It's Alive!: Wicked Discoveries

Welcome to Victor Frankenstein’s foreboding lair strewn with insane equations, strange artifacts and miscellaneous body parts. Is Frankenstein a lone genius unlocking the mysteries of life for the benefit of humankind, or a mad scientist seeking to fashion the world in his own image? The masses certainly want to attack his monstrous laboratory with torches and pitchforks, but what if we instead used our collective energy to create a new workshop of widespread learning and creativity?

Transcript

Frank Spenser: It's October.

Yvette Montero Salvatico: Your favorite month of the year.

Frank: I could not be more excited. This is my favorite month of the year because it contains my favorite holiday of the year, which we've already expressed on other episodes.

Yvette: Multiple occasions.

Frank: Here we are, nonetheless.

Yvette: We're in October in the midst of our new collection, the Monstrous Collection.

Frank: Life could not be sweeter.

Yvette: I was going to say you are peaking right now.

Frank: I'm peaking right now. I wanted to ask you before we got started today on our new month, what is your favorite memory of Halloween, or maybe in particular Halloween costumes?

Yvette: That's a good one. I just had to jump on the phone with my mom to remind myself of some of the goodness that was our childhood Halloweens, because as a child of immigrants, we didn't even know McDonald's was a thing, just to give everybody a perspective. It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized, oh, you can go to a restaurant and get food.

Frank: If you guys were driving down the road, nobody said, let's stop at McDonald's.

Yvette: No.

Frank: You just went to the back seat and got the rice and beans on the cooker?

Yvette: My mother had a full-on pressure cooker on the back of the station wagon. I'm not joking.

Frank: Delicious for food, bad for bugs.

Yvette: Yes, not so good. Surprisingly, we're not purchasing. There's no purchasing of costumes, but my mother and my grandmother both knew how to sew so we had some pretty good costumes. On the downside for us kids, they lasted a long time. What does that mean? That means that one year my brother was an alien.

Frank: Excellent with an alien costume?

Yvette: Yes, and it was very reminiscent of this past month that we just had with alien invasion. He was an alien, black outfit with the appropriate accessories. The year after, that became a ninja costume.

Frank: Same costume?

Yvette: Basically.

Frank: Now he's alien-ninja. He's a ninja from--

Yvette: There's no more alien. He's embodying the ninja with-

Frank: Just a ninja with the same costume.

Yvette: - the same costume, maybe with some different accessories. He had his eyes covered.

Frank: Just accessorizes.

Yvette: Right.

Frank: He was like it was an alien, but now it looks like a ninja, same costume?

Yvette: Yes. It's all about how you personify.

Frank: The base of the custom must have been [unintelligible 00:02:24].

Yvette: Then she thinks it became a pirate. We're not really sure. We have to find the pictures of it.

Frank: A pirate.

Yvette: Right.

Frank: We went from alien to ninja to pirate, but it's all the same costume.

[laughter]

Yvette: I'm telling you. You've got to be industrious. Again, these costumes last a long time, she made them. Again, for those of you who have grown up on costumes from the store, you don't know how lucky you are, that those things fell apart immediately that evening.

Frank: By the way, I do think I heard your brother say that his favorite costumes were just the paper bag from Piggly Wiggly or the grocery store.

Yvette: Publix, yes.

Frank: Publix or whatever, over your head.

Yvette: It was actually Pantry Pride at the time if I'm not mistaken.

Frank: Right. The name of the grocery store with Pantry Pride, because you might be listening to this in Singapore, China, whatever your grocery store name is, tear some holes in a bag.

Yvette: Not a plastic, a paper bag.

Frank: Don't put the plastic bag.

Yvette: No, this is a safety concern. He said that even one year, my mom put the paper bag on her head and she got candy. There's a lot to unpack here about the socioeconomic status of my childhood. You've got an inside view to that.

Frank: There's a whole journal article here, the socioeconomic status of Halloween costumes. When you said that about don't put the plastic bag on your head, it reminded me of in the '70s, an era long gone, your land of the lost. It used to be that at Halloween went to the store and the costume hour was just boxes. Boxes with a mask inside with a rubber band.

Yvette: Oh, I forgot the-- yes.

Frank: Yes. You just looked at the box and the mask was through cellophane, but the costume was behind it. You just picked out clown or whatever. Then now we've gotten to where the costumes hang on racks and stuff and [unintelligible 00:04:08].

