Nuanced. - 37. Carin Bondar: Biology, Science Communication & School Board

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Carin Bondar is a Canadian biologist, writer, filmmaker, instructor, speaker, television personality, mother, and School Board Trustee in Chilliwack, BC.Video Interview: https://youtu.be/n5m85h_kTS0Her work focuses on increasing science literacy and communication. Recently elected to the Chilliwack School Board, Bondar is an advocate for STEM education and for keeping girls in STEM subjects through high school. Bondar is author of the books Wild Sex and Wild Moms (Pegasus, New York), she is writer and host of the online series based on her books, which have garnered over 150,000,000 views. Bondar’s work appears on National Geographic, Discovery Worldwide, TED, Animal Planet, Netflix and The Science Channel. She is an adventurer and explorer, having discovered 7 new species of beetles and snails in the remote jungles of Borneo with her research team from the Netherlands (Leiden) and Italy (Verona). Bondar lives in Chilliwack, British Columbia with her four children, three dogs and one cat. Carin Bondar's Website:https://carinbondar.com/Send us a textSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Karen Bondar. It is so fantastic to finally be able to do this interview. We planned it a long time ago, and a lot of things were arising. You had a very busy schedule. And so I'm very grateful to have you on because you've pioneered science in Chilliwack. You've really set an incredible example. And it's just an honor to sit down with you and be able to have a conversation. Could you give listeners like a little brief introduction of yourself? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, first of all, for having me. I know, crazy clash of the schedules in the last year or so. And thank you for your kind words. I am so happy to do what I do, and it's wonderful that I get to do it here in Chilliwack. Yeah, my name's Karen Bondar. I am a science communicator. I'm a biologist, and I'm a mom here in Chilowac. In actually, last February, I became part of our school board as well. And yeah, so I wear several hats. in town and I'm actually very proud to wear to wear all of them. Yeah, I can't blame you for having a busy schedule. That's a lot to manage with your involvement with sharing science with people and so many different mediums. But let's start kind of from the beginning. Where did your background kind of start?

And how did you kind of lead into the world of science? When did that start? Yeah, that's a really good question because for me, the path was not a straight one, not even remotely. I was, as a young girl, as a young, yeah, young girl, I was such a good performer. I was, you know, it was that little kid in the dance studio seven out of seven days a week, and I loved it. And so that was just my passion, and I didn't consider anything else. I was so into dance. I was, you know, doing jazz and ballet and tap and all of those things. My daughters, well, one of my daughters is doing it now, so I can see that that sort of drive in her as well.

I was going to be a racquet. That was my goal. And, you know, I followed through with that until I was about 16, at which point I decided, no, wasn't going to become a rockette, but I was going to become a ballet dancer. So I kept up with my very rigorous ballet training all the way through high school. And then right after high school, I made good on that promise, I guess, to myself. And I moved to Germany to Frankfurt. And I joined a small company there. as a ballet dancer and at 18 that was just a huge culture shock and uh it wasn't something I was prepared for socially I was totally prepared for it physically and my body was doing what it was supposed to do but my mind was not happy at all so um it didn't last in Germany for very long six months is about I think as long as that was and then um I came home and I had been lucky enough to win a scholarship to Simon Fraser. And so I came home and I was able to pick up my studies and go to Simon Fraser. And interestingly enough, the first couple of years of my degree, all I did was take a lot of courses is I was just not totally sure where I was going to go. So I did

dance, I did acting, I did archaeology, I did French, I did all these artistic things because I had been, you know, that was what I was. I was an artist and a performer. And I always had, though, there was always just this wacky thing that I did to my schedule every semester. I would look for one biology class because that was what I couldn't do. That was like hard. You know, that was a challenge. And I was like, oh, I'm going to try that. And it turned out that biology was always the best class I had in my schedule.

So it took me nearly three and a half years to declare my major. It took going to university in the day and coming to go home to Mapleville. Ridge where I was living to go to night school at night to make up all my credits in high school because I dropped out of all scientists in high school. And looking back on it now, that is why I am such a huge advocate for keeping kids in science, keeping girls in science, and especially keeping girls in science who are good at art. It's okay. They can be both. So yeah, anyway, five years later, five and a half years later, I came out with an undergrad in biology. And the only thing I wanted to do was keep studying.

And so I started a master's program right away at UVIC. Well, I went back back in in Australia first. Okay, we got to slow down. Can you tell us about what ballet was like for you? Because I don't have any experience in that. And I imagine listeners don't either. But I think it's likely a good way to develop yourself. And like there's a lot of discipline required for something that looks so beautiful.

You think that like for beautiful things, maybe there isn't that discipline required. But it's like, it seems very stringent and you have to follow certain steps. What was that experience to do ballet and kind of see your future in that area? Yeah. What a neat question. It is so hard and you, and it's so rigorous, but it is so comfortingly repetitive, I guess. And so you come to know your bar routines. And I worked at the bar, you know, for hours and hours and hours and hours.

And, you know, this was a daily thing. And it was, it was, you know, and actually, it's funny because I think about what do I look at when I go on Instagram now, I have like the Marianski Theater and I have, you know, all of these ballerinas just showing their feet exercises and showing all the things that they do because I just, I think it's beautiful. And I, um, I just remember how dedicated one had to be. It was, it was a, a field where you really were going to go as far as you pushed yourself. And, um, yeah. So it, it. I've always been incredibly driven, and I think it's funny because now I'm sort of midway through my 40s, and I don't know, that drive is kind of slowing down a little bit, or maybe I shouldn't say it's slowing down, it's maybe going in different directions now. But yeah, I just, I was that person who could enter the studio at 8 a.m., and I'd be the last to leave. Like, I'd had my own key to my studios, because my teachers obviously didn't want to keep those same hours as I did, but I just, that's what I want it.

So I did it. And I guess that's, that's sort of what happened to me in my biology as well. You know, I decided I wanted a PhD in biology. And so I just didn't stop trying until I had it. Right. I'm interested to know what you think of individuals learning how to dance because, from my understanding, mothers actually like dance with their babies unknowingly. But if you fast forward their interactions with the baby, they are doing like a little bit of a dance.

and it's like a way of children and people learning their body and having that mind-body connection and you can see when people don't have rhythm and I definitely do not have rhythm because I don't have any of those experiences but I'm interested to know do you think that there's value in people learning how to dance because it seems like we don't really have balls anymore we don't have ballroom dancing that's common like what do you think of the benefits of learning how to dance and knowing your body in that way yeah yeah oh on limited benefit and potential from doing these things. And I think and I believe fully that my dance training pervays every aspect of my life. So, so yeah, I think from a very, very basal state

of biology where moms and babes can actually move together and in rhythm with one another, I'm actually working with a team that's doing a documentary for the nature of things right now on dance on dance in the animal kingdom and what does that look like and how does the beauty of movement invoke emotion and feeling and yeah so I think there's great potential for movement and dance to to be a huge symbol of communication a huge symbol of love and emotion of togetherness and spirituality. And I would argue as well, I don't know, Aaron, the ballroom dance community is strong and big, my friend. And so I do a couple of things. One of the things I do is I work for a cruise line called Cunard. And it's these big fancy ships that go all over the world. And I'm telling you,

the dancers flock to these ships. Every night is a ball, one of those balls you were talking about. And that's just what they do. It's the most spectacular thing to see just in their unbelievable gowns dancing around these dance floors and on these crazy ships. The luxury of it all is crazy and interesting. But it all comes down to the dance. And you even have people who come on these cruises that come and get a partner on the ship, like the ship offers partners. So, yeah, you know, I think that it's definitely a huge partner. of life for very many people, however it looks. And I think also my immense training in dance

really prepared me for what I'm doing now, which is bringing performance to science. Because we haven't had that so much. And I think that's something that's really contributed to a lack of science literacy in the population. You know, it's not, we don't have scientists who are being as beautiful as dancers or as, you know, other theater performers that are, and I want to. I want to incorporate science into that so that we can, you know, have have just a better perspective of what actually goes on in the world as we're enjoying these beautiful pieces. Absolutely. And I think you do a really good job of that because I do think that science can move too much towards staring at a board, repeating a PowerPoint and not being accessible. And even talking to my partner, she couldn't stand like Earth science in high school.

Yet we're out there walking. And she's like, what's that plant? How does that plant interact with this? Why is that eagle choose that? Like the beauty of science is right in front of you when you look at the mountain. and the interactions of the environment, yet it kind of gets lost if it becomes too stagnant and dry in a classroom setting. Yeah. But let's continue your education. So you choose to go back to university

and you're taking a bunch of classes and you realize that biology is the one for you. Yeah. And then from where do you go? So then I start basically filling in my schedule with the courses. I sort of approach this biology degree backwards because I was able to take a lot of the biology courses

because those were the ones that I was always chunking away at, you know, one by one by one. But it wasn't the same for all of the co-requisites that one needs for BSC. So that's when I started doing the night school and getting all of those things done. I then, in 1996, oh my word, that's a while ago now, I've spent an entire semester at Banfield Marine Station on the west coast of the island. And that was just a totally transformative experience for me. It was my first time at a biological station, and I was there, you know, not in isolation, but yes, in isolation. You know, in 96, yes, there was email. No, it was not every day.

It was now and then. There was no phones. I remember at the station. There was two pay phones. And, you know, you had to line up for the phone if you wanted to phone someone. It's kind of ridiculous to think about how different life was at that time. Anyway, that really changed me because that made me really realize how much I loved biology and how much I loved being immersed in it. Not just doing it at a university in a classroom, but actually, like you were just saying, being out, being out in the ecosystems, the intertidal zones, all of those places we were able to just jump in a rowboat or a motorboat and get to.

It was life-changing. So from there, I decided to pick up a marine biology focused master's. And I applied to U of A, U of Alberta, and to U of U Victoria. And then I ended up choosing U Victoria, and I did a two-year master's program there on a very obscure aspect of evolution and development. Now, I say obscure aspect because, you know, you have a big, huge biology question, and it's this awesome, excellent question, which was, how does evolution evolve? That's kind of a meta question to ask. And the way we went about answering that in this particular lab was we looked at snails, snail embryos, and how the developmental process of these snail embryos would change through evolutionary time. It was a lab-based project. It was super fun. Tons of electron microscopy. Lots of specimen collecting and prep and mounting.

very, very basic science. So I teach a class now at UFE called Science Communication. We talk about the difference between basic science and applied science. And so basic science is really what my master's was all about. It was knowing, it was figuring out what evolution is and means and how the process of development is itself under evolutionary pressure and why might a certain developmental process evolve in one way over another? So very abstract concepts. And when I graduated from my master's, I loved this part of research, but I was also

really seeking to do a more applied project, one that was something that was a little more tangible for the world. So when I finished my master's, I switched fields. And I went into, from the field of evolution and development, I went into the field of ecology, which is the study of animals in their environment, pretty much. And I did that over at UBC, and by then I I would have probably, I think, sought a PhD, who knows, anywhere in the world. I'm an adventure. I like that. But at that time in my life, there was some unfortunate family stuff unfolding, I had my dad quickly passed away, suddenly passed away in 01, and left a family business to be run. What was that family business? So there was movie theaters, movie theaters. We had

Harris Road Cinemas in Pitt Meadows. There was one in Mission, and there was one here in Chilliwak, cottonwood bore. And, uh, no way. Yeah, that's it. That's why I'm here in Chiluat. How long were those a part of your, a part of your life? Like, was that always growing up? Oh, no, no. My dad opened the first theater in 1990 when I was 16. And in fact, I had never even been to Chilliwack. It was, I was about halfway through my PhD. I was, you know, having the time in my life. I was, you know, in the UBC research forest doing my projects. I was, I'd never even been to Chilliwack. And then my dad passes away. And then unfortunately, my brother took over for him. But my brother died as well. And so I had no, there was no one else. Once my dad and brother died,

I have no aunts or uncles or cousins or grandparents. I have a very, very small family. It's my mother and me. What was that like to go through? Oh, God. It was terrible. It was like such a grappy time. I just remember thinking, oh, because up until them, up until that point in my life, things had been great. You know, I had the life of, you know, just a normal kid growing up, figuring my stuff out, thinking that I was the center of the universe. And then, you know, started my Ph.D. or started to look for my PhD whilst knowing things were going to probably unfold. We knew my brother was sick and we knew that it wasn't going to be good. He had AIDS. He died of AIDS and he went through a long and excruciating battle with it. There was

no cure at that time. So yeah, it was fish out of water. So what I did is how did they impact your life? Like what role did they play in your development growing up? It seems like you had a pretty, an ability to focus on yourself in your own development. Yeah, true. And like how did they kind of contribute to that? My dad was always very driven of his own right. And so he was a huge supporter of me, and he was always actually the guy with the video cameras filming all the dancing. So he was just, he was a cameraman. And of course, that that led to his passion, which was movie theaters, which is why he opened the movie theaters, although he started as a teacher and a teacher librarian for, that was the bulk of his career. And yeah, so he and I were

never super close. I guess we were as far as just dad and daughter. My brother and I, we were the bobsy twins. We were two, three, two and a half years apart. And yeah, that, that was very hard losing him. I don't think that I'm over right now. I don't think you ever get over something like that. But it, because it was such a long illness and because there was, you know, there was still a real stigma around it at that time, we were not able to take him to a normal hospital. We had to take him to St. Paul's when there was any kind of complication because of the treatment we would get at just normal normal lower main non-hospitals. So yeah, it was, it was really hard. Do you think that that's reduced now or gotten more manageable now in comparison?

Yeah, you know, absolutely. And I know many friends and colleagues who are happy and living very healthy lives that are HIV-positive. And it's not as stigmatized as it once was. it's, you know, there used to be an entire ward at St. Paul's dedicated to HIV-A. So it was 4C, 5C, 8C, 10C, I don't remember, but it was a C. Anyway, there isn't even a word anymore. So, yeah, there was just a lot of competing things at that time for my attention. I took a year off of my PhD because that one other thing that was happening during that time as well was that I was having my first baby. So first baby, moved to Shilawak, taking over the theater, death of the brother, like just, yeah, I don't, you know, you go through a time like that and you're like, oh, dang

it, okay, life is not what I thought it was. Yeah, because that's like a high of having your first child versus the loss of family members and kind of being swung into a whole different world. How did you handle that? What was it like to try and take over that business? Yeah, it was, it was different. because it was not a, it was not a thriving business. And I had landlords there who didn't understand anything about our family situation or about me. Right. So I remember writing a letter to them. And I remember right, you know, when I first got inherited the theater, I wrote a letter and just said, okay, biologists, doing my best, don't know anything. Could you please help me here? give me a break on the rent or something. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. It was like something like

$23,000 a month in rent that we were paying there. And, um, and I remember this so clearly, I was summoned to a wall center one down town Vancouver. And basically, I was sat down at a huge board table, all these glass windows, uh, overlooking the city of Vancouver. And the guy said to me, you better get that sorted out or we're going to take your mom's house. because my mom had been a personal guarantor on the lease, and they were like, we don't care. We don't care about you. We don't care about you. We don't care nothing.

