Bonus: Meet the Minds Behind the 'Dope Labs' Podcast
Hosts: Anna Reser and Rebecca Ortenberg
Guests: Zakiya Whatley and Titi Shodiya
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Falling asleep under a million stars by Springtide
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In this bonus episode, Rebecca and Anna talk with the hosts of the Dope Labs Podcast Zakiya Whatley and Titi Shodiya about how Dope Labs came to be, how they approach each episode, and how the podcasting landscape needs to change.
Show Notes
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Rebecca: Welcome to this special bonus episode of the Lady Science Podcast. I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Anna: And I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: And today we're excited to be welcoming the voices and minds behind the Spotify podcast Dope Labs. In each episode of Dope Labs, scientists and best friends Dr. Titi Shodiya and Dr. Zakiya Whatley share scientific principles with a healthy dose of pop culture, bringing on experts that help them understand how fireworks go boom, what keeps friendships strong, how con artists manipulate us, and what science can teach us about making our skin glow. So thanks so much for joining us today.
Anna: So just to jump in and get us started, can you tell us a little about how Dope Labs came to be?
T. Shodiya: So Zakiya and I met in grad school in North Carolina. She was there before I was. And when I got there I thought, "Okay, nose to the grindstone. You gotta get outta here. You're tryin' to get a doctorate. You can't be playin' around." And I was absolutely crushing myself with work.
T. Shodiya: And so I decided, "Okay, I need to start looking for community so that I don't feel so sad all the time." And I joined this graduate student group for graduate students of color. So it was PhD students of color that was kind of to build community and things like that. And Zakiya was the president of it at the time.
T. Shodiya: So that was when I first met her, and she had such a way about her. She has a very electric personality. She has a great smile. Everybody loved Zakiya, so I just gravitated towards her. And then we became very fast friends, and so now I call her my cousin. And so over that time she helped me with not taking myself so seriously and having a little bit of fun in graduate school.
Z. Whatley: And Titi helped me add some rigor and the structure I needed.
T. Shodiya: So from there Zakiya graduated and left. And she was a professor in Pennsylvania, and I was still in graduate school. And then after that I did a postdoc. But then we had always had these really great experiences together, usually when we were out at the bar, and we would run into people who would say, "What do you do?" And we say, "Oh, we have PhDs, da, da, da, da." And people would just start asking us all of these random questions.
T. Shodiya: It seemed like questions that were eating them alive from when they were little. And we would say, "Okay, yeah, I think I know the answer to that." Or we'd say, "I don't know the answer to that, but let's have a conversation, and maybe we could get to the answer." And it was just so much fun. So we were like, "This could possibly be a really great podcast." And so that's where the idea was born.
Z. Whatley: And then later on, I guess I was still in Pennsylvania at the time.
T. Shodiya: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Z. Whatley: And I was in the process of quitting that job, leaving there and going to my job now. And in the middle of the night, I sent a link to Titi, which is not abnormal.
T. Shodiya: Not abnormal for Zakiya.
Z. Whatley: I keep different hours.
T. Shodiya: Yes. She is a vampire.
Z. Whatley: And so I sent a link. It was for Spotify's Sound Up. And I said, "Oh, my goodness. Look at this program. It's for women of color who are interested in podcasting. We've always talked about it. Why don't we apply?" Well, that's what I said in my head. I just sent the link.
T. Shodiya: She didn't send all those details in the email. It was just a link. And so I was like, "I don't know if I click on this link if my computer will explode, if all of my information's gonna be sold to someone in Russia."
Z. Whatley: The dark web.
T. Shodiya: I don't know. I don't know. And so I opened the link 'cause my friend Zakiya never steers me wrong and was like, "Wow, okay. Yeah. I think this is a good idea, but I don't think Zakiya has the bandwidth to try and work through this application." 'Cause she was, like she said, in transition between two different jobs.