Yvette: By the way, you might be thinking to yourself, how did that custom still fit him? He's not the tallest guy, he didn't grow a lot, but eventually, they were more knickers. It was perfect for the pirate because it's like a cyclops.

Frank: Rip the pants a little bit. You're like--

[laughter]

Yvette: Yes, exactly.

Frank: What else could you say it was?

Yvette: It's like the whole episode--

Frank: Those box costumes, you put that mask on, and if it's on for more than say 60 to 90 seconds, you are basically sweating like a guy who's getting ready for a pro-wrestling fight.

Yvette: Let's just bring this back to today because these are the same-- I'm not going to say a bad word, but these are the same idiots that say they can't wear a mask in a pandemic, but they were walking around the whole neighborhood collecting candy with scooby-doo on their faces. No problem.

Frank: Never take it off. You get home, and literally, your face is glistening with sweat. They're like, I can breathe, just too tiny nose holes. Too tiny. You're just steaming it up in there. It's like a sonnet.

Yvette: By the way. You can't even see if cars are coming or nothing.

Frank: I remember thinking when I first put it on, I'm so cool like Frankenstein. Then I'm like Frankenstein was really uncomfortable all the time. No wonder he was angry. Listen, I got to tell you a really quick story.

Yvette: Okay, it's got to be quick because we're [crosstalk]--

Frank: I didn't get to tell my story and they're going to love this. That is that we used to every year, we didn't even go trick or treating because my house was considered to be a haunted house, an actual haunted house on the block. I think we've mentioned this before. Because everybody knew that, it was the perfect place to set up a haunted house when people visit on Halloween. They knock on the door, I answer dressed in a costume and it's scary. You can see behind me, there's something on the stairs, but it's in the dark. It's one of my friends dressed in a costume.

We used to make our "friend", I'm doing the air quotes here, that was the most gullible of us all. You got to pick out the most gullible in your group. We were like, "You've got to go in the attic." There's an attic window in the front of the house, but you're up in this dark attic by yourself. He always dressed like Frankenstein because he was one of our friends that was the lumbering, taller than everybody else. Looked a little like Frankenstein in real life.

Yvette: He was tight cast.

Frank: Yes, but all night he would throw a dummy out the window, and then he'd be like, "Frankenstein threw the dummy out the window." Then we would carry it back up the stairs and give it to him through the attic door and run away because it was scary.

Yvette: You think me making black beans and rice in my station wagon was weird?

Frank: Again, the socioeconomic.

[laughter]

Frank: All night he was screaming from it. There he did the Frankenstein. Then he'd be like, "Can I cut him down and scare you?" We were like, "No, you got to stay up there and torture him."

Yvette: Today, he is like--

Frank: Right, actual psycho probably.

Yvette: Yes, he's probably a hoarder. He's probably doesn't leave his house.

Frank: Right.

Yvette: That's nice. We need to look him up.

Frank: Welcome to the new month of The Wicked Opportunities podcast.

Yvette: I know you don't listen past this, so welcome. My name is Yvette Montero Salvatico.

Frank: My name is Frank Spencer, and I told that story at the end there because it relates specifically to the theme of this month's Wicked Opportunities podcast.

Yvette: Right. This month, we are traveling or reframing the wicked problem of Frankenstein's lab-

Frank: Frankenstein's laboratory.

Yvette: -to a wicked opportunity, which I can't remember if we say it now, I guess they read it on the descriptors. They already saw them now.

Frank: They probably know. In this first episode, of course, we're always hovering around more of that wicked problem so that we can tell you why.

Yvette: Unpacking it.

Frank: Unpacking it, and then getting to our wicked opportunity.

Yvette: Of course, you've been with us now the last few months, you know that we are working through our new collection, the Monstrous Collection. We've done alien invasion, we've done zombie apocalypse. Now we are going to tackle Frankenstein's lab. We're going to be using the Natural Foresight framework to walk through the reframing of this wicked problem because we believe that the world would be a better place if everybody fueled their work and their mindsets with Foresight.

That's the key way to reframe wicked problems, those complex problems that seem to just get more and more involved with every attempt at solving them. We know that Foresight is the way to tackle them. We use Foresight, specifically, Natural Foresight in our podcast. Week one is discover, week two is explore. Then we map them, we create. You could follow along on future space through our Reframe Magazine that gets delivered to your inbox every week.

In addition to the podcast, we have supplemental pieces of content. This week, you get to participate through a crowdsourced image of the future exercise where we create a mood board. You can decide whether you fall more on the wicked problem or the Wicked Opportunity side. There's no right or wrong answer. It could depend on the day and what news article you've just read.

Frank: That's true.

Yvette: In this week's version of the podcast, we use the framework of learn, unlearn, and relearn. We learn by understanding the origins of the wicked problem. Sometimes that's in language. For this month, it's really about literature. Then we move into unlearn where we dissect the pop culture framing of this dystopic trope.

Frank: How did that morphe over time and how does it manifest today?

Yvette: Then we relearn and debut and explain our Wicked Opportunity future. It's important to note that what we're trying to do here is not necessarily remove or eliminate the wicked problem, but we're trying to leverage the environment in which that wicked problem exists to really showcase how there's a wicked opportunity hidden within it's just a matter of reframing our mindsets.

Frank: Yes. Right. Before we jumped on the podcast here today to do the recording, I was reading a tweet from Nora Bateson and she said, "Be very careful of the industrial age complex because its language and its framing has snuck into everything from food to the way you're betting your house, your neighborhood, and everything. You have to understand that's the water we're swimming in." The wicked problem is the water you're swimming in. How do we think about that completely different? Swim in those waters differently, swim against the grain, so to speak. Use that environment that we're in and [unintelligible 00:10:46] thinking upside down to see the different way.

Yvette: Right. Ultimately, what we're trying to demonstrate with these podcasts is how you and your everyday can unpack problems both in your personal and your professional and in society and use foresight to discover novel, new ways of approaching it. To create more transformational futures and often starting with the why and understanding the origins of a problem or an issue is the best way to start. If you've been with us since the first collection you know that we used to use CLA or we would use CLA for this part of the first collection that first week, and for this collection, we're using learn and learn relearn. Let's define Frankenstein's Lab.

Frank: Yes. I want to start off by just saying, of course, this is the book Frankenstein from Mary Shelley. Considered one of the first works of sci-fi or Gothic horror or [crosstalk]--

Yvette: They didn't even know it at the time, but now looking back [crosstalk] it's pretty amazing. She was 18 years old at the time.

Frank: That's crazy and it was a challenge, of course. We're going to talk about this a little bit more, but she wrote it on a challenge, who could write the scariest story. I think we'll get into that in a few minutes, but I love this quote from the book because she's actually describing the lab and you're wondering right now Frankenstein's lab. Month one, you did zombies, month two you did aliens. I was expecting this to be vampires this month or something. but literally, we're not focusing. Remember if you ever read Frankenstein, Frankenstein's the doctor, not the monster. The monster was unnamed, right? Who is the real monster in this book?

Frankenstein's lab the way she describes it, I think really sets the stage for what we were want to talk about this month because she said it was a "Solitary chamber or rather cell at the top of the house, separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and a staircase where he kept his workshop of filthy creation." This describes what we're talking about, the definition of our wicked problem really is a reference to the infamous laboratory of the lone genius, Victor Frankenstein, a place where ancient alchemy and fringe experiments were practiced away from the public eye without consideration for widespread ethical ramifications or societal education.

Yvette: Right. We want to focus on this idea of the lone genius of how that's truly a wicked problem. We see it manifesting today with our billionaires going to space and the like and just the ethical dilemmas and the fear that are still induced by scientific transformation and experimentation. Look no further to your daily debates about vaccinations-

Frank: That's right.

Yvette: -and the COVID virus to see that this is still, this distrust of science, this concern over ethical ramifications of our interplay with technology is still very much a serious issue that she, Mary Shelley, had done so brilliantly. In terms of the history and the origins of this idea of the lone genius or sometimes the mad scientist archetype, of course, the book itself is the starting point for a lot of these elements. You wanted to talk a little bit about why she wrote it. It was interesting because it was the year without a summer. There was a volcanic eruption.

Frank: That's right. There was a lot of the summer where even there in Europe, the sky was bloated out.

Yvette: Yes. They had to stay inside which again, reminiscent of a similar period of time over the last year and a half.

Frank: Sounds familiar.

Yvette: Did you write a famous novel during your time during the pandemic?

Frank: I did not.

Yvette: Yes. We learned how to use the air fryer.

Frank: I read the novel on how to effectively use the air fryer to make my delicious food with. I did a lot of work. Do I get any credit for that? There were lots of clients, lots of scenario writing. Did I write? Yes, I wrote a ton. Did I write a book that will someday be as famous as Frankenstein? I did not.

Yvette: Not this time around.

Frank: Not this time around.

Yvette: She did write it as a result of a contest. In the book, it describes Frankenstein as trained as both an Alchemist and a modern scientist, which in many ways makes him like the bridge between those two eras of that evolving archetype.

Frank: Right. Yes and I just wanted to mention briefly too, because I know our audience will find this fascinating that at the time there was really a lot of focus on what was called galvanism which was this fringe science today. If it were today, Jeff Bezos would surely be spending Amazon money on this. Maybe he is in a manner of speaking. We'll talk about that too.

Yvette: Yes. We see lots of examples of science today.

Frank: Yes.

Yvette: Radical life extension, we're going to talk next week about the genetic babies.

Frank: That's right. Our transhumanism, there's all kinds of things that we could talk about today that like good futures. We're like Frankenstein's ourselves I think a little bit the future, I see that. This science of galvanism was like, can I bring a frog or a cow's head back to life if I electrocute it? It turns out Shelley was hanging around her father and these parties that they would have at their house where they would invite famous scientists. Even the father of Charles Darwin was often there and these different guys were into this galvanism.

This is probably at least to some degree where she got this idea to write Frankenstein from was reanimation through electricity. Remember the body parts that were used to make the monster were human and parts of pigs and all and then they raised it up and let the lightning bolt strike it. He came down and the monster was alive. This is the science of galvanism, this is probably where she got this from.

Yvette: Super interesting too. We'll talk a little bit, I think later about socioeconomic status and influencing who gets to practice science and discovery because in reality, what you just described there is really rich people getting together and almost be bored and like, let's reanimate a frog because we got nothing else to do.

Frank: That's exactly right. As a matter of fact, in the movie where and I think you were saying in the book, Frankstein never says to the [unintelligible 00:17:09] it's alive.

Yvette: Never said it.

Frank: It's alive, It's alive but in the movie made in the 1930s or I think late '30s, I'm probably wrong about that correct me if you want to fact check our show. You actually do see the doctors say it comes down, this hand starts to move, he goes, "It's alive." Then he turns to the people that were witnesses in the room and he says, "Look, three sane scientists, one madman." He was suggesting that the mad lone scientist was more important than the collective wisdom of the established scientists.

Yvette: Yes. That's really interesting because even if you look back to this idea of genius before the 16th century people didn't really speak of other people being geniuses, but rather them having genius. Genius as the Harvard scholar, Marjorie Garber says, meant a God or spirit given to every person at birth, but then we started to see a change with the enlightenment thinker who sought to give man a dignified central place in the world. They actually made our man's, I guess not mine at the time, man's thinking the center of their universe and created a profoundly a social self.

Frank: Oh my goodness and we could go the rest of the month on just this individualism versus the collective, which is a lot of what this month's about, but this extreme radical individualism is what we're seeing in two ends of the spectrum really all the way from the Bezos and the Musk's who Jeff Bezos, I think as we stand here today is worth $190 billion. When you've got that much crazy, ridiculous, insane, and psychopathic money, why not make a rocket shape phallic and go into space even though you have no astronaut training. Do whatever you want because it's all insane at that point.

Yvette: Yes. It's interesting because hand in hand with this idea of the lone genius is the secret nature of it, the isolated and siloed element of it. I love this piece of research that we gathered where once we made it past the futile and farming way of life to more of capitalism and industrial environments, artists needed to be more than entertaining. They had to be original, they had to profit from their work, and so it was in 1710 that Britain enacted its first copyright law. That established authors as a legal owners of work and really giving new cultural currency to the idea of authors, originators creators-

Frank: The lone genius

Yvette: -the lone genius.

Frank: That's so heavy. In other words, capitalism reinforced that whole idea before art was truly art and then it became a commodity as everything we commoditized. We've talked about this before, we commoditized death now.

Yvette: Again, any time that you assign a trademark or copyright, we're not necessarily suggesting that we're against those things, but that creates implications around firewalls and secrecy. We'll talk a little bit more about that. The lone genius, isn't just about someone challenging the ethics and acting alone, but there's a secretive aspect, right?

Frank: Exactly. You're setting me up beautifully because I love this piece of research that we have. Again, thank you, Ashley Powers for all of our research every month and here, this quote says "Frankenstein is the prototype of the mad scientist who hides himself in the laboratory." You see that in our banner picture that [unintelligible 00:20:59] has drawn for us this month. It says, "Secretly creating, not an elixir of immortality, but in the human life only to find he has created a monster." Frankenstein is not only the romantic overreach or determined to transcend human limitations. No, no, no. He is also the air of Baconian Optimism and enlightenment confidence, that everything can ultimately be known and that such knowledge will inevitably only be for the good.

I wrote a side note to myself here. It's like, if you think about that phrase, what should be coming to mind for you is centralization, determinism, control. As man, we're separate from nature. I'm going to control it. That's what that lone mad scientist-- As a matter of fact, I look forward to next week because we've got some articles that talk about some of the recent discoveries especially around designer babies and that kind of thing. How we try to control our universe. Look, the bottom line here is if you look all around us as I was quoting Nora Bateson earlier, be careful of the water that we're swimming in. The monster is everywhere.

We've created these plastic societies where I'm driving down the road to come to the office this morning and there's the stoplights and we've covered the ground with cement for cars to drive on. We are those Frankenstein creators in many ways. We're learning that from that same attitude of the lone genius of the commodification that you just read about this. A way to try to control our environment and create a monster out of it.

Yvette: Right. We talked about the origins. I think we're jumping ahead a little bit, but now we wanted to make the transition, that was learn, now we want to unlearn and talk a little bit about the pop culture representation of the lone genius, the mad scientist, that was first originated in Frankenstein. I think it was really telling one of the articles that we read in preparation was close your eyes and imagine a scientist. What is that cultural representation that comes to mind? There's some obvious ones, Doc Brown.

Frank: Back to the Future.

Yvette: Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters. Of course, Dana Scully from the X-Files.

Frank: She was the good-- Mulder was the crazy mad scientist on the show, I think in a way.

Yvette: Yes and then Seth Brundle from The Fly.

Frank: The Brundlefly. You know what's really interesting about that, The Fly? Of course, played by Jeff Goldblum, which I love him in another movie I'm going to mention in just a minute, which is actually a Frankenstein type movie too is that he was both the Frankenstein character and the monster because he made himself into the fly is really [crosstalk]--

Yvette: That's heavy. Rick and Morty, Rick Sanchez and [crosstalk]--

Frank: Rick Sanchez, crazy drunk, Rick. He got the white lab coat on.

Yvette: Yes, but beyond scientists, we've really also romanticize the idea of the lone genius. A lot of young adults heading back to college these few weeks and you're seeing in dorm rooms everywhere, posters of Floyd and of Einstein. You always have that great quote at the bottom "Imagination is more important than knowledge." The popularization of these lone figures, we've gone back historically and documented that they weren't acting alone.

Frank: Of course, right?

Yvette: We love this idea of this narrative of the lone genius.

Frank: Well, I imagine you're putting that on your dorm room wall. If you actually are or if it's hanging somewhere. If it's in the library at your school, it's because they're trying to get you to aim to be the next Einstein to be the next Musk, to be the next Bezos, or whatever. Again our real discovery is collective. We're going to get there eventually, but I want to talk about a few of the other movies too like aliens for instance, because the original alien movie, we don't know who created the alien. If they're just another breed from another planet, turns out that wasn't the case.

There's another race of engineers who are going around the universe, creating life and taking it away again which is exactly what Victor Frankenstein tried to do in the book. We see movies like Splice, where they created a new baby made out of animal parts and human parts, [crosstalk] super creepy, and created a new species. This is very Frankestenian. Jurassic Park was the movie I was going to mention. One of your favorite movies of all time.

Yvette: Life finds a way.

Frank: When you think about John Hammond-

Yvette: Yes, that thing is Frankenstein all over the place.

Frank: -John Hammond, the scientist, the movies. "I got a mosquito from an Amber Bock sucked out his blood and made a dinosaur. They're like, "You are crazy," because he was the craziest scientist they knew.

Yvette: Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Frank: He was like, "Oh." Remember at the end of the movie, Hannah goes to the car, he goes, "It's over." When the dinosaur had eaten everybody is like, you finally just figured out this is over? The Raptor ate your handler. Oh my goodness. There's X [unintelligible 00:26:06], you mentioned The Fly. I even saw a funny picture when we were doing some of the research of one of my favorite cereals of all time, Franken Berry. They used to have [unintelligible 00:26:12] as well, but Franken Barry, that Frankenstein has been all over the place. I think even in the cereal was like the monster, yes, the representation, but this delicious cereal created by the makers of Franken Berry.

Yvette: It's interesting because like all the other tropes we've talked about, these don't just get created out of nowhere. We can talk about why Mary Shelley wrote the book had to do probably with fear and uncertainty. She also had, gosh, so much death in her life. My goodness, all her three children died as infants.

Frank: Within four years of each other.

Yvette: Her husband died.

Frank: Drowned. Percy Shelley of course famous author himself.

Yvette: He was only able to marry her because his pregnant wife--

Frank: Committed suicide. This all happened within a six-year period and her mom died too.

Yvette: When we look at these Frankenstein films and we look at these films about the lone genius or the mad scientist, they're really probably speaking in part to our fear of science and this idea that scientists somehow know more than we do. Gosh, I wish that was relevant today. It seems so. Wait, it is.

Frank: Oh, darn.

Yvette: Oh, wait, it is.

Frank: If only had that had stayed in 1818.

Yvette: Yes.

Frank: Here we are in 2018, 2021, nope.

Yvette: You see this weird confluence of the lone genius that myth of this cowboy scientist and this one person knows it all combined with our distrust of science in many ways, coming together on social media to where this individual who has done "His research". Which probably means reading a couple of tweets is able to weigh on an argument about immunology and has the same amount of street cred and credibility as the literal immunologists.

Frank: Yes. Well, you were saying all of that and I couldn't help, but think why you were saying that, my mind was in the lab and I saw you with your words mixing a wild mad scientist potion together. That's what it is. This is this crazy elixir of science is locked away behind journal articles, so we don't know what's in it. We don't know.

Yvette: We're skeptical.

Frank: I don't know what's in that vaccine. I don't know what's in it.

Yvette: I don't know what's in it.

Frank: I know it's a bunch of mad scientists over there plus you also pour into this elixir, a lack of education

Yvette: A distrust to academia and education.

Frank: Education, right. You mix all that goodness together and disassociate people make this gap between the haves and the have nots wider and wider. What you end up with is a monster that devour society.

Yvette: Right. The individuals that do generally can pursue stem fields are the ones, generally speaking have a higher economic class because our lower socioeconomic class and our marginalized communities don't have those opportunities. It is quite the confluence of variables to create the environment that we see today. This is why I love the work that we do because don't get into a Twitter debate about this because it's far too complex to boil it down to 140 characters.

We have to take time to discuss what are the origins of this? You could argue that the origins to those Facebook debates that you're having right now is the 1800s.

Frank: It is.

Yvette: We've got to unpack this before we can move forward. If not, you're just operating at the surface and you're frustrating yourself and everyone else and you're not getting anywhere.

Frank: I just read two great articles, both saying that Ben Franklin, by the way, used to be an anti-vaxxer. His son died of a smallpox. He instantly became a vaxxer. Made the hospital said, "Oh no, I was wrong." This argument surfaced again in the 1800 in America, the early 1900, the late 1900. Here we are, again, it hasn't gone anywhere. It's the same argument. If you think this is new, it's not as old as the hills. We have not fixed this because of the cowboy nation that we undergo. I know that our podcast goes around the world and this is heard in other places as well. We see the same kind of responses in other nations for maybe different reasons or similar reasons.

Yvette: Academia is siloed across the globe. Again, I think that was for a reason at some point, the idea of specialization and being able to focus. In fact, when you look at something like the Nobel Prize, it can only be awarded to at most three people around a particular topic.

Frank: Wow.

Yvette: Here, our systematic recognition is reinforcing this idea of the lone genius of the individual contributor and the savior of it all.

Frank: Wow.

Yvette: Are we moving on to relearn?

Frank: Yes. We have gone through learn, unlearn, and now we want to be able to tell people what the wicked opportunity is, define that. How can we, again, as Yvette says, not live inside of that problem and try to solve it, but really see this landscape as an opportunity, flipping the script, leveraging it, and doing something radically new, something provocative, maybe even preposterous.

