Episode 163: Timiebi Aganaba
International Space Lawyer, Professor & Futurist
01:25:15
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Show Notes
Timiebi Aganaba is a space lawyer and assistant professor at ASU's School for the Future of Innovation in Society. Her career has taken her around the world, including a stint at Nigeria's brand-new space agency right out of law school that launched her career in an unforeseen direction and later took her to France, Canada, and now the United States. She also shares the human elements along her journey and how they helped her. Timi's path shows what openness to the unexpected can bring. Let's join her in her journey and be inspired to step into the unknown.
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About Timiebi Aganaba:
Timiebi is an assistant professor of Space and Society, in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, an affiliate faculty with the Interplanetary Initiative, a senior global futures scientist with the Global Futures Lab, and holds a courtesy appointment at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, all at Arizona State University. Timiebi was a post-doctoral fellow and is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) based in Waterloo, Ontario Canada where she focused on environmental and space governance.
Timiebi was Executive Director of the World Space Week Association coordinating the global response to the UN 1999 declaration that World Space Week should be celebrated Oct 4-10 annually. She is currently on the Advisory Board for the Space Generation Advisory Council supporting the UN Programme on Space Applications. She is also on the Science Advisory Board of World View Enterprises and the SETI Institute.
Other positions include 4 years as a space industry consultant for the leading space analyst firm in Montreal, Canada where Timiebi led a pipeline of commercialization studies for the Canadian Space Agency and led the socio aspects of a socioeconomic assessment of the Canadian space sector.
She was also a teaching associate (France, 2008) and associate chair (Ireland, 2017) of the space policy, law and economics department at the International Space University, and an associate at Kayode Sofola and Associates law firm. She was an NYSC Corp at the Nigerian National Space Research and Development Agency, where she spent a year in the legal affairs and international cooperation department.
Timiebi has represented Nigeria at the UN as a Next Generation Aviation Professional at the International Civil Aviation Organization Model Council in Montreal (2014) and at the Legal subcommittee of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer space in Vienna (2011).
In 2017, Timiebi was the recipient of a Space Leaders Award from the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) and her doctorate received the George and Ann Robinson Award for advanced research capabilities.
An avid and passionate communicator, Timiebi has been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, NPR, LA Times, the Telegraph and Business Insider amongst others! She hosted and produced the 12 episode Ladies do Launch podcast and has acted as an international moderator for high level events such as the Dubai Expo 2020.
Transcript
In this episode, we are going beyond so many different things with our guest, Timiebi Aganaba. She is a space lawyer extraordinaire and a wonderful academic at ASU. She has a beautiful career story and stories of resilience to share with all of you. Welcome, Timi.
It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Thank you so much for doing this and participating in it. You have an international career and international training. I will start first with what inspired you to become a lawyer and go to law school. In your case, you have a unique story of choosing to go to law school in another country. I want to hear about that.
My parents were immigrants to England. My dad was a surgeon and we grew up in a small town in England. As many immigrants, you only have three choices for careers. You have to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer especially when you are the first child. There’s not a lot of scope. I did think I wanted to be a doctor, but I don’t like blood. I didn’t like child abuse, so I thought, “I could be a human rights lawyer or be someone who protects people,” so I went to the University of Leicester to study law. I got there to my first class and it was the most boring thing that I have ever done in my life.
I was like, “I have made a bad choice here,” but I finished. I graduated and didn’t do that well because I wasn’t very passionate about it. I was disappointed because I’d always been a great student. My mom persuaded me, “Why don’t you try going to law school in Nigeria?” Everyone was astonished. My dad was like, “This is crazy. This doesn’t make any sense. Why would you be a Nigerian lawyer?” I went to law school in a village called Bwari, in the middle of nowhere in Nigeria. It was the most profound experience of my life, just dedicated and passionate people. It wasn’t like law school when I was in England where everybody was going to class but people weren’t like, “It was so hard to get into law school.”
There are thousands of people waiting. In Nigeria, there are thousands of people trying to get into law school. We have a massive population. With strikes, it might take people years to finish their undergraduate when it’s only supposed to take 3 or 4 years, so they are in line to get into law school. Nobody takes advantage. Nobody downplays being in law school. When I went to Nigeria, that’s when I discovered, “This is a privilege.” In law school in Nigeria, lawyers only wear black and white. It was more of a culture. We are all in uniform and they are very committed to justice and all these things. That’s when I learned that this is a noble profession. This is an interesting thing.
When you graduate from the University of Nigeria, you have to do a year’s service for the country. I was adamant that I was going to do something significant. I kept telling everyone, “I want to do something important.” My mom wanted me to work in Oil and Gas Law because Nigeria is oil and gas. I was adamant that oil and gas are not the future. I already knew then that sustainability was going to be something that was going to come and you can’t bank your future on oil and gas. One day, I got introduced to the person who came to Nigeria to set up the legal department of the Nigerian Space Agency, and then I happened to be his first hire. He saw the passion. He saw the willingness to learn and all that. That’s how I became Nigeria’s first female space lawyer.
When you graduate from the University of Nigeria, you do a year of service for the country. … I became Nigeria’s first female space lawyer.
Choosing to leave England to go to law school in Nigeria is a unique choice, but it’s interesting the way you describe that, in saying it reinvigorated your passion for the law and what it could do. In a sense of a noble profession, that’s interesting because you think that other countries value the rule of law very significantly.
Even though you think of African countries, corruption, and all these things, that immigrant thing that our parents have in the Western countries where we have to study is because it’s valued. It’s valued because we all know that it’s the same in America. Most of the presidents and senators are all lawyers or have a legal background. Your parents know that if you study this, you are going to be all right, but it was only in Nigeria that I got to see that for myself and I got to see, “By studying this, I’m going to be somebody.” I grew up in a small town in England, so I never saw myself as anybody. I was an immigrant in a small town, so it was never these big dreams that you are going to do anything major, and then I got to Nigeria and it was like, “You could be the president or the senate.”
That’s interesting that you are like, “I’m going to do something big.” It is this sense of contribution and that you are able to do that, but also that is your mission.
At the end of the day, I will say I also had the added thing on my side by being British-Nigerian. I have to describe that. It is already being an international person. That gave me some extra clout in Nigeria because people do value it. Unfortunately, in developing countries, people value these Western experiences. I remember when we did moot court at law school and somebody had to play the governor, and everyone was like, “It has to be you that plays the governor. It has to be you to be the president.”
There’s this expectation that you bring more to the table the global experiences. This was a first for me because I grew up in a small town. Nobody was saying, “You could do something massive.” You are trying to be an immigrant and fit in. I got to Nigeria and it was like, “You are a star. You can do all these things,” and that’s what made me stay for my youth service and have to be revolutionary.
It’s how your outer experiences led to your self-confidence and wanting to execute on a larger mission. That’s important in how we change from our own experiences. It’s outside us but also impacts us individually. The sense of wanting to do something new has a major impact in an area where the law is truly developing in space.
Also, having someone recognize in you the possibilities. The person who hired you saw, “On one hand it’s a new area, so it’s not like there are 100 space lawyers lined up who have all this experience to apply for the job. I want someone passionate about it and has something I can see that I know they would be great at.” That’s mentoring.
