Lulu Miller:
She finally looked at me and was just like, “What are you doing here? Your questions aren’t going to bring him back.” I didn’t have an answer. And I remember driving back 14 hours to New York through this thunderstorm just thinking, I don’t have an answer. I don’t have the backbone. I don’t have the ethical compass to be doing this work. This microphone is too powerful and I have not grown up enough to hold it. And at that time, I was just like, I want out. I should never do this. I’m messing with people’s lives. I’m making people feel worse. I don’t belong here.
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode writer and radio host, Lulu Miller talks about the conflicts in her career and about going deep into reporting.
Lulu Miller:
Literally smelling the pocket notebooks in his archives that I eventually visited that had been collecting the sweat near his heart, I got intimate with this guy.
Debbie Millman:
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning journalist, an essayist, the co-host of Radiolab, and the founder of the podcast, Terrestrials. She’s also the co-founder of Invisibilia, the groundbreaking NPR show that explored the invisible forces that shape human behavior. Lulu is also a prolific writer, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Virginia Quarterly Review and Catapult. And her first book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post, The Smithsonian, and so many others. Known for her curiosity, her rigor, and unmistakable voice, Lulu’s work blends science, philosophy, and personal storytelling in ways that make us rethink what we think we know about the world and about ourselves. Lulu Miller, welcome to Design Matters.
Lulu Miller:
Oh, Debbie, it’s so nice to be here.
Debbie Millman:
So Lulu, I want to start with this question. It was very bewildering to me actually. Is it true that your least favorite word in the world is cerulean?
Lulu Miller:
I hate it. I can’t believe you found that random interview. Yes. I think cerulean is like the epitome of everything wrong with words. I think it is this overly fancy, showy word for something that we all have access to, a beauty, we all have access to, the sky. The color is one of my favorite things that is out there. And then this word, to me, it’s just too fancy. And I get that maybe in the way it sounds, it kind of sounds like pools, and it’s like cerulean, I do get little images in my head, but I just think it’s too fancy and it just makes people feel bad who don’t know what it means. And I hate that word when I see it.
Debbie Millman:
Do you hate the color?
Lulu Miller:
I love the color. I think it is one of the best colors, and that’s probably why I feel so passionately about the word. And if I hear someone using it, I try not to be judgy, but I judge. Oh yeah. Who are you trying to shut out with that word? And what pedestal are you trying to put yourself on top of? Yeah, I really have beef with that word.
Debbie Millman:
Well, in the four-color printing process, we have a bunch of different colors, one of which is a word that I hate, but I also hate the color, which is cyan. Very, very close cousins of cerulean.
Lulu Miller:
Yeah. Why do you hate that? Why do you hate the word?
Debbie Millman:
The name is so … Cyan? Really ugly, ugly word.
Lulu Miller:
Well, to me, cyan, I don’t know. The Y gives it a little shimmer. I like the cyan. Anyway, it’s so weird, these associations we bring, but I …
Debbie Millman:
I love that you have words that you love and hate. I do too. And it’s fun to be able to talk to that with somebody that doesn’t think I’m weird. Lulu, you grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. Your father was a science professor, your mother was a professor of humanities. Not a surprise you started writing at a very young age, and I read that you did this by taking reams of computer paper, this sort of old school continuous accordion sheet with caraway perforations on the side from your dad’s computer to his printer and wrote for hours without ever tearing the paper. So this long sheet of paper would emerge with your writing. How long did the accordion paper get?
Lulu Miller:
I mean, these questions are so great. It would be longer than the bed I was lying on, and I would write on my stomach. I would go into my parents’ bedroom when they were out doing other things and just feel like the queen bed was this massive pool of … Like a horizon. Anything was possible. And then the paper itself would feel like sledding. I could go anywhere, and I am still doing it. I mean right here, I still kind of do a version of it. I always write, I’m just holding up these notes and I add … Some words get big and some get small. And I think it was just this feeling of I can take this story wherever it goes. And usually when I was little, they were just wild things about talking animals and oh, a bat and oh, here’s a sunken boat. Let’s get the bat. If it got on the steering wheel of the boat, could it lodge it out of the mud and take it down the river?
And just kind of keep doing this mix of my imagination and then physical reality and just keep things seeming where those two things with kind of the imagination with the constraint of physical reality would go. And there something so inviting about that literal white page and words being able to in moments become drawings and then go back to words and yeah, it’s like I’m getting chills right now thinking about it just because it felt so delicious and fun, a really neat way to just kind of escape.
Debbie Millman:
I was really fascinated by that bat story mostly because somehow in that story, your dad is able to catch the bat in Tupperware.
Lulu Miller:
Yeah. So that one I think was inspired by this bat that flew into our house and my dad went up on a ladder to get it in Tupperware, and we all, my mom and sisters and I ran out. I don’t know why we were so afraid of the bat, but it was some instinctual human … They’re not rodents, but whatever, flying thing, response. But then we left him there and he was screaming, “Help, help, help,” because he hadn’t brought up a top or a piece of paper. So then there was this angry bat in the Tupperware, and then finally I think my mom went back in and got him a top, and then he took it out.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I learned from your book that we’ll talk about in a bit about the fact that bats aren’t rodents, but we’ll talk about that later. But it is a fascinating fact. When you were seven years old, you went on vacation with your family to Wellfleet and there standing in a marsh, you asked your father if he knew the meaning of life. What did he tell you?
Lulu Miller:
Yup. He kind of took a big what I believed to be delighted pause, and then he kind of chuckled and said, “There is no meaning. There’s no magic. There’s no point. There’s no plan, there’s no destiny. There’s no God, there’s no heaven.” Just stamped out everything including meaning. I mean, which was really interesting. And then he went on this tirade about how we’re no different than the ants right below our feet and we’re just kind of walking around, evolution happened to have put us here on the planet, and if you look at the whole timeline of evolution, we’re this tiny pinch that’s just here at this moment and we’ll probably be gone soon, and things like cockroaches and horseshoe crabs will probably outlive us and we’re not any more important to the world or the planet than anything else. And it’s all kind of random. And then I think he paused and said, “Actually, we might be less important to the planet than many things like ants that at least decompose particles and sometimes aerate the soil,” and I don’t see us doing much of that. So yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Did that mean that he didn’t think that anything mattered?
Lulu Miller:
He walks around and says stuff like that all the time, not in a depressive way, in a very delightful nihilist, carpe diem sort of way, and in a sort of playfully provocative way. He certainly says that, and I certainly believed that for a long time. Although watching him, I think things really do matter to him. I think people matter to him and making people feel good matters to him. I think ceramics, he got back into throwing pots in his retirement, matters to him. I think humor matters to him. You see things that matter, but he would say no.
Debbie Millman:
It’s a big concept to share with a seven-year-old, and you described your father’s answer to your question as a kind of thunderbolt. What did it feel to be handed that truth at seven?
Lulu Miller:
I mean, it felt normal. Now that I have an almost seven-year-old, I think that I am taken aback of, not even that it was harsh, but how declarative it was. It was its own kind of certainty and its own kind of dogma, which I just being such a daddy’s girl believed and didn’t question for a long time. But at the time it felt like, oh, it was the spiritual truth that I then just needed to, and a part of me still believes it. I haven’t totally shaken it at all. So I think it just felt like, okay, well that feels like truth, and somehow if I abide by that, I’ll get to a place where I’m like this guy who loves his family and loves his work and doesn’t really care what people think of him and is weird and funny and seems to be pretty happy. So it felt like a key. It felt true.
