Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with writer, speaker and former Creative Director of Google’s Creative Labs Tea Uglow. 25/10/2023
Elizabeth
Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about the deep values of the people who are shaping our common life, the experiences that have formed them, and what we might all be able to learn in how to grow in empathy and curiosity towards people who may be very much not like ourselves. Every episode, I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or public profile, and I try and get at what is sacred to them. What are their deep values? What is their vision of the good? I have interviewed people from almost every different tribe, political position and perspective on religion, politics, identity, and anything you can think of. For me, it is a spiritual practice. I think the world is increasingly divided and our technologies and the ways that we are encouraging us to lean into the worst parts of ourselves, the tribal parts, the polarising, suspicious, hostile, defensive parts. And I want to tend to my soul by resisting that, by listening deeply with curiosity and empathy, not arguing with a lot of very different people. There’s some reflections from me on every episode at the end because I’m trying not to present myself as a neutral observer with no opinions and no perspectives, but I am trying to be honest about what I’m hearing and what I’m learning from each guest. So I hope you’ll stay on to listen to that at the end. As always, it’s hugely, hugely helpful if you can leave us a rating, leave us a review. Perhaps the best thing is to send an episode to a friend and say, I’d love to talk about this one. What do you think?
So today we are speaking to Tea Uglow. Tea is the founder of Google Creative Labs in London and then in Sydney. And the Creative Labs are kind of a hub of innovation within Google and have a particular experimental role, often working with arts organisations to see how they can push the boundaries of technology. Tea actually left Google this year to set up Dark Swan, which is a set of ex–Googlers who have had a mass exodus to set up a creative and strategic consultancy around AI and web3. She’s also author of a book called A Curiosity of Doubts, which I think is a very lovely title. Tea and I spoke about technology, about the way it forms us, about the ideas behind it, the positive and the negative of it. We spoke about her childhood prior to her transition when she was presenting as a head boy at an all boys school and a rugby player, and then a married father with kids and the effect on that journey for her. And we spoke about what we can learn in times of real suffering. What is it we can hold on to when everything else disappears? I really hope you enjoy listening.
What is sacred to you? Tea Uglow’s answer
Tea it is a joy to see you across many, many, many miles. And I want to start with a question that if people are not keen to go deep and get into ideas fast, they can find jarring. But I think I know enough about you to know that you’ll be happy to get into the meat of things straight away. And having had a bit of time to reflect on this question which you can take in any direction you want, what do you think might be sacred to you?
Tea Uglow
Ideas, actually. There’s very little that sacred to me, partly because of the journey that I’ve been on in my life. I’ve had to let so many things go. So much of what I thought or believed or trusted as reality, I just discovered is not real. When I was at my very lowest ebb and an inpatient at my clinic, there was nothing there at all, I didn’t know who I was. I had nothing left. All I had was ideas. I found myself saying that all I had was the place where the ideas come from. My brain was still thinking and when you allowed it to stop thinking about all of the pressures, anxieties, fear, shame or guilt, when when you got silence, what you had left was ideas. The only thing that was left for me were my ideas and what I thought. That was very important to me beforehand, but the idea of sacred is such a profound concept that it has enormous weight. As much as I would love it to be something tangible and external, sometimes it’s as primitive as knowing what is there when there is nothing else.
Elizabeth
Where do you think the ideas come from?
Tea Uglow
That’s actually the thing that I find most rewarding about being alive. There have been phases throughout my life where I have sought solace in and that carry you through. I know for lots of people that comes from their faith and religion. I suppose my religious background is built out of the faiths of others. One time when it was quite bleak, and I didn’t really feel like I was going to be around for much longer, my mother said, it is much more interesting. Being alive is much more interesting. Having thoughts or not. That actually was a huge solace. For many years that was the reason we stayed alive, because it was more interesting than not being alive, in principle. Much like having faith in anything, I have faith in ideas, and conversation and sharing ideas.
Elizabeth
I have a low stakes game to myself when I’m prepping to speak to someone. Often as I’m reading and thinking and listening to someone I try and guess what they might say to the sacred question. What I wrote down this morning was curiosity. It feels like in the same ballpark, that there’s a hunger to understand.
