- Publisher |
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher
- Media Type |
- audio
- Podknife tags |
- Business,
- Careers,
- Design,
- Feminist,
- Personal Journals,
- Society & Culture
- Categories Via RSS |
- Business,
- Careers,
- Education,
- Self-Improvement,
- Technology
Each week, you’ll meet new authors, activists, entrepreneurs, and troublemakers of all types who are changing the status quo: fighting online harassment, dismantling white supremacy in design, and so much more. You’ll hear how they got started, where they found the courage to speak up, and what they do to take care of themselves in tough times. Produced by Active Voice.
- People |
- Country Of Origin |
- USA
- Produced In |
- Philadelphia, PA
- Premiere Date |
- 2018-01-17
- Related Hashtags |
- #disabledandcute
- Frequency |
- Weekly
- Explicit |
- Yes
This podcast currently has no reviews.
Submit ReviewStrong Feelings is ending—but we’re excited to bring you the first episode of our new show, “Per My Last Email.” If you like what you hear, make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, or Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts—or visit the show at PMLEshow.com.
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You deserve an equitable, actionable, and thoughtful performance review. So how do you move forward when you get…something else entirely?
That’s what we’re tackling in our very first episode. Listen in as Jen and Sara coach people through big dilemmas—and even bigger feelings—about the wild and weird world of performance reviews. You’ll leave with new tools to help you rebound after unfair or unexpected feedback…or at least some good stories for the group chat.
Links:
Got a work situation eating away at you? Send it to us! Submit your dilemma at PMLEshow.com.
Hey, Strong Feelings fans! We’ve decided to retire the show…so we can focus on a brand-new one! It’s called Per My Last Email, and we cannot wait for you to hear it. The first episode comes out April 13, so if you like this trailer, make sure to subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, east-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F%2Fmusic.amazon.com%2Fpodcasts%2F533527c5-75a0-4339-8f3b-e1fb89b1242b/1/0100018747e04f17-20e5825a-f392-41d9-befb-b2bf9d9552b8-000000/oLlPjm2CESiq-pP0b8jMnBey7Pw=315">Amazon, or Stitcher—or visit PMLEshow.com to get the details.
Here’s what it’s all about! Enjoy! —Sara
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How can I get my boss to advocate for me and have my back? Should I disclose my disability? Why can’t I juggle all of this work? Work raises a lot of questions—and too many of them get stuck in our heads, rattling around until we feel overwhelmed and unqualified.
No more. Join hosts Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Jen Dionisio for this brand-new podcast designed to help you work through all the big feelings and confusing situations that come up at work.
Each episode, they’ll share real-life dilemmas listeners are struggling with—from how to respond to passive-aggressive emails to what to do when your boss gives you truly terrible feedback. Then they’ll share the tools they use in their coaching sessions to help listeners get through whatever work throws their way.
Per My Last Email starts April 13—so subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. Because work gets weird. Sara and Jen can’t wait to help you get through it.
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Theme music: “(I’m A) Modern Woman” by Maria T
Producer: Emily Duncan
Created by: Active Voice
We’ve spent the past few months deep in a series on pandemic clarity—hearing intimate stories about people whose relationships to work have changed dramatically over the past two years. But the more we listened to others’ stories, the more we realized…it was time to tell our own.
In today’s episode, Sara is joined by Active Voice operations manager and Strong Feelings producer, Emily Duncan, to talk about their own reckonings with work. From the founding of Active Voice during the pandemic to confronting exploitation in the music industry, they offer glimpses into the reality of being leadership works-in-progress.
What we do is really tech and UX and UI focused. But I do think that there's a ton of overlap in multiple industries. And I see myself as having the ability to take some of what I've been learning here and bring it back, take that fire from the Greek gods and bring it back down and share it. If I can come and help educate even just one person on their rights and what they deserve, I think that it will have all been worth it.
—Emily Duncan, Ops Manager at Active Voice
Links:
What would you do if you found out you were being paid $25,000 less than your peers, and that while they were allowed to work from home, you were expected to show up in person?
Kate Rotondo had both happen while working at one of the largest and best-known tech companies in the world, and the experience profoundly changed her relationship to work. Kate joins Sara to tell her story of institutional betrayal—and how it took her from working in code to working in clay.
I had to let go of the responsibility of providing for my family. I had to let myself become expensive. I also had to shift my sense of what's important to me from getting my career back and earning that money to reclaiming my time—to becoming rich in something else, if it wasn't going to be career accolades, and it wasn't going to be respect at my job, and it wasn't going to be the money that came from that. I kind of had to shift and think, 'What I'm asking for here at work is to have the same lifestyle as my colleagues.' My colleagues wake up in the morning. They don't drive three hours to get to work…So how do I get that? How do I get the quality of life that the men around me have? How do I regain a sense of entitlement to that time? That I'm entitled to have free time. I'm entitled to have passions.
—Kate Rotondo, founder, Equal Clay
Links:
Joann Lee Wagner used to feel pretty guilty for taking breaks—until her organization decided to experiment with a new way of working: the four-day workweek. In the process, Joann had to do more than change her calendar. She had to rethink how she thought about work itself.
Today we share the story of one person’s, and one organization's, experience trying out a four-day week: Joann Lee Wagner, the VP of people operations at Common Future. They tested a four-day week in 2020, and have since made it permanent. Listen in as Joann walks through how their experiment came together, what they learned in the process, and how it changed Joann forever.
I think of my grandmother who was an entrepreneur in San Francisco in Fisherman's Wharf, selling her candles and working so hard to make a living for her family and the health challenges that came after that. I think about how she wouldn't want me to be in a place of such constant stress and hardship, where I'm working myself to the bone just to live now. I think that she would really have wanted something else for me. And so it took a moment of reflection to really think about, "Where is that coming from?" in order to be able to even come into work in a four-day workweek context. Because at the end of the day, we are really challenging the assumptions around work that we as organizations carry, but also we as individuals.
—Joann Lee Wagner, VP of people operations at Common Future
Links:
A year into the pandemic, Julie Threlkeld met with a leadership coach to talk about building her confidence in stakeholder meetings. And she left deciding what she actually needed was to retire early.
Today on the show, Julie shares her story of leaving the tech workforce at age 56—and how keeping Future Julie in mind helped her get there.
Sara also chats with Eugenié George, a financial wellness specialist and educator who specializes in helping women of color understand their money and their ancestry. She shares tips on how to manage your money to align with your values and financial goals.
When I started working for myself, I had this vision of myself that I always called Future Julie, and Future Julie is the older version of myself…the person who's probably not going to get hired as a freelancer after a certain age, because that's just the reality. Or because she's too sick of trying to keep up with technology, or she's literally sick with something, or she just has other things to do with her life than meet other people's goals and trade your time for money. And that was always the person I was working toward supporting.
—Julie Threlkeld
Links:
Who are you beyond the bio on your LinkedIn profile? In today’s episode, we tell the story of Alison Taylor—a designer and strategist who went to great lengths to find that out.
After being hospitalized due to extreme burnout and a toxic workplace, Alison knew that she needed a change. So she started a journey of healing and self-discovery spanning five years and three countries. And that’s just the beginning.
I just want to be me. I don't want to be "Alison: business designer/strategist, helping creative freelancers, early-stage startups, and folks design sustainable, unique products and systems that scale sustainably." I don't want to just be that. I'm so much more than that. And I felt like I was losing who I was….And then I realized, "Yo, you can unsubscribe from all of this.” Who's making up these rules? Everything is made up. And you don't have to subscribe to any of this. You can decide to be the person that you are, you can decide to use your voice.
—Alison Taylor, founder, Augur
Links:
We’ve all heard about pandemic burnout. But that’s not the whole story. This season on Strong Feelings, we’re focusing on pandemic clarity: how the past two years have changed people’s relationships to work…for good.
In February, we gathered detailed survey responses from 236 people working in tech and design. Our central question: How has your relationship to work changed in the past two years? The results of our research were just released in a new report called “Work needs to stay in its place”—available for download now at activevoicehq.com/research.
We found that the pandemic didn’t just upend people’s daily routines. For many, it triggered a dramatic rethinking of their priorities and values at work. So that’s what we’re talking about this season. To kick things off, Sara sits down with researcher Dr. Urszula Pruchniewska, who worked on the report, to discuss some of their findings.
I think the pandemic set the stage for us being able to talk about stuff that we might have been feeling for a really long time but we didn't share with each other, or even share with ourselves. The idea of work being your passion and doing what you love is so prevalent throughout society that it's weird to say, "No. Work is just work." Especially in design and tech fields…where we are taught to have so much personal feelings around our work.
—Dr. Urszula Pruchniewska, research consultant
Over the next two months, we’ll be sharing intimate stories with people who’ve experienced major changes to their mindsets, motivations, and relationships to work. You don’t want to miss it.
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Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity, equity, and respect at work. The best way to do that? Unionize! Tech worker and organizer Nora Keller tells us how to get started.
Nora Keller is a product manager at the New York Times and an organizer for the Times Tech Guild. The unit was formed earlier this year and is one in a growing movement of new tech-worker unions fighting for equity, transparency, and a seat at the table.
Every worker, no matter where they work, or what they do, deserves an equitable, accountable, and transparent workplace. The working class is going to find its power through solidarity. It's not going to find it through division. And the truth is that the average tech worker has a lot more in common with a healthcare worker or a teacher than they do with the Jeff Bezoses of the world.
—Nora Keller, organizer, Times Tech Guild
We talk about:
- How Nora got involved in the unionizing effort
- What the members of the Times Tech Guild are fighting to change in their workplace
- How a union is formed and the process to getting it recognized
- How to spot and prepare for common union-busting tactics
- The risks of organizing and how the danger is often greater for members of marginalized or underrepresented groups
Plus: in our last You’ve Got This of the year, Sara calls us to keep questioning our defaults in the workplace. How have your expectations of work changed this year, and what do you want to stop tolerating in 2022? For all this and more, check out https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Design and tech events need more diverse lineups. But getting on stage? That's a big hurdle. Women Talk Design CEO Danielle Barnes joins us to talk about how to get over it by giving yourself “a soft place to practice.”
Women Talk Design is on a mission to see a more diverse group of speakers onstage, and a more diverse group of leaders thriving in their workplaces. CEO Danielle Barnes shares her story of joining and building the organization from a speaker directory to a set of flagship programs and events designed to build a safe, welcoming community and elevate the voices of women and non-binary people.
One of the things that drives me to do this work is that I truly believe everyone should be able to see someone onstage—or leading a meeting, or in the books that they're reading—that looks like them, that has similar experiences to them, and think that that can be them as well.
—Danielle Barnes, CEO, Women Talk Design
We talk about:
- The evolution of Women Talk Design and how Danielle transitioned from volunteer to CEO
- The power and necessity of public speaking and finding your voice
- How to find and hone your “why”
- The importance of seeing yourself represented onstage and in media
- The myth of “waiting until you’re ready”
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers tips for how to lower the stakes for yourself while practicing a new skill—whether speaking, listening, or anything else. Get more tools at https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
Links:
- Danielle Barnes
- Women Talk Design
- Present Yourself Intensive (starting January 12)
- Active Voice
The pandemic broke our understanding of the world. How do we put the pieces together again? Samira Rajabi joins us to point the way—and it all starts with getting comfortable “sitting in the shit” with each other.
Samira Rajabi is a researcher, writer, and assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado. Her work focuses on the intersection of trauma, social media, disability studies, and feminist theory, and her book, All My Friends Live in My Computer: Tactical Media, Trauma and Meaning Making, came out earlier this year.
I think this impulse to compare comes from this sense that what you're going through is not legible to other people. So we often sort of demean our own suffering because we don't think that it's worthy in the eyes of society, or culture, or our peer group. I think the way to cope with that is to listen better. So rather than being in a space, where it's like, "Oh, you say you're suffering? Well, listen to my suffering," it's, "How might I hear what you're saying with a recognition of who you are, and where you're coming from, and what you need in the moment, and then also offer my testimony about where I am, and what I need, and who I am in the moment?"
—Samira Rajabi, author, All My Friends Live in My Computer
We talk about:
- How Samira’s desire to understand her own experiences with trauma led her to working at the intersection of gender, disability, and media studies
- How a brain tumor diagnosis and treatment led Samira to find online community, and how that community helped her process grief and trauma
- Why comparing trauma is futile, and how to “sit in the shit” with the people in our lives instead
- The politics of trauma and traumatic experiences, and how power plays a role in who gets access to care
- What ambiguous grief is and why it matters
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers ideas for how to listen more deeply and stop trying to “fix” things for the people in our lives. For more tools and practice tips for staying present to others’ pain, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Take a moment to check in with your body—yeah, right now! Do you feel tension in your shoulders? A clench in your jaw? A heaviness in your chest? Those feelings have something to tell us—and it’s time we tuned into them at work, says Alla Weinberg.
Alla Weinberg is a work relationship expert and culture designer who coaches teams and leaders to build relationship intelligence skills, create cultures of safety and trust, and move past toxic work environments. She's also the author of A Culture of Safety: Building Environments Where People Can Think, Collaborate, and Innovate.
What needs to change: we have to shift from this mechanistic mindset around work that people are cogs in a machine, or resources, or capital, and understand that we are biological creatures that get sick, that have chemical hormonal changes in our bodies, that have emotions, that are messy, honestly, in a lot of ways we're very messy, and design around that piece. That we have differences in ability in how we think, in how we function and start from that place. Because everything was designed around the idea that people are machines, and we're not.
—Alla Weinberg, author, A Culture of Safety
We talk about:
- Physical, emotional, and psychological safety at work
- How our feelings manifest in our bodies, and how recognizing these emotions helps us process them
- How to create a true "safe space"
- "Stress" as a euphemism for "fear"
- How the modern workplace was never designed for people who menstruate or get pregnant, and what needs to change to accommodate all bodies at work
- Alla’s personal story of feeling unsafe at work and how the road to healing from trauma led to her finding her life’s work
- Rituals and practices for processing feelings and fostering connectedness
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara walks us through how to do a body scan. For more on using this tool to release tension and feelings in our bodies, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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When do white folks learn they’re white? And how do they start to understand the scope of benefits that whiteness affords them? For Jessie Daniels, these uncomfortable questions are only the beginning.
Jessie Daniels is a Faculty Associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a professor of Sociology, Critical Social Psychology, and Africana Studies at Hunter College and The Graduate Center at CUNY. She is a world-renowned expert on Internet manifestations of racism, and her latest book Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It is available now from Seal Press.
I imagine there are people who are going to read this book and throw it against the wall. And that's okay. But I would just encourage you to pick it up again, after you've thrown it against the wall the first time, and keep reading and sit with the discomfort and also ask yourself, why are you uncomfortable? I would argue that, to the extent that white people are uncomfortable hearing what I have to say, and white women in particular, is because we're holding on to whiteness in some way. We want that to not be a problem. We want that to mean that we're innocent, that we’re beautiful, that we're better than other people. And it just doesn't mean that. Let's let go of that idea of whiteness.
—Jessie Daniels, author, Nice White Ladies
We talk about:
- How feminism and white supremacy often coexist and how “gender-only feminism” always ignores race
- White women’s complicity in slavery and its lasting effects
- The “meme-ification” of the Karen archetype and the real dangers they pose
- The path Jessie took to discovering her own whiteness
- How to divest from the culture of whiteness
- The power, and necessity, of sitting in discomfort
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara discusses how white women hold onto whiteness in the workplace, and the hidden meaning in terms like “professionalism,” "culture fit,” and "niceness.” For more on reckoning with whiteness in your workplace, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
Links:
- Jessie Daniels’ website
- white-ladies.html">Nice White Ladies
- Racism Review
- They Were Her Property by Stephanie Jones-Rogers
- Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria, Jr.
- h.htm">The Red Record by Ida B. Wells
- Living with Racism by Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes
- Jasmine Stammes’ talk, “The 'Subjective' Researcher”
- Active Voice
More resources on shame and resilience:
- Read Natasha Stovall’s “Whiteness on the Couch”
- Find a local chapter of Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ)
- Attend Robin Schlenger’s Shame Resilience Workshop or an Ambient Noise event
What if spending a few minutes each day touching a plant or staring into space could change your life? Paloma Medina has seen it happen—and tells us why it’s the first step toward radical, equitable change.
Paloma Medina is a management trainer, public speaker, coach, and entrepreneur who uses neuropsychology to help leaders develop more inclusive and equitable practices. She joins us to talk about trading cortisol addiction for life-affirming productivity, the power of tracking equity metrics on your team, and why she recommends everyone spend 5 minutes a day doing nothing.
Inclusion is a sense of belonging. It is how we pick up signals from others that we are valued, liked, that we belong. That we have friends, that we've got people on our side. A ton of the work that I did in the beginning in researching equity and inclusion and how it intersected with the kind of manager trainer I could be was realizing there is all this neuropsychological research that shows that belonging is this absolute core need. Humans are wired to scan for it, protect it, and freak out fully if there's any threat to their inclusion.
—Paloma Medina, management trainer
We talk about:
- How the neuropsychology of productivity relates to equity and inclusion
- How to transition away from hustle culture and into life-affirming productivity
- The difference between equity and inclusion
- How leadership can use the three E’s of professional development to combat bias in the workplace: education, exposure, and experience
- How closing down Paloma's retail store, 11:11 Supply, helped her find a renewed sense of self-worth in the midst of uncertainty
- The power and protest of doing nothing
- The BICEPS model of core needs
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara shares a post from Desiree Adaway on the connection between overwork and white supremacy: “White supremacy knows that when we're exhausted, we remain obedient. And when we're overworked, we tend to stay quiet.” For more on this topic, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Why do so many people mention Brock Turner’s promising swim career, or the many Oscars Harvey Weinstein won—instead of focusing on the stories of their survivors? Why do women often feel guilty telling a mansplainer to stop? For Kate Manne, the answer to both comes down to a single concept: entitlement.
Kate Manne is a professor, writer, and moral philosopher whose research aims to more closely define and combat various forms of misogyny. In her newest book, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, Kate offers a bold new perspective on the ways in which men’s entitlement to sex, power, knowledge, leisure, and bodily autonomy are used to police and disenfranchise women and other marginalized populations.
It can really change the course of your life to say, "I do not have to feel bad for certain people, and I do not have to feel guilty for my refusal to prioritize the emotional needs of the most privileged people.” Rather, I can actually look toward people who are more marginalized, who are genuinely in need of my solidarity and support. So that's where it's both personally liberating not to feel those illicit sources of guilt and shame, and it can actually, I think, completely redirect where your moral energies go. Because so much of patriarchy, as well as white supremacy, is misdirecting moral emotions that are good things to have. It's good to be sympathetic, and compassionate, and empathetic in your life. But where those emotions get funneled, and in service of whom, that is something that often goes awry under white supremacist hetero-patriarchy.
—Kate Manne, author of Entitled
We talk about:
- Common forms of entitlement, and how privileged groups have been deemed entitled to certain behaviors
- Why men often assume the role of “the knower”
- The concept of “himpathy,” and how labelling injustice is often key to dismantling it
- How having a child and finding solidarity in community helped shape the writing of Kate’s second book
- The difference between being entitled to speak up and being obligated to speak up
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers advice on how to tell when you are obligated to speak up against misogyny in the workplace, and how to assess the risk of speaking up in those circumstances. If you’ve ever kept quiet about injustice and then wondered if that was the right choice, this bit is for you. For more on this topic, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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We’ve all heard about unethical tech products that track and surveil users. But there’s another kind of harm happening in tech: abusers co-opting apps and other digital products to control and hurt their victims. Eva PenzeyMoog explains this growing problem—and shows us how to fight back.
Content warning: This episode features discussions and specific anecdotes of tech-enabled abuse and interpersonal harm, including domestic violence.
Eva PenzeyMoog is the founder of The Inclusive Safety Project and author of the new book Design for Safety. Through her work as a tech safety consultant and designer, Eva helps people in tech design products with the safety of our most vulnerable populations in mind.
In terms of trying to talk about this stuff at work, or just with other people who work in tech, it was honestly kind of awkward because this isn't a topic that people like to think about. I talk a lot about domestic violence, there are other ways that this happens. There's issues of child abuse, and elder abuse, and things like unethical surveillance of employees and workers. But domestic violence is the one that I focus on. And just bringing that up, kind of out of nowhere, during a brainstorming meeting, it's kind of weird. And now, you know, my team is very used to it. And they're all really on board and are actually helping with some of this work, which is great, but at first, I think people just aren't used to saying, "Hmm, what about someone going through domestic violence?" It's kind of like, "Wait, that's dark. Do we really need to talk about that?" And yeah, actually, we really do.
—Eva PenzeyMoog, author of Design for Safety
We talk about:
- Issues of safety in tech products and how abusers misuse them to cause harm
- The importance of destigmatizing conversations of user safety in tech and design
- Who is responsible for ensuring user safety?
- What qualifies as authentic consent?
- How to use techniques like a Black Mirror brainstorm and abuser archetypes to uncover and address harm potential in your product
- What it was like to publish a book in the middle of a pandemic, and how Eva strives for a sustainable approach to doing this work
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara discusses how feelings of powerlessness can lead us to look for things we can control. This can often manifest in some toxic workplace behaviors: micromanaging, inability to delegate, obsessing over data. If you, like so many of us, feel these behaviors creeping in, look for places where you can assert control over things that you can actually take ownership of: set a regular hour for a walk each day, institute “no Zoom Thursdays,” schedule a shutoff time during weekdays. And if you find something that works great for you, send us a message. We’d love to hear about it! For all this and more, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Most of us think of trauma as the capital “T” kind: war, natural disasters, serious abuse. But day-to-day life is full of smaller traumas, and those need to be processed, too: bullying, work stress, the aftermath of the pandemic. Rachael Dietkus of Social Workers Who Design is on a mission to help us do just that.
Rachael Dietkus is a writer, author, and social worker focused on the ways trauma shapes how and why we design. Through her organization Social Workers Who Design, Rachael and her team work to normalize and codify trauma-informed practices in design workplaces.
We've demonstrated a certain kind of toughness and unplanned resilience that has really been built on this collective trauma of living through a pandemic. And so there can be some power and some comfort in that. I think that with all of the adaptability and need to be adaptable throughout the past several months, what it has really shown us is that we now need flexibility. So is there flexibility in scheduling? Is there flexibility in how and where we work?
I have sometimes used this phrase that I personally have a very high threshold, but a quick tipping point. I see that in a lot of people. You know, there's just this like, "Well, everyone else is doing it. It can't really be that bad." And the more that we just keep suppressing and deserting those cues that we're getting, the more it's just building, building, building. And at some point, the body is going to respond.
—Rachael Dietkus, founder of Social Workers Who Design
We talk about:
- The parallels between social work and design
- How designers can look to social workers to be more trauma-informed
- What is trauma? And how can we become more aware of it?
- Healthy coping mechanisms for dealing with our own personal traumas
- How to build a trauma-informed, human-centered workplace
- Why “bring your whole self to work” is dangerous
- Relational empathy versus transactional empathy
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara talks about the importance of specificity in our feelings and how that can help us get out of “comparison mode.” Are you really “just stressed,” or are you feeling something else: shame, betrayal, anger? Ask yourself, what is my anger telling me? What triggered it? What can I learn from this feeling? What unmet needs do I have here? For all this and more, check out https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Most work environments prioritize profits over people. But there are other ways businesses can look—if we’re willing to imagine them.
Rachel and Travis Gertz are the founders of Louder Than Ten, a cooperative company on a mission to democratize the workplace through project management. Through their training and apprenticeship programs, they show digital organizations how to give power back to the people leading their projects.
When some people talk about this, it seems like such a radical idea, but it's actually so practical. It's just a very common-sense way to make sure that you're more sustainable. Worker cooperatives last longer, people stay longer, they ride out through the rough times. Because the first thing that a capitalist framework company is going to do is they're going to cut their workers, right? And then they're going to retain all the earnings up at the top. But if you're a worker-owned cooperative, everybody has to support and pitch in. So I just think it's just a very practical system.
—Rachel Gertz, CEO of Louder Than Ten
We talk about:
- The history of cooperatives
- How does a co-op work?
- Louder Than Ten’s journey from “traditional” company to co-op
- Steps to turn a workplace from profits-focused to people-focused
- How gig workers and small businesses can leverage their power to build a more equitable workplace
- Resources and readings to learn more
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers tips for how to foster transparency in the workplace. How could you experiment with transparency, with authenticity, with honesty around something that maybe makes you a little uncomfortable? Who do you want to sit down with and explore other ways of working? For all this and more, check out https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Even before the pandemic, Americans were experiencing a devastating loneliness epidemic. We talk to UX designer-turned-connection coach Kat Vellos about the longing for deep and meaningful friendships that so many of us experience, and how we can build deeper, more substantial connections in our adult lives.
Kat Vellos is a connection coach, speaker, facilitator, and author on a mission to transform loneliness and “platonic longing” into authentic human connection. She is the author of two books: We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships, and Connected From Afar: A Guide for Staying Close When You're Far Away.
When we think about connection, we often turn our lens outward, and it's really important first to look inside and say, what is it that you really need right now? And what is missing? If you can wave a magic wand and have the kind of connection you want, what would that look like, and how would it be integrated into your life? And the way you answer that question helps you determine what to do and where to go when you then turn your lens outward and seek to cultivate that connection externally with other people.
—Kat Vellos, author of We Should Get Together
We talk about:
- The loneliness epidemic and how COVID changed connection
- The idea of “platonic longing” and the importance of identifying and talking about loneliness
- Having passion for your job versus following your curiosity
- How organizations can invite and facilitate connection within the workplace
- What we can do to focus on reconnection in our personal lives
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers tips for how to foster joy. Where have you told yourself you shouldn't feel joyful? What is that costing you? What would be different in your life if you were operating from a place of joy? What would shift, what would change? For all this and more, check out https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
Links:
Last year, we saw the media regularly call Black Lives Matter protesters “rioters,” “violent,” or “thugs.” Yet on January 6, those who attacked the U.S. Capitol were often described as “passionate protestors” and “Trump supporters.” Linguistic anthropologist Suzanne Wertheim explains why these language disparities matter—and how biases like these show up in our workplaces, too.
Dr. Suzanne Wertheim is an anti-bias consultant, researcher, and educator. She is also the founder of Worthwhile Research & Consulting, a firm that optimizes workplace culture through anti-bias and communication training. She is an expert in how cultural biases are expressed and perpetuated through language, and trains tech companies to spot and dismantle these biases in their workplaces.
It's not your fault that you were born with a human brain. It's not your fault that your entire lifetime you've been fed garbage distorted data. And it's not your fault you were born into the body you were born into… But it is your responsibility, once you learn things, to make sure that you are looking for problems and then using your power to address them.
—Dr. Suzanne Wertheim, founder, Worthwhile Research & Consulting
We talk about:
- The role of a linguistic anthropologist
- The dangers of softening language and other linguistic distortions
- How bias impacts workers in the tech industry
- Which populations are most at risk for workplace bias and how to effectively fight against it
- What we can learn from research on trans workers who transitioned gender presentation in the workplace
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara talks self-care, self-confidence, and how to better understand our inner critic. When does that inner critic rear its ugly head? What does it say? Who does it sound like? If you can learn about where that critic comes from, you can start to recognize when it’s not serving you. For all this and more, check out https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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It’s no secret that the shift to remote work during COVID-19 has been stressful and isolating. But for many, the online workplace has also led to increased harassment, hostility, and harm.
McKensie Mack, Caroline Sinders, and Yang Hong are co-authors of a new report from Project Include all about harassment, harm, and hostility in the remote workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study included data from almost 3,000 survey respondents as well several first-person accounts of how remote workplaces can exacerbate harm. The report aims to provide not only a comprehensive picture of the trauma faced by various groups of tech professionals but also tools for companies to correct harm and become more trauma-informed.
There are a lot of ways in which, for example, trans women and non-binary people experience transphobia in the workplace, and it's not considered to be harassment. And I think it has a lot to do with the ways in which we define what harm is. And so in our work, especially, the fact that trans people are nearly twice as likely to have experienced gender-based harm than their peers, the fact that Black non-binary people, Black women are nearly three times as likely to experience race-based harm in the workplace as their peers, it tells us a lot about the ways in which gender impacts how people are experiencing harm in a workplace and how it amplifies that experience.
—McKensie Mack, CEO of MMG and co-author, Project Include report
We talk about:
- Which groups have been disproportionately affected by remote work
- What we mean by “harm” and “harassment”
- What harmful workplace practices look like, and how workplaces can become more trauma-informed
- Strategies for how to handle or intervene in a harmful workplace
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara talks steps for using your privilege to speak up against a toxic work environment. Ask yourself: what are the harmful behaviors that you've been tolerating in your team or in your company? What's stopping you from speaking up about those? Is it that you are afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing? For all this and more, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Vivianne Castillo left counseling to become a UX researcher. What she found was an industry that talked a lot about empathy—but wasn’t very good at practicing it. Now she’s building a company dedicated to changing that.
Vivianne Castillo is a UX researcher, humanity in tech advocate, and founder of HmntyCntrd, a masterclass for people in UX and tech that was just named one of Fast Company’s most innovative companies of 2021. Vivianne uses her background in counseling and trauma to educate on and advocate for the trauma-informed workplace, empathy in the face of capitalism, and justice for all. At HmntyCntrd, she helps people from companies like Apple, Slack, and Spotify become advocates for equity and change in the tech industry.
I think a lot of UX and design professionals can have this tendency of, "Well, if I don't do it, who will? If I don't advocate for this user, who will? If I don't care about this person who will?" And you know, I have just learned that it's not all on me, and that I can't save everyone or everything. And that is such a freeing gift to realize, and just step into the reality that it's not all on you.
—Vivianne Castillo, founder of HmntyCntrd
We talk about:
- What it really means to be humanity-centered, and why that’s often missing in UX
- How and why Vivianne developed the HmntyCntrd program
- The various forms of trauma caused by work and how a workplace can become more trauma--informed
- What it means to choose courage over comfort
- Vivianne’s viral resignation letter from Salesforces, and how to identify when it’s time to leave a toxic work environment
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara talks steps for assessing when it might be time to leave a toxic work situation. Ask yourself: what are the costs of leaving? The costs of staying? What am I risking? If I stay, how can I set boundaries at work? For all this and more, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
Links:
Margot Bloomstein wanted to find out how companies can beat cynicism and build trust in this moment. Years of research and a new book later, she has the formula: voice, volume, and—the scariest for all of us—vulnerability.
Margot Bloomstein is a brand and content strategy consultant, speaker, and the author of “Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap, just out this spring. As the principal of Appropriate, Inc., she has helped organizations ranging from Harvard to Timberland engage their audiences with transparency, consistency, and clarity. Now, in Trustworthy, Margot opens up about how brands, and consumers, can use vulnerability and transparency as powerful tools to affect change.
Being able to look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “What is uniquely me? What makes me distinct,” that's hard. And I think it goes back to that point of vulnerability. We have so much discomfort about confronting not our strengths and flaws, but our humanity—what makes us unique—that the idea then of sharing that with other people, that's scary. But it turns out that is the most rewarding thing for both us and for those other people.
—Margot Bloomstein, author of Trustworthy
We talk about:
- How “voice, volume, and vulnerability” can combat cynicism
- What it means for a company to be vulnerable and why that’s a positive thing
- How to handle criticism
- How to start writing, speaking, and idea-sharing
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara challenges us to confront perfectionism and discover our perfectionist origin story. Who taught you to be a perfectionist? What else were they teaching you? And what's all this perfectionism costing you? If you want to take that challenge on, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
Links:
What if you built a movement powerful enough to defund hate groups online, won one of the most prestigious awards in advertising, and then had your co-founder tell you to stop taking credit? If you’re Nandini Jammi, you’d get even louder.
Nandini Jammi is a brand safety advocate and co-founder of Sleeping Giants, where her campaigns got major advertisers to stop funding sites like Breitbart. Now she’s co-founded a new company called Check My Ads, where she works with Fortune 500 companies to ensure that their ads aren’t showing up on extremist sites. She is also a writer, speaker, and activist full of practical advice for how to stand up for yourself in the workplace.
"I think that when you take a stand on something that is important, you will always have people who disagree with you. And that's fine. And you should let them disagree with you...if you're out there creating change and fighting for what you believe in, you're doing something right if people disagree with you. It can feel a kick in the gut sometimes when people that you respect don't agree with you. It's always important, I think, to understand their perspective, understand why you disagree with it, understand why they disagree with you, and use that to push your work forward."
—Nandini Jammi, co-founder of Check My Ads
We talk about:
- How Nandini helped strip funding from some of America’s most powerful far-right news outlets
- What is a brand safety advocate?
- Why “being difficult” in the workplace is not necessarily a bad thing
- How to find the courage to claim your achievements and stand up for yourself in an unsupportive work environment. And when it’s okay to leave.
- What makes a successful business partnership
Plus: A new segment called “You got this!” This season, Sara leaves each episode with a challenge to our listeners. This week’s is: “What is your boldest, most in-your-face thing that you honestly wish you could say out loud? What is one small risk that you could take this week to make that happen?” If you want to take that challenge on, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast!
Links:
Strong Feelings is still on hiatus, but we’ve got a show we think you’ll love: Thread The Needle, a new podcast all about the place where feminist ideals and the realities of life meet.
In this episode, called “Why Won’t He Do the Dishes,” journalist Donna Cleveland looks at the sorry state of gender equality on the home front. She also uncovers a surprising research finding—splitting chores fairly does not create happier couples.
If you like what you hear, subscribe to Thread the Needle wherever you listen to podcasts, or head to theneedle.co.
Welcome back, friends! Today’s episode isn’t the glorious season opener we thought we’d have. And that’s actually ok.
Tuning into your gut can tell you a lot, even when the answer is hard to hear. Listen in for all the details on Katel’s sabbatical, Sara’s new company, and what happens next.
Links:
- Collective Strength, our monthly event series in Philly
- Active Voice, Sara’s new leadership development and coaching company
- A Book Apart, Katel’s publishing house
- Our newsletter, coming out the first Friday of the month
What would you do if a Google doc you made went viral, and suddenly groups across the country were implementing your ideas to plan political action in their communities? If you’re Leah Greenberg, you’d found Indivisible—the national nonprofit she started with her husband Ezra Levin after the 2016 election.
Now Leah and Ezra have co-authored a new book about what they learned creating Indivisible and supporting thousands of local Indivisible groups around the country, and how all of us can join the fight for more inclusive democracy. It’s called We are Indivisible, A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump, and it’s just in time to kick you into gear for the 2020 election.
We started off resisting Trump, but we know that Trump's not the problem. We know that Trump is a symptom, and that if we had a healthy democratic society that valued the lives and equality of all of its people, Donald Trump would never have gotten remotely close to the White House. And so fundamentally we felt like what was crucial for us, and what was crucial for the movement, was that we were moving from resisting Trump to resisting Trumpism, and tackling the kind of fundamental flaws at the heart of democracy that were making our country vulnerable to Trumpism.—Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible
We talk about:
- What made Leah and Ezra create the Indivisible guide—even though peers warned them it could ruin their careers
- How to put pressure on elected officials, and why working with a community group makes political engagement more successful and more sustainable
- Why it’s crucial to get out of campaign mode and avoid burning staff and volunteers out
- What it’s like to run an organization and write a book with your partner
Plus: It’s our last show of the year! Sara and Katel talk about what they’ll be bringing with them into 2020, what they’ll be leaving behind, and what all of you should listen to while Strong Feelings is off the air this winter.
Links:
What if moms were granted the kind of parental leave they really needed to heal from childbirth, care for baby, and return to work? Lauren Smith Brody thinks it would completely change the lives of new parents—and everyone around them.
Most parents have to go back to work months before they’re emotionally and physically ready, missing out on an important developmental phase. When Lauren had her first child, she realized that phase needed a name, and a movement—so she launched The Fifth Trimester to help parents and businesses transform workplace culture together.
It shouldn’t be on women necessarily, and it shouldn’t be on moms necessarily, to have to make these big cultural corrections just because they’re the ones who need it in this moment. It's really on all of us.—Lauren Smith Brody, author and founder of The Fifth Trimester
We talk about:
- Why openly talking about being a parent at work is so critical. “Coming back to work as a new mother was my first day on the job all over again in many, many ways...I didn't know how to do my job and be a mom at the same time. I felt like a newbie and I just decided to expose that all over the place as much as I could and make it ok.”
- How asking for what you need as a new parent can actually help everyone in your workplace. “Try to remember that this is not something that you are asking for for you, your family, in this moment. This is a plan for how you will get your job done. But also, any flexibility that you're able to win is really a win for everybody around you.”
- Why reckoning with our racist and capitalist past is the only way we can fundamentally change the system. “Racism so clearly impacts the access to support and even just obviously simple good health and the right to good health that American workers have. ...So very often you'll see that a company has gotten headlines for providing, you know, so-and-so is going to now have, you know, 12 paid weeks of family leave. Great. Who actually has access to that?”
Plus: committing to becoming better advocates for people who have kids and digging a little deeper into the very real impact slavery’s history still has on our country today.
Links
- The Fifth Trimester
- Lauren on Instagram
- slavery-cotton-capitalism.html">The 1619 Project, podcast episode 2: The Economy That Slavery Built
- capitalism.html">The 1619 Project, article: “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”
You know all the work it takes to stay on top of laundry, not let the insurance policy lapse, and keep track of school meetings and doctor’s appointments? All that often-invisible labor was exhausting Eve Rodsky. So she did something about it—for her family, and for all of us.
That something is a brand-new book: Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much To Do and More Life to Live. It’s also a game you can play with your partner, a way for moms to stop being the “she-fault” parent, and—if Eve has her way—a tool for changing the dynamic of practically any relationship.
We were doing everything so fairly. He helped me secure my dream job in philanthropy. I marked up his operating agreements, because I'm a lawyer by trade, as he grew a new business. We took turns doing the dishes. We took turns making each other dinner. Well, cut to two kids later. And I find myself literally sobbing on the side of the road over a text my husband sent me, and that text said, "I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries.”—Eve Rodksy, author, Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much To Do and More Life to Live
We talk about:
- How Eve created the “Shit I Do” list—a massive, viral spreadsheet that made all her invisible labor extremely visible. “How can we value what we don't see?”
- How that spreadsheet evolved into the Fair Play method (and what her husband thought when she showed it to him).
- What it was like to talk with and test Fair Play with 500 couples from across the country.
- Why the smallest details often cause the biggest fights—like the COO of a publicly traded company locked out of his house over a glue stick.
- Why a 50/50 split often isn’t the answer—but honest conversation is. “this is not about scorekeeping. It's about ownership.”
Plus: fish sticks and frozen veggies for dinner, the pros and cons of being a latchkey kid, and why ownership is such a crucial concept.
Photo credit: © Avia Rosen 2019
What if lacing up your sneakers weren’t just an exercise habit, but a radical political act? That’s the premise of GirlTrek—the movement to help Black women and girls reclaim their health and their communities through a daily habit of walking.
We sit down with Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison, the co-founders of GirlTrek—the largest public health nonprofit for Black women and girls—to talk about reclaiming space for rest and health, what it means to take daily walks in the steps of a Civil Rights legacy, and why Black women making s’mores in the mountains of Colorado is actually a tiny act of rebellion.
The most radical thing any woman can do, and particularly a black woman, is to slow her ass down. Slow down, stop running for other people's praise. Stop running for other people's approval. Slow down.—Morgan Dixon, cofounder, GirlTrek
On the agenda:
- Why GirlTrek’s annual Stress Protest is a life-changing experience. “We are having a genuine spiritual experience on the top of a mountain that is fueled by the truth-telling of Black women who come there and vocalize that they are hurting, and then commit to claim space for themselves and their family.”
- How GirlTrek is creating a workplace that’s not built on hustle. “We have an offseason every year. That's an annual sabbatical, essentially, that our entire team takes.”
- Why Black women particularly need self-care. “Two-thirds of black women engage in little to no leisure time physical activity...because we don't have any leisure time. That's why we don't exercise on our leisure time, because we don't have any leisure time.”
- How Harriet Tubman’s legacy inspires GirlTrek today. “She literally walked herself to freedom and saved her own life… And then she went back over and over again to get friends and family, which is what GirlTrek does.”
Plus: We’re in love with the idea of a company offseason. Fellesferie, 2020 y’all.
Links
Indigenous women and girls face some of the highest rates of violence in the United States—and often fall through the cracks of the federal and tribal justice systems. We talk to tribal law and victims’ rights expert Sarah Deer about her work to change that—while pushing back against mass incarceration.
Sarah Deer is a lawyer, professor, Muscogee (Creek) tribe member, MacArthur fellow, and an expert in tribal law and victim’s rights. She’s best known for her work on the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women act in 2013, but she’s dedicated her entire career to ending violence against Native women. We talked to her just after she was inducted in the National Women’s Hall of Fame this fall—and we had so much we wanted to know.
Heads up: As you might guess, this episode talks extensively about sexual violence and child sexual abuse. Take care of yourselves when you listen.
If we can center the voices of Native women, and frankly women of color generally—center them rather than marginalize us—we can start to craft solutions that are going to help everyone. I mean, I think if we can solve rape in Indian Country, we can solve rape anywhere.—Sarah Deer, tribal law and victim’s rights expert and 2019 National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee | Photo by Natalie Sinisgalli
We talk about:
- What it’s like to operate from inside a system that was not designed to serve you
- How Sarah’s work played a direct role in the 2010 Tribal Law and Order Act
- Why the 2019 VAWA reauthorization is still stalled in CongressHow Sarah makes sense of the tension between fighting mass incarceration and working with the legal system
Plus: How to decide which tradeoffs to make, what we can do to work within unjust systems without becoming part of those systems, and why there’s nothing empowering about having more women running fracking companies or payday lending schemes.
How do you make space for yourself in the world when you’re shy and a little bit weird? If you’re cartoonist Liana Finck, you channel the stuff stuck in your brain into your art—and find out a lot of people actually feel like you, too.
Liana is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and a wildly popular cartoonist on Instagram. Her newest book, Excuse Me: Cartoons, Complaints, and Notes to Self, is a collection of drawings about dating, love, sexism, anxiety, and all the absurdities of city life. We talk with her about getting comfortable with a public persona, processing feelings through drawing, and...crying at job interviews. She’s a delight, and you are gonna love this episode.
There’s a real good feeling in sharing something with strangers... I’m saying, “this is no longer my private shame, this is something we all share.”—Liana Finck, cartoonist and author of Excuse Me: Cartoons, Complaints, and Notes to Self | Photo of Liana by: Jorge Colombo
On the agenda:
- Drawing as a form of understanding yourself. “I’m trying to explain something to myself that I didn’t have words or pictures for before.”
- Being a shy person. “I think I was shy because I knew I was strange in a way that I couldn’t quite define and I was very afraid of being found out. And the sadness I think arose from the shyness... I was afraid of showing myself and I felt trapped and helpless and out of control. And I think that has a lot to do with something that society didn’t find me exactly what they ordered.”
- Putting yourself out there. “If I only did what was comfortable to me, I wouldn’t be able to make a life at all. I’m so used to stretching myself that I’m always doing it.”
- Breaking into the New Yorker. “I would come into the New Yorker once a year for many, many years… I would be the only newbie, and also the only woman, and also the only young person. And also of the young people—if there were any young people—the only one who didn’t go to Harvard.”
Plus: Handling professional rejection, rejecting others, and what to do when you wake up and realize…you’re a gatekeeper in your field.
The craft beer scene has plenty of bros waxing on about hops, but more and more women are making beer, too. And if they’re Love City Brewing’s Melissa Walter, they’re making change while they’re at it.
Melissa is the co-founder of Philly’s own Love City Brewing, a vocal supporter of getting more women into the beer industry, and an advocate for safer, more inclusive bars everywhere. She joins us to talk about how she went from therapist to brewery owner, why she prioritized covering employee benefits and creating a philanthropic program from day one, and what it looks like to build a bar where everyone feels welcome.
Yes, of course, we need to make money, we need to keep the doors open, we need to keep the lights on. But beyond that, I’m like, why do you need five million dollars this year? I’m not saying that making money is terrible, but I’m saying you can build these things in, grow a little more slowly, be a little more conscious... You live in this place, you should take care of it.—Melissa Walter, co-founder of Love City Brewing
We talk about:
- How she’s creating community for women in beer. “There are women in the industry, we just have to find them and bring them together.”
- Why diversity always matters. “I think any industry should look like the community in which it is involved.”
- What it looks like to make accessibility a foundational requirement. “Our front entrance is a ramp; everybody comes in the same way: you go up the ramp, done. So, people who use a chair or don’t use a chair, same entrance, same accessibility as everybody else. All of our bathrooms are gender-neutral, so anybody can use any bathroom whatsoever.”
- Why all Love City staff go through sexual harassment intervention training. “The things that I’ve read from other places are that if they do take advantage of this training it’s like they’re admitting something is wrong. And I’m like, ‘ah…no? You’re doing the thing to make sure things don’t go wrong!’”
- Why Love City decided to give back from day one. “You live in this place, you should take care of it.”
Links
- Lovecitybrewing.com
- Love City on Twitter and Instagram
- Melissa on Instagram
- Pink Boots Society
- Safe Bars Philly
It’s time for riots, not diets. This week we talk about bodies, health, food, and fatness with Kimberly Dark, author of the new book, Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old.
Kimberly is a writer, a storyteller, a performance artist, a professor, a yoga teacher, a queer mother, and so much more—and she delves into all of it in this interview. From being shamed as a fat child to starving her way through her teens to finally leaving diets behind forever, we loved hearing how Kimberly learned to love and nurture her body—and how we can all change the way we think and talk about fatness, beauty, and aging.
You can’t hate a person’s body and claim to want to help them.—Kimberly Dark, author, Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old
We talk about:
- How our healthcare system fails fat people. “I don’t use the word ‘obesity’ because it’s a medicalized term to describe a fat body, which, fat bodies are not inherently diseased.”
- Why eating well and exercising shouldn’t be prerequisites to respect. “There should be no requirement for anyone to have to uphold health practices in order to be considered a worthy human being.”
- Coming out as fat: “If you want to know me, if you want to know me in my full humanity as a human being, then I should be able to talk about my experiences in the world.”
- How to sit next to a fat person on a plane: “We’re going to occupy this space together; let’s acknowledge it, and let’s treat each other nicely.”
- The double-bind of beauty expectations. “Women are supposed to be on a quest for prettiness and we’re not ever supposed to acknowledge it.”
Plus:
- Unpacking our own relationship to weight, food, and health
- How anti-fatness affects people at work
- Getting dressed up for the abortion ball
Links:
- pretty-and-soon-to-be-old.html">Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old: A Makeover for Self and Society
- Kimberly on Twitter and Instagram
- Kimberly’s website
How do we know what happens in a war zone? Most info comes from journalists—white, Western, male journalists. Zahra Hankir thinks it’s time we heard from a very different group: Arab women reporting from their communities.
Zahra is the curator and editor of a new book: Our Women On the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World —a collection of powerful stories about living and working in conflict zones, all written by women.
She first realized how important this work was in 2011, when she was a journalist working at Bloomberg in Dubai, holed up in a highrise trying to report from afar on the Arab Spring. Now she’s collected the work of 19 different journalists—from a Syrian American straddling multiple cultures during tremendous strife to a Yemeni woman explaining the perils of attempting to travel her country without a male relative as chaperone.
The stakes are so high with so much of the coverage that these women do because they’re writing about their homelands and they’re writing about their neighborhoods and their villages… There is a level of intimacy there and there is a level of personal connection to the story that informs the way they approach the story, and they go through the struggle of having to remain impartial at the same time, even though it feels impossible.—Zahra Hankir, editor and curator of Our Women on the Ground
We talk about:
- Why it matters who we hear from, and which stories are centered in conflict reporting
- What it means to be impartial in journalism—and what to do when that’s impossible
- The challenges of being a reporter and a woman in the Arab world
- Why so many women journalists feel guilty pausing from their reporting to tell their own stories
- How hearing women’s stories changes our conception of the truth
Plus: Passing the Bechdel test, black girls and horror films, the problem of avoiding politics talk, and, on a lighter note...it’s finally clog season, baby!
Links:
- The book: Our Women On the Ground
- Zahra’s website
- Zahra on Instagram and Twitter
Buckle up, friends. Today’s episode is a wild ride. We sat down with famed feminist lawyer Gloria Allred to talk about her four-decade career fighting discrimination and sexual violence, and her new induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame...during the same week some messy details emerged about her role in the Harvey Weinstein saga.
Whew. When we sat down with Gloria earlier this month, we knew she was a powerhouse lawyer—from representing more than 30 women in the Bill Cosby case to fighting California’s gay marriage ban in the state supreme court in 2004 to advocating for abortion rights and against gender discrimination since the 1970s, she’s seen and done a lot.
But just before we got her on the phone, a new book came out that complicates things: She Said — written by two New York Times reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke open the Harvey Weinstein story in 2017. In it, they detail how Gloria’s daughter Lisa Bloom, also a feminist attorney, went to work for Weinstein, promising to plant stories painting accusers like Rose McGowan as unstable in the press. The memos were pretty damning. And then, Kantor and Twohey took aim at Gloria herself—because back in the early aughts, her firm represented a client who signed a secret settlement with Weinstein—and that client now feels burned.
So in this episode, we share an inspiring, powerful interview with Gloria—and remind ourselves that all our faves are problematic.
Fighting injustice is very good for the health… Take that rage and anger, which is a source of energy for you, and move it outward into constructive action to win change.—Gloria Allred, 2019 inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame
We talk about:
- The power and limitations of lawsuits as a form of justice
- Prison abolition versus locking up rapists, and why carceral feminism won’t save us
- How Gloria went from a childhood in Southwest Philly to public school teacher to labor organizer to celebrity attorney
- Why fighting injustice is good for the health
Links:
- Gloria’s website and legal firm
- Seeing Allred, the Netflix documentary on Gloria’s life
- She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement
- The New York Times Daily podcast weinstein-lisa-bloom.html">episode about Lisa Bloom and weinstein-gloria-allred.html">episode about Gloria Allred
- Gloria’s op ed in the LA Times, defending private settlements
We’ve all heard advice to hustle, work harder, and push push push. And...most of us are exhausted as a result. So this week we’re talking to someone making the opposite choice: Stephanie Hurlburt, an entrepreneur who built a successful business, no nights and weekends required.
Stephanie is the cofounder of Binomial, a company that makes image compression software. But she’s not a startup founder working 100 hours a week and trying to scale as fast as possible. Instead, she’s optimized her business for her mental and physical health—while still sharing her knowledge with industry newbies, closing big deals with companies like Google and Netflix, and healing from the trauma of domestic violence.
The purpose of my job is to give me time in my life. And money can help give me time in some ways—for instance, if I amassed enough money to not need to work at all. But money can also not give me time. For instance, entering into a big contract where I was constantly on the clock. So, having that as a very clear priority really helps guide a lot of decisions.—Stephanie Hurlburt, cofounder, Binomial
We talk about:
- Why business is always personal—and it’s ok to be yourself. “When I was working in the gaming industry, there was very much a boys club there... It kind of made me realize that I’m never going to get a real seat at that table. And when I’m open about myself, I’m definitely not getting a seat at that table. And maybe that’s okay! Maybe I find tables that actually accept me.”
- How to reframe networking as human by thinking about it as a natural give and take, not a transaction. “I feel like to a lot of people, they dread it because they see it as very transactional. And I don’t really see it that way.”
- Why letting an email sit for a day or two is actually an important part of setting boundaries. “The first conversation you have with someone, you’re setting some very key boundaries about what’s okay and what’s not okay, even if you’re not explicit about it.”
- How mental healthcare can help you break free of burnout cycles. “The number one thing that I wish I did when I was overworked was actually to see a therapist. Because I feel like I have grown so much through therapy and I have learned how to manage my time through therapy. If I had sought a therapist earlier, I could have prevented a lot of pain.”
Plus, what Sara and Katel did on their summer vacation: unplug their laptops, drape themselves in linen, and go cliff diving with tween boys. No, really.
Links:
Did your school offer sex ed? If you grew up in the U.S., there’s a good chance it didn’t—or that the information you received was incomplete, unhelpful, or even… inaccurate. Tanya Turner is changing that—by bringing “Sexy Sex Ed” workshops to teens in Kentucky.
Tanya started Sexy Sex Ed when she realized how many teens weren’t getting honest, inclusive, and consent-base sex ed anywhere else. Now she’s bringing her interactive workshops to all kinds of groups, including adults. When she’s not teaching consent-focused sex ed, you can find Tanya spouting “smut and socialism” on the Trillbilly Workers Party Podcast, advocating for Appalachian arts and media at Appalshop, or...maybe even handing out condoms in a parking lot.
Sex ed is not doing its job if it’s not encouraging and motivating people to share knowledge. So, my goal every time I lead a Sexy Sex Ed is that the information ripples out from there and people are sharing what they’re learning. —Tanya Turner, creator of Sexy Sex Ed
We talk about:
- Why so much of sex ed should really be “Communication 101.” “A lot of the workshop is how to talk to other people—how to talk to yourself, really—how to listen to your body, and how to trust your instincts.”
- When and how we should really start educating kids about sex. “It’s never too early to start talking with kids about what love feels like, and consent, and language for their body parts.”
- The value of learning about your own body. “You can’t trust a doctor to know everything going on with you. A doctor is only as powerful, and strong, and good for you as you are able to communicate with them. And you have to be able to listen to your body.”
- ...And learning about everyone else’s, too. “I feel like all people have a responsibility to understand the anatomy of all other people so that we can help each other and support each other.”
- Why bringing sex ed to Appalachia matters so much. “Rural sex education has actually decreased by 20% in the past ten years, so we’re getting less than we used to and we weren’t getting much to begin with.”
Plus: Sara and Katel go deep on the sad state of sex ed across the United States, wave a middle finger at abstinence-only education, and get to know the Dildo Duchess.
Follow Tanya:
Can business be a site for radical creativity and social change? Join us as we go back to school with feminist business consultant Jennifer Armbrust.
Jennifer is the founder and director of Sister, a consulting firm that advises companies on bringing feminist principles into business practices. She’s also the creator of Feminist Business School, an online course, and the author of Proposals for the Feminine Economy. We talk to her about what it means to bring feminism into business, what it might look like to build more equitable economic systems, and why she thinks all entrepreneurs should read some Audre Lorde.
Listen to your body’s messages as guidance, instead of seeing your body as an inconvenience to work—which is what capitalism says. Capitalism says, “you could work so much more if you didn’t get sick or pregnant or have to eat or go to sleep!”... So, that’s kind of the first place I work. How do we bring your body back into your business and let your body have some votes on what happens throughout the day? —Jennifer Armbrust, founder of Sister and creator of Feminist Business School
We chat about:
- Why Jennifer let go of the pursuit for “ideological purity,” and embraced bringing her feminist backpack into the weeds of capitalism instead
- How our culture of overwork and constant pressure to produce fails us
- Why listening to your body, not just your to-do list, is a feminist act
- Why fear is what keeps people—and companies—stuck
- The importance of “tinkering”—using small shifts to create change
- The limitations of “conscious capitalism” in creating equitable futures
Links:
Plus:
- Sara and Katel talk about their own successes (and...not-so-successes) bringing their feminist practices into their work
- Why having a woman in charge doesn’t make a business feminist
- The problem with individualistic “go get yours” women’s empowerment messages
- White feminism in history: how Southern white women’s slaveholding helped secure their economic future
Photo credit: Aubree Bernier-Clarke
Abortion rights are under attack across the country—from “heartbeat bills” aimed at destroying Roe v. Wade to “crisis pregnancy centers” that lie to pregnant people. But Seneca Joyner knows we can fight back—by organizing and paying for abortions.
Seneca is the manager of community organizing at Women’s Medical Fund, the oldest and largest abortion fund in the country. She’s also a Muslim, an anarchist, a parent, a historian, and...a joy to talk with. So listen up for a deep dive into abortion rights and access, what’s happening legally right now, and why Seneca is 1,000% sure that we will win.
Our average pledge at Women’s Medical Fund is $128. And we often talk with people about that because what that means is that before folks call us...they have pooled their resources to bring money to the table, but they’re short, on average—for this extremely safe, regular medical procedure—less than $130. —Seneca Joyner, manager of community organizing, Women’s Medical Fund
We talk about:
- Why organizing for abortion rights is just as crucial to raising money for abortion care. “If we are not organizing ourselves and our communities to ensure abortion access...abortion will be so heavily criminalized that it won’t matter that we have half a million dollars to give away. It will be impossible for folks to access care for any reason.”
- How black women’s real lives aren’t represented by the dominant narrative. “I grew up in the eighties when the dominant discourse was that... black women were literally ruining the black community. And then I looked around and I saw myself, but I saw my mother and her friends. They were so joyful.”
- Why crisis pregnancy centers are really anti-abortion centers—and their goals are to waste your time. “When people decide to have an abortion, they are resolute about it... And a way that our abortion opponents have hit on that has been extremely successful is that crisis pregnancy centers juuuust make it—they’ll add another week or two weeks in the ways that they obstruct people from actually finding a clinic.”
- How Muslim faith and abortion advocacy fit together. “I was more able to live not only my life as an abortion enthusiast, but also as a person who had an abortion that was a parent that loved people and wanted to see good in the world—it was actually coming over to Islam and doing this work as a Muslim woman that enabled me to do every part of it.”
All the links
- Women’s Medical Fund
- National Network of Abortion Funds
- Guttmacher Institute (check out their 2017 abortion stats, fact sheet on abortion worldwide, and stats on who gets abortions )
- is-the-hyde-amendment.html">What is the Hyde Amendment?
- The fallout from Planned Parenthood leaving Title X
- Tennessee’s attempt to turn its heartbeat bill into an all-out abortion ban
- A Vox explainer on heartbeat bills
- What Americans actually think about abortion
Are rest and joy part of your daily regimen? Maybe they should be. Author and activist adrienne maree brown joins us to talk about her new book, Pleasure Activism.
adrienne is a black feminist writer and social justice advocate based in Detroit, and activism.html">Pleasure Activism will change the way you think about yourself, your body, and your relationship to feeling good. She’s also the author of Emergent Strategy, the cohost of How to Survive the End of the World, a doula, a facilitator, and so much more. This is an episode we’re gonna be sitting with for a while.
Because the crises are so big, there’s a real desire to constantly be responding to these crises —there’s never a moment when we can’t justifiably be working because there’s so much to work on... But what ends up happening is we suffer because we don’t have joy, and connection to each other, and connection to our bodies, and connection to family, and pleasure in our lives. And that suffering builds up into exhaustion. That exhaustion leads to a depletion of hope, a depletion of vision, a depletion of innovation under pressure. —adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure Activism
We talk about:
- Acknowledging our bodies, even when things are dire. “No matter what else is happening, we still have this body that is full of nerves that can feel pleasure.”
- The power of reclaiming your body and relearning how to feel. “Somatics is a way that you can recreate, regenerate belonging through learning how to be authentic and to feel your feelings in real time, and communicate them in real time, ask for what you actually want and mean.”
- Raising sexually liberated kids, and talking frankly about sexual trauma: “If we are comfortable bringing children into a world in which they could be harmed, we need to get much more comfortable discussing that harm and figuring out ways to intervene on it.”
- Why we are what we practice—and that means practicing intervention, not politeness, in the face of racism. “If you keep rubbing at the same spot in your clothing, eventually you’re going to change that spot, you’re going to make it a worn-down area. I think we do the same thing ourselves. We wear down parts of ourselves that we actually need to keep sharp and strong. Like analysis, like the part of ourselves that can intervene on racism. We wear those things down by being polite over and over and over again.”
More from adrienne: Website | Twitter | Insta
Plus:
- Giving the finger to “posi vibes only”
- Reclaiming rest for black bodies with the Nap Ministry
- Rest is more than just another productivity hack
- The case for not reading your email in the morning
What are you doing for pleasure? Tell us!
It’s episode 69, y’all—and that means we’re getting steamy. Author Jasmine Guillory joins us for a look at the world of romance novels: why they’re important, what people get wrong about them, and what it’s really like to write them for a living.
Jasmine is the New York Times bestselling author of The Wedding Date, The Proposal, and a new book, The Wedding Party, which just came out in July. Her hugely popular romance novels have earned fans from Reese Withersppoon to Roxane Gay to, well, us!
We loved hearing Jasmine talk about why she centers black women in her books, how she writes about bodies in inclusive ways, and why romance novels aren’t guilty pleasures—but rather a sweet (and sexy!) comfort in tough times.
People of color have always embraced stories that weren’t about us, so we have known that everybody else out there can do it… These are stories that everybody wants to see. —Jasmine Guillory, author of The Wedding Party
We chat about:
- Jasmine’s latest book, The Wedding Party. It’s about Maddie and Theo, who share a best friend and a mutual hatred—till they end up in the same wedding party, and keep “accidentally sleeping together.”
- Why so many of us (ahem, Sara) are biased against romance novels. “There’s so much misogyny out there in the world, both external and internalized, that people kind of think that books that treat women as whole people...there must be something wrong with them.”
- How pizza and tacos are central to a steamy plot. “I want more women especially to stop thinking of foods as ‘bad’ or ‘good’—to stop thinking of themselves as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ based on what they eat that day.”
- Why Jasmine’s sex scenes get super-sexy—without focusing on characters’ body parts. “I wanted them to feel like no matter what they looked like in comparison to the character, there are certain things about your body that will still attract people.”
- Writing consent into the storyline. “If you’re writing a story where a heterosexual relationship is at the center of it, the power dynamics between the two people are important and you have to analyze that.”
Links:
- JasmineGuillory.com
- Jasmine on Twitter and Instagram
- The Wedding Party
- How to Write Consent in Romance Novels by Hannah Giorgis for The Atlantic
Plus:
- Self-optimization culture is a tool of hyper-capitalist patriarchy, pass it on
- Getting your nails done and watching goofy TV is fine, ty
- This is now a Jia Tolentino stan podcast. Don’t miss Athleisure, Barre, and Kale: The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman and Trick Mirror
- Finding optimism for the fight against gun violence with last weekend’s Presidential Gun Sense Forum and the upcoming Recess Rallies with Moms Demand Action
Have you heard the groundswell women making waves in music lately? Talia Schlanger has. The public radio powerhouse joins us to talk about the art of interviewing, the importance of uncomfortable conversations, and why “women in music” isn’t a theme—it’s just what normal looks like...on her airwaves, at least.
Talia is the host of World Cafe, the iconic radio show produced by WXPN in Philadelphia and distributed nationally on NPR. Before joining the show in 2016, she was a producer and host at the CBC. In this live episode from the Philadelphia Podcast Festival, we talk about scheming and scamming her way into radio, what it was like to take over World Cafe from creator David Dye, and why she’s fighting every day for way more diversity in music.
We’re not doing this as some summer camp project to try and make the world better for everyone. We’re trying to remove the biases that we have, so that we can hear the best stuff that’s out there—so that we’re not missing out because we have outdated ideas or because our ears are closed or because maybe we don’t have a frame of reference for something because all the music that we listened to maybe at a different time in the music industry was male. —Talia Schlanger, host, World Cafe
Links
- World Cafe on NPR
- Talia’s bio
- Talia on Twitter and Instagram
- The interview with St. Vincent that got Talia noticed at World Cafe
- The (awful) ghomeshi-new-york-review-of-books-essay.html">Jian Ghomeshi backstory (content warning: sexual violence allegations in here)
- Two very different interviews with Lizzo: Fresh Air and World Cafe
Plus:
- Everyone in Canada knows Drake
- Sara gets her bra signed by Australian teens
- Katel totally loves ska, pass it on
- We’re all gonna BFF Alanis someday
- Butt masks: a bridge too far
Thanks to The Philadelphia Podcast Festival for having us, Indy Hall for hosting, and all our friends and fans who made it out!
What’s it like to spend a decade working on your first novel, become a bestselling author, and still have the first thing people say about you be that you’re “adorable”? We talk with Korean American writer R.O. Kwon to find out.
R.O. is best known for her 2018 novel, The Incendiaries. It’s a story about young love, religious fundamentalism, violent extremism, and coming to terms with the loss of faith. It was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Atlantic, Bustle, Buzzfeed, the BBC, and a bunch other outlets—and it’s finally out in paperback this week.
It was a dream to talk with R.O. about finding massive success after working on her book for 10 years, loving literature she couldn’t see herself in, and why we all need to stop calling Asian women “cute.”
I was desperately in love with an art form—literature—in which I physically could not and did not exist… the books I had around the house that I loved and still love were Henry James and Jane Austin and Edith Wharton. All these books by very dead people in a world in which—if I were ever to appear in, say, Edith Wharton’s world—I couldn’t have even gone into the rooms where things are happening. Nobody would have talked to me. At best, I might have been a circus attraction. —R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
We chat about:
- Why reworking the first chapter over and over isn’t the best way to finish a novel. “I had twenty pages of the most elaborately reworked prose I had ever read. I threw it all away and then I started again.”
- Why including sexual violence in the book came so naturally. “It would have felt unrealistic to me I think in retrospect to have a more sanitized version of a college world. That wasn’t the college world that I knew, at least.”
- What it’s like to lose your faith at 17. “My entire life is divided into before and after. And that aftermath has in a lot of ways felt like an aftermath where a predominant note has been grief.”
- How she handles online harassment. “Every woman writer I know who is online in any way is getting harassed—that seems to be a part of our online lives, which is so awful. So, there has been harassment, especially anytime I write a nonfiction piece that has anything to do with gender or race or, god forbid, both.”
Links:
- kwon.com/events">R.O. Kwon’s book tour details
- R.O. on Twitter and Instagram
- The Incendiaries
- On Being a Woman in America While Trying to Avoid Being Assaulted in The Paris Review
- 48 Books By Women and Nonbinary Authors of Color to Read in 2019 in Electric Literature
Plus:
- Embracing a shitty first drafts mentality—in writing and pretty much everything else.
- How perfectionism makes us feel safe and in control, but actually shuts down progress.
- Fuck yeah to saying no! Did you know you can rest even when you're not sick?
- Why capitalism hates that you have a body.
What does community mean? How do you build one? And why do they matter—particularly for people of color?
We chatted with Naj Austin this week to find out. She’s the founder Ethels Club, a new private membership club and workspace created by and for people of color. And while Ethels is definitely a spot where you can perch with your laptop for a few hours, it’s way more than coworking: we’re talking exhibits from artists of color, mental health programming designed to destigmatize therapy and connect members to therapists of color, and so much more.
The first Ethels Club is set to open in Brooklyn in October—and that launch can’t come soon enough for the thousands of people who’ve flocked to her waiting list (including early investor Roxane Gay). So we asked Naj how she’s making it happen, what it means to build a business and a community at the same time, and why she’s committed to offering more than just a desk and some wifi to her members.
People are looking for spaces where they can feel seen, celebrated, and find like-minded people in real life. —Naj Austin, founder of Ethels Club
We chat about:
- How Ethels Club went from a spark of an idea to an actual business with Naj as CEO
- Why Naj got fed up at typical investor meetings, and decided to raise funds from other people of color instead
- When and how she took the leap from employee with steady pay and predictability to running Ethels Club
- Why she thinks so many people are interested in a space like Ethels, which goes beyond a basic coworking spot
- Waiting for Beyoncé to call (🤞🤞🤞)
Links:
Plus:
- Why you should find a group of your peers to chat through challenges and celebrate wins with—like therapy, it’ll help!
- Why Collective Strength (our community in Philly) is for women and femme or nonbinary-identifying folks—and we’re totally OK telling men to skip our events
- Fuck yeah to every single beach body out there (except Sara’s sunburned thighs)
When Mary Pipher first published Reviving Ophelia in 1994, she changed the way America thinks about teenage girls and their needs. Now she’s back with a new 25th anniversary edition of her landmark book—this time, published with her own daughter, Sara Pipher Gilliam.
From student debt to school shootings to climate change to digital culture, a lot has changed for teen girls in the past 25 years. But many things remain the same: body image issues, anxiety, sexual harassment and abuse. We sat down with Pipher (who you may remember from the spring, when she came on to discuss [women, friendship, and aging](link to ep)) and Gilliam to talk about what teen girls experience today, what it was like to write a book together, and why it matters so much for all of us that we change our “girl-poisoning culture.”
There’s a strange way in which girls today are never together and never alone. And so the primary building blocks of self—which is to be interacting face-to-face with other people and to be alone reflecting and developing one’s own inner strength—those aren’t occurring right now. Mary Pipher, co-author of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, 25th Anniversary Edition
We chat about:
- How the culture we remember as teen girls in the ‘90s is so very different for teens today
- Why depression among teen girls has gone up and down over the years, where it stands now, and what social media has to do with it
- How Sara Gilliam went from reading her mom’s book for teen authenticity 25 years ago to co-authoring the update with her as an adult
- The ways today’s teen girls helped update Reviving Ophelia for modern times
- How it’s too late for parents and teachers to simply tell teens to stop using smartphones, so it’s important to encourage intentionality around social media and device usage instead
Links:
Plus:
- Why we simply had to get our driver’s licenses immediately
- Exploring the love/hate relationship we had with our early jobs
- Why you need to wear at least two hemp necklaces for school pictures
- Fuck yeah to naps and Netflix breaks during the day
Talking about money is uncomfortable for lots of people—including us! But way too many of us aren’t getting paid what we deserve, and if we want to change that, then we all need to start speaking up—for ourselves, for each other, and for a more equitable financial future.
So join us for this deep dive into all things work money: how to ask for a raise, negotiate an offer, and deal with all the weird feels that come up along the way. To help us out, we’ve got clips from our first Collective Strength event, where we were joined by one of our most fave people ever: author and consultant Karen McGrane.
Plus, we asked y’all to tell us what advice you’d give your younger selves about salaries and negotiation, and a bunch of you answered! So we have tips and stories from folks at lots of career stages—all designed to help you feel more prepared to go get paid.
The more you do it, the less emotional it becomes, and the more it just becomes a very transactional kind of thing. The only way that you get to that place is by committing to yourself that you will negotiate every offer that you get... Every time you get a salary offer, ask for $5,000 more. Period. Every single time. And it can be more than that. Maybe you are making more money than that and it’s time for you to ask for $10,000 more or $20,000 more—I know somebody who once negotiated $100,000 more! Your ability to do that, though, starts with you being willing to ask for $5,000 more. —Karen McGrane, managing partner, Bond Art + Science
If you put some of this advice to the test, we’d love to hear how it goes! Leave us a message at (267) 225–5923, send an email, or find us on Twitter!
We chat about:
- That time Sara took on more and more work without a promotion—and ended up way behind financially.
- What we learned—and didn’t learn—about salaries growing up.
- Why negotiating your salary over the phone is the way to go, even if email feels easier.
- Why you should wait as long as possible to talk salary when you’re interviewing for a job.
- The “PITA quotient”: Remember to consider what a job will take from you then set your rate appropriately.
- Why Karen thinks you should always ask for at least $5,000 more in a salary negotiation (or, hell, maybe $100,000 more).
- How to “lovingly plot revenge” when you find out your salary is too low.
- Sorting out all the awkward feelings that come along with money talk.
Plus: What we’re doing on our summer vacation, big love to Harvest for supporting us all year, and fuck yeah to already hearing a money success story from a Collective Strength attendee!
In this episode:
Did your first management gig come with a small pay bump and zero training? Ours too! But being good at doing a job doesn’t mean you’ll automatically be good at managing people doing it. That’s where our guest, Lara Hogan, comes in!
Lara is an author, public speaker, and coach for managers and leaders across the tech industry. Her latest book, Resilient Management, is brand-new this week. We’re huge fans of the way Lara throws out the playbook of a domineering boss who aims to intimidate. Instead, she’s all about nurturing, coaching, and sponsoring people— so they can grow and reach their goals. And she does it all with empathy, warmth, and humility. Love.
Find [people] an opportunity. Put your name on the line for them, put your reputation on the line for them, and help them get opportunities that they are looking for. —Lara Hogan, author of Resilient Management
We chat about:
- Lara’s new book, Resilient Management!
- Why there’s more to managing than just mentoring, and how to start sponsoring and coaching people, too.
- What goes into training to be a leadership coach, and how to find the program that’s best for you.
- Why moving desks in your office seems like a pretty small thing but is actually often a Big Deal in the workplace, and what that can teach us about humans’ core needs at work.
- Why it’s a must to get to know people who aren’t just like you in the workplace and find ways to sponsor them in their areas of interest, rather than defaulting to what you think might benefit them.
Links:
- Lara’s new book, Resilient Management
- Lara on Twitter
- Wherewithall, Lara’s management training and coaching company
- Paloma Medina’s BICEPS model
Plus:
- Screwing up when you’re the boss.
- Crying at work.
- Still worrying about that weird thing you said at a party in 2004.
- Realizing not having a boss is great...until you have no one to help you grow.
- Being on the receiving end of a thousand “I want to talk to your supervisor” conversations.
- Giving a big fuck yeah to the badass women who rolled up their sleeves and helped us make our first Collective Strength event happen!
What happens when one woman looks around her field and notices the leaders are mostly men? If that woman is Becca Gurney, she starts her own design studio, and creates a place that chooses to hire women, pay them fairly, and find clients ready to do the same.
Becca is a Washington, DC-based graphic designer, art director, and founder of Design Choice. She’s built an agency focused on social justice issues that’s vocal about fair pay and offering work those who are often overlooked in the field—women and people of color.
The hardest part is knowing what you’re worth and then sticking to it. I do a lot of research to understand what my worth should be and a lot of that research involves knowing what men who are doing what I’m doing are charging. —Becca Gurney, founder of Design Choice
We chat about:
- How Becca makes a conscious choice to look for new women and/or people of color to work with on projects, instead of hiring the same people over and over—and why you should, too
- The truth behind being asked to work for peanuts all the time—even when you’re the founder of a design studio—and the importance of turning down work that doesn’t value you and your expertise
- How to build a supportive network when you’re just starting out as a freelancer
- Why keeping politics out of business isn’t required—and can actually help guide your work to new places
- How to figure out what your male peers are making so you can be sure you’re being paid what your work is really worth
Links:
- Design Choice, Becca’s design studio
- freelances.com/">She Freelances, a new site for finding freelancers for hire in the DC-area (and if you are a freelancer in DC, add yourself!)
Plus:
- The conference organizer who complained about speakers asking to be paid for their work and got ratioed on LinkedIn for having such a Bad. Take.
- Why Eva PenzeyMoog deserves all the stars—and cash—for her talk on designing against domestic violence
- Why it’s important for us to share what we make, how we ask for it, and which conferences treat speakers best.
- Why Karine Jean-Pierre is the woman we all need in our corner.
What if—instead of waiting on the right romantic relationship—two best friends had a baby together? This week we chat with real-life and onscreen best friends Miranda Kent and Danielle Weeks, the creators and costars of a new web series about just that: Baby Love.
We loved hearing about Miranda and Danielle’s creative project, but we gotta admit: it was their incredible relationship that really blew us away. They met when they were fourteen, y’all...and they’ve been BFFs and collaborators ever since.
Our biggest hurdle always is when we get together, we just want to talk. We don’t necessarily go straight to the work. So, a lot of times, we have to set a timer, we have to be really diligent.
—Miranda Kent, Baby Love co-creator and costar
We chat about:
- How to be successful in creative collaborations with a friend (we definitely took notes)
- Why getting through the difficult moments makes a creative partnership (and friendship!) better
- How fertility fears, a very British breakup, and true friendship led to Baby Love
- Our value as women—whether pursuing career, motherhood, both, or...neither
- Aging in Hollywood (and what happens when you decide you won’t just fade away)
Links:
Plus:
- Trans women are women, TERFs are toxic, and why we need to keep unlearning gender binaries
- How we manage being besties who collaborate on projects—like this podcast and our new community—while also running other companies (whew)
- Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a genius, Fleabag is a work of art, and if it’s not clear already: we fucking love women creating, writing, starring, and generally owning shit onscreen
Did you know that women are 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash than men—and 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured? That’s because cars are designed for the average male, not the average human. This week’s guest is Caroline Criado Perez, and she’s on a mission to change that.
Caroline Criado Perez is a journalist, a feminist campaigner, and the author of a new book called Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. It’s an in-depth look at the ways everything from heart-attack symptoms to snow-clearing routes put men first—and what needs to happen to change that. Caroline is also a fierce campaigner for women’s rights, and has a certain knack for making her feminist campaigns go viral. As you might guess, we absolutely love her.
You don't have to be nice all the time. Women are always taught we have to be nice and everyone has to love us. And actually, if you're trying to make change, that is impossible and you have to be okay with that. —Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Caroline chats with us about:
- Gender bias and how it’s dangerous for women, even (and especially!) in medical situations.
- The invisibility of women in data, including in medical tests and medication, unpaid labor, disaster relief, car designs, and more.
- How a gender audit of policies in Sweden led to a change in how they clear the snow to best allow citizens to go about their day, instead of continuing to automatically favor men to the detriment of women.
- Why having women in the room when designing things for massive public use—like Twitter—is essential if you’re aiming to create something that will work for more people, not just white men.
Links:
- Caroline on Twitter
- Caroline’s website with tour dates, writing, and her current campaign
- Book: [Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men]](https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/invisible-women_9781419729072/)
Plus:
- #YouKnowMe, Shout Your Abortion, and why women seem to always have to share their most personal stories just to be seen as human.
- FY to seven girls at Bronx Prep Middle School who created a podcast about periods—called Sssh! Periods—and won the grand prize for middle school in NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge.
Were you allowed to cry as a kid—or did someone tell you to toughen up and get over it? Nanci Luna Jiménez believes that too many of us were taught to shove our feelings down, instead of handling them in healthy ways—and that if we can’t release our feelings and process our hurt, we can’t dismantle oppression.
Nanci wants to change that. She’s the founder and president of the Luna Jiménez Institute for Social Transformation, where she inspires individuals and organizations to deepen their commitment to social justice and create transformational change. And she wants us all to understand why building intimate relationships and allowing ourselves and others the space to release feelings aren’t just feel-good tactics. They’re acts of revolution.
When we get hurt and there’s oppression coming at us, the responses we’ve normalized are all responses that eventually numb and isolate us. And if they don’t numb and isolate us, then they will come out and leak out in ways that become oppressive towards other human beings. —Nanci Luna Jiménez, founder and president of the Luna Jiménez Institute for Social Transformation
We talk about:
- The Luna Jiménez Institute for Social Transformation
- How healing from institutionalized oppressions and social justice are connected
- Adultism—the systematic and institutional mistreatment of young people—as the training ground for oppression
- What constructivist listening is and how practicing it is beneficial
Links:
- Luna Jiménez Institute for Social Transformation
- The Transformational Communication Program and other LJIST events
Plus:
- We’re launching an IRL community called Collective Strength in Philly! Check out the details and RSVP to our first event on salary, fair pay, and negotiation.
- Sara talks about why she makes a point to talk with friends about speaking fees, freelance rates, and salaries as often as possible.
- Remember our chat with Veronica Rex about the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund two episodes ago? Their Mother’s Day bailout raised over $135,000 this year and bailed out a bunch of moms for the holiday, plus they have plans (and the funds!) to bail out more moms soon.
If you’ve ever had a job, chances are you faced issues and didn't know who you could safely reach out to—especially if you’re a woman and/or a person of color working in an industry that is dominated by people who don’t look like you. Instead of struggling to get through it on your own, what if you could send a text and chat it out with a trained peer?
Good news! Empower Work exists for just that purpose. It’s an online platform where you can get fast, free, and confidential support by simply sending a text message. On this week’s episode, we chat with founder and executive director Jamie-Alexis Fowler.
I think so often when you’re grappling with the situation, it feels so isolating. It can feel like you’re the only person who has ever faced this, that you’re the only person who has felt this stuck. And, of course, it’s deeply, deeply personal. And that’s completely normal to feel that way—and also it’s important to recognize that this is something that millions of Americans are facing. —Jaime-Alexis Fowler, founder and executive director of Empower Work
If you need help with a work problem, considering asking Empower Work. Text 510-674-1414 anytime, or use the Empower Work web chat.
We talk about:
- Why Empower Work’s peer support matters so much when people feel isolated and alone.
- The most common issues people need help with (hint: it starts with an "m" and it ends with an "anager").
- Why so many people struggle when they’re “the only” person in their workplace.
- The benefits of peer counseling, and how to train people to support others.
- Why Jaime-Alexis is committed to keeping Empower Work a nonprofit—rather than making it a service companies pay for.
Links:
- Empower Work
- How to start texting with a peer counselor
- Empower Work on Twitter
- Jaime-Alexis on Twitter
Plus:
- How we’ve handled our own crap work moments—like being asked to commit to a new salary in a hallway, or dealing with a conference creep who’s tight with your boss
- Why we can’t talk about handling work issues without talking about toxic masculinity
- How Sara and Katel plan to take over the world with their new workshop
One out of three people who are arrested in America can’t pay their bail, leaving them to sit behind bars for months while they wait for a trial—losing jobs, homes, and even custody of their kids in the process. Most of those people are black or brown. We talk with community organizer Veronica Rex about why the cash bail system is so broken, how community bail funds work, and how we can help bring home black mamas this Mother’s Day.
Veronica Rex is a mother, grandmother, and activist with the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund. She’s also experienced the injustice of cash bail firsthand. Last year, she was arrested—and she had to choose between bail money and legal support. So she sat behind bars for three months before she learned about the bail fund. Now she wants to share her story with the world, and help more black mamas stuck in pretrial detention get back to their families.
It’s like being in slavery again because you have to pay for your freedom. We should not have to pay for our freedom, and we should not have to sit behind bars until the system decides to give me a court date, until the system decides it’s time for my arraignment. —Veronica Rex, Philadelphia Community Bail Fund activist
On the agenda:
- What happens when people can’t make bail: they lose their jobs, homes, cars, and even their kids
- Why people who have to wait in jail for their trial are more likely to plead guilty, even if they’re not
- What it really looks like to be stuck in jail before trial, from lockdowns to strip searches to being denied medication
- How bail funds work, why they matter, and why you should give to one this Mother’s Day
Donating to a bail fund is an incredibly simple, incredibly powerful action. And right now, your money can go to bringing black mamas back to their families for Mother’s Day. Check out National Bail Out to find a bail fund near you, or check out the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund to support our local black mamas.
More reading on cash bail:
- bail-system-reform.html">Why cash bail favors the rich
- The ACLU sues Philadelphia’s courts for their bail practices
- Veronica Rex at last year’s Mama’s Bail Out Day
- 2002 Bureau of Justice statistics on jailed people
- 2009 Department of Justice statistics on cash bail
- 2018 American Economics Review study
Older women are the happiest demographic in this country—but you wouldn’t know it based on how our culture talks about them. Mary Pipher, author of _Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing As We Age, joins us to set the record straight.
If you’re a woman, you’ve probably internalized a million messages about the horrors of getting older: changing bodies, diminished careers, invisibility everywhere. But Mary Pipher wants you to know there’s more to aging than gray hair—there’s also incredible resilience, growth, and even bliss. And the more we build those skills now, the better off we’ll all be.
“It’s in everybody's benefit, not just older people’s benefit, to have a new way of redefining older people that is not in terms of loss and diminishment, but in terms of growth.” —Mary Pipher, author of Women Rowing North
Whatever life stage you’re in, this interview will speak to you—promise. We talk about:
- Why ageism is probably a bigger problem for older women than agin.
- The resilience of older people—and how all of us can bump up our resilience skills now.
- Why “friendshipping is a verb”—and why building lifetime friendships is “an emotional and mental health insurance policy” for women.
- Finding gratefulness and joy, even when things are tough.
- How to transcend our former selves, so we don’t just adapt as we age, but actually savor changes.
- Handling loss and the power of being with loved ones in their final days.
- What’s next for Mary: a 25th anniversary edition of her groundbreaking book, Reviving Ophelia, which changed the way we look at adolescent girls.
Plus: On our way to a 50-year friendship, caftans on the beach, and why every book needs a launch party with a book cake.
(Author photo by Sarah Greder)
Links:
- Mary Pipher
- Books: Women Rowing North, out now, and the 25th anniversary edition of Reviving Ophelia, out in June
- The happiness of older women
Indigenous communities face all kinds of injustice—from violence to poverty to climate change. Yet their voices are often absent from policy discussions. We talk with Seeding Sovereignty’s Christine Nobiss about what it would look like to follow the lead of Indigenous people, and why violence against Indigenous women needs much more of our attention. (This episode discusses sexual and domestic violence—please take care of yourself while listening.)
Christine is a Plains Cree-Saulteaux writer, artist, and organizer based in Iowa. She leads several projects with Seeding Sovereignty, an organization empowering the political voice of Indigenous peoples.
Indigenous women have managed to tenaciously keep our culture together, and keep our children healthy, and our communities going. We are the walking embodiments of a social impact strategy. —Christine Nobiss, decolonizer, Seeding Sovereignty
We talk about:
- How Seeding Sovereignty empowers Indigenous peoples’ political voice
- How Christine got her start as an activist and organizer, what it means to be a decolonizer, plus what she’s working on now
- The power of tapping into younger—and older—generations to build an activist movement
Links:
- Christine’s column on Bustle
- Christine interviewing Elizabeth Warren
- Seeding Sovereignty
- SHIFT, Seeding Sovereignty’s political engagement program
- Accomplices Not Allies
Plus
- We dig deeper into the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the U.S. and Canada
- We check in on the status of the still-not-renewed (!!) Violence Against Women Act, and why it needs everyone’s attention
- And a big fuck yeah to running a 10k together, and swinging by Federal Donuts after. (Fun fact: this podcast became an idea during a run!)
Are high heels oppressive or powerful? Good or bad? Beauty or pain? What if the answer to all of those questions is...yes?
We talk with Summer Brennan about her new book, High Heel, which explores how heels aren’t just about fashion or culture, but are really about women’s place in public life.
Summer is a journalist who writes about gender, art, and the political history of fashion. Her new book, High Heel, is part of a Bloomsbury series called “Object Lessons: Exploring the Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things.”
What does it mean if the most feminine shoe is the shoe that makes it difficult to get from one place to another? In the literal sense, does that say something about our metaphorical ability to get from one position to another position?
We chat about:
- Summer’s new book. High Heel is out now!
- Why high heels are such a divisive topic, and how Summer deals with negative feedback
- High heels and class: how what women are expected to wear ties directly to perceptions about where they stand economically
- Her own relationship with high heels—and ours (it’s complicated)
- Writing about oyster farms and environmental policy, high heels and feminism, and a thousand things in between—all at the same time
Links:
- brennan.com/">Summer’s website
- brennan.com/books">Information on all of Summer’s books
- “Sex, power, oppression: why women wear high heels” in The Guardian
- Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series
Plus
- Sara shares why liking things thought of as girly ended up feeling like a rebellion to her—and how that resulted in sneaking clear mascara as a kid.
- Katel reveals that a love of clogs runs in her family, and why she blames high heels for once fainting on the NYC subway.
- We recommend Bossed Up, a podcast that keeps it real about the challenges women face at work.
- And a big fuck yeah to...Cantrip Coffee, a new roaster in Philly whose co-owner is Robyn from Blowdryer—the band behind our theme song!
We hear lots of stories about motherhood and parenting. But not very many about moms themselves—except for ones where they feel guilty and exhausted all the time. Journalist Katherine Goldstein wants to change that. She joins us to talk about what it’s really like to be a working mom—and how she’s challenging the world around her, not conforming to it.
Katherine is a journalist whose work focuses on women, work, and parenting issues. She’s also the creator and host of a new podcast called The Double Shift—a show that explores the intricate lives of mothers who work. She joins us to share her own experience, and the amazing stories of working moms—from a 24-hour daycare provider in Las Vegas to a candidate who’s running for office with three small kids in tow.
The conversation about working mothers is very dominated by mostly middle class, white collar, urban people in big cities… usually through a lens of a lot of privilege. And those concerns that are raised by that group are completely valid and need to be talked about, but those are only a very small slice of the experience. —Katherine Goldstein, journalist and host of The Double Shift
We talk about:
- How Katherine went from print journalism to reporting via podcast, and how she developed The Double Shift
- Why “leaning in” doesn’t work as advertised for moms, and, well, lots of women
- Why men are essential in the work of protecting and supporting women and mothers
- Why angry moms make such great activists
Links:
- The Double Shift podcast
- Elizabeth Warren’s universal child care plan, explained
- How Democrats Plan To Make Child Care More Affordable For Working Families
Plus
- Sara gets showered with glitter at a Robyn show and there’s just still so much glitter everywhere
- Katel and Sara discuss how their friends and families are navigating child care, from the wildly varying ways it takes shape to how much it costs—and what universal child care could mean for American parents
- And a big fuck yeah to...poetry! More specifically, lovely poetry books (and more) from Small Press Distributors
Jessica is the executive director at The Audre Lorde Project and an activist and organizer advocating for sex workers—first with Decrim Now and now with the brand-new Decim NY. Her passion for the work stems from her own experiences with gendered violence, homelessness, and the sex trade. We fell in love with her insight, her voice, and her incredible compassion. You will too.
Those who are most vulnerable to sex trafficking are people who are already in the sex trades, just like any other industry. The solution to ending trafficking in the agriculture industry is not “ban food” or “end demand for food.” That’s not logical. The solution to ending trafficking is by meeting people’s basic needs. —Jessica Raven, executive director at the Audre Lorde Project and Decrim NY steering committee member _(Photo by Darrow Montgomery at the Washington City Paper)
We talk about:
- Jessica’s work with the Audre Lorde Project and Decrim NY
- Recognizing that sex work is work
- Sex trafficking, The Mann Act, and the connection to interracial relationships
- SESTA, FOSTA, and how bills and policies like them endanger the lives of sex workers
- Why closing down a website doesn't end sex trafficking
- What a healthy sex industry would look like
- How to be a better ally to sex workers
Links:
- The Audre Lorde Project
- ALP on Twitter
- Decrim NY
- Decrim NY on Twitter
- Decrim NY on Instagram
Plus
Sara and Katel unpack the messages they grew up with about sex work, why it’s becoming a campaign issue for the 2020 election, and why everyone working in tech definitely needs to pay attention to SESTA and FOSTA. We share our love for podcast BFFs She’s All Fat—an amazing show celebrating body positivity, chill vibes, and—surprise!—friendship. Listen up!
“When black women win, everyone wins.” This week, Feminista Jones tells us all about black feminism, social media, activism, and her new book, Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets.
Feminista is a writer, community activist, social worker, public speaker, and one of our extremely longtime faves. She wrote her latest book—out now—to capture the current moment of black feminism on social media and in digital communities, and serve as her personal contribution to feminist theory and history.
There is a unique existence being both black and woman in this world. And black feminism is the refusal to choose one or the other. It is the declaration that I am both, and I will not choose one or the other, and that all of my liberation work, and all of the things that I fight for are because I am both.
—Feminista Jones, activist and author
Y’all definitely need to listen up, because she’s full of wisdom. We talk about:
We talk about:
- Why she wrote Reclaiming Our Space—and why you should go request it from your local library
- Black feminism and digital platforms
- #YouOkSis and the importance of bystander intervention
- Her new passion project, Black in Philly, profiling real life for black people across the city
- How she deals with the harassment that comes along with having 160,000 Twitter followers
Links:
Plus:
- Sara and Katel chat about being white, seeing race, and understanding what “whiteness” is—and isn’t
- How Oregon started out as a whites-only state—and no one talked about it
- What to read: The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang’s new essay collection, out now from Graywolf Press, about living with chronic mental illness
- Fuck yeah to surprising your friends with a card in the mail to brighten their day
Self reflection. Emotional care. Therapy. And...tarot? Hell yeah. The woman behind a wildly popular daily tarot reading on Twitter, Jessica Dore, shows us how mysticism and science can meet—and bring us all opportunities for healing and self-discovery.
Jessica is a writer and graduate student of social work who reads tarot as a tool for therapeutic healing. Through her spiritual side hustle, she gathers a weekly tarot circle, leads workshops, and helps thousands of people access feelings, thoughts, and life questions to better understand themselves.
> The cards have a unique way of cutting right to the core of things with people. I’ll have people often tell me, “wow, this is worth ten sessions of therapy.” And that’s anecdotal, that’s not to say that tarot reading is a replacement for therapy at all. But people will say that they can just get right to the heart of things.
> —Jessica Dore, writer and healer
We talk about:
- Jessica’s path from working in self-help book publishing to tarot reader to social work grad student
- How her daily Twitter card pull gained her a huge following, and helps people connect with her—and themselves
- How tarot can help us access deeper feelings—and feel less alone
- Why it’s important to feel mentally and emotionally prepared when you’re helping people get in touch with themselves
- How to get started with tarot!
Links:
Plus:
- Sara and Katel have an overdue friend date
- We check in with each other using an empirical rating system, and it's super helpful—for real!
- Fuck yeah to great roles for women and more diversity of women on screen in some of our favorite shows right now
You know we love talking about feelings, and we love talking about work. So when we saw that a new book was hitting stores this month called No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotion at Work, we just knew we had to talk about it.
We’re joined today by one of the book’s coauthors, Liz Fosslien. She’s an information designer, an illustrator, and a woman on a mission to help people understand that feelings aren’t just normal, they’re crucial—even on the job.
> You’re not the only person that is feeling anxiety, that is feeling joy, that is feeling frustration. There’s this really traditional view that you should check your feelings at the door when you enter an office. And research shows that we are emotional creatures, regardless of circumstance. So, it’s actually biologically impossible to feel nothing.
> —Liz Fosslien, coauthor, No Hard Feelings
We talk about:
- Why you shouldn’t “check your feelings at the door”
- How listening to your feelings can make you smarter
- The problem with suppressing emotions to be “successful”
- Why our love affair with “rational thinking” at work is failing us
- When and how to start talking about your feelings with colleagues
Links:
- The book: No Hard Feelings
- Liz and Mollie’s website
- Names drops from the interview: Pat Wadors, the CHRO of ServiceNow; Mellody Hobson and her TED Talk, “Color Brave or Colorblind”; sociology professor Adia Harvey Wingfield; psychology professor Kira Hudson Banks; and stanford.weebly.com/professor">Gregory M. Walton, the Stanford professor behind The Belonging Guide
Plus:
- Everybody’s winging it all the time, not just you
- The worst part of feeling like an imposter is the loneliness
- Fuck yeah to boss women—like Emilie Aries and her podcast, Bossed Up—Sara’s latest binge
> I think most of us feel like we’re winging it in life in general...and we just don’t talk about it enough. And so then what happens is people who are struggling feel like everybody else has it all together. But no, we totally don’t have it all together.
> —Sara
No one loves meetings, but we all attend them—probably a lot of them! So why are so many meetings so bad, and how can we make them better...or stop having them in the first place? On today’s show, we talk to author and facilitator Priya Parker about how to make gatherings of all kinds more meaningful, memorable, and inclusive.
Priya is a professionally trained in conflict resolution, and has worked on race relations at college campuses and on peace processes globally. She’s the founder of Thrive Labs and the author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. And she’s got a ton to say about bringing people together with purpose.
> When I hear “we want everyone to be excellent to each other,” it makes me angry. And the reason it makes me angry is because it’s a power-blind way of seeing. It assumes that people when they walk in, that there aren’t any power dynamics, that there isn’t any hierarchy. That everyone will behave in the way that in your mind you think everybody behaves. And it assumes that you are creating a utopia without actually doing anything to create that utopia. > —Priya Parker, author, The Art of Gathering
Priya tells us all about:
- How we’ve reduced meetings to the “things”—like food, wine, and table settings—and let our people wither. “This reflects an assumption that we’ve had for many decades, which is if you get the things right in the gathering, everything else will take care of itself. And I can tell you as a group facilitator, that is not true.
- Why even events like sex parties have a ton of structure. “It allows people to actually organize and be around that purpose in a way that they don’t have to feel like they’re having to take care of themselves and each other.”
- Why “being chill” isn’t going to make your event relaxed. “Being chill is actually a selfish act. Because you’re doing it because of how you want people to see you.”
Links:
Also in this episode, Katel and Sara talk about the joys and challenges of running meetings, the power and vulnerability of owning your expertise, and so much more. Plus: we chat with Graywolf Press about new books to read this spring, and celebrate getting involved in grassroots organizations.
It’s a motherlode of an episode this week! We’re talking all about kids, work, and how the two fit together—or, way too often, don’t. From family leave policy to flex time to all the weird stuff people say when you opt out of kids altogether, we’ve got tons to discuss.
Our guest today is Amy Westervelt—a journalist, podcast host, producer, the founder of podcast network Critical Frequency, and a mom to two kids. And now she’s also an author: her new book is called Forget “Having It All”: How America Messed Up Motherhood—and How to Fix It.
Whew, that is a lot. And that’s actually how Amy ended up writing the book! It’s a hell of a story, and it led her to a deep-dive into the history, politics, and policy decisions around working parents.
> I took off literally an afternoon to have a baby and mostly also didn’t even tell the people that I was working for that I was pregnant—because with my first son, I did tell people, and like 80% of my freelance work disappeared and never came back… I felt kind of proud of myself for really not even pausing a beat to have a kid. And I felt like that was kind of a messed up thing to feel. I was like, “why am I patting myself on the back for the fact that no one even knew I was pregnant?
> —Amy Westervelt, author, Forget "Having it All": How America Messed Up Motherhood—And How to Fix It
We talk with her about:
- Why we need to make more space for taking care of others. “There’s a certain amount of caregiving that’s required to make society work and that can be in the form of parenthood, it can be in the form of taking care of elderly people. It can be in the form of taking care of yourself. All of those things are kind of necessary.”
- Why she started asking male CEOs how they balance work and family. “Oftentimes, it’s like, ‘I have a lot of paid help or I have a spouse who’s a full-time parent.’”
- What she does to decompress when all her responsibilities and ambitions start to add up. “So, when I start feeling really, really overwhelmed, the thing that helps me the most is to just go be alone. Whether that is sitting in a room for ten minutes or going on a walk or whatever.”
Also in this episode:
- Sara and Katel talk about their own decisions not to have kids
- Katel experiences the sadness of a Bagel Thin
- Sara ditches a judgey OBGYN
- And, Sara and Katel get hyped to announce their first big workshop together, at Lead Dev NYC
Links:
What do a sex podcast, a photography practice, and hanging out with witches have in common? They’re all part of Kate Warren’s jam-packed schedule.
This week, we talk to the DC-based photographer, artist, and podcast host about using art to elevate conversations around race and gender, trading a 90-hour-a-week job in marketing for building her own multifaceted business, and what it’s like to immerse herself in contemporary witchcraft communities for a story… and have it change her life.
> It is absolutely paramount to me that I prioritize holding space for people to share their own stories in whatever way they feel best represents them and not tell their stories on their behalf… And so when I’m going into spaces like the trans community, I am making sure that I am communicating my mission and vision and intent and I’m treating my subjects as the collaborators that they are and not just a person to stand in front of the camera and be taken advantage of.
> —Kate Warren, photographer and host of Insert Here
Follow Kate: Website | Insta | Podcast
Also in this episode:
- What to do when you’re doing too much
- “Less this, more that” in 2019 (check out our bugbee-editors-letter-january-2019.html">inspiration on The Cut, and their inspiration on Insta)
- Shedding a tear for the last season of Broad City—but fuck yeah to collaborating with your BFF
Oh, and if you do the “less this, more that” exercise we talk about? Share it with us! Email us at info@strongfeelings.co, @ us on Twitter or Insta @strngfeelings, or leave us a voicemail at (267) 225–5923 and we might even play your comment on the show.
Cora Harrington loves lingerie—and the complex feminist questions surrounding it. On today’s show, the founder of The Lingerie Addict talks about building a business out of a lingerie blog, questioning norms about gender and bodies, and why a $20 bra probably exploits women workers.
We loved hearing about Cora’s journey from nonprofit worker with a side-hustle blog to running a beloved—and deeply thoughtful—business about lingerie and writing the most inclusive book about lingerie out there: In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie.
From America’s “puritanical” ideas about butts and nipples to how to write about bodies and lingerie in a gender-neutral and body-neutral way to how underpaid garment workers are part of our long history of devaluing women’s labor, this conversation is about so much more than satin and lace.
> Bodies that are coded as women, or coded as more feminine, are seen as inherently transgressive, and are seen as something that needs to be covered up or censored or hidden… You’re not allowed to talk about your body or see your body or reference your body in public.
> —Cora Harrington, founder of The Lingerie Addict and author of In Intimate Detail
On the agenda:
- Why Google won’t serve Cora’s site ads—too titillating!—and why should all be concerned about the Tumblr “female-presenting nipples” ban: “this is the kind of censorship that only grows over time. It doesn’t shrink.”
- How to take the value judgments out of writing about bodies: “No matter what body you’re in, it’s fine. Let’s get you in beautiful underpinnings.”
- How women’s labor is devalued—and what it truly takes to turn lace and tulle into “this three-dimensional structural support that can hold up pounds of flesh for hours at a time.”
Also in this episode: being mistaken for a booth babe, realizing you gotta take something off your plate, and setting intentions over a bowl of queso.
Welcome to our 2019 premiere—where we dig deep on all the ways our culture tells us we’re not “enough,” and get some help figuring out what to do about it.
We’re joined by writer and cultural critic Heather Havrilesky, author of the new book, What If This Were Enough. We talk about writing NY Mag’s “Ask Polly” advice column, facing our emotions and sad moments head-on, and how we can all make 2019 the year we stop beating ourselves up and learn to enjoy ourselves a little more.
Plus: Katel shares her gratitude journal, Sara unpacks her judgey feels, and we talk through all the ways we’ve both felt inadequate or unproductive at work—and how we’re moving past it.
It's our 2019 trailer, y'all!
Sara and Katel open up about what you'll hear on the new season of Strong Feelings—a weekly dose of intimate realtalk about work, friendship, and feminism with the best friends you didn’t know you were missing. New episodes start on January 10!
That’s it: it’s our season finale—and our last episode of No You Go, ever. Really. But don’t worry, we’re not quitting the podcast game. We’re coming back January 10—with a new name that, well, we’re really feelin’.
In this episode: we ask each other tough questions about our first year as podcasters—like what was great (spending time together! Learning new skills!), what was hard (uhhhhh long answer), and what we’d suggest to anyone looking to start a new jam. The highlights:
-
- How to celebrate a milestone while in the middle of some major burnout
- What to do when you end an interview and realize there’s no audio
- Why we wish we’d made friends with other podcasters a lot sooner (and what you can learn from our mistakes)
OH! And we want to hear from you, too! If you have strong feelings about something, we set up a hotline for you to share them. Leave us a voicemail at (267) 225–5923.
> Strength and emotions are often seen as being at odds with each other, and something that I really think we do on the show—and that I want to do on the show—is demonstrate that having feelings and talking about those feelings is strong. That’s a strong thing to do. > —Sara
Thanks for listening to NYG this year, and we hope you’ll join us next year for Strong Feelings. New episodes start January 10! If you’re already subscribed to the show, no sweat—NYG will simply become Strong Feelings in your podcast app in a few days. We’ll also be moving our site over to strongfeelings.co later this week, and updating all our social, too.
And while you wait for new episodes, definitely sign up for I Love That, our biweekly newsletter—next edition comes this Friday!
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher Shout out to Harvest, our awesome sponsor once again. Harvest makes time tracking and project planning software for freelancers, tiny teams, huge corporations, and everyone in between—even me! Check them out at getharvest.com, and when you upgrade to a paid account, use code “noyougo” to get 50 percent off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, code “no you go.” [intro music plays for 12 seconds]
Katel LeDû Hey everyone. I’m Katel.
SWB And I’m Sara!
KL And you’re listening to the season finale of No, You Go—
SWB —the show about building satisfying careers and businesses,
KL —getting free of toxic bullshit,
SWB —and living your best feminist life at work! And speaking of best lives, Katel, welcome to our last 2018 show! How are you feeling?
KL So, I seriously cannot believe that it’s been a year and I’m really excited about next season and next year…but…I have not been doing super great—just in the last week or so—and I’m feeling a lot of feelings about that.
SWB Okay, so before we celebrate, [laughs] I think we have to talk about that. [KL laughs]
KL Yeah, so I was really kind of struggling last week and trying to keep on top of everything and just feeling like I wasn’t doing a great job at anything. I wasn’t doing anything well or right and I was also beating myself up over it, which felt even worse. And over the weekend, I pretty much spent all day Sunday crying.
SWB Oh, no! [KL laughs] I’m so sorry, Katel! [KL sighs]
KL So, I mean it felt good because I’m a person who likes to cry and that actually feels good because it’s a big release for me.
SWB Ughh same. I totally love to cry. [KL laughs] I do cry a lot. I definitely cry a few times a week.
KL Yeah, totally. But it also felt terrible because I kept thinking about how excited I should be and how ready I should feel about wrapping up this season and heading into everything we’re doing next and next year. And honestly, I sat down to write some notes for today’s show and all I wrote was that I feel burned out and I don’t know what to do about it. And then I just was like, “okay, what is my plan here?” I do know what to do next in these moments, but I have to take those steps. So, I’ve gotta talk to my people. I got to talk to my partner and my therapist and you. And I knew I just needed to say some of those words out loud.
SWB And I’m so glad that you did because I really want to know how you are and it’s A) because I care about you and I care about how you feel—I want you to feel good. And B) if things aren’t working for the show, then we have to pause and talk about it, even when that’s weird or hard. If we don’t talk about it, how are we going to have the show be meaningful and relatable and real? It’s going to start feeling fake—
[2:46]
KL Yeah.
SWB —and obviously we don’t want that.
KL No.
SWB And also, something I think about a lot is that it takes a lot to put together this show—we spent a lot of time on it. And so, it’s way too much time, [KL laughs] if it’s not going to be real, right?
KL Right.
SWB It feels like we need to get through that kind of stuff honestly, otherwise it’s not worth it to invest this time—and obviously, I want it to be worth it. So, I’m really glad you told me.
KL Yeah, and I think that is part of my plan is just connecting with people—letting people know that I’m struggling. I know that if I tell Jon, my partner, he will block for me. And I know that if I tell you, you’re going to block for me too in whatever way that is most helpful. And I know that if I go and talk to my therapist, she’s going to be there for me. She’s going to say, “that sucks” and she’s also going to give me some tools to help me get through whatever I’m dealing with. And she knows pretty much everything that’s happening with me, so she asks me to think about my optimal self. When I think about who that person is, what does she need? And to think about what that person needs and what am I missing right now? So, that really helped me just kind of think about what I’m missing and what I need to prioritize and one of those things is space and downtime.
SWB Yes, I think that we all need down time, obviously, but it’s always hard to actually consistently do for yourself. And then the other thing that I was thinking about as you were talking about feeling burned out and you weren’t doing great at everything…I think something that’s been extra stressful for me the last few weeks at least—and I suspect maybe for you too—is that we have been working on all of this kind of side planning for what we want to do next year. We’re going to have a big reveal later in the show. And so I feel like I’ve been kind of carrying around a lot of that with me, both the extra work of planning for it, as well as just kind of not talking about it. And so I’m hoping that when we talk about on this show, that means we won’t have to hold on to it anymore.
KL Yeah, I feel exactly the same way. It’s been very exciting [KL laughs] and very stressful. So, I can’t wait to just talk about it.
SWB Before we get to that though, first we want to talk a little bit more about the year that is about to end, so things we learned—which was a lot of things personally that I learned—and also what that means for what we want to do next and where we want to grow. So, is there something that you just can’t stop thinking about that you heard a guest say this year?
[5:06]
KL Yeah. When I sort of started to think about this, I thought back to one of our very early episodes with Eileen Webb when she said why should only work get my best brain? And that has been stuck in my brain ever since that episode. And I think we talked about it a little bit on the show—we kind of recapped it—and I think it’s something that has come up a lot and we’ve sort of come back to a bunch of times. So, I love that something so early on has kind of carried its way through.
SWB Yeah, I don’t think we’ve explicitly brought it back up, but I feel like it’s been lurking there in the back of my head. And you’re totally right, and it’s such a good concept, so thank you, Eileen. [KL laughs]
KL Yeah. Alright so, Sara, what was harder than you thought it would be?
SWB Oh my gosh. [KL laughs] You know what was really hard for me? Feeling like an amateur. [KL sighs]
KL Yeah, I get that.
SWB I don’t think I had done something that made me feel so out of my depth for a while. And that’s probably good for me! Like when I took that pottery class a couple of years ago, [KL laughs] and I was really bad at it. I think that was good for me to be bad at it and to just enjoy doing it anyway—enjoy doing it without feeling successful at it. I think that was good. But the difference is that like in this particular circumstance, I am doing something that I came in with no experience in and I’m doing it really publicly. And so it’s not like my pottery class where I’m like, “okay, I made some shitty pottery [KL laughs] and I can keep that to myself.” [SWB laughs]
KL [laughing] Yeah.
SWB It’s like I made some shitty pottery and now I’m going to, what? Sell it to the world at this art fair?
KL Yeah. I’m going to publish it.
SWB Right? And so I don’t think our podcast is shitty, don’t get me wrong. But I do think that we’re doing something that we hadn’t done before and that was tough. And I feel like over and over again, I was reminded of how I was an amateur. If you remember very early on we were interviewing Alisha Ramos, the founder of Girls Night In?
KL Mhm.
SWB Okay, so we hadn’t quite figured out at that time that in order to do that interview, we had multiple people signed into our recording service Zencastr that does separate tracks for each party. And that if you do that, you can’t all be in the same room because you will get your voice coming in over the airwaves, as well as the voice in the room, and it’s so disorienting.
KL Yeah.
SWB So, remember that Jenn was leading the interview, so we left her [KL laughs] in the office space [KL laughs] where she was recording and we moved to a couch on a different floor and huddled over a laptop—
[7:38]
KL Yeah.
SWB —and I remember just feeling so out of it.
KL Yeah, and then even you and I on that couch were sharing headphones. [laughs] So, it was just super awkward and we were like “is this right?” [laughs]
SWB And so, okay, that was when we weren’t consistently figuring out where we were going to record and how we are going to record. And I remember thinking, “well, I won’t make that mistake again,” [KL laughs] which is great—okay, fine, we learned something.
KL Yeah.
SWB However, I felt like very week we were making new mistakes. [laughs]
KL [laughing] Yes.
SWB Every week we’d stumbled upon something we hadn’t done before and that was hard. And I had a hard time balancing the idea that on the one hand, you got to learn somehow and you can’t learn unless you do it, with the idea that we wanted to make something that was good enough that people would want to subscribe to it and that it would be important to people and valuable to people.
KL Mhm.
SWB And so how do we make something that’s as good as a podcast we love without the experience [laughing] of the podcasters we love?
KL [laughing] Yeah.
SWB I feel like finding that balance and finding a place where I was both putting in enough time and energy to get better at it and try to make sure that the product was good, but without beating myself up that it was not perfect—which it wasn’t, sorry everyone.
KL [laughing] Yeah.
SWB Okay, Katel, I have one for you.
KL Okay.
SWB Is there anything that you learned from a guest this year that you feel like changed the way you look at your work or the way you look at running the show?
KL You know, when we talked to—just recently—the authors of New Erotica for Feminists, I really loved hearing how they collaborate and how they support each other and have each other’s backs. And we heard that they can legit break down in front of each other and they know that that’s not going to change anything. If anything, they’re going to just rally around each other and figure out how to make it work. I think when we asked them about how they work together—when you asked that question, you kind of expect them to be like, “oh, we have these stumbling blocks, we have these challenges”—and I’m sure that they did—but they were like, no, we work really well together and that’s why this is fun. And that’s why we made something we really love and we’re really proud of. So, I loved hearing such a positive story about that and I think it just made me think about and reflect on our relationship and how well we work together. And that’s made things feel good and easy, even in the face of [laughs] some of the things we didn’t feel like we were so good at.
[10:01]
SWB Yeah, and I think hearing from them, I really heard the trust that they had for each other. And I think that that’s valued in comedy writing that if you’re going to work with comedy writing partners, you have to be able to give each other hard feedback if the comedy is not working. And that if you’re going to collaborate on jokes, then there’s a lot of riffing off each others ideas until you figure out something good. And that bringing that spirit into their work meant that they had that collaboration because they trusted that if somebody was like, “hey, I wasn’t really meaning to go there“— like, ”eeegh, I don’t think this is working”—that that’s okay and right to say and that’s not mean or tearing other people down. It is all in the spirit of making it better. And so I like to think about that trust that they had for each other and think about, you know, the kind of trust that we need to bring to our relationship and the kind of trust that I’ve had in the best working relationships I’ve ever had.
KL Okay, so I’ve got a question for you. What’s something that you think went horribly wrong?
SWB Uhhh! [KL laughs] I don’t think talk about all the negative stuff, but I will. [KL laughs] Okay, so related actually to feeling amateurish—when we had recording issues, that was really tough for me.
KL Yeah.
SWB And we had a little bit of a spate of them this summer and fall. And what was especially tough about that is that I felt like we had hit our stride and I was like, “I thought we were past this!” [KL laughs] And then a few things happened where I was just like, “oh, no.” One of them was the time we were trying to record with Cindy Gallop. So, Cindy is a pro. She has done a lot of interviews and she’s so sure of her messages, right? And when we got her on the line to record, we were having some trouble with Zencastr. And it’s a little bit like a Google Hangout—everybody gets onto this line, but everybody is also on their own separate line for the recording. It’s pretty cool. Except that the VoIP—so like the internet connection—screwed up like three different times and we had to stop the recording and restart it, which I felt so silly about, and then eventually we actually switched to using my conference line to record, [KL laughs] which was like a whole, “okay, now we’re going to need you to do this instead.” And, of course, that has some other issues with it like you can’t record on separate tracks, so voices get on top of each other. Anyway, through all of this, Cindy was a pro, but I remember just feeling like, “she must think we are a mess.” [KL laughs] It was kind of traumatic!
[12:17]
KL I know. It felt very dire in the moment [laughs] because we were just like, “oh my gosh, are we gonna get through this?” [laughs]
SWB I know. And I felt so out of control—
KL Yeah.
SWB And that’s one of the the things that’s hard about when you have a technical issue is that it makes you feel out of control and I of course hate that.
KL And it eats up time, which just feels like it adds to that pressure.
SWB Yeah! And especially because I really value the time that our guests give us—
KL Yeah.
SWB —and I don’t want to go over the amount of time we’ve blocked. We try to be careful about blocking enough time. I think we learned a little bit about that early on. But I feel nervous as soon as we start having problems that are making us eat into that hour that they’ve given to spend with us.
KL Yeah.
SWB And then remember after? Okay after Cindy—
KL Ughh. Yeah.
SWB —then, if you remember, we had Keah Brown on the show, who was completely wonderful—
KL Amazing.
SWB —but what you don’t know if you weren’t here for the recording, [both laughs] is that when we first tried to record with her, she was having all of these mic connection issues or Zencastr wasn’t identifying her mic or whatever. It went round and round, we spent a long time on it, and she was so great through all of it. But finally it seemed like we got it worked out, Zencastr was like, “yep, we hear the mic.” When we started recording, it was showing little sound waves for her voice. And then we listen to the recording later…
KL Ughhhh
SWB It was nothing but static! [KL makes a horrified noise] 45 minutes of static.
KL That is—that still makes me cringe. [laughs]
SWB Thankfully, Keah is amazing and she was like, “let’s redo the interview.”
KL Yeah…
SWB And so we just redid it and, of course, she was awesome again. She might have been even better the second time.
KL I know.
SWB So I try not to think about what little gems she happened to say the first time that we are missing now because the interview is great and she’s great. But those things are a really good way to erode your confidence. And I started looking into more of this, the deeper we got in. The only real way to a 100 percent prevent this stuff it seems is if you’re booking studio space and everybody’s going into a studio. And sadly we’re not quite there yet. And also you need to have guests who are willing to take that extra time to go into a studio—
KL Yeah.
[14:18]
SWB —which is also, you know, kind of a lot of burden for them. And so we’ve talked to a few people about what they do and there’s lots of different things that people have suggested. We’ve heard from people who actually mail their guests high-quality mics and then expect them to mail them back and hopefully they usually do. We’ve talked people who use other kinds of services. But the biggest thing we heard was that we’re not alone in having these kinds of issues and that sometimes sound quality sucks. And sometimes you have flubs and it’s hard to get rid of and, you know, we’re not on a mega budget—we’re not Serial—[KL laughs] we’re doing what we can here I think something that I’ve realized is that when you have a tech issue with a guest, it can kind of go one of two ways. Either it can be really alienating for the guest where they’re like, “what’s going on” or it feels like they’re having their time wasted, or it can be a way to kind of take the wall down and be like, “oh, we’re all in this together,” you know?
KL Yeah, exactly. You can kind of build up a little bit of a rapport because you’re like “uhhh this is terrible but we’re gonna we’re gonna figure it out.”
SWB Yeah. And so, you know, some of that depends on the guest, but I’m thinking about what can I do when there is a tech issue to create more of that space for it to be something that we get through together and not something that makes them feel alienated. So, I’m hopefully going to get better at that and not feel so fucking awkward [both laughs] whenever there’s a tech issue.
KL [laughing] Yeah.
SWB So, Katel, I do have another question for you.
KL All right, hit me.
SWB What’s something that was really surprising to you about doing the show?
KL Well, I think back to the very first few episodes that we did when we were still figuring out how we were going to have the show produced. And we decided okay, we’re going to we’re going to work with someone to do that and also get transcriptions done. But you and I spent some time doing the transcriptions at first.
SWB Super fun. [KL laughs]
KL Super, super fun!
SWB Much love to people who do transcription regularly.
KL Absolutely. And I just remember thinking this is really uncomfortable for me to listen to my own voice this much and I thought like, “this is either going to make me feel really anxious about moving forward and kind of getting over some of my own hang ups I have about listening to my own voice or it’s going to be really good.” And what I found is that it didn’t take me very long to get used to hearing my own voice and I feel really good about that. Now I think just something about knowing that I was going to have to listen to my voice made me think, “this is my voice and that’s what it sounds like and all I can do—and all I want to do—is get better at telling stories and articulating the things I want to say.” And, I mean, the other hard part of that was how hard it is to articulate some of the things that I want to say and some of the stories that I want to tell. So, I think just having it recorded added a little bit of pressure there. So, it was surprising.
[17:14]
SWB Listening to your own voice is tough—
KL [laughing] Yeah.
SWB —but I like your voice.
KL Well, I like yours. [laughs]
SWB Thank you. I feel totally numb to it now because I’ve listened to it so much.
KL Yeah.
SWB So I’m just like, “literally whatever.”
KL Yeah.
SWB Watching myself on video, I still find more challenging.
KL [laughing] Yeah.
SWB I’ve done it. I recommend it for anybody who wants to get over some of their self shame issues. Once you can make yourself numb-er to that [KL laughs] I feel like a lot of stuff gets better, but it’s not easy.
KL Yeah. Alright. So, even though we didn’t always feel like pros along the way, we did learn a lot of stuff. What advice would you give to someone trying to start a podcast?
SWB Find a community.
KL Mhmm.
SWB That is something that I don’t think we thought enough about or did enough for until later in the game than I want to admit. I think we got pretty heads down working on the show. And also, you know, I definitely felt like I had a strong community in some of the other parts of my professional life. I had all these women that I would turn to who worked in my field, but it didn’t occur to me that I didn’t really have other people to turn to who did podcasting and who wanted to talk about that. It wasn’t until we went to Werk It that I felt like I sort of saw what I was missing, [laughs] which was this community of women podcasters who were sharing ideas and sharing stories and experiences and were really generous with each other. And [laughing] that was 11 months in.
KL [laughing] Yeah. Well. [SWB laughs]
SWB So, we’re still building on that whole community thing. So, if you are starting to think about doing something—a podcast or any kind of side thing—I would say definitely find some of that community earlier than we did because I really think that that kind of support would have been really valuable to us. And it’s going to be valuable now. I know that we are following up on so many conversations from people we met there and already it feels really different.
KL Mhm.
SWB And I think particularly because podcasting is pretty male-dominated still.
KL Yeah.
SWB And so, I mean I listen to podcasts I have men on them. [laughs] I enjoy certain men in my life, but I feel like being a woman in podcasting, some of the stakes are different, some of my interests are different, and there’s also just not enough of us, and so finding that community I think has been hugely valuable. So, whatever it is that you want to do—it doesn’t matter if it’s podcasting or not—I think don’t skimp on finding community is definitely advice that I will be taking in the future and you may like to.
[19:34]
KL Yeah. I think that’s great advice.
SWB What about you? Do you have any advice?
KL I think give yourself a little room to stumble and know that that happens and it’s okay and you might have to [laughs] redo something here and there. Also just tapping into your networks and not forgetting that those folks are there and that the people who support you are going to support you in this new thing. You don’t get support unless you ask for it and tell people what you’re doing.
SWB Yes, definitely. I think talking more with people about what we’re doing is so important and it’s definitely what I was really getting out of that whole community thing too.
KL Yeah.
SWB Okay, so last question. What do you most want to improve next year?
KL So, I definitely want to develop the way that I tell stories and just how I share the things that I want to share. And I want to chip away at my fear of public speaking and this has been like such a huge step in that direction. And I know that I’m not in front of a crowd, but you know what I’m saying. And you have certainly helped me to do that. I think I loved doing our live event, so I would love to do more of that, and just do this a little bit more in front of people and just develop—develop the show a little bit more.
SWB So, I think that really dovetails with what I want to improve next year—
KL Yeah?
SWB —because I also want to do more joining of groups and attending events and doing live shows. And I think part of it for me is even evolving how I think about the show and sort of where it sits in my life. So, when we started this I kind of thought it would be like, “oh it’s a side thing, it’s going to take me a few hours a week.” And I mean, maybe I thought it was going to be more than a few hours a week, but I very much thought of it as something that was kind of a smaller thing over here. What I’ve realized over the course of this year is a couple things. One is that it takes a lot of time to do a good job. It takes a lot of time to grow and evolve. It takes a lot of time to work on the stuff that’s hard like marketing and promoting it or finding sponsors. All of that stuff is time consuming. And I’ve also really love doing the show.
KL Yeah.
SWB And so I think I need to be honest about like, “okay, this is going to be a substantial part of my life and this is not some little side gig, but it is actually a meaningful place in my professional world and it deserves care and feeding and nurturing.” Also though, it maybe needs to make more money, so I can get more time. [both laugh]
[21:52]
KL I was gonna say, “aww, I love that, that’s so…thats so beautiful”— [laughs]
SWB [laughing] It was so beautiful until I said it needs to make more money? [laughs]
KL No, no. That is also beautiful, I agree! [laughs]
SWB Well, I am so hyped to be getting into next year and I cannot wait to tell everybody what next year is going to look like! [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
Career Talk with Shopify
SWB Hey, it’s Sara ducking in for a quick break to talk about careers with our friends at Shopify. This week, they want us to tell you all about a couple job they’re super excited about. So, the first one is being the UX Lead for their payments and balanced team. Okay, so what that means is that you would be leading a team of researchers, designers, front-end developers, and content strategists. And what you would be doing is trying to help make financial information simpler and more understandable for Shopify’s customers, so that entrepreneurs around the world aren’t bowled over by confusing jargon and they can actually, you know, understand how their money looks. Oh, and it’s based in Montreal, which is just lovely. And then the other job Shopify is really, really hoping to find some amazing candidates for is based in Ottawa, which I actually got to visit a year or two ago for the first time and it’s so pretty there. I even took a run around some river paths and ended up crossing from Ontario into Quebec on my jog, which is something you could do everyday if you live there. But about the job, okay. So, this is another UX Lead position and this time it’s for Shopify Home, which is the most prominent artificial intelligence product at Shopify. And so in this role, you’d be responsible for actually redesigning that, which seems like a pretty big deal. But you wouldn’t be doing it alone. You’d be working with peers in product management, engineering, and data science and you’d be working together to figure out strategy. And then you’d be leading a team. That team would have product designers, content strategists, and researchers on it to help bring that all to life. So, that’s it! Two amazing new roles open right now at Shopify. Get all the details on these and over a hundred other open positions at shopify.com/careers. That’s shopify.com/careers. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
[23:49]
Welcome to… Strong Feelings!
SWB So, it is time! It’s time for the big news part of the show. This is not just the season finale of No, You Go. This is the last No, You Go show ever.
KL Nooo!
SWB Okay, don’t freak out because you actually know what’s happening. [both laugh] Okay, we are coming back in January, we are just switching things up a little bit when we do. So, as we talked about last week in our episode, our third co-host, Jenn, decided to leave the show. And after that happened, me and Katel were really unsure what we were going to do. And then we happened to be on this long weird car trip one day—if you read the newsletter, you may remember this. Katel had to be in court to support someone who was filing a protective order. And so the court date was 9am, two states away and I’d literally had knee surgery [KL laughs] four days before…this is a terrible math problem!
KL [laughing] Yeah.
SWB 9am, two states away, four days of knee surgery. [both laugh] So, I was like, Katel, you cannot drive this five hour round trip drive to go do this horrible task alone. [KL laughs] You just cannot do that.
KL Yeah. Oh my gosh, we had to leave so early, I couldn’t even pick us up fancy coffee—I had to make it and bring it. But you were such a goddamn trooper and you coming with me made that really long day just so much more bearable. And something I think a lot about is that you are someone in my life who shows up.
SWB I do try to be somebody who shows up. [KL laughs] That’s definitely something that’s important to me and I think a lot about how powerful it is to show up for someone else when they really need it. And sometimes when they’re not even asking for it and then they realize later that it really helped them. And so I’m really glad that I did because I will say that on the way back from that trip—we’d gone to court and this whole thing and there was just so much emotional exhaustion in the car on the way back.
KL Yeah.
SWB And there was just so much going on. And I was really glad I was there because we could kind of decompress and you could process stuff out loud. We could talk about it. But also it was like the eighth hour [KL laughs] of the stressful fucking day that started at 5:30 in the morning. And so one of the things that came out of that totally exhausted state was, maybe we should change the name of the show and let No, You Go be something we did with Jenn and sort of have a fresh start with just us.
KL Yeah, totally. I remember sort of starting that conversation by asking, “okay, what if we change the name? What what could it be? What direction would we even go in?”
SWB Yeah, that was really helpful for me because at first I was actually a little nervous about changing the name because it felt like, “oh my god, that’s so much work,” or are we just creating more problems for ourselves?
KL [laughing] Right.
SWB But when you were like, “well, what if?” it allowed me to think about ideas without feeling like this was something we had to do or feeling like there was pressure.
KL Right, exactly. And I definitely hadn’t considered it that much until then and then when we were in the car together, we thought, okay, let’s spend some some of this ride home brainstorming and if we come up with something that we love, we’ll figure out what to do next with it.
SWB So, we did come up with something that we love, but before we tell you what that is, Katel, do you remember any of the names that we came up with that we did not go with?
[26:54]
KL Oh my gosh, I don’t!
SWB Well, you were driving.
KL [laughing] Yeah exactly!
SWB Its okay, I have some notes. Let me let me share some notes with you.
KL [laughing] Oh gosh, oh gosh.
SWB So, the first one. Definitely a pass…which was, “In It Together.” [KL laughs] I mean…yeah!
KL I mean yes, accurate!
SWB But it’s a little too on the nose.
KL [laughing] Yes.
SWB I have no actual recollection of talking about this, [KL laughs] I was a little surprised to see this in my notes.
KL [laughing] Oh gosh.
SWB It must have been one of those things we wrote down going like, “this is bad.”
KL Yeah.
SWB “Talk It Out.”
KL Oh hmm. Yeah, that’s like, you know, Saved by the Bell era. [laughs]
SWB It’s a Saved by the Bell era local daytime TV show—
KL [laughing] Yes.
SWB —where your local celebrities get on to “Talk It Out” about the issues of the day.
KL Or it’s like the Saved by the Bell school radio show. [both laugh]
SWB Okay, pass! [both laugh] Okay, another one I don’t remember at all…“Sure Thing.” [KL laughs]
KL Oh my god.
SWB I don’t know!
KL That sounds…problematic, I think. [both laugh]
SWB Okay, there was some better stuff too. Okay, so here’s one. It wasn’t quite right, but I really loved the idea and I still love the idea because I think it’s definitely us: “Make Trouble.”
KL Mmm! Yeah, I do remember that now that you say it and I liked it too.
SWB Okay, and that one led to one that I actually still do kind of love. I would listen to a podcast that was named this—“Big Trouble.”
KL Ooh, yeah. I like that too.
SWB I mean, “Big Trouble”! I’d listen to a show called “Big Trouble.”
KL Yeah, absolutely.
SWB But that’s not what we’re calling the show because at some point we were in the car, we were kind of bouncing things back and forth and I said something like, “I have strong feelings about this.” And I remember just sort of pausing and being like, “wait… ‘Strong Feelings?’ [KL laughs]—is that…is that a name?” [KL laughs]
KL Yes, and I think we even said it out loud over and over like a dozen times just to kind of, you know, get a feel for it. And then I feel like it clicked and I love that there was this very literal duality in the words. Like, “strong” and “feelings,” but also we have strong feelings about a lot of things.
[29:02]
SWB Yeah, I do. [KL laughs] I think that strength and emotions are often seen as being at odds with each other and something that I really think we do on the show—and that I want to do on the show, is demonstrate that having feelings and talking about those feelings is strong. That’s a strong thing to do. And so I feel like it was a big moment to have that click into place. And if you remember, we were still in the car and I actually pulled out my laptop—again, Katel was driving—I pulled out my laptop and I started making the shittiest little mockup of a show tile that had our faces on it and “Strong Feelings” in big, bold type and it was not at all right. It was not at all the cover art that we are going to release later this week.
KL No.
SWB But I remember looking at it and being like, “oh my God.” And you were like, “yes!” And so we sat on this name for a few days and we ran it by some friends and people that we trusted and we just sort of thought through how much work is it really going to be to change things. Spoiler: kind of a lot. [KL laughs] But we were so hyped about it still that here we are! Katel, we are “Strong Feelings”!
KL Ahh I’m so excited. It’s so exciting to just share this with all of you. And yeah, this is awesome. And it feels like a lot is changing—or maybe that’s just us—but I’m really excited that even though we have a new name and a new look, were not changing too much about the show, it’s just evolving, like we are! And we’re still going to interview an amazing guest on each episode, we’re still fired up by our Fuck Yeahs—and mostly we’re going to be just digging in deeper on things like unfucking our work lives. And we get a lot of mail about this—even just in our listener survey we launched last week—we’ve had people ask us about how to be ambitious without beating yourself up all the time. And that is definitely part of unfucking your work life and your career, for sure. And just finding the stuff that you want, and finding joy in pursuing it, and not buying into all the really toxic bullshit out there that just gets in our way. And I think actually our January season premiere guest will get into some of that.
SWB Yes! And then I also want to talk about some work stuff that’s often not in conversations for quote unquote professional women. Like, for example, sex work. You know, we had Cindy Gallop on talking about sex tech and that was great. But specifically here what I mean is talking about sex work itself, like as a job people do to earn money. I think a lot about how activists in that space are always reiterating that sex work is work, which is very simple and it’s like, “sure it’s right there in the name.” But what that means, which is: sex work is labor. People deserve to be paid for their labor. They deserve to have a safe space. They deserve not to be exploited. And that we have so much in our culture that marginalizes sex workers and that is all about sort of indicting them on a personal level, as opposed to changing the systems that make so much of that work exploitive. And so if we’re going to have a conversation about work, and we’re going to try to have a feminist conversation about work, that we definitely need to make sure that our topics include sex work. So, I want to dig into some touchy subjects like that, some things that people maybe haven’t thought enough about, and that I hope that I can learn more about.
[32:10]
KL Yeah, absolutely, that we haven’t thought about. Another thing that I’m really excited to dig into more, are issues for parents and families. We have someone coming up to talk about family leave policy and we definitely want to hear more from moms and parents in general about what it’s like for them since we are not…parents or families.
SWB Yes. Oh, and another thing I definitely want to do—I really want to keep talking about what it means to take care of ourselves, like take care of our fragile little brains and bodies. You know, what do we do when we’re burned out? What do we do when we cry all day on Sunday?
KL [laughing Yeah.
SWB I feel like 2018 was a year where the kind of hashtag self-care reached a fever pitch. Self-care was getting sold to me in almost every single place I turned.
KL Ughh, yeah.
SWB And it was like a zillion bath bombs and face masks. And don’t get me wrong, bath bombs and face masks are fine.
KL Yes.
SWB They’re pleasant. Look, I’m not shaming you for enjoying a bath. Take all the baths you want. But I do think that there’s been so much emphasis on sort of productizing self-care instead of talking about, how do you actually nurture and protect and nourish yourself in a world that is constantly trying to drag you down, or tell you that you’re not enough, or that your face or your body are bad and shameful in all of the different ways? And that’s also trying to tell you that you don’t deserve safety, or you don’t deserve rights, that we’re going to put a fucking sexual assaulter on the Supreme Court?
KL [sighs] Yeah.
SWB You know, how do we actually take care of ourselves in the face of that? And so I want to keep talking about, what do you do to find joy and to believe that you deserve to have that joy, in this world that is so often so fucked up? That’s what I want to talk about.
KL Yeah. I think that’s so important because self care should be whatever you need it to be and it shouldn’t be like, “now you’re fucking up self-care” [both laugh] because it’s being sold to you. So, okay, we have a lot we’re thinking about, but we want to hear more. So, if you have strong feelings about something we actually set up a hotline for you to share them. Leave us a voicemail at (267) 225–5923.
SWB Yes, please leave us voicemails—and we’ll put it in the recording too, but if you want to have your voicemail potentially shared on the show, you can let us know. If you want it to be anonymous and never shared, that’s totally fine. But we really want to hear from you, so we hope that that will be one other avenue that you can do that. And also look for our new look out later this week. So, we’ll have a new URL—that’s strongfeelings.co. We will try to make sure all of our redirects work correctly though, so if you forget, no worries. And if you’re already subscribed to No, You Go, don’t worry about that either because the name of the show is just going to update in your listening app. So, it’ll go to “Strong Feelings” and you don’t have to do anything to make sure you keep on getting the show. But it’s going to move to “Strong Feelings,” we’re going to change everything over. And it’s pretty exciting because me and Katel did a photoshoot [KL laughs] we got a new logo and maybe that’s only exciting to us, but I think we look pretty cute.
[35:10]
KL Yeah, we do.
SWB So, welcome to “Strong Feelings,” and thank you so much for listening this year! [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
Fuck Yeah of the Week
KL All right, so something that is absolutely still sticking around is our Fuck Yeah of the Week. And I think this time we’re going to talk about what are we most proud of from this year?
SWB Oh, fuck yeah. [KL laughs] All right. I want to give a fuck yeah to something that might sound a little bit mundane at first. I want to give a fuck yeah to consistency. [KL laughs]
KL I love it, tell me more.
SWB Okay, it sounds boring. But given that we’ve never done anything like this before, given that it’s a lot of work, given that there was a lot of churn with what’s happening in our professional lives like travel and like I had this knee surgery, given that Jenn decided to leave the show during the year—there was just a lot going on. Given all of that, we got this show out weekly, pretty consistently on the schedule we had planned to from the beginning. We are going to end the year with 38 episodes of the show.
KL Wow.
SWB Yeah, and that’s pretty good. We started kind of late in January and we’re only going to mid-December. So, it’s like 11 months—38 episodes. That’s—
KL That’s a lot.
SWB Yeah, and I’m so proud of that. I’m super proud of that. And I’m also proud of just sort of feeling like we’re starting to hit a groove. We felt that at different points and then—
KL Sure.
SWB —got a little destabilized here and there. But nevertheless, I feel really proud of that work, I feel really proud of the consistency, and I feel like it’s really easy to start something with a lot of enthusiasm and then to sort of peter out as you go. But I keep finding new reasons to love what we’re doing and to get excited about what we’re doing and consistently finding new ways to improve and learn and grow. [KL laughs] There’s a lot of stuff I want to keep getting better at. So, I am so proud of that! I’m proud of sticking with it and I am proud that I feel like we have lined up a 2019 that’s going to be fucking great.
KL Yeah, me too. I’m very excited about sharing all of that. That makes me think of what I’m proud of, and that is how well we work together. And I know we talked about that a lot, but it’s such a huge part of why we love doing the show and why we want to make it as good as we can. And I think just like finding an even deeper friendship through this other thing that we do together has been so cool because I think there is just always a lot of opportunities to get tripped up on little things in something like this and just lose sight of what’s important. And I’m just proud of how much I’ve grown through this, and how much I’ve learned, and how much our friendship has grown.
[37:48]
SWB I can’t lose sight of what’s important because I can literally see from here. [KL laughs]
KL I mean, we can see each other’s eyeballs, that’s pretty much it.
SWB Well, fuck yeah! What a year! What an accomplishment. And fuck yeah to everybody who’s been listening—
KL Yeah.
SWB —honestly, you all are so rad. We sent out a listener survey last week like we talked about earlier and we’ve been getting such amazing feedback. There are definitely some places we want to improve—
KL Yeah.
SWB —but we’ve also been hearing so many stories of people who have found what we’ve been doing helpful and valuable to them. So, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening.
KL Thank you so much.
SWB Thank you for letting us know. Thank you for sharing with your friends and hopefully thank you for sticking around for Strong Feelings!
KL Yeah, definitely. Well, that’s it for this very last episode of No, You Go. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph from EDITAUDIO. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. We’re taking a little holiday break, but we’ll be back as Strong Feelings starting January 10th. So, definitely keep listening and you will love what we have in store. In the meantime, make sure to sign up for our newsletter, I love that. It’s an every-other-Friday treat! See you again next year! [laughs]
SWB Bye!
KL [laughing] Bye! [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, and fades out]
What if Tom Hardy drove up to your house to deliver loads of LaCroix and cash? That’s the premise of just one of the stories in New Erotica for Feminists, a book of “satirical fantasies of love, lust, and equal pay.” And we were lucky enough to talk to its authors!
We got three out of the four—yes, four—authors on the line to talk about writing the book, how they collaborate with so many different schedules and voices in the mix, what it’s like to build a women-run comedy site on a shoestring, and why all of us could use a group of badass creative partners in our lives.
> We all have a lot of rage at society…and this partnership helps us sort of channel it into a constructive way where it’s at least cathartic and we can feel like we’re helping other people laugh. I mean, that’s one of the things that came out of this book—we would love for it to change the world. It’s probably not going to do that, but at least it entertains people and makes them feel like they are not so alone. > —Fiona Taylor , co-author, New Erotica for Feminists
Links on links on links
Also on the agenda
- We talk about writing with coauthors: what works, what doesn’t, and how to make sure no one loses their shit in the process
- Katel talks about finding her own voice, distinct from her company’s
- Sara wonders if her freewheelin’ podcastin’ lifestyle is bad for business (and whether she cares)
- (Spoiler: her bank account cares)
- We say farewell to our co-host Jenn, who’s sadly not coming back to the show next season (but whose hilarious takes on balancing parenting and professional badassery we miss every day)
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher Thanks to Harvest for supporting today’s show. Harvest makes project planning software that you can use for all kinds of crucial stuff like tracking time, managing deadlines, and my personal favorite—getting paid. They’ve even got all kinds of reports you can run to gain insight and shine a light on the health of your projects. Try it free at getharvest.com and when you upgrade to a paid account, make sure you use the code “noyougo” for fifty percent off your first paid month. That’s getharvest.com, offer code “noyougo.” [intro music plays for 12 seconds]
SWB Hey everyone, I’m Sara!
