[upbeat music] It's Quinn.
Maybe you're like me, and sometimes you just spiral out, not just because everything is a lot all of the time, but because some part of you actually wants to do something about it.
But, I mean, holy shit, where to start, right? Great news. We built an app for that. It's called What Can I Do? Even better news, it's free and it's fast. It takes just three clicks to start unfucking the world.
Visit whatcanido.earth to get started for free. [upbeat music] We have a very special returning guest today, Dr.
Maddie Stone, scientist, mom, blogger, author of The Science of Fiction, which is one of my favorite blogs. And it's important to remember I'm very old.
I predate blogs in a lot of ways, so saying it's one of my favorites, I think, goes a long way. Maddie's back. We're gonna rerun our actual conversation with Maddie from a while back. Maddie, what's your guess? Was that
six months ago, a year ago, or seven years ago? Oh my gosh. That was- I don't know. [laughs]... like I fell into the event horizon of a black hole. [laughs] Time is just, like, stretching out.
I don't know if it's been two seconds- Ugh... or 10 years. Mm-hmm. I'm Matthew McConaughey banging on the bookshelves, but I don't know what to ask for because everything is such a mess.
What do I even tell my younger self besides get more sleep? It's not gonna be great. We have Maddie back for a very special reason, and hear from you in a sec. I just wanna talk about sort of our reason why. In...
The election didn't go so great for people who give a shit about other people and ecosystems and continuing to nudge the line of progress in the direction of helping more folks.
And one of my favorite politicians, which is a weird phrase to use, we try not to make idols of anybody, but people who continually, measurably fight for a better future, we try to do that.
So one of mine, AOC, after the election, she said, "We can't just be right. We have to be effective."
And one of the things we've done a very poor job in general is of meeting people where they are and not just yelling at them about how it should be better and how we can make it better and being perfectionist about it.
And where we considered here, Willow and I, and I really should've dragged her onto this, but she usually refuses to, [laughs] which is understandable.
We had all these ideas, you know, a year and a half ago, Maddie, about, oh, if we're gonna expand our operations, knowing what we do well, should we have newsletter and podcasts, like, about electrification or about public health or about
trees or, you know, natural carbon remo- uh, uh, all these different things. And one, it's a little less fun. You know?
Two, I think there's a lot of, like, B2B publications and groups that do that really well already that we're not so versed in necessarily. That is not our day job.
And three, those people are already kind of being reached. Like, the people who are listening to a podcast about home electrification are already on board. But if we talk to people about
fantasy fiction and science fiction and secondhand clothing and food and things like that, or health, like in the gym, right, whatever the white guy thing is, these are places people already are.
They're listening to these things, reading these things, watching either four-second videos or 400-hour podcasts. I spend my evenings watching the same spaceships over and over go pew pew.
And I think if you're able in this day and age to take the actual intended lessons away about fascism and precious minerals from Star Wars, whatever version, and Star Trek and Dune, maybe a million other people can too.
And my goal as we kind of figure out how to do this is if I can radicalize some small percentage of those folks to say, "I think Battlestar did an episode on water scarcity. What can I do about this in the real world?"
Then I've done my fucking job and had a little more fun along the way. And nobody understands and writes about the connection between fiction and the real world like Maddie Stone. Hi, Maddie. Welcome back. Hi, Quinn.
Thank you for that lovely introduction. Think you said it better than me. No, I don't think so, but this is all I think about, right? And we can either find someone...
Like, I don't have time nor the quality to do something like you do, and it's hard to find someone brand new, as much as that would be fun, to sort of spin them up to do.
It's another to say, "This thing is fucking awesome, and we would love to put it in front of more people." What do you think, Maddie? And you said yes, and that's awesome. Why did you say yes? Yeah.
Well, I love talking about the connections between science fiction and the real world for all of the reasons you just laid out.
I love that you started with the idea of meeting people where they're at because I think that's so important.
As a professional science communicator, that's most of what I think about is how to bring people into this little nerdy pocket of the universe that's actually fascinating, but can be so
difficult to approach from the outside. Mm. And I just cannot think of a better vehicle for doing that than stories. And I'm a big nerd, and the stories I like are mostly science fiction and fantasy stories. Mm-hmm.
And turns out, a lot of other people love watching Star Trek every night. Mm-hmm. Or, you know, getting into an epic fantasy series and going down endless rabbit holes of, you know, RPGs.
There's so many different flavors of-Fandoms out there of stories and storytelling mediums that can transport us to a different world, and people are really invested in these. Mm-hmm.
And it turns out that so many of our stories have something important to say about the world we live in, whether it's, you know, a meditation on what society could look like in 300 years. You know? Mm-hmm.
Are we gonna exist in a galactic federation of other species, mostly cooperatively with some friction along the way, and how are we gonna navigate that?
It can be a very hard science fiction look at, you know, the physics of what real space travel could look like that might inspire a kid watching it to grow up and be an astrophysicist. Mm-hmm.
There's just so many ways that science fiction, fantasy are
sort of creative laboratories, testing grounds for ideas about the kind of world we wanna build, the kind of technology we wanna see, how to solve the biggest problems of our time. And that's what I love writing about.
That's really my passion at the end of the day. I pay the bills writing about a lot of other things as well. Mm-hmm.
I do a lot of very important but depressing investigative work about all of the powerful interests standing in the way of progress, but when I need to remind myself why that work is important,
I bury myself in science fiction for a few hours. Mm-hmm. And
I think that getting back to the theme of meeting people where they're at, there's a lot of people who don't wanna read that important but depressing investigation about how the fossil fuel- I don't. It's my job...
industry conned us all for 40 years. [laughs] Yeah, yeah. I get it. I'm just like, no, I know. And again, the work you do- Yeah...
and the stuff with Amy, it's all incredible, and you just wanna shake it at people, but Willow and I say all the time, "Not everybody wants their vegetables all the time." No. You know? And I get that.
And I get that, too, and so that's where the science fiction comes in.
It's an attempt to meet people where they're at, to tell them about all the ways in which the stories that they already love, that are a big part of their world can help us understand something important about our society, and maybe, just maybe, point us in the direction of a better future, and I think that's, you know, what brought me to Important Not Important and why I think this partnership is so exciting, is it's really forcing me to think about that what can I do aspect of science fiction.
You know? It's not just about explaining the cool physics behind how a warp drive might work. It's, you know, how can this help us in our present-day world? Mm-hmm.
And that can be really sort of a challenge to think through, but already I think this has been a really fun creative partnership, and yeah, I'm just excited to move full steam ahead with it. Yeah. I love it.
It does require... And it... You know, we weren't originally, the fulcrum wasn't what can I do, you know?
That kind of evolved from, I don't remember what the impetus is, but, you know, coming up with this tagline sometime in COVID of science for people who give a shit, and I have said too many times, fortunately and unfortunately now, there are many more people who give a shit about many more different make or break type issues, questions, opportunities, so the least we can do is be there for them.
But again, people don't wanna read about it. They don't wanna listen to, uh, an hour-long podcast about climate change, and then that's it, and you're like, "Well, I'll just go walk in traffic now."
Well, what did that do for me? I get it. It's not great. Yeah, but, you know, they do want to watch a show about a future in which maybe we've terraformed another planet- Mm-hmm...
and maybe there is some sort of disaster with the weather control machine that, you know, keeps the planet habitable and is causing everything to unravel, and maybe we can use that as a way to talk about, you know, climate breakdown without actually ever saying those words.
Sure, yeah. And it really... You know, this also really inspires me.
I'm an advisor to the Good Energy folks who are a non-profit working in LA and all over the country trying to get any amount of climate stuff into movies and TV, basically, and we're working on the playbook for it, which I contributed a very little part to.
You know, my argument was, again, my wife has been doing this for a long time, and seeing how the sausage gets made with these things, but most of the time how it doesn't or it gets meddled with or watered down.