It’s so profound to have been there at the beginning of a country’s space program. A lot of people were like, “Working for the government is so terrible.” It’s because of all the stories you hear of corruption, mismanagement, and all that. My boss at the time created this office. It was like the mini-United Nations in there in terms of we were strategizing positions for the UN on space debris.
Several years ago, I was researching Environmental Law applications to space, and that’s why it’s so profound for me all the space sustainability stuff with space now because I did that many years ago, and then all about how we going to create this thing in Nigeria and Africa. It was the biggest thing that I could ever have imagined that would have come my way.
It’s interesting because, subsequently, I did work in a law firm in Nigeria. I did and it was very interesting having worked in a law department in the government agency and then working in a law firm where the client was another ministry. It was an interesting experience being in Africa. When I came to America, I didn’t think that Africa or Nigeria was as bad as it’s made out to look because a lot of these things like corruption are systematic institutional problems. Nigeria itself is not bad. Nigerians themselves are not bad.
In America, you can see it here too. All that to say is if it wasn’t for my experience in Nigeria, I wouldn’t have been successful in France, Canada, and America. For me, that’s such an inspiring story to tell young Africans who feel like, “When you go abroad, you are trying to fit in.” I’m like, “No. Your experience is going to give you significant value added when you come here because if you are in the right institutions, you already have the skills. You have the passion, commitment, and dedication. You have failed institutions where you were.” That’s why foreigners do so well. Nigerians are one of the most highly educated foreigners in America because once you land here, it’s hard to get here, but once you get here, you know how to navigate institutions. You know how to get what you need. If I’d stayed in England, you would not know who I am now.
I don’t think you would have grown yourself in the ways that you have because of the experiences you have had too. I also think about the space opportunity in Nigeria. Yes, there are institutions, but you are talking about creating within the other government institutions a whole new one, and there’s something fresh about that.
Also, the level of the questions that you are able to deal with. As you said, I’m dealing with big framework issues and some of the issues that now have hit the mainstream like space debris and all of that. It gives you the opportunity when you are on the ground floor of a new endeavor to grapple with big issues that then after that, you can bring that experience with you to a lot of other settings that people at that level of experience wouldn’t have that big picture thinking. If you are working on part of the pieces of the puzzle, it’s not like seeing the big picture.
It was fortuitous and I feel blessed that when I postdoc in Climate Change Law, it was 2016. The Paris Agreement on climate change, which is the biggest environmental agreement that we had, was in 2015. I also came to climate change with, “We have to create this thing.” It’s massively multi-stakeholder. Every single person has a role. How do you go from zero to everyone? When I decided to do that postdoc in Climate Change Law, it was because I was like, “I can see that this is where space is going to be. How do you go from zero?”
I was like, “You learn from these other regimes.” Many years ago, the first thing I did was International Environmental Law liability regimes applied to space debris, and then I did my Master’s at McGill in Space Sustainability in 2011. I then did my postdoc in Climate Change Law. Look where we are now. The main idea now with sustainability is how we start thinking about ensuring that these activities can continue in a sustainable equitable safe way.
That’s why I say it’s interesting because when I say it like this, it looks like I knew right back then. My boss at the time was the one that had the foresight that, “African countries are just starting to get into space.” If we don’t do something about the way these big actors are operating, we are not going to be able to use space.
I was at the Black Space Week organized by the White House National Space Council. Everyone clapped when I said, “It’s so funny that people think from the developing country like they don’t have anything that they bring to the world.” I’m like, “Several years ago, we knew that we had to be sustainable in space, otherwise it would be unusable.” That was out of sheer obviousness when you are coming into a place where other people can’t see the woods from the trees. The irony is, instead of them saying, “Are our practices sustainable?” they immediately say, “Look at all these new people coming in. Now, it’s no longer going to be sustainable,” which is a bad way of looking at it.
You are saying, “Multiple people are coming in. It’s not sustainable,” instead of saying, “The reason that it’s not sustainable is because you have no practices right now to ensure that everybody acts in a sustainable manner because you didn’t want to hold yourself to any account.” That’s what my studies were about. What does the developing country lens bring when you are looking at these space futures?
It seems fitting. That’s where you are now in the school of interdisciplinary future thought.
Where I’m at now? I’m at the College of Global Futures at Arizona State University, and we have four schools there, the School of Complex Adaptive Systems, the School of Sustainability, the School of Ocean Futures, and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society. All of those are revolutionary and brand-new ideas all around this idea of thinking about the future.
At my college, we have 50 professors from 45 different disciplines. It’s a melting pot. What I have learned from the transdisciplinary perspective is, isn’t it funny that once you now use a word interaction? You talk to a lawyer, engineer, or ecologist. Either you are all saying different things and using the same word, or you are all saying the same thing and you never knew. As a lawyer, being in a transdisciplinary environment is fascinating because you care about language, and you care about saying, “What do you mean by that? What does that word mean?” Everyone is taking it for granted.
Every discipline and everyone has its lingo and you are like, “What does that mean?” I’m trying to break that down. Even though there may be similar words or people who mean the same thing, they look at it differently. Having all of those different disciplines together, you are going to look at problems from very different perspectives, and putting those together will hopefully lead to some interesting answers that you wouldn’t otherwise achieve.
It is such a joy to be able to have students from a very vast array of disciplines, but everybody respects the law. I don’t know how to describe it. Scientists and engineers are the main people I work with. They don’t want lawyers in the room because lawyers are either going to stop them from playing with the toys they want to play or say they can’t do things, but engineers are notorious for thinking that other people aren’t as smart as them because they make big things happen, but they have a lot of respect for lawyers. They do. It’s changing now that more disciplines are coming into space, but it was hard for other disciplines. Scientists and engineers are very much like, “If you are not building a rocket, then you know one.”
They have always known the role and the place of lawyers, but lawyers have always been quiet behind the scenes. Only now that you are seeing Space Law. It’s not just academic and quiet people behind the scenes. Now we are at the forefront because we are now saying, “I talk about the emerging space 5.0 era. If space is to scale, it’s about governance and equity.”
In America, we say 1.0 and 2.0, but in Europe, they are right up to 4.0. All the other areas of space have been a defining thing that happened, like Apollo and the International Space Station, but now there’s a whole variety of things that could happen. It’s the process. It’s not like, “When Artemis happens, we are in a new era.”
No. Artemis is the beginning of this idea of whether are they going to be exploited in space. Are we going to be traveling to different places? This era is the human factor. That’s why now you are finding people who understand the system’s approach to all these things happening. Lawyers are well placed to be like, “How do we get everyone on the same page in all this? It is because it’s not scientists and engineers sitting around playing in a room anymore.”
That was an impactful description that you gave in terms that it isn’t going to be one event. In the past, we walked on the moon. It is these discreet things that opened up a whole new set of possibilities, but here it’s more of a continuum of that.
It’s a continuum. We talk about adaptive governance and space governance. Given that things are going to keep changing towards this, we don’t know where it’s going to go. Now it’s getting all the people in because we don’t know where it’s going to go. The sustainability movement has helped us say, “If we look at Earth, we don’t want things to go the same way that we did here.” We have all this lifetime of experience to say space is an opportunity to be different.