Katel LeDû And I’m Katel.
SWB And you’re listening to No, You Go, the show about building satisfying careers and businesses
KL getting free of toxic bullshit
SWB and living your best, feminist life at work.
KL Today we are talking to Brooke Preston, Carrie Wittmer, and Fiona Taylor, three of the four—yes, four—authors of New Erotica for Feminists, a collection of “Satirical Fantasies of Love, Lust, and Equal Pay.” It came out last month, after the authors wrote a post of the same name on McSweeney’s earlier this year. We talk with them about the book, why they wrote it, and what it was like to collaborate with four co-authors, as well as how they all came to be writing partners, and what it’s like to write satirical erotica—or erotic satire??—about women getting promotions and men doing housework. It was awesome.
SWB Yes, it was a super fun interview to do, but I actually want to start with something a little bit serious—creative collaboration! It’s such a big theme for us, I feel like it comes back around to that over and over again. And obviously, that’s important for me and you, but also it got me thinking about cowriting. I also co-authored a book with Eric Meyer, it’s called Design for Real Life, you may have heard of it.
KL Uh, yeah I have. And I remember when you came to us, that’s actually the first and only book so far that we’ve published by two authors at A Book Apart. And when you pitched it, I was kind of not worried, but—and less worried that it would be hard for us to publish, but more about what the process was going to be like because I’d never done that with two authors and I wasn’t sure if you all had an approach or how you would do it. And I don’t think I ever really asked you about how that went. What was it like?
SWB You know, you’re asking a little late. The book’s already been out for like [KL laughs] two years! [laughs]
KL I know! [laughing] I’m like, “by the way…”
SWB Okay! So, at first, I had this moment where I thought that maybe it would be easier than writing a book by myself because I’d actually just written my first book alone before that. And, you know, I thought it’s fewer words per person, right?
KL [laughing] Yeah. That totally sounds like good math.
SWB Yeah. [laughs] It wasn’t really easier. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. This is not negative in any way, it just wasn’t for me. And I think Eric would probably agree, it wasn’t necessarily an easier process than writing alone because me and Eric, we had never worked together before. So, we didn’t really have a shared history or a shared voice. It wasn’t like this came out of all these other projects, it came out of just sort of—we had some overlapping interests and we had recently become very driven to help designers sort of understand how their work could impact people or hurt people. And so we came at it with a lot of shared passion and sort of some shared values, but we just—we didn’t have a body of work or a history together to build on. So, it was like starting from scratch in a lot of ways. And I think one of the things that we tried to do was just communicate really clearly and really kind of concretely about who was doing what and how we wanted to do things. And it’s not like every decision we made at the beginning about how to break up the work stuck, things morphed over time. But I think it sort of set us up to talk to each other about it and not make assumptions about it, which was good.
KL Yeah. And I can imagine. I mean, you’re two different people and it’s two different perspectives, and even though you’re both really great writers, I just want to say that at least from my perspective, it felt very smooth. And I think you’re a natural lead taker on projects, so I’m sure it helped having someone sort of steering the ship. Were your conversations with Eric productive?
SWB Yeah, I think that one of the things you mentioned that it felt very smooth, I think one of the reasons it felt very smooth was that we talked a lot about how to fit things together. And, like you said, we’re both strong writers, but I think my experience is a little bit more editorial, meaning I have a lot more experience editing other people’s work. And so, for me, it would be painfully obvious where he had written something and where I had written something. And so for me—
KL [laughing] Right.
SWB —I spent more of that time smoothing things out before you ever saw it.
KL Right.
SWB And I worried a little bit—I was nervous about doing too much of it because I didn’t want to make him feel like I was changing all of his stuff or his voice, but I think that we had a good conversation about that. And fundamentally, he trusted me from that perspective and also wasn’t precious about it. And I’m glad that we had that because it did allow me to take something I was already strong at—I’m quick at doing that kind of smoothing editorial from editing other people’s work for years, that it ended up feeling pretty good. I think it made me—I think, I hope—a better writer or a better partner in projects and it also I think just made me better or more confident in collaborating with people, which is good because now I collaborate with you all the time and I don’t know, I feel like it’s going okay. [laughs]
[5:35]
KL Uh, definitely. I think about this a lot over the years of running A Book Apart because everyone I work with is freelance. So, there’s a lot of collaboration that has to happen in all sorts of different degrees of intensity. Even though we’ve developed a network of editors, for example, I work mainly with Lisa Maria Martin, who is our managing editor.
SWB I love Lisa Maria! You know, I have gotten to collaborate with her too. I think the first time was actually way back in 2012.
KL Wow!
SWB I knew she wanted to quit her job, and a project came up where I was putting together a team for it—it was a really big project—and I was like, “hey, if you are ready to get out of there, I can get you on to this project with me. It’ll go for three months.” She wanted to move and so the timing was perfect. The project was not perfect, [both laugh] but the timing was good and it was the right moment for me to be able to be like, “hey, I think you’d be a really great fit for this.” And from there we’ve gotten to be able to work together a bunch of different times. And it’s just awesome when you have somebody that you can kind of sync with and that you can really trust. And so I’m really glad that you get to work with her!
KL I know, me too. And I love working with her. It’s funny because I think about sort of the trajectory of how we’ve built out processes and stuff. And for a long time, I thought having several editors working across projects was the best approach, but then working more and more closely with Lisa Maria, I realized that it was more effective to have a lead on everything and then bring others in as needed. And I think we both actually realized that. Plus I think we both really love having what we consider a quote on quote “real colleague” in our day to day ABA work. I mean, I know I do and I think it’s just been really important to both of us. But I don’t think I’ve collaborated with someone on a really big project in a long time. The podcast and the other work you and I are doing are definitely the biggest outside of my daily gig. And I’m going to say it, it’s been an incredible journey. You know how I like to talk about journeys. [laughing] I have learned so—
SWB [laughing] I do, I do know this about you. [both laugh]
KL [laughing] I am looking at my crystals on my windowsill. I have learned so much about myself. One thing I did not realize until we started doing more together was that I was really hungry for new challenges. And then we started the podcast and I was like, “wow, here are all these things I do not know how to do.” Like developing a good interview, or crafting articulate ways to tell the stories I want to tell. And I learned so much from you, you’ve helped me get a lot more comfortable with that articulation and you just really make me feel like I am capable of anything.
SWB That’s so great to hear because I also—I feel like it’s been really exciting for me over the course of the past year to hear you sort of get more comfortable in interviews, get more comfortable in our conversations and open up more. We’ve talked about this.
KL Yeah.
SWB I came into this doing a lot of public speaking and it doesn’t mean I knew shit about podcasting [KL laughs] because I did not. I did not. But it did mean that I was a little bit more confident putting sentences together on the fly.
KL Totally.
SWB And that’s just something you have to get used to. And so, I don’t know, I feel like over the course of us working on this, I’ve been like, “oh my gosh, it’s so great to hear more of your voice shining through on things.”
KL I love it.
SWB Okay, so something else I’ve been thinking about after we did this interview was what do you do when you have a creative project or a side project or whatever it is, and it doesn’t necessarily align with the rest of your professional identity? So, I asked our interviewees about how this fits in with the jobs that they have because they have jobs in journalism or digital strategy. And I wondered, “are you ever worried about not being taken seriously in those spheres because you’re writing feminist erotica in this other sphere?” And I asked that question for me because [laughs] I’ve wondered about that for this show. We are really open here, I talk about a lot of personal stuff, we interview people who talk about periods and sex tech or just subjects that I think a lot of corporate culture is really uncomfortable with, right? Like talking about race and racism directly. And so I’ve worried and wondered and worried and wondered over and over again—what does that do to my consulting business? And, you know, it actually hasn’t [laughs] necessarily been great for it!
KL [laughs] Yeah, I mean, it’s so interesting to hear you talk about that because I think my work is associated with A Book Apart as a company, it’s so different for me. I’m not selling myself directly in the way that you are. And I feel like I do have a certain amount of flexibility and sort of safety to branch out and expand my professional persona. And obviously, I also want to stay mindful of how I present myself on behalf of A Book Apart, but it’s so interesting to kind of look at those two things side by side.
[10:15]
SWB Yeah and I guess as I think about it and as I talk through it out loud, I think in my head I think, “oh, maybe this podcast is at odds with my consulting.” But I actually am not sure that’s what it is. It’s more maybe, I don’t know, I guess over the past year, I feel like I’ve invested a ton of time in getting this off the ground and really wanting to make it good. And that isn’t tied directly to my consulting and as a result of that, I haven’t done a lot of work to publicly talk about practical issues within design, content strategy, user experience. And I do still have opinions on that stuff, it’s not like I don’t. But I feel like I’ve been less interested in writing and speaking about it, except for talking about sort of bias and harm in tech culture, which isn’t really the kind of thing you get hired for as a consultant.
KL Yeah.
SWB So, I guess maybe it’s more that. It’s like, where am I spending my time and my focus and my energy? And then thinking, “well what is the right balance?” I might give a talk about something like bias and inclusion in tech products and that might be great for a conference, but do I need that to be able to turn into a longer-term project? Do I need to build clients out of that? Do I need to focus specifically on building that side of things? Or am I okay if people don’t call me as much? [KL laughs] Am I going to be okay with that?
KL Yeah.
SWB And what does that look like? And so I don’t know that I have the exact answer to that yet, but it’s something I’m really thinking about. And it’s funny, it’s been seven years that I’ve worked for myself and I think this is the very first time that I’ve felt a little bit like, not just that I’m making evolutionary change or iterative change, but more like, “oh, you might be reaching a crossroads.”
KL [laughing] Oh my gosh, yes! I was just realizing that. I have been with A Book Apart for—it will be six years in March, which just—I can’t believe it. And it’s amazing and it really feels like a big accomplishment, but I also think about how that’s a long time and only in the last year have I really branched out and developed a bit more of myself that isn’t strictly associated with A Book Apart.
SWB I think that’s awesome. I think six years is a long time and I think it is something to celebrate, but I think it’s also a huge thing to celebrate that in the past year, you have been like, “oh wait, I’m not just this business, I am also a person with an individual identity” and wanting to kind of tease that out a bit. And, I don’t know, maybe we’re at the crossroads together. Maybe we can do a remake of that Britney Spears movie.
KL Uhh, you know I’m down for that. [both laugh]
SWB So, okay. So as much as I want to resolve all of our career questions in the next ten minutes, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
KL I mean, that would be great. [laughs]
SWB But I will say this. I felt really inspired when I heard the New Erotica authors talk about how they worked together and how they think of their collaboration and how they trust each other because it’s—I don’t know, I feel like that’s more how we work together.
KL Yeah, it totally is.
SWB They’re funnier, but that’s okay [KL laughs] because it made me really confident that however things shake out and whatever it is that I decide to do with my life and however we decide to work together in the future, I guess I feel like you’re going to be at the center of all of it, which is great. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
[13:21]
Interview: the authors of New Erotica for Feminists
KL Today’s show is real special because we’ve got multiple guests joining us. They are three of the four authors who wrote one of our new favorite books—I’m going to give it to all the feminists in my life for the holidays. It’s called New Erotica for Feminists: Satirical Fantasies of Love, Lust and Equal Pay and we are so very here for it. Brooke, Fiona, and Carrie, welcome to No, You Go.
Carrie Wittmer Thank you for having us.
KL So, your fourth co-author, Caitlin, couldn’t make it today, but we are really excited to talk with the four of you. How did you all start working together?
CW So, we all met on the internet on Facebook about two—almost exactly two years ago. I was a member along with Caitlin, Brooke and Fiona of a private Facebook group for female comedy writers. And I was feeling very frustrated because I couldn’t get any of my work published. I didn’t feel like any of the sites that existed, while great, didn’t really fit my voice. And so one day I just posted, “hey, does anyone want to start a female satire site with me?” and Caitlin and Fiona responded, we started emailing. And Brooke and Caitlin knew each other because they did comedy together in Portland, Oregon. And so Caitlin added Brooke and for a couple of months, we just started planning a website that became The Belladonna Comedy. And so we literally met on Facebook.
KL That’s so cool. And we definitely want to ask about The Belladonna a little later on, but since we are talking about the book, let’s dive into that. Tell us what it’s all about and how it came to be.
Fiona Taylor So, one day we were on GChat and we were talking about our dream of having The Belladonna get a sponsorship from LaCroix sparkling water. And Brooke said, “I’m not really sure how sponsorships work, but I think Tom Hardy drives up to your house in a box truck full of LaCroix and cash and just [KL laughs] backs up to your garage and unloads it and plays with your rescue dog.” And we were like, “yeah, that sounds scientific.” [SWB & KL laugh] So, then I said, “well, actually, that sounds like porn for Brooklyn women.” And I think Caitlyn may have said, “oh, that’s a premise. Let’s throw that into a Google Doc and start going with it.” And of course, we all had ideas from there and it morphed into the McSweeney’s piece—“New Erotica for Feminists”—that quickly went viral once it was published. And about a week later, we got an email from a book editor in the UK saying, “do you want to write a book?” And we ended up writing the book in three months and then editing it in two, so it was on a really accelerated schedule.
KL That’s incredible. So, you mentioned the McSweeney’s piece went viral. Was it weird to have an article become something much larger?
[16:11]
CW I think it was—I’m speaking for myself—for a comedy article to get that wild, for lack of a better word, was really new and shocking to me. For my full time job I’m a reporter at Business Insider, so I’m quite used to some pieces taking off and having a huge audience. But for my comedy, which is what I’m truly passionate about, I was like, “wait, people actually want to read this.”
KL [laughing] Yeah. So, there are lots of things we love about the book and in the beginning, you note that you “intentionally removed many identifiers to allow a diverse array of readers to superimpose themselves onto the page.” I personally think this makes the book very sexy. Why was that so important to do that?
Brooke Preston I think these were conversations we were having throughout the process. We wanted to be very aware of the fact that we happened to be four, white, straight, cis women and making sure that were were understanding our privilege there, but also that were were writing in a way that made every reader truly feel welcome. At first, we tried to write a lot of diverse vignettes and reps that were maybe about a woman in a headscarf or about not touching someone’s hair, but it didn’t feel right to speak as someone else’s experience that we didn’t live. And so we decided to kind of go the opposite direction with it and remove a lot of the identifiers unless we were talking about a specific famous person because then everyone can sort of superimpose themselves, as they do in real erotica, and become the sexy star and feel included.
CW Yeah, I think another thing we wanted to do with the book was we were trying to kind of embrace good erotica because a lot of great writers have written good erotica. Most of it on the internet is bad, but there are some great writers who have written good erotica and the best erotica is not specific because it invites you to imagine yourself. I think I said at another talk a couple of days ago how erotica is more specific to women and more popular to women because they’re not seeing some guy rail a woman in a kind of gross, upsetting way. They’re imagining themselves, not seeing someone else do it. So, I think it was important to us to also stay true to the good erotica that we’ve seen.
KL Yeah. Things start out super strong with the opening vignette and I will read it, if I may. [laughs] “The cop asks if I know why he pulled me over. ‘Because my taillight is out?’ ‘Yes ma’am, it’s not a huge deal, but it could be a potential safety issue. I’m happy to escort you to a busy and well-lit garage a few blocks up run entirely by female mechanics. I won’t give you a ticket if you can take care of it now.’ ‘That’s fair,’ I say, my eyes lingering over his clearly visible badge and identification.” So, [laughs] A) that’s hot. [FT laughs] B) I know this is satire, but legitimately it turns me on too, which makes me think about how sad I am that literal fairness, equality, and not being treated terribly is so scintillating. [laughs] Can you tell us more about how you explored the play between satire and erotica and maybe what kind of boundaries you came up against, if any?
[19:26]
FT I think one of the things that we discovered while we were writing this is we read our joke and we were like, “haha, that’s so funny.” And then we were like, “but is it really funny? Because that’s how the world should be.” And then there was sort of a mixture of sadness and rage in there as well. So, I think that’s what we tried to do with the satire is just sort of create—it’s funny, but it really shouldn’t be funny because this is really how the world should be.
BP And our UK team, as part of the promotion of the book, created a “My Feminist Fantasy” hashtag and had readers kind of write their own vignettes about what their feminist fantasies would be. And it was—they were very funny and very good, but also it was striking that so many of them just centered around safety—just basic safety. Someone wrote in and the gist of the vignette was that they were waiting at a bus stop and a man comes up next to them and takes off his headphones and says, “I can tell that it’s making you uncomfortable that I’m here and you don’t know me, so I’m just going to wait at a different bus stop.” [laughs] And that’s the whole vignette. And that so many of these are just like you realize that we’re not at a place societally on either side of the pond where we can just take our safety for granted. And so even though we’ve come so far in the last year or so in the national conversation, this was sort of also chance to say, “yes, but big and small, there are still so many inequalities that we still have to address and that are still so far from being our erotic ideal [laughs] or reality.”
CW Yeah. I’ll also say my approach to writing this book was a little different than my co-authors in that I just read a lot of erotica. This is also how I approach a lot of my satirical writing and comedy. I just go deep into the thing that I’m trying to satirize. So, I just read a lot of erotica and I thought, “okay, I just read a really upsetting master and dom thing with a buttplug and they were coworkers, how can I make this into—spin the feminist issue on this?” So, instead of thinking of what are the issues I want to address, I did what are the erotica things I want to put in the book and then how can I spin them? So, it was really eye opening.
KL Yeah, I can imagine. That’s super interesting. And in another set of vignettes in the New Erotica for Feminists Who Are Parents chapter—that chapter is perfection. One of our faves from that, [laughs] again if I may. “I open my blouse, my naked breasts peeking through for a fleeting moment. I breastfeed my child in public. It is extremely uneventful and everyone is chill about it.” So racy! [laughs] I mean, we know from friends with babies that this is quite literally a fantasy. You’re never far from a judgey person or a creep. Why do you think it’s important to call this out and why was it important to include these in the book?
BP Fiona and I are both parents. But obviously even though Carrie and Caitlin are not currently parents, they are very supportive of women who choose to be parents. And so the four of us really felt like parents are really just an overworked and under-appreciated part of the population. And feminists who are parents are facing a lot of really real challenges and a lot of the most egregious examples of this inequality—the lack of paid maternity leave being a great one. Or talking about a less than perfect split of emotional labour in the household. And so, I think we have a joke in the table of contents that says something like, “we’ll explore the fantasies of these parents, even if it’s really just naps.” And I think we wanted to make sure there was a parent chapter, even though I think it was the hardest to write because obviously, you don’t want there to be any whiff of that you’re trying to eroticize children. [laughs] And so it was the hardest entry point to try and crack, but it was important for us to include.
KL So, talking a little bit more about the process, what was the book writing process like for the four of you?
FT I think it was less challenging because there were four of us, which made it a lot easier. Someone always has an idea, even if someone else is like, “I am totally braindead at this moment.” So, what we did is we opened a Google Doc. First, in our book proposal we worked out the sections. So, everyone just started throwing ideas in there and I think our work on The Belladonna—we edit together, we write pieces together, we’re just so used to working with each other now that I don’t think there’s ever been an issue where someone has edited or added to someone else’s work and anyone has had an issue with that because we all make each other’s work stronger and better I think. So, people would have an idea, sort of throw it in there, get it as far as they could, then everyone else would sort of come in and go at it and make it stronger and I think that we’re just really lucky that we collaborate well together.
CW Yeah. I think another thing we did really well was communicate on when we were going to work a bunch on the book. So, I would send a GChat to the group like, “hey, I’m getting up early on Saturday morning and I’m planning on spending the entire day writing.” And we were just really good about communicating when we could, and so I think our contributions to the book were all very equal. I mean, we’re—like Fiona said, because we do edit each other and add jokes to some that maybe we—I originally wrote, we all have an imprint on every single part of the book. A lot of people have been asking, “oh, so which chapters did you write, Carrie?” And I’m like, “I wrote the whole book. We all wrote the whole book.” [KL laughs]
[25:30]
BP I would just say the other piece of that to tack on—we all bring a sort of different sensibility to our writing, so Fiona has a lot of literary depth, as does Caitlin. Caitlin has a strong knowledge of mythology. Carrie, being an entertainment reporter, has a ton of science fiction and TV and referential knowledge. So, everyone just brings something different to the table and has a slightly different voice. And so they meld really well together and so it was a good check on ourselves because there were a few times where we would go back and edit and then in the early stages—the original person that had started the draft of that vignette and would say, “oh, that wasn’t actually the joke that I was originally going for.” But then if we weren’t getting it, maybe the audience wouldn’t have gotten it.
KL That’s so cool. It really sounds like you all do really work very well together. You also all co-founded The Belladonna together, which is a satire site by women and other marginalized genders for everyone. We love this. How did you decide to found the site and what are your goals for it?
BP I think one of the pieces that was really important to us was that what we didn’t want to do was create a site that the byline wasn’t really of value. The tricky part when you’re a new site and you don’t have any cache or followers yet [laughs] is that we wanted to make it really clear that we wanted to make this a high quality writing site that was selective. Not so selective that women felt they could never be part of it or develop their voice on it, but also not something where you could just send anything in and we would just put it on the site. Because I think those sites exist and they serve their purpose, but they’re not as valuable of a professional byline because they’re not a selective site. So, we wanted there to be an editorial process that was really focused on A) showing women’s voices—developing their own voice, rather than having them fit into a specific style that way that say _The Onion_—
FT Yeah, because we want to really help writers and at the moment, unfortunately, we can’t pay because we’re not making any money from the site. One day we hope to have that change, that is a goal. So, in terms of—we can’t pay people, so we are trying to make sure that we give them valuable feedback that will help them get published on our site, help them get published on other sites. And sometimes when we read a piece and it’s good, but it’s not quite right for us, we’ll make suggestions about where they should submit it in order to get another byline. So, we really just want to be a place where voices that wouldn’t be heard that frequently are sort of amplified and we do want to be able to monetize and we do want to be able to pay writers and I’m sure we have other goals too.
BP Yeah, I think just the biggest thing is just building that community and widening that pipeline.
SWB So, you mentioned that you’re not yet making money off of the site and that you’d like to, and I wanted to ask a little about just sort of where you see the site going and how you kind of keep it in perspective. Because I know that running an indie editorial site is famous for being hard, right? We all miss—well, maybe I won’t speak for all of you—but I know me and Katel definitely miss The Toast, I miss The Awl, and I’m curious—as you’re thinking about what you want to do with The Belladonna, how do you kind of make it work, despite the fact that it is hard to run an editorial site on the internet without necessarily having a big influx of cash?
CW Yeah, it’s not easy. You’re very right that it’s very hard. All of us have made sacrifices in our personal life I think to devote to the site. I think we each spend about ten hours maybe per week, give or take depending on how many submissions we get, on our work for the site. And we all work full-time, so it’s mostly our nights and weekends, our days off. And I think that we keep doing it even though we don’t get paid for it yet because we’re all so passionate about it. I know that sounds very cheesy, but it’s true. We really believe in ourselves, we really believe in our writers and we all want to get ahead—we want big TV writing jobs and we want that. So, we’re going to keep doing this because we believe in ourselves and our community and we know that this is a great way to get ourselves out there.
[30:04]
BP And honestly, we’ve gotten so many great emails and some of the most moving are when someone writes and says, “you know, I was going to give up on comedy and I just didn’t feel heard or appreciated in this community at all, and now I’m going to keep going.” Or a lot of people will write to us and say, “that was the nicest rejection letter I’ve ever gotten and that makes me want to submit to you again.” To me, those are real people that are experiencing maybe a lasting career shift, or maybe they’ll say, “I found sort of my own writing partners or my own people through this site and through this community and now we’re off writing together for other sites.” That is a real, tangible effect that you had on someone’s life. And so to us, that’s well worth the small time sacrifices and financial sacrifices that we’re currently putting in this site to just see this vision that we’d had actually coming to fruition and happening.
SWB Yeah, that’s really interesting. It sounds like it’s not just, “we want to run an editorial site to run an editorial site,” but that there’s all these other potential outcomes that you’re looking at like are there screenwriting or TV writing gigs out there? What kind of community does this create? And that sort of changes some of the incentives, which I love hearing about that.
BP And we also have really great interns. We hire a pair of interns every—it was designed to be quarterly, but in the last few rounds they have been so great that they have offered and we have begged them to stay on for longer, so it’s been more like six month cycles. And they contribute pieces to the site, they help us on the editorial side just making sure, you know, all the trains run on time. They also sometimes have their own special projects of something they’re really passionate about. Whether it’s how can we bring more diversity to the site and curating some initiatives around that, to merch—we’ve been in process talking about how do we maybe do that. So, it’s been so beneficial to have these young women, who are hungry to start their careers and so talented.
SWB And so I want to pick up on something that has come up a little bit here and there as we’ve been chatting and that’s that you all are also doing other jobs. So, for those kinds of jobs, is it ever weird to navigate the different parts of your professional identity? Do you ever get worried that commercial clients or, Carrie, for you, journalists or editors will think you’re, I don’t know, not serious about that work or look at what you’re doing with erotic feminist satire [laughs] as being at odds with the other part of your identity? [BP laughs]
CW I don’t really care. [laughs & SWB laughs] And if they have a problem with it, I’ll go somewhere else. That’s what I have to say because this is what I care about. [laughs] Honestly!
FT Yeah, I haven’t really run into that issue. My boss, I have to say, is really excited that I published a book. He’s going to publish his own book. And he doesn’t necessarily tell clients what the name of my book is, but he’ll be like, “oh, she wrote a book.” You know, which—he’s like, “this helps me too.” So, so far it’s working out.
KL So, Brooke, you and Caitlin are both involved in Second City, right? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
BP Yeah! So, Caitlin is the person that created the online satire writing program and curriculum for Second City. And she’s taught that as part of their faculty for seven years. And then she brought me on just about a year ago, and now I teach her curriculum and I’ve added sort of my own notes and experiences to that as well for about a year.
KL That’s so cool. I would never have ever dreamed there would be an online satire writing program. How did that start and how has it sort of evolved?
BP I mean, I think Caitlin could speak to the origins of it more. But I know that the demand is really high, it’s one of the top enrolled programs perennially in the online pantheon of classes at Second City. And first of all, kudos to Second City for having online classes because I’m the only one of the four of us that doesn’t live in New York. I live in Columbus, Ohio, but that doesn’t make me any less serious about comedy writing. And we’re finding that that’s true with a lot of people and especially women, either because they have a job obligation or family obligation, that not everyone can or wants to live in New York or LA, but that that has been prohibitive for people to have professional comedy careers. So, The Second City really saw that and helped open this new channel that has raised so much talent from across the country and across the world because you can really take classes from anywhere. And it was instrumental to my development. I took Caitlin’s first iteration of classes when she developed the class, I took the first round as a student. And that really helped me polish up work and polish up my skills and find a group of people to write with and earn a lot of bylines that have led to other opportunities.
[35:02]
KL I love that it sort of morphed into that for you. So, we’re really interested in how you all work together, obviously. And not just logistics of making work happen, creative or otherwise, but also just how it is to work with people who are also your friends. What drives you to keep making things together?
BP I think we just really enjoy each other. We are friends and we like being around each other and we really are also true admirers of one another personally and professionally—of our work and our voices. And so it just makes it fun. I wish that I had more time to devote to the things that we’re working on together because it’s much more fulfilling for me—sort of in the vein of what Carrie said—it’s much more fulfilling to me to do this work than it is to necessarily work on a white paper about something. Whereas I’m good at that and I can do it, but it’s not bringing out my passion. [laughs]
CW I think it also has a lot to do with the fact that we like each other like Brooke said and we work very well together, but we also know that one day, we can probably help each other do something great or do something great together. We could maybe one day create a show together, or one of us could get hired on a show and try to help us get in too. So, I think it’s just the fact that we have that passion that Brooke is talking about that’s never going to go away. It also helps us just always want to work together because we know that this is something really special that will turn into something big. And it did! [laughs] Our relationship already has benefitted all of our comedy careers, so it can only hopefully go up from here!
FT Yeah, and I’m just going to add that I think we all have a lot of rage at society [laughs] in the path to here. And this partnership helps us sort of channel it into a constructive way where it’s at least cathartic and we can feel like we’re helping other people laugh. I mean, that’s one of the things that came out of this book—we would love for it to change the world. It’s probably not going to do that, but at least it entertains people and makes them feel like they are not so alone. And we also have a resource section at the end where people can decide what they can handle and take on and sort of try to change things. And so hopefully our book will make people laugh and then they can sort of go do something constructive as well.
KL Sara and I feel this so much. We sort of back each other up and we keep each other going and we’re kind of these—we’re rocks for each other in all of this [laughs] hellscape that’s happening! [BP laughs] And we keep inspiring each other, so I think that’s so important. [FT laughs] And it’s really been important for us to figure out what the boundaries are around and between how we work together and what our friendships looks like. Is there ever any need to adjust or readjust the working relationship in order to kind of keep nurturing the friendships?
BP Probably on smaller levels. I mean, I think we all communicate so often and pretty honestly that there aren’t needs for major adjustments too much. One example that’s funny now in retrospect—everyone always tells you how hard the writing process is and that you’re going to get exhausted and that you’re going to have these breakdowns sort of in the middle of it. And I was thinking, “you know, I think we’ve done pretty well, we haven’t had any major breakdowns.” [laughs] And then we were on a call talking about the past—someone had sort of mentioned that they were interested in potentially talking to us about in the future doing a pilot around this idea. And we had tried to start in the process of also doing the book—the book wasn’t out yet—thinking about how could we spin this off into a pilot idea. And I’d had a particularly hard week, I was very exhausted. And I don’t know if you’ve ever reached the creative place where you’re just like, “I don’t have ideas any more!” [laughs] “I don’t have any of any kind!” So, I was just sort of at that point. But I had grown up as a comedy and TV junkie, I’d really, really—what an opportunity when someone brings you to that. So, you’re thinking, “I don’t want to miss this.” And so I was so just sort of beside myself that I didn’t have any ideas [laughs] that were very good for this that Caitlin very gently on an internal call with the four of us said, “do you have any ideas, Brooke?” And I was sort of quiet for ten seconds and then I just burst into tears [laughs] on the call! And I’m like, [wailing] “I don’t have any ideas!” [laughs] It’s only funny now in retrospect, but they were so taken aback and like, “oh, are you crying?” And I’m like, [wailing] “I think so!” But they were so sweet about it and were just like, “well, maybe we should just back up [laughing] and do this after the book comes out. Maybe this is a sign that this is too much to have on our plates right now at one time.” So, that’s sort of a more extreme example of—you know, I should have been more self aware of just like, “nope, that’s too much for me!” and just been more aware of it. But I was just so exhausted that it just manifested in this sudden breakdown that they were very sweet about.
[40:20]
SWB I love that story because I think it would be great if we were all so self-aware [CW laughs] that we were going to prevent ourselves from going into meltdown mode. [BP laughs] But you need the friends who can help you even when you do go to meltdown mode, so I love that you all found that in each other. I feel like that’s a theme that me and Katel come around to all the time on the show. So, we are just about out of time though and while we could talk with you all day, we’re going to have to let you go. And so before we do, I want to make sure we ask, where can everybody keep up with more of the awesome stuff you’re working on and very importantly, buy your book?
BP So, you can buy our book anywhere that fine books are sold. If your local store doesn’t have it, it would be super great if you could ask them to carry it. Our website is thebelladonnacomedy.com. And we have a lot more ideas in the works that we hope to bring more books and more projects to you in the future if you someone will let us do that. So, that would be great.
SWB Well, I certainly hope that they do. And thank you all so much for being on the show! [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
Career Chat with Shopify
KL Hey friends, it’s time for our weekly career chat with Shopify. You know, I manage a small business and an online storefront and using Shopify to help us do that is a no-brainer. But what about all those big businesses? That’s where Shopify Plus comes in because they believe large merchants should love their commerce platform too. I really dig that. And the best part? They’re hiring an Enterprise Sales Rep to show high-growth, high-volume merchants like Tesla, RedBull, GE, and L’Oréal all the reliability and flexibility Shopify Plus has to offer. This isn’t just any sales position either. The job description says you’ll need to have a sense of adventure and an entrepreneurial spirit. That means you’ll be taking the reins and growing fast in the role. And get this, you’ll rack up experience equivalent to a real-world MBA. That’s really cool. I also just really love that Shopify values hiring diversity for all their positions. They say, “we know that diversity makes for the best problem solving and creative thinking, which is why we’re dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage everyone to apply.” So, if that sounds good to you, learn more about the Enterprise Sales Rep position and dozens more at shopify.com/careers. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
Fuck Yeah of the Week
KL Okay, okay. Let’s get to our fuck yeah. Sara, it’s pretty important this week.
SWB Yes, it is. So, you all remember our third co-host, Jenn Lukas. So, back in October, we told you she was out for the season. And, well, she’s decided that she’s not going to be able to come back to the show. And we are really bummed out that we couldn’t figure out a way to make it work, but me and Katel decided we’re going to keep the show going. We actually have a lot more on that next week because we actually have some big news to share about the show! But this week, we wanted to first make sure we took a moment and give a fuck yeah sendoff to Jenn! So, what we want to do is listen to some favorite clips.
KL Oh my gosh, yes. This is such a great idea. You know, I have really been missing her voice on parenting and figuring out how to be a mom—and any day now, a mom of two kids—while being awesome at work. And it was so helpful to have her open up about stuff like family leave.
JL Maybe two months into my leave, I started watching conference talks [laughing] while I breast-fed because I missed it! I missed being in the know and being still connected to that part of me that is my career. And being like, “how do I stay ambitious while I’m physically acting as food for my child?” [laughs]
SWB You know, it was so funny. I remember she actually texted me during that time to ask me, “hey, are any of the talks you’ve given recently online? Are there videos of them?” And I was like, [KL laughs] “yes, but why would you be watching them?” And I just didn’t get! So, that conversation totally helped me get, right? I was like, “oh, because she wanted to feel more connected to the stuff that she felt like she was missing.” And so that made me also remember we need to make sure as we go forward that we talk about parenting-related issues. And we definitely need to bring on more badass moms because otherwise I’m not going to realize all that stuff!
KL Yes!
SWB You know what I also miss though? I miss Jenn’s sense of humor a lot. She was always bringing so much energy to the show. Like when we all talked about periods?
JL You know, they have the Myers-Briggs test and these color tests and I just want you to know that my personality right now is period!
KL I know, [laughs] I could not stop laughing. Something Jenn always did was bring a lot of energy to the show, like you said. And also no one—no one—loves Jeopardy as much as Jenn.
[45:05]
JL At one point during labour, I think I definitely said to my husband and doula, “I wonder who won College Jeopardy.” [SWB & KL laugh]
SWB Yeah, so when Lilly Chin, who was the winner of that College Jeopardy tournament that she mentioned, when she agreed to be on the show, I thought Jenn was going to lose it. [KL laughs] Not quite like Ke$ha level of lose it, but still, she was going to lose it!
KL Yeah.
SWB So fuck yeah, Jenn, we miss you. And we are sending you all of our best vibes as you prep for baby number two!
KL Fuck yeah! That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Brooke Preston, Carrie Wittmer, and Fiona Taylor for being our guests today. And if you loved today’s show as much as we did, don’t forget to subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Your support helps us do what we do and we love that! See you again next week for our season finale!
SWB And big news! Bye!
KL Bye! [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, and fades out]
Writing a book is hard. Writing a book as a woman in tech is even harder. So what happens when some mansplainer comes along to rain on your well-earned parade? Laura Kalbag tells us about how she found the courage to write, why listening to women reminds her of what’s important, and how she keeps her cool even in the face of jerks.
Laura is a designer and the cofounder of Ind.ie, a not-for-profit that works on protecting people’s rights in the digital age—and the author of Accessibility for Everyone. She works tirelessly to champion web accessibility—that is, making websites and apps usable for as many people as possible, including those with disability—and believes the best online experiences are ethical and inclusive.
When she wrote her first book, she embarked on a journey: from doubting whether she could do it, to gracefully handling a high-profile mansplainer, to getting the attention of J.K. Rowling and Roxane Gay. All before publication day.
> I don’t care about impressing little men. That’s not my job. I care about trying to reach the right people with the messages that I care about. I care about trying to make the web more inclusive, trying to make the web more ethical, and if people aren’t bothered about that, then I’m not bothered about them, quite honestly. > — Laura Kalbag , cofounder of Ind.ie and author of Accessibility for Everyone
We talk about:
- Cofounding Ind.ie, which focuses on building technology to protect people’s privacy and rights online.
- What it’s like to run a company with your partner when you have wildly differing work schedules, and why respect and trust are key.
- The Ethical Design Manifesto: a guide Laura created to help folks make more sustainable design choices.
- How she navigated the book-writing and publishing process—from self-doubt to self-promotion.
- What it’s like to be on the receiving end of some of the worst mansplaining we’ve ever seen—and how to keep on being awesome, anyway.
Follow Laura : Twitter | Ind.ie
Plus: Sara and Katel share their adventures from Werk It, a women’s podcast festival, where they learned tons and got to spend two days surrounded by amazing women and non-binary folks in excellent outfits.
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher Today’s show is brought to you by Harvest, my go-to tool for tracking time, invoices and clients. It’s easy to use on desktop or mobile and it’s great for both freelancers and large companies. And it just makes it easier for you to do things like get paid. See all the features and try it free at getharvest.com. And when you upgrade to a paid account, you are going to want to enter the code “noyougo” at checkout for fifty percent off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, code “noyougo.” [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
SWB Hey everyone, I’m Sara!
Katel LeDu And I’m Katel.
SWB And you’re listening to No, You Go, the show about building satisfying careers and businesses—
KL — getting free of toxic bullshit—
SWB —and living your best feminist life at work.
KL Today we’re talking to Laura Kalbag, someone both of us have known for a while. Laura is a designer and the co-founder of a not-for-profit called Ind.ie and she’s also the author of a book I got to publish—Accessibility for Everyone. It was really great getting to know her throughout that project and I’m so glad we got to talk to her about her work and what it was like to write a book.
SWB I loved talking with Laura and something that she mentioned in her interview that I was hoping we could start with is that you reached out to her to write this book, right?
KL Yeah, we totally did.
SWB Okay, so last week on the show you mentioned that a couple of years ago you realized that A Book Apart had been mostly publishing books by white guys. And [laughs] you really wanted to change that and so you were starting to try to figure out ways to get more diverse authors. Was reaching out the Laura kind of part of that effort?
KL Yeah, so we had always really relied on people with good ideas to come to us and pitch and it was mostly we were kind of waiting for folks to just send us pitches and that’s how it worked for a while. But, well, that’s sort of how we ended up with all those white guys. So around that same time when we were thinking about this, we had noticed that Laura was doing really great work around accessibility on the web. She was speaking and writing about it and we could see that she was already articulating some of the concepts we’d wanted an accessibility book to focus on. So, we decided to reach out to her to see if she would even be interested.
SWB Well, obviously she was because she wrote the book, but in the interview, she also talked about how she didn’t know if she knew enough to write a book or if she would have enough material. She was like, “I never would have done this on my own. I wouldn’t have submitted this proposal on my own.” And I totally relate to that because I have felt that way every single time I’ve written a book and that’s three books and it has not changed! [laughs]
[2:38]
KL [laughing] I mean, yeah.
SWB And so I feel really lucky that there were other people who are out there who advocated for me—there were people who nudged me when I needed to be nudged—because I think that without that, I don’t think I would have written any of them. I mean, I really didn’t know what exactly I had in me until somebody kind of tapped me on the shoulder. And one of the things that has been really interesting for me to think about is how you’re doing that as a publisher, but that doesn’t have to come from a publisher, that can come from lots of places. For me, the only time a publisher did that was on book number three, but for the first two, it was people I looked up to in my field and that was super important.
KL Who was the first person who did that for you?
SWB It was actually Kristina Halvorson. Some of our listeners probably know who she is. If you come from user experience and content strategy, that name is really familiar. She is the author of a book as well and pretty big proponent for content strategy and runs conferences. And so, you know, this is kind of something that she does. But when she reached out to me, it was like 2011, it was before I had ever really spoken at a conference. I hadn’t done much of anything public really. I mean, I’d written a few blog posts. That was really what I had done is I’d written a few blog posts. And she got me the phone one day and she was just like, “you should write a book and Louis Rosenfeld”—the guy who runs Rosenfeld Media—she’s like, “and Louis Rosenfeld’s going to publish it.” And I was taken aback. I was not expecting this at all.
KL Yeah.
SWB I remember that she DMed me to say, “hey, can I get you on the phone?” I was at work one day at my job I was totally burned out at and I was like, “I’ve no idea where this is going, but I’ve got to go somewhere because I’m really miserable right now and this is very exciting.”
KL Yeah.
SWB So anyway, so—I figured, “well, I don’t know that I believe in me, but she seems to believe in me, so I’m going to see where this goes. And if Louis says that he wants me to write a book for him, I’ll do it. I might do it badly [both laugh], but I’m going to give it a shot!” And so that’s what I did and, you know, I haven’t opened that book in a while because looking at your past work is tough. So, I don’t know how I would feel about everything in it today, but I would say that a lot of people have told me that was really really helpful to them—getting them to understand a concept of structured content, which isn’t important for this particular conversation—but getting people to understand that at a time when a lot of people in my field found that very confusing and breaking it down and making it easy for them. And I think that that was really all I ever wanted, right? Like wanting other people to understand the things that I had found really helpful for me in my work. And so I mean definitely big thanks to Kristina because that was such a pivotal moment for me.
[5:20]
KL That’s so incredible. I really wish everyone could have that. I mean, I feel like this is part of what made us want to start that research we mentioned earlier this season where we interviewed people and sent out a survey asking folks about building their career visibility. And it was so exciting to start talking to people about how they built their profiles—finding out what was easy, what wasn’t and I think we’re seeing some ways we could help folks feel more empowered to go pitch a book proposal, or a conference talk, or start writing and actually share that writing.
SWB Or like start podcasting?
KL Yeah! [SWB laughs]
SWB Yeah, no, I want to focus on this a lot more this coming year, you know, 2018 is almost over and I feel like I’m just kind of coasting into the holidays now. [both laugh] But for 2019, this is a big goal of mine, right? I want to help more people have the same kinds of pivotal career moments that I got to have. And something that I’ve been thinking a lot about is mine have been really ad hoc, right? Kristina Halvorson happened to notice my work—I mean, she was paying attention, it wasn’t totally random. But she happened to notice my work, she happened to have recently had a conversation with Louis Rosenfeld, who was somebody she already knew as a peer—about what he was looking for for his publishing house next, and then she had the kindness and was willing to give the time to reach out to me and to kind of help me along and encourage me and helped me make connections, right? She was the one who introduced me to Louis and that at the time felt a little bit scary—I wasn’t going to just email that person out of the blue. And so that’s something that I definitely have tried to do for other people now that I’m in a more comfortable place or a place where I feel like I have a lot more credibility and people kind of know who I am. I definitely send out recommendations like, “oh you should really get this person at your conference,” or try to connect people to book publishers or whatever kind of opportunities they’re looking for—recommending people for jobs or contracts. Whatever it is, right? Because I feel like that is one of the ways that I can make sure that a wider range of people are getting access to opportunities and also that when I know people are out there with really great ideas or doing really great work that they are getting recognized for it. But it’s not enough to just do it at that ad hoc level. I think that that’s great and I’m glad I’m doing that and everybody should do that. I hope anybody who has the power to do it does it. But I just think that there’s so much room to do this at a more systemic level. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to projects like Women Talk Design, which I think we’ve mentioned before in our newsletter, where they are curating this big collection of women and non-binary speakers and the talks that those people have given because they’re really trying to get more women in front of conference organizers and to make sure that event organizers are never going like well, I don’t know where to find anybody who can talk about X or Y who’s not a man.
KL Right.
SWB Because that’s not true, they just don’t know where to look, right?
KL Yeah, exactly.
SWB So, they’re saying, “no we’re going to try to do this at a broader scale” but I still feel like there’s so much more to work on here. I want to help people figure out, you know, what do they want to talk or write about, what do they really want to share? What are the things that they figured out that have really helped them in their work that they feel like other people would benefit from if they just knew about them? How can we help people figure out what those things are? How can we make it easier for them to organize their ideas and share their ideas because something Laura mentioned is that it wasn’t until she sat down and wrote an outline and really put together all of her ideas that she could see that she did in fact have a body of work there—she had a lot of material and she had opinions!
[9:05]
KL Yes!
SWB And I think though that sitting down, writing an outline and getting all of your opinions into one place—that’s a super fucking daunting task if you’re doing it by yourself. That’s so hard, I wouldn’t do it.
KL Yeah, absolutely.
SWB And so it’s like, how do you get yourself to that place mentally? Well, you need some help probably and what if we could give people more tools for that and more opportunities for that where they felt like they had that support?
KL Definitely. And yeah, I mean talking to Laura got me so inspired to sit down and really get to work on this—figuring out if we want to write a book on this, or give workshops, or who knows! Because we—we totally need more voices like Laura’s.
SWB I think we’ve talked about her interview enough. I think everybody needs to hear it now.
KL Definitely. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
SPONSOR: STORY WORTH
KL I just sent my mom the coolest gift for her birthday, thanks to our sponsor this week, Story Worth. I’ve always loved the idea of recording some of our family history, but I never really knew where to start or how to do it. Frankly, it kind of seemed complicated. But Story Worth helps you share a family stories in a very easy way. Here’s how it works. I just went to storyworth.com, signed up with my email address, invited my mom to tell her story, and that’s it. Story Worth will send her weekly questions prompting her to tell a story, which she can write or record. She has some really interesting stories that I want to know more about and keep forever—like how she met my dad in the Peace Corps or Benin in West Africa or how she had to tread water for half an hour holding a brick over her head to train as a lifeguard. So, Story Worth lets her do that and I love that any data she shares stays safe and secure on their site. And at the end of the year, we get an awesome hardcover keepsake book to share and pass around the whole family. You know, she’s such an important woman to me and I’m so excited to hear more about and celebrate her. And I can’t wait to share Story Worth with her. It’s such a perfect birthday gift and hey, the holidays are coming up too! So, if you want to record and share your own stories or invite your friends and family to join in the fun, go to storyworth.com/nyg to get started. And right now No, You Go listeners get $20 off. That’s s-t-o-r-y-w-o-r-t-h dot com slash nyg. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
[11:20]
INTERVIEW: LAURA KALBAG
SWB Laura Kalbag is an author and the co-founder of Ind.ie, a not-for-profit that works on protecting people’s rights in the digital age. Katel even got to work with Laura when she wrote Accessibility for Everyone for A Book Apart—something that then got the attention of folks like JK Rowling and Roxane Gay. Yes. I am so excited that Laura is here to talk with us about that and about all the incredible work that she does. Laura, thank you for joining us on No, You Go.
Laura Kalbag Thank you for having me. It’s really exciting to be able to talk on a podcast with two people who’ve actually given me great opportunities in my career themselves.
SWB Oh, [laughs] that’s lovely to hear, but I think that both Katel and I have been big fans of yours for a while, so we are excited to have you.
LK It’s very, very exciting.
SWB So, let’s start out with talking about Ind.ie. Can you tell us a little bit about Ind.ie and what led you to start that company?
LK It really started out sort of about five or six years ago, particularly when the Edward Snowden Revelations came out. So, when Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA in the US and how governments were sucking up a lot of our information about what we were doing online and spying on us in that way. And we were talking about this a lot because it was something that really impacted our work. We’re building things for the web and we’re using the web all the time. What we were wondering though is why is so much information being sucked up? Why is so much stuff about what we’re doing, what we’re looking at, who we are already being sucked up by big corporations—the social media and things like that. They’re already collecting the information and that’s what makes it easy for governments to get hold of it as well. And so what we started to do is look into ways of how can we build technology that doesn’t make it so easy for governments to surveil us and helps protect people’s rights.
SWB So what are the things that you’ve been working on as part of Ind.ie is a little app called Better, right? Can you tell us about that?
LK Yeah. So, what Better does is, it protects you while you’re browsing the web and it does that by blocking trackers that are trying to follow you around the web—so the kinds of trackers that might retarget advertising at you. So, you might be on a site and you might be looking at something you want to buy like a nice new dress or something like that. And then you find that same dress showing up on ads on every single other website you’re visiting. And that’s an instance of when you’re being tracked by a tracker in their sort of background of the site. And they’re using that information that it’s you on that website to show you that ad again and again. And there are all kinds of different trackers doing all kinds of different things behind the scenes. And so what we do is we curate our own list where we decide what we think is a potentially harmful tracker and we block it for you, so that when you’re browsing the web—it only works on Safari for Mac and for iPhone for iOS—but when you’re using Safari, you don’t have to have those trackers watching everything that you’re doing.
[14:27]
SWB And since you’ve been sort of getting that out into the community, what kind of response have you gotten from it?
LK It’s very interesting. I think a lot of people agree with what we’re doing because we are doing it for the reason of protecting people’s privacy because we want to keep people safe. The people whose privacy is most at risk are people who are most vulnerable. It’s people who do not want their governments to necessarily know what their location is. That could be undocumented immigrants, it could be people whose lives they don’t necessarily want to share with corporations and things like that. So, that could be perhaps if you’re gay in a country where you’re not allowed to be—where homosexuality is banned—you don’t want that kind of information getting into the hands of people who could then pass that on to your government or to someone that could cause harm to you. And so what we’re doing is really trying to protect people’s privacy. It very much varies from ad blockers. So, what we mostly get compared to is ad blockers and a lot of people download Better expecting it to block ads. And it does because what we’re doing is blocking the tracking and the tracking actually tends to block 99.99% of all ads because most ads are based on profiling you and sort of examining your underlying behaviour. But if an ad is just a link, just a picture, just a bit of text, we don’t block that. We’re not trying to prevent people from making money on the web, we’re just trying to prevent people from invading the privacy of the people visiting the web.
SWB And so you bring up the whole advertising model of the internet and that makes me want to ask a little bit about the business model that you’re using when it comes to Ind.ie. So, I know that a lot of your work is—it’s a tiny team and that you have a lot of it being supported by donors and patrons, right? So, how does it work for you to run this type of company?
LK A lot of it is trying to find ways to be financially sustainable and not being hypocritical about what we do. Because we don’t want to take money from people if they’re doing it because they want to get good PR from us or if they want to get something sneaky in exchange. So, we make money from selling the app. It’s one of the reasons why we make an app that goes on an app store because Apple is one of the few ways you can make money with apps. And we make money from doing things like going around and talking at conferences and events. And we’ve raised a little bit of money for research—we’ve got funding for research into creating an alternative model for social networking in a way that the people can have ownership and control over their own information and over their own data. So, what we’re trying to do is bring all these different ways of making money together. It’s much like I think a lot of not-for-profits —their financial situations. You’re trying to make enough money to keep doing what you want to be doing and what you think is important to do.
[17:35]
SWB And now, you founded Ind.ie with your partner Aral, right? So, what’s it like to build a business with your partner?
LK It’s really great in a lot of ways and in other ways it can be very difficult because we live and work together, so that’s spending a lot of time together. And so we have to find strategies where we have our own space, we do our own things. We do things in our own way as well because both of us have predominantly both been entirely independent in our professional lives, so we’ve both run our own businesses before. And so bringing those two things together with two people who are—like to have control over how they do things and have very set ways of getting things done—we’ve had to do a lot of work and we’re continuing to do a lot of work to be effective together and to be able to do things together. But it’s really nice to feel like you’re working towards something together. A lot of people can find their work kind of leaking into their lives and I don’t mind that a lot of the time because it’s actually nice to have something you’re both passionate about and you both want to work on together.
SWB Yeah, that’s interesting. You know, we talk on the show sometimes about things like balance between work and personal life and sort of how to make sure that you can turn off work. But I think there is also the story that I totally relate to that’s around saying that, you know, I’m sharing this thing that I really care about that I share with my partner and this thing that I really care about that I spend a lot of my time on is something that I don’t mind bleeding over into everything else, that I like this feeling of it all being part of the sort of like, cohesive view of who I am and what matters to me.
LK I love it, but I also love having a good balance. And that’s one of the ways where we completely vary because Aral has no sense of balance whatsoever. He won’t be offended [laughing] by me saying that. [SWB laughs] He will work late at night, he’ll work all weekend. I work very strict hours. I like to get started at a good time in the morning, I work until the evening. I’ll go off, I’ll do dog walks during the day sometimes. I don’t work weekends unless I really, really have to if there’s a deadline or an emergency or something because I can’t keep myself sane and well if I work all the time. And he’ll allow himself some down days and things like that, but that’s how he does it. And so I say to him sometimes, “I know you really want to talk about this thing tonight and you want to start working on it tonight, but I’m not going to, so you’re have to wait until the morning.”
[20:12]
SWB Is that hard to do? I mean, that’s a lot easier to do if your coworker is emailing you at 10 pm—you just ignore it. It’s a little harder when that person is [LK laughs] across the dining table from you.
LK Yeah. We try to keep different spaces in the house as well, so that we can be working on things separately and someone can have time to just chill out and play computer games or whatever and not feel like the other person is in their peripheral vision working, making them feel guilty that they’re not doing stuff. Because it can be really difficult in that way. But I think one of the things we’ve really had to learn about working together is respecting each other’s way of working and respecting what works for each other because we know we have very different personalities to begin with. We both have very different ways to work, ways we enjoy working, and ways we find work fulfilling. And so we have to respect that in each other.
SWB It sounds like that takes a lot of trust. I mean, because you can’t really work with somebody and allow them to do things the way they want to do it unless you fundamentally trust that they know what’s going to be best for their own work.
LK Yeah. I think we know that we’re working from the same guiding principles, that we care about trying to protect people’s rights, we care about speaking out about things, speaking out about sort of surveillance capitalism, as they call it. The idea that this business model where people are making money from your data and trying to do things in a way that understands that a lot of people aren’t privileged and do not have the technical knowledge, do not have the time or the money to be able to make the web safe for themselves. And so we’re trying to work towards solutions that work for a mainstream audience. And these are our kind of guiding principles that we both know we agree on and if we feel like one or the other of us is not really sticking to that, we can call each other out on it too. We have to have that kind of relationship where we’re willing to take criticism, as well as give it.
SWB That’s great. And I want to pick up on something you touched on there a second ago. You talked a little bit about making work accessible. And I know that you’ve built a big focus on accessibility in your work. I mean, you wrote a book [laughs] about accessibility which we’re going to talk about here in a second. Can you tell our listeners who aren’t from tech or design what you mean when you talk about accessibility and why it’s something you care so much about?
[22:39]
LK When I talk about my book specifically, and the things that are in my book, that’s really focused on making the web accessible to people with disabilities. And so it’s this idea of a lot of the ways that we build things on the web can be exclusive to people who have disabilities because we’re not paying attention to how some people need to consume content in a different way. They may not be able to read it, they may be using something to read the screen to them, rather than reading the texts themselves. They might need to have subtitles because they can’t hear what’s going on on the web. So, that is about trying to make the web easier for people with disabilities to use. But that extends out into so many different things that we do because it’s about making something that’s written in a very technical way easier to understand for people who are maybe starting out and don’t have those technical skills yet or people who don’t want those technical skills, have plenty of other things to do with their lives, and just want to be able to understand how something works. And so, I’m trying to work on applying accessibility to absolutely everything that I do—always trying to be better at making the things that I design easier to use and understand by as many people as possible.
SWB And so the other thing that I wanted to ask a little bit about that I think ties into that is something that I know you’ve worked on at Ind.ie, which is the ethical design manifesto. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how that fits into the picture?
LK The ethical design manifesto is first of all, making sure that what we’re building respects human rights. Because it’s all very good making something that’s beautiful, making something that’s fun to use. I mean, the products that we have on the web, we’re pretty good at doing that kind of stuff—making stuff fun. We know and talk about things like user experience. But actually, unless the core of the product actually respects human rights. I mean, if the core of the products we’re making actively does not respect human rights, then what are we doing with the products we’re making? So, it’s things like making sure that the products we build respect people’s rights by respecting their privacy, keeping things private, making them accessible, making them sustainable—both financially sustainable and not having a negative environmental impact—making things interoperable—allowing people to move their data around if they want to. And then once we’ve done all of that, once we’ve got products that respect human rights, then we can focus on the doing things we do well in the industry like respecting human effort— so, understanding that people put a lot of time and effort in when they’re using our products, so we want to make sure that the products we build a functional and convenient and reliable. And then once we’ve achieved all of that, we can look at focusing on the experience—making things delightful and things like that. I really enjoy quoting Sara on this when I talk about it in talks and it’s—I think you say something like not spreading a thin layer of bullshit in order to cover up things that just aren’t working. [laughs] It’s not like twinkle—sprinkling a little bit of fairy dust on top of something that’s rubbish.
[26:05]
SWB Yes. So, we talked a little bit about the book that you wrote and I would love to talk about that further because, Katel, you actually got to publish that book, right?
KL Yeah. So, actually a few years ago, the team at A Book Apart had been wanting to publish an accessibility book. And we knew we wanted to reach out to you, Laura, because you were doing such great work around the topic, clearly. And then Accessibility for Everyone came out in 2017. How did you decide to write that book with us?
LK Well, I’m very glad you asked because I never would have offered. I have never really been in the position where I would have had the confidence to say, “oh I can write a book about this.” But actually, as I started to think about the outline and the proposal that I was going to write and what I wanted to say, I realized, “oh actually I have loads to say about accessibility” and actually over the years—because it’s been something I care about so much—I’ve accumulated so much information about different ways to make websites more accessible for people with disabilities that it would be really great to be able to share that. I had so many bookmarks and so many things and so many great people that I follow. And I like the idea of being able to take accessibility as a topic that can seem very big and very intimidating and give an introduction to it that applies to a lot of different disciplines within the web profession. So, how it applies to writing code, how it applies to designing and doing things like choosing color palettes, and how it applies to even writing text and writing copy. And so I love the idea of being able to be that bridge to the people that really had huge levels of expertise as well.
KL And it was—it just came together so well. I think exactly what you are talking about really shines through in the book. It’s very informative for folks who are getting up to speed about it and need to really get a lay of the land. You’ve talked before about how your brother, Sam, has cerebral palsy and that probably sparked some of the interest in the topic for you. And you talk about him in the book, which is awesome. You mentioned that you sat down with him and talked with him about how he uses the internet when you were writing the book. What did you learn from that?
[28:26]
LK Well, it was really funny because before I started writing the book I hadn’t even thought about how my brother having a disability affected how I saw the world and how much I cared about accessibility. I hadn’t actually connected those two things together because I—growing up with Sam, he’s been my brother since I was three years old—I’m three years older than him—and so, our whole lives have been making little accommodations around his need. He can walk, but not well. He has mild cerebral palsy, He finds balance very difficult, he has learning difficulties often associated with cerebral palsy and difficulty with things like fine motor control as well. So, throughout our lives together—and we spend a lot of time together—we’ve always been doing things like—I’d read a menu to him in the restaurant. He could do it, but we get there quicker if we do it together. I know to give him my arm on my right side when we’re walking somewhere just to make it a bit easier for both of us. And I’d never really watched him use a computer before because it’s not the kind of thing you sit and watch somebody else do. So, what we did is one day, we sat there on the phone and I got him to talk through all the things that he hated about using the web and the things that he loved and the things that really helped him. And it gave me a really nice insight into his particular use and what it also really revealed to me was how different everyone’s use of the web is. How because we’re not watching each other use computers, use our device every day, we don’t necessarily realize that we all have different ways of doing things. We all type in different ways, we all read in different ways, we all—some of us open a million tabs, some of us only have one tab open. We will do these things so differently and what it really shows is the need for inclusivity and making websites accessible. What it shows is the assumptions that we make are usually very wrong.
KL Did you do any other kinds of research for the book or did anything surprise you as you were writing it?
LK What always surprised me was the many different ways that every time you talk to new people, they let you in on a different way that they use something or a different way that they access something. So, I did a lot of research into the different forms of input that people use with the web. We think that it’s quite a lot when people are using laptops and iPads and iPhones and all different brands of tablets and things and even watches to access the web now. What we don’t tend to think about is how people might use things like screen readers, which read the contents of the screen to you as audio, or things like eye tracking, so you can have this device that tracks your eyes, so that you can use your eyes to show where you want to go on the page, what you want to interact with. The same—you can do it—there’s these buttons that you can use if you have difficulty with motor control, you press the button, so it scrolls through all of the different options on the screen and you press the button when it gets to the part that you want. And there are so many different ways to interact with computers using all of these different things. So, when we’re trying to create experiences on the web and we’re really focusing on exactly how one tiny little element should work and exactly how we want it to be, we need to think about how so many different people will use that in a completely different way from what we intend.
[32:05]
KL Absolutely. Okay, so in August last year—about a month before the book was due to launch on September 26th—you excitedly tweeted that you wrote a book and rightly so. That tweet sort of became famous though, and I remember getting your first Slack message about it. Can you share a little bit about what happened?
LK Yeah, so I think this was even the second tweet I’d written about it because I was so eager to make sure that no one had missed my first tweet because when I was writing the book, we kept quite quiet about it—I talked with my friends and family about it, but it’s not something you announce before it’s done, lest it never get finished. [KL laughs] And so I wrote this tweet saying “if you’ve missed it, I’ve written a book. It’s coming out very soon, sign up to get it first.” And so a couple of links—a link to the A Book Apart page and then a link to my website. I don’t think it was even right away, but maybe a few hours later I got this reply from a very well-known designer saying, “Actually you wrote a text. It took a few other people and skills to make that into a book.” And I was absolutely mortified, and it was late at night and I’m not a late-night person really, but I saw this quite late at night and I completely froze inside my gut because I was really worried that what I’d written had implied somehow that I wasn’t being grateful to the people that had helped [laughs] me with this book, [KL laughs] that had actually made the book exist. Like you, Katel, and just everyone else involved because it is a very small independent publisher. There’s a lot of people who put their bit of love into it. And I just felt horrible and thought that I was suggesting that I was ungrateful, but then only in the back of my mind when I was—if I looked at it from a detached perspective, of course, this guy wasn’t being very nice. [laughs] And fortunately a few people started to point that out and kind of speak up for me and say “hey, you know, when you start a message and you’re correcting a woman and it says actually and you tell her something that she already knows, you might be doing something called mansplaining [laughs & KL laughs] and it got to the point where this started getting picked up by a lot of people. I don’t even know how JK Rowling or “Rowling”—my brother says I have to make sure I pronounce her name correctly seeing as she stuck up for me—congratulated me on the book. And Roxane Gay, which I was amazed with, because I love Roxane Gay’s writing. So that was pretty cool. I was sitting there reading all these lovely people say really lovely things to me about my book, but it kind of didn’t stop the fact that it came out of a man mansplaining to me. [KL & SWB laugh] And so then, of course, there were magazines wanting to write about it. Teen Vogue and contacted me to ask me for my comments on the situation and that was a difficult one because there are a lot of people really railing on Erik who tweeted me. And I don’t like pile-ons. I don’t like it on social media when people try to bully each other by drawing a lot of attention—particularly people with a lot of followers—drawing a lot of attention in order to shame someone. I think a little bit can be healthy, a little bit of awareness. But actually, there’s a point where you’re just bullying people. I didn’t want to really be involved in that. And so I did say—sort of when I saw it was starting to get a bit much, people can we just—this is nice, this has been fun, but can we draw our attention elsewhere now because there’s a lot more to worry about in the world than a tweet about a book.
[36:10]
KL Yeah, I mean I do just want to say that of course, you are an extremely thoughtful person and I don’t think anyone was assuming that [laughing] all the work that went into it was, you know, disregarded in that tweet. But the truth is that you did write a book and you have every right to be excited about that and he had no right to sort of like mansplain that to you. So, I mean the negative part is that that happened, but there were these positives that came out of it—you had these badass famous authors tweeting in support and solidarity with you and and you did pick up a lot of this coverage and I know it was bittersweet. What did you do to handle that?
LK I tried to have a healthy amount of perspective about what was going on. And I remember sending messages to you saying, “hey, maybe we could open pre-orders because, I mean, while people are hearing about the book…” I mean, it’s not the kind of book where someone who knows nothing about the web is going to buy it just because of a tweet that they didn’t like somewhere. It’s not that kind of thing. But if it did raise awareness for accessibility, well that’s really cool. If it meant that some people ended up learning about making their websites more accessible for people, that’s a really cool outcome. And so I tried to look at it that way. It could get a bit frustrating when people would introduce me at conferences talking about the tweet and some people said things like, “oh, you must be really grateful to him after all of this.” [KL laughs] And I just thought, well actually, you know what? I’m not because I think the book would have done fine without his attention and it doesn’t feel right being grateful to him. He wasn’t being nice and he continued to not be particularly kind to me in private messages and I just wanted it to go away at that point and I didn’t want to have that negative attention anymore.
SWB I mean, you’re still being, I would say, so diplomatic about it. And so thoughtful about it and I will just say, I remember when I saw his original tweet, it was quite early on in this whole firestorm and I felt sick to my stomach with anger at him for this because I knew that it felt like he was stealing something from you—stealing this pure moment of you being able to celebrate having done something difficult and have something to show for it that you could share with people. And so, I want to talk a little bit more about how that felt for you because I know you’ve written a little bit about it, about how the feeling doesn’t go away, right? You’ve mentioned that it made you feel really small and it’s also made you feel like even afterward that you don’t want to make a big deal out of it or celebrate this book because you feel that implication of being indebted to him always coming back to you.
[39:17]
LK Well, that’s the thing. It’s often a lot easier to be angry and get sort of enraged by these things when it happens to somebody else. Because I’m really great at getting angry on behalf of other people. I spend the majority of my work trying to encourage other people and often by telling them off and telling them I don’t think they’re doing the right thing in order to try to get people to behave more ethically in their work. And it’s very different when you’re on the receiving end of it. And I’m a very sensitive person and I really take criticism to heart. I really listen and I really care about what people [laughs] think about me. So, when the comment first came through and I thought “oh, no, I’ve done something wrong, I’ve done something wrong.” I’d just started to be able to talk about this book. I was already quite nervous about the idea of publishing a book in the first place. I was worried that people wouldn’t think I was qualified or well-known enough or know enough about the topic to even do that in the first place. And so to suddenly have someone questioning that on Twitter very publicly— someone who has a lot of followers. And, in fact, I think he was even responding to a retweet from someone else who has even more followers. And so the idea that all of these people would sort of see my embarrassment was—oh, it made me feel horrible and I do keep going back to that feeling, I do keep kind of thinking, ugh, I call it “the book.” I call it Accessibility for Everyone. I don’t say “my book” because I don’t feel like it’s my book and I’m really worried that if I do go around saying oh “my book,” people will think, “oh there she goes thinking that she did all this work when she just wrote the text.” So it’s—I know how unreasonable it is. I really do know how unreasonable that is, but I can’t help but feel that way.
SWB I think that’s one of the things I wish people who make these shitty comments or people who have given you this kind of like, “oh you should feel indebted to him” feedback. I wish that was the kind of thing they really understood was like how much this kind of stuff can erode the confidence of somebody who’s kind of gingerly setting their foot out there and saying like, “here I am I made something” and you know what? You did not deserve that and you wrote a book! You wrote a fucking book! it’s your book. That book is yours. [all laugh]
KL It is.
SWB And I think that that’s one of the biggest things that—it makes me sad that somebody would try to take that away from you and particularly—I think that this is something that he wouldn’t have said that if you had been a man. He just wouldn’t have it. It wouldn’t have even occurred to him.
[42:21]
LK No.
SWB And I’m sure he doesn’t believe that. I’m sure he doesn’t think that it was a gendered comment, but it fucking was. And it’s so frustrating and I’m curious: is there anything that you have found that has helped you figure out how to celebrate this anyway? Or is there anything that helped you sort of process it and move on from it?
LK Yeah. Well, I unfortunately it’s something that I feel like I have experienced with in that—so my partner, Aral, and I work together and I often find the work we do together, we will get different gendered—different responses to what we do. And people will treat him in a very different way from how they treat me when we’re often saying similar things in similar ways. And it can be so frustrating and feel very unfair. And what I try to do is I try to see the victories in reaching the people I really want to reach. Like when I’m giving a talk and I have a man come up to me afterwards and dismiss it as I’m apparently young and idealistic or I don’t know what I’m talking about or I haven’t been in the industry for long enough—all of which is untrue, by the way. Actually, it’s the women who come up to me afterwards and say “oh that talk was great and I loved it.” I’ll always remember this fantastic tweet this woman wrote after I gave a talk. She put the animated GIF of—oh, it was Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games—you know—when she does the gesture of like victory and everyone like looks around. And she put that up after my talk saying “yeah, this was such a great talk and you really smashed it.” And that’s what I care about. I don’t care about impressing little men. That’s not my job. I care about trying to reach the right people with the messages that I care about. I care about trying to make the web more inclusive, trying to make the web more ethical, and if people aren’t bothered about that, then I’m not bothered about them, quite honestly.
SWB I love that so much. I was cheering for you, clapping so loudly in my head right now. [LK laughs] And I love that because I do think it’s so great when you know that you reach people and I know that your work absolutely reaches people. And you have a lot more people that you’re going to reach. So, we are running out of time and I’m wondering if we can—before we go—just talk more about that. What’s next for you? What are you excited about? And what do you have coming up in 2019?
[45:01]
LK What I’m excited about is being able to dig in and keep going with the work we’ve been doing. We’ve been doing a lot of research and a lot of work into trying to work out how do you architect ethical technology in this day and age when we have so many things to worry about? How do we try to build technology that understands things like bias and how people are discriminated against all of these systemic issues we face? How do we try to make technology that is stronger and can be flexible and not be the same old stuff that straight white men in Silicon Valley are making? How do we make things that are for everybody? And I’m really excited about being able to work on these things—being able to really dedicate time to it. I think now we’re in a place where we’re settled down where—we’ve been moving a lot over the last few years, so we finally have a place to live that feels comfortable and safe and will give us the ability to just get on with it.
SWB Well, I’m so glad you’re doing that, both because of the work itself and because I know that you are such an inspiration to so many people, including me and Katel. Laura, we have loved your work for a long time and we have been so happy to have you on the show. Laura’s book, which is Accessibility for Everyone, is available from A Book Apart. And, Laura, where can listeners find out more about you?
LK You can find everything about me on my website, which is laurakalbag.com.
SWB Laura, thank you again for being here.
LK Oh, thank you for having me. Thank you for being so kind. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
CAREER CHAT WITH SHOPIFY
SWB Time to take a quick minute to talk careers with Shopify. So, this week we have Mackenzie Bartlett, a recruitment researcher for production engineering. Mac, you see a lot of incoming applications. What is the number one thing that you recommend when folks are applying to Shopify?
MB Thanks! My top tip? Do your research on the company before you apply and definitely before you interview. Shopify has a ton of videos and blog posts online and it really stands out to me when a candidate has done their research and knows a little bit about what the team is working on already. It shows me that you have an interest in what we do and the problems were solving. It’s a simple tip, but it will make your application stand out and your interview process that much better. And as an aside, make sure your cover letter is addressed to the right company. You wouldn’t believe how many applications we get that are addressed to a certain popular music streaming platform, which will remain unnamed.
[47:33]
SWB Oh my God, I’m not gonna lie. I made that mistake on a proposal once. So, don’t be like me, do your research, and maybe you should also talk to Mac. Check out shopify.com/careers to see all the latest job postings. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
FUCK YEAH OF THE WEEK
SWB Katel, I don’t even have to think about what my “fuck yeah” is this week because it’s Werk It! That is the women’s podcasting conference, which we went to just before Thanksgiving.
KL Yes!
SWB So, for all of you who aren’t podcast nerds, Werk It is put on by WNYC, which means that it is full of super legit podcasters. We got to learn from people like Manoush Zomorodi, who I’ve loved for a long time. She used to run a show called Note to Self, but now she has this new one called ZigZag, which is pretty rad. And we also heard a panel from Nora McInerny, who runs Terrible, Thanks for Asking, which I thought that panel was super refreshing and such a good show too.
KL Yeah.
SWB And like, these are some really big names in podcasting.
KL I know! It was very cool. It was a great conference and we met some really incredible people.
SWB Also, we got the hang out in New York for a few days together, which was fun.
KL Yes.
SWB And also—and this was an extra cool part for me—one of the things I learned is that maybe we are further along than I thought with this show.
KL Oh my gosh, yes. That was so validating.
SWB A lot of the stuff the presenters were talking about I felt like “oh yeah, we’re kind of already doing that” or like, “oh yeah, we’ve been working on that.” Not to say we have it all figured out, not to say that we’re going to be like raking in that Serial level fame and fortune yet. [KL laughs] But, I started feeling like, “yeah, maybe we’re not quite so kind of like fresh to this. Maybe we are—we do kind of know something now.” And we also had this mentor session, which was awesome. It made me realize that any time I’m going to an event that has mentor sessions, just sign up for them because—who knows what you get!
KL Oh my gosh. That was very—a really cool thing they did.
SWB Yes, and so our mentor happened to be somebody who was really well connected in podcast land. And she was so reassuring and she was even legit excited about the future of our show and how she can help us, which, I mean, I hope everything that we talked about pans out, but even if it doesn’t, it was just so great to hear from her that we’re doing okay. It was great also to be in community with all these other podcasters and especially women podcasters, right? Because so many podcasts events are so male-dominated and this allowed us to leave both feeling, I think, really excited and just like a little more confident that we’re doing alright. We’re like—fuck that, we’re doing great!
[50:05]
KL Yeah! Fuck that and fuck yeah to Werk It.
SWB Yeah, we worked it.
KL That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go. NYG is recorded in her home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Laura Kalbag for being our guest today. If you like today’s show, please leave us a review and rate us wherever you listen to podcasts. And get even more of us in your life with I Love That—our biweekly newsletter. Sign up at noyougoshow.com. See you again next week.
SWB Bye! [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, and fades out]
Do you feel like you see yourself and your friendships reflected in most TVs or movies? We sure don’t. Emily Best tells us why we won’t get more diverse representations of women on screen unless we change the way films and shows are funded and distributed—and how she plans to do just that.
Emily is a producer, director, and the founder and CEO of Seed & Spark, a new crowdfunding and streaming platform that wants to change the way entertainment is made and distributed—so that independent creators can actually be independent. She started Seed & Spark after making her own first film, where she learned just how little Hollywood’s middlemen understood about reaching women.
> I started thinking of all the movies I had ever watched and everything that was available to me and I was like, “where are my friendships? Where are the women I admire?” And they were nowhere to be found. And so, that summer we started toying with the idea of making a movie that would represent female friendships the way that we understood them. And I didn’t know that this was a radical idea. > — Emily Best , founder of Seed & Spark, on why she made her first film
We talk about:
- Why the film industry doesn’t see women as a viable audience (spoiler: they’re wrong about that).
- Using a wedding registry website to create a crowdfunding campaign for her first film.
- Why Seed & Spark is the only streaming service with a pay-what-you-can model—and a community where creators and fans build real connection.
- Why algorithmic content recommendations—a la Netflix—lead us to an unsatisfying place (and how to change that).
- The importance of creating a code of conduct for online communities—_before_ you’ve got trolls and Nazis.
- Fck Yes!, a webseries about consent that shows what happens when people actually talk in the bedroom—and how awkward moments can turn into extremely sexy ones.
- What’s next for Emily: A documentary project about the Equal Rights Amendment (which is still not ratified).
Follow Emily : Twitter | Medium
Plus: Sara and Katel get real about their own failures when it comes to diversifying who’s involved in what, and talk about their fave subject: female friendship (and donuts).
> By doing the thing that was easy, which was bringing in somebody who was already connected to us, who we knew would be a good fit, we weren’t able to think about the benefits of bringing in somebody from a different background. > —Sara
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher Today’s episode is brought to you by Harvest, the makers of time-tracking and project-planning tools for all kinds of businesses. Track vendors, map out complex tasks and team schedules, send invoices, and just look cool, calm, and collected the whole time. Try it free at getharvest.com, and when you upgrade to a paid account, make sure to use the code “noyougo” for 50% off your first paid month. That is getharvest.com, offer code “noyougo.” [intro music plays for 12 seconds]
Katel LeDû Hey everyone, I’m Katel.
SWB And I’m Sara!
KL And you’re listening to No, You Go, the show about building satisfying careers and businesses—
SWB —getting free of toxic bullshit—
KL —and living your best, feminist life at work. On today’s show, we’re talking with Emily Best. She’s the founder and CEO of Seed & Spark, which is a platform for crowdfunding and streaming TV and movies. She’s also a producer and director herself, and she’s just really fucking cool. She’s here to talk with us about what it’s like as a woman creator in Hollywood, and what she’s doing to change that for everyone.
SWB I am so glad we got to talk to Emily about this, because I feel like this has been such a big conversation in Hollywood the past couple of years—talking about things like pay inequality or—you know—#oscarssowhite, or even the #metoo movement. Looking at representation in entertainment is such a big deal, but it also really got me thinking about just how systems of inequality are perpetuated in general, like the way that across industries, people who already have connections, who are already in the right networks, they’re the ones who get to have new opportunities, and other people just stay shut out. And it’s this “rich get richer” sort of thing. And that’s definitely not just in entertainment, I mean that’s absolutely something we’ve talked about in tech. You know, I remember when we had Nicole Sanchez on the show and, you know, she does diversity and inclusion consulting, and she talked about going into different companies to try to help them de-bias their hiring processes, and what she would find is that these companies would still ultimately want to hire people from the exact same backgrounds as always, right? So even though they said they didn’t want to be biased, they would want to hire people who went to the same schools that they had gone to, or who had worked the same companies that they had also worked at. So, what you end are with are these systems that are just circular, right? So, it’s the same people hiring the same people over and over again. And obviously, I think that that is bad—I think that if you’re listening to this show, you know where we stand on that—but what I really had to think about that I want to talk more about is the way that I’m also part of that system. And—you know—like you and me, right? We’ve actually even I think been a little bit part of that system on the show. So, for example, a while back we decided we wanted to bring somebody on to help us a few hours a week just to help us have our shit together and up our game, right? So, helping us share more cool stuff on social media and help us manage our inbox, and email guests—things like that. So, we were basically looking for a production coordinator and we ended up hiring someone awesome. Her name is Sarah Blackstock and shoutout to her, we love her. But she wasn’t someone from outside of our network. Katel, she was somebody that you already knew.
[3:06]
KL Yeah, and I totally agree with this and Sarah does this kind of work part-time with us at A Book Apart and I suggested to you that we should consider her because I thought, “damn, she’d be a great fit.” And she is a great fit. She’s awesome at managing social stuff and just totally vibes with us in terms of caring about—you know—our podcast, the same issues that we want to talk about, which is great. But it’s true, she got this gig because she was—you know—already in our orbit. And granted, it’s—you know—it’s not like a full-time thing, it’s—it’s a few hours a week, but we didn’t search for her.
SWB Yeah, and I guess what that fundamentally comes down to is that our show ends up still being—you know—created and produced by a bunch of white women. And all the time I am talking about how I want to make sure we’re elevating the voices of people who aren’t white, people who are different than us, and it’s really easy to rely on the same old, same old. And when you’re white, that ends up tending to be other white people. And so—you know—obviously, we’ve put effort into making sure we have diverse people on the show and I—and I think that we’ve done a reasonable job there—not always perfect, but I think that’s definitely something that you can see—you know—in the history that we have. But I think we need to acknowledge something here. And I think what we need to acknowledge is that by doing the thing that was easy, which was bringing in somebody who was already connected to us, who we knew would be a good fit, we weren’t able to think about the benefits of bringing in somebody from a different background and what that might bring to the show that would be different and equally as good or potentially even better. Who knows, right? Because it wasn’t even on our radar.
KL Yeah.
SWB So—you know—Sarah’s awesome and—and I don’t want to minimize that because she’s great and I love her and I want to keep her on the show, but I do feel like I just want to be honest about that. I don’t think I thought enough about what we might be missing out on by not casting a wider net. And so I feel like it’s important to talk about that publicly because if we keep growing, and I really hope that we do, I want to make sure that we’re doing better next time, that we’re really thinking about that and thinking about who we are going to and how we are going about those decisions. Because I think even at the small scale, they’re so crucial.
[5:09]
KL Yeah, this is something I think about a lot too when it comes to who we’re working with at A Book Apart. And I definitely don’t think we talk about it enough and we haven’t done a good enough job. And we need to be up front about that because who we work with is very public. It’s obvious if you look at who our authors are, who we’ve published—it’s a lot of white guys. So, I think when I realized this was a problem, and that was a couple of years ago, I started doing a lot of things differently and I—and I still—you know—there’s still work to do. But I thought about, I need to make our proposal submission process a lot more open and visible and push it out to—you know—to people who might not have seen it or might not have thought to contribute something. So, I published the outline and a form on our website and I wrote a blog post about it and I was hoping to share it with communities that would circulate it. And that’s still just small percentage of what I could be doing to do more outreach. I’m also looking actively for people who are speaking and writing about things that we might publish, and I think the challenge that I run into a lot is that I’m one person. So, I can get to a bunch of—or a couple of—conferences a year and sort of look for talent, but it’s time consuming, all of that takes time. And I think when I look at bringing on different voices, if I sign somebody today, their book might not come out for another year or two, so—you know—talking about that sort of moment I recognized this big problem, next year I think our lineup is maybe 90% women authors, which is so rad, I’m so proud of that. But that—that took a long time.
SWB Totally. I mean, it takes forever to even figure out when you’re talking to somebody if they really are ready to write a book and want to write a book badly enough to actually do it, and then want to invest the time in fleshing it out and then also even what their idea is. All that stuff just takes forever, it’s not—it’s nothing you can kind of short-shrift.
KL Right, exactly. And I—that’s one of my favorite parts of the process is working with folks to make that happen. And if you don’t do it in the beginning, it’s like you’re playing catch-up and trying to solve this much bigger problem later on.
[7:25]
SWB Yes. And that actually reminds me of something that Emily said in her interview, which I thought was really helpful and a really great conversation, where she was talking about setting up boundaries for building an inclusive community and a community that doesn’t tolerate harassment and she was like, “well, we haven’t had any problems with that yet, but I decided to write a code of conduct before we had problems.” And I think that’s exactly the right approach for so much of this, right? You have to build in that inclusion from the beginning because otherwise it’s really hard and slow to try to right that ship down the line, because you’re trying to undo stuff, or you’re in a defensive position. And so, it means that—you know—you really cannot start out by only thinking about desired outcomes. You can’t just think about all the positives, you have to think about the negatives, or you have to think about who you could be leaving out or who could be hurt by whatever it is that you’re doing. And so—you know—that’s something I think about when it comes back to us. It’s like we were thinking about all the positives of working with Sarah that we didn’t think about what we might be missing out on by not opening it up to other people. And I think that’s on us, and that’s something that I’m definitely going to be thinking about for a while.
KL Yeah, totally, me too. Well, Emily said so much inspiring stuff, do you want to take a listen?
SWB Yes. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out][8:38]
Sponsor: Harvest
SWB So, our friends at Harvest asked us if we could try using their time tracking software for something a little bit different. So, Katel, do you have any personal time problems we can solve?
KL I actually do. So, I’ve been knitting this blanket and I have actually been working on it for two years. And I can only seem to get myself to work on it in the winter and it’s just taking forever. I just counted and I have done 180 rows so far, and that means I have 252 more rows to complete the pattern.
SWB Oh my god, that sounds like so much! It’s going to be three more years!
KL Ugh, I know. [laughs] And I just can’t work on this for that long, I need to set a schedule and get it done or I’m going to give up.
SWB Okay, so how long does it take you to knit one row?
KL Well, I tracked my time working on it yesterday and it takes me about ten minutes.
SWB Okay, so you’ve got 2,520 minutes. So 2,520 divided by 60 is exactly 42 hours. So, okay. If you just made knitting this blanket your full-time job for a week—I mean, on top of your other full-time job and this podcast—you could get it done!
KL Right. Yeah…
SWB Okay, okay, so you’re not going to do that. Okay, so we have—we have to do some project planning. So, it is six weeks until January 1st. If you knit for seven hours a week until the end of the year, you could have this completely done. You could do this in an hour a day!
KL Ooh! Or like two episodes of the new Charmed every day. I think I can do that.
SWB I think you can definitely watch two episodes of Charmed. [laughs] But you’re going to run out of Charmed, right? How many episodes are there?
KL There are only a few.
SWB Oh, okay, what else is in your queue? Are you caught up on Riverdale?
KL Definitely gotta catch up on that. Um and I might need another show in the queue—if anyone has suggestions.
SWB Send them in! But also, this is pretty doable, right? Just an hour a night watching your teen dramas, knitting your rows, and you’ll get it done! So, all it took was some time tracking and some forecasting and now you can—you know—put it in your schedule and stick with it, which is exactly what Harvest tries to help you with. So, they’ve got this tool called Forecast where you can schedule teams out across projects and then track how booked up different people are or how free people are. And that way, you know just how much people can fit into their schedules or how many Charmed episodes they can watch. So, check it out at getharvest.com/forecast. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
[11:00]
Interview: Emily Best
KL Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed & Spark, a new crowdfunding and streaming platform that wants to change the way entertainment is made and distributed. She’s also an advocate for diversity in entertainment and a producer and director in her own right. Her current creative project is “Fuck Yes,” a web series about sexual consent. Uhh… fuck yes to that! Emily, welcome to No, You Go.
Emily Best Thank you so much for having me.
KL So, let’s start with Seed & Spark. Can you tell us about it and how it came to be?
EB Yeah. So, we built something that hasn’t been built before, which is that we’ve combined crowdfunding and subscription streaming into a single platform. So, I think rather than thinking of us like a crowdfunding platform, we’re more like a creative marketplace akin to Etsy, where we’ve built the tools for thousands of small businesses and content to power themselves. So, funding audience building and obviously being able to stream, so that audiences can watch stuff is all part and parcel of the same platform. In 2010, I was producing a play in New York City. It is—Hedda Gabler is to women actors what Hamlet is to male actors. It’s like a seminal role for a younger woman. And there aren’t many of those in theater, as there aren’t in film. We were producing this play—I never thought of myself as someone who would get into cinema, but my friend Caitlin Fitzgerald, who was playing the lead, she was on the up and up. She had done some really big movies and she was starting to sort of get into that role that young, beautiful women get into of auditioning for all these parts. And so she would come to set where we were working with this brilliant material and she would bring the sides for her auditions the next day and the parts that she was being asked to audition for were so insulting to women. And it was a wakeup call for me. All of a sudden I started thinking of all the movies I had ever watched and everything that was available to me and I was like, “where are my friendships? Where are the women I admire?” and they were nowhere to be found. [laughs] And so, that summer we started toying with the idea of making a movie that would represent female friendships the way that we understood them [laughs], right? And I didn’t know that this was a radical idea. So, the lessons that we would get from trying to make a movie that would eventually be called “Like the Water” were really the foundations of starting Seed & Spark.
[13:33]
KL That’s so awesome. When you were sort of first starting out, what was your experience as a first-time producer? And what was that beginning like?
EB Yeah. So, I got lied to is how it happened. Caitlin was making a movie that summer with Ed Burns, and it was 2010, right? So, there were some interesting things that had just happened. Canon made a camera that put a full-frame sensor in a photography camera and that turned it into a high-resolution video camera, and all of a sudden, high resolution video was accessible to everyone.
KL Yes, I remember that.
EB Right? So, this was like a boom. Well, Ed Burns was one of the first independent filmmakers to adopt this technology for his own purposes. Caitlin invited me to set one day to see what they were doing, and I knock on this apartment door in Tribeca, and I went and watched them shoot a scene. And it was the cinematographer just holding a 5D camera, and it was a guy with a boom, and Eddy was like rewriting on the fly, which I think is something that he does, and they shot the scene. And that was it! There was no crew, there were no lights, there was nothing! And so, Caitlin brings me to see this and she’s like, “we could make a movie, it’s so easy!” [KL & SWB laugh] So, Caitlin would go on to co-write a script with our friend Caroline Von Kuhn, who would go on to direct, that was the opposite of the kind of movie that you are able to make for $9,000 theatrically. So, Ed Burns was making a run-and-gun, mockumentary-style Manhattan kind of captured-in-the-streets film. Caitlin and Caroline wrote a slow, contemplative drama about a young journalist who goes home to her childhood town in Maine to write the eulogy for her best childhood friend who has died. And so once we got a cinematographer involved—a woman who is now one of my best friends, Eve Cohen—Eve Cohen was like, “you can’t shoot this movie the way he shot that movie.” And so, all of a sudden this $9,000 idea we thought we had was much larger in scope. And so now I was just producing a legit nearly $200,000 independent feature. And I got really lucky. My dad goes to his—I think it’s his 45th high school reunion and hooks up with a guy name Bar Potter who he went to high school with and turns out, Bar Potter has been in LA producing movies for 30 years. And Bar Potter basically took me under his wing and taught me how to produce movies, step by step. I was very lucky because he was an attorney first and contracts are really what a producer needs to be good at in the end. So, I got very, very lucky to have that education. But then when I started the fundraising process and I started talking to people about the kind of movie we wanted to make and the kind of women we wanted to put on screen that was different from anything that’s been done before, I found out that innovation is not a good pitch in movies actually. [laugh] They were like—they want to know that there’s a tried and true audience for this thing. It wasn’t that people were surprised that women weren’t represented, they were like, “yeah, but that’s because there’s no audience for it.” So, it was really hard to raise money. [laughs] We raised some money from let’s call it friends, family, and fools—affectionately. And then we—Caitlin got a big, residual check from her work in “It’s Complicated” and put some of that into the movie. And then we were still like $20,000 from what we needed to go and shoot the movie. And the interesting thing also about 2010, 2011 was this was the rise of crowdfunding out of the ashes out of the financial crisis. And so Kickstarter and Indiegogo were starting to become kind of all the rage in the filmmaker community. And our filmmaker friends knew very well about it, but our friends’ parents did not, right? [laughs] And we figured we needed to get to our friends’ parents if we were going to have any hope of raising any money. So, instead of running a crowdfunding campaign on a newfangled crowdfunding platform, we built a wedding registry of all of the items that we needed—the camera, and the car rentals, and—we were going to Maine in the summer—so the bug spray, and the sunscreen, and the food, and the makeup, and the coffee—you name it, right? We built this long wedding registry and we sent it everyone we knew and a really interesting thing happened when people could see what their participation was—you know—like “oh, I’m not just giving money so these girls can fuck off to Maine for the summer, we are participating in helping them achieve this thing that they want to achieve.” What was more surprising to me and the big revelation was, “okay, now I have got to sell this movie and get it distributed.” And I started talking to sales agents and distributors and they weren’t particularly interested in us until we told them about what we did and how many people had contributed and how at every screening we had anywhere in the world, including places where I was not aware we knew people, like Oaxaca and Romania, people who contributed to our campaign either showed up or sent their friends. And so it was this really powerful tool for building community around a project that was trying to do something differently. And this project was trying to do something differently in a year when I sat across from a sales agent, who after telling him about what this movie is about, it’s a—it’s really a friendship drama about a women discovering—you know—rediscovering herself after the death of her childhood friend, he said, “well, if you could put some lesbian erotica in it, I could sell it.”
KL [inhales sharply] Yeah…
EB He wasn’t talking about lesbian erotica for lesbians. He was trying to think of, how do we make this movie palatable for a male audience? And it was like a wakeup call moment of like, “oh, it’s that nobody—none of the middlemen actually know how to reach women, and so they assume they’re not a valuable audience.”
KL Yeah.
EB Right? And this would be the beginning of unravelling sort of a century of institutional bias. I realized that if you wanted to reach an audience that wasn’t being reached, there were literally structures in place to make sure you couldn’t do it around projects. And so I started ideating with a friend of mine about well, what if we made this tool for creating a wedding registry for your movie or show available to more filmmakers. And I was like, “well, it doesn’t have to be filmmakers, it could be, like, journalists and dancers and writers and whatever.” And the idea was that it would really help you gather and understand your audience, because my experience was when I went into the room with those third-party gatekeepers—if I knew about the audience and if I had data about the audience, then I could get them to listen to me and pay attention. And I was very interested in going from feeling like I had no power in any of those discussions to feeling like I had some power and authority to explain why my project had value and why my IP had value. And I think the biggest realization for me at that time was—you know—independent film quote-unquote for so long has been you have to independently finance, write, edit, produce, direct, sound design, color correct, etc. And then you have to wait to get picked by a festival and wait to get picked by a sales agent and wait to get picked by a distributor and I’m sorry, but what the fuck about that is independent?
[21:08]
KL [laughs] Yeah.
EB Like actually what happened is I woke up one day and I was like, independent filmmaking is dependent filmmaking, and the internet should make it possible for us to be actually independent, but there’s a lot of work to be done. And part of that work is deprogramming the filmmaker brain that what you have to do is work hard and if you’re just special enough, you’ll get picked. Because that I think is the thing that we’re working against the hardest.
KL Yeah, I feel that so much and I mean you went from filmmaking to also changing—you know—how entertainment is being created and funded, and it’s like changing who holds the power, which is really fucking incredible. What was the driving force behind that part of it?
EB Education. As we were going and testing this—like I took this wireframe to Sundance in 2012 and I talked to every filmmaker who would possibly talk to me. And the filmmakers, many of whom had crowdfunded at that point, said, “yeah, so these are the things that are hard about crowdfunding, but what’s really hard is distribution.” And boy did I not want to get into the distribution business, but it was shouting at me loud and clear that actually the only solution that’s going to be really valuable to filmmakers is an end-to-end one, where the work that you do up front to raise money and gather audience has to be meaningful to your ability to secure distribution, monetize distribution, pick a good path for distribution, etc. So, the beginning of the film business, there is no audience data because people are pushing nickels through a window, right? [laughs] They’re going to the nickelodeon literally, and so you don’t have any audience data because it’s just a cash business. And oh by the way, even if you did, there are Jim Crow laws and shit governing who can and can’t go into theaters, so you wouldn’t get audience—good audience data anyway. And then they put a box in your living room called a TV and then you can watch whatever you want and nobody really knows what or why. And then they start spying on you with your permission through Nielsen, right? And Nielsen started to deliver sort of aggregated data, like here’s how many people watched a thing. But they had to make a lot of assumptions about why or what motivated that watching behavior. And so, in absence of any real audience data, the film business grew its marketing capacity based around assumptions about what made stuff successful or not. All of the greenlighting that was happening in Hollywood and otherwise was backward-looking. This is what performed well before, and therefore this is what will perform well in the future. And then it got really interesting in the 2000s. Two things happened simultaneously: the internet hit the film business, the DVD market collapses almost overnight, and for unrelated reasons, the censorship rules lighten up in Russia and China. And so, Hollywood starts to see that if they can make movies that play well in China, that gives rise to the Hollywood mega-blockbuster. Because all of a sudden, they’re not making 500 million dollars on a movie, they can make a billion plus dollars on a movie. And that had never been true before. And ever since then, Hollywood has been making these super mega-movies for international audiences. And in the meantime, Netflix, who saw all of this coming, went to the studios and was like, “hey, I see what you’re doing in movies, we will pay you x plus one for those syndication deals. And just like the rest of your world, we will also not give you audience data.” And the studios were like, “fine, we’ve never had audience data, we don’t give a shit about audience data.” And that would set a precedent that the platforms like Netflix would get all of the audience data and the producers from the studios all the way down to little, old me trying to make my movie would get no audience data through distribution. The film business has basically been set up to completely segregate the producers and even the distributors of content from the data that would help them make smart and efficient marketing decisions on the internet, and it has created a massive power imbalance, worse than even when the studios were basically giant monopolies. Because without that data, filmmakers are completely dependent on the platforms to just get their movie out there, but they can’t compete with the platforms because they have no data transparency. And because Netflix got so much data and got so powerful, it’s driven a ton of consolidation in the last 24 months, right? You have AT&T buying Time Warner, which means Turner and HBO and everybody, and they’ve shut down FilmStruck because it’s not a billion dollar business, right? And that kind of consolidation has never ever been good for the independent creator. And ultimately, that was why I thought crowdfunding was so valuable because crowdfunding was the first time that filmmakers could go directly to their audiences and transact and get all of the data from those audiences and be in direct contact with them. And it continues to be one of the only ways that they can do that. And that’s why we then moved into the streaming space, is because we realized that there were no real streaming services being offered that also disintermediated the relationship between filmmaker and audience and would allow a savvy filmmaker or a savvy distributor to just open up Google Analytics and make some smart marketing decisions about how to drive more traffic to their projects.
[26:54]
KL So, then speaking of streaming, you’ve noted before that human curation versus feeds driven by algorithms was pretty critical to how Seed & Spark works for end users, which is different than what you see on all the other platforms. Why is that so important?
EB Well, first of all—fundamentally—algorithms don’t curate. Algorithms recommend, humans curate.
KL Right.
EB So, right now there is more audio/visual content out there than could ever possibly be watched by a single person, or even thousands of people, for the rest of their lives for all of time. So, algorithms, not dissimilar to what happens in your social media sphere, they tend to create a bit of a bubble. And my fear about algorithmic recommendation is really—the same thing that happens on Facebook or otherwise—is the echo chamber effect. So, I think what we’re all trying to do is build empathy and build bridges. And an algorithm is trying to recommend to me the thing that is most similar to the other things that I’ve watched, which creates a little echo chamber of I’m probably only all of a sudden getting recommended things that look like me. And I think why we make movies is to get us to recognize ourselves in the other. And that’s really why we’ve taken a human curation approach. So, you can tell us a little bit about how you’re feeling—like what your mood is or what kind of theme you’re interested in—and we will recommend for you no more than four movies at a time that fit kind of the thing that you’re interested in at the moment. And those are decided by people—how those things get structured and categorized and recommended are decided by people. We design playlists, so that if you’re interested in a certain topic or theme, you can move through a bunch of different movies that will give you really, really different experiences around that theme. Because ultimately, the point of storytelling has always been to connect us to each other and I think algorithms are actually very divisive, and that’s something that fundamentally we don’t want to build into our technology.
SWB Yes! And one of the things I think a lot about is just like the extreme examples, right? So, if you look at the way that say YouTube will send you toward more and more and more extreme content. So you can go really quic KL y from, let’s say, you watch a Jordan Peterson video—I don’t know if you’re familiar with him— EB Yep. Unfortunately.
SWB Unfortunately. A right-wing academic from Canada who says a lot of trash stuff about Muslims and women and a lot of other groups. But you might end up on a video from him, somebody links to it, or you Google something and end up on a video from him. And he’s fairly abhorrent—but, you know, if you start watching videos like that, there have been studies that show that within one or two clicks of watching related content, all of a sudden you’re on explicit propaganda videos that are anti-black, for example. And that kind of stuff, that algorithmic function is—algorithms just want to get to some sort of finite right answer, and so they’re just going to go further and further and further, And that’s—there’s no joy there. And what you’re describing is fundamentally about finding joy and connection and that’s so different.
[30:11]
EB That’s right. Computers are not going to help us do complicated human things like build empathy. I don’t think the internet will ever replace or supplant community building. Community building has to happen in communities. It doesn’t happen on the internet. Now, the internet can be a tool that aids different kinds of community building. And that’s why on the crowdfunding side—you know—the way that we went about building our business. You know, when we—[laughs] when we launched, I raised like $245,000 and then in the first two years, I think I raised a total of a million dollars. And during this time, IndieGoGo raised like 65 million dollars and Kickstarter raised—I don’t know—20 million dollars or something like that. There was just no way that I was ever going to compete with their resources. So, we went on the road—literally went on the road. I got in my car in LA and drove all the way across the country and all the way back and we taught workshops about how to help filmmakers use the tools of the internet to build and amplify the community-building efforts that they needed to do in order to build enough support and funding around their projects. And that turned into what is now a national education program. In 2018, we will teach 137 live workshops in person, not only for us to build human connection with them, but for them to build human connection with each other. And if you look at why do people choose Seed & Spark, it’s because—so, some of it is because they heard about us at one of these events, but more often than not, it’s that they heard about us from a friend who attended one of these events. And that I think is, to me, like, an example of the power of… there is stuff that you can only do in person, and you can’t build math functions to replace that.
SWB I love that so much. And we see a lot of people who will just try to plunk humans into the same digital space and call it a community, which is not actually a community. And so I really like calling out that a community means something. And so related to that, I wanted to ask you about something you wrote about recently, which is having a code of conduct for your community. So, in the technology industry, there has been lots of debate about codes of conduct—should we even have them and whether there’s even a safety problem we should be dealing with at all. So, I’m really curious how you decided what would be in the code of conduct for Seed & Spark, and how that came to be.
EB So, our community was increasingly demanding more ways to speak directly to one another. And separate from that, I had heard from my friend Eileen Carey, who is an entrepreneur, about some of the problems that corporations were facing with their Slacks—that harassment was happening in one-to-one communications in Slack channels, and there was no transparency for the corporation into those channels. And then also the reverse, that there is like a super function where you can go and look at people’s Slack messages and then their safety was being—anyway! There was like a bunch of issues around one-to-one communication that is enabled by a platform, either inside a company or inside a community. That it seemed to me—I didn’t want people to think that if you weren’t posting it publicly, but you were using our website to communicate with people in ways that would make them feel uncomfortable or shut them out or shut them down, that we wouldn’t have a say in that. I don’t subscribe to the notion that my job on a tech platform is to protect free speech, because free speech is protected in the Constitution. And all it means is that you can’t get arrested for your asshole opinion. But I don’t need to let you run around with your asshole opinion and shut people down on my website. I don’t have to tolerate that, right? [laughs] And since we’re trying to build a community that is about engagement, empathy, support, diversity, it means there can be lots of different kinds of opinions and that has to be okay and there has to be an environment that encourages lots of different kinds of opinions. Now, this is a sort of statement that an asshole will love to glom onto and be like, “well, you don’t like my conservative opinion,” and I was like, “no, I don’t like your racist opinion.” Because your racist opinion is fundamentally saying that other people’s opinions don’t belong there, and that is not the same. My opinion that you shouldn’t be able to shut people down is not the same thing as your opinion that other people shouldn’t be shut down and guess what? I get to fucking decide. So, if you’re a person who wants to use the internet to be terrible and shut people down, that’s fine. My corner of the internet is not for you. And so, we want to make sure that everybody feels like they have a pathway for notifying us if they feel like there is rude or harassing language or other ways that people use the internet to spam and be crappy. [laughs] We just want to make sure that people can feel like they have some control over their experience, and also I think that encourages it to be a safer place to disagree. And that’s—that to me is like, the code of conduct is about kicking the discussion level up a notch and demanding a little more from people than just whatever the fuck the first thing was you thought to say. And to be honest, we haven’t had these problems really before at all on the site at all, but I also just wanted to put a stake in the ground about why we don’t want to see them in the future either.
[36:07]
SWB Yeah, I love that because I think that part of the way that you prevent those problems is by putting your stake in the ground while you’re small enough for that to be a really easy thing to do, instead of waiting until you’re big and then pretending it’s hard.
EB For me, it was like we have to release the code of conduct in conjunction with these new functions. It can’t be as a reparative measure, it has to be as a proactive measure. When you work in diversity and inclusion generally speaking, you have to be thinking about being proactive and not reactive. Because reactive is where the discrimination often happens and it gets defensive. And we didn’t want to come from a defensive position, we really wanted to come from a really proactive and positive place of like, “hey guys, here’s what we’re trying to do here. As such, here are some things you shouldn’t do here because we’re trying to do this other thing here.” And then, because I am not a person who tries to, like, assault other people on the internet, you actually have to go through some mental exercises around, like, “what is a terrible thing that somebody could think to do that I wouldn’t normally think to do?” That part’s hard. So it is helpful to look at other codes of conduct, because other people will have thought of nefarious behaviors that didn’t occur to you.
SWB Yes, yes. So, I want to switch gears a bit and ask about something that I think is also pretty exciting and pretty important, which is your series “Fuck Yes,” which talks about consent. Can you tell us about that?
EB “Fuck Yes” is a web series, they are digital shorts about consent. And they’re really meant to be examples of what effectively navigating consent situations would look like. So, rather than being—I think so much of sex education is about what not do. These are really just vignettes about different kinds of couples navigating what to do. And we came together and sort of decided that a Fuck Yes episode is a couple that comes to sort of an awkward moment, and they navigate an awkward moment, and guess what happens? Nobody dies from awkward. And maybe it’s a little bit funny and sweet. And what happens after the awkward is it gets way sexier, because actually communication is such a core part of what makes sex sexy. It’s like we spend so much time as humans talking, and then most people get into the bedroom and just completely stop talking, as if that’s not allowed as part of the sexual experience. And that’s so weird if you actually think about it. Because talking is as much a part of what can make something sexy. And that’s sort of core to the episodes. They pretty much all have moments of humor to navigate the situations, and ultimately, the important thing is both parties arrive to something that feels like a fuck yes. So, not just a yes, but a fuck yes.
KL I love that and I think I speak for both of us—we are so excited about that and encourage everyone listening to check it out. So, let’s look into the future a little bit. What are you working on next and what are you excited about?
[39:17]
EB I’m excited there’s like 100 women going to Congress. I am working next on a documentary about the Equal Rights Amendment. It’s actually a fact that most people don’t know that we never passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Or rather, we passed the Equal Rights Amendment, but it’s never been ratified. We are one state away from ratification, but there are massive, massive legal challenges stacked up against it even once it does get ratified. And there are huge implications to the fact that women are not equally protected under the law. And it goes to reproductive rights, it goes to domestic violence, it goes to pregnancy discrimination, it goes to workplace and wage discrimination—all of these things and it’s in part because we don’t have language in the Constitution to protect us, so it’s been my latest obsession and that’s what we’re working on now.
SWB That sounds amazing.
KL So, is there someplace we can follow along to see that when it’s viewable?
EB Probably in the mid to late spring there will be a place where you can start to follow along, and our hope is to release something for the 100th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage in early 2020.
KL Amazing.
EB But nationally speaking, everybody should be following what’s happening in Virginia. Their legislative sessions opens on January I think 19 or so, and that is the next likeliest place to ratify, at which point 38 states will have ratified, and then shit starts to get really interesting.
KL That’s amazing.
SWB Emily, it has been so awesome to talk with you. We have one last question, which is just where can folks learn more about you, Seed & Spark, and everything you’re working on?
EB Well, I’m easy to find on Twitter @emilybest. Seed & Spark is seedandspark.com. I would really encourage everyone to go and subscribe. We are the only pay-what-you-can streaming service, meaning you can pay anywhere from $2–10 for the exact same service, whatever you can afford. And I believe we are the only streaming service on the planet right now that has 50/50 gender parity among the directors for the movies and shows on our site, and there’s a lot of really awesome stuff to watch.
KL Well, that sounds excellent. Thank you for sharing all of that and thank you so much for all of the incredible work you are doing. We are so excited about it and we are so excited to talk to you today. Seed & Spark is so cool—everyone, you should check it out right now, it’s at seedandspark.com. And thank you again. EB Thank you so much for having me.
SWB Yeah, fuck yes to all of this! [EB laughs][music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
[41:58]
Career Chat with Shopify
SWB Hey y’all, it’s career chat time with Shopify. This week we have Courtney Symons. She’s a lead writer working in Shopify’s Office of the CEO, and she’s got advice to help you take what you’re passionate about and turn it into the next phase of your career. Courtney, let’s hear it.
Courtney Symons I was on the marketing team at Shopify for four years, but my real love has always been writing. I made a point of having conversations with our CEO Tobi Lutke about my passion for writing. And without even realizing it, I planted a seed in his mind that created a connection: when he thought about writing, he thought about me. And when he decided he needed a writer, he offered me the job. I learned that when you want something, you need to throw it out to the universe. You can’t just wait for things to happen to you. Being bold about my ambitions has paved the way for so many incredible career opportunities.
SWB As someone who also loves writing and finds a way to make it part of everything I do, I love this. And I love that Shopify has so many roles I never would have expected. Maybe even one for you! Visit Shopify.com/careers to see what they’re hiring for today.
[43:03]
Fuck Yeah of the Week
KL So, we already talked about “Fuck Yes” with Emily, which was really awesome and we just have to fuck yeah to, but do we have anything else this week?
SWB Yeah, so I definitely have a fuck yeah to anything regarding consent, but I have something else that Emily talked about that I want to give a fuck yeah to, and that is female friendships. So, she is so right. Female friendships are not depicted enough in media, or at least not in their actual depth or in all of their glory. There is so much about female friendship that gets reduced down to like, oh we go to book club, or drink wine together, which like, maybe, but I think there’s so much more to it than that. And I think she’s totally right that we need to be able too see more of that and that there is an audience for that. And so first of all, fuck yeah to the female friendships I have, and particularly to you, Katel, you know? Our friendship on and off the show this year has just been so incredible to me.
KL I think the other day we realized that we were seeing each other like every other day. And maybe it’s not that often all the time, but it’s very frequent. And it’s not just because we’re friends and we like hanging out, because we obviously do. But I don’t know, I’m really excited about the show and a bunch of stuff we’re working on, and it really makes me happy to talk about it because when I moved to Philly a couple of years ago, I wasn’t sure what my friend network was going to be like, and I definitely wasn’t sure if I’d find a best friend here. And Sara, you are one of my soulmates. So if you get sick of me, I’m sorry, but I promise I will at least always bring donuts.
SWB Oh, I appreciate that, but I don’t think I’m going to get sick of you. I’ll probably get sick of the donuts first. [laughs]
KL [laughing] Yes!
SWB I also though want to give a fuck yeah to something else in this too, which is us being able to share our friendship on the show. Because, you know, I hope it starts to change in some small way the thing that Emily was talking about, right? That lack of depiction of female friendships. Because I think hearing us talk publicly about our relationship and sort of demonstrating the trust we feel for each other and the way that we’re really willing to be vulnerable with each other and be there for each other, demonstrating that to people and kind of putting it out there as like an awesome thing that we have, I think that that’s really, really great. And people need to hear stories about people being best fucking friends and working on badass projects together and celebrating that. So, I’m glad we’re telling them.
KL Ugh, fuck yeah to that!
SWB That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and it is produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Emily Best for being our guest today. And if you loved today’s show as much as we did, you should definitely make sure that you give us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever it is that you listen to your favorite shows, because your support helps us do what we do and grow this little baby into a grown-up podcast! Thanks for listening and see you next week. [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, and fades out]
The midterms are over (though the recounts and runoffs may not be). So we make sense of what happened—and what’s next—with Jenn Taylor-Skinner, the host of our fave new feminist political podcast, The Electorette.
Jenn tells us all about why she’s feeling pretty good about the midterms, how she plans to keep up the momentum into 2020, and why having a bilateral pulmonary embolism—yep, the same thing Serena Williams had—made her take a hard pivot into podcasting in 2017. Now she’s the full-time host of The Electorette—one of Teen Vogue’s picks for political podcasts, and a show you’ve gotta add to your rotation.
> I just really wanted a space where women could speak without being interrupted. And I had no idea how much I had a hunger for that myself. > —Jenn Taylor-Skinner, host, The Electorette
Follow Jenn | Follow The Electorette
On the agenda
- More than 100 women are headed to Congress—including the americans-congress-haaland-davids.html">first Native women, the first Muslim women, and the youngest women ever
- Florida voted to re-enfranchise more than a million people with felony convictions—and this is really freaking important
- Protecting voter rights and making sure no one ever has to wait six hours at the polls should be top priority (Jenn recommends Ari Berman’s book, us-the-ballot-by-ari-berman.html">Give Us the Ballot)
- White women gotta do better
- Maxine Waters remains iconic
Plus: we fucking love all your “I Voted” sticker selfies (here’s Sara’s!), your lil baby voter pics, and…you.
Sponsors
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Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher Harvest is the time tracking and project planning software I rely on to keep my business running smoothly. And you can rely on it too! With awesome features like Harvest Forecast, which helps you figure out who’s assigned to what and keep track of workload, and tons of reports that shine a light on the health of your projects, Harvest makes it easier to focus on getting things done, not busywork. Try it free at getharvest.com, and when you sign up for a paid account, use the code “noyougo” to save 50% off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, code “noyougo.” [intro music plays for 12 seconds]
Katel LeDû Hey everyone, I’m Katel.
SWB And I’m Sara!
KL And you’re listening to No, You Go, the show about building satisfying careers and businesses—
SWB —getting free of toxic bullshit—
KL —and living your best, feminist life at work.
SWB And as I’m sure all of you know, last week was a big week here in the US. We finally had the midterm elections, which I was on pins and needles about. So, we’re going to talk a little bit about that today—we’re going to talk about what happened, and what’s next. And to help us out, we invited Jenn Taylor-Skinner onto the show. Jenn’s the host of The Electorette, an intersectional, feminist podcast about politics. And she is going to tell us more about her perspective on the midterms, as well as what it was like to trade a career in tech for running a political podcast and how she keeps it all together even when she’s talking about heavy stuff all day like voter suppression and reproductive justice. So, first up, Katel, how was your election day?
KL It was good, I actually went in the middle of the day, which is a little uncharacteristic for me. I usually go first thing, I think you like to do that too. But I was lucky because there were no lines and it was pretty easy. I definitely was thinking about how that was absolutely not everyone’s experience, but I was extremely anxious the entire day and I think I had my shoulders up around my ears all night.
SWB Ugh, yes. I was also feeling very anxious. And I was so upset, you know, watching on Twitter when people were reporting six hour lines at their polling place and broken machines and I mean, it’s not that I think that Philadelphia’s polling locations run super smoothly. [KL laughs] You know, my husband was actually working the polls and he was like, “oh boy, these voting machines,” but we didn’t have those kinds of lines. And I think, I mean obviously that’s just a travesty, right? Voting should not take six hours. You should not have to be waiting through all of this mayhem, it’s just ridiculous. But, luckily that was not my personal experience, so I do like to go early. I meant to get there right at seven when they opened, but I was writing an email or something, so I got there at 7:25 and there was already a good line. And so as I’m shuffling up there, I see none other than Lizz Fiedler, who you might remember. She was a guest back in season one running for the PA legislature in my district, right? And she was out there welcoming voters at my polling location, which was rad.
[2:51]
KL That’s so awesome.
SWB Yeah, so I got to chat with Lizz and even though her candidacy at that point was a pretty sure thing, she was running unopposed because her district is 90% democrat [KL laughs]—for her the primary was the big deal. But even so, she was still feeling pretty nervous because she told me she had spent, you know, fifteen months putting everything she had into this campaign and she just—it’s not real until it’s real.
KL That is so cool, I remember going to the party she had when she won the nomination, which was amazing. And this is definitely the first time that I’ve been this close to folks who are actually running in these races. It’s very exciting.
SWB Yes. It was really awesome also that I ran into her outside of the polling place and then I got to literally walk inside and vote for her.
KL [laughing] Yeah.
SWB It was great. And so also like I said, my husband was working the polls and he was there at 6:15 in the morning—
KL Ugh.
SWB —wrapped up around 9pm and, you know, it was definitely quite a day. [KL laughs] But he noted that turnout was really high in Philly, which was also—that was encouraging to hear. So yeah, I mean it was a stressful day and a lot of—a lot of ups and downs, but you know, here we are.
KL So, obviously we didn’t win back the Senate and there were some awesome people running who didn’t win, but it’s been a few days and I think it’s important to talk about some of the bright spots. Like here in Pennsylvania, we are finally going to send some women to Washington. We mentioned before on the show that right now Pennsylvania has 18 reps in the house and none are women, which is changing in January, which is amazing. Four women will join the delegation: Mary Gay Scanlon, Madeleine Dean, Susan Wild and Chrissy Houlahan.
SWB That is so reassuring and even though four out of eighteen is [coughs] not enough [KL laughs], it’s still okay—that is so crucial, right? We need those voices. So, we don’t have the representation we need, but there are a lot of really great wins for women and I just want to recap a few of the ones that are so exciting because I know it can get lost a little bit as we are still facing all of the same problems we were facing before, as our political landscape is still a freaking nightmare. It can get a little lost, so let’s just remember some stuff. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from Minnesota and Michigan, they are going to be the first Muslim women to serve in Congress. And then you’ve got Sharice Davids from Kansas and Deb Haaland from New Mexico, who are going to become the first Native American women to serve in Congress. Veronica Escobar and Sylvia Garcia are the first Latinas that Texas has ever sent to Congress. Which like, come on, Texas?
KL I mean, seriously.
[5:20]
SWB And then in Massachusetts you’ve got them sending their very first Black woman to the House, that is Ayanna Pressley. And then also the youngest women ever were elected in to the House, so New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who obviously everybody was excited about during her primary upset, you know, she was a shoo-in during the election, her district was so strongly Democratic, so of course she won. But now, at 29 years old—she just turned 29—she’s the youngest women who has ever been elected to Congress.
KL That’s so rad.
SWB Yes! And then it’s not just her. Abby Finkenauer of Iowa is also 29, although she’s going to turn 30 in December, [KL laughs] so she’ll be 30 when she actually goes there.
KL That’s a pretty good birthday.
SWB Gosh, I know. Can you imagine? We didn’t quite hit this goal.
KL [laughing] Yeah.
SWB And then finally, one other person I wanted to mention—not a woman, but Jared Polis of Colorado will be the first openly gay governor, which I think is also pretty rad.
KL That is also amazing. So, this is all so encouraging and it’s really nice to pause and get excited about all the good news and, of course, we need to know that there is still so much to do.
SWB Yes, and I think that’s one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to Jenn from The Electorette because she’s just immersed in this stuff every single day and when we talked to her, she was feeling really positive. She was feeling good. You know, I thought it was so interesting to hear her talk about why she’s feeling positive because there’s a lot of reasons you could point to to not feel good, but she’s choosing to look at all of these encouraging signs and to focus in on, well, what are we going to do next and where do we focus our energy? And so I felt like we had a really good and nuanced discussion about that that I think you all are going to love. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
Sponsor: Care/of
SWB Care/of is a monthly subscription vitamin service that delivers completely personalized vitamin and supplement packs right to your door. Or I should say to my door because I just got my first Care/of shipment the other day and, Katel, I have to tell you it is pretty cool.
KL Ooh, wait, so how do you figure out what you get?
SWB Okay, so this is pretty neat. So, you go to takecareof.com and you do this online quiz thing and what it does is it asks you all about your habits and your goals. So, for example, you know I go to the gym a lot, so they’ll ask you about exercise, and if they—if you want vitamins that are going to help you with workout recovery. Or they’ll ask you if you want to sleep better or focus better. And so I took it and I was like “oh yeah, give me some of that good brain stuff.” [laughs]
[7:32]
KL Ughh. I could use that too.
SWB Seriously. So, okay, so then once you decide what you want, Care/of is going to ship your vitamins to you in these awesome, daily pill packs, so you have this personalized mix of stuff that is already organized for you. You don’t have to fuss with a bunch of bottles, I just grab a pack while I’m making coffee. Oh and there are vegetarian options and vegan options if that’s your jam and speciality items like prenatal and postnatal vitamins for all of you mommas-to-be out there. So, for 25% off your first month of personalized Care/of vitamins, visit takecareof.com and enter the promo code “nyg.” That’s 25% off your first month of vitamins, only at takecareof.com, promo code “nyg.” [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
Interview: Jenn Taylor-Skinner
SWB Jenn Taylor-Skinner is the creator and host of The Electorette, a podcast about politics, feminism and intersectionality where she interviews women who are leading causes and making change—from Black Lives Matter organizers to reproductive rights experts. And we invited Jenn here today to give us some expert perspective on the election and tell us a little bit more about her show and her story. Jenn, welcome to No, You Go. Jenn Taylor-Skinner Thank you, I’m excited to be here.
SWB First off, can you tell us a little bit about The Electorette?
JTS Yes. So, I started The Electorette probably a little over a year ago, so I guess at the end of the summer in 2017 or early fall in 2017. And it was actually somewhat of a long time coming because after Trump’s election and after Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, I felt that I needed to do something. And if I look back in my history, I think that I registered The Electorette domain one week after the election. And so it wasn’t until later after, I think the spring of 2017 where I—after I’d gone to The Women’s March in DC and I met a lot of brilliant, brilliant, passionate women there and I thought, “You know what? I just want to talk to women.” I—being in technology had spent most of my time around engineers and lots of male heavy teams, but after being at The Women’s March, there was so much energy there in DC and around the world basically that I just felt that I wanted more of that all of the time.
SWB And so now you’re doing that pretty much full time, right? What was that decision like to kind of jump in wholeheartedly?
[9:45]
JTS So, like I said, I registered the domain right after the election, but I wasn’t quite sure, you know, how we make these kind of big decisions in our head and in our heart, but we don’t quite jump in? [laughs] And sometimes it takes something big to push us? Well so my big thing—and like I said, I’ve never told this story—so my big thing was sometime around late spring in 2017, I had a bilateral pulmonary embolism, right? The same thing that Serena Williams had, you know, a clot in both lungs. And so long story as to how that happened and how that was diagnosed, but basically, it was pretty serious. And I realized that life was precious and it could end at any moment, you know. I am and I was a really healthy person, it was just kind of this medical fluke that this happened to me. I realized that I really needed to stop wasting my time in spaces where my voice wasn’t being elevated and it wasn’t being heard, and I really wanted to do this. So, I just made a hard pivot. I mean, I think after I got—I was released from the hospital, I think I went back to work and I resigned.
SWB Wow, that’s amazing.
KL Wow.
SWB So, what’s it been like this kind of first year, little over a year of the show, both for you personally and then also, you know, as you’ve been running this hyper political show focused on feminist issues in the run up to the midterms in the midst of a truly wild year?
JTS So, as soon as I started asking women to come on the show and to be interviewed, I had no idea how much energy there was to do something like this and how much hunger there was for women’s voices to be elevated. So, one of the goals that I had with The Electorette was to kind of counter the incorrect messaging out there around lots of things, around reproductive health, around gun violence and all of these things—but hear it from women. You know, again, this kind of goes back to my experience spending most of my career in technology and, you know, what happens when you work in technology when you’re on male-heavy teams, often women’s voices and their opinions aren’t heard. You get talked over—your ideas aren’t listened to. And I just really wanted a space where women could speak without being interrupted. And I had no idea how much I had a hunger for that myself.
SWB Yes! I think that’s something that me and Katel can definitely relate to on this show because I feel like every time we interview people, we’re just like, “how do we friend her?”
KL Yeah, we always want to hang out with [laughing] the people we talk to way more.
[12:01]
SWB Okay, so in addition to talking about making friends on podcasts, I also want to talk to you about the midterms themselves because a lot has happened and, you know, when our listeners are hearing this, it will be just about a week after election day and so, of course, everybody will know we didn’t take the Senate, we did gain control of the House, and we have a ton more women who are heading to Washington and also winning local elections. So, lots of cool stuff, but we also did see some really great progressive candidates get defeated and I’m wondering, how are you feeling now, kind of coming down from that?
JTS Maybe I’m being naive, but I feel really, really good. You know, I hadn’t really thought about or talked about The Women’s March in a little while now, but just talking to you now, I’m starting to remember in my heart and in my body what that felt like. And you know, that felt like it was 20 years ago, even though it’s only been two years ago. And I think when we were all together and we were marching and we were doing all of those things, I think that we had no idea what direction we were going to go. And [laughs]—I think that this was the first goalpost, right? This midterm election. Over 100 women are headed to Congress, and that’s a historic number. I think the total is 111 at this point, but 100 women—that has never happened in the history of Congress in over 200 years. I think it’s—Congress, it was 229 years ago I think, it was started. But yeah, I just feel really good about that. Just that number alone.
SWB Yeah, and I love that—that pausing to celebrate that, to celebrate those numbers and to celebrate a lot of the individual victories. Katel and I have been talking about things like—we’ve got Native American women who are going to be in Congress for the first time, we’ve got Muslim women going to be in Congress for the first time. And there’s a lot of fucking awesome stuff happening. But the other thing I really noticed and I think everyone really noticed about this particular election cycle was just how messed up the voting process itself is—like how many people were reporting six-hour waits in line and broken polling machines, how many polling places were being closed, often in particular communities, aka Black and Brown neighborhoods. Still dealing with all these issues around disenfranchisement and gerrymandering. And so one of the bright spots that I found in the midterms was the law in Florida that was restoring voting rights to people who have been convicted of a felony, which is like this one, small bright spot in a lot of examples of ways people are being disenfranchised to see an effort towards re-enfranchisement.
[14:29]
JTS That change in Florida is huge. It’s huge, right? So, if you think about that governmental race between Gillum and DeSantis there, just think about how that would have turned out had these people been able to vote, right? I mean, that’s just incredible. It’s an incredible change.
SWB Absolutely. It was over a million people who are going to regain eligibility and the margin between candidates in Florida was like—I don’t know—60 or 70 thousand votes, something like that. It was very small. I mean, you have to really think that a million potential new voters is a dramatic change to the landscape in Florida, and I think about that a lot. Like, you know, how do we start to make progress on ending voter suppression and protecting voting rights when it often can feel like such a self perpetuating cycle, right? Like we can’t get the people who need voting rights to have the voting rights that it would take for them to be able to vote to change the laws. [laughs]
JTS Well, it’s been a really terrible time in terms of voter suppression, but the thing that I’ve noticed from, you know, just within the past two years, is that voter suppression used to be an issue for the experts. You know, people who wrote wonky research papers, you know, people who kind of crunched the data and write books about it, but now it’s mainstream. You know, even when I started this podcast, like in 2017, I was reading the book by Ari Berman and I was reading, you know, some other books and I would talk to people and people weren’t really—the average person just wasn’t really aware of the bigness of voter suppression. And I think the fact that we had these really big superstars running for office like Stacey Abrams in Georgia and the governor’s race in Florida—the fact that we really had these people that we wanted to win and the fact that the possibility that they wouldn’t win due to voter suppression was really good for highlighting this as an issue. Now, everyone’s thinking about it and everyone’s talking about it. The only caveat that I have there is that—and it’s something that I need to research and I need to read about—but obviously, Brian Kemp, [laughs] Brian Kemp in Georgia is really good at voter suppression. He’s an expert. He’s a voter suppression expert, right? [laughs] He’s the Secretary of State and the only thing that I’m curious about is why there hasn’t been more focus on the Secretary of State races? I mean, to my understanding, I think that there were 27 seats open—Secretary of State seats open—that we could—could push for. And I don’t understand why that isn’t happening, but I guess overall, I’m just happy that we’re going in this direction where, you know, the whole country is watching what’s happening with voter suppression.
[16:58]
SWB And I think that this is the kind of conversation that we have to have a lot more of and—another conversation that I think we have to have a lot more of is the conversation about white women. [laughs] So, NBC news exit poll was finding that 50% of white women voted for Ted Cruz, which ughh can you imagine voting for Ted Cruz? [JTS laughs] But people keep doing it! And then in Georgia I know that there was a pretty similar story there and I’m a white woman and I was pretty sad to see that, but I also wasn’t really surprised. It’s well documented the way that a large percentage of White women will vote to uphold patriarchy and white supremacy. But I’m curious—you’re a Black woman, right? So, from your perspective—how do you make sense of the way that the other women that you want to speak to and whose voices you want to hear aren’t necessarily having your back?
JTS Yeah… well, I mean, I think you’re talking just generally, right? Like [laughs] I don’t know anyone—
SWB Hopefully not specifically! [laughs]
JTS I don’t know anyone personally, Black or White, who—who would have voted for Cruz. I mean [laughs & SWB laughs] that would be an instant unfriend. [all three laugh] I mean just—so you’re right about the numbers, and—you know—it makes me sad too. And I’m looking at them right now and you’re right that it was like 60% I think of White women who voted for Cruz and 72% of White men voted for Cruz. We shouldn’t let the white men off the hook, right? But yeah. So, those are the numbers and Black women, I think it stands at around 94 or 95% went for O’Rourke. So, obviously the thing is that for the party, for the Democratic Party, and I think that they are realizing this—where their base lies, right? You know, with Black women and let’s see—I don’t know what the number was for Latina women, I think it was around 65%. But people of color, right? They need to focus on the—on the needs and the issues that affect these communities and put effort and resources into getting out the vote there. I had one of my very first guests, Laura Briggs—she wrote a book about reproductive justice—and I asked that question too because I’m just really baffled and just trying to figure it out. And she had a really good analysis. And I think that as we’ve matured as an electorate, we’ve begun to better understand the psychology behind women who would vote for someone like Cruz or someone who would vote for—for Trump. So, the scare mongering on the right about the caravans and about MS–13 and about immigrants who rape and all this kind of stuff, that’s very intentional, right? So, they’re running on this fear narrative. And so the theory that she has is that White women have a lifestyle that they want to protect. You know, they want to protect their children, they want to protect their homes, they want to protect their safety and you can kind of see that I think mirrored in those viral videos like the ones with Barbecue Becky, where lots of women around the country are kind of trying to police the world of people they think are nefarious. And so, by the fact that conservatives are kind of scaring them to say “hey, there’s a lot more scary people out there and we’re going to help police them for you,” they’ve made this bargain that says “hey, you know what? If you protect me and you keep my environment safe from these nonexistent threats, I will in turn make the bargain to weaken my reproductive rights or all the other things that you want to take away from women generally.” And that was my question to her since she’s an expert on reproductive rights was reproductive rights benefit all women—Black women, White women, Latina women—they benefit all women, so why would they bargain that away? And so I thought her answer was really good and that was that they made this calculation—they made a calculation that it is worth it for us to give up a few rights so that you could protect me and my family and life essentially.
[20:32]
SWB You know, me and Katel were just talking earlier today about White feminism and probably not the people who would have voted for Ted Cruz, but the people who don’t necessarily want to question the role of race in their feminism or don’t necessarily want to think about what work they need to do to dismantle some of their own assumptions. And I think that often times it’s like that challenge feels really big. And I know you care a lot about intersectionality and touch on that constantly in your show. Is there anything that you’ve learned along the way or that you’ve found really helpful in sort of being able to reach across that—that chasm and get people to understand that we can’t really talk about feminism without talking about race?
JTS I think there’s a lot of guilt there. I think that people don’t like to confront their own complicity. I think one thing that happened to me personally was just a personal anecdote. There are two distant relatives that are having a conversation and people always ask me about politics and they were talking about some of the—the race issues that we’ve seen in the country. And actually, I should—I should give you a little more background because they weren’t Americans, right? But they were just talking about the race relations in America. And one was talking about, “well, you know, you have all of these people who come into your country and you know, they want handouts and whatever.” And then the other person wanting to bond with me or I guess take the side—the correct side—said, “no, that’s just racist, you’re racist.” [laughs] And so I noticed that the other person just shut down and so I said “well, you know”—and I lied—I actually said, “well, no, you’re not racist.” [laughs] And then I explained to them why that position was wrong and I gave them some books and then I gave them some facts and then they were open, so in that moment I kind of flipped someone to show empathy for the people that they were kind of demonizing, but by I guess lying a bit and just showing some empathy and seeing that moment when they were shutting down. Because I think that guilt shuts a lot of people down.
SWB Gosh, I mean that’s—I think that’s a great story and I think you’re right. Guilt shuts a lot of people down, but that’s also a lot of freaking work to put on you, right? To have to do that for them. And so I guess I think a lot of it too that I would hope that some of our listeners really hear, particularly our White listeners, which I suspect is probably the majority of them, they need to figure out how to get over some of those feelings of defensiveness themselves, right? That talking about race and saying the ways that we have learned to think about race and the beliefs that we have deeply embedded in ourselves about race as White people are not neutral. And sure, you don’t want to be racist, but that doesn’t mean that you are—your desire to not be racist or not be called a racist does not [laughing] absolve you from this and it’s—it’s okay to have difficult conversations about race and it’s not about being a bad person or a good person, it’s about saying, “I’m willing to do some work to talk about this problem.” And I would like to see more White women being able to do that without the labour of women of color coaxing them along, you know? So, obviously there’s been all this talk for months and months and months about a blue wave and then we had progressive candidates like Beto O’Rourke getting a lot of national attention. And when he didn’t win, you know, we had some of these major races not go the way we wanted. I’ve heard a lot of people in my feed or in my social circles expressing feelings of defeat. Now, you said earlier in our conversation that you were actually feeling really good, that you had a lot of positivity and you have a lot of reasons for that, you have a lot of bright spots you’re looking at. But I’m wondering, what would you tell somebody who is feeling that sense of defeat right now?
[23:58]
JTS Anyone who may be feeling a sense of defeat may have wanted to look closer at the—more closely at the numbers [laughs] before the midterms because the margins for those big races with—you know—Gillum in Florida and Beto O’Rourke in Texas and for Stacey Abrams—they were always really, really close, right? They didn’t have a lock on those races. So, I was always hoping that the media would highlight some of those other races that didn’t have celebrity candidates in front of them, right? And so, I’m not really sure. I think that it’s really hard to feel those big losses because these are superstars. Beto O’Rourke is a really big superstar and he’s not going anywhere. So, the thing is I think that I would tell those people to look at the amount of mobilization and energy that Beto O’Rourke was able to garner in Texas, right? That was a seat that was not supposed to be in play. And the fact that he had—that he was so close is—is really a positive, right? And Congress, winning back the House, which was just something we were supposed to win, which we were predicted to win—we only needed to flip 23 seats and I think as it stands, we’ve flipped—I mean, I think maybe 30 to 31 seats. So, that’s huge. I think that’s really huge. So, one of the other things I wanted to highlight—I wanted to go back to the number of women of color who—who won their seats. You talked that there were two Native American women making history going to Congress and there are two Muslim women going, Rashida Tlaib is one of them. You know, I actually heard Rashida Tlaib talk at the She the People Conference and that was in San Francisco a couple of months ago. You know and she is a firebrand. She is passionate. And if you—if you listen to all of these women who—who won last night, these aren’t just any women in politics, right? These women are fired up, they are passionate and they are—they’re running out of their outrage, they’re running out of frustration and anger. This is a different crop of women. I think you’re going to see a different Congress with these women seated.
SWB Well, so speaking of that, now we’ll have a majority of Democrats in the House in 2019. So, what are you hoping that they can focus on? Or what do you think should be the priority?
JTS First of all, we’re going to be running some really great committees. For instance, Maxine Waters, she’s going to head the Financial Services Committee. And you know what that means? [laughs] That means that she can subpoena Trump’s taxes. So, she can subpoena Trump’s taxes.
SWB Mmm! She has been waiting for this day.
JTS So, that’s the thing that’s foremost on my mind, I’m thinking about that, you know? And all of the committees, the investigative committees that we’re going to head.
[26:33]
SWB And what about for you personally? So, now that the midterms are over, what are you kind of planning to spend more of your political energy on and what’s on your 2019 agenda?
JTS You know, first of all, we’ve got a couple of runoffs possibly, right? I think before we started this conversation, there was a possibility that there would be a runoff in Georgia. And then also there is definitely going to be a runoff in Mississippi in the senate race with Mike Espy and Cindy Hyde-Smith. So, Mike Espy is the Democratic candidate and that’s a really important Senate seat. And also, there is an automatic recount being—being kicked off. So, there are a few really important seats that aren’t completely 100% lost and I guess my point is is that I have a feeling that Democrats might do what they have a tendency to do and have done in the past, which is to kind of quickly move on or to fill this sense of complacency or we need to keep this energy up and it needs to ratcheted up on into 2020. So, I’m hoping that if these runoffs happen, if the recounts happen, all of that energy that went into the races before midterms stays there to support these candidates, to get them over the finish line. The work isn’t done. So, for me, between now and 2019 and between now and 2020, I’m going to be focusing on doing my part to keep the energy up.
KL I actually wanted to ask you a couple more questions about going back to Electorette. You said you started the show because you wanted to build on a sense of community and strength and I just—I think that’s such an important idea and concept to carry through as we sort of move on from—from this very poignant moment. How has that piece of it evolved for you in context of the show?
JTS I wanted to elevate the voices of women without necessarily saying it, right? Because I don’t want to limit my audience to just women. So, what I was hoping to do was to get listeners generally—men, women, non-binary people—to get used to hearing expertise from women, right? Because so often—and I think there’s a study about this—so often, media outlets, they call on men more often as experts in comparison to how often they call on women. Right, so what I wanted to do was get the audience, my listeners, used to hearing facts and expertise from women. And it’s funny, just the other day, there was a list of top political podcasts to listen to from Teen Vogue and Electorette was number one, [laughs] so I was really happy about that. But the—the person who wrote the list was a man and I was really proud of that—that Electorette was at the top of his list for political podcasts to listen to. And that’s kind of what my goal has been. So, it isn’t—it is about elevating the voices of women and bringing women together, but it’s also about kind of nudging, gently nudging our allies to support us as well.
[29:16]
SWB Yeah, totally! I think about that a lot in the context of our show too. We obviously, you know, we talk to women, we also talk to non-binary folks, but we haven’t really had any men on the show and we’re very comfortable with that. But we do know that men listen, we get emails from them pretty regularly. We hear from men who are like “I didn’t know what I was missing in terms of having access to kind of deep conversations between women.” And for some men, they really crave that. Once they got that, they were like, “oh! This is a perspective that I just wasn’t hearing.”
JTS So one of the things I also try to do, not with just men but also with white women, because I do know that there are white women out there—all you have to do is look at the exit polls—who aren’t necessarily on board with the things that would kind of help us all, right? That issue of intersectionality, is that, like I said, I bring on experts because I figured if you hear the voice of an expert and they’re talking about facts and not necessarily opinion, people are more open. So I do have lots of people who come on to talk about race in this kind of factual historical context. One of the ones that is my favorite, is my conversation with Mehrsa Baradaran—she wrote the book The Color of Money, which talks about the history of black banks and you know, talks about the history of black wealth, and why blacks have less wealth than white Americans. And she goes on—and this book is really great, everyone should read it—and she talks about this from a factual point of view and from a historical point of view—everything that’s happened to get us to this point. So that’s one of the roles the podcast, is to talk about things that are really difficult for people to hear and kind of remove that personal finger-pointing element.
KL Makes a ton of sense and I feel like—I feel like that is—that is very true. One of my favorite parts of your Twitter bio is “kid embarrasser.” [JTS laughs & KL joins in] Can you tell us a little bit more about that first and basically what it’s like to be a parent while running Electorette, running this podcast and doing this full time.
JTS So, [laughs] dancing will do it. You know, calling him silly names like buttercup, that will do it. [laughs & KL laughs]
KL Oh gosh.
JTS But what is it like? So another thing that embarrasses him is when I play Electorette on the speakers—on the loudspeakers in the house. [laughs] Yeah, but you know, it’s fine and actually he is old enough to—to be able to be there in the room or be in the house when I’m doing a recording or you know.
KL So, when you took this full time and started doing a podcast full time, I mean that’s pretty different from having I guess a quote, unquote traditional jobby-job, as we like to say. What has been the difference there and what has been harder or easier?
JTS Well, you know, obviously managing your own schedule is—is a good part of it. Although, if you’ve worked in technology, the good thing about that is you do have a little bit more control of your schedule than you do if you were, you know, worked at some place where you have a retail job and you had to go specifically from 9 – 5 or like 8 – 4. So—but I did gain a lot of flexibility in that, right? Which is helpful with having a family. So, I do miss going to the office, I do miss being around a lot of other people, so I always try to get out when I’m not actually recording, get out—go to coffee shops or go to cafes and work. So, one of the things is that if you work by yourself or you work for yourself is that it can be easy to get pretty lonely and spend a day without talking to people.
