Rose Eveleth is a producer, designer, writer, and animator. Currently, Rose is the producer and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about the future. Mixing radio drama and science journalism, Flash Forward is a smart and often funny exploration of the potentially sticky consequences of a future scenario, “everything from the existence of artificial wombs, to what would happen if space pirates dragged a second moon to Earth.”
Rose’s work has been featured in the Best American Science Writing anthology and she was a 2016 MJ Bear Fellow. She has a degree in ecology, behavior and evolution from UC-San Diego and a graduate degree in journalism at NYU. Among her many and varied professional positions, she has served as a columnist for BBC Future and Motherboard, a producer at The Story Collider, the special media manager at the digital science and culture magazine Nautilus, and the managing editor for the online publishing collective LadyBits, “a place where women are smart about science.” Rose also edited the Smart News blog at Smithsonian Magazine and founded Science Studio, a home for all the best science multimedia on the web. She has also been an animation editor at TED Education, a contributing editor at Smart Planet, and helped develop a podcast for ESPN’s award-winning documentary series 30 for 30.
In May 2018, we spoke about being a default feminist educator, whether any of her body implants are the mark of the devil, and who the future is really for.
Sarah Augusta: I’d like to start by talking about my current favorite episode of your podcast Flash Forward called Fitness in a Bottle which made me laugh really hard out loud. In the episode you were trying to decide whether or not to put illegal internet medicine in your body. It was everything that I think it great about the show. Can you tell us a little bit about where that topic came from and how it felt to bring your personal life into the show?
Rose Eveleth: That came straight from a New Yorker article by Nicola Twilley, who’s a friend of mine, and also makes a really good podcast called Gastropod. I’ve covered the bodyhacking, enhancement world a lot so I was kind of familiar with the concept of these drugs but I didn’t know the history behind them and she’d covered the history really well. I also really love anything that provides for some sort of live moment because often when you’re covering the future it’s inherently speculative, which is fine, but sometimes you want something tangible: here’s a thing that exists that I can point to and hold in my hand. This was a great way of doing that because these drugs do exist, you can buy them. I’m also generally really interested in what people think about risk in the future and what people are or are not willing to do with their bodies. What do we think is acceptable body manipulation and body modification and what is not? As part of her piece Nicky talks about ordering these drugs on the internet and she decides eventually not to take them and her and I walk through that a lot in the interview, her explaining why she decided not to. We talked a lot about why someone decides to or not to and people’s personal risk aversion. As soon as that conversation ended I was like “Oh I definitely need to order this.” I am less risk-averse than Nicky is. I don’t know if I’m less risk averse than most people, not in general, but for that kind of thing, I am. I have an RFID chip in my hand, I have lots of tattoos. So as soon as I knew I wanted to order it I figured some part of the episode would be about–do I take it or not? And it really evolved organically to talk to my dad and my boyfriend in part because my first question when I got the stuff in the mail was “is this actually what it says on the bottle?” and conveniently my dad works in biotech and could answer that question, in theory. So he was an easy person to call, and because the question was do I do this thing, it was fun to include the question of “So, as a dad, do you think I should?” I was actually really surprised when he and my boyfriend, Robert, didn’t just say, “You’re crazy! What are you doing?” They both said, “I know you’re going to do whatever you want anyway, so…”
SA: Have Robert or your dad been in other episodes?
RE: Robert’s been on the show before very minimally. He was in the show where we went to a concert for a pop star that is not “real.“ We went to a Hatsune Miku concert for an episode about avatars and the future of pop stars and their personas. My dad has actually been in the show once before but never about something that was about me. My mom has been a voice in the future before so there’s a little Easter egg in there. And I have interviewed my grandma before because she used to work on a farm and we did an episode about the future of farming. So people in my life have been in the show before but not in this way, this much, where they were directly speaking to my person.
SA: Do you ever get feedback that listeners want to know more about you?
RE: Listeners know what I think about things. I’m pretty clear about saying “here’s my opinion.” I don’t talk a lot about my personal life on the show in part because that’s not what the show’s about. It’s not a personal narrative show and that’s fine. Listeners, I think, kind of end up knowing a lot about what I’m like—they know I have a dog—but it doesn’t really make sense most of the time to include anything about my life. But in this case it made sense for the episode and I feel like it makes it more interesting when you’re talking about a decision to actually hear someone grapple with it first person instead of like “here’s what some people might think about whether they should do this or not.” People don’t tend to ask that much about my personal life.