Debbie Millman:
Thereafter, you’ve written about how many of the big questions that you ask your parents about life were met with a mix of nihilism or ambiguity, and it seems looking at your timeline that this is also when you started to feel questions about what it meant to be happy or depressed. You started to see a therapist. Do you think that that had any correlation?
Lulu Miller:
Oh, yeah. I don’t think it made me depressed or anything like that, but I do think that when I got to my lowest, and I feel so much more comfortable talking about this now that I’ve written about it, but once I would feel suicidal, which now I’m like, oh, I believe about 50% of people feel that at some point. I don’t think it’s as scary of a thing to say as I used to. But yeah, once I felt like, oh, life is too hard or humanity is too hard on people, and I don’t have any hope that we’re going to change because I don’t have faith. I don’t have a religious system. I don’t think that evolution necessarily guarantees any kind of moral evolution. And if I just feel small and not good at changing the world and not good at feeling happy, and I just feel sad about the way certain people are being treated and I don’t have hope in our species, then some days I would want to leave the planet and leave existence.
And that’s when I would think about it. That’s when it would rise up and be like, there’s no point. It doesn’t matter. And I think I would always remember feeling like, oh, well, if I’m someone who came out, who evolution spat out with thinner skin and life hurts, then I guess if nothing matters except maybe our sensory experiences and it feels painful to be alive, then maybe I’ll just take myself out. And that’s when it would come back up. It was right when I’d be at the edge and then this thing felt like a neon sign saying go over. I couldn’t find a chain link fence. I couldn’t find a reason not to, although I guess obviously I did because spoiler alert, I’m still alive.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you described feeling at that time that you had a parable sized hole in your heart, and you have spoken candidly about trying to end your life when you were 15. After you left the medical facility, when you recovered, you’ve written about how your body was probably crying for help, but your words and your brain were still smiling and laughing and reassuring that you were fine.
Lulu Miller:
If not more, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I did that too as I was growing up, I went through quite a lot of really terrible abusive experiences, but always wanted to be the happy girl, wanted to make sure no one thought that I was damaged or that I was anything but as perfect as I could possibly pretend to be.
Lulu Miller:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
For you, was that a survival mechanism? Did you feel that you were less than people if you weren’t happy or smiling all the time?
Lulu Miller:
I mean, I was horribly embarrassed because word got out and I wasn’t allowed to go on this art trip I was so excited about because the school thought I was too much of a risk, and I think I wanted … A, I didn’t want any of my friends or adults to think that I was a concern. I think that was the biggest thing is I wanted to show that, okay, this community of people knew about it in my school. And after that moment, I just wanted to project, I think, I don’t know. I think, okay, you know what I think it partly was? Because I don’t have that much faith or any belief in an arc that bends toward good, and because I saw humans doing such pain, I knew how to make people feel good. I did know how to do that. I think I learned how to do that in my family.
If I’m doing anything, I enjoyed making people feel good, not saying the kinds of things that make spikes come out, saying the kinds of things that ease the little scared animal person out and seeing what a difference that made with my oldest sister who was just horrifically bullied to the point of dropping out, and just how differently she could be if you were kind to her or not. It’s just simple, but I really wanted to make people feel better, and so I think I just wanted to double down and go back to that and be providing jokes and be providing an ear, and I’m not a thing you need to worry about. I want to worry about you. I’m just more comfortable in that space, and I felt like that’s one of the few things I know how to do that I think I can bring that’s good. And so I just wanted to get back there as quick as possible and then have more people later in my life have no clue I’d ever been that low. That felt important to me for so long. It doesn’t anymore.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I found it really, really, I don’t know that ironic is the right word here, but really quite compelling that you didn’t want anybody to worry about you, but you were worrying about everyone at that time. What were you worrying about?
Lulu Miller:
I mean, probably I was just worrying about the exact equal and opposite response in somebody else. I think I was just worrying about someone feeling alone in their room. I mean, probably just kind of the image of my oldest sister just at a period in her life where she was so lonely and had basically no one who understood her. That was kind of the formative concern of just not wanting someone to feel that awful, not wanting someone to feel that alone. And I think that was an initial driver, and I should say people totally worried about me. Both my sisters worried about me, my mom worried about me. I think my dad did in his way. I was being cared for, and I was so lucky in so many ways. It’s just sometimes you just come out all misshapen and oversensitive even when you have lots of resources.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I mean, it’s so interesting to think about the fact that you’re worrying about other people. You don’t want them to worry about you, but they’re worried about you and not wanting to let you know that they’re worried about you in an effort for everybody to protect each other and be cared for. At 16, you finally found a therapist. You’ve stated “The charade finally stopped,” and I’m really curious, what did she help you understand that no one else was able to up until that point?
Lulu Miller:
Monica Meehan McNamara, let’s shout out her full name. She was so great. She just helped me understand that you can have a dark thought and it doesn’t have to set off a red siren. I mean, that was one of the biggest things was it was the first place after all that where I was still really tangled on the inside. I could feel her concern and her care, but I also could feel like her curiosity to get beyond … Just like it was okay to have these hard thoughts, and that just felt like part of living. And she really didn’t care as much about the symptoms so much as what was going on on the inside. And she talked to me like an adult, and I think it was just like this space I could be really real and feel someone being really curious about me.
Debbie Millman:
At that point in your life, what did you think you wanted to do professionally?
Lulu Miller:
Oh, I wanted to be a novelist through and through. That was the dream. I didn’t know if I could, but that was like … I wanted to just stay in my pajamas all day, get my little cup of coffee, see the world for a moment, and then disappear into that same imaginative space that we talked about, the perforated paper, dreaming up a story. And I think, again, I just wanted to minimize interactions with the real world because they stressed me out. They made me sad, and they drained me, and I was intimidated. And so my dream life was to curl away from it all day.
Debbie Millman:
But you majored in history when you went to college?
Lulu Miller:
I did. I felt like I had a real lack of understanding of the broader world and how we got here. And I had taken a few classes in high school, but in my high school, you could drop history really early. So I did, and I had done all this art, and then I was in college, and I think I took a couple … I think maybe I took a philosophy class, and it was so heady and intimidating that I was like, okay, I don’t even understand all these different kinds of criticisms of ideas. I just want to learn about some facts before I’m out of here. So yeah, I majored in history in a way because I felt like I should. No one told me that, but I just felt like I needed to learn more about the world.
Debbie Millman:
After college, you moved into a basement apartment in Queens. Sounds swanky.
Lulu Miller:
Very. Four of us in a three-
Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah. I lived in a railroad flat with two other people. It was challenging. You began working as a woodworker’s assistant. I think at that point you also had some interest in sculpture.
Lulu Miller:
So also similarly in college, I majored in history, but I took as much studio art as I could. And I was doing that the whole way through, printmaking, painting, pottery, and then woodworking. And I just loved the smell of it. I loved building. I built a chair and I built this really weird standing light, and I think it just felt so satisfying to work with my hands. So I wasn’t very good, but I had some familiarity with the tools. And so I got this job off Craigslist for this guy, Rob Day, who had submitted to the Brooklyn Design Show, and he got a spot, but he got in based on tiny models and he’d never built the real ones. And so he hired me for a year basically to build out this line, and we built a bunch of tables and a bench and a credenza. And I just learned from him, day after day, he was in a shared communal space in Brooklyn and we had the radio on all day in that studio. And that was truly how I fell in love with radio.