SWB Jenn, we are getting close to being out of time, and so before we let you go, I want to hear a little bit about what’s next for The Electorette. What kinds of topics are you looking to explore next on the show, and what are you excited about?
JTS Yeah, you know. So, one of the—a couple of other episodes that I have coming up, which I’m really excited about: I talked to someone who did a long-term, maybe a year or so, research study on women in porn. And that one is going to be really interesting. So, [laughs] that one is coming up. And I’m doing one, I have one in the works, on street harassment and public harassment, and that’s going to be really great. And one of the things that I’ve started to do recently is to have multi-part episodes or episodes where there are more than one expert who are there to give a different perspective on a single topic. And I’m thinking about some other things—you know, how to bring in voices, not necessarily experts—people who write books or people who write podcasts or journalists or politicians—but women who do other things, everyday women. I think that their voices are important too—mothers and people who work and who aren’t necessarily in the business and getting their side of things. So, that’s something that I kind of have in the works as well. And I’m also going to do—try some solo episodes too, we’ll see how that goes.
SWB Well, based off of everything you said today, I think they’re going to go really well. So, thank you so much for telling us all about your story and helping us make sense of the midterms a little bit more. So, our last question for you—where can folks get more Jenn in their lives?
JTS You can go to electorette.com and I am all over Twitter, of course. [laughs] “JTaylorSkinner”—that’s my Twitter handle and I am obsessed with Twitter, so if you want Jenn, you can get a saturation of Jenn on Twitter.
SWB Well, awesome. Thank you so much for being here and everyone, go check out The Electorette. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
Sponsor: Shopify
KL Time for a break from politics to talk about jobs! This week, Shopify’s director of talent acquisition, Anna Lambert, brings us some much needed advice for anyone looking to hire. Let’s here what Anna has got to say.
Anna Lambert Don’t fall into the “done it before” trap. So many employers look for people who have “done it before.” For example, I want a developer who has built an commerce product using Ruby on Rails. I mean, sometimes you’ll want that specific experience, but that shouldn’t be your default. You will miss out on amazing people who bring diverse experiences that may make them great in the role. So, learn how to assess talent without relying on them having done the specific job. The magic comes when teams are made up of people with varying experiences. They may be self taught or come from a completely different industry. Job seekers—learn how to translate what you’ve done to other industries, disciplines, and problems. You don’t have to have done it before, but you’ll need to show how you’ll learn and what you’ll bring to a new team.
KL I love Anna’s advice because it’s one way that more diverse candidates can make it through the process. So, if that sounds good to you, you should talk to Shopify. Visit shopify.com/careers to see all their open positions. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
[35:35]
Fuck Yeah of the Week
SWB Okay, so I feel like we already had a bunch of fuck yeahs earlier in this episode. We said fuck yeah to so many awesome candidates who are breaking boundaries and making waves—all these people who are firsts and onlys. But do we have any other fuck yeahs before we go today?
KL I definitely think I have one and that is babies wearing “I Voted” stickers. [laughing] Something that made me smile a lot on election day was flipping through Instagram, and I think I was scrolling through and actually saw three photos in a row of babies I know—and I know some cute-ass babies—and they were all wearing their parents’—I presume their parents’—“I Voted” stickers, and it was just so sweet. There were also a few photos of dogs wearing stickers on their floofy heads and butts and that was also great.
SWB I also love baby photos in general on Instagram, but I especially love the baby voters. I mean, I don’t think the babies were making the voting decisions, but—I don’t know—babies would probably make better decisions than what a lot of America seems to be making. [laughs] Okay, so I love the voter stickers in general because I feel like they just really normalize voting and they kind of just show you how many people in your community are out there voting. You know, I saw somebody complain about them online saying they felt performative and that taking a photo of yourself after having voted was like wanting to be perceived as doing good without necessarily being very politically engaged. And I get that—maybe some people literally don’t do anything except go vote once a year and put a sticker on and take a selfie, but still I think that’s still—it’s still nice to see those pictures because I think it’s great to normalize voting as a part of people’s lives and a thing that we do and participate in and that everybody—all of your friends, all of your family, everybody is doing it. And so it’s—it’s nice to visually see that, it’s nice to see everyone voting. The other thing I loved was just all of the different voting stickers.
KL I know! That was really cool, seeing which ones were different from state to state.
SWB And which ones I was jealous of—
KL Yes.
SWB —we need some better designed ones in Pennsylvania.
KL New York has a really cool one.
SWB They’re super cool, yeah! Okay, so fuck yeah to everyone who is out there celebrating their vote and then also fuck yeah to doing everything we can to make sure everyone actually has the right and the ability and the access to be able to vote in the future because that needs to change.
KL Fuck yeah!
SWB And that’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and it is produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thank you so much to Jenn Taylor-Skinner for being our guest today and thank you to everybody for listening. If you like the show, please don’t forget to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts because that really helps us spread the word. And we will see you again next week! [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, and fades out]
How do you decide when to take a huge leap in your career? What happens when your therapist thinks leaving your cushy tech job is a terrible idea—but you do it anyway? Googler-turned-comedian Sarah Cooper joins us to talk about writing satire, redefining success, and making men mad along the way.
Sarah’s latest book is called How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings: Non-Threatening Leadership Strategies for Women, and it’s out today (we got a preview copy, and it’s so great). She also runs The Cooper Review, a wildly popular satirical blog about business culture, and in 2016, her first book, 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, was a bestseller.
We love Sarah because she’s funny as hell, and also incredibly open about what it’s like to trade a career in tech for the sometimes lonely—but also wildly satisfying—world of comedy.
> I have so many outlets to discover myself and who I really am, which is something that I think is just really important for a life, you know? To know you left everything on the table and you told every story that you wanted to tell and you let everyone know who you are—and you didn’t leave this world without telling everybody that. > > —Sarah Cooper, comedian and author of How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings
She tells us about:
- Leaving a career at Google to perform standup and write satire all day
- What happens when people think your satire is serious
- How being a Jamaican immigrant taught her to observe people so she could fit in
- The pros and cons of being a “people-pleaser”—and how to let go of that when it stops serving you
- How keeping a “best self journal” helps her stay focused while working alone
Also in this episode
Sara and Katel talk about the big career choices they’ve made, and how they’ve built structures and support systems to make those careers work for them. Deets:
- Sara celebrates seven whole years without a traditional “jobby-job,” and thinks back on Cindy Gallop’s advice that working for yourself is the least risky thing you can do
- Katel tells us why she took a pay cut to run A Book Apart—and how she handles the lonely parts of working, well, alone
- We both definitely wear fancy blazers at all times > I remember being so excited to work with a much smaller team and fewer people… I was like, “oh my gosh, this is going to be so great, it’s going to be just a few people, it’s going to be really nimble.” And then I realized that most of the time it was really just going to be me working kind of by myself. And it was a lot harder than I expected because there was essentially no structure unless I made it, and it took me at least a good year to kind of figure out how I was going to work, how I was going to be productive, whether I even liked that way of working enough to keep doing it. > > — Katel on trading corporate life for running an indie publishing company
Plus:
- Our friends at Harvest want to make sure you know about Graywolf Press and 826 National.
- Fuck yeah for rock ‘n’ roll, women musicians, mental health, and our fave live show in fooooorever: Courtney Barnett.
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher [Ad spot] Thanks for Harvest to being our sponsor today—and for making awesome project management and time tracking tools that I rely on to keep my business running. I think you’ll love them too. They offer all kinds of reports that help you shine a light on the health of your projects, and they make it easy to track invoices and payments. Try it free at getharvest.com, and when you sign up for a paid account, you can use the code “noyougo” to save 50% off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, offer code “noyougo.” [intro music plays for 12 seconds]
SWB Hey everyone, I’m Sara!
Katel LeDû And I’m Katel.
SWB And you’re listening to No, You Go, the show about building satisfying careers and businesses—
KL —getting free of toxic bullshit—
SWB —and living your best feminist life at work.
KL “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings” is the title of our new favorite book, and it’s out today. It’s written by our guest, Sarah Cooper, and we are so pumped to talk with her today. Okay, along with some extremely funny, satirical advice for getting by in the workforce, Sarah gets real about why she wrote the book, and what happens when people don’t understand that it’s satire. And how she managed a massive change in her own work life, going from being a manager at Google to a full-time comedian and writer.
SWB Yes, I was super interested in that, and I was hoping we could talk more about that transition piece. Because companies like Google are so designed to really keep you there in a lot of ways, right? You don’t just get fed at work, you also get dry cleaning and haircuts.
KL So weird.
SWB It’s super weird. [KL laughs] But they’re very—you know—once you’re in them, they can be very cushy places to be—
KL Yeah.
SWB —and they also oftentimes will feel like you’re doing exciting work, and you’re paid really well, and so there’s a lot of stuff that kind of keeps people there. I have a friend who recently mentioned that—you know—she’s been at Google a long time and the idea of leaving is really hard for her. So, it’s interesting to hear Sarah talk about leaving somewhere like Google to do something that was so uncertain and so risky, right? Like a career in comedy and writing? That’s such a dramatic pivot.
KL Yeah, I know. It is—it’s so fascinating and I loved listening to her story. But, Sara, you’ve been working for yourself for as long as I’ve known you, but that wasn’t always the case. That hasn’t been your whole career, you made a big moving from working at a traditional—you know—jobby-job to go out on your own in 2011, right?
SWB Yeah, actually October has been my seven-year working-for-myself anniversary!
KL Congrats!
[2:27]
SWB Thank you. It has been pretty great for me. I think that it’s definitely something that has suited me. But—you know—what’s really different about it compared to somebody like Sarah is that I don’t feel like I’ve taken such massive shifts. I feel like my changes have been a little more bit by bit over time. I wasn’t in a big, fancy, fully catered office with free haircuts and massages; [KL laughs] I was working at an agency with 40 people, which means I was working a lot with clients. And so my shift from working with clients at an agency to working for myself with clients was smaller. And the kind of work was similar. But I do think that over the past seven years, I’ve made more and more of those little incremental shifts, or kind of mini-pivots or whatever you want to call them, where I do feel like at this point my work has evolved so much—both in the kinds of clients I work with, the complexity of the projects, I definitely charge more [KL laughs]—lots of—lots of good stuff.
KL [laughing] Yep!
SWB But also just the makeup of my days. My day is not mostly clients, it’s—maybe that’s a third of my time. And a lot of my time is spent on things like speaking at events, writing books, doing workshops and more facilitation versus sitting down and doing the work for clients. And—you know—also running this podcast, which does take a bunch of time. And maybe someday we’ll make a bunch of money. And so I feel like on the one hand, I have quote-unquote the same business I had seven years ago, and then on the other hand, on a day-to-day basis it looks really different. And my goals have changed too. That’s one of the things I think is really interesting talking to somebody like Sarah is hearing a really different perspective on leaving a traditional kind of job and moving into something else.
KL Yeah, completely. And I mean to me, and I think a lot of people, the idea of going solo and leaving the perceived—you know—quote unquote safety of a traditional job, has seemed kind of scary. I mean, when you initially did that, what did that sort of first leap look like? Did you do anything specific to prepare—you know—financially, [laughs] emotionally, mentally?
SWB Yeah, so—you know—I think about something Cindy Gallop said to us in her interview a couple of episodes ago where she said that in—in a lot of ways, relying on another company to take care of you is the riskiest thing you can do, and that relying on yourself, in some ways, is less risky. And I think that that was something I kind of had come to on my own back then, because I felt like the company I was at—you know—didn’t value me for the reasons that I wanted to be valued. I mean I think that they did try to value me because I was doing a lot for them and they did recognize that, but it wasn’t in the way that I wanted and it wasn’t for the kind of work I wanted necessarily. And so I felt like looking out for myself was in some ways going to be better for me. What I did, though, to prepare for leaving, I did—you know—I had some savings, which was great. At the time, one of the things that was really helpful was that my expenses were very low. My husband was in graduate school, which means that he made almost no money. He was a teaching assistant while he was in graduate school, so he had a very small stipend. So it wasn’t as if I could rely on his income, but what it did mean is that we had chosen to rent a little mini-house behind a house in a neighborhood that was affordable near the university. And so we had a low rent and we didn’t have a lot of financial commitments—we didn’t have kids, we didn’t have new cars with payments or anything like that, because we had been kind of set up to live a lifestyle that made sense for a graduate student, even though I had a real job with a substantial income. So, that made it so that the—it wasn’t that I had this huge—you know—amount of financial cushion, but it did mean that the amount of money I needed to not get evicted and to keep the lights on wasn’t that high. So, one of the things that I did was I set some goals around finances. I really wanted to—I wanted to meet or exceed the income I had been making at the agency, not just because I wanted to have the same amount of money, but also because I wanted to feel like it was a way of proving to myself and maybe to the world that what I wanted to do was a real and legitimate thing that was worth paying for, and that I didn’t have to do it on somebody else’s terms. But I also thought about, “what is the minimum amount of money that I need on a monthly basis to not have life fall apart?” And when I realized that it just wasn’t that much, I thought, you know, I can scrape that together. If things are lean here and there, I can scrape that together. And that gave me a lot of confidence, so that was helpful. The other thing that I did is I knew that the company I was leaving really relied on me and so—they were going through a time of flux also, so I knew that they could really use my help for longer. So, what I did was I proposed to them that I would contract with them for a couple of months—I think three months or so I contracted with them—and so that gave me some time to kind of wean off of having that salary. And it gave them some time to get over me leaving and to have a—you know—different plan in place. And during that time I had that consistent money coming in from them, I did more of that reaching out to people in my network. And I knew people who worked at different agencies or different companies who I had maybe worked with in the past, and so they knew that it was helpful to work with somebody like me. And none of their companies had content strategy teams at the time, and so they would often bring me in and I was like the first content strategist they’d worked with on a project [laughing]. All of them now have whole content strategy departments, so I feel like they’ve kind of gotten the memo—and I don’t want to take sole credit for that by any means, that’s something that’s sort of shifted in a lot of people’s industries in general. But I think what that was really helpful, too, was that I looked at, “who do I know who is out there working in other companies I’d like to work with who has experience and can speak to the fact that if you have somebody with this skillset working on a project, you can do much better work, you can get things done much more effectively?”
[8:12]
KL Yeah. That’s so smart that you did that. And just when you think about leaving something and trying something new, it’s—you know—I think you are focused on, what does that actual moment look like when I stop doing the old thing and start doing the new thing? And the smart thing is to actually do a lot of prep work before that and kind of take stock of where you’re working, who you’re working with, and figure out where those avenues can lead to, where they can develop into something for your new project and, I don’t know, I think that… you know, that’s really helpful to hear.
SWB Yeah, I mean I don’t know that I was that planned about it, [laughs & KL laughs] but I definitely did try to do that. And I also—I’m trying to be, you know, pretty honest about some of the financial pieces of it. Because I talk to people who are often, you know, wanting to take a risk like this and the risks for them might look totally different. And I never want to, you know, lie about that, or make it seem like that’s not a big financial risk. I didn’t—like I said—I didn’t have this big cushion, but I did have relatively low risk at the time, and that’s not going to be true if somebody has, let’s say, small kids at home, or already has a mortgage, and all of your calculations have to look different. And I think that one of the things that I hear a lot of is this sort of idea that, “just jump in, do what you love, take the leap!” without talking about how often people who do that successfully had like—I don’t know—family money or a spouse with a high, stable income or whatever, right? All of these other things that made that possible for them. And so I just think it’s a disservice to not be honest about those things.
KL Yeah, it totally is. And I’ve talked about this before—I took a pay cut when I left National Geographic to come to A Book Apart, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I hadn’t already been established in my career, if I hadn’t already—you know—moved up the management ladder and was making a certain salary that had allowed me to save. I was also partnered with someone who had a full-time job and who we had a little bit of a buffer, so I could do that and make a change.
SWB So, what was it about that opportunity at A Book Apart that made you want it so badly you were willing to take a pay cut for it? Because working at a small company, it is riskier—you know—you said you got paid substantially less, there are not fancy offices, there are no free haircuts at A Book Apart.
[10:38]
KL [laughing] No, not yet.
SWB What made that feel worth it for you?
KL I mean, I knew it was going to be a huge opportunity and—you know—I was looking for a new challenge and that it certainly was. I knew I was going to be able to work with a whole new community of people and, you know, people doing work that I really admired and that I really wanted to be involved in. And I knew I’d be able to grow in a way that I hadn’t really been able to grow before. I was going to be able to grow my skill set, which was exciting, but also scary.
SWB What do you mean? What were some of the things that you feel like you saw in that role that you were like “ooh yeah, I want to be able to do that”?
KL I saw a chance to be a part of building something that was more or less kind of in its—you know—beginning phases. And that was super exciting. But there was also an opening to basically develop the role as I grew into it, and I’d never experienced that before. You know, I think I’d always gone into a job being like, “here is the list of responsibilities and this is more or less it.” It’s cut and dry. And this was an opportunity that I hadn’t had before where I was making it what it was, which was super cool.
SWB So, was that ever hard though? Because I think one of the big shifts there you’re describing is going from a pretty structured environment to a really unstructured environment without, you know, having like, “here’s the boundaries of what your job is and here’s, you know, who is on your team.” And you don’t have a set of colleagues that work full-time with you, it’s like people juggling multiple kind of side gigs, and A Book Apart is often one of their side gigs. Was that hard?
KL Yeah! I remember being so excited to work with a much smaller team and fewer people, because I think I was so used to working with such large teams and so many people that it felt like it was hard to really move things forward. So all of a sudden I was like, “oh my gosh, this is going to be so great, it’s going to be—you know—just a few people, it’s going to be really nimble.” And then I realized that most of the time it was really just going to be me [SWB laughs] working kind of by myself. And it was a lot harder than I expected because there was essentially no structure unless I made it, and it took me at least a good year to kind of figure out how I was going to work, how I was going to be productive, whether I even liked that way of working enough to keep doing it. And I think now it would be really hard for me to go back to a traditional office environment at least. I mean, I have a friend who has been freelancing for almost five years and they’re just realizing that it does not work for them. They need—they are realizing that they need to go to a place and do the work and then leave that place. And I very much understand that.
[13:23]
SWB Totally, yeah. I can relate to that feeling, but I’ve never quite sunk into it. I guess I’ve had moments where I feel like that, and then I’m like, “no, okay, I need to add some structure, I need to shift how I, you know, how I do things.” You know like people who talk about how they need to get dressed for the day or whatever before they start work? I’m not one of those people, but there are things that—you know—that I think about. I don’t do client work at nights or on the weekends. I do end up doing work at night or on the weekends, if I’m going to be honest with you. People sometimes ask me, “how do you do all the things that you do?” And I’m like, “I like to work and I don’t mind doing it in the odd hours.” But I don’t do client work then. I work on the podcast maybe.
KL Right.
SWB But to me, setting some of those boundaries like not doing client work and not replying to client emails late—that’s important and that’s something where I feel like it keeps it on my terms.
KL Yeah, totally. It’s like you sort of—you have to have a little bit of a sense of office hours for there to be some kind of structure. Even if it’s only in your head and—because people, a lot of people don’t know that you aren’t—in a quote, unquote office every day doing that work.
SWB I’m in a very fancy office at all times. [KL laughs]
KL You are.
SWB And I am definitely dressed up in a very fancy business outfit and I’m wearing a blazer.
KL At all times.
SWB At all times.
KL Yeah.
SWB Literally always. [KL laughs]
KL I mean, I think about that idea of sort of working from wherever and at first again, how that idea was so exciting, but how it can become such a slippery slope. For example, on one hand I was able to plan and host that bachelorette weekend that we talked about a little while back because I could handle all the logistics leading up to it—you know—in and around my daily schedule. But when the weekend came, I also worked a little during that weekend because I could and I had a lot I need and want to get done. And to your point, it’s sort of like I love a lot of the work that I do and that’s—that’s okay, that’s part of my life, but I do need to remember that I want to set some boundaries. So, it’s great to have a lot of flexibility and freedom, as long as you kind of keep an eye on where the lines are.
[15:30]
SWB Yeah! And I let myself redraw the lines. They don’t have to be consistent all the time. But to always be thinking about “okay, I am redrawing this line right now and doing a lot of work stuff during a different—a weird time, but that might not be forever, I don’t want that being normal.” I like it though. You know, I get to do things like add a few days of vacation time when I’m taking a business trip, right? So, I go to the West Coast to go to a conference and I tack on a few days and I go see my nieces in Oregon. That’s awesome, I love being able to do that and I just have to juggle other things around it, right? I don’t have to take PTO, I don’t have to budget for it that way, I just have to juggle everything else around. I also love that I can do things like schedule appointments or run errands at like 2pm on a Tuesday and that again, I just have to be able to juggle everything else around it, which is why sometimes—you know—I do stuff in the evening that I would otherwise get done during the work day, but it means that I was able to do stuff during the work day that otherwise would be a nightmare like going to IKEA on a weekend!
KL [laughing] Yes!
SWB You know? And I feel like those are good tradeoffs for me, but I always want to take stock of what those things are.
KL Yeah. Something Sarah mentioned was that work can be lonely. Were you lonely at first when you started this—you know—this endeavor, what you’re doing now? Or do you get lonely now ever?
SWB So, I don’t tend to get lonely most of the time. Sometimes in small moments, but never in a bigger way. And I think one of the reasons for that is that I know that I’m pretty social and early on, I connected with a lot of people who were doing some of the same stuff that I did. So I remember in 2011 when I first left my job, a friend started a really small little Google group for people who were doing freelance or consultancy type work in content strategy. And it was only five or six people—eight people, I can’t remember. But that was really helpful at the beginning where I felt like “oh okay, I can chat with people who are sort of facing some of the same stuff as me or I can ask questions—what do your contracts even look like? What am I doing? What’s going on?” Very basic questions. [laughs] And that group kind of petered out—sometimes those kinds of groups peter out, but it was valuable to me in the moment. And then in 2013, I helped plan a little retreat with fifteen or twenty people running small consultancies and we came out of that and started a Slack group a little while later—I think actually a year later we turned it into a Slack group—and that’s still going and that’s—it’s a place I can bounce ideas off of, ask questions. And it’s also people I just really trust, which has been helpful. The other thing that I think has really prevented me from being lonely is that I do partner with people on projects a lot and I partner with you on a ton of stuff now, Katel. So, one thing that I’ve noticed is that I don’t work on A Book Apart and you don’t work on my client projects or come with me when I speak at conferences usually, but I feel like I have kind of a work partner where you kind of know what’s going on with my work and I know what’s going on with your work and we have enough work we’re doing together that—I don’t know—it feels like a colleague!
[18:29]
KL Ahhh, I love that so much! I agree, I feel the same way and it’s been such a cool thing to have developed where it’s like all of a sudden if we want to have a co-working day, we could do that.
SWB Totally! Plus we get to talk to so many fucking awesome people together, which is something that I really, really love. So, why don’t we do that?
KL Let’s do it. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
Sponsor: Harvest
KL [Ad spot] So, before we talk to Sarah, we’ve got to talk about something actually pretty related to her work—reading, writing, and creativity. Our friends at Harvest told us those things are super important to them, especially when it comes to making sure more diverse voices have a chance to share their ideas. So, Harvest has pledged to spend 4% of its profits each year to causes that help more people from all backgrounds read, write, and get creative. Two groups they support that you might want to check out are 826 National, which supports seven writing and tutoring centers for youth across the country, helping them write with confidence and originality. Check them out at 826national.org. And Graywolf Press, a nonprofit literary publisher that champions books from underrepresented voices. They’re at graywolfpress.org.
SWB I love this so much because I think about all the incredible writers we’ve had on the show so far. Like Sarah, of course, you’re going to hear from her in just a second, or Keah Brown from last week, or Nichole Chung a few weeks ago. And then, of course, Carmen Maria Machado back in the spring—you know—her book was actually published by Graywolf Press! And I think about how—you know—the world just needs more writers like them and organizations like 826 and Graywolf are really crucial to making that happen. So I love that we’re able to spotlight them and—you know—writing and creativity are so important for everyone. So, even if you’re not going to be a capital-W writer, Harvest has noted that as a remote company with people in a lot of different time zones, they rely on written words to get things done and collaborate and that reading and writing skills make it possible for them to do that and make them successful. So, they want to support more people in gaining them and so do we. So thanks, Harvest, for caring about literacy and creativity and check out 826 National and Graywolf Press for more. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
Interview: Sarah Cooper
SWB Sarah Cooper is a comedian, writer, and self-proclaimed trash-talker based in New York City. She runs thecooperreview.com, a wildly popular satirical blog about business culture, and her first book, 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, was a bestseller. Now she has a new book. It’s called How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings and I am laugh-crying already. Sarah, welcome to No, You Go. [21:02]
Sarah Cooper Thank you so much.
SWB So, Sarah, we were reading your new book—Katel and I were actually just talking about it—and we really were laugh-crying. In chapter one, already I was losing it. I was reading the section where you—you started having all these illustrations of hairstyles to avoid and let me just describe this for readers who haven’t been able to read the book yet. It’s this illustration series where it’s like okay—long, flowing hair is too sexy and then there’s the hair that’s up in a bun is too boring, there’s the hair that’s too old, and then the last two are where I just lost it. It’s the one that’s like “too black”—natural hair, right? And then “way too black,” which is braids. Okay, so the book is full of illustrations like this and activities and basically advice for women to be successful, but don’t be too successful. How did you get to this place where you decided to write a satirical book of “non-threatening leadership strategies for women”?
SC Well, it started as a blog post called “9 Non-Threatening Leadership Strategies for Women” and I wrote it two years ago—and it was sort of based on my experience kind of making myself more passive and trying to be more pleasing in the office and sort of getting called out on being a little too aggressive with my opinions and seeing other women get called out on the same things. And so this idea of being threatening when, in fact, we’re actually just being direct or straightforward or saying the same thing that a man would say made me think it would—it’s kind of like the perfect thing for satire where you’re trying to tell women “this is how you be less threatening,” but really the way you were going to act in the first place was already not threatening. So, that led to that first comic, which I almost didn’t publish because I have a group of friends and family that I sort of run things by before I publish anything. And I did get the feedback that this might be construed as offensive and people might take it too seriously and I might see [laughs]—I might be seen as someone who is anti-woman for giving this advice. And so, I really worked on it to try and make it as obvious as possible that it was a joke, so the advice sort of gets more silly towards the end of the post where the very last thing is “wear a mustache so that people will think you are a man and that way you won’t even have to be less threatening.” After that, I published it and it just sort of went viral in the same way that “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings” went viral and really hit a nerve and people still did think that I was serious and didn’t realize that I was not actually telling people to put on a fake mustache. But I think a lot of people just sort of saw themselves in a lot of the advice. And so that was kind of the initial spark of the idea for this book and I started writing a different book actually, last year—and I wasn’t going to write this book, especially after the election. I thought that there was just a sense of hopelessness that all women sort of felt and I didn’t know if there was a way to create something that would be funny, but also kind of not dismissive of how women were feeling. And so it—it did take me a little while to figure out how I could do it and I think what happened was I started to get angry and I think—you know—women started to go from sad to pissed and I think when I became pissed I was like, “you know what? This ridiculous. We have all of these rules everyone is trying to tell us to follow, they’re contradictory and we actually can’t win because no matter what we do, it’s not good enough and it’s not right.” And I think that that was especially how I felt with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It was like she didn’t smile too much or she smiled too much or she was “too prepared,” I think was something that someone said, which just made me so livid. I was like, “wait a second. [laughs] If you’re too prepared, that’s not good enough?” So, it just got me so frustrated and so that’s when I was like, “you know what? I can make fun of this and I can kind of do it in a way that’s funny, but also kind of speak to how frustrating a lot of these rules are and this situation is and a lot of how women are feeling in the workplace in terms of how we should present ourselves when really we just want to be ourselves without being judged for all of these little things.
[25:28]
SWB Yes. I mean, there is so much kind of what I would say is shitty advice for women at work that is basically giving them these pointers for how to like “hey, here are some tips to suppress how you really feel all the time and act more like a man,” right? That’s kind of what they boil down to—
SC Yeah.
SWB —and so it’s interesting that you had that much of a problem of people not realizing what you were doing was satire. It seems very obvious to me.
SC [laughs] Well, I think some women were like, “you know what? I’’—they are actually on my side without realizing that they’re on my side. I think that’s the funniest part because they’ll be like, “you shouldn’t be telling women to do this, women should just act the way that they want to act and if men are offended, then screw them.” And I’m like, “yeah, exactly, that’s the point of what I’m trying to say, [KL & SWB laugh] thank you for pointing that out.” So it’s more people not—you know—it’s more people that are kind of on my side that just kind of don’t realize that I’m not actually telling people to act like this, I’m saying that we shouldn’t be telling people to act like this and that’s kind of a running thread throughout a lot of the stuff that I do—it’s bad advice. Don’t take my advice, do the opposite of the thing that I’m telling you to do and that’s a—a lot of what this is as well. But yeah, people still take it seriously and I’ve got to laugh sometimes at that.
SWB So, I’m curious—you’ve touched on this a little bit. Do you ever find yourself feeling frustrated or getting into some awkward space where you’re trying to write comedy about actual awful things that happen to real women all the time? Does that ever sort of get you down? Or does it feel like a positive outlet for you? I guess at some level it must since you [laughing] are writing a lot of comedy about it!
SC [laughs] You know what? When you take something seriously and it feels kind of sacred, you are like “I don’t want to make fun of that because I really feel strongly about that” and so it did feel like a bit of a stretch and that’s why I wasn’t going to write it at first. And then especially with the harassment chapter—that chapter almost didn’t make it in there just because I—but it had to because then I was so angry about all of these things that women have to deal with. This idea that if we get harassed by someone who is a high performer and is a really incredible contributor to the company, that somehow makes it so that they can’t do anything about it because they need that person. [laughs] It’s just this idea that companies—a lot of companies—don’t seem to care about how they’re getting to their goals, they just care that they get to their goals and so they—there’s a lot of people who kind of get trampled on in that process. And so I think that what ends up happening is I’m a little scared to make fun of something or it’s a little bit too raw to make fun of it, but then the sort of frustration makes it so that I can’t help but make fun of it because I really, really need to point this out and I really—this is just something that I really want to say about it.
[28:14]
SWB So, I know that a lot of your work sort of stemmed from your experience in kind of a past life working at Google for a number of years, kind of working in the tech industry. You’ve said that it has given you plenty of material, and I’m wondering if we can go back to that a bit. Can you tell us a little bit about sort of both how you got started in comedy and in tech and how the two kind of intertwined?
SC Yeah, it’s kind of a messy story. I always wanted to do something with performance and theatre and acting, and I kind of did it on and off while I was working. And I found stand-up because I wanted to be a better actress, and I kind of wanted to be more myself on stage and on camera. And so I decided to just get on stage at an open mic. And I drank a lot and got very drunk and got up on stage and told this story about dating and it was—it was very nerve-racking. But then I got up there and I felt very comfortable and I realized that I really liked writing for myself and I really liked being myself more than pretending to be—a character? That’s kind of—that was something that I was doing sort of in between working for Yahoo and Google and then I continued to do stand-up while I was working at Google and I would get my coworkers to come to my shows and I started to write a little bit more about what it was like to work with them and sort of making fun of the software engineers there and they—you know—loved that. They’re some of the funniest people I’ve ever met. I didn’t really realize that there was this sort of opening for satire in the corporate world before I wrote “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings,” which is really based on observation from sitting in meetings and—while I was supposed to be paying attention and contributing, I was making observations about what my coworkers were doing and especially the things that people were doing to make it seem like they knew what they were talking about when really most people weren’t paying attention at all. And I just always found it fascinating that certain people were seen as the smart ones. To me, almost everything is a sort of performance. And it’s also… I’m an immigrant. I was born in Jamaica. And so I think I’ve always kind of been like, “well, what’s the thing that I can do in this situation to make it look like I can fit in here and I’m part of it?” And so I was always sort of watching. And so I think a lot of it was just I really like observing all of those things and the first time I put that together was in “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings” and it really just resonated with people and that’s kind of what started my writing career that—as it is right now because that took off so much that I ended up leaving Google and—and writing my first book about it.
[31:02]
SWB Yeah, I think from that original post my favorite tip was maybe number six, which was “ask ‘will this scale?’ no matter what.” [KL laughs]
SC Yeah.
SWB Because, obviously, that’s the kind of thing I’ve heard a lot and it’s the kind of thing that is just said when you don’t know what else to say. And I think that that’s something that you really pinpointed so well is the way that people will sort of come up with these so called smart, insightful questions that are really just stock questions that they use to sound like they know what they’re talking about.
SC Yeah.
SWB Something that I want to touch on though—that you mentioned a minute ago that I think is really interesting, is you mentioned sort of being an immigrant and moving to this country from Jamaica and feeling like that gave you more of a sense of observing what other people are doing and figuring out what is the norm here. Sounds like maybe from a young age you became really attuned to needing to code switch and sort of trained yourself to always be identifying what the code is that’s happening, so you can flip on your “okay, I’m working at Google now” script and kind of blend. Is that something you feel like is a strong piece of your experience?
SC That’s funny, I’ve never thought of it as code switching, I’ve always thought of it as people pleasing. [laughs] I’ve always been a huge just people pleaser, which is part of myself that I absolutely hate and I did it with—you know—sort of my parents, I did it with my friends, and I did it at work. I did it in relationships. And it took me a long time to realize that a lot of times I was doing and saying things that I didn’t actually think or feel just because I thought that’s what was wanted or needed by other people in that situation. So yeah, I mean I think that I developed that from a very young age. I have [laughs]—I have this memory of being very young, and I couldn’t read yet, and I was sitting at a breakfast table with my dad and he was reading the paper and he got to the comics section and he slides me the comics section and he says, “read this, it’s funny, you’ll laugh.” And he didn’t realize that I couldn’t read yet. And so I didn’t want to say, “Dad, I can’t read” [laughs] so [KL & SWB laugh] I looked at the comics and I just started laughing—I just started pretending to enjoy myself so that my dad would think that I was doing what he wanted me to do. And I feel like that was my earliest memory of just being like, “oh, they think that I should do this, so I’ll do this”—you know? But it took a long time for me to step outside myself and realize I don’t have to do that. I can say and do what I feel.
[33:31]
SWB And so I’m curious—as you were sort of starting your career working in tech and sort of going in with that people pleaser mentality, what was that experience like for you?
SC Very successful, I have to say. I joined Google and was within a few years promoted to manage the team. And I did very well there, people loved working with me, [laughs] people loved having me in their meetings. You know, I think people pleasing is—it will get you to middle management. I don’t know if it will get you to be like a VP, but definitely as a woman especially, if you’re a people pleaser, I think that it can get you pretty far. The only thing is, you’re going to get something that you might not want, which is what I had. [laughs] You know, I became a manager and I was in a lot of meetings and I think that’s when I started to realize that I wasn’t being as creative as I wanted to be, so I guess it was kind of a blessing in disguise that I came to a point where I was more passionate about writing and stand-up and all the things I was doing outside of work than I was about the things I was doing at work. But I just find it fascinating how—you know—there’s so much imitation going on in the corporate world. I mean, that’s what people are doing in terms of how they figure out “well, this is how I need to get ahead, I need to—obviously this VP is talking so passionately about this product and all these features, and so I need to talk passionately about all these products and all these features.” Now, that VP might actually be feeling those things, but then the middle manager is just sort of imitating that passion. And so, I think that that to me was a lot of the things that I was doing as well. And it’s just kind of a strange situation, because they’re like, “oh, you have to be authentic—you know—you have to be really yourself,” but then a lot of it is just a performance in a lot of ways.
SWB You mentioned how much of a people pleaser you always were, but it seems like almost flipping when you started writing the satirical posts because they’re fundamentally making waves. And I’m wondering if that was ever sort of a scary decision for you to make.
SC It was. I mean, even as innocuous as “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings” was, I was so scared to post it because I didn’t want my coworkers to think I was making fun of them, because I was making fun of them. And I didn’t know if they would read it and I would ruin some relationships. So, that was really scary, but then a crazy thing happened. It came out, everybody read it, everybody loved it, they all started asking me if they could be featured in my next posts and they do this thing in a meeting and maybe that’s another trick I could put in there. And so that was kind of the first stepping stone of like “oh, this is okay!” And I will say that comedy for me definitely is sort of a defense mechanism. I can kind of hide behind the satire of it a little bit in order to say what I really feel. I feel like this is part of my growth is to say it in a satirical funny way, and then kind of get up the courage to say what I really feel and what I really think and be really committed to that. But it is really scary to put myself out there even a little bit, and even setting up a newsletter and sending out emails, and even when I had just forty people, I felt terrified to just send out my newsletter. It was just—it took a long time, but it’s been really great. You know, I think it’s been exactly what I needed in order to become more of who I am instead of this person that I think everyone wants me to be.
[37:08]
SWB I’m curious too, you talked about your newsletter. We mentioned at the top of the show The Cooper Review, which is the satirical blog that you run and I’m curious how and when did that get started and how did that build its audience?
SC So, I posted “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings” on Medium at first because I didn’t have a blog. And then when it got—it was starting to get millions of views, I was like, “wait a second, I should be getting some of that traffic,” so I created thecooperreview.com about—I want to say—a month or so, or maybe six to eight weeks after that blog post came out. And then I started using the post on Medium to sort of drive people to my website and get people to sign up for my newsletter and started to grow my audience that way.
SWB And so you also mentioned a lot about feeling a lot of fear about posting it and then getting a lot of positive feedback, but did you also get negative feedback? Have you received much criticism or, you know, trolls or kind of angry folks?
SC Not from my coworkers, but from—yeah, random strangers. People get very angry, especially on LinkedIn [laughs] when you think that you’re trying to tell people how to—how to look smart in meetings because they take their meetings very seriously. So, I get people saying, “well, you shouldn’t—you shouldn’t try to look smart, you should just be smart” and I’m like “okay, thank you.” [SWB laughs] Yeah, so that’s kind of funny, but then I also get—you know—I wrote a post about gaslighting, which also made it to the book as well, and I got a woman who wrote to me and said that her boss did this to her and it was very painful and—and how she usually finds my things very funny, but this was just very painful for her and she didn’t appreciate it. She didn’t think it was great for me to write this. And I was very sensitive to that, so I wrote her back and said “you know, part of the reason that I write this stuff is because I want people to be more aware of it and I think that—you know—like G.I. Joe says, “knowing is half the battle.” And so when you are aware that these things are happening, then you can do something about it, then you can say, “hey, this is what’s happening. I’m not crazy, you’re making me feel like I’m crazy.” And she wrote back and it was really nice. She was like, “yeah, that is true, that is a good point. If I had known that that was what was happening at the time, that might have helped me.” So, I have situations like that, I have, I’ve gotten some hate mail about this book. It’s not even out yet, no one can read it yet, but just the title is making people upset. A man wrote and said he would definitely not be buying my book [laughs] because it was offensive to men. It’s really, really funny actually. The subject of the email is “blatant sexism.” It says, “I won’t be buying your How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings. If I wrote a book called ‘How to Be Successful Without Hurting Women’s Feelings,’ no publisher would touch it and I would be lambasted for writing it in the first place, even when calling it satire. What appalls me the most is not that you wrote it, but that most men will ignore the blatant sexism, uncomfortably laugh it off, and pretend it doesn’t hurt because that is somehow more manly. I’m man enough to call you out on it, Sarah Cooper. [laughs and KL and SWB laugh loudly with her]
[40:13]
SWB Is it too late to get that as a back cover blurb? [all laugh]
SC I know, I know. It was so perfect because I just love that—I love that “oh, most men are just going to laugh it off and just—and hide their pain” and I’m like, “welcome to our world. This is what we do all the time.” So, when I first got that, I was like, “oh my god, this is—I’m offending people, I’m offending people” and then the second I sort of shared it with a few friends, they were like, “oh my gosh, this is hysterical, you have to share this with everybody.”
SWB It is quite funny and it’s also it’s like oh my gosh, you couldn’t even have the title of your book about not hurting men’s feelings out [
KL laughs] without hurting this man’s feelings.
SC Exactly, exactly.
SWB He’s so sensitive! You know, sometimes I just think men are too sensitive.
SC I think they’re too sensitive, I think they’re too emotional. [all laugh loudly]
SWB Exactly, exactly. When I read your work, I feel like it comes from a perspective that I relate to a lot and obviously all of the content about—you know—being harassed at work or being looked over for promotions, all that kind of stuff, I’m like, “okay, this really resonates for somebody who’s a woman.” But I know that you have male readers and I’m curious if you get a different kind of feedback from men who read your work?
SC I think there’s just a range. I mean, I think there’s men who—god bless them—they feel like men and women should be equal and so we shouldn’t treat them differently. And it’s really hard for them to just accept the fact that yeah, we would like to be treated differently, but we haven’t been. And that’s the point. The other thing that frustrates me is that—and this happens with men and women too—it’s just like, “well, why didn’t you write a book about this?” Like this guy. “Why didn’t you write a book about women’s feelings?” It’s like there’s a specific audience and there’s a specific thing I’m trying to say and I’m sorry I couldn’t write a book for everybody, but that’s not how books work, I can’t do that. And so I think that there’s men in that camp—I think there’s men in the camp of “oh this is going to be great for my—my wife, or my girlfriend, or—you know—a friend of mine who is in the working world” and they probably don’t think that—that it will help them that much and I think that that’s fine, too. Maybe some of it will sort of—I appreciate that and I obviously it will be great that they want to share it with their female friends, but I think that the men who actually say, “I want to read this, I want to know what this perspective is like”—those are the men that just—they make me so happy. I always think about after the election; my husband is a straight white man and I was really upset after the election and he said to me, “you know, Sarah, I understand this is different for you.” And that’s all he had to say. You know, all he had to say was just appreciate the fact that this is different for me than it is for him and that’s all I want men to do is just say, “hey, this is an experience.” This is an experience that we have and these are things that we have to deal with that you don’t have to deal with and yes, we appreciate that there are things you deal with that we don’t have to, but can we just talk about us just one second? So, I think those are the men that I’m hoping to get to more of and I definitely see that. I have a great—a good deal of men who really support me and really support my work and are not even remotely offended by this title and actually see how they can learn something from it too.
[43:25]
KL Yeah. It’s so funny hearing you say all of this and then at the end of the day, it’s still—just to underscore it—we’re really not—it’s not a lot that [laughing] men would have to do. It’s like just paying attention—
SC Right.
KL —and being a little more self aware and—you know—leaving that channel open. Thinking a little bit more about your career and your work as a comedian and an author, was it scary to leave the perks and stability of a giant company like Google? Is there anything that you miss from that?
SC It was terrifying and it took me a long time [laughs nervously] and no—everybody was pretty sure that I was making a mistake. Even my therapist was like, “you know, you should stay there at Google.” [laughs] My family, my fiancé at the time—now husband. Because the thing is, I met my husband at work and he’d see me at work and I was happy, you know? I really liked those people and I really enjoyed being there, and Google is such a comfortable place to be. Everything you could possibly want is there. I probably took advantage of the nap pods too many times, [KL & SWB laugh] but it was great—it was great. And so the thing that I tell you I would miss the most is having a place to go and be comfortable and being around people that I just really respect and admire and make me laugh. I miss that very much because I didn’t realize how lonely writing was going to be, I didn’t realize how much I would enjoy sometimes being alone, but then really, really, really need to talk to people and—so now it just takes an extra effort that I didn’t have to do before, to talk to people and go outside and go do things and in order to get that stimulation and find that new material and all of that stuff. So, it took me a while and I was panicking for at least the first six months after I left, but I realized that it was a bigger risk not to leave than it was to stay because I could always go back. And once I told my boss I was leaving and he said I could always come back if I wanted to, that made me feel like, “okay, I can do this.”
KL That’s great. I’m glad that you had that and I completely get that apprehension about making such a big change—you know—not just like this is a big career change, but this is a big change in how I operate on a day to day basis. That’s huge. So—you know—today, these days, what does a typical week look like?
[45:57]
SC Well, it’s kind of crazy right now because I’m in this—you know—the last four weeks before the book comes out, so it’s a lot of working with PR. But usually it’s writing, it’s working on my blog, it’s—I have contributors who write and submit things and so looking at that stuff, it’s writing new material for stand-up, it’s going to an open mic maybe in the afternoon, maybe one or two open mics in the afternoon. Maybe I’ll have a show at night. And I am meeting a lot more people, I haven’t really found collaborators that I work with regularly yet, but that is something that I want to work on. I’d love to start a podcast like you ladies! That is something I have been thinking about, but I can’t get past coming up with a name! So, I would like to do something like a podcast or more regular content because for me, I’ve realized I love having a schedule and that’s been the hardest thing for me is just to have a consistent schedule.
KL Yeah, I appreciate that. Especially being in a field that is—you know—very much creative, I think people often underestimate how much it helps to have a schedule, how much it helps to have stability, however you can make that happen. So what is great about working as a full time comedian and working the way that you work right now and maybe what’s kind of harder about it?
SC I think what’s great about it is kind of what I was saying before is that I have so many outlets to discover myself and who I really am, which is something that I think is just really important for a life, you know? To know you left everything on the table and you told every story that you wanted to tell and you let everyone know who you are—and you didn’t leave this world without telling everybody that. And I think that’s really important. And then using that to inspire other people and—when I get people writing me that they are starting to draw or are starting to write satire or they are doing something else, that’s really exciting for me, and I hope that I can do more of that, which is create more things to inspire more people to create things. That’s the thing that’s great about it, it’s kind of this journey for me as a person that I get to be on and I don’t have to dedicate the majority of my day to being at a job that I am not that excited about. I can devote most of my day to doing things that get me closer to who I want to be as a person. And the thing that’s hard is staying motivated and, you know, getting out of bed, not getting frustrated to the point where I just feel like I don’t want to do anything because nothing’s working. You know, it’s really hard just when there’s nobody telling you, “hey, there’s a deadline.” You make the deadlines, sometimes you just don’t want to do that thing or you just don’t feel motivated to do that thing and so it’s—I think that’s the hardest thing is finding that consistency and that motivation for me so that I can keep going without having any external people telling me what to do.
[49:00]
SWB Do you have any techniques that you’ve found work for you when you’re having those moments where you’re like, “well what if I just got back under the covers?”
SC Yeah. I have a journal called the “Best Self Journal” and it it has kind of changed my life and if—sometimes I use it and sometimes I don’t. If I don’t use it, it’s very bad. If I use it, it changes my day. And basically what I do is the night before, I will write down every hour of how I’m going to spend the next day and doing that makes me—first of all, it makes me realize, “hey, there are—there are enough hours in the day to get done what you want to do” and also it just is this thing that I keep referring back to throughout the day to kind of stay on track. And so if I have that, it really helps me keep going because I have this plan and I can kind of follow that plan. If there’s nothing, if my day is just an open blue sky, then I will just piss it away on Twitter—and that’s—that’s what I’ll do. So, that has really helped me.
SWB I love the “Best Self Journal.” I know that I’m not going to be my best self necessarily every day, [SC laughs quietly] but thinking about what would I be doing if I was really being my best version of myself in this moment is like—that sounds like a pretty cool exercise.
SC Yeah.
SWB Sarah, this has been really great and we are about out of time, so I have one last question for you, which is just, where can folks follow your work?
SC So, my personal website is sarahcpr.com. s-a-r-a-h-c-p-r.com—c-p-r is just short for Cooper, it doesn’t mean I know CPR or anything like that. And you can see all my events on there and all my press and all that stuff. If you want to check out thecooperreview.com, that has all of the blog posts and hopefully we will return to a regular publishing schedule there as well, once we get out of the book craziness.
SWB Well, that’s awesome. So, everybody, you heard her—follow Sarah and also How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings is going to be on sale by the time you’re listening to this. And even though I’m personally pretty okay with hurting some men’s feelings, I definitely loved it. So, pick it up! And Sarah, thank you so much for being here.
SC Thank you. And the book has mustaches in the back that you can actually wear, so another reason to buy it. [laughs & KL & SWB join in]
KL Perfect. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
[51:20]
Sponsor: Shopify
SWB [Ad spot] Hey, it’s time for a quick career check with Shopify. This week we have Zeina Naboulsi on the line. She’s the executive assistant to Shopify’s CEO, Tobi Lütke, and she’s here to talk about the interview process. Zeina, tell us what you’ve learned!
Zeina Naboulsi Well, one of the pieces of advice we constantly give to candidates is “just be yourself.” And it sounds so clichéd, but it’s true. Three years ago, when I interviewed at Shopify—or even when I recently sat down with Tobi about my new role—I just remember giving myself permission to be authentically me. This alleviated so much pressure. This is a new challenge for me, but going forward, I can look at it from a lens that’s really mine. Interviewing is nerve-wracking enough as it is. Imagine spending the whole time trying to be someone else. Just think, if you can approach an interview being your authentic self, you know that you’re going to show up on day one and every day after that as you.
SWB Thanks, Zeina! That might sound hard to do, but it’s so true. And if you want to work with folks like Zeina, then you should check out Shopify. They’ve got roles in offices around the world, all at shopify.com/careers. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
Fuck Yeah of the Week
SWB Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. My fuck yeah today. It’s very important.
KL Yeah? What is it?
SWB Rock and roll.
KL I love rock and roll!
SWB I think there was a song like that…
KL Was there? [laughs]
SWB Probably. Okay, so specifically, tonight me and Katel are going to go and see Courtney Barnett—
KL Ughh!
SWB —and I just love her so much! Her album from earlier this year, “Tell Me How You Really Feel,” has been on repeat for me over and over and over again for the past few months.
KL Me too, I love Courtney Barnett and I remember when she came out with the song “Avant Gardener,” which is essentially a song about her having a full-on public panic attack. And it’s such a great song, I identified with it so much. I really appreciate that she sings about anxiety [laughs] and depression and brings it into her art and she’s just so fucking good, I can not wait.
SWB Yes. You know, there’s just something about her songwriting that really gets me because it’s like it’s quirky and fun, but it’s also often really open about things that are sad or difficult. And so I like that kind of juxtaposition and it feels really honest and kind of disarming, right? Because it feels like—it feels like you’re kind of really getting to know her. And so it makes me happy hearing her voice and it makes me feel like we don’t have to pretend that things are fine when they’re not, but that also, things are going to be okay and it’s okay even if you’re sad.
KL Yeah. Plus I love any opportunity to hang out with you solo, obviously, but we are taking our partners with us tonight, so that’s a bonus. We’re doing a double date! And we’re so cool, we’re doing it on a school night. [laughs][54:01]
SWB I totally still feel like, “oh my god, we’re going out on a school night.” I used to go to a lot of shows in my twenties—all through my twenties I went to shows constantly and I feel like the past few years, I really haven’t made it to as much as I would like. And—you know—part of it is getting older and it gets late and I get tired and I’m not going to lie, that happens and I’m okay with that. I’m actually pretty okay with that. But part of it I think has been because my work life has resulted in a lot of travel—I’m in and out of town, I’m at conferences, it’s sort of like going to a concert can sometimes feel just like a lot. And it’s also just hard to keep up with bands and when they’re going to be in town and am I going to be in town? So, I feel like that’s been less of my life than I’d like it to be, but I’m trying to kind of bring a little bit more balance back around that. So, we saw Sweet Spirit a few months ago. And then just recently me and Will, we went to go and see Liz Phair and relive some awesome nineties vibes, that was also excellent.
KL I’m so sad I missed that.
SWB Yeah, I felt like I was one of the youngs at the show—[KL laughs]
KL Yeah.
SWB —which is also a pretty interesting feeling because I don’t feel like that that often anymore. And so—I don’t know—I like that I feel like I’m kind of coming to terms with where I am in life, which is that I can’t go to everything and I’m also—I’m not going to go out for a drink with you after the show.
KL No.
SWB I’m going home!
KL Going to bed.
SWB I’m definitely going to bed. And—you know—I don’t really want to go to a festival.
KL Yeah, no. Those are over for me.
SWB But I still fucking love a good, live show and I am so fucking excited to be out there tonight seeing Courtney Barnett. So, fuck yeah to getting out and seeing artists you love!
KL And fuck yeah to badass women musicians.
SWB Fuck yeah! Well, that is it for this week’s episode of No, You Go. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and it is produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Sarah Cooper for being our guest today.
KL Thanks for listening. And hey, if you like our show, don’t forget to subscribe and rate it wherever you listen to podcasts. Oh, and tell a friend or two. See you again next week!
SWB Bye! [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, and fades out]
It’s a rough year after a rough year after…a rough year. Writer, journalist, and #disabledandcute creator Keah Brown reminds us to celebrate our wins and find joy anyway.
Keah has written for publications like Harper’s Bazaar, Teen Vogue, Essence, Catapult, Lenny Letter, The Rumpus, and Glamour. She also has cerebral palsy—and one day in 2017, she was feeling cute. So she posted a photo of herself with the hashtag #disabledandcute, and boom: she started a movement.
Since then, she’s signed her first book deal, written about everything from Lilliam Rivera to Solange, and generally taken the world by storm. Plus, Roxane Gay thinks she’s great. What more is there to say?
> We spend so much time with disability narratives either being used to prop up an able-bodied character, or to die for the emotional turmoil of an able-bodied character. And I’m just like, nope. I live at the end of this book, and I’m going to keep living, and you’re going to see more of me, because I’m not going anywhere. > —Keah Brown, writer and #disabledandcute creator
Keah tells us all about:
- Starting the #disabledandcute movement Her Teen Vogue cover story on disabled representation in fashion
- Being named to The Root 100 list of most influential African-Americans
- Writing for Roxane Gay’s Unruly Bodies series
- The double-edged sword of being the “go-to disability writer”
- Working on her first essay collection, The Pretty One, due out from Atria Books next fall
- Relying on Demi Lovato, Paramore, and her friends to get through the hard parts
Plus:
- Katel tells us all about her workshop with last week’s guest, Sonalee Rashatwar
- Sara has a very attractive knee surgeon
- Don’t miss Milena Paulina’s gorgeous photos of fat bodies
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Try it free, then use code NOYOUGO to get 50% off your first paid month.
Away makes stylish, high-quality luggage with amazing built-in features—like a laundry bag and USB charger. Use code NYG to save $20 today at awaytravel.com/nyg.
It’s a rough year after a rough year after…a rough year. Writer, journalist, and #disabledandcute creator Keah Brown reminds us to celebrate our wins and find joy anyway.
Keah has written for publications like Harper’s Bazaar, Teen Vogue, Essence, Catapult, Lenny Letter, The Rumpus, and Glamour. She also has cerebral palsy—and one day in 2017, she was feeling cute. So she posted a photo of herself with the hashtag #disabledandcute, and boom: she started a movement.
Since then, she’s signed her first book deal, written about everything from Lilliam Rivera to Solange, and generally taken the world by storm. Plus, Roxane Gay thinks she’s great. What more is there to say?
We spend so much time with disability narratives either being used to prop up an able-bodied character, or to die for the emotional turmoil of an able-bodied character. And I’m just like, nope. I live at the end of this book, and I’m going to keep living, and you’re going to see more of me, because I’m not going anywhere. —Keah Brown, writer and #disabledandcute creator
Keah tells us all about:
- Starting the #disabledandcute movement
- Her Teen Vogue cover story on disabled representation in fashion
- Being named to The Root 100 list of most influential African-Americans
- Writing for Roxane Gay’s Unruly Bodies series
- The double-edged sword of being the “go-to disability writer”
- Working on her first essay collection, The Pretty One, due out from Atria Books next fall
- Relying on Demi Lovato, Paramore, and her friends to get through the hard parts
Follow Keah: Twitter | Insta | Facebook
Plus:
- Katel tells us all about her workshop with last week’s guest, Sonalee Rashatwar
- Sara has a very attractive knee surgeon
- Don’t miss Milena Paulina’s gorgeous photos of fat bodies
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Body-positivity sure seems popular right now—but that conversation is often limited to celebrating slightly larger bodies and slightly broader sizing options. Our guest today challenges those ideas—ands helps us understand what real liberation would look like.
Sonalee Rashatwar is a fat, queer, non-binary therapist, community organizer, and donut queen based in Philly. Katel first found out about her as @thefatsextherapist on Instagram, where she posts about body image, fat positivity, and delicious food.
> Pleasure is very virtuous. We need food pleasure and sexual pleasure to survive this capitalist nightmare. And it’s okay. I give you permission. > > —Sonalee Rashatwar , The Fat Sex Therapist
Sonalee provides counseling to people navigating sexual trauma, body image issues, racial or immigrant identity issues, and South Asian family systems, and she holds workshops on topics like unlearning body image issues.
Follow Sonalee: Instagram | Twitter
We talk about:
- Reclaiming slurs that have been used against you—with a shout out to Jes Baker’s new book, Landwhale
- Being featured on Breitbart for saying that “thinness is a white supremacist beauty ideal” while speaking at the University of Vermont
- Expanding our idea of body image issues “beyond body size, eating disorders, and self esteem” using Megan J. Smith’s Repeal Hyde Art Project as a parallel
- Decolonizing sex and pleasure
- Triaging trauma responses during this seemingly endless sexual-assault-filled news cycle
- Getting hyped about “boring self care”
Plus:
- Katel looks great in a $7 metallic jumpsuit
- Sara’s done eating $14 airport chicken wraps
- 7–11 sells quinoa?
- It’s okay to skip the boozie slushies (unless that’s your jam—no judgement!)
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher When I want to look like I have it all together, I look to Harvest. Harvest makes awesome software that helps me track my time, manage schedules, and send invoices. I love how easy it is to use on the desktop or on my phone and it’s perfect for freelancers, agencies, or anybody who needs to manage projects and client work. So, go to getharvest.com to try it for free and if you’re ready for a paid account, use code “noyougo” to get 50% off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, code “noyougo.” [intro music plays for 12 seconds]
Katel LeDû Hey everyone, I’m Katel.
SWB And I’m Sara!
KL And you’re listening to No, You Go, the show about building satisfying careers and businesses—
SWB —getting free of toxic bullshit—
KL —and living your best feminist life at work.
SWB Hell yeah it is! Katel, who is on the show today?
KL Our guest is Sonalee Rashatwar, aka “The Fat Sex Therapist.” We’re going to ask her just how she got that name and why her work as a fat, queer sex therapist is more important now than ever. Before we get to our interview with Sonalee, Sara, you are about to get surgery.
SWB Uhh yes, I am about to get surgery. I’m finally getting my torn ACL fixed, and so by the time this episode comes out, I’ll actually be back home recovering. So, that means that I’ve been spending the last few days really trying to tie up some loose ends. So, I actually just got back from my last business trip for a while. I was in Dallas.
KL Uh yee-haw, that sounds like a perfect way to tie things up.
SWB You know, actually it was perfect, and I’m going to tell you why. So—okay, so I’m in Dallas, right? And I was speaking at this conference and then I get back to the airport, I’m on my way home and I’d been wearing these heels to speak in and I should have changed out of them earlier and I didn’t, so my feet are killing me. I’m in the security line, the security line is really long. And then there is a canine unit there that’s checking people, sniffing for drugs, right? I’m like, “okay great.” So, now there’s also this agent there who is barking orders at people—where to stand, “no, stop, no, wait,” you know? And like, “take everything out of your hands, you can’t have your phone in your hands, but you need your boarding pass in your hands, but oh your boarding pass is your phone, so okay you can have your phone in your hand now.” And he was just gruff, you know how this is, right?
KL Yeah.
SWB So, he’s gruff and barking orders and it’s like, “okay, so you need to walk by the dog, but not too fast. Make sure your bag is out of the way so it’s not going to hit the dog in the head.” It was this whole thing, right? Okay, so we go through that, it takes forever. And so then finally I get to the other end of security and it’s like 5pm, I’m not going to get home until like 9, and I am a human person who likes to usually eat food at some point between 5 and 9. And I’m like, okay, I’m in Dallas. It’s a massive hub, right? So I’m like, there’s going to be some options. I can get some food to go, no problem. This terminal I happen to be in was—there were a few restaurant restaurants where I could sit down there, but I didn’t have time for that. And then the to-go options, there was almost nothing. Part of it was under construction. And so I look around and quickly realize that my best to-go food option, my best to-go food option—is an airport 7-Eleven that also sells salads and wraps.
[3:23]
KL Wow, wow, wow, wow.
SWB And I—so, I pick up my salad and then I get on the plane, right? And then the plane is just jammed full and there’s no room for people’s bags, and then we’re in the air and the woman sitting next to me accidentally spills her glass of water all over my laptop keyboard. And she’s apologizing profusely. I’m not even mad at her, but I’m just like, “I just need napkins,” right? [KL laughs quietly] And so—you know—I’m sitting on this plane and I’m just freaking miserable and I finally pull out my 7-Eleven salad. [KL laughs] And I start eating the salad and then I’m like, you know what? This salad is actually kind of okay. It seemed really freshly made, it was full of kale and quinoa, and—you know—nothing was actually wrong, right? I have a decent seat, I have food to eat, I just came from a paid speaking gig, I made it through security without being harassed or profiled. There’s lots of things that weren’t super fun about it, but I am fine. The problem is just that I am done. I am done with being in airports and I am done with looking at sad $14 chicken wraps. I am just done. And so that’s actually why that was the best trip, because the good news is that I am literally done, right? I looked around and I thought, “I don’t want to have to do this,” and then I realized [laughing] I don’t for a while, because I don’t have to go anywhere! [KL laughs]
KL That’s right. I mean, that is good. And let me just say that I am shocked and encouraged that 7-Eleven has a salad that not only has kale, but also quinoa in it. Mental note for the next time.
SWB I mean, I make no promises about future 7-Eleven salads. [KL laughs]
KL That’s fair, that’s fair. But you know, that does make me think of, you know, when I left my last job to—to come to A Book Apart, it was this time where I was all of a sudden seeing this concrete finish line in sight, and I was starting to deprioritize some of the stuff I was doing at Nat Geo. And because I had one foot out the door and I was excited about this new thing that I was going to do, this thing that was coming up, and I was starting to plan for that and think about it. But you kind of can’t really do all of those things at once, so you have to wrap up some loose ends and—so you can get excited about that, or so that you can take a break and—you know—move onto the next thing. So, I totally get that.
[5:46]
SWB Yeah and then, you know, that’s the thing about my life, is that the way that my work life is set up—or the way I should say that I have set up my work life—is that I don’t really have those kinds of clean starts and stops. Projects come and go, but I don’t have any moments where I can be like, “oh, I used to work at x place and now I work at y place” because I haven’t worked anywhere except or myself for like seven years, and so, you know, during that time it’s like my work has changed dramatically in terms of the types of projects I do or how my days actually look, but there aren’t a lot of finite moments like that where I feel like “okay, done with x, time to move on.” And instead what I tend to do is I tend to add a new thing in, and then at some point if the new thing starts taking up more of my time—like speaking, for example—then I have to start doing less of something else in order to make that happen. But it tends to be kind of gradual, and it tends to feel like a lot of juggling in the moment.
KL I know I run into challenges with this because my ongoing day-to-day doesn’t really have these sort of clean boundaries, you know. Yes, I’m running this business, but I’m doing this podcast as a—you know—as a side project right now, and so I always think there’s time and space for more new things [laughing] as they come along and I think it’s really easy to think that, even though it might not be true.
SWB Yeah, so I’m kind of looking forward to having a little bit of time after surgery, even though I need to be recovering and that’s not necessarily fun purely. [KL laughs] But—but I like that it’s almost giving me a little bit more of a concrete boundary and the ability to kind of reflect back on what I’ve been spending my time on and then look forward at what I want to be spending my time on. Because I have been running really fast this year. Obviously, we launched the podcast earlier this year and it’s a lot of work to get this off the ground and it’s—you know—it’s really, really great, but it is…it took a lot of time. And then I think about in the past six months, like just six months since I tore my ACL and put off surgery because I had too many things already scheduled. Okay, I looked at my calendar and I actually wrote down where are all the places that I have been, and I’m going to run through them for you real fast. Okay, so first up right after I tore it—I tore it at the beginning of March—right after I tore it, I went to Australia. Right after I got back from Australia, my grandmother died, which was not unexpected, but still tough. And then I turned around and immediately flew to Munich for that to spend a few days with my family and go to the memorial, which was really important to me. So then after that, I had trips to Minneapolis, Paris, Boston, Vancouver British Columbia, and before and after Vancouver I actually made stops in Oregon for various family events. And then I went to Madison, Wisconsin. I went to San Francisco. I went to England. I went to Amsterdam. I went to Atlanta. And then now Dallas.
[8:30]
KL [laughing] Sara, that’s so much!
SWB It is so much! And I didn’t quite realize how much it was until I sat down and wrote that list! And when I realized I needed to have this surgery, but that I had a lot of things scheduled that was going to make it hard to slot it in anywhere, I actually packed my schedule even tighter, so that I could get a lot done before the surgery and then not have to do anything. So, now I have a calendar that is very open. I have to do things like physical therapy. And that is giving me a chance to think about my work life in a little bit more of a before and after kind of way. So, I can think about it like, “what do I want my work life to look like after Thanksgiving when I’m picking up steam again? Where do I want that steam to be going?” You know?
KL You know, I think this is great. And it’s—for me, I know it’s hard to run a business and to work for yourself and put boundaries around time that you need for yourself to recoup from surgery or—you know—just take a rest or slow things down. And I feel like even though we are always checking in with each other about how we’re doing and how much we’re doing and how we’re feeling about everything, nothing really ever feels done, and it always feels like we could be doing more and I think it’s really tough to navigate that.
SWB Yeah and I think I also have realized that I tend to be a little bit scared of being idle. You know, I grew up feeling like I needed to kind of hustle and always be productive, both because I knew—you know—we didn’t have a lot of money, and I knew I needed to do well in school to get a scholarship, so that I could really afford to go to college. I knew that I also needed to have a job so that I could have a shitty car so that I could get out of the town I hated living in and also have enough money to buy some cigarettes and smoke with my friends. [KL laughs] But—you know—I definitely always felt this need to kind of like, make sure that I was being productive and taking care of things, right? And part of it is that we never had any money—my family never had any money. I remember my mom working so hard pursuing this dream that she had of going to graduate school, getting her PHD—she’s a biochemist now—and so we spent actually a bunch of my childhood with her in graduate school and us living off of her $12,000-a-year stipend as a researcher. And that was basically the money we supported the family with. And so—this was only in the ‘90s, this wasn’t that long ago. $12,000 was not very much money.
[10:53]
KL Yeah.
SWB And so I think some of that history means that I’m used to not giving myself a lot of breaks because I’m used to seeing that modeled around me, but also because I just like to work. I do fundamentally really enjoy it, but being kind of full-speed all the time doesn’t really give you time to reflect or evolve, or to focus on how you want to evolve. And so I’m really looking forward to kind of having this season where I can clear out some headspace and—you know—break out of some of the cycles or patterns that are maybe keeping me stuck in one way of looking at my work and preventing me from really thinking clearly about what I want next.
KL Yeah, this makes me think of hearing Sonalee talk about recognizing thought patterns we have—you know—around biases, or race, or body, and unlearning the ones that are not really healthy for us or not helping us succeed. And so maybe some of this is about unlearning beliefs about productivity and idleness.
SWB Yes! I absolutely want to think more about that, and I think there’s a lot in that interview that we should be thinking about. So, why don’t we get to it? [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
Career Chat with Shopify
SWB So, you know we love to talk about careers here on NYG—and so do our friends at Shopify. This week, they’ve sent us a tip from Daniella Niyonkuru, a production engineer. And—sidebar—I just watched a talk by Daniella called “How Tech Almost Missed Out On Me,” which is such a freaking awesome sentiment. So today, Daniella has three lessons she learned as someone entering tech from an underrepresented background. Let’s hear them!
Daniella Niyonkuru First, you should always take chances on the things you want to achieve. I’m currently working in a role that I almost didn’t apply for because I felt like I didn’t tick every box I needed to in the position. You don’t have to be absolutely perfect at what you’re aiming for, so don’t sell yourself short. Second, don’t be afraid to raise your hand. Your opinions are valid. It’s important to find your own safe spaces to practice sharing your ideas. You’ll hone this skill as you go. And lastly, looks, age, race, and gender are not a burden, and these things will never prevent my code from running—but syntax errors will.
SWB Daniella’s story is super inspiring. So, if you want to take a chance on something new and work alongside amazing people like Daniella, you should head to shopify.com/careers. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
[13:00]
Interview: Sonalee Rashatwar
KL Sonalee Rashatwar is a seemingly endless source of positivity and inspiration, and I only know this from following her on Instagram since late this summer. She’s a fat, queer, non-binary therapist who specializes in treating sexual trauma and body image issues, and she’s a community organizer right here in Philly. There is so much we can’t wait to talk to her about. Sonalee, thank you so much for joining us on No, You Go.
SR Thank you so much for inviting me.
KL So, you’re known as “The Fat Sex Therapist” on Instagram. This really piqued our interest because all of those things—fat, therapy, much less sex therapy—are topics that really don’t get enough attention or conversation. How did that moniker come to be?
SR Earlier this year, I was invited to The University of Vermont to do my workshop on race and body image, where we kind of talk about expanding our body image issues beyond body size in talking about things like race, class, documentation status, and understanding body image issues as ways that the state polices and surveils our individual bodies. In this workshop at University of Vermont, I stated that thinness is a white supremacist beauty ideal. And it got picked up by Breitbart, and I was featured on Breitbart in a surprisingly unbiased article. [laughs] But—but what happened after being featured was Breitbart readers descended on my Instagram page and that was when I became known as “the fat sex therapist.”
SWB Do you feel like it was almost a reclamation, or just an owning, of what Breitbart wanted to label you as in a way that they had perceived as negative, and you’re like “no, no, no, no, no. That’s me and that’s fine.” [SR & KL laugh]
SR Yes! I find it really similar to what Jes Baker has done. She recently published her second book called Landwhale. And “landwhale” is a slur that was used against her, and in this book she essentially talks about all the ways that you can reverse slurs used against us to be like “yeah, this is something that I find hilarious and I wear it like a badge. And if I wear it like a badge, then you can’t hurt me with it anymore.”
SWB So, it’s interesting—you know—you talked at the beginning about the work that you’ve been doing around sort of intersections between race and size and body positivity. What are some of the specific things that you work on in your workshop that focus in on race?
[16:41]
SR One of the first things that we do in my workshop is we expand the idea of body image beyond body size, eating disorders, and self esteem. Those are usually the three suggestions I will get from an audience before doing this workshop on what they think of as body image issues. And what I try to do is trouble that assumption of what the limits of that assumption can be—that they’re really just thinking about this individual experience of the size of my body and the way that it moves through different spaces. So, in the workshop, what I do is expand our understanding of body image issues by presenting some of the artwork created by Megan J. Smith. They have created art—a beautiful art series—for the Repeal Hyde Art Project. And that is their art project. The Repeal Hyde Art Project has created these stunning images that expand our understanding of what reproductive justice and reproductive rights should look like. So, usually when we think about reproductive rights, we think about birth control access or abortion access, contraception. But that’s the limit of usually what we think of as reproductive justice. But what Megan J. Smith does is kind of recenter reproductive justice around marginalized communities like communities of color, indigenous communities, communities under deportation risk. And when Megan J. Smith does this, we identify issues that are—like police brutality. Police brutality is actually an issue that disrupts a healthy, black family because we see that there are super-high rates of black incarceration and indigenous incarceration in the US, and that disrupts a healthy, black family. And that should be considered a reproductive rights issue because reproductive rights and reproductive justice should be the freedom for your family to exist in a way that you think is healthy and good for the entirety of that family’s existence—from birth to death. When we expand our understanding of reproductive justice issues to include all things that harm a family from living its fullest, freest life, then we should be thinking about racism and structural issues too. And this is what we do with body image as well. We expand our understanding of body image issues beyond this individual experience within our body to also think about the ways that the body—sometimes non-consensually—is coded by folks on the outside looking at our bodies. So, when we think about police brutality, oftentimes we see the narrative of a white cop shooting an unarmed, black person. Or an unarmed disabled person, or an unarmed indigenous person. And it is in those cases when a cop is looking at someone’s body and saying their blackness to me is coded as a threat. Their disability is coded to me as this chaotic threat that needs to be quelled. And the same thing for an indigenous person. The indigeneity of someone’s body is coded as “this is a threat.” And so when we think of body image issues beyond individual experience, we get to see these systematic layers that are placed on top of our body that we don’t have control over. And that is the way that we need to expand our understanding of body image issues beyond just body size and thinking about documentation status. If I look like a Latinx person, I am more likely to be stopped and asked for papers—my documentation papers. And that’s a body image issue. Based on my body image and the way it’s coded, I am at more risk for violence and harm, and my body is experiencing a lack of safety when I move through public spaces, unlike other people’s bodies.
KL We know that you’re teaching workshops on body issues and unlearning body image issues and breaking down diet culture. I think when you think about that abstractly, it’s like how do we unlearn that and where can we start?”
[20:00]
SR The first step is always becoming aware of it. So, I live in a black neighborhood in North Philadelphia and it is being gentrified by Temple University students, by me—as someone who is not indigenous to this neighborhood—and I am aware of my anti-black racism every time I get out of my car. I am aware of the ways in which I am more likely to look over my shoulder, to be hyper-aware of my surroundings, in ways that I wouldn’t be if I was walking to my car in the white suburb that I work in. And so the better I can become aware of the ways in which I am presuming risk when I move through the world based on nothing else but racism, I’m better able to check that and say “this is not a real risk. This is based in racism.” Awareness of it helps us to move it and shift it because then we get to change the way that we behave based on that feeling.
SWB When you’re talking about things that are specific to body image, do you find that you’re also kind of doing the same thing? So, okay, so what about these feelings about—you know—how I look, or these feelings about how somebody else looks, where are those based, and sort of, what do I need to unlearn there?
SR Yes. So, that is a great way for us to understand, where is my discomfort coming from? And when we apply it to body image, when we see a fat person walking around our neighborhood in an outfit that we are usually told fat people shouldn’t be wearing like a bodycon dress or something that is tight fitting or something that shows skin, or something like short shorts—we have usually thought to ourselves, “ugh, why is that person wearing that? That is—don’t they know that’s a fashion don’t?” But sometimes it’s actually an internal projection of “I don’t feel like I am allowed to wear that, or I am deserving of wearing that, and so that person shouldn’t be either.” But that’s really punitive. That’s actually a replication of carcerality, which is this idea that if I commit a crime and I get in trouble for it, then you should too. This retributive justice—you know—eye for an eye. And that’s not actually the way that we’re going to get to a more liberated place, a more liberated version of this shithole of capitalism that we’re in now. There has to be abundance. You can dress like that, and I can dress like that too.
[23:35]
SWB Yeah—you know—it’s interesting. This reminded me of this realization I personally had several years ago where I realized that I kind of hyper-focused on other women’s midsections. That I would think about whether they were—you know—did they have love handles sticking out of their pants or something like that, right? And I realized, oh, this is something I am hyperconscious of for myself. And oh, why is that? Well, because I had a father who thought it was fun to poke at my belly when I was a kid [SR sighs], and made a big deal about whether or not—you know—you had a chubby belly, right? A chubby belly was a thing that was very ashamed. Well, and that’s all—I mean, okay, he shouldn’t have done that, that was a poor choice—
SR Yeah!
SWB —but that I was like, “oh, that is a weird shame feeling you are projecting onto other random people out there living their lives—
SR Yes.
SWB —and man, what if we just let them live their fucking lives?” And when I realized that [SR laughs quietly] then I just like—it changed my whole perspective where I was like—I still sometimes think about it, but I think about it much more from the perspective of like “look at them out there living their life!”
KL Yeah.
SWB And it was really helpful for me to recognize what that really was and where it was coming from. You know, looking at the world in that way is so small.
SR Yes it is. It’s so restrictive. We don’t have to continually replicate this behavior in a way that I experienced and I’m going to pass it on. We don’t have to—you know—continue with the behavior that way. We have a choice. We have a choice to restrict those thoughts, to address those thoughts and challenge them before we replicate the behavior. And I also want to name that this is body image trauma. So, even though it feels like—you know—this is something that I’ve been able to absorb and challenge and reframe and move on from, if you have experienced body shaming, being put on nonconsensual diets as a child, feeling like an eating disorder was passed down to you from a parent or some elder in your family—you know—these are things that are—I would consider are body image trauma. And I also expand it to include relationships that can have this abusive, coercive dynamic to it where—I’ve worked with a client who, there was really explicit conversations within her relationship that included, “if you’re not going to the gym every day, if you increase from this size to this size…” I name these things as body image abuse. When it feels like if your body changes in a way, that the relationship is over, that the love was conditional and we have to throw it all away: you’re no longer attractive to me and it’s over. That’s body—that is abuse, that is abusive.
[25:12]
KL So, you’ve written also a lot of decolonizing sex. Can you tell us about what that means?
SR So first I want to parse out sexuality and gender. So, sometimes folks think of sexuality as just intercourse, but sexuality is so much bigger and includes things like gender. It includes things like body image, type of affection that we like, whether or not we like intimacy or romance. And my work in decolonizing our understanding of sexuality and gender is primarily focused on us becoming aware that the norms and assumptions that we’ve been taught through our parents, our families, grade school, offers us a really narrow set of selections, and that is a form of colonialism, because at least in the US pre-colonialism, indigenous options were way more bountiful. And I’m not trying to claim that all of us should appropriate indigenous ideas or genders or family systems, but depending on where we come from—I’m an immigrant, my family is Indian-American, they’re from India, I grew up Hindu—pre-British colonialism, we had more than two genders, we had more than two sexual orientation options, we had more than one option for our family system where there’s a mom, a dad, and some kids. We just had more options for the ways that families already exist. So, if you think of here in the States, we have families where grandparents raise the children, we have families where an aunt might raise the children, we have families where there are multiple adults. Decolonizing our understanding of normalcy really helps us to understand whatever rigidity we are thinking is automatic or should continue the way it is, it doesn’t have to be that way, especially if that definition or the box isn’t fitting for us. So, if I don’t feel totally female or male, I can pick a different box. There are more options and that’s okay.
KL Yeah, I mean I think there are obviously—you know—some very main or obvious ways colonialism has affected the way we think about sex, but what are ways we can reject some of those?
SR So, some of the ways that Christianity has been used as colonialism here in the US includes the ways that we think about sex, as well as food. So, when you think about some of the times that you might have thought of yourself as someone better than someone else who was quote-unquote “sluttier” than you—or having more sex than you, or having more kinkier sex than you, or more alternative sex than you, or gayer sex than you—if you thought of yourself as better than the other person, that sense of morality comes from Christian colonialism. The same goes for this idea that if any man enjoys any type of anal penetration, that makes him gay. This is also a form of colonialism, this is a colonial thought. Enjoying stuff up your butt just makes you enjoy stuff up your butt, it doesn’t [all laugh]… we don’t have to shift orientation labels, you just like what you like. [laughs] Another one includes this idea of martyrdom, or kind of like asceticism: if you are starving or if you are abstaining from sex, that that makes you closer to God or holier or better than someone else. These are ideas that also come from Christian colonialism. This idea that gluttony is a sin. This idea that indulging in things that are pleasurable is sinful. Pleasure is very virtuous. We need food pleasure and sexual pleasure to survive this capitalist nightmare. And it’s okay. I give you permission.
[29:12]
SWB Yes! So I love this connection between sort of like a decadent appetite and a decadent sexual appetite, and the way that those things are so policed, and pushing back against that and recognizing that as part of the Christian colonialist mentality I think is so powerful. You know, I also wanted to ask you about your work as a sexual assault counselor. And specifically, you know, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got into doing that work, and what specifically—what areas—of dealing with sexual trauma you focus on. SR So I’ve been working in the field of broadly anti-violence work for the last seven to eight years. And anti-violence includes the fields of addressing or offering services for folks who have experienced domestic violence, sexual violence of any kind, as well as human trafficking. So, I came into sexual violence work through my volunteering and through social work school. I specialized in trauma to understand my own trauma, and that is usually the case for most folks who work in anti-violence. Not to out anybody, but everyone who works—everyone who I know who works in anti-violence or gender-based violence work—has usually experienced some type of gender-based violence, whether it’s domestic or sexual violence, I’ve experienced both. And we sometimes look for those trajectories in careers because we’re trying to better understand our own lives. That is what sociology and psychology has always helped me to do and in my work as a therapist, most of what I do is just offer those insights. A lot of permission giving, a lot of acceptance work, self acceptance work, self compassion, things like that. SWB Have you found that as you’ve been sort of working in this space over the course of the me too movement, the Supreme Court nomination, the endless news cycle of extremely triggering stories about sexual violence…have you found that that has impacted your work or impacted the people who you are working with?
SR Absolutely. For trauma clinicians everywhere, it has been a harrowing two to three weeks.
SWB Yes, me and my therapist just talked about it [all laugh]. I mean, for her, she was talking about how she felt like she needed to bear witness, and she needed to hold space for her clients. And then she had a moment where she fell apart herself, and she needed to have that time for herself. Yeah, but, it’s been rough for me as someone who’s experienced sexual violence, and it continues to be a whole shitty rollercoaster. So, what are you doing to help them navigate this? How do you help them sort of deal with the—you know—the increase in triggering moments, or just the increase in kind of like, I don’t know, general stress and anxiety, as they’re also trying to handle their own trauma?
SR Absolutely. So, I use a two-step approach. And this is like triage work, so [laughs] it might feel shitty, because you have other areas in your life that are experiencing these explosions, but we really just need to work on reducing the anxiety of being exposed to graphic details about someone else’s sexual assault on the news. Graphic details about Kava-nope and all that nonsense, and anything else that can be related to increasing anxiety. So, the first step is reducing or eliminating the exposure to the thing that’s—the stimulus—that’s causing the anxiety. So, that might mean taking breaks from any news, even if you’re in the doctor’s office, sitting in a waiting room—you know—asking the receptionist to turn off the monitor. Becoming aware of how much screen time you are visually consuming though social media and looking at and reading the news. How much are your friends talking about it and are you actively letting folks know—you know—coworkers as well, “hey that’s not something that I want to talk about. Can we change the subject?” So, as much as we can, reducing exposure to the thing that is causing us stress. And it might make us feel shitty, because we feel like we have to bear witness, and we should stay informed. But we can’t pour from an empty bucket. So, if exposure to that stuff is actively causing us harm, for the temporary moment—so for a couple of weeks, a couple of months—it’s okay. You’ll catch up on it eventually. If it’s really super important, someone will text you that something really wild happened. The information will get to you. But it’s okay. It’s okay to stay small and isolated and walled off.
KL I know that we’re all going through cycles of this, so I just really appreciate you saying that because I think it’s important to hear [laughs] especially right now, so thank you for saying that. Something you share fairly frequently are posts about “boring self care” [KL and SR laugh], and I love this so much. Because [laughs] it seems like even hashtag self care now feels like a competition, so [laughs] I just really love that a lot. What are some of your favorite things to do for self care, boring or otherwise?
SR When I tell you what I do for self care, you’re going to be like, “oh, you just take care of yourself!” Uhh yeah, that’s all boring self care is. So, things like if I know that I have to be at work at a certain time the next day, making sure that I’m in bed so that I can get eight to nine hours if I really, really am exhausted that day. So, making sure I have enough sleep, making sure that I pack lunch and snacks for the day so that I—so which also means that I do some grocery shopping a couple times a week. What are some other boring self care? Oh my gosh, doing laundry before I run out of clean underwear!
[35:18]
KL Yes! [SWB laughs] I love—I love that one! Yes! [all laugh]
SWB It’s like literal self care.
SR Preparing myself a dinner with fresh vegetables.
SWB Yeah!
KL Yeah.
SR Yes.
SWB It’s like these mundane tasks—you know—they’re super mundane, it’s not exciting, it’s not a fancy face mask. But I think that a lot of the stuff it’s like—it’s the kind of stuff where when you’re feeling anxious or depressed or whatever is going on in your life and you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s like those are the things that are really easy to not do, but then by not doing them, you ultimately feel worse. And so I like this idea of sort of holding space for that and then—I’m going to hold space to make sure I don’t screw up my bedtime rituals just because I’m feeling overwhelmed, because I know that that’s actually better for me in the long run. So, I love boring self care.
SR Yeah, it’s like how can your now me take care of future me?
SWB Okay, so Katel also was bragging to me [KL laughs] before this interview—straight up bragging—that she is going to a workshop with you that is about unlearning all of these body image issues, and it happens to be on the day that I am getting a very exciting knee surgery. So, I will not be able to join her, which I’m very bummed about. And so, I’m curious, where else can people learn more about your body image work?
SR I will be releasing a webinar in December or January for anyone who is outside of Philadelphia and you can keep an eye on my website or my Instagram. I will be releasing opportunities to purchase $20 to $30 tickets for a pretty small-sized intimate workshop that would cover unlearning diet culture, working through body image issues, and expanding your understanding of body image beyond just body size or self esteem.
KL Sonalee, it’s been so great talking with you and we hope everyone listening today starts following your work. Where can folks keep up with what you’re doing next?
SR The greatest place to keep up with me is on Instagram, and you can find me at Instagram as @thefatsextherapist. If you like or hate something that I said today on the podcast, you can always reach out to me and let me know through my website, and that’s sonaleer.com. S-o-n-a-l-e-e-r dot com. And I have a contact form and I will reply to your email, no matter what. SWB Well, Sonalee, it has been so great to have you, and you will get nothing but love letters from us.
KL Yes. [SR laughs] Thank you so much for being on with us today.
SR Thank you so much for having me, it’s been such a pleasure. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
KL Hi everyone. Are you getting “I Love That” yet? That’s our biweekly newsletter and it’s real good.
SWB Every other Friday we send out personal letters from one of us, plus product recommendations, links to what we’re reading, and more. We also profile an activist, a writer, an entrepreneur, an artist, a candidate, or somebody else who is inspiring us right now.
KL So, come on and add a little bit more fuck yeah to your inbox. Head to noyougoshow.com/ilovethat right now and sign up. That’s noyougoshow.com/ilovethat. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
FYOTW
SWB Hey Katel, what are we fuck yeah-ing this week?
KL So, I just hosted a bachelorette weekend in New York City with about a dozen women. It was two nights all weekend, we all hung out in this one big loft and it was great. We had one night where we kind of did a cocktails, happy hour thing, and then the second night where we kind of went all out and did a big hoopla where we went out on the town, we got all dressed up and it was really great, we all looked really wonderful.
SWB Yeah, is the fuck yeah that metallic gaucho pant jumpsuit number that you sent me a photo of? You told me that you got it for seven dollars.
KL I mean yes, but also my fuck yeah is actually that—so even though I went all out on, you know, the outfit and getting all gussied up and, you know, just making sure we all were having a great time over the weekend—which we did—that night when we all went out and sort of the big night out, I actually decided around 11pm to go back to bed. And I even skipped the boozie slushies that came round—and the shots.
SWB I mean, fuck yeah to that actually! [laughing] It sounds like you made a really good choice!
KL [laughing] I did! I will say, I felt great Sunday morning and—you know—I feel like most of the time I probably have a little bit of fomo where—you know—it pushes me to have that extra drink or stay out a little later than I should. And that is totally the right time to do it—you know—when you’re hanging out and celebrating with your friends. But I don’t know, in this moment I just needed to do that for myself, and I did. And so yeah, fuck yeah to listening to myself and heading back in!
[40:02]
SWB Yeah, fuck yeah for listening to yourself, and fuck yeah for taking care of your needs and knowing sort of how much is right for you. Because also you did a lot of organizing. I know that Katel did a ton of work for this thing, because she was telling me about all the different plans and spreadsheets. And so there’s a moment when you’re like, you know what? When you’re done, you’re done. And you did great. So, fuck yeah to you!
KL Thanks. Thank you. Well, that’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by the Diaphone. Thanks to Sonalee Rashatwar for being our guest today.
SWB If you like today’s show, then make sure to take a moment and give us a rating or even leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is that you listen to your favorite shows. Your support really helps us and helps us spread the word to more people.
KL See you again next week! [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, and fades out]
Today’s interview might not be safe for work—but Cindy Gallop thinks it should be. She joins us to talk about why we all need to be a lot better at talking about sex, what it’s like to found and scale a sex tech company, and why working for yourself is the best thing you can do.
Cindy is the founder and CEO of Make Love Not Porn, a social sex site that wants to “make it easier to talk about sex for everyone in the world,” and a former advertising executive who’s spent years demanding diversity in companies and on stages. We talk with her about building her business despite an industry that’s way too anxious about funding sex tech, why she doesn’t rely on rational arguments about diversity anymore, and how she intends to build the “sex tech full stack” and bring about world peace. Yes, world peace.
> Fear of what other people will think is the single most paralyzing dynamic in business and in life. You will never own the future if you care what other people think. And so I began doing what I tell other entrepreneurs to do, which is when you have a truly world-changing startup, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way around… If reality tells me that I cannot grow Make Love Not Porn the way I want to, then I am going to change reality. > > —Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO, Make Love Not Porn
We talk about:
- Launching Make Love Not Porn in 2009 with her infamous TED talk
- The challenges of funding and scaling Make Love Not Porn
- Creating and raising money for All The Sky Holdings to fund sex tech companies and the infrastructure they need to operate
- How to change the “closed loop of white guys talking to white guys about other white guys” that’s at the top of every company
- Why we should talk about our sexual values as much as we talk about values like manners, work ethic, and accountability
Follow Cindy: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
Also in this episode
- Cleaning out the undie drawer, buying nice lingerie, and what it’s like to have our very personal lives and our professional lives meet
- The endless bra ads on Instagram (and how many of them make you feel like you have a problem body
- Saying one more fuck yeah to Christine Blasey Ford, and the incredible effort she and so many survivors of sexual violence have made to share their stories—or just keep surviving—during the past few weeks
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher Do you ever need to track your time? Then you should check out Harvest, a great tool I’ve been using for years to help me manage projects, budgets, and invoices. They have all kinds of features I hadn’t even heard of, like the ability to start a timer on your desktop with the Mac app and then stop it on your way home from the iPhone app. It’s super easy, it has options designed for both indie freelancers and big teams, and best of all, No, You Go listeners can save 50% off their first month. So try it for free at getharvest.com, and then use code “noyougo” to get that sweet 50% discount. That’s getharvest.com, code “noyougo.” [intro music plays for 12 seconds]
SWB Hey everyone, I’m Sara!
Katel LeDû And I’m Katel.
SWB And you’re listening to No, You Go—the show about building satisfying careers and businesses—
KL —getting free of toxic bullshit—
SWB —and living your best feminist life at work.
KL [singing] Let’s talk about sex, baby.
SWB Go ooooon. [KL laughs]
KL All right. Well, I will not continue singing, but today’s show really is about sex. Sex tech! We got to talk with Cindy Gallop, who is the founder and CEO of an organization called Make Love Not Porn. And she’s an outspoken advocate for equality in advertising in tech.
SWB Cindy’s interview is so fucking great, I think you’re going to be super interested in what she’s doing with Make Love Not Porn, and you should prepare yourselves because she’s also just extremely outspoken about not just equality, but basically everything. But before we get to Cindy: Katel, how’s your week going?
KL It’s good, you know, last weekend I was actually going through some clothes. I was changing out some summer stuff for some more cozy fall stuff and getting that into rotation, and I don’t really know if I can even talk about this on the show, or if I should, but I was going through my underwear drawer throwing out some older stuff and kind of wishing I had some nicer lingerie?
SWB Ugh, we’ve all been there, huh? Yeah—you know—I think you should definitely do that. And I also totally get it though. It feels a little personal to talk about the undies on the show. I don’t know, we get personal a lot on this show, but there’s something about drawing attention to undergarments that feels a little bit like—I don’t know—like is somebody going to take that as an invitation to sexualize you or talk about your body? And it’s like, no, I just want to talk about my underwear drawer for a second.
KL Yeah, exactly, like we—there’s just so much weirdness around that, and I think it’s something that I definitely, and women in general, just normally edit. And I feel that even more so putting myself into very visible spaces like a weekly podcast. And it just made me think a lot about how women feel so much pressure to manage and curate all these different aspects about ourselves to kind of edit what we share and what we make visible or not.
[2:50]
SWB Yeah, I’ve been feeling a bit of that too, and I guess in some ways I’ve been trying to figure out, how do I do less of it? How do I let myself be more of myself in more places? And that’s not to say that I want to bring up my lingerie in a business meeting—because I don’t, thank you—but I am trying to be okay with the idea that we can open up about kind of whatever we want on the show, which is sort of this one aspect of us that’s very, very public, and that means that sometimes people who are listening to the show might also be the person who sees me at a conference or is across the room from me in a business meeting, and they might actually know something about my bra or my period or whatever. And that’s fine, I still deserve to be in that room and have that professional conversation too.
KL Yeah absolutely, and be respected, and have all of that.
SWB Well anyway, the crucial question here is… what are you going to be shopping for when you go out to buy those new undies?
KL Well, I was actually thinking about that, and I don’t even know if I know really where to start, but I sure do get a lot of underwear ads on Instagram.
SWB Oh my god, yes—so many underwear ads. It seems like—is there like—is every other person in the world starting a new underwear company right now? [KL laughs]
KL I mean it feels like it!
SWB So, the thing is—okay, I have very mixed feelings about this. Like on the one hand, I’m really into the fact that there are a lot more options that are starting to be out there for women’s clothing, including a lot more sizes—so a lot wider range of sizes for people—a lot more different kinds of options, a lot of stuff where there’s more emphasis on sort of like where things are being made or how they’re being made or whether it’s eco friendly. And all of that is great. I love that there is a goal also to have more comfortable bras. I think that that’s been a big push the last couple of years. Buuuut! Even if they’re doing body positive advertising, even if they’re showing people with a range of different skin tones, and people in a range of different ages—which is all great and I see more of that happening—it’s also just like… a lot. Like a lot of my experience with the internet is just messages about stuff I should buy to fix my “problem body.” [KL laughs] That’s—[laughing] that’s a term that this woman—actually she’s based here in Philly—Lauren Hallden started talking about: that she was feeling so inundated in her feed with messages about her body being wrong and needing to be fixed in some way—and of course, fixed with products—that she created this whole site about fixing your problem body as kind of a joke. And I think about that a lot—right? So much of this advertising is really geared at fixing what is a problem with you.
[5:21]
KL Yeah, exactly. And that that whole idea of, you know, of a body being problematic is such a construct anyway. I mean—I don’t know—I started following @yrfatfriend on Instagram, she just joined I think a week or two ago, and it’s amazing—please go follow her. And she put a post up the other day—it was a post about an ad for a weird shaper kind of thing, and there was just a line in one—in the comment that she made that was—that has just stuck with me, and it said, “corporations will not save us.”
SWB Yeah, I mean she was talking about the way that this shaper was designed to make you look smaller and that they were using that as sort of being a message about body positivity, because they were showing larger women in the ad. But a product that makes larger women look smaller was from her perspective not the solution, right? Like, that’s not the dream we’re going for here. And—you know—I think a lot about that though, right? Like this idea that corporations will not save us. I was thinking about that when we were talking to Cindy. You know, she comes from an advertising background, and I think you’ll hear in the interview, she has kind of a little bit more of a pro-market take than some of us might have. She’s pretty clear about it. She wants to make a fuck-ton of money from what she sees as being ethical, pro woman sex tech. And I’m like “okay, fuck yeah! Show me real bodies, pay sex workers, promote women, get rich, sounds great.” But on the other hand, I do think it’s important to remember that, right? Corporations will not save us, even if they’re not only being run by white guys.
KL Yeah, I loved Cindy’s perspective and I want you all to hear her, she’s really inspiring. But I also want us to keep questioning what we’re building and buying. [music]
Interview: Cindy Gallop
SWB Cindy Gallop is a force. She’s the founder and CEO of Make Love, Not Porn, a social sex site—something we definitely want to ask her more about—and she’s an outspoken advocate for equality in fields like advertising and tech. In fact, she actually first came to my attention a few years ago when I saw her online lambasting events that had all male lineups. So, we’ve invited her here today to talk about how she built her business, how she built her personal brand, why sex tech really matters right now, and what it’s like to get on stage and say exactly what she thinks. So, Cindy, welcome to No, You Go.
Cindy Gallop Thank you, thrilled to be here.
SWB First up, can you tell us more about Make Love Not Porn? What is it?
[7:38]
CG Sure! So, I guess in the first instance, I should say Make Love Not Porn is a complete and total accident, because I never consciously, intentionally set out to do what I am now doing. I date younger men who tend to be men in their twenties, and about ten or eleven years ago, I began realizing through my direct personal experience dating younger men that I was encountering what happens when two things converge. And I stress the dual convergence because most people think it’s only one. I realized that I was experiencing what happens when today’s total freedom of access to porn online meets our society’s equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex. When those two dynamics converge, porn becomes by default sex education, in not a good way. So, I found myself encountering a number of sexual behavioral means in bed—I went “woah! I know where that’s coming from.” I thought, “gosh, if I’m experiencing this, other people must be as well.” I didn’t know that at the time because ten or eleven years ago, no one was talking about this, no one was writing about it, and being a naturally action-oriented person, I decided I wanted to do something about it. So, nine years ago, I put up—with no money—this tiny, clunky website at makelovenotporn.com, which was myth versus reality—porn world versus real world. I launched at Ted in 2009 and became the only Ted speaker to say the words “come on my face” on the Ted stage six times in succession. The talk went viral instantly as a result and it drove this extraordinary global response to my tiny website that I had never anticipated. And I realized, I’d uncovered a huge global social issue. So, I felt a responsibility to take Make Love Not Porn forwards in a way that would make it much more far reaching, helpful and effective. And I also saw an opportunity to do something I believe in very strongly, which is that the future of business is doing good and making money simultaneously. So, I saw an opportunity to create a big business solution to this huge, untapped, global social need. And I use the word “big” advisedly because even then back in 2009 at concept stage, I knew that if I wanted to counter the global impact of porn as default sex ed, I was going to have to come up with something that at least had the potential one day to be just as mass, just as mainstream, and just as all-pervasive in society as porn currently is. So, I was thinking big right from the get-go. So, what I decided to do was—I always emphasize that Make Love Not Porn is not anti-porn because the issue isn’t porn. The issue is that we don’t talk about sex in the real world. If we did—amongst a whole host of other benefits—people would then bring a real-world mindset to the viewing of what is simply manufactured entertainment.
[10:31]
Our tagline at Make Love Not Porn is “pro sex, pro porn, pro knowing the difference.” And our mission is one thing only, which is to help make it easier for everybody in the world to talk openly and honestly about sex. Talk about sex in the public domain, and by that I mean, parents to children, teachers to schools, everyone to everyone. And even more importantly, talk about sex openly and honestly privately in your intimate relationships. And so, given this mission of “talk about it,” I decided to take every dynamic in social media and apply them to this one area that no other social network or platform will ever do in order to socialize sex and to make real-world sex, and talking about it, socially acceptable, and therefore ultimately just as socially shareable as anything else we share on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram. So, five and a half years ago, my team and I launched makelovenotporn.tv, which is an entirely user-generated, crowd-sourced video sharing platform that celebrates real-world sex. So, anyone from anywhere in the world can submit to us videos of themselves having real-world sex, but we are very clear what we mean by this. We are not porn. We are not amateur. We’re building a whole new category on the internet that has never previously existed—social sex. So, our competition isn’t porn, it’s Facebook and YouTube. Or rather, it would be if Facebook and YouTube allowed you to socially, sexually self express and self identify, which they don’t. So, social sex videos on Make Love, Not Porn are not about performing for the camera, they’re just about doing what you do on every other social platform—capturing what goes on in the real world—as it happens spontaneously—in all its funny, messy, glorious, silly, beautiful, ridiculous, comical, awkward humorous. We curate to make sure of that. We—our curators watch every single video from beginning to end. We do not publish them unless they’re real and we have a revenue-sharing business model. So, part of the sharing economy like Uber and Airbnb—you pay to rent and stream social sex videos and then half that income goes to our contributors, or as we call them, our Make Love Not Porn Stars. Because we would like our Make Love Not Porn Stars one day to be as famous as YouTube stars. For the same reasons—authenticity, realness, individuality—and we want them to make just as much money. We want to hit the kind of critical mass where one day your social sex video gets a million rentals at five dollars per rental and we give you half that income. We are the answer to the global economy.
SWB So, just one small little website then, huh?
CG Exactly. [CG laughs and SWB joins in]
[13:13]
SWB One of the things I really wanted to ask about is how the business side is working. So, I read that earlier this year, the site was at around a half a million members and real revenue was coming in, but that mostly it had been built on a shoestring budget. I’d love to hear more about how that process has gone, both operating on a shoestring and then what it’s like out there seeking investment for a social sex enterprise.
CG I readily say to my team that the biggest thing we have to celebrate at Make Love Not Porn is the fact we’re still here, because the tech and business world has been trying to shut us down every single day we’ve existed. I did not realize when I embarked on this venture that we would fight an enormous battle every day to build it, because every piece of business infrastructure any other tech startup just takes for granted, we can’t, because the small print always says no adult content. Our biggest operational challenge is payment processing. PayPal refuses to work with adult content. Stripe—the gold standard for taking credit cards online—can’t. Mainstream credit card processors won’t. Every, single tech service I want to use, be it hosting, encoding, encrypting, the terms of service always say no adult content. I have to go to people at the top of the company, explain what I’m doing, beg to be allowed to use their service. We had to build our entire video-streaming, video-sharing platform from scratch ourselves as proprietary technology because existing streaming services will not stream adult content. Even something as apparently simple as finding an email partner to send the membership emails out with—MailChimp wouldn’t work with us. We were rejected by six or seven before we found SendGrid who would. So, I have found it extraordinarily difficult to raise funding for Make Love Not Porn. I pitched the concept for makelovenotporn.tv for two years before I found one angel investor who got it—put up the seed funding we needed to at least build the platform. I’ve been battling to raise funding for the past four years to scale Make Love Not Porn. Our biggest obstacle to finding investors is the social dynamic that I call “fear of what other people will think.” And by the way, “fear of what other people will think” is the single most paralyzing dynamic in business and in life. You will never own the future if you care what other people think. And so I began doing what I tell other entrepreneurs to do, which is when you have a truly world-changing startup, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way around.
[15:44]
So, I like to say that I got into the Steve Jobs business of reality distortion. Because if reality tells me that I cannot grow Make Love Not Porn the way I want to, then I am going to change reality. And what I mean by that is four years ago, therefore, I deliberately began defining, pioneering and championing my own category—sex tech. And I did this purely to legitimize it and to create a climate of recent activity amongst investors to get my own startup funded. So, I literally wrote the definition of sex tech. And sex tech is any form of technology or tech venture designed to innovate, disrupt, and enhance in any area of human sexuality and human sexual experience. And I began speaking at tech conferences all around the world on why the next big thing in tech is disrupting sex. Because I thought at base level if I just say this loudly enough, often enough, and in enough places, people will start to believe it. And that had two further accidental consequences. The first was that—you know—I was doing this purely to find investors for Make Love Not Porn, but the more I demarcated and defined this category, the more I saw for myself the enormous potential within it, not least financially. Secondly, I gained a reputation as a global champion of sex tech and so sex tech founders from all around the world began writing to me. And they wrote because they have all the same problems I do. They can’t get funded, they can’t put payments in place, they poured their hearts out. And I realized that I have unique access to extraordinary sex tech deal flow. So, that was the point at which I went “okay, if I can’t get my own startup funded, I’m going to have to get the entire category funded.” And so, because I couldn’t raise two million dollars to scale Make Love Not Porn, seemingly counterintuitively, I decided to raise 200 million dollars to start the world’s first and only sex tech fund. Because if nobody else is going to do this, then I will. The name of my sex tech fund derives from a quote by Chairman Mao, who famously said many years ago in the interests of gender equality, “women hold up half the sky.” I think that’s relatively unambitious, so my sex tech fund is called “All the Sky Holdings.” And the derivation is deliberate because if I can raise 200 million dollars, I plan to invest in two areas—the first is radically innovative sex tech ventures with a focus—not exclusively, but primarily—on those that are founded by women. The most interesting things in sex tech today are coming from female founders. We are finally owning our sexuality, finding unique ways to leverage in business terms, because we get the enormous market that is women’s needs, wants, and desires, historically deemed too embarrassing, shameful, taboo to address in business. And by the way, tap that huge primary market, you tap a huge secondary market of extremely happy men. And then the second area I want to invest in is, every business obstacle I encounter is a huge disruptive business opportunity in itself. I want to fund the infrastructure of sex tech—what I’m calling the sex tech full stack. Because the first payment processor that embraces legal, ethical, transparent sex tech ventures like mine cleans up. The first hosting provider, the first e-commerce channel, the first streaming provider. I want to fund the ecosystem of sex tech to do three things. Firstly, to create a self-sustaining portfolio for All the Sky, because any ventures I fund will need all of this. Secondly, to be a huge revenue generator, because every sex tech venture all around the world and the entire adult industry needs this. And thirdly—and I use a Peter Thiel term here deliberately—to monopolistically build out and own the entire underlying ecosystem to make sex tech the next trillion dollar category in tech. So, that’s how I want to help overcome the obstacles I and every other sex tech founder encounter.
KL I mean, this is a movement—this really feels huge. Those companies who aren’t working with you now or who haven’t—do you foresee them changing their minds? Are—are you seeing anybody kind of realize that this is such a huge market?
[19:57]
CG Change comes when you and I and everybody else makes that change happen. I don’t wait for things to change, I make them change. And so you bet they’re going to change, because I’m going to make those companies change their minds, and I’m going to make them be positively gagging to partner with me one day. I don’t know how long it will take, but I’m going to do that.
KL That’s fucking awesome and [laughs] that’s the best answer [laughs] you could have given. Can we talk a little bit about advertising and a little bit more about your career there? You were an executive of a major ad agency—it was called BBH?
CG That’s right, yeah.
KL You were launching and leading their New York office, serving as a C-Level role with a global organization. What led you there?
CG I began working for BBH back in 1989 in London. And while I was there—and this would have been I guess in the early 90s—I pinned Nigel Bogle, who is one of the Bs in BBH—up against the wall and said, as you do when you’re a young, thrusting, ambitious account director, “where am I going in this agency?” And Nigel did the great management tactic of turning the question back on me. And so he said, “you tell us what you want to do, Cindy, and we’ll make it happen.” And he said, “don’t be bounded by the realms of the possible. If you would like a job that does not yet exist, tell us what it is.” So, I thought, gosh—you know—can’t say fairer than that. So, I went off and I thought about it and I came back to him and said, “okay, my dream job is running—one day—BBH North America.” Bear in mind we only had one office in London at the time. And I said, “and to be my total dream job, I’d be doing that in New York.” And so he said, “okay, we have actually started talking about the US and your request is logged.” Actually, BBH ended up opening an office in Asia Pacific first, so I went out to BBH in Singapore as the number two. But in 1998, I got my dream job and I came over here to start up BBH New York twenty years ago.
SWB I read that you left BBH in 2005 and you felt like that was your moment when you could speak your own ideas and not always be speaking on behalf of the company. And I’m really curious how that all came to be. So, when you decided to leave, was it really because you wanted to be able to speak in your own voice or was that sort of a happy byproduct of it?
CG No, not at all. It wasn’t as planned as that. My entire life and career has been a series of accidents. Nothing’s been conscious and intentional. So, back in 2005, I turned 45 and I had my very own personal midlife crisis, in the sense that I’d always thought of 45 as kind of a midlife point. Obviously, by the way, in the happy assumption one lives to be 90. Fingers crossed. [KL & SWB laugh] But in the couple years running up to it, I’d felt that on one’s 45th birthday was the moment when you should pause, take stock, reflect, and review: where have I been, where am I going? So, February 1, 2005—my 45th birthday—I deleted that. And that was the point at which I went, “oh my god, I have just worked sixteen years for the same advertising agency.” Wonderful agency, love them to death, I honestly cannot rave about BBH enough, but I went “woah, maybe it’s time to do something different.” And then the issue was I hadn’t the faintest idea what. So, vast amounts of thought and angsting ensued, and eventually I went, “maybe the best thing to do is to put myself on the market, very publicly and go “okay guys, here I am, what have you got?” and see what comes to me. So, I took a massive leap into the unknown, I resigned as chairman of BBH New York in the summer of 2005 without a job to go to, and it was absolutely the best thing I could have done with my life. It gave me the opportunity to start working for myself and that is what I recommend to everybody.
SWB Yeah, I mean I agree. I’ve been working for myself since 2011, and I think I’ve—as my friend Karen says—I think I’ve gone feral. Like, I don’t think I can come back. [they all laugh] You know, sometimes people will laugh about, “oh I couldn’t go back to working in an office every day, I couldn’t get dressed up every day” and for me, I mean maybe that’s a nice piece of it, but the real thing is that I couldn’t go to a place where other people told me how to spend my time or where I felt like I had all these other external pressures. I love having that feeling of being so self-directed. And it sounds like that’s massively important to you as well.
[24:06]
CG I mean, people make the mistake of thinking that a job is the safe option. A job is the least safe option you could possibly have. Because in a job, you are at the complete mercy of management changes, industry downturns, marketplace dynamics. I always say to people, whose hands would you rather place your future in? Those of a large corporate entity who at the end of the day doesn’t give a shit about you, or someone who will always have your best interests at heart, i.e. you?
[24:50]
SWB I love that so much, that’s so reassuring. So, okay, part and parcel with sort of you going to work independently and sort of building your own kind of personal profile, personal brand—the “I like to blow shit up” brand—you also started talking a lot about equality in advertising and sort of related industries and diversity of who is making decisions and whose voices we are listening to in those fields and I’d love to ask a little bit about that. So, what is it that you are most hoping people realize about diversity at work and having diverse voices in the room?
CG Stop talking, start doing. You know, I don’t need to spell out the benefits of diversity, because everyone else is doing that and has been doing that for a very long time, myself included. The single thing I want people to realize is the quickest way to—you know—get to diversity is stop talking about diversity, just bloody be diverse.
SWB Why do you think that’s so hard for companies to actually do?
CG Fundamentally, and I’ve been explaining this for literally the past decade, but the reason that change is not happening in this area is because at the top of every industry and every company is a closed loop of white guys talking to white guys about other white guys. Those white guys are sitting very pretty. They’ve got their huge salaries, their enormous bonuses, their gigantic pools of stock options, their lavish expense accounts. Why on earth would they ever want to rock the boat? Oh, oh, oh they have to talk diversity! They have to appoint a chief diversity officer, they have to put in place diversity initiatives, they have to say the word diversity a lot, but secretly deep down inside, they don’t want to change a thing because the system is working just fine for them as it currently is. It’s like the old joke about a lightbulb. How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change. And in this case, the lightbulb does not really want to change.
SWB Yes. I mean—you know—I talk about this a lot in conversations with tech companies specifically where if this is actually a priority for you—well when something is important, what do you do? You decide to do it, you put resources to it. You put people, time, etcetera to it, and you do it and then you see if it worked—you measure the results. And if you’re not doing any of that, then what you’re telling me is this is not actually important to you.
CG The way to change this is not through rational argument. There are many, many rational arguments out there citing the business benefits of diversity. If rational facts and numbers worked, we would not be looking at the picture we are today. The change has to be emotional. At BBH, our creative strategy was “we don’t sell, we make people want to buy.” I don’t sell diversity, I make people want to buy it.
SWB So, how do you do that?
CG The way I would do it, the company and its culture wouldn’t even realize it was changing until it had changed. The problem with the rational approach is and—and by the way, there are many, many research studies attesting to the points I am about to make. First of all, when as a company you say you are all about diversity, you have a chief diversity officer, you have diversity initiatives, you talk diversity a lot, you alienate the current regrettable business and societal norm, which is white men. So, white men feel alienated and angry and all the more resentful and therefore the less inclined to change anything when a company says it’s all about diversity because they feel threatened. Also, it is fundamental human nature to believe that when we are doing something virtuous in one area, we are free to continue exercising a vice in another. The very mundane human example is “I’m having a Diet Coke, therefore I can eat this bag of chips.” In the same way, when a company talks about diversity a lot, it’s very easy for people inside the company to go “oh yeah, we’re doing diversity over there, so I can carry on behaving the way I always have done,” including biased recruitment and promotion and behavior. So, you have to be extremely clever and sneaky and subversive—and I use those terms in a positive sense—if you want to affect true cultural change. And by the way—again this is what my industry is all about and what I have spent, you know, 33 years doing—working in a business that is all about getting people to do things they originally had no intention of doing. SWB Yeah, I think that the—what I think is really interesting about this—we’ve talked to some folks on the show before who do things like diversity consulting, and some of them are doing a lot of this—looking at hiring practices and evaluating bias in those, but I think that what really rings true here and that I’ve seen over and over again is that there is that sense of “oh, we’ve outsourced the problem to the person who is responsible for the problem, as opposed to internalizing and saying, oh no, no, no, the problem is us, right? At every single level and at every single place, we are creating and recreating problems that lead to a lack of diversity or a lack of inclusion in our company. And so it’s like outsourcing the problem to a diversity officer is never going to change that in the myriad of ways that that happens on a day to day basis. So, we are getting close to being out of time and one thing I really wanted to ask you about is just how much you have invented and reinvented yourself over the years. It kind of seems like you are constantly reinventing yourself. And so I’m curious where you see yourself going next and what’s really exciting to you right now?
[30:36]
CG Well, I mean, there’s only one place I see myself going next, and that’s building Make Love Not Porn into a billion-dollar venture. And everything I do is fully focused on achieving that. And the reason for that is when I say that Make Love Not Porn’s single-minded mission is to make it easier to talk about sex for everyone in the world, because we don’t do that currently, people have trouble understanding how massively profoundly fundamentally beneficial that would be. Everything in life and business starts with you and your values. So, I regularly ask people the question, “what are your sexual values?” And nobody can ever answer me because we’re not taught to think that way. Many of us—if we’re lucky—are born into families where our parents bring us up to have good manners, a work ethic, a sense of responsibility, accountability. Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed, but they should. Because there—empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness, honesty are as important as they are in every other area of our lives where we are actively taught to exercise those values. So, when Make Love Not Porn achieves its social mission at scale, here’s what will happen. Parents will bring their children up openly to have good sexual values and good sexual behavior in the same way they currently bring them up to have good values and good behavior in every other area of life. We will therefore cease to bring up rapists. Because the only way you end rape culture is by inculcating in society a universally openly talked about, discussed, promoted, understood, operated and—very importantly—aspired to gold standard of what are good sexual values and good sexual behavior. When you do that, you also end #metoo. You end sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual violence—all areas where the perpetrators currently rely on the fact that we do not talk about sex to ensure their victims will never speak up, never go to authorities, never tell anybody. When we end that, we massively empower women and girls worldwide. When we do that, we create a far happier world for everybody, including men. And when we do that, we are one step closer to world peace. I talk about Make Love Not Porn as my attempt to bring about world peace, and I am not joking. [KL & SWB laugh quietly]
KL I think we love that and we’re so—so grateful you exist and that [laughs] you’ve been here—
CG Oh, thank you.
KL —talking to us. And we’re—we’re so glad that we get to share this with folks, so thank you so much for being here. If our listeners want to learn more about behaving well in bed and everything else you talked about, what should they do?
CG Well, I would absolutely love your listeners to go to makelovenotporn.tv to sign up and subscribe to our site, and by the way to consider becoming one of our Make Love Not Porn Stars. Our Make Love Not Porn Stars tell us that socially sharing their real-world sex on our platform has been as transformative for them and their relationships as socially sharing everything else has been for the world at large. You can follow me on Twitter @cindygallop. You can follow Make Love, Not Porn on Twitter @makelovenotporn. You can like our Make Love Not Porn Facebook page. You can find me on Facebook. And you can follow me on LinkedIn—Cindy Gallop.
SWB Well, Cindy, I know I will be checking out Make Love Not Porn a lot more deeply after this. So, thank you so much for being here.
KL Yeah, thanks.
CG It was an absolute pleasure. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out]
[34:03]
Career chat with Shopify
KL Hey Sara, wanna talk about a really cool job for a minute? SWB Uh, yes—always.
KL Great, so do our friends at Shopify. They’re hiring for a director of product management in Montreal.
SWB Ooooh I love Montreal! You know, I haven’t been there in a bunch of years, and when I was there, I was only there in the middle of winter—which is not the best time for Montreal—and yet I still loved it. It was such a fun and cool city. I would love to spend more time there. So tell me more about this job?
KL OK well it’s leading product management for Ecommerce, which is Shopify’s largest sales channel. And the job is all about setting product strategy and leading a bunch of different teams, collaborating with engineering and UX directors, and then also working with customers to figure out what to build next and why.
SWB I love that this posting talks so much about collaboration and partnership, even though it’s a senior role, they’re not just focusing on what you’ll “own” or “lead.” Soooo If you like how that sounds, maybe you should apply—for this job, or for one of the dozens of other awesome positions at Shopify. Check out shopify.com/careers to see what’s new.
KL Ship it!
FYOTW
SWB Ugh, so I just feel like the past couple of weeks have been full of so many “oh fuck” moments that [laughing] I think we really need a “fuck yeah” right now.
KL Ugh, we really do and I think we are all just nodding in agreement—I hope—when we say we want to give a fuck yeah to Christine Blasey Ford. We are recording this during the FBI investigation, so who knows what will happen. But like so many of you, we watched the hearing last week and we were just so incredibly moved by her courage.
SWB Yes, absolutely. I mean—seriously who knows what will happen? Like ugh, this entire Supreme Court confirmation process has just been exhausting and insulting and horrible in so many different ways. But when I watched Dr. Ford testify, she was so powerful to me because she was up there being so vulnerable and so raw about some of the worst moments of her life. And she also was doing all of this work. You could see it in the way that she was speaking and the way that she had prepared and the calmness that she brought, that she was doing all of this work to be the “right” kind of victim, or the “right” kind of person to be up on the stand. And I hope you can hear the air quotes around “right” because she shouldn’t have had to be doing any of this, right? She had to really monitor her demeanor, make sure she was deferring appropriately to men, make sure she could make a pithy little joke about needing caffeine, right? It’s so easy for her to be positioned as somebody who is unreasonable or irrational or whatever. And the thing is, she shouldn’t have had to do any of that, right? She should not have had to do any of that to be taken seriously. She should be able to be angry and be taken seriously. And sure as shit Kavanaugh was able to be angry. But she did it anyway, right? She got up there and she did a huge amount of work to be perceived in the most credible light given the amount of importance that she placed on doing that and like… fuck yeah to that!
[35:43]
KL Yeah and another thing that’s coming out of this is it’s creating this huge wave, this—you know—this huge shift. The organization RAINN reported that Friday after the hearing was the busiest day in their 24-year history and from the hearing through the weekend after, they saw 338 percent increase in hotline traffic.
SWB That’s the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, if anybody’s not familiar with it. They’ve been around for—like you said—24 years.
KL [sighing] Yeah.
SWB And their hotline is one of the most common places people will call if they need help with sexual violence. But of course, RAINN is just one hotline. I used to work at a rape crisis center and we had our own hotline, it was a local one. And I am sure that they were busy and I am sure that every hotline around the country was busy.
KL Yeah, absolutely.
SWB You know Stacy-Marie Ishmael, who is an editor and a media critic and just like a Twitter fave of mine, for a long time whenever a new story about sexual harassment or abuse would come out, any kind of new #metoo story, she would tweet “floodgates.” [KL sighs] I think about that a lot, right? The floodgates keep opening wider and they’re still not open all the way. And I think about that because it just creates this image of like things that have been pent up for a long time pouring out. And that’s totally what we’re seeing, right? We are seeing so much that has been stuck in the shadows, hidden from sight forever. And—you know—it’s hard to keep hearing about it. It is a lot to constantly be bombarded with these stories. And I think we talked about this a little bit last episode—sometimes you need to turn it off and I can completely understand that and respect that. But I also think it really matters that this is coming out. So, a huge fuck yeah to Dr. Ford, but I also want to give a big fuck yeah to all of the other people who have stood up and started telling their stories about the trauma that they have endured. And—you know—they’ve had literally nothing to gain from it, right? They’ve been doing this because they thought it would help other people, because they thought people could learn from it, because they thought the world needed to know. And I think that that’s huge. I know people, I have friends who have come forward in their communities or in their companies over the past week or two to talk about things that have happened to them. And it’s been a major risk for them and they’ve decided to take that risk and I am so proud of them.
[39:18]
KL I know, I am too. And I think—you know—we’ll also agree that if you have a story and you aren’t able to share it or you don’t want to share it, you’re not ready, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to tell anybody and you don’t owe anything to the world. However you are dealing with it, however you are—you know—getting through, fuck yeah to you for surviving and for—for being here.
SWB Fuck yeah to you, too, Katel.
KL Yeah.
SWB Yeah. Well on that note, that is it for this week’s episode of No, You Go. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and it’s produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thank you to Cindy Gallop for being our guest today.
KL If you loved today’s show as much as we did, don’t forget to subscribe and rate us on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Your support helps us do what we do and we love that.
SWB Okay, see you again next week! Bye, Katel!
KL Bye, Sara! [music fades in, plays for 32 seconds, and fades out]
What do you share with the world—and what do you hold back? How do you talk about family secrets or childhood trauma with strangers? And what happens when you bring more of your most personal experiences to your work? This week, we go deep on the power of getting personal—and the choices we have to make along the way.
Before we start, Sara and Katel break some bad news: Jenn’s not here today, and it’s looking like she won’t be able to join us for the rest of the season. We’re sending some big hugs her way, but we have so much to talk about right now, we’re gonna keep on going.
Our guest today is the incredibly kind, talented, and just plain fucking rad writer and editor Nicole Chung. She’s the author of the new memoir, All You Can Ever Know—which is on sale T O D A Y (ugh just buy it already). It chronicles her story of transracial adoption, growing up in a white family in small-town Oregon, and finding her birth family while starting to raise her own children. Reading it made us laugh and cry and fall even more in love with Nicole.
In addition to being an author, Nicole is also the editor-in-chief of Catapult, a literary magazine, and the former managing editor of toast.net/">The Toast, everyone’s favorite weird-funny-feminist site. We had so much to talk with her about.
Follow Nicole : Twitter | Insta
> It was difficult to start sharing such personal stories about my family and about adoption and about racism that I’d experienced. And it’s not necessarily that I needed someone externally to validate them or to say, “this is legitimate, this really happened, this is important,” but I think just a little human kindness and, like, honestly went a very, very long way. The Toast was a fantastic community… Every time I wrote something there—I mean, both the goofy stuff like “If John Cho Were Your Boyfriend” and the more serious pieces on race or adoption or family—the response was overwhelmingly positive and supportive, and it was just really a privilege and a honor to get to edit and publish and write for that community at The Toast. I think it did make me braver. > —Nicole Chung, author, All You Can Ever Know
Links from the interview
- Nicole’s longread about writing while grieving
- The long history of Oregon’s racist exclusion laws
- Love for Nicole’s editor, Julie Buntin at Catapult
- Nicole’s toast.net/2016/06/09/the-best-of-nicole-chung/">writing at The Toast, including toast.net/2015/03/24/john-cho-boyfriend/">If John Cho Were Your Boyfriend
- All You Can Ever Know, on sale now
Also in this episode
Chatting with Nicole got us thinking a lot about what it means to share your story with the world—in your writing, in a talk, or, say…on a podcast. So we dive into some of our own stories, and the choices we’ve made to tell—or not tell—them in our work.
> You spend a long time purposefully not talking about it and reminding yourself to push it down, push it down, push it down that when it all comes back up and you’re purposefully sharing it, that feels weird. > —Sara
We touch on:
- Our archive.com/?u=b68c4c935529251a931d72f1a&id=0135b4b422">most recent newsletter, where Katel talks about being sexually harassed by a boss.
- The conflict between wanting to speak your truth, but finding it exhausting. As Emma Gray writes, “I am so tired of women having to mine their pain to convince men of their humanity.”
- Sara telling hundreds of strangers that she was sexually abused—in the middle of a design conference.
- Lisa Maria Martin’s great post on keeping politics out of your talk.
Plus, did you know you can listen to books? Katel discovers the joy of audiobooks with Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman. Meanwhile, Sara shares what she’s planning to read in her slippers this fall:
- Rebecca Traister’s new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, also out today!
- Dope Queen Phoebe Robinson’s new essay collection, Everything’s Trash But It’s OK, coming out later this month.
- Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, due out in November.
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
[Ad spot] Sara Wachter-Boettcher NYG is sponsored by Harvest, the tool I use to track time, manage projects and send invoices. You can even integrate your Harvest account with accounting software like Xero or QuickBooks. I’ve got to get that set up! Try Harvest for free at getharvest.com and if you like it half as much as I do, then use code NOYOUGO when you upgrade. That will get you 50% off your first paid month. That’s getharvest.com, code NOYOUGO. [intro music plays for twelve seconds]
Katel LeDû Welcome to NYG, I’m Katel LeDû.
SWB I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and you probably noticed that Jenn’s not here today. And unfortunately it looks like she’s probably not going to join us for the rest of the season. She’s taking some time off from the podcast—as you know, she’s got a lot going on. But there’s just so much we still want to be talking about this fall. There’s political stuff—there’s the midterm elections, all the bullshit happening in the Supreme Court—and there’s also work stuff. Like me and Katel, we have started research for a little side hustle that we are hyped to start talking about with all of you.
KL Plus I feel like we’re kind of getting good at this whole podcast thing. And we have so many rad people we still want to interview, so we’re going to keep going. Starting with today’s guest, Nicole Chung. She’s the author of the new memoir out now: _All You Can Ever Know_—about being adopted into a white family, raised in rural Oregon, and then deciding to find her birth family as an adult. We tried to keep cool, but we were total fan girls.
SWB Talking to Nicole about writing a memoir just got me thinking a lot about my own writing. Especially—how I write about, and when I write about, personal stories. And I’ve done a little bit of that and I know Katel, you have too. In our last newsletter, you wrote about being sexually harassed by your boss and you told this story that really stuck with me where you just talked about him coming into your office and telling you how sexy it was that you spoke French and trying to get you to say something in French to him, which is all super gross and creepy. But I’m really curious—it was powerful for me to hear the specifics of what had happened and to sort of be able to see myself in that place with you and really feel for you there. And I’m wondering what it was like for you to write about it in that specific of a way?
KL Gosh, I—it was definitely hard and also great I think, in a way. I remember writing the first draft and it was like three pages long because I—all of a sudden I just was remembering it and I hadn’t thought about that whole experience in a while. And all of a sudden I just was word vomiting out every, single detail and every aspect. And then—you know—I had to go through and kind of—I did a few second and third drafts thinking about what exactly I wanted to share and how I wanted to tell that story and—you know—make sure I was still kind of protecting myself.
[2:44]
SWB That’s something that’s hard to sort out—right?
KL Yeah.
SWB Like how much do you want to talk about your history and when and why you’re doing it. I think about this when it comes to bringing up my history with sexual abuse, which is something I’ve done a lot. I’ve mentioned it in one of my books and I’ve mentioned it in a lot of my talks on stage at conferences and I’ve talked about it on Twitter. But it’s interesting—you know—for a long time, I never really talked about the details. In fact, I remember the first time I brought it up, I was giving a talk and it was relevant to the topic I was talking about. I was talking about sort of being asked about that later in a form, but I acknowledged being sexually abused in this sort of very evasive way or sort of blink and you miss it sort of way, it was very easy to not have heard that that’s what I was doing if you weren’t paying attention so much to the talk. And that felt really hard for me at first, but it was almost like once I’d done it, I wanted to keep doing it. And sort of like half step at a time, talk about it in more specific detail or talk about it with a little bit more sort of ownership of it and not sort of making it be something that I am vaguely alluding to, but just saying it as it is. And so I feel like half step at a time, half step at a time, up to now—you know—recently I posted this Twitter thread about sort of like how we want to let men who’ve harassed ourselves or abused people sort of like come back into the fold. And I sort of talked about my experience and I talked about it more specifically than I had before. And still not that specifically, honestly, where—you know—it was a teenage neighbor boy who had sexually abused me for a long time when I was a really little kid and I’m thinking more and more that I want to tell that story in a deeper way and with that kind of detail that allows you to kind of—you know—understand what it was like, and also understand sort of the aftermath of that and kind of let go of some of the sort of long-standing shame that built up around it that I know I don’t deserve to have, but—you spend a long time purposefully not talking about it and reminding yourself to push it down, push it down, push it down that when it all comes back up and you’re purposefully sharing it, that feels weird.
[4:59]
KL Yeah, it totally does. And I think just talking about that whole idea of shame—you know—I think with your experience and as I wrote in the newsletter with mine—you know—this isn’t—this isn’t a new story, but it’s also when you think about the fact that as part of those stories and experiences, we weren’t believed or we were doubted that the thing that happened to us even happened to us. That makes it so much fucking harder and it’s like—I don’t know—I think that perpetuates the feeling of shame, it makes us feel like we can’t go into detail and that feels—that feels really terrible. I was sharing with you earlier that someone wrote to me after the newsletter went out and the first thing they said was just “I am so sorry that happened to you.” And that made me so relieved and feel very emotional because I think that that should be the absolute first thing that we start saying in this situation. Not—you know—surprise at like “oh my gosh, really?” It’s like “yeah, no, I’m so sorry, now let’s talk about it.”
SWB You know, I don’t know that I’ve talked about this on the show before, but for about three years when I was in college I worked at a rape crisis center and I specifically worked in their education program, which meant I primarily talked to kids—middle schoolers was the number one audience we were able to get the okay from schools to go in and talk—to talk to them about sexual abuse and to talk to them about both child sexual abuse and things like consent. That’s a whole other show topic that we’ll get into at some point—
KL [laughing] Yes.
SWB —because actually I can’t believe we’ve never talked about this before.
KL Yeah.
SWB But one of the things that we learned very early on in the process of being trained to do this kind of work was to say literally that—right? “I’m sorry that happened to you.” There’s something powerful about it because it’s like there’s no question about whether it happened to you—right? And there’s no surprise, it’s more like there’s a tacit acknowledge that just exists that it happened.
KL Yes.
SWB And that is something that people need to hear because they’ve often heard so many messages from the people who have abused them or from culture at large that it doesn’t happen or it’s something to be shameful about. And to just be like “no, this happened and we can take that as a foundation that it happened and then talk about how we feel about it and what we’re going to do about it.” The other kinds of things we learned very early were conversations about saying very explicitly like “I believe you.” People are so afraid they’re not going to be believed, they’ve been told they’re not going to be believed, and then also “it’s not your fault.” Because that’s another one that often times abusers will tell people that it’s their fault—something they did—or other people will tell them that or that’s where the shame kicks in. And just you have to do a lot of work to counteract those messages.
KL Yeah, to me when I hear that, it just boils my blood because it’s never a person’s fault when they’re harassed. Nothing you do ever warrants being harassed or abused, like that’s just—you can say that without having gender or anything in the mix. It’s like—we can all agree on that. [laughs]
SWB Yeah—as we’re talking about all of this, it’s interesting. We started out this podcast saying this is really about work and about—you know—ambition and careers and sort of what drives us and it’s interesting because people have questioned me before about why I would bring up things like sexual abuse in a professional setting or why I want to talk about this stuff when I’m also wanting to talk about my career. But for me, the more we talk about this, the more clear it is that I cannot actually separate those. I can’t separate out the professional I am now from the little kid who experienced abuse, or from the college student whose first experience with public speaking was going into those middle schools to talk to kids. Those are all me and all of that experience directly informs the work that I do and what happened to you that you talked about on the newsletter—being sexually harassed by your boss happened to you at work. It’s directly tied to your career. And so I think it’s so valuable for us to kind of dig deeper on this stuff and think about the way that that does shape and drive the people that we are at work.
KL Yes. I can’t separate the things that impact me at work from the work I do and I don’t want to. You know, I—when people talk about the idea of quote, unquote keeping politics out of work or anything we do, it’s like that question doesn’t even make sense to me. And it shouldn’t—you know—everything is political.
SWB Yeah—our friend, Lisa Maria Martin—shoutout to Lisa Maria—she wrote this post a while back after a conference organizer had told speakers not to be political in their talks where she was basically like “look, that’s impossible.” Because you’re asking for this sort of false neutrality like, as you said, there is no neutral—because by defining what is and is not acceptable to discuss on stage, what’s political, what’s not political, what’s too political, you are making choices. So, she’s basically saying the conference organizer is making choices and those choices come down to politics themselves. “You are always excluding something,” she says, “or more likely, someone.” And—this is one of my favorite quotes—“for too many people in the world, their entire existence has been coded by society as too political.” And we are too political because we exist. Because we were harassed or abused, because we have periods, as we talked about a couple of episodes ago—right? We’re too political just being here and so if somebody tells us to not be political, then what they’re really saying to me is “don’t be.”
[10:40]
KL Yeah, completely. I am not interested in that. You know, the other thing that I think about when we’re talking about this, is I was just on a podcast where I talked about work and our podcast and [laughs] my therapist being on our show and we just—you know—dug into a lot of stuff. Plus I’m writing more in our newsletters, which I love, and that is really cathartic to talk and write about that stuff, but it’s also resurfacing trauma. And I mean I’ve talked about this with my therapist—you know—after writing some of the letters I’ve written for the newsletter, I’ve [laughs] gone into therapy and just been like [sighs] “oh my gosh, that was big” and she kind of looks at me and is like “yeah, that is big. You’re reliving it—you’re reprocessing it.”
SWB Yeah and I think it’s really crucial to acknowledge that. That it is work to—to reprocess all this stuff and that that can be exhausting. So, for example, after—you know—[coughs] that guy that we have to call our president tweeted basically that if—if Kavanaugh had actually—had actually really assaulted Christine Blasey Ford, then why didn’t she report it at the time? So, women started posting all over Twitter—you know—all of the reasons that they hadn’t reported things that had happened to them. And there was this huge movement and then I saw a bunch of tweets talking about how tiring this was. So, there’s this one, for example, from this woman Emma Grey where she said—you know—“I’m so tired of women having to mine their pain to convince men of their humanity.” [KL sighs loudly] And that one really stuck with me like yeah, we shouldn’t have to mine our pain to convince other people that we exist and that we deserve to be treated better than this.
KL Ugh, gosh yeah that—[laughs] that is so fucking true. And there’s no perfect recipe for this. I think that’s definitely true from what we’re talking about here and deciding how much time and emotional work you want to spend on, it is definitely part of the equation, but I’m choosing to share because I hope someone hears it and at the very least just is—knows that someone else has been through something that they’re going through. But we shouldn’t have to feel like we have to expose every little thing just to be believed. And I think we’re seeing way more women sharing things about themselves and it’s so inspiring, but we have to remember that that comes at a cost.
SWB Absolutely. Like for—for me, I generally do want to share. Like I said, as I’ve shared more details about the things that have happened to me, it’s made me feel good and wanting to share even more. So, it’s something that I want to do, but I just—I guess I just want it to be acknowledged as work—right? It is labor. I’m choosing to employ a tool—that tool is my personal experience—and I’m doing it because I have a goal to help others and I have a goal of affecting change, but it is work and I want people to value that work and to understand that there is—you know—exhaustion that can come out of that work. And—you know—that’s actually something I really loved about talking with Nicole because it really feels like she shares so much of herself in her work and brings so much of her authenticity in. But I also noticed in our interview that she was really thoughtful about it. She’d really thought a lot about what she wanted to put on the table and what she wanted to keep to herself and so I loved her book, but I also loved the way that it got me thinking more about my own choices and thinking about how and if and when I share my personal history with the world.
KL Yeah, she really got me thinking about how I process things and how writing can help you do that, but it can also distract you from it—you know—it can distract you from processing things. Plus Nicole’s just so open and giving, it was so amazing talking with her. [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, and fades out]
[Ad spot]
SWB Time to take a quick break to talk about one of our favorite topics—careers! This week we’re bringing you a job search tip from Julia Hurrelmann, a recruiting researcher at Shopify. She’s here to give us her advice for writing a cover letter that gets noticed. What have you got, Julia?
Julia Hurrelmann Thanks. Since I see so many applications, I wanted to give you my top tip for creating an awesome cover letter. Have a friend or even a neighbor review the letter, obviously to check for spelling and grammar. But also ask them to make sure your motivations are evident and most importantly that you haven’t minimized your experience or skills. We can be our own worst critics. Remember to tell your story and make it crystal clear why you felt compelled to apply.
[15:17]
SWB Thanks, Julia! Those are some great tips wherever you’re applying, especially if it’s one of the dozens of open roles at Shopify. See what’s new there, from marketing to mobile development in offices around the world. Visit shopify.com/careers to learn more. [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, and fades out]
SWB Today’s guest is Nicole Chung, author of the new memoir All You Can Ever Know, which is on sale right now. It chronicles her story of transracial adoption, growing up in a white family in small town Oregon and finding her birth family while starting to raise her own children. Nicole is also the editor in chief of Catapult, a literary magazine, and the former managing editor of The Toast. We have a lot to talk about. Nicole, welcome to No, You Go.
Nicole Chung Thank you so much, Sara. Thank you, Katel.
SWB It’s so great to have you here and first up, we’d definitely like to have you tell our listeners a little bit about your book and also really about your story. So, you were born in Seattle severely prematurely and you were then adopted into this family in Oregon. Can you tell us a little bit about that and about what you learned about your birth family while you were growing up?
NC So, I actually didn’t know hardly anything about my birth family growing up, which was extremely common for adoptions of the time actually. Nowadays, a lot of domestic sort of infant adoptions are more open, but back when I was adopted, sort of the default was that it would be closed and there’d be no contact between the birth and the adoptive family. So everything I knew about them was sort of guesswork or it came secondhand through the adoption lawyer or through maybe the judge who finalized the adoption to my adoptive parents and then to me. My adoptive parents never met my birth parents, growing up—you know—I didn’t know their names, so what I was told about them was basically this sort of skeleton story, like a hard working immigrant story about how they came here from Korea, didn’t have much money. When I was born very prematurely they felt they didn’t have the resources to take care of me. One of the many effects of my early birth was that doctors thought I’d have a lot of health problems that I wound up not actually having. So—you know—they were letting my birth parents know kind of these different kind of worst case scenarios, I guess, because they were trying to really prepare them for what it could be like to raise me if I had all of these various problems and health challenges. And they really felt it was beyond them. So, this is the story that I heard growing up. It was not necessarily untrue for what it was, but [laughing] there were a lot of holes—right? Because nothing is really that straightforward or simple. So, when I set out to find them when I was an adult, one of the biggest reasons for searching was I was pregnant myself. I was pregnant with my first child and I just remember sitting there at my first prenatal appointment being asked all of these questions about my medical history and my birth and my birth mother’s pregnancy and why she gave birth so early and I had no answers to these questions—you know—I had no idea if this was going to happen to me, if I—you know—was maybe going to have a higher risk pregnancy or birth too. So, certainly one of the more pressing reasons to look when I did—apart from a lifetime of curiosity—was this really practical matter of “I’m in this exact position, I’m in the position she was in and I don’t feel prepared for what’s about to happen.”
