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[Music]

VOICE 1: What happened to you?

VOICE 2: No, no, no, where are you really from?

VOICE 3: Who's your real parent?

VOICE 4: Why are you single?

VOICE 5: What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you here?

VOICE 6: Do you need help?

VOICE 7: Where are they now?

VOICE 8: How can I do better?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: We made it to the end of our third season!

HARVINDER WADHWA: Yay!

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: We unpacked 15 whole questions.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Yes, indeed.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: How are you feeling?

HARVINDER WADHWA: Mixed, mixed in the sense that, very happy I think it was a very successful season. A little sad that the world will be deprived of my jokes once we are done with the season.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah. No, I think that's the big loss here.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Exactly.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Today, we're doing a bonus wrap up episode to look back on all the questions we just unpacked and the season we just had. Harv, this was your idea and I'd love to hear a bit more about why this was important to you, to look back.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Yes, I wanted to wrap things and put a bow tie on it. To basically try to find what are we trying to do? What did we achieve? So that said, this is more emotional, I guess, than perhaps rational. I don't know. But yes, I wanted to talk about it and also get a feel of what our listeners thought about our episodes.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah. And to kind of achieve what you were saying there, I think we're also going to get into some listener questions, some of your questions about the season. And I'm excited to hear directly from people who have been on this journey with us, what they want to know as we reflect on what we've just been through and all we've just learned.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Wonderful.

[Music]

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: All right. Ready for the first question, Harv?

HARVINDER WADHWA: Absolutely.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: This is one from Emilie and Emilie wrote, “Which interview from this season blew your mind the most?”

HARVINDER WADHWA: So it's very hard to pick one, but I would pick a combination of two, which was Jam and Sara [Acevedo] for the autism episode “Are you sure?”. Because between the two of them, I got a huge perspective on autism. I did not know anything about it and it may be that I'm ignorant compared to most other people. But the amount of learning I got from that episode, it covered so much ground for me.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: That's awesome. I'm so glad.

HARVINDER WADHWA: What about you?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I think the first interview that stands out to me, what I think about that is way back when we did, “Where are you from?” I really loved all the perspectives in that episode. But when we talked to Eva Jewell, the Anishinaabe scholar, about her perspective on “Where are you from?” and how, when Indigenous folks ask each other, that can be a really positive question. And that was really cool hearing her story about how she actually met her relative through that question when she was halfway across the continent. I really just expected we would get that same perspective of this question is bad. It's othering. Don't use it. The end. And we got a lot of perspectives that were in line with that. But this one, I think, really broadened my mind.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Next, we have Carson with his question.

[Answering machine beep]

CARSON: Hey Elena and Harv, what is the most challenging part of hosting and interviewing?

HARVINDER WADHWA: So Elena, let me take that first.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: OK. Go for it.

HARVINDER WADHWA: My constant fear was that inadvertently, I may offend a guest. Of course, that was never the intention. But then again, when you are not as versed with the issue as the guest is, there is always a chance of asking a stupid question.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I totally feel that too. I actually have a lot of anxiety sometimes before our interviews, and I think most often I come away from our interviews being like, “Oh no, that was so fun. You know, it was a lot better that I was thinking it was going to be. My anxiety was kind of for no reason.” But I feel you, I still have that.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Now fully aware that these guests are aware that they are being interviewed for that very reason, that people don't understand these topics. And the guests have been a hundred per cent, been very kind. But that was still at the back of my mind, and that did end up me self-censoring a lot of stuff. So maybe in hindsight, I should have not. But that's the way it is.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I think I would add to that that sometimes it is hard to listen to someone's story that is particularly tough or traumatic and know how to react in a compassionate way. But also ask follow up questions.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Yes.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: You know, that's a hard thing to do because that person's reliving a difficult moment that you know Harv and I, I'm thinking of in our episode about formerly incarcerated folks, you know, Kadeem Reid told us how many times he'd been shot. And it was like, “Hey, you guys been shot that many times?” and we were all kind of like ”...no!” It can be hard to know how to respond in a way that's like compassionate and interesting, and it suits the moment. Am I showing that I'm listening enough? Am I saying too much?

