Ja-Nae Duane Show

Ja-Nae Duane Show EP 4: Edge of Tomorrow with Tiffany Vora

• Ja-Nae Duane • Season 1 • Episode 4

Share episode

What if the key to solving Earth's greatest challenges lies in preparing for life beyond our planet?

Dr. Tiffany Vora, molecular biologist turned space advocate, joins us to explore the unexpected connections between biology, technology, sustainability, and space exploration. Her journey from washing laboratory glassware as a child to becoming a Singularity Fellow in Biotechnology and VP of Innovation Partnerships at Explore Mars reveals a profound truth: the boundaries between scientific disciplines are illusions that limit our ability to solve our most pressing problems.

Biology, she explains, is fundamentally a language—or rather, multiple languages—that we're now learning to read, write, and edit with unprecedented precision. The AI revolution transforming how we interact with text is similarly revolutionizing our understanding of life itself. Tools like AlphaFold can now predict in milliseconds what once took scientists years, not eliminating scientific careers but elevating them to focus on creativity rather than computation.

Perhaps most compelling is Dr. Vora's passionate case for space exploration as inherently connected to Earth's sustainability. The closed-loop systems required for Mars habitation—efficient solutions for air, water, food, and energy—are precisely the innovations we desperately need at home. As she powerfully states, "Life making life in space better means making life on Earth better."

Through personal stories of her Antarctic expedition with women in STEM and raising a child for an unimaginable future, Dr. Vora offers wisdom about resilience, curiosity, and the courage to ask for help when needed. Her message transcends disciplines: our greatest innovation will come from crossing boundaries, paying kindness forward, and preparing humanity for radical futures both on Earth and beyond.

Join us for this mind-expanding conversation that will forever change how you think about the relationship between distant stars and our home planet. Subscribe now to catch every episode of these boundary-pushing conversations with today's most provocative thinkers.

SUBSCRIBE HERE:

YouTube: https://bit.ly/Ja-NaeYT

Apple and Spotify

For over 20 years, behavioral scientist Dr. Ja-Naé Duane dedicated herself to one mission: Make life better for one billion people. This award-winning innovator and expert on global systems focuses on helping corporations, governments, and universities understand and develop systems of the future using emerging technology such as VR/AR, AI, and blockchain. Ja-Nae guides companies forward, helping them get out of their own way to create exponential innovation and future forecasting. She has had the pleasure of working with companies such as PWC, Saudi Aramco, Yum Brands, Samsonite, Natixis, AIG, and Deloitte. A top-rated speaker within the Singularity University community and the author of the bestseller, “The Startup Equation,” Ja-Nae at helping both startups and multinational firms identify new business models and pathways for global scale. Her next book SuperShifts is due out in April 2025.

To Pre-Order SuperShifts: https://bit.ly/SuperShifts

Connect with Ja-Naé Duane:
Visit the Ja-Naé Duane PODCAST: https://bit.ly/40G1i7G
Visit the Ja-Naé Duane WEBSITE: https://bit.ly/Ja-Nae
Like Ja-Naé Duane on FACEBOOK: https://bit.ly/Ja-NaeFB

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Janai Duane Show, where she explores the systems that shape human behavior in society through the eyes of technologists, scientists, executives and leaders. From the algorithms that govern our digital lives to what the future of work will look like, we'll be taking a closer look at how these systems function and the implications they have on our lives.

Speaker 2:

function and the implications they have on our lives. Hello everyone, and welcome to the J'Nai DeWayne Show. Today I have the absolute pleasure of introducing someone who was very instrumental in the early days of this podcast and, let's be frank, it's still early days. But without this person I wouldn't have my first three shows, and so with that, I'd like to introduce Dr Tiffany Vora. So Dr Vora is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, scientist and writer, as well as thought leader. She earned her undergraduate degrees in biology and chemistry both from NYU and her PhD in molecular biology from Princeton University.

Speaker 2:

Currently, tiffany serves as the Singularity Fellow in Biotechnology at Singularity University. She is the non-resident senior fellow at the Geo Tech Center at the Atlantic Council and she is the VP of Innovation Partnerships at Explore Mars. Her mission is to prepare humanity for a radically different future on Earth, and well, let's be frank, beyond, this conversation gets into the beyond. We talk a little bit about what it means to prepare humanity for space, what it means to prepare humanity to live on Mars, and it is a fun and wild ride. When I was gearing up to launch this podcast, tiffany was one of the first people that I reached out to, because I knew that if I was going to kick this off right. I needed to do it with people that I trusted, and Tiffany was one of those folks who I knew would deliver no matter what, and she has. So, without further ado, let us dive into this really inspiring and awe-provoking conversation that I have had with Tiffany Vora. Yeah, so we were just chatting about how long it's been.

Speaker 3:

I think it was spring of 2021 here, I believe Great, so that was just as we were coming out of the thick of lockdown and and all that business, right yeah, so it's been a while. I honestly think those years have done something to our perception of time. Every time, I see someone and we try to figure out when was the last time we saw each other. There's like this two and a half year gap that nobody can account for, and it has made time extremely elastic. It seems like it's crazy.

Speaker 2:

It's crazy. So I was really you know it's been well one thank you for for joining me. I'm super excited. There's so many things I want to talk to you about. There's so many things that I've always wanted to talk to you about, because but we just you know the nature of whenever we see each other, it's always work and we're always moving on the move.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, on the move is a good way to put it. So there's a lot that I want us to cover, but I actually want to start with your background. I want to know you know, because I don't think I know this. Like, how did you even get into science as a kid? Like what was it that sort of sparked this interest for you and led what is now your lovely, crazy journey through life?

Speaker 3:

I'd be super happy to talk about that and I'll give you the headline to start. There was no plan. Whenever folks ask me to speak to college students or high school students, I always lead with that because it worries me that people think that you've gotten to where you were because you had a plan. I'm going to go out on a limb and say former opera singer that this was not the plan. No, it's not the plan. So this was not the plan.