Debbie Millman:
And you fell in love with This American Life and Radiolab?
Lulu Miller:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, of course.
Lulu Miller:
Yeah. It was 2005, and I mean, my parents had listened to NPR all the time as a kid, but I hated it as a kid. I was like, public radio sounds boring, get on jam and 94.5. But this just sounded so different to me. But the news shows too, Brian Lehrer, Leonard Lopate, just the morning news, I think I was absorbing information. That’s when I realized I loved listening. I just loved it. This American Life popped out as just this place with all this humor and irreverence and wild stories that were real. And then Radiolab just felt like this … It was early days of experimenting with sound in that way for journalism. And there were just these stories with these musical pockets of wonder, the kinds of questions you’re kind of told to stop asking. And here were these two adult men debating things with scientists, and it was just this beacon. I was like, I want to reside in there. I want to go there.
Debbie Millman:
Although you had no previous training in radio journalism, you wrote what you’ve described as a deranged formal intern love letter to Radiolab in order to trick them into giving you a job.
Lulu Miller:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
So did you write, “Dear Jad, dear Robert?” Who did you write it to? Do you remember any part of it?
Lulu Miller:
Yeah, I mean I wrote it to the whole team. I could probably find it. I’m sure I have it somewhere. But yeah, I mean basically I said, I have fallen in love with your show. I know you do not need me. I can tell based on your website that you are like a kitchen well stocked with incredible chefs. I know my line was like, “And sometimes too many chefs in the kitchen is a problem, but sometimes a chef walks by and sprinkles like a little hand of cilantro that brings everything together. I could beat your cilantro. Let me be your cilantro.” And then I remember it because they called me Cilantro for years. Yeah, that was my moonshot.
Debbie Millman:
You began volunteering one day a week while still working for the woodworker. You said they dropped you out of the nest really quickly.
Lulu Miller:
Oh, so quick.
Debbie Millman:
How? In what way?
Lulu Miller:
I mean, it was this tiny little shop. It was just the three of us up in the old WNYC building where we were up on the 27th floor and the bubblegum pink walls. I mean, the one I really remember, we were doing a show on self-deception, and these psychologists had done a survey of things that people might lie to themselves about if they enjoy their own bowel movements and if they’ve had rape fantasies and if they’ve had XYZ, all these things. And I took the survey out to Times Square and ask people, man on the street to answer the questions. I’m turning fuchsia right now, but I just did it. I mean, I just was like, they were like, “Oh, just go do that.” And there was no, “It’ll be scary. You’ll be Okay.” They’re like, “Oh, just go do that. Come back with some tape. Some people say yes, some people say no.”
And so I was just like, okay, sure, great. And then just freak out for about half an hour in Times Square and put on the headphones, take this super invasive shotgun mic out. And I remember going out with another reporter, Sally Herships, and she just was great at it. She was more experienced. And then my trick was like, just pretend you’re Sally. Whenever you do this, just pretend you’re Sally. You’re not Lulu, you’re Sally. And she’d go up, she’d be curious, she’d ask, she didn’t do a whole lot of disclaiming and apologize. She just did it and I would just pretend to be her. So it was stuff like that.
Debbie Millman:
Where on the continuum did people fall on the liking or not liking their bowel movements?
Lulu Miller:
I mean, a surprising amount of people answered that they did. I mean, a ton of people were like, “Oh, I don’t know.” But a ton of people, I mean, you can go back to that episode and listen to the tape. A lot of people answered honestly about stuff that felt taboo and I think even felt more taboo then when there wasn’t as much TikTok and a poop emoji, even just normalizing that it was, I remember it being shocking and funny.
Debbie Millman:
One of the first episodes that you worked on was with Robert on the episode “Detective Stories,” and I believe the first interview you did on your own was the show about an elderly man who had begun having musical hallucinations.
Lulu Miller:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Were you involved at all in finding the guests or coming up with show ideas in addition to working on putting them all together?
Lulu Miller:
Yeah, I mean, I was always pitching, and I wouldn’t say any got through until I’d been there for a couple of years, but I kind of liked to think of myself as a bottomless well of bad ideas. I would just pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, and I had bans. I wasn’t allowed to pitch synesthesia anymore. We’ve still never done a show, but part of me is as host, maybe I should bring that back. And I remember I kept pitching this story about cowbirds who lay their eggs in other bird’s nests. And it got a no, no, no, no, no, no, no for years until I kind of finally found an angle that had a human story and a question about how we moralize on nature.
But yeah. So I think I was always trying and then just learning by watching a million pitch meetings, what got through, and it was basically when Jad was surprised, you just see his eyes and he started asking all these little follow-up questions, and it was when things didn’t live too much in a cerebral land, they brushed by it, but they didn’t stay there. And it was when the narrative just was so strong that he’d just start asking these really human stories. And so I don’t know, I just learned to watch which kind of pitches got that reaction and just tried again and again and again to craft them so they would get that.
Debbie Millman:
You learned how to make radio at a time when listeners couldn’t pause or rewind or fast-forward. Did that change impact the kinds of stories you were creating at Radiolab at that time, both before being able to do that and after? Was there any significant change in the way that the radio was being made?
Lulu Miller:
I mean, I still think about the lack of pause button in every story. So in a way, maybe I haven’t evolved with it, but I remember Jad once saying, “This story has to be a freight train.” Someone turns on the radio and it’s whizzing by and you want to get on no matter where you turn it on. And so that would mean basically the narrative and the tape was so interesting, you just want to ride on if you hopped on in the middle. But it would also mean you can’t have something so technical that you’d have to go back to reread it, essentially.
Those stories, especially the early days, they did just have this engine. I am just furiously thinking about how to not waste someone’s time. I’m furiously thinking about how to whittle, whittle, whittle until, not that it’s necessarily, the cuts are as fast, it’s not that. But it’s that maybe you have a very eerie long part that’s really slow, but then it’s juxtaposed. I don’t know. I still almost create as though there isn’t the rewind button because I think of that as a good narrative pressure. I want someone to not want to press-
Debbie Millman:
Any button.
Lulu Miller:
To press the … Yeah, to go to a different podcast, which I think … So I learned how to create in a time when you couldn’t really press the buttons, and now I like what you just said, and now I’m trying to create in a way that makes you forget you have buttons.
Debbie Millman:
You worked at Radiolab for over five years. How did working there and working with the people that you did, some of the most brilliant people in radio and podcasting, some of the real pioneers, how did they influence your sense of rhythm and moral tension and the various other important aspects of creating stories that have meaning?
Lulu Miller:
Probably the two biggest things are, one, it taught me, at least in conversation and in interviewing to go for the question you’re actually wondering about. And I just saw time and time again, someone making this move that the part of me growing up that was afraid of hurting or afraid of bothering or not wanting to take up space or whatever, all that coached me to be one way in space conversationally. And then I would see all these different interviewers who are working on the show, just ask the person what they really wondered and how dignifying that is, and also how many different ways there are to be direct. It can have a little edge or it doesn’t have to, and you could be really efficient with your words, and some people like me still just take a second to wind up, but there can be directness in it too.
