Alecia (host): 0:00

I'm Alecia Vogel, and this is Tech Brat. On November 9th, 1914, in Vienna, Austria, a star by the name of Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born. From the moment she could speak, Hedy was asking questions, eager to understand the world around her. As a child, she had a habit of taking apart music boxes and putting them back together, Fascinated by how their intricate mechanisms worked. Her father nurtured this curiosity by taking Hedy on long strolls through Vienna, discussing science and engineering as they went. Little did he know that the same music, gears, and motion that fascinated his daughter would one day inspire a technology that would change global communication forever. Hedy developed a penchant for acting. and it wasn't long before Vienna's film industry took note. While attending acting classes, she forged a note from her mom in order to land a job as a script girl for Sasha Film, the largest Austrian film production company of the early sound era. Her presence on set soon led to small roles, each performance garnering more recognition than the last. Then, at the age of 18 in 1933, Hedy was catapulted to fame and infamy with the release of Ecstasy. A provocative and groundbreaking art film that boldly depicted female nudity and pleasure. Among those who were captivated and scandalized was Fritz Mandl, a wealthy Austrian arms dealer. In the months following Ecstasy's release, he persistently sought to meet her backstage at her plays and showered her with extravagant gifts in an attempt to win her over. However, once they were finally wed, his admiration quickly turned into control. Deeply embarrassed by the mere existence of Ecstasy, Mandel reportedly spent the equivalent of over 6. 5 million in an unsuccessful attempt to buy and destroy every existing copy of the film. Forced to abandon her acting career by her husband, Hedy was required to endure excruciatingly dull and stifling dinner parties with high ranking military officials and industry leaders, many of whom had direct ties to the Nazi regime. As war tensions escalated and anti Semitism spread, Hedy realized that she had to escape, not just from an oppressive marriage, but from the growing danger in Europe. In 1937, Hedy devised an escape plan. She hired a maid who resembled her, sewed jewels into a maid's uniform, and fled to London in disguise. There, she crossed paths with the head of MGM Studios while he was scouting for European talent. And she soon began a brand new life in Hollywood with a contract for 500 a week, the moniker of the most beautiful woman in the world, and a new stage name, Hedy Lamarr. Despite all the glitz and glam of her newfound American fame, Hedy couldn't help feeling preoccupied by the war raging in her homeland. In an effort to contribute to the war effort in a more meaningful way, she teamed up with avant garde composer George Antille and invented a communication system called frequency hopping. Hedy Drawing inspiration from self playing piano mechanisms. Upon presenting her plans to the U. S. Navy, she was basically laughed out of the room and advised to use her beautiful image to sell war bonds instead. However, the Navy secretly revisited her frequency hopping patent just a few years later, where it would go on to become the foundation of modern wireless communication. Today, I'm joined by Alexandra Deen, the director of Bombshell, The Hedy Lamarr Story, to discuss Hedy's incredible journey and the broader challenges faced by women in tech, both then and now. Thank you so much for joining me, Alex. So to start, what first drew you to Hedy Lamarr's story and what inspired you to create Bombshell?

Alex Dean: 4:03

When I started working on the Bombshell story, I was taking a huge leap myself from a corporate job. Where I think I was really feeling some depression that I hadn't recognized yet. I was working at Bloomberg Television and I was working on a series called Innovators, which was about people who were inventing things today. And I really fell madly in love with a lot of these stories and a lot of these young inventors, including young women like Lamora Freed and, um, Others who are creating these great inventions and many of them were not getting funding. And I started to realize that it was the ladies, it was the girls that were not getting the funding. And I started to get really frustrated about that because I kept reporting on this really exciting technology and it wasn't getting made. And I started to think about why, why. Do we trust these young men more than these young women to make their technologies? So I took this huge leap, started a company with my brother, and we started working on what we wanted to do first. And I kind of latched onto the story of Patti Lamar because there were a couple of books that had come out about her that were suggesting she may have come up with this major invention that we all use every day because it affected Bluetooth and Wi Fi. Yet she was dismissed and nobody understood her because she was the most beautiful girl in the world at the time. That was what her moniker was. She was an actress. She was a gandolous woman who had been in a very, very sexy movie when she was young. And that's kind of what people knew her for. They just couldn't accept that this very pretty actress could be the brain behind one of the most major inventions of our time.