SA: How do listeners respond to your opinions?
RE: People often ask what I think about things, so over the course of the show I have included a lot more of my take and I have gotten feedback that people like that. I think when I first started the show I was very worried about putting too much of my opinion into it, but I have found that people tend to like that. I think people who listen to the show trust my perspective on the future. At the end of the first episode of this current season I included a monologue/rant thing about what I think about the future of senior care and technology and I wasn’t sure if that was going to work. But I didn’t get any sources that really talked about the thing that I wanted to talk about. So I figured I would include it and I said in the show, “I don’t normally do this, but I’m going to say this thing,” and a lot of people responded to say that they liked it and I should feel free to do more of it in the future.
SA: Your work lives near the intersection of science and journalism and in both of those you’re supposed to try to write without bias. But your podcast also lives in this third space of speculation where you’re really allowed to do whatever you want. How do you find the right balance there?
RE: I would argue that journalists aren’t unbiased! I think that it’s better to err on the side of being clear about what my opinion is so that you can take or leave what I put in the show knowing what I think. There are definitely people that have responded to some of the episodes saying “Oh you talk about social justice too much” or “You’re too politically correct.” For that episode on exercise I pointed out that fitness culture is very much obsessed with thin, white women and one person responded being like “I don’t know why you had to bring race into it.” So some people really don’t like that. I’m not going to not do that because that is what the show is trying to do–remind people that the future doesn’t exist in a vacuum and it all intersects.
SA: You’ve mentioned several times on the show and other places that you’ve gotten feedback that the show is very dark. Do you feel like that’s an accurate and/or inevitable assessment?
RE: I feel like it’s inevitable but not necessarily accurate. Part of the reason I started the show was to push back a little bit on the two dominant narratives surrounding futurism. One is the narrative of Black Mirror—we’re all just going to be husks of ourselves staring into these glass boxes, it’s horrible and soulless and technology is evil etc., etc. And I love Black Mirror. I’m very glad it exists, but there is that bad version of futurism where we just go straight to eugenics! And then there’s there’s the Techno Utopia where we’re all going to live forever, we’re going to “cure” everyone of every disease. There’s that version, too, which is similarly sort of ahistorical and not engaging with the reality of humans and the reality of the way technology is used and created. So the show was born out of seeing all this coverage and wanting to have a middle ground. I wanted to have something about the future that engages with both sides and saying “some people think this is going to happen and some people think this, here’s an analysis based on these different versions of the future where we try to put some of these proposals into context, allowing humans to be both messy and problematic and also weird and joyous and surprising. Which is the part that I feel Black Mirror misses, the part where humans are very strange and wonderful and creative. The part the Techno Utopian people miss is where some people are going to misuse technology. I try to ride the middle ground between dark and light.
SA: Does the feedback impact how you approach your work on the show?
RE: There are always people who consume future-related content because they want to be told the future is going to be okay. They only want to hear about how technology is going to fix everything. And there are certain people who want exactly that when they look for futurism content. I think those are the people who generally think the show is too dark, because I am going to point out that this or that new innovation could be misused and here’s how and why. So I don’t take those critiques too seriously, and I do think that on the whole the show is actually pretty light-hearted. Even when we’re engaging with tough, thorny topics I try to do so in a way that’s not so self-serious. We’re all just making this shit up anyway! I think some futurism takes itself really seriously and I’m not a very serious person. I take things seriously but I also enjoy myself in life! Any time you make anything about the future, there are always people who just want you to tell them that technology is going to solve everything—don’t worry, you’re going to live forever!—and I’m just not going to do that. I think that’s where those critiques sometimes come from.
SA: I think in particular the radio drama introduction portion of the show leans toward humor. Could you talk about the structure of those intros? Do you intentionally go for more humor there?