SWB One of the things that I really loved in the book was your experience—after you found them—getting quite close to your biological sister, Cindy. And something that—that really struck me was the way you wrote about that relationship. It was really moving to hear about both the connection that you have, but also, honestly, the anxiety that you felt as you were getting to know her. Sort of wondering if you were being too much, like too ready to be this super close sister to her and not being sure that she had the same sort of expectations or desires around the relationship. And I’m curious—how did it feel for you to lay out that relationship, to really lay it bare for your readers?
NC It was honestly a gift. One of the best things I think that’s come out of this book is the chance to talk even more with my sister about it. Of course, the story of how we reconnected and how we grew close, we’ve kind of gone over and over again. It’s like our origin story, [laughs] we really like to sort of talk about it still, but—you know—as many times as we had been over it in the years since it happened, there were definitely some things that I wanted to follow up on, some things I wanted to check with her. Just more questions I had about her life and about her feelings, especially when she first started to learn about me and when we started to talk to one another long distance, especially because I was going to be writing it down for posterity and for—for wider audience, I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight. So it was just a great opportunity to go over all of that again and I did kind of just learn more about her—her life and how she thinks and what she was feeling about our reunion as it was happening. You know, just the other day we were talking and it was clear—you know—she said she felt really honored by the book, which is dedicated to her and to our kids, and I mean that just meant so much to me. I used to joke that if Cindy liked the book, I didn’t care if anybody else liked it [laughs] because her—how she felt about it was so important—you know—and I just feel really lucky both to have her in my life, and the fact that she really let me—not just let me, but encouraged me to write our story and has been so supportive of it and feels honored by it. That just means everything to me and it was a real privilege to tell not just my story, but her story too.
[20:50]
SWB Yeah, that’s so powerful to hear about because I think how—you know—how often do people get to have those kinds of almost incredibly vulnerable and honest and reflective conversations with their siblings. I mean, I guess all of us could, but we probably don’t [laughs] make the time for that that often and to really hear if the way that we remember things happening or what we understand to be true is also true for them and to kind of—you know—actually get on the same page. I love that and it makes me want to ask my brother some deep questions, but I don’t really have a reason to. [KL and NC laugh]
NC Well, good luck with that! Yeah, it was—it was interesting too because I think both Cindy and when we—when we met face to face for the first time—you know—there was all this pressure. I remember our husbands would look at me and then look at her and then look back at me and I could just see them trying to catalogue the ways they thought we were similar and the ways they thought we were different. And I remember thinking, “oh what if she doesn’t like me? And what does that mean if your own sister doesn’t like you?” [laughs] And I’m an adult. It’s kind of late to change, I can’t make myself into this version of myself who would be less—just like not too much for her. [laughs] It’s—it was sort of very much a “well, this is who I am at this point” and she had been getting along okay without me is the thing. She really had. She had a full, happy life and I wasn’t sure if she would really need me in her life the way I felt I really wanted and needed her in my life. But as it turned out, she was feeling exactly the same way about me so everything [laughs]—everything worked out great. But I do remember thinking, “am I asking too much of this person?” Yes, we’re sisters, but we’re also kind of strangers and—you know—there’s no particular reason for her to feel this connection or want to let me in. So the fact that she did was just a real unexpected gift.
SWB Yeah, so and I think what I’m also really interested in that you touched on a little bit there is that the process of writing a memoir that is so—you know—entangled with other people’s lives means getting—you know—getting into conversations with them about what happened then and how you write about it and also kind of dealing with potential fall out with them if the way the memoir comes out isn’t exactly how they would have liked it to come out. And I’d love to talk about that a little bit more because I was thinking about that a lot as I was reading about your childhood and—you know—writing about the parents who raised you. So—you know—you wrote in an essay a while back that you pictured your mom telling you that you had no right to do this, no right to turn them into characters. And then you said that she didn’t end up saying that, that she basically accepted that this was your story to tell and that your—your father did as well. And you wrote that you felt seen in that whole exchange with her and—and I’m wondering how important was that to you? And what was it like to hear that from her?
NC Oh it was very important to me to be able to share the book with my adoptive parents and have them understand why I wrote it and not hate it. [laughs] I don’t know, sometimes I have—I feel like I set my expectations low so I won’t be disappointed, so—I mean—I wasn’t necessarily expecting them to love it or give it to all their friends, but I wanted them to feel generally okay with what I had shared and how I had shared it. Which isn’t to say—you know—I asked for permission to share certain things, it was more like—you know—the very first draft I had that I felt was okay and good enough to show to people, I showed to everyone. You know, I sent it to my sister and my birth father and I sent it to my adoptive parents. I didn’t really want them to be surprised later on and I wanted to have time—on the chance I did get something very wrong—I wanted them to have time to correct me if I really needed to make some changes to facts. So, my adoptive parents [laughs] took a while to read it. I think after like four or six weeks or something, I hadn’t heard anything and finally I was like “so, you know, I know that you’re really busy, but”—this is what I actually said—I said “it’s not like War and Peace, so like” [KL & SWB laugh] “like—like how’s it going with the book—you know? I’m here to talk about anything you want. I would love to know what you think.” There was no reason why—of course I had talked myself into thinking like in my anxiety silence meant that they hated it—but in fact, they were just extremely busy. [laughs] And they were—they were going slowly because they were reading it together, chapter by chapter. You know, my mom would read a chapter one evening and my dad would read the next chapter the next evening, so that’s why it was going slowly. And they were both so positive about it and really supportive and—you know—I think one thing I wanted to get really clear in the book—and this was not about placating anybody or pretty up my story in some ways—like I think I’m pretty honest about places where I wish things had been different, but—you know—one thing I think it was—it was always going to be important to get through was just how loved I felt growing up. I could not have had parents who loved me more and I kind of just wanted that to be clear because I think—I mean, not just because it’s the truth and not just because I love them—but because I think you have to understand our bond and how much they cared about me and saw me as theirs to understand why it was so hard for me to search. Like why—why it took me so long to get to that point, despite being really curious for so long. It was just so difficult for me to imagine having other parents or other family besides the one I had and I was really worried about what they would think and how they would feel if I searched. So—you know—I think my parents were really happy that that came through. They both really liked this chapter where I spent a lot of time sort of telling their story, like how they—I did write them as characters, but I wrote their story—how they met and got married really young and moved out west and wanted so badly to have a family—you know—it just kept not happening for them. And I think you have to understand that too—have to understand the stakes for them to see why my adoption felt like—not just like wish fulfillment for them, but like destiny or divine intervention almost. They—they really built it up in their minds because it was the culmination of what they had wanted for so many years. And again, without understanding that—you know—there’s no understanding kind of the pressure I felt and the decision to search and how—how long it took me to get there. But I loved—I loved writing that chapter about them. That is still one of my favorites in the whole book and I—my father passed away in January and I think that chapter is the hardest for me to read now, but I still really love to revisit it, I just—it was actually really, really fun to get to write that about my parents and to get to write about my childhood and how much they loved me. I think we were all doing the best we could—you know—and I think that does come through in the story.
[27:35]
SWB Yeah, I think I hear that as well and I’m—I’m so sorry for the loss of your father. I’m glad that he got to at least read that chapter. I know that he didn’t get to finish the whole draft, right?
NC That’s right, I think he passed away pretty suddenly when they were about halfway through it. So, my mother’s read the entire book a couple of times, but my dad didn’t get to finish it unfortunately. He did—you know, because of how the book is laid out—he had read most of the parts that he was in. The second half of the book is—is much more focused on search and reunion.
SWB I’m glad that they could feel the love coming from what you were writing. I think as a reader, I could definitely feel that and see the nuance that you were writing these people with. I think that that’s—you know—that’s something that I found really powerful because, of course, the story isn’t simple. And like you said—right—it sounds a little bit simpler on paper, but in reality it’s complicated and one of the things that certainly complicated it and that you—you wrote about pretty extensively was, of course, race. So, you were a child of Korean parents and then raised by a white family in a small Oregon town. I am also from Oregon… it’s not a super diverse place [laughs nervously] for a number of reasons, one of them is a history of racist exclusion laws that if folks haven’t heard about, they might want to look up. I didn’t learn about them until I was an adult.
NC Yeah same, I learned in college.
SWB Yeah I mean it’s—you know—I do remember when I—when I moved to Oregon, I was actually eight years old from San Jose and I remember thinking, as I looked around my new school, “where are all the Mexican kids?” [NC laughs] I just didn’t quite get it at first like, “this seems weird, this seems so different” and then over time it just became really normalized because, of course, I’m white and so once I was there for a while, I stopped thinking about it and that was fairly easy to do. Now, that wasn’t quite as easy for you to do because you weren’t white and because you were always the one who was different and I’d love to talk about that a little bit. You—you wrote in the book that you would go ages without seeing anyone who looked like you and that you would hear racist comments at school starting at a really young age. I’m really curious—as you were reflecting on your childhood and the place that you were from, did that make you sort of change the way you—you think about where you’re from or sort of process that history differently?
[30:01]
NC Well, I think I had already started—maybe in my early twenties, maybe even in college—to think harder about what it was like for me growing up in a—in a very white pocket of Oregon. And it wasn’t even just that—you know—my town was predominantly white. It was that I went to a parochial school when I was in elementary school, so it was much smaller even than the public schools would have been. And I think less diverse. It wasn’t—not to say that I would have gone to school with tons of kids of color—you know—in a public school, but—I mean—at this little Catholic school I went to, often it was just me—you know—for years. And that was definitely I think extremely isolating. I had already started to kind of think about that as a young adult and in college because my college experience, thankfully, was very different. You know, I went to school on the East Coast, I went as far from home as possible. It was diverse as far as college campuses go and I think 25% Asian and Asian American, so for the first time in my life, I was far from the only one. I could actually blend in in a crowd if I wanted to. It was amazing, [laughs] I loved it—I just loved it. It never got old. And so honestly the word I kept coming back to, especially in my early twenties, was sort of the harm that might have been done—inadvertently, it wasn’t like anybody—well, I guess except for people who said racist things, actually racist things. But for the most part it was not something that anyone or any group did to me in particular, it was just the overall atmosphere. The default was whiteness, it was what I was surrounded with all the time. I didn’t have the experience of having been anywhere else where it was different and so I was just always used to being the only one or one of very few. And I really didn’t start to kind of unpack what that meant and—and the direct harm I think it caused until I was older. That said, I was pretty aware in the moment as racist things were being said—you know—as kids would give me the chink eye in school or call me slurs or—you know—tell me to go back where I came from or say things about my adoption. I knew in the moment that that felt very bad, obviously, and I knew—I knew even then it wasn’t teasing. I never thought of it as teasing. I didn’t know to call it bullying or something else or racist for that matter, but to me it felt very different than say, being made fun of for wearing hand-me-down clothes, which had also happened to me. Or being made fun of for wearing glasses—you know—it really felt like what they were attacking and targeting was the essence of who I was. It was something unchangeable and fundamentally part of me. And I don’t know, having—having that happen, having that happen before I had the words to describe it to anybody was certainly harmful. It was isolating. I didn’t really know what to do with it and for years, I kind of just put up with it in silence I guess. I don’t remember really trying to tell many people about it. And—you know—my adoptive parents confirmed this. They said, “you never told us that specifically was happening. We knew you were unhappy at—at school, but we didn’t know that was why.” And so—I don’t know—it was this thing I felt like I think I had to protect them from it too—you know—because they did raise me to think that my race shouldn’t matter and that it wouldn’t matter to—I don’t know—it didn’t matter to them, it wouldn’t matter to other people, but I was being confronted with this daily proof that it did really matter to other people and I remember feeling like if I told them, they wouldn’t understand and it would make them feel bad. So—you know—even at a very young age, I was kind of trying to protect them from the reality of what was happening.
SWB Yeah, the way you wrote about it in the book, it felt very much to me like they were trying to do their best and for them, what they perceived as doing their best was to pretend that your race didn’t exist and that that—you know—that that created all of these new problems for you. And I think—you know—when you talk about it as a harm, I think that that’s really powerful and it feels like part of that harm is also—you know—if the harm that’s being done doesn’t go acknowledged or understand, right? Like you don’t have anyone to talk about it who understands that it is harm.
NC I think too my parents were sort of following—I mean I know they were following—the advice they were given at the time they adopted me. I felt like that was really important to put in the book. Not as a defense, just as a fact—you know—they asked several people—like experts—before I was adopted “does it matter that she’s Korean and we’re not? Is there something special we should be doing? I don’t know, are there books we should read or classes we should take?” And everyone told them no—the social worker, the judge. You know, they did try at several points to at least ask the question and—you know—all of these people told them “no, it doesn’t matter, just assimilate her into your family and it will all be fine.” And “assimilate” was really the word the judge used and that’s the word that my adoptive parents would remember and tell me later. So—again this is not like an excuse—but I think it was just very much the prevailing attitude of the day when it came to transracial adoptions like mine. You know, I think people were thinking it was important not to try and like—not to other the child. They were already going to be in the minority in a white family, so—you know—don’t call lots of attention to it because how would that make them feel? And yeah—I mean—that was really—that sort of colorblind line was the line most people in my adoptive family took, so it was a cue that I really tried to follow. It just—it was a lot harder for me for obvious reasons.
[35:39]
SWB Thinking about that—you know—obviously people have been writing about some of the problems with the colorblind approach in general. How has your sort of perception of—of transracial adoption shifted at this point? Or sort of what kinds of things do you want people to be thinking about and asking about and questioning?
NC You know, I do try when I write about my personal experience or my life, I try hard not to be prescriptive or offer a lot of advice. I don’t feel like I have the training or the background—right—necessarily to do that. But there are a number of things I think are really important and to some degree I think are changing in adoption. I hear more these days about the importance of not just acknowledging, but celebrating a child’s culture and country of origin. That can look a variety of different ways, but I think it’s something that a lot of adoptive families feel comfortable with honestly because it’s the fun part. It is obviously way less fun and it’s much harder to really look hard and interrogate your communities, your schools, your churches and where you live and how you live and your social circle and think about if you were a non-white child—a child of color—entering these different circles and communities, what would your experience be? How would you feel? Would you feel comfortable? Would you find people who looked like you? You know, and that is a lot harder to do, it can be really uncomfortable. Also, I think it’s—it’s just hard as kids get older to talk about racism. I’ve been talking to my kids about it since they were verbal, but it is not always easy—you know—it can feel very difficult. It can sometimes feel heartbreaking and I understand this parental urge—right—to protect our children, but at the same time—you know—I think these are conversations that are so important that we can’t shy away from and—I mean—almost every parent of color I know talks to their kids about racism. It is unavoidable, it’s about survival and it’s about who they are as a person and what their experiences will be. It’s about being honest with them and we just—we do know from studies that a lot of white parents aren’t having these conversations or—you know—just find them really challenging. They are challenging, but if you’re the white parent of a child of color—you know—who is going to have the experience that a person of color has in this country, it’s absolutely something that you have to be able to talk about really honestly from a young age and not just wait for the child to bring up, but make it clear these topics are safe and they are always on the table and—you know—sometimes you’ll bring them up and sometimes your child might bring them up, but they have to know that they can come to you with these things. It is absolutely going to be relevant in their lives. Of course, even if it’s not relevant to how you love them, which it shouldn’t be. But yeah, I think there’s a tendency in adoption still to think that the differences are unimportant compared to the love. And I guess I would just say I think both of those things are really important. [laughs] And I think if you’re going to look at it realistically—you know—look at the child for the whole person that they are and think about what their experience is going to be. You know, these are conversations that you have to have before you adopt and then, obviously, after as they age in age appropriate ways.
SWB I really appreciate you bringing up sort of the—the need for white people to have conversations about race. I mean, obviously, in this particular subject when it comes to transracial adoption, yes, but I think in general. And that’s something we’ve talked about on the show a few times where—you know—white people are the only people who get to choose [laughing] not to have conversations about race and then because of that, we’re really bad at it, right? Because we’re just incapable of having intelligent conversations about things that we are nervous about and have no practice in, no vocabulary for, etc. So I think it really underscores something that is true in so many different areas that if we learn to talk about race, that that is incredibly helpful and important. Something that you mentioned in sort of this conversation around how do you help adoptive kids stay in touch with the cultures of their birth families or at what level that happens.
[39:52-41:20: Transcript unavailable]
KL Yeah, I love hearing all of this. This is like—it’s just so cool to hear your story. I have a question about sort of the writing and publishing process because you recently talked about how this book was passed on by many publishers and for a while, you thought you might not even get to write it. What do you think changed for you or sort of in the market that you were working in?
NC I mean, the first person in my acknowledgements is my editor, Julie Buntin at Catapult, and she deserves that place. She really fought for this book. I think even within Catapult—you know—I don’t know if everybody was immediately on board. I have no idea and I have not asked, but I know Julie always really wanted it. And she actually reached out to me even before I had a proposal and asked “hey, I really love your work, what are you working on? Are you working on a book?” [laughs and SWB laughs] And as it happened, I was, but I think honestly it took somebody with the kind of faith and commitment that Julie had to this book to get it to happen. All this to say, it is really wonderful to have a publisher that believes in your book even more than you do. I think—I’m not trying to sound self deprecating or falsely modest, but it’s such a deeply personal story—I am so close to it that it is difficult for me to evaluate it as a piece of literature. It just is. So, having really smart, really talented people in my corner the whole time sort of cheerleading for it made such a difference. I can’t imagine getting this kind of support—you know—from another publisher to be honest. I feel like all the things that other publishers thought were risks—like there aren’t very many Asian American memoirs out there, what if this only appeals to people who are actually adopted? I think that Catapult saw the things that made this book different in the marketplace as strengths and not risks. And I mean personally I very much hope that it’s well received, but also, I felt all along that I do not want to let them down because their faith in this book has just been extraordinary. And the way they continue to hustle for it—I mean, the fact that people are talking about it, that’s really because of their work, you know? So, I feel very lucky to have landed where I did.
KL I think that makes so much sense and, you know, it’s funny Sara and I have recently been talking about how something that we’ve noticed with authors and just in general folks who are wanting to write more—whether it’s in book form or not—getting some external validation of, you know, the fact that [laughs] what you’re saying is—makes sense and is important is critical. And I think having a really good relationship with the publisher you trust is huge.
NC It’s true. I really give them a lot of credit, honestly. This is a very different book. You know, there aren’t a lot of adoption stories out there by adoptees. For the most part, our stories are told by other people. And so I really do appreciate and give them so much credit for—I guess—taking a chance on this.
SWB So, in talking about how the book came to be and sort of the people who helped make it happen, I also want to ask a little bit about The Toast, where you were the managing editor.
NC Oh sure!
SWB So, for our listeners who aren’t familiar, The Toast was a site that Nicole Cliffe and Daniel Ortberg started that featured really funny, weird, feminist writing is maybe the simplest way to put it. It’s not publishing anymore so if you haven’t read it, go check out the archives because you have a whole lot of delight in store for you. [NC laughs] Anyway, so Nicole you wrote for The Toast a little bit and then you ended up being the managing editor and you once wrote that without The Toast, you probably wouldn’t be writing this book. And I’m curious what it was about your experience there that made it feel so crucial in sort of your—your development as a writer and your ability to be where you are now.
[45:05]
NC Well, I think that one thing writers talk about a lot is the importance of community. And that can take so many different forms. You know, I don’t get to hang out with a lot of writers in real life. My first writing communities were really online. I mean, it was LiveJournal, to be honest, and it was Hyphen Magazine, and it was The Toast. So, I think I am really a product of these different communities I found. You know maybe I just kind of lacked some crucial shot of courage or something, but it was difficult to start sharing such personal stories about my family and about adoption and about racism that I’d experienced. And it’s not necessarily that I needed someone externally to validate them or to say, “this is legitimate, this really happened, this is important,” but I think just a little human kindness and, like, honestly went a very, very long way. The Toast was a fantastic community, the commentariat—much has been written about how it was one of the only good comment sections on the entire internet. It’s true that every time I wrote something there—I mean, both the goofy stuff like “If John Cho Were Your Boyfriend” and the more serious pieces on race or adoption or family—the response was overwhelmingly positive and supportive, and it was just really a privilege and a honor to get to edit and publish and write for that community at The Toast. I think it did make me braver, I think it made me appreciate the work of other writers so much more, and it made me think—I mean it was one of the things, maybe not the only thing, but one of the things that made me think, there is interest in this beyond people who were adopted or beyond people who have adopted. And people who are curious or have their own complicated families or have their own family secrets, they will be interested, they will be able to connect, they might get something from this. It could be a story that people need. So, yeah. It was not any one particular experience at The Toast, just the overall privilege—you know—of getting to work for that particular community.
SWB Yeah, that concept of generosity rings so true to me because I do think that there is this peace that’s like really great editors and really great community make you feel like you are sort of receiving—even if you’re receiving something that objectively sucks like feedback on your work [laughs]—but you feel like you’re getting something that—that is—is good and enriching in some way and it feels like a gift. I think that that’s so powerful and to make that process come from this place of sort of genuine love and care and that—that I think is so much more powerful and so it completely shows. So, now fast forward to where we are right now. By the time our listeners hear this, the book will be out and there has been a lot of buzz for it. I saw that Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review and called it “stunning, vibrant and provocative,” which are some pretty good terms. And I saw it’s also on a lot of highly anticipated lists for the fall, so um… how are you feeling?
NC I’m feeling really overwhelmed! [SWB & KL laugh] Although, sometimes I feel oddly nothing. Like I was sort of a blank slate of expectations. I didn’t know—this is my first book—you know—and I didn’t know how it would feel. The fact that it’s a memoir and so personal—I mean—just kind of made it more—I think—anxiety producing and mysterious for me. But yeah, I kind of—I see all the lists and it’s all really lovely and I feel people are being very charitable and I try not to give into imposter syndrome, but sometimes I do wonder [laughing] “what is the source of all this?” I don’t know, it’s so strange to see something that just lived in your head and in your heart out in the world having a life of its own. Like people reacting to it, even positively, in ways beyond your control. I love every kind thing, every thoughtful thing that people say about it, but at the same time, it’s just—it’s just so strange too to know that it’s out there being reacted to—you know—not only can I not control other people’s reactions to it—you know—I don’t want to. I think that’s the experience of reading—that something that nobody—not even the author—can take away from you is how you read a book and what you take away from it. But it’s just really interesting to hear the parts that I maybe think of as slightly less what the book is about, sometimes those are the parts that really resonate for people. I keep taking screenshots of the lists or saving them because [laughs] I feel like I’ll read them later and maybe feel more. Right now it’s just like there’s a limit. It’s like by 11am every day, I’ve hit my limit of what I can feel about the book that day and I’ll have to [laughs] wait for another day to feel and process more. [SWB & KL laugh] It’s definitely a lot.
KL That makes total sense. I mean, we love it and we—we hope that you enjoy all the moments [laughing] no matter how overwhelming they might feel. But—so when you think about looking forward to once some of this frenzy of the release has passed, what are you most looking forward to?
[50:08]
NC I want to go on vacation for like a month! It’s not going to happen—it’s just not with work—but I want to take a little break. I’d like to take a nap for like three straight days. [laughs] And—I mean—I’ll be really honest. This has been—it’s been coming up in some other interviews too, but—I mean—my father passed away in January and I feel like I have not really even begun to like —I don’t know—not move past it because you don’t move past it, but there has not been a lot of time to think or to grieve. There hasn’t been as much time as I would like for my family this year and it’s just because of the nature of publishing a book, working a lot, not having a ton of vacation and—and having—you know—my father pass in the same year that my book comes out is—it’s been really hard. It’s been… really challenging and—and I’m honestly really looking forward to having some downtime for myself to process and maybe go to grief counseling finally. Just sort of spend a lot of time with my mom and my kids and—you know—certainly I’ll be thinking about what’s next, but I think probably some self care will be in order. [KL laughs]
KL Yeah that’s—
SWB Yeah, I hope you get both. I think you should have both a vacation and the time to properly process your feelings—
KL Yeah.
SWB —and deal with grief.
NC Thank you. I mean that said, I am so looking forward to the book being out there. I’m really looking forward to tour. I think it will be, again, overwhelming, but mostly wonderful. I feel very honored that anybody is spending time with the book and I really want to get out there and meet and talk with people about it because it’s a special thing and I know—you know—I’ll never have this exact experience again. This is it for this—for this book, this is my chance. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also looking forward to taking a really deep long breath [laughs] when it’s over. [SWB & KL laugh]
KL We’re sadly almost out of time, so I just want to make sure that everyone knows that “All You Can Ever Know” is on sale literally everywhere right now, so we hope everyone will pick up a copy. Nicole, where else can folks keep up with you?
NC My Twitter handle is @nicole_soojung—Soojung is my Korean name. And I’m on Instagram—Nicole Soojung—and those are my only public social media accounts so [laughs] but I would love to connect with people. My email is also not super difficult to find either. And if there are writers out there who have stories they would like to share, I do edit and publish fiction and non-fiction for Catapult so I would love to hear from you.
KL Amazing.
SWB Nicole, thank you so much for being here.
NC Thank you for having me! I had such a good time. [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, and fades out]
SWB Listening to Nicole talk about her book is so great. I could give a fuck yeah for that. Buuuut I think we need more fuck yeahs than that. Katel, what have you got?
KL Oh, I’ve got a good one and it is on theme! I just started listening to audiobooks. Hi, welcome me to [laughs] the present day. [SWB laughs] I’ve started to read so many books in the last few months and I just—I don’t know—I never seem to be able to finish them in paperback so I got a Kindle a little while ago, which I love because I can keep a bunch of books on it. But all of a sudden, I took a chance, I got an audiobook and now I feel like I have this whole new option.
SWB So, what are you quote, unquote reading right now? [KL laughs]
KL So, I’m reading slash listening to Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman. It is fucking great, unsurprisingly, but it’s really amazing because I get to just kind of lose myself in it for the first time. I haven’t felt that way in a while, so it’s great.
SWB That’s awesome. This is also really great because I actually wanted to do a fuck yeah to fall books because there are so many great books that are coming out. So, Nicole’s book obviously, which we got to read early, which was such a treat. But I’m also really excited for Rebecca Traister’s new book, it’s called Good and Mad. It is about women’s anger and hello, I have some of that [laughs]—in a healthy way. And then there’s Michelle Obama’s memoir and Phoebe Robinson from 2 Dope Queens has a new book that’s called Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay. [KL laughs] Great title. And there are so many more books that I’m hyped about, so I can not wait to get some of these new titles, curl up with them, get myself a warm beverage while it’s cooling down outside. I’m just very, very, very much looking forward to reading books all fall and winter.
KL I love it. I think we need to take a little trip somewhere to a fireplace-having location and just have a whole weekend where we read. Just—you know—putting that out there.
SWB That sounds so great. So fuck yeah to fall reading!
KL Fuck yeah!
SWB Fuck yeah. That reminds me, I’ve got to order some new slippers. [pause] Well, that is it for this week’s episode of No, You Go. Our show is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Nicole Chung for being our guest today.
KL If you love NYG, make sure to subscribe and rate us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Your support helps us do what we do and we love that. See you next week!
SWB Bye!
KL Bye! [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, and fades out to end]
Breaking up is hard to do—whether you’re ending a business relationship or a marriage. Bonnie Bogle’s done both, and she’s here to tell us about the good, the bad, and the it’s-just-plain-complicated.
Bonnie cofounded Mapbox, one of the largest providers of custom online maps in the world. But after growing the business from zero to more than 200 employees, she left it all behind. Now she’s the director of Brazen in Philadelphia, where she works with startups at the start of their journeys.
Bonnie tells us about what it was like to launch Mapbox with her husband as her business partner—precisely at the moment they decided to get divorced. She also shares what it was like to leave that same company after building it into a massive success. Oh, and how she knows the secret behind McGruff the Crime Dog’s life story.
> Who cares if this is super unusual? Yeah, we’re getting a divorce, and we’re starting a company together at the same time, and screw it! Let’s just do it. We both want this. > — Bonnie Bogle , cofounder of Mapbox and director of Brazen Philly
We chat with Bonnie about:
- Why living in Peru inspired her to create her first company, build open-source websites, and ultimately provide access to better maps
- How everything Bonnie learned running operations for a quickly growing startup became the backbone for how she’s helping other new businesses launch and grow
- How to decide whether and when to let go of something you love
Follow Bonnie: Twitter | Insta
We also dig into…
- When leaving a job is bittersweet, so you hang around for a month (or more)
- Toxic companies, toxic bosses, and realizing when you gotta GTFO
- Crying in the work bathroom: the worst, but also sometimes totally ok
- Breastfeeding at meetups, in Parliament—and wherever the hell you want to (if you want to)
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
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Jenn Lukas Hey, welcome back to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû.
SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
KL Our guest today is Bonnie Bogle. She’s someone I met about six years ago in DC when she was Head of Operations at a company called Mapbox. And she cofounded and bootstrapped Mapbox. Back then, it was a few people and pretty soon it was hundreds. And then last year in 2017, Bonnie walked away. So we’re going to talk with her about all of that and her journey—building the company and deciding to leave it and what’s next. It’s kind of a cool story.
SWB Yeah, I really liked chatting with Bonnie because I think we talk with folks a lot about starting new stuff but we don’t talk that often about when do you decide that it’s time to go? Especially when it’s something that’s really close to you—right? Like, she spent a lot of time building the company and to walk away from it was a huge deal. So, I think we should talk more about knowing when it’s time to leave… whatever! Leave a job, or leave a side project, or leave a company you started.
KL Yeah, seriously. I think about this with National Geographic because I was there for over six years before I joined A Book Apart. And there were lots of reasons I left, many of them were positive like looking for a new challenge or working with difficult people. I also had just never worked with a smaller company, which was interesting to me. But—I don’t know—there were also a bunch of negative reasons or reasons that didn’t feel so positive that I left. And I realized at a certain point that I’d gotten to a certain level of management and I think I had gotten exposed to—you know—some toxicity and some politics and some bullshit I just wasn’t really loving. And that made me unhappy and that was spilling over into how I was interacting with my team, which sucked. And it was in the middle of the summer I think and we were dealing with a whole bunch of projects, like a whole bunch of deadlines were hitting and our team was understaffed and somebody was out for vacation for a couple weeks coming up and then somebody else on my team asked if they could take the same two weeks off and I like…said no. I just basically was like “no you can’t” because I felt like I just couldn’t be with like one less person and thinking back on that, I’m just like I can’t believe I had that conversation with that person.
[3:01]
JL What was it like having that conversation with that person?
KL Yeah, it was terrible! Like I think back on it and I was feeling a lot of stress and like I said, I think that was kind of spilling over into how I was dealing with my team and I felt so shitty that I had treated that person—you know kind of like not—not with a lot of respect by just being like “no because I say so.” Like that’s terrible! And I—I don’t know—I think at the time I didn’t—I felt like I didn’t have any other choice but really I did and it just makes me so sad that that’s how it went down.
SWB I’ve definitely felt like I was in a situation where I was struggling so hard to keep my head above water myself that it was really hard to make space for advocating for the people who were reporting to me. And that’s definitely one of the big reasons that—that I left the job. I mean I remember managing a team and I realized that I was spending so much of my time managing up, so some of that was—you know—making sure that I wasn’t getting the short end of the stick with management. Part of that was also being the shit umbrella—right? Which is where like you want to prevent the shit from upstairs [laughing] to come down on your whole team [KL laughs] and so—you know—when there were questions about things like what everybody’s workload was and whether—this is at an agency—so whether everyone was sort of fully utilized, as they say. So like how billable are people? Are they making enough money for the company is fundamentally what that means. And whenever those kinds of conversations came up, I had to fiercely advocate for the people who I was working with and make sure that they were essentially protected—right? That nobody was perceiving them as not contributing enough because they were working very hard. That was very consuming for me and I did not feel like I had enough space or time or energy left to do a lot to support them or sponsor them—give them opportunities to shine or to grow. And that is something that I really wish that I had done differently and I think ultimately the kind of—kind of like you mentioned, Katel—toxicity that I felt coming at me all the time, that’s when I basically decided like “I gotta get out of here.”
[5:12]
KL Yeah, this is also just making me think back to that time. [suppresses laugh] And I was in an office with big windows that like looked out onto the floor where the rest of my team was and [laughs]—two of my team members sat directly outside my office and I just remember like sobbing [laughing] because of something, like some meeting I had come from and being like so overwhelmed and I just looked up and they were [laughs] watching me and I was like “oh god, [laughs] this is bad.”
JL Oh my god [laughs]. [KL sighs.] I have a line when it’s time to go and that’s crying at work. And not because it’s not okay to have feelings—
KL Totally.
JL —but if any place is making me cry, I am like “get the fuck out, you do not need to be in a situation like this.” [KL laughs] And I know that’s easier said than done—right? It’s not always easy to just be like “okay, I’m going to get a new job…like tomorrow!” But there’s just a line of respect that I need people to have at work. Not just to me but me to them and everyone all around. And so there was—I had a job this one time and someone yelled at me. [KL sighs] And I am so not okay with people like yelling, scolding people. And I just started crying. And I couldn’t stop, I mean I was just like—I closed myself in—in office in attempts to stop crying because I didn’t want to leave the office and have other people see me cry. And that was it for me, like mentally. I still ended up working at that place for a couple more months but it was like me creating my exit plan.
SWB Yeah, I feel like those kinds of events can be like a wake up call. But I do wish, Jenn, that you had been that little angel over my shoulder for all the times I was crying in the bathroom. [laughing] Because I’ve cried in a lot of work bathrooms! [JL laughs] And it didn’t really occur to me to be like “wait a second, you shouldn’t have to be doing this!” And I think it’s fine like look, if you cry in the bathroom, it’s okay. Everyone cries, it’s fine. But to look at that and say okay, it’s not just something wrong with you that you’re crying in the bathroom, it’s like what’s going on that is enabling that to happen over and over again.
KL Yeah.
JL There should just be signs in the bathroom. [laughs] You know, not no crying—it’s okay, your feelings are okay—but like no to that—
SWB But like— JL —asshole who made you cry. [laughs]
SWB Yeah, [laughing] exactly.
JL You know, and there’s times—again if everything else was perfect and this was just a random situation where—I don’t know—someone was having a real shit day and I accidentally got yelled at—you know? But it wasn’t. It was representative of a toxic situation that I just shouldn’t have been in anymore and it was time for me to go.
SWB One of those moments for me was when I was actually being harassed by this guy who did not work for my company but he was a vendor, so it was a third party service we used a ton, so we had this really close vendor relationship with them. And I went to their big vendor conference because my team was responsible for this relationship and we’d been like—just like normal conference things. We’d been out at drinks with a coworker from my company and—you know—went back to the hotel, I am going to my room to go to bed because I am a reasonable adult. And I started getting all these gross texts from him trying to get me to come to his hotel room to play.
KL Eugh.
SWB And it was—it was very gross. And I had spent the whole evening thinking like—you know, we had talked about—I don’t know—the farmer’s market that he likes to go to with his wife and how he had just dropped his daughter off at college. Like I thought we had been having a very normal conversation! He thought that he was like teeing up this whole extra scenario. So it was super gross and obviously he was gross, but one of the things that was a huge sign for me was that after that happened, I did not feel like I could talk to the owners of my company about it. I did not trust them. I did not trust what they would say or do about it and I did not feel confident that that scenario would end in a place that was any safer for me. I knew, for example, that one of the owners of my company, like the vendor relationship we had with this other company was so important to him that I was like “he is going to prioritize that relationship over me.” [KL sighs loudly] Which like—
KL Not—not okay.
SWB So because of that, I did not go to them. And it was just like I reported to the owners. I was a director reporting up to the owners and I had this team of like six people who worked for me. And a couple of them worked with this vendor all the time. And so at one point I quietly sat down with these other women and warned them about this guy. And I look back on that and I think what a sad state of affairs—right? As their manager, I was effectively telling them that they couldn’t trust that they were working in a place where they would be safe—right? I was effectively warning them about a creep as opposed to preventing a creep from being in their workplace. And I don’t think anybody should be in a workplace where somebody is going to harass or assault them. And obviously, self included—right like this should not have been happening to me—but that was definitely a moment where I was like “oh my gosh, I can not do right by them.” And I regret it in some ways. I mean, at this point, I would absolutely push this issue forward and I would go to their company and I would make a stink about it to them, I would make a stink about it to the owners and I wouldn’t shut up about it until something changed, even if that meant that like I was pushed out. But at the time, I felt really scared of that and I also felt like I had no idea where to even start. That was when I really realized—this is an environment where I am not going to be able to affect any change that is good for anybody, myself included, because this obviously objectively awful thing has happened and I don’t feel safe enough to even talk about that, so what the fuck [laughs nervously] am I ever going to be able to fix here?
[10:58]
KL I give you a lot of credit for—I mean, you know—going through that and looking back on it. And obviously it’s so hard to not have feelings of like “I wish I had done this.” But I think that that is something we fall into when we’re sort of—a little earlier on in our careers and we’re managers and when you’re in an environment when the responsibility to like do the right thing is—is only and constantly being placed on you, that’s not necessarily fair. It’s not that you’re not going to do the right thing but when you don’t have a structure—like you said—through which to kind of make things better, that’s—that’s really tough.
SWB I’m curious. Have either of you ever left a job that you really loved and that was like a place that was good and you felt really close to, but you felt like for whatever reason, you had sort of gotten what you needed to get out of it?
JL Totally, yeah. I have a couple of times actually. My first job out of school—I worked at Lockheed Martin—and though that might have not been the [laughing] perfect fit for me—I don’t know if everyone would imagine me working there—I worked with a bunch of really great people. But the issue with working at Lockheed Martin is you’re working on a lot of confidential things and if I ever wanted to find another job, I couldn’t really show my portfolio. Because I was more the web design field—right? [laughing] So it wasn’t exactly the perfect match for where I wanted to go in my career trajectory, so I knew that I sort of had to make a move because if I stayed there, it wouldn’t follow my career goals in life. So even though it was a really great job with really great people, it just wasn’t the perfect fit for me and what I wanted to do. So the long term picture made it sort of easier for me to leave that job and try something new.
SWB Jenn, I know also that you ended up working at Happy Cog a few years later—an agency—and that you were there for several years. And I remember when I met you, you worked there. And I just really strongly associated you and Happy Cog. [JL laughs quietly] You’d been there a long time, you seemed so crucial to that place. And so I’m curious, did you feel that way—like Happy Cog was a big part of you and was it hard to leave a place that was—that you felt so close to?
JL Oh yeah, I still say “we” when I talk about Happy Cog. [KL laughs] You know, so I’m like “oh yeah, we did really great things there,” it will forever be a “we” for me. I absolutely loved it, felt very invested in that company and the success of it, still do follow them and always—like “oh what’s everyone doing now?” The thing is though—you know—I was there for six years. And I was doing a lot of speaking and I was just doing a lot of different work and I always wanted to try freelance. And it was really a good point in my career and my personal life for me to go out on my own. I had done—tried doing freelance once and that was right out of school and let me tell you, [laughing] that was not a good time for me to try freelance. But it just felt like this was a really good time for me to go out on my own and try consulting and focus more on the speaking. I was running Ladies in Tech at the time and I had a lot of just like writing and speaking engagements and I was like “I’m going to go for this!” So I had enough confidence to be brave to leave that job and try something new that I wanted to always try.
SWB Was there a sadness about leaving a place that you did feel so connected to and almost felt like, like you said it was a “we,” like you felt such a part of?
JL Totally, it was one of those things where the people I worked with will always be my friends and—you know—there was even like, “hey if you want to come back and work at the office, you can.” Which I definitely felt like I could, but I also sort of needed to separate because I needed to feel that separation. But you know, you keep in touch and you know—you just—you move on and there’s other things.
KL Yeah, it’s funny that you say that because when I left Nat Geo—I mean, that was super bittersweet. And I remember that I gave a month of lead time—
JL Yes [laughs]
KL —and I kept—[laughs] and I kept telling myself that I was doing that to make sure I handed off things and that everything was smooth but looking back, really that was for me to—[laughing] to be able to let go.
JL Yeah, when I left I gave six weeks! [KL laughs]
SWB Yeah, I think this is something that Bonnie talks about a little bit about just sort of that—how do you let go? And feeling like you’re ready to let go and that it’s time to say like “okay—you know—this thing that I thought of as mine and us is no longer going to be mine and I am going to let it go out into the world and it’s going to do what it’s going to do.” And I think that that’s a really important part of growth—you know—when you have to let go of this one vision about yourself and your job and your life in order to pursue this other vision of yourself and your life.
[15:26]
JL I can’t wait to hear more about that! [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, and fades out]
Interview: Bonnie Bogle
KL Today we’re talking with Bonnie Bogle, the director of Brazen in Philly, a community for women entrepreneurs. I met Bonnie when we were both living in DC and she was in the midst of running and growing Mapbox, one of the largest providers of custom online maps for websites and apps. And she’s gone from writer to entrepreneur to community leader and we can not wait to hear what’s she’s up to. Bonnie and I ran into each other in April and I almost squealed with delight at realizing that we live in the same city again. So needless to say, Bonnie, I am really happy you’re joining us. Welcome to No, You Go.
Bonnie Bogle Thanks, it’s great to be here.
KL So I want to just go back a little bit. You started out as a writer for the National Crime Prevention Council and the Nonprofit Technology Network. It seems like you’ve always sort of wanted to do work that benefits the public good. Can you tell us a little bit about—you know—just sort of starting out and what your early career was like?
BB Sure. What brought me first to Washington, DC, was I went to college at American University and was lucky enough to have a lot of internships and then one of the ones that was probably most influential on me was when I worked for the local NPR affiliate. And that was where I realized the public good of community radio and also where I realized that my lifelong dream of being a journalist was actually not the right fit for me. [laughs] So when I did start off my career being this writer for—you know—something that was crime prevention, which was interesting to me on the local level but then also within technology was appealing. And also I was at that nice age range where coming out of college I knew how to use a computer better than most people, like that moment in time where the internet was on the newer side of things, so that was also an easy job to land.
KL Did you ever meet McGruff the Crime Dog?
BB Oh my gosh, so I actually, I wrote in his voice—was largely what I did when I was there. Because what I did was I ran the children’s website. I was not tall enough to actually wear the dog suit myself [KL laughs] thankfully, however one of my claims to fame in that job was I wrote the life story of McGruff, on how he actually became the Crime Dog.
KL Oh my gosh, that’s very cool. [laughs] I love that.
SWB I have so many follow up questions about McGruff but I feel like they would derail this entire interview. [laughter]
KL Well, we’ll do a follow up.
KL So skipping ahead, you started your first company Development Seed when you were twenty-three and then three years later you co-founded another one called Mapbox, as I mentioned before. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey?
BB So, right after college I was actually living in Peru for a year and that was where we started Development Seed. I was down there with Eric Gunderson who is actually—he was the cofounder of Development Seed and later Mapbox as well—and we were following everything that was going on in the United States, which was open source technology and being used in some campaigns—like particularly Howard Dean’s campaign in interesting ways that we hadn’t seen before. So really what we were seeing was people being able to post stuff on the internet, when before it was super tricky unless you were a programmer and also very expensive. And meanwhile, we were living in Peru where we saw that every, single person was online but every website that they went to, somebody had created it from a different country. So our initial idea was to build open source websites, particularly using open source content management systems, so that people locally—particularly non-profits—could make websites and talk about their work. So we started there and that was kind of the very, very, very early days of Development Seed. We shortly thereafter ran out of money and moved back to Washington, DC, picked up another co-founder—Ian Ward—who stayed in Peru and—but then we started working with international development organizations. And that was—really like for me kind of how we started with Development Seed. I came on full time after the company had been up and running for…about three years? We worked with these international development organizations—at first we were just building them websites, but then we quickly started specializing and doing a lot of work with data visualizations, content management systems, like I said, internets back when that was a thing. And yeah, and we were slowly growing a team. And really what we realized as we were doing this was that we were hiring people who were very interested in building very cool technology, which is not really where you excel in the consulting game where a lot of what you want to do is build replicable technology so that you can—you know—spit it out very quickly. So we just kept trying to sell new things and we built new things and got better and better at doing that. Which was really fun, we built a name for ourselves. And then we had two different runs at doing—at making products. Both were moderately successful in that we sold them both but then also our third product that we tried building as Development Seed was what turned into Mapbox. So that was—our clients needed maps. And our clients were working in places like Africa and Haiti and—you know—the Middle East, Afghanistan. And at the time, the maps that existed online—it was just Google—there weren’t any maps of those places. It was maybe you would see a capital on a map, so we had to figure out how to actually put street maps up there. A lot of the work we were doing was humanitarian relief, so people getting from point A to point B was super important. So we figured out how to make maps—a lot of that was through convincing—you know—countries to give us their data, which was surprisingly easy to do. We hired some interns to help us with that. And then we had to figure out how to put it online—that was much more complex. But that need that we saw from our international development clients and this is—you know—the Red Cross, World Bank, that was really what kind of helped us come up with the idea of Mapbox and build the basis for it.
[20:56]
KL It’s so cool when you hear about people solving real problems and real life challenges where—I mean—were you able to see sort of the positive results of that?
BB So yes and no. I would say it was one of those that we could see the possibility for the positive results of it but that was also kind of what ended up being a bit of the slog of the consulting work that we were doing was that we were building these—these tools that we thought honestly could solve these problems. I mean—you know—famine in Africa—you know—delivering supplies after earthquakes in Pakistan. And we saw the potential but we weren’t always seeing—either we didn’t get any information back on how people were using it or the information that we did get back showed that the government pays a lot more money in order to build products than to fund their use. So that was something that was—honestly kind of pushed us even further into not wanting to do consulting work and really wanting to focus on our product. Because we loved the—the mission of what we were working on was something that was very important to us. But honestly it gets super draining when you see that what you’re building, what you’re pouring hours into, what you’re working for like sub market rates at in order to be able to put this thing out there and then to see it not used…I think we all saw that—went through that. And that’s just part of how the world works—I understand that. But it was one of those things too that tipped us over. We’re like, “yeah, doing our own product, that could be cool, that could be something that’s up our alley.”
KL Right, because you have real control over it.
BB Exactly.
KL So you started Mapbox with your then-husband and you were in the process of splitting up, right?
BB Yes. So it was me and my ex-husband and there was a few other people that we all kind of deemed ourselves as cofounders of Mapbox. And timing was interesting because we had our first like big win with Mapbox in 2012 when Foursquare started using us.
KL Yeah.
BB And that then kind of then launched us into this “okay, maybe this can be something.” And we decided to go for it, we actually had a bit of a team vote about it, there was about ten of us in the room that said okay, let’s go for VC funding, it’s the only way we’re going to blow this up and really compete. And yeah—and then a few months after that was when me and my ex-husband—we decided to split up.
SWB That sounds super hard! How did you get through that period of like exciting professional stuff happening, big things, big decisions to be made, while also dealing with really hard personal stuff?
BB So, I got together with my ex husband when we were in college, we were juniors in college. It was my first big relationship, so it was also my first big break up, so I had no idea how to do that either so that was a nice complicating factor in the midst of all this too. I think at that point because we had been working together for so long, we were both decent at compartmentalizing personal and professional, so that was helpful. We also didn’t tell anyone at first, which was helpful in that nobody talked about personal stuff at work in regards to us splitting up because no one else knew. So I could go into this—you know, both of us could go into this safe spot where it wasn’t going to be like—you know—you got the pity eyes or whatever it may be that could throw you off your game. So we did some things to protect ourselves and we did that for a while. But honestly for months, I was really on the fence of “is this a place that I can stay” and it took me a while to get past that. And a lot of that was trying to figure out, can I work on this thing that I want to knowing that it means that life will be as us as two individuals and not as us as a couple? And when we did finally tell a few people—the other cofounders—they all basically said, like, “we can’t do this without you.” And that was this reaffirming thing for me that was really helpful. So it was a lot of reassurance from my coworkers that built up my confidence enough to be like—and also just talking with my ex—to be like, who cares if this is super unusual? And yeah, we’re getting a divorce, and we’re starting a company together at the same time, and screw it! You know? [SWB and KL laugh] Like, let’s just do it. We both want this.
SWB Kudos—kudos to you! Because I feel like I am so much pettier [KL laughs] than that and I would like to think I would be the kind of person who could handle it and like I am not confident I am that person. [25:01]
KL Well, speaking of—you know—sort of stepping into that role and not necessarily having a traditional background in business, was it hard to figure everything out?
BB So I wasn’t the one that went after our funding, so I wasn’t the one pitching, which I think was—was good, that’s not that something I think I’d be particularly good at. I didn’t have the pressure of that and also the rejection of that right as I was going through a divorce, thank god. But I had the supporting of the company on the backend. So really what it was was trying to figure out how to not only create this new company and figure out how to get it set up so that we could actually take on VC money, while at the same time running the other company—Development Seed—to make sure that we could actually pay our bills and pay our team. So it was almost like I had two full time jobs during that time, one of which I had been doing for a while, so knew what to do and one of which I had absolutely no idea what to do but that was the future, and so if I screwed that one up, we were all done. [SWB & KL laugh quietly] I also had both the curse and the luxury of knowing exactly how much money we had in the bank and when we were running out of it.
KL Yeah.
BB And we had a lot to get done. And it was a good time overall too for—like I dove into work harder than I ever had before and that was probably just what I needed. I had something to focus on and we got a lot done and we were building this thing that was about to be so exciting.
KL Did your role sort of ever change or evolve—I mean I’m sure it did—but in context of Mapbox growing because it sounds like it grew quickly and big.
BB So, yeah, I mean my role definitely changed and a lot of that happened honestly overnight with funding in that basically when funding hit, not only was I doing all of the running the company, running operations behind it and just really everything on kind of the backend of the house. But then also we had this opportunity for the first time where we could really figure out how we wanted to grow and we knew that we were going to grow quickly, we knew we were going to double in size as far as team size. But also we had—we had money for the first time. We had never had any money before, we always had like maybe two months in the bank. So that was this freedom of we could do it the right way because we had resources and we were very lucky in that we had investors who were supportive of us as well. So really it was a lot of—at that time—was a lot of envisioning of who we wanted to be when we grew up, as a company. And something that was important to me and to the other co-founders as well was creating a business that was a place that we were very proud of, a place that we wanted to work and that—you know—had the values that we wanted to put forth. And yeah, we wanted to build an environment where everybody could thrive and felt supported and had space to do what they thought was best for the company. And that was a lot of my job was trying to figure out how to create the foundation of a company that we could be proud of and then how to grow that and have that not break as we grew as fast as possible.
SWB So I know that Mapbox has grown a ton and it’s become—you know—a pretty good sized company but also you left the company relatively recently, right? So can you tell us about that? What was it like to grow this thing and then make an exit and what made you decide to do that?
BB So I was there—I left about a year and a half ago. And I helped grow the company from 0 to about 225 people. I had been working with the combination of Development Seed and Mapbox—for ten years, so I hit my ten year work anniversary and that was a nice pause for reflection. You know, I mean, I can’t tell you how much I grew based on the opportunities I had career-wise, but also I worked with the same leadership the entire time. And essentially I mean, like I didn’t really have a boss but if I did, it would be the same group of people being my boss. And that felt like a lot. And I had also hit this point where growing a company is very, there are so many interesting things about it, but it was almost like at that point, I was—we were past some of the building stage. Obviously everything’s still growing and building—now too—but I was doing a lot of the things again or for the second or third iteration on them. Which was necessary, because there was the thinking through of how do you do this for a larger company. But it was almost like I was solving the same problem. So it was really fun to come up with our onboarding plan for our team and how we best brought on new hires the first and second time, but doing it the fifth time, that wasn’t really fun anymore. And I was able to pass off, obviously, a lot of work as my team grew, but it was also not really…I wasn’t sure if it was exactly giving me what I wanted career-wise overall. We were also going through this transition internally at Mapbox where we had started as a flat company, which worked really well for us for longer than I—honestly than anyone ever thought it would. But we were coming up on the point where that absolutely had to change, it was no longer working and we were talking through how to fix that. So, a lot of the internal debate at that point was whether or not we were going to—like how to put in management structure. And a lot of what went with that was a lot of the systems and work that I had built over the years. So it was time to change but I wasn’t—frankly, I wasn’t winning the argument on how to do that. Meanwhile, we were also having the conversation about what was next for the company where we were discussing basically like do we go for another round of funding? And the answer to that was yes. We decided to go for as much funding as we possibly could, but then I knew that that was another three- to four-year commitment of running as fast as possible. At this time I was splitting my time between San Francisco and DC, so like personally the toll of doing that was pretty heavy. In the beginning it was so much fun, but after three, four years I was exhausted all the time and I missed having a life in a single city. Yeah and it just seemed like all these factors were kind of combining together so that it meant that it was—it was a good time for me to leave, it was good for me personally because I would get a break. I could try something else out new career-wise, which I was hungry for, and also company-wise it would give the company a fresh start, as we were doing kind of like a massive cultural and internal organizational change for me to be able to step away and so it wasn’t like “that was the old way under Bonnie and this is the new way under—you know—Series C, this is what this looks like. [30:55]
KL Yeah. Well now you are the director at Brazen, where you’ve been launching the Philly office. Tell us more about Brazen and what you’re doing there.
BB Sure. So I started with Brazen beginning of the year and really what we want to do is help women entrepreneurs grow their companies. So we work with people who are doing startups like high-growth startups, which—you know—like Mapbox and other ones. But also people who are just trying to go from being the only person at their company to hiring four people, five people. So really going after some of the small business pieces too. And we focus on the operational pieces on like how do you actually do like that? And these common questions that everyone has who is running a business—you know—like how do I hire, how do I—financially how do I plan for this? Legally what do I do? How does this work? What is—you know—when do I go after financing? So that’s kind of like our bread and butter is focusing in on those things, which is really interesting for me and what really drew me to it because that was all the stuff that I had to learn as I was going through my work with Development Seed and Mapbox and which I had no idea what I was really doing with up until I had done it. And it’s a steep learning curve, it is for everybody. So kind of like Brazen, our goal is in order to kind of help people with those tangible questions that they have as they’re going through it, but also connect them with other entrepreneurs so they have people to ask questions to. I know when I was—when we were getting Development Seed off the ground and I felt completely over my head all the time on—you know—like oh how do we run a business, I don’t know I’ve—you know—I’ve never done this before. All my friends were working nine to fives and whenever—you know—I would talk about work, they’d roll their eyes at me. [KL laughs] They’ve gotten much better about that over the years, but our idea with Brazen is to fill that need for people.
KL I love that this exists.
BB Yeah, thanks! I think as a resource it’s really helpful. It’s something that I—looking back, I wish I had had access to.
KL How has it been working for a company that’s already established versus running your own thing?
BB Yeah I mean it’s a lot of—like asking for permission is something that I haven’t had to do in over—you know—basically my entire career. So that part has been strange and I’m—and I’m—frankly, I just don’t really ask for permission. I just go out and do stuff and if it works, it works. And it’s been—it’s been good. Like it’s—Brazen has a startup mentally, so that’s great. And it is interesting not carrying the stress of it too because that was something that I’ve also had for so long that I really I wanted a break from. And that was really important as I was thinking about what I wanted next career wise, so yeah, I mean that part’s been nice. Like I stop work when I eat dinner and then I don’t normally go back online unless there’s—you know—unless I’m excited about something.
KL Yeah, I totally get that. And I think it’s really nice when you can kind of take a step back and—and see what you’re missing in your current situation and say like “okay, this is the thing I need to move to next.” So, you are also expecting a child soon, right?
BB Yes! In October.
KL That’s so exciting, congratulations!
BB Thank you.
KL I’m sure that that has also something that you’re considering in terms of what you’re working on now and—you know—what’s next for you.
BB Oh, definitely. And I—and I feel like I’m in this funny spot where—and this kind of fits my personality—but where I did—you know—last year I did this full life pivot where I left Mapbox, I had been living in DC for—since college. So that was about eighteen years and I decided hey I’m going to quit my job, leave the company I helped start and move to Philadelphia where I don’t know anyone—except unless I went to high school with them or they’re related to me. And my boyfriend. But it was a big change and part—I mean, it was something I wanted to do for a long time but also I really wanted to focus on my personal life because I had done a crap job of that for a long time. So particularly after like when Mapbox started and got full up and steam, I—I worked. That’s what I did. And I loved my job, I loved what I was doing, so that was—that was fine. But it was—it was fine for a moment in time and I was ready for something different. And then now I feel like it’s—I’ve gone like swung completely to the other extreme because now we’re having a baby soon! And we just recently bought a house in the suburbs and have this master plan of splitting our time between living in Philadelphia in the city and then being out in the suburbs because—to be closer to my boyfriend’s two kids. And I own a car now for the first time since I was in high school [KL laughs] and everything has shifted drastically in the other direction, which is both really exciting and also confusing sometimes. [laughs]
[35:10]
KL So, I’ve just got one last question for you. If you were to—you know—tell someone who was looking to start a company or something just wildly new, do you have any sort of advice that you would give them based on all of the kind of amazing experiences that you’ve had?
BB Don’t think twice. Just—if someone has the itch to go do their own thing, I always tell them to do it, to try it. Because otherwise you’re going to overthink things. When really, starting your own business is more about getting stuff done and getting out there, even when you have no idea if what you’re doing makes any sense. Because then as soon as something is out here, you can make it better, you can fix it, and you can get reactions to it. But it becomes real once you get started. So yeah, I mean I think that would be my biggest piece of advice is go for it. You know obviously it’s always good to think through financially to make sure you’re in a good spot and all those things, but if you can, take the—take the jump. It’s an exciting ride. You’re going to learn more than you ever will working for somebody else, just because of the amount of pressure and the amount of risk that you’re going to be taking yourself. And even if it doesn’t work out, then—you know you took the plunge and went for it and you can go back to doing what you were doing before.
KL Yeah, I love that.
SWB And maybe some of our listeners would be interested in getting some guidance and support from a community like Brazen!
BB Yes! That would be awesome! So Brazen—we are in six cities now, Philadelphia being one of them but also in Chicago, Saint Louis, Detroit, Denver and Dallas. So, if you’re in any of those areas, check us out.
KL That’s so great. Thank you so much, Bonnie, for joining us today. It was really, really lovely to talk to you.
BB Oh wonderful to talk to you! [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, and fades out]
Career Chat
[Ad spot]
SWB It was so cool to talk to Bonnie about knowing when it’s time to make a change. And speaking of career change…it’s time for our weekly career chat with Shopify. What do we have this week, Katel?
KL Well, I was looking at Shopify’s job listings, and I found one for a Product Operations Manager, where they’re looking for someone who can be a team player, coach, and referee all-in-one. I love this because I know a lot of folks like who have this skill—and it’s so critical to being a manager!
SWB Totally! And, you know, one of the things I really love about Shopify’s job listings is that they’re not overly prescriptive, like you must have 5+ years of X, or you must have a bachelor’s degree. They just feel a little more human. Like check out this one for the Director of Partnerships in Channels. They’re looking for “a senior strategy and business leader” and you’d be doing stuff like developing strategic relationships, or improving product integrations, or building teams across different offices. But then at the bottom of the posting, it says: “Experience comes in many forms, many skills are transferable, and passion goes a long way.” And they go on to talk about that if your experience is close to what they’re looking for, that you should consider applying even if you’re not an exact perfect match to everything that they list. And I think that’s so great.
KL I love that. SO. If you want to solve problems you’re passionate about and work with a team that’s making commerce better for everyone, visit Shopify.com/careers to see which role might be right for you! [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, and fades out]
FYOTW
KL So, I’ve got a fuck yeah to share. So last night, I hosted about twenty women and two men from a volunteer group that I work with here in Philly. And it was really cool, we don’t meet up that often and so we all got to hang out and it was great. And we had someone giving a presentation and it was great—super informative. And she brought her one year old baby with her so she was—you know—giving her presentation, the baby was hanging out and she started to get a little uncomfortable at a certain point, kind of fussy. And so mid-sentence, the woman who was talking just looks up at the room and says “does anyone mind if I breastfeed?” And this is a group of people who, if you’re going to breastfeed in front of twenty some odd people, this is the group to do it in. And so we all just started laughing because we were just shouting like “yes of course, oh my gosh.” You know, in this group, of course do that. So it was really cool and it just made me think I was so glad to be in that room and be a part of it, but I was also like “fuck yeah, she should be able to do that wherever!”
JL Also fuck yeah for hosting [laughing] twenty-two people in your house!
KL [laughing] Thank you, thank you.
JL Because, impressive. But it’s great that we can feel this way, but I hate that we even have to feel this way.
KL Yeah.
JL Like there shouldn’t even be a question like “does anyone mind if I breastfeed?” or even, like, the hesitation. People should all be able to feed their children wherever and however they want to at all times.
SWB Totally! I think like fucking breastfeed everywhere, anywhere. Like kid’s got to eat, it’s not a big deal, people breastfeed, it’s not a big deal. Something that I saw recently was that there’s a lot more emphasis on people breastfeeding in public spaces. In fact, really public spaces. Did you all see back in the summer—I think it was in June—there was a member of Parliament in Canada who took a quick break to breastfeed her son right during the middle of Parliament.
[40:00]
KL I love that.
JL Yeah, and the year before—Larissa Waters in Australia also breastfed in Parliament. And the more that people do it, the more it gets normalized. And it sucks that we have to normalize it, but we do because [laughs] people have such strong, uncomfortable feelings to it, which makes me really upset. You know—I was just thinking—you know—maybe we need to create a Foursquare for breastfeeding. [KL laughs]
SWB Like a breastfeeding scavenger hunt where it’s like [laughing] you have to breastfeed in this whole list of places and you win some prizes.
JL Yeah I mean, it’s like one of those things. Like as you know, I breastfed my son. And when I first starting breastfeeding, I did personally feel uncomfortable breastfeeding in public. Luckily, I have the support of a lot of friends and I’d like—you know—mention these groups, which are great if you don’t have other mothers that you’re close to if you’re looking for a thing, there’s breastfeeding support groups online that are—that are awesome at this that will help give the confidence so that you don’t feel like you ever have to ask “can I breastfeed” because you shouldn’t. You should go into a restaurant, a park, if you [laughs] have to be at some sort of meeting with your child for some reason, you should be able to feel comfortable to be able to breastfeed your child there and without even ask or hesitation and no one should feel weird about it because that’s just—you know—what we do.
SWB Totally! And I do think—you know—if you feel uncomfortable breastfeeding in certain scenarios or if you feel a little more private about your body, that’s totally fine—right?
JL Yeah, sure!
SWB This is not about pressuring anybody to do things that make them uncomfortable, but it’s about the ways in which we feel like we can’t do a thing that we should be able to do because other people are going to think it’s weird or shame us or make some nasty comment. I remember when I was on a city bus in Germany with my sister-in-law who was breastfeeding their baby. So—you know—she just lifts up her shirt and starts breastfeeding in the middle of the city bus. And I remember I asked her—you know, her and I are close—and I asked her, what was it like to get comfortable doing that? Was that something that you immediately felt comfortable doing, or did it take a while, and how did you get comfortable doing it? And she said it was a little bit weird at first, but she said, like, really it was within a week or two of just being like “gotta feed this baby”—right? Your priorities all shift around and she’s like “baby is hungry, need to feed baby” like you just—you just sort of normalize it very quickly. And—you know—they’re lucky enough to live in a place where I don’t think she gets a lot of flack for that in Eugene, Oregon. [laughs] But in other places that’s not true—people will say something to you and like…no, don’t ever do that.
JL And, you know, just to re-emphasize, if breastfeeding in public is not something you want to do—I mean, certainly don’t do it. But anyone who does want to do it or needs to do it, you know, should be able to without any judgement. And I think it’s up to all of us to provide those supportive spaces—you know? I shouldn’t have to go up to someone and be like “well, would you rather see my child breastfeeding or hear him cry?” There should never have to be that statement. I shouldn’t have to convince anyone of this. And so I think it’s, one, being accepting but also—you know—if you do see those people who are judging, tell them a little bit more about why this is okay. So, fuck yeah to breastfeeding in all places that you feel comfortable breastfeeding.
SWB Fuck yeah! Well, that is it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by the Diaphone. Thanks to Bonnie Bogle for being our guest today.
KL If you loved today’s show as much as we did, don’t forget to subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Your support helps us do what we do, and we love that! See you again next week!
[Music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, and fades out to end.]
Welcome to the periodcast! Yep, today’s show is all about menstruation—the good, the bad, and the get me a frickin’ heating pad already. So grab your period product of choice, and join us as we get comfortable talking about the politics of periods, what it’s like to talk about your cycle at work, and why we refuse to keep quiet about this super normal bodily function.
Our guest is Nadya Okamoto, executive director of PERIOD, a nonprofit she founded in high school that’s dedicated to turning menstrual care from a taboo topic into a basic right. She’s also the author of the new book Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement, which comes out October 16.
> Eighty percent of our congressional positions are held by men. And if people in power continue to be afraid to talk about periods and do not acknowledge it as an actual need, then where it counts, periods will continue to go unaddressed. So that’s why we need people who don’t menstruate and people who identify as men to be involved. > > — Nadya Okamoto , founder, PERIOD & author, Period Power
- How experiencing housing instability as a teen led her to see what happens when people can’t afford period products
- Why PERIOD is on a mission to make periods something we celebrate, not hide
- Why she ran for Cambridge City Council at the age of 19—and what she learned in the process
- What it’s like to be running (and scaling) an international nonprofit at the age of 20
Links on bloody links
- PERIOD
- Nadya’s Instagram
- On Nadya’s city council run
- Pre-order for Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement
Also on the agenda:
- Bringing up menstruation on stage
- Monster post-pregnancy periods
- The unbearable gender-normativity of way too many period-tracking apps
- The magical properties of heating pads
- Stop calling us “girls” already
And finally: if you’re eligible to vote in the U.S., time to check your registration—your state’s deadline might be coming up in the next couple weeks, and you don’t want to miss all the awesome women you could be voting for in the midterms this year.
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
[Ad spot] Sara Wachter-Boettcher This season of No, You Go is sponsored by Harvest—my favorite tool for tracking time, projects and payments. Today I used Harvest to send a couple invoice reminders and to run a quick report on year-to-date payments. It only took two minutes and now I feel totally on top of things, or at least on top of that one thing. Try it for yourself at getharvest.com and if you like it, make sure to enter the code NOYOUGO when you upgrade to a paid account. That will get you 50% off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, code NOYOUGO. [intro music plays for 12 seconds]
Jenn Lukas Hey, welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû.
SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. And today’s show is all about periods. Not the ones at the end of a sentence—although I do really like to talk about punctuation—today we’re talking about menstruation. And it’s one of those super normal things that we just don’t talk about enough. We are joined today by someone who is working to change that. She is Nadya Okamoto and she’s the founder and executive director of Period—a non-profit she started with a friend in high school that is dedicated to turning menstrual care from a taboo topic into a basic right. She is awesome! And I have to say, I freaking love talking about periods. I seriously bring them up in almost every conference talk I give, which means I bring them up a couple times a month.
KL That’s so awesome, and I have to personally say I’ve seen you do it twice recently and I’m [laughs] so excited you’re doing that.
SWB Yeah, so I remember the first time I did it, I was actually really nervous about it. It was 2015 and at the time I wanted to talk about things like bias in tech products. And I realized that period tracking apps are a really great way to do that because there’s so many assumptions about gender and sexuality in them around things like pink and hearts and flowers, but also things like assumptions that you must be using this app because you’re trying to get pregnant or trying not to get pregnant. And so I decided it was important to talk about this on stage, both because I thought it was a good example and because I was just like, “people have periods, we should talk about them! ” And so after that talk—I will tell you—people loved it. People came up to me, tons of people—definitely mostly women—and they told me that it was so powerful to hear me up on a stage just acknowledging periods as something that exist like it was a totally normal thing because they felt like that wasn’t something they had been allowed to talk about. And I was just like “fuck it, I’m talking about periods every time I get on stage now!” [SWB and JL laugh]
JL Yeah, I mean I knew about period tracking apps, but I never really used one until I heard it in one of your talks and then I was like “oh.” And then I actually started using it when I was trying to get pregnant again. And also after you have a baby, your period is so irregular, so I was also just trying to have any semblance [laughs] of like what my body was trying to do. So I started using one regularly and it just was really helpful. And I mean I do have to admit, I really, really love not having my period right now, [SWB laughs] but of course that’s really going to come back to haunt me after I give birth and I bleed for possibly up to six weeks, which is really pleasant let me tell you.
KL Oh yeah, that just does not seem like the appropriate treat [Jenn laughs] after having given birth.
JL People don’t really talk about that part.
KL Yeah.
JL It’s like you skip a period for nine months and then it’s like [laughing] “hey! remember me?”
KL Your body’s like, “hey, what’s up!” [laughs]
JL [laughing] Yeah!
SWB It just sounds so tiresome because you’re already exhausted, you have a newborn and then when you’re on your period, you’re losing all that iron, that just wears you out all by itself. And so the combo sounds deadly.
JL Yeah.
KL Seriously. I tried a period tracking app for a little while because a couple years ago, I wound up being off the pill for a little bit. But when I went off the pill at that point, I realized that it was the first time in twenty years that I’d been off the pill. And when I started having a natural period—which was all over the place and hence the period tracking app—I felt kind of sad because I was like “oh.” Like I haven’t really understood what my body is doing for this whole time, so it was kind of cool to get back in touch with that, but I also felt lots of feelings about it.
JL I had started the pill really early because I had really irregular periods so before sexual activity or anything like that. And I had really bad cramps and once you change that, your body is like…it reacts!
KL Yeah. I had no idea what to expect and I feel like when I went to my doctor and I said, “okay, I’m going to do this, I’m going to go off the pill,” they just don’t really tell you a whole bunch of details. They’re like “okay, it may do this, it may do that [laughs]. You may get lots of periods, you might not get any! [laughs] And it’s sort of like, why don’t we know this?
[4:55]
SWB And I think part of it is everybody’s body is different and who knows what’s going to happen, but then part of it is that a lot of women’s health stuff is just so chronically understudied—
KL Yeah
SWB —that nobody’s done the research to figure out what tends to work or what tends to be a good way for people to do this. I also went off the pill to get an IUD and I had been on the pill for a very long time and I had not gone on the pill because of cramps and heavy periods, but I had cramps and heavy periods. And I remember being sixteen years old or something and getting like nine-day periods. [JL sighs loudly] I know that’s no six-week, post-pregnancy period, but it was still awful and it was just very, very draining. When I mentioned it being exhausting, like that would wear me out, and I’d just be craving spinach and steak—[laughing] because I’d like need this iron supplement [JL & KL laugh] and so I feel like being able to have access to a range of different ways to lessen the impact of the period on my life has been obviously really important for me. Like if I had to go through these massive nine-day periods to this day, I think that it would be harder for me to get the things done I want to get done in my life!
JL Yeah, I mean, but that’s the thing, right? Like who do you talk to about this? It’s one of those things you didn’t talk about. You didn’t turn to your friend and be like “hey, are your periods nine days also?”
SWB I know, I talked to my mom about it and her periods were also really heavy! [laughs]
KL [laughing] Ohh!
SWB But of course—what do you feel like you’re going to do about it? But of course going on the pill helped me a ton, but now looking back on that, I think like, well shit, we should all be talking about periods a lot more—which is, hence, why I get on stage and talk to hundreds of people about periods. Because they’re just periods, right? They’re just a normal thing that a huge percentage of people have and it’s totally fine to acknowledge they exist and to acknowledge the part about them that sucks and also the part about them that’s really cool.
JL Yeah, I won’t ever forget the time that I worked at Lockheed Martin. As you can imagine, it’s very business [all three laugh] and I was sick one day and my manager was asking me if I was okay or something and I didn’t want to talk about it, I was just having really terrible cramps and I just didn’t want to talk about it. And what I would normally do in that situation is like make something up like, oh, I don’t know, I had food poisoning or a cold. And then I remember finally saying like, “I’ve got my period and have really bad cramps” and he was like “oh, okay.” And I remember feeling so free!
KL That’s amazing. I want to start doing that more and just being like “you know what? [laughs] I’m really crampy and I’m really not up to doing this particular thing right now.”
SWB Excuse me, I need a no bullshit day—
KL [laughing] Exactly!
SWB —because I can not handle any bullshit.
KL Can we just like write each other notes to get out of stuff for period cramps and period nonsense?
SWB [laughing] I mean yes, although a part of me is like, I would so abuse the privilege.
JL I mean I don’t necessarily want to get out of it—right—I just want people to acknowledge that I’m coming from like—
KL Totally.
JL —they have the Myers-Briggs test and these color tests and I just want you to know that my personality right now is period. [SWB & KL laugh euphorically]
SWB Completely!
KL You are so right, you are so right.
SWB Well I mean if you had some other issue like if you had a migraine, for example, you could tell your coworker “I’m sorry, I need to be in a dark space, I have a migraine.” I think having really bad cramps is similar, right? Where you’re like, “I’m sorry, I just have really bad cramps right now, and it’s hard for me to focus”—it’s a totally normal thing to say if we just let that be a normal thing to say.
KL Yeah, you’re totally right. And I was just thinking that I still—there’s always one day whenever I get my period now where I want—like all day it would actually be ideal if I could sit there with a heating pad. And I do it for as much of the day as I possibly can, but it’s like yeah, if we could just say, “this is something I need to do to like actually get work done today,” so.
JL [laughing] Yes.
SWB So I think clearly we have a lot of thoughts about periods, but there is a lot more that we haven’t even gotten into about some of the politics of periods and how people get access to period products and who pays for those and I think we should hear from our expert on the topic.
JL Yeah, definitely. _[music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out] _
Interview: Nadya Okamoto
KL Maybe you haven’t picked up on it yet, but we’re always looking for reasons to talk more about our periods. But why do we have to look for reasons? Why can’t we just talk about them? We are going to ask our guest today that exact question. Nadya Okamoto is an activist and entrepreneur and she was sixteen when she founded PERIOD, the menstrual movement—four years ago. She did it after realizing that menstrual products are not reliably available to those who need them the most and we have so many questions about Nadya’s journey and what’s next for her, and we cannot wait to dig in. So, Nadya, thank you so much for joining us on No, You Go.
Nadya Okamoto Of course, thank you for having me.
KL Well, let’s start with PERIOD. Tell us what it is and what y’all do.
[9:56]
NO So, PERIOD—we are a global youth-run NGO that provides and celebrates menstrual hygiene through service, education and abbacy. And we do that through a number of different ways. We do it through primarily the global distribution of menstrual products to menstruators in need and we mobilize young people all around the world through our campus chapter network to push forward social and systemic change around periods. So, as you were saying, we work to change the narrative around periods to be something that’s more positive and normalized, while also pushing for systemic change towards menstrual equity. So in the last about three years, we’ve addressed over 300,000 periods through product distribution and registered over 200 campus chapters at universities and high schools around the US and abroad.
KL Was there a moment that made you decide this is something I need to do?
NO Yeah, so my passion for periods comes from a really personal place. I started the organization when I was sixteen after my family experienced housing instability my freshman and sophomore year of high school. And during that time my commute to school was about two hours long each way and my bus stop was in old town Portland, Oregon, where there are like ten shelters in a two block radius. And at that bus stop was where I actually became sort of accidental friends with a lot of homeless women who were there trying to go to their local shelters or just trying to [laughs] pass the day. And I think I was really curious about their stories, especially at this time when my family was on paper legally homeless and through hearing their stories of hardship, but then also sort of collecting this anthology of their stories of using toilet paper, socks, brown paper, grocery bags, and cardboard to absorb their menstrual blood and take care of their period, that I essentially became obsessed with periods and would spend my free time learning that periods are the number one reason girls miss school in developing countries, are a leading cause of absenteeism in the States for girls in school and about the sort of systemic barriers like the tampon tax that exists here in the US still. And so it was really after becoming obsessed with it, learning a lot about the issue, realizing that there weren’t really any non-profits around that were doing what I thought needed to be done that I decided that as soon as my family got our feet back on the ground, that I would start my own organization.
KL This is so interesting to me because I feel like very specifically you talk about period hygiene and it seems like it’s one of the tenets of PERIOD’s mission. So why is that aspect so important and why is it a focus for the education part of what you’re doing?
NO I think we really operate off of the idea that it’s a fundamental human right to be able to discover and reach your full potential regardless of an actual need, right? So we support menstruators feeling clean, confident and capable regardless of whether or not they’re menstruating. And I think that the word hygiene is very controversial in this space because it implies that menstruation is inherently dirty and we’re not saying that menstruation is inherently dirty, but we’re saying that when people do not have access to period products and they’re menstruating, it can be an unclean experience that can one, cause infections, can cause discomfort. Because of the stigma around periods, the shame around free bleeding or the nervousness about bleeding through your clothes or just people finding out that you’re menstruating can cause someone to feel less confident about seeking and reaching their full potential while they’re on their period. And that’s something that we’re really fighting.
KL Related to that—how do you see the taboo of talking about periods manifest itself most in terms of that stigma? For example, when we’re at work, there’s been a long history of just you’re kind of trying to scuttle to the bathroom and hide your tampons or your feminine products and that just feels really shamey. How do we get past that and just talk about it more?
NO That’s something we’re really working on as well. So making sure that we’re pushing schools especially—but also workplaces—to hold period products, make them available and make it known that they’re available. Being able to have a workplace where you can say, “hi, for all menstruators in the office, we have free tampons and pads in the bathroom,” because like—treat it like toilet paper, it’s something that we all have to do and that happens to us and that’s a healthy part of life that we should really be supporting. I think a big part is one, making it clear that people deserve access to period products and creating a space where people if they’re having cramps, if they’re struggling with their period, can feel comfortable talking about it.
KL Does everyone want to talk to you about their periods?
NO Um, no, but I usually push them to do so. And I will tell you—I think as a young activist, I get so much excitement and pleasure when I meet someone who doesn’t want to talk to me about their period and I push them to. Like I think every, single person in our chapter network in our team sees it as sort of like an exciting challenge to make people think about periods and realize the need for the menstrual movement. And I think that’s why we’ve been so successful. That’s why we’ve been able to grow so fast and so big. We’re now the largest youth run NGO in women’s health in the world and a lot of that is due to being able to convince people that they need to care about the menstrual movement very effectively.
SWB So you said that you oftentimes find yourself pushing people who don’t necessarily want to talk about periods to talk about them, how do you do that? And is there a time when you’ve done that where you feel like it really changed the conversation?
[15:05]
NO Of course. I mean, we do it every day. We’re constantly meeting people who don’t want to talk about periods or haven’t even thought about it before. You know, our tactic is really being able to frame the menstrual movement as a small part of the larger movement towards gender equality, right? So being able to talk to people and say ‘if you believe in gender equality and global development or breaking the cycle of poverty or you call yourself a feminist, you inherently have to join our army of what we call [laughing] ‘period warriors,” right? We’re a movement of people who are fighting to normalize the conversation of periods because we can throw stats at you about how periods hold people back from equal opportunities in education and employment and if you really support equal opportunity in every field and support our achieving gender equality, it is an integral part of progress to be able to accelerate the menstrual movement. And I think that we’ve also mastered being able to combat ways people might challenge us. You know, we often get ‘oh, I get what you’re saying, but what about climate change or sustainability, or what about equality in sports?’ Like anything like that. And regardless of what people throw at us, I think we’ve found ways to bring periods into the conversation. So for example, with sustainability, that’s the one I get a lot. How do you prioritize periods when we’re really talking about the Earth and I can say ‘well, you know, the average disposable pad or tampon can take up to five to eight centuries to decompose and people are using tens of thousands of products in their lifetime, how can we open up conversation for more sustainable use of period management?’ Right? So I think that there’s ways that we’ve been able to find avenues to bring people into the conversation regardless of how they’re coming into it and I think that that’s been a big way Period has grown our movement.
SWB You know, there’s a couple things in there that really caught my attention. One of them is this idea that there’s this what-about-ism, right? With every time you bring up one issue, it’s like ‘well, that’s not the biggest thing we should be worried about right now.’ And that’s such a derailing tactic I think is oftentimes—even if it’s unintentional, I think so many times that ends up derailing conversations where it’s like, well, nothing gets better if we don’t talk about it, and so if you create the situation where it’s simply undiscussed, then there’s no way to actually improve things for anybody. We’ve had guests on before who have talked about things like racism in the workplace and how reluctant companies are to even say the word race or to even talk about black employees and say the word “black”—they can’t do it because they’ve been trained that somehow talking about race is the real racism. The result of that, is they can’t put their finger on the actual issues, like how can you actually affect specific gendered issues—in your example—if you can not talk about what they are as what they are? So I really love that message of like, “it’s just a fucking period, talk about periods!”
NO Yeah, of course. I think a big part of it is—we will tell people like, “do you know that in 36 States, there’s a sales tax on period products because they’re considered luxury items, but Rogaine and Viagra aren’t?” And I think that we bring up the tampon tax a lot because I think it’s such a clear example of misogyny in the US that people don’t really think about and take for granted and we say ‘we need to talk about these issues’ and in the US, less than 20% of our congressional positions are held by women. So whether or not you get a period, whether or not you identify as man, woman or anything in between, we all need to be talking about periods.
KL So, I think I read somewhere recently that you’re taking leave from your studies at Harvard to focus on scaling PERIOD and speaking more, which is amazing. So what does scaling mean for the organization—you know—now and kind of as you look forward?
NO As an organization, we have full time staff now, which is still crazy for me to think about and as an organization, we’re constantly thinking about how we can push deeper impact in our focus cities. Right now we have offices in Portland and New York City and interns at both places and remotely. And we’re continuing to figure out how we’re going to scale. Right now our focus cities for 2018 were New York and Portland and Boston and we’ve really scaled up our distribution there. But it’s making sure that we’re supporting shelters and supporting legislation in those areas and really deepening our impact with chapters.
KL So, related to that, what has it been like to be such a young entrepreneur, but an entrepreneur in general?
NO I think every day is a challenge and I constantly struggle with imposter syndrome and feeling like I’m not doing my job well, [laughs] but I think that that sort of insecurity is definitely what keeps me working really hard. I think one of the biggest challenges on a personal level is maintaining self care and confidence because I think that—I run into all the time people telling me that I’m doing my job wrong, or I could be doing my job better, or people telling me they disagree with what I’m doing. And of course we get a lot of support, but as a perfectionist, [laughing] those are definitely the comments I remember. And I think also PERIOD the movement is growing so fast, which is so exciting, but our resources are not growing at an equal rate, so a big challenge for me has been teaching myself and then learning how to do non-profit development when I don’t have a degree in non-profit or business management. So it’s been very much learning as you go. And I think the reason we have been successful thus far is because I’ve sort of adopted this mentality of being completely unafraid to ask for help, Google questions and admit when I really don’t know what I’m doing.
KL God, everyone loves to tell you how they think you should do something from the outside. I have also learned this and [laughs] I feel like it’s extremely frustrating. Is there anything that you kind of felt surprised to learn along the way? Like something that has made you grow?
[20:25]
NO I’ve been really pushed to think about gender when I work on this. Like gender is a social construct because when I started this organization I started it to help homeless women and I wasn’t even thinking about—to be completely honest—trans identity and experience with periods for trans people. And it’s been through working on this organization, being called out by trans people about the need to be more inclusive that PERIOD has sort of become one of the leading organizations in being gender inclusive and that’s very much because I think for me it was a surprising learning experience to be able to take a step back and realize that I am not the person to be leading those conversations, but we’re building a platform to have conversations like talking about gender as a social construct and people who don’t identify as women but also menstruate.
SWB We’ve talked about trans issues on the show a lot of times—both with guests who are part of those communities, but also with each other, kind of talking about how we’ve learned and continue to learn, right? Like still have a lot to learn when it comes to questioning things about gender and it’s so useful to say the way that you came to this issue is via these homeless women that you got to know, but that you’ve realized that it is not limited to that and it’s not limited to women and that you were able to kind of hear that and make that part of what you do. And I think that’s so hard to do in the moment—it’s so easy to go to that place of defensiveness like, “ugh, I mean well though, like don’t they see that I mean well?” And to learn that skill of holding that feedback and processing it and then choosing to do something productive with it is great. Was there anything that you found helped you learn to do that well?
NO My biggest inspirations and the people who keep me extremely grounded are my mom and my two younger sisters. I think that it was very much my sisters and my mom who taught me to listen and know when it’s my time to take lead and know when it’s my time to empower others. And I think from a really young age I have always thought about leadership as truly being able to empower others to be leaders themselves and I think that that’s something I carry really deeply within me as we grow PERIOD and we’re not just about recruiting volunteers, we’re about recruiting chapter leaders and people to lead activism in their own communities.
KL So we heard that you’re now also releasing a book about periods. Can you tell us about that?
NO Yeah, so a few months ago—actually like last, oh my gosh, like last year in 2017—I signed with Simon & Schuster, the book publisher, to write Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement. It’s my first book and it comes out October 16th and I’m very, very excited for it.
KL Congratulations, that is amazing. [laughs]
SWB I want to ask some questions about the book, but before we ask questions about the book, can we just say, like, hell yeah, that’s so great, congrats! It’s so much work to write a book and you mentioned like, “oh my gosh last year.” Even that—that’s moving pretty fast. Most books take so long—
NO Oh, I wrote it in like a month! [laughs]
SWB Wow! What was that like?
NO It was crazy, I was constantly behind deadlines. I missed most of my deadlines and my literary agents are incredible and were really the ones who kept me on track and then thank goodness some higher power might have been watching out for me, [laughs] but I ended up getting stranded at the Tokyo airport for 30 hours coming back from a speaking gig in Singapore and wrote half the book in my extended layover. So I think that it was definitely a hectic process. I don’t think of myself as a great writer so it was definitely a challenge of believing in myself, but my tactic was just I would say the words as I would write and I just sort of thought of me explaining to a little sister—or someone I thought of as a little sister—about their period and how I think that they should think of their period and what they should know about it, what they should know about the menstrual movement. And I would just write down what I was saying out loud. And that was sort of my strategy with writing.
SWB That’s so cool. Was your audience for it as you were working on it—were you really imagining that being sort of like the younger sister, the younger version of yourself—is it really meant for teen girls and young women?
NO Yeah, so it’s young adult non-fiction.
KL Well, I definitely want to read it regardless. [laughs]
NO My dream is for this to be a manifesto for the fourth wave feminism. Of young people using social media to mobilize thinking about feminism in a very intersectional way. But I want this book to be super accessible to people of all ages and of all genders and of all menstruation or non-menstruation experiences.
[24:50]
KL This makes me think of how, you celebrate periods a lot and I think that is so important. Like on PERIOD.org’s website, the team’s bios have a stat and it’s essentially ‘menstruating since’ and I—for some reason I loved that so much because I thought about when I first got my period and I was like, hell yeah. I’ve been menstruating for a long time and that’s really fucking cool. And it’s just this little thing that starts to destigmatize—and again—celebrate our period. How do you advocate that people start to do that a little bit more?
NO The whole book opens with my own personal story of my first period about how when I got it, it was a really scary experience. But when I told my mom, it was a really happy experience because she was so excited that I was a woman [laughs]. And I think that for me, I talk in the book about how this is something that tells us that our body is growing and working. Like framing periods as something that’s like about growth. There is so much we can know about our bodies from getting our period. Whether it’s knowing whether or not we’re pregnant or—you know—knowing how our blood health is. Like anything like that. I think being able to frame periods as like—this is something that first of all—makes human life possible, but also, is something that is positive in many ways. Like the experience might be hard, you might get cramps, but at the end of the day, getting your period is something that should be celebrated.
KL Totally.
SWB So Nadya, there’s one other thing I wanted to ask you about. So earlier, you were talking a bit about how you really want people who have periods to have more access to information, feel more comfortable talking about it, and I’m curious what your thoughts are about people who don’t have periods and what their role is in the period movement.
NO I always use the example of US congress. The movement can make noise about how we need to make access to period products equitable, how we need to get rid of things like the tampon tax and how we need to change society and change systems to advance the menstrual movement. We can say that as much as possible, we can make people care. At the end of the day, in order to do that successfully, we need to engage both people who have periods and people who don’t have periods. For the most part, people who don’t have periods are men, and we still live in a world where almost 50% of our world identify as men and don’t get their period and still even in progressive countries—quote, unquote progressive countries like the US—80% of our congressional positions are held by men. And if people in power continue to be afraid to talk about periods and do not acknowledge it as an actual need, then where it counts, periods will continue to go unaddressed. So that’s why we need people who don’t menstruate and people who identify as men to be involved.
SWB Yes and—I don’t think that any of our listeners are in Congress probably—I don’t know if they are, that would be great, but—you never know!—but I do know that we have at least a good chunk of listeners who are men. And so men, if you are out there listening, learn to talk about periods. It’s not that hard!
KL Yeah, seriously. Well and speaking of Congress, I want to ask you about in addition to running an organization with increasing visibility, last year you ran for Cambridge City Council. What was that like?
NO It was one of the most terrifying, exhausting, but of course meaningful experiences of my life. I was constantly feeling under scrutiny, but I really believed in what I was doing, I had an incredible team and I was really passionate about the platform that I was running on.
KL So you didn’t win, but you were nineteen and if you had been elected, you would have been the youngest and first Asian-American female city councillor in the city’s history. That’s badass!
NO Yes. Well and it was really exciting! Actually, one of the most surprising learnings I got out of it was learning to be proud of my racial and ethnic identity. I grew up feeling really ashamed of being Asian and it was actually running that I first experienced extreme hatred for being Asian, but also a whole new level of support for being Asian. Because I didn’t know, but Asians are the fastest growing minority population in the US, but more underrepresented at every level of government than any other racial or ethnic group and that’s the same for media and politics. And so I think that it was an incredible experience of learning to be okay with myself and who I am, but it also taught me to be completely unapologetic about myself because every way I turned, there was always someone telling me what I was doing wrong or what made me wrong.
KL Right, yeah, absolutely. What made you decide to run in the first place?
NO For me, it was really the passion about housing affordability. It was me going on runs, being able to see gentrification in the city and then just wanting to learn more, get more involved, ended up with an 80-page word document of what I thought city council could be doing better and then when I started hearing jokes of “oh if you have so many ideas, why don’t you run yourself?” I decided to look up what it took to run. I saw that you just needed to be 18 and I was 19, so I sort of thought, “okay, I’m qualified” and went for it.
KL [laughs] I was reading a Teen Vogue article that you had been interviewed in earlier this year and you talked about campaigning and the toll it took on you. You were understandably tired and exhausted and you also say you felt alone at points and didn’t feel all that confident. That sounds really fucking hard. How did you work through that?
[30:03]
NO I mean, I think that it’s something that I still deal with—I still feel very alone at times, especially when things start to ramp up. I got really close with my mom actually. My mom and I have always been really close, but it was an experience where I wanted to talk to my mom a lot more and I think she was the one that I would always tell I was feeling tired when I was really feeling tired. I think that support was really meaningful for me.
KL I get the sense from following you on Instagram because we follow you and you’re—you’re wonderful [laughs and NO laughs] that you’re always inspiring folks with your energy and your creativity and your drive. What do you do if you’re the one in need of inspiration?
NO I watch a lot of videos of Beyoncé performing. [laughs] I watch a lot of videos of Sean Lew dancing and I follow some incredible people that I really look up to like Alli Webb, the founder of Drybar. Like Blair Imani and Phillip Picardi of Teen Vogue, Elaine Welteroth—I really use Instagram as a place to just be inspired by people and I think a lot of it is—or what I’m inspired by—is people who give their all to what they do and also give us insight into their world of self care too. So, being able to see Beyoncé performing, I’m just always in awe of how much she gives herself to every performance. Like I have friends who aren’t big fans of her or her music, but I’m like, okay, you can not watch a video of Beyoncé and say she doesn’t give it her all, right? No person gets up on stage on tour for two hours at a time and just goes that hard, you know? And I think that I very much use that as inspiration especially when I’m on speaking tour—obviously not performing for as big of crowds or as often—but I sort of take that mentality of no matter who I’m performing, even if I don’t know anyone in the audience or I don’t know what organization I’m actually speaking at, [laughs] I give it my all and I get up on stage each time thinking, like, there’s someone in the crowd who what I’m going to say could really mean a lot to them.
KL Yeah! Hell yeah! I think we—we can all benefit from channeling some of that Beyoncé energy and that drive and just—I really feel like you can feel it. Whether you’re watching on YouTube video or there in concert, it’s like—it’s, yeah, it’s very cool.
NO I completely agree.
KL So one last question. What is next for you and PERIOD?
NO Yeah, I’m not going back to school for this year so I think I’m just going to be growing a lot of it and then we have PeriodCon 2018, which is our global conference. That will be in December in New York City. So it’s doing Period, really working on those and also I guess getting ready for my book to come out!
KL Well, that all sounds amazing and we will absolutely be following along with you. Thank you so much for joining us today.
NO Thank you so much for having me! [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out]
[Ad spot] KL Hey everyone. Let’s take a sec to talk about our favorite topic: careers. This week’s focus is interviewing. To help us, Shopify’s VP of UX, Lynsey Thornton, tells us what she looks for when she’s trying to grow her team. Lynsey?
Lynsey Thornton So I care a lot about bringing people into the team who are passionate about the problems we’re solving for independent business owners and who aren’t afraid of challenging us to be better. So that’s what I look for when interviewing at Shopify. What’s different in your company, project or team because of you? And that doesn’t always have to be a big thing. Maybe you were the first person to bring customers into your project process. Or perhaps you were the one who took the initiative to update your companies job descriptions so they were more inclusive. Changing things for the better, even the little things, shows not only that you care, but that you can act.
KL I love this tip. If you’re looking for a new role, show your potential employers how you grow and hey, maybe your new role could even be at Shopify. Check out Shopify.com/careers to see their latest roles. [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out]
Vocab Swap
KL So girls, should we do a vocab swap?
SWB Bleughh, girls! [all three sigh and laugh]
KL It’s—why. It’s so terrible.
SWB I have been called a girl so much recently. In fact, Katel, me and you—we were at the beach a little while back in the summer with two other women and literally all of us were old enough to be president [KL laughs] and yet, our Airbnb host—as he was showing us around this house—kept calling us girls.’ And I don’t know, it feels so infantilizing to me. It feels like nails on a chalkboard, I hate it so much. And I have been called a girl at the airport, at a hotel, I was at a farm stand buying some fucking tomatoes—I feel like I’ve been called a girl so much in the past month and I am so over it.
KL I know, I am too. I mean, I feel like it’s probably not—you know—everyone’s intention of the person who’s saying it to infantilize or shut things down, but that’s how I feel about it. And—it just seems so flagrant. Like when you’re addressing a group of men, you never think to say ‘well, boys.’
[35:11]
JL Right? Speaking of vocab swaps, there’s plenty of things to say. Women, ladies. I’ve always been a really big fan of ladies because I just think it sounds classy as fuck. [laughs and KL laughs] Just like ‘yes, I’m a fucking lady.’
SWB And I know not everyone loves the word “lady” either, but I do think it’s definitely—for me—always, it’s always a better option than girl.
KL Yeah.
JL I used to work with this man and he was not my direct supervisor, but I would hear him talk to the women that he worked with and he would call them over and he’d be like “girls, girls, come over here”—to talk about their designs. Like he was in an episode of Mad Men!
SWB Super gross.
JL It was like, every time I’d hear it—“girls, girls”—I would just vomit in my mouth and I was like, “this is the worst—please stop belittling them!”
SWB Yes! I’ve heard some push back about this like, “well, what are we supposed to call groups of women in a casual way like we would say ‘guys’? There’s no equivalent to ‘guys,’ so ‘girls’ is the equivalent to guys.” And the reality is there isn’t really a precise equivalent to the term “guys”—which has its own problematic backstory—but it turns out you don’t even necessarily have to replace “guys” or “girls” with anything else. Sometimes you can just say “hey, how are you all doing tonight?” or “hope you all have a fun weekend,” right? You don’t have to say “girls” or anything to fill that gap in there, because there’s really not a gap. I think it’s just this assumption that you have to add some kind of gendered statement in there and…turns out you don’t!
KL Yeah, the guy who showed us around the beach house, he could have just said, “here’s where the keys are.” [all three laugh] Still works.
JL It’s like magic!
KL So this isn’t so much a vocab swap for us, but it’s something I really wish more men realized and—you know—so just men listening, everyone listening, just please think about it, y’all! Okay? [all three laugh]
JL So, fuck yeah to that statement! But that’s not even our fuck yeah this week, is it?
FYOTW
KL Oh gosh, I think I’ve got something. I know we’ve been talking about this for a while, we even talked to someone who is running for office—Liz Fiedler—early on in our first season. But with the midterm elections coming up, there are just so many women running for office and it’s fucking amazing and I just thought we should take a moment to look at who is running and just—I think it’s amazing, it’s so cool to see so many people.
SWB Well, there’s a few that we’ve talked about in the newsletter, so folks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York or Stacey Abrams running for governor in Georgia. But there’s so many other people out there who we are just starting to research!
KL Yeah, it’s not just the first time we’re seeing so many women, it’s like then—these people running are breaking through all these firsts in their own areas. Like Ilhan Omar in Minnesota—she, in 2016, she became the first Somali-American Muslim legislator in the US and now she’s running for Congress in Minnesota, which is just amazing. And there’s also Deb Haaland in New Mexico and she will be the first Native American woman in Congress if she wins. And she is currently favored to win. There’s a lot of women currently favored and I think that’s just so fucking cool.
[38:28]
SWB I have recently been following this organization that is called the Voter Participation Center. And what they so is quote increasing civic engagement among the rising American electorate. Which they mean unmarried women, people of color and millennials. And so I think that’s really cool because obviously those are groups that I care a lot about and I care about making sure younger people, people of color and women of all kinds are able to get out and vote. So, they’re looking at stuff like which states are closing polling locations or if states are enacting legislation that makes it more difficult for people to vote and they’re also doing things like keeping track of when different voter registration deadlines are. So, I was taking a look at their site because it’s a little complicated. There’s online registration deadlines and mail registration deadlines for different states and so they have kind of done all of the math for you so you don’t have to read the thing that says ‘within 28 days of this, this has to happen’ and instead you can just kind of get an update on when it needs to happen in every, single state.
JL That is so helpful.
KL I know, that’s really cool.
SWB It is very helpful. And I looked at it and I wanted to give a shout out to them because a whole bunch of states have deadlines in just a few weeks like in early October. The earliest one I saw is October 7th. And so if you’re a US citizen and you want to vote and you’re not 100% sure that your registration is current, I think it’s definitely time to double check because this is the time of year when you want to make sure that you are going to be able to get in and vote. And also if you know people like college students, people who are often really busy in the fall, maybe aren’t paying attention to this, this is a great time to check in with them and make sure they’re registered too.
KL Fuck yeah to women on the ballot and to all of us going to the polls. I hope everyone does. So if you don’t need this list, please share it.
SWB Fuck yeah!
JL And that’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and is produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by the Diaphone. Thanks to Nadya Okamoto for being our guest today. And if you like what you’ve been hearing, which I assume you do because you’ve made it this far, [laughs] please be sure to subscribe and rate us on wherever you listen to your podcasts because your support helps us reach more people and keeps us going. And we’ll be back next week with another great guest. See you then! [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, fades out to end]
We’ve all heard companies talk big about how they value diversity. But many still aren’t willing to quantify how they’re doing: who works there? Who’s getting hired and promoted? Are people being paid equitably? On today’s show, we talk about diversity, data, and how one engineer’s call for hard numbers shook things up.
That engineer was Tracy Chou—a leading voice in tech industry diversity and inclusion conversations. She’s a wildly talented software engineer who believes in the importance of increasing transparency among tech companies, the need for tech to value a humanities education, and the pleasures of spending way too much time on Twitter.
> As an engineer, I’m so used to having to have data for everything. But the lack of data on the workforce side just felt so hypocritical to me. It seemed like it wasn’t really a problem that we wanted to solve if we weren’t even looking at the data. > —**Tracy Chou, Project Include founding advisor **
We talked with Tracy about:
- What the real picture of diversity in tech companies looks like and where the numbers are.
- Why it’s important for tech companies to get comfortable releasing data about their workforce, and why it’s critical to consider the intersectionality of diversity efforts.
- A nonprofit Tracy helped to found called Project Include, which shares best practices around implementing diversity and inclusion solutions.
Plus, we talk about ch-ch-ch-changes and asking for help:
- Specifically, change at work—how we deal with it and how it can affect us emotionally and physically.
- And yup, we constantly have to remind ourselves that it’s ok to ask for help. The good news is, we’re helping each other do it more. Jenn even got to take a vacation complete with funnel cake, because she asked for help with childcare.
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
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[intro music plays for 12 seconds]
Jenn Lukas Hey friends, welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû.
SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. And today we are talking to Tracy Chou, who is an entrepreneur and an engineer whose push for tech companies to start revealing employee diversity data back in 2013 kickstarted a lot of huge changes in Silicon Valley, and put her on the cover of The Atlantic and Wired and a whole bunch of other stuff. It also led her to become a founding member of Project Include, which is a non-profit that is on a mission to accelerate diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. So we chat with Tracy about how she became a diversity advocate, how that’s changed her career and what she’s learned along the way. But before we do that, I just want to kind of check in with everyone. So, how’s life?
JL Life’s been a little wild this week. We kicked off some really big team changes at work. You know, some small changes, some big changes, but some people’s day to days got pretty changed up. And of course, seating changes.
KL Oh gosh, that can be a big doozy. How’s it going?
JL [sighs] Well, I can say this. People really just don’t care for change.
[All three laugh]
SWB [still laughing] No! Not at all.
JL You know, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about like why do people hate change so much?
SWB Because we all have habits and comforts and then you take them away and it’s very hard because inside we’re all just delicate little flowers. [Katel laughs]
SWB Seriously! We are!
KL Yeah!
SWB We are! It’s hard!
KL You get used to something and you’re like ‘wait, now everything’s changing and how am I going to adapt and how am I going to deal with this.’ And I think yeah, it just, it feels like it— it can feel overwhelming and especially when it has to do with sort of changing folks that you’re working with or places you’re sitting. Like I think physical changes can impact you a lot.
SWB And maybe also the thing with physical change like where you’re sitting is that nobody really realizes that it’s impacting them so much, right? People will underestimate how much of an impact that can have and so it’s the kind of change that can really affect your day to day, but that nobody’s kind of taking stock of and and it’s sort of assumed that that will just be fine. And I think that those changes are hard, right? The ones that we don’t invest enough time in planning for and understanding that there is an emotional component to it. The other thing I think about when it comes to change is that oftentimes people will know that the company needs to change and they’ll complain about the way it’s organized and it’s so hard to get anything done and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And yet when you try to enact changes, it’s really difficult to get people on board. And I think part of that is also like change that people are choosing for themselves versus change that is being done to them. And the reality is, nobody likes to feel like there is something being done to them and so that’s one of the biggest things I always think about is how do you make this something that people feel a little bit included in or consulted on? Or at least how can you put it into terms that will help them see it as something that is going to help them in their day to day or take away some of the pain that they were experiencing in terms of workflow or whatever. And of course, that’s not always invested in and it’s also not always true! Like for some people it’s it’s not actually solving the personal problems they had even if it’s solving company problems. And then it’s like okay, how do you get people on board and sort of get them through that hard part of of shifting gears?
JL One of the things we do with team changes that I think is really good is re-establish team norms. So sit down with everyone and everyone sort of discusses just like, what are the routines and what are the beliefs and the things that are important to people as a team. And I think that can really be helpful with new teammates to be like ‘here are things that are important to me, what are things that are important to you, and what’s it going to be like to live together at work?’
KL Yeah.
SWB Do you have any sort of particular structure for doing something like that?
JL We have the scrum masters run that and sort of they have a questionnaire list that brings stuff up. So, people eating lunch at their desks or how you use the shared space or the tables. So we—like I said, we switched the teams so we had to discuss ‘hey, can we still use this table to watch Jeopardy at lunch?’
[All three laugh]
KL Very important!
JL [laughing] Yeah!
SWB Yeah, bullet point number one: Jeopardy!
JL Right? But I mean also things like how you point stories. So pointing stories is basically a level of effort of how much an effort will take to get some sort of feature work done or something at work. We do daily stand ups at work where people tell you what your status are at meetings. You know, what time is that? Or are you doing them over Slack or like virtual stand ups? I think it can also be things like ‘here’s how I receive feedback best’ or ‘here’s how I think we should handle reviews of other people’s work.’
[5:18]
SWB Yeah, I mean there’re so many questions that come up when there’s any kind of change like that. Since I don’t work in a company—but the kind of consulting I do with companies is always about change because invariably they are coming to me because they realize that their content or their user experience isn’t working as they want it to and the reason that it’s not working is always rooted in their not being able to make it work as a company. The way that they’re organized, the way they do things, who’s in charge of what. So, I have to talk to people about how their jobs are going to change and how things are going to be different. And I’m a big fan of having people practice some of those skills. So if it’s like okay, we are going to do a different kind of writing process where instead of—you know—you produce this content over here in this department and then you ship it out the door to this other department, there’s going to be a collaborative process. Well then, okay, we should practice that. And so we’ll do that in a workshop setting where we’ll pair people up and we’ll actually practice—how do we work on these things together, how do we share drafts and get feedback from each other? And I think that those kinds of low stakes practice sessions—because you’re not doing your real job, you’re just kind of practicing the new thing in a short period of time—I think that that can help people feel more comfortable with talking to people they aren’t used to talking with.
JL Yeah and I mean I also think that it lets you feel more in control, and sometimes if you embrace that, if you know change is coming, you can do more exercises like that. And sort of prepare and be ready for this. So if you are expecting change or just knowing it can happen or knowing specifics, you can just be better ready I think to deal with it.
KL I love thinking about kind of how a different perspective or sort of embracing a different kind of approach to the change can kind of help you through it. It makes me think of when I was at National Geographic, we would go through organization changes from time to time, but at a certain point, we actually went through a really big physical change where we went from everyone was in cubicles and not just cubes that were like low sort of where you can see everyone. It was like six feet tall and offices and everyone went to cubes that were like four feet high. So, everybody could see everybody—including managers, it was all sorts of like all different levels, and people were really freaked out. And one thing that we realized immediately was going from sort of a perceived sense of privacy to not having any, meant that we kind of had to think about the workplace etiquette a little differently and just no one had thought about that. Like no one. It wasn’t—you know—a matter of management doing something wrong or folks not thinking about it, it just was like ‘oh, wait we have to work together a little bit differently.’ And something I’ve actually seen work really well is at a co-working space I go to here in Philly. [Laughs] Someone made these little coasters that were like red light, green light. So basically you put your little green circle up if you were ready to chat to people or didn’t mind having people coming up to your desk, or you put the red one up if you were like ‘I’m going to be heads down and working on something.’ So—I just think this idea of kind of looking at things a little differently too can help.
JL It’s like Fogo de Chão, [Katel laughs] the Brazilian steakhouse where green means bring me more meat and red means no I’ve had enough.
KL [Laughing] Exactly.
JL Yeah I mean I really like that because we used to say the universal sign was headphones, but I think we all know that doesn’t work. I was reading a bit on Harvard Business Review about this. They had some interesting things about finding humor in the situation, talk about problems more than feelings, don’t stress out about stressing out, focus on your values more than your fears—this idea that remembering that you’re you no matter what the change is can really help you. The change doesn’t have to define who you are. But something else I really liked was this like ‘don’t expect stability,’ where they talk about this 70’s research that was done where they studied two groups of managers and one group thrived and the other didn’t. And they said—you know—the adaptive leaders chose to view all changes as an expected part of the human experience, rather than as a tragic anomaly that victimizes unlucky people.
KL Yeah!
JL And then the struggling leaders were ones who were consumed by thoughts of quote on quote the good, old days. And they spent their energy trying to figure out why their luck had suddenly turned sour—because they kept looking back to something that wasn’t there anymore.
SWB That’s so interesting too because that just reminds me so much of politics, right? You have so many people who are talking about the good, old days. And you’re like ‘wait, when were the good, old days and for whom exactly?’ And I think it’s true at work too where it’s like when people get obsessed with the good, old days, those are probably also mythical. Right?
KL Yeah..
SWB They may have been good for some people in the organization but it’s undoubtedly that they weren’t working for other people.
JL And the other thing that you might like if you dig in, you might be like ‘okay, well this part was good, but this part wasn’t’ and you can think about how to get that good part back. So if what you missed was that you sat with someone or you worked with someone really closely that you didn’t—you know—make sure you’re setting up time for lunch with them or maybe you set up pairing sessions where you still work together. But you know, trying to figure out what it is that you did like and then what are things you can apply moving on? What are the things that you’re excited about now? And what are the things maybe that you didn’t really like then? And maybe you didn’t get a chance to work on these exciting things or work with this person and now you do get to work with this new person or you do get to work on this new project. Or maybe this new seat allowed you to clear off the desk that you’ve been meaning to do. [Laughs] It’s funny, I was actually like—in the seating change I ended up not moving seats and I’m like ‘ugh, but I’ve got all these boxes I’ve got to bring down.’
[All laugh]
KL [Laughing] You’re like ‘no, I need a move to help me reorganize.’
JL *[laughs] *Yeah, so just—like you’re saying. Trying to figure out really what are the positives moving forward? If there are things you will miss from those days, how do you keep them up and try to make the best going forward, as much as you can. I mean, It’s always hard and I don’t want to make it ever sound like that’s easy, but I think we can all do it.
[11:26]
[Music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out]
Time Trivia
SWB So we’ve been talking a lot about change and our interviewee today definitely talks a lot about change in the tech industry as well so I’d like to get to that interview, but before we do, we have one last little segment. It is brand new, it is called Time Trivia. Because we talk about time on this show all the time! We need more time, we try to balance the time we have, we rant about how we are sometimes feeling a little bit unbalanced. And so our friends at Harvest wanted to see if we could stump each other when it comes to time. So let’s see. Katel, you’re up today and our theme is women authors. Are you ready?
KL Oh gosh, let’s do it.
JL Okay, Katel. Here is your first question. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter manuscript was rejected twelve times before it sold for an advance of only £1,500. Now she’s sold more than four hundred million copies. How long did it take her to write that manuscript? A) 5,000 hours, B) 15,000 hours, or C) 50,000 hours.
KL Oh my gosh, this is already a lot of numbers. I’m going to say C) 50,000 hours.
JL Katel— that is correct!
KL [Gasps] Yayy!
JL It took her six years to write Harry Potter.
KL That’s a lot of hours!
SWB We even tried to stump you with the twelve times £1,500, 400 million copies—you were unstumpable. Question two. More math, sorry. [Katel laughs] Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847. If she’d been paid a freelance rate of $50 an hour – pretty good in 1847—how much would she have earned for her wild, passionate tale of Katherine and Heathcliff’s love?
KL Ugh, I love this book.
SWB Is it A) $740,000, B) $60,000, or C) $330,000?
KL Ohhh my gosh, I’m going to go with B) $60,000 even though I feel like it should be more.
SWB It is way more. It is actually $330,000 because it took her nine months to write that book, which is still a real short time considering how great that book is, ugh.
KL Yeah, it is! I’m glad it was more than $60k.
JL Okay, Katel, last question. Stephanie Myer’s classic tale of vampire love and lust—yes, Twilight—[laughs] has become a five-film series. If Stephanie had been billing her time to clients instead, how many 15 minute increments would she have billed? A) 870, B) 8,700, or C) 87,000?
KL Ooh. 8,700?
JL Katel, you know your 15 minute increments. That is correct! B) 8,700.
SWB Two out of three, not bad. I think that’s a winning score! So, thank you so much to Harvest for sponsoring our time trivia today and for supporting women authors, which they do, and women podcasters. So check them out at getharvest.com.
[Music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out]
[14:34]
Interview: Tracy Chou
SWB Tracy Chou is a wildly talented software engineer, who has also become a leading voice in tech industry diversity and inclusion conversations. She has been an engineer at Quora and Pinterest, an advisor to the US Digital Service and is one of the cofounders of an organization I am personally super fond of and that’s Project Include. She was named on Forbes’ 30 under 30 tech list in 2014 and she has been profiled in everything from Vogue to Mother Jones. So I am extremely excited to welcome Tracy to the show today. Tracy, thank you so much for being here.
So, you went to Stanford, you interned at Facebook, you were one of the first engineers at Quora and one of the first engineers at Pinterest. That is kind of like a perfect Silicon Valley pedigree to a lot of people. Except, you’ve also written about feeling out of place during a lot of that time and not necessarily feeling like the industry was designed for you. And I’m wondering if we can start there—what was it like in the beginning of your career? And what was exciting about it and maybe what was not so great about it?
Tracy Chou Yeah, so I grew up in the Bay Area surrounded by tech and I think that made it very easy for me to naturally fall into the tech industry. When I started working in tech I think I just accepted things for the way they were, including the lack of gender diversity, racial diversity. I honestly didn’t notice or think that things should be different. But there definitely were experiences I had when I started working that felt off, but I didn’t know how to articulate or pinpoint them. I tended to blame myself or think that there was something wrong with me when I had a lot of coworkers hitting on me all the time, for example when I was interning. And—you know—when I started working and felt like I might be treated differently, I assumed that it was because I wasn’t as qualified or there was something about the the way that I was approaching my work that was inferior and therefore caused people to treat me differently. So it took a while for me to put all the pieces together, and so I was just talking to a lot of other people in industry, other female engineers. One of my early conversations that really started to make me aware of these sorts of issues systemically, was with Tristan Walker who is an African American founder. And he had reached out to say that he had seen some of my writing about being female in engineering and wanted to share that he had similar experiences even though he wasn’t technical and he wasn’t a woman. Being the only black person in the room oftentimes felt as alienating and he could really identify with a lot of the things that I was saying. And that helped me to see how pervasive the sort of experience of marginalization is. Even though the tech industry is one that tries to pride itself on being so innovative and designing the future, being this engine of progress, there are so many ways in which it is still very backwards.
SWB What year was that? That was like 2010,11,12 in there that you were really kind of getting going in your career and having those experiences?
TC Yeah, the first sort of Silicon Valley tech internship I had was in 2007, but I started working full time in 2010.
SWB So in 2013, you wrote this post on Medium that got kind of a lot of attention, where you were calling out the lack of data about women who are working in tech—and maybe specifically working in engineering, and the lack of success metrics attached to company’s diversity efforts. So if companies maybe had diversity efforts, they didn’t necessarily have any sense of whether they were working or not. And so that post kind of blew up and a lot of companies started sharing their numbers in a GitHub repo. And for listeners who aren’t familiar with GitHub repos, it’s just a site where you can work collaboratively usually on software projects, but you can also do things like collaboratively share data. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that happened. First up, what made you sit down and write that blog post and did it feel risky when you did it?
TC I had been working in the industry for a few years at that point and had gotten to know a number of the female engineers at other companies. And it started to be this thing that I would keep track of in the back of my head like which startups, which companies had which female engineers. Whenever I went into rooms I would automatically start counting, so it was just something that I was keeping tabs on personally. At the same time, I was looking at diversity at Pinterest and I wanted to make recommendations to the team about what we should do to be more diverse and inclusive. Facebook and Google were getting a lot of really good press around their parental leave policies, for example, and lots of companies were talking about how they were sending lots of people to the Grace Hopper conference, which is this big annual conference of women in computing. But I found it very hard to justify recommending any of those things to Pinterest because there were no success metrics. So these kind of thoughts were swirling around in my head when I went to Grace Hopper that year—this was October 2013—and I was at a breakfast where Sheryl Sandberg was speaking in front of the room and she made a comment about how the numbers of women in tech were dropping precipitously. Which, I didn’t disagree with the sentiment of, but it made me wonder what numbers she was talking about, because to my knowledge there were no numbers really out there. And so when I got home with all these thoughts rolling around my head, I ended up writing this post around diversity data. I was also reflecting on how the way we treated workforce issues was so different from the way we treated product development. As an engineer, I’m so used to having to have data for everything. We’re pretty religious about tracking all this data on our users [laughs] and understanding their behavior and that’s the way that we approach problem solving in product development. But the lack of data on the workforce side just felt so hypocritical to me. It seemed like it wasn’t really a problem that we wanted to solve if we weren’t even looking at the data. And of course I understood all the reasons why companies were skittish about even tracking the data because it would also mean that they would start to acknowledge the problem and have to solve it. But when I wrote the post, I wasn’t expecting much of a response. I didn’t think that it would be something that many people would even read, much less act on. I would also add though that in hindsight it seems like this post became big immediately and started this whole movement, but it did take some time as well. It was more of a slow, snowball effect. And so there were smaller companies that contributed their data first and the bigger companies took a little bit more time to process and work through what they wanted to do before they all started releasing their reports as well.
[21:05]
SWB When I look back on it, it kind of reminds me of in some ways like the moment that happened last year when Susan Fowler published her Uber blog post where there was this moment—the table had already been set for this conversation and it was just it pushed it over the edge or something. And I’m not sure if it’s exactly the same by any means, but it did really feel like a moment was happening and I’m curious, why do you think it ended up really snowballing? What was it about that moment that you think caught on?
TC I think there was general appetite to do something about diversity and inclusion. More people were acknowledging that it was a problem. And I think the way that I framed it, which was, “let’s just start sharing some data,” made the problem seem a little bit more tractable. At least there was a first step that people could take. There was one thing that an individual contributor, for example, could do. So if you’re working at a small startup, you can look around the room and see how many engineers and how many female engineers and count that up and submit that data into the repository. And it felt easy, actionable, and also clear that this would contribute to a broader cause. I think I had a little bit more credibility as an engineer working at a company that a lot of people knew. And I think that piece is still important, I could speak from the perspective of being on the inside. And I think also I just got lucky. In a lot of ways I think of this project as a startup where startups have the markets that they’re going after, the products they’re trying to build. Sometimes they’re too early and the market isn’t ready for them, sometimes the product isn’t just quite right yet for people to want to engage with it. A lot of things have to come together all at once and luck, timing, all of that plays in. And somehow this Medium post in a row and the GitHub repository that I set up just happened to be just right at that time to capitalize on this increasing intent from people in the community to do something. And I think I was the right person at the right time to be pushing on that message.
SWB If you’re an engineer or anybody who uses GitHub already, it’s also like, it feels sort of a natural place or a more comfortable place.
TC Yeah, I think the GitHub angle was also interesting because it spoke more to engineers and people who write code, as opposed to HR. So it was getting engineers submitting their data through pull requests, and those people were less encumbered by thinking through, what are the legal ramifications and what are the HR risks here. They’re just thinking, like, this is the team that I work on, I want to report the data on the team.
KL This is so fascinating to me too because in that post in 2013 you also focused really narrowly on defining the technical roles. You wanted companies to talk about actual engineers—not every other role, not business development or whatever. Sort of as a way of saying companies shouldn’t pad their numbers about the women they hire if women aren’t in those roles. And I see that point. I’m also curious if that perspective has shifted over the past few years or changed at all?
TC One of the reasons why I wanted to be really specific about just tracking women in engineering is that for something that was crowdsourced, it had to be as simple as possible to contribute that data. The more you ask from people, the more drop off you get in that flow. So I wanted to make it super simple. But the other point about just looking at engineering versus the rest of it was that I did want to get away from that sort of padding of the numbers. And in the tech industry engineers are very much valued because they are the ones—we are the ones—building the products that are being sold, very close to the core value of the companies. So there’s this idea of looking at where the prestige is and how much inclusion you have there. Now that there’s more data coming out, we can see that even if you have a reasonable amount of representation across the companies, usually they’re lower ranked, few of those people are in decision-making roles. One interesting data point that I would love to see that is very hard to get is diversity on the cap table, and so that’s looking at ownership of the company—like who owns the shares. And I would suspect that ownership in these different tech companies skews very heavily white and male, because founders will have a lot of stock, early employees will have much more because the stock grants are risk-adjusted so people who are joining early will get much more stock, investors get stock, executives get a lot of stock. So even if your company has a lot of women, but they’re all in the lower-ranked, non-technical roles, the value that they get out of the company doing well is much less. So I really wanted to dig in on engineering within tech because that is so close to the core of Silicon Valley.
[26:05]
SWB One thing I’d love to ask about—we talked with Nicole Sanchez of Vaya Consulting back in June and her company focuses on diversity and inclusion in tech and consults with a lot of tech companies. And one of the things she said to us was that she flat out does not love the way that the numbers are being reported by tech companies right now, that there’s still a lot of gaming of the system because so much of the numbers is just about percentage of people in full and percentage of new hires, right? And that there’s not a lot of information about things like retention of those employees and seniority of those employees and, as you mentioned, who is actually getting a cut of these companies, right? Like who’s really taking home money? And so it sounds like—and I’m curious about your thoughts on this—but it sounds like the way that you were initially looking at some of these metrics was sort of really, really important at the time, but maybe isn’t quite enough to answer the questions that we have about how that industry is doing and to answer the questions that we have about whether things are getting better.
TC Absolutely. I think we need much more comprehensive metrics and there is certainly gamification of the current metrics that get released. I think getting people even into the flow of releasing any data was a pretty big step. And I think it’s good to keep pushing on companies to release better data. So one obvious thing is intersectionality—instead of just putting gender on one side, race on one side, looking at those intersectional cuts and just see is it just white men and white women getting promoted? How does it look for women of color? Those sorts of questions can’t be answered if all the data is being split out. I’ve been relatively heartened by how much companies have been willing to release—enough that we can look at their data and see that in the last few years even if we’ve made some progress on gender diversity, we’ve had backsliding on racial diversity, which is not a good statement on the industry, but at least we have that data that we can even point that out and see that some of these diversity efforts aren’t uniformly benefitting different people and, in fact, are causing some harm to different groups.
SWB So another thing I was really hoping to dig into that I think you kind of touched on a little bit when you were kind of talking about technical versus non-technical roles, is I’m also curious how you feel about who’s considered technical in Silicon Valley and sort of the valuing of engineers when you are also kind of thinking about sort of the appreciation for what it takes to build tech products? I was reading an article you wrote—I think last year—about realizing that it’s not really just about engineering, and realizing the value of learning things like understanding people and human behavior and communication skills and—you know—liberal arts and humanities. And the stuff that you hadn’t necessarily taken that seriously when you were in college as something that was important for ensuring that the things we’re making aren’t laced with bias or harmful to people, and being able to think through sort of the impact of our work. And so I’m curious how you think about those things together. Like okay—we value technical roles a lot and so it’s important to look at who are in the roles that we value the most. But are there also issues around the kinds of roles that are valued or the kinds of roles that even exist? And how do we sort of make sense of that?
[30:25]
TC Yeah, absolutely. I think our whole way of approaching technology building right now is pretty flawed. I think for a long time we’ve unquestioningly assumed that technology is always progress. So whatever we do in the software realm will be positive. And we’re seeing very clearly now that that’s not the case. It’s very easy for the software products that we’re building to be used for harm or used in ways that we didn’t anticipate. And for the people who are building these products, whether it’s the engineers running the code or everyone else involved, we do need to think more holistically and broadly and contextualize our work in society and understand what the impacts of technology are before we can assume that we’re doing good. Some people have drawn analogies after the election cycles in the last couple of years to the sorts of ethics considerations that other domains have had—so, chemical engineering or in physics. When the people in those fields realized that their work could be used to create weapons, they had to think pretty hard about doing science or doing this kind of research and I think the people in the tech industry and in software right now really need to have that same sort of introspection and deep questioning. For a long time in the tech industry, we’ve really downplayed the value of a humanities education and and I think that is problematic. You see that reflected in compensation. For example, who gets these big payouts, who gets really big salaries. It’s tricky because also the sorts of value of someone who can bring in terms of the ethical reasoning and product guidance, that work is not as easy to value, put a dollar amount on. It’s a little bit easier to look at what an engineer is producing or what a designer is producing and say this is the value of their work and it ties very directly to the final output and I think if the whole system is fundamentally shifted around, we can start to see the value that non-technical folks are bringing, then hopefully that is reflected in the compensation and payouts as well. At the same time, you have this very classic supply and demand type issues around sorts of talent that you need, so the engineering salaries will be high for a while because engineering is very obviously needed and there aren’t enough engineers to fill all the roles. Even if we were to recognize the value of the non technical work that needs to be done, if there is such a mismatch in supply and demand on the technical side, the salaries will still be higher there. So there’s a lot of things to address systemically, but I think one starting point even just within the companies that we’re looking at is trying to shift the culture to acknowledge the different viewpoints that different people from different educational backgrounds and different training can bring.
SWB I think one of the things that’s also interesting and maybe compounds all of this, is the way that a lot of the kinds of roles that are more based in humanities or social sciences or that would benefit from that kind of background, they are tending to have a lot more representation of women in them, and so then you kind of have this interesting cross section of the skills are in less demand. Also we’re used to paying women less, or we’re used to putting women into sort of more caring roles versus rational roles, and so it’s hard to tease out all of those different issues that intertwine and result in gendering of who’s in what kinds of roles, and devaluing of some roles, and then also to have the conversation about well, “why is it that so many women are in these kinds of roles and not in these other kinds of roles?” And to be able to talk about all those things at the same time I think is really hard for a lot of people. It takes a lot of investment in the discussion to be able to pick apart things with that level of nuance, and I think a lot of the time organizations aren’t there yet.
TC Yeah, I completely agree. [Laughs] There has been some research into when professions become more lucrative and prestigious how they—how the men tend to crowd the women out. So, there used to be more women in software engineering and they were kind of pushed out. So the 37% of CS degrees in 1984 went to women and it’s been declining, the percentage has been declining since then. But in other industries as well, one that I found kind of interesting was beer making used to be mostly women and then men found out that beer making was cool and it became all male brewmasters. Even in things like cooking, when men reach the top and become these top chefs, it’s very prestigious. Even though women still do most of the cooking around the world, it’s just not viewed as as prestigious or lucrative for them. So as you were saying, there’s all these interesting dynamics at play and it’s really hard to tease out specific effects.
SWB Yeah totally—I think about some of the conversations I’ve had with folks when startups starting hiring people to do quote growth hacking and you’re like ‘wait a second—isn’t that—wait, aren’t they—isn’t that marketing? I think they’re doing marketing!’ [Laughter] But marketing was always more women in the field and growth hacking was this very hardcore bro kind of role. If anybody out there is a quote growth hacker as their title, I’m sorry if I’m making fun of your profession. But it is, it’s one of these made up titles that’s almost—I think—masculinized a lot of skill sets that were traditionally perceived as being more feminine. And then low and behold, those people are being paid a lot more money.
TC I think you also see this reflected in the maker movement—where it’s been rebranded as this very male type of thing where you’re making things. But if you actually look at what is being done—creating things from the raw materials—that’s stuff that a lot of women have been doing in different domains, but it had to get rebranded for men to be super into it and for it to become prestigious.
SWB Totally, like what’s not being a maker about being a knitter?
TC Yeah!
SWB You’re literally making things out of thread, right? [Laughs]
TC Yep.
SWB I’m amazed that we have not gotten to this yet because it’s so important, I want to talk about it. Okay, we have not talked about Project Include. So, you started doing all of this work to share this data that you were gathering and to talk about this issue. Can you tell us a little bit about how that grew into founding Project Include?
TC Project Include was eight of us women in tech getting together a couple of years ago. So, there was a lot of discussion in the broader sphere about the problems and everything that was going wrong, but not nearly enough about solutions. And for the people that wanted to do the right thing, they still didn’t know what to do. So, we thought that the highest leverage thing we could do was write down our recommendations and resource—what we knew to be best practice around implementing diversity and inclusion. Our initial launch was just a website with a lot of recommendations—everything from defining culture, to implementing culture, to doing training, hiring, resolving conflicts, measuring progress, and also a framework to think about all those things, so it’s not just like pick and choose some of these tactics and apply them to your org and then you’ll be fine, but thinking through more holistically how to approach diversity and inclusion truly inclusively so it’s not just gender or just race or just one facet of diversity and then being very intentional about measuring progress. So, there was a bunch of these recommendations we wrote down. The feedback we got from the community was really positive and people wanted us to do more with it, which is how we ended up incorporating as a non profit and adding Startup Include as a program where we actually work with cohorts of companies on implementing these recommendations. But our hope is really to drive these solutions forward and we’re focused on startups for now. We think that the highest leverage opportunity is with startups before they become too big and are hard to steer—try to get those good practices and processes in early and hopefully some of the startups that are thinking about D&I early will end up becoming the big companies of tomorrow and they’ll already have baked in these best practices. We also acknowledge that what we think to be best practice now may change and so we really do want to build more of a community around these issues and solutions and kind of in the same way that open source software works where you put stuff out there, everyone can benefit from it. As they’re using it, they may think of ways to extend it or improve on it and they’re contributing that back to the community—we want that sort of a community around diversity and inclusion.
SWB Yeah, that’s really interesting and I think it’s one thing to identify problems, it’s one thing to try to address them, but we clearly don’t really know how to fix this yet. So, I’m curious is there anything that you’ve found as you’ve been advising Project Include and sort of seeing it grow and adapt—is there anything that you’ve seen out there that you’ve really feel like you’ve been able to learn from and that’s helped to shape where you’re making recommendations now?
[39:54]
TC The biggest takeaways still are that you need metrics to understand where the opportunities are and also where things are going well. So we recommend that all companies do look at their data. It’s cool to see so many people trying out different things. I think it will take some amount of time before we learn which things really work in a long term sustainable way, but definitely excited to see lots of people experimenting with D&I now.
SWB So Project Include, that was founded in 2016, right? You’ve got a couple of years of kind of starting to shape the organization and provide more than just your manifesto, but also the actual community and practices and working with these companies. So I’m excited to see what else comes out of that.
TC Yeah, one thing we’ve been thinking a lot more about is how to achieve leverage impact across the industry and some of that is going to be working with other organizations. Earlier this year, a couple of us launched this project called Moving Forward to get venture capital firms to first of all, have anti-harassment policies and then publish them, make them available to founders and then also have points of contact as accountability. And so this came out of some of the #metoo harassment stuff that came out last year, where what we saw was that in that relationship between founders who were trying to raise money and venture capitalists that control this money, there is this gray zone of interaction where they’re not necessarily in a professional relationship yet. As in cases where there is a power imbalance, sometimes there are abuses of that power. So our idea was to push venture capital firms to be very explicit about what’s acceptable behavior between people that work at the firm and potential founders that they might want to be investing in or other people in the community. And so we launched Moving Forward, now have over one hundred firms that have their anti-harassment policies out there and the points of contact. This is something where I worked on that separate to Project Include, but we ended up realizing that there was a good opportunity for collaboration between Project Include and Moving Forward so I could serve as a little bit of that bridge.
SWB That’s so cool, it’s sounds like you just have your hands into so many different parts of this problem and like trying to sort of untie the knot from lots of different angles, which I really love.
TC Yeah, I mean there’s a lot to be done here—so lots of opportunity.
KL That is so true. I feel like we’ve been talking a lot about your work as a diversity advocate and I just want to go back to you for a minute, because I saw you write a while ago that you don’t want to just work on diversity issues because you love to code and you like your life a lot more with that in it. How do you balance those things and stay excited about both?
TC I still identify as a software engineer and someone that likes to build products and build things. Sometimes that means building teams and companies, but the diversity and inclusion piece will, I think, always be a part of my life and that conversation is still just so prominent in the industry, it’s hard to not take part of it. So that always be a part of what I do, but in my more full time capacity, I do like to be thinking just about technology, how powerful it is and how it can be used to hopefully impact the world for better.
KL I’m also curious—you know—if the move from San Francisco to New York has had any impact?
TC When so many things change all at once, it’s hard to say. I do think being in New York has helped to broaden my perspectives quite a bit. I’m not surrounded by tech people all the time and I like being around people who don’t think about the same things I do all the time and just to be surrounded by this greater diversity of people.
SWB We talk a lot about place on the show because I feel like so many conversations in design or tech or publishing or whatever can be so limited to such narrow places, so I’m always interested in—you know—kinds of perspectives that people can bring in. So we are just about out of time and before we go, I wanted to say: Tracy, I have been personally inspired by your work for a long time and I know I’m not the only one. So I want to thank you for being on the show and ask you, is there anywhere that our listeners can better keep up with everything that you’re up to?
TC The best place to keep up with me is Twitter, so I’m @triketora on Twitter. It’s t-r-i-k-e-t-o-r-a. I tweet a lot, so I also will not be offended if you follow and then unfollow because there’s too much going on, but that’s the best place to keep up with me.
SWB Well I know that a lot of our listeners will definitely want to hear everything you have to say, even if you tweet all day. Thank you so much for being on the show.
TC Ahh, thank you for having me!
[music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out]
Career CHAT
KL Hey y’all, time to talk careers with our friends at Shopify. This week we’ve got a tip on what to look for in a company from Shannon Gallagher, a product manager on the merchant analytics team.
SG: Being a lifelong learner is super important to me. I need to constantly grow and push my boundaries. The nice thing is, that’s one of Shopify’s core values, too. When you make a positive impact here, you can move into new roles, new disciplines, and new spaces. That’s had a huge impact on my career. Two years ago, I was on the recruiting team. Now, I’m in product management… And I’m still expanding my knowledge and reaching for new goals every day. This kind of environment means I’ll never get bored—or feel like I’m stuck in one place. The point is, you’ll love work so much more if you’re with a company where the goal is growth!
KL Thanks, Shannon! If you want to join a team where you can keep learning and make unexpected and wonderful moves—if you want—then you should check out Shopify. They’re growing globally, and they might just have the perfect role for you. See what’s new this week at shopify.com/careers.
FYOTW
JL Okay, so I’ve got a fuck yeah this week, ladies.
KL Let’s hear it.
JL Sutter and I are taking a vacation this week.
SWB Fuck yeah! [Laughs]
JL [Laughs] I know, I mean we could just stop there, mic drop.
[All three laugh]
JL But this vacation is to Wildwood, New Jersey—and for those unaware of the magic that is Wildwood—it’s a wonderful place at the Jersey Shore with boardwalk, food and funnel cake, and soft serve ice cream. And perhaps most importantly—it’s only a bit over an hour from Philadelphia. And here’s what we knew. We wanted some time to get away to ourselves, but we’re not really in the place where we wanted to plan something big or get on a flight. We just wanted some time with each other. That’s not because we don’t love our son, but two years ago we took a babymoon, which we gave ourselves a long weekend before a major change in our family. And we’re going to have that again soon, so we wanted to do something like that. But how do you get that time to yourselves when you have a toddler? So we were really thrown off and honestly I just—was like ‘that’s fine, we don’t really have to do it,’ like—not a big deal. But then this wild idea came to us. Why don’t we ask his parents if they’re available to watch Cooper for two nights?
[45:48]
KL What did they say?
JL [Laughing] They said yes!
KL Yaaay!
JL And so it’s amazing what happens when you ask for help!
KL That’s awesome. And also grandparents love to help in that way.
JL It’s like—I don’t know why, but asking for what you need can be such a hard hurdle to overcome, but it can totally pay off awesomely, so I am saying fuck yeah to asking for help!
KL That’s awesome. This actually resonates with me, too, because when I take time off at A Book Apart, I have to make a point of putting it on the calendar and asking folks to cover some stuff while I’m out so that I don’t have to worry about it or think about it. Because otherwise I would never actually really get time off. Like I have to actually set up that—you know—those boundaries and ask for help and I didn’t realize that until late in the game and I was like ‘oh, I actually need to raise my hand and do this so I can properly take some time off.’ So I love this.
SWB I love this too because it’s actually a really good reminder for me. Because I think as both of you know—because you’ve called me on it before—I do not like to ask for help and I sort of take it almost as a point of pride to do it all myself. And that’s been good for me in some ways, but everybody needs help, myself included. And it’s one thing to ask for help, but it’s also another thing to actually accept the help and let go, right? Because part of what you’re saying, Katel, is that when you set that boundary where you’re like ‘okay, I’m taking a real vacation, can you please handle this for me’—you’re also saying ‘and I’m not going to check in so I need to be confident that it’s handled.’
KL [Laughing] Yeah.
SWB Right? And I think that’s something that’s hard for me—just to fully let go and to just say ‘nope, this is handled and I’m not going to get all anxious about this, I’m just going to accept that it’s handled.’ And I realize it’s not a lack of trust—it’s like I trust them—but it’s almost like my brain doesn’t trust me enough to fully let go, you know? [Laughter]
KL Yeah.
SWB I have to remind myself like no no no no no, you asked for help, now your job is to take the help and then walk away.
JL Yeah and it’s—it is hard to do things like that, but I think it gets better with practice. I mean, I read a bunch last year—some manager books and they talk a lot about just delegating things, delegating tasks and how important that is. But what’s really important is when you delegate the tasks, to trust that they’re going to get done and then be okay with the fact that whoever does them will probably veer from the way you were going to do it. So, we left an agenda or notes of what Coop’s normal day is for the grandparents and not to be like ‘you have to do it this way,’ but just so they have a guide-ish like ‘here’s what we would do.’ But I understand if you’re not going to do it exactly the same way and you know what, that’s okay. I’m okay with that, thank you for the help. I’m going to be able to now focus on other things that are more important than making sure that you did this exactly the way I would have done it.
KL Yeah, I think that is so true. I’m thinking about this and I feel like we need to come up with an acronym for all the parts so… accept help, let go, enjoy—ALE!
[Laughter]
SWB That’s also what I would like to have on my next vacation.
KL Yeah, exactly. [laughs] Well, fuck yeah to asking for help and to getting it, and we hope you enjoy.
SWB Eat some funnel cake for me.
JL Okay. [Laughing] You got it!
SWB Well, that is it for this week’s episode of No, You Go—the show about being ambitious and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and is produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thank you so much to Tracy Chou for being on the show today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, thank you so much, you’re the best. And you could be even more the best if you would take a moment to leave us a rating or review on your podcast listening app of choice and let your friends know about No, You Go because we’d love to have them here too. We’ll be back again next week!
[music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, fades out to end]
Do you ever feel like you’re facing impossible choices—tradeoffs between family and work, between money and passion, between pushing for a promotion and just wanting to take a damn nap? Well, our guests today have been there. And not only that, they’ve written about it.
Those guests are Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace. A few years ago, they were both in their early forties and feeling stuck. So they set out to learn whether other women they knew were feeling the same—and what they could do about it.
Hana and Elizabeth interviewed forty-three women they had first met more than two decades ago, when they were members of the same sorority at Northwestern University. The results of those interviews is the new book The Ambition Decisions: What Women Know About Work, Family, and the Path to Building a Life, which came out in June.
> Ambition is not this entity that is contained in a box labeled “career.” …We wanted to kind of liberate the word ambition from this kind of office-boss-lady idea and let it live outside of those constraints. > > — Elizabeth Wallace , coauthor, The Ambition Decisions
We sat down with Hana and Elizabeth to talk about:
- How they started their project, and what they learned from the women they interviewed
- How ambition often changes over time, and how to embrace that change
- Stuff we often forget about when we’re on “rosé dates”—like figuring out whether your prospective partner supports your ambitions as much as their own
Links
- The Ambition Decisions from Penguin Random House
- Hana on Twitter and her website
- Elizabeth on Twitter and her website
Also in this episode
Jenn talks about her upcoming maternity leave, and why it sucks to have to “sell” your employer on taking more than three months off. We chat about:
- The FML of the FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act)
- Using short-term disability insurance to get paid during maternity leave
- Ivanka Trump and Marco Rubio’s woefully inadequate proposed paid leave act
- What it’s like for Sara’s family taking parental leave in Germany
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher [Ad spot] Hey friends! Let’s talk about time for a sec. There’s never enough and I never seem to know where it goes—unless I’m using Harvest. Harvest is a time tracking and invoicing tool that helps me manage projects, clients, and payments, and keep my little biz running smoothly. Try it free at harvest.com and when you upgrade to a paid account, the code noyougo is going to save you 50 percent off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, code: noyougo [music fades in, plays alone for 13 seconds, fades out].
