Prom Night: Stories from Proton Prom

In this week’s episode we’re sharing some of the stories from our second annual fundraiser Proton Prom.

Part 1: Comedian Josh Gondelman is terrified when he gets a call that his father doesn’t remember there’s an ongoing pandemic.

Josh Gondelman is a writer and comedian who incubated in Boston before moving to New York City, where he currently lives and works as the head writer and an executive producer for Desus & Mero on Showtime. Previously, he spent five years at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, first as a web producer and then as a staff writer where he earned four Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, and three WGA Awards. In 2016, Josh made his late night standup debut on Conan (TBS), and he has also performed on Late Night With Seth Meyers (NBC) and The Late Late Show with James Corden (CBS). Gondelman is also the author of the essay collection Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results published September 2019 by Harper Perennial. And as of 2019, he has become a regular panelist on NPR mainstay Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. In Spring 2020, Gondelman launched his own podcast Make My Day, a comedy game show. And he was the co-creator of the popular Modern Seinfeld Twitter account. Josh’s most recent album Dancing On a Weeknight came out in 2019 on Blonde Medicine Records. (His prior album Physical Whisper debuted in March of 2016 at #1 on the iTunes comedy charts (as well as #4 on the Billboard comedy chart). Offstage, Gondelman is also the co-author (along with Joe Berkowitz) of the book You Blew It, published October 2015 by Plume. In the past, Josh has written for Fuse TV’s Billy On The Street. His writing has also appeared in prestigious publications such as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New York Magazine, and The New Yorker. Additionally, Josh has performed at the Rooftop Comedy Festival in Aspen, CO, and headlined at the Laugh Your Asheville Off Festival in Asheville, NC. More recently he has appeared in the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, the Bridgetown Comedy Festival, and SF Sketchfest. His debut standup comedy CD, Everything’s The Best was released in November of 2011 by Rooftop Comedy Productions.

Part 2: Growing up Ken Ono dreams of being anything but a mathematician.

Ken Ono is the Thomas Jefferson Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia and the Chair of Mathematics at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published over 200 research articles in number theory. Professor Ono has received many awards for his research, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship. He was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE) by Bill Clinton in 2000, and he was named the National Science Foundation's Distinguished Teaching Scholar in 2005. He was an associate producer of the 2016 Hollywood film The Man Who Knew Infinity, which starred Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel. Earlier this year he put his math skills to work in a Super Bowl week commercial for Miller Lite beer.

Part 3: As a teenager, Eric Jankowski is inspired when he meets his science heroes.

Eric Jankowski is an associate professor in the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering at Boise State University as well as Story Collider’s Board President. He earned a PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Michigan where he also got pretty into bicycles, storytelling, and playing go. Eric's research leverages high performance computing to engineer new materials for sustainable energy production.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

It’s been a tough couple of years, I think, no matter who you are, right? Even if you’ve kind of avoided the worst of what’s been going on in the world, it’s been a tough time. And I think for me, some of the hardest stuff has been feeling really removed from people that I care about. Not being able to be with them when they need me or when I think they need me, or when I want to be with them. It’s a lot, right?

My great aunt’s sis passed away about a week and a half ago and I hadn’t seen her since before the pandemic started. The last time I saw her was one of the most inspirational moments in my whole life.

Josh Gondelman shares his story at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NY in June 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.

First of all, my great aunt’s sis passed away, I think she was 97. When I saw her, she was 95. And if you can hang out with somebody who’s kind of hanging in there mentally and physically at 95 years old, you got to jump on that. Not literally. You’ll crush her. But you’ve got to seize that opportunity because there’s so much family history in a person of that age that you’re not going to get from anywhere else, and there’s a level of confidence in a healthy 95-year-old that you’re not going to see anywhere else on the planet Earth.

My great aunt walked around all day like she just won an Oscar on top of Mount Everest, just unbeatable swagger, oxygen tank. That was her vibe all day long.

The hubris came out in interesting ways. This is the last time that I saw her. I’ll think about it. I’ll really treasure this story forever.

