Strong Feelings (Sara Wachter-Boettcher)
Explorez tous les épisodes de Strong Feelings
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| 16 Dec 2021 | Solidarity in Action with Nora Keller | 00:32:53 | |
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.
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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. Links: | |||
| 14 Feb 2019 | Emotions at Work with Liz Fosslien | 00:50:21 | |
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:
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> 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 | |||
| 16 May 2019 | Acts of Revolution with Nanci Luna Jiménez | 00:51:24 | |
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.
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| 19 Sep 2019 | Time for Business with Stephanie Hurlburt | 00:52:51 | |
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.
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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: | |||
| 23 May 2019 | You Don’t Have to be Nice with Caroline Criado Perez | 00:52:59 | |
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.
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| 02 May 2019 | Free Black Mamas with Veronica Rex | 00:42:53 | |
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.
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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: | |||
| 22 Aug 2019 | The Politics of Feeling Good with adrienne maree brown | 00:54:00 | |
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 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.
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More from adrienne: Website | Twitter | Insta Plus:
What are you doing for pleasure? Tell us! | |||
| 08 Apr 2021 | Being Vulnerable with Margot Bloomstein | 00:46:27 | |
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.
We talk about:
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: | |||
| 12 Mar 2020 | Introducing: Thread the Needle with Donna Cleveland | 00:30:43 | |
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. | |||
| 06 Jun 2019 | Know Your Worth with Becca Gurney | 00:53:21 | |
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.
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| 15 Aug 2019 | All Pleasure, No Guilt with Jasmine Guillory | 00:37:41 | |
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.
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| 01 Aug 2019 | Faith, Loss, and Fiction with R.O. Kwon | 00:47:03 | |
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.”
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| 01 Jul 2021 | Tuning Inward with Rachael Dietkus | 00:49:28 | |
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?
We talk about:
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. Links: | |||
| 24 Oct 2019 | Women in Beer with Melissa Walter | 00:46:21 | |
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.
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| 20 Feb 2020 | Time to Do Nothing | 00:28:45 | |
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:
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| 18 Apr 2019 | Decolonize Everything with Christine Nobiss | 00:37:58 | |
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.
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| 17 Jan 2019 | Body Politics with Cora Harrington | 00:51:10 | |
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:
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. | |||
| 25 Apr 2019 | Friendshipping Is a Verb with Mary Pipher | 00:49:46 | |
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.
Whatever life stage you’re in, this interview will speak to you—promise. We talk about:
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:
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| 09 Sep 2021 | Design for Safety with Eva PenzeyMoog | 00:48:27 | |
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.
We talk about:
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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| 21 Oct 2021 | Nice White Ladies with Jessie Daniels | 00:52:18 | |
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.
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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:
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| 26 Sep 2019 | The Reckoning with Gloria Allred | 00:47:20 | |
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.
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| 12 Sep 2019 | Sexy Sex Ed with Tanya Turner | 00:43:52 | |
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.
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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: | |||
| 12 May 2022 | The Four-Day Workweek | 00:36:40 | |
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.
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| 05 Dec 2019 | The Fifth Trimester with Lauren Smith Brody | 00:56:04 | |
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.
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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 | |||
| 20 Jun 2019 | Talk Money, Get Paid | 00:42:03 | |
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.
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:
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: | |||
| 29 Aug 2019 | Funding Abortion with Seneca Joyner | 00:49:49 | |
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.
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| 25 Mar 2021 | Going Rogue with Nandini Jammi | 00:41:21 | |
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.
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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: | |||
| 12 Dec 2019 | We Are Indivisible with Leah Greenberg | 00:37:52 | |
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.
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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: | |||
| 26 Aug 2021 | Become a More Courageous Leader | 00:04:13 | |
Strong Feelings returns September 9th, but in the meantime, we wanted to share something with you: the Courageous Leadership Program, Sara's six-week group coaching program. It's all about stepping out of self-doubt and into your power as a leader, and it's designed specifically for people in design and tech who want to be bold, inclusive, confident leaders—but maybe need a little bit of help shaking off some of the societal messages they've absorbed that keep them playing small. If this sounds like you, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/group-coaching. Groups run Tuesdays starting September 21, or Wednesdays starting September 22, and enrollment is open now. | |||
| 18 Nov 2021 | Remaking the World with Samira Rajabi | 00:41:07 | |
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.
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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. Links: | |||
| 30 May 2019 | Friendship First with Miranda Kent & Danielle Weeks | 00:40:50 | |
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.
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| 18 Jul 2019 | Reviving Girlhood with Mary Pipher & Sara Pipher Gilliam | 00:54:36 | |
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.”
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| 24 Jan 2019 | Holding Space with Kate Warren | 00:49:29 | |
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:
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. | |||
| 22 Apr 2021 | Courage over Comfort with Vivianne Castillo | 00:46:24 | |
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.
We talk about:
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: | |||
| 07 Oct 2021 | Life-Affirming Productivity with Paloma Medina | 00:39:03 | |
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.
We talk about:
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. Links: | |||
| 03 Jun 2021 | Platonic Longing with Kat Vellos | 00:41:11 | |
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.
We talk about:
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: | |||
| 23 Oct 2018 | On a Journey to Happiness with Keah Brown | 00:45:38 | |
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 tells us all about:
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| 18 Mar 2021 | Strong Feelings is Back | 00:01:42 | |
Welcome back to Strong Feelings—a feminist look at the messy world of being human at work. Grab your coffee and join host Sara Wachter-Boettcher this spring as she goes deep on what real leadership in tech and design looks like. You'll hear from 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. | |||
| 03 Apr 2023 | Introducing: Per My Last Email | 00:02:38 | |
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, Amazon, or Stitcher—or visit PMLEshow.com to get the details. Here’s what it’s all about! Enjoy! —Sara – 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. -- Theme music: “(I’m A) Modern Woman” by Maria T Producer: Emily Duncan Created by: Active Voice | |||
| 02 Dec 2021 | A Soft Place to Practice with Danielle Barnes | 00:50:53 | |
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.
We talk about:
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:
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| 13 Jun 2019 | Management Muscles with Lara Hogan | 00:55:38 | |
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.
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| 17 Jun 2021 | Practically Radical with Rachel and Travis Gertz | 00:49:02 | |
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.
We talk about:
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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| 17 Oct 2019 | Miraculous Bodies with Kimberly Dark | 00:52:03 | |
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.
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| 04 Nov 2021 | Feeling Ourselves with Alla Weinberg | 00:48:09 | |
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.
We talk about:
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. Links: | |||
| 14 Mar 2019 | Working the Double Shift with Katherine Goldstein | 00:51:09 | |
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.
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| 21 Feb 2019 | Therapeutic Tarot with Jessica Dore | 00:48:42 | |
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:
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| 10 Oct 2019 | Women and War Zones with Zahra Hankir | 00:45:59 | |
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.
We talk about:
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:
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| 14 Apr 2022 | Introducing: Pandemic Clarity | 00:47:22 | |
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.
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. Links: This episode features clips from | |||
| 10 Jan 2019 | That's Enough with Heather Havrilesky | 00:55:36 | |
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. | |||
| 09 May 2019 | Empower Work with Jaime-Alexis Fowler | 00:55:52 | |
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.
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:
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| 21 Nov 2019 | Fair Play with Eve Rodsky | 00:48:55 | |
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 talk about:
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 | |||
| 05 Sep 2019 | Feminist Business School with Jennifer Armbrust | 00:49:16 | |
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.
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| 28 Apr 2022 | Future Julie | 00:32:27 | |
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.
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| 20 May 2021 | Linguistic Distortion with Suzanne Wertheim | 00:50:37 | |
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.
We talk about:
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. Links: | |||
| 11 Apr 2019 | Are High Heels Feminist? with Summer Brennan | 00:40:55 | |
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.”
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| 13 Apr 2023 | Per My Last Email: My review sucked—now what? | 00:56:13 | |
Strong 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. — 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:
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| 07 Nov 2019 | Walking the Tightrope with Sarah Deer | 00:55:41 | |
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.
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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. | |||
| 23 Sep 2021 | Himpathy with Kate Manne | 00:49:05 | |
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.
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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. Links: | |||
| 06 May 2021 | Studying Harm with McKensie Mack, Caroline Sinders, and Yang Hong | 00:50:13 | |
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.
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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. Links: | |||
| 28 Feb 2019 | Black Women Told You with Feminista Jones | 00:54:26 | |
“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.
Y’all definitely need to listen up, because she’s full of wisdom. We talk about: We talk about:
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| 07 Feb 2019 | Transformative Meetings (No, Really!) with Priya Parker | 00:47:01 | |
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 tells us all about:
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. | |||
| 07 Mar 2019 | Sex Work is Work with Jessica Raven | 00:45:22 | |
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.
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PlusSara 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. | |||
| 31 Jan 2019 | Forget "Having it All" with Amy Westervelt | 00:59:51 | |
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:
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| 25 Jul 2019 | Feeling Seen with Naj Austin | 00:45:20 | |
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.
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| 31 Oct 2019 | Excuse Me with Liana Finck | 00:50:59 | |
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.
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Plus: Handling professional rejection, rejecting others, and what to do when you wake up and realize…you’re a gatekeeper in your field. | |||
| 19 May 2022 | Fix Systems, Not Women | 00:40:14 | |
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.
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| 02 Jun 2022 | Toxic Gratitude | 00:43:29 | |
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.
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| 14 Nov 2019 | Radical Daily Action with GirlTrek | 00:42:18 | |
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.
On the agenda:
Plus: We’re in love with the idea of a company offseason. Fellesferie, 2020 y’all. Links | |||
| 21 Apr 2022 | The Thunderdome of American Capitalism | 00:36:01 | |
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.
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| 13 Dec 2018 | Welcome to Strong Feelings | 00:02:14 | |
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! | |||
| 17 Jan 2018 | Unapologetic Women | 00:56:02 | |
It’s the very first episode of No, You Go! Jenn, Katel, and Sara get together to talk about the itch to get out of a professional rut and start something new—whether that’s changing jobs, launching a company, building a side gig, or maybe even…idk….starting a podcast? > Fuck it, let’s just do it. Let’s be unapologetic women asking to do work, and to be paid fairly for it. Read on for more of what we covered, and read the full transcript for all the, like, verbatim quotes, you know? Show notesFirst, we tell the story of how No, You Go got started:
Next, we kick off the show—and 2018—by hearing how four women who made big changes last year knew it was time for something new:
Also in this episode
Many thanks to The Diaphone for the use of their song, Maths, in our theme music! _ TranscriptJENN LUKAS: This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by CodePen: a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. It’s like a big virtual sandbox where you can build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. Your profile on CodePen is like your front-end development portfolio. Learn more and create your first Pen at codepen.io. That’s c-o-d-e-p-e-n dot i-o. JL: 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. KL: In today’s inaugural episode of No, You Go, we’re talking about the itch to get out of a rut and start something new. First up, we’ll talk about how No, You Go came to be. Then we’ll listen in as a bunch of badass women tell us how they knew it was time for a change in 2017—and how they made it happen. Also on the agenda: our favorite CW teen drama, the politics of donuts, and breaking out the Olivia Pope wine glasses. [Clink] [Musical intro] How it all began[1:10] SWB: One day, I was actually out for a run with Katel. We were up in this really pretty park and it was the middle of all and we were crunching through the leaves, kind of miserably running some—some 10K distance so that we could justify donuts. And I started telling Katel that I had this podcast idea that was all about: how do you go from kind of doing the work, whatever your job is, to being able to kind of like show your work. Like, speak about it or write about it, or something. Like, how do you go from being somebody who’s kind of more heads-down to being more of that like active or visible member of your professional community? JL: Yeah! KL: Yeah! SWB: And I was like, I had this working title, like “Show Your Work” or something like that. And we were like, that sounds like a fun idea. You know, I just had a book come out in the fall and I was really interested in kind of helping other people understand what that process looks like. A lot of people ask me questions because they don’t necessarily know. JL: Me included. KL: And me! SWB: Yeah! Well, and that’s one of the things that we started to want to talk about, is like: how does that whole thing work? And that’s, you know, just one example, right? I mean, it’s not just writing a book, it’s also like, how do you go from working in a field to like, teaching other people how to do it and leading classes. Those kinds of questions. So, I really wanted to start talking about that more, and Katel was the publisher of one of my books, and so I thought she would be like an ideal person to talk about that with. KL: And I thought that was a great idea. I think “Show Your Work” was actually an awesome name for a show—we should do that also. JL: Let’s get this one off the ground first! KL: All right, okay. So, yeah, I am the CEO of A Book Apart and published one of Sara’s books—it’s amazing. And I moved to Philly about two years ago after living in DC for most of my life, and Sara and I became besties really quickly because we had a lot in common. Namely, loving slash hating running and hating running to love donuts, even more. So, one night we were all sitting actually at Jenn’s house, and we were drinking wine and watching Riverdale as we do—we’d all gotten together and [that’s] another thing that we loved and had in common. And we brought it up to Jenn and she got really excited. JL: To be fair, Sara’s giving me that look like, “I’m not quite sure I’m sold on the Riverdale.” SWB: No! I was just thinking, can we have a sidebar about Archie’s hair for a second? JL: Mhmm, Archie’s hair. KL: And now, did you know Sara’s really into Riverdale? JL: Ooh! Did you catch up? SWB: I am super caught up. And Archie’s hair is still ridiculous. And I’m pretty sure that Cheryl Blossom’s lip liner gets bigger and bigger every single episode. JL: It’s awesome. SWB: It’s gonna be her entire face soon. KL: It’s so good. Maybe that’s what I need to do, is just go big with the liner. JL: I love it. You know, I forget, Katel, if you told me this—I always had a problem with Archie’s hair but then, you brought up that like, it helps if you remember that it’s a comic book and then it makes the extreme-ness of his hair a little bit more acceptable. KL: Right, it’s like, it makes the TV show juicy, or like, pulpy? I mean… “juicy” is maybe not the right word, but you know what I mean! SWB: No, no, no, let’s stick with juicy. JL: No, I do know what you mean! And you know, sometimes we just have to watch an episode of Riverdale after a long day. SWB: For professional reasons. JL: But for me, it was super awesome because I just had a child ten months ago, yes indeed. And so, with a child and I’m back working full time—I work as an engineering manager and UI architect down at Urban Outfitters. And sometimes, my lovely friends will come over after my child goes to sleep and we’ll watch Riverdale and talk shop. Which is awesome, ’cause you start to feel a little bit alienated to some extent, from your previous life and you have this awesome new life going one. But then you like, miss parts of your old, so it was really nice to have my friends come to me so that I could keep trying to figure out how to make this balance work. And maybe balance isn’t even the right word, but to like figure out how I can keep doing things that I love along with the new things I love. So, it was super awesome. [5:00] SWB: Yeah, something Jenn has not quite mentioned, is just how much stuff she used to do in terms of like, speaking and side projects, constantly. Like, when I first met Jenn, every other week, I swear it was like, “Oh, I just started this podcast called Ladies In Tech,” or “Oh, I’m working on this web series called Cook Inside the Box, where we make recipes off the back of boxes.” And it was so cool to see her doing all this stuff, and like a lot of people, it’s really hard to do all of that stuff when you have really little kids and a lot of kind of, responsibilities at work. But what we want to talk about, is, how do we make space for some of that and kind of integrate it into our lives no matter what other stuff is going on. JL: That’s what was so nice about talking with you two, is figuring out how that can work. And I know you’ve both been amazing soundbars for me. And I feel very lucky to have both of you in my life and I think that is a lot about what we’re basing this podcast on. It’s like, how we can be stronger together with people who support us and figuring out how to do these things. Even if you’re working with new—and I mean, using a stretch here of calling it a constraint—but, we’re used to like, how we work with constraints. And this is just a new, different part of my life, and it’s really nice to be able to talk to y’all about how that works. KL: This also feels like just a really awesome after school kick-ass club that I’m super excited about. And I feel like, sometimes, you know I don’t have kids and you know that’s a really tough thing to figure into your life when you’re going from, you know, not having them to having them and a career and everything. And I think even for someone who doesn’t have them, it’s like, you’re still trying to manage a bunch of different things and figure out how to like, stay excited, and go outside and like, meet with people and hang out not you know, become a total hermit like I like to do. JL: Oh my god, going outside is so hard sometimes. KL: Exactly! SWB: But I think, this really speaks to the way that I think the idea for the podcast evolved. When we started talking about it with Jenn, what we realized is that, for a lot of us who, you know, consider ourselves ambitious and sort of really interested in our careers but also kind of non-traditional about it. Like not necessarily interested in only ever working at one single company and a lot of us, you know, work in consulting or small companies or we take on side gigs. You can sometimes end up feeling like you don’t have colleagues. And I think that that’s something I’ve heard a lot from—particularly from women the past couple of years. That they were looking for places where they could connect with other people who got their work, even if they weren’t traditional colleagues. And I really look at that as a big piece of what we’re doing here, is kind of taking the place of having that sort of peer group that you maybe used to have at an office. But if you work in lots of non-traditional settings, you don’t have that anymore. JL: And even when you do work in that, sometimes its you know, you still have a variety of interests. So as you said, I used to do a lot of side projects and that’s totally different than my full time job. So, I think, as we were all sitting on the couch and we were getting more and more excited, that’s sort of where the name of this show came to be. Right? SWB: Yeah, I think one of the things that was really funny about that, was that—so, I was sitting there as Jenn and Katel were kind of going back and forth, like, getting more and more excited and hyped about the show. And all of a sudden, they’re talking over each other and Katel—always the gracious one—is like, “no, you go,” and waits for Jenn. And Jenn goes, “that should be the name of the podcast.” And she kind of laughs and I’m like, wait, stop, no that is the name of the podcast now. So, that’s how we named the podcast and started thinking a lot more about you know, what kind of things we’d cover and where we’d go with it. So, kind of getting outside of that, just the idea of showing your work—although that’s part of it—but more thinking about, what are all the different ways or paths that people take to satisfy their ambition or satisfy their need to, you know, create stuff in the world. And how could we go about highlighting those and helping other people see the different kinds of ways their lives might look. And giving people a little more support along the way as they figure out what that looks like for them. JL: I think also, you know, we’ll talk about challenges of being ambitious. I think there’s a lot of things that all people, but especially for us as women, that we always have to balance, right? Being too abrasive versus being too nice and how we manage that in this world—to achieve some of the things that we’re trying to set out to do. SWB: I was thinking about, one of the other podcasts I really like, Call Your Girlfriend—the hosts on that show talk about shine theory. And for them, shine theory is this idea, like, I don’t shine if you don’t. So, the idea is you’re going to have you know, like, you want the smartest and most accomplished women by your side because actually everybody’s better when your friends are successful, too. And I think about that a lot when I think about this show because I’ve got some like, pretty accomplished women by my side working on it. And I think that that is an incredible way to look at how do we, you know, how do we navigate our lives, and how do we think about ambition. [10:00] Because we’re always looking toward these other people that we totally respect and that we can learn so much from, and they’re looking right back at us. And I think it creates this environment where we can be really supportive of each other and also get a little bit more comfortable kind of like, celebrating that ambitious side of ourselves and not pretending it’s not there. Which I think is often what women are expected to do. KL: Yeah, this actually tied back to, Sara, what you were saying a little bit earlier, about you know, having colleagues and we all work in kind of, I think, different setups these days. It’s not necessarily like, Sara and I don’t even go into an office most days, and we have meetings sort of from wherever. And even though you know, we’re all friends and we have—our professions and our careers are kind of intertwined because we work in the same field or area— we don’t work together physically. But we talk and speak and write about similar things and I think we have passions about the same things. And especially in terms of trying to lift other folks up and finding ways to actually do that. We all work in different setups these days and you know, a lot of us—Sara and I included don’t even necessarily go into offices everyday, but I think it’s really important to feel like you have some kind of camaraderie. Some kind of network that you’re able to rely on in your work and obviously outside of that work. For me, it’s been so critical because I literally work by myself in my home and I have—I work with a lot of team members that are just distributed. So for me to have folks that I can see regularly and talk about things that are related to the work I do is so important. I think I was really missing that from going from a big company like National Geographic to a company that was a small startup. That was a huge shock, that was a big change. You know, working with fifty people a day and then all of a sudden being by myself. So this has been incredibly important. I think being able to extend that and hopefully share that and build a community around that is super exciting. JL: Totally. SWB: Yeah, like I remember when I quit my last real job, which was in 2011, I was working at an agency. And I went from an agency to freelancing and consulting in doing content strategy and UX work. And at first, I will tell you I did not have this kind of network. I was mostly feeling really kind of alone in my work. And I would work on a project and get in with the team on that project but they weren’t really ever my team. And so over the years I’ve certainly like built up this collection of you know, like, really cool people who get what I do and who are just there for me. And that network has made all the difference. I don’t think that I would still be consulting, much less speaking and writing books and stuff like that, if I had not built that kind of community. And that’s something I want more people to experience because I think that it’s one of the only things that can kind of help keep you sane and happy. KL: I feel like the dream used to be work from home, and like work for yourself and you know, be your own bossa and sort of be the master of your own time. And it’s great, it has so much—it gives you a lot of freedom and there’s a lot of flexibility but it’s also very lonely a lot of the time and you know, I think you need to find something that actually helps you get through those lonely times. JL: Yeah. SWB: Yeah, like I want the yoga pants, but I also want the like, deep personal friendships. KL: Right! SWB: That come with seeing people really regularly. And so, you know, it’s how do we make a life for ourselves that kind of can bring us both. JL: I got news for you: athleisure. Is my office wear. SWB: Trust me, I have gone full force into the athleisure lifestyle and I am not looking back. So one thing that I do think about, though, in this whole conversation about kind of finding that community and helping to help others, you know, figure out what their path is, is that Jenn, Katel, and I—we really come from relatively similar backgrounds. You know, like we’re similar age and we’re all based in Philly, and we’re all white ladies with professional jobs. Having a lot in common is really good, but we do know that that could be a pretty limited view of what it’s like to work as a woman. In fact, it would be incredibly limited. So one thing that’s really important to us and that we want to do on this show is make sure that we’re bringing in people with a lot of different experiences and different backgrounds. And make sure that we are getting things from perspectives that the three of us would never have. [Musical interlude] JL: You know, speaking of hearing from other voices, I think it’s time we get into our main segment. But before we do, we are so excited to tell you about the sponsor who’s making this very first episode of No, You Go possible: Codepen. CodePen is a powerful tool that allows designers and developers to write code—like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—directly in a browser and see the results as you build. Whether you’re new to front-end code or been writing it for years, it’s the perfect place to learn front-end programming languages, show off what you create, build test cases, get help on tricky problems—and find inspiration. Whenever I have a new idea and I want to get right to making it happen, you know, I don’t want to have to deal with setting up the environment or setting up hosting or build tools, I just go right to CodePen and start building. I can share that code with others on my team and see what they think about it, and then we can go from there. CodePen has so many cool things to explore—like CodePen PRO and Projects, where you can explore tons of awesome Pens. Get inspired and learn from others, and share with them at the same time. Sign up and get started by visiting codepen.io/hello. [Musical interlude] We introduce the badass lady brigade[15:30] JL: So how do we know when it’s time for something new? SWB: That’s a question we asked a bunch of women who had made big changes in 2017—job changes, life changes, that kind of thing. To get us started, let’s hear from one of our favorites. BECCA GURNEY: This is Becca Gurney, half of Design Choice, a graphic design studio in Washington, DC, where we have the aim of empowering women to lead, to get paid, and to be awesome. Our central mission and idea is that we almost make the conscious choice to pay women fairly for the work that they do, and before you can pay them you have to choose them to do the work. So for the four years leading up to this one, I had been freelancing, and I had just fallen into freelancing. I didn’t choose it, I didn’t really go out and take a risk and say hey, this is what I want to do. It was there and I did it, and I just kept doing it. But I had been feeling really unfulfilled and pretty aimless in it. I wasn’t doing great work. I was just doing work, and there was no real point to it. It was awesome that I could make my own schedule and I could go home to make jam whenever I wanted, because I was feeling jammy. But I didn’t think of myself as successful or empowered. And then the election happened, and I didn’t feel successful or empowered. And I was looking around at the leaders in our industry, which is mostly dudes, and I didn’t feel successful or empowered. The AIGA Census data came out and women in my area at my level are being paid $20,000 less a year than men. And so hey, I don’t feel successful or empowered. And the moments that sparked any sort of a feeling that felt good were the moments that I was with women, talking about being fucking unapologetic women. And how could I do that through design and Stacey Maloney was in a bunch of those conversations, and we said, “Fuck it, let’s just do it; let’s be unapologetic women asking to do work and to be paid fairly for it.” And we started Design Choice. JL: How awesome. SWB: I love so much about this. Fucking unapologetic women. I think we qualify, right? JL: I hope so. KL: I think so. Let’s get there if not [laughs]. SWB: Katel, how do you know Becca? KL: We got to be friends when I was in DC. I started working at a coworking space to try to get a little more face time with other human beings when I started this solo thing. And she was just awesome. We became friends really quickly, and we sort of went through some growing pains at this particular coworking space because of management that was not empowering and didn’t make us feel confident about working there, and we moved to a different one. We shared an office. We just really became good friends and got to know each other. Becca is one of those people who, you know that if she says something, that she’s going to do something, she’s gonna do it. She just shows up and she’s such a rock star. I hate using that word, but she is, she absolutely is. She’s creative and amazing and when I listened to this recording that she sent, I almost teared up because I was thinking, oh my gosh, I have felt so similarly—that feeling of like, you’re doing all these things that you’re supposed to be doing, you’re making the money, you’re going to the meetups, you’re doing all the things, but you don’t feel empowered and you don’t feel successful. And like, what is that? And trying to pull all of that apart and get at the root of why, and figure out what you’re going to do to change that, is huge. It’s so huge. And the fact that she came out of that and created this agency, and it isn’t just helping her feel successful and empowered, but also doing really fucking amazing work for companies that should be employing women, is just so rad. SWB: Yeah, I love this idea of her saying that this company is explicitly about hiring women and paying women fairly. And that’s really built into the fabric of it, and she’s not afraid to talk about it that way. Because I think about it in terms of how I spent my own year. [20:00] I think something that I did in 2017 is get comfortable with the idea that my work simply was political—that I couldn’t really create an artificial boundary between the things that I care about professionally, talking about a user’s experience of a piece of software or a website, and the things that I care about personally, which is basically all social justice issues. And so that really came out when I wrote my most recent book. It’s called Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, and essentially I am really taking a direct look at this tech industry that I have been part of for a long time, and highlighting some of the ways it’s gone really wrong for people who are often the most vulnerable or the most marginalized. You know, it was hard but I think I got to a place where I was no longer afraid of saying that out loud, and saying that in front of important people who, in the past, I would have been worried wouldn’t have wanted to hire me for consulting. And now, I’m thinking, okay, I need to find a way to make this an organic and natural part of what I do, because I can’t really live with myself otherwise. KL: Yeah, I think you’re totally right, and that whole unapologetic thing—I feel like there’s so much to unpack there, and something we’re grappling with it every day in everything we do. And I know for me it’s kind of like, you tear a little bit away and you’re like, okay, I made some progress. And then you’re like, but wait, is this fitting in in the right space? So I feel like hopefully, if we do enough of these, we’re really going to get in deep in terms of how people are doing that. JL: Becca wasn’t the only one feeling frustration. Let’s hear another story from Jenn Schiffer. JENN SCHIFFER: At the end of 2016, I was feeling really stuck in a rut. I wanted to do good work, but I didn’t feel like I was in a position to do that. I knew I was going to leave, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and I was afraid to make any changes. But then I was very lucky and very fortunate because Fog Creek approached me about doing community engineering for their new product, Glitch.com. And so I’ve been there ever since, and it’s been great, and I feel like I’m doing my best work, and I’m making an impact. And so I’m hoping in 2018 to keep that momentum going. JL: Oh, Jenn Schiffer. She’s is constantly always saying such smart things, and I think that’s one of the reasons that I really just enjoy everything she does. I didn’t meet Jenn in person until a couple of years ago, but I started following Jenn a while ago because she was posting a lot of awesome humor-filled development posts, which was something quite unique, and she had a really great voice. SWB: You mean she trolled dev bros on Twitter? [Laughter] JL: It was the California Style Sheets post a couple of years ago, which is one of my favorites still, and I think it was awesome and it showed a lot of things, because, yes, being written by a woman, I think a lot of people thought, it must not be humor, it must be serious. And that was—ugh—sigh-worthy. But Jenn was awesome, and I followed that, and was lucky enough to have her on the podcast I used to run, with Val Head, Ladies In Tech, where we’d talk about public speaking and Jenn was a guest on our show. We were lucky to have her. She’s done a lot of awesome things. One of the things I love about Jenn is if there’s a gap or something that she wants, she makes it happen. She was living in North Jersey I believe, and working for the NBA at the time, and there was not a meetup and I think she went into the city for them. And so she decided to start her own North Jersey meetup. And so instead of saying, there’s nothing here around me, she started her own. And I think that’s such an important thing that we can do in this industry. And you can see it now, that she is starting something new again. And I think one of the things that she’s always done is helping people learn. A talk she gave recently she had this great quote: “We don’t learn alone.” And I think that’s true in this industry, but also in many industries where we are just better together and we learn more when we’re around each other. KL: You really feel like she’s bringing you along in the learning, when she’s speaking about—when she’s giving a talk or doing a demo or whatever. SWB: I think that’s one of the cool things about this new role that she has. She went from a role where she was doing a lot of programming to a role where she’s the community engineer. That means that she’s doing a lot more of that educational piece, and helping people make use of this tool Glitch, which is from Fog Creek. And what’s really great about it is that it’s a way to not just do the heads down work, but to be doing the showing your work and sharing of things, and making these things more accessible for people. And particularly making these kinds of tools in tech feel accessible to all kinds of folks, right? I think that’s a big piece of how Glitch has positioned itself on purpose, and that’s in no small part to people like Jenn, who are making it feel like a tool that anyone can pick up and use—and not a tool that only super elite programmers from one very particular background can pick up and use. [25:00] And so I love that about her, and I hope that continues to be a really good move for her, because that was an exciting “something new” that happened last year. Something Jenn talked about though, which I think is something that all of us can relate to, is that feeling of frustration, burnout, being bored, or just not feeling like you have space to do your best work. That’s something I’ve certainly felt. I’ve felt it at different points over my career, but certainly when I last quit my job, one of the big reasons is that I was working an ungodly number of hours. I was the last one in the office every night. I literally set the alarm leaving the office every day for like a year straight. And I simultaneously felt like I couldn’t get my head above water. I was trying to do so much, and it didn’t feel like I could go anywhere. One of the ways that I got out of that was quitting my job, but it wasn’t just quitting the job. It was also getting a new outlook to my work. One of the reasons that I quit my job was so that I could write my first book, which was like my first real effort to give my community some of my expertise and knowledge. And that was a really helpful reframe for me to get me out of that rut. And so I’m curious, have you guys had experiences where you feel like you’ve gotten burnt out or frustrated, and how did you move past them? JL: When I left my last full-time job to start consulting, I at the time was doing a lot of public speaking. I was away more than I was home, and I really loved it. That’s really what gave me the courage to quit my full-time job and start something new. There was something I really loved, I knew what I loved, and it was less being frustrated with anything I was currently doing, and more me seeing something that I really loved doing, and figuring out how I could make that happen. I really loved my job at the time, I was a development director at Happy Cog. But I had been doing it for six years. And it was definitely something I loved, but again, six years is a long time, especially in the tech field. And there was this new thing that I loved a lot. Being able to travel and meet people and teach was something that was super important to me, and for me to be able to full commit to that, it almost forced me—or gave me that boost that I needed—to quit my job at the time and go out consulting and have this freedom to do this thing. So, for me the driver was something I really loved and wanting to do, versus being burnt out or frustrated at a current job. SWB: Totally. I loved what you said about, it wasn’t that there was something wrong with what you were doing. Sometimes I think we get stuck in a rut because we’re like, well, I like the stuff that I’m currently doing. But for me at least, part of being happy does really come down to growth or evolution in what I’m doing. So it’s not a matter of me hating anything that came before necessarily, but I want to bring something new into the fold. New people and new experiences. I want something else to kind of keep it interesting. I want to keep it interesting, and if I’m feeling too steady all the time, then I think I’m bored. So I love this idea that it’s like, okay, is there something out there that you’re really excited about, or that you want to be good at that you’re not yet good at that can really drive us to change things up. KL: I’m gonna be real honest here and say that I’m currently burnt out, and I’ve been struggling with that I think for like the last year. SWB: Weird, how could 2017 burn someone out. How is that possible? [Laughter] KL: Yeah, exactly, It’s like, can you just be burnt out just from being burnt out? And I think I’ve worked through a lot of it, not that it’s something—I think at one point I thought, okay, like, this is something else I need to check off my list, getting through burnout. Which is not how it happens and not how you heal from it. It shocked me into realizing that I needed to make some changes in how I approached my scheduling and, you know, my work. But I think sort of related to what you’re talking about, not necessarily saying I need a different job or I need to change career paths. It’s like, before ABA, I would go to work, you do your job. That’s the thing, it’s this packaged thing. And now it’s not like that. A Book Apart is not like that. Granted I’ve been doing it for years, but it just—you start to think, okay, there’s nothing outside of it. Even though there’s lots of stuff outside of it, and I think I just needed to look for it. This is part of it. I think I’m starting to feel a lot less burnt out. I think I also got really confused—or not confused, I got worried, because I started to think that burnout is just fatigue, and it’s not necessarily just fatigue. It could just be you need a fresh take or a new project or whatever. [30:00] SWB: Yeah, and I think it definitely says a lot. The key to fixing burnout is not always necessarily career change, but sometimes it’s just like, perspective shift and remembering all the other things that you love. You know, people talk about work-life balance, and I always really struggle with that conversation, because work is really important to me, and it’s so intertwined with so many pieces of my life. So I don’t look at it as, work is over here and life is over there. But at the same time, I’ve lived the life where work was consuming me: “Oh, I’m writing this email at 11:30pm.” You know, when you stop seeing any distinction between those different parts of yourself, I think it can be really easy to get so sucked into work, that when things aren’t going well at work, it means that things are not going well for you. So it’s like, if work goes through a rough patch, your whole life sucks, because there’s nothing else there. KL: Right, it’s such a big part of what you do and who you are. And it’s something I never really paused to think about, moving from my twenties to thirties to forties, is that, like, that’s an ongoing thing. It’s an evolution. You don’t just figure it out and then it’s done. SWB: The kind of work that I do evolves all the time, so of course the relationship I have to my work has to evolve all the time to.. That’s only natural. KL: Right. SWB: I think it’s hard sometimes to remember that, because you think, “Oh, well, this used to work for me.” Well guess what, this doesn’t work for me anymore. I am in my mid-thirties now, and my needs are a little bit different. And there are things that I’m not willing to put up with anymore—thank god. JL: Yes. [Laughter] KL: Right. And you can be unapologetic about it. JL: Yeah, and along with being unapologetic, sometimes you really need to trust your gut. Let’s hear from Mina Markham about trusting her gut. MINA MARKHAM: To channel Olivia Pope, it all comes down to a gut feeling with me. When I’m presented with some new opportunity, I kind of do a gut check and see, is this something that I will regret not doing. And if the answer is yes, then I know what I have to do. I have to go ahead and make that change. That’s probably the only thing that can explain how I’ve had so much change in my life the past few years. I’ve had three jobs in three years, all of which required me to pack up my life and move to a new city and basically start over. Each time came with their own instances of doubt or of terror or sometimes just full-on panic, but none of which I have any regrets about doing. So I have learned to trust my gut, trust my instincts to know when it’s time for me to go ahead and make that leap. JL: Oh, Olivia Pope. Inspires me too, but I’ll get to that later. It just inspires me so much when people have the ability to follow their gut, especially when it involves moving. Sara, you’ve moved a ton. SWB: Yeah, I’ve moved a lot of times, and I’ve moved across the country, but I still don’t think I’ve moved as much as Mina Markham has. KL: Yeah, if you’re not familiar with her, Mina was at IBM in Austin at the beginning of those three years she talked about. Then she moved to Brooklyn to work on the Hillary campaign. Now she’s a senior front-end engineer at Slack. So that’s a lot of choices, and a lot of change. And I think trusting your gut becomes really vital in all that. I also think it’s how you get to a place where you actually know what it’s going to look like to have regrets or to not have regrets, and you become okay with it. You kind of can envision it a little bit more. It becomes a cycle that starts to repeat itself, which, that’s how you gain more and more trust in your gut. SWB: What she said reminded me of this column I read a couple of years ago. It’s an advice column called Dear Sugar that Cheryl Strayed used to run. She wrote a response to somebody who asked, like, I’m thinking about having kids, I’m in my late thirties or forty-ish or something like that, and I don’t know if I should, but I think I might regret it. And this person felt like having kids because they thought they might regret not having kids was a bad idea. Now, I don’t have kids. I’m not planning to have kids. But this column really stuck with me, because the way she responded to it, she was like, you know, thinking about your future self and what you might regret is one of the only ways that you can kind of make sense of choices. And she was like, this is actually a really healthy way to look at, like, is this something that I’m going to wish I had done later on? Once you do make a decision, then you have to think of it as other lives that you chose not to lead. I think she called it “the ghost ship that did not carry me.” So it’s like this other ship that you could have been on, but you didn’t take. [35:00] And that would have been this other thing, and you can wave at it from the shore, but it’s not yours. So I think about that a lot when it comes to choices, whether it’s those big life choices, or the smaller day-to-day work choices: what are the ships that I’m choosing to be on? And as long as I’m thinking about where my gut is, and I’m thinking about what is going to be a positive thing for future me, I usually feel pretty good about it. JL: I think this is another habit thing, where the more you get used to making these decisions and being okay with them, the stronger you probably feel being like, this is okay and I’m going to go for this. SWB: Yeah, totally. I think that it’s hard at first to know what does trusting your gut even mean, right? And so I think about, how do I know that I’m trusting my gut? You know, if I start doing something where it’s like, “Ugh, I should really take this project on,” or, “I should really speak at this conference,” and then every time I go to, like, write the email that would be the saying yes email, I get knotted up and I don’t do it, I’ve started to slow down and say, wait a second, why am I sort of hemming and hawing about saying yes to that email? And usually it’s because I have some kind of reservation or misgiving. Versus there are times when people ask me to do something or I am presented with opportunities, and my heart is immediately in it. Now, sometimes I have to say no to those things too, because they don’t fit for one reason or another, but knowing that immediate response of opening yourself up to whatever’s in front of you, versus pushing it away, that means something. And it’s worth taking the time to figure out what your body’s telling you, where that’s coming from. And I think that’s the very beginning of trusting your gut. JL: And sometimes it’s not just about making a decision by yourself. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to find someone else to help you decide what’s next in your life. SWB: Let’s hear from Lara Hogan. Lara is an engineering leader who some of you may have heard of, because it seems like she’s everywhere these days. She was a VP at Kickstarter, and before that she was a senior manager at Etsy, but she’s up to something new, too. Let’s hear about it. SWB: Okay, first of all, I want a Deepa. [Laughter] KL: Yes. SWB: So, Deepa Subramaniam is Lara’s business partner, and they founded this company called Wherewithall, that is doing consulting work on product teams and engineering teams. But most importantly, me and Katel actually had dinner with them a couple of weeks back. And watching them interact with each other and talk about their work, and the way their faces just light up. It’s so great to seem them coming together and creating this thing that they clearly are really passionate about on the work side, but also just as partners. They really make sense and they get one another. I thought that was so great to see. I’ve mostly worked in different kinds of consulting arrangements. Sometimes, me and somebody else will partner up on a project or teach a workshop together, but I’ve never had that kind of long-term, we-are-business-partners thing set up. And I think it goes back to what we said earlier, around how we sometimes have to make our own colleagues. It’s like they’ve literally created a business that allows them to have that kind of collegial relationship. And I think that that’s really powerful and something that’s kind of scary for a lot of us to do—to, you know, make such a firm commitment. But it’s great when it works, right? KL: Yeah, it’s like you wish, you know, and sort of dream about finding your soul mates in your life partner and your best friends. And I feel like it’s becoming a lot more, you know, that this happens with work now, and it’s just really cool. Like, you can work on projects where you’re like, these are the kind of people I want to work with all the time. And then you know what that looks like. JL: Yeah, and I think it’s amazing. But there’s also like, half- and quarter-way points, too, right? So, I think, as you mentioned before, we don’t necessarily traditionally work on the same types of things, but I love both of you, so having chances to work with you is great. And I just remember, like Sara and I, when we were both doing a lot of public speaking, we would go out to happy hour or we would go out to dinner and we would just talk about public speaking things. And even though Sara and I would be talking about completely different things, the business of public speaking was something that we could both talk to and learn from each other. And talk about how we were doing things, how we were organizing, how we were charging. How we were going to do logistics of things—and having someone I could talk to about that was, like, totally priceless for me. [40:00] SWB: Yes! You know, I think that there’s a lot of pressure in culture at large and definitely within the tech industry, to kind of not talk about some of this stuff. For example, don’t talk about how much you charge for things and how much you make off of things. And I know that that can be a touchy and sensitive discussion but I really think that only benefits the people who have the most power. And that’s so problematic. That tends to disproportionately affect women and it tends to disproportionately affect people of color, and particularly disproportionately affects people who are women of color. And so I’m really a big proponent of having as many open and honest conversations about topics like compensation as possible. Because I really think that the fact that we haven’t had enough of those is part of the reason that we hear things like Becca’s statement earlier on, where she talked about the AIGA survey. Which is a designer’s survey showing that women at her level were making $20,000 less than men. It’s certainly not the only reason, but part of the reason that continues to go on unchecked, is because we’re encouraged not to talk about it. So I’m gonna fuckin’ talk about it. JL: Yeah, I wrote a post in, I don’t know, 2015? 2014?