Remake (Eran Dror)

 

David Peter Stroh is the bestselling author of Systems Thinking for Social Change: A Practical Guide for Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results.

 

For the past 40 years, David has helped leaders to apply systems thinking to organizational strategy, and achieve breakthrough, sustainable change. He is a founding partner of the influential consulting firm Bridgeway Partners, a faculty member of the Academy for Systems Change, and a charter member of the Society for Organizational Learning.

 

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• How he was exposed as a child to both natural and urban complexity growing up in Inwood, at the very northern tip of Manhattan, NY.
• How he fell in love with transportation systems, but ended up studying Organization Development at MIT.
• How his search for greater impact and a seat at the table led him down the Systems Thinking path, and eventually to founding a consulting firm alongside Charlie Kiefer, Robert Fritz, and Peter Senge, later of The Fifth Discipline fame.

We also discuss:

• What’s a system, and what’s systems thinking?
• Why do complex systems often yield unintended consequences?
• What are the benefits of systems thinking, especially in the world of impact?
• What does it tell us about wealth inequality and poverty?
• And why David has come to see systems thinking as an almost spiritual practice?

 

David’s book and his blog are must reads for anyone interested in making deep and lasting positive impact, and avoid undesirable consequences. And this conversation can serve as a good, and I think, exciting intro to the topic.

 

Professor Steve Evans leads one of those fields that sound boring, but are actually super critical to our world and our future. He is a Director of Research in Industrial Sustainability at Cambridge University, where he leads research that helps factories become sustainable at scale. He helps industry bring about sustainable change at scale, including business model innovation, system transformation, and helps push the limits of efficiency in both advanced and developing countries.

 

Steve has over 30 years of academic experience and spent over 15 years in industry, where he led groundbreaking projects with Airbus, Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan, Electrolux, Toyota, as well as the city of Porto, Portugal, among many others.

 

• What he learned from his early interest in martial arts.
• How his time in both academia and industry helped him think about the right relationship between the two.
• Why industrial sustainability is so crucial for avoiding catastrophic climate change and why it also represents an enormous financial opportunity.
• How to make making itself more sustainable.
• What the shadow of a bike is, and why we need to think about the sustainability of products we buy as larger than simply the materials used in their making.
• What his vision for industry in 2050 is.
• And what are some of the most promising developments he's seen in this field?

 

This conversation is one of a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, scientists, entrepreneurs, and impact investors who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to remakepod.org to subscribe.

 

And now let's jump right in with Professor Steve Evans.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Developing listening skills as an introspective child, and how feeling like an outsider helped her develop those skills.
• Her electrical engineering studies, and her transition into looking at how technology influences society and people and how we live. 
• Her time at Netscape, and tying together the products for a consistent look and feel across a suite of products that came out at the time called Netscape Communicator. 
• Her move from Netscape to Yahoo!, and what went wrong for Yahoo! as a company trying to find its way.
• Her time at Google as we look at it from all angles. What was the state of design at Google before she joined and what were the changes she tried to implement as she brought human-centered design and practices to Google?
• Hiring strategies, staff training, and how design workshops ultimately became the Design Sprint at Google.
• What is design and what is a designer?
• And the role of the designer in venture capital.

 

I think my greatest takeaway from this interview is this sense of hope that someone like Irene is able to walk into these very "techy" cultures and produce real change. And all it takes is really showing the value of the work and being willing to engage and promote better practices. I think Irene will be an inspiration to many non-engineers who find themselves in heavy engineering cultures and want to make a contribution. 

 

This conversation with Irene is one of many weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, best-selling authors, designers, makers, scientists, impact entrepreneurs, and others who are working to change our world for the better. So please follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to remakepod.org to subscribe.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Irene Au.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• The value and importance of speaking your truth, and how she learned that in childhood.
• Her journey from Kenya to the United States, and then to South Africa.
• Her experiments with architecture, physics, and computer science.
• Why urban planning was more appealing to her than architecture.
• The issues that architecture doesn't address.
• Her approach to foresight and future thinking.
• Smart cities, and what constitutes bad urban design.
• Her work with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe.
• And decolonizing our knowledge and ways of knowing.

 

I loved hearing about Geci's use of different foresight practices to imagine different futures and different possibilities for the future. But what really stayed with me is how dire the situation is — with urbanization outpacing our predictions and our ability to plan, and giving rise to shortages and unplanned solutions that may be less than ideal. We need every tool in our creative toolbox to make sure our cities grow to be a place of diversity, creativity, and opportunity, rather than their opposite.

 

This episode is especially rich with resources and references, so I wanna encourage everyone listening to check the show notes. We are fairly meticulous at listing and providing links to every article, book, person, or resource mentioned in the episode.

 

We have close to a dozen weekly episodes already lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, and entrepreneurs who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to RemakePod.org to subscribe.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Dr. Geci Karuri-Sebina.

 

BJ Miller is an American physician, author, and speaker. He is a practicing hospice and palliative medicine physician, and is best known for his 2015 TED Talk, "What Really Matters at the End of Life". BJ, who served as an executive director of San Francisco's Zen Hospice Project, has been on the teaching faculty at UCSF School of Medicine since 2017, and is the subject of the Netflix Academy Award nominated short documentary, End Game. His book, A Beginner's Guide to the End, which he co-authored with Shoshana Berger, is an unflinching, compassionate, and intensely pragmatic guide to the end of life.

