Vivienne Ming: Science is a Story, Revisited

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. This is the FoST podcast. Welcome.

Today I want to revisit my conversation with a guest who has a hopeful vision for the future: Dr. Vivienne Ming, a self-proclaimed “mad scientist” and serial entrepreneur. Vivienne is an incredible example of someone who’s using the power of technology to change the stories that make up our world for the better. In her 25 years of working with AI and machine learning, she’s invented multiple systems specifically to improve people’s lives, including models that help treat medical conditions like diabetes and bipolar disorder, or address social issues such as implicit bias in hiring, or reuniting refugee families. One in particular that we discuss in this episode is the Inclusion Impact Index, which tracks the contributions of women and LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs to the US economy, as well as where their contributions would be, if they were given equal access to resources.

With this concrete data, it becomes easier and all the more necessary for these founders to tell their success stories. Since this recording, Vivienne’s work’s been covered in Forbes, The Washington Post, the Financial Times and the London Times, and she’s given dozens of keynote talks at conferences around the world. All the while she’s been a staunch advocate for human-centered equal opportunity artificial intelligence, focusing on the concrete good that this technology can do. When I re-listen to this episode, I’m reminded of the impact that one passionate, committed, caring person can have, whether that’s through stories, through science, or as in Vivienne’s case, through both. I hope she inspires you as much as she inspires me.

Vivienne Ming, it is such an honor to have you on the Future of Storytelling podcast.

Vivienne Ming:

It’s great to be here. It’s always fun.

Charlie Melcher:

Thank you. I go to a lot of dinner parties and people think of the modern-day dinner party as kind of the contemporary metaphor of when our ancestors used to sit around the campfire and listen to some shaman or healer tell a story. And most of the dinner parties I go to are so disappointing in terms of the stories I hear. People tell me these sad tales and pathetic kind of, what they’ve been doing at work— and I found myself a few years ago in a crowded restaurant sitting across from you and I heard you share a story that I will never forget. I’m going to ask you if you would be so kind as to tell that story again.

Vivienne Ming:

Sure, I’d be happy to share it. And I have become comfortable with the idea that the only reason people actually invite me to dinner parties is as color. I’m the weirdo that’s there to… And I seem so normal on the outside. When I was little, I was supposed to win a Nobel Prize. I was supposed to be this amazing kid carrying the torch. My dad, he became a doctor, so he gave me every advantage and all of it just slipped through my fingers. All those things I was supposed to be by the time I was in high school, I hated everything about myself. I was a failure in every way I could imagine. I was clever enough that I had these exceptional test scores, which allowed me to choose which university I went to. And thinking I’d be a doctor like my father, I went to the University of California, the one down in San Diego where everyone thinks they’re going to be a doctor someday. And then I flunked out and within a year or two I’m homeless and I found myself living in my car.

I had no money. I had no job, not because no one would ever have given me one, but because I’d reached this point in my life that was like, well, if I’m not winning a Nobel Prize, then I’m not worth anything. I genuinely believe this is 1995. It’s America, so I got a gun. Turns out that’s very easy to do. I had a night in October of 1995 where I just pointed the gun at my head in the car that I was living in and tried to think about why I should be alive. Well, I guess it’s not a big shock, a twist reveal to say 30 years later that I didn’t pull the trigger, but boy did I come close. And it was something my father actually said. He had always said this thing, “Live a life of substance. Live a life that makes other people’s lives better.”

And so I had this night and I needed a reason to be alive, and so I’ll be blunt, I just made one up. Live a life that makes other people’s life better. That’s my rule from now on. That’s how I’m going to make my decision. Every time something comes up, it’s not going to be about me. It’s not going to be about whether I’m happy. That’s only led to failure. I’m going to choose what makes people’s lives better. But what came after that was astonishing.

Charlie Melcher:

And so you did go back to school, and you did get your degrees, and you taught, and you got married.

Vivienne Ming:

The first thing I had to do was just confess to the people of my lives, “I’m a fraud and a failure.” But from that, I suddenly had the money to go back to school and I went back. Same school, notionally the same person, got perfect scores in every class. I did my entire undergraduate degree in a single year, same school I’d flunked out of. It was truly astonishing. The dirty secret was I still hated myself, but that wasn’t how I made my decisions. I thought that getting perfect grades maybe would make me feel better. They didn’t. But the thing I kept telling myself was, “It’s not about me. It’s not about whether I’m happy. I’m never going to be happy.” That was something I had become very comfortable with.