Alecia (host): 5:38

That's crazy. And what you said early on about how There's this exciting technology and, you know, why do we trust these young male inventors, not the female inventors? When I was actually doing research for this podcast, I came across a stat that only 3 percent of, of venture capital funding goes to women. And if you have a female founder, your chances of getting funded actually go down, which is actually kind of insane. So, you're definitely not alone in being like, what the heck is going on here? Um, it's actually kind of a huge problem, I think even in my province of Alberta, because I'm quoting the US statistics usually, because I was working in US tech, but even in Alberta, it's like, I think only around 20 percent of funding goes to female founders. That's depressing.

Alex Dean: 6:24

Depressing. It hasn't changed since I started working on Bombshell in 2014. Oh my god, yeah. I hope it's better now. I hope it's better than it was in 2014. Please God. But yeah, we needed to rethink and invent our world. And why do we only have certain people inventing our world? Nobody else can get access to the funding.

Alecia (host): 6:43

Were there any surprises that changed the direction of the documentary while you were working on it? So many. Because when

Alex Dean: 6:50

I began the work on Bombshell, the idea that she was really the brain behind this invention called frequency hopping, which becomes the basis for Wi Fi and Bluetooth and GPS, the idea that she was the brains behind that was basically a rumor. It had been explored by some brilliant people, but there was no kind of hard evidence of her claiming the invention herself. And so I spent The beginning of the kind of adventure of making bombshell, looking for that smoking gun so that I could really make the argument she had done this and it wasn't her co inventor and it wasn't stolen from an ex lover, you know, there were all these theories. Wow.

Alecia (host): 7:31

I had no idea that's so insane. That was the lead

Alex Dean: 7:35

historian at the

Alecia (host): 7:36

time. So I'm assuming this historian was male, right?

Alex Dean: 7:41

And he knew her. He'd met her. Oh! He had met her twice. And he was a huge movie buff and a fan of her movies. And there was a movie in which she plays a spy. It's a comedy. And he had a poster of that movie, and he bought her earrings where she looked like the character she played in that movie. And she wore them, so he bought them in tribute. And then he had banned, in his work, this theory that she had stolen the technology from, uh, Being around her husband, who's a munitions manufacturer, and basic, she even posited she might've hidden it in her shoe, you know, like a blueprint of some kind in her shoe on her way over. So that was actually the biggest theory that I had to debunk because he'd met her. He claimed to have recorded a conversation with her in her lobby that was part of his history of spread spectrum. Then I found a smoking gun. that he was misrepresenting in editing history. Cause I found an original, uh, email correspondence between him and Hedy's son, where Hedy's son says, what did she tell you in that interview? And he says, she told me she invented frequency hopping. And in his own reporting of what she said, he redacted that line. He literally takes out that line where she said, I invented this in order to replace it with this. theory he has that she was actually the real life character she played on the movie screen. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And then we found in the notebooks that she and her co inventor. Right. You know, it's all based on a new remote control that had only come out when they were making their technology. So it couldn't have been a blueprint of something stolen years before, before she left Vienna from a neck glover. It was just literally impossible. They were showing the insides of this new remote control in their notebook.

Alecia (host): 9:33

So one of the most moving parts of the documentary is when you uncover the letter from the Navy contractor acknowledging Hedy's contribution to frequency hopping. Can you tell us about how you discovered that letter and what it meant for the story? So there are two letters. I'm not sure

