Episode 10: @SciBabe Transcript

Making Better 10 Transcript: SciBabe

Intro:
Chris: I’m Chris Hofstader.
Francis: I’m Francis DiDonato.
Chris: And this is Episode 10 of the Making Better Podcast, featuring Yvette D’Entremont, known to the general public as “SciBabe”
Francis: Yeah, I had a lot of fund talking to her. I think as a scientist, I love when people are as diverse in their interests as she is, not just science but other things as well.
Chris: Yeah, you don’t find too many science communicators who also talk a lot about pornography.
Francis: She’s definitely one of the sexiest guests we’ve had on—it’s unusual for me as a scientist to expect someone to be quite as fetching as this guest.
Chris: So, with that said, let’s get on with the episode.

Chris: Yvette D’Entremont, welcome to Making Better!

Yvette: Thank you for having me.

Francis: Yeah, very exciting to have you today, welcome.

Chris: You’re known as the Science Babe, but you also do a podcast about porn…

Yvette: SciBabe, there is another woman, Debbie Berebichez, she is a physicist and she is a science babe, so there are two for the price of one.

Chris: Oh, so you are the Sci Babe..

Yvette: SciBabe indeed.

Chris: How did you get started in science?

Yvette: Well, I needed to choose a major, and I actually double-majored in Chemistry and Theater, and Chemistry was because I wanted a career, and theater was because my father didn’t hug me enough–could have been worse, he could have hugged me too much–look, it’s my childhood, I will cope with it how I want. … The awkward silence on that joke is always great, people don’t know whether to laugh or to go “awww…” So after I got my degree in Chemistry, worked for a year in sales—hated sales! Of all th things that got me to go into forensics for my masters, we’d had a talk from a chemist from the Boston Crime Lab when I was in P-Chem, my most hated course I had in undergrad, and I was like, “oh you can use chemistry for forensics? that sounds like a lot of fun!” Because apparently I had missed every show on CSI ever—so, I got my masters in Forensics and concentrated on toxicology and biological criminalistics, really enjoyed that, and ended up working mainly in toxicology. I did explosives analysis for Department of Homeland Security contractor, worked in a toxicology and drug analysis lab for a couple years, and then most recently, before doing SciBabe full time, worked in a pesticide analysis lab as an analytical chemist, mainly doing method development for analyzing new formulations of pesticides. So that’s been that, and then one day I decided that I liked telling people they were full of shit, and that has been a pretty fun career path for me. Oh yeah, and now I analyze porn for The Plot—for fun.

Francis: When I was told you were going to be on this show, I saw the work you had done regarding Roundup, and I was really surprised to hear you kind of be an advocate for its safety, because there’s very few people that are in the media at the moment who are doing that. So, I told the guys from our show that I was going to do a literature search on it, and I was going to confront you with the data and see if your analysis could hold up to scrutiny. Well, I did the literature search, and….I got nothing. (laugh)

Yvette: So this is our big confrontation—is that you’re like, oh shit, I have nothing to say.

Francis: There’s almost no evidence to suggest it’s a carcinogen—that was just so surprising. Do you find other people are surprised?

Yvette: Yeah. It would have been so much easier if Monsanto was just 100% evil, it would have been easier if all the documentaries were right, right? I wish that everything we saw on Netflix was real—I wish that there wasn’t all this misinformation and mixed-information going out to consumers about the safety of their food, but I mean the truth is I don’t want to let this go unsaid, there are still problems with safety in the food chain and the food supply, let’s not cover that up. But we do have the safest food system and the safest way of growing food that we’ve ever had in history now, and Roundup is a part of that. We left much more toxic pesticides when we moved over to pesticides like Roundup—and I just want to clarify one thing before you get emails about this—pesticide is the blanket term for all of the other “-icides”. So an herbicide is a pesticide, “pests” is not to denote insects. Insecticide is also a pesticide, herbicide is a pesticide, fungicide is a pesticide. So, there you go, before you get emails.

Francis: I must add though that it’s not that there’s conclusive data that it’s absolutely safe, it’s just that there’s very little data to suggest that it’s not.

Yvette: Basically the data does not show that it’s carcinogenic or that it builds up in the system or that there’s long-term toxicity. The LD-50, the TD-50, the measurements that show that it’s going to cause you the types of things that proponents of organic agriculture or the people that are very scared of it—the things that in the scientific studies would would show the type of harm that they’re indicating, are just not there. It’s not the danger that people are making it out to be. Technically, it’s not as bad for you as table salt, on just a plain old measurement of toxicity. It’s less dangerous to you than caffeine and salt,, and aspirin. I think those measurements jar people, and then people always come back with, but what about long-term carcinogenicity? And same thing, there really isn’t evidence for it—and if I see evidence for it, I will change my goddamn mind, because I eat the food too. Just to give an example, Aspartame, of all things, that I have defended because it’s been studied so thoroughly, there came an announcement from—I believe the European Food Safety Administration—that aspartame needs to go through some more thorough testing, because some of the tests don’t hold up to scrutiny, and I was horrified. I want to look more into this report, but the fact that this even came out bothers me, that there might be some validity to this this, and that I might have been wrong, or I might have…said bad information, or that these tests were not held up to enough scrutiny. And I looked at the scientist that put out this report—they don’t seem to be alarmists. I’m always willing to re-look at something that I thought I had known for a fact before, but man, do I like my aspartame and am I going to be disappointed if it’s not safe.

Chris: When we do hear about problems in the food supply, in the United States at least, it’s usually e-coli and it’s usually coming from organic farms. I mean the whole Chipotle disaster…

Yvette: It was precisely because of how they sourced their food. I do not want to bash on organic here, because I think organic farmers, they do a lot of care into the food just like conventional farmers. But part of the way, of how they fertilize their crops, is still through older means, a lot of times it’s through…fertilizer that comes from a cow’s butt, or from other—you know, it’s poop. Where do we get microbes that aren’t always conducive to human life? Yeah, it’s poop, that’s where e-coli comes from. Please, just wash your produce carefully.
——
Yvette: I literally do talk about the plot-lines in porn, so we could talk about that if you want…we’ve done a few nerdy ones. We did the Avengers, and you would be surprised at what makes a parody porn good or bad, and we really like doing the parody ones. Because, you know, they’re something that the audience can kind of sink their teeth into, because they’re familiar with it—and you would be amazed at what makes a bad parody porn. Part of it is, you have to enjoy the sex you’re watching, but there has to be a thread through the movie that takes something that was in the original and kind of turns it into a sex thing throughout the whole thing, and that’s kind of how you make a good parody. There are a couple ingredients to it that makes it work. We got Tom Arnold on the show—this is what I get for having an occasional celebrity who follows my writing—and when Tom Arnold was on, Arnold Schwartzenegger FaceTimed him, so we accidentally had a guest appearance from “the governator”—[*] podcast. That’s my closest to a claim to real fame.

Francis: I was wondering if in that industry, it was sort of taking advantage of women who were, either doing it because they’re addicted to drugs, or they had mental illness, that kind of thing, and that in contrast to how many can actually do that and not be negatively affected by it, given our patriarchal society where men are so predatory a lot of the time?

Yvette: That is a really good and deep question, and here’s the thing—I know that we have a sampling bias in the people that we have on our podcast. We don’t end up having people who come in for three months and leave after they’ve grabbed some cash. We end up having people who have been on for a while, we’ve had Ella Darling, who—she has a masters in library science, and she’s gone on to have this long career where’s she started off in VR porn, started a VR porn company, and now she runs a company that’s just VR for people to interact with each other without a porn element. So we’ve had people who have gone on to have really empowering careers, and it was because porn gave them the money to have a career that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. No matter what, it’s going to be a little predatory, because you’re—there’s more money if you do more extreme scenes, to a point—but women are, because they’re able to do a lot of things to monetize on their own now, which they couldn’t back in the day when all of the money was through DVD sales, which admittedly did make more money, from what I understood—now, women are able to kind of run their own empires. This is something that we’ve heard from a lot of women who have come on the show. They can run their own fan site where people can buy clips exclusively. Fans can request—and the porn stars don’t have to say yes to it—but fans can request a specific clip from a specific porn star. They can ask, can you make a clip in which you masturbate with x-thing, and the porn star, for a price, will say yeah, they’ll do it. We’re living in a golden age of porn, women are in charge of what they’re doing with their body more. They’ll mix up a few nights of featured dancing with a day of doing a scene, they’ll do a trade for scene with someone, there’s a lot more autonomy now than there was years ago. One of the downsides, though, is that the straight-up pay for scenes, because of pirating now, because of digitization, pay has gone down quite a bit. It’s actually much lower for men in the industry, i’t about half, depending on the type of scene and whatnot, but yea, women get paid much more than men in the industry, it’s very strange. It’s one place where the pay inequality benefits women. But it is gonna be a little predatory, in a way, but I think much less so than people think. There’s weekly STD testing in the industry, mandatory. You are safer having unprotected sex with someone in porn than you are almost anyone else on the planet, and it really does take much better care of its people than I think a, “civilian” would think.

Chris: Are you familiar with Jon Ronson’s work, The Butterfly Effect?

Yvette: To a point, yeah.

Francis: I think one of the things that alarms me is that…I have 14-year-old son, and if he goes on Pornhub, something like that, the kind of things that’ll come up are not representative of what I would like him to think good sex is like—at least as a starting point.

Yvette: Kids should not learn sex from porn. Porn is—it’s kind of like trying to learn quantum physics from the Avengers, or learning Tai Kwon Do from an action movie. That’s not where you should learn about sex—teenagers should learn about sex the way that the rest of us did, from fumbling in the dark in the back seat of a car, trying to figure out where the clitoris is and failing miserably for about ten years—that’s how the rest of us did it, right?

Francis: I think it was seven years for me..[laughter]

Yvette: I…like it took me a while to locate my own, and I have one…

Francis: But what I think is encouraging is that there are some sites, mostly run by women, that feature actual couples having sex, and it’s not edited and it’s not always like those nasty ways that they end in normal porn and things like that, that just seem very un-respectful to women in general, things like t hat.

Yvette: Here’s the thing that I think people don’t understand, because I think that a lot of people think no matter what, if there’s a degrading scene, you know, with cum in the hair, there are women that are into that, too. This is not just for the man’s benefit. A lot of sex is about consent, and that’s the thing that gets left out of the conversation is, don’t teach the teenage boys it’s OK to do this. Teach the teenage boys to have a talk with the woman that they’re going to have sex with. Teach everyone about communication skills, because—and not to be pushy, and to talk out what you want in sexual experience, because yeah, it’s OK to do something ridiculous within a sexual scenario that you wouldn’t do with anyone else, but you have to talk that shit out every time. Because what you did last time with the same partner might not be what they want this time. What you did with another girl definitely might not be what you want or what this new girl wants, but the things that you see in porn are never going to automatically be what somebody wants. I mean, the angles they fuck at so that it looks good for the camera, the putting it in one hole and then the other hole and then back to the first…oh my god. There are things that just happen in porn that don’t happen in normal sex, and it’s not where you should be getting your cues. Everyone that I know in porn will say the same thing.

Chris: Ronson suggests that one of the reasons younger people are having less sex is because sex in real life doesn’t live up to the porn.

Yvette: I don’t know how true that is…but it also wouldn’t surprise me. I think one of the reasons why people might be having less sex, with the advent of freely-available porn—and I kind of liked this, admittedly, in my 20s—I would decide, I’m not going to go on a date with a guy if he’s gonna be more likely to be a hassle and less likely to be an orgasm than my Hitachi. [laughter] You know, if I think this guy is gonna be a—not likely to lead to boyfriend or great love or good sex, and my Hitachi and a couple hours of watching re-runs of Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit”—that’s gonna be a good night. This guy—not so sure. You know, which one are you gonna go with? I can see that. Porn is always sex with someone you love, it’s never gonna lead to an STD—there are good things to teenagers watching porn instead of going out and having sex with someone who they’re not interested in. Which would you rather your kid do, watch porn or knock somebody up? And I know those are not binary choices—but, think about it. It’s OK for your teenager to watch porn, but you need to talk them through it. And that’s an awkward conversation, and why I’m glad I only have cats and dogs.

Francis: I’m just trying to leave a couple of windows open on the computer of porn that I think is…good to learn from.

Yvette: Well, first start with Ryan Creamer and wholesome porn—it’s completely clothed, just go to Pornhub and check out Ryan Creamer, it’s hilarious. It’s like, “honey, I washed the dishes without you asking me. Honey, I know you need to go to Ikea today, here’s my credit card, buy what you need.” Like it’s stuff that’s completely not sexual and it’s like, oh, porn for women!

Francis: I think some women would consider that foreplay…

Yvette: I mean, that’s stuff that will get the guy laid later…my partner and I were already starting product development on the first stage of this, but eventually we want to have a whole “wash your junk” kit. We already have a website for it, and it’s in development stages, but we’re starting a product called “fuckwipes,” because you need to wash your junk before you expect anyone to touch it. That area needs to be clean, I want it to pass the white glove test.

Francis. Nice. Well, that kind of brings us to one of the things that I think is the purpose of this podcast, which is to talk about the future, and utopia…

Yvette: You know, enemas do lead to utopia…literally, that was what Gandhi believed. Look this shit up, I am not kidding. People who are listening right now are like, what? He used to give enemas to people.

Francis: What about the future of sex? How is all this technology, if you also consider the potential for AI and robotics to weigh in, and all this other stuff, what is this doing for the future of sexuality and humanity? What are the pros, what are the dangers?

Yvette: There are a lot of both, and I’m glad you brought that up. So, I think future of it—I hope this helps us facilitate communication, because a lot of things that have fucked up people’s sex lives is just not being able to talk about it. I’m sure that you three have all been perfect lovers, a hundred percent of the time, to all of your partners, right? As have I, we’ve never screwed up a thing by not discussing it—huh? Huh? uhh. So I hope that this new digital age will kind of help us realize, and give us the tools to be more open with the people that we’re mashin’ genitals with. There are even apps now—I downloaded one a while ago and then deleted it, ‘cause I realized my husband and I discuss everything already—but you know, there are tools to help you discuss which fetishes you’re into, help you walk your way through what you want and what you don’t want. And people are getting more open with it.

Chris: What’s on the back end of that? I mean, is somebody building an expert system or an AI based on all the data you put in, and they’re going to have the privacy problem that exists on Facebook becomes like a really explicit privacy problem?

Yvette: That is a terrifying possibility. Like, how safe are your porn preferences? If they’re anywhere online.

Chris: How does your life as a porn podcast host dovetail with your interest in science and science communication?

Yvette: It’s a very interesting dichotomy, because I—well, I try to write about science with a big ol’ heaping dose of humor. I’ve wanted something to add some levity to what I do. I was kind of at a point with SciBabe where part of me wanted to pack it in, really. I was deeply depressed at the time, the week that we launched—it was, I don’t know if you guys remember this happening, I’d just been sexually harassed/assaulted at a conference, and that kind of blew up my life for a while, and it was like, I need something to focus on that’s not this. It was like, how do we find a way that’s funny and informative to just kind of get some comedy out, and do something that’s completely off the map. I had—and here was how it kind of came from a Science thing, I was giving a talk at a local science museum when I lived back in San Francisco, and it was a talk on bad science in the movies. And this is why I make this joke about Neal DeGrasse Tyson all the time—I was riffing on his whole, you know, ripping apart bad science in movies and I’m like, Neal, they’re science fiction movies! Nobody goes to Avengers to learn about quantum physics! They go to see Tony Stark punch a robot spaceship alien! But I just joked, I’m like, it’s ripping apart the bad science in a sci-fi movie, hey, it’s like ripping apart the plot in a porno—you still get out of that what you went in there for. And then I was like, wait—if there’s a market for ripping apart the science in a sci-fi movie, maybe there’s a market for ripping apart the plot in a porno. Hmmm. And so the podcast was born. There’s such a loose tie-in, but I think one of the things we enjoy about it, both my podcast partner, Alice, and I, is it’s a chance to tap some comedy out of something that’s ripe for it, because we sit there are look for continuity in our porn. We really do, and I mean I think this throws people. It’s like, no no, we are looking for the plot. We’ve had comedians, we’ve had scientists, we’ve had of course porn stars on, to review a porn with us. And we tell them, and this is what throws them the most, we’re like, yeah, you can skip the sex scenes if you want. We literally watch the plot. So does it tie in to the Sci-Comm? I don’t know, but we try to have fun with it. There was one episode we did with Riley Reyes, who if I recall correctly is president of the Adult Performer Advocacy Group—I’m probably screwing up the name on that [note: Adult Performer Advocacy Committee]—but after we recorded, she shot me a DM, she’s like, “oh my god, I just realized I follow you on Facebook. I’m a huge fan.” This is something that people forget: porn stars are, you know, after they get off the stage, they have interests and they have lives. It’s been nice to kind of de-mystify this entire field and get people to see, kind of like I always try to tell people, scientists are people too! We’ve gotten to become friends with a lot of these people, and we’ve seen a lot of them do stand up comedy—Kate Kennedy, we saw her performing this last Saturday at the Comedy Store, she was amazing. It’s been interesting to see people react to this, and be shocked that, oh, you know, “oh my god, porn performers are human beings—what?” It’s like, yeah, they don’t go back and be hung up on the shelf with the rest of the sex at the end of the day. So, it’s been a multi-faceted thing that I’m not sure exactly if it ties in to Sci-Comm or not, but we’re enjoying it.

Francis: I imagine one of the difficulties you would have, though, is, based on the statistic I had read once, which is that they measured how long people watch porn for in hotels, and they found that the average was something like 11 minutes.

Yvette: Wow, that’s longer than I expected.

Francis: Yeah. I don’t know, maybe they’re nervous, ‘cause they’re in a hotel or something. But that doesn’t leave much time for plot development, and characters, and …

Yvette: We watched, yesterday, a two-hour and forty-nine minute parody of the show “Cheers,” and it was amazing.

Francis: Who makes…?

Yvette: WoodRocket Studios…and they’re almost all directed by Lee Roy Myers. We really love the Big Lebowski XXX, you should watch that for the cinematography values…

Francis: Can you give an example of that? It’s hard for me to…I love Big Lebowski, so…

Yvette: So, you know the dream sequence where he’s like flying through the bowling alley? That happens. The beginning sequence where everyone is like, you know, it’s just this kind of dreamy, well-lit sequence of people bowling—instead it’s topless women at, they rented out a local bowling alley in Hollywood, in the middle of the night, to have a scene full of recording topless women at this delightfully lit bowling alley. The acting is so good in this that they have—and this is something people don’t understand—they have non-porn roles in movies like this. And the guy playing the John Goodman character was so good that we’re like, man, he could have just stepped into that role! If you see a porn with either Tommy Pistol or Evan Stone in it, guaranteed to be hilarious. They’re funny! I wish I was kidding, but they’re better than people expect, every time.

Francis: Well, sex in general has to be really great source material for comedy.

Yvette: Oh—one last one. Horat, the parody of Borat.

Chris: What do you think about film makers like John Waters, who don’t exactly do porn but push every other limit possible.

Yvette: I think he’s great. I think that ’s part of art and cinema is finding edge and making people think with it. That and I love that John Waters just kind of tries to tap dance around an NC-17 rating with pretty much everything he does.

Chris: Yeah, he got one the last film he did, and that’s the last film he did. He can’t get financing anymore. His latest book, by the way, is really terrific. It’s brand new, it’s the last two, three months, and the opening sentence to the book is,”Somehow I became respectable.”

Yvette: Wait, John Waters, really—are you sure about that statement?

Chris: He goes down the list of the awards he’s won and his installations at museums and all this—the fact that the art world woke up and sort of embraced him.

Francis: Well, we have a President that a lot of people are very offended by…

Yvette: Doesn’t feel like we have a President right now.

Francis: And here’s my question—you know, like we’ve been talking a lot about sex and porn and stuff like that, but given the state of this country right now, what do you find obscene?

Yvette: I find sexual assault to be obscene. I find the language that the President uses to describe immigrants to be obscene…

Francis: How about when he talks about grabbing…

Yvette: Yeah, well that’s sexual assault, so I find that to be quite obscene. I find the disrespect towards anyone that disagrees with you, and I mean, I get it—that’s something that’s coming from, I hate to say this term, but that’s something that’s coming from both sides. In general, I find the complete lack of concern for people that don’t look exactly like you to be kind of obscene, given that he’s orange, that’s pretty much everyone.

Francis: One of the things that’s come out of this show, in discussing concepts of utopia, is a recurring thought that respecting diversity is fundamental.

Yvette: So, I went out to dinner the other night with a handful of atheist-y, sceptic-y people, and I had a Star of David necklace on. And of course everyone’s like “but you’re an atheist!” and I’m like, “I’m also Jewish.” And they’re like, “Wait, wut? How does that work.” I’m like, on a molecular level, when you throw my DNA into a tester, I cannot not be Jewish, it’s the only thing I am. So, on my mom’s side I am Acadian, and we are a people without a land mass. We were deported from Canada by the British—basically I’m genetically indistinguishable from the cajuns, give or take, and we are a people without a country. And on my dad’s side, Jewish, and once again, all the little towns that my people were from, destroyed—and that [cost de hollow]. And so I am, on both sides, a people without a country. So I don’t wear the Star of David to say “I’m Jewish,” I use it because this is my family. I don’t know what else to be. And so when I hear people who have complaints wish diversity and don’t want immigrants, and I’m like, you know, you’re basically advocating for me not being alive. I’m not OK with it, and I really wish that people were not so offended by different strains of DNA.

Chris: What do you think are the most important recent discoveries in science? We’ve had pictures of a black hole, we’ve discovered gravitational waves, there’s all kinds of amazing stuff going on—what excites you the most?

Yvette: I’ve focussed more on nutrition and health than I do on the cosmos, but I think in my field, at least, there’s a lot of research that’s coming out on obesity more and more lately, to figure out what’s the thing that’s gonna kill us. And that’s a lot of where I try to focus, because that’s what got me into skepticism, was falling for everything and then un-falling for it. There’s a ton of research going into not necessarily how do we get people to lose weight—because, you know, we kind of know how to do that, it’s just hard. But now we know that there are people who get the “fat diseases”—the ones that are associated with obesity, at a very low weight. And there’s a wonderful article in the New York Times talking about a woman who weighs 119 lbs and has fatty liver disease. So they’re trying to study what causes people at different weights to get these diseases “of obesity,” and from that they can look at what medications can be used to stave this off, or to see what gives people a genetic predisposition to these diseases that we commonly associate with being overweight. So, it’s like, is it a genetic quirk? Is there a way to fight this, is there a way that we can manage this, along with managing weight? But if there is a way to keep the diseases that come with this at bay for people who are at a manageable weight, obviously get the—you know, keep weight into a healthy range, but there have to be other ways to fight these while we’re trying to keep calorie control and exercise as a part of a solution. And I think the fact that they are looking at these answers is pretty wonderful right now, because it’s something that really hadn’t been explored for a long time.

Chris: Where do people go to learn realistic things about diet and health? Because every tabloid at the grocery store has “he beef and beer diet or whatever the fad diet of the week is…

Yvette: Everyone wants to lose weight on bacon, right? Thus the basis of the keto diet’s appeal—and here’s the thing, keto will make you lose weight. Even me, who wrote an article ripping keto to shreds, will tell you—if it makes you lose weight, if it makes all your numbers healthier and your doctor and a registered dietitian say, yeah, this is a healthy option for you, go for it. But I’ve recently lost 50 lbs and I didn’t do it by following any set diet, I just counted my calories. I kept track of what I was eating. I had ice cream on a regular basis, I had tacos a few times a week—from my taco truck, not that I measured out—and I just kept track and lost weight, and that’s the thing. Calorie counting is hard, it’s a pain in the ass. People are—even registered dietitians—are bad at it. People underestimate what they eat, and that’s a big part of why we gain weight. And people want an easy solution, and that’s why they grab a diet book. They’re like, if I just cut out this macronutrient or this food, if I cut dairy, if I cut meat, if I cut the rice, then it’ll all go away. And all of these types of things, they’re cutting calories, each thing you do is just a way to cut calories. So you don’t have to be afraid of certain types of food, you just have to figure out how to make it manageable. If you’re a person who can’t put the ice cream down, don’t buy the ice cream. Leave it for special occasions. I mean, if you want good information about how to lose weight, ask your doctor for a referral to a registered dietitian—not a nutritionist, that is not a protected title, I could call myself a nutritionist tomorrow and no one could stop me legally, which is why you shouldn’t come to me to ask me how to lose weight. I’m not a medical professional, go to a registered dietitian—that is the best advice I can give you on this. It’s partially because a diet book, a website, they don’t know your health, they do not know your numbers, they don’t know your history, they can’t ask you for a food diary; diet is largely personal, the way that you get to a diet that you can manage long term—and I don’t mean “diet” in terms of calorie restriction, I mean the way that you eat, long-term. It has to be sustainable, it has to be something that works for you. So Pleeaase a registered dietitian.

Francis: One of my favorite science terms is “elegance,” used to describe when an experiment is done or there’s a finding and it just has this simplicity, and this harmony and perfection to it that is almost, it’s just very inspiring, almost sublime. I was wondering if you’ve had experiences of that.

Yvette: So, I have worked mainly as a chemical analyst. So you hand me a thing, I have to put it through a series of extractions and put it into a machine and see if that machine doesn’t break—both doesn’t break with the way that I extracted it, and analyses it really well. And I don’t know, it’s hard to describe that as an elegant process. But there is something that I find very beautiful about the fact that we can manipulate the chemical processes of these various polarities, of all the solvents we’re using—I’m told, hey, we have about 20% of the target molecule in this vial, and there are a bunch of binders and a bunch of other things that we’ve used in there, and you have to get all those other things out without losing a single percentage of this, and tell us exactly, down to the hundredth of a percent, how much is in there. I think there’s something beautiful about the fact that we can make a method that, you know, just from scratch, from what we know about all the different items that we’re using to extract this, we can make a method that can consistently will tell us, to the hundredth of a percent, from solvent to, you know, minutes of extraction we need to shake this thing out, to filtering, to which column we’re using, to runtime, to ramp temperatures; and we’re eventually going to get a readout that tells us, consistently, what’s in our mystery liquid, and that was what I really loved about what I was doing—was that process of making that, and at the end having my organic chemist and my formulations chemist being able to give them that readout that said, here’s your thing, and they trusted my results. There was something beautiful about that to me, and that’s what—I miss that about the lab. So I like my writing, but I really did love the beauty of analytical chemistry.

Francis: Beauty is one of our favorite topics here, and you are such an open person, I’d be curious to hear you elaborate on other things in other areas that you find beautiful.

Yvette: My masters is in forensics—I know forensics is a messy, gross, horrible field, where we always think about dead bodies and things like that. This is not beautiful thing by virtue of looking at it, but I find something elegant, I think, about the fact that we can measure the stage of maggots in a human body, the stage of maggot development, and determine when someone died. And now, there’s also entomotoxicology, where you can measure the amount of drugs in a bug and get a rough measure of what the drugs were in someone’s system around when they died. Please don’t quote me on that, please check with an expert, I have been out of the lab for a while, you should check with an entomotoxicologist for the exact on that. The fact that we have all these tools now—that’s something scientifically wonderful and beautiful to me, that I look and and go, these tools are something that we could have had, that I wished we’d had for much longer, that there’s not enough of.

Francis: Well, that’s a [first?*] time on our show…

Chris: …that maggots have come up, yes.

Yvette: I do what I can to bring up gross beautiful things…

Chris: We had M.E. Thomas, the author of Confessions of a Sociopath, on as a guest. She’s an actual sociopath who’s trying to work to make life for livable for people like herself, and she was telling us that there’s some Instagram page that has all this really weird medical stuff that she’s just obsessed with, and …

Yvette: Nice.

Chris: It’s all really gross stuff.

Yvette: It doesn’t surprise me. Sociopathy is a…like, I read a decent amount about it….and it’s like….I think it’s something like 4% of the population have a degree of sociopathy. It’s interesting to think that there are, within that group, there are a lot of CEOs, there are a lot of surgeons—the percent that become criminals and serial killers is much lower, but if you go into jail and you meet serial killers and other types of criminals, good chance you’re talking to a sociopath in a lot of those situations.

Francis: Or in politics…

Yvette: Oh yeah. Anyone who’s a professional liar, or like there are a lot of symptoms—lack of empathy, inability to connect—lying about things that are completely unnecessary to lie about…But then there are sociopaths who have kinda gone, oh, I have to fit into society, and even though I don’t feel like there’s a reason to be honest here, I probably should. So there is learned empathy in some cases. Have you ever met a friend who you suspect is a sociopath?

Chris: Francis and I used to hang out at CBGB all the time, and there was one guy there we were absolutely certain, and he was violent and…I mean, he was the only person I was actually, I can remember being actually scared of.

Francis: Well, the punk scene, given its nihilism, was sort of a…attractive environment for people who were that type of sociopathy, I guess.

Yvette: Like, I hate throwing a clinical diagnosis on someone, that is not my expertise, but just going by behaviors, I think I have known at least two that I could just be like, yeah, if these guys aren’t sociopaths, I am not capable of understanding human behaviors. You know, people who just lie all the time and rile up shit amongst their friends, and can’t hold a steady job—I’ve known a few of those. And I’m like, either a narcissist or a sociopath, they’re really close.

Francis: But you have to know them for a while for that to be true. In my experience, the people who were probably the sociopaths that you came to know in your life, were amongst some of the most charming, charismatic people you’ve ever known. I mean, I had dinner recently with two friends who—they’re both diagnosed. So it was me and them having dinner together, and honestly, I had to struggle at times to even notice, because it’s strange how invisible and maybe it’s sometimes, in some situations, unimportant it is.

Yvette: With one of the friends that we figured it out with, it took years, because you felt good in their presence. They were so nice to everyone, and you…this person, for so long, you thought that all of the problems in your friend-group was because of everyone else, then you realize this person was just lying about everyone. And you felt so good around them, but years later the person who had been her best friend for a decade up and, like, friend-dumped her. And I’m like, hmmm, this is interesting. So when I moved to the west coast, had a phone call with her, and we talked out everything and she’s like, yeah, she said all these things about you. We went through everything, figured out all the lies, all the completely unnecessary lying, all the behaviors lined up with sociopathy, and that’s the thing—is that charming, really manipulative, lied about unnecessary things that just made no sense, unless there was an underlying pathology there. And it was just, some of them were just grandiose lies that made no sense, like I said, unless either a narcissist or a sociopath, and so many of the things are interchangeable. But it was so strange to look at it and go, wow, we think there was a sociopath, you know, in our dorm for all these years, one of our best friends, living with us for all these years—collecting our secrets for all these years.

Chris: But now Facebook will do that for you.

Yvette: [laughs] Yeah. Cambridge Analytica is our new sociopathic friend.

Chris: I mean, an AI that, even if we can, you know, jump 20 years into the future, or 50 years into the future, whatever, an AI that became self-aware is probably going to be a sociopath.

Yvette: There is a new documentary on Netflix on Cambridge Analytica. It’s terrifying. People that worked for it that kind of left and, should we say, told on the company—they’re, in retrospect, they’re like “what did we do?” Because they’re looking at Facebook telling lies at the Congressional hearings, they’re like, “no, they definitely still had our data, they knew what they were doing, Mark Zuckerberg’s lying”—it’s just…whoof

Chris: There’s a book called Zucked that was written by one of the early advisors to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, and Jim Fruchterman discussed that on the podcast, and it’s a pretty scary book.

Yvette: Doesn’t surprise me. Like, I remember when Facebook started, I was a senior in college and everyone’s like, hey, our school finally got access to Facebook! ‘Cause we were like, Boston area, all the schools were getting access first, and it still took till the end of grad school for me, until Facebook was starting to become a thing—and then it was, you know, a few years of Myspace-Facebook-Myspace-Facebook. I feel like we should just all go back to Myspace.

Chris: After Friendster went out of business, they released their database, and with 95% certainty—there’s been a lot of progress since—and just using the Friendster database, you could determine the sexual preference of somebody who didn’t have a Friendster account, but was in the contact list of somebody who did. That study was published four or five years ago. I mean, Facebook and Amazon and Apple and Google, what I call the G-MAFIA (stands for Google Microsoft Apple Facebook IBM Amazon), their level of intelligence power right now is greater than any nation.

Yvette: This doesn’t surprise me at all. Just check out, I think it was called “The Hack,” [The Great Hack (2019), Netflix] was the one that I watched yesterday—they said basically they had 5,000 data points from every person that signed up, and from that, from everyone that they scraped, that was connected to everyone that they took the survey from—and it’s just knowing how much data they have on all us—it’s terrifying. Part of me goes, you know, makes me want to shut down my Facebook account, and then part of me goes, wait, what would happen to SciBabe? Like that’s the thing, they know that they have us already, and it almost feels like it’s pointless to un-sign up.

Chris: I haven’t killed my Facebook account, and I know what it’s doing, but all I use it for is to promote this podcast.

Yvette: Yeah, like because I’m so online, I know how public I am. How would it help me to get off the internet, the way I am right now? I don’t feel like it would help me at all. If I wasn’t doing what I did, I would shut things down.

Chris: We could try to encourage people to use things like GNU Social and Mastadon, which are ethically-run social medias, but unfortunately they have fairly few users. And those are entirely community-driven, so you can inspect the source code and everything like that to make sure it’s not spying on you…

Francis: There’s so much room for improvement, which gives me hope, because you know there was a time when everyone thought AOL was invincible, and then poof! And if I watch my son with his gaming things and how like, one day Minecraft, they’re all playing that, and next day they’re all playing Fortnite, it can come and go before you can even imagine—it just happens. And I think Facebook is that vulnerable, and you know, it’s gonna be figured out.

Yvette: I would be surprised if Facebook was—and I say this knowing I could be completely wrong, but—if Facebook still looks the same way it does by 2025, either in power or in design, and I know it will be redesigned 15 times, but I would be surprised if there wasn’t a major restructure or a major exodus by, within the next five years.

Chris: And the other problem is, Facebook is so rich and powerful that any sort of competitor other than one that’s community-driven comes along, they’ll just buy it, like they did with Instagram and all the others.

Yvette: I mean, and as much as people in Congress have been saying it needs to be, there’s a monopoly that needs to be broken up, can you see these people…they’re not exactly regulate-business type folks in charge of the country right now, and this really does need to…how is it not a monopoly when it owns Whatsapp, Instagram, and god knows how many other apps? Does it own Snapchat, too? I don’t even remember.

Chris: They don’t actually own Snapchat, they just sort of drove them out of business by putting all the Snapchat features into Instagram…

Yvette: They own every platform you’re on, basically. Like, at one point I was like, yeah, I’m gonna use Whatsapp to avoid..oh. There’s no point. I mean, even if you get off Facebook now, don’t they pretty much still own your data?

Chris: They say they’ll delete your data if you ask them to, but I don’t believe that.

Yvette: How many times have you—and this is the one place where I sound kind of conspiracy-theory-ist. Part of me knows that it’s just they drag your material from everyplace you’ve ever looked on the internet. But how many times have you just thought something, or said something to someone else in the room and discussed it, and suddenly there’s an ad for it on your Facebook, or somewhere online?

Francis: tons.

Yvette: Yeah. And it freaks you out, right?

Chris: Your Amazon Echo might be listening to you all day long…

Francis: That happened to me this week, and I still have no idea how those ads got up there.

Yvette: Yeah. There will always be something online saying you’re imagining it, it just…like, your computer knows so much about you because it grabs from 15 different places. Because I tell people, don’t believe in conspiracies—so much of me wants to say, naaah, it’s just so ridiculously good at grabbing information….and then there’s the other part of me, that’s like, you know, they lied to us about Cambridge Analytica, so they’re fucking lying about this too! I don’t believe in any other conspiracy thing, and this one makes me go…what the fuck? Like—sometimes it just doesn’t feel like there’s another explanation for some of the ads that show up, other than—I never typed it in. I’ll look through my google searches, I’ll look through things that I typed online earlier, and I’m like, why is there an ad for something I just discussed with my husband a minute ago, and never typed in? Then there’s the thing that we say in forensics, that there’s no such thing as coincidence.

Francis: It’s too bad that there’s such a bias against regulation these days.

Yvette: I don’t know, I was about to say fear of it. But there is so much fighting against it, because the argument is always, you regulate an industry, it’s gonna make it harder to do business—but is it really? Is making it harder to screw over consumers really gonna make it harder to do business? I mean, I worked in two highly-regulated industries before, in pesticide analysis and in a biotech lab, and you know, we were still pretty able to work. I worked in producing pesticides—I want that industry heavily regulated, I eat the food, so throwing on extra regulations to things has never really destroyed an industry. Like, I’m sure someone out there is gonna be like, “but what about…?” and they’re gonna pull up one example, but a little regulation has never killed off an industry.

Chris: Well, if we go back to the late 70s, when the United States was much more favorable towards regulation and taxes were much higher, people say that stifles innovation, but a couple of guys named Steve Jobs and Bill Gates went out and created two absolutely, monstrously innovative companies.

Yvette: How dare you bring up facts, Chris! How dare you!

Chris: [laughs] Why do people, it seems to me, do you think—and this is kind of, from out of left field—but people on the left and people on the right, everyone just seems really angry right now.

Yvette: It’s probably because the country seems to be in a bit of a perpetual dumpster fire?

Chris: But it seems to be even outside the US—I mean, you have Brexit, you have Italy’s economy falling apart, you know, we have all kinds of—Venezuela’s a disaster, Brazil, one of the wealthiest countries in the Americas, is in a state of collapse…

Yvette: Well, let’s see. A handful of years ago—and this is just from listening to too many podcasts on history, economics and rising authoritarianism—in the 2008 economic crisis that really did affect us globally, not just in the US, ‘cause the US economy will, really is a trigger on the rest of the economy; we saw economic collapse everywhere, at least to a point. In countries in Europe that we’ve seen rising authoritarianism, it’s not that they’re like, yeah, we want fascism! It’s that what the have there right now, or what they’ve had in the last five, ten years, they don’t see the good economic impact that they want. So it’s not that they suddenly hate Macron or the policies that he’s had, it’s that “it’s the economy, stupid.” Bolsonaro down in Brazil, it’s not that they’re like, “authoritarianism, yummy!” it’s that it’s the economy, stupid. Their economy has not been doing well under the last guy, and Venezuela—the sad thing is that even though they have to know that Maduro is a bad guy on some level, but there are still people who are loyal to Chavez who did help the economy quite a bit. He didn’t help it as effectively as he could have, because there was a lot of money coming in from the oil boom, but he also needed to put more of that money into infrastructure and into the people, and there was money squandered, and there wasn’t a structure set up for it to be continued to work for the people in the country. And it’s kind of, and this is why people are mad down there, because all these oil fields are just rotting. Their entire financial system has kind of crumbled. I am clearly not an expert on Venezuelan economy, so…ask an expert to clarify all the things I just fucked up…but like, that’s the thing. When the economy crashes, and it crashes under one system, people are gonna go hard to the other side. So right now, in Poland, in Hungary, in Italy, in France even and England, anywhere that there’s been an ability to convince people that the economic unrest is due to the other side, you can force in an authoritarian regime, whether it looks like an authoritarian regime at first or not. And that’s kind of what’s happened in a lot of these countries, is that people are upset about one thing or another, or they’ve been convinced to be upset about one thing or another. And you saw it here with Trump, starting off with Mexicans are sending rapists and murderers, and that rhetoric has continued on. Because the economy was getting better, it was steadily progressing under Obama, so it wasn’t economic distress. He’s caused more of it since he’s got in, but he managed to stoke fears—and that’s what’s happened across Europe. In Germany, at first, they were like, bring in the Syrians, and a couple of small incidents were used to stoke fears, not just about Syrian immigrants, but there were people—I want to say it’s the ADL was the name of it? But there was a group in Germany that, when they were having riots because of an alleged incident with Syrian refugees, were going to Jewish-owned businesses and throwing bricks through windows. So a lot of old prejudices are coming back with these new authoritarian regimes. It’s kind of terrifying.

Francis: I’ve always had this metaphor in my head that I’d like to run by and get your opinion on, and it’s an economic kind of metaphor where, when I think of cancer, I think of how you have these cells, and these cells are in your body and they’re part of you. But then they decide, fuck everyone man, I’m just gonna get big and take everything and bubble off and try to like, pretend that it’s all about them. So I think in society we all live so interconnectedly, and with all of our wealth and what makes the world so beautiful in a lot of ways has to do with things that our ancestors built, our grandparents, our great-grandparents and all the work they put into—New York city, this city was built by people who are mostly dead now. So, I was thinking, you know with capitalism we have this idea that, of rugged individualism, and how everybody can just sort of like really focus on themselves and then somehow magically, it’s gonna be good for everyone. But what happens with cancer is, if it keeps growing, the body dies, and I feel like that kind of concept in terms of how, with multinationals and corporations just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, is kind of like happening on an economic level.

Yvette: Yeah. I’m trying to think of which direction to go with an answer to this—at one point it felt more like corporations understood they had a responsibility to make sure that their employees were paid enough so that they could put money back into society, and now it seems like the only responsibilities that they have are to their investors, and to make money for themselves. And it’s like, you know, if you don’t pay people enough, they can’t keep the economy moving.

Chris: Way back at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, we had in Germany the Krupp corporation, the munitions manufacturers, recognized that and started all kinds of great programs for their employees, and that’s where Henry Ford got the idea, he went over to study there. He came back to start Ford motors, he was going to make a car that his employees could afford to buy, so he’d sell more cars.

Yvette: I want to say, “good on ya, Henry Ford,” but he was also a virulent anti-Semite. Hitler loves the guy.

Chris: Oh, he was a horrible person.

Yvette: Him and Charles Lindberg were kind of like the biggest Nazis in America, and I’m not being hyperbolic.

Chris: The reason the Krupp corporation and Ford did it was to stop unions. It wasn’t benevolent, it was to keep from unionizing.

Yvette: This is why I drive Toyotas, because they’re not Fords and they actually work well.

Chris: We’re running really long, so I’ll just ask you the same last question we ask everybody, and what would you like to promote or plug or…?

Yvette: Oh! Let’s see, so if you want to find my podcasts, you can check us out over on Twitter @TGOMpodcast

Chris: What is the name of your podcast?

Yvette: Oh, it’s the Two Girls, One Mic podcast, because we’re classy and we talk about all things porn. I like to say we talk about the holes and the plot-holes in your favorite porn—and indeed, we’re the porn podcast that your grandmother would love! It is far less tawdry than you expect, and it really is just a comedy podcast. You can also, for my “day job,” find me over at the SciBabe on Twitter and Instagram, and at Facebook.com/SciBabe where I talk about science with a heaping dose of snark. Thank you guys for having me on, I’ve had a great time.

Chris: Well, thank you so much coming on, we really appreciate it.

—end

Episode 9: Howard Bloom Transcript

Making Better transcript: Howard Bloom

“…and those changes, those uplifts and upgrades, those messianic moves, those are the real responsibility of capitalism.”
—Howard Bloom

(music) Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.
(music)


Chris: What do Prince, mining asteroids, starting the hippie movement, and being on Coast to Coast 300 times have in common?

Francis: Could it be Howard Bloom?

Chris: He’s our guest on this episode—he talked to us about his history as a rock’n’roll PR guy—

Francis: And that includes some time with Prince, which is a really interesting story.

Chris: We also discussed how Howard helped start the hippie movement—

Francis: All that and some background in science, in politics, in…you never know what Howard Bloom’s going to discuss next.

Chris: So without further ado, here’s our interview with Howard Bloom!


Chris: Howard Bloom, welcome to Making Better!

Howard: Thanks, it’s nice to be here.

Francis: Yes, thank you very much for joining us, we really appreciate it.

Chris: You’ve a long history doing public relations for rock and roll bands—can you tell us a little about that?

Howard: Ok, well you have to know, my background is not in popular culture, it’s not in popular music; my background is—at the age of ten I got involved with theoretical physics and microbiology, and at the age of 13 I realized that what really interested me was ecstatic experiences, the stuff that William James called “the varieties of the religious experience.” And when I got out of college phi beta kappa/magna cum laude, I had four fellowships in what is today called cognitive neuroscience, and I realized that if I accepted any of those fellowships—actually I accepted the one from Columbia—it would be Auschwitz for the mind, I would never get anywhere near the ecstatic mass human emotion tidal waves that I was looking for, the tidal waves that make the forces of history. So I took an opportunity, and I went into something I knew absolutely nothing about—popular culture—absolutely nothing about it. And a few years later founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry and worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, ACDC, [?], KISS, Queen, Run-DMC, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, ZZ-Top, GrandMaster Flash and the Furious Five, and a bunch of others. And my role, since I came into this from science and not from being a vinyl junkie, my role was, if you approached me, my role was to know your career, to have already analyzed its strengths and its weaknesses, and to see how we could make you—if you deserved it—how we could make you a permanent icon in the landscape, how we could make you a permanent presence in the lives of kids. So that’s what I did in the rock and roll business—I helped generate icons, I helped subcultures find their voice, I helped the country music—of all things, ’cause I didn’t like that kind of music—find its voice, but yeah, there was a group of people that were prisoners of the Bible Belt, and they felt they had a right to be on a global stage; well, I helped them find that voice on a global stage. I did the same with glam rock and with heavy metal, with punk music, with disco, and with…Texas culture and a bunch of others. So, the job wasn’t what you would think in terms of PR. Danny Goldberg, who was a terrific publicist and then became the head of Atlantic records and head of Polygram records, says that I wasn’t in this for the spoiled egos of rock stars, I was in it as an applied science—well yeah, but applied science with a heart, with a gut, with a soul. I mean, if you walked through my office and you were interested in working with me, I sat you down and told you something very basic: if you expect me to create an artificial mask for you, an image, and claim that it will make you a star, I’ll send you to my best competitor, I’ll get you a meeting in the next two hours. You can walk over from my office to his. If you’re going to work with me, you have to understand that music is a soul exchange, that it’s an exchange between something deep in you that takes you over and dances you on a stage, that takes you over when you try to write a lyric and are sure you can’t and two hours later there’s a lyric on the blank screen in front of you. Those are the gods inside of you, and my task is to find those gods, put you in touch with them, so you know what it is that is a force bigger than you are, that makes your music for you.

Francis: Can you give any examples of how that happened with some of your clients?

Howard: Yeah. Once upon a time, I used to read all three trade magazines, all three of the insider magazines on what was going on in the music industry every Monday morning when they came in, and I noticed something very odd; there was an artist I never heard of who was moving way up on the R&B charts, which white people didn’t pay any attention to in those days. Not only was he moving up on the R&B charts, his record went platinum, and I’d never heard of him—and I was a student who studied every comma and period in the music industry. Then I got a call asking if I wanted to work with this unknown person out of Minneapolis, who claimed to be 19 years old at the time, and it was the artist that I’d been watching move up the charts. And so I said immediately yes, he was obviously some kind of a strange phenomena. And his name was Prince. So I laid out my conditions, I will only work with you if I can sit down with you in your own environment, for anywhere from one to three days with no handlers around—no managers, no assistants, no wives, nothing—just me and you, and if I could go on a hunt for the soul inside of you, or the soul that dances you, the soul that makes your music. And the manager said yes. Then I got a very strange phone call from Warner Brothers Records—Prince was on Warner Brothers—and in those days, there was a big barrier at record companies between the black people and the white people, within the company. If you were a black act, you automatically got thrown over to the black staff, and the black staff and the white staff didn’t really talk. Warner’s was a little bit different, because whereas most of the black staff on the other side of the color barrier within record companies were relatively unsophisticated people, the folks at Warner Brothers, even in the black department, were Harvard-level people—extremely articulate, extremely intelligent. So I got a phone call from one of the extremely articulate, extremely intelligent black publicists at Warners saying, you put your foot in it, you’ll have a real hard time with this one. Prince won’t do interviews, we set him up for two interviews and he was quiet in one of the interviews and didn’t say anything, and in the other interview tried to strangle the interviewer. Now if this had come from a standard black staff, maybe…god knows how that idea would have arisen—but I would have taken it seriously in one way, but I had it taken a whole different way coming from this super-intelligent Warner’s publicist. Nonetheless they met my demands, and so they flew me, Bob Cavallo (Prince’s manager), flew me to Buffalo New York—which ironically is my home town, not Prince’s home town—where he was rehearsing for his “Dirty Minds” tour at the Shea Theater. And when his rehearsals were over around one o’clock in the morning, we locked ourselves in a back room in the dressing rooms, and we sat there talking until roughly 7-9 am in the morning. It was the Warner Brothers person was dead wrong that Prince wouldn’t talk to me. What were we looking for? We were looking for Prince’s imprinting points; there are certain points in your life where your brain is open to a certain kind of phenomena, and when it finds that phenomena it latches onto it and it makes that phenomena, whatever it’s hooked onto, whatever it’s imprinted on, a part of your brain’s shape, your brain’s morphology for the rest of your life. I call those things passion points, imprinting points. So among other things, I asked Prince a very simple question—when was the first time you remember being interested in music? And Prince talked about when he was five years old—which was often a key imprinting point, almost always a key imprinting point—and Prince’s mom had taken him to a theater in Minneapolis to see his father rehearse. And they come into the empty auditorium, and there his father was on center stage; and behind his father, said Prince, were five of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen in his life, and that was it. Some of the imprinting characteristics for most rock and rollers are that joining point, where sex and massive attention meet. With many of the artists I work with, their imprinting points came in watching Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show, or watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. A point where the screaming girls, the mass attention, the sexual attention, they all come together in a common point. So, this was my main story in understanding Prince—there were lots of others, but this was a key story. So now I was in a position, when I finished my hours and hours of interviews, I went back home—I didn’t yet have computers—I had to cut and paste literally with scotch tape and scissors, and I cut apart the interview and I arranged it in chronological order so it told the tale of Prince’s most important imprinting points, and I sent it back to Prince, and I said, “this is your story. And whenever you do an interview, I want you to tell this story, no matter what the interviewer asks, tell this story, because the interviewer is a megaphone, the interviewer is a microphone through whom you speak to your audience. And your audience has to know what’s at the heart and core of you.” And I gave him a bunch of other training in how to do interviews, and then within the next two years, he did roughly 150 interviews altogether, the person I was told could not possibly do an interview, and who had tried to strangle an interviewer—we never had a problem, never. Now look, Prince—it took me a long time to realize this—Prince was only about five foot, two inches tall, he was tiny. And so I would imagine that when Prince was growing up, he’d taken a lot of shit, that he’d been beaten up a lot, and so he was very timid around men. He wasn’t timid around girls, especially attractive women. I insisted on going out to Minneapolis once a year, after looking at the lyrics to his upcoming album, and debriefing him, because every year your imprinting points change a little, you continue to grow and your imprinting points grow with you. And the third year when I went out to Minneapolis to interview Prince, he had me in the auditorium watching him as he was rehearsing, and then refused to see me. The fear had taken over. Nonetheless, one of the tricks to what I was doing is that, Hermann Hesse says that you have 10,000 personalities hidden in a dark closet of the mind, and the only one of those 10,000 personalities you know is the one that fought to the surface and became you. But those other personalities are inside of you, so one of the tools that I use, which is strange coming out of science, was tuned empathy. It was finding that hidden self in that dark closet of the mind that corresponded to Prince, and then resonating to Prince’s frequency. So Prince’s manager was able to call and say, look, you know, I’m not supposed to have lyrics to Prince’s album, and you’re not supposed to know about the lyrics for Prince’s album. But if the lyrics to Prince’s album mysteriously show up at your desk at 10:30 tomorrow morning, can you tell me what Prince is thinking? And the answer was always yes. All I had to do was see the lyrics, and I knew where Prince’s head was at, I knew where his heart was at, I knew where his soul was at, for years, without ever once again being able to sit down and have a multi-hour conversation with Prince. So that’s just one example of finding the soul inside of you and helping reveal it to your audience. So you think science would be the basis of what I did, and science was in fact the basis of a lot of what I did, but you know science isn’t science unless it uses empathy as well. Science isn’t science unless—or has a good sense of a lot of the stuff it doesn’t know. When it comes to the realm of the human soul, which is what I was after in the music industry, science doesn’t have a clue. So you have to be able to open your eyes. And the first two rules of sciences that I learned at the age of 10, the two rules that converted me to being, to science as my religion, are the truth at any price, including the price of your life, and look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before and then proceed from there. When I was twelve and thirteen years old, I discovered that the most interesting stuff right under your nose isn’t under your nose, it’s behind your nose, it’s what I call “the gods inside.”

Francis: As a scientist myself, I kind of view it as science is what we’ve been able to demonstrate in a reproducible way, and there are phenomena that we can see are pretty reproducible but we don’t have any instruments to measure them.

Howard: Right. We have no numerical system for grabbing ahold of them, and in science very often when we don’t have a system involving equations and numbers, we feel helpless. In fact, usually we deny that the phenomena exists altogether until we find a way of dealing with them with formulae and math.

Francis: Yeah, I think as I’ve grown as a scientist I’ve just become more and more humble in terms of being aware of how much there is to know, how much phenomena is out there that is not subject to our senses and to our tools. But you could see their effects.

Howard: Absolutely. Hitler’s not a replicable phenomena, although his speeches tended to have pretty much the same impact when they were made, and yet should science understand a Hitler or how he came to be, so that we can stop new Hitlers from arising? Absolutely. Should we understand what he was able to do successfully in stirring the souls of his audience? You bet! Should we be able to use that for good? You bet! Should we deny that it exists? No way! Science is the aspiration to omniscience, it’s the aspiration to know and understand everything, and our science is still, very, very, very, very primitive. It thinks it understands the world, the cosmos, but it understands such a tiny fraction of the cosmos, that it’s ridiculous, and there is something called observational science. You go out into the field and you become a participant-observer. You become a part of the process that you’re observing—Margaret Mead used to do that in anthropology, and in fact that all the great anthropologists have done that, and it’s where the phrase “participant-observer science” comes from. Well, I was doing participant-observer science in the music industry, and the tales of all of these adventures are in a book. It’s called Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll, and that book will be available in April of 2020. And the other books tend to focus on science, because the situation is that I left the music industry in 1988, I felt I had learned everything that I was going to learn from it, and I got sick. So I was sick in bed for 15 years and started to write my books. This sounds hideous to say it, but the fact is I had become a legend in the music industry and the BillBoard Guide to Music Publicity, a publicity textbook, for example, had 20 pages just of an interview with me, about what I called perceptual engineering. I was credited with having re-invented publicity in the music industry. So because of that, I needed to re-establish my scientific credentials, because the rock and roll publicity overshadowed my scientific credentials.