—“A Formula for Charging Speaker Fees”—and it’s about… SWB: Oh yeah! KL: It was great! JL: And it’s still, I mean, it’s probably the most visited blog post on the Nerdery. And I mean, that site hasn’t been updated in over a year, but we still get traffic from that post especially. People looking for how to charge, how do I put numbers around something, and so I was thrilled that people are still finding value in that. Because, for me, it was really valuable to talk about it. SWB: So that’s the kind of thing, I think, if you feel sort of isolated—and it’s not just about money, really—but if you feel isolated in your field, or if you feel like you don’t know who you can trust, then you can never really get to a place where you have the confidence to then have that conversation with the people the really matter. KL: Or if you’re just starting out. SWB: Totally. KL: That’s a whole group of people who—like, I wouldn’t even know where to start if I was doing it for the first time and I just had no idea. If I had no idea what to base it off of. So if I found a resource that was helpful like that, it would be so valuable. SWB: Yeah and I think, you know, especially since things like money conversations—it’s like if you try to have one and you’re not that confident about it and you don’t really have any context. If you get pushback, it’s really easy to believe that you’re getting pushback because you were asking for too much. And you don’t have a frame of reference. So, anyway, I think building those relationships to give you more context and get more insight and feedback and, just like you have someone to bounce everything off of—it’s so valuable. I’m really happy to hear people like Deepa and Lara are teaming up because I think that the more of these kinds of powerful relationships between people that exist out there, the stronger any industry is going to be. JL: Completely, yeah. I think that finding advocates in your peers and finding that partnership is so important and valuable. SWB: A lot of the folks we talked to—they were kind of moving from working at a company to starting their own thing. Or otherwise kind of shifting gears in that more consultative way. Jenn, you went from consulting to going back in-house and then you had a baby, so you had kind of different sort of year with a lot of new stuff. But I’m curious: what did that look like for you and what made that work for you at this moment in your life? JL: You bring up a good point, Sara. I think a lot of times, we often say like, “oh i’m starting something new,” and it’s always about quitting your job. And I did that, as I mentioned before. SWB: Quitting your job can be great, let’s not lie about that. But it’s not always great. And it’s not always what you want. JL: And it was what I wanted for a really long time. And I think one of the hardest things for me, because of the vision that comes along with that—the freedom, the working from home, the yoga pants, the ability to do anything you want, essentially, is awesome. And then for me to recognize, you know, what was also awesome, was going back to a full time job. I started consulting for Anthropologie and I worked onsite a couple days a week and I was really enjoying it. I enjoyed the work I was doing, I enjoyed being in-house again, and I really enjoyed working on product as opposed—it was a different change from agency life. And I thought that that was such a nice change—and there was part of me that was really hesitant to go back full time. And, they’d offered the full time work, I still wasn’t sure, and I think part of it was just because I thought what I was supposed to do, was stay consulting. You know, I’d already quit my job—why would I ever go back!? [45:00] And then, I realized for me, that the full time job gave me a lot of stability, in that, in order to try new things such as: BABY. [Laughter] JL: For me, I always like to have at least one or two maybe, super stable things in my life when I try something new. When I first quit my job, I had a very stable relationship—now with my husband, also stable friendships, a lot of stable colleagues, that were really allowing me to try something new. Now I had again, this stability, that was like, ok, I feel pretty great—maybe I’ll go and try this new-fangled baby thing that I hear people talk about. And it was really great to have the support of the people that I work with, also, at the time, figuring out things like maternity leave, figuring out how to make the balance before I went on maternity leave. And so, going back for me, was like a little bit of a hard move but something that I knew was right for me at the time. And something that I really wanted to see through. Will I be full-time forever, I’m not sure! But for right now, I’m enjoying a lot about it. SWB: Yeah, I think that when people start a business or move to doing consulting or something like that, that’s often this sense of like, if they ever change course from that, I think it gets perceived—or there’s a fear that it’ll be perceived—as failure in some way. Or like taking a step backwards. And of course, life’s not really like that, right? There are times when something makes a lot of sense and times when it doesn’t. And I think that’s part of the thing I’m really interested in exploring more in this show. How do we figure out the next steps that are right for us, that allow us to continue to grow. And to try not to buy into some of those bullshit stories about what it means to be successful. For example, none of us have a goal of being tech company founders who go out and get a bunch of venture capital so that we can be the next unicorn company worth a billion dollars. I mean, I guess having a billion dollars sounds—no, I’m sorry, having a billion dollars actually sounds awful. It sounds truly terrible. Because I look at the people who are making that their kind of dream they’re chasing—and I think, would I be happier? I don’t think so. Would I be creating a better world? Probably not. What is really the draw of that except for the idea that it’s what a picture of what success looks like. And I think what I’m hoping we can do here is really talk about of different types of success. JL: Yeah, it’s like, when is the right time for you to do these options that we have. And you know, we’re so lucky that we have options, especially in the tech field where you have a lot of abilities to work agency, to work product, to go consulting. Lots of different options. So I think it’s as you said, not a one size fits all and not always a one size fits all for this time frame forever. SWB: So I know that having a baby was a big new thing, but I also know something that you told me when you were still kind of getting embedded in that job was that it was—and I think you mentioned it a little. You said it was a chance to work on product, which you hadn’t done before. And it you were telling me a lot about some of the challenges of working at scale at this big e-commerce company and all this stuff that was a little bit new. And I’m curious, do you feel like—not only did you create this stability for your but have you also been growing professionally in this new job? JL: Yeah, sure. I think one of the things that was really neat, as you mentioned—working not only at CSS architecture at scale, but also taking on management responsibilities. So consulting, I managed myself, and sometimes some other members of teams. But generally now I’m in a position where I have direct reports. I’m working more in the engineering team and helping people with their career paths again, is really interesting to me and definitely a new challenge. Managing is hard. SWB: People! You know? KL: People are wonderful, and hard, and wonderful, and hard. JL: Exactly. So it’s rewarding in a whole new way and challenging in a whole new way. I haven’t managed since before I was consulting, so it was fun to take that on again. But also just something completely new—it’s nice to see that at this point in my career, these different kind of challenges. But that said, focusing a lot on both the management and the architecture also sort of left this gap where I wasn’t doing as many of the things I was doing before with side projects. So trying to figure out—it’s again, facing this sort of similar thing as I had before, where I’m not burnt out on what I’m doing—there’s just something I love and I miss doing that also. So how do I also get this thing that I love in my life somehow. But not at the same scale as before. Because like I mentioned, it’s that balance. And it all comes down to scale again. Where, I don’t want to quit and got consulting and go travel all over the place again all of the time because I want to be home with some level of stability. But I want new projects also, so talking to both of you was really neat because then the idea of starting something new with this podcast came up. And this, for me, is so exciting, because it acts as an outlet to do a lot of things I loved doing in side projects while still maintaining a lot of this new stability that I found in my life. Fuck Yeah of the Week[50:15] SWB: You know when your friend gets an awesome new job, or publishes an amazing article, or finally pays off their student loans, and you’re so excited that you keep texting them in just like all caps and the fire emoji over and over again? Well, that’s the next segment here, it’s called the Fuck Yeah of the Week—and it’s where we share the people and the things that we think you all should be celebrating. Think of it as the podcast form of the 100 emoji. So Jenn, who is our very first Fuck Yeah of the Week? JL: Well, Sara, I’m gonna go ahead and say, it’s US! Fuck Yeah, Us! KL: Fuck Yeah, YES! JL: You know, I think sometimes you gotta take those moments and celebrate yourself, and I think we should be celebrating ourselves for getting this thing up and running! Here we are, we’ve talked about this idea, and now we are actually in the room recording it, ladies—we’re doing it! SWB: Yeah! JL: It’s awesome. SWB: You know, earlier we heard from Lara Hogan about her, you know, new business and all of that. But this reminds me so much of something that she started writing about years ago. She has a whole site about this—it’s Lara Hogan’s donut site, I don’t know what it’s called. But basically, what she does, is she celebrates every career achievement with a donut. And she started doing it because she realized that whenever something cool was happening, like she was getting a promotion, or she was accepted to give a talk somewhere, she would go, “ok, great,” and then move on to the next thing. And she wasn’t giving herself permission to celebrate that. So she started saying, “ok, every time something major happens, I’m gettin’ myself a donut.” And she takes a picture of it and she puts it on this website. And I think that that’s wonderful, because every time she has a new donut thing to celebrate, I’m like, “hell yeah, get that donut!” JL: Yeah! SWB: And I love that we’re able to do that for ourselves, too, because, yeah, I think we’re often taught to keep looking forward or don’t let yourself have too much of the limelight. And, I hope that anybody who’s listening to this can kind of give themselves a fuck yeah, too, for the things that they’re accomplishing. KL: Definitely, it’s so exciting to see how far Lara’s Tao of Donuts, essentially, has spread. Because you see other people taking photos, you know, of their donuts that they’ve gotten after speaking for the first time, or you know, doing a big demo. And that’s so cool, because you know it ties back to this thing that she, talked about, and that’s super cool. I hope that we see lots more photos of donuts, or your celebration. JL: Our second fuck yeah are these Olivia Pope wine glasses that we are drinking out of today. The Olivia Pope wine glass has always been, for me, my special donut moment. You know, on that show Scandal, when she drinks, and it just was like, “wow, where do I get a glass to just drown my sorrows or celebrate my joys.” Like, that is the glass that holds everything. They sell them at Crate & Barrel. Crate & Barrel is not one of our sponsors, but they could be. KL: They could be. [Laughter] SWB: Are you listening, Crate & Barrel? JL: But! I love these glasses because I take them out when I need to like, either, like, pause and be like, this is life right now, and this is just my moment to just like, take it all in. Be it good, be it bad. But like, here’s just a moment to pause and be like, “Fuck yeah, I got these glasses, and in this case, I got these friends, and I’ve got this wine, and I’ve got this podcast, so, it’s pretty good.” SWB: You know, if you haven’t seen an Olivia Pope wine glass, first off, it’s going to be in the show notes, but if you Google “Olivia Pope wine glass,” you know exactly—immediately—what we’re talking about. KL: It’ll be on our Instagram. SWB: But what’s really key about the Olivia Pope wine glass, is that it’s got a big glass, but it’s also on this long, really slender stem. It’s like a big-deal wine glass. It’s not just like, “Oh I’m having a quick glass of wine.” It’s very much like, “I am having wine now, period.” And, I like that because it does—it kind of creates that space, right? Like, you were saying, Jenn, it’s not just like that you’re going to pour yourself a quick glass. It’s that you’re pausing and taking a moment and you’re allowing yourself to have that bit of joy. And I think that that’s really important, even though, normally I don’t trust myself to use the Olivia Pope wine glass on the regular, but I want them to exist in the world. JL: That’s why I have six of them. [Laughter] KL: They’re great, because they have presence, yet they’re elegant. SWB: So, just like us? JL: Mhmm. SWB: 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. Our theme music is by Philly’s own The Diaphone, from a song called Maths. In this episode, you heard Becca Gurney, Jenn Schiffer, Mina Markham and Lara Hogan. We’ll be back next week with Episode 2. [55:00] KL: Until then, we leave you with this advice from Sam Kapila, a designer and educator who’s always up to something new: SAM KAPILA: I know it’s time to start something new when I’m a little bit scared….the good sort of scared that inspires me to want to explore something new in a project, or in a job, or scared in a way that you might surprise yourself. It’s also important to start something new when you can’t stop thinking about a certain idea, and it keeps you up at night. It’s in your 3am journal on your bedside, and it’s something that you just can’t wait to start doing and be really proud of. And I think, any time you can be proud of something you are doing, that’s definitely time to start something new. | |||
| 20 Jan 2018 | Pocket Rabbits with Eileen Webb | 00:47:05 | |
We made it to Episode 2—and hey, so did you! High five! This week, we’re all about TIME: how we make it, how we use it, and how we think about it. We’re also joined by our very first guest, Eileen Webb, who straight-up blew our minds with her take on making time on your own terms. Seriously, it’s > Why should my work get all of my best brain? Here’s what we cover. (Yep, there’s a full transcript below, too!) Show notesFirst things first: is it time for for lunch yet? We think so (we’ve been thinking about snacks since 10:15). We start out with a segment on reclaiming lunchtime for, well, whatever you want:
Next, NYG sits down with web strategist-slash-farmer Eileen Webb for an interview that’s sure to stick with all of us for quite some time. We talk about:
Follow Eileen on Twitter, or hire her at webmeadow.com. Also in this episode:
Thanks to our friends The Diaphone for the use of our theme song, Maths, off the album of the same name. _T TranscriptJENN LUKAS: Today’s show is brought to you by CodePen. CodePen is a place to write and share front-end code. You can try out new technologies, learn new things by forking other projects, and show off your own awesome work. Your profile on CodePen is like your front-end development portfolio. Learn more and create your own Pens at codepen.io. That’s c-o-d-e-p-e-n dot i-o. JL: 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. Today on No, You Go we’re talking about time. How do you make time for things you want to do while keeping all the things you have to do in check? We’ll explore making—and breaking—routines and habits, and pull apart the politics behind how we spend our time. And we’re really excited because today we’ll be joined by Eileen Webb, who’s here to talk to us about things like sunrise hikes, why she doesn’t book meetings in the mornings—and, oh yeah, running a consulting company from a farm in rural New Hampshire that runs on solar energy. But first on the agenda: I’d like to take Lunchtime with Jenn Lukas for $500, Alex. [Intro music] JL: There was one night that we were staying late working on something and my whole joke was, “I gotta get home in time to watch Jeopardy. And someone was like, “oh, you know we could stream it.” We streamed Jeopardy while eating dinner together as a group while we were working hard to finish a project. And it sounds a little silly but it was, like, really awesome to take a moment while we were trying to meet a deadline. But then we stopped to all eat dinner together while watching Jeopardy, which is probably the greatest game show of all time. And I don’t say that lightly, because I’m like really into The Price is Right. So it just became a little bit known about how much I like Jeopardy at work. And we would talk a lot about it. And that got other people—other big Jeopardy fans would come out of the woodwork and start telling me about how much they loved Jeopardy. The Jeopardy thing just sort of continued. Some of us would come in the next day and be like, oh, did you see Jeopardy last night? And we would talk about Jeopardy. Someone made me an Alex Trebek Slack icon, you know, the usual. JL: I do not care for that! KL: Did you all end up playing that first night? Were you, like, playing along? JL: Yeah we are all for the yell out the answers. There’s no, like, “don’t say the answers.” And no one says “what is.” Actually, someone says “what is” now, but to be fair, we have a new coworker at work, and he was on College Jeopardy. KL: Whoa. JL: Yeah, legit. Anyway so this kept going. And then like once the weather turned cold, we would—when it comes down to lunchtime, we would eat lunch outside a lot. We have a really great outdoor setup down at our campus—and, oh, I hate the word campus—laughs—down at our workspace. Anyway, once the weather got cold, we still wanted to do things together, but it got a little weird because you don’t always want to eat in the cafeteria, so sometimes people bring lunch back to their desk. And we actually just renovated our office space, and we have this great pod setup. KL: Get on in here! JL: Right? Exactly. So it just started being a thing. Like, “Hey, are we going to watch Jeopardy today?” And it was like, “Yeah, we’re all going to grab lunch now. So we’d go grab lunch together, bring it back, and now we watch Jeopardy. And we have a little Slack channel, so we can let people know when it’s starting. Though, we have a very open building, so it’s pretty obvious when Jeopardy is starting. [Laughter] SWB: How many people come and gather and watch Jeopardy at lunch now? JL: I’d say it’s anywhere between like 5 and 10, but a variety. KL: That’s a good group. JL: So like, there’s a rotating group of I’d say 15 or 20 people. SWB: When you started doing this, was it ever difficult to feel like this was a good use of your time, or feel like you should be back at your desk instead of taking the time away to watch the show? JL: Yeah, totally. And not to mention, our desks are right there. You can see it. In fact, someone made a quote-unquote joke one time that was like… I was like, “Hey, wanna watch Jeopardy?” and they were like, “No, I have work to do.” And I was like, “Yeah, but this is lunch!” KL: Yeah, like, remember that? JL: You know, they have these amazing studies where, like, you can only focus on things for such a length of time. There’s this interesting thing, it’s every 10 minutes that you have to stop what you’re doing for a minute to digest what you’ve done and get back at what you’re doing. So we’re talking about four hours at this point. And I think at that point it’s really important to stop for a minute, take a break, eat lunch, watch a Jeopardy or whatever your thing is, and then get back to what you’re doing. And I think you start fresh. I think that’s how you avoid daily burnout. SWB: Yeah, you know when you were talking about Jeopardy lunch, I think a lot about some of the pressures that I’ve seen in offices around constantly looking like you’re busy, or looking like you’re working. I’ve realized that much of that is a show, that people who—you know, you feel pressure to constantly look like you’re working, so you eat lunch at your desk. People who do that, they’re not actually more productive, and they’re probably more miserable, than if you just took a real break and sat your ass down somewhere and did something that was not work and was not intended to look like work and was not pretending to be work. [5:00] JL: Yes. Ugh, yes. [Laughs] It’s funny, they have all these browser extensions to stop you from looking at certain sites while you work. And it’s so much easier to do that if you are focused, and then you take that official break. SWB: I think a lot about the conversations we have about time, and how we get really focused on making sure you carve out time to do big things. People will write about how, you know, “Oh, I wrote my book by sitting down every morning between 6 and 8am and writing 1500 words for two months, and that’s how I wrote this book.” That seems like a miserable way to write a book to me, personally, but I think that moreover, so many of those conversations are just about how do we do big things. But what we’re talking about here is much more around how do we make time for things that seem small, but have a much greater impact on our wellness and on our psyche and on our ability to have boundaries. JL: Down where I work, we work at the Navy Yard in Philadelphia, which is in South-South Philly, you can’t go any further, it’s surrounded by the river. There are some really neat areas to walk in. I know people who will just walk down by the river and look at the old ships during lunch break, too. And so, there’s all sorts of like—you really take a lunch. Eat your lunch, get some air, and do something that clears your mind to give you a good second half of the day. SWB: Katel, what do you do for lunch? KL: Oh, gosh, well, sometimes, I do have to admit, sometimes I will eat something very hurriedly over the sink so I don’t get any dishes dirty. It’s very efficient, and it’s very sad. I was actually just thinking, one of my absolute favorite things is when I am traveling whether it’s for work, or I am out somewhere and I just happen to be on my own, sometimes i will go and just have a really fancy lunch by myself somewhere, and I’ll just get something extravagant, just because I can. Or something that’s like, oh I should save that for dinner, or whatever. And sometimes for me, just having that, even if it’s not a two-hour thing, it’s really nice to kind of like, sit with yourself. SWB: I don’t love going out to lunch most of the time. Like Katel said, I love going out to a fancy lunch every now and again, but for the most part, I prefer to eat home foods for lunch. I like to make a sandwich or assemble leftovers or put together a salad, and that’s fine. But what I’ve found is really important for me is to get out during the middle of the day, and I find that that’s my favorite time to go to the gym or go for a run. Something I have been prioritizing more and more is making sure that that happens, and that happens before it’s super late in the day. Because I work from home, and because I tend to have a fair amount of autonomy over my schedule—I mean, I have meetings and things, but they’re meetings that I agreed to set—I can kind of, you know, always fit it in where I want, in theory. But time slips away so easily. So it’s like, you have a couple meetings, you do a little work. All of a sudden you’re really hungry, so you eat something. Well, can’t go running right after you eat something. So now I get back involved in some work and some meetings, and suddenly it’s 5pm. And while I can still go for a run then, what I have found for myself is that making sure I get the time to go out sometime more in the middle of the day, I am doing something that is totally distinct from work, and that forces my brain out of the work zone, and I end up having an overall better day, a more pleasant day. And so I really have been trying to prioritize that, and prioritize it on top of things that seem more important in the short term, but I’ve realized in the long run aren’t. KL: That’s one of the things I’ve struggled with the most not working in like an office or a structured environment. Because my time is my own—and that’s really great, and I am very grateful for that—I also don’t have any accountability to anyone to be like, okay, I gotta go take a break, and this is going to help me be more productive in the long run. I don’t know, I am just thinking back to when I was starting out in my career, and maybe I didn’t have as much time or flexibility, or didn’t feel quite as much like I could take a break, I think, like, conversely, removing myself from the office and actually like—even if I wasn’t going out and like buying a nice meal—I would just go eat lunch somewhere else so I would feel like, okay, I wasn’t sitting at my desk and I wasn’t being judged, but I am taking time for myself. JL: Yeah, that’s so important. I can only imagine. I mean I luckily sometimes have someone who sits next to me and says, “hey, you gonna go get lunch?” KL: Yeah, it’s like, hey, are you just going to sit there all day? JL: You need a lunch app that rings, that’s like “hey!” SWB: Well you know, this whole conversation about reclaiming lunchtime and taking time for yourself, it makes me extremely excited to introduce our guest for today. Katel and I had the chance to sit down with Eileen Webb. [10:00] Eileen is somebody I’ve known for years, and she’s always the person I turn to when I want someone to give me some good advice and some thoughtful ideas about how to look at my time differently, and how to make sure that I’m creating space in my life and habits in my life that are going to give me some sustenance and some perspective and not burn me out. [Musical interlude] JL: CodePen’s a powerful tool that allows designers and developers to write code—like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—directly in a browser, and see the results right as you build. Whether you’re new to front-end code or have been writing it for years, it’s the perfect place to learn front-end programming languages. You can show off what you create, build test cases, and get help on tricky problems. Not to mention, you can find inspiration browsing all the awesome pens that other people are out there making. It’s a great community that I love being a part of. Whenever I have a new idea and want to get right to making it happen, I open up a CodePen and just start coding. I can skip all the things that are roadblocks for me—like setting up environments and getting hosting—and just get right to the projects I want to create. CodePen has so many cool things to explore, like CodePen Pro and Projects. Sign up today and get started by visiting codepen.io/hello. [Musical interlude] Interview **: ** Eileen WebbSWB: I’m excited to introduce all of you to Eileen Webb. Eileen is a friend of mine, and she’s also the director of strategy and livestock—no, seriously, livestock—at Webmeadow, a solar-powered web consulting company in New Hampshire. When she’s not tending her chickens or Instagramming her bunnies, she’s helping progressive organizations with their digital and content strategy, giving talks at lots of different tech conferences, and she’s teaching workshops (sometimes even with me!). EW: Hello Sara, hello Katel. KL: Hi! SWB: I am so happy we could interview you nice and early, because I feel like you have so much insight into making a working life work for you, and getting comfortable with the idea of that not looking like everybody else’s, that I think people are going to really love. EW: My life is definitely not looking like other people’s. [Laughter] SWB: Yeah, so I would love to start out talking about that. I know that you live in northern New Hampshire, you don’t live where a lot of us would imagine an ambitious tech professional would live. Can you tell us a bit about what your day to day looks like? EW: Sure I live on a small farm. And so a lot of my day to day actually revolves around animals and livestock and like, in the right season, vegetables and growing things. But right now, the depths of winter, so it mostly involves bringing thawed water to animals in the cold temperatures. A lot of my day honestly is animal focused. And then I come inside where it is warm and I sit at my computer talk to clients all day. Because of the kind of work that I do, I do a lot of work that is people-focused. I work with a lot of teams and I work with teams to figure out how they are going to do things with their teams moving forward, and sort of how to change their internal processes. And so I spend some time making documents and working in spreadsheets and looking at websites, a lot of time talking with teams and talking with people about how to make their workdays better. SWB: So how did you end up building that kind of working life? What led you to have a web consulting company that is also on a small farm in northern New Hampshire? EW: My partner and I both worked in Silicon Valley in the ___ era, so in the first dot-com boom. And it was very, I don’t know, dot-commy? It was very busy, and long hours, and, you know, working for sort of Wall Street bros. SWB: Mmmmmmhmmmm EW: Yeah, I know. Wall Street bros. Yay. When we left that, we—so, my mom grew up in northern New Hampshire, so we actually moved to my great-grandparents’ farmhouse, which was still in my family. And for a while we ran a bakery, because we didn’t want to do computer stuff anymore. But there comes a point when you can only make so much money off of baking bread, and if you want to make more money, you have to just like literally scale up and bake twice as much bread. Or you can build someone a website and get paid so much more money than baking some bread. So we went back to doing website stuff. And I have a background in backend development, so I did a lot of server-side stuff and sysadmin kinds of things, and like programming of content management systems. And my partner is a front-end developer, so he would do the CSS and the HTML and the sort of performance-dev stuff. So we built lots and lots of websites for people. And then because I don’t like working that much— SWB: Oh, we’re going to dig into that a bit further in a minute. EW: I don’t like doing work that people won’t use, and so it got to a point where, when people would ask me, “Oh, will you build me a blog section on this site?” I’d be like, “Why? Prove to me that you need it. Prove to me that you have the internal capacity to fill a blog on a regular basis.” And sort of that type of attitude ended up spilling over into full-time strategic work. [15:00] I started out doing strategic work because I didn’t want to build things that people weren’t going to use, and then even when I graduated to the point of having other people build the thing, I still really like asking all the questions: what do you need? Why do you think you need it? How can we demonstrate that this is true or not true? And so I ended up being a strategist all the time. And because I’m self-scheduled, I was also able to weave in all this animal stuff and all this lifestyle stuff, like living out in the woods and going hiking and all that kind of stuff. SWB: Yeah, tell us about that. Tell us about your going hiking. EW: I want to be careful because when I say hiking, a lot of people really picture, like, backpacking. And I am, if nothing, just the worst pack mule in the entire world. I hate wearing backpacks. I hate carrying things because it’s a lot of work. And so when I say hiking, it’s more like walking, it just happens to be that I live in the woods in the mountains. So it’s walking, but in trees [laughter]. So I do a lot of walking and hiking. My partner and I, we take off every Tuesday morning, and we have for more than a decade at this point. We take every Tuesday morning and we go out into the world. This time of year we go snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. Other times of the year we go kayaking or we mostly do walking, because it’s obviously the easiest thing in all seasons. And it’s a really important piece of our physical self-care, and also our mental self-care, in giving ourselves space to work with our clients, and to give ourselves to someone else for so much of our work we. It’s a little bit of time we take back for ourselves. KL: That’s so cool. I just gotta say that. SWB: Yeah, I love this. And it’s one of the reasons that I really wanted to talk with you. Not just because of the hiking, but the concept behind it of taking that time consistently and prioritizing it. I think I’ve talked with you about this before, where I’m like, okay, I would like to do more of that, and figure out, how do I systematize that into my schedule, because I don’t think I give myself enough of that. And so I am really curious, how did you and your partner make that a priority, and what are the habits or routines that you have that enable you to keep that time protected? EW: I am a huge huge fan of…I don’t remember if it’s called time-blocking or time-boxing. That’s how you can tell what a big fan I am of it. [Laughter] If I block stuff off on my calendar…like, my calendar, if I click over to my calendar right now, On Tuesday morning, it just has a big block of time, that is a recurring block of time every week, that says “Tuesday Adventure.” And so when I am going to schedule things, when I am looking at when people want to have calls and things like that, it is already blocked off. And like, even though it is just blocked by me, right, it’s not like there’s an invitation with lots of other people on it, literally having that visual block in my calendar graphics really helps me remember that that is what I am supposed to be doing on Tuesday mornings. I do that with all my calendar stuff. My Thursday mornings are blocked off for what I call “work selfies,” which right now is usually a writing project, but sometimes is like taking a class in git, or whatever random thing I want to do. And I like to block things off. I usually try to keep my mornings free for intense brain work, and then my afternoons are calls and meetings, just because that’s how my brain works best. So like, building the structure in is really important for me. I have this friend, Krista Scott Dixon, she’s like a personal trainer and nutrition coach and stuff. And she talks about how willpower is what we use to not punch our boss and to not pull our pants down in the middle of the supermarket, and that willpower is an overtaxed resource. You cannot depend on willpower to do things like make good food choices and decide to go to the gym, because your willpower is just, like, out most times of your day. And so instead of relying on willpower to remember to do those things, it’s all about relying on structure, and setting up structures that make it so that you’d have to have willpower to overcome the structure. So you set up the structure in a time when you’re calm and making good prioritized decisions, and you sort of build the shape of a day and the shape of a week that supports whatever your goals are. SWB: So I need to sit down, have a protein-laden snack, take a deep breath, light a candle, and then structure my day or my week. EW: Yeah. KL: I love that. EW: This works for me because of the way my brain works. I am really good at following structures I set up for myself. I don’t get tempted away. Just sort of awareness of the stuff is the most important thing for me—awareness of, like, of this is what this timeblock is for is enough for me to be like, well, I guess past me said this is what Tuesdays are for. [20:00] Obviously that wouldn’t work for everyone. But for me, just setting up the structure makes it pretty easy to stick with it. SWB: It kinda seems like there’s a certain faith in yourself you have to have to make that work, right? You’re trusting that past you made a good choice and not a bad choice, and not second-guessing that. EW: Yes. KL: I think it’s also, like, just feeling accountable to something, and if that’s a framework, I feel like that makes so much sense. I’m a really visual person, too, and I feel like looking at a calendar that has blocks reserved for things that I’m doing, seems like a no-brainer. When I went from regular office job to being solo and working remotely, that went away. And I feel like I need to re-institute some of that. SWB: You know there are people who talk about their calendars as being basically slots to be filled. Their calendar will literally have meeting after meeting stacked up on it, and it’ll have one 30-minute block at 12:30 and somebody will come book that. And that mode that people get into, or that their corporate culture almost forces them into, or at a minimum sort of encourages, is one that’s very much, you’re in a reactive mode all of the time. It’s like your calendar is a thing being done to you. And then there’s those people who treat their calendar as more like something that they have ownership of, and they create slots for meetings and they say, okay, this is when I’m available to meet. It’s a more proactive way of looking at it— of saying, I need to reserve parts of my day for things that are not just requests of me, but are the priorities that I set up for myself. I’m the best judge of my own priorities; I can’t have 7,000 people making requests of me. EW: I think there’s also something around the idea that—I think that we all are pretty aware that we work differently at different times of day. Like, I know that for myself, morning time is when I can do deep brain work. It’s when I can do synthesis, and analysis, and sort of like, deep focus. Where, anything after lunch is like, I can still do work, but I can’t write essays—I’m good for meetings. I’m real good at scheduling calls in the afternoon. But I can’t do deep, intense, sort of, focussed work, because it’s just not how my brain chemistry works. And so if you know that about yourself and if you have been working, you know, long enough that you recognize those patterns in yourself and you pay attention to them—making sure you use the right parts of the day, doing the right kinds of things. Sometimes people will ask me to do meeting in the morning and every once in a while, I’ll say yes, but I’m really reluctant to. Because I know that I could do meetings in the afternoons and that would be great, but if I do a meeting in the morning, I’ve basically lost my morning for doing focused work. SWB: That’s something I really wanted to ask a little more about. You said that blocking off time is often enough for you and that’s enough of a reminder to yourself. But I’m curious: when you get those requests and when they’re from someone who’s insistent that they don’t have any other time or it seems important—how do you push back against that or how do you evaluate those things and make a decision about whether you’re going to, you know, sacrifice the schedule that you were going to have for something—or that you’re not going to? How do you process that and make sure that you don’t end up consistently setting the time aside and then not giving yourself that time? EW: So I think a lot of that comes back to the idea of sort of having faith in yourself. And I am so fortunate as a consultant to be able to control my own time and other people can’t see my calendar. So if I say I’m not available before Tuesday at 1:00 PM, no one has any reason—I mean now, if they listen to this podcast, great, now they know! [Laughter] EW: But, no one has any reason to question my calendar, right? Like, they want to meet with me and I will give them some number of times. You know, I’ll say I’m available this chunk of time and this chunk of time. And so that’s one thing—is literally being in control of my own calendar and believing that I have the right to manage my own time. And the other piece of this for me, is that mornings are when I do my best work. And I was telling a friend about this a couple months back, and she said, “Well but you go out hiking on Tuesday mornings. Have tried doing your hiking in the afternoon instead?” And I just had like, an off-the-cuff response of, “Why should my work get all of my best brain?” KL: Yeah! EW: It was what my dad would call like, a throwaway comment, but I started thinking about it after I had said it, and realized that’s actually core to the way I manage my time. If you wait until you’re running on fumes before you do any sort of self care, the kinds of self care you can do are super limited. If you wait until a Friday night for the first time for you to like, take time to let your brain rest, pretty much all you’re going to be able to do is sit on the couch and watch Netflix. [25:00] SWB: You don’t know my life! [Laughter] EW: Sitting on the couch and watching Netflix is a glorious joy that we should all partake in as much as we can. But if that’s the only thing you can do, it’s sort of not giving yourself a full range of nutrition of what it is your body needs, and your brain needs, to sort of heal and take care of itself—and keep you in your best prime. So I think a lot about—I mean I used to think about this a lot and now it’s super second-nature, I’ve just ingrained it. That, I’ve set up this schedule to make it so that I am able to do my job. To make it so that I am able to work with clients well, and I am able to take on contracts and sort of manage these hairy people problems. And just sort of deal with everything that running a business entails. If I shortchange the structure that I set up to keep myself safe and healthy, I’m limiting my sustainability as a person with a career. SWB: And you know, I know everybody has different capacities, and everybody has different blends of types of work—and amount of work versus other stuff going on in their lives—that’s sort of an optimal blend for them. But I love this idea that, I think is true for everybody—there is a way of doing work that is sustainable and that is giving you energy. And there is a way of working that is just chew right through you. And, for me, I know it’s been hard to give myself the gift of setting some of those limits because I feel both kind of a constant drive professionally—but also I guess I just really love doing stuff. I’ve realized something about myself. I used to think that to have work down time, what I should be doing is “relaxing.” And what I realized is that I don’t actually enjoy relaxing. Like, I like a spa day every now and again, for sure. But I do not like to hang out all day on a weekend day and like, binge watch a show. I don’t enjoy that at all—I hate it. And for me, I need to do non-work things—like you mentioned going hiking. I need to be doing something active, whether that’s intellectually active or physically active, I need to be doing something active in order to feel like I’m having an enjoyable and sort of, satisfying time. But that I need to give myself over to those activities and not let work bleed into them. I have a big habit of doing the like, work-cation, where I go somewhere for a conference or something and then I tack on a little bit of vacation time. And that’s fine, because I get to see new places that way, and it’s amazing. It’s an incredible thing I’ve been able to do. But I cannot confuse that with an actual vacation, where I went to a place with the intention of not working. KL: Right, and exploring it and seeing new things and actually taking it in, instead of being like, I have this break, where I can go and take a twenty minute walk and maybe see something while I’m trying to… SWB: Or even taking a day or two at the end of a business trip is still hard, you know. I think something you said, Eileen, that i’m going to be thinking about for a long time, is why should work get the benefit of all of my best brain time. SWB: So like, being able to go on a trip and saying, okay, I’m only going on this trip for personal enrichment, so I’m going to give my best brain time to enjoying being in this place. I’m not going to use it all up at the conference before I get to see anything. I really love that concept and I think I’m going to be thinking about that for a while. You have this schedule that’s really closely intertwined with your partner’s schedule. Where you take these hikes together, and you used to work on a lot of projects together. But he’s recently been working in more of a full time capacity versus working directly with you on projects, right? EW: Yes. SWB: How has that shift gone? EW: It has been a really interesting shift. One thing is like, some of the things we just literally time-shifted. Like, we used to do Tuesday morning hikes that ended around lunch time. And now we do Tuesday mornings that end at like, 10:00am. So he’s not starting significantly later than he would otherwise. It means we have to get up earlier and leave the house earlier. And this time of year, the sun doesn’t even rise until like 7:30 or something. But I’ve always wanted to do sunrise hikes, and I don’t—I am not good at getting up early in the morning, it is not one of my strong points. And so I’ve never done sunrise hikes because I’m just too sleepy for that. And so now, we actually sort of have a need to do them because this is where they fit in the day. And so that is sort of a fun thing. Some of the stuff is the same but in shifting it, we found new places to explore. It’s a little bit like—it makes me think of design constraints are what make artists sort of have their most interesting insights and creative bursts. Because there are like little constraints to work within. So now some of the scheduling constraints have made us find—like we found some more trails that are closer to home. [30:00] Because we live in the mountains, which is great, and there are trails everywhere. But it usually takes us a good solid thirty or forty minutes of driving to get to a trailhead. And if you only have two and a half hours total, like, that’s a lot of time eaten up driving. So we’ve finding a lot of more local trails. And these are not really marked trails. They’re not in guide books, right? They’re much more like a trail across someone’s land that is posted that people can walk here and that’s safe and fine and legal and everything. But you have to sort of search them out. So it’s been fun; it’s been a new set of explorations. One of the reasons that both he and I pay attention to this stuff a lot, is that we both he have chronic health conditions that preclude us from overworking. You were saying earlier, like, “How do you make sure that you respect the time that you set aside for yourself?” And a great way to do that is if your body just shuts down if you stop respecting that time. That will learn you up really quickly. So both of us are in a position if we do do too much work, and if we do over-stress ourselves, our bodies will just react very strongly and in ways that are not pleasant. And so even with him doing more regular work and more sort of full time work, we are finding ways to make sure that we’re preserving what keeps us healthy. SWB: You know, I think about the number of people I know who are managing a chronic condition and it’s a lot. But I also think that all of us are managing health in general and that’s probably something that we all need to be better keeping in mind. Regardless of whether we have a specific diagnosis or not. We are fragile little human people, and, right? KL: Yeah I think we’re all dealing with just, the state of things, especially in the last year, eighteen months. SWB: Oh boy, are we! KL: And I feel like you don’t think of that as a condition or a thing you’d need to pay attention to or factor into how you plan your days or how you work or how you spend time with people, but it absolutely is. And I think just your point about being aware is just such a good one. EW: There’s a phrase I really love in the disability rights community that people who are not currently disabled are are just temporarily able-bodied. For some people it’s very temporary. And for some people it’s like, maybe you’re getting a month of able-bodiedness, and some people are going to have years of able-bodiedness. But for the most part, like, it’s a pretty universal thing that at some point you will not be able-bodies anymore. So making the most of preserving that while you can and doing what you can to make sure that you’re not contributing to your own pain or your own exhaustion, is really important. KL: Yeah, wow. SWB: Yeah. This stuff is just gonna be so valuable for people to hear and get their—to get a little tiny Eileen in their head, whenever they’re looking at their calendar and making decisions. KL: [Laughs] Are you doing career, life coaching? EW: Yeah, I train the rabbits. One rabbit per person—it’s a pocket rabbit for like, a good two months until it becomes not a pocket rabbit anymore. KL: Yes! Let’s do that! SWB: Katel would really like a pocket rabbit. KL: I kind of want to go back to the beginning. Something that you were saying about not wanting to build things for people that they didn’t use. To me, when you started also talking about how you got to be living on this farm and how that was a family thing—I think just the idea of farm life, you know, whatever you might imagine that to be. You kind of do what really needs to be done and you don’t do anything extraneous. I can see all of that really syncing up and I imagine that that impacted the way you approach work and the way you do things. I don’t know if you felt that way. EW: Yeah, no, that’s definitely true. I think it’s less pointed and and more underlying deep understandings. Even just things like when the season changes. When it’s fall turning into winter, there’s a whole bunch of things you need to do before the ground freezes—like you can’t move fence posts once the ground has frozen. And you can’t sort of like, rearrange things. When the first frost comes, you need to pick all the tomatoes, today, because tomorrow they will be ruined. And so you abandon whatever other project you were kind of thinking about doing because this project now has the highest priority. And I don’t feel like I have any super direct lessons from that, but just as a sort of philosophy, like, what’s the most important thing to do right now? Let’s make sure we get that done first before we fritter off doing other things that might be more fun—but five days from now we’re going to be really said we did it in the wrong order. KL: Yeah. SWB: Well, it just seems like it totally connects you to a timescale and a rhythm that is outside of what most people would associate with their work—people who aren’t working on farms. I think it’s maybe a good reminder that there are many other ways of looking at the day, than like, through the lens of an iCalendar. KL: Yeah. EW: Yes. There’s also a whole bunch of like, farm interaction stuff. If you try to have one kind of animal in by itself—like if you just have chickens. It doesn’t work as well as if you have chickens and pigs. [35:00] And if you’re like, raising vegetables, you want something that’s gonna eat all the scraps from your vegetables. Rabbits will eat all of the kale scraps that we don’t eat. And there’s something really sort of neat and foundational in the way that all the waste from one thing feeds another thing. Like, I don’t really feel bad if I end up throwing out food—not like, huge amounts of food—but when there’s food that’s done, it just goes in the compost. And then the compost turns into garden dirt, and then I grow more food with it next year. There’s something very soothing in that, and there’s something sort of nice in finding the place where what feels like waste, can actually be turned into fodder for something else. SWB: Well, that’s yet another amazing metaphor that I think will stick with me. Ok, we have time for one last question. What is the most rewarding thing that you spent time doing this week? EW: Ok, so it was -26º F at my house last Tuesday; it was very cold. And we were like, what are we gonna do? Like, it’s freezing and we can’t go outside and we were feeling sort of stir-crazy. And so I took some really thick, warm fleece, and I made like a sweatshirt that has a cowl neck so you can put your entire head inside this sort of scuba neck. It’s like living inside a fluff. SWB: GO ON… EW: And it has a kangaroo pocket, so you put your hands in the warm belly space—it was just very, like, cozy. And I was very grateful to have the skills but also the machines in my house to let me make that clothing and have it be really warm and fuzzy. And I put it on and I’m like, I’m not taking this off for, like, three days. It’s perfect. KL: That’s awesome. I really picturing this thing, too. SWB: Yeah, I love it so much. Well, Eileen, it has been amazing to chat with you. I’m so happy that we could get the time to share with other people how you make time in your life. Where can people find you online? EW: People can find me primarily on Twitter @webmeadow. I’m also at webmeadow.com, but that’s just like a static website. Twitter is a good place for me because it’s full of pictures of animals and also snarky comments. SWB: Well, that is one of my favorite combos. KL: Yes. SWB: Alright, thank you Eileen! EW: Thanks for having me. Fuck Yeah of the WeekKL: You know when your friend gets promoted, or they launch their new portfolio, or they finally meet someone who just gets them—and you’re totally pumped for them? That’s our next segment. The Fuck Yeah of the Week: where we get super excited about someone or something that’s just been killing it lately. So, who’s our Fuck Yeah of the Week? SWB: Well, our Fuck Yeah of the Week this week, is 2018 liberations. Let me tell you about what that is. So Cate Huston, who’s the mobile engineering lead at Automattic—the people who make WordPress by the way—she wrote this blog post a the beginning of the year where she said, “I hate new year’s resolutions. Not because I don’t believe in goals or working on myself, or the new year as a time to reflect and adjust. But because I’m tired of focusing on the ways I’m inadequate and need to do better. I hate seeing my friend worry about what they need to do better. Especially right now, when the world is selling so many of us short.” I love this sentiment. That new year’s resolutions can be great but they can also be problematic if they’re just reinforcing ideas that you’re just not good enough. So, a few of Cate’s 2018 liberations were things like, “Doing things because I’m flattered to be asked at all.” For example, being a token woman on a panel, and saying yes just because she felt flattered invited. Nope! She’s not doing it anymore. Apologizing for her achievements was another one. That’s definitely something I’ve heard myself doing before. Where, you know, I’ll play down the fact that I’ve, I don’t know, written three books, or run my own business for half a dozen years. Like, those things are pretty cool, and I want to be excited about them. So I’m really happy to have found 2018 liberations and especially excited because all these other cool women started chiming in. Here are a couple more examples that I think you all are really going like, that have come out in the past couple weeks. One is from Ellen Pao. She said that she was going to stop spotlighting people who don’t pay it forward. “I try to use my voice to highlight the great work of others with the hope that they will shine their light on even more others. But some people hold all the light for themselves,” she wrote. She said that in 2018, she wants to “shine more light on people who deserve more attention but are systematically neglected.” And then there’s Karolina Szczur. She said that she was going to liberate herself from white feminism. “If feminism, allyship, or what-have-you isn’t intersectional and going beyond binary gender, there’s work to be done,” she wrote. “Feminism and allyship aren’t fashionable lifestyle choices.” Or this one from Erica Joy—she said, “assuming best intentions and similar pieces of advice that require I minimize experiences that are painful.” She says she’s done with that. So, ladies, what are your liberations for 2018? [40:00] KL: I love this too, and it’s such a good question. I feel like at liberations versus resolutions, it’s like, just so much more positive. In fact, I went to therapy earlier today, and I told my therapist all about it and she was super excited. So I felt like reaffirming in itself. And you know, that really just made me think about putting a focus on self care and self-betterment, and just not being worried—that it’s ok to put that first. SWB: First off, like, shoutout for therapy. KL: YES. SWB: Therapy’s cool. KL: Hands up! SWB: People who go to therapy are great. Finding a good therapist is amazing. One of the things that I also love about what you’re saying, is that you’re talking about self care in the way that I really think it’s meant to be, right? Like, sometimes you see hashtag selfcare, and that’s nothing but buying yourself something expensive. And we’ve all bought ourselves something—ok, I bought some fancy face cream, hashtag self care. Bu that’s not actually really nurturing or nourishing yourself. That’s a pretty shallow moment in time that feels nice, but what you’re really talking about is like, making sure you’re getting what you really need in life, and getting the support from others and having somebody to talk to. Those kinds of things are such a deeper level, that we need to be able to talk about distinct from like, I bought some cool earrings ’cause I was sad. KL: Yeah, I want to let go of feeling shy about talking about that stuff. And, ultimately, let go of feeling shy in general, because I feel like I’m shy about things I should not be. And I don’t know, I think that’s a good place to start. SWB: Fuck yeah! JL: I love face cream! [Laughter] JL: One of the things I actually love about face cream, almost, is the same way I love my Fuck Yeah wine glasses—is that, like, I feel so rushed all the time. And my daily beauty routine, when I stop and have that moment—and of course it doesn’t matter if it’s a $5 face cream or $100 face cream—I just like that moment that stops and says, this moment’s about me. Yeah, I really like that. SWB: Totally! KL: You feel like you’re in the commercial… [Laughter] KL: And you’re like, you have the towel on your head, and you’re like, “yes, Noxzema clean!” [Laughter] JL: Yes! This moment—Rebecca Gayheart! She was the best, the Noxzema girl! KL: Right! Oh gosh. SWB: But it’s not just the like, face cream, right? It’s not really about the product, it’s about the time. KL: It’s the moment. SWB: And like that little bit of something for you. I like to pause and remember that because its’ ok to, like I said, buy myself a pair of earrings when I feel sad. Ok, I’ve been there, I’ve done that. Like, I’m not saying that that’s necessarily a bad thing to do. But you’re not really liberating yourself from shit that way. Like, that’s not really the answer here. I think my 2018 liberation is that I want to liberate myself from worrying about how I’m going to be perceived all the time, and just trying to exist a little bit more. One of the things that I’ve noticed about myself, is that as I’ve put myself out there professionally more, it means things like speaking, right? You have to get up on stage in front of people. Writing books—you have your name on this thing and it’s out there in the world, and like, people read it and they have opinions and feelings about it, and they talk about it. And all of that feels so personal. And I think it’s important to look at feedback from people—that has useful things in it and it’s going to help me become a better speaker, or writer, or whatever. But, it is not useful for me to internalize that as some kind of reflection of myself. Or that like, if somebody didn’t like my book, I am a bad person and should feel bad. And that’s really easy for me to do. I found myself doing it a lot. And so I’m really trying to allow some emotional distance and be like, you know, I wrote a book. That book is gonna be liked by some people and not by others. I cannot actually change anything in it at this point. It is on paper, in stores, like I can’t do shit about it if somebody doesn’t like it. So, I can let it go. And to also be like, yeah, it was a book or it was a talk, it was a podcast episode—it was what it was. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Like, there are a lot of books out there. None of them are perfect. Some of them are better than others, and mine will be valuable to some people. It is not the end of the world and it is certainly not the end of me if there’s negativity that somebody has about it. So, that is definitely something that I want to liberate myself from. I suspect it’ll be a year long process, and probably longer than a year. But, you know, hold me accountable to that this year. JL: I love that. I will definitely—I think both of us can hold you accountable. Because you’re a badass. Your book is great. KL: It’s fucking great. JL: And I can totally imagine—and we’ve talked about this—and I totally get that. Because no one–there can be a hundred people that will be like, “I loved your book,” and then one person says something shitty. KL: Right. JL: And then you’re like, I can’t stop thinking about that one shitty thing that person said. Which is so unfair, because your book’s amazing. KL: Yeah. SWB: And it’s also imperfect, right? Like, of course it is—all books are, right? Like, all things are—all things are imperfect, so being able to just be like, yeah. I wrote the best thing I could, during the time I had, with the knowledge I had at that time, and the constraints I had at that time. That is what I was able to produce and put into the world, and here we are. [45:00] JL: Fuck yeah. SWB: Fuck yeah. KL: Fuck yeah. JL: So, my 2018 liberation, I’ve decided, is to stop caring about what other people think about how I feed my child. On one hand, you have people who have very strong opinions about breastfeeding and how long you should breastfeed your child. And if you breastfeed your child for a shorter duration than what they deem “okay,” then you get a lot of judgment. And then on the other hand, I have a lot of judgement for the amount of time that I need to take to breastfeed or to pump and to work that into my schedule for people that want me to do other things besides provide that for my child. So this year, I want to not care about what other people think about how long I do or do not continue to provide breast milk for my child. KL: I love that. SWB: So, 2018 liberations—I’ve been so excited about these ever since Cate posted about hers at the beginning of the month. Even though we’re a few weeks into the year now, if you have not come up with a liberation for the year yet, I recommend it, because let me tell you, it feels great. JL: Also, liberate yourself from having to do it right at January 1st. You can liberate yourself anytime. KL: That’s right! Oh my god, do it tomorrow. Do it on February 1st! SWB: Come up with a new one every week! KL: Yeah! [Laughter] [Musical interlude] 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 our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Eileen Webb for being our guest today. We’ll be back next week with another episode. [Outro music] | |||