Sort this shit out. Wow. Yeah, it was really hard. But, you know what? Then you do. You do. What else are you going to do? I came home.

I had a good cry. And I picked myself up because what else are you going to do? I started taking accounting classes. I, you know, God, how many years was that? I guess I moved out here in 2005, and I sold the theater by 2011, so six years later. Just to put that into perspective for me, I loved the Paramount Theater downtown, but to be boozy, to feel wealthy, we would go to the Cottonwood Forest Cinema's during that period of time and go to like the White Spot or Taco Bell or something as like for my birthday. Like that was for my family during that period, that was like a moment of feeling wealthy to be able to go to that movie theater instead of the one downtown. And so it's just, it's interesting to know that you were involved during that period where Jacob and I would go there and feel like we were wealthy because it was very difficult to get to the malls and that side of town when the transit system wasn't the same.

It was like a bus running every two hours. And so to get out there to pay for a $15 taxi was a lot of money to us back then. And so, like, for my family, it was a big deal to go to that movie theater instead. And that one was like the happening movie theater when I was growing up. Isn't that cool? Yeah. And, you know, eventually the woman who did buy it, she's the one who currently owns it now, she has done wonders with that business.

She has done things I could never have done. I'm not a business person. I am not business-minded. I don't like conflict or I hate dealing with money. It was not my jam. I was a terrible business person. I had Kathy, the woman who bought it. And I always laugh because I always say that she's the daughter my dad never had

because she loves that place. And she's got it rolling in the way that I never could have. So, yeah, it worked out in the end, but those were some pretty crazy years. Yeah. What was it like to take off that time from the Ph.D.? Were there ever any fears of you not being able to go complete the PhD? Because when I read that, I was like, wow, that would have been like a time where something you've been working so hard for to put it on the back burner, and so many people

don't finish their PhDs that I've met. So I'm interested to know what that kind of feeling was. Were you eager to get back to it? How did you get back into it? Yeah. Yeah, great question. So just coming back to that driven side of me, there was no way I was not going to finish this thing. Oh, my gosh.

I would have done a lot more than I had to finish it. totally, I have so much gratitude for the fact that by this time, this was six years later-ish, I, well, no, I finished my PhD in around 03, but by then, most journals had come online. And so I was just writing by then. I had one, I had my first son, and then I had only writing to do before I finished. And so I think the reason I was able to finish is because of the internet, no kidding, because we were living in Chilliwack at this time. And I, um, I, I was also working at the theater pretty much full time. So, yeah, I think that the Internet played a huge role.

And I think that the Internet has been a saving grace and a tool of empowerment for women and for females that have traditionally been playing that role in the home. And I think that, yeah, I've felt it as a really empowering way to begin a career. Although looking back at it now, it was pretty much the only choice I had. so yeah so that's what happened was i took a year's leave for my maternity and uh went back to and just you know just chipped away at it i it was mine to finish and oh be damned if i wasn't going to finish that i was going to finish well what was it about what was your phd written on and i think it'd be interesting to kind of talk more about that aspect of the journey because for some people hearing the word phd i think overwhelms them masters what's the question how do you

approach this? What are journal articles? So could you tell us about your PhD and what you wrote about? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I started in the marine biology realms. We sort of talked about going and spending that time in Bamfield. And then my master's was with those snail embryos looking at how their development could possibly evolve. So then my PhD kind of took a lot of these ideas and put them all together in an applied way. So I wanted to look at development. And the animal that I was looking at primarily in my Ph.D. was our freshwater crayfish. So if you ever see those little fellas or those little guys scuttling around in our streams, we have a bunch of them in the hoax loo. Passavasticus Linus. That's our native species. That's what I worked on.

And I looked at how their role in the ecosystem changes through their life. So it turns out that juvenile crayfish, little tiny crayfish, do completely different things in an ecosystem. than large adult crayfish do. And actually, in the biological world and in the invertebrate world, this is really, really common. And it's hard for humans to kind of get our minds around that. Because when we have babies, they look just like we do. They look like little mini humans. And then they grow up and they just get proportionally bigger and they become humans, adult size.

Whereas in the invertebrate world, there can be many, many different developmental stages that each, you know, provide a different ecosystem service or that have a different rule to play. You can think of sort of the caterpillar cocooning to become a butterfly, that kind of idea where you have different physical types that an organism can exist in. Well, that means that that organism can have a ton of different impact on an ecosystem based on which stage of life it's at. So that's what my PhD looked at, and I elucidated how crayfish as part of a larger stream ecosystem. changed through their lives. So I would have, I would work directly in first order streams,

little teeny streams in Malcolm Knapp Research Forests in Maple Ridge. I got really good at becoming kind of like a MacGyver, because you do. I did these huge field experiments where I created these big enclosures within the stream. So if you can picture a little stream babbling along, I created these enclosures. They were one meter squared. They were made out of PVC pipe for the skeleton, and then they had this stuff called hardware cloth, which is like, it's like one centimeter squared like mesh. And I, that's what the walls were made of so that the water could just come through. And so, yeah, I varied the type of foods that were in there. I varied the parameters, my experimental parameters inside of my enclosures were different from outside.

And it was amazing. I mean, I just got a chance to design and implement and undertake huge experiments in the, the field. And that's, yeah, that's pretty much it. And it was, it was in the center for applied conservation research. And so, you know, why do we do this? Why do we care? Why is this even applied? Well, it's applied in the sense that these are vulnerable areas to forestry and deforestation in British Columbia and looking at how these ecosystems thrive and what kinds of factors impact how well they can thrive is sort of the greater conservation umbrella under which we worked. Right. And so can you tell us about the prior research that you had to do because a lot of people hear about

thinking and using the science and relying on science. And I think it's interesting for people who haven't gone to university, who haven't seen what it looks like to have a peer-reviewed journal, to have a peer-reviewed article that you're reading, that's bringing all these different information from all around the world together into one document. Can you tell us about what that process is? Yeah. This is, so the notion of a peer-reviewed publication or paper. That's the currency in academia. And I'll just take it maybe a couple of steps back and say that, yeah, there's this thing called the scientific method. And this is, you know, what do I teach in my psychom classes? The scientific method is this universal, systematic way to do work. And what it is,

it's, you know, it's a set of five steps, you know, observe something, make a hypothesis about your observation, create an experiment or way to test your hypothesis, collect data on that observe what you collected and repeat. So this systematic process is how scientists go about all of their work, regardless of where they are in the world or what it is that they're looking at. And that's what makes science work, and that's what makes it rigorous across multiple, you know, fields or countries. Now, the notion of peer review is that because we write our work or because scientists all work, according to this scientific method, where you carefully detail how you go about a problem and how you, you know, collect your data and get your results. Other scientists

in the field are always going to be the ones that are judging you. So science almost on purpose judges itself as harshly as it possibly can. So as an example, my, you know, my master's supervisor in this snail development world. You know, there was another few labs in the world that studied this phenomenon at a very high level. And so whenever she would publish a paper on it, her work would be sent to these other labs because they're the other experts on it in the world, you know, or not just this one other lab, but there are several. And that's a really good way to make sure that everyone is keeping their work clean and reputable and rigorous. So, So peer-reviewed work is academic currency, but we have a problem.

The problem with peer-reviewed work is that it ends up being only accessible to other scientists. So journal articles are generally not something that the general public would pick up and read, unless you were fairly advanced in a certain topic and you understood what was going on there. And so we're missing something. We're missing away for these peer-reviewed journals or for all this scientific information that is kind of being stored in these high-level journals. Now we need people like me and other science communicators who come and sort of decode all of those things, not for other scientists necessarily, but for the general public.

Because a scientist in their lab is busy doing their work. They're focused on it. It's all they care about. They want to share it. they want to publish it, but they don't really want to become experts at communicating about it. That's not their thing. Fair enough. There's only so many hours in a day. And so that's where the field of science communication comes in. Yeah, but overall, one thing that I really like to drive home, especially, you know, when I'm talking to the general public about science, is that we

follow the scientific method as a way to be systematic. It's a way to provide evidence of work done and results achieved. Pseudoscience, on the other hand, you know, pseudoscience is primarily responsible for a lot of the misinformation and, you know, garbage solutions to this and that that we see on the internet. Pseudoscience will not be peer-reviewed.

It will not be looking to beat itself down as science will. So that's one really good way that people in the general public can actually, you know, look at something and try to determine whether it's legitimate or not. Yeah, I definitely don't disagree. And I think about, like,

There are certain things that have benefits like essential oils that people like to use, but then it goes too far because nobody's kind of putting a stop on what it's capable of doing and what it's not. And so I've seen documentaries talking about people using essential oils on their face and then having hives and having negative reactions starting to try and take the essential oils like orally and having consequences because they're pushing it perhaps too far. And they're trying to pull too much out of a liquid where whereas we can kind of confine and try and figure out the solution. to things and see where it might fit and how it can be useful perhaps in a diffuser and it'll make your air smell good and maybe that will help you focus. And like trying to draw those limitations is not something I think people outside of academia are good at. Once you find a solution to something, then you want to go tell everybody about it. And I think you kind of see that with the gym. When people start exercising, they start saying, you need to start exercise. And I've gotten all these

benefits. And if you do it too, you're going to experience all these benefits and you're going to live the best life possible or going to a vegan diet or an all meat diet. Like there's all these things where once you experience a benefit, you're convinced. And so you're willing to go and try and convince anyone else and not think maybe this person's biology is different than my. Maybe what works for me doesn't work for them. And they're not looking to disprove their perspective. They're looking to see, well, if you use it and now you're benefiting, well, that just reinforces this is the best thing and nobody's talking about it. And you kind of get into this echo chamber of everybody's doing the same thing.

And I think that that's something social media is kind of exacerbated. A hundred percent. And, yeah, that you've really explained it well. And that is not something you'll see science doing. So that's just a really valuable point. And I also want to just make one other additional point based on something you said. And that is that we will have, we often have these influencers, right? And I mean, a really good example is Gwyneth Paltrow with her goop phenomenon.

there is so much pseudoscience and actually things that can be harmful to women from this kind of junk. And it's the lack of rigor and it's the lack of basic understanding of how something might change from person to person, as you were saying. That's what the scientific method automatically takes you through. And that's what we aren't getting with a lot of these fads where it's simply all about making money, getting likes, doing clicks. And, you know, it's so interesting for me as a biologist that I've studied life as it evolved naturally. And so I just find that humans are such a strange juxtaposition now because we are, of course, a product of evolution, just like the rest of the animal kingdom. However, our incredible brains have allowed us to veer from the natural ways of biology

to such hugely strange extents that we are, you know, both unnatural and natural, I would argue. We are no longer, you know, creatures that are a product of natural processes, yeah. I couldn't agree more. I'm interested if you could talk to us because you've mentioned evolution a few times, and I still know there's people out there who don't believe in evolution. And so I'm wondering if you could walk us through perhaps what evolution is and what why it's kind of testable and that we know that it's true. Yeah, so a good way that I like to think about it is I, you know, I started my career as a science

communicator with this crazy series called Wild Sex. And if you were in Cholok last February during my election campaign, you probably heard about it. So wild sex inevitably leads to wild offspring. And so if you kind of want to think about a circle, the first half of that circle is the wild sex. And then the second half of that circle is the wild offspring. That's what happens next. So these circles keep going on, keep going around and around. And you kind of think about these loops that are never-ending, sex, offspring, sex, offspring, sex, offspring. And everybody's doing that. And we all have these genes, this population diversity. Every time we mix our genes with someone else,

we're creating more diversity. And so what we eventually have is we have people, For example, if you want to sit, you know, if we were all sitting in a big theater, as we often are during lectures, not during COVID. But, you know, everybody in a theater, we could consider that to be a population, say. And everybody there has the same 23 chromosomes, because, I mean, that's how many humans have. But our chromosomes do not look the same. Somebody has, you know, different color hair. Somebody has different color eyes, different gene for this, for that, whatever. In short, there's variation in the genetics of the population within that room.

And so that means that say, oh, I don't know, in the next minute, like a flood was going to happen. And just so happened that two people in that room have the ability to swim because they have toes that are webbed together or something. Those two people can swim, and they'll be good. And they might swim off to, you know, to found a new population. It's not because they were better. They were just sitting in that room just like everybody else. but this random thing happened. The water flooded the theater and they had to swim and they were just better swimmers.

Totally random. That's evolution because we have so much genetic variability in our species and in any population. And, okay, yeah, humans kind of take the danger out of our lives a lot. But for the rest of the animal kingdom, survival is not easy. Survival is not guaranteed like it is for us. And so survival depends on aspects of your genetics that get you through, that allow you to have the gift of life. And humans don't do that. So here's an example.

Say, you know, there's a clumsy zebra walking along the plains, the Savannah, and clumsy zebra walks into a pothole or something and breaks its leg. Climsy zebra's dead. No question. And so clumsy genes, then, therefore, don't do all that well in the zebra population. So you end up getting zebras who aren't clumsy because, you know, that means that they will die. Okay, so then you take humans, Karen, clumsy human. Karen, I've broken both of my feet by walking. Yay.