Tea Uglow
A very long time ago, a colleague at Google made a video using the Rolling Stones’ Can’t Get No Satisfaction. They did a whole kind of thing. It was very funny. It was just observed things that looked quizzical and out of place with the soundtrack. I asked them about it, and they said, it’s you. They said, you can’t seem to see anything or not want to see more about it or understand more about it. I’m a big fan of curiosity. I think that curiosity is slightly maligned. I’ve never really understood the idea that curiosity killed the cat. I wrote a book called A Curiosity of Doubt, which is in retrospect, an extremely autistic book, in that it’s really just about all of the things that I didn’t understand why we do. I still don’t understand why we do them. It’s only through pushing and testing ideas that we get to a place where we can understand the world better. That’s a natural progress. The opposite of progression is regression. When we stick to things that we believe to be true, and don’t challenge them, and don’t question them, and don’t doubt them, and then we become very staid. I suppose I have conservative views. I’m a great believer in ancient culture, and near ancient culture and modern culture and all forms of culture. I like preserving things. I like conserving things. But I don’t believe that ideas are served by neglecting our doubts and pretending that they’re not there. I think that when we live with doubts and talk in an open and in a frank way, and have those conversations, it’s much more healthy.
What formed Tea: a lack of childhood memories, the role of women, and creativity
Elizabeth
I want to go back to the beginning a little bit and get a sense of your story and how you’ve become the person that you are today. Could you give me a sense of the big ideas that were present in the air and your childhood?
Tea Uglow
I don’t remember much about my childhood. I knew that I was trans at a very early age. I’m autistic as well. And queer. Lots of things that in the 1970s in Kent weren’t actually things that you could be anyway, let alone things that were represented in society as being anything other than freakish. I come from Canterbury in Kent and it was very stable childhood. I have brothers and sisters, and my father was a university lecturer and my mother was a publisher and writes great historical books. They’re both remarkable people. There was nothing about it that I find particularly remarkable, apart from my mother who wrote an important feminist book called the McMillan’s Dictionary of Women’s Biographies in the early 1980s. Because she was finding students coming to her saying what other women writers should I be reading, she was like, where do you go to find this information if you don’t have a university lecturer? Within her publishing job was trying to find someone to write that and eventually, as she says in the introduction, she wrote it in a fit of pique. There was no resource for what we would now consider to be a Wikipedia of notable women, something we now consider 40 years later, quite normal, quite reasonable, and quite unthinkable that it didn’t exist. She wrote it with four children under the age of six and a very kind of conventional dad who basically played cricket all weekend and was always at work. I think I’ve always been most inspired by her. She’s the person that I’ve always wanted to emulate so she’s a really important figure in my life. Because it was quite traumatic being me, there’s this very useful skill called dissociation that we all do. When you’re young, your brain can create ways to just not be who you are. We call that dissociative identity disorder and it used to be called multiple personality disorder. In the last five years I’ve been talking more and more about it because along with all the other things seems it’s the one that’s most misunderstood. The main point of it really is that you don’t communicate between yourself and so you don’t have memories and we can’t access a lot of information about ourselves about what we’re doing. So when we talk about doubt in university, the more I understand that this is a combination of being autistic and also just not knowing where things are. Time is a very wibbly wobbly thing when your brain operates in a slightly different way to most normal people. In building a picture of myself from from childhood, it’s quite hard to escape the fact that I don’t remember it.
Elizabeth
This may not then be an answerable question for you. Or maybe it will be because of the feedback of others. If I had met you, as a teenager who did I meet? Who was the kind of presenting person then and how might they have been described?
Tea Uglow
There’s about three different versions of me. Tall, lanky, skinny. I had very long hair. I used to wear nail varnish which I didn’t think was weird at all. All of my friends were female, obviously. My name was Tom, I was the Head Boy of my boy’s school. I generally found being a boy much easier than being female in terms of in terms of presenting. I did ballet until the age of five. Then my dad was like, rugby I think. I was captain of the rugby team. I went to Oxford to do Fine Art. I spent most of my spare time in the Girl’s Common Room in Year 12. No one seemed to bat an eyelid at that. I also had a different life, which was very different. I was sort of involved in what we would now call club culture but at the time, was rave culture. We would go and have these parties in the woods that would last for days and everyone would be very high. It was a different world. It was incredibly freeing and I think often about how much I have medicated my way through my life in different forms. It was one of the few moments where music was incredibly politically active in opposing the poll tax and these Tory bills that were about repressing music. The Conservative government at the time had also in introduced Section 28. I think we often forget that there’s this entire segment of society that grew up in the UK anyway, with no discussion at all about sexuality, gender, or diversity of opinion. I knew nothing of that. I only knew how I felt, and I knew how it represented. I knew that this was not something I was going to share with anyone at all.