Alex Dean: 9:48

which one You're referring to, they were both the prizes. One, we literally blindly bought a trove of letters of Hedy's personal correspondence that were going up for auction. And her correspondence was so hard to come by that we just contacted the highest bidder and we're like, can we defray the cost of buying this little bit and purchase the rights to show what's in these letters? And he was like, yeah, great. So we got scans of all these letters that had never been seen before. And we were just lucky that there happened to be letters in there between her and this ex boyfriend in the Navy. Where she's trying to track down what happened to her invention. And so you could see her mind and how it was working and that she did feel ownership with this invention. She did want to know what happened to it. She understood that it was starting to migrate into all this Navy technology. Then the other letter was a letter from a young inventor who wanted to actually give her a tribute because he'd started to realize that she was in fact the Hedy Kiesler on her patent, you know, that that was actually Hedy Lamarr. And he wanted the world to know. Famous actress was actually this brilliant invention, inventor. And he was putting her invention into missiles, which was sort of the beginning of it migrating into the kind of GPS technology we know today. And he happened to have written this tribute, and it was just really lucky it was still on the Wayback Machine that was just on the internet. So it wasn't even like on a public website. It was on the Wayback Machine. I believe so, yeah, it's been a long time, but I think that's how we found that. We knew about it because he'd actually gotten her this award, her first award, which you see footage of in the, in the documentary where her son is, you know, gets that phone call from her on stage. That award was engineered by him. So we knew that he had been the one who discovered in the technology world that she'd done this thing and had brought it to the attention of the IEEE.

Alecia (host): 11:43

So Anthony Loder, her son, was that Is this his first time seeing any of that tribute to her when he was reading it in the documentary?

Alex Dean: 11:56

Not quite. He had grown up with her sort of telling the story and had just been like deeply confused about it. That's true. Understandably. Right? Yeah, like, what? You invented what? I don't understand. But she would also talk about all sorts of other inventions she had tried to make that hadn't necessarily taken off. Yeah. And it was all kind of kooky. You know, he's like, she had some sort of stoplight she was always working on. It was all meshed, mashed up with that stuff. Rumor. And, and he said at some point she did go up in the attic and bring down a patent or two and, but she had patents for more than the frequency hopping. She had like three patents. And then he himself got a job selling early car phones and realized that the technology they were talking about was literally frequency hopping in these early car phones. And sort of started to connect the dots that, Oh, mom is saying she invented this technology, this going into these early car phones. And so he was a little bit banging the pot already saying, Hey, I think my mom invented something important here. When he started to get contacted by these engineers that said the same thing back to him. So he was the first person who was like, Oh, my mom should be recognized for this. I think he literally didn't know for a long time how to tell the world.

Alecia (host): 13:09

Do you think Hedy's story would be different if she lived in today's world? You know, that

Alex Dean: 13:14

was one of the biggest questions I kept getting after the film came out, because that was pre COVID and I was literally traveling around the world with it, talking to different audiences in different countries. And people kept asking me, could this happen today? And in the middle of that, I got a call from Paris Hilton, who turned out to be my next documentary subject. And she literally was saying, I think I'm like Hedy Lamarr. Like I have this story nobody knows and this persona nobody knows. And they just think of me as a scandal and a faith and a persona character that I play. And because she framed it that way. And because that was a question I had at the time, I was really intrigued. And that became the documentary called This is Paris about, um, You know, this woman who, to my mind, actually is a very, very brilliant business mind. She made half a million dollars herself. She's also become a major activist. And all of that was hidden by the fact that she is this scandalous figure in our minds. And so, you know, unlocking her story, I have to say, was very, very similar to unlocking Hedy Lamarr's. They're very parallel seekers. I mean, Paris didn't come up with an invention, but. She has actually affected our lives in many ways, if you start looking closely at the amount that Paris has put out into the world and what she's behind and been swollen in, in saying.

Alecia (host): 14:47

Yeah, when, when your documentary about her came out, I was just absolutely blown away because I grew up at a time where Her first big reality show, like out on the farm, I can't remember it. The Simple Life. The Simple Life, yes. Um, I just remember growing up with those narratives about her being so ditzy and so stupid and like, you know, the show in a way, like looking back on it is kind of like satirical and like, it's funny, but like, you know, back then I was only like maybe 11 or 12 when it came out and I was just sort of like, oh, I'm not going to be like them. They're stupid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it makes me sad because I can see now how business savvy she is and just the code switching she does with her voice, or she's talking to the media, she turns around and her voice deepens and you're like, oh. That's not her voice.