Speaker 3:

So in terms of when I started getting interested in science, I mean I was that kind of kid who was interested in how the world worked. I was that horrible child that took her father's record player apart, put it back together. It was never the same after that. It always spun a little too fast and so years later, when I bought those same records on CD, I was really confused because I was like why are they, why are the Beatles singing the song so slow? I don't understand. Turns out I didn't reassemble the record player correctly. So I was really interested in how things worked.

Speaker 3:

I was a good student, which is probably no surprise for you. School worked really well for me, and as I got older I started becoming interested in medicine. So my father had a very severe heart attack when I was very young, when I was in about fourth grade, and we spent most of that year, it feels like, in and out of the hospital with my dad. So I saw doctors, amazing doctors, wonderful people who were solving these important problems that really mattered to people and I thought, okay, this is what science is. So you know, I'm what 10 years old at this point, this is what I think science is, and my dad was a chemist originally, and so he was the kind of dad who, to spend time with the family on the weekends, would take my brother and me to the lab to wash glassware.

Speaker 2:

Oh wow.

Speaker 3:

Yes, so I'm a very good glassware washer, but so I had seen kind of what chemistry looked like, and then, when I was in high school, as a high school senior, I worked in my dad's lab during the summer, and then, when I went to college, I was pre-med because, honestly, it was either chemistry or medicine. I didn't know that there were these other flavors of science. I had no idea, right, and so it was while I was an undergrad at NYU that I started realizing that biology was really my happy place. I was really interested in living things, how they worked, and as time went on, though, I started getting this sneaking suspicion that maybe I didn't actually want to go to medical school. Now, my parents were not particularly happy about that, despite the fact that my father was a PhD scientist, the idea that I would also be a PhD scientist. He'd say things to me like oh, you should just take the MCAT for fun, right? And I'm like it's like a full-day test, like there's nothing fun.

Speaker 2:

Like there's nothing fun about that.

Speaker 3:

There's nothing fun. But you know, to be fair, I think now that I have my own child I can understand that. You know the one thing a parent wants is for their kids not to do what they did Right. So I think my dad was trying to get me onto the path that somehow he had missed, and so I I want to believe, with the best intentions, that that that and you know my mother was an administrator at a children's hospital in New Jersey, so we kind of had that feel. But I got to the end of my undergrad education and I thought I just really don't want to go to medical school. So I went and I graduated a bit early and I worked at a pharmaceutical company for a little bit as a researcher. It was great. It amuses me now that just about every single thing I did for that company a robot does now. So I was the robot back then. And then I applied to graduate school and did really well, you know, got into all the graduate programs I applied to, which watching kids apply to college. Now I still feel really proud that I was successful at that.

Speaker 3:

But then I went to Princeton to do my PhD. I studied. I was in the molecular biology department. So I'ma molecular biologist and at the time it was really a fun time. It was an exciting time because systems biology was just getting started. So this idea of being able to analyze really, really, really large biological data sets using computation, that was just really taking off in a big way. And so I invented technology as part of my PhD and generated all this data, and then had this sudden moment of horrified realization that I didn't know what to do with any of it, which is just learning and growing up, so I had to learn to program. So I learned to program pretty late in the day, which is why I'm kind of a lousy programmer. So thank you, ChatGPT, for helping with that. Yeah, and so I finished my PhD. I became a professor at the American University in Cairo, so I lived in Egypt for two years. That was before the revolution, did you not?

Speaker 2:

know that. I did not know that.

Speaker 3:

Surprise. I lived in Egypt from 2007 to 2009. Amazing experience that was, like I said, just before the revolution there. And then I moved back to the United States just as the global economy was collapsing in 2008, 2009. And so I had thought that I was going to continue with my academic career. But with the economy blasted, there were no jobs. So I ended up starting to work freelance as a science communicator.

Speaker 3:

I did that for about six months and then complained to my husband one night that I was doing all the work but kicking half the money back to this other company, and he said why don't you start your own business? And I said that's ridiculous. I'm a scientist. I don't know anything about starting a business, but I live in Silicon Valley. So 12 hours later I had a business and I spent about 14 years building that business to help scientists from undergrads all the way up to senior faculty members learn how to communicate their science either to other scientists or to the general public. So grant proposals, papers, textbooks, websites. I wrote poetry for people. I did all kinds of stuff Poetry, poetry. It was pretty cool. I was pleased with that job. That was a good one Wait.

Speaker 2:

was that based off of data, based off of a study, or is it just?

Speaker 3:

No, it was actually an in memoriam. So somebody was writing a piece to memorialize a colleague who had recently died, who was also a scientist, and to honor that that person they wanted to come up with some verse to do that, and so I helped write the poetry for that, which was really fun and not something people think about when they think about science. But remember, scientists are people and we love each other and we want to remember each other, and there are lots of ways that we do that, including poetry, which I think is wonderful. And then after that I threw some funny personal connections. That's how I first got connected with Singularity University, which is how you and I met. And then I came one day. They said, oh, you should come give a talk. I was doing some contracting work for them. I said I love giving talks, sure. So I came and I gave a talk and they said you really need to work with us. And so I came on board there as a faculty member, eventually became the head of faculty for SU, for our global ecosystem of 300 thought leaders around the world. That's when I met you, that's when we met. And then, after doing that for a bit, I realized that what I really cared about was talking about people in the programs, whether they're kids or whether they're senior business people. I really needed to be in the room with people and so I transitioned out of my full-time employment with SU.

Speaker 3:

Then the pandemic happened. So again like my timing is terrible. If you want to do a startup, don't choose me as your co-founder because then everything will tank. And then during the COVID years I had a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with people. Everything kind of seemed up in the air in those days I don't know if you remember which was both scary but also liberating, because if anybody came to me and said, hey, you want to try this thing, of course I was going to say yes.

