The Tight Five: Episode 10 – Professor Charles Morton, Brown University - Part II
In the second part of this two part interview (you can read Part I here) with Charles Morton, we tackle a wide range of topics including translating an idea into something tangible, the myriad ways that COVID has affected his children and the community he lives in, how author Neal Stevenson has foreseen a number of tectonic trends in our culture and a fascinating examination of the skillful way that Zadie Smith’s writing shines an insightful light on race.
Part I was great, but Part II builds on that energy and takes the conversation to a whole new level. Please read Part I if you have not and take my advice and dive headfirst into Part II!
Charles has been a close friend of mine for almost three decades. He’s also a super talented guy who plays bass in several Boston area bands, teaches organic chemistry at Brown University (he holds a PhD from MIT), coached men’s and women’s college volleyball and most importantly he is a father of four.
The Tight Five: Origin Stories from The Second Row is a series of conversations with smart, thought-provoking folks who are doing great things in ‘The Front Row’ of work, mental health, marketing, service and technology and how they came to their personal and professional path in life. The series is named after the moniker of the combined Front Row (two props and the hooker in the middle) and the Second Row in the rugby scrum.
Matt:
What’s your process for turning an idea into something tangible?
Charles:
You know, this is a really interesting question because I am a horrible person to answer it.
Matt:
Yeah. That's why I asked.
Charles:
Like many people who are interested in too many things, I have a lot of projects going on at various stages of disarray—a lot of incomplete projects. Sometimes things get finished and shipped. A lot of things are 80% done, 50% done, 20% done.
Matt:
Big loading dock. Big warehouse.
Charles:
So, how do you make an idea tangible? Tangible could mean shipping the product, that's one definition. I'm going to go much earlier and say, how do I get an idea promoted to more than just an idea.
Matt:
You can call it… something actionable.
Charles:
The first thing an idea has to do is find its way onto paper. I go through a lot of scratch paper because if I don’t write it down immediately, it vanishes from my brain forever. Once I get it down on paper, just the very act of trying to formulate it into words or a diagram or a recording, it’s in progress.
Next, I need to find somebody who will fill in the gaps. I need to talk to smarter, more in-the-know people, and what I want those people to do is ask me questions that I haven't considered yet. I want them to shoot my idea down. I want them to tell me why it won't work.
Matt:
Again, it's similar to knowing that something doesn't work is almost as more valuable than knowing it does work.
Charles:
Some people tend to be scared about sharing ideas early. They don't want to share because they don't want anybody else to take this and run with it and that's just nonsense. Nobody has time to steal your idea and go develop it. They've got their own stuff going on.
Matt:
No idea is that good. Nothing is that well baked coming out initially.
Charles:
Right. Right. Certainly not my ideas!
So, you have an idea and you’ve got to talk to people right away. The chance of bringing something from an idea to a tangible process or prototype or business model or even a pitch, is a long process. You need to talk to everyone you can possibly think of—anyone that might be able to give you some insight into how to attack the problem. The space in my head is not enough for an idea to germinate and sprout. It has to be transplanted into a collective number of brains that I have access to via friends, family, colleagues and the students I’m around.
I've been talking about this in the context of inventions or startups or some kind of innovation, but you can think about it as well in terms of playing in a band, right? Over the years I’ve played in a number of bands… and someone will write a riff or a drum part and maybe it's cool, maybe it's not cool. Until you bring it to some people that you like playing music with, you don’t know what the group will come up with.
If you're Prince or Charlie Pluth or someone like that who can do that start to finish and come up with something as a total banger then, hey, good for you! But most of us both need to and should consult our friends and bandmates and say, ‘Hey, I wrote this. What do you think?’
Matt:
Yeah. It's interesting whether it’s an idea or a song. When do you say, ‘Hey, we've got something here!’ Alternatively, when do you abandon it?
Charles:
If it's still stuck in your head in the shower 2 days later, it's a song, right? There's some component of that. You work on it more because you created something that stuck in your brain. There are some really interesting ideas out there about what constitutes a great song.