Alex Dean: 15:35

It's not the one that we know. And of course, studying women like this is you start to realize how we as women navigate the culture differently than men often.

Alecia (host): 15:44

Oh, absolutely. The media coverage you showcased in the documentary actually kind of reminded me of how the press has covered Taylor Swift's romances because of how Hedy was married six times. And this often dominated the narrative. around her in the press. So from your perspective, in what ways has the conversation around women's achievements versus their person, personal lives evolved? And where do you think we still see similar patterns today?

Alex Dean: 16:09

I think you're right about Taylor Swift. I think we're in a really interesting moment right now of a kind of a backlash to Me Too and a feeling that women have now dominated the narrative long enough and we don't have to pay attention anymore to these very persistent issues. that kind of come up when you talk about women in tech, particularly, where women are just still not treated with the same gravity, not treated with the same seriousness, and it really does still manifest itself in problems like not seeing women founders in any of these major companies coming out, not seeing women owning the technology behind these major new companies. And you'd think, okay, it's under representation. Boo hoo. Really, it starts to be a major issue when you look at the power players in the world today. Who is really pulling the levers of power? And it's still all white men, who have enormous amounts of power, that all, if you think about it, stem from the fact that we only, only take them seriously as inventors and as pioneers. And is that the world we want to live in? Where, yeah, we pay lip service to diversity, But in truth, we give power to one group again and again and again. And they do what they want with it and treat the rest of the way they want. So. Everything else just becomes performative. It's not real change.

Alecia (host): 17:38

I can relate so hard to that, because during some of my job searches, I was approached by companies doing some really cool work. I'm not going to lie. There were some really cool projects that I was approached about. But then when I actually asked them, how many female leaders do you have in your company? HR person? And do you have any senior female engineers? Do you have anyone in project management who is senior, who is a woman? Do you have anyone in the C suite? And a lot of the times they were telling me no, 99 percent of the time also I would be the first woman joining the company, period. They liked the idea of inclusivity, but they were really not paying attention to creating an environment that was actually inclusive for women, because I could see myself joining and then still just being. overlooked or not being really taken seriously because they're used to dealing with men and they just have these inherent ideas about what it means to work with a woman. So, I can relate to a lot of what you just said. It's very frustrating.

Alex Dean: 18:40

Frustrating. And there's a question in my mind about why are you joining all male spaces all the time? How would that happen? And of course it comes back to this funding. Why are so many young women with these brilliant ideas not getting funded? And that's what I, this all came from. I was in a privileged position for two years to interview many, many brilliant female inventors. So it's not like they're not out there.

Alecia (host): 19:06

I just also find it so interesting that the whole industry of technology. Stems from women. Like the first programmer, Ada Lovelace. Women were basically being hired as these human calculators, and it was seen as busy work that, you know, men were too good to do. And then all of a sudden, the tables turned, and they're like, oh, this is actually important. Never mind, we want this back. Same with

Alex Dean: 19:27

filmmakers, by the way. A lot of the first filmmakers are women. Really? Many, many. Wow. And then that industry consolidated, it became women. Based in California, the power players took over and suddenly the women were pushed out. But a lot of the earlier directors were women.

Alecia (host): 19:43

So why was it so controversial when Hedy went overseas to Italy and did her big directed movie and it bombed? It seemed kind of like, oh, you think you're so special? Like why would you do this? Well, that was my interpretation

Alex Dean: 19:59

at least. Because she was in the era of the Backlash to that, to the women dominated, um, which was really still before the talkies. So, you know, Hedy's, Hedy's trying to compete in the very male dominated studio system era where men handpick other men to write movies. It's become, you know, the exact opposite, and she's like, wait a second, because she has such an interesting free mind. She's like, I'm a major movie actress. I'm going to shake up this product and make my own films. She was also maybe slightly over inflated sense of her own abilities. And so some of these things blow up in her face. But God bless her for it. Thank God she did or she never would have come up with frequency happening. Do

Alecia (host): 20:45

you think Hedy ever experienced imposter syndrome? No.