Speaker 3:

So through that I came to be involved in some policy work now, which I do with the Geotech Center for the Atlantic Council, where I'm a senior policy fellow. I also work with a nonprofit called Explore Mars and some other nonprofit space groups, like Humanity in Deep Space. We should talk more about space later, but I am a big space nerd, have been for a long time and what really excites me right now is the fact that biology is technology in an increasing way Because of exponential technologies and advances in the life sciences. The stuff that we can do now in biology is amazing, and it's only going to get crazier from here, and so I go around the world talking to people like you, trying to help them think about the future, what's an opportunity, what's a threat, and what they can do to make the world a better place in the future.

Speaker 2:

So I have two things I want to touch on. Let's go back first, before we get into what is really what's exciting you in biotech, because that's absolutely something I want to chat with you about right now. Communicating science is a really special nuanced skill. I would say. I don't know if you agree with that, but I you know now as and I can now say this like now as a behavioralist, I can appreciate how difficult that is. What are some of the things that you learned in building a business around that that, even if you know the viewers are not scientists or the listeners are not scientists, like what are some of the things that you learned through that process of distilling other people's research and work?

Speaker 3:

I think the most important insight that I have had is that when we are trying to communicate science, it's not about me, it's about the listener, it's not about the scientist, it's about the person who is trying to learn something about the science. So my job as a science communicator is to understand who you are and what motivates you, and then I have to tell my story in a way that meets you where you are and sparks your curiosity or whatever that is that I can do. That that's actually not how scientists talk to each other. We're taught to talk to each other from our own area of expertise, and then you know some portion of the room understands what you're talking about, some portion doesn't, and you just deal with that right. And in science I would say we even value that a bit, because there's something about a naive audience that can really spark imagination. Because if you're thinking in your box and somebody else is over in that box, trying to cross boxes is where the magic happens, right, but it's a bit harder when you're crossing that. Science. Non-science divide is too strong a word, but my culture, my vocabulary, my way of looking at the world, my touch points that I share in common with people who have had the same education as I have. I don't have that necessarily with other people. So, just like every tribe or community, you know we have a set of mental shortcuts that we use. I cannot use those anymore as a science communicator.

Speaker 3:

So you know, just as an example, my husband is a professor at Stanford. He's super prominent in his field, very well known. He gives probably 100, 150 talks a year. Wouldn't surprise me at all. I have a few times asked him to come along to some of the innovation type programs where I speak and where you speak, and invited him to join me on the stage and he has told me that those were the hardest talks he's ever had to give, because he had to think about every single word. So if you've ever gotten to see me in the wild, watch my face, because occasionally somebody will ask me something and my face will kind of blank out for a second because what I'm doing is taking science language and trying to filter it, translate it into something that I think will resonate with you, a way of talking, a way of thinking, a way of believing. And that is not yet an instantaneous process for me, but I think it's worth taking the time to get that right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's almost like speaking another language right when you, just you need that moment. But to your point. You want to make sure you have you're using the right words. You're framing to make sure you have you're using the right words, you're framing it in the right way, you're using the right context.

Speaker 3:

Right and that I'm leaning into storytelling skills that we use in other forms of our life, daily life, that we don't use in science. I remind people when scientists, when they're talking to the general public, like this is about characters, conflict, mystery, hook, right, like we can use all of that In science. We're taught to kind of elide our personalities. It's not about me, it's about the science. I'm down with that. That's fine. But if I'm trying to get somebody else interested in the story, I want it to be about people. Let me give you an example. Have you read the Codebreaker by Walter Isaacson?

Speaker 2:

No, but I've heard that it's great and it's on the list.

Speaker 3:

It's spectacular. I cannot highly enough recommend that book and that was fascinating to me because he really got it in terms of scientists being people and how they interact with each other. And so when you read that book and you follow Jennifer Doudna from when she was a kid in Hawaii all the way up to this point of you know the breakthroughs of CRISPR, that's a personal journey. He's telling a personal story and even at the very end, where he's really walking you through the molecular biology techniques which I'm a tough reader to impress for this kind of thing I normally do this right, which I'm a tough reader to impress for this kind of thing I normally do this right Because I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, pipette, pipette. I understand. I actually read every sentence because I recognized that this was a master storyteller at play. He was just telling a story that happened to be true.

Speaker 3:

He's so good he's so good. I haven't read the new one, but I intend to.

Speaker 2:

Well, that's good to know. So I I'm glad to know that Codebreaker has a positive endorsement. Gold star, all right, excellent, excellent. So tell me a little bit about thinking about some of the exciting I think exciting stuff happening in biotech right now. What's lacking? A really good story that the public can sort of hook onto, because I feel like there's a lot going on, but I don't think that's getting translated well to the public. Or you can even just tell me what you're excited about, but I think there's a lot there.

Speaker 3:

So I think, one of the pieces that gets lost. So now I'm going to argue against everything I just said Excellent, fabulous, love it. One of the things that tends to get lost is how these techniques that in the headlines are being used for very sexy things, like medical care or food or these various things, actually have these applications that are so fundamental and so not sexy that a normal person wouldn't see them Like what? Let's talk about CRISPR. So CRISPR is a gene editing technology. It is an update of the bacterial immune system. So humans did not invent CRISPR Bacteria, did. I love that point. This is a point we should come back to. So it's how we basically debug the source code of life, where the source code of life is DNA. So if I want to go in and change individual A, cs, t's or Gs in a gene, I use that. I do that using techniques like CRISPR. So that's amazing, right? That's how, for example, the last fall, the UK and the US just approved the first CRISPR medicines for sickle cell anemia.

Speaker 1:

Which is amazing.

Speaker 3:

It's amazing. This is like life-changing stuff. But for many years, when I talked to scientists, my colleagues, about CRISPR, what they were really excited about was how powerful it could make the basic research they were doing in the lab. And so to them, it's not necessarily about curing cancer, it's about understanding cancer in a way that we weren't able to do before, in an engineering way rather than an observational way. And so when people ask me like, oh, what should I be investing in biotech, I tell them to look for the technologies that no one will ever see. You want the technologies, the foundational technologies that are driving all of the breakthroughs that are going to get to the headlines, not necessarily those breakthroughs themselves, and that takes a.