T. Shodiya: And so I said, "Okay, well, I'm gonna try. I'll try my hand at it. I'll fill out the application. We've talked about this idea enough where I feel like I should be able to submit a good application." So I filled it out and I hit Send. And then a few weeks later Zakiya was moving into her new place and I was helping her.
Z. Whatley: Yes. And I said, "Oh, my gosh. Have you seen this tweet? It says that over—" No. Was it 80 or 18?
T. Shodiya: Eighteen.
Z. Whatley: Over 18,000 people applied for this. Those odds are worse than gettin' a grant funded. There is no way we could get this. I'm so glad we didn't waste our time.
T. Shodiya: And I said, "Well, I submitted an application, so our idea is one of those 18,000. But I think it's really good. I already took off work for that week that they're gonna be doin' Sound Up because I'm just tryin' to put it out into the universe and let the universe confirm that for me and manifest that." And she was like, "Girl, you are crazy."
T. Shodiya: And a few weeks after that we got an email sayin' that we were selected. And we were in New York and did Sound Up, ending up winning. And so we got some seed money to start our idea, and we hit the group running. And that's when Dope Labs was born.
Rebecca: Yeah. That's amazing. And one of the fun things about your podcast that I imagine Spotify thought was so cool is the way that you connect science with pop culture and memes and social phenomenon. And so I was wondering how you guys thought about that approach, and also are there ways that you come up with the topics for the episode? Like for example, do you start with the pop culture and then find the science that goes with it, or you start with a science topic you wanna talk about and then find the unique in?
Z. Whatley: I think it's always the pop culture first. What we think about how do we engage folks? How do we make this interesting to people? If you think back to any classes you've taken, nobody wants to go "Chapter One. The mitochondria's the powerhouse. This is the nucleus." Nobody cares about that. I wanna know what's goin' down my [unclear 06:52] and what's the science behind that? Right?
Z. Whatley: That's the way. You grab what people are already interested in, and then you say, "Look at all this science behind here." Just lift up this thin veil. I think that's what we're trying to do. I think that's always been our approach when Titi taught, when I taught. That's always been our style, right? And so I think we just wanted to bring a little bit more of that. That's just the other part of grad school that we also brought to this podcast. Not just our friendship.
Rebecca: Yeah. Nice. Very cool. Yeah. I loved what you said earlier about when people would ask you all these questions and both you wanted to give them answers, but you also wanted to be like, "I don't know the answer, but let's talk about it and do some looking into it and figure it out together." I think that's just such a cool approach to teaching anything, to good conversation. And I really like that that spirit comes into the podcast, too.
Z. Whatley: Absolutely.
T. Shodiya: Yeah. We like the way that our podcast is formatted because we don't position ourselves as all-knowing. We don't know a lotta stuff. I know I don't know a lotta stuff. And so the way that we try and set up the podcast is that we don't know, so we're asking questions that we feel like everyone else'll have and the questions that we honestly have and we walk through it with everyone so they feel like they're on this journey with us and that they're incorporated into our friendship as well 'cause all of our listeners are our friends.
Rebecca: We love it when once in a while, someone on social media will be like, "I feel like I'm having a conversation with my friends about this topic when I listen to Lady Science." And I think it's the best compliment.
T. Shodiya: Absolutely. I love it.
Rebecca: So you're now in your third season of the podcast, and you started by dropping an episode in June that was really interesting about the history of science and racism and race science and the impact of racism on science today. And both because it was really interesting and because we do a lot of history of science stuff—we yell about this stuff a lot—it definitely caught my eye. And I was wondering if you would mind talking a little bit about how that episode came together and what it was like to research it at this particular moment that we are all living through.
Z. Whatley: I think this episode came together. It's a moment in time, right? This is what's happening. We were seeing this is a moment when everyone else had their eye on race in America and really across the globe. And I think somethin' that we found, we saw the Black birders. So Black birders. This week is Black in Chem Week. So in the STEM community we were seeing these different groups of folks poppin' up and sayin' like, "We're here." At the end of season two we had just done a Black in STEM episode in February.