Chris: Did you choose to walk away from the music industry, or was it your illness?

Howard: I started doing the research for what would be my first book in 1981, I started organizing the material in 1984, and I started writing it in 1987, I think. And then I wanted to move away from the music industry and just do my books full time. There’s no way you can get away with that when you’ve got a wife and you’re at a legendary level. And I got sick, and the sickness was horrible, it was monstrous, I was too weak for five years to have another person in the room with me and too weak to utter syllable, too weak to say a thing. So it was hideous, but monstrosities produce advantages sometimes, and it allowed me to do my work on my books full time, and I needed to do my books on science because, as I said, I needed to re-establish those credentials. And when I was 12 years old I had built my first [?] algebra machine, I had co-designed a computer that had won science fair awards, I had been schlepped off to a meeting with the head of the graduate physics department at my hometown university, the University of Buffalo. I imagine that he was granting five minutes as a courtesy to my mom, and instead we spent an hour discussing the hottest topic of science at the moment, the interpretation of the Doppler shift and Big Bang vs. Steady State theory of the universe. At the age of 16, I had worked at the world’s largest cancer research facility, the Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute, and I had spent that summer at Roswell developing a theory of the beginning, middle and end of the universe that predicted something that wouldn’t be discovered for another 38 years—dark energy. And if you go online and look up “Howard Bloom Big Bang”—or big bagel—you’ll see the theory in a five and a half minute, very simple animation, and it explains what dark energy is, which is a mystery to science. The actual existence of dark energy wouldn’t be discovered until 1998, I was coming up with this theory in 1959. So even though I had this scientific background, nobody knew it. So my first books were all science, The Lucifer Principle of Scientific Expedition to the Forces of History, which a lot of people call their bible and reads like it was written tomorrow. The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, the office of the Secretary of Defense had a forum based on that book and brought in people from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM and MIT; The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism, which the sheik who runs Dubai named a racehorse after, which his former minister of development who runs a 33 billion dollar sovereign real estate operation and he’s co-founder of the Arabian business and economic forum, and he went in front of the Arabian Business and Economic Forum and said there’s a book I particularly resonate to, it contains the future of Dubai, and proceeded to read passages from The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism. The 11th President of India called the book a visionary creation, and he and I worked together for four years on harvesting solar energy in space and transmitting it to earth. The next book was The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates, and that’s very relevant to what you’re doing in science, because Barbara Erenreich read that book, and she wrote an introduction for the paperback version. And in her introduction, she says that for 250 years we’ve been doing reductionist science; it’s only gotten us so far. To understand how a hummingbird flies, via reductionist method, you have to kill a hummingbird—well, there goes everything that makes the hummingbird fly. In this book, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates, is the first step in the next 250 years of science. The other books are How I Accidentally Started the 60s, which I wrote while I was sick in bed. Certain forms of human yanked me out of my misery, and they were P.G. Wodehouse and Dave Barry, and I wrote this book, it’s the story of my adventures accidentally helping start the hippie movement, and I wrote it to be as hilarious as I could possibly make it. And then a manuscript got to Timothy Leary and Timothy Leary came back with a quote that was just astonishing: he said it was a monumental masterpiece of American literature, and filled with [wow woo aha] experiences and nonstop scientific comedy routines and waves of hilarity, and wow-woo-aha and he compared it to James Joyce. What I didn’t realize is, as I was writing this book from my bed in an attempt to create the kind of transcendent humor that had lifted me out of my circumstances, and Timothy Leary was dying prostate cancer and needed exactly the same thing, and apparently he found it in that book.

Chris: Can speak more to how you accidentally invented the 60s?

Howard: It was an acdent. I was a total outcast in my hometown of Buffalo, New York. The other kids, to the extent that they acknowledged me at all, called me the sickly scientist, and I read Time magazine from cover to cover every week. And every week Time magazine covered the latest escapades of the beatniks. I thought, well, there may be no social group that want to have anything to do with me in Buffalo, New York, but if I could ever get anywhere near the beatniks, they would accept me. So I thought the beatniks would accept me, and so I tried to drop out of high school, I tried to get a motorcycle and drive to California, not realizing not only did I not have the money for a motorcycle, I did not have a driver’s license and knew nothing about how to drive one. But nonetheless, my parents managed to enlist my teachers, and they persuaded me not to drop out of high school, so when I went off to Reed College, which was called the Harvard of the West and had the highest median SATs of any school in the country at the time, higher than Harvard, higher than Cal Tech, higher than Yale; a few weeks before the end of my freshman year, I dropped out to seek Zen Buddhist Satori and to find the beatniks. And I trekked all the way down from Portland, Oregon to North Beach, which was where the Beatniks were supposed to be headquartered. And I went to the City Lights bookstore, which was owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was the king of Beat poets, and the store was empty! I walked in, there was a guy behind the counter, he was reading a book, he didn’t lift his eyes when I walked in; I asked him where the beatniks were, he didn’t even answer. I walked out on the street looking terribly confused, and somebody stopped and said, “you look disturbed about something, can I help you?” The kindness of strangers is really remarkable under some circumstances, and I said, “yes, I’m looking for the Beatniks.” He rolled his eyes up into his head, and scratched his forehead, and then he finally said, “well, have you tried Colorado?”—and that was a little bit vague as a destination for me. So what ended up happening is that people followed me and my two companions, and the group grew larger and larger, we ended up living naked all day long in a big condemned house in Berkeley, California, and people were dropping out of their jobs and dropping out of their schools to come out and follow us. So while looking for the Beatniks I accidentally became one of the catalysts—I’m sure there were thousands of us—for a movement that as yet had no name. And I left the country for a year after these adventures, and when I came back Time-Life publications, the same people who had told me about the Beatniks, had found a name for our movement, they called it the hippie movement. So that’s how I accidentally started the 60s. And I’ve got another book, it’s The Mohammed Code, and it’s about the rise of Islam and within a hundred years of Mohammed’s death, the empire of Islam conquered a territory 11 times the size of the conquest of Alexander the Great, five times the size of the Roman empire, and seven times the size of United States. Nothing like it has ever happened in the history of the world, it is the biggest imperialist and colonialist movement this world has ever seen, and the most successful. And since understanding the forces of history is what I’m all about, using science, that book is essential reading. So that’s it, that’s my seven books, and now Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll in April.

Chris: What can you tell us about the new book without spoiling it for us when it comes out?

Howard: Well, Michael Jackson’s the most remarkable person I’ve ever met in my life, so far utterly beyond the norm that it’s hard to describe it, except that I tell the stories and the stories get that across in this book, and I also pursue the mystery of who killed Michael Jackson. But the stories you must read, because you know there are certain people who expand the boundaries of human possibility: like for example, in 1954, no one had ever broken the 4-minute mile, and a guy in England got together with somebody who had a very analytic mind, and they took pictures, they took film of his running, Roger Bannister, and they analyzed every movement of his knees, every movement of his ankles, so that he could be trained to maximize his energy when he was running. And the 4-minute mile, which experts had considered a biological impossibility, he broke it. Now once Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile, if you look at Wikipedia and look up the 4-minute mile, it will explain that every decent, [boldly] competitive runner now automatically breaks the 4-minute mile. So there are certain people who expand the bounds of human possibility, and Michael was one of those people. And he did it—remember the first two rules of science? Truth at any price, including the price of your life, and look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before and then proceed from there? Well, rule 1, the truth at any price including the price of your life, it’s courage. And rule 2, look at things that are under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before and then proceed from there, is awe, wonder, curiosity. Michael had a quality of awe, wonder, and curiosity I had never expected to see, I had never imagined. He was purely committed to his kids, to his audience, absolutely, totally dedicated to them, and he would have laid his life on the line for his audience. But you have to read the stories, because until you read the stories, you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. I’m hoping this book will correct the record on Michael, and it’s the stories of my involvement with all these other artists: with Bob Marley, there’s a lengthy chapter on Bob Marley, with Bette Midler, with Billy Joel, with Paul Simon, etc. It’s my adventures, literally looking for soul.

Chris: And how does Einstein fit in there?

Howard: Einstein was a major role model for me when I was a kid, and…OK, so I’m in eighth grade and I’m 12 years old and…I didn’t register at the time, it took me decades to register this, but no one ever made eye contact with me in school. So one day, it came as a total surprise when one of the girls in class moved her eyes in my direction and fixated on me, and said “I told my mother you understand the theory of relativity.” Well, in reality I didn’t understand the theory of relativity, and it was a big deal in those days, it was said that only seven people in the world understood it, but I wasn’t going to contest that to her, because it’s the only thing I had to stand on, being the sickly scientist. As soon as school got out, I got on my bicycle and I rode the two miles to my local library—the librarians knew me better than my mother, literally—and I said “give me everything you’ve got on the theory of relativity” and they went in the back and did some shuffling around, and they found two books and they shoved them across the desk to me. One was a great big fat book, and one was a little tiny skinny book. So I started with the great big fat book, because I had learned at that point that if you don’t think you understand something, if you push yourself all the way through to the bitter end, by the time you finish you’ve understood something. And then eight o’clock at night rolled around, and I was only 50 pages into this book, which was all equations and very little English, and I don’t understand equations, I never have. And I realize that my mom’s going to put me to sleep at 10 o’clock and I’ve got two hours left to understand the theory of relativity. So I turned to the little skinny book, and I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but every once in a while it feels as if an author has reached out through the page, grabbed you by the lapel, put his nose up to yours and said, “schmuck, listen, I’ve got a message for you.” Well, that’s [Patton?] with the introduction to Einstein’s book. Einstein seemed to drag me nose to nose with him, and say these words: to be a genius, it is not enough to come up with a theory that only seven men in the world can understand. To be a genius you have to be able to come up with that theory and then explain it so simply, so clearly, that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of intelligence can understand it. So Albert Einstein, through the pages of a book, had told me, “schmuck, listen up! You want to be an original scientific thinker? You have to be a writer, and not just any writer—you have to be a delicious writer, a clear writer.” So that became part of my marching orders, as a part of my science, to become a writer. And becoming a writer was what accidentally got me into popular culture, and ultimately into the music industry. So Einstein was responsible, of all things, for my ending up working with Michael Jackson and Prince. There is this movie that’s come out recently, about Michael Jackson, it made it onto HBO, it was a hit at the Sundance festival, and it accuses Michael of all the hideous sexual deeds with children that ultimately destroyed Michael’s life and destroyed his career. And when that movie came out, what was noticeable was, there was an avalanche, a tidal wave, of reaction against it. And there were people going online, going on Youtube, and giving detailed analyses demonstrating, with timelines, with precise timelines, why the claims being made about Michael couldn’t be true. The avalanche was an avalanche of Michael lovers around the world who refused to give up on Michael Jackson, and this is 10 years after Michael Jackson died. So the remarkable thing is that Michael’s hits record, in the public mind, not just here in Amsterdam and Moscow, all over the world, that no other artist in my lifetime has ever hit—I mean, beyond even Elvis. And people know there is something worth loving there, they don’t know what. And this book attempts to answer the question of what, what was it that the fans of Michael Jackson know at an intuitive level, that the critics of Michael Jackson do not know.

Francis: There’s a phenomenon that I’ve always been interested in, which is how popular music participated in the evolution of human consciousness, and one of the things that was really clear in the 70s is, American at that time seems very free in terms of the process by which grassroots music would be discovered and then curated and offered to the public, by either AM or FM radio, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, in some of the communist countries, it was all controlled by the government—it was laughable, actually, in comparison to the richness and, I guess, just the immediacy of the music that the West had. Are we sort of creating, through the corporatization and monopolization of the media, something that kind of mirrors what happened in Russia and how causing things to stall maybe in terms of how fast this country could be evolving, is the fact that the cutting edge of the art isn’t really being offered to the masses, the people who are capable of appreciating it but aren’t going to go out and find it on their own.

Howard: Well, I think the opposite is happening. Look what I just alluded to, Pandora. Pandora and Spotify have changed everything, so has Youtube. People are able to find a far vaster array of music than they’ve ever been able to find in their lives. Musical artists are able to find an audience more easily than has ever been possible in the past. In fact, in the 1970s and 1980s, when I got into the music industry, there was a rough equivalent of the Stalinist bureaucracy at the top, the gatekeepers, the folks in the record industry. You had to get the attention of A&R guys, those were talent scouts, and manage to get a record company contract, and record company contracts were almost impossible to get—maybe one out of a million musical acts actually got a music industry contract—so without going through the gatekeepers, you couldn’t reach the public. Today, you can go out and start touring on your own, if you can afford it, ‘cause it’s very expensive, and you can start connecting with your audience. You’ve got people like Amanda Palmer, who raised over a million dollars on Kickstarter—that wasn’t possible back in the 70s and 80s. And with Pandora, you have personal control over what you get to listen to, you give thumbs up and thumbs down to things, and you can add any artist who’s on Pandora that you want to the station that you’re listening to. That wasn’t at all possible in the 1970s and 1980s; you had top 40 radio and you had something I helped establish, and the whole story of how that was done—or at least I was there for its birth—you had progressive radio, where the DJs were allowed to play anything they wanted.

Chris: I think we used to call that AOR…

Howard: Yeah, Album Oriented Radio, you’re right. My role was accidental—I mean, most of my life has been accidental—in order to get into popular culture, I started a commercial art studio with a bunch of starving artists. One day, I walked our portfolio of artwork into ABC, and ABC had owned seven FM stations, and this new concept of progressive radio had just been invented. ABC was going to do something incredibly risky—it was going to take these seven stations, stop doing the top 40 which everybody else was doing, a limit of 40 songs that got airplay—and was going to go with the progressive format. It hired me and my art studio to do all the graphics for this huge change, and we did a spectacular job. I had a 19-year old artist named Bradley Johannsen who was a visionary—every time he sat down and did a picture, it was an entire world you had never seen or imagined before in your life. So he did seven of these imaginary worlds for ABC, and it helped put them on the map, and ABC asked me to found an advertising agency in order to handle all their ads, and I didn’t want to learn time-buying, which sounded incredibly boring to me, so I didn’t do it—but that gives you a measure of how trusted we were at ABC Records. So I was there for the inception of Album Oriented Radio, I wasn’t a move and a shaker, I was a participant. Remember, I didn’t know anything about popular music—my Rachmaninoff/Beethoven/Bartok and Stravinsky were the people I had been listening to since I was ten years old, and the head of promotions for ABC started educating me about popular music. And then one day she said, look, we’re having a concert in Studio B, why don’t I give you two tickets. OK, so I took the two tickets and I took my lead artist and took him with me, and we went to Studio B. There was this piano player on stage, and my artist, Peter Bramley, started getting up out of his seat and whooping and hollering and he embarrassed the shit out of me, I thought this was terrible behavior, why can’t he just sit still? And then the concert was over, and it took me years to process this. What I failed to realize is, one of the reasons that that artist on stage, that piano player, was able to give such an incredible performance, was because Peter Bramley was feeding him energy, and you need energy from an audience if you’re a performer on stage. It’s what lifts you out of yourself, it’s what does give you an ecstatic experience. It does allow the gods inside of you to dance you around like marionette. The artist onstage was named Elton John, and the album came out as Elton’s first live album, and you can still hear Peter Bramley to this day whooping and hollering, and helping make that concert what it was. So I learned about popular music from my experience, my involvement with ABC, and my involvement in helping them establish Album Oriented Rock, or Album Radio.

Chris: I used to just absolutely love the DJ Vinnie Scelsa in New York, I don’t know if that name rings a bell..

Howard: Oh yeah, absolutely. Plus there was the day I was [up] at ABC, their DJ and the new format, one of their DJs was named Dave Herman, and there was a stack of records almost up to his shoulder, at least up to his nipple in front of him, and he was leaning on it with his elbow, and we were talking, and then one of the album covers caught his eye. And he looked down, he lifted the album cover in his hands, and he said “this looks interesting, I think I’ll play it when I get on the air.” The album that he’d picked up was called “Jesus Christ Superstar,” it was the most unlikely record you’ve ever heard of, it was a rock opera, which was a dream at the time. It was the story of Jesus Christ told from the point of view of Judas Iscariot—I mean, how the hell would that ever be commercial, right? And it was the first airplay, in Herman’s play was the first airplay that Jesus Christ Superstar got. And of course since then Andrew Lloyd Webber, the writer of Jesus Christ Superstar, has become a multi-billionaire and has been recognized by the Queen. So it was almost, my experience was almost Forrest Gump-ian experience. Sometimes I made things happen, and it wouldn’t have happened without me, and sometimes I was there, along for the ride, and can tell you what it was like—and it was fascinating.

Francis: One of the things we like to discuss on this program are concepts for the future and how we can evolve beyond where we currently are right now in terms of technology, in terms of how the world is structured, in every regard. I was wondering what your thoughts are about what direction the world is going in, and what kind of vision we can aspire to.

Howard. Well, four billion years ago there was this hideous planet, absolutely monstrous; poison pill in stone. And it was the mother of all climate change catastrophes, its temperature went up and down 88 degrees every three hours, for three hours you were on the surface of this killer of a planet, you were exposed to something poisonous called radiation and for three hours you were exposed to something equally poisonous called [darkness?]. Plus it had a tilt to its rotation, and the result was that as it rotated around the sun, it produced four major climate changes a year—summer, fall, winter and spring. And life had the audacity to get started on this planet, and over the course of the next four billion years, despite catastrophe after catastrophe after catastrophe, the greened and gardened the place. Despite a hundred and forty-two mass extinctions, life continued to hold on and expand. If life has greened and gardened one poison pill of stone, how many poison pills of stone are there above our heads, just waiting to be greened and gardened? They’re all over the place. We’re discovering there are billions and billions of planets up there. Look, life is imperialistic and life is colonialistic. It likes taking over territory, kidnapping and seducing and recruiting dead atoms and bringing them into this enterprise of life, into this grand initiative of life. There are creatures that are better than us at research and development, they’re called bacteria. We race with them and we narrowly manage to stay neck and neck with them, but there’s only one species on this planet that can take green and garden stuff, that can take ecosystems out of the gravity well and to other poison pills of stone—and it’s us, humans. It’s our obligation to open the rest of the solar system and ultimately the galaxy and beyond that, a multitude of galaxies, to life, to green and garden the whole thing. So I’ve got this document called Garden the Solar System, Green the Galaxy, and you can find it on HowardBloom.net, on my website, again that’s HowardBloom.net. I was at Maxwell Air Force Base in May, and with a team of people I put together a two billion dollar moon program, and right now we are promoting that two billion dollar moon program because they current President, much as I loathe and despise him, and the current Vice-President, much as I loathe and despise him too, want to get us to the moon by 2024. And if that’s the motivation that gets us greening and gardening all of those gravity balls up above our heads, fine. And we’ve got a way that we can do it, so we are promoting this two billion dollar moon plan, and the two billion dollar moon plan and my partner in this is a three-star general, and the plan is very simple: give a billion dollars to the first company that can land a nice, big roomy human habitat on the moon, and give another billion dollars to the company that can set it up and run it. That’s it, that gets us on the moon to stay, and it gets around a whole bunch of obstacles that the space military industrial complex is trying to throw in our path and keep us from getting to the surface of the moon. One of my friends, a chief research scientist at NASA, visited his old friends at NASA, the powers that be at NASA, about eight months ago, and he came back with a very simple report: that the people at the top in NASA had told him, “if you think we’re going let you step on the surface of the moon, you’ve got another thing coming.” In other words, NASA was sabotaging our ability to take [ego?]systems to space. And this program gets around any form of NASA sabotage whatsoever. So, the future is above our heads, the future is in taking life to places it has never been before and allowing it to adapt and kidnap, seduce and recruit a biotic atoms, dead molecules and atoms, and bring them into the grand enterprise of life.

Chris: I heard you on Joe Rogan’s podcast talking about this space-military-industrial complex. Now, I was born in 1960 so I was not aware when President Eisenhower gave the nation the warning about the military-industrial complex, but I’ve certainly grown to see its evils. Would you like to speak to that?

Howard: Well, yeah. The space military-industrial complex saddles us with impossible programs, and they kill us! It is not here to provide American security, it’s here to undo American security. I mean, just like Donald Trump to undo American security, too, but it’s a different process. So back in…10 years ago, Boeing was doing research on gas stations in space, fuel propellent depots in space. What’s the advantage of a gas station in space? Well, you could take an existing rocket from ten years ago, you could fly it to orbit, you could refuel it in orbit, and it could go to the moon, it could go to Mars, it could go to Jupiter, it could go to the moons of Jupiter, it could go to the rings of Saturn, it could go anyplace in the solar system with a simple refueling, and no new rocket had to be developed to accomplish this. So we could have been up and running if Boeing had continued the development of these propellent depots, these gas stations in space. We could have been up and running with human programs to the rest of the planets a long time ago. But Boeing managed to land a contract for something that would produce far more immediate lucre, far more immediate profit. It was called the Space Launch System—it was a mega-rocket, it was a franken-rocket cobbled together by Richard Shelby, the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee in order to keep jobs in his district, and cobbled together from old technologies. So Boeing killed—not only killed its work on gas stations in space, it forbade the use of the word “depot” anywhere in Boeing or the other company that it controlled, United Launch Alliance. Meanwhile, Richard Shelby got that same gag order placed on NASA itself. So for ten years there’s been this focus on a space launch system, the mega-rocket, the franken-rocket, and it has meant two billion dollars a year to Boeing. The franken-rocket was supposed to fly, space launch system, was supposed to fly in 2015. I don’t know if you noticed it, but 2015 is in the rear view mirror, that was four years ago, is the franken-rocket/space launch system anywhere near being ready for flight? Not at all! It may never fly. And if it ever flies, it will cost between one and two billion dollars per flight. Now for that, you could buy 22 launches of Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy. In other words, you could buy 11 launches to the moon, and 11 launches to Mars from Elon Musk, and you could buy it today, because the Falcon Heavy rocket is already flying, it’s already done three flights—unlike the space launch system, which may never fly. And for the sake of all of this, we stopped the space shuttle and America has not had access to space in American vehicles since 2011. We’re supposed to be the space leader, we hitch our rides to the International Space Station on Russian rockets. This is a hideous, monstrous embarrassment. Plus, the space military-industrial complex has come up with this plan to never get us to the moon—it’s called the Gateway, the Lunar Gateway, and it’s a tiny little space station that’s supposed to orbit the moon, but never get us to the lunar surface! And Lockheed Martin is trying to put all of our attention, all of our money into this, and it is succeeding, so far. So the business of the space-military-industrial complex over the course of the last nine years, has been to keep us out of space, not to get us into space. Why? In order to make a quick and easy profit. A friend of mine from Boeing points out that the space-military-industrial-complex makes its profits off of what are called change orders—every time that Congress changes its mind about what the characteristics of a rocket should be, or every time NASA changes its mind.

Chris: My background is engineering, and I’ve done a lot of contracting, and I know exactly how the engineering change order, ECO as we call it, can bloat a project and absolutely destroy the deadlines.

Howard: Right. So the more bloat, the better, because the more money that means on the bottom line of companies like Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, and Lockheed-Martin. So, the goal is to get beyond this, and the two billion dollar moon program just doesn’t say a word about them, doesn’t threaten their program, takes whispers of money—a billion dollars for two years running, is a whisper of money in NASA terms—and simply gets us to the moon, period, to stay, with a nice big roomy human habitation. And Bob Bigelow, the reasoning behind this program is that Elon Musk has already got the Falcon Heavy, and he’s about to have the Starship to get us to the moon and back. Jeff Bezos has already announced his moon program, with his Blue Moon lunar lander. And Bob Bigelow, who was behind the Quality Hotel chain, or something of the sort, he’s a hotel entrepreneur, and he bought inflatable habitat technology from NASA over 15 years ago, roughly 20 years ago, and he’s had a plan for a lunar colony, and he’s been building it—for ten years. For ten years, we’ve had a lunar colony that could be finished in a year or two, with a little bit of extra funding. And here we are talking about this useless little lunar orbiter, just to make money for Lockheed-Martin? Are you kidding me? Americans’ leadership in space is going to determine which set of values rules the world for the next 40 years. The Chinese want it to be them, and they have a detailed program for how they are going to colonize the moon, colonize Mars, colonize the solar system and then colonize the universe. And it is so important to the Chinese that Xi Jinping has had this all locked into the Chinese constitution, what he called the Chinese Space Dream. So we have our own companies knifing us in the back, and if China wins in this space war, it’s the Chinese set of values that is going to dominate the world for the rest of this century. It’s the Chinese totalitarianism, it’s the Chinese intrusion into your personal life, it’s the Chinese system of using face recognition in order to give you toilet paper. You’re in a bathroom in China, a public bathroom, and if the facial recognition system says you have not been a good citizen, that you haven’t toed the party line with enough fidelity, it won’t give you toilet paper! That’s a major motivational interference in personal life.

Chris: We’ve recently had the journalist James O’Malley on the podcast—we haven’t published that episode yet—and he’s been following the Chinese social credit system very closely, and he took a trip to China and was just…you know, if you have good social credit you could ride the fast train, if you don’t you have to ride the slow train, it’s really like a dystopian science fiction story…

Howard: Yeah. It’s Pavlovian, it’s Skinnerian, it’s, you know, you give the pigeon a piece of corn when it moves in the direction you want it to move in, and you successfully shape its behaviors. That’s what the Chinese are doing, giving out little rewards if you turn in the direction the party wants, and depriving you of rewards or giving you negative reinforcements when you turn out of the direction that the party wants. So if that’s the way we want the world to be run, no freedom of speech, no tolerance, no pluralism—you know, we have a million Uighurs who are in re-education camps in China right now. If that’s the way we want the world to be run, then let them win the space race, and they will make sure that’s the way the world is run. If you want tolerance, pluralism, freedom of speech, and democracy, the things that we value in the United States, we gotta win this space race, it’s as simple as that. Plus, the space race is going to do, for the future of humanity, what opening up the New World did for the Europeans—it tripled the gross domestic product in 100 years, of all of Europe, and space is going to triple the gross domestic product of all of humanity. It’s going to provide what are called, in my book, the Genius of the Beast, material miracles and secular salvation like you wouldn’t believe. Who should be delivering that to the world? Well, I’m an American chauvinist, I want America to be the country that delivers this to the world. In the music industry, which I departed from in 1988, I want to see soul come back. I want to see an emphasis on the fact that music is a soul exchange, that it’s not about downloads, it’s not about pieces of plastic, it’s not about the transfer of money, it is about fucking goddamn human soul. I would love to see that return—whether it ever will or not, I don’t know, because I was the only one preaching it when I was there, and I’m not there anymore. Every once in a while, I try to inspire somebody new in the music industry to follow this particular line, but it’s not that easy. So the future is space, and the future is soul.

Chris: You say that you want to return “soul” to capitalism—can you explain to our listeners what that means?

Howard: Yeah. There’s a hidden mandate in capitalism that most capitalists fail to see, but they follow it whether they see it or not, and it’s “be messianic.” It’s “save, lift and upgrade your neighbor.” Upgrade one neighbor you get a dollar, save, lift and upgrade a hundred neighbors you get a hundred dollars, save, lift and upgrade a hundred million neighbors and you get a hundred million dollars. It’s as simple as that. When Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, he upgraded human possibilities in ways we have never imagined before. Look, when I was co-designing a computer, when I was twelve years old, computers were the size of a brownstone in Brooklyn, like the one I’m sitting in right now. To have a computer in your pocket is astonishing! To be able to communicate with friends in Beijing or Hong Kong or Hungary while you’re walking down the street with tiny little headphones, ear buds in your ears, that astonishing! So what Steve Jobs developed was a material miracle, it was a source of secular salvation. And we’ve been churning out these material miracles since approximately 1790, when the steam engine was perfected. We once upon a time…what’s the name of the guy who wrote Robin Hood and…Sir Walter Scott. So Sir Walter Scott was alive as the new steam engines were coming online, and Sir Walter Scott said, “Those who tell you that a steam engine will ever power a mode of transportation are lying to you, it will never happen!” And you know, Sir Walter Scott was a reasonably intelligent and well-informed guy. Well, then, steam engines were put on ships, and all of a sudden instead of taking months to get across the Atlantic, and being totally reliant on winds, you could directly go across the Atlantic in a week or so. We’ve been introducing these new material miracles every ten to fifteen years now, for over 200 years. And what’s the job of you and me, what’s your job as an engineer? What’s my job as an imagineer, as a visionary? It is to make sure that those material miracles come at an even greater pace in the future, that we utterly change the nature of what it is to be human. Look, when their parents put an iPad in the hands of their 16-month-old child, and that 16-month old lays in his cradle and starts exploring the digital landscape that’s implicit in the iPad, and comes to know that digital landscape better than his parents ever will, and comes to be more proficient in the use of this thing…the use of an iPad, than anyone could have possibly have imagined, and that child ends up at the age of 5 going to first grade with the equivalent of bachelor’s degree in submarines or dinosaurs or whatever the subject of his or her personal obsession is, you’ve changed the nature of what it means to be a human being. And those changes, uplifts and upgrades, those messianic moves, those are the real responsibility of capitalism.

Francis: Yeah, I was just wondering where you go from there.

Howard: Well, where you go from there? The law of unintended consequences. Every time you invent something, if it really takes hold, it produces results of kinds you never could have imagined before. And according that first habitation, that nice, big roomy comfortable human habitation of Bob Bigelow, inflatable habitat on the moon, where that’s going to lead—well, it’s going to take an industry. When Sputnik went up, who could have ever imagined a communications satellite? Dish TV? Direct TV? Being able to take the Olympics from one side of the globe to the other instantaneously? Not having to make a videotape and then rush the videotape by courier to New York so it could be seen in North America. Who could have imagined the telecom business? Nobody! Nobody did. And yet today, the satellite industry alone is worth a third of a trillion dollars a year, and once we get to other poison pills of stone and start greening and gardening them, we’re going to triple the gross human product, eventually. First we’ll raise that to three trillion dollars, from a third of a trillion dollars, and then it will utterly change the nature of what it means to be human. And it’s the unintended consequences that are going to be the real stunners. When Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, he never imagined putting an iPad in the hands of a baby, and how it would change that baby’s life. Look, you know, we’re born with twice as many brain cells as we use, and then half of our brain cells are pared away, they go through apoptosis, pre-programmed cell death. So the ones that stay alive, the brain cells that stay alive and the assemblies of brain cells that stay alive are the ones that are called upon for action and use. When you put an ipad in a baby’s hands, you re-sculpt its brain, because there are whole ensembles of neurons that would have died out in a previous generation and are now kept vigorously alive. You have just changed the nature of what it means to have a human brain, with a simple piece—well, not so simple piece—of technology. So we do not know what the impacts are going to be, of gardening the solar system and greening the galaxy. We don’t have a clue. All we can say is, material miracles come tumbling out of the least expected places, and this is certainly an opportunity for material miracles we have never imagined in our lives.

Chris: We’ve had a couple of Scientific Skeptics on this show, and you’re on Coast to Coast, the radio program with the UFOs and the weird conspiracy theories and all of that, and I’m certain you’re probably going to be the only guest we ever had who’s been on Coast to Coast—so what do you actually believe of what they—George Noory and his guests talk about?

Howard: Nothing. I don’t believe that there are aliens up there, but the fact is that this universe has a tendency to super-simultaneity and super-synchrony. I did a paper about this for Physica Plus a long time ago. That means that all of the quarks at the very beginning of the universe came into existence at precisely the same time, in only 16 different forms with gazillions of identical copies of each. Then, all about three hundred thousand to three hundred and eighty thousand years after the big bang, the first atoms came together, and they were precisely the same and they all came together about the same time. Then, gravity took over, you had the era of the great gravity competitions, the great gravity crusades, and that resulted in the assembly of black holes, galaxies, and stars. Black holes, galaxies of stars are all pretty much the same, and pretty much arrived, sort of, at the same time. So if the universe is in the habit of giving birth to new forms, entirely new forms like galaxies and stars and planets, and putting them together in pretty much the same form at pretty much the same time, then it stands to reason that mega-molecules have assembled life all over the place at pretty much the same time, give or take a million years or two. But we have absolutely zero evidence for the existence of alien life, of life outside of this one single planet, and we’ve been looking diligently for it since I put Earth, Wind and Fire together with Carl Sagan to see if Earth, Wind and Fire could do a benefit concert for the SETI project, and that would have been about 1981. That’s forty years ago, almost, and we haven’t found a thing. So the odds seem to be, from a scientific point of view, that there is no alien life, that we’re it when it comes to life. So I don’t believe in any of the conspiracy stuff…I mean, they have me as their token Democrat, as their token liberal, and as their token real-science person. And I appreciate the fact that they want me—I mean, 300 appearances is terrific, it gives me new challenges, new things to explore and research every single week. So I’m very grateful to them, but I don’t agree with any of the ideas that they tend to fixate on.

Chris: I enjoy listening to Coast to Coast—sometimes I have weird sleeping problems, and I’ll find myself awake when it’s on, and even though I disagree with everything, I enjoy the humanity of the callers, I think there’s something in the people who call in to that show that I just find compelling.

Howard: And you’re one of a whole mess of people, all over the country, who are secret listeners to the show, who will not confess it during daytime hours, but who are, for one reason or another, awake at one in the morning, Eastern Time, when the show starts, and are insomniacs and enjoy listening to the show. So when they had me do a one-hour debate with one of their Republicans, on Republicanism versus Democratism, they took a poll, and he got 80% of the votes and I got 20% of the votes. But that 20% is so grateful for hearing sane stuff that it makes it worthwhile. And George is very good to me—George Noory, the host—is very good to me.

Chris: What makes the difference between a Democrat and a Republican?

Howard: So the Republicans operate on fear of people smaller than they are, people weaker than they are. They get their hierarchical kicks, they feel high on the social totem pole…stepping on, stomping on, the people beneath them—immigrants, in this case. Democrats tend to want an open world. Democrats try to, tend to want a global world. The amygdala, which is where political activities are centered for conservatives, is a fear center; the insula is an identity center, it’s more concerned with flashing symbols to those in your group that you’re one of them. And there’s a huge amount of conformity within the liberal left, among us Democrats, but we’re operating from different parts of the brain, and we’re operating with different assumptions about what the world is really all about, and Donald Trump is betraying America and he’s the traitor—I mean, to use words, I don’t like to use these words in political discourse, but they’re words that are used every single day by the Tea Party and the conservatives. They use the word “traitor” and they use the word “turncoat.” Well, Donald Trump is the only traitor and turncoat I have seen in the White House in my entire lifetime.

Chris: I think this has been a very good interview, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. Howard, what would you like to plug or promote, what would you like our listeners to look at?

Howard: Well, just look up Howard Bloom on Amazon, and buy any book that you choose, and then let me know what you think of it. Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for Einstein, Michael Jackson and Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll, coming in April.

Chris: Maybe you can come back on the show then, and…

Howard: Well, that would be terrific. I will look forward to the next time.

—END

Episode 8: Hayley Stevens Transcript

Making Better Podcast: Hayley Stevens

(music)
Announcer: Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Chris: Welcome to Episode 8 of the Making Better Podcast. This episode features Hayley Stevens, the paranormal investigator from England. I’ve known Hayley for quite some time, and we’re pretty good friends. I was pleased when I was sitting beside when she won the Occam Award for the Best Blog in the skeptical world. Hayley’s been investigating haunted houses and other places around England for a long time. She’s never found an actual ghost, and usually comes up with a logical explanation. So without any more introduction, let’s get onto the interview.


Chris: Hayley Stevens, welcome to Making Better!

Hayley: Thank you very much for having me.

Francis: Hi.

Hayley: Hi.

Chris: You and I have known each other for about seven years, I think it was, when we met at that QED conference, …

Hayley: Yeah. It’s a while ago now…

Francis: So is QED a cruise liner or something?

Chris: QED is a conference that goes on in Manchester, England every year, actually Marsh is one of the coordinators…and it stands for Question, Explore, Discover, and it’s a really interesting conference that mixes, sort of, science enthusiasm and humanism and….just interesting things. It has just the coolest audience of any conference I go to with any regularity. Just everyone there is just so nice…and you get a real great mixture of people.

Hayley: You do. It’s …yeah, and you always learn something that you didn’t expect to learn. So you know what the talks are going to be about, but you come away with all sorts of new information and knowledge—it’s great.

Chris: So you’re most well-known within the skeptical movement as a paranormal investigator, and most specifically a ghost hunter. Can you tell us how you got into that—and a bit of your journey with it?

Haley: Yeah, sure. I mean, I used to be a ghost hunter. I wouldn’t kind of class myself as ghost hunter anymore, and that’s because when I first sort of became involved in researching the paranormal, I did it from a position of somebody who believed in the paranormal and would go looking for evidence of ghosts and hauntings and so on at the weekend. And then a few years of doing that led to me having this kind of realization that, actually, what I was doing and the conclusions that I was reaching didn’t really make sense. I started to find out more information about the kind of rational reasons that cause people to see and experience strange things and about the psychology behind strange experiences that people attribute to ghosts and monsters and so on. But I’ve always been interested in these stories of ghosts and monsters and hauntings and all sorts of weird things. So rather than just kind of turning my back on it and finding maybe a new hobby that’s a bit less weird, I carried on researching the paranormal but from a more, kind of, what I hope is a more rational perspective. The position I take now is, I’m not interested in proving or disproving that ghosts are real and that monsters are real, I’m more interested in what’s going on that causes someone to see a ghost. And that might be finding the rational explanation, you know, they’ve seen some kind of illusion or maybe it’s a hoax or something like that; or what it is about the person that made them interpret it as a ghost when maybe somebody else wouldn’t have reached the same conclusion.

Francis: I would like to hear a definition of what skepticism really involves. Is it a movement, is it a philosophy, what…when you say “skepticism” what is it?

Haley: Well, kind of at the core, skepticism is just balancing up the evidence for a claim. So if someone says, “I’ve invented a time machine,” you’d want to see the evidence, you know, you would be skeptical of that claim. When somebody says that they’ve seen a ghost, you can be skeptical of that claim and look at the evidence, and familiarize yourself with the evidence and what it means and what it doesn’t mean. And the same can be said for medical claims: so when people say that they have a cure for cancer, you can examine that claim and see if it actually stands up to scrutiny. If the evidence is there, you can look at the research that’s been done. Was it—does it have a double-blind control in place, is it good research, has it been peer-reviewed and so on. And on the flip side of that, there is a movement, a skeptic movement, where people who have a sort of…I wouldn’t say a passion for disbelieving things, ‘cause that sounds really quite sad, but people who are kind of driven to maybe making the world a bit better and kind of protecting people from the sort of hocus-pocus out there that other people try to (sh*?) onto other people. There is a movement where people will kind of conduct activism and in the UK a lot of it is grassroots activism, whereas in the US it tends to be more organized. And we’ll try and raise awareness around bogus claims and so on.

Chris: While it’s more grassroots both on the UK and Australia, it’s much more effective in both the UK and Australia. The top-down approach here in the US creates these pyramids where very little of any actual effect ever happens.

Haley: Yeah. I suppose as well, the fact that it’s quite, and has always been quite grassroots over here in the UK and also, as you say, in Australia, means that you don’t have to be—it does help to be an expert in a certain field—but you don’t have to be an expert to actually make a contribution. And your [face?] doesn’t have to fit—you can help people, or you can become an activist. One of the biggest things that happened in the sort of grassroots movement here in the UK, probably about a decade ago now, was a homeopathic “overdose”—all across the country, people a homeopathic “overdose” to kind of protest the fact that one of the biggest high street pharmacies over here was selling homeopathic medicine to people. And that was literally a grassroots thing, and I remember going along to the one nearest to where I live, and we downed our homeopathic tablets and we made the press and there were groups of people watching what we were doing. And that has kind of snowballed over time to the point where now, the NHS, the National Health Service here, have de-funded homeopathic medicine. So the money that we have here to be spent on medication will not be going on placebo medication—that’s really good news, especially in a time where our country is facing austerity and there are medications that do work for certain conditions that people get denied. So, you know, the power behind grassroots skepticism isn’t necessarily weaker than organized skepticism, like a top-down system, like you say, in the US. So yeah it can be quite inspiring, and I think it’s the same across Europe, as far you see grassroots organizations popping up all across Europe as well.

Chris: In the process you went through as you became more rational about the paranormal things, I mean, did a lightbulb just go off one day and say, this is irrational, or was it slower process and then how did you get in from there, into skepticism in a broader manner?

Haley: I think it was a lightbulb moment in me realizing that I needed to change what I was doing. However, the kind of path that led to that point was an interesting one, so…there was somebody that I was friends with who was a skeptic. They described themselves as a skeptic, identified as such, and we would have discussions about paranormal research and ghost hunting. And they were civil discussions, and we both knew that we disagreed with one another, but we just talked about it like two adults, basically. And the points that were being made, I didn’t necessarily always have a kind of a defense to the arguments being raised, and that got me thinking. And I think probably in the middle of those discussions with this friend—cause I used to be part of a small group of people who would go out investigating alleged hauntings, but we did it with the intention of finding a ghost or looking for evidence of ghosts. Around that time we went on an investigation to this pub in the city of Swindon, and we caught the landlord faking activity, we literally caught him red-handed. And it made me realize that actually, we weren’t really as aware of our surroundings as we had always thought that we were, and we were not 100% in control of the case and the stuff going on in the location whilst we were there. We were not aware of everything going on, and I think that was probably when I had the lightbulb moment and realized that we probably could have been tricked on other occasions. And if it wasn’t necessarily tricked by somebody kind of outright committing a hoax, we could have been fooling ourselves without necessarily realizing it, because we were not aware of everything that was going on around us, that was kind of when I had the lightbulb moment. And at that point, I didn’t initially become immediately involved in the skeptic movement, but a friend of mine at the time just happened to be…he was sort of looking to maybe start a podcast on which he would talk rationally about the latest kind of paranormal news stories, in the newspapers and on the internet, and I happened to…something a bit like this, where I was talking, it wasn’t a podcast, it was like an online radio show. I did an interview with them, and he happened to hear this, and asked me if I wanted to do the podcast with him. So I did that, the podcast became semi-successful, we got quite a large following, which was great, completely unexpected. We’re not quite sure why…

Chris: Which podcast was this? Righteous Indignation?

Hayley: Yeah, it was called Righteous Indignation, and we honestly didn’t know what to expect, and then suddenly we were getting like 10,000 downloads immediately every episode, we just didn’t understand why, but we just carried on doing what we were doing, ‘cause obviously people liked it. And from there, somebody who ran a Skeptics in the Pub group in Nottingham asked me if I would go and speak for the Skeptics group, and I did, and then I started getting more and more requests and so I started meeting more and more people who were involved in the UK skeptic movement. And I realized that actually I got on with a lot of them, and we had similar interests, and they wanted to hear what I had to say, and it just kind of snowballed from there, really.

Chris: One can buy a lot of different devices on Amazon these days to help you find ghosts and detect spirits and things like that, have you encountered some of these devices, and can you tell us how they might work?

Hayley: Well, I can tell you that they don’t work. Yes, I’ve encountered some of them. There is a lot of money to be made from selling ghost hunting technology, and a lot of it tends to be stuff that’s been borrowed from other fields. So, EMF meters, for example, electro-magnetic field meters, they have a purpose, but ghost hunters sort of borrowed them and then adapt the purpose, and EMF meters will be used by ghost hunters to see if they can monitor any fluctuations in the EMF of a location. And if the levels go up and down, that will be attributed to a ghost. Largely, this sort of equipment is used to communicate with ghosts. So there’s something called electronic voice phenomena, which are these recordings that people make in an attempt to capture the voices of ghosts, and traditionally electronic voice phenomena or EVP as it’s known, as it’s shortened to, was always kind of done—you would record, and then you would play it back and hear the voices. But as technologies have developed, we now have these devices called “spirit boxes” on the market, and they sort of—the claim, at least—is that they enable you to do “live” communication with ghosts. And you turn the machine on, it basically skips through AM and FM radio frequencies, so you get this kind of juttery sounding all[?} and you also get snippets of the broadcasts that they’re skipping through. And it basically claimed that these noises and this skipping of the channels and the frequencies enables the ghosts to communicate with you, so they’re able to somehow, to use that to communicate with you.

Chris: Basically, it’s the sounds you used to get from an old stereo when you just spun the tuning dial…

Hayley: Absolutely. And it has a lot of white noise in there, too, and humans, we are sort of pre-dispositioned to find meaning where there is none. So if you’re sat in a house or a building that somebody has told you is haunted, and you’re listening to one of these machines skipping through, and you know that the building is supposed to be haunted by, let’s say…here in England we’ve got a lot of grey ladies. So let’s say that you know that the building is supposed to be haunted by a grey lady called Jane. You’re going to be listening for things that you would expect to hear—you don’t do it necessarily intentionally, so you’re not, you know, most ghost hunters aren’t out to sort of cherry-pick their data and to falsify data in any way that supports the idea that somewhere is haunted. But because we are pattern-seeking creatures, and that just happens to be the way that our brains work, you find the words that you would expect to hear in this jumble of audio. So it sort of, these devices sort of create false positives, which are then presented as evidence of ghosts. But largely ghost hunters will just borrow equipment from all sorts of places and adapt it into ways in which they can look for ghosts. So for another example, is the Microsoft Kinect which is a device which you can use to kind of interact with your game consoles—well, ghost hunters will use that to find ghosts. It kind of blows my mind, because it’s just really irrational, but it also kind of demonstrates—I think if you look hard enough, you can see ghosts wherever you want to see them, really.

Chris: Your blog, which has won an Occam Award, covers all kinds of different topics. I mean, you have opinions on all sorts of things, I mean you’ve written about..

Hayley: I do..

Chris: …sex workers, you’ve written about punching Nazis, you’ve written about all sorts of stuff…why don’t you elaborate on some of the other things you’re interested in?

Hayley: Yeah. So, I mean, the punching Nazis thing—I think that kind of conversation on my blog happened, I think probably just before, or in the leadup Trump being elected, or maybe just after. And it was sort of more commentary on the whole kind of alt-right movement that was happening in the US and these demonstrations that were happening on the street between basically fascists and anti-fascists. And how the people kind of got caught up in this discourse about whether it’s OK to punch a Nazi, and I think there was that chap, I can’t remember his name now, he was…

Chris: Richard Spencer…

Hayley: That’s him. Yes, he was being interviewed and then got punched, and a lot of people were debating whether it was OK to punch him. And so I just kind of wrote a blog post with my thoughts on that. And yeah, I’ll blog about feminism, and atheism, politics, all sorts of things, because even though my skepticism tends to be mostly about the paranormal, it applied to all areas of life and you know, these are topics that, they affect me but they also affect other people. And I’ve always just used my blog as an outlet for my ideas. I never realized back when I started blogging, when I was in my early 20s, that people would continue to read it and then nominate me for the award, which was lovely. And the number of people that read the blog has always surprised me, it’s always proven to be popular, but I’ve never really kind of wanted to only write about the paranormal. It is my blog in which I write about paranormal, but it’s also the blog on which I write about life in general.

Francis: Can people be divided into those that are sort just gullible, and those that know that they’re “taking the piss” or just lying to people? How does happen that somebody comes up with this stuff, and do they really believe it?

Haley: That’s a really good question, and I don’t think that there is necessarily a straight answer to that. I mean, some of the technology now has been influenced by American ghost-hunting television shows, so it’s hard to know. I mean, there’s an American television show called “Ghost Hunters”…follows a group called TAPS—I’m not sure if they’re still aired now or not, but they started using, for example, they promoted the use of a laser-grid pen on ghost hunts, it would enable you to see things moving in the dark. A better solution to that would be to turn the lights on, but when it comes to a ghost-hunting TV show, you have to…you can’t help but be a bit skeptical about their intentions when they’re promoting this sort of equipment. There are online stores and websites dedicated to people making equipment which is purposely built to help people find ghosts on ghost hunts, and it’s in their best intentions for people to believe that this equipment works; whereas on the other hand, you do have people who genuinely are interested in whether ghosts are real or not, and they’re not meaning any harm, but they are being illogical in the way they approach it. And when they sort of borrow equipment or adapt equipment, it’s because they think that they’re being rational, they think that what they’re doing makes them scientific. So there’s a whole range—it really depends on the equipment, and sort of who’s created it, ‘cause I think most of the time people have the best intentions when they’re making or adapting a piece of equipment, but there are those who definitely see it as an opportunity.

Chris: Earlier you said you had caught a landlord faking ghost things—can you maybe tell us more specifically what he was doing, and tell us of some other of your ghost-hunting adventures?

Haley: Yeah. So the case that I mentioned before, when I kind of had the lightbulb moment, the guy involved was the landlord of the pub. Ironically, the pub was called The Ghost Train, but I don’t think there were any ghosts there, especially after what happened. So we were called in—this is what was quite unique about it, was that we were called in. Back then—this is sort of like, 2005, 2006, I’m 18, 19 years old—and we get called in, and normally we call people to see if we can come in, you know. So we get called in by this guy because he’s convinced his pub is overrun with ghosts, there’s all this paranormal activity happening, his staff is scared, his customers are scared. And we agree to go in, and we’re like yeah, we’ll come and have a look, because we feel all like we’re the ghostbusters, basically. So we go down there, we get there, and you can—I think the moment we arrived, you could tell that something wasn’t quite right. Just the way people were acting, it was almost like they were in on a joke. But that’s in retrospect, looking back, I can say that—at the time, we didn’t really think anything was too amiss. So we started doing our investigation, we did like a big walk around the place. We had a psychic—we used to use a psychic—and he did his thing, and then we split off into smaller groups. One group would do one area, another group would work in a different area, and I wasn’t actually in the group that caught him; the group that I was with was very close to them, so I kind of caught the immediate aftermath of what happened. And the group had been…this pub had an outbuilding, which they used as a function room, and they had storage room in there as well. And the group had been in the function room, and they had heard what sounded like a mirror smashing in the storage room. They went in there to see if they could find the mirror that had been broken, and it had no light in there, there was no lightbulb, so they were using their torches, looking for maybe broken glass, or a broken mirror, or something like that. And they’re looking around, and one of the guys happened to turn to the door where another member of the team was standing, and as he turned to the door with his torch, his torch caught this figure sort of crouching behind the door. He screamed, obviously thinking it was a ghost—as you should, when you’re on a ghost hunt—but it was actually the landlord. What had happened was that the people in the pub had figured that the ghost hunters were in the function room, and the landlord had crept into the storage room, which was next door, and had thrown a glass across them, and then hidden behind the door in the hope that they would think it was a poltergeist or a [flying] ghost or something. But obviously, he got caught, but he only just got caught—if that person hadn’t turned when they turned, if they hadn’t been standing at that particular angle with their torch, we probably wouldn’t have known that he was there. So yeah, that kind of raised a lot of questions. But it’s hard to rationalize why somebody would do that. I think one of the members of the team actually went to talk to him whilst the rest of us were packing up to go—because we were like, yeah, we’re out of here, this is ridiculous—and from, if I remember correctly…it was a long time ago…I think he said something about wanting to be on “Most Haunted,” which is the television show that has here for, since 2002. He said something about Most Haunted, so we did wonder if he was trying to trick us into thinking he was haunted so we would then write about it, and then they could contact the show producers and say “we’ve got a haunted pub, look, these people came in and this is what happened to them, you should come and do a television show here.” I don’t know.

Francis: Were there any instances at all where you thought maybe something is going on here?

Hayley: Yeah, there have been lots, I mean, even as someone—I mean, I don’t believe in ghosts now. I do in a cultural sense, in…I believe that the cultures that we grow up in shape the way in which we interpret things, so I believe in ghosts in that sense, in that people genuinely think they’ve seen ghosts because of how they’ve been raised, with the folklore they’ve been raised with. Supernaturally, I don’t believe that there is anything, and I think when we die, we die, and that’s it. That being said, though, as a skeptic, as a nonbeliever who researches the paranormal, I mean it’s not that weird that I would experience weird things when I’m investigating them, because we know that they have a cause, we just established what the cause is. And if it’s a naturally occurring thing, then me going into the place that the weird thing happens in, means that I’m probably going to experience it. It’s just a case of trying to stay calm whilst experiencing it, so I can then try and work out what it is. That doesn’t always happen, and I have had the few occasions where I’ve wanted to just run away screaming. And I think the strangest things that I’ve experienced have always been those that—it’s not like a horror movie thing. So when something weird happens, it’s not necessarily terrifying, it’s just bit uncanny. And you don’t necessarily want to run screaming into the night, although sometimes that kind of flight-or-flight response does take over. One of the strangest things that I have experienced happened…there’s this mansion in Gloustershire called Woodchester Mansion. It dates back to the 1600s, I think—my history is not great—and it’s unfinished, so the stonemasons and the carpenters and everybody put down their tools and just left, and nobody really knows why. So you’ve got this half-finished mansion—it’s fully enclosed, but there are doorways that lead to three-story drops where there should be a floor but they never finished the floor. There are staircases that go to nowhere, all this sort of weird things. And we were in there—it’s a very spooky place, but nothing really happened. And then as we were leaving, I went to the bathroom very quickly on our way out—they don’t actually have toilets in the building, they got like a sort of port-a-cabin type thing like you get at festivals and so on, but quite a posh one—and so I went in there to go and use the bathroom in there, and as I’m in there on my own, something said my name from the other cubicle—there are two cubicles in the ladies’—and I’m in one cubicle, and something says my name from the next cubicle, or what sounds like my name, and I’m like that’s really funny, who’s there, like ha-ha-ha. And there’s nobody there. When I leave the cubicle, I look in—there’s nobody there, and when I go outside everybody is accounted for. Nobody had left the group, and…they’re all being serious, at least I believe they were being serious. And when we told people who had heard, asked the investigation to go ahead, they were like, yeah, that’s one of the things people experience. The weirdest thing happens in the most modern building on site, not the big spooky mansion, it’s in the porta-cabin everyone uses for a loo. So that was quite weird. And I think it was weird because afterwards—obviously I’m just replaying it over and over in my head, was that really my name being said? Was it just the plumbing? Was it, did I hear somebody outside and it sounded like they were inside? But I’ll never know…it was just a bit spooky. Another case we investigated took place over a number of years, it was a very long case. We would hear like a whistling noise—it would be as though somebody was whistling at us, and then when we moved to where they had whistled, the whistle would then come from somewhere else, but it was all very enclosed, so there was no way that there was anybody hiding. Yeah, just strange little things that you’ll probably never find an explanation for, it’s just a bit uncanny, really.