Elizabeth
You studied Fine Art and it’s really clear that creativity has been a deep thread in you, but you didn’t come out of university and and go seeking a creative job. You went straight into the charity sector originally. You narrate that period as a kind of trying things and failing things and getting fired and sort of feeling your way, which I always think is so helpful and permission giving, for people to realise that many very successful people took a little while. You ended up at Google temping, I think making PowerPoint slides. Fill me in about where the seed of the Creative Labs came from, because it’s been such an industry leading thing.
Tea Uglow
It was a new idea. It was a really extraordinary time. It was just timing. That’s another thing about life. Mike Tyson said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I often think of that, as I reel from one punch to another, which is that you are in a way kind of never completely in control of your destiny. This is not something that people can have or expect. And it’s really important to remember that opportunities are really unlikely. I genuinely walked into these big doors at Google on the very first day and with my background I felt like I didn’t belong, this is not where I should be. I am not of this world. I don’t do corporate. And this is back in 2006. So when I say corporate, Google was 5000 people all over the world. It was not it a big company, 150 people in London, but it did feel corporate because it was so dominant in everyone’s life. And I did just go there, because some friends said, why don’t you come and do some work for me whilst you’re getting your head back together? Just three weeks, I think it was three days a week. I mean, it was really nothing. It’s not because someone there was like, you’re really talented. People don’t generally pick you up and turn you into a thing. And I’ve never really had that mentored experience. What I tend to do is experiment and push what can and can’t be done. Three weeks ended up being three months ended up being six months, I ended up moving around and spanning various different teams, helping them all out. The real opportunity was that there was no structure at the time, it was really was really loose. The most nascent part of it in a way was that they had no coherent organisational management. It seems like a strange thing to say that my creative opportunity came up. I did an MA in Design Management at the University of London on Wednesday nights for two years. So I actually had all of this kind of quasi–business stuff that I could put some use. I think people who know me now we’ve just blanch at the idea of letting me organise things. But back then, it was quite chaotic. And I was a slightly different person. So we built this structure. And we were doing sort of fun things. We end up doing the YouTube channel for the Pope. And for the Queen, the Queen came to visit. I met the Queen because we did the Buckingham Palace YouTube channel. Not a huge hit. When we were doing the thing with the Vatican, I was like, you guys have got like a billion potential viewers, you really should be like the number one leading channel. If you could just do something that isn’t the sermons on a Sunday, you could probably be the trending thing on YouTube every day. They never really kind of gone into that. On that particular story, my favourite moment was overhearing one of the PR people talking to who were phoning the phoning the Vatican and them saying, no, Google, G–O–G–G–L–E. That’s right. Yes, Google. It was a different time. It was a different time, it was really was different. We also genuinely thought we were changing the world for the better. We’d have these young kids coming in, we’d have like, 21 year old coming in, and who really genuinely wanted to change the world for the better and they did amazing things. It’s been quite sad actually watching us become the organisation that everyone said we would. Watching it make decisions that are really about legal issues or money rather than the principal and the premises. It was an amazing time when we got there.
Understanding technology as a force in our lives
Elizabeth
So I want to talk about that really, because part of the reason I asked you on, one of the things that the project is trying to do is just talk to a lot of different voices from different perspectives from different walks of practice. It’s like a spiritual practice for me to just listen and seek to understand. And one of the things I was really aware I had a gap around was around technology and those who can help me understand the ideas behind it. This may or may not be where you are, but the ways it can be a force for good because I think I have a default, a kind of a default conservatism.
Tea Uglow
That’s a very natural response to technology, and it’s been a natural response to technology through the centuries, forever. Socrates is writing about Plato’s dislike of writing, as a kind of malign force. And, yet, if you think about it, without writing, we don’t have any of our culture, our culture is really in the idea of being able to place the word into into a transferable vessel. So the book is a transferable vessel for ideas. So you know, it goes way back, and that’s Plato, you’re not alone.
Elizabeth
I think the thing I’m trying to discern is like, in me is just that human resistance to change. So I think a lot about formation and in my kind of theological context liturgy, but you can talk about social liturgies, you could talk about technology as a form of social liturgy, and social ritual, and the point of liturgy and ritual is they’re repeated, and anything we do repeatedly forms us and changes us and changes your soul or your neurobiology or however you want to talk about it. So I guess my question for you is, looking back, let’s take the last 20 years, how have these incredibly rapid advances in technology, I guess the sort of baseline primary one is just ever more constant connection to the internet, how has it formed us and in positive or negative ways, however, you want to narrate that?