Jenn Lukas Hey! Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû.
SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
KL Do you ever feel like you’re facing impossible choices—like tradeoffs between family and work? Between money and passion? Or between pushing a promotion and just wanting to take a damn nap? Well, our guests today have been there, and, not only that, they’ve written about it. Those guests are Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace. They are the authors of The Ambition Decisions: What Women Know About Work, Family, and the Path to Building a Life. It’s a new book that came out earlier this summer and we were lucky enough to snag a copy before sitting down with them.
JL Ugh! I really just loved and related to so many things in this interview. I’m constantly trying to figure out that magical balance of things as a working mom and life and work and all those things that I think all of us are trying to figure out. But adding with the mom twist the last few years, you know, there’s so many tough things to think about when you’re having a child. You’re thinking about things like, where is my baby going to sleep? Or what am I going to name my baby? Is my baby going to be healthy? All these things. And one of the things that I really wasn’t ready for the first time and maybe not even the second time around is how I was going to take maternity leave. There’s just like, you’re figuring all these things and it’s like, you know, when you’re going to like a new place but you’re like, “Oh yes, I also need a passport.” It’s like [laughs] you know you’re planning a vacation but you’re like, “Oh yeah! This one thing.” And well, what’s available? And where I work and generally a lot of places you’ve got the FMLA leave, which guarantees you three months away from your job, not paid, but just that you—they will hold the job for you. Some companies will pay you for your time off, some won’t. Where I work we have short-term disability through a separate company, so I get some percentage of my paycheck for a variation of six to eight weeks. So, six weeks if I have a vaginal birth and eight weeks if I have a C-section [laughs]. That’s always a fun formula trying to figure out [laughter]. It’s just—
KL That also just like still does not sound like anywhere near enough.
SWB It’s like so little!
JL I know. Yeah.
SWB So Jenn, how long are you going to take?
JL So I’m going to take four months. I took four months with Cooper. Again, this was something I negotiated with the people I work with. So luckily I work in a supportive and when we sat down and talked about my leave and what really made sense for me, I could not really fathom coming back in less than four months. And I am definitely in a lucky enough situation between my husband and I that we could afford for me to take off four months of unpaid, you know, that’s a tricky thing, too. So you figure that out and then you also get really nervous, right? So like you’ve cleared the money thing and you cleared the time off with your job, but you also have this guilt like, “Can I be away from work for four months?” Because at the same time you know I like working. How do I remain ambitious and take this time off to be with my family?
SWB One thing that I would imagine being really hard is that identity shift where it’s like, if you identify really strongly with your profession and your career and then suddenly that goes away—and sure, you have this amazing new thing right in front of you and it doesn’t take away from the fact that being a parent is this whole other identity opening up—but like, when something is just suddenly gone, you’re like, “Wait! I was an expert at a thing, and [laughing] where is that now?”
JL Right. And yeah now I’m like the opposite of an expert at a thing [laughter]. This is like…I’m totally in this like, “Oh where am I?” And I remember when Cooper was first born and I was home. My child is—is slash was—not a good sleeper. So there was this real lack of sleep. And I breastfed, and when I did, I’d be so tired when I woke up in the night that I would just like…you’d do anything to stay awake, you know, whether you’re like drinking tea or like eating cereal or like watching really bad television on your phone with headphones. And so when he was first born, I remember I was watching this show Unreal which is like a fictional reality show—it’s a binger.
KL Wow.
JL Just like, I needed the most mindless but addicting TV to keep me up, right? And then I don’t know, maybe two months into my leave, I started watching like conference talks [laughing] while I breastfed because I missed it! Like I missed the—like, being in the know, and being still connected to that part of me that is my career and being like, how do I stay ambitious when I’m physically acting as food for my child?
[5:06]
KL Yeah. I mean I think that totally indicates that you were absolutely still an expert, that you are. That you were just trying to like [laughs] make it all work. I mean you’re sitting there multitasking like before you even have to [laughs] get back up. So.
JL You know there was parts of work that I really missed and I wouldn’t say I was necessarily like, “Yeah, I’m like super ready to go back,” but I couldn’t have gone back earlier than four months, too, because I just—I physically wasn’t ready. The lack of sleep and what pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding, if you choose to do it, does to your body it’s just like, to physically be in a place with people where you have to make sure, like, your shirt is buttoned [laughing] was just not fathomable to me.
KL Ugh. Gosh. Yeah. I mean that sounds really, really rough. Sara, weren’t you talking about, you have a cousin who’s pregnant right now but she’s in Europe?
SWB [Chuckles] Yeah. So my mom’s side of the family is all German. They’re in Germany. And so that means I get a lot of info from them about what things look like in their part of the world that are different than here, and some things that are very different are things like health insurance and family leave and maternity leave. So my cousin is pregnant with her second child right now, and she is a junior professor at a university in Munich. So she has a pretty great job. But what really kicks into play in Germany is a lot of state benefits that are mandated. So she’s not getting extra support because she has a good employer, she’s getting support because this is just how it works there. So what she gets that’s standard is you get this standard amount of time right around the birth that is specifically tied to being a parent who’s giving birth. So I believe it is six weeks before the baby is born and eight weeks after the baby is born, you get paid leave. But then beyond that, you go into a different kind of leave that’s more of a parental leave, and with that you get a reduced salary so it’s usually I think 65 percent of what your salary is, but there’s a cap. So the monthly cap I believe is 1,800 Euros, so it’s not as much necessarily as she would be making in a given month, it’s going to be less than that, but it’s a substantial amount of support and all of that is state mandated and required and one of the things that I was reading about after she told me about, you know, how this looked, because they treat it as parental leave that may or may not be tied to the actual like childbirth event. The parental leave you can take up to a year at once, but then you can also take different chunks of it up until the kid is like eight years old or something, where like they had this example where as long you go back to work for I think it’s at least a year in between, you can take like a year off when the baby’s born and then another year off the year that the kid is transitioning to school or something like that. So it’s really interesting the way that you can do that and also that you can really easily break that up between partners and you also have some paid leave time where both partners can be off at the same time where both partners can be off at the same time for a couple of months. So it’s interesting how much different it is and how that really shapes the way that she looks at this process and her family looks at this and the way that it sort of like maps onto her professional life. You know, she’s not totally freaked out about the money piece of it. But then there’s also just like, because it’s so normalized for women to take a year, she doesn’t feel nearly as much of that stress around like, “what are people going to think?” Or, “I need to make sure I show back up as soon as possible and get back to it.” There’s a stronger sense of like, this is what happens, you go on leave and you come back and it’s fine.
KL And you like still have a job and you don’t have to worry about that.
SWB Yeah and I think that there’s something to be said for, you know, like there’s the legal piece of it, but what the legal piece does is it sort of sets a social expectation that’s different. So that’s like it’s not personal judgement as much. It’s not perfect. Ok. Don’t get me wrong. In fact, she wants to go back sooner than a year, because as a junior professor she really is concerned about leaving her research for that long. And one challenge she has is that in Germany there are not as many childcare options for babies under a year old because the standard is usually that there’s a year off. So, you know, it’s certainly not perfect and I’m sure that other folks in Germany have other experiences that have lots of problems, but the way that the state supports it really changes also I think like a lot of the interpersonal dynamics around it.
JL It’s so amazing. I mean, you really have to sell it here. You know?
KL Yeah.
JL And there’s so many things to sell, right? Like I mean if I went to my company and I was like, “You know, I want to take four months off.” And like you can only get three. I mean what do you do? Do you fire an employee for that one extra month and then have to like spend the cost of hiring someone new, onboarding someone knew, training someone new? Whereas if you work with the employee, then you set up a supportive workplace where both I’m happier and they’re happier. So I think that for people trying to figure out how to make this work for them, you know, there are like lots of, you know, quote/unquote “selling points.” But it just sucks that we have to sell it.
[10:12]
SWB Well, yeah, and I think, you know, I’m really hoping this is an issue we finally make some traction on in the US. I was reading the other day that three out of four voters in the US actually want paid family leave and there is a lot of talk about making legislation to make that priority. Of course [chuckles] the most recent legislation I saw from August of this year is backed by Marco Rubio and Ivanka Trump, so I’m not [laughs] trusting that to save us. Their idea is basically that you can borrow from your future social security to pay for your paid family leave. And I’m like but wait, hold on, social security’s already screwed! Like I don’t see how this solves anything. So I don’t think that’s the answer, but I do know if we have this many people that support it and we’re starting to see a lot more discussion of it, then I’m hopeful if some other things potentially uh change politically in the next couple of years, maybe this is an issue we can finally get to the forefront on.
JL You know just the more we talk about it, though, I feel like—and the more people understand—the less weird it gets when you get back, too. Because, I mean, that’s the other thing: like you do have to go back. And I’ll tell you, going back that first day is weird [laughs]. It’s just weird [Katel laughs]. Luckily, I did this, which was like smart, is like maybe like two or three weeks before I went back, I had gone down to have lunch with some coworkers, which was good because it was sort of like an ease back in. But people are happy to see you, which is awesome but you also—you’ve got some people that don’t really understand and they’re sort of like, you know, they ask you like…they’re not saying, “Hey, how was your vacation?” But that’s sort of maybe how you’re reading it [laughs] and you’re like, “Mmm. Yeah.” And then like you’re also missing your child, and you’re also trying to like, if you’re breastfeeding, you’re trying to figure out how to pump, which is like…oh my god that’s an episode. So I don’t—[laughs, Katel laughs] I’m not going to go into it—but like you’re just trying again to balance so much, and then you’re trying to do that and then you’re like trying to not cry in the middle of a meeting because you miss your child, maybe you leaked some milk all over yourself, and you think—maybe they are, but it could be in your head—that your coworkers are judging you for being away for so long. So it’s just like… [laughs]
KL So it’s like the first day of school but like incredibly worse and you never thought that could actually be a thing [laughs].
JL Yes [laughs]. Yes, exactly.
KL Well, I would seriously talk about this all day and it really makes me want to like hear what Hana and Elizabeth had to say about just how they wrote their book and just like what they learned. Should we get to their interview?
JL Definitely. I’m so excited to hear what other people in this position have gone through and the expertise of what they have to say on it [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out].
[12:57]
KL [Ad spot] Hey friends, craving just a little more NYG? We’ve got you covered with our bi-weekly newsletter, “I Love That.” Every other Friday, we share personal notes from your trusty cohosts (that’s us), a curated collection from our favorite finds—from fancy summer sunscreen to causes we’re hyped to support, and a roundup of great reads we don’t want you to miss—like op-eds about the tampon tax or an awesome interview with Tiffany Haddish. To top it all off? There’s always a profile of someone you may not know about yet, but we’re sure you’ll be inspired by—and we love that. Add a little more “fuck yeah” to your inbox: sign up now at noyougoshow.com/ilovethat and hey, share us with a friend or two! That’s noyougoshow.com/ilovethat [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out].
Interview: Hana SChank and Elizabeth Wallace
SWB Today we’re joined by not one, but two fascinating guests: Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace. They are coauthors of a new book, out earlier this summer, called The Ambition Decisions: What Women Know About Work, Family, and the Path to Building a Life. That’s definitely a topic that hits pretty close to home here on the show, and I am so excited to dig into it. Hana, Elizabeth, welcome to No, You Go.
[14:04]
Hana Schank Thank you.
Elizabeth Wallace Thank you.
SWB So, we’re really excited to talk to you about this. We talk about things like ambition and balance all the time on the show, and I’d love to hear a little bit more from you two and how this book came to be. So from what I understand you’re more than just coauthors, you went to college together at Northwestern in the nineties and that history kind of sits at the core of the book. So can you start by telling us a bit about the book, your story, and how it all came to be?
EW Sure, this book really started with a midlife crisis, as many great things do. And we were both kind of at a point in our lives where, you know, we were in our early forties and were just feeling stuck and feeling like we weren’t where we wanted to be with our careers or with our marriages or with our parenting, and just really feeling like it was hard. So we started having conversations around this general stuck feeling and decided to reach out to some of our other friends from college, most of whom we hadn’t spoken to since 1993, to get an understanding of just where they were. Like the overarching idea was: it is hard for us, are there other people who somehow have this all figured out? Can we find this, like, mythic woman who just, it’s easy for? And we remembered that everybody we went to college with was very ambitious, and so we sort of felt like, if they couldn’t do it, then who could do it? And so probably we would find people who had it figured and we would then be able to apply those, you know, what that person knew and fix our lives.
SWB How’d that work out? [Laughter]
EW Yeah, it turns out there’s no mythic woman who has it all figured out [laughs], but it ended up being this three-year project where so we did these initial interviews and they were so fascinating and so illuminating that we wanted to keep going. And so that was how we ended up interviewing—we were both in the same sorority, and we didn’t want to interview all women, all over the world, forever. I mean actually we would like to, but we wanted to [laughs] complete the project within our lifetimes. And so we thought about how we could basically draw a circle around the project, and since we’d been in the same sorority, we thought, “Well let’s just interview everybody that we graduated with.” So we ended up interviewing 43 women from Northwestern, and while we [laughs] didn’t find the woman who had it all figured out, what we found was really interesting and turned into a book.
[16:28]
SWB So what did you learn from those 40-something sorority sisters that you interviewed? What did it tell you about where people’s lives had ended up?
HS One of the things that we found was, it did not fix our lives, but it did help us make a little bit better sense of what we had sort of termed midlife crises. One of the primary findings was that all of the 43 women that we spoke to fell into one of three life paths. And two of them were more traditional, previously defined paths. One was the high achiever. A traditional high achiever who is a c-suite or c-suite adjacent executive, prominent in her field, a high earner, has a lot of self-pride about her job and her accomplishments, and has set her career as one of her primary foci in her life. The second was the opt-outer, who were a number of women who had careers and jobs that they were happy with to some degree and then, after having their child or subsequent ones, opted out of the workplace and their careers, either temporarily or more long term. And then the third group was this amalgam of women that we had not seen previously identified nor named and we kind of thought they were just this hybrid group who really weren’t necessarily reaching for it all, but also had not opted out and we were like, “What is that?” And so by the time we interviewed everybody, we generated this name for this third group, which we also fell into, which were the flex-lifers. And these were women who for the most part had full-time jobs, some had scaled back to either freelance or part-time work, but basically had created flexible work situations so that they could focus on being ambitious in other parts of their lives and that they—that their ambition had not waned, they had just scaled back some of their career ambition and fleshed it out into other areas of their lives.
SWB Yeah so I think that the flex-lifers piece is pretty interesting. As I was reading the book, one of the things I kept wondering was like, “Which category am I?” And I’m actually still not sure. I think of myself as being super ambitious, but also not particularly interested in, like, being c-suite adjacent, as you said. And I’m somebody who takes sort of having some elements of flexibility very seriously, but I am exceedingly professionally ambitious. And I’m wondering if maybe some of my inability to figure out where I sit in there, or my sense that it doesn’t quite fit me, is that I don’t have kids. Did you find that almost everybody you talked with had children?
HS There were a few who did not have kids and there were, in fact, some flex-lifers who didn’t have kids. One woman in particular who chose not to have children because she wanted to focus on her career and she didn’t feel like she could be the kind of parent that she wanted to be if she was working but at the same time—and so it was like sort of pursuing this c-suite thing and then at some point said—looked at what that life looked like and said, “Actually, I don’t want to have that.” And moved to Colorado so that she could volunteer and go hiking and have a more flexible life, even though isn’t was to accommodate children, it was to accommodate, you know, interests and hobbies and just the way that she wanted her life to shake out. I will say that sometimes I’m not sure if I am a high achiever or a flex-lifer. You know I think you can be one one day and the other other days. One of the things that we found in the book is that a lot of women move across the paths over the course of their careers and sometimes I’m starting to think like maybe I move across the paths within the course of a week [laughing], because I have days where I’m very ambitious and I have a whole giant list of things that I want to do at work. But then I also am recognizing that I have certain boundaries. Like I actually kind of really—I worked from home for a long time and had a long time where I thought like, “Eh, you know, I think I really want to be in an office.” And I’m now sort of coming to terms with, actually maybe working from home is really good for me and the lifestyle that I want, and that of course limits the kind of jobs. You know, you can’t like be a CEO and work from home [laughs]. So—not that I want to be a CEO, but you can’t have that kind of job and work from home. So I think that, you know, for a lot of women there’s sort of a constant reassessing of, “actually this thing is important to me now,” and, you know, next week maybe something else will be important to me.
[21:06]
EW One thing that we didn’t talk about that much in the book but that is kind of emerging for me too in real life in a meta way is that—that these categories, these life paths, like sexuality and gender are more fluid than they are static. The other thing that really, really came out of the book was that ambition is not this entity that is contained in a box labeled “career,” and that you can not want to be a c-suite executive and still be very ambitious. You can still be very career ambitious. You can be ambitious in your career and in other avenues, but that really we wanted to kind of liberate the word ambition from this kind of office-boss-lady idea and let it live outside of those constraints.
JL I love this so much. We’re expecting our second child, and if you had asked me some amount five, ten years ago, I would’ve been like, “Yeah, c-suite. Definitely where I want to go,” but recently I’ve been reevaluating everything. So it’s good to hear, you know, it’s that like company of others that’s like, “This is ok that I feel this way.” And I love the idea that I can flex how I feel between, “do I want to be in this group or that group?” because it does change for me week by week too sometimes.
EW Another thing that we personally got out of this book that we hope to share with other readers is this sense of, you are not alone and that you are not the first woman to do this, you are not the first woman to question her ambition when about to have her second child and you are not the first woman to think about, “Well what’s my life going to look like three years from now?” You know? And, “can I still pursue c-suite executive-dom after I have my second kid?” And I think that still, in our forties now, I think we ask ourselves every day: can we still do this? Can we still do that? And these are questions that we really wanted to see other women answer. And so to know that you’re not alone is a huge part of why we wrote this book and a huge takeaway that we want readers to absorb.
JL So, can I still follow up on the c-suite after [laughing] I have my second child?
HS Actually one of our favorite stories is a woman who stayed at home for ten years and had never planned on staying at home but her first child was born on 9/11 and it was a really traumatic experience and she just felt like she could not leave her newborn child with anybody else. She ended up having two more children and then when the financial crisis hit, she all of a sudden felt like, “I need to be contributing to the family and also, by the way, haven’t really loved staying at home and wasn’t what I planned on doing.” She went and sat in the lobby of a bank [laughs] for weeks and became friends with the receptionist in order to get an interview and now is a very senior person at this very large bank. So it is possible. She is a dynamo, but we love that story because it shows the degree to which these things are possible and you can be constantly reevaluating, “actually, this is what I want now. Actually, this is what I want now.” There were—and actually she was not the only one who, you know, stepped back for a bit and then came back in. You know, your thirties is a time, especially if you are having children, when, you know, I personally felt a lot of inner turmoil around, like, am I not ambitious anymore? I was running a company because it gave me flexibility, but it wasn’t, like, ticking off all of the intellectual boxes that I really wanted it to. And one of the things we hope people will get from this book is, you know, I think that I and a lot of other women, there’s a lot of just guilt involved in like, “Why aren’t I killing it at work while also having a three-year-old and a newborn?” [Laughs] Which in retrospect is like, “Well, maybe because you have a three-year-old and a newborn, and you wanted to focus on that, and you’re tired, and that’s actually totally fine.” The idea that it’s, you know, if you’re not doing it now, you’re never going to do it is just ridiculous.
SWB Yeah I think, you know, we talk a lot on this show about defining goals and ambitions on our own terms and I feel like that’s such a piece of what you’re highlighting here: the way that we’ve conceived of ambition, or women’s ambition maybe especially, is too narrow. And I think that maybe speaks even to why I’m like bristling a little bit at trying to fit myself into one of those boxes, because the desire to do big stuff and to be pushing towards something is always there for me, but my desire to do that on terms somebody else has set up is exactly zero. Like my desire to go do that for some large corporation is very low. But that doesn’t make the ambition any smaller. And I…you know, I think maybe some of it is a limitation on what we mean when we say “high achieving,” or there are other ways to be high achieving than being a corporate executive.
EW Yes, uh, a hundred percent. That’s kind of a big sub-takeaway of this book. And, you know, when we came up with these three paths, we named the first one “high achiever” only as a jumping off point, I think, to ways to discuss and define and redefine ambition. And while we don’t call the other two groups “high achievers,” we really make the point that they’re trying to achieve their ambition in other ways every single day of their lives in all aspects of their lives.
HS You know a lot of the women that we labeled high achievers you know they were not all c-suite corporate people. It was much more around how they talked about their careers and how they placed their careers in the other elements of their lives. So they were women who might be recognized in their field, or who were flying around and giving talks, or seen as expert in multiple fields. We had one person who was a rabbi, we had somebody who was a screenwriter. So, absolutely, it’s not just about climbing the corporate ladder.
[27:09]
SWB Something that we touched on early in the interview here but didn’t quite dig into is who those women were, and also I guess importantly, who they weren’t. So something you mentioned at the start of the book is the way that the cohort of women that you interviewed does not reflect women in general. And I’m curious what this particular group of women can and can’t tell us about the broader issues that women face, and sort of like, where is it limited?
EW So the group was attractive to us because they were identifiable. We could find them all and interview them all in our lifetime. And they were women that we met in 1989 and that we graduated with in 1993, and then re-interviewed again starting in 2014. So we had the privilege of knowing them and knowing their history for over 20 years, which gave us an access and an intimacy that we would not have with random strangers. They all had the access and knowledge and information to get to a private college and they were not all wealthy, several of them were on financial aid for their tuition and their sorority dues and had work-study jobs that helped them with both of those. But, you know, what did they have in common and I think what they can tell us is, this small slice of women who graduated three months after Bill Clinton was elected and into a life where we had really come of age with second-wave feminism and we saw our mothers living this kind of binary existence around work. Like my mother was a c-suite executive and Hana’s mother, you know, for the first part of her life was a stay-at-home mom and we didn’t see a ton of in-between. So in this group we saw a lot more in-between. But so what I think that they can tell us is that ambitious, highly educated women with a ton of potential still have a lot of barriers to embracing their ambition. There are the obvious external barriers like sex discrimination and bias in lots of ways in the workplace and at home, but we also encountered with this group a lot of internal obstacles to embracing their own ambition, whether it was self-doubt and confidence, whether it was ingrained gender assumptions that they really should be doing everything in the home except controlling the finances, which many of them were happy to expect their male partners to do, or assuming that their male partners’ jobs or careers were more important than their own. And then, further to that, we also learned that there’s more than one way to be ambitious.
SWB And so I think I remember also reading that most of the women that you interviewed were white, or at least that there was not necessarily the kind of racial diversity in the group that you would see in America, and I’m curious if you’ve thought about sort of what impact that has or what kinds of issues might be particularly facing women of color that are not necessarily addressed here.
[30:12]
HS So they are predominantly white, although there were several women who were Asian American and several women who were first-generation Americans. One thing that we talk about in the book is that at Northwestern there’s an entire separate black Greek system. So there aren’t black women in the book. Certainly, you know, this book does not speak for all women. It’s a socioeconomic slice and a racial slice. But this is the group that we were working with and we felt like they—what they had to say was interesting enough and relevant enough to a broad enough swathe of women that it was of value.
SWB Yeah so kind of speaking also kind of on the angle of identity and who you were and weren’t talking to, something that I was really noting in the book was that a lot of the stories that you tell are about cisgender, heterosexual women who are married to men, which is a lot of women—but Elizabeth, your partner is a woman. How do you think that that has changed or not changed the kinds of challenges or tradeoffs that you’ve made or that you saw with other women that you interviewed who were not married to men?
EW We interviewed a couple of other of women who are in same-sex relationships, and some with kids and some with not, and I think the biggest difference there is the ambition balance or cap within a partnership or marriage and also the breakdown of domestic labor and emotional labor within a relationship that those are not an engrained assumption or not a foregone conclusion, like I think they were with a lot of our heterosexual subjects, because we just came together not with the same assumptions of how we were going to run a household or how we were going to support each other financially or how we were going to break down the finances or how we were going to decide who empties the dishwasher or how we were going to decide who was the more primary caregiver this year or who was the more primary caregiver next year. So I think that for me specifically, and for the other non-hetero cisgender women that we interviewed, that basically it was much more of a tabula rasa when they were approaching their ambition and their relationships and how that fleshed out. I’m of the personal mindset that everybody should marry a woman, men and women. But I know that that’s not every woman’s choice and I know that there are a lot of heterosexual women in the world and in this book and, you know, I think that what we saw in those relationships were that the women who challenged the more gender-normative ideas around ambition and marriage and goals and responsibilities within their own partnerships, that the women who kind of turned those assumptions on their faces were the ones who seemed like they were in more satisfying marriages. And there’s something to be learned from same sex relationships. I think the answer is yes.
SWB Yeah, so it sounds like what you’re saying is maybe all of us in all kinds of relationships could learn that it’s helpful to sit down and honestly talk about expectations and labor and who’s doing what, and take stock, and actually acknowledge all of the little details that go into running a house?
HW A hundred percent.
SWB Weird, right? [Laughter]
[33:14]
HS Um, you know, we have a couple of different stories of women who actually did do that, some of them from the beginning of their careers kind of had this breakdown where they were the more primary earner or they were not going to be the primary caregiver and some of them did not have that arrangement from the get go and decided at some point into their parenting and marriage and career journeys that they were going to say to their partners or husbands, “I’m not really liking the way the breakdown’s going right now. It’s not really working for me. So here’s what needs to change,” and one of my favorite subheads in the book is “All the Bullshit Things He Didn’t Even Know Were Things.” But this was a woman who was a high achiever and who was a partner in a law firm and who had two children with her husband. She very much wanted to set up a gender-equal co-parenting situation and working situation. And so she said to us, “You know, my husband thinks he thinks he’s so equal. He thinks he does so much and he’s like so proud of, you know, ‘Oh, I, you know, I took the kids to school this one day.’” And so she said, “So one day I sat down and made a list of all of the bullshit things I do that he doesn’t even know are things, and handed him the list and said, ‘Pick half. You start doing half of those things.’”
SWB Did he do it?
HS Yeah and yes, he did. So the point—the takeaway from there is that you may be in a marriage one day where… the point is that these relationships don’t necessarily always just naturally unfold organically over time like a magic, feminist fairytale, but that you may have to demand these things, and you may have to demand a restructuring. And sometimes that demanding, that really works. In fact, in a lot of cases, the women who did that—to some lesser degrees of I guess quote/unquote “success” or “gender equality”—but the women who articulated that this was an issue for them and that they needed to switch it up, generally for the most part saw it be switched up. And the women who didn’t articulate it and who did not make a priority did not see it switch up.
SWB That’s so interesting and it seems like that’s such a powerful thing to do but also not always an easy thing to do. So I do have one last question for you both that I would love to hear before you go. So, you spent a lot of time writing this book and you’ve synthesized a lot of what you found into this book, so beyond obviously buying the book and reading it, is there a piece of advice that you would give to someone who was at one of those pivotal moments in their career and in their life where they could double down or…not? What would you tell them?
EW One of the most important takeaways that we want people to come away from the book with is that you have agency and you are in control of these decisions. And we spoke to a lot of people who felt like, “I want to do this but I really can’t for the following reasons, you know, my life is not constructed in a way that makes this possible. My household is not constructed in a way that makes this possible. You know, I don’t feel like I’m going to be like living up to my potential in all areas if I go in this direction.” And the degree to which women really have control over these decisions. And the women who identified what they wanted to do and figured out how to put the pieces of their lives together to make that happen were able to achieve what they wanted to achieve. So that maybe sounds really obvious, but it wasn’t for a lot of women. It’s easy to see other people’s lives, right? It’s hard to see your own. So we had a number of women who, in part because we did these interviews over a three-year period, when we would first talk to them they would say… you know, we had this screenwriter who said, “I’d really like to direct, but I just don’t see how that’s possible.” And there were a couple of people who said things like that, like, “I would love to do this and I just don’t know how I could make it work.” And then when we interviewed her six months later—and she was convincing, too, about like—we were all like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, that could never work for you [laughs].” And then when we interviewed her six months later she was directing a big-budget Hollywood movie. So she figured out how to make it work, even though we had all agreed it was not possible. So the idea that you can achieve the things that you want, it just maybe requires some logistical thinking. And that the way that you need to organize your life to achieve whatever that is is not a permanent thing. She had a crazy period of time for her life while this movie was shooting, and then she went back to having the kind of lifestyle that she’d had previously. The other big takeaway I think for parents from this is around non-negotiables. One of the things we talk about in the book is identifying the things that you feel like you must do or you internally feel like you are lacking as a parent and this is not external, this is that different women have different things that they feel like are the thing that makes them a parent. And figuring out what those are, and then figuring out how to get rid of, delegate, pay somebody, just not do the other pieces. And that the women who did that were able to direct their ambition in ways that were much more meaningful to them. They could spend meaningful time with their children. They could—they had more time for focusing on work. They had more time to, you know, compete in trail running marathons or whatever it was that they wanted to do with that time.
HS Also, if you do consider yourself ambitious in whatever way you see that ambition flowing, and you are somebody who wants to be life-partnered or married, that you should really think about either, you know, if you are at a point where you’re thinking about partnering or you already are partnered, is that we found for these women that who they were partnered with and how that person felt about their partner’s ambition was crucial to how successful that woman was going to be and the things that she pursued. And that that’s more important than a lot of people think when they are getting together with somebody because, you know, you don’t necessarily think when you’re meeting somebody and like having rosé dates, “How is this person going to view my career or my ambition or what’s important to me after we’ve been together for ten or twelve years and after we have children? And is this person going to assume that his or her career is equal to mine, or are they going to inherently assume that theirs is higher to mine? And are they going to assume that they will be the higher earner, or are they going to be wanting me to be the higher earner? Will they support that if that’s something that I want or that’s something that organically happens?” All this is to say that when it comes to partner selection, if you are an ambitious woman, that you would do best by yourself by thinking about how your partner will support that ambition and logistically what that will look like and if you have children will you, you know… this was something that we saw time and again, that the woman in these relationships was the one who automatically was going to be the one who had to leave work if one of her kids threw up at school, or if there was a half-day at school—that she was automatically going to be the one to go pickup. You know I think that may be something that’s changing a lot in younger generations, but with some people it’s not. And so thinking about and talking through what your partner’s ambitions are vis a vis what yours are, and how they are going to flourish together. Because partners’ ambitions are not…they don’t live in a vacuum within a marriage.
[41:52]
SWB So make sure you’re questioning the defaults and actually talking about it.
EW Yeah and marry or partner with somebody who thinks your ambition is as important as theirs is. If it is important to you [laughter].
JL Hurray to that.
SWB Well, with that, I think we are about out of time, so everybody pick up The Ambition Decisions. I think that you’re going to really like a lot of what you hear about how you can start thinking a little bit differently about your own goals and your own life [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out].
[42:20]
SWB: Hey y’all, it’s time for career chat—brought to you by Shopify. This week, we’ve got Krystle Olson from the research team sharing her tips for encouraging diversity in your applicant pool.
Krystle Olson: Thanks! So, I wanted to highlight some of the best ways to support accessibility when creating job postings. First, limit the job requirements to only what’s truly necessary. People will often not apply if they feel they can’t fulfill 100 percent of job requirements. Experience comes in many forms, so if you’re a company that values potential and supports on-the-job learning, make that known. Second, write job postings with the person in mind, and help them see themselves in the role. This can be your first impression with candidates, so don’t squander it! The bottom line is, if more companies treat candidates as humans, rather than just lines on a CV, we’ll all be better off.
SWB: This stuff is SO important. So if you’re posting a job, listen up. And if you want to work somewhere that’s already thinking about this kind of thing, then you are in luck, because Shopify is hiring—maybe for a role you’d be great at. Visit Shopify.com/careers to learn more [music fades in, plays alone for four seconds, fades out].
[43:30]
FYOTW
SWB All right, it is time for our last segment of the show, and maybe our favorite segment! It is the Fuck Yeah of the Week, where we celebrate something that just made us say, “Fuck yeah.” Uh Katel, do you have something for us?
KL I do, and you know this is my favorite part—one of my favorite parts. But, I don’t know, I was just thinking how busy I’ve been this summer, and earlier this week I’d gotten home from a trip, and I was watering the twenty-some-odd plants we have in our house. Some may say that’s too many; I disagree. But it usually takes me like ten minutes or so, because there’s a bunch and they’re, you know, scattered all over. And I was halfway through when I realized that this is like one of the few things I do, at least once a week, that I focus on a hundred percent. It’s almost become meditative, because I can’t really multitask while I’m doing it, and I kind of love that about it, because for those ten minutes or so, it’s all I need to focus on, and I’m doing kind of like this extremely tangible, satisfying task. I don’t know, it’s just this, like, little routine I realized that I have and I love that it just lets me kind of like turn my mind off and let it be.
SWB Fuck yeah! Little routines are great. I feel like that even when I kind of set away work for the day and I’ll start making dinner, and it’s like I find something that’s really nice about pulling out a bunch of vegetables and I’m washing and cleaning and chopping things. I was peeling carrots yesterday, and I mean like on one level I fucking hate peeling carrots, but on another level there’s something about it that I find very kind of meditative, like you said, right? Because it’s just like this simple little thing, I can’t really multitask while doing it, it creates a division between the work part of the day and the evening, and it has to do with like nourishing myself and thinking about, you know, what I’m going to be eating, which I’m always excited to do. And so that’s a little routine I super cherish.
JL These sound so nice. And I mean as you both know my life is a little bit less routine-y these days, but recently I’ve been going through the bedtime routine. So like they really make a huge emphasis on creating a routine to help your child fall asleep and the one we’re currently going through now is, read Coop a story and then put him in his crib, and then I turn out the light and I sit in like a chair nearby until he falls asleep. And, you know, again, you all know me, I’m not going to meditate for that 20 minutes. Not my jam. But what I recently started doing is bringing my headphones in with me and listening to an audiobook, and it’s become so lovely that I look forward to that time.
KL I love that. And I totally agree. I feel like I don’t necessarily need to sit, you know, in the lotus position for an hour every day. The thing that I do where maybe I take a walk to the subway and like watering plants I’m just letting my mind wander and sort of letting myself zone out a little bit and I just—I really love that. So fuck yeah to little routines.
SWB Fuck yeah!
JL Fuck yeah!
SWB Well that’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace for joining us today.
JL If you like what you’ve been hearing, please rate us on Apple Podcasts and subscribe there or anywhere where you listen to your favorite shows. Your support helps other folks find us and we. Love. That. We’ll be back next week with another great guest [music fades in, plays alone for 30 seconds, fades out to end].
Today’s episode is all about showing up as your most authentic self at work—and about finding a space where you’re supported and respected to do that. It’s also about the challenges of taking risks, the joys of personal growth… and skydiving.
Our guest today is one of the coolest, most totally herself people we know, Ada Powers—a writer, user researcher, community builder, and badass trans woman based in San Diego and currently working at a software company called Tealium. You’ll love her.
> Being able to come to work as myself means that I get to come to work as myself. I get to think about, “What would make me happy in this context? What would make me happy and feel fulfilled doing this work?” Ok well maybe it means suggesting this initiative, maybe it means taking on this project, maybe it means changing my responsibilities a bit. It means I get to show up and be engaged with how I actually feel and how that looks. > > —Ada Powers, writer, researcher, and community builder
She tells us about:
- How and why she told her company she’s trans before she came in for the interview
- Why she wants her coworkers to know she’s poly
- Why sharing pronouns helps more than just trans folks
- How to take criticism and feel your feelings without being a jerk
- What to do when activism leaves you burnt out
Go be friends with Ada already:
Also on our agenda:
- Uncovering Katel’s past life as a skydiver
- Reliving our Vancouver live show
- Recreating the Kate and Leo Titanic bow scene on stage
- Unlearning the habit of immediately gendering strangers
- Celebrating the besties of yesterday, today, and tomorrow
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Away makes stylish, high-quality luggage with amazing built-in features—like a laundry bag and USB charger. **Use code NYG to save $20 today at awaytravel.com/nyg. **
Transcript
SWB [Ad spot] Do you like getting paid? Me. Too. And Harvest helps me do it. If you’re a freelancer, work with an agency, or have pretty much any reason to send an invoice, you should check out Harvest. Track your time; assign tasks to teams; keep track of profitability; and more! Visit getharvest.com to try it free and when you upgrade to a paid account, use code NOYOUGO to save 50% off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, code: NOYOUGO.
KL That’s a good discount!
[Music fades in, plays alone for 30 seconds, fades out.]
Jenn Lukas Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû
Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. And today we are talking about showing up as your most authentic self; finding space where you feel supported and respected so that you can show up fully; and how we can all do better at that. We are joined in that conversation with one of the coolest, most totally herself people I have ever met, and that is Ada Powers. She is a writer, a user researcher, a community builder, and a badass trans woman based in San Diego. You will love her.
KL Before we do that, I’ve had some self-discovery recently that’s maybe not like always bright and shiny and has a big epiphany at the end, and I kind of wanted to share it with you because, I don’t know, I just wanted to get your thoughts on it. So, we did a live show in Vancouver recently and it was awesome but it was basically the first time I’ve ever done that. Meaning I’ve never gone on stage and been one of the only focuses of entertainment or the sole focus of what was happening up there, and I felt terrified. And before we went on, like that whole day I was just thinking about how—so, ok. Quick sidebar: I used to skydive for a couple of years. Like I did it as a hobby. And we can come back to that if you want [laughter].
JL That’s one exciting hobby!
KL [Laughs] Uh yeah so I used to skydive and that whole day I was thinking, “Oh my gosh, I actually might feel like I would rather jump out of a plane than like go on stage later.” And I couldn’t shake this feeling and I was like, “That sounds bananas. Like, how could I feel that way?” And I think it was just I just wasn’t sure how it was going to go and, you know, I was worried. I wanted to do it right. But of course like we did it [chuckles]. You can hear the show but yeah, I don’t know, I felt like I went through something there and it was great. I had a great time but it just was so uncomfortable the whole time [laughs].
JL You know, I was away one time in San Diego with my best friend, Julia, and she made go tandem paragliding, and [oh gosh] I definitely never would’ve done it had it not been for her little friendly peer pressure but I loved it once I was up there. And like there was something like so comforting and like looking over and like seeing her flying up there too, and there was that safety. So did you feel safety while you were up there with Sara?
KL Oh my gosh. Absolutely and I think that had a huge part in why I actually had so much fun and afterwards I was like thinking I kind of wanted to do it again which I wasn’t expecting to feel and yeah, you know, like looking over and knowing she was there and just knowing that she had my back and sort of that, you know, we had planned this so it was going to well enough and we were going to make it work. It was—it was great.
SWB Did you feel like we were Kate and Leo in Titanic?
KL [Laughs] Absolutely. I definitely did.
SWB I was holding onto you the whole time.
KL You totally were [laughter].
SWB It was really fun. We really missed Jenn doing the live show [yeah]. That was like the biggest bummer about it was that you couldn’t make it out there, Jenn, but it made me so much more confident and I hope, Katel, that you’re feeling confident about it now because I feel like we could do this again and we could do it bigger and badder and better.
KL Definitely. And like I said I think the highlight that I walked away from it with was that I did like it and I was really excited about it.
JL And there were giveaways and like—
KL There were.
JL Not to make light of that but it’s like when you do something that’s fun, right? Like you really like—you brought something that’s you and I think when you’ve got something like that it makes you feel more comfortable in the moment. So I think there’s like a whole lotta things about making something that could feel really uncomfortable more comfortable. And, you know, we’ve talked about this before. I did my first talk was a talk with Mark Huot who I worked with a for a long time and, you know, there’s safety in numbers and we do these things at work, Tech Talks, and lots of people are like, “Well I want to do it but I’m really nervous.” I’m like, “What if you did it with someone?” And all of a sudden it just like feels more light. Or what if you didn’t do an hour? What if you only did fifteen minutes? Like, you know, finding these ways to make it more fitting for you so you don’t have to like go all in to what some people might consider the only way you could do public speaking. There’s definitely ways that you can just be like, “Let me make this what I would want to spend an hour doing.”
[4:55]
KL That makes so much sense and I think you’re totally right because we—basically bringing like our show and as much of it as possible with us, that helped a lot. The only thing I’m sad that we didn’t bring is that eight by ten of you framed [laughter] on set.
SWB The one thing I want to definitely call out though is that yeah, ok, it was our show so that made it a little bit more comfortable and you’re up there with me and that made it a little bit more comfortable but also like that is a pretty baller first thing to do on stage [Katel laughs] like, you know what I mean? Like that wasn’t like a little ten minute talk at a meetup. That was getting onto a big stage at a theater where it feels legit with like spotlights and having you know like, I dunno, over a hundred people there listening and watching you do this live and then recording and like releasing that to the world. Like that is a huge thing to start with. So like props for that.
KL No. I really appreciate that and honestly like I felt all of that coming from you, and I will say that I do want to give a shout out to the audience because they were so fucking rad. Like being able to see them and when I did make [chuckling] eye contact with anyone which I was scared to do at first, people were like into it. And that was very cool. So I think like being able to see that feedback was—was awesome.
JL Yeah that’s always helped me like trying to find—like once you do brave it and look out into the audience you can find the people smiling back at you and you’re like, “Oh. Ok. This is ok.” But I’ll also say like there’s been times where I’ve been more nervous doing like a ten minute small meetup group versus like doing a talk in front of like 600 people because there’ll be so many lights that you really can’t see everyone’s faces at that big one. So it’s sort of like ah. Ok. I’m just here by myself [laughter].
KL Right.
JL So I think whichever one like people get started with or do I think that you could make it and you could do it.
KL I did.
SWB I mean one of the things that I think was so great about it was how you were like, “I’m terrified of this; I’m terrified of this,” and now looking back you’re like, “Oh I actually liked that.” And you wouldn’t have gotten to realize that joy that you can get from it if you hadn’t given it a shot.
KL I think that’s exactly it. I went into this whole thing maybe just focusing on the fact that I was nervous and anxious and uncomfortable but I came out the other end actually being excited about it and feeling like I wanted to try it again. And I wasn’t expecting that. So I think that was just the coolest thing that came out of it. It was just totally different realization than—than I thought I would’ve had. So, I don’t know, I—you know, we’re talking a lot about, you know, coming through this stuff and being uncomfortable and sort of finding out a little bit more about yourself and it really makes me want to get to our interview with Ada [music fades in, plays alone for eight seconds, fades back out].
KL [Ad spot] I’ve been in the market for a really good carry-on suitcase for awhile. As an adult human woman who travels a decent amount, kind of late to the game, to be honest. So I’m real excited about the new Away suitcase I just got and particularly pumped because I get to actually carry it onto a plane very soon.
SWB Ugh! I’m so jealous of this. Me and Katel are actually travelling together and she gets to have this new Away suitcase with her and I will be there just with my normal ol’ bag.
KL Ah! So when I opened the box, I gotta tell ya, I could tell I was going to love it. It has this TSA-approved combination lock and a built-in charger for my phone. Oh! And even a removable and washable built-in laundry bag.
SWB Wait! A laundry bag?! I have heard of phone chargers being built into suitcases but I’ve never heard of a laundry bag. That’s rad!
KL Yeah. I cannot wait to try it out. I’ll definitely be testing it’s over-packer proof compression system. If you want to try for yourself and you do, Away is sharing a special promo with our listeners. Visit awaytravel.com/nyg to get $20 off any suitcase. With a 100 day trial and free shipping on any order within the lower 48 states, you can’t go wrong. Go to awaytravel.com/nyg and get $20 off your next favorite suitcase [music fades in, plays alone for four seconds, fades out].
SWB Today’s guest is someone I had the pleasure of meeting a few months ago at a conference. Her name is Ada Powers and she’s a writer and researcher based in San Diego, working at a software company called Tealium. She’s also trans, poly, and really good at talking about what both of those things mean to her. So we’re going to talk to her about all of those things and a lot more. Ada, welcome to No, You Go.
[9:20]
Ada Powers Hi! Thanks. Thanks for having me.
SWB So first up: can you tell us a little bit about what your work looks like? So you’re a writer and a researcher at a software company, what does that look like day to day?
AP My official title when I got hired—and to this day is, information developer. I work on the information architecture team which handles both our documentation portal, our knowledge base, and our community our community forums, our community manager is on our team. A lot of my work is technical writing, is technical editing, and then from there seemed kind of a natural drift to look more at product writing and UX writing, realizing that I love writing, I love tech, I love software, I love combining those things. So I’ve been going in that direction, and very fortunately my company is the kind of company where lateral moves are encouraged, where people—and this kind of plays into a larger part of why I like working where I work: it was really great to get there and realize they had a culture of trying as hard as they can to let people come to work as themselves, and that means both bringing in the skills that you have, not just the ones you’re getting hired for. I have a background in human-centred design and design thinking, and a little bit in qualitative research and so with one of my co-workers who works on the UX team, we looked around at the company and said, “Well, there could be a little more qualitative research here. There could be a little bit more of a usability testing culture.” So we kind of started that party, building processes between each other and changing my day to day responsibilities accordingly because this was an important thing and the company seems to value and it’s a thing that I can provide and it’s also been nice because it’s also the first full-time job that I started since I started transitioning. I was pretty open in my interview at really it was important to be really up-front with my employers or with people that I’m working with about who I am. So I told them, you know, “I’m transgender. I need to start under these pronouns. I need to start under these names. I need to know that you’ll have my back if some discrimination comes my way and I know that I’m not going to be the one being pressured to leave. That people recognize that I do belong here and that if people have problems, they’re the ones with the problem,” and I’ve been decently assured of that by legal and by my managers, and minus a couple bumps in the beginning, it’s been pretty smooth.
SWB Was it hard for you to say that while you were interviewing and to sort of like set that expectation on the table when you’re in, I don’t know, interviewing can be kind of a vulnerable spot where it’s like, “I want them to like me.”
AP It is a hard thing. To go into an interview and have to decide between financial stability and authenticity. That’s a choice that a lot of people unfortunately have to make on an ongoing basis and I know more people than I’d like to know who are close to me who have to make that choice in favor of stability and they do not get that authenticity. So it is absolutely a fraught thing that any trans person and honestly any person of any sort of marginalized identity that can reasonably be not disclosed to your employer has to struggle with, whether it’s disability or religion or other proclivities one has which might not be viewed favorably by normative society. For me, I am very privileged. I don’t have money but I also am very comfortable being uncomfortable. I’ve had experiences, too many experiences actually, where I’ve chosen to just be employed because it seemed like the default, right thing to do, and then I would slowly waste away at a desk over a number of years until I finally reached a breaking point and I would quit and do something drastic like travel around and then come back and start that process over again. And so I knew that there was not necessarily a connection between full-time employment and happiness for me. There was some piece of, “Are you feeling professionally fulfilled? Are you feeling mentally fulfilled? Are you feeling challenged?” And then also, as I’m learning recently, there’s also a piece, “Are you showing up to work as yourself?” And so I knew that I did not want to work at a full-time company. I didn’t want to work a full-time job unless I had those things taken care of because I knew I could make it work with part-time work and side work and so I was able to come in and be a little bolder with saying, “Hey, this is who I am. You can take it or leave it. I don’t want to show up at a building everyday and not be able to be myself because that just erodes your soul.” It erodes my soul, at least. I can’t do it for very long. So it really is a matter of being able to make this experience worthwhile for everyone and it turned out to be the case. I find that almost strange because it’s so simple but it really is profound is being able to come to work as myself means that I get to come to work as myself. I get to think about, “What would make me happy in this context? What would make me happy and feel fulfilled doing this work?” Ok well maybe it means suggesting this initiative, maybe it means taking on this project, maybe it means changing my responsibilities a bit. It means I get to show up and be engaged with how I actually feel and how that looks. I think a lot of trans people pretransition have feelings and have desires and have body experiences that they are sort of trying hard without realizing it but trying hard not to pay attention to those things and so it just looks like ignoring your body. It looks like ignoring your needs, ignoring your desires, and kind of doing whatever society thinks you should be doing by default, certainly in terms of gender but my experience is that bleeds in other things as well. So my professional experience has largely been, throughout my life, showing up to work and kind of just figuring out what the bare minimum is and doing that until I get laid off or some other thing happens and I have to leave. So this is not just the first time in my life I’ve been able to show up and feel like I’m able to bring my cutting-edge self to work, but also the first time that I’m feeling engaged and fulfilled enough to really start to make a difference in my professional life and really start to drive my career forward.
[15:00]
KL I love that you were really looking for, you know, this company or this new experience and that organization to have your back. I think that says so much about them and it illuminates what’s that going to be like working there. So I think that that’s so smart.
AP Yeah I agree. I have been very pleasantly surprised by how happy I’ve been here and how well I’ve been treated.
SWB I think it’s so fucking great that you were able to go into that experience with that attitude and with that expectation and also I love that you were able to say, you know, not everybody gets to do that, right? And to be able to acknowledge like look, if somebody’s out there listening who can’t show up as themselves at work and does not feel like they’ll be supported or as choosing financial stability over, you know, being able to express their identity fully. That’s ok. Like that’s real. But because you were able to do that and have that work for you—the results sound like they’re both good for you but also like what you’re describing is results that are good for the work that you’re able to do because you are more engaged in it and because you’re able to see things from perspectives that they were missing and feel comfortable speaking up about it.
AP Absolutely. Definitely speaks to the business case for inclusion which, you know, it’s easy to feel complicated about. I don’t want a company to be not shitty because you’re dangling dollar signs in front of them but it really, again, it sounds weird but only because it’s so simple and it’s that if you allow your employees to feel like they have agency and respect, then they’re willing to do work for you that is good. That’s [laughter] it’s so damn simple but it really is what it comes down to. If I had to hide large parts of who I am here, I would be in a repressed state, and if I’m in a repressed state, I don’t want to take chances, I don’t want to honestly do anything but the bare minimum. So it turns out that being good to people helps them be good to you as employees.
SWB So you mentioned earlier that when you laid it all out on the table in your interview process, that you were trans and you basically expected to be treated well and supported and they agreed to that. That sounds like they at least on paper at least they were like, “Yes, we’re on board for this.” What has your experience been like now that you’ve been there for awhile. Like is there anything that colleagues, bosses, et cetera have done that have sort of made you feel welcome or included. For example, I’m thinking about listeners out there who work on teams or run teams that may have trans people on them or trans people on them that who they don’t even know are trans yet. What kind of stuff should they be paying attention to?
AP When I talked to my boss, we had a phone interview before I did an on-site and we had a conversation where I told him what I was telling you—that I have these attributes, I have these intersections that I need respected, and he told me pretty honestly, “I want to respect you. I don’t know what that looks like and so if you can tell me what you need, I can make sure you get it as best I can.” And honestly it doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. If he thought that he could know what my experience was like, if he thought that he could give me what I needed without me asking, there’s a great chance he’d be wrong, just because anyone would wrong but that seems like a fair division of labor to me. I’m not expecting to him be a mindreader. I will tell him what I need if I need anything. And if he isn’t certain, he’ll ask me. And I think the most—the thing that’s contributed the most to me feeling good here is consistent pronoun usage is [sighs] honestly that comes down to it. It’s kind of funny to see the discourse around special snowflakes, and being treated specially and it’s so very opposite from how every single one of us feels. I don’t want to be treated special, I just want to be treated the way anyone would be treated just by being a person. This is my name. Can you use my name? These are my pronouns. I have to inform you of those because you would guess wrong. But that’s no different than other person where you would look at them and you might guess wrong and they’ll correct you and then you use the right pronouns. It’s that simple. It’s just easier to guess wrong for me. So, it’s very, very little that is needed to make a trans person feel welcome. Besides that: knowledge of ignorance and that willingness to collaborate. And then the rest is culture, right? If people are telling really nasty jokes, sexist or misogynist or transphobic jokes, then I’m not going to feel comfortable being there but that is, again, not really a thing that is unique to trans people. It’s a thing that is endemic to the experience of women and people of color and pretty much any marginalized identity who has to be in a workplace. If the people there say that they’re welcoming but they show that they’re not welcoming through their actions, through the ways that they participate and co-create culture, then they’re not walking the walk.
[19:55]
SWB You mentioned pronouns and I’m glad that you did because I would love to ask a little bit more about that and the reason being that ok, it’s 2018 and I think that if you’ve been listening to our show like we’ve touched on trans issues and pronouns more than once like most of the people listening to the show probably I’m guessing understand that like calling people by the pronouns that they want to be called by is generally good, and things like the singular they are ok but I think that there’s been some conversation I’ve heard recently and I’m curious your take on it. I have heard from trans folks who have really think it’s helpful when cis people share their profiles or like put it in their Twitter bio because it kind of normalizes the idea that we shouldn’t be assuming people’s gender which is something that you just touched on. But then I’ve also heard sort of the opposite that it could be problematic because it can be like performative allyship or because it can kind of like feel like it erases the struggle that trans folks have had to have their gender be taken seriously. And I don’t think all trans folks agree or need to agree. Probably that’s unrealistic in any community or any people whatsoever but I’m curious if you have any thoughts on how we talk about pronouns and how those of us who aren’t trans specifically talk about pronouns. Like what makes you feel good?
AP You’re definitely right that there are disagreements within the trans community. I think there might be less disagreement on this issue than one might think and I say this knowing full well that there could be someone out there listening, “I disagree.” That’s fine. Everyone has pronouns. I think that’s a thing that everyone can agree on. I have pronouns. They’re different than the ones I was assigned based on my physiology at birth. You have pronouns. Presumably people use certain words when they refer to you. Those are properties that we have. They may change the same way that you may change your name. Everyone has the chance of changing their name at some point in their life. That name is still a part of you. It is a thing about you which can shift but after it is done shifting it then remains static. So there are experiences people have where their pronouns shift over time. There are experiences people have where their pronouns might be variable, there might be multiple words which would suffice for someone’s gender pronouns. But those are still their pronouns. And so I don’t really think it’s controversial to suggest that people normalize the experience of giving pronouns, even people who aren’t trans. In my experience, that is an excellent way for cis people to use their privilege because I’ll tell you the other side of it, too, but here’s the thing: when I was first coming out and I had not had much experience with estrogen at the time, so I still presented fairly masculine, and even when I was presenting feminine still looked fairly masculine to most people. There were times when I would not give people my pronouns because I knew they would probably get it wrong. And it was more emotionally difficult for me to tell someone who I was and have them ignore it whether through malice or through simple ignorance than to simply bear being referred to in a way that hurt me but knowing that they didn’t know because I didn’t tell them. And sure there’s an angry part of me that is yelling, “Can’t you see?” But no, they can’t see. People can’t see that sort of thing, even when you really want them to. So I think the more experience we have asking people their pronouns and having experience respecting them can only be a net benefit. I think that there’s this culture around inclusion where we assume that it only really helps marginalized people but time and time again I think we see that when we see start respecting the people who are the edge cases, who are on the fringes of what’s normative, we wind up helping more than just those people by trying to be inclusive.
So when bathroom bill stuff starting hitting in the US, and people started freaking out about the idea that trans people might be using their restrooms, you started seeing masculine looking cis women and feminine looking cis men getting attacked and getting policed on their way into the bathroom and it— I think building competence and understanding that bodies can differ from gender identity and your assumptions might not be correct is something that helps absolutely everyone and it just happens to help trans people a whole lot more. So I personally think that cis people putting pronouns in their bios, building a habit of asking people what their pronouns are and of offering their own pronouns as if it was there—just part of their identity like their name. Which it is. “Hi, I’m Ada. My pronouns are she/her.” “Hi, I’m Sara. My pronouns are she/her.” That is super easy to do and it goes a really long way. I think the things that people object to is when it goes a bit too far and I think that’s where the performative aspect goes in where people say, “You have to give your pronouns. You have to—we’re going to go around and you’re going to have to give your pronouns. You’re going to have to put your pronouns down on this badge or whatever and we’re going to create an environment where we talk about pronouns.” Well, not all trans people are comfortable giving their pronouns anyway. Like I just mentioned a situation where for reasons that were very personal to me, I did not feel comfortable giving my pronoun in every situation.
[24:59]
AP [Continued] Some people are closeted for whatever reason and so they don’t feel comfortable—you know then they’re put in the position of having to give fake pronouns which feels weird or being outed as trans which can be dangerous. So I think a lot of the work is towards recognizing context and towards finding balance where you create space for people to give their pronouns and you normalize it by giving it yourself but you’re not actually forcing anyone else to participate in that system. You’re just communicating that it is acceptable, and that it’s possible, and then of course addressing bad actors who give the whole attack helicopter. “My gender is attack helicopter.” “My gender is racecar.” Those kinds of answers. Those are the people that you definitely want to talk to a little bit more but I don’t think that you need to go the point of enforcing and giving pronouns with everyone. Just normalizing it. Just normalizing it by doing it yourself.
SWB I love just having this conversation about how do we do a better job of retraining ourselves around like who and what is normal and sort of like what should be assumed and I think that that’s tough. I feel like that’s like a lifelong thing I’m working on. And so it’s like, you know, just trying to think through well what are all of those things that I think of as being perfectly normal? What are all of those things all of us, you know, were taught to think of as perfectly normal that if we stop and question them a little bit and scratch a little deeper, we realize we just have tons to unpack.
AP Oh absolutely and I think that it’s way more important to realize that you have tons to unpack than it is to get to the bottom of unpacking all of it. I think that is very literally impossible. It’s a lifelong thing. I personally believe that there is no one more dangerous than someone who is convinced that they are safe [pause] when they think that they have finished that process. “I got woke. It was a Tuesday. I remember it clearly [Sara laughs]. Check it off the calendar. I’m done now.” I’m terrified of that person. I am way more terrified of that person than I am the race car driver gender person because that person can make their way into spaces where some level of acknowledgement of different realities of human beings is required because they can fake it well enough. They can talk it well enough and then they can get in my proximity and then I can discover just how much well meaning ignorance they have, and then I have to make a judgement call about whether or not I want to expend resources on that interaction. It’s actually the people who are benignly center that—like I’m pretty good at avoiding Trump supporters. Great at it, actually. I don’t think I regularly interact with anyone who admits to me that they are a Trump supporter or talks about far right politics in that way. But I know plenty of people who take just a little bit more energy than they give to interactions with me. In fact, this morning I met with my doctor and that’s a whole fraught relationship but I was giving him some pointers on notes he was taking and talking to him about the societal requirements that we feel pressured to perform gender under for doctors so that we can get access to the medicine we need and how there’s an element of performativity there and how there’s a whole system at play that most people who aren’t trans don’t see that affects how we interact with the medical institution.
AP [Continued] And I could tell he was a little bit hurt and I felt like it was sort of my responsibility in that moment to hold space for that hurt and we didn’t really have the relationship or the time to unpack that but I left feeling a little icky because I felt like I don’t know my guard was down. It shouldn’t have been. But my guard was down, I have had a good relationship with the doctor up to this point, and he’s been pretty good about empowering me to make a lot of my own medical decisions which is honestly great for trans people and so, yeah, it’s those kinds of people that cost me the most energy in a given day are the people who are almost there and think they’re there and then I have to work not just with them not being there but them being so sure that they were there. I think you have to approach life with this knowledge that you are inevitably going to fuck up. And the question is not if but how and when and be very prepared to deal maturely and responsibly with that. So that when someone does have the courage or fortitude or desire to, you know, love for you to tell you how to do better, that you don’t cost them more than it took them to start that interaction in the first place.
[29:25]
SWB Yes, we had this conversation with a guest in last season, Saron Yitbarek, where we talked about getting that kind of feedback for the community that she was producing or ways, you know, she’d meant to make it an inclusive community and ways that she might have missed the, you know, missed the boat a little bit on this or that, and we kind of talked about how that kind of feedback is in a lot of ways a gift and it doesn’t feel like it in the moment that you’re getting it but it is because it’s somebody taking the time and like using their energy who is feeling marginalized or alienated by something you’re doing and actually telling you so that you have an opportunity to learn something and like their choice to give you that gift of education is really, really, really great and like if you’re not willing to open yourself up to it like you’re the one who’s losing out.
AP Absolutely! I hosted a friend of mine over this past weeked which was San Diego pride and he uses a wheelchair and he was telling me about the ways in which my house—the ways that my house was not ideally wheelchair accessible and not just, you know, what I could do to fix it but what I should tell people when I make Facebook events. Letting people know about the things that are structural and can’t be fixed and laid out how I could frame it in ways that folks who are regularly in those situations would understand. And I was honestly so thankful that he was willing to do that labor, that he was already at a disadvantage being in that space and not having the access to it that he wanted but he was also willing to give that feedback to me not knowing if I was in a place to receive it or receive it well or not. And I’m certainly not trying to pat myself on the back because I was only able to receive it well because there were a bunch of other times I’ve been butt hurt [laughter] and probably cost someone way more effort than they should’ve—so, again, it’s a process. I was able to do ok by that interaction but I’m sure some other interaction in the future I’m going to have to work a little bit harder to maintain my calm under and I guess the most I can hope for is that we just keep that chain going of, like anything, working at it, getting better. It’s a practice like anything else.
SWB Totally. And recognizing that like it’s ok to have a feeling of defensiveness but you have to decide like, “Oh I don’t have to express my defensiveness at this person. Like I can have a reaction that’s like, ‘Ugh! How dare they?! How dare they critique me! I’m trying to do the right thing here.’” Like you can have that in your head. You can have a little quiet moment with yourself where you feel that feeling and then you have to look at the situation and be like, “Ok. I need to approach this in a way that is fair to this other person and that is going to actually help me grow.” Like it’s ok to have like whatever shitty feelings we have because c’mon. We all have some shitty, petty feelings sometimes [laughs] it’s like figuring out, you know, what are you going to do with that and like whose responsibility are those feelings. Well it turns out their yours. Right? Like they’re not other people’s problem.
AP Right. I’m so glad to hear you say that. I can even go a little further: I think it’s important, it is not just ok to have those feelings, it is so important to recognize those feelings and to figure out a process that works for you for dealing with them. I have seen especially since the most recent election so much burnout from activist friends, mostly white and relatively privileged activist friends, who are working really hard to hold space for all the people who were hurt, for all the people who are angry, they’re past not all men. They’re past not all white people. They recognize that every person who fits certain intersections is passively benefitting or in some ways complicit in certain oppressions. And they realize that they don’t have to feel personally responsible for people’s anger and rage but they do want to hold a space for it. And I see so many people trying to actively decenter themselves all the time but that’s not a way for a person to live. Like you can’t live never, ever, ever thinking about your own needs and, yeah, some of your reactions might be problematic but you are no help to whatever causes we’re trying to accomplish if you collapse under the weight of your own guilt and pain and struggle.
SWB Ugh. I love that so much. It reminds me of the conversations we’ve also had on the how about things like therapy and like I mean not everybody has amazing therapy experiences and not everybody has the easiest access to therapy but one of the things that I know Katel’s talked about this a lot like you know having that space with a therapist you really trust is also a space to process all of those feelings and that are unresolved and to like recognize that that is valuable and important.
[34:05]
AP Absolutely. It doesn’t have to be in therapy but therapy’s a great place. I have gotten very lucky and again have been very privileged with therapists. My therapists have overall been pretty great and I should probably go back to one soon. There’s more stuff that’s coming up but they were absolutely critical in getting me to a place of stability and if I were actively in therapy now I would definitely be talking about some of the challenges I’m experiencing in that area of I don’t know I think that comes up in tech a lot too or just really any work that we for some reason call white collar where—and this is getting into the—a little bit into the balance that I try to walk here in the tech world where if I was all activist, all anger, all the time, I probably wouldn’t advance much in my career which is fine like who cares about me? But it also means that I would lose out on opportunities to affect change within a system to whichever extent that that is desirable which opinions certainly vary on. But it’s a thing that I’m interested in is trying to engage— using my privilege to engage with systems that other people don’t have access to and seeing if I can use that access to make them a little bit less shitty and so there is a pragmatic tightrope you have to walk of alright what are the right changes to make right now? When is the right environment to bring those up? How can I acquire more social capital and more education and knowledge about the problem space I’m working in and execute on some ideas I have in the future? If not exactly right now. It’s very hard when you’re invested in that process. To stay connected to people’s hurt and pain and suffering. And to say connected to people who are more radical than you because you’re surrounding yourself quite intentionally with people who are quite possibly less radical than you and I think that has an erosion effect as well. So I think it’s challenging for any of us when we’re trying to affect change in an environment that is more normative or oppressive or regressive than we would like it to be to play that game and to do well at it. To succeed in that environment possibly for our own goals but also certainly to do some positive things with the privileges that we get or the opportunities that we acquire but without losing a connection to the people that ultimately you want to try to help.
KL I agree. I think it’s, you know, that’s something for people to strive towards. I wanted to switch gears just like a little bit. I’m really curious about your writing about being polyamorous which you’ve said before is something that you figured out and started practicing around the same time you were figuring out gender. Can you tell our listeners a little about what that means to you?
AP Yeah, polyamory is important to me for a variety of reasons. I have been actively practicing as polyamorous for about three and a half years now. As you mentioned, around the same time I discovered I was transgender, a little bit before. Which is kind of funny. I had gone the vast majority of my life having certain preconceptions about myself: that I was monogamous, that I was cisgender, that I was a boy, and that I was straight. And those all changed at once. It was very interesting to experience. I had been living I think this speaks to both gender and polyamory. I had been doing serial monogamy for about fourteen years, from my teenage years until about the time I was twenty-eight. Getting in one relationship after another, kind of jumping ship as soon as it started to go down but not really unpacking my baggage just loading it onto another plane and taking off again and it wasn’t until I noticed that pattern over the course of several years because my thing was falling into codependent relationships and seeing them through or rather falling asleep in these codependent relationships and in the same way that working at a desk job eroded my soul sort of merging soul with another person and not really thinking about what you wanted also erodes your soul. So I would, you know, pop up and do something about it and eventually I saw that pattern and decided I needed to stay out of relationships for awhile, or at least exclusive relationships.
AP [Continued] So when I was twenty-eight, I started a period of about a year of singleness where I continued to date, go on Okcupid, Tinder, what have you but I was very clear that I was not interested in exclusive relationships. I was very invested in maintaining my independence and figuring out what worked for me and I think it was giving myself that space, of refusing to get into exclusive relationships that allowed me to get close enough to myself and be tolerant enough of my own company and to like my own company enough. And give myself space to speak to myself where I could start to ask some of those difficult questions and start to chip away that some repression without knowing it that eventually led to me discovering that I was trans. So think it was late 2014 when I both discovered that I was probably not a boy and also that me doing monogamy poorly my entire life was not the entire part of the story. It was actually very huge for me to flip that script, recognize that there were other ways of living and loving because my entire life I had been bad at monogamy which I interpreted as being bad at only loving one person. Some people seem to be able to get into a relationship and then their hearts and their minds and their bodies all align towards only wanting that person and that seems very strange to me. I can love a person very deeply, I can appreciate so many things about them and yet still be fascinated and curious and interested about other people and their experiences and their lives and their hearts and their bodies. And so getting a framework where I was able to flip that from being bad at only loving one person to being good at loving more than one person definitely was a game-changer for me. And I’ve been doing that for about three years now, and it’s been hugely, hugely transformative and great for me —not just because I am living more in line with how I feel like I’m wired, but because the kinds of communities that spring up around polyamory and people who practice polyamory, but especially those partnership networks, have been really, really crucial in giving me a stable, emotional experience through life, especially with all the other changes I’m going through. So being able to give and receive support in what feels like a very stable, healthy, loving ecology has been fantastic for me. And again I have the privilege where I can be out about that. A lot of people can’t because I’m also willing to take the risk of discrimination and possibly not being able to have access to certain opportunities in work because of that. So as long as I can be out and proud about it, I definitely want to be.
[40:45]
SWB Ugh. I love this story a lot because I was thinking as you were talking about this, I was thinking back to when we first met at this conference, we were sitting at this lunch table together and you were talking about being poly and with some other conference attendees and what I recall from that conversation was just that it was a really open and honest conversation that also felt very normal and I think that for some people they you know they might be like, “Oh my gosh how would you even end up talking about that at a conference?” But it felt like such a normal part of who you are and such a normal part of what you bring to wherever you go. And so I love that you kind of brought this back around to some of the same stuff we talked about earlier with regard to gender around like being able to bring your whole self to work, being able to tell people who are, show people who you are, and use that as part of your tools in the actual job that you do, and I think that all of that tying together is like so valuable.
AP I appreciate that a lot. Yeah I will take a little bit of credit for fortunately being ok in those kinds of situations and being fluent in social situations but a lot of it is very intentional. I definitely benefit from normalizing the ways that I’m different from others and other people certainly benefit from the effort I’m willing to expend at normalizing those things for others so I find ways to not force it but if I could say partner. I might say, “One of my partners,” instead and that provides a small little opportunity for someone to either follow up on that or they just heard it and it went in one ear and out the other or I just managed to casually disclose that I’m polyamorous but not in a way that turned the conversation towards that and then that’s one more data point a person has about polyamory. Or mention something very casual about my transition and that’s one more data point about how a trans person lives. So some of it is calculated and quite often it leads to these wonderful interactions where we can talk openly about it because I’ve successfully found my way into a group of open minded people.
SWB Well I appreciate you figuring out how to be able to do that and taking risks to be able to do that because I also know that is really important for the people who aren’t feeling safe enough to take those risks. And you know with that in mind, I do have one last question for you so ok, you sit at least a few intersections that I know about, right? So you’re a trans woman, you know, you’re queer, you’re poly—maybe more that we haven’t even discussed, and you think about this stuff a lot. So I’m really curious for folks who are listening who want to be more in tune with issues around inclusivity, trans issues maybe specifically, do you have any last advice that you would give to those folks about how they can do a better job being open to people that they haven’t met before or to new ways of thinking about things and making spaces more welcoming?
AP Honestly, make friends with the people that you want to understand better. Like, again, it sounds weird, but it’s only weird because it’s so simple. We are given an abundance of information about how to be certain things and how to live certain ways and we are given an extreme deficit of information about how certain other people live or other possible ways that we could be living, and I think the only way if you had to give one thing to change that it would simply be to start the process of opening channels to different information, to more information. If you’re listening to this podcast and you don’t know any trans people, great. You know at least one. You are very welcome to reach out to me and ask questions and I can introduce you to more.
KL Thank you so much for being here. I know that I would love for more people to read what you write and hear what you say, so where can people find you?
AP Yeah the handle that I’ve been using more places lately is “mspowahs.” You can put that into Twitter and you can put that into Medium and you can get a hold of me. Any channel that you’re comfortable with, feel free to reach out. I write about polyamory and queerness and transness on Medium and I talk about tech inclusivity and I just shitpost about being queer all the time on Twitter.
[45:00]
KL Awesome. Well, thank you so much. That’s amazing.
AP Thank you! [music fades in, plays alone for four seconds, fades out]
SWB So one of the things I really loved about Ada’s interview was that it got me thinking about our vocab swap segment that we do from time to time, and we haven’t done in a little while. And I was hoping we could dig into something Ada talked about, which was pronouns. I mean she talked about it a lot. So obviously pronouns are really important to a lot of people especially to people who aren’t always called by the pronouns that they want to be called by and it made me think about how we can all do a better job of kind of shifting our thinking and kind of breaking some of those immediate assumptions we make when we see somebody out in the world that we don’t know and we assume that they are one gender or another and instead try to like hold back on that and, you know, get used to thinking about gender a little differently. So I was thinking about that in terms of vocab swap and something I saw recently on Twitter was a thread and I have no recollection of who it was from where the— the person was talking about how, you know, if you see somebody in public and you know let’s say you are in line and there’s somebody in front of you in line and you see somebody cut, you could say something along the lines of, “Oh. I think this person was first.” Instead of saying, “Oh I think she was first.” Because if you don’t know how somebody prefers to be referred to you don’t have to actually make an assumption, right? You can just say they or that person and it’s totally normal and once you get used to doing that then it can really extend to I think all of your interactions and like you can— you can do a much better job of asking people about what they want to be called and just making sure that you’re not misgendering people by making assumptions up front.
JL I got a lot of practice of this actually in my mom’s group, you know, with other people’s babies and, you know, instead of being like, “Oh, your son’s so cute,” or “Your daughter’s so cute.” I really just go in and be like, “Your baby’s so adorable.” And you know I’ve had people be like, talk about my son, and being like, “Look at your cute, adorable daughter!” And I’m like, “Mm.” Which is fine. Like it doesn’t offend me but it’s just one of those things that I’m now more cognizant of it and so I try not to make those same assumptions on other people.
KL I think yeah I think that makes so much sense. I mean you know thinking back to what Sara was just saying about looking for opportunities or just making it a little bit more of your practice in day to day life and not necessarily waiting for specific instances where you feel like you need to pay attention to it. I mean I think it’s just something that if we thought about a little bit more on an ongoing basis it would help make it not feel like a—a thing.
SWB Have either of you ever called somebody you know by the wrong gender?
KL Oh yeah absolutely. I feel like recently I did that and where I think you know before we really started I think generally talking about, you know, the three of us and I think I’m doing it more in my relationships with other friend groups, which I’m really appreciative of. I would have really like felt bad about it or like made a big deal and I don’t know maybe put my foot in mouth even more. And it recently happened where I was introducing someone and I said “she” and I said, “Oh, excuse me, they.” And I just tried to like make it a thing like oh I fucked up but I’m, you know, I obviously knew the right thing but I didn’t say it and I—without stopping the conversation, I was trying to do that and I think like there are instances where you want to you know maybe take that person and like say, “Oh my bad, I’m sorry.” But I don’t know just in an effort to kind of like make it a little bit more normal.
SWB And like not to make it all about, you know, me and my feelings. “Oh my gosh. I screwed up. I can’t believe that. I’m bad [exactly]. I’m awful. I’m terrified.” Which I think is really easy to do but then it ends up making it all about you [totally]. I mean, I remember I did this to a friend who I met when they were presenting as one gender and who came out and publicly transitioned later and, you know, I felt really bad about it because it was like something—I hadn’t seen them since then and it was something that was very stuck in my memory and I was like, you know, this is something I have to unlearn and like that’s on me. I think about as being part of the work that we all have to do to change habits and to take that on as like—it is a practice. Like you said, Katel, it’s like you have to practice it and I don’t think any of us can like fix that overnight necessarily, but I mean you’re trained to talk about people’s genders since people are babies like Jenn just said! Right? Like it’s so deep and so building that into a habit I think is so worthwhile and it’s something that I certainly haven’t like finished doing but it’s something I’m working on.
[49:50]
KL Yeah. Definitely. And we need to talk about it more like we’re doing and I think like that is the only way we get there.
SWB Totally [music fades in, plays alone for three seconds, fades out].
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Emma Grant Hey, this is Emma, and I’m on the lookout for a senior user experience leader to join our UX team. Our ideal person knows how to take the lead on defining goals and strategy, but also isn’t afraid of getting into the weeds and sketching with their team. Sound like you? Then you should definitely get in touch—even if your background isn’t purely in design or UX. Diverse experience is a huge plus here—in fact, working with people that bring a wide range of perspectives is one of the reasons I love working at Shopify. So if you thrive on change, operate on trust, and love asking questions, come join me!
SWB Emma sounds awesome. I want to work with her! If you do, too, head to Shopify.com/careers to check out the UX lead job posting and so much more [music fades in, plays alone for three seconds, fades out]!
KL So we are at one of my favorite parts of the show which is the Fuck Yeah of the Week and I have one to share. So when I got back from Vancouver I had a friend of mine—like one of my besties from when I lived D.C., she came to stay with me for the weekend and it was so awesome. We hadn’t seen each other in like six months—which is a really long time for us and it was just a) it was amazing to see her and spend some time with her, but b) I took her to get her very first tattoo, which was so cool. So it was great that she came and even greater that like the minute she stepped off the plane, we like picked up like we had not skipped a beat. And that was so awesome. Do you both have folks in your life like that?
JL Totally! Julia who made me paraglide [laughter].
KL Oh gosh!
JL Yeah but I mean I’ve known her since I was five and like we’ve gone in and out of each other’s lives but like it’s one of those things where there’s not any hesitation to picking back up, whether we find ourselves in the same place or having to text each other about something, or ask for advice, or jump on a phone call. There’s no hesitation of being like, “Ok. Let’s spend twenty minutes with the obligatory I’m sorries, my apologies,” you know talking about before like how do we just keep the flow going and I think that’s what we do. We just embrace the fact that this is what this friendship is.
SWB Could she still get you to go paragliding? [Laughter]
JL Oh gosh. She totally could! Which is like ridiculous [Katel laughs] because like I—she probably could now and I’m sick and like nauseous and pregnant and she could probably show up and be like, “But I’m here from Boston. Let’s go jump off a cliff.” [Laughter]
KL “Ok we’re going tomorrow.”
SWB Ok we’re going to recommend that you don’t paraglide while pregnant though probably. I’m not a doctor but I think that you shouldn’t do that.
JL The No, You Go show is not advocating for this.
KL Yeah [laughs] please don’t.
SWB I totally have a friend like this. I recently saw her. You know I was back in Oregon which is where I grew up and I met her back in college when we worked together. We were in the same training class at credit union customer service. Very exciting. And so her name is Katie. Shout out to Katie. Katie and I don’t know. The second we’re in the same room I just feel like I’m at home and I’m like, “I know this person and she knows me,” and I feel like I can just open right up to her. And the way that we catch up, I mean, we definitely want to catch up on the new things going on in each other’s lives, but it doesn’t feel like you’re just like running through a history of like a list of the things you did over the last period of time. It feels so much more natural. And there’s something about it that is just so wonderful. And I feel like I’m lucky enough that I have had a handful of friends of like that over the years from different moments of my life, you know, I have one who I’m still close to from when I was a kid and, you know, I have another from the time that I was in Arizona or whatever like I have a few of those and it’s so freaking great to be able to kind of sustain that and to have intimacy even though our lives look totally different now. Like me and Katie, we live on opposite sides of the country. She has a six-year-old, I definitely don’t have kids. You know like I’m like extremely driven like push, push, push all the time, doing ten thousand things. She’s very good at relaxing, it’s one of the things that she always tries to teach me and I still suck at. You know it’s like on paper our lives are so different from one another but you get us in the same place and we just gel and I fucking love that so much.
JL And I think that’s so important to know, you know? There’s like there’s people that like your lives can take different turns but you’ll still like just really get along great and then sometimes your lives will take turns from other people and, you know, you don’t have that much in common and that’s ok too. But I think it’s really important to just be like here are friendships I want to sustain and here’s friendships that were definitely important to me but maybe not as much anymore.
KL Yeah, totally. For the relationships that you have with folks that, you know, are the kind of you see each other and you pick right back up like what do you think has been a part of making that happen? Like what’s—sort of like what’s the glue there?
[55:00]
SWB Gosh. Ok. So I think—this is the foundation of it that is the hardest to explain but I think is the most crucial for me has been it’s almost like I guess a radical acceptance of the other person’s life. Like you have to come at it where you just sort of like you can look at them and you can be like, “I see them and I want them to have the life that they have,” and instead of sort of like getting to a place where you’re almost seeing as like highlighting all the ways it’s different, you’re, you know know what I mean? [Mm hmm] You’re sort of coming at it like you’re embracing that life that they’ve built for themselves and you can see them in it and they—and you can feel like the same is happening for you. And I don’t think you can make that happen with everybody, I think that it’s something that you can certainly foster by trying to bring that to your relationships and then finding the people that it sort of clicks with.
KL Yeah.
JL Yes.
KL I totally agree and I think that, you know, if you do have someone in your life like that and maybe you’re kind of like heading in that direction, just knowing that like, it takes both people doing that, you know? It’s not just necessarily like oh ok I want to try to make this work but I think if you—if you see that there’s something there like that, you know, go towards it, I think. If you want to—if you want to nurture it.
JL Yeah I think that’s so important too like something that like you touched on, Sara, was just like you can control you, right? Like you can’t control other people. So I think the more accepting you are of like everyone coming to things with their own stuff, and you know embracing that, I think the better luck you have of not trying to like force something. And just being like, “No, like this either like works or if it doesn’t but I know what I can control and that’s me.”
KL Yeah.
SWB Yeah. You know I also think that the people where I have that feeling with are people where we both can see that the other person has evolved. It’s like [hmm] I can see—Katie, for example. I can see Katie as she was when I first met her but like when I meet her now I’m like, you know, I can still see that but I also can see all of the ways that she has totally changed. Of course—I mean like, one hopes, right? And I think sometimes if you don’t see somebody that often it’s easy to want to like put them back in the same role that you had them in five years ago, ten years ago, whatever, and like not allow them to be the person that they actually are now. And I think that when you can make sense of that and can be like, “Ok. I fell in love with this person as a friend. Like and I love that version of them but I also love this version of them and I recognize that they’ve grown in ways that I wasn’t present for,” I think that that’s sort of an important thing to keep in mind and sort of recognize. I don’t know I guess I thought that like this conversation would be about like, “Oh just make sure you text them more! And don’t just text, set aside time for calls.” But actually I don’t think that’s what it is. You know I’ve had [yeah] moments in my life when I talk to these people a lot more and a lot less and that wasn’t the frequency or the type of contact was not what really did it, it was I think sort of like the mental and emotional space.
JL You know we’ve talked about this with our friendship too, you know, it’s not necessarily like just because someone doesn’t text you every five minutes or just because you don’t—like plans don’t work out that first time. It’s not about that. Right? It’s the, “I’m just going to check in when we’re going to check in. We’re going to see each other when we do. And when we do, it’s going to be awesome.”
KL Yeah. And I feel like there needs to be, you know, some kind of, I think, I’ll just call it cosmic energy that, you know, brings you two together but it’s also trusting that that is like that that is going to work. That being open and being a true friend and being your true self and seeing that in each other. That, you know, that’s a big part of it.
SWB Can we just say like fuck yeah to the besties of yesterday, the besties of today, the besties of tomorrow? All of the besties that we have all around us?
KL Fuck yeah, besties!
JL Fuck yeah!
JL Well that’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious — and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Ada Powers for being our guest today.
KL And hey, do you like our show? Take a quick minute to rate and review us. It helps other folks find us and we’d really appreciate it. We’ll be back next week [music fades in, plays alone for 28 seconds, fades out to end].
Welcome to Season 3, friends! We’re so hyped to get back into the game with Jolie Kerr, a podcaster, writer, and New York Times bestselling author who’s here to help us all be a little less gross.
Jolie is best known as the expert at “Ask A Clean Person,” where she dishes up advice on cleaning basically anything—and we mean anything. She’s also the dirtiest clean person we’ve ever met—like, who else is going to get tell you about the best way to wash your sex toys and clean cum stains off the couch?
We ask Jolie about becoming a cleaning expert, turning her part-time column into a media empire, and navigating the politics and gendered expectations around who cleans what. Plus, she gives us great advice on how we can all be just a little bit less gross.
> In my experience, men have found it very empowering to read my columns — to know that they’re geared towards them. They are written for a male audience and they’re not condescending. They’re funny. They’re oftentimes raunchy. I always say, you know, “Clean person. Dirty mind.” > > Jolie Kerr, “Ask A Clean Person” creator and NYT bestselling author
Links on links on links:
- The Ask a Clean Person empire: the AACP Lifehacker column, Jolie’s New York Times archive, the AACP podcast on acast, and of course the original column on The Hairpin (RIP)
- My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag… and Other Things You Can’t Ask Martha, Jolie’s bestselling book
- How to wash a chest binder and avoid shirt stains after top surgery
- Hand-wash your bras already (hahahahaha jk jk we’re using a mesh bag)
- Hygge versus KonMari
Also in this episode: Jenn shares some big news, Katel spends all her Swiss Francs on frites, and Sara shops for a therapist—with the help of Katel’s therapist (who we all met last season).
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more.
Transcript
[Ad spot] SWB This season of NYG is brought to you by our friends at Harvest, makers of awesome web software you can use to track your time, plan projects, and get paid. I love it, I use it, and I am so excited to have their support this season. So do me a favor: check them out for free at getharvest.com and if you’re ready to upgrade your account use code NOYOUGO to save 50 percent off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, offer code: NOYOUGO [intro music for 12 seconds].
Jenn Lukas Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. And we are back for season three. We’re so excited to be joined together by Jolie Kerr who is perhaps best known as the voice behind Ask a Clean Person which is a podcast and column and so much more. She is an expert at cleaning basically anything and like we mean anything and she is also incredibly funny. We ask her about becoming a cleaning expert; the politics of domestic bliss; and, of course, how we can all be a little bit less gross. But first welcome back, friends.
JL Yayyyy!
KL Wooo! How was your off season, you two?
SWB I don’t feel like I took anytime off [Katel laughs] but like other than that part. You know, my summer break, as we say, has been pretty good. I didn’t like go to the beach and get a tan but I did have a little bit of down time and that was really helpful and gave me a little bit of recharge but then I got super duper busy again and so right now I’m in the middle of just a lot of travel and workshops and client stuff and so I feel like I’m a little bit stretched thin but I’m also feeling kind of like [pause] energized about it. So, you know, it could be worse.
KL Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I feel like my summer was looking kind of slow and low key for a while and it got kind of packed up too but I did get the chance to take a little trip with my mom to visit my grandmother who lives in the south of France. Which, I know, poor me. But we [chuckles] — we went down there and then we also made a little side trip to Switzerland which I had never been to before. Holy crap! Switzerland is fucking gorgeous and it’s also fucking expensive. So I didn’t do as much shopping as I [laughing] would’ve liked to but I got to see a lot of beautiful sights.
JL That’s amazing. Did you eat chocolate?
KL Yeah. I ate chocolate and I— Sara, you’ll appreciate this. I mean you both will. I ate a lot of french fries.
JL I would definitely appreciate that [Katel laughs].
SWB I always appreciate french fries but one thing that our listeners might not know is that like french fries are Katel’s favorite food. Or like, I dunno, it’s like you require a french fry course every meal.
[2:48]
KL Yeah. Yeah. I—
SWB Not every meal. But — [laughs] if available [laughs].
KL It’s totally true. You said that the other day when we — we all got together which was so nice after having had a little bit of time away and we got back together and had a happy hour and you said that, and I told Jon, my partner, and he was like, “That describes you to a T.” [Laughter]
SWB I mean I think we can all learn a little something from that mentality, right? [Katel laughs]
KL Yeah.
SWB Like don’t we all need a french fry course sometimes?
KL Yeah. Jen, what about you?
JL Well it’s been a little bit of like a [sighs] — it’s been a little of a rough summer. I gotta say. We’ve had baby sick, I have a sinus infection, my husband was in the hospital for a little bit. And if you’re a subscriber of our newsletter then you’ll know a little bit about all of this but on the good note about all of this: I’m pregnant again!
KL Woo!
SWB Woo hoo!
Multiple Voices Yeah!
KL Yay!
JL Yeah.
SWB How — how you feeling?
JL [Sighs] It changes day by day. Some days I feel a little bit like I want to throw up still, some days I forget that I’m pregnant, whether that’s because I’m like working or chasing around a toddler and then I’m like, “Oh shit. I’m pregnant.” And we’re like, you know, more than halfway there so the other day like lying in bed with Sutter I was just like, “Hey, we should like probably figure out what we’re doing about this second [laughing] child.” [Laughter] Yeah. We gotta probably like do some stuff.
[4:19]
KL Yeah.
SWB Jen, what are the things you’re feeling like [pause] prepared or unprepared about?
JL Heh. Well. So it’s like a little confusing, right? So we’re having another boy. So we’re going to have two boys. So we’ve got like clothes, right? Because we have all of Cooper’s clothes that we saved and stuff but then I’m like— and we have a crib because my sister had given me her old crib but I’m like, “Ok, yeah, we’re set, right?” And then it’s like, “Oh shit. We don’t have another mattress.” Like so this baby’s going to be born and it’s just going to be like, “Oh where are you sleeping?” So it’s almost like there’s this like comfort in like doing it again because you have this experience already but like it’s almost like, “Oh no. It’s like there’s still stuff we need and there’s still stuff we have to figure out.” Like do we need double strollers? Where are they going to sleep? How are we going to manage like everyone does that whole advice like sleep when baby sleeps, right? But how can you sleep when baby sleeps when you also have a toddler? So [sighs] I don’t know. Some of it is like [sighs] we’ll figure out when it comes. So I’m like not that worried which is a weird feeling for me [laughs] to not be that worried.
SWB I kind of want to stop and celebrate that though.
KL I know! And I feel like that — that makes a lot of sense, like you have been around the block, so to speak, you know, you — I mean at least like this time it’s not a complete — I don’t know like you’ve — you’ve done it, so it’s like you know a little bit about what to expect which I’m sure can feel reassuring.
SWB Yeah like we know your kid and like —
KL He’s awesome.
SWB He’s doing great. Look! He’s walking around, he’s saying stuff, he’s awesome.
JL He’s certainly eating [laughter]. You can tell by the mess all over my floor which we’ll probably talk more about today but yeah it’s like I don’t know it’s weird, again, there’s this like point where like before having a kid, you know, I had like all the time to like think about all these scenarios and now I just don’t because you’re already like — we’re already struggling for the time — like finding time without kids, right? And then every time you add something it’s like one more bit of time so now I’m just like — it’s sort of nice to be like, “Eh. I could worry about or I could not.” So.
KL Yeah.
[6:19]
JL I’m just sort of doing a lot of not trying to worry about it and being like, “We’ll figure it out.”
KL I mean I think that sounds completely solid.
JL Well, let’s hope so! [Laughter]
SWB And like you will figure it out, right?
KL Yeah. Yeah.
SWB Like I mean obviously. You’re super competent. Look at you and look at like all of the other shit you’ve already figured out. You got this.
JL Yeah, we’ll have a two-year-old so we’ll like have a babysitter, right? [Laughter]
KL Yeah, exactly.
SWB Right.
KL I always joke with my sister. I’m like, “When do they start — when do you start like asking them to do stuff for you?” [Laughter]
JL Uh, Cooper has actually learned how to take stuff out of the washer and put it in the dryer.
KL Ah!
JL But then he’ll want to put it right back. So. [Laughter] And then he’ll like get bored halfway through and walk away and you’re like, “Ok, well. You’re part of the way there.”
KL I mean, hey, that’s a start. That’s great.
JL Yeah.
SWB So, speaking of pulling things in and out of the washer, we talked to somebody for the show today all about cleaning and it was just so fucking great. I’m feeling like we should get to the interview with Jolie Kerr.
KL Let’s do it.
[7:26]
[Music fades in, plays for five seconds, fades out]
KL Hey, everyone, it’s time for a career chat brought to you by Shopify. Each week they’ll be bringing you info on a cool new job or a tip for advancing your career or landing the perfect gig. Let’s hear the first one.
Holly Hey, this is Holly and I work on UX recruitment at Shopify. One thing we look for in applications is when your personality shines through in your portfolio. Avoiding things like unsolicited redesigns and focusing more on projects that highlight your interests and your individuality can really set your application apart from the pack. Showing us your involvement in the design community is a huge bonus and can emphasize your impact even if you don’t have a ton of professional experience under your belt.
KL Oooh. I love this advice. If you’re interested in working with people like Holly, you’re in luck because Shopify is hiring. Visit shopify.com/careers for all the info.
[Music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out]
JL Jolie Kerr is a writer, cleaning advice columnist, and the host of the podcast Ask a Clean Person. Her book, My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag and Other Thing You Can’t Ask Martha, was a New York Times bestseller. Welcome to the show, Jolie.
Jolie Kerr Hi! Thank you for having me!
JL Thanks for being here! We had some technical difficulties and I got to do your intro twice which was awesome because I still had just as much fun the second time doing it. So, Ask a Clean Person started as an advice column on The Hairpin in 2011. How’d you get into the advice columnist role?
JK Totally fell into it backwards. Like it was the most unplanned thing in the world. The Hairpin had started and the editor of The Hairpin was like, “I really want you to write for the site.” And I was like, “Yeah. I do, too. I’ll think of some ideas and let you know.” And another friend of mine was like, “You should write about cleaning.” And I was like, “Tyler, that is the worst idea you’ve ever had. Who would want to read about cleaning? That is so boring.” And he was like, “No, no, no, no. I really think it’s a great idea and I think you should do it,” and so I mentioned it to the editor of The Hairpin and she loved the idea and I was like, “I still do not see this at all but like, ok, if more than one person is saying I should do this, I’ll figure a way to do it.” And when I figured out— at least for me what made sense in my mind was to do it as a Q & A style column and advice column. To have people come to me with their actual problems. Messes that they needed cleaning up, problems that they had their life, whatever it was, and I could offer them some solutions to their problems. Otherwise I was like, “I’m not — I don’t want to write like, ‘Today you should make your bed. Tomorrow you should do your laundry.’” Like that didn’t seem compelling [laughs] but giving — giving people which like I guess I do sort of write that now but like [laughs] I don’t know I guess — I guess I figured like in my — in my real life, in my friend group, I’ve always been kind of the fixer friend. Like the one who people come to when there’s a problem that needs to be solved that maybe they don’t want to go like ask their parents about. So, I was like, “Ok, if I put that attitude into whatever this cleaning thing is going to be that — that makes sense in my mind as something that would be compelling for people to read,” and so we came up with Ask a Clean Person and I thought that it was going to like last for a month. Like I — I sent out an email [laughing] I really — I did not have any faith in this concept at all. Um [laughs] and to get the column going, I sent an email out to probably about 20 friends and I was just like, “Hey, I’m starting this thing for The Hairpin, do you have any questions about cleaning?” And I thought I would get back like three or four like pity emails of someone being like, “How do you fold a hoodie?” Oh no [laughter] I got — I got back like a deluge of questions just from this like small group of friends that I sent this email to.
[11:06]
JK [Continued] And they were wild like some of them were like things like, “I have this like silver trophy that’s like a fam— been in the family and it’s all tarnished and I don’t know what to do about it. I know the answer is silver polish but like how?” All the way to one of the very first questions I got from a friend was about male sexual fluids. And I was like, “Oh. Ok. Maybe there is something here.” So I launched the column and, again, I was like, “Well, maybe this’ll like run for a month or two and then it’ll kind of peter out.” Within two weeks of running the column I didn’t need to pull on questions from my friends anymore because I had so many reader questions that had come in the first two weeks and I was like, “Oh. Ok. This is great. I really like this.”
SWB Why do you think it struck such a nerve at the time? Like why was that an immediate hit for people?
JK Gosh. I don’t — I still don’t think I know the [laughing] answer to that question. I mean I was the one who didn’t think it was a great idea. I mean I think the thing is that cleaning is so incredibly universal, literally everybody had to do it. It touches every part of our life from, you know, just like the mundane like you gotta wash the dishes to our hobbies. When you — when you’re really passionate about something keeping the things that are involved in your hobby, whether it’s playing an instrument or playing a sport. Keeping that stuff clean becomes very important to you. So there’s such a spectrum of how cleaning touches all of our lives and it’s just a universal thing.
[12:32]
JL Yeah I mean it’s like — it’s such a bigger topic than people think it is, right?
JK Absolutely. It’s wild to me. When I tell people what I do — like I always describe myself as being like a doctor at parties like everyone— everyone wants to show me their proverbial mole, right? [Laughter] They want to like — they want to like either tell me about a horrible mess they’ve made, ask me a question about how to like get a stain out of something, or they want to tell me some secret that they know about cleaning.
JL Hmm.
JK It’s — it’s an amazing thing and I and the thing is like I socialize and I think I love my job and I don’t mind hearing people’s stories and learning their weird tricks and stuff and I certainly don’t mind helping people when they have questions for me but every time I leave a social gathering I’m like, “I must be the boringest person in the world. I just talked about cleaning exclusively for three hours.” [Laughs boisterously] But I think the thing is also, especially with the column and the — the tone of the column and — and sort of where it was placed in the world and placed in time was that there was just nothing like it. Like you could get cleaning advice, you know, at Good Housekeeping or you could get cleaning advice at Real Simple or you could buy, you know, Martha Stewart’s like Homekeeping Handbook that weighs 20 pounds but you couldn’t get cleaning advice that felt real and relevant to your life. And I think that the Q & A format of the column was really what created that atmosphere for people is that you’re reading the letters that people are really writing to me. You’re getting a glimpse into their life. You’re not only getting advice on how to remove Sharpie from toilet seat, you’re finding out how the Sharpie came to be on the toilet seat in the first place, and that’s very amusing for people.
SWB Yeah, you know, I was thinking a lot about this in advance of talking with you because it seemed to me like the column fit really neatly into the kind of the overall tone of The Hairpin at the time. Like there was Ask a Queer Chick or later on there was Ask a Swole Woman. So these are the sort of like I — I looked at them as like these kind of modern takes on a very traditional format of advice columnist and to me there was something about the way that your column and some of these others that it felt both like simultaneously really sincere like it wasn’t a joke but also sort of could be very funny and also kind of subversive [yeah] and I’m really curious like how much of that was intentional on you part? How much of that was like just kind of the nature of The Hairpin in 2011. Like how did that develop?
JK I think that it’s a little bit of both. I mean certainly it was the nature of The Hairpin in 2011. I think that — I always think of the OG Hairpin as being very akin to the OG Sassy Magazine. There was like a real editorial sensibility that we all had. I think that we picked from one another and certainly that we all picked up from Edith and I think that the — you know, you — you talk about the — the kind of sincerity of it. That — that was I think one of the defining things about The Hairpin was that our ethos was very much and it was never stated outright. It was just sort of how the voices that Edith was drawn to all had this commonality that we all felt it was ok to like things and that was a little bit new for our corner of the internet which our corner of the internet grew very much up out of kind of the Gawker sensibility, you know the guys who started The Awl who then spun off into The Hairpin. They came out of Gawker. And so there was kind of that like — in our corner of the world — that kind of like snarky, it’s not cool to like thing tone whereas at The Hairpin we were like, “It is ok to like things. It’s ok to be nice. And actually that is — that’s nice for the readers and it’s nice for us and it makes our lives better.” I think that was really genuine and I think that came through. I do think there was also a lot that was really subversive about what we did in that I think we were very voicey and we were true to who we were with our voices. And so that became subversive. It was subversive to have a Seven Sisters educated woman writing about cum stains and that’s who I am. I mean that — and that was real and was like from the jump that was how we were and I think that’s why it resonated so much with people.
[16:44]
SWB I am very glad. There’s a — there are women writing about cum stains because like you know they’re real.
JK Yeah! They are real! They’re very real [laughs]. And actually well I’ll say one thing that surprised me so much over the years is that I have a pretty like big audience of older women, like 60 plus women who read my column and I’m also like wh — like why? And my theory on the reason that they’re reading it is that they’re looking back at themselves when they were the age of my target demographic and thinking, “Gosh. I really wish I had this in the 60s and 70s like yeah you know young guys weren’t calling home to ask about — ask mom about cum stains.” [Laughter] And I think there’s like a — I think there’s kind of a girl power thing for that generation of women to read and think like, “Look at how far we’ve come that this — this exists in the world. And I wish I had had this but I’m glad it exists now and that’s part of like what we’ve fought for with our brand of feminism and so on.” And so I see it as just like part of the evolution of the women’s movement that like, you know, there was — there was definitely an anti — anti-housework bent and that’s a good thing for feminism and I’m very like rah rah on that but I think that it’s come full circle to be like, “But we still have to clean the cum stains.” [Chuckles] You know?
JL Yeah, and by like age 60 or 70 I really hope I figure that one that.
JK Yeah [laughs].
JL [Laughing] So maybe there’s just like, “Yeah, please, tell me! I’ve been searching for this for decades.” So, Jolie how did you become a clean person? Have you always been a clean person?
[18:20]
JK Oh yeah. Born this way. 10,000 percent born this way. There was actually — there was recently like a Twitter thing that was going around that was like, “Tell your most on-brand story from early childhood.” And I actually told a story, I have literally never told a soul this story until I shared it on Twitter. When I was at summer camp sleepaway camp when I was about ten or 11 years old, we had laundry service so you’d put all your dirty camp uniforms and underwear all that stuff into your laundry bag and it would get sent out and then it would come back. And one week for some reason — and I remember doing it. I don’t remember why I did it. I folded all of my dirty clothes before I put them into my laundry bag and they were dirty and — but I folded them which is insane [laughter]. Uh, crazy people have done — I can’t tell you why I did it. I just did. And later that week when the laundry came back our bunk got scolded for sending clean clothes to the laundry. And I just kept my mouth shut because I knew that if I said like, “No, they were dirty,” that it would like I was lying because it was such a crazy thing to have done and no— no one would’ve believed me and so I just kept my mouth shut and didn’t say anything but the fact of the matter is: I wouldn’t have been lying. They weren’t clean clothes. They were dirty clothes they were just folded. [Laughter] I’m not normal! [Laughs] And I really have always been like this. So yeah you ask like how do I become a clean person? Really kind of just always this way and I think like it’s actually — it’s always surprising for people to learn that when I started the column I was not a cleaning expert at all. I didn’t consider myself one. I was just a person who knew a lot about cleaning. By the time I finished writing my book and moved the column away from The Hairpin over to what at the time was Gawker Media Group I was like, “Oh! Now I’m a cleaning expert. Like I just wrote a whole book about cleaning and now I really can call myself an expert.” So that was when I made the shift between thinking of myself as a clean person and feeling comfortable calling myself a cleaning expert. That would’ve been probably in 2013. It’s been five years now that I, you know, have billed myself as a cleaning expert.
JL So I think some of our listeners struggle with imposter syndrome, you know, where they doubt their credentials to be in the position they are. Did you struggle with that ever when giving advice?
JK No! [Laughs boisterously] Actually I didn’t! [Laughs] I know you’re supposed to say, “Yes.” But I didn’t.
JL No, I think that’s great.
JK I think the thing is is that I, especially in the early years when I was not an expert, I put a tremendous amount of research into answering the questions. What happened early on in the column was that within like a month or two I started getting questions that I just didn’t have any clue as to what the answer was but I was like, “But I’m going to find out!” And so I put a tremendous amount of research into finding the right answers for the questions that I was being asked and then I started building up this body of knowledge and I think that because that was the way that I approached the job where like I didn’t bill myself early on as an expert I was just like, “I’m just a clean person. I’m going to help at solving problems. And if that means that I’m going to have to like three hours of research to figure out how to get this one weird stain out, I’m going to do that three hours of research.” And because I did that and because I think early on in my career I had started off as a fact checker at Sports Illustrated, so I’d started off with a— a journalism research background, I felt very comfortable with the methods that I was using. So I felt confident in the information that I was providing to people and the answers that I was giving to people because I knew that it was based in my experience having been a researcher for, you know, big magazines in the late 90s and early 2000s.
[22:10]
JL How did this become your full-time thing?
JK So I — when I first started writing the column for The Hairpin, so I was at The Hairpin for about two and a half years. I was working full-time as a business development and marketing manager at law firms. I had like a big corporate job. I wore suits. I wore pantyhose. I made six figures. Like I was like — they called me Corporate Barbie. And I started doing the column on the side as a hobby. I was totally unpaid for it and so I would write in the mornings, in the evenings, and on weekends. It literally never occurred to me that this would be a career at all until a publishing company came and asked me if I was interested in writing a book. And at that point I was like, “Huh. Maybe this is like something.” And so I had to, you know, go through the whole process. I had a to get an agent, I had to write a proposal, you know all of that stuff that you have to do. And I got the book deal and at that point because I was accepting payment for the first time for that work I had an ethical obligation to tell my manager at the law firm because for — at law firms even if you’re not a lawyer there are conflict issues that come out if you’re doing side work. So I went to my manager and I was like, “I have been keeping a secret [laughs] I have like a whole other life that you don’t know about.” And she was like, “What are you talking about? This is so wild. This is so cool. I’m so excited for you.” At that point we agreed that I was going to move to a part-time status while I was — you know to basically make time to write the book and all of that, and then after— after the book came out, I basically was in a position where I was like, “Yeah, I can write full-time.” I did at one point, maybe about six months after the book came out, I did go back to a different law firm as a consultant and within like two days I was like, “Nope, this is not what I want to be doing at all.” It was supposed to be like a year long consulting gig and I think I stuck it out for like four or six months and then I was like, “Bye, guys! I’m out of here. I’m going back to writing.”
SWB So you left that gig and you started throwing yourself full-time into writing and then now into the podcast which I know is a pretty big part of Ask a Clean Person today [yes]. So there was some topics that we saw had come up relatively recently on the show that were specific to trans audiences and I was really curious about that. And so I think it’s something I think is awesome like not only talking obviously about things like cum stains, but getting [Jolie laughs] into all kinds of topics that people don’t traditionally think of asking an advice columnist. So you were talking about washing a chest binder [mm hmm] and then also talking about how to keep your shirts clean after top surgery if you have to put like ointment or whatever on stuff. And so I was really interested like how do you think about the sort of inclusivity of what you’re writing about in sort of the topics that you cover and making sure I guess that you’re — you’re answering lots of questions from groups that maybe other people aren’t speaking to.
[25:04]
JK Yeah. I mean one of the things about the podcast: so I’m partnered with a podcast network that handles all of my — all of the technical stuff and all of the business side stuff but the show is independent in terms of I have full editorial control over it. And I don’t answer to anybody but me. And so that freedom allows me to do, you know, what I would refer to as a niche episode certainly. That episode that you’re talking about, I think it was Episode 126 that had— how did you — with questions from people — trans people on cleaning issues that they’re facing and that are specific to their community and really are not going to be relevant to the majority of people listening to my show but I think that it’s important for me to take them on because they are — they are real and legitimate questions and if one person has that question it means at least, you know, 20 other people do too. I think also — my listeners know I’m quite liberal and so representing communities that are oftentimes marginalized is really important for me. There’s another kind of element to it which is that historically I have had — the format of the show has changed. It’s bounced between a guest format and a permanent co-host, and when I do have a co-host it is always my preference that that co-host be a man and preferably a straight man because I don’t really want the show to turn into what I — what I refer to as “two bitches gabbing about cleaning” because I think that that reinforces like a hideous gender norm about cleaning that I do everything in my power to like rail against and so one — one way in which I coach the show in terms of the topics that I cover is when to think about, you know, certainly mar— you know, marginalized audiences who aren’t represented as well which I think the think trans episode is a good example of but also to do a lot of episodes that are geared towards like, you know, the straight, white man. Like, you know, one of my most popular episodes is my hockey gear episode is all about how to wash hockey gear and that’s not a male problem. Women play hockey too, obviously, but you know, generally speaking, like that’s like — that’s one my “dude episodes”. So I just always want to have a balance, really, in thinking about who the shows are for and making sure that it’s as diverse as possible in terms of the topics that I’m taking on but also the audience who they’re geared towards.
SWB Yeah, I really — I love that and I mean there’s a lot in there that I would love to talk about more. So one of the things that you brought up was kind of the gendered aspect of cleaning or people’s perception of cleaning like cleaning is tied to domesticity and it’s definitely historically pretty feminized.
JK Mm hmm [laughs].
[27:44]
SWB We don’t typically expect men to give a shit about whether things are clean or to like take the lead on cleaning. I mean plenty of men do.
JK Yeah. But that’s the thing: they do. They really do. I mean I could say it until I’m blue in the face: men clean, they care about cleaning. The biggest problem is that they are not socialized to clean [pause] from a young age the way that women are. My attitude about writing about cleaning for men and podcasting about cleaning for men is just to say like, “I’m not going to wag a finger at you. I’m not going to shame you for not knowing something. I’m just going to teach you how to do something [pause] and now you know.” And I think that in my experience men have found it very empowering to read my columns, to know that they’re — they’re geared towards them [pause]. They are written for a male audience and they’re not condescending. They’re funny. They’re oftentimes raunchy. I mean obviously I’m a very raunchy person. I always say, you know, “Clean person. Dirty mind.” And I — and I think that it’s just like very relatable and I get I mean just beautiful, touching feedback from the most unlikely sources. You know, you just — you just wouldn’t imagine that like a bunch of guys reading like a sports gossip blog would be like obsessed with a cleaning advice column but they are. They’re like, “It’s just — we’re so happy when you show up with your advice and like the weird questions that people are asking. I really learn something and I can’t believe I’m reading a column about cleaning but here I am,” you know, like and it’s just really nice for me.
SWB Yeah. One of the things that I notice about it too is that it kind of gives it that like cleaning is for everybody. Like everybody is gross and messy, everybody needs to clean things, and you know I’m wondering if you’ve thought about how your work plays into changing people’s perceptions about cleaning and changing people’s perceptions about sort of divvying of that labor in households or the way that assumptions are made about who should be cleaning what. I mean do you hope to get people thinking about that kind of stuff even though obviously for the most part you’re like — also you just want to teach them how to clean a blood stain out of something.
JK Oh yeah. For sure. For sure. And I think that’s part of the socializing. I, like I made a really, really deliberate decision when I left The Hairpin. I was like, “I want to be writing for a male and a female audience. That’s really important to me.” Because at the especially there were like a lot of like think pieces going around about the — the division— the unfair division of labor and, you know, how women, you know, really carry so much more of the — of the load when it comes to household chores. And I was like, “Look: all of that is true and good but you’re really not going to get any progress by just writing these like scoldy thought pieces, wagging your finger at men, telling them all of the stuff they don’t do. That’s not going to motivate them to do it. They way to motivate them to do it is one: to say — one to acknowledge that they haven’t been socialized and they haven’t been taught. They don’t know how! They don’t know how! You know?!” Like let’s start at the fundamentals. You can’t expect someone to do something if they don’t how to do it [laughs]. So I was like, “Let’s just go teach them how to do it then they’re going to be thinking about it and it’s not going to change overnight but this is part of the — the teaching and socializing process that will bring us up to a little bit more equality when it comes to household chores.” So you know you teach a guy how to get his pits stains out the next thing that happens out of that is that he starts noticing other laundry issues or he has a sense of pride in the fact that like, “Oh god! I got the pit stains out of my shirt. I’m so happy. What else can I do? Like I didn’t expect to feel happy after doing laundry but I do. Where else can I get that high from?”
[31:24]
SWB Yeah I was thinking a lot about the whole thing about like it’s both not knowing how to do it but like you said it’s like noticing, right? Like noticing the things that need to be done or like recognizing that they are things.
JK Yeah. I mean that’s the socializing, right? You know women are socialized to, you know, put the dishes away. Men aren’t as necessarily as socialized. They’re not even socialized to see it. It’s like, you know, I hear people talking — women, mostly women. I know some women actually do this themselves, too but like this a refrain I hear from women all the time that like men leave the kitchen cabinets open, just like walk away [laughter] like with the cabinet, like don’t close the cabinet [laughter] and they’re like, “I’m going to have to go and close the damn cabinet.” Like you don’t even see it. I’m like, “No, that’s the thing. He doesn’t see it. Because someone has always closed the cabinet behind him.” Like [laughs] so you know yes of course it’s frustrating, you get mad but like he doesn’t even know he’s doing it! He doesn’t see it! He’s not seeing it the way we see it.
JL This is why my husband had open shelving [laughter].
SWB Yeah it’s so funny like I grew up in a household that was just kind of messy and not terribly gross or anything but it’s kind of messy and so I am the one who didn’t used to see the cabinet open and or like, you know, you like make something and you leave things out on the counter and my husband is a — he’s a [chuckles] clean person so he actually very much notices and I think I’ve really like turned corner on that one like I put things away in the kitchen typically, you know, and I’m much more organized about it. But I go to like my brother’s house and I’m like, “Why is this knife with mayo on it just sitting on the counter? Who are you?”
JK Uh!! [Laughter] Mayo freaks me out to begin with.
SWB “You’re a grown man!” Ok. So we have asked a bunch of questions that are like around how you started doing what you do and sort of like that whole kind of social or political framework it’s — it’s sitting in but we also definitely want to ask you a few questions that are a little bit more about the cleaning itself. If we could move to some of those.
JK Yes, you sure can.
[33:28]
JL So, my husband and I we actually — we have a pretty good division of labor here. Or I should say we did prior to we now have one son at home and we also have another one on the way and everyone always like— we’re all busy. Right? We definitely have that busy thing but like how do we find time for cleaning when life gets so unpredictable with schedules?
JK I think prob — well, and there’s no great answer to that. I’m sorry [chuckles] I can’t — I can’t create time for you [laughs] I’m magic in many ways but like [laughs] I can’t create time. I think one thing to think about is using small chunks of time for small tasks. So a lot of times people think about cleaning as kind of like, “Ok, I’m going to dive in and do an hour of cleaning and get the whole house cleaned all at once.” And frankly that’s not realistic for most people. It’s how some people work best and if they do that’s — that’s fine. But you can get actually quite a lot done in one minute, two minute, five minutes, ten minutes. Much much more than you think. So I think it’s like a little bit of just grabbing, you know, a few minutes here and there to take care of things. Just put things away, do a couple of dishes, you know, load the dishwasher, whatever it is. So focusing on small tasks that add up is probably the right strategy for someone who is in your particular situation which is short on time, busy, busy, busy, want to stay on top of things.
JL Right. I love that. I mean I try to do that sometimes with work too like set aside like, “Here’s two minutes to do an email.” Or like that so sort of same thing around the house except the problem is when I’m home the couch looks so good in those minutes.
JK Yeah. I know.
JL But then there’s times, right? Where I feel like myself and other people, they’ll use cleaning to procrastinate doing other things. Right? So maybe like is procrastination the secret to cleaning? [Laughs]
JK I do that. For sure. For sure. When I have writer’s block, I’m like, “Oh, I’ll just go clean something.” [Laughs] Or like if I’m just being — I shouldn’t say even when I have writer’s block because I don’t have writer’s block that often but like just when I’m being like a lazy writer, I’ll just be like, “Oh I’ll just like instead of writing this kicker [laughs] that like will take me five minutes if I just actually sit down and write the damn kicker.” I’ll be like, “I’m going to go clean something and I’ll call it work [laughs and others join]. It’s like really dangerous so like [laughs] I could always convince myself that it’s work when really like, “No, Jolie, you’re procrastinating. Like go write the kicker!”
JL That’s amazing.
JK “Yeah because writing is your work. Like cleaning is not actually — cleaning your apartment is actually not your job.” [Laughs and others laugh]
[36:02]
SWB I totally feel like I’ve never been cleaner than when I had a book contract [laughter]. But you know when you’re writing about the internet like I do then you have a whole other problem which is that you tell yourself that doing stuff on Twitter is work because [Jolie laughs] you’re writing about it and in fact you are not only wasting time on Twitter but like have you been on Twitter? It’s terrible! [Laughter] Anyway, back to the cleaning.
JL Yeah, I mean that’s like, you know, sometimes I’m like, “Mm. I don’t know. I gotta put away my son’s stuff. I’m really just being a good parent right now. It’s not that I’m not getting to these ten projects I wanted to do.” So no shortage of excuses I don’t think. Um, you know, the reason that I feel like in the last few years there’s been a lot of attention to cleaning philosophies like hygge or the art of tidying up. You know how do — how do we find the right balance?
JK I can’t answer that question because what balance looks like for one person is totally different from what balance looks like for another person. And I think that like all of these philosophies are great. They’re like diets. You know? They all work. You just have to find the one that works for you.
JL Right. It’s so confusing because some people are like, “Get rid of everything.” And then some people are like, “Surround yourself with comfortable, wonderful things.”
JK Right. And — and you know the thing is is that for a certain set of people get rid of all your things works and resonates with them. For another subset of people, you know, surround yourself with cozy plush things works for them. For other people, you know, Jolie Kerr foul mouthed dirty minded talking about cum stains works for them. You know, like [laughs]. So—
SWB Works for me!
JK There’s — I think, you know, I don’t ever see people who espoused cleaning philosophies that are different from mine as being competitors because to me it’s just all part of a landscape that creates a buffet for people to choose from and find solutions that are right for them. Like I really — I really am in the business of solving problems. And so [right] — if someone’s going to find the solution to their problem in, you know, the art of tidying up, by all means I want them to do that. If someone’s going to find the solutions to their problem by, you know, reading my columns or listening to my podcast and feeling like, “Ok. I’m going to —” A lot of people, actually this is kind of a funny little like aside about how people consume me is that a lot of people listen to my podcast while they’re doing their weekly cleaning. And I love that [laughter] I think that’s like the best thing in the world! Like because they’re listening — they’re not cleaning the thing I’m talking about. They’re not listening for active advice while they’re cleaning, they’re listening because it’s like a way that they can pass the time and they — people always say to me, they’re like, “It actually makes me excited about cleaning because you’re so excited about whatever it is you’re talking about that like it makes me excited while I’m scrubbing the tub.” That makes complete sense to me. I totally get it [laughs].
[38:54]
JL Oh my god. Yes! I have like binged on your podcast this week and now I’ve wanted to like clean everything.
JK Oh my god. I’m so — I’m so sorry. That’s a lot of Jolie Kerr in one week [laughs and others laughing]. But yeah I mean it — it’s so genuine so I feel comfortable saying this: I have so much enthusiasm for my job and I just love what I do so much that I can understand why it motivates people to clean. I get it. Like I get why it’s — why listening to me being like hysterical about hand washing a bra makes people want to go like hand wash their bras. And I love that because I want everyone to hand wash their bras! [Laughs]
JL I’ve got a setting on my washing machine to do that, don’t I?
JK You do. You do. [Laughs]
SWB I feel so judged right now.
JK Yeah. Don’t feel judged.
SWB I have a mesh baggy.
JK Mesh bagging it is fine.
SWB And I air dry. I’m doing ok, right?
JK You’re doing fine. So we do [chuckles] we just recorded an episode about — about bras and I said exactly that. But yes, indeed, the mesh bag and air dry is totally fine. I say this all the time: first of all, I’m not here to judge. At all. And also I live here in the real world with all of the rest of you. And, yeah, I would like you to hand wash your bras. It’s actually an incredibly painless process but I also completely and totally recognize that most people are not going to do that and that’s ok. So like there are other options, the mesh bag, the delicate cycles, air dry. That’s fine! That’s totally fine. Do not feel judged.
JL I love it and I feel like I’m like with you. Like listening to you makes me want to clean out of excitement whereas like when I was younger if I’d be like really unmotivated and hungover on a couch on a Saturday, I’d put like an episode of Hoarders because then it would make me get up and do something because I like feared myself into cleaning my house.
JK [Laughs boisterously] But you know what? If that works — if that works for people, that’s fine too. You know what I mean? Life if you need to be like scared straight by Hoarders to like put your underwear away. Like, by all means, whatever it takes.
[41:03]
JL So we’re just about out of time but before we go we’d love to hear more about where people can get more Jolie and like what everything’s looking like for you now.
JK Sure thing! The best place to get the most Jolie is to listen to my podcast. It’s called Ask a Clean Person. It is available basically everywhere that you get podcasts. You should definitely consider downloading the Acast app. Acast is my wonderful podcast network. I love, love, love them and their app is wonderful and I am primarily these days writing for The New York Times but I also have regular columns at Lifehacker and Jalopnik and probably a new one rolling out sometime soon. And you can find me on social, I’m very, very, very active on Twitter. I’m great on Twitter. You can find me @joliekerr. Same handle for Instagram and on Facebook it is facebook.com/askacleanperson.
JL Awesome! I can’t wait! And I’m excited to hear more about this new thing that’s potentially coming out so thank you so much for being on our show today!
JK Thank you so much for having me. This was really, really fine [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out].
JL So, at the end of each episode, we like to have a little bit of a Fuck Yeah for those of you who haven’t heard our previous seasons before. Where each week we just sort of celebrate something that makes us go, “Fuck yeah!” in life. So, Sara, you got something for us today?
SWB Uh. I definitely have a Fuck Yeah today because I’m feeling really good about some — some work I’ve been doing. So, last season we actually had Katel’s therapist on the show, Dr. Allison Chabot. And she was so encouraging about how you go about finding a therapist and sort of recommendations for how to kind of like try out therapists and get a sense of finding somebody you really click with and I was so encouraged by that because it was something I’d been meaning to do for awhile and it’s really daunting and I just felt like, “Where do I even start?” Well, I did it. So, what I did is I actually asked Katel if her therapist would have any recommendations for referrals, got a handful of referrals, called a couple of them. Just like she said, I took time out of my day to like have phone conversations with a couple different therapists. We spent like half an hour on the phone with each of them. And then I scheduled preliminary appointments with them because I liked them both and I just wanted to kind of feel it out in person. And I had both of those appointments this week. And it was a little bit funny to have like first time visits with two different therapists in the same week, where it’s like, “Am I going to talk about the stuff?” Or whatever. But it was really helpful for having like this kind of direct comparison and feeling like I had basically somebody else to compare against. And so my Fuck Yeah is that I did that work, first off, of like getting it together to make those phone calls and go through the process and figure out what your insurance will pay or whatever. Like that is no joke. And then fuck yeah I like both of them!
[43:56]
JL Yeah!
KL Oh my god. Fuck yeah! I love this so much! I feel so proud of you. Seriously like I think that’s so awesome. I feel like this was such a cool, positive story. Also, oh my gosh, what are you going to do? I mean I’m sure you’re still thinking about it but you have to like give one of them a rose, right? [Chuckles]
SWB Right. Yeah. So, here’s my plan. So I was going to call them both and ask if they can meet me at a special location and then I was going to make sure they’re both there and — yeah, no. I guess, I actually don’t know what I’m going to do.
JL Katel and I will hide in the bushes and wear an earpiece and tell you what to say to each one.
SWB Oh my gosh.
KL I like this idea so much.
SWB So, I have kind of a small lean in one direction with one of them and I can’t quite figure out if it’s because I happened to see her first [mm hmm] or if she was actually like clicking a little bit more. Like part of me thinks that I had a couple of like real eye opening moments in the session with her that maybe were just because I saw her before I saw the other person because they were both really good. I mean first up like I think the recommendations I got from Dr. Chabot were really good and I read about them and kind of like picked a couple who felt right to me based on their websites. All — all along the way I was kind of gut checking it, same with the phone calls. So anyway I don’t necessarily feel like [pause] this one versus the other is much better but obviously, you know, I gotta make a decision and so anything that helps make a decision at this point seems fine because like I think that they’d both be great. So, yeah, I’m going to kind of follow up on that. I’m giving myself a few more days to mull it over and then I’m just going to try to get my shit together and go to therapy regularly with a therapist I actually like.
KL That is so cool. I love that. Fuck yeah!
JL Fuck yeah!
KL That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious — and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Jolie Kerr for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us. It helps more listeners like you find us. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter! We will back next week with another great guest [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, fades out to end].
Welcome to Season 3 of No, You Go—a weekly show about ambition, friendship, feminism…and always finding something to say fuck yeah about.
Starting August 14, we’ll be back and better than ever, talking to some of our favorite activists, authors, entrepreneurs, and more about how they got where they are, what they learned in the process, and how they keep their heads up in tough times.
Here’s just a taste of what’s in store.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher: If we got Slim Jim as a sponsor, I would say yes. I’m sorry, I would take that money”
[Musical transition]
SWB Hey everyone, we are back from sipping cool drinks by the pool, and we are so hyped to tell you about Season 3 of No, You Go—a weekly show about ambition, friendship, feminism…and always finding something to say fuck yeah about.
JL We didn’t sign Slim Jim as a sponsor, but we did scheme up tons of ways to make NYG better than ever. Starting August 14, we’ll be talking to some of our favorite activists, authors, entrepreneurs, and more about how they got where they are, what they learned in the process, and how they keep their heads up in tough times. I’m Jenn Lukas, and hey, I’m pregnant again! I’m looking forward to talking about juggling my career, toddler, and upcoming new baby. I can’t wait to explore how major life changes affect—or don’t affect—our career ambitions…and to see if I ever get sick of ice cream. I’m really living the pregnant-lady stereotype over here!
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDu, and I look like I have my shit together most of the time. (Secret: I don’t, and it’s ok!) And you know what? That inspires me to keep talking about what it takes to live my best, healthiest life at work and at home. I hope our stories help—and I hope you’ll join us.
SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and I am so ready to keep having conversations that make me think and feel—about issues like gender, race, class, mental health, and more. And I’m excited to share those conversations with you, so we can all get better at talking about tough stuff—together. Plus, we’re gonna keep on interviewing the coolest women and nonbinary people we can find. From guests who make us feel like burning shit down…
Nicole Sanchez clip It’s a Benetton ad. You know? If you can make your website of your company feature a black employee, you’re good. Like that’s where we are now. That’s the bar.
JL To guests who make us pump our fists with joy…
Saron Yitbarek clip And she looked at me and she said, “I don’t believe in stepping stones.” And it just gave me chills. And I was like, “Ahhhh! I too do not believe in stepping stones.” It was amazing.
SWB And guests who get super real.
Jolie Kerr clip It was subversive to have a Seven Sisters-educated woman writing about cum stains. And that’s who I am.
KL Oh my god. I still can’t get over that one. And we’re only just getting started! New episodes of No, You Go start August 14th, and you won’t want to miss a single one. Because everyone deserves a group of badass women in their corner. Especially you. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts.
JL And if you like NYG, don’t miss I Love That, our biweekly newsletter! Head to noyougoshow.com/ILoveThat to sign up.
[Musical outro]
And that’s a wrap on Season 2! What better way to head into a summer break than with Nicole Sanchez, one of the smartest, sharpest, most trusted voices on building diverse and inclusive workplaces?
We talk with the founder of Vaya Consulting and lecturer at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business about what has and hasn’t changed in tech culture, how companies try to shortcut diversity efforts, and why well-intentioned white people often screw up.
> We’re taking on 500 years of colonial America when we talk about race. And nobody can be expected to do that in a training… We’ve hit this mainstream complacency with, “Great. You hit 4% black people in your company. Wonderful. Oh. You have 6% Latinx. Wow! You’re really doing well.” Like that’s kind of where the conversation is stuck. It’s a Benetton ad. > —Nicole Sanchez, founder of Vaya Consulting
We’re taking a few weeks off, but don’t worry: Nicole’s going to leave you fired up all summer. And look for new episodes of NYG in August!
Links on links on links:
- Nicole’s company, Vaya Consulting (and their new management training courses)
- “Diversity in tech and what we’ve already lost,” Nicole’s moving essay about her father and STEM
- Ijeoma Oluo’s stellar read, So You Want to Talk About Race
- Starbucks, anti-blackness, and why unconscious bias training isn’t enough
Also in this episode
We, like, talk about our word choice on the show and off—from “I think” to “I don’t know”—and debate the benefits and drawbacks of changing how we speak.
- Just Not Sorry, an app that “warns you when you write emails using words which undermine your message” (we’re skeptical)
- “From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We ‘Policing’ Young Women’s Voices?”
- Turns out, men use filler words more than women
Have a bitchin’ summer, everyone! Stay sweet and we’ll see you in August!
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.
Transcript
Jenn Lukas [Ad spot] Today’s episode is supported by Shopify. Shopify makes great software that helps anyone with a great idea build a successful business—and they’re growing. Join the more than 3,000 diverse, passionate problem-solvers around the world who already call Shopify their professional home. Visit shopify.com/careers for all the info, including office locations, open positions, and more about what makes them so great [music fades in, plays for ten seconds, fades out]. Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and welcome to our Season 2 Finale!
JL Woo!
SWB We can’t believe we’re already at 20 episodes, plus a bonus-ode, and five editions of our biweekly newsletter. P.S. Are you getting our newsletter yet? It’s called I Love That, and you will love it. Sign up at noyougoshow.com/ilovethat, because Edition 6 is going to come out this Friday, June 29th. To round off the season we will be digging deep into the world of diversity and inclusion with none other than Nicole Sanchez, founder of Vaya Consulting and one of the smartest, loudest, most trusted voices in workplace inclusion. But before we do, let’s talk about something that I think we’ve all noticed this season and that is the way we speak. Like… you know… word choice?
KL So my friend Allison Crimmins, who we had on the show in Season 1, wrote to me and said that she noticed that we say “I think” a lot. She noticed in one episode that we said it, like… a lot [chuckles]. Which made her think about how many times she writes it in emails and speaks it out loud when she’s not really even meaning to, along with other words or phrases like “I just,” “perhaps,” “maybe,” and starting sentences with “I’m sorry.” Ugh! I do that too. I do it all the time. And there was a period of time where I looked at my emails and would scrub them out. I would scrub them out of the beginning of emails and was like, “What am I doing?” So basically all of those things that we say, qualifying statements that make us sound like we’re basically apologizing for [chuckles], you know, existing or, you know, taking up space. I came across this article and this app called Just Not Sorry that you can install and it will alert you to when you use “I’m sorry,” “I think,” “I just,” “maybe,” and let you do that more easily when you send emails. So I thought that was really interesting.
JL Part of me when I hear things like this, or I hear other people critique people’s language, I sort of want to be like, “You know what? Like, who cares? Eff those people, because that’s not really what like the main meat of a conversation is,” and part of it really frustrates me. And then part of me thinks realistically in life there’s a lot of things that people do that really frustrate me and they’re going to judge me for it. So I have two options: either, like, eff it and don’t, or think about how that affects my life and career and consider whether or not I want to make a change.
[3:10]
SWB I think in this whole conversation it’s really useful to kind of parse out, when are these kinds of softening words being used in ways that are helpful and beneficial to conversation and that show that you are listening and sort of in a conversational moment with somebody, you’re not just like talking at them, and when are we using this kind of language to kind of hedge what we actually think, or to even obscure what we actually think, or to, you know, make it easier for people to walk all over us? And I guess something I think a lot about is how often is that sort of like your default state—“sorry for existing” and “sorry for saying anything”—versus when is an “I’m sorry” an appropriate kind of interjection in a conversation? And so I guess I think a lot of that gets flattened in this conversation, right? Because so much of the advice that you read out there, you can find like—if you Google this, you can find a hundred articles about this in about a minute that’ll just be like, “Just remove ‘justs’ from your emails, get rid of every single time you say ‘maybe’ or ‘I think’,” and the reality is that, what if the problem isn’t that women say those things too often? What if the problem is that men aren’t socialized to say those things enough? And I think that that is part of the problem, too.
JL Yeah I know we’ve talked about this in the past before is like hey, you know, really being careful about, you know, as an engineer who gives feedback to people, how we give that feedback. And me saying something like, “I think you could rework this by adding an attribute here,” is better than, “Add an attribute here.” It just like—especially because you’re communicating online and not face-to-face with someone that you’re not necessarily knowing the inflection that I have. So, “I think we should go get ice cream,” versus, “We should get ice cream!”
SWB Wait! Hold on. Hold on. We should get ice cream.
KL I mean that should be a statement always [laughs]. A lot of times when I start speaking with someone, especially if I’m trying to have a conversation that’s a little bit more difficult, I find myself softening things and I think, you know, in that case that’s really valuable and I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to lose touch of that. But I do—I think it is good to just keep an eye out on like instances where I could be a little bit more assertive or, like I said, concise and clear.
JL Yeah for me when I communicate, especially at work, I want people to know that I’m confident in the things that I’m recommending.
KL Right.
JL And I think a lot of this is making sure that you do sound more confident.
SWB My sense is that focusing on clarity and making sure that we are hitting specific points in the way we want to and feeling confident about the things we are saying, that’s really valuable, right? Like, we are sending this information out to the world and we want as many people as possible to hear it and have it resonate with them, and I think that when we are focused and when we can cut out sort of too much extraneous stuff, that’s really helpful. On the other hand, people use filler words. That’s a human thing to do. The kinds of—_kind of, sort of, um, uh, you know_. Everybody has different filler words that they rely on, but the reality is that people use filler words. And in fact they’re have been a lot of studies that men use them just as much as women, but women tend to be criticized for them. And a huge piece of this is just the way that we end up policing women’s language as being somehow not up to par with men’s language when the reality is, it tends to be a little bit different and it also just tends to be more, like, hyper-watched, right? Like you feel like people are paying so much more attention to it. I mean that’s one of the reasons I know women radio hosts get so much mail about their voice. I am just waiting for us to get some angry email about vocal fry because I feel like that’s a rite of passage [Katel laughs]. I’m not actually waiting for that email. Please don’t send it.
[7:17]
KL Yeah we’re really not trying to will that into the universe. But at the end of the day I do think that I would rather sound more human than just completely cold and assertive and confident. And I know that that might be the ideal in a lot of people’s minds, but, I don’t know… I’m going to strive for not apologizing when I know what I’m saying, but also making sure I make my point as clearly as possible.
JL I definitely find that I try to be more careful with this in written communication. And I try not to hyper-focus on editing myself when I’m speaking. I’ve done, as a public speaker, you know, I’ve watched recordings of myself, which is painful, but you do learn a lot. But that doesn’t mean I’ve watched every recording of myself. And it doesn’t mean that I do it at a regular basis. You know every once in awhile I go, “Oh. Maybe that’s something I want to think about,” but I definitely don’t harp on it, because again that balance of, like, where I feel more comfortable. Now I know I just said ‘like’ in that last sentence, but you know what? I’m ok.
SWB So I’m the person who listens to all the raw recordings and goes through—
KL [Laughs] God bless you.
SWB—everything that we produce and then provides notes to our producer about, you know, where I think the good bits are and what we can probably cut out. And I will say that one of the things that I’ve really noticed is that we talk like people actually talk. We talk like friends talk over drinks. That is part of the show. Like that is part of the point. And removing that is, I think, not the goal. At least not my goal. However, I think that there are also things that I find all of us end up over-relying on, and I think actually in terms of this conversation something that I wish we all said less of… it’s not “like”—I could give a fuck about “like”—it’s “I don’t know.” And I think that one’s really easy when we don’t want to assume that the other two of us agree with us and so we’ll make a point and then we’ll kind of say, “I don’t know,” as if we’re not certain that we actually believe the thing that we just said. That’s one that I want to be more cautious of. But some of this other stuff, I just look at it as like when people have conversations, they speak naturally. Natural language has filler words, filler words are fine, and we edit out and clean out some of the stuff that doesn’t go anywhere, but we’re not going to edit out every example of that, because that would make it feel stilted and weird, and it wouldn’t give it that sense of, like, you’re sitting around the table with us having snacks.
[9:50]
KL And I just want to say that, you know, I want to thank Allison for bringing this up because it is clearly so complex, and I’m sure that we will talk about this a little bit more. So, I don’t know, I’m glad that it came up [laughs]. God fucking damn it! I said “I don’t know.” [Music fades in, plays for three seconds, fades out].
Sponsors
KL Hey, everyone, taking a quick break to talk about some of our favorite people, our sponsors. And not just because they support the show but because we actually use their services like WordPress, the people behind almost one in three websites—including ours. If you need a website that’s reliable, looks good, and is super-easy to customize to your needs, then you need to check out WordPress. They’ve got it all: awesome designs, custom domain names, tons of integrations with other services you use, and maybe best of all, incredible customer support 24/7. We know because we’ve used it. And all this starts at just $4 a month. Four bucks! So start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off your brand-new website.
SWB [Ad spot] We’d also like to thank Harvest for their support once again. Harvest helps teams keep track of the time they spend working on different projects and clients, and it’s one of my favorite tools. Use their simple software to assign tasks, set deadlines, manage projections, and so much more. You can even use it to run business reports and find out how healthy your projects really are. Personally I love using Harvest for invoicing. In fact I just looked today, and I have sent 355 invoices using their system so far.
JL 355?!?
SWB That’s totally real.
JL That’s a lot of invoices.
SWB If you are a freelancer, consultant like me, or an agency, you should check out Harvest. Visit getharvest.com to try it for free and get 15 percent off your first paid month with the code noyougo. That’s getharvest.com, offer code noyougo [music fades in, plays alone for three seconds, fades out].
[11:45]
Interview: Nicole Sanchez
SWB Today’s guest is someone I have personally admired for a long time now, and that is Nicole Sanchez. She is the founder of Vaya Consulting, a firm that’s pioneering solutions to tech’s culture problems. Problems like lack of diversity, pay inequity, and biased hiring practices. She also earned an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and now teaches a workplace diversity course there. Nicole, I have about a hundred things I want to talk with you about [laughter] and thank you so much for being on the show today!
Nicole Sanchez Oh no, thank you. I am such a fan of your book. I love it so much. I have given to many people, Technically Wrong is just such a good read. So thank you for that.
SWB Uh, thank you! But we did not bring you on here to plug my book—
NS [Laughs] Ok.
SWB Because we gotta talk about what you are up to. There’s so much here. So first off: can you tell our listeners a little bit more about Vaya, like what your work looks like, and sort of what made you found this company?
NS Sure. So I’ve been working on workplace diversity and inclusion for 24 years, and my first job doing it in tech was actually in 1999. And what I started learning there and continued to learn is that people are very interesting in groups, and they do interesting things, but they don’t generally do new things. They keep doing the same things over and over, which means some of the same ways of success, but also some of the same mistakes. And where it gets really interesting to me and why I ultimately started my firm is that when we look at groups behave and we purposefully try to make them diverse—in a lot of ways, but specifically in terms of race and ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic background—really fascinating things happen. And it’s not… my work isn’t so much about rectifying the past, even though that is definitely some of what my inspiration and what my motivation. It is more about, we build better things in diverse teams that are working well. We as humans, we as people in the United States, we in tech, when we have a diverse group of people who are behaving inside an inclusive structure— meaning everybody has a voice, everybody has a shot, everybody has an equitable stake in what’s going on in the outcome—the kinds of things that are produced are unparalleled, when you compare them to some of the more traditional ways, especially the way tech has been built by more homogenous groups of people who share the same class background or the same education. People mostly have their heads wrapped around, “Ok diversity is good and we need more of it,” but they don’t know how to get it and they certainly often don’t know what to do with it once they have it. So we’ve really rolled up our sleeves and get into the tactical work of revamping a hiring system, for example, or doing executive coaching for the executive who just isn’t fluent in this conversation yet but really needs to be. And so in any of our dozen clients, there are different points in their trajectory, but always pointed towards building a culture of inclusion with a diverse group of people running and working inside it.
[14:47]
SWB And so I know that this issue is near and dear to you because of your own experience in the world, but you also wrote before that this was something that was important because of your father’s story. And you wrote this really moving article about it and I would love to talk a little bit about that and how that story has driven or affected, you know, the work that you do now.
