Your Legacy Is What’s Said About You When You Leave the Room with Dr. Hoby Wedler
Dr. Russell Strickland 28:34
Actually, one of the things that I find interesting is how many times you can anthropomorphize things in science, and it kind of works that people talk about, what would the brain What would I do if I was a bromine sitting on this, this, you know, this carbon atom logic actually lead you to a solution? It should move? The bromine doesn’t think the way you should? doesn’t react the way you do. But still, there was something in there that helped you. And Richard Dawkins, the the evolutionary biologist talks about this idea of what would the gene kind of want to do to survive, and it doesn’t have sentient to do that. But that insight helps them to understand the problem. It’s amazing to me how often we can do things like that, if I were that gene or that bromine or whatever, what would I do? And it gives you an insight. It’s, there’s no reason it should give you insight, but it does.
Dr. Hoby Wedler 29:31
That sounds a little bit chilling. Yeah. It It does. It works. So
Dr. Russell Strickland 29:38
awesome. Well, listen. So we talked about kind of your, your traditional path through through through your graduate degree program. Because a lot of our students when we say unconventional, yes, you went through and did a lot of things that are different from your peers, but your peers were other students. Going through working in the lab doing the same sorts of things that you were doing. Many of the students that I work with, they’re alone, essentially, they’re in the workforce already. And we say, quote, going back to school, but really, they’re still in the workforce. And they’re also in school, working to get their, their PhD. And so that’s kind of an unconventional path that we talked about. But right after school, you start, there’s a lot of unconventional things that you and I have talked a little bit about. And you mentioned, in particular, the intersection of art and science. So tell me about that a little bit how someone who has a PhD in organic chemistry, it’s interested in arts and science.
Dr. Hoby Wedler 30:43
So this is an interesting thing. And it actually came about because I had the opportunity to teach at the great fortune to teach a few chemistry classes, general chemistry classes while in graduate school. And one of the things that I realized was that students that I worked with, did not speak chemistry. So if I explained if I had supporting images, and explained what these images showed, it wasn’t good enough, they wanted really flashy, cool, nifty images that they could follow along with, and, and utilize for their success, where they could see a picture of what’s actually happening. You know, and to me, that was, that was fine, but they really needed those diagrams. And they needed me to point and say this, here and back there. And it was, it was really difficult to do. And I realized that I was spending so many hours with my assistant assistance, building these, you know, catchy images, remembering when to try to point and say this year that there and try to teach in a more sort of conventional way that sighted teachers teach sighted students, right, and kind of realize that maybe, maybe the assistance required in teaching chemistry was was greater than I wanted to, I wanted to, you know, to own and to take it in my career. The other part of being a being a research chemist, and an instructor of at the collegiate level is that you have to read a lot of literature articles, and organic chemistry, literature, articles, posts, I’m still working on solving this accessibility problem and confident that we will. So I work with Dean and his group all the time to still to think through accessibility and to think through a blind and visually impaired students can more appropriately do chemistry, successfully study chemistry successfully. But really the question that the difficulty is that papers were very hard to read, okay. And because authors tend to, especially when they can use a picture, they tend to use just words to make it very, very hard for me to follow what they’re what they’re doing, right? Well,
Dr. Russell Strickland 32:49
the old saying is worth 1000 words, and you would much rather have 1000 words,
Dr. Hoby Wedler 32:54
I would much rather have 1000 words, because it is doable to describe organic chemistry and words, it is far less efficient. And using a picture, I think, I think that, you know, efficiency is based on the highly visual system that we’ve created to explain chemistry and to explain science in general, you know, we use pictures, it’s just easier. And it’s only easier because that’s what we know. That’s what we’ve done. It’s conventional. So I decided while in graduate school, and you mentioned at the beginning that I did do some work with Francis Ford Coppola, and indeed I did at co innovate with him. Truly blind and I mean, blindfolded wine tasting experience that we call tasting in the dark. And I’ll spare you the details of that for this matter. But what I’ll say is that, that led me to do a lot more work under blindfold with others in the food and drink space, other beer and spirits, brands, also some oil and vinegar, a lot of work with coffee, and even even other food groups. What it also led me to do to really think about using the blindfold as a technique to teach other people how to approach the world and how to be more sort of aware of the world around them. And that, that in a roundabout way led me to really understand that while I’m a scientist, I’m also really an artist and creator. And I’ve arrived, you know, wine is one of these interesting things, and I still am in the wine industry to this day, and plan to be for a very long time. You know, wine is an interesting thing, to me that really spans that intersection between art and science, so well, right? In one sense, you know, the way the grapes grow, it’s, it’s science right there. You know, you need you need water them you need to know, a lot of science to be to be a vineyard manager, etc, etc. But also, the winemaking team and even your management team needs to have a lot of art in their, in their skill sets and, and really understand what you know how to make a great wine and how to balance it. So I really believe that there’s an intersection a very fine intersection between science and art that I figured out sort of how to straddle in my career. No, simply put, I think, and I, by the way, did a TEDx Talk all about this and all about something that we’ll get to eventually called Sensory Literacy, which I’d love to share with, with listeners, the podcast. Which would you remember the name of that TEDx talk? Yeah, it was called Sensory literacy by yours truly, Dr. Hoby Wedler. So it’s, it was on the TEDx Sonoma County stage.