Charlie Melcher:

And then you found yourself at some point, I think you told me that you were having headaches or physical ailments. You were not well.

Vivienne Ming:

I was such a mess on so many levels. And yet while the first say 20 years of my life were slowly… Everything got worse and worse internally and externally. The next 10 years of my life were this weird divergence. Everything externally about my life got better. My career as a scientist took off. I had papers in nature and I developed new algorithms for understanding the brain. It was was amazing. Not only was my career taking off, I found this person that loved me. I loved her. She made me happy. I didn’t make me happy, but she did. And yet I hated myself. And I’m like, God, two out of three, how many people get to live a life where they have an impact on the world and there are people that care for them? Then something weird happened. It’s October 19th, 2005. I’m lying in bed next to my fiance. And for no reason whatsoever, I turn to her and say, “You want to know my deep dark secret? I wish I was a woman. Well, good night.”

And I rolled over to go back to bed. It was totally unplanned. It was entirely spontaneous. I didn’t intend for it to go anywhere. Just for a moment in time, I was actually happy. And I just thought, you know what? I’m going to share this truth thing with her. And I am now a completely different person. My name, when my wife asked me to marry me was a very different name, and my body was entirely different, and everything about me. But what I discovered was, being able to be me when my life was getting better, I’m falling in love. My career is taking off. Being able to be me was actually the gift. That was doing everything right and suddenly I get to be happy. But I’d extend that a little bit, which is to say even though my career was taking off, I suspect had I never changed, I would have some very admirable career as a footnote scientist at a very nice university somewhere. It’d be a good life, a life I’d happily wish for anyone else.

And yet in the years since my transition, I built the first ever AI to treat diabetes. I founded five companies. Yes, I am a mom of two and a wife, but I also have had the chance to advise the UN on global AI policy and build a system that can predict manic episodes in bipolar sufferers. I mean, I’ve gotten to do so much and I’m quite confident. I don’t believe I’d have done any of it if I hadn’t had the chance to be me.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, it certainly seems that the work you’ve done has been very much focused on how you can use your gifts, who you truly are and bring those to bear in service, in support of other people to solve problems that are creating suffering. I mean, I know for example, the project you did for your son.

Vivienne Ming:

Oh, my goodness, 2011, my son was probably three and a half and he starts wetting the bed. But swing around through 2011 all the way to Thanksgiving, and he’s just turned four. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, he’s taking a bath and he throws up. It’s the flu. It’s not a big deal. By that Wednesday afternoon, we’re heading into the four-day weekend. He had lost about 15 pounds off a 40 pound frame. He can’t stand up. He’s disoriented. We rush in first to the doctor’s office. They don’t even need to do a test. You can actually smell it. All of it is sweet. So if you don’t know what that indicates, it’s type 1 diabetes. It’s an autoimmune disease, affects about a million Americans. It’s different than type 2, which is the one that’s more common. So he’s dying. I mean, his blood sugar was off the charts when we finally get him to the emergency room.

So we get him there, his blood is acidic. As it starts to eat itself, it turns his own blood toxic. He is dying. And I got to spend the hardest 24 hours of my life in the pediatric intensive care unit at Oakland Children’s Hospital. 24 hours. But as hard as that was, I am a nerd. I’m a geek. The hardest thing for me was about a month later. So my wife and I are both scientists. We take my son home. We’re collecting all of this information about him. I mean data. We crashed Google Docs on a regular basis. Everything he ate to the gram plus all of the nutritional information, how much fat, how much protein, how much carbohydrates, his activity levels. I put a smartwatch on him, again, back in 2011. So this was a basis band. It was invented by Intel. There’s no Apple smartwatches back then.

And we go in for our first outpatient visit, and I’m thinking they’re going to love us. How often do they get these amazing parent that has collected all this data that they can use? So first I email it to them and I don’t get any responses back. And I’m thinking, oh, I get it. They’re old school. So I print out about an inch thick, just mass of spreadsheet paper, and we bring it in with them and we give it to them. And they’re that we’re wasting their time. What are we supposed to do with all this data? And I am thinking to myself, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. No one is innovating in any way in this treatment. And I thought that was crazy. So that night, my wife and I bought a used book on endocrinology, and so we read up on the book.