 

Today, BJ sees patients and caregivers through his online palliative care service, Mettle Health.

 

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Growing up with a mother who lived with polio, and how that influenced his thinking.
• A severe accident early it life, which forced him to re-form his identity and informed the rest of his journey.
• His path in Palliative care - and the insight that the health establishment is designed to treat diseases, not humans.
• His insights into the meaning and wisdom one can find at the end of life.

 

It's been a rare pleasure to talk to someone like BJ, who is someone who steps into realms of experience most of us avoid at all costs, and to hear the precious types of wisdom he brings with him from there.

 

This episode, I think, is also a great introduction to the world of palliative medicine, which may be the first time the medical establishment put the patient's experience, quality of life, and constructed meeting at the heart of care, treating people as opposed to diseases. BJ and I discuss the ways the healthcare system and hospital system are badly designed, and what can be done about it.

 

Dr. Jessica Gallagher is in charge of External Engagement at The University of Adelaide, and was formerly the Pro-Vice Chancellor of Global Engagement and Entrepreneurship at The University of Queensland (UQ). At UQ, she has transformed the student experience, by embedding entrepreneurial thinking into the educational curriculum for every discipline. She oversaw the creation of UQ Ventures, and led their LeadHers program in helping 1,214 female participants to build confidence and grow leadership capabilities.

 

Jessica is also director on the board of the Kokoda Track Foundation, where she provides expertise and support in improving the lives and futures of Papua New Guineans.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Learning the power of education from her father, who was a teacher.
• Studying abroad in Germany, and how it opened her mind to different cultures, languages, and ways of thinking.
• The importance of entrepreneurship studies for all disciplines and specialties.
• Her work to increase rates of female student enrollment in UQ's Accelerator program, and to provide them with the tools and confidence to succeed.
• The importance of stepping outside of your comfort zone and continually challenging yourself to keep growing.

 

This conversation with Jessica is one of a dozen or more upcoming conversations with designers, authors, scientists, investors, and entrepreneurs who are changing our world for the better. If you don't want to miss them, please follow our show on your favorite podcast player.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Dr. Jessica Gallagher.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• The topic of belonging and how to foster it.
• The need for belonging in troubling times.
• What being bored at school taught Susie about herself and the world.
• How she moved from politics to design and got involved with the Stanford d.school.
• Her work in the K12 lab at d.school, which combined design thinking with the Montessori education system.
• Moving from design thinking and education, to liberatory design and design for belonging.

 

What is belonging? What does it look and feel like? Why does it matter? What is othering, and how does it work? The importance of ritual, storytelling, and spaces, and crafting belonging. As someone who's researched religion through a designer's eye, I love the emphasis on ritual, spaces, and storytelling, and crafting belonging. All of these areas, which religions are famously good at utilizing, whereas secular environments often fail entirely to appreciate. But what if a school made you feel as welcome and as part of the community as the best churches? What if the rituals we crafted and the stories we told included every one of us?

 

Since this interview with Susie, I've already interviewed a few of her co-authors in the d.school new book series, which will be coming out in the next few weeks.

 

This conversation is one of a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and activists who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to RemakePod.org to subscribe.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Susie Wise.

 

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is an academic lecturer, a spiritual leader, a disillusioned activist, and the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home.

 

He was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Soon after he was born, his family emigrated to Bonn, Germany with his father on his first diplomatic assignment. This, Bayo's first trip, would foreshadow a life of travel, both literally and figuratively. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont.

 

He's also Professor of Practice at Middlebury College. He sits on the board of many organizations including Science and Nonduality, Unashay Sanctuary, and more. 

 

Now living between India and the United States, Bayo is a proud father and a devoted husband.

 

• Growing up in transition, Nigeria to Germany, and then many other places.
• Family being a constant value in his life.
• His love-hate relationship with India.
• His activism and his postactivism, and what does it mean to be a postactivist or to be postactivistic? And specifically, what it means to discover as an activist that your very activism has become part of the problem you're trying to solve.
• What does it mean to engage with the world without trying to apply your prejudices on it?
• Hope, and why it too can be problematic.
• How he sees the world, and how he tries to not get trapped by images and words, to experience a world that's alive and not static and dead. And to avoid overly defining things and overly restricting our view of the world through that definition.

 

I talked to Bayo at the end of January, and it was right after a Design Sprint with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie (a former guest of the podcast), where Bayo's work and his online course was one of the demos that we looked at as an example.

 

I'm very excited to bring you this conversation with Bayo, and I was very excited to talk to him. His writing is intensely beautiful. He speaks and seems to think in poetry. His words paint pictures that move us, but avoid being captured. I think Bayo is an awakened person. He clearly sees things in a way that's deeper and that's hard to comprehend sometimes. But his efforts at clarity and communication are very obvious and evident here, and I think it will be appreciated. I'm a little bit worried that people who don't really have any strong spiritual background might find some of these topics hard to understand or relate to. So I want to leave you with this recommendation.

 

I would like you to imagine the world as a dynamic, elaborate, interdependent, ever-changing and shifting, an intensely alive cloud of interactions, where nothing is quite as solid or as clear-cut as it seems to be. Now, imagine seeing this mess so clearly you can feel it in your being, and then having to find the words to describe it, knowing full well that every word and sentence leaves out as much as it brings in. And so, as you listen to Bayo with words, I would like you to try to understand that he's trying to communicate something that's intensely nonverbal. That's at least how I connect with it and how I find my way into it.