Matt:
Yeah, not every song is ‘Purple Rain’ or ‘Party Like it’s 1999.’ Nor is every idea.
Charles:
You can get overprotective of a melody or a riff. You're like, I'm not sure if I want to bring this to the band either. I don't know if I want to bring this to other people. I think that this song needs more work or it's just too personal. I need to work it out myself. Well, if you hide it, you're not going to develop it.
Matt:
You have got to bring it to practice.
Charles:
If your bandmates’ interpretations of it are the same as what you had in mind that's cool. It's fun to play with somebody long enough that you end up sharing a brain and you don't have to put any effort into it.
You know what I'm going to do there, so we just do it—that familiarity can be comfortable or it can get stale.
Matt:
That's what was so cool about watching Peter Jackson's Beatles documentary on Apple was that you saw Lennon and McCartney and even Harrison come in with kernels of songs. And they were at various levels of being finished, but then you saw the role that Ringo and the other guys had in terms of finishing those songs. Ringo was always there, he was always on the beat. He was always steady. He was in the pocket. Additionally, Harrison could add to what Lennon and McCartney was doing. Lennon and McCartney shared that brain, but also how they brought really original stuff to the table.
Charles
When you describe Ringo's role in that, it resonates because I think I'm personally better at arranging something than creating the original melodic idea. I'm not a front man, but if somebody comes in with a melody and a chord progression, then I can arrange that into something fun. It's about knowing my job and what I’m good at.
It's the fun part for me. I think get more joy out of hearing a recording of a song that I arranged than one featuring a killer bassline.
Matt:
If the bassline is the thing that you remember that sticks out, it's kind of not a good song, I know it depends…
Charles:
You just pissed off all the Red Hot Chili Peppers fans, but that's okay.
Matt:
Hmm. Alright.
Charles:
That ties back into what we're talking about earlier in terms of what's coaching, it’s trying to get a whole bunch of people to do their very different jobs toward a collective end. If you're a producer or an arranger, how do you make the most out of the individual people's contributions so that they all reinforce and support one another?
Yeah, I mean if you take the Chili Peppers example, the super talented arranger in that band is Flea and to me, that's what comes through on all of the songs. It’s his understanding of melodic and harmonic ideas from so many musical contexts more than his epic bass playing that drives that bus.
Yet John Frusciante is a virtuoso player, especially when it comes melody, he hears things on that Jacob Collier level. Just the relationships between notes—he’s not confined to a rigid Western 12-note system; he needs to bend this note a little bit because it works better in this chord context...he’s that level of virtuoso genius. Flea is the architect of what makes a song a banger, but Frusciante's the one who's gonna hit something memorable and soulful.
Matt:
Three years after the world shut down because of COVID what are the 3 impacts on you and the communities you live in.
Charles:
I think that people are much more selective about what community activities they choose to be a part of. For example, we kept my kids in soccer throughout because it's outside, which was awesome. We couldn't have them take 2 years off from having in-person interactions with friends, and the best way to do that was through an outdoor sport. So, you know, we kept everybody in soccer. But we took time off from indoor winter basketball, because we didn't feel as good about that. Even today we go out less. Everything is still stressful. The undercurrent is always playing in my head, ‘Is it worthwhile to go do this? Do we really want to do this? Can we go to this place on a day where no one else is going to be there?’
I think I would’ve liked to believe that people would have developed better habits. What I mean is are you aware of yourself? Can you cover your mouth when you cough in public or can you decide not to go out because you’re sick? I think the thing that's really been funny and pathetic at the same time in the US especially the incredible resistance to masking.
It is literally the lowest intensity intervention, just putting a fucking mask on. It's the easiest thing you can possibly do, so miss me with all of your, ‘I can't breathe’ bullshit. You know who can breathe? The entire continent of Asia. Go to Japan, go to China, go to Korea and you'll see people on the train wearing a mask because they're sick and it’s culturally accepted and expected to mask as a matter of basic manners.