NS Ah thanks. We just passed the third anniversary of my father’s passing. I wrote it for him, really, about six months after he passed and it’s called “Diversity and Tech and What We’ve Already Lost.” And my dad grew up the youngest of 11 kids in East LA, and then later in Montebello, for anybody who is from Southern California and for whom that matters, and he met my mother at Montebello High. And my dad was a fantastic student, specifically in math and science, and his dream was to go to UC Berkeley. And his parents couldn’t afford it, so he had to figure out first of all how to get in, which he did. And then how to get himself up to Berkeley, which is where I live now, and how to pay for school, and where to live, and—and everything. This was 1962. The fall of 1962. There was no affirmative action. Very little financial aid to be had. And so he was really scraping it together. And over the course of his first two years he really met head-on the ugly twins: poverty and racism! Poverty and racism are an evil pair, and he really just clearly fell victim to both of those things, and ended up having to drop out, go back down to Los Angeles, he and my mom—they ended up getting married, they lived together in [chuckling] relative happiness for over 50 years, they have four children, all of us girls, and he didn’t get to finish at UC Berkeley. He didn’t get to finish his degree, which was absolutely his dream. And when I go back and think about his story, and now that so much of the history is online and searchable, I look at who some of his classmates were in his math classes and in very early computer classes. Because UC Berkeley was one of the only—well, was one of the first universities to make computers accessible to students—and he was learning how to program them and playing on them. And his classmates were people who went on to be pioneers in tech. And my dad ended up spending 35 years working at a fast food restaurant, which he ultimately owned. My dad did get a degree later on at Cal State East Bay, which was great, but his health was failing at that point and he didn’t ever get to actually be the inventor, teacher, computer scientist, mathematician that we knew he always wanted to be. And it had nothing to do with his potential, had nothing to do with how hard he worked—because he worked harder than anybody I’ve ever known. It had everything to do with being born in a certain package compared to a different one. And that is how we lose talent in tech. It isn’t always as obvious as the racism my dad faced, but there are so many barriers to people like him today with accessing the field of technology and certainly being entrepreneurs or having ownership stakes in valuable companies, or inventing really cool things that are going to go to Mars. There are so many barriers being born the youngest of 11 in East LA and actually achieving that dream. And we, you know, we’ve done a decent job at removing some of those barriers, but they’re not all gone, and I worry daily about the talent that we’ve lost in our sector as a result.
[18:06]
SWB That story is so moving and, I mean, first off: it’s just such a moving tribute to your dad. And we’ll link to it in the show notes, of course, so everybody can read it. And the other thing that really struck me about it is that it was such a perfect encapsulation of the problems that we face when we start trying to talk about things like meritocracy or we talk about the way that the tech industry almost acts like there is no past. Like that everything is new, and so everything is a fresh start all the time, and I think it kind of creates this culture where we’re not thinking about the way that people are being shut out before they can have any chance to make anything at all.
NS Yeah. That’s right. And our system here in Silicon Valley and in tech overall, although I think it’s probably most present here in the Bay Area, is that somehow on the one hand, we want to talk about how fair and meritocratic everything is, and if you just work hard and grind, if you hustle and do all the things, then you will achieve success. And then on the other hand, the same system is creating the barriers to entry, creating the barriers to resource access, creating the barriers that continue to allow the “winners,” quote/unquote, the “winners” to keep “winning” and those of us who are trying to come in, you can’t get a foothold. The system is so really rigged against that, you know, you just think about somebody who has a great idea that could be the next billion-dollar company, or $10 billion company, and if you come in from a background where you don’t have any financial security of your own, you don’t have the network to talk to the people who can help you get the capital, you don’t know what the right events to be at are, you are—you stick out like a sore thumb for whatever reason, whatever the package you’re in causes you to stick out as not according to the pattern of the rest of Silicon Valley. It is very difficult literally, like logistically, as well as psychologically, to make those breakthroughs. And I don’t see many people who have access to the resources that maybe, you know, VCs do or CEOs of companies, I don’t see them going out of their way to very effectively remove those barriers to new talent. And it is intellectually dishonest when we say, “We want the best,” but we’re also going to simultaneously create barriers to some of the best getting inside the system.
SWB Yes! All of this talk about, “We want to get the best,” I’m like, “Y’all don’t even know what the best means!” [Nicole laughs] Like, “How would you even know what that is if all you’ve ever seen is this one very narrow slice? How do you even know you have the best? Like you actually don’t.”
NS [Chuckles] Well I had one client, just to give you an example of that, who had hired me to identify bias in their hiring system. They brought my consulting firm in and I was sitting in a candidate review process where they were going over their docket of candidates for jobs, technical and non-technical. And my job was to raise my hand and say, “Hey, I think bias has crept up into the system.” And the first candidate that I witnessed be evaluated by this group, the candidate wasn’t there, they had already gone through the whole system. The candidate docket, somebody puts it down on the table and says, “Well, this guy went to Harvard and worked at Facebook, so obviously we’re hiring him.” And so I hadn’t been sitting down but for 30 seconds [chuckling] and raised my hand and say, “If that’s what you think the best is, why did you spend tens of thousands of dollars to interview him? When you could’ve found that out from LinkedIn, if you looked—or his resume?” You say, “Yup. Harvard: check. Facebook: check. Great: you’re hired.” If that’s ultimately what you’re using to make your decision then don’t—don’t waste your time meeting the person. Just go look for people who worked at Facebook and went to Harvard. And we see this over and over again. This lazy shortcut for validation. People, for example, wanting to use GitHub commit graphs as an indication of how strong of an engineer you are. That doesn’t—that’s not how that works, because that’s a subset of the talent you want to be pulling from. So it is very lazy to say, “Ok, anybody who’s in open source, anybody who has the time to dabble in these public projects, great: you have a leg up.” You’ve now advantaged the already advantaged in that hiring process. And we just see this happen over and over, and it’s not as simple as somebody sitting there saying, “I don’t think women are smart enough to work at my company.” Like those are easy. Those are easy to spot and extract. It is much harder to get into the systems that have petrified around those beliefs.
[22:43]
SWB So this completely brings us to the next thing I wanted to talk about which is like, ok, you have been doing this work for more than a couple of decades. Two full decades in the tech industry! [Nicole laughing] And so I saw that you recently gave this talk, a keynote that was called “Diversity and Inclusion Hit the Mainstream, Now What?” And I think that that’s—that’s kind of my question. Well, so now what? Like we—we’re talking about this stuff. Companies are increasingly willing to hire people like you to help them fix it. But where have we started making progress? And where are we still stuck? And how do we move beyond lip service in this conversation?
NS I think we understand diversity on some level, even though we can’t all agree on it, what it really means when you get to the granular look at it. We know it means bringing lots of different kinds of people together and that something good’s supposed to happen, but along the way one of the stops we’ve taken in this conversation is enumerating transgressions, which is very important because people deserve to be heard when they’ve been wronged. And we have invested a lot in individual stories of individual people who have suffered inside a system. And, like I said, that’s really important, and it’s not to invalidate their experience, but we haven’t done a good job of indicting the system that allowed that to happen, because you cannot pick out every bad actor one by one, first of all. And second of all, the system is much more strained than any individual. I meet with clients all the time and I’m just going to—I’m just going to tell it [chuckles] kind of like it is, which is what I said in my talk. I meet a lot of well-meaning white people in particular. I meet a lot of white women specifically who say, “I can’t figure out why in my HR system I still can’t convince a black woman to come work here.” Right? And it’s just tons of good intentions that still don’t add up to progress, and so we’re stalled on this. We say, “I’m not—” You know, people say, “I’m not racist. Ok. I’m not racist. I’m not sexist. I’m not homophobic.” Great. Why are we still seeing the yield that we’re seeing? And the answer is that we’re not digging into understanding the systems. One of the systems that has yet to be indicted is, for example, the system of how equity is distributed in a company in Silicon Valley. That in my opinion and from my experience has a much greater potential for impact on the people we want to benefit from our diversity and inclusion initiatives the most, and to move the needle most significantly. If we can actually indict the system of how VCs in particular set up equity distribution, we’re going to make a much bigger impact than, “Let’s hear another story about another person who transgressed or had something bad happen to them.” Again, people deserve to tell their stories, but it is not the thing that’s going to get us to the next level as a sector. And so that’s where my talk was really about like, “Ok. We get it. It’s bad. It hurts. So then what? Let’s talk about equity distribution, let’s talk about executive compensation, let’s talk about your hiring practices, let’s talk about recruitment practices, let’s talk about promotion and evaluation inside the company,” the real nitty gritty that actually makes up the results that you’re seeking to impact. People think, “Well, yay, we’re talking about it, and therefore it must be better.” And that’s not true. It’s actually driven some conversations further underground. It’s stalled other efforts. And I think people would find it surprising to know that I don’t love the way that we report our data, our diversity data as a sector right now. I don’t. I think it actually paused some efforts and slowed them down in ways that where I would’ve wanted to have seen much more traction by now.
[26:44]
SWB Can you tell me more about what you mean by that? So, what don’t you love about the way that diversity is being reported? And for those who aren’t familiar with it, like can you just describe a little bit about how you see it being reported, and maybe what you’d like to see different?
NS Sure! So it’s still voluntary. Companies are not compelled by anything other than social pressure to release their diversity data. And what companies who do it generally do is they say, “Here’s how many men, here’s how many woman,” and there isn’t a lot of reporting off of the binary. “Here are the men in our company, here are the women in our women in our company; here’s technical versus non-technical,” and we know that inside a company that’s very [sighs] that’s very company specific. You know you may be inside one company where the support team is highly technical and another one where they’re not. So it’s very difficult to know what we’re actually measuring there. And then they say, you know, “Leadership/non-leadership,” and then they say, “Here’s race and ethnicity.” And that’s basically it. And so what companies have done is they’ve been able put their best foot forward because it’s simply a snapshot. It’s a snapshot that counts heads. How many people are here today on this day that we recorded? And it doesn’t tell you any story. So every company now knows that as long as you’re on a cadence where you feel good about your hiring, and let’s say you start cohorts in September, and you particularly start new hires in September, and you’ve made great efforts to diversify your new hires. If you report your data in September, your snapshot looks really good. But we’re not reporting six months later where we learn people of color start to fall out of the system and start to go, “You know what? Turns out this culture isn’t actually that welcoming for people like me.” And so within the first six to 12 months you may lose all those people you reported in September. But you got another, you know, amount of time to make up for it again, by the time you have to report again. So it is in some ways very easy to mislead people into thinking, “This is who’s always working at our company.”
[28:44]
NS [Continued] One example that a client gave me was saying that, “We report every June, and in July of last year we lost 30 women. Out of a company of 500, we lost 30 women within two months because of something that happened. But we know we have 10 months to hire 30 women back and show no blip at all in our reporting,” which actually tells a story of what’s going on inside the company. If that makes sense. And so that to me is where it set us back. It didn’t help people on the culture part, it got the diversity part but it didn’t get the inclusion part or the equity part or the belonging part.
SWB Yeah, that’s so telling, too. It’s managing to the metric, right. So now there’s a scorecard out there and you’re like me in a class I didn’t like in high school being like, “Ok. What’s the minimum I can do and still get an A because this is not going to touch my GPA?” Right? Like that’s—
NS That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. And also because we’re so opaque as an industry. You can lose 30 women and then deceptively hire 30 new women without them knowing potentially that this is a terrible place for women to work. And so you haven’t fixed anything but—but your public face looks great.
SWB So—and this brings me back to something that I know was tweeted from that talk, which was that the money shows us where people’s priorities really are. And so, what would it look like for a company to really invest in the kind of shift that you’re talking about?
NS So yeah the adage that I like using is, “Don’t tell me what your priorities are, show me your budget and I’ll tell you your priorities.” And priorities in Silicon Valley in particular and in tech overall—and I guess in business overall, I mean let’s just be honest—whose upside looks like what is going to tell you what is actually valued. So if you can say—and the reason I think that it’s—that it’s remained a secret is that people know that the disparity is actually shameful. There is no way that you can say, “Oh yes that single engineer who did so much for our work once we went public made $200,000 on our big exit. I, however, as CEO, who was really a pain in the ass to deal with, just walked away with a billion.” Like that’s the scale that we’re actually talking about. And then that doesn’t even bring it into account the custodial staff, the food service staff, the security staff, you know, working at your front door. Those people have been erased from the equation. And so until Silicon Valley is really ready to—until companies say, “All right, we’re going to tell you our percentages of distribution and we can actually report it publically and we want everybody to know because we stand by our method.” Until a company can do that, including their board and investors: “Here’s who owns what part of the company.” And it’s generally that about ten percent own 90 percent of the company and then vice versa. Right?
[31:35]
SWB Mm hmm.
NS And so once people start to get wise to that and demand that as a metric of reporting, I think we will start to see some stuff happening. I have yet to meet a company that has said, “We’re very transparent with this. I know what I own and I know what our CEO owns and I’m ok with it.” That just doesn’t happen, and until we hit that level of transparency with our resources, I think there’s a lot of shell games that can be played with diversity and inclusion. But follow the money, like Robert Reich always says, former labor secretary, “Follow the money. Follow the money. Follow the money, it’ll give you all your answers.” The same goes for tech. So I—I unfortunately get asked quite often, “Tell me a company that has got this figured out.” And the answer is there isn’t one. And I don’t mean that to be really depressing, because I think there are companies that actually are moving forward and trending well but no, there isn’t a company that has modelled this in the way that it needs to—that it needs to actually look in order for this to be successful in the next generation.
SWB Yeah, you know, so much of this reminds me of just like how easy it is anytime there’s change to be made, anytime there’s like big organizational shift to be made, to want to go to those shortcuts and to go like, “Ok. How do we get the benefits or whatever this thing is but without actually doing the painful part of having to [Nicole chuckles] operate differently? And commit to operating differently?” Like, you know, there’s no—there’s no shortcut to this and then the reality is that this is having a dramatic effect on, you know, the most marginalized groups.
NS That’s right, and I also think that some people have figured out that you can make money doing this. I mean I definitely am making a living working on diversity and inclusion and I stand by my methods and, you know, I’ve been at this for a very long time. We are seeing the market start to be flooded with people who offer advice, who offer consulting services, and we know, for example, there’s no race lens on what they do. Or they’re not pushing on—on the question of resources and equity. The rise of mediocre D&I advice [chuckles] that actually isn’t going to move the needle, but placates lots of people. And they go, “Well, see that wasn’t so scary, that wasn’t so hard.” Like, this work is hard, and we’re taking on 500 years of colonial America when we talk about race. And nobody can be expected to do that in a training. And you can’t—you literally, scientifically cannot undo unconscious bias with a training. And we’re still sort of messing around on the edges going, “Gosh. That was fascinating. Ok. Going back to my job, which is now operating same way it did yesterday.” If that’s how we’re going to do it and that’s what’s being sold, and that’s what people buy, I’m very nervous that we’re going to just hit this—this is the second part of the talk I gave—we’ve hit this mainstream complacency with, “Great. You hit four percent black people in your company. Wonderful. Oh. You have six percent Latinx. Wow! You’re really doing well.” Like that’s kind of where the conversation is stuck. It’s a Benetton ad. You know? A Benetton ad [Sara laughs] if you can—if you can make your website of your company feature a black employee, you’re good. Like that’s where we are now [chuckles]. That’s the bar. “Don’t—don’t look too hard at our board of directors [chuckles] because yeah. But we’ve got our Latina. We’ve got our black man. We’ve got our, you know, gender-ambiguous person. And we’ve got like your standard white guy representing our company.” And you know that’s not representative of their company, but they were smart enough to say, “Ok this is a marketing effort. Let’s show different people.” Great.
[35:19]
SWB So I’d love to ask about something that I think this really kind of connects to, which is that whole unconscious bias training thing you mentioned. So just recently we had, back I guess in May, Starbucks did its company-wide unconscious bias training day. And I was really interested in something you wrote about that, where you talked about the problems with unconscious bias training, as well as the problems with sort of like, positioning what happened at Starbucks—which if anybody doesn’t remember, is a Starbucks here in Philadelphia. Two young black men came in, sat down, didn’t order anything, they were waiting for somebody to show up who they were having a meeting with, and the police ended up being called on them. And so in the uproar over this, Starbucks decided it would do unconscious bias training for all employees. So one of the things you mentioned was also that this is not just like a quote/unquote “diversity” issue, this is about anti-blackness and anti-black behaviors, and that it was important to talk about that. So I’d love to kind of dig into that. Like, why it’s important specifically to name what’s going on, and what the limitations are of doing something like unconscious bias training, which I think a lot of people think of as generally good.
NS Ooh! So, I’ll start with the unconscious bias piece. Certainly when I’m teaching my class at Haas, I talk about unconscious bias. It is a fascinating and very real phenomenon that most people don’t know is going on, and it basically runs in the background of your mind. We’ve all been primed by images and messages over the course of our life about good, bad, pretty, ugly, you know, worthy, unworthy, safe, dangerous. And whether we like it or not, and we can’t control it, those things get triggered, especially under pressure. And we do and say stupid things and we treat people differently according to how these biases are running in our background. And so it has been really well documented around things like juries, right? Even if you factor—because anybody can do it to anybody. It’s—I as a Latina can do it to another Latina. It’s not—it’s not as conscious as, “I’m Latina and I know that stereotypes are not real, therefore I’m not going to treat another Latina that way.” That’s not how it actually works. But it runs so deep and far in the background of our minds that we can’t access it through introspection. You have to access it by putting it under pressure and then you see it come out. So it’s a fascinating concept. What I have seen happen in this conversation is that it allows people to forget about the nuances of different kinds of racism or sexism or any phobia. Pick your [chuckles] favorite phobia. It lets people off the hook and thinks that all things are treated equally. “Well I didn’t know that I had a bias against Asian people, therefore I’m—but now I’m working on it, therefore that must automatically extend to black people, too, because I’m learning how to not be racist.” And that’s just not how it works, because context is everything. And who is on the receiving end of your bias is really what’s critical here, because your bias will not be the same for a light-skinned Latina like myself as it might be for a dark-skinned black man like in the Starbucks in Philadelphia. And so what folks aren’t talking about is that anti-blackness as a subset of racism is its own thing. And racism is both enacted by individuals, we know, but racism on a much larger level is a system where people who are in the majority and in power control the system to the detriment of people who do not share that same racial—those same racial identifiers.
[39:04]
NS [Continued] In this case, what happened in that Starbucks was anti-black racism. There were presumably other people of color in the room and who had come in and out during the day and had, you know, not ordered anything, had used the bathroom, lots of different people of color. But it was two black men who were—who received the bias. And I don’t even think it’s unconscious bias. This was an overt bias of having the police called on them in a Starbucks. Talking about anti-blackness in America is not the same thing as talking about racism in America, and if I could get one thing across to people who are working on issues of identity and the isms and the phobias is that context is everything, and that once you’ve solved one type of -ism, you have not solved them all. And so this is a constant drumbeat for me, is like, when you say that there’s an event for women in tech—and I wrote a piece called “Which Women in Tech?”—if you just bill it as just “women in tech,” who you’re going to get is white, and maybe some Asian, women coming to that event. That is what “women” as the overall banner means. And so you don’t get into the nuance of, what are black women in tech facing specifically? And what a white woman who is much more enfranchised and towards the center of an equation, of a system, experiences in her sexism is very, very different than what a black woman living closer to the edges of a system experiences. You’ve got intersectionality. You’ve got anti-black racism, anti-blackness, that she has to navigate. And so women as an umbrella term for “Let’s decrease sexism in tech. So c’mon women, let’s all get together.” Women of color, for the most part, do not hear it as an inclusive term. And so when people say “racism” it’s much easier to say racism as the umbrella term than it is to say, “That was some anti-blackness. That was some violence enacted on black bodies by calling the police,” and that is a kind of—that is a way that racism and bias shows up. But implicit bias or unconscious bias as a solution to one of your baristas calling the cops—they’re not related to each other all that much. What would have been much more effective for Starbucks is to clarify the policies that the company has for when the police get called into a cafe. That would’ve been a much more direct response to what actually happened which is, “Everybody is allowed to sit here and not order anything. Everybody is allowed to use our bathroom. The police only get called if somebody believes they’re in imminent danger. If you call the police simply because you thought somebody looked suspicious, you will be penalized or fired.” Right? That’s a much stronger statement in direct response to what happened, but what Starbucks did is they’re like, “Let’s take on all of racism. Let’s take on all of unconscious bias.” And now you’re—you’re just on a different—it’s just a different conversation. And unconscious bias trainings themselves have actually shown to potentially be counterproductive because they enact—they start to trigger biases that people weren’t previously aware of and create very awkward situations in the future.
[42:20]
SWB You know just today I was having a conversation with somebody where we were talking about why it’s important to—to name things and it kind of hit me that, you know, as a white woman, something that I realized is that I think that the way that we—we meaning like white people like me [chuckles]—like the way that we tend to avoid the specificity of language around saying something like “anti-black” and want to call it something like “bias” or even, if we have to do, maybe we’ll use the ‘r’ word. Right? Like maybe we’ll call it racism, if we have to. But one of the reasons I think that happens is that it’s a way to protect white feelings, like it’s a way to make it more comfortable and more palatable for me, because it is—it is uncomfortable when you get into the specificity of saying “violence against black bodies,” right? Like that is—that is more painful and—
NS That’s radical [laughs] right. Right.
SWB And so—and so it’s like, oh. It’s—even if well intentioned, it’s like the effect is that it allows me to stay emotionally distant from the harm. And when I’m emotionally distant from the harm and I’m also not experiencing the harm because I’m a white person, I am much less of capable of doing anything about it or interested in doing anything about it. And that that is like—the way that that functions, it ends up being, even if it’s well intentioned, it—it ends up reinforcing all of the things about white supremacy that we say we want to change, because we’re unable to call it what it is.
NS Yeah! I mean it’s a very important thing for all of us to realize that we need to talk about hard stuff better. We need a better framework for doing that. And when companies ask me my advice and they say, “Where should we start?” One of my first bits of advice is, “Normalize a conversation around race.” I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone into a company and even when I say “black” and you can see people—like, I have one client, I’m done with them right now, but I had one client, and the CEO of this company, who was white, could not bring themself to say “black,” to describe somebody as black. Because it had been so ingrained in this person that recognizing race was somehow rude, and was somehow racist in and of itself, rather than just being a descriptor. But that’s about the value of the word that you’ve been taught, not about the value of the actual fact that I am brown. And if someone says, “Oh I didn’t even recognize that you were Latina!” I’m like, “That’s not true. Don’t say that.” [Sara laughs] Like, you know, like oh nobody—you just can’t be like, “Oh describe Serena Williams.” “Oh well she’s a tennis player, she’s a very strong woman, she’s tall, she’s very, very muscular, she’s very—” I’m like, “Yeah Serena Williams is black!” Like, you have to be able to say it because there’s no—there’s nothing wrong with that word. And so we have to work on there being nothing wrong with that. And what I’ve noticed a lot in working with white folks is that they need permission and coaching on how to start saying the precise words. They know them. You know them. You know that somebody is black. But you may say, “Gosh, am I supposed to say ‘African American’ or ‘black’?” And so that by the time it comes out of your mouth, it sounds unnatural because you’ve overthought and now you, whoever, the white person in the equation, has made race an issue by tipping their hand to the other person and going, “Oh ok. I see.” You don’t even know how to start this conversation. So I talk to companies about normalizing a conversation on race, because if you can do that, there’s nothing harder. 81 percent of millennials do not want to talk about race in mixed company because it just goes off the rails so fast. You need strong facilitation. You need a framework. You need good reading material like Ijeoma Oluo’s So You want to Talk About Race, which is mandatory reading if you care about this at this point. And in so doing, anything else that comes up to people who have—to a diverse group of people who have wrestled with a conversation on race—nothing is scarier than that in the United States. No conversation is scarier than talking about racial backgrounds and in mixed company.
[46:32]
NS [Continued] And for people of color the anxiety comes from like, “Ugh! Who’s going to—who am I going to have to decide I can’t trust anymore?” [Chuckling] Right? Like, “I don’t really want to know that you’re secretly struggling with these things, because I really like you and it’s just easy to go out to lunch with you,” and that’s the calculus that a person of color might be doing on the—on the light end. On the heavy end it’s like, “Am I safe here?” And a white person may be going to the calculus of, “I don’t want to inadvertently offend somebody. I don’t want to hurt any feelings. I don’t want to sound like a fool. I don’t want to make a mistake.” And that’s generally the calculus that’s going on in the room. So if you can actually help people get good vocabulary and use precise language, like I think—“I think this company is racist.” “Ok. You think this company is racist. Tell me how you saw that show up. Is it showing up across all—all groups? Are you seeing it specifically targeted at groups? Is it showing up on—you know, socially? Is it showing up in compensation? Tell me why you think this company is racist,” and helping people get to many levels below that so that we can actually unearth—like to keep talking about digging up, I just imagine digging stuff up and like tossing it out. Once you’ve dug deep enough to find it and you can toss it out because it doesn’t serve you anymore, we have to have language be our guide on that. And we have to teach people how to mess up. And how to rebound from that. And be ok with the fact that this is hard and uncomfortable and you’re all going to be ok when we’re done with this conversation. Provided you have good facilitation. Otherwise the same people who always get hurt are the same people who get hurt in that situation.
SWB I love this so much. I—[NS laughs]—you know I mean it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about and trying to talk to people about is like, if we don’t do it, we will—whatever it is. If you don’t do it, you will stay bad at it. You cannot get better at something if you keep not doing it [chuckles] right? If you keep avoiding it, you will never get better at it, and this always be a conversation that you’re bad at having. And so you’re going to have to figure out a way to practice having these conversations. So but not everybody has realized that there are people like you who can maybe help their companies have these conversations. So what are the kinds of things you’re working on right now that some of our listeners’ companies might be interested in?
[48:46]
NS Oh thank you for asking! So we’re for hire: Vaya Consulting, vayaconsulting.com. One of the things that we’re launching in the fall is management training because rather than saying, “Ok we’re going to take on diversity and inclusion and let us train your managers about diversity and inclusion.” That’s not as helpful as saying, “Here’s how to be a good manager through the lens of inclusion.” And—and so we’re launching on that um in the fall and so anybody who’s interested, you can go to vayaconsulting.com/inclusive-management-training. If you just have a question you can write to inquiry@vayaconsulting.com as well.
SWB And for all of you out there who don’t have like a company you run, but you’re interested in this topic, which I think is a lot of you, definitely check out Nicole on Twitter and on Medium, because I learn a lot by following her those places. Nicole, it has been so great to have you on the show today.
NS Thank you! Thank you! It’s been really nice to be here [music fades in, plays for three seconds, fades out].
Fuck Yeah of the Season
SWB Hey, ladies, do you know what season it is?
KL What season?
SWB It’s fuckin’ summertime!
KL Yes!!
SWB I’m so hyped for summertime, even though I’m a little bit sad, because this is the last episode of Season 2, and we are going on a little bit of a summer vacation. But I’m also extremely hyped because we’re taking a summer vacation!
KL Yay! Before we put our flip flops on and walk into the sunset, can we just reminisce a little bit about maybe some of our favorite moments or favorite Fuck Yeahs?
JL Fuck yeah we can. You know what I really loved this season? Way back in Season 2, Episode 1, we interviewed Neha Gandhi and she said, “It’s Monday today, and what’s the one thing that I need to do in order to feel like I’ve really accomplished something meaningful by Friday?” And I loved that! I just think it’s so neat to set up your goals for the week. I’ve become really into using Evernote and planning out what I’m going to do this week. I stole this from my coworker, Matt, who’s like a really hardcore Evernote user, and it’s just like a really nice way to set up your week to be like, “What do I need to focus on now?” So I really, I really liked when she talked about that.
[51:00]
KL It’s nice because it’s also like you can deal with a week at a time. [Chuckles] It feels very doable.
SWB I mean I have a lot of to-do lists, but I’m not that great about being like, “What do I need to accomplish to feel good on Friday?” So have you been feeling like you feel more of a fuck yeah! on Fridays now?
JL It’s like my whole week, I feel like I have a general really nice roundabout view of and so I—sometimes I have to switch it. It’s not the same on Monday as it is on Friday. But by Friday I feel good going into the weekend, and I know I’ll be ready to set myself up. I set up a “What’s going to happen on Monday” also. So I feel ready, and it like really cuts that anxiety of Sunday of like, “Oh! What’s coming up next?” So.
SWB I do that week planning, too, but I think I what I need to add to it is something that is more on that like satisfaction end. Not just like, “Here is what my week is going to look like.” But, “Here’s how I’m going to feel when these things are done at the end of the week,” and use that as a little bit of that North Star throughout the week.
JL It’s definitely a prioritizing tool for me, figuring out, like, “What’s really the most important thing that I need to get done at this point?”
SWB Something I really loved that I think about a lot is this quote from Saron Yitbarek, where she was mentioning advice that she received from somebody else, who said, “I don’t believe in stepping stones,” and when I heard that, I was sitting in my office all by myself and I swear to God I fistpumped in the air [laughter].
KL That was very cool.
SWB It was very good to hear it and it felt so natural coming from Saron. And I think one of the reasons it really stuck with me—it’s not to say that sometimes stepping stones aren’t helpful or that everybody should think that way—but it was so refreshing and exciting for me to hear somebody just owning that they want to do big things and they’re not sitting around waiting. That they are not trying to take baby steps, that they are going to get out and makes things happen for themselves. And they were saying it in such a way—like the way that she said it was not aggressive, not like crushing it! It was just so confident and in control and I just loved it.
KL I mean I’m biased, but I loved having my therapist on the show. That was really cool and I know we’ve talked about it a bunch, but it was also really surprising to me that I had kind of a realization as we were talking to her, and that was really cool. It was when she was talking about how, you know, when you get sort of further along in therapy and you start to actually look at the relationship between you yourself and the therapist and use that as a tool for evolution of the therapy itself. I was kind of like, “Oh my god! My head is like exploding!” And it was really cool to have that happen on the show.
[53:50]
SWB I don’t think that it is selfish for you to talk about that episode, because that episode was really, really great for me, too! I thought it was so valuable and so wonderful to both kind of like take the veil off of the therapy experience, and also just to kind of like see you open up to the world and say, “Yup! I’m in therapy, my therapist is awesome! Here she is! And it’s the most normal thing in the world!”
KL Yeah. Yeah. It’s taken a long time but I totally believe that.
JL I also really loved that we heard about mentoring a lot this season from Sarah Drasner and from Lilly Chin, and just like different ways you can get into mentoring and how important that is [KL yeah] and that it doesn’t have to be something that’s like a lot of roadblocks to get into. You can mentor people and different ways to get into that.
SWB Something else I want to give a big fuck yeah to is not something that happened on the show, but it’s something that we started getting in our inbox. So, over the course of this season, we received a whole bunch of emails from people who wanted to suggest themselves as guests on the show. And apologies if we have not gotten back to you about that. We are definitely looking at topics and themes and what we really want to dig into over the next few months but we love you, and we really want to be able to say like, “Look: it is fucking rad to put yourself out there and to send an email that is like even suggesting yourself as a guest.” That is awesome and I definitely want to hear from anybody who thinks they’d be a rad guest on the show, whether we end up having a space for them or not.
JL Yeah I love these ideas of ways to put yourself out there because you don’t know until you try and so I just think it’s really cool. Plus I get to like learn more about what other people are doing, and what awesome things you all are doing.
KL So, one last thing I will just throw out there is that I’ve had a couple of friends separately say to me that when they listen it feels like there not just keeping up with me but they’re hanging out with me and hanging out with us, and that is so fucking cool. I just never dreamt that that would be an outcome of the show, and that has just been such a cool thing to hear. And I think about that every time we record now.
SWB I mean, I think that’s awesome, and I think it totally speaks to why we can have natural like fucking language like, you know? [Laughter] And it is—it is like hanging out with people, and so we are not going to lose that in this whole conversation.
[56:17]
JL I can’t wait till one day we have a No, You Go hang session with all of our listeners.
KL Oh my gosh! A No, You Go meetup!
JL Aaaah! Awesome.
SWB You know what I’m really waiting for? This will be my sign that we’ve made it: No, You Go fan fiction [Katel laughs]. Please and thank you.
KL Maybe like some fan art.
SWB Yes!
KL That would be cool.
SWB We are definitely. We are always waiting for fan art.
KL [Laughs] On that note, fuck yeah to Season 2! Fuck yeah to you both. And fuck yeah to all y’all who have been listening. It’s been so rad. We’re so excited to be here.
SWB And we’re taking a little break, but don’t worry: we will be back very soon. So look for new episodes from us in August.
JL And that’s it for this season of No, You Go, the show about ambitious—and sticking together. No, You Go is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, still the Super Bowl champions, and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Nicole Sanchez for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us wherever you listen to our show. Your support helps us spread the word. We’ll be back in August [music fades in, plays for 32 seconds, fades out to end].
When Lilly Chin knew she couldn’t lose during Final Jeopardy, she decided to give a joke answer: “Who is the Spiciest Memelord?” But that joke became a meme itself—turning Lilly into not just the College Jeopardy champion, but an internet sensation.
Today, we chat with the MIT grad student about what it was like to be on the show, how the internet treats women in the public eye, and how her brush with fame changed the way she looks at online visibility. We also talk about Lilly’s research on soft robots, mentorship, Twitch streaming, and doing it all for the stories.
> We’re so used to thinking about women in terms of their outward appearance that even when it’s on a very academic game like Jeopardy, people are still defaulting to thinking of, like, an object of attraction. > —Lilly Chin, MIT PhD student and College Jeopardy champ
_Note: We’ve donated net proceeds from this episode to RAICES, the largest immigrant legal services organization in Texas, and ActBlue’s fund supporting 12 organizations working with migrant, detained, or deported children and families. Please join us. _
Links from the interview:
- Lilly’s website
- The infamous “Who is the spiciest memelord?” clip
- The Jeopardy subreddit
- Talia Levin’s article about appearing on Jeopardy, “Big Tits for $600”
- Justine Sacco’s tweet about AIDS in Africa
- So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
- The “right to be forgotten” concept
- The field of soft robotics
Also in this episode:
- Creating intimate spaces online, from our newsletter to Tiny Letters to private Slack accounts
- Shopping feminist, ethical, local, and just plain good companies
- Why Katel has the headshot-1-660x480.jpeg">best sweatshirt ever
Sponsors
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Transcript
Katel LeDû [Ad spot] Shopify builds software to help anyone with a great idea build a successful business. In fact, more than 50 percent of the entrepreneurs who use Shopify are women, including me! I use Shopify to power abookapart.com and so do people in 175 different countries! Now Shopify needs more great people to join their team. Visit shopify.com/careers to see open positions, learn about their culture, and so much more [music fades in, plays alone for 12 seconds, fades out].
Jenn Lukas Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
KL I’m Katel LeDû.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. And we did it, everyone. We did it!
KL What?
SWB We got Jenn’s dream guest on the show.
JL Is it Kesha?
SWB Ok. We got Jenn’s second dream guest on the show. That would be Lilly Chin, who’s the 2017 College Jeopardy winner, and a current graduate student at MIT. We talk with Lilly about what it was like to be on the show, how her final Jeopardy answer made internet history, and how the whole experience changed the way that she looks at things like networked culture and online visibility.
KL Ugh you know something that really got my attention in Lilly’s interview, I’m really wondering if we can start there for a second. If you subscribe to our newsletter, I wrote a letter to introduce Issue #4 and I talked about how I used to get really bad panic attacks, and I still struggle with a lot of anxiety, and I’ve, you know, done a lot to sort of figure that out. It’s still an ongoing process and while I felt really great to have a platform to share something really personal like that, I also felt really exposed and, I don’t know, it made me think that like, I kind of forget that, you know? We’re in a room talking to each other and it feels really safe and supportive and we’ve had such good feedback about the show, which is great, but, I don’t know, you kind of forget that you’re really putting yourself out there.
SWB Yeah, I think about this a lot because I think podcasts do feel intimate, and they feel intimate for the listener, too, but you don’t really who might be listening. And I mean I think with something like a newsletter, you don’t know where that might end up or where it might get screenshotted and shared around. And I think, you know, we’re going to—we’re going to talk with Lilly a little bit more about this, but there’s ways in which that kind of like hyper-visibility or like constant networked feeling online can make it hard to know what context you’re in—and the context shifts on you sometimes without you realizing it.
[3:04]
KL Totally. I mean even writing that letter for that issue, I was like, ok, this went out to, you know, a hundred some odd people. Thank you for subscribing. But it lives in… forever in internet, and like anyone can find it. And I had these moments the day after we sent it out where I was like, ok. It’s just like, it’s out there. And I think, I don’t know, like it’s a weird feeling.
SWB What was making you feel like vulnerable or exposed about it? Or like what is the fear that you have about this letter existing out there where you talked about anxiety?
KL I mean I think part of the anxiety that I talk about is the sort of spiral that happens where you start to feel small or weak or like you’re not, you know, up to snuff or you’re not like performing or you’re just not like the person that you’re “supposed” to be. And I think that just is compounded when there’s eyes on that—when people are looking at it and you’re offering it up. And I think ultimately I feel, like I said, very grateful—and I’ve said this I think, you know, to you, if not, you know, recorded it—I’m really proud of the therapy work that I’ve done, and I’m so, so happy that I get to share that. But it’s also, like, weird [laughs] and raw. And so yeah, I don’t know, this whole thing has been like a process a little bit.
JL Yeah, it’s never just one feeling. It’s not like [yeah], “Oh ok. I know I’m going to feel exposed so I don’t want to do it,” because there’s things that make you want to share all of this like with people too. The internet’s not just like, “Uh well I don’t know what’s going to happen, so I’m outta here.” It’s very much like not one-sided.
SWB And I think some people probably have that feeling. Like I don’t what’s going to happen, so I’m outta here. But clearly we don’t, because we keep doing this podcast [laughter]. And so we are—we have things we want to talk about and things that like… it’s not just about, like, “I want to talk about this,” or even, “I want other people to listen to me”—although I do, I want everybody in the world to listen to me. I’ve got a lot of opinions— but, that I think that the kinds of stuff that we’re talking about and sometimes struggling with are things that are really normal and that are under-discussed. And just the act of having natural conversations about them in a shared space is really powerful [yeah]. But also there is risk there, and I think that that’s one of the things that we have to kind of like constantly make peace with, or at least I feel that, that like I have to make peace with what kinds of risks those might be. And so, you know, we’ve talked about this in the past, right? It’s like, “If I tweet that, what kind of randos are going to come troll me?” And is it just going to be your, like, everyday rando that I can block, or is it going to be actually something more sinister? And like those are real like internal monologues that I’m having on a regular basis. At the same time, though, there’s something to me that’s a little different about both like podcasting and also something like a newsletter—or like, I subscribe to a lot of people’s Tiny Letters—that is a little bit more intimate feeling, and in some ways almost feels like there’s been a resurgence in that. And I look at it almost like a way to reclaim space. Or reclaim something that’s not exactly privacy, but that it feels a little bit more private in a world where so much of our communication feels so, like—actually as Lilly talked about—hyper-networked [chuckles].
[6:34]
KL Mm hmm. Yeah. Or like, just branded. And that can feel weird too. I mean I love that some of my friends have Tiny Newsletters because I feel like I’m reading their journals, which is such a cool—it’s such a cool feeling, you know?
JL It’s got that same feeling of like, you know, blogging back in the day, or like, you know, it felt just more like … I don’t know, more connected with the people. And I think that’s sort of like what’s nice about the podcast, too, and getting feedback about the podcast is I just feel like it’s a different way to be connected with people.
SWB Blogging has certainly changed a lot and, you know, now it’s like, what’s the difference between a blog and an online publication? What is Medium? Like everything has sort of collapsed into like one big text box on the internet. And some of these spaces that we’re talking about give it a little bit of definition, you know? I think the same thing about a lot of the like private backchannel Slack accounts I’m in. I’m in a few of them that are like professionally focused, kind of… but what they really are is private communities of people who I’m close to for one reason or another where we can talk really openly and honestly about things that are happening in our professional world, but in a space where we have absolute trust with people. And I find that to be really valuable, and I feel like that’s where I turn so often to process how I’m feeling about things that are happening in the world. Where like that used to be Twitter, and that doesn’t always feel safe enough. Or sometimes it’s not even about safety. It’s like, sometimes that just feels too loud.
KL Yeah. Well [quiet sigh] my therapist what says that what we’re doing is a gift. So. I just want to share that [laughing] with you.
SWB Oh my god. If anybody listening has not listened to the episode where we interviewed Katel’s therapist, it is so good. Talk about a gift. Like that—that was a gift.
KL That was really wonderful.
JL And if anyone listening has not subscribed to our newsletter yet, you definitely should because it’s full of more little gifts.
SWB If you aren’t subscribing to our newsletter, we started it about a month ago and we are doing it every other week. We have, like, super-intimate letters from us about things happening in our lives, plus a whole bunch of links and things that we love. And it is called, maybe fittingly, I Love That [laughter]. So if you go to noyougoshow.com/ilovethat, you can subscribe and you can also check out the back issues [music fades in, plays alone for four seconds, fades out].
[9:02]
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JL [Ad spot] We’d also like to take a moment and thank our friends at WordPress. WordPress has been a supporter of NYG since the start, and we’re big fans of theirs too. After all, it’s how we run our website, noyougoshow.com. We trust WordPress because it’s super easy to set up and customize, but it’s also really powerful. For example, we added plugins to host our podcast, and also gather sign-ups for our newsletter. You can even set up a ‘buy’ button or add an online store. Plans start at just four dollars a month, so what are you waiting for? Start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off your brand new website [music fades in, plays alone for three seconds, fades out].
Interview: Lilly Chin
JL Lilly Chin is a graduate student at MIT working towards a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her technical research interests are in robotics hardware design. She studies how old and new forms of media collide, chiefly in video games, film, and internet culture. You might recognize her name, as Lilly was also the 2017 College Jeopardy Tournament champion! And she even created a meme while doing so. Welcome to No, You Go, Lilly.
Lilly Chin Yeah, it’s great to be here.
JL Oh so we’re super excited that you’re here. We’re big fans of Jeopardy both at my house and at work [Lilly chuckles]. I have to tell you that we followed the College Tournament really intently, and we were definitely all rooting for you when you were on.
LC Thanks [laughs].
JL [Laughs] We had this joke that I was going to miss who won because the final day of the tournament was also actually my son’s due date.
LC Oh! Oh! Oh. [Laughs].
JL And uh, sure enough, I went into labor that morning. At one point during labor, I think I definitely said to my husband and doula, “I wonder who won College Jeopardy.” [Laughter] We were very stoked the next week to find out that it was you.
[11:29]
LC Oh thanks [laughs].
JL [Laughs] So what got you interested in being on Jeopardy?
LC The RA from my dorm, actually, he had been on Jeopardy the summer before and we had all like made viewing parties and gone to see him. So when it came time for the test to be taken, he was like, “Oh, you all should just take it and see how you do.” And so it actually took a couple of tries before I was on the show, but then, yeah, my second time I tried out I got on. So.
JL Nice! That’s awesome. What—what’s the audition process like?
LC So it’s pretty cool. The first round is just this online test and it’s just really quick-fire, just asking you trivia questions. And if you do well enough on that, they invite you to an audition, which is in person. And the producers themselves definitely have a ton of energy because at the end of the day, Jeopardy’s a TV show. So they want to make sure that you’re really excited, that you have some sort of stage presence, and that, like, you know, you’re actually the person who took the exam since it’s all online.
JL Hmm. Yes [laughs]. Were you nervous going into that?
LC I was very nervous the first time, but the second time I actually was thinking like, “Oh, I have to go all the way to New York. It’s kind of a pain,” and I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to go. But I had a lot of fun, so I ended up just going. And I think being more relaxed the second time around helped me out, like, be more natural in front of the camera.
JL When did—do you find out right away if you’re going to be on?
LC Oh no, so for the tournament you actually have to wait for like a month or so. I had forgotten actually when I got the call that I was going to be on, and for adult Jeopardy you actually have to wait. You’re in the contestant pool for like a year and a half before, so you’re just waiting there.
JL Wow! [Yeah] So when you found out and then you went to the show, what was the energy like on set there?
LC That’s really interesting. because it’s—like you have 15 people that definitely don’t know each other just sort of randomly in this place. And the thing I was struck by was that the set was actually quite large, right? Like you’re so used to seeing it on the TV just like cutting from the clues to the contestants and back again, but like actually seeing it as a space that you inhabit, it was really interesting. I guess also the energy is [stammers] it’s just the same thing of like, oh I understand, all of these contestant producers are really trying to hype you up and have you really excited. And so at the end of the first day, I just immediately went to bed. I didn’t even have dinner or anything. Just like, conked out, because I was just so exhausted from being that high-energy. Yeah the next couple of times I went on the show actually it was a lot more comfortable, because I knew how sort of the filming schedule works. But it’s a very tiring experience.
[13:46]
JL How did you prepare for being on the show?
LC So I did trivia in high school, so like Quiz Bowl and those things. So I had most of my trivia knowledge from there. But I would say like the one month before the show it was like learning about betting strategy, reading up of what the common questions are. I don’t think I did as much preparation as other people did, but definitely looking into betting strategy was a big one.
JL I feel like it’s such a wide variety—like, you never really know. I mean there’s like some repeats on Jeopardy all the time in like topics but it’s like, how could you possibly narrow it all down?
LC Yeah, I mean, it’s a funny thing, right? Because it’d still a TV show, so you need to have the answers be things that people at home will be like, “Oh! I’ve heard of this before.” So you can’t have it too obscure. I—I remember one thing funny though is that the popular culture is definitely like, right, like I’m a 2000s kid and so I think one of the things was like ’80s and ‘90s TV shows, and I was like, “Well, I know I’m not going to do well in this.” [laughter] Yeah.
JL I know I think—my co-workers and I always watch that, and that’s, like, definitely our alley so [laughter]. So we mentioned a bit in the intro that you are also the creator of a meme, which happened during Final Jeopardy. Can you tell us that story?
LC So I had seen like people give funny Final Jeopardy answers in the past. So I decided beforehand that, oh if I ever have a chance to do a lock game, like a game where I would win no matter what, I would put some funny answer down. And I decided to do “dank memes,” but then I was like, oh that’s probably not PG enough for Jeopardy, so I decided “spicy memes.” And then on the Final Jeopardy thing it turned out it was a “who is” question, so then I said, “Who is the spiciest memelord?” And got Alex Trebek to say it on national television [laughter].
[15:26]
KL That’s amazing.
LC Yeah.
JL So it was not planned?
LC I knew that like if I had the chance, I definitely wanted to say it, but it was also not planned for how viral of a reaction was gotten. Like it turned out—I was just thinking about my friends. Like, “we watch memes all the time at home, they’ll like it.” And then it turned out the internet also [laughs] really likes memes. So I did not plan for that at all. Yeah.
JL Right. Yeah. How has that—how has that been?
LC So I’ve been actually thinking about writing more academically about this experience, but this idea of the sudden burst of fame—like I was on the front page of Reddit twice, there’s like a million views on that video, and then it suddenly has a spike and then this long tail of just there’s still this ambient fame, especially since I’m still at MIT for graduate school where people, especially other students, will recognize me. But, you know, just the other day I was in the North End and got recognized on the street, and it’s not something I’m expecting. And this idea of like, you know, this sudden burst of fame. Like going up and then going down again and then suddenly like, “Oh reruns are happening, I’m getting a lot more Facebook messages from randos.” It’s sort of interesting, and it’s also interesting to be known more for Jeopardy than for my research, which is something I’m more excited about, I guess. But at the same time, the fame that I’ve gotten from Jeopardy might’ve helped me in terms of like recognition for my own research, right? Like whenever my advisor introduces me to someone else from a different lab, she’s like, “Oh do you know that this is the [laughing] Jeopardy winner?” [Laughter] So that’s an interesting balance. Yeah.
JL You’ve even taught a class about this, right? At MIT?
LC Yeah. So there’s an educational studies program where MIT undergrads and grad students can teach high school and middle school students. And so this was related with the comparative media studies part, where I really enjoy sort of showing that like it’s not just like analyzing books or film, like you can actually do all of these cool analyses of contemporary media culture. So that’s what I was trying to do was take my current case example and being like, “Look: here’s how these media analysis techniques can really help you understand what’s going on in your life, even if it’s something as weird as like national television.”
[17:34]
JL I mean have your views changed a lot about what it’s like to be a public figure?
LC Yeah. I think I’m more confused—I get more and more confused about why people want to be famous. Like when I’m doing my Twitch streaming, I think it’s interesting that there’s always like these people who are like, “Oh I want to make it big,” and there’s some crazy statistic about one in three British children want to be a YouTube star when they grow up [laughter][oh]. Yeah it’s because I mean that’s what you’re growing up with, and that’s what you’re seeing as your content. It’s not like TV or movies as much anymore. It’s like, “Oh, I see these kids making videos on YouTube.” And I’m sort of like wondering why people want the fame, because like I kind of get it, right? Like I want my research to have exposure because then more people are thinking about my ideas and I think I really appreciate that. but then at the same time it’s like there’s so much attention to your life. Also like the harassment part of it, and it’s a weird public/private divide that I’m not sure people know fully what they’re getting into when they sign up for this. And some people enjoy being like a figure of controversy, right? Like Kanye West and Donald Trump come to mind, where it doesn’t matter what the press is but as long as people are talking about you, it sort of continues like some gratification.
JL Right. I mean there’s—I mean you talked about being on the front page of Reddit and there’s also a Jeopardy community subreddit, and how does it feel to, like, look at people talking about you?
LC I was worried at first that there was going to be—about the internet hate. And there’s a Woman of Jeopardy Facebook group where people sort of like commiserate about the experience. Yeah there’s a really good Vice article that’s called like, “Big Tits for $600,” and it’s just sort of like a very good compilation and just sort of talking about the experience of being a woman on national television and sort of what that means. So I was—I was a little bit nervous about that, because I had read these stories before, but when it came down to it and I saw what people were writing, it just sort of seemed so petty that people were coming up with these impressions of me after 20 minutes of national television. I was actually more taken aback the second time I went around for the Tournament of Champions where people were actually extremely nice and just sort of doing analysis of the game and less about me because I had braced myself for all of this verbal abuse, and then when it wasn’t there and people were just really kind it’s like, “Oh she tried really hard,” it was really not what I expected and sort of threw me off guard.
JL For those who don’t know, on Reddit you can like you have like a little identifier that says that you were a contestant on the show to prove that it’s you. And I’ve seen like a couple of people definitely get into the threads with other people and reply to some of it, and I feel like a lot of is positive but then, you know, as you mentioned, like with women I’ll see a lot of comments like, “Oh her—” Not about you, about like other contestants that will be like, “Oh I hated her! Her voice was so annoying.” And it’s like wow! [Chuckles] People are harsh.
[20:19]
LC Yeah it’s just also like… in some sense of being like a female figure like in the—in the spotlight, it sort of puts you up. Like we’re so used to thinking about women in terms of their outward appearance that even when it’s on a very academic game like Jeopardy, people are still defaulting to thinking of it, like, as an object of attraction or something.
JL You’ve talked about, you know, you have an interest in the “fight to maintain one’s identity and narrative in a hyper-mediated network culture.” [Mm hmm] Can you describe a bit what that means?
LC What I found really is that … usually you have some control over your own identity. It’s very closely tied to you. Obviously you can’t control everything about what people think about but you, you know, you talk to people it forms an identity. But what happened is that with Jeopardy there was this very immediate division between myself and my image, right? So like millions of people saw me saying, “Who is the spiciest memelord?” on national television and so some people—so some people are trying to co-opt this as like, “Oh look! It’s a meme culture.” And then other people are like—Jeopardy itself is trying to co-opt this in saying like, “We need to target the 18 to 35 age demographic for advertisements and this is like, you know, a cool kid.” So they kind of go over and it’s like, “How do you do fellow kids?” And my friends from high school when they were like, “Why—why are you on my Instagram feed?” And I was like, “What?” And it turns out that they had used my image to advertise on Instagram to try to encourage more people to apply for the college test. Which I think is crazy like sure, yeah, I signed off all my rights, but in some sense, right? Like their curation of my image is no longer outside my control. I’m like fighting against, you know, Jeopardy, I’m fighting against 4Chan, I’m fighting against all of these forces about who gets to control my image. So it becomes an interesting thing, because I think this happens on some level to everybody, right? There was a good article talking about how Snapchat is dying and this idea that even on Facebook, even on Twitter, all of these things were cultivating our own personal brand of how we want to come up with. That everything is now sort of a online interactive CV, and there’s not really a chance for you to be yourself because you’re worried about how it’s going to be taken either way. So not everyone has this experience of, like, “suddenly national television is taking my image and running with it,” but we’re always sort of trying to deal with this idea that now that everything’s on the internet, there’s so many different forces that you’re really trying to curate something, and is it even possible anymore?
[22:47]
JL Do you think it’s possible?
LC I think in some sense you have to accept that like you no longer have control of your image which [chuckles] is—which is kind of like what I’m doing. But at the same time, so this is coming from a book I read from Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. It’s this idea where individual people have to sort of be their own PR firm. That like you have to do, like, this brand curation. I think it is possible, but it becomes a lot more effort and you sort of have to understand what you’re doing, right? There’s a lot of talk about the right to be forgotten, because it’s like, oh kids don’t understand what they’re doing and you might say something dumb on the internet. I don’t think we ever had the right to be forgotten, like within your community—it’s the classic like, you know, small town, scarlet letter, everybody knows what you did wrong—but I think encouraging more people to understand how these forces happen and how to better protect yourself, I think that’s sort of the best you can do.
JL I do a lot of public speaking in the web field and I remember like the first time that I got back from a conference and the conference had posted pictures of me, and of course I’m, like, in mid-word so my face is all distorted, and it’s just like, I’m like, “Oh my god, that’s awful!” But I was like, “Hey, I guess I made it.” [Laughter] And I remember now because I have like, you know, people will be like, “Hey, can you take a picture?” And then they’ll like, you’ll take a picture of them and they’ll want to see the picture to like see if it’s ok [yeah] and I don’t—that doesn’t happen to me anymore. Like I’ve just given up on that battle [right][chuckles], because I think there’s so many bad pictures of me on the internet. But I did a talk one time for a Girl Develop It group here which was like sort of trying to encourage more people to get into public speaking and it was just sort of like, you know, “What’s the worst that could happen?” And I went through and showed highlights of all the terrible pictures of me on the internet and it just sort of was like one of those, “Well, like really what is the worst-case scenario of this?” And sort of, “Is it that bad in protecting yourself, like maybe against the things that are really bad? Not things like, ‘Oh here’s an unflattering image of me’.”
LC For public speaking, you go out there and you know really clearly that, “Oh I’m going to put out a face and I’m going to present myself and so I should prepare myself for, you know, being judged by other people.” But now with the internet, it’s less clear that really like anything that you do, like, it could be subject to like people seeing it and people making judgements of it. There was a famous case, which is Justine Sacco who made a tweet that was like, “Oh I’m going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding, I’m white.” [Oh yes] Yeah.
JL Before she got on a plane, right?
LC Right.
[25:15]
JL And then she got off the plane and there was an obvious amount of backlash, yeah.
LC And but the thing was, is that she only had like 200 followers before that, and so she probably thought, like, “Oh I’m just going to make this like off-color joke to like my 200 friends,” and then so what she thought was a private transaction actually blew up into like a huge like, you know, trending on Twitter like number-one thing. And I think that’s really the idea that I’m trying to get at is that it’s less clear what your private and public actions should be. So you sort of overprotectively try to curate everything. And then you sort of, like you were saying about the pictures, it’s almost impossible to do that.
JL Right. So you know all of this, like you know all of the potential [laughs] for repercussions of being on the internet and what can happen. But that said, like, you are still like I think sort of embracing this public figure. So, as you mentioned before, you have a Twitch stream, right?
LC Yeah.
JL Tell us a little bit more about that. Like, what makes you stream? And what sort of things are you streaming?
LC So I stream on Twitch, and Twitch is primarily for video games, and so I started streaming because one: I had the Jeopardy fame and I was like, “Oh, this would be a good platform to jump off on,” and two: a lot of my friends stream speed runs, which are trying to play video games super fast and I was like, oh, as a media scholar, I don’t understand why they do it so the easiest way to learn would be to do it myself. And it started off from this academic interest and then it turned into, I really appreciate the community. There are a couple of people from Scandinavia who like tune into me like super regularly, even though it’s like 3 am in Sweden time. And I find myself that like I’m putting on this like show for them, that I enjoy talking to them. I enjoy like, you know, discussing the video games, or like what’s going on in my life. And that’s sort of an interesting feeling, like it’s gone beyond just like, “Oh I want to put my ideas out there,” and it’s to, “I want to talk to these like two or three people,” and then I make more friends and it’s quite nice.
JL It’s again that balance, right? Like here’s a potentially like field that we’re like opening ourselves to all this potential negativity, but you keep finding really positive things.
[27:20]
LC Because in some sense the reason why it is still [chuckles] a positive experience is because I have like, you know, ten people who watch me regularly on a twice-a-week basis, right? And similarly I have sort of private I guess IRC, you know, like internet chat channels that I do with my friends, and in some sense like the only reason that these are still nice is because they’re public, but they’re still private in a way. And sort of finding these spaces on like an increasingly networked world is difficult. In the past it used to be that you would be in these local communities, right? Like, “Oh, I live in the Cambridge area so I’ll like talk to all of the people in Cambridge and find similar things,” but now in some sense we’re creating local communities but on the internet. So it’s no longer local geographically but it’s local in terms of interests or maybe like respect for each other and things like that.
JL Like you were you saying, you know, you just jumped into streaming because you wanted to learn more about, which is just so neat like to just like, “Ok. I’ve got an interest in something. I’m just going to do it,” is that generally how you live your life?
LC Yeah. I definitely do things because like, “Oh, it’ll be a lot of fun.” Or like, “It’ll be a good story out of it.” The whole thing about doing the spiciest memelord was definitely like, “I’ll get a good story out of this,” or like, you know, even trying out for Jeopardy in the first place.
JL I think that’s like such a neat idea. You know, I was reading a bit on your Reddit AMA, you had said, “One of my guiding principles for whether I’m wavering between whether or not I should do something is, will I get a good story out of it?”
LC Yeah [laughing] exactly.
JL This year the College Jeopardy Tournament of 2018 just happened and you also offered advice to the folks taking part in it. And you’ve also been an MIT Women in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science mentor. And worked with Girls Who Code. You are a mentor extraordinaire!
LC Oh. I don’t know. It’s just like, I have advice and, like, I appreciate all the people who gave me advice. So it makes sense to just sort of give back because I can. Yeah, I don’t know, I thought it was interesting because recently someone came up to me and was like, “Hey, do you want to be part of my admissions consulting group, where like, you know, parents pay a lot of money and you, like, review essays and stuff like that?” And it just felt really bad like because—because on one level, right, I enjoy doing this work and like it would be nice to get paid for it. But on the other hand, it felt like contributing to these systems of like people not getting the mentorship that they need just because they don’t have the right networks or they don’t have a ton of cash, and it feels like the right thing to do is to—is to give back in whatever ways you can. Like oftentimes I feel like I’m not giving as much as I could. I was a MedLink in the dorm system, which basically like we’re students and we live in a dorm and we have basic first aid training. And we also know about all the medical resources on campus. So if people are having relationship troubles we can point them to mental health or, you know, if they got a cut we have band-aids and things. And I think that was one of like most rewarding experiences because it’s not just that, “Oh like I want to help people because like it boosts a resume,” or something like that. It’s just that people are—people are having trouble and you want to help them out how you can. I guess like I don’t see… I feel like I could do more for mentorship like because like, as you’re saying, like I’m doing a lot of different things, but at the same time I feel like being there and at least like reminding people that there is somebody who cares is important.
[30:31]
JL Right. It’s really neat so I mean you find it rewarding, I’m assuming.
LC Yeah. Like I said I have a sort of insecurities about, am I actually doing enough to help people? Because when you’re doing so many things, like, is it on a superficial level or not? That’s why—that’s why I was a little—I was a little like taken aback when you were like, “Oh you’re a mentor extraordinaire.” Because on some level it’s just giving advice to people because you’ve been through these experiences and, you know, they haven’t. Even the older grad students when I’m freaking out about things and they’re just being like, “Yeah I freaked out about this too,” it’s sort of comforting [chuckles].
JL So what’s next? What has you super excited?
LC I’m really excited about my research, especially now that it’s summertime because I don’t have—sort of going from undergrad to grad school is this transition away from other people are setting the curriculum, and like telling you what to learn, to I’m setting my own path and like my own research. So I’m working in soft robotics. So usually when you think of a robot it’s this hard metal skeleton, but soft robots is this thing, “Hey! What if we make robots out of rubber or silicone, like soft materials, so that they’re safer around people and they can pick up squishy things?” So I’ve been working on, how do we make these soft robots work? How do they grab things? I’m also really excited about sort of this Jeopardy paper that I’m doing: how do we think about fame and identity using myself as a case study, but sort of broadening it to other people. And then finally, I guess, the combination of these two interests is as robots are becoming more and more commonplace, as algorithms and big data are sort of changing the way we approach things, how can we have people still be like comfortable with this—with these new algorithms and things? Like it’s more than just like, “If I have the robot from the Jetson’s show up like can I interact with it?” It’s more on a fundamental level of when I say “AI” most people don’t know what this means. And it’s actually pretty understandable but we need to stop thinking about scientists as like, you know, these like mad scientists who are doing whatever they want in their lab coats and more of something approachable, especially as the future is heading towards that direction.
[32:15]
JL We’ve talked a little bit before with one of our previous guests, Alison, about this idea of what the scientist—the white man in the white lab coat.
LC [Laughing] Yeah exactly.
JL [Laughs] The crazy hair. And I think like generally, you know, you start talking about robots and generally there’s like the, either like, “I am intimidated by that subject,” or like, Skynet questions I think starts being thrown out.
LC Yeah. I think, especially for my research, right? So soft robotics, it’s intentionally for like, you know, being around humans instead of not being in a factory somewhere, and I remember someone—there was a conversation about like, what does the future of work look like? And they were like, “Oh! You know, service jobs will be ok because who wants a robot to take care of grandma?” And I was like raising my hand, I was like, “Actually this is literally my [laughing] research!” And so on some level, I really want to tell people the thinking behind it of like the direction because I can’t predict the future of what research is going to be like, but to reduce the fear of like, “What does AI mean? What does deep learning mean?” I think would help people understand like, ok, like one: this is a future that I can understand; and two: this is a future where I can actually belong in.
JL So, what are you telling people?
LC So one thing that I need to keep remembering is that when I am not in MIT, and everyone’s working on like robots and drones and what have you, that like most people when they hear “robots” they’re like, “Woah! Like you must be really smart!” And I’m like, “Wait, no, I’m not. I’m not that smart.” And it’s just like—it’s just like, you know, you know how to build things, you know how to build things with Legos and stuff like that and when also when people hear “algorithms” they think of like ones and zeros flying everywhere, but at the end of the day an algorithm is just a set of instructions, you know. When you follow a recipe you’re already following an algorithm of some sort. So I think like, you know, it’s the same thing of like being able to talk about your experiences and sort of destigmatizing things whether it’s like, you know, “Math is hard,” or like, “Algorithms are mysterious black boxes.” I think just explaining things and, you know, being patient. I mean I think that people are going to realize at some point that robots are just a tool, right? And that like you still need to remember that like tools are for humanity.
[34:23]
JL Lilly, before you go, where will the next place be that we see you?
LC Hopefully on, like, the cover of the New York Times for some cool robot research.
KL Yes! Also you’re welcome back here anytime.
JL Definitely!
LC Oh, thank you! [Laughs]
JL Please let us know how the soft robotics are going. And how we can make sure to [Katel laughs] welcome our new overlords.
LC All right [chuckles].
JL So.
KL Awesome. Thank you so much for being with us.
LC Yeah, thanks for interviewing me [music fades in, plays alone for two seconds, fades out].
KL So this week I want to say a “fuck yeah” to Pride Month, because June is Pride Month and I’m—that’s awesome. It’s also my birthday. Just PS. Just letting you know. And, I don’t know, this got me thinking about some of the folks that I follow on Instagram, and one of them is a brand called Wild Fang, and I really love them because they like they really walk the walk. They’re—they—they sort of say they’re not just a brand, they’re a band. And I—I love that because they’re very focused on the people who buy their clothing, and their very feminist, and they like—you can see that in everything that they do, including the fact that they give a lot of money that they raise to charity. And this month a percentage of their proceeds is going to The Trevor Project, which is the world’s largest non-profit organization focused on suicide prevention and crisis intervention among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning youth, which is fucking amazing. So this just got me thinking and we sort of started talking a little bit about who we’re shopping and brands that we’re supporting and I think it just led us to talking about like paying attention to that a little bit more.
[36:32]
SWB Yeah. One of the things that I’ve really been noticing is just, it feels like there’s a lot more options all of a sudden for brands that I can support that are doing things that are important to me or that are offering products that are like just more inclusive and also just better suited to like me personally. And it seems like a big sea change that’s happening just in the last couple of years. Like for example I know a lot of folks go absolutely wild for Everlane, and one of the things Everlane does is like, they do luxury basics is their market. Luxury basics like reasonably priced or something. I don’t think that’s their actual tagline. And one of the things that they do is they tell you exactly how much of that money was spent on paying the garment workers, how much of it was spent on shipping, how much of it they get as profit, and so it’s really clear exactly where that money is going, and I think that that is, you know, that’s like one example of a way that they’re kind of trying to set some new standards. I’m really excited to see organizations that are like making cool shit with a good cause in mind, making cool shit that is going to serve a wider range of people, just making cool shit while throwing away some of the like bad practices of retail industry.
KL Another place that I have bought a couple of things from which is just like a fun clothing shop that does like t-shirts and sweatshirts. It’s actually… I’m wearing this sweatshirt in my photo on the website and it says, “Smile,” and it has like a possum and it just has, “Smile,” is crossed out and it says, “Nope.” Which I fucking love. It’s like my favorite sweatshirt, and it’s by a company called Culture Flock, and they are a company that, quoting them, “believes in equality for all, being kind to others, and protecting the planet, and having fun every day.” And I love that because it’s very simple, but they’re also—we’ve talked about this on the show a couple of times, about like place and that you can do really fucking cool things in like a lot of different places—and they’re based in Springfield, Missouri, which I think is super cool.
JL I’ve also been trying to remember to shop local. And trying to pick up things at like places nearby where I live, because just like people in Springfield, Missouri, there’s places everywhere that have a lot of—a lot of local, great shops near there. So I’ve been trying to remember to do that instead of doing my very easy and convenient ordering that I do sometimes, sometimes I’ll go down the street to get the baby shampoo that I need instead of ordering that and getting it in five days.
KL Totally. It also like feels really good when you can see the person who is either, you know, either owns the shop where they’ve obviously done a lot of thinking about what they’re stocking there or, you know, they’ve even made it. It’s very cool to buy something directly from that person.
JL Totally.
[38:44]
SWB I just really like the way that we are having a lot more conversations, at least like in the circles that I’m in and I think like in the circles that maybe a lot of our listeners are in, about sort of what we’re buying and where it’s from, and why we’re buying it, and it’s not to say that I’ve stopped all like bad impulse buys when it comes to, like, t-shirts that I think I’m going to love and then I don’t love or whatever. But it really has made me think a little bit more carefully about the way that I think about things like fashion, or the way that I think about like who and what I’m supporting. But yeah! I’m like really excited to see just a lot more options and a more stuff that I can feel better about and not just feel like I’m, you know, just spending money on fast fashion. So I guess I would say, fuck yeah to having way more options when it comes to places we could shop locally, places we could shop online, and maybe an even bigger fuck yeah to the fact that now I know what to get Katel for her birthday, which is definitely going to come from Wild Fang.
KL Yesssssss. Fuck yeah! That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Lilly Chin for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcast. Aaaand subscribe to our newsletter! Your support helps us spread the word, and we love that. We’ll be back next week with another great guest [music fades in, plays alone for 34 seconds, fades out to end].
Starting something new can feel super overwhelming…and kind of terrifying. The good news? A lot of us feel this way—no, really, that’s the good news! That, and we’re all in this together.
On this week’s show, we talk with Saron Yitbarek about how she started, grew, and nurtures CodeNewbie—the most supportive community of programmers and people learning to code. It all started with one little (but powerful) sentiment: be nice. We also talk to her about what it’s like to be new at something, making a place for yourself at the table even if you’re not sure there’s a seat for you, and living up to your own potential.
> I don’t think I’ve ever taken a piece of feedback that I didn’t immediately inside respond with, like, intense anger and, you know, taking offense to it. But…we’re not optimizing for my feelings. And we’re not optimizing for me patting myself on the back. That’s not the point. We’re optimizing for creating a really strong and amazing community and to be a resource for other people. > —Saron Yitbarek, founder of CodeNewbie
Also in this episode, we:
- Swap stories about first jobs, finding office advocates, and gaining the confidence to take the reins at work.
- Get pumped about summertime vibes and vow to spend a little more time outside, even if it means sweating a little. (A lot.)
And don’t forget to check out CodeNewbie’s Twitter chat, podcast, and Codeland conference.
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher [Ad spot] Do you want a workplace where you can hone your craft and make an impact? Then you should check out Shopify. Shopify creates commerce tools used by more than 600,000 merchants around the world—and they’re looking for smart, passionate problem solvers to help them grow even more. Learn more about Shopify and see all their current openings from Toronto to Tokyo at shopify.com/careers [music fades in, plays alone for 12 seconds, fades out].
Jenn Lukas Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû.
SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
KL Today is all about being new. How do you find your footing; adapt to new environments; and, ultimately, get a place at the table; and how can those of us who already feel comfortable in our industries or our jobs just do a better job of holding the door open for those who come after us. Our guest today has lots of experience with that. Her name is Saron Yitbarek and she’s the founder of CodeNewbie, an organization that’s all about, well, supporting people who are new to code. But before we get to Saron, do you all remember what it was like when you got your first sort of grown up job?
SWB I had a couple of like semi-grown-up jobs where like I still had to do a lot of like customer service but they were—like I had a salary. But my first proper grown up job, I was just about 23, about to be 23, maybe something like that, and I got a job as a junior copywriter at an ad agency. And let me tell you what: they really emphasized the “junior” [Katel says, “Aw!”] whenever they could. It took me a few months to figure out, like, who wielded power and who I could turn to, and who everybody secretly hated. And that always like—that always takes time in a job, but in that particular moment I felt like in a lot of ways I felt like really vulnerable. Like I was trying to build at the time what I thought was going to be some kind of writing career and that morphed a lot in ways that were awesome. But I was like, “Ok, this is my chance to get my foot in the door in—in some kind of industry that I want to be in,” also it turns out I don’t like advertising but, you know, I was like so kind of anxious about fitting in and performing. And it was really tough. I mean I felt I was like super tucked off by myself. I didn’t necessarily know who I could trust or who to go to. And I learned a lot while I was there but I remember feeling like such an outsider. And that feeling sucks.
KL Looking back on that, I mean I think one of the sort of nice things about getting older and growing in your career you can kind of look back and say, “I wish I had known this,” or, “If I could tell myself something.” Is there—is there anything you look back and think, “If I had known this or if I had had the confidence to do this, I could’ve gotten by a little bit more easily?”
[2:58]
SWB I think in that particular environment the thing that I wish I had realized was that they were optimized to like wring whatever they could out of their junior staff on the creative team, but also the account management team. Like that was really how they operated, and I couldn’t see that at first, right? That that was the entire structure of the business was such that you would work the hell out of the most junior people, because those people were so desperate to want to fit in and want to succeed. And not even that that would’ve like changed my behavior necessarily, because obviously I was using that as my own stepping stone or whatever, but I think what it would’ve changed is the way that I looked at it, because I think that I internalized a lot of weird shit for a while that looking back I want to be like, “Oh, baby Sara, that was some toxic bullshit that had nothing to do with you.”
JL Agency life [laughter]. My first real adult job was actually a pretty good experience. I made Navy training simulations at Lockheed Martin.
KL Woah!
JL I know [laughs]. It was different but you know what? I just worked with a really great group of people. It was a interesting scenario that a bunch of people that graduated from the same college as I did we all like went and worked there. And so it just started like someone worked there and then they were like, “Hey, you should hire my other friends,” and like they just kept hiring all of us. My first boss, his name was Bob Eagle and he had a sign outside his office that said “The Eagle’s Nest” and Bob was awesome. He’d walk around with a stress ball and he’d just be like, “How’s it goin’?” And he’d like come by and like see how things are going, and like he just genuinely cared. Like if you needed something he’d like help you out and, I don’t know, it was just like one of those things like it definitely wasn’t going to be the job for me for life. For instance there was another woman that worked there who was not in my department. I’m not sure what she did but she would come down and she—all the time she would look at me and say, “You look like the coroner chick on NCIS!” [Laughter] Yes! The super goth one [laughs].
SWB Ok sidebar: I love that she’s still super goth even though that show’s been on [laughter] a very long time. I really like that she’s like a permanent goth. I’m pro living a permanent goth lifestyle if that’s your truth—
KL Completely.
SWB —like you should do it.
KL It sounds like Bob Eagle was kind of like a coach figure though.
JL He was awesome.
KL So that’s, like, that’s amazing. I think when you have that early that—that makes you feel like, “Ok, if I can identify the advocates in this scenario or if I can kind of like figure out who the people are who are going to help me either make the right connections or like get involved in the right areas or the right groups or whatever.” That is so helpful.
[5:49]
JL And the other thing was like, really like, for that… how I left that job was really important. Because you’re working on confidential information, you sort of like get stuck in a—like how do you get another job after that? Because you can’t really show anyone anything you’ve worked on, because it’s all classified. And so I was in a position where I was like, “I don’t want to stay here longer than a year.” There’s other stuff I did want to like get more into agency and design life. And so I like applied for—I didn’t—I wasn’t sure how to do that because I didn’t, again, I didn’t really have a portfolio because all of my stuff was classified. So I applied for internships, honestly, as my next job and I decided to take one and so I went to put my notice in, and when I went to tell Bob he was like, “Huh. How many days a week you working there?” And I was like, I think it was like two or three at the time. He goes, “Why don’t you stay and work here the other two or three days til you’re ready to leave?” And I was like, “That would be amazing!” And it was just one of those things that because I was honest with my intentions and I think like I didn’t like leave in like a blaze of glory. It made it that like here was someone who was able to like look out for me who wanted me to stay and work as long as I could, so it was like beneficial for both of us. So I think like an honest conversation ended up working out really well.
SWB You know it’s interesting there’s something else that you mentioned when you were talking about that workplace. Like one of the things that made it really great was also that you—it sounded like you didn’t ever really feel like an outsider, because you had these connections to people from the college you’d gone to going in. And I think for a lot of people that’s just not going to be the reality. And obviously, like, hiring only people from one college is kind of problematic in a lot of workplaces already. So I always think of like, “Ok, now that I have a little bit more sort of like stability and some amount of context about how my industry works, how can I help other people feel less like outsiders? Because they’re not necessarily all going to have that kind of experience, and like, so what do I do with people who come in who don’t have the connections or the network or the like, “Oh I worked at my uncle’s firm last summer and learned the ropes of this industry”—like, what do you do to help those people? And I’m thinking about that a lot when it comes to the people that I encounter now who are in their twenties and who are trying to get their footing and get that door open a [chuckles] little bit. I don’t want them to feel so, like, at sea.
KL Yeah. I love this idea and I—we just hired somebody, you know, part-time at A Book Apart and she’s amazing and she’s wonderful, and I mean I think completely aside from this, she is wonderful. But a big part of when she came on board that I wanted to make sure I had in place was—and I know this can sound sort of like prescriptive, but I made sure to do a lot of planning work in the onboarding, because we’re a remote company. And I wanted to make sure she felt like she was part of a team, even though it was, you know, everyone’s remote and she didn’t know anybody she was going to be working with. So I just wanted to make sure that I introduced her to everyone and that she knew sort of what everybody did and there were some expectations for the first month and the first three months and sort of like there was a roadmap that we could follow together. And it wasn’t just like, “Ok, you’re hired! Like here’s your computer and [laughs] like you’re on your own.”
[9:05]
JL We have a summer internship program at Urban that’s starting next week and one of their managers on our team will be this woman Dee, and Dee was suggesting to call them summer associates instead of summer interns because “interns” you get the obligatory coffee jokes. And so I felt like it was like nice that she was like looking for ways to like make them feel more included right away instead of like, “Oh the interns are here.”
SWB Right, like they actually work there and they matter.
JL Yeah.
KL Right.
SWB One of the things that Saron talked about in her interview that I also thought was super interesting was feeling like she walked into rooms and didn’t feel like she had a place at the table, and she had to make space for herself. And I know I’ve had that feeling a lot, too, and I think it comes back to that same concept of making space for people. And I’m—I’m curious: have you ever had that feeling of, like, finally realizing that you had a place at the table? And how did that come to be?
KL Yeah. I definitely have. I think I sort of felt it in a couple different ways in my career, you know, in the last couple jobs I’ve had. When I worked at National Geographic I was there for a really long time and sort of worked up this, you know, ladder of management and I was getting invited to executive-level meetings and I was getting a chance to sort of like be part of those conversations but even though I was invited and I was sitting at the table, I never felt confident enough to really like say everything I wanted to say. And I think that was, you know, a combination of things not having someone who sort of made me feel empowered to do that and also I think just some general cultural stuff that was going on there. But by the time I sort of felt confident enough to do that, I was switching jobs and when I went to A Book Apart, I was facing a completely different scenario where I walked in and I had a seat at the table immediately and it was sort of like, “Here you go.” Sort of, “here are the keys.” And like, you have a seat at the table and you’re also allowed to make all these decisions, and that was sort of scary in a different way.
[11:18]
SWB Like how did you get to that place where you were new at A Book Apart and you knew you were supposed to be in a leadership role but you didn’t necessarily know what like the boundaries of that are because it’s a small, you know, small company. How did you get to a place where you like kind of took those—took the reins? I don’t know we’re talking about keys and tables but let’s throw [laughter] reins in there too. Where you like felt like you could take the reins and just be like, “Ok! I’m—this is what we’re going to do now.”
KL I felt like it was sort of double-edged for me and how I work because, like I said, I sort of came into this scenario where we were all sort of figuring out what the job was which was super exciting. It was like figure out what this role is and you make it what you—you want it to be. And that was extremely exciting but it was also terrifying because I was so used to having structure and boundaries and clear expectations. So it was like, “Ok, what do I do?” [Chuckles] Like, “What do I next?” So I think just becoming aware that I had to set some of those was—was super helpful. And I think that you don’t recognize that right away.
JL It’s interesting that like the freedom to like do these things is based on the fact that you are responsible and capable of doing these things and it’s like weird that we have to like remind ourselves of that sometimes but it’s good to know that. Be like, “Yes, I can do this.” I remember back when eventually I did start going into agency life as a junior developer and, again, that junior word. Ugh. It always really grinded my gears [laughs]. Really, really working in the vocab swaps today, ladies. You know I would like, there’d be—I’d be working on like an email campaign, let’s say there’d be an issue, but I couldn’t just tell the client what the issue was. I had to tell my manager, my manager had to tell the project manager, the project manager had to tell the account manager, and then the account manager could tell the client. The email would get forwarded, and then an email would get forwarded back down the chain to me, and by the time it got there it was like a bad game of telephone where they didn’t even describe the right problem anymore, and I was like, “But that’s not what the problem was.” “Oooh.” And I remember when I went later on to my next job I was like working on something and I was like, “Ok, you know, this is ready for the client.” And they were like, “Ok, email them.” And I was like, “What? You want me to tell the client that their templates are ready?” And they’re like, “Yessss. You are a capable adult [laughs] like who can do this.” And I was like, “Oh! Thank you for trusting me to be able to email a client,” like again not something like we’re all capable of sending an email and leaving out like expletives like of the email and writing a response.
SWB Well [laughter] speak for yourself.
JL [Laughing] “Here are your fucking templates. Have fun!!” [Laughter.] That’s exactly how I would’ve written it. You know of course we can do this, but because of the fear I think at the last job it like instilled in me of being junior, it was like, “Oh! I don’t know if I can write an email.”
[14:14]
SWB You know it’s interesting this whole concept of being a junior or whatever. I think obviously everybody has to be new at their thing at some point, like there’s no escaping that. But in some cultures I think that that labelling of somebody as the “junior” person and the way that they then get treated can be really problematic. And so something that I really loved about talking to Saron was the way that she sort of celebrates being new to something as being a really powerful place to be. And I was really excited to hear about the way that she has built that community, and it—it’s specific to code for her community, but I feel like so much of it applies to like literally anything. Can we listen to the interview?
KL I can’t wait [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out].
Our sponsors
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Interview: Saron Yitbarek
KL I am so excited to welcome Saron Yitbarek to the show today. Saron is the founder of CodeNewbie, which is the most welcoming, supportive, just plain fucking awesome international community for people learning to code. We are going to talk about how she built CodeNewbie; what it’s become; and what’s next for her and her company. Saron, welcome to No, You Go.
Saron Yitbarek Yeah, thank you so much for having me!
KL Awesome. Well, let’s start at the beginning. How and why did you start CodeNewbie?
SY So I started CodeNewbie as a reaction I guess to my own learn-to-code experience. So when I decided to first learn to code four or five years ago now, I started by doing it on my own. So I quit my job, I spent 12 to 16 hours a day couped up in my apartment, doing online coding tutorials, reading books, doing courses—anything I could really get my hands on—and it was just hard. It was really, really hard and it was hard in a different way that I expected. It was really lonely, it was frustrating, I found myself internalizing a lot of failure because, you know, when it’s you versus the computer, the computer is always right which means that you are always wrong [chuckles]. And after about three months of doing I said, “You know I think I need a little bit more structure in my learning,” and so I applied and got accepted into a bootcamp and all of a sudden I had 44 other people in the room who were going on that exact same journey with me and they—they got it. They understood it, you know? We cried when things didn’t work, we high fived when things did work, and it was so interesting to me that the biggest thing, the biggest difference, biggest bonus of having—of being part of a bootcamp is that community and that community really made all the difference. And when, you know, it was near the end of my time at the bootcamp I thought to myself, “Wow! This was one of the biggest benefits of this but I only got it because I could afford to take three months, you know, without continuing to not work and I could spend, you know, thousands of dollars on this program and that’s not accessible to most people. So how do—how do you provide that same community, that really essential community if you, you know, are not in that position of privilege.” And so I at the time Twitter chats were like a huge thing. You know people—I think people still do them now but like back then like everyone had a Twitter chat and so I thought, “Wow! Twitter chats are a really great format to, you know, to—to reach a lot of people all you need is a Twitter account and an internet, and to be awake during the time of the chat, and with just that you can get a bunch of people in the same, you know, quote/unquote “room”, virtual room and get people talking and connecting and sharing resources and that’s what happened.
[19:14]
KL That sounds really amazing and I love the fact that you built something based on sort of like a challenge that you were running into. So I want to ask a little bit about you. You’re an Ethiopian woman who’s become somewhat of a public figure, you know, working in tech and—and running this company. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience and your journey?
SY Yeah, for me my experience has been less defined by specifically being Ethiopian and more defined by being an immigrant. Like I feel like growing up as an immigrant, I never really felt like I belonged anywhere. You know? And even though I was raised in this country, I was raised in America, I came to the US when I was almost three years old. We always talked about Ethiopia as home. You know? You say, “I go back home.” You know which like even now when I think of like the word “home” I’m thinking like, “Oh! Obviously Ethiopia.” Never lived there. You know [chuckles] I’ve—I’ve been here my whole life but like in my mind there’s always this sense of occupying a space versus belonging in that space. You know with my family we were—parents are very strict, and I also like raised Jehovah’s Witness. So like there’s a whole other strictness and, you know, don’t be a part of the world that comes with that religion. My dad was very much about you know, “Get your education. Be, you know, a doctor, a lawyer. You know, don’t get—don’t get distracted by boys.” You know that whole thing. And so, yeah, I—I feel like I was very much watching the world around me and didn’t really feel like I could actively participate until I became an adult, until basically [chuckles] I like left home. And that’s my worldview. Like my worldview when I walk into a room is never like, “I own this.” Or, “This is for me.” Like there—there are very, very few times I’ve ever walked into a room or been in a place and felt like, “Yes, there’s a seat for me here.” I always feel like I have to make a seat or take someone else’s or just be loud enough that even if I don’t have a seat they can’t ignore me, you know? And I think just that element of—of always feeling like the outsider is something I’ve carried with me and has been, you know, a good thing and a bad thing in different situations but that’s probably been like the—the one part of being Ethiopian that has very strongly shaped, you know, definitely being in the tech industry and really everything else that I do.
[21:29]
SWB That’s so amazing to hear you explain it in that way, because it makes your desire to do something like CodeNewbie make a lot of sense to me. Where it’s like, oh you were out there thinking, you know, “There wasn’t a space for me. Ok, I have to figure out how to create one.”
SY Mm hmm.
SWB So I’m curious like you mentioned that CodeNewbie started out as being this Twitter chat and then it’s really grown and expanded a lot since then. Can you tell us a little bit more about that piece of it? So like once you started creating that space for you and for people like you to have these conversations and to feel more supported, how did it evolve?
SY It evolved by mostly just listening and reacting. We did the Twitter chats every Wednesday night at 6pm Pacific Time, 9pm Eastern Time for one hour, using the hashtag codenewbie and the general structure is that I would tweet out questions usually based on some type of theme and everyone in the community would answer and the value of it wasn’t really in the questions and the answers, it was more in the opportunity to hear other people’s thoughts, opinions, perspectives, stories, and the chance to connect with them. You know when you say like, “Hey, I’m going to ask a question everyone gets to answer,” you’ve kind of given permission to the community to have them talk to each other. Actually we explicitly encourage that. We say like, “You’re more than welcome like, you know, use the hashtag but you’re more than welcome to respond directly to each other.” And so that’s the real value of the Twitter chat. And so we did that for five, six months and it got to a point where I still had to kind of promote it. You know I still had to ask for retweets and, you know, push it and, you know, and all that, and then at about five, six months I said, “Huh! I don’t really need to push it anymore. Like people—people get it. You know they already know what it is, they know what it’s about, and they—they keep showing up.” And that was the moment when I was like, “Ok I think I have something. I don’t know what it is but it’s—it’s something.” And what I realized about a year into doing the Twitter chats is that—if you’ve been on Twitter you probably know that Twitter is a great way to start conversations, it is not a great way to have a conversation. 140—I guess 280 characters now is just—it’s just not enough to—to have people understand you before you piss them off [laughing] and so I kept thinking to myself, “You know what’s—what’s a good way to dig deeper into a topic if you want to unpack a particular story, a particular problem, what’s a better tool for that?” And my first job out of college was actually working at NPR and so I thought, “Oooh! Audio! Podcasting! That’s a really great medium to focus on a story, a problem, a person. To dig in for, you know, 30, 40 minutes, an hour, and, you know, just kind of live in that world for a little bit and extract as much value from that as you can.” And so, you know, that was a direct response to how—understanding limitations of the Twitter chat led to the creation of the podcast. And then I think at some point after doing the podcast, people kept asking for, you know, a—a place to meet physically which, frankly, I was kind of opposed to because, you know, I thought that the whole beauty of CodeNewbie and kind of, you know, the point was to connect people who aren’t connected. And so when I thought of meetups there was like so many limitations. You have to physically be there. You have to be able to drive there. You have to be available for a set number of hours, you know, doing nothing but the meetup itself. So it felt very exclusive in—in a way but I had like too many requests and too many who said like, “I just need in-person physical support. Like I, you know, online is great but it’s not—it’s just not the way for me.” That I kind of gave in and said, “Ok, let’s do some meetups.” So we did that in response to the community but I guess the last like big thing that we did was the conference. So when I graduated from my bootcamp two months after graduating I applied to speak at a conference which I had absolutely no business doing. It was RailsConf 2014 and I had this what I thought was a really shitty idea and I was talking to a woman, Vanessa Hurst, who is one of the co-founders of Girl Develop It. It was a really, really big really amazing non-profit teaching women to—to code and I told her my idea and she’s like, “Oh! It’s so good! It’s great!” And I’m thinking like, “Ok. If she thinks it’s good then, you know, I’m going to listen to her.” And—and then I said to her, “I’ve never spoken before, you know, do you think I should do it at a few meetups first and then, you know, maybe like sometime down the line, you know, pitch it to a—to a conference?”
[25:36]
SY [Continued] And she looked at me and she said, “I don’t believe in stepping stones.” And it just gave me chills and I was like, “Ahhhh! I too do not believe in stepping stones.” Like [laughing] it was—it was amazing. And so because of her I submitted that idea. I think it was that day—I think it was like the last day to—to submit talks and I remember so vividly being on the train, you know, on the way back home from work. And this was maybe like a month later and I—I saw the email and it said, you know, “We’re excited to offer you a position, you know, a—a speaking slot at RailsConf,” and I literally—I gasped, I laughed, and then I cried. And I was sitting across from these two little old ladies and they were very afraid of me. I looked very—I looked very unstable [laughs]. And so that was my first speaking opportunity and also my first conference. And when I got there it ended up being an amazing experience. I’ve done a ton of speaking since but what I recognized is that tech conferences are not made for newbies. They’re made for industry people. You know the idea is that you want to level up, you want to learn more about your framework, your language, your particular domain, and you go to level up. If you don’t have a solid foundation first, if you’re not up with the trends, if you just don’t even know enough to know what the trends even are, then it can be a really hard place to find value and—and to feel like you belong. And so when I was there I kept kind of making little mental notes of like, “Ah like this didn’t work for me,” and, you know, “This—it would’ve been so good if they—if they had this and that.” Everytime I go to a conference I’ve kind of just been adding to that list of things I would do differently and things I like, things I don’t like. And so I—I said to myself, “You know at some point I would love to do a conference but if I do it’s going to be super newbie friendly and I’m going to make sure no one feels lost or overwhelmed or like they don’t know what’s going on.” And I guess it was three years after my first tech conference, I produced CodeLand which is our conference specifically designed for newbies and that was also a reaction to my own experiences. So that’s a long way of saying it’s been a lot of listening. It’s been a lot of listening to the community, figuring out what the best solution is, figuring out how to hopefully execute that well, and give people the tools they need to succeed.
[27:46]
KL That’s so cool. I feel like when you were talking about that advice that you got of, you know, not believing in stepping stones it was like that was the message you needed to hear in that moment. I really love it. When you were getting into tech and into this industry and building a huge community there, has that shaped your experience in your work and your life in general?
SY It’s made me a lot more tolerant of [chuckles] people’s differing opinions, meaning like, you know, when they’re different from my own very strongly held opinions. It’s really—you know we talk about inclusion a lot and, you know, to be clear CodeNewbie is not, you know, a diversity effort, it’s not a diversity initiative but I think that everything should inherently be inclusive. I think we should always strive to include as many voices and perspectives as possible, regardless of, you know, what industry or what problem you’re trying to solve, and so in the efforts of doing that I’ve learned that I have a ton of blind spots. You know even being an Ethiopian immigrant woman, you know, non CS holding, you know, person. Like I have a ton of blind spots that I didn’t realize that I had and it’s from being very open to being critiqued—actually that was—I had like a little closing talk at CodeLand and the message of that was please call us out. If you see us do something that you feel like is a little off brand. If you see a better way that we can do something. If you see that we’ve excluded someone. If you see that we’ve, you know, done something that it just doesn’t follow our values, the values that we’ve stated, please send me a message. Send me an email. And people have. People have over the years and, you know, it’s one of those things where it’s never fun to be called out. You know especially when you pride yourself on certain values and someone’s like, “Mm mm! No. You didn’t—you know you did that thing and that thing is not the thing.” So you’re—you know, it’s—it’s hard to—to listen to that and kind of not—and I don’t think I’ve ever taken a piece of feedback that I didn’t immediately inside respond with, like, intense anger and, you know, taking offense to it. But then I say like, “Ok that’s not—that’s not what we’re optimizing for.” Right? Like we’re not optimizing for my feelings. And we’re not optimizing for me patting myself on the back. That’s not the point. We’re optimizing for creating a really strong and amazing community and to be a resource for other people. And if we’ve decided that that’s the goal, that’s what we’re working towards then it’s a lot easier to, you know, feel your feelings but then put ‘em aside and tell ‘em to shut the fuck up. And then go about and, you know, go about and, you know, listen to the things that people say and implement those changes. So just being more open to being critiqued, being more tolerant, and just understanding that even though I’m a double minority or a triple minority, it’s probably, you know, quadruple I’m sure if we think harder. Everyone has their biases, everyone has their blind spots, and, you know, and I’m not an exception to that.
[30:37]
SWB Gosh, that is so important. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, because I give a lot of talks that are about, you know, the way that bias gets actually built into tech products, right? Which means that I have to talk about all these issues and like I’ve had to really come to terms with the fact that I’m going to fuck it up sometimes or like I think that for me it’s been like this process of saying, “Ok. I’m going to talk about things that are difficult and uncomfortable, and—and the reason that they are difficult and uncomfortable is that they are not talked about enough and that like we are bad at talking about things if we don’t practice it [chuckles].” So, guess what! You’re going to have to do this and sometimes you may do it badly because you won’t be able to do a good job at it without some missteps along the way, and like to try to look at it as like this is—this is just what you have to do now. I also feel you though, oh my gosh, Saron, I like—[sighs] I get that same response. That first like immediately like—
SY “Who do you think you are?!?”
SWB Right! Like, “Can’t you see—can’t you see—”
SY “I’m trying so hard.”
SWB Yes! Exactly! “Can’t you see I’m trying so hard here?!?” And then it’s like, hmm, nope. Not—valuable. Like, you can have that feeling but like that doesn’t add anything to the world. And it’s so hard and it’s so important I think to like acknowledge that that’s like a super normal response. We can all have that feeling and then like you can’t make that the important thing of the conversation, right? Like I’m so tired of—I think so many of the problems we face are like people putting their feelings at the same bar of like actual harm being done.
SY Yeah!!! Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And what I’ve learned is that the tendency is to justify it, right? The tendency is to explain yourself, the tendency is always, “No, no, no, no. That’s not what I meant.” What, you know, like, ok, fine, I, you know, I keep saying the word “guys” that I know that it’s not inclusive but like I’m not a bad person, you know? Like [chuckling] that’s really what it comes down to is you convincing, frankly, usually like this stranger on the internet that you’re not a bad person, and what has—there’s two things that have kind of helped me not do that and number one is, you know, people have done that to me and I’m just like it just looks so bad. It looks so bad. But also I’ve learned to recognize that when someone takes the time to give me constructive feedback, it’s because they trust that I’ll do something about it. Like it’s a sign of faith. You know I’ve never given feedback to—and I see a bunch of questionable things all the time in the tech community and when I give feedback it’s usually because I know the brand didn’t mean to, right? Like if I saw a brand and they’re obviously sexist and then they, you know, do something like that’s a little questionable, what’s the point? You’ve already decided that you’re sexist. It’s risky for me to put my neck out there and it’s not helping my life, like I’m trying to help you be better. And if I think that you actually don’t care and I think you actually are sexist, racist, whatever-ist, I’m not going to bother. But if I email and say, “Hey, I noticed blah blah blah blah. You—you know I know you really care about blah blah blah so you might consider doing blah blah blah.” That’s a huge sign of faith. That’s a huge sign of me saying, “I trust that you actually care. It probably wasn’t intentional. It’s probably a blind spot you weren’t aware of and, you know, and—and I want—I want the best for you and so I’m going to try to be helpful.” Like that’s actually what that means. Recognizing that that’s usually what people mean when they do it to me really helps me get over myself.
[34:01]
SWB Totally! I’ve referred to it before as, like, that kind of feedback doesn’t feel like it, but it’s actually a gift.
SY Yeah, absolutely.
SWB It’s somebody doing you a kindness.
KL Mm hmm. This makes me think of, again, that—the idea that the things that are—are driving this community and what you set out to do with this community are really baked into, you know, every piece of it. Are there a set of values and principles that drive the community?
SY Oh yeah definitely. We start every single Twitter chat with our three rules: be helpful, be supportive, be nice. We—we declare it every single week and we really try to embody that as much as possible. So if you—it’s so funny, if you look at, you know, the CodeNewbie Twitter account compared to like my Twitter account, it’s very different brands. Like it’s very different branding. [Chuckles] I think that, you know, especially with the CodeNewbie account my—my goal was to be your biggest cheerleader. This characteristic—this like quality, you know, really came out to me I think it was two years ago? Yeah I think it was about two, three years ago. I was at work and I had this—this terrible, terrible pain in my right shoulder and I write with my right hand. So I had this terrible, terrible pain on my right shoulder and it was actually like my first week at a new job. So it was very bad timing. And it hurt so much that I ended having to go home early to see a doctor. That day—that night, it came back again really, really strong. It just it hurt—it hurt so bad that my—my shoulder was like frozen, meaning I just I could barely move it. Like I just physically couldn’t move my arm and it hurt so much that I was crying. Like I was just—just howling in pain. And this was two minutes before the Twitter chat was supposed to start. And so I’m sitting at my computer and I’m like, you know, like holding my arm and just, you know, crying and howling, and my husband’s looking at me and he’s like, “We have to go to the emergency room.” And I said, “No!! It’s time for the Twitter chat!” And so I—I said to him, I was like, “You are going to type. I am dictating to you. You’re going to type and you’re—we’re doing this chat together.” And, you know, he knows better than to—to mess with me. So we sat at my desk and opened the computer and, you know, I’m—I’m dictating to him and that’s when I realize like how seriously I take this because, you know, he’ll type something that’s pretty friendly and I’m like, “There’s not enough exclamation points!” [Laughter] “You need three exclamation points minimum!” You know? And—and Suzy will be like, you know, “I—I just contributed to my first open source, you know, request.” And I’m like, “Congratulate Suzy!!!” You know? [Boisterous laughter] “With–with smiley faces!!!”
[36:28]
KL It’s so obvious to me that you do such a great job of bringing people along with that and an explicit sort of member criteria of being nice and I think that that’s so incredibly important and it draws other people who value that into the community. Did that come from a specific place? And like how—how do you maintain it?
SY I really—I wanted it to be very clear the type of behavior that’s expected. Like very, very clear. Like there’s no question of who we are, what we’re about, and—and what we will, you know, put up with, and what type of behavior we encourage which is why we start every Twitter chat, you know, for the last four years has started with those three rules and we embody that. We, you know, we—we show that in every tweet that we do and every post and the podcast—in everything we do, we try to be as supportive and positive and inclusive as we can be. And so I think that when you are showing the values that you declare and you’re like showing them off, you know, and—and really just pushing them really hard, you tend to, I think, kind of gross out people who don’t believe that. Like it kind of becomes annoying. You know? Like if you’re like, “Everyone’s amazing all the time!!!,” you know? That can be annoying for assholes. So I think what I found is that by being aggressively positive and kind of over the top with displaying these values and these qualities, we’ve given people an opportunity to self-select. And if you are mean, you don’t believe these things, I think you just don’t want to sit with us. You know? I think we would just annoy the crap—like it’s not fun to hang out with us. And that was very intentional.
SWB I was also thinking about it as like, I think that it’s so intensely positive that that might seem over the top, except that when you step back and you realize that so many people are plagued by self doubt and also have, like, other voices that are not positive. It’s like, I think people are really hungry for that. And it’s such a gap that they don’t—they don’t have. And so if you were a person—like if CodeNewbie was literally just a human person, like it was just you, coming from your voice, it might feel like, “Ok, ok. This is a little much.” But coming from this other entity and kind of making it this bigger community feel, it feels totally right.
[38:50]
SY Yeah! That’s—you absolutely nailed it. It’s what people need, and if you don’t need it, then you won’t be with us. It’s just that simple.
SWB So, I think it’s pretty clear people needed that because CodeNewbie has grown and grown and grown and become this big, massive thing and it’s now your full-time job, right?
SY Yeah, I’ve been doing it full-time for almost two years.
SWB That is really amazing.
KL Yeah.
SWB So can you—can you just tell us, how did you turn that into something that you could really like leave your job for and be able to make not just a supportive community but, like, something that could also sustain you?
SY Yeah. So I think it was three months maybe after doing the—the podcast, the CodeNewbie podcast, that someone emailed and said, “Hey, can I give you 200 bucks to run an ad on your podcast?” And I thought, “I can paid for this? That’s crazy! That—that’s amazing!” You know? And so I—I took that and I said yes and I thought like, “Oh. Like maybe—maybe there’s a way to—to like turn this into something that’s actually sustainable.” And so that was kind of the—the beginning of that. You know I found that a lot of community leaders—I think one of the fundamental mistakes that they make is that they tend to undervalue what they have. So I remember this was maybe a couple of months ago I remember seeing—I don’t remember if it was a tweet or like an email in a mailing list. I remember seeing something where this person was or—was trying to organize a conf—her first conference, I think it was her conference, for a community and she was looking for sponsors. And the way she was pitching it and talking about it was, you know, “Oh! I—I just need a little bit more money to—to be able to, you know, pull this this off and if you all work at companies that could possibly help me out, I’d really appreciate it.” And I was like, “Oh no. Oh no, no, [laughter] no, no. That’s not—that’s not how you do that.” You know? And her community was women in tech or something. And I, you know, I’m thinking to myself, “Do you know how valuable that is?!? Do you know how many sponsors, how many companies, are dying to get in front of, you know, badass women in tech? Like that’s—you have—you have an asset! Like that’s what it is. You—you have so much value in your community leadership and you need to—you need to at least recognize that, you know, whether you use a thing about it is another thing but you need to at least see that.” And I think what I’ve been—why I’ve been, you know, more successful than most people who start communities is recognizing that and thinking, “Ok. Who else would find this valuable? And how can I turn that into something that allows me to support myself and to do more projects and dedicate more time to it?” And I think it’s understanding the value that you bring. I think that is the key to—to sustainability.
[41:37]
KL Yeah, absolutely. So I have a question for you, and I’ve just been thinking a lot about, you know, everything that you’ve been talking to me sounds like it takes a lot of energy and drive. So I wanted to ask you about a tweet that you had pinned to your account for awhile and it read, “I struggle with depression and a year ago I made this video for myself. Totally forgot about it, made my night.” And the video is sort of a video note to your future self giving yourself a pep talk. Why—like why did you make that video and how did you find yourself being so open to talk about that?
SY I have a hard time being by myself. I have a really hard time being by myself and I think that I have unintentionally unknowingly been distracted by the fact that I’m always thinking about other people, whether it’s my, you know, before I did CodeNewbie full-time, whether it was like my—my quote/unquote “real job”, or whether it was doing CodeNewbie. I feel like I’ve always been in some way doing some type of community work or just something that just involves a huge amount of collaboration and just, frankly, putting everyone’s needs first and I think that that has been a really awesome distraction from my own problems [chuckles] and it wasn’t until I uh so I used to work at Microsoft before I—I quit to do CodeNewbie full-time and it wasn’t until I didn’t have Microsoft anymore and I was working on my own that like quote/unquote “all of a sudden” all these mental health issues kept coming up and I—I just found myself, you know, upset for no reason, sad for no reason, just, you know, just depressed. It was, you know, and—and it got, you know, it got really bad last year. Like 2017 was such a shit year. I mean for many reasons but like personally just like easily the worst year of my life. And and it was really, really, really fucking hard and it was—it wasn’t hard because I had to do CodeNewbie and kind of like put on this persona of taking care of everyone else but it made it weird. It made it weird to kind of like, you know, spend all day in bed crying hating my life and then right at 6pm Pacific Time: “Hey, everybody! Welcome to the CodeNewbie Twitter chat!” You know? Like that’s weird. It’s really weird. And I’m—and frankly I’m really proud of myself for still, you know, maintaining my duties during that period but that was—it was very, very bad. It was a very, very dark year. And it’s really forced me to reevaluate really like every part of my life. Like I’ve changed my eating, my exercise habits, I’ve changed like the way that I work. I really felt like I had to rebuild myself. I felt like I had to rebuild it thinking like, “Ok you—you need to consider this—this new friend of yours now, called Depression, and you need to—like we have to address this. We can’t just, you know, pretend it’s not there and just kind of, you know, hope it’ll leave. It’s—it won’t. So, we need to—we need to like actively work on it.” It became like a—I think it got really bad in like June, it was like right after CodeLand, I think it was like June. So it became like this six, eight month project that I was actively working on. I’m super, super—I mean, honestly, like the—my greatest achievement is, you know, being able to address it and get to a place where I can manage it now but, yeah, it’s—I find that when I’m—when I’m alone with my thoughts that’s when I have to deal with my thoughts. And that has been the hardest part.
[45:04]
KL That’s so incredibly encouraging to hear and I—I completely I feel so much of what you said. I think just becoming aware of it and knowing that it’s this new thing that is in your life that, you know, you have to manage. You have to, you know, deal with. So I think that’s—that’s really great to hear and I mean personally I’m—I’m really glad that you’re—you’re in that place that you can support the amazing thing that you’re building. So we have just one last question for you, you know, on that note, what drives you to keep pushing at this and keep growing and nurturing what you’ve built?
SY My drive really comes from answering the question, like, “Can I live up to my potential?” You know the way I was, you know, I—I was raised like I mentioned really strict parents actually my mom was—I think she was pretty lax. I think it was really just my dad. But, you know, a strict upbringing. It was all about like, you know—like my dad would make homework for me. You know what I mean? Like—like that type of family. Like he would like create his own homeword. And so I think, for me, it’s just always been about just internalizing, frankly, what my—what my parents taught which is that complacency is—is not an option. If you want to be great, you have to work super fucking hard, and you have to work super fucking hard forever, and that’s like—like that’s life. Like that’s just how life works and so, you know, whether it’s CodeNewbie, whether it’s, you know, something else, whatever it is that I do, if I care about it, it really comes down to like, “Can I live up to the potential of this thing that I’m doing?” And that’s—that’s my biggest driver.
SWB Well, Saron, I think it’s very clear that you’ve worked very hard on CodeNewbie. I think it definitely shows [Saron laughs]. So can you let our listeners where they can find out more about you and about CodeNewbie?
SY My Twitter handle is @saronyitbarek, just my first name and last name. And you can find out more about CodeNewbie at www.codenewbie.org. The CodeNewbie Twitter handle is very, very active, so @codenewbies with an ‘s’ because someone already took codenewbie but, yeah, those are the places to learn more about us.
SWB Awesome! It has been so great to chat with you today and we \ _really_ appreciate you being on the show. Thanks, Saron.
KL Yeah, thank you so much.
SY Thank you! This was a lot of fun. Thanks so much for having me [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out].
[47:18]
Fuck Yeah Of The Week
SWB Well, I know it’s time for the Fuck Yeah of the Week, because Katel has a huge smile on her face.
JL And she’s dancing.
SWB She just shimmied, actually, in this room. I swear to god. Katel, what is the Fuck Yeah this week?
KL It’s true I was shimmying, and that is because—so I just had a nice cold, refreshing glass of rosé when we started recording tonight, and it was wonderful, and that made me think of how it’s sort of the unofficial official start of summer. And I’m so glad because I just love being outside. I think a lot of us do. And I’ve been thinking about just—not just being outside and kind of walking instead of taking a cab or whatever but sort of reconnecting with nature [laughs] as, you know, sort of cheesy as that might sound. There are a lot of nice hiking trails around here and I really want to take advantage of more of them and, I don’t know, I just—I hope that we all take a little bit of time to explore our own cities, and towns, and neighborhoods, and I know we’ve talked a lot about doing that a little bit more now that the weather’s nice. I also vow to not complain about how hot it gets this summer because this winter so cold and so long. So if you catch me complaining, feel free to—to stop me but I’m just glad it’s so nice out now.
SWB I make no such vow [laughter] to not complain about how hot it is.
KL That’s ok.
SWB I gotta be honest: I’m really glad that you can’t like see me on the podcast, because I feel like I’m just a sweaty person [light laughter]. But I’m trying to make peace with that because the reality is that I love to go outside and do stuff outside all year round. And I always think of like my birthday as the launch of summer because my birthday’s always around Memorial weekend.
KL Yeah!
SWB And so on my birthday this year—actually, Katel came with me, we went to look at like some historic ships [laughing] in the harbor here in Philadelphia and sat outside at a beer garden. And that to me was so refreshing, not just because we looked at boats, or because we were drinking beers on the Delaware, but because there’s a moment this time of year where like a—a switch flips in me where I just care a little less about stupid bullshit. And I’m like, “Ahhh! Summer.” And I want to kind of like lean into that a little bit and like let myself take it a little easier. You know I had a \ _very_ busy spring that was like made busier by some unexpected stuff and so I’m \ _really_ hyped to sit in the backyard with my rosé or my iced coffee or whatever, depending on time of day, day of week. And like enjoy that. And not feel like I should be doing something else, and allow myself to be like, “Hey! It’s 3:30 pm on a Friday in the summertime, like, maybe you can knock off for the weekend?” And like, you know, like give myself a little bit more permission to say, “Fuck yeah to fuck it.”
[50:16]
KL Yeah.
JL I’m listening to you both, I’m like, “Ah that sounds really nice.” I’m trying to think of like how to apply that to my life. I mean I can’t really knock off at 3:30, I’ve got the—I’ve got the old 9 to 5 and then I’ve got the child. But what I have been doing recently is like we talked before in like a previous episode about like meal prepping. So like we could eat together as a family, and like get our son to bed at like a decent hour. And then essentially when we’re done with that I feel like, “Ok. So from eight o’clock to nine o’clock I’m like trying to like clean up a bit, maybe like answer some emails, do some like last things,” and then I’m like, “Ok, I’m going to bed because I am tired from the day.” And the other day we did instead after he went to bed I was like, “You know what? I’m just going to sit outside and paint my nails.”
KL I love that!
JL It was awesome! I was like, “Oh I miss this. I miss this.” And so trying to balance the like getting a good night’s sleep and like taking a moment to like sit outside and enjoy the air, and I’m not really sure what my balance will be on that yet but I have to try like think more about it and maybe see if I can sneak a few more of those in somewhere.
KL Yeah! I think just like let’s just try to go outside, a little bit more.
SWB Fuck yeah.
KL Fuck yeah!
That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music if by The Diaphone. Thanks to Saron Yitbarek for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate up on Apple Podcasts. Your support means the world and it really helps us spread the word. We’ll be back next week with another great guest [music fades in, plays for 32 seconds, fades out to end].
Introvert, extrovert, ambivert: how real are these labels? And how can we use them to do a better job of making space for more types of people—without pigeonholing anyone?
We’re joined this week by Rachel Robertson, a designer and UX lead at Shopify. We first heard about Rachel when we stumbled on an article she wrote called “An Introvert’s Guide to Collaboration.” In it, she talks about how she used to carve out work she could do independently—but realized this was keeping her from growing, because she wasn’t exposing herself to different perspectives that could improve her work.
> I love when people share their experiences and their perspectives… and I always benefit so much from that. So there was a point in time recently where I wanted to participate more in that conversation, and not just be a consumer of everyone else’s points of view. > —Rachel Robertson, UX lead at Shopify
We ask Rachel more about her experience as an introverted person, how that’s changed her approach to leading a team, and what companies can do to make themselves more inclusive to people like her.
Also in this episode, we:
- Discuss the mixed feelings people had about these introvert/extrovert lounge signs at Confab, a conference Sara recently attended.
- Look at the roots of the seemingly innocuous term “grandfather clause”
- Give a big fuck yeah to deleting apps, consider the Time Well Spent movement, and promise to really actually close the Twitter tab this time (any second now)
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.
Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Try it free, then use code NOYOUGO to get 50% off your first paid month.
Transcript
Katel LeDû [Ad spot] Finding the right job is hard work. Good thing there’s Shopify. Shopify is on a mission to make commerce better for everyone—and they’re looking for impactful, ambitious, and passionate people to help them do it. If you want to be part of a diverse team that loves solving problems—and help entrepreneurs around the world start and grow their businesses—then you should check out Shopify. Visit shopify.com/careers for all the info [music fades in, plays alone for 12 seconds, fades out].
Jenn Lukas Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
KL I’m Katel LeDû.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. We’ve got tons in store on today’s show: we’re going to check in on our vocab swaps; we’re going to share our Fuck Yeah of the Week; and of course we’re going to hear from a great guest. This week we are joined by designer Rachel Robertson who’s here to chat with us about how she learned to collaborate as an introvert, and what that taught her about leading teams with a range of different needs. So, speaking of being an introvert or an extrovert, I was at a conference just this past week and they had these really interesting signs outside the lounges. So they had these two lounges where you could kind of chill out between sessions or if you wanted to skip out on a session, and one of them was labeled “The Introvert Lounge” and one was labeled “The Extrovert Lounge.” And it was pretty neat, I’d never seen something like that where they specifically labeled one to be, you know, where you could do quiet stuff or you can be doing work or checking email. And the other one where you could have a conference call or plays games or chat with people. And one of the things that happened after that conference was that … a tweet went viral of a photo of this and there was like such a divided conversation about whether this was good or bad. The people that thought it was good were like, “Oh my gosh, this is how humans work.” And the people who thought it was bad were like, “This feels kind of like… judgy to people who are extroverts, or judgy to people who are introverts.” Or it feels like, “I don’t want to be labeled as one or the other,” and it really got me thinking I feel like introvert and extrovert has been this like really common discussion just in the past year or two, and I’ve always felt kind of weirded out by the language even though like probably most people would be like, “Sara, you’re an extrovert.” Like, “Sara, c’mon like you’re—you’re an extrovert. It’s pretty obvious. Just own it.” And I agree with that, but I also feel like there’s something weird about having that as an identity versus like being like, ok, sometimes I feel extroverted and I want to do extroverted things, and other times I don’t. And like, you know, sure I trend more to one side more than some people. But, I don’t know, I guess I’ve always felt like that was a way that we try to like put people into boxes and so, I don’t know, I’m curious: do you identify as an introvert or an extrovert, and what does that mean to you?
KL I definitely—I identify as an introvert based on I think the one thing that I have read routinely about, you know, sort of what defines an introvert and that is—or this is the part I relate to the most—which is that I recoup my energy by being alone and having downtime and sort of if I am in heavy social situations, I—I need to sort of like have that recuperation time. But I also feel like I’m extremely social in a lot of situations and when I go to a party I like to chat with a lot of people and I don’t—I don’t necessarily feel inhibited in terms of meeting new people or like talking to folks but, I don’t know, so I think I have—like now that you’re saying that I feel like I’ve felt sort of torn about it and I feel uneasy because I don’t know if I do fit squarely in one of those boxes. Yeah, so, I don’t know, that brings up an interesting question.
[3:50]
JL I liked a lot of the comments on this Twitter thread that brought up, you know, where do—where do ambiverts fit in? And I was like, “Huh, I haven’t heard that phrase before.” And so the ambivert is mix of extrovert and introvert and I was like, “Oh. Thank you,” because people when they see me I think, similar feeling, they assume I’m an extrovert. And that’s maybe just because like I’ve been in social situations, I do public speaking. But, the same way as you can tell like, I don’t really mind the public speaking but I get really tired afterwards, and I just like—there’s times where I can get a mix of like the energy from being around people, but I also want to like go to my hotel room, order room service, and just hide. And so there’s definitely a big mix of things. It’s weird to me when I hear that idea of like, “I need to recuperate by downtime,” I can’t imagine any other way. Like I can’t imagine not having downtime. Like the idea that someone doesn’t, like… is that really like a thing that people don’t want downtime?
SWB Yeah, I guess I feel like this is why I think that the concepts of introversion and extroversion are super helpful, but the identity labels are not always as helpful, because I think humans need downtime, and there’s—there’s differences in how much and when, but absolutely, like I consider myself fairly extroverted in a lot of scenarios, but I also need to hide in my room sometimes, and I also get to a point where I feel very tired after a lot of social interactions. I just think that that is true for all humans at some point and the points obviously differ, but there’s been this attempt to, again, right, like it’s convenient to give people a label and be like, “You’re this and you’re that,” and I think that the reality is just so much more nuanced. And I think that that’s one of the things that—it’s like step one is just recognizing, like, people have differences, and step two is recognizing that those differences almost always fall on whole spectrums and people don’t have the same experiences. And that seems to be a harder shift to get people to—to sort of take seriously.
JL Yeah. I really liked that they were addressing this at conference.
KL Yeah!
JL But I didn’t love the versus vibe. And that’s the thing that I feel like all these things—like we had to do one of those Myers Briggs personality tests at work one time—and all that ends up with I feel like is people judging you. And it just felt like it was one of those things you’re supposed to do so you can work well together with people—
[6:21]
KL And like know more about yourself.
JL Yes.
KL Whatever but yeah.
JL Which in an ideal world, if you can get that to work, is great. However, it doesn’t always work.
KL Yeah.
JL And that’s the part that I think is tough.
KL It’s almost like—I get the—I think I get the thing that they were trying to do but, you know, obviously hindsight and looking back on it and being like, “I would’ve done this differently.” I mean it’s almost like saying, ok this room is going to be like chill—a chill vibe and quiet—and you can come in here and just like do your thing, and listen to music or whatever. And then this room is going to be games. And so there’s obviously going to be an element of, you know, getting to know people in a social—like interaction. That kinda feels more like you get the idea without having to be like, “I’m a this.”
JL You didn’t tell me there were games.
KL Yeah [laughs].
SWB So—so, speaking though of like hindsight and like, oh gosh. Huge shout-out to Confab, the content strategy conference that I was at, and, specifically, to Tenessa Gemelke, who runs the event. She’s sort of like the director of all things Confab, and after this tweet blew up—you know, it’s like retweeted 4,000 times and there’s this like huge debate happening in the thread— she talked a little about, oh, you know, “I learned a lot from reading these comments.” And one of the things that she said was that when they designed this she was really imagining it like the—the copy underneath each of these signs is, like, punching up. So she sees herself as being super extroverted and one of the things it said on the lounge copy was like—on the introvert lounge was where you can “hide from extroverts.” And she thought that was funny because as somebody who identifies as extroverted, she was like, “Oh, you know, this is—this is punching up. This is not making fun of people who might feel uncomfortable with it.” And she realized that that wasn’t the case for everybody. And—and I think that, you know, I think that the intention makes a ton of sense, and I bet that they’re going to do something similar again but I’m confident they’re going to have some slightly different labels. And, you know, I liken this a lot to the same kind of stuff I’ve talked about with when it comes to user experience design. Right? Like professional work where… it’s so much more helpful usually to ask people what they want to do than it is to get people to define who they are, because defining who you are is really fraught and almost always if you try to make people define who they are by like selecting this category or that category, there are going to be people who do not fit the boxes. And I think that that’s the same here. And I happen to feel comfortable using both rooms, right? Like I used one room when I was doing quiet things and then I used another room when I saw a bunch of my friends in there and we were going to play Apples to Apples, and that was fucking great, but I don’t know that everybody would feel comfortable that way.
[9:04]
JL Yeah. I mean I would sit, generally, in the quiet car on an Amtrak train, but sometimes I’ll walk over to the cafe car and get some train wine, you know?
KL Oh look at you! [Laughs]
JL It just—it just depends a little bit. However, I don’t necessarily want to be put into the same group as the other riders that I’m riding with on an Amtrak train because I don’t think that necessarily we would fit into the same sort of focus group labels just because we ride on the same kind of train on the Amtrak.
SWB Well, uh right, again, like I go to the quiet car all the time on Amtrak because I want to do some work and I don’t want to be bothered randos and that’s great but that doesn’t mean that I identify as “quiet person.”
JL Doesn’t mean that you can’t have an Amtrak hot dog.
SWB I don’t eat rail dogs [laughs]. But you know what I mean? Like if I tried to say, “No, I’m a quiet person.” You would all laugh at me. I am not a quiet person. But I’m a capable of being quiet during a train journey because I’ve chosen to be in a quiet environment.
KL You know who’s not capable? A lot of people [laughter]. And I have very often appointed myself as the Quiet Car Patrol. So, just, you know, I’m very fun to ride the train with.
SWB I prefer Quiet Car Vigilante [laughter]. You have to, like, mete out justice in the quiet car.
KL [Laughs] It’s so true.
SWB The worst I had was somebody who was watching YouTube videos with no headphones.
JL In the quiet car?!?
SWB Yes.
JL Shame.
[10:29]
SWB Extreme shame. I know. Listeners, I love all of you, except for the ones who are doing anything without headphones in the quiet car. So, I think we all are kind of on the same page that like we have varying degrees of introversion and extroversion and like fitting neatly into one box or the other is maybe not always helpful or even possible but I still think it’s so interesting to kind of talk about those different facets of people and I think a lot of business culture has really been like designed with the idea that more extroversion is the ideal. That like, that is the best way to be, and that if you’re less like that, you should try to be more like that. And so one of the things I was really excited about when we talked to Rachel, our guest today, was that she was kind of pushing back against some of that. That it’s not like there’s one better way to be, it’s that we haven’t necessarily optimized workplace environments so that more people can be successful in them. And so I’m super interested in talking about these concepts—even if they don’t perfectly fit—because I think that that’s so valuable to start to look at, like, well what do we change in the way that we operate our companies? Or what do we change in the way that we run meetings so that they become places where like more of us can, I don’t know, not be miserable—
KL And thrive.
SWB Totally. That’s probably a better answer than not be miserable.
KL I totally agree. I can’t wait to hear from Rachel. Should we do it?
SWB Let’s do it.
Our sponsors
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[13:28]
Interview: Rachel Robertson
SWB Rachel Robertson is a UX lead at Shopify—which is, full disclosure, as you probably already know, a sponsor of ours that we’ve had for quite some time. But that’s not actually why we wanted to talk with Rachel today. The reason we wanted to talk with Rachel is that we stumbled on this awesome article that she wrote called “An Introvert’s Guide to Collaboration.” In that article she talks about how she used to carve out work that she could do independently. And then she realized that it was preventing her from growing because she wasn’t seeing new perspectives and learning from other people as much as she wanted to be. So we’re going to talk today about what she did to change that, and how that realization has shifted the work that she does as a designer and also the work she does as a leader. Rachel, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Rachel Robertson Thanks for having me.
SWB So let’s start with this article. What was it that made you realize that you needed to get better at collaboration? Or find a way for collaboration to work for you?
RR There wasn’t this like ah-ha moment, but I realized that I wasn’t having as much impact as I could have if I was working more collaboratively. At the time, as I mention in the article, like Shopify was growing quite a bit, and I knew that in order to have the impact that I wanted to have and, you know, be a good role model for more women joining the team, that I needed to start collaborating. Some things that I realized was that it’s really important to understand the people who you’re working with and for them to understand you, and to like be the person to help facilitate that inclusion in the team, and to work actively with each other.
SWB You know it’s interesting because as somebody who thinks of themselves as introverted and finds it difficult to kind of be more, I don’t know, I guess assertive or vocal in situations, it puts you in sort of a vulnerable position to have to tell other people what you need. How did you get to a place where you felt comfortable doing that?
RR Authenticity is something that’s really important at Shopify, and so people are encouraged and supported to be their authentic self. And, you know, to be your authentic self, you have to really be honest about what your true needs are and who you are. So I felt like the environment already kind of optimized for helping me feel comfortable doing that. But my challenge was more about how I typically tend to stay in my own head and internalize, and in a lot of cases, again, I think it’s just a personality thing, I tend to overlook my own needs. So I need to be really intentional about not doing that in order to sort of like participate in this culture that I work in.
SWB Yeah, so, let’s talk a little bit about what those are, because I know you mentioned in the article that you started doing this thing where you created like a blueprint for yourself to kind of help people understand where you’re coming from or what you need. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, what is it that you need? And sort of like, how did you … articulate that or formalize that in a way that other people could use?
[16:26]
RR The blueprint exercise is basically just an activity that a team can do. It’s a practical review of outlining who you are as an individual, what your preferences are, any work quirks that you have. And I think this was actually a method that—I mean I didn’t invent this, I probably found out about this idea from someone who found out about it from someone else. But as someone who is on the quieter side and has sometimes struggled to kind of like break into conversations or kind of like build a rapport really quickly with people, this method resonated with me because it was something structured and specific that I could do that communicated sort of like what I bring to the team, to my teammates. But also it’s really important if you’re working with people to understand them and that they understand you. So bringing them into the activity as well.
SWB Yeah. So, tell us more. So, you mentioned that it’s a structured activity. For people who haven’t read the article yet, we’re going to link it in the show notes. But can you tell a bit more? Like what goes into that blueprint? What are the different pieces to that activity and sort of what does it reveal about you and about your team?
RR Yeah, so I had down things like, “What is your superpower and your work quirks?” So by that I mean preferred methods of learning or, you know, your communication style, anything that you can think of really. Skills and interests. People’s backgrounds because that’s always interesting I think. And what people can come to talk to me or whoever is filling the blueprint out about, which kind of reveals the things that they feel they really bring to the team. A fun fact about me is that I have a bachelor of fine arts in contemporary dance, specializing in choreography, and that I had this little dance troupe for a while. And it’s just, you know, kind of like a little humanizing fact about myself that’s a point of interest.
SWB And what kinds of stuff did you end up learning about your teammates this way?
RR You pick up the things that are unique about everyone, but also make the connections over things that you have in common. So, you know, there’s kind of—it’s nice to see that diversity in the team, but also the things that you have in common. And then a big one is kind of the fear of public speaking and the nervousness of being around the center of attention. That one’s pretty common in my team.
SWB And yet here you are being interviewed for a podcast today.
RR Yes, I know [laughs].
[19:00]
SWB How are you feeling about that?
RR It’s exciting. I mean I am—I am nervous, not too nervous, but it’s exciting because right now something that I’m excited about in my professional growth is, I’m trying to practice feeling a bit more comfortable exposing myself to a broader audience than, you know, just my day-to-day team. So it’s a bit scary, but also I’m motivated to do it because I’m trying to grow in this area.
SWB Yeah that’s really interesting. So as somebody who’s not necessarily very introverted, it’s—it’s interesting for me to listen to people who talk about, you know, wanting to kind of like keep things more to themselves and being more likely to kind of retreat internally, and yet simultaneously having that desire to get out in front of people and to be able to talk about things. So how do those things come together for you? What makes you want to share the things you know and sort of talk more publicly?
RR I guess if we’re talking about introversion I should probably define a little bit about what that means to me. So for me it’s, you know, aspects of being more internal and in my own head and really needing to be alone a lot of the time, and drawing my energy back from being alone. But I don’t see it as something that I’m trying to get over or deal with. I think it’s just, you know, part of who I am and it is being my authentic self. I try to stay in tune with what is motivating me, and things that motivate me are, like, personal growth and having an impact, and I love when people share their experiences and their perspectives—like reading about it, listening to it—and I always benefit so much from that. So there was a point in time recently where I wanted to participate more in that conversation, and not just be a consumer of everyone else’s points of view.
SWB What I’m really struck by in what you’re talking about is that you realize that there’s is sort of like a benefit, frankly, to the world of people who are more introverted feeling comfortable kind of stepping out of their comfort zone a little bit and speaking up. And so I’m curious, how can workplaces, and also, like, society in general, do a better job of supporting folks who aren’t naturally extroverted, but still have tons of goodness to share?
RR I guess just in society in general, like, characteristics of people who are more extroverted tend to be maybe looked up to a bit more or rewarded a bit more. And I think that’s because people who are extroverted tend to be a bit more open and think on the fly, and like open about their thoughts on the fly. And there’s this perception of trust almost because of that openness. Whereas if you’re a bit a more introverted, it can sometimes come across as you’re holding things back. So for me personally, I always think about trying to manage that perception or just be aware of it.
[22:04]
KL As I’ve been listening to you talk about all of the things that you’ve done and all of the steps you’ve taken, it makes me feel… like I really wish I would’ve known some of this or just thought to kind of like explore it a little bit more, especially when I made my last career change, which was coming to A Book Apart. And the main reason for that is because I went from, you know, working in a sort of a traditional organization, a traditional company, where it was lots of people and, you know, teams and structures that I was really used to, and then all of a sudden I was remote. And I was working with, you know, a team of people who I never saw. So I really—like thinking back on that, and even today I think it’s still a challenge—the struggle of, you know, collaborating with people that you don’t see when it’s easier for me to just do the work on my own. I think, like, I’m looking back on that, and I think it was—that’s why some of that felt harder, because I also had to get over this like physical boundary. So I guess I’m just thinking, I feel like this could be part of an onboarding exercise where you talk about a blueprint or that type of thing. So I think, I don’t know, I think it could be a really nice way to kind of get folks to talk about, you know, where their strengths are and where their weaknesses are so that there’s—it feels like there’s more support.
RR Yeah definitely. I think the format of things, too. Sort of practicing a bit more mindfulness and inclusion in the format of things. I mean, I’ll give examples in the workplace. Like meetings are a big one. Often these are kind of set up, there’s a room with a lot of people, and it’s, you know, maybe not moderated. And if you’re more comfortable speaking up, and a bit louder, it might not necessarily be the best format for people who are a bit quieter, right? So, yeah, I think there’s a lot to do with format and just being mindful of different peoples’—like the way that they think or how they communicate.
SWB Yeah, you know, as somebody who typically speaks up in meetings or conversations—I mean, it depends a little bit on the audience, but I tend to be, you know, one of the people who’s comfortable kind of jumping in—I think it didn’t used to occur to me that that wasn’t true for everybody, or that they needed different things to feel comfortable doing that. And I really I feel like I really started to learn about that a few years ago when I got more interested in things like facilitation. And so as you were speaking I was thinking about some of the tools I use when I’m facilitating, and so, you know, for example making sure that some of the activities that we do if I’m facilitating a workshop are activities where people have a chance to kind of like jot down ideas or collect their thoughts individually before they’re supposed to pipe up as a group, you know? Or there are other techniques like that give people different modes of participating. Like sometimes it’s they can add stickies to a wall and then their ideas definitely get up on the wall, and, you know, and then we can talk about them. Sometimes it’s having those few minutes to write something down before it’s time to take input from everybody. But I started thinking a lot about, you know, what are the ways that we can structure these kinds of sessions so that more people feel like they can take part in them? And also so that, you know, it’s not just the loudest voices that get heard—because I can assure you, the loudest voices are not [chuckling] necessarily like the smartest or best voices in all scenarios.
[25:44]
RR Yeah. Like I always appreciate going into meetings where there’s going to be ideation or sharing ideas to get a bit of context ahead of time from whoever’s running it. Agendas actually really help.
SWB So that brings me to something that I noticed in your article and I would love to hear more about. So there was a picture you included of something that was called inclusion pyramids that you have in meeting rooms around Shopify. Can you tell our listeners what those are and where they come from and what they’re for?
RR Yeah, sure. So they’re paper pyramids that are located in all the meeting rooms at Shopify and in some common spaces, and on each side there’s a little tip about making an inclusive meeting. And so this was—we have a diversity and inclusion team, and they developed these pyramids, these paper pyramids, as just as a friendly reminder to be mindful of fostering inclusive meetings. And they’re kind of passive, right? Like they’re—the way they’re used is that they’re there. In different meeting rooms there’s different messages on the different pyramids. And the way I use it, personally, is, you know, like I noticed just in the course of meeting I, you know, I’ll glance at them and there’s a few that over time have stuck with me, that I try to be mindful of during meetings, whether I’m running the meeting or just participating.
SWB What are the ones that have stuck with you?
RR Yeah, so, there’s about, I think, two or three. The first one is about how meetings aren’t for everyone. They’re not everyone’s jam. And it’s really important to seek input and get feedback from people who were quieter during the meeting. Another one is around being mindful of people if they’re joining remotely into a meeting. We have really sensitive microphones in the office here and so trying to avoid typing or having side conversations during the meetings. Those are the—the two that are always at the front of my mind. And then of course like another one—the other one is if people get interrupted, you know, being intentional about bringing that conversation back to the person’s point or to the person.
SWB Yeah. That’s so important. I mean I think also about the way that sometimes people will get, you know, like their point will kind of get trampled over or ignored or whatever and then somebody will bring it up again a few minutes later and it’ll get attributed to a different person and sort of making sure that you’re giving people credit for their ideas, too, and that you’re, you know, you’re identifying where they came from. That kind of thing I think about a lot.
RR Yeah. Yeah, it can happen especially if—if the conversations are getting pretty lively or vibrant, right?
SWB Yeah and I think a lot of times it happens without people realizing that that’s what they’re doing, or without any sort of like malicious intent. And then I think sometimes it happens for other reasons that are more complicated, like I remember reading about the Obama White House, they—the women who worked there did this like amplification strategy, because they felt like they couldn’t get their ideas heard. And so they would specifically seek out each other’s ideas and amplify them and say like, “Oh I really liked what so and so said about blah blah blah,” to like make sure it was ingrained in people that these ideas were coming from the women, which I thought was super interesting. And I think, you know, it’s indicative of what was going on in that culture that that was a problem they were having. But yeah, I think using all of these techniques to kind of look at how do we think about things like meetings, how do we think about our workplace culture to make sure that people with different perspectives can be heard. Because you mentioned something earlier about, you know, like you’re not trying to change who you are. You’re not trying to stop being introverted. And I think that’s really important, because I feel like that’s what a lot of advice about how to succeed at work is, is like, “Oh! You should just become a different person!” As opposed to looking at like, oh actually we should figure out how to play to the strengths of lots of different types of people.
[29:46]
RR Oh yeah. Yeah. I’ve read the books that have that message [both laugh].
SWB So I think we have a lot of listeners who would also identify as being introverted and would also, you know, love to be more collaborative, but don’t necessarily work for companies where they feel like that’s easy to do or where like maybe, you know, you mentioned that you felt like the culture really supported that there. What advice would you give to somebody who’s just kind of just trying to figure out where to start, or isn’t sure that they feel safe speaking up about what their needs are?
RR Mm hmm. Yeah. I—I think my advice would really be to first identify like what is behind that struggle. Like what is actually going on there? Is is that you haven’t been communicating what your needs are, or have you tried different ways of approaching that? Are there different people that you can talk to in your organization to like get your needs heard or get support from? And then of course there’s other situations perhaps where the support just really isn’t there from the company or the organization, and I haven’t been in that situation, but if it were me I would probably think about trying to find a place that is more supportive.
SWB Yeah, I mean, I think it’s not that easy necessarily for everybody, and not necessarily in all industries, but something I think a lot about is, like, when I’ve seen friends who’ve been in clearly toxic work environments, it’s really easy to blame yourself or to think, like, you must be doing something wrong. You must be the one who’s problematic, or whatever. And I think it’s helpful, even if you don’t necessarily have a plan to go somewhere else, but it’s helpful to be able to just see it clearly and to be able to say like, “Wait. No, no, no, no, no, no. The problem isn’t me. The problem isn’t that I’m an introvert. The problem is that this place is doing these specific things that are preventing me from feeling safe and successful here.” You know, I think even just that knowledge can be empowering.
[31:46]
RR Yeah definitely it’s like the first step, right? You have to know what is actually going on, what is the case, and then think about different courses of action from there.
SWB So. Ok, so, now that you’ve kind of gone down this path of figuring out how to work more collaboratively and to have more of a public presence while also being true to yourself, how has that shifted sort of like what you want to do next in your career or with your goals?
RR I think I just want to do more of that. Like I want to keep getting better at it. As I mentioned, the big one for me is working on getting a bit more comfortable with things like public speaking, and, you know, putting myself out there, whether it’s writing an article or, you know, speaking to you lovely ladies here.
SWB So, I think that that’s great. I would love to hear you speak and write more, because that article you wrote about collaboration was really valuable to me, even though I don’t work at a, you know, a traditional company where I have a lot of teammates. I work with different people all the time, and it was really useful for me to think a little bit more clearly about, what are some of the assumptions I might have going into meetings? And sort of challenge those assumptions a bit. So, thank you for that. I’m looking forward to what else you have to say. Where can our listeners find out more about what you’re working on and what you’re interested in?
RR Yeah, so people can check out things that I’m writing about on ux.shopify.com, along with all of my other brilliant colleagues on the UX team.
SWB Well, that’s great! Thank you so much for being here today and we have really enjoyed talking with you.
RR Thank you [music fades in, plays alone for four seconds, fades out].
Vocab Swaps
JL Hey, so in Season 2 we introduced the vocab swap, which was just our chance to look at some of the language that we use in, you know, our everyday lives. Things that maybe you were like, “Ugh I wish there was something else I could say in this instance.” You know, like “kill two birds for the price of one”? That’s not what you say at all [laughter].
SWB What—I have a series of questions! [Laughter]
KL Is that like Payless BOGO?
SWB Why are we killing birds and—
[34:04]
JL This is why I need you to tell me how to swap my vocabulary!
KL Why are we killing birds and—
SWB We’re not killing birds.
JL Ok. So instead what we’re really trying to do here is find better things than what I’m currently saying right now. So, does anyone have any others besides killing birds for a vocab swap so that we can talk about this week?
SWB I have one that I came across just recently that I just never thought about, which is so true for so many of these. And that is the term “grandfather clause.” So a grandfather clause, as you have probably heard in your life, is some kind of policy that is old and outdated and most people don’t have that policy, but because you had it before a certain time you get to keep it, right? And the term actually comes from after the Civil War, during Reconstruction in the South, in the 1890s. A bunch of Southern states started enacting things like poll taxes and literacy tests. And so of course those were designed to keep black people who had just recently been granted the right to vote from actually being able to vote. So the problem for the people who were enacting this legislation was that if you had poll taxes and literacy tests, that would also disenfranchise a lot of poor white voters, who were often illiterate as well. And so that meant that that would cause an uproar. So what they did to ensure that they could keep black people from voting without keeping white people from voting was enact this thing they called a grandfather clause. And that meant that if you or your family had had the right to vote prior to 1867, you could vote, even if you couldn’t pass the tests. So the 15th amendment was passed in 1870 and that’s when former slaves were given suffrage. So that means that in 1867, of course, no black people could vote. And in 1867, all of these white people could vote without passing any tests or paying taxes. And so the result is that white people ended up being grandfathered in, and black people had to follow the new rules. So that was declared unconstitutional in 1915 for reasons that I hope are pretty clear, but we still hear that word a lot.
KL I’ve even worked at jobs where like I, you know, I miss some arbitrary cutoff and like the—the pensions weren’t available to me because I hadn’t been, you know, quote/unquote “grandfathered in.”
SWB And so it’s like a term that we don’t really think about because you’re—you’re like, “Ok! Grandfathered in: that’s meaningless, right? Like that’s not—that’s not sensitive language.” But I think the history of that is super problematic, and I have found myself, you know, questioning using that phrase and sort of like questioning how common that phrase just sort of slips in in weird places. So, I don’t know, do you have any fun ideas for [chuckling] different ways to talk about grandfather clauses?
[36:47]
JL I really like legacy. So legacy policy or legacy clause or legacy rule. I think legacy pretty much describes what a lot of these instances are.
KL Yeah and I think in some contexts you could say, you know, this is a historic rule or a historic guideline that we’re working with or whatever. I mean, I think then in some cases it’s actually a special case, and that’s how people are talking about it, which feels a little like, let’s actually call it what it is if it is a special case.
SWB Right, or like you’re being granted an exception of some sort, yeah. Yeah. And it’s like such a little thing, and I bet most people don’t think that much about it when they say it, and also like you think like how often does that even come up? But it comes up surprisingly often in anything contractual, and I was actually a little bit bummed that that wasn’t something that I knew about, that I didn’t know like sort of the provenance of that language. And now that I know it just makes me think about how many historical terms come from places that I don’t really want to replicate.
KL Totally. I feel like ever since we started this, I’ll find myself saying something and I’m like, “Is that what I really mean?” And, “Maybe I should explore that. Like, am I using it correctly?” So I’m glad that we’re doing this.
SWB And I mean, you know, I don’t think it’s like—I don’t think anybody can be perfect with language. I think there is no such thing, right? Because context shifts all the time and audience shifts all the time, and if you are talking to people with different cultural backgrounds, expectations shift. But I do think that there’s something that’s so valuable about taking that moment and being like, is this just a thing people say without thinking? Or is this what I actually mean? Like, what am I communicating with this phrase, and am I communicating some things that might have consequences that I don’t intend?
KL Yeah. A little bit more awareness and just I think it’s never a bad thing if you take a pause and think about what you’re saying.