Setting the bar too high for if this isn't a climate story it's not worth making, if that's not the A story it's not worth making, is not gonna happen.
It's if we get a joke about how hot it is and how it didn't used to be this hot, it's a win. You know? If we can get characters and jobs and stuff like that, great, sure, that's all great.
But again, it's not just climate. It's clean water. It's how we treat each other. It's what we call each other. You know, there was a really great
little thing on Twitter, which is not something people say out loud very often, after Superman came out a couple months ago about at the very end when the robot, I think it's Number Four or something, says something about it'd be nice to have a name, and he's like, "Well, Number Four is a name."
He says, "So is Gary," and he just calls him Gary. And someone online was like, "You can just call people the name they wanna be called. It's not that fucking difficult." [laughs] Like, it's not...
Like, Superman, which was not, like, a subtle movie either, which I loved, but, like, just threw it in at the end there. Like, you can just call him Gary 'cause he says his name is Gary. Great. Okay.
You know, we can do those things, and if it takes a fucking robot working on Superman, sure, okay. Like, whatever the delivery vehicle is, if it's fun, yeah, great. Great. I'm in. Yeah. I'm in.
I recently finished reading my former colleague Annalee Newitz's most recent book, Automatic Noodle- Okay...
which is about a bunch of robots in future San Francisco who open a noodle shop.And they face a lot of prejudice from the humans because why are these robots opening a noodle shop?
They don't know anything about good food. They don't even... They can't even taste it but it really gets into sort of issues of personhood and identity and- Mm-hmm...
yeah, you know, why can't we just accept that a bunch of fucking robots in the future might be good at making noodles?
And, you know, that seems like such a trivial example, but if you read it, it is such an important point about how we treat each other today. Mm-hmm.
And it's just, you know, much more fun to think about robots making amazing dan dan noodles than to hear a lecture on- Mm-hmm...
how we are or are not relating to each other in healthy ways. [laughs] Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And it is stories, it really is.
I mean, you know, my wife's got a bajillion dollar movie about witches coming out, and- Amazing... there's a lot baked in. It is a very timely movie for a sequel for a,
you know, book and musical that started, what is it, 22 years ago or whatever it was, you know, 32, I don't know what year it is anymore.
It's always been timely is kind of the argument, but at the same time, it's, yeah, look, if we're gonna do it with witches and a bubble, then that's how we're gonna have to do it. Great. You know?
You can find these things anywhere. I have spent my life being inspired by them from a harder sci-fi, you know.
You've written a lot about Annihilation, which I can rewatch 400 times and reread those books, to, to again, musicals or Grimm's Fairy Tales or whatever it might be, or The Last Unicorn, you know, one of the greatest books ever.
And I do think that a- as someone who writes about the intersection between science and genre fiction, one knee-jerk response I encounter to this is, "Oh, well, that isn't, you know, believable, so why are we talking about it?"
But it sort of gets back to what you said about how it's not necessarily about making it 1000%, you know, technically accurate. We're not trying to pass a dissertation defense here.
I've spoken with Star Trek science advisor Erin MacDonald a few times over the past. Mm-hmm. The phrase that she said to me one time that really stuck with me was, "My job is not to make this scientific.
It's to spray a veneer of plausibility on it." I love that. And
if somebody like Erin MacDonald, who is this very smart, has a PhD in astrophysics, can, you know, sprinkle a couple of, you know, tidbits of science on top, then somebody like me, who is not writing something for, you know, HBO- Mm-hmm...
or Paramount, can do an egregiously deep dive into what that tells us about quantum physics and people who want that- Sure... can find it. Yeah.
A- again, how do we get in the door with some of these folks are already reading all this stuff, you know, a little more intentionally.
And then a- as I always say with our parenting show, it's like my goal is to help other people realize they give a shit about other people's kids, and then just do a little something about it.
You know, if we joke a- as much about kids bringing home their lunches half eaten and, like, the bread's soaking wet and it's gross and they packed it themselves and they still didn't want it, maybe at some point you realize, shouldn't all the kids have lunches?
And if we can do that, again, through these stories, then that's great, 'cause it is a complicated fan base, science fiction, certainly, of which I call myself a proud member, but at the same time, it's enormous.
It's enormous, and they really do give a shit about a lot of things, and a lot of them aren't, quote-unquote, "real," but they're certainly tethered in reality. I'm gonna put you on the spot.
What are some of your favorite sci-fi stories you haven't had a chance to write about yet? Ooh. Mm-hmm. Favorite stories I haven't had a chance to write about. Could be old, new, whatever.
There is a show on Netflix, Scavengers Reign- Okay... came out a few years ago. It's about alien ecosystems, and I don't wanna spoil too much, and I also need to go back and rewatch it, because it's been a while.
[laughs] But I just thought that it was, like, the best sort of thoughtful deep dive into what, uh, a really different type of ecology could look like. Mm. And that just really jazzed me. Yeah.
Something that, you know, is not clearly a set in Southern California. Mm-hmm. It's, no, these are silicone based life forms. These are things that did not spring out of Earth's biosphere. Yeah.
And I, I really wanna write about that at one point. I recently read Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, the duo behind S.A. Corey- Mm-hmm... who wrote The Expanse series.
I started reading their new series, Captain's War, and I would love to interview them about that, because kind of on the exobiology theme as well, the thrust of it is a small group of humans in the far future are living on a distant planet and are attacked by sort of an insectoid hive mind race that's much more advanced than them called the Carrick, and
it's so interesting how these aliens think. It's so, so different from, you know, how humans think, and I think there
is a lot of work done in the book to show that there can be different types of intelligence, different types of persons that we just are never going to fully understand. Mm-hmm.
And I think that is really important as we enter this age perhaps of, you know, we're, people are always talking about how we're on the cusp of some sort of real breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Mm.
Don't know if I totally buy that yet. Mm-hmm. But I think we are entering an age where our understanding of what it means to be a person is expanding, and will need to continue expanding. Yeah.
And I think this book does a really good job of thinking about
that issue, and made me a little bit humble about, you know, my ability to understand, you know-A group of people who come from an entirely different worldview, an entirely different evolutionary lineage.
So I thought that was really cool. I think it's so applicable to al- but also the world we exist in and how many different skews of people we have in so many different ways.
You know, we're dealing with this autism fucking bullshit about Tylenol and, and vaccines and this and that, and we've got every version of neurodivergent people, and it's all beautiful and wonderful.
And one of the, you know, things as we have... You know, we're very proactive activists, however you wanna frame it.
You know, one of the things we've had to learn in how we frame things in working hopefully primarily with really in the what can I do stuff with the groups, as they say, on the ground who are usually the ones, like, m- born into or affected most by.
And everything from sea level rise to pollution or farm workers in the heat or someone who's more likely to get bit by a mosquito with malaria, or they were born somewhere on the spectrum, whatever it may be, or they don't have the ability to walk, right?
Is that theirs is an entirely different world, and they're usually the ones best able to speak to it as we start to think about things like CRISPR and gene drives, both for people and mosquitoes. What do they want?
And they're gonna come at it from a perspective that's so wildly different often, and unexpected a lot of times, than someone like me, who like, I have a bad back, and that is it. And that is mostly self-induced.
You know? My perspective is wildly uninformed from that. Like, why would I put it on them? And again, you can use sci-fi in that respect to say, "Oh, they came from some far off place."
They don't always have to, but if it can inform us in how we treat each other, then that's amazing. Yeah. Hopefully. No, completely. Awesome.
Well, listen, we can definitely have more conversations like this as- about your archives, which are all up on the site, which is very exciting, and anything new and things you wanna write about or think about.
But yeah, I'm excited to get into it. I'm so pleased you are putting up with us already. Mostly me. Will is great. I'm just a nightmare, so... Happy to put up. Happy to put up. Oh, that's very kind of you.
With me writing 2,000 words about, you know, the physics of dragon flight. Fucking sign me up. I'm so excited. [laughs] This is, by the way, this is all just for me. The Science of Fiction is on the site.
We'll put the link in the show notes, all that fun stuff. You can subscribe to it, read it, share it. It'll be fun. [upbeat music] Why is it so important that we share the science of fiction?
And what do we do with it once we have it? That's today's big question, and my guest is Maddie Stone. Maddie Stone is a prolific science journalist. She is a doctor of earth and environmental sciences.
She's the former science editor of the technology website Gizmodo, which I love, and the founding editor of Earther, Gizmodo's climate-focused vertical, which I love.
Maddie has edited articles for The Verge, uh, Polygon, and Grist, and her original and award-winning journalism has appeared in, oh my gosh, uh, National Geographic, back when they had writers, uh, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Grist, Vice, MIT Technology Room, Technology Review, and Drilled, and many other outlets we love and link to basically every day.
An avid science fiction fan like me, Maddie runs one of my favorite blogs called The Science of Fiction.
It is an email newsletter and a blog, if you're old, that explores the real-world science behind fictional monsters and alien planets and stuff like that, which is checks off all of my boxes.
Welcome to Important Not Important. My name is Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit, like Maddie.
In our weekly conversations, I take a deep dive with an incredible human, like Maddie, who's working on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone this time.
So our mission here is to understand and un-fuck the future. Our goal with you here is to help you answer the question, what can I do? Maddie, well, welcome to the show.
You've already had quite a day, so thank you for, for hopping on. I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. So excited to be here and talk about what is truly one of the most fun subjects for me to talk about. 100%.
We- we'll, we'll skip over all, like, the m- mining and, and just talk how do you transport whales onto a bird of prey. Maddie, truly one of my favorite movies. We'll, we'll get to it.
I also recently looked up what year it was made, and it's very upsetting.
I like to start with one important question to set the tone for, you know, what hopefully is a fun fiasco, which is, why are you vital to the survival of the species? And I encourage you to be bold and honest about it.
Oh my gosh. Uh-huh. I'm a very humble person by nature, so this is a really challenging question for me. I believe it. But am I vital to the survival of the species? Mm-hmm.
I would say, tying it back to the theme of our conversation today, I feel like I have
long carried inside me this unusual, unusually strong interest in science, particularly earth science, the environment, how the natural world works, also preserving the natural world.
I've been an environmentalist since I was, like, five years old, and they started doing construction and logging behind the playground where I played out in recess.
And me and my little kindergarten friends, like, yelled at the construction workers from across the fence- Fuck yeah... which was probably not the coolest thing to do.
But I've been an environmentalist as long as I can remember. I've been, you know, pursued science academically for a long time. Just a big science nerd.
Love communicating about science with the world.But I've also been a huge science fiction fan my whole life.
And I think there is an essential intersection of science and science fiction, a way they interact with each other, shape each other, and help the public understand what's really essential about science.
And I've tried to leverage that as a way of connecting with audiences and helping the world, my, you know, small sliver of the world that I communicate with mostly via the internet, understand complex scientific topics, understand sort of big picture trends taking place in society, and understand, you know, what needs to be done to build a better future through this intersecting lens of science and science fiction.
So I guess that's, you know, how my, how I hope to see my contribution matter, um- That was amazing... in a couple hundred years. Look at that. That was amazing. Look at you. Yeah. Understood.
It's a completely ridiculous question that, I mean, truly you are first in our hearts, but guest number one seventy-eight or something.
I've been asking it for a long time and can get some ridiculous answers, but also something sometimes are pretty meaningful and provocative, but most people are just like, "What are you talking about?"
[chuckles] So I appreciate your, your candor and your attempt at putting something together there.
Just- We are gonna get to the science of fiction and all of that, which I find so meaningful for a thousand different reasons. I grew up on science fiction. I still l- live and love science fiction.
It's what I put on at night as long as it's not too dark these days. My wife is a screenwriter and producer, and I did a little of that.
So it's-- I get the whole thing is, is so important to meet people where they are in, in the worlds they already care about to show them what we are capable of, and also the real science that can inform those things.
So before we get to that though, let... If we could, because a lot of folks listen to this looking for an answer to the question, what can I do? And it turns out that's like a lot of what we really do best.
We, we contextualize some things, and we'll give you the news about some things, but we always try to pair it with like really reputable, specific things that you can do about those or a potpourri of things that are very measurable and measured in that respect that we've kind of done the homework for folks.
And the podcast is a version of that in that, you know, it's folks like yourself who, as I like to say, work on the front lines of the future. And without going into your entire life story, folks do find ways into
working on the front lines of the future. Either they're a student, or they make some sort of lateral move, or they run an endowment, whatever it might be.
By listening to these stories and having empathy for people who, how they found their way into this, and you didn't just go straight into the science of fiction.
I mean, you've had a fairly hardworking, illustrious here and now beat, which obviously is still going as of, uh, literally this morning, and your work has been so prolific and meaningful across obviously Earther, the Post, Grist, Drilled.
We love Drilled, The Verge, all these places. You are
honestly, uh, to me at least, probably our most impactful journalist around EV metals and mining and the clean energy metals and mining beat, which I assume stems from your super cool doctorate in, in earth sciences.
But I do- There's a connection there. Y- yeah. Well, it's there. I mean, um, again, just a quick list and, and I wrote these all down and truly like this has helped me really...
Truly your reporting has helped me get like a one oh one to two oh one in this stuff. The Microsoft work this morning about, uh, using, uh, the company to s- how, how can they stop enabling fossil fuels, right?
Aluminum smelting, e-waste from toys, unionized mining for these kinds of materials, wind turbine magnet recycling, right to r- you've covered right to repair like seven different ways.
Rus- Russian nickel supplies and concrete. It's all the stuff, right? That it's so easy to ignore, but that is the hard game, right? You get constantly see climate tech company raises this money.
It's, it's a, they're a software company.
This is the hard stuff that we've got to cure, and it's very complicated and controversial from, you know, mining on indigenous lands to unionized work to waste to obviously the, the deep sea stuff and what that does to, potentially does to ecosystems.
But I, I do wanna talk for a moment about your evolution or transition from your doctorate, which is a lot of writing in itself to journalism and Earther and all the rest.
Was, was journalism always the goal, or how did you get there from yelling at construction workers at age five to starting Earther and where you are now? Yeah. Great question.
Journalism absolutely was not always the goal. I think for a long time I thought I was gonna go down a more traditional science research academic track. I did my undergrad in ecology.
I loved the idea of a career that allowed me to kind of spend half my time outdoors hiking through the woods, going to amazing far-funk-flung places and, you know, half my time in a climate-controlled lab looking at data on a screen trying to understand a really nuanced problem and, and make my, my contribution to our collective knowledge base.
So I did start out thinking I was going to go down this more traditional research track. I got into a PhD program, was about a year and a half into that program when I realized, you know, [sighs]
really not a fan of a lot of things about academic culture. What do you mean?
I was frustrated with the sort of slow pace at which research results get, you know, translated into societal understanding and, you know, from there into meaningful action.
And, you know, as someone who's, uh, always been an avid consumer of the news, particularly climate and environmental news, it felt like there was this cognitive dissonance between these, you know, these big problems that we face that are becoming sort of more real and more apparent every day and the, the very slow and plotting pace of scientific research.The, the type of research I was doing intended to ultimately help us wrap our heads around those problems in a more meaningful way.
So you know, I still have a lot of friends and colleagues who've gone down the science route, but I realized pretty early on in this PhD track program that it was not for me, that the part, the part of this whole process that I really liked the most was the communication of the end results and explaining, you know, why this matters.
And doing that either in a talk format or writing up the abstract or conclusions in a research article was always sort of the most, the most valuable part of the process to me.
And all my advisors thought that this was very strange, because most scientists do not care for writing, do not care for public speaking. Right. Yeah. No, thank you.
And so I got a lot of kind of raised eyebrows at my just general interest in science communication, but also a lot of support for it, to give my academic advisors credit where due.
And so about couple years into my PhD program, I, I had done a lot of research. I was writing a dissertation, but I was al- I also started sort of actively blogging on the side.
My dissertation, not to get too in the weeds about it, because it, it is really quite niche and focused as these things tend to be, was about soil carbon in tropical ecosystems and- Sure...
what keeps it in the ground and what causes it to leave the ground. Do it.
And looking at a lot of interactions between minerals and microbes and processes playing out on a really small scale and what that might mean for the future of our planet.
Anyway, as I was working on all of that, I started a blog on the side about environmental microbiology and all the cool things that microbes are doing and we can use them for, because I just find them fascinating.
And a lot of that had to do with mining and recycling applications of microorganisms, so, so it was just like a fun thing I wrote about once a week.
Pulled up a research paper, wrote a blog post on it, sent it out into the ether, and a couple hundred people might have read it. As
the years of dissertation [laughs] writing wore on, I started to take this side gig of blogging a little bit more seriously.
You know, as I was, I was committed to, to finishing the dissertation, to seeing my PhD program out, but also realizing I was, um, I, I wanted to do something quite different after I finished than what a lot of my peers were doing.
Again, I had a good amount of support from my academic advisors, including being allowed to do a, I guess you could call it a glorified internship working for the university newsroom at the University of Pennsylvania, um, essentially shadowing and working as the underling for the two staff science writers there.
And so that was sort of my first introduction into journalism.
I wrote some, you know, profiles of scientists and press releases about cool things going on on campus and new studies that were coming out, that sort of thing.
And so that kinda gave me a nuts and bolts education into, very crash, crash course education into what, you know, what a press release is, kinda how the sausage gets made in science communication, how findings get disseminated from universities to journalists to the wider public.
Around that same time, and we're talking like 2013, 2014 here, I also started a second blog called The Science of Fiction. Sure. Yeah. Literally anything to not write your dissertation.
Anything to not write the dissertation. I know. I was such a slacker. My sister-in-law, uh, got hers in psychology and said she always, she said, "I had the cleanest apartment of any of my friends."
She's like, "All I did was, like, type, 'No thank you. I'm just gonna go, uh, dust again.'" So. Yeah, totally.
So I, around that time, this was about a year before I was supposed to be finished with my dissertation, I started a second blog called The Science of Fiction.
And this was, if, if you remember the old Gawker media and family of sites that have since sort of scattered to the wind under various owners or been shut down, there was a free blogging platform within Gawker that anyone could use to start a blog called Kinja.
It's still the backend of the Gizmodo family of sites. I was an...
Of io9 and Gizmodo at the time, and I started my own Kinja blog blogging about the science of science fiction because, again, huge nerd, always been a big fan of sci-fi, and it was just a fun additional way to communicate about science fiction.
And that got noticed by Annalee Newitz, who was the editor in chief of io9 at the time, which was fairly shocking to me.
I had never pitched them a story or considered [laughs] pitching them a story, but a couple of my ar- articles got re-posted to io9.
Subsequently, Annalee reached out to me asking me if I wanted to be the weekend editor at Gizmodo because they needed someone to blog fast and furious seven times a day, Saturdays and Sundays.
This was right around the same time that I was actually finishing my dissertation and being like, "What the hell am I gonna do next?" And so, um- Sure. Blog Saturdays and Sundays...
I had, I had taken on a few freelance assignments for different outlets at that point. I had a small collection of, like, actual journalistic clippings to my name.
So I didn't have much of a resume, but she sorta took a chance on me, and that's how I got my foot in the door at Gizmodo and spent a few years there, and then founded a climate vertical there called Earther.
And I'm now jumping years into the future, but that's sort of the compressed history of how I got my start and how I transitioned into journalism. I love it. Thank you for that perspective.
It's helpful because, you know, I... It's funny, my wife, I'll mention her a few times, she's the greatest person alive. She, we grew up on-E. T., right?
Kids riding bikes, solv, s-solving cri, Goonies, like, y-you name it. She made a TV show for Apple TV a few years ago called "Home Before Dark" and it's inspired by this young
literally real life journalist, eight, eight year old when she first hit the news, Hildy Lissiak, whose dad was an investigative journalist in Brooklyn, and, uh, uh, it's, there's a very good chance I get this wrong, but basically she used to tag along with him on, you know, to interview...
I mean, he did, like, dark stuff, and she was super into it when she was six and seven and eight, and I believe he covered Newtown, and he was like, "You know what? I think I'm out," which is understandable.
And they left and moved back to the small town he was from, and he was like, "I'm just gonna write a book." And she's, "That's great, but I'm a journalist, so I'm gonna keep going."
And she published something on Blogspot, you know, it was whatever it might have been. Mm-hmm.
Uh, and it, like, scooped the local paper on a murder or something, and she was nine, and it got all this national attention, but the town freaked out, "Who are you to come in here and saying all this stuff?"
But Hillary was like, "This is incredible." She got a book deal, you know, and the newspaper always... Anyways, my wi-wife and her best friend made a, a T- a fictionalized TV show about her, which is basically
young Hildy and her friends r-riding bikes solving crimes. It's amazing, but, um- I love that. Yeah. But, uh, I think about you screaming at construction workers about, uh, getting too close to your playground, but it...
You never know how you're gonna get into this thing where you're like, "I have to do this." And there's definitely a thousand variations along the way.
Like you said, doing an entire dissertation which is, I'm committed to it, and we're writing about the soil.
Which by the way is, like, incredibly important and still questions, like, we- we're not 100% sure on, and [chuckles] we need to, sir, before we keep selling fake carbon offsets to people.
But that stuff, it really does matter, and it, it does... I have done 700 different things, and it... I do look back and go, "If I removed any of those, would I be here?"
I'm not sure, even though they don't totally go one-to-one or it felt like a waste of time then or now, but I try to im- pass that on to, to fo- I'm 1,000. Right.
So I try to pass that on to people who feel like, "I'm lost," or, "I'm doing two different things," or, "I freelance in six things and I don't know where it's gonna be," and it's, I don't know where I'm gonna be.
You know? It's... And you don't know what's gonna add up- Yeah... to get you there. Absolutely. Some people often ask me if I were to do it over, would I have done the whole PhD again?
And I really don't know the answer to that question, but, you know, it... Despite not having used that in furtherance of a scientific career, I do think in some important ways it got me where I am today.
I don't know if I would've found science journalism if it wasn't for the confluence of, you know, random opportunities and lots of free time in front of a computer. Sure.
[audio distorting] Yeah, and at such a specific moment of, like you said, Kinja and Tumblr, and I mean, that wa- I think that was post Blogspot.
But the point was, like, there were these tools, and it was sort of federated-ish, you know? And we all worshiped IO9, but the comment section was huge, you know? That, that whole thing, it was...
Yeah, boy, that feels like- Absolutely... a long time, a long time ago now. Yeah, you can bil- it was a long time ago. That feels very, like, early internet now.
But yeah, no, there were bloggers on Kinja who had- 100%... big followings who were not affiliated with Kotaku or Jalopnik or IO9 or any of those sites. Yeah. It was a whole thing. That's crazy.
Unfortunately, all of those old science fiction blogs have been scrubbed from the internet. I was able to download, like- Really?... Internet Archive, or yeah, Internet Wayback Machine has some of them.
I, I really need to set aside an afternoon to go through the process of cataloging them. Um- We gotta get those back out there. Thank God for the- Yes... Wayback Machine. I know. Wayback...
I, I am such a fan of the Internet Archive for so many reasons, but particularly because it hosts those early blog posts that played an- Yeah... important role in my career.
[chuckles] I told someone recently about how I, m- the hard drive with all my college papers. I was a religion major, which is interesting, 'cause I'm, you know, flag-waving atheist. But I took a...
I thought I wanted to do political science. Took one class and the professor annoyed me freshman year, and I said, "Well, I'll go do this," 'cause it's also how we understand the world.
You know, so many people, it's also so much of our conflict and how people live their day-to-day lives. So same thing.
But it wasn't a dissertation, but I remember writing about, you know, the history of armed religious conflict between India and Pakistan and what that land was before and all this, and it's... Does that apply now?
Not necessarily, but I still ask questions about why people do what they do, why they have to do what they're doing, and how, why we keep making so many of the same decisions we keep making.
And that's part of it, or it's inspired by it. Would I do the same thing? I don't know. It definitely wasn't on Forbes top 10 most lucrative college majors when I graduated, you know, a thousand years ago.
But, you never know. I think it's fair to say most of us don't really know what we're doing in our early 20s and, you know- No. Yeah. Or- Lucky if we make it out of there with- Early 40s. Yeah... or early 30s- Yeah...
with some sort of semblance of a career trajectory. Yeah, trajectory is, is a word. It's doing a lot of work there.
So before we get into present day science of fiction, I feel like we do need to talk about all of the new Star Trek the past few years. How did this- There has been so much. There's been so much.
Before it was just Chris Pine, and he's great, you know? But there was a period, you know, where we... Post-DS9 and some other things and Voyager where we had...
I mean, I think the first Chris Pine one was like 2009, right? And then Into Darkness- 2009. Yeah, yeah... which I support, by the way. I liked Into Darkness.
But then we got this Paramount Plus was like, "We're gonna make all of it." Yeah. What, what is your favorite? What, what do you, what have you jived with? What has really spoken to you? Because I've got- That's-...
I think some popular and some controversial opinions. Mm. Okay. I don't know whether my opinions are going to be popular or controversial, but I'll just put them out there.
Of the new Trek, and I have watched, I think I've watched all of it. Actually, I haven't started the new season of Discovery. Need to do that. I'm only two in, so don't worry. We don't have to get into it.
I'm, I'm- Yeah... behind and terrified of reading the in-But yeah, no, I've just been avoiding it.
I love Lower Decks because I think that Lower Decks is like just, it is just such a warm and wonderful tribute to all things Star Trek.
It's clearly written by the biggest Trek nerds who ever lived. Yeah. It tells actual Star Trek stories that like fit within the canon and feel consistent with the rest of the franchise.
But it is also like constantly making fun of Trek tropes, you know, just in a thousand ways, big and small, providing the loyal Star Trek audience, the people who've been watching this since they were kids, all kinds of just Easter eggs and- Mm-hmm...
just fun, delightful things that I never really expected a Star Trek show to do. So a big fan of Lower Decks for branching out, doing something completely different, and totally nailing it, in my opinion.
Sad to hear that there's only gonna be one more season of that show. I, I, my anger is like untenable about that. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Strange New Worlds has been kind of surprisingly great.
I think it has revived a lot of the feeling of, you know, classic original series Star Trek, while modernizing a lot of the things that desperately needed to be modernized about it. Mm-hmm.
And yeah, kind of strikes, strikes a cool balance between tapping into that nostalgia and getting the fans of the original series, or people who grew up with the '90s Trek, in my case, you know, having that like warm, fuzzy feeling of, "This reminds me of my childhood in some way," but also providing something like really new and obviously something that couldn't be done in the- Yep...
'60s or the '90s. So I'm a big fan of both of those shows. I, I love the, the musical episode on Strange New Worlds. It's so good. I was just like so shocked by how fun that was.
I was bracing myself for it to be- Yeah... like a total train wreck the entire time. But that to me really sort of brought home the fact that they've got a team that like really knows what they're doing. Yeah.
The fact that they could pull something like that off and not have it be like a cringe fest the entire time. I don't think you'd go for it unless you're pretty confident. It reminded me of...
Did you ever get to see, not, not sci-fi, but a truly wonderful show called Crazy Ex-Girlfriend? I think I did now. Oh my God. It's all about mental health, and it's fantastic, but it's all music.
And you're just like, "Oh my God," like the confidence to pull this off is just out of this world. But yeah. Yes. When they were like, "Oh, there's gonna be a musical episode," I was like, "Oh my God. Ugh."
Brace yourself. I'm so nervous. Yeah. But I tell you- Yeah, and- Sorry, I was just gonna say, o- one of the things that has been so emblematic about this run to me is not just the, you know, Lower Decks,
not focus, but willingness to just throw trope after th- trope at you and shine a light on it and then move on so quickly, but have it be a part of it, but also, like you said, do old school Trek things, but also have these characters who you love and empathize with because they're just constantly getting things wrong.
But besides probably season two of Discovery, which tried to do kind of a, almost like a DS9 type feeling to it, which I loved, these shows have all really worn their heart on their sleeve- Mm-hmm...
in such a way that... You know, a friend and I were just talking, and he's commuting from Richmond to DC once a week, and he's always got this train ride. And I said, "Look, you just got...
You, you wouldn't pay for Paramount Plus." I was like, "Fine. I'm gifting you Strange New Worlds. Like you just gotta, you gotta do it." And he was like, "Well, that's really nice."
I was like, "Trek has been our safe place for our entire lives," you know, sleepovers doing TNG. And this version of that has mostly felt that way.
It's really just, not just the show and the theme, but these characters really wearing their heart on their sleeves. It's so warm and empathetic- Mm-hmm...
and goes overboard with kindness, even in Lower Decks where they're, you know, ripping on each other or frustrated with one another, which happens. They're in these high stake things, but I don't know. That is...
My wife always calls it, in a loving way, like me watching my spaceships blow up at night, like where that brings me back to an uneasy place. But yeah, there's something a- about it, and it seems so intentional.
You know, I remember one point- Yeah... of Discovery last season, something like that, there was a point and, and they showed the bridge, and it was all at least not Earth males on the deck.
And they were so supportive and warm to each other and ready for whatever came, and I was just like, this is the thing that I think has driven me to where at least I am, where it's just going...
Like I don't think tech is necessarily gonna save us. It's like the people and how we decide to use it and make sure it's inclusive of everyone. But I don't know.
That's the thing that I've, I felt has always spoken to me, and it's why I love science fiction so much. Nailed it. There we go. There you go. I don't- Yeah. No, I mean, I completely agree.
It's so earnest, but not in a...
Just in a very genuine way, and in a way that provides such a nice counterbalance to so much other pop culture and science fiction that's out there, where everything has to be, you know, a little edgelord-y, or a little
apocalyptic, or, you know, pointing out how everything is terrible and how everything is going to continue to be terrible. I think Star Trek has always, you know, at its roots, it's like utopian science fiction, right?
And I think the new series have broadened my understanding at least of what it means to, uh, be a utopian science fiction show. I think, uh, a utopian science fiction show can go to some very dark places.
But as you say, there is always this underlying earnestness, this underlying warmth and spirit of kind of camaraderie. And, you know, we can do this if we all work together.
And, you know, all of us together is something that-I think the, what that means within the context of Star Trek has expanded a lot over the decades. Um- Yeah. A hundred percent.
And it's just- Well, together, has changed a lot in, in the context- Yeah... of decades for Star Trek, certainly. Yeah. Absolutely.
So it's been a nice evolution, but also nice to see the show sort of keeping to its roots in some essential ways. Yeah.
And it's easy to feel like, boy, all of a sudden we've got f-f-five new things and Lower Decks is ending, and Discovery, and then what? And then, and you got two- I know...
two, two seasons of Picard that I feel like we could talk about for hours, and then a third one that was completely different. But by the way, show run by the same guy.
And then they were just like, "We're just gonna do the thing that people want." And talk about they just... Fan service. And I was like, "Great. Give it to me." Absolutely. Absolutely. I...
This is what I want after thinking about climate change all day. Mm-hmm.
But I wanna root, again, getting to science fiction in Star Trek IV, about the voyage home, and, and the way this movie kinda wrapped up the first few movies, and Leonard Nimoy directing it again, and him being like, "We're not doing, we're not doing the battles.
Like, I'm not... I, I don't wanna do it this time. I wanna do something that's, I mean, so grounded compared to anything [chuckles] else." But also, people always joke, they're like, "Oh, it's the one with the whales."
I'm like, "Fuck yeah, it's the one with the whales." Like, it's... Everything about that movie means so much to me, I think, from, again, it was from 1986, so I was four. But to now, again, the heart on their sleeve.
Well, I guess we gotta go, we gotta go find the whales so the alien thing inexplicably needs to hear from them, and then it'll go away. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like your love of science fiction feels similar to that.
I think so. I was negative two when that movie came out. I didn't see it until I was a teenager. But it, yeah, it had a really big impact on me. And I, again, have been an environmentalist my whole life.
I loved those cheesy '90s movies, the Free Willy series. Fuck yes. So I always had kind of a thing for whales. Dear boy.
And then I, I grew up watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine, l-little bit of original series, but the movies sprinkled in there.
And yeah, I just, I, I think, you know, the lens, the way that Leonard Nimoy approached that film as not wanting, as you say, for it to be, you know, a film about war or us versus them, but to have it be sort of a collective problem that we need to address.
And a very topical problem for the time, I should add.
I'm not sure if it was 1986, but it was some year right around there that the first international moratorium on commercial whaling went into effect, and this was sort of the height of the Greenpeace Save the Whales campaign, and people, you know, public concern over commercial whaling and what that was doing to our oceans and biodiversity was really starting to reach, like, a fever pitch.
And so that was obviously an issue that Leonard Nimoy cared about, and he made it kind of the central plot line of his Star Trek movie, which I just think is so badass. Yeah. I... Kudos to him for, for doing that.
And yeah, you know, I, I don't know if we're ever gonna have another movie where it makes sense to transport a humpback whale into a Klingon warship. So that will always have a [chuckles] special place in my heart.
I, I just love this thing, and again, my, my wife is this incredibly hardworking and wonderfully talented, creative, and
amazing human who, who makes these things, and I get to watch the struggle of even someone who is very successful, like, for the system to constantly spit it out and tell her no, you know, partly because she's a woman, and partly 'cause the system is so broken.
Like, top to bottom, it's not great.
But any idea, if you were like, "Here's the deal, we're gonna, we're gonna, at the end, we're gonna beam the whales onto the cloaked bird of prey we just powered up from the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier, and then we're gonna fly away, and we're gonna take the lady with us," um, this system right now would be like, "No, no."
But I appreciated that some, for some reason, they let them go for it. And like you said, I don't know when we'll see it again, but this is what I feel like science fiction does for me when it comes in my inbox.
It feels like things at least I remember reading in, to go even back farther, Wired in the 1990s. These questions of, and this is my question I always, one of the two questions I always try to get to, which is like,
why do you feel like you have to do this work? I can tell why you have to do all the mining stuff. Like, that is so important, and it is so integral to so many decisions we're making right now.
But, you know, it felt like he had to... They were like, "Go make your shit, Leonard Nimoy," and he was like, "Okay, here we go." Mm-hmm. And it feels like your conversations with these folks
who you talk to for science fiction and your love for it feels a similar way, which is like, this is really important, and it's easy to just be like, "It's movies and TV," but it's not.
Tell me about, like, how sort of this latest incarnation of it, and like why you have to do this- Yeah... as well as all the, you know, scooping Microsoft.
I think it's, I think that, you know, pop culture, the stories we tell are so important to how we see the world, and they're often an essential part of our identity growing up.
They often shape our career paths in, in weird and unexpected ways. I've spoken with so many scientists over the course of my career as a science journalist who have identified some early,
you know, science fiction movie or book that they read as sort of the spark that launched them down, you know, a career path studying galaxies or exoplanets or microbes in Antarctica. And that really, I think,
tells us something about how humans are... You know, we are creatures of stories. We like to tell stories. Stories help us understand, make sense of the world.
And science fiction stories in particular, I think, are just such a powerful vehicle for understandingBig, macro, complex problems in new ways and sort of gaming out solutions that maybe don't make sense now or don't make sense 10 years from now, but could make sense in 100 or 1,000 years should there be, you know, XYZ new technologies available, new societal structures in place.
Like, science fiction is sort of a breeding ground of ideas for what is possible if we remove some of the, the structural barriers in place today. And, you know, it's not...
And I truly feel that, y- you know, this isn't just fun sort of thought experiments about, you know, what could be.
It would be so great if we, you know, were able to fly around the galaxy in these faster than light ships and visit all these different worlds and meet all these different alien cultures.
That's all great, but it's not just about this is fantasy escapism. This is really a vehicle that allows us to think about, you know, the problems and the challenges facing society today and
how we could con- address them in a less constrained future, in a future where we've sort of changed the underlying conditions in some way.
And, you know, there are books that have been written, there are professors who give lectures on all of the ways that science fiction has inspired real world innovation, and that's part of it.
You know, we see all these one-to-one examples of, uh, a visionary science fiction author, you know, Jules Verne, Arthur C.
Clarke, all these kind of golden age sci-fi authors thinking of technologies that we now have in our world today. But
that sort of one-to-one, oh, it happened first in science fiction and now we have it in our world is... That I think is just one small part of the power of science fiction to affect change in the world.
I think much more broadly speaking, it allows us to reflect on our problems in a kind of an open and imaginative space and think outside the box when it comes to solutions.
So, you know, climate change is obviously one of the most pressing, if not the most urgent problem of our time, something I spend a lot of time thinking about and writing about as a climate energy journalist.
And I think science fiction has a really powerful role to play in th- thinking up how we're gonna solve it, and not just, you know, dreaming up new types of transportation and new forms of energy, but how we actually rebuild and restructure society.
And I think there's powerful examples from the writings of Octavia Butler, um, all the way through to a lot of modern climate fiction authors today who are really actively using fiction as a vehicle for, you know, imagining a different future and imagining how we could, you know, restructure our world in order to live a little bit more sustainably on this planet.
So I think to wind down this long and rambly answer of why this is important- I love it... you know, it's, i-i-it's, we all love stories. We don't all love science fiction, but a lot of us love science fiction.
It feels like, you know, this kind of nerd culture has exploded in recent years.
It's a huge opportunity to communicate with audiences that isn't necessarily in the traditional route that you get information out there as a scientist or even as a science journalist.
It's a huge opportunity to meet people where they're at. And science fiction in general offers us this enormous kind of imaginative playground for thinking about how we can, you know, build a better future.
Well, I think that sums up basically everything I care about, so that, that was wonderfully instructive and conceived on the spot, but obviously after decades of, of thinking about and working in and, and marinating on it, which is what, you know, the best science fiction and even, you know, fantasy can do for us, which is just like keep it going up here and making you think of not just, again, what is, like you said, the coolest new transportation, but
what I seemingly always come back to, I guess, at this point in trying to help people answer the question, "What can I do?" Is, okay, that's cool, but what are we gonna do with it? Who are we gonna help with that?
What can we rectify or readjust with that or despite that or, you know, in lieu of that? And I think about that with everything from mRNA to, you know, like you said, solar powered desalination to all these things.
It's going, okay, okay, what of these... I had a, a wonderful scientist on the show, an AI researcher, and she said, "I answer old problems with new technology." And it is. It's looking at those things and going, okay.
And by the way, one of the great things of "DS9" is questioning sort of this utopia in, in a lot of ways, right? And "Battlestar" did that very differently, too. You know?
I remember when they did torture during the Bush years and things like that. They were like, "W- I mean, we're not doing it, but we're doing it, and we're gonna be like, 'Well, should we do it?' Because they're...
Like, these people are trying to kill us, and yet," yadi, yada. So you can do it more overtly. You can do it more fantastically, whatever it might be. But I, that is where it comes back to it for me.
A-and even something like "ET," which, oh, they showed on, uh, on an IMAX theater, like, last year, and I got to take my 10-year-old to it, and I was like- Oh, that's amazing... "This is gonna be the greatest thing."
And I was trying not to overhype it, but I was like, "Just so you know, this is, like, top three for me." But it's still this question of, what would you do, you know? Mm-hmm.
With this other that is trying to survive and wants to get home, which speaks to so much of what we have going on now with climate induced immigration and, and things like that.
It's like, how, how are you gonna treat people, and what are you gonna do with this thing? And I don't know. That's, that's why I really love this series, and I'm so glad you spend time on it. Is there, is there
sort of a unifying intentionality behind who you bring in and, and talk to? Is it like, "Oh, I really love this thing. Let me give them a call"? Um, or is sort of there some...
quota or goal or something like that behind what you're going for? It's frankly, it, it, it, it is a little less planned out than that. It's more driven by, you know, what I am
reading, what I am watching, what I am consuming, and the questions that's raising for me.
And then oftentimes I get very lucky in my day job as a climate journalist and a s- science journalist more broadly, because I don't just write on climate, to meet really interesting people who share my passion for really nerdy things, and, you know, we just get to talking after the interview, and it turns out they also go to Comic-Cons and give panels on, like, the science of Star Wars or whatever.
I mean, that newsletter.
And so it's a mix of getting to talk to a lot of really cool people as a science journalist who also happen to share a passion for science fiction and how it can be this, like, vehicle for meeting audiences in new ways and, you know, getting some really kind of wonky and complicated ideas across through something that they are really passionate about already.
Sure. And, you know, I just finished Andor season one, and I have- Mm-hmm... this, this really nerdy question about what that, like, astronomical spectacle in the sky is and how that could actually work. What was that?
I'm gonna... Well, it was crazy. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Well, I, I, I did a science and fiction post on it, and I called up an astronomer, and we talked about meteor showers. Is the Eye of Aldani a meteor shower?
Like, what the heck is it? And, and her best explanation was maybe it's, like, the slime trail from migrating virgals, which are those, like- The whales... galactic space whales. Yeah, the whales. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See?
It's always whales. Yeah. It's the whale slime trail, like, you know- Yeah... from thousands of them migrating across the upper atmosphere and lighting up in the sky, which is both awesome and just so absurd. I love it.
I'm like, "That's the answer." Yeah. So, you know- I'm gonna go with that. And so I try not, I try not to be too much of a scientist when I go into this project.
I try not to be like, "This is what is technically accurate about flying-" Yeah... space whales in Star Wars, and this is what, why it doesn't make any sense at all."
You know, there's the space in this form, there's a, there's a tightrope walk in this form of science communication where you want to be accurate, but you also want to be fun, and you want to accept the fact that in this universe, there are magic people with laser swords who can move things around with their hands- Space whales...
and their mind. Right. And that's just, you know, we have to work that in with the laws of physics. We just have to do it. Mm-hmm. So, yeah.
So it's, it's, you know, what are the weird questions that pop into my head as I'm reading and watching and consuming science fiction?
And who are the latest, like, fun people I talk to who would be willing to sound off for an hour about, you know, the actual science behind dilithium or what... Kind of a hodgepodge. Perfect. Welcome.
You're among friends. It- To my obvious next question, is there some fiction in you somewhere after all of this? That's a great question. Well, I have dabbled in creative writing over the years.
Never been so bold as to try to publish anything, but I have a lot of unpublished drafts of stories kind of gathering dust in various hard drives. So it's, I think about getting into at some point in the future.
My mom actually is a fiction writer. She's written a lot of books. She's quite prolific. Oh, that's awesome. And, yeah. So there's a little bit of it in the DNA. Yeah.
It's a really challenging head space to toggle in and out of with journalism because it's, you know, going from every sentence has to be factually vetted and buttoned up and
run by various parties for- Mm-hmm... accuracy to whatever- Light swords... the [laughs] fuck I want- Yeah... to put on this paper, and I hope it sounds good and connects with people.
So it's, uh, it's a lot of mental toggling to go between the two.
The, the times in my life where I've done more creative writing dabbling or, you know, times where I've been sort of, like, in between jobs or, again, finishing my dissertation, there was really a lot of time wasted in that period.
But yeah. I mean, I, you know, some of my, some of the science journalists I look up to the most have pivoted to or balanced a career in science journalism with science fiction writing.
And so it is sort of an aspirational goal of mine. Not something I'm gonna do this year or next year probably, but get back to me in 10 years, and we'll, we'll see if I'm working on something. Great.
And everything's gonna be great in 10, so we're nailing it. Everything's gonna be wonderful, yeah. We're nailing it. [laughs] I love that. So, uh, one of the...
Again, I worked for a little while in, in the screenwriting trade, and there's still some things bouncing around there. Because of my sort of involvement in it and now proximity to it in a lot of ways, and then this
job, if you wanna call it that, I advise this group called Good Energy, which Anna Jane Joyner founded- Mm... a couple years ago, and it's fantastic.
And basically, it's a new foundation, and what she and her, her cohort do is try to get more, first of all, understand how much climate, specifically climate, is in movies and TV today/the past 10 years, and then proactively try to get more in.
And over the course of
m- my loose involvement that I'm so lucky to have with them, you know, it has become essentially this question of, how do we get literally any climate into anything, knowing that, uh, the way the sausage is made is very complicated and mostly out of your control?
So it's anything from, like, literally a joke to a whole s- character storyline or a, an arc or a setting or whatever it might be.And so they just recently developed their version of the Bechdel test.
Are you familiar with the Bechdel test in movies and TV? It's basically, God, if I'm getting it right, it's are there two women in the movie or TV?
Do they talk to each other and do they talk to some- about something other than the love interest, essentially? Yes. I'm, I'm pretty sure that's what it is. I think that's about right.
So, the-- and most movies fail, of course.
The climate version that they've come up with, I believe they're calling it the climate reality test, I'll f- I'll find it, is does climate change exist in this world in any way, and are the characters aware of it?
And they just ran this study with Colby College that they came out with this week, and they ran, they took IMDb's top basically two hundred and fifty movies from the past ten years, which, you know, imperfect ranking, but it's something.
And, and eleven percent of the movies qualified, answered both questions, which is more than we actually thought it was gonna be. It's more than I would have expected. Right? Right.
I was, like, thinking in my head, like, all right, we've got Don't Look Up, we've got Geostorm, we've got The Day After- And then you're like... Right.
But again, we haven't lowered the bar, but tried to understand again this process where, again, like you said, you go from journalism, where you're like, "You better fact check this forty different ways," and they hand it to the forty groups who have to do it themselves from their perspective.
Fiction, which is, you know, there's the science and entertainment group that pairs scientists with screenwriters and TV writers and things like that,
and that group usually gets that, "Look, we're trying to put the best science into these things, but in the end, the story is the thing that is gonna win because that's what we're making here, not a documentary."
And forty executives are gonna tear it piece to piece, and then we're gonna screen it, and things will change. And, and you just have to be cool with that if you wanna be a part of this.
And I think that's why the climate bar is not necessarily low, but every little bit does help. And this is kind of where I have such an issue with the personal versus systemic action thing, right?
Which is this might be one screenwriter or one TV writer fighting for a solar joke in a TV show that's making thirty episodes, and if it gets in there, like, that is a win.
And that is because it could reach so many people because it just makes it part of everyday life in some way. Because as you've said, we get so much from our stories.
They don't just tell us what the future could be in this perfect world or about lightsabers or Ghostbusters. [chuckles] You know, like, I definitely tried to build a proton pack at one point with a lot of light bulbs.
Yeah, it didn't work, unfortunately. Not enough power.
But they tell us who we can be and what we can do with the things we have and shine light on the mistakes we've made, not just technology-wise, but as a society and an economy and things like that.
And that is so important going forward. You know, I think about, do you know the journalist Ed Yong just recently left The Atlantic, won the Pulitzer? Yeah. His
early COVID piece where he said, you know, COVID was this lake that exposed, flood that exposed all the cracks that were already in our sidewalk. And, um, a lot of cracks. We have not filled them. It's not great.
And science fiction can do the same thing. It can go, "Hey, look at all these choices you made to, to get you to this fictional place. What if you make those? But also, what could go wrong with some of them?
What do you need to make them?" But also, you know, there's the more sort of dystopian stuff which I frankly stay away from, right? Or the complicated things that go, "You make this choice, this is where it's going."
I used to love Black Mirror. It was great. Now I'm just like, "That's Tuesday. No, thank you." Yes. "No, thank you." Yeah.
Anyways, it's all to say I'm very thankful for your work, and I'm thankful that you do both versions of it 'cause these mineral questions and the people who do it, just like the people who do our health work around whatever technology we're using,
that is what matters to make sure we kinda get it right as much as we can by those people, right?
And to include the most people and to make sure they're paid and to make sure it's not creating just prolific amounts of waste, and we recycle what we can, right? Because we've got to do this thing,
so let's attempt to do it [chuckles] and ask the right questions in a way that is most beneficial for most folks in the little ecosystems we have remaining.
Well, I'm grateful for anyone who is doing any work trying to inject more climate reality into, you know, Hollywood science fiction. I think it's long overdue.
I think there are more people thinking about this all the time. Sure. But as you say, lots of competing priorities, lots of- Yeah... uh, screenwriters, lots of executives.
Ultimately, you know, it's a balance between entertainment and what works for the audience and, you know, whatever messages or information that the, the writers behind this massive enterprise, you know, want to get out there.
Sure. And I did recently do an interview with Star Trek's resident science advisor where we talked a lot about that. Love that.
And I think she was very positive on how science has been considered and incorporated into the recent series. Obviously, not everything is going to have
a explanation that, you know, stands up to a dissertation defense or a peer review, but everything, uh,
ev-everything that touches on science in some way gets run by an actual scientist, and that person has input in the writer's room, and there's something really valuable about that, I think.
And I'm really happy to see more efforts directed toward incorporating climate and, you know, our collective, our collective problem that we all have to deal with over the next century, and that we shouldn't be shying away from in our fiction.
So that's awesome that you're involved with that. Well, I'm the world's smallest piece of the puzzle, but it matters, and I care about it, and again, I was the beneficiary of growing up on so many of these things.
My favorite animal's the whale for clearly, like, a bunch of reasons. Yeah. So, you know, it matters. It sticks with people, right? No matter what- Yeah... age you see it in. So anyways.
Well, and if you want an explicit tie-in between my mining and mineral work and the science of fiction, I've done a couple of posts that have been good performers for the blog.
I did an sort of exhaustive survey of where in the galaxy we might mine lithium beyond Earth. After that, I noticed that theme was starting to pop up in science fiction.
There's a season of The Expanse on a lithium mining world.For All Mankind, another show that I really enjoy- So-...
features a lithium mining plot on the moon involving, like, a shootout between astronauts from the US and the Soviet Union.
So there's been this sort of trickle of interest in science fiction in recent years in incorporating what I see as sort of one of the biggest questions and challenges of our time, which is, like, the resources that we need in order to move into the, into the future.
So yeah, that is something I, I try to spotlight when I can, 'cause it's a little, a little bit of a, a niche that I've, you know, really made my own over the last few years.
It's a niche, but it underpins the whole thing, because we have had these finite resources- Yeah...
that powered the past 200 years, and we didn't go about procuring those in the best way and didn't ask, even ask really about the costs or externalities involved [chuckles] until now.
So doing that now for these resources that are finite and in these difficult or controversially hard to reach places, or they're just under China, where most of them are [chuckles] is- Yeah...
we have to ask those questions. 'Cause we do need them, and it would be great to- Yeah... get them. It would be great if we recycled a lot more of them. But, you know, why I believe they're... I'm a liberal arts major.
It's why I believe there, there should be, like, a chief should we do this officer in every tech company, right? It matters to ask these questions. Be extremely helpful. [sighs] Aye yi yi.
All right, Maddie, last couple questions, and this is kinda where the... I don't know what the metaphor is today, but the point is there's so many climate metaphors I can't use anymore.
The other day my, my kid was like, "My gas tank's filled up." I was like, "That's out." We can't say rising tide lifts all boats. That's not ideal anymore. There's a few of them. Yeah. The point is, how can we help?
So we like to focus on things people can do to donate, to volunteer, to get educated, to be heard with their representative at whatever level, locally or, or larger.
What are some specific things besides reading your work wherever it goes, including your Microsoft piece from this morning, good for those folks, but also subscribing to the Science of Fiction, which has such a cool URL.
Is it, what is it? It's like sci.fi, or science- sci- sciof.fi? Yeah, you can, y-y-y- it's sciof.fi. You can thank- Yeah, there we go... Doc Finland for that domain. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot.
They had that one available, so that was- The Indian Ocean was hot for a little while there. People use that one a lot. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So what are some s- other- Yeah...
specific ways you believe in groups doing great work, people doing great work that should be followed? Tell me. Do you want an answer that relates specifically to the science fiction or to- Whatever you want...
whatever I want. Okay. If you were like, "People should watch the second season of
For All Mankind 'cause it's a perfect season of television and the ending is heartbreaking and wonderful," uh, then you can just say that. Sure, sure, sure, sure. But if there's other things, we can do that too. Yeah.
Well, I guess my first answer will be, because I imagine there's a lot of s-scientists and scientifically inclined folk who listen to your podcast, you know, don't be afraid to get out there into a non-traditional forum and talk about the thing that you're passionate about, whether that is going to a local video game or comic convention or giving a talk at a museum or, you know, some sort of public event.
I think it is really important for people to put a face to science in order to, you know, hopefully help rebuild some of the trust that has eroded over the years.
And, and, you know, if you're a science fiction fan, if you're a comic fan, if you play video games, if you play board games, there is a convention out there of- Oh, yeah...
like-minded nerds who want to know, you know, why this works- Mm-hmm... in a phys- you know, on, on a chemistry level, on a physics level, and are eager to absorb your knowledge.
So go to those people, meet them where they are, and use your shared passion to connect with them. That's what I would say for the, the science folks in the room.
For everyone else, gosh, there's, you know, I think again you mentioned this, this false debate between individual and systemic action, which is just, yeah, really frustrating and not something I wanna get into too much there, but I am always a why not both type of person.
And if we're going to change things on a systemic level, it starts with, I do believe it starts with, you know, building small grassroots communities. So do something in your community that matters. Mm-hmm.
You know, get involved in a local, you know, park cleanup effort. If you're into tinkering and repair, get involved in a repair cafe.
These are events that take place all over the world where people bring their old broken down devices, and people who have a little more experience fixing them teach you how to open it up and fix it.
You know, rather than throwing that thing in the trash or taking it out with your, you know, yearly e-waste haul, learn what's inside it and how it can be repurposed. Yeah.
I mean, I just, I, I think local and, and grassroots, and I, I, I think we, we gotta start small in a thousand different ways. Yeah. Um, at least a thousand.
Um, but that, those are all opportunities, uh, as we desperately try to, to, to paint it. That's it. Important & Not Important is hosted by me, Quinn Emmett. It is produced by Willow Beck, and the music is by Tim Blaine.
You can read our critically acclaimed newsletter and get notified about new podcast conversations at importantnotimportant.com. Thanks so much for listening, and thanks for giving a shit.