Even though I’m very much a realist, I’m not a Star Trek fan. I didn’t watch all those things so I don’t believe that humans are going to be different because they are how they are. Space imaginary is what we talk about in sociotechnical studies. The space imaginary allows you to hold different variables and say, “What if we did this differently?”
The example I like to use is if I woke up one day and said, “I think that the US Constitution is terrible and we need to renegotiate the Constitution,” people would be up in arms. Everyone would be arguing, but if you said, “Elon Musk said that we are all going to Mars. We need to develop a constitution to take all the best practices to create a new constitution,” you can have a conversation. That is the power of space. Even though it’s very realistic, it’s not kumbaya, but there’s something about it that allows you to even play with the idea of being different.
It does leave it open, even aside from the whole sci-fi universe. It does because the newness of those ideas allows you to say, “This new thing is going to happen. What do we do about that?” Also, we don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s one of the things. You could be paralyzed in what you do with the law if you say, “We don’t know, so we are not going to do anything.” As you said, some of the things that we know about now, we can’t do that. We have to be proactive.
At my school, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the future is our topic of conversation. I have had to learn a whole bunch of new skills about how you think about the future.
You have thought about the future from the Space Law perspective, from the agency perspective, and Space Law generally for a while in many different settings, but this isn’t tied to that. It’s broader than that.
It is, and it’s a set of practices now. It’s funny because I realized that law students have the underlying tools to do this. We have the potential. We work with moot court. You have the potential that you have to think of what could happen. The tool for futurism is horizon scanning. How do you determine or pay attention to weak signals, things that people aren’t paying attention to, and how they may grow into different things? You’d have to be mapping the signals. Also, scenario planning.
Those are all skills that we have from the legal training. It’s the what if.
Scenario planning is what if, and then game theory, gaming, and role play, which we have at moot court, and collective visioning, which we have when we think about creating new agreements. It is all the tools for thinking about the future. Lawyers don’t think of it in terms of the future. They think of it in terms of now.
They are like, “You are looking at your horizon scanning and you are looking at the weak signals because you are looking at risk now.” The difference between that and someone who’s futurist is the people, for instance, who hired me that were like, “I wonder if Africa could be a space superpower.” That is something that when they hired me a few years ago and then they got the funding for me, which would have probably been several years ago, that’s pretty far out of the horizon.
That’s the difference. We think in scales of the 5, 10, 20, and then 50-year time zones that other people don’t think of. That’s what I have been doing with the Africa thing because even though I just started, we are creating a new space agency. When I left Nigeria, I now started thinking, “Nigeria on its own isn’t going to make that much impact. It needs to be an African story.” That’s how I started. I wrote my first journal article about the potential for an African space agency, which has now come online in 2023. It’s so funny. I was listening to my first interview for that, which was several years ago for it came into being.
I was going to ask you about that because you saw the potential of the Nigerian Space Agency. Also, when you talked about sustainability and your interest in studying that because that’s where you thought space would go, do you naturally think about long-term trends like that? It is because it seems like you were early on.
I do because I’m blessed that I have never cared about money. I tell you it’s true. Now I want money. If anyone wants to throw me some money, please do. If you take out money from an equation, it changes the way you look at things because money is such a driving factor for the things we do. People are worrying about, “Am I going to pay off my loans from law school? What school are my kids going to go to? Am I going to be able to live in the neighborhood that I want?” For some reason, I have never been someone who thinks about money or is worried about money, which may be showing my privilege, but I was like, “I will always be okay.”
Even if I’m not or even if I have no money, I’m a simple professor, but I’m so rich. I have a very strong spiritual life. I have a strong bond with my children, so I feel like I have things. If you meet my family and my mom, they have joy in their poverty. You should go to church in Nigeria. There’s way too much corruption, but everyone is dancing, singing, and happy, and you are like, “We don’t have this in the West. We don’t have this joy.”
I have a joy that means that even if I only had $10 to my name, I would still be dressed fabulously in my $10 outfit. That opens you up to looking at things that other people may not care about. I have spent a decade working and advocating for Africa for nothing. People have been like, “You have done so much for the movement.” I’m like, “Because that’s the future. Everyone is going to know that I was part of that future.” That means more to me than if I earned $1 million because, at this point, I just care about legacy. That’s why, but again, it’s the privilege but not in the way that we understand privilege. It’s a privilege that I have been blessed with joy and contentment, and that allows me to open up to think about things that people are too busy to think about.
That’s an expression of faith in that regard. Because of that, you are allowing your natural and skilled talents to be used to their best degree.
There are some people who are doing some significant work like Michelle Hanlon who are doing significant work at trying to get non-space people to understand this because we are trying to scale now. That’s very different from the typical space engineer. That’s very far from what they know, these rock stars. Everyone knows Neil deGrasse Tyson and people like that, but all these other people coming out, to be able to do that, you have to bring your full person.
I remember listening to Michelle’s saying. She was 50 years old when she did this. “You need to be at a point in your life where you are ready to stop chasing things and you are ready to create, you are ready to build, and you are ready to create a legacy.” That’s what you will see in all the people who are vocal and public like me. They are all futurists. They are all talking about creating something that’s going to last beyond them.
They listened to us when we were talking about horizon scanning and weak signals. I loved Michelle’s interview when she said the reason she got into space was because her kid said, “You a good lawyer. Can you work on this because one day I’m going to go out?” She listened to that, and she went with it. You will find that is the mentality of people that you hear and see in the Space Law field. They have done all the things and now they are ready to commit to something like this that is about the future and is about legacy.
This blew me away because so many African young people reach out to me, and I’m scared to encourage them because I don’t know what job they are going to get. You know how it is. It’s hard to be like, “You are going to become a space lawyer.” It’s hard to be a space lawyer. A lot of people who are space lawyers fall into it or are privileged somehow. It’s very hard to wake up and then be like, “I want to be a space lawyer.” You have to do a lot of internships, a lot of networking, and a lot of all the things. What I found is that almost every single person who is willing to do all that is going to make it even if they don’t become a space lawyer, but they have tenacity and all these skills.
When I earned an arm, some seventeen-year-old from Uganda was like, “I want to be like you.” At first, I would feel uncomfortable because I’m like, “I have three nationalities. I have a British accent. I have no money worries,” but then I said no. He found me. How did he find me? How did he even not find me but have the boldness to be like, “Will you mentor me because I want to get where you got to?”
It’s so inspiring. That’s the thing I love about this field. It’s those people who are later in their life, they want to do something and they put all their passion into this, or those people who are younger and they have done everything to find you and you do your best to drag them along. I want to find African billionaires and say, “The billionaire story got captured in the West during COVID in a bad way with the press.”
COVID was happening. There are all these things, and these billionaires are hanging around in space. The African billionaires, because we have some, I want them to get into space because by 2030, 42% of global youth will be African. Almost half of the young people in the world will be African. Most people are ignoring it, but the people who are looking at it are looking at it from a risk lens like unemployment or they are going to get captured by terrorist groups. No one is looking at almost half the world’s youth from a hopeful perspective.