 

This is one of a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and activists, who are working to change our world for the better. So please follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app or head over to remakepod.org to subscribe.

 

And now let's jump right in with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Developing listening skills as an introspective child, and how feeling like an outsider helped her develop those skills.
• Her electrical engineering studies, and her transition into looking at how technology influences society and people and how we live. 
• Her time at Netscape, and tying together the products for a consistent look and feel across a suite of products that came out at the time called Netscape Communicator. 
• Her move from Netscape to Yahoo!, and what went wrong for Yahoo! as a company trying to find its way.
• Her time at Google as we look at it from all angles. What was the state of design at Google before she joined and what were the changes she tried to implement as she brought human-centered design and practices to Google?
• Hiring strategies, staff training, and how design workshops ultimately became the Design Sprint at Google.
• What is design and what is a designer?
• And the role of the designer in venture capital.

 

I think my greatest takeaway from this interview is this sense of hope that someone like Irene is able to walk into these very "techy" cultures and produce real change. And all it takes is really showing the value of the work and being willing to engage and promote better practices. I think Irene will be an inspiration to many non-engineers who find themselves in heavy engineering cultures and want to make a contribution. 

 

This conversation with Irene is one of many weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, best-selling authors, designers, makers, scientists, impact entrepreneurs, and others who are working to change our world for the better. So please follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to remakepod.org to subscribe.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Irene Au.

 

Max Rashbrooke's TED Talk on upgrading democracy has touched a nerve, and has been viewed over 1 million times in a matter of months. He's a Wellington-based writer and public intellectual, with twin interests in economic inequality and democratic renewal. His latest book is Too Much Money, about wealth disparities in New Zealand, and his previous books include Government for the Public Good: The Surprising Science of Large-Scale Collective Action.

 

Max is a Senior Associate of the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies. His work appears in outlets such as the Guardian and Prospect magazine.

 

• How moving from a wealthy school to a failing school in a low income neighborhood opened his eyes to his own privilege and the extent of poverty in the world.
• How he became fascinated with the problem of entrenched and compounded inequality and lack of mobility as a financial journalist in London during the financial crisis.
• The dangers of increasing inequality and immobility, and how it leads to a mistrust in institutions, an attraction to populist authoritarianism, and a crisis for democracy.
• How he proposes to upgrade democracy for the digital age, by increasing participation and incorporating tools like citizen assemblies, online consensus building, and participatory budgeting.
• And why having faith in our fellow citizens and in the power of the government to do good is essential to healing democracy in our lifetime.

 

I really enjoyed talking to Max, and hope that you'll enjoy his excellent introduction to the growing movement of more participatory democracy. Max is one of dozens of great conversations with thinkers, activists, and makers who are trying to remake our lives in some meaningful way. If you don't want to miss them, please make sure you subscribe in your favorite podcast player.

 

And now let's jump right in with Max Rashbrooke.

Patrick McKeown is the best-selling author of The Oxygen Advantage, and the Clinical Director of the Buteyko Clinic International. Over the past two decades, Patrick has trained thousands of people around the world to safely challenge their bodies and produce positive changes through correct breathing. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading breathing re-education experts.

 

TODAY'S GUEST

 

Alan Lightman is an American writer, physicist and social entrepreneur. He served on the faculties of Harvard and MIT, and was the first person at MIT to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities. Currently, he serves as professor for the practice of the humanities at MIT. In his scientific research, he has made fundamental contributions to the astrophysics of black holes and cosmic radiative processes.

 

He is the author of numerous books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Einstein's Dreams, an international bestseller, The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, and his latest book, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings, where he discusses questions of nothingness and infinity, the mind, and the specialness of life.

 

Alan's essays and articles have appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper's, Nautilus, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Salon, and many other publications.

 

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, and living between physics and the humanities.
• What it was like to study physics at Princeton and Caltech.
• Working with Richard Feynman.
• Writing Einstein's Dreams.
• The connection between physics and spirituality.
• The topics of entropy and life.
• The rarity of life.
• On nothingness and infinity.
• On the value of wasting time, and many other topics.

 

This conversation with Alan Lightman is one of a dozen or more upcoming conversations with bestselling authors, thinkers, designers, scientists, and makers who are reimagining our world and experience. So please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, if you haven't already, so that you can make sure you don't miss them.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Alan Lightman.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Growing up in the 1950's in the US, and seeing segregation and the opposite of inclusion.
• The superficial design of the television era — designing to increase perceived value, and to increase purchases based on looks.
• His experience designing on a computer in the 70's.
• Designing kitchen gadgets.
• The need for multidisciplinary thinking, ergonomics, psychology, and other fields of knowledge.
• What makes a good designer?
• The importance of asking questions and being uncomfortable.
• The connection of design and religious studies, with meditation and mindfulness as tools for a designer.
• Design and inclusion.
• The 4B Collective — gender and design.
• The model of collective versus agency, and the difference between a process-based approach versus a knowledge-based approach in design.
• Qualitative versus quantitative metrics.
• And the death of the brand.