I would have died if I was any other kind of animal, but because we're humans, we're like, oh, hey, no, no, no, we can fix that. No problem. We have the ability to fix that. not only do we have the ability to fix it but we have the ability to keep you safe warm dry and fed until you're fixed and then you can go ahead and reproduce after that because you know biology survive reproduce that's kind of what we need to do um and so yeah any genetic variability in a population means that some individuals will be more likely to survive in the future than others and that's it that's all evolution means that's it

It's a simple, diversity. And I think it's provable because like all dogs descended from wolves. Yeah. And that's a really weird thing to think about when you think about how we're so connected to dogs. And so many people, I think, sort of take that complex relationship for granted. And I was just watching Explained, which are Netflix documentaries by Vox on Netflix, talking about dogs and our long relationship. They're the first animals we co-evolved with. And a scientist took a group.

of wild dogs and had them breed together and only breeded the ones that were friendly that were like, yeah, they didn't have that much aggression. And after, I think, like, a few generations, none of them were aggressive. And they had basically turned into dogs over that period of time. And that's like a complex relationship that we have where they were both our supporters. But now, for so many dogs, they look nothing like wolves. And they're all cute and cuddly, but they serve new purposes. And I don't think we talked about, like, the benefits of service dogs and the benefits that having that companionship can have because their love is somewhat different than

human love between two people because it's unconditional. And they were breaking down how the sweat of people, depending on why you're sweating, will actually help inform the dog as to what your mood is. And again, we don't smell that sweat. We don't understand those types of pheromones. And so we don't think about it. But that's why your dog is able to care for you. you when you're having a stressful day while come over and just lay with you is because it's

picking up these scents and they took the sweat of people separately in a different room, put it into a vial, put it in the middle of the room, the dogs would come over and have a different reaction after they smelled it. They would either be happy after if it was like the person was having a great day and took that or if there was tears, they would have a different like chemical response to that. And that developed over time so that the co-evolution would work better together. That's interesting. And like it just blows my mind to learn about that and have that different perspective. And that's what I feel like I missed in my biology classes is how that applied part applies to the regular life. Like you think about those courses, your biology 10 or

stuff. And it doesn't, it doesn't feel like it's delivering the same content that that Netflix documentary or information that you deliver. What is that like for you to try and take the information that seems kind of stale or dry and turn it into something people can interact with? I love it. This is what I love doing. It's just, oh, that's why I get up in the morning. I love to think about ways that I can talk about scientific concepts, biological concepts, in ways that will mean something to people, how they can relate to it, how it matter. Why does it matter? Why should they care. I love thinking about ways that I can create media that includes both a message and a scientific theme. And so, yeah, how do I do that? Gosh, I guess everyone's styles are a little

different, but I think I like to lead from beauty. I admire beauty in nature so much that I often allow that to inform the beginning. So when I'm designing a lecture, for example, I will look for images that convey the concepts that I'm looking to discuss. So I'll visually communicate, I'll orally communicate, and then, you know, if we're in class, we'll be able to actually actively discuss things. But this is where pop culture makes a real impact in my work because I love the idea of taking a really hit song and creating a, you know, just a little scientific ditty over it, you know, that will be memorable in some way because a song was very popular. So a lot of science

communicators that are far better singers than me do this in a really amazing way. I also like doing things. Of course, sex is never a terrible topic. And I, you know, I did, as we've alluded, I did receive quite a bit of negative attention during the election campaign over a lot of the topics that I work in, primarily sex. But sex is just so. ubiquitously important to every animal on the planet, including us. And so I will never apologize for having that as a major way to, I guess, sell my work. But the thing is, we are biological creatures. I mean, do we realize that every day the choices that we make in our lives are primarily based on our sex life? It's really quite remarkable that sex comes

into everything. So I guess, yeah, I really like to make people's lives relevant or make my material relevant to what's happening in people's lives. And people are always having sex, Aaron. Absolutely. What is that like for you to kind of see? Because I think it's interesting that there's a whole subset of the population, mainly conservative type people, that struggle with that topic, that want that kind of minimized. And I think you see rises in that during like sexually transmitted diseases, like at the heights of those times, communities become more conservative. Like I had Laura Reid on, and she talked about the Royal Hotel. And during the 1900s, there were sexually transmitted diseases.

And so they had separate entrances for men and women to keep them separate. So it would reduce sexually transmitted disease. Hope that was their kind of goal. And so you see peaks and valleys of that approach. Certain times, it's more okay to have those conversations and those types of events are more okay and then certain times there's not. Is it interesting to see that, to see that response to a scientific topic, to a topic that so many people say they support the science, and then when the rubber hits the road, you kind of see them hop off board. A hundred percent. I chuckle.

Like, I literally have to chuckle at the way that we treat our own bodies and how hypocritical we can be when it comes to the things that we purport and the things that we promote. I mean, to have a child, you have to have had sex. That's just sort of the way it goes. So to have now this child and to be not allowing this child to understand this very important aspect about where they came from, certainly the children ask that when they're very young, where did they come from? And do we give them the whole, you know, reproductive biology?

101 at that point? Absolutely not. But do we say, yeah, you know, there's a seed in this part and there's an egg over here and seed meets the egg and that's how it goes. I mean, I just don't think that we're doing our children any favors by pretending that we, you know, that these aren't just very, very pervasive and ubiquitous things for us. We are animals. And I guess maybe that's where it begins, this kind of divide. And I know there are some schools of thought that consider humans to not be part of the animal world. And I think when you get into that kind of thought, that's a tricky one for me. So I like to just keep things as real as honoring to the biology as I can. And I really never, at least I don't think I've gone wrong in just sticking with what I

know about biology and allowing that to inform how I interact with my children, how I interact in an educational setting. And yeah, I guess there are people who are going to be uncomfortable discussing it. I guess I would advise those people to stay home from my lectures because I'm not going to stop doing them. Well, fair enough. And I think that making it more accessible and starting the conversation has to occur at some point in order for us to remain educated. And I think that that's where hopefully that kind of bridge comes in. And I'm interested to know what it's like in comparison to like a classroom, where you have students who are hopefully engaging meaningfully with the material.

And then you take it to another crowd. And perhaps it's a completely different response than what you're used to. Always. Yeah. And I love that, actually. I like bringing materials to different audiences and sort of gauging, not just how they'll react differently, but also how I will present differently. And certainly to that room of, you know, corporate people who are coming for their keynote lecture, that room is going to be

a lot different than the, you know, fourth grade class that I was in at Central last week versus the, you know, who knows what else they are. But I absolutely have to take that responsibility onto my own shoulders. It's not always easy to do, but I can generally, you know, take, if there's a question that comes up, that could be somewhat inflammatory or, you know, that I can tell they're looking for me to, you know, go into a trap or say something that they want me to say so that they can prove me wrong or something. I don't know.

I guess I've gotten pretty good at just not being bothered by it or allowing, allowing something to be said and just kind of having that conversation. I like it when people sometimes ask me the tough questions because we can generally come to a consensus if the questions are respectful and constructive. Yeah, you also mentioned about how there are certain schools of thought that don't think we have that relationship with the environment or that we're somehow different.

And I think that the challenge there, well, it's interesting to see that indigenous culture doesn't view it that way. I think that that's like an interesting bridge between science and indigenous culture because I had the opportunity to interview elder Eddie Gardner and where he talks about how he like the fact that he calls trees the rooted ones rather than trees and the ones that crawl rather than bugs I thought was beautiful but I also thought about it after and was like it's so fascinating because I don't know if he knows that he's doing that to show like a greater level of respect for those plants and living creatures

But the fact that he's doing that is so different than get that bug off me, that kind of approach. And I just think it shows that deep connection that indigenous people have with the environment, with the belief that, like, I've compared when people say grace, like religious people say grace, to salmon ceremonies. They're done very differently. But the same idea is to be grateful for the role the salmon plays in the rivers, with the bears, with the trees, with, like, with the whole ecosystem around. it is similar to what you do when you say grace and you say thank you for the food to whoever you're thanking. There's like these interesting overlaps of being grateful but doing it in different ways and I don't always know that people are there. I don't know if they realize there's these overlaps but I think indigenous culture does a good job of showing that ecosystem relationship

in a different way than perhaps Western culture has gotten used to. I would 100% agree with that And I am actually so excited for a project that I've, you know, just started working on, which is to indigenize a lot of what we know about the ecology of our, you know, charismatic megafauna. And, you know, as an ecologist, I, you know, I think it's crazy that I got a PhD in a field that hadn't been impacted by indigenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge is ecology. Indigenous peoples have been existing in harmony with nature for thousands and thousands of years. And the fact that indigenous ecology hasn't been included in my education or anyone's education in ecology is an absolute travesty. But I'm so thrilled to be at UFE where that's a priority. That's one of our common mission statements for the entire university is to get our curriculum on point.

and I feel like my field specifically, you've just nailed it on the head. Indigenous people respect the ecosystem and they have an understanding for how each part of that ecosystem is relevant. And as you said, calling a bug the crawling ones is such a respectful way to talk about what a crawling thing might do. The pieces of the ecosystem that they're cleaning up, that they're eating, that they're pooping out for the bacteria. to come, who will then digest and, you know, on and on it goes. And, and yeah, what do we do as in Western cultures primarily? Get that bug off me. Kill that thing. Kill it. They don't burn it with fire. Whatever. Um, no. God, what? That's crazy. That just, that's upsetting and disappointing to me as a biologist. Why do we do that? Why do we suddenly, you know, why do we

teach our children that some things are yucky and gross and should just be killed for existing? That's ridiculous. Absolutely. And I think I'll be interested to know what you think of this. I'm writing a paper right now on like the philosophies of indigenous law versus Western law. It's an area that I'm interested in not to see what the differences are, but to see whether the similarities lie. Because I think that that's what brings us. When we're looking for differences, I think we're focused on the wrong thing.

And what John Burroughs talks about who's a Uvik professor of indigenous law and kind of the foremost leader of that topic, He talks about how, like, we talk about indigenous oral traditions, but it's tied into all of the legal principles that they follow are tied into the natural order of the environment. So when they describe, like, how the trees interact with the bears that interact with the salmon, they're teaching legal principles to their children. It's just, it's just not written down as like, this is a rule you should follow. It's like, this is how this bear lives in harmony with the salmon. This is how this bird interacts with this. And this is how you should live your life based on how they live there. lives, this is what you can learn from their actions.

And so I'm interested to know what you think of that. It's, yeah, this notion of learning, observing, and coming at it from a framework of every single thing that's here comes to the table with an equal value. That's what, you know, somehow in colonialism, we've missed that. And it's become this huge sort of pyramid almost. I think I'm a very visual person and I think about how everything or not everything but many things in sort of that Western hierarchical view of thinking, you know, comes down to what's the most important thing? Where are the dollars and cents? How much, how can I gain the greatest level of profit? That has no place in nature. In nature, teeters don't exist. Well, they do exist. But they are run by the principles of biology. And so, yeah, we have, I think that creating systems that are based on indigenous principles that are essentially principles of love, togetherness, and inclusion, that is how we have to approach science and biology.

And it's a new way of thinking about it, but it's the only way that we should. should have ever been thinking about it. It's quite arrogant for us to have gone about it in any other way. And it's good that we have an opportunity now to learn and to and to, you know, reconcile a lot of the things that have been done. Absolutely. And I think it's valuable to make the science accessible and also try and tie stories together because the other thing that I found interesting was for the Kwokkwakawak, I believe,

First Nation community up north, they have the canoe story, which was their was a great flood, and they all tied their boats together, their canoes together, and then the waters rose, and then they were all separated across North America, and that's why you see indigenous people all across North America is because of that flood. And that has very interesting ties to the story of Noah and the Ark, Great Flood, how do you approach it? And I think with the floods that have taken place here, the idea that you should prepare for the flood outside of when it actually occurs, to prepare for that is the moral of that story, regardless of whether or not somebody argues that it's actually occurred or not. It's sort of irrelevant whether or not

it actually occurred. The idea that you should prepare for the flood, whether it's in your life, whether it's in your community, you should always try and prepare for those things and make sure that the people around you are taking care of and that you have a plan when those moments arise. And I had the opportunity to interview Mark Lalonde, who's the safety and risk manager for SFU, and he talks about you should have like a three-week kit in your house at all times. you should have, be prepared for these circumstances, and so many, I think that falls on deaf ears of like, yeah, you're right, I should do that. And then we go back to not doing that at all. And so it's interesting to see how these stories can kind of be tied together and promote something positive to people. And I think that that's what you're delivering when you're tying into biology and the environment for people to try and figure out how to live more harmoniously with the environment. And I'm interested to know your thoughts on kind of the current climate of the environment. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's been really interesting to see all of the, not all, I haven't seen all, but much of the media coming out of COP 26. It's hard. This is not an uneasy time for our environment. And I don't think things are going to get easier before they get far harder. And that's just because I don't, I don't think we understand what it is we're up against yet. Even those of, you know, even those climate scientists who are at the front lines. We've had a lot of unexpected feedback loops that have happened to trap

even more greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. And a lot of these feedback loops are what is causing many of these unforeseen massive wildfires, massive flood events, mudslads, etc. We're seeing it now. And I don't think that's going to change. We're going to be living. We're going to be living. in a new world. And I mean, humans are, humans are an animal that won't act until it has to. And I do think, I mean, I will stand by the words of the late great Stephen Hawking who said that we will figure out a solution when we have to. And until, I mean, you know, here we have, we have so much going on with our climate. And yet we have billionaires that are, you know, fighting to be the first ones to go into space. Does that mean that's not good? No, it's good. It's good. It's neat that we have exploration that we're trying to figure out things. But what it exhibits is this massive dichotomy between where money should go and where money is going. But, you know, there's a lot of interesting things happening. I'm loving watching how potentially some billionaires are stepping up to the plate to give some dollars back to major climate initiatives.

I love how we have the ability to use clean technology. You know, it's funny to think about the fact that we have the answers. We understand hydrogen fuel cells. We have electric vehicles. It is actually the top down that's keeping oil and gas, at least in my opinion, you know, the powers that be want oil and gas to stay as our main fuel. fuel source because that's what's keeping them up on the dock. So that's a real tricky one. I think we're going to see a lot of systems fail, and I think they should fail.

So it'll be interesting to see what happens in the next, I don't know, 20 years, 50 years, the metal's going to hit the metal or whatever that saying is. Yeah, I'm actually working on having an SFU professor on who's working on carbon capture and trying to implement that across British Columbia. Because I think there's a place in Squamish that's working on that. And I just think it's always interesting to see whenever, even with these floods, seeing people come together when the challenges occur is probably the most beautiful part of being a part of a community. Seeing those rare unexpected stories, like I think social media can make people pretty negative on and feel bleak about the future because anybody can make a comment.

But when you have something like the Barrow Town station and seeing how many Chilliwack residents came out till 3 a.m. to try and make sure that system didn't fail. It didn't fail. And it worked. Exactly. Seeing that is like, that's the hero's story. That's the thing that pulls us closer together and something that you can lose if you just post climate change is real. And then you get all these comments debating a topic.

Those aren't the people who are going to be a part of the solution anyway. So their thoughts or perspectives are sort of irrelevant to how we need to proceed as like a species. Yeah. And, you know, I think that you raise a really good point that, you know, we can sit. we can all sit back in our homes and be isolated from one another and it's so hard to understand the tone of a comment or of an email or a tweet or something like that. It's very easy for us to get our backs up and to be annoyed with each other. But yeah, when you see people coming together and actually fixing something or, you know, coming together because their fellow humans are

suffering, it is a beautiful thing. And because so many people came together just recently here, in Abbotsford, because of all of the flooding, we're seeing not just this beautiful display of humanity, but we're also seeing that this is going to be our new normal. And so what we may, I mean, I hope what we may start seeing is more attention being paid to, you know, the simple ways that people can make some small changes. You know, stop eating meat a couple times a week. If you eat it every day, eat meat, you know, a couple times a week, don't eat it. Or, you know, maybe don't take that extra truck or your big truck to the corner store, maybe walk or, you know, things like that, just the tiny things that will eventually add up or that do eventually add up.