Matt:
Yeah, we've turned it's more than just a mask. You know, it's turned into a symbol.
Charles:
Yeah, I think that as an American society, we've completely missed the opportunity to incorporate that level of collective giving a shit into our belief system. We've completely missed that opportunity. We've made no progress on that front. My kids were some of the last ones to wear masks at school. Once the school said you could you didn't have to mask anymore our kids continued to mask because that's just the thing that we thought was more responsible and they took some heat from it from their peers. Now they're at the point where they get to decide whether they're going to mask or not, but if you decide you need to go for it, don't feel bad about it because you're not hurting anybody by doing it.
Matt:
Hey, last question. What book, author, a thinker has been important for you in your academic career.
Charles
So, one of my two favorite authors of all time is Neal Stephenson. He writes elaborate sci-fi with historical fiction with these immense interweaving parallel story lines. He writes about broad and awesomely long ideas that you read and just say, ‘this is more than a cool story.’
Matt:
Anthropology, sociology. Very deep.
Charles:
And then you realize, oh my God. This is a proposal for the architecture of how this giant global societal system came to be—he came up with some stuff a while ago that ended up coming true. Like the idea of a metaverse, the concept that we're all online managing different personalities on different platforms as a way to interact with other people, that was in Snow Crash which he wrote in the early nineties.
So, his writing style and his effort to make the technology that he either invokes or creates to make his stories go is spot on, or at least plausible and really cool. It’s pretty easy to get lost in his books and I've probably read each of them at least four times. I'll periodically pull Cryptonomicon off the shelf because I need to read it again. I feel as a STEM person and as an engineer, those novels are crack for me.
Matt:
What is the second…?
Charles:
My other favorite author would be Zadie Smith.
Matt:
Yeah, she would have been my guess. For you.
Charles:
This goes for a completely different aspect of my existence, which is what it is like to be a brown person in different parts of the world, specifically a mixed brown person who grew up in a mixed household in Southern California, a part of the world with literally every ethnic group, all in the same place. You're exposed to so many different cultures that you don't even realize it—you're not consciously aware of being in a melting pot. You just are. And if you're also mixed, you don't necessarily have a racial identity. Until you are forced to develop one. Exogenous forces. It's not part of your consciousness from day one. It’s not like, we're the black family in the neighborhood, we're the Asian family in neighborhood or whatever. It turns out different people look different. We go to their house, and they do some different things with food or religion or whatever and that's cool.
Whatever you hear about LA and racism and the different groups that don't like each other, it's a story that doesn't really match my experience there. My experience there was there's all different kinds of people, some people get together with their communities and do stuff and then they do other stuff with other people, we're just all here.
I had to move to New England for college in order to experience being seen as a black guy first. That's everyone's first thought when I walk in room is oh, there's a giant black dude.
Matt:
You are 6-5…
Charles:
True.
I'm 16 and I moved Cambridge and when I walked down the hall by another black person whom I didn’t know, they’d gives me this nod and so I would give that nod in response. I guess we are now on the same team here, right? I didn’t know there were teams.
It’s an interesting dynamic, right? It's still funny to me if you're mixed race, almost every conversation about race is weird, right? It's just inherently hilarious.
I find myself having a lot of fun, long term friendships with other mixed kids because we can lean into knowing that dynamic, we can make fun of any component of our existences, and we don't feel any animosity in any direction because how do you do that?
So, Zadie Smith has perfectly captured that in her writing. Starting with White Teeth and then going forward, she describes these wonderful characters and storylines. But these stories don't work unless you understand the richness of their backgrounds, and the way that Smith describes them is both objective and realistic. She writes the way a normal human would know and observe people, so the stories don’t depend on the characters’ racial identity or mixed identity to make the plots flow. But her attention to detail in including characters’ backgrounds adds a dimension to the story—it helps you paint your mental picture and maybe have a better look into their motivations.