RE: The intros are so fun. It’s where I really get to just be weird. The point of those intro bits is to introduce the concept of the future and give listeners a little bit of a game to go, “Okay what is this?” It’s a puzzle to figure out what’s this future? Also it’s very easy to start a show and say, “Okay today were talking about exoskeletons.” Because the point of the show is to really get into the weird specifics of “how would this actually work?” Being able to do that in an audio drama form is fun and interesting. The interesting things in my mind about the future are the weird, sticky points that are often comical when you try to deal with the future. Like when you try to talk to Siri—half the time it doesn’t work! So presenting a version of the future where everything works perfectly and everyone is just engaging with this technology in this seamless, flawless way just feels very unrealistic to me. So often I’ll try to do something where there’s an unexpected use of the technology or it’s showing people struggling with this thing that doesn’t usually work very well. That feels more realistic to me and is more fun to script than if you had a person at their computer being like, “Now I am making the singularity.” That’s not interesting to me and it doesn’t feel real either. Also it’s just who I am, even with topics that are serious my point of engagement is usually somewhat humorous–we’re all going to die anyway, so we should at least have fun!
SA: How does writing the creative fiction portion of the show different from your other writing?
RE: I’ve always loved creative writing and so it’s a nice outlet to be able to do that. Any time you’re talking about the future you’re essentially making things up anyway. It’s fun to be able to really blow that out and really try to imagine what it’s like to be in that world. Because so much of the show is about the weird, less sexy versions of the future, like: What are the liability policies for sex robots? That’s a question that is more about that nitty-gritty specific stuff and I think that’s often better explored in fiction, because it allows a listener to put themselves in the position of the main character.
SA: So the fiction is about engagement.
RE: Right. When you read fiction, you’re often imagining yourself in this world and that’s kind of what I’m hoping people will do in futurism. And I think it’s often hard to do that when you’re just a reader going, “You’re talking about this thing that isn’t happening yet in a world that I don’t really live in yet, so how do I even engage with that or imagine what that’s like?“ I think fiction can be a really great tool to bring people in and say, “Okay, now you are in this world. Get used to it, look around, see what’s happening and then we can talk about your reactions to it and what might be going on here.”
I think that’s the function of the fictional stuff. It wasn’t born out of that kind of thinking—I came to that later. I started because I really liked writing fiction and I did journalism, so I thought I might as well try doing both at the same time. It was kind of a weird idea, but my editor from the original version of the show really liked it, so we ran with it. It’s been really fun ever since.
SA: Do you see yourself writing more fiction?
RE: I love writing fiction and I think there are some topics that are much easier to explore in fiction then in journalism. Like I was saying, often when you read stuff about the future it’s hard to imagine how you would react or how you would even be included in this future. That’s in part because so much futurism is written assuming you’re a straight, white man. It’s also inherently difficult to imagine a world in the future where all these other things have changed. It’s hard enough to know where you stand now in the world! That’s a thing people are constantly trying to figure out! So there are some things that I would love to explore in fiction that I have started to work on: I did a live show with Pop Up Magazine during their last season. It was an audience-driven Choose Your Own Path where you are the main character and you get to pick what you decide. It was about Senior Care. You show up to a retirement home with your dad and it’s only staffed by robots: how do you feel about that? It was sort of forcing people to engage with that a little bit. And these are questions that they will probably have to deal with, in some shape, in the future.
I think fiction encourages you to imagine yourself in that world in a way that journalism doesn’t necessarily. Journalism is supposed to write a window into someone else’s world so you can understand it. Fiction is like you are now in this world. I think everyone that reads books imagines themselves as the main character, that’s how a lot of people engage with fiction. In some ways that is a great way to get people thinking about the future. Black Mirror is very successful for this reason. People watch it and they’re like, “Oh, what would I do and how would I feel? Is this about me? How does this relate to my life?” People can read journalism or listen and consume journalism with a detachment because it’s about someone else. It’s about another thing, it’s not about you. And while fiction isn’t necessarily about you it feels much more inviting to step into that world. I think there are some topics that I’d really love to explore. Also the nice thing about a longer fiction project is every episode of Flash Forward is only 45 minutes and then you’re on to the next one. So being able to really sit in a world and explore it a little more fully is also really appealing to me. There’s also some futures where I go “Oh we didn’t even talk about this whole other thing that I would have loved to include but didn’t have time for.” I would love to see the universe of Flash Forward expand out a little bit to include more fiction projects like books or TV.
SA: So you primarily work alone–you currently produce and write Flash Forward by yourself. Is some of the writing easier to do solo or do you use your actors or other people to help develop the work?
