The Magic School Bus Effect: Making Stats & Science Accessible

Happy 50th, Jen. Jennifer-Lee: I know. What kind of present do I get? I feel like we've been together for 50 episodes now. What is that in anniversary terms? I don't know. That's a good question. Jennifer-Lee: Is it wood? Is it gold? I don't know. All I can say is I'm really happy to have gotten to episode 50 with you, Jen. Jennifer-Lee: What did the older people say? A hundred more with you? That's great. We've learned so much from so many incredible higher education podcasters along the way.

Good to be here.

Great to be here Neil. Thanks for having us.

So first off, you two are longtime friends, if I understand that correctly. And you were actually students together at Stanford, is that correct?

Yeah, a couple years ago.

Just a few.

Back in the day. Yes. We were grad students at the same time, and we were friends because our boyfriends were friends.

Yeah, they introduced us. The boyfriend's long gone though.

The boyfriends are long gone. But you two and your friendship is longstanding and now you're podcast hosts together.

Yes.

Excellent.

I don't, I think if you had asked us back in the day, will you be podcasting together, first of all, we would say, what is a podcast? But yes. Second of all, no. You don't think of these things in grad school, how lasting they are, but it's really the basis for a good collegial relationship and a friendship.

Yeah, I like that.

So I invited Regina to come co-teach a course with me at Stanford. So she actually flies out from Gallaudet a couple weekends in the summer to teach this course with me. And we do it, uh, flipped classroom. So we pre-taped the lectures and when we taped the lectures, we decided to do them video podcast style. So we have a conversation, we talk about case studies. And our students the first year said, hey, we're watching these on Friday night instead of Netflix.

But then the second cohort and the third cohort did the same thing. So we thought, oh, maybe, maybe we should check this out and actually do it. They wanted to keep on learning statistics, which was really exciting, and I think shows the power of podcasting. And learning through conversation.

Is that ultimately sort of what you were hoping to achieve from the podcast then, is just to continue that learning? Or what did you hope to achieve, or what do you hope to achieve from this podcast?

Definitely teaching. Kristin and I feel very strongly about understanding evidence, understanding statistics, and being able to apply this in your everyday life. And so we choose the fun subject like hookworms as a way to investigate the science behind that.

We are planning to, so we are not far enough along yet that we've had the opportunity to drop it in our classes. But that is the plan. And actually we do envision this as a teaching tool that others could use. And I, a friend of mine recommended it to her kids high school AP statistics teacher. So we're hoping, you know, that'll set it in motion and people will start using it as a teaching tool. Yes.

So then from an audience perspective, it is a bit more of a focused audience. Then I know we've been joking about the topics here so far, but it really is meant to be a more learning cerebral, you are digging into real statistical components and isn't necessarily for the wider audience. There is a more, a smaller sort of focused audience for this show then.

I might disagree with that.

Okay, great.

Kristin might agree, but we can have a little conflict on this. It'll be fun. I like the idea of people tuning in, I think there are a lot of people, just general listeners out in the world that miss school and they want to continue learning, but they don't want to take classes and listen to lectures. They want to learn through stories and fun things and people having good conversations with each other. So I think in the back of our minds, yeah, maybe kind of targeted, oh, learn.

Yeah. We might have like a primary audience in mind that's a little bit of grad students and people, young scientists trying to learn some statistics. But I think we also keep in mind that we have lots of people listening to it that are not studying statistics. My kids like it. My kids have been listening, and they just feel like it's fun to listen to.

I think that's great what you're saying. You get into the weeds enough in the statistics stuff for it to work for your grad students, but at the same time it's, Regina, as you said, it's approachable for a wider audience.

We both are advocates for making science approachable and making scientists better communicators. I have a whole course on Coursera where I'm trying to get scientists to write more clearly for everyone. So I think it's a part of our vibe as well.

That's great. So as our audience is other higher education podcasters, maybe we can just sort of get into some of the minutiae here about producing and how you launched and so on and so forth. A lot of the podcasters we've interviewed to date are more tightly aligned with their universities. You've launched and you are producing Normal Curves with, from what I understand, without much support from Stanford or from Gallaudet University. That's correct, right?

Zero support.

Okay. Because we hear a lot and just in our day-to-day work, it's like, you know, working with comms departments within schools. It's like professors approach them, I wanna start a podcast. So did you approach either of your schools for support off the bat or you just gone out on your own on this?