That in itself is another way of giving that hug to that community member. It's an indirect way, but it's something that you can do to make the world better, just, you know, and we've all got to start thinking like that because if we all keep sort of staying in our little, little isolated rooms with our backs up against the walls saying, well, I'm not going to stop using plastic. And they stop using plastic. You know, come on. It's not going to work if we approach it like that. Well, and I really loved seeing how, like, electric vehicles kind of won the day in terms of our own community because we ran out a gas. And so gas of vehicles weren't offering the same value than electric car would offer. And it was just

kind of like a, for a capitalist, for a business owner, for somebody who kind of leans perhaps more right and less towards taking those steps, and you now have the perfect argument as to why an electric vehicle would be more valuable if gas lines are cut off. If we have shortages of gas, your electric car keeps running. And I think that having the argument laid out on all factors, not just kind of the ideal version, but being able to say, this is a good idea, not just because it's good for the environment, but here, if you don't have gas, if you are in these circumstances,

it can actually be even more valuable. Like, I think Tesla has done such a cool job of making a Tesla desirable, not just for the benefits to the environment, but for just if you want the coolest car with the craziest technology attached to it, then you probably want a Tesla because I rode in my friends

and the technology to protect your children and your family, the security that it offers in comparison to a regular car, is far superior. And so it's like the airbag system is different than that of my car, which just shoots an airbag in my face. It will actually predict when you get into an accident where the airbags need to deploy in order to protect you and your family best.

And Elon even made the point of like, this is even more valuable than just the seatbelts that you think are very protective. This is better than that. And it was like, this is a good argument not on just one front. It's good on all fronts. And I think that that's how you win people over is by presenting all different perspectives of the argument. I like that. And I, you know, I also like that Elon Musk is such a, you know, a shit-distirmer. Let's just call it what it is. I love how he's actually putting his money where

his mouth is at this point. I mean, I don't know what's happening, but lately he said something like he'll give $6 billion to solve world hunger if the WHO will give him a plan. And honestly, I think they did give him a plan because they're like, all right. So I like that he's crazy and kind of different that way. I mean, we need those people. Absolutely. Absolutely. Can you tell us about after your Ph.D., where do you go from there? What is the next step?

And how do you, did you know you wanted to be a science communicator when you were in your Ph.D.? Or when did that come about for you? Yeah, I know. I had absolutely no idea. I was, I remember very clearly one day before I got pregnant, I was maybe about midway through my PhD. And one of my lab colleagues came to me in the lab and just said, Karen, what are you going to do when you finish your PhD? and I was just like, I don't know. Teach dance to small children, maybe? I have absolutely no idea. And I think the, you know, so I'll unpack that a bit. I didn't want to be an academic.

And that was because I saw my master supervisor and I saw my PhD supervisor and I just saw how completely enamored and ensconced they were in their particular research systems. And I mean, you have to be. To be an academic, you know, you can. kind of choose a system, you choose a question, and you work on that question. That's what you do. And I just didn't think that I would ever be able to have my life be focused on one thing, so specifically like that. And I also, you know, I wanted to be a mom. I always wanted to be a mom. I didn't want to be a mom before I was ready, but when I wanted to become a mom, I didn't want to just go back to work either. I wanted to be with my children and spend time with them. So, yes,

finished the PhD. I had, my son was two, my daughter was about six months old, and I had caught one at that time. So I pretty much, as soon as I got my PhD, I unfortunately had to kind of put it on, put it aside, because I was running the theater, and that was taking all of my time. By the time my third child came around, that was in 2011, nope, that was the fourth one, 2009 was the third one. 2009, that's when I was finally able to get back into biology. So what I did, very similar to how you're starting off your repertoire. I started a blog. And way back in 2007, that was a pretty forward-thinking thing to do in the sciences. There wasn't a ton of science on YouTube yet. And so I started this blog and it was just like, hey, I'm Karen. I have a PhD. I'm stuck at home with my children.

I'm reading cool papers and I'm talking about biology and I just started doing that because that was kind of keeping me saying I loved being at home with the kids but I needed to exercise my brain a little bit and I did get noticed and I was picked up by Scientific American Magazine

to be in their block network within about a year or so and so you were doing it with no like support nobody was like requiring it you were just giving your time and saying this is something I'm just enjoying doing oh interesting and you did that for a year before any kind of bites, I guess, to use a fishing metaphor.

I mean, I still do it. To be honest with you, that blog is still running. I don't write it, but I have an assistant who takes my books and she breaks them down. So, yeah, that's kind of always been my thing that I just like to offer out biology, funny biology stories. Yeah, I just like doing that. Yeah. And then I got this offer from Sign of American, which is awesome, started talking. I noticed like when I was doing interviews, writing articles, you know, talking to people about

their work. People were just interested in the sex angle. It just, no matter what, it always, those got more hits, those got more clicks, those got more questions and likes and shares and so on. And so, um, I started, you know, talking about it more for that reason. And then, um, you know, I was very motivated. I don't know that I had, I didn't even know what a science communicator was at that time. I'm not even sure the science communication was even there. He had, there was sort of this muddling of, you know, science and comms and stuff. Did you like people like Stephen Hawkins? prior or any scientific leaders back then? And who did you, like, look up to during that time? I was very much into the primate women. So Jane Goodall, Diane Fosse, I was very much all about

the women who were out there doing field work, just out there with apes. That was very cool. I wanted to be Diane Fossi pretty much. Byrute Galdicus was a professor at Simon Fraser, and I think she still is. And, yeah, I was very taken with these. really strong females who were making careers for themselves in the sciences. Sylvia Earle is another strong female presence in the water sphere. Yeah, so I would, I had these things in my mind, and I, every time there was an opportunity to just do things like go on a Shaw TV talk show or a little breakfast TV thing in Vancouver or something, I would do those.

I would just be like, hey, I could talk about, you know, tricks at Halloween and romantic things at Valentine's Day and gifts at Christmas and, you know, there was a show on Discovery Canada at that time called Daily Planet. And they would, you know, I'd be like, hey, I'm going to do a three-part rituals series. What do you think? And they were sometimes open to letting me do things like that. But then I just, you know, I guess this company from South Africa, they were called Earth Touch, they saw an interview that I had given somewhere. I don't even remember where, but I was just out there trying to give as many interviews as I could. And they saw one and they said, they caught in touch and they said, hey, we have this crazy idea. We want to do an online show

about the evolution of reproductive biology or animal sex. We think you'd be the perfect person to do it. And, you know, the beauty, the beauty of the internet and blogging and online series is that, you know, within six weeks, I was on a plane to South Africa. I was like, yeah, let's do it. Television doesn't work like that. I have one pitch right now that is like kind of my life's work pitch and I'm really excited about it. It has been in the works for like it's we're in our like one year and six month mark right now like pitches TV takes forever. But anyway, so went to South Africa, did the series and it was just so rough and dirty. We loved it. It was so fun. We made 21 episodes in nine days. And I've worked so hard. It was ridiculous, but it was

the most fun. And we just cranked them out and they ended up, yeah, getting, I don't know, I've lost count at $100 million, but they did well. You know, it was a fun series. And after Wild Sex came out, then I guess I got a little bit branded as a sex person. So a couple more series came out. Oh, right. And then I got the TED talk based on that. So then once I got a TED talk and then I got a book deal. Yeah. So that's kind of how those things went. Wow. What was that journey like? Did it ever feel surreal to be in another country all of a sudden as a consequence of a blog post? And how did you, how did you approach that? I loved it. I think it was, I was not in a great place in my personal life at that time. My divorce happened, I think like a year and a half later. I hadn't quite contemplated it yet, but it was there. So I wasn't happy at home. I was because I had my kids, but yeah, there was, you know, life isn't perfect. And I remember just being in South Africa, just having my mind blown.

Like, wow, I'm back. Like, wait, who are you? Wait, oh, this is me. Like, oh, yeah, I forgot. I forgot I could feel like this. I forgot I could be like this. I like this. It was a rebirth, I guess, you know?

Yeah, like you reinventing yourself. Yeah, like I got back from there and I was like, oh, okay. I got some more. to do. And how did the TED Talk kind of play into it? Was that expected? Like when the videos were exploding and then a book deal, like walk us through that. Yeah, I couldn't believe it. So the guy who was putting together the TED program was for TED Global in 2013. It was in Edinburgh, Scotland. He just phoned me. I thought it was a prank call. He had this really thick Italian accent and he was calling and he introduced himself. He said why he was calling and he said why he was

calling and he said that, you know, he'd like me to do this TED talk or whatever. And I just, I couldn't even understand what he was saying. And I was like, so when do I find out if I get to do it? And he's like, no, I'm calling you to ask you to do it. I'm like, what? So yeah, it just, it just happened. And it was, it was fantastic. I have no problem being, you know, curated. I got a ton of help from Chris Anderson himself. I felt like the talk that I gave at TED Global was really good, and I did a good job of it. I was so scared. Oh, my goodness. I've never been more scared. And I, you know, I remember pacing before I went on the stage because I felt like if you go to a TED as, you know, from your company or from your, from your job or whatever, you know,

your colleagues are like, yeah, man, you're awesome. Like, way to go. That's cool. Good feathering your cap. But I felt like if you go there as a freelancer, which is what I was at that time, it could be like, the biggest job interview you ever have like it's very you know potentially very important for you so i was really nervous um but it but it went well i think and um and then you know the the book deal came it was pretty straightforward i um i was working with an agent in london england at that time and um the the book deal just was basically offered um and uh i think the thing that i found a bit scary and strange about the book reading process is for that first book. I didn't have anyone helping me. Like I assumed that maybe I'd get an editor or something, like something

they'd send, I don't know, somebody would proof read it or something. And that didn't happen. They just pretty much printed what I wrote. And I was like, I don't know what I'm talking about. Why are you guys just printing what I write? So yeah, I don't know. I have, I wonder if sometimes I suffer from imposter syndrome. I mean, I'm sure I do, but I just was like, well, I'm sure I can't do this. So why are you getting me to do this? So, yeah, it's, I don't know, you've got to keep yourself in check, I guess. You don't want to get an ego, but you also want to make sure you do believe in yourself.

Absolutely. How did you approach the work? Because I think imposter syndrome for people is often overcome by working hard and like trying to feel like you earned it because you put in the work. What was it like to write a book? because I assume many listeners have never written a book, never been offered the opportunity. What was that process like to receive a contract and have someone say, we want you to write a book and it needs to be this long?

And how did you approach that? So I had, yeah, I had those basic parameters. And before I got the contract, I had one conversation with the publisher. And I said, well, if I was going to write one, here's how I see it going. I see it having three sections, you know, meet the partner, have sex with the partner, deal with the sex products after the sex, as in the offspring after. And so that was pretty much all that I had given the publisher. So once I got to started, I really just took those three sections and started flushing them out. I did a, you know, because I had that experience of writing my PhD thesis,

which is kind of like writing a book, I guess, you read all of the, um, primary literature in your field. So I think I read almost 800 primary literature papers for writing wild sex and probably a few books as well. Because I wanted to sort of take the reader through what it looks like across the animal kingdom, but then across the process of meeting, mating, and dealing. Yeah, through the animal kingdom and through those three things. And so, yeah, that's kind of how I fleshed it out. And it ended up that I went to London to record. I also did the audio version of it in my own voice.

So that was a really fun thing to do. Yeah, so I guess that's kind of how it went. I don't know. I like sitting at home. I'm actually quite an introvert. I can be an extrovert too. I'm an ambivert. But for those years, like, I had no problem just, like, sitting in my office, literally.

databasing and downloading and reading papers all day. Like that really makes me happy. Really. So you're good at balancing the two because I imagine that some people would be really good in front of the camera or out there and then not want to do the readings or the studying or the preparation that would be required. How long do you think it took you to like prepare to write like the book or to write articles? How much backend work goes into researching those things? It depends, I guess, on the project. But I, because this, the wild sex, and then I went on to write another book after that called Wild Moms, because of that material, it just kind of becomes ingrained in you, talking about it, writing about it, doing that I then went on to write another series from the books. I wrote another online series about Wild Sex and another one for Wild Moms, which are animated.

So those took less time because I kind of already knew. But I would say for something that is new for me, especially now in approaching how indigenous people view various aspects of biology or various specific organisms, that's something I need a lot more background on. I'm going to have to go back and really, like, get, you know, hit the books again because I don't know that yet. And I don't feel comfortable working in a space unless I know what I'm talking about. So that will require me to go back and do a lot more reading. Do you think that that will be at all challenging? Like, do you feel like there's a good representation of indigenous understandings in the literature? Yeah.

Yeah. No. I think there isn't. That's a good question. And I guess what I meant was most of what I have to do to obtain a lot of that information is relationship building. Right. But I do have to go back and kind of understand a lot of what I want to break down about the sort of colonial side of academia. before I kind of put those things together.

Right. And how does, like, writing a book compare to being a speaker in a TED talk or being in front of a camera, do you have a preference in the mediums that you communicate in or do you get different things out of different ones? Yeah, interesting question. I like being on camera. I do. I think it came from me growing up as a dancer, my dad being the one with the video camera. And I knew I was making my dad happy when I performed for the camera. So, so, but I, I just inherently love being in front of a camera.

I'm a ham. I joke about it. I'm just like, ooh, is there a camera? Hi, how do I look? Like, just, ugh, why am I like that? I don't know. But I am. So I guess I would have to say I do like the camera stuff.

Although I love speaking on stage. I love being with a live audience too. That's really fun. And teaching is kind of like that. And that's, you know, funny enough, I, when, when COVID came along, I wasn't actually working at the university yet. I had just kind of been peripheral to the university. I mean, I was really busy doing other things. And then I was just so lucky that, you know, when the pandemic happened, there just happened to be an opportunity for me to start teaching because a lot

of the current classes had to be canceled because they weren't able to offer them online. And so that was just a new thing for me. And just this past semester has been the first time that I've been in class with students because it's all been online up to now. And wow, what a neat thing that is. I love that. We have the best conversations. Right. So you went into UF.E as a professor, but online. Yeah, that's right. And so you didn't even get to meet your students for the first time starting out as like a professor. Yeah, that's right. What was that experience like? And what courses do you teach you? Yeah. So it was super weird. And I remember laughing with my ex-husband, who's also a professor. And he's, because I said, oh, no, I'm just going to get this.

I'm just going to get the students to turn on their cameras and we're all just going to talk and we're going to have this great conversation. It's going to be fantastic. And he's like, let me know how that goes. And, of course, I had no idea that the students would not turn on their cameras and, yeah, they're very shy. So it's really nice seeing their beautiful faces in person. Were you able to push them at all to kind of face those discomforts? Because if anyone's going to be able to pull like somebody out from behind the camera, It seems like it would be you.

Oh, that's nice of you to say. Yeah, we would. So, I mean, the course that I initially started teaching to them did have a communications component. So there was, I scheduled us a few discussions where they had to be ready and they had to have their camera on and they knew we were going to actually have a formal discussion on those days. So, yes, I do think it's possible. And by the end of the semester, students are generally more easygoing about having their cameras on. But again, there's a lot of factors that could potentially be at play there for a student that I have to be, I guess, cognizant of. Maybe they aren't in a private space.