Francis: You know what I think? You know how there’s dark matter, and we just sort of like know it exists, but we don’t really have the technology or the senses to measure it or see it? I’m thinking there could be like, possibly, life forms that are the equivalent of that, or are like some kind of level of consciousness? I mean, I would leave room for the possibility that we don’t know everything that actually exists in this universe. But what I don’t think is that, if there was intelligent life that was sort of on this other plane that people call ghosts, right? Why would they just want to fuck with people?

Hayley: I think if I was a ghost, that’s exactly what I would do! I would kind of knock things over when your back was turned, and then you turn around and go “did that fall over? I’m not sure if that was like that before or not.” That kind of puts you on slight edge rather than just like, you know, chains and all that kind of stuff, like rattling chains and throwing the curtains from the windows…just the little things that make people think, “Oh my god, did that just happen?” I would totally do that. But yeah, there are different theories about what ghosts are.

Chris: …just paint “REDRUM” on the side of…on random walls, …

Hayley: Yeah, and instead they’re like “it’a a teenager, I think”…it’s, you know, a kid, it’s not a ghost. I was doing that thing where you make the cat just follow you around the room, like, with its eyes, and everyone’s just like cats just do that, it’s fine…I think. But yeah, when it comes to the paranormal, there are different theories, well, there are different hypotheses about what ghosts are. So one person might think that a ghost is a deceased person somehow still existing in spirit form, and another person might think that they’re an inter-dimensional being, another person might think that they’re a sort of elemental sort of nature-spirit…yeah, it kind of varies, and that can actually, it can make it quite difficult to counter arguments, because when it gets to the whole inter-dimensional elemental things, if you start questioning that people just accuse you of being a materialist, and how could a materialist ever understand? So yeah, sometimes it’s a bit of a…losing battle.

Francis: So one of the things that we like to talk about on this show is the future. And I’d be curious to hear…where do you think this world is headed right now, and how can maybe skepticism help to steer us in a better direction? Have you learned anything from ghost-hunting that relates to society in general, and maybe what some of our biases or superstitions are in terms of influencing our future?

Hayley: That’s a pretty deep question. Sort of yes…so, although I believe, personally, that when you die that’s it, I still find optimism in that, I still find meaning in that. So I refer it sort of being as like…nihilistic optimism, because it’s like “oh, there’s no point in life, isn’t it great.” And when it comes to people who believe in the paranormal, and belief in the paranormal, well, a lot of polls will tell you that more people believe in ghosts now than before. I don’t think that’s true. I think what’s actually happening is that people are more willing to talk about believing in ghosts than they were before, I think it’s seen as more acceptable. I also think at the moment the world can seem like a pretty scary place, you know, politically and so on, there’s just so much going on, there’s so much in the news that seems really bleak and really quite scary and terrifying. And I think that can make people turn to things like the paranormal and psychics and magic, so with Millennials, for example, of which I am one, more and more people are rejecting religion and they’re turning to things like crystal readings and tarot cards and so on because they find more comfort in it—which means, some of these things, they are relatively harmless. There are for people being harmed and sort of being taken for a ride by charlatans, so there is work that the skeptic movement can do to help people to understand how to sort of question things, how to look for evidence, what evidence actually is, what good data looks like, and so on. I can’t remember where I read it, something very briefly, very recently that showed, for example, that when it comes to the ant-vax movement, that it is possible to change the minds of people who believe that vaccinations are harmful, but it’s through kind of discourse rather than by belittling people. So I think that that kind of discussion-based activism and…rather than, you know, the looking down on people kind of approach that a lot of skeptics take, I think that is the way that the skeptic movement can make the future better, by recognizing that although we all believe in different things, there’s more that kind of unites us, more that we have in common with one another than we probably would necessarily think to begin with. And it’s through that kind of discourse and through the sharing of information rather than the pushing of opinions, that I think we can make the most change. What kind of happened with me when it came to my kind of own believing in ghosts to not believing in ghosts, that happened because the people that I was talking to didn’t tell me “you’re wrong, it’s because you’re stupid that you believe this” or “you’re an idiot, you’re wasting your time,” it’s because they kind of picked apart the arguments, but they did it from a sort of position because they wanted to help me see it for myself, rather than telling me what was best for me. And it worked, and I’ve then been able to go on and learn so much more about the way that humanity works and the mind works, and what makes people see ghosts, and the effect that grief can have on people and so on. And I generally do think that just talking to people, rather than talking at them, can make such a huge change.

Francis: One of the things that we struggle with in this country is, it’s been labeled as “post-truth” politics. It seems like no real recognition of what the real data is and what the false data is. And when you have people like Trump in there, even confounding that by calling “fake news” when it’s real news, it just makes it really difficult for people to know, I think, what the information is that they’re supposed to be evaluating. What would a skeptic say about that?

Hayley: I think it is a problem, and we’re not really taught these skills at school. There’s something called CampQuest which a friend of mine runs in Europe where young children—and I actually spoke at a CampQuest in England a number of years ago—and it’s basically like summer camp, but for kids who are interested in science and so on, and it teaches critical thinking skills. And I think critical thinking skills are so important, not just because, oh, Bigfoot’s not real and aliens haven’t visited this planet, but because that kind of skillset helps you in every aspect of your life. I think the skills that I’ve learned, as someone who became involved in the skeptic movement, has definitely helped me in my career, in my day to day life, in my health, and so on. And I think it’s such a shame that we’re not taught these skills from a young age. That said, when you see—especially in the UK at the moment, with this whole Brexit thing that we have going on—you see people kind of just spouting the same misinformation because it’s fed to them in a way that appeals to them. So our biases are against us, in a way—and yeah, unless you have those critical thinking skills, it’s really difficult to spot that happening. It is a real shame.

Francis: Yeah, I think we have a real problem with lack of good journalism. Like a lot of independent journalism, maybe? “Cause there was a time when you had all these different sources, and you could kind of figure out for yourself which of them is more accurate, you know, get a bigger picture by combining, that sort of thing, but it’s almost like we have these, like, this one voice that gets distributed through all these different mainstream media news sources and news companies…and it’s, I think, a huge issue that we lost that.

Hayley: Yeah. And you see the same kind of patterns where people will accuse certain news outlets of being biased, when that actually might not be the case, when you take a step back and look at the claims they’re making, or the coverage they’re giving, it’s quite balanced, you know. I think one of the problems we have here in the UK at the moment is—and I think this is the result of, that the 24-hour streaming television news cycle and so on—over here, you find a lot of the extremist politicians are given a lot of air time because they make themselves readily available to fill the time slots that producers have to fill. And so you find that you get their opinions being given equal footing as maybe a well-researched, well-rounded politician who knows what they’re talking about. And you get that a lot in politics, so we’ve got a lot of kind of Brexit debates happening here at the moment in the UK, but you also see it elsewhere. So you’ll have television shows who will cover things like the measles problem that we have, where people are not getting vaccinated, so measles is starting to spread again, and they’ll maybe interview a doctor, an then they’ll interview someone who’s anti-vaccination who isn’t a medical professional, but gives them the soundbites and the airtime coverage that they need. And these people are given equal footing, and therefore the viewing public, whom, if they don’t know any better, will think that those two opinions are worth the same, and then they’ll just pick the one that fits their own biases rather than the program maybe challenging the misinformation they have in their heart—it gives it sort of an airing, as though it’s equally balanced, and I think that’s a huge problem.

Francis: Do you think that a society that works in competition, like with say, free market capitalism, is as robust and desirable as a society where people are more like thinking we’re all in this together, and work together for common causes?

Hayley: It’s difficult to know for sure, because I don’t think…I would love society to kind of think that way, where you can all kind of work together, but I think the divides within society are just so, there are just such wide divides in society that that would never happen. But I do think people, when they work together, you know, major things can be achieved. But in an ideal world, perhaps that would happen, but we don’t live in an ideal world, do we?

Chris: But I do see, both with grassroots—not just in skepticism, but I see a lot of positive forward motion going on right now among small groups who are seeming, you know, to have some great effect, and that’s what makes me optimistic.

Hayley: I mean, politically in the UK we recently had the Independent Group, who are a bunch of politicians who have split away from their main parties. Some people see that as an optimistic move, rather than being tied to their party line, these politicians haven a stand, which is encouraging. And we do have voices emerging in the politisphere, like Jess Phillips for example who is a Labor MP. She’s received a lot of online abuse, but she’s taking a stand, and you see a lot of people supporting that. And I think in that respect, the tide is turning. I think that has some parallels with the skeptic movement, actually, especially in the US. The US skeptic movement there has been a huge issue with women being harassed and abused and assaulted even. But what you find is that the skeptic movement, when it came to that stuff, I think, were ahead of the curve on those problems. I mean, now we have things like the MeToo movement and so on, the Womens’ Marches happening—but the skeptic movement was ahead of the curve on that and were calling it out before it became like a mainstream thing, which is kind of encouraging, I think. I think there’s definitely cause for celebration, I think there are people who have been kind of put down and put upon a lot, minority groups and so on, who are standing up and being counted and being heard. And I think that’s great, and I’m always in support of those sorts of grassroots movements, definitely. And of course in the US Skepchick have just re-launched their blog, which is great news.

Chris: I was wondering what Rebecca was up to lately.

Hayley: Yeah, they just re-launched, which is fantastic, I think.

Chris: You’ve been on a couple of podcasts in the past, of your own. You had Righteous Indignation, and you were Marsh’s parter at the beginning of Be Reasonable—which by the way has become one of my favorite podcasts, because it makes yell every time I listen to it…

Hayley: [laugh] It used to make me yell when we recorded it, let alone listening to it. I’ve got a podcast at the moment that has been going since about…I think 2015, actually, called the Spooktator podcast. And it’s more paranormal themed than the Righteous Indignation podcast or Be Reasonable were, although those podcasts both did touch upon paranormal themed stories and interviews and so on. The Spooktator I co-host with my friend Paul Gannon and another chap called Charley Revel-Smith. It’s a monthly podcast, though we are looking at releasing more on a more regular basis if we’re able to. But we basically examine weird things in the news, but also things that are happening culturally and socially, and movies and so on, all that have a paranormal theme to them. We also look a lot at folklore and how it kind of influences modern media and so on. And so for example, in the last episode, we spoke about the Ohio Frog Man, and how some people think it’s linked to some recent sightings of the Kentucky Goblins—which sounds, to anyone who’s not interested in the paranormal, just sounds completely ridiculous. From a cultural aspect, it’s quite interesting, and when you pick apart these stories you start to understand why people believe things in the way that they do, and where these claims come from and how they spread. And so, yeah, we produce the Spooktator—we’re basically just three people who are giant paranormal nerds who have an interest in these things and we found there are lots of other paranormal nerds out there who like listening. So it’s really cool.

Francis: So how is your interest in the paranormal evolved? Like, you had your original, genuine curiosity about its veracity, I guess…but as time’s gone on, what’s kept you interested?

Hayley: So at the moment, I’m studying toward a psychology degree. So I’m really, I found I’ve gained more of an interest in how people think and why they think that way. So over the years—obviously, originally I believed in ghosts, so I was interested in ghosts and ghost evidence and so on, and then I lost that belief. So I sort of became more interested in maybe—not necessarily debunking, I don’t really like the word “debunking”—investigating and solving mysteries. And kind of pointing out when somebody was hoaxing something, that kind of thing. I still do that to an extent now, but now I’m more interested in what causes people to think they’re haunted, but I’m also interested in the people at the center of these cases, because you normally find that the things people report as paranormal activity have some sort of either a physical health, or a psychological health, or a social theme underpinning them. There are usually other causes that are making people interpret things like that. I’m also interested in how belief can influence people, and also experiences of bereavement and grief and so on. Yeah, so I…kind of more interested in, probably, the people than the ghosts, but I am still fascinated in the idea of ghosts and so on and why people—even though we can demonstrate how it’s not necessarily possible for them to exist, how people are still fascinated and still believe in them.

Chris: But I always find UFO stories interesting, because I’ve spent a lifetime reading science fiction which has aliens in them, even though the evidence for actual aliens visiting our planet is nonexistent. There’s always part of me that hopes, you know, SETI finds something on its radio or what have you.

Hayley: Yes. And I think the sort of thing that I find really interesting is how, when it comes to the, when you ask people what a ghost is for example, they might say something like, a headless horseman. But actually when you look statistically at the records, there have been very few headless horsemen reported over the years, and I find it really interesting the sort of characteristics of ghosts that survive, but for no real good reason. I think it’s really fascinating how we carry these ideas, and also the way in which, for example, traditionally in England you would have had your haunted crossroads, which is where people who had taken their own lives would have been buried. And so you would have the haunted crossroads, but now we don’t really have haunted crossroads anymore; instead, we have sort of roads traffic-accident hotspot ghosts instead.So you would have seen ghosts kind of lingering on the side of the road near the crossroads before, but now you see them where people have passed away in car accidents. And so the evolution of ghosts is also quite cool to look at, and the way in which ghosts emerge after tragedies as well. So after the 2011 Tsunami in Japan, there was this almost unpredictable, really, there was this flurry of sightings and reportings from taxi drivers who said they kept getting people getting into their taxis and asking to be taken to, like, a town that had been devastated, just completely wiped out in the tsunami, and halfway on the journey they’d look back and the person who’d gotten into their taxi would not be there anymore. But they would carry on the journey to the place, and they would out and they would open the back door of the car so that the ghost, in their mind, the ghost could then get out and complete their journey. And I found that really, really interesting, the way that that kind of story evolved. I think for as long as humanity—and when you look back, we kind of see these cycles—for as long as humanity survives, ghosts will survive. When times are tough, and when life is harder on people, ghosts tend to flourish and people tend to rely on them, trying to get through the bad times. And I think that kind of makes ghosts a little bit cool, really, I don’t know. But I am a little bit biased.

Francis: Well there’s kind of a myth to it, you know. It serves a purpose that’s similar to way myth works in societies. What’s interesting to me too is that it almost seems like there’s less interest when you’re talking about ghosts and whether it corresponds to, like, Christian ideas of good and evil, and that kind of dualism where…say, for example, with exorcism, it’s an evil spirit that’s taking over a person, but with a ghost it seems more neutral or something.

Hayley: I think it depends on the person that becomes involved in the case. So we do have a problem in paranormal research communities with people who are sort of these self-styled demonologists and self-styled exorcists. In America, for example, Lorraine Warren just passed away…

Francis: She’s the Amityville woman?

Hayley: Yeah, that is what she was best known for. And Annabelle, the haunted doll, those sorts of cases. But they did a lot of cases, and the common theme through most of their cases, if not all of them, was that the devil did it, so any of the hauntings they came across, it was demons and devils, and you needed the church, you needed to pray, and with their doing exorcism. And that kind of stuff is really dangerous, because nine times out of ten—well, actually that’s a statistic I’ve just made up. But more often than not, when it comes to these cases, there are underlying causes, and these have to be considered first. You have to consider, are the family recently bereaved? Because that is a huge trigger for these things. Is there an underlying mental health condition? Is there an underlying physical health condition? Is there a social issue there? You know, you have to think about the social-cultural experiences that the person’s going through. Are they living in poverty? That can affect the way in which they interpret things. But a lot of people don’t consider these things, and a lot of skeptics don’t consider when they then start tackling the people as being deluded or stupid. And it’s just not the way to solve these cases.

Francis: Is there a particular psychological predisposition to believing in ghosts that you’ve been noticing?

Hayley: I just think that confirmation biases play a huge role when it comes to these things. Whether that is…I mean, I’ve spoken a lot about the bereaved, or whether it’s because you’re in a house that’s said to be haunted. There are so many ways in which you can convince yourself that something’s going on, and then you start to see evidence of it where there is no evidence. And, you know, seeing meaning where there is no meaning, whether that’s in audio or perhaps in photos or video—so many photos have been sent to me over the years where it’s literally people just seeing things in the pixels of their photos, their badly lit photos—to the more traditional sort of spiritualist methods of tipping tables and doing ouija boards or dousing and so on, all of these things rely on our sort of predisposition to find meaning when there is none. And I think the most important that a person can learn about this, not only that you do that, not only that see things where there are not things to be seen, but even when you know that you do it, you still do it. So you can be a nonbeliever who knows how a ouija board works, you can then take part in a ouija board sitting, and it can still work and still feel really [?], even though you know how it’s working, and it’s because you sort of had this illusion of how in control you are of what you’re experiencing, but actually, when it comes down to it, we are sort of not as in control as we would like to expect. And I can remember doing a QED con one year, actually, I remember doing a glass divination session with some skeptics in the bar of the hotel that the conference was in, and they thought it was quite funny ‘cause the hotel was said to be haunted. And they were like, “oh Hayley, show us how we can talk to the ghost!” So we took a glass, an empty glass, we turned it upside down, got our fingers on it and I started doing the old ghost hunting thing of like, “is there anybody there? Make the glass move, show us that you’re here”—and then it moved. And everyone round the table crapped themselves almost, because they just hadn’t expected this glass to move at all. So even though they knew it was unconscious muscular movement that was doing it, it still happened, and produced this really uncanny experience for them. So even when you know how it works, it still happens.

Francis: Oh, so is that the basis for ouija boards?

Hayley: Yes, it is. And anything, basically, that you need to touch, whether it’s table-tipping, ouija boards, glass divination, or dousing crystals or dousing rods, anything like that that you need to touch, you are moving it, whether you mean to or not, you’re probably moving it.

Francis: I’ve never been able to get a ouija board to work. Someone gave me one as a present, and I tried to give it back, ‘cause I couldn’t get it working, and they wouldn’t take it back.

Hayley: [laughter] Yeah, I mean it doesn’t work all the time, especially if you’re really hyper-aware of it, you can…so it’s unconscious muscular movement, which means that you don’t, you’re not doing it on purpose. But when you become super-aware of how much pressure you’re putting onto the planchette, you can actually stop doing it. So one of the things that I used to encourage ghost hunters to do, when I used to talk at paranormal conferences, I used to say to them, when you’re doing your ouija boards, take some putty or some play-dough type stuff, put it on top of the glass, and if you’re pushing it your finger will imprint into it. And actually just by putting the putty on top of the glass, they became super-aware of how much pressure they were putting on it, which meant they put no pressure on it, and it didn’t move. When you kind of start putting those controls in place, it just falls apart completely. But then, that just makes me a party-pooper.

Francis: When I think about my friends and the experiences that I’ve had with people over the years, the one paranormal thing that comes up a lot that people really seem to believe in, are these mediums who can kind of, either talk to the dead, or even a pet, like there are some pet mediums—is that what they’re called, mediums?

Hayley: Yeah, mediums or psychics..

Francis: …psychics, yeah. I mean, there are people who swear on this. You know, “this woman, she like, somehow she knew I had this blue shirt when I was 12”…I’m wondering, what is behind that? Why is it that this seems to be so prevelant?

Hayley: It’s really fascinating, and yeah, some of them can be really, really accurate and quite scarily accurate actually. I once sat with a psychic who just out of nowhere pulled out the name “Mandy”—and I’ve got an aunt Mandy, and it’s not a super-common name over here. And I was just like, whoa, that’s really creepy. But actually then somebody pointed out to me that when you think about it, you probably know someone called Mandy—if not Mandy then Amanda—it’s kind of about chance. And there are, the most two common ways that psychics can trick you—this is the thing I need to point out as well. When we talk about “psychics,” it’s really important to understand that there are some people out there who say that they’re psychics, or say that they’re mediums, who genuinely believe that they are. And actually it’s probably that they’re just very perceptive people, and we…cause we all have the ability to read people. Like when you walk into a room, when you’re talking to someone, if they’re shuffling around the way they’re standing, the way they’re talking, the inflection of their voice; that kind of thing, the clothes they’re wearing—you instantly make judgements about them. They might not be correct judgements, but you instantly start picking up on things about them. And some people are just very good at it, and then think that their perception is “extra-sensory” when actually it’s not. But when you then go to the other end of the scale, where you have people who claim to be psychic but are not psychic, one of the tricks that they use is called “cold reading”—it’s where you say things which seem really personal but actually they’re quite vague. So things like you used to have a blue shirt that you used to wear a lot, or you had a grandmother that’s passed away, or you’ve got a bruise on your knee or you sometimes get sore knees, or you had a dog when you were young who was like the best family dog you ever had—things like that, that actually, when you are at a psychic show, seems really personal to that person, their reading, but there are probably ten people in the room that that could apply to. On the flip side of that, you have “hot reading,”which is when they know information about you because they’ve researched you. And we…

Chris: …that article in the New York Times that Susan Gerbic wrote, where they caught one of these stage psychics actually using Facebook and looking up stuff about the people they were talking to.

Hayley: Yeah, exactly. I was gonna say, we share so much information online without necessarily realizing we’re doing it. I’ve got a friend called Ash who does this show, “How to Be a Psychic Con Man,” where he literally stands in front of an audience of skeptics and convinces them that he has psychic powers by doing all of these psychic readings, and actually they’re really, really specific readings. And I remember going to one of his shows, and I sat in the audience next to the guy called Andy, and I looked over his shoulder and I saw his name, I saw he was on Facebook, I saw his name, I went out the back to where Ash was getting ready and I sat down. We went onto Facebook, we found this guy’s profile, and we found all of this information despite neither of us being his friend. And then Ash basically memorized that information, went on stage, and then part way through the show, just started doing this reading on this guy, and the stuff that he was saying was so specific that even though this chap in the audience was non-believer, he was physically shocked that Ash was picking up all this information about him. And I had been privy to that, and actually even though it was then revealed to him how it had been done, I felt really uncomfortable that we had done it, you know. But it was all in, you know, part of the bigger lesson basically. But yeah, there is so much information about you out there that you probably don’t realize. And you find that a lot of people who go to psychic shows will go to their local spiritualist churches, and some of the psychics will then go along to those spiritualist churches, or people that work for them will go along for a couple of weeks, and they’ll listen in to what people are saying, what readings are being said and so on. And then they’ll pick up on that information, and they’ll use it in their show. And historically in the US, obviously, is the now-infamous case of James Randi versus Peter Popoff, where James Randi exposed the psychic Peter Popoff as using an earpiece, and his wife was feeding him information about audience members. You can’t always trust what people are saying—they might think that they’re psychic, and they’re just very perceptive; they might just be feeding you information that seems really specific but it isn’t. So if you are having a psychic reading, one of the best things you can do is record it, and then listen back to it and see how many of the statements were right, because we’re also really good…we’ll remember all the hits, but we’ll forget the times when they said something that doesn’t make any sense to us. So listen back to it, count how many times they say something that doesn’t make sense, and then ask yourself if the things that do make sense could make sense to other people as well. And actually you’ll probably find most of it does.

Francis: Do you think that there are nascent human capabilities that get misconstrued as paranormal? Like say for example, things like intuition or I guess maybe telekinesis…just things that, who knows that maybe we could evolve someday into having some new capacity? Is there any sense of that in the paranormal?

Hayley: I’m not sure, to be honest. I mean, people do think that, as paranormal beliefs. When it comes to things like telekinesis, I’m quite skeptical. When it comes what may…

Chris: …and a lot of this has been studied, formally. The United States…

Hayley: It has.

Chris …government funded a lot of this study, the Soviet government funded a lot of these studies, and they came out with the null hypothesis in all cases.

Hayley: And there is a field of research called parapsychology, which continues to study ESP and PSI and so on, to see if these things possibly exist. Some people argue that the evidence is there, but actually, again—this goes back to what we were saying before about being able to critically analyze data, and the way in which data is captured—and when you look at the sort of tests that have been done over the years, so the [zena] tests for example, and other such cases, you find that the protocols in place might not have been as stringent or as controlled as they should have been, which may have allowed kind of positive data to creep in that wasn’t actually positive data, it wasn’t, you know, kind of proving the hypothesis at all in the way that they had predicted it would. But there is a lot of debate, and actually when it comes to this sort of topic, it gets quite heated. For example I’ve blogged previously about parapsychology and caused huge arguments, and had a lot of abuse sent my way, because there are so many people who are just absolutely sure that humans have these powers, and it can get quite ugly when you start to question those claims.

Francis: It would seem easy to demonstrate, if you could do that…reproducibly…you know, there wouldn’t be any argument. I think humans, though, they do crave magic. I mean, look at how popular Harry Potter is.

Hayley: Yeah, exactly. And I don’t think that will ever go away, I think people will always have paranormal beliefs and magical beliefs. As I said before, millennials are kind of less religious than the previous generations and more interested in the magical and in witchcraft and so on. And I think that will always be the case, so you do get skeptics out there who just seem so affronted by the idea that anyone could believe in anything that isn’t scientific, but that’s just reality. Well, it’s their version of reality, but them having that version of reality is reality, people are always going to have these beliefs. And it’s really easy, I think, to kind of get caught up in the whole idea of how it can harm people, or it’s really harmful to believe that because you could get ripped off, and yes there is harm to be done through these beliefs. But ultimately, that’s not going to stop people believing in the things that they think are real. So I think taking it personally is, I think, just a very easy way of getting frustrated all the time. And in the skeptic movements, you do see a lot of people who do get frustrated and it’s just pointless.

Francis: I think a good point that it’s in some ways a big distraction, because if people are suffering, if we need change, looking to magic to make it happen, you know that’s definitely, probably not the most effective direction to be going in.

Hayley: Sure, no exactly. However, there has been research—it was a while ago now—but there was research done that showed that people who had lost a husband or a wife, that the majority of the people involved in the research, they were kind of interviewed at stages following their bereavement, and within the first ten years after the death of their spouse, the majority of them reported that they had experienced the ghost of their dead husband or wife, and that it had comforted them and it had helped them through their bereavement. So although believing that their husband or wife’s ghost is in the house could have opened them up to harm, you know, they could have been preyed upon by a psychic or whatever, ultimately it helped them come to terms with the tragedy they had gone through. And I think there are definitely positive aspects to be taken from that, so I don’t think it’s necessarily black or white when it comes to whether magical thinking and paranormal beliefs are a good or a bad thing.

Chris: Well, with that said, we’ll ask you the same question we ask all our guests at the end, and that’s—-is there anything that you’d like to promote or publicize or pimp?

Hayley: The only thing that I would like to share is my blog: it’s hayleyisaghost.co.uk. I post there as often as I can, and it is just things that occur to me, things that I find interesting, my takes on weird paranormal things.

Chris: And we should remind everyone you’re not the new Congressman….

Hayley: No, I’m not that Hayley Stevens, I’m the other Hayley Stevens. And there’s an equestrian called Hayley Stevens, and then t here’s me, the ghost hunter.

—END

Episode 7: Penny Arcade Transcript

Penny Arcade Making Better Transcript

(music) Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Chris: Well, Francis, this is episode seven of Making Better, and we’re featuring Penny Arcade.

Francis: Yeah, Penny is someone that I’ve loved listening to for many years. I think the first time I ever heard her was at Saint Mark’s Church on New Year’s eve, which is when—used to be like so many of greatest Beat artists and other poets would be there reading for the New year, and you’d kinda get the sense of where the world was at by listening to them all, and Penny really stood out. I remember at the time thinking, who is this person? And I’ve followed her through the years, and her performances and I find her take on the world extremely well-thought-out and visionary, and I think people will really enjoy her.

Chris: I agree. I think this is one of my favorite episodes so far, and it’s not often you get to talk to a real 60s radical anymore.

Francis: Not only that, but someone who was the type of a radical where they didn’t have to sort of apologize a lot for the naivete of their youth. A lot of what Penny has believed, she’s believed most of her life and I guess history’s borne it out.

Chris: So without further ado, let’s get on to our interview.


Chris: Penny Arcade, welcome to Making Better!

Penny: Oh, OK, hi! (laughs)

Francis: Hey Penny,

Penny: Hi, Francis

Francis: …I’m so exciting to spend some time talking with you now, and I think it would be great for our listeners if we could just start a little biographically…and maybe you could talk about where you came from, and …

Penny: OK. I’m first-generation American, I’m the first person in my family born in America. My mother’s family, who I was mostly raised with, are from Baslikata*, which is the Appalachia of Italy, it’s one of the very, very poorest parts of Italy and it’s a place where the people were fundamentally sharecroppers. So I come from people who were slaves not in the 17th century, but in the 20th century. The vast tracts of land were owned by the nobility, a nobility that did not live anywhere near where these lands were. So I have always been anarchic. As Judith Molina once said to me, “Penny, you’re an optimist, because you’re an anarchist, and all anarchists are optimists.” So yeah, do I think that the world could be a better place? Yes. Do I think that that’s gonna happen? No. Why? Because of human nature, and we’re living for the past, seriously, 30 years with the commodification of rebellion. So all these people who have 27,000 tattoos, they all have the same tattoo as everybody else, ‘cause they all want to be different like everybody else. They were gathering down at Occupy, and eating french fries from McDonalds. There’s a real schism in the intellectual life of Americans. Americans are not political people; they have a culture of being political, which mostly at this point buys down to buying Che Guevera t-shirts for their four-year-old children. This thing that everybody’s waiting for to happen, that’s really really bad, that everybody’s afraid is gonna happen—it’s already happened. OK? It’s already happened. So, for me, I don’t believe you can change the world, but I do believe you can change the world around yourself. I came up through the 60s, I was involved with Yippie!, which was the Youth International Party with Abby Hoffman. I was involved with Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers with Ben Morea, that did preach armed revolution, and at that point, in 1968, 1969, there was a radical left in this country. There hasn’t been a “Left” in this country, honestly, since when? Since the 60s. There’s no Left in this country. People have a lot of fantasies about their political involvement, but they don’t want to take a really hard look at what the real situation is, and the real situation is, take it to the streets. Listen, the last big demostration we had in New York, which was the one where the infantilized women with their little pussy ears—there were three cops at that demonstration. That’s how worried they were. Three cops at the whole demonstration!

Chris: In the old days, there’d be three cops just watching me.

Penny: Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, I think people are walking around, everywhere I go I hear people talking “oh, they’re talking truth to power, I was just talking truth to power this afternoon.” These people are seriously narcissistic fools. I mean, you don’t talk truth to power and win.

Chris: Nobody wants to go to jail.

Penny: Wells they definitely don’t want to go to jail, they also don’t want to be hit in the head. And the police do hit you in the head, you know.

Chris: I’ve personally been arrested 24 times in civil disobedience actions, so, I know the routine.

Penny: But we’re living in a period where there is such a fanciful idea that people have, that they’re being pro-active, meanwhile, how many states are already ratifying anti-abortion? And then everything’s fragmented, so culturally, what you might call the Left, is completely…

Chris: …people like Bernie Sanders, and AOC…

Penny: No, but what I’m even talking, I’m talking more about whether it is minorities, women, or what are now called “queers,” it’s all been micro-sliced. There is no coalition. And you cannot achieve anything without coalition. So, you have the Black Lives Matter people, which I try to connect them with class issues—they could care less about class issues. You know, everybody’s got their own thing, like all the gay people who are so ill-informed that they don’t realize that if we lose Roe v. Wade, we lose LGBT rights, because the ACLU wrote the gay liberation, I don’t know what you’d call it…contract, let’s call it, on the back of Roe vs. Wade, as unnatural acts. So that they used the unnatural so-called act of a women getting rid of a fetus from her own body, and they had it cover the unnatural so-called unnatural acts of same-sex sexuality. But people are oblivious to these things, and so people are only interested in their own little plot, happily digging away in their own little plot, whereas the right wing forms coalition with anyone. As long as you hate the rights of other people, you’re welcome to coalesce and be part of the coalition with the right. I mean, but you know this is not just happening in America, it’s happening world-wide, and we have been warned about this, not just since George Orwell, but all the way back to the beginning of the century with Brave New World. And people have not listened, because people don’t listen until it happens to them. I tried to do housing activism in this neighborhood of the Lower East Side in the mid-90s, and there were like twenty-seven million 20-year olds with multiple piercings and tons of tattoos lined up in the cafes of Avenue A…you couldn’t get them to one demonstration. But the second that they’re about to be evicted out of their building, suddenly they become interested in housing rights. And all of these things are the same, it’s the same thing with feminism. You know, the MeToo movement supposedly created this burst of flower of feminism, but feminism does not mean that you care what happens to you and your eight friends, it means that you care about what happens to all women. And the failure of feminism has always been the way women betray women, and women continually betray women.

Chris: The feminist movement started that way, with Sojourner being kicked out and Helen Keller being kicked out, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton being kicked out, all for raising issues of race or..

Penny: Right. …and class. Race and class.

Chris: Helen Keller was social justice.

Penny: Right. I don’t really know where it’s gonna go, because everything’s so fragmented now, it’s not like you’re gonna get any kind of real group of people…I mean, everybody wants Trump impeached, I’m like, Trump is not the problem! Pence is the problem—Trump has no values. Pence has tons of values and they’re all evil. We’re living in a world of disinformation, we’re living in a world of fragmentation, the promise of the internet failed…

Chris: I don’t think we can entirely conclude that. I think it is failing right now, but we don’t know where it will be in five years…

Penny: OK, but what I’m talking about is, the idea was that people would be connected. And the result is, that you used to be able to get more information from just walking down Avenue A, about what was happening in this neighborhood, than you can get now, with all of the social media that we have. Because of the algorithms and because of human nature. People want pleasure, people do not want to do anything that is uncomfortable. And when I talk about the failure of the internet, baby, fifteen years ago, if I was researching something, and with my clever mind where I could come up with multiple, multiple multiplying, over and over and over, every single one of them a closed door that you come to that’s another www-dot-zi-doc-dot something, that leads nowhere. There is a real failure to the internet, because the internet is not free. The internet is owned, and it is manipulated, and I’m not a programmer and I’m not a tech person. But I know, I’m a user, and I can tell when it’s impossible to get anywhere with the internet compared to what was going on before. And about five years ago, I was at the McDowell, doing a McDowell residency, and there was a wonderful young woman whose name I’ve forgotten now, who is a worldwide web activist, and she presented a program to, I don’t know, 40-50 artists who were gathered at McDowell, talking about what was really going on with the internet. Those people could care less—and these were supposed to be, you know, really investigative, artistic minds, right? And at the end, very very very, the talk was over and I just raised my hand and I said, “excuse me, how many people in the world are doing what you do?” She said, “oh, being activists for freeing the world wide web?” I said, yeah. She goes “oh, there’s probably about a hundred and fifty of us.”

Chris: We had Richard Stallman on the podcast as a guest, and he’s the leader of that movement.

Penny: Ok, so the point that I’m making is, the next thing that she said, “do you want to know how many people are employed by the forces of evil?” she said, “try five hundred thousand.” So the balance is really off. So before you can do anything about anything, you’ve got to face the true, real facts. You know, which means not just as a group, but individually. How far am I willing to go? What would I do? How much do I care? And I care about the working poor. I care about immigrants without papers. I don’t give a fuck about middle class people. As when the Matthew Sheppard demonstration happened—I can’t remember what year that was—and lots and lots of nice, well-meaning gays and lesbians went to the march and had their candlelit march, and then they were all completely freaked out when police on horseback started stampeding into them! You know? They were like “we don’t want a police state”—guess what? It is a police state! I’m not Miss Optimism here, but I am all for facing reality, and for what can we do, and I’m not sure about what we can do.

Francis: Could we talk about your life as an artist a little, too, because there would be a lot of people who aren’t…

Penny: Yeah, who aren’t familiar with my work. Like, everybody.

Chris: You’ve gotten to work with two of my heroes–

Penny: Yeah? Who are they?

Chris: Andy Warhol and Quentin Crisp.

Penny: Oh. OK, that’s interesting. Very, very diverse people.

Chris: But they were both profoundly interesting to me, so…

Penny: Yeah, well…everyone has their taste, don’t they? Right. Andy was a very interesting person, not that anybody could really experience really how interesting he was, because he was very introverted and alienated, I guess is what you’d say. He was a strange man in many ways. And Quentin Crisp was also a very odd person. I was very close to Quentin Crisp and I knew him very, very, very well, and he had an extraordinary intellect that, because of his—well, really, his belligerence—I mean, he really couldn’t hide what he was. For people listening who don’t know who Quentin Crisp was, he was an effeminate, gay Englishman who, at the end of his life, achieved a great deal of fame, one could say, because a film in the UK in 1975 brought the question of homosexuality into public discourse for the first time. It was called “The Naked Civil Servant,” and it was played on PBS, so it was not only in the UK and Europe but also in America. And Quentin became quite famous in his early seventies, and he was a brilliant, brilliant man. He was an aphorist, which means a person who comes up with one-liners, and an organic intellectual. He was quite, he had quite an extraordinary brain. But he was also very limited, because most of his life he was delegated to a very, very narrow social milieu. Because he was so effeminate, and because he could not hide what he was—as he said, “every closet door I knocked on, they said ‘not in here.’”

So, at any rate, my work, I started doing theatre…actually the first theatrical thing I ever did was, I somehow in 1967, when I was seventeen and first came to New York, I ended up with the Hog Farm. And the Hog Farm was a very famous commune in the 60s that roamed around America in busses, and they’re the people who fed everybody and did all the triage at Woodstock, so they’re famous for that. And I somehow knocked into these people as a homeless street kid might, in 1967, and they had a gig at the Electric Circus, which was a big performance place that catered mainly to Long Island teenagers and kids from the boroughs. And they were hired to be, like, professional hippies at this event, and I found myself unwittingly standing next to Wavy Gravy, also known as Hugh Romney, who in the 50s had been a pretty successful stand-up comedian, and then with Ken Kesey and these other west coast psychedelic people, he became Wavy Gravy and started the Hog Farm. And unbeknownst to me, I was standing next to him, and I guess he got this idea that he should put somebody up in the air over the crowd of kids who were dancing--Sly and the Family Stone were playing on stage—and he said, “we’re going to pick you up and we’re going to sail you over the heads of the people,” and I was like, “OK.” And I guess he chose me because I was small, and I went sailing over the heads of the people, and I think I’ve always had good instincts, I understand systems, so I tried to be very entertaining as I was sailing through the air, you know, not just be a lump of coal. And I ended up on the stage with Sly Stone and started dancing, and looked over at Sly Stone who was like, giving me super-dirty looks, like GET OFF THE STAGE, and I probably did the first stage dive in rock and roll history! I dived into the audience, and they sailed me back over the heads of all the people ’til I got to the very end and was dropped off. So that was my very first performance, and then not long after that, I was introduced to the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, which was the original glitter-glam rock’n’roll political theatre of the 60s that influenced everything from Hair to Rocky Horror to David Bowie. And the New York Punk scene—which I hate that term, “punk” because punk means somebody who challenges you to a fight and doesn’t show up—so I just was never “punk,” I’ve always been an outsider. Or in the 60s, when we didn’t want to be hippies, we said we were “freaks.” So there were freaks and hippies. So John (Vaccaro) who started the Playhouse of the Ridiculous really tuned in to the darkness that was in America that “Hippy is dead”—that was 1968, and they had a big funeral for the Hippy is dead in California, and also in the East Village, that was the fall of 67—either the fall of 67 or the fall of 68—was when Groovy and Linda were murdered in the East Village and then everything turned very dark. But Vaccaro was already—he was older, he was probably close to 40 in the late 60s—their manifesto is, “our situation is beyond the absurd, it is absolutely ridiculous.” So they were looking at the world as a place that had gone beyond the absurdity of Ionesco and the other people who were looking at modern life as a real degradation of the human spirit. And his theater was extremely political, he was the first person who had a rock’n’roll band onstage, and a lot of the people who came out of the Playhouse created what was called the first Punk scene, which was people like Ruby Lynn Rainer* and the Rednecks and Wayne County, who became Jane County, and he influenced the Dolls, the New York Dolls were influenced by Vaccaro…the Stilettos, which started with Elva Gentilly* and Debby Harry and then morphed into Blondie. So that’s kind of the milieu I come out of as a teenager. So if the theater that I was involved with in the 60s was about tearing down the fourth wall—between the public and the people on stage—then I grew up to tear down the other three walls. So I have made my own work since 1985, I started making my own work when I was 34, after performing for 16 years in other people’s work. And my work is political humanism, investigating the human condition, what it means to be human in 2019. My relationship is with the public, as opposed to with critics or with arts administrators, and it’s quite a miracle that I’m able to do my work all over the world, given that i make a lot people nervous. Not the audience so much, but certainly the gatekeepers, which is why most of your audience has never heard of me. Let’s put it this way: I’m not on Fresh Air, you know what I mean? 

Francis: So would you consider yourself a performance artist, a poet, a…

Penny: Well, I am first and foremost a poet. And for people listening, there’s many ways of being a poet. So I didn’t write poetry for a very long time, because I was very insecure. I still have a great deal of lack of self-confidence and lack of security emotionally. I know it doesn’t sound, I don’t sound like an insecure person, but you can be a really smart insecure person. So I believe what I perceive. I’ve spent years honing my mind, through reading and argument, and listening to people who are smarter than me, and being around people who kicked my ass and didn’t let me have soft ideas. I live every day as a poet and always have since I was a child, meaning I go where the day takes me, and my investigation is into my place in the world, my place in this life. And originally I fell into being an experimental theater actress, that’s what I did with the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, that’s what I did with Andy Warhol. Andy asked me to become a Warhol “superstar” in 1969 and I was in his film, “Women in Revolt.” I found the Warhol scene really boring…

Francis: Why?

Penny: Why? Because it was boring! It was boring, it was like a lot of..you know…people act like the Warhol scene was like some kind of a French Foreign Legion that you joined—I mean, there was all kinds of people there, and it was mainly about how they looked. You know? And a lot of really crazy people who wanted a lot of attention for absolutely no reason. So Andy wasn’t discerning, he was neither discerning nor loyal. You know, people would come and be around and he’d have them be around, and it could be anybody. I always say that about the Underground, people always say, “oh, I wish I could be part of the Underground, I’m just not cool enough”—but the Underground’s not about being cool. It’s about being willing. People who were interested in those particular kinds of activities that were going on gravitated to a scene like the Warhol scene, and people tried to, you know, be part of it. I did not try to be part of it. Andy chose me from the Playhouse of the Ridiculous because he wanted people who were performers but who weren’t crazy. So that’s a real problem, not being crazy, if you’re an artist, because a lot of people are really crazy, and I’m not. I’m a very, very grounded person. I don’t think being an artist is special, OK? A lot of people want to be artists because they think it’s special. They think it’s going to set them apart from people, but I just don’t see it that way. And just like I don’t see being gay as being special.

Francis: I personally feel like the vocabulary of politics right now—it makes it impossible to have a really meaningful conversation and figure out what to do. Because in my mind, left-right politics, all that, especially when you get people who go to college and they want to be a lefty and they read all this old 19th Century stuff, and everything—but I feel like we’ve kind of come to this point now where there’s power that is held by very few people, you know the resources and the potential to affect that power, the potential to use technology and resources for the betterment of most people instead of very few, we never get that conversation going because we’re using all this old terminology, and it’s not…

Penny: i agree with you. I agree with you. Because most of it’s really poseur, you know? It’s not really people who really want to do anything. I mean, people call me an activist all the time, it’s written about me—I have never called myself an activist. An activist is what your community calls you, and they call you that usually after decades of selfless, anonymous service. And people just go around calling themselves activists, you know, it’s like you’re not an activist. An activist is somebody like Carmen Febone* who for like 60 years fed the poor on the Lower East Side and nobody knows her name. That’s an activist, you know? But this is the thing, it’s the gentrification of ideas. [tweeting in background] That is my bird clock, by the way. So a different bird will sing from time to time. [tweeting] That clock belonged to John Vaccaro, who passed away about, I don’t know, about six, seven years ago, and I inherited that clock, which means I have to think about Vaccaro every time it chirps. Someone was asking they were calling me an activist in an interview yesterday, and I said I’m not an activist. I think if I was a real activist, when I was in Zanzibar two years ago and I realized that they needed schools for the children there, and they needed fresh water in the villages, I would have stayed there and I would have made that mission my mission, because it was right in front of me. I’m not an activist, but I am a helper in my community. People know that when they have a problem, they can come to me and I don’t extend my help only to people I like. So in that sense, I am active.

Francis: [Do you agree] we’ve been revolving around the concept of inclusion, and how every everything is…I like how you used that term “micro-split..”

Penny: micro-splicing…

Francis: micro-splicing and, it’s so true that there’s all these little causes and they’re not connected…

Penny: There’s no coalition. The 60s worked because there was coalition. Now, you think that the powers that be don’t realize that coalition is dangerous, and so why not have all these little micro-spliced groups? And then what do you do with the college students? Because throughout history, it’s been the young who have led change in the world, because young people are always idealistic. And now all those kids, all those young people—if they’re at all interested in anything, which a lot of them are not, a lot of them are just operating in some kind of Kardashian reality—but the rest of them are all split up into little different groups. They’re either into Black Lives Matter, or they’re into the MeToo movement or they’re into trans rights or they’re into gender-fluid-queer-something. No…people do not come together to fight the common enemy.

Francis: Which is…?

Penny: Well, I would say it was that democracy was an experiment that failed. It never happened. We had more or less democracy at different points in this country’s history, but we never had a full functioning democracy. And I think that what really happened that people don’t look at is, the only trickle-down that ever happened was the trickle-down corruption at the highest levels of government and commerce, that happened with Halliburton and with Enron and all of these terrible scandals that we had in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, where honor, justice, honesty, all of these values no longer have any meaning in our culture. What has a meaning in our culture is, getting over. Did you get over? You got over? We respect you. Did you get the money? We respect you. We’re speaking right now from the Lower East Side, the East Village Lower East Side of New York, which, you know, in the 60s up to about 1983, there was a really big difference between uptown and downtown. People who lived downtown were usually aligned with left politics, they were anti-war, they were anti-rampant capitalism, they were for clean water, clean food, free sex and…meaning the freedom to choose…and it was a very big difference to uptown. And then around 1985, this started to change, and all of a sudden the values of downtown changed. So you would have a performer like Taylor Meade, who was also a Warhol superstar, but Taylor Meade came to New York in the 40s, he was a poet, he was aligned with the Beats and he was a very, very, very funny comedic actor. Well, he used to perform with Bill Cosby and all those famous comedians in the 50s, and when Bill Cosby would see Taylor Meade, who didn’t have a pot to piss in, Bill Cosby would sit down and have a talk and a drink with Taylor, and nobody thought, “oh, there’s Bill Cosby, he’s a multi-millionaire. There’s Taylor Meade, he’s poor.” Nobody would think that way, because the values didn’t include that. Nobody cared—so you’re a millionaire, so what? You had to have more going on than celebrity or money. That was an actual intrinsic value in the downtown art scene. That’s gone now. They’ll do a flip for Taylor Swift or for any other, you know, psuedo-celebrity—and I say “psuedo-celebrity” because to be a celebrity is different than being famous. To be a celebrity is to be celebrated for being able to do something. Taylor Swift is not rock star—Prince was a rock star, Taylor Swift is an insect. But the world has changed, and people don’t want to face it. So as you’re saying, Francis, that we’re using outmoded language, political language, the truth is that just everyday contemporary language is completely in a crisis where you can’t say anything, only certain people can use certain words…

Chris: And we need to remember fifty different pronouns…

Penny: Right. Exactly. And this is all—it’s just fascinating to me, because people think there’s some freedom in this. And the reality is that in the 80s, there was this huge politically-correct movement, which was the same thing. You couldn’t say “queer,” you couldn’t say “dyke,” you couldn’t say all these words or all these words you couldn’t say. And that was coming from the right wing. And now it’s coming from the supposedly the left. But I’m always, like freaking out when people talk about the Left, because what Left? You know, there is no Left. There’s nothing radical going on in America. Really, Trump got into office because of the abdication of the centrist middle class from the working class. The working class in this country is flipping out. Of course they’re going to go fascist. That’s what they do. Nobody cares about the fact that you cannot put food on the table for a family of four without both parents working two jobs. I grew up, my father was put in a mental hospital from a beating he received at Ellis Island when I was three, and I was raised by my mother and grandparents. And my grandparents were very elderly, and my grandfather worked til he was 78 years old, as a ditch digger for the city of New Britain, Connecticut, and my mother was a sweatshop seamstress. When I met Robin Morgan in 1967 at the Yippie hotline—Robin Morgan, for those of you who may not know, is a famous feminist, she was one of the original high-profile feminists in the 60s—and she invited me, Abby Hoffman gave her the other side of the storefront, and she started WITCH, which I do not remember what it stood for, but Women-ITCH, whatever it is, google it. They did the big demonstration against the Miss America pageant in 19…I guess it must have been 1968. I went to one of these meetings, she invited me to one of these meetings she was having, and I looked around the room and all of the women who were there—there were about eight women—most of them I knew as being the girlfriends of leftist political guys, including Robin Morgan. And Robin Morgan was telling me, “women don’t want to be housewives.” And I was looking at her, and I’m like, “my mother sews 70 hours a week in a sweatshop, she’d love to be a housewife.” I would have loved to have my mother at home. Are you kidding me? My mother would come home, and we couldn’t talk because she was exhausted from sewing in the sweatshop. So, you know, this privilege that accompanied a lot of these people’s ideas, you know I’ve always preferred the underclass. At least you can be direct with them, and you can be forthright and honest. I think the biggest problem that we’re facing right now is that it’s impossible to communicate with anyone. No one is allowed to stumble through ideas. In contemporary neuro-science, we know that you learn to form ideas by talking. You know, it used to be thought that first you were thinking, and then you spoke. But actually now it’s understood that you speak, and through speaking, you form ideas. And that’s the important reason for having a vocabulary, because the larger your vocabulary, the more expansive your thoughts can be. But right now we’re living in a time that is getting just narrower and narrower and narrower as far as expressing ideas.

Francis: Did you read Victorian literature? They were so elegant. Their vocabularies were immense compared to ours.

Penny: I know.

Francis: And, you know like…

Penny: I mean that was part of being seen as an intelligent person, was having a vocabulary. You know, I do my bit, I go to universities, and I talk to the kids. A lot of times they’re angry with me, and I say, “yeah, you’re angry with me,” I said, “but in 30 years I’ll be dead but you won’t have any water to drink.” You know, there are dark periods in history.

Francis: This is a dark period.

Penny: Yeah. And they usually last, like, 30 years.

Francis: It’s been at least 30…

Penny: Yeah…(laughter)

Francis: I remember I saw you at Saint Mark’s Church one New Year’s Eve, and you did this bit about the Age of Aquarius…

Penny: Oh yeah.

Francis: And how, everyone thought it was in the 60s but it turns out that it’s not for another 30 years or something…

Penny: Yeah.

Francis: ..or maybe it’s coming?

Penny: Well, I mean, the thing is that…look at what we’re living with. Monsanto. In what Kardashian world would anybody ever have thought, with the history of famine on this planet, that making seeds that only last one cycle is a good idea? Who thought of that?

Francis: Why is that even legal?

Penny: But it’s insane! It’s completely insane. When I was in Tanzania, last year, I met three biochemists, and they were telling me that in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, all GMO things are illegal. Because they’ve already lived with famine. They’re not falling for that. But look at what’s happened in America, the greatest of America once was that we could feed all the people who lived here, and that there was free education for everyone. And we are losing both. It’s staggering. I mean, in my lifetime—I’m gonna be 69 years old in another month and a half—and I never would have believed. This is something even with the paranoia the 60s, we could have never come up with this scenario.

Francis: No.

Chris: We were so paranoid as hardcore punk radicals, we were constantly…you know, we’d be hanging out at Frank’s house trying to figure out who among us was the CIA plant and everything like that…

Francis: Oh, there was definitely a couple.

Penny: Yeah.

Francis: They were the ones that interrupt constantly, and you know, like derail you, make sure you can’t accomplish anything…

Chris: I don’t think we were important enough for the government to worry about.

Penny: But the thing is that you still wouldn’t have been able to come up with the scenario that we’re currently living in. The thing that’s interesting is, I was in Australia during the presidential primaries, before the primaries. And one of the Australian political papers asked me to write a personal view of American politics. And I knew that Trump was gonna win. And nobody…everybody wanted to…”how did you know Trump was gonna…”

Francis: Yeah, how did you know?

Penny: It was..you know, it was as clear as the burning cross on your lawn! It was what America wanted, it was the unspoken America, that that’s who they were aiming at. The America that thinks Trump is a successful businessman. I mean there’s something wrong with this world—they can publish, and promote, and say, that every single business of Trump’s has gone under, and you’ll still get a whole bunch of people going “he doesn’t to be in bed with the government, cuz he’s rich.” Americans are super-stupid.

Francis: Do you know what’s coming after him? Some Democrat or…gets in office and realizes that he totally gutted us financially. And then they’ll say, well, we have to responsible, we’re going to have to do some austerity again.

Penny: Right. Well the austerity should come from the government itself. Stop paying all of these retirement benefits of hundreds of thousands of dollars for all these people who’ve been Senators and been in the government. The whole thing makes no sense, none of it makes sense, and it’s not…it’s not something that can be fixed. So if it’s not something that can be fixed, the way I see it is, like, reminds me of how I felt on September 11th. On September 11th, when the plane went through the second tower and I was watching it from the roof here, and I knew that the plane was gonna go through the second towe—which all the people on all the roofs around me somehow didn’t know. And I kept screaming, it’s gonna go into the tower, and people were looking at me like I was crazy. I thought, OK, now we’re gonna get New York back again, ‘cause nobody’s gonna want to be here. And instead what happened? It became the go-to place. So what will happen is, there will be a series of cataclysmic natural events, that we already know, that our government is not prepared for any emergency. We saw it with Katrina, we know nobody’s minding the store. During Katrina we watched it on television for days. Like, OK, you can bomb the shit out of Yemen but you can’t drop bottles of water and food into that…

Chris: The Superdome.