Speaker 3:

It's tricky right, like, if you're not an expert, I miss tons of things because that's the way it works. But I really think the foundation of the pyramid is where there's so much interesting stuff going on in food. Right, looking at the ingredients instead of the finished food. The ingredients is where the action is right. But me, as a consumer, I never see those. They're just embedded. I'll give you one more, because it's my favorite use case. Everybody wants to talk about AI.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's the buzzword, right. Just like you know, Metaverse was last year, blockchain before that. Speaking of, you know, thinking of infrastructure and technology that will lay infrastructure, but yes, Right.

Speaker 3:

So two things I want to tell you about AI and biology, so that you can see why I find this so exciting. So a few years ago, you might remember, deepmind, which is a Google company, released an algorithm called AlphaFold which can predict a protein's structure from its sequence. I said that in one sentence, but that has been the holy grail of molecular and cellular biology for a hundred and something years, and when I was a PhD student, if you tried to solve the structure of a protein, it could take you eight years to do that. And the reason we always want to know the structure of a protein is in biology. If you know the structure, you know the function. The shape tells you what the thing does. Right, it's foundational. So you would spend eight years as a PhD student trying to solve the structure of one program. When AlphaFold does it, it does it in 150 milliseconds. They have published a database with the structure of every protein known to humans. It's like 200 million of them, I think that's insanity Game changing Right.

Speaker 3:

And so when people are using AI to write pirate sonnets, I'm like, okay, sure.

Speaker 3:

There's value in that. This is what I use it for. I'm not going to tell you lies. So that's the first point is that even before our AI moment today, a few years ago, we had this astonishing breakthrough for biology. That was just remarkable and word had kind of gotten out a little bit before they released that this was going to happen. And I said to my husband over dinner one night you know, are your graduate students scared that the robots are going to take their job? And he said are you kidding? They can't wait. They've already got the server set up. They cannot wait for this code to drop because they don't want to do this stuff anymore. They want to use their intelligence and their passion and their creativity and their science to elevate right. Not to spend eight years doing this really hard, really important thing, but now a machine can do it pretty well, right? So that's my first thing. The second thing about that is that we talk a lot now about large language models. Biology is a language.

Speaker 2:

You know, I never thought of it in that way.

Speaker 3:

There, in fact, are many languages embedded in this construct that we call biology. Dna is a language, proteins are a language, epigenetics is a language. Neurofiring, that's a language. These are all languages, and so you can use that large language model concept in biological systems where the language is biology right and there are now more and more use cases for this basically using generative AI to come up with DNA sequences, antibody sequences, protein sequences, drug sequences, like all these various things, and the key realization, though, is that biology is the language.

Speaker 2:

You know, what I love about that example is that when many people think about biology, to be honest, like they have a disconnect between, you know is that when many people think about biology, to be honest, they have a disconnect between biology and the way in which technologies such as AI can be used. But what I really love about identifying biology as an ecosystem of languages you know, I'll use that term for the lack of a better one right now is that there are so many, there are so many things that can jump off of that. Right, I mean, the possibilities are endless. Tell me a little bit about. I want to switch gears a little bit, if you're, if you're okay with that, because what I um, I was really excited to see that you went to antarctica with a team of of women within stem, but with two m's, and what I?

Speaker 2:

What I didn't know until recently is that women were actually banned from Antarctica, and you know, back in the 70s. So there's twofold. Why that trip? Why that you know beyond the mission? Why that trip for you? Why was, was that meaningful and what does that mean for you in your work? Like, how does it tie to that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So I was lucky enough to be part of the Homeward Bound program, which is the program that you're talking about, and the Homeward Bound program has two pieces, and both pieces were magnets for me to say yes to do this. The first piece is that it's a leadership development program for women in STEM with a focus on sustainability. So it's not enough to have a STEM education, it's not enough to be a leader and it's not enough to care about sustainability in the future that we're moving into, because the threat is so severe that we're facing. So, ideally, the idea of this community is let's get all of those things together, right? So women in science like that's a thing. Women in leadership that's a thing, let's put all of it together. So what we did was we spent every year.

Speaker 3:

There's a cohort and I believe, as of right now you and I are talking in March 2024, the HB9 cohort. The applications are open, so you apply and if you get accepted, like I was lucky enough to do you spend a year doing an online leadership development program with another. My group was 100 women women and non-binary people from around the world, and so we had a kind, a four-piece trajectory to that where we learned a bit about science, communication, building our visibility, doing leadership assessments and skills. That, for me, was probably the most useful part actually working with a coach and assessing what my leadership style is where are my strengths, where are my weaknesses and then identifying some experiments we could do to see if I could play to my strengths and start, you know, working away my weaknesses.

Speaker 2:

Oh, can you share an experiment?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we had a few of them. You're really gonna laugh. So this will come as no surprise to you, janae, but I tend to lead from the front. You Me, what?

Speaker 3:

No way, yes, so an experiment that we did, that I actually deployed on the ship while we were in Antarctica, was the coach said okay, so you want to be part of this thing? What if you just don't run it? And you know, of course old Tiffany is like because if I don't do it, I, you know, of course old tiffany is like because if I don't do it, it's never going to get done. It's not going to get done as well. All these stories we tell ourselves, right, yeah, and so I'm like no, instead of listening to that tiffany, I'm going to listen to experimentalist tiffany, who says okay, we have a hypothesis, we have a set of outcomes that we're going to measure, let's see how it goes. And so, on the ship, they were calling for people to run curriculum, design and deployment for the second half of the time that we were down in Antarctica and I you'll be so proud of me did not put my name in the cup. Really, yep, still ended up on a panel the first day, that's okay.

Speaker 2:

You didn't put your name in the cup.