And I think it just taught me that this move that I had kind of incorrectly cordoned off as confrontational or always negative or aggressive or something that just being direct, that’s often so dignifying and it often gets you so quickly to the most interesting spaces. And there can be some confrontation, there can be some challenge, but most of the time that is the kindness. And that was a revolution. I mean, that was a revolution for me about how to be with people as a journalist, as a reporter, as an interviewer, but as just also as a person. I still have to remember that when my headphones aren’t in, and I’m not in the theater of it all, I still default to, I bite my tongue and I go to being polite, but I try. So that was a real revolution.
And then I think in terms of craft, it’s part of why I was barking about the word cerulean. I think mostly about Jad as the person who … Because he would sit with me and we’d move parts of stories out and we’d talk about stuff a lot. So I think of him as kind of the real mentor for me, but he didn’t want to sound smart and he didn’t care, when pitches or stories got into that space where they’re just expounding and you can hear almost like a flatness, there was just a low tolerance for that. And I think he wanted to be deep. He wanted to take a narrative and have it lead you and bust up some belief or lead you somewhere deep. But he didn’t want to do it in a way that was off-putting or exclusive. And so I think it honed this dive to be deep without talking about ideas in a way that excludes people.
Debbie Millman:
You left Radiolab to go to the University of Virginia to fulfill your “Dream of getting an MFA in creative writing before you felt like you got too old and had never tried.” But you were also in deep recovery from heartbreak at that time. How did that impact your decision to leave Radiolab and go back to school?
Lulu Miller:
So the breakup, the me cheating, leading to a breakup happened about a month into the program. So I left.
Debbie Millman:
Okay.
Lulu Miller:
So it wasn’t like the clean line of, oh, I’m hurting and I’ll go, but I think it was since I was little, I’d wanted to spend time creating fiction, but the reason that I think drive came back and arose in me while I had this dream job, it was like 2010, Radiolab was one of the only podcasts like you were around, Radiolab was out there, just a few of us out there who got to make our money doing it, earn our living doing it. But I had had this experience out when I was reporting on this story, actually, the cowbird one I mentioned where I’d found that human tie-in, and it was about a man who died fighting a fire he had set to protect the warbler that the cowbird was parasitizing. And I went out to tell that whole story of who they thought was the bad guy and they thought it was the cowbird, but then it was us by preventing forest fires.
And then I talked to the family and the brother and the sister and the mom of the guy who had died and the mom was in this kitchen in Michigan and the power went out and there was this very eerie interview and she finally looked at me and was just like, “What are you doing here? Your questions aren’t going to bring him back.” And I don’t think I had a good answer. I think I was in my heart, I wanted to do a story about cowbirds and having there be a human drama attached to it was a way to make it interesting. I didn’t have an answer. And I remember driving back like 14 hours to New York through this thunderstorm just thinking, I don’t have an answer. I don’t have the backbone. I don’t have the ethical compass to be doing this work. This microphone is too powerful and I have not grown up enough to hold it.
And at that time, I was just like, I want out. I should never do this. I’m messing with people’s lives. I’m making people feel worse. I don’t belong here. I was so ashamed of myself honestly, that I just was like, I can’t do journalism. They’re journalists who are tough, who have that ethical … But I don’t have it. So I left and I just wanted to go back to hiding out as I saw it in fiction. And then the breakup happened right at the beginning, and I just spent these two years in many ways it was so dreamy. I had a front porch. I had space. I loved Virginia, I loved the wilderness, I loved hiking and swimming in the rivers, but it was a very lonely time too. I wasn’t very good at writing fiction. I would write these stories and see nobody moved in the workshop, including the professors.
Debbie Millman:
I think you called it the flatness on the faces of your classmates.
Lulu Miller:
Yeah, I mean, it was just like, and then the problem of … I admire people who can write a novel. For me, staying in my head was precisely the wrong prescription for what I needed right then. I felt shame about my journalism at Radiolab, that moment, that kind of moment, I felt shame about my breakup, which I had caused by cheating. And then I just burrowed into my head where I was met with anger and more shame, and it was a very … I mean, parts of that experience were wonderful, but I think I learned pretty rapidly you’re not finding a way out in your head.
Debbie Millman:
A topic that had been coming back into your consciousness at that time was a story you had heard back when you were first working at Radiolab. You were getting a tour of the back rooms at the California Academy of Sciences and heard about a taxonomist named David Starr Jordan, who had lost thousands of fish specimens he discovered and named and tagged back in the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. What intrigued you most about this particular story?
Lulu Miller:
I’m chuckling because it’s just like that me had no idea what a big part of her life this random old taxonomist would become. But yeah, he just felt like such a parable for the human condition. We are born into chaos, to the life, this picture my dad painted, the meaninglessness, the evolution, what works. We’re blown onto this planet, and chaos will keep having its way with us, and tornadoes will come, and earthquakes will come and destroy any order we try to make. That is just what will happen. That is our lot. And yet humans keep trying to do beautiful things and build palaces and build technology and build sanctuaries and order the world to make it better or to make it beautiful or to make it better for them or whatever. And we just keep doing it. It’s like in the face of these ultimately doomed odds, we’re all going to die. Everything we make is going to get destroyed.
And so for me, we all live that in our lives all the time. But he had such a, like to me it was just comically proportioned that he was a taxonomist, his job was literally to create order in the world of fish. He spent years compiling this lab and all these specimens and then an earthquake destroyed it. And it’s not just that it destroyed it, it separated the names from the specimens. It felt reverse biblical, reverse Genesis, your knowledge, your order is ripped off. If it was me, I’d give up and he just invents this technique of tying the label to the fish with a sewing needle, and that felt like there was something comical to me in it. Did you ever read those spy verse spy comics? It would be like one would do one thing and then one would get bigger and one would do another. That’s what it felt like to me. It was just like man trying to outsmart chaos, and to me it’s just chaos is going to win.
And so I don’t know. When I first heard about that, he felt foolish, he felt like Icarus in a way. He was flying too close to the sun. He was flying too close to the earthquake. My thought was, okay, you’re going to sew it to a fish, but then something else will happen, a fire or whatever, a flood or decay itself will erode that thread. So he stuck in my mind, but at first glance, when I first saw him, I kind of felt sure about what he was, and then in that time in my life when I was just really not sure what to do and how to move forward, I just started thinking about him and I started realizing he’s not a parable, he’s a person. I literally just wondered what happened to him, and I wanted to write a one-page essay and find out what happened, what happened to him, what happened to his collection.
Debbie Millman:
You ended up writing a 35-page single-spaced essay. What set this fire in you?
Lulu Miller:
Again, I think it was the belief that I was going to write this one page prose poem, man vs chaos. Find out was he a cautionary tale or did things end okay? I think I was kind of hoping for his demise, but also hoping not. I don’t know. And he had written so much, he was so prolific, and I found his autobiography, which was this huge honking, double wide thing with all these charming moments, and no one had really written about him, so he wasn’t someone who there was a lot of discourse about. He felt like my own little person to explore. And almost like radio, it was just like there was all this tape, there was all this writing, and then I could kind of excise the gems, and then his story crashed into all these things. It crashed into the eugenics movement in a very startling, massive way. It crashed into a potential murder story, and then it ultimately crashed into this existential story about fish in particular, this idea of taxonomy, but also more broadly.