 

We talked in the middle of April 2022, and I was looking forward to chatting with Dan when I watched his hilarious and informative product review videos he's done with Epicurious, where he takes a kitchen gadget and critiques every aspect of its design, ergonomics, and function. We also had a short prep call before the interview, where it became clear to me what a serious design thinker he is, and how much we can all learn from him. It was really a joy to talk to Dan and explore his way of seeing the world and his unique approach to design.

 

This conversation with Dan is one of a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and investors who are working to change our world for the better in some meaningful way. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to remakepod.org to subscribe.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Dan Formosa.

 

Catherine Griffin is the founder and CEO of ImpactableX, and sits squarely at the intersection of capital, social innovation and execution to drive world-changing technologies. She has designed impact measurement and management tools that help social entrepreneurs to measure, track, and improve their social impact, as well as demonstrates its connection to revenue, and help startups make better impact decisions and investors to quantify their social impact. Prior to launching ImpactableX, Catherine served as Managing Director at an award-winning impact accelerator, GoodCompany Ventures, where she helped accelerate the application of new technologies to address the world's most pressing challenges.

Catherine serves as a lecturer at Wharton, and her work has been featured in FastCompany, Forbes, and The New York Times, among others.

 

• How growing up in a family of doctors instilled in her a focus on healing and a sense of care for others.
• How her personal struggles in college led her to ask tough questions about herself, her privilege, and her path in the world.
• How she got disillusioned with the world of nonprofit social development, and turned to private markets to see if their innovation could help more effectively.
• Getting involved with GoodCompany Ventures in collaboration with the city of Philadelphia, and how that put her in touch with acute public needs and innovative private solutions.
• The challenges of monetizing social impact ventures, and the inherent connection between value creation and value capture.
• And what she's learned about finding one's path in life and making a difference.

 

This conversation with Catherine is one of dozens of wonderful conversations we have for you with designers, authors, researchers, makers, investors, and activists who are trying to make our lives better. So if you don't want to miss those episodes, please make sure to follow this show on your favorite podcast player.

And now let's jump right in with Catherine Griffin.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Him growing up as the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors and the perspective it gave him.
• The rarity of people who take a moral stand in the face of bad consequences.
• What Everett Hughes had to say about the people who keep themselves clean and good while knowingly ignoring horrors done in their name.
• The character of dirty work and the systemic structures that make it persist. We then dive into particular examples, such as prison systems in the US, drone warfare as an imagined way to clean up war, and things that Americans consume that have dirty work behind them.
• Moral injury and how unethical jobs can over time create real injury, psychological harm to the people performing them.
• The invisibility of dirty work.
• What can we do to clean up dirty work?
• And we dive into the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the extent to which Israeli society is delegating the dirty work of occupation to soldiers and military police, and the ways in which civil organizations like Breaking the Silence are trying to counteract that tendency.

 

It's impossible to talk to Eyal and not think about the places where I might be exporting unpleasant or unethical work to invisible hands while still benefiting from their work. And it's been useful to think about what I can do in these situations. Eyal provided a valuable and challenging framework to think about the world we live in and what's truly necessary to make it better — not only keep our own hands clean, but raising awareness and reforming systems that fund and perpetuate morally injurious work out of the site of so-called "good people".

 

This conversation is one of a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, authors, scientists, designers, makers, and entrepreneurs who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to RemakePod.org to subscribe.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Eyal Press.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• How he developed his love of art and design sensibility.
• Growing up in branding inside of Nike, until eventually becoming Chief Marketing Officer.
• The importance of emotion and storytelling.
• On authenticity, and why chasing cool is a bad idea.
• On creativity as a team sport.
• And on the importance of courage.

 

We talked in mid-June 2022 and I was looking forward to talking to Greg because Nike clearly is doing some amazing work around branding and brand values, and is able again and again to create authentic connections at scale. 

 

I'm a latecomer to the world of branding. For much of my life, I was an avid product person and saw the brand as an afterthought. It's only in recent years that I understood the extent to which our lives, our thinking, and our decisions are driven by the stories we tell, and the emotional associations we make. 

 

The art of doing that well is branding. And it can be used for good or evil, and is just as important in non-profits and political organizations as it is in business. 

 

I really enjoyed the stories of some of Nike's iconic campaigns. Digging in to find compelling ways to tell stories that illustrate and support your values in a real way, feels like a very human way of crafting a brand that people can believe in. 

 

I've counted the episodes that we already have recorded and edited for you, and it's currently eight episodes. There are famous designers like Vicki Tan and John Maeda, authors like Susie Wise and Ashish Goel, and the most connected man in the world, Chris Dancy, among them. We release conversations weekly with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and activists who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to RemakePod.org to subscribe.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Greg Hoffman.

 

Dave Johnson is a lecturer at the Stanford Law School and at the Stanford d.school, where he teaches negotiation through design thinking. Before Stanford, he worked as a lawyer for 20 years in Silicon Valley tech companies. His most recent articles are designed for legal systems and designing online mediation.

 

He's currently writing a book under the working title, Climate Change Activism by Design.