This was more of a pet project, so we didn't even think to approach anybody for support. It's not that they didn't support us, it's just that we just started this sort of while we're both on sabbatical and had some time for a pet project. Jennifer-Lee: Your podcast, though, is really highly produced. Do you guys do all of that? Yes.

Kristin is our amazing editor. Who does not like technology. So I think it makes it all the more amazing that she is doing all of that. Yes.

Well, I'm a reluctant adopter of technology, but then when I get it, I like it. But it's the bar of getting over learning something new because it's supposed to just do what you want it to do and often it doesn't. And that drives me crazy. We do have, I do send it to, I'll put a plugin for East Coast podcasting. They do the final polish on the sound. I am doing the editing out of the, you know, when we mess up and rearranging and stuff though, that was quite a learning curve.

I think that we have certain freedom though, Neil, getting back to your question about institutional support. It's nice to be independent. You can be a iconoclastic, you can talk about your dating life, your love life, and not worry. You don't need to represent the institution. So I think it comes with certain disadvantages, but advantages as well.

You do have the disclaimer in your intro that this is separate from your day jobs, which I think is a smart thing to have in there, but that's an interesting insight that it gives you the freedom. I also think, Kristin, it's interesting that you never even thought about that. As I said, we hear this all the time, especially from the folks we work with in the comms department, that a prof sort of, here, we wanna do this, help us do this, make this happen kind of a thing.

Neil, I also think it's our journalistic background. So we didn't feel the need to go through the communications because we already had that training. I did reach out to somebody in communications and say, hey, can you write about it? They haven't yet, but I'm hoping. Jennifer-Lee: But the school's obviously are aware that you guys are doing it and they haven't told you to stop, so that's awesome.

There you go. Exactly.

So let's dig into a little bit about your pre-launch process, your journey. So you got this push from some students and the two of you went, hey, let's do this. So how long from, we're gonna start a podcast to actually launching was it, and maybe just sort of tell us a little bit about that pre-launch journey. What did you learn along the way?

That was a long journey. Kristin, 2022? Is that the first time we actually started talking about this, I think? Three years?

Yeah. We started talking about this as a book first. And then we kind of went back and forth, but we decided on podcast. We didn't really start working on it till the end of 2023. I had a little cancer in the middle, so that also, yeah, we, we had a little break in, we got kind of going on it and rolling. And then I had a stage one breast cancer. So that derailed it for a bit and then we got back on it.

Also, we had no idea what we were doing. So it takes a little while. You're finding your way yourself.

The first episode, I think, well, didn't end up being the first episode, but the first one we taped probably took us a long time to get through the whole thing.

Did you sort of, from there, you gotta record it and listen to it. Is there stuff you can share with others out there that are at this, we wanna do a podcast, what do we need to think about before we actually launch?

I think Vitamin D might've been the first one we taped, we worked on. That was like the first one I wanted to tackle. Or was it Red Dress? One of those two. But I can tell you that it took a very long time, a ridiculously long time to get to a final product. Because we didn't really know how we were framing it or the organization, the narrative. And alcohol as well. Yeah, we did many iterations, yeah.

Kristin I think had a good insight that I resisted at first, but I will call it out. She said, we just need to start. We have no idea what we're doing, so let's just go into the booth, turn it on, record and just start talking because the only way to climb a mountain is just to start. So there were a lot of iterations in there.

Yes. And I also like to research a lot. So some of those, I did quite a bit of reading of papers to prep, but then we just went in and talked about like, oh, I found this. I found that.

A lot.

But this is where Regina's got it down a little better than me because I tend to fall down a rabbit hole and I'm like, I'm going to research all of vitamin D and like, you know, five weekends later. Whereas Regina has been more disciplined and been able to stick to a few papers. And we can really dig into those.

I think you can see the two sides of us come out with this because we're both professor and science journalists. So professors say, ooh, these are great facts. I wanna put this in here because I learned so much about it. And surely it's important. And surely everyone else wants to know all of the details and all of the great story.

The Magic School Bus. I like that, Jen. Jennifer-Lee: Magic School Bus effect. Yep. There you go.

We're gonna use that in marketing.