RE: I wish I had people to bounce stuff off of. I have voice actors and they read scripts and I say, “Hey, if any of this sounds weird you can adlib.” They sometimes do that but there’s not a lot of back and forth with them. There are definitely times when I will go down a road on an episode and I’m like, “Maybe no one else thinks this is interesting,” because like any journalist I can get very obsessed with something that isn’t actually that interesting to anyone else. And that’s why you have an editor. There was an episode about about the future of pop stars that I mentioned earlier and I did a whole section about all these people that think Beyonce is a clone–maybe that was a terrible idea or maybe it wasn’t! Who knows when there’s no one to go, “Why are you doing this?” or “Let’s talk about structure.” So it would be great to have someone. In my ideal world, Flash Forward becomes more financially successful and I can hire someone like an editor or a co-producer so there’s someone to bounce ideas off of. But yeah–right now, it’s truly just me and my brain sitting in my office, for better or worse.
SA: On your personal website, you describe being freelance “yes, on purpose.” Working solo seems like one part of that choice. Why did you decide to go freelance? What do you like about it?
RE: I’ve been freelance for a long time even before Flash Forward and I really like it. You kind of get to do whatever you want! Obviously you have to convince other people to pay you for it but you get to follow your own interests. I’ve always known it would be a little lonely but I’m also not a very extroverted person. I’m fine sitting in my office by myself all day. It’s more about the creative process. I wish I could send stuff to someone and say, “Hey, does this make any sense?” or “What questions come up for you if you listen to this?” Not everyone enjoys freelancing and I totally understand that, but for me it’s perfect. I really like being left to my own devices to chase weird ideas and research stuff and call people and do all those things.
SA: You wrote a great blog piece about having what you call “a personal board of directors.” Does that come in to play here?
RE: Yeah. I have some people that I really admire and if I get stuck on something I can always say “Hey what do you think about this?” I recently had some more big-picture fiction ideas that I was thinking about and I sent them to two people that I really respect to say “Hey can you give me a gut check? Does this sound interesting? Are you following the plot here?” and that was really helpful. Even on the business and finance side, making sure that I’m making a good decision about a partnership, I have people that I can ask questions of which is very helpful. I don’t want to overstate that I’m doing this all by myself and no one is helping me. There are lots of people who are very helpful and important to me and without them I think I would have probably given up a long time ago because it is hard to do a thing by yourself.
SA: You said sort of casually “you have to convince people to pay you for it” and can you unpack that for the world? Because that’s hard!
RE: Right! I’m one of those psychotic people who love’s pitching. I really enjoy it. It’s like a game where you try to figure out “What does this editor want? And how do I convince them to give me what I want?” and I like that puzzle. I had an editor once, Adrienne LaFrance, who is now at the Atlantic, and she said this thing—at one point I was stuck on something—and she said “Everything can be a story, anything can be a story. You just have to figure out what the angle is and who to pitch it to.” And I really do think that’s true. I do a lot of going down rabbit holes and trying to find something interesting and almost always I can find an editor who will be interested in it. Part of being a journalist is calibrating your interestingness meter and figuring out where you land. And it definitely helps having had very brutal editors tell me “that’s not interesting.” I feel like I’ve gotten a good sense of what’s a good story for me and my skills and my interests and I’m very lucky to be able to only do things that I care about at this point. and I know now here’s what I’m interested in chasing, here are the editors I know that I work really well with who understand when I say “I want to do a story about this thing that doesn’t sound interesting yet but let me tell you why!” and they’ll listen to me. I’ve built up some trust among editors that I’m probably on to something sort of interesting. A lot of it is relationships obviously but a lot of it too is knowing “okay I know this editor really loves this kind of story so I’m going to go to them and be like here’s what I’m thinking.” And I can send some editors emails that say “I’ve been thinking a lot about this thing. What do you think about x, y, and z?” and we can talk it out which is a thing that people who are just starting out, I realize. I recognize that’s not great advice, but it’s been great to find the editors that I sync up with.
SA: One thing that I think is a thread throughout your work, which seems like a choice but also maybe a little bit of inevitability, is the way you end up being the expert in the room when it comes to things involving women or feminism or just non-cisgender issues. I was really struck by an episode of the podcast Alan and Jeremy VS Science Fiction where you were discussing Octavia Butler’s short story Bloodchild. There was stunned silence after you described childbirth to the male, cisgender hosts who are both fathers. In addition to being an expert in the realm of your fields of journalism and science, you also end up having to educate your peers a lot.