Dr. Russell Strickland 35:24
So Sensory Literacy want to check that out, we’re gonna definitely put that in the show notes. So for anybody who wants to just head over to our blog at www.dissertationdone.com and check out the show notes. If you happen to be listening on the podcast, we’ll have that link down there for you. So that you can check that out. So thanks,
Dr. Hoby Wedler 35:40
Russell, I really appreciate that. But simply put, I think that science fills our toolbox with tools, whether that’s a computer or a computer program, or, you know, a box of nails and a bunch of wood and you go out and you build a house, you know, that’s fine. Science is what we use to build with, but art really dictates how we build it, you know, and what we do. So I really do believe that we’re all scientists in some way. And we’re all artists in some way. And I think we all can own our part, or our particular part of that intersection between art and science.
Dr. Russell Strickland 36:16
Now that that’s, that’s certainly true. And you can see the the kind of the ebb and flow between art and science historically, we have right now, what, right now years and years ago, architecture used to be, in my opinion, much more interesting than it is now, a lot of the architecture that was influenced by religion was very inspirational. And now when you drive down the street, even the churches look fairly plain, some of the newer churches would like warehouses. It’s very interesting that that has has happened. I like to see a little bit more art in some of those areas. But then we have art now, infecting our science to some degree, because people are trying to decide what facts are, what is objective reality and just put their own spin on it your own take on it. And that’s something where we have to understand that you can feel a certain way about certain things, but we have to agree on what objective reality is. So it’s, it’s important to know that there is an intersection of the two inform each other, but they also have their own domains, which is something I think we need to to heed in this this particular day and age.
Dr. Hoby Wedler 37:34
For sure, absolutely.
Dr. Russell Strickland 37:37
So tell me a little bit more about what this intersection between art and science means to you maybe an example of something where you’ve used science to, to, in an artistic way, or maybe where you’ve taken something that is art in a sense, and imbued it with a bit of science?
Dr. Hoby Wedler 37:56
Yes, well, sure. A really interesting case study, I think, is a good example of, you know, really understanding this intersection where we were able to apply it in a real world example. So this whole project started with a large tech company based out of Cupertino, California, to global tech company, reached out to their glass supplier, Japanese glass supplier and said, We need a glass that feels more silky, are hanging out with our new addition of phones and trackpads on our computers, and we need a glass that feels more silky. They have a really highly trained industrial design team. And that was the leader of the industrial design team that said that to the glass company. And the glass companies stretch their hands. We haven’t we make glass you know, we make glass for your motor industry, make glass for the tech industry, yada yada, right, we thought about what silky glass means they’re like, What are you? What are you looking for? And they said, Well, we don’t we don’t really know what that means. Either.
Dr. Russell Strickland 38:57
years? No, we don’t like it. We needed to be better.