My great aunt and my parents and my sister and I went out to lunch. And at the end of the meal, the waiter comes over and he goes, “Can I interest you in dessert? We have one dessert special today. It’s a slice of pumpkin pie.”

My aunt looked at him and she goes, “We’ll have some grapes for the table.”

And the waiter goes, “Grapes?”

And she goes, “For the table.”

The waiter left the dining room presumably to quit, is what I thought was happening. Just like, “Ugh, I guess I get to go back to law school like my dad keeps saying.”

He comes back two minutes later with three giant bowls of grapes for the table. There weren’t even grapes on the menu at this restaurant. Such is the power of 95-year-old self-esteem. My great aunt just thought about grapes, said the word grapes, manifested grapes into her life.

Thank you.

And why wouldn’t you? When you’re 95, you don’t have a lot of time to go a bunch of different places asking for the things they advertise. When you’re 95, you show up where people bring you. You tell the folks there what you want and you make it their problem, right? Just like, “Some dessert?”

“Yeah, I’d like some grapes for the table. Also, stamps, hard candy and my cholesterol medication. I’m 95 years old and you’re my concierge to the universe right now, so let’s make it quick because I have Jeopardy set to DVR, but I don’t know what that means, so I'm going to have to watch it live.”

So all that is to say I'm going to really cherish that memory. But I haven’t seen her for almost— I hadn’t seen her for almost two‑and‑a‑half years before she passed away, and I’ll always think about that.

The most harrowing moment of the last few years in my life is my dad had a health scare. To set the scene, it was May 2021. I had had one vaccine, but I wasn’t fully vaccinated, and my dad went into the hospital and I couldn’t visit him. He had this health scare.

And I say scare so that you know he’s fine now. That’s what scare means. Sometimes, people are like, “Well, is he okay?”

I was like, “Yeah. I said scare.”

You’re never like, “Oh, my grandfather had a health scare.”

“Well, what happened then?”

“Oh, then he died.”

But the last couple of days, very scary before he passed. Just a lot of moaning, shaking, rattling some chains, real Jacob Marley stuff.

My dad had this health scare and it was truly terrifying, because the human body and the human mind, some of it feels so inscrutable, especially when you’re far away and you can’t look into the eyes of the people that you care about.

I was at home in Brooklyn and my mom called me from the Boston suburbs, which is where I grew up. She called me up on a Monday night.

And she said, “Josh, I have to take your father to the hospital. I took him in. I took him to the hospital. We went to the emergency room. His short-term memory disappeared in a span of 10 minutes. He doesn’t know his birthday. He doesn’t know our address. He doesn’t even realize there’s a pandemic happening.”

I was terrified. I had the same reaction that anyone would have if they heard this happen to a man of my father’s age, another demographic. So I was like, “Oh no, Fox News got him.”

Not acknowledging the pandemic? That’s Fox News behavior. He’s come down with Hannity’s disease and, in my experience, that’s terminal. I don’t know if you put down a dad. I don’t think that’s what you do. I don’t wanna.

What happened was my dad had taken a bunch of pictures, framed pictures off his shelf and then he went upstairs to change for dinner. When he came down, he asked my mom, he was like, “Who moved those pictures?”

And she was like, “You did.”

Then over the next few minutes, it had become clear that his short‑term memory was completely disappeared, so she was very alarmed. She took him to the hospital. They did a quick memory test. This is real. They tested my Fox News hypothesis.

They said, “Do you know what day it is?” And he said, “No.”

And they said, “Do you know what month it is?” And he said, “No.”

And they said, “Do you know what year it is?” And he said, “No.”

And they said, “Do you know who the president is?” And he said, “Yes. The president is Joe Biden.”

And they’re like, “Okay, he hasn’t been watching Fox News.” They think it’s a totally different guy on there, unless they’re talking about gas prices then Biden’s in charge of everything.