Jen did ask you a little bit about your process. You're on two different ends of the country, three times zones away, and you're doing a lot of the editing and production yourselves. So maybe just, um, could you just share a little bit more about your process and how you guys collaborate together in two different time zones?

So the recording process does present some challenges. At first, we tried me flying out to California, where we would sit next to each other in the booth. I'm glad actually we started that way because I feel like there's a certain synergy that happens when you get two people to together. We have now switched to, time zones are still a problem. So I end up working a little later, but me in my closet, in my apartment, where I am now, and Kristin has a nice booth to work in.

Yes, I have access to a booth and Regina is in her closet.

So each of you picks a, a topic or a focus, and then you research up front, and then you come together and you start recording? And then Kristin, you're doing the sort of first cut of the editing and you get some outside help for the final post production?

So we're switching off leading the topics. And what we do is one person goes off and researches, and then we get together and do sort of a first take of talking it through. And basically it's one of us asking a lot of questions and also us identifying what are the statistical topics that we wanna bring out because we can't talk about all of them. So we have to pick a few per episode. And then we refine it from there.

I think it's helpful the format that we've set up where one person is responsible for most of the research on the topic, and the other person comes in relatively fresh because they are the audience proxy. So it's very helpful to have that other person asking questions because it brings an arc for the story that it wouldn't occur to you. So I like how we have this back and forth, switching things off.

I really like that approach. And you can actually, when you listen to your episodes, you could probably make that assumption. You could sort of tell who brought the topic to the table? I think actually you even addressed that in a couple of the episodes. It probably helps as well from a prep perspective, that each of you is responsible for every second episode to go deep as well too. So that's probably a good takeaway for the audience.

We, we do an initial take that's just for the laughs and the asking all the questions, but then we do two takes because I've found in the editing that sometimes I need a second take to grab from, I have a backup in case the mic is reverberating or whatever. Or just we talked over each other or somebody said the wrong number, you know? So I have a backup.

Yeah, we've also learned that working in chunks helps. So we go in that first take just exploring together, but then we have an idea of the backbone of how it's going to go, and then we have a rough script. And we've realized that taking things in chunks just makes it a little easier to edit and a little easier to say over and over. It took us a while to figure that out because sometimes we were just doing take after take. And it got a little unwieldy.

We have about 25 chunks per episode, so we tape the chunk once and then we tape it again. So sometimes that second take is a little cleaner.

Some of it is what Kristin and I had covered when we were doing a lot of science journalism. So Kristen wrote a health column for a beauty magazine, Allure magazine for a decade, and she covered health studies there. For a little while I was writing for the Los Angeles Times and doing a column on sex, kind of mating, dating sex. But Along the way, we covered studies that were, uh, questionable quality.

Yeah. I had 150 words per study, so you couldn't get a lot in, so there was a lot more I had to say. And I think Regina similarly. There's just a, we felt like there was a lot more to cover, but when you're writing for magazine or newspaper, it's very short.

I think we're also picking things that are in the popular imagination that are in headlines. And you always wonder, hmm, what is the evidence behind that? Because other journalists are covering it too, and they don't have room. But we have the opportunity to go a little deeper. I am tending to pick things that have to do with dating or relationships or sex or gross science. And Kristin is doing a lot with health. So we're also gravitating towards things that we enjoy ourselves.

And these are topics I've been following for years and I often use in my own teaching at Stanford. So some of the bad papers or good papers I've already used in teaching before and that's, they're in my bucket.

So how did you launch Normal Curves? Did you have a network to lean into? What was your first initial push to get it out there? I think a lot of podcasters, this is something that they'd probably love to hear from you guys about how you kind of approached your launch.

We didn't really know what we were doing. I do have some following through, I have a writing course I teach on Coursera, which again is trying to get scientists to write better. And so I had somewhat of a following on that. So I had an audience, and I think in developing the podcast, we were thinking a little bit about that audience, young scientists, grad students.

Kristen is very goal oriented, so I love it. She said, okay, here's the date. We just have to pick a date and we have to launch. We're not going to be ready. We have no idea what we're doing, but we just need to do it anyway. And if it were me, I would keep delaying until we were, you know, 200% ready. And there is something to be said for having a Kristin on your team that's like, nope, we're just doing it anyway. And then find yourself along the way.

Thank you.

Yes, yes.

I wasn't looking for that from the question I asked.

It's okay.