Maybe they don't have the ability to, oh, gosh, I don't know. Maybe they're just in their bedroom. Maybe they don't want to come on. Or, you know what I mean? So I've got to just be really careful to make sure that I'm not sort of limiting any students that way by making them do something uncomfortable. On the other hand, this is university. So I do want them to work and to extend themselves and, you know, yeah, make sure that they go beyond their comfort zones a little. Right. And what was that course focused on?

It was the first time that I taught science communication. And it was super interesting because we were able to really pick up on a lot of current COVID stuff. At that time, there was no vaccine. We were still trying to figure out the nuances of what this coronavirus was. And so it was an incredible time in the science communication space. And in fact, I was taking a course myself through the Knight Center of Journalism, which is at the University of Texas. I was taking this open online course that was taught by one of my journalism heroes. And I've since even had her come and speak in my classes. But it was so cool. I was taking this course.

And there were students from like 50 countries in this course. It was incredible. And I was able to take my experiences there. to my experience at UFV and yeah, just sort of speak with journalism, students all over the world, trying to cover COVID from whatever perspective they had in their country. Wow. So you're teaching a course and you're taking a course. Yeah. Can you tell us about what that course was about? And why choose to do that? Because I think the struggle for so many who don't go to school is why. Why am I going to go to school?

What is school going to teach me? What do I need to know? Like, I'm running my business. Business is good. I'm fine. Why do I need to know this? Yet you, you basically have opportunities at your doorstep. It doesn't seem like you need another form of education. And if you wanted to, you could probably just watch YouTube videos if you really wanted to avoid the formalities. Why go and attend another educational facility? I think I am addicted to school.

I am also a wedding planner, an interior designer, and a therapist, by the way. I am totally in love with going to school. But I'm not doing that. I wasn't doing that for an increase in pay or any other reason. I was doing that because I knew it would make me a better instructor. And it would give me a really good perspective from which to teach my own students. So like I just kind of looked at it as this amazing opportunity. It wasn't, it was a free course.

It was open to anyone. And yeah, I just, I'm really motivated for things like that. And I feel like because I am really interested in breaking down some, and really making a difference to the level of science literacy and society. I think that I just need to be open to whatever potential things come my way that might help me do that. That is what sets the example, I think, because I think so many people miss out on that and try and find, like, when I know biology students or chemistry students or physics students, there's never that, how am I going to reconnect with the community with this knowledge? And I think that that's what many academic types struggle with, is you've got all this great information, how do we get it back to the community that it would be relevant or useful to

understand? And trying to find those bridges is something that individuals like yourself are very good at finding how to communicate that. And I think that that's the value of kind of reinterpreting what a degree is for. Because many people think of a degree is like, well, what are you going to go do with it? And it's like, your biology degree has been a tool that's really opened other doors that you would never put down on a list when you're applying to take a biology course or to get a biology degree, your path is so unique in comparison to most people go and become a biologist or go work at a facility and get paid a normal amount. Your path is so unique.

And I'm just interested to know what it's like to work with the more formal academics and see such a difference and be able to share that with young people who might not consider a future in chemistry, biology, physics, engineering. being able to connect it back to the community has seemed to have brought you a lot of passion and energy. Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, you ask good questions. So that is a really good one. And I want to, something that came to my mind so quickly that I want to say is that, no, academics don't really understand SciCom yet, right? So I remember when I started my blog, my PhD supervisor, I'm sure he was probably disappointed. He said something like, I don't know,

good for you, you're starting to blog, you know, like, because that was so foreign to him. He's like, I don't even know what that is. That makes no sense. You just spent five years doing this. What does that even mean? So I definitely think it was, it is not something that is accepted generally in a lot of academic circles. Now, that said, the Dean of Science at UFE is this incredible woman who has had a very interesting life. she was born in Brazil, she was raised, I believe, in China, and then she came to live in North America.

She gets it. She understands who I am and what I do. And because of her, I have been able to worm my way in because, yeah, so I don't think necessarily that it was, it wasn't like a red carpet that rolled out or anything like that. But at the same time, I feel like I was seen. And so once I was seen, by her and invited in, now the other academics see, and they're like, okay, they just didn't get it. They didn't understand what it is I do. And I think a lot of them, you know, I don't understand what they do, so I don't expect them to understand what I do. But it feels so much better now and more familiar now. And I think I was somewhat apprehensive of, you know, joining the university community because I felt less than.

And I felt like, oh, well, God, I didn't take the, I didn't become a professor. So I'm not, I, I don't really deserve to be here. And I, you know, it's funny because I'm an adjunct professor and now I am an instructor. But, you know, at that time when I was an adjunct professor, I remember having a lunch with the new director of the School of Creative Arts, Heather Davis Fish. And she said, hi. Oh, yeah, and you're a professor here now. And I was like, oh, God, no, I'm just pretending. And she was like, what?

No, you're adjunct. it says right here. And I was like, oh, yeah, I'm adjunct. But, you know, I was considering that meant nothing. And she was like, stop it. You don't mean nothing. So, yeah, so I feel like my own, I'm getting in my own way, too, sometimes. So I think that where I am now is in a place of acceptance with, yeah, with the university. And I'm hoping that it'll continue. I don't see why I wouldn't, but it was nerve-wracking for me at first, for sure. I think that that's so important that they've brought you in because it's been one of my critiques.

I love UFE with all my heart, but one of my critiques is I don't think they put the spotlight on the professors sufficiently or put their feet to the fire enough because I think that it's better for everybody if the professors come out of their shell or come out of hiding to share their knowledge because it kind of reinvigorates their passion for the work they're doing. And for students, like, a lot of professors that I've spoken to have said, rate my professor is stupid. Okay. And then from the student's perspective, it's like, I would never choose a course without looking at rate my professor.

And so there's like this deep divide between both thinking for rate my professors. They see like the odd negative comment that's just like, this is the worst professor I've ever seen in my life and I would never take them and go, oh, this is a terrible way of doing things? But the rest of the comments are always usually pretty helpful in helping the students understand. Is this going to be like a lecture heavy class? Is this going to be a heavy reading class? What is it going to look like? What's the experience like? Rebecca almost never takes a course without considering rate my professor and whether or not her learning style and the professor's teaching style are going to line up. And so I always try and encourage professors to come. I've had a bunch of professors on the podcast to try and get them out from behind it because I think on the page about each professor there should be like a five minute video with each professor saying, hello, my name is this, this is my research areas, this is what I'm interested in, this is who I am, this is a little bit of my background, because that's what some students are looking for. They want that understanding professor. They want to understand who they're learning from. And I just worry that the more they move towards too much adjunct professors, the more they move towards not keeping on

and saying professors are like the bedrock of our educational facility. We need them to be inspired and be encouraged to go back to their communities and build and make our like PR better because I don't think having a sign that says UFE is the same as having knowing someone who teaches at UFE and say you could take my course and you could learn from me and how cool would that be to learn from someone like myself that you know already like to me that's going to build way more bridges like UFE tried to do something in downtown Chilowac where they had like a facility downtown that's right I remember that I don't think it worked because that's not what are looking for. They want to know the people that they're going to be learning from. They want to

have that type of relationship because that's what kind of helped me flourish from an immature child to a grown-up was having professors say, I know you could do better than this, and you're not. And so you're not living up to your own potential. And that was John Haidt, and I had him on the podcast and thanked him during that interview for pushing me in that way, because that's something I didn't have a father figure who said, you're not good enough the way you are, and you can be so much more if you tried. I didn't have that person in my life in that same way. And so I found him to be very impactful in that way of saying, I see you're smart. You're just not writing it on this piece of paper and you need to figure out how to connect the two. And so I think that's the beauty of him

as a professor. It's not necessarily just his focus area, just what he teaches in terms of criminology. It's how he approaches his students that I think that's what's missing from the bios of so many professors. That's so interesting. And, you know, that is part of my plan. for our psychom cohorts is to make those videos, is to have the students in the documentary stream make a five-minute documentary on our faculty members. I think it would be, again, one of those things that is a win-win-win. It's a win for the university. It's a win for the student. It's a win for the science communication program. And I think, yeah, that's what UFB is really good at, I think, is really at integrating.

There's a lot of initiatives to integrate city and city initiatives with student initiatives. And, yeah, I'm working with water managers in the city of Chilliwack with one of my classes. I'm working with the city of Abbotsford for my sustainable fashion class. And also potentially we're doing a little swap of used clothes or something at Imagine High. So, yeah, I think UFE is definitely because it's a smaller university, we have so much potential to really become, you know, embedded in so many local education, local schools, in local businesses, and local organizations. I see a lot of representation, too, in the social sciences.

And I'm on the Chilliwack youth community that's part of my work as the school board. And it's amazing to see how much the university pervades even in early childhood education. So I love it. I think, you know, the answer to the future, I think, is connectedness. We've siloed ourselves through, you know, the past several hundred years. Universities have become literally these silos of different departments where you may not even know who is working in the department next to you. Like, you know, you go in, you do your thing, you leave. And it's someone like me just comes in and I just create little lines between everybody.

And because I don't know, I guess that's just what I do. I'm a communicator. I'm a bridge builder. I just like to see patterns and people and project and make them all work together. Absolutely. And I think it's curious that that occurs because you think of like a communications major versus a psychology major. They're both so similar in that it's human interaction. How do you talk to other people?

What is the psychology of talking to somebody else? How do you like there's psychology and how you write like a memo to somebody or an email to somebody. How do you where do you put the negative information? Where do you put the positive information? How do you frame that email? mail, like there's psychology in that, yet the psychology in the communications department can be completely separated. And everybody should know that.

Scientists should know that. Historians should know that. Geographers should know that. And that's kind of, you know, part of my argument for having communications in science. Because, you know, generally speaking, the powers that be are like, well, communications is not a science. Therefore, you cannot put it in the science department or in the faculty. But it's like, no, no, no. Your sciences have got to learn to communicate as well.

It's critical. It's critical. Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I'm also interested to know what the journey has been like for becoming a school board trustee. What pulled you to run? Yeah. What pulled me to run was literally I was upset at what I was seeing was happening, especially to Willow, Reshalt, based on what I've seen on social media, as well as things that have been shared.

in our local press, as well as a lot of things that have just happened live in our community. I felt like the timing was perfect and the opportunity was there, and I felt like I was a very qualified candidate. And to be honest with you, I love it. I love being on the school board. I think it's an excellent fit for me. I'm going to definitely run again. I'd love it. Yeah. I didn't even think. I didn't, you know, something I didn't think of before it kind of manifested. And then once it manifested, it was just the most obvious thing. You know, once I thought of it, I couldn't believe I hadn't not thought of it before that. So I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying the opportunity to learn how this system works. It's very complicated and very different from, you know,

coming at the school district is so much different than actually just being a student and wending my way through it. Both my parents were school teachers. So I definitely have education in my bones. And, yeah, I'm just really enjoying the opportunity to understand what happens in different committees, at different levels of, you know, organization between different levels of organization, and also finding ways to insert my own little magical bits where I can. Right. Can you tell us about what the school board does?

Because that's something that's interesting. We talk a lot about it, but what is that day-to-day actually? What are the decisions being made? Yeah. So the school board, the board members are meant to be those individuals that are overseeing the budget and the strategic plan of the district. So I don't want to say that we're puppets because we're not puppets, but we are kind of token people who are elected to ensure that the school board and budget, or that not the board, but that the budget and the district are running according to plan. And because it is such a. a massive district and because we have, you know, relationships between, we call them our partners, but we have the district staff, we have teachers, we have school union staff, we have union members that are also doing the clerical, the janitorial, the janitorial, this is like an entire community that works.

And so what we do as a board is we often receive presentations from various groups in the district that are wanting to show us what kind of learning plans they're using or what kind of interventions they're using or just the aspects of new cutting edge things that are taking place in the district. We also then work to review the preliminary budget. So every year there's actually like three budgets that come down. There's a projected budget and then there's an actual budget and then there's a corrected budget. And so, you know, I am not a terribly good money person or numbers person. So I'm actually on the audit committee, which is another thing that happens in our district where we have an independent auditing firm go through the entire

financial workings of the board, again, to make sure that, you know, all of the T's are crossed and the eyes are dotted and that everything has been done according to the books. What else do trustees do? We are there also to be spokespeople for the district. So I do a lot of visits to schools. I do, I like to talk to classes. I love just because the biologist and me, I'd love to do that. And gosh, what else do we do? So how much do schools differ in terms of how they deliver content?

Like, do they approach things differently per school? And do you guys approve or support that? Because it sounds like Imagine High is somewhat unique in how it's being approached. So how does that work in terms of community? Are there different plans for different schools? Oh, definitely. But the school board members, we don't really have a role to play there. That's all about the individual's principals, vice principals, and, you know, PVPs for sure,

and then the individual teachers that are at each school. So each school site is kind of like its own little kingdom. You have the principal, you have the vice principal, you have your secretarial staff, and you have your teachers, of course, and then you have your other staff members. And so it's really each little community functions on its own. The imagine, yeah, it's such a new, exciting. I loved going to the opening and just the students were so friendly, it's so gregarious and outgoing. And yeah, those students are the more arts inclined, the more technology inclined. I, as you'll know from the outside of our interview,

I definitely do not like students to count themselves out of science. And so I don't love the idea that there's a fine art stream and there's not a fine science stream. However, there is technology at Imagine High, and there's also the technology stream at AD Rundle. And these are really, like, world-appropriate, timely, ready programs for students. So yeah, they have the ability to become technologists or, you know, whatever, you know, computer techie things happen. And that sort of maybe makes more sense to some students than studying the normal subjects that you'd have at other schools, you know, the provincially examinable subjects. And I think it's a testament to the fact that, you know, the world's changing. Young people are making money and becoming good in far different ways than, you know, education looks a lot different today than it does than it did when I was, you know, just graduating high school, that's for sure. Yeah, it is super interesting to see people kind of like one generation laughed at people who played video games. And now those people who are playing those video games can make incomprehensible amounts of money.

Playing video games that often we were told is a huge waste of time. You're never going to make money doing this. So what are you doing? To see these changes that I don't think our society would have predicted like 10 years earlier, it's very interesting to see those developments and to try and encourage students to figure out what their passion is. and to go and follow that. Yeah, absolutely. It's mind-boggling to consider all of the choices that are available to students now.

I think even just looking at the different electives that they can choose from the 11th grade, from the 12th grade. I love that, you know, they can learn any number of languages, any number of skills or trades. There's just a ton going on. I've got two kids at Sartis Secondary right now, and it's a fantastic place. Absolutely. And so where do you hope, like, what type of decisions do you have to make that are relevant to you in the school board? Like, have there been any that you've struggled with or had to sit back and ponder how you want to approach it in comparison? Because I have seen you make videos.