Alex Dean: 20:49

I think that she experienced being, what I think what we would now say was maybe like, you had today, very modern woman's brain in the body of a woman trapped in 1945. So she was like, what the fuck all the time? What the fuck is wrong with this place? Why can't I do this? If I want this plastic surgery, I'm going to invent it. If I want the fountain of youth, I'm going to invest in pure meth, which I think is vitamin B12. You know, she just was going to fit everything. Because the world, to her mind, was wrong, and she had incredible conviction about that. And the world did turn out to agree with her in many ways, but never to compensate her or recognize her for her.

Alecia (host): 21:31

How did it feel to see the impact of your documentary and the way it has helped bring Hedy's contributions to tech back into public conversation?

Alex Dean: 21:39

Oh my god, it felt incredible. It was my first film, and it took me Two years of really making it and editing it and another two years of planning and then getting it out in the world. So really my baby. Um, I felt like I just gave everything in my heart and soul to Hedy. Like I, I left it all on the floor. I had two small babies at the time. I was like, what am I doing? I remember coming home one night just like weeping and there was like ice on the trees and I felt like the whole world was falling apart and this film was never going to get made. And then at some point the film kind of came together, became its own being. Hedy started to speak through it and now I have the sense that it takes care of me. People reach out to me about it, that Hedy is almost reaching out to me through people and it feels like this, you know, enormous boulder that I pushed up the mountain, you know, now has sort of transformed, transmogrified into this gift that just keeps giving back to the world and to me and I'm awed and astonished. Did that happen?

Alecia (host): 22:43

The archival footage and interviews in Bombshell brought Hedy's story to life in a very personal way. How did you choose what to include and were there any discoveries or stories that didn't make it into the final cut that you wish you could have included?

Alex Dean: 22:57

So many. I had a brilliant editor consult with me because I was doing a lot of the editing on Bombshell myself toward the end and I had a brilliant editor called Penny Falk who came in and said, it's great editing, it's just rolling boulders out of the way. You've got to roll all the boulders out of all the things you're attached to and you've got to let the narrative just rush through. And there were a lot of boulders. There were a lot of things that I was emotionally attached to that just didn't fit.

Alecia (host): 23:25

You've had the chance to speak to many experts, historians, and family members in telling Hedy's story. Was there a particular interview or moment during the production that deeply impacted your understanding of her?

Alex Dean: 23:35

So the hardest thing about telling Hedy's story was that there was this myth of this brilliant young woman who had come up with frequency hopping. And then if you talk to her friends and relatives, the woman who they talked about was not that brilliant young woman at all. She was somebody with a very scrambled brain who had been arrested for shoplifting and had botched plastic surgery and had been a recluse and turned out had hit her children and horrible things. And I was like, how on earth am I going to connect these two humans? How does that, how does that happen to someone? So in terms of understanding heading, one of the most important discoveries was actually very serendipitous. It was that this book was coming out about Dr. Feelgood, who had been JFK's doctor and who was developing this particular form of meth. And when I got a copy of Dr. Feelgood's patient lesson and Hedy Lamarr was on it, that was a total eureka moment because through that conversation, I realized there was a transcript of a, of somebody else's manuscript for a book in which we were told that Hedy was Dr. Fielgood's patient that Hedy had started taking injections of this meth and had actually been funding him because she thought this was an elixir of youth and she thought they were going to help children with multiple sclerosis. And she was offering herself up as a test subject, but she was injecting pure meth from the age of about 40. So of course that created a scrambled brain. He messed with her own brain as his test subject. And she broke this beautiful brain. She broke herself. That's where a lot of the violence came through. A lot of the really crazy decisions later in life. She was a math addict, but she didn't know it because really she thought she was helping science. And that was like the key for me.