It took me years to understand it, but I read in Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s book about this idea that fish as a meaningful category had been killed by scientists, and that had happened in the 80s. And I’m like, why do I not know that fish don’t exist? Every serious scientist thinks fish don’t exist, but I don’t know that and that feels connected to this guy. I don’t know. There were just all these little threads that I wanted to understand, and that felt important for my understanding of the world that we are all trying to hack our way through. I think it spiraled because of how rich the primary source document trove was, and then how many weird things seemed to be waiting in the wings that I could research myself to.
Debbie Millman:
I want to describe David Starr Jordan A little bit, the good parts for our listeners. He sailed around the globe for decades persistently in search of new fish species and to find new clues to reveal more about what he referred to as nature’s hidden blueprint. And he worked so tirelessly that he and his crew would eventually discover one fifth of the fish known to man in his day. One fifth. It’s just incomprehensible to me. He also did have a controversial life filled with a lot of bad decisions, both scientific and personal, and these have impacted how the world views him and has diluted his scientific contributions in many ways. You didn’t know about these sort of bad decisions prior to finding his autobiography. Did his autobiography in any way describe sort of the more end-of-his-life stories in any kind of objective way, or was he just very happy with who he became and that was that?
Lulu Miller:
Oh, he was so happy. He is an expert in protecting his self-image. If anything, he does reveal that. I mean, he talks about how his colleagues would comment upon how basically … I don’t have it exactly right, but it’s like no matter how things got down or went wrong for me, I always whistled as though I didn’t have a care in the world. His positive self-regard was almost impenetrable.
Once I learned more about him, I could see these little … He had a very antagonistic relationship with Jane Stanford, one of the founders of … The founding mother of Stanford University, where he would go on to become the first president and have a huge influence there. And there’s statues of him and buildings were named after him and stuff like that. But there’s this little dig in the night, he writes about the 1906 earthquake. And Stanford’s campus at that time was totally decimated in a very symbolic move. The welcome arch crumbled, and there’s all this stuff, and he manages to blame it on Jane Stanford. There’s this little thing where he’s like, “Because she was in a haste to create so much, there weren’t the proper steel rods” or whatever. And so I see him kind of gaslighting other people now that I know more about the story.
Debbie Millman:
It felt a little Trumpian actually.
Lulu Miller:
Yeah, yeah. So he doesn’t reflect on any failures unless there’s a backdoor brag in it. It’s like, I didn’t do that talk. Oh, no. Literally, there was one where he said, “I didn’t get that award because I wanted to give it to a kid more needy than me,” or “I didn’t do this talk because I had too many requests to accommodate.” So he is a marvel. I think at some point I called him an acrobat of twirling anything negative about him into something positive. It’s almost breathtaking to watch.
Debbie Millman:
Your book about David Starr Jordan, and so much more titled, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and The Hidden Order of Life took almost a decade to finish, and it came out in 2020 smack in the middle of COVID. That didn’t stop it from becoming a national bestseller. It was chosen as a best book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Congratulations on all of these accolades and achievements.
Lulu Miller:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
All that being said, you write in the book how you started it from a private, desperate place looking for some moral instruction. What kind?
Lulu Miller:
Yeah, I mean, I was looking for a different way to be in relationship to chaos and to the reality that we don’t matter and how to move forward on one of those dark days where everything feels ruined or you’ve made a mess. How do you surmount those feelings of shame that can make you just want to give up either at what you’re doing or the relationship you’re in, or life itself? I think the moral guidance I wanted was how do you stay humble and have sort of an accurate self-view of how small we are in the face of everything and still have enough will to push forward? And so that’s what I was searching for in David Star Jordan because he kept doing it. We didn’t even mention that an early collection was literally struck by lightning and burned to the ground. This man’s life was plagued by chaos, and he just always kept going. He always bounced back. And so I kind of wondered how he did it. That’s what I was searching for.
I mean, I think for me, the real learning came when I stopped treating him like a sort of parable. And when I just looked around at what his story had led to, which ended up being the eugenics movement, he was a huge player in it, not just a part of it in the way that many science stories were in the early 20th century, but a huge player in starting a eugenics research institute in convincing wealthy people to sign onto the idea and powerful people to sign onto the idea. And therefore his sort of love of ordering fish turned into a belief that you could order humans. And that there were certain people, particularly those with disabilities or who didn’t have access to books and couldn’t read, and he had all these beliefs about what was in the blood. And instead of killing them, his humane idea was that you could sterilize them so that they wouldn’t carry on.
His sober seeming, his scientifically backed language and his charm and his skill as a communicator got all kinds of people to sign on to these ideas and to these policies, which are still with us in some form in certain ways. But really it resulted in the sterilization of tens of thousands of people starting at around 1907, 1908, all the way up until the 70s. And I think I just at that time when I started reading the book, I just didn’t know about the American eugenics movement. I didn’t know about the ways in which Nazis were inspired by certain things we did, or we were inspired by early texts by Germans. And I just didn’t know. I just didn’t know about the whole history here and how we had eugenics state fairs and competitions and sterilizations.
Debbie Millman:
And there’s still laws on the books allowing some of this.
Lulu Miller:
Absolutely with different language. Instead of saying unfit, they’ll say, unable to give informed consent. There’s different words for the same idea. And it was that moment where me wanting to read him like a moral text, it just jumped. And then I sort of woke up and became a reporter and was like, oh, there are people living today who were sterilized, who were impacted by him. And I think it’s kind of like when I started to go report out the living legacy of eugenics and meet people who are affected and talk to them about the ways that they engage in community care and find their own will to live despite such horrific violence. That’s where I actually found something. It was like those people that actually taught me something.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote early in the book, you shared that initially there was so much that you admired about David Star Jordan and his devotion to the hidden and the insignificant, his absurd walrus mustache, his steel backbone, the gritty resolve that prevented him from crumbling in the face of whatever misfortune came his way and there were many. As the story unfolds, you do share your many, many discoveries of really nefarious and terribly, terribly troubling behavior. Did that impact how you felt about writing a book that was largely about him?
Lulu Miller:
I was too far in. I mean, the chuckle comes from, would I have selected him and spent so much time just waltzing, I mean literally smelling the pocket notebooks in his archives that I eventually visited that had been collecting the sweat near his heart? I got intimate with this guy.
Debbie Millman:
Did you feel betrayed when you learned-
Lulu Miller:
Yeah, or I just felt … I guess a little, because yeah, in particular, that line of his, as a young naturalist, he had learned from this sweet old citizen scientist, neighbor friend of his, to care for the hidden and insignificant, like ignore the showy roses, notice the dandelions and the buttercups. You will learn more about the blueprint of life from that. And he took that to mean you should care for the hidden and insignificant, and what a great guiding light. How do you go so wrong with that? And then literally create policies that want to get rid of the hidden and insignificant and not listen to them when they opposed him too. We can all have bad ideas, but I also think his sin really started to come when he dug in and didn’t listen to all the opposition, moral-
Debbie Millman:
His stubbornness was his undoing.
Lulu Miller:
But yeah, of course, I think I felt betrayed and I also just felt angry and let down. I was like, oh, he’s just another A-hole. I have nothing to learn from this guy about how to go on. I mean, his method is be a bulldozer of confidence and self-delusion. Don’t listen to anyone around you and don’t care about the violence you enact on people. So that’s not really going to help me. I don’t want to walk in that path. I think it was more, I was just feeling like still lost, like, oh, he had nothing ultimately to offer in that department.