HARVINDER WADHWA: Laughing at the right time or should you be laughing at that moment or not?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, 100 per cent.

HARVINDER WADHWA: One thing is, I think our questions were just the starting point of exploring a whole bunch of things.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: With the episode regarding incarceration, I am quite confident the majority of the people don't understand our legal system. Majority of the people don't understand how things work behind the scenes.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: That was something I really, really, really wanted to explore a lot more. But in 40 minutes, you can do only so much.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: And this is one of the most sensitive topics. So not only does it have to be handled very sensitively, but also it goes into great detail of depth.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: I mean, I come from India, where human rights violation is a daily occurrence. So to me, this had a little bit of more emotional feelings.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: We have a question from Erin.

ERIN: Hi Elena and Harv, I have a question. Is there any subject that you really want to tackle, but you can't figure out the right question for it?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Speaking from having, you know, meetings with our producers and stuff, Harv, we struggle with this all the time. There is definitely a couple ideas for topics that we've had, so we considered having an episode about non-binary people and different pronouns and stuff like that. But we really, we asked around, we talked to different folks, couldn't really find the right question. I think a problem within this is a lot of times we don't want to just force a statement to be a question. So I'm thinking of, for example, bisexual people being told, “Isn't this just a phase?” like that kind of question. And that doesn't really work for our show because people don't tend to ask them as questions. They're not curious. They're just trying to kind of poke and attack people.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Right. I have two, which were very, very close to me emotionally. And one was about refugees. And again, I'll have to give a bit of context because my parents became refugees in 1947, when they had to move from Pakistan to India.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Oh damn.

HARVINDER WADHWA: The way people perceive refugees and what the reality is are two different things. So I wanted to make an episode on that. And the second one is the homelessness. It bothers my conscience that we are one of the richest countries on Earth and people don't have a place to live.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: So these two, I really, really wanted to explore more, but unfortunately we couldn't find, and you guys did a lot of hard work to see if we could find the right question. But again, we didn't end up doing either of these two episodes.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, maybe in future we will find the right question for some of these burning topics of ours.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Absolutely. So this question was submitted by Maggie. “I'm impressed with the people you have on the podcasts. They are so knowledgeable and so eloquent. How do you find them?”

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: That's a good question. The answer is all over the place. There's definitely some people who when we're brainstorming a topic, I go, “Wow! OK, one of my favourite podcasters would be great for this” or “Someone from a movie I like would be great for this.” And other folks definitely. I really love talking to Kristen Meinzer for the “Do you know your real parents?” adoption episode. She's one of my favourite podcast hosts ever, and that was amazing. I think Sabrina was a big fan, our producer Sabrina, was a big fan of Christine Ha before we had her on the show on the “Do you need help?” episode. Also, we often find people who have written about these topics and these questions. We scour Twitter. Sometimes they've made a popular tweet thread about it or something like that. And we also brought on this year our chase producer Sarah Melton, shout out Sarah, who is really crafty at finding people and would look at places like Facebook groups for voicenotes.

HARVINDER WADHWA: So if I'm hearing it correctly, watching TV and spending a lot of time on social media is not always a complete waste of time.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, exactly.

HARVINDER WADHWA: OK.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Definitely everyone, watch all the TV and always be on social media. That's how you make a podcast!

[Music]

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Looking back on this season Harv, what were your proudest moments of making it?

HARVINDER WADHWA: Oh, I think we being picked up by Apple as our spotlight. That we were the first non-US, so I'll use the word international, podcast to be featured by Apple USA. So I think we made history.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, that was pretty cool. I just got a poster of the artwork they did.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Yes.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: For when they featured us as Apple's Spotlight Pick of the month for August. I just got that art. So there's a picture, a big poster of the two of us sitting in my room right now. And it's kind of awkward because it's, I haven't hung it up yet, it’s at the foot of my bed. So whenever I go to sleep, we're staring at me and I hate it. But that was wild. And even just, you know, the little messages we've gotten from people on socials or hearing that your daughter, Harbani’s teacher, had featured an episode of the show in the class.