Alecia (host): 25:25

And it wasn't just that it was like fountain of youth. He was administering this medication saying it was like vitamin B shots or

Alex Dean: 25:32

something? Vitamin B12, yeah. So she didn't actually know that it was meth. She thought, He understood that there was something, he had a, you know, I think he used like goat sperm and stuff as well. He was a really crazy guy. He was also one of the, uh, doctors that the Nazis had taken a lot of his research and used it. All of the Nazi soldiers involved in the Blitzkrieg were taking, it was developed by Dr. Fielden. So he was a tremendously not well regarded, famous, he was a famous doctor. And so I think she felt privileged to be part of him developing this. Miracle drug that was going to help all of these children. And so she, she offered herself up as a test subject. And of course, she also wanted the fountain of youth for herself because she had been the most beautiful girl in the world. And I, I found that male interviewers find this very hard to understand, but no woman I've ever talked to has found this hard to understand. When you're a young woman and you are worshipped for your beauty, it is very, very, very hard to let go because there's a power there that as women, we never find again, many times. And for Hedy, she was the most beautiful. She wasn't just beautiful. She was so beautiful, they wrote songs about her being the most beautiful girl in the world. And so her power, as far as she was concerned, in her world came from that. And she was going to protect it any way she could. However, I think in Hedy's case, she wanted that power, not for some narcissistic reason. But because she thought she was so brilliant and was going to fix the world and people needed to keep paying attention to her and giving her support and funding, which of course they didn't. And instead of helping herself stay young forever, she butchered her own plastic surgery and injected herself with meth and became a recluse or a shoplifter. So that's the tragedy of it. But I think women can understand the parable much better than men, um, because we live it in small ways.

Alecia (host): 27:29

Yeah, I can't help but draw a parallel to one of the most recent episodes of Grey's Anatomy in season 21. Oh my god, the show is still going. I had no idea. And I can't stop watching it. I just paid for the subscription for the whole new season on YouTube, so I'm funding this. Shonda Rhimes is that good. Who's that good? Oh, man. She's so good. But in the most recent episode, I think it was episode three of this new season, they touch on this subject a little bit when they have a patient come in who got a BBL, a Brazilian butt lift, who gets a flesh eating bacteria infection in her soft tissue. One of the residents comments like, why would she do this? Why would somebody do this to themselves? They have a slight monologue about how. In order to be taken seriously as a woman, you have to be attractive. If you don't feel attractive and if you feel like you're not being perceived in that way, it's understandable that you would seek out ways to get that power back. So definitely concede even, you know, 60, 70 years later, that's still sadly very true, it seems. Yeah, and

Alex Dean: 28:36

now it's not as obvious as the kind of plastic surgery that Hedy was doing, but you know, who doesn't have this conversation with themselves as they get older about Botox? Every American woman, I think. Every single one.

Alecia (host): 28:48

Preventative Botox. Preventative Botox

Alex Dean: 28:50

and creams and like, you know, we're sold things to, you know, what are we trying to be attractive to 20 year old men? No. We're trying to maintain our place in society and not become invisible.

Alecia (host): 29:00

What advice would you give to other filmmakers or storytellers who want to bring the stories of overlooked women in history to light?

Alex Dean: 29:07

I

Alecia (host): 29:07

think

Alex Dean: 29:09

you're looking for a story when you try and go out there and tell a story like Hedy Lamarr's, you're looking for a story with that element of surprise. You know, we're not surprised, I think, in 2024. I hope we're not surprised that women do amazing things. Uh, we are surprised by Some other element of the story. So in Hedy's case, that this woman who was also the most beautiful girl in the world, who was also known for doing this orgasm on screen, or in Paris's case, this woman who's known for being a ditz in the funny show or doing a sex tape, that that woman is brilliant because we're meeting our audience where they are right now and our audience right now thinks women can do brilliant things, but not also be powerful in that gorgeous ditzy or whatever way. So. You have to surprise your audience. So you have to find that subject who subverts expectation today. And if you don't have a story where the subject subverts expectations, but they are brilliant, you need to tell us why else we need to care. You know, I think the thing is, we don't want to reduce women to two dimensions when we're celebrating their brilliance either. They aren't just brains. They are living, breathing humans. And we have. told the story of brilliant men in three dimensional ways for a long time, but we seem to struggle with that when it comes to women. And so I encourage people to look at women as three dimensional beings and to not shy away from their dark sides, shade as well as to draw the light. And that then becomes a hook, like, tell us about, you know, is this a woman who struggled to keep her family together or, you know, in Paris's case was abused in a boarding school and so traumatized she created this character. What is it that is the key to this person's character that maybe we overlook because we just don't draw women in three dimensions?