 

EPISODE SUMMARY

• The role of law and how design can make it better.
• His ideas on climate change and climate change activism.
• How object-oriented programming and design, and the philosophy behind it, could be implemented in the world of law.
• Chaos theory, object-oriented modeling, and fuzzy logic.
• The question of what is law, norms versus laws, spaghetti code in law versus object-oriented and object modeling.
• The legislative system as all input and no output.
• His involvement and passion for climate change and climate change activism, and how he wanted to inspire more people to become active and activists, rather than an activist.
• The issue of individuals who are following climate trends and climate science, and getting really overwhelmed and feeling that there's not much they can do as individuals. And giving those individuals the tools to organize, collaborate, arrange small teams around specific tasks, and build a real force for change from the ground up.

 

We spoke at the end of March, 2022, and I was excited to get into this conversation because I love the idea of law and policy by design. I really think that the legal institutions and laws and policies are some of our most powerful tools for keeping chaos at bay and for keeping society functioning properly. And I really believe that tools from the world of design, particularly empathy and ideation, prototyping and testing, and iteration — that a lot of these core practices could really bring a lot of value in the world of law. So seeing that Dave is straddling these two worlds was very interesting to me.

 

This conversation with Dave is one of a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and investors who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to remakepod.org to subscribe.

 

And now let's jump right in with Dave Johnson.

 

Pia Mancini is a co-founder and CEO at Open Collective, a chair of the Democracy Earth Foundation, and a democracy activist who helped create the DemocracyOS platform and launched a Net Party in Argentina.

 

Her TED Talk, about upgrading democracy for the internet era, has exceeded a million views and helped reshape the conversation around the meeting place of democracy and the internet. She is a Y Combinator alum, a young global leader at the World Economic Forum, and she's also Roma's mum.

 

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Her journey from empowering citizens in the political process to empowering collectives to self-fund and self-govern
• Her vision for a more inclusive and expansive digital democracy
• The tension between idealism and the realities of life, politics, and system

 

We also discuss:

• How do we, as individuals, create a system and an environment that affects change?
• How can we use technology to upgrade democracy?
• How do we trust ourselves and each other?

 

There is no more important discussion, I believe, than how our new technologies should be used and woven into the fabric of our public life. And how to move from chaotic, even destructive populism, to a constructive model of participation and empowerment. My conversation with Pia is one of the most fascinating conversations, in an ongoing series of design conversations we've lined up for you on design for democracy, social change, and positive impact.

 

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is an academic lecturer, a spiritual leader, a disillusioned activist, and the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home.

 

He was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Soon after he was born, his family emigrated to Bonn, Germany with his father on his first diplomatic assignment. This, Bayo's first trip, would foreshadow a life of travel, both literally and figuratively. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont.

 

He's also Professor of Practice at Middlebury College. He sits on the board of many organizations including Science and Nonduality, Unashay Sanctuary, and more. 

 

Now living between India and the United States, Bayo is a proud father and a devoted husband.

 

• Growing up in transition, Nigeria to Germany, and then many other places.
• Family being a constant value in his life.
• His love-hate relationship with India.
• His activism and his postactivism, and what does it mean to be a postactivist or to be postactivistic? And specifically, what it means to discover as an activist that your very activism has become part of the problem you're trying to solve.
• What does it mean to engage with the world without trying to apply your prejudices on it?
• Hope, and why it too can be problematic.
• How he sees the world, and how he tries to not get trapped by images and words, to experience a world that's alive and not static and dead. And to avoid overly defining things and overly restricting our view of the world through that definition.

 

I talked to Bayo at the end of January, and it was right after a Design Sprint with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie (a former guest of the podcast), where Bayo's work and his online course was one of the demos that we looked at as an example.

 

I'm very excited to bring you this conversation with Bayo, and I was very excited to talk to him. His writing is intensely beautiful. He speaks and seems to think in poetry. His words paint pictures that move us, but avoid being captured. I think Bayo is an awakened person. He clearly sees things in a way that's deeper and that's hard to comprehend sometimes. But his efforts at clarity and communication are very obvious and evident here, and I think it will be appreciated. I'm a little bit worried that people who don't really have any strong spiritual background might find some of these topics hard to understand or relate to. So I want to leave you with this recommendation.

 

I would like you to imagine the world as a dynamic, elaborate, interdependent, ever-changing and shifting, an intensely alive cloud of interactions, where nothing is quite as solid or as clear-cut as it seems to be. Now, imagine seeing this mess so clearly you can feel it in your being, and then having to find the words to describe it, knowing full well that every word and sentence leaves out as much as it brings in. And so, as you listen to Bayo with words, I would like you to try to understand that he's trying to communicate something that's intensely nonverbal. That's at least how I connect with it and how I find my way into it.

 

This is one of a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and activists, who are working to change our world for the better. So please follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app or head over to RemakePod.org to subscribe.

 

And now let's jump right in with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe.

 

Shari Davis is a TED speaker, a participatory budgeting facilitator, and as she defines it, a recovering local government employee. She joined the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) after nearly 15 years of service and leadership in local government. As director of youth engagement and employment for the City of Boston, she launched Youth Lead the Change, the first youth participatory budgeting process in the US, which won the US Conference of Mayor's City Livability Award.

 

We spoke at the end of February, and I was very excited to talk to Shari because of her work on participatory budgeting, which seems to be one of the most promising new ways for everyday citizens, from all walks of life, to supervise and have a say in how public funds are being spent. Participatory budgeting has the potential for having an enormous impact on corruption, on efficient use of funds, on creating better, more efficient and more impactful programs, and also a huge effect on how people feel about their government. And all of this is already happening around the world, so I was very excited to hear about this from someone who's really leading this movement.