But I don’t know. I don’t feel … No, I’m grateful I learned so much about our country and other lessons about how to be in the world that if I hadn’t followed his story, which turned out, and I like a good twist. So I was actually happy he ended up in a weird way, from a narrative point of view, going back to Radiolab and just pure storytelling, keeping people hooked, the fact that he was dark. That’s an interesting thing to study because then you can ask how, and he’s not a villain. He’s not evil. He’s a person who had really good influences early on. So what went wrong? And that to me is a very interesting thing to study.
Debbie Millman:
One of the stories embedded in Why Fish Don’t Exist is the importance of naming things both in science and beyond. And I’d like to read one of my favorite paragraphs in your book, which I think will give our listeners a real sense of your poetry, but also of the science. So here it goes.
“There’s an idea in philosophy that certain things don’t exist until they get a name. Abstract things like justice, nostalgia, infinity, love or sin. The thinking goes that these concepts do not sit out there on some ethereal plane waiting to be discovered by humans, but instead snap into being when someone invents a name for them. The moment the name is uttered the concept becomes real in the sense that it can affect reality. We can declare war, truce, bankruptcy, love, innocence or guilt. And in so doing change the course of people’s lives. The name itself is a thing of great power then, the vessel that drags the idea from the imaginary to the earthly realm. Before the word, however the thinking goes, the concept is largely inert.”
As someone who does a lot of work in branding, which is about positioning reality in a way that you want people to see it and then giving it a name, this was revelatory, truly revelatory. And it goes all the way back to the way in which humans have named religions and have named their gods. And if you think about so many of our wars, most of them are about a god that we’ve named that may or may not exist or land that we’ve declared has borders which don’t really exist. So I’ve been thinking about this now just obsessively how our naming something somehow gives us this entitlement to own it.
Lulu Miller:
And alchemizes it. I think of these experiments we did in chemistry class where you put the one thing in and it catalyzes it, and then suddenly you have something concrete in this clear solution. And that name, tons of people have written about this in other ways, but just this idea that the name itself is the catalyst to make an idea concrete enough to bludgeon people. It’s not always bad, it could also really help people, but it becomes concrete enough to have impact at the level of bruise and blood. It’s weird, and it is, I think I see it around all the time now.
Debbie Millman:
How did researching the dandelion influence the way you think about hierarchy and certainty and mattering?
Lulu Miller:
That’s a metaphor I love. That’s a word, a principle for me, that’s done a lot of good. I came across it years actually before I had worked on the book, and there was this, I think it was a Dutch company that operated on this idea called the Dandelion Principle. It was founded by a dad whose son was on the spectrum, and his idea was his son was having all this trouble getting work, and his idea was that these certain qualities that many workplaces deem hard to work with, I think could be really valuable in another context. And so it was sort of like an agency that helped people on the spectrum get work by showing the ways in which everything that is making them considered a weed is actually valuable. It’s kind of like a crass metaphor, but it’s helpful. And for people designing airports, they could work with folks who are on the spectrum to tell in a quicker way, is this pathway too small? Because they have more sensory awareness, and might be great at this.
So this idea that something we consider a weed or a problem may actually be this valuable herb is the broad Dandelion Principle. And it’s all about just how fully you’re considering this organism and realizing that value is always defined from the outside, and that any organism, be it human or plant, has intrinsic value. And it’s just thinking about how. I make the point in the book that that’s something the eugenicists absolutely failed to consider among many other things like morality. But also even if you want to create a supposedly strong enduring race, you’re going to want to include diversity in there. So they forgot about that scientific principle too. If they wanted to do it-
Debbie Millman:
They want to mix things.
Lulu Miller:
But yeah, with the Dandelion Principle, I think just that idea I talked about in relation to these two women, Anna and Mary, one of whom had … They both been separated out by the state and put in an institution as a result of the eugenics policies. And one of them had been sterilized, Anna had been sterilized, and she had been seen as this weed, something to be plucked from the race. I mean, David Starr Jordan literally wrote a book on eugenics called The Human Harvest, and he thought about it like weeding, like planting, and she talked about her scar. She has this state sanctioned stamp of the fact that it was believed to have no value and to have to look at that every day. And that was the idea.
And then of course, meeting her and meeting her within her community where she’s bringing the receptionist at her apartment building all these drawings, and she’s hooking up her friend with this guy who she didn’t want to date because she didn’t feel like dating, but not that you have to bring light or be cheery to have value in existence, but in this particular instance, she’s bringing so much value. She’s strengthening the thread of society, which was exactly what the eugenicists believe she wouldn’t be able to do. And it’s just because they failed to consider her value. And it’s like just this baseline, four-year-old could get it philosophical principle. The value is in the eye of the beholder.
And so to me, the Dandelion Principle just really brings that together. That obviously in some yards, they’re considered weeds, but you use dandelions for herbs in certain teas and they can help with all kinds of eyesight and blood flow and things like that. So to me it’s a nice metaphor. And then dandelions are everywhere and I just sort of feel affection and also a reminder to keep considering value because I do it too. I’m judging people who use the word cerulean left and right and I should check myself.
Debbie Millman:
Lulu, there’s probably another 24 hours of questions that I could ask you about your book and I’d still love to be able to do that, but I don’t think it would be fair to do that to you here. And there’s a bunch more that I want to talk to you about, but we haven’t covered one really important topic in the book that you hinted at earlier in our conversation and the realization that led to the book’s title and then also sort of the ultimate irony to David Starr Jordan’s life. And the question is, tell us why you titled the book Why Fish Don’t Exist? Because it’s true. It’s actually true.
Lulu Miller:
Yeah. So basically, if you think about this is just a discovery made by ichthyologists, fancy word for fish scientists who are studying the biology of fish and the evolution of fish and how they’re all related and where we fit in that tree of life. And the better and better scientists got looking at that, analyzing DNA and all kinds of other things, they have come to realize that fish as a scientific category is not real. It’s like a gerrymandered category is the best way I think to think about it. And specifically, if you were to take something like a salmon and a lungfish, which is one of those kind of big lobey fish and a cow, and you look at them, you would think the lobe fish and the fish were closely related, but the truth is the lobe fish and the cow are much more closely related. And so if you want to-
Debbie Millman:
Because of their lungs, is that right?
Lulu Miller:
Because of their lungs and because of what’s going on in the inside and where they are actually on the tree of life when they came, when they split off, cows and lungfish are far more closely related. And so if you want to keep all fishy things together in the ocean, like scaly, swimmy, fishy looking things, you can totally do that and you can call them fish, but you also need to include cows and birds and you and me and every vertebrate. So if you really want to keep using the word fish accurately, it would be a synonym for vertebrate. But if you care about making scientifically meaningful categories, fish just is not one in the way that something reptiles or mammals really is. So the more scientifically accurate and useful thing to do is to say that fish don’t exist. It is not a meaningful category. There’s much more nuance there in the ocean.
And for me, when you accept that, and it literally took me years of reading, interviewing and drawing diagrams to get it. I think I get it now, but once you accept that, it’s kind of this invitation or maybe like a stop sign, a fish shaped stop sign to think twice about every other category out there that you have been told is definitely real. And in the eugenics movement, that would be crude terms like unfit. You are unfit to carry on, you are declared with this scientific sobriety, but anything. And so for me it’s just this reminder that the categories we make, nature has no hard lines. We’re constantly drawing categories over them, whether they be colors or groups of people or things in the water. And it’s just this reminder to investigate is this category serving me? Is it serving the people trapped within it? Are the people within the category asking that you look closer? Or maybe it’s about building shapes. I don’t know. It just is just this big reminder if something as basic and simple and not complex seeming as fish isn’t meaningful or real, what else do I have wrong?