SWB I think a lot about habits and how powerful habits are, and I think that you can obviously learn a habit to—to trade one word for another. But, even broader than that, I think you can learn the habit of being more intentional with language, and so I think for me just talking about it on the show and like recording that and sending that out to the world gives me a really good reminder to check in with myself and take it seriously and to not brush that off. And I feel like that has been really good for me, and I hope that that’s good for some of our listeners too.
KL I think so too. I was just going to say, “Fuck yeah,” because this feels like a Fuck Yeah. But we haven’t even gotten to that yet.
[39:22]
JL But we can!
Fuck Yeah of the Week
KL What is our Fuck Yeah of the Week?
JL Our Fuck Yeah this week is fuck yeah to deleting apps from my phone.
KL Oh boy!
JL Yeah. See ya, apps! I’ve gone a little bit like clean-house wild recently because I have been like following some of the news that’s been like happening along in 2018 about this while time well spent movement which was originally coined by the people doing humanetech.com maybe a little bit co-opted by Facebook now. But there’s a bunch of companies that are sort of embracing this movement. So there was just recently Instagram was reporting that they are going to start showing you through their usage insights, the time spent on their app. So you can see how much time you are spending on Instagram. And Google just released some time management tools to their new Android P system, and Facebook and other apps are doing similar. So the thing is this whole idea of like, looking at, like, what is technology doing to us? Are we spending not just really too much time, but what kind of time are we spending with our apps? And do we know how much time we’re spending on our phones?
SWB And I think like a lot of us just don’t know, because you see these stats about like number of times people look at their phone in a day or whatever and it’s like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, and you do it without thinking. But I also, you know, I’m a big fan of cleaning house in my apps every once in awhile. It’s like a little—like my little Marie Kondo exercise. I got a new phone recently and I totally deleted a bunch of apps. I kind of went through and I was like, “Am I actually using these? How many of these are tracking data?” You know I had turned off a lot of that data tracking, but there’s this huge amount of stuff that’s being tracked. I deleted Facebook long, long ago because it’s super creepy and it’s a time suck. However, they—they also own Instagram, so I’m not sure that the tracking situation is any better for me now. But I do really appreciate any effort to kind of get people to kind of take stock of how technology has changed our lives and whether they’re happy with that. And if you know anything about me, you know I don’t go around like lauding big tech companies very much, and I don’t want to do that here because I think that like a lot of this is sort of like kind of a—a shallow response to a lot of negative press tech has had this year. But I do really think that, like, being able to take stock of what you’re getting from it and—and, like, have there been consequences to all the good things that you’ve gotten from technology? Right? Because there’s obviously a ton of good stuff I can say, like, about keeping in touch with friends and family and like being able to have instant access to like pictures of my nieces, which is pretty great for me. But then it’s like, what are the negatives that I often don’t take stock of?
[42:08]
JL Yeah it’s interesting, so I was like reading a bunch about this whole idea of like digital wellbeing, and how we can change it so that it’s—we’re just spending more time doing the things that we really like. So like, you know, once I deleted more things from my phone then what was left were the things that like maybe I enjoy more, like my Breaker podcasting app, you know? Or I do still have Instagram on my phone, but like again, I’m trying to figure out how to make that work in my life right now to like, I don’t know, where I’m not like hating myself after I’m like, “What did I just do?” So like the other morning, somehow, we got my son to daycare like really fast and I had like some extra time and I was just like scrolling in my kitchen, drinking coffee, like looking at Facebook. And I’m in this like just like local neighborhood group and there was just like—there was this thread and it was just like—it was about the Kendrick Lamar concert recently, [laughter] and I just couldn’t stop reading it. There was like 426 comments and I was like, the stupidity of some of like the people posting on this were just like—I was like—I just needed popcorn. Like I was just going through it, but then next thing I know it was 20 minutes! And I’m like reading through all these like stupid comments and I was like, “What am I doing?” And I was like, “How did this benefit me?”
SWB I mean it’s—it’s kind of like watching crap TV, right? Where it’s like, it’s not—look: if you need a little mindless time, that’s ok. Everybody—everybody has their limit and needs some mindless time, and you are a busy mom of a young toddler and you got him to daycare and you had a little window of time. Like what are you supposed to do? Pick up Tolstoy? Like I don’t—
JL But that’s like, you know, I could’ve—I could’ve walked to work in that time, which like I have been doing a little more of, or like I could’ve just like sat outside for a little bit and not looked at a screen. So that’s the thing I do think—and not to say that that’s not other people’s like mindless time or that I don’t watch like TV sometimes but, you know, it’s weird the other day like my husband was commenting about the fact that like, we like got a new couch last year and it’s not as comfortable as our old couch. And he’s like, “God this couch is just not comfortable.” I was like, “Yeah, but we don’t watch as much TV.” [Laughter]
KL That’s such a good point. Yeah!
JL So it’s like, if it’s just not there, like, you just won’t do it. So if I delete these apps, then like maybe I won’t spend as much time on my phone.
SWB Totally! I guess I just mean, like, it’s cool if having some mindless time looking at an app sometimes is sort of, you know, like what you need at the end of a difficult day or just like it’s fine like I don’t want to shame anybody for wanting to—
KL Yeah.
[44:40]
SWB—kind of—
KL Or like just how you are going to spend 20 minutes at that moment. It’s fine.
SWB Right. I mean like it’s just like when I watch House Hunters International on a plane [laughter] where like I just need to zone out and enjoy some me time. But I think it’s also a question of, like, when is that what you’re doing, and when is it that you’re just kind of like mindlessly wasting time and—and actually coming away from the experience feeling really unsatisfied? And—or just having that be, like, the default behavior. And so you know like, “Oh I’m not doing anything else so I guess I should watch crappy TV.” “I’m not doing anything else, so I guess I should play with my phone.” And, like, trying to be more aware of that.
KL Yeah. I recently, like in the last couple of months, a friend of mine had told me about this app called Moment, which basically just tracks entire usage of your phone. So it tracks every app usage, every time you pick up your phone, every time you make a phone call, every—like every time you do anything on your phone. And I used it for like 36 hours and I was like, I [laughs] looked at it several times and I was just like, “I’m not ready to face this.” Like, I just can’t. However, it was part of an exercise I was doing to kind of figure out where I was spending my time in a day because I was kind of like, “I’m working so much.” And like maybe I could be a little bit more, you know, constructive, or like sort of package my time a little bit better so that I feel productive but also have some free time and like don’t feel guilty about it or whatever. And though I stopped using the app, I made a decision which has benefited me way more than using the app, and that is to not look at email while I’m in bed, and that I’m only allowed to start looking at email once I sit down at my desk for the day. And that was a huge shift and it has like improved my life, like, levels and levels.
JL That’s awesome. I mean this goes back to our episode of Shannah, you know, we were talking about financial planning and like looking at a budget because until you make a budget, you don’t really know where your money is being spent. So I think until you use an app like that or start like thinking about his stuff, you don’t really—you can’t really tell how much time you’re spending on certain websites or certain apps.
SWB And I think just like figuring out how much money you spend eating out or whatever, if you haven’t really been tracking it, you’re going to underestimate it. Like, I’m sure I would underestimate how much I use my phone, and I can definitely say, “Yeah, but it’s all this work stuff.” Right? It’s like, “Well, you know, like I have conference and then I’m in between meetings where I have to travel to them, so I’m like on Slack on my phone.” And it’s like yeah, that’s true but like, that’s some bullshit [laughs]. Like you—that’s not counting a lot of other stuff you’re doing. Especially I noticed something I do that I’m going to try to stop doing is like, I will go and kind of like mindlessly scroll Twitter and then like not tweet, and like consider tweeting a bunch of times and then not tweet. And like, I don’t have to tweet. That’s, like… the goal isn’t even that I need to tweet more. It’s just that, like, I want to be more intentional about when I want to part of that and when I’m not part of that, and mindlessly scrolling it, except for like it being a good way to sometimes get some headlines really quickly, like you get a sense of what’s happening in the world. You don’t need to do that for an hour and a half. You can like do that in five minutes. And if I’m not going to be actually like communicating with people and making connection and like contributing ideas, then like I should fucking close tab. But sometimes I am also that person who’s like, “I gotta get off Twitter.” And I close the tab and then like literally 30 seconds later I open a new tab of Twitter without realizing it!
[48:21]
KL My favorite is like, and then I’ll just like pick up my phone and look at it and I’m like [laughing], “What am I doing?!”
JL Well that’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. No, You Go is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Rachel Robertson for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, make sure you subscribe and rate us on your lovely app which you can use to listen to this podcast [laughs]. We all do. And it really is awesome because your support helps us spread the word. And we will be back next week so we will see you then [music fades in, plays alone for 30 seconds, fades out to end].
Savings, budgets, retirement. Oh my. No matter how on top of our lives we feel, talking about money still makes us squirm. And…well, we’re tired of it.
Today on NYG, we talk about where those financial fears come from—and what we’re doing to get over them. To help us out, we chat with Shannah Compton Game, a Certified Financial Planner and the host of the Millennial Money podcast. Shannah’s all about helping people like us get more comfortable thinking and talking about money, and she’s quickly become one of our fave resources for financial info.
> When you don’t talk about something, you feel really isolated, and you feel like you are alone. Like nobody could possibly have the same money issues you have. But the reality that I try to tell everybody is: you’re so wrong! We are all so much alike when it comes to money, especially the things that we’ve not done so well. > —Shannah Compton Game, host, Millennial Money
Shannah tells us all about:
- Why money is such a taboo topic (but shouldn’t be)
- Which financial advice to take, and which to ignore
- Why we all hate the B word (budget, ugh)
- Why it’s totally not too late to get your finances in better shape
Also in this episode:
- Sara celebrates her presidential birthday
- Katel survives on pizza by the slice
- Jenn gets deep into the meal prep lifestyle
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.
Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Try it free, then use code NOYOUGO to get 50% off your first paid month.
Transcript
Jenn Lukas [Ad spot] This episode of No, You Go is made possible with help from our friends at Shopify. Their mission is to make commerce better for everyone—and they’re growing their world class team to make that happen. And you know what? They’ve read plenty of cover letters over the years. So this time they want you to read theirs. Because they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in, plays alone for 12 seconds, fades out]. Welcome to No, You Go, the show about ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and this episode is going to come out the day after my birthday [someone says, “woo hoo!]”. Mm hmm. And it’s a very special birthday. I will be turning [clears throat] 35.
KL Woo!
SWB Which means I could be president.
KL Yes!
JL Nice!
SWB Definitely can’t be president.
KL No, you definitely should be [chuckles].
SWB Oof. I don’t know. Looks like a terrible job [laughter]. I’m not real pleased about how it’s going right now, and probably I’ve got too many skeletons in the closet [laughter]. However, the other thing they always say when you turn 35 is that, according to the financial quote/unquote “rules,” I am supposed to have two times my annual salary saved right now… Two times! My annual salary. Yeah. So I—I don’t have that. And I will say, like, I’m—I’m pretty organized. I’ve saved a lot for retirement, particularly starting when I was about 29, but I haven’t caught up to that mark yet, and I get a little stressed out whenever I think about it. So to help us with some of that stress, we are talking today with somebody who knows a lot about money: how to save it, how to budget, and how to even think about maybe retiring someday. That would be Shannah Compton Game. She is a Certified Financial Planner and the host of the Millennial Money podcast. Don’t worry, it’s not just for millennials.
JL I’ve been listening to her podcast over the last few weeks and it’s been really awesome because actually about over the last month, month and a half, I gotta tell you: I’ve been taking a—a journey into money.
SWB Uhhhh what kinda journey?
[2:24]
JL Well, every year around tax time, I get really anxious and I start going, “Hmm. Oh no I should’ve sent all this to my CPA awhile ago,” and then I look at the list of things I have and I go, “I was supposed to do this thing last year. Oh! I was supposed to do this thing the year before.” And I have this really organized list in Wunderlist about all the uh—it’s called my Adult List and [chuckles] it’s got all the things I’m supposed to do like [inhales deeply] allocating and diversifying my assets, giving things to Cooper’s future college fund, I’ve got this whole list of things I’m supposed to do and have I done them?… [Sucks teeth] No. Do I look at that list?… No [laughs].
KL And then you realize a year has passed.
JL Yes!
SWB And then like three years has passed.
KL Yeah.
JL Mm hmm! Where does that go? And then, you know, like other people, I start to think about it and again the anxiety starts to build up and I’m like, “No, thanks.” But then I started thinking like, “Ugh! I really—I just like really—I have to start learning about money.” Like, I have to. I can’t keep pushing this off. And, you know, it’s a mix of like looking at the taxes, thinking about my son, and just being like, “What am I doing?” And so my CPA had recommended the book Get a Financial Life and I found it on Audible [chuckles] because that’s my jam now. And I was like, “You know what? Maybe I’ll try giving this a shot because I can’t—” I’ve tried reading through other money—finance books before and though I can like really get down with like other books, the finance books just like I start glossing over, and I was like, “But maybe if I listen on Audible, I’ll like get into it.” So I did! And it’s abridged so it was only like two hours, which again was perfect because it was so short and listening to it at like 2X speed means it’s like over in an hour [laughter] and it’s like really basic but like just gave a lot of good overviews, and then I was like, “What other Audible books are out there?” And then I started getting a little wild. So I’ve been like reading slash listening to all these books, and reading these magazines, reading these blogs, listening to these podcasts, and I know so much more than I knew six weeks ago.
SWB Do you feel more confident with what you should be doing now?
JL I do! It’s awesome. So I’m now actually in the search for a financial planner. And that’s the other thing like I—I wanted to get some time with a financial planner but I didn’t wanna use my time at someone’s hourly rate to be explaining to me like what the difference between stocks and bonds are. You know like because that felt like a waste of money of something I could learn myself. So I felt like I should take some time, learn about real basic stuff, and then pay a professional to help me with like the real specifics to me, and not just like, “Here’s things about money.”
[4:56]
KL Yeah I like that and that sounds so… practical. And I think like something that we all really liked hearing from Shannah is that you kind of don’t [sighs] sometimes the first thing you think about isn’t the fact that you have to take into account your own personal goals and sort of like how your life is shaking out, and like whether you’re having kids or not, or like if you have a partner, or your business, or like all these variables that are… like you’re not like every other textbook case of, you know, what you should do with your money. So, I don’t know, it’s just I—I think that was like so important for—for me to hear, especially, just cuz it’s like you don’t know. If I wanna retire when I’m 60, that’s totally different than if you’re like, “Ok, I actually might work a lot longer than that.” And we’re all living a lot longer. So I think, I don’t know, just like taking into account all those things and realizing that there is a lot of research you can do on your own before you start talking to a professional.
JL Right. Yeah and there’s so many—I mean that’s the thing like it—you can gather all these opinions and then you just have to factor them for you and what you wanna do. I mean there’s people now that are trying to retire at 25, and then there’s people that wanna work, you know, until the day they die. And I—or and obviously everything in between. So, I think it’s so important to like really think about what you wanna do and then start setting those goals for you. And there’s so many resources out there now. That’s the thing and it’s really intimidating to get started but I think like you just have to do it, and we’ve heard this before, right? Just like with starting businesses and starting projects, it’s one step at a time. You know? So if it’s even just like, “I’m gonna look up one term today.” Or, you know, “I’m gonna read one article or listen to one podcast.” Then like you’ve done more and learned more than you knew yesterday.
SWB And for me it’s also been like I mean I need to do some things, right? So… it’s like ok I need to check some stuff off the list. So actually I go to the same accountant as Jenn and… he has also given me certain recommendations, right? So thinks like, “You and your husband should have wills at some point.” And things like that. And we’ve done some of them and some of them I haven’t gotten around to yet. But on my list for this year—and this is like the kind of thing that goes on like a year to-do list, because it’s such a pain in the ass—is like, I need to move some accounts to consolidate at a financial institution where I can manage them more effectively, and deal with some of my long-term like retirement planning. And just I know that the process of moving those accounts is going to be a bit painful and so I’m kind of setting myself, I’m saying like, that is a task I need to set aside some time for. You know there will be like paper forms, somebody might make me fax something. God knows that’s gonna take me a week [Katel laughs]. I know you can fax online. It will still take me a week. But, you know, this is achievable, but it doesn’t feel achievable sometimes in the moment, and I try to remind myself that like, look, it is very normal to feel this way. I happen to be in a lucky position where I like—I have money I can theoretically be saving. I know that not everybody does. Like, I’m doing fine. Give myself some, you know, break the tasks down. Just like anything that’s big. Break it down a little bit. And set some time frames that are realistic and allow myself to feel good about getting some of the things done and not so upset about the things I didn’t get to.
[8:18]
JL Yeah. I mean you know when you get that like new IKEA cabinet and it comes with like 20,000 pieces and you just look at it and you’re like, “Fuck my life.” [Katel laughs and says, “Yeah”] That’s like sort of looking at like your money to-do list and you’re like, “Oh my god I have to roll over a 401K. Ughhhhhh!” I mean how many of us have 401Ks that are like sitting somewhere and you’re like, “I don’t know what it’s doing?” From like a previous job.
KL Yeah. You’re like, “It’s there. I think.”
SWB I told you I started saving for retirement when I was 29. Do you know what I did when I was 29? That’s when I started working for myself. I literally never took advantage of an employer 401K while I had a traditional job.
KL Yeah!
SWB Whoops!
KL But it’s more complicated than just being like, “Oh. This thing is available.”
SWB I know. And I also really felt like I needed that money at that point in my life.
KL Absolutely.
JL Totally. And I mean that’s the like—the other thing that’s really like important and—and we’ll talk about this a little later on is that like, it’s ok. You can start saving now. And for me that was like so important because like the anxiety of like, “Ok well, you know what? I didn’t start investing when I was 18. So, you know, what now?” And the thing is but I’m doing it now. And that’s the other thing that I feel like stopped me from learning more. It’s like then I just start feeling bad. I’m like, “Oh I’ve got this like sitting in a money market account and it’s not like diversified enough. Like inflation is basically eating away my savings.” And now I’m like, “You know what? I can start now.” And—and that’s the thing it’s always like, you just need to start when you’re gonna start. And if it’s not tomorrow that’s ok too. If it’s next month, that’s ok. But like giving yourself that slack and being like, “I’m gonna do it.” So like I’m now moving all—like—like I have like two 401Ks that I need to move over from previous jobs and I’m like finally getting it done. And it’s a pain in the ass, I’m not gonna lie. But it’s also not as hard as I thought it was gonna be. So it’s like a combo.
[10:01]
SWB Some of this stuff I feel like the hardest part is that like mental blocker about it because it’s about something that makes you feel a little anxious. I mean I have, you know, like I know that in my family… my mom really started getting her retirement stuff together in her forties because she didn’t really make much money till then, till she became a professor, and before that, you know, we were pretty poor. She was extremely frugal, but there’s just not that much money, so there’s not that much money. And so I look at that stuff and it makes me stressed, and then it makes me both like wanna put a lot of money away but also like… not wanna deal with it. Like deal with it sort of like emotionally and—and I feel like I’ve gotten over a ton of that and I feel like getting over that has been super helpful for me to make some better plans around retirement and around—around just sort of like having my financial shit together in general, to the point where, look: I may be turning 35 and not exactly have two times my salary set aside, but I actually feel really fucking good about where I am financially right now as well as like kind of that I—I do have my shit together. Not everything but like no, I’ve made a lot of steps, and they’re good steps, and they were like tough to get to and now I fucking did it, and I can do future stuff.
KL Yeah. I think that’s the thing like… that is a universal thing. It’s complicated. It can feel really raw and emotional which I think maybe sometimes I—I know a lot of the times I’m not expecting and I think to just like realize that and know that there are ways to get through it is super helpful. And I really loved hearing from Shannah because it made me feel like where I am is right for where I’m supposed to be right now, and that’s ok, and there are a lot of different things I can do to move forward. So, I don’t know, it was really good to hear from her [music fades in].
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[13:21]
Interview: Shannah Compton Game
SWB Shannah Compton Game is a Certified Financial Planner, and she’s the host of the Millennial Money podcast, where she dishes “life-changing money and lifestyle tips to jumpstart your finances, ignite your savings, and empower you to reach all your awesome goals,” which sounds pretty good to us. We are super excited to have Shannah on the show today because we know we have money questions, and we are dead certain that some of you have money questions, too. So why don’t we get into it? Welcome to No, You Go, Shannah.
Shannah Compton Game Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited. I—I love talking about money, obviously [laughs].
SWB Yeah so speaking of that, ok you run a podcast about money, you’re a Certified Financial Planner, what does your day to day look like? Like obviously you talk about money all day. How does that break down? What’s the mix of things that you typically do?
SCG Yeah, you know, I have a really interesting background, kind of a mix of both creative skills with sort of, you know, these money and business expertise skills and so a couple of years ago when I started my podcast I just thought, “You know I want to create a company and a brand that creates products that really help, you know, everyday people understand how to not only grow their money but—but how to deal with this money stuff in like a really relatable and dare I say, interesting and fun way.” So that was sort of the reason that I started the podcast. So every day for me looks completely different. Some days I’m writing a bunch of articles or I’m working on my first book right now. So there’s a lot of writing there. Other days are podcasting, other days are interviews. I also do a lot of teaching and I have—I host a lot of kind of like interesting dinner parties where we talk about money. So really every day I wake up it’s so completely different [laughs].
JL Oh! What are those dinner parties?!?
SCG Yeah so it’s my version of talking about money. I’m sort of the anti, like, conference room person. So I get a bunch of people together, people who don’t know each other, and we have a chef come cook us an amazing meal, and we sit around and we talk about money, and we talk about life, and we talk about business, and all sorts of things, and so, you know, you walk outta there with like 20 new friends, and hopefully that you’ve been inspired to, you know, go do things a little bit differently.
SWB So, that sounds really cool and this also sounds like a really interesting mix of things. Was there a moment when you realized like—I assume, you know, you were working with clients doing typical financial planner stuff when you realized that there was something else that you wanted to do. Like how did that happen?
[16:00]
SCG My dad had been in the financial industry for about 40 years and I started working with him and we worked with really high-net-worth clients, people who had a lot of cash, and it was great because it was really like a crash course to learning all of these things about money and then I got my—my Certified Financial Planner designation, and I thought, “Ok I’m gonna have, you know, my own planning practice.” Which I did for—for quite a few years. And then I just decided, you know what? I really like the creative side of money and I feel like we don’t have a lot of modern-day people talking to us about money. You know, there’s Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey—those are kind of the most popular names. But they’re a little old school I think in their thinking, and so I would just kind of tap into that like crazy entrepreneurial spirit and I’m like, “Ok well why not try to create something different? And something new and fresh?” But it hasn’t—it certainly hasn’t been easy but working with the clients for about 12 years really gave me an understanding of a lot of the similarities between people and then, you know, learning some of those like really tricky techniques as well.
SWB Yeah, so, you mentioned a little bit that you felt like there were a lot of people who were kind of old-school doing financial planner work, or sort of being financial planning, I don’t know, “personalities” out there. What do you think is sort of the difference between what you would describe as sort of this old-fashioned take and the way that you approach it?
SCG Look: I think we’re just in a really different climate. I mean there a lot of people, especially a lot of younger people, that are becoming entrepreneurs because they kind of have to, you know? The job market just isn’t what it used to be and people wanna create something. And there’s also a lot of debt, a lot of people still have student loan debt, a lot of people, you know, are having to plunk down a lot of money to buy a house. So I think there’s just a lot of really unique dynamics happening that just call for kind of a different approach. And I honestly feel with—I don’t know how you feel, but—with social media and, you know, Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and we’re always in other people’s lives… like the kind of pressure right now to compete with people financially even when you don’t have that money. I feel like there’s never been a time like now.
SWB That’s really interesting that you mention that sort of sense of like it being—it seeming at least like all these people have all these fabulous things and are doing all of this amazing stuff in their life, and it does—it does create that sense of, like, you see people’s highlight reel on Instagram and you think that that’s how they’re living day to day, and like what you’re not seeing is, you know, the like sad peanut butter sandwich they’re having [chuckling] because there’s nothing else in their fridge right now, you know?
SCG Yeah, it’s so true! I mean I even struggle with it myself where I’ll—I’ll get in this mode where I’m like, ok. This is like really silly. You have your own talents, your own skills. Like you don’t need to be, you know, comparing yourself. But it’s just—it’s so easy to do, you know? And like you said like we’re showcasing obviously usually like the flashy version of what we’re doing in life and not the realities which are, you know, tough.
[18:59]
SWB Yeah, so, it seems a little bit like the—the brand that you have, the podcast that you have, like the way that you talk about money, and sort of just the way you sort of position yourself feels… maybe a little bit more targeted to women, and I’m curious if that was something that you were doing intentionally or if that’s just sort of like my interpretation!
SCG It wasn’t certainly intentional but I do feel, you know, that women—look: we are in a tough spot financially whether you know it or not. You know, women live longer than men. We start and stop our career. We just have a lot of issues that require us I think to think differently about money and then, you know, I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole entire career, so that’s really where a lot of my heart is in helping women—not only inspire them but also help them, you know, in the practical side of money because we just don’t learn this stuff anywhere.
SWB Yeah, you know I was I thinking a little bit before this interview about the way that financial services I think have historically been pretty targeted at men and sort of advertised in a way that was targeted towards men and yet, you know, we’ve seen society really change around like a lot of women are breadwinners in their families and, you know, more likely to graduate from college. Like there’s a whole lot of—of shift happening in the role of women in the world and it’s like, you know, looking at the financial industry as sort of needing to catch up to that. So it’s cool to see people kind of like taking that seriously and looking at those issues more often facing women, you know, directly.
SCG Yeah, absolutely, and I think particularly in the professional financial industry of—there are only about 70 some odd thousand Certified Financial Planners, which is kind of the highest echelon of—of financial planning designation you can get here in the US, and of that 70,000, only about 22% are women and it—that number is not increasing at all. Like it’s been stagnant at that number, and what I find working with a lot of of women, and particularly women entrepreneurs, is they don’t necessarily wanna like have a, you know, 60-year-old dude sitting across from them, lecturing them about their money, or taking time off to care for their newborn, or whatever it may be. You know, they want somebody that they feel they can relate to. And so it’s been a real interesting sort of sweet spot as well, you know, being a woman and—and having that expertise.
SWB Oh my god, totally. As an entrepreneurial woman I can definitely say that I do not look forward to situations where I have to sit across a desk from a 60-year-old man who’s gonna tell me what to do with my life. Um [laughs].
SCG You and me both!
SWB [Laughs] Ok so… thinking just a little bit more about your podcast and the writing that you do and this book that you’re working on, which I’m super excited to hear more about, does that all still feed back into doing financial planning for clients? Or is your career sort of like moved more into that… lots and lots of education and hosting dinner parties space, and you’re not doing as much of the like—of the one-on-one anymore?
[22:00]
SCG Yeah, exactly. The one-on-one is fantastic, I just have always felt pulled in this direction and, you know, it took me a few years of fighting against that pull to go, “Ok, ok. I [laughs] I give in,” you know? And so this is really where I feel my expertise lies. You know, I have an ability to connect with people I think and, you know, it works really well in this space, and, you know, I have sort of a separate brand where I work with female entrepreneurs, but kind of in a more business, money-centric approach, which is what I love. So, yeah, I mean for me, you know, I—I thought that if I was gonna be a CFP, I had to have a planning career and that was just the end of it. And it just felt, honestly, a little bit too boring for me.
JL I mean it’s interesting you have this whole podcast about the subject of money, but a lot of people avoid talking about money. So what allowed you to overcome that stigma?
SCG Honestly when I launched the podcast I thought, “Who in the world is gonna listen to a podcast of me just kind of like babbling on about money?” [Laughter] But what I have found is that, you know, like money revolves around every aspect of our lives: our relationships, our careers, our vacations, you know, everything that we do. And I—I think that, you know, for most people there’s a lot of like stress and fear around money and so I just approach it and the way I sort of approach everything is, you know, if we can sort of break you free from some of those stressors around money and like get you in a position where you can think about it differently and you can really understand that you can create the lifestyle that you wanna live. Like you have the tools right now in your bank account to do that, whether you know it or not, that, you know, that felt like a spot that was really comfortable for me because I’ve had my own kind of crazy money journey myself, and so, you know, I just wanted to be honest on the podcast. I wanted to share my own struggles, I wanted to share struggles that, you know, I’ve seen other people go through and how they’ve overcome those. And, you know, we just little by little, like sort of a grassroots movement, the podcast just has grown and grown and grown.
JL Was it easy for you to start talking about it right away? Were you just like, you know what? I’m gonna be open and honest about this.
SCG Not at all! It’s hard when you’re supposed to be the quote/unquote “expert”. You know? To admit like, “Oh, hey, when I came out of college, I had credit card debt,” and, you know, I’m very honest on my podcast. I went through a divorce in my really early thirties that was financially devastating for me, and I basically had to give up every asset that I owned in order to not have to pay my—my ex-spouse for 10-plus years. And take on debt. And that was a really hard position to be in, because I felt completely demoralized like, “Who am I to give advice to someone?” But I think I’m—I’m grateful for that because what I learned was I had these tools and these skills and I had the know how to pick myself back up and if I could instill those into other people, especially other women, to help them know that no matter what they go through in life, you know, they can get up, dust themselves off, and restart again, then maybe that was kind of the best thing that ever happened to me.
[25:16]
JL I think we try so hard to—to be perfect all the time.
SCG Yes.
JL And we try to like—and if we’re not, to definitely hide that. So I, like, I’m trying to think about the leap from like, “Ok. I’m gonna do it. I’m now gonna like admit to everyone that I’m not perfect.”
SCG That’s a really tough space and I think honestly like you have to get there. First. You know like that to me is the starting point for change in anything that you—that you wanna, you know, achieve in life. And for me that was just the spot of—of being able to say to other people like, “Ok, I’m human. You know I’ve had stuff happen to me, and I’ve made mistakes, and I still sometimes spend too much on vacations, and, you know, all—all those sorts of things,” and I think for me it was, you know, speaking the reality of life and that’s what I try to get every guest on the podcast to do too that… through doing that people would figure that they’re—we’re all more alike than we’re different, particularly when it comes to our money. And that you just—perfect is totally unattainable when you’re thinking about your finances. So don’t even try to put yourself there.
SWB I really love this and I’m so thankful to hear you kind of talk about about your own story and sort of saying like, “Look: I’ve been there. I’ve screwed it up. I’ve been in a bad place, and I worked myself out of it, and, you know, and other people can too.” I’m curious like… how did you work your way out of it? Like how did you go from that place of sort of having to kind of start over financially to feeling like you had it more together again?
SCG The best advice I could give is just, I took it step by step by step. So if I looked at the entirety of the situation—like how much I was in debt, and how much I had to pay my ex-spouse, you know, all of the things that I had given up—like if I looked at in the entirety, I had, you know, those like panic, freak-out modes. And so I had to just break things down by little pieces. Like, “Ok. I’ve got this debt. Ok. I know how to attack debt, right? There’s two ways to attack debt, I’m gonna pick one of them and I’m gonna for it,” you know? So I started moving in that direction. And then I also know like, “Ok. I have all these skills, I have these talents. None of that was taken away from me. How do I turn that now and start having that be more revenue-producing for me than it was before?” So for me it was just literally about writing out goals, staying really focused, and, you know, trying to put these little steps together to get yourself to a place where you feel like, “Ok. I’m actually achieving things and it’s going in the right direction.” But it’s tough. It’s hard, especially when you’re in a tough emotional situation like that. But I think really being focused, and really seeing it like, “Ok, it might not be good financially but it is a clean slate to work from, so lemme just figure out how to, you know, start attacking some of this.”
[28:07]
SWB I love this idea that like you might feel like everything’s been taken away from you because you—you lost, you know, a lot of things financially, or people can feel like that if they lose a job, but like, nobody took away your talents. And like it’s a really good reminder that you’re still you, and you still have all of that.
SCG Yeah! It’s really easy to feel down, to feel depressed, to have that anxiety, and I—I’ve certainly been there but, you know, yeah I mean that really for me was like the biggest realization. Like, “Ok. I had to give up all this stuff but I—yeah, I’m still me. I still have all of these talents and I can make these talents better and that’s something nobody can take away from me.”
JL There’s so many topics in here that I think so many people would be afraid to talk about. And, I wanna ask you, Shannah, why do you think people are so afraid to talk about money?
SCG I think it’s just this taboo topic and so because of that people just don’t talk about it. So when you don’t talk about something, you feel really isolated, and you feel like you are alone. Like nobody could possibly have the same money issues you have. But the reality that I try to tell everybody is: you’re so wrong! Like we—we are all so much alike when it comes to money, especially the things that we’ve not done so well.
JL Right. How do you suggest people like start opening up about this to—to their friends or, you know, to others? Like when—when is the appropriate time to start talking about money?
SCG Well, I think, you know, with friends you have to make sure you’re in good company. It’s really easy, I think, for other people to judge you, especially if you’ve never broached this topic. But I’m just a big believer, especially if it’s something where you feel really pent up about, like start talking to people in just a casual way. I mean you don’t to share everything, you know, that you feel like maybe has been a money mishap in your life, but start maybe having some conversations and see if that releases some of that pressure.
JL You know how appropriate is it to talk about money with your coworkers?
SCG You know that’s so interesting like the statistics are showing that people, especially people in their like twenties, are really, really open to talking about money at work with coworkers. It’s not a subject that I would probably talk about, you know, if I had coworkers. But, you know, I think again you just have to feel it out. You have to feel out like your comfort level and then you have to feel out, you know, the person that you’re talking to. Like is this person gonna be open or receptive to whatever I’m saying or any advice that, you know, I’m asking for? So it’s kind of like knowing your audience first is—is pretty key in that—that situation but the workplace is a little tricky, I think.
[30:40]
SWB I think that that’s one of those issues that’s coming up over and over recently because of so many conversations about like pay equity where, you know, particularly women and I’ve heard this from people of color and the you know like probably most of all I’ve heard this from women of color saying like, “You know we know we’re not achieving pay equity and if we don’t talk about what other people are making, then we don’t have any context and that sort of like keeps us more powerless in our workplaces.” And so I think that’s where at least some of that shift is coming from is from people who feel like they’ve been kind of like missing some context and wanting to go seek that out. I know I personally I mean I don’t—I don’t work in a company where I have coworkers, so I don’t get to talk to them about money, but I talk to people who are my peers all the time about the offers that they’re getting for jobs or like, well, you know, like, “Oh, well, I know somebody who was offered a position in a company that I think was similar and they were offered somewhere like this,” and, you know, “I’ve seen some other positions that were in this range.” And just trying to like give people more of that context so that they don’t feel so in the dark.
SCG I think that’s a really good point, too, and I—I think that, you know, you—you said it maybe a little bit more eloquently than I did, but it’s also like I said, knowing your audience. So, yeah, I mean obviously for women like the pay equity thing is—is a huge—you know I’m not sure quite sure how we solve that issue but um—other than we just pay women what they actually deserve [chuckles] but I definitely do that as an entrepreneur, I’ll ask other people like, “Hey, what did you get for this contract or this client hired you, what did they pay you?” And some people are willing to open up about it and some aren’t and that’s ok.
JL For me I know like Sara and I we’ve had conversations about money but, you know, those certainly didn’t happen the first time that we ever met. Um [laughter] that was definitely after many a happy hour [laughter], where you know, I felt that someone that I was like really confident in like both friend and—and working like that, you know, we could have these conversations and keep it between us and so I found it really important to find someone that I could sort of trust. Trust is such a huge part of these money conversations.
SCG Yeah. For sure. Such a big part!
JL So, you know, money can be very intimidating. The other day someone in like a work Slack channel said, “Every time I think about wanting to get better about it, I get too confused and I walk away.” [Laughter] I think a lot of us can relate to that. How do you suggest people get, you know, quote/unquote “better” about their money?
[33:03]
SCG I think that that’s what happens with a lot of people. You know I preach a lot about probably people are sick of hearing this but I preach a lot about a concept I call “Knowing Your Numbers.” So if you hate the word budgeting, I’m right there with you, I’m not a big fan of the word budget. But um, you know, the concept of knowing what cash is going out of your bank account, and where that’s going to, it gives you a lot of empowerment over your finances. And I think starting places like there where, you know, you can really have this awareness of what’s going on with your money puts you in this place of power, it puts you in the driver’s seat when it comes to your finances, and it helps you to make really educated decisions about what you’re doing with your money. But I—I do think, you know, it’s really easy because it can seem really complicated, you know, “What should I do with my money? Well, I can’t figure anything out so I’m just not gonna do anything,” but I think there’s so many resources out there. There’s podcasts. There’s so many articles. Gosh there’s books. I mean there’s apps. You name it. And it’s all about just pulling out what’s gonna work for you and throwing out the rest, because as I always tell people like money is not a one-size-fits-all. So what’s gonna work for you is not gonna work for me. And so I need to figure where there are pieces of information that maybe you have or money tips that you’re using that maybe would work for me and the rest I’m just gonna throw out because it—it doesn’t work for me.
JL Yeah, I think that’s so important. I’ve been reading a ton of money books, and magazines, and listening to podcasts recently, including yours [laughter] and I just like—there’s so much information but of course not everything is applicable to me.
SCG Yeah, you know, and it’s really interesting um we kinda talked about this earlier with that like idea of perfection. There’s this kind of underground movement right now happening. I just recently was—was quoted in an article about the downsides of extreme personal finance and so there’s this movement of—of bloggers and people who are saying… Dave Ramsey talks about this a lot, that you can’t have any debt to be quote/unquote “successful.” And I think that that’s really putting undue pressure on people, because I mean let’s face it, like, honestly sometimes having debt is the smartest decision you can make. Sometimes leveraging somebody else’s money actually works to your advantage. And so I think you know broad-sweeping these concepts across and telling people you know, “You have to do it this way. And you have to retire by 35. And you have to—” It just doesn’t work for everybody, and I think it puts us in this… you know more of a panic state when it’s just—it’s not applicable to our life.
JL Right. I mean I get so concerned, right? Like I’ve listened to an abridged Audible book of Dave Ramsey [laughs and laughter]. I’m gonna put that out there. And I listen to and I—I remember thinking like, “Wow. If this had been the only thing I had listened to, like if this was the first thing, like I wonder what my life would be like.” Would I have just like done everything that he had told me to do?
[36:01]
SCG I think that happens a lot with money because I think, you know, look: we don’t normally learn about it at home, we’re not learning about it in school, nobody’s teaching us about money. And so I think that, you know, sometimes we just like glom onto the first thing. But really like I encourage people like listen to lots of podcasts, read lots of articles, you know, again like pick out what’s gonna work for you and just throw out the rest.
SWB When I start trying to look at a lot of different sources to make a financial decision, sometimes it works pretty well for me. I can like read a few different things and come out feeling like, “Ok. I get it now.” I understand whatever this thing is, whether it’s like for example, you know, researching mortgages a few years ago when we bought our first house. And that’s great. Sometimes when I’m researching money things, and I would say like particularly with retirement stuff, I read a whole bunch of different stuff and I come out the other end going, “Well now I’m even less sure what I should be doing!” [Laughter] How do you recommend people kind of can make sense of what is gonna work for them or not get overwhelmed when you get all of this kind of like complicated and sometimes conflicting information?
SCG Yeah, that is such a great point, especially when it comes to retirement. Most people are kind of in this like retirement fog like just not sure how much you should save or where it should go, you know? And this is really a case of it’s always a good idea to hire an hour or two of like a Certified Financial Planner’s time to figure out, ok, what actually is gonna work for you. Because somebody can look at your situation holistically. But I think it does really start with the place of—and this sounds really obvious but people forget this a lot of time—of what is the vision for your life? Realistically, what do you want your life to look like? You know, do you wanna retire at 50 or 70? Or you know I know some of those decisions are hard to think of now, but if you could paint a picture of what you want your life to look like what would that be? And then ok, now that you have that picture, how do you get your money to come alongside that picture and help make that actually happen? And I think when you start from that approach then you have this visualization and you can figure out then what you need to do with your money. What are those different steps you need to take to be able to fund that, to get you to that vision.
JL So, you mentioned before budgeting. And I think a lot of the reason I think we avoid that is because it sounds like we’re just basically cutting all the fun out of life. So, how do you suggest people think about making a budget and how do they get started with that?
SCG I always tell people like the only reason in the world that you’re ever going to attempt to do anything like a budget is so that you can actually fund your goals. You know: do you wanna buy a house? Do you wanna—are you starting a family? Do you wanna stop working? You wanna start a business. You wanna go on vacation. Like what are those things that you wanna do? That’s the only reason that you do a budget, because you’re incorporating those goals into your budget so that you can structure your money properly. So that you’re actually able to achieve those goals. And I tell people, like, I don’t like the word budget. If you don’t like the word budget, change the name of it. Call it whatever [Jenn laughs] the heck you wanna call it! Just understand the principle of when you are tracking where your money is going, you are putting yourself in the driver’s seat of making changes with your money so that you can drive more money towards those particular goals. Even if your goal is you wanna pay off debt, it’s—it’s just when you have an understand of, you know, the what’s coming in is the easy part. Like that’s the part we all like. The what going out part, you know, most people are like, “Well I have some general idea of where I spend my money,” and then there’s a process that I go through with people where we dial down and we actually look at the bank statements and, you know, I—I come back to them and we compare the numbers of what they thought, and what they actually spent, and it’s kind of mind-blowing at times. So it’s—it’s putting yourself in a powerful position to be able to make changes and also to be able to anticipate when, you know, big expenses are coming up and things like that, and really, I mean, it can be as uncomplicated or as complicated as you want. Some people use Post-It notes, some people use pieces of paper, some people Excel templates. Microsoft has a ton of free templates or you can use budgeting apps. I mean so it’s really kind of based off of your temperament and something that will keep you motivated.
[40:28]
JL Huh. I never even thought about other options besides like an Excel spreadsheet.
SCG Yeah. There are so many of them out there. So I always tell people, like, try a bunch of things until you figure out something that actually works for you.
SWB There’s like nothing more terrifying to me than having to sit down and face how much money I spent in a given month on, like, coffee.
SCG Yeah I—I know. Coffee [inaudible], you know, eating out is another—is another big one. I worked with a couple a couple of years ago and they wanted to buy a house and they just—they made really good money and they couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t have a down payment ever. And so they’d handed me this like, you know, scrap of paper budget that they had made probably like a year before, and of course it wasn’t accurate. And uh, you know, after we did sort of the exercise of looking at their bank statements, I came back to them and I said, “So like, how much did you think that you spent on eating out?” And they’re like, “Oh I think we spend like $300 or $400 a month.” You know? And I’m like, “Do you wanna know the actual number?” And they’re like, “Sure!” I’m like, “Well, the last like four or five months tracking back you’ve spent about $2,500 a month on eating out.” And they were like, “What?!?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I mean—” You know, they obviously knew they were going out to eat a lot but they just—it just wasn’t realistic to them but, you know, when they realized that then they were able to shift things a little bit and they bought a house in four months. So, if I understand like how scary that can be: for sure because there are times I don’t wanna look at my money but um I think if you—if you can flip it on the flipside of things and just say, “Look: the only reason I’m doing this is because I got all these other things out here and name them and visualize them that I wanna do.” And so if I don’t look at this, I can’t get to this.
[42:14]
JL Ughhhhh. Having to look. [Laughing] Having to look internally at ourselves is so hard!
SCG I know! I know. I know. I know. It’s—it’s really hard but I promise you like after you do it… one or two times, if you can find that positive inspiration, it does start to change.
JL You know it’s true, and then you have to like remember like, “Wow. I’m so happy I know this now.” So you can like identify these things. It’s almost like the not knowing is worse.
SCG You know it’s—it’s just coming to the place where you—look: before—before I got divorced, like I was the girl who never wanted to look at the ATM receipt. I would deposit money and I wouldn’t look at the receipt. And it’s dumb because there was no reason because there was money—always money in the bank account. I just fixate on numbers and so I didn’t wanna look. And then when I got divorced I was like, “All right, I gotta look at the ATM receipt.” [Chuckles] Like, I gotta deal with this and, you know, the first few times were a little hard for me and then after that it was like, “All right, I got this. I can do this.” You know? And so I think as much as you can like positively inspire yourself, the better off you’re gonna be.
JL So I’ve been trying to tackle this. In like the last couple of months I’ve been like, “I’m gonna learn more about money. I’m gonna do it.” And I’ve been doing it but like I’ll read a lot of advice that’s like, “Start saving in your twenties, otherwise you’re screwed.” And as someone in my thirties that makes [laughing] me feel terrible!
SCG Yeah. Don’t listen to that. It’s not true. It’s not true. There’s always a way to remedy absolutely everything financially. So… that the stuff where it’s like, ok, they’re trying to get to clickbait on the article [laughs]. We’re also in a generation where we’re probably realistically gonna live well into our hundreds. So we’re probably not gonna like, you know, put up shop and stop working at 65 like maybe our parents did and so it’s gonna look completely different. I mean some people even argue that we’re not actually going to quote/unquote “retire”. We’re just gonna keep working and, you know, with the internet and—and side hustles and, you know, we’re gonna be in our nineties like side hustling. Um—
SWB Oh my god that sounds so exhausting.
SCG Right?! So I mean [laughter] I just—you know, don’t—don’t freak about it.
JL With—with that in mind, you know, I think sometimes we’re hesitant to save for retirement because it seems like… like it’s not ever gonna happen.
SCG Yeah! It’s this taboo word obviously that we hear all the time and I think, you know, once we get into our thirties we’re like, “[Gasps] Oh my gosh!” You know even though it’s 30-plus, potentially 40-plus years away. And, you know, their life is gonna bob and weave all around around them. So I think that it’s just about, you know, again having some goals and look: if you can only save a little bit of money each year for awhile, so be it. It’s not the end of the world.
[45:00]
JL So, Shannah, can you tell us a little bit about this new book you have coming out?
SCG Well, it’s a little bit top secret so [chuckles]. I can’t dish a whole lot but I—I’ve always like when I was—when I was writing it I was sort of writing it under the idea of the anti-money money book. So for me it’s—it’s a book that is full of inspiration that’s gonna help you feel better about, you know, whatever financial situation you’re in, and then also the book shares a lot of stories from people that hopefully, you know, somebody can relate to… who have gone through different things in—in their lives and how they’ve kind of pulled themself back up or the different steps they’ve taken, and then it’s fused together with my own story. So it’s not a book where, you know, chapter one is “how to pay off debt” and chapter two is “buying a house.” It’s just not that type of book. It’s to me it’s—it’s always the type of book I’ve wanted to write, which is really making money come to life and helping it be relatable to people reading it that they can see maybe themselves through somebody else’s story or be inspired through their story.
JL That sounds absolutely incredible and I know that I am very excited to read that when that comes out. But while myself and our listeners are waiting for your book, where can they get more Shannah?
SCG Absolutely! So you can find the Millennial Money podcast on absolutely any podcast player, and we would love to have you listening. We do episodes twice a week, or you can head on over to my website shannahgame.com to check out all of the back catalogue [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out].
FYOTW
KL I’m really hungry. But I’m also thinking about our Fuck Yeah of the Week.
JL Well, you’re in luck, Katel, because this week’s Fuck Yeah is fuck yeah, meal prep!
KL All right… tell me more!
JL Ok. So we’ve all either like… are meal prep converts at this point or we’ve like read about meal prep and been like, “Oof! That sounds like a… investment of a lifestyle.”
SWB The look on my face says, “Oh my god are you one of those people now?”
JL I think you’re gonna like it because I feel like I’m someplace in the middle. So I’ve been reading all this meal prep and hearing about meal prep for like ever. Like, “Meal prep! Meal prep! It makes life so much easier, etc.” But I was just like, “I can’t get down. I can’t get down.” But! Like money, I’m taking those slow steps into like being like, “Well, let me try it out and maybe I can like figure out a way to make this work,” and so we’ve been like struggling in that our son needs to eat at an early hour. And it’s like right in like a weird time. And then we do bedtime, so like we would like to give him dinner at like 6:00, but then we wouldn’t eat and start making dinner until after bedtime, so then we’re eating like 8:30, 9pm, and like I’m trying to go to sleep at like 9:30 so this was—
[47:46]
KL Yeah, it’s like, “What are we in Spain?” [Laughter]
JL [Laughing] What is going on here?!? Without, like, the glorious wine.
KL Yes.
JL So I mean there’s wine, it’s just not as good. So we were like, “You know what? Let’s like—let’s give meal prep a shot.” And like the thing is so we sort of looked at what we could do and—and we’ve got an Instant Pot, and we sorta became Instant Pop converts which, Katel—[laughs].
KL I wonder who helped you do that [laughs].
JL And then we’re also really into like sheet pan meals, and then the third part is um we’ve been doing these Hungry Harvest um like CSAs which are basically like they call like “ugly produce.” So like produce that stores reject for like one reason or another. Either if it’s like been over-production of something or mis-shaped apples. So they do a CSA and they deliver to your door which is awesome. So we get those delivered on Saturday, and then sometimes we’ll like supplement with an Instacart if we can’t go to the store because, again: baby. And then on Sunday we were like, “Well, let’s give this a shot.” So basically we just take all of these vegetables that we get from our produce share and we just like, we just roast ‘em with various things. And then I found a recipe for one-minute quinoa in the Instant Pot. So we do that. And then we do like one other like protein-ish thing which we freeze to then have later in the week. And then Sunday like when we’ve got time, we usually like grill something like a meat or a fish and then we’re like, ok. We’re gonna like just do the one like protein thing like… for the next two days, and then we like break out the thing that we froze from the Instant Pot. So like we tried and we’re like, “Oh!… This is kind of working.” And so now we—we’re saving time and we’re able to eat dinner at 6pm with our child. So we all eat dinner together as a family which is… really awesome.
KL It sounds like it’s, you know, a good thing to manage sort of budget-wise also because you’re kind of looking at like …you know a week at a time or whatever length of time. So that’s like—that seems really helpful.
[49:52]
JL And we waste way less food. We were doing the thing like where we’d be like, oh yeah, you know, I want all this stuff. And we were trying like sort of live the lifestyle we had before like before having a kid, where it’s like, oh yeah, we can cook extravagant dinners and like make all this stuff. But like… what we’d end up doing is being like, “Ugh! We’re throwing out another head of kale?!” Like and then you just feel awful. Like for many reasons. Like, one, you just wasted food, and you wasted money, and you didn’t get to eat that kale. So like it’s always like a little bit of a bummer and now we’re like actually making sure that we’re cooking everything.
SWB You know years ago Will and I were really good about planning out our meals for the week. We didn’t do like a ton of pre-prep, but we would really plan out ingredients. And also, to be honest, we were broke. Like we didn’t have that much money. When Will was in graduate school and we were in our early twenties, we would go grocery shopping every weekend together, and we would shop off of what was on the circular that week, which is like how I grew up. It was like a very like you would really look for what was on sale, and stock up on things when they were on sale, if you could at the time, and, you know, and so we used to do that and we were very good about thinking about things like, Ok, well… you know if we buy this kind of produce that is on sale this week, we need to have it in two different dinners. So we’ll like do it two different ways or whatever, right? And that worked pretty well, particularly because I wasn’t travelling that much then and so, you know, we would cook dinner together every night and it didn’t cost a lot of money. And it wasn’t perfect but it was good. And it kinda fell apart at some point because I travel a lot and we kind of stopped really doing those big shops together, and we just like stopped having as much of a plan, and so recently… I struggle with the meal prep in that like I have this piece of me that wants to like make dinner for the night that night. I really like it in a lot of ways. But I did get way better about going back into thinking through the week. What’s going on this week? How many meals can we prepare realistically? How many evenings this week are we going to be able to cook at home? And I’ve been really enjoying feeling a little bit more planned out. I’m not like micromanaging, but it makes me feel good to feel like I go into the week with like a little bit of a plan, the right kinds of stuff stocked, and a realistic sense of what I’m gonna do with all the kale I just bought or whatever, you know? [Laughter] But also like, don’t you sometimes have a plan and then you’re like, “I had a fucking Wednesday, and I just don’t wanna”?
JL So, I will say this: the meal prep is new. So, I’m saying fuck yeah now, but I’m not sure if I’ll be saying fuck yeah in another five weeks. There are like points where I’m getting like a little bit tired of like what we’re eating. So now we’re trying to like think of like other things that we can do to make it different. Maybe we need more sauces, maybe we need to like, I don’t know, just expand something. So we’re gonna look into that. But like the other week I was going home and we’re like—we’re… right near some like really good pizza restaurants and this just like smell of garlic was like just coming through the air, and I got home and I was just like, I just looked at Sutter and was like, “I’m ordering a pizza.” [Laughs, laughter, laughing] I was like, “I do not care. This is just like I am ordering this pizza right now. Like that is what’s happening,” and it was so good.
[53:15]
KL I love that. I—we like awhile ago, Jon and I decided that we were going to try basically switching off every day. Right? So like one—like if I decided dinner and it doesn’t—it doesn’t have to be a cooked thing. It can be like you are just in charge of dinner. You’re PMing dinner. You can cook it, you can order it, we can go out somewhere, whatever. And that was like kind of great because you just like had the night off if it wasn’t your night. But then a pizza place—a slice pizza place—opened up across the street from where we live. So now it’s basically like both of our ideas all the time are just pizza slice [laughing, laugher], which does not [laughter]… it sounds fucking amazing like today.
SWB It might not be like a long-term plan.
KL [Laughing] It’s not a long-term plan.
SWB So I think the thing about meal prep is—is sort of—it’s not even like just meal prep but it’s like kind of thinking about [sighs] how do I make sure that I have some of that time in the evening that is like good family time? Or how do I make sure that I eat the way that I wanna be eating more often? Or that I kinda stay on budget? It’s kind of like thinking about that stuff and sort of like giving yourself some space to figure out that out without, I think, without getting like too rigid about it and making it feel like another on the long list of shoulds, which I’m kind of like tired of feeling like I have all these shoulds.
JL Totally. Fuck yeah.
KL That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Shannah Compton Game for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us on Apple podcasts. Your support helps us spread the word. We’ll be back next week with another great guest [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, fades out to end].
Today’s topic is…therapy! If that makes you a little bit nervous, you’re not alone: lots of us feel a bit scared to talk about our mental health—much less make an appointment to get help.
Plus, navigating the mental health system can be challenging: How do you find a therapist? How do you pay for it? How do you know if they’re a good fit? And what happens if you need to break up with them? We have so many questions.
To help us answer them, we called up none other than Katel’s own therapist, Dr. Allison Chabot. She’s a clinical psychologist working in Philadelphia, and talking with her gave us all the best feels.
> Ask your friends. Ask your family. Somebody else has gone to therapy that you know. So many people go to therapy. And you hear positive experiences from people: you hear how it unlocked something, it opened something, it helped them look at themselves in a different way. It is a leap of faith, it really does take courage, but I feel like, what do you have to lose? > > — Dr. Allison Chabot
Links from this episode:
- Meditation app Headspace
- Sliding-scale therapists at the Philadelphia Society for Clinical Psychologists
- Psychology Today therapist finder
Also in this episode: Jenn goes to a meditation workshop and fucking hates it, Katel shouts her love for therapy from the rooftop, Sara plans her summer lipstick game, and we all get hyped for a #summerofselfies.
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.
Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher [Ad spot] This episode of NYG is supported by our friends at Shopify, makers of great tools that help entrepreneurs around the world start and grow their business. And they’re growing! Shopify is hiring all kinds of folks, everything from customer support to engineering to design to sales. Personally, I want to run their partnership program in Paris. Mmmm. Join the more than 3,000 smart, passionate people around the world who make Shopify great. Visit shopify.com/careers to check them out [intro music fades in, plays alone for ten seconds, fades out].
Jenn Lukas Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû.
SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
JL On today’s show, we’re talking about taking care of ourselves. Not the kind of taking care of ourselves that involves eating better or sleeping more or hitting the gym, not even rigid skin care regimens. Nope. Today: it’s all about therapy. In fact, we even have a super special guest: Katel’s own therapist, Dr. Allison Chabot. Sara and Katel sit down to talk with her about being a therapist, finding a therapist, breaking up with your therapist, and all other burning questions about mental healthcare. Let’s get started!
KL Yeah.
SWB Ok. So, talking about mental health is still pretty taboo for a lot of people, and it’s hard for people. And I think it can be especially taboo in contexts where we’re also talking about work which is like something we always talk about on this show. But, Katel, you invited your therapist to be on the show and I would love to know how did you get comfortable talking about therapy and like being a person who goes to therapy?
KL Yeah, uhh [chuckles]. Honestly, I think that is has come partly with just being in therapy and doing therapy for a lot of my life, and realizing what an impact it has had on how I navigate relationships, how I am a good and better friend to people, and just how, I don’t know, like how I heal myself and make sure that I’m taking care of myself so I can take care of—of the people I love. And, honestly, you know, [sighs] not just because we had my therapist on the show but she has been really instrumental in showing me how my relationship with therapy is a part of my life in a way that I just never really realized it was. And finally like feel really proud to share. And I think that I’ve been paying more attention to other people’s journeys in therapy and realizing that it—it is a really important part of a lot of people’s lives in whatever capacity, even if it’s like group therapy, if it’s, you know, once a month, if it’s just like whatever works for you can just be really life changing. So, I don’t know, I think that there’s a lot of—I want to try to help destigmatize that and so I think that’s why you’ll find that every time—if you’re talking to me about therapy I’m just like very [chuckles] enthusiastic about it. So I guess that’s why I’m open about it too because I want to share that.
[3:10]
SWB Yeah, totally! I mean I think that’s one of the things like therapy is normal and tons of people go to therapy! And part of the problem is like if you can’t talk about it, then you feel like nobody’s going or it’s only people who are in sort of like worse case scenarios or they’re at crisis moments in their life and like obviously if you’re in a crisis moment in your life which, like, is also a normal thing to go through in the course of a life. But if you are in a crisis moment, yeah, therapy can be really helpful but it doesn’t have to be that, it can also just be a normal part of how you cope! Yeah. And figure out like how you feel about things, and how you feel about yourself, and like becoming more self aware or becoming better at like processing your feelings or like there’s all of these reasons that—that people go, and—and I’ve definitely gone for a few different reasons at different moments of my life.
KL I think when you can kind of learn how to be introspective when you need to be and kind of like take a beat and look at things with a different perspective because of tools you’ve learned. That’s the biggest thing I’ve taken away from it is that I’ve learned tools to kind of like take with me. It’s not just going to a therapy session and, you know, having that one on one time but it’s also the things that I take away from it where I’m like, “Ok. I feel a little bit more equipped,” and I think that’s a huge part of it. It’s been very important to me. I think I’ve, you know, I’ve said this on the show before but I’ve struggled with depression my entire life, and I take medication for it, and it took me a really long time to feel [sighs] not bad about that. And to feel like sometimes you are a person that takes medication for your entire life. I don’t know. I may be one of those people. I may not be. But supplementing that with tools and guidance has just been critical.
SWB I love that whole thing thing you’re saying about kind of checking in with yourself. And so I think—ok, so I want to ask about kind of another way people check in with themselves. Jenn, I heard you took a meditation workshop recently and I would love to have you tell us about it.
JL Oh I did.
KL I want to hear about that too [laughs]!
JL So I, you know, I love the idea of therapy. And, I think, we’re going to dig into this more today but one of the things I’ve always found is like I—like I don’t know how to find the time for a lot of these things and—and the commitment. So I often look for other things that would be like similar to therapy such as my addiction to self-help books and I feel like everywhere you read things like breathing and meditation or things that like help you get in touch with yourself, right? And less stress, and like just generally like people say meditation and they’re like, “Meditation changed my life!” And I’m like, “I want to be less stressed. I want like a new life changing view, and to like breathe.” So actually at work we had a meditation workshop offered during the day at work, and I was like, “Well this is perfect!” And so I was really excited and I go and it’s in this like big, happy, natural light room, and here’s this woman and she like—she obviously is like—she’s got the meditation thing down, right? Like she’s like [laughter]—
[6:18]
KL You’re like, “I can trust this person to guide me through.”
JL It’s definitely like, you’re just like, “Wow your vibe is like, I’ve figured life out,” you know like when you meet those people and you’re like, “Wow! You have—you are like so comfortable in your skin and just like—
SWB Un-fuckin-bothered.
JL Yes! “You look relaxed!” And, you know, she even says in like her intro, she asks, “How many people have like tried meditation but like been discouraged by it?” And like me and a couple of other people raised their hands, right? Because I’ve tried. I’ve done like some of those apps and like I just like I turned them on and I’m like, “Nope.” And I turned them off. And she was like, “Don’t worry if that’s you, we’re like going to get through it together,” and I was like, “Ok! Yeah!” And so like eventually like we get to the like meditation part and she has us all like close our eyes and she starts sort of leading us through this breathing thing and she’s talking about visualizing the breath going in. But like [laughs] the thing is: I close my eyes, and I’m trying to do this, but instead of like seeing my breath around me, I just start getting like really tight and anxious. And I don’t know if it’s just like the slow breathing, or my allergies, and my nasal passages, or just like this kind of breathing is not for you but as I’m breathing in I’m just like, “I—I hate this.” I do not use the word [chuckles] hate lightly. Like it’s beyond—[laughs]
KL That’s exactly how you want to feel [laughter] during meditation.
SWB That’s like a different kind of self awareness, right? Like it’s none of the self awareness of like, “Oh wow I’ve reached this higher plane.” It’s the self awareness like, “Oh I’m a person who fucking hates meditation.” [Laughter]
JL I’m like, “I definitely do not care for this. Like this is definitely not—” and like so like at some point like I, you know, I cheat and I open my eyes of course to be like, “Are there still people here? Are people—” But people look like they’re into it and I’m just like, “Ok. Alright.” And so I stop doing the breathing thing because I can’t. It’s like making me light headed and like, again, maybe it’s just because I have a really stuffy nose but I cannot do it. Anyway, so eventually it ends and I’m like, “Ok good.” I’m like, “I’m going to get outta here.” But! [Laughs] She has this thing where at the end she likes to go around the room and have each person say one word to describe what you’re currently feeling at that moment.
KL Wow!
[8:44]
JL My word is like, “Anxious as fuck!” [Laughing and laughter] Like, terrible. Awful. I hate this. Like, right? But she starts on the other side of the room, thankfully, and everyone’s like “Relaxed” . . . “Rejuvenated” . . . “Free.” So I start like thinking, I’m like, “Oh my god what am I going to do when—what am I going to do when they get to me? Because I don’t want to ruin all of these good vibes of everyone who like can get down with meditation.” Like, it’s one of those things, I’m like, “It’s not them, it’s me.” [Laughs] Right? And so, so finally it gets to me [chuckles]—
KL Oh gosh! What did you say?!?
JL And I just said, [laughs] . . . “Hungry!” [Boisterous laughter]. Well it’s not rude!
KL You’re like, “It’s not untrue!”
JL Yeah, it’s not untrue.
KL It’s the least rude thing I can say right now.
JL Um I did manage to sneak out after one person or another did. I did hear though that I missed a uh giant group hug.
KL Wow. Ok. So you—you mean you escaped a giant group hug. [laughs]
SWB Do you think some of it was like context like trying to do it in the middle of the work day with your co-workers around being not a good vibe? Or?
JL You know what? It may be a time thing for me. So like I do have there’s like one app I downloaded and one of the things I really love about it is you can choose like you don’t have to get into a 60-minute. They have a three-minute one. And the three-minute one does like the thing where like I even modify it a little bit where I just like—it’s like, you just sit and then basically like you think about the different body parts and I just try to relax those body parts, and that I can do because it’s like a really specific instruction, for a very short amount of time. And so I don’t feel like I’m on my own, I guess, when I do that.
KL I totally agree. Is it Headspace?
JL Yes!
KL Yeah. I use that too and I have—I found the exact same thing. I thought, breaking it down so that you can actually do like just chilling out and going outside for two minutes. Like sometimes that’s actually what you need and also I like being guided. I like being guided in a way that’s not like obnoxious and just like—they’ve done that really well. Like the person who does it has like got a great voice, they do like a lot of great narration, et cetera, et cetera.
[10:54]
SWB So I know we—we have a really awesome interview to get to and I want to hear Katel like, we invited your therapist on the show because we wanted to talk about therapy but also because you really like your therapist. I am super jealous of that. Like how does that feel?
KL It’s—it’s amazing and she’s been a big part of my life the last year and I think just like getting through a lot of—of hard stuff, and I think sort of knowing that I’ve made a connection with a therapist has come with a lot of trial and error, and working with different therapists. And like, in all honesty: I’ve gone to therapists where I’ve seen them for a year or more and it’s been a terrible relationship. Like I go and I sit there and they look at me like I’m taking up their time and their space and that’s the worst feeling in the world and it’s so—I feel like counterproductive. And I think if you talk to people who have sort of, you know, made any attempt at finding a good therapist like that—that is going to happen. And I think the, you know, the bummer about that is that it happens but the good side is that what we learn from Dr. Chabot is that there are ways to kind of figure out why it didn’t work, and how you can find someone that is a good fit. So I feel extremely lucky. It’s, you know, I think a bunch of things, I’ve put in work but she’s also amazing, and because I’ve had—I’ve had a history of knowing what that looks like, I was able to know it right away.
SWB Well, she’s not my therapist. So it was the first time I ever talked with her and I really loved it. So I think our listeners are going to love it too. Should we get to the interview?
JL Definitely [music fades in, plays alone for four seconds, fades out].
SWB [Ad spot] Hey, everyone! Sara here and I’d like to tell you a little bit about the folks who help make No, You Go possible. First up is CodePen. CodePen is like a big, virtual sandbox for designers and developers. You can use it to write code directly in a browser and see the results right as you build. And right now CodePen is also doing this awesome giveaway that is just for No, You Go listeners. They’re giving away three free pro developers accounts. All you have to do to win is go to codepen.io/nyg and answer one question which is what do you love about CodePen? If you haven’t used CodePen yet, no problem. Just tell them what you’re excited to make first. So check out CodePen today, and enter to win one of those three free pro accounts. Go to codepen.io/nyg. That’s C-O-D-E-P-E-N dot I-O slash N-Y-G. And another rad company that helps make our show possible is WordPress, the company behind 30 percent of all websites including ours. In fact, I’ve also used WordPress for my personal site, sarawb.com, for years now. I love WordPress because I can make updates and tweak the design pretty much whenever I want, however I want. And I know that if I break something. Whoops! I’m not alone. Because they have great customer support 24/7. WordPress plans start at just four dollars a month and you can do everything from create a simple one page site to publishing a blog to hosting an entire online store. WordPress is the easiest way to make your site your own. So start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s 15 percent off your brand new website at wordpress.com/noyougo [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out].
[14:34]
KL I’ve known Dr. Allison Chabot for just about nine months. She’s a clinical psychologist working in Philadelphia and, well, she’s my therapist. From the moment I met her I knew I’d found not just a guide but someone I trusted completely to help me on my journey of healing and growth, and I’m so thrilled Dr. Chabot is joining us today. Allison, welcome to No, You Go.
Dr. Allison Chabot Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you already and I appreciate the invitation to share a little bit of my world.
KL So, you are a clinical psychologist. What does that mean in terms of your day to day?
DAC Ah my day to day. I’m a clinical psychologist in private practice. So I work five or sometimes six days a week, seeing patients in my office, one at a time. I do individual work. I’ve been in private practice for about 15 years now. I’ve been doing it full-time for about 12 years, um but my first mental health gig was about 25 years ago when I had just finished my bachelor’s degree.
KL What does the education and sort of training look like to become a clinical psychologist?
DAC Well the path that I took was to get a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s, and I did that in Missouri. And then came out to Philadelphia to Temple University and then about six or seven years of training there. So that’s several years of taking courses, and and, you know, various things like a pathology diagnosis, therapy, research. And then a few years before graduating of seeing patients and getting to know how to do therapy, how to do testing and assessment, like intelligence assessment, things like that. And then writing a dissertation, and then after that point there’s a postdoctoral fellowship. So I did a couple of years at Pennsylvania Hospital working there and, again, just getting more experience under my belt with lots of different populations and therapeutic modalities. So it’s a long road but it’s worth it.
KL Yeah that seems to important to kind of have, you know, a varied sort of picture of what, you know, kind of people you’re going to deal with and, you know, different issues you might encounter. What type of therapy do you specialize in today? And how does that compare to like other types?
[16:59]
DAC Most of my practice, the way I think about things, actually comes from Freud. It actually comes from psychoanalytic therapy, thinking deeply about how our personalities develop, how our early life experiences shape that, how our subconscious or unconscious mind actually steers the ship, you know, from below the surface, and I don’t know that my patients would know that I practice from that foundation because my style of talking is actually fairly interactional, day to day, basing it in problem solving, but the way that I conceptualize with going on with somebody is from that deeper framework. Other types of therapy that you may have heard of are cognitive behavioural therapy which is, you know, it has some deep components but it’s really more of a practical guide about how understanding that your thoughts and feelings affect each other—and helps you reframe your thinking, and tends to be homework focused. It tends to be short-term therapy and, just my personal belief is that it’s harder to get deep personality change or deep healing from that type of therapy but that was the first therapy that I was trained in. There’s also dialectical behaviour therapy which is a group format plus—plus individual therapy and that’s really helpful for people who have a hard time modulating their emotions or find themselves overwhelmed by stress quite a bit. So that’s just a, you know, a little bit of an example.
KL That’s so great to—to hear all of those different types because I think this leads to another question that I think, you know, I have certainly had along my way and I know other people have is that there are so many options and it can feel a little overwhelming. How can someone new to therapy figure out, you know, what type might be a good fit for them or, you know, what they might even start with?
DAC My suggestion is actually not to overthink it because we often think we know what we need when we go into a healing experience, and because we feel vulnerable, we’re getting ready to ask somebody for help, and—and you know, share some things that are difficult to talk about. Lots of times we engage our intellect and we think, “Ok. I’m going to figure this out first.” Or “I’m going to—I’m going to beat my therapist to the punch. I’m going to figure out who they need to be and then I’m going to go find them.” And while that makes some sense to some extent because we’re adults and we want to—we’re, you know, we’re informed about ourselves and we want to make good decisions. Just going by instinct and knowing what fits is an even better indicator of finding the right therapist. And we can talk about, you know, how to go about finding a therapist but when it comes to knowing is this the right person, I think that’s more about a click or an instinctual thing. Does that make sense?
KL Yeah, absolutely, and I’ve [chuckles] just been nodding along because I’m like, “Oh gosh I wish I had—I wish I had heard that before I ever started,” you know? And I’ve been doing it—doing therapy for a long time now and I think just kind of doing that gut check with yourself is so important. So, yeah, touching a little bit on kind of starting therapy is there anything that you, you know, might advise folks to do when they are starting therapy? Or what’s the best way to find a doctor?
[20:17]
DAC There are a few websites that are helpful, I think Psychology Today is the best one I’ve seen, where you can actually, it reminds me of dating websites. You can look at therapist’s profiles. They usually have a picture, they describe their work, you can see a little bit about their educational background and who they prefer to work with: what age groups, individuals, couples, and what their specialties are, what type of therapy they provide. And then, you know, you can search by zip code. It’s really a nice way to get a feel for a person and I found—although I don’t have a profile on Psychology Today because if I did I think I would be overwhelmed. My practice is full and so I just—I’ve never needed to do that. I think it’s a great way of helping people find a therapist. If someone calls me and my practice is full, I’ll send them to that website and it’s kind of a matchmaking exercise. It works really well.
SWB Allison, you mentioned a minute ago something about kind of clicking with a therapist and kind of almost that, you know, you—you’ll know you’re with somebody who’s a good fit because you’ll feel it. And my experience in therapy I think has been that I’ve never had that kind of relationship. Like I’ve seen a therapist a few times intermittently over the years and was never particularly feeling it with them but kind of kept going for a little while and then stopped. What I would love to know is, I found it overwhelming and a lot of work to get to the point where I could even figure out who to go to and make an initial appointment. I’m curious if you have any recommendations for like how to kind of get through some of that early stage stuff or how to make it easier or something to [laughs]—to find that person you can click with?
DAC I think that a lot of people have had that experience. I’ve certainly have had that experience and starting a therapy at a time of crisis. And finding somebody who was convenient, and I could pay the copay. And I found myself going home after the first few sessions, asking myself things like, “Is that person crazy?” Or, “Do they really understand me?” “Do I trust that person?” “Will I be able to trust that person?” And, you know, the fact that I was asking myself those questions should’ve been a red flag for me but I stayed in that therapy for three years. It took me three years to break up with her [chuckles] as a therapist. So my recommendation, as hard as it is, is to keep searching. And what I tell people if they call me and if for some reason we’re not the right fit. Either I’m not—I don’t think that I can help with exactly what they’re looking for or our logistics don’t match up, I recommend that they call and talk on the phone to three people. And I always say, “If you have courage, it is hard to do.” To talk on the phone to three people, and then if you can, meet with two people and interview them and figure out: is this going to work for me? If you think about it like dating, you don’t, you know, when you you go on a date, you’re like, “Eh, he was ok.” Right? “Nice guy, decent conversation, I guess I’ll just keep going out with him.” How fulfilling is that relationship going to be? Is it going to move you forward personally? Is it going to make you feel fulfilled and alive? Your therapy relationship is so important! That it deserves the same diligence but it’s hard to do because we look for a therapist when we’re not feeling our best selves. When we’re maybe even in crisis. And so it’s hard to have the courage and—and maybe even the appropriate level of entitlement to say, “I’m going to keep looking.”
[23:53]
SWB I feel a little better knowing that you went to a therapist for three years who wasn’t [chuckles] a great fit. Not because [Katel laughs] I mean I—I wouldn’t wish that on anybody but I feel a little reassured that it’s normal to, you know, not necessarily know how to find the right fit or to shut it down when [laughing] it’s not the right fit. When you talked about sort of like how important the therapy relationship is I’m also wondering, for our listeners who’ve like never tried therapy and are curious about and—but like aren’t really sure what to expect, how would you describe like a good therapy relationship?
DAC I would say someone that you can talk about anything with. You can talk about the things that make you afraid, the things that make you excited. The things that you feel happy about, as well as the things you worry about. And then eventually, ideally, you can talk about the therapy relationship itself. So, I try to listen for if something seems to be going on. Let’s say I asked a question or made a comment in a session and it just seemed to be that, you know, ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly something shifted or something happened. I put a bookmark in it in the back of my brain, and I listen for it in subsequent sessions. Did I say something that hurt? Did I say something that helped? And ideally, eventually the patient or the client feels comfortable enough to say, “I’ve been thinking about what you said.” And if they can’t but I hear indications of it, then I’ll bring it up myself. And that’s something that’s specific to a psychoanalytic type of therapy is that you actually use the therapy relationship to help the person understand themselves more and to help the person hear where their resistances might be in relationships, you know, where they might feel hesitant or unsafe and actually heal some of that.
SWB That so like hit me when you said that—that a good relationship in therapy is one where you can actually even talk about the therapy, and you can talk about anything because I’m like, “Oh gosh! I’ve never—I’ve never been there.” That’s really helpful to think about it in that way.
KL I love hearing that too because—and this is so funny because I’m having like a—a total realization right here in this conversation because, you know, and I love working [chuckles] with you, Allison, but this is the—this is the first relationship with a therapist I’ve had where I feel like I’ve been not just comfortable enough to assess the relationship and to like figure out how it can actually help on the journey, but empowered to do that. So I, you know, I thank you for that and I think this is just so amazing to hear that, and I hope it, you know, it resonates with—with folks who are—are thinking about it. And I will also just say that I totally agree with that, you know, thinking about finding someone to work with when you’re in a moment of crisis and I’ve—I’ve done that so many times in my life where, you know, I think thinking about it in your regular life and thinking about how therapy can, you know, add to [chuckles] the moments when it’s not crisis can really help when you do get to that crisis point.
[27:09]
DAC Yeah that’s the beautiful part of therapy is that once the storm has passed then you still have this relationship with this person who sees you and knows you. And then you get to healing. Sometimes we think of therapy as being only for mental illness—someone with bipolar disorder or someone with panic disorder, someone who has panic attacks. Certainly psychotherapy helps with that but there’s also just, you know, the worried well [chuckles]. There’s just the rest of us who struggle with life because life throws curveballs and we each have personalities where we throw curveballs at ourselves and it takes—well it helps to have somebody outside of you who knows you over some different contexts, and different situations over a period of time, who can say, for example, “Ah! You tend to go to guilt easily. I think we’re there again, right?” And it fine tunes your own hearing for yourself. And so the goal of therapy actually is to internalize the things that your therapist says. And people will say this sometimes, “I’ve been hearing your voice in my head all week and I’ve been telling myself,” and whatever it is that I usually tell that—that particular person. And that’s when you know also that therapy is moving along, and going well and the ultimate thing is that I eventually put myself out of a job, right? I mean I have—I have patients who’ve been with me for ten years but there’s people who graduate from therapy because you get past the pain and suffering and into the healing and into the rest of life.
KL Wow. Yeah. And speaking of, you know, sort of being in a relationship with a therapist for a long time or a short amount of time if it’s not the right fit. How—is there a good way to break up with a therapist and—and sort of vice versa. I mean, you know, do therapists ever break up with patients?
DAC Yes. Both happen, and what’s really interesting is a therapy can go really well and then still it might be time for—for those two people not to work together anymore and for the next therapist to take over. And that may sound really strange but there are times that I can help a person through a particular season of—of their life. And I, you know, it’s something that I can do well and we work well together, and then I hear perhaps they’re really curious about working with a person of colour, or they really need a dialectical behavior therapy group, they really need that group experience plus individual therapy plus crisis management, you know phone calls in between sessions. And I’m not trained in that type of therapy. And I’m not set up for lots of crisis phone calls because I have young children at home. So that’s—that’s one way that either the client can choose to relocate themselves or I can help them realize that that’s now in their best interest. Other times people just kind of peter out and stop coming. I reached out recently and talked with a man who is retired and I said, “Just thinking about you, wondering how you’re doing”, because he just kind of faded from therapy and he said, “Well, you know? I was thinking you told me one day people just stop coming and that’s how it ends.” And, you know, he’s somebody’s who’s [KL: awww] maybe a little more concrete, right? A little um, you know, he wasn’t ready to tell me that he feeling better and just never returned after a vacation [laughs]. So it was nice we had the phone call to get some closure on that for him to hear me confirm and give him permission that he could move on in his healthy life, you know? I think you’re also asking about what if you, as a patient or a client, you know or you have a growing that the therapy’s no longer helping you, and it’s time for you to leave the therapist. And I’ve actually done that not just once but twice, as a patient myself.
[31:08]
DAC [Continued] It’s—it’s not the easiest thing to do and in both instances I got—although I had complete clarity about that it was time to go and the therapy was actually hurting at that point, rather than helping, I got resistance from the therapist in both cases. And at that point you realize that you’re kind of on your own, in terms of knowing yourself. And that the therapy for me had reached me to this gross point that I could have clarity about what was best for me. So it’s a series of conversations usually, if it’s been a long therapy about, you know, what’s helped, what hasn’t, and why you’re going. It does—you know, if it’s a short therapy, if it’s three months or three sessions, you can just say that you’re going in a different direction. You don’t owe the person a lot of explanation. You truly don’t. What you owe is you yourself knowing that you’re making the right decision.
SWB I totally feel like I should probably talk to somebody a little bit more about like, things like avoidance because I have never had that conversation. I’ve just always been like, “Uh I’ll just not go. I’ll just not schedule another appointment.” [Katel laughs] “I’ll—I’ll call you to schedule that appointment. I need to look at my calendar.” And then fade into the night.
DAC Yes! That’s the most common way that people leave therapy. It truly is. That’s because, you know, it’s hard to know why it is you’re feeling avoidant. “Is it me? Is it the therapist? Is it the way we’re talking together? Could we adjust that?” And, again, it’s such a vulnerable relationship that if it’s not helping you—it’s kind of like you can’t really choose a different mother, [chuckles] you know? You can choose a different therapist. You can say, “This person doesn’t make me feel safe or heard.” Or, “This person’s not pushing me enough.” “This person isn’t growing me enough. They’re making me feel too safe.” You know? You get to do that.
SWB That feels really empowering just to be reminded that you get to do that. I mean I think that the last time I stopped seeing a therapist I was just like, “She just seems really bored and disinterested in me and I feel like [chuckles] that’s not a good feeling for me.” [Laughs] Like, “Why am I—why am I spending money on this person being bored for an hour?”
KL [Laughs] Woah! [Sara laughs]
DAC Absolutely. I honestly had somebody—I’ve had somebody fall asleep on me one time and that should’ve been when [Katel gasps] I started for the exit [laughter].
[33:38]
KL Ok that—I think you win there [laughing].
SWB Oh my gosh! Ok! So you know what I’m getting from this is also I think like a little less of that guilty feeling of just being like, “You know what? Nope!” And moving on. And even if I don’t confront them directly, but kind of being like, “Ok, I gotta advocate for me here.”
DAC That’s right and I think this requires a lot of self compassion because this—except for maybe your closest, I don’t know closest friendships or romantic relationships—this become the most vulnerable relationship in your life.
KL Mmm.
DAC No one else meets this person. No one else can give you feedback. Like, “No, no, they seem interested!” Even though their eyes are rolling back in their head, you know? No one else can give you feedback so you have to have a lot of self compassion that it’s hard—it’s hard to leave. Or it’s hard to move on, it’s hard to have the conversation. There’s no need for guilt though. Guilt, I find, is such an unnecessary emotion and it just I don’t know it just brings you down. It brings your energy down. Yes, this is a vulnerable relationship but imagine yourself in all of your other contexts of life. Do you have a hard time being—being assertive elsewhere? Do you have a hard time getting clarity about your leadership in your work? Or in your other relationships? If not, then just, if you can, plug that in to your observations of the therapy relationship and then decide for yourself.
KL What do you think are some misconceptions people have about—about starting therapy and just about that whole process? Is there—you know, is there anything you wish people knew more about?
DAC That’s interesting. I don’t hear much from people about what they were expecting versus what they’re getting. So I’m curious about that myself. I used to encounter this more that people would come to me expecting that I would give them specific advice or specific guidance. And, so, for some people it’s a learning curve to realize that it’s—it’s a listening relationship that I do more listening than maybe what they’re accustomed to and I’m not telling them what I think they should do very often. I am more listening to inconsistencies maybe in what they’re saying like, “You say you want to do this on the one hand but you’re doing that on the other hand. Can you help me understand what’s happening there?” And so I really just help them listen to themselves more deeply. Usually people like that. Usually they’re like, “Oh! Ok that’s how this is going to work. Now I get it.” But that’s the main thing I think I’ve seen happen is if they think they’re going to come for advice.
[36:29]
SWB I mean it sounds good to—when you think about, you know, the idea of going in and having somebody tell you how to fix your life but [Katel and Sara laugh] I suppose the literature shows it doesn’t really work that way. I’m curious, Allison, as you’re talking a little bit amount sort of like misconceptions people have do you also feel like there is still a level of like cultural stigma about therapy? And do you think that that’s changing?
DAC I honestly I think that I live in a little bit of a bubble just with the people that I see. Most of the people I see have friends who are in therapy or they’ve been therapy before and haven’t felt like it worked and so they’re returning. On the larger stage, I do think there’s still quite a bit of stigma about therapy and about mental illness. I think it’s because we fear dark places in ourselves and so we fear dark places in other people. We fear being out of control and so we don’t like it when we see, you know, somebody on the street talking to themselves because they’re out of control. I think in general it’s just—we’re so stressed [laughs]. We’re so stressed, as people, in general, that we like to keep things buttoned up and we like to have the appearance that we’ve got it all together. We might say, “Oh I’m so stressed.” Or, “Oh I’m so busy.” But we don’t tend to quiet down and say, “I feel scared.” Or, “Sometimes I feel sad and it comes over me and I’m not fully sure why. I wish I could think about that with somebody and figure that out once and for all.” Or, “I don’t know if I’m parenting my children any better than I was parented and I promised myself I would do better.” These are difficult issues and so I think because we fear looking at those things in ourselves, it’s hard for us to see other people actually experiencing them and expressing them and getting help for them.
SWB Something that really makes me think about is the way that multiple things can be true at the same time. Like I can both be really together and competent and also scared and hurt and need somebody to talk to. Like those are not mutually exclusive states. Like there’s no on/off switch for those things, right? Like I feel like sometimes it’s really easy to get into a mindset or you’re encouraged to be in this mindset where if you’re together and organized and successful, then you must not have like these kinds of problems to deal with. And it’s like, well that’s just not true. Like people aren’t like that. I think we talk about this on the show a lot that like you can be awesome, successful, badass and also like, struggling to get through the day, and like [laughs] that can be the same person and that’s fine.
DAC Yes. I—that is the most profound statement. Yes! A hundred times yes. I agree with that. And it’s something that I’m still learning constantly. I’m in a supervision group with um women who are all ten, twenty years older than me and I’m, you know, at forty-six years old I’m the—the young kid on the block but that’s what we’re learning about ourselves and from each other. We’re all therapists in supervision and in therapy together—that you can both be a mess and successful and just fine. And that’s so profound.
KL Ugh! I love all of this so much and I—like I had myself on mute but I was just going, “Mmm, mmm hmm, mm hmm” [laughs], so [laughing] just throwing that out there.
[39:56]
DAC I have the hugest smile on my face!
KL Aw.
SWB Yayyyyy! [Allison laughs]
KL This is so great.
SWB Now I want to be like, “What does it say about me that I get this like, level of satisfaction that I like got the right answer?” On a test [Katel laughs] with a therapist—which is like super unhelpful [laughs].
KL I love it. It’s great.
DAC Well, I was thinking earlier that I learn so much from my patients, right? I learn so much when people talk about their relationships or they talk about the things they discover and so that, my friend, is an instance where a therapist learns from you because basically and—and this happens a lot in therapy that’s really working is that you resonate back and forth, back and forth. I literally just learned that lesson and put it in those words, less than two weeks ago. That I can both be a hot mess and successful and sturdy. So it’s—that’s just—it’s exciting when that happens. When you reverberate back and forth like that.
SWB Yeah! I love that. Gosh. This is making me all like revved up to—to get back into some kind of therapy relationship.
KL So now that we’re sort of, you know, getting excited about uh the idea of therapy, I think one thing that has come up, you know, I think in—in some conversations I’ve had with folks is what can people expect in terms of, you know, making time for therapy and sort of just like making the actual act of therapy happen? I know that you have sometimes offered to do some sessions by phone which is so cool and I had never even thought about that. So I think just in general, you know, what are sort of the criteria around what folks should expect in terms of like how often they should and, you know, making time for it?
DAC Yeah. I think that therapy works best when you can meet with somebody once a week. At least at the beginning when you’re first getting to know somebody. I find sometimes that after a few months of doing that that people, because of their schedules, want to meet every other week. And people still get to know each other and still move forward. It’s just, you know, the progress—it’s like going to the gym, right? If you go three times a week you get fit faster than if you go every other week. But it’s—it’s a big commitment. It does kind of take over your world sometimes, just in terms of how much you process about things outside the sessions and what’s going on. But my recommendation—and it’s typical for most people—is that you go once a week at least for awhile. In my training because I was training to become an analyst which means, you know, on the couch kind of Freudian style [chuckles]. There was a time that I was going to analysis three times a week and then four times a week and then, believe it or not, five times a week. That is, you know, a level of training that’s not necessary for most people but it was important for therapists themselves to really have explored themselves. So that’s, you know, at the high end of things.
[43:11]
SWB You likened this to going to the gym and, obviously you’re right, if you only go to the gym every other week it’s not going to do as much for you as if you go more often but I’m also wondering, you know, for people who do find it challenging to make time if they can only get in every other week. I mean, I would say if you can only get to the gym every other week, you should still go every other week. I mean how do you—you know like would you still recommend to a patient that, “Ok. If that’s all you can do right now, let’s do that.” Or, you know, like how do you like work through those kinds of hurdles?
DAC Absolutely! I do think that if every other week is what fits with your schedule that—that it’s still very useful and I find that people who are motivated and still thinking about things between sessions or journaling about things. Or sometimes people will have thoughts and they’ll say, “I want to put a bookmark in this,” and they’ll email it to me and they’ll say, “You know, read this when we—when we meet but I want to get this off my chest.” That’s really helpful to keep the continuity. And people who come back, you know, to a subsequent session, not saying that this isn’t necessary but when people come back to subsequent sessions saying, “I thought about what you said and here’s what I’ve been doing with that.” Or, “I talked to my sister about that and she said the same thing.” You can tell when people are actively working with their material in between session, then, definitely meeting less frequently is still really helpful.
SWB Like taking the stairs all the time during those weeks when you’re not at the gym. Ok.
DAC Oh!! Yes!! Great analogy! [Sara laughs]
KL That’s perfect!
DAC There’s another part of—I mean journaling and talking to other people is helpful but really one of the things that I find most useful is some kind of spiritual growth in between therapy sessions, some kind of yoga or meditation or guided meditations. That also gets into the deep healing and some of the subconscious stuff that weighs people down. So I find that very useful as well. If you dare I would recommend either yin yoga. Do you know yin? Y-I-N?
[45:17]
KL Mm hmm.
DAC That’s very therapeutic and I’ve recently discovered what’s called kundalini yoga which is not as common but you go through a series of poses and they’re called kriyas, and breath exercises, and mantras that are also deeply healing. Definitely not something you’d see at the gym. But if you dare [laughs].
KL That’s a good idea. I also like hatha yoga just because it’s a sort of a slowed down version and it’s—just focuses a lot more on stretching and holding the stretches which I feel is sort of is like a nice bridge between like, “Ok. I’m—I’m doing general, you know, sort of stretching for like better flexibility and taking that into a yoga practice and saying, ‘Ok, like this is—I can do this.’”
DAC Yes! Absolutely. And the thing about yoga is you have to take your practice off the mat. So whatever you struggle with in the class, whatever chatter is going on through your mind when you’re lying in savasana at the end that is your yoga practice. And you take that off the mat, into your life, and that’s therapy.
KL Absolutely! It’s so true. Well just like going to yoga and going to the gym, you know, does like you usually have to pay for that. What—what does therapy even cost? You know? I mean I think there’s all sorts of ways you can pay for it and depending on whether you find someone that’s in your network or your, you know, covered by your insurance. Like is there a general idea of what folks can—can think about when they’re budgeting for it?
DAC Yes, there’s really a range. There are I believe the going rate in Philadelphia is somewhere between 150 and 200 dollars an hour, which is a lot if you’re going weekly. Fortunately, unlike yoga and things like that, insurance covers therapy. And it used to be that insurance companies would limit the number of sessions you could go for a lifetime or for a year and your therapist was constantly having to call them and ask for more sessions. That has—that has ended. So if you have something like Aetna Insurance or Blue Cross Blue Shield, Medicare, it’s pretty easy to find—well, there are lots of therapist that are in network with those therapists. I hesitate to say it’s easy to find somebody because a lot of the therapists their practices are full. That’s a problem that I see people running into quite a bit. There’s a place in Philadelphia, I believe it’s called The Philadelphia Society for Clinical Psychologists. They have a huge network of therapists that either do pro bono work meaning that the therapy is free or that they have a sliding scale and there are other great organizations. There’s one called Insight for All which is providing psychoanalytic therapy to the homeless in Philadelphia. So there there is a push to make therapy available to everybody.
[48:19]
SWB Yeah, you know, we—we have a lot of listeners all over the place and so I think something that—that they may want to do is just kind of like Google around for sliding scale therapy options wherever they’re located and kind of look into some of those resources.
KL Ok. So we have just one last question for you: what would you tell someone who’s listening to this episode and curious about therapy but, you know, still a little scared or a little unsure?
DAC I would ask your friends, ask your family. Somebody else has gone to therapy that you know. So many people go to therapy and you hear positive experiences from people, you hear how it unlocked something, it opened something. It helped them look at themselves in a different way. It is a leap of faith. It really does take courage but I feel like what do you have to lose? Getting to know a little bit more about yourself? Getting to meet somebody who has talked with and listened to lots and lots of people? What have you got to lose? Especially if you know how to break up with them if it doesn’t work [laughter].
SWB Thank you so much, Allison! This has been so wonderful to chat with you.
KL Yeah.
DAC Me as well. Thank you so much, guys. It’s my pleasure [music fades in, plays alone for six seconds].
JL Hey! It’s time for the Fuck Yeah of the Week!
SWB Fuck yeaaaah!
JL Hey, Katel, what’s the Fuck Yeah this week?
KL Ok. So I’ve been noticing that a bunch of really badass, amazing women, and just like everyone I follow in varying degrees has been like posting more selfies and just kind of documenting themselves and their lives, and I love it so much and it’s made me think about how I want to post more selfies. And how I’ve literally in the last week probably taken you know, five or six and then just like gone as far as posting them and making a comment or like a caption and then deleting it. Because I’m—I get like too nervous or scared or whatever.
SWB What’s worrying you about posting a selfie?
KL I think it’s this like the—the whole Instagram thing of like it has to be this perfect moment in time or this like perfect, you know, life thing or lighting or whatever and I—it’s totally not true. That’s bullshit.
[50:40]
SWB I think like, for me there’s also a piece of it where I often feel like, “Well, I don’t want to be the kind of person who posts all these selfies or who is like obsessively doing selfies,” and I—and then I’m like, first off: who gives a shit? Like if you want to do like elaborate selfie photo shoots, you should do that and that’s great [Katel says, “Definitely”]. I think you should definitely do that. Let me know your—your name on Instagram so I can follow you [Katel chuckles]. But I also—I don’t necessarily want to go to that level but I also I think like it’s like—it’s like anything where it’s like if I put this out there, what are people going to think about it? Are they going to—are they going to think that I think I’m pretty? Or are they going to think that like I think I’m like special in some way? And then it’s like, “Oh god I can’t have people think bad about me?” And it’s like the reality is people have been making selfies forever. Like since photography there have been selfies and before photography people got like fucking paintings of themselves made [Katel says, “Yes!”] with like the most expensive shit they owned. It’s fine. And like—like wanting to sort of document yourself and what you’re up to is really—it’s normal and it’s human and, you know, I mean I don’t know. I don’t want to necessarily have my phone out at all times while I’m like doing stuff [Katel says, “Yeah”] because I like to also just do the thing I’m doing and talk to people I’m with at the time. But I’m tired of like culture that hates on selfies as sort of like this thing that stupid girls do which always the implication that it’s like immature and it’s almost feminized and it’s—that’s like not historically accurate. You know the first selfie was uh taken by Robert Cornelius in 1839?
KL That’s dope [Sara laughs].
JL I think about, you know, I [sighs] I just feel like it’s social media. Everyone should be using it to what they want to use it for like it’s not—this is like how I feel about like the NFL when they banned like touchdown dances. I’m like, “It’s NFL! Let the people dance in the end zone.” Anyway, it’s like social media, let the people take selfies. You know, Sara, you mentioned that like, “Oh what if people think like I think I’m beautiful? Or I think I’m great?” You should think you’re beautiful!
KL Yeah!
SWB Oh don’t get me wrong that is like some weird, internalized bullshit but I like I don’t think I’m alone in having those feelings or kind of like having 10,000 conflicting feelings in that moment of like, “Oh I’m kind of feeling this look today but also I don’t people to think that like I tried really hard for this and I took like 7,000 shots for this even though if you want to take a good selfie you kind of do [laughter] have to take a bunch of them a lot, you know?
JL Yeah but like it’s digital. You can take 7,000 shots. You’re not paying for this. Like it’s that, I don’t know, I just—I’m all for like celebrating just like ourselves and like the like—and people around us. I mean that’s like the Fuck Yeah is about celebration and like I really like social media and the idea that like, “Let’s take a look and embrace these like moments that like are important to us.” So um, you know, I get the whole thing like a lot of people are like, “Well, people post these perfect selfies and they act like that’s the only like thing that’s great about their life.” They never had bad days. And for me it’s not really that on social media. I like to really use social media as a way to say like, “What am I excited about in life?” And so there’s an app I really like One Second Everyday and you basically take one second of video every day and then you can mash them together into like a six minute snippet at the end of the year or however long you like. But what I really like about this app is like it reminds me that everyday is awesome and to like find one thing I’m really excited about. So like even if I’m having a really shitty day, I can be like, “Oh, you know what? Cooper just smushed blueberries on his face. That’s awesome.” Or like, “Hey, I’m having like—I’m recording a podcast with friends,” and so like it gives you that time to be like, “Here’s why I’m still thankful for life.”
[54:22]
SWB I think what’s hard about it sometimes is—I mean just because like anything with social media where there’s an audience involved, there’s a level of it that is a—kind of like performative, right? It’s like, “What am I putting out for other people to consume?” And then you have to think like, “What do they going to think about it?” And I totally support people who don’t overthink any of that but I also recognize like that’s a natural thing to kind of think about because, you know, like sometimes you do get crappy comments or—or worse. And like, you have to just kind of make sense of like what’s going to give you some joy from it. But I really think like if selfies give you any ounce of joy then fucking post as many selfies as you feel like. If selfies give you no joy, like feel no obligation to [laughing] post selfies.
JL I mean it’s the whole like, I don’t know, everything is so formulaic, right? Like, if I post too many pictures of my cat, then I’m posting too many pictures of my cat. If I’m posting too many selfies, then I’m posting too many selfies. If I’m posting too much of my baby, I’m too many of the baby. It’s like, you know what? Why don’t I just do what I want to do.
SWB But like what if it’s pictures of me with my cat? There’s no limit on those, right?
JL No.
SWB Ok.
JL Definitely not. But that’s the thing these like quote/unquote “rules”, right? That we have to follow are like, such a bummer. Like let’s just like, rock it.
[55:31]
SWB I also feel like, you know, weed out people who don’t make you feel good about yourself, which is easier said than done. For sure. Like it’s totally easier said than done. But if you post a selfie and people are shitty about it? Mmm mmm hmm. You deserve better friends than that. Whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever’s going on in your life, you deserve better friends than that! You want people who are going to say nice stuff about your selfie or at least, at least tap a like. Come on! Come! On! [Laughter]
JL If you’re going through the streams and you’re like, “Ugh! This person posts so much selfies.” Like why—like maybe ask yourself like why does that bother you? Does it bother you because you want to post more selfies? Does it bother you because I don’t know I’m trying to think of why that would cause—like because you don’t want to see that much? Then unfollow them.
SWB Well plus people post all kinds of stuff that I’m not super interested in.
KL Yeah!
SWB Or that it’s—it feels like, “Oh. Ok. I get it. They’re in this like certain place right now on vacation. Like I’ve seen a bunch of photos and like I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole right now.” [Inhales deeply] I just keep scrolling.
KL I know. Yeah.
SWB And it’s fine. Right? And I can still love them and I don’t have to like, it doesn’t’ have to be any sort of reflection on like them as a human, right? Like it’s like they’re—they’re just doing their thing.
KL I think that’s the thing like I—like the people that I follow and that I like following and that I haven’t decided I’m going to unfollow or block or whatever. I’m like, “I like seeing you and so when I see your face and a thing that you’re doing that is like, clearly making you say, ‘I’m going to document this,’” I’m just like, “Fuck yeah. That’s awesome!”
SWB We’re going to take a selfie together and—and post it on the No, You Go Instagram.
KL I think that’s a good idea.
SWB I’m going to try to work on my selfie game too. I took a real quick selfie today and it was the first one in awhile but I think I’m going to try to up it a little bit because it’s going to be summer, I’m going to get my summer lipstick game on real strong, and like you gotta document that.
KL Yeah!
JL I was really bummed that I didn’t like selfie it up during like my pregnancy because I was like, I felt like I was really rocking it.
SWB Uh I can confirm: you were rocking it.
[57:24]
KL Yes! Absolutely!
JL Thanks.
SWB So, I’m super hyped by this talk about selfies, I am going to, like I said, focus my selfie game, get it real on point for summer 2018.
JL 2018! Summer of Selfies.
SWB Fuck yeah!
KL Fuck yeah!
SWB Well, that is it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and it is produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is The Diaphone. Thank you to Dr. Allison Chabot for telling us all about therapy today. And if you like what you’ve been hearing, don’t miss our newsletter, I Love That. It comes every other Friday and, well, you’re going to love it. Check out noyougoshow.com/ilovethat to subscribe. And we’ll see you here next week [music fades in, ramps up, plays alone for 34 seconds, fades out to end].
This week, we get down to the business of being a badass woman in tech with Sarah Drasner, an engineer, author, award-winning speaker, and renowned expert on web animation.
We hear about mentorship, using your profile to help others be seen, building a body of work, and so much more.
> For the first little while I was trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps and just, like, work really hard to kind of get some place where I felt more comfortable—where I was not just taking any job that was offered me. And then the second part of that is to extend whatever privilege I might have to others…to promote the work of other people that are doing great work in the community that might not be seen. > —Sarah Drasner
We talk with Sarah about:
- What it’s like to write a technical book like SVG Animations, Sarah’s book from O’Reilly last year
- Using machine learning to make images on the web more accessible for blind people
- The benefits of diverse teams
- The badassery of Arlan Hamilton and her company, Backstage Capital
- How to get over feeling overlooked in your career (and the secret benefits of being underestimated)
- Mentoring others, finding mentorship for yourself, and getting comfortable in a senior role
- Why the number of women in technical roles isn’t going up
- How visibility can lead to harassment
Also in this episode, the three of us get real about the pros and cons of showing your age at work, and discuss all the anxieties and double-standards we face when it comes to how we look and what we wear.
- Katel becomes an unofficial spokesperson for Billie Razors (call us, Billie! We can make it official anytime)
- Sara talks about Linguist Deborah Tannen’s 1993 essay, “is-No-Unmarked-Women.pdf">There is No Unmarked Woman”
- Michelle Wolf isn’t apologizing for her comedy set at the White House Correspondents Dinner
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.
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Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher [Ad spot] If you have a great idea, you can build a successful business with Shopify. They’re leveling the playing field for entrepreneurs, and they’re looking for passionate problem solvers from around the world to help them do it. See how you can join their world-class team, and learn so much more about their history, their culture, and where they’re going next. Visit shopify.com/careers [music fades in].
[0:29]
Jenn Lukas [Music fades out] Welcome to No You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû.
SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. We are so excited today to talk to one of our favorite people working in tech and that’s Sarah Drasner. She is perhaps best known for working in web animation, she’s known for being a speaker, but today you’re going to find out why she’s also just super awesome. We’re going to talk to her about a lot of things but one of the things that came up in our conversation is kind of being more senior in tech, and sort of getting comfortable as a woman in a senior role in technology, and I think that’s where we’re going to get started in our conversation today.
KL Yeah, speaking of that, I [exhales sharply] have to share something with both of you. The other day I was like taking a shower, shaving my legs, doing, you know, whatever, and I noticed that there was like a rogue couple of hairs that creeped away from my bikini line, and like onto my thigh and on my stomach. And then I also saw one on my boob, and I shaved it off because I didn’t know what else to do. And it just made me sort of spiral into this thing of thinking about how I’m getting older, I turned 40 last year, and in my head I’m like, “I just turned 40.” But in reality, I’m like about to turn 41. And it’s just, time is moving on—which is totally fine. But I think I just like can’t help thinking about it a little bit more and I think that happens. Do you remember, either of you, when I declared I was going to just go grey and say, “Fuck it,” and I just be a greyed hair—grey-haired person.
SWB I mean I remember [KL chuckles] and I thought that was a great idea.
KL And then approximately five point nine weeks later I was like, “Never mind. I can’t do it.”
SWB Ok and then I also thought that was a great idea.
KL [Laughs] Well I’m very lucky to have supportive friends but I go back and forth between feeling like whatever, it’s fine. I’m going with it. I’m going, you know, gracefully and then I think I realize things are changing, and then I feel like I have to cope with it somehow.
[2:36]
JL Katel, I also think either choices of your hair is a good idea.
KL [Laughs] Thank you.
JL I will tell you, as your friend, I’m a little scared about a quick thinking razor near your boob.
KL Yeah! Well—
SWB That—I am more concerned about that than the grey hairs on your head.
KL I—I hear you.
JL Just the fastness of it. I just want you to be careful with a razor near your boob.
KL I totally hear you, and this is not a plug, because the razor brand, Billie, is not sponsoring us.
SWB Yet!
KL But they’re wonderful and their razors are super great and very klutz-proof [laughs]. But yeah, I think that just kind of goes hand in hand with, you know, sort of figuring out how to feel attractive and sexy and sort of like as you are going through different parts of your life.
SWB You know I remember this time when my mom was in her maybe like early to mid forties. And up until that point she had never worn makeup, and she had never really thought about wearing makeup, and she had become a professor a little later than some of her peers. So a lot of her peers were starting their professorships when they were in their like, let’s say, early to mid thirties, and she was starting almost ten years after that. But then they would like pause and have children a few years in and she had kids in college at that point. So, she had this moment where she was like feeling concerned that she was showing her age in comparison to people who were her peers at work. And I think it freaked her out a little bit and I think rightly so. I mean on the one hand everybody should do what they want but on the other hand what I think she—she realized and what I think was true for her and is, you know, true for a lot of us is that people were going to perceive differently if they knew how old she was, or she started showing her age more, and that making it seem like she was the same age as her peers or closer to their age was professionally valuable to her. And I think about those kinds of trade-offs all the time. Sort of like what are you saying about yourself if you allow yourself to be perceived in this way or that way because you stopped dying your hair or whatever. And like I think it’s tough, right? Because there’s no—there’s no like good answers. All the answers have trade offs to them it’s never simple, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I think particularly like I spend a lot of time feeling kind of public in my profile, right? Like I give a lot of talks, which means I’m on stage, I’m at conferences and I’m shaking hands with people, and I feel like people look at you and hopefully most of those people are not hanging out like critiquing [laughs] my looks or my body or whatever but there’s a piece of me that sort of like knows that some of that is happening. And like as a woman that’s always happening to some extent. And you kind of—it’s like I’m just—I find it like tiresome and also I don’t really know how to not care about it. And like not caring about it is a trade off too, right? Like you could choose to not care about it and then you may be treated more poorly because you don’t care about it, right? So like I—I feel like I spend a lot of energy on this, like kind of behind the scenes, and—and then I’m pissed about that because like I would rather spend my energy on like literally anything else.
[5:44]
KL I spend extra time thinking about do I need to be on a video call? Right? And so do I need to put [chuckles] a fucking coat of mascara on, at least, and some lip gloss. And usually I feel like yeah, I do. I need to like do something so that I don’t know, look a certain level or a certain way or whatever. And I know that, you know, when I have meetings with men, that’s not, they don’t think about that at all. They’re like hopping on a call and going—you know what I mean? They’re not—they don’t need like an extra 15 minutes to just kind of like figure out how they look, which—
SWB I mean plug for our newsletter, which came out on Friday. So in Friday’s newsletter I actually talk a little bit about this, right? Like what are some of my tricks for making myself feel or look put together for the surprise video call. And it’s totally like can I slap some paint on this [chuckles] before I get on, right? Like it’s like ok, lipstick and a necklace. Or it’s like, I’m going to throw this little blazer cardigan over whatever I’m wearing and use this headband. And it’s like, the kind of smoke and mirrors to kind of like, “No. Look: I’m—I’m ready.” [Laughs]
KL Cool. Which sucks because I—I think all of us here are kind of like, “We do fucking great work. We’re—people want to work with us. And like why is that not enough?”
SWB Also we all look great.
KL [Laughs] But you know just that like it’s—it’s bullshit that that’s [yeah], you know, that that’s a thing.
JL I mean we’ve talked about this like I’m on the opposite side where like the days I do work from home now and when I did work from home I always get dressed in the morning. But for me, it’s not, even if I don’t have video calls because it’s not for other people. It’s for me. I need to mentally take the break from like here I was sleeping to now I’m like doing something else. And like that’s why people will tell me that they like don’t put bras on. And I’m like, “But a bra means I’m doing something now.” Like it is like like the physical thing I am putting on my body to say that like, “Ok. I’m now like ready to rock the day.”
[7:45]
KL There’s a transition.
JL Yes. Yeah. And so I totally understand why people wouldn’t want to do that but for me I like I need to move from like one point here’s my like relaxing to now like here’s like my business time.
SWB You know I do put a bra on but like pants are pretty optional but that’s like a personal preference thing.
JL [Laughs] Yeah. You know I’ve been struggling recently with like, “Do I want people to think I’m older or younger?” Like I can’t—I can’t decide. Like there are some where I’m like, “Oh if like people think I’m younger, they relate with me more.” But like maybe people are like, “Well, why are you my manager?” Like, “Aren’t you my age?” And I’m like, “No, I’m actually older than you.” And like the other day I was at work and I was talking about the movie The Wizard with Fred Savage and Jenny Lewis [laughter]—
SWB Uh huh! As you do [laughter].
JL And I was talking about how like I went to go see it in the movie theatre so I could go see a sneak preview of Super Mario Brothers 3 because it was in the movie before the game came out, and my coworker just turns and goes, “Wait! How old are you?! Like weren’t you like one when Super Mario Brothers 3 came out?” And I was like, “Yeah let’s go with that.” And then I was like, “Oh. I guess I just gave away my age at work.” Which like I don’t specifically try to hide but I don’t like necessarily flaunt either I suppose. It’s interesting like every year I get older I feel more confident about a lot of things in my life. It really—it frustrates me when I hear people say things like, “Oh I’m so old. Ah I’m so old.” Because there’s always someone older than you. And it’s like you’re—you risk insulting other people and their age and how they’re feeling about themselves and so I always try to be really cognizant of that but, you know, it’s hard, right? Because, you know, you do go through things where it’s like, “Well, I’m not—I’m not the same age as I was a year ago, or five years ago, or ten years ago, so how do I adjust if there are things that are like weirding me out about this?”
KL Yeah. I think that’s the thing too. I have felt more confident and sort of myself, you know, in the last few years more than any other time. And then I think going through different physical changes caught me off guard which was like why I started feeling that way. But it’s funny that you’re talking about sort of like how you’re perceived because we had a comment in our iTunes ratings and reviews that talked about—about us being sort of like older sister figures which we really loved because we thought like how cool is that to you know have that kind of vibe? But I think there’s also something associated with that, with being like, “Oh.” Like, “But you still want to hang out, right?” [Laughter]
[10:20]
SWB Oh my god. My biggest fear. You know this also really has me thinking about, there’s this essay I read years ago now. It’s called “There is No Unmarked Woman.” And it’s by Deborah Tannen and she—what she writes about is she’s basically taking like a concept that exists in linguistics about marked languages which is like … there’s like a standard form and then there’s the marking in—in linguistics where that like changes the meaning, right? And she says basically when you’re a woman, the way you’re perceived in society, there is no unmarked existence. Meaning that, like, if you go into a room wearing makeup that says something about you. If you go into a room not wearing makeup, that says something about you. If you wear clothes that are revealing, if you wear clothes that are conservatives, et cetera, et cetera. And not in the same way that men go into rooms, right? Like when a man goes into a room he can wear an outfit that is, like, unremarkable, right? And so—it’s like perceived as a very neutral thing, right? But no matter how you go into the room as a woman there is something—it says something about you. And I think about that a lot about age as well, too. It’s like, oh, do you want to be perceived as older or younger? It’s like, well, it depends what that says about you. And like what are people perceiving from that. And I just feel like that’s a lot of like extra cognitive effort that you go through to decide like how might this perceived? How do I feel about it? How do I feel about the potential risks of doing it? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and like , you know, weighing it out and making those decisions about how you’re going to wear, and how you’re going to present. And I think it’s like worse for other people too, right? Like I’ve had trans friends who’ve said like, “You know, part of me wants to be able to pass as the—the gender that I am, and part of me doesn’t. Part of me wants to show up in a room and be noticeably trans and make people deal with and like vacillating between those feelings.” And I think that that’s, you know, it’s like an unresolvable tension, right? Like we’re never going to be a able to like find an answer to this [laughing] conversation, right? Because you’re always going to have to figure what do you—what do you want? What is expected of you? What are you trying to do in that scenario? What are other people thinking? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
KL I mean one of the perks that happens and comes along with, you know, getting older is that you get to share that, and I think that is one of the coolest things we heard from Sarah Drasner. So, I don’t know should we listen to that interview?
SWB I’m super ready for it [music fades in].
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[13:35]
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SWB Woah, wait! 166? That’s, like, a lot.
KL Yeah, like a Director of Production Security which sounds extremely important, and a Choose Your Own Data Adventure. So visit shopify.com/careers to find out what they’re all about [music fades in, plays for 3 seconds, fades out].
JL Sarah Drasner is an award winning speaker, Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft, and staff writer at CSS Tricks. Sarah’s also the co-founder of the Web Animations Workshop with Val Head. She’s the author of SVG Animations from O’Reilly and has given frontend masters workshops on Vue.js and advanced SVG animations. She has worked for 15 years as a web developer and designer, and at points even worked as a scientific illustrator, and an undergraduate professor. That is awesome. Welcome to the show, Sarah!
Sarah Drasner Thanks. Thanks for having me.
JL It’s like such a pleasure to have you here. You know, as I mentioned before I had to cut some of your bio because there was so much [laughter] so I think it’s just so cool. You’re doing so many awesome things. So most recently you left consulting and you’re now at Microsoft as a Senior Developer Advocate. Can you tell us a little more about what that means exactly?
[15:45]
SD Actually, it’s kind of funny because Senior Developer Advocate in some ways means that I’m getting paid for some of the work that I was doing for free before [laughs] so—
JL That’s amazing [laughs].
SD Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I was always doing kind of open source work on the side, and doing a lot of talks, and, you know, putting out a lot of resources, and doing consulting work at the same time. Microsoft is really like kind of steering the ship differently these days and it’s much more towards open source and, you know, giving back to the community but also like, you know, of course communicating some of the cool things that they’re building. So my job is a bit of all of those things. I’m still doing a lot of engineering work. I’m still, you know, speaking at conferences. I’m still writing articles and, you know, some of them are about Microsoft, some of them aren’t. And all of that is cool. So it’s a really good job for me.
JL Was it hard for you to leave consulting?
SD Yeah! It definitely was. I had a couple of contracts coming down the pipeline that I was super excited about. One of them was to work with Addy Osmani who I do hope I get to work with someday because he’s like one of my heros. So turning down contracts with people that I just like really wanted to take. So it was—I think, you know, it took me like a while to really decided because I just was sitting there like, “But on the one hand there’s this, and on the other—” So like, you know, which isn’t to say that either of them—like I think when people say that it was a hard thing for them to decide it means that either option was bad. It was quite the opposite where I was like, “Oh I’m like—this is really strange because previously in my career it had been very much like, ‘Take what you’re given, [laughs] I gotta, you know, support myself here [laughs]’.” So this was—this was a very different type of decision making process for me and my career.
JL So you mentioned, you know, you had a couple of projects lined up, I feel like that’s something we constantly like we worry about disappointing people in order to maybe choose the choice that we really want to make. How did you balance that struggle?
SD I try to be as transparent as possible about like, “Here’s what I’ve got coming down the pipeline, this person is talking to me, I’m not sure if I can do this.” You know? Even if it’s just like a chance that something could happen. So that there’s no surprises coming down the pipeline. So yeah, I think that that really helps.
JL Yeah.
SD Um people really need honesty.
[18:14]
JL So, Sarah, last year you wrote the book SVG Animations: From Common UX Implementations to Complex Responsive Animation. Can you talk us through the process of writing a technical book?
SD Oh yeah! I mean I think actually like writing a book was on my bucket list, although that was another one where I’m not sure I would’ve done it unless O’Reilly had reached out to me. So thank Meg Foley, if you’re listening to this. I think I really thought that I was going to write it a lot quicker than I did. So I thought that I was going to write it in like, you know, nine months to a year and it ended up being like a two year process and I didn’t anticipate how long the editing process would take. Especially because they were like, “Oh name two technical reviewers,” and I named four because I was like, “Oh well that’s going to make the book better.” But the thing about four technical reviewers is you have to go through the book four times [laughing] like line by line. So I definitely was kicking myself for that decision. But I do think it made it a better book. But yeah I mean writing books is a lot of work. Like I know everyone says that and like it should be obvious by now but like that’s all I can say is like it’s a lot of work.
KL I was just going to say those are so common to be like, “I thought this was going to take this amount of time but [chuckles] it took twice as long [SD laughs] or four times as long.”
JL I mean but that’s great to hear, right? Because when people say a long time and nine to 12 months would be a long time to a lot of people [KL absolutely] and so I think it’s like—it’s really great to hear like two years because I don’t think we talk that much about timelines. Right? We say like, “Oh it takes a long time,” but like your definition of long might be different than someone else’s definition of long.
SWB You know something I’ve thought a lot about when I’ve written books I have also had people come to me and—which is awesome and it kind of happened in a few different ways but I’ve never gone to a publisher cold and said, “I want to write a book.” And I have lots of thoughts about sort of like ways that’s good and bad, and all kinds of feelings, but I’m curious like, from your perspective, what do you think it was that you had done before you got to that point that made a publisher come to you? Because people ask me this a lot, like, “Well how do I get a publisher to come to me?” “I don’t—I don’t know! Keep doing stuff until people notice?” Which is like a really bad answer.
SD Yeah, yeah, no. I think that’s a great question and, yeah, I get those kind of questions fairly frequently too. I mean I know actually because Meg told me that she found me because of talks. She had seen me give talks before and I was giving talks on SVG animation, and complex responsive animations. So that was what made them approach me. You know I’m actually starving to work on another book now which I’m just kind—like my fiance is like making fun of me because I said that I wasn’t going to write another one [laughter] I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it yet but I’m going to write another one with Smashing and I mean certainly that one is because of my relationship with them for talks. So I think talks—I mean that’s probably not like a catch all for anybody but for me that’s been historically what happened.
[21:24]
JL Well one: that’s so exciting. I cannot wait to hear [SD chuckles] more about it. I think too like that makes total sense, you know, if you continually—if you continuously speak about the same subject, right? Then I think that you have more like chance of people noticing that, right? Would you say that that’s true?
SD I think like if people think of X and they think of you. You know like if I think about like you know bias and algorithms I probably think of Sarah. You know like, not me [laughs]. So, you know, I think that that helps.
JL You’ve been working a lot with machine learning lately too, right?
SD Yeah, I’ve been working with machine learning quite a bit but not in like a very deep sense I would say. There are some APIs that Microsoft Azure exposes where you can just do like an API call. In other words, I can just like talk to this thing and say, “Here’s an image, can you please tell me something about this image?” And then it gives me data back. So I’m not building the thing from scratch like some other people are. I’m just like communication with it and making some projects with it. So like one project I made was I was mentoring a blind woman and she mentioned to me that a lot of the internet was not accessible to her. In other words, she was working with screen readers which like read out the content of a webpage. And there was no alt text for images. So if you have an image of something like a meme, or if you have an image of something like a news story, there’s no content there for her. It’s just completely empty. And so she felt left out of a lot of conversations and experiences. So I used these cognitive services which was this machine learning API and I made a call to this API and created dynamic alt text where people forgot to add them. So I’m making a Chrome extension so that blind people can use it on any site that they visit and kind of gather data. So it analyzes the image both for words and text. And, you know, it’s not perfect. It’s still learning. There’s, you know, definitely stuff that it could be better at but it’s really pretty good. Like very, very impressive. So I think that using some of the machine learning for good because there are like positive things that you can do with it is really exciting for me. So I’m not necessarily building the machine learning piece but I’m applying it.
JL Yeah that sounds absolutely amazing. Could you explain a little bit more for some of our listeners who aren’t really familiar with machine learning?
SD Basically machine learning is when you teach a computer to make assessments on its own. And this process has been started, you know, like this historically like invented in the sixties but hasn’t really reached maturity until lately where people can really use it, and have been using it very frequently because there’s so many of us online that we come into a point where we really need a system to build and tag and sort for us. Some of the way that it works is that like actually I’ll teach like kind of like a trained like there’s—there’s a few different ways of working with machine learning but like one of the simplest ways of discussing it is a genetic algorithm. So this isn’t every algorithm. There are like thousands of algorithms but this is probably the like lowest metaphor I can think of that’s like easy to understand. So let’s say you have this bot and you say, “Ok. Here is—you have these two—like a pug and kitten.” You say, “Here’s a picture of a pug and here’s a picture of a kitten. Now guess which one is pug or a kitten.” At first it’s going to be totally random, right? Like there—it’s going to be like, “I don’t know. That one?” And they’re going to fail. But if you keep selecting the algorithm that’s picking the one that is like “Pug, pug, pug, pug,” then taking those, throwing those away, like getting all of the ones that are correct, and then you do that a few thousand times, eventually you arrive at this very complex algorithm that actually knows a pug is a pug.
[25:40]
SD [Continued] The problem is that by the time we reach that level of maturity no one really knows how it works. Not even the person who [chuckles] originally was building the first algorithms. So they’re a bit of a black box and that’s true pretty much of every machine learning algorithm. They get to a point of complexity where the people who built it knows how it started but they don’t necessarily know what’s going on in the end. And they are effective. So we keep using them but there’s also some dangers there which are, you know, that it can be seeded with the wrong information. One is like that’s like a really huge one is like what if you’re giving it fake demographics data that’s built off of things that aren’t real? Like you could actually start building, and tagging, and sorting all—like huge amounts of people to see only a certain kind of information based off of information that’s not really true of them.
SWB You know I think about this stuff obviously all the time and one of the things that I also think a lot about is like that there has often not been enough care going into what data we fed the things to start with. Right? So it’s one thing that if you’re like, “We showed it a bunch of pictures of pugs and kittens.” Ok fine. But when you start talking about people and like image recognition of people you get into a lot more difficult territory because there’s so many more bias get involved there. So like I’ve seen a lot of examples where the—the images the machine learning system has learned from was almost entirely pictures of white people and as a result [right] the system is really bad at identifying pictures of people who aren’t white. And so if you then apply a system like that to this tool you’re talking about which could have this huge benefit for blind people where you’re—you’re using, right? If you were using uh a machine learning system that had been trained off pictures of white people to then figure out what an image is and tell a reader what they were of and it did a worse job of—of figuring out when people were in the image if it was like people of color like then you’re also feeding bad information to the blind community that you’re trying to serve, right? So it’s like you create these problems by not looking at where that data’s coming from and whether it’s representative of the people that you need to represent.
[27:38]
SD Well totally and I think actually like so first of all like the—this is like a really old problem too. Like with even like the old cameras that we—you know the first film was just trained off of white people’s skin tones and then like didn’t actually pick up black people’s skin tones well. And we’ve done [chuckles] kind of a bad job of this historically in other areas. So now we’re doing it in machine learning. But I think if we—if we have diverse teams. This is another reason why having diverse teams is really important because you’re kind of more likely to think of those things or at least have someone on staff who’s like, “Hey, wait a minute.” [Laughs] When you have these kind of issues before it even gets shipped. I mean I worked at a company that I’m not going to the name of where they were going to ship a feature that would’ve actually been against the law. It was going to use machine learning to kind of train on data that wouldn’t have been legal. And I just had, by chance, read about that like a couple of weekends before that and raised my hand. And I was just a developer on the project. I wasn’t like a PM or even someone who was guiding the way the project was shaped and I just kind of raised my hand and was like, “Isn’t that illegal?” And, you know, kind of cited this thing that I had read and they looked into it, and they were like, “Oh my god that is illegal. We shouldn’t ship this product.” But here the thing is like I wasn’t like anyone super special. I just was a random person who said, “Hey, I don’t know so I think if you have you know more of a variety of people, and more of a variety of thought processes in a room—you know, towards anything in any given room, then you’re more likely to catch these edge cases that you know might be shipped like even before they happen.”
JL So, Sarah, I mean talking more about this and getting more representation and you mentioned it before that you were mentoring someone who was blind. Last year you started mentoring people who were underrepresented, can you tell us more about that?
SD Oh yeah I really feel like the first—you know, for the first little while I was trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps and just, like, work really hard to kind of get some place where I felt more comfortable, where I was not like just taking any job that was offered me. And then the second part of that is to extend whatever privilege I might have to others. So a big part of that was trying to figure out ways to mentor people, or to help other people grow, or to promote the work of other people that are doing great work in the community that might not be seen. And I decided to create this like piece of my time that would be devoted to mentoring underrepresented in tech, and so I made like a Google form and I just kind of like picked people off of that list and say, “Hey, like do you want to chat?” And, you know, in the form we—they check off like what—like some areas that I might be able to help them with. It ranges anywhere from like JavaScript and like Vue to like, “I just need someone to talk to.” Or [laughing] you know like, “I just feel alone right now.” Or you know something like that so we do through like a variety of topics and stuff and there’s just like a bunch of people that I try to mentor. Some people are like first time public speakers, even just like listening I think is helpful. So I think a big part of being a senior developer is not just like touting your own expertise and experience but actually like helping others.
[31:23]
JL So did you like tweet the form out and wait for people to fill it out?
SD Yeah! I did. I tweeted out, I actually have like 500 [laughs] responses.
JL That’s amazing!
SD Which is more than I can [laughing] actually do. So I feel—there’s like a part of me that feels super guilty but I did see that there was a bunch of other people who took that and did their own version of it. So I think that it kinda spreads it out a little bit. And I feel—if anybody filled out that form and I didn’t get to you. It’s really nothing personal [laughing]. I’m like trying to get through as many people as I can, it’s just there’s a lot of people on that list.
JL Yeah, how do you—I mean 500 is a lot. But I mean like ten is a lot. How are you finding the time?
SD That’s always a challenge. I mean there’s definitely months where I’m not able to do it as much as I want to. There’s also people that I just know that I’m mentoring and some of the mentoring relationships are kind of casual like you know they’re friends of mine who ask a lot of questions about how to do this and that or like it ranges from that to like really formal meetings. So there are months where I can set aside the time to have a few mentoring sessions, and then there are times when I just, you know, am on the road a lot and so it comes more in the form of like people randomly wanting like one Skype meeting or like somebody just chatting me on Facebook for a while, asking me how to do deal with a certain situation. I’m also mentored. I think like one person who helps mentor me is Val. She was a consultant way before I was a consultant and so when I started working as a consultant I—she spent a lot of time with where I was just like asking a ton of questions like, “Is this normal? Should I set up a contract?” [Laughs] Like just kind of like I don’t know what I would’ve done without her actually. And also Darius Kazemi he is really super awesome and he actually even just like sent me a version of his contract for me to like understand what a good contract looks like. Which I super appreciated. Darius, if you’re listening, thank you. So I don’t make it sound like I’m only doing, you know, outward. Like I’ve also benefited from other people’s expertise as well.
SWB You mean you’re not learning as a human person? [Laughter]
SD Yeah [laughs] basically.
SWB You know I”m really curious you talked a bit about wanting to make sure that there is, you know, a diverse group of people in the room making decisions in tech which is something I think, you know, all of us share that value. And you’ve talked about wanting to mentor and help answer questions for people who are earlier in their careers, and also I think something you said was like, “Sometimes people just need to not feel alone.” And I know that that’s something that often women in tech can feel is kind of alone. Do you feel as you’ve gone through your career and gotten to this place where you have you know you’re relatively well known, well connected, and well supported. Have things changed for you being a woman in this field has this—is this something that you think is like changing overall? Like what’ your take on sort of where things are at and what needs to happen?
[34:27]
SD I do feel like things have changed for me. I’m already privileged in some sense because I’m white and, you know, I was living in San Francisco which is like a tech hub. So that gives me that—like allowed me that point. I don’t live in San Francisco anymore but that allowed me some affordances that people in more remote areas don’t have for even being connected. I feel like I was ignored for a lot—to be totally honest, for a lot of the first part of my career and I, you know, I think when I first came up and like people were starting to recognize me, they thought I must be like a junior, or like I must have just like, you know, shot up—like as I just started making things. But the truth of the matter is I was working for a very long time. Like more than a decade just nobody knew of me and nobody really cared. To which I say to people listening: if you feel like you’ve been working for awhile and nobody’s paying attention to you, don’t give up. Like really don’t. Because it doesn’t mean the end of anything. Sometimes people just take a little bit to, you know, notice you. And also I would say if you haven’t been noticed, and you feel like you should’ve been, one thing that I think actually really helped me was by not being noticed for a long time, by the time people did notice me I already had a huge body of work, and people were like, “Woah! Where did all of this work come from?” [Laughing] I’m like, “I’ve been working for so long.” [Laughs] So I think that actually helped my career in some sense that people were just like, “Oh my god there’s so much—there’s so much here. It wasn’t just like a one off or something.” Recently I tweeted about an experience I had where I changed my hair color. I was like fake blonde before [chuckles] and then I dyed my hair back to my natural colour which is brown … and when I kind of had gotten used to like people at tech conference maybe knowing who I was a bit before going there and then I went to JSConf Iceland and I went to this party and everyone was like, “Oh, whose girlfriend are you?” [Laughter and disappointed ughs][Uh huh! Mmm] [Laughs] You know? I mean you know that’s like I remember that. I remember that experience from before I was well known. And I’m like, “Oh this is still here. I just stopped experiencing it because people knew who I was.” Like I just am not recognized at this event, you know? Like because—because I dyed my hair. So I think that that like that kind of was like this reminder and I tweeted that out and the entire responses to the thread were either guys like, “I can’t believe that happens,” and women just going, “Yup, that happened to me the other,” “Yes, that happens to me all the [laughing] time.” Like and I do think we have a long way to go in that sense. I try not to get saddened by the numbers that are actually going down for tech instead of up like for a lot of other industries the number of women goes up over time. And for ours it’s actually trending in the opposite direction which I also—which is why I think that mentoring is such a big deal. Like giving people a support system is really important.
[37:44]
SWB I started recently listening to this podcast, The Startup Podcast, and it’s from Gimlet and they’re—they’re featuring a VC named Arlan who she’s a, you know, like a black gay woman in Silicon Valley, trying to run a venture capital fund and she has decided to call the people that that she wants to invest in not underrepresented but underestimated and I think that’s really interesting to think about like the way in which so many of us have been underestimated in our fields, and sort of like you’re kind of flying under the radar as a result and that means that there’s like all this untapped potential which, you know, like it’s super problematic that—that we may have been underestimated but being able to kind of harness that potential is really exciting.
SD Totally! First of all, Arlan is a hero of mine. I just like I mean she’s been doing stuff for forever, I only was aware of her recently and was like, “Holy crap.” [Laughs] She’s—she’s just super great. And yeah I think that that’s amazing. I’m going to actually try to like co-opt that term, giving her credit of course. Like that’s—that’s a really, really great term because there are so many people who—like I feel like I’m mentoring who I’m like, “Jesus Christ, you’re doing so many cool things,” and then people don’t really know about them. Or even just like people who are doing good work that like some people know about but then they still get talked down to like they’re not that valuable, like, you know, I think that there’s some people that like—like Lin Clark who does amazing, amazing work and then people like on a livestream are, you know, harassing her or whatever. And I just like, it’s like why?!? [Laughing] She’s incredible. She’s probably like benefitted, you know, React community more than anyone in terms of like understanding some of the things that are going on. So I just think it’s kind of like an important time to support people.
SWB Yeah like how do you find sort of the balance for yourself between wanting to push for representation in tech and wanting to talk about some of these issues around the lack of diversity and the way that people have been underestimated but also just wanting to like do your fucking job as an engineer and be known for being awesome at your job?
SD Yeah. I mean that’s a really good question I think that actually I try to lean towards showing not telling because I think that actually changes minds more than me telling people to, you know, it’s like on the one hand I could be like, “Ok you should respect women,” and like people who already respect women will be like, “Hell yeah!” And then the people who don’t respect woman will be like, “Why?” [Laughs] And, like, “Go away,” and like, “No.” But if I, you know, if I work really hard, and make work that they need, or make work that like, you know, people are using or people like find valuable then they kind of have to—I don’t have to say anything, they kind of have to reevaluate some biases on their own. So I kind of believe in putting my money where my mouth is and like, you know, sure, like I’m not always going to make like a perfect thing or anything but if people find the work that I do valuable, I think that that’s much more compelling and tends to move the bottom dollar a little bit more than—and I kind of know this because people have told me. Like I know a number of dudes who write to me and say like, “I, you know, I used to have bias against women and I saw some of the work that you were doing and I had to reevaluate what I was thinking about it.” And I think if I had just kind of gone forward and said, “Women, you know, respect them.” I don’t know that that—it would’ve been quite as effective and see that in the kind of ways that I promote women is also to just like really like highlight the work that they’re doing because that is important. That’s the important piece is, right? Is like all of the work that they’re doing is super valuable and then people can see that for themselves and it kind of like does the job of show not tell. But I’ll also say this on that subject matter: my mom is the first woman Chief of Neurology on the planet and she was physician and chief of UCSF, and is a very brilliant women, and she was really like a kind of pioneer in medicine. And she taught me a lot of this stuff. This isn’t born from my brain or something. She actually like I think a lot of other people’s moms taught them a lot of, you know, other really awesome things. My mom taught me like, “Ok. Like this is really important when you’re in a business meeting you can’t talk like this. You have to say this.” Or like, “When you’re presenting your work you have to make sure to do this.” Or, “You know, honey, you’re just going to have to work, you know, five times as hard, I’m sorry.” Like [laughs] which I think you know I think is unfortunate but also really super prepared me for tech.
[42:56]
SD [Continued] There’s no other way around it like what she did for me is, you know, what she did for medicine was really important, but what she did for me was also super important and she’s obviously my role model.
JL I think that’s I mean that’s just incredible to hear, Sarah, and I think, you know, you are probably setting the same example as a role model now with your family.
SD I mean I don’t know. I hope! You know my step-daughter is is super into code and she’s brilliant, she’s like kind of unbelievably brilliant. Like I give [chuckles] workshops to adults and she figures things out way [laughing] faster than we do. I think part of that is like kid’s brains just like they’re like super open to new ideas. And so that’s super exciting to see. But she also kind of takes after her dad where she’s super method—that’s just who she is. She’s like really methodical, she like really, you know, thinks through problems well. She has a really good memory for numbers and, you know, kind of computational ideas. So like we’ll like run through—like I’ll show her a JavaScript concept and she’ll have built like five things [chuckles in background]. So [chuckles] uh and the—the funny thing about it is like, you know, her dad is very humble. She is no—you know, Megan, if you hear this in the future, like know that I [chuckling] fully support you but she’s—she’s not super humble [yeah] but I think that’s great because she has a ton of confidence, and I’m just like, “Girl, you’re going to need it. [Laughs] So I’m not going to do anything to dissuade you from that because people are going to try to, you know, not let you have that. And so like go—go for it.” She’s like [laughter in background], “I’m really good at this.” I’m like, “You are!” [Laughs]
[44:45]
SWB You know what? Well we just had an author on the show, a fiction author, Carmen Maria Machado a few weeks ago. And, you know, one of the things that she said was getting comfortable with the idea that she is good at things and so how often women are taught to like not talk about the things that they’re good at, and to not own that. I—one of the things that I’m, you know, makes me so excited is thinking about how can we do work today. You know like people like you and people like us posting shows like this to make it so that there’s fewer of these double standards in the future and so that, you know, as girls like that grow up, they do have the opportunity to not have to work five times as hard but can just be awesome for being awesome.
SD Totally. Totally. Yeah I mean it is kind of funny how like that stuff comes at a—like a really young age that you’re not supposed to—you’re not supposed to be proud of yourself, you’re not [chuckling] to like, be excited about the thing like, “I built this thing and it’s great!” Like there’s a certain age where people tell you not to—not to like that or not to feel like that, and yeah, it’s kind of important. It’s important to stay excited about the stuff that you’re making.
JL Completely. So, before we get going, just one final question for you, Sarah. You have a really awesome end of your goal setting tradition and I was really hoping that you could tell us the story about that.
SD Oh yeah so my best friends and my fiancé and I were like talking about how we have these goals and I was kind of talking about how like I make a list for myself, and she was saying that she has a list for herself, and you know he was saying that he has a list for himself. So we decided that we take these like either staycations where like one of us comes over to the other person’s house or like we—one year we went to Cancun and like did this. But we’d all like hang out together and drink champagne and talk about the things that we’re planning for the future, and the things that we want to get done. So every year we make a list of the things that we want to do and want to accomplish and we revisit last year’s goals. We like kind of look through them and, you know, for some of the goals we say like, “Oh, you know, that’s no longer important to me.” It’s like, “I never did it but I’ve changed my idea about whether or not that was important or vital to me.” And then, you know, on other ones we’re like, “Oh like I shoulda gotten more done on that.” Or like we’ll check in mid-year and see where we’re at. Um it’s nice to work with other people through those things. It makes me feel really accountable in a way that doing it on your own—plus like the champagne and the kind of like, you know, celebration of it makes it fun instead of arduous. Like instead of like, “Oh no I’ve got like things on my list.” So yeah it’s been like a really awesome thing I think for each of we’ve all gone a lot further in the last few years because of this kind of like bond we share like supporting each other.
JL It’s so awesome. I think the to-do list is always something that a lot of us struggle with [laughs] and so I love this idea of a communal, celebratory to-do list and goal setting.
[47:52]
SD Yeah and it’s like long term goals too. I think to-do lists tend to be kind of short so it’s nice to kind of take a purview and be like, “What do I want to accomp—” Like kind of like align yourself like, I’m doing all these small things that are like, you know, tactical. But what’s my strategy here? Like what’s the long term here?
JL Yeah, that’s a great point. I think often I’ve very micro-focused, and I think to stop every once in awhile and be like, “Wait. Where am I trying to get?” Is really valuable.
KL Yeah. Thank you so much for being here.
SD Yeah, thanks for having me! This has been a blast. It’s so nice to speak to like three women that I admire so much.
SWB Oh I—we admire you too!
JL And we cannot wait to keep seeing what you’re doing.
SD Thanks, likewise.
JL Because it just gets awesomer and awesomer.
SD Bye! [Music fades in, plays for four seconds, fades out]
KL It is time for one I think of our favorite segments: The Fuck Yeah of the Week. Sara, can you tell us what that is?
SWB Yeah. The Fuck Yeah of the Week is someone or something we’re super hyped about and this week it is none other than Michelle Wolf. As you might’ve heard because it was freaking everywhere, Michelle Wolf did the comedy segment of the White House Correspondents Dinner last week, and it was pretty fucking great. I mean she really didn’t pull any punches. She was extremely direct about a number of problems with the current political climate and one of the things that she talked about directly was Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the lies that she tells. Now, she got a lot of flack for this, I don’t want to repeat the whole thing. It was a 19-minute segment so if you haven’t seen it, you should go watch it because it was great. But what really got everybody bothered was that, you know, she made this joke about how Sarah Huckabee Sanders burns facts and then uses the ash to create eyeliner to get the perfect smokey eye. Aaaand what she was accused of was having criticized Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ looks, which was not what she criticized. What she criticized was the fact that this woman tells lies all day and is supposed to be the White House Press Secretary. So, anyway, you should watch it, you should catch up on the controversy, but what I think is really important here and the reason I wanted to give her a big fuck yeah is that after all of this has happened, I think it’s really easy to kind of get pushed into apologizing and walking it back, and to be pushed into, like, being nice. And, instead, you know, she had an interview with NPR where she was like, “I stand by everything that I said,” and one of the things that she talked about was like, “You know when people invite a woman to do comedy, they’re often expecting her to be nice. And, in fact, that’s something I talk about in my comedy is the way in which people are expecting that I’m going to be nice and I’m not. I’m not there to be nice.” And she said she didn’t regret a word that she stood by it. And so, I say fuck yeah to telling it like it is and then also, you know, not being pressured into apologizing for something that you shouldn’t have to apologize for. And fuck yeah to not being a nice girl.