Speaker 3:

But I didn't put my name in the cup and instead what I saw my job as doing was supporting and amplifying the women who had put their names in the cup, and that is a slightly different role for me, and that was nice, because then I was able to directly use the skills that I had developed in the online portion of the course and deploy them in an unusual setting on this ship down in Antarctica which is amazing to try to grow myself and challenge myself in a specific environment. So that's just one example. Don't run everything, tiffany. You know crazy talk.

Speaker 2:

Was it comfortable though.

Speaker 3:

No, no, it was deep. Are you kidding For me to step off? No, no, it was deep. Are you kidding For me to step off? No, it was deeply uncomfortable.

Speaker 2:

You look like you were nice and calm about it, so I figured I could at least ask the question. It's been a few months, I mean no.

Speaker 3:

So again, you know these stories that we tell ourselves. We're really good at telling ourselves those stories and we tell them over and over again, and I feel like a theme for the last three or four years of my life has been trying to identify these stories that I tell myself, figure out which ones are serving me and which ones are not, to let go the ones that are not serving me. Ask me how I'm doing that and then lean into the stories that actually do serve me and then, ideally, write some new stories.

Speaker 2:

Right, that's how we do this well. So then, how do you identify those stories that you know that work work for you now, work for you in the present and maybe they work for you tomorrow. But you know, because there's some that's you know.

Speaker 3:

It's like ecological memory you know for sure, for sure, um. So I'm lucky in that I get a lot of help. So I have a therapist. I love her, she's great. We talk about all kinds of things. And for anyone out there who is hesitant about going to a therapist, I will tell you that you do not have to wait until you are suffering to go on a journey. So I've done that.

Speaker 3:

I also, about a year and a half ago, started a meditation practice. I'm still a baby at meditation, but man has it made a huge difference. So it's I can't speak highly enough about it. Yeah, I, I honestly wish that everybody had access to these tools. It's, it's like someone is so between the therapy, the meditation, a few other things I'm doing with people I trust, being able to be aware of what your stories are, to look at your stories without getting sucked into them.

Speaker 3:

That's the mindfulness piece. That's hard. And then having the courage to try something different, to do the experiment. Fortunately, the experimenting part's easy for me. That's kind of my superpower. But putting all of those things together and then closing the loop and saying, okay, I tried this thing, how did it go? And now, what do I want to do next? And that's a journey that's never going to end. But the Homeward Bound part was a big piece of that for me because it was me pulling on multiple threads of my experience, you know, as a professional, as a scientist, as a woman, as a leader or a leader, aspiring leader and then working with amazing people from all over the world who were trying to do the same thing. And if I can only speak, I mean we can talk about penguins. If you want, penguins are the best.

Speaker 2:

Penguins are great.

Speaker 3:

Penguins are great. Yeah, they're like little wind-up toys you put them down, they just go in a direction. But really the community was really astonishing. I knew intellectually how amazing these women and non-binary folks were, but it wasn't until I spent three weeks with them on a ship that I really understood it. And now I've got this amazing go-to community of people. We see each other actually all the time around the world. I'm spearheading a project see, I ended up running it Fail. I've got a project that a team of us are working on. We just had a meeting yesterday about that that we're still driving forward and we talk to each other all the time. We have a WhatsApp group that gets you know 50, 80 messages a day, still months later after we went, and that's the kind of impact that I think gives you the potential to pay forward for the rest of your life. Right, it's funny to talk about going to Antarctica and talk about how you care about sustainability, because the act of going to Antarctica is itself highly problematic.

Speaker 2:

I was going to ask you about that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I'm happy to talk about it, and it's something that we wrestled with as a group and wrestled with individually, and wrestled with individually, and the way that I came to it was to promise myself that I would come back not with 1x impact. This isn't about changing me. This is about leveraging me to help change the world and so I had to promise myself that I'm not going to drop this Like I have to go out and look for that 100x impact. That's how I pay forward the environmental costs that I incurred while I was down there.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean it's such an amazing opportunity, but to then I mean that has to be a personal commitment, right, and it's really about what does one value and what does that mean as we're thinking about our journey into the future. So I love that. That's the way in which you framed it up. Are there? Did you guys come out of that with specific projects and collaborations that you're working on? Like, yeah, help us to understand a little bit more of it sounds like an amazing personal development, but I also imagine that there's just there's more than just the community and the personal development that there's, that there's more here than meets the eye.

Speaker 3:

Yeah so. So the way it worked was we were down there for about three weeks on the ship a couple days before that in Argentina, and the the first week and a half was kind of faculty-led programming, so revisiting some of the work we had done during our online portion. We actually weren't only my cohort on the ship, there were some other people from other cohorts as well, so we had to kind of like integrate everybody and do some community building and that sort of thing. But then the second week and a half then was participant led, because the members of the community are amazing, right, doing amazing work all over the world and giving everybody a chance to shine that way. But a few days in and I didn't know this was coming, this was a surprise to me we did kind of a classic innovation ideation session with giant butcher paper and sticky notes and the whole thing rotating around. I've seen stuff like this a million times, trying to figure out what are the big questions that this community might have the power to answer. And so we did a couple of rounds of this ideation and then everybody stood up and they said, okay, go to the one that you think is most interesting, and so I gravitated to one that was about AI and sustainability.

Speaker 3:

Not how do we use AI for sustainability, but what are the sustainability costs of using AI? The water, the land, the energy, the metals, the workforce, all of these things. Biodiversity the water, the land, the energy, the metals, the workforce, all of these things, biodiversity. And so I ended up at a table with a group of people who were interested in the same thing, and the other tables all had their projects, and so we had some protected time during the ship journey to kind of hash out some things. So we had a couple of working sessions, which was great things. So we had a couple of working sessions, which was great. And then we have just kept it alive since we got home, because we think for this group, that this is a really important conversation and I'm going to tell you, janae, you're going to laugh. But okay, sustainability and AI. I'm worried that AI is not sustainable.