RE: Yeah, futurism is very much dominated by a certain worldview. In part because the kind of people that have time and money and energy to explore the future and not the present have a privileged position. You need to have money and time to think about the future and not where your next meal will come from or your next paycheck. And so much future envisioning is basically based on a bunch of rich, white guys. Madeline Ashby, who is a great futurist and science fiction writer, has this really funny thing that she says about why so many futurists are obsessed with living forever when most people are just not interested, she says it’s because living forever is great when you’re making compound interest! That encapsulates a lot of the problems in futurism. There have been not straight, white men writing science fiction for forever: Sultana’s Dream is from 1905. There have always been people imagining the future that are not those people but they don’t get the microphone, they don’t get the spotlight, they don’t get the TED Talk. Obviously Octavia Butler is a huge luminary, there’s Ursula K. LeGuin, there are lots of people who have imagined other futures. I tend to like to remind futurists that I’m talking to that perhaps they could expand their world a little bit. Most of the time they’re relatively perceptive, I mean Allen and Jeremy were very nice they just hadn’t thought about it! Which is sort of funny to me because you know if you’ve ever read any scholarship about Octavia Butler’s work it’s very clear that she’s engaging with these questions in a very specific way. I go to these body hacking conferences and every time I make the case that my IUD is a cyborg implant there’s this confused look.
SA: I love your article titled Bodyhackers Are All Around You, They’re Called Women comparing your IUD to the RFID chip in your hand! You make the case that they are both cyborg implants.
RE: Every time I get a note from someone saying “I read your thing and now I think of myself as a cyborg!” I’m like yes yes yes! One guy a couple years ago said “Well that involves lady blood so I’m not into it” and I was like “You are willing to cut your own arm open and insert a deck of card-sized machine and then sew it back up with no professional or anesthesia but the fact that I have an IUD is gross to you? I don’t understand.” It’s kind of a willful ignorance. Donna Haraway is not new. The concept that woman are engaging in cyborism or engaging with these questions about the body and the future of the body is not new. This has been around for a long time. So I get tired of having to be like also remember women! Disabled people! Trans people! It’s a very exclusionary world.
I think that it’s getting better. There have been a bunch of anthologies that have come out recently driven by disabled folks and trans folks and that’s really great. And I think that there is some acknowledgement in the Futurism world that they have a problem. That said it’s kind of amazing to me that people who think so much about the future have such a narrow view. Like you can imagine being a spinning set of wheels going through space but you can’t imagine women in it? It feels like it’s such a limited imagination. This is something that adrienne maree brown talks about a lot, she is an amazing writer and scholar, and she really has great things to say about the super narrow vision that people have about the future and why it’s so narrow. I recognize that the majority of people who listen to Flash Forward right now are white. It’s about 50/50 men and women which I’m very proud of but they are mostly upper-middle class, white people and I’m just trying to remind them that other people will exist in the future too and might not be included in these visions a lot of the time. So I do feel like it’s part of my responsibility as a person who’s analyzing and projecting and predicting and thinking about the future to make it very clear that there are other people that should be included in these conversations.
Everyone has their own perspective [that they think] is clear and it’s not, right, so just making assumptions clear is a huge part of thinking and talking about the future. Which is good scholarship in general but also very important when you’re talking about these things.
SA: That kind of educating can be exhausting—when you feel tired, how do you find relief?
RE: I just read a lot. I feel like there’s only so much education you can do. I recommend a lot of reading to people. If I do get into a situation where I’m like “Oh this person has never encountered the idea of blank, as long as I feel like they’re engaging in good faith—which is not always an assumption you can make—but saying oh well it’s worth reading x, y, and z women who have written about this. I get a lot of emails from listeners who will either push back on certain things or they’ll be like “I don’t understand this” or “I don’t know why you said this.” I assume that listeners who are choosing to download my podcast are engaging in good faith and I send them a lot of reading and they are usually happy to do it. That’s science fiction and journalism and nonfiction. But personally when I feel like I don’t know if I can deal with another one of these, I do a lot of reading and I read authors that are not white guys. I try to read things where I take a timeout and read some Robots vs. Fairies.
SA: Tell us about your hand chip.