[50:45]
KL Uh yeah. I say fuck yeah as well. I just—I think it’s so important especially for someone in her position to have been invited to do that to, you know, to stand her ground and stand by what she did and said, because it wasn’t any—you know she didn’t say anything that was like, “Oh my gosh.” Like so controversial that it was detrimental. It was like she was calling people out for, you know, what was happening. And addressing a room full of people that [laughs] don’t want to hear that.
SWB Super tough room to work. I wouldn’t want to have to give a talk in front of that room because the people there are just sort of like prepared to dislike you.
KL Yeah, and! It’s also—it’s not a Comedy Cellar. It’s not—you’re not going on and like feeding off a group of people who are like there to laugh [laughs] and like there to support you, and like want to hear you roast them. I mean I think there’s been a historical, you know, underlying like that’s what it is, but if you don’t want that to be what happens there, then this isn’t the set up.
SWB Why the fuck are you inviting Michelle Wolf then, right?
KL Exactly. Right.
SWB Like that’s on you.
KL Yeah, exactly. So I think she did a great job.
JL I think it’s going to be really interesting to watch stand up comedy as it like expands like a year or five years from now. I mean we talk about things—I mean we do vocab swaps on the show, right? Where we talk about like how to like tread on sensitive subjects whereas like stand up comedy throws all that out the window. So I think it’ll be really interesting to see if people stay true to what they believe in with that, especially with like a movement to sort of like be more sensitive to other people, and be more careful about the things we say. So I—I’d like to see where we are in five years from now, on this podcast, and we can look back and be like, “What’s Michelle Wolf doing now?” Because I have a feeling that she’ll still be like standing behind what she believes in.
[52:33]
SWB Yeah. And I think, you know, that’s one of the other reasons I really liked what she talked about is that she said, “You know? When I wrote my set, I specifically took care to make sure that I wasn’t going to be making jokes at the expense of other women’s looks.” That that was something that she didn’t want to do in the set. And so it’s sort of like—I think what it actually shows is that—you know there’s this talk in comedy where it’s like, “Oh if you’re sensitive, or if you’re worried about inclusivity, then you can’t focus on telling jokes. And it’s just going to kill all the fun.” And I think with somebody like her shows is like you—you can be more careful with what you say and how you say it, and you can be inclusive and also still be really fucking funny. And that doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to like your humor. It’s not that. But that you’re not going to make jokes at the expense of more marginalized groups and you can do that and still be like super fucking good at it. And I would like to see a lot more comics sort of stretch themselves in that way. Right? Because I feel like it’s kind of a lazy answer to be like, “Well if I can’t say literally anything without any ramifications at all then you’re like, you know, getting in the way of my creativity.” And I’m like, “Man, maybe you’re just not that creative then.” I don’t know. Sounds like a problem with you [chuckles].
JL But I think it’s also you know you brought up like I mean it’s choice—like I think you know I read that you know she had an abortion joke in there too which like is not my cup of tea but I’m not inviting her to my birthday party. You know? And so for me that’s like—that’s like research on a lot of things. And so, you know, she didn’t change what her style was because of where she was.
SWB And I also think that you, you know, there’s differences between telling jokes that are not going to be like in good taste for everybody. Just like some people don’t like swearing which I’m fine if people don’t like swearing, fine and they also should not listen to this podcast [laughter and chatter]. I think that it’s one of these things where, you know, the way you choose to talk about a joke about abortion is really important to me. I mean you know it’s—people talk about the concept of punching up or punching down. Right? It’s like who’s the butt of the joke? And and I think that that makes a big difference. I’m not suggesting you should enjoy abortion jokes. But like the way that she was talking about it, you know one of the things that she said, is like, “Oh yeah, all you guys oppose abortions,” she’s speaking to like the conservative legislatures in the room, “Unless it’s the abortion you buy for your secret girlfriend.” But like [laughs] so in that—in that joke like the butt of the joke was the people who are being hypocritical, right? And so like that’s—to me, like that’s a different flavor than like there’s lots of other things that could’ve been said.
KL It also used to not be televised. So, I think there’s something in that that, you know, it is now. And so now it’s in the public sphere and there’s room for appreciation and criticism and I’m glad that we can have this conversation, and I feel like even that’s a Fuck Yeah.
[55:17]
JL Totally.
KL That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is my The Diaphone. Thanks to Sarah Drasner for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us on Apple podcasts. Your support helps us spread the word and means the world. We’ll be back next week with another great guest [music fades in, plays for 32 seconds, fades out to end].
Transcript by secondhandscribe.com.
In S2E3, we fall hard for Adda Birnir, founder and CEO of Skillcrush—the online coding school with a heart.
While coding bootcamp programs tend to talk about turning students into rockstar programmer gods, Skillcrush focuses on using tech to build a fulfilling, creative, and sustainable career. And the message is working: after some early ups and downs back in 2012, Adda has taken the business from a fledging idea to a stable, profitable, and growing company of 35 employees. And she’s here to tell us all about it.
> At some point I decided that I wanted the business to survive and I was going to figure out what it would take for it to survive and do that. And that really meant sort of letting go of kind of any idea I had about what the business was going to be. > > —Adda Birnir, founder and CEO, Skillcrush
Listen in for a super-real convo about:
- Bootstrapping a business instead of raising venture capital
- How to bounce back when the bank account runs dry
- Why women are flocking to Skillcrush to learn technical skills—while most bootcamp programs struggle to attract them
- Building pay equity into the heart of how Skillcrush runs
- Making sure you don’t end up hating the company you built
Plus:
- Friend dates, cheese plates, and ordering as many desserts as possible
- Vocab swaps for “crazy” and “guys” (for more ideas on this one, check out this article from The Establishment)
- Morning people: are they a fuck yeah! or a fuck that?
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.
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Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher [Ad spot] This episode of NYG is brought to you by our friends at Shopify, makers of great tools that help entrepreneurs around the world start and grow their businesses. Shopify started with just a few people obsessed with personal growth. Now they’re a team of more than 3,000 with offices and remote workers pretty much everywhere. What’s next? Oh, just redefining the future of entrepreneurship. If that’s interesting to you, visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re working on [music fades in, plays alone for ten seconds].
Jenn Lukas Welcome to No, You Go [music fades out], the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû.
SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
KL Today on the show we’re talking to my friend, Adda Birnir. Six years ago she developed and launched an online coding course and has since built a thriving company around it. We talk about the early days of starting a business; how to decide when and if you need financial help as a startup; and we dig into what the future of working in tech might look like. But before we get to that, can we talk about our co-host date we just had?
JL We can definitely talk about this. So, last month was my birthday, and I had the chance to go out with these two lovely ladies. And it was so awesome, we went to dinner, and drinks, and then dessert, and then we went another place for more dessert [laughs, others laugh].
SWB It was my favorite part about our co-host date.
KL We know—we know how to do dessert. We know how to like do a night out. Clearly.
JL I think that is definitely true. And I—I think that, don’t get me wrong, I love this podcast, and hanging out with you during this podcast, but I really loved hanging out with you over dinner, drinks, and dessert times three.
SWB I was soooo happy to… get out and just kind of have fun with both of you because I was thinking a lot about this like we’re all busy and have so much different stuff going on in our schedules, and we all have like other work to do that’s not the podcast, of course, right? And so it’s really easy for like the only social time we have with each other to also be podcast time, and then you realize like… all we do is work on the podcast. And as much as—you’re right: I love it. Like I love doing it—I wouldn’t do this otherwise. But then you’re like, oh wow what used to be friend time is also now work time. And then you’re like, oh what happened to like just having friend time with my friends? And so I think that’s really cool that we sort of were, you know, making that time and I think we gotta make sure that happens more often.
[2:29]
JL A lot of us are so lucky to be able to have found friends that we can work with which is so cool because you’re just like doubling down on awesome time spent together but I—we—I keep coming back to this: this balance thing, right? And trying to figure out how to remember that… [under breath] I don’t have to remember that you’re my friends, I do know you’re my friends [laughter].
KL Do you remember why we fell in love? [JL laughs boisterously, others laugh along]
JL The next Nicholas Sparks book! [Laughs] No, You Go: a Love Story.
KL Yeah, yeah, exactly [chuckles].
JL But I think it’s—we all keep coming back to this balance thing, finding that balance. So, I don’t know, just going out to dinner with you all just reminded me (not that I forgot, I promise I didn’t forget) but just like, again, that this is the reason I think I love this so much is because I’m doing something I love with friends that I love.
SWB I also love having like a cheese plate and not also talking about whether or not we can sign a sponsor, or what we’re going to do for the upcoming episode, or how many downloads we got this week. Like that was a pretty good cheese plate and also we didn’t have to talk about the podcast. Which, like, I love the podcast but that doesn’t mean I want to talk about it all the time. I love work but I don’t want to talk about it all the time.
JL That’s true.
KL Yeah.
JL We did talk about one thing about the podcast which was that we should bake this in every time we finish the season: a No, You Go…Out to Dinner [all laugh].
SWB Yeah, I mean, totally! I love this idea that we work that in as sort of like these celebratory moments. And like a season is little; like we’re talking 10 episodes at a time right now. That’s what we’re, you know, that’s what we’re calling a season. And it’s not like we’re, you know, doing these like major milestones, but it’s like these little mini markers that like, “Yeah! We accomplished something and that matters!”
JL And I really like it. I mean and I think scheduling stuff is ok. And we’ve talked—and we’ve talked about this before with guests, right? I mean I know last week with Carmen, Carmen had mentioned, you know, how she’d scheduled weekends off. And, you know, to have that specific time booked. And, you know, and Lara Hogan has talked about how she likes to celebrate with donuts, and I think having these things that you specifically whether you mark them on a calendar or they become habit or routine. Something that really reminds you to keep celebrating these victories, these friendships, these professional milestones, anything that you want to love, to really celebrate that about yourself, some way or another. It can be something small, it can be something big, whichever fits into your lifestyle.
[4:50]
KL I love that and I’m so glad we did that, and I can’t wait til the next one. Something else that I really like that we’re doing is, you know, just working on improving ourselves a little it and part of that has been, you know, this new thing we’re going to do with the vocab swap. And I just thought, like let’s check in on that a little bit. So, vocab swap is something that we are starting because we realize we were saying things like “you guys” a lot or, you know, things like “we’re going crazy” about something, and we just—we wanted to change the way we were talking and just be a lot more aware of those things, and learn more about how to practice that a little bit better. So h—how do you feel like it’s been going?
JL I feel like it’s been going well. I’ve run into a few hiccups here and there. For “you guys” I’m really good if I’m typing: I can type “y’all” or “folks.” But it feels weird for me to say “y’all” or “folks” out loud. The face I’m making right now [chuckles] is like mmm. It just doesn’t roll off my tongue that well. So, I don’t know, are you—are y’all saying something else?
KL I also find that if I simply just take a beat and say “you” because that can apply to a group of people. If I’m not sure or like don’t feel comfortable saying “y’all” or “folks” or, you know, whatever, I like saying “friends” or “pals” [yeah][mm hmm]. I don’t know, just kind of thinking of all those different ways you can kind of experiment. I had a hard time with it, too, and then I was like, “I think I just need to force myself to say it,” and then it became a lot more comfortable.
SWB I think that a lot of time like other things sound weird in our heads [yeah] because we’re not used to them, but they don’t actually sound weird. But I think, you know, something I—it depends on the context, right? Like so at the beginning of a conversation if you’re like introducing yourself or, you know, you’re saying hi for the first time, it’s like—I sometimes find that something like a “hey everyone” is more comfortable for me [yes yes] and then in conversation if it’s like, you know, “What do you guys want to get for lunch?” I find myself not saying that anymore because I find it’s pretty comfortable to say like, “What do you all want for lunch?” Not a y’all but like, “What do you all want?”
KL Right. Yeah.
SWB I found that those—those are the ways that it tends to work for me I think most of the time.
JL And then the other one for me, you know, we were talking about substituting “crazy” for things like “wild.” So, “I’m wild about that.” And I love that, but then I ran into something like, what about if I’m saying, “This drives me crazy.”
[7:24]
SWB Yeah, so I mean that’s an interesting one, right? Because what you’re implying there is that this is making you mentally ill. And that’s kind of like what you mean, right, when you say that but it’s not really what you mean, right? And so for a lot of people it feels like that’s making light of people with actual mental illness. And so, you know, it’s hard to just swap out a word there. It’s like you kind of need to change up the whole phrase [mm hmm] so that you’re not—because if you say some other word that’s a substitute for crazy, like, “This is driving me nuts,” you’re basically saying the same thing [mm hmm]. So—so we started brainstorming some potentials [laughter]. Ok, so, “That makes me frustrated.” That’s a—that’s a good baseline one. You can use that pretty much anywhere.
JL Totally.
SWB What else did we come up with?
JL Uh, “This really grinds my gears.”
SWB [Laughs] These get bad so quickly [laughs].
KL “These really—really get my panties in a bunch.”
JL [Laughs] Uh, “This makes my blood boil.”
SWB “This really rubs me wrong.” [Mm] Meh [laughter].
JL That phrase, “Rubs me wrong,” rubs me wrong [laughter].
KL “That really… steams my mussels.” [Laughter]
SWB Is that a thing?! [Laughter]
KL No!! [Laughter][Music fades in, plays alone for two seconds, fades out.]
Thanks to our sponsors
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[10:16]
Interview: Adda Birnir
KL I know my way around HTML and CSS because of one person: Adda Birnir. She is the founder and CEO of Skillcrush, the online coding school with a heart, which she’s built from the ground up over the past six years. Adda helped me learn programming languages, but more than that, I felt confident after learning something new, which is amazing. She’s helping thousands of people learn to code so they can make a living doing work they actually love. Adda, I’m thrilled to have you on the show. Welcome to No, You Go.
Adda Birnir I’m so thrilled to be here!
KL So let’s just get into this: how did you launch Skillcrush?
AB We started, you know, in April of 2012 and basically at that point I had been working as a developer for probably about two years or so, and was kind of interested in this idea—was a moment in which startups were really hot, and it was like right when a lot of those incubators were sort of coming out. And it was kind of like everyone had a big idea and I was like, “I want in on this too!” So I was playing around with some different stuff with some friends of mine. At the time I was—I was running sort of a very, very small design/development shop with a business partner who became one of the founders of Skillcrush, and we were kind of experimenting with different ideas around apps and services and stuff like that that we could offer people. And we’d actually had one that had totally flopped and that had been a really good lesson for me because it was definitely one of those things where instead of starting with a problem and a customer, we started with a solution so we were, you know, there’s kind of a typical startup thing like a solution in search for a problem. And therefore I wanted to do everything with Skillcrush totally the opposite way. So we actually launched the first like first thing where we put the Skillcrush name out there was just a newsletter that we launched, and we launched it at South by Southwest [SXSW]. And by launched at SXSW, we put like an email form signup on an iPad and like walked up to people at SXSW and [laughs] tried to get them to buy it with an email address. So that was the first sort of genesis of Skillcrush in the form that it is today.
[12:23]
SWB What did you tell people at SXSW? Like what did you tell people they were signing up for?
AB Basically the kind of like hypothesis or like the question that we were trying to answer for ourselves was: would women buy a product that was about technical topics if we positioned it in a much friendlier kind of way? That was kind of like the scientific experiment we wanted to do. Our hypothesis was that it’s not really that coding, per se, is unattractive to women, it’s that the way in which every other, you know, major university, education, everything outlet talks about it is the problem. And so if we repositioned it in a much friendlier way that seemed a lot more relevant to women’s lives, would they be willing to buy it? And our thought was if we can’t get women at SXSW to buy it, we’re screwed. Right? Like this is—this is definitely like the early adopter audience, and what we sold them, and by “sold,” again, it was for free with an email address. But what we sold them was a tech word of the day newsletter. I think. And it was like, every day we were going to define a new tech term in like a fun and interesting way. But I’m sure our pitch changed a lot, I’m sure, person to person, because we were literally doing direct sales person to person.
KL I—I remember that newsletter. I mean, I signed up for that and I remember thinking like, “This is such a great entry point.” So, I don’t know, it—it worked.
AB I got Katel!
KL [Laughs] Yeah, exactly. So in the early days, after you grew sort of from making just that newsletter, you started doing these tutorials… what were those early days like creating all those tutorials? And like you—you yourself were at the center of this brand and kind of giving the lessons. Like what was that like?
AB It was just a lot of work [laugh]. I mean it was like… I would literally—I mean I think that’s sort of every founder when they start, right? It’s funny for me to think about now because there’s people who’s like full-time job it is to video edit for us, for example. Whereas I used to write the content, do the video, edit the video, upload it to the site, code the site, you know what I mean? [KL laughs yeah] It was just like every single part of it. Yeah, I mean—I mean honestly like I think I am somebody who happens to be—like really enjoy that aspect of it. I mean I love Skillcrush and what it is now, but like I miss those early days. I miss the days when I could like have an idea… you know? Run through the entire production cycle and have it up the next day. That was super duper fun. It was also like soul crushingly like… you know like the weight of like, “Is this going to work?” You know, “Am I deluding myself?” Like all of that stuff was really, really hard. So, you know, it’s a—it’s a give and take.
[15:05]
KL Did you always feel like you were the kind of person who would start a business? Like, when did you know that you were that person?
AB I… discovered that I was the type of person to run a business probably like four or five months into running my first business when I realized. I mean I really had to like have a heart to heart with myself and be like, “You know what? I’m running a business.” Because what had happened is that I had basically been doing this job, I was working at MTV at the time, and I really didn’t like it. And I met this friend who became my business partner and she had run a freelance—she’d basically been like a solopreneur kind of freelancer, sole proprietor, before that as a designer. And she was basically pitching to me that like I could be the developer, she would be the designer, and we could take on bigger projects together… And I was basically like, “I’ll do anything but stay here.” [Laughs] So I was like, “Sounds like a great idea. I’ll do whatever you say. You seem to have a vision.” So I did that and then I like had that—I had some sense that we needed to incorporate the biz—the whatever it was that we were doing. Again, I was not thinking about this as a business. And so I did all this research into co-op business models which is actually like a thing you can incorporate as. And I had this like fantasy that we were going to be this cooperative, and I was doing all this research about what that meant and like all this stuff. And then eventually like it just got to this point where I was like, I just dug myself, like really dug into some rabbit hole, and she was like, “We just need to make an LLC and be done with it.” I was like, “Ok, fine!” And that was kind of the moment at which it dawned on me that like this was a business that we were starting. Skillcrush obviously was very different. When I started Skillcrush I had already run a business for two years, and gone through a lot of the things around like incorporating, and, you know, hiring your first person, and then, you know, what does it mean employee, contractor, like you know—health insurance—like all of that stuff which is its own big learning curve.
SWB Adda, when you started Skillcrush did you kind of go all in right away or were you still doing client work and kind of doing this on the side? Like how did you spin it up into what it is now?
AB Yeah, no, definitely not going all in like right away. I started, you know, we were doing—we were a design and development consultancy, effectively, so we would you know build websites for clients for hire and so that, you know, luckily it lent itself really well to this because we kind of were—like we had a workflow that sort of accounted for a lot of different projects and moving them along at the same time. So it wasn’t so hard to like slot in a personal or a sort of, you know, more of like a pet project for us. But so we started off that way. We did apply for an incubator. So that was helpful for us for a number of reasons: they gave us some money, which was great. And then, you know, sort of allowed us to dial down the client work and really focus for awhile. I think it also was, you know, at the time like I think it was like a lot of validation for us—which, looking back on it, I don’t really think that getting validation from like any sort of incubator or investment really means very much, but at the time it did. You know, like, I guess what I’m trying to say is objectively, it’s not like they really knew that we were, you know… going to work out as a company. But I think just having anyone tell you that this is a good idea and then put some money behind it like obviously is really helpful and encouraging at that moment in time. So.
[18:21]
KL Yeah.
AB That was super helpful. And then we actually got a follow-on note from another investor so that gave us a little bit more runway. But I will say, like, we burned through all that money and then literally had negative dollars in the bank account and had to like figure out what the hell to do with ourselves [laughs]. So then we went back to doing client work. So it was definitely like it was a long road. Like I… went full-time on Skillcrush in the fall of 2014. So that was like over two years after we had batted the company.
SWB That’s really interesting. So… so yeah something that we hear about a lot is when people start talking about, you know, running a startup, they’ll—they’ll immediately launch into… how they went from an incubator or whatever into, “Ok when we got our Series A,” and, you know, “Going for our Series B.” And did you kind of stop going down that investment path or did you continue once you went past the incubation stage? Can you tell us more about how that played out?
AB Yeah so we did basically an incubator, which was $25,000, which is kind of traditional for an incubator. Then we did a convertible note, follow-on investment, which was basically like we just got—we got handed a $50,000 check and we didn’t even have to ask for it. But convertible notes, for those of you who aren’t familiar: basically they’re debt that will convert at the point at which you raise more money. Meaning that it’ll convert to equity. So it’s like you owe $50,000 on this timetable, but the idea is that instead of having to actually pay that back you raise more money. Like a Series A, for example. And at that point it converts to equity instead of being a debt. So we basically got a total of $75,000, and we used that to sort of fund the initial creation of our product and at that point we got ourselves to a point where we were making money but very little money. It was like $5,000 or something like that which, Katel, that’s probably like, you’re probably like one of the first dollars in the door [laughs, KL laughs].
KL Yes!
AB [Chuckles] But yeah, so, and, you know, I think at the time like we were like, “Oh $5,000, that’s awesome.” Like, “Next month it’ll be $10,000, and then $15,000!” And instead it was like $5,000, then it was like $4,000, then it was like $3,000, and then we were like, “Oh no! This is a disaster.” And that was the point at which we had to, you know, just out of necessity, had to go and start doing other work to just make a living—I mean just to pay my rent. But in terms of the whole question of like whether or not to raise. You know, honestly this is something I fought with my co-founder about a lot, and I think she would be comfortable with me saying this. One of my co-founders I think kind of like basically left because I effectively refused to fundraise at that point, and the reason I refused at that point was I really didn’t—I just didn’t know even where to begin with that. Like I didn’t really know what I would do with the money if I raised the money. I didn’t really know what potential there was. I mean for me, this was so new at that point in time. It just wasn’t something I felt comfortable doing or wanted to do and I also think like that there was an extent to which like I had this sense of like, like, “I have a lot to learn here.” Both like myself as a person but also just like in context of this, like is this a viable business? What is needed for it to be a viable business? What does it look like? What needs to happen?
[21:31]
AB [Continued] And I think I just didn’t want kind of the pressure that bringing on more people would bring into it. So yeah, so I didn’t raise money. And then later on when I got to the point where I could’ve started to answer those questions, it kind of felt like the same thing, except for now I like was more knowledgeable, like I felt like I didn’t want to make promises I couldn’t keep. I—it was growing really organically, and it was growing at a high rate, but not at a sort of venture-backable high rate. And at that point I didn’t need the money, like I—we were profitable. So I just kind of continued to grow it like that.
SWB I ask about it because I feel like so often when we have any conversation about a kind of tech-related business, nobody seems to understand that like… this is actually one potential path you could take. It’s almost like people have forgotten that since, you know, like people have been starting businesses by doing work for money [chuckles] for a really long time, and then it’s like, all of a sudden, it’s like everybody collectively forgot that, and assumes that what you have to do is go out there and get, you know, large amounts of funding and that it is all about raising capital, and then having to make those people happy. And so I—I really like, you know, looking at what are other ways people do this kind of thing? And then, how does that change what you offer, and how you offer it, and how you choose to grow?
AB I don’t regret anything about what I’ve done. I mean I will admit, just for full disclosure, I did raise money from an angel investor in 2015 and the reason for that was that at that point we were making a lot of money but I also had a lot of costs. It was making it hard for me to invest as much as I wanted to in growth because, you know, I think as a young company, like it’s really hard to sort of build up the cash reserves that you need in order to feel really stable. So at that point I did take on some money just to sort of have some more cash in the bank, and allow us to continue to invest in the growth of the business. But… running a startup business, like I have—it’s really keeps you honest and I think that I can’t imagine like even for me now like having more money in the bank like it does fundamentally change the way you make decisions. And sometimes at some points in the business I think that’s like ok and appropriate if you know what you’re doing. But early on, I mean you’re literally just spending blindly. Like you have no idea what to spend money on, or like you just—you don’t know how to do anything. I mean you don’t know how to like spend your time or money, and that just lends itself to spending money on things you shouldn’t be spending money on. And it’s not that it’s impossible to like raise money and then do it right, but I think that it’s impossible to bootstrap it and not do it right, right? Like you can’t do it for very long if you don’t do it right. So it like really, really forces you, in such a healthy way I think, to know what the hell you’re doing—or to learn really fast.
[24:16]
SWB Right. There’s no pile of money sitting around that you can misuse—
KL Exactly.
SWB —because it’s not there [giggles].
AB Exactly. Yeah. It’s like I mean and you feel the pain. It’s like you’re looking at negative dollars and you’re like, “[Choking sound] What am I going to do to get myself out of this?”
KL [Laughs] Yeah. You feel the effect right away and you have to make a decision to turn it around and—I mean the—I don’t want to say the cool thing is, because sometimes it doesn’t turn out to be cool but, you know—an interesting thing is that when you make a decision to try something else or something new you also get that feedback like right away. You’re like, [chuckles] “Ok this is working. Keep doing that.”
AB Yeah. And granted like it only works for certain types of businesses and there’s other types of businesses that it’s very difficult and stuff like that, but I am really thankful for the experience, I’m really proud of having gotten through that. And I think Skillcrush is a much stronger company today because of that fact. So I definitely would recommend it. That said, though, like, listen: it’s true, nobody give you a—you know like I was profitable, like, I don’t know, maybe my third year in business or no, my second—or whatever. My first, my second full year of business and like nobody gives you a parade for that. And then you raise like a Series A and everyone’s like, “You’re amazing!” So like, I don’t know… I get it.
KL That’s totally true.
SWB It also seems to me like that’s sort of part of the problem [AB yeah] with like the tech industry and sort of like, what it chooses to celebrate and not celebrate. and what kinds of incentives that gives people.
[25:40]
AB Yeah, I mean listen: if we want to get real cynical, I think the tech industry is premised on like wealth consolidation, and like, what are you rewarding at the end of the day? Like some VC invests a bunch of money and then sells the company. Who is actually benefiting from that, right? Like I don’t—I don’t know. So yes. So I think there’s like some fundamental problems with what the tech industry and what our world values. I could not agree with you more.
SWB Well, totally. You know what, though, I don’t think—I mean—I don’t actually perceive that as cynical, or maybe I don’t know maybe I’m just cynical, but I perceive that as being sort of like celebrating other ways of doing things. And, you know, like speaking of that, I’m actually really curious. I mean you kind of went around building the business a little differently than what some other people in tech might’ve done, but also the message and the sort of positioning of Skillcrush has been pretty different too. I mean you mentioned that when you mentioned the SXSW launch and sort of going up and trying to make it approachable for women, and I’m wondering if we can talk more about that. Like, how do you see Skillcrush as being different than other code bootcamps or academies and things like that that are out there?
AB So [sighs]… I—it’s funny. I had an interesting conversation with a founder of another bootcamp and he was basically asking me, like, how do you—you know, because I think a lot of the other bootcamps struggle to attract women. And like our audience is 80 percent women. And we’re, you know, we’re literally enrolling hundreds of women a month. So it’s like they’re not not there, and they’re not not interested. They’re interested. And it was just funny for me because I was sort of like, “Oh it’s so simple.” And at the same time, like, you’d have to change everything about what you do. I think—like I can tell you how we do it in a million different details and sort of how we execute on it, but I think fundamentally it’s that the mission of our organization is focused on this audience: it’s women who are looking to make a career change because they want to make more money, have more flexibility, be more creatively, you know, fulfilled in their jobs. And we believe that by empowering them with tech skills, it’ll give them a lot more opportunities they don’t currently have. And we want, you know, to help them sort of make that transition. So then what that means is that like… we start everything from that premise. Like I mean we actually literally have a persona and she has a name and everything is like, “Is this what she would want?” Right? Does she want this class? Does she want this color? Does she want this design? Does she—like would she resonate with this imagery? Like so it’s just like it’s completely baked into every aspect of how we run the company. And—and I mean I would go as far as like to a certain extent like—I mean [sighs]… this is where like the persona and me I guess get a little conflated but like [chuckles] you know the company also is sort of—we want to build the company that would be a company that she would want to work for. Right? That is—that sort of does right by our people in the way that we think that like, you know, they should be done right by. So yeah it just… it’s just how—it’s the air we breathe.
[28:32]
SWB I’m thinking about even just a really tangible way that this plays out. You know I was taking a look at… how you talk about Skillcrush like on the website and I was looking at the reviews that you have, and I was noticing the difference between… what I see there versus like what I see on like a lot of these kind of bootcamp sites which is a lot of those feel so sort of like aggressive, like that you get out and you’re immediately this like coding rockstar who’s going to get this six-figure salary and I think, you know, that may well be true for somebody who comes out of the program, too, that they’re going to end up getting a great salary, but there was a lot more message of like, this very achievable feeling of like, “Yeah, I was able to transition into a job in tech doing support and then I was able grow that from there into this bigger position,” and it feels a little bit more like realistic? Maybe. Or a little bit more… just not—not so aggressive in that—in that like super… domineering way.
AB Yeah I mean I think there’s a lot of culture in tech that I really struggle with, which is very much about virtuosity and [exhales sharply] sort of extreme technical ability, extreme, you know, you want to be the best coder ever! Who knows like the most languages! And like so fancy, and have like a really tight hierarchy of like what technical skills are valuable and which ones are not valuable. And fundamentally that is not a message that resonates with our audience. Like if we were like, “We’re the single best, most advanced, most intense place to learn Python,” like our audience would not come to us because that’s just not what they’re looking for. And I think like that is a huge distinction that I think differentiates us from everyone else basically, and I think that’s kind of what you’re speaking to. And I will say, too, like (and this is anecdotal) but like we do have male students and we also will get a lot of male students who will look at our programs, and it’s so funny because like… it’s so different in talking to them. And they tend to be much more interested, like they’ll really like hammer on our customer support of like, “What languages do you teach?” Like, “How do you teach them?” “How updated are they?” “What version are they?” Like all this stuff. And that just isn’t, you know, with our core audience it’s much more about what you can do with it rather than like kind of like how hardcore and how like legit are my skills going to be when I walk away from this program. And like, we still are legit. And like teach awesome stuff but, you know, that’s kind of not necessarily like our number one value proposition.
SWB Yeah I like this idea that—that there’s lots of ways to do tech. Like there’s lots of ways to work in tech and like, sure, you might be the kind of person who wants this like super intense kind of thing but… there’s so much work to be done in tech and there’s so many interesting problems to solve that like you don’t have to be that person to find like a really cool career in the field which I like—I like that that message is coming through. I love that so much.
AB Yeah I mean I think again, you know, fundamentally like our audience is not sitting around being like, “The most important thing to me is that I work in tech.” That’s just not what they’re motivated by. Like they are motivated by, you know, having a career that is more fulfilling to them in like, you know, in lots of different ways. Whether that is that it’s creative and flexible or that they make more money, I mean whatever, you know, that can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people. And kind of the role that we’re playing is saying, “Listen: like tech is not even like a career. It is the career,” you know what I mean? Like it’s—it is the world we live in. And the more empowered you are from a technical perspective, the more choice you’re going to have, and the more options you’re going to have, and the more power you’re going to have, frankly. And this is kind of that moment. Like it’s like the industrial revolution or something, it’s like if you don’t sort of get on the bandwagon now, like there’s just a—there’s a lot to lose, potentially. And so, you know, we’re trying to—you know, trying to sort of bridge that gap.
[32:25]
KL Yeah. That makes so much sense and in making tech, you know, and sort of this whole world more approachable for women do you—do you like ever worry that they’ll, you know, what they’ll encounter in the culture when they get there?
AB If I thought that the only that you could take advantage of the skills that we’re teaching you is to go work at a tech company, I think I would feel a lot more conflicted about what we do. But from my perspective like and, you know, and I say this partially from my own experience and also from, you know, just what I have observed and also just, you know, reading lots of data on jobs and where they’re moving. Like I don’t think that the only way that tech skills is useful to somebody is like to go work in the tech industry in sort of traditional like quote/unquote like “development” job. And I have major concerns about people who go do that and I definitely like would caution anyone. I mean, you know, and to go in with open eyes. Like I think—and I think [sighs]… it’s complicated like obviously I want women to have those jobs and I want more women to be in those roles but I also think fundamentally like, you know, it’s the big, I don’t know, you know, I’m just going to throw out some names here. Not to just single out any single company but at the end of the day I really do fundamentally believe that it’s like Google, and Apple, and Facebook, and all those, and Uber, like they’re the ones who have the most to lose by not diversifying their workforce and I don’t want to promote an idea of a like—I don’t believe in the idea that like… we should be begging them for jobs or begging them to like—like I fundamentally think that what’s amazing about the internet is that it really does democratize and distribute the power in a way that is kind of unprecedented in human history, and I’m about like distributing that power, and I don’t necessarily think that anyone should feel like they’re at the whim of some, you know, sexist tech company’s culture.
KL Well, speaking of that like what [exhales sharply] what could change there in terms of I don’t know, like, this industry and those people just being, you know, better at supporting more diverse folks coming into it?
AB Honestly, like I don’t know that I’m always like the best person to comment on this. I mean I can tell you like the things that we think about in terms of like how we create our company to try to combat bias, you know? And from a structural perspective: it’s hard. Like I get that. You have to do things that are not sexy. Like, you know, a big thing we did was institute these salary tiers where we really kind of worked really hard to equalize people’s salaries, and not—it doesn’t mean everyone makes the same amount, but like sort of create really strict standards of how we divvy up salaries and decide on salaries. And I mean I think it’s super sexy, but like from an individual’s perspective it’s not. It means you can’t, like, maximize your salary at Skillcrush. Like that’s not something that’s going to happen to an individual because we think about it from like sort of the collective perspective. So I think, you know, it’s about really reexamining the values of what these companies are going after.
[35:18]
KL Yeah totally.
AB And that’s hard.
SWB I’m so into this idea of like thinking about it from the collective perspective, I mean if you are working in a traditional environment where nobody is thinking about it from the collective perspective, like obviously you kind of gotta like… get yours or whatever. Like that—that ends up being like a mindset you have to get into to survive there. But if you are in a company where there’s this collective feeling in where you do have a sense that people are in it together. I think that you can approach situations totally differently. I love that.
AB Yeah. I mean I think the thing is like from an employer’s perspective like everything is collective actually, right? Like I—like, you know, and this is based in my actual experience: like if I negotiate with someone and they negotiate an extra like $30,000 for their salary. That’s $30,000 dollars I can’t pay someone else or pay another like three people or whatever or raises I can’t give or bonuses. Like there is—it is a zero-sum game. I don’t have endless amounts amounts of money and I guess what I became really concerned with personally was pay equity, which I think is what you’re addressing, right? Like when you don’t have standardization and you don’t have pay equity then yeah, you should just basically try to get everything you can for yourself because like otherwise you’re just a sucker [laughing]. It’s like getting the short end of the stick. But I just, I mean like, I’m like whoever would think that that would create like a good structural outcome?
KL Yeah.
SWB Right, like, that’s more about like how do I—how do I like… exist in this environment or this culture in this system that is not like actually designed in any sort of healthy way, versus what would a system look like that was actually, you know, going to be like positive and good for people. And those are such fundamentally different questions that I think maybe we don’t spend enough time like parsing out, like, the difference between those things.
[37:10]
AB Yeah. Absolutely.
KL So we were reading an interview with you where you talked about how you get out of a rut, and part of your answer was sometimes you, quote, “Must surrender and trust that you won’t feel so uninspired forever,” and we—we just really loved that like, you know, getting caught up in the idea of forward momentum and I think so many of us do that. That, you know, that kind of like unrelenting [laughs] you know push that you feel. Like how, I don’t know, how do you—like how do you deal with that?
AB I think step one is always acknowledging it, right? Like I think that it was a big revelation for me just to be like, my role at this company has really changed, and I don’t get to be the person coming up with all the big ideas all the time. You know, and I really miss that, and I don’t—I don’t really have a solution for it. It’s been really helpful for me to talk to other people. Like I have a mentor who sort of gave me warning. He was like, you know, like, “You know like when you get up to like 30 to 50 people,” and we’re at 35 right now, he was like, “A lot of founders wake up and realize they hate their [laughing] lives and hate their companies,” because it’s just this, like, weight. It’s like all the fun parts are drained out of it, and like now all you do is like bureaucratic stuff, and for a lot of people that’s not why they got into the business at all. And that can be a real challenge. And that was kind of a warning he gave me and, you know, I don’t hate my company, but it was good for me to sort of have some warning that that wasn’t—that was like very normal.
KL Yeah some perspective that you’re like, “Ok, I’m not the only one going through this.” Well, ok, so we’ve got one last question because we know we’re running out of time. But so, what would you tell someone who is considering building their own company or, you know, starting something new like that?
AB It’s really funny because I feel like I do get asked this question a lot and I meet with people and it’s funny because it’s like I feel like I’m always like there to rain on their parade. And that’s so not what I want to do [KL chuckles] because I’m like, “No! You absolutely should go for it. It’s awesome.” So I—let me start by saying that: like you should totally go for it. It’s totally awesome. It’s completely—I think something that’s really important for people to understand is like there is a method to the madness. Like there is a way to make it much more likely that you will succeed. You know? It’s not just luck. And then, you know, and then to rain on your parade: I would say that like, you know, fundamentally—and this is something I say to people and they don’t like, but I will say it anyway—you at some point have to decide whether you are more attached to running a successful business or more attached to like realizing the vision that you had for your business. And in a perfect world and actually like I will say for myself like Skillcrush exceeds my expectations like by like a factor of like, you know, 25. Like it’s—I’m so proud of the company I’ve built and the product and there’s so many aspects of it that I couldn’t have even—like that I literally just would never have known to do, and that are so phenomenal. And like going on that journey has been, outside of like marrying my husband, the best thing that ever happened to me. But I think that like it’s successful from a business standpoint because at some point I decided that I wanted the business to survive and I was going to figure out what it would take for it to survive and do that. And that really meant sort of letting go of kind of any idea I had about what the business was going to be, and really base it on, you know: what was the problem? Who was the customer? And how was I going to solve their problem? And I think when I say that to people like they hear it as me telling that their like baby’s ugly or like they need to throw out their baby or whatever which I understand why they see that way but I really believe it’s about like letting go of like your vision of your baby, and like trusting in the process to like bring you an even better baby [laughter] and like I don’t know how much longer I can stretch this baby analogy but uh—but I just—yeah. I just think that like you—it’s like being in business is—like to really, really fundamentally be in business, it’s a lot of like really, really painful, hard choices that in the end, I think if you like come at it from the right perspective and don’t just like become a diet pill company or something like that, it will lead to like a much better outcome than you could’ve even imagined on your own. But I think it’s a very humbling process.
[41:30]
SWB Thank you so much for being on the show! This has been sooo interesting, and helpful, and thoughtful, and I am so glad we could have you.
AB Yeah, no, it’s so good. No, thank you! [Music fades in, plays alone for two seconds, fades out.]
Fuck Yeah of the Week
KL So it’s time for one of my favorite parts of the show: The Fuck Yeah of the Week. Jenn, can you tell us what that is?
JL I can, Katel. How about fuck yeah, mornings! Question mark?!?
SWB Ugh!! Are you sure?!?
JL I’m not sure. But I am sure and I’m going to try to be sure. I’ve been trying to dig into more about this whole morning-people thing that I’ve been hearing so much about my whole life. And I—I’m not so much a morning person, and I—right now I’m not an anything person because I’m sleep deprived and with a one-year-old, the mornings are the nights, and it’s all the same. But even before that I only dabbled in and out of being a morning person, but I feel like I’ve always had that pressure to like want to be a morning person. You know? I get it. It’s great. Sunshine. Do a bunch of stuff. It sounds amazing. Right? Like get stuff done before work, enjoy the coffee, there’s so many things about the mornings that are awesome, right? There’s so many things that like, fuck yeah, mornings! But there’s still something about the mornings some days that you get up and you’re just like, “Ugh! Mornings [laughs].” So I’ve been trying to think about how to more fuck yeah, mornings! And one of the things I read recently that I really liked was that… when you get up instead of being like, “Ugh, you know, I didn’t sleep well,” or, “I’ve got this thing to do.” Instead ask yourself: what am I looking forward to today? And I love that, so the other day I got up and then I said to myself, “I’m so looking forward to seeing my friends today,” and when I like reframed the morning like that to then think about the positive things that were coming up, it completely flipped the script. So it like switched how I was going to look at the rest of that day and all of a sudden I was like… “Fuck yeah, morning!”
[43:36]
KL I like that so much. I—I think of myself as more of a morning person than like a, you know, a night owl, but I still find it like over this winter it’s just been, you know, extra hard getting up and it’s dark and all that. But I always love like the first coffee [mmmm]. And there’s something about it that like always gets me—I’m just like, “Yes, if I can just like get to that, it’s all going to be good [laughs].”
JL Something I started doing a few years ago was not waiting to get to work to have my first cup of [KL yeah!] but making sure that I woke up and had that cup of coffee at home. So that like I could really enjoy it and didn’t feel like I was rushing all around. So I’ve always made sure, even like with changes in schedule, that I have at least 15 minutes to enjoy that cup of coffee and have that be my time.
KL That’s so funny. That reminds me of—and this like a while ago but my sister at one point I—I just like hadn’t realized that she did this, and she was like, yeah, you know, she and her husband would like—they would go get out of bed, make coffee, and then get back in bed, and drink the coffee in bed and just like sit there for 10 or 15 minutes like enjoying coffee! And I was like, “That sounds amazing!!!” I was like, “Oh my god. Why am I not doing that?!?”
SWB You should’ve all seen my face when Jenn said that she realized that she didn’t have to like wait till she was at work to have the first coffee [laughter] and I’m like, “I don’t understand. How did you get to work?” But like how did you move your person from your home… ? [Laughter] But anyway so like ok, there’s that. But also I really think like—I don’t think of myself as a morning person necessarily. Like I can drag myself up and out for something early when I need to and occasionally for like an early workout when I don’t think I can do it later or something like that, but I kind of like to, you know… wake up a little more slowly and like not have to talk to anybody right away [laughs]. Like I don’t have to be a morning person, necessarily, to still say like, “Oh! But I can find some joy in what’s coming up that day,” right? Like you don’t have to transform yourself. You don’t have to wake up smiling, you can still be kind of dragging ass, but you can also say, like, “Ooh! What do I have to look forward to today?” And I’m—that’s a habit that I want to start getting into so that I don’t go into the day like with that general sense of dread and [laughing] foreboding and instead identify something good that I’m looking forward to that day. And if I don’t have anything to look forward to at all that day, then maybe I should take a moment in the morning and come up with something because—
[46:04]
KL Yeah!
SWB —like if you don’t have anything coming up in the day that you can be like, “That’s going to be good. That’s going to be my time,” [inhales sharply]… maybe that’s the problem… maybe it was never the morning’s fault.
KL Maybe we can all learn to love mornings.
JL You know this is like what we’ve talked about before where sometimes you just like—like with salary numbers in one of our previous episodes we were saying, you know, if you’re going to go in for a salary negotiation, keep saying the number that you’re going to ask for until like you sound confident in it. So maybe if I just keep repeating over and over again… “Fuck, yeah, mornings! Fuck yeah, [laughs] mornings! Fuck. Yeah. Mornings!” Until I really really believe and then it will happen [laughter].
KL I believe it. Fuck yeah, mornings.
SWB I’m a little unconvinced but I’m going to say—I—I’m going to say, fuck yeah to taking a moment to think about things I’m looking forward to on any given day because: fuck yeah, I like looking forward to things.
KL Yes.
JL Fuck yeah!
SWB Well, I think that wraps up this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Adda Birnir for being our guest today. Be sure to check out “I Love That,” our new, biweekly newsletter. Sign up at noyougoshow.com/ilovethat. And if you like what you’ve been hearing, we’d love if you’d give us a review on whatever podcast app you use. We’ll be back next week! See you then [music fades in, plays alone for 30 seconds, fades out to end].
It’s not every day we chat with someone the New York Times has listed as part of “books-by-women-in-21st-century.html">the new vanguard” in fiction. But today’s our day: Carmen Maria Machado is live on NYG!
We sit down with the badass author, National Book Award finalist, and fellow Philly resident for a conversation about writing, working retail, believing in your own work, craving the company of other women, and so much more.
> The art of non-dominant groups can be trendy, but we think of men and whiteness and straightness as, like, eternal… And of course that’s fake, right? Like, that’s not real: men, and white, and straight, and cis, and all those things… are not neutral, but we think of them as neutral. > —Carmen Maria Machado, author, Her Body and Other Parties
Here’s what we cover:
- The “fat women with fat minds” of Carmen’s “The Trash Heap Has Spoken” essay in Guernica
- How a retreat at the Millay Colony for the Arts kickstarted her writing career
- The wild popularity of “The Husband Stitch,” Carmen’s story in Granta (which, like, just read it already)
- What it’s like to go from working at the mall to full-fledged famous author in a few short years
- The exploitative mess of the adjunct teaching market
- Carmen’s review of Danielle Lazarin’s new book, talk-danielle-lazarin.html">Backtalk, and how women internalize the “slow, invisible grind” of misogyny
- Why Claire Vaye Watkins’ essay “On Pandering” and Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” struck such a nerve
- Craving the company of women in a culture full of far too much bullshit
- Finding the confidence to divest from sexist culture, take up space, and acknowledge your talents out loud
Plus: why city snobbery is bullshit, the incredible joys and health benefits of naps (seriously, just thinking about a nap can even lower your blood pressure)—and why y’all should just visit Philly already.
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.
WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you.
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Transcript
Katel LeDû [Ad spot] Shopify is leveling the playing field for entrepreneurs with software that helps anyone with a great idea build a successful business. More than 50 percent of the business owners they power are women—across 175 countries. And they’re growing their world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to find out how they work [music fades in, ramps up, plays alone for ten seconds.]
Jenn Lukas Hi! And welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
KL I’m Katel LeDû.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. Today on No, You Go we’re talking with one of my favorite authors, Carmen Maria Machado. This first book of stories, Her Body and Other Parties, was just listed as one of 15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times. Like, seriously. Carmen’s also a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, which means she lives right here in Philly. And that got me thinking a lot about place. You know, like in a lot of industries we sort of expect people who are ambitious to live in a specific location. Like, you’re a writer, gotta move to New York! Oh you’re in tech? Well why aren’t you in San Francisco? But, like, Philly is great. There’s so much amazing stuff happening here, and I wish more people knew that.
JL Ugh! I love Philadelphia. You should see the Philadelphia tattoo I have across my abs. Just kidding [all laughing].
KL I was like, “What?!? Show me!!!”
SWB My god.
JL But I do in spirit. In spirit it’s there. Just, uh, just Ben Franklin hanging out [KL chuckles] eating a—Ben Franklin eating a pretzel right on my bicep.
KL Love it. Very on brand [laughs].
SWB Can we all get like matching Ben Franklin eating a pretzel tattoos?
KL Or just like a Liberty Bell? Something small, tasteful.
SWB What do you love so much about Philly, Jenn?
JL Ugh. I’ve been in Philadelphia for… woah. 18 years?
SWB Wow!
KL Woah!
JL How’d that happen?
[2:04]
SWB Like your whole adult life!
JL Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. And at first I didn’t love Philadelphia. I came here from Boston and I was just like, “Why—what am I doing still in the cold?” I guess is what I was thinking. And, I don’t know, I felt like there’s just something that wasn’t great and then within like two years it just grew on me. I loved that it’s flat, it’s cheap, and it’s got a lot of great people, and so much good food. But it’s got that—Philadelphia has this interesting thing in that uh it has like, people will say like this inferiority complex of a city of where, you know, we’re between DC, New York, Boston, and always something to prove. I feel like there’s a lot of that which I think has led to a lot of great innovation. A lot of people just like building lots of stuff to be like, “No, look! Look at all this amazing things that like that we have here.” I had the chance once to work for visitphilly.com website, which was probably one of the best projects I ever worked on because there was just having a chance every day to come in and work on something that showcased our fine city. And I think it’s so important to have pride in where you live, because it’s where you [chuckles] spend your time.
KL I feel like—I lived in New York for five years of my life, like my late twenties, and I loved it, it was great. And coming from DC it was sort of like I got the sense that people were kind of like, “Oh, you finally moved to like a real city,” which totally felt like not at all. And then when I got back to DC after living in New York, people were kind of like, “Why would you ever leave New York?” And there are, you know, personally a lot—a million reasons why I left New York. I feel like it’s odd to get that reaction depending on where you live. And when I was in DC for that second time, I was working at National Geographic. So when I told people where I worked they were like, “Oh! Well that’s amazing.” And I’m like, “Yeah. That’s where HQ is. It’s in DC.” Like—
SWB I think one of the things that’s so frustrating to me about talking places is that—is that kind of reaction that you’re talking about, that like, “Oh! You live there!?” I remember this one time I was having brunch with a friend of a friend in New York, we were in Brooklyn, and she—this woman, I didn’t know her very well, she asked me where I lived, and I said I lived in Philly, and she goes, “Oh Philly? Well, it’s a good starter city for New York.” And I looked at her and I was just like, I just like dead-eyed her, and I was like, “Or it’s a place that people live by choice?” It was so—it was just like one of those throwaway comments for her, because in her head, her assumption was like basically everybody was just trying to move to New York, and, like, you would only live somewhere else if you like couldn’t make it in New York or whatever. And I’m like, “I don’t want to live in New York.” I like New York. It’s fine. But I—what I think is—is important to remember and I think about this a lot for the podcast is like there are people doing awesome shit literally everywhere, and one of the things that we can do is do a better job of seeking that out. You know? Finding folks in all kinds of places. Like, way back I think in our second episode we talked to Eileen Webb who lives in northern New Hampshire and is doing all of this awesome work on accessibility, and strategy, and the web, and like… she lives on a farm. And like why not? Why the hell not? Why can’t we look at people doing great stuff everywhere.
[5:25]
SWB [Continued] So that brings me back to something that I loved about talking with Carmen, who is doing this amazing work as an author and becoming like straight up a famous writer. And she’s right here in Philly! And I suspect in like all kinds of cities out there you would find people who are just like top of their game in their fields, working from all kinds of unexpected places.
JL And not just cities. I mean more rural areas, towns, I think one of the things that we always have to keep in mind that we do here is that there’s things about Philly that I love, obviously, and then there’s things about Philly that I don’t like, and that’s true of any place. And so I think the trick is finding that balance of someplace that you really like to be that helps you be the best you.
KL Thinking about the idea of a “starter city” assumes that, you know, everyone has the same resources or lifestyle that would allow you to just like move wherever you want to go and move to, you know, a really potentially expensive city or place that, you know, you might just not have the resources that kind of work in that area that you can—that you can really have access to. So, I don’t know, I think it’s—I want to pay more attention to, like Sara said, you know, the work that people are doing that aren’t on the coasts or aren’t, in the places that we know are networks and all of our friends are. I think it’s kinda cool that we start looking at that.
SWB Well, with that, can we go ahead and get to the interview because I am super hyped to have everybody listen to this interview with Carmen.
KL Agh! I can’t wait [music fades in, ramps up, plays alone for four seconds, ramps down].
KL [Ad spot] We want to be able to share our voices our way through our website, and we use WordPress to help us do that because it gives us freedom and flexibility. Make your site your own when you build it with WordPress. They offer powerful ecommerce options from a simple yet effective buy button to a complete online store, and WordPress customer support is there for you 24/7 to help you get your site working smoothly. Plans start at just four dollars per month, so start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off your brand new website [music fades in, ramps up, plays alone for four seconds, fades out].
SWB Over a year ago I read this amazing essay in Guernica called “The Trash Heap Has Spoken” about women refuse to apologize for taking up space. “Fat woman with fat minds”, as the author, Carmen Maria Machado, put it. It was a gorgeous essay and it’s one that I actually still think about all the time. So when her book came out last year I devoured it immediately. Fast forward just a few months and Her Body and Other Parties, a book of stories that defy genre, that are fantastical, and erotic, and queer, and just were really captivating to me, has been awarded about a zillion prizes. It’s been a bestseller, it was a finalist for the National Book Award, and somehow, despite all of that huge success, we still managed to get Carmen Maria Machado here to be interviewed on No, You Go. And literally she is here today. She is in our studio, also known as my office in south Philadelphia, and I am extremely excited to chat with her and also a little bit nervous [laughter]. Carmen, welcome to No, You Go.
[8:33]
Carmen Maria Machado Thank you for having me.
SWB So, first up, ok, after I read that essay in Guernica I found out that you went to college with a friend of the show, Lara Hogan. And she said that you did photography together. So, first up, like when did you start pursuing writing as a career, and sort of what was that path for you?
CMM Yeah! Well, I’ve always sort of—I’ve been a writer or a person who writes, or sort of organizes her mind around writing, for my entire life. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. Um and when I got to college I thought to my—like I wanted to be a journalist, that was sort of my way out. Like, “Oh, I’ll have health insurance and also, you know, have a job, and like be a writer.” And of course this was like 2004, I got to school, I started journalism classes and I did not like them. I was like, “This is not me, I don’t like—I do not have a nose for news. I don’t like hunting news stories. I don’t like talking to people on the phone.” Like all of these things that would be required of me as a journalist are things that just bore me or make me too anxious, and I don’t want to do it, even though I like writing. So I sort of moved around, I switched majors a few times. I was like lit for a hot second, and then I switched to something else, and then finally I took a photography class and I absolutely loved, and so I ended up getting like an independent study major where I sort of combined a lot of things including writing and photography and fine arts, where I met Lara. And so, yeah, so then like I had this idea of like being a photographer [smacks lips] that did not last for long [laughs] but I’ve never supported myself doing it. I worked all kinds of jobs [chuckles] um it’s just never been a thing that really like worked out for me. So I have a really nice Instagram account. That’s like the way that my student loans that I’m still paying off [laughing] that’s what they’re still going towards is a really well curated Instagram account and that’s about it. And then after school I was living in California, just sort of working some random jobs, and it wasn’t until I went to grad school which would’ve been in 2010 that I really started thinking about writing as a career, and as a thing that I could pursue sort of more professionally.
SWB And you were in grad school in Iowa, right?
[10:30]
CMM Yes. Mm hmm.
SWB What was that experience because it’s a pretty intense program, right?
CMM Yeah I mean it’s the—so it’s the oldest program in the country which is sort of where it gets its reputation from. Um, you know, there’s a lot of really wonderful who’ve gone there. Uh I had a really good time. It was really nice to be able to go to a program that was funded, that I was able to just like write, and like not have to worry about work, and not have to worry about anything else. Like I was just—I had to do a little bit of teaching which also was nice because then I discovered that I really liked teaching um which before I did not realize.
SWB Speaking of teaching [mm hmm], I saw that after grad school you had ended up kind of back in the Philly area, adjuncting uh while also working at the mall, and—and I’m curious like when do you feel like it all started to come together for you, career wise?
CMM That’s a really good question. I mean it sort of happened in stages. So while I was in grad school, I— through a friend I met my now wife and we were dating long distance and decided after I was finished that we wanted to move in together wherever we would live. So she was living in Boston at the time, I was living in Iowa City, and we decided to do—to come to Philadelphia because it was like an affordable city we could live in and we had both—she had lived here before, I had never had but I grew up in Allentown. So not too far away. So yeah so we got here and in the beginning I mean, yeah, I was really struggling. Like she was working full-time and was more or less supporting us. I was, you know, adjuncting and working a retail job, and making like barely anything. I was really struggling. Yeah, I was going to King of Prussia mall… I was driving back and forth every week. And it was horrible. And I was very stressed out and sad and was, you know, sort of plugging away at some work, and was just writing some stories and, I don’t know, feeling like maybe I had made a mistake, or maybe like writing wasn’t in the cards for me professionally. And… it was really hard to write because I was physically exhausted all the time, just from the—from standing like teaching, you know, it is exhausting in its own way but like with working at the mall, I was just like on my feet all day, I was driving really really far back and forth and I was exhausted. So um at some point I applied for a writing residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts which is up in upstate New York and I got in for a session. So I quit my job, went there for a month, and like wrote a bunch of stuff. And that actually got me [smacks lips] back in this really nice headspace where I suddenly found myself able to be like, “I have a whole book here, and I can just kind of get it all pulled together.” And so I had written this story called “The Husband Stitch,” which is probably my most famous short story. I have a friend—someone has called it my hit single [laughter and laughing:] Like it is kind of like my hit single. It’s like the story people usually know of mine and so, yeah, and I had an agent at this point, and I sent it to him, and he submitted it to magazines and Granta ended up picking it up. And putting it on their website. And so that became—that was sort of like the trying point for me because that story did really well, people really responded to it, because it was online people were able to share it, and there was like a lot of sort of movement around that story. And, in fact, I believe last year they told me it was still their most read story at their website. But even though it’s three years old. Like it’s been out for three years but like, they were like, “Oh yeah, no, like there’s just a ton of traffic to that story. It’s like—it’s like a really highly trafficked page on the site.” So um so yeah so that was sort of the moment, like once I had that, and then I started putting together this collection and then, yeah, in about a year. So that would’ve been in 2014, so then I sold the book in 2015. Like in the fall.
[14:03]
CMM [Continued] So yeah and then once that happened and then I started—and then got like this offer at Penn where I’m now the Writer in Residence. So I suddenly had a teaching job where I had like health insurance. And like [laughs] a living salary [laughs], and like all these other things. Um and that was pretty awesome. So… so yeah. So that’s—it just ended up sort of working out nicely where that became like the place where my career sort of turned, and people started to pay attention, and sort of knew who I was, and everything has sort of followed from there.
SWB And I think for listeners who don’t know about the adjunct teaching market, it’s a, I don’t know, exploitative nightmare. I would say [chuckles]. So like if you’re curious what the difference is between adjuncting and having a fellowship at Penn where you have benefits, it’s like night and day. A lot of adjuncts are contingent faculty and it’s like a couple thousand dollars a semester to teach a course, and you end up making, I don’t know, probably less than minimum wage at a lot of places?
CMM Oh—oh absolutely! Absolutely you’re making less than that, because like you usually have office hours, and all the grading, everything you do outside of class, and prepping for class. Yeah, no, it’s actually really bad. And it’s funny because I think sometimes students—I’ll ask occasionally like see if students have a sense of what adjuncts—like who they are or what their situation is, and even now they really don’t. And, you know, when I was in college I also did not understand what adjuncts were. Like I had adjuncts and I didn’t realize it because like to a student it’s like, “Oh you’re my teacher! Like what’s the difference?” Well it’s like, oh the difference is huge. Like adjuncts are, you know, often like broke as hell, like they’re getting food stamps and they can like barely make ends meet. So, yeah, it’s like really—it’s one of those—you know it’s a labor issue that’s like getting a lot of traction and like in Philadelphia they’re actually like the—there’s an adjunct union that’s been um unionizing various schools and they’ve been actually pretty successful which is pretty awesome but, yeah, it’s a bad situation for sure.
SWB And I’m curious like you mentioned that you really loved teaching and was it difficult to balance out this feeling of like loving teaching but knowing that you’re doing it in this like kind of exploitative environment where you—you can’t actually make a living off of it?
[15:58]
CMM Yeah, I mean I think the hardest thing for me was that I couldn’t be there for my students in the way I wanted to be because I was just—it was just unpaid labor. So like… you know like I would grade, and I would do workshops, and I would prep lectures, and I would all this stuff, but then like if a student wanted like more feedback on something, like I wasn’t getting paid for that, you know? And so I had to say no to things. And the students didn’t understand, and some of them would be like, “Well, why can’t you do that thing for me? Like you’re my teacher.” And I was like, “Well, in normal circumstances, yes, certainly, like you know?” Yes, as a teacher, like for example if a student come to you for like a letter of recommendation or something like that—that’s part of the process, right? Of being a teacher. Is being like, “Yes, like I am at least open to the idea of writing a letter of recommendation,” for example. Um or like, “Talking to you, you know, within the semester about certain things.” Um but when you’re an adjunct like all bets are off because you’re not making any—You’re making, yeah, 3,000 dollars a class. Right? So it’s like what are you supposed to do? Like how are you supposed to like value and manage your time? That part is really, really hard and—and when students don’t understand that—and you can’t just say like, “Oh, by the way, like I’m an adjunct. Like your school does not care enough to like pay me a living wage and you need to take that up with them. It has nothing to do with me.” You know? Um so I think it’s a combination of like just because students don’t know um and then yeah, and then just like trying to decide like where do you value your time, you know, if you’re a good teacher like you want to be there for your students. Like you want to be able to help them during the semester in the way that you can but yeah like when you’re not making money or—I’m just giving them free time. Like I’m not… you know I’m not doing—So yeah it’s a bad, it’s a really bad situation.
SWB Well, so your situation has changed pretty [chuckles][yeah] dramatically since then and I would like to talk about that. So, in addition to be being a National Book Award Finalist which I like to say over and over again because I think it’s fucking awesome [laughter]. Um you were just called part of “the New Vanguard” by the New York Times… uh what’s—what’s that like?
CMM [Chuckles] That—well that was shock—that I was—I mean nothing that’s happened to me have I—have I expected any of it. Like if you told me like, “Oh, your weird, genre-bending short story collection that’s going to be out from an independent press is going to like do just crazily well in every respect.” I would’ve never ever ever, in a million years, I would’ve been like, “You’re crazy. That’s ridiculous. There’s no way.” Um but yeah everything that’s been happening and then, yeah, that New York Times piece where they were sort of talking about like women writers of the 21st century who have like—who are sort of showing us how we read and write—like and that my book being one of those 15 books is just completely unbelievable [chuckles]. Um—
SWB So, I mean when that happens, I assume you also have a lot of sudden like demands on your time and attention. How do you negotiate that? Like how do you figure out what you’re gonna say yes to?
[18:41]
CMM Oh, that’s a really good question. I mean you have to, like I’m learning to be more protective of my time. The thing is that what’s weird in the beginning was that, you know, I wasn’t sure how the book was gonna do and so I said yes to everything. And then at some point you have to—right, decided like I’m not going to do this, or I’m not going to do this. And I was lucky that my wife is actually very—she’s brilliant. And very, very good at knowing all my weak spots. So, for example, this spring, she made me build in three weekends where like I was not allowed to schedule anything and it was just weekends that I have off. And at the time, I was like very grouchy about that. I was like, “Oh I don’t want to do that.” But I’m so grateful that she did that because now there are weekends where I’m like, “I don’t have do anything. I can just— I can just relax. I can do laundry!” Right. I can just like do what I have to do.
SWB You can have a weekend.
CMM I can have a weekend!
SWB That’s called a weekend.
CMM Right, yeah, it’s called a weekend. Right [laughter], where I’m not traveling. But I’ve been traveling. Except for those weekends, I’ve traveled every single weekend for the last like six months. Like I’ve just been—you know, so it’s—it’s—it’s hard. And I think it’s also like remembering, right? Like it’s ok that right now I’m doing that, but then like knowing that this summer I’m going to a residency and I’m gonna go back to working because like I haven’t been writing and that’s been making me really sad. So like knowing that I have that on the horizon, you know, saying no to things. Like saying, you know, and like I sort of have a set of criteria so if I get asked to do something. It’s like, you know, do I know the person whose asking me? Is it something that I really want to do? Like I’m like, “Oh I want to be with that publication, or I want to—” You know there’s like a reason. Sometimes I think it’s just—it fun. Where it’s like, “Ooh that sounds really cool. Yeah I do want to try that.” Um so right now I’m judging this cookbook contest for Food52 and they like asked me to do it and I was like, “That’s so weird! Yes! I do want to do that!” [Laughter] Because like [laughs] I love cooking, and like they’re like, “We’ll send you these cookbooks and you can cook from them.” And there’s like a tournament—it’s like a tournament of cookbooks or whatever. And I was like, “Yeah! Yeah I do want to do that. That’s so weird.” So like I’ll say yes to that sort of thing. So it just becomes a matter of like figuring out what my priorities are, like, you know, so I sort of run every opportunity through like a little set of filters where I’m like, “Does it have this? Does it have this? Does it have this?” And I’ll say yes or no.
SWB Yes I’ve had those periods. I mean I travel a lot for work things and conferences and book things and it’s like… I’m mostly pretty good at it, and then I realize, I’m like, “Oh no. I have limits.” And like I need to remember them. I used to do things like book those like multi-stop trips. Like [yeah] three stops [yeah yeah yeah] and then I realized like, I’m fucking miserable every time I do it and it was like, “What if you just didn’t do that anymore?” [Right, right] “What if you just said no to things that would require that?” And I found that—that was like when you talk about finding criteria and stuff it’s like, oh, notice those patterns. Like, “what are the patterns that are making you unhappy?” and getting rid of them.
[21:19]
CMM Yeah, or like I had someone once tell me like, “You should never do anything where the amount of money you’re being paid to do it, you’re not excited to go.” So like if you are like—if you’re like, “I don’t want to get on a plane, go to this place, do all this work, get uh go on a plane back, lose a weekend, and it’s for like 500 bucks or whatever.” Like you know like learning what is it that you actually want. Um what is worth it to you to like get out of the house or like and like leave your loved ones, and like get a on a fucking airplane which is like it’s fucking hell, [laughter and laughing] you know?
SWB Yeah, I mean I also feel like um I definitely will say yes to things sometimes. I—I don’t do this anymore, but I used to have this problem where I would say yes to something and like, as I was writing the email saying yes, I had that like tight knot in my stomach—
CMM Yeah, you’re like, “I don’t want to do this.”
SWB Where yeah, like deep down [yeah] I didn’t actually want to say yes. And so now I try to be way more aware and like also let those emails sit a little longer.
CMM Yes! Yeah this is also a thing I’ve noticed is, right, if I like—if I like don’t answer it right away, and also like it—I sort of went through this phase where I felt a little guilty about this but I said yes to some things and then I actually thought about it and then I wrote them back and I’d write them back and I’d be like, “You know I’m so sorry. Like I know I agreed to do this yesterday but I’ve been thinking about it more and I think I actually don’t have the time.” And I did that—I did that earlier this year and I was so—I almost like cried from relief and she was—and the person was super nice about it. They were like, “Don’t even worry about it. Like you’re obviously so busy. It’s totally fine.” And then I was like so happy, I was like [cries out], “Oh I’m free! Free!” Like I could’ve been stressing about this for two weeks and instead I just like said, “Nope, actually I can’t do it. Sorry.” Uh—
KL And that feeling of relief is such a huge [chuckles][right! Right!] And it’s not like—it’s not like you’re waiting until the day before this thing [right, right, exactly, exactly] is going on, it’s like you are, you know, you’re—you’re paying attention to it and you’re like, “Ok, I need to just take this—remove this from my plate and my future for, you know, whatever reasons. And that’s ok.”
[23:10]
SWB There’s also like just the incredible unmatched joy of canceling plans [laughter]. So good. But yeah so I read a book review the other day of yours for Danielle Lazarin’s Backtalk [mm hmm] and I would love to talk about it a little bit because in there you know you talk about how it explores the “exhausting, slow poison of masculine power, the grind of the patriarchy on even the most privileged of women,” and you pose kind of a question in there, like, “How do writers divest themselves from the pressures of the dominant culture while also addressing the burdensome weight of that dominant culture?” And I think that piece and your—your Guernica essay last year, all of those things are sort of like attempting to wrangle with internalized misogyny, on some level, um and that’s something I feel like is sort of cropping up a—a good bit among feminist writers. So I’m wondering if you could talk more about that. Like, I feel like in that article you started to… you started to answer that question a little bit of like, “How do we divest ourselves of” that internalized misogyny is like… “Don’t be pleasant or easy to teach. Look mean for the camera. Just get up and go.” What does that look like? Like how do you get up and go?
CMM Ugh! That’s a really huge question. I mean I think [sighs] this is the—it’s so funny I feel like there’s this, right? This idea about like you become more conservative as you get older. And I think that’s a really weird idea because I feel like every woman I know gets more and more radical the older they get because it’s like the world—the bullshit of being a woman in today’s culture, or in any culture, or any time, or whatever, is so awful that like just the longer you’re alive, the more radical you become. So I feel like I’m way more radical in terms of like my thoughts about gender than I was like ten years ago which is amazing to me, and I think is sort of the opposite of what most people would expect. Yeah so I mean I think—yeah I think right now this topic of internalized misogyny and like I—I talk about in that essay like Claire Vaye Watkins essay “On Pandering,” and I also talk about “Cat Person” the—that story in The New Yorker. All of which also deal with concept of like internalized misogyny. So like I think what’s really interesting is that right now I have a lot of thoughts about like Hillary Clinton—like I feel—I feel like there’s like a lot of… what’s in the air right now is—is like post this election and like regardless of how you feel about… Bernie Sanders or Hillary specifically, I think we can all agree like the way that misogyny played out on this really massive scale during the election was like really traumatic for women. And I think we actually have not fully addressed that trauma and I think we just went to pure panic mode because, like Trump is president and suddenly like, you know, we just gotta get past it. But like I think there’s something about… like people talk about like women—like white women voting for Trump and I think it—that is interesting not just because obviously like it’s this way in which like race—like race alliances, racism sort of trump, no pun intended, this like gender element. And the way in which women loathe themselves so deeply, on this like deep sort of cultural level, right, that like even though Hillary Clinton is like the most privileged woman probably to ever walk the fucking planet [laughter]. That she couldn’t win that election against this like incompetent, blowhard, like caricature of a sexist guy from like an ’80s cartoon. Like that to me is just an illustration of like how broken it is. Again, regardless of how you think about her specifically. And I think that like “Cat Person” is another really good example of that, in terms of that story, like where it’s all about like… it’s like, again, not about rape exactly but it’s about like what does it mean that like women—it’s like easier to have sex with a man that you’re not really that into than to like say no and walk away… because it is! And like I have been there. I have personally been there. Where it’s like [absolutely!], “I don’t want to do this.” And most women I know have been there where there like, “I really don’t want to do this but I’d rather like just not have to deal with not saying no.” And literally like that Stormy Daniels interview, I don’t know if you guys have watched it but like—
[27:06]
SWB I specifically did not watch it but I read about it later. But yeah that’s kinda the story too, right, it’s like, [crosstalk] “Well, I might as well do this ’cause…”
CMM He’s like, “Were you attracted to him?” And she was like, “Oh no!” It’s just like [laughs] and then she was like—and then he was like, “Well, why’d you do it?” And she’s like, “Well I found myself like, ‘Here I am, like I’m stupid enough to get into his room like I might as well just like do this.’” And it’s the same like absolute like res—where it’s like ugh the resolve. It’s like, “I can’t fight this anymore. Like it just is what it is. It’s easier to have sex with this totally odious man than it to like just get out of here because he could do god knows what.” And so I feel like there’s something about that that’s really interesting and I feel like the Claire Vaye Watkins essay, again, dealing with with this idea of like women trying to align themselves with men which I think is also like a massive problem that we don’t really talk about a lot. And I feel like this narrative of sort of like, you know, women being like, “I’m just one of the guys!” I’m like I knew a woman like that in college, it was this woman who like that was literally like she was just like, “I’m just one of the dudes! Like I don’t know nuh nuh nuh,” and it always struck me as like deeply, profoundly sad and I feel like it—the more I sort of live like the more I’m like, “God! That’s the [yells] saddest, worst thing!” Um so, you know, like feminis—femininity and femaleness is so odious to somebody that they would just be like, “I reject that. Women are—” She was like, “Women are just drama queens. I rather like align myself with men.” And even queer women align themselves with like male power, so that women who aren’t even attracted to men necessarily being like, “Oh I need to like align myself in that way.” And so that to me is really interesting and I think that there’s something in there that we’re—we’re coming to this like… I don’t know if it’ll actually be a catharsis but I feel like [mm hmm]—we’re sort of—this is like sort of what’s in the air right now and I feel like we’re arriving in this place where we’re having to reckon with like… again, like not just like this cartoonish like male villainy that’s so—The problem is that like Trump is like… cartoonish male villainy, but what’s actually way worse is like, again, this slow, almost invisible grind, and the ways in which women then within themselves reinforce that, even when the, sort of, the power’s not directly not on them in that moment [mm hmm]. And I feel like that is something that we like need to figure out. And I don’t know if we will, I don’t know if that’s possible, but it’s something that is—is very interesting to me as a writer and so it’s like what I write about and so of course that book—that essay—you know, writing that review gave me a little space to like talk about that because it was—I was like, “Oh this is exactly what this book is about so like [mm hmm]. Here, I’m also gonna like talk about this idea that I have.”
[29:20]
SWB Yeah I mean I feel like this comes up in all kinds of fields. I mean I definitely know early in my career I… spent a lot of time hanging out with the dudes in my office because the dudes in my office were like in positions of more power, oftentimes. And they were fun! They were nice. I mean they were—they were in lots of ways great people but I definitely had a couple of years in there where it was almost like I set aside a lot of the more… like overt feminist work that I had done prior to that and was like, “I’m kinda—I’m here to, you know, get shit done and move up and make space for myself and, you know, I’ll do that by fitting in at—for a round of beers with these dudes.” And I couldn’t really see it that way at the time. Like I could not have explained that was what I was doing but looking back it’s like that was definitely what I was doing. And there came this moment where I was just like, “I don’t fucking want to.” And then I realized is that over the past several years, I mean definitely since the election but even before that, I was going through a process of sort of like… reevaluating the men in my life [mm hmm]. Um like I have a husband. I love him. His great [laughter]. Still in my life. He stayed. Um but like I definitely cut out a lot of people who I thought I was like “supposed to” like [mm hmm], or people who were “important” in my field, or whatever. Right? Like I was just like, “Oh. Is this actually bringing me anything in my life?”
CMM And I do think that’s also—I think that’s part of getting older. I do feel like as you get older you’re like, “Well life is short, I will die one day [chuckling in background], I need—I can’t like waste time on people who are like making me miserable or like don’t—or don’t—you know they don’t, not that you like, not in like a self-serving way where you’ll like, ‘Only people who can help me,’ but like just being like, ‘No, like that person doesn’t give me any joy. That person like makes me feel bad about myself.’” You know, whoever. Like I want to—but then yeah, there’s this element also of like my tolerance for like, male masculine bullshit is like this big. People who are listening, you can’t see. I’m making a very tiny little notch [chuckling in background] with my fingers. It’s like almost nothing because I’m just like, “I can’t. I don’t have time for your weird shit.” [Laughter] Like, I don’t want to deal with that. I gotta live my life. I gotta make art. I got a life. But I—but I crave the company of other women. And I mean I’m queer but also like I just crave like… I think women are more interesting [laughs]. I think women are just more interesting and I feel like the—yeah, it’s like I don’t have to explain myself to women [yes]. I don’t have to explain… we just know.
KL Yeah, you don’t have to explain about being or existing in—in [right]—in small facets of [right]—of ways that like seem like they should be obvious but [yeah].
SWB Right. Like when you’re like, “Well, you know, sometimes you just had sex with somebody because it was easier than leaving.” And everybody’s just like [crosstalk and laughter], “Oh yeah—I get it.”
[32:00]
CMM [Inaudible][Laughter]—no man. Almost no—well, I’m sure some men. But almost [sure]. Probably a very tiny percentage but every woman knows what that’s like, every single woman. It’s like, “Oh yeah,” where you’re like, “I’d rather—I don’t know what this—I don’t know this guy, I don’t know what he’ll do if I say no.” Or having to deal with like the whining and the inevitable like bullshit that’s gonna come with me saying no is just like easier for me to just like have sex and then like go away. So like that, right, well woman know that and—and I think it’s really nice to have that um and I think what’s really nice about what’s happening sort of in terms of art and writing right now is like you are getting a lot of these narratives are sort of being presented um like well before like “Cat Person” and like all these other stuff that’s been in the last couple of years. There was this really amazing piece I want to say in Buzzfeed maybe like two or three years ago that was also about this idea where it’s like not rape… but it’s like what about this exact phenomenon where it’s like it’s not rape, it’s not sexual assault, like you consent, technically, but you’re consenting because of this like larger power structure that like is totally out of your control and like, all things being equal, you would say no but like you just don’t want to deal with—You know so it’s like I’ve—this is like a thing that’s just in the air and I think we’re just like thinking about it a lot.
SWB Well I think that there’s kind of a lot of stuff in the air right, you know, you touched on some of it and one of the things that—that seems to be like definitely in the air is just I mean women’s stories are—are selling now. Like in a way that, I don’t know, maybe they probably never had the opportunity to before, they probably [chuckles] would’ve sold if they had been out there in the world [mm hmm] but I feel like there’s—there’s suddenly a lot more space? I’m not sure if that’s the way right way to look at it though but I feel like there’s um so many more women authors from all kinds of backgrounds who are like getting a lot of attention and who are kind of becoming, well like “the new vanguard” or whatever, right? Like there’s like—there’s—there’s sort of an appetite for that and a—and a—more of a, I don’t know, there’s an appetite for it which maybe was always there but there’s maybe more of a willingness to publish it and more of a willingness to promote it?
CMM Yeah I mean it—I feel like it’s sort of actually a bunch of different things, like I mean on one hand, not to be um, not to be cynical, but like feminism is a brand that sells. Like there is a sort of level of like… it is accept—it is a thing that is acceptable… for like companies to make money on, you know? And like so the reason, for example, that we’re seeing like so many like gay st—we’re seeing more like gay stories and more feminist stories is because right now, we’re in a place where that sort of thing is permissible and is even, like, profitable. But I don’t think that necessarily means that like, it—I don’t know if that’s as much as changing, it’s just like technology’s permitting this, certain sort of independent groups but there’s like just sort of weird little pockets that like are permitting it, and so it is like happening, but I don’t necessarily know if that means that like it’s different now, “everything’s better,” like I don’t—I don’t actually know if that’s the case. I’m also very cynical about all this.
[35:03]
SWB And I wonder, right, like I wonder if there’s a moment where people are like, “Oooh! We can—if we buy this book, right, like if we buy this author’s work, we think that’s gonna sell because it’s going to fit into this like group of like [totally] women of color writers who’ve sold well in previous years.” That’s a moment. That may not be a change that lasts.
CMM Right. The problem is that we think, and by we I just mean like culture. We think of like, minority—the art of non-dominant groups can be trendy, but we think of men and whiteness and straightness as, like, eternal and not trendy, and just like that is—that is the natural baseline, and anything else is like a trend. So like publishing—and publishing and other sorts of art forms—might follow those trends, but ultimately we will always return to this baseline. And of course that’s fake, right? Like, that’s not real: men, and white, and straight, and cis, and all those things are not like—are not neutral, but we think of them as neutral. So I feel like, yeah, I feel like we’re in this place where like, you know, there are these like spikes, but it’s because of this trendiness that—but it doesn’t mean that’s gonna be that way forever, right? So until we re-conceive of what is neutral, like, what is the center? And if we keep thinking of maleness and whiteness, et cetera, et cetera as the center, then we’re gonna keep like cycling back to that, you know? And so I think there’s like a different way to conceive of it that is like—but again, that’s about divesting. That’s about, like, rejecting the structure altogether, of everything, which is like really different than just being like, “Rah rah!” Like, “yay!” Like it’s actually more about like pulling everything out from the roots and like starting again, and how do we that? And I don’t know. Look, I don’t know how we do that. I think that’s like a big question and I think um… you know, we’ll see.
SWB Yeah. If—if the question is basically like, ok, well if we redefine what neutral is or like sort of what—what normal is and we cannot do that unless we can deal with our internalized misogyny. [Right] Right? And so it’s like, ok, well then how do we deal with that? And that’s such a huge question. Then—then, you know, it’s like—it’s a long haul to get back around to like, ok then what—what—what does the world look like after that [right] and like who the hell knows. But I’m—I’m curious: what has that meant in your personal work in your life? So, like, how did you get to a place where you felt like you had the confidence to show up with, you know, your, I’ll use your quote from earlier, with your “fat mind,” [chuckling in background and chuckles] and like and to say like, “I’m here and I’m going to take up space and I’m going to tell the stories that I want to tell, and I’m going to do them in these genres that don’t—that haven’t really been recognized, or I’m going to take genre and I’m gonna do whatever the fuck I want with it.” Like how did you get to a place where you felt like that was something that you could do?
[37:51]
CMM I wish I could say that it was all internal because certainly part of the process is like, being like, “I am going to do this thing.” Part of it was actually—but part—a lot of it was other people, you know? I was lucky in that like I had like my girlfriend slash wife who’s like brilliant and I trust and love, like being like, “This is really awesome. This is really different.” There were other people in my life like really encouraging me and like, you know, readers who read my work and wrote to me and, you know, so there were like these other sort of forces working. And then at some point I—I feel like I was looking at what I was doing and I was like, “I have something to say.” And, you know, the interesting thing about being like a writer or being any kind of artist is like you have to have an ego. Because, you know, you have to say like, “What I’m creating is important enough that I think other people should pay for it, should read it. It should be published, or it should be presented,” or whatever, and like that requires an amount of ego where you’re like, “I think that what I have to say is that important.” Um and I think sometimes people forget that element of it or they—or they—they’re like, “Oh like this person is so arrogant,” or whatever but it’s like no, no, you have to believe that, or else why the fuck are you writing? What’s the point? Or why are you making whatever art? So at some point I had to be like, “Yes, like I’m really good at this. I’m gonna—I’m gonna do it and I’m just gonna make this happen.” And that felt really amazing, and it felt really—and it felt right. And now—so it’s like I had to get over this hump, and then at some point, like obviously like the books are doing really well and I was like, “Ok so I wasn’t—” But even the book hadn’t done well I think I still would’ve felt that way like, “I’m good at what I do.” Like I know that I’m good at—I’m not good at a lot of things. Like, you know, I can’t draw to save my life. Like, you know, I’m really bad at dancing, like I’m not a fast runner, when I paint walls it’s always really crooked, like there I do not have a lot of skills but I know that I’m a good writer. And that—I can say that and like I know that’s true. And I would never—you know, I don’t ever say things like I, yeah, I would never claim to be anything that I’m not and like—but I know I’m a good writer. And I have that. I have that. And so… I can sort of move forward that and that’s like in my arsenal of like getting through my life and like getting through everything um and knowing that and believing that. So… yeah. I don’t know. So I think it is like—it’s, yeah, it’s partially like sort of taking from other people what they are handing to you because I think oftentimes people will say to you like, “You’re really good at this thing.” And you want to be like—especially women want to be like, [uptalking:] “No, no, no. Like I’m not—I’m not—oh, oh, you know, like I—thank you. I’m just doing what I do.” You know? And it’s like you want to—because you’re trained to like minimize yourself in that way and it’s like—it’s like saying, “Oh thank you, I worked really hard on that. So thanks so much. I really appreciate it.” And it can be scary and also for me like I get really scared when I have to admit like—Like, for example, like right now I’m working on this new book and I’m really scared that I’m not smart enough to write it and that’s really hard to admit. Because it’s like, oh my god, like, what if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew? Like what if, you know? And so now I’ve gotta like rapidly make myself the kind of writer who can get through this project, and that’s like a very terrifying challenge. But also, that’s how I know I’m getting better, because I’m like pushing myself through like these new stages of—of art and of—you know, and I read my book—my book came out in October. When I read it I’m like, “I’m already a better writer than I was when I wrote this book.” And that’s really exciting too, being like, “Oh no, like I, you know, I’m already better.” … Like I’m already sick of reading from it because I’m like, “Oh I can do better than this,” you know? [Laughs] So yeah so I feel like it’s like taking what people give you… sort of, you know, challenging yourself and pushing yourself and, you know, knowing what you’re good at, and I think also like a lot of that in—involves like being bad at things. Like, I don’t know, my dad is a chemical engineer and the poor man was trying to get me to be a scientist for like my entire life and of course I like at every turn just resisted him in [chuckles] in every way [chuckling in background].
[41:29]
CMM [Continued] And I’m ba—I’m not good at math, I’m not good at, you know? [Laughs] You know like I’m not good at any of that stuff. Um but I do remember like getting I think a C in chemistry in high school and I had like a—I had like a conniption, like I was having like a nervous breakdown, and my dad was like, “Look,” he said, “Ye—did you do your best?” And I said, “I did!” Like I was going to school, I was like. He’s like, “That’s all you can do. It’s ok. You don’t—you’re not good—no one’s—no one’s good at everything.” He’s like, “I never trust people who have like straight As in absolutely everything because it’s like… it’s like you’ve gotta fail, you’ve gotta,” well he didn’t say—he didn’t say “fuck up” but I would say you gotta fuck up sometimes. You gotta be like, “I’m gonna try this thing, maybe I’ll get a little better, maybe not. Like, I’m—but also I can do this.” Or, “This thing gives me pleasure, I’m gonna do it anyway.” And I feel like there’s this way of just like figuring out like, yeah, like how you occupy your space and like being ok with bad at things and also being comfortable with being good at something and men are good at both those things. Men are really good at being like super confident in everything that they’re doing and also like fucking up royally at the same time.
SWB And they just move on!
CMM They’re just going on! Right! And like women are just like, “Aaaaaah!” [Laughter in background] And I feel like it’s like because we’re just taught to do that, we’re taught to like [inaudible crosstalk] freak out and agonize at every turn. And it’s like you don’t have to live your life that way. That’s like a prison. That’s fake. So, yeah, so I don’t know, and this is all stuff that I’ve only realized in the last like few years of my life, you know? And so there’s something really freeing about that.
SWB I love it so much.
CMM I’m so glad [laughs].
SWB I love it so much because, you know, we talk about this a lot on the show. This sort of like… having other—like when other people come to you and tell you you’re doing great, and like how important it is to actually listen to them and take that seriously because it’s so easy to brush it off and, again, like to come back to what—what I mentioned at the beginning, like, to reduce your own successes to luck, right? [Yeah] And to like, “Oh yeah I wasn’t—” No, like, sure, I mean, it’s not to say like there are some ways in which we all get lucky, there are ways in which we happen to have this moment, and the right thing at the right time but like, things have happened for me in ways that were good because I worked my ass off, right? [Right, yes] Like I’m good at things and that is why I’ve gotten a lot of it.
[43:28]
CMM And I think also recognizing because for me like people will ask me like, “What is—you’re having this moment, what does that mean?” And I’m like, “Well, like it’s a lot of things.” Like it is some amount of luck. Like there’s timing. Timing is a thing you often can’t but like good timing. Yes, I’ve worked my ass off. I’m also really privileged in a lot of ways. Like I grew up, you know, I was educated, like I grew up in a certain kind of household. Like I’ve never like been hungry, I’ve never like been homeless. Like there’s like all these things sort of working for me um so it’s like, you know, and also, yeah, I’m working really hard, and also I have some talent. And I think there’s like, like saying like, “I have a talent,” which is a thing that like is sort of nebulous and is hard to pin down and like where does it come from? And can you teach it and like I mean that’s kind of beyond purview and I could talk about that for like ten hours but there’s like that element, there’s privilege which you can’t control, there’s luck which you also can’t control, all you can control is like the hard work element.
SWB Yeah, I mean I don’t know if you can teach this necessarily but it seems like something you can give to someone.
CMM Or like—yeah or like let someone know about it. Yeah, no, for sure.
KL Talk about it more like you’re saying, I mean I think talking to each other and talking to other women who may not just may not ha—have experience talking about this stuff or listening to people who have experienced it [yeah]. It’s, you know.
SWB Or also it’s like we’ve sort of been taught to be ashamed of it. Like something [exactly] we talk about a lot is how common it is for women to feel like they shouldn’t talk about their ambitions, or talk [yes] about things they want, or like to like—yeah, like to—to—to be able to say out loud like the intentionality that they have [yeah] and put into things [yeah].
CMM Right it’s—it’s very gauche to be like, “This is what I want.” Or, “This is my goal.”
SWB And I’m kind of fucking tired of that [yeah] like I don’t—I’m not interested in that. I want to hear what—what women want and [yeah] like what they’re—what they’re doing—
CMM But not like in a Mel Gibson kind of way [boisterous laughter].
KL No. Never.
[45:00]
SWB Never. Literally never in a Mel Gibson kind of way. Carmen, thank you so much for being on the show today.
CMM Oh of course! No problem, thank you [music fades in, ramps up, plays for five seconds alone, fades out].
SWB Is everybody ready for the Fuck Yeah of the Week?
JL I’m so ready.
SWB I’m always ready for the Fuck Yeah this week, because the Fuck Yeah this week is: naps.
KL Aaaah!
SWB Ugh uh do you—ok…
JL How do you feel right now just saying the word “naps”?
SWB I feel like I want a nap.
JL You know what thinking about napping does? It can reduce your blood pressure.
KL Just thinking about it?
JL Just thinking about a nap!
KL Oh my god.
JL There was a recent study that found that just people anticipating naps was enough to lower your blood pressure.
KL So we should be thinking more about snoozing.
SWB Maybe this is why my blood pressure is so great because I think about naps a lot [KL laughs].
JL Everyone just stop for a second… think about a nap [sigh of relief from KL]…
SWB So I don’t nap like all people nap. Like some people are like, “Oh my gosh, if I sit down for a nap it’s like two hours.” And I’m like I don’t have that kinda time. But when I take a nap, I—I take a micro nap. And—
[46:13]
JL What is a micro nap? And tell me more!
SWB Ok. So, you know, I work at home, and, you know, sometimes you get like that afternoon lull where your brain doesn’t work that well, it’s like after lunch and you just need a minute. If I have a little bit of time something that I’ll often do is I will set my alarm for 12 or 15 minutes, and… I’ll just kind of doze off. And when I wake back up 12 to 15 minutes later, I feel so much better. And I know it sounds wild. Right? Like I know it sounds wild to be like, “Wait, you nap for 12 minutes?”
JL Stop. Does this work? Is this real?
SWB So it works for me and—and I’ll tell you when it works: it works when I’m having an afternoon where I’m just—I get that sluggish, tired feeling and where I’m feeling so sleepy already that I’m like, “I just can’t.” So I’m already like already pretty sleepy feeling and I figure like, instead of trying to fight it, I just lean into it, and then come back bounced back. And so for me, when I’m in that zone, I found that that kind of little break is much more productive than like trying to fight through it. So—so here’s my 12-minute story, ok: two minutes to fall asleep. Ten minutes of napping.
JL And it wor—and you fall asleep within those two minutes?
SWB Oftentimes I can fall into like a light sleep.
JL Mmm… I’m—I feel like my blood pressure’s dropped just listening to you tell that story.
KL I know! I—yeah, I have not usually been able to do that and I think now I’m listening to you say this and I’m wondering if it’s something that I could maybe just like try to practice a little bit more because when I have napped and just like been able to do it for like half an hour or something, even that is, you know, really nice and—and I feel refreshed. But I feel like I was always one of those people who I would go to sl—like go to sleep to nap and I would two hours later I would [chuckles] wake up and I’d be like, “Ah! Everything’s shot!” And then you feel terrible.
SWB Yeah, I mean I can do that if I lie down for that long it’s like you’re just you’re brain foggy because you go into those deep sleep cycles. I don’t do that—it’s just like a real quick thing. Here’s the thing: you know my number one tip for getting good at the micro nap? I mean I don’t know if micro naps are gonna work for you or not, maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But my tip is like, first up… learn to feel really good about the idea. Like don’t feel bad or guilty about taking a little nap [KL absolutely]. Don’t feel like you should be doing something else, don’t feel like it’s sort of like indulgent. Feel like sometimes that is the most productive way that you could spending your time.
[48:49]
JL There’s so many studies about how good naps are for you. I mean like things like just being more alert, increasing your patience, reducing heart disease.
SWB Oh my god, I need way more patience. So should I take a lot more naps [laughs]?
JL Maybe you need to up it to [inaudible over crosstalk]—
KL Yeah, definitely.
SWB You know the other thing I think, though, like you were saying, Katel, like you need to practice a little bit. I do think it’s the kind of thing, like, even if you’ve mentally given yourself permission, you may not have kind of physically let go of this idea that—that taking nap is a—is, like, a weird thing to be doing. So like normalize it, and then it might get easier to fall asleep.
KL Completely. I think that is absolutely true. And I think also just doing some sort of physical hygiene around that, where, you know, I’m putting myself in like a very comfortable place, and making it conducive to doing that instead of being like, “I’m gonna—I’m sitting on couch already, I’m just gonna like lay my head down,” that doesn’t always work.
JL One of the things that always frustrated me as a new mom is everyone was like, “Sleep when baby sleeps.” And I’m like, “Buuut I can’t just sleep on demand,” and that would be so annoying because you can’t predict the sleep schedule of your newborn or toddler, it turns out um [laughs] and so he would go to sleep and I’d be like, “Well, I want to sleep,” but I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep and so like and I would give myself two minutes, ten minutes, 15 and I wouldn’t fall asleep and then I would just get frustrated and think about that and then I would just give up and—and do something else like eat or shower which was fine. Other necessities. But I—then I eventually realized that for me it wasn’t just about falling asleep, the idea of just lying down and giving my body and sometimes my mind a chance to just relax also was really refreshing. So I’ve gotten way better at that. So maybe not falling asleep but this idea of just breaks and resting and giving myself a chance to do that. And like you were saying, Sara, being ok with that. And also being ok if I don’t fall asleep. And I think that was one of the thing that was one of my biggest battles is I’d be like, “Napping’s not working. I’m not falling asleep.” But being like, “You know what? I’m just gonna lie here for ten minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, whenever he decided to wake back up and I’m just gonna—I’m just gonna be.”
[51:04]
SWB Did you ever think that you would be just like looking forward to when he’s like a surly tween or teen [laughter] and like won’t get up until 11:30 or [laughs]? So yeah, naps. I recommend it. They are Sara approved. I think you should take ‘em. I think you should feel good about them. I recognize if you work like in a traditional office, you may not be able to do what I do in the middle of the day as easily, and that’s ok. But I do think giving yourself those little breaks and like letting yourself try to relax. It’s like, I had to get over the feeling of like I was wasting time and to think like, “Man, I’m actually saving time because I’m not gonna be productive for the next like 90 minutes if I try to push through this tired period.”
JL That reset button is so important.
SWB Fuck yeah naps!
KL Fuck yeah!
JL I’m gonna take a nap now [laughter].
KL That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together, and naps. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Carmen Maria Machado for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us on your podcast provider. Your support helps us spread the word. We’ll be back again next week [music fades in, ramps up, plays alone for 32 seconds, fades out to end].
Welcome back! We’re pumped to have you here for Season 2. Here to kick us off is Neha Gandhi, the COO and editor-in-chief of Girlboss, a new publication “for women redefining success on their own terms.” Sounds about right to us.
Neha told us all about her start in journalism, what it’s like to manage teams of mostly women, and how group texts with her friends keep her grounded (you’ll LOVE the rosebud and thorn analogy, promise).
> First of all, maybe it’s ok to be selfish and put yourself first, and put your career first at times. But also, ambition is not a dirty word. That said, none of us feel ambitious all the time, and none of us have exactly the same idea of what success looks like. > —Neha Gandhi, editor-in-chief and COO, Girlboss
Plus: Having good and bad managers, being good and bad managers, and what we’re doing to cut noninclusive and ableist language from the show. Y’all ready?
Link love
- If you enjoy our convo about manager-ing, check this advice column from The Cut about a-boss-im-afraid-to-show-any-weakness-at-work.html">being a better manager by being vulnerable with your team.
- Get more on Neha’s background with this interview, and follow her on Twitter for more on pop culture, politics, and the media industry.
- To hear from speakers like Paola Mendoza and Janet Mock, register for the Girlboss Rally livestream on April 28.
- For more on the topic of gratefulness and negotiating, check out this advice on how to negotiate when you’re being promoted.
- And if you’re interested in learning more about inclusive language—and maybe tweaking some of your own habits—check out this words-and-terms-to-avoid.html">list of ableist words and the Conscious Style Guide.
- Use Slack at work? See if you can get your company to customize Slackbot to nudge your team when they use noninclusive language.
Sponsors
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.
_WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _
Transcript
Katel LeDû Shopify builds products that help entrepreneurs around the world start and grow their businesses. Starting from a few people obsessed with personal growth, Shopify is now a team of 3,000 folks working in offices and remote teams across the globe. They’re growing quickly and building an international team that will define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to find out what they’re working on.
[Music fades in, plays for nine seconds, fades out].
[0:32]
Jenn Lukas Welcome to Season 2 of No, You Go: the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas.
KL I’m Katel LeDû.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and I’m so excited here for our first episode of Season 2 because we have so much good stuff in store. We are kicking things off today by sharing an awesome interview with Girlboss editor-in-chief and COO Neha Gandhi. She talks to us about building a career in publishing through a dramatically changing landscape, how to redefine success for ourselves, and why talking about money is so difficult. She also talks a lot about what it’s like to grow as a manager. And, actually, can we start there today?
KL Yeah, I feel like that—listening to her talk brought up so many sort of thoughts and memories about, you know, just my career as it’s gone so far, and how I’ve had good managers and bad managers, and I feel like having both of those things has helped me grow as a manager, like when I became one for the first time. It was a really sort of frankly awkward situation because I was working in a team of people and I was most of those people’s peers and some of those people’s junior. Like I, you know, I was sort of at a level below and all of a sudden I was their manager. And it was really—a really interesting shift because I had to kind of like not just learn how to manage the team and make them feel like I was there, you know, doing the job well. It wasn’t just awkward, it was also really challenging because I was learning how to be a manager and that in and of itself is like: how do you run processes? How do you manage workflows? How do you, you know, keep things running? But then how do you also you know get the people on the team to feel like you’re there doing the right job, you’re the right person for the job, and you have their best interests in mind. And, for me, I think going directly from being, you know, sort of working with those people at—at the exact same level to being a manager was like … I realized that the more I included them in the process of like me getting up to speed, the more investment they would have in the team succeeding and like moving forward.
JL That’s so neat, because [sighs] there’s so many parts to being a manager. So many things to learn and constantly learn even once you’ve been a manager for awhile. But to then also feel you have to prove yourself because you didn’t come into the role as a manager. You transitioned to the role of a manager. It just puts on a whole new layer of things to consider when, you know, trying to really rock your job as a manager.
[3:11]
KL And especially when you’re, you know, either at a job or a company where there’s either a super strict or defined management style. Like if it’s extremely hierarchical or, I don’t know, not a lot of room for growth. So it’s like not as clear when people become managers or not. Or it’s loosely defined and you’re kind of like trying to figure that out. I think it’s—it’s so hard to identify when you’re a good manager, or when you’re, you know, not being good at that.
SWB I remember I first became a manager—I was in my twenties and I was working at an agency and I went from being sort of like the only person doing content strategy and web writing related stuff to taking on sort of like this broader strategic role and bringing in somebody who I managed who was a writer. And then all of a sudden from there I went from having this one direct report to having a team of six staff and two interns who reported to me. And I became a director at the company which meant, you know, at this agency of like 40 people and meant that I reported directly to the owners and I was in all of the senior management meetings, and … there was no advice or guidance about what I was supposed to be doing. And not only that, there wasn’t anybody to take over a lot of the client work that I was responsible [mm hmm mm hmm] … and as a result, I was really overwhelmed and I had these people reporting to me who were great, but I didn’t feel like I was there enough for, and I wasn’t sure how to be there for them. And, you know, about half of them I really felt like I was an appropriate person to be their manager. And the other half felt like, they need a team. And I, you know, like my boss, the owner, was basically like, “We need them to roll up into somebody’s team and, like, you’re it!” [Chuckles] And like that’s not a good reason to have somebody report to you. And—but it created this scenario where, you know, like how was I going to guide and support them if I wasn’t totally sure that I really should be their manager in the first place? [KL Totally] And, you know, what—what I remember most about that experience was that I felt like the most important thing I could do in that moment, given what was available to me, was that I needed to advocate for the people on my team to the other senior managers and to the owners of the company because it was such a like weird transitional time. That was really important and I spent a lot of time there. But, you know, as a result, like I think—I think I did good at that. I did a lot of that. But what I think I did really bad at was being there for them individually, right? So like being able to hold one-on-ones with them and hear about the work that they were struggling with, where they wanted to grow, the sort of individual piece of it. And part of it was that I didn’t have time. I mean I really didn’t have time. But another big part of it was that I didn’t really know how to do that. And that’s like the biggest thing that if I—if I were going to manage a traditional team again, I would want to learn to get better at.
JL I can relate so much to what you’re saying. I manage a team now. At Urban, I’m an Engineering Manager. And I … also have always struggled with how do I be a manager and also be an engineer? And I’ve talked to so many other engineering managers that have the same struggle of trying to find that, you know, balance. I’m always trying to find a balance somewhere. And so one of the things I did—I had talked to my manager about some of the stress I was having because I was feeling like I wasn’t doing—I thought I was doing a good job, but I didn’t think I was doing a great job in that I was having a real struggle going from, ok, in the morning, maybe I’d have a touch base, and then later I’d have to go to a meeting about, you know, design specs, and then maybe the next day I’d have another touch base with another direct report. And it was just really hard for me to constantly do the context switching. And so I started instituting Manager Monday, and Manager Monday is where basically I’d come in on Mondays and I’d hold all my touch bases with my direct reports on Mondays. It varies with my direct reports based on how often they want to meet and discuss. So some people I have biweekly touch bases with, some people I have every month, every three weeks, it just depends on the desires of my direct report. And I’ve just now scheduled them all on Monday. Which means: I come in Monday, and that is my focus. I’m going to focus on the management roles of, you know, my job. And it’s really helped me because then I don’t have to context switch back and forth. I come in on Monday, I say, “This is what I’m here for today.” So if other questions get asked, my calendar’s essentially all booked the entire day with management meetings or I block off time to, you know, just work on other things that are directly manager-related. And that has just I feel helped my relationships with my direct reports and my workload so much because I really feel like I can always be there on that day and be in the headspace for it. And like it doesn’t always work, you know, sometimes I’m out, sometimes the direct report is out, sometimes something comes up that I’ll have to move it to like, oh no, Manager Tuesday which doesn’t sound nearly as good [someone else laughs] but you know then it’s like a one off.
[8:18]
KL That’s so great. I think that’s something that I struggle with, you know, running a business that—I work with all freelancers, all remote folks, you know. This is no one’s full-time job, which has, I think, made it difficult sometimes to have everyone feel like they’re part of, you know, a singular team. And they don’t necessarily need to, but I’ve looked for ways to try to make that happen as much as it’s comfortable and possible for people. But I think that’s been so important because everyone—when you feel like you’re, you know, kind of cruising towards the same goal it’s—it just helps a lot. So. And it’s really beneficial for me because it makes me feel like I’m not just [chuckling] like out there, you know, on my own.
JL Yeah, at Urban we had combined engineering teams. So we had a engineering team at Anthropologie and an engineering team at Urban Outfitters and we’re now combined under one team, starting about a year and a half ago. And one of the things that was interesting there was you took two teams and now we’re meshing them together it’s not like—you have to build a new culture! Because all of a sudden you just have a whole new team of people. And so we started a Urban Education and Culture Club where we tried to come up with activities for people to sort of get together and learn from each other and meet each other. And it sort of expanded to the whole building, so not just engineers but other people that are working on the websites and some [?]. And we use a Trello board to manage some of this [laughing]. So what we do is like drop things in like, “Topics People Wanna Learn,” or maybe people want to have, you know, a clicks watching party we did one time. Or, you know, a bowling happy hour. And just ways that we can get together and sort of sometimes it’s … you don’t want to force culture, but sometimes you do have to shape it. And like, you know, help build relationships by having planned activities. Things don’t just happen naturally. You don’t put 200 people in a building and be like, “Ok! Now everyone know each other and be friends.” So I think it’s ok to force a little activities on people—but things that help people learn to grow with each other.
[10:19]
KL And ultimately that—I think that helps people learn how to work with each other too [mm hmm]. Can I steal that? A Culture Club Apart or something?
JL I love it.
KL Great [all laugh].
SWB I mean I—I like thinking about how we build cultures and how we shape cultures because I think, you know, in—in industries like tech, oftentimes it’s like people substitute perks for culture [mm hmm]. So it’s like, “Oh we have free beer and ping pong.” Or whatever, right? Like there’s the stereotypes and often that’s like literally what they have and it’s like that is not a culture. [Mm hmm] And sometimes that can create really problematic cultures because it’s like, you know, you get super alcohol-centered or you end up with a culture that’s super male driven, and you don’t really have activities that women feel comfortable participating in, or lots of problems. But I think the big underlying thing is that those perks are not culture. Like culture is something you have to create and foster and [mm hmm] like facilitate and then over time you have to sustain it and all of that is work. And I think that work is super important, it’s not talked about enough, and oftentimes it’s like super devalued. Right? It’s like, that’s the office mom’s job as opposed to a fundamental part of having a workplace that is healthy and, therefore, also productive.
JL During my one-on-ones with direct reports we’ll come up with goals and talk about, you know, things and that very often is technical related but sometimes it’s more about building the sharing community of our group. So one of my direct reports wanted to start basically like a code sharing thing which didn’t have to do directly and necessarily with the work we were doing on Urban but any technical problems. So we have something instead of a round table, we call it the dev square table. So we brought the dev square table where we could just look at different pieces of code, either for Urban or outside of the company and, you know, talk about it and share it with each other. So sort of a show and tell for code. Which is really neat because it just gave us a chance to just sit around and—and talk—talk code with each other, which was awesome. Another that we’ve done there was developer’s cinema lunch which then another one of my direct reports, when I went on maternity leave, took over and made it sort of… we’d bring popcorn and it ended up moving outside of lunch. So, don’t worry, we weren’t just eating popcorn for lunch [laughs]. But it was really neat. You know she sort of took what I had and enhanced it by having, basically, we’d watch a video and then discuss it. Talk about like things that we learned in the video. And it just gave us more of a chance to really learn and grow from each other. So it’s really neat, I feel like, to work—to help just outsource it. So it doesn’t become like an office mom thing, but you’re working with the whole team, for the whole team to take part of growing that culture.
[12:48]
SWB You know, speaking of building culture, that’s definitely something that I thought was really interesting in Neha’s interview. When she joined Girl Boss, it was just a fledgling startup organization and she’s really trying to build that out and figure out what that culture should be there. And so why don’t we go ahead and listen to that interview?
KL [Music fades in] Yeah let’s do it.
[Music ramps up, plays alone for four seconds, fades out.]
KL If you visited us at noyougoshow.com, then you know it’s our hub online. And we use WordPress to run it, because it gives us the freedom and flexibility to share our voices, our way. Make your site your own when you build it with WordPress. No need to do any coding or design, and the WordPress customer support team is there 24/7 to help you get your site working smoothly. And plans start at just four dollars per month. Start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off your brand-new website [music fades in and out].
KL Neha Gandhi is the editor-in-chief and chief operating officer of Girlboss, one of our favorite magazines and communities. She’s been building a career in publishing for over a decade, navigating the editorial world at publications like People, Harper’s Bazaar, Seventeen Magazine, and Refinery29. Excuse us while we brush the stars from our eyes. Neha, we are so excited to talk to you. Welcome to No, You Go.
Neha Gandhi Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
KL Awesome. You’ve had an exciting career in publishing so far, one I’m sure that has been a ton of work. Can you tell us a little bit about your path?
NG So I graduated from college a little uncertain all through college about what would I really wanted to do. I think I found my path really through a process of elimination more than anything else. “Oh, I worked at a congressman’s office. Maybe that’s not for me.” “Management consulting: not for me. This non-profit: not for me.” So then I ended up interning at People Magazine one summer right before I graduated and loved it. Except that when I graduated I was like, “Oh I have this one amazing internship, surely I can get a job!” So I was looking for a magazine job and the competition was fierce. Everyone else who was applying for these jobs had had, you know, 10 different editorial internships over the course of four years in college and I had been doing a lot of different things that I, now looking back, really appreciated, but at the time was like, “Oh. I’m not going to be able to find a job.” So I didn’t find a job right out of school.
[15:22]
NG [Continued] I moved to New York for an internship that paid minimum wage at InStyle. And I’m really grateful for that opportunity. I learned how to fact check, I sat with the copy editors, and I, you know, developed an attention to detail and was able to work on some really cool pages, and do some research. And then I moved over to Meredith which I was a freelance editorial assistant and I got the opportunity to do the job … as like maternity fill-in for the senior fashion and beauty editor. And I think that that was just a great opportunity that came my way probably because they didn’t have the money to really bring on someone for maternity cover. But it really taught me the value of saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s an opportunity. I will absolutely do it. Do I know how to do that job? Definitely not. Do I think I can figure out in the fly? Probably.” So I got to do that and that was where I learned to properly assign, how to edit, how to think about an editorial calendar, and I learned about publishing on the web for the first time there. So that was great and when she came back, they were like, “You know, you probably want to move on and find another job because you don’t really want to go back to that freelance editorial assistant role that you came in for.” So I did. I moved over to Harper’s Bazaar and I started out as an editorial assistant there and then was the online editor there and I, you know, got to sort of help with research, I got to assist, I got to work on the website, which at that time involved a twice a month refresh that, you know, was me adapting some stories from the magazine, taking them down to the 14th floor in the Hearst Tower on like CD-ROM and having them like hard code the website twice a month. So it was a really [chuckles] different time [someone else chuckles] for internet publishing [yeah] but that was great. I learned, you know, everything I know about having proper work ethic and how magazines are run I learned at Bazaar. Well and from there our managing editor at Bazaar went over to Seventeen and he brought me over with him after a couple of months and I got to be the associate lifestyle editor there, and then I took over some of the entertainment pages, and then eventually took over the website, and I was at Seventeen probably for four years, and that was a lot of fun as well, and that was the first time I really had my own pages, and got to contribute in a very different and I got to conceive of ideas, and put them through the entire process, and write stories, and edit stories, and fact check, and all of that good stuff. Um it’s where I became a real editor. And then after that I moved to Refinery29 and I was there for about six years. And I, honestly, just loved the website. I was a big fan of the brand. God, I got to be the deputy editor there, the executive editor there, I got to grow that editorial team from probably eight people to over a hundred, and then I moved into a role as VP of editorial strategy, and got to sort of bridge the divide between editorial, and marketing, and content strategy, and product, and then eventually moved into a role as the SVP of content strategy and innovation, where I really got to dig into analytics and data and think about how do we use the signals—the many, many signals that we get from this audience—to make the best possible work that we can? Things that allow us to grow as a business and be as strategic as possible without ever … sacrificing the quality of the work, and of the brand. And that was really fun. And I probably could’ve stayed there forever because, you know, you stay somewhere for six years in publishing years that feels like three or four lifetimes. I ultimately ended up leaving to take the job that I’m in now at Girlboss because it felt like a big adventure. I met Sophia, the founder of Girlboss, she wrote the book Girlboss in 2014, probably last January, and she and I met over drinks at the hotel she was staying at, and she really talked to me about her vision for what we could build here. We wanted to make less content but really go deep with it and have a lot of purpose and just really add value to this woman’s life. And I got so excited about that. I sort of couldn’t stop thinking about it, which I think is always a good sign when you’re thinking about a new job or making a move.
[20:00]
NG [Continued] So we had that conversation for a few months and then I finally, officially, accepted in April and I started here in July and we’ve just been sort of … head down trying to get this thing off the ground, and really delivering the promise of what Girlboss can be.
SWB So one of the things that really came out as you were sort of going through that story and that trajectory was this sort of shift in thinking that happened along the way, at some point, which is like from this idea of online publishing being somehow like sort of the second-rate piece of it to being something that was really fascinating to you. And I’m curious, like, how did that shift happen for you or what made that shift happen for you, where you saw sort of a big potential for your career to be doing something interesting that was online focused and like online explicitly?
NG I think some of that started when I was at Seventeen, partially because the internet changed and because publishing changed, and editors-in-chief and publishers were much more willing to sort of, you know, start thinking about the internet not as a thing that’s going to cannibalize your newsstand sales but as a thing where you can talk to your audience, and you can tell meaningful stories, and you can potentially even make money. That sounds so ridiculous saying that out loud right now but that was really a concern. That was the concern for most magazine publishers in the early 2000s. You know, “That’s never going to be a place where we make money, the internet. So we want to protect all of our hard work from sort of just being given away for free over there.” But that thinking started to shift and at Seventeen I really saw the power of that and especially talking to a teenage audience, you want to be on the internet. You want to be there with them on their social platforms, you want to be tweeting at them, and that was where we got to do really fun programs like I would, you know, live tweet “Glee,” and “Pretty Little Liars,” and all the shows that teenagers were watching then, and then I would take the tweets that our audience was um sharing back, and I would create more storytelling out of it. And that was so much fun, and that felt like what storytelling on the internet could be, suddenly I saw the power of that in a whole new way. So I really credit Seventeen and the editor in chief at the time, Ann Shoket, as well as Julie Hochheiser, who was overseeing the website when I started there because these are people who really were able to understand what could the internet be for this audience, and how do we really maximize its potential? So that was really fun but there was also a part of it that was … it was easier to get a more senior job if you make a shift to the internet. And I don’t know that that’s true today because the business models have changed so much and I think, you know, publishing is a tough place to be these days. But in 2010 I knew like in a very sort of like cut and dry way that if I wanted that deputy editor title, I was going to get it much faster moving to a place that was a startup like Refinery that was internet only, rather than waiting to get there at a print magazine.
[23:09]
KL So there’s probably not a lot that’s like quote/unquote “typical” about, you know, your day to day but can you—can you just tell us a little bit about what, you know, what you might do in a typical day?
NG It’s so fun working at a startup at this stage because what that is changes everyday, and what I try to do for myself is um we have a weekly team stand up, 10am on Mondays, where everyone goes through and says their one priority for the week, and I think at a startup at this stage that’s really hard, and at first we got some pushback that was like, “I can’t pick just one thing. I have a hundred things on my list. Like I could [chuckles] no sooner, you know, choose a star in the heavens.” But that has shifted a little bit and having that meeting has really forced people to prioritize and say, “Ok, it’s Monday today, and what’s the one thing that I need to do in order to feel like I’ve really accomplished something meaningful by Friday?” So that’s how we really think about our time here. So every week is probably different but we set that priority on Monday for each of us and, you know, right now my priority is really thinking about the Girl Boss rally which is coming up on April 28th and we actually moments ago just sold out of our last ticket. So um I’m really excited. We’re going to have a full house and just amazing speakers but that’s really where I’m laser focused right now. So I have meetings with the team. I do a one-on-one for an hour every week with each of my direct reports, and I have an incredible art director, an incredible editorial director, an incredible head of audience, and then an editorial assistant who report to me, and I’ll have their own direct reports, as well as I always do a team meeting with all of those three team leads, and then make sure that I have time with my partner on the revenue side, Alison Wyatt, who’s our incredible CRO and president, to connect probably twice a week. So those are the standing things that happen every week and then I really try to think about how can I make sure that the rest of what I’m doing this week is less about checking things off my to-do list and like dealing with small stuff, obviously important stuff comes up all the time, but it’s less about sort of that like tactical like just check mark work and more about driving toward that priority that I set at the beginning of the week. And I think that that sets me up to be much more successful.
KL Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, we all occasionally have bad days. If you are ever having a bad day, is—what’s something that you do to kind of work like work through that and get back on track?
[25:39]
NG I have been forcing myself, and this is the advice I give to everyone on my team as well: if you’re having a bad day, if you’re feeling frustrated, and especially if that frustration is about to manifest itself as a snippy email, or as like some form of written communication that maybe you’re not going to feel great about later, take a step back. Like actually physically stand up, take three deep breaths, and if you still feel that way, like you’re just unsettled, or you don’t have an answer, get up, leave the office right now and we work here in Silver Lake at this beautiful space at Sunset Junction. We have like this like—I don’t know, I just moved to California six months ago so I’m still blown away by the natural beauty of everything here. But we have this beautiful space and a basketball court, and I’m like, take advantage of that, right? And I try to do this myself: stand up, go for a walk outside for at least five minutes, but that really does help me because I think that mental reset of like: stand up, go outside, see the sun shining, get some fresh air, and like just like clear your mind for a second. Like that really helps because I think a lot of those like mental tricks, like I need the like physical trick to trigger a reset for me.
SWB [Chuckles] I was just thinking about how, like, one of the ways that I know that I need to take a moment [KL laughs] is I can hear myself like kind of angry typing. So if I’m writing an email [laughter] and it’s like CLACK, CLACK, CLACK, CLACK, CLACK really aggressively, I’m like, “Hmm, I’m going to take a moment on that one.” But I was just, you know, I was just talking with a friend like in one of our many backchannel conversations where she was trying to like write back a reply to somebody. Some guy had like, you know, kind of sent her a really passive aggressive email and she’s like, “How do I respond to this and make him know blah blah blah?” I’m like, “What are you trying to get out of that interaction?” And just taking that moment and thinking like, “What am I trying to get out of sending this angry email? Am I just wanting to like tell this person that I think they’re an idiot? Is that actually going to be productive for anybody? Is anybody going to get anything out of that? Or, you know, am I trying to resolve a situation? Like could I just not reply to them ever? Like what are my options here?” And I think that like it kind of helps me at least get out of my feelings a little bit and um breathe and—and then think long and hard about whether I actually want to send that response or whatever it is that’s giving me a tough time.
NG That’s so right. I feel like so often in those moments where you’ve gotten some kind of communication over whatever medium that has like triggered that like rising heart rate reaction, it’s so often it’s about, like, I just need to write back or I need to say something in order to feel like I won this conversation. Like, “You have said something wrong, and you have to know it.” But it’s like, actually, you don’t. And we’re all adults and we’re, you know, senior in our careers at this point and like we should be setting different kinds of examples. But it’s so much easier said than done.
KL Yeah. It totally is. So we talk about ambition a lot on the show and sometimes we hear sentiments like, “Does this even apply to me?” Or “I don’t see myself as a quote/unquote “successful” person.” We read an interview where you mentioned something similar for Girlboss that defining a girlboss as someone who “gives herself permission to define success on her terms and change that definition whenever she damn well pleases.” We love that. What would you say to that listener who’s not really sure that they, you know, necessarily qualify as ambitious?
[29:08]
NG Well, first of all I would say: take a step back and, like, how are you defining ambitious? Because I don’t feel ambitious every day. But I do want to make sure that we’re having a conversation about ambition that doesn’t like set it aside as a taboo or demonize it in any way because I think it’s wonderful to be ambitious, and I think there are still sort of social stigmas that come alongside being an ambitious woman, alongside being seen as too aggressive or too difficult or too focused or selfish. And I think that like I do want to change those conversations and say, first of all, maybe it’s ok to be selfish and put yourself first, and put your career first at times. But also, ambition is not a dirty word. That said, none of us feel ambitious all the time, and none of us have exactly the same idea of what success looks like. So how do we have different conversations and get out of this space where we’re putting ourself in—ourselves in boxes. Where we’re saying, “This is an ambitious person and she looks like this. This is an unambitious person and she looks like this, and I have to be one of these people,” where we should be having much more nuanced conversations about, “This is what good looks like for me right now in my life where I am.” And maybe that is about relentlessly pursuing a career goal, maybe that’s about in my personal life, maybe that’s about caring for a parent, or caring for a partner, or for a child, maybe that is about thinking about my mental health in a different way, and really caring for my body. It’s probably some combination of all of those things but like where you’re pulling each of those levers in different ways like that’s your ultimate definition of success where you are right now. And like how do we create spaces for women to honor that, right? Because I don’t think it’s about giving them permission. You don’t need me to give you permission to do anything. You can do whatever the hell you want to but how do we create a space … and start conversations that remind you of that?
KL I love that. I wish you could see how furiously I’m nodding my head [chuckling] along.
NG [Laughs] Aw! Thank you.
KL I think, you know, one of the things that we’ve talked about on the show and, you know, I think is at the forefront of a lot of our minds is just talking about money because it’s so hard, and for women it’s made to feel shameful. And I think it’s really exciting and heartening to see more conversations happening around pay equity and, you know, salary negotiation, and just learning how to talk about it. What do you feel—like what are Girlboss readers looking for most when it comes to money talk? And like what have you found?
[31:58]
NG So we try to cover money from every angle, whether that is talking about the basics of how to save, whether that’s talking about how do you actually do the research you need to do to figure out what your quote/unquote “market value” is? How do we have more honest conversations about debt? About things that are really hard? And things that are holding us back? Those sort of deep seeded like dark things that like keep you up night when you think about money because I think money anxiety is very real for so many women and men in this generation and we want to address that. But we also want to talk about things, like, something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is just the relationship with money and self doubt, and thinking about … promotions. Like how do you negotiate for a raise? How do you negotiate for a raise when, say, you were offered a promotion but you weren’t offered more money to go with it? I’ve been on both sides of that table, and this is something I write about in my Girlboss email this week that goes out on Thursday, but I’ve been someone who’s had to manage a team and has had to cut budgets and say, “Ok. You can have—I fought for a promotion for you but I can’t get you more money now.” And that’s really tough and I’ve seen different reactions to it but I’ve also been on the other side. I think, you know, when I was younger and, you know, an associate editor, I was definitely at a place where the publishing industry was struggling. We had so many layoffs in 2008. I mean so many industries were struggling at that time. And there was this was sense of like, “You just need to be grateful that you have a job, and don’t ask for more, and maybe you can absorb the job of the person we laid off next to you but you should be appreciative of that.” And that idea of like, “You should be appreciative,” is really tough. I think that that’s something I really struggle with because so often my internal monologue is about gratitude. I don’t want to seem ungrateful for the thing I’ve already been given. So I couldn’t ask for more. I couldn’t counter your perfectly good offer with something that I actually really think I deserve because I don’t want to seem like I’m not already grateful for what I’m being offered. And I think that that’s really tough. There is a place for gratitude in all of our lives, and I think that it fuels us and it makes us better people, but I think when you think about negotiating this fear of seeming ungrateful I think it’s really … troubling. I think it’s something that on a personal level I know holds me back, and I think I see it for many women. How do you have like a really clear, unemotional conversation about what you need and deserve when you’re worried that the reaction you’re going to get is emotional?
JL I think it’s so interesting to think about this, you know, idea of grateful—like of being grateful and I can totally relate to a lot of what you were saying. And I think about when I was younger in my career having those same feelings and I think the way it’s leveled out for me is I’ve been more grateful to myself. So I’ve been really grateful about the experiences that I had and I felt more I think confident and grateful for what I can bring as well. So I think that’s helped me with that balance.
NG Oh I love that! That’s such a nice way to think of it.
JL I was thinking about it as you said it. I was like, “Oh yeah,” I was like, “That,” I—like—hearing you say that it just like resonated so much in me that I realized like I think that’s part of like how I’ve grown over the years and like realizing like a balance between that.
[35:33]
SWB You know this is something that I think is tough, though for—for a lot of people, particularly women, and particularly sort of earlier in their careers because there’s so much sort of like—there’s so much about our culture that will tell women that they—they kind of like should be grateful for the opportunity to finally get a chance to do something and it encourages them to sort of not necessarily see themselves as somebody who deserves to be there. And sort of like bringing value that is important for the organization. And I think it’s easier, you know, like looking back for me now, being in my thirties and kind of like having, you know, feeling like I’ve done a fair amount that, I can say like, “No, what I do matters. I’m very good at what I do. And I absolutely, you know, want to be paid fairly for it, and feel comfortable advocating for that because of that confidence.” I think it’s hard when you’re—when you’re getting started. And I’m curious, Neha, do you have any—any advice that you give people who are earlier in their careers about sort of like where to find some of that confidence without—without necessarily having as many years to back it up?
NG I make a point of, every time I hire someone, I like to put aside a little bit—and I’m giving away my tricks here—but [chuckles] to put aside a little bit of money inside of my budget to give someone room to negotiate because I think it’s really important, especially in entry-level roles, that if someone tries to negotiate they’re not immediately shot down. And even a little bit goes a really long way in that regard but the people who don’t end up negotiating are asking for anything and just end up accepting the offer. I usually go back to them and say, “Hey, let’s talk about this at your six month. But like I had a little bit of money that like I had put aside so that you could negotiate for like a little bit more and you didn’t ask for anything. Like I would encourage you to always ask.” Which maybe is, you know, unorthodox advice for a hiring manager, but I do think it’s important because talking and dealing in specifics in real scenarios is what really lets us think about how you would do something differently and how you can improve.
SWB I feel so conflicted about that because on the one hand I’m like, “Yeah! Learn to negotiate! Like it’s a really helpful skill. It is a skill that, you know, I think women, in particularly, aren’t—aren’t really taught as much about. And then on the other hand a part of me is also like … it’s—it’s true that women are not necessarily, at least in a lot of environments, they’re not taken the same way as men when they do try to negotiate or when they do, you know like, if women go into work environments and behave in the way that would be totally acceptable for a man to behave, they are not necessarily treated in the same way. And so I always worry about sort of like setting the expectation that we should be teaching women to do at work is the same thing that has worked for men. And so I always feel a little bit like, “Huh, what if work were just more transparent? Like what if we—we were coming to that conversation differently altogether?”
[38:40]
NG You should leverage the traits that are yours, but what I’m talking about here in terms of like negotiating, like, we’re not at a place yet where we have true transparency in terms of what we pay people. And we do know that there is a gap in terms of wages that is largely, not entirely, but like significantly contributed to by the fact that women are less likely to negotiate especially as they move further up the ranks. So what I’m trying to do is give advice based on what has worked for me in the industry that I’m in, and I think that there are other industries where it is much harder to ask for more, and where it’s, you know, even commonplace for there to be some level of retribution if you negotiate. And I think that that’s very different. But I think I can comfortably say if you work in media and you’re seeing retribution for negotiating, that’s a real red flag. Not—most organizations in this industry are not like that and so if you’re coming up against someone who is going to behave that way, that’s a red flag for other bad behaviors that are going to be coming down the pike.
SWB I love that because I think we talk about that a lot on the show that like how somebody treats you in an initial interaction should tell you a lot about what you can expect in the future and if what they’re doing is a red flag up front then, like, maybe you don’t want to be there at all.
NG Yeah.
KL I like—when I think about, you know, just the conversations around money and managing it, and—and just everything that you’ve been talking about, that—to me that is a—a very small part of what I consider my mental load, and sort of something that I carry around that I think is, you know, we talk about all these areas and it’s like I think as women we sort of, at a baseline, carry a much heavier load, and I—I would love for you to talk a little bit about that because I know that you touch on the idea of mental load and kind of just how we manage that. I mean, how do you manage it? And how do you feel like a good, productive conversation can happen around that?
NG I think I will preface this by saying I don’t have any of the answers but this is something that I think about so often, it’s something that me and my closest friends talk about all the time, and many of them have kids so I think that the conversation about emotional labor and about mental load becomes much more exacerbated when there is the care of another human being happening. But I—I think about it—I mean I actually think part of mental load is how much time I spend thinking about mental load so, I don’t know, say what you will about that but like [all laugh] … you know I am so I’m married, I’ve been married for a couple of years now to someone who I really see as a true partner. It’s someone who, you know, when I was offered this job in LA, said, “Yeah, let’s take the leap. I’m going to work remotely at my job and we’re going to make this move across the country to support your career,” and I think that that’s partnership, and I recognize that there are going to be moments where we make choices to prioritize in my career, as well as other moments where we make choices to prioritize his career and I think that that’s exactly right for me, and I hope for more women. But … I think I still worry about like what—like what’s really—what’s equal? When you think about like introducing like the care of a child into a marriage, into a home, when both parties are working? Because I think that some of this is personality based, some of this how we’re socially conditioned, and some of this is what society like expects from us, right? But I am the project manager of our lives and I think that’s not to say that my husband doesn’t contribute often but, you know, I am the one who loves making lists and loves, you know, if you’re going on vacation you book the hotels, you do the pieces that like allow you to feel like real structure around the experience and that’s, again, it’s not a ding, right? Because like we could have a great vacation that had probably a little bit less structure to it and still be really happy but if that’s my default state how are we ever going to live in a place where I’m not the one who’s always doing that? And taking up just a larger part of like what is required to keep a home and a family in order while also, you know, I had big ambitions about my career, and about sort of how I want to continue to grow from here, about the things I want to accomplish, and that … feels terrifying to me, truthfully. Like thinking about how to really balance what my ambitions are in a professional sense with what I think good could look like at home and this feels like such a … old conversation. Where like I feel like we haven’t made that much progress in a lot of ways. And, you know, in some ways we’ve made a lot of progress but in other ways I don’t—I don’t know what the solutions are here but it’s something I think about all the time and it’s something that my husband and I talk about a lot pretty openly and I think that that’s part of the solution, right? How do you have really honest conversations about the things that … scare you?
[43:58]
SWB Ugh! I love that!
KL I know [crosstalk and laughter] —
JL This is so real [laughs]. I like can’t—[laughing] I like can’t even. I’m just I am currently—and it’s funny—the reason I was able to make it today is because we have a snow day here and my husband is currently watching our one-year-old son downstairs so I could be on this podcast [chuckles]. So I’m just like, I’m like yessing everything that you said and just like wow! [NG chuckles] I’m like —yes! [Chuckles] One hundred percent! You are speaking exactly what I have thought so many times. So thank you for articulating that so well.
SWB I mean like literally the three of us on the podcast on our, like, sort of private backchannel Slack, right, we’re talking about podcast stuff. We just had a long conversation about this very topic, of sort of like being the project manager in our relationships. And we all have partners who are … partners. They’re real partners. And like I made a joke, they’re not like … guys who come home from work, sit on the couch, and like wait for you to have dinner on the table. Like they’re very much active participants in—in all of these different parts of life, but at the same time it is one of those things where you look at it and you go, like, “Oh yeah, who makes all of the hotel reservations?” Or who’s the one who figured out like, you know, what the dentist appointment schedule was or whatever those kinds of things are. And I think—I think you’re right. It’s like that—it’s like that figuring out, like, how do you balance those things? And how do you talk about about them? And how do, you know, hopefully over time shift them in ways that feel good for everybody involved? And not feel like, you know, it’s this constant source of tension.
[45:32]
JL Well I think it’s being honest too. So I think it’s really important, you know, as you were describing to know that that’s sort of how you manage your life, or those are the things that are in it, and I think if you know that then at least you can have an honest [KL yeah] conversation about it.
NG That’s so true and it’s so hard. It’s I mean even in like great relationships where there’s open communication and trust like it’s hard to say the things that really scare you.
KL It totally is. [chuckles] It really is. So [sighs] when we talk about this it—it really makes me think about, you know, learning to ask for help and we talk about asking for help and just kind of being ok with that. Who do you ask for help?
NG I ask so many people for help. I think first and foremost I ask Sophia, our CEO here, for help when I feel uncertain about how to solve for something, or how to like I think it’s such a fun thing to be at the startup scrappy stage of, you know, we started out with ten people when I got here, maybe even eight, and now we’re 17 people and we’ve, you know, we’ve more than doubled and that’s so exciting and then I have amazing friends, and I think there is something so special about having community that I’m really sort of acutely aware of right now because when you move across the country you really see—most of my community is in New York still. The women that I talk to all the time now it’s on a text thread rather than over a meal or over breakfast or coffee or a drink. Or at least not as often. But I think having just even like that text thread of—I have a circle of friends who we just sort of like free and direct discourse just like spill all of our updates and our questions and our rants. And that’s amazing. And that’s a place where I feel I can turn for help. And I have another circle of friends where it’s something similar, but we do like a Friday text thread of like a rosebud and thorn, you know? Something that like you—you’re really excited about as well as something that’s like blossoming and something that’s hard. And that structure is really nice and it feels a little silly to say it out loud that my friends and I communicate in this way but when, you know, life priorities and distance separate you, it’s so nice to know that you’re just sort of staying close to people, and able to find a framework in which you can talk about like the really real stuff.
KL Oh my god.
SWB The rosebud and the thorn is something that—
JL I love that!
SWB Like I’ll be thinking about that [NG laughs] for awhile—
KL That’s so great.
JL That’s so great!
[48:02]
SWB So, Neha, before we wrap up, is there anything happening at Girlboss that you really want our listeners to know about?
NG The most important, exciting thing that we have upcoming is the Girlboss Rally in LA on April 28th. We are—we unfortunately just sold out of tickets today but you can go to girlbossrally.com and you can get digital access, you can get all of the video, and see all of these amazing speakers from Bozoma St. John to Gwyneth Paltrow to Janet Mock to Paola Mendoza to Sarah Sophie Flicker to Jen Gotch, just like really incredible women that I’m so excited to gather together, to really pick their brains and get inspiration, but also follow that inspiration up with real, actionable advice so that we can all learn something from people who have done incredible things.
SWB Well, thank you so much for being on the show today.
NG Thank you for having me—
KL Yeah, thank you.
NG This was really fun [music fades in, fades out].
JL So for new listeners, joining us on Season 2, something that we love to do at the end of the show is end with our Fuck Yeah of the Week, which is where we look at something that makes us say, “Hey, fuck yeah!” Hey, Sara, what’s this week’s Fuck Yeah?
SWB This week we are saying, “Fuck yeah,” to building more inclusive language into our vocabularies. So, so often when we were recording the podcast during our first season, we would just be chatting along, and suddenly, you know, I might say something like, “Hey, guys!” And one of the things we talked about was how “guys” can feel alienating to people who, you know, aren’t guys. And it’s such a common thing that is said—I mean it’s said so often in all kinds of contexts, and some people don’t mind it, some women don’t mind it, some really do. And what we decided is like for our podcast because we want to make sure people feel welcome listening to it that we just cut that stuff out. And that’s a hard habit to break.
JL It’s so hard! We all say it quite often. I say, “Hey guys,” a bunch and it’s also hard to be like, “Hey, do you know you just said ‘hey guys’?” to your friend because you don’t want to constantly correct someone, either. But because we’re all working on this, it’s something that, you know, we—we’ve tried to get more comfortable being like, “Oh! You just said that.” And I think it’s really helpful to do that, especially in a place where, you know, I trust both of you and I know that you know when I say things I don’t—I’m never trying to be noninclusive. And so something one day we were recording and I was saying something, I think I was explaining a Fuck Yeah, and I said, “Yeah, I’m going to go tab-crazy about this.” And I kept talking and talking and then I hear Sara sort of breathe and she’s like, “Hey, Jenn?” And I was like, “Oh no!” And, you know, she had brought up that I had said crazy and—and crazy can also be one of those words that I’m trying to move away from. And I hadn’t really thought too much about that and I think, again, because it’s something that’s so in my vocabulary right now. I’m crazy about that! But, you know, there’s plenty of times where, you know, I’ve used “crazy” to describe things and I was like, “Oh, why would I not say that?” was my initial reaction. And I think I got a little bit defensive at first. I didn’t say that, but just inside I felt like, “Oh no, you know, like why wouldn’t I say this?” And then Sara suggested instead using “tab wild.” And the thing about it was “wild” is such a more exciting word than crazy that this vocab swap was like super awesome! I was like, “Oh yeah, wild! Let’s go wild!” Like you know, like I wouldn’t want to be like, [sings] “Let’s go wild! Let’s get nuts.” But [laughs] you know swapping wild for crazy just sounded so much better, so it’s where I began to be more open to the idea, if switching things in my vocabulary means that, you know, the world is my oyster.
[51:41]
KL Yeah. I think it’s like—it’s just that—it’s figuring out what—what do you actually mean and is there a really good word that you can use instead that’s not ableist or that is more inclusive? And I think just being able to pay attention to that and, like you said, Jenn, feeling like we’re in a group of people that we know we can practice this more is so important and there’s nothing quite like hearing yourself recorded over and over again [laughter] to realize that it’s something you need to be more aware of, and pay attention to, and I love that we’re doing this.
SWB I mean it becomes like a default filler word, sometimes, you know?
KL Absolutely.
SWB And I think like for me I remember a few years ago when I was editing a magazine I was really uncomfortable with like the singular “they.” Like saying, “they” as a singular person instead of “he” or “she,” and I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. And I can understand feeling that way about pretty much any kind of language change, because it feels uncomfortable at first like, nobody likes change, everybody likes things how they are, right? [Laughing] Honestly, that’s—that’s—people are creatures of habit. So if you have a habit to say things a certain way or see things a certain way, at first you can bristle. And it took me longer than I want to admit to get comfortable with the singular “they.” By the time we had Stevie on last season, who is non-binary and uses “they” as their pronoun, I was on board for sure [mm hmm] but just hearing them talk about it too reminded me like, “Oh yeah, like this really matters for people.” And if it matters for people, then it matters for me on the show. I want to model that behavior out to the world.
[53:19]
JL And as you mentioned, I mean we are lucky, we have editing, we can look through this. I would, you know, I would never step someone in a large group or crowd and be like, “Hey, actually! You just said this.” But I think it’s, you know, pulling someone maybe aside after. If I notice someone at work is saying something a lot then maybe I want to be like, “Oh, just so you know,” or you know I’m in a Slack group for design systems and they have one of the automatic things that if someone writes “Hey guys” it’ll have a Slack message popup that says, “We use inclusive language language here. How about something like ’Hey, folks?’” And I like something like that because the message is written really friendly and it’s not like pointing out anyone’s wrongdoings, it’s just, “Oh here’s something you probably didn’t consider. Let’s all start considering this more.”
SWB And I think it also it also all depends on context, situation, language, the severity of something, like I think there are definitely times where in a group setting if somebody says something egregious [KL yeah] it might be important to call them out publicly because it might be important to publicly state, “This is not acceptable here.” [Mm hmm] And other times it’s like there’s a slip and they just need a quiet nudge and—and I think it really depends. But I think when it comes to doing, you know, if you’re going to put a podcast out into the world, and if you’re going to say like, “Yeah, this is a feminist podcast,” then like fuckin’ live it. So we have to make sure that we’re really thinking about that carefully and—and, you know, continuing to get better, and I definitely think of this as something that like we have not fixed. It’s a thing that we are aware of, and working on, and like figuring out … what else is out there? Like what other stuff is out there that we haven’t realized yet, you know, could be alienating some people and what are we going to do about it?
KL Yeah, so that’s we’re really excited because we thought we would add a new segment to the show, and we’re calling it Vocab Swap. So we’re going to keep tabs on how we’re sort of doing with this over the season, and we’re going to look for new ways um to learn how we can just expand our inclusive, and just practice it a lot more, and find new ways to—to do that.
SWB Yeah! So I think for our very first Vocab Swaps we’re really talking about “guys” and “crazy” and taking note when those words are coming out of our mouths and thinking about why we’re using them, and whether they are appropriate, and who they might be hurting.
KL And that’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Neha Gandhi for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Your support helps us spread the word. And don’t miss our new biweekly newsletter, “I Love That”! Head to noyougoshow.com/ilovethat to sign up. See you all next week! [Music fades in, plays for 30 seconds, fades out to end.]
Welcome to Season 2 of No, You Go—a weekly podcast all about building satisfying careers and businesses, getting free of toxic bullshit, and figuring out how to live our best feminist lives at work. New episodes start April 17. Here’s a sneak peek of what’s in store.
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