| 19 Jan 2018 | Fancy, via South Philadelphia (Bonus!) | 00:26:19 | |
Hey look, it’s a bonus-ode! We sent our demo to a bunch of friends, and they sent us back, like, a zillion questions. So we thought we’d answer a few on air—and then ask you a question of our own. > Does it alienate potential clients if I’m tweeting a lot about sexual harassment in tech? Do I care? As always, we’ve got the show notes—and a full transcript—right here. Show notesHow many bottles of wine does it take to answer your mail? Technically none, but it’s more fun this way. In this week’s mailbag, we talk about:
Thanks as always to our friends The Diaphone for the use of our theme song, Maths, off the album of the same name! TranscriptJENN 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. SWB: Hey everyone, today on No, You Go, we’re doing something a little bit different. You see, we sent out our demo episode to a whole bunch of friends recently, and we started getting a lot of questions back from them. So what we thought we would do is go through that mailbag and answer some questions. And we thought, even better, let’s open up some wine, and answer those questions with the mics on. So, why don’t we go ahead and see what our listeners have to say. [Intro music] SWB: So, Jenn, what are we drinking tonight? JL: I have good news for you, this wine is already started. We are drinking tonight a lovely Côtes du Rhône. ALL: Mmmmmmmmm KL: That’s fancy, for fancy ladies. JL: It’s from the wine cellar of 11th Street Liquors. [Laughter] SWB: I was gonna say, it’s fancy, via South Philadelphia. KL: That’s right. JL: The South Philadelphia State Store. Thank you state store. KL: We don’t mess around. SWB: Okay, so let’s see what’s in the mailbag!” KL: So, a listener from Vancouver, Canada asks, “How did you know you wanted to do big things?” SWB: That’s such a tough question. I spent my childhood and early adulthood feeling really ambitious, but kind of not knowing where to put that ambition—like not being clear what I was working toward. And it was not until probably my late twenties that I had some idea of what I might be working toward in my career. I feel like it was more of a gradual figuring out on my part, to get an idea of what made me tick, what made me feel satisfied, so I knew where to put my energy and wasn’t feel like I was throwing my energy all over the place. KL: It doesn’t always necessarily feel like big things, but I am always looking for things that make me feel uncomfortable and nervous, and speaking in front of people makes me feel that way. So, I don’t know, this just feels like really good practice, and it’s exciting. JL: I think I’m with you in that I don’t necessarily think of them as big things, but I guess that’s the same as answering one of those questions like, “Well, my biggest weakness is caring too much.” [Laughter] So, I don’t want to be cliche here, because, they are big things. I also don’t want to sell anything that I do short, or anything that we do short. I think thought that if they’re things that I really like doing, it makes it easier to then get into it. So I think I just always wanted to do things that I really liked doing, and sometimes if you really want to do something that you love, you have to go big. KL: Totally. And it might not feel like, oh, I’m going to embark on this huge thing to you, because you like all these things about it. SWB: I think it’s also, you know, tying back to something we talked about in our first episode was that we really wanted to talk about being ambitious, and what that means. And I think that’s a scary word for a lot of people to use, and I think maybe particularly for women to use, because it’s like, you’re not necessarily socialized to think that what you’re doing should be ambitious. So it’s like, I don’t really think of anything I’m doing as being big things, but when I look at what other people are doing, I think that they’re all doing big things. So maybe I am doing big stuff and I am just not—I’m minimizing it. JL: Yeah, totally. Yeah, you’re completely right. And we almost get used to downgrading it, and thinking that is wasn’t a big deal, and it almost becomes a self-defense mechanism. KL: Yeah, like just in case it doesn’t happen, or you fail, or you stumble. SWB: Or in case somebody out there shits all over it. KL: Yeah, sure. SWB: That’s certainly something that I have felt. When I started writing publicly about my work—not writing in my work, but writing about my field—I was very nervous that people would think that my ideas weren’t valuable, weren’t adding anything. Or that they were just plain wrong. I think that a lot of people have that sensibility. You know we talk about imposter syndrome, and feeling like what you’re doing is not that important. And we try to tell women to be proud of their accomplishments. But part of that is a very real fear, because there are definitely assholes out there who will tell you that what you’re doing doesn’t matter, isn’t valuable, or isn’t good. It can be healthy to protect yourself a little bit, and it can sometimes also be difficult, I think, to like, parse out the difference between minimizing your accomplishments because you don’t want to take up too much space, or minimizing your accomplishments because you don’t want to be a target. You know, I’ve definitely had—not too bad so far, but—my share of trolls who have come after me for things I’ve written or said online, and a lot of their arguments really boil down to: How dare you? How dare you have thoughts and opinions, and how dare you exist in the world sharing them? How could you not see all of that around you all the time and not kind of internalize that a little bit? JL: Sara, I think that’s a great point. So, how do you know you want to do big things? Well, if you’re willing to put up with that shit, then I guess you know that you want to do big things, because you care about it even with the potential negatives that come with putting yourself out there and doing big. If it’s important to you enough that you can be like, eff those jerks. SWB: Totally. Like most days I have that feeling. I can put a middle finger up and get out there and do what I want to do. There are times, though, when the assholes get the best of you. And I think that’s okay. I tend to look at it as like, part of doing ambitious work is also recognizing that it’s not like, one unbroken line of progress. You’re going to have those moments where you’re really feeling capable and you can get a lot done, and you feel confident to get out there and talk about your work, and then you’re going to have those moments where you don’t feel that. And that’s okay. Because it doesn’t mean you’re not going to have another idea or another opportunity to get out there and bring your ideas to the world. JL: Here’s another question that we got: “My attention is spread thin across so many things.” She wants to know: How do you have time for hobbies? Do you have time for hobbies? KL: Sometimes I’m not even sure what my hobbies are anymore—we’ve talked about this before—because I feel like there’s a lot of crossover between things you love to do and things you’re doing for work. But I did realize recently that I haven’t read a full book front to back in a really long time. That made me super depressed. That’s one of my goals this year. So I know that’s not necessarily a super glamorous hobby, but you have to prioritize it. SWB: Well I also think, you know, what counts as a hobby? Is this a hobby? On the one hand, I think that this podcast is a super-serious part of my work, in the sense that I am putting a lot of focused time into it, I’m taking it very seriously, we’re thinking about things like sponsorships and producers, and we want this to be something that is polished and legit. On the other hand, it is also an opportunity to hang out with some of my closest friends, and drink wine, and order Thai food, and laugh—and that’s a good social activity. And so where does this sit? Like a lot of things in my life, I feel like it sits somewhere halfway in between. And I’m okay with that. That said, I think, you know, we talked about this a bit in our first episode, and you do have to have time that is not work time, and you do have to have things in your life that are not work things. For me that includes lots of physical activity; I really like to make sure that I go running and I go to the gym and lift. And it also means that I spend time reading books, and I don’t read all of the professional books that people around me seem to be reading. I sometimes do read books in my field, but I spend a lot of time skipping those in favor of picking up fiction, because I feel like that’s a healthier choice for me. KL: I just want to say that I do read the books that I publish. Just to any authors who are listening, I just want to make sure that you know that. [Laughter] JL: Do you know the last book that I read? It was called Solving Child Sleep Problems. [Laughter] KL: Sounds accurate. SWB: So, a really fun hobby. JL: It’s really great. I actually listen to the Audible book when my child wakes up at 2am, and I nurse him. KL: Is there a hobby that either of you have that you used to do earlier in your life that you wish you could bring back into your life? SWB: Not exactly, but there is something that I used to do way more of that I realized a little while ago had fallen by the wayside a bit on, which was cooking. I have always liked to cook and I really like to be able to make things from lots of different types of cuisines, different types of foods. And for a long time my husband and I would cook pretty much every night. Originally, we couldn’t afford to go out to eat all the time, and we still liked to eat interesting and good things, and healthy things, and things that come from vegetables, and so we would cook them. Over time, you know, I found that we would have more disposable income and it would be easier to go out more often, and that’s fun, but I was starting to really miss the feeling of setting down my work and doing something that was a complete shift in my brain and doing something with my hands. And so I have been trying to make sure I set my work down earlier more often, and really spend a little bit of time on the whole chopping, cleaning vegetables, prepping things, sautéing things—all of those little bits of cooling that are not necessarily fancy, but that I want to have a pause to make a meal from scratch. And so I have been really making sure that I am making time for that more evenings than I was for a while. JL: I keep going on the opposite spectrum. We now have an Instant Pot, and we do not do as much. KL: Hey that’s not shame, that’s all game. SWB: Instant Pots are great. I love my Instant Pot. Can we just do like an Instant Pot episode? JL: But yeah I don’t mean to keep bringing it down, but I’m going to be honest: no, I don’t have time for hobbies. That’s just not a thing I have time for anymore. So I do sort of as Sara was saying consider this a hobby, because it’s not my 9 to 5, and I really enjoy this. So I guess it is how you define hobbies. If hobbies are something you choose to do that doesn’t necessarily pay your bills, then yes, this would be a hobby for me. I like, seriously schedule every hour. I don’t preschedule it, but every hour of my day it’s either at work, or with my 10-month-old, or sleeping. So every hour I’m spending not trying to catch up on sleep is I guess a hobby. So then this would be a hobby. But other things I keep struggling to try to make time for. I don’t exercise or cook as much as I want to. To go to a yoga class, oh my god. KL: It takes planning. JL: And the yoga class near me is an hour and a half. Who’s got an hour and a half? KL: That’s so much yoga. JL: It’s like, so much! SWB: I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I hate yoga. KL: I love it, but those are long classes. JL: Yeah, they’re real long. So then I try to do online workout videos where I can, but even then, you have to do it when your kid’s napping, and I think, if my kid’s napping, then maybe I should be napping. Everything’s a choice now. KL: Yeah, and you’re like, don’t hop around and thud around on the floor. SWB: Well okay, so I know that when you have a small child, that becomes so painfully clear that everything is a tradeoff. It is definitely easier for those without small children to make some of those choices about how they spend their time. But all of us are making tradeoffs about how we spend time, right? JL: Yeah. SWB: A lot of it has to do with what gives you energy, what makes you feel good. And for some people, they need more of that pure downtime. And other people, myself for example, kind of lose their shit a little bit when they have too much downtime. So like, if you take me to a cabin for a weekend in the mountains, and you’re like, let’s all hang out in this house all day, I’m like, that sounds awful. I am going to die here; when are we going outside for a walk? And other people don’t feel that way. So I realized, for me, I need less of that really downtime stuff, that stuff that’s really relaxing for other people, I need less of that. And that having something like this, that is sort of a creative outlet, and I’m making something, but is sort of low-stakes—that is very positive for me and that feels good in my life. JL: Let’s get another question! KL: Yeah, here’s one from San Francisco: “Something I’m interested in lately is the notion that when you’re on the corporate career track, there are clear “stages”—early career, mid-career, senior level, etc.—that are tied to titles and responsibilities. When you’re in a smaller company or work for yourself or as a consultant, that sense of being on a track isn’t so clear. What does it mean that I’ve been a consultant for 10 years? How do you talk about that or even THINK about that?” SWB: I have the same question; I’d really appreciate if someone could answer that question for me. [Laughter] KL: That is such a good question. I think that is actually an issue, a little bit, in companies in general where there aren’t necessarily clear tracks everywhere. And I think that’s also just because the way we work has evolved so much in the past decade, five years. SWB: Yeah, and I think, Katel, you’re a CEO—which is, first off, badass. Katel’s a CEO, I like to tell people that. But secondly, okay, well, you’re not getting promoted. Which is cool, because you’re in charge, but what does that mean for what growth looks like, or what the next level looks like for you? How do you know what that is in your job? And it’s unclear. You have to define that in new ways that we don’t necessarily have vocabulary for. KL: You do, and I think that is one thing that I learned along the way. I sort of had to take a lot more ownership of it than I kind of expected to. I had to—not necessarily decide, but navigate, and say, okay, I think it’s time to make some sort of progression upwards or to over here, and try this new responsibility out or whatever. And I think you kind of have to forge that ahead a little bit for yourself. And if you’re at a company that has more team members, get people who are going to advocate for you to make that happen. SWB: And you know, for me, I think about this listener who says she’s been a consultant for 10 years. I haven’t been a consultant quite so long. But it’s been over six years, long enough to ask myself some of these same questions. Like, do I just keep doing this forever? And for me, what I’ve found is that I look for constant reinvention. Am I changing up what I offer to my clients? Am I changing up how I spend my time? Writing books is a big piece of that. Not that that is a right answer for everybody, but that being an author is a different kind of role and a different kind of work, and that has allowed me to grow in different ways than doing consulting alone would. And also looking at, am I feeling like I am gaining in some fashion? And some of that is like, am I gaining in influence? Or am I able to have conversations with a different level of person in the companies that I am working with than I was originally? And I try to take stock of those things and see if I feel like I have growth on those fronts. And for me I have found that to be a really helpful way of looking at it. KL: I love that. And I think you have to take it on to craft that into your, you know, quote-unquote story, in terms of what you tell people that you do, and how you tell that. JL: Yeah, I think when I was consulting, I would go back to my resume or my LinkedIn, which some people may not use, which is fine, but whatever you’re using to track what you’re doing. And I would add new entries. I mean, I was consulting the whole time, but I would mark projects that I was doing. And sometimes having a form to fill out, where you’re forced to list what you’re doing, and like your accomplishments, will help you start writing down the things. Like, oh yes, I did this this year, or I did this side project. And when you start listing them, it’s a way to make sure you’re—my mom would always say this—“are you keep track of everything that you’re doing?” And I’m like, “yeah, mom.” [Laughter] KL: Yeah, you’re accounting for it. JL: Yeah. So some sort of place where you can track that, whether it’s your personal portfolio or your resume or LinkedIn. Something where you’re actually writing down what you’re doing, whether you’re trying to get more work, or you’re trying to move into some other position at some point. SWB: I also think that some of this comes back to the way that women particularly are socialized, right? Because so often we have been taught to not make too many waves, the idea of advocating for yourself and stating what path you want to be on, and saying, “I want these responsibilities, I want to go here”—that is not something that many women are practiced in, or that many women feel safe to be able to do. And so I think part of that makes it more difficult for us to put ourselves out there and kind of stake a claim and say, “Look at all the things I am doing. Here’s the direction that I’m going in.” And it’s more comfortable to say, like, okay, is somebody else going to define my next job title for me, my next role for me. And it’s hard, because on the one hand work has changed so much in the past few years, as Katel mentioned, and obviously gender norms are changing, too. But we still have so much historical baggage around them that they definitely have not caught up with the way that work is changing. That can just make it extra challenging for women, and I don’t think that we can resolve that, but I do think we need to be able to talk about that. And I think creating the space to talk about that is really important, because it’s a real thing. KL: Yeah, and I hope that more people, more women will feel like, at least they can practice talking about it, and I think that’s a big step, too. Even if you can practice talking about it with a friend or a colleague, that helps a little bit. SWB: Yeah, totally. Well I think that kind of bleeds into the next question that we got from a listener, which is, how do we blend “professional” and “personal.” Imagine there are definitely finger quotes around both of those. She says, “does it alienate potential clients if I’m tweeting a lot about sexual harassment in tech?” And then also, “Do I care? How do you figure this out, and what are the tradeoffs for that?” I love this question. I love this question because I have thought this question in my head a hundred different times. Nothing gets better if you can’t talk about it, and I’m tired of feeling like I can’t talk about the things that matter to me, and so I am navigating the ramifications of that. JL: Yeah, and I think on that note, you can choose how you want to tweet about things, you can choose how you want to talk about things. You don’t have to say, well I can never talk about politics, I can never talk about sexual harassment. But you can choose how you talk about those and you can talk about those respectfully. And I think that’s sort of a way you can navigate it. And you don’t have to do that either, you can go out there swinging, if you want to. It’s just a matter of what feels comfortable for you and how you want to represent yourself. But to be honest, yes, I think you do have to assume that anyone at any point can read what you are writing if you’re putting it out there, and that people will make opinions on you based on that. Of course, that can also win you work and friends and relationships, also. I mean I think there’s two sides of that. SWB: I also think that what might be safe for me to do is not going to be safe for everybody. I mean, I’m relatively established. I have a pretty strong network. I have a name behind myself. I’m also from a certain class, you know. I went to college! You know, for me, the tradeoffs don’t look the same as they would for somebody else. JL: You also a have a book, and this is like, something that we know you’re passionate about. So I’m not going to see your Twitter and be surprised reading it there. SWB: No, but in fact to write that book I had to have already made this choice. I had to make the choice to say, huh, I might alienate some tech companies that might otherwise hire me by writing this book. Am I okay with that? It was an uncomfortable choice that I still have fears about, but I guess—we talked about this in the last episode—but I realized that I was going to be unhappy if I chose the other option, if I chose not doing this. That was going to be something that I would regret. And so I decided that I was going to be really honest with myself, like, this might cause me some problems, but I am going to do it anyway, and I’m going to navigate those as they come, because it’s that important to me. JL: And finally our last question: “Who inspired you? Who made you feel like you could step up and be visible as a speaker, writer, etc.?” SWB: So there’s obviously lots of people who have inspired me over the years, and I think that’s true for all of us. None of us can boil it down to one thing or one person. But somebody I’d really like to mention, particularly in relation to the previous question about the personal and the professional, and how do you blend them, is Karen McGrane. So, Karen McGrane is known in the mobile content strategy and UX fields. She’s a wonderful speaker, and I used to see her at conferences and just think, what a badass. And I was so impressed by her work. And I remember one day, I used to edit a magazine called A List Apart, and we got a piece from her. It was supposed to be a column—she was a kind of regular writer—and it was entitled, “Give a crap. Don’t give a fuck.” And I remember getting that and thinking, like, oooh, can we publish this? And I think she kind of asked that question when she sent it, too. And she talked about how being great means being vulnerable, and it means not giving a fuck what other people think. And it was this kind of really intimate piece of writing, and it took me aback a little bit, because it was so good, and it was kind of unexpected from somebody who I thought had paid so much attention to crafting that professional profile. And I think that that’s when I first realized that maybe I could have some of that, too. Maybe I could bring intimacy and vulnerability into my work and into my writing, even writing writing about my work, and still be perceived as professional and still be perceived as credible. I went kind of like whole-hog that direction, and that kind of led me to where I am now. And so I’m super thankful for that, and I think about that a lot as a really inspiring moment in my life. JL: When I worked at Happy Cog, we had reviews every few times a year, and one of our goals was being, like, a thought leader in the industry. And so, we were all really encouraged to put our thoughts out and share. And that was one of the things I really loved about working there, this whole idea in the mid-2000s of really sharing what you were doing, and that it was just a community. And so I think between Jeffrey Zeldman and Greg Hoy, I had a lot of support of like, getting my thoughts out and putting myself out there and really talking to different people and trying to submit to conferences. And I did my first conference talk—it was a group talk—but I co-presented with Mark Huot. I did front-end and Mark did backend, and we were constantly pairing together, and so he was always super supportive of me. It was easier to get started with a friend, so that was an easy way to break in. Like, how do we do this? Well let’s do it together. And it feels way better to have had that person standing there next to me—literally next to me—while I was presenting. I made Mark go with me to every talk I was doing. [Laughter] SWB: He’s here right now. [Laughter] KL: Hey Mark! JL: Hey Mark! KL: On that note, I just want to say that both of you inspire me. I know that’s cheesy, but— JL and SWB: Awwwwwwww! KL: You do, because you’re both so smart and creative and funny, and I love being around you, and you just inspire me to try new things, and I’m just so grateful. JL: That’s awesome. SWB: Thank you, Katel. You inspire me, too. [Laughter] SWB: There’s a circle of inspiration now. KL: There’s a rainbow flowing across the sky right now. SWB: Well, before we spend the next 45 minutes talking about how we each inspire the other over and over again, I think we should move on to our very final question, which is actually a question all of you. We’d really love to hear who—and what—you want to hear on the show. Are there people you’d love for us to have on as guests? Are there topics that you’d really like us to tackle? Are there things that you’d like to be able to do, whether that’s getting up on stage and giving a talk, like Jenn was talking about, or writing a book, like I was talking about, or anything else that you would love us to talk about or bring experts on to talk about. If you have an idea, let us know. You can go to noyougoshow.com to send us a message, or tweet us @noyougoshow. JL : 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. Our theme music is Maths by The Diaphone. You can find us online as Sara mentioned at noyougoshow.com, or on Twitter @noyougoshow. We’ll be back next week with another brand-new episode. [Outro music] | |||
| 30 Jan 2018 | Cool Adults with Sara Chipps | 00:34:16 | |
Today’s show is all about getting started: taking the steps to turn new ideas into living, breathing (and sometimes even money-making) projects. Our guest this week is the totally rad Sara Chipps—the co-founder of Girl Develop It, and now the CEO of Jewelbots, which makes smart, open-source friendship bracelets that girls can code. (We want some for all our BFFs.) > Here’s what we covered (and as always, you can find the full transcript below). Show notesFirst up, we talk about all the URLs we’ve purchased—and how sometimes, spending $5 is just what you need to take your own idea seriously.
Then, we fangirl out during our interview with Sara Chipps, who not only created Jewelbots, but also co-founded Girl Develop It. We talk about:
Also in this episode:
SponsorsThis episode of NYG is brought to you by: _
_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. _
TranscriptSara Wachter-Boettcher Today’s show is brought to you by CodePen. Ever want a place where you can write and share front-end code with others? CodePen is that place. It’s full of awesome inspiration and projects with a great community. And speaking of community, the CodePen World’s Fair is happening in May. We’ll talk more about that in a bit, but be sure to sign up for an account at codepen.io. That’s [spells out codepen.io]. [Intro music] Jenn Lukas Hey! And 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. On today’s show we’re excited to talk about getting started. We’ll discuss how we come up with new ideas and then, once we’ve got ‘em, how do we actually take them to fruition? We’re totally pumped today to talk to Sara Chipps, who has taken two of her amazing ideas, Girl Develop It and Jewelbots, and made them into reality. But first on the agenda, let’s talk about how five bucks turned into a new podcast. Getting started with just $5[1:20] KL So a couple of weeks after we started talking about the podcast, uhhh, got an email from info@noyougoshow.com and saying that we’re paying five dollars a month for the email address and now we really have to do the podcast. And at that moment I really think it became real and like this thing was really going to be real. So we kind of wanted to start there and talk about how that happened. JL Five dollars is all it takes. Five dollars and a dream. SWB [Laughs] yeah, so I was the one who sent that email and I was like, “Well, I got a credit card! I got five dollars a month. I spend five dollars a month on a lot more dumb shit than [others laugh] email accounts.” So for me it was a really low investment to also look at it and be like, “Dude, we are going to take this seriously. And I think that that’s how most anything I’ve ever done sort of came to be—by figuring out something that was small, but really concrete. And the concreteness is what helps it feel real and feel like something that you’re seriously going to do. KL And a little skin in the game. I mean, I know it’s not much, but you know when you kind of feel like you’re putting some actual cash to it, you’re like, “All right.” [Chuckles.] SWB That’s like a whole latte I can’t buy now. KL Absolutely. JL Yeah, I think that there’s definitely been a couple nights where, you know what? Maybe I’ve had a few glasses of wine and that helped make the appeal of certain domains sound good [laughs]. I’ve been known known to buy a domain or two. SWB I can’t relate to this at all. KL No, me either [all laughing]. JL After an exciting night out. But, you know, there’s one thing, you know, you’ll be at the bar with a friend, you’ll be at the coffee shop with a friend, you’ll be at the house with a friend, and you’ll be like, “Oh I have this idea,” and you’re sorta joking around and you’re like, “You know what? Lemme—lemme just pull that trigger and buy that URL,” and the next thing you know: you’ve got a URL and you’re on your way. SWB Yeah, I’m curious, Jenn, you had Cook Inside the Box a couple years ago, this web series little episodes where you and our friend, Sequoia, would cook recipes from the sides of boxes. I loved this series so much, everybody please go Google this right now if you haven’t seen it [laughter]. So I’m curious: how did that start? JL So I do remember how that happened. Oh my god, so many years ago at Converge in South Carolina, one of my favorite conferences. I think I was with Val Head and Chris Coyier and maybe a couple of other people and we were walking to go get some food. And I was telling them about how I was eating a box of Nilla Wafers and um you know those delicious cookies? And there was a recipe on the side of a box for Nilla Wafers which didn’t make any sense to me because a Nilla Wafer is just like a cookie. You just— KL You just eat it. JL You just open up the box and eat it, right? [KL chuckles] But they had this recipe and I was like, “This is amazing.” We talked about, like, what other boxes could possible have recipes on them and then I became a little bit obsessed with figuring out [laughter] that, and I thought it was really funny. And then one day a few weeks later I was telling Sequoia about this conversation and she was like, “I would totally do that with you.” And I was like, “Really?!?” I was like, someone else— KL This is a good idea. JL —someone else is in invested in this?! That’s amazing! And then that was it. We went to the grocery store and started our user research. SWB What was the first recipe you made? JL It was the Nilla Wafers’ Nilla Yogurt Freeze, which was a mix of strawberry yogurt, frozen with Nilla wafers, and the serving size was: one [laughter]. KL Was it as delicious as it sounds? JL It really actually was. It was just a little bit sad. SWB I think my favorite episode was the one where you rolled hot dogs in ketchup and then rolled them in— JL Cornflakes! Yes, cornflakes. [5:00] SWB Yes! And baked them for…not long enough? And that was a treat. Mm hmm. JL Yeah I heard that was quite—that was when I was a vegetarian so I had an easy out of not eating that, so I avoided that one. KL Yeah, you were like, “That’s all you.” JL Yeah. But yeah, you know, all of a sudden you take this thing that just happens in casual conversation, next thing you know you’ve got a YouTube web series [laughs]. SWB You know something I always think about is that one of the challenges is anything that feels big. Like there’s a lot of steps, there’s a lot of moving parts, there’s a lot of pieces to it. And so some of the biggest stuff that I’ve needed to take all the way from end to end is book stuff. And I don’t consider myself necessarily a like typical writer, just because I think everybody has a different process. But the way I do it tends to be, like, I need to have some kind of outline that’s enough structure, enough substance to it that I can imagine it coming together. And then I have all these weird tricks to actually getting it done where it’s like I pick off the easy chapters first, so then I feel like I have something of substance, all of these different things. But I don’t know a lot about techniques or process for getting something big like that done, just sort of what I’ve cobbled together and made up. Katel, running a publishing company, do you feel like you have developed some of those tools or techniques for people to kind of tackle big things? KL I was actually just talking to an author recently who had [chuckles] told me that for the past couple of months a “to do” on her list had been “write book.” And I was like, “No!” [Laughter] “Don’t do that.” I was like, “That’s too big. You’re never going to get to check it off and that’s going to feel terrible.” So along with looking at kind of how she could break things down and sort of structure them and, just like you said, pick off some things that were a little easier. You know, get a framing set up first and kind of plug in the meatier bits. One thing that we’ve started doing is just having check-ins during the writing process and I think that’s helped a lot because it’s a bit of accountability. So folks don’t feel like they’re just off in the ether writing and writing and not knowing whether they’re going in the right direction. So I think just having some tetheredness helps a lot. JL One of my favorite books of all time is Getting Things Done by David Allen, and he’s got a really, for me, approach that really resonated well, which is, you talk about what the next step is that you have to take. And you don’t worry about, like, what’s the 20-step-ahead step? It’s, what’s the next thing I want to do for this exact thing? So if it’s something like, you know, I want to write a book. Well, I was like, “Well, what’s my next step? Maybe it’s get in touch with someone who I know, like Katel, who publishes books. So my next step is to email Katel.” Just that. Not even, like, come up with an idea, not write it, not find a publisher, it’s just write someone I know. And then the other thing that I really liked about the getting things done approach is if it’s something that it’ll take less than two minutes, to do it right away. So if I can write you an email that just says, “Hey Katel, I want to talk to you about books. Let’s grab dinner sometime this week,” and that’ll take me less than two minutes, then I’d send that email. KL Yeah, I think breaking things down to as small as possible so that you can actually start checking things off your list is—it feels better than anything. SWB You know something that you just said, Jenn, about “if it takes two minutes, just do it.” I totally noticed that when we were working on starting this podcast. So you know one night we’re sitting, talking about lots of different things we needed to do, like all these macro to-do lists, right? Like, “we need to figure out microphones,” and like themes, and guests, and schedules, and like—you know it was very, very broad. And one of the things that we knew we needed to do was start recruiting a few people who could contribute to our first episode where we wanted to have these short snippets. And Katel and I, I think, both had kind of the same reaction, like, “Okay, let’s make a list of those people and assign each of us a list of those people to contact. And then, you know, we’ll do that after this meeting,” and meanwhile Jenn is literally over there like, “Okay, I sent all my emails to my people!” [Laughter] And you know that doesn’t obviously work for everything. It works for those short things though, and I think that that really gave us some momentum, and that momentum at that particular moment was really, really important and helpful, and got us all the way here where we are today! [Laughter] JL GTD, man! KL That’s right [music fades in]. Thanks to our sponsorsSWB Hey Katel, do you know what I love getting done? KL Um, nails? Snacks? SWB I mean yes, and also yes. But more than anything, I love thanking our sponsors, because I’ve realized that starting a podcast is just a lot of work. There’s so many little details to take care of and so many pieces that have to fall into place. Getting some support from wonderful sponsors has made that so much easier. One of those great sponsors is wordpress.com! WordPress is the first place I went to create our site: noyougoshow.com. It’s also how I run my personal site, sarawb.com. [10:00] Whether you’d like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating your website on wordpress.com helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. I love WordPress because it’s easy. You don’t need any special skills to create an amazing site fast. You can just pick up a template and go. But it’s also super customizable. So if you’re working with an awesome developer like our co-host Jenn, you can turn your WordPress site into pretty much anything you want. Plus they have 24/7 support and plans that start at just four dollars a month. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo to get 15 percent off your website today. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo. KL We’re also so excited to have CodePen as our sponsor. CodePen is the place to write and share code with the front-end community. You can share your code with others and explore what they’ve created by browsing all sorts of Pens. And this spring, the CodePen community is coming together in real life for the first time ever with a CodePen World’s Fair, taking place May 30th through June 1st in Chicago. Three radical days of hanging out with people who love CodePen as much as you do. Day one is an expo with art exhibits and interactive installations, day two will be amazing conference talks about front-end dev, and day three will feature fantastic workshops! Sign up at codepenworldsfair.com to hear more. That’s codepenworldsfair.com. [Interstitial music fades in and out] Interview: Sara Chipps[11:15] JL So though I’ve had a slew of my own ideas, some better than others, I’ve also been fortunate enough to be part of other projects that were the creation of others. One of these was teaching for Girl Develop It, a non-profit organization that provides affordable programs for adult women interested in learning web and software development in a judgment-free environment. I met Sara Chipps over six years ago. She co-founded GDI in New York and was looking to expand it to Philadelphia. I can’t begin to explain how flattered I was when Sara had asked me to teach the first class here in Philly, which was an intro to HTML and CSS class and, to this day, I can say that it’s been one of my favorite parts of my career. She has since embarked on new feats in robotics and wearable technology, and is the CEO of Jewelbots. I am so, so excited to have Sara here today to talk about the opportunity that she has given people to join in some of these projects with her and hear more about her current adventures! So, welcome to No, You Go, Sara! Sara Chipps Thank you so much for having me! That was the best introduction I’ve ever gotten in my life! JL [Laughs] yay! I’m fangirling here a little bit to have my friend on the show. So I’m super pumped! So, Sara, tell us about Jewelbots. SC Yeah, so Jewelbots is a project that I’ve been working on for the past almost four years. You know, I polled a lot of my male peers about how they got started in programming and how old they were, and what I heard from them is often they were, like, middle school years was apparently the prime time for people to get started programming, and often it was because of gaming or something that is traditionally masculine, which might help explain why there is such a big gender gap. So we set out to make something that was more traditionally feminine and open source. And so we met with about 200 young girls in that demographic and we talked to them about what we could build for them, what would be exciting. And what we heard from them is that their friendships and their friends are the most important thing to them at this point in time. Do you guys remember being that age? JL Oof. Yes [laughter]. SC So, yeah, so what we did was we made smart friendship bracelets. And the way they work is they detect your friends when they’re nearby and they light up when you’re together, and you can use them to send secret messages and things, and they’re also open source. So girls can program them to do all kinds of things, like go rainbow colors when all their friends are in the same place, or one girl made a metronome. They can do all kinds of animations in really cool colors, they can make games, that kind of thing. So it’s been a lot of fun. JL That’s so neat. We did, like, a beach trip a couple of years ago and we made friendship bracelets on the beach and it was the best [laughter]. SC That’s so great! JL So I don’t think that joy of friendship bracelets has faded. SC That’s so awesome. JL Knowing you from Girl Develop It and knowing a bit about Jewelbots, I think that it’s quite obvious you want to encourage women in the STEM field. For this one, would you say that you were thinking more about wearables, like were you really into that? Or were you thinking, like, “Okay, well, I’ve worked with adults. How do I get into younger girls and women getting into this?” What was your inspiration for getting this project started? SC Really it was hearing from adult women things like, “I didn’t know what an engineer was until I got to college.” And just stuff like that made us say, “Okay, when are people learning about this stuff that are getting involved in this field, and how can we make sure that that is something that they know about?” And so that’s kind of how we settled on this age group, is, you know, it’s when a lot of men are typically exposed to programming. JL Right, yeah, so you had this idea and you mentioned you know you got together with about 200 girls that gave you this feedback. How did you decide to sort of start with this? I mean it’s user research, right? How was that the next step you took? [15:00] SC So I started with an idea. So I knew I wanted to do a wearable. I knew it needed to be a bracelet just because you know if you’re doing notifications or anything like that and it’s around your neck you don’t see it, and if it’s on your—if it’s like a ring, it has to be a huge, huge ring. Yeah it’d just be like this monster. JL I would wear it probably—[laughter]. SC That’s great. So my idea was that we would make a bracelet and you could change the color based on your outfit, right? So like I wanted to wear blue today, I would make my bracelet blue. That would be like my look for the day. And I thought this was a great idea. I also thought I had remembered what it was like to be 12. So myself and a friend at ITP, which is a program here at NYU, made a prototype and brought it to schools to see what girls thought, and they were like, “That’s a dumb idea.” Well, they saw it and they’d be like, “This is cool! What is it?” And we’d tell them and they were like, “Oh, I’d never use that.” [laughs] like, “Okay, god!” [Laughter] I know, it was really rough. Because you think you remember, right? I found myself in front of classrooms, like, explaining that I was a cool adult [boisterous laughter]. Like, “I know most adults are lame, but I’m not.” And I was like, “Oh my god, I am, I really am.” [Laughter.] SWB So what did they tell you that they actually wanted to use? Like after they told you that your idea was lame, how did you get out of them some good ideas that would be things they would want to use? SC So instead of saying, like, “What’s your idea?” We asked them more about their lives and their day-to-day and the things that they enjoy using. And just every conversation went back to friendship. You know, like, they all still wear the friendship bracelets—like the ones that we used to make, either the thread ones or those like plastic lanyard type ones, and they still make those, they still wear them, sometimes they’ll wear ‘em like all the way up their arms. So one day when we had compiled some of this feedback and started talking about, “What if we made like a real friendship bracelet?” And we started talking to them about that. That’s when they started really freaking out. Like their whole faces would light up and they’d be like, “Oh my god! I would have to have that!” SWB It’s so refreshing to see people really take their user research seriously, because I think so often user research gets like straight up ignored. So I think that that’s such a huge difference and I think it also speaks to what makes this valuable for actually hitting that mission of encouraging girls to enter STEM because you know you didn’t like accept kind of a shallow answer to that and you really looked at what was going to make it meaningful and connect with them at that deeper level. SC Like we didn’t even think about this until we actually did a hardware accelerator in San Francisco called Highway1. This was my first foray into hardware and so it was a really big help getting into Highway1 where you know what they do is they kind of incubate your company and they have experts there that can help you and guide you through the design and development prototyping process. And our first I just heard some nightmare stories about like, “Here’s something that we built and we didn’t talk to anyone. And here’s how we wasted like millions of dollars for this company because we built this thing that either doesn’t work or there’s this huge error we didn’t foresee or the people just don’t want it.” And so after hearing those stories I was like, “You know what? Um we should probably go talk to some people.” That’s one thing about my job and what we do is that girls in this age group are so fun. They’re so fun. They’re so opinionated and like fierce and hilarious and independent. And so it’s definitely the best part of my job is just meeting these girls and hearing about their lives and just being so impressed. I’m like constantly impressed by girls in this age group and like the cool stuff that they’re doing. JL How did you break into that? Like, how did you get access to being able to talk to these girls and finding out what they wanted? Was it through one of the incubator programs? Was it through NYU? Was it through something else? SC So there’s a statistic like 94 percent of parents in the US want their kids to be exposed to more you know programming and programming resources. And not even 40 percent of schools have computer science programs, and what is called a computer science program in most schools is like not something that we would consider programming. One thing that this has really exposed me to is just what a huge gap there is. Like we tried to like visit the entire demographic of you know socioeconomic classes uh in this age group. So if you go to a private school they will have a computer science program taught by a programmer and if you go to most public schools they have like a typing program taught by a teacher that doesn’t know anything about programming and – if they even have that, you know, sometimes there’s like a computer for an entire classroom to share. [20:00] So what we did is we volunteered to teach some classes. We were like, “Hey, we’re programmers. We’ll teach, you know, some beginner programming classes to your students in exchange for them answering some of our questions.” So that was kind of how we got in there. And it was a pretty neat thing to be able to meet girls and talk to them. JL Yeah, that’s so smart! So you work with a co-founder, Brooke Moreland, on Jewelbots, right? How did you come together? How do you find that you’ve surrounded yourself with people to help make your vision come true? SC Brooke was—when I moved to New York—one of the first people I met. She had a company called Fashism with an ‘s-h’. It was kind of like Instagram before Instagram, where people would upload pictures of their outfits or like fashion and people would like rate their fashion. And it was really popular with teenagers. Like hugely popular. And so with her background, you know, her skillset is just really complementary to mine in the way that she has fashion and business in her background, and I’m more focused on the technology side of things. And so when I started working on this, I reached out to Brooke and was like, “What do you think?” And she’s like, “This sounds awesome.” JL And for me sometimes, I have the problem of like how do you hold an idea that’s like so precious to you and then like trust others? Or like even be brave enough to first mention the idea to someone else? SC Yeah, yeah, I had been working on it for a few months already. And it’s so funny like when you first start prototyping something, it looks like garbage. Right? Like you’re always like—and when I was first working on this I was using Arduino and things were, like, taped together and falling apart and all this stuff. And so I just kind of showed her this thing. And she’s like, “Oh this is cool!” And then you have to find people that I think are like…can see past the tape. KL [Laughs] yes. JL So once, you know, you showed Brooke the idea and she was like, “This is great.” Were you both like, “Okay, we’re going full-time on this”? How did you sort of build up to what Jewelbots is now? SC At the time it was just me and I was full-time on it. And going full-time on a side project is really hard. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without getting into Highway1, as they give you seed funding for your business. So I had already been full-time on it for a few months and then she had just left her job. So we kind of both just jumped in. JL Monetary blockers I think are tough when people have ideas. You know, do you have any advice for people that are sort of like, “Well, what do I do? I have this idea. I’m not sure how to take it to the next level.” SC Before that I had a full-time job and it took me – I had been working on it for maybe about eight months or so part-time before we got into Highway1, before I was able to quit my job, and I’ve definitely been there. You know, Girl Develop It, I always had a full-time job. And it’s really difficult and one thing I learned fairly early in is even if you make the smallest bit of progress at night—you know, like, you get home, you’re exhausted, you don’t feel like working on anything—and you just spend five minutes writing one email, right? If you can get that one email out, or do that one thing that will push things forward, you know you’ll just keep going. The place where you get lost is when there’s, like, three weeks and you didn’t work on it and you’re just procrastinating because you’re like, “I have hours and hours of work to do.” But if you just make sure to take a little time every day, or you know just a few times a week, making sure you’re spending 15 minutes, 20 minutes, you can make sure that things keep growing. JL I like that a lot. Because things can feel overwhelming. You know you take a break from something and all of a sudden there’s so much to do versus a little. So I think that makes total sense. So before Jewelbots, you know as I mentioned, I know you through GDI, Girl Develop It. Can you tell us a little bit about Girl Develop It and how that got started? SC Yeah! So we never set out to make the company that it is today which is a really awesome, big non-profit. So one thing that happens to female developers is you will meet—like someone will be like, “Oh it’s so cool that you’re like a female developer! I know another female developer. You guys should be friends.” [Laughter] And you’re always like, “I mean, thank you, but like [laughs] I have work, I have a job.” SWB And like there’s more than two of you out there. You know, like, “Oh gosh, you have to know this one other person who they happen to have the same job.” It’s like, do you say that every time you meet somebody who’s an accountant? [Laughter] “I also know an accountant!” No, you don’t. SC “Do you know them? Do you know this other accountant?” [Laughter] Yeah so when—so someone had done that to us, and it was actually fortunate because we were talking about how in our computer science classes often we felt like we were afraid to ask questions because we were afraid that, you know, sometimes you feel like you ask a stupid question, it’s something you should know. Like, people in the class are going to be like, “Oh god! Of course the girl doesn’t know this!” [Chuckles] and, like, start throwing batteries at you or something. I dunno [laughter]. JL Huh, Philadelphia style [laughter]. [25:00] SWB But that sounds frustrating, right? It’s like you feel like you can’t just hang out and focus on learning and getting the most out of your class because you have to sit down and be like, “Oh I’m also somehow like a representative for my gender here.” It’s like, that’s a lot of extra pressure and a lot of bullshit. SC It is. It is and so having both shared that experience, we were like, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a place where you know like people could learn and they could ask every stupid question that they think of?,” you know, and not be afraid of having to know that? Because also learning as an adult…like, kids are so fine not knowing things, you know? Like, because kids: you’re not supposed to know. But as an adult, you know, it can be scary asking questions because, you know, you’re supposed to know. So we scheduled just one class, one HTML/CSS class. This is in 2010 when there wasn’t a lot of these boot camps and things like that teaching. And we didn’t know how people were going to come or if they would be into it or anything like that but it ended up selling out, you know, in the first day. And then we planned another class and another class and then people in other cities were like you know, “We want to do this. This sounds cool.” So finally you know it started growing and it kind of like grew like a weed. Like it just kind of—yeah, it was pretty wild. JL So in a lot of teaching for Girl Develop It, I know a lot of times the students they want to make a change in their career and they’re ready to try something new. Do you have advice for people that would want to start a new career, how they get started in doing that? SC Programming isn’t hard. Like, you know, we’ve done this disservice as a community to say that you have to be good at math to be a coder, or you have to be some kind of genius to be a coder, and it’s so not true unless—I mean, yeah, there are, like, people that work—there are like quants that work in finance, and they have very specialized degrees. But most, you know, development jobs where you’re doing web development, it’s not rocket science. You know, it’s not anything that the average person can’t understand if they put in the work. So I think that, first of all, don’t be daunted by it—don’t think it’s not for you or you’re not smart enough, because I promise I’ve yet to meet the person that can’t understand how to, like, do an HTML/CSS page after like you know sitting down for a bit and working to understand it. And also, you know, be ready to put in the work, because it’s definitely hard work. SWB That really brings me back around to thinking about Jewelbots and how powerful it is to bring that to girls who aren’t getting that message, right? Who are like getting far too many messages about technology being something complicated and foreign and sort of you know being kind of alienated from it already at a young age and not even knowing you know what an engineer does. I really like the idea that you’re making it feel accessible and relatable because you’re totally right, this isn’t something that normal people can’t do. It’s not just for special people. And so I’m curious, like, as Jewelbots has grown and developed like, where do you see that going? SC We’re on target.com, we’re on our own website, we’re in a lot of places and it’s grown a lot, which has been very cool. We also were in the Wired store, and I think that the way we see things going is a good question. We’re about to make some big announcements for Jewelbots and kind of ask our audience and our community what they want to see from us in the future. You know, this community has come together of young ladies and they’re building things and sharing with each other and the coolest thing I think is the tiny speaking careers that are launching because of these eight-year-olds—eight-, nine-, 10-, 11-year-olds—that are going out there giving conference talks about programming their Jewelbots, which is so adorable. Like, I cry every time. I really do. And that’s not a joke. I’m just like sitting there crying [laughs]. JL That’s so amazing! SC I know! SWB Yeah, that’s super cool. SC Yeah. But so we’ve shipped 10,000 of them now, and we’re working to figure out what’s next and what we should be working on next. So we’re about to announce some big stuff and then ask the community what they want to see from us. JL Oh I can’t wait to hear more about that. Speaking of speaking, I know that you cut back on speaking to make time for Jewelbots. How’d you come to that decision? SC I don’t know about you, but when I was younger I didn’t really travel. Like my family, like we went to Disney once and my family was very like we drove 20 hours to see family members and that was our vacations which I loved them for. Like [laughs] I’m not complaining. But getting older like being able to travel the world to give conference talks was such a cool experience because I got to see so many different places. But what I started realizing that even though it was fun and glamorous and things it was getting in the way of work, it was getting in the way of like getting things done. And so now when I do talks or when I get you know asked to do talks, I evaluate like, what will this do? Will this help the business? You know um or will this be you know a distraction? [30:00] JL That’s great and then, Sara, have you ever felt blocked or in a rut? And if so, how have you gotten out of it? SC Yeah. And that’s a really good question. Focus can be hard, because there’s just so much going on, and often you feel like you’re doing the same thing every day. I usually focus on my personal life then, or, like, what habits I can bring to my life in general that will be beneficial because often it’s not work, often it’s work affecting life, right? So if in work I need to be doing the same thing every day for a while, that means my other time I should try to do something fun. So I usually focus on adding a new habit or, you know, something in my life that can distract me from the the rut, the day-to-day. JL And then before we wrap up, do you have any final advice for anyone that’s got an idea and wants to get that idea to a product? SC What I say all the time is, just start with those baby steps. It’s going to take a thousand baby steps. Everyone has a good idea, right? Everyone. Ideas are worthless unless it’s something that gets made. So you know, if it’s going to take a thousand baby steps, then if you start today, you only have 999 left. But if you don’t, then it’s never going to happen. So it can be really daunting. You know, I look back and I can’t believe we have like a manufactured product. Like I never—it’s just insane. I never would imagine I could do something like this. But, it just took a thousand baby steps. JL I love it. Sara, thanks so much for joining us on No, You Go today. SC Yeah! [Music fades in] JL You’re so awesome! SC Thank you for having me. [Music fades out] Fuck Yeah of the Week[31:45] JL You know when you’re so excited about something that you just start going google wild and you have like one million tabs open and you can’t wait to read them all? That’s our next segment: the Fuck Yeah of the Week—where we get super excited about someone or something that we just want to google the shit out of. Katel, who’s our Fuck Yeah this week? KL I’m gonna go ahead and say it’s daylight, because this morning when I was making coffee I looked up and I realized that it’s now light out in the morning a little earlier, which is so awesome, because you know just a few weeks ago it was like dark when I was making coffee, which is just really depressing. So I’m just really excited that our days are getting a little longer and I feel like we can get a little bit more light and a little bit more time back into our lives. SWB And a little more energy, right? KL Yeah, definitely. JL I love that. I mean I know when I you know I work on sites so when I’m leaving work when it starts getting dark at four, I’m like, “Okay, well,” you know it’s hard to sort of keep in that mind set where like I’m still at work because then it feels like daytime is work— KL Yeah. JL —and nighttime is home. And so when like the day starts pushing more forward, then I’m like, “Okay, look, I still have this crossover.” It’s not such a hard line between like work and home. It’s just like, “Oh, here’s just my day.” Instead of like, “Here’s work. Here’s home.” It feels so versus each other— KL Yeah! You’re totally right. JL —when it’s day versus, you know? KL It feels like there’s a much crisper line. SWB Plus, every day is one step closer to it being summertime stoop beer season, and that is something that I look forward to saying, “Fuck yeah” to very soon. KL Me too. And beer garden weather. So, fuck yeah, daylight! [Music fades in.] SWB Fuck yeah, daylight! Outro[33:25] JL Well that’s it for this week’s episode [music fades out] of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. No, You Go is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, and our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thank you to Sara Chipps for being our guest today [music fades in]. We’ll be back next week with another episode [music ramps up to end]. | |||