Tea Uglow
I think you have some, as with most stories in life, both, it is a very positive story and it’s a very negative story. They what is extraordinary about it is quite how extraordinary it is, how enormous it is, and how when we look back on the history of society, we will look at this as in exactly the same way as we do the Industrial Revolution. When I was born, this notion of the digital transfer of information, rather than the written transfer or the analogue transfer of information, whether it’s sound or or however it was, these are all like highly gate–held things. You have publishing houses, you have broadcasters, you have state control, yes, libraries, exactly. You can control. And not in a kind of particularly negative way, but like, you can control the nature of society by controlling the media it consumes, and we still see this to a certain extent with Rupert Murdoch’s astonishing influence over the entire world. And it’s not him personally but suddenly the tools and channels that he has can shape narratives in a way, which has been completely astonishing and considering the internet, it’s amazing how much influence that one kind of branch of communication has had on certainly the English speaking world over the last 20 years, for good or evil, and depending entirely on your politics, actually, in that instance. I think regard to technology as kind of the idea of digital technology, it’s actually worth going back a little further to the 1960s and looking at the kind of radical liberalism, or even further back the founding of the United States and this incredibly radical Puritan belief in freedoms, in the right to freedom of congregation, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, the Bill of Rights. The first one is the most interesting, that’s the right to freedom, and the second one is the right to violence which is very interesting. The next ten are just basically a text from your ex saying, you can’t beat me up anymore, and you can’t park your horse in my front room, and you can’t take me to trial without due course. And it’s just real trauma stuff, actually. But the first two are fascinating. So you’ve got over in the West Coast, in the 1950s, after the war and you’ve got like this incredible intellectual liberty, the Libertarian approach towards free markets and freedom of speech and incredible strength of freedom, which then sprouts into the summer of love. There’s an enormous cultural kind of movement around freedom. From there come the geeks. The actual science part of the technology is not so hard. It’s scientists building computers, who are, as with most human practices, always interesting in improving the efficiency of their of their practice. So there’s odd thing called Moore’s Law which is about the capacity for data transistors to get faster and faster and faster. Now we’re getting into silicon innovation so it’s kind of fizzling a little bit, but for a long time, it’s been on this extraordinary hotkey. So at a scientific level, you can just watch this unpredictable curve towards unbelievably high speed computers. If the military had continued to control computers, and it hadn’t been coming out of a place which was profoundly libertarian in its ethos and background. If you didn’t have sort of extraordinary pioneers, like Tim Berners, Lee, who didn’t patent. I mean, he was at CERN, he was an academic, he should have patented his model for the world wide web, for the idea of hypertext and links, and pages. Things that now seem completely obvious only really exists because he didn’t patent it, he gave it away to the world for free. So science and the military, between them, sort of lost control of the gatekeeping quality that we see in almost every other form of media. Still now, can’t just publish a book. We all thought that you would be able to publish a book because you can kind of publish as an ebook, but like, it’s the machinery that you can’t get past. You can’t run a newspaper, you can have a blog, but there’s not a newspaper. It’s still fascinatingly controlled by society. That freedom and libertarianism is what gave us the web. It’s still there. So open AI is like, exactly that. Google, the idea that they should organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible, is a profound idea. I mean, encyclopaedias collected the world’s information and then sold it, that’s what they did. And Google’s was like, well, we can make money on the side. And actually it was when they weren’t making the money on the side that I started to lose the faith. Whilst we were making money to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible, I’m like right on point, when we were organising the world’s information to make money I’m not on point anymore. I think now the thing that we’re finding most distressing now is that we are still in that ultra libertarian ethos. And you see hyper scary libertarians like Elon Musk. They’re not utilitarian, they don’t believe in the greater good, they believe in absolute freedom for them to do whatever it is that they that they they want. You also see it with things like Open AI and you see it with the decentralised web, which is probably something we don’t need to get into because it’s just scary. Certainly Open AI’s decision to release into the wild really dangerous technology and then have the gall to go, oh, we should be regulated now. Can you regulate us now that we’ve established ourselves? These are things that I think we will look back on in another 20 years and just find completely baffling. That’s a very long answer to your question. I can’t say whether it’s good or bad apart from the other, maybe we get into the social parts of it, and then it becomes a different conversation as well.
Elizabeth
That is very helpful and sort of reassuring that I’m not some kind of like a backward luddite and going, wait what is happening?
Tea Uglow
How about other cultures? The Chinese get a great deal of criticism for their firewall. I’m not a huge fan of China by any means and I’m not advocating this, but like, if you want to control how your society moves into this age, then you have to control it.