Z. Whatley: And one of the things that often comes up is this feeling that science is above racism, which if you're in science, you're wondering, "How could that be?" But this feeling that science is so objective that it doesn't bend. It doesn't have any bias with it. And that's certainly not the case, and we know that's not the case. And so what we wanted to do was to say, "Let's go back to the origins" because sometimes it's hard for people to see when you're in something, right? And so we're sayin', "This feels so normalized to you, right, that you don't even know where the bias began. You don't even know where the wrongdoing started." And it's just ingrained in the sciences now.
Z. Whatley: And so I was reading Angela Saini's book, and Titi and I talked about this. And I said, "What do you think?" We had a lotta different angles. It always starts with, like I told you, the pop culture moment. And I said, "Well, there are so many different ways we could take this. What do you think is the best approach?" And we just started diggin' and digging, and this felt like the right angle to go, the right direction to go in. And she's an incredible science writer.
Z. Whatley: And I was like, "She's not on Twitter. She's not active right now because she's writing, okay? So there's no way we're gonna be able to get her." And our producer said, "I'll just send her an email." First of all, cold calls, cold emails like that terrify me. But she sent her an email, and she replied and said, "Oh, yes, I'd love to." And so then I was like, "We really gotta get ready."
T. Shodiya: "We've got to prepare."
Z. Whatley: But we knew a lotta this stuff, right? You learn these things. I learned a lot of this stuff—I went to a Historically Black College, Hampton University. This was built into my Intro Bio and then some of my genetics courses, and I used to teach a class called The Fault in Our Genomes that explored—you can see I'm a fan, right?
Anna: Sorry. I love it. I love it.
Rebecca: Yes.
Z. Whatley: It explored some of these ideas and some of the early beginnings of genetics and personal genomics and some of the troubling things around it. And so I was aware a little bit, but I found myself so furious because I felt like we're still repeating the same things from way before, right?
T. Shodiya: Right. Because one of the things that Angela Saini says in the episode is the barrier that people can't get past is that race is a social construct, that it is not real. And people still, even after we put out that episode, they still were struggling with that one piece. They were like, "But you're Black." And I'm like, "Right. Right. Right. Right. That's true. But that's made up. It's made up. All these things are made up by people who were trying to create a hierarchy and make themselves superior to other people. We are not different. We have different skin tones, but we are not different from each other."
T. Shodiya: And so it was really interesting still having to have that conversation even post the episode, and we're still seeing a lot of engagement around that episode because people are still sharing it and people's like, "Oh, my gosh. This really opened my eyes. I don't even know." Now it's like, "I have to rethink everything." They have to unlearn so much just so that they can relearn this new stuff.
T. Shodiya: It's like if somebody asked you, "How do you put on a sock?" It's so a part of your every day that you're like, "I don't even know how to describe that." And so now unlearning that and unlearning what they thought they knew about race and what that meant and what being Black is and what being white is and relearning what it actually is—a social construct—it's mindblowing for a lotta people.
T. Shodiya: And doing it during this time, where it's at the forefront of everybody's mind, I thought it was perfect. I loved that we were able to get that episode out at the time that we did because everyone was looking for resources and ways to educate themselves. And I'm just glad that we were able to be a part of that conversation.
Anna: You're talking about getting Angela Saini on the podcast and doing a terrifying cold email. Oh, boy. Especially like you said, she was very public about "I'm writing. I'm out of here. Please don't talk to me. I'm very busy." Oh, man. That's brave.
Anna: So I wanted to ask about other guest experts that you have on your show. And many of the people you have on your show are women of color, and I think that's pretty special given how white and how male science expert representation is. So can you talk a little bit about—obviously with Angela Saini you were reading her book. But for other people, how do you choose who to have on your show and why? And how does that whole process work?
Z. Whatley: I'm gonna get to your question. We will.
T. Shodiya: Oh, no.
Anna: Uh-oh.