Alecia (host): 31:05

If the pre Dr. Feelgood version of Hedy Lamarr was still alive today, what's one question you would love to ask her?

Alex Dean: 31:14

I had a dream about that one. I was actually talking to Hedy Lamarr as a young woman. It was extraordinary. I'd love to talk to her about what's next right now. For us, I think, you know, particularly in America, we're in a really precarious position. I don't know if we'll ever be able to kind of move on from what I think was the most powerful moment I've seen in my lifetime, which is around 2018. We were really in a conversation about looking at women's history differently and understanding how women were kept back. And all of that has now gotten a little bit lost in the backlash. And I'm really curious what, how do you think is next for women? How do we keep? talking furiously about these problems so that we can change them in a world that doesn't seem to want to have that conversation.

Alecia (host): 31:58

What do you hope viewers who maybe are just hearing about Hedy Lamarr for the first time or haven't watched your documentary yet, what do you hope they take away from her story and your work in bringing it to light?

Alex Dean: 32:13

I really hope when people watch any of my work it's always about can you just be a little bit more empathetic? Suspend your judgment for a minute. Especially with women, but you know, people we just point and laugh, or we just dismiss quickly because, because it's fun to feel superior to somebody else, or it's easier to just live in a world where we shove people in categories. But I think that one of the major impediment to having a really diverse society where everybody, you know, is on equal footing, we judge each other too quickly. Too easily, and we think that only one group can be lifted up and everybody else has to be pushed down. And even if we're changing which group that is, we turn around and judge the other group. I particularly think that about this next generation of women, younger than me, the people in their twenties are extremely judgmental and I'm really shocked and saddened by that because I think instead of enlarging our empathy, we're enlarging our judgmental muscles. And really my argument has always been. We need to enlarge our entity. That's how we're going to start to lead the world together as a diverse group, instead of apart. How do we share power? How do we respect each other? How do we include all of our stories and make sure no one is excluded? Nobody is judged. Nobody is better than anyone else. You know, that. It's what I've always been fighting for and I can't believe it feels like it's getting further away despite all of our work.

Alecia (host): 33:45

Especially in tech where we're having a lot more conversations about user experience and human centric design decisions. A lot of that all stems from empathy. Good product design is inherently related to empathy. You need to be able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and not only solve a problem for them, but understand how they're going to navigate your product when they don't have an understanding of how it's supposed to work. Like, you already know, you have a cognitive bias. You already know how to get from point A to point B. So when you see somebody like a nine year old man struggling to get through the system to pay his bills on time online, you just go, oh, well, he's stupid. Like, that's no way to design a product, right? And It's also interesting to me that around this, I think it was like the 1960s, there was a sociology study that came out about how the most profitable, ideal employee to have as a software engineer is a sociopathic man, like an anti-social man. And a lot of this actually led to the dismissal of women from the tech industry in the UK specifically, but. You know, even just looking at the sort of, um, What is the word I'm looking for? You know the people who do like the silly drawings of people on the street? Do you know them? Caricatures? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. There's this caricature of like, when you think of a nerd or an engineer, you're thinking of like an anti social guy who doesn't go out, he doesn't get women, he just cares about his stupid video games or like, you know. Whatever, doesn't leave his basement, that sort of stuff. I'd love to see a day where when we think of somebody who's a nerd or somebody who's tech literate, we don't just default to, oh, it's just like this. Antisocial dude and stuff. And I feel like a lot of that stuff surrounding that study actually prevented us from better product design sooner because there's a tendency to lean more towards profitability instead of empathy and designing things that'll be easy to understand and easy to navigate for people, if that makes any sense.