| 06 Feb 2018 | Frands Forever with Alisha Ramos | 00:39:48 | |
HI FRANDS. We’re all BFFs now, right?…Right? In this episode, we talk about how we make new friends as busy adults, how we sustain relationships beyond grabbing lunch or drinks, and how we build the kinds of communities that give us LIFE. We’re also joined by Girls’ Night In founder Alisha Ramos, who tells us how she built a company around a simple concept: connecting and celebrating women who’d rather stay in. > Here’s what we covered (and as always, you can find the full transcript below). Show notesDid you know that Sara and Katel first bonded over crab fries? That a full 50 percent of the city of Philadelphia knows each other through Jenn? Well, now you will. We also talk about:
Then, we catch up with Alisha Ramos, who tells us how she quit her job last year to start Girls’ Night in, a newsletter for ladies who’d rather skip the party, thanks. Now GNI boasts more than 30,000 members. We bond over:
Also in this episode:
SponsorsThis 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. _ TranscriptSara Wachter-Boettcher Like you, Shopify isn’t a fan of long, boring ads. So they’ll keep it simple. They’re hiring great people. Their mission: to make commerce better for everyone. Shopify is the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs and they want to apply to you. Join a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team where you’ll get shit done. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. [Music fades in] Jenn Lukas Hi! 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. JL On today’s show we’re talking about developing relationships and going beyond the quick work lunch or happy hour type of friendship. How do we create deeper connections with people we know and that we want in our lives now that we’re adults, professionals, mothers, activists, multi-taskers—you get the idea. How do we seek out these deeper types of friendships? We’ll also talk with Girls’ Night In founder, Alisha Ramos, about building a community of women, and how she makes space for meaningful relationships in her life. But first on the agenda: hey, Katel, will you be my friend? KL I would love to be your friend. You know, I remember the first time we really hung out and met. We were both at Converge. We started sort of following each other around to the different things people were doing and I had seen you speak and I was like—I really wanted to hang out with you and it was cool that I met you at a conference because it’s always good to have a conference buddy. And I also remember the first time Sara and I really hung out, it involved crab fries, which is very important to the Philadelphia region. She missed a pottery class, I think? Just to keep talking with me, which I felt super special for, and then I think that just was a natural progression into taking over the world. SWB Totally! I remember meeting Jenn through conferences and stuff like that but then, one day right after I moved to Philadelphia, I thought, “You know? I’m going to email Jenn Lukas. I don’t know her very well but she seems very cool, maybe she’ll hang out with me.” [Laughter] And I emailed her and, lo and behold, Jenn lived two blocks from where we had just moved in. Like literally two blocks away. And so immediately, you know, we made plans to get together, and I will say that being new to a place, Jenn and Sutter, her husband, were like—you guys were, honestly, so welcoming, and it was so wonderful because I feel like through you we met so many other people. You were very generous with sharing those friendships that you had with us— KL Aw. SWB —at a time when I think we really needed that. We’d spent a couple of years, you know, moving around and not sure where we were going to land long-term after my husband finished graduate school. And so it was not just that we really connected, but it was also that generosity that I think was so valuable to me. And I really hope that I paid that forward by the time Katel moved to Philly [laughter] and we were sharing crab fries, because I remember sitting there and just being like, OK, we’re not just having professional drinks. We’re hanging out now. It’s on. This is—you know—we’re going to be here for a while.” JL It’s so nice. Wow. I’m having all the feels, ladies [background “aws”]. It’s so nice and I think the other thing is, you know, we make friends through conferences, we make friends through meetups, we make friends through these activities, and lots of times I think we meet people and then we’re like, “Ah man, I really dug hanging out with them,” but then it doesn’t happen again. Maybe you live someplace else. But I think one of the things that was really awesome with both of you is that we maintained a level of correspondence that when you both happened to move to Philadelphia I was like, “Yes!” SWB No, but I think it’s important to put that kind of, I don’t know, a little bit more work in, I guess you would say, because we’re not in college anymore. We’re, um, a couple of years outside of college, and one of the things that happens is everybody gets busy with their own lives. You have a partner, maybe, or you have children, and your career gets demanding, and I travel for work a lot. And so it gets harder to match up schedules, it’s harder to find time to consistently see people, and you have to prioritize that, and I’m really glad that I have friends who do prioritize that also because I feel like we always make the time. And we always—you know, we don’t make a big deal out of hanging out, right? Like we make it a consistent thing that we do without having to make it super formal and it doesn’t have to be like, “Oh I’m throwing a dinner party.” KL Because of our proximity we can kind of do things on the fly which is really cool. And, I mean, it wass so important for me moving from DC to Philly. I knew I knew some people sort of and I had no idea whether I’d be able to be rebuild a network and it happened, I think, so much faster because of exactly what you said, Jenn. [5:00] And also I feel like as you get older you sort of know you’re going to be friends with people. The people you know you’re like, “OK, these are just going to be acquaintances or not as close relationships.” You’re a little quicker to be like, “All right [chuckles], I know the camps now.” You know? JL I think it also helps to never take a scheduling mishap as something that means that we can’t hang out. So I think lots of times with schedules, you’ll ask someone to hang out and they’ll be like, “I can’t,” and then you don’t follow-up. And I think that we all have very busy schedules but we’re never like, “Oh, that must mean that Katel doesn’t want to hang out with me because she’s not available.” And getting over this like — you get these flashbacks from high school of like trying to be friends with people, right? [Laughter] And you’re just like, “No! It’s not that.” And I think that I’m so much more quick to get over that now because I can imagine myself being in the space where I’ve wanted to hang out with people but I couldn’t make it work and it wasn’t that I was avoiding them or doing these things that I feel like we still get self conscious about, sometimes, with building friendships. You know you have to put in that time. SWB Right. It’s not like, “Oh, I invited Jenn to do something twice and she turned me down both times, so now I won’t say anything again. I have to sit here on my hands and wait for her to call me.” You know? I definitely don’t feel that way. I’m like, “Ok, Jenn’s got a lot going on and—” KL I’m just going to ask her a third time. SWB Yeah [laughter]! Third time’s a charm. You know but I’m really glad that we’re all kind of on the same page about this and also able to talk about it because I’ve read all of those studies about how people report that their loneliness levels are really high and particularly as people move into middle-age and that there’s a lot of studies that show that things like the more socially isolated you are, the more likely you are to have health problems, and the more likely you are to actually die prematurely. It’s kind of morbid, but it’s true that loneliness is this really big factor in people’s health that is not that well understood. And the other thing that happens with loneliness is apparently it’s something that’s really common with men. Like men are much less likely to sustain the kinds of relationships that we’re talking about into their middle-age and later and as a result you’ve got these generations of lonely middle-aged who are super isolated. And it’s causing them all kinds of issues and I think that even though that’s more prevalent in men, I mean that’s not something we can ignore for ourselves either because we’re all, like I said, ambitious and busy and have a lot going on in our professional lives that it would be easy to not make time to do that deep friendship stuff. It’d be easy to have that happen and not realize it’s happened until you have been doing it for years and you’re really fucking lonely. JL Yeah. KL Right. This is why it’s important that we make some early plans for the friend compound that we’ve talking about. JL Oh my god! Yes! KL And we can invite our husbands, obviously, if, you know— SWB Meh. JL It’s going to be some kind of farm, right? KL Uh, absolutely. Yes. With a vineyard of some kind. SWB So the friendship compound is like—it’s pretty much what it sounds like — it’s a large facility, homestead, not sure, where we can all bring all of our besties down and form a new, totally not cult-like [laughter] society. KL I think we found a new direction for the show. I don’t know [laughter]. JL Oh no, we’ve tricked people into something they were not expecting here. SWB I said it wasn’t cult-like! It’s fine. KL OK. All right [laughs]. SWB This whole conversation about friendships and sort of like the way that we form connections and keep those connections strong, I think, is a really good way to introduce our guest for today, because I think she’s going to have a lot to say about that, too, and I am so excited to hear it [music fades in]. Thanks to our sponsorsJL [Music fades out] No, You Go is proud to be sponsored by wordpress.com. Whether you’d like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating a website on wordpress.com helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. In fact, we use WordPress here for NYG. You don’t even need experience setting up a website. WordPress guides you through the process from start to finish, and takes care of the technical side. They also have great customer support available 24 hours a day. Plans start at just four dollars a month, and you can always get a custom domain for the life of the plan. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo to get 15 percent off your website today. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo [music fades in]. Interview: Alisha RamosKL [Music fades out] our guest today is Alisha Ramos, the founder of Girls’ Night In, which started as a newsletter for women who’d rather stay in tonight, something I think we’re all drawn to in many ways, and has turned into so much more. Alisha, we can’t wait to hear about. Welcome to No, You Go! Alisha Ramos Thanks so much for having me! KL We’re so excited to talk all about this. Can we kick off by having you tell us a little bit more about Girls’ Night In and just how it came to be. [10:00] AR So Girls’ Night In, as you mentioned, started off as a newsletter for women who’d rather stay in tonight, and now it’s become more of a community of women now. What we do is we send a Friday morning newsletter every week to over, I think we’re now at 30,000 subscribers, mostly millennial women across the US and across the globe, and we kind of share smart reads for you to read during your night in or things like recommendations for you to do, whether it’s watching a TV show that we love or a podcast that we’re loving. So that’s kind of how it started and now we’ve gotten this amazing community of women around it from all corners of the globe. We have readers in Charleston, South Carolina, to Barcelona to London and, you know, our mission at Girls’ Night In is to help women relax, recharge, and cultivate more meaningful community in a world that’s increasingly stressful and lonely [KL laughs]. So one really cool thing that kind of sprung up very organically is our book club. So we do a monthly book club meetup in seven cities now. And that’s been a really amazing way for our community to gather and really live out the mission of Girls’ Night In. This kind of community of women that want to create better connections with one another. KL That’s amazing! I feel like that’s seems like such a beautiful and natural progression of things. What was it about fostering deeper connections than, say, going to drinks or having a quick coffee that you made you decide to kick this into gear? AR I was looking at how we live our lives today. Like I’m in my later twenties and the idea of going out no longer really appeals to me [laughing][KL laughs] for various reasons. I have a hard bedtime now of like 9:30pm I need to be in bed. But I think our relationships are changing so quickly; society is changing; mental health issues are on the rise; rates of loneliness are increasing in our society that’s always on. Like we are so entangled with technology now that we’re kind of burnt out from all of that. And looking at my habits of how I want to spend my time with my friends, I found myself hosting more gatherings that are intimate and cozy in my home versus wanting to go out. So I think Girls’ Night In encapsulates this whole movement of women who would rather spend the time taking care of themselves and developing better relationships, not just with themselves, but with other women, like their friends. And it’s very timely. When Girls’ Night In started the presidential inauguration had just occurred. There was this kind of overwhelming sense of stress and anxiety among my friends, and I’m sure just like the world in general. So, especially with the news cycle being completely unrelenting, people were searching for a break from all of that and I think Girls’ Night In became the answer for a lot of people. Like they’ll write in and say, “I didn’t know that I needed this, but I definitely needed Girls’ Night In in my life because it helps me remind myself that it’s OK to take care of myself and take a break from everything else that’s going on in the world.” KL That’s—yeah. That’s amazing. It sounds like you’ve had some questions that were kind of cycling around in your head that made you, you know, look into that a little bit more— AR Yeah. KL —and one of them was about disconnecting from tech. I personally find that so challenging. In what ways would you like to explore that with this community? AR Our February theme is going to be techno self-care. So, you know, technology—we never want to pit technology as the enemy because it can be used for good, it can be used for bad. I think overall we’re all very overwhelmed with technology and media and the news right now and it can be unhealthy. KL Yeah. AR In terms of how to disconnect from technology, the one thing that we are doing as a community is encouraging people to get offline and meet each other [laughing] in real life, especially, you know, for women in their twenties. It’s such an awkward time where—especially where I’m from, in DC, it’s a very transient city. There’s people coming in and out and I feel like we’ve forgotten how to meet new friends and make new connections. KL [Exhales sharply] right. AR Yeah, I really don’t know what I would do to make new friends besides go to a [laughing] networking event. It feels kind of awkward. [15:00] So one way we encourage our community members to disconnect is to join us at our monthly book club meetings and that’s— KL Sure. AR You’re getting away from your screen, it kind of feels like you’re doing something for yourself, and it’s a way to, not escape reality—but sometimes! It depends on what you read. It can be an escapist type of ritual. So that in and of itself is a really great self-care tool. But then when you add on top of that the act of gathering around a common book that you’ve read and really enjoyed, you get to create these really cool conversations and connections with each other and that’s the kind of feature that I would hope to build with Girls’ Night In where, you know right now we’re always on Instagram, we’re liking each other photos, but what does being social even mean anymore in this age of social media? I don’t like the future that I see in five to 10 years. We’re really just trying to recreate a more intimate sense of community. JL Hey Alisha, what kind of books do read at the book club? AR Our general guidelines are that we read books that are authored by women from diverse backgrounds and we read both fiction and non-fiction. So most recently we read Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng which was my favorite book. SWB I’m in the middle of it right now! AR Oh my god! It’s such a treat! SWB It’s so good! AR It’s so good, yeah. I just savored every word. It was so good. So, yeah, we try to focus on stories that are authored by women who can bring something interesting, something unique that we can discuss as a community. We’ve also read a couple of non-fiction. Like Too Loud, Too Fat, Too Slutty— KL Wow. AR —by Anne Helen Petersen. That one was a little polarizing actually [laughs] in our community. Some people loved it, some people hated it, but that’s kind of what the beauty of the book club is: we want books that spark conversation. KL Yeah. I feel like now—I just joined a book club. So maybe I just need to join Girls’ Night In and find one [laughing]—find one to meet up [laughs]. JL Have you found that people that have come to the book club will make plans together afterwards? Like are you seeing that a lot of people are forging friendships from the book club? AR Yes, definitely. We, at every book club, we basically have to force people out the door [laughing] because they want to continue having conversations and that’s really, really the coolest thing that I’ve seen. So we have private Facebook groups for everyone who has attended a book club for each city. And our New York community—there’s one woman who was like, “Hey, I’m relatively new to the city. I really enjoyed meeting all of you at book club. Would you want to start a potluck dinner thing?” And I think she was—she asked this and I think she was expecting maybe like five people to respond but, I kid you not, like 40 people signed up for this thing [chuckles], and she was like, “OK, woah. I think we’re going to have to now split up into five different friend groups—” JL That’s amazing. AR “—to do like a potluck rotation.” So it’s been really cool to see friendships like that and conversations like that start. KL Yeah. SWB Something I really love about that story is that it speaks to the way that like once you kind of tear off the bandaid of making friends, like once you go, “Ok! I’m going to go the book club,” once you’ve done that, then the doors open a little bit and then suddenly it’s a little easier to invite— AR Yeah! SWB —a bunch of women you’ve never met before out to do something. I think sometimes that’s hard when we’re, you know, we’re all busy, everybody has a lot going on, scheduling is the worst. And to try to forge that deeper connection with somebody while juggling all the other things that we seem to do because we’re ambitious and whatnot. It can feel like too much of a barrier. So I love the idea of sort of lowering that barrier for people. AR Absolutely! Definitely! And like book clubs are just magical, first of all, because books are amazing. But, second of all, it creates a really interesting common ground for everyone. Like you’re going in and it’s not like a scary networking event where like, “Oh my gosh! What am I going to say? What am I going to ask people?” You’re all showing up because you read the same thing and you are starting off with that common thing and you end up picking up little pieces of the other person’s life as she’s describing how she read the book and interpreted it and then it kind of like takes the pressure off a little bit—of trying to make small talk, which I personally really dislike. [20:00] I’m a very highly introverted person and I think as a result I would rather have those deeper conversations with people and skip the like, “Oh yeah, where are you from?” “How’s the weather?” “The weather’s really cold.” So I think having that commonality and as a discussion starter has been really, really cool. KL Yeah I really want to know how have you kept Girls’ Night In on even keel as it’s grown so quickly? How are you leaning on your friends and other Girls’ Night In-ers to help with that? AR I mean Girls’ Night In is very new in my mind. I quit seven months ago, in June. So it still feels like it’s in its very early, early stages. So as a result like I basically don’t sleep or I—well there was a good period of time where I was not getting a [laughing] lot of sleep, essentially. But now I’m getting definitely better at delegating, finding people who are way better at doing things than I am — which has been probably the key part of keeping this thing going. I do work with a lot of really talented individuals who help me with editorial, the community side of things, we have amazing book club hosts in all of our cities, partnerships, like technology, everything. So it’s been really cool to grow Girls’ Night In from just me to this team of really awesome people who help out. KL Yeah, absolutely. So speaking of making that move from what you were doing before Girls’ Night In, it’s funny: I’ve read you describe yourself as a Type A person needing to have a plan for everything and [AR laughs] to me that’s like, I raise my hand and I’m like, “Hey, hello! That’s me.” Do you remember the moment you decided to jump into that and start something new even if it meant you might not know exactly what that was going to look like? AR I didn’t have that one day or like a-ha moment where I knew that I wanted to do this. So Girls’ Night In—I had the luxury of the fact that I started it as a side project while I had a full-time job. So that kind of gave me a cushion of like, “OK, I can do this and see if it becomes a thing and then I might make the decision, but if it doesn’t, then I’m OK. Like I can keep my job.” So I launched it in January and then kept it a side project for six months or so and it kept growing and growing and eventually—I don’t know if you’ve ever done like a full-time job with like a side hustle or something, but eventually you get to a point where you’re just like [laughing], I’m really tired of doing my full-time job. I get off at 6, and then you go into like your second shift of doing the other thing from 6pm to god knows when, like midnight or 1am. And that’s really unsustainable, like physically or it was for me at least. KL Yeah for sure. AR The second thing that helped me understand that like, “Oh, maybe I should take the leap,” is that I started to get really amazing feedback from people and I would hear from my friends who live in California or New York that they were having a conversation with a random stranger, somebody that they just met, and they would say, “Oh, have you heard about this newsletter called Girls’ Night In? I just signed up,” and I think that really helped me understand, “Oh, this could become a really big thing if somebody I’ve never met in California is talking about it— 23:40 KL That is so cool. AR “—and actively sharing it with their friends.” KL That’s yeah — that’s amazing. Cool. Can you give us a little sneak peek at what’s next for Girls’ Night In? AR Our newsletter is our main product right now. So I’m focusing on building out the right team for that, more solidifying our editorial strategy around that, and just growing our audience and growing our brand I think will be a key focus for the next couple of months. You know everything we do ladders back—or should ladder back to our broader mission of helping women relax, recharge, and cultivate community. So we did do a little experiment with launching our own products and, you know, my background is as a web designer. So designing physical products was actually really, really fun for me. So I think you can expect to see some more things along those lines and then the third piece is I personally have gotten so much out of our community in real life through the book clubs and that has been just so fun to grow and watching the reaction to the book club has been amazing. [25:00] We’re now at the point where people get frustrated if they can’t get a ticket to one of our book clubs because they sell out pretty quickly [chuckles]. So we definitely want to make sure that we can expand the book clubs in cities where maybe the demand is really high and look at how else we grow that side of things. KL Well I have one final question for you, and it’s how are you going to relax and recharge this week? AR I recently watched the movie I, Tonya and I loved it so much that I might go back and watch it again [laughs]. I also have been binge watching The Crown on Netflix— KL Yes. AR —and I really love historical dramas so that’s been—it’s just such a good show to binge watch and just chill out. And I’m also kind of revamping my skincare routine right now. I’m a huge beauty junky. So I’m doing a lot of research in trying to find the perfect moisturizer for the winter. So yeah lots of skincare and lots of The Crown. KL That sounds excellent. SWB I can’t wait to hear about that best skincare for the winter because I tell you what [AR laughs]: it has been dry and cold and— KL Yeah. We’re all struggling here. AR Yeah. [KL laughs] we’ll write something up. KL We will definitely read that. Thank you so much for talking with us today. AR Thank you. KL It was really great to hear a little bit more about what you’re up to and, yeah, thank you so much! [Music fades in.] AR Yeah, of course! Thanks so much for having me. JL [Music fades out] I kept thinking when Alisha was talking about the book club that would help what we were talking about in the bonus episode where you were finding a lack of books to read, right Katel? KL Yeah. That was so fun. I was thinking about it the other day because thanks, listeners, for listening to that because I got some really nice recommendations for books to read and it has actually really inspired me to really do this. So I am buying those books, I even found the crumby charger to my Kindle. I’m going to really do it for real. So I’m very excited and it was really nice to hear these recommendations from different friends who have very different, I think, interests and likes. SWB Yeah, if you didn’t listen to our bonus episode: one of the things that came up is that Katel admitted she hadn’t read a book except for the ones that she’s physically publishing for a little while and she was feeling a little bit bummed about that. So I’m excited to see what you read. Do you have a book that you want to pick up first? KL I think I’m going to pick up Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan because I’ve just liked her work, and I didn’t really realize that there was something new from her. So that was really cool. SWB Yeah, yeah, I mean oftentimes I’ll read a book by an author and I’ll be like, “Ooh! That was pretty good,” and then their next book is the one that really gets me. That’s something I really found with Celeste Ng, the author of the book Little Fires Everywhere that we talked about in Alisha’s interview. I read her first book and I thought it was pretty good, but the second book has been just amazing. And so hopefully you’ll find the same with Jennifer Egan. JL I love the conversations that people have around books. I mean just looking at the two of you right now: you’re getting really excited when you’re talking about it and so that’s what I think is so neat about things like book clubs is it gives you — it’s an instant conversation starter. And I think it’s interesting to think about is the way that we could build friendships. It’s weird I’ve heard this but I never realized it before: becoming a mom is like an instant conversation starter, which is weird and it doesn’t like—I thought it would’ve felt forced, because people have told me that before, but it’s not. Whenever you have a passion about a book or like a complaint about a diaper, there’s just something to talk about with someone. And I love these ideas of not being scared of that. That you’re like—happen to just be in the same sort of population, but being like, “This is a way for me to start talking to someone.” You know, trying to find those groups. Someone just was telling me—my friend Beth was just saying that there’s now a Tinder for moms [yup mm hmm]. But you know it’s hard if you’re in areas where you’re finding it hard to meet other moms, or finding it hard to just meet other women, or finding it hard to meet people that also love the same books that you do. How do you do it? Right? So as much as like, I’m like, “Wow, that’s crazy they made that.” I mean if it’s a way for you to connect with people, then I think it’s really cool. SWB Yeah I think that that’s something that Alisha was definitely talking a lot about was this difficulty of making and sustaining friendships as an adult. I think something like a book club is a great way to do that, but other ways that I’ve definitely found is getting involved in something local or something political. I know that that can be a great way to get to know people. But it’s also, you know, it takes a little bit to get comfortable with getting out there and getting beyond that initial spark of conversation where it’s like, “OK, we support the same candidate.” Or “We both have a kid.” [30:00] Or “We both like the same book.” But going from that to being like, “OK, we need to get into that substantive conversation where we really connect,” is not always easy. But the more that I try to open up a little bit and allow it to happen, I feel like I get better at it. It’s a habit you can learn or a skill you can learn. JL Yeah, when my son was born I was feeling very much like I had a lot of friends with kids, luckily, who I can ask their advice but no one was exactly at the same age as my son. I’m on a message board, it’s a Google mailing list for local moms or local parents in the area and sometimes people will start mom groups or parent that you can meet up and they’ll be like, you know, “Winter Moms,” “Spring Moms,” stuff like that. And there hadn’t been one when Cooper was born. But, so, a few other people expressed interest and I was like, “Well I guess I’m starting this.” And I remember thinking like, “Oh good, I won’t have to start something,” but then when it wasn’t there, I was like, “Ok, I’m going to start it.” And I mean it was just a meetup at a coffee shop nearby, once a week. But you know you just put it on the board, you say, “Here’s where we’re meeting.” And you start a mailing list and you know once you get over the fact that you have to just make that initial effort, you can do it pretty fast, and then show up, and meet people, and from there I’ve kept in touch with a few people but stayed like really close with two moms. And like that of course didn’t happen magically but one of the things I loved leaving there one day Rachel, my friend, was like, “Do you want to just meet up and take a walk someday?” And I was like, “Yes, I would love to walk with you someday.” [Laughter] And I just thought it was so cool that she asked. And that’s the whole thing is just getting over that fear — SWB It’s weird, right? To feel like you risk rejection in the same way that you wouldn’t want to tell somebody you were interested in dating that you like them. It kind of feels the same. Where’s it’s like, “Do they actually want to be my friend?” KL Right, yeah. JL Go for it! KL Yeah, go for it. SWB What the hell else are we doing with our lives? Well I think it’s about time to move into what is, I don’t know, maybe my favorite segment? Which is of course The Fuck Yeah of the Week. Fuck Yeah of the WeekSo I have a Fuck Yeah for the week that I hope you all are excited about. My Fuck Yeah is the upcoming reboot of Murphy Brown [yes!][oh my gosh!] starring Candice Bergen. I don’t know how many of you listening were Murphy Brown fans back in the day. I, as a child, in the nineties, was definitely a Murphy Brown fan. I liked her kind of tough-as-nails persona. She was a news anchor, and she wasn’t taking shit from anybody. But there was a huge hubbub over Murphy Brown when the character on the show was going to have a baby out of wedlock. And Dan Quayle got real upset about that, and there was a whole discussion about sort of the morality of single motherhood and choosing single motherhood as being something that was somehow inherently evil. And it was quite something. I’m super hyped to see what this reboot does with that entire concept because one hopes we are a lot further along now in terms of how we conceive of parents and what makes a family and what’s OK for a family to be than we were in the nineties. Although, at the same time, I think about all of the kind of sexist shit that that show was really tattling and I’m like, “Man, we’re still kind of right in it, though!” KL Yeah, we totally are. I remember watching that show and thinking that was one of the first times I had seen a character like that—that I could actually have seen myself becoming. And I know that I mean it was sort of in like a dreamscape kind of thing [laughs]. SWB No, no, no! Whenever we say Murphy Brown I do picture you [laughter]. KL It’s just—you kind of were like, “She’s smart. She has her shit together. And she’s also going to have a family. And why not? Why couldn’t I do that?” I hope that that was a lot of people who felt that way. It’s so fucking awesome that it’s coming back. SWB I mean I’m not always necessarily a fan of these reboot series, you know? I tried to watch the Will & Grace reboot on the plane the other day. I mean I was curious. I didn’t really expect it to be great. So I turned it on on the plane and then about 30 seconds I was like, I don’t think I can handle this because the [sighs]—the representations of gay people did not feel like they had evolved at all in the intervening years, and I think that that’s what really hit me. That this way of talking about, you know, queerness 10 years ago or whatever—or 15 years ago—that maybe seemed progressive then, or seemed new to be able to talk about it at all, felt very dated and felt very out of sync with the realities of all of the queer people’s lives that I know. [35:00] And so I was like, “This is just uncomfortable and also just not funny.” So I’m not necessarily somebody who thinks everything needs to be rebooted and I hope that the Murphy Brown reboot goes well. But I’m just excited for a new generation of people to learn about Murphy Brown and to look up to somebody who is so badass. JL What other shows would you want to see rebooted? SWB OK, so I want to see a Designing Women reboot, and that’s another one where—you know we watched an old episode of Designing Women recently and it had some amazing stuff in it, the premise of that particular episode is that the ladies were considering taking on a client to redecorate their— JL Brothel. SWB Brothel, yeah. So, um, there was a lot going on. There were some differing opinions about whether or not prostitution was good or bad, or OK for women or not Ok for women. And I think at the time that show was seen as being pretty progressive and really pushing the envelope on a lot of women’s issues, and similarly to Will & Grace you would find if you listened to a lot of those episodes that there would be some attitudes that feel pretty out of sync now. But the idea of there being this sassy group of women who come from really different backgrounds and have some pretty different perspectives and who are also pursuing their professional lives together—the idea of that being an ensemble cast, I think, makes a lot of sense. JL It’s interesting to think about these shows that have reboots. It’s like they almost want a reboot as a chance to redeem themselves. If they look back and cringe at some of the stuff now and I find myself thinking about this a lot. Like, what am I saying now that in 20 years I’m going to be like, “I can’t believe I said that.” SWB Shit! I think about that all the time: about stuff I’m saying I’m going to regret in like 20 minutes [laughter]. JL That’s also true. But like thinking about things that they’re redoing now. Like they’re remaking the movie Overboard. And I don’t know if you remember the movie Overboard— KL [Gasps] what?!? JL Right? Because at first when I thought about this I was like, “Oh I loved the movie Overboard,” but then when you get back into it, it’s essentially like a two-hour movie about like roofie-ing someone. It’s awful. Basically Goldie Hawn gets a concussion, loses her memory, and Kurt Russell convinces her that she’s his wife to take care of the children! SWB There’s a lot of like real normalization of very rapey ideology that goes on in a lot of these movies and that’s—it’s both reflecting what was accepted in the culture at the time and also kind of driving that. That reinforces such outdated, but also just plain abusive, attitudes. And I hope that we get more and more honest about some of those problems. Like it’s not to say that you can never watch some eighties movie again, but I think that that when we do we need to be like, “Wait a second.“ You know one thing I’m really thankful for is the continued education I get to have from people with different backgrounds, different perspectives than I have who are allowing me to see how much I didn’t used to see, right? How much media I would just kind of passively consume without realizing what was at play. And so the more that we have these kinds of conversations and we talk about what’s going wrong, the more effectively we can both critically analyze the media of the past, and then also push for better representation in the future. KL Amen. JL Fuck yeah Murphy Brown! KL Fuck yeah. SWB Fuck yeah Murphy Brown! I’m going to get myself like a blazer with some shoulder pads to celebrate [yes!][fade out]. OutroSWB That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious and sticking together. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please go ahead and give us a rating or even a review on iTunes. No, You Go is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, and our theme music is by The Diaphone. Our producer is Steph Colbourn and you can find us online at noyougoshow.com or on Twitter @noyougoshow. Thanks to Alisha Ramos for being our guest today. We’ll be back [music fades in] next week with another new episode [music ramps up to end]. | |||
| 13 Feb 2018 | You Should Run with Elizabeth Fiedler | 00:57:53 | |
On Episode 5, we cure our political fatigue with an interview with Elizabeth Fiedler, a progressive Democrat running for a seat in the PA House. We also chat about wage equity laws, salary negotiations, and why you—yes, you—should run for office. If you’re anything like us, you’re tired as hell of what’s happening in politics: corruption, sexism, and misogyny are on full display. Immigrants are under attack, reproductive rights are under attack, environmental protections are under attack. The list could go on. But despite it all, we’re not about to sit and sulk. Instead, we want to talk about the legislation and candidates we’re excited about—because we could all use some hope right now. > Here’s what’s on the docket in Episode 5: Hey employers: pay upFirst up, we talk about one of our favorite topics: getting paid—fairly. Here in Philly, we’re upset about more delays on our first wage equity ordinance, which would bar prospective employers from asking about your past salary (which is one of the major ways employers justify continuing to underpay workers from marginalized groups). The law was supposed to take effect in January, but the Chamber of Commerce filed suit—again. Their first lawsuit, last summer, was thrown out for lack of evidence that it would harm businesses. But wage equity laws are coming. California’s went into effect in January, and a bunch more are cropping up all over. And when an economy the size of California makes a law, it tends to have a ripple effect. Now some big employers are announcing that they won’t ask for past pay info, either. While we’re on the topic of compensation, we also chat about how to negotiate those challenging money conversations—and how to avoid getting backed into a corner (or in Katel’s case, a phone booth) to accept an offer that’s not up to snuff. Elect. More. Women.Next on the show, we talk with Elizabeth Fiedler, a candidate in May’s primary for a seat in the PA House, representing the 184th District. That’s the heart of South Philly, where Sara and Jenn both live. Lizz took a break from knocking doors (literally—she is always out there knocking doors) to talk with us about her run. We cover: Showing up at campaign events with an infant strapped to your body. We love Lizz. Here’s where to get all the deets on her campaign: Seriously though: Let’s elect some women.After chatting with Lizz, we look at the stats for elected officials in Pennsylvania. It’s not great. We’re ranked 49th in the nation for having women in office. Here are the facts:
But good news: women all over are fed up, and a record number are running for office in 2018. Rebecca Traister had a great article about it in The Cut last month. Plus, we’re super excited about folks like Danica Roem, who won a seat in the Virginia Assembly last November, becoming the first openly transgender person to be elected to a state legislature. Finally, we talk about organizations dedicated to getting more women on the ballot, like Emily’s List and She Should Run. Know a woman who’d be great in office? You probably do. Tell her you think she should run. SponsorsThis episode of NYG is brought to you by:
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_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[Ad spot] Sara Wachter-Boettcher This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by our friends at Shopify. No, literally. Because so many of the coolest designers, writers, and developers that I know have all recently joined their team. Shopify’s mission is to make commerce better for everyone, and they’re hiring more awesome people—people like you!—to help. Join a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team, and work on the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in]. 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 On today’s show we’re talking about politics, and why it’s so important to have representatives that, well, represent us. We’ll also be joined by Elizabeth Fiedler who went from public radio reporter to candidate for the Pennsylvania legislature. Lizz took a break from knocking on doors and calling donors to tell us all about her life as a first-time political candidate, a mom, and a badass woman. But before we meet Lizz, let’s talk about just one of the many ways that professional is political: money. SWB Katel, Jenn, have you all heard the latest on Philly’s wage equity legislation? It was supposed to go into effect in January, but it’s been pushed back again because of lawsuits from the Chamber of Commerce. And I’m getting super frustrated by this, because I’ve been so excited to see it happen. The legislation is actually designed to prevent employers or prospective employers from asking you about your salary history when you’re in the interview process. And it’s meant to help close the pay gap by prevent people from kind of keeping salaries articifilally low. Right, because so often women and people of of color, and particularly women of color, go into these interview processes and are asked or demanded to share what their prior salary history was, and they end up unable to catch up to their peers, even when they change jobs. So this legislation is supposed to stop that. And it was signed like, a year ago, but it hasn’t been enacted yet because of these ongoing lawsuits. So at this point, I’m starting to get super frustrated. JL I think there was something similar in California. SWB Yeah so I was actually reading that there was some disappointment that Philly didn’t get to be the first in the nation to enact the law because the lawsuit slowed everything down. Because it was supposed to be first but California very quickly thereafter enacted very similar legislation that also ended up going into effect in January and what’s amazing about the California legislation is that, as you might be aware, California has kind of a massive economy and so so many big companies are headquartered there and that means that they hold a lot of sway over how business is done in general in this country. And so what we’re now seeing is all of these big companies, and especially tech companies, which I think is important to a lot of our listeners, are starting to change their policies whether or not somebody is in California. So I was just reading that Amazon has announced, for example, that it’s not going to ask people about salary history during the application process, no matter where it is that you might be working for Amazon because, you know, if you are starting to compete against companies that can’t ask those kinds of questions, it starts to make sense to kind of go with the flow. And so I hope a lot more companies go with this particular flow. JL Yeah, I love this. I mean it’s so often that we can caught in this trap, right? Where you start a job, whether it’s out of school or later on in your career, and you take the starting salary or what they’re offering you and then how do you build up from that? Right? So if people are constantly asking you what you do. I mean so it’s not even one: how do you get a raise at your own job? But then even if you’re leaving, how do you make a significant leap in pay if someone’s asking you what you’re currently making, even though you currently could be way underpaid for your skills and talent. KL It’s so problematic to think about because, you know, in my career — I feel like I’m, you know, pretty well established and I think back to points in time where I’ve tried to negotiate for a raise or make some kind of move with my pay and I feel like I’ve had that latitude. And I think about not feeling empowered to do that and being really trapped by just the last thing that was on your resume and, you know, just in your salary history — that just feels like such a — it’s like so blocking. JL Yeah. I mean you start a job and you’re working there and you work really hard and then, you know, you expect a raise to some extent but then what do you do once you’ve gone way beyond the capacity of your job? Right? And we have this problem where often we’re like, “Ok, well we’ll give you a percentage raise.” But three to six percent on top of your current salary, if it’s a low salary and not as justified for what you should be making, isn’t going to get you to where you need to be. And then sometimes I’ve seen companies — well it’s like, “Ok we’ll bump that up to ten percent.” But percentage-based raises are always really tough. And so then what do you do? I mean you start looking for another job, and then you’re looking for another job, and you’re still stuck. [5:10] SWB Yeah. I mean I remember earlier in my career getting trapped in these kinds of conversations where I would be going from — kind of, you know, individual contributor roles where I was responsible a pretty narrow slice of things to taking on more leadership, more strategic involvement in the organization, you know like being invited to more high-level meetings with clients, and also taking on management responsibilities. But because it was a smaller company and there wasn’t necessarily a clear path or progression, none of that was necessarily treated as if it was a promotion. And so what would happen is I would go into these reviews and I knew that I had been underpaid, I knew that I was being underpaid dramatically, but you go into the review and they’re like, “Well the number you’re asking for is a 25 percent raise and the standard we’re giving is, you know, five percent or something and we just can’t justify something like that.” And it’s like, “But where’s — how do I ever make up this gap?” And, you know, the thing about percentages, right, is that they’re based on the original number. So if you start a job and, I don’t know, maybe you make let’s say 50 thousand dollars a year and somebody starts the same job and they make 60 thousand dollars a year, their percentages are always going to add up to more money! And so even if somebody gives you a bigger percentage, it’s like you will typically end up further and further behind. And, you know, we’ve seen this happen so many times and it’s often to the people who are least likely to ask for pay adjustments and most likely to be judged harshly when they do which is [ahem] women. KL Yeah, I remember very vividly one of the first times I made a move to a higher position, I became a manager. I think I skipped a couple levels at that point in time. And I remember the moment where my boss was basically asking me to agree to the pay rate like in a moment between meetings. He literally was basically like, “Shake my hand. Here’s the amount.” Like, “You don’t even get a chance to say anything.” SWB Were you, like, in a fucking hallway? KL Yeah, no I’m not even kidding we had ducked into a room that was a phonebooth. And I was just like — I really regret that moment because, looking back on it, I wish I had said, you know, “No, wait. I deserve to take some time and think about this and come back to you with some questions.” But at that point in my career I felt like, “I need to take this. I need to make this move. And, great, it’s a little bit more money. Whatever.” SWB I wish our listeners could see my face because [laughter] what my face says is: “What’s his name? What’s his social security number? Let me look him up and have a conversation with him,” because I’m angry. JL It’s a great point, though, that it’s so hard in those moments to be like, “Hold on, wait, I need a second.” KL Exactly. JL But we should be able to say that. There is nothing wrong — I mean what’s the worst that could happen if someone’s going to say, “You know, I’m going to have to get back to you on that.” They’re not going to give you a raise anymore? SWB Well, I think that though — I would say that sometimes people’s fears are justified, not necessarily that the whole thing is going to be rescinded but that when you start asking questions, when you start advocating for yourself, like, sometimes people do react to that and not positively. And I think that that’s a sad reality that we’re trying to negotiate all the time. KL Yeah and I think as women there’s been situations where things have disappeared or been removed from the table and I feel that’s just a really real thing for us. JL I think for moments like that it’s important that we all sort of practice what happens if we’re in a situation like that. And I think for those fears where we are worried about that, which it definitely a justifiable fear, one of the things that I’ve done when I’ve felt uncomfortable is made sure to lead with: “Thank you so much for this offer! I’m so excited to be coming up with a new plan for us or a new partnership for us to work with. Let me just take this back and get back to you.” And sort of, you know, turn the ball where you’re thanking them, not saying that you have to but, again, if you’re playing that sort of defensive, “I need some time,” I think that’s sort of a way to be like: here’s how I can do this without fearing that I’m then causing animosity. SWB And I totally love what you’re saying, Jenn, about kind of practicing this stuff. In a similar vein, I have sat with friends of mine and talked through how much they were going to ask for in a negotiation and then I’ve been like, “Ok, have you ever said that number out loud?” And they’re like, “Oh! No!” [Laughter] I’m like, “No, ok, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to sit down and you’re going to say this number out loud to me over and over again until it stops sounding weird.” And I had a friend of mine who did that a couple years ago and she came back and not only did she, of course, get the job and get the money. She told me that it was really helpful to have said it until it didn’t sound odd and have said it until she was like, “Oh I can own this. I can own this dollar amount.” And … I think that’s hard to do but I think, like, it’s very helpful, I think, to do with a friend. It’s so great when you find somebody you can talk to about this stuff. I love — I love being able to talk to friends about this and being like, “Look, I don’t want to get weird about money. It can be touchy for people. But, you know, whatever the money is that you want to talk about, if you want to talk about it with me, I am so there for that and we can strategize and negotiate and practice until you’re ready to go into that meeting and be like, ‘Look, here’s how it’s going to be’.” [10:55] JL It’s really important to, I think, find either friends that you can talk to about that but I’ve even — Sarah, I’ve talked to you about this stuff before, so I definitely am taking you up on that. But, I mean, I’ve even done it, like, to my cat [laughter]. SWB Totally! Yeah. JL And sat there and just been there like, “Hey! What do you think about this, Azrael? Azrael, I would like to make 700 thousand dollars.” [Laughter.] KL My dog really understands [chuckles]. JL The other thing that’s really great is looking online at salaries near you. And I think that some of the resources that people have. I mean there’s been people that have started anonymous Google Docs Sheets and there are surveys about what people are making in the field. And I think that’s so helpful for getting an idea of the number that you can really feel comfortable with. I mean not all of us have people around us that are working in the same fields we are. So I think it’s really important to rely on the internet and other resources, if you don’t have someone near you that you can talk to about this. So I think it’s great that some of those are out there. And we should definitely link to some of those in the show notes. KL Yeah, that’s such a great point. Like, companies have to do market research to figure out what they’re going to pay people, so you should definitely do that as well. SWB It’s important to keep in mind that all of that secrecy around pay which companies will often really try to get you to have — it’s like, “Oh, don’t talk to people about salary, don’t talk to people about money,” that’s coming from a company because it’s in their best interests when people don’t talk about money. That doesn’t ever mean it’s in your best interest when people don’t talk about money. The reality is if you are working at a company that you do not have any ownership in and you are doing a job, you know, you have to be the person who’s going to advocate for yourself … I mean all of this strategizing, all of this practicing, all of this go get your friends to talk about salary with you — I think all of that is great and I’m glad that we’re all doing it but I’m so glad that we’re starting to see legislation that will actually support these kinds of things because, honestly, as much as it’s a good thing to be able to do given the circumstances, we all have better ways to spend our time than trying to talk to our cats about how much money we should be making. So I’m so glad to start to see some legislation and I hope that we can push for more legislation that helps with pay equity. You know, it’s been a long time coming [music fades in]. [Music fades out][ad spot] SWB We’re so happy to have wordpress.com as our sponsor on No, You Go again. Whether you’d like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating your website on wordpress.com helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. You know, we use WordPress here at No, You Go. It was the first place I went to build the site. And what’s great is that you don’t need experience setting up a website. WordPress can guide you through the whole thing from start to finish. They have great customer support. I know they have great customer support because I have asked them questions and they have answered my questions without me getting frustrated or upset. They’ve got that customer support seven days a week and they also have plans that start at only four dollars a month. With every single plan you can get a custom domain name for the entire life of the plan and they’re just great people. So if you go to wordpress.com/noyougo you can get 15 percent off your website. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo [music fades in]. Interview: Elizabeth FiedlerSWB Elizabeth Fiedler is a candidate in May’s Primary for a seat in the PA House, representing the 184th District, which is the part of South Philly where both Jenn and I live. I first heard about Lizz back in the summer of 2017 when our friend, Sekoia, told me about a super progressive woman that she had met through a local moms group. And she said she was considering running against a long-term incumbent who I wasn’t particularly excited about. So I was pretty intrigued and a bunch of us headed over to Lizz’s one night to hear more about her potential run. Since then Lizz has gone from pretty unknown to somebody who has posters with her name on them all up and down my street. Lizz, I’m so excited to talk with you right now, in the middle of your campaign. Welcome to No, You Go. Elizabeth Fiedler Thank you so much for having me. SWB So, first off, can you tell us a little bit about your platform. [15:00] EF Sure! I am always happy to talk about my platform. So, I am the mom of two little kids and that’s important for me to mention in the beginning because healthcare has actually really been a struggle for my family, accessing healthcare through the marketplace, CHIP, Medicaid — so it’s taken many more of my life hours than I expected. And I know a lot of other people are also struggling to access healthcare. That’s something I’ve heard from a lot of people across our district. And so that is one thing that is — one of the primary points of my platform is working toward a healthcare system in our fair state of Pennsylvania. A healthcare system that will work for all of us. So it’ll prioritize our lives over profits for corporations and over making the super rich richer. It would be similar to a single payer system: Medicare for all, these things that are discussed as ways that we can, as people, make sure that we have a healthcare system that prioritizes our health. SWB Yes! I mean I also have spent my fair share of time navigating the healthcare exchange, navigating getting insurance as a self-employed person, and it is so time consuming and so hard to figure out and so frustrating and that’s, for me, for somebody who has, so far, been a relatively low user of the system and also — I’m somebody who the system has kind of worked for … and it’s still a pain. And I know that I’m very lucky that it’s only been a pain and I’ve still been able to navigate it. EF Definitely. I actually recently just started … sort of sharing my own story about trying to get my two little kids covered on health insurance and I got this phone call and, this is after weeks and weeks of me submitting all of this documentation and calling them and saying, “Do you need anything else? I’ve got these two little kids. I need them on health insurance. I need them on health insurance.” And I got this phone call a few weeks ago and the woman said, “I’m really sorry to tell but neither of your kids have any health insurance right now. There’s a problem in the system, we had delays, they have nothing.” And so — and my kids are three and seven months — SWB Oh my god. Yeah. EF — and she said — and this is after I had submitted more paperwork than you can imagine [laughing]. Or maybe you can imagine. And she said, “If anything happens to either of them during this time, you can’t take them to the doctor. They can’t go to their regular pediatrician. You have to take them to the emergency room and you have to plead with the nurse on staff: ‘I have a child here who’s uninsured and who’s injured, can you please them?’” And I mean, my god, no parent should have to say that, no person should have to say that. It’s just appalling to me that we live in a country where that is part of our healthcare system where people are uninsured or underinsured and I just — I can’t — I feel very motivated to work toward a better healthcare system and so that’s always been — you know when I’m out there knocking on doors and talking to people that personal connection, and similar ones I’ve heard from so many people, that’s always on my mind. SWB It’s so shocking for what it is and then also just that this healthcare worker would explain that to you almost like it’s the most normal thing in the world. They’re so used to navigating this completely broken system that they’ll just walk you through all of these wild steps that you’re supposed to go through as if that’s — that’s just how it is! EF Yeah, absolutely. JL I can’t imagine as someone with an eleven-month-old and I feel like, for me, I’m calling all the time. So as a new parent, I’m constantly like, “Um, can you just check to make sure my baby’s ok?” And so to have to go from the opposite is yes, it makes my heart sink hearing that for you and for everyone that has to go through that. EF Healthcare also was one of the things that could’ve held me back from making that decision to run. So the job that I had before running provided healthcare. It wasn’t perfect but I had health insurance, it was pretty good and both my children were on it. And so my decision to run affected my family in some very significant ways, including the fact that we all lost our health insurance and had to go through the marketplace to get healthcare. My partner works for a small business and they don’t provide healthcare to dependents. So that was actually a very significant thing for me that I thought a lot about. My kids are on this healthcare, I’m on this healthcare through my work, do I really want to make this decision to run for office and, in some ways, give that up? Right? And I think that’s real for a lot of people: being tied to a job because of the way that our healthcare system in our society is structured and how much health insurance is tied to employment. SWB Yeah, absolutely, it gives employers a lot of leverage over people. EF It does and I think it keeps some people in jobs that they don’t necessarily want to be in, right? For what they think that they could earn more money somewhere else or would be more interested in a different career or could start a small business but they’re terrified of the leap it would take them to jump into an unknown healthcare situation. [19:55] SWB So you were weighing the decision to run, you were interested in doing it, you were dealing with healthcare, and you were thinking about that pretty heavily. What made you decide to go for it? EF Gosh, I thought a lot about it. I had a career as a journalist that I really loved and I had been working as a reporter for more than ten years and it was tremendous. I really had the chance to talk to a lot of people across our city in South Philly and it was a great job. And I realized that I needed to do more. I looked at the world that we live in and the world that I’m handing to my kids and we’re handing to future generations with healthcare and schools and climate change and I thought about the fact that, honestly, I’m pretty terrified about the direction a lot of those things are going in. It’s not the world that I want my kids and other generations to inherit and I just really decided I needed to do more. I couldn’t continue to do what I was doing. I was no longer as happy with it as I had been because I felt so compelled to act. And I would like to say that I was the one who came to that realization after careful reflection but I needed a little help getting there. It was actually my partner, we were driving — I don’t know — we almost never drive, I don’t even know where we were driving but I remember we were in the car side by side and I was talking about how — national politics and state politics and I’m so unhappy with what’s happening and I feel like I need to be more involved. And he said, “You know you want to run for office, right?” [Laughing] I think — I don’t know how long it was before I said anything but I hadn’t really thought of that. And I think that’s the case for a lot of people who have not been involved in politics. That’s certainly the case for a lot of women. It’s not a sphere that’s particularly welcoming to us, especially where we are geographically right now, it’s a place that’s dominated by men and by a male culture and I had just never imagined myself being that person, having my face on the literature. [Laughing] you know really — maybe I would work for someone. I had never thought specifically about stepping up and doing that. It’s a big jump, right? It can seem intimidating. It took my partner saying, “You know you want to do this, right?” For me to think about it and I was like, “Oh! You’re right! I do! I absolutely do. It’s exactly what I want to do. I want to have a firsthand impact in affecting and crafting policy. I want to be the one out there talking to people about what’s working for them, so that we can make government work better.” It was like he flipped a switch in my head and suddenly I was — you know, just hearing that from him I was able to see in myself that that’s exactly what I wanted to do. SWB That’s great. I love to hear that kind of level of ownership that you’re saying. Like, “I want this and I want to put myself out there and make that happen.” And I think you’re right, like women are frequently not taught to do that — to sort of say, you know, “I’m going to put myself in the center of this and I’m going to make this happen.” And that combined with a whole lot of other factors have made it really difficult to get women into office in Pennsylvania particularly. Something I’m super curious about that you started to mention here was what the local political climate is like. Not all of our listeners are in Pennsylvania, they may not realize that Philadelphia is known as kind of a Democratic machine. The city is almost entirely voting Democrat — pretty high numbers like 80 percent or so but it’s not necessarily progressive and it’s not necessarily the kind of scene that might seem welcoming to you. So can you tell me a little what that’s like: being a newcomer, trying to oust an incumbent in this particular area? EF Sure! So big picture, for people who don’t know, Pennsylvania is 49th in the nation in women in elected office. So that’s every level of elected office, Pennsylvania is second worst only to Mississippi in that stat. So we obviously have a very long way to go. It was quite intimidating in the beginning. The thing that has motivated me from the very, very beginning when I first started telling people I was doing this through us opening our campaign office last weekend was the response that I’ve gotten from people. I knew in the very beginning that I had very strong values, very strong desires of what sort of legislation I wanted to work toward, a strong reason for doing this, but I really did not know exactly how people would respond. And it has been so absolutely amazing. So people I know, people I see at the park, and then all these people who I knock on their door and I introduce myself and I say, “Hi, I’m here to meet you. I want to hear what’s important to you. What’s working in your life, what’s not working in your life, what would you like to see elected officials thinking about and government doing?” Honestly, the response that I’ve received from people has been really, really positive. It’s been: “Thank you for stepping up,” “Yes, oh my goodness! We need more women in elected office. We need more people who really have our interests in mind.” So those are the sorts of conversations that I work hard to remember when I am part of difficult situations and difficult discussions where I don’t necessarily feel particularly welcome. There were some people in the beginning who when I told them what I was doing, they were like, “Woah!!!” [Laughing] I mean I think they were pretty surprised because it is …yeah, you know, I’m a mom and a former journalist and someone who’s active with my local public school. I don’t have a lengthy insider political pedigree, I haven’t been thinking about this for decades, you know? I’m someone who’s stepping up because I really feel called to do it because I want a better health insurance system for all of us. Because I want all of us to have clean water and clean air. And so going back to those principles and those reasons that I’m running and thinking about specific people I’ve talked to and their struggles is how I get through some of those tougher times, honestly, when I don’t feel that welcome. [25:45] SWB Yeah, well I think I mean I’m so glad that you’re doing this because bit by bit when we have more women and more people from different backgrounds and people from new generations involved in what is a pretty uh homogenous political scene here. It gets easier for everybody else that follows and I’m so glad to see that happening. I’m really curious: you’ve mentioned being a mom a few times, obviously it’s very central to your life and it’s also central to your campaign, but what the hell is it like to have a seven-month-old and a three-year-old as you’re in the middle of this campaign? EF [Sighs] oh boy! Pretty good. Sleep is actually something I prioritize more than other things, more than folding laundry, more than — I don’t know, whatever the other — cleaning our house. I prioritize sleep because I know very personally, I’ve known this as long as I can remember, that without sleep I am much less, much less happy and much less useful in the world. It’s pretty tough for me sometimes at night to say, “Alright, it’s 10pm I’m going to bed,” when I look around and see all of the things that there are left to be done but I work hard to do that because I know it’s important for me and for me to be a good — not just a good mom but a good candidate, a good person, a good human being to interact with. So I try to think about myself and prioritize that. That said: it’s tough sometimes. I mean, I love my kids and sometimes, especially most of the weekend: Saturdays and Sundays, I’m usually gone. I’m usually out knocking doors, sometimes I have one meeting. But I’m usually gone, you know, 9am to 7pm is pretty consistent. 9am to 6pm, sometimes, if I get done early. So I have started to try to come back in the middle of the day just for a little bit. You know get some pre nap-time cuddles, some kisses, read a book to them, I sing my son “Jingle Bells,” it’s still his favorite song. [Laughing] so I try to get home in time for “Jingle Bells,” like things like that that are moments that are — it’s not as much time as I might, you know, in different world want to spend with them, but making sure that I have some time like that with them each day. So that I can think about it when I’m out there knocking doors and it’s freezing cold and my legs, honestly, are a little bit tired. Having those moments because I think without that balance I wouldn’t — it would be much harder for me to do it. I would also say that it’s amazing. It’s really amazing the response I’ve gotten from people. I’ve had people reach out to me who said, “Oh I’ve always — you know I’ve been thinking about running for office but I thought I couldn’t do it because, like you said, I have an eleven-month-old or because I’ve never been involved in politics or I’m pregnant,” or whatever their thing is, right? Sometimes related to kids, sometimes not. But often they’ll say, “Well, I saw you spoke to the Indivisible chapter and you had a five-month-old baby in the baby carrier on you and you were just doing it and you could see his little chubby legs hanging out there and I can do it too.” Like that was a message to me that like, “Oh I could absolutely do that if I want to. I could run for school board, I could run for commissioner.” So that’s really been fantastic and I’ve had people reach out to me who, you know, they like Facebook message me who I have never met [laughing], who I don’t know from across the state. So that’s honestly been inspiring for me to hear from them …and …I just try to remember why I’m doing this. And that’s what, you know, the moments when it’s hard and it’s time for me to go and I give them a kiss and my three-year-old says, “No, no, stay! Do a puzzle.” Um I remember that I got into this for a very specific reason because I really believe we should have elected officials on every level of government fighting for us as people for healthcare and education and water and air and that’s why I’m doing it. And then I give them an extra hug and kiss and tell them I love them and I’ll see them for dinner and then I leave. EF So, you know, there are some tough times. I’m very, very fortunate to have a wonderful, wonderful partner — SWB Yeah, so speaking of partner, how did you work out with him what that balance or that juggle, I guess, would look like? Like, how did you figure out how you would keep things running on a day to day level? EF Oh boy! Four months in, we’re still trying to figure that out! [Laughs.] SWB I mean, I guess, aren’t we all? But yours seems [laughing] particularly acute. [30:00] EF [Laughs] yeah. Always coming from a place of respect and both of us always remembering that if the other person did something wrong or did something differently from how we would’ve done it that it was not malicious. It was not intentional, most likely, it was just an effort to get that thing done. Right? So whether it’s like my son sometimes wearing uh his pajama pants to school or wearing his rain boots when it’s not raining. Or my youngest child wearing a sweater that doesn’t exactly fit — like something like that, right? Or like we’re eating spaghetti for the fourth day in a row, woohoo! You know things that I’m like, oh my goodness, us always remembering why we’re doing this. Why we’re doing this as a family and that we love each other and we respect each other and the other person is doing the best they can. It might not be perfect and it’s probably not going to be. And I also heard from a number of other women who are already in elected office in Pennsylvania and um … it was really great. It was good to hear from them, you know? Hear from them say like, “Yeah, it’s going to be tough. There are going to be times when you think like, ‘This might be too hard. I don’t know about this,’ but you just gotta keep pushing through. Just push through. Do your best. There are going to be moments when it’s messy and not perfect and that’s fine. Accept it. Don’t try to be perfect or have complete control of the situation. Sometimes um it’s ok if your kid eats pizza for lunch and dinner. That’s fine.” [Laughing] things like that that you know when you’re a parent you want to do your very best all the time and we all do, in life, right? You want to wear matching socks, things like that that like oh my goodness, in the scope of the world, it doesn’t matter, um that said: my socks are very much matching right now. I would like to say, for the record [laughs][laughter]. SWB Well, I mean, as a candidate you kind of having to go out with at least matching socks. I’m curious, did you have to buy a lot of blazers to run? EF So a lot of my clothes — this is — I don’t know if it’s of interest, it’s a personal thing but I would imagine some people have had a similar situation after having a child um a lot of clothes didn’t fit anymore. So I had a fair amount of stuff from working as a reporter for 11 years. I had the blazers and the dress pants but a lot of that didn’t fit or was not particularly comfortable. So I bought a few things on sale with the help of my mother-in-law who is very fashion savvy. I think I look pretty good. I try to wear colors. I tend to like grey and navy and black. But I’m working on it. I’m trying to wear color, trying to stand out. So I did it. I bought two blazers — SWB No, you’ve gotta be out there in the red and blue, right? EF [Laughs] I keep my two blazers in high rotation. SWB That would be tough for me to get used to, having to kind of always go out there and be like, “Ok, I’m going to put it together today and I’m going to project a certain kind of image and that image can’t be gym clothes.” EF Right. No stretchy pants, no athletic pants [laughter], no athleisure pants, none of that. No, no. SWB Oh man I feel like I should you know like pour a little out for the athleisure pants here, that’s so sad. We all like stretchy pants. JL I just try to leave the house without any cat hair on me and that is what I consider a win for the day. SWB Oh by that measure, I’m also losing. Damn. Ok. So something else that I’m really curious about is what candidate life has been like for you so far. Like is there anything that surprised you about being a candidate? EF Mmm. One thing that has surprised me that I’m really dedicated to working to improve after I win this race is just how hard it was in the beginning — it was difficult logistically. I guess I would say. Like some of these databases you need access to so you can see voters and like starting a pac and figuring out finances and things like that that are very specific things, there are solid answers to these questions but for people who don’t know — and I did not have a particular idea — they can seem daunting and overwhelming. Right? You think like, “Wait, do I start a PAC? Would a PAC be in my name? Would a pac be in someone else’s name? What money does a PAC spend? Does all money go through a PAC?” I mean things like that that like it sounds like it’s in the weeds kind of but it’s actually really integral to running a campaign and running it correctly but I think — I know from talking to a lot of people. Just stuff like that can feel so overwhelming in the beginning that you start to think, “Oh well maybe this isn’t for me. I don’t know how to do this stuff. I have no idea. I don’t even know where to start. I don’t even know — would I Google it? I don’t even know who to call.” Luckily, I personally knew a few people who had run campaigns before and I could ask for help and ended up hiring some really good people who know exactly what they’re doing and could help me with some of the nitty gritty stuff but I think we absolutely need to have systems, programs, organizations that help people with those details of running. Right? So help them come up with their platform, help them come up with their personal narrative and story, but also help them with some of this particular stuff that can feel so overwhelming in the beginning and, I think, can result, honestly, in a lot of people giving up and deciding it’s not for them. People who should absolutely run and would be great elected officials. SWB Yeah, yeah that overwhelm I think can be so easy [laughing] to sink into and never get back out of. EF Definitely. SWB So, kind of a similar line, was there anything you feel like you got good at in a hurry? Like any hidden talents that came out as you started running? [35:20] EF Talking more about my personal experience and my personal stake in this and why I’m doing it from a very personal level. I’m doing this, obviously, for larger reasons of social institutions and economics and social justice and racial justice. But I think it’s so important that elected officials explain to us what’s at stake for them, right? What’s driving them. Why are they so invested in this thing? And that’s something that can be even more difficult for women who are running for office, right? To appear vulnerable, to show that they’re vulnerable about some things because it can be scary, right? [Laughing] And it can be kind of brutal in politics and the instinct for many people is to close up and just start talking about, like, bill numbers and throwing around jargon. And I think it’s so important for elected officials to show that they are, whatever they’re motivating factor is, personally, whatever the thing is that they’ve been through that fuels them and wants them to go out from 9am to 7pm or whenever they’re doing it. I think it’s important … for people to know that. SWB Yeah! And, you know, one of the things I really like about this message of having to get a little bit vulnerable is that I think it’s also — it points towards sort of a different way politics could be and a different way elected officials could act, right? Like if everybody who was in office was willing to operate at that kind of human level and get real about what they’re doing, I think that we would see government very differently. There’s so much of this … ego and pomp that sort of gets involved that prevents people from being real and certainly there’s so much of that that’s like very gendered. And I think that, you know, if we had more women in office who were willing to get up and talk in that way, you know, I think that the — just like the overall tenor in how things would get done would change dramatically. EF Definitely. And I think that’s one that we can work, like in our situation in Pennsylvania — that’s one way in which we can work across a partisan divide and urban-rural divide — is to really show that humanity and focus on that humanness and our human needs, as opposed to some of these old divisions that exist and are real but that are often transcended by our needs as people. SWB So … speaking a little bit more about changing the ratio of women in politics in Pennsylvania, I’m curious what it’s like to run as a woman—a, you know, relatively young woman. I think you’re about the same age as we all are which is, you know, thirty-something-ish. EF I mean I would say one of the things is that I am — my kids sometimes come to things with me, especially my youngest when he was a little bit younger. So when I announced, Louis was three months old and so was still very much in the developmental stage of needing to eat more often, needing more physical contact, and so he was often in the baby carrier when I would show up at events, when I would show up at big meetings with people, and there were quite a few [laughing] instances when people were astonished that I was the candidate. That I had shown up with a child in tow and so normalizing that — I think it’s important. Period. And I think also as a matter of economic justice, I mean a lot of us can’t afford to have a babysitter to watch the kids all the time. A lot of us don’t want to necessarily do that all the time. So really like normalizing that, I guess, would be something that’s important and some people have been quite surprised and so for me it has been a lot about pushing past that. You know, noting it: yes, true, baby is here. Now let’s talk about the reason that we’re here: I would like to seek your endorsement. You know showing them that it is possible to be doing both things at the same time. That I’m still a person to be taken very seriously. That I still have a lot of experience and am very dedicated. SWB I love that because I think, yeah, it’s normal. People have babies. Like a lot of people have babies all the time and they’re still people with ideas and plans. And so I’m really glad you’re out there, you know, bringing your kids along and bringing them up regularly and making that so central to the campaign without also letting that be a distraction. It doesn’t turn into just talking about, “Oh my god it’s the candidate with the baby.” Right? It’s like, “We’re here to talk about issues. Also, my kids are very much part of my life.” EF Yeah, absolutely and that’s something that we’ve stressed with our campaign from the beginning in that — so when we have people going out to knock doors, we just had our office opening party, we have fundraisers, we always work as hard as we can to provide childcare. And that’s actually resulted in a lot of people, a lot of young — youngish parents — I call myself youngish — parents getting more involved in politics, getting more involved in our campaign than they have ever before. Because they didn’t get the message. You know? They didn’t feel like they were welcome, there was no childcare, what are they going to do about it? Approaching it from this perspective of, “Of course childcare is provided, and we would love you to come and knock doors with us from one to four,” has been hugely rewarding and is the way I want to conduct my campaign too. [40:35] SWB So speaking of your campaign, I’m curious too: who’s on your campaign team and how did you approach building out that team? EF In addition to myself there are three paid people on staff. We have a lot of super volunteers who are absolutely amazing. Our paid staff is all women: finance director, field director, and campaign manager … and they’re fantastic. I could not ask for a better group of people to be surrounding me. My campaign manager has been with me since the very beginning. She started as my field director and she’s worked in the last two election cycles, specifically down here. So she’s very experienced and she also lives down here in the district. And we spend a lot of time together. That was one thing someone told me in the beginning was like, “Make sure you like your campaign because you’re going to spend more time with them than you will with any other human being.” And that’s Amanda. And Katie is my field director. She worked as a super volunteer in the last election. Her candidate who won — and she’s the face of the campaign in many instances in the office. When a volunteer shows up in the office and says, “I’m here to volunteer,” they often see Katie. And my finance director is Gretchen and she organizes fundraisers and also helps me with what is called Call Time. Call Time is when it’s me, a phone, and a list of people who I’m going to call, and ask them to support my campaign financially. And uh I guess maybe that has been one thing that has been surprising for me is how strange, especially in the beginning, how strange it was to call people up and ask them for money. I mean, just saying that sentence, like I never in my life had done that before. Um calling people and asking them for money. So getting more used to that, getting more comfortable and thinking about why I was doing it, why I’m running. SWB Do you feel comfortable now when you call and ask for money? Has it shifted for you to now you’re like, “Ok, I can do this. No problem.” EF It’s gotten easier. It’s not always easy, it depends. The idea is that you create this long list of everyone you’ve ever encountered in your life and that includes people you haven’t talked to in ten, or 15, 20 years, you call those people and you tell them, with great excitement in your voice, “I am running for office!” And you tell them why and you hear from them and then you ask them for money … which is pretty strange if like you have not actually talked to them for 15 years and they’re just telling you about their life and their kids and you had no idea they had children and you didn’t know they lived in New Jersey. Things like that where it really feels a little — it doesn’t feel comfortable. I’ve gotten better at that and I’ve received, honestly, really, really amazing responses from people when I’ve asked them for financial support and that’s what made it easier. That and just doing it over and over. Someone who ran for office before told me [laughs], he said, “Call all of your exes and all the people you’re dreading calling.” And I was like, “Oh! I don’t want to do that.” And he was like, “Call all of those people because once you call those people and tell them about your campaign and ask them for money, you can call anyone! You won’t feel afraid at all.” SWB We are just about out of time so I want to ask just a couple final questions and the first one is do you have any advice that you would give to people who are from groups that are underrepresented in politics who are interested in running? EF If you’re thinking about it, you should run. SWB Just that? Period. You’re like, “Look, if you’re thinking about it that means you actually want to already.” EF Yes, absolutely, and people should think about what office, what level of government makes sense to them, for them, in their lives and given the kind of work that they want to do. But I really think so many of us are held back just by that feeling that like, “Hmm, maybe there’s someone else out there who is more qualified. Maybe there’s someone else who would be better at this.” And in some cases: sure, there is. In many cases, there is not. It’s us! We’re the ones. We’re thinking about it already. If you’re ready to do the hard work and you’re considering running for office and you hear, when you say it to other people, people are like, “Oh my gosh! You would be a really good candidate, of course!” Then you should run. You shouldn’t let any sort of hesitation like that hold you back because we need so many more people to run, so that we can have gender parity and so that we can have our ideals and our values represented too. SWB So last question: the Democratic primary is in May and a few minutes ago you said something about, “When I win,” so I love that and I’m curious how are you feeling at this point? Are you starting to get excited? [45:06] EF I feel good. It’s surprising to me that we are already so close to the election. Time has gone by both quickly and slowly but generally quite quickly, and I feel good. We have a lot of hard work to do before the election. That said, we have a really good team and I know that we are committed to making it happen. SWB Well, I feel good. I’m very excited. EF Thank you [music fades in]. JL [Music fades out] well, I loved that. There was so much that Lizz said in there that I could completely relate to. SWB Yeah, I bet. I mean like all of this balance and juggle of being a new mom and trying to do ambitious stuff. I mean it kind of is pretty similar to the stuff we’ve talked about already. JL Yeah, completely. And one of the things that I really loved that she touched on was that for their campaign fundraisers how they were providing childcare. So people could canvas and they’d watch their children and I’m constantly struggling with that. I’ve started digging into speaking at conferences again because I took a little bit of a hiatus while pregnant and then in the first 11 months that I’ve had Cooper and so now I’m trying to get back in and I’ve been talking at conferences but it’s hard to figure out what I’m going to do. There’s some conferences that provide childcare for both attendees and speakers which I just think is so cool and so great that people are thinking about these sort of things. SWB Yeah, I love that too. It’s — one of the things I always think about is that even if only a few people need the childcare, you know it doesn’t have to be a large percentage of people, it’s really meaningful to those people who use it and then to everybody else I feel like it’s also such a strong signal that this event is thinking about you as a person and that people have needs and that it’s ok, right? It’s ok if your needs are childcare, it’s ok if you need to ask for a meal with certain dietary restrictions — SWB — like those kinds of little details I think really tell your attendees or your audience a lot about your values and I’m always looking for that, even though I don’t have kids, right? If I see an event that has childcare, to me that’s a signal. JL Yeah, I spoke at and attended JS Confs back in the day and they used to have a Significant Other track. So that you could travel with your family and what they did is they would have like — if you were attending the conference, the Significant Other track would go and do tours of DC, where the conference was. And I just thought it was neat to provide something for that. So if you wanted to travel with your family, to have that there. KL That’s so cool and I feel like, thinking about potentially a conference organizer’s point of view, it’s like, why wouldn’t you want to be able to get as many people to your conference and include those people because of a variety of different things that they might need. So it just seems obvious, you know? JL I guess it’s hard though, right? I mean cuz it’s another cost. KL Oh for sure. JL And so I think it’s always like — yeah I mean I don’t know it’s hard — I can understand why people’s instinct wouldn’t be to think of it but I wish they would. KL Yeah, no, for sure. SWB Running events is hard. Running events is very challenging, running anything is challenging, but I think that what it really means is that there’s a lot of priorities that people have that they kind of perceive as being default, right? Like, ok, for example at a conference oftentimes the default priority is: we need to have an open bar at the party. And people don’t think twice about spending budget there but will think like, “Oh my god! I have to spend money on childcare!” And I think that that’s just a challenge to what the default priorities are. And once you — it doesn’t mean that every event is going to have a budget for everything but it does mean that if you can kind of like let go some of those assumptions then you come at it from sort of a fresh perspective and say, “Ok, what’s really going to create the kind of experience that we value and that sort of like lives out our values?” JL That’s so true and, you know, a lot of those open bars are sponsored by bigger companies. So maybe conferences need to work with sponsors, maybe sponsors want to sponsor childcare … and they should do this and whatever conference that is should talk to me about speaking there [laughter]. SWB Absolutely. KL Yes, yes. Good idea. SWB I mean, hell, you know especially in tech you’ve got all of these big tech companies that are like, “We need to show that we support women in technology. We need to have a more diverse perspective. We want people to see that we value this.” Sponsor some childcare instead of sponsoring booze! I enjoy drinking, don’t get me wrong — but I would much rather buy my own wine at the party and see them sponsor something that really matters. JL Quick thank you to our sponsors for being so supportive of our podcast. SWB Woohoo! Yeah! KL Yay! SWB So I want to go back to one other thing that Lizz talked about though and that was the representation of women in politics in Pennsylvania. So she mentioned that Pennsylvania’s 49th in the nation for how representative women are in elected office. So I looked into this and there are some kind of sobering stats about this. So, first off, Pennsylvania has never sent a woman to the US Senate. Did you know that? Never. Not once. [Wow][oof] We’ve never had a woman governor and right now did you know there are 18 representatives in the US House from Pennsylvania? So we have 18 reps, zero of those reps are currently women. [50:25] JL How could that be?! KL I know. SWB Man, misogyny runs real deep! [Sighs] so it’s not looking great. You know at the state level it’s actually a little better. So the level that Elizabeth is running at: 19 percent of our state legislature is made up of women. So there’s some women but it’s still definitely very, very low but something I’m really excited about that you can see in somebody like Lizz is that there are historic numbers of women running for office this year. So like 2018 is going to have just a huge number of women running at all levels. There was an article in The Cut last month from Rebecca Traister and she talked about how at that point, in January, 390 women said they were planning to run for the House of Representatives. And that’s higher than any year ever. And she also talked about how many of those people were black women. So 22 of them were non-incumbent black women. So new people entering the races and that’s like more black women than are in the House as a whole right now. There’s just like so many women running for office and I’m really excited to see that and I’m so excited for Lizz because I think she’s going to make a great candidate and a great representative. KL That’s so awesome … I remember the first time I met her and went to her house, I think it was right before she announced, and I was like, “How is this person going to do all of this?” You know it just seemed so daunting and I was levels removed but having seen her, the few times I’ve seen her just out in the field and talked to her, I see her doing it and I hear her talking about how she’s doing it and I’m like, “Ok,” it just makes me feel so much more encouraged and inspired that all of these women are getting into office or are getting into running and that it’s really possible. Fuck Yeah of the WeekJL Hey! It’s time to celebrate even more awesome! You know when someone makes it a true Daily Double and they get the answer right? Or your home team makes it to the Super Bowl? That’s this next segment: the Fuck Yeah of the Week. Hey, Katel, what’s making you go, “Fuck yeah!” this week? KL You know I am so inspired by Lizz Fiedler’s interview that I started looking around and there’s great organizations supporting and promoting women running for office. It’s so cool. One called She Should Run, there’s another one called Rise to Run. And, of note, She Should Run, for example, has a tool that they have built called Ask a Woman to Run. It’s so cool. You can go to their website and literally nominate someone to run for office and provide a little information. It’s really, really cool. They also have a She Should Run incubator which meets women who are already sort of in the process, wherever they are in that process, to help them, support them, promote them to run which is so cool. SWB Wait, so can you tell me more about this? So if I go to She Should Run and I submit somebody that I think should run, what happens? KL You share the message with that person, so that’s really awesome. And they basically provide a bunch of resources to help them start and get on their way. SWB But it’s like a little nudge. KL Yeah. SWB You know I love this because when we were talking to Lizz she told that story about being in the car with her partner and they’re going somewhere and she’s like ranting and raving about what’s going on in local politics and how she wants to kind of make a difference and she’s feeling … you know like this urge to get involved in some way, and he’s just like, “You know you want to run for office?” I feel like having that external voice that’s like, “Hey, you know you want to do this.” Right? Like as she was saying, if you’re thinking about, you should do it. But I feel like it’s hard, right? Like I like getting involved with things, I like being civically active, but the idea of running for something is pretty scary and so there’s something to be said for somebody putting a little bit of their faith behind me in like a slightly more organized way than just saying it … over drinks. Like actually sitting down and being like, “No, go do this.” KL Yeah, I’m thinking back to [chuckles] — I don’t want to take us down a sad hole here but right after the election, the Trump election, I was like, “Shit, I need to mobilize a lot more,” and I just really had no idea where to start. And the immediate thought I had was I need to look at my friends and trust those friends who I know know what to do and where to start. So the fact that there are resources that help you do this now is just incredible. SWB You know and there’s a lot of new resources cropping up since the fall of 2016, for reasons that are probably pretty clear to our listeners, but there also are organizations that have been around a long time. Like I’ve long been a fan of EMILY’s List and I just recently found out that EMILY’s List is an acronym. I thought it was started by somebody named Emily. It stands for Early Money is Like Yeast. JL Woah! [55:16] SWB As in it makes the dough rise. Like, that the entire idea of it is that when you get early donations to a campaign, that really provides the foundation that allows a campaign to be successful. KL That’s a good acronym. SWB Who knew?! But I’ve long relied on EMILY’s List for information about who they’re supporting because it’s really focused on, particularly on pro-choice candidates, which is something that’s pretty important to me but … I’m so glad to see other organizations out there bolstering things because, as we heard, right? Like there’s a lot of work to be done to diversify who is in office and lots and lots of organizations to help us do it, I think can only make it better … So … Fuck yeah! Like fuck yeah, we got some work to do, politically speaking. But also a “Fuck Yeah” to all of these amazing women and also folks who are trans or nonbinary who have been cropping up in elections — I don’t know if you all saw Danica Roem this year who won a seat — KL Ah! Amazing. SWB — in the Assembly in Virginia as a trans woman. Like, fuck yeah! KL Fuck yeah! We’re going to do it. SWB I loved what Lizz said like, “When I win.” KL Yes! SWB I want us all to bring that along with us, right? Like, “When I win, when women win, when we win …things are going to be a lot better.” 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, home of the Super Bowl champions, and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Elizabeth Fiedler for being our great guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please subscribe to our show on your podcast listener app of choice, and be sure to rate us on iTunes. Your support helps us spread the word. We’ll be back next week with another radical guest. KL Go Iggles! [Laughter][music fades in and ramps up to end]. | |||
| 20 Feb 2018 | How to Draw a Scientist with Allison Crimmins | 00:50:10 | |
It’s no secret that 2017 was a trash year, and 2018 hasn’t been…easy. But somehow, we’re still here, making it work—and even finding inspiration, joy, and success. We want to talk about how we’re coping during even the most trying political and cultural times. To help us, we sit down with none other than a climate scientist working in government to find out how _she’s _keeping her head up in rough times. > Here’s what’s in store in Episode 6 (and as always, there’s a full transcript): Show notesFirst up, we look back on last year and how we made it through. We talk about how even though we had some big successes, it was hard to feel accomplished while the world seemed to burn in turmoil. We discuss:
We also discover how to recognize when it’s OK to just turn off and tune out. Hint: it’s always OK when that’s the most healthy choice. Interview: Allison CrimminsOur guest this week is Allison Crimmins, a badass friend who works on climate change in Washington, DC, during the day and cancer research at night—no big. She takes us through her typical Tuesday and tells us how the hell she’s doing these days. We cover:
Fuck Yeah of the WeekFinally, we swoon over the unveiling of the absolutely brilliant Obama portraits. If you haven’t checked the work of Amy Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama, and Kehinde Wiley, who painted Barack Obama—do it now. SponsorsThis 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. _