So my dad, they did a few scans. They did a CT scan, etc., because they’re really checking. Because when something like that happens, it’s so mysterious. It’s not like, “My leg hurts. Let’s do an x‑ray and see what there is.” It could be so many different things with the brain.

So they did all these scans. They pretty quickly ruled out Alzheimer’s. They ruled out a stroke, which I was terrified it might be. They ruled out dementia, all these stuff. They’re like, it’s not that.

And I slept all that night because I couldn’t hear this. My mom didn’t have cell phone reception in the hospital room. And because of the pandemic, she wasn’t allowed to hang out in the hallway and call and text family.

So I slept with my phone clutched on my chest, which I'm sure is giving me chest cancer, a new kind of cancer invented by me, and I heard the next day.

So with the next morning, I heard from my mom what they realized my father had. I was so fitfully sleeping that night. I was so stressed out. What they figured out happened to my dad was that he was suffering from amnesia.

And kudos to my father for living such a robust 70 years on this earth that he’s just done doing regular stuff and has started living out sitcom plots from the ‘70s. That’s incredible. My only framework for amnesia is like someone’s on a desert island. They get hit in the head with a coconut, forget that they’re on a desert island.

So I was talking to my mom on the phone the next morning, I was like, “Mom, have they tried hitting Dad with a second coconut? Because that always seems to work for Gilligan and Daffy Duck.” They had not.

What they figured out happened specifically, I want to be specific, my father was suffering from a condition known as global transient amnesia, which sounds like it means being so rich, you forget where you own property.

Just like, “Is the summer home on Turks or is it on Caicos? I can never remember. This global transient amnesia, it’s terrible.”

Don’t laugh at that, smarties. No, that’s a nerd joke. I found the nerds. I found the nerds. Knock it off.

And I know this is Proton Prom, even though I’m dressed like it’s a bar mitzvah, and I apologize. But what global transient amnesia really means is it comes on very quickly and all‑encompassingly, and then it disappears almost as quickly as it comes on.

It was very scary. I’d never heard of this before. And the fact that it was happening to my dad’s brain was very terrifying.

And it played out exactly as was forecasted. At Monday night, my mom called me to say that my dad was having trouble with his memory.

Tuesday at lunch, he was like, “Did they COVID test us when we got to the hospital?”

My mom was like, “Oh, you’re back.”

And that’s what happened. His memory came back all at once, except for a 10‑hour blackout the night before, which kind of sounds fun, doesn’t it? Like, I’d sign up for that once. That’s just a bender without the nausea and apologizing.

So his memory came back on the next day. It was like truly phenomenal, like just the unknowability of other people’s minds was really stunning to me.

I was talking about this with a friend. I said to her, I was like, “They don’t expect it to come back.” That’s something that they know about global transient amnesia. It’s not like it happens and then keeps happening to a person, thank goodness. But they don’t really know what causes it. They think, because sometimes it’s concurrent with a powerful migraine, they think it might be related, but they haven’t done enough studies to know for sure.

That’s what I was telling my friend. And she said, “That’s interesting, Josh, because I just read an article about global transient amnesia. And what I read was that sometimes it is also concurrent. It occurs concurrently with a powerful orgasm.”

And I said, “I don’t have to know all of science.” I had a pretty fine explanation for this phenomenon right at my fingertips, and then she hit me with a second, way more psychologically complicated phenomenon and explanation. Because I was just starting to come to terms with the fact that my dad, at his age, was maybe starting to lose it a little bit.

But now, I also have to reckon with the fact that my mom, at her age, definitely still got it and good for them. But mom, maybe take it down a couple notches if you want dad to remember the way home from dinner.

My mom does not love when I tell this story to strangers despite the immensely flattering light it paints her in. Sex so good it gives you amnesia, that’s a Drake lyric, Mom. My dad has no recollection I’ve ever said this to anyone, so we’re cool.

Thank you so much. Have a great night.

Part 2

So let me get started. My life, my life was supposed to be a formula laid out by my parents. You can probably picture it. Think about the kid in elementary school, the Asian kid in elementary school with a bowl haircut. Well, that would have been me.