I don't know if we should admit there was a shift in title.

Oh, that's right.

What? What was the original title?

Are we giving that away, Regina?

Yes. I think we should give it away.

Yes. it was originally gonna be Sex, Beauty, and Statistics, and that was recognizing that Regina had written about sex for general audiences, science of, again, and I had written about beauty for general audiences. Actually it was about health, but it was for a beauty magazine. So it incorporated those tracks as well as the statistics.

And Neil, you and your team helped us explore and helped us come up with the Normal Curves, which we love. And the fun logo and tagline.

Well, Regina, the fun logo is all you. That was a stroke of, of genius. I think another reason we didn't go to our, ask for institutional support, it was because originally there was sex in the title.

I do think it's helpful, so much of this requires inside knowledge, I think already. How do you even choose a platform? Where do you go? Where do the files go? You have files, what do you do with them? How do you do all of this? What is an RSS feed, right? All of these things, it's helpful if you have a friend or if you have, you know, someone like you, Neil, to come in and break it down step by step because it seems obvious to you, but not to two professors starting out.

Right. We knew nothing.

I guess then that is a perfect way to lead into, for anyone thinking of starting a podcast, what is some advice you can give?

Just do it. We didn't think too hard about it. We just got in the booth and started taping.

Are most of the podcasters that you work with, are they doing it solo or do they have co-hosts together? Jennifer-Lee: Most of mine are interview style podcasts. So there'd be one host, interview.

Yeah. We work with a lot of single hosts that's not co-hosts.

So that, that's good advice. If you wanna start a podcast, get a co-host because that has made it doable. I wouldn't have been able to do this on my own. Jennifer-Lee: But I will say when I worked back in radio, I learnt, you don't always have great rapport with everybody as a co-host. I've been lucky. I co-host this podcast with Neil, so we're lucky that we have the rapport that we have. But not everyone has it.

I think that it's also helpful, right? Rapport, respect, all of that, but finding someone who has complimentary skills and personality, bringing this, because two of me would be too many, two of Kristin would be too many. So bringing that together because you get different strengths that way, different perspectives.

That's great. I like that. I met Jen, I had been thinking about doing this. I was thinking there was an opportunity to, you know, this would be a good way to meet more higher education podcasters and to really lean in and to learn more about it. When I met Jen, I was like, hey, you wanna do this with me? And I agree, that's been a great part of the journey is doing it with someone else and, and Jen came with more of a background into interviewing and the space and whatnot too.

I think it's helpful also to think in terms of story and not lecture because a lot of your audience are coming from this academic background, and it's a different experience to lecture. You come in, you need to deliver content, you have a captive audience. It's very different than podcasting.

I think that's some really good advice 'cause I think that especially for professors to think that way differently. And obviously as science writers and journalists, you brought a different perspective to the table where you had experience doing that. It wasn't just, here's the facts, you had to weave a story into your articles and into your writing. And it comes out too in the way you approach things.

We'd actually spend a lot of time thinking about the narrative arc. So when we do that first take in the booth, after that, we then start to say, oh, when this goes here, this goes here. And we often move around based, not what the natural conversation was, but where can we build a better narrative arc.

So you're now seven episodes in, I would assume you're starting to hear from your audience, any feedback that you've received that's surprised you. Anything that sort of made you rethink something or just, I guess it must be interesting to start to hear feedback just in general from an audience.

Yeah, it's qualitative instead of quantitative. We can look at the download the numbers. But it's much more interesting to see the comment, the stories from actual people. We've gotten some fantastic comments that really I think help keep us going when we think about how much work this is. Jennifer-Lee: Any comments from the students?

That is great. You guys are the anecdote to the bro cast. Jennifer-Lee: I love it. I'm stealing that one. So, well, I think that was great. Thank you so much for joining us today. I think it's been great to hear about your journey, and we've learned a lot. I think there's some really good, tangible insights for those out there thinking about planning to launch a podcast. Really appreciate your time and your, uh, candor today.

It's has been fun. Thanks for having us.

Well, that was a fun conversation, wasn't it, Jen? Jennifer-Lee: I feel like I could talk to 'em forever. I felt like we were like at a bar gabbing together with a bottle of wine. I think that's what's great about their podcast is to a certain extent they're achieving that you feel like you're part of this conversation that they're having, but also it's part lecture as well too.