Dr. Hoby Wedler 39:00
Yeah, we just needed to feel more silky. And the glass company said, well, let’s let’s reach out to a creative company a really cool, you know, out of the box creative company. And that company happened to be IDEO. IDEO, and they’re based out of San Francisco, they’re global design company, you probably heard of them. And IDEO said, Hmm, we don’t really know. You really know what, how we can how we can really get people to understand glass texture, you know, the glass company can put all sorts of different coatings on glass. But how do we how do we get this message across to the industrial design team at this tech company? And IDEO said well, we do know this sensory expert, and that was me. I just finished my PhD and was launching my company now which is Senspoint and let’s call him so they called me. And what I did is I worked with a glass company on really understanding first of all what coatings they were applying to glass and how that might change. into the texture. And what we arrived at are four glass surfaces with four very different textures. And we came up with a two dimensional texture, sort of glass texture protocol, which is where you can the textures are going from almost sticky, to slick. So you can imagine like, if you rub your finger in a glass of being kind of sticky, all the way down to being really slick, where your finger just rubs right across it, even if you push down hard, it, it just moves. Or another metric is going from smooth to rough. So you can have a rough glass surface. That is also what I would call sticky, which provides some traction on your finger. So that was the science behind it when I said
Dr. Russell Strickland 40:44
two dimensions and that you could also have a rough texture that is still physically
Dr. Hoby Wedler 40:52
well sticky makes that as far as I could have a rough texture. It’s got some granularity to it, but slick, but you might call smooth as well. So it’s just like interest, you imagine an x and y and x and y axis on a graph on a piece of graph paper. You know, the x axis, let’s say it goes from sticky to slick, right, the y axis goes from you know, rough to rough, rough. So you can have something that’s super slick, and also super rough down in your down in your lower right quadrant there. That’s that’s real
Dr. Russell Strickland 41:21
thing. I wouldn’t have thought that necessarily. I would have thought those two things would be fairly related. That this way I get the slicker you get.
Dr. Hoby Wedler 41:30
I kind of thought that too until we really got in the lab and started working on it. So that was the science behind it. And the art artistic part of it was okay, how are we going to get a team of you know, out there industrial designers who are awesome artistic thinkers and industrial designers to understand this. So we ended up doing is I ended up building with IDEO, a tech day for this company where we brought all the industrial and all the graphic and product designers as well about 500 people through in total, and different stations where we paired glass texture with different foods. And at the end of the day, we paired glass texture with textures of wine on the palate. So one station, we paired glass texture with both fresh and dried fruit. And at another station, we paired class texture with cheese. And then like I said, at the end of the day, we brought everybody together and paired glass texture with wine. And it was amazing because they got it you know, it was like that they were taking something tangible. And I can describe how this cheese feels on my palate. Oh yeah, and I’m feeling this glass. And I can use similar words to describe it. So it was sort of this aha moment, which ultimately, and it sounds like a you know, sort of a long, roundabout thing. But it ultimately led to them making a decision about what glass they would use for their, for their next, you know, release of phones and trackpads. And to a greater or lesser extent, they’re still using this similar glass that we got them to arrive at. So I think I hope that example is sort of a decent succinct case study to sort of define this intersection that we’re talking about. That’s really cool. And from a business and I bet you it doesn’t hurt your clients. Kind of attitudes and, and, and appreciation of the work you’ve done if you get them drunk at the end of the presentation. That’s my trick, you know, I don’t know if my work is good or not. But if I get drunk at all, it all works out.
Dr. Russell Strickland 43:23
And if you pair it with enough wine, everybody’s happy about how it turned out.
Dr. Hoby Wedler 43:27
Right? So I say I’m a good cook, because because I like to make sure my dinner guests have had plenty to drink before the you know.
Dr. Russell Strickland 43:37
That’s right. How is it that food is always so good? Well, tell me a little bit about moving on from from that intersection of art and science. You mentioned your your TEDx talk was Sensory Literacy. What does that mean? And how to eat How should people become more sensory literate? in your in your point perspective?
Dr. Hoby Wedler 44:01
That’s a really great question. And simply put, I think sensory literacy, which I’ll explain momentarily, really leads to awareness. And I think that what we all can strive to do is to be more aware of our surroundings, both internally and externally. So what we’re thinking about what we’re processing in our minds, more internal, and external is more everything from relationships that we that we see around us, all the way through to, you know, how we how we brand something and how we market something and being just being aware, I think it’s so helpful and I’m actually doing some some coaching and motivational speaking and coaching I’m starting a coaching program myself around just coaching people to be more sense more aware of their senses more and and then ultimately lead to more general awareness, which I really think leads to a higher level of inclusivity of everybody.