But secretly, by middle school, I wanted to be Eddie Van Halen. Think the bowl haircut, but I wanted to be Eddie Van Halen. Do you remember the red guitar with the white stripes? The hair out to here? What was that song? Running with the Devil, remember that?

You want to see something really funny? This was me in my bedroom. Bom, bom, bom, bom-bom. I was a kid, the Asian kid, who secretly had other dreams. I wanted to be Eddie Van Halen.

But the truth is, for the first 25 years of my life, I was 100% Japanese math boy. To give you an image of what that was like, I should begin by saying that my father was a math professor at Johns Hopkins. My parents were like tiger parents. I love them, so please don't get the wrong idea, but they were kind of hard on us.

To give you a picture of what that was like, being the 100% math boy, in kindergarten, they bought this little desk and they made me do geometry problems at this little desk while I sat next to my dad doing his research in mathematics.

In second grade, they signed me up to take the SAT test. Picture the kid with a handful of number two pencils and an eraser, legs swinging like this at the table around all these teenagers with acne who’s stressed out about where they're going to college. That would have been me. I did get an 800 on the SAT in second grade, but I think I got like a 200 because I could barely read in the verbal.

So I lived this life until I was about 15 or 16, the good grades. They made me play the violin. So if any of you out there like to play the violin, please don't take this the wrong way. But if your parents make you play the violin, it's kind of hard to love it. Secretly in my bedroom, I'd hold my violin not like this, but like this, pretending it was that red guitar with the white stripes.

So I lived that life. And the formula, maybe you think it worked. Maybe it worked. I went to college at the University of Chicago. I loved it at the University of Chicago, but I hated math. The reason why I hated math is because it was like burned into my brain that math should be about memorization. It should be about tests, at least tests that you get at least like a 95 on and it should be like whip-fast mental calculation. Who likes that? Who likes tests? But that's what I thought math was for the longest time. Like I said, the first 25 years of my life.

But I had to be a professor. I had to get a PhD. That's what my parents expected of me, so that was kind of a huge turmoil in my brain. But like a good 100% Japanese math boy, I followed the formula and I ended up going to graduate school at UCLA.

Ken Ono shares his story at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NY in June 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.

I shouldn't say secretly. I loved LA, Southern California. Think Pacific Coast highway, the weather. Coming from Chicago, just think about the weather. It was awesome. So everything about UCLA, except the math part, was awesome.

But I had to fulfill my familial obligation to get a PhD in math, so I secretly wanted to come up with an exit strategy. You see, there was no way in my mind that I was going to be a professor that gives tests and thinks that that's what math is. I couldn't imagine doing that for my life, but I was at least going to stick it through and try to get that PhD.

The way I did it was as follows. I learned about an Indian mathematician by the name of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Maybe some of you know the name. He's an amazing guy. So if you've never heard of the name Ramanujan, let me just take a moment to tell you about this very true story.

In the late 19th century, Ramanujan was born in lush South India. He was an autodidact. He was self‑trained. He was an amateur. And he believed that his Hindu goddess gave him visions of mathematical formulas. I mean, who does that? Most people in… when I was growing up in the ‘80s, I wanted to play video games. Somebody give me the secret to Donkey Kong. I want to get to Level 30, whatever.

But in the late 19th century, there was this man. His name was Ramanujan, and his Hindu goddess gave him visions of formulas in his sleep that he recorded in these three very special notebooks. I thought that was a lovely story. Ramanujan died at a very early age of 32, so there's a lot about his story that's really at the same time breathtaking and romantic. But for me, I thought it was an awesome idea. Some guy left behind for us three notebooks to study. Think about other books that people really study, and I thought, “Oh, that's going to be awesome.”

So for my PhD, I decided to study these three notebooks. The yellowed pages still exist. And the faculty at UCLA said this is the craziest thing you could ever do. Who in the world would recommend to their student to do something as esoteric as studying notebooks left behind 80 years ago? It's backwaters mathematics. No one does that.