Alex Dean: 35:54

Well, I I'm, I'm working on a novel, my first novel, and it's about. a world in which, funnily enough, my main character is testing AI for human feel. She's part of what's called the human feel lab. I think part of why I said it there is I wanted to talk about the problem with technology, that it is so designed without empathy and without real, a real feeling of how it was going to be used in the future, that then, you know, we're going to have this huge issue when we start to use it as our cares or the keepers of our memory, whatever it is. We're, we're gonna find out how flawed it really is because of who designed it and how. And it's going to impact our human lives because what we need more than anything is empathy.

Alecia (host): 36:40

Yeah. I think there's even like a quote that I read somewhere from IBM about how to never let a computer make a managerial decision. It kind of takes a lot of that human element out. That's right. In a, in a way.

Alex Dean: 36:54

Yes, it does. Yeah. And we are going to rely on it more and more because we're going to be able to mimic humanity better and better. But. You have to always think about who's designing it. Like we're starting to understand bias in computer systems, but it goes so much deeper than bias. It's, it becomes a way to discriminate against people, to pass judgment on people, all of our worst trait can be amplified as well, by AI. So we need a diverse group of people creating the world we're about to live in.

Alecia (host): 37:22

You just reminded me of this story from early on in my career. I was working at this company that was building proctoring software and they were introducing this like bio recognition system where it would, it would try to match your typing patterns and it would do facial recognition and you had to pass all these tests before starting an exam. It was a team of all white male engineers, and I just kind of raised my hand in a demo that they were giving to the company, and I just asked, did you test this on anyone who is not white or male? And they go, they look, they're like, they look at me, and they look at each other, and they're like, actually, we didn't. I'm like, you understand? You might actually be unintentionally creating another barrier for people of color and women if they can't log in to take their licensing exams. So luckily they did go back and they, they verified that everything was okay. But I was like, how did they not think of

Alex Dean: 38:21

this? How did they not think of that? Exactly. Empathy. Unless we are all making these, this future together and making sure to put in the, you know, the traits we have that are maybe not as. It's commonly recognized as financially viable and desirable in capitalism. Like empathy. If we're not putting those traits in intentionally, nah, we will suffer later.

Alecia (host): 38:45

So what is next for Alexandra Dean? My next series is coming out in

Alex Dean: 38:52

April, uh, about the Judd family. It's about Naomi Judd, who killed herself very tragically. The night before, she was inducted into the Hall of Fame as one of the most celebrated country singers of all time, told by her two daughters, Ashley and Wynonna Judd. And it's really about the relationships between mothers and their daughters, and how we help each other and form each other, and also how we deal with generational trauma. And it turned out to be, for me, a very, very beautiful experience. I learned a lot from the Judd sisters. And we found some music that had never been heard before. It became the soundtrack to the song, including a very gorgeous song that she left for her daughters about them going out into the light and becoming their best selves after she died. That was a really beautiful series and I hope everyone watches it.

Alecia (host): 39:45

Thank you so much for joining me. I think I learned even more about Hedy somehow, despite all the research, the film I watched and everything. It was really cool to sit down with you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. As we close out today's episode, I want to highlight Bombshell, the Hedy Lamarr story, which was directed by my guest today, Alexandra Dean. This documentary dives deep into Hedy's life, her struggles, and her groundbreaking contributions to wireless communication. You can find links to where you can watch it in the episode description. When I reflect on Hedy Lamarr's story, it's hard to ignore the parallels between her struggles for recognition and the challenges still faced by women in tech today. Just last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced the erosion of DEI initiatives at META, a move that signals yet another barrier For marginalized voices in the industry. It's a reminder that progress is never guaranteed. We must continue to uplift and support the innovators who are too often overlooked. Anyways, thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of Tech Brat. I'm your host, Alecia Vogel, and if you want to learn more about the podcast or find more episodes, you can find us at techbrat. fm. Until next time, stay curious! And continue to fight for the recognition that you deserve.