Dr. Russell Strickland 44:55
So I’ll tell you a little bit about a, an experience I had when I was in high school. We had this thing that we call a leadership retreat. So we went off for a weekend and three days, maybe something like that. And purposely, we brought kind of leaders from the school, and then some of those kids that maybe could use a little bit of help. And got this group together. And there were several different exercises and experiences we went through. But one day we went, we had this experience where we each had to pull a slip of paper out of the hat. And the slip of paper said, I’m trying to remember exactly what it was. There were three, there were three, three things you could pull out a hat one says that you can’t bend your arms. And so we actually limited arms, so you couldn’t bend your arms. The other said you couldn’t talk. And the other was that you’re blindfolded that you couldn’t see. And we created these little triads, where we had to get from where we were in, and this was in like summer camp kind of environment. So we went from, where we were out the cabin, down the path or whatever, across uneven ground, to the cafeteria, where we picked out what foods we wanted, and came back to the table and sat down and ate them. Now, if your arms don’t bend that’s there are issues there. If you can’t speak, but you can see, again, there’s some issues there. And then if you can’t see, but you can feel and move things through
Dr. Hoby Wedler 46:29
everything else.
Dr. Russell Strickland 46:30
Yeah, no, it was really interesting to take people it was it was an icebreaker of sorts, but obviously much more involved in that. But to get people to appreciate what it’s like to take all of these things that we take for granted, and just not do one of them for a while and then see how you can, how you can succeed. Even with that, that sort of limitation placed on you temporarily, the appreciation we have for each other, and also for these senses was really heightened by that experience.
Dr. Hoby Wedler 47:03
Oh, that’s interesting. And I love things like that, because they just get you thinking differently. That’s ultimately, ultimately what I like doing with with sensory literacy in general, is just getting people thinking outside the box. And that’s why these blindfolded experiences, whether they’re tastings or otherwise are shown haven’t been so impactful. I think it’s because they just, they get people thinking a bit differently about their surroundings, and about what we the lives that we that we live. So to me, sensory literacy is very simple. It’s the fact that we should be able to take in information from all five senses, process that information, and make logical deductions from that information and, and create valuable content for our minds to consider. Right? So I don’t know. And I feel like if we’re really aware of all of our senses, not just being able to look at something and say, yeah, that’s a red fence. But being able to hear something and actually intelligently say what your what it is you think you’re hearing, or smell something on the air and say what you’re what you’re smelling, you know what any of these things, and it just creates a richer experience. And I really do believe that everybody blindsided otherwise, whatever, can learn to be a little bit more literate in their senses. And it’s something I’ve practiced in my non visual senses for my whole life. So I feel like I’m, I’m much probably more literate than most in my non visual senses, which allows me to overcome not having eyesight, and I say eye sight very deliberately, they’re not vision, I do think that all of us have vision, it’s just that some of us lack eyesight. And then ultimately, I just feel like if you’re, if you’re a good listener, if you listening, you don’t hear, you’re more aware, you listen in the process, and can be anything from the birds outside, if you’re walking into work in the morning, to listen to your partner, business partner, romantic partner, whatever. And not just hearing what they’re saying that actually listening and processing just creates this this level of awareness that I think fosters even more inclusivity. And the whole design behind what initially what I put together with Senspoint and what I’m bringing sort of more to my, to my personal brand, which is, which is you know, more more, what I’m doing just just personally right now, is bringing that that sense of awareness to both product design and experience design. And really, my branding companies, my two branding company Senspoint is going to remain a branding company, but the food and beverage company is actually under a rebrand and we’ll get to that in a second to a different name. All of those companies perform what I call multi sensory branding, which is that we don’t just create a good looking label, or a good looking brochure, we make it you think about what paper your labels on, we think about how the product sounds when you open it, you think about if it’s an edible or something you would ingest, how it smells and tastes. We want all these things to connect with each other. And to me, branding is multi sensory because we’re all so Sort of subconsciously sensory literate, it’s just not necessarily at the top of mind, if we can create wonderful, unique cohesive experience, experiences, across all