But what the faculty didn't understand was that I didn't like the math that was being taught to me. How many of you actually like the math that was actually taught to you? I wouldn't believe you, right? But if I had the time, I could actually explain to you what beauty is in formulas if you were to stare at some of these equations. I won't do that now. It's not a math lecture. But let me give you some analogies.

You all have been to the beach. Who hasn't been mesmerized by how sand piles form at the lapping of the waves? Who hasn't been mesmerized by the splitting of the color in light as it passes through the prism? Who hasn't been mesmerized by the motion in flocks of birds? This is all beautiful stuff, but at the same time, that's math.

Math is everywhere around us. It's not about, can you remember 30 different trig identities or formulas that appear in the back of a calculus book? That's not what math is. As a graduate student, I understood that by working through these notebooks.

Well, to make a long story short, at that time, I wanted to become a mathematician but my way, one which allowed me to think of myself more as an artist than as someone who just does lots of calculations. Please don't ever mistake me for someone who just likes to do calculations. I don't know anyone who is like that.

And so everyone thought I was foolish. It was 1993, I was applying for jobs. By the spring of 1993, I hadn't gotten a single interview.

Although 1993 was a long time ago, it wasn’t so long ago that we weren't actually reading emails every day. So by the early 1990s, you logged on every day to check your email on your cathode ray tubes. For me, I was hoping and praying that some university would invite me out for just an interview. That's all I wanted, an interview. Give me a chance. Maybe I'm not so foolish.

Then it became June. As you know, colleges usually start in August. I'm not getting a job. It's June.

June 23rd, my third wedding anniversary, I come out of the shower dripping wet. Wrapped a towel around my waist, sit down to this cathode ray tube and I log on to check my email. Do you remember, we used to get emails over phone lines and every letter would appear like one by one?

But that morning on June 23rd, I received my first viral email message, dozens of messages sent over and over and over again forwarded by friends. You know what happened that morning? A few hours earlier in Cambridge, a mathematician by the name of Andrew Wiles had announced the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

If you've never heard of Fermat's Last Theorem, you certainly have heard of the Pythagorean theorem, A squared plus B squared equals C squared. You all remember that.

But if you ever wondered about what about A to the n plus B to the n equals C to the n? Well, it was Fermat's conjecture that apart from the stuff that Pythagoras discovered, there would be no other solutions. And establishing that there are no other solutions would be an open problem for over three centuries. This problem was so hard it was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the hardest math problem.

And on that morning, June 23rd, Andrew Wiles announced a proof. As I was reading the email dripping sweat, I was like, “This is history.” This made the front page of the New York Times the next day. What math problem makes the front page of the New York Times? This is the only one time maybe in history that has happened. I should ask Nick.

As I was reading that email, halfway down, there it was. People were trying to figure out how Wiles had done it. In the email, it said he used modular forms and Galois representations. Oh, my God, that was my thesis. I could not believe that I was, overnight, one of the ten people in the world who had a chance to check and make sense out of the most historic event in modern mathematics. I never had to worry about getting a job again.

So it's 2014. I'm a professor at Emory University and I get an email. Now, we have internet, right? I got an email from a Hollywood director. His name is Matt Brown.

He says, “We're making a film called The Man Who Knew Infinity, about someone I think you know, Ramanujan. And I'd like to have a Skype with you.” This is a long time ago. Nobody Skypes anymore. But in 2014, we Skyped.

“I'd like to Skype with you because we need help with the art department. We need to know what formulas to put on the chalkboards, sort of like A Beautiful Mind.”

What was supposed to be a 15-minute Skype turned into a couple hours and by the next week, I was on a plane to London, to Pinewood Studios to help with pre-production.

I think I'm a pretty outgoing guy so I started out working with the art department. Then I started working on the script. And by the end of the week, they invited me into rehearsal.

I wasn't expecting that, but it was a Friday. I came in with my coffee expecting to work with people in the art department. But Matt pulls me aside, the director. He goes, “The actors are here. Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, they are here and we need you to practice.”