Z. Whatley: Something you said just really stuck out to me about who gets to be an expert and how white and male the category of "expert" is, right? Titi and I have talked about this a bit. There's something about science and the way we're trained as scientists that supports a culture of gatekeeping, right? Somebody tells you when it's a good time for you to apply. Well, they're supposed to, I think. Somebody tells you, "Yes, you're ready to take your qualifying exams." Somebody tells you, "Yes, you're ready to defend. Yes, you're ready to leave your postdoc. Yes, you're ready to go on the market." Now we think, no matter how great your work is, now you can get tenure. Even if it's great early, right?
Z. Whatley: And so there's this culture of other people, this external validation, to say you're good enough or you're expert enough. And I think we've really tried to push back against that, right? And so one thing that really stands out to me, and I'll let Titi chime in about some of our other experts, but we've reached out to a grad student. And I heard her speak, and I said, "You would be great on our podcast. We can build a whole episode around this." And she was terrified. And she was like, "I don't know."
Z. Whatley: And she was so self-critical in a way that we don't see with other experts and in other conversations we've had, even if someone tells us something that's wrong when we fact check it, right? You think they come back and say, "I heard this one thing I said, it mighta been wrong. It could be." No. They don't do all of that self-editing.
Z. Whatley: And it is both great for us to be in a position where we can highlight some other voices that are often muted by the star experts that we typically see. But it also makes me a little bit sad, too, right, that you internalize these things and without knowing it, it feels like that's the process. So yes, now we can answer the question. Sorry.
T. Shodiya: Yeah. It's about who our culture decides is credible. And they don't lend credibility to people that look like me and Zakiya or other iterations of us. You know what I mean? And, I mean, we've even seen it in our comments sometimes, where they're like, "I don't like the way y'all talk" or "Why did Titi say this like that?" when I'm using slang. That is, me using slang basically bothered them. And they said, "It makes you less credible." I'm like, "I don't think that's how that works. I don't think that me using slang makes me less credible because this PhD doesn't really care." You know what I mean? And I still have my PhD even after using slang.
T. Shodiya: And but they feel like you have to sound a certain way, you have to look a certain way, you have to do all these things. And so with our guests, we try and break that where it's just like we wanna highlight people of color, women of color, and people in all of these marginalized communities that don't necessarily fit that mold that our society says is a scientist because we're out there. All of us are out there, and we're doing the work. It's just that nobody is passing us the mic. And so that's what we really try to do with our guests.
Anna: Yeah. And it wasn't a digression about expertise. That is an answer to my question absolutely.
Rebecca: Yes. Yes. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. So also digging a little bit deeper into the problems of who we consider an expert—see, this leads just perfectly into the next question. So both, of course, science and podcasting are fields that are pretty notorious for being white and male. And so I was wondering if you'd be willing to talk a little bit about what your experiences have been like a little bit more and what some of the particular challenges you think that Black women face doing the work that you do.
Z. Whatley: Gather round. No. No. Right. And I was just thinking—and given that, right, there are so many things that I know and I know Titi knows I would love to say. And I am not protected, right? If I say those things, they follow me. And, sure, there are consequences for the words you say, but even if I speak my own truth, right, there's risk in that even in places, in spaces where you no longer exist. We know the science community is small.
Z. Whatley: I think a lot has changed, but in similar ways, and a lot hasn't. I think about the community that Titi joined when I was at Duke. I was already there. She came on board. She tells the story in a different way. I think of myself as a Venus flytrap. And I'm like, "Oh, look, a new friend." And I caught her.
Z. Whatley: But I think those same problems where we were feeling excluded or not really aware of what we needed to do to move, to advance, the social unwritten rules around grad school, those things just follow you everywhere you go. That happened at the grad school phase. It happened at the postdoc phase. I can speak for myself that it happened at the postdoc phase. It happened when I joined a tenure-track position.