The next day I started hacking all of my son’s equipment, breaking into his medical devices. Turns out I broke all sorts of US federal laws. You are not supposed to hack into medical equipment, but I redirected all of the data out of his equipment to my personal server, and I built a model that could predict into the future his blood glucose levels. I built this model where I could say, he’s going to eat this, this, and this, and it would say, “Here’s how much insulin you should give him. And if his blood sugar goes low, we’ll let you know before it happens.” I got invited to some fancy black tie dinner at the White House and I showed up wearing a live camera computer on my head, and the Secret Service flipped out. They let me in. I swear to God that I asked ahead of time, but they let me in.

And then they saw on the internal security that this crazy woman was walking around with a fluorescent blue computer on her head. While I was at the party, I got a message from the system that I had built that said my son’s blood glucose levels would go low in the next 30 minutes. So I sent a text message to my sister and he didn’t go low because she gave him some crackers. Probably the single most proud moment of my life is I got to build a superpower to protect my son, and then I got to tell other people how to do it. No patents, no licenses. I figured more people would be alive, and that is a good thing.

Charlie Melcher:

Vivienne, let me ask you about some of the things you’re working on now. We’d love to hear a little bit about the inclusion impact index.

Vivienne Ming:

I was an academic at UC Berkeley when my wife and I came up with the idea for a tech company an education company using some of—I got a little of my AI chocolate and her education peanut butter. And then I went out to try to raise money for my first tech company, venture money. And it was pulling teeth. Nobody wanted to give some weird blonde. I mean, they loved the technology, but nobody wanted to fund a female CEO with no business background. And it was really eye-opening. Now in the years since, again, I’ve founded five companies and been a chief scientist at others. I’ve raised over a hundred million dollars across all those companies. I have never pitched a female VC. None in my entire life has someone with actual voting power been in the room.

That includes all the companies that turned us down, all the companies that funded us. I know a few, but they’ve never decided my fate, much less someone who’s transgender. Founders are straight white guys, maybe the occasional South Asian, East Asian guy, but it sure as hell ain’t some weirdo like me or even a considerably less weird women or other. And I’ve been there and I’ve lived it. I know what it’s like.

Charlie Melcher:

So the inclusion impact index, yeah.

Vivienne Ming:

Exactly. I know what it’s like being a female founder of a company, and I know what it’s like being a male founder of a company. It is wildly different, but I’m a scientist. I like having statistics. So here at Socos Labs, which is my little mad science lab where we just work on projects for free, we invent stuff and give them away. One thing I thought would be really great would be to build essentially a website, a map. We look at every single major city in the United States, all of the data on job creation and funding patent creation. We’re going to expand so much of this, and we just wanted to say, how much of an impact were queer entrepreneurs having on their neighbor’s lives? Female entrepreneurs, black entrepreneurs. If you are different then that stereotype of what an entrepreneur is, then I wanted a chance to share your story and to do it in real time. We can make a change. And that was the purpose of the index.

Charlie Melcher:

And just so people understand who are listening, you’re using all of these type of economic data that you’re able to pull for those metro areas and use it to sort of see the impact of people of color, people of LGBTQ, the impact that they’re making in those communities as business creators, as entrepreneurs. And to project forward what could be the real impact if they were better supported. So you’re telling a story, it’s almost like a kind of protopians fiction. You’re sort of imagining what the future could be through your data science, big data.

Vivienne Ming:

Yeah. We have data on hundreds of thousands of people coming into this system, pulled in from the patent office and the Census Bureau from some amazing data partners that are out there collecting information like Crunchbase and others. And we pulled it all together in one place and developed some models that make predictions.

Charlie Melcher:

So tell me about how your research led you to understand that there’s a tax on being different.

Vivienne Ming:

One day I got this call from a reporter. She said, “Hey, there’s this guy named José Zamora, and he’s just written a blog post, which has gone viral. He claims no one was responding to his resumes, so he changed his name at the top to Joe Zamora identical resume. And suddenly he claims everyone’s giving him offers. Dr. Ming is this plausible?” And what we found was if you were different then you needed to go to school longer, fancier schools. You needed to work longer times at your company to get that same probability. And I thought, okay, how do I package this? What do I call bias that conveys our discovery? And I realized I had the perfect word, the dirtiest word in the conservative language. It’s a tax and it really is. It’s just like a tax. It’s extra pay. For José, it’s about three quarters of a million dollars just because you have a different name.