_ TranscriptKatel LeDû [Ad spot] This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by our friends at Shopify, the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. In fact, my company, A Book Apart, runs on Shopify … and great news: they’re hiring more awesome people to join their team. And they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply to you. Join a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team, and work on the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in]. [0:39] Jenn Lukas [Music fades out] Hey and 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. SWB You know we all know that 2017 was a trash year, and 2018 looks like it’s going to be stressful too. So today we are going to talk about what we do during these tough times, how do we stay motivated, and how do we keep it together. To help us do that, we’ll talk with Allison Crimmins, who is an environmental scientist working in government — yes, government — on issues related to climate change. Talk about tough times. But before we steal all of her coping methods, let’s talk about the state of our union. KL I don’t know, I had a weirdly good professional year last year, and I don’t know, it was in a lot of different ways. I really wanted to grow in a couple of different areas that I previously didn’t know if I was going to be able to. We had sort of locked down a lot of things that go into the day to day running of A Book Apart, and one area was just marketing. I really was like, “I don’t feel confident in this. I really want to get a better grasp of it,” and [exhales deeply] I feel like I got better at it by asking for help and just realizing that I wasn’t going to get there alone and that I really — I wanted to get stronger in that area and, you know, some others to actually sustain the business. It was really cool to be able to find that and also, I don’t know, just feel like I had really made some progress and felt like I achieved something. And while I felt kind of successful and that I had made an accomplishment, there were mornings, like a lot of mornings, that I would wake up and just feel like, “What the fuck? Like maybe this doesn’t even matter.” It was a weird feeling to have that juxtaposition. It was tough. SWB Yeah, I mean I definitely felt like that too, right? I was working on a book for a lot of last year: finishing writing it, going through the editorial process on it, waiting for it to come out, doing all of the legwork in advance of it coming out. You know, you need to be excited about it, right? Like you have to be excited about your own book if you want anybody else to be. And meanwhile I would be reading Twitter, because I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on in the thing that my book is about, and what do you see on Twitter? Well, you see a bunch of garbage the president said, and all of this stuff that was just really depressing, and it was really difficult to keep focused on anything else, and I felt like that was hard. It’s hard to think about things that are going well and to think about like, you know, if you get praise for something, or sales at A Book Apart go up, or whatever, and to be excited about it when you’re also kind of like, at a macro level what the fuck even? KL Yeah and I mean I think for me too just feeling like, if you’re excited about it, and you’re feeling like, “Ok, we made progress, we had successes.” That obviously rubs off on other people and you want them to feel like things are moving in the right direction. So it’s hard to, obviously not just feel that for yourself but then, make sure [laughing] that you’re not falling apart and that that’s spreading. JL So Katel, what did you do on those days when you were wondering, does it matter? Does this matter? How did you cope with that? KL I mean really and truly it was the fact that I’d done the work of putting a network together and really surrounding myself with people who knew the right steps to take and in the right direction, and having folks that I could rely on. So I think — I mean also being accountable to having a vision and making sure that you are moving in the right direction was huge. JL It’s weird to say this but it’s almost refreshing for me to hear this just because, you know, I think a lot of times we have feelings like that: is everything going to be OK? Am I going to make it through this time of my life? Whether it’s because of external situations going on or internal ones, or just things you can control, things you can’t control. So it’s almost refreshing to hear that other people go through that as well and that just because you have those feelings doesn’t mean that you won’t get through them or learn how to cope with them at the same time. So I think it’s really nice. So thank you for sharing that. SWB Yeah, Jenn, did you ever feel dissonance last year because you had a baby: big exciting thing, awesome thing, not without its own challenges, right? [Laughter] JL Different challenges. SWB But where it’s like, “Oh my god the largest source of joy I’ve ever had in my entire life also what the hell is happening in this country?” 5:16 JL Yeah, I’ll tell you that I struggled, I think, with feelings of guilt a lot last year because I turned off. I turned off a lot of social media, I turned off a lot of news. The current events and just keeping up with sort of like the social network around me I felt all to be a little too overwhelming while trying to make sure that I stayed healthy to be able to give birth to a child. SWB Like what can we do to make you feel less guilty about that? Because like I think you should feel no guilty about that. JL Thank you for saying that but, you know, it’s hard because I’ve read — there were so many great articles and I tried to read about like what can we do, what could you do last year, and how could you get involved. And I have great friends that were doing a lot of things locally that were really awesome. At the time, you know, I was eight months pregnant. Besides just wanting to sleep all the time, like physically you have this physical being inside of you [laughter]. That is like draining. KL Draining you. JL It’s like having this alien sort of inside — he’s going to listen to this when he’s older and he’s going to be like, “You called me an alien.” But I mean like that’s what it is. SWB You know what? Here’s the thing: your kid is never going to be interested in your podcast [laughter]. KL That’s true. But we’re still — by the way, we’re still going to be doing it then. So just — [laughter] get ready. SWB We’ll be extremely famous. JL Um but I mean you have this, like, life force inside of you, sucking your energy and making you tired, and then I would like try to turn on the news for a second and I would be like, “I can’t.” For me it was really important to recognize that I couldn’t. Katel, you mentioned accountability and um, you know, there’s being accountable to employees or a team. For me, I felt accountable to, at the time, my unborn son and being like, “I need to make sure that I’m doing this for you.” So sometimes having a thing that’s not you or a person or — can help you figure out how to make it through this next step. Sometimes I can’t see what the next five steps are, so if I can see through someone else’s eyes it helps me figure out where I need to go. SWB Well, I mean I think it’s very important that now that you have this child, right? What is one of the biggest things that you can do for the world? Raise a son who’s a good person and who’s not a terrible misogynist. I would greatly appreciate that and that’s also — that’s a big task, right? You’re raising a kid in a culture that is going to present some problems and you’re going to be aware and there to work through it. So you didn’t watch the news for awhile. I do think it’s important to pay attention to what’s going on in the world. I’m not trying to say that like, “Oh and none of it matters. Hashtag selfcare, turn it off all the time!” I just mean that you have to recognize what’s going to be useful for you at any given moment in your life and at the moment in your life when you’re like, “I cannot actually do anything about this because I don’t have anything to give.” Turning it off is probably the most productive. So it’s not sucking more energy from you, right? So I actually I applaud that. I applaud that you were able to do that and I hope that you have forgiven yourself for doing that by now because it doesn’t fucking matter that you missed some news. I can fill you in: it was bad [laughter]. KL I think that’s the thing too, like you realize that it’s this cycle of panicking and just being like, “Fuck does it matter?” And then being like, “Well, wait, there are things in my life that I know it matter for or to,” and then realizing like that you need to prioritize and maybe prioritize for other beings or people in your life and then being like, “OK, it’s going to be fine.” And then maybe it starts all over again when things get rough. JL And I think that’s a great point and in terms of forgiving myself now it’s like, “OK, well, let’s podcast. Let’s talk to people. Let’s get out there.” What else can I — what can I do next on things? So it’s not always, “Well, just because I didn’t do anything in 2017 doesn’t mean I can’t do anything in 2018.” So I think it’s that whole like terrible cliche about tomorrow’s another day in here. SWB What I also think a lot about is that gluing yourself to a news stream and going through cycles of freaking out is also not doing anything. That is not actually doing anything. And it’s not to say that there’s something wrong with being informed, but I do know what it’s like to sort of reflexively refresh to figure out like what new fresh hell has unleashed. And what I realized of course is the biggest things that I did last year was, like, I raised a bunch of money for abortion access. I donated a tremendous number of hours to Fair Districts PA, which is working on stopping gerrymandering in this state, and there’s significant progress on that, like we’ve just recently, in Pennsylvania, won this lawsuit against the districts that were drawn last time, which are super gerrymandered. And I was a direct part of the team that worked on digital strategy, and made sure they actually had a brand, I mean I did all of this hands-on work. And then, those don’t do anything to stop Donald Trump. Right? Like in this sort of like — in some of these macro ways that you know things are screwed up, I didn’t necessarily affect those things, but those are really tangible things that I did that are important, and that are important to human people who live in the communities that I care about. And like I was able to that because I had some and energy and expertise to give. And maybe this year you’ll have a little bit of time, or expertise, or energy to give to something you care about, but you gave a lot of time, energy, and expertise to birthing a child last year. 10:45 KL I mean: props [music fades in]. SWB [Music fades out][ad spot] Hey Jenn, do you know what always works during difficult times? JL What, Sara? SWB WordPress.com! So, WordPress.com is one of our wonderful sponsors, and we are so happy to be supported by them. 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Ever want a place where you could write and share front-end code with others? Maybe even a potential employer? Your profile on CodePen is like your front-end development portfolio. I’m working in CodePen at least ten times a week. I love it. And if you’re ready for even more more CodePen, be sure to check out CodePen Pro. With a pro account you can upload assets like images to use in your code, you can create private pens — I have so many of those! And you can even see changes as you build with live view. Not to mention there’s a cool professor mode for teaching and working real time with your students. Pro accounts start at just nine bucks a month. Learn more at codepen.io, that’s c-o-d-e-p-e-n dot i-o [music fades in]. KL [Music fades out] Allison Crimmins is an environmental scientist working in Washington, DC. Along with her day job in climate science, she works on ambitious side projects like an early stage thriving biotech startup — no big deal! And volunteers to help encourage young folks to engage in STEM. She also happens to be one of my very close friends and every time I talk to her I feel either inspired, or assured, or pumped about something, and sometimes all of the above. Allison, I am so happy to have you on the show today. Welcome to No, You Go. Allison Crimmins Thank you! I’m very happy to be here. KL First can you tell us a little bit about your work or your area of expertise? AC I am a climate scientist with a background in oceanography but I also have a degree in public policy. So I’m in this kind of interesting place where my job involves some kind of wonky, nerdy climate science but also thinking about how that applies to policies, and thinking about ways to communicate that science to all sorts of different audiences, from policy-makers, state and local decision-makers, or just general members of the public. Yeah I really enjoy the sort of some science, some policy, some communications. I like that I get to do a piece of that everyday in my job. SWB Can you tell me a little more like what does that look like on a day-to-day level? AC Yeah, like my average Tuesday? [Laughter] SWB Yeah. AC So I have ongoing research projects that look at the impacts of climate change, specifically how they affect human health, and, in some cases, how they affect our economy. And so I help manage different research projects that publish peer-reviewed papers that go into wonky scientific journals and that’s kind of the science side of my job. The other side of my job would be making sure that that science actually gets applied and also communicated. The taxpayers pay for that science, and so they have a right to see it and know about and learn from it. KL So we know this is kind of a difficult time for people who do what you do, sort of generally, how are you? In this job? In this environment? Right now? [14:50] AC Yeah I get asked that a lot nowadays. Or if I meet someone new and I tell them that I’m a climate scientist, I usually get a, “Ooh, thank you for your service.” Which is — it’s actually been kind of nice that people have been coming out of the woodwork to actually let us know how much they appreciate the work we do. It’s hard to do good science and then not see it get used or be appreciated as much as it once was. But it doesn’t stop us from doing the good science. In fact, in a lot of ways it inspires us to work even harder. It’s kind of proof that what we’re doing is really important. KL How do you stay motivated or focused or even sane through all of this? AC Well, I guess it’s probably important to admit first off the bat that I don’t handle it every day with the utmost grace and aplomb. I’m an average person in a lot of ways, and so I have good days and bad days. But there’s always that driving factor that I’m doing good science and I’m helping to make the world a better place, and I’m surrounded by lots of people who feel that same way and have that same goal. And so in a lot of ways it’s the people I work with that have really helped me keep going every day and keep pushing through. KL Have you and the people you work with had to redefine things like progress or success in the initiatives that you’re trying to get through or the projects you’re trying to push out the door? AC I think by necessity you have to. I mean, I’m a civil servant. I work with a lot of other civil servants. You know you think about administrations shifting and you think that might cause a huge upheaval of the people that work there, but really the government is made up of mostly civil servants like myself who through whatever administration comes through will keep doing the good work and the good science and making sure that our country’s moving forward. So, you know, for people who have been there for decades, a lot of those people see this as just an inevitable shift in the political winds but not really altering their mission, or their long term goals. I think it’s harder for people who are newer in government to have such a severe shift, I guess, from the last administration to this one, especially in terms of climate change because in the last administration it wasn’t just that we had an administration that was pro-science, it was actually that we had a hunger and an actual request for more information to better understand the impacts of climate change. So we’ve had to, you know, we’re still doing the good work, we’re still doing good science. That’s still happening. We just have to be more strategic or creative in some places about how we accomplish those goals. SWB Yeah, what does that mean? So when you say getting strategic or creative, like, what kinds of techniques are you using day-to-day to feel like you can still make some incremental progress or get things communicated in a way that gets adoption, or in some way feel like you’re still moving toward those goals? AC Yeah, I think I’ll start by telling you a story that my father-in-law told me. He was in advertising for many years and he told us that oftentimes you’re able to be more creative when you’re forced into a situation with lots of limitations or restraints. So in his case, you know, he would be working on a commercial for a product and suddenly the company would say, “Well, we don’t want any people in this commercial, and it has to be this long, and you can’t say these words.” And they’d set up a bunch of limitations which can feel very confining and frustrating but it’s in those situations where I think anyone can be even more creative. It forces you to be creative. And I think about that story often in my day-to-day job when I am faced with maybe the normal way we would do something is now off the table. You can look at that with frustration or you can look at it as an opportunity to be even more creative. So in this time I’ve, you know, I guess to get more specific I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about other people or other groups that I can collaborate and maybe I can do the science but they can do the communicating. Or maybe I can connect to researchers who haven’t worked together in the past and one has the data and one has the model and, you know, maybe there’s a way I can put those two together and I don’t need to have my name on it but that science still moves forward. It forces you to really, I don’t know, get sneaky and strategic about how to keep this science progressing. [19:58] SWB In some ways it clarified what’s really important here. You’ve been able to say, “OK, it’s really important that the science keeps happening even if your name is not on the paper,” which I think is kind of hard though, right? Like if you’re somebody who has a lot of career ambition and is doing this work, is it ever difficult to feel like you can’t be as recognized for the work that you’re doing? Or as valued for that work? AC I mean that’s always hard if you’re not appreciated for the work that you’re doing. But in this case I think I don’t mind it so much. I’m happy to actually see information get out to people even if my name is not attached to it. And even kind of bigger picture: if I’m successful in my life-long career of addressing climate change, no one will have heard of my name because climate change won’t be an issue anymore that we’ll be dealing with. It’s kind of that counterfactual element of my job is, you know, we don’t talk about the ozone hole as much as we did, or when was the last time you heard about acid rain? If I’m truly successful at my job, you won’t ever know it. KL Has doing this kind of work, even in the last five years, the way that you’ve had to shift or change approaches, has that made you learn anything about yourself that you weren’t expecting? AC Something I’ve learned about myself is that, you know, when I first started this job I was moving kind of out of what we call bench science. So I wasn’t working in a laboratory anymore, working at a lab bench doing sort of the wet lab-type science, I was doing more work to apply that science. And when I first started my job and maybe I would work with a contractor or another researcher and I would look at the work they were doing and I would almost be jealous of it and think, “Well, that’s where I should be. I should be the person in the lab doing that experiment.” But over time I came to really appreciate sort of the project management aspect of my job, that I can guide the research and be sort of the big thinker behind coming up with new research questions and connect researchers together and in some ways it feels a little bit like I’m able to conduct more of the orchestra rather than play one instrument. KL Mm hmm. AC And that’s something I never thought growing up. I was the kid with the “Save the Whales” poster on their wall, you know? [KL laughs] From an early age, I thought I was going to be the, you know, that girl out on the boat saving the whales. But I actually feel a lot more powerful in the position I’m in now that I can help the larger movement of science progress. KL Right, you’ve sort of felt out all of the places you’re strong and you’re using those skills to do it like more holistically. You’re also the director of strategy for Remedy Plan, the biotech startup that I mentioned in our intro. Can you tell us a little bit about it? AC Sure. This is a startup company that my husband has started that does cancer research and it also kind of started out of two researchers coming together to discuss their … seemingly separate fields and finding a very interesting overlap and coming up with a really, really great idea of a new way to find cancer therapeutics. And so when my husband was first dreaming this up, you know, he’s on this very rigid academic traintracks. You know? You go and you get your PhD and you get your post doc and you follow this exact pathway and suddenly he had an idea that was like too good to pass up. It really was. And when he explained it to me, I instantly recognized it as too good of an idea to pass up. And so he quit his job and started this company, and we’ve been going for two years now and the science is going great [chuckles]. It’s interesting to be working on climate change during the day and cancer research on the weekends — KL It’s not, you know, it sounds totally laid back. SWB Does it ever feel just like a lot? Because it sounds like a lot when you describe it. AC It is a lot, yeah. I mean I don’t work full-time, of course, for Remedy Plan, but I try to help out where I can and it’s a pretty small startup, so, you know, the few people working there end up wearing a lot of different hats. But also both my husband and I are scientists and so all our training comes from science and we’re being forced to learn a lot of new skills. Like how to write a business plan, or thinking strategically about our branding and our website, or how does one even go about pitching potential investors for a Series A round? So it’s also kind of exciting and in much of the same way I love science because it’s an act of discovery, this side project has also been a really fun act of discovery for me, kind of exploring this whole other world. [25:16] KL That’s so cool, and also, I mean, I just want to say that you are incredibly good at communicating complex scientific concepts, you know, sort of real talk here: a lot of scientists aren’t always good at this, and it’s like, why is that, do you think? AC Yes. I don’t think a lot of people go through school or go through their PhD with any pressure or any element to explain what they’re doing to anyone else besides their immediate colleagues who understand the same language. And I hope that that is something that is changing. I think the other element is that scientists are wary to talk about their science in what they might view as a more simplistic or a way that could be misinterpreted which is unfortunate because I think if you really understand your work and your science, then you should be able to explain it to anyone. And I think, especially for my field of science, I think you have a responsibility to explain it to other people. KL Absolutely! I mean how did you get good at it? AC I think probably just because I’m really geeky about it and I like to talk about it a lot. And I want other people to be as excited as I am at these discoveries and so it’s something that I’ve always enjoyed doing. SWB I’ve met lots of scientists over the years. Actually both my mother and my brother are chemistry professors. They’re all geeky about their science, right? It’s not like any of them are not geeky about it, they all love talking about it. But what they don’t all love to do is come to you with it, they want you to come to them, right? So it’s like they want to talk about it on their terms because that’s what they’re comfortable with. And it sounds like something you’re really comfortable with is being able to bring things to other people and have a little bit more of that collaborative spirit, which to me seems kind of crucial to being able to communicate it in a way that’s going to work for different audiences. AC Absolutely, and I think even going back to, you know, the story of Remedy Plan. It came out of two people in slightly different fields who were able to communicate how exciting the thing was that they were working on and then see where those things overlap and provide an opportunity for something greater than the sum of its parts. KL So I gotta ask this: women make up half of the total college-educated workforce but only 29 percent of the science and engineering workforce. How have you navigated that? AC Yeah it’s a really tough field to be a woman. I mean a lot of fields are. This one’s definitely tough and at every step of the way, from undergraduate and grad school and post docs and jobs, we struggle and it’s hard, especially because we don’t have a lot of role models to look at, or we haven’t so far. Hopefully that’s changing. And often the role models we do have are those super amazing, you know, titanium women who can do it all. And it’s like, well, do you have to be made of titanium? I mean, can you just be someone who’s really into science and curious about life to enjoy being a scientist? So I got some advice early on in my career from a very wonderful female scientist who said to be wary of the people who are maybe hierarchically a little higher than you, and to be extremely giving and helpful to the people who are coming up behind you. And so I try as much as I can to talk with college kids or high school kids and most of the time my message is just, “Hi, I’m a scientist and I also happen to be a woman.” It doesn’t have to be much more complicated than that. That I think when I first started going into classrooms, the teachers would have the kids draw a picture. Before I got there they’d have the kids draw a picture of a scientist and the kids would, of course, draw a man in a white lab coat with crazy hair and glasses. Like to a kid that’s our image of what a scientist is: this like wacky guy pouring chemicals from one jar to another. You know and then they introduce me and here I’m just kind of a normal lady coming into the room to talk about the fact that being a scientist let me travel to the Great Barrier Reef and explore these new lands, and make exciting discoveries, and I think just actually being seen is important. So I try to make that a part of my life as well to help when things get tough. [30:00] SWB Yeah I love that. It reminds me of this interview we did for an earlier episode with Elizabeth Fiedler, who’s running for the Pennsylvania Legislature. And she talks about how she has gone to campaign events with her baby strapped to her and on the one hand she — you know her children are extremely central to her life, and they’re also central to her campaign, to the issues that she cares about, and they’re present. And she wants people to see them there, right? But on the other hand she doesn’t want to hang out and be the baby candidate. She is there to talk about specific issues and it’s kind of this idea of like normalizing it, right? “Yeah, yes, I’m a mom. That’s great. That’s important to me. It’s very obvious. And then also let’s talk about the issues that we’re here to talk about, and let’s talk about what we’re going to do in this community.” And it’s kind of that same idea, right? It’s like, “Yeah, yup, I’m a woman. I’m here. And that’s extremely normal. And let’s talk about the science.” AC Absolutely. I mean there’s also times where I’ve had to be, or I try to be, more direct. I’ve been asked to speak on panels and blatantly told, you know, they’re so thankful I said yes because I’m the only woman on the panel. So when I am in those situations, or even when I’m sitting, watching a panel, I try to actually note out loud, “Hey, [chuckles] there’s no women on that panel.” A couple of weeks ago some colleagues and I were coming up with a list of people we wanted to reach out to review something we were working on and we came up with a list of ten names and not one name was a woman, and so I was like, “Hey guys, can we think of a few women?” And it was like — it’s not that the people I was working with were purposely not choosing women, they didn’t even recognize it until it’s said out loud. So, I think, sometimes just kind of shining a light on it in hopefully not too pushy of a way but just, you know, noting that this is the state of affairs helps, again, draw attention to the fact. SWB Yeah, like you don’t realize your own biases around what you think of as a default human and are until you can kind of take a step back. In tech, all the time, we have these conversations about representation and I remember this one time when I was being invited to speak at a conference and I was not available to speak during those days and so I declined. And he replied to me kind of exasperated and upset and what he told me was that I was the ninth woman that he’d asked to turn him down. KL You’re like, “Uh huh?” SWB And I was like — and then he was basically complaining that he couldn’t find any women who would speak at his conference. And I’m like, OK, first up: do not tell people that you’re the ninth person that you went to. Thanks for that. But second: it’s like, OK well you’re asking me really late, the conference was far away and it was only a few weeks out or maybe a month out or something and it was going to require, like, an eight-hour plane flight. And, you maybe haven’t done enough work to have women in your network who know you are, who trust you, who can talk to other women about whether your event is a good place for them, who you know et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like, why are you upset that women are turning you down instead of wondering, ‘Huh, what is about my event that is making it not a desirable opportunity for them?’ Look internally, bud.” Um but I’m not sure he actually did that. KL Well I am really glad that you are being seen and that you are on those panels and the author of these papers and I’m just really glad that you are. You’re such a great role model and you’re a really amazing motivator. Is there anything that you tell people, especially younger folks who are entering this field or trying to find their path? AC You don’t need to be some super nerdy genius to be a scientist. And, you know, of course, we have this persona in our society that that’s what a scientist looks like, that they’re some socially inept, weirdo, kooky nerd. Or that they are just an absolute genius at math. And I try to let them know that you don’t have to be any of those things. You know, I got a D in my seventh grade science class. But what you do need is curiosity, and if you’re curious and you like to explore and you like to discover, if you have those traits, that’s what makes a good scientist. I mean, I was a huge Indiana Jones fan as a little kid and, I know from the outside it probably looks like I’m sitting in a cubicle, working on an Excel spreadsheet, but I am like parting cobwebs from ancient stone ruins and finding hidden caves and using this decoder ring to find the treasure. That’s how I view science: as this very exciting opportunity to discover new things. So I feel like a lot of people, or especially kids, I think they don’t see themselves as a scientist if they’re not, you know, getting straight As in math. Or if they’re not a whiz at science class in school. But it only takes curiosity to be good at science. [35:24] SWB I totally want to dig into this a little bit more because I think we hear that kind of thing a lot about certain fields, anything related to science and technology too. We hear that about programming, right? That like in order to be a programmer you have to be this socially awkward person, usually a dude, and you work by yourself until the middle of the night, hacking away at something, and you had to start coding when you were 11, and all of these things that are really unachievable for a lot of people, or just not realistic, or that are just very alienating, and I think particularly alienating to girls who, no matter what they do, never fit that particular mold. Right? Like they’re never going to look like the kooky guy in the lab coat. And so I think that it creates all of these weird boundaries and this sort of like mysticism around science and technology as if it’s something that normal people can’t do or don’t do. And I think that’s the kind of thing that I want to push back on all the time because most of science is just normal people doing work. And that work is interesting and that work is powerful, but you don’t have to be special to do that. AC Absolutely, and it’s that sort of image that kids are forming in their mind when they’re young, that “scientists are not me.” They’re someone other. That they’re this, you know, other kind of human being with these other skills, and none of those skills happen to be social skills, that does science. And when those kids grow up to be adults that’s a really pernicious feeling to have. That scientists are other people and that also makes science feel like something that’s not approachable, that’s not being done with good interest at heart. It makes it into that sort of creepy, mad scientist. And that hurts us and we see that, of course, with climate change. We see that there’s this distrust of science, and distrust of scientists, and even just a distrust of people who are experts. And so that sort of stereotyping even when you’re young I think leads to pretty big problems for the advancement of science when those kids grow up. SWB Yeah, yeah, absolutely and I think back too to like the conversation about, you know, having kids draw scientists when they’re little. It’s like, man, not only are they all drawing a guy, but I bet you none of them drew a black scientist. Right? Like it sort of perpetuates this cycle where it’s like we just see the same stuff over and over again and you think about something like environmental science and something I think really immediately about is the way that climate change definitely affects, you know, people in poverty than people who have means. And it’s likely to affect communities of color and the idea of having like lack of representation in science from those communities that are likely to be really affected. Seems like such a massive problem. AC Absolutely, and I think it’s exciting to see the environmental justice gaining more legs and I think there’s a lot more work that needs to be done. You kind of can’t separate environmental damages from the justice movement. So it’s a super important topic and I hope that — you know, maybe science isn’t your thing. Maybe you are a genius graphic designer or, you know, you want to work on, you know, social justice issues. There’s still all sorts of opportunities in the scientific field for people like that to make the world a better place. SWB Would you be able to talk a little bit about the environmental justice movement, for those listeners who aren’t familiar with that term? AC Environmental justice is basically just the idea that we need to treat people in a fair way in whether that’s their race or their color or how much money they make or the type of place they live. Those people should all be involved in environmental laws or environmental policies and it’s really important to have all those different groups sitting at the table, thinking about how to improve our environment moving forward, and it’s an unfortunate fact that, of course, when there are thing that harm our environment, they harm the most vulnerable people in our society. So when someone’s building a power plant that’s going to have emissions that give kids asthma they’re often building it in a, you know, not in the backyards of people who are wealthy but in the backyards of people who are already facing a lot of environmental struggles, or a lot of existing health struggles. And so when we’re thinking about how to improve our environment going forward, you can’t think of that in a vacuum. You can’t think about it without considering social justice issues and getting those people who are affected by the inequalities in our society, they have to be at the table for those sorts of decisions. [40:37] SWB Yes! Like this totally dovetails with so many of the other conversations we’ve been having around different subjects but it all comes down to the same thing, right? Like you can’t have a really narrow slice of the population making decisions that affect everybody else — AC Yup, absolutely. SWB And that’s kind of what we’ve had for a long time. AC I mean in my work I spend a lot of time thinking about the impacts of climate change on human health. And you can talk about the impacts on extreme summer temperatures or Lyme Disease or air quality issues or water quality issues, but time and time again it’s those vulnerable populations who are most affected by these impacts. So it’s the elderly population, it’s the children, it’s people with low socioeconomic status, or tribal groups, it’s people with preexisting health conditions or disabilities. And so it’s important that any action that we’re taking to improve our environment involves those people. KL So I mean between your day job and Remedy Plan and all these things that you’re doing, you work on a lot and you give yourself to a lot of this work that is really passionate. What are you doing that helps refill your energy jar? AC This week the Winter Olympics are starting, and I’m a big Olympics nerd. And I also find that the Olympics completely like reignite my faith in humanity like, “Wow, all these countries can still come together over sportsmanship!” You know it gives you a little bit of faith that — KL Yeah. AC The human spirit can solve these problems. KL Like we just have to try. We just have to show up and try. AC If we can all come together over bobsledding and curling, we can come together over climate change [music fades in]. JL One of the things I really loved about Allison’s interview is when she said what you need is curiosity. I think that’s so important, especially when we talk about getting more people interested in STEM and the work that I’ve done with Girl Develop It and this idea, lots of times, we don’t necessarily think of ourselves, “Oh well, you have to be a math nerd to do something.” It’s so important to think like, “No, what you need is curiosity to see if this something that appeals to you once you start doing it.” So I love these things that’s like let’s find out more about it to see if does appeal to me, not just assume it doesn’t apply to me. SWB Yeah, you know I think about this a lot because having my mom be a scientist, I think I grew up with this understanding that like that’s what a scientist looked like, right? And it was my mom and she wasn’t always wearing a lab coat and she wasn’t even particularly nerdy looking. She’s pretty cool. And I thought of that as being pretty normal and it took me actually a long time to realize other people did not see that as normal, that like people were like, “Oh you’re from that weird smart family.” And granted not everybody’s going to be a scientist, by any means, I mean it’s not for everybody. But to really normalize that as something that, like, people can do, women can do, people from different backgrounds can do, like that whole conversation about going in and having people draw a scientist and I think like, “Yeah, nobody would’ve drawn my mom.” Like, I would have drawn my mom. Representation matters a lot and having people understand at an early age, like be able to see themselves in something. I think that’s huge. I’m so glad that Allison talked about that and talked about sort of also the social justice and racial justice parts of environmental science, because I think that we don’t talk about that nearly enough or talk about it in those really human terms. KL If more people like her can do this work and be as articulate about what she does and how she does it and why it’s so important and why it’s so important for other young girls to get into it, I mean it’s like a no brainer. [44:28] SWB OK this totally brings me to what I want to talk about for the Fuck Yeah of the Week. KL OK. SWB Can we have a Fuck Yeah now? Is it time? KL Yes. JL I could use a little Fuck Yeah! SWB So our Fuck Yeah this week is the new Obama portraits, which we have been ogling over. So one of the things that I love that about them, and we’re going to get into some of the other stuff we love about them, but one of the things I love about them is that they’re such a powerful reminder, even during this time when things are difficult, even during this time when it feels like we are going backwards on a lot of issues, that we are still seeing amazing movement on representation of diverse people and specifically black people in all kinds of culture, including art. I mean obviously black people have been making amazing art forever. That’s not new. But what I think we’re starting to see more of is black art showing up in more prominent places and getting more attention. I’m paying attention to things like huge book deals that black writers are getting or, you know, Get Out last year and then this year we’ve got Black Panther coming out. And I think it’s so important to note that that is huge and that is big and that matters. And that that kind of representation, like we talked about with Allison, right? Representation of who a scientist can be, representation of like who is depicted in art and what are they doing. Like, it’s so important and I want to say a big Fuck Yeah to that. JL Yeah, there was a great quote from Michelle Obama and she said, “I’m thinking about all the young people, particularly girls and girls of color, who in years ahead will come to this place, and they will look up, and they will see an image of someone who looks like them hanging on the wall.” And so, you know, just like we talked about with Allison, the scientist, I just think the more that people see other people in these roles, the more that it becomes feasible to be them. SWB One of the other things that I loved about Michelle’s portrait, in specific, is that Amy Sherald, the artist, painted her in a sleeveless dress. I dunno if you all remember but in 2009 Michelle was criticized, I guess is the kindest way I could put it, but I would say that she was shat upon by conservatives for having her first White House official portrait be in a sleeveless dress. She was wearing this very classic black sheath with pearls, she looked great, but she was treated like she had done something wildly inappropriate. That, you know, of course it’s like somehow too revealing, too slutty, I don’t know, it makes no sense because arms — arms are fine. We all have arms. I’ve seen lots of arms. It’s OK, everybody. But it was just one of these ways that we could see the Obamas being treated differently than other candidates or presidents would’ve been treated and being treated in a way that was designed to make them seem like they weren’t credible or they didn’t belong there or whatever. But here we have Michelle in this sleeveless gown, looking amazing, but also just kind of giving her own fuck you to everybody who called her out for that because now that gets to be in the National Portrait Gallery forever. KL I love that. Also I was so struck by the portrait of Barack Obama. And I just I saw this tweet that Brittany Packnett had written and I thought the exactly same thing. I mean, she says, “Can we talk about how stunningly powerful it is to see a black man in a garden the way Kehinde Wiley painted Barack Obama? It dismantles so much and creates new visions of masculinity that black men rarely have the public permission to explore.” That is amazing. It’s so — I just feel like if that doesn’t resonate with you … SWB Yeah, I mean you know one of the things I noticed right away was like, “Oh yeah, have I seen ever a painting of black man in a garden in that way?” KL Right. SWB It’s like, no, you know, I’ve seen a thousand pictures of white people in, like, you know, impressionist paintings, or romantic paintings, like strolling in gardens with the little umbrellas or whatever. But I have definitely never seen a black person depicted that way. When you start paying attention to who are you seeing and then also like what roles are you seeing them in, I think that it helps you be much more aware of just how many gaps there are in how people are represented, and I’m so excited to see this kind of representation, and, you know, it’s not to say like that we’re saying like, “Oh we need to go back in time.” Or we’re trying to live in the past. It’s not about that. It’s about like what does that mean for our future to be able to have this on the wall and have kids go to a museum and see it? [48:54] KL So I think we can say that is a for sure Fuck Yeah for amazing paintings, for black artists, and for just representation that moves us forward in even the tryingest of times. 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 is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Allison Crimmins 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 and ramps up to end]. | |||
| 27 Feb 2018 | Be Your Full Amazing Self with Sydette Harry | 00:46:38 | |
Have a love-hate relationship with social media? So do we. In Episode 7, we explore the joys and perils of visibility, and talk with Sydette Harry, an expert in online communities.Trolls, randos, and straight-up neo-Nazis: being a woman online can be tough. This week, we’re exploring how we make choices about what and whether to share online. Our guest this week is the inimitable writer, editor, and tech/media critic, Sydette Harry, also known as @blackamazon. She’s an editor at Mozilla and part of the Coral Project, which is working to create healthier communities and comments sections. She’s also smart as hell, exquisitely blunt, and committed to talking about what’s wrong online in the voice she grew up with. > Here’s what we cover—and of course, we’ve got a full transcript, too. Show notesA year ago, Lindy West quit Twitter—and she’s not coming back. We miss her voice, but we’re also a little jealous. Plus: Jenn moves her sports talk to Facebook, Katel closes the tab and never looks back, and we all wonder whether Klout still exists. (Sara used to be influential in burritos. Just saying.) Interview: Sydette HarryGet comfortable, because you won’t want to miss a second of Sydette’s searing commentary on tech culture, Twitter, journalism, race, gender, and weight. We talk about:
Fuck Yeah of the Week: Ladies Get PaidWe’ve talked a lot on the show about wages, being underpaid, and how hard it can be to negotiate at work. So this week, we give a fuck yeah to a group educating and empowering cis and trans women and non-binary or gender non-conforming folks to get paid fairly. Check out Ladies Get Paid for workshops, town hall conversations, and more. SponsorsThis 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. _ TranscriptKatel LeDû [Ad spot] This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by our friends at Shopify, the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs like me! And A Book Apart. Are you looking to join forces with a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team? Well Shopify has great news: they’re hiring more awesome people to join them and they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in]. Jenn Lukas [Music fades out] 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. JL Today we’re talking about online personas, communities, and our love/hate relationship with social media. What do we want out of it? And how do we decide how visible to be in a world that’s full of trolls and randos constantly popping into your mentions to tell you that you’re wrong? We’re also joined by Sydette Harry, who works with Mozilla and the Coral Project on building healthier online communities and comments sections. We’ll talk about how race and gender play a role in what happens online. SWB Hey, do you all remember last year when Lindy West quit Twitter? JL No, what happened? SWB Ok, so Lindy is a writer and a comedian, and she had this book come out called Shrill, which is a memoir. And she’s awesome. And she was one of my favorite voices on Twitter, and then one day last January she just deactivated, and she ended up writing about it in The Guardian. She did it on the day that, at the time, our president-elect was taunting North Korea about nuclear weapons on Twitter. And she was just like, I’ve had enough. So she wrote in The Guardian that, you know, “For the past five years, has been a machine where I put in unpaid work and tension headaches come out.” She talks about how she’s used it to write jokes for free, post political commentary for free, answer questions for free, do feminism 101 for free, and she wrote that, you know, “Off Twitter these are all things by which I make my living, but on Twitter I do them pro bono. And in return I’m micromanaged in real time by strangers, neo-Nazis mine my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit, and men enjoy unfettered direct access to my brain, so they can inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.” So she’s been off Twitter for a year, and I’ve been wondering, is Lindy going to come back? Because she was also somebody who I really looked to for interesting insight and conversation. And as much as I really understand everything she’s saying and I agree with it, quitting Twitter also feels impossible to me because it’s something I’ve relied on for such a long time, sort of personally and professionally. Well, Lindy is not coming back. So earlier this month she wrote a new piece called “I Quit Twitter and it Feels Great.” And she wrote about what her life is like now. She’s like, “I don’t wake up with a pit in my stomach every day… I don’t get dragged into protracted, bad-faith arguments with teenage boys about whether poor people deserve medical care… I don’t spend hours every week blocking and reporting trolls.” And I think about this a lot because like I also am spending more time than I would like to on that kind of shit. But at the same time, I love so much about Twitter, and about social media in general, there’s a lot of stuff that it’s really connected me to. And so it made me really curious, like, how are you all negotiating this? How do you think about your visibility online? Do you feel like you’re making choices as a result of all of that crap? JL Well that sounds lovely, I have to say, to some extent. But I have not followed that same path. KL Yeah, I mean, well Sara and I, actually, we were really lucky: we just saw Lindy speak at an event and I actually really liked something that she said about Twitter and Facebook, those platforms, they want you to and they’re really banking on you to think that they’re the only way, the only way that you can connect with other people. And like while that’s bullshit, we know at the core, it’s really hard, like you were just saying, Sara. I mean this is a lot of how we have gotten to know each other, and a lot of people that we’re friends with, and have made really good connections to work. So I don’t know, I mean, I think it’s trying to find some kind of balance, but I don’t know. I look at both of you and I don’t participate that much on Twitter or Facebook, I guess, but I was thinking back on this. When I was really starting to feel like I had something, maybe, to say, or like I would feel comfortable saying something on Twitter, I was watching all these people that I really loved and cared about getting completely trashed just for like existing there. And I got really scared. So I think that’s why I haven’t really put myself out there at all. JL I think one of the things that I find hard to grasp about Twitter is Twitter now versus Twitter 10 years ago. KL Yeah. JL And I feel like I still have this … like love relationship with Twitter, for the Twitter that I loved 10 years ago, which I just felt was way more focused on specific technology news, which is what I was looking for at the time, and sort of what I was really more putting out was technology news. [5:00] And now it’s so much more. And, you know, it’s sort of — when people are like, “Oh, I long for the good ol’ days!” And part of me is like, “Oh! But Twitter used to be this!” And I’m like, “But just because it used to be something doesn’t mean it is that or ever will be again. And I think for me that’s sort of trying to find how much I still interact with it is definitely not how much I used to. SWB And I mean like of course it’s changed, right? It’s a big platform and it has so much power to get the news to everybody in the world really quickly and some of that stuff is amazing, but it is also overwhelming and can be a little difficult, I think, to handle the kind of like context-shifting of somebody wanting to tell me about some article they wrote that’s relevant to user experience that I might want to read about for work. But then also, here’s the latest absolutely batshit thing the president said,” and then also, “here’s somebody with a really funny joke and a dog picture,” which I like. Don’t get rid of those [KL chuckles]. And then all of a sudden we go to the latest tragedy. And I think that that mishmash of everything is hard. It’s almost like a context collapse, right? Like there is no context anymore. It’s all just in this one weird stream. And I recognize that I have control. I can unfollow. I can create channels that I want to use. I can put people into this or that list, I can follow those certain lists for certain things, but that’s not really how I like to use Twitter. That’s not — then I feel like it’s a job to manage it [uh huh! Yeah! Yes! Right][laughing], and I don’t really want that job. But the thing is, it’s also a really powerful place where I’ve met so many great people, and has been super important to my career, and I hear this a lot from women, especially, who feel like that’s where they were able to find networks and establish some professional footing, and yet … if I have to have one more conversation with some rando who wants to explain the topic of my book back to me, I’m going to lose it. JL I think, for me, I’ve had transition what I post on Twitter over the years. So first starting on Twitter I would post about any random thought that popped into my head, a lot of sports, and then also, because my focus is in engineering and technology, a lot of development news, and one of the things I found is I’d get a lot of feedback from people that would be like, “Oh. It’s baseball season. I should unfollow Jenn Lukas because she’s tweeting about sports again.” And I was like, “Hey!” But then part of me is like, well, you know what? What I go to Twitter for is to read technology news, and so I just sort of took that at that time and was like, you know what I’m going to do? My Twitter account is going to focus more on development, engineering, UX, UI, links, things I write, that sort of subject, and then I moved all my more personal thoughts, including sports, cuz that’s personal [laughter]. My love of the Eagles is very personal! KL Gets personal. SWB I’ve seen Jenn do a football dance, it’s extremely personal! [Laughter.] JL But I moved that all to Facebook where I found the audience sort of matched better what I was doing there. So more local friends, more of the people that wanted to hear more about that, and where with the comments on Facebook, I could have more conversations about those personal things. Whereas Twitter where it’s a megaphone versus a two-way conversation there mostly. So there I kept things that were more announcements and then moved things conversational to Facebook. And, like you said though, Sara, you get into this weird context switching. So that’s worked for me and I think it’s worked really well, but there are times where I’ll go to Twitter and I’ll be like, “Oh. I want to post about this thing I wrote.” But then there’s a school shooting and, for me, I can’t look at this stuff and be like, yeah, lemme tell you about a new variable font on the web when there was just a shooting in Florida, and that feels super weird for me. And those are the times where I don’t really even know how to handle social media. SWB How could anybody, right? Like we’re dealing with a world that communicates in such an always-on kind of way, and I don’t know that anybody has figured out what to do with that, and what is a healthy way to deal with that. I sometimes feel like I end up spending all of this time kind of hemming and hawing and debating about whether I should post anything at all. And in a way that I never used to do. And so like, for example, I will sit there and think through the various potential outcomes like, “If I’m going to say something that’s kind of funny, is this something where somebody is going to not get the joke and then they’re going to get mad, and then they’re going to snowball from there? Is this a thing that I’m going to have to be explaining the joke to people all day? Is this a thing where I’m going to have to be, like, defending my own credibility to talk about this subject? Like what kind of labor am I going to have to put in to manage this?” And then also I start thinking like, “Well how does this fit into the overall context of other things that I post?” [10:00] And where I used to be just like, “Here’s a funny, random thought that I had on my way to the bank!” And it was OK. I’ve stopped feeling like that, and I’ve actually found that it’s almost like I have, in some ways, less faith in myself over knowing what I want to be communicating, which is a little bit unsettling. KL Yeah. You’re second-guessing yourself. I mean that’s where my anxiety paralysis comes in really handy because I just don’t do it [laughing] and then I walk away, and then I’m like, “All right, wait till the next decision.” JL And I totally get those feelings. I have them too. I’ve actually been trying to force myself to tweet more, but, again, because I write and I make a podcast with two wonderful friends, and I have to get that out there somehow because I want to share that with people. So I still have that. Like, I would love to quit Twitter, but I also want to keep sharing, and I want to keep seeing what other people are doing, too [KL yeah], and, for me, I haven’t found the exact medium to replace that yet. SWB Well, and also, like, when you do things like have a podcast and write a book or whatever, a lot of the success of those things ends up coming down to your ability to promote yourself. And, even if you have, for example, for my book, I mean, I have publishers, they have PR people, they’ve done a lot of stuff, but if I weren’t doing the work too, it just doesn’t go anywhere. And part of that work is making it visible and so then, then you get into this space where you feel like, “Is all I’m doing posting about my own projects? My own like —” KL Building your own personal brand. SWB Yeah, like, “Hey! Subscribe to my podcast!” JL My Klout score! KL [Laughing] Oh my god! JL Does that still exist? KL I don’t know. SWB I remember opting out of that but, at one point, I was influential in burritos [laughter]. Thank you very much. JL What?! I would eat a burrito with you. KL That’s amazing! [Music fades in.] SWB [Music fades out.][Ad spot] If you’ve visited noyougoshow.com, then you know it’s the center of our online presence. Well, we built it on WordPress. We love WordPress because it’s super easy to customize, has great customer support, and comes with lots of features that make publishing our podcast, or pretty much anything else, really easy. It’s no surprise that nearly 30 percent of all websites run on WordPress. Plans start at just four dollars a 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.][End of ad spot.] SWB A few years ago, I realized that way too much of the media I was consuming was coming from white people. And something I started doing was really paying more attention to where I was getting news and where I was getting information, and I started seeking out a lot of different writers, people of color who were involved in the public in some way, journalists. And along the way I obviously started paying attention to lots of big names: Roxane Gay or Ta-Nehisi Coates. But after awhile I feel like a whole new world opened up for me, and one of the voices that stuck out to me almost immediately was Sydette Harry, who is probably better known as @blackamazon on Twitter. Sydette, I hope, does not mind me saying that she is a force, and I have learned a lot by listening to her and watching her have conversations about everything from immigration to online harassment to black culture that I didn’t know anything about. And I am just so elated that she took the time to be on the show today. Sydette, welcome to No, You Go! Sydette Harry Thank you! Thank you for having me! SWB So I’m really happy to have you here and to hear more about how you ended up doing what you do. So the way I understand it, you are currently running editorial at Mozilla, and I’d love to hear more about how you ended up there and what that day-to-day looks like. SH Ok. So. What it is — I am the editor of the Foundation website and editor of the Network. So my real goal is to develop processes and systems and discussions. I was like, “How do people talk? How do you get online? How do we get stuff out?” Really shifting from the kind of traditional like, oh this is a Foundation and we kind of do these things, into a, so how do we start a global push towards something Mozilla has called internet health. They’re writing reports on it, there are fellowships around it, but this discussion of how do you know that the internet you use is healthy and sustainable and useful for you? And that it works for what you want to get done and what you want to do in life. And I think that that is super, super important to think about in a way that is informed by my experience online. My experience online is that I am from Far Rock. It is a two-hour train ride, if you are very, very lucky. And it became very, very apparent to me that if I wanted to — once, and I was also, right after I graduated from college, so that was one of the first colleges to get Facebook. [15:00] So it was like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn. And it’s like, “Oh! We have Facebook. Yay us.” And there was also very much — at the same time, my father got deported the year I graduated college. And then the economy tanked in around 2007. So … there becomes this very big thing of, “How do I navigate this idea where I’m leaving this place of great privilege, where I’m leaving this great place of, oh, you have everything available to you in ways that you never had before,’” and it’s now you are part of a broken family. Literally broken: they took your father and they deported him. And you are not — and you were told at your very, very expensive graduation: “This is how you will amass the world and blah blah blah blee da blee blee.” And you