Elizabeth
You’re right, so you could use Bhutan as a more kind of fluffy and acceptable example. Any society that goes, this is forming us, this is changing us, this is changing how we relate to each other. This is changing how we think about ourselves in the world. Can we slow it down? I think the thing that I always come back to and forgive me that this is just an incredibly naive way of thinking about it, is because if freedom is basically the only value, is your is your entire ethical vision of the world, and I think most people say freedom is a good, what I see in technology is a just a standard consumer, is the way that it isn’t really interested in the parts of myself that I want to grow. My patience, my kindness, my curiosity, about people not like me. It’s very interested in my curiosity for facts and information, particularly when they connect to buying things. It’s not interested in feeding the bit of me that wants to, to do the like slow local work of growing plants to feed my neighbours. Because there’s no particular way of monetizing that. The bits of me that I feel fed is the bit of me that wants evermore increasing comfort, evermore increasing convenience, and cheapness. That’s the way we’ve built the business models. That’s the need that kind of tech entrepreneur will start with like, where’s the problem, which is in fact, like a minor inconvenience? And I’m now I’m like, what if the inconveniences are how we grow up as people? What if these are things that our soul needs? Is there tech that could do it differently? That’s a very long and incoherent question. I just love to hear your thoughts.
Taking responsibility for change
Tea Uglow
I understand what you’re asking. I think the answer is, it’s not actually technology that we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is corporations. I think that in the beginning, when the internet was very grassroots, I actually didn’t like the internet the first time I experienced it, but that was 1994. You could count the number of servers in the world on three hands. It was it was amazing opportunity, I was at university and I happened to be studying with someone who was a computer person, and they they really wanted to tell me and teach me about something called the internet. And they were very excited about how you could link between these computers, and took me probably about 10 years to get over that trauma. Because it was not very interesting. It did not feed me. I did not feel like I was blessed by this particular piece of technology and I don’t think anyone really does until until much much later. Whilst you were speaking I actually want to talk back to old technology again and say that the runaway quality of what is happening is is not unlike the Reformation and Gutenberg and this idea of democratising the means of production, in economic terms, of ideas. Suddenly the radical fringes were able to distribute really extreme ideas at a level that completely caught the church off guard and led eventually to the huge schism and historically, it’s not a dissimilar time. We are in a very interesting point of pullback where the traditional societies are beginning to go, hang on, what, what is this? And yes, there is an entire generation that already they’re going, sorry, like, who are you? And why do you think you get to tell us what we should be thinking and how we should be acting and who we are? But you are seeing, one of the reasons for the polarisation of politics is not so much about the technology and the misinformation it’s genuinely about, like the democratisation of those tools of production. The idea that every single person, almost everyone in the world can, can make a film distributed to the rest of the world, and for it to be seen by potentially millions, if not billions, of people. That is so terrifying to any form of power. Their inability to grapple with that, they’re still dealing with problems that aren’t problems anymore, they were problems like 10 or 15 years ago. The time lag for people to catch up is incredibly frustrating. Zuckerberg was incredibly worried about privacy when he was a 19–year–old and he was very blase about it in 2010. He said, privacy is dead, get used to it. In 2010, he said privacy is dead. Like I was doing work which was trying to show people what they meant by that and I actually got shut down for doing it. AI is another one where I’ve been shut down. They’re like, this is throwing grenades to people inside the tank. And I was like, yeah, but there’s people outside the tank. They’re like, do you want to be outside the tank? And I was like, not really. But this is that was 2015. We were talking about GPT2. Zuckerberg was in 2010. So by 2017, if you want to, like have arguments about privacy and data and things, it’s like, no, no, no, seven years ago. The same with AI. In 2015 those of us who cared, we were sending up warning flares, about AI, about large language models, exactly the problems that we’re having now. Actually because it didn’t actively affect people, we don’t respond to those things. We don’t respond when it’s very much like global warming. Now people have got a problem with it, it’s like now now’s no good. Our entire generation has abjectly failed our children by our failure to kind of to do these things. Actually, I’m quite kind of buoyant about AI at the moment because we are beginning to deal with issues that we should probably have dealt with 1 or 8, if not 10 years ago, and we’re beginning to call out the players in that space. We’re not going along for the ride as we have been so much. It is wild how people go, oh, this is really scary, but it’s kind of cool as well. Like, can we shouldn’t use AI to write our essays, but I’m going to use AI to write my essay. All of these things are very solvable, of course. If individuals didn’t look first to their own immediate needs and their own immediate comfort and their own immediate gratification. Actually, we’re capable of behaving as a society as a communities and actually making decisions. I think that the corporations, and the way in which we structure corporations is partly at fault. I think actually the way we structured democracy with the idea that people are voted for, and therefore I’m much more concerned with losing their jobs, and they are doing good on these kind of short window, like short term windows. It’s that curiosity, the doubt that you alluded to, at the start, I just cannot help but think that there are better ways to organise ourselves. It is a very frustrating thing to spend your life like, pointing at things which you know, are not just holding us back but actually ruining our lives. Our lives are individualised. And yet we are all voting for them with our feet, and with our dollars, and with our vote. We as individuals are entirely responsible for the systems that we complain so bitterly about.