Z. Whatley: And then at some point you throw your hands up. Some people do. I did, right? And I think a lotta times the question that I've always asked and I usually ask myself and then I ask Titi is like, "Do I want a seat at this table?" I think so often people say like, "This is the top of the mountain," and this is where you're tryin' to go. And imagine getting there and people are like, "Oh, no, you don't have on the right shoes. You're not wearing Merrells." And then I was like, "How am I supposed to build a community for other folks to follow me or to come here if I have no community, right? And how am I supposed to sustain myself?"
Z. Whatley: And so I think there is all the same things we were trying to figure out and crowdsourcing for ourselves at the grad level, it happens as you move up in hierarchy in academia. But then also there are fewer folks to crowdsource with, right? And I think it becomes quite challenging. And I think we see some similar things. Podcasting is going through a reckoning of its own right now.
Rebecca: Yeah.
T. Shodiya: Yeah. I think another this is that with a lotta these places that are providing resources to folks, they're providing resource to the same folks every single time, the same types of folks. And that's the reason why the podcasting landscape looks the way it does. There isn't a lack of Black, brown people that have podcasts. There's a lot of 'em. It's just that we don't know about them because they're not being highlighted like some of these other podcasts are being highlighted.
T. Shodiya: And so we're not a part of the podcasting machine, so I don't know what the strategy is, but there are some really great stories out there being told by people of color that deserve more shine than they get. And I know with the reckoning that the podcast community's goin' through right now and the way that some of these places are handling Black creators, I mean, it's no wonder that people of color feel some type of way about becoming a part of that space.
Z. Whatley: Yeah. And I think that's the thing, Titi, you have highlighted something about. I mean, one of the issues is discovery. It's not. I think that, yes, what Titi and I are able to do is a lotta fun. It feels magical to us. We like recording together. It's a lotta cackling, too. But I think there are plenty of other best friend pairs, right? And as much as we need to hear—as much as our story is important, there are plenty other stories that are just as important, plenty of other creators that could be as equally or better suited to do this than us.
Z. Whatley: And so I just look at it. I've always thought about this as a discovery kinda thing, and your usual suspects are the people who get the shine, right? But I think we saw there's no shortage of talent. In June when everybody wanted to make the list of whether it was a Black creator, Black actor, Black accounting firm, Black shoe salesman—
T. Shodiya: I found Black toothpaste. I found Black mouthwash. I'm not even jokin'. I was just like, "I need some Black-owned toothpaste." I Googled it. A buncha companies popped up.
Rebecca: That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah.
Z. Whatley: And so it's not about this small pool or these things not existing. It is equal opportunity for discovery. And that's also a part of the credibility conversation. And these things, unfortunately, they're not unique to science. We see it in podcasting. We see it in acting. We see it everywhere, in entertainment. We see it everywhere. Sorry.
Anna: No, no, no. No. I'm just tryin' to figure out a nice way to wrap that up because there's so much stuff in there that I think is really important for people to think about and take on. And we'll wrap up so we can [unclear 26:09] Titi's heart out, but thank you both so much for coming on the show and telling us about your show. And we were very happy that you reached out to us because then we got to know about your show. And so hopefully some of our listeners will become your subscribers, too. I think probably a lot of them will.
T. Shodiya: We would love that.
Rebecca: Yeah. I think so. If you guys like us, if Lady Science listeners enjoy listening to us yell and laugh about science, then you're definitely going to enjoy these two yelling about science.
T. Shodiya: Yeah. You can listen to Dope Labs Podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter at @dopelabspodcast. You can follow me at @dr_tsho and Zakiya at @zsaidso on Instagram and Twitter.
Rebecca: Like our episode today? Leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions about anything we talked about, you can tweet us at @ladyxscience or use the hashtag #ladyscipod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, articles and essays, pitch us an idea, and more, visit ladyscience.com.
Rebecca: Remember, we're an independent magazine, and we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one-time donations. And both of those things you can do by visiting ladyscience.com/donate. Until next time, you can find us in Facebook at @ladysciencemag and on Twitter and Instagram at @ladyxscience.