 

It was really fun to chat with Shari. She clearly has a lot of practice at connecting with, and including many different kinds of people. And so she puts you right at ease and she uses humor effectively. But it was the topic of the conversation that was really amazing to hear about.

 

( * Please note: this episode was originally recorded under they/she pronouns. )

 

• How her early involvement in martial arts as a kid really shaped her attitudes towards practice, responsibility, and community.
• How she initially got involved in the city government in Boston, eventually leading the youth department and bringing together resources and services for the youth of the city into one place.
• How she was asked to lead Youth Lead the Change.
• How the city earmarked $1M to be spent however the youth decided it should be spent, using the power of participation to make better decisions, and how that whole process unfolded.
• The US democracy's fatal flaw and how a lot of decisions happen in non-transparent, closed-door ways, ways that deepen inequality and division.
• How to run and lead a successful inclusive participatory budgeting project, whether you're a local government, a school, a non-profit or a national government, and why that makes such a huge difference.

 

What stayed with me is this idea that by bringing people together and putting them in the right kind of process, and then paying attention and designing the process itself, how much better decisions are. Talking to Shari was really energizing and hopeful, and this is one of our goals with every conversation we bring you including several conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and activists who are working to change our world for the better. So if you're interested in these types of hopeful conversations, follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to remakepod.org to subscribe. 

 

And now let's jump right in with Shari Davis.

 

Dr. Leidy Klotz is the Copenhaver Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, where he is appointed in the Schools of Engineering, Architecture, and Business. He co-founded and co-directs the university's Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative, which engages and supports applied, interdisciplinary research.  

 

Leidy studies how we transform things from the way they are to the way we want them to be. His research on the science of design has appeared in both Nature and Science, and he has written for The Washington Post, Fast Company, Lit Hub, and the Behavioral Scientist. Leidy has authored more than 80 original research articles and secured more than $10 million in competitive funding to support his and others' work in this area.

 

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• His early career as a soccer player.
• Studying engineering.
• His aha! moment when playing Legos with his son, which led to his breakthrough research and proof that people systematically overlook subtractive changes when considering a solution.

 

We also discuss:

• Adding versus subtracting.
• His book, Subtract.
• On adding as a strategy against entropy.
• On great examples of functional subtraction.
• Subtracting in design and in civilization in general.
• On loss aversion as a possible driver.
• On minimalism.
• And many other topics.

 

Leidy's insights are especially crucial for designers, and has encouraged me to incorporate a moment of subtraction in our design processes. I think we'd all be better off if our products, our laws, our routines, and our homes, occasionally got simpler, instead of more complex.

 

This conversation is one of a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with top thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and impact investors who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to remakepod.org to subscribe.

 

And now let's jump right in with Dr. Leidy Klotz.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Her 6:06pm tradition where she takes a picture at the same time every day, and the value of documenting our lives in this way.
• How she learned the value of prototyping at a very young age.
• What drew her to geology, and the relationship between geology and visualization.
• Her lateral move from geology to design and how that got her into designing maps.
• What is a map? Hint: It's broader than you think.
• The agenda of maps:
  • The bias of data selection.
  • The bias of interpreting data.
  • The inclusivity of maps.
• Why she says maps are made of a mix of data, craft, and bias.
• A map of a world in proportion to the number of sheep in each country.
• The book, The Secret Language of Maps, and what made her write it.
• And many other topics. 

 

I think what stayed with me most is the incredible richness and craft that goes into making the best maps. The myriad creative and tactical choices that have to be made, and what these choices say about us, our values, and our intentions.

 

This conversation is one a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and activists who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to RemakePod.org to subscribe.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Carissa Carter.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• How growing up in a strict fundamentalist Christian upbringing, and decoupling from that, shaped his outlook.
• His complex relationship with atheism and religion today.
• How he discovered love and solidarity in activism.
• Technologies of organizing.
• Forming decentralized decision-making processes.
• Nihilism in the face of dysfunction as a form of cowardice.
• Loomio, and collective decision-making software.
• Status and hierarchy.
• Shifting culture through fermentation.
• And the concept of stewardship.

 

We spoke in mid-June 2022, and I was excited to talk to Rich since he's been introduced to me by Daniel Thorson, whom I interviewed here in episode 10. I've been following his writing on Twitter and find the idea of decentralized work and collaboration fascinating, exciting, and challenging.

 

It's perhaps the greatest question of our time: now that we're all connected and have incredible tools of self-organization, how can we make better decisions together? How can we outcompete centralized organizations? And how can we benefit from the wonderful richness of so many brains without descending into chaos, nihilism and mob rule?

 

This conversation is one of a dozen or so weekly conversations that we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and activists who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to RemakePod.org to subscribe.

 

And now let's jump right in with Richard D. Bartlett.

• Growing up with no books and few words in a small peasant village in Southern Germany.
• The importance and uses of silence which stayed with him ever since.
• How he became interested in philosophy, and the big questions after his grandfather's death.
• Moving freely from philosophy to comparative religion to anthropology and art history.
• The happy accident that led him to studying neurobiology and learning to see himself as a brain.
• The importance of concepts in framing our day-to-day experience.
• What do terms like human and humanity mean? When were they introduced? How did they evolve?
• What is the relationship between nature, humans, and machines?
• His work with some of the largest technology companies who are building a future to bring philosophy and art into the room.
• Where does creativity lie with AI algorithms like DALL·E 2?
• And the need to always reexamine our assumptions about the world and our values. 