Elizabeth
I would love to know what helps you. You do seem to me to have a kind of philosophy or spirituality or something. You’ve read about philosophy, you think deeply, you keep coming back to awe or magic. What are the practices or ideas in your life that help you resist that part of yourself, that technology at its worst is exploiting.
Finding joy in uncertainty
Tea Uglow
It’s very curious I spent a whole decade doing this very trying to be very, very normal. I was very, very normal. That’s when I got my job at Google, I was a white cis guy. I was going to be normal, I was going to have a very beautiful wife. And she’s still very beautiful, a partner who’s the mother of my children, and we had mortgages and all of these sort of things. Actually, I could do that normal when you’re single. When you become a parent, the normal of being a parent is a massively more contracted kind of space that you you can’t perform in. And I’ve always spent my entire life performing. There are the places I am happiest, like in my clinic and above the Atlantic or the Pacific in a plane, because those are places where you don’t have to be anything to anyone. I find it very odd that I’m often in conflict with my partner who wants them to not explain screens and tries to protect them. My view is very much, I’m forever saying to people, it doesn’t take very long apart from the fact that we’ve got human lifespans. If you step outside of human lifetimes, these are like blink of an eye things happening all around us. I have a very, very long term kind of universal sense of time and our own kind of existence within it. And that’s very helpful. Then the other thing is my practice, so lovely that you mentioned it actually because it just sort of swam straight into view. There’s a thing called lanton mind which is comes from reading child psychologists. In fact, Allison Dawkins did a really wonderful f illumination of how creative a three–year–old is. I love watching small children discovering physics, discovering attachment theory. Yeah, it looks like they’re just throwing a toy out of the pram, but actually they’re working on a trajectory, they’re educating their ear as to where sound comes from and whether it’s consistent. They are exploring the universe around them completely, with a completely open mind as to whether it will continually and like the fact that the toy is forever being pulled back by parent. And then there was a point at which it stops being brought back by parent. And that really fascinates me that you have a moment where everything else is constant, like the toy will always follow, you will learn that there’s a trajectory, even if you can’t as a child articulate these things. But there’s an there’s an inconstant, which is that eventually someone will not bring you back. Because they just done with bringing the toy back, eventually, they will behave in a different way. And I think that you can approach everything in the world like that. It’s like, what is what here is constant? Nothing, very, very little around us is constant. I have a great belief in magic because I believe in humans. I believe in the fallibility of our senses. Actually, I understand the fallibility of our senses. The more neuroscience you do, the more physics you do, the more you understand how approximate our understanding of reality is and how fluid the world is. That makes magic entirely plausible, not possible, but plausible, that the illusions of like, my brain is quite illusory. As I have that on a fairly routine basis, I take great joy in the uncertainty of everything, and the inconstancy, and the speed of all of these things. It allows me just to sit back, I can still get quite worked up about as I have about the things that I find strange in the world. I still do my work, which is still very much about pointing out how we might use technology better, often to to the arts and things. But it doesn’t generally work out that way. And that’s been the hardest part of life. They’ve bene going, but why are we doing that? And then the worst parts has been watching companies like Google, who were very good, they started off with principles. They had to buy YouTube, because they weren’t as bad as YouTube. And they were really burnt by watching Facebook just completely disregard everyone’s rights and privacy and freedom. I think that they were like, as an organization, really burned by people being bad and getting away with it over and over again. And they’ve just been burned again by Open AI doing exactly the same thing. And that’s why they just become more and more kind of like, more and more like them, because we let them get away with it over and over again. It’s just like watching children. So like I try and treat everything like I’m a three year old child, which some days is easier than others.