That’s where when I had to grapple with myself. “Should I be spending my time getting ten-year-old kids interested in space, or should they be doing something else?” I said, “There are very few things for them that are about a hopeful future.” Those billionaires, if they are reading this show, I would say to them, “If you find someone interested in space, hire them.” They don’t need to work in space. You could incentivize them with space. Every year, they get to go to see a NASA space launch. They don’t have to work in space, but you can utilize their passions for space to keep them motivated in the things that you are doing.
That is an untapped pool. The African kids love space. You can get them to do fabulous things, and it’s simple to incentivize them. An African young person, if you tell them they are going to go to Florida to watch a space launch, if you tell an American kid that, they’d be excited. Let alone an African kid. That would be like telling them they have won the lottery. That’s enough that they can do whatever it is. We need to build our society, whatever jobs we need, but use that lens of space.
This is where I have got to with space because I’m not a space geek. I don’t love space, but I love it as an imaginary. I love it as this opportunity to say, “There’s something about space.” Whether you like space or not, space gives everyone five minutes of their time. Anywhere in the world I go, it doesn’t matter if I’m on a plane or if I’m on a bus. If I say I’m a space lawyer, you can imagine. You have everyone’s time for five minutes. The reason I chose five minutes is because the problem with real spacey people is they don’t know when they are losing their audience.
The five minutes, not a long dissertation.
They will now start going on and on, and then the audience is no longer in the mystery of it, but they are in the weeds like, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”
It’s gone past. You are talking about in terms of incentives, but you are talking about the youth who are interested in space. There’s something about that that shows imagination and ambition in themselves that says they want to go accomplish something else. It may not be in space, but there’s something about their mindset that shows that they would be successful in a range of other things.
It is the confidence in yourself that you think that you can do this thing that nobody has heard of. It is like I told you. I went to law school because I was like, “You have three options. Become a lawyer, doctor, or engineer.” That’s what most of us are like. Almost every interview where I hear immigrants and they ask you what you studied, that’s what they said.
You are so right. When you summarize it, I’m like, “That’s the immigrant story.” Any one of those three is acceptable.
For some little kid in a village somewhere to just dream about space, people are going to think he’s crazy. In Western countries, they say a lot of kids start dreaming about these things too, and then somewhere along the line, they lose it. If that happens here, you can imagine what it’s like over there. They will be like, “Get your head out of the clouds and go do something,” especially firstborns. I’m a firstborn. My dad was a firstborn. You have to set the path.
Potentially, if everyone else doesn’t do what they are supposed to do, you may have to carry the whole family. That’s why you are going to have to be a lawyer or a doctor. The people who are not thinking about all those things and not worried about all those things will get beaten out of them. My mom wanted me to be an oil and gas lawyer because, oil and gas in the Nigerian context, is a triple whammy.
Those who want the best for you and think security and stability for you as they see it, that’s a perfect combination.
Now I love that I can invite anyone to my lab because being transdisciplinary, there is now a new field coming out of this transdisciplinary ability and skills for people who are translators and integrators. This is the thing that Michael Crow, our President, always talks about that the superheroes of the future are the integrators.
They probably always have been the superheroes. Say right now we love entrepreneurs, but what can an entrepreneur do? They can bring the resources and they can bring the talent. They can bring excitement and they can bring the media, like Steve Jobs or whatever. It’s always been the integrators, but those people were superhuman. They weren’t taught. In places like Arizona State University, we are trying to teach people to be like that, and it’s not easy. In my school, our undergrad program is in Innovation and Society. How do you get parents of seventeen-year-olds to be like, “Go do a Major in Innovation and Society?”
Our students at my school, even though it’s hard to get them in, they are extraordinary. Our PhD students are extraordinary because they are not people who follow the grain. They are people who are builders and leaders. I can boldly be there with my legal background because, in a field where no discipline is dominant, the one that can bring law and order is very respected because everyone thinks they are right.
As a lawyer, I sit there and I’m like, “I don’t care which one of you are right or not. We got to figure out how we are going to move forward.” That’s what you can bring as a lawyer. You can be that person that is like, “I will put the template down.” I remember when I first started in my school because tenure is a complicated thing and people are always scared of it.
My school was so new that we didn’t even have tenure rules when I started. People were like, “How can you be in a place where you don’t know what the requirements are?” I said, “I’m a lawyer.” There are two kinds of lawyers. You are either scared of no rules or you are like, “I can make the rules.” I would rather be in a place where when I get there, we start making the rules. I have to fit into the rules that were there because I have the confidence that I have the ability to affect the rulemaking process.
That is one of the benefits that you get coming in early. It’s almost like you are comfortable with a startup culture to some degree.
I’m so comfortable with a startup culture. Because I’m not looking for money, even though for people who do startups, they want to be rich, but you are okay if it fails. The thing that you did was you tried to build. You brought something into the world, and that is priceless. The thing I didn’t like about law firm life is I didn’t like the people who were bored, depressed, and hated their clients.
I was like, “How much would it suck to have a client that you don’t believe in their values?” That’s my worst nightmare, having to spend multiple hours in a day doing something that I don’t believe in. I get that as an academic at a school like mine. I have the privilege that every single thing that I do is what I want to do. Even other tenure-track professors don’t have that. The way the tenure process works is you have six years to become this nebulous thing that is expected of you, and if you don’t, quit your job. What you find is a lot of people gung-ho for six years working their butt off to meet some standard, and then they are going to taper down afterward because they are so burnt out.
They are burned out from that process.
You hear people saying, “I’m going to be the real me when I get tenure.” I’m like, “How sad,” because that’s a lot of energy in your youthful years when you had to wait to be who you want to be later. I say all this that I could turn around and not get tenure, but I know that my tenure track experience has been transformative. It’s been wonderful. I will leave if I don’t get tenure or if I do something else saying, “That six years of my life was well-spent. I can tell you the impact. I know who I served and all that, and then I will go do something else.”
You don’t need to be tied down to what you expect that you are going to be. You need to believe in yourself that whatever comes, you are going to be able to look at your track history. You overcame before, and you will overcome again. That’s the hope. I know that things get difficult, and at some point, people lose that ability to keep bouncing back. That’s better than being fearful of saying that fear mentality happens.
There are two things in that one. You are talking about the resilience of saying, “Whatever happens, I can pick myself up and take my marbles, go somewhere else, and make an impact there,” knowing that it’s you and not the setting that allows you to have agency. The second thing is enjoying and appreciating the value you bring and the value that the position brings to you at that point in time.
There are so many times, especially lawyers, who were thinking so far ahead. Like you said, when you get tenure, everything will be whatever. In the meantime, there’s life going on for those many years. Do you want to put everything on hold or are you going to appreciate and make decisions that say, “Whatever happens at that point, I’m still contributing and getting something back in that interim?” That is important because our life is made of moments in each day. We have got it that way, too.
Now that I have had enough of a career to have a story, everything that’s happening, I’m just adding to my story. Before, I didn’t know what the story was, so I had to be like, “Am I going to get that postdoc?” Now I already have the story. Everything that comes in, you are figuring out where that goes in that story and what parts of that story could be elevated.