And I really hope that's the future of politics is to have a video where you say, this is my kind of perspective. This is why I'm making this decision rather than the other decision. This is how I came to this. Like, I think that that's a healthier way of. doing politics, like I think far better than having three people stand up on a stage and debate each other is to do something like this, where a person can lay out their plans and their thoughts in a fully fledged form rather than sound bite type discussions. And so I really enjoy the videos. Oh, thanks. And yeah, you know, I think it kind of levels the playing field

a little bit for all of us. If we can use these individual abilities to get our message messages out. And I do think that social media and the power to use, yeah, your phone for crying out loud to make a short statement is really powerful. That's, for me, that's the easiest thing to do. I'd rather just speak to people, but I'm comfortable on camera. So I recognize for sure that that might not be the preferred medium for all people. For me, it's been a big learning curve. this, you know, really and truly, I did not know a lot heading into this. And so I have been learning. And I would say the, you know, the biggest thing that's, that I've struggled with was just our recent, you know, the recent decision that school boards were the ones who are

choosing whether or not we should have a vaccine mandate. I don't think that was a wise decision to put that on school boards. I don't think that school board trustees are trained in any way, shape, or form to mandate health, you know, rules and regulations. So I did make a video about that. I was, I had to take it down, though, because I made a mistake at one point in the video. And I, instead of saying vaccine mandate, I said mask mandate. And I didn't want to confuse people. So I just took it down. But yeah, you know, for the most part so far, the challenge has just been trying to catch up, trying to learn, learn the ropes and figure out when to talk. And, you know, it's Robert's rules and all this. It's, yeah.

And what, do you have any thoughts on how this is sort of played out in terms of young people and these regulations and these approaches in schools? Do you have any, any thoughts on those? The masks and the vaccines, do you mean? Yes. Anything that jumps out to you that you'd be comfortable talking about. I mean, I think that for the most part, kids are malleable and kids are okay. And they'll, they will just rise to the challenges. and they'll do what we ask of them. I really think that students, students can be successful when they have, you know, teachers and systems that allow for their success.

So, I mean, I think it's unfortunate that, you know, that with the pandemic has come a lot of negativity and a lot of, oh, my goodness, you know, questioning and frustration and not knowing and, oh, did so-and-so have it, did so-and-so have it? that kind of thing. I mean, I think these are all very general issues that probably most populations across the globe are struggling with. I've seen so much incredibly good action from teachers, from counselors, from EAs, from many people in our district who, you know, just continue to come through for the kids. It's, you know, it's not always easy. The last several weeks have been incredibly difficult ones for, you know, for everyone. We're just trying to, we're

trying to make the best decisions possible with the information that we have. And I, yeah, I got to say the district staff, wow, they are amazing people. Rohan, just an amazing superintendent. He just doesn't ever stop. And so, again, I never miss the opportunity to learn from someone. And, yeah, I'm learning from him how to be a good leader, how to be a charismatic and compassionate leader. Right.

And I'm interested to know what it's like to work with all of these. these people because you speak so highly of them, but yet I feel like these are like majorities of the population we almost never hear from. Like you never really hear from like a group of teachers in Chilliwack or a group of janitors in Chiluac or like any representation from these communities, yet they're in there every day. Like I still remember my janitor from Central Elementary and like these people play a role in the background of our communities yet really don't get any of the spotlight. Interesting. Yeah. Although I would say that that, again, depends on a level of personal choice for career. If you go into, you know,

maybe if you're in the janitorial, you're there because you don't necessarily want to talk to people all the time or, you know, it's hard to say. EAs definitely are, a lot of moms I see become EAs. They like working with children. But certainly there's, you know, everybody's got a very diverse story to tell. I attend a lot of the meetings. So a lot of the QEPI meetings, the union meetings, and those are really interesting to go to, and they're also that chance, you know, that chance for all people within their union to have a say of what's, you know, whether something is going right, going wrong, or anything in between. So that's also been an interesting thing to just observe how all of these different meetings take place, what kinds of topics come up,

and then how they are sort of passed along up the chain of command, so to speak. Another example that I found really interesting is that, you know, I've been on my PAC for years and I, you know, I attend as part of my trustee role. I attend some of the PAC meetings. And so I'll go to the PAC where PACs come to a decision about something that will then go to a D-PAC. And then I've actually been at the D-PAC when I see those things coming through. And then the D-PAC thing comes up to the board. And so, you know, you can kind of trace the pathway that some of these initiatives make all the way sort of up the ladder. And it's neat to see when the system.

works in that way. It's doing the democratic thing and it's effective in that way. Can you tell us about PACs? Because my mom was a part of when I was growing up, but it doesn't sound like all the parents are involved. And so I'm interested to like what topics, what is the role of the PAC when it comes to decisions. Yeah. So in every school, any parent has the opportunity to become part of the PAC. And it's the parent advisory committee for the school. They generally meet once every month, possibly a little bit more than that, depending on the season and what you've got going on. The kinds of decisions or the kinds of things that PACs do are primarily fundraising, and they will pay for things like playground equipment, benches, landscaping. We even had a trail put in from funds from our PAC.

It's basically getting extra cool stuff for the school in a way and how parents can come together to basically raise. We used to do all the, you know, Newfeld farms orders and the hot lunches. And, you know, there's lots of things that happen in school that our parent directed. The lunch programs are a good one. You know, that's put on by the pack. A lot of times, gosh, what else? You know, popcorn sales on Fridays, things like that. All of those kinds of initiatives are just run by the pack. And if you ever have like a school carnival or a, you know, book fair, things like that. We just try to make the school into a fun community. And it's really not a lot of time. It's just a matter of showing up at the meeting every month. And these days, I think it's just on Zoom anyway. And yeah, it's just

kind of a cool way to get to know other parents that are at your school. Other parents that are interested in Deepak. You know, it's always, when I joined my pack, I didn't even know what Deepak was, is the district pack, right? So every pack, and so my school was Little Mountain, for example. So Little Mountain has its own pack, president, secretary, treasurer. And there's also a D-Pack rep. And the D-Pack rep from Little Mountain goes to the monthly D-Pack meetings. And then they report back on what's been talked about in the district. So it's just a really cool way to get involved in your school community. It's also a really nice way to get to know your principal or your vice principal and your school secretary. So I don't know, I'm a very social person and I like

to just be part of my communities when I'm in them. So it was just a natural thing for me to want to be on my pack and just be in. I'm, you know, I'm a big cakewalk person. I like to run the cakewalks at events. So that's my thing. That's awesome. And can you tell us about how this ties in with your family and like a little bit about your family today and how that looks and how perhaps the decisions you make impact to them? Because I imagine that there's a lot of tie-ins between the broader decisions and then bringing that home to your family? Oh, massive. And it's, yeah, I wasn't a huge fan of the little itty-bitty baby stage.

That was trough. That was not a word. That was rough and tough. And I did have postpartum depression very severely all four times. It was very, very difficult. And again, that makes me an advocate for moms who need extra supports at this time. The kids are older now. They are, gosh, let me think.

My littlest one is 10. 10, 12, 14, and 16. And gosh, they, we just, it's great. I don't know. They're, they see sort of their, their lives now, if that makes sense, I can see how they are now becoming their own individuals, making their own plans and, you know, obsessing about their own, whatever it is that's happening in their lives. And so how do I invite, I mean, I think they, they like the fact that I'm on the school board. They were quite, um, enthusiastic and they were brilliant during the campaign. They would come to hold up all the signs when we were holding up signs at different places. I think that they appreciate that I have a role to play in their school. And they don't

really necessarily understand what that role is, but just that I'm kind of involved somehow. That is awesome. And likely a statement of how to lead your community and setting an example in that way as well, because it must have been difficult in those circumstances to put yourself out there. And, like, I'm sure before you're like, do I want to do this? Is this something that's going to go easy or difficult? And to have that support from your family, I'm sure, was incredibly helpful. Oh, so much so. And, you know, we, I like to say my ex-husband and I have a happy divorce, we really do. I mean, I think people, if you kind of can step away from your own issues and make it about your family, it's great. And yeah, it was wonderful to have, to have his support

and have the kids and his support, just, you know, being excited for me, letting me know that it was awesome. They were there. My mom had a little sign in her yard. Oh, my goodness. I never really considered how that would feel to walk her or to drive around town and, like, see your own face on a sign. That's a strange thing.

That is fair enough. And I think something that has been worthwhile for the community, because I think your ability to share the information and the decisions you're making, has made that positive impact for people to start to engage with these issues, hopefully more seriously and feel more connected to it. Because I think the school board, at least from me growing up, it was always like that backburner issue not as important as who you elect as MP or who you elect as MLA. Like these are the important ones. But this impacts your children. This impacts your family and your children's development. And so engaging with that and like seeing that is like probably

the most important thing I think is useful for people. For me it is. I don't really. have plans to go into a political space necessarily, but I love the school board. I just love it. It's such a great space for people who are passionate about education and the direction of education. Yeah, it's a really interesting, and I mean, can see how it wouldn't be interested if you weren't wanting to become an MP or an MLA or something like that. It's not your exact direction, but you have to know what's going on in your school boards. That's a really important part of the community. Yeah, and having a science educator or somebody who tries to share that information at those meetings seems so, like, in hindsight, it just makes total sense. Yeah, and

maybe that's why I'm loving it so much, because it's like such a good fit. I'm just, yes, I understand what you're saying. I'm happy here. You've also been involved in a ton of different documentaries and series. Which one stood out to you or that jumped out to you and was meaningful for you to help develop or be involved in. Gosh, all of them, but I just have one coming out that is just about to get released. And I got the sort of, what do you call that, the pre one sent to me. And I, it's amazing. It's about carbon.

It's a documentary about carbon. And it's being done by Canada and Australia. It's a co-pro between Canada and Australia. And it's just, I'm so stoked because this one is all about carbon. journey and how it, you know, goes from being part of the atmosphere to being part of our food and part of, you know, blah, blah, blah, goes. It just, I won't spoil it. I won't give you a spoiler alert. But my part is not too big in this documentary. I was explaining photosynthesis and respiration. And who is talking about photosynthesis right before me? Neil deGrasse Tyson,

I'm dying. I'm like, what? I have a project with Neil deGrasse Tyson. So I'm so excited that, like, I don't know, it's dorky, but I, yeah, look at me. I'm grinning like an idiot, as I say it, but I'm just excited. No, that's fantastic. We're both explaining photosynthesis, and I'm like, hey. So that one, I don't exactly know when it's coming out, but I know that they are sending it to the film festival circuit right now and hoping to get some traction there. So, and then, gosh, what else? I have another project that I really am enjoying called Battle of the Alphas, which is just a really great bio,

series, and it's all about sort of alpha behavior, whether it's alpha males, generally it's alpha males, but also we have sometimes where there's alpha females, and we just talk about all kinds of interesting behaviors with respect to aggression and friendship and mating and just all that good stuff. So that one, we'll be shooting the next season for that one just in early January. And so what is that like to be involved in these? What is the planning process and what is the travel like to have to be involved in these when you have a family? Yes. So since COVID, it has been very little travel. And in fact, I want to say most are all of the shows that I've found during COVID. And I've filmed quite a few. They have sent people all the way out here to Tiloac to just get my parts so that I don't have to go anywhere. So that's been really, really good. I also don't mind going to Vancouver, which, yeah, it's not too far. So usually what happens is I will start going back and forth about what they want me to do. and how much they want me to talk about and what they want me to talk about.

And then we pretty much will just choose dates and choose times that work, depending on my involvement in this series. As I mentioned a little earlier, I have another one that I'm planning. It's at the pitch stage. And this is basically a series that is based on my books and based on my life. It's kind of like my life legacy show project. That would be, you know, traveling. That would probably be, I don't know.

The last time I did a shoot where I had to do an hour of television, it took three weeks away to do an hour. So I'm not sure. I think it just depends on the project. Wow, that sounds difficult. And it's really cool to hear that those others are filmed here in Chilliwack to kind of adapt. Can you tell us more about the science behind the one that you just filmed recently on photosynthesis and then more about the one on alpha males? Yeah. So, I mean, basically what I think the main, you know, message of the carbon documentary is to really kind of bust down some of the common misconceptions that people have about carbon and about fossil fuels. You see, when capitalism meets anything, we have a bit of a problem because, you know, concepts like biodiesel and natural gas and, you know, things that have this sort of. Eco spin on them are just carbon. It's just all carbon. And I think if people understood that carbon as a

fossil fuel is a bad idea, the end, then it would be a lot easier for us to make more of our day-to-day decisions. And I think that that's what this documentary is aiming to do. It's aiming to actually say, hey, here's how carbon moves through the atmosphere. You know, it's CO2 right now. and then bang, it gets brought into a leaf. What happens once it's in a leaf? Oh, the leaf does this with it, and then we eat that leaf. And so this documentary is actually following a carbon molecule on her journey, and we've given her a her, and we've actually made her a little bit of a saucy,

saucy little lady of the night because carbon is so good at bonding with many other elements in the periodic table. So that makes her a little sleazy at sometimes. She bonds very well with a lot of different things. You know, we play around a ton with personifying carbon. And in the end, I think that it works so well because it's a documentary story, but it's actually documented the story of an atom. And the way that they've been able to use graphic art to superimpose atoms onto actual footage of stuff really gives you a neat idea of how it actually works, like how carbon cycles through. being a gas to being a solid. Yeah, it's a cool one. And then the Battle of the Alphas, yeah, picture your favorite, you know, animals, your giraffe, your elephant, your shark, your mere cat,

your eagle, your sea lion. That's what this show is all about. It's like taking those awesome creatures and just, you know, epic fight scenes. I think it's a show that probably, I'm not involved in the production of that show at all. So, but I know, I know. that they use mostly stock footage and they just find fight scenes and then we explain the behavior of it, which works great. I mean, I was on a show called Outrageous Acts of Science for, gosh, six, seven, eight years. I mean, we shot 125 hours of that show, so many hours of that show. And that was all about crazy science you'd see on YouTube and stuff like that, just breaking down everyday science. Wow. What is it like to work with different organizations? You've worked

with like the Discovery Channel to Netflix, most people only understand these things when they're watching it on their TV. What is it like for you to be on the other side making deals, agreements, signing contracts, and having them shoot footage of you? What is, do they differ a lot in your opinion? Is it just come down to the individual photographers

and filmers that are right in front of you? How do they feel from your position? Yeah, it's what you just said there. It only ever breaks down to the people that I am with on a given shoot. I don't generally deal with any executives. I don't generally even know when my shows come out. Like, I rely on people to be like, hey, I saw you in something. I am like sort of the low man on the totem there. But so I would say that at the level of a director, there's been a huge diversity in my career with the different directors that I work with. And yeah, you know,

just it's just a matter of personal style for how different directors work and how many, you know, takes they want of a specific line or something like that. Yeah, I, you know, I guess I just enjoy, I'm such an adventure. I just enjoy the journey. So I don't really mind who I'm working with necessarily. I just like to do what I'm doing. And I do remember having one director once, though, that was just, he wanted so many takes of every scene. And I remember this very clearly. We were at MIT in Boston. And we were interviewing a very prestigious scientist.