experienced points of brand, we’re really creating something powerful and useful there. So that is, you know, I think we’re all visually literate. So if I said to you Russell you are a sighted man, if I said, was this, and I held up a picture of a red fence. Well, I think you’ve seen enough dividers between, you know, areas of land that are so called fences, that vocabulary word is fairly clear. That one’s fairly clear to me as well. But you also the color red, since childhood, I would argue it’s just ingrained in you you see it, and immediately come to that definition of Yep, this is red. I know what this is. Right. So that’s, that’s something that comes into your mind, and you know it, and you you’ve settled on it, and that you’re done. That makes sense, right? I think aromas can be the same thing in my mind, they are, they’re just vocabulary words that we know. And training ourselves in that vocabulary of sound, and aromatics and tastes and, and our sense of touch, and really touch mean both emotional feeling. And actual feeling, I think is a really important exercise. And it takes a lot of practice, it’s not something you can do overnight, it’s something you need to train yourself to do. But, you know, we use our eyesight for 85 to 90% of the information we take in from our surroundings. That’s really striking to me, because that’s 85 to 90%. So that means that we have four additional perfectly good senses that we’re only using to take in, you know, 10 to 15% of the information from our surroundings. It’s really interesting there.
Dr. Russell Strickland 51:47
Yeah, I think that that is really interesting. And I wonder, so I read an article, and it’s been a long time, I cannot tell you where it came from. But that talked about the idea that a definition or a theoretical framework for intelligence, is the extent to which you are aware of your surroundings. And they meant aware of your surroundings. And I think that deep level that you’re talking about? And so there’s a question as to whether if you practice this idea of sensory literacy, and you try to be more aware of your surroundings through aroma, you try to be more aware of your surroundings, through sound through tact or response, if you’re trying to use all of those senses, and you practice that, how does that change the way you process information from your environment? Generally? Because yes, you are going to pick up more information. So you’ll have more information at your fingertips to analyze or compute within the back of your brain. But how does that affect decisions that you make? Have you have you thought about this at all? Or do you have any insights there?
Dr. Hoby Wedler 52:52
Yeah, I thought a lot about this. And I think that what it creates is, is a more inclusive mindset and more understanding of the opposition, if you will, you know, when making decisions on, on what to do on how to do it. So it’s really interesting, you ask that because I have thought a lot about this, this level of inclusivity, and how we can create that and foster inclusive culture, through the sense of being literate in all five senses. And, and really mainly a sense of being able to listen to what’s being said, and, you know, also, just in a, in a sense of, of being generally aware, and one area that I think that that creates inclusivity if you will just just hear me out here, do you want me here, um, you know, let’s, let’s consider so we’re talking in the end of the third quarter in 2020, we’re doing this interview on the 29th of September 2020. And anyone who remembers 2020, or is still living, it knows that it’s been a year of a lot of a lot of racial racial violence, and also the pandemic that we’re having. But I’d say about the just some of the some of the issues that we’ve been seeing with them, you know, with law enforcement officers, using using lethal force on on certain minority groups, I think a lot of that could be solved by awareness on both hypercard you know, a heightened sense of awareness, and literacy and in our senses on both sides. So if we look at it from the, the, you know, the law enforcement side, I think, I think there’s there, you know, we need to be more careful about, not about, you know, we need to be careful with with what we do and not to necessarily take action right away and really to, to think before we take action, but But then again, you know, those law enforcement officers have been trained that when they feel their life is being threatened, they need to they need to do something about it. And you know, of course, there are going to be some some bad you know, some mistakes made and some some people who truly shouldn’t be in the, in the profession, but what I’m, what I’m getting at here is that, you know, on the other side, I would be telling the minorities who are saying Hey, wait a minute, why are we getting Why are we getting? Why are people getting shot is like, chances are the person doing the shooting said, Stop, you know, put that down in a letter, you know, stop doing what you’re doing. You know, it’s someone with a with a large gun, it’s telling me to stop. I’m gonna hear what they’re saying. And I’m gonna listen and stop. You know? So
Dr. Russell Strickland 55:23
yeah, there are elements on on both sides. I think when you mentioned training, I think that that’s super important on both sides.