Debbie Millman:
As I was reading your book and trying to wrap my mind around this, I was telling people about it and I was using your example about people on a mountaintop in plaid and so forth, but I also realized the hubris that went into deciding that everything in an ocean is considered some type of fish. Well then wouldn’t it mean that everything not in the ocean would be one giant species?
Lulu Miller:
I know.
Debbie Millman:
That’s what it means. That’s what this is.
Lulu Miller:
And that example is mish, that anything on a mountain, a mountain man, a snake, an eagle and a goat, those are all mish.
Debbie Millman:
Right. They’re mish because they’re wearing or [inaudible 01:02:58] plaid.
Lulu Miller:
Right, right. Yeah. I mean I get it. And people thought whales were fish for a long time and didn’t know what sharks looked like really. I get it. We didn’t invent the goggle until just a few decades back. We didn’t see that world as much. I get it why we would lump it together in this kind of unknown. But yeah, it’s as absurd as saying that. Yeah, the goggle fact, by the way, I learned in our Radiolab shark series, which we just did a week … We didn’t do a shark week because that would be infringing on branding. So it was a Radiolab week of shark and our reporter Rachel was the one who brought that to our attention. Wow, we haven’t had goggles even for a century.
Debbie Millman:
And that was so pivotal to some of your realizations at the end of Why Fish Don’t Exist.
Lulu Miller:
It’s true. The snorkel goggles really.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You returned to Radiolab as one of the co-hosts in 2020, so you were coming out with a book and rejoining your family at Radiolab at the same time. What was it like to return to the show? Was it a hard decision to make?
Lulu Miller:
It was not a hard decision to make. I got the call that Robert and Jad were both kind of … Robert had stepped aside and Jad was getting ready to, and they were thinking about new co-hosts and would I want to, and I was sitting in a parked car in Lincoln Park. It was like a beacon. It was like come home. And I had been away at that point for basically a decade. And I think I had along the way, grown that backbone or whatever, that sense of self. I had grown enough of a compass that I felt … I mean I wanted to do journalism and I had been doing journalism. I had sort of already returned, but I think it was like, yeah, it was a dream.
It was the show that got me into the medium. It was the show that told me I could still ask these kinds of questions as an adult and hunt for these kinds of stories where our beliefs about the world are broken, which feels very sacred and urgent to me. And it’s like a room full of nerds and it’s like the nicest team in the business. It was a dream. Yeah, really.
Debbie Millman:
I came upon a conversation that you wrote about, and I don’t know exactly where it came from. I can look in my notes if it’s something that you think is important, and it’s you talking in first person. “I left Radiolab kind of when that feeling came to a head where I was just like, I’m not cut out for this. I’m not courageous enough. I’m not X, Y and Z enough. I’m too worried. I talked about it once with Jad from Radiolab too, and I was thinking about coming back to radio or not, and I was like, if I have that voice, maybe I’m not meant to do this. And he said, ‘No, that voice is what makes you good at it. That voice is the moral compass. I’d be concerned if you didn’t have that voice.’ So it’s useful to just realize that this is part of the job. It is just part of the job and these questions of how to balance all these things and realizing you can bring in editors and colleagues, you don’t have to go through it alone. It is what makes it better.”
And I wasn’t sure if that was the conversation you were referring to earlier in our conversation today, or if that was something separate that you had with Jad as you were considering coming back to the show.
Lulu Miller:
Yeah, it was a couple of years before. It was when I was leaving this fiction world and actually deciding to go to NPR and work on what became Invisibilia. And that was the moment where I was like, I have left journalism, but I’m very intrigued about going back in, but I don’t think I should. And I remember talking to him, I was living in Virginia at the time and really not in a confident place at all, very unsure of the path ahead for anything in my life and just consumed by worry, consumed and it was very liberating. He said exactly that. “If that worry wasn’t there, I’d be worried. That worry is the sound of your compass. That’s great.” And it felt like I had thought that worry cast me as exactly the wrong person for the job, and he was there spinning it to say it was right. And I still believe that, and I listen to it when I feel it coming up.
And I think the other big thing is realizing you don’t have to keep those worries private. They’re not some symptom that you’re doing it wrong. Those are exactly the things to surface immediately and bat around with a big team. And the joy of collaboration also after writing a book which was lonely, and I feel like I am in my collaboration era. I love it so much. That really helped me turn a corner on what I think my calling is, what I think I’m supposed to be doing on earth. And now I just love it. I feel so lucky. I mean, this is such an honor to talk to you, but God do I love being on the other side more. It’s so fun.
Debbie Millman:
I feel the same way.
Lulu Miller:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
The same way. I only have a couple more questions for you. In my research in prep for today’s show, I discovered you said something when Why Fish Don’t Exist was first launched, when it was first published. You stated this, “I have just written my first and likely only book called Why Fish Don’t Exist.” You proved that inaccurate when you published your second book, a children’s book titled Trucky Roads last year. What was it like to go from writing about such heady philosophical topics to creating a children’s book?
Lulu Miller:
It was so fun. It was great. I mean, watching it come alive with the artist, Hui Skipp, who is just amazing, and then getting to take it out and also describing it was so much easier. We spent weeks trying to figure out how to describe Why Fish Don’t Exist, never really got there. And then know Trucky Roads is like, well, it’s about trucks and also roads, but it was so fun. And getting to do the readings that I’ve done with kids is just such a delight. And there’s an invitation at the end for kids to make up their own trucks and hearing what they invent is so great. And writing it, it just kind of spilled out. And it was inspired by this character, my son made up because he loved trucks, and so it just kind of spilled out. I originally wrote it just for him, so the writing was easy. It was done. I polished it a little, and then I just got to have this incredible artist bring it to life. And so it just was smooth, easy, fun, great. A very different journey.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things I thought was so fascinating about both of your books, there is a thread between them. They both include the phenomena of naming, deeply embedded in the book DNA. They both are about creating language for objects.
Lulu Miller:
100% and playing with it and seeing where … And they’re kind of lusting up categories because it’s just a very simple … The book is basically naming different kinds of trucks, which was the kind of book my son just could not get enough of, excavator, digger, whatever. But then playing with that a little and making up a tow truck versus a tow truck when the second one is-
Debbie Millman:
It’s like a truck taxonomy.
Lulu Miller:
And actually I am supposed to hear back this week, but there might be a third book, which it is another children’s book, which is also about naming and categories. And this one is called The Book of Balls. And it’s about different kinds-
Debbie Millman:
Goosebumps.
Lulu Miller:
It’s about different kind of balls, but it’s the same. It was watching my second son grow up and he was a little bit slower to language. And so ball was one of the only words he had for years. And we were a little worried, but then we started to just see how many things were balls. So it’s like all the balls at the gym, but also buoys and also pearls, and also our doorknobs and designed things and street light globes. But also, oh my gosh, the earth is a ball and the sun is a ball, and why does the universe crave a ball? And there’s so many spheres. And so it’s playing with that. It’s funny, as much as I’m wary of categories, that didn’t start as a book, that just started as a list in my notes app of everything he was calling a ball for years and just noticing what words show us, what they blind us to. And I love that intersection between language and nature. I think it’s infinitely interesting.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve recently launched another podcast while you’re doing Radiolab, you’re now also you’ve created it, you’re hosting it’s called Terrestrials. What motivated this new direction?