We were there at his biomechatronics lab. And he was the guy who made artificial limbs. And he, this academic was just your quintessential academic. He was like three hours late. He was such a diva. He didn't want anybody to disturb him for the first hour that he came in. He was just going to go in his office. and check emails, and the whole crew were all just, like, waiting, just like, do, do, do.

Like, it was just such a bizarre thing. Anyways, then finally, by the time this professor started working with us, then my director wanted, like, 18 cuts of every scene. Oh, boy, it was a long day. I can't imagine. But that's, like, the unique side of these shows that I don't think people get to see when they watch you in a, like, it's just a few minutes or it's a whole show, but they don't get to see the underlying interactions that are taking place.

Where have you gotten to travel as a consequence of doing these? Oh, gosh, lots of places. I love traveling and I can't afford to do it, so I have to get jobs that let me travel. Everywhere. A lot of TV I've done in the States, and certainly I've shot a ton of stuff in L.A., which is where, you know, we always shot outrageous acts of science there. Many things are shot there. But location stuff, all Africa, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana.

England, a lot of places in England, a lot of places in Europe, Australia, Malaysia. I did a cruise thing, what do you call that, like a little circuit of lectures around the Middle East once. That was really interesting. Went to Oman and Jordan. What is it like as a biologist? You're seeing the world in a different perspective than most. What is it like for you to see different ecosystems and to have somewhat of an understanding of the variety? a gift, insane. It feels amazing. The Red Sea is so neat and such a strange and phenomenal place. It's hot and it's salty. And it's this weird ecosystem that's so much life is there. But in these crazy conditions. And then you have the Suez Canal that eventually comes out of the Red Sea at one end. And you have all these animals that migrate through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean. But no animals migrate from the Mediterranean.

to the Suez. So there's this incredible, interesting biology that happens there. And only there because we made this ridiculous canal and all the animals want to get out of the Red Sea, but none of them want to get out of the Mediterranean. It's super interesting. Oh my gosh. It's so interesting to hear your perspective because when, like I've talked about this before, when Rebecca and I traveled for the first time to Hawaii, we didn't know what you're supposed to do. And I think that that's a struggle many people have is you're traveling based on what you hear. is important other people you're going there because like we went to Hawaii and what are you supposed to do in Hawaii you're supposed to go tan on the beach um and so what did we do we went

on the beach we didn't have like our own developed understanding of like what do we enjoy why would we go travel there what would we want to get out of it if we were to go there and so like now thinking about like our disconnect from space and being able to see the stars and like we would want to go to the the planetarium on the big island and learn more about space and how how that interact and we love documentaries and learning about things and so like I think our understanding of travel has grown to want to go to a place for for a reason for an understanding to understand and learn more about that environment that world and so it's interesting to hear your perspective because I think it's something that lacks for so many people who say

I'm going to Mexico I'm going to Cuba why am I going there I'm going to tan and it's like we have tanning beds here like you can you can do that anywhere what do you want to get out of it? What do you want to learn? What do you want to bring back as a consequence of your travels? Yeah, I love that concept. And I actually have, you know, several of my students are currently volunteering at many different wildlife organizations locally here. And that's also, I always say to people, that's something you can always do if you want to sort of bring another level, another level of meaning to your travel is, you know, volunteer at an animal sanctuary for a week. You know, they need people to do the bad jobs. You know what I mean? Like, but, but it's

amazing jobs. You just like, hang out. with animals all day. I remember being in Costa Rica. And actually, I was only on vacation there, but of course I was at an animal sanctuary poking around. And there was this young girl, young woman in an enclosure with teeny little spider monkeys. They're itty bitty and they're adorable. And it was literally her job to sit in this enclosure with the spider monkeys and let them climb on her. Like that was her job. And I was like, wow, that's a great way to spend the summer. She's like, yeah, I'm in heaven. You know, it was so cool. And that's, I, I, I love when I get to travel to places for work because, you know, if, for example, when we were shooting a show about relationships between animals and people, and we were in Namibia at a rescue center for various animals, but the main thing they would have is baby baboons because in Namibia, the mama baboons are quite pest, quite pesty.

They will eat crops, you know, similarly to any kind of crop destroying animal we might have here, like the dears or something. And so farmers will shoot the baboons, but then not necessarily realize if it's a mom, that it has a baby. And so ironically, then the babies get saved and sent to sanctuaries. And so there's a lot of rescuing of these baby baboons. And one of the guys that we were working with at this sanctuary would say, you know, it's so interesting. We get so many females that come and volunteer here. And they come when they've got a broken heart and they come and they hang out with the animals. And the animals heal them.

And then they can go off on their merry way. But anyway, I loved going to this place because we got to see it from the inside out, you know? Like, I actually got to be in the sanctuary and part of the action. And I just couldn't think of a better job than that. Right. Do you have a favorite part of biology? Do you have a part that jumps out to you personally that maybe isn't what producers are looking for? Or like, what does it jump out to you about biology in comparison to physics or chemistry?

I think that it comes down to beauty. Like, it just comes down to my absolute admiration of beauty. So if you would look at my Instagram or my TikTok, all you will see is pictures of mushrooms. And no, I don't have a lot of followers there because I guess a lot of people don't like to like, like to look at mushrooms. So that's okay. That's what I like. Have you watched Fantastic Fungi? Not yet, but I can't wait. Okay, because we watched that. And like Paul Stametz, who's a mycologist, is like, I follow him on Twitter. I follow him on anything I can because his ability to like explain how fungi is so different

than like flowers, plants, us, mammals. It's a different kingdom, yeah. Exactly. And how it's evolved separately, but there are like, there's knowledge within that. And that's where when I sat down with Brian Minter, I wanted to ask him about it because I had watched this documentary. And the documentary changed me because they talk about trees specifically and how trees actually have offspring from each other, which I didn't know.

And then it talks about how trees communicate through the mycelium underground and how a tree can move its baby tree, its offspring tree away from it if there are invasive species, bugs, things that are attacking it or if there's not proper nutrition, it can help move that tree farther away from it so that it can grow and thrive separately. And then that's when I was like, okay, I don't, there's no errands better than, plants. There's no, you can't do that because you didn't even know that there was these relationships taking place that have such a dramatic impact on the environment. Like, I look at a tree and I was like, that's just a tree. And then going back to that, the rooted ones, it's like, it's so much

more than I could ever comprehend. Oh, you know, I saw this thing on Twitter the other day and it was someone who had taken a picture of one of my beloved mushrooms, but they had also managed to include, they had maybe grown it in a petri dish so that all the mycelia were, were visible. So you could see the mushroom, but what was really the visual stunner was the hugeness of that mycelial network. And yeah, I think if I had to do it all over again, I think I would probably go into mycology because I don't think we know enough about fungus. And I think fungus is really important as far as its capabilities of recycling and restoring ecosystems, like mind-blowingly important. I don't know. I even. I even,

wonder about the potential of fungus to digest plastics, microplastics. Paul Stamondich talks about that, well, maybe not specifically plastics, but he, like, oil is a form of like plastic, there's carbon in both. And he showed with, I think, the BP oil spill, he had like four separate sections and one of the different types of mushrooms to see what the impact would be. And it cleared out all of the oil from the spill in that. And then he's done work here at UBC and within our... our forests to try and see the impact of like sort of like helping these ecosystems like come back and I think that work I tried to get Susan simmered on if you know she's amazing yeah

yeah she's a very popular person she's very difficult to get on and so but she's an expert in mycology and I think that that area is so interesting to see um how we can help these ecosystems because Paul statements again worked to try and fix the problem with bees and one of their wings not working they have like a technical term for their wing not working properly okay um and he was one of the people who discovered that there is a connection between bees, honey, the mycelium in the trees, and how to give them a certain type of mushroom that will help them address this wing problem that they were having that was causing a devastation in Oregon. Incredible, right? And what kind of untapped properties have we not thought about that

are, you know, we're just basically cracking the book on microdosing and understanding how some of these psilocybin and stuff are actually quite positive on brain function in a lot of ways. So yeah, I think, sorry, I keep hitting my mind. I think that the future is ripe for the natural world, but the problem is we've ruined it, the natural world, most of it. So we have to come to that reality and understand that reality. And, you know, as we started our conversation by saying, you know, people just do little day to days. It doesn't feel like much. It doesn't feel like you're changing anything, but you are.

Absolutely. And I think that that's another interesting one. Like when we talked about how sex is kind of a tough topic for certain communities to think about, I think the same can be said for psilocybin where there's a lot of knowledge there. And there's John Hopkins who's doing really good work on showing the potential benefits for depression, anxiety, for reintegration into the community, for broader subjects that I think, again, there's a certain subsection of the population that would just, just like all that research to kind of go back to wherever it came from and not be discussed,

but I think it's valuable for people to consider the religious experience that humans have. We have a religious instinct, and I don't know if we understand where that comes from, but whatever psilocybin is doing, it's hitting that cord in human beings. Indigenous people have used that throughout history, other communities. They have shaman. They have people who are experts at handling these types of ingredients to try and get the benefit, but also the wisdom. And I think that that's the beauty of elders in indigenous community is there's a sense of wisdom. Like, again, with this paper that I'm working on,

the problem with books is that you don't have somebody to help you interpret the book correctly. You get your interpretation, and that's whatever you want it to be. And you can maybe ask your friend, but you don't get to ask the author, where with indigenous communities, you always go to the elder to verify if you had a dream. What does that dream mean? You don't just go and try and figure that out yourself, you talk to the elder who tries and helps you interpret that dream for the benefit of everybody. So you actually go in the right direction with it rather than just saying, this is my interpretation, it is correct, and I'm going to go and run with it. And that's the same idea as a shaman when you're having like a psilocybin experience is that

you're talking to somebody else about it. You're going through that process with support, with somebody who's experienced and understands the ingredients and understands what you're experiencing and is helping you kind of put that into reality. So you go back in a better direction and it's one of the unique ones because you can get such long-term benefits from one single experience. Oh, wow. Yeah, I don't know a lot about it, but I know that our minds to it have been too closed because of things that have, you know, social, social constructs and I guess rules and various, I don't know, things that we are supposed to do and not supposed to do. So, I mean, I don't know. I think I guess I just take a little bit less of a stringent approach and try

to keep an open mind because I think there's a really powerful potential there. I think that's something I struggle with. I think I do lean more on the conservative side of things. So I'm more doubtful. And then I have to push myself to go do the research and understand it further because I go in with, I guess, a skeptic mindset of like, really? And then once the trees, when I find out that they're communicating with each other, then I go, okay, like I'm out to lunch and I'm wrong.

So I need to humble myself and try and expose myself to this and talking to people. like yourself, Brian Minter, really help me see it through a new perspective because I had the opportunity to interview like Carrie Lynn Victor, and she sees indigenous art and culture and community in such a unique lens. Like her, she talked about visions and how she doesn't always know where these ideas come from, but then she has this feeling of obligation to share that or create that. And she'll be like, I have to go, guys. Like, I have to go create this. And it's like, where does that come from? What does that mean? And I don't have that. And many other people don't have the those experiences. So what does that mean for her? And I think that that's what I enjoy so much about

these interviews is I get to see kind of a little bit into how you see things and how other people view the world in a unique lens. I love that. I love that because I, you know, and I think, wow, what a gift she has. And I mean, I know Carolyn and I'm so grateful for her work all over our town. And I love that, how she gets these images in her mind that she has to go paint. I love that. I, you know, and I think everybody's process is their own individual thing. We may not even realize. We may not even be giving the enough clout to our own processes because we are too busy doing other things, ignoring them, you know, potentially. So I think that, you know, maybe that is a good piece of piece of advice as well as to, you know, listen, listen to what your inner voices are

telling you. Listen to where, you know, also pay attention to your actions. I find for me, I'm quite a pacifist. Like I tend to just wait. I don't make big decisions immediately about things. And I kind of just like to hear all sides and really ponder and get philosophical about things. And so I tend to just kind of take that person in the corner just watching kind of point of view and just view everything as a chance to learn. So sometimes I worry like, oh my God, will I ever have another idea?

will I ever think of another thing to write or do? And I think that the fact that you worry about things like that is just, it's kind of one of those great things about being human, you know? Yeah. We are endless cycles, and it is what it is. Absolutely. And so how do you approach that? Like, you said you have this, your life's work kind of story coming up.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that and what you want, maybe, like, I don't want you to spoil anything or anything like that, but what did you want to get out of that? What did you want to share? Yeah, you know, that's a great question. And I don't know if I fully answered it for myself. So, you know, basically I'm working with a production company that's based in New York and a fairly prestigious one that I definitely know who they are. And so I was thrilled that they wanted to work together and to come up with the show idea. And actually, they wanted to do a show based on my first book.

And I was like, well, I've kind of done that show and I've kind of done it twice already. So I do. I don't really want to do that show. show that I want to do. And that show is kind of like taking what I wrote about in the book and really kind of delving a little deeper into what it means and sort of taking not just the sex approach, but taking the motherhood approach and really kind of flipping a lot of our belief systems on their heads about what we think mothers should be doing and how we think, you know, mothers should be caring for offspring and having sex or dealing with partners or just, you know,

taking some of these really real stories or taking a story like, for example, I have, you know, one that's all about enduring love and male dolphins. And male dolphins are extremely homosexual and extremely hypersexual, meaning that they have homosexual sex many times a day with each other. And that's because they have these really tight-knit bonds between the individuals and their groups. That is so interesting that these are hugely intelligent mammals that have, that are showing us what it means to have enduring homosexual love.

love. That's neat. So it's stories like that. And yeah, so anyway, we developed a pitch about it and we've been pitching it around, but then of course, COVID's kind of thrown a wrench and stuff. But what I want to get out of that would just be the ability to really have people see these stories in a way that makes them really consider their own lives and how their own lives are actually not entirely different from the lives of any other biological creature. at the end of the day, what does it look like to survive and reproduce if you are a blank or a blank, or a blank, you know? And it's not the same with every animal. You want to take the hyena as another animal that has a really strange story to tell. I mean, females have masculinized male genitalia. Why? And how does that break down into how they parent and how they raise their offspring and how their cultures evolve? So yeah, that's what that, project is about. And I'm just hoping we get to do it. But, you know, it's one of those things. You could be in the pitch cycle for years. And it's okay. If it is, it is. You kind of got to be okay

with that in the television world because everything can change in a second. Yeah, I think the evolution of like that aspect of creatures is so interesting because you see, and like I think you touched on this in one of your books where like the meeting phase is where like birds will sing songs to try and impress other birds and try and show off and like we've watched Netflix documentaries on that and it's so fascinating to see the amount of work they'll put in to try and create like a little section of leaves that looks just so so they can impress the other bird and and these processes that we don't really think about love or romance or those positions in our own lives being applied extrinsically and one of one of my frustrations with I think like humans is that we're really like

maybe men were really good at like the first six months the first year for most men and then there's some sort of drop-off period where they're allowed to sit on the couch and do nothing and watch golf shows and it's like i don't understand you're not the same person you were at the beginning and why is that why was it okay then and now you're allowed to not do those things anymore and like seeing that disconnect is always something interesting to me to look at humans as like more biological creatures that aren't necessarily thinking through all their actions and just kind of live in. That is so interesting because, you know, if you want to just break that down, the, you know,

mammalian males are not meant to necessarily be parents and helpers. They're meant to be the donors of the sperm. And I don't necessarily mean that in terms of our species. Okay, let's just put that disclaimer on there before you get a lot of hate mail. But yeah, no, males, mammals, sperm. Give it and go. That is what their role is. So, you know, as you say this thing, actually, like, that is kind of, unfortunately, that is biology a little bit there. Yeah. So, but humans, of course, we are different and we have the ability to think and to get philosophical and to understand our actions. So no, we don't have an excuse to just sit there and do nothing on the couch. But there is potentially an evolutionary background there. Yeah. Yeah, I think about that, particularly in terms of, like, indigenous communities, because not having, like, I forget the name of the scientist who discovered it, but it's not about whether or not you have a father. It's how many father figures are in your community that makes a huge impact on the development of children in that community.