Penny: That’s right. There’s something really wrong. I mean we already know that Americans can’t work. Americans have lost the capacity to work, right? They took all the jobs, and then…so we have several generations of people who have never had to really be able to do something. I mean, we are dependent on Mexicans and on people coming from Eastern Europe and places where people can still ..make things. I mean, I brought a pair of shoes—there’s a shoemaker on Second Avenue, and I had this pair of shoes that I bought in Scotland, and they had—they were real witch’s shoes, and the toe turned up. And I used to tell everybody they were flat when I bought them and then I put ‘em on and the toes turned up—and I had had them in San Francisco, in a theater that was very damp. And the platform, which was made out of foam, disintegrated. I went everywhere with these shoes, I tried so many different places; I brought them to England, I brought them to L.A., I brought them everywhere looking for someone to fix them. And I was up in Woodstock and this woman said to me, “by the way, if you ever need a shoemaker, there’s this great shoemaker in the East Village on Second Avenue and Third Street.” I thought that was the oddest thing that someone would say to me, so I went there with the shoes. I put them on the counter and I said, “Can you fix these?” And he looked at ‘em, he said “100 dollars.” I said “done. When will they be ready?” He said “in one week.” The next day I get a phone call, “they’re ready.” And I go and pick them up at another shoe store, on First Avenue, and the guy brings me the shoes and they look brand new. I said “oh my god, you fixed the platform!” Remember, this is like an Arabic shoe with the toe goes skyward, right, it’s like round and up. And I said, “oh you fixed the platform,” and he said “what?” I said “you fixed the platform.” And he goes to the back and he comes back with the old platform. He had built a new platform. I looked at him and I said, :Are you from Uzbekistan?” And he said, “Why do you know that?” Because only somebody from Uzbekistan would still know how to make a shoe. Not just repair a shoe, but he made the shoe. I mean it was so outrageous, but this is what we find, that we’re losing really basic skills. I mean, New York City—you know, this is not a great place to get stuck if something really bad happens. Where’s the food? You know, we already know, like the flooding that’s in this neighborhood. They’re selling multi-million dollar apartments in Miami Beach, yet everyone knows that within 15-20 years, Miami Beach is not gonna exist anymore.

Chris: I’m currently sitting in St Petersburg, Florida and my house is at 35 feet, so I’m rooting for climate change so I can sell it as oceanfront property…

Penny: Well, there you go. But you see what I’m saying—we’re not facing, our leaders are not facing, the reality. I’ve said for a long time that what we need is a million-child march, because it’s the children who are going to inherit all of this.

Francis: Well, there’s that Swedish woman…

Penny: Yeah, the girl. Yeah, she’s fantastic.

Francis: Yeah, she’s…ok, she might be one little glimmer of hope, optimism, that generation…

Penny: Yeah.

Francis: ‘Cause eventually the kids are gonna be like the 60s again, where they’re gonna say, you know, if you’re an adult, we’re not interested in what you have to say, you’re…

Penny: Well not only that, it’s just the betrayal is tremendous.

Francis: Yeah.

Penny: The betrayal is enormous, because this is what bothers me—what is wrong with these oligarchs who are not even interested in the welfare of their own spawn? Right? They’re going to suck all the value out of the planet…

Francis: They have compounds that they’re gonna, you know, run to when the shit hits the fan…

Penny: Oh yeah, in Uruguay and stuff. Yeah. But it’s funny, because like I don’t know what they think. I mean, it’s like just the concept of a gated community—who wants to live in a gated community? So let’s get back to, now, what can be done. So I really am in the business of Being and Becoming, that’s what I’m trying to always evolve, and I’m a big promoter of authenticity and individuality for people. And that’s one of the ways that we can help ourselves…

Chris: One of the recurring themes on the podcast, from a lot of our guests, has been making small changes and, you know, if you get millions of people to make small changes suddenly it’s a big change.

Penny: That’s true. People stop using straws and plastic wrapping and…I’m here with an iced coffee in a plastic container, and I realize, oh, I should…I bought my stainless steel straw, you know, and I should take my stainless steel canister to get my iced coffee. I agree, small changes. But when it comes to what’s going on in the government and the failure…see, one of the things I’m most angry about is, I’m angry with the House of Representatives and the Senate and the Congress, because they are not protecting us from what’s going on in the White House. How dare…how dare the White House sell off our natural resources, our state parks, our highways…and these things aren’t even publicly known. You just get dribs and drabs of that information. We have Democracy Now! is one of the few news sources where you find out what’s actually going on…it’s a very sophisticated government. Corruption and evildoing are not new inventions. These were understood all the way back to the seventeenth century. So there are safeguards within our government to protect us from people taking advantage…and yet Trump has been able to have his own offspring as—what are they called?

Chris: Senior advisors…

Penny: Advisors! They’re doing all kinds of business, on the back of Americans—it’s like nobody’s minding the store. We’ve all been in that position, we’ve all been in a position where, all of sudden something goes wrong and there’s a free for all. And we’re like…well….we shouldn’t really be doing this but…I’m taking this. I’ve been there, I think most people have. And that’s what’s going on in the government.

Francis: So a question that comes to me a lot lately is, what can people who find reverence and beauty in nature, what can we do to…how do we interact with people who don’t have that? I just see it as something that potentially…

Penny: I mean, that’s…this is like the million dollar question, because if people have no respect…I mean…there’s Chris Tanner’s mother. Chris Tanner is a painter in the East Village, and his mom lives in North central California, and she has been an ecology person as a Congresswoman, etc. for 60 years. And she is seeing right now all of the things that she helped put in place be overturned. If it’s happening in California, where people care a little bit, like nobody cares here. I don’t know, I don’t know what the answer is. But I think that the card that holds the change is going to be an ecological disaster card. Something’s gonna come from the outside that’s gonna lay something down. And I don’t know what that is, but…that’s my sense. It’s…there’s not going to be a change because of the good wishes and well meaning of people. It’s gonna be in response to a crisis.

Chris: We’re bumping up against our time limit, so…

Penny: Yeeeah! We did good.

Chris: I’ll just ask you the same question we ask every guest: Is there anything you’d like to promote or pimp or tell people about that they should go see?

Penny: Well, everyone can go to my website, which is PennyArcade.tv—you can write to me, anyone can write to me who would like to write to me, at mspennyarcade@gmail.com. Invite me to your town—I like doing my work in different cities and meeting different people, and you’re all welcome any time to write to me with any of your problems, I can solve all your problems…my problems I’m not so good with, but other people’s problems are a piece of cake. Stay in touch!

Chris: Well, thank you so much.

Penny: Thank you.

Francis: Thank you.

—END

Episode 6: Jim Fruchterman

Making Better—Jim Fruchterman

(Music) Welcome to the Making Better podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Chris: Well, Francis, we’re up to episode 6 of Making Better!

Francis: Yes, and this is a really great episode.

Chris: This episode is Jim Fruchterman. He’s McArthur Genius Fellow, he’s one of the people who invented modern machine recognition based optical character recognition (OCR), he’s a social entrepreneur and a leader in the social entrepreneurship field, and while I respect an awful lot of people in the world, Jim is one of the very few whom I truly admire. This episode has a few audio glitches in it, we use a program called Zoom to record, and we had a few internet hiccups, but we hope you enjoy the episode.

Francis: (hiccups) That was a hiccup.


Chris: Jim Fruchterman, welcome to Making Better!

Jim: Thanks a lot Chris, glad to be here.

Chris: So you have a long and varied career doing all kinds of things, but always with a social conscience aspect to it. So if you could just give us a bit about your background, that’d be a great way to get started.

Jim: Well sure. Well, basically I’m a nerd. You know, I started doing computer programming in the early 70s, I went to Cal Tech, which is kind of nerd mecca, and so I was always interested in technology and science and figuring things out—and it was never quite clear what that career was going to be, but I thought I’d either be an astronaut or a professor. So that was kind of the track that I was on in college and when I started grad school. The connection I had to solving social problems was in college, I was in a class, a modern optics class, and we were learning how to make optical pattern recognition things. And because it was the 70s, and pretty much all the jobs were in the military-industrial complex, our professor was using the example of how you could essentially get a smart missile with a camera in its nose, and have a computer that had a representation of the target—could be a tank, or a bridge—and the idea is that you’d fire your missile, it would look around in the world until it spotted its target, lock on, zoom in and blow it up. So I had to do a project for this class, and I was going back after the lecture going, ‘I wonder if there’s a more socially beneficial application of this.” And then I got my one good idea in college, which was, hey, maybe you could make a reading machine for the blind. Maybe instead of recognizing tanks, you could recognize letters and words and speak them aloud. So, the next day I went back to my professor with a lot of enthusiasm, and he explained that someone actually had used this kind of technology to do pattern recognition on words; matter of fact it was I think the National Security Agency was using it to sort through Soviet faxes that they had intercepted. And they were having too many faxes, so if they could spot the word, like “nuclear weapon” in Russian, they would actually route that to a human..a human analyst to actually review. And I said, oh, great, so it’s already been built—how much does it cost? He said, uh, I think it’s millions of dollars per installation…which took a little of the air out of my, you know, reading machine for the blind tires. But it lay the groundwork for some of the future things that happened. So after finishing my masters at CalTech, I went to Stanford to start a PhD, and—Stanford is in the middle of Silicon Valley, and this was a pretty exciting time in Silicon Valley’s history, and so I and a couple of other engineering grad students started an entrepreneurship talk series in our dorm. And our first speaker had started a PC company named for our dorm, and the second speaker was the president of a private rocket company. And, I’d always wanted to be an astronaut, I’d even gotten an interview with, with the people at NASA in Texas, and so I said, ah great! So I took a leave of absence from my PhD program, joined the rocket project as their chief electrical engineer, built all their electronic systems, and the rocket actually blew up on the launch pad. So that was a bit of a disappointment…and I went back to Silicon Valley with my boss from the rocket project, and we tried to start our own rocket company, we tried to raise $200 million. No one gave us $200 million, and then my boss—now partner—said, hey, I know this guy who’s a chip designer at HP and he wants to start a company to design a custom chip that will something really cool. And I said, what’s he got in mind? He said, I don’t know, let’s go have dinner with him. So we went and had dinner with this guy, and he described how he wanted to make a chip that could take in light and recognize letters and words. ..Wow..that’s like my good idea from college, you could help blind people read with that. And so that became the start of a company that was originally called Palantir and then changed its name to Calera, and made essentially the first omni-font character recognition technology that worked without being trained. And as we started the company, we became more aware that Ray Kurtzweil had invented a OCR system and a reading machine before we had, and we, you know, raised a bunch of money from Silicon Valley venture capitalists to compete with their character recognition product. Long story short, it was one of the early machine learning companies in Silicon Valley, our particular breakthrough was, we took millions of examples of characters and trained an algorithm in how to recognize those characters, and it worked really well. Company built up, sold a lot of products to insurance and law firms and the government and, you know, those were sort of our main commercial markets, but the dream of making a reading machine for the blind was still there, and I still didn’t know any blind people, but I just imagined they could use this. And so we built a secret prototype, based on our commercial character recognition product, that was connected over a serial cable to a PC that had a first-generation *tracks voice synthesizer in it. And we demonstrated this to our board of directors, and it worked, it scanned the page and it read it aloud, and my board was, you know, excited, the product demo, you know, there’s a new potential product, and they said, Jim, you’re the VP of marketing, how big is the market for reading machines for the blind? And I said, well, we think Kurtzweil is selling about a million dollars a year, now that they’ve been acquired by Xerox….a relatively awkward pause occurred in the board meeting, and they said, well, but we’ve invested $25 million in this company, what’s the connection between a million dollar market and that? And I said, oh, it would be great PR, the employees are really excited bout it, our customers will be proud of us…and they’re like, no, you know, you’re only $15 million and year and you’re supposed to be $30 million a year in revenue by now. You’re missing plan, you’re not making money, we’re not going to allow you to distract the company to launch a new product to help blind people, because it doesn’t make enough money. And they were, you know, right from a business standpoint, wrong from a social and moral standpoint—so that’s kind of what caused to…to launch out of, sort of, the traditional Silicon Valley tech world and into the assistive technology and nonprofit world.

Chris: And that’s when you founded Arkenstone.

Jim: That’s right. So, so I went to, after the board vetoed it, I went to…the board vetoed the project because they didn’t want to distract the company. [*] said well, you could start your own nonprofit. And I said, what do you mean, nonprofit? He said, well, you don’t think there’s any money in this…I said, no…he said, I can give you pro bono help to start a charity, and you’d be essentially a tech nonprofit. I kind of giggled, ‘cause, as you know, I said well gee, I you know, i’ve been associated with an accidentally non-profit tech company, you know…gee, maybe if you’re a non-profit tech company you’re like…successful by definition if you lose money! (laughs) And so, that was the start of Arkenstone, and the idea was, because the market was so small, if we could make a break-even, you know, half a million, million dollar a year venture, it would be a big success. And Arkenstone became the only high-tech company I’ve ever been associated with that actually beat its plan. I think within three years we were $5 million a year, and making reading machines for the blind as an enterprise, and breaking even—and that’s how Arkenstone actually went into the reading machine for the blind business and my old company was perfectly happy for me to do it, just as long as I did it outside of the company as a customer. They gave me a really big discount, they gave me extended credit, but—as long as I wasn’t distracting the team from making money, they didn’t have an objection for me doing it. And basically, I got a pretty sweet deal in exchange for a noncompete and no-hire agreement from my old company.

Chris: And that would go on to become what’s now Benetech, a nonprofit with a much broader set of goals and agenda. Why don’t you tell us about Benetech…

Jim: So Arkenstone got started in 1989, got to $5 million a year, and as time went on, you know, we would keep cutting prices, more people would be able to afford the product, our revenue stayed about the same. We were always break-even. We created a new product, we created a talking GPS for the blind called Strider, but it didn’t make enough money and we were short of money, and Mike May, who was then our VP of Sales, was kind of our core user of that product, he ended up spinning out of Benetech and starting Sendero Group to make talking GPS. But I was basically struggling with the fact that running a break-even social venture meant that I had no extra money, and the fact that we kind of had to shut down Strider or spin it off was basically an indicator that break-even was great as far as it went. So after about ten years, I got…I was kind of getting bored, I had all these ideas for other things that we could do to help blind people, to do stuff [for human rights], then the guy who started what became Freedom Scientific, Dick Chandler, came over and said, hey, I want to buy Arkenstone from you. And well, it doesn’t belong to me, it’s a charity, go away! So, he came back a couple of months later and he said, Jim, why don’t you tell me what your aspirations are? Hmm. This turns out to be a negotiating ploy, but as a nerd I didn’t really recognize it as such, and I said, well, I have all these dreams of doing, you know, other things for blind people, I want to do human rights,..and he said, tell you what, I’ll give you $5 million to your nonprofit, buy the assets of Arkenstone and merge it into Henter-Joyce with its JAWS product and Blaize Engineering with their Braille and Speak product, and you know, we’ll create this new company, and you can stay in the nonprofit with your engineering team, rent the engineering team back to us for a year, and then go off and start new projects. So that’s…but they also bought the Arkenstone name, so we had to change the name of the nonprofit from Arkenstone to Benetech. And we did our year of work on the next version of all the products that we had sold to Freedom Scientific, and then we had the ability to go off and look at a whole bunch of new projects. And so what we did is, we had about $5 million from Freedom Scientific, which could not go into my pocket—that’s illegal, it’s a charity—we raised another between $4 and $5 million from big silicon valley donors, especially Skoll and Omidyar are the two key people behind the creation of eBay. We had $9 million, we looked a hundred ideas, we invested in 20 ideas, and four of them became nonprofit social enterprise products that went on to change their field. So the one that is really well known in the blindless field is Bookshare, but we also started a first big data group human rights movement, we started the first software for capturing human rights data so that the information wouldn’t be lost, we created an environmental project management package, and plus there are a lot of other projects that we tried that didn’t take off, which is pretty much the Silicon Valley way, it’s just that in every case we’re not looking to make money—‘cause we’re nonprofit—it’s how can we help the most people while breaking even. And that formula turns out to, not only, you know, worked after we sold to Freedom Scientific, but it’s continued to work to this day, and we’ll always have lots of cool tech for good projects in our hopper, and are busy trying to figure out how to, which ones will take off, and then scale them up and make an impact.

Chris: And your business plan for Benetech received the Charles Schwab recognition as the best business plan for a nonprofit that year…

Jim: We got a lot of recognition. It was Klaus Schwab, who was the founder of the World Economic Forum, the Davos people, who gave us the Social Entrepreneur award and our Bookshare business plan won, I think, runner-up in the Yale business plan competition, which was the first social [*] business plan competition…and then we won the Skoll award. Even though we were pretty early on, once we made that transition to Benetech, we started to get a lot of attention, because the social entrepreneurship field—this idea of using innovation and entrepreneurship to help solve social problems—really started taking off in the early 2000s. Because we’d been doing it for a dozen years, we were seen as one of the founders of that movement.

Francis: Why is it that you won these awards, what specifically did you do best?

Jim: I think the unusual thing about us was, we bucked the Silicon Valley greed-profit-seeking motivation, that often leads Silicon Valley to do some kind of nasty things. We said, look, no, we’re setting up to be in the public good. So I think the reason that people got excited and recognized us was the idea of an exciting, Silicon Valley startup company that had chosen to be a charity, to be a nonprofit, and to focus on doing social good, kind of flew in the face of how people regarded Silicon Valley, which was make money at all costs, and kill yourself along the way. I think that was one reason, I think the other reason was that the things we we were doing were really understandable. Many tech companies have great products that the average human being cannot understand why this middleware company exists. We were helping blind people read, you know, we were the Napster of books, when it came to Bookshare. We were helping document human rights and helping convict genocidal generals of genocide. I mean, this I think captured more people’s imagination that technology could be used deliberately for good rather than occasionally evil by accident, which is certainly the story of big parts of the tech industry today.

Chris: I like the phrase, the “G-mafia,” it stands for Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, IBM and Amazon as the evils of, ah…artificial intelligence these days.

Jim: Basically, we were using what was considered at the time “artificial intelligence” to actually help blind people read. And AI has that potential to do good, it’s just right now I think we’re at a point where a lot of people are applying machine learning/AI in very sloppy ways…and hurting a lot of people, because they’re just ignoring many of the things we know about things like statistics. Anyway, we can come back to that, but I’m spending a lot more time kind of helping, not only the disability community, but other minority communities understand some of the threat that AI, badly applied, actually poses to their interests.

Francis: One of the things that I found really troubling during, like, the 80s and 90s even, was the religion of the free market, where like the free market could solve every problem. One of the things that I’ve seen, especially in research, is that when there isn’t a lot of money to be gained, it’s hard to get funding and it’s hard to get things up and running a lot of the time. Say, for example, with rare diseases, that kind of thing, you know we have this situation now where nonprofits kind of pick up the slack, but it seems to me that there’s like an inefficiency to it all because, for example, my girlfriend has a nonprofit, and she spends half her time or more raising funds. Is this model, in your view, working? Is there…other ways to approach it on a larger scale? Is government maybe supposed to play more of a role?

Jim: Well, the short answer is yes. People often try to say, Jim, why aren’t you a for-profit? Can you be making a lot more money as a for-profit? And the answer is…yeah, but we want to work on social problems. And many social problems are directly connected to a market failure. The reason that Arkenstone, you know, the original name of Benetech, got started was because our investors said, “no, that doesn’t make enough money, don’t do it.” And so, now, the free market religion usually goes the extra step of saying, if it doesn’t make a lot of money, it’s a bad idea. And that’s the idea that I reject and a lot of other people reject, which is, wait a minute, if you think that, then you’re going to consign 95% [men who need] to never getting the benefits of most of this cool technology we’ve created. And the great thing about technology is, the marginal cost of a new piece of software, a new chunk of content, is next to nothing. So as long as you can see your way clear to actually working on this thing that’s not an exciting market, you can do an amazing amount of good for almost no money. Bookshare is an example of, we promise any student in the US that needs a book, we’d already have it, we’ll go get it and add it to our library. And now the library has 700,000 books and about 700,000 users—that runs for $10 million a year. On less than another $10 million a year, we can solve the problem for the whole darn planet, which by the way is a fraction of what the planet spends on library services for people with disabilities. Its leverage is terrific. The other part of your question, which is about what model is there? So, there’s basically two models; one model is, you encourage the creation of nonprofit social enterprises, like Arkenstone or Benetech, and now there are several hundred of them. So, we were alone back in those days, and the other people who were starting similar things at the same time, we didn’t know about each other, I didn’t know that this thing existed for the first ten years. And so now we know that we’re a field, the people who create the technology—the companies, the academics, the authors, the publishers, whatever it might be—they’re often quite generous with access to their intellectual property to help more of humanity. So we’re actually able to get our hands on this stuff. So I think that that is a good model. The nonprofit sector is never going to be as scalable, as efficient, as something that actually makes money. So if you can do social good and make money, I encourage people to do that. But I think your last point is, what about regulation—I think it is possible to take some of the worst things about industry and change some of those things by legislation. And the one that a lot of people with disabilities are familiar with, it’s actually against the law to discriminate against people with disabilities. Now, we all know that doesn’t stop it from happening, but on the average, it makes it harder, and as people lose more and more lawsuits, they do more and more to avoid getting, you know, caught in a lawsuit, we actually move the ball forward. So I think that both of those models are important, and I think that it’s clear that we have a need for more nonprofit social enterprises, and we also have a need for more government regulation to remedy some of the excesses of the market, some of the negative social consequences that come from—you know, whether it’s over pollution and climate change, or it’s discrimination through AI—these are all things that need some attention, in my opinion.

Chris: Can you speak more to some of the human rights and the non-disability related things that you work on at Benetech?

Jim: Oh sure. I think the great thing about the sort of transition at Benetech was, it gave us some money to respond to some of these needs. And so the story of Benetech has been, starting from base in technology serving people with disabilities (which by the way is still more than 2/3rds of what Benetech does), but we’ve been able to do quite a number of projects for other parts, other social issues. So one of the big questions we had is, how can we help prevent atrocities in the developing world, on human rights violations? And you know, we thought about it a lot and the best thing we could come up with was, what if you could capture and not lose the testimony of, you know, people who survived human rights abuses, that witnessed them, and so t hat started a very long sequence of work at Benetech—it’s been going on now for over 15 years—of supporting the human rights movement. Because frankly, if you think about the human rights movement, the only thing it has is information. I mean, activists and information are their only assets. And so, we found out that the majority of these stories, these truths, were getting lost—groups were going out of business, they were getting…their offices were burned, their computers were stolen—so the idea is, hey, let’s capture those stories, let’s back them up into the cloud, so that they’re not lost, and then if we get a big pile of data, then we essentially had a big data group that would actually analyze these patterns and so testify in genocide trials, identify patterns of basically who did what to whom, and be part of the support for the outnumbered human rights activists. And so we got involved in a lot of the large-scale human rights violations, you know, civil wars and conflicts, we helped really understand what the numbers are and political science, that was kind of unusual to actually be asserting things based on data rather than opinion. And we had lots and lots of data in a lot of these civil wars and conflicts, from many , many different groups. And so we were able to do this, we moved into the LGBT community in Africa, after they were under a lot of threat of capital punishment for being gay, and certain African countries was being floated as a law, helped groups write the first police violence against gay people and their country kind of reports, and leading to change, and often we’re helping the UN, so…so for example right now, our biggest project in this area is that there’s between five and ten million videos that possibly include information about atrocities in the Syrian civil war, and we’re writing machine learning AI algorithms to help basically go from $5 or $10 million videos that you might want to look at, which no person can actually do, down to maybe the 500 or 1,000 videos that might be relevant to preparing a case against people who launch chemical munitions. We’re not a human rights group, we’re the nerds and the scientists who help make the human rights movement more powerful. That’s one example, another example is the environmental field came to us, about a dozen years ago, and said to us the state of the art for project management in the environmental field at the time was an excel spreadsheet, and that—you know, it’s another case of the market failure that we talked about, is construction had fifty different project management packages, depending on what you were constructing. But people who were running, you know, wetlands restorations, or campaigns against environmentally bad practices, were stuck with an Excel spreadsheet. And a general tool like Microsoft project was way too complex for your average biologist or activist, so we wrote something called [morati]. We jokingly called it TurboTax for the environmental activist professional—the idea is that it would ask you a set of questions, kind of a “wizard,” and come with an explanation of how a dollar in, like more salmon or cleaner air or whatever it might be—and so that project has gone on to be, you know, the leading project management package in the environmental movement. The list kind of goes on, I mean, we’re doing a ton of stuff in assistive technology, we started the Diagram Center, which is all about how to make STEM and STEAM; and the whole idea of Diagram was, why doesn’t everyone in the field get together, build shared technology and shared standards as a common effort, given that we all care about making science and technology, engineering and math, and arts content more accessible. And so that’s a great example, and then of course some, the one that I think is very exciting is the woman who took over as CEO of Benetech from me in…late last year, Betsy Bowman, who’s been at Benetech for 10 years, she helped get the “Born Accessible” campaign launched, and the goal of “Born Accessible” is to eventually put Bookshare out of business. The idea is that if we can convince the publishers to create their mainstream e-books completely accessibly, then blind and other people with disabilities related to print can just get the standard e-book and it should work great. And that’s increasingly the case, and we’re hoping to do that for more and more complicated works so that, eventually, the need for something like Bookshare will peak and people will start relying on mainstream e-books to be able to read what they need to read.

Chris: And what do you see for the future, what ideas are out there that you haven’t started on that you would really be enthusiastic about doing next?

Jim: So I’m actually having a blast with actually not being the CEO of Benetech, and the great thing is, I think Benetech is going to continue to expand and have ever-greater impact under the new leadership, and frankly it was probably, after about 30 years, probably time for someone to take over Benetech. And the roadmap that Benetech has is pretty clear—you know, we worked closely with the World Blind Union, and other blindness organizations, especially the NFB here in the United States, to get the Marakesh treaty passed globally, to get the US to ratify it, Europe has ratified it…I think the goal is, is that even as we work on the Born Accessible movement here in the US, to reduce the need for Bookshare, I think that there are millions of people around the world for whom access to books is, you know, ten or twenty years behind where we are in the US. And so I think the Marakesh treaty is going to let us, over time, become the national library, be where Bookshare was 15 years ago in the US. I think right now Bookshare is the national library, free national library in easily a dozen countries already. So I think that roadmap is kind of set, obviously Benetech is going to go off and do more and more stuff in human rights. Benetech’s also started doing stuff in health and human services, they have a project called Servicenet to make information about health and human services a lot more available to people who need them, because that field is stuck kind of in the “yellow pages” era of information management. So Benetech is off and running those things. I’ve launched a new social enterprise called Tech Matters, as of January. It’s actually physically sponsored by Benetech, so we still have a connection, but the difference is that if I don’t raise money for Tech Matters, then I don’t get paid, so Benetech’s not on the hook for paying my salary. And now I’m working on a whole fresh set of social problems that Benetech hasn’t had the bandwidth to work on. So I”m working with the global movement of child helplines, so these are the people who, you know, in many countries take the phone call from a kid in crisis or someone who sees a kid being abused, and helping them update their technology platform to do a better job of helping potentially a hundred million kids around the world in the next few years. I’m working on fighting slavery in the supply chain, basically unethical labor practices, I have a next-generation environmental project that’s going to help essentially regions figure out what to do about climate change and the environment and matching conservation up with livelihoods and agriculture and all that sort of stuff. So the common thread to everything I get to do today is, someone has a social problem that they want to solve, they’ve got a group of nonprofits or government agencies, or for-profits, that want to work together on solving that, and I get to be their nerd. I get to help imagine what technology products or standards or glue might help unlock the potential of these people to help solve this big social problem. And that’s, frankly, it’s a blast. I’m, you know, fresh challenges, lots of people who are very dedicated to the community that they serve, and I get to make their tools or help see that they have the best possible tools for the job.

Francis: I think what you’re doing speaks to an enormous need in society today, where there are all these technological solutions, and maybe potential for creativity with what we have, and it’s not really being discussed even as a choice for society. I think that the role that you’re playing is one that we need on such a larger scale.

Jim: I’m glad to say that I’m part of the growing movement, because a lot of people see the same problem that you see with technology. And I see it most obvious in the universities, both among faculty and students. I think that computer science faculty—to pick a group—are very concerned about what they’ve helped create, which are basically, in many cases, technology companies that are, if not immoral, are certainly amoral, and often are kind of clueless about the negative social impacts that they have. Quite a number of universities have started programs that go by a bunch of different labels; one label is “public interest technology,” the idea that people might want to work on essentially using technology to help solve social problems and serving in the public interest rather than in the private interest. There’s people who work on “computer science plus” problems; so, how could computer science help ag, how could computer science help human rights, how can computer science help education. So there is a movement here, and I know that, for example Stanford just announced a major university wide program to try and engage their faculty, who are pretty high-powered, and their students, into actually working on social problems rather than on just relentlessly spinning off, you know, the next Silicon Valley unicorn company. So, I like the think this is going, and of course there is a, you know, very exciting stuff going on in the—especially in the last administration—that has continued, under the Trump administration, which is, you know reforming how the federal government uses technology to better serve people. Government agencies realize that they’ve done a really bad job of serving society, I think the Healthcare.gov fiasco of a few years ago was kind of, you know, one of the low points and I know that a lot of people are trying to make sure that technology actually works better for, let’s say, veterans or people who are on Social Security, and hopefully we will see more progress in those areas, which touch an awful lot of Americans.

Francis: Well if you want to talk about waste, what are we going to do about this defense budget, and the amount of resources…I mean, all that power that could be used for good. I know this is sort of one of those out of left field questions, but you can’t, you know, get away with saying, hey, I’m not a rocket scientist because actually at one point you were.

Jim: (chuckles) Obviously I got started by hearing about a military application of technology and thinking about a social application of that same technology. And the good news is, you know, Silicon Valley got its start almost exclusively in defense industry applications, and the story of Silicon Valley over the nearly 40 years that I’ve been here, has been a steady move away from being focused as much on military applications of technology to applications that help society, and we see this in the giant protests at companies like Google about their technology being used, say, to target people for assassination with drones. There’s an awful lot of people in the tech field who did not go into the tech field to build technology that did that sort of thing, and talent ultimately is one of the biggest factors in what goes on in tech companies. And so many tech companies are going to have to pay attention to how their technology is being used, and I think that we’re going through a period right now, you know, we’re highlighting not only how technology is being applied to military things, but also how the technology is being applied to, whether it’s enabled bullying, or thrown elections, or whatever it might be, I think people are beginning to grapple with some of these social impacts that got ignored during the go-go phase of the last, especially 20 years of the growth of the internet.

Francis: I love the idea of being a nerd. I mean, I consider that like a pretty high compliment in my world…you know, you think that maybe this country would want to try a nerd for President, I think what we have now is like as opposite a nerd as you could possibly be.

Chris: I think Michael Dukakis was that candidate, and we…he didn’t do very well.

Jim: Yeah, I know, my sister was saying “will you please run for president” and I’m like—naah.

Chris: C’mon Jim, everyone else is…why not?

Jim: I think that one of the biggest concerns expressed by nerds, especially nerd philosophers and nerd thinkers, is that the technology that we’ve created has undercut, kind of, respect for technology, for science, for fact. And they lay that at the door of essentially what are our social media, sort of world has created is that, by the way that a Facebook or YouTube makes money is for people to stay on their site longer, and they’ve learned that the way to get people to stay on their site longer is to feed t hem more and more outrageous things to cause them to get angry, or get sad, or—to basically appeal to their lowest emotions. The problem with things that are false is that they are more engaging. Essentially, Silicon Valley has created this giant engine to sort of stupidify the average person who uses their products, because it’s in their economic interest for you to get more and more false information because it’s more engaging. ‘Cause, you know, whether it’s clickbait or a false claim, those things get a lot more attention—i.e., more people spending more time on the site—than things that happen to be true. I think there are people who are very, very worried about this, and this might, you know, come back to some of this regulation that so many people in Silicon Valley object to regulation, but they’re like systematically destroying respect for science, respect for truth, respect for institutions…by creating a tool that relentlessly destroys those things in their economic interest.

Chris: There was a study published recently, I think it was out of a university in the UK, that showed that if you start YouTube with a brand-new account, completely fresh, you know, Google doesn’t know anything about you so it doesn’t know what to recommend, and you do your first search on the US House of Representatives, and then just watch each video that it recommends to follow next, and within eight to ten videos you’re going to be on something promoting the flat earth theory.

Jim: Yeah. Or Alex Jones and Infowars, or something else like that—yes. I was actually reading a book, actually entitled “Zucked” which is by an early advisor to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who actually says it’s like three or four things, but, we tend to end up there because the algorithms encourage it. And AI, really good at doing whatever task you set it to, and if the task is “have people spend more time on the website and click more and look at more ads,” that’s why you end up with stuff that’s false. But I’m on the techno-optimist side. I think that most tech people want to be creating things of value, and do not want to be associated with things that are evil by accident, or now, one might argue after it’s been pointed out enough, evil on purpose—and so I think that my goal is to keep putting the idea that it is possible to make a living doing technology for social good. It may not be the best path to becoming a billionaire, it’s a pretty bad path if becoming a billionaire is your objective. You know, there’s an awful lot of people who want to live a life that they can actually be proud of and work on things that they’re actually proud of, and as demonstration of that there’s a lot of great teachers and a lot of great people in many professions that help people in spite of the fact that they don’t make as much money. I want to get more of the tech field to channel itself into this, how can we do good on purpose? How can actually set out to maximize human utility—making people’s lives better? Because I think that is ultimately what drew a lot of us to being nerds.

Francis: We had a guest, Richard Stallman, on recently, who had this really great idea I thought, which is to have a progressive tax on corporations based on their size. Basically what that would do was, it would make it so, you know, at a certain point it just doesn’t make sense to get any bigger, and you know the idea that that would ultimately create a more diverse and robust economy.

Jim: And of course Richard, you know, founded the free software movement, which really influenced these more community values—and we are giant fans of free software, we’re also giant fans of open source software, which I know Richard’s not crazy about. But I’m not as much of an economist, I’m how we actually choose to solve this problem. I do believe that whether it’s income inequality or abuses of tech platforms, that we’re going to see more regulatory activity, we’re going to see more changes in tax, but ultimately it depends on the electorate deciding that they want those changes. And it’ll be interesting to see if we can get that consensus, because clearly we haven’t necessarily been moving in that direction lately.

Chris: As we just discussed, AI’s driving people to increasingly faulty and useless information, people are more and more likely to be misinformed.

Jim: Yeah, and sometimes it’s much more subtle than that. I did a major study last year for a major disability donor, and they asked me to look at what technology might help if the goal was to greatly increase the number of people with disabilities who had employment. Many of us on this call know about assistive technology and other ways that you could make people in employment more effective and more likely to be able to get a job or keep a job, because they have tools at hand to do it. The thing that blew my mind—and maybe it shouldn’t have—was essentially technologies taking over the recruiting and the hiring process in almost all large corporations and many small and medium corporations. And Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, has been applied to every single step in that process, and in many cases, the way machine learning has been applied is egregiously discriminatory against people with disabilities. Which, one would think, is against the law in this country, but that doesn’t stop people from buying this technology or applying it, because the people who sell the technology say, “our machine learning, it doesn’t see gender, it doesn’t see race, it doesn’t see disability” and yet the way they’ve implemented these things can’t help but discriminate. And I think that we’ve, you know, we’re part again of a movement of calling out these technologies and saying “how is it possible that that technology doesn’t illegally discriminate against people”…and I expect, actually, that we’re going to have to have disability rights attorneys suing companies over buying machine learning tools that discriminate against people with disabilities, and eventually people will have to actually correct this. But some of these companies are going to become, you know, very rich before anyone actually calls them to account for the fact that they built something that extensively discriminates against people with disabilities.

Chris: About a year ago, I wrote a blog article called “Can an AI be Racist?” and I based it entirely on what Apple suggests in my Favorites playlist every Tuesday, that comes out, if you use Apple Music…and every week they recommend 25 songs that you’d like to listen to, you know, from your own library and put it together as a Favorites mix. And literally for weeks and weeks on end, the top dozen were all white artists, and the bottom thirteen were all black artists. And Jimi Hendricks was always the borderline. So for some reason, Apple Music prioritizes white artists over black artists, and my record collection’s probably 75% minority.

Jim: Yeah, it’s really fascinating how that works out, isn’t it?

Chris: Yeah, but it surprised me after a few weeks in a row, when I started following it.

Jim: This is an issue that’s getting a lot of attention, and people are ..one of the things that people are trying to do, one of them is make the people who work on machine learning a much more diverse crowd, so that the kind of oversight that might lead to the kind of outcome you describe is less likely to happen if you have a more diverse group of people working on it, going “gee, this result seems very odd.” But in many cases we don’t have people who work on these tools that see these obvious problems. And of course, I think gender discrimination problem is the one that’s the most obvious, and people have the most awareness that it’s a problem. There’s a famous story about Amazon killing an automated resume screening tool because they could not keep it from discriminating against women. And if it’s that hard to stop something from discriminating against women, imagine how hard it is to stop it from discriminating against minorities or people with disabilities.

Francis: I think that’s really a fascinating line of thought, because it circles back a little bit to what we were talking about earlier, where in, you know, like a capitalist free market system, you know there’s going to be like certain things that just don’t get attention that really need attention. I wonder if there’s some kind of connection there.

Jim: The example that I use in this report is a company called Hire Vue (and they spell it, you know, like hiring people and View like v-u-e I think). What they do is create a screening tool, that they show you a video and you record yourself answering that video, and then a machine learning algorithm analyzes your facial movements and your voice tone and your word choice, and decides whether you are the one in five people who do this who get an interview with a human being. So they screen out 80% of all people. And I think we can all imagine many, many different kinds of disabilities that might get in the way of using this, from accessibility problems with the app as itself, actually pointing the camera at the right spot…and then the question is, well, how many people with disabilities were in the training set that they used to create this “scientifically validated” thing? And I’m guessing not a lot of blind people were in their training set. So, you know, it’s both the algorithm, what they’re collecting, has tremendous discriminatory capabilities. What if someone can’t speak, what if someone has a stroke and half their face doesn’t move, what if they’re from a culture that discourages obvious show of emotion…I mean, all these things that are discriminatory and then you have the training set, and how it was trained, and I’m guessing that it did not reflect a diverse population that included lots of minorities and people with disabilities. And yet, this tool is going, it’s out there and being used all over the place, and one of my favorite geeks, the guy who actually was like the head of our human rights program for almost ten years, he said “something that you all should watch out for is, when the customer for a machine learning tool and the people who build the machine learning tool…if neither of them suffer any consequences when the machine learning tool gets something wrong, you’ve got a case of moral hazard.” And this is classic example of, the company is saving money, that bought the tool, the company that sold the tool is making money, and the fact that they might egregiously discriminate against people with disabilities…who’s suffering? People with disabilities, not people who are in the middle of this transaction. This is the core of the problem that we’re having, essentially with the new generation of technology, is that the people who are engaging in the financial transactions are actually not the people who suffer the consequences of the decision, right? The users of Facebook, people posting on Facebook, they’re being commoditized and product-ized to get a free tool, but, you know, it’s Facebook and their advertisers that are making all the money. This problem just keeps resurfacing, that we’ve now moved to a market where the traditional “I am the seller, and I’m getting for you, and your the purchaser, and we’re the only dynamic”…Silicon Valley has, in many cases has moved to this dynamic where the person who actually uses the product is the product, and I think we’ve all heard that kind of claim, but it shows up in this sort of thing where the people who suffer the consequences of it going wrong aren’t actually making the decisions about how to build the product or actually how to pay for it.

Chris: And how do you see a path to disrupting that?

Jim: I mean, we’ve talked about the two paths that are there, which is, you know, starting nonprofit social enterprises that actually focus on doing good with the technology, and regulation to curb the most excessive abuses by the for-profit world. I’m not naive, it’s…it’s not going to be possible for nonprofit social enterprise to displace Facebook. I don’t take that as a very serious option. But I find that many of the technologies, or the things that we’ve come to understand from these technologies and these successful companies can be applied to deliberately doing social good. Obviously doing pattern recognition to help blind people read books was the one that started my career. You know, right now we’re trying to figure out how could you use machine learning to better prosecute war criminals, in the Syrian context. The project we’re working on around, sort of, large scale environmental stuff, how could we be using machine learning to better model erosion and water retention in regions that are going through land degradation and desertification. The same tools can be applied to these things, and I think that a lot of this is intent. We need to get more people intent on doing social good with technology, to create value that is not purely privatized, that actually keeps in mind the impact this has on society, and then we need regulation that actually makes it difficult for people to go out and just ruthlessly exploit people, which they actually have a great habit of doing.

Francis: Another things that I think is a big flaw in our society today, in regards to its relationship to new technology, is basically how the workday has gotten more and more intense when the actual amount of labor it takes to sustain a quality of life for the world has gone down. I was wondering if you could speak to that at all?

Jim: There are people that are working on this, and different groups have tackled different parts of it. So, there’s a guy who came out of the tech industry who started a movement called “Time well spent.” And the idea is that these tech tools have stolen a lot of our attention, and that has caused our human relationships to actually suffer, because these things are designed to be addictive, more addictive and overcoming many of our self-governing mechanisms, you know, why we should spend more time with our family, for example. And so they’ve influenced new features on the latest generation of iPhones and Android phones, actually spend more time with tools that help you keep from looking at email up until when you go to bed, creating more awareness of, gee I spent 40 hours last week playing this online game, maybe that’s actually not what I want to do. We also have some things going on in terms of social norming and regulation, and the Europeans are further along on this, whether it’s with much stricter privacy requirements and antitrust requirements, and actually fining companies like Google billions of dollars for violating those things. There’s also, I know there are European companies that turn off email in the evenings so that their employees can’t work on company email after a certain point, after six o’clock at night, or before eight o’clock in the morning, whatever it might be. One of my favorite books on this subject is from Tim O’Reilly, the guy who coined the term “opensource” and has been a big leader in the tech field for a long time, he wrong a book called WTF, which when he gave a talk on it in the Obama White House got sanitized to “What the Future.”

Chris: That’s funny, ‘cause President Obama was on Marc Maron’s podcast called WTF, and he expands it to be the largest philosophical question of our time, “What the Fuck?”

Jim: Yeah, exactly. Well anyway, it’s good to know that President Obama’s up for this in multiple dimensions, but Tim’s book—I mean, there’s a lot of exciting stuff there about where he sees the future going. But one of his biggest points is, we get to choose—you know, people often in the tech industry present this as an inevitable form of, you know, it must be this way. Data wants this. Business just works this way. And that’s not actually true. As a society, we can choose to prioritize privacy more, or prohibit some of the most abuses of our data, or whatever it might be. And so I think the question is putting, sort of, society back in charge of making some of these choices, either by informally what they choose to do and not do, but also what their legislators do in terms of regulating industry.

Chris: Changing gears then, what is it about technology you are most optimistic about, looking to long term future? Like, you know, where do you see us in 20, 30, 40, 50 years if your optimistic vision of technology happens?

Jim: I think that there’s some things that technology can do for us that will make lives better. So let’s say that we have some agreement on what a better life is. Or whether that’s just more autonomy to make choices about their life. So we could imagine technology helping solve the climate change issue, or taking some of the extreme impacts of climate change off. We can imagine technology and access to information being such that education becomes more effective, that the rights of women and minorities and people with disabilities have a greater level of respect. Obviously there’s tremendous stuff going on in the medical area. So if our goal is to reduce human suffering, to improve the quality of life for people, to give people more autonomy and more choices in how their lives unfold, that communities can make choices about how they want development or industrialization or conservation to be pursued in their communities—I see every single social issue that we face, there’s a lot of people working on that issue that want to make a dent in it, and I see technology as an indispensable tool in helping realize those visions of a better, more just, healthier, greener planet, whatever it might be. And so, you know, that’s what makes my job really so much fun. It’s if someone sits down with me and says here’s a social problem, and here’s the better world that we can imagine, it’s not hard for me to come up with five exciting technology ideas that might help contribute to that, a couple of which are bad ideas, a couple of which are probably great ideas—I don’t know which are which right now, but it’s not hard to figure that out, and that’s what I get to spend my time on, and I know that there’s an awful lot of people coming out of the tech industry who would like to be doing that kind of work, and I want to that just more normal, more sustainable, more of a career choice that more people with tech skills can actually pursue.

Francis: How would you recommend to someone who is hearing this that wants to change careers now? What would be the first steps for someone like that?

Jim: You know, you’re most powerful when you bring skills to bear, and so if you are mid-career, and there’s a lot of things that people have learned in their career that might apply to doing social good, right? I mean, I think my background as a tech entrepreneur and a machine learning guy actually turned out to be pretty darned handy to a lot of things that I ended up doing, leading Benetech, and now Tech Matters. And so if you are early in your career, I mean I often advising people, saying, what are you really good at? Get better at it, get some experience…some people come out of school and go into the nonprofit sector. And I think that that is increasingly a career option, but I’m also aware that the way our economic system works, often people come out of school with so much debt they have to go, and go to a job that makes more money. But I think that, I see people coming to the kind of work that Benetech does, whether it’s fresh out of school, early career, mid-career, late career, final sort of phase in your career—people at every step along that way are actually saying, I want to move from money to meaning, is sort of one of my catchphrases. And I think that there are…if you have a skill that’s actually applicable to these kind of social good applications. And so there are, there’s a lot of meat out there. It just doesn’t happen to pay, you know, $500,000 a year.

Chris: But you can make a reasonable salary in the non-profit sector. Because of some research I’ve done recently, I know the salaries of an awful lot of people working in the non-profit sector in the blindness space, and they’re making a living wage.

Jim: Yeah. And yes, I mean, the CEO’s generally not making, you know, billions or hundreds of millions or tens of millions, or generally not millions, but we can get people who are working for big tech companies to come join us. They often take a significant pay cut, but you know we can still pay more than $100,000 a year to a software developer with a lot of experience, even if they can make more than $200,000 or $300,000 at some of these tech companies. I mean the average salary at Facebook is like $250,000 a year.

Chris: But that doesn’t include contractors, and they have a ton of contractors there.

Jim: No, they do have a pretty deft way of pushing those people off payroll. But you come fresh out of school from an elite school, and you get paid an awful lot money to go to these companies. But again, if you’re not about profit-maximization but working on something that you really care about, yes, you can make a decent living and…we have lots of people who work for Benetech who work around the country and take advantage of the flexibility of working from home. Many of our employees with disabilities are actually working from home rather than living in a very high-cost area like Silicon Valley that doesn’t have great transit. They can take a different place and do a great job, because frankly, given the kind of technology we have today, your online presence doesn’t look much different whether you’re in Chicago or New York or down the hall here in Palo Alto.

Francis: One of the things that I try to do in this show is create almost like a brainstorming kind of moment, at times where you’re maybe even like theorizing about how the future could be and how…either what technology you would predict, or importantly, what technology that isn’t being used right now that if implemented, could make huge changes for the better.

Jim: I tend to be more practical…even…

Chris: This gives you the chance to step into speculative fiction.

Jim: (laugh) Alright, this is my Atwood moment.

Francis: This is the show where, that we’re up for that.

Jim: The thing that really excites me about technology and the directions that we’re going with sensors, with better medical technology, with better data collection technology, with better machine learning technology, is that the idea that we would be able to understand social problems at a far more detailed level, is very exciting and a bit terrifying, right? So the challenge to us going ahead is, how could we use knowing everything we possibly might want to know about a social challenge, and then using the technology to do social good while still respecting the privacy and human rights of the people who involved. And so, I think that that is the essence of what I want to see going forward. I just love sitting down and saying, imagine we know everything, now what will we do? Because the way that we’re going, that’s actually a realistic assumption for tackling some of these problems, thanks to the incredible sensing infrastructure, data infrastructure, that we already have, that could be applied not so much to making money, but instead making life better on the planet.

Chris: Is there anything you’d like to promote or plug, whether it’s something you’re working on or something that other people are working on?

Jim: I think the thing that I want to “plug” is that people should get more involved in using technology explicitly to do social good. I think that it’s something that’s in many people’s hearts, and they feel like it’s like almost they don’t have permission to do that…I want to give people permission to go out and find a way to make a living while doing really great things through technology.

Chris: Excellent. And with that, thank you so much for coming on Making Better, Jim.

Jim: I’m glad to be part of it. Thanks.

—END

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Episode 5: M.E Thomas Transcript

(music)
Welcome to the Making Better podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Francis: Hey Chris.

Chris: Hey, Francis.

Francis: So today I’m very excited, we have author M.E. Thomas, who wrote Confessions of a Sociopath, A Life Hiding in Plain Sight. When you hear the term “sociopath,” what comes to mind?

Chris: I would think it’s somebody who’s either a criminal, highly manipulative, or…generally evil. But that was before we had our conversation with M.E., and a lot changed in my mind in that hour.

Francis: So with that in mind, why don’t we just jump straight into the interview today.


Francis: Hello! I’m really delighted to have M.E. on today. So welcome to the show…

M.E. Thank you.

Francis: Just to start, for people aren’t…haven’t read your book, or…would you like to introduce yourself, your background?

M.E. Yeah, sure. So I, I guess starting at the very beginning, I’m a westerner, grew up in California. I’m Mormon, the church actually is trying to get us to say the full name of the church, so I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I was born into it, raised into it. I have pioneer ancestors. I’m a musician, I majored in music and then I went to law school, and I happen to be a diagnosed sociopath, or anti-social personality disorder.

Francis: I guess what I’d want to start with is just maybe your thoughts about neuro-diversity…and just like the spectrum, even among sociopathy and how it’s generalized.

M.E. OK. It’s an interesting question for me, because I didn’t even realize that I was different, or how I was different, until kind of a later age. So I’ll just quickly walk you through that. Like, when I was a child I always thought that I was different but I mostly thought that maybe I was just smart. I am pretty smart, like in the way that I perform well on standardized tests, or whatever. There were just kind of things, you know, that other children didn’t see that I saw, and vice versa, honestly. I just had different blind spots than other people. So I mostly just grew up with a different perspective. It wasn’t until I was in law school, and I was sharing an office space with this other law student—we were both law students doing a clerkship at the time—and we were really bored, because they honestly only had like five to ten hours of work for us to do a week, but we had still be there. And during that time, we just talked about everything. She was really interesting, you know, she had a degree in theology, she was gay, though…and had grown up kind of during this era in which it wasn’t OK to be gay, so a little bit older. And after, you know, weeks of talking about basically everything, she said you might want to consider the possibility that you’re a sociopath. So I looked it up and I thought, wow, this really fits.

But I didn’t think of it as a disability at the time, I didn’t really think much of it at the time, which is probably kind of typical sociopathic reaction, to not really care about personal details in my life. And it wasn’t until maybe, it was about five years later that I was having some difficulties in my life. I had work problems, getting fired or kind of let go from a job, or relationship problems, long term friendship problems, romantic relationship problems…and all these things falling apart at the same time. And I started to notice a pattern, I started to notice, hey, this is not the first time this had happened. And in fact it happens about every three years. So to that extent I started thinking maybe there’s something to this sociopathy thing, maybe I should look into it, and maybe this is..this is somehow contributing to the fact that I, every three years, kind of have this cyclical self-destructive way of living. And I thought, too, you know, I’m getting older. When I was younger it was fine to self-destruct like that, because it’s more expected, people…other people were doing it, you know, it’s fine to total your car, you know, everybody does it kind of once in their teenage years. But you can’t kind of keep doing that as you become an adult. It was starting to become apparent to me, you know, it was starting to have more lasting consequences for me. And so I looked into it, I started a blog, which was sort of a journal I guess of researching different aspects about sociopathy. And the other reason I started the blog was I thought, you know, the stuff that I read, kind of online at the time—this was like 2008—so this is…there isn’t a lot written online, but the stuff that you did read was pretty negative, almost uniformly negative. And it said it wasn’t treatable, and it said, you know, there’s nothing that we can do for these people, and they’re just, you know, essentially a plague on society. And the best that society can hope for is being able to identify sociopaths and essentially set them up on an island together, you know, to live out their lives. Or people talk about, you know, just round ‘em up and kill ‘em, that sort of stuff. And I thought, that’s not been my experience. You know, I found out a lot of the research on sociopathy has been done on male prisoners. I don’t think, to this day, there’s research been done that either looks directly at the female population, or includes a significant female population. 

So then, you know there’s just, like, a lot that we don’t know about sociopathy. I think there’s a lot that we don’t know about disabilities in general, and the role that they kind of play in society, and the different things that people can do with a brain that’s wired differently. And I think it’s kind of…myopic to think, you know, there’s an optimal human. It’s like, what is optimal today is not necessarily going to be optimal tomorrow, etc. In fact I worked for a nonprofit, sometimes, do some work for them, legal work, and they quote this, I forget what the exact statistic…something like 60% of jobs that kids today will be doing when they’re adults don’t even exist yet. So they’re kind of suggesting, you know, like, we can’t just train people, we can’t take ‘em at eight years old and say, ok, this is the job that you’re going to be when you’re an adult, and we’re going to give you the education and training necessary to, you know, optimize that particular performance of that job, because we don’t know that that exists. So I think that sort of suggests that there’s a little bit of hubris in thinking that there’s going to be an optimal human, and thinking that the circumstances that we currently live in are going to be the circumstances of tomorrow, essentially. So I guess I think, in terms of neuro-diversity, you’re basically hedging your bets as a society. I think there’s the moral, kind of, reason for why we are interested in neuro-diversity, which is that all human life has value, you know. If you think that, then naturally you’re going to be on the side of neuro-diversity, but I think there’s also a good strategic way of thinking about neuro-diversity, which is that there’s sometimes situations in which you want  a certain type of personality or a skillset or experience; the more diverse it is, the greater chance society has of surviving. Just a quick funny kind of example: so one of my friends recently had a birthday party for stepchildren. And she does not get along with the ex-wife, right? And the ex-wife was going to be coming to her house, and the ex-wife before has come to her house and given her the silent treatment, and like treated her like trash. So she’s like, you know “I really want you to come, M.E., to this birthday party”…essentially—maybe you guys can kind of guess—to talk to the ex-wife, to put her down in subtle ways, you know, to basically check any attempts that she had about, you know, these little micro-agressions, and to, like, you know, instill my own—her own sense of fear about, you know, messing with this situation. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to come…

Chris: I’ve been invited to parties just to be the asshole..

M.E. Right. But being an asshole sometimes is terrible, you know, in social situations, and sometimes it’s really, really useful. I think most people can kind of understand, you know, you’re in a terrible work situation, or you’re, you know, you’re in a terrible like public situation, like one time—same friend—we were dining, we were eating Thai food, really one of these kind of hole-in-the-wall places with eight tables. We happened to be seated right next to these other two women. And then halfway through their meal, they turned over and said to my friend—and I think they had, like they had every moral justification in the world to say this, but they said—“you know what? you have a really annoying voice, and your voice has been annoying me this entire time that you’ve been talking during dinner. You have ruined this meal for me.” And …

Francis: Oh my god.