Speaker 3:

What did I use in order to write the first draft of our policy paper? I used AI, right. So it is not lost on me that I am utilizing the systems that I'm actually trying to change. That's also true of me as a woman in STEM. It's true of me as a woman in technology. I'm working within a system and yet I'm trying to disrupt the system, and there's lots of levels here. So it's a really fantastic, really fantastic opportunity, and each of us in this particular group, we have a different angle. We live in a different part of the world. One is a startup founder, one works for a huge company, one works for a government, one is an academic I don't even know what I am. Then there's me. Two are academics, and so learning to work together with all that diversity also causes us to use the skills that we acquired in the leadership development thing and work together to get this thing out.

Speaker 2:

That, we think, is a really important conversation that we want to see more of in the world, self-aware as you are, Because I find that and I mean you've just hit it on the head I find this as well, where we are working within systems to disrupt them, but in that case we're also a part of that system.

Speaker 3:

Yep, and I'm not going to tell myself any lies about that. I'm absolutely part of the system that produced me. I just think we can do better.

Speaker 2:

I would wholeheartedly agree. Can we translate or not translate, but transition to space. Of course, I would love to talk about space. Can we talk about space please? Well, I was super excited to see that you were on the board of Humans to Mars, which is, as far as what I know about the organization, is a fantastic organization. I'm really interested in thinking about what we need to consider biologically in order to become an interplanetary species, in order to become an interplanetary species, but then also thinking a little bit about what are some of the from a cognitive perspective and then also from a skill building perspective, like what are some of these things that you see that we need to consider? As you know, we're trying to hit that goal and Humans to Mars, I think, has the goal of 2030? 35? Yes, I'll tell you about this. All right, tell us about that.

Speaker 3:

So our organization, our nonprofit, is Explore Mars, and our upcoming summit is called the Humans to Mars Summit. That's in Washington DC in May I think it's 7 and 8, 2024. That's in Washington DC in May I think it's 7 and 8, 2024. Okay, and so what we are, explore Mars, is a community of people who are committed to seeing a sustainable human presence on Mars, beginning in the 2030s. Okay, our mission statement deliberately keeps that vague because, of course, there's lots of controversy over which part of the 2030s I am a 2033 girl myself, controversy over which part of the 2030s I'm a 2033 girl myself. There is a magic launch window that year where the planets, like the journey, will be the shortest that it could be, and so I think we should not waste that opportunity. And, you know, I think we should be sending people in that launch window. I will volunteer. If any Elon, nasa, whoever's listening, I volunteer. So the other thing that I think is really useful about that timeline is that it's not that far away. Right, it's pretty close. It's pretty close.

Speaker 3:

Think about the original moonshot, the real moonshot, right? The Apollo program. That was President Kennedy mobilizing all of government and all of society on a timeline that, had he not been shot, he would have been personally responsible for you don't see that very often, certainly not in politics in the United States anymore, and so if it were up to me, we would do this tomorrow. Right, because I'm a very tactics, like I said, leading from the front. Put me in the spaceship, I'm ready. But there's a bigger issue here. Yes, I love Mars. I've been a space nut since I was a kid, growing up in Florida watching space shuttle launches from my backyard.

Speaker 2:

Particularly at night. That must have been amazing, it was amazing.

Speaker 3:

That was a really formative experience for me, and when I was in graduate school I actually did three Mars simulations. So I went to the southeastern Utah desert twice and the high Canadian Arctic near the North Pole once to do an analog simulation of living on Mars. So happy to talk about that, that was also. Those were important experiences. I did that with a group called the Mars Society, which is still active. But for me here's my angle with all of this Life making life in space better means making life on Earth better.

Speaker 3:

If it were up to me, I would never again have to answer the question why should we spend money on space when we have so many problems on Earth? To me, these are essentially the same problems. Right, space is a sustainability problem. Where are you going to get your air? Where are you going to get your water? Where are you going to get your food? Where are you going to get your energy? How are you going to keep people healthy? How are you going to? If you want to make more humans, how are you going to keep them healthy? How are you going to educate them? Those are the same problems that we have on Earth, and I absolutely am so blessed that Explore Mars leans into that, and one of the big themes in this year's summit is what innovations are crucial for Mars that also will make life on Earth better, even before we leave for the red planet.

Speaker 3:

Because what we want to know is how can we help point policymakers, lawmakers, venture capitalists, universities, anybody who's interested how can we help them? See, these are the problem spaces. So give you an example a couple years ago at one of our events, I met folks from a wonderful company called solar foods, and this might sound familiar to you. What they do is they use microbes to make protein powder out of air.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I know these guys, you know these guys yeah, and you know where that idea came from.

Speaker 3:

So that's a space problem. Right, it'd be great to take the carbon dioxide that I breathe out and turn that into food I can eat. Right, that's a closed-loop system. But think about all the food security that we have on Earth. Wouldn't it be great if, in some kind of shipping container, in a desert, in a conflict zone, at the bottom of the ocean any of these things? Or even just in apartments in Brooklyn, you could be making your own protein out of thin air instead of relying on animal protein or soy protein? Right? So those are two stories that often don't get told together. I want us to tell that story together, because I want the future of space to be about humanity making itself better, no matter where we call home, and I think that's possible.

Speaker 2:

So how do we get there, though? As we think about so, as we think about our heuristics, what we end up doing most of the time is creating variations on similar things. How do we break out of this? How do we set a new trajectory for ourselves so that we are able to achieve something like that both here as well as on Mars?

Speaker 3:

Well, obviously I have the answer to that, Janaye.

Speaker 2:

Oh, you do Excellent.

Speaker 3:

Perfect, I've solved all the problems, so I'll just kind of give you the broad strokes. First of all, we've got to change our mindsets about what's possible and what we value right, thinking about climate, thinking about the future. I give a lot of talks about longevity. You know, one of the things that I always tell people is, if you really believe in the longevity future, then you believe that you are going to be alive for all the horrible things that are coming from climate. Right? Which means that it's not just your great-great-great-grandchildren that you're trying to innovate for. We're innovating for ourselves right.