I have done so much now. I have worked in 6 countries and 5 different functions that you can pick up another strand from another point in time because now you have all this extra experience. That means that you have all that value added to go back. That’s why I know there’s a bunch of people who have had roles where they now left and then they came back.
I remember McGill University. If you do your Master’s, PhD, and postdoc, it’s not good to do it all in the same place. If you now apply to be a faculty there, it would be like you have done everything here. If you now leave and you are successful somewhere else, they will want you back because they are like, “You are our product, you have made it somewhere else, and you have something to bring back.”
That’s why you should never burn bridges. That’s very important. That’s what I learned too. You never burn bridges because you never know where those people will go. It’s another one of my God-given experiences that when I finished my PhD, I was scared because I was so niche. I was an African space lawyer. I did my PhD in developing country perspectives in Canada, and I didn’t know where I was going to get a job.
I figured out that Environmental Law was the thing that I should do, and there was an International Law Research Program in Canada, a big one that had an Environmental Law program and I applied. Can you believe this? As soon as I applied, I went on LinkedIn. What flashed before me was the new director of that program, I went to law school with him in a village in Nigeria. I was like, “Are you kidding me that of all the places, things, and whatever, this new place that I have put all my hopes in getting into, my boss was going to have been someone that I met in the law school?”
It is about timing and all of that too.
It blew my mind. That’s why I am like, “If I hadn’t gone to Nigeria.” It was that first boss that I had at the space agency, and then this boss that I had for my Environmental Law Program. I didn’t have any African networks before going there. In my 5 countries and the 3 nationalities that I have, it was these 2 people, Nigerians that created this whole thing for me.
That gets the whole concept of the importance of colleagues and networking, but that’s not networking with quotes, but how it works. It is having worked with various people and having them come back into your life in that way.
Also, never underestimate people. You can imagine. I was born and raised in England. My dad is a surgeon. I could have gone to that village like the savior complex of a backpacking trip. I would have never known that one of my colleagues would have risen so far above me that he would have been my boss in the West.
From law school, he went to Harvard and went to Oxford. He worked at Norton Rose. He wrote three books. He had twins and then became my boss. I would have never imagined that, so you can never underestimate anyone. There was that president that went to NASA and saw the janitor. He said, “What are you doing?” He’s like, “Helping a man get to the moon.” You don’t know who that person is, especially in America with all these immigrants.
You don’t know where people are so you should respect everyone. It is not because people might help you but because that’s the right thing to do. Everyone has value. The gods may shine on someone who could make a difference in your life. That’s the value that I try to live, and this is why I do so well with my mentees and students. They are always like, “You are some important big professor.” I’m like, “I guarantee you I’m not. I’m a normal person who was given this platform and it’s people like you that make me look good because conversations that I have with you every day give me new ideas. They inspire me. I don’t have to pretend that I came with them by myself because my skill is communicating the idea.”
People won’t be like, “It wasn’t your idea because I know how to express it so powerfully. People will still give me credit, so I don’t need to pretend that I came up with it by myself.” That’s why my students are always blown away at how much credit I give them. I’m like, “To be honest, the truth is ideas are a dime a dozen.” There are so many ideas, but after you have the idea, can you put it into some structure and format? Can you communicate it? Can you implement it? Can you scale it? There are so many more steps from the idea. Even if you have a powerful idea, that is the little piece of getting that idea out in the world.
You have to act on it, communicate it, and all of those things as well.
It’s hard. I remember I set up a company. I got my first contract with a space agency and it was a $20,000 contract. That was my very first contract. I was like, “This is going to be so easy.” That’s why they say it’s not good to start high. I never got a second contract. I thought that it was smooth sailing. I was like, “This is so easy,” and I have got tons of ideas. You can have an idea, but can you do all those other things?
It’s good to have things like that give you humility. It reminds you of that, which is an important factor.
It’s funny. The pastor was talking about what is the number one virtue. Everyone is like love and all this, and he’s like, “It’s humility.” It’s because through humility all the other virtues have an opportunity to come out. It’s interesting because my favorite leadership lesson with all the people that I love the most is humility and boldness. People who are bold and out there must be arrogant, but that’s not true. I feel like I’m bold and I’m out there, but I feel like a very humble person. I believe in myself.
Having humility doesn’t mean you don’t have confidence in yourself.
My favorite traits are humility and boldness. It’s powerful.
Working towards that, you have both of those. That’s good. Boldness and thought, let’s put it that way. That’s awesome. I have to have a question since you are in the School of Futures and things like that. What takeaway would you give to folks who are in law school now or in space in the next several years or something like that? What do you think are the big things to pay attention to?
I care about understanding fear and building trust. These are the primary things that we have been dealing with for all of human time. We are still so fearful and we still have a hard time building trust. Studying that, hopefully, to use it for good and to be able to learn how to create spaces and opportunities where people feel that they can speak their truth. It makes a big difference. The problem is they can’t because they don’t know how that’s going to be used. That is problematic, which is why boldness and risk-taking are important too because you are going to have to gamble.
Learn how to create spaces and opportunities where people can speak their truth.
Especially now, we have a cancel culture. Everything is recorded. They tell you to fail fast and whatever, but it’s etched for all time for people to keep watching over and over and you could be canceled. People coming up have to have boldness and the only place that I get my boldness is making sure that all these external things are not your identity because you can lose it all. I would say the most important thing is to be grounded and figure out what is important in life. Once you are grounded, no one can take anything away from you, and you will be able to have that boldness to see how you can figure out this issue of fear and trust and bring people together. That is a superstar power.
As you said, having this collective vision, each person needs to be able to contribute their special sauce to that. If you don’t have the trust, then people aren’t going to share that. They are not going to be genuine and share that. That’s not good for humanity overall because you want to build a better mouse trap, as they say, and that’s from having all of the voices in the mix.
This is where historical education is poor, especially in law schools. It’s about breeding competition. It’s about who’s at the top of the class. It’s built into the nature of what we think of lawyers, even when people feel like they need a lawyer who’s dominating and all that. They feel like that’s what’s going to get what they need. I get it. I’m an academic, so that’s why I can be hopeful and say it can be different. I’m a realist, so I know the real world, and even if that’s the real world you have to operate inside of yourself.
That’s a good point because you are saying all of these various things outside you, there are things you have control over and things you don’t. You have control over yourself. What can you do in that setting that you know you control as opposed to others that could change that?
I did some interesting training during COVID at the Harvard program on negotiation. That blew my mind. I did a training on mediation and I did a training on international negotiations. I have done simulations before and I don’t know whether it’s because these are Harvard-level executives. They were so good at their roles that it scared me.
We were doing a simulation of them. An international negotiation to try and get a landmine treaty ban. The topic was how many signatories you needed to bring it into force. If you don’t want it to come into force very quickly, then you are like, “We need 50 signatories before it’s done.” If you are serious about it, I learned a lot about myself because I wear my heart on my sleeve and I worked my butt off.
You should have seen me in the Zoom rooms trying to get everyone. Those people played their characters so well that I can see why people would get jaded because of something that seems like a no-brainer like, “Let’s do something that will prevent people from dying.” You still have people working against it. Lying or caring more about money and interests. I see that.