M.E. I know! (laughing) I went off on those people! I’m just, you know, not afraid of confrontation, you know, I just—I don’t even think I was rude. I didn’t yell, I didn’t get emotional, I just, you know, cut them to the quick,” that’s unacceptable, please leave now. Now they’re faced with this situation where they thought—who knows what they thought when they said that? They thought she was going to stop talking, maybe, or apologize, or whatever it is. But it’s just, you know, sometimes it is, like you say, it pays to be an asshole, or it pays to have an asshole around, I guess.

Francis: As long as you’re not a dick.

M.E. Right. (laugh)

Francis: The dick thing I don’t know if scientists have come up with whether it’s a nature vs. nurture thing, but in the absence of having a moral …a morality that’s universal and religiously based, I think a lot of people have whittled it down now to just, “don’t be a dick,” is sort of like enough for society to function with.

Chris: “Wheaton’s Law” comes up so often….

M.E. What is Wheaton’s Law?

Chris: Don’t Be A Dick.

M.E. Oh, ok.

Chris: It’s Will Wheaton, the actor from Star Trek. He did a presentation at a conference a number of years ago, just called “Don’t Be A Dick.”

M.E. (laughs) What is his definition of being a dick? I’m curious, because in this idea of, like, making things better, that you are all, are interested in, I often wonder, you know, what is the acceptable kind of neutral behavior, you know? And like you say, in the absence of having like a religious morality or, you know, in this world in which we’re trying to kind of look for that neutral morality, well what does it mean to be a dick? Like what are the things we can say, you know, never do this behavior, this behavior is not acceptable. Since we’re saying that so much behavior is acceptable in certain circumstances.

Chris: One of the things we in the humanist community are constantly wrestling with is how to prove to people that we can be “good without God” and how we actually do have an ethical framework and things like that. So when we’re encountering somebody with what we would believe to be irrational beliefs—you know, somebody who believes in a flat earth or somebody who denies climate change, or—you’re not going to convince people to become critical thinkers by being a dick. You know, don’t go up to them and say, “you’re stupid.” Maybe try to engage in a conversation with them about why they believe in what they believe, and maybe try to point out the logical fallacies and hope that they come around to our side.

M.E. Right. Yeah, I can see a, one thing that I have been thinking about recently, you know, and has like kind of a religious kind of coloring to it, the belief, it definitely comes from a religious perspective, but I think it’s interesting when you think about, like, the idea of how can we have a happier society, like a sort of utopia type society? Religiously, that’s what we think of heaven. Right? Heaven, and the Mormons are interesting, they have like a very practical idea, I think, about heaven. They’re almost kind of like science fiction-y the way they view heaven. They think of heaven as being just like a place where people are much more advanced, right? You’re much more advanced to the point where you’re, you’re essentially like, god-like. Right? And how do you have a society in which people have such great powers? You know, they’re very kind of god-like, but you don’t end up with wars and destruction. You know, you don’t end up with them getting so advanced, so powerful, that one person can sort of like set off a chain reaction and destroy everything. And in Mormonism, the concept is, you cannot interfere with other people’s agency. That is the one sort of “don’t be dick” rule, is that no matter what you do you have to allow the other person freedom. Right? You can’t impede on their own autonomy, I guess. So whatever you do, it can’t affect their own ability to do whatever it is t hat they want, or to be essentially unmolested. You know, like you have to make sure that all your actions and choices don’t affect others, or if they do affect others, that there’s some sort of consent. That you’re not infringing on somebody’s agency that way, which I think is a really interesting concept, and it’s a concept that I feel like has been…popular before, maybe, you know, there have been some movements in which it’s been popular, like, just “Don’t Tread on Me.” Right? Or even the Tea Party movement, which I think first started off with being, you know, like live and let live, and then kind of twisted to different things.

Chris: I hear similar ethical frameworks described, certainly by Unitarians, where belief in a god is optional but an ethical lifestyle is the most important thing. And I hear it at humanist events, really often, is, you know, in our “good without god” is, you know, here’s an ethical framework. It reminds me a lot of how you described your relationship with Mormonism in the book, in that it provides, you know, a set of guidelines for living and also gives you the rational reasons behind them.

M.E. Right. Exactly. It’s interesting that you say these things about ethics, but what…what are the rational reasons? You know, like, there are different…I guess if you are a, you know, sort of utilitarianism, right? Then there’s going to be a different kind of outcome that you’re looking for. Right? And that’s where the ethics come in, is that we’re looking for the outcome that allows for, you know, the best ultimate utility, right? And I guess Mormonism, the interesting kind of twist they have on it is this, this real focus on agency and autonomy. “Cause in Mormonism they have a belief, actually, that there was a war in heaven, and it’s interesting kind of thinking about where we are socially. You know, World War I, I think a lot of people don’t really understand what were the causes of that war. It seemed like people were just eager to go to war, right? World War II, there’s a greater kind of understanding of what the causes were, because they related to the aftereffects of World War I, which were so terrible. And now we have nuclear bombs, and I think the concern is—and I was just watching a Rick and Morty episode (laugh) where they reference this—you know, you’re going to get so advanced that you’re basically going to be able to bomb yourself out of existence. Right? The concern is that, you know, we have gotten so advanced that we have the real capacity to harm ourselves irreparably, as a society. That’s kind of the concern, and I guess the ethics, especially if you are going to talk about a utopia that would be so advanced, that would be a major concern. How can we avoid having these sorts of wars, or major conflict happen. And I think the simple Mormon answer, but it kind of makes sense to me logically, too, is that you just, you can’t interfere with other people’s agency. Like if somebody wants to—and this is the thing that I think is so hard for people to kind of get behind, today–is to allow somebody to be a racist. You know, this idea, and I talk about it actually in my classes that I teach, paralegal classes, is it OK to punch a Nazi? I would have thought the answer, from anybody who had, like, any sense of ethics, would be “no.” It’s never OK, like the ends don’t justify the means, right? Even if they’re a Nazi, you still, you still can’t punch them. Right? We have a legal system, right, where we hold people accountable in various ways, but you’re not a vigilante, you know. We don’t believe in vigilanteism, that’s why we have the legal system that we do, and all of its checks and balances, right? And the police system that we do, and all these things are intended to get to this point where we’re not just punching the wrong people, I guess, or you know, like people aren’t taking it upon themselves to inflict violence on others. But even rather well-meaning people, I hear them say, “yeah, it’s OK to punch a Nazi,” that’s an OK thing. And part of it I think comes from this idea that, you know, if you don’t fight bad things, you know, and fight them just as dirty, you know, as they’re trying to fight against you, then there’s going to be something that…bad happening. But I think a lot of it comes from just this feeling that you don’t like Nazis. You know, you don’t like Nazis, you don’t approve of the way that they are, you don’t agree with their beliefs, and you have a hard time existing in a world with Nazis. It makes you angry, you know, makes these people angry to live in a world with Nazis, and it offends them personally, too. I’ve heard people, and you know, there’s kind of a funny joke people say, you know, on Twitter, I guess a little bit of a meme, where they’ll say, you know I’m personally offended. Somebody says, you know, I eat my McDonald’s french fries this way, with the ketchup, and you know that’s disgusting, and they’re “oh, I’m personally offended.” You know? They’re…and it’s a joke, right? It’s meant to be a joke, but it’s also kind of true-ish, that people are getting personally offended, they feel personally attacked when they’re kind of called out about certain things. Or when there’s other people existing in the world that have nothing to do with them, you know, they’re just speaking, for instance, at a, the university that this person might be attending. They express feelings of, like, personal hurt, you know, or that they would be traumatized to have that person speak at the university. There’s something of like a personal trauma that they’re experiencing. That sort of thing, I think, wow. That would be a real impediment to allowing people to have the free agency, because if somebody wants to believe, you know, somebody wants to be a Nazi, why is that like a personally offensive thing to you? You may find it offensive, or you may find it logically, you know, like Nazism doesn’t make sense, logically. Or here are the other reasons why I find it distasteful or evil or wrong, that’s fine. You can have an opinion, but why does it offend you that somebody else’s opinion is different, I think is a really interesting question, and I think something that, you know, a sociopath would never experience. You know, so this seems really weird to me, to see it in so many people, it’s almost like this weird malady, like some sort of sickness like plague that’s spreading throughout, psychologically, throughout the community, especially I think in millenials, but not exclusively. You know, there are plenty of old, especially the stereotype old white people, who have similar thoughts. You know, they can’t stand the thought that there’s this gay couple next door that are raising their child with neutral gender pronouns, and have not told the child whether the child is a boy or a girl. There are plenty of people being offended by that, or the anti-vaccine people…you know, people get, want to kind of get angry about these things, and I guess I just don’t understand it. If somebody wants to do something, and it’s not infringing your agency, then why? And they’ll go through a lot of kind of mental leaps to get to the point where they’re saying, no, these people are affecting me. Because, you know, one Nazi’s gonna turn to ten, is gonna turn to 100 and eventually I’m going to end up in a totalitarian society of Nazism, and that will affect me. But I just don’t see it, and I especially don’t see how urgent it is from the one Nazi to you need to punch them. You kind of, what you were saying about “good without god” and these ethical lifestyles, and like this idea of trying to convince people to “don’t be a dick,” you know, with their irrational beliefs, you’re not going to convince people by punching them. It’s like an absolutely ineffective tool that they’re choosing to use, too. You know what, I think it kind of is, and it stems from like my own experience with sociopathy. I essentially think most personality disorders, from what I’ve learned, from what I’ve known, from what I’ve experienced and the people that I’ve met, I think most personality disorders involve an issue with the sense of self, with the sense of identity. Right? I think that’s why they’re called personality disorders, right? Like a narcissist has a false sense of self, there are other ways that people kind of distort their view of self in other personality disorders. For a sociopath, there’s just a very weak sense of self, there’s like, almost, like, you’re not an actual person, you’re just like, like a hologram or like a cypher. You know, an illusion—or you’re like, water or something. You take the shape of whatever vessel that you happen to be in.

Francis: People identify with their programming a lot of the time. Like, they’re born into a culture, they’re born into a sexuality or, you know, like they’re male, they’re female, they’re from this class; there are all these things that are sort of accidental, almost. They were just born into it, and then they identify with that. But how much of that is real in terms of what their potential to be anything is, you know what I mean? And what if, in that regard, sociopathy is more of an awareness that these are things that are almost like accidents that were put upon the human consciousness of this child, and then they identified themselves with it. Whereas, if you don’t grasp on to all that is like, this is me, then you have to figure it out for yourself.

M.E. Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. I wouldn’t say that that’s all that sociopathy is, but i think because they have such a weak sense of self, and there are other problems that are created by the weak sense of self. But I think one of the advantages is that they don’t feel like ego-hurts, for instance. You know, sometimes on the internet I guess we call it butt-hurt; you know, somebody gets so incensed because, you know, they feel like their ego, somebody has been challenging, kind of, their sense of identity, their sense of self. And that’s, is what sets them off so badly. I think we see it in politics a lot, when people have, you know, outrageous reactions, or people have these sort of temper tantrums. This idea that somebody has offended you—for whatever reason, like you said—because, you know, let’s say they’re American, and they identify so strongly with being an American, that whenever anybody says something slightly, what they consider to be unpatriotic, then they kind of flip out, you know, and they’re personally offended by it, because, you know, they’re an American. I think it is true, like a lot of these things are kind of…accidents, and I think the sociopath acknowledges it. I’ve never identified, for instance, strongly actually with my religion, even though I am interested in the religious beliefs, I’m interested in the theology, and the different kind of playing out those ideas—I never think of myself as being like, super-Mormon. I guess. Right? Like if somebody insulted Mormons or were like, “oh yeah, Mormons, polygamy, multiple wives, whatever,” I’d be like, “yeah, maybe this is true” right? (laugh) I wouldn’t take it personally. I have never identified for instance with my gender, either, and I think it’s one of the reasons why I wouldn’t either consider myself bisexual, because it’s not like I think of other people as having these very strict kind of gender roles, either. I don’t think of myself as being “I’m a libertarian” politically, but I don’t think of myself as being libertarian, in fact I used to never vote at all. I used to kind of just be like, these are things that are happening, and there’s not that much I can do, and kind of, who cares? You know, like I never had like these strong kind of beliefs or sense of identity. And these strong beliefs and sense of identity, I think, do harm people in particular ways. There’s kind of a concept…Paul Graham, if you google this you can read his article, it’s a really short article, and he says keep your identity small. And he’s just kind of suggesting there are certain things that you strongly identify with, for instance you love the Steelers, or something, you’re such a huge Steelers fan, if somebody says something bad about the Steelers, it can really incense you. Right, it’s going to trigger you emotionally, you’re going to have a particular kind of emotional, irrational reactions to somebody suggesting, you know, that the Steelers aren’t as good as you think they are, for whatever reason. And we see it in Europe all the time, with the football hooliganism, these soccer teams that hate each other so much that they’re like getting in fights in which people end up dying. And it seems so kind of absurd, but it’s like, if that’s what you identify so strongly with, then it’s not so different than, for instance, nationalism that we see today, where people are willing to kind of like shut off their empathy to, like, huge swaths of people just because they’re not part of their identity, and they want to maintain the identity they do have, which is a certain view of what it means to be Norwegian, or a certain view of what it means to be an American. And they kind of want to freeze in time this 2010 or 2019, whatever their view is, like, this is the perfect way to be Norwegian, we want to go back to the 1940s in terms of what it means to be Norwegian. They identify with these things so strongly that they’re willing to do similar sort of thing where the ends justify the means. They’re willing to infringe on somebody’s agency, they’re willing to punch somebody, they’re willing to, uh, hurt somebody in a way that I find to be…I don’t identify with it at all. Like, I don’t understand what’s going on there psychologically. I think there’s definitely something going on, but I think it’s an interesting concept sociopaths don’t have, other people do have.

Francis: One of the key things we’ve been talking about is, what are the things that are blocking our progress toward a more utopian society, and this idea that people can’t coexist or that people should persuade each other to be more like them, are not really true, and huge impediments…so, I’ve been liking the metaphor of the mosaic, and you know, like, when you talk about neuro-diversity, what’s great about that is you, you’re saying like on a biological level we’re even different. But that’s fine, and people will have strengths in ways that you might not, because they are different. And this idea that we’re all the same, or that we’re all capable of fitting into this monoculture and being happy, is absurd. And once you move past that, and say OK, the reality is we are different from each other and that’s cool…you know, like it kind of opens it up to not be intimidated and appalled by differences in the way that those people that used to pick on us and beat us, you know, want to beat us up, Where they saw us as a challenge to their own identity, as opposed to saying, wow, you know, that guy is onto something really creative, and you know, I would never in a million years feel comfortable walking down the street dressed like that but I’m really happy there’s someone who does, something like that, you know? But for some reason, it was seen instead as a challenge, and that’s I think one of the important things that we have to get rid of. And you know, this idea that we can’t accept certain types of people is problematic. You know, there wil be people who may be, initally at least in a more utopian direction, identify themselves as like, you know, Aryan-ness or whatever. But I think ultimately, once you take away the dangerousness or the anti-social-ness of it, a lot of them might lose interest in being Nazis. Or maybe they won’t, who cares, you know? If somebody wants to go live with their own race, I don’t think anybody has a right to say you can’t do that. And one of the failings of the left, I think, is that they are so black and white about things that when it comes to people having freedom of choice, it just even can’t happen, because there’s all these rules of what’s right and wrong in a politically correct context.

M.E. Yeah, I agree. this is kind of an interesting story, right. So when the book comes out, I quickly get outed as a sociopath by some of my law students. And it gets on this legal gossip blog, and I start getting phone calls, I start getting emails from people who are finding this out. And some of them are really positive and nice, you know, and I still think these people are great people and I really respect them.

Chris: I think anyone who spends the time to actually read your book is going to have a much more positive view of you as a sociopath than somebody who didn’t. I think the book really answers a whole lot of questions, just the average man on the street wouldn’t think, had he not read the book.

M.E. Yeah.I hoped that that was true, and I think it is true for a large proportion of people, but I think there’s still more than I thought, there was still a proportion of people who, for whatever reason—and you know, confirmation bias we know, if you have a previous belief it’s really hard to let go of that belief. Certain types of people are more open than others, certain types of people hold more rigidly to their previously conceived beliefs than others, for various reasons or in various contexts. And so there was kind of a negative reaction. But I had kind of hedged my bets a little bit with this, you know I was a law professor, wanted to stay a law professor. Was hoping I would stay a law professor—the end of the story is, no, I did not stay a law professor, right. So that kind of, uh, clues you in to how people ultimately reacted. But one of the schools I taught at was in San Francisco, I was there as a visiting professor, and I intentionally chose to visit there, because I thought, well in hedging my bets, you know if I have connections with more law schools where they know me personally, there’s a greater chance for instance that this school would end up hiring me even after the book was done, And I thought, San Francisco, liberal San Francisco, right? They’ll for sure be able to look at this and think, hey, you know this person is a…you know, neuro-diversity, we’re pro-diversity and we’re pro- people being able to be the people that they were born as, right? You know, we’re willing to support that, I thought that was maybe going to happen. But they had the worst reaction of everybody…they banned me from the campus, they not only banned me from the campus, they banned me from being a thousand yards from the campus. It was like the entire downtown San Francisco area they allegedly banned me from and said that they would call the police if I, you know, crossed that boundary. Of course that’s not legal. There’s nothing legal or right or rational about it. If you read the email they sent me, it was just such an irrational kind of knee-jerk reaction, which was just kind of like, sociopath=bad for whatever reason.I’m not sure what their sort of reason is, but there was something triggering about the very fact that I was, like, a sociopath that they just found so unpalatable, not just unpalatable, but dangerous, you know, unpredictable, who knows what it was. They went to the extent of violating so many of my civil rights, or at least purporting to violate my civil rights, for just having a published this particular book. It’s a really interesting reaction, and it’s one, I don’t think it’s indicative of all kind of reactions, or like a liberal progressive thing. When I think about—and it is true, you know, politics, like both parties seem very black-and-white thinking, in kind of unpredictable ways for me, I guess that’s why I’m a libertarian is, because I don’t understand how you can have a certain stance on the death penalty and abortion, for instance. (laughs) Which both parties have, which seem to contradict each other, a little bit, right? So these sorts of reactions, you know, the reaction that these people had, like why is it so threatening to them that I’m a sociopath? I don’t have a criminal record, I have no history, past history of violence, and to have that sort of reaction where you’re just like, you know, I can’t even stand to be around you. I said, OK, I’ll just come pick up my things or something. They said no, we will mail you your things. It was that bad. And I was like, OK, well I still need to like grade my finals, and they’re like, you’re gonna need to do that, you know, a thousand yards away from campus, you know, never come back sort of thing. And I….I even said, you know, I feel like you’re having an overreaction, they were like, no, we have thought about this a lot, you know, we’ve considered it. So it’s an interesting thing, in this world in which we allow for neuro-diversity, would that be something that is acceptable to do? They have a fear, and that’s what I kind of understood. You know, they have a—I don’t think I’ll say, legitimate, they had a legitimate fear in the sense that it was an authentic fear. They were feeling fear. They had like an actual sense of fear, but it was an unjustified sense of fear, right? Same with these people with the identity. They have a hurt, you know, they feel personally offended, but is it like a feeling of personal offense that we can kind of get behind and say, OK, you know, we’re going to allow you to feel personally offended and act however you want. Hit a Nazi. It’s fine to have the feeling, I guess, but then the action cannot be to infringe on people’s identity…er, I’m sorry, sense of agency. Even if it is, you know, you have that fear, you have that hurt, you have these various feelings.

Chris: So I was just sort of wondering how you felt neuro-diversity might fit in with diversity in general, because people with disabilities are the only minority who intersects with every other minority, and is also oppressed by every other minority.

M.E. Yeah, that’s a good point. You know, it’s interesting, I didn’t even think about it, but it’s like, even within neuro-diversity, people who say that they’re pro-neuro-diversity, they don’t like sociopaths. You know, it’s fine if you’re austistic—you know, in fact I have a Downs Syndrome uncle, I write a little bit about him in the book, he has violent tendencies that were so severe that he could no longer stay with my aunt, who was his caretaker. He had to go to an institution basically. And do I think that people with Deans Syndrome are all violent? No. But do I think that violence manifests itself in a way that’s kind of different to him, you know, with Downs Syndrome? Yeah, because we can’t call the cops, we can’t throw him in prison, we don’t have, kind of, these avenues that we have with people who, who don’t kind of have disabilities. I just think it’s a really interesting way to treat people. Like there are true differences in the way that we treat people—I think it’s great that we’re not throwing him in prison, but I think it’s also weird that we throw people in prison who are sociopaths, then, right? Because they also have unique kind of issues; they don’t respond well to punishment, just like my Downs Syndrome uncle. I think it’s so great that people have become so, kind of open minded about children with autism now, right? I think it’s great for the children, I think it’s great because it was like, kind of a kicking a wall, you know, to try to force these kids to behave like normal kids, and for what reason? You know, who is it benefitting? To try to get them to kind of conform to these, like, ideas of what a good kid should be in a educational setting, 32.5 kids per class or whatever, and they’re all sitting there with their workbooks. You know it’s such, so weird how we’ve gotten rigid about these ideas, but it…yeah, I find it…hmm…a little appalling that the same people who promote neuro-diversity in one area, and seem to be so, kind of, accepting and willing to accept, are the same people who are banning me from campus, a thousand yards from being on campus. It’s such an overreaction to me.

Francis: That kind of awareness issue, don’t you think?

M.E. If I thought—and this is kind of a little bit of jaded—part of my legal research was actually in information sharing, and misinformation, right? And what we can do about, kind of, free speech issues, you know, like what does the law have to do with free speech and do we really think that there’s a marketplace, a functioning marketplace of ideas, such that good ideas survive and bad ideas eventually kind of die out. And I think, you know, in the past five to seven, ten years, we’ve seen a lot of social behavior that suggests that our previous conceptions that people are really looking for truth and for facts—they’re not completely false, you know, like I think people still prefer the truth generally speaking, but there are situations in which they don’t. So it’s a misinformation thing, but I think there’s something else underlying their…reluctance to give the same kind of neuro-diversity privileges to other people. I’m really interested, I don’t have like an answer on it, but I think it is an issue when I was so interested in this concept of trying to make a better society and kind of, what would it look like? Of a utopian society and, uh, kind of the science behind it. Are there impediments to that—scientific, psychological, resource, economics, to having this kind of utopian society, and I immediately started thinking of these, because it’s been something that I have grown up all my life seeing, kind of the back side, the hypocrisy, of empathy. You know, the hypocrisy of compassion, right? The hypocrisy of these, you know, like these good feelings, kind of tribalism, you know, the negatives. Even before other people saw it, I saw it. Mob mentality has been, like, my constant fear, you know the idea that—and we know that it happens, you know, it happens to normal people, where they all just happen to gang up.

Francis: Well, I consider myself highly empathetic, and I would consider mob mentality one particular expression of empathy. I don’t think you’d have mob otherwise.

M.E. Yeah. (laugh) I agree, but I want to hear your ideas on it. Like go ahead and explain it.

Francis: Well, the thing is, empathy connects people. It makes you feel their feelings, but empathy is also sort of like an on-off switch. And if you can identify an idea of different people as “other,” then you can feel empathy towards your tribe and then no empathy at all, if anything like the opposite, towards them. You know, which is why in every war, they try to like de-humanize them, make the enemy seem like they’re really different on some fundamental level. And, you know, what they’ll do is they’ll whip up the empathy like they did in the lead up to the Iraq wars, where, you know just saturated you with the 9-11 stuff and the personal stories of how these horrible terrorists who like, they hate freedom, they want to do this, they attacked our homeland—and it’s like an empathetic response towards the people that were suffering on such a intense degree, that raises that mob mentality, where they “yeah, let’s kill ‘em!” You know? But I think if you didn’t have empathy at all, that wouldn’t be possible, because you’d be like, rational, and you’d be like, um…you know, you’re not subject to that same level of mob and tribalness.

M.E. Yeah. You know, I’ll take it one step further, I think it’s like not just empathy maybe, although I think it has a role, and say it’s also this, this kind of sense of identity. Because you think, would a mercenary fight as well as somebody who’s a true believer? You know, we see true believers doing outrageous things, you know, horrible things, 9-11, for instance. Right? Because they identify so strongly, they think this is like the absolute truth, and I’m going to impose this truth on everybody. You know, the infidels, the non-believers, they have to hear this message and the best way to reach them, I guess, is to kill them—that’s kind of the attitude. We used to think of that attitude as being associated mostly with extremists and terrorists, but now we’re like out there punching Nazis, right? I think Antifa is one of the most terroristic organizations that we have operating in the United States. But I don’t think it’s condemned often enough, to like go out there are commit violence against people who have opposing viewpoints to yours?

Chris: I don’t think Antifa has enough power or actual organizational capabilities to be a real threat.

M.E. I hope that’s true. (laugh)

Chris: I think they’re a bunch of kids who show up looking for a fight, and…we had that back in the 60s with the counter-revolutionaries showing up to start violence and…you know, I think they’re just troublemakers.

M.E. Hmm. I hope.

Francis: As Joe Strummer once said, they’re kind of Stalinist, maybe.

M.E. Stalinists in what way?

Francis: In the sense that, like, they, they act like they’re for the people and for like these higher values, but they’ll like squash you if you think differently.

M.E. Right, exactly. You know, I have a little brother who is solidly hipster Millennial, and I kind of use him as, you know, keep my fingers on the pulse (laugh) of that type of generational, like…he’s socialist, you know, he loves Bernie Sanders, the…kind of, this type of thinking, right? Which I don’t think is necessarily bad, it’s just like there’s a particular type of group of people that I think are associated with those kind of beliefs. And I think they’re sympathetic to Antifa, I think these younger people are kind of like…you know, I keep repeating it, but it’s like the “ends justify the means,” this concept of, we’re in this fight, good and evil, and we are on the side of good, and the people who disagree with us are necessarily evil.

Chris: I don’t trust Bernie Sanders, ‘cause he reminds me too much of myself. He’s an old man with messy hair who talks about things he can’t deliver.

M.E. Um-hm. (laughs)

Francis: I think the, the reason why people do find some sort of inspiration in Antifa is that, you know, there’s been this like, mechanism that’s been going on for a long time where the right wing are like street fighters, like they just want to win, they don’t give a fuck how they’ll go about it, if they win, they win. The left is like, you know we have to be democratic, reach across the aisle, and provide like persuasive arguments and data, and all this stuff, and when it gets down to the fight, they get their asses kicked, because, I mean, they’re bound in a way that people who are like street fighters are not bound. It seems like there are people who are willing to have the strength of their convictions enough to really fight for them. I’m not saying that that’s a good thing necessarily in this situation, but I also think there is a frustration amongst people on the left that, they’re just getting steamrolled.

M.E. Yeah. I see that, I see kind of why they feel that way, you know I don’t think it’s completely irrational, but I, I guess I disagree with that kind of attitude that they’re gettting steamrolled. They kind of, and this is..it’s, again, I think it’s this idea of identity and maybe identity politics, now that we’re talking about politics, is that any kind of—if you have such a strong belief that, you know, the people that oppose you, you know, it’s almost like a zero-sum game. You know, any gains that the right makes, you know, makes the left feel like they’re getting steamrolled, and I’m thinking, you know, not really. You know, what happened to, like, compromises and concessions, like most people would think of that as being pretty weak now. And they’re so sick of the compromises and concessions, that they think that they’re constantly getting ripped off. Whereas the left, they’ve had control of the Supreme Court basically since the Warren Court, right? Roe v. Wade and they’ve maintained that for decades and decades, right? Now they’re upset at the thought of that ending. They don’t kind of see that they’ve had their way, essentially, for the past, what is it, like four or five decades, starting with Brown vs. Board of Education. I think, controversially, and you can, controversially I say, but you can find Ginsberg also saying similar sorts of things about some of these cases, these big cases that even, you know, people who haven’t gone to law school know about. Some of the ways that the Supreme Court kind of justified—they’re not good methods. They broke particular judicial norms, you know, which is something we keep hearing about, you know, we’re breaking these norms, and it’s again kind of like the ends justify the means, right? Like we’ll be a little bit underhanded about the way that we go about kind of getting this result, because we’re so in…we’re so interested in the result. And I don’t think that that can happen ever. My kind of—and this is kind of a Stoic philosophy, too—is that it always has to be process-oriented, it can’t be result-oriented. Because if it’s result-oriented, then it really does turn into this kind of like zero-sum game. You can’t reach across the aisle if you want something and they want something else, you know, it always has to be a compromise. There can’t ever be, like, well let’s think about ways that we can like engage in this process and get someplace that, you know, neither one of us can even see right now. But it’s gonna be ultimately a better place than the current vision that we both have. Does that kind of make sense?

Francis: Yeah. And you know it’s a little bit dualistic to, to me in my mind, like we’re…we’re trying to come up with the uptopia where everybody gets to decide who they are, everybody respects everybody’s personal decision on who they are, and we have a society that it gives them the resources to actualize that life in a really exciting, fulfilling way. Or, you have this idea that, you know, it’s my way or your way, and it can’t be both ways. And actually, in reality, it can be both ways a lot of the time. And that’s why our system is failing I think.

M.E. Yeah. This idea of, just, coexisting seems to be kind of getting pushed out the window, there’s—I don’t know why, is it social media? We’re like, we can’t stand, you know, the cousin on Facebook or whatever who has different political beliefs than us, or something, and so people are just getting so incensed about it. They’re getting outraged, you know, we’re being steamrolled, where all it is is just (laugh) it’s just kind of like the natural shifts of power. I guess I just don’t see where anybody’s getting steamrolled, but both parties think that they are, because in the zero sum game, any time that the left wins, the right loses. Any time the right wins, the left loses. That’s kind of the attitude that people have. There’s no longer this idea of, like, hey we have a Constitutional Republic democracy, and this is the process, and if you didn’t like the result this time, then we have particular institutions that have been around for centuries, you know, that you can use and work within those institutions to enact the change. Now people are talking about, uou know, again, my little brother, who I think is a good indicator, kind of barometer of the way people are thinking, has just like, he thinks that the government is essentially useless Constitution garbage, you know, because it doesn’t lead to the result he wants. And that’s kind of, the mentality you have seen increase everywhere, where people are thinking constantly about the ends, they’re no longer thinking about means that we have been talking about. You know, how can you live a meaningful life, how can you live a life of fulfillment and purpose, and not have it being impeded by others. You know, like not have other people be offended by the fact that…

Francis: ..Or anyone’s business…

M.E. Yeah. It’s not anyone’s business. But people have made it their business, it’s gotten so popular, I think, in the past decade, to make everybody’s business your business. And I just don’t understand why.

Chris: Well, and we also live in a world where privacy no longer exists, I mean, you tried to publish a book anonymously, and how quickly were you discovered?

M.E. 24 hours (laugh), 48 hours…yeah. Definitely that same week.

Francis: Maybe what the college was angry about was that you didn’t abide by the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule.

M.E. Mmm. Do you think there is, like, still “don’t ask, don’t tell” for that sort of stuff?

Francis: Well, there’s so little awareness about it, first of all. I don’t think the true nature of the heterogeneity of human minds, of psychology, has been brought to the attention of people in general. When you’re talking about people maybe that don’t have a lot of empathy, and you know there’s always a whole spectrum to everything. My yoga teacher recently, and if you’re listening, my apologies if I’m bringing you up without asking, but, she was talking about how she works with people who are dying. She helps them with the death process, she calls it a “death dula.” And I said to her, you know, “how are you on the empathy scale? Do you have a lot of empathy, or not too much?” And she said, “ah, I don’t really have much empathy.” I said, “I guess you’re probably libertarian, right?” And she said “yup.” (laugh) But here is a woman who does, like she’s such a, like, angel, kind of, you know? Like she’s doing this job that I could not do, because I have so much empathy, I would make these people feel horrible about the fact they’re dying. She can be emotionally detached and actually do the job properly, you know. You’re like a trailblazer that you even wrote this book and got people thinking about this stuff and opened the conversation, but you just opened it as far as I can see. And it definitely, in my mind, impacts a lot on the idea of neuro-diversity and that sort of stuff, but I also feel like it’s also really, it’s beginning. You know, it’s like a nascent kind direction that we’re going in, a movement where we’re going to find that different people have different aspects of personality that we have pathologicized. You know, we take like extreme examples of it sometimes, and turn it into a disorder. But you know, it’s a spectrum. You know, like I think people don’t understand, you know like you have all these primary colors that we’re figuring out now psychologically, but you know like people don’t, I don’t think, really understand what all that means, and what’s there. And honestly, even people like me who’ve been studying this stuff and trying to like really wrap my brain around and figure out how to use this to make society better, I feel like it’s still very new, to me, the cutting edge of human consciousness in some ways.

M.E. I hope. You know, I hope that this is, this is happening. I think people are becoming more aware. I think that, again, kind of—this has been the theme of at least my comments—the impediment I can kind of see to people being more open about the possibility that other people are living equally valid lives, even though they’re making very different choices, is this concept of identity. Can you believe, for instance, can I believe that my religion has truth to it without necessarily thinking that other people’s beliefs are wrong? Can I think that one way is a good way without thinking that other peoples’ ways are bad? I think there’s kind of like a, just like a…a broadening of your perspective that needs to happen a little bit more before we’ll get to that place where society is really capable of having that degree of acceptance for neuro-diversity. It reminds me, I follow on Instagram, I think it’s called “medicalpedia” and it has a…I don’t know why I follow it, it has like all these gruesome, you know, photos. Somebody, you know, got their foot cut off in a motorcycle accident, right? And it will show–I think it’s for medical students, but it’s really interesting, I think to learn so much about the human body and the way that it’s connected by seeing it in these kind of distressed ways. And I recently saw a picture of, there was a homeless man who got brought into the hospital, and he was complaining of having a lack of sensation in his feet, and he’s also diabetic, right? And they’re taking off this sock, and underneath the sock—yeah, you can look this up—are hundreds of maggots, and I was like “what!” Like as they’re peeling away this sock, there’s just these maggots, like falling off the sock, I mean literally, like his foot is covered with maggots. And you start seeing the maggots start coming out from under the skin, you know, and you’re like, how can somebody let it get this far? I’m sorry I’m not able to attribute the source on this one, I recently read this article, this comment about this guy talking about homeless people, and his comment was basically that if you don’t understand other people’s choices, right, if somebody’s choice seems so kind of stupid and wrong to you, then you really don’t understand the full background of their situation, their environment, why they’re making that particular choice. Like if we could get to the place where, instead of just decrying everybody’s choices as being wrong, where we would try to understand why is it that you’re making this choice? You know, why did you let it get this far? What are the kind of influences that lead you to believe this politically, you know, why is it that you have this particular emotional reaction to things? If we really tried to kind of understand why, then I think we would, we’d be able to understand better how everybody has good in their choices, you know, everybody is kind of doing the best that they can, and that there really is an ethical, kind of ultimate good in allowing people to have the autonomy to live their own lives, make their choices, that there’s value in that and we don’t have to have everybody look and act and be the same.

Chris: I think that’s one of the reasons why I don’t really like labels like “left” or “right” or Democrat-Republican, blue-red, or whatever; because I think it creates a false dichotomy, and I think people have embraced that false dichotomy. I mean, I think we probably, as Americans, you know, Trump supporters and Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters, probably agree on 90% of stuff, if you asked them as individuals. And yet we join these teams, or become members of these tribes, and all of a sudden, as you were referring to earlier, it becomes a black and white, win or lose, situation.

M.E. Heh. Yeah, and it is kind of weird. Let’s say I like the Steelers so much, let’s say I like a particular member on the Steelers. In two years he’s going to be playing for, like, the Chargers or something. You know, it’s so weird that we’re kind of this way, we’re so rigid, in thinking that this moment in time is going to stay this way. You know, the Republican party is always going to be like this, the Democrat party is always going to be like this. Whenever there’s a new movement, right, we’re like, whoaoh! You know, this is shaking things up so much, and how are we going to kind of like live—I think it really just illustrates the falseness of the labeling. Right? That there isn’t so much a dichotomy as we thought before, even if there are things that are dichotomous, we’re not necessarily perceiving them correctly, they’re going to shift, possibly, and having more of this openness to the way that we understand labels. I went to Cambodia—when did I go? like 2010 or something—and at the time I had travelled kind a lot of places, but still, out of all the places I’ve travelled, it seems like the people were…and you know, I understand, I was only there for a few days, it’s hard to get an impression, but my impression of them was that they were very happy.. They were very happy, very kind of, um…content. And it was also one of the poorest places I have ever been. You know, so poor that I realized by the second day, when I saw like a little piece of plastic wrapper out in kind of these rice patty villages, I was so surprised to see it, and I was like, why am I so surprised to see this candy wrapper? And it’s because I hadn’t seen any plastic waste or any waste at all in the past, you know, 24 hours, right? So super, super poor, even compared to other SouthEast Asian countries. I kind of wondered why they’re so poor, and I thought maybe it has to do with, you know, Pol Pot and the killing fields and they had that civil war for so long that they were just sick of the violence, they had, you know, a similar sort of situation, one people trying to impose on the other types, and the types are fighting and they both think that they’re justified, and they’re willing to, you know, use violence to impose their beliefs and their worldview on other people, that can’t stand the fact that there are other people different from them. You know, very similar kind of story that seems to be behind so much conflict in the world. But after decades of this, and I think 20% of the Cambodian population was killed? And still now it has one of the highest amputee rates, right? Because they land-mined the entire country, basically. In fact, like you can still…I forget what the rates are, it’s like a thousand people a year die from land mines, and then many more end up maimed or otherwise hurt. There are like, you know, certain places are just unoccupied because of land mines, there’s like 10,000 landmines or unexploded ordnances. But they’re just sick of it, right? And so maybe that will happen to us, too. Maybe we’ll be like, you know, shaming each other, playing the zero-sum political game, until like we get to the point where we realize from personal experience, you know, decades later, that it was a terrible way to govern a country, it was a terrible way to relate to our fellow humans, and that there was just such waste. You know, human, human waste or otherwise, that we’ll just learn. You know, we’ll learn even though we have the capacity to do this particular thing, we’re not going to do. Similar thing with World War I, World War II.

Francis: That’s such a great thought. Before we end, I would like you, if you can, to maybe talk a little bit about what you’re working on now. You’re researching a book, right?

M.E. So I, I’ve started writing a second book, probably in the last year or so. The reason why I started thinking about it is, you know, I’ve learned a lot since the last book was published, I guess 2013, so almost six years ago, in May. Since then, I’ve gone to a therapist, I’ve learned some other things, and so I kind of thought, you know, I have…I have some more things to share. And so I wanted to share it with people, and there was this…young man, he’s in his mid-20s in Australia, and he wanted to join the Australian version of like, essentially the Seals, their Navy special forces. But he wasn’t allowed into the military, because during his college era, somehow he had gotten the diagnosis. He was seeing a therapist. The therapist never told him what the diagnosis was, but it was in his medical records, and so when went to go to apply to join the Navy, they saw that and said, you know, you’re not getting in. And he was like, “M.E., now what? Now that I have this diagnosis, I just found about it last month, and it’s ruined my dreams of what I wanted to do as a career”…You know, he was like a semi-professional swimmer, so it was definitely what he wanted to do. And I thought, this is the perfect question that I feel like I can kind of help answer. And I think I had a little bit of hubris, too, when I started, I’ll go down and meet him, and I’ll try to meet some other, kind of, sociopathic minded people, and try to kind of start sharing my ideas about things. And I..I still do think I have like, some insight that does help them, and I do try to help them. I’ve been, now, I don’t know, like ten different countries or something, I’ve been traveling the world this past year, meeting these people and other people who aren’t necessarily sociopathic minded but are interested, or have similar experiences, you know, are interested in neuro-diversity, or have friends, relatives, who are sociopathic minded. And I’ve since learned a lot, and I guess I’ve learned even more than, you know, thinking I have the right answers. And I guess talking to you today, this may explain a little bit of the background of why I think it’s so important to hold your beliefs lightly, gently, and keep and open mind, is that everybody has such different experiences. You know, the British sociopaths are different than the French ones, are different than the Russian ones, are different than the Australian ones…and it’s not even just their nationality, obviously, that’s different. It’s just everybody is so different, and things manifest themselves in such different ways for different people, and the answer that’s right for me is not necessarily going to be the answer, or the solution, for somebody else. So I guess even within the sociopathic community, I’ve learned to understand and respect that a little bit better, and understand that everybody essentially has to just make their own way, and that there are certain things that are more true than others, or will tend to be true is more situations than others, but I think when you take anything to an extreme, you’re gonna end up in a bad place. That’s true of virtues, they can become vices, and I think that’s even true of “truth,” that you can distort truth by taking it to an extreme. So, I guess I just think more in terms of everybody is different, there’s such a huge diversity of people, even amongst the sociopathic community, things that work for us, things that seem right for us, maybe aren’t going to be necessarily so for other people, and to just kind of be OK with that.

Chris: And with that said, what makes you optimistic about the future? I mean, I don’t think you’d be out there writing books and doing the activism you are if you’re optimistic at least at some level.

M.E. Mmh. That’s so true. It is so true, I really am optimistic about the future. I think one thing that makes me optimistic is that I, myself, have changed, you know. I don’t think I’ve ever been really kind of rigid about beliefs, even though I write the book, you know, the first book is just kind of a snapshot of what life was like, and a lot of it was, by the time I even was writing it, it wasn’t stuff that I was necessarily, you know, still engaging it. I guess (laughs) some of the more childish things, you know, or some of the more immature things, by the time I wrote it, they were mostly in my past. And things have changed similarly, like with therapy, other things that I’ve been doing, you know, relationships that I’ve had with other people—I just see things as being, like, this journey of change. I have seen change in my own life, I’ve gotten to happier places in my own life, and so I…just, I guess I believe in the power of change? Self-willed change, and I think I believe in the, I guess, the divinity of the human condition. You know, I believe in the, the potential that humans have to do really great, good things, and to have very deep, meaningful, lives, live lives of meaning, and to understand that they have quite a bit of power. Everybody has power. Sociopaths are more aware and thinking about power every day, but everybody has power to understand, you have the power to do of great good, and great evil. Which is why, you know, even if you’re just kind of shooting off a tweet, or shooting off a Facebook post, to kind of be more considerate and aware of the sorts of effects that that may have on people, to be more considerate and aware of the way your actions affect others, and this kind of getting to this concept of treating everybody as being equally, I guess, sacred. You know, and not interfering with their own ability to change and to…make their choices freely and uninhibited by…your own issues and hangups and your own feelings about what they’re getting up to.

Chris: Well, thank you, M.E. Thomas, for joining us on Making Better.

M.E. Thanks so much, Chris.

Francis: Yeah, Thank you very much.

M.E. Thank you, Francis.

—end

Episode 4: Richard M. Stallman Transcript

Chris: Richard Stallman, welcome to Making Better!

Richard: Thanks for asking me on.

Chris: You’re most well-known for being the father of the free software movement, and I don’t believe most of our listeners know anything about free software. So can you start, maybe even by the most fundamental of definitions, by telling us the difference between “free” as in freedom and “free” as in gratis…

Richard: Well, I don’t use the word “free” to refer to price, I avoid that for the sake of clarity. Free software means software that respects the freedom and community of the program’s users. So it’s a matter of freedom, we’re not talking about price at all. In fact, when I want to say that something is available for zero price, I call it “gratis,” because that’s an unambiguous, clear word. And every time I say “free,” it refers to freedom, never to price. But why is it important for software to respect your freedom and your community? Well, with any program there are two possibilities: either the users control the program, or the program controls the users. You’ve probably heard about the issues that happen when companies control seeds, or companies control medicines, or companies control how you can watch TV or connect to the internet. These companies use their power to mistreat people. Well, it’s just the same with software companies. Nowadays, if you’re running in your computer a program that is not free software, whatever company owns that program has power over you, because it controls the program that tells your computer what to do. And the company’s programmers, they know that, and they are probably designing that program to give the company an advantage over you, to put you at a disadvantage. The companies do this by putting in malicious functionalities, like they make the program spy on its users, or they design it to refuse to do the things that the users will want, ‘cause it’s to their advantage not to let users do what they want. They may have it depend on a server, which might get switched off; they could make it censor users, it can have a backdoor which can be used to do whatever they want to do to users whenever they want to do it. The Amazon e-book reader—we call it the Amazon Swindle—has a backdoor to erase books. And Amazon used this backdoor to send a command to erase thousands of copies of a particularly book one day, and can you guess what book it was? It was 1984 by George Orwell. I’m not making this up! If I were writing fiction, that would seem just too unbelievable, I wouldn’t dare pick that example. But that’s what really happened!

Chris: 1984 meets Fahrenheit 451.

Richard: Well, in 1984 the government burned books, too, you know.

Chris: Yes. So you laid out the four fundamental freedoms of software freedom—could you go into, briefly, should the four freedoms?

Richard: Sure, but I want to explain how they figure in. I say that in order for the program to respect users’ freedom, the users have to have control over it. They need to have control separately but also collectively. Now there are four particular freedoms that the users need in order to have control, so these four freedoms—we call them the four essential freedoms—they actually make a practical definition of free software. So, freedom zero is the freedom to run the program any way you wish for any purpose. Freedom one is the freedom to study the program’s source code, those are the plans that a programmer can understand and then change it so that it does things the way you wish. In other words, so that it works differently, any way you like. And these two give each user separately control over the program, but in order to exercise freedom one, you need to be a programmer. Most users are not programmers, but they still deserve control over their computing, which requires control over the programs they run. How does a non-programmer get to have control? Through collective control, which is the freedoms for a group of users to work together to exercise control over what that program does. So maybe you and five other users decide to make certain changes, and then some of you, who know how to program, write those changes, and then you all use the result, including some of you who don’t know how to program. So this is the way non-programmers can participate in getting programs changed the way they wish. Collective control requires two additional essential freedoms, which adds up to the four essential freedoms. So, freedom number two is to make exact copies and redistribute them to others, either give them or sell them to others, when you wish. And freedom three is to make copies of your modified versions and give or sell them to others when you wish. So with this, the group’s members can cooperate. If one member of the group makes a modified version, then with freedom three, person can copies of that and distribute them to others in the group…then they, with freedom two, can make exact copies of that, and distribute them to others in the group, and this way everyone in the group can get a copy of this new, modified version. So this is why those four freedoms are all essential, so that users have individual, separate control and collective control. Collective control requires two additional essential freedoms, which adds up to the four essential freedoms.

Chris: The comment I was about to make was about the second freedom, I was going to say that the Free Software Foundation website has a list of other volunteer opportunities that people can do to help free software, who are not programmers.

Richard: That’s right, there’s a lot of work that this movement needs which is not programming, some of it which is not particularly technical. It’s like any other political movement, we need speakers, we need people to organize local activist groups and look for opportunities to try to move things to freedom. So you don’t need to be a programmer. Take a look at GNU.org/help and you’ll see our list of many different kinds of work we need.

Francis: If the free software movement succeeds, how will that improve the average person’s life?

Richard: Well, it means that you won’t be mistreated by the software in your computer. You know, right now many programs are spying on people. We recently found that programs sent sensitive personal information to Facebook because the developers of those programs, their mobile apps, use the Facebook library that sends data to Facebook. But you’ve got to expect programs to be spying on you if they’re non-free, that’s why I don’t use any of them. I just reject them all. If there’s something that would be convenient but it means using a non-free program, I won’t do it. I defend my freedom. I won’t sacrifice my freedom for convenience, that’s the first step in having any freedom is not trading it for convenience. But the thing is, if you make that trade, eventually you’ll be at such a big disadvantage vis-a-vis companies, that you’ll probably end up being lured into throwing your money away and being mistreated constantly by companies that profile you, your wallet will be emptied, your democracy will be emptied, your elections will be manipulated, and if the government knows everything about everyone, and of course whatever the companies collect in the US the US government gets to take from them, then heroic whistleblowers like Edward Snowden will be impossible because they’d be caught right away. If the government knows who goes where, what each one does and who talks with whom, there is no privacy left and you can see what that looks like in China, and that’s where the United States is heading to. It’s time now to organize and fight and say, “stop talking about regulating the use of our data, and stop collecting it at all.”

Francis: We live in a generation of kids right now who haven’t been brought up to appreciate privacy as a right, even.

Richard: That’s true, it’s very threatening. But there’s no use giving up. You see, I don’t need to be an optimist to keep fighting. I know that it’s better to fight than to surrender. If you surrender you’re immediately defeated. What good is that?

Francis: I agree completely. So what do you do about all this information that’s been garnered about everyone that’s on Facebook and all these other sites that have been tracking people—is that information just out there ready to be exploited?

Richard: Well, it is. Theoretically we could pass laws requiring them to delete it, but even if we don’t delete the old information, if we stop the collection of more information, that will gradually solve the problem of the old information. It will become less applicable and less complete, and eventually it won’t be enough to be a basis for tyranny by itself.

Chris: I’ve heard you talking, and you use a phrase that I really like, that if you use Facebook you’re not actually a “user,” you’re a “used”

Richard: Correct. Facebook uses people, people don’t use Facebook. Facebook uses people to collect data about them and about other people. If you talk with people through Facebook, then those people are pressured by you to be used by Facebook, to give data to Facebook. And when they do so, they’re also pressuring others. So they may be pressuring you to communicate through Facebook, while you’re pressuring them to communicate by Facebook. People are pressuring each other. And my conclusion from that is, it’s really our duty to refuse to be used by Facebook. But it’s important to note that Facebook collects data about people in a number of other ways, even if they don’t have Facebook accounts. For instance, there is a period tracking app for women, which was sending data to Facebook, and these women didn’t necessarily have to have Facebook accounts. It was still getting data about them, so of course it can find out when they’re pregnant, and not only that. Lots of programs have been sending data to Facebook in that way. And websites also send data to Facebook. If you look at a website and you see a “like” button, the Facebook server knows that your machine visited that page.

Chris: And we actually, after you and I went back and forth in email a little bit, Richard, we’ve decided not to have any “like” buttons on our website because Amanda, our web person (who you met in Cambridge once) looked at them and they all execute Javascript…

Richard: Right…but the point is, it’s not just executing Javascript, it’s malicious Javascript. It’s a non-free program which is malicious, as many non-free programs nowadays are. It’s the usual case. That may sound like a shockingly strong statement, but people have done studies of, I think, the thousand most popular android apps at the time, and found that the majority of them were spying in one particular way that was easy for the researcher to detect. Of course the rest could be spying in other ways, but without knowing that, the researcher had already proved that most of them were spying. And by the way, there are a lot of other things like, similar to the like button, but from other companies, and they’re all doing the same kind of spying. But we have a browser which blocks all of that, it’s called Icecat. Obviously, it’s a modified version of Firefox. And we’ve put in various features to protect users’ privacy.

Chris: And there are some social media outlets that are ethical…I’m thinking of Gnu Social, and Megadon perhaps?

Richard: You mean Mastadon?

Chris: Mastadon.

Rchard: Yeah. Mastadon is actually a modified version of Gnu Social. Yes, they’re ethical in two ways. One is that the client software you need is all free software, and the other is that the networks are run to some extent by the community, and therefore, they’re not constantly being designed to get people to give more data. Of course you still have to think about what you’re going to say to people. What you say in any social network, no matter how ethically run it might be, is going to be visible to a lot of people. So, you should think twice before saying things. You know, don’t post photos of other people, because publishing a photo with other people in it is helping to track them. You should ask them whether they really want to be tracked. Don’t post photos of minors, because those photos will be part of their permanently available data, available to whoever, whoever it might be depending on how you posted it. But the point is, that’s someone who hasn’t had a chance to think about whether that’s a good idea, and could conceivably be used to hurt that person, or even you.

Chris: So it brings us to a question of consent.

Richard: Well, a baby can’t consent to anything. So, people don’t realize how dangerous massive surveillance is. But if you want to understand that, read about China’s social credit system, which is designed to keep track of people’s behavior in many dimensions, and then punish or reward people, depending on how much the state likes what people are doing.

Francis: What do you think, say, 50 years from now, would be the ultimate landscape for how software is offered, the nature of software? Say, like 50 years from now.

Richard: I can’t tell you. Nobody can predict the future 50 years from now, it’s fatuous to try. Human as in technology may not exist. Technology might exist and no humans, or humans exist but no technology. Robots powerful enough might consider humans to be a dispensable toy, or an inconvenience. On the other hand, global heating disaster could destroy globalized manufacturing and leave humans without the ability to make high tech goods, and some would still survive, nowhere near as many as today.

Chris: What do you consider are the most successful pieces of free software out there today? I mean, in my mind, the internet wouldn’t work without free software, so…

Richard: I don’t know if that’s true. I can’t say that I’m sure that the internet would not work without free software, free software has, for much of the internet’s existence, played an important role in its use. But there were other programs to do those things, and so there could still have been an internet without them, it just wouldn’t have respected our freedom at all. But the most important free software is the Gnu/ Linux operating system, that’s what makes it possible to run a PC with only free software. And then Android has a relationship with free software. It’s not a simple relationship; a large piece of Android is released by Google as free software. It’s not everything you need to actually run a device, so you’ve to either pick your device carefully and put in some free replacements, or run non-free programs along with it. And then many of the original apps of Android were non-free, and over the years some apps that were free have been replaced with non-free programs by Google. And the next thing is, if you get an Android device, it’s not certain that the programs distributed in that device are free—they could be non-free modified versions of the free programs, they could be other programs that are non-free. It’s something that can only be checked on a case-by-case basis. There is a free variant of Android, it’s called Replicant, it works on certain models and it’s entirely free software.

Chris: Does Replicant also cut down on the surveillance as well?

Richard: Well, to some extent. There are various technical methods to do surveillance. Many non-free programs spy on the user and send personal data to somebody. Well, if you don’t run those programs, if you run only free software, you’re pretty much safe from that. It’s unusual for free programs to spy on the user, because the users can fix that. That means that the users, if they care enough, can make sure that the program doesn’t spy on them, and this is a powerful deterrent against anyone’s putting in surveillance functionalities into free software. It’s not guaranteed, you may have to check which version you’re going to use to avoid surveillance. But at least it’s possible to make the modified version which doesn’t spy. In any case, though, that’s not the only form of surveillance. For instance, there’s an increasing danger from cameras on the street that recognize license plates and recognize faces. Now, that doesn’t work through our computers, we can’t block that by changing the software in our computers. We have to organize and get laws to say that face recognition systems may not recognize any face except somebody put in the list by a court order.