Dr. Hoby Wedler 55:30
That Exactly. And that’s one goal that I have is to, is to train, for instance, you know, law enforcement agencies about how to be more aware, even when dealing with people with disabilities, but also to treat the groups that are feeling jeopardized, how to be more aware of, of law enforcement, you know, and that’s, that’s just an example, I think of how this, this sense of awareness can lead to general decision making in general intelligence.
Dr. Russell Strickland 55:53
Right? No, I think that that’s, that’s true. That
Dr. Hoby Wedler 55:58
I didn’t think of anything political, I’m really trying to be a thing. That is an analogy.
Dr. Russell Strickland 56:04
Yeah, I think here that there’s no reason for people, but this is a message I certainly would like to get out into the world is that there are real issues in this world, and they don’t have to always be tribalized, they don’t have to always be us versus them. That the idea of understanding and and, and coming up with some middle ground, I think is important. So I think certainly, I’ve read plenty of stories of officers who have responded to cases where they were trying to do a well check or safety call and someone that has some sort of disability, perhaps a mental issue, and the officer ended up responding with deadly force. Let’s figure out a way to train that differently. Maybe police officers aren’t the right group of people to handle that situation, maybe they just need to be trained to handle that situation differently. But if someone’s being called in to protect the safety of someone who is not in complete control of their, their faculties, let’s let’s try to make sure that that doesn’t ever result in in in deadly force, unless it’s just plain clear that the officer is, you know, in imminent physical danger. But on the on the flip side, there are certainly plenty of cases that admittedly don’t get written up in the in the news media, those those visits going well. And so we have to understand what what’s the difference between those those visits going well, and those visits going tragically? And how can both sides so to speak, contribute to successful outcomes?
Dr. Hoby Wedler 57:36
To acknowledge to that we’re we are all only human. Yeah, I think we got to cut each other some slack on all sides.
Dr. Russell Strickland 57:45
If we could say one thing for 2020. And for the last several years, honestly, it’s it. Listen, none of us were brought into this world with an instruction manual. None of us knows, honestly, what the hell we’re doing. We’re all just trying, none of us have more advantages than others. Coming into this world, the way the world is laid out, our family or whatever, histories that we come into this world that’s just almost unavoidable. But
Dr. Hoby Wedler 58:16
the mistakes that we make end in you know, and in someone’s last loss of life, and to be truthful, some of these things seem very deliberate. And we’re not, we’re not mistakes made. But for the vast majority of them are our mistakes. And I hate to say it, but we’re all gonna make mistakes,
Dr. Russell Strickland 58:32
right? And mistakes can happen. Hopefully,
Dr. Hoby Wedler 58:34
we’re all gonna learn from those mistakes can
Dr. Russell Strickland 58:36
happen at all levels. And sometimes those are a matter of life and death. And sometimes they aren’t. So yes, if you’re lucky enough to be in a career where your mistakes generally are a matter of life and death. Cut some of these other folks some slack, when when they’re dealing with high stress situations, where their mistakes can be a matter of life and death. But if you know, this is something I was talking to my son about the other day, he said, well, we all need to be treated as citizens. And I think Yeah, but if you’re taking on responsibilities, where you do have, you know, kind of life and death issues at matters of confidentiality, or privilege that you’re dealing with, like a law enforcement officer, like a physician, like a lawyer, like a therapist, then you’re not just going to be treated like a citizen, but it’s somebody who has an additional level of responsibility. And we should treat all of those things seriously. And that goes for you. And I in some sense, as well as we’re sitting here talking about all sorts of things with, with the first name, Doctor, we need to work differently than they might consider someone else’s.
Dr. Hoby Wedler 59:38
With those two letters, you know, in front of our names, we take on a certain responsibility.
Dr. Russell Strickland 59:43
It’s true. That’s totally true. I tell my students with Dissertation Done all the time. Listen, you know, when when you graduate, people that knew you before they’re going to treat you just the same. Everybody else is going to look at you like you walk on water just about you You gotta you gotta treat that with with a certain amount of respect and reverence the the amount of authority that you’re going to command.