Elizabeth
It’s beautiful. Sorry to be very cliched and on–brand, but it is reminding me of a scripture from my tradition. And when Jesus says basically, let the little children come to Me they know something you don’t, that it’s those who are able to adopt that childlike posture that will inherit something. It’s one of the one of the many, many very enigmatic things that Jesus says that I just like sort of sit with and chew on. I wanted to ask you one final question. And I often ask guests because they come from so many different perspectives and life experiences and politics and tribes. What is one thing they wished people who are not like them or who disagree with them understood. Listeners do come from all over the place and they are wonderful because even though they are very different, the thing they have in common is they are seeking to be curious. And you can pick that about your autism about your trans–ness, about your technological journey. What is one thing that you wish other people in the world not like you understood about what it’s like to be you?
Tea Uglow
I think it would have to be, I would probably go back to the being different parts. It’s a very interesting thing that that we’ve been dealing with. In a way, again, you can tie it into technology. Without technology, without the freedom of my communities to find themselves, ironically, on places like Twitter. That’s where we find ourselves. It’s where we share who we are, and those spaces, because you often in the disabled community and mothers even. Everyone has found themselves in a way, and they’ve often found their enemies as well. From a trans perspective, it’s been very challenging, being told that we’re not valid. I wish there was a better dialogue between the trans community and the voices, the barrage of hostility that we experience. There really aren’t many trans people, who actually want this state of this state of conflict to continue to exist, who want to feel like they are somehow fraudulent. We could do a different podcast about how hard that those decisions are, and how hard is it for parents to listen to their children and hear them and all of my mental health issues are because it wasn’t possible to be heard. There were no role models. And if they were role models, they were like, normally in The Sun being being called all sorts of names. And frankly, as an autistic person and as with dissociative identity disorder, these things when they’re represented in popular culture, a trans autistic sort of did, person is a perverted to sort of axe murderer who’s really good at maths. It’s not the kind of narrative that we want. And it’s not the dialogue that we want. And it’s not fair. It’s not actually very Christian. And I’m a huge fan of Christianity. Actually, a huge fan, is rather difficult thing to say. I’m a great studier and fan of religions. I’m a great believer in a lot of the teachings of Jesus, I think that people don’t understand how fundamentally the idea that the weak and the meek, we should be good and we should look after others, is so deeply rooted in that. Especially when you are like in those outside communities and you feel often very attacked by them. Heterodoxy, orthodoxy, and things, are a different kettle of fish. And what has happened to those teachings in every religion is a different conversation. But I just wish that there was a better dialogue. I wish there was a way of meeting people. It is both a blessing and a huge curve that we have been able to emerge as communities as voices as people and live our lives and for children to be able to live their lives. I’m not a scary person. And you feel a little bit like the like the ogre under the bridge. We’re not out there to eat the goats. We just would really like someone to talk to. And that’s all it is, really, it’s that simple.
Elizabeth
Tea. Thank you so much for your honesty and your curiosity and for giving your time to talk to me today on The Sacred.
Tea Uglow
My pleasure.
Reflection and Outro
Elizabeth
Well. What an interesting conversation with Tea. What a sweet and honest person came across. And I think what really struck me is how open she is about her fragilities, about the various things that she’s learning to live with, autism and disassociative identity disorder and as a trans woman. And how different that is from what I had in my head as the kind of representative tech person. That really serves me right. I went looking for a guest. I often think, right, who do we need next on the podcast? And I think, what do I need challenged in me? What position do I have that I haven’t examined very much? And who’s gonna help me understand that better? And I know that I have quite strong negative feelings about how we’re using technology and the role of technology in the world, ironically, as I’m also quite addicted to social media. But I wanted to speak to someone who is optimistic about technology in the world. And I thought, I know, I’ll speak to someone who is a sort of, the phrase that I used, which is ironic in the circumstances, was tech bro. Someone who is a kind of, who believes in the kind of power of Silicon Valley for good. There must be someone like that out there. And they will be confident and they will be persuasive. As you can tell, that’s not how we landed with this particular guest. And I’m really glad to have had that set of assumptions in myself challenged as I’m often having them challenged. So yes, not a tech bro. Tea said that ideas are sacred for her. And that was very interesting. This sense of actually it’s thinking and being able to be curious and understand the world., I love how people grasp hold of this question about what is sacred and then take it in all their different directions. And often you can see them trying to define it. And she said, for her sacred is there when there’s nothing left. And this phrase her mum used when she was suicidal, it’s more interesting to be alive than it is to be dead. It’s more interesting to have thoughts than it is not to. That massively stripped back kind of minimum viable product of living that is interesting and you can have ideas. You can