And for indigenous communities, if you have people giving the sperm and leaving, that really impacts the development of the young people in that community. But if you have other father figures, like teachers, professors, those community leaders, they can help perhaps not fix the problem, but help offset any of the detrimental. mental effects you would experience. And those are the interesting things I don't hear talked about when we talked about addressing like social inequality or these problems is how do we get more role models into these communities? How do we increase those individuals who are going to set an example? Because that's always been my frustration with like reserve systems is you don't have scientists, you don't have leaders of parties, you don't have your physicians, your doctors,

you're like in many rural indigenous communities, you don't have those people. Those are role models for those young people that they're missing out on all the time. And that's something that, like, I just, I don't hear talked about. And then it's like, well, like, we just have to work together. And it's like, there's other deeper problems within these communities that needs to be discussed further. A parallel system, not a parallel, but one that comes to mind when you talk about that, too, is that, you know, we could look at the landscape of academia. And we can look at how that's evolved through the years. And what we can see is that it's largely male-dominated.

It's a very, it's a place where you'll generally see a single demographic. What does that mean about what we know, right? What does that mean about the questions that have gotten asked about science? And the reason I say that example is because I have a charity that I started to try to get women into academia more. Because basically, why don't we see women in academia as much? it's because babies, you know, they have to have them. And then academia is quite unforgiving towards that. So having those voices, even having female voices at the table when it comes to science, yeah, I think of similar things.

So when you say, yes, what would be the outcome if we had these role models, like these other areas or these other ways for children to learn? I think that's a really valid point because learning from just one system necessarily does not mean learning. Absolutely. And I think of what Nina Zekis from Luna Float talked about because she was talking about the role elders play and particularly female elders play in the development of children and kind of watching over the children and then being able to see that person is going to be a great carver,

that person's going to be a great dance or that person's going to be a great this and like being able to watch the children over time and see what kind of characteristics they're developing to help make sure that they live up to their potential because I don't think people realize their full potential as quickly as they would if somebody else was able to point it out to them and say, you're really good at this.

You're killing it at this. Like I had Scott Sheffield on and he was doing like sciences and then one person one day was like, oh, like you're doing history and you seem to like history. Why don't you just do what you like? And he was like, that was like a aha moment.

Like I didn't even think I could do what I like. And those stories are so crazy common that I think we need other people. to be able to say, this is what you might be good at. And so seeing the role of elders and seniors and leaders in a different light rather than, and I forget who made the comment about like our capitalist system kind of treating seniors, like, you're retired. You can go sip mitis on the water now.

You're not needed. And it's like, we actually need you to go and help our young people figure out what they're going to go become. In the indigenous cultures, the elders are the most celebrated, prestigious members of the community. And so they should be. Yeah. I agree with that. And it is so sad that what happens to our seniors is not all of them, but yeah. You think about COVID and like the effects of like seniors' homes in particularly Ontario.

And it's been very difficult for those communities. And I think of my own grandmother and like losing her and trying to think about what did she leave behind was her legacy. Like the decision to adopt and bring in an indigenous child into her. occasion home and raise her as her own to save her from a circumstance where she might not have gotten the same care that she would have gotten on a reserve because she had both her eardrums blown out. That decision to me set such a positive example and really like reaffirmed where I want to take this because I think of my grandmother who went to Indian residential school. My group my non-biological grandmother who saved my mother. My mother's sacrifices living

with a disability and feeling like an immense amount of responsibility to like, carry on their legacy and putting my life into perspective. And I love Andrew Victor's discussion of the seven generations back, thinking of the wishes of your ancestors and your family members and what they wanted for you and your children and your grandchildren, trying to live those out and think forward seven generations on how can you make the world a better place and how can you help your children and grandchildren and make sure that you're pointing in the right direction. And that's where I try and take these conversations is to try and lay that out for people.

It's amazing. That's beautiful and it needed. Yeah. So the other part that I wanted to ask you about is where are you going to take this all? Because you're managing a lot. And I was even surprised that you were able to do this today because you're so busy. You've got so many different hats on. Where do you hope to take this? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Now I am very happy at the university, which is kind of grounding me for the first time in my career, actually. And then the school board does as well. So yeah, I actually have responsibility. abilities that are primarily here. So I, however, what I see that as now is this incredibly great jumping off point from which I can still continue to do many of the projects that I do. So a lot of the TV shows that I do are just maybe a two, three day commitment just because I already know the drill and blah, blah, blah. So it works.

It's okay. However, the university system is kind of also flexible in that it's, you know, semester-based. So if I say, you know, I could potentially say, oh, next semester I'll be doing this or that. Maybe in the summer I'd be available for some travel. It's never straightforward, but that's, it is what it is. I have four children. It's total chaos. I thrive on chaos, I think, in a way.

I don't necessarily know if I consider it chaos. I just consider it like just happy, generally pretty fun. Every day is something different going on. The kids are getting older. They want to travel. They want to come with. My older daughters come with me twice already. So, you know, potentially now that I'm, you know, not necessarily in a beginner phase where, you know, if I'm an executive producer or a director on my own projects, then I will have the ability to bring a kid with me or something like that.

Otherwise, you know, we just, we make it work. I got a really good system. Got a lot of support. Do you hope to make things more independent or do you like working for other people on carrying out other people's visions? because the independent space of whatever I'm doing and other people is really growing. And so is that something that interests you long term to become more independent and do projects that jump out at you that you've kind of come up with? Or do you enjoy just having somebody else reach out with a contract that's perhaps more simple

to just follow through on? Yeah, I think that I, you know, I spent my 30s really doing my own stuff. You know, well, I wrote through the three books and I wrote the series and I just considered that was me, like, lavishing in my own work. And I'll continue to do that. But no, I don't have any more book projects right now. I have, um, my literary agent has a couple proposals of mine, um, of books that I would write if I got a contract for one. Um, but yeah, I actually, so I think what I'm craving in my career now is more of a, of a grounding. Um, and I'm really thinking that the university is a great place for that for me, because it will continue to allow me to,

to do my SICOM stuff. I can put students on projects that I'm currently working on. So I think that, yeah, at the moment, I am really looking to ground myself a little more, just that much older. I'm just that much more in, you know, desiring of a very steady paycheck and a very, you know, it's, it's been fun doing a ton of travel. But I do feel like I'd like to take it a little more easy. Right. That was the other question that I wanted to ask you about. And I know you're not like the business background, but I think that more conversations need to take place on passive versus like active income, like the ability to have income coming in where you don't have to stress so much about when the income's coming in. And I think that that's something

more people should just think about. Do I want to have passive income or like active income where I have to go to a job, be there from nine to five, work hard and then go home, you've been able to kind of create a space for yourself where some of your income is more passive, like book sales. You don't have to be out there championing your book every day in order to have income from that. And so I'm just interested on your thoughts on what that kind of experience has been like because it doesn't seem like it was planned. It seems like it was as a consequence of making good relationships and doing good work. Yes. And I don't receive book royalties or any royalties from television projects or anything like that. So I don't, I wouldn't say I have a ton of passive

income. So again, that's why I'm looking for more of that steady role. I would say that, you know, I got to do a lot of amazing projects and I really threw myself into that work and I wasn't ever really going into it for the money. So I, you know, I just realized that I kind of do have to grow up a little bit and gain a little bit more of that stability. But honestly, Someone said to me several years ago, Karen, you are never going to be a rich person, but you are going to have a very rich life. And that is a very apt description of me because I just will, 10 times out of 10, I will rather have the experience than the money. I just, yeah. And it's so funny because a girlfriend of mine said to me, you know, hey, I really want to go on this vacation.

Do you want to plan a vacation? And I was like, you know, I'm sorry. I just don't have a vacation budget. I just, and yet I go on so much travel, but it's because I don't pay, I cannot, I don't have enough money to go on a vacation, but I do travel because I work in travel. Yeah. Have you ever thought about starting like a substack page or anything like that? Like a writing page where people can, can show their support for the work you're doing or a Patreon page or anything like that?

You know, I would love to, but that's something I don't understand. And that, yeah, maybe I'll have to start that. Can you teach me? Yeah, the sub-stack one is interesting because there's, like, I know a few evolutionary biologists who are on there who write amazing in-depth articles, like similar to blog posts that are very educational. And then people in the substack space, from my understanding, are very financially supportive of those endeavors and go, this is amazing, this is what we want more access to.

And it's, again, it's, I think, just finding the community that really gets what you're doing and sees the intense value that it brings. Yeah, that would be something that would be. amazing. I know several people who are doing incredible things in the Patreon space. And that was always something I thought, God, how do they do this? I'm not, and I have ADD. So really bad, really bad ADHD. And so whenever I do something like, oh, I'm going to start this, then I'll get tired of it after, you know, a few weeks and then I'll move on. So I have to be careful for things like that because I'll start a ton of things. I just won't finish them. Yeah, fair enough. And you're already on the go. So

much with so many other projects that that kind of makes sense. Can you tell us about how people can find you on social media and what you perhaps do on those social media platforms that are different? Because your Twitter page looks different than your Instagram page and what people can expect. Yeah, so generally my handles in most places are just my name. So try to keep it pretty simple, first and last name. Yeah, my Instagram is pretty, it's fairly personal. There's some, you know, just I like baking and food and things like that.

and mushrooms, of course, in the forest. My TikTok is all just biology stuff, silly little biology things that I like to sing and make stupid. Like, it's just dumb, but I like it. And then Twitter, yes, Twitter is much more for the science communication is big on Twitter. So I do reserve Twitter for really good posts about science communication and sharing things and encouraging scientists and elevating voices and retweeting things that I think are meaningful and interesting. So, and then Facebook is, I have a good couple groups over there and a page, and those ones are just sort of the, yeah, bio nerds like me. We just like to share cool stuff and that's all we do, yeah. And then YouTube. I think you have a YouTube channel as well, right?

Oh, we do. Yeah. Although most of the YouTube stuff that I've done that's, that's been bigger, has been on other people's channels. So my own channel is, yes, I have a few things like my little trustee videos and things like that. And a couple series that I've done, just my own little series, I did a five-part little series on sex once. But, yeah, nothing too much over there. Right. And can you tell us about any particular areas in the Fraser Valley that you like most or that jump out to you, that you enjoy visiting for the benefits of biology? Oh, my goodness. They're countless.

So my favorites in town are the T.M. Wetlands for sure, the community forest. There are innumerable little trails up Chilliwack Lake Road. One of my best friends and I, we just, we love mushrooms. We don't, you know, not magic mushrooms, but just going and finding mushrooms. So on most nights, evenings, you can find us out at Chiluac Lake Road, just like hiking with our dogs. Yeah, I just, that's what I love. The really, the really covered temperate rainforest forests, like a lot of of the ones around Coltis Lake to, anytime where you almost, you feel the atmosphere change,

you know, and you get into the rainforest and it's like just moss hanging off all the trees and it's kind of misty and it's, oh my God, I just, ugh. Yeah, you made me think of Laquam, which Carrie Lynn Victor was talking about, she helped name that. And then right near the community trails is another trail that focuses on mushrooms. And there's like little articles all along that trail about all the different mushroom. that exist. So cool. What makes you like mushrooms?

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. The other thing I'm obsessed with is sea slugs. And honestly, I don't know why. I just love them. I just love them. They're so cute.

Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you being willing to share your story. Some of the adversity that you faced with the loss of family members, I think that those are really important for people because I think it helps connect us and understand that, like, we all have struggles.

Yeah. We all have really hard times that we've gone through and overcome and move forward as, a consequence and the fact that you still were able to, despite all of that adversity, complete your PhD, go on to share so much knowledge and expertise in a field like biology. I just think it's so inspirational for people and I hope that that's what they get out of this because it's certainly why I was so excited to have you on and thought you have to be on because you set such a good

example for people to figure out what your passion is, whatever it is, and get that out to the world in whatever way that looks like. I don't think that gets said enough no matter how many times Oh, it's a thank you. That makes me feel so happy because, you know, it is. We're, we are human. And I generally, I spend my days going, does it even matter? Like, do I even, does anyone even care? You know, so I, I love that you reached out to me in this way. It means a lot to me because I, yeah, sometimes when you do become more of a spokes, or not a spokesperson, but like maybe a role model in society, you don't want to get it wrong. You know, there's a little bit of pressure there. You don't want to say something that, that, that, that somebody might interpret in a bad way. So I really appreciate the opportunity to just speak and to be myself and to, yeah, that's it. I'm so pleased to be here. Well, thank you so much, again, for being willing to reach out because for those

listeners who don't know, you reached out when I had received a very negative comment and you were like, let's make this happen, let's do it now, like this is a good time. And that was so encouraging because I was having those feelings of like, I'm doing the best I can. And having those negative comments is like, I know that it's not true. I know that I shouldn't believe them. But there's always that fear when I started this. Am I the right person for this? Am I going to be able to do this the right way? Could other people do it better? Like the feedback I got when I started was, you shouldn't make it three hours. And to me, it was like, but what part of the person do you want me to cut out? Do you want me to cut out their family life, their community involvement? What

aspects do you want me to cut out? Because I don't want to cut those. And for the person, the goal is for people to be able to listen to this and hear about all these stories. And for some people I've talked to, it's the family life. Some it's the career. Some, it's the adversity. Like, for different people, there's different pieces that we get out of it. And I could never imagine cutting somebody's story down in that way. And that's why I don't think I'm fit for print news or anything like that, because I'd be writing books. Long form is beautiful. And I love that you're sticking with your concept. It's a great concept. And you're doing a great job of it. Well, I really appreciate. And again, thank you for the kind words and for being able to

willing to take the time, despite I know you've got a lot going on with school board and the decisions on whether or not to go online or what that's going to look like. I'm sure there's a lot going on there. And so the fact that you were able to take the time just means a lot to me personally. Cheers, man. Thank you.