Francis: I’m imagining that if this face recognition, the computer could look at you, your laptop could look at you, figure out who you are and then market…

Richard: No, no no, no. Your laptop knows who you are. If it’s running non-free software, it’s very likely spying on you also, but if it’s running free software and you use a system distro that’s developed by people who care about protecting privacy, it probably isn’t spying on you. No, I’m talking about these cameras that are placed in the street, they’re not on your laptop. They watch everybody who passes by. And Amazon is now recruiting people to put video systems, you know, at their doors to watch everybody who comes up and the video, I believe, just gets stored by Amazon, and so the FBI, I believe, could collect it all with a National Security Letter. But in addition, there are programs to get people to sign up to send some of this information to cops. I know in Detroit, there’s a program where the cops tell businesses, if you want us to show up quickly for a 9-11 call you better have a camera that we can watch through all the time. Well, cameras that they can watch through all the time should be flat out illegal!—unless a court says put a camera right there for the next five months. These strong measures are what it will take to give us actual protection from total government tracking of what we do. And anything less won’t do the job.

Francis: I think a big hit on freedom was the Patriot Act and how that undid a lot of these freedoms.

Richard: I like to call it the “Pat-riot Act,” ‘cause in a country based on an idea of freedom, there is nothing less patriotic than that law. The idea of the US is that the government shouldn’t have total control over what people do, it shouldn’t know every, where everyone goes. It shouldn’t know everyone you talk with.

Francis: Well, how do we get back to that sort of awareness in people?

Richard: …have to change laws. I don’t have a magic recipe for how to win this campaign, but I can point out what we need. Let’s think of the Green New Deal. For many years, most of us—except denialists—have acknowledged that global heating is very dangerous and that it needs to be stopped. But you’ve seen, over and over, inadequate proposals, proposals that wouldn’t do the job. And now finally you see Extinction Rebellion and the students climate strike and the Green New Deal, where people are demanding that solutions be considered that would really solve the problem, that are not obviously insufficient. Well, I’m saying the same kind of thing about how to avoid having a surveillance state that represses dissent. We have to put an end to the collection of so much data that it could repress us.

Francis: Are any bills in Congress along these lines?

Richard: Not that I know of. But in Massachusetts, a bill has been submitted to stop the state from doing face recognition. It’s presented as a moratorium until proper regulations can be adopted. But in the meantime, it says none at all. There are very limited exceptions, which I believe depend on a court order. So that’s the kind of solution that’s needed, except it has to apply to private companies as well.

Francis: Maybe we need a Free New Deal, like getting back the freedoms we gave up because of the 9-11 hysteria back in the Patriot Act days. I think a lot of what was promoted at that time were supposed to be temporary, like emergency measures, too, not like a permanent …

Richard: Exactly. That’s what typically happens. That law was initially temporary, the Pat-riot Act, and it got renewed a few times, and I think ultimately made permanent, if my memory serves. But it shouldn’t have been passed at all. It was obvious at the time that this was a worse attack than the September 11th attacks themselves. In fact, on that day I started to write an article telling people what the next target would be, our freedom would be the next target. In the article I started to write, I urged Americans that, in their frustration about being unable to fight back against the bombers, that they must not start destroying their own country’s freedom instead.

Francis: And Obama was such a disappointment. I mean, the way Obama treated whistleblowers, instead of maybe seeing Snowden as a hero with what he did…I mean, that to me was very telling about who Obama really was.

Richard: Well, I could tell that before the election. His slogans were “Hope” and “Change”—could you get vaguer than that? It was clear that he wasn’t the kind of person who would really try to solve the country’s big problems. I wasn’t knowledgable enough to foresee the specifics of his disappointing actions, his inability to push hard for anything, and his subservience to the banksters when the central problem of the United States is plutocracy. You can look at so many different areas, whether it’s surveillance, or pollution, or impoverishment of most people, or imprisonment, or the failure to curb global heating, and what you see is, plutocracy’s involved. I couldn’t see that much detail about him, but I did see that he was not proposing firm and major moves to address these problems.

Chris: I got excited about President Obama when he was still a candidate, because he was the first major Presidential candidate I’d ever heard who included disability in his speeches, and then he turned out to be an absolute disaster for people with disabilities. His Justice Department and his Federal Communications Commission were just an absolute failure for us. It was just a phenomenal disappointment.

Richard: Yeah. Well, it’s one more disappointment on many others from Obama.

Francis: Actually prosecute all the people that were doing the, uh, stuff the Bush team were doing that was obviously illegal, and the bankers, the banksters, and then his basic idea was, “we can’t look back, we have to look forward.” I was thinking, you know, if any lawyer tried that in a court, like “Judge, yeah he killed 50 people, but we can’t look back, we have to look forward”—what kind of justification is that anyway? But somehow he pulled it off.

Richard: Yeah, they stole a million Americans’ houses with fraudulent foreclosure, let’s not look back at that…but it was Obama and it was, Holder, I think was his name, the Treasury Secretary, who let the banksters off the hook, protected them, and when states were going to prosecute them for this fraud, it was Obama and Holder that pressured them to let it drop.

Chris: But if you compare what our Attorney General did in the banking crisis to Iceland, where 35 bankers in Iceland all went to jail—little Iceland actually prosecutes criminals while big United States gives criminals handouts.

Richard: Yeah. Well, part of that is because the companies are so big that it’s hard to fight them. Well, I have a proposal for how to make all these companies get smaller. The proposal is, a tax. You could think of it as a progressive sales tax. The bigger the total company is, worldwide, the higher the tax rate. This way, it pressures companies to split themselves up into independent businesses, because then each one will pay less tax.

Francis: Whoa. [claps] I love that idea! It’s so simple, and it has to work.

Richard: Well, it has to work if it’s tuned right. You know, there are economic questions in there, I can’t be sure it would actually work, but I’m sure it’s worth studying to see if you can tune it so you’ll get good results. It’s much better, though, than existing almost-nugatory US antitrust law, which requires suing the company and proving it did something in a very small range of prohibited kinds of actions, and then it can be split up…splitting it up in a way chosen by the government, which is not, again, limited by certain criteria, what…that’s not the way to do it. This tax would pressure companies to find the way to split themselves up, find an efficient way, but that would still give you n smaller companies instead of one giant company.

Francis: Well, you know, part of how we got here was this kind of scam that I think Reagan really started, where the free market became sort of a religion, and it was the answer to everything is just free market, free market, no regulations, and that sort of thing.

Richard: Right. It’s the cult of the invisible hand.

Francis: Yeah. And even with regards to free software, how do you think the free market system has backfired in terms of the common interest people have?

Richard: I wouldn’t say that. You know, free software can exist in a free market, in fact it does. Of course every market has regulations. Some markets have arbitrary regulations that limit participation to certain entities. That’s usually what’s meant by not a free market. But there are always regulations on any market. If you tried not to have them, everybody might start cheating unless they know each other enough that they won’t. And markets are unstable in many ways that economists know about but in neoclassical economics they tend to close their eyes to this fact. The reason that we have anti-trust laws, 100 or so years ago, Americans realized that the market was unstable against mergers and trusts that would conspire to fix prices. So, laws were needed and were adopted to stop that. Well, when the market hits an instability, if you don’t want to let society fall into that instability, you need laws to stop it. You need regulations of the market. So, I wouldn’t say that free software is in any way contradictory to the free market. But there are certain practices that are harmful that shouldn’t be done. Our society, our legal system and the ambient philosophy promotes the practice of non-free software which is basically subjugating people through their computers. If you want software to treat you ethically, the way to get that in practice is, insist on free software and that way the user community of each program can make sure it isn’t nasty.

Francis: Can you give an example of what that would look like to people who aren’t into programming and that sort of thing?

Richard: Well, suppose that there’s a certain program that is inconvenient to use “cause the designers made a certain choice about how you would tell it what to do, what it’s interface would look like. And suppose that it doesn’t cater to people with vision problems. People with vision problems can work together to add a screen reader into that program, or make it talk properly to a screen reader. You don’t have to wait and try to convince the program’s principal developers that it’s worth paying attention to this. You can just ignore them, you can fix it yourself. You personally could fix it yourself if you want to, and this kind of thing’s happened, you know. Do you know Krishna Kahnt (*)?

Chris: I do.

Richard: Yeah. Well, Krisha Kahnt is a great example. He came to one of my talks, I suppose it was in Mumbai, and he said “I’m a blind user of Gnu/Linux and I find that the screen reader is not working very well. What should I do?” And I said, “work on improving it,” and he did. And he made important contributions to the free software screenreader that we have.

Chris: They were tremendously important additions, and he works a lot on the project now.

Richard: Yeah. Oh, that’s good news, ‘cause he’s so effective. The point is, if you said that about Windows, it would be useless, it would just be pissing and moaning. It’s unpleasant that the screenreader in Windows is inconvenient in these ways, what can I do? The answer is, nothing. “Cause Microsoft controls it, and it controls you. But when the program you’re complaining about is free software, then you can improve it yourself, or you, being a group of blind users who don’t know how to program but you’ve got money to contribute, you could pool your money to hire somebody to make whatever improvements you ask for.

Chris: There is actually a group out of Australia called NV Access, who make a screenreader called NVDA for Windows that’s GPL.

Richard: Yeah, I know. It’s sad that it’s for Windows. I wish they would work on making it run on Gnu. So this freedom for the users is what distinguishes free software. So it means that we can fix things that are broken, it means we can add improvements, but in addition, it means that we can fix and also deter anything malicious. When a company controls the program and controls what it does, that company faces temptation, the situation gives that company power over the users, which adds up to temptation. And you can’t expect companies nowadays to resist temptation to exploit people. Exploiting people is what most of them think they’re there for. So they’re going to put in malicious functionalities: like stopping you from doing certain things. Like spying on you. Like the backdoor that allowed Amazon to erase copies of 1984 and at other times to erase other books, and then there’s the censorship control that Apple has, which allows it to prevent people from installing apps unless Apple approves of them. And Apple was exercising this censorship power arbitrarily until 2017, at which point China told Apple, “from now on you’re going to censor for us”—and Apple said, “yes sir.”

Francis: Was jailbreaking iPhones kind of an attempt at some sort of…?

Richard: Yes, the purpose of “jailbreaking” them was to be able to install programs Apple didn’t approve of. But I gather that it’s pretty hard to jailbreak them now, and it’s not done very much. So basically Apple won that battle. We can’t assume that we will always defeat malicious technology because we’re so clever. We have to fight against it on the ethical grounds, politically. We have to say, don’t permit computers to censor the installation of applications or other software. Why should we allow such products to be sold?

Francis: I agree 100%. I think most people would agree with that.

Richard: Well, why should we allow programs to spy on people? Why should we allow programs to be designed with DRMs so that they restrict what users can do with the data they have? Why should we allow programs to have backdoors? People have accepted, though, people other than me, and I hope you, have basically granted legitimacy to the software developers having power over users. There are many people that complain when they see companies use this power in ways that cause pain, but they mostly don’t say that the companies shouldn’t have power over people in the first place. That’s what the free software movement says.

Chris: When Tim Cook came out with his criticism of Facebook, and came very closer to your “user vs. used” statement, all I could think was, you know, Richard Stallman’s been saying this for ten years. Tim Cook is certainly smart enough to have known it ten years earlier, why wasn’t he saying it then?

Richard: Well, first of all, “smart enough to” is not the operative question when it comes to taking a political position. You need more than just reasoning ability to reach political conclusions, because these conclusions are based on events in the world. And if you don’t see the harm, then you won’t reach the conclusion. So that’s not where my criticism of Tim Cook would be. My criticism is that he presides over malicious software, too. Apple is, I think, the nastiest company in regard to malicious software. Everything about Apple machines is designed to be malicious. In fact, I read that as of September or so, it became impossible to install Gnu/Linux in a Mac, that the Macs that came out after that were configured in such a way that they wouldn’t permit it. It would easy…

Chris: I have Ubuntu installed in a virtual machine on a my Macintosh and use it, so…

Richard: Sorry, that’s not the same thing. You’re still running Apple’s non-free software, which I wouldn’t tolerate in a computer of mine. And if Apple has set it up so that you can only run free software by…run a free system in a virtual machine, and can’t make that the native system of the machine, that’s oppression. That’s one of the things that I’d propose should be illegal.

Chris: Apple does ship some free software on Macintosh, I mean Emacs is there…

Richard: Some free software doesn’t matter. The question is, can you live in the free world, can you have freedom? It’s like saying, well, gee, there’s no chain on my left hand, there’s only a chain on each of my feet and on my right hand and on my neck, but on my left hand there’s no chain! Isn’t that great! It’s a small step towards where things should be. You see my point? The goal of the free software movement is not that we have a few programs that are free. No, it’s to do our computing in freedom, which means no non-free software. That was the goal from the very beginning. That’s the goal that I announced in 1983, to develop a sufficient body of free software that we could get along without any software that is not free.

Chris: I’m going to ask you now, an entertaining Richard Stallman story, just because I’ve heard it told to me in about 30 different versions. You were coming home from your birthday party and were told that Symbolics was no longer sharing its software with MIT. Now the version of the story I heard most often is that…

Richard: Let me tell you what actually happened. It’s better than recounting a possibly incorrect story. First of all, I don’t know whether I had a birthday party that day. Most years I have not had one. But it was on my birthday that I was informed that Symbolics had effectively issued an ultimatum to everybody at the AI Lab. But perhaps I should explain the background for this, because most people listening don’t know what Symbolics was or what the dispute was about. Well, a group of us at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab had developed the LISP machine. LISP is a very elegant programming language that was often used for Artificial Intelligence, as well as for some other things. So this was a computer designed to run LISP programs faster and do so with full runtime error checking. If anything turned out to be the wrong data type and you tried to operate on it, the machine would show you that there was an error and where, and you could do whatever was useful to do. It wouldn’t go blindly on, treating the data as if it were the other type and do total nonsense. So the LISP machine was a big advance, and we wanted to give other people—other labs, not individuals, really, at the time—the chance to have that. So people started to create a company to manufacture LISP machines. By the way, LISP is short for LISt Processing. Anyway, there was a disagreement, and the group split and two different companies were started by different parts of the group. The person who had started the project, Greenblatt, wanted to make a hacker companies—we all called ourselves hacking, and “hacking” just meant playful cleverness, such as developing the LISP machine. That was hacking. We had a lot of fun being playfully clever, developing that software. So his idea was that it would not hire away everybody from the AI Lab, and thus not destroy our community, and in other ways be less ruthless than typical companies funded by venture capital. The other people decided to do it the usual way, with venture capital, and make something that would be ruthless. MIT set up an agreement between the two companies, for them to use the LISP machine software system, which entailed, by the way, making that system that I had helped develop parts of, into non-free software. And that, that hurt my conscience. What could I do? And things just went along, but basically the agreement was both of those companies could use and distribute MIT’s LISP machine operating system, and they both had to give their changes back to MIT. But the MIT lawyers forgot to include a clause saying that MIT could redistribute those changes. It sort of took for granted that that would be permitted. Symbolics was one of the companies, it was the one with the venture capital, the one that was going to be ruthless, and it was. And on my birthday, it said that from then on, it would provide its version of the system to MIT for people at MIT to use, but MIT would not be allowed to put those changes and improvements into the MIT LISP machine operating system. Symbolics’ idea was that since it had hired most of the programmers away from the AI Lab, and had destroyed our community, and the other company, Greenblatt’s company, since it didn’t have all that money, didn’t have programmers working for it at the time, Symbolics thought that it would destroy Greenblatt’s company this way. It thought that everyone at MIT would use the Symbolics version of the system because it would have improvements, and that the MIT version would languish, it would not be maintained, and therefore LISP Machine Incorporated, Greenblatt’s company, would fail. And I interpreted this as an ultimatum that required everybody at MIT to choose a side between the two companies. I didn’t want to choose a side, I had been neutral. I had stayed working at MIT rather than go into either company, because I didn’t want to take a side in that conflict. Although before it wasn’t a…burning conflict, it was just a potential conflict. It was definitely contention between the two, and I just wanted to stay at MIT doing what I’d done before. But I couldn’t do that anymore, Symbolics had forced me to take a side. Therefore, I took the side against the attacker, Symbolics. That’s what you do when you’re neutral and you’re attacked by one side. So, I said that I would develop replacements for all of Symbolics’ improvements and put them into MIT’s version of the system, and thus keep it maintained, keep improving, and also enable LISP Machine Incorporated to have a chance to succeed, stopping Symbolics’ attempt to destroy it. Symbolics didn’t like this, but I did this for almost two years, and that was to punish Symbolics for imposing an ultimatum that it thought would compel me and everyone else at MIT to be a supporter of Symbolics. I don’t like it when anyone tries to force me to support in an injustice against someone else.

Chris: So effectively in two years you did all the work of Symbolics’ team, that was heavily funded by venture capitalists?

Richard: Yes. I wrote equivalent different software to compete with all the people who had left the AI Lab that used to be part of the same group. I worked terribly hard. But it was my ability to succeed in doing that, that showed me that I could entertain the idea of developing a free operating system, which was an even bigger job.

Chris: And that’s what led to Gnu/Linux.

Richard: Well, Gnu is the operating system I developed in 1992, when Torvalds made Linux free software. It could be used as the kernel for the Gnu system, that filled the last gap in the Gnu system, which was almost complete at the time—complete in the sense of a minimal operating capability, a system you could use to do its own continued development. It didn’t have everything you’d want, but it was a system that could be run and developed. And that is the result of my decision, that I was going to develop this system no matter what it took, because it had to be developed, it was the only way that people would ever be able to use a computer in freedom. And that is, without any software that puts you under the power of somebody else.

Chris: And you’ve grown that community from basically yourself to tens if not hundreds of thousands of people around the world who are hacking on free software every day…

Richard: Yes. Although sad to say, most of them don’t support the free software movement. People in 1998 who disagreed with our philosophy decided to try to co-opt our work and substitute a different philosophy, a business-friendly philosophy, one that didn’t rock the boat. They called that “open source,” and the idea was they would not talk about freedom, they would never talk about it as a matter of right and wrong. They wouldn’t say that open source was their substitute for free, but it stood for a different idea, it wasn’t just a different name. It was a different name for a different meaning. Whereas we say it’s wrong if a program doesn’t respect your freedom, they would never say that it’s wrong if a program is closed source. That was exactly what they wanted to avoid even hinting at. Well, that led to a lot of companies, including even IBM, boosting the term “open source” and never raising the issue in terms of right and wrong. And that did lead to more development of programs that are free, but it led to our communities mostly forgetting about the issue of freedom, which is the reason this is so important. So, what that means is, our community is much wider now, but it doesn’t have the same deep roots.

Chris: How would you see to promote the philosophy moving forward?

Richard: Well, we can talk about it, which is what I’m doing now, and we can show that we treat this as a principle. So I won’t have a non-free program on my computer. I don’t say I use free software “whenever possible,” meaning whenever it’s not too hard. No, I say I will not use non-free software. I won’t have it on my computer at all, and if there’s something I can’t do with free software, well, then I’m not going to do it, I guess, until there is free software to do it.

Francis: What about having class action suits against companies to prevent the spying aspects…..?

Richard: I don’t know whether you have a chance of winning. In principle, if you’ve got a chance of winning, I’d say go to it. But I don’t think that there are very good laws against it. The most there is in some cases as far as I know is that, in some cases they are required to ask permission. Now that’s a very weak protection, because the computing industry, the software industry and digital dis-service industry, has become adept at the manufacture of consent. They can get you to say “yes” with a combination of several techniques. One is, writing carefully so that it’s not clear to you just what you’re saying “yes” to, and another is putting the consent in something very long, that would take you hours to understand, and you couldn’t understand because it’s written in a way that is above your reading level, and that you’re not even going to look at anyway.

Chris: And also typically you’ll find the “agree” button is before the text, so most users out there just hit the “agree” button so they can use the software.

Richard: I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “before”—I don’t know if it’s legally valid, legally binding if you can’t see the agreement before you agree to it…

Chris: They just put the button at the top, with the text below it, so…

Richard: They know they can manipulate people because people have not been…their consciousness has not be raised about how they’re going to be mistreated. But then the final pressure is, you want to use this dis-service, and you feel it’s very important to you, so even if you saw that they were going to do nasty things to you, you think that your choice is either to accept it or not. And in the short term, if you don’t value freedom the way I do, you might accept it. “Cause in the short term, your choice is either use it or don’t. But in the long term, society’s choice is either to have one that respects our freedom and privacy and community, or have one that trashes our freedom and privacy and community. Because if we tolerate the unjust one, it will fill the niche and it will be harder for us to replace it with the just one. So my feeling is, it’s my responsibility as a citizen to reject the unjust one.

Francis: Seems to me that, if it were other technologies that came before computing, the same type of behavior would have had people up in arms. Like if the phone company was listening to your phone calls and then sending that information to ..markers and stuff, I mean people…

Richard: Well, but that’s happening now.

Francis: It’s happening on phones?

Richard: Well, I know the phone companies are recording who you talk to, and some of them are telling the US government, one thing we learned in 2013, I think we learned this from Snowden, is that AT&T had been telling the US government—I think specifically the FBI—about every long-distance phone call it had made since 1988 or so.

Chris: And the government can collect all these phone numbers and know everybody who’s talked to everybody…

Richard: Exactly. And that’s exactly what we can’t allow the state to know about people other than court-designated suspects. That’s the system that we developed to protect people from being tracked in all their activities by the state.

Chris: We have Jim Fructerman coming on as a guest, and he’s built, at Benetech, a communications system that’s being used by more and more NGOs and nonprofits who are doing work in countries that…may have governments unfriendly to their work, that goes a step beyond TOR even, to make their communications private.

Richard: Does it support non-immediate messages, in other words something comparable to email?

Chris: I am not certain, I don’t know the details.

Richard: That would be important. You see, if it supports something comparable to email, something that people could have drop into their mailboxes, then I could use it. But if required that both people be online at the same time, it’s impossible for me. Totally impossible.

Chris: It’s pretty much designed for human rights organizations to communicate with each other.

Richard: It may be a very good thing, I don’t know enough about it. I’d be interested in seeing a summary of its features, maybe we could use it. Is it all free software? I’m hoping it is.

Chris: Yes, it is. Because of some mistakes they made early on, not everything Benetech does is free software, but they’re replacing everything they have with free software now.

Richard: I’m glad they’ve got on the right path.

Chris: They were doing some things in Windows. If Windows was free software, this wouldn’t have been required, but they had to use real—almost black-hat hacker techniques to get information out of some things in Windows.

Richard: Yes, that’s one of the problems you get when you’re trying to build on top of a non-free program, which is the developers tell you about how to do certain things, and they don’t tell you how to do other things. Non-free programs often have secret functionalities that other products from the same company can use, but your products can’t. Basically any chance they get to manipulate others to their own advantage, they don’t hesitate. Because there’s nothing to check their nastiness anymore. Windows has a universal back door. What this means is that Microsoft can forcibly change the software in a Windows machine in any way it likes. It can put any nasty thing into a Windows system.

Chris: And I’m sure there are many nasty things already there.

Richard: There are. We have a catalog of known malicious functionalities, hundreds of them. It’s in Gnu.org/malware. Malware means a program designed to run in a way that hurts other users.

Chris: You also have a list of all of the crimes Facebook committed, don’t you?

Richard: Well, I have a list of reasons to refuse to be used by Facebook, and that’s in Stallman. org/Facebook.html

Francis: How do they make all that data available? Like, how do they sell it, and who’s buying it?

Richard: It’s complicated and I don’t know all the info. I don’t actually care very much how they use it, the point is, those are details that don’t affect my judgment of anything.

Francis: I’m just wondering if perhaps it could be made illegal to use that kind of information.

Richard: Well, it could be. I think it’s probably just as easy to forbid the things they do to collect the information as it is to limit the harmful things they do with it. And one thing that we’re not likely to see laws to forbid them to do, is give the data to the FBI when the FBI asks for it. And that’s, of course, what the Pat-riot Act requires.

Chris: So if they’re not collecting the data at all, Frank, they can’t sell it, they can’t give it to the government, they can’t do anything. So Richard’s point is, pass laws that keep them from collecting it at all.

Richard: Right.

Francis: Well, I’m just being selfish, ‘cause I’m assuming there’s all this information about everything I’ve googled and everything I’ve bought and everyone I’ve talked to for the last bunch of years…

Richard: Well actually, if Google knows who you are, when you do a search, which it probably does more or less if you haven’t come through TOR using a browser designed to hide your identity…

Chris: I believe Google blocks TOR now…

Richard: Yes, it does. That’s my experience. Although…not actually it doesn’t block TOR, exactly. What happened last time I tried was, it sent me a capcha, but the capcha required running non-free software, and I wouldn’t run that. I don’t know what other nasty things that…the code of that capcha involves. We’re changing the subject…the point is, Google, if it knew who you were, kept track of what searches you did, and uses that to profile you and will give it to the FBI if ordered to.

Francis: I remember there was that time when everybody was worried about lists they were on, and how, like, if there’s some sort of other huge event that’s created like 9-11 that people would just be herded into stadiums and stuff, who are considered…potential threats to whatever they

Richard: If anything, we’re closer to that now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the supporters of the bullshitter do a thing like that. I used to call him “the Troll,” but that’s when …the main thing he was doing was saying outrageous things, in other words trolling. Even what he says is worse that just trolling, it’s making up total nonsense that’s different every day from what it was the previous day. I also refer to him as the Bully, the Cheater, the War-lover, the Saboteur-in Chief, whatever fits whatever act I’m talking about. The point is that they have such contempt for every actual meaning of human rights and the Constitution, that I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they put thousands of Americans into prison for political reasons.

Francis: During a crisis, they could easily pull that off.

Richard: Well, they have lots of cops that are right-wing. And so if they wanted to put leftists in prison, I’m sure they wouldn’t get much resistance from most cops. It’s not as if they would need to be careful about deciding who to imprison, people like that are not tremendously concerned about doing justice, even in terms of their own ideas of right and wrong.

Francis: I’m not sure if right and wrong really enters into their thought process. More like win or lose…

Richard: Well, in a way it does. They certainly do think that various groups of people are bad and they’re doing things that are wrong. The point is that checking carefully what each individual has or hasn’t done is not part of their thinking about it. They like saying “lock her up” and proving that she did something that is a crime, is not something that they think is even pertinent.

Francis: Well, we’re having to re-fight all these old battles. I think eventually where we’re headed now, we’re going to have to start arguing over whether democracy itself is valid.

Richard: Well, we know the answer to that. It’s the worst of all systems of government, except the others that have been tried from time to time.

Chris: So we’re bumping up against our hour—Richard, is there anything that you’d especially like to add?

Richard: For more information about free software and Gnu, look at gnu.org. If you’re interested in philosophical questions, look at gnu.org/ philosophy. If you’re interested in free software licenses and what they mean and which ones to use, look at gnu.org/licenses. If you’d like to see why schools have the moral obligation to teach exclusively free software, look at gnu.org/education. And if you want to look at why governments should move to free software in all their activities, look at gnu.org/government. And if you’re interested in why we should prohibit systems that collect personal data, make sure that they’re designed in a way such that they don’t collect data about who does what and who goes where and who talks with whom, look at gnu.org/philosophy/surveillancevsdemocracy.html–the title of the article is, How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? There’s also the Free Software Foundation, whose website is FSF.org. If you look at FSF.org/resources/hw you can find out about machines that can run with free software. And there’s other useful resources and campaigns in that site as well. And you can also donate or become an associate member of the Free Software Foundation. Donations are memberships are our main source of funds. There’s also gnu.org/help, which lists various kinds of volunteer work we’re looking for, and most of them do not involve programming. You don’t need to be a technical person to do them.

Chris: And that’s something that I constantly tell people I know who use Gnu software, that they can help out in one way or another. Whenever I talk to somebody who says “oh, Gnu—I use Gnu paint, or whatever Gnu program they use.

Richard: Thank you for doing that. And Happy Hacking!

Chris: Thank you so much for coming on Making Better, and we hope you’ll come back maybe in a year, give us an update.

Richard: Sure.

—[end]

Episode 3: Anne Devereux-Mills Transcript

Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future.

Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Chris: Well, Francis, it’s Episode 3 of the Making Better Podcast!

Francis: Awesome! I’m very exciting, because I woke up this morning, I read the headlines, and once again…the Trump administration was at war with the environment, and I felt like, god I gotta do something! We all have to do better, we all have to do more. This aggression will not stand, man! So, I’m really happy that we’re doing this and, you know, in our own little way sending out a positive ripple in the world.

Chris: Well, that’s been the central theme of Making Better since we started, every guest we’ve had, and I think we’ve had nine so far, is somebody who’s out there already making the world a better place.

Francis: Exactly…and that was a Big Lebowski reference, by the way. You know, we are the majority, the amount of people who actually want to have a good life and not destroy the earth and each other, is the vast majority. And I think it’s just a matter of time before all of that effort gets harnessed in a way that the power goes to the people again.

Chris: This episode’s guest is Ann Devereux-Mills. She’s a former advertising executive turned activist, and she’s also a four-time cancer survivor. Her primary organization is called Parlay House, which facilitates communication among women to help them with their careers and with their lives. She’s also the producer of a documentary that aired on PBS called “The Return” and she’s an activist on prison reform issues in California. We had a terrific conversation with Ann, and I hope you will all enjoy it as well.

**
Francis: So, I would like to welcome Ann Devereux-Mills to the show today. Hello, Ann..

Ann: Hey there! Nice to be with you.

Francis: It’s great to have you here. Your life story and your work, I think, is a really great platform for discussing a lot of the issues that we’re concerned with here at Making Better. So if I could, if we could just begin with you giving our listeners a brief overview of your story—where you came from, your history as a CEO and in business, and then where you’ve come to today.

Ann: Sure. Well, I grew up in Seattle before Seattle was the Seattle it is today, where the University of Washington was mostly it, but I was lucky enough to go to a little private school where people like Robert Fulghum, who wrote Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, was my English teacher and Bill Gates was a few years ahead of me, you know, doing the amazing things he was doing, it was just one of those kind of special times. And I left Seattle to go straight to Wellesley, where I had four amazing, unexpected years, because I’d been totally boy-crazy. So there I was in an all-female environment for four years, and really found myself on a whole different level that was terrific, and I graduated with a degree in political economy and it was 1984 and it was a recession, not like the 2008 recession but not a good time to get a job, and I got the one job I could get at the time, which was at an insurance broker called Marsh & McClennan. And got to my first day of work and my boss said, “you know, I hadn’t really thought about what you should be doing, why don’t you go home early and come back tomorrow and I’ll figure it out.” Now, many of us would like to be sent home early for a free afternoon by our boss, but this was the beginning of my corporate life and I was sort of distraught about it. But I decided, OK, I’m going to be a New Yorker, and I was really naive, really naive. So I just decided, OK, I’m going to walk up through Central Park, I’m going to walk up Madison Avenue, cross through Central Park and—I was living on the upper West side—and I got through to the middle of the park, and standing under a tree was a tall, handsome man and I had kind of never really talked to a tall, handsome man as an adult, and he had the Village Voice under his arm, and…it was raining and he asked for directions, and I heard one sentence and I immediately thought, Gay English Actor…and I was wrong, wrong and wrong. He was Irish, he was not an actor, he was straight and he was looking for a job and a date. And I was the safest person walking through Central Park and he asked me out for a drink, and luckily I had one friend in New York from Wellesley and she was working as a bartender, so I sort of knew that if he was a serial killer I would have someone who had seen me last…and of course, I ended up marrying him, and so it’s sort of a fun start of a story that didn’t turn out so well, ‘cuz we went our separate ways, but it was the beginning of my experimenting, doing things that were unfamiliar—marrying someone when I didn’t have a lot of relationship experience, and jumping into things pretty quickly. But my career as an insurance person didn’t last very long, because it was a really bad fit for a feminist in a very stodgy, old boys network, where I could do a whole program with you all talking about the sexual harassment of that time, and I won’t . But what I did do was learn how to understand what I do well, understand what I don’t like and don’t do well, and iterate my career until I got to a place that was a good alignment between my strengths and my interests. And that world was the world of advertising. And so I sort of evolved, first to corporate communications and liked that but didn’t like the small reach of just investors and shareholders and so when I got to the world of advertising, it was because Warner-Lambert, which no longer exists but it was a consumer package goods sister company of Parke-Davis, and I helped them get the ADA seal on Lysterine and do things way back in the day when we were starting to understand some of the health benefits of health care related products. And I just kind of got my groove, between the interesting and deep nature of science and the leadership and communications opportunities that sort of played to my natural tendencies. And so, I started the first direct-to-consumer advertising agency, along with some other leaders in the field pretty early in my career. And then I went on to found and build four different healthcare specialties for advertising agencies that you’ve heard of or seen modeled in Mad Men, like, you know, VBDO and TBWA and Chiat-Day and…you know, it was a fascinating career that I didn’t have any comparison to, so I didn’t really know that the pretty male exclusionary world that I was in didn’t have to be my story, but it was my story. And sort of getting out of the marriage that didn’t go well, it was a very abusive situation and not good, and I ended up being a single mom and running companies, and that was my life. My life was get up at 4:45 in the morning, drive into Manhattan, go to the gym, get to the office, run a company, get home and be a dedicated mom. And that’s very exhausting, mentally and physically, and what happened was, I had a series of cancers, and had some pretty major surgery when going through my divorce, and thought that would be the end of that. And then unfortunately a number of years later when I was in Uganda, where I’d helped start a school for kids who had very little access to anything, I got a call from my oncologist after just a usual follow-up, and he said “eh, sorry to tell you this, but your cancer has accelerated and we have to do some more major surgery. And so I just did what I’m used to doing, and I walked into my boss’s office and I said, “I know it’s…this is a tough economy (this is 2009) very tough time for businesses, and I know it’s not good for me to take two or three weeks off to have the surgery but I gotta do it, so I can live, but I’ll be back and I’ll run the company”…He said, “oh, I’m gonna have someone else run the company.” And in one week, I lost my job, my health and my youngest daughter was heading off to college, so my identity was just exploded, in one single week. So what do you do when…you know, I used to walk into the room and either, “Hi, I’m Ann, I’m the CEO” or “Hi, I’m Ann, I’m the mother of one of these two daughters”…what do you do when all those ways you defined yourself don’t exist anymore? It felt like a betrayal of someone that I’d built companies for and trusted, it felt like confusion because I’d always been a high performer and had multiple successful CEO roles, and the only thing that I had left that hadn’t been exploded that week was a relationship, long-distance relationship that I had with the man who is now my husband. But he was living in Santa Cruz and said “hey, why don’t you, after the surgery, why don’t you come and move out west?” and I’m kind of like, you know, I’m a city girl, I don’t think I can move to Santa Cruz, but if we can negotiate and move to San Francisco, why not? And I had to go through a lot of introspection, of what do I do now? Do I run a business in San Francisco?…but I had time, you know, I don’t think most of us as adults have the benefit of time to stop and think about, do I keep pushing hard against that door that’s straight ahead, or do I stop and look to the sides and around and recalibrate. And I decided to recalibrate, and when I did an assessment of my life to that time, I realized that when I was growing up I was one of three daughters, and when I was at Wellesley I was among 2,000 women, and when I was a mom, a single mom that was the house of hormones with my two daughters and me, and then I spent 20-some years sort of slugging it out in a very male world. And when I got sick, there were very few people who were there for me. And the people that were there for me were a few girlfriends, mostly not from business, and I realized that all the time in business it had been exceptionally transactional. and if I wasn’t in power, people didn’t need me anymore. And that made me long for authentic and meaningful relationships—for myself, I did not start out on a mission to build relationships for anybody but me, but I felt like I needed some intimacy, I needed a trusting environment and to have conversations about things that we weren’t talking about, like what it feels like to be a woman in a man’s world. This is way before MeToo was MeToo…but, you know, what it feels like to be afraid about your health, what it feels like to, you know, have female health challenges that no one talks about. You know, what it feels like to start a new relationship at the age of 50, what it feels like to no longer be the definition of who you were before. And so I just started asking friends of friends, since I didn’t know anyone except my boyfriend at the time in San Francisco, who do you know and do they want to come..and come over to my house and, you know, have a glass of champagne and talk about stuff? And so we did an experiment, and I think there are 12, 15 people in the room, and we had a marvelous time, and really got to talking about meaningful things early, early in the conversation, and at the end of the night, we sort of said, “hey, do you want to do that again?” And everyone sort of agreed and we said, well, why don’t you bring another woman who you think might enjoy this kind of conversation, that’s sort of around content, around some sort of speaker or panel or something. And the next thing I knew, there were 30 and then 50 and pretty soon 2,000 members in San Francisco who would gather (not all 2,000 at one time) in small groups at my home on a monthly basis, and really started to build an authentic conversation and a community of trust that’s way outside of our bubbles. And we’re 20 year olds, and we’re 80 year olds, and we’re working women and we’re women who’ve chosen to stay home or women who have retired or women whose careers haven’t started yet, and a broad range of interests, and….you know, it’s just turned into this sort of magical community that then has been replicated in New York, and now L.A., and London and, you know, I hope soon Washington DC. It was sort of a proof point that the loneliness and need for connection that I felt was actually a much more universal experience, probably even beyond women, but certainly with women that have become part of my extended network. So that was a very long answer to your life story question, but that’s where we are today, is 4,000 women in four cities, soon to be five, and hopefully many hundreds in the years to come.

Chris: I very much identify with having to make a major change in one’s life: before I went blind, I was, you know, this hotshot software engineer/contractor working for a lot of start-ups and venture capitalists on turnaround projects, making a real lot of money, and then the world found out I was blind, and my phone stopped ringing. And, you know, maybe there were still a handful of friends , you know, but as you discussed the transactional nature of relationships, I suddenly realized that almost all the relationships in my life were that way, they were people who wanted something from me rather than actually being friends.

Ann: Yep. It’s a sad state of our society…and I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, you know, does it go back to biblical references, whether it’s on the negative, an eye for an eye, or the sense of do unto others as you’d have them do unto you in sort of a transactional way, or is it about how we behave in the world. And I had a really interesting email exchange with a woman who I respect so highly, who’s been another senior woman multiple-time success, and she sort of said, I was talking about how challenging it is to roll out Parlay* House in cities where I don’t have someone who has the time and the means that I have to really build the content and post these on an ongoing basis, and we were talking about how much do you give of, you know, whether it’s the Parlay House list and community to someone who has something similar for a partnership; and it’s very hard to know what sorts of tradeoffs and exchanges that benefit both organizations, or both people, are meaningful and what are extractive. And I don’t have a clear answer to that.

Francis: I had a friend post something on Facebook today which was a question, “were you happier before or after social media?’ And I just thought that was kind of an interesting question to pose to people…and I love how Parlay House creates these connections, but it’s also, it seems to me, answering the limitations of the connectedness that we all have now through social media, which in some ways makes people and information so available, but at the same time there’s something lacking.

Ann: It’s so interesting you say that, Francis. One of my members in New York is an amazing young woman who has started an online movement called Half the Story, you can look at it, #HalftheStory, and she’s on a mission to encourage young people (she’s in her 20’s), to encourage young people to not just present their most beautiful, most perfect selves on social media but to really talk about things that we don’t talk about. And it’s a strong parallel to what we’re doing at Parlay House. You know, we’re sort of the opposite of social media in that we’re not forcing, but really setting the stage for conversations that are not the conversations that you have on social media. Like how do you rise to the top of a career while you’re battling mental illness or an eating disorder. We’ve talked about that. How do you take some pretty tough setbacks and turn it into strengths later on. We had a woman and her husband who had fallen into a cult and lived in a cult for 20 plus years, they had a child, they were an arranged marriage…they finally escaped the cult, how do you re-enter society after you’ve been living in another, false world? We usually talk about victories and ignore the struggles. And yet everyone struggles. I really made mistakes as a parent, I look back and think, what would I have done differently? I have these two phenomenal daughters, but they both worry when they are struggling, because I never talked about when I was struggling. I was so protecting them, ‘cuz they’d already been through a lot between the divorce and other stuff, I sort of felt like I needed to show them that you could be and do, you know, anything, and be superwoman. And all of a sudden, then, when they had normal people problems and struggles and fears and anxieties that everybody has, they somehow felt they shouldn’t have them, because their mother didn’t have them. And so I’m kind of on a, you know, trying to re-write that story in the second half of my life by talking openly about the things that are hard, and by setting the stage for us to talk about the truths of the human experience, which are so imperfect, and that’s just the nature of humanity.

Chris: I see that in the blindness community all the time, where organizations like the National Federal of the Blind, it’s the biggest membership organization in our space, seem to almost trivialize how hard it is to go through life on a day to day basis in a community with an 80% rate of unemployment, and, you know, they seem to suggest that, you know, blindness is just an inconvenience, and in fact it’s really, really hard, and I think they almost anti-motivate people when they show off, you know, somebody like Eric Weiihenmayer, the first blind man to climb Mount Everest. And I think a lot of people look at Eric, who is a very good guy, he’s a friend of mine, and say, you know, he climbed Mount Everest, you know, I have trouble getting to the Post Office or something, you know, I can’t do anything when we focus so much on the savants, so to speak.

Ann: Yeah, the outliers, sure. Sure, I think that’s true, and that’s why I’m sort of on a mission to create safe spaces to have the conversations that are the real ones. I mean, it’s great to have, we sometimes have superstars, women who have done things that very few women have ever done before, and I think we all get motivated by those stories of, sort of amazing achievement. But that can’t be the only conversation, because it just isn’t reality for most of us, even for those of us who want to be those outliers, those super-high achievers. We’re just not telling the story of their hardship, which I’m sure was there. I don’t know Eric’s story at all, but I’m sure that achievement was not a straight line of “I want to do it, and therefore it’s so.” I’m sure there were setbacks and challenges and risks and we’ve got to talk about those.

Francis: Can you give examples of how what has transpired at Parlay House has …tangible examples of how it’s changed people’s lives?

Ann: Sure. What it does is, it facilitates conversations, either at the event or after the event, that creates bonds that wouldn’t have been there. So we had a health-related topic, and two women were sitting on the coach who were strangers, next to each other, and they started talking about their personal health experiences and it turned out that both of them had ulcerative colitis, which is a painful and often embarrassing disease that affects your ability to have competent relationships, and sexual relationships. And they’d never talked to anyone else about this problem, and they happened to be sitting next to another woman in a safe space who had the same issue, and all of a sudden neither one felt alone. Now that’s a small example, it’s just two people, but it’s two people who all of a sudden didn’t feel alone in the world. And you know, we’ve had other examples, like we had a panel of these women who had followed their husband’s careers to Hong Kong, and they’d sort of put their own ambitions in the back burner because they were supporting the family, and they all sort of realized that they were letting go of themselves and their own goals and they formed a group that was called “the re-group” and they were holding each other accountable. This was not just a career oriented thing: one wanted to write a book, one … each wanted to do something different, but they met on an ongoing basis to hold each other accountable. Well, I didn’t know that in the audience that night were a number of women who, by anybody’s definition, would seem to be happy and successful and whatever, but they were feeling the same way, they were feeling stuck, and they were feeling like they need somebody to work with them, to sort of get on track to the next thing they wanted to do. And so another group that was very very similar was formed by women that I didn’t know and I didn’t know was happening, but happened because someone was willing to talk about that journey. So, there are so many examples. There are people who have gotten jobs, there have been people who have found an outlet for interests in philanthropy or supporting a cause, but most of the examples are the really personal one, where there’s all of a sudden an empathy, and I think empathy is kind of the most, most important component to everything that I’m trying to do is this ability to see and hear and not judge, but actually just see yourself in the position of another and hear and listen to what they need and somehow provide some of that as one new human to another.

Chris: I guess it must also help people feel less like the “other”…

Ann: Exactly. Exactly, and you know, when you look at our gatherings, you really see a diversity that, you know, the streets of San Francisco are generally not filled with people of color. And I see the difference, because I’m bi-coastal, I see the difference in New York where, at least visually, there’s a greater range of skin color on the streets than there is in the city of San Francisco. But in all of our gatherings, whether it’s San Francisco or New York, not only do we have age diversity, but we have, we have racial diversity, we have income diversity, we have diversity of sexual orientation…and it just feels so great to be…be finding connections that appreciate our differences. It’s not finding the similarities, because I think that’s…kind of bullshit, I think it’s recognizing that in our differences there are opportunities to learn, opportunities to feel yourself in someone else’s shoes, to think outside of your norm, to, you know, to just connect and stretch in ways that aren’t in our little bubbles. And I love that.

Francis: We were talking earlier about the transactional nature of business and you know, to a large extent, capitalism as it’s being practiced in this country today…and also talking about this idea of connection with people and the value of that. But, there are some people for whom these, like that transactional type of environment, it suits them, and it serves them very well. And I think partly one of the reasons why you see such a concentration of people who are more predatory and lack empathy in the higher stratas of business is because it’s sort of where their—at least in the system as it is right now, it’s where, it’s their comfort zone to some extent. So, given the heterogenous nature of our society, how do we say who have lots of empathy and want connection that’s meaningful and soulful between people in community, like, how do we have our needs met and they also have their needs met? Are they in conflict?

Ann: That’s a complex and interesting question. I mean, one of the experts that we’ve had speak to Parlay House a few times, and it’s always sold out, is a woman named Wendy Bahari who’s one of the national experts on narcissism. She talks about how to deal with the narcissists in your life. And, you know, we have a narcissist as our President right now, most of us have worked with narcissists in our career, and there’s a lot of data that shows that many of the most successful leaders have very significant elements of narcissism as part of their personalities. But, you know, we’re at a stage in society right now where we’re sort of looking at people as awful, or wonderful, as, you know, horrific or like a deity, and you know, I think that that’s a big mistake. And so there are people who are much more out for themselves and are willing to throw other people under the bus to achieve their own successes, and, you know, I don’t think we can control them, I think we can only control our own personal behaviors. But when you understand what is happening behind, in the emotional self, of those people who act in a narcissistic or self-absorbed way, a lot of times it’s actually driven by really significant insecurities that are being sort of masked and covered up by this aggressive, bullying, selfish behavior. And the more we can understand and empathize, even with those people whose behaviors seem more like terrorists than like humans, it helps understand where they’re coming from, it helps bridge the communication gap and helps us to not take those behaviors personally. I think we all have choice, of some…to some extent, but those of us who are able to make our own choices on how we want to live in the world, to try to find understanding for those who live very differently than us as much as possible, that’s sort of all we have control over. All we really have control over are ourselves and our …our decisions on how we live our lives. So I can’t reconcile that, but I can tell you, we’re not as black and white as it might seem when you cut it, cut it the way you just cut it.

Francis: Well, you know, with regards to our President, he is definitely, I think, making the paradigm for change that we have right now…seem much more like it needs to be evolved to…I think a lot of the old ways that we’ve relied on for change, like say marches and activism…it doesn’t seem like they really do much anymore…

Ann: Well, I guess that’s…I think that might be a little bit instrumentalist. I mean, I know that when Trump was elected and I was in Washington at the first Women’s March and I was there with my daughter who is of a whole different generation, I’ve always been someone who is a thoughtful and engaged member of society, or I’ve at least tried to be. But I was not an activist in the marching, protesting sort of way, and I think that there was an element of momentum that happened, that isn’t sort of end-result oriented but is part of this process of learning about our sense of power. And I think what you’re getting at, Francis, and I probably agree with you, is that the system is so broken that this two-party system, even our Constitution and how some of the things are being interpreted, related to gun control and other stuff, just doesn’t serve our society as well as our Founding Fathers intended. And to really move forward as a society, we might need to go to that really scary place that is after what was, and before we figured out what will be, and that’s a really hard thing to do. I mean I’ve done that as a human, as a personal…on my personal path, where I had to end my career in order to have the time to think about what else I valued. Can we do that as a society without it being too scary or chaotic? Or, you know, having the fear that an equally horrible next person will take over? I don’t know. But I agree with you that just going down the same path and making tiny jogs to the left or the right, in terms of political parties or policies, isn’t making the massive level change that we probably need to be a good society.

Francis: And massive level change is something that you in your own personal life know well…

Ann: Yeah. Some of that was forced on me, and when I realized that things were, the rug was pulled out from under me, I chose to take a really scary leap. I mean, it was so scary to not just do what I knew how to do, and just go back and run another company and have the same identity and, you know, build my self-image around this idea that I was a CEO because that gave me comfort. You know, to sort of start again and say, how do I define myself next, and how do I reconcile that I’m not the only bread earner in the family, that I’m contributing in a way that some, who are very income-oriented, or title-oriented, might not value. You know, I still find myself, when people say “what do you do?” I sometimes just subconsciously revert to, “well, I used to run advertising agencies, and now I…” you know, fill in the blank. Instead of just having the confidence to say, “I founded an organization that’s on a mission to empower women and to create safe spaces for the conversations that they can’t have other places. I mean, that sounds pretty good, when you…but it doesn’t feel as much of a success in the societal norms as I would want it to. I still fall back, sometimes, on what I used to do, and that’s a shame.

Francis: It’s also understandable, given how successful you were…that is pretty significant.

Ann: Yeah, but you know, when, when I’m at the end of my life, and I now know that could be any day, just because I’ve faced that reality, having been a CEO is not the most meaningful thing to me. I mean, I loved it, It’s in my wheelhouse, it’s where I feel very comfortable, but the level of pride that I feel about that is very different than—and not meaningful to me—as the level of pride I have with finding things that help people on a more empathetic level.

Francis: And perhaps even the sublime is relative…

Ann: Yeah. It is. he-he.

Chris: We were just talking about massive change that needs to happen in society, but taking on massive change all in one lump seems rather difficult. And I think I read this in some of your blog articles—making small, minor changes a little at a time and, you know sort of like the butterfly effect, seeing them spread?

Ann: Absolutely. And, you know, I write a monthly blog called One Small Thing. And it’s really a way of trying to say to all of us who feel overwhelmed by the amount of change that we feel needs to happen in society, to not be paralyzed by the size of the problem, but rather be empowered by the types of things I talked about that happen at Parlay House, by one conversation that might be meaningful, by one action that can start a cascade for someone else and someone else after them. And I just—I’m finishing up a research project that’s part of a book that I’m writing, where we tracked…you know, it’s hard to know what, I call it the “thing after the thing” is…so you do something without the expectation of return for someone else. It’s a stranger, or someone that you know that could use your help, and you assume that it was positively received and maybe even that something happened that they passed it on in some way after that, but you don’t know. So, we conducted this research study that we’re just getting the results in now, where we grouped people by whether they were an instigator of one of those actions that were meaningful to someone else, whether they were the recipient of something and what they did with it, or whether they witnessed it, was the third category, and what happens when people witness a meaningful action from one human to another. And the amazing thing was, that not only was there something that the recipient did for another person based on the recognition of how they benefitted from the kindness, but the witnesses also were motivated to behave in a very similar way. So that gave me a sense that this doesn’t even have to be a one to one to one cascade, but that there’s a multiplier effect when people understand their own power to help another in some way and then feel inspired to do it.

Chris: One thought that comes to mind is, I don’t know if you know the city of San Francisco has a law against restaurants giving free food to homeless people, and I know a terrific restaurant that I enjoy, and it’s actually kind of on the expensive side, but every night they take all the food that wasn’t served and one of their people bring it to a park and feed all the homeless people, it’s…some homeless people who recognize me walking down the street will whisper to me where the food will be that night.

Ann: That’s really awesome. I love that story. Yeah, that’s harmless anarchy, in my opinion. Maybe I don’t know all of the potential fears and risks, whether it’s tainted food or who knows what, what…

Chris: No, it has nothing to do with tainted food, it had to do with…it made homeless people hang out…and, you know, wait for the food, for the free food. It was a way to keep the homeless people away from the restaurants.

Ann: You know, a lot of these laws sort of, think, happen because you have a reactionary or strong person who’s pissed off about something, and they go over the top in creating legislation that makes things hard on humanity. My husband and I spent a number of years working on a Proposition in California that was in response to a very similar type of thing, it was the father of Polly Klaas who was unfortunately kidnapped from her home and killed by someone who was a formerly incarcerated person. And her dad was obviously, as we all would be, so distraught about what had happened that he was behind an initiative that resulted in California having one of the most tough 3-strikes laws in the country, and that meant if you had two prior felonies, and you were convicted of anything—and by anything, I mean, we have examples of stealing a piece of pizza, or a golf club from a store, or writing a bad check—these are not violent acts, these are, you know, small…you were sentenced to life in prison. And we have thousands of people in the California prison system who ended up with their lives taken away from them because of that law that was based on someone’s personal and traumatic experience, but resulted in a lack of fairness for everybody affected afterwards. And you know, we were fortunate enough to have our Proposition win with 70% of Californians supporting a much more fair third-strike policy that required that third strike be serious and violent before you take away someone’s entire life. And 3,000 people had their sentences re-assessed and have returned to the community with very low recidivism rates…it’s proof that we have to beware of reactionary laws that are disproportionate, and as a society if we can sort of base our actions on concepts of fairness or empathy rather than fear, I think we’re gonna make some progress. And again, that was a very small change to one law in one state, but the cascade that happened at that time was, it went from 3,000 Californians having their sentences retroactively re-evaluated to a new and fairer policy which meant people who were arrested subsequently did not face that same penalty, and rolled all the way to the White House, where Obama, before he left office, began pardoning people for minor third strike drug offenses across the country. And so that’s just an example of how—this was a lot work, but it was a very small Proposition related to one law in one state, and it ended up being a national phenomenon. And so that’s what gives me hope in this time where there doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of hope.

Chris: You made a documentary about someone released after the 3-strikes…

Ann: I did. Yeah.