Speaker 2:

I think many people forget that.

Speaker 3:

They forget that and they also forget the part that, again, in this longevity future, we will be alive for our great-great, great great grandchildren to look us in the eyes and say you knew about climate change in the 2010s and you didn't do anything. And knowing that I will have to answer for that really changes how I look at how I spend my time and how I spend my money and how I parent my and these various things. And so, and again, even if I'm wrong about the longevity future and we don't live to be 140 or whatever, I still benefit from that mindset and the world still benefits from me having that mindset. So I think mindset is a big thing, but I don't want to overemphasize individual responsibility here, because we all also work within systems. We have processes, we have governments, we have businesses, we have all of these things, and we have to also change the context that we're in in order to enable individuals to act in really impactful ways. So the good news is well, the scary news is there's lots of knobs to turn. The good news is there's lots of knobs to turn right. Good news is there's lots of knobs to turn right, and maybe you're interested in the government piece and I'm interested in the mindset piece.

Speaker 3:

We're still rowing in the same direction. We're just holding different oars, and so I take a lot of hope from that, and so what I really hope people, especially young people, understand is that there is a place for them in these futures. But then that means we got to make sure that there actually is a place for them, right? So one of the reasons I love that you asked me this is that it's a nice segue from what we were talking about with Homeward Bound and Antarctica.

Speaker 3:

I went down on that ship to tell a hundred women and non-binary people from around the world that, no matter what sustainability problem they were working on, we wanted them in the space community. I don't care what it is, whatever you're working on, come talk to me. I said this standing in the ship with these giant leg warmers on Come talk to me, because there's a place for you, because we need you, and those are the types of bridges that I want to see happen. But again, if we're telling people there's a place for you, there has to actually be a place for you, and I think we have a lot of potential for that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, I agree, it's, you know, thinking about how old's your son now 12. Can you imagine how old's yours? He'll be seven next month.

Speaker 3:

Oh, my goodness yeah.

Speaker 2:

But thinking about being alive that long, which sometimes is hard to think about, what are some of the things that you're instilling in your son now that can help set him up and we'll just say even his children up for success as we're moving into, you know, into this future, hopefully a more sustainable future, both here on this planet and beyond, you know.

Speaker 3:

You know, I get asked all the time what job my son is going to have when he grows up. Oh, you do, don't you? No, oh, all the time, I have no idea my son's going to have a job that hasn't been invented yet. So how am I supposed to teach him? Like, what classes do I sign him up for in school for a career that hasn't been invented yet? Obviously, after tearing my hair out over that, I realized that was the wrong question, right? So you know, up until whatever November 2022, we were telling people learn to code. Teach your kids to code. They don't need to learn how to code anymore, right, gen AI helps with that.

Speaker 3:

You've got to have a different set of skills to deal with AI, but that's a different conversation. So instead, what I am focusing on in my parenting duties are things like curiosity, empathy, resilience, understanding that learning is a lifelong process. This is something that I have noticed is a big divide among people. You know there are people who, for very good reasons, have wanted to get one job, work that job, be stable, retire, and that's the whole story. And now the world is changing around us so fast that story doesn't work anymore for the vast majority of people, and you can either see that as a threat or you can see it as an opportunity, and so this idea that I might have an 80-year career I can't do the same thing for 80 years, right, like no way, even if I found that interesting.

Speaker 3:

The world around me is not holding still, and, as you and I both know, technological change is accelerating. This is the slowest it's ever going to be, right, so I have to understand that. I'm going to have to learn new stuff always for the rest of my life. It's not going to be the same. I mean, even today's AI is not going to be anything like next year's AI, and I have no idea what that looks like. It's guesses, I'm probably wrong, but that's okay too. That's another skill that I'm trying to instill in my son. Is that willingness to be wrong.

Speaker 2:

Is he having trouble with it?

Speaker 3:

I think honestly they're. So now I'm speaking from like an American cultural perspective. I live in Silicon Valley, so let me just like paint that picture so everybody knows where I am. What I see a lot of in the school-aged kids that I interact with is this fragility.

Speaker 2:

They have the idea, because they are taught, that there is a right answer and there is a wrong answer, and they are terrified to be wrong I see that too, and I'm not in silicon valley like we're, we're in boston, but still I mean and my son is, is much younger yep, but I see that as well, and I see that in my college age students as well. They want, want the right answer, and I'm like there is no right answer.

Speaker 3:

Then everybody blows up.

Speaker 2:

So I love the fact that you're instilling curiosity. You're instilling resilience. Is he receptive to that? Or maybe give an example of how you're doing that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so you know we have hits and misses um as anybody does.

Speaker 3:

For me, this is the whole parenting thing is an experiment, right? Um, I'll give you kind of a comical example and then we can unpack it. So several years ago, when he was a bit younger, uh, I was working in my office at the front of the house and he and a friend were playing out in the front yard and then suddenly I couldn't hear them anymore. That's always the warning sign. So I get up to find out what's going on. I open the front door and there is a ladder that has been placed against the roof. Oh, my, okay. And I say to my son hey, sweetie, what you doing? And he says, oh, we threw the football up on the roof and I knew you were just going to tell me to solve the problem. So we went and got the ladder and I was like, okay, well played, you're right, I would have just told you to solve the problem. Can you think of any other way to solve the problem that doesn't involve you climbing on the roof? And he thought for a and he's like, oh, I should go get the drone. I was like, yes, go get the drone and knock the football off the roof like throw rocks. I don't care what it is maybe not throw rocks at the house, but some some other version of throw rocks, um. But so I had clearly sort of gotten my message across, but he had internalized it in a way that was still not matching up with my rubric, right? So because he hadn't thought, like gosh, if I fall off the roof and mom has to take me to the hospital, that will cost her more time and she'll be more annoyed than if she has to help me get the football off the roof. So that's an American football, by the way, not a soccer ball, again context. So that bit was interesting because it caused me to recalibrate a little bit how I was trying to get him to do this, not as a leave mommy alone, go do it yourself, which I admit I have done many times, but more as a you're smart, see what you can come up with. But more as a you're smart, see what you can come up with Another time.