HARVINDER WADHWA: She did not know that Harbani was related to me so she just picked up a good podcast.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Wow, OK.

HARVINDER WADHWA: So yeah, wow!

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Well, I've also been really loving getting listener feedback, and we've gotten more and more of it this season. I think because our show has just grown and there's some things that just stick with us. For instance, we got this lovely email from Pam from Winnipeg, who was talking about how the show resonates with her, given that she lives with chronic illness. And she had this line she gave us permission to share. So I'm going to read it now. “I want you to know that I also live in a world of daily inappropriate questions and conversations that start in rude ways where I need to decide how to respond: with openness, with frustration, with anger, with kindness.” So it's really lovely when our show resonates with people in different ways.

HARVINDER WADHWA: So now that we have responded to questions from our listeners, Elena, I have a question for you.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: And the reason I am asking you is because I couldn't find a clear answer, so I'm hoping that you can enlighten us a little bit more.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Ooh!

HARVINDER WADHWA: And I was trying to suss out what was the theme of the season three. And there was no theme, it was so diverse.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: For you, what was the big takeaways for this season?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Ooooh.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Tough one, huh?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Very tough. I think, as usual, I hate that we say this all the time, but context is so, so important. We delved into a lot of different questions this season that aren't so much clearly inappropriate or not inappropriate. I think of the question, “Do you need help?” the blindness episode we did where one of the main takeaways was, it's not really that this question is inappropriate. It's that if our world is more accessible, we would ask different questions or we wouldn't use it as much. Lots of different questions were way more like, “Is this inappropriate? Is this maybe helpful sometimes.?”And even the classic inappropriate questions like “Where are you from?” we got some angles on it that in certain contexts made the question more positive. So yeah, I was always really surprised by the gray area that came out in some of these episodes. So with that in mind, I really think that the message of the show is still, you know, be curious, be open, but try to be mindful of this context, care about the human beings you're engaging with.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Fair, fair. I have a few things to add to that. One is that I never thought I would be able to change anybody's mind because I don't think so that's even possible.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

HARVINDER WADHWA: I am not even able to convince my friends to listen to my show.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Oh no!

HARVINDER WADHWA: So, so, so, so there we go. But having said that, the aim of the show was to make a little bit of space in people’s mind, to be curious, to look at the other side as well. And what I would also say is that don't be afraid of asking questions. This is not about stifling conversation. It is actually about encouraging conversation, but because you know that certain things can be insensitive. So be mindful of that and you can ask the same thing in a better way.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, I think the goal of trying to plant some different seeds in people's minds to give them something else to think about, I think that's a good goal. I think that's a good, hopefully attainable goal for us and what we do here.

HARVINDER WADHWA: So Elena, I want to take this opportunity one more time from the bottom of my heart to thank everybody. And that starts with our team: you, Cindy, Sabrina. And of course, our extended CBC team, whose support was tremendous. On top of that, I would also like to thank our listeners and I sincerely hope that people enjoyed our show, they learned something, at the same time they had fun. And that's what I had, a lot of fun doing this podcast.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I'm so glad and thank you, Harv. Thank you for being along with this journey in these dark recording tents a couple times a week for almost a year now. If you have any further thoughts or questions that you didn't get in before today, we'd still love to hear from you. Check us out on social media. That's @IQ_podcast. Or you can email us contact@iqpodcast.com. And stay tuned to our socials and our website because we will be posting more there as we wrap up the season.

HARVINDER WADHWA: All right. Elena, so this is our final signoff for the season.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Bye Harv. Bye everybody.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Bye everybody!

[Theme out]

HARVINDER WADHWA: OK. Should we cut?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Woo hoo!

HARVINDER WADHWA: Alrighty!

Transcript: Inappropriate Questions Season 3, Episode 16

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