Lulu Miller:
So Terrestrials is our family-friendly show all about the strangeness right here on earth. It’s basically a nature show that is kid-friendly. It came out of this really cramped moment where it was COVID and I had newly moved to Chicago, a city I didn’t know that was cold. And I had two kids and our apartment, everything felt cramped and everything felt dark. And I had a lot of the stories I had reported over the years, I had Invisibilia and early days of Radiolab. And even when I was first back, I’m interested in why things break down. I’m interested in hard stuff. A lot of them dealt with death or disability or violence or eugenics. I am drawn to that. I want to understand those stories.
But I think I was really missing nature. I was missing Virginia like I missed a lover, honestly. I was really heartsick and feeling stuck. I needed a shaft of light. I needed somewhere where I could think about nature, where I could get into nature in my mind. And we had, during COVID, there were all these requests at Radiolab, there were all these requests coming in for listeners to create a kid-friendly feed because sometimes Radiolab is like behold the wonder of fireflies. And sometimes it’s like, here’s this horrific murder. So parents understandably wanted just kid-friendly stuff to listen to with their kids.
And so we had created that feed and we saw there was interest, there was hunger. And so I think basically, I made an episode without telling anyone because I always like to communicate in content. I don’t like to communicate in ideas. I don’t like to tell an idea before I’ve done it. So I made this pilot episode that was a real life story of an octopus that escaped from a tank and slid down a drainpipe and returned to the ocean. And it’s true, and it really happened and the way it did it, and the wonderful writer, Sy Montgomery, had written a children’s book about it and she told me the story. But along the way you get to learn how it did that and the fact that maybe not just wings can be convergently evolved, but intelligence itself might be, and maybe increasingly scientists think that octopuses have a real kind of intelligence.
And it just came out of this desire to alongside the harder, more complex stories to also have … When I feel stuck, I go to nature. I really do, and it opens me up. And I was just feeling stuck. I was watching where the world was going politically. I was watching climate change and COVID and I was like, I don’t know about human stories. I need to see how nature is doing things. I need to see places where nature is defying our expectations to it. And it was kind of in all honesty, at the very end of Why Fish Don’t Exist, I say this whole tirade about if you approach the world with more doubt, you’ll see a more wild and beautiful world where everything’s reverberating with possibility, which fine, pretty words, but show me that world. And so this podcast is episode by episode trying to show a world where every episode breaks our expectations of how creatures are supposed to work.
And we have stuff on symbiosis, we have all kinds of different stuff, but then the twist was making it for kids. Having my own kids, I think showed me, I had never babysat. I just wasn’t a kid person until I had them. And I was like, oh, their brains, they have a high standard. I think I had looked down on children’s entertainers and I still struggle to be like, I’m a children’s entertainer. My wife’s like, “How am I going to still be attracted to you that you’re a clown?” But they have a high bar. You have to have a good plot and you got to make them laugh and they have really open minds. That’s my favorite part. And I start every episode with a minute before I tell you what the thing is because I don’t want you to walk in with any expectations. And I think of that minute as unscrewing the cap on the word, maybe the episode’s about an octopus, but maybe it’s about a tree stump. But I don’t want you to know that until you’ve thought a little about what it’s like to be that creature.
Anyway, it came out of that. And then the twist of making it for kids’ brains in many ways, I’ve found just my dream creative soulmate, which is Alan Goffinski who does all the songs and the music, and he’ll write an original song or two for every episode. I sing on some of them. And what that has opened up, he is such a creative genius and he’s so generous. It’s not patronizing kid music. It’s kind of decent and it is more than decent. It’s really good.
Debbie Millman:
It’s really good.
Lulu Miller:
And I can say that because that’s not me, that’s him. And he wears his heart on his sleeve, but he’s also really silly and he hadn’t been in radio. So for him it’s really new and it’s like this way to play. He’d been a social worker, he’d been doing really different kinds of work. Fun fact about him. He used to hold the Guinness World Record for the longest hug. He’s a compassionate dude and a genius, and pushing down that fourth wall and playing in a space that’s musical. And increasingly, I’m like, “Alan, can I sing on this one too?” Anyway, there’s just something that’s been very incredibly vitalizing about playing in that space. So yeah, so that’s going too.
Debbie Millman:
Lulu, my last question isn’t really a question from me.
Lulu Miller:
Okay.
Debbie Millman:
It is a question nonetheless. Earlier in the show, we talked about how you shared your fears about returning to radio with Jad Abumrad and how he helped you understand your strengths. And I’ve interviewed Jad for this podcast twice, and I’ve gotten to know him a little bit through mutual friends over the last years. So I reached out to him and I wanted to ask him what he thought might be a good question for you given how well you know each other. And so he responded as follows with two questions.
Lulu Miller:
Okay.
Debbie Millman:
“What would I ask her? I don’t really know how to phrase this as a question, but Lulu, she’s two things at once. She’s one of the most joyful people you will ever meet. I think if you were to interview anyone who’s worked with her, they would say that. She’s also somebody who has dipped into periods of real darkness. She’s written about this in Why Fish Don’t Exist, that she had periods in her life where she really struggled. I’ve always felt like her creative engine and her approach to the stories that she tells somehow lives at the fault line between those two states. My questions are this. Are there stories or approaches that she embarks on now that she wouldn’t have 10 years ago? And how has being a host and also being a parent played into that evolution?”
Lulu Miller:
He’s so freaking smart.
Debbie Millman:
I know.
Lulu Miller:
It’s so lovely to be seen. A lot of the time, I’m making the work to survive. I mean, Terrestrials itself, I mean hopefully the kids don’t have to feel this, but that it’s driven from needing to see a world that is less grim than the one that keeps showing itself. It’s like needing to see that there are ways to live harmoniously and ways to mend the world. It’s like if I don’t find those, I won’t be okay. So he’s right about that. I mean, I do think just the uncool of it all, making a kid’s show, singing on the radio, all that is something I wouldn’t have done 10 years ago because I would’ve cared more about perception. And now I just care about how good it feels to do it and to find out those stories and make it with a team. I think I care more about the process than I ever have.
And I guess the other, so the other … I’m even catching myself. I said I don’t want the kids to feel that burden in the show or whatever, but in a way, being a parent has made me see kids as full people. And when did my depression set in? Around seven. Actually, I do want this to be extending a hand in a subtle, not laborious, labored way, but in a subtle way that says, just as the world might feel like it’s closing in with no magic or hope, there is some, and it’s right here on earth if you look close. There are other ways to be, and they worked for millions of years, and maybe we can draw design inspiration there.
Being a parent also has made me think more about the future. And I think one of the things I’m reporting on now for an adult book I’m working on is trying to look at different ways that we can mend the world through community care, maybe through some mutual aid, just different ways that that’s done in human societies and plants and animals. And I think that topic would’ve felt way too daunting to take on 10 years ago and now it feels urgent and exciting.
Debbie Millman:
Lulu Miller, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Lulu Miller:
Thank you so, so much. Thanks for having me.
Debbie Millman:
You can listen to lots more about and from Lulu on the podcast, Radiolab and Terrestrials. You can read more about her and about the world in her truly remarkable book, Why Fish Don’t Exist. This is the 20th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced by the TED Audio Collective, by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Master’s in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.