Speaker 3:

We have a fence, like a gate in our fence that goes back to where the garbage bins are, and I was trying to get back there one day and because of the way our gate is set up, you can't open it. If you're short like me, you can't open it from the inside, so there's like a string that kind of like goes up over the top in order to pull it and then the other side of the gate opens up. And one day I went to open the gate and there was a stick jammed in the latch and I thought to myself I was like that kid, like damn it, like why is he messing around? And then I really looked at the stick and I realized he was too short to reach the string, so he was making it so that he could open the gate. And I was like, okay, he did exactly what I would have told him to do right Figure it out, solve the problem. And so it's not. I'm telling these stories where, like, he either got it right in one or he got it wrong in one.

Speaker 3:

What interests me much more is, if you try a solution and it doesn't work, you try something else, or you iterate or you update. Much more is, if you try a solution and it doesn't work, you try something else. Right, or you iterate or you update. You don't just put it down and walk away and say, I don't know. This is something that I really got a hold of when I was like up in the Arctic on these Mars simulations. You know, you're six people on an island. If you don't fix it, it doesn't happen. Right, that's it right. It doesn't happen, that's it right. And so I kind of internalized that from that experience, that you should be the innovator who actually tries to get this to happen.

Speaker 3:

Now, that said, the adult skill I've had to learn is asking for help and knowing how to thank people gracefully and know that they accept my thanks. Right, that was a harder journey for me, was it though? Oh, absolutely Absolutely. Because I've had this mindset and for all the reasons, right, because I'm a woman, because I'm brown, because I was always the outsider and because I'm pretty capable and pretty intelligent, like just doing it myself. And I will tell you the day that ran out, that ran out, the day my brother died and I had a four-month-old baby and I had to get to the East Coast to get to my grieving parents, to get my brother's body taken care of and get everything taken care of, and I just couldn't do it. I was still breastfeeding him. I just couldn't do any of it. And, my good friends, this is when you learn, right.

Speaker 2:

Who is really your?

Speaker 3:

friend. They came out of the woodwork and they offered to do things and I was so desperate that I said, yes, you plan my brother's wake. Yes, you go talk to the funeral director. Yes, you go through his papers and figure out what his loans were. And it was only because I literally couldn't do it. And they did a great job and I was, and I was allowed to grieve my brother, which was really helpful.

Speaker 3:

And then, a few years later, another close friend who actually hadn't come then, her mother died and I flew out back to the East Coast to help her get her mother's effects in order and to sell her house. And a couple of days later it was freezing cold. We were in this house with no heating. You know, boxing up a person's life, which is super hard. She looked at me and she said I didn't help you when you needed help and you were the only person who came to help me. She said I am so ashamed and I don't know how to thank you. And I said people helped me when I needed it. This is me paying that forward. Now you have to pay it forward to somebody else, and that's how we do this. We don't pay it back, we pay it forward.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love that. That's, you know it's uh. So my mom just passed and it's been really interesting to see.

Speaker 3:

I'm sorry, it's okay. I lost my mom in 2020.

Speaker 2:

Oh man, it's rough right, and it doesn't matter what your relationships are either. They're still your parents. But yeah, you know, I love the idea when we think about reciprocity. I at least. Yet when I was younger I don't know about you I always thought if I paid it back, I had to pay it back to that person. And I I'm now and have been over the I don't know past maybe five, seven years it clicked finally that it's not about necessarily that person, because you might not be able to repay that person in the same way, but it's about taking that love and that act and that act, you know, that act of service, and really shepherding it forward. So I love that example example. That's such a lovely example.

Speaker 3:

Thank you for sharing that I believe in talking about hard things because if it helps somebody else, that makes the world better. Right, yeah, I, we don't have to get all buddhist or whatever, but you know there's so much suffering, and for what so many people need love, like they just need someone there, right that's right and that can look like so many things right.

Speaker 3:

It can look like telling your story, it can look like listening, it can look like giving somebody money. I I last year, last summer, ran into my very first client who, when I started my first business, she was my very first client who, when I started my first business, she was my very first client. We got onto the same plane in Frankfurt. It was insane In Frankfurt, in Frankfurt of all the places, we were not coming from the same thing. So we were there for two different reasons and I just had this. I got to say thank you. I got to look my first client in the eye and say you believed in me when nobody else did. And you paid. Thank you, right, that first paying gig it's a big deal, yeah. And she said you were worth it. And I said thank you, like. And I, it was great, I got the chance to say thank you. Um, we don't always get the chance to say thank you to the people who made a difference in our lives.

Speaker 3:

I'm now I'm at the point in my career where I now want to be one of those people, and it could be listening, it could be funding, it could be connecting. I do a lot of connecting, introducing people, saying yes, I don't say yes to everything, I can't. That was another lesson I learned in that Homeward Bound program. That's a very gendered thing, you know. It's a very gendered thing. It's a very gendered thing for women in particular to just want to do things for people and at some point you run out and you can stop before you run out. I hadn't realized that either. And so there's just so many forms that our goodness in the world can take. It doesn't just have to be this one thing and we get to pick what that form is. I love it, I love it. Well, doesn't just have to be this one thing and we get to pick what that form is.

Speaker 2:

I love it. I love it. Well, I'd like to say thank you, tiffany, for joining me today. It's been an absolute pleasure and, yeah, it's good to see you, my friend.

Speaker 3:

It's good to see you too. Thank you so much for bringing your light into the world, and I look forward to many more conversations like this. One Sounds good.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the podcast. You can find us on all the major podcast platforms and at wwwjanaeio, as well as on YouTube under Jarnae Duane. See you next time.