 

This conversation with Tobias is one of many weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, authors, makers, activists, and leaders who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to RemakePod.org to subscribe.

 

And now let’s jump right in, with Dr. Tobias Rees.

 

TIMESTAMP CHAPTERS

 

In this episode of Remake, I sit down with Ana Ferreira and Alex Muench. Ana is Head of Design and Product Design, and Alex is a senior digital product designer at Doist, a completely remote team of over 100 people, and the maker of popular productivity apps, Todoist and Twist. Ana and Alex are the creators of Twist, a remarkable and opinionated communication tool aimed at replacing Slack with a less distracting, more focused supporting, less real-time alternative.

We've been using Twist for a few months at Remake, and it has done wonders for our ability to communicate remotely across time zones, to stay up-to-date, and catch up when our work allows rather than disrupting work to be always connected. I really can't overstate how much more harmonious and effective work has become since we moved out of real-time chat tools. And a lot of this goes back to Ana and Alex's ideas and the company's opinionated take on work, communication and design.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• What it means to be a designer.
• What makes Doist special as a company.
• What's wrong with "always on" team chat tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google's team chat, and the culture of availability and distraction they promote.
• What it takes to be an effective distributed team.

This chat with Ana and Alex is just one of dozens of great weekly interviews we have lined up for you with leading designers, bestselling authors, activists, impact investors and entrepreneurs. We're trying to change our lives for the better in some meaningful way. So if you haven't done so already, please follow us on your favorite podcast player to make sure you don't miss them.

And now let's jump right in with Ana Ferreira and Alex Muench from Doist.

 

Karoli Hindriks is the CEO and founder of Jobbatical, a startup Forbes named one of Europe's 10 Most Exciting Technology SMEs for 2018. Jobbatical is working on removing the friction of international relocation by making immigration processes seamless through technology.  

 

In 2020 the EU Council named her one of the 8 most inspiring women in Europe. In 2021, she was a speaker at the TED conference in Monterey, CA talking about reinventing the passport.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Growing up in post-USSR Estonia.
• Founding her first company at 16, officially becoming the youngest inventor in her country.
• Leading the launch of seven television channels in Northern Europe, including National Geographic Channels and MTV.
• Her aha! moment regarding immigration and migration while in Silicon Valley.
• The migration and mobility revolution.
• What Jobbatical is doing to facilitate movement of talent and knowledge to where it's most needed.
• Reinventing the passport for the new global economy and the modern age.
• And much more.

 

 

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Lessons from his youth, where he moved around the world as a child and interacted with different religions and backgrounds, which helped him understand that we are shaped by our contexts and experiences.
• His entry into cognitive psychology, and going beyond the laws of behavior into: Why do people behave the way they do?
• Building neural networks to model cognition.
• His world-changing PDP paper (Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition), a paper that was published in 1986 and transformed this whole field, and directly led to more and more people embracing the connectionist model and neural networks.
• The fact and meaning of bi-directionality in neural networks. What does it mean that information can flow both ways in the same network structure?
• Generative models, and in this context, OpenAI's DALL-E 2 algorithm, which can create amazing illustrations and artworks — and should we credit generative or creative algorithms with artistry and give them credit for their art?
• Consciousness — does it extend beyond humans and is it something that we may be able to find someday in algorithms?

 

Talking to Jay really reminded me of the best in mankind, that through curiosity, asking interesting questions, and constructing thought models and experiments, we can unlock such a subtle and fundamental thing like cognition and the connectionist model, which then unlocks all of this power for society at large. We now have this responsibility to reign in the worst of mankind in how we exploit, curate, and share in the benefits of this incredible power. This will be a running topic for us, AI in the future. We explore the power of design and human-centered thinking to create a better future for everyone.

 

This conversation with Jay is one of many weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with leading authors, thinkers, designers, makers, scientists, and social entrepreneurs who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to remakepod.org to subscribe.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Jay McClelland.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Growing up in the 1950's in the US, and seeing segregation and the opposite of inclusion.
• The superficial design of the television era — designing to increase perceived value, and to increase purchases based on looks.
• His experience designing on a computer in the 70's.
• Designing kitchen gadgets.
• The need for multidisciplinary thinking, ergonomics, psychology, and other fields of knowledge.
• What makes a good designer?
• The importance of asking questions and being uncomfortable.
• The connection of design and religious studies, with meditation and mindfulness as tools for a designer.
• Design and inclusion.
• The 4B Collective — gender and design.
• The model of collective versus agency, and the difference between a process-based approach versus a knowledge-based approach in design.
• Qualitative versus quantitative metrics.
• And the death of the brand.

 

We talked in the middle of April 2022, and I was looking forward to chatting with Dan when I watched his hilarious and informative product review videos he's done with Epicurious, where he takes a kitchen gadget and critiques every aspect of its design, ergonomics, and function. We also had a short prep call before the interview, where it became clear to me what a serious design thinker he is, and how much we can all learn from him. It was really a joy to talk to Dan and explore his way of seeing the world and his unique approach to design.