Yvette: Yes. How do we update our mindsets, our mental models to look at the problem of Frankenstein's lab, the lone genius of siloed disciplines, and how do we approach that problem with a new perspective? We think the wicked problem of Frankenstein's lab can be reframed as democratized discovery. For us, this is defined as a decentralized view of scientific discovery that harnesses multiple ways of knowing. Widely disseminates deep knowledge and unearths novel ideas through complex emergence.

Frank: Decentralized discovery, decentralized communal discovery, and then really being able to leverage that emergence that's around us so that everybody can participate. My first question to you Yvette this?

Yvette: I would say the ways of knowing I think is such a crucial part of that.

Frank: Oh, yes. Maybe we'll mention that again because it's so powerful, but because there are multiple ways of knowing in the world.

Yvette: There really are.

Frank: Let's get back to that again in a second because I want to actually ask you a question.

Yvette: Sure.

Frank: Because the tough part about this is you already really mentioned this. It's like, so now if science is dispersed among everyone, how do we know we're getting something accurate because we're not saying, I don't think that studying for long periods of time and really knowing the depth of immunology or cancer research or synthetic biology and all, you can just pick up a book and know that, are we saying that?

Yvette: No, but I think it's just recognition that siloing away knowledge and putting it on high doesn't generate acceptance of that knowledge. It's like what we tell people when we are advising them about creating a foresight competency, that siloing that away or if there was a way to even just purchase the future of your company and be able to know that having that volume of knowledge is pretty useless because you're not equipped to do anything with it or understand it, or really don't have the culture within your organization to address it, to accept it, and to act on it.

Similarly, we obviously recognize the importance of scientific discovery. We're just saying that it can't be held to just the rich, the white, and the male because I think we have-- There are many different ways to democratize discovery. There is letting more people into the field, there is different ways of knowing and recognizing that there is more than quantitative metrics in science or there should be and it should be valued as much as the qualitative and the other ways of knowing and in looking for discovery and knowledge and information from everyone.

Frank: Yes. I love that you said that part because really what that leads us to is that by the end of this month, we're going to need to get closer to how do we reform or rethink a society where it's not a question of, gosh, we're just saying that deep knowledge isn't important anymore. How do we disperse that knowledge more? How do we give and empower agency among the masses to think that way?

Yvette: How does discovery just become something every day that we do, that we embrace, that we seek as humans in one another, in ourselves, in our environments?

Frank: That allow us to both learn and give learning to-

Yvette: Teach, yes

Frank: -and teach. Also just to, even if we're not learning and teaching, and we don't have some kind of deep knowledge, it creates greater wonderment, which is a space for learning [unintelligible 00:35:23]. I think that's super, super important. As a matter of fact, I know a part of what you were saying [unintelligible 00:35:29] it reminds me of the disordered universe or cosmos. The Disordered Cosmos is a book by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, is relatively new. She's writing on not just physics and the universe, but she said it should be everybody's right to go out, look up into the night sky and have wonderment. In the book specifically, she talks about LGBTQ and the trans community and just immigrants community, indigenous communities that have been historically left of the sciences because they'd been largely white and male.

Yvette: Let's talk about this evolution of the wicked opportunity. One thing that we didn't mention as it relates to Frankenstein is that in his creation, there was an element of wonderment that he had as almost like a newborn. In analyzing that piece of literature, many people point to the fact that that book really teaches us about compassion and empathy. Gosh, if we don't need more of that these days, I don't know what we do need more of?

Frank: Isn't that a key, because if we have more compassionate empathy in society, there'll be more wonderment, more openness to learn, and know that I don't know everything.

Yvette: From each other, yes.

Frank: It's the idea that if I'm really closed down, I think I'm really smart. The smarter you actually really are, the more you're open to that you don't know very much.

Yvette: I think the other thing that has changed around science, even though we've talked in this podcast about how the current state of affairs suggests that there is still fear around science and a distrust, we have seen more and more ordinary people entering into science and their humanity be amplified. Women have also obviously entered into the sciences more and that's, of course, critical because we tend to ask more questions about relationships.

Frank: Love it.

Yvette: I think connecting on the internet and networks, allowing more people to have access, we're already starting to see this move to more democratized discovery. The weak signals are all around us about how this is already emerging.

Frank: That's awesome. Of course, when I mentioned that list I didn't even mention the women part it's so basic. Bringing that feminine spirit and the science is so important because again, it's like swimming in that old pool.

Yvette: It's tough because although there's obviously--

Frank: No diversity of it.

Yvette: There's obviously greater representation of women in science, but having had people close to me in that field that are female we've got a long way to go because we might've checked a few boxes of how many women we have represented, but they don't feel included. The systems in place definitely act to discriminate against having women continue to progress in those fields.

Frank: Yes. You hear a lot about still microaggression and that's happening towards that feminine spirit in science because we still want to hold on to the mad lone scientists.

Yvette: Right. Structurally women, when they want to have a family and have children-

Frank: That's right.

Yvette: -again, child-rearing and falls mostly to women in most situations in society. It's very difficult for them to maintain a career or be able to on-ramp it back on. The other thing we talked a lot about in this podcast is this idea of information and siloing. Of course, that would be a big part of democratized discovery is breaking down those silos, making information much more readily available.

Frank: I think it really plays into the fact, as a matter of fact, at one point we had considered calling our Wicked Opportunity, citizens science, and we're aware and there are others that have been able to teach us even more on the fact that, and then we've read a lot about the fact that this idea of citizen science, which a few years ago was a more popular moniker for what we're talking about when we say democratized discovery really who is the citizen? How do you define who a citizen is? Again, that can lock the doors to a broader, more diverse, more varied, and colored way of seeing the world.

Yvette: Yes, because today citizen science as great as it is mostly practiced by wealthy white individuals. It does lock out individuals of different backgrounds cultural representations, worldviews, race, and you name it, so, and we need all those because neuroscience studies clearly indicate. If you go back and you look at the works of Einstein and Picasso and all of these supposedly lone geniuses, first, you find out they weren't actually acting alone. They all had counterparts and peers and partners-

Frank: Groups.

Yvette: -that were huge in influencing and helping them make their discoveries. Neuroscience more recently has really pointed out that having a creative network, having multiple individuals tackling a problem-- We take it for granted now, we know that this is the case yet that image and that myth of the lone genius continues to persist despite the fact that we have evidence to suggest that having more individuals, more diverse perspectives involved in solving a problem is much better.

Frank: I love that you brought in social neuroscience. How could you possibly go wrong with that? I think just to close out, we wanted to get back to that multiple ways of knowing, because it's not just about more inclusion, it's about more inclusion of different ways of seeing the world. Quite honestly, if you go back to more historical cultures that are being unearthed and I was just reading a piece from [unintelligible 00:41:18] today talking about the Maori way of knowing in New Zealand, very different from a Western view of things. Now we start to dive into the philosophy of science. Why is science been framed the way it is? It's not because of the science we discovered it's because of the context that we develop the science in.

That's a heavy, heavy thought because you're like, "Wow, we know about neutrons and boom, that's just because of that's the way it is." No. Actually the way we learned about neutrons is because of the context that it was learned in, and if you had learned it in the context of the Maori nation, or [unintelligible 00:41:55] had learned about it from South Africa, it still might be neutrons. Maybe we would have given it a different name, maybe, but I think that the metaphor surround it would be quite different and the philosophy of science would be different.

Yvette: Yes, everything that we need to capture within discovery doesn't fit in a test tube, and I think by embracing different perspectives what we'll find is new ways to solve some of these huge challenges like climate change, that are exacerbated by our current scientific ways of knowing. I'm excited about this new month.

Frank: Oh, this is such a great month. I'm so super excited. Frankenstein, we're going to get you out of that laboratory and we're going to create a new laboratory before this month is over. One that's much larger, bigger. You'll see it probably in the picture already, the header that [unintelligible 00:42:44] does for us, but that laboratory is yours for the take it's all around this.

Yvette: All right. Thank you so much, Mr. Spencer. It's been a pleasure again to spend the last little bit with you discovering learning, unlearning, and relearning about Frankenstein's lab.

Frank: As always, you're awesome. I'm so excited we're in our Halloween month, I look forward to the rest of this month and everybody that's listening until then we can't wait to go on with this conversation about Frankenstein's lab. We'll see you next time.

Yvette: Bye-bye everybody, stay safe.

[00:43:15] [END OF AUDIO]