So I walked into this room full of smoke. It's a very small room in Pinewood Studios, a little coffee table. Matt Brown, the director, was there. Dev Patel, who you may know from Slumdog Millionaire or Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and Jeremy Irons. Oh, my God. He was for me the voice of Scar. I couldn't believe I was there.

So they were sitting around the coffee table and I was like four feet back thinking, “Holy shit, that's Jeremy Irons. That's Dev Patel. What the hell am I doing here?”

After about 15 minutes, Jeremy Irons, who smokes like a chimney, in his deep voice, we were on these chairs on the wheels, he grabs the chair between my legs, pulls me up to the coffee table, blows smoke in my face and says, “Do I have your attention?”

I said, “You're Jeremy Irons.”

“You have a job to do here. I know nothing about mathematics. Quite frankly, I hate mathematics, but you've got to help us pretend to be mathematicians, and you have a job to do.”

I was, like, “Awesome.”

So, over the next couple of weeks, I got elevated through the various roles in the film. I ended up becoming an associate producer. In a matter of three weeks, I became an associate producer of a Hollywood film. And the last thing that you do as an associate producer is you become part of the promotion team.

I walked the red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival at Tribeca, San Francisco. And I'd like to end this story with what we did at the Zurich International Film Festival where our film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, was chosen to be the gala film. The first night of this week‑long celebration of films, they chose our film.

And at the conclusion of the film, they bring you up on stage and they ask you questions. I actually even got a couple of questions. And at the conclusion of the question‑and‑answer, nobody can prepare you for this, you leave the theater and there, in Zurich, you're walking on the green carpet. I think I'd maybe seen like one camera lens the size of the type that I saw hundreds of lining this 200-yard long walk of green carpet.

And we processed out to have our individual interviews with Hollywood Reporter or the Entertainment Tonight, so on and so forth. That was in formation behind Dev, behind Stephen Fry and Toby Jones. I'm the math guy. I was the 100% Japanese math boy.

So while I was waiting my turn to answer the two or three questions I got while the others got dozens, out of the corner of my eye, running down the green carpet, was a really familiar face. It was Anna Kendrick. Me, in middle school, I would have been like the boy thinking slow motion girl running towards you. It's Anna Kendrick. And I'm thinking, “She must love Dev Patel.” Who doesn't?

But then she comes up to me and goes, “You're the math guy, right?”

“Well, you're, like, Anna Kendrick, like, Pitch Perfect 1, 2, 3, I can count.”

“I really want to talk to you.”

“What kind of universe— don't wake me up, right?”

And she goes, “I'm about to make a film about mathematics with Ben Affleck.”

So it wasn't quite true. It turned out to be a film called The Accountant. Maybe some of you saw it. But I have to tell you what was going on in my mind. The boom mics, the flash bulbs, Hollywood, I was thinking, “Oh, my God, this is, in this moment, I am something like Eddie Van Halen.”

And I was a mathematician, but my way. Thank you very much.

Part 3

It’s 1993. No, it’s 1999. It’s 1999 and I am on a date with Ken Ono, who we've met tonight, and Russell Hulse, a physicist who had discovered the first binary pulsar and had won the Nobel prize for it. This was a pair of stars that are caught in each other's orbit and stuck in each other's gravity, rotating about each other. You can detect their flickering with telescopes from earth, as Russell did.

This moment of supreme serendipity is a result of two things. One, it's the National Science Foundation's 50th birthday, so they’re sending famous scientists out to do outreach at high schools like mine.

And number two, at 17, apparently, I had established enough of a brand such that my high school administrators were like, “What the hell are we going to do with these two hyper nerds from the National Science Foundation after the assembly?” And somebody was like, “I guess we could throw Jankowski at them.”

I think that same faculty member gave me Prime Obsession as a book like, “This guy will like this.”