Chris: I tried to find it, I couldn’t find it online, and…

Ann: It’s on Netflix, it’s called “The Return,” it was a PBS sponsored film and it was, we won an Emmy nomination for it, and it was an amazing story that uncovered the experience of not only the individuals, as they returned to society, but their families, and really uncovered, sort of, the next issue my husband and I are working on, which is related to mental illness as a huge problem in our society that’s contributing to our packed prisons and, you know, we have many, many, many people who don’t have access to mental health care in terms of diagnosis, in terms of treatment, in terms of care, and then they’re afraid or they’re confused and they break into an empty building because they don’t have a place to stay, or they act out because they don’t have access to medical care, and instead of helping them we throw them in prisons where their disease just gets worse. And so, that film not only was our way of telling the story about the importance of hiring and understanding the side of people who are re-entering society, but also helped us understand what to do next and what to focus on next in terms of helping restore mental health support. You know, Reagan, when he was President, understood that the mental health care system was relatively broken in our country, and so he did away with mental health institutions. And I don’t think it was completely ill-motivated, because they were pretty bad institutions, but what it means now is we’re starting from scratch and trying to find ways to support people who have not had the benefits of mental health care that we, who are more privileged, have.

Chris: I had a good friend released from jail here in Florida, he was junkie…and it was just a minor stealing thing, but his lawyer negotiated probation for him, and he was released from County jail with absolutely nothing waiting for him on the outside, and within four weeks he was back on the heroin, he overdosed and died in July.

Ann: Unfortunately, the situation of your friend is all too common, and we have, as part of our 3-strikes work, heard many stories of people being released from prison in paper suits, without the $200 they’re supposed to have to get them to wherever they’re going next, and many of them, because they don’t have a choice, return to either the abusive homes or the gangs or, you know, because they don’t have a plan and a program, there are terrible stories of people released in a wheelchair, at night, without any support, who sleep in alleys until they can figure out how to get to a place that can help them. One of the programs that my husband and I have been sponsoring is a program called Ride Home, where it’s run by people who are formerly incarcerated themselves, and they wait outside of the prisons, knowing that our Prop 36 folks are being released, and they help them create a plan to get to transitional housing that helps coach them on getting a job and developing a resume and giving them a safe space to transition back into society. But, you know, there aren’t enough of those Ride Home people all over the country to help other have that re-entry that can hopefully make them successful. And, you know, sadly your friend’s situation where, because he didn’t have any support and he didn’t have any money and, you know, where he went straight back to the drug addicted life that he had had before, is all too common. Again, what’s an easy thing that we can do to help create change, if that’s an issue that you care about, contributing towards a Ride Home program or offering an entry-level job to someone who is coming back into society is one of the greatest things that you can do that truly has meaning for someone else.

Chris: I find it interesting that the prison reform issue doesn’t seem to be a hardline left or right wing thing. I mean, we have Bernie Sanders working with Rand Paul in the United States Senate on sentencing reform, and you’d never think those two guys would work together on anything.

Ann: It’s so funny that you say that, because we noticed, when we were doing our fundraising for the Proposition, that we actually got…we tend to lean left in our political views, and we got as much or more support from Republicans as we did from Democrats, and in fact this was not a party-oriented initiative, it was a belief of people who value fairness over other measures that came together and supported and passed this. You know, when you pass with 70% of the vote, you’ve got to have a lot of people on both sides that believe in what you’re doing, and I love the fact that Bernie and Rand Paul are working together, or whatever those random divides are that we call Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and liberals, because it really, what they’re uniting on are shared values…and that’s what we should be doing as a nation, to be honest. You know, this party system is so kind of arbitrary, and it forces us to dig our heels in without thinking. And I think if we did a little more thinking and feeling and a little less rule-following, we might benefit.

Francis: I agree with you so much about that. Part of the impetus to create this podcast for me was to try to start staking out alternatives to those kind of nineteenth, twentieth century political…the vocabulary, and just the boxes it puts people in…because I think a lot of that has lost its usefulness to us now.

Ann: Right. Completely agree.

Francis: I think there’s also two really different orientations towards how we relate to each other. And one is sort of the Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest…you know, it’s more of like, I guess what you would associate with a male kind of energy, which is predatory and…it’s about, if anything, thinning the herd. But then you also have another completely almost opposite approach, which is that we should be focussing on the weakest link, and that the health of the whole is something that is going to be increased by us helping each other, and those in most need. They’re very, very different approaches, I guess, to how the world functions, as a result.

Ann: Yeah, my reaction to that is, you’re right, and both are pretty polar in their approach. I’m not so sure that “thinning of the herd” or focussing exclusively on those with the most need is going to be the answer, and I think it’s just got to be brought down to a much more micro and individual level. I just think we, as a society, are talking so much in black and whites, in polarizing and sort of, if you’re not with me, you’re horrible, rather than, if you’re not with me, you might have something I can learn from that makes me more well rounded…I’m just feeling a little exasperated by the state of our thought processes, that “are you with me or are you against me” with nothing in the middle.

Francis: What I wanted to relate that to, as well, is you’re very active in…women’s movements, and you’re like a real trailblazer in terms of women in business, and I think right now what I’m starting to see, could be wrong, but are…people who are coming up and shaking things up, women, who almost seem like a new sort of archetype than we had before, because, say like in the days of Thatcher, for example. You had women who took offices of power, but a lot of their policies were indistinguishable from men, in any way. But I’m wondering if there is something uniquely feminine, to me, it would be something that was less like that survival-of-the-fittest kind of mindset, but something that we really actually need as a society right now, especially with regards to the state of the environment and our..

Ann: Yeah. You know, my gut reaction to that—and it’s probably not fair, because I know plenty of men who have this trait too—but I think there is the female desire to nurture, that comes from bearing children, and, you know, needing to support lives that are not sustainable on their own, that we sort of do when we have newborn babies that came out of our bodies…there is something about tending to and nurturing others that is more female, at least historically has been more female. I know many nurturing men as well, but, you know, I would say in my experience that quality is predominantly female quality. And you know, men needed to defend, and while they were off, you know, hunting and fighting off enemies, women were tending to families and tending to the land, and those genetics stay with us through the generations, and I think to be more nurturing as a society incorporates the empathy that I talked about earlier, and the awareness of, and value of, human life and what we need to survive. And that includes the earth being a healthy and sustainable place and, you know, it’s a whole cascade of what we need in order to not only live, but to be good humans. And so my new archetype is a weird combination of a stereotypic nurturing woman, but she’s now powerful and capable of not only nurturing in the home, but nurturing as a leader. And I tried, I don’t know what, I don’t know retrospectively what kind of leader I was, but I always intended to be a leader who empowered and nurtured and helped those that worked with me thrive. And, you know, I kind of think instead of trying to be masculine and gain power by behaving in the same way that our male successful predecessors have behaved, that there is an opportunity for all of us to take on some of those more loving qualities. And I know loving in a work sense, in a leadership sense, is kind of a weird idea. But if we make it acceptable to feel and care in addition to winning, I think it’s gonna create a better society.

Francis: I agree. Well my own personal evidence for it was, raising a son, I believed very strongly when I first had him that any kind of male-female sort of…I thought it was just modeling and what they were nurtured into being, and then what I discovered is that when he was like four, he was running around playing with trucks and stuff, and most of the girls were playing with dolls, and that wasn’t 100%, but it’s just one example of how, like at a really young age, he was very boyish.

Ann: Yep. And my sister did a very similar experiment. She had a son, she’s the only one of the three girls who has not had just daughters, and she had a son and wanted him to play with dolls and not have weapons and…he would turn anything into a weapon just by nature. And he’s the sweetest, nicest human. He’s not, you know, he’s not a violent kid or anything else, completely normal, now lovely man, but she tried to take away those gender stereotypes and he just, without even knowing, just created them in his own way himself.

Francis: It’s something you see universally in that age group. It was, it was very surprising to me. But, you know, there’s a way to work with it, I think, that…what I tried to do is figure out role models for my son, where he could feel like embracing that sort of warrior energy, but directing it in positive way. And honestly, it’s really hard to find good male role models in the media, because I guess the media doesn’t really benefit very much from these people who are living these quiet, heroic lives, there has to be like some huge conflict or something. So, I had a really hard time doing that, but what we came down to is that Mother Earth needs to be protected, and it’s your job to protect Mother Earth. So it became a way for him to sort of use his masculinity but at the service of the feminine. And I think that really stuck with him. It directs it in a way, I think, that’s necessary right now.

Ann: What’s he doing now, Francis?

Francis: He just got accepted to a high school that I’m really happy about, and he’s taking Kung Fu and Yoga, and I work very hard to keep him off of the video games…and that’s been a really big challenge. His generation is growing up with video games and YouTubers and all this stuff that we never had, and it’s…it’s new, it’s a little hard to navigate it as a parent.

Ann: It is.

Francis: Regarding the future, do you feel optimistic about the future, and if so why?

Ann: You know, I’m inherently an optimistic person, and so I’m not sure I could say I feel optimistic, there are things I worry about. I certainly worry about our environment and its ability to sustain us, given how we’re treating it, but I also feel that the pendulum historically in our nation and in our world has swung back towards center always. So for those of us who feel right now like the emphasis is on things that are not according to our values, and our leadership is not supporting what we feel is important and how we would want to behave as humans, I have to have a longer term view, and know that, you know, when I look through history in the times I wasn’t alive, or even earlier in my life when people were either running our country or massive acts of destruction or murder or violence made us fearful about what our society was, that there is some balance that’s in our system that will allow us to have more positive and better feeling times in the future. I just have to believe that in order to, in order to live and so…you know, I believe in good humans acting in small ways towards others to do what they can do personally, and I believe in our system in some form to get that pendulum back, back to a place where we all feel we can live with it a little more. And, you know, sadly I fear that it might take another five years before we see the pendulum swing back, but I hope to still be alive and making positive changes both in the meantime and when it comes back in to accelerate the ways that we can be a kinder society. So I’m working on it on a day to day basis, and I haven’t lost hope. I don’t think you can. We can’t throw up our arms, and we have to just keep doing whatever we can do, given the current circumstance. I’m on a mission to do that.

Francis: Yeah, I think a lot of us are, actually. You know who I think are, one of our big hopes is? My son’s generation…they’re growing up knowing that there’s an urgent need to change the way we’re interacting with the environment, and that sort of thing.

Chris: For the first time in decades, we’re starting to see young people organize among themselves. We have the Parkland kids, and now we have the climate kids who are skipping school every Friday to protest…I mean, I think we’re actually seeing energy among young people for the first time in what I think is a couple of decades.

Ann: Yeah, and I see my kids, who are little bit older than Francis’s, not being willing to take jobs unless there are good for society components in the actual companies. And, you know, I didn’t grow up in a time where we gave that thought. Corporate social responsibility was emerging, you know, fifteen years ago, and everybody thought, wow, that’s an amazing idea, a company can do well and also do good, and now the next generation is saying, well, we’re not going to work for you unless you do both. That’s awesome.

Francis: It is. I think our kids’ generation are gonna see people that came before them sort as, like, these crazy kids who just trash the place, and it’s time to clean up. And they’ll have, I’m sure when technology is really applied to the service of, say, cleaning the oceans, and cleaning the air, and…what we’re capable of doing is gonna be stunning. And it’s just a matter of will, and it’s a matter of, I guess, somehow creating the choice for people in the way that they recognize that, in a very clear, finite way.

Ann: Yep.

Chris: I had a young friend write to me this morning, he just turned down a job well over $200,000 a year—this kid’s only 23 years old—because he did not want to work on artificial intelligence drones that are used to kill people, and he accepted a job paying about half of what he was offered, where he could work for a company that does accounting software or something..benign.

Ann: Well, it’s very enlightened of a young person, you know, to be led by values rather than by money, that’s fabulous. He probably can live with himself and feel good, that’s awesome.

Chris: Well, we always end just with the same basic question: Do you have anything you’d like to plug, or…promote or…whether it’s something you’re working on, or something somebody else is working on, or just something you’d like to put out there that people might be interested in?

Ann: Sure. I would say if you want the monthly reminder of small ways that you can personally make a difference in the world, go on my website anndevereuxmills.com and sign up for One Small Thing, which is that monthly newsletter/blog. But I think, assuming that you don’t need that reminder and you just have a way to live your life each day where, at the end of the day, you sort of say, “was I the person that I would like to have been” and if so, great, ‘cuz I helped someone or I did something that feels additive to society, and if I didn’t, it’s OK, I thought about it and tomorrow’s another day to do that. So I’d encourage you to live the small life, because if we all do that, we’re gonna end up creating big and meaningful positive changes at a time when it feels like the world needs it most.

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

Ann: Well, thank you for making it better.


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Ann: Chris, you have a phenomenal voice. I’m sure people have told you that before, but this is a good vehicle for you, cuz your voice is very soothing….

Episode 2: Michael Marshall Transcript

Welcome to the Making Better podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Chris, Well, Francis. it’s episode 2 of Making Better.

Francis: Yes, indeed, and this has been a really fun trip so far. What do we have in the can, something like 8, 7, 6?

Chris: I think we have 8 episodes total recorded, this is the second one we’ve released.

Francis: Yeah, and such a diverse group of people so far. I’ve been having a lot of fun with that.

Chris Yeah, it’s been interesting. Every guest has been different in their own way, but there’s a certain common thread that we see, I think, running through all of them. I think, you know, we’re talking to an optimistic group of people, people who are already making better things happen in the world. And one of those guests is this week’s interview, Michael Marshall. I first met “Marsh” seven years ago at the QED conference in Manchester, England, of which he is one of the co-coordinators. Marsh is also one of the founders of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, and is a full time employee at the Good Thinking Society, an organization dedicated to promoting critical thinking and science in the UK. Marsh is probably most well known for his work with the Good Thinking Society as one of the leaders that got homeopathy banned from the NHS in England, saving the British taxpayers millions of dollars on bogus cures.

Francis: And if you’re like me, and you didn’t know anything really about the skeptics movement, this is a really cool interview.

Chris: Michael Marshall, welcome to Making Better!

Marsh: Thank you for having me, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Chris: I’ve known you for quite some time, and I know a bit about your work, but I don’t think our listeners do, so…you work full time for the Good Thinking Society, an organization I find fascinating, but can you tell us a bit about the organization and the work you do there?

Marsh: Yeah, it’s kind of a tricky thing to describe what it is that I do, really, so I’m..I think technically the UK’s only full-time, professional skeptical investigator. Which effectively means, because I work for this charity called Good Thinking Society and the charity’s there to promote science and to challenge pseudoscience. So I spend a reasonable amount of my time investigating where there are pseudoscientific claims, and sometimes that will be about people who say they’re talking to the dead or reading palms, and other times it’ll be about people who say they can cure this disease or offer this alternative treatment, and we look at whether the evidence for that actually works…so I spend some of my time actually going undercover to have these claims made to me directly in person. I spend some of my time looking to see how we can bring these claims, where they aren’t backed by evidence, to the attention of people like the press, regulators, sometimes even the police when they’re making particularly egregious and damaging claims. And the rest of the time I spend doing public lectures, essentially encouraging groups of strangers to doubt stuff is kind of a big part of what I do, describing the work that I’ve done, and whenever anybody …whenever I tell people about my full time job, that it involves telling people to doubt stuff, there’s always at least a few people in the audience who look at me as if to say, ‘that isn’t a real job’…and to those people I always point out that’s how good I am at making you doubt stuff, that you even doubt the validity of my chosen career….so that’s kind of what I do in my day job, and that sort of takes all sorts of different forms and, yeah, occasionally I’ll be lecturing here or writing for newspapers there, or being in a strange undercover environment where someone’s telling me stuff that isn’t true and I see what I can do about it.

Chris: The piece you’re most famous for, that you work on with the Good Thinking Society, and that you started, I think, before you even started working for Good Thinking, with the Merseyside Skeptics, an organization that you co-founded…is on homeopathy and getting it banned from the National Health System in England…

Marsh: Yeah, so this is an area that I’ve been looking at for about 10 years now, so I just kind of started, I was one of the co-founders of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, which is just a local community group, really, the reason that we put the group together was because if you’re someone of faith, you know that you can walk into any city in the world pretty much and there’ll be a building filled with people of your faith, people who kind of agree with you at least on some pretty core principles…and if you’re somebody who is a believer in psychic ability, you can go to spiritualist churches, or you can go to psychic meetings all round the world, and you meet people who already kind of agree with you a bit, but there wasn’t really an easy access community for people who didn’t believe in those things, ‘cuz it can be quite a tricky thing to gather around not believing in a thing, and so that’s where this kind of community group came from. But as well as having an idea, an ethos to try and build a critical thinking, a community of non-believers, as it were, we also wanted to look out and say, how do we affect the world around us if we find these kind of pseudo-sciences that can be quite damaging and dangerous and misleading? How do we try and push back against that, and what can we do to try and encourage critical thinking and to challenge ideas that don’t work and don’t stack up? And that’s where we really started settling on homeopathy, which at the time was starting to make headlines because we got the major pharmacy in the UK, Boots, who admitted that the reason they sold homeopathic remedies wasn’t because they believed that they worked—because the don’t work—but it was because, they said, their customers wanted to buy them. So, essentially, “we’ll sell you it, even though we know it’s nonsense but you’re willing to pay for it,” was of the position of the UK’s biggest pharmacy. And so we came up with this kind of campaign, which we might sort of chat about in a bit more detail in a moment perhaps, to question Boots’ position and also to say to the public, you might think that homeopathic remedies are herbal remedies, you might think they’re natural remedies, you might not know that they’re neither of those things. Homeopathic remedies are based on very unnatural principle, the idea that the more you dilute something, the stronger it gets—that’s a central tenet of homeopathy—but it kind of runs contrary to pretty much every experience you’ve had of diluting things, I imagine, in your life…but the majority of people didn’t realize that.

Chris: If I’m pouring a scotch and water, I use about a gallon of water and just a teaspoon of scotch, and it’s just way stronger…

Marsh: Yeah, that’s the real hard stuff at that point…but funnily enough, the thing we found was that the majority of people, if you looked at surveys of public opinion, if you looked at the way people talked about homeopathy, if you looked at how it was discussed in the media, the majority of people really did think that these remedies were natural remedies, or they were just another word for herbal remedies. So we wanted to make the point that homeopathy is a very specific idea, and we also noticed that homeopaths weren’t going out of their way to say to people, “hey, do you know our remedies are based on the idea that diluting stuff makes it stronger?”

Francis: Where did homeopathy come from?

Marsh: Yeah, well the origin of homeopathy is quite interesting, I think it was about …late 18th Century Germany, there was a chap called Samuel Hahnemann who, at the time, was doing experimentation to try and treat malaria. And he found that if you..quinine, I think, it was from a particular tree, I forget which tree it was now, but he found that if you administered this stuff to people who had malaria, their symptoms improved…and partly, that was because it actually turns out that quinine is a useful antimalarial, it’s got some properties that could then be used and synthesized and used in sort of antimalarial treatments after that. So you had him doing sort of these natural experimentation initially, and he come up with sort of further ideas that when you give someone quinine they take on symptoms that seem a bit like malaria, in terms of you get a fever and things like that, so he figured that it was the fact he was giving you a fever that was treating the fever that you have. So he thought, if you give somebody something that mirrors the symptoms they already have, the body would learn to fight the symptoms of the thing you’ve just given them, and that would teach the body to fight the symptoms of what ailment they already had. But, of course, this should lead into places where the homeopathic cure for insomnia is coffee…because coffee keeps you up, but your body can fight the coffee and go to sleep it can fight whatever else is causing insomnia and go to sleep. Obviously, that’s not going to work, because coffee will keep you up.

Francis: Is there a homeopathy remedy for gullibility?

Marsh: (laughs) There may well be, there may well be…so you have this kind of idea that, you give someone coffee and it’s meant to treat their insomnia, and obviously it’s not going to do that. So…Hahnemann had the idea of diluting it in order to take out the ill effects…the negative side effects, but just leave the “essence” of what it was, and that’s where this kind of serial dilution comes from. And the majority of people we found—not just in the UK, but in opinion polls conducted worldwide—didn’t realize that homeopathic pills were diluted to the point that there was none of the original substance left in them. And we figure this was a really important point, because, for a long time people who didn’t…who recognized that homeopathy didn’t work, they would say, well, homeopathy doesn’t work because of all these scientific studies over here, and the homeopaths would say, well actually we’ve got our own scientific studies…and if you’re an everyday person going about your life, you don’t have time to go looking for medical journals that you might not have access to, to figure out whether those studies are valid or not. So you just hear the studies on both sides…and so the science alone wasn’t going to convince people that homeopathy didn’t work, and that’s why we came up with this idea of saying, if we can get people to understand one central, very simple point, and that’s that a homeopathic pill has nothing at all in it, most people are gonna go, if this pill’s got nothing in it, it’s not gonna do anything for me. Most people would realize that, and that’s why we came up with this, the first kind of activist thing that I ever did with regard to alternative medicine, was the …

Chris: That would be your 10:23 campaign…

Marsh: Yeah, 10:23, which is the series of homeopathic “overdoses”…where we had people go into their local Boots pharmacy and buy some homeopathic tablets and then everybody, all together, would stand outside of their local pharmacy and they would take an “overdose” of these sugar pills to demonstrate that you don’t get any ill effects, you don’t get effect at all, because what you’re “overdosing” on is nothing but a sugar pill. So, yeah, in the first year—this was 2010—we had 300 people in 13 cities across the UK taking this homeopathic “overdose” at 10:23 in the morning, and it made national news as a result of that, and really kicked off or re-energized, in the public consciousness in many ways, a new kind of debate about what homeopathy actually is. And slightly, for a little while, changed the way homeopathy was described in the UK.

Chris: And for our listeners who don’t remember high school chemistry, can you tell us the significance of the term 10:23?

Marsh: Yeah, so cuz we identified, not just that the public opinion was that homeopathy was either natural or herbal, but we also identified that the press coverage would also mistakenly not tell you what homeopathy actually was, so when the media talked about homeopathy, they’d say it was either a natural medicine or they would say it’s an ultra-dilute medicine, a very dilute medicine, they would say there’s barely anything in it…but they wouldn’t say there’s nothing at all in it. And that was the key point that we wanted to get across. So we figured, how do we force the media, when they report on our publicity student—cuz it was a publicity stunt—how do we force them to tell the real science of homeopathy? And I came up with this idea of calling the campaign 10:23, because odd numbers stick in the mind, if you hear a number, you think it must have a significance, and that number does have a significance. And the idea is that, I talked about the dilution of homeopathy, how you take a substance and dilute it into lots and lots of water, until there’s nothing of it left. If you take your initial drop of coffee, and you start diluting it into water, you will reach a point where there is only water left in any random sample that you take. And that point is called the Avogadro constant, and it’s 6.02 times 10 to the power of 23 drops of water to one drop of coffee. When you buy the homeopathic remedies in your local pharmacy, or you go and see a homeopath and they’ll give you these homeopathic remedies, pretty much all, the vast majorities of the remedies that they give you are past this point of dilution. So this is the point that says, there is literally nothing at all in this, in this remedy. So we thought, if we call our campaign 10:23 after this chemical point, the Avogadro point, then if we do our “overdoses” at specifically 10:23 am, all coordinated across the UK and a year later right across the world, when the media talk about this strange serious of publicity stunts, called this strange number, they have to explain what that number is, they can’t just say “the 10:23 campaign did it at 10:23 in the morning”…and just not explain that number, you’d feel it’s not a satisfying way of telling that story, there’s a very clear gap there. So when the media covered this, and this was front page news on the BBC website for the entire day, it made pretty much every national newspaper, I believe, every single piece of coverage explained the campaign group 10:23, which takes its name from the chemical principle that shows there’s nothing in homeopathy, blah blah blah blah blah. So we were able to crowbar real science into the media discussion by understanding what the shape of a media story is, and where the gaps are, and how to sort of fill those gaps with…science, really.

Chris: And that brings up your background in public relations, before you became a full-time skeptic, you were a full-time public relations specialist.

Marsh: Well, sort of, sort of. I worked in a marketing company for a long time, so I’ve spent…alongside my career as a skeptic, which I’ve been involved in skeptical activism for 10 years and I’ve been a full-time skeptic with the Good Thinking Society for five years. Before that I’d worked for many, many years in a digital marketing company. And so I always had a bit of an interest in marketing anyway, and that sort of did certainly feed into the branding of 10:23 as a campaign and some of the decisions we made about how to communicate. I’ve always had a very great interest in understanding how to communicate the messages, especially complicated messages, as clearly, concisely, as accessibly as possible, really. And so that really led to me kind of examining how stories end up in the newspapers, and getting really involved in understanding how much of the story the newspapers are actually fed by commercial sources, which has been another string to the various kind of various strains of the [?] that I’ve acquired over the last decade.

Chris: You often talk about Bad PR on your Skeptics with a K podcast, and you did a blog, 365 days of Bad PR, that I must admit to having never read…

Marsh: Yeah, so…

Chris: I’m the guy who listens to Be Reasonable all the way to the end, I’m the one hand raised when you asked that question at QED every year, so…

Marsh: Oh well, that’s good, ‘cause I can absolve you of never having engaged too much with my other blogs…no, I’m someone who likes to take on lots of projects, so it was actually…my interest is really piqued in this kind of subject, of how much of the news is kind of influenced by PR and commercial messaging. It was piqued by a book that I read by Neil Davis from the Guardian, and the book was Flat Earth News. (sorry, Nick Davis, not Neil Davis, Nick Davis) And it was a really fascinating book because Nick Davis is a very seasoned Guardian reporter, and this was kind of an insider’s view of what was going on in the news rooms, and explained how the commercial aspect of the media has really fallen away over the last, sort of, 30 years, and even more so the last, sort of, 10+ years of the internet…the internet’s kind of intrusion upon the media landscape, or participation in the media landscape. Because there is such a gap in funding of newspapers, because people don’t buy newspapers anymore, people expect newspapers to come to them immediately and for free…those twin evils of immediacy and completely without any expense involved…it takes the bottom out of it, it takes the funding out of journalism and really ends up starving journalists of the one resource they really need, which is time. A journalist sort of lives and dies, journalism lives and dies on the time you have to source a story and check a story and develop background facts and even to do the little bit of checking that tells you not to go ahead with this story ‘cuz it’s nonsense. So once you strangle that time out of journalism, and you still have a huge amount of demand, increased demand in fact, for content, there are people who are then going to step in and fill those content gaps. And that’s where newswire material and the idea of “churn-alism” which is to repackage content and copy you found elsewhere or was given to you elsewhere and you repackage it as a journalist as if you wrote it yourself, even though you haven’t contributed to it or haven’t particularly fact-checked it. And it’s also where the PR element of the media really has exploded over the last sort of 30 years, so that’s what I spend a long time tracking, on a blog that I sporadically upkeep on a project that I now sort of lecture at universities as part of their journalism and PR degrees on, is to track this story in the newspaper that might have an effect on the way that people understand the world…where did it come from? Well, we can show that it actually came from this press release, from this commercial organization, you can have this very specific marketing goal in putting forward this message. And so when we see these stories of research shows that men gossip more than women, or women gossip more than men, or whichever hook is a-la-mode at the time, when you look at the research behind those, and you look at the company involved in putting those out, you can spot the reason this company is putting this story out is that it supports their commercial message and it has a commercial incentive to them in this way, and you can see why it’s kind of trying to massage people into behaving a certain way…and then you question the validity of the data that they’re presenting is actually not great, and in many of these marketing research stories it’s not great, you can see this is just an advert for that company. So what I do on the PR blog, is I pick a story from the newspaper and point out who put the story there and specifically what message they’re trying to send with that story, what the sub-text of the story is. And once you kind of understand just how much of this stuff is out there, it really does make you, in my humble opinion, read newspapers a different way and engage with the media in a different way.

Francis: It seems to me that, especially in this country, there is a lot of interest in the idea of skepticism and the right, and particularly Trump, refer a lot to what he calls ..”fake news”….so, in a sense, it seems to me that the work that you’re doing is, it’s sort of being short-circuited in some bizarre way, by people who are just subverting the whole idea of…looking at the evidence objectively.

Marsh: Yeah, well I think it isn’t that they’re subverting the idea of looking at the evidence, it’s that they taking the terminology of something very, very specific and then misapplying it in order to rob it of any meaning or rob it of the initial meaning and context that it had. So if we look at “fake news” as a term, and this is kind of a thesis I’m sort of developing a little bit at the moment, but where the “fake news” term is most valuable is to look at stories that are wholly constructed, that have no basis in reality. And we saw a huge number of these during the US election, there were stories that the Pope had came out and offered an endorsement to Donald Trump, there were stories that there were Marines stranded in a country and Donald Trump personally signed off or paid for helicopters to go rescue these Marines…and these were stories that appear on sites that look like, they carry all the trappings of a media site…they’ve got all the, sort of, the signifiers that make it look like a media site, but actually there is no journalism involved, these are entirely made-up stories. And lots of these stories are actually, I think, initially made up first of all, just to get engagement, just to get people’s eyes on the page, because the page is covered in adverts and has affiliate links…and it’s really just trying to monetize eyes on the page…and when you have a landscape that’s set up to reward..people financially for the number of hits their website gets, which is a very reasonable sounding metric, and a reasonable sounding way to carry out online marketing and online advertising. But when that system exists, you almost inevitably set off an arms race between the people who are, amongst the people who are looking to get as many eyes as possible on their page, and don’t care what they have to do to get that. And I think that’s kind of where the origins of fake news came from, with these stories that sprung up not necessarily first of all with propagandist purposes, but with just sensationalist purposes. But I think going into several elections worldwide, one of them being the one in America, I think that ecosystem of almost Darwinian evolution of…you know, survival of the fittest in terms of who can put forward the most sensationalist headline and the most sensationalist form of clickbait headline: “12 Tips That Will Blow Your Mind! You’ll never guess number 7!” you know, that kind of ecosystem…when that was there, and then there were people who had a…bad actors with very specific political points to push, whether those points are true or not, so long as it points to a certain direction, I think that’s where “fake news” is a very helpful term to describe that system, where people are putting out sensationalist stories that are supportive of one candidate or lies of another candidate. And we saw this with, for example, the two stories that I cited, the Pope one and the Marines on a helicopter one….I believe both of those are…certainly the latter of those, was shared by Sean Hannity on his website, Sean Hannity obviously used them, Fox News, and you have kind of a very easy mechanism by which a story which had a sensationalist and maybe even propagandist point of view in terms of its initial writing, gets laundered into mainstream via the bridges along the way. So I think that’s where the term “fake news” is phenomenally valuable…but unfortunately, it’s such an easy term to co-opt, to say, well, anything that I don’t like I can just label it “fake news” in order to devalue it or to denigrate it, so Trump can stand in front of CNN and say the entire channel, the entire media company, media platform, is “fake news”….and there’s no real engagement with what he means by that, because what he means by that “I don’t like you.” But the term itself, and I think the tools that were behind the initial term and the scrutiny that the term initially represented are still very valuable. The tools themselves aren’t being co-opted by bad actors, but just the terms of them are.

Chris: At least in America, and I look back at, you know, relatively recent history, let’s go back to, like, the Ronald Reagan administration, we agreed on the facts…so acid rain was the big environmental issue of the time, and Ronald Reagan’s science advisor, you know, said, look, these are the facts, and Ronald Reagan had a climate…or acid rain denier as an Interior minister, he fired him, hired someone who was scientific and they invented the cap-and-trade program, which has been very successful. So they used a conservative, market-based solution to an environmental system and it was interesting, because both sides were at least able to agree on the facts, and the debate was over the policy.

Marsh: Yeah, I think that’s…that’s something that isn’t…that isn’t borne out in sort of, political discourse, conversational discourse…at the moment, and I think that’s a huge, huge issue with the way that people from either side of an aisle…interact, I completely agree…especially if somebody has a..an investment in muddying the waters and obscuring facts. And I think that’s where we kind of are, and it’s the line that’s been trotted out a million times, but I actually think it’s something many people don’t really grasp the full significance of, when Kellyanne Conway says, well, the President has “alternative facts”….I actually think she was saying something different toward a lot of people…will take from that…I don’t think she was saying, that what the President has, or what the administration has, is alternative-to-fact….as in constructs that are wholly invented. I think she was effectively saying, that, well, you have a…this statistic can tell you this, but I can pull up a different statistic that, if I use that in isolation, it will tell you another thing…you know, I don’t think she meant it quite as transparently as that, but I think that’s the phenomenon she was possibly referring to, or certainly a phenomenon that I’ve observed. So, you can find elements of fact…it’s not just when people outright deny the facts, I think there are facts that are true, but are narrow enough that the use of them actually constitutes a falsehood, because there’s a greater truth that is revealed if you…widen the scope, if that sort of makes sense.

Francis: I think, especially in the left-right politics in this country, there’s this undercurrent where the left will try to persuade with facts and data, and the right just want to win…and push through a policy or something like that, and will do anything, say anything, you know, just manipulation…so you have this one group who are trying to play fair, and another group who read books like Robert Green’s 48 Laws of Power, and The Art of War, and all that…

Chris: Or The Art of the Deal…

Francis: Yeah. and what you have is this sort of, just like a broken dialogue where one half isn’t even really interested in the truth. And the other half is trying to come up with, like, the correct formulation of the data that will eventually persuade the other group.

Marsh: Yeah. So, I mean…first of all, I would say that I do consider skepticism a-political, I have my own political..political opinions, and while I would say that I believe them to be informed by skepticism, I wouldn’t want to say that you can only have certain opinions if you’re a skeptic, you’d only be from one political side…so if we go into the politics area, I just want to make that clear. But I do think the idea that one side of an argument can be engaging on the facts and on logic, and to their mind reason, while the other side isn’t engaging at that level but are actually engaging at something else, and I think that something else is a kind of value system, an identity, I think that certainly is a very valid point. And I think we see that in some of the discussions that you see in political discourse in America, some of the discussions you see in political discussions in…Britain over Brexit, things like that. But we see it a lot in the stuff that I deal with in terms of my skeptical day job, or the skeptical world in which I kind of …move. When we talk about people who, for example, are against vaccinations, or the people who believe that the world is flat, I see an awful lot of people engaging with people who hold those opinions, and engaging on the facts, without necessarily understanding that it wasn’t the facts that got people into that position, it was something else. And if you just try and engage, if you throw facts at someone for whom facts weren’t their motivator to get them into the intellectual space that they’re in, those facts will be deflected. And instead you need to…you do need to engage at a values level. So I think that there is an element amongst people, amongst groups that would consider themselves to be progressive, critical thinkers where we also have to understand that we need to engage at the value system that the people we’re talking to have. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the values that they have are probably, I would say, mistrust of corporations, mistrust of big organizations, mistrust of government, and compassion for their child, protection of their child. Some of those are very admirable and understandable values, you know, I absolutely would understand why someone would…protect and worry about their children. I understand why people would question the motivations of big corporations, we see pharmaceutical companies that we absolutely should be questioning some of their decisions on…in that one example of anti-vaxxers, if you want to try and get anywhere in that conversation, if you go in and say “well actually, here’s the statistics around measles in…over the last hundred years,” that isn’t going to affect them. But I think if you were to be able to go in and say, look, I know that you’re trying to do what’s best for your child…and I understand why you would doubt corporations, because there were these big problems here…but, the flip side of that is, protecting your child also means protecting them from these issues here, and try to engage with the fact of a shared understanding of values. I think that’s perhaps a more productive way of having those conversations, and that’s something I try and do in various parts of the…the work that I do, really.

Chris: How do you find common ground with a flat-earther though?

Marsh: Well, (sigh) I think, first of all, there’s an easy common ground in that they are humans, and I’m also a human. So that’s a pretty easy common ground…and that sounds like a very trite thing, but it’s actually something that a lot of people miss when they’re talking to people they disagree with. You assume they are the sum of their arguments, and miss the fact that they are people holding those…those opinions. So I quite often will have conversations with people who believe the world is flat, and the first thing that I want to do is kind, try to understand them as a person, and I’m not necessarily going to reason them out of their belief in the flat earth, largely I think because a lot of the people who will hold a flat earth belief to the point where they are, in the case of the people I talk to, appearing on stage at conferences and hosting podcasts and doing videos about why the world flat, I think that becomes quite a core part of their identity and who they see themselves as…so certainly an hour-long conversation with me isn’t going to…isn’t going to shift something fundamental about who they believe themselves to be. So I just really want to try and understand them, and I think we do find common ground. In some ways. I think a lot of people, when it comes to flat earth belief, will say these people are anti-science, they are uneducated, this is a failure…Neil DeGrasse Tyson says this is a failure of science education. And I think that’s actually quite a harsh view. I’ve talked to lots of flat-earthers who do believe in the process of science, and are even trying to do the process of science, but don’t understand the sensitivity of the tools that they’re using, or the makeup of the experiments that they’re doing, and they don’t understand why their own personal observations in the experiments they carry out shouldn’t be given a huge amount more weight and significance than the consensus of thousands of people who’ve made their own observations using far more sensitive equipment. So I think even there, writing off the flat earth believer as someone who is unreachable, has absolutely no common ground, misses some fundamental…fundamentally why it’s an interesting thing to do to talk to people you disagree with.

Francis: You talk about helping people learn how to think, even…what are the characteristics of optimal thinking?

Marsh: Oh gosh, that’s a big question. I think one of the most important ones, and it’s one that’s often hugely overlooked, is to question your own beliefs and particularly the beliefs that you hold more strongly. This is something that we, as humans, are just not very well designed to do. I’m exactly the same, in that you’ll get into arguments online, and you’ll get a little heated at someone saying something that you think is silly, and when they make a point, the first thing you do is to say, well that can’t be right, and you google to find the first link you can find that proves them wrong, and you don’t necessarily even read it fully, you just know that this is the thing that came up when you said, when you looked for why that person was wrong…which is a very motivated way of…it’s motivated reasoning, it’s motivated behavior. Whereas a better way to do it is say, well, what is this person saying and how do I observe that and evaluate that as objectively as possible? And similarly, a belief system that you hold incredibly strongly is precisely the thing that you should be sense-checking regularly, because that is going to be your achilles heel, really, that’s going to be the one thing that you don’t question because it’s so obvious to you and so, sort of, [?] So I think that humility of your own belief structure is hugely important, to try and grow as much as possible a willingness to change your mind based on the evidence, even if what you’re changing your mind about is something that you feel very strongly about, you feel very emotionally tied to. These are really, really difficult things to do. It sounds like an easy thing, but it’s one of the most remarkably hard things to do, and I’ve got a huge amount of respect for someone who’s been through that journey of completely being on one side of a fence, looking at the evidence, and going, actually, that was all completely wrong. It’s takes a huge amount of intellectual fortitude, intellectual honesty, to do that.

Chris: What do you think is the best way for somebody who may not have a great science education to start learning more about critical thinking, without, you know, having to go back to university?

Marsh: Yeah..so I mean, you’re absolutely right that it’s an issue that people haven’t necessarily got the vocabulary and the expertise in reading scientific papers. I’m also terrible at reading scientific papers, I find that…the structure of them often impenetrably boring. You know, I’ve got an English background rather than a science background, so I can also understand that, also you have the issue that a lot of science journals just aren’t accessible to the public, so in a way we are reliant, to a degree, on people who are science communicators, to translate the reality of the research into approachable language, and that translation is always going to be flawed. So I think one of the things you can do is to try and seek out multiple, multiple opinions on a topic, and then try and figure out what the doubt about those opinions might be. So if you were to look at vaccination, for example, you could take a look at what the pro-vaccination side are saying, and try and find out how much of those statistics are true, and how many people who make their careers in medicine are pro- or anti- vaccination, and we see the consensus of the experts there. And if you look at the anti-vaccination arguments, and you try and really scrutinize not just whether these are true, but how you could falsify them…I think the falsifiability is very important, because what I think I see a lot…and I have a lot of conversations with people who are very passionate on one side of an argument, is that they specialize in looking at the other side’s argument and deconstructing it and going, well, this can’t be true, for these reasons….but then they’ll put forward an argument of their own which they clearly haven’t done that level of scrutiny on, it’s gonna be a very sort of superficial argument. And again, I think this is kind of an understandable human trait, arguments and points and facts and ideas that gel with how we already see the world are gonna pass into our minds much more easily than ones that don’t quite fit. So I think that’s the biggest thing, is being able to question the information that you agree with the most…and where it comes to a position where you’re not sure either way, to really have a look around at the consensus of experts.

Chris: When it came to recommending books, though, two came to mind immediately to me, one is Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan, which I think is almost the primer for skepticism, and then…I really like Brian Dunning’s books, I think he sort of turned Skeptoid into a series of books which I think are really informative.

Marsh: Well, certainly, and I’ve never read his books but have heard a lot of the Skeptoid essays…and I think what Brian does very well is cover the basics of an issue in enough depth that you’ve really got a pretty comprehensive handle on things by then…so yeah, I think he’s a good example of that. I must admit, it’s quite tricky for me to recommend skeptical books, because I spend so much of my time immersed not in the literature and culture of the critical thinkers, but instead reading stuff from people who aren’t critical thinkers, that I’m probably a terrible person to ask about what a good skeptical library looks like. I’m sat in my office right now and looking across at the books that I keep in my office, that are sort of science and skepticism related, the vast majority of them are from people who disagree with me, because I enjoy so much immersing myself in the arguments and ideas of people that I disagree with, and try and understand where they’re coming from. So yeah, that’s possibly…I’m possibly the worst person to recommend what a good skeptical library ought to look like.

Francis: You, in a speech to the Australian Skeptics national convention, sounded very optimistic. I was wondering if you could explain why you have this optimism?

Marsh: I think I am optimistic. And I think part of that is because I really believe in people, first of all. It’s very easy, I think, to have a very negative view, a very apocalyptic view, of everything is getting worse and people don’t care and people don’t engage, and especially when you’re very much in the middle of a particular issue. And so we see that with, go back to homeopathy or go to vaccination, it’s very easy to see the people who disagree with the scientific point of view, the critical thinking point of view, the people promoting homeopathy, the people advising people not to get vaccinated. It’s easy to see that and say, oh, there’s so many people and they’re so strong and they’ve got all this kind of success, and to see that as like a 50-50, like there are them and there are us, there are believers and there are skeptics, and it’s kind of a pitched battle, and I don’t believe that to be the case. I think actually it’s much more likely that there’s a vast middle ground of people who…aren’t really that invested either way, and are very reachable. And so one of the reasons I was particularly positive, especially being in Australia, is seeing how great the work of even a small number of people, how great that work can be. So Australia, for example, used to have an organization, an anti-vaccine organization called the Australian Vaccination Network. And…sounds like a legitimate organization, they’d get play across the media, every time vaccines were mentioned the head of that organizations would be on the phone or on the TV about it. And it was really the work of, maybe, sort of five, six, seven people in a group called “Stop the AVN,” or slightly more than that, who started pushing back against that, and they’ve completely changed the way that the Australian media reports on vaccination. They no longer take an anti-vax view when talking about vaccines on the media, and they put forward a much more pro-vaccination, pro-science, pro-reason point of view on those issues, and that’s because of the work of…a relatively small group of activists. So I think it’s easy to look at things like the fake news of the internet, and the hellsphere that social media can occasionally be, and be quite apocalyptic, but I think the powers of those platforms, the powers of those tools to spread misinformation, are also tools and platforms that we can use to spread positive information. And it doesn’t take…the barriers, the gatekeepers, to spreading good information, are down and the gatekeepers aren’t there anymore, so it…you can actually get an awful long way, and I think there’s a lot of people who really care about things and doing things the right way. So, yeah, I think I am quite positive. I think most people, I think there are very few people trying to harm people and trying to spread intentional untruths, and there’s a lot of people who care about what’s real. And I think, I do think we’ll kind of get there in terms of how to get out of the bubble we’re in at the moment, which is where unreason seems to be prevailing in certain really important areas.

Francis: We lost a poet recently, named Mary Oliver, I don’t know if you’re familiar with her…but one of the things she once said is that, instructions for living a life are: Pay attention, Be astonished, and Tell about it. And I feel like with technology offering so much right now to people, the flip side of that is, yes, there are existential threats that have been created by advancements in technology, but the good side of it is just not getting out enough. And part of my interest in this podcast is to get that part out, to tell about what the good things are in this world, and give the facts, give the facts about how the technology could be used in a different way that would benefit a lot more people, that kind of thing.

Marsh: It’s kind of the…the human condition, to a degree, and certainly the condition of the stories we tell, and therefore the story that the media tells, is that the stories that are worrying or troubling or negative and depressing—those are the stories that are much easier to tell. You’ll that, you pick up the newspaper and you can get a, in any or of the last couple, you can get a false impression of how terrible things are going, the last couple haven’t been particularly great years internationally, for lots of different reasons, but it’s very easy to get negative stories, stories about how awful this is and how sensationally terrible this other thing is. It’s very easy to cover those stories, but it’s one of the things that’s kind, you always have to bear in mind as you…look at a story of some awful tragedy or terrible event, someone behaving awfully, is that the reason these stories are news is because they aren’t common. If really awful things were a thing that happened….you look at an awful murder, or something terrible like that…it’ll make the news because it’s such a gruesome and terrible thing, but if it was happening 50 times a day in every town, it wouldn’t be news any more, it would be life. So I think we have the stories we tell and the way we tell them, do skew towards negative for various reasons, and sort of bearing that in mind is a useful way of engaging with the media, really.

Francis: It’s a…issue of a profit-driven media…

Marsh: It sort of is, but I don’t think it’s necessarily even—profit-driven almost suggests that there’s an overt decision to be cynically sensationalist in order to make money, and I suspect it’s, the business decisions are, for most media outlets, sort of different to that. Because it’s so hard to get by, it’s so hard to cover your costs in the media these days, and finding the stories that are more in-depth and interesting is a much harder thing to do with limited resources, so I don’t like the idea of…writing off journalists as being, or newspapers as being all about the profit and not about the truth. I think the vast majority of people who go into the media, and who are acting in the media every day, are actually trying to do a very good job. Even the forces that are stopping them from doing a good job are probably also driven by people who are trying to do a good job, but their job just runs contrary to the goal of positive and independent…and powerful media. I think it’s a broken system rather than broken people using a working system, as it were.

Francis: Yeah, I agree with that. I have a son, and not long ago I posted in social media a question to my friends, which was: If you had to name a really good role model for a man, for a boy to look up to, who would you choose? And I was astonished at how difficult that question was. And one of the people that responded to that question said that, well, you know, the thing is that in the media, you know it’s really hard for them to assume anybody is going to be interested in the story of, like, a quiet college professor or a teacher who lives a really great…has a great career, and helps people, and was happy…it’s kind of, in some ways, just not that exciting information, so it doesn’t get out there.

Marsh: I think it’s more about, personally I think it’s more about the fact that the majority of people know what good is, and that’s why bad sells..? Because you know what the right thing to do in many situations would be, you know what would represent an honest life and a just life and you know, just and kind behavior, those things are kind of ingrained in us in a way that we are drawn to the cases where those norms are broken. Because they’re such norms in us—the reason gruesome, grotesque stuff catches people’s attention is because we know that’s wrong, and we know that’s wrong because we know what’s right. So I think it’s more perhaps about the fact that we already have a good sense of what’s right and what the good way to be is. Now that does mean finding positive role models can be tricky, because it’s very hard to tell stories about the unremarkable thing. But I do think we have got an in-built and innate sense of morality that we all, whether consciously or sub-consciously or unconsciously, follow.

Chris: But you and I…you and I, Marsh, have discussed the difference between the message and the messenger, and that maybe the notion of role models and leaders is an older concept, and we need to be thinking more small-scale and following communities rather than individuals?

Marsh: Yeah, I’d say so, and I’d think it’s…more about gestures and work and contribution than it is about personalities and leaders, I think. I’m always very wary of elevating people, even within a relatively small community, to elevating people beyond the point where they are questioned, or beyond the point where they are…where people will…evaluate them. You know, I think for me, I like the idea of saying, “this is great work.”

Chris: During QED, you were talking about the Buzzfeed article about Lawrence Kraus, and how many people came and said, “well, Michael Marshall said it’s true, so therefore it must be true”…but discounted all of the women who were accusing him.

Marsh: Yeah, yeah that was a very disheartening..disheartening thing. So…but I think, again, that’s a symptom of the fact that our society still has some way to go towards ironing out the unconscious biases that we have when it comes to things like gender and race and sexuality and stuff like that. I think even a lot of…a lot people who have done a lot of thinking and have come around to getting rid of the conscious biases, aren’t able to recognize, or able to work on…haven’t finished working on, getting rid of the unconscious biases, and that can be quite a tricky thing when people will say, “well, I’m no sexist, ‘cuz I would never say anything bad about women directly”…yes, but it’s not about saying bad things about women directly, it’s about what your actions and assumptions are and the way that you talk about, the way you judge women in this kind of way compared to a man in the same situation, and those kinds of ways. So the idea that …the weight of the opinions and the weight of the reports from the many, many women who were named in that Buzzfeed article saying this happened to me, and I witnessed this and I was aware of this…the idea that those names, their opinions mattered less than the opinion of me–one of the few guys mentioned in the article who agreed with those witnesses–yeah, it just shows that there’s still this unconscious bias. But I think even if we look back 10, 15, 20 years, we’re seeing changes in that direction, too. It’s slow and it needs to go quicker and it needs to go a long way, but I’m still positive about the fact that I think people are moving in the right direction. And I think in many ways some of the subcultures you’ve seen grown up around rejecting some of the progress that’s been made, are in a way a reaction to the fact that progress has been made, that progress is making its way through society, slowly. And there are people who are will be made uncomfortable about the fact that their positions of unchallenged …acceptability are now shifting to a point where they will be called on, on even unconscious biases, and called on to try and address those biases. So I think even that is a sign that there is some positivity, even if that’s just me taking a silver lining to that cloud.

Francis: In a democracy, it’s really important people know how to think and have good information, and I’m wondering, have you envisioned any changes in how that could happen in our countries…is it a responsibility for people to educate themselves, and is it a responsibility for the media to at least have some outlets that are there to provide facts…like, real facts?

Marsh: Yeah, so it’s kind of tricky, because those are instinctually, you’d say those are good things, and those are things that should happen. But I think even scrutinizing those we come up with issues….so for example there are media organizations doing pretty good work in fact-checking some of the worst mistruths that are out there, it’s incredibly hard to fact-check in real time, so you have a lie getting around the world before the truth has to…has time to put its shoes on, as it were. But also, I think it’s missing the fact that some of the untruths that are…that are perpetrated by people, the incorrect facts, the lies that are being put out by people for their own political, personal or cultural gain, I think some of the reasons they take root with people aren’t because people are genuinely persuaded that one statistic has changed their mind or anything, I think it’s because it aligns and comports with what they already thought. So putting out an account of factual [?] isn’t always a very useful…it’s not the magic solution, because the people who believe a lie aren’t necessarily going to be the people who go seeking out evidence that what they believe was a lie. It’s great to be able to put out a fact-check, and say, Donald Trump was lying when he said these things, but unless you can get that to everyone who would still vote for Donald Trump right now, and convince them that they should care about this more than they care about the fact that he’s on their side when it comes to their…their views on…on trans rights or on their side when it comes to their views on tax, or on their side when it comes to their views on how many minorities should be allowed into America, then I don’t think you’ll reach those people. I think similarly to say that people should educate themselves, kind of …is an overly simplistic solution, because if you haven’t got a grounding in critical thinking, I don’t know where you go to realize you haven’t got grounding, and go to try and change that. The tool you’re using to evaluate your beliefs is the tool that also stores all those beliefs…and those beliefs impact on your evaluation, so it’s quite…it’s tricky in that regard. I had this kind of conversation with someone who was pointing out that there’s no barrier to social mobility in the UK, because people who are from a very working class background can get a loan and go to university…and they miss the fact that, where I come from—I was one of the few people I know who ever went to college—and, although there was no barrier to stop them, they didn’t know that people weren’t just led to believe that that was an option, it wasn’t part of the culture to just assume that that was an option. So, yes, the door was unlocked, but if you never realized that it’s a door in the first place…it doesn’t matter whether there’s a lock on it or not, and I think that’s also the truth when it comes to people educating themselves about what they don’t know. So I think where there are solutions, I think the solutions still have to understand what people’s values are and try and engage, first at that level of, of values so that they understand the purpose of trying to assess and challenge their own perceptions of facts and situations first, and then you soften the ground for facts to take hold, but unless you do that kind of softening first, by helping people understand what their missing, I think you might end up with some stony ground on which those seeds would fall.

Francis: It seems to me that, prior to internet and a long time ago even, there were…arbiters, and whether these arbiters were credible or not, you know, I can’t say for sure, but there were either sources, like say the Encyclopedia Britannica, I don’t know if you have that in your country…and there were certain news sources, maybe, that people felt were legit, and you know there was a way to kind of settle differences in opinion to some extent…where is that today, and how can we…do we need that, should we—is that something we should try to strengthen or create more in our society?

Marsh: Yeah, I…don’t know really, ‘cuz I’m not necessarily sure that..that it ever really existed. I think people have always been very siloed into their…their own chosen media, and I think what we’re seeing isn’t…isn’t necessarily a new sensation of extreme siloing, although I think we are seeing a bit of that. But I think what we’re seeing is that…there’s more transparency around what silos people are in. And I talk about this a little bit when it comes to looking at, say, the news media. If you go back to before the advent of the internet, people would read their own newspapers and not really deviate from that. So I grew up, my family would read the tabloid, the Sun, which is a very right-wing tabloid, and I think a lot of people who would read that the Guardian, which is a left-wing broadsheet newspaper, wouldn’t ever see what was being said in the Sun, and certainly growing up I never saw anything that was said in the Guardian. So you had your own siloed readership there. And then the internet came along, and all news went up online and everyone read everything for a short amount of time, it was brilliant that you broke those silos down, and then people started just bookmarking their own sites and only returning to the news sites that they already would read, or the news sites that kind of, politically or culturally or socially, agreed with them and you kind of re-siloed. And then social media came along, and everything was sort of…everybody was reading a bit of everything, and sharing that into everyone’s timelines, and you’d see it from all sorts of different places, and then people would then silo by choosing who they followed on social media, and we go back into our silos of …you’re more likely to follow on social media or be friends with on social media, the people who share similar world views and therefore would share similar media platforms and media organizations as their go-to places. So I think we’ve seen this kind of, concertina effect of an expansion of…what we read, and then a contraction as we become comfortable in…having filtered out the bits that…made us a bit annoyed or we disagreed or we thought was ridiculous because we disagreed with it. And I suspect that’s always been the case, it’s just…way more obvious now that we’re not reading everything, because…if I went to a newsstand 30 years ago, and picked up my newspaper, I’d have no idea what was even in those other newspapers, and I probably wouldn’t have that many people around me who would tell me what was in those newspapers…now we have social media kind of eco-system where the worst things from those newspapers do pass in front of us and we can see what’s being said on the other side of the divide, and that’s what makes this kind of, so outraged that the other side of the divide are saying these things. So I think it’s kind of…it’s almost ironic that we are less likely to be fully in our echo-chambers and silos than we were. And the fact that we see stuff that we disagree with, and it shows us that we’re in that echo-chamber, makes..it a new phenomenon, where previously we would never have heard what was happening in someone else’s echo-chamber, and we could quite happily assume that the bubble that we were in represented reality in the rest of the world. So yeah, I don’t quite know…know whether there was ever this sense of objective, unquestionable truth, even the Encyclopedia Britannica has been shown to be, I believe it’s been shown, to be littered with more errors than Wikipedia, across a representative sample. So, yeah, we didn’t have a better system to check it against at the time, so it stood.