 

This conversation with Dan is one of a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and investors who are working to change our world for the better in some meaningful way. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to remakepod.org to subscribe.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Dan Formosa.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Her digital nomad lifestyle.
• How having a pen pal from another country instilled a desire in her to explore other cultures.
• What it was like to live and work on a cruise ship.
• Why she left her music career to become a digital nomad and coliving consultant.
• What is coliving, and what are the range of options for the coliving curious?
• Why is coliving becoming such a trend around the world?
• The freeing experience of coliving for solo digital nomads.
• The value of community and the importance of friendships.
• Different types of coliving spaces.
• Coliving versus packing more people in a small space.
• Crafting a community experience, and also a hospitality experience.
• Getting people involved in the creation versus supplying everything.
• Coliving and old age.
• Why is coliving slower to take off in the United States?
• The urge to explore the world versus the urge to lay roots and nest.
• And her new group, teaching more women how to travel solo.

 

Design is all about challenging defaults, and so what stayed with me the most is how important it is to challenge societal defaults in terms of our living situation, geography, and lifestyle. Who said the right way to live is to work hard all day so that you can afford a large house with a fence and smart locks to keep everyone else out? And who said that we have to wait until retirement to spend significant time traveling the world?

 

We have some amazing episodes lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, and activists, answering questions like:

 

• What do most people still need to understand about transgender and non-binary individuals?
• Why is prototyping essential to making truly new things?
• What's the value of knowing what you're about and crafting a personal manifesto?
• And how can we find the freedom to think in an increasingly connected world?

 

So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to RemakePod.org to subscribe. And if you're a subscriber already and enjoy our show, you can go to RemakePod.org/support and join our supporter community.

 

And now, without further ado, let's jump right in with Leah Ziliak.

TODAY'S GUEST

 

Alan Lightman is an American writer, physicist and social entrepreneur. He served on the faculties of Harvard and MIT, and was the first person at MIT to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities. Currently, he serves as professor for the practice of the humanities at MIT. In his scientific research, he has made fundamental contributions to the astrophysics of black holes and cosmic radiative processes.

 

He is the author of numerous books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Einstein's Dreams, an international bestseller, The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, and his latest book, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings, where he discusses questions of nothingness and infinity, the mind, and the specialness of life.

 

Alan's essays and articles have appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper's, Nautilus, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Salon, and many other publications.

 

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, and living between physics and the humanities.
• What it was like to study physics at Princeton and Caltech.
• Working with Richard Feynman.
• Writing Einstein's Dreams.
• The connection between physics and spirituality.
• The topics of entropy and life.
• The rarity of life.
• On nothingness and infinity.
• On the value of wasting time, and many other topics.

 

This conversation with Alan Lightman is one of a dozen or more upcoming conversations with bestselling authors, thinkers, designers, scientists, and makers who are reimagining our world and experience. So please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, if you haven't already, so that you can make sure you don't miss them.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Alan Lightman.

 

In this conversation we talk about:

• The US and the Holocaust documentary, and the antisemitism, xenophobia and nativism, and the rejection of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.
• How the Watergate crisis led her down the path to documentary filmmaking.
• The power of documentaries to change views and bring truth to life.
• The films she made alongside Ken Burns covering the Vietnam War, jazz, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and many others.
• Her film, College Behind Bars, and the process of making it.
• The Bard Prison Initiative and why it is so special.
• The history of prison and education.
• The power of education.
• History of crime and punishment in the US.
• And many other topics. 

 

Lynn goes deep into topic after topic in American life, and as a result she's a broad and fascinating thinker and speaker. Beyond the incredible power of College Behind Bars, what stayed with me is the power of documentary film to start us thinking and talking about complex topics, and in some cases, like with College Behind Bars, to affect a change in policy.

 

This conversation is one a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and activists who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, or head over to RemakePod.org to subscribe.

 

And now, let's jump right in with Lynn Novick.

 

Dr. Natalie Nixon is a creativity strategist, global keynote speaker, and author of the award-winning The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work. As president of Figure 8 Thinking, she advises leaders on transformation by applying wonder and rigor to amplify growth and business value. Natalie's been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, LinkedIn’s "Hello Monday" podcast, and Seth Godin’s "Akimbo" podcast.

 

She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, John, and is a lifelong student of dance—hip-hop and social ballroom of late.

 

• Learning patience and flexibility through her COVID experience.
• Growing up as a sensitive kid in Philly, and moving to a rough public school there and how that affected her. 
• How her father's love of jazz and her mother's love of opera and classical music brought her closer to a world of art and creativity.
• Studying anthropology and Africana studies, and how she ending up getting a PhD in design management in London.
• The difference between being artistic vs being creative.
• Why strategy is creative, and why creativity is strategic.
• How we all have a creative capacity.
• The role of chaos in creativity.
• Her book, The Creativity Leap.
• How dance and design thinking are related, and what she learned about design and creativity from ballroom dancing and hip-hop.
• Embracing difference as a part of the creative process.
• And how we need people around that will ask different questions than we would.

 

This is one of a dozen or so weekly conversations we already have lined up for you with thinkers, designers, makers, authors, entrepreneurs, and investors, who are working to change our world for the better. So follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app or head over to remakepod.org to subscribe.

 

And now let's jump right in with Dr. Natalie Nixon.

 

In this conversation we talk about: