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In a world where trust in institutions and in news is falling and the role of influencers is growing, finding the connective tissue between you and your audience is key to, well, connecting. 

To establish a rapport, which can if nourished, lead to trust, which can lead to a genuine connection. And for the creator to go further, to push deeper, to find meaning and bearing in places we as consumers or readers or listeners might not otherwise look or expect, like in local news or video game reviews or recipes.

I think that matters a lot. We’re not only losing trust but feeling that loss. With so much coming at us, we notice and feel a lack of connection, we feel adrift and unmoored. I am moved by people whose work and art I can connect with, whether I’m seeking it out or not.

Because connection matters. Who we get our COVID information or our weather forecasts from matters, but also who helps us understand where we can find comfort, and why.

My guest today is Swapna Krishna.

Swapna is a writer and journalist covering space, science, tech, and pop culture. She writes everywhere from Fast Company to StarWars.com, from StarTrek.com to Business Insider, the LA Times, Bitch Magazine, Bustle, Mental Floss, and more.

She’s appeared on a million excellent podcasts, at Comic-Con, and is the co-host of her own show, the Desi Geek Girls podcast, and the new host of PBS’s show Far Out.

Swapna often writes some of the most empathetic tech and pop culture commentary on the web. She has this unique ability to say “this is what this big thing means to me” and make you feel like “yes, me too!” or “Wait I didn’t think about that”.

We have very different backgrounds and lives but I trust her writing and thoroughly enjoy her new show, and her efforts to try and meet people where they are, on science issues and pop culture fandoms big and small.

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We have ignored vaginas for so long. Hear me out.

On the one hand, history and popular culture, from god-kings to love songs to movies to fan fiction, are littered with supposedly straight men with a single pursuit: intercourse with a vagina. 

But along the way these same men have pigeonholed women and their vaginas into simple vehicles for heterosexual sex or reproduction. They’ve ignored almost everything else in the area, and shamed women for even considering pleasuring themselves, or pleasure at all, for getting sick, for failing to carry a child, and more.

This ignorance touches everything – from the law to culture to racism to medicine to psychotherapy.

Sex-ed is under attack. Birth control is under attack. Reproductive rights are under attack. Trans rights are under attack.

There has simply never been a better or more consequential time to understand how and why the vagina and friends work, every day, not just on "sex day", or during menstruation or menopause, to understand what lies beneath and how incredible the whole thing can be – and how different one person’s setup can be from another.

My guest today is Rachel E. Gross.

Rachel is an award-winning science journalist based in Brooklyn whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, WIRED, New Scientist, Slate, Undark, and NPR, among others.

Rachel covers the debates and personalities that shape scientific knowledge, most recently as Digital Science Editor for Smithsonian Magazine. She has won the Award for Excellence in Religion Reporting, a Wilbur Award for Best Online Story, and she was a finalist for an Online Journalism Award in digital storytelling.

And in 2019 Rachel received a MacDowell Fellowship to complete research and reporting for her new book, Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage.

…and that is why we’re here today, to talk about vaginas. To be more inclusive, we’re here to talk about vaginas and friends.

Because there’s so much more to the vagina and her friends than you could possibly know. From the microbiome to the clitoris, we’re learning new things every day about a hugely meaningful and ignored part of 50% of our species.

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I think about time a lot. Some days I feel ancient, some days I can’t believe how old I am.

I’ve got kids, too. I can’t believe how fast they’ve grown up already. They love so many things. Swimming. Cooking. Plain pasta. The beach. Vegetables, somehow. Their friends. Their family. Dinosaurs.

Man, oh man, do they love dinosaurs.

I love to challenge them, to help them think about how long ago it all was, and how long it lasted. How different the world was. How the land under their feet was an ocean, once.

And of course, knowing what we know now, how fast it can all change. How an asteroid - or a virus, or a fire, or a flood - can change your life forever.

I try to help them understand that, unlike the dinosaurs, we have the tools to prevent many of these things, and we have the foresight to understand when and how, and why they might happen.

As much progress as we’ve made in these 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, from fire to wheels to meat to agriculture to handwashing –  we are in a moment when we are challenged yet again on a global scale, and unlike the dinos, our future is of our own making.

Things can change quickly, and we need to understand how that’s happened before.

My guest today is Riley Black.

Riley is a science writer and amateur paleontologist based in Salt Lake City, Utah, right in the center of dinosaur country, where she chases tales of vanished lives from museum collections to remote badlands.

Riley’s published books include Written in Stone, my favorite and critically-acclaimed My Beloved Brontosaurus, When Dinosaurs Ruled, Prehistoric Predators, and her newest: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, a fascinating, emotional page-turner that explores the minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, and centuries after the dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub asteroid 66 million years ago.

Riley’s journey and storytelling are powerful and so important in this moment when we’re so ready to move on to the next thing that we haven’t taken the time to cherish the people, the places, the world around us, and how lucky we are to have them.

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