I think that she just has a really genuine way to present characters as people first. Because she’s not doing cliched, stereotype shit. It’s as if she says, ‘Here are interesting characters that are real, these are people that you might sit by on the bus, these are people that you might interact with at work. These are people that you might cross paths with for some reason.’ And she’s so good that those interactions are their own thing and could be told without the cultural context. But it's so much cooler if you know the cultural context.
Matt:
She writes knowingly without bias.
Charles:
Yes, and she's doing it from her standpoint of, ‘how do you navigate being mixed, how do you navigate being ethnically ambiguous, how do you straddle different cultures? At home versus at work versus with extended family, how do you do that?’
Matt:
How do you belong?
Charles:
You did that very well. How do you belong, or do you even need to, and do you want to, right?
Matt:
Yeah, do you want to?
Charles:
And how do you tell stories correctly? There's always a sort of backlash against complicated, varied stories like hers and when Hollywood gets a hold of them, they get whitewashed.
Like when they did with the movie ’21,’ about the MIT blackjack team. They totally whitewashed it. Many of the real people on that blackjack team were of varying ethnicities, mixed kids, Asian kids, Indian kids—lots of different flavors of people on that squad. Well, that's lame, right?
Matt:
Yeah.
Charles:
Believable humans make interesting narratives and Smith does that, like nobody else. I don't know, as a mixed person when I read her books, I feel I feel all the stuff going on the page coming from all the directions that I identify with. All the permutations of relationships between people on these pages really evolve as I figure out their roles in the story. The other person who captures this dynamic is Trevor Noah.
Matt:
Oh yeah?
Charles:
We all love Trevor Noah, he was hilarious on The Daily Show; his stand up is great. But a couple years back when I read his book Born A Crime, I'd never read anything that paralleled it. It starts with him as a kid in South Africa and there was a point where he had to basically decide whether he wanted to identify as black or colored (meaning mixed) and he chose to identify as black. I think it was when he was like choosing what junior high to go to and because he was mixed, he could go be with the colored people or with the black people. He spoke Zulu and several other languages and even at that age, he's this very worldly guy and you would think he would go be with the group in the middle that maybe connects him to everyone. But no, he decided to latch onto one particular component of his identity, and he went to the black school.
I had an analogous question posed to me when selecting a junior high. In the way that the LA Unified School District worked in the late 80s, I was on track to go to the to the junior high that my address said I should go, you know, the neighborhood junior high. But I had two other options through whatever they called a gifted program or the extra nerd program. One of them was Portola, and the other one was Eagle Rock. But it was the way that they represented me that totally turned me off was. ‘Oh, you go to Portola if you want a mostly black school or you go to Eagle Rock if you want to a mostly white school. And what they were asking was, ‘how do you identify?’
And I'm like, I don't want to identify, that's not a parameter that I want to use to choose my school.
Matt:
I want a third choice.
Charles:
I'm going to go to Stephen White down the street in Carson with all the people I know. People who live in this neighborhood who are Filipino or Samoan or Tongan or Mexican or Vietnamese or maybe they’re Hawai’ian or some combination of things that you can’t even decipher, and I'm going to go to school with those people and I'm going to be mixed and the only kids who stand out a little are the few who look 100% white or 100% black.
Trevor Noah’s story about choosing a school, or choosing a path based on your own racial self-identity—and just the notion of the existence of colored as this intermediate caste in South Africa is fascinating. But the way that he presented that just really resonated. I read that, and I immediately sent my mom a copy and I sent her a text that said, ‘Mom, you need to read this.’
But if I think about a book that I want to take on a plane and like get lost in instead of watching like six episodes of Project Runway on the little TV, I'm probably grabbing something from Smith or Stevenson.
Matt:
Me too. All right, my friend. Thank you.
Charles:
Yeah. Hey, thank you, man. Good questions.
Matt:
It's fun.
Charles:
Good times.