If you are too personal about this thing and in this context of international negotiations, you won’t be able to do anything. It opened my eyes to, “What do I need to be like in international negotiations?” If you are running around trying to save the day, you are going to get burned out. This is where I ended up now focusing on strategy.
My courses are on strategic thinking like, “What do you think about what is the long game or the end game?” It’s not that the end justifies all means, but you have to be strategic. You can’t just show up in a place. You have to think about it. Think about your moves. Think about what the other person’s moves could be.
You have to be strategic. You can’t just show up in a place. You have to think about it.
Probably law students do all this, but my being in a whole bunch of different disciplines has taught me that the law school tools are the things that you use, but your character, mindset, and attitude are the things that have nothing to do with law school or being a lawyer. It’s about being a human. That lens makes a difference. Even if there’s a position that you don’t like, can you still figure out how the least damage can be done?
The other reason that I got this is because I worked when I was in a law firm on a case where it was all foreigners in Nigeria. That was hard. I get it when people have some sentiments against the West because when they come in, it’s all gung-ho. They don’t care about you. They know what’s right and it can be very difficult even if they are right. You can be right and still destroy everyone’s spirit.
That reminds me of Nicole Stott the astronaut who was also a guest on the program. She talked about the same human elements like how do you excel or how do you get the teams to excel and be ready for tough situations in space? A lot of things she talked about were very human elements. How do we make sure, if we are in a tough situation, that the team remains a good functioning team after that incident?
In other words, you are very intentional about the people as people in the team to make sure that it continues to operate and how those relationships will continue to work. Even if you are in a death-defying tough situation in space, how you treat those people is important because you are going to continue to be that small team in space after that happens, and thinking about that. It reminds me of that same thing we are focused on the human element and being intentional about that in a way that a lot of people gloss over.
Space people are not bad because they think that that’s too soft. They are like, “How’s that going to get us to the moon? How’s that going to help us build a rocket?” It’s like that team culture applies to every single project of all time. My PhD student, a psychologist is working on team dynamics for duration space travel. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing because her theory is like those days of astronauts being the toughest, the strongest over if you are talking about. Scaling space is people who are not superheroes, people who are fallible. If those people are going to Mars, the chances are she can guarantee that someone is going to have a mental health breakdown.
It’s not about pushing that aside because you can imagine there’s no way that would be a PR nightmare for NASA. If someone has had a massive hissy, you’d never hear about it. She’s saying, “You need to assume that that’s going to happen.” How do we start thinking about that? How do we think about that in developing the team because it’s only the team that’s going to save you when you go to Mars?
It’s going to save you. It’s going to take an hour to hear back from Langley or whoever. By that time, who knows what would have happened? It matters in the context of all the problems that we are having with mental health breakdowns in society because of the structure of society. Every generation has said that the previous generation was better. My parents, back in my day, it wasn’t like that. Everyone says that, but the only reason that I saw the difference is because I have lived in different countries. Every time you move out of your comfort zone, you see people acting in different ways.
I remember when I went to Nigeria because there was no consistent electricity supply, so you could have hours with no light. When I was growing up, I lived in a big house. We had four stories and everybody was on their own story. When I went to Nigeria, when the lights were out, everyone was in the living room with candles.
That was a very different experience from me growing up in this isolated way. When I think of power shutdowns in Nigeria, I think of all the stories of like everybody laughing being in the same room. Even though I’m not saying that it’s good that they don’t have an electricity supply. The fact that I moved to a different place and experienced a different thing about culture means that if in my house we’d had a power shut down, everyone would be panicking, and like.
Here, it was the way that they have created survival mechanisms around the thing. Going to France was transformational because in England, the culture that we have there is everyone goes to the pub. There’s a pub on each street. Drinking is a very central part of the culture, but it was very different in France. Everyone drinks with their meal. They have a glass of wine, but it was very different from the local pub where people were like, “Give me another beer.” In France, it was a lot more sitting around the table with a glass of wine and having a conversation.
When you move like that and you see these different things, you are like, “I get to create my narrative because I have seen it from so many different lenses.” Canada was transformational for me because Canada was the first place that I lived where it’s so outdoorsy. People go golfing. When we moved to Canada, my dad learned how to play the saxophone. He learned how to golf. He learned how to ski because that was a different lifestyle in Canada. It’s very outdoorsy. You start appreciating the outdoors in a way that when you go to Dubai, everyone is in luxury places because. It’s very interesting and that’s why putting yourself in lots of different environments and then having the time to reflect.
It’s not about feeling, it’s about coming down and then thinking about your feelings. Thinking about thinking. That’s what a lot of people, rich people who get to travel the world and do all these things. They can’t use it to do anything because they don’t have the time to say, “What did I learn from that? How does that affect what I’m doing, how I engage, or what I see?” They are busy hopping on planes, traveling around, and not experiencing it.
You have to reflect on things. It’s important.
I’m letting the academic in me come out because that’s the beauty of being academic. I have that time.
That’s the point of having the time to reflect and provide deeper thoughts about things and see connections between things as well. It’s important in pathbreaking work that you are doing at ASU in terms of thinking about the future in a very interdisciplinary way.
It’s important work that a lot of people don’t see because, if you don’t expose yourself as a professor, people don’t know what professors do. The beauty of people seeing it is like I remember my first strategy class I taught. The first thing people say is that strategy is a plan, and I did this whole hypothesis-based approach to figuring out what strategic thinking is. He was like, “As soon as I got to the workforce, my boss said the strategy is a plan.” Maybe what we learned in class didn’t make sense. He got me thinking of when people say, “What you learn in school has nothing to do with what you work.”
It’s funny because I look back and say, “I believe in skills-based learning, but the whole point of that class, which he will only figure out later was I got you to think about what it is to be strategic just because he says that strategy is a plan.” I did not teach you this is the definition of strategy. This is how you have to think. I said, “What is being strategic?”
It’s not about somebody that you do this step and this step. You have to put your whole self into an experience. He is an undergrad. The first thing that he thought of was, “Maybe this class is irrelevant because my boss said that a strategy is a plan.” I’m like, “That’s the beauty of academia. If you open up what you are doing, the students get to understand that it’s only in this class that I get to experiment with what that means.”
When I get to the real world, I’m going to have to do whatever my boss says it is, but in class, you get to think about that and you get to formulate your ideas about what it is. That’s what’s going to get you to leadership. The boss had to go through that process to come up with what he said. When you are the bottom employee, you have to do what you are told and that’s when you think, “The teacher didn’t teach me anything.” That’s why because I read a lot like law school doesn’t prepare you.
It doesn’t prepare you. If you need to be prepared for specific jobs, you don’t need to spend 3, 4, 5, or 6 years learning things. It would take a year to learn things and this is what you are going to do. This is the screw that you put in. This is how you do it, then just go do it. No. They try and give you lots of different types of examples of the same thing. It’s when you get to the job that you figure out how it applies in that specific context. Usually, it’s years later. If you had a good teacher, it’s years later that you will remember.
It comes back and you go, “That person was smart.” To get you thinking and to have you thinking, but as you said, there’s so much about the training in the law and your career has shown that allows you, to open up a lot of other opportunities that are not straight law practice. There are so many different things and evolving things within your career in so many different ways.