Chris: Wikipedia’s interesting, because it really shows a positive effect that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have contributed to.

Marsh: Yeah, I think it’s a…it’s an absolutely remarkable tool. And the idea that…it is a tool that is, a tool that iterates based on what can be sourced or shown to be true, is a huge and useful thing. You can’t just put up a statement on there and accept…and have it accepted as fact. But even that, I think…I think Wikipedia is fantastic, but it just shows how we’re still not great at designing a system that doesn’t accidentally get some pretty serious flaws in it. And I was actually talking to somebody who had a problem, they had a Wikipedia page written about them, and included a fact about which university they went to, and why they…didn’t go to that university, why they didn’t finish their degree at that university…and the fact was completely wrong, and was taken from an interview the person gave, and said something as a joke, or it was a misinterpretation by the journalist…so they would try and remove that “fact” and it would re-appear because of the source…we can source this, it was in this newspaper, it must be true, and the person saying “I am the subject of this material, it isn’t true”—but because they couldn’t, paradoxically, point to anywhere official that proved what they said about their lives was true, the thing that was wrong about their life stood. So even there, we’re still figuring out how to iron out kinks in the system. And I suspect we’ll never fully iron out the kinks, we’ll just have choose which kinks upset us the least, and which kinks upset our ability to get as close as possible to…truth, as possible, really.

Chris: Isn’t that the ultimate goal of science, is just to make increasingly accurate approximations of truth?

Marsh: Yeah, absolutely, to see how we can get rid of the errors that are there without introducing grander errors…is the scientific…the scientific objective. And I think that’s what a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand about science, is they assume that science is a series of assertions and rules and statements handed down from elite intellectuals in ivory towers, and misunderstanding that any one of these things that are considered to near certainties could be overturned if we had evidence and examples and demonstrations that sufficiently overturned that weight. So it’s the opposite of that kind of decree from on high, in that everything is approximate, sort of pending further information. So that’s kind of a misunderstanding that people have about what science is and what it’s looking to achieve…

Francis: Getting back to the idea of an arbiter for a lot of people, the Bible is the ultimate arbiter…so, you know, how to reconcile the world with science, which is based on reproducibility, and the Bible, which is based on whatever the Bible is supposed to be based on, we’re working through this, I suppose, as part of our evolution.

Marsh: Yeah, I think so, and I think also the conversations around religion that way have to kind of come through this, and I think that it from both sides, I think it’s very easy for…I myself am an atheist, I grew up in the Catholic faith but not really being that persuaded a believer, and so stepping away from that wasn’t a huge thing for me. But one of the things I see with a lot of the people who I would agree with in terms of the likelihood of there being a God, is a complete dismissal of people that they would disagree with about, on that question. And I do, I guess this comes to a point or an idea that I come back to a lot of times, that it’s very easy to write off the people we disagree with and say, well, these people are Biblical literalists, and there is nothing that I have for them, nothing I can say that would engage them at all, so we should just leave them over there to their thing…and I’d far rather that we, that people like myself who are atheists, would see people who are believers in the Bible and try to engage on what it is in that book, or what it is in their religion, that they hold valuable. So if nothing else, I’m not trying to tell people their God doesn’t exist, but I would quite happily like to discuss with them whether their God really is right when they say that gay people are evil and transpeople are evil and all these other things that…extreme religious conservatives would hold as true. I don’t need to persuade people that God doesn’t exist to persuade people that people who are gay and LGBTQ are acceptable. And I think if we do go down that route of saying, well, unless you’re an atheist, you’re wrong….I think we leave all those people to…to follow the worst elements of a religious doctrine, of a religiously-derived doctrine. So yeah, even with that, of people who get their truth in the Bible, I’d still rather understand what truth they’re deriving from it, and what values and what needs in their life, from an emotional, intellectual and, kind of, social point of view that is met by those issues and see how we can work around those to get them on board with some of the more progressive values that I think are good for the world.

Chris: But you’re one of the few people I know with the temperament that doesn’t lose his temper when…I mean, I’m just thinking of this week’s Be Reasonable episode…how you didn’t lose your shit while I was like, screaming at my iPad.

Marsh: Yeah, so, I mean this comes up lots, I’ve got this show that I do, Be Reasonable, where I talk to people that I completely disagree with about an issue…and rather than be aggressive or antagonistic or have this kind of big slanging match that lots of people would recognize as the kind of conversation they might have had before, I try and have a polite and good natured and…try and check their ideas and try to be…pretty intellectually rigorous without losing the thread of the conversation. And partly the reason I think that I do that show, is because those are conversations that a lot of people aren’t having, and it might be because they feel they aren’t able to have those, either because of the people around them who hold beliefs that are so far outside of the mainstream of people that you…you might work with, you might be friends with, you might have in your family, and you don’t want to start picking at those threads because they’re too raw beneath them. Or people feel, kind of have those conversations because they don’t think they’d be able to stay calm in the face of someone saying something that they find either incorrect or morally objectionable or those types of things. But for me, I think the value is in being able to hear those arguments without losing your civility in that moment, and I totally understand why some people would see, you don’t need to be civil if someone is doubting your personhood as a…in terms of your value as someone of a race different to theirs, that being civil to them isn’t something you would be inclined to do, and I appreciate that. But I think with my show, it’s there to be the place where these…some discussions will happen in a civil manner, so we can understand what are people who hold these ideas saying? Because a point that I’ve made out to people is that, when I talk to someone who is anti-semitic, or when I talk to someone who is selling alternative remedies to cancer patients, that will almost certainly result in some of their [daft?s] Those conversations, the only time that person is having that conversation is not just with me, it’s not just that they only ever have that conversation with me, they’re talking to lots of other people who don’t know that the person’s wrong, who don’t know necessarily to challenge them or check what they’re saying. And so we can allow those conversations to happen in the darkness and never know about them, or we can, in very certain situations and very certain circumstances, in pretty specifically crafted platforms, have those conversations and understand what rhetoric is convincing people that white supremacy is a valid idea that should still exist in the 21st century. So that’s kind of why I keep my cool and try and have objective conversations with people who hold objectionable views or incorrect views, in a way that doesn’t shut down the conversation, because I’m there to understand what do these people say to people in order to justify their views, and how do we hear what’s wrong with those arguments?

Francis: You could also see…as different views, which if they don’t hurt anyone, if they don’t infringe on someone else’s rights to be who they want to be and live the life they want, I say live and let live, you know? And I think one of the problems with the left is, we’ll hear a lot of the right, ultra-right-wing rhetoric, and automatically assume that they want to take over the world and force everyone to think like them…perhaps they’d be happy to just live in some little encampment in Idaho, really far away from where I live, and that’s fine (laugh). You know, I think, you know, there’s so many differences, there’s opinions that are just gonna persist, that what you’re doing sounds great, because what you say basically is that, ‘I’m gonna hear you out.’ And maybe initially that’s all that we can really do.

Marsh: Yeah, I think you’re right to a degree. I certainly am saying I want to hear them out. And I absolutely wouldn’t be saying that if I, for example, did a show where I speak to lots of people whose views I completely agree with, and then the next show would speak to someone whose views I completely disagree with, where people who tune in might not know which side of this…they’re on. What I wouldn’t want to do is just say, you know, this eminent scientist, who’s got some really fascinating research on physics, is at the same level of…conversation and….given the same level of platform as someone who, for example, as I spoke to this week, is, would describe themselves as a “race realist” who believes that white people…that other races are not as intelligent or capable as people who are caucasian. I absolutely wouldn’t want to equate the…those two conversations, with someone that I respect. The reason that I have a platform specifically for people I disagree with is I think it affords me a level of safety, or affords the conversation a level of safety, that I don’t have to worry that the people listening to me might be persuaded that, actually this guy’s got some pretty interesting views about race. People who listen to the show will know that I disagree with this person, and the only reason that they’re on the show is because I think they are completely wrong. And accepting that these people are wrong, let’s hear how this person who wrong about what they’re saying, justifies what they’re saying. Now I think one of the real issues, one of the reasons that I think I…am not inclined to say, we should just let everyone have their own opinions, is because, I think, for many of the people who, when talking to me—someone they know they disagree with—they’ll put forward one side of a conversation. And they’ll put forward certain arguments, certain rhetorics, that are there to represent their side as best as possible. But when they’re talking to someone that they agree with, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if they say very different things. And if those things aren’t, hey, we just want to all get…do…have our own lives and not really worry about [?] too much, I absolutely would be surprised if they went much further than that into places where they are incited, at the very least the infringement of other people’s civil liberties and at worst, probably incitement of actual violence. So, I do think it’s important to have the conversation with people you disagree with, to understand what they use to recruit people and what they use to persuade people. But I think we also shouldn’t just assume then that, well, this is just opinion and you’re welcome to have an opinion on these issues, because it’s harmless. I do think opinions that are obviously false harm someone, somewhere down the line. Even when it’s something like the flat earth, which the idea that the world is flat isn’t going to kill anyone, but I went along to a flat earth conference and saw speakers there who didn’t just think the world was flat, but also thought it was run by “Zionists” and their Protocols of the Elders of Zion prove that it’s actually the jewish people who are intentionally in charge of the world and intentionally causing all these disasters, and did you know they killed JFK? and did you know they did 9-11? and did you know they’re behind vaccines and you shouldn’t vaccinate your children, and did you know they’ve cured cancer, so don’t take chemotherapy…if we were to silo people off and say, you can go over there and have a belief that is contrary to the evidence and completely runs in the face of logic, but you just go over there and we just…will forget about you, I think you cut those people off to a place where they don’t end up in places that are good for them, either psychologically, intellectually or…in the long term, necessary physically. So I think it is still incumbent upon society to try and reach people who are holding ideas that are so far out of the mainstream and so far against logic and reason…I don’t think, yeah, cutting them off is a necessarily good solution to that.

Chris: Lastly, Marsh, is there anything you’d like to plug? I mean, you have two other podcasts, and I know you have an event coming up this July in Liverpool…

Marsh: So I do a lot of stuff, so the place to see the work that I …think is kind of, the important stuff I do, is Good Thinking Society, that’s the charity that I work for, where we’re doing things like challenging government’s provision of alternative medicine and things like that. So you can find that at GoodThinkingSociety.org …You can find the podcasts that I do, so Be Reasonable, the interview show where I talk to people I disagree with and try and keep things civil but interesting, and Skeptics with a K, which is a bit more of a light-hearted look at skeptical…well, we’re skeptical of news stories and pore through the evidence behind certain stories in a light-hearted way, you can find either of those on iTunes or general podcast providers. And it’s actually ten years that I’ve been involved in skepticism, and ten years since we founded the Merseyside Skeptic Society, so this July, for any UK listeners or anyone who happens to find themselves in the UK in July, we’re having a one day, one-off celebration of skepticism, where we’re gonna have a load of speakers and entertainment and I’m going to be emceeing it and talking about stories for the first 10 years of the Merseyside Skeptics Society. And you can find out more about that at MerseysideSkeptics.org.uk as well.

Chris: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on Making Better, Marsh.

Francis: Thank you very much.

Marsh: Well thank you so much for having me, I’ve really enjoyed it.


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[Bell End]

Chris Since you were an English major, therefore you must know this: I would like to spell, define, use in the sentence, and give us the etymology of the word “bell-end”

Marsh Oh, bell-end. I can do that, I can do that. It’s a…fantastic insult that I didn’t realize was not an insult that was used in America, I think it’s actually used in Australia as well, although I could be wrong about that. But a bell-end is the tip of a penis, the head of the penis above where the foreskin is—which might be why it’s not used in America because neither is the foreskin in a large part of America—but yeah, so the bell-end is the end of the penis. It’s just a lovely insult, ‘cuz it’s so evocative and ridiculous and has a lovely term to it, so to say someone is a “bell-end,” is a bit like saying, oh, they’re being a dick but not a dick in an aggressive way, more like a…an annoyance or a fool, or a bit goofy. So yeah, someone’s a bit of a bell-end, is a British insult, and it’s an insult that, when we use it on Skeptics with a K, which one of the podcasts that I do, and which is a bit more light-hearted than most of the stuff that I do, we didn’t realize it wasn’t a widely-used insult until one of our listeners used it in conversation not realizing what it was, and then had an English person there, they were like, “you can’t just say that”—they used it in a formal conversation, a formal setting, I think, and were told “why are you calling people the end of a penis?” Because people assumed that a bell-end was either end of bell curve.

Chris Susan thought it was the handle of a hand-bell that’s kind of shaped like a dick…

Marsh Ah, ok, I forgot that they did that…yeah, so some people did go with that, yeah. I know some people came up with that it was…that you’ve got a bell curve, and bell-end is someone who’s so far off the bell curve that they are not in a normal distribution, they are an extreme. So they used this in very sort of light-hearted and kind of, sort of slightly more academic kind of way, and British people in the audience were like, “did he just call you a bell-end?” (laughs)

Francis I never heard that one before…(laugh)


Episode 1: Interview With Sina Bahram Transcript

Welcome to Episode One of Making Better.

The Making Better podcast aims to create a solid framework for optimism by interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers. Our guests will include scientists, musicians, philosophers, activists, skeptics, writers, artists and any other sort with ideas for the future. Now, let’s meet the hosts of Making Better, Dr. Francis DiDonato and Chris Hofstader.

Chris: Well, Francis, this is episode one of Making Better.

Francis: Yes, I’m really psyched, it’s great to collaborate with you again. I think the last time we collaborated was in front of CBGBs maybe in the 80s?

Chris: I think the last collaboration we did was a fanzine we started out of your apartment..uh on the Bowery just south of CBGBs. I think that was 1981, ’82..so

Francis: My, how time flies..

Chris: Yeah, it sure does, and it means that we’re old now

Francis: Older and wiser, perhaps?

Chris: Perhaps.
(chuckles)

Francis: I was thinking that, these past 35 years, it’s almost like Ronald Reagan pushed society and society has just been falling down for like 35 years, but like now, because you know, we’ve sort of reached the end point with this guy that we have now in as President, it’s like this new sense of possibility again, like we could not be reactive and actually start looking ahead at what’s possible in the future.

Chris: Well, we’re seeing so many ..new activism starting up, everything from the Women's March to the Parkland kids and ..there’s a lot of reasons to be optimistic and a lot of people out there doing all kinds of interesting things to get society back to its normal pace.

Francis: Right. You know, I ve spent the last 35 years working in science, getting my PhD, and just being very heavily invested in that, and you have moved on to your…maybe you can describe what you’ve been doing..

Chris: Well, I did..most of my career, after 1983 was in software engineering, and then for the last 10 years I’ve been a full time activist in the disability rights space.

Francis: Yeah, so the things that were possible when we were hanging out originally at those hardcore matinees with your band, and my band, and..there’s new possibilities now, new opportunities technologically, and people have learned a lot about ideologies as well, so that you know I think that the excitement I’m having with this program is ..we’re almost on a fact-finding mission, what is possible, like what is this new world that we have the possibility of creating now?

Chris: This month’s guest is inclusive design specialist Sina Bahram. I’ve known Sina since he was about 16 years old, when he lied to me about his age and told me he was 19, which was easy to believe because he was already most of the way through his undergraduate degree at Nc state. Sina has gone on to form a company called Prime Access Consulting, and focuses most of his work on making museums accessible to all kinds of people, whether they have a disability or not. Our conversation with Sina discussed his work we talked a bit about museums, and we went as far as discussing even the nature of beauty. and a number of other topics, and we think you’re really going to enjoy our conversation with Sina.

Chris: Sina Bahram, welcome to Making Better!

Sina: Thank you for having me.

Francis: Yes, welcome

Chris: Sina, you’re most well known for being a universal design specialist. And when you look up “universal design” on wikipedia, it’s less than obvious what it’s describing. So, can you tell us in a manner that our listeners might understand, what you do and what universal design, inclusive design, and those kinds of things are?

Sina: Yeah, sure. I guess a few definitions of terms might be in order. So, you look up “universal design” on wikipedia and you see some things about the Center for Universal Design at [?]..State and you see Ronald L. Mace’s name tossed around, etc. any of (?) this broad spectrum of ideas, designs for ..used in the design of services and products and other offerings, etc. it enumerates these different kinds of things but doesn’t really tell you, what this is all about. And what it refers to is a methodology that incorporates thinking about all of the possible ways your users might be able or unable to interact with your offering due to, let’s say, disability, due to a difference in language, ..in my company, Prime Access Consulting, we like to use the phrase “the entire vector of human difference.” This is not only ability but it can refer to age and gender and orientation and so on and so forth. And these things matter because when we think about making a product, whether it’s an iPhone, whether it’s an apple corer in the kitchen, whether it’s a piece of software, we need to consider all of the possible users so we can make these things accessible and usable to the widest possible audience. So, in a nutshell, that’s what universal design, inclusive design, these things are. Now, there’s some nuanced differences between things like universal design and inclusive design, I tend to prefer “inclusive design” just because inclusive design, to me, well it has the word “inclusion” at its heart and that really is at the heart of my practice. So I tend to go around talking about inclusive design, but you’re absolutely right to point out that the Wikipedia page, for example, is on “universal design.” Some textbooks that exist in this space, they’re on universal design. That’s the more formal name over the years, but a lot of folks have been gravitating towards this idea of inclusive design. It also just feels a little less..totalitarian in a way, universal design, I’ve seen a lot of developers, especially, with a very pedantic mindset, be turned off by that phrase because they feel like they need to boil the ocean, right, they need to do all of the things, all correctly, all of the time, in one go. And that’s not the idea, the idea here is that you fail forward, you iterate and you make things progressively enhanced and more accessible to people in future iterations. You learn from your mistakes and you fail forward. That’s the impetus I bring to inclusive design work.

Chris: Now, you mentioned the name of your company is Prime Access Consulting..why don’t you tell us a little about the business that you run and how it’s been growing and then we’ll go on to my favorites of your clients.

Sina: Sure. So, Prime Access Consulting, or PAC for short, is an inclusive design firm, we’re headquartered out of RTP, Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, we’ve had a strong concentration on folks in the GLAM sector, so this is Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, for several years now. And the work that we …

Chris: So by “GLAM” you’re not referring to David Bowie, are you?

Sina: I am not. Sadly, although the MCA Chicago did have a David Bowie exhibit that benefitted from our work, and actually incorporated visual descriptions as part of the [coyote] project that we did with them. Essentially, what we do is we work with museums and folks in this sector on the entirety of their offerings. Right, so this could be a website accessibility project, looking at things like WICAG, the web content accessibility guidelines, an accessibility especially around persons who use assistive technologies like screenreader and screen magnifiers and things of this nature, but it can also refer to policies. It can refer to building out accessibility roadmaps, it can refer to working with boards of trustees, all the way down to the intern that just got hired last week. And understanding that this commitment to inclusion, this commitment to making our offerings, whatever they may be, content, digital, etc. available to the widest possible audience, that’s the responsibility of every single person in the organization. It’s not just one person’s job or one person’s role, or some system you can buy that will fix all of your problems. And so, we try to weave this idea of inclusion into the entirety of our clients’ practices. and so we do that through a variety of ways. We do that through working with their developers, we do that through testing and evaluation and audits and that sort of methodology, and we also do that occasionally when we are really lucky to get called in at the very beginning, and by the very beginning I’m referring to something that’s being built and the shovel hasn’t even hit the dirt yet. We’re talking early days, and we then have the opportunity in those cases, like we did with Canadian Museum for Human Rights, to lay down a groundwork where we can prevent inaccessibility and lack of inclusion from even cropping up in the first place. There’s always going to be little things, don’t get me wrong, but we’re laying the groundwork that the baseline expectation is that everything starts accessible and inclusive.

Francis: As a graduate student, my advisor was a big proponent and advocate of basic science. And a lot of the things that have turned into drug therapies, that [] thing, or even the tools to get to that, were done through basic science. And I bring that up because it makes me think that, in doing universal design, you can probably come up with technologies or other things maybe that have unexpected application and much broader scale. You see that?

Sina: Absolutely. Every day. Literally every day, in our work we see that. So, there’s the obvious examples of things like a curb cut. So a curb cut is that sloped piece of pavement or sidewalk that allows, for example, a wheelchair user not to have to hop the curb to cross the street—but that’s not the majority of people who use curb cuts. If you look at the numbers, the majority of folks who benefit from curb cuts are..parents with strollers, people with grocery carts, at the air, roller skaters and skateboarders and bicyclists, etc., and that’s just one example, right? And if you think about curb cuts, you think about the history of curb cuts, they used to be smooth. And then the problem was identified that, especially if you combine a smooth curb cut with not a lot of elevation difference, so there’s not a very steep slope, with the advent of silent or mostly silent cars by way of electri cars, you’ve got a recipe for not-such-a safe-crossing for, let’s say, someone who’s blind, that may not know they’ve crossed into a street from the sidewalk. So, we didn’t, as a society, go, “oh well, curb cuts were great, guess we’re not gonna do that anymore!” Right? That wasn’t our reaction, our reaction was, ok, there’s a problem here, and the progressive enhancement, the fail forward, was “let’s put bumps on it”…let’s put dots on it, it’s colloquially referred to as “foot braille”…(there are no messages, I’ve checked, municipalities are missing an amazing Easter egg potential there, I feel) But essentially, the idea there is that we gradually, you know, put these sloped bumps on it, it’s feeble with your foot, if you’re a guide dog user, feel-able with a cane if you’re a cane traveller, etc., doesn’t interfere with a bicycle, and it makes it better, right? So that’s one example of just broadening and it being used by others, but if you think about the advent of just technologies and in general, necessity is the mother of all invention, so the expression goes, and there’s a lot of necessity that comes out of work, especially when you’re thinking about users with differing abilities. So a lot of this work involves inventing solutions along the way…I think what puts our work aside a little bit is that I have a very strong commitment—I’m glad you mentioned basic science—to evidence-based, objective measures, right? It’s not just what I think is a good idea—I think I have lots of good ideas—but they’re not worth anything if you can’t evaluate them and prove that they are effective. And so, evaluation and evidence-based techniques are at the heart of what we do when we try to broaden those things that you’re talking about to wider audiences or spin them off as a technology, etc.

Francis: Can you give an example of that?

Sina: Sure, so let’s talk about visual description. So if you think about visual description, it’s the act of describing what you see, presumably for an audience that cannot see that thing. Right? And usually even additionally, presumably, because they are blind. Now most of these constraints don’t have to exist, you could be describing it to someone over the phone, they could be a sighted individual, but just not physically there with you. So then we could maybe broaden this to say, an eyes-free audience, right? And then you can broaden it even more to say, wait a minute, why are we concentrating on people who can’t see this thing? If you actually look at the work that involves, and we’ve done some of this work, we provide a visual description of a painting to someone in a contemporary art gallery. All of a sudden they go from “wow I feel really dumb in here I don’t know why that thing on the wall is really expensive, or is really valuable to society, or really has a message to say”…they go from that kind of feeling to “Oh, I get it, that little blue sliver in the background was the reflection of the sail of the ship..ok, I totally understand that”…and so it turns it into a prolonged looking exercise or an exercise in really guided looking…and this is, obviously, for a sighted individual. So it returns agency back to visitors of these institutions. you know, it’s really easy to talk about all the good things museums do, because there’s a lot of them, and they’ve been doing it for millennia, but, the idea here is that if you think about how people feel in the gallery, these feelings of exclusions are not just because of differences of ability, they can be about differences of background knowledge. If you’re not an art expert, reading a visual description, yes, that might be critical for a blind user, is still super helpful to you as a sighted viewer of that artwork. So that would be one example of broadening.

Chris: Since we’re back to art, I know one of the projects you did was the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and Andy is somebody I think is both a hero of mine and Francis as well, so if you could speak a bit about that project, ‘cause it’s kind of personal and I think Andy has taken snapshots of both of us at different times…

Sina: (laugh) With the Andy Warhol Museum, one of the things we did was tactile reproduction. So this was, [Edith Whitewall] out of Pittsburgh came up with this really cool technique, to basically laser into I think a sort of [CNC] type of process, into a material called acetol (sp) and acetol is this geometrically inert material, supposedly you can put it in gasoline for over a year and it will not change shape, which, you know, immediately makes you think, OK, this is a good candidate to be felt by the general public. You know, a bunch of people are going to be touching it. So, that’s the material we went with, and then he basically wrote a mapping algorithm to go from color to elevation. And so you have things that are, for example, brighter, that are raised, and darker, that are lower elevation, and as you’re touching something, you then can get a sense of what the painting or line drawing or screen print may represent. But here’s the thing, if I give you these tactile reproductions, just throw one at you, right…you sit down at a table, you’ve got both arms out, right, these are reasonably big, sometimes they’re a foot, two foot, three foot in diagonal. You’re not going to immediately go, “Oh, OK, I get it, this is a reclining nude” or “this is a sports car from a three-quarter sort of profile” being seen…you’re not going to necessarily immediately intuit that, because of how tactile graphics work. And so what we did with Andy Warhol as part of this project is, we provided them two things. We provided them visual descriptions of the artworks, so that you have a general sense of what is being seen, and for all of the benefits I alluded to earlier, but then we also provided guided tactile description. So guided tactile descriptions are the act of assuming someone is touching the tactile reproduction as you are describing it to them, and not only are you describing the visual things that are going on, you’re describing what they feel like. So as you take your right hand and start on the letter “c” this spells out the manufacturer’s brand name, C-a-m-p-b-e-l-l-‘-s. You’ll notice a drop shadow to the right of the “C” and in this font, the “e” looks like a backwards “3,” you know, something like this. Right, so you can start explaining as someone is touching, you know, something iconic like Campbell’s, and this allows you to get much more detail and a much more immersive, rich experience. But, there’s also an awesome side effect—the side effect is, and I saw this happen, this happened in front of me. I was there doing some testing, we were at an evening event there at the museum…this girl, I think she was eight, ten years old, something like that, couldn’t have been older than ten years old, and she’s asking her mom, she’s like “Mommy, why are there dots on it?” because we had braille labels to the right of these things, to explain the work and so on and so forth, and she’s like why are there bumps there, why are there dots? And so mom and daughter had a three, four minute discussion about “that’s braille, someone who’s blind can read it, etc.”…and again, they were not talking about Andy’s works at all, whatsoever, not for that three or four minutes. But that side effect, the museum could not have been more delighted about that, right, that happened in their space, they facilitated that conversation. So you get this awareness building as a side effect of this inclusive work as well.

Francis: I guess a question I also have, that seems kind of simplistic, but I think is important, is ..why inclusion?

Sina: Yeah, no, I think it’s a fair question. Those kinds of questions, I feel, need to be answered through the lens through which you interpret the world, right? So if you want to take a utilitarian approach to the world, or a moral objectivism approach to the world, or you know there’s various philosophies of how we should treat fellow humans and so on and so forth. If you want to be pragmatic about it, we’re all getting older, right? As we do, we are very easily able to enter and sometimes leave the group of persons with disabilities. and this has nothing to do with socioeconomic status, or anything along these lines. And so if you want to take a completely selfish approach to this, this is something that could help you, maybe not now, but in the future, and you’ll be dependent on this.

Chris: In my talks on disability, one of the things I always say, that makes disability different from every other minority, is that a) disability is the only minority that intersects with every other minority, and it’s the only minority that you will ultimately join if you live long enough.

Sina: If you live long enough, I totally agree with that. And the thing is, there’s other reasons, there’s benefits. When we talk about business, we talk about ROI based arguments—Return on Investment—right, and there’s a lot of that. You know Toyota has a lot of inclusive design and universal design initiatives. They’re not necessarily—you know, I don’t want to impugn their moral objectives, but I don’t feel they’re doing it for only moral reasons, they have a fiduciary duty to their stockholders. The reason they’re doing it is, they can sell more cars to more people for longer, end of discussion, full stop. That’s an ROI argument, and it’s a very easy one, because now there’s evidence and data about it, it’s not just what people think will happen or say is a good idea. When we talk about institutions like museums, we don’t talk about ROI in terms of return on investment, we talk about ROI in terms of return on institutional objectives. So by making your stuff more inclusive, you are increasing your visitorship, you are increasing your engagement time, you are increasing your ability to contribute positively to the community. Whatever their institutional objectives are, these practices, they assist that as well.

Francis: What about from an economic standpoint? Are there economic incentives for this kind of thing?

Sina: There are, I mean, again, with respect to the return on investment argument, you can sell more products to more people for longer, so that’s definitely an immediate economic incentive from a purely capitalistic perspective. Depending on the kind of work you are doing, there’s non-dilutive (sp?) granting that’s available, granting that if you’re a small company, doesn’t require you to give up equity but is just a funding source, you know, think of Mellon Foundation and the Knight Foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates, all of these charitable and philanthropic organizations. So there’s economic support from that perspective. There’s also the flip side, which is that there are legal and regulatory requirements to doing these things, whether it’s video accessibility and we’re talking about captioning an audio description, or media companies, or we’re talking about website accessibility, there are a lot of rules on the books now in a variety of different countries, to enforce these things. And so there’s economic incentives and there are a lot of disincentives not to do this, I feel that, in pretty much every layer of the stack that you want to look at.

Chris: One of the incentives, Francis, is certainly to avoid getting sued. And Sina, maybe you want to speak a little bit to the legal frameworks between the ADA, ADA Restoration Act, and IDEA.

Sina: Sure, ..look, I’m not an attorney, nor am I cute enough to play one on TV, so I want to preface all of this…you have legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act or ADA for short, it’s going on 28, 29 years now, the 30th anniversary is coming up in 2020 I believe, and the way that courts, especially within the United States of course, have established what it even means for a place to be a public place of accommodation, and subject to things like the ADA and to be accessible, is that websites are falling into this categorization. So what you start seeing is, you don’t see a lot of cases go all the way to settle…excuse me, go all the way to a decision, they mostly get settled out of court. Sometimes they get settled even pre-lawsuit phase, through things like mediation and so forth, but there’s a really, you know, important I think understanding to have here that, if you’re selling something, especially, to the public online, and you are a public website, a public company, etc., there’s virtually no defense you have having an inaccessible website. And so oftentimes, what you’re noticing over the past, oh, 15 to 18 years, is that the caselaw has just overwhelmingly been in favor of any type of plaintiff that brings a complaint on these grounds. Now, there’s something really important to talk about here when we talk about legal frameworks and accessibility and so forth. So, we can agree that a lot of us…on this conversation and most of the time in accessibility conversations, want companies to do the right thing and we’re able to help them achieve those goals etc., the first reaction is not to suit up. These legal frameworks do exist though, when there is no other source of recourse. However, what is happening a lot these days is that you’ll see these drive-by lawsuits, where folks will sue a company or a series of companies, they’ll grab a random person off the street that identifies as having some disability, and then usually it’s a blind person, and then sue under those grounds, and this is the law firm just using this as a purely money-grab scenario. And that does not make for a healthy accessibility environment, because it really makes it so that nobody takes accessibility seriously, they see it for what it is, which is a hundred-fifty, hundred-sixty thousand dollar money grab by a law firm per case, and they’re not actually making the web more accessible. Now it’s important also to give a shout-out here to Lanie Feingold, who is—I would say the country’s, but I would probably argue—the world’s expert in structured negotiation. So she actually goes in, and she’s an attorney by training and by practice, and she goes in and works with both parties to arrive at a solution so that this does not need to turn into a lawsuit.

Chris: In Lanie’s entire career as a disability attorney, only one of her cases, the lawsuit against JetBlue, is the only one that ever made it to a courtroom.

Francis: What was that one about?

Chris: JetBlue absolutely refused to negotiate, so they ended up in court. But it was about the JetBlue website, blind people couldn’t make their own plane reservations.

Sina: Fun fact about air travel, the reason that, at least to my understanding, that the in-flight entertainment systems and such are not subject to accessibility requirements, is because DOT (Department of Transportation) carved out those things as an exception, as an exemption, and what they got in return was all of the meet-and-assist and other facilities that exist to assist disabled travelers and travelers with disabilities in the airport, but as a result, basic ADA does not apply on board an aircraft, in the sense that your screen that could trivially be made accessible, absolutely trivially, is not.

Francis: I was wondering what you’ve seen on the horizon that is particularly exciting in …new technologies, new directions, …where do you see us being in, say, even 10 years from now?

Sina: Well, I’ll rig that up into two different questions. So what have I seen recently that’s pretty exciting? There’s some really great stuff happening in the AR space especially (Augmented Reality) where you are taking the video and audio feed in from a..traditionally a mobile device…and then layering some things on top of that. And in the space there’s some really cool stuff happening, for example, with an app that you can run on your phone—this is still in prototype phase, so I’m going to talk about it in the general sense—you wear it as a lanyard around your neck, and you turn around in the gallery, and as you’re looking around the gallery you are being told what the painting is, the visual description of it, and even immersed in an audio experience of that world. So imagine that when you’re looking at the painting of the Statue of Liberty, you’re hearing the wind and everything go by, because that’s the, kind of the angle of the shot, and then you maybe pan over to a farm scene, and you hear that sort of immersive 3D audio space. And so these are some things that are really interesting because it takes the ability to blend things like AR and VR (Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality) with these needs to make these environments more inclusive. And instead of treating it as a problem and sort of saying, “that’s hard, we can’t make VR accessible, we can’t make AR accessible,” it’s actually flipping that proposition on its head and saying, we can use AR to make the physical world more accessible. So that’s pretty exciting to me, and there’s a lot of projects along those kinds of lines that are using technology, not only to make our digital world accessible, but to make the physical world accessible. This is everything from scanning applications that read what’s on the end of a camera, whether it’s currency or text or objects or faces, to audio recognition to assist communication for people who are deaf and hard of hearing, you name it, right? With respect to looking 10 years forward, I think…you know, there is a lot going on right now. I mean, there’s a lot of things I’m really fascinated to see how it’s going to play out. We are finally at a point where we’re making some significant progress in AI, and in machine learning. I don’t think we’re going to have strong AI by 2029, but I do think we’re going to have expert systems that are, maybe, finally, worth at least their label, and can be expert [at doing stuff]. I’ve always found that …that label to be a little frustrating, because most “expert systems” that I have interacted with have…been anything but. And so you’re going to see more of that, you’re going to see more conversational agents, right, things like your Alexa and Siri and so on and so forth. You’re going to see more integration between these things.

Francis: I was wondering if you might touch on any advancements in AI that you’ve come across recently..that are particularly exciting to you…

Sina: I think that, there are a couple of areas that are being worked on right now that are really interesting. One area refers to basically transfer of knowledge between different neural network based approaches. Right, so you have a system that can translate language, great. awesome. And you have another system that can understand what it sees, computer vision, OK? That’s delightful, great. Now, these two things need to talk to one another, but not only do they need to talk to one another…you can always take the output of one and make it the input of the other, in fact that’s how, for example, Facebook’s image recognition stuff and how a lot of other things work, right. This is based on some work out of MSR and Microsoft presearch and several others do this, where you take…um, Margaret Mitchell’s work, and so you take the output of a computer vision system, you feed it into a natural language processing, a natural language generation system, and then that’s how you can get the computer to describe what it sees. That kind of linking, that’s doable. But I’m talking about is, if you have awareness of the world, and a model built up, of understanding of concepts and an internal formalism, if you will..those, in our brains, are hybridized across language, and vision and olfactory and all this other stuff…and so, that’s the kind of stuff that I’m interested in, in AI and machine learning right now, these system that don’t just do one thing well. It’s great that you can play chess and beat any living being. I’m really happy for you. But what I’m really interested in is that I can introduce a new game to you, you know, dear computer system, that you’ve never seen before, tell you the rules, and we can immediately play and start having fun. I can do that with most humans, and most basic card games, in no time flat. But I can’t do that with a computer system, necessarily…we’re getting better about that kind of transfer [base]. Now that’s one area. The other area looks at things like, capsule nets and other ways of representing knowledge. Right now, the way neural networks work for the most part is, they operate off of this insight that we can choose to go one of two ways. We can either see a ton, and I mean a billions of rows of data, and then use a little bit of calculation per observation to arrive at a model, or, we can see very little data, and use a ton of calculation to arrive at a model. Now, the system that most people are familiar with that your phones, your computers, your TVs, everything, your Alexas, they all use the former, right, they are based on billions and billions, trillions of rows sometimes, and then they do a little bit of calculation and they arrive at a neural network as an understanding of the world. But if you think of us, as people, that’s not how we work. We don’t make a billion observations, there’s very few things I think any human has made a billion observations about…if anything. But a baby can start acquiring words in no time flat! Right? So these kinds of concepts of one shot learning…and, if I right now in this conversation said, “Chris—red means 3, and Francis, blue means 4” and then I asked you guys, “what’s red plus green {blue?}, you guys shout out “seven”—that’s great, that’s awesome, we were able to learn a couple of things and then perform operations in a different domain, and we did that…I mean, I did it for you, hypothetically…but we did that in no time flat, as people. Computers have a hard time with that. That’s a trivial example, but you can extend that to things like a robot assisting you. So you want to show the robot how you want to laundry folded. As opposed to relying on laundry-folding algorithm version 4.7.1…and that’s where I think some interesting work is being done as well.

Francis: I was wondering if you could provide a laymen’s description of quantum computing…?

Sina: Sure. I’ll take a crack at it.. Quantum computing is based on some of the observations we as a society, we as a species have made about how the universe operates, at a quantum level. So, without getting into the specifics of quantum mechanics, a subject that I don’t even feel qualified to give a lecture on…

Chris: Richard Feynman himself said, as soon as you think you understand quantum mechanics, you know you don’t ..know anything about quantum mechanics.

Sina: Having dabbled a little bit, I cannot agree more with that claim, right. At the heart of it, this comes down to an interesting way the world works…the universe operates. At least to our current understanding. And that is that, if you are talking at the quantum scale, at very small, very tiny, tiny microscales, then an electron, for example, does not have a fixed orbit around an atom. It has a probability that you can say, of where it may be at any give time. And the reason for this is that there is an inverse relationship between the momentum of that ..electron and its position, and between momentum and position we can extrapolate to velocity, which is oftentimes what’s used. And we know we can either really precisely tell you how it’s traveling, you know, or we can really precisely tell you exactly where it is. But as you pinpoint one, you lose accuracy about the other, allright? And then, you also start realizing that in quantum mechanics, there’s a concept called entanglement. So entanglement relies on this idea that, if you take two particles…don’t worry about what they are, and let’s just give them a..property, allright? We take two photons, and one of the properties we like to talk about in quantum chromodynamics, for example, is the spin. So imagine that something can have a spin of “up” or a spin of “down” for just the purposes of this discussion. If we take two photons and entangle them with one another, then if we modify the spin of one photon to be up,”the other one is guaranteed to be down…this starts leading to really interesting things you can do. Like, for example, entangling a lot more than just two particles together. So, fast forwarding a lot and doing a lot of hand-waving, quantum computing relies on these fundamentals to allow us to perform calculations in a square root of the time it would take us otherwise. So in other words, if you had to perform a million calculations to do something, on a quantum computer you could do that with a thousand calculations, right? And that’s because these “cubits” as they are called, are entangled with one another, and you can then perform certain manipulations to arrive at a solution, depending on how you phrase your problem. And it’s very complicated, it’s not about adding ones and zeros together or anything along these lines. But what it buys you is some drastic quadratic speed-ups of things like factoring prime numbers, like searching a database, and like modeling quantum effects. So if you think of a modern computer system, think of a chemistry-based system. It has to know all of these rules for every single particle, and the more you can model, the more precise your model is going to be. Well, in a classic computer system, you’re going to quickly exhaust, you know, billions, trillions, quadrillions of calculations in a very small amount of time, just to model just a few drops of a liquid, you know? And so, with a quantum computer, you’re able to do this and with the accuracy of those quantum effects, actually being modeled correctly. And so now you can start applying this to…well, there’s a couple of implications. Number one, a lot of basic assumptions of cryptography go out the window, because factoring prime numbers becomes a lot faster, right? Now there are quantum proof algorithms that we have today, we can look at things like [electric] curve cryptography and [polwart] secrecy and that domain, etc. There’s also applications where you look at drug discovery, or you look at, OK, I want a material that…this is rather topical…I want a material like steel, but I want it to be see-through…and I also, you know, want it to have certain properties, like being able to carry an electric charge on top of it. Well, right now we have to kind of experiment and noodle around and bump into things and use a few first principles in the lab–I’m grossly oversimplifying here–to arrive at some of those things. But if you have the ability to search the space of materials, and start doing parameter sweeps, you could start discovering these types of solutions in a computer system without even needing to prototype it first. That’s the kind of advances quantum computing brings.

Francis: The purpose of the show is to identify..where’s that gap between where we are right now, and what is possible for us…right at this moment. And I was hoping that maybe you could provide a couple of concrete examples of what changes we’re not manifesting, what technology we’re not taking advantage of, that could make the world a much better place right now.

Sina: I think that a lot of what contributes to that gap that you’re alluding to…is not necessarily an absence of technology or engineering or something from the sciences, right—there’s some of that, of course, you know, we don’t have a systemic cure for cancer right now, we don’t have an amazing battery solution, you know, if we could increase energy density by 10X you would ..the world would change. The world would literally just…change. Because energy is really what limits us in terms of ability, your phone could be a million times more powerful…an energy problem, right? and a heat problem, in terms of what you do when you have that amount of energy and you’re generating heat, you have to get rid of that heat. So these are the kinds of fundamental advances that prevent us from jumping that to some of the things we see from sci-fi, right? So your phone can act as a pocket projector and also act as a system that could power anything from an airplane all the way down to, you know, your phone call, your video chat, etc.,…there’s not a lot of practical limitations there, there’s some engineering problems that wouldn’t be resolved, but the fundamental things have to do with energy density, in terms of batteries and the ability to handle heat, right, waste heat. But, I think that a lot of the reason for not crossing this gap has to do with policy, it has to do with the absence of different teams being able to work with one another in seamless ways. It has to do with the lack of efficiency when we try, as humans, to do virtually anything at scale.

Francis: I have a question that goes back to art, and making museums accessible. I think that, for me, as someone who is, I’m a scientist, I’m also a musician, I think a lot about the idea of beauty and I think about beauty and science in the context of elegance and …beauty is a really, really important part of being human. I would like to hear maybe a little about what your views are on the importance of beauty and how what you’re doing is helping people with disabilities to experience …

Sina: Well, one minor nitpick would be that I hope what we’re doing is helping everyone experience it better, not only persons with disabilities. But definitely an emphasis there. I think…beauty is a difficult one to me, because it seems highly subjective, right? Our concepts of beauty in the western world are very different than those in other parts of the world, and over time, these definitions have changed as well. There’s also different interpretation frameworks for beauty, you know, aesthetics vs. simply contribution to the whole vs. simplicity and elegance as you alluded to earlier. So…there’s a lot to unpack in that one word, and I think it’s highly overused…or, I shouldn’t say it’s overused, it’s over-loaded, right? It’s highly over-loaded term. But what I can say is that, what I find beautiful is, essentially looking at experiences, and allowing for and facilitating shared experiences to happen with the same level of enjoyment across the different parties. So if you think of a blind person being at an aquarium, where their sighted friend is looking at the fish and going “wow, oh my gosh that one looks so cool, it’s got these orange stripes on it and it’s swimming really fast but only in the front, really close to the glass..” right? Well, can we translate that, right? Can we use computer vision and an audio landscape to bring that to life, simultaneous with the visual observation? And the metric for this that I use is, do you both go “wow” or “ooo” at the same time? If you do, we did our job right. Win, we succeeded, high five. But, that’s easier said than done. There’s a lot to be unpacked there, we’re talking about cross-domain expressions of beauty through various modalities and being piped into, in your case, vision, and my case, an aural representation, two very different people with different backgrounds, right? There’s so many variables to unpack there. But at least we’re trying to reach parity with the experiential nature of some of these environments, like in the case of museums, as you asked about. So that’s one, I think, aspect of beauty. The other one is, when we talk about a visual description, a lot of people start gravitating toward this unnecessary requirement that they put on themselves, and it is that my description must be objective, right? First of all, I reject this notion. There’s no such thing as an objective description, not one written by a human being, right? I completely reject that, on first principles, definitionally, I feel that that is not true. Moving on past that assertion, I think that we need to start acknowledging principles like, multiplicity of voices, right? So a 26 year old man of color out of Baltimore is going to have a very different visual description of a Carry James Marshall painting than a 45-year old white lady working in the museum, right? And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that, but we should be able to allow for the surfacing of multiple interpretations and multiple objective, you know, pseudo-objective descriptions of these things, and simply embrace that. And so I think that, maybe increasing diversity might be one tactic toward the strategy of beauty, if I can put it into that framework, but I don’t know that I even internally have a definition of beauty that I find consistent enough to then say, how are we maximizing it, necessarily, in our work.

Chris: When I think of memories of various artworks, my favorites are people like Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper, but I also think of some Abstract Expressionist works, you know, Jackson Pollock and DeKooning and people like that, how do you possibly even start to describe…I mean…

Sina: Yep, no, it comes up..so, with abstract, I would argue that a description is merely the first step. And that you really need to look at multi-modal, multiple modalities, of expression there. You need to look at tactile, you need to look at sonification, which the use of non-speech-based audio, you need to look at, again, different descriptions or guided tactile descriptions, olfactory, for example, etc. And so there are these mappings that can occur, cross-sensory mapping, and that can then start bringing something like an abstract Jackson Pollock piece to life. And I think it’s very important to discuss sequencing, right? You set the scene for someone, you’re like, OK, you’re about to feel this thing, it represents a bunch of paint just being splattered everywhere, just go in with that mindset. It’s not an accurate definition, the curator will have my head for telling you that..it’s fine. Just think about that for a second.

Chris: I think of trying to look at a Jackson Pollock painting with something like a sensory substitution piece of software, like seeing with sound, and that piece of software specifically always starts at the right and pans right to left, yet visually when I see a Jackson Pollock painting, I always would start from the center and work my way out, probably in concentric circles.

Sina: Absolutely, but that’s why I would argue we would hopefully not be using a general purpose tool to interpret this, but it would be one that was specifically, you know, it would be bespoke, specific to this building. Because otherwise, I think, you can’t get there. Now eventually you can start establishing models and different frameworks for saying, in this type of abstract painting in this type of abstract painting, versus that type of sculpture versus that type of line drawing, we should use these other modalities, and these are the mappings, and that becomes then a very interesting machine learning problem, to pick the right output modalities and also to allow the user to customize that. But, I would say, for now those need to be …I shouldn’t even say almost..those need to be treated on a one-off basis.

Chris: That makes sense, certainly. I mean, because they were also painted on a one-off basis…

Sina: Exactly. Exactly.

Francis: One of the things that I think is a failing of the economic systems that we’ve had in the 20th century that, to a large degree, persist now, is that there has been this top-down, sort of implementation of possibilities for people professionally, economically…in a way that eliminates people …to figure out for themselves what it is that they really want to be doing to contribute to society, at least in an optimal way. And I was thinking that part of what we would need for that to change, is a sense that the very same thing that would allow me to have the resources and the freedom to go after what it is that I’m passionate about in life, is the same thing that will enable other people to do that. So I’m wondering if that is, sort of like another reason for inclusion, because the idea is that if we keep thinking about organizing this world in a way that optimal for the maximum amount of people based on this sort of cookie-cutter idea of how people should be, and what should make them happy, we’re gonna make it impossible for a lot of people on the other side of that bell-shaped curve to contribute and to live satisfying life and to give the world the gifts that they are capable of giving…

Sina: Yeah, I think that’s true. I mean, I think that right now, the determining characteristics of what people do, sometimes can hopefully pleasantly align with what they like doing, but it’s about making money to be able to afford food, and shelter, and supporting the family, you know, xyz, these kinds of real-world concerns. So the issue then becomes, allright, you’re now starting to enter a world, we’re a little ways away from it, but it is happening, where automation is going to make that less and less and less needed…at least for certain categories of job, categories of labor and skill. So then, you’re going to have a lot of people who don’t…well, at leat…two things, number one, they don’t need to work to continue making the planet operate…you now, most economists I think say, like, with full automation, less than 10 percent of people have to work, right? So …talk about 8 billion people or whatever it is, 800 million have to work around the world, what do you do with the other 7. 2 billion people? And this is where I think it speaks to your point of, well, what kind of interests do they have and how can they contribute to society and what’s the impetus to do that, and do we all just stay home and exist in a VR environment for 8 hours a day, you know, what’s that future look like? And you know, I think that humans are usually pretty good, as a whole, not necessarily in small chunks, but as a whole, for seeking challenges. So, you’re going to start seeing more stuff with, the moon, or Mars, or solving some of these other problems, or building cities under the surface of the ocean…things of this nature. And I have a feeling…

Chris: With climate change, Miami will be under the surface of the ocean…

Sina: There you go, yeah, exactly. (laugh) A really practical example. Yeah, I mean..I just feel like that’s the kind of stuff that is going to exist, but the impetus for “I must do this in order to eat tonight” is gonna become less and less and less. And so, then it becomes a really, really big problem, it’s a complicated problem with a lot of moving parts involving economics and politics and socioeconomics and just all sorts of things. So…

Chris: How do we avoid then, some sort of Ready Player One type dystopia?

Sina: I think that having challenges is a really good motivator, right? So, I mean, I’m all about using space as a mechanism to solve the problems here on earth, right? I think you do need to start encouraging people to become colonists on Mars. It’s not for everybody, but …you’re going to find, out of 8 billion people, 80 of them that are willing to go out there and have a really crappy life for a couple of years, right? But we’re going to learn a lot from that. And you know, you’re going to find the next wave that’s like, they at least got the water and the air thing figured out, I think I’ll go, I know they don’t really have the food thing figured out yet, but….

Chris: Lawrence Kraus would say, we’d sent graduate students, because they’re slaves anyway…

Sina: Exactly, right? I mean (laugh) that would be…there you go. But I mean…that…I think is part of it, the other part of it is that I think we’re going to have different challenges. You’re not going to need to drive a truck anymore. The robot does that for you…but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not going to be part of the project that is going to start turning all of those highways…you know, let’s say we figure out another form of transportation…you’ll have all these highways around, what are you going to use those for after a while, right? If cars aren’t going on them, if we have hovercraft or something, then what are they going to be used for? Right? Could we turn those into solar…existing solar installations, where you don’t have to do anything, right? There’s all sorts of weird ideas and interesting things that I don’t think we know about yet, …that can provide an outlet so that we don’t turn into a Ready Player One type dystopia, but I’m not so convinced that we won’t turn into a Ready Player One type dystopia if we keep making the types of political decisions and lack of concern about climate change and other pressing needs that we seem to be doing.

Francis: I thought of a metaphor maybe also for what I was getting at…you know, in the twentieth century mindset we have this, like bending machine kind of mindset, whereas with automation, AI and all that, even to some degree now with 3D printing and what you can do maybe in that direction, it’s more like we should be adopting—and I hate to use Star Trek a lot, but—you know, like a more Replicator kind of mindset.

Sina: Yeah, I think you are going to start moving towards a world in which things don’t need to be built ahead of time to be available to you. So that would be how I would phrase that. You’re already seeing that to a certain extent, just through things like convenience of, you know, like these coffee pods that you can put in a machine, hit a button and you get a cup of coffee. Well, you didn’t have to grind the beans, you didn’t have to …use a French press to extract that perfectly at below 140 degrees Fahrenheit, you didn’t have to do those things, you just hit a button…and you have a pretty decent cup of coffee that comes out…it’s not great cup of coffee, I’m a little bit of a coffee snob, but…it’s totally servicable, and that’s only gonna start getting better, so I do think that is definitely true, where we’re going to start moving towards a something does not need to have been made for it to be made in a short amount of time, or at least assembled or in some way available to you. But, I also again would go back to most of those things require energy. Most of those things require access to cheap and renewable power, and so we’ve got to solve this energy problem. I would actually go so far as to revise my answer from earlier, if you really want to know the thing that I think would make the most fundamental impact on the world, with respect to addressing your gap question, it would be solving energy density and the availability to free and renewable energy. I think that would have the highest impact.

Chris: So I’m gonna go downstairs as soon as we’re done with this podcast and start making my own cold fusion machine….

(laugh)

Sina: Good luck with that, the literature is a little torn on the possibilities there, so let me know what you come up with.

Francis: When you’re testing it, turn off the air conditioner….

(laugh)

Chris: Well, with that I’ll ask you our..closing question we ask everybody, and you already mentioned Prime Access Consulting, your company, but is there anything else you’d like to plus, of your own work or somebody else’s work, or ..anything that you’d like to just pitch to our listeners?

Sina: Well, I would encourage you to just think about whatever it is you’re doing, whether it’s at a nonprofit, at a for-profit organization, in your personal life, and think about in which ways you may be inadvertently and unintentionally excluding a group of people, whether it’s because of ability or different backgrounds, etc. and what are some ways that you could make small changes to make that better. Maybe you’re running a restaurant and you can just print out a few versions of your menu in 22 point fonts…a really easy ask, it costs you a few cents of paper and ink, and you can keep them behind the desk…it’s a really simple thing. It’s not gonna solve all your problems, but it’s a step in the right direction. And I think that if, frankly, if every one of your listeners did one or two or three things like that, we’d be moving that needle towards a better world.

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

Sina: Thanks for having me.


Closing: We’d love to know what you think of our podcast. Please visit us on the web at MakingBetterPod.com or follow us on Twitter @MakingBetterPod. Leave us feedback, or, if you really like what we’re doing, send us a donation. Initially, we plan on releasing episodes on a monthly basis, but once we’ve raised $1,000 to cover some of our costs and to encourage us to keep going, we plan on releasing episodes every second week. Just to let you know what’s coming up, future episodes already in production include interviews with: Michael Marshall, from the Merseyside Skeptics Society; M.E. Thomas, author of Confessions of a Sociopath; and Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation. See you next month!