RE: Yes, my hand chip. So I say this in the article, but it’s not very useful. I got it because I was hanging out with these body hacker guys and between the kit and a piercer it would have been like a hundred bucks but this guy was like oh I’ll do it now at the Austin Marriott hotel conference room which is probably not allowed. This guy has done more of these than I think anyone so I was like good, it’s fine, I trust you. And it is all sterile. So you put your hand on the table and, it was funny, he was having trouble getting it to go in and he said “You have really thick skin” and I said “Well, I’m a woman on the internet!” and no one laughed!
So it’s an RFID,if you have a fob for your door it’s the same technology. It’s a near-field technology, it doesn’t talk to satellites. That’s the first thing people ask “are you being tracked?” and I’m like no it can’t do that. If your dog is microchipped it’s the same technology. So it’s very low-tech and can store a very, very small amount of information. I could put an unlock on the car where I could just wave my hand in front of it and unlock the car. In theory, in the future you could do Apple pay with RFID chip, I mean, Apple doesn’t allow unregistered NFC chips, it’s not a thing now for obvious reasons. It’s a fun party trick at this point.
And this is part of my point: between this and my IUD I will take my IUD any day of the week because it’s actually useful to me. That’s why I like to contrast them. I have these two implants, right, and one of them seems way more cyborgy than the other but it’s actually pretty much useless to me. It’s fun, it’s cool. My IUD lets me live in the world in a way that this does not.
It’s funny every so often there is group of people on the internet who think that the government is doing this to people against their will and that people who have these, it’s like the mark of the beast. So I sometimes do get emails from people saying repent! There’s also a group of people who think that you’re going to get cancer if you have one so I get some very concerned emails. I’m like, I drink Diet Coke, I’ve got other problems.
SA: Who do you think of and recommend when you think of the future of rockstar science journalism?
RE: I tend to recommend more science fiction and thinkers. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. They co-edited a book called Octavia’s Brood which is about futures and social justice and how do we include more people into these visions. Amy Webb is a futurist. When people ask who is a good futurist, I say Amy Webb. There’s so many futurists that are just nonsense talkers, our version of charlatans. There are degrees in Strategic Foresight, futurists can have actual qualifications but also they can just be people who decide they want to predict the future. It can be very hard sometimes to tell the difference when you are a person who doesn’t follow this field. Often I see people on the news where I’m like this person has no idea what they’re talking about or this person has no qualifications to be talking about this thing they’re talking about. I actually cringe a little bit when people describe me as a futurist I’m like no! no! no! No! I’m not a futurist, I’m a journalist! I’m not trained in futurism, it’s not really what I do. So much of futurism is selling their version of the future to make money. Amy Webb is not like that. Amy is a very smart person who reads all the research and can tell you what every lab is doing. We don’t always agree but she’s super smart. Madeline Ashby is also really smart. Ed Yong is really great, his writing is really good, Hal Hodson is really smart. Other names are Genevieve Bell, Arielle Duhaime-Ross, Tananarive Due, K. Tempest Bradford, N.K. Jemisin and Kate Devlin.
SA: Out of all the futures that you’ve gotten to explore is there one that was your favorite? Or your least favorite, the one where you said please don’t let this happen?
RE: I will say I learned a lot in the first two seasons about what makes a good episode. There were definitely episodes that I wouldn’t do again. In order to be a good episode of Flash Forward you have to be like this is a future in which blank happens. Sometimes if I pick something that’s too broad it’s really hard to think about what’s going to happen because there are so many things that could go on. So it’s much better when you have a future in which there is a pill that can replace exercise: this is a future in which blank very specific thing happens and then you can engage with that specific thing. We did one about the future of borders but that’s too broad. What about borders and which borders? I hadn’t thought it through well enough. One of the ones that I really love is the super religion one about an algorithm that makes a super religion. I really enjoy thinking about what it takes to create a culture or a movement. I collaborated with this computer scientist, Janelle Shane, and we put together three million words of religious texts and then had an algorithm spit back out text and had an actual priest read them for us. It was very fun and very weird and gets at a lot of things about this cult of efficiency, this idea that you can just have something print all the data and give you an output. There are people in Silicon Valley who are building a church of AI so it’s not that outside of the realm of possibility. I got to talk about different modes of religion, we talked to someone who comes from a Native American tradition about the differences between that and a Judeo-Christian religion, we talked about Islam, we talked about all these different things. I like the ones that are slightly weird. That was a really fun one to work on.