You are such a great example of that, and also, seeing opportunities and taking advantage of those opportunities and growing and adding your skillset on top of your legal training is such a great example for people who are in law school now or thinking about law school. What can you do with a law degree and all the different ways that you can use the discipline of legal thinking to create an impact in the future and the development of the future?
I appreciate any time that someone from a law platform asks me to speak because I don’t talk that much to lawyers. My students are not lawyers, and so I always feel like I’m a pretend lawyer. When I have these conversations, it’s quite clear that the whole point of what we are learning in law school is pretty much everything that I do. It’s that I don’t call it law. I don’t call it legal thinking. I don’t call it applying it to cases, but it’s all there.
When you were breaking down the different aspects, I was thinking, “That’s right. All of those different variations of legal training.” Some other guests on the show have had similar a-ha moments. They are nonprofit leaders. They have done important social impact. Leading important social impact organizations, and they will say, “We can directly see the value that we add from our legal training to discerning problems, finding a path through them, advocating or persuading for funding, support, or with other agencies about their work.” All of those skills are translatable in so many ways and can be used to further your passion and interests strictly outside the law, and you can make a difference with it.
When you say it like this, it’s so obvious because of how many people with legal backgrounds do significant things. That’s why shows like yours are so important because eventually, you are going to get there. No. It’s at the beginning you don’t know or you haven’t heard, or even if you did get shifted because your parents had done this. They had a specific way that they started. Hearing these different stories and you have inspired me to be like, “It’s okay.” You feel like you aren’t the greatest lawyer in the world, but you are doing the things that legal training is meant to do.
One of the things serving on various boards that I have served on is that this is strategic like leading through to a conclusion and being able to see the problem. You hear all of this input and then organize that input and identify, “Here seems to be the problem, and here are the three paths that we could take to resolve that problem. Here are the actions we have to take to execute to get to any of those. Now, which one do we want?” Making sense of all of that and finding out a framework for it is something that we are trained to do that, not non-law trained entrepreneurs or business people are necessarily good at.
I study law in England, Nigeria, France, and Canada, and it’s funny. Everywhere the students are competitive. Everywhere, a lot of them ended up hating it because they couldn’t do the thing that they wanted to do. That’s why it’s important to know that if you get to the point where you are like, “The reason that I did this, I’m not feeling it anymore.”
Instead of getting depressed, figure out how you can use this in a way that’s going to be more aligned with who you are. You don’t have to stay there depressed and miserable because it’s a powerful tool that everyone will respect. If you go somewhere else you come with the confidence of, “I have got the skillset that I can bring to this problem.” You come feeling dejected, that’s not going to work. If you come to understand that you have something that isn’t working for you in the way that you thought it would, it’s a powerful enough toolset that it will be valued anywhere else that you go.
You exemplify that in spades in all different countries and all different arenas, but it’s true for so many other settings. Unfortunately in a lot of law schools, the perception is there’s a certain path and that is the path of success. A big law firm, whatever it is, and that might be for some people, but it isn’t the only path and it’s not the only way to use your skills.
My ex-husband is an accountant and that’s the thing. The big four and then trying to become a partner. People get so burnt out from that whole rat race of things that you have to do, and then they get there. They are like, “Is this what I have been stressing for all these years?” That’s why all the self-reflection work that I’m talking about is so important all the what is grounding you and what is driving you.
Yes. Be successful, but what is that success about? Is it taking you to where you want to be? We hear so much about depression and alcoholism in these fields because people are trying to self-medicate to be able to keep going. My message is that self-care matters, and I don’t think success in our field is at the expense of people’s lives.
Self-care matters.
It’s not at the expense of your life. We all know, like we say, employees or clients can let you go in a second. Remember, you have responsibilities. You have things that you have to do, but you should remember yourself. If you are not in a place where you are allowed to value yourself and to care about yourself, that’s not a place in the long term that you want to be.
That’s a great message and something important for folks navigating their careers to think about and check in for themselves. Sometimes it might be fine, but maybe a few years later it isn’t. Things change in organizations and things change for you. Being aware of that and making a change if it doesn’t serve who you are or allow you to bring all of your skills to what’s going on and all of you as a person too.
This reminds me of making me feel that the fact that I didn’t end up in practice, is what I want. It’s so funny that I feel like through this show, for instance, I get to reach those people and give them a hopeful message. I have spoken at two White House events. I have reached wherever it was that I thought that I wanted to reach, but I have done it in a way that honors who I am. Even though I had the shame, I felt a lot of shame from not making it in the way that I wanted to. I’m like the irony is I would have never been a public speaker. I would have not been the person that I am. You have to say everything that happens, even though some things are terrible that happen, everything happens. It just happens. It just is. I say this about countries.
In America, we love to say this country is good and this country is bad. When you have moved around as much as I have, you see what a country is. Countries go through different things depending on what’s going on and things like that. This idea of that’s a country and that’s a good country, it’s contextual and you have to look at it over time and things like that. It’s important to be cognizant of that and be okay with yourself. That’s the problem that most of us are not.
In America, we love to say this country is good and this country is bad … it’s contextual and you have to look at it over time ….What in Nigeria is great that is a model and is an example that can be scaled? What I can see in Nigeria is tenacity, and I can see the skills, the abilities, and I see core infrastructure and systematic issues, but I see a bunch of talent.
I love that like a country just is. Think about that as not having judgment. It just is. Now this is the reality. For now, what do we do? How do we respond to that? It can be hard to do that with people or countries.
It’s hard. All these things that I’m saying are all hard to do.
It sounds like you are like, “Just do this,” but it takes all these years of discipline and thinking and all of that to get there, but it’s good to have that goal.
As a Nigerian, all I hear is people complaining about Nigeria. Nigerians complaining about Nigeria, but I haven’t seen where that’s gotten us.
I see what you are saying it doesn’t achieve anything. What is the point?
It does not. My mom said to me, “You may have this fancy accent and you may have all these degrees and nationalities, but everyone is going to see a Black woman and ask you what African country you are from, so you might as well be proud of where you are from.” When she said that to me, it was life-changing because I’m not going to sit here and say that Nigeria is great, but there are so many problems everywhere. What in Nigeria is great that is a model and is an example that can be scaled? What I can see in Nigeria is tenacity, and I can see the skills, the abilities, and I see core infrastructure and systematic issues, but I see a bunch of talent. I feel like that’s more powerful than if I joined the choir of saying, “There is so much corruption. It’s so terrible.”
Focus on the positive and the positive is the people.
Positive is always the people. The problem that you have with that is this idea of brain drain. When you now say, the people are great, then the people get taken out. My end game is how to keep people on the continent. There’s no way you keep people in the continent because you can’t take all the best out of there and leave it as a wasteland.
The only way that you can keep people in the continent is if you build good institutions in the continent that they can stay in. Why am I here in America? Yes. I’m committed to being here. I’m committed to serving my students, but in the back of my mind, I know that I don’t want to get all the best students from Africa to come to ASU. My family is establishing a Canadian university in Nigeria because as soon as all the students come to university here, they are not going to want to go back.