It’s the tax on being different. I’ve paid it, José Zamora paid it, my wife has paid it. And quite frankly, if you think hard, but it doesn’t take that much thought. We all pay it, right? The best possible people don’t get the same opportunities. And so the likelihood, a world that runs entirely on the Harvard grads that got into Harvard because their parents were Harvard grads is not really a sustainable world, not if we’re talking about all 8 billion of us. It makes so much sense to me to understand that we all pay the tax on being different.

Charlie Melcher:

Let me ask you, what was the big takeaway from the understanding of the tax on being different? How can we address that?

Vivienne Ming:

There are genuine villains in this world, but the simple truth is most of bias isn’t explicit villainy. It’s people being human. And it turns out we’re all human, as much as I might be trying to turn us all into cyborgs. The real failure to me is not that we’re biased. The failure is that we refuse to acknowledge it. That we refuse to be honest with ourselves about our biases and our failings. So the starting point for me is just normalizing this. Accepting that we’re imperfect, but always should be striving to do better. It’s a bunch of practical things. Here’s a very tangible one, and we just wrote a piece about this. Wage gap. What is the single biggest factor that we found that predicts wage gap? How many female faces are in the leadership team? The more women on the board in the C-suite, particularly CEO CFO, the lower the wage gap.

Why? Because if I’ve worked my off my whole life to get to an elite school, I worked hard at Stanford, at MIT, wherever– École Polytechnique–and then I got an amazing job at a top company and I’m still working harder than everyone around me. And then I look up and there is nobody like me on the leadership team, or almost nobody. There’s a part of my brain that starts doing a bunch of calculations, even if I’m not aware of it. And it starts saying, “You know what? Don’t work any less hard, but why don’t you put that extra hour into a nonprofit project, or put it into church, or put it into your family, put it into something. Work hard, but don’t work as hard on this because it’s not going to pay off.” It only takes those subtle shifts because they accumulate. Discrimination comes with compounding interest.

You cannot solve these problems from the bottom. It doesn’t start in the mail room. It starts in the C-suite. You want to show the world that you believe that Black lives matter, where are your Black executives? You want to show the world that you support Pride. Is your supply chain made up of companies that discriminate against gay people? There are tangible things companies can do, and they are things that I guarantee you, their shareholders will view as a sacrifice and they will not be happy about it. This is a moment for leadership. And if you need the data, I’ve got the data to back you up. Your company will be better as a result of this. But until the rest of America sees that their hard work is respected and will pay off in a traditional career, they’re going to put the hard work someplace else because that’s how all of us work.

Charlie Melcher:

That’s a great learning and a great lesson for us for now, for today. What I’m so constantly impressed with is how you tell stories with big data, with data science, with artificial intelligence. You’re able to use your power to crunch numbers and to write code, to reveal things, truths about humanity. I find myself sitting here thinking how similar in some ways the left and the right brain are, how similar in a way the scientists can reveal the certain kinds of poetic truths or hold a mirror up to us, and through that help to enlighten or heal just as much as any great artist. And so with that, I want to say a sincere thank you for spending this time with us, for the beautiful work that you do. And just to again, be kind of sitting around the fire or table with you for a little while and hearing you share your story. So thank you, Vivienne.

Vivienne Ming:

Thank you. It was a lot of fun. And I will share one single thing that my advisor said to me when I was a student that his advisor said to him before, “Science is a story. It is a creative expression. Science, whether we’re talking about mathematicians or scientists or engineers exploring the unknown. Whether you’re an artist or a scientist, that is your job. And the ability to communicate that to the world is your responsibility.” I’m thrilled that I get that opportunity so often, and I’m really appreciative that you gave me the chance today.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the Future of Storytelling podcast. Thanks for joining me. The FoST community is made up of talented professionals who believe that storytelling and technology combined can help bring about a better world for us and for future generations. To learn more about the Future of Storytelling, subscribe to our free monthly newsletter at FOST.org. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media, in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.