actually see that being quite comforting because it lowers the bar. It’s not saying you have to have lovely feelings all the time, you need to be happy all the time, it’s saying, it’s interesting, stay curious about it. I enjoyed Tea saying that she thinks she’s someone who has quite conservative views, which again is not what I expected for someone working in that innovation space, probably not something I expect someone who’s a trans person to say frankly. Again, all these ridiculous associations and assumptions that we bring to encounters with people. And then that line, it was quite traumatic being me as a child and the way being someone growing up in a world in which you perceive yourself not to fit, you perceive yourself not to be welcome. So helpful for those of us who didn’t experience that to just hear about the impact of it. Dissociative identity disorder, fascinating. Multiple personality disorder, it used to be called, makes me wanna go read about it, and she’s totally right, you don’t hear about it. It’s not something there’s a lot of visibility around. We have a lot of negative tropes around it. This fascinating thing of her different selves don’t communicate with each other. Like one part of her can have memories that are not shared by another self. Oh, fascinating. I know nothing about that. And I was really glad to have a chance to learn more. Drugs, I wrote down how how people who have a difficult childhood, basically who experience adverse childhood experiences, early trauma, just don’t thrive in their early years. She talked about self–medicating, how she went to a lot of raves and took a lot of drugs. And I was speaking to someone recently, a friend of mine, who has had very late diagnosed ADHD and now realises that they basically got through their medical degree by taking a lot of ecstasy. I will not tell you who they are, which are amphetamines, right? That basically sort of hacked their own brain to find the thing that helped them focus enough in order to pass their medical exams. They would not do that now. It really helped me have more sympathy and understanding, you know, I’m not a massive taker of drugs myself and I have some concerns about the impact of them. But I think stopping myself from assuming that they only have a purely hedonistic role in societies. But for some people, they are almost being used therapeutically, they are being used in order to find ways to live and to function was a really helpful challenge for me. Just hearing about those big ideas that drove the early. I sort of knew there was this kind of optimistic libertarian sense. And I can see how attractive it would be, how romantic to say, knowledge is power and power to the people we want to get information, get rid of the information gatekeepers and get information into the hands of the people. That could just seem like a very noble and moral thing. How hard it is to keep money and power out of that. I think of open source technology, about Mozilla in the early days, and what is the alternative to governments being in charge of things and profit driven corporations being in charge of things, even kind of philanthropic endeavors often get their money via corporations and open source technology has its limits because some of the people involved probably need to make a living. How do they make a living? That’s not an original thought at all, but how could it have gone differently? If we could go back to the early days of the internet and gone, how could we make this a thing that forms us in the direction that we want to be growing and not the opposite in the way that it broadly seems to be dividing us? What different decisions would we have made? I think that’s an interesting thought experiment. My like, right, I need to find a techno optimist person to convince me that this isn’t all so terrible. That didn’t work out. Tea saying, you know, we’ve released extremely dangerous technology into the wild with things like ChatGPT. Just another thing to put on my list of things to try not to be worrying about too much. To be surrendering and seeking the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Yeah, it was really helpful or sobering to hear her disillusionment to hear her disillusionment with Google, to hear some of the ways we as humanity to continue to make choices that are not serving us. A tale as old as time. And then Tea brought up her transness and I didn’t invite her on the podcast because she’s trans and didn’t want to lead with that because ithere’s many more interesting things about her. But I was glad to talk about it and to hear her say and it was a little bit heartbreaking. You know, I’m not an ogre. I’m not an ogre under the bridge. I’m not a scary human being. And that longing for a conversation and a dialogue that is less toxic and less poisonous for everyone concerned. I think a lot of us share it, whatever our intuitions are on this topic, I think mine are fundamentally confused and depend on who I’m talking to, frankly. I have some very strong intuitions about treating people with dignity and kindness and paying attention to their particularity. I don’t have a developed theory of what is gender and what is sex. And I’m not sure how to resolve some of these very sticky particular issues in quite a small number of cases. I just feel sad and confused about the whole thing. And I’m glad to keep listening. I don’t wanna say to both sides because I think there’s always more than two sides going on. But all I can really commit to is to keep listening. Keep listening to trans people and their experiences. Keep listening to gender critical feminists and others who have concerns about how some of these changes in thinking about sex and gender and attempts to everyone would say rightly increase the space for trans people to make choices and live safely can also have knock–on effects for other groups and other settings and how we navigate some of that. One of the deepest divides we’ve really been going for the new realm stuff this series. Race and trans, but also poetry. So you know, good to have a mix.
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