If they can have a great university experience, that makes all the difference. We will see what happens with that. My colleagues in the diaspora, I’m like, it’s easy to be like, “I left that awful place behind,” but you were blessed to get out. You were blessed to have abilities and skills and why would you leave people to suffer? It’s hard. I am making it sound easy.
You have to try different things to see what works.
Like my mom said to me, the irony is if you think that people are going to respect you more because you ignored your past, they are not. If someone is like, “You are from Nigeria. You left Nigeria because it’s so terrible. You are now here doing well and you never want to go to Nigeria again.” People are not like, “That’s so noble.” To be honest, all of us need at least one little project that we do from where we are from. Even if it’s a tiny thing to be able to do something with the God-given opportunity that you have, you have to. It’s a moral imperative.
If you think people will respect you more because you ignored your past, they are not.
Giving back is so many people feel that way. As you said, a certain sense of legacy at a certain point. What that means is different. Maybe different for different people, but it’s always about giving back to the places you came from, which includes your country. It’s important.
Having pride, it’s not unbridled pride, but having pride in where you are from, to be honest, is a lot more inspiring than denigrating where you are from.
We come from a collection of experiences and in your case from many different places. All of those have combined to make you who you are, and you should be proud of all of those.
As you get older, you learn different things, which can change how you feel about that or have different experiences, I had a child who died, and my ex-husband, who’s from Haiti, I set up an endowment fund in my son’s name at a school to give scholarships in his name. This is the challenge of working in a developing country. You would think it was a no-brainer that we were going to give you money. It’s so hard to even give someone something because of the way the systems are. It’s like I’m not even asking for anything. I’m giving and it’s so hard, so people get discouraged.
Having pride, it’s not unbridled pride, but having pride in where you are from, to be honest, is a lot more inspiring than denigrating where you are from.
I’m trying to give back and it’s extremely complicated, and I’m being rebuffed.
That’s another message that I’m giving that I get it. I’m here saying admonishing people for not doing enough, but a lot of people have tried. They have tried so hard and it feels like constant bashing up against a wall of something stopping you, and all of us have felt this. Whoever’s reading this show, I’m saying just give it one more shot.
It’s such a beautiful way of honoring your son too.
It is. It’s amazing.
I usually end with a little lightning round of questions. You have answered some of them. It will be a streamlined lightning round. Which talent would you most like to have but don’t?
My talent would be to keep having children. I love to have so many kids.
You enjoy being a mother. That’s good. That’s so funny. Whether of these questions, who is your favorite writer or what is your favorite word?
My favorite word is intentionality. I try to not let life happen to me, but I try to put what I want out there in the universe be intentional about it, and then accept what comes.
You do more than accept. You are proactive as well. A little bit of both. Who is your hero in real life or heroes?
I don’t have many heroes outside of my family, but there are features of people that I like. The feature that I like is I like very bold people who are humble. People that they are tenacious. They go for what they want, but you know that they are doing it from a place of care, empathy, and love. You know that they are doing something significant when they have a lot of haters.
If everybody loves them, that’s not the person that I admire. I know one of these person. I didn’t want to give this name. There are so many people that are like this. You put yourself out there. You give it your all. Instead of people seeing the effort and in what you are trying to do. They are projecting a whole bunch of things.
I have seen the controversy and all of that stuff around him, but he’s moved the ball forward and certainly the discussion forward and space environmentalism for sure. That’s valuable. There are a lot of haters and there are ways to use that on social media to at least gain more attention to the issues. He’s skilled at that.
It’s not easy because, for instance, I have seen comments that you can say, “Just ignore the comments,” but when the comments keep coming, it’s like slowly ignoring your comments even if you know that it’s wrong. I admire people who despite that can still keep going. I had my first troll and it took everything in me to not respond because I said, “That irony is responding gives them more agency and power.” It’s very hard because you have to say, “I have done enough work. I am sound enough that even if they throw all these things out there the people who know, know. The people that don’t, it doesn’t matter.” That takes a lot of self.
That gets back to what you were saying about being very self-confident. Even if you are, that can still be tough.
Those are people I admire. This is why I’m a little bit of a fan of politicians. When I hear people’s blanket statements abusing politicians and presidents, maybe because I have people in my family who do this very thankless work that you do this way and half the people hate it. You are never going to get everyone on board. I get it that people who have a voice, want to say, “He did such a bad job. He’s so awful.”
I don’t have many heroes outside of my family, but there are features of people that I like. The feature that I like is I like very bold people who are humble. People who are tenacious. They go for what they want, but you know that they are doing it from a place of care, empathy, and love.
Every time I see leaders, and I see, because I’m a leader, I know what it takes to make decisions and to be like, “Who am I going to hurt?” You can’t give everyone what they want. It’s hard to sit and see people just, “He’s so awful. She’s awful. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” I’m like, “They may know what they are talking about. They may be balancing twenty different complaints.”
Then realize all of the other things that are being balanced to reach a decision.
Yes, so I admire politicians.
That’s so magnanimous of you, but that’s talking about looking from different perspectives, which you do well. What in your life do you feel most grateful for?
You know this. My daughter. I’m so thankful to be a mom.
That’s so great. It’s so great to see your joy in that role. It’s very sweet. Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you invite to a dinner party?
I am such a stereotypical Black woman to say Michelle Obama. This is our stereotype. The Obamas. It’s got to be Michelle and Barack Obama, first people I’d have to dinner. That’s in America, but Nigerian, it’s a writer called Chimamanda Adichie. She’s a Nigerian author. She’s done well in America. She had a TED talk called The Danger of a Single Story. I watched that TED Talk and you know when you are like, “She could be my friend.” People with that affinity, an absolute hands down, Chimamanda Adichie.
Now I have to listen to the TED talk. I have listened to your TEDx talk. It was good. You are good at that. Last question. What is your motto if you have one?
Learning first and helping others to learn.
You are exemplifying that every day in your position at ASU, so you are in the right place.
It’s such a privilege to learn in public because you have to be humble. The beauty of learning in public is being humble and being able to say where you are struggling is way easier than learning something hard on your own and feeling like a failure when you don’t get it. Plus, when you tell people, I’m learning this in public, so you can see and inspire you to learn too. People are supporting you and you feel good about what you are doing, even the struggles because you can talk it out. It’s a selfish thing that I say learning first and then teaching others to learn because I love to learn. I bring in the community.
It’s such a privilege to learn in public because you have to be humble. The beauty of learning in public is being humble and being able to say where you are struggling is way easier than learning something hard on your own and feeling like a failure when you don’t get it.
I love your phrase about learning in public because there’s so much about building in public or failing in public, all of that stuff in terms of the entrepreneurial approach, but I love the academic approach and the learning in public phrase. That’s very cool.
There’s a gentleman on Instagram who’s an older Black man learning to read. Can you imagine what it’s like to be an older person to read? The pain and the feeling of worthlessness and all that, because you are supposed to already be able to know how to help. It’s so powerful to watch. He’s doing it and all the people he’s helping.
Encouraging others to do the same thing and to persevere and things like that. You are right. There is a benefit to learning in public for others, too. Thank you so much. I have learned a lot in our discussion as well, and it’s been a joy to talk with you.
Thank you so much. This is a wonderful project and keep going.
Thank you.