So I was so excited for this date because, as a 17-year-old super nerd, spending the afternoon with a famous mathematician and a Nobel prize laureate is basically my idea of the perfect day. In fact, binary pulsar is a really great description for the things that I was feeling in my loins.

At first, I'm most impressed by my proximity to a Nobel prize, but as the date continues, Ken is feeding me cryptography problem after cryptography problem. We're making small talk around this. I still have this green sheet of paper with a cryptography problem whose solution is Meg Ryan in the drawer in my room in my parents’ house back in midland Michigan.

But Ken reveals to me that when he was my age, he didn't want to study mathematics. He wanted to race bicycles. I just wanted to race bicycles in part because of overbearing parents. And he revealed to me that he didn't want to play the violin, and my parents made me play the violin. So on this day, I see in Ken a possible future me, a successful future me, a Japanese kid who is a cyclist who had successfully rebelled against his parents by becoming a famous mathematician and a college professor?

Eric Jankowski shares his story at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NY in June 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.

We really stuck it to him, Ken. Nice job.

But that moment of vulnerability and those moments of humanity on that date really stuck with me. I spoke about them the first time that I stood on the Story Collider stage 12 years ago now, or I guess maybe 11. But I got on the Story Collider stage in Ann Arbor, Michigan and told the story about my date with Ken and Russell and the regrettable stand-up routine that I had done in front of the executive team of the largest chemical company in the world that may have gotten my biology teacher fired.

In doing so, I found a forum for the messy, hilarious, joyful, and regrettable facets of growing into a profession that I had bottled up while trying to pursue the path that I thought scientists like Ken and Russell followed.

When the Story Collider emailed me telling me that my episode on the podcast was getting a lot of downloads, it was revolutionary to think that other people might connect with my story the same way that I connected with Ken's that day. And it was motivational to get that kind of attention. It was cathartic to be able to share the failures and facets of the things that I had done that I felt guilty about while stumbling as a young professional.

I thought about those things and wrote about those things when I applied to the National Science Foundation's Early Career award. This is a half million-dollar grant that young faculty can get when they're starting out on their careers, and that grant was accepted.

Those moments of vulnerability and humanity informed my application to tenure that I submitted a couple of years ago, that was accepted.

Shout out to my dean who's here with her family tonight, coming out all the way from Boise.

And I continue to think about the scale of those kinds of connections and that kind of impact that the Story Collider has had since then. With every podcast episode that's released, there's the potential for millions of people to make those kinds of personal connections.

And before each of those podcast episodes, there's a live show, like the one that we're at tonight, where strangers can gather and experience the universal truth of doing science, which is messing up and learning.

This work is important because in higher education, it's not always the case that we're met with these moments of vulnerability, kindness, and humility. In fact, in the training of scientists and mathematicians and engineers, there's policies and procedures that embed sexism, racism, and prejudices that are antithetical to our pursuit of the truth.

I think that's what brings many of us here together tonight is that we're doing the work of understanding things about the world, revealing truths about the universe, but for what? To improve things for justice, right?

And this impact that the Story Collider is having is in some sense just getting started. In the last five years, the Story Collider has started partnering with faculty at institutions all across the country, like Jeff Schinske at Foothill College where they're measuring the impact that listening to stories like those from Story Collider have on the language that students use to describe scientists.

And at Boise State, with my colleagues Krishna and Ann, who you should all meet tonight, where we're measuring the impact that writing personal stories has on our students’ professional development, their sense of belonging, and their sense of identity.

The Story Collider is becoming a catalyst for real interdisciplinary sciences. There are faculty from anthropology, from marine biology, engineering, chemistry, mathematics that are coming together to understand how we can use narrative to build a better science, to change for whom science belongs.

So tonight, I'd like you to be somebody else's Ken Ono, unless you're Ken Ono, in which case you're already everybody else's Ken Ono. But by that I mean I want you to plant a seed that helps people help people for decades.

That is the mechanism by which I think we can change science, we can change the planet, and maybe, someday, make the colonization of the first binary pulsar a more just place for all. Thank you.