now have no job, you’re going back to your house, and you’re going to have to try and rebuild your life from what is, essentially, a very traumatic place. And I have a background in theater, so my thought was, “I now have a forum to talk!” And ever since then I have been commenting on anybody who’ll give me a password and some access. And I tried everything. But my actual training was history and theater and dramaturgy and pipes and processes. So while I was doing that commentary, I became very interested in, “How does this work? How does this apply to communication theory? How does this work for what we’re doing?” And, through that and writing and commentary — I had a blog called Having Read The Fine Print — trying to get into this space of so how do we know what we’re doing is correct? And how do we know that what we’re doing is useful? Because that is a huge question. And Coral had seen some of my work, and they hired me, and I’ve been working from that ever since. SWB OK, so Coral Project. I’m a big fan of the Coral Project, which has been working on making comment systems more healthy and humane for quite some time. Can you tell us a little bit more about the Coral Project? SH Coral Project was started in 2014. People got together and said, “Comments are terrible.” So it’s The New York Times, The Washington Post, Knight Foundation. We were under Open News, and we are now under Mozilla. And we worked out of The New York Times building. It was like, “So how do we build better comments?” The first person hired was the project lead, the general, Andrew Losowsky, and I call him The General because [laughing] he always gets so — he’s like, “Why do you call me The General?!?” And I was like, “Partially because it makes you blush,” and also it was right around the time of Hamilton [laughter]. We’re like, “OK, you’re The General.” But he does not make me call him that. But — and then I was the second hire. And then we were working with our tech leads, and one of the things we came to really quickly was that it wasn’t enough to focus just on comments, we had to look at how communities were sorted. So people were like, “We’re going to write guides on how to use better comments.” And it was going to be research on comments and then it was like — as we were talking, we were like, “All of this stems from larger systemic problems, larger editorial problems.” If you really want to talk about why your comments are bad, you have to talk about how you set up your community online because the experiences of community, even communities that deal with some heavy, heavy stuff, have a wide range. There are communities that deal with some of the most traumatic things that are genial, well-run, not to say that they are always perfect, but there’s a real sense of community there. And then there are communities that deal with what I think would be like pretty superficial things in the sense of — on top they’re superficial, but the same issues show up and they become important, and they implode often. And communities can implode really quickly. And it’s like, why does that happen? What leads to that happening? And how do we talk about that? SWB In that work, it sounds like, you know, your experience firsthand commenting anywhere and everywhere during this really difficult moment of your life was directly applied there. Can you talk more about how you brought that experience into Coral? SH The way I think about it is I try to create communities where, depending on how I’m acting, it would not be at all difficult to kick me out. And I think that that’s important. And people always, like, stutter. It’s like, I try to create communities that are supportive of the least—the people who have the least advantage, the least resources, the least training, to become a member. And I want to continue to make people aware of what it’s like to try to be a member of these communities. And there are some communities where I’m like, “If I was a moderator of the community, I would put myself out.” And that’s good. And that is how you really have to think about these things, and not because it’s some level of altruism, but it’s very much the first question we ask all the time: who is your community for? Who do you want this community to serve? And how do you make your community represent that? Because what happens with a lot of people is, “Oh, we just had — we just had a community and then we didn’t do anything.” And I am like, “Well, you did do something.” Whether or not you believe you made it. [20:00] No choice is a choice. Because people see that you didn’t make that choice, you didn’t do whatever you said you were going to do, and they very much responded accordingly. If they are the type of people who take advantage of these things, they did that. If they are the type of people who are very likely to be targeted by violence and see that you don’t do anything, they stop responding. They stop being involved. And that is a choice. And with Coral it became varied things from, do not look for the quick fix of “tech will build a tool” or “this will be the tool” or whatever. It’s very much about, so, “this is what you want to do. How have you built it in that this is what you can do? And this is something that you had given space for your community to be able to do? Have you done that?” SWB Yeah, totally, that makes a lot of sense, and I think about a lot of this in the context of something really big that many of our listeners would have familiarity with, like Twitter. They spent a really long time with such a hands-off approach, and with this idea that somehow they were going to be the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” as they said so many times, and therefore their approach to their community was that they weren’t a community, right? They’re just a platform. And the result is, well, they’ve been entirely unable to deal with harassment and abuse on their platform for years and years and years after many people, including you, have told them about it. SH Oh. So one of the things that constantly happens now that I’ve moved from commenting about tech to working in tech is, I don’t ever want to hear the word “scale” again. It has started to become like — I start to get twitchy a little. Because people use scale as an excuse to not talk about very basic stuff. And it bothers my soul. Because ultimately what people want to know is, how are you going to take care of them? And people go, “Well, it doesn’t scale! We’re not in scale!” And I’m like, “Well, that’s nice. What are you going to do for the people inundated right now? If you’re working on it, let’s be honest.” There’s also this myth of the early adopter and what early adopter tends to mean is early adopter with social capital, not actual early adopter. Because I found out very quickly that I was actually — I’m actually one of the first people to adopt Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter for nine years. And I didn’t know that. Because I had never considered myself among the [in mocking voice] “early adopters” because I was never talked about in that fashion. And part of the reason that I wasn’t talked about in that fashion is because I didn’t have social capital when I was an early adopter. Now I have it. And I’m like, oh! OK, so that’s what that means. That’s what you are talking about when you say “early adopter,” you basically are trying to say “someone who matters to us.” SWB Well, yeah, and at Twitter it was very much conceived of people who are like us … “us” being the founders. And who were the founders of Twitter? It’s a bunch of young, white guys. And so I think that they certainly were not thinking about people particularly different from them as being part of those early adopters. But the way I understand it there are tons of stats going back maybe not a full 10 years ago, but at least eight or so years ago, around adoption of Twitter by black people, and how high the black user base was of Twitter, and I just think they didn’t even think enough about it to even consider caring about it. SH And it’s not easy in the way folks want to talk about it. It’s — there is a — “do you have beef with @jack @Twitter @support?” Of course. But that’s not the thing I want to focus on. It’s not the thing that I care most about. The thing I care most about is, how is this affecting who we look at, and who we take care of, and how we take care of them? Because very simply, very, very simply: the way we talk about and look at abuse, the way this is designed isn’t good. And the reason it’s not good is because it hasn’t been designed well, it hasn’t been considered well, and it’s because, and this is my new thing, is that nobody who has a social science degree or had a social science focus sat there and thought about what happens when you get a large black population. What happens when you get a large population of abusers and harassers and things like that? How do you successfully set up your experience? Not a free speech wing in the free speech party, but what does each specific user get when they step on? And that’s very much what I often rave about is the racism and the sexism and the Nazis. I’ve talked about that in public. You can look that up. But what is very hard for me, and a lot of times, and this is what most scares me about it, is the difficulty it is to get people to focus on: so how are you going to help a user in this case? How is this one person going to get what they need from you? Right now? Not at scale. [25:00] Not at scale. Because that’s the word everybody likes to bring out. “We’re going to talk about scale. We’re going to talk about scale.” And I’m like, “When are we talking about the specific person? And it’s very hard to get people to think about that and talk about that because they almost have an innate sense of shame of like, “Well, we really didn’t think about that.” And I could probably use a lot more curse words when I say it. It’s like, I’m completely uninterested in how bad you feel about the fact you didn’t do it before. I want to know how you’re going to do it now. SWB Yeah, you know, I think so much of that reluctance, like you were saying, kind of comes back to shame that they didn’t think about it, and then also that — that fear of looking it dead in the eyes, right? Like when you look at it at scale only, you don’t have to think about the individual people, and as soon as you’re asked to think about the individual people, that becomes a human-level problem that is, you know, is a little bit painful to look at. And avoidance is powerful. So something I would love to talk more about because I think it’s really relevant to this conversation is something I’ve heard you speak about a lot more recently, which is making this argument that the voices we hear in news and the voices that we hear online are not representative of people, like, where you’re from. SH There is very much a non-acknowledgement, especially coming into media, and I have it from a really specific perspective. I am a member of a program called Prep for Prep … which is, it’s specifically designed to try and address systemic equality. So it’s about 40 years old. It was started in 1978, right around “the Bronx is burning.” President Ford basically tells the city, go burn in a fire. We don’t have any resources. And how do you take kids who are under-resourced by the city and whatever and what-have-you, and make them into the leaders, the people who are going to be the dreamers coming out of the progressive sixties and seventies? And the way they thought about it was, you are going to equip the kids who show the most ability to endure — straight up just endure — and high IQs and certain psychological profiles. You’re going to put them through academic, like, basically bootcamp, and you’re going to put them into the NYSAIS system. NYSAIS system being the New York State Alliance of Independent Schools. These are private schools so old that some are older than Harvard and Yale, and some are of age of Harvard and Yale. This is old, old money that can link itself back to the Oxbridge. And what happens with Prep is that you develop a machine to address the fact that we may not have resources and all of that, and we become trained in being leaders, and you do that for 14 months. I did that. I started that when I was nine. This is all going on in the middle of the crack eighties, in the middle of Reagan America, in the middle of the nineties, this is happening while IIRIRA, which is ultimately what my father was deported on, was being signed into law. And at this time, I’m doing a two-hour commute back and forth from Far Rock to Trinity Day School. And I ultimately ended up graduating from Poly Prep… about how this is how you’ll make your mark on the world, this is how you’ll make your world better is that you learn how to be among power. And we mentioned beforehand a lot about code-switching and talking. I also have the experience that I’m a first-generation American. So my general speaking voice is not my speaking, speaking voice, because there’s a voice that very much a lot of people recognize as “home” voice. And it’ll come out in certain words I say but there was very much this, “You are on presentation. You are on presentation.” And then I graduated from college and it all broke down. It wasn’t — like I had done my best, I graduated from college two years early, and there wasn’t a there there for me. And, most importantly, there, to this day, I don’t think in a full encapsulation of who I am, there is a there for me. I go in often, I’m not alone, but I may be the only of my specific background in a room. I might be the only person with my specific sense of experiences in a room, often. And especially post having like a job in tech and a job in news. And these are decision-making rooms. What became important for me is that I didn’t want to have the conversations that I had been taught to have, which were, “Prove that you deserve to be there, and then make it so everyone knows that you are of a certain class.” Because what I actually want to have is, like, these are actually really simple things, and these are tools, and these are mediums designed for everybody. So if you are saying you are going to design for anybody, and you cannot understand me when I try to speak as clearly as possible but in the voice that I speak when I am comfortable and with myself and fully aligned with all of my experiences and my full self, you are not doing your job. This isn’t my fault. SWB Yeah. [30:00] SH Code-switching is a very real thing, but there is also a lack of looking at how for a lot of folks and for a lot of things, you speak multiple languages and there are multiple layers to how you speak. You are forming your use through who you are. And what does it say about these platforms and these places that they can’t support you being your full self? And I find too often at certain engagements when I talk to people, specifically within tech and sometimes journalism, there is a deep, deep jump into jargon, into non-understandability, and I’m just like, “No! We are going to talk about it using language everyone can understand, because that’s what we’re supposed to do.” So we can talk about scale, we can talk about pipeline, we can talk about design, I’m conversant in all of that. I’m conversant in all of that in almost three languages. At the end of the day, am I still dealing with a Nazi or am I not? Am I still dealing with an inaccessible piece of a tool, or am I not? If I am still dealing about that, and me and you have sat here for three hours having a conversation that makes us both feel very smart, but then we didn’t do no shit, we weren’t successful! For me it’s like, you can or you can’t. And how are you communicating to people about whether or not you have the ability? How are you communicating to people about whether or not they can expect this of you? And a lot of this is not even — it’s funny to talk of language, it’s not necessarily about what your answer is, it’s about how you talk to people. So you get a lot of this, it’s like, this person is speaking on high and is telling me that they can or cannot do this thing. Or they will or will not do this thing. Because they don’t think that I deserve to actually know, straight up, that you don’t actually have the capacity to deal with the fact that Nazis are coming for me? Or it’s not on your number-one to-do list? But you wonder why people are mad?” SWB Right, right, yeah, like, “Oh let’s definitely spend 30 minutes explaining to you why we haven’t done it yet,” instead of just saying, “You know what? This isn’t one of our priorities.” Like at least if they were honest about where it sits on the priority list, it would be refreshing in some ways. SH And in some ways I think sometimes they’re not even sure. Like, “it is a high priority, but we have no idea of how to attack it.” OK then. So if you don’t know how to attack it, and you’ve been working on it for how long? Maybe you need some new people in the room to answer that question for you. You might want to talk to some new people. I don’t know. That might be an option. SWB Right, like perhaps there are people with expertise that you don’t have and that you have not previously recognized as even being experts in the first place. So, you know, something you talked about a little bit in there that I was really interested in and I’d love to go back to a little bit more is you talked about sort of your upbringing and going through this really intensive Prep program and it being very much about, you know, I guess I would put as like bringing you from where you’re from, bringing you to a more privileged and richer, white culture. And it sounds like one of your frustrations is this idea that that is only happening in that direction. Right? It’s like, OK, we can give somebody like you some new opportunities or give you access to these communities that you maybe otherwise wouldn’t know how to get access to, but there’s not a lot of effort to go to those communities or to understand people there or to meet people where they’re at. Is that part of the way that you would see that problem? SH Definitely! And it’s something where I’m always very particular to talk about is that, yes, in a lot of ways I am more diverse than the average person who shows up to a lot of these things. We’re not going to lie about that. I am, by virtue of being black and female, even though I am a cis, able-bodied person, I am more diverse than the people you usually have in there. [Sings] That being said [finishes singing], I’m still an Ivy League graduate. I’m still a person of a certain education. I’m still the kind of person who would survive and go through all of these things. So when you say that I am diversity, let’s all be clear here: you ain’t doin’ that well, fam. You’re not doing that good. So what bothers me is not so much that people are creating exclusionary products, that is problematic to me in and of itself, but often what truly, truly disturbs me is that they’re exclusionary and nobody seems to know that they are. So everybody’s like, “Yeah, we make this for everybody!” And I’m like, “According to what?!” You can make a really great business just off of catering to you and your friend set if you know their income, if you know their strides. And that is so, to me, completely acceptable and wonderful, and if you can make a business model off of that, awesome! The issue I have is that there are people who are like, you don’t admit that you’re making it just for your friends. You really think everybody lives like this, and you do not have a feedback loop for anybody to tell you you’re wrong. SWB I know that you’ve talked recently about losing weight and the shifting way that people treat you since then. [35:00] Can you tell us a little bit more about what that’s been like? SH Sure! I mean, I had what is called a vertical sleeve gastrectomy, and they cut out half of my stomach, because I have a condition called polycystic ovarian syndrome. It’s very prevalent, usually among lower-income African American women. And it can lead to anything from sensitivity to insulin to death, and it’s not well-studied. And when you live in a fat-phobic society, I was experiencing problems all my life with my reproductive system. And finally there was a just a moment of, OK, I have to get this done. I have to be able to live my life in a really specific way, and if I want to have children, I need to be able to do this. So I went from being about a size 26 to a size 12, 14. I’m on the teetering edge. And it is not accidental to me in any way, shape, or form, that people are kinder to me. People are nicer to me. People also occupy my space more, so that there is a lot of this where I’m like, “Oh I understand what women say now, when they say that there is a lot of physical imposition,” because — I’m very tall, I’m about 5’11,” but I was also about 350 pounds. So I never dealt with people trying to physically impose me, because that was not necessarily a fight they thought they could win. Now at about 230 pounds, I am — I look more like an average woman. And I realize that people will be up in my space more. Men will try to physically intimidate me more. And it was never something I thought about. And it also makes me very aware of the idea of … there are times when I see my ideas get accepted better. They are just accepted more readily because I am in — I look different. You don’t understand how badly you’ve been treated until you stop getting treated that badly. SWB You’ve done so much work to bring this thinking to tech and to media and to start conversations that I think are painful and difficult for people in those industries. What are you hoping to do next? Like what’s on your radar that you really want to focus on this next year? SH We might be denying amazing people the ability to fully live their lives. We might be denying amazing folks the ability to fully express themselves, to fully deal with the work and the joy that they have in themselves, and that is… that is what — if somebody was like, “What really like pisses you off?” I’m like, “That’s what pisses me off.” The idea that we’re not — we’re creating a world where folks cannot be their full, amazing selves. And that is something that we have to look at. And what I hope this year is to do more work that allows folks to be their full, amazing selves, to be fully present, fully active … in their work and their joy — and that allows that for me too. I’m not above anybody. I’m part of that set. SWB Yeah, that’s amazing. Well, I, for one, definitely want you to be able to live your full life and be your full self, and also continue to do the amazing work that you’ve been doing for the community that you come from and for all kinds of marginalized communities. So I’m so thankful that we got to talk to you about all of this today. SH Yeah! I’m always glad to talk [music fades in] with you about it. JL [Music fades out] let’s keep the awesome going: we got any Fuck Yeahs this week? KL Heck we do! Our Fuck Yeah of the Week is Ladies Get Paid. It is a newsletter I just signed up for, and it’s not just a newsletter, it’s like a community. And it’s really awesome because in the newsletter, which comes weekly, you get news and info and all sorts of great heads up about webinars and workshops all over the United States. Like meetups to get drinks and advice from peers and potential mentors, it’s really cool. And it sort of covers everything from like practical advice for how to take advantage of a vacation when you’re not, let’s say, really good at letting go, like me. So it’s just — it’s really nice, and I think it’s also cool because it shows you where things are in not necessarily real time but it’s like, “Hey, there’s a thing tonight,” or “There’s a thing tomorrow.” And you could go there and learn how to negotiate better. JL I see there’s a “Ladies get drinks in Hawaii”! KL Oh, we should do that one. JL We should definitely do that one. [40:00] SWB So the entire thing for Ladies Get Paid, it’s about, like, teaching women negotiating skills and that kind of thing, or what? KL Yeah, it’s like negotiating how to get more money or a raise, or step into leadership positions when you’re not sure, you know, how to quite do that. SWB I totally love this idea and I’m going to check it out, because I know on the show we’ve talked about things like wage equity a bunch of times, and sort of like some of the issues that we’ve had ourselves. A couple of episodes ago, you were talking about kind of being backed into a corner by a boss and like asked to agree to salary in a phone booth room, as opposed to having any time to think about it. And I think, you know, so many of us could really use some of that feedback from other people and practice having these conversations when they’re in sort of low-stakes environments. So I think that’s like a perfect complement to stuff that keeps on coming up on the show. KL Yeah, absolutely, it’s just really nice to know that there’s a whole bunch of resources out there for this and ways that you can actually talk to other people who are going through the same thing and people that you could learn sort of techniques from. SWB So do they have like a chapters in different cities kind of thing? KL Yeah, I know there’s one in New York and they actually just — they did their first conference, which was kind of cool. And that was, I think, just in the last month or so in New York. And they’re taking that on the road. So they’ll be in Seattle next. But I know that there are meetups and stuff all over the place. SWB So that’s a pretty cool concept for anybody who was sitting at home, listening to one of our previous episodes where we were talking about wages and talking about, like, how do you have these conversations with your friends? Try to find a community like that, and if there isn’t one near you, maybe it’s time to start creating these kinds of things. KL Fuck yeah. SWB & JL Fuck yeah! SWB 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 Sydette Harry for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please go ahead and give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and tell your friends about No, You Go. We’d love to have them here! We’ll be back next week [music fades in] with another great guest [music ramps up to end]. | |||
| 27 Feb 2018 | Badass Women in Your Corner: The NYG Trailer | 00:02:54 | |
This is No, You Go—a new podcast all about being ambitious, building a career that won’t make you miserable, and finding friends who’ll high-five you along the way. Each episode, we talk about what it’s really like out there: managing jobs and bosses, pursuing goals, and getting shit DONE—even when the world’s on fire. So take a listen. Because everyone deserves a group of badass women in their corner. Especially you. | |||
| 06 Mar 2018 | Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable with Erika Hall | 00:55:02 | |
Let’s be real: writing is hard. We’ve written and rewritten this intro seven times. Taking on any new challenge or project that requires deep thought, passion, and creativity, can push us outside of our comfort zones. It can make us feel anxious about succeeding—but it can also force us to grow and take on new challenges. In this episode, Erika Hall talks with us about starting a design agency, the power of empathy in everything we do, and her brand-new book. > Here’s what we get into—and of course, there’s a full transcript, too. Show NotesFirst, Katel shares a secret: when she started working for A Book Apart, she’d never worked on a book before. But neither had the first author she worked with! And it all worked out ok. We discuss getting used to big new challenges, and how to decide when it’s time to take the leap and write a book—and then give the middle finger to imposter syndrome. Interview: Erika HallDesigner, author, and all-around smarty Erika Hall fills us in on how she spent the last year: writing a book (and getting stuck, and writing some more), teaching people how to make better design decisions, and taking on gender bias in the workplace. We talk about:
Fuck Yeah of the WeekWe end the show with heartfelt appreciation and admiration for Emma Gonzalez (@emma4change) and the massive student activism movement that has been ongoing in the wake of Parkland.To all the people, young and old, who are standing up and speaking out: fuck yeah and thank you. Links:
SponsorsThis 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. _ TranscriptSara Wachter-Boettcher Do you want to work with a diverse, passionate team that likes to get shit done? Then you should talk to Shopify. Shopify is the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. And they’re growing! And 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]. 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 Whether it’s a blog post, a conference talk, or a book, writing is hard. Finding inspiration to create is hard, but how do we get through it? On today’s episode we’ll talk with Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design and author of Just Enough Research and, the brand new book, Conversational Design. We’ll hear about what motivates her to write, and how she manages everyday bumps in the road to large-scale challenges. But before we hear from Erika, let’s talk about this whole publishing thing. KL So … when I started at A Book Apart, I had never worked on a book before … and neither had Erika. SWB Wait, hold on. You started being in charge of a publishing company after not having ever worked on a book before? KL Yeah, no, shhh, don’t tell anyone that. SWB So, first up: like, uh, I don’t know that anybody could tell because you did great. But, like. how did that happen? KL So while I was jumping into publishing into a book, I was also getting acclimated to the role, and figuring out what I was doing with A Book Apart. And like really, truly, the company was also sort of figuring that out. Which is good. We were growing together. But it was something I had never done before and I was absolutely terrified. I was basically supposed to be the leader on this project. I was supposed to know what I was doing, I was supposed to keep everything going. I was also supposed to establish myself and get a bunch of people to trust me and to work with me and to know that I was going to lead them in the right direction. Um and [chuckles] I felt like I was starting from scratch and completely flailing. There was also no one I could really talk to because I, all of a sudden, didn’t have any colleagues. I had always worked for companies that were large. I had always worked for organizations where I went into an office every day and, all of a sudden, I was, you know, working from home. I was completely by myself and we didn’t have a team. I was the first full-time employee with A Book Apart. So it was really strange to kind of go from being around a bunch of people all the time to being alone. It took me like a good year to just like get used to it. [2:45] SWB Yeah, I mean, something I was really thinking about as you were talking was like, ok, how much I think we often … underestimate how long it should take to get used to something. And big changes take a really long time. You know they talk about like what are the most stressful moments in people’s lives? And some of them are, you know, grief of a close — you know, losing somebody close to them and going through grief, or going through a divorce, but also things like moving is one of the most stressful things. All of those like high-stress things — new jobs are definitely part of that. And I think like — I don’t know, at least I do this to myself where I’m like, “I should be over this by now.” Or like, “This shouldn’t be that big of a deal,” and then it is a big deal and you end up kind of beating yourself up about why aren’t you comfortable yet or why aren’t feeling more in the groove of things yet? And then like you know [sighs] looking at it from the outside though and being like, “Uh Katel! Of course that took a fucking year [laughing] that sounds really hard!” KL Yeah. SWB You get a different perspective. KL Yeah well and even thinking about like the, you know, the question that you asked in the beginning of kind of like, how did you start at this, you know, at this thing that you hadn’t done before? I had like so many fears about that … because I spent, and again, because I was sort of on my own and didn’t have like an ongoing feedback loop, I was always in my head about like, did I make the right choice? And am I gonna do this job well? Like am I gonna serve this company and these people, you know, to the best of my ability? … I was actually just talking to Erika the other day because, you know, her book is launching and she was like, “Oh my gosh, I hadn’t really realized that was both our first time working on a book.” And she was like, “Well, you know what? It worked out.” [Laughing] And I was like, “Yeah, it totally worked out. It worked out well.” JL I — [laughs] I love this because this is like the quintessential fuck of imposter syndrome [laughter]. Like essentially you were just like, “You know what?” You said it. You said you felt like you were flailing but I mean, spoiler alert, because we’re years ahead now. I mean, you weren’t! I mean, you published a slew of great books! So obviously you took this and you got through and you did do an awesome job. So I love it because I feel like we can now look back and talk a little bit about how you were feeling but you still took on that job. You still did it, even with potentially these doubts that you had, or these feelings of flailing, you took it and you were like, “I’m gonna do this.” There had to be this part of you that was like, “I know I can do this,” because you did it, right? SWB Also, this is the obligatory moment where I have to remind everybody that Katel is now the CEO of A Book Apart [KL laughs], where, that wasn’t where you started, right? Like you were the managing editor when you started there? [5:35] KL Managing director. SWB Managing director, sure [yeah]. Um so, right, going from being the managing director, which is obviously still kind of running the show and getting books out the door, to being the CEO means that the people who founded the company saw that you were doing an excellent job and that you not only could lead publishing but that you needed to be at an executive level of the organization. Like … so … yeah. Like you can do it, obviously. I think we have a lot of evidence at this point [laughing] that you can do it. KL Yeah. Here I’m like wiping my brow. I mean, yeah, and I think while I was stepping into having only been in very structured environments, I was like, “Ok, this might be a little more difficult for me.” But it was also a chance for me to be like, “I can make this something that I want it to be.” Which is amazing. That’s an amazing opportunity. But yeah, I mean I think you have to look for those openings and kind of say, “Alright, I can do this job. You know, I have these skills. And it might just be a little bit of different scenario or the set up might be different but I’m gonna apply that.” JL Yeah, I love this. I feel like a lot of times people feel like if they’re in a path with a specific direction there’s no how do they move over. I love that you did that [KL yeah]. You took those and you applied them to a different direction. SWB I think there’s something else thought that maybe also is a parallel to what happens when you write a book which is like, you also have to be able to look at your past experience and have some faith that you maybe know more than you give yourself credit for, or that things that you learned in the past really do apply. And I think some of the time that takes some experience to be able to look at what you’ve done in the past and imagine it kind of coming together in a different way. I mean I know when it comes to writing, going back to thinking about from the author perspective: nobody goes into writing a book for the first time having ever written a book before — like you have to do it for the first time! Right? [Agreeable sounds from others] That’s — that can feel very daunting and I know it feels daunting for probably most people and I think one of the things that really helped me when I thought about writing a book was like, “What are the strengths that I already have that have led me here?” And I mean obviously part of it is like having subject matter expertise that somebody wants to publish a book about. Ok that’s one piece of the strengths. But it’s not just that. It’s not just like your knowledge, it’s actually also about having the ability to take something big and break it down into small chunks … the ability to kind of think about that macro picture of like what’s the whole arc of this thing going to be and then zoom in on the details. Or maybe it’s skills that people already have in things like just doggedly getting stuff done, checking things off the list, like project management skills are massive. Or perhaps it’s just, you know, you can start out thinking like, “I can do this because I know that I have a voice that’s really compelling for people and I’m gonna have to get much better at [laughing] project management,” which I think is true for a lot of authors. You know whatever it is, you have to be able to kind of identify like, “I don’t just have an idea or a topical expertise, I also have some skills that I can apply to this particular kind of problem.” And I think sometimes it’s like … I don’t know, I feel like we work in a culture that really is quick to label people as this or that and it’s like, you know, so you end up in these — these modes of thinking where you’re very defined by the job titles you’ve had before and it can be hard, I think, to remember that those are just combinations of skills and you could combine those skills in another way and end up with a totally different job title that you’re totally qualified for. [9:11] JL Yeah. I can’t think of like how many people in the past have been like, “I don’t really care what title you put on your LinkedIn, this is what you’re going to be doing here.” And I feel that’s like a common sentiment from employers sometimes. KL Yeah. One of the things I love about A Book Apart is that we really look for authors to have — to come with like not just potentially subject matter expertise but like a point of view. Right like some kind of way they’re going to approach or present the thing that they’re writing about that is different or has some kind of meaning that we really identify with. And, I don’t know, I will just say that you know as many doubts as someone might have about whether — whether they can write a book about something, or they are, you know, the right person to write a book about it. It’s like, “We haven’t read a book about that by you.” So I mean that’s a shameless plug to say that, you know, I love hearing from people about their book ideas so, please, write to us, but [laughs] — JL This episode is not sponsored by A Book Apart. KL [Laughs] It’s not! Sorry [laughs]. SWB Um no I think that um I think that that’s a really important thing to keep in mind because I know that going into whether it’s writing or speaking or just in general like kind of … putting yourself out there and talking about your profession and talking about things you know, trying teach other people things you know, it can often feel like — it feels very daunting if there’s other people have written stuff or said stuff before and I have to be totally new and original and then you start feeling like, “Well, gosh, everything’s already been said.” And of course it hasn’t. And you know for me it’s — I’m always thinking like, “What are the problems that I’m seeing out there that my peers are experiencing? And what are the issues that I think people should be talking about more than they are?” And then figuring out what that perspective is and once you have that perspective, I think things really click into place and you end up with a different kind of book, and a different kind of result than the kind of like “Insert Topic for Dummies.” Right? Like which is a different kind of book which might be helpful [KL right] for some people but [yeah] that’s such a limited view on what a professional book could be. Um you know I always think of it as like — I wanna influence how people think about their work and that’s — versus just saying, “I wanna teach them how to do a thing.” KL Yeah. [11:26] SWB I think that’s something that [laughing] Erika does really well, as well. I think that she definitely understands that teaching people about issues in design and research is also all about having that point of view and that point of view is informed by all of the experiences that she has both professionally and personally and I really value that when I read her work. KL Yeah, I mean, she really brings that and her personality to it. So, I mean, she’s also just really fun to read which is a huge bonus. SWB Well, speaking of her being fun to read, I think she’s also fun to listen to. Are we ready to hear from Erika? KL Yeah, let’s do it! [Music fades in.] From our sponsorsJL [Music fades out] Whether you have a business, a project, or a podcast, a website is vital. Here at No, You Go, we use wordpress.com because it gives us the freedom and flexibility to share our work our way. Make your site your own when you built it on wordpress.com. You don’t need to do the coding or the design, the WordPress customer support team is there 24/7 to help you get your site working. WordPress offers powerful ecommerce options ranging from a simple and effective buy button to a complete online store. Plans start at just four dollars a 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 your brand new website [music fades in]. Interview: Erika HallKL [Music fades out] Erika Hall is a co-founder of Mule Design in San Francisco. She and I met when she was working on her first book, Just Enough Research, with us at A Book Apart and I had just joined the company. I have since been in awe of how Erika advocates for good design work through her own practice, that she generously shares her expertise, and how she does it all with fierceness and wit. Erika, we are so happy to have you on the show today. Welcome to No, You Go. Erika Hall Hi! Thank you. I’m very happy to be here. KL Yay! You co-founded Mule Design in 2001. How did you and your partner, Mike Monteiro, decide to start Mule? EH [Laughs] wow. The origin story [KL yeah] in that — the mist of time. Well we’d uh we’d been working together and … we had developed a, you know, as has become apparent: we have strong opinions about things, and each of us, independently, I think our entire lives has had strong opinions about things, and we were doing design consulting and we said, “Hey, we have strong opinions about how this should go and we would like uh be in charge of our own choices and especially choosing clients because, I think, that’s where our dissatisfaction with working for other people really came from is we saw that the clients you choose make you the sort of designers you become,” and we saw how those choices had been made and we were like, “Oh we don’t really — this work can be really, really hard and demands, to do it well, it demands a lot of commitment … at every level, really.” So we were like, “Ok we wanna choose our clients … and we wanna this control over how we work with them and control over the client relationship. Hey!! Let’s start a company.” So that’s sort of how it started. 14:40 KL How has running that company changed over time for you? EH Oh boy. Uh … we ourselves became less stupid, I think, because [laughter] when we started we really, really had no idea what we were doing. So the great part — and we talked to a lot of people uh doing our research before we started who had started companies to say, “What should we look out for?” And, “Do you have any advice?” But then over the course as we talked to other people running their own companies we really learned — it’s like what you learn when you grow up, between being a child and being an adult, is you learn that no adults actually know what they’re doing. We really learned that everyone running a company, like at every level, feels like they’re making it up as they’re going along. So, I think, our experience wasn’t unique or that unusual but over time we really found, you know, we’d get in these challenging situations and have this experience to fall back on, and the conversations with clients that used to be terrifying, all of a sudden I had all this experience, and we developed all this experience around working with organizations, and so that part became easier. And then over time we really found that the business has been changing because organizations are building their own internal design teams and so it has worked out, I think, well, in the sense that what we have become particularly good at … is also the set of things that are much more in demand which has to do with dealing with the organizations and creating the conditions for good design, not just providing design services. KL Were there any things that you ran up against that were really difficult for Mule or just challenging in a way that you were like, “How are we gonna help clients with this specific thing?” EH Oh boy. Um [exhales deeply] I mean the thing that makes the work most challenging is how humans make decisions. And what we’ve found is that sometimes we come in and we say, especially now that we say, “We’ve been doing this since late 2001.” We say, you know, “We’ve worked with organizations of every description, from a two-person startup to, you know, an enormous multinational organization.” And it all comes down to how the individual humans communicate and make decisions, that’s what makes a project go well or go badly. And the nature of people is that we actually — we hate change, right? This is something I talk about all the time: we’re creatures of habit. And we like to be comfortable. And doing new things, and going into territories that you don’t understand very well is really uncomfortable. And the thing that’s hardest for us, and the place that we still feel like, “How do we help you?” Is if people hire us and they say, “Oh we wanna do things differently, we wanna change, we wanna be innovative … but we don’t want to be challenged … and we don’t wanna change how we work as an organization.” And then there are limits to how much we can help them if they are still — if we say, “Ok we have to come to this and be really collaborative.” And they say, “Oh we wanna hold onto our fear and hold onto our hierarchy … and we still wanna make decisions based on what the person with the most power in the organizations prefers, rather than what the evidence supports,” then they’re really — there’s a limit … to like if the organ— if the people in the organization don’t want to engage at that level, there’s only so much we can do … because that’s what the work requires. 18:19 KL Speaking of, you know, just working with people and, [chuckles] you know, interaction with humans, like you’re really vocal on Twitter about a lot of things like design research, the political climate, and feminism. Have — do you feel repercussions from that? Or do you like worry about alienating clients or attracting trolls? EH Nope! [Laughs, KL joins in]. KL [Laughing] I mean how has that — I feel like being active there is [yeah] you know it’s a part of your work, I think, and it’s [mm hmm] a part of just not being able to separate politics from design and vice versa. Like, how do you deal with that? EH I mean it is a part — like we would not have like named our company Mule if we didn’t want to establish a certain [clears throat, chuckles] sensibility. And I — I have and I — this is something that I’ve spoken about privately but haven’t said publicly, and now I’m afraid I will say it, but who knows what will happen, is that uh … personally … I have [hesitates] not experienced bad repercussions from being online and being outspoken online. I don’t know why that is and I hope I’m not welcoming it now … but it’s — it’s sort of been a mystery because I say things and it’s fine. Uh we have gotten some repercussions from things Mike has said, particularly about guns, but those repercussions are — it — like I’ve learned a lot about how online reviews systems work … uh and the trolls have come at us. Like every place that we can get sort of a star rating, trolls have come at us to downvote us and so we’ve learned is that those systems work better or worse at um filtering out trolls. For example, Yelp is really good … for obvious they’ve really developed a practice about highlighting reviews that are more legitimate. Amazon is pretty good at this. Google is terrible! So if you google “Mule Design” you will see an amazing set of what I call fan fiction reviews … which — which describe scenarios that have never happened but because they’re indistinguishable, from Google’s perspective, from legitimate reviews, there is no way to remove them [KL right] and — and if you go on Amazon and you look at the reviews for Just Enough Research, they’re divided between — like they’re half five-star reviews and half one-star reviews, and the one-star reviews have nothing to do with the book, and everything to do with us being outspoken, particularly, I think, for things around um gun control. KL Right. SWB You know, Erika, that’s really interesting. Um I think both what you’re saying about not having felt like you’ve been particularly targeted in the way that women are so often targeted online for being outspoken, and I felt a little bit of the same where … I get some but I haven’t had the sort of like coordinated attacks or — or just overwhelming quantity of abuse that so many people I know, particularly women and then, of course [mm hmm], particularly the most marginalized women [yeah] have had, and I — I’ve wondered a lot about that myself too, and then I’ve been like, “Ok well, what does it mean for me to sit here and, like … wonder why I haven’t had more of that? Am I inviting it?” You know, “Should I knock on wood right now?” [Yeah] you know I think a lot of it, for me, I’ve thought about like, well what does that have to do with my level of like privilege and power and sort of, like, a sense of, like, do I seem to be better connected or better protected than the people who are getting more abuse? Is it dumb luck? I’m not totally sure but I’m really interested if you’ve thought about how that’s played a role in how you’re perceived? [22:07] EH [Inhales sharply] yeah! And one of the reasons I’ve been really reticent to say anything about this is because it feels like victim blaming to say, “Oh I’m doing something right! And the people who are … getting a lot of abuse are doing something wrong.” Like that is something I don’t believe in and don’t want to promote that idea in any way. But this is just been generally true in my offline life as well. So yeah, I don’t — I don’t know. I mean [KL yeah] maybe I am that personally terrifying … maybe that’s it. SWB I like to — I like to think that. I like to think that [EH definitely] — that people are a little scared of you and that maybe people are a little scared of me [yeah] and I’m very ok with that. EH Yup. Exactly. Like, “Take me on!” KL Right, if that protects you, that’s ok … Erika, one of the many things that I admire you for is that you talk about empathy as a piece of the design process, but actually also part of the working process, how we work with other people. Can you talk about why that’s so important? EH We don’t talk a lot — enough about empathy for our coworkers and colleagues, and this also ties into the work we do around gender bias and collaboration and all of the organizational stuff about design … is that so often you get in organizations where people treat each other terribly or have a lot of fear … about their colleagues or their — the leadership, and there’s a lot of politics. And so I think we really need to think about empathy for our coworkers and seeing the people that we go to work with every day as human beings. And that’s actually more difficult because it’s — a lot of times organizations in the way that they provide incentives or recognition, even though they talk about, “Oh! We’re a team-centered environment. Yay!” Are really incentivizing to be very competitive and terrible to one another, and that’s the part, I think, solving that … will really help … bring better things into the world. And you have to do that. You have to be able to be honest with each other, and so something that [sucks teeth] um I’ve talked [hesitates] about before and is uh, I think, a few people have been talking about the concept of psychological safety that Google really promoted after they did this project, Aristotle, to look at what made teams work. The idea that you have to feel comfortable … being vulnerable in front of your coworkers and you have to be — feel like you can admit you don’t know things and you can make mistakes and you won’t be attacked for that or diminished for that in the workplace is such an important concept and, I think, that’s — all designers should be looking more inward and looking at that context in which they’re doing their work. [25:02] KL I think about this in every corner of my life. I mean I think about it, you know, in my interactions day to day with just, like, people I’m, you know, working with or talking with or on the street, whatever. And [sighs] I just feel like the more we can do to — to, you know, propagate that, the better. Like if we can start to feel a little bit more vulnerable with each other, [sighs] I just feel like we can do better work. I mean I know that sounds cheesy but [yeah!][laughs]. EH It’s absolutely true and I think this works at every level, like this is how, I think, decisions should be evidence based and we should each other as individual humans with value. And I think the what’s going on politically … connects to how we are in our work lives, and how we are in our personal lives, and our neighborhoods. It’s all the same. It’s like if you’re acting based on fear and myth … um and you’re treating people as though they aren’t individual humans but part of a category that you can stereotype and demonize, that’s true in the workplace. If you’re talking about, “Oh designers versus engineers versus marketing people!” And it’s true in society. KL Yeah, completely. In a recent piece you wrote, actually, “The Nine Rules of Design Research,” which is awesome, the first thing you write is: “Get comfortable being uncomfortable.” What do you mean by that? EH This is something I found in talking to a lot of people and thinking about research after writing Just Enough Research is you hear about all of these … barriers to doing research, a lot of times it’s, “Oh that costs too much money to do a research study or it takes too much time.” And this is all cover for the fact that people are actually terrified of asking questions — and especially people who end up in, like, positions of leadership. To say like, “Oh, we don’t know this and we have to find something out, and I don’t have the answer,” is really scary and that’s nothing that we’ve been rewarded for our entire lives. And if you want to, you know, have a research mindset or just use evidence to make decisions, you have to be in a constant state of admitting that you don’t have all the answers. That has to be where you live in order to continue to learn. You have to walk in to work every day and say, “I don’t have all the answers,” and that just has to be kind of your mantra … and that’s terrifying and uncomfortable. It’s much more comfortable to say, “Oh I have the answer and I’m gonna hang onto this answer,” because you have certainty and certainty is really comfortable. And if you have — if you have a way of looking at things, you don’t want that to be challenged by new information. And that’s very uncomfortable. So if you start by saying, “Ok! I’m just going to be uncomfortable because I’m going to recognize that I have an opportunity to learn something new every day and I’m never going to be done,” then once you get comfortable with that mindset, then it becomes a lot easier to — to accept new information and have really good arguments and discussions with your colleagues about the best course of action, because it’s not going to take away that certainty that you need to cling to and defend. SWB Yeah, I’d love to dig into something that you mentioned a little bit: so when it comes to being vulnerable at work and sort of like having to have that start from within in order to get anywhere, something I’m curious about is how does somebody who maybe isn’t in a position where they have um a huge amount of power at their organization, like how do they find space to do that without sort of making themselves vulnerable in ways that are maybe more negative? I guess what I mean is if you don’t have a ton at work, showing up and kind of putting that vulnerability out there may not create — you know, you doing that by yourself is not going to work if the environment is not [chuckling] uh prepared for it and like so like what does somebody do about that to kind of try to make space for that in their life and in their work and foster that in a work environment that they don’t necessarily control? [29:09] EH That is a great question because it’s absolutely true that if you’re in a more toxic work culture and you admit you don’t know know something, right? Like right off the bat? Then that’s gonna be like fresh meat for the vultures sort of thing. The best way to handle that is to ask questions because I think there’s so much concern with making a good argument and offering a lot of reasons for things, and it’s much better — and this is something you can — I think you can do from any position but it’s still, in some organizations, risky. Uh to just ask. Like if somebody puts forward something with a lot of certainty and you’re like, “Huh! I’m not so sure about that.” Find a way to just ask — asking questions is really powerful and then you can help without yourself starting by saying, “Hey! I’m the person who knows the least around here.” You can create a culture of asking questions and that will kind of shake that sense of false certainty a little bit. KL You also started writing about the impact of gender bias in the workplace and how to be a good ally. Can you tell us … just about that and what made you write it? EH We started … doing a workshop around gender bias and the reason we started doing the workshop around gender bias, it came from the observation that we’ve been talking about gender bias in the workplace, well, for my entire life, but especially in like the last … uh 20 years it seems like the conversation has gone nowhere because we all recognize, “Oh! Huh! Especially in the sciences and in academia,” but, it turns out, in every industry there’s a tremendous amount of gender bias. And the thing I observed having, you know, worked in web-related things for the last 20 years is that it’s gotten worse for women. When I started out in my career, I felt totally supported. I felt like we were all learning things together. When I worked um … at — I started at a more technical position and when I was just learning things about um building websites and running web servers, I would hang out with the nerds. They would invite me to the LAN parties, right? Where you all get on your computer and shoot at each other, playing Quake, or whatever. And they — I had root on the server and that was fine and they would — they were like, “Oh you wanna learn more about Unix? Cool!” And … it seems like i the recent years it’s not that sort of paradise, apparently, that I experienced. And so we started asking the question like, “Why did it get worse?” Um and why is all of this training — cuz you’re like, “Oh people are talking about unconscious bias and we’re doing these trainings.” And I’m like, “This is not working,” and when we talked about it, the core problem we identified is that organizations were treating this like it was a knowledge problem. Like, “Oh this is just something people don’t know.” And they’d do these trainings that would say, “Hey, everyone! Did you know that people act out of these unconscious biases and stereotypes and that’s making it hard for people who are less well represented in the workplace to get fair treatment?” And then everybody goes to these trainings and they’re like, “Oh cool, so everybody does it. So I don’t have to change.” And we said, “Oh what if we … look at the problem another way?” And it really is a problem of changing habits, not just giving people new information. And once you look at the problem like that, it’s a much different problem and it’s much harder to solve in the sense that you can’t just put a thousand employees in a room, show a presentation, and say, “Go forth and be unbiased.” And uh and so we developed a training around, “Ok, how do we help women who are experiencing this in their workplace, do less work?” Right? Because women are often doing a lot more work to deal with the amount of bias that they encounter. And so we said, “Ok, we’ll do a workshop that says, ‘You can change — you can kind of change the habits around this and you can also personally do less work.’” And one of the comments we received was, “What about the guys? Why aren’t they participating in this?” And the reason is that if you’re in a position of — of power and privilege, you have no incentive to change your habits, to change the way things work. This is why, you know, you look at Apple and their diversity numbers are terrible. And they’re like, “Oh yeah yeah, we wanna work on that.” But why should they? They have billions of dollars and what they’ve been doing is really worked for them … but I recognize that there are a lot of men out there who do believe that gender bias is a bad thing because it, you know, it’s like they don’t feel like they need their mediocrity protected. So I wrote that piece to say, “Ok, if you’re one of the guys who recognizes that this is a bad situation and doesn’t feel threatened by people saying that it should change, here’s some really concrete things that you can do to support this type of change.” [34:25] KL I think back on earlier in my career and I had similar thoughts to what you were saying at the beginning of this and I look back on it and I’m like, “I don’t know if it was better.” Like I think that I felt more supported and I’m not sure that I actually was. Like I think it may just not have been a good enough or a big enough conversation at that point and the fact that it is way more out in the open and people who are afraid and have that fear of sort of like holding onto what they’ve, you know, the habits that they have had over the years are — that’s why that just seems like so much more uh glaring. SWB I think a lot about how at the beginning of my career I … did not think that much about some of those dynamics at work because I was really busy trying to like establish professional footing, and figure out what I was doing, and create some credibility, and some sort of space for myself to get things done. And as part of that, I worked with a bunch of dudes who I largely liked and I liked to be able to hang out with them and sort of feel like I was one of them and, you know, hang out at the beer bar, and … laugh at the dirty jokes and whatever. And that was fine and I mean like it wasn’t like a particular horror story or anything but, I think, one of the things that I’ve since very much realized for myself is that a lot of my sense of like, “Yeah ok this is fine,” was coming from a place of … subverting some things about myself in order to create space in an environment that wasn’t necessarily supportive to me and so it’s like I didn’t think that it was a big deal but I’ve since realized that there were a lot of pieces of myself that I had to turn off in order for myself to kind of fit in. And — and then at some point that became like not enough for me [yeah] and not acceptable to me. [36:20] KL Yeah it’s like we — we all had to do that because we had to like try to focus on doing the actual work, right? To get us to the next level or to, you know, start managing bigger teams or get into the meetings or whatever and it’s like, yeah, I totally agree with you, Sara. SWB Yeah so I wonder if it’s like it seems better, like it seems like it was better only because if you didn’t ask for enough, you know? [Laughing] like we weren’t ask— I wasn’t asking for enough, I would say. EH Yeah, I think that’s part of it and, I think, specifically just talking about web related things. Like when that all started in San Francisco, it was a more welcoming community because it was something — it was a new endeavor that wasn’t part of any industry that I would say was institutionalized enough to also have institutionalized sexism. So I really feel like it was welcoming to women, I don’t think it was ever particularly racially diverse. I will say that. But I think what happened is that there was sort of a — this web culture. This like nerdy, little web culture … that was sort of an alternative culture and then, I think, finance culture took it over. I think that’s also a part of it … because I think that’s really what’s changed … is that it’s not like, “Oh we’re doing this thing that makes no money! … that is cool and we’re figuring it out and it’s like a whacky little science project that people who like doing whacky little science projects like.” And then these companies became investment vehicles. And then I think that brought all of that “Wolf of Wall Street” bro culture into it. So I think I absolutely agree with what both of you have said in terms of like, “Oh! We were being the cool girls.” But I didn’t feel as much of that, I felt like, “Oh we’re all doing this neat thing and building this new world and — and having a fun time together,” to, “Oh! Here are people who want to use this to transfer wealth in huge ways and who cares what we’re actually building.” And so I think that is also part of it. KL So we are talking to you at a very, I think, exciting moment, um you have a brand new book coming out. Can you tell us just a little bit about that? EH Yeah, Conversational Design — it’s about using human conversation which humans have been doing for oh a hundred thousand years, kind of as long as we’ve been human, we’ve been conversing. And using that as a model for designing interactive, digital products and services, and really looking beyond the surface because I know everything around chatbots and the speakers you talk to you like the Alexa and Google Home — that’s really been operating on the surface and I think what people are finding now is that it’s not necessarily easier to talk to a system like that and so it goes — I try to go a little deeper to say, “Ok what makes it so easy? Like we’re having this conversation and it’s easy and natural. And what makes that work? And how can we look at that to say, ‘Oh how can we really make these systems work in a device independent that feels more human and humane?’” KL Well as your publisher, I’m very excited about it [laughter]. Um I also know that writing a book and that process is really fucking hard, what were some of the biggest challenges you encountered? [39:53] EH Whoo! Well 2017 just as a whole! That was really hard because well the genesis for this book was a set of things I was thinking about and talking about like ten years ago about language and the interface and all of that. So first there’s the idea that, “Oh this is going to be much easier than my first book.” That’s like the first myth that you get right out of the way [KL chuckles]. And then everything seemed to be changing in the industry so often around this stuff because I started with, “Oh I’m just going to talk about using language,” and then I felt like, “Oh I’ve gotta incorporate these things that are happening around messaging and AI and voice interfaces and things like that.” And then the 2016 election happened [laughing] um and then it felt very difficult to get it together to write a book about interaction design when the world was on fire, and that led to a lot of just sitting in my office, staring at my screen, not doing anything, and feeling terrible. And so that made it hard [KL laughs]. SWB I don’t think you were alone [laughter] in that I mean like I had literally that same problem, but I think everybody I know had some variation of that problem where it’s like, “Is what I’m doing even a thing anymore? Like who cares?” I think, Katel, you talked about this on a recent episode where you were like, you would think about something that you really wanted to do at A Book Apart, right? Like you talked about wanting to build out, you know, the marketing campaigns more effectively and then being like, “Well [sighs], does work even matter? [KL laughs] Do books matter?” [KL yeah] And of course books fucking matter. But it can feel sometimes like they don’t. KL And I think there’s that, you know, like we talked about with Eileen Webb in her interview there’s this like sort of overcast of are we feeling up to ourselves? Like are we feeling ok? And I know, for me, like I often underplay how much it affects me when I’m dealing with a health issue, you know, not just physically and mentally but emotionally, and I really feel like I get slowed down easily, and I used to not think that that was the case. Erika, you went through some health stuff in the last year too. How did you navigate, you know, going through that and healing and just trying to stay on top of running a studio, and writing a book, and just, you know, finishing? EH [Laughs] That was the icing on the glory that was 2017 is, yeah, I’m generally a pretty healthy person and I had a situation and I had to suddenly realize I had to have some pretty major surgery. I haven’t really talked about this much. So yeah, right when I was finishing the book, I was going through this stuff and … so I felt very, very lucky to be like where I am geographically and to have like to have the support and tools I have, and to have the health insurance I have. So it really was a like, “Ok, hey! It’s a thing I have to deal with.” And in some ways, it was great because it was so concrete … and um, and yeah, fortunately like Mike was super supportive and did a great job of hiding how he was freaking out. And it was just like a series of steps. And it’s one of those things like in crisis situations, like I get super matter of fact, like, “Ok. Here are the things that are happening. These things are happening now. Ok.” And so I did that and I was just lucky that everything went great because like you — bay area has the best healthcare in the world, because my insurance was good, because everything went super smooth, and the whole like kind of let’s call it “the ordeal” was like less than two months. [43:38] KL Mmm. Well, I have one last question: where do you find inspiration and optimism these days? EH What helped me, when things got really dark, is to like step away from the computer and just go to my grocer, and go to my dry cleaner, and have these like friendly interactions and say, “Oh this is really where life happens.” Like it’s really easy to get caught up in these — because right now, thanks to the internet, we can know about everything terrible thing going on in the world at all times. And so it’s like, “Oh hey! People are still like living their lives [laughs] and it’s ok in some places on the ground.” And then just with the people I know and the people who are finding the strength to do positive things and a lot of that is also in books, as Sara mentioned. Like books are really important! There are a lot of books that were written during really terrible times in history. Like you look at what was going on, you know, during the twentieth century … all of these like horrible wars and uprisings and then the fight for civil rights in America. And dealing with everything going on there and you’re like, “Wow! Throughout these periods which are arguably as bad or worse than what the crises that we’re dealing with now, people still found the strength and the ability to put something out there into the world that’s positive and enduring,” and I think looking at that is really fantastic. Because it’s so easy to react. Right? There’s so much to react to every single day. There are like ten horrible things to react to, that like pull you down into this really primal fear place [KL chuckles] and I think you find these ideas and these people that lift you up out of it. Man, I’ve started listening to Oprah’s podcast [laughs]. I highly recommend her conversation with RuPaul! All we watch in our household now is RuPaul’s Drag Race, and that really helps. And I listen to BBC In Our Time, which is a fantastic podcast where academics talk about, like, concepts in science, or notable thinkers, or periods in history, and it gives you that historical context, which I think can help crystalize—like, it helps to look backwards a little bit to think about positive ideas for the future, and get out of this corner of “everything is on fire and the world is ending.” KL Yeah. Well I’ve written down all of these recommendations and I’m going to do the same thing. Thank you so much for joining us. It was so great to talk to you. EH Oh thank you! I love talking with fantastic people such as yourselves! [Music fades in.] Fuck Yeah of the WeekJL When we plan our shows, we talk a lot about what the Fuck Yeah of the Week’s going to be. And this week we were talking about a few different things. And the thing that kept coming to my mind was Emma Gonzales and the students’ work in the wake of Parkland. I’ve been following some of this work and @emmaforchange is her Twitter account and you start following this Twitter account and you start seeing all of these powerful voices … and all of these powerful thoughts that are coming out of … you know, the children and youth in our country right now. And, for me, that’s … so amazing to look at. And — and it does inspire a “Fuck Yeah!” and a, “Thank you.” A thank you to see that people are speaking out about this right now. There has been — I don’t know if any one of us can look at this and not get emotional but everything that’s been happening, and it’s not that this was the first that anything has brought up these emotions in our country, um gun violence is definitely nothing new. But I think [sighs] every time I see it, I get a little … the sigh is so heavy, I just don’t know what to do. Um I feel very lost, I think now, I think about my one-year-old son. And I think, “Fuck! You know?” Like you start like, “Should we homeschool? Should we move to Canada?” There’s like a gazillion thoughts that come through my head at all time and I just get like a little bit lost and a little bit um, not a little bit, a lot depressed. And like what do we do? What do we do for our kids? What do we do? And when I see this group of people that are fighting for themselves, that, to me … [sighs] … it makes me feel like I could potentially believe in something and that there might — that there will be change. [48:13] SWB Every time there’s a school shooting, I think about my friend, Teresa. My friend Teresa was one of my best friends growing up, and we eventually both moved to kind of different parts of town, so we were in different high schools. And in 1998 she was shot in a shooting at Thurston High School. Um she was shot in the head. And every time. Every time. Right? There’s a shooting in the news, I imagine [fighting tears] myself back at the hospital, visiting her, and talking to her mom at the ICU. I mean. and she was there for weeks, I mean she — she was like … this is such a terrible distinction to have to even make, but she was basically the most severely injured person who lived. I think a lot about her but I also think a lot about, what did I think and what did I go through during that time in my life? And I will be perfectly honest, it didn’t occur to me to protest. Like it didn’t cross my mind … I knew that … America’s gun culture was a problem. I understood that this was not okay or normal. I mean this was earlier, like this was before Columbine, even. I — I knew that, but it didn’t really occur to me that there was a thing that I might say or do about it beyond … beyond just saying like, “Wow, guns are fucked up,” to my friends. And beyond going to hospital and, like, being there. So I think a lot about like [sighs] how much presence of mind it takes from these kids to be able to do that at this moment, and I also think about sort of like what’s changed since then? Like what’s different in the world? And part of it is things like, you know, social media, and access to these tools to really get out to a lot of people really quickly. Part of this is the fact that there’s just been so many of these shootings in the time period between Thurston High School in 1998 and today. I mean that’s going to be 20 years ago this May. But I also think a lot about who these kids are able to learn from, and the kinds of techniques that they learned, and something I’ve been really — I’ve been really paying close attention to, and really thankful for, is that as these kids are stepping up and refusing to be silenced and — and really … doing remarkable work. So many of them have also said that they didn’t just come up with this on their own, that they learned tactics and techniques from people who’ve been doing organizing work, activist work for years, and specifically, you know Black Lives Matter … which did not get the kinds of positive publicity that these kids are getting and doesn’t mean these kids don’t des— like these kids deserve every single second of positive publicity for the work that they are doing. But I think it’s really important that they’re able to also say like, “We didn’t just make this up ourselves. Like there’s people who have done this before us.” And, you know, I think about how much different … my reaction might’ve been if I had had more of a connection to activist groups that existed then, and the work that they were doing, and the skills in organizing, and just sort of understanding the power of protest that I just didn’t know that much about. And so I’m — you know, I’m so — I’m so [sighs] sad that we are at this moment, and in terms of gun violence in this country, and in terms of like so many other issues, but I am Fuck Yeah excited at the kind of like way in which I think so many of us are getting more comfortable with protest, with pushback, with being vocal about the things that matter. I like to see so many people getting out of their comfort zone and sort of like stretching that muscle a bit. And being willing to stand up and say what is important to them. And it makes me hopeful that is a time that is like … hard to be hopeful during. [52:25] JL Yeah, agreed, I mean there was um, you know, students that were in Riverview Gardens High School in Saint Louis that did the walk-out and were told that they would not be let back into school. There was a tweet from David Hogg that said, “To those of you not let back into school. One: that’s a great college essay, and two: your schools will be on the wrong side of history, you won’t be.” KL The people who are saying, “This is going to go on your record, you’re going to be suspended, you’re going to be expelled.” Like, that’s not even going to be a thing if this doesn’t get solved. SWB Your permanent record is a myth, first off. KL Exactly. SWB Um, like guess what’s on my permanent record? Like, you know, like I got in a fight with Pauline Dungan in the sixth grade [laughter] and I got suspended and look at me now, motherfuckers! I’m fine. It’s fine. But I also — you know but yeah I think that it’s — it’s definitely all of these like fear tactics to try to kind of keep kids in their place. And I look at those kids and I’m like, “Man, those kids’ place is in the front!” Like, that is their place. They’re in their right place right now. KL They see straight through that fucking bullshit! That’s the thing, that’s one of the biggest powers they have. JL So thank you for everyone that is working on the march for our lives and for speaking out and for fighting for yourselves, and I hope that, you know, we all can find ways to fight for our kids also today, and find ways to constantly, you know, be advocates for ourself, and be advocates for those around us. SWB Fuck Yeah for the teenagers. Like … KL Yeah. SWB Fuck Yeah! KL Fuck Yeah! [53:55] SWB The kids are all right. 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 Erika Hall 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 [music fading in] with another great guest [music ramps up to end]. | |||
| 13 Mar 2018 | Show Up and Be Real with Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen | 00:59:18 | |
In Episode 9, we talk inclusion riders, the importance of pronouns, and how all of us can better support folks from marginalized communities.If there’s one thing we’re sure of, it’s that we’ve got to stick together—and that means supporting and centering the voices of folks with less opportunity and privilege than us. In this episode, we talk with designer and educator Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen about how listening, and finding community, can help us do just that. They also share how parenting shaped their career path, what it was like to come out at work, and why they see allyship as something we practice, not something we have. Listen up. > If I show up at work as myself, then I’m in a state of being in my greatest power. And I think if you can find a workplace where they want you to be there in your greatest power, then like, yeah, show up. This is how you do it. Here’s what we get into—and of course, there’s a full transcript, too. Show notesIf you didn’t catch the Oscars, don’t worry—we start the show by filling you in on our favorite parts. Of note:
…which we go on to explore:
Interview: Stevie Thuy Anh NguyenIt’s not hyperbole to say it was an honor and a pleasure to talk with UX designer and educator Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen. Stevie tells us about the causes that drive them, establishing a career in design, navigating coming out as queer, and what it really means to practice allyship. We talk about:
FYOTWWe end the show with a little self-love and high-five because, fuck yeah!—we made the New & Noteworthy list on Apple Podcasts! AND it reminds us of all the amazing women-hosted podcasts we listen to and love—including a show you should definitely check out, called Good As Hell hosted by Lizzo.
SponsorsThis 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. _
TranscriptKatel LeDû This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by Shopify, the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. And did you know they’re growing? If you want to work with a diverse, passionate team that likes to get shit done, then you should talk to Shopify. The best part: they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply to you. So visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about. Jenn Lukas Hey! 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. SWB I’m so excited today to talk about one of my favorite topics: inclusion. And, more specifically, we’re going to talk about how people like me, like all of us, can step up and make an impact for underrepresented groups in any field. To help us out, we sat down with a friend of mine, Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen, to learn more about what real inclusion can look like. But, first up, did you all watch the Oscars last week? JL Nope! KL Uh, I did, and I have a few favorite things I kind of want to share because, first of all — you didn’t have to watch it just to see all the pictures that come out of it but Janelle Monáe’s fire red, like military-inspired pant suit was phenomenal. SWB She looked amazing. KL She looked amazing. I also would really like to make a very genuine request to Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph to run for presidents ASAP. SWB Like, co-presidents? KL Like, yeah, absolutely and then, I mean, to top it all off: Jordan Peele won for best screenplay for Get Out, which is just fucking so awesome. I saw that movie and I was so obsessed, I loved it so much that I started following Jordan Peele on Instagram, and he posts a lot of Get Out fan art, it is absolutely worth following. It’s magical. JL I loved that movie. KL It was so good. [2:02] JL Yeah. Um, also, I love this pantsuit. I just Googled it. SWB Get on the internet right now! “Janelle Monáe Oscars pantsuit.” The cape portion of it or whatever that kind of swoopy back is is amazing! So I loved that she really made it her own. Like it was not the kind of look that not just other women were wearing but that, like, anybody was wearing. But it also felt so completely Oscars. Right? Like it felt like she had the whole vibe — fantastic. Ok. So we can keep talking about the Oscars which I also did not actually watch. Uh I like to look at outfit photos later. But, instead, what I was hoping we could talk a little bit about was the story that came out about Frances McDormand and what she said at the end of her speech. She said something about how she wanted to leave the audience with two words and those words were “inclusion rider” So Nicole Sanchez wrote this piece that Jenn actually sent around to all of us, that was about what inclusion rider means in tech or what they could mean in tech. So Nicole is awesome. She is a diversity consultant who runs a company called Vaya Consulting. So she spent a long time looking at diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. And she wrote this piece where she talked about where inclusion riders come from and what they mean. So she credits Dr. Stacy Smith at USC for originally coming up with this concept, and says that it comes from diversifying talent in the media. And the concept is kind of pretty simple, right? It’s like: if you take a rider, which you may have heard about from the music industry— JL So a rider is like what you request if you are going to be performing somewhere. And it could be something like, “I need to have sparkling water, or I need to have a soundcheck of two hours before I’m going to go on.” It could be— KL A fancy rug. JL Or a fancy rug. It could be all these things, you know, maybe you want to make sure that you’re going to have some sort of food. Or in the famous case of Van Halen, you might say, “I demand there be no brown M&Ms.” Which really wasn’t a demand that they needed, they stuck that in their rider to make sure that it was actually being read. So it was one of those things where if they got to a venue and they saw that there was no brown M&Ms, then that means that someone actually read the rider, and the requests that they were going to do, and that they were going to have a good show. KL Paying attention. I mean it matters. JL That’s why Justin Bieber requests that his hotel room is decked out in carnations of a specific color pattern — I’m not making this up! KL I told you! It’s— [4:30] SWB Ok so, so the Bieber rider is not also what we want to talk about tonight. Although we could. Um instead I mean I really like the way that this concept applies to other facets of life. So what Frances was talking about at the Oscars was like, “Ok. If you are an in-demand name in Hollywood, you have an opportunity, in your contracts, to stipulate that the people who are working on the set, and the people who are working with you, um are coming from diverse backgrounds. You have this, you know, you have the opportunity to say that you want to make sure that they’re being paid fairly. You have an opportunity to make some demands that might actually be relatively small in comparison to what you could be getting paid if you’re a big star, but are really, really huge for people who aren’t you.” And so, what Nicole talks about in her article is really applying that other places like, let’s say, a tech conference. Like, if you’re an in-demand speaker, you also have a lot of power. And you can say, “I would love to speak at your event, but I’m going to need you to do some shit for me first.” And getting really specific about what you expect to make sure that that event is inclusive and welcoming to people who are not in demand like you are. KL Yeah, I really like what Nicole wrote because it made it really obvious and seemed really reasonable to have this filter out into a lot of different areas, right? And, like you were saying, you might not be a speaker who’s super in-demand, you might just be starting out. But I think a lot of it is just knowing that it’s very fair and totally appropriate to ask questions about the thing that you’re about to sign up to do. SWB Totally! That reminds me of what Erika Hall talked about when we interviewed her which is like the importance of asking questions and the power of asking questions. I have been thinking about this a lot and I talked about this a little bit actually on Twitter today. Like, one of the things that I’ve started doing is when I’m asked to speak at conferences which, you know, I’ve written some books, and I’ve done a lot of speaking. So I do get asked which is great but I’ve started asking some questions back and I try to make them pretty consistent, across the board, because I find if I ask the same stuff over and over, I’m more comfortable asking and it also feels a little less weird, like it’s not a special standard, it’s just my standard. And so I have a few things that I would say are kind of in my rider, or at least like, they’re in my Go/No Go [chuckling] kind of file, right? Like I won’t go to your event if you don’t answer these questions in a way that I can live with. So it’s things like, you know, for me I always ask like, “Does your event have a code of conduct?” That’s something that’s on Nicole’s list too. But I also ask things like, “What are you doing to ensure that your event has a diverse lineup?” And I ask it that way specifically because I want to hear how people think about it. And if they tell me things like, “Well, we just want to have the best speakers.” Then that’s a big red flag for me because I question, “Well, how do you know you have the best speakers? ‘Best’ according to whom? According to like people you already knew? People your Twitter connections already knew?” You know it’s like it brings up a lot for me. Or at least it’s an opportunity to have a conversation with them. And depending on how that conversation goes, that can tell me a lot about whether I’m interested in coming there, and also it’ll tell me whether I’m interested in investing time and helping them identify speakers they hadn’t heard about, which I’m super happy to do if I feel confident that, you know, if I recommend a speaker who is from a more marginalized group, who’s maybe less experienced than I am, to go to an event, I don’t want that person to be treated poorly. I want to make sure that I’m sending them to an event where somebody’s going to take them seriously. So I feel like by having those conversations, it gives me a chance to feel out how much somebody’s thought about this, how open they are to change, and how willing they are to kind of put in work. Because it is. It takes work, right? Just like we talked about on an earlier episode: it takes work to think about, you know, not centering all your events on drinking, which is a really answer. It takes worth to think about something like onsite childcare but like every single detail you do as an event planner is work and I want them to think about this as an important piece of their job. [8:33] KL Yeah, I mean, you just said that you have an opportunity to do this and I would almost say that established folks, like yourself, I imagine feel like they have a — an obligation to. SWB Absolutely. I don’t know that everybody does. I wish more people who felt like they had some sway — and I, you know, I have like some level of sway. There’s people who — who are like much more in demand and who make a lot of money speaking in our field. And I think that they have a huge responsibility. But I definitely, 100 percent like I — yes, I think of that as an opportunity in the sense of like, I’m glad to have the opportunity. But 100 percent it is an obligation and it is a responsibility. JL Yeah, um I’ve always did a similar thing to you, Sara, where I had a list of a set of questions that I asked every conference opportunity that came up and, you know, like you’re saying, it helps when you have the standard because then you can send an email back that’s like, “This is what I ask all my conferences. No matter what.” And I wrote a post about this awhile back, mine were focused a little bit more about seeing if they — if speakers were paid, and one of the things that I really like to ask is, “What is the cost of the conference? And how many attendees do you expect?” And then afterwards I would say, “What is your speaker fee?” To make sure that then, you know, if a conference will write back, “Oh our conference cost 12 hundred dollars, we’re expecting, you know, a thousand, 2,000, 5,000 people and then the speaker fee is zero, right? KL Then that math is wrong! SWB That math speaks for itself, right? Like it’s like, “Mmm, hmm, how do you like the way those numbers look on the page?” Right. [10:00] SWB Yeah, I mean I wish that everybody would have thought about this by now. I kind of feel like, “C’mon, like you sh— c’mon, you should be thinking about this already.” However, I also accept that that’s not the case and if my goal is to make more people aware, and hope that more people come along with me on this particular journey, then I do feel like part part of it — being able to do something than education is ok and important. I don’t expect everybody to do that, in all circumstances, but I feel like I have enough like sort of comfort and confidence of where I am that I— I can do that. And I think that’s a service to — I’m not so much worried about doing it as a service to the conference organizer, I think that’s like a side benefit. I think about that as a service to the industry, at large, and to the people who need that information to be more widespread. JL Completely. And, you know, I would say that, as a speaker, I did this but as an attendee I’ve asked for things too. And so I feel like people should feel empowered to ask questions as an attendee also, you know, “Will you have a vegan meal?” “Will you have a vegetarian meal?” And that’s something that I used to ask a lot um you know, “Is there a place to nurse?” Or “Is there a place to pump?” And like, “What sort of facilities will be available?” And, as an attendee, someone who’s paying for a conference, you should definitely feel empowered. I mean as a speaker, you should too, that wasn’t taking away from that. But you should definitely feel empowered to write the organizers and make sure that they will have these things available to you also. SWB And I’m also deeply suspect of any event that makes you feel bad for having— like if some event makes you feel bad because you ask for a vegan meal or you ask for a nursing room, like, “I’m sorry. What the actual fuck?” It’s one thing for them not to necessarily be able to meet every need, that’s like a different conversation. But I think if somebody comes to you with a need, and you write them off, or you minimize it, or you pretend like it doesn’t matter. Like, I don’t want to go that event. And I don’t want — I don’t want those people to have my money, or for them to use like my face and my talk to promote their event. KL Right. SWB Um so there were some things though on Nicole’s list that I’d never thought about before that I’m super glad to have heard about now. So for example, I had not thought about — and I feel silly not having thought about it but I never thought about asking about the people who are working the event. So like the laborers, the people who are doing setup and takedown, the people who are doing food, like how are they being paid? She specifically mentioned, you know, what are the labor conditions, are they part of a union? I think there’s probably a whole lot of different questions you might ask depending on your particular interests or your particular kind of like stance but I think asking about the welfare and the support of the people who are not kind of seen as like part of the conference, but are, in fact, like what makes the conference run. Like that’s a huge area that I’m going to be thinking more about. KL And the fact that, you know, she points out, is there — is there a process for intake of these kinds of requests, or like these kinds of questions, right? For like just handling that and — and talking about them. JL So I think the conversation that keeps coming up again and again, from conference organizers saying, “How do I make this happen? How do I diversify my lineups? How do I diversify my speakers?” And I think some people have provided solutions and ideas for this. An article I read recently on Medium was about the Enterprise UX Conference which um they’ve been working on this for four years and every year have slowly iterated on how they’ve been handling things. And I think one of the things that is really great about that is they didn’t just give up after year one. They’re like, “Well, I don’t know how to do it.” Is that they’ve been slowly trying to improve their process and they wrote about this and they were saying that one of the things they did was make sure to have different people, besides three white men, choosing the lineup and being in charge of the themes. And as soon as they started expanding from that, then so did their speaker lineup. SWB You know one of my favorite conferences, Design and Content, actually a conference that Stevie, our guest today, is going to MC this year, they’ve done a really similar thing where they have a selection committee and what they specifically did is they intentionally went out and identified people from a bunch of different backgrounds and then they paid them for their time to be on that committee. And it dramatically changed how they come up with who’s going to be on the roster for the year. And they’ve written about it publically, we’ll put that in the show notes, because I think that they have a process that is — is something that other people can follow. And, you know, part of it came out of their first year. They had really good intentions. They went out and thought about, you know, “You know let’s make sure we have a good, diverse lineup. Let’s ask some people who we’ve never seen before, and some new faces, et cetera.” And an attendee called them out for it at the event and said you know, “This lineup is really white.” And they had to take a step back and be like, “Yeah, it is.” And sit with that. Right? And figure out what to do about that. And I think that that’s hard but I think that’s one of the responsibilities that we have is to be able to hear those kinds of feedback and say, “Ok I’m going to listen to that and then I’m going to figure out how do I change?” And, you know, and that’s one of the reasons I like to ask these questions I ask, right? Is it’s like, do I get defensiveness? Or do I get somebody who can say, “Yeah, you know, we haven’t that diverse of a lineup in past years. You’re right that’s something we should change. I have some ideas but I would love to hear more,” or whatever it is. But that — that openness is really, really important. So, um, that’s one of the things about Enterprise UX that I think has been great as well is that they’re willing to write about it. Like they’re willing to admit it that it wasn’t great year one! Which is sometimes hard to do, right? You have to be able to look at your work and say like, “Here are the ways that this wasn’t where we wanted to be. And then here’s what we did differently.” [16:11] JL Another site that I found interesting was womentalkdesign.com. Their tagline is that they “elevate the best talks about design from women and empowers event organizers with tools, approaches, and information to engage more women speakers.” So this is a neat project because it’s an answer to that question of, “Well, I don’t know where to find these speakers!” And so I really like it because they went out and tackled this specific question that people kept asking. SWB Yeah, I mean Christina Wodtke who is one of the people who created that site, I know that part of this was born of her frustration. Like, she’s been in the industry a long time, working in tech and in UX. And people would frequently ask her, “Well, where do I find all these diverse speakers?” And now she’s like, “I don’t have to answer that question anymore!” Right? Like she’s like, “They’re out there. You just have to do a little bit of work, to get outside of the bubble that you have,” and then she was like, “Ok, let me go and do some of that work.” And um — and so the result is that it’s like, “Oh! You’re looking for more diverse lineups for your event?” That’s certainly not everybody, by any means, but like if you haven’t at least gone through that, like you’ve done not even the bare minimum. JL And I— I don’t think inclusiveness just stops at these conferences, right? I mean one of the things that came out recently was Lara Hogan wrote a great article about how to apply inclusiveness to your hiring process, and how to like tackle that, and one of the things that she had was to make sure that you have a diverse group of the team interviewing these candidates, and I think that’s great thing: making sure that it’s not just one group of people that are interviewing all of your candidates as they come in. SWB And I think it also goes back to some of the same stuff that we talked for like an inclusion rider is that if you are in a position where you feel like you have some choice about the job that you’re taking, which I recognize not everybody is in, but if you’re in that position and you’re thinking about, “I want a place that’s going to give me the most growth opportunity, I want the place that’s going to offer a really good salary package, et cetera, et cetera,” you know, I think that it’s another responsibility to be able to say, “I want to place that is willing to kind of put its money where its mouth is when it comes to being an inclusive environment,” and to ask those same kinds of questions, right? “So what are you doing to increase diversity in your team?” And “What are you doing to support people who come from different backgrounds? And like — what does that look like?” JL I love this question. I love this so much. Um I think it’s like— as a candidate, as an interviewee, you might be like, “Well, how do I phrase this? How do I make sure that this job is going to be a good job with me?” And I think that’s a great way to phrase it. Um when we interview people, one of the questions I always ask is, um I phrase it as: “Diversity and inclusiveness are really important values to us. What are some important values to you?” And, you know, it’s a very leading question but you’d be surprised at how many people go on some sort of tangent that is, like, “Ah. You know? I want to make sure that I have like — snacks.” No one’s ever said snacks! That’s an exaggeration [sure] but it’s certainly something that’s like, you know, not appropriate for the answer or where I was hoping that they would go. SWB We talk a lot about sort of how this relates to people who are working in like tech and design fields, but this is the kind of thing that I think is really transferrable to almost any field, right? Like that it’s not really about the industry that you’re in, it’s like if you were working in an industry that is not necessarily perfectly inclusive, which is like, newsflash: probably all of them. Then you know I think that the— the same kind of stuff applies and you can kind of bring some of these same principles and ideas along. So I’m really stoked that we’re talking about inclusion riders, I don’t think it necessarily has to be like a contract in every circumstance, I think it’s much more about how can you apply that concept to whatever it is that you’re doing in your professional and however you’re interacting with people who hold power in your industry. [19:55] ** **** JL** [Sponsor] No, You Go is proud to be supported by wordpress.com. Whether you’d like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating your website on wordpress.com can help others find you, remember you, and connect with you. That’s why nearly 30 percent of all websites run on WordPress. You don’t need experience setting up a website, WordPress guides you through the process from start to finish. And takes care of the technical side. In fact, we use WordPress at No, You Go. WordPress also has 24 hour customer support, which is great because we all have different schedules. Plans start at just four dollars a month. Start building your website today! Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off your brand new website. Interview: Stevie Thuy Anh NguyenSWB Our guest today is Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen. I first met Stevie back in the summer of 2015, after I gave a talk at a conference up in Vancouver, and they approached me afterward wanting to chat about my talk, which was very flattering. But more than anything, what I really remember about that conversation was that this person I just met had come to me with so much kind of kindness and generosity, and our conversation felt so uplifting. And over the next few years, I have paid a lot of attention to what Stevie’s been up to and the things that they’re talking about and interested in. And this year, fast forward, Stevie is now going to be the MC of that very event where I met them: the Design & Content Conference. They’re also a UX designer, a design educator who works with youth and teaches in two different university programs, and somebody who’s just really active in their community in Vancouver, and in design in general. I am so excited to welcome Stevie to the show today. Thank you so much for being here. Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen Thank you for having me. Can I add a moment and just also acknowledge that I am also on unceded Coast Salish territories, and while we may call it Vancouver, it is the unceded land of the Coast Salish people, particularly the Squamish, the Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. SWB Thank you for doing that. I think that actually sets the tone for this conversation really well because I think one of the things I would love to talk with you more about is sort of the way that you look at your role as a designer in your community and sort of the impact that you have on community and on the way that people from different backgrounds within your community are represented. So can you tell us a little more— how did you get to this place where you start a conversation and you say, “Actually, can we remind ourselves of the indigenous people whose land this is and this land has always been?” Like, what was your process of getting to a place that you were comfortable doing things like that? STAN Honestly, every time I have these moments where I’m like, “Oh! I need to say something, I should say something, this is the right thing to say,” and it is still really, really hard because I think always makes me uncomfortable not knowing how the other person may respond on the other end. Yeah, these issues are political and they are uncomfortable for people to talk about, hear, or acknowledge. I don’t know if you know what’s happening right now in Canada, but Tina and Coulton were murdered and people don’t talk about it because people don’t care. And so we need to bring these things up even though it’s really hard because people are dying. So that’s my response I guess. When I began to recognize that when we don’t talk about things, people die. And the more personal we make it, the more people who we spend time with who are directly affected by these things, by systemic oppression, the more we recognize the power that we have as individuals when we are in a place where we have to acknowledge these things. SWB That’s a pretty difficult topic and I think that that’s something pretty challenging to our audience — I mean, you mentioned that it’s hard for people to talk about, I think it’s hard to talk about on a podcast like this where we — where we really do want to talk about, you know, finding some joy even when things are difficult. And I don’t that that means erasing talking about the things that are difficult, by any means, and so, with that in mind, what is your day to day work? [25:23] STAN Hmm my day-to-day work probably doesn’t look too different from many people. I’m a parent; I have a five, almost six-year-old, son. And I have shared custody with his father. And so on days when he’s with me, I actually wake up at like 4:30 in the morning, and I wake up, and I shower, and I go to make a matcha latte for myself every morning. And I come out and I answer emails, I try my best to catch up on like Slack, on text messages, on WhatsApp, on Viber, on Signal, on my work email versus my personal email, and um what else is there? Messenger. So that’s kind of normal, I imagine, I think we all have these mornings of having to try to catch up with all that stuff. And then I get him ready for school, take him to school, and it’s a privilege that allows me to do that, and I come back and I work. And so some days that’s with Out in Schools, where I’m talking about queer and gender issues with young people in high schools. And sometimes in elementary schools. And other days it’s going to meet my own clients at their offices. And then other days, it’s staying home um and doing like UX work. So for me that’s everywhere from leading a workshop, like I did this morning, where I’m presenting to clients whatever our ideas are, whatever our proposals are, and then other days I’m heading off to go teach. And then I come home and I try to fit in some yoga somewhere. And pick up my son and then do things with him in the evening, feed him, put him to bed. And do some more work and then go to bed. That’s my day. SWB I think a lot of our listeners can relate to sort of the juggle and trying to figure out what the right mix of things is in a day and how to have some time for yourself amid everything else. Can you tell us more — like what was your journey into becoming a designer? How did you end up in this sort of life that you’ve crafted for yourself now? STAN I lucked into it, I think. I remember I was in high school and I had really no real idea about what I wanted to do and somebody came into the school who was an alumni and did a presentation. And she worked in — she worked in marketing for an ad agency. And I just thought her job sounded really cool. I liked that she got to like talk to people and I liked hearing about how she got to like come up with ideas to do things and like sell things to people, which I feel so much like cringey shame about now. But at the time it sounded really interesting. Um so I went into the university and studied communications but partway through my program, I did a certificate in innovative leadership from SFU, Simon Fraser University, and it was an eight-month program where the first four months we did workshops, and the last four months we got to do like a practical project with a local company. And the company that I happened to work with was a leadership development company. And at the end of this project, which was, funnily enough, all about looking at how people within the organization viewed their leadership skills, as opposed to people who are like several levels away from them. How did those people view their executives leadership skills. At the end of the project, the person I’d been working with at this company said, “Oh I noticed you like — maybe had some graphic skills. You know we really need a graphic designer.” And I’m like, “Well, I’m like — I’m taking my first course in design right now.” “Well, that’s great! That’s more knowledge than we have!” And so they hired me and I started off just like making PowerPoints and doing a lot of things in print, working within business development and supporting people people in sales. Packing suitcases. I did a lot of packing suitcases. But along the way I learned a lot about like leadership and leadership models and um when we talk about adult learning, that realm is something that I gained a lot of experience with over six years. And so at the same time I was still in school, had abandoned communications, and had — was fully in design now, and then I went away on an amazing field school and came back and was pregnant! So I took a year off. And I will say this is like — this is an important part of my professional journey, this is an important part of my growth and journey as a person, because having my son changed everything. I’ve always been someone that was really into research. So the moment I got into something, or the moment I found out about something new, I’d like totally geek out and go read every book, watch every movie and documentary, and talk to every person I could find about the thing. Uh I get really excited about new hobbies and interests. So I got really excited about being pregnant, and about birth, and about breastfeeding, um and about being a parent. And when that happened, I began to see the ways in which I had to make really, really clear decisions. So the same way in marketing or in design, you have to have a reason as to why you’re doing something for a certain desired outcome, I knew that I wanted my son, I wanted my child to be happy, and I knew that I wanted him to be really kind, and I knew that I wanted him to be really safe. Like I wanted him to live. Right? Like that’s all I really wanted and I knew that I had to make decisions to support that. And so that was like — we raised him vegan for the first like year because we felt it was important for him to have the choice, right? It was important for him to know that you don’t have to eat animals but you can and that’s your choice. But do you know what you are doing if you are going to that? So he still doesn’t really eat animals. But that’s still something that applied to me in my life. I began to think about like what am I doing? Is this who I want to be? Is this how — what powers do I have as an individual to like make all those things happen for him? And it made me really political. Like all of a sudden, things that I have always had values about like really mattered because I’d made an investment in the future by having him, and I needed to invest in the future. And then I got laid off from my job. The job that I’d had for six years. I was a marketing assistant or a project assistant but I was never actually a designer. And I was feeling a lot of doubt about this and I have a mentor at school, Russell Taylor, who is kind of the father to like so many of us in this design program. And I reached out to him and I said, “Well, I got laid off. I really love design but I have no design skills. I didn’t finish my degree.” And he goes, “Well come back and teach for me. Um like you know this stuff. You’ve taken this course and I like — I feel confident that you’re going to do a good job in this.” And so he brought me back and had me teaching his second year course with him. And then at the same time he was developing a conference that was in its second year. And at this conference, he brought in agencies and different companies to like do talks but also to do interviews. And while I was teaching, I also applied for an interview at this conference, and I came out of the conference and I was offered — I was offered some jobs! My first job in which I would get to call myself a designer. And so, Sara, this is where it kind of comes back around to you because this job was the first job that I gone in to do the interview and really felt like, “This is who I am. And like I don’t know these things. This is what I’m working on. Um please see some potential in me!” Like, “Please take some faith in me because I think I can do this.” Uh and I felt really good about some of the things that I felt were just really natural and inherent to me. And they absolutely said, “Yeah!” Like, “We think you can do this. We think that you can kick it out of the park. I feel confident putting you in front of like our — any client, right from the getgo.” And this was my manager, Robin Ashmore, and so it was the first job where I’m like, “Oh. Ok. Like I can admit that I don’t really know this but I can learn this and I can develop in these areas where I think I’m good.” And part of how he supported me was allowing me to go to that conference DCC, Design & Content, which is how I met Sara! And at this time though I was beginning to get really bitter, um I was beginning to look around and see that we, as designers, have all this potential to build things that really make a difference in the world and really help people, and yet we’re like focused on how to get snacks. Or we’re building technology that is actually enabling violence against marginalized people. So I — even now I tell people that I feel shame around calling myself a designer because as a whole, this industry is causing so much more problems than it is helping and I think so many of us have this power and opportunity to actually do something about it, and we’re afraid to. And we don’t. For whatever reasons. And some people have more ability to do something about it then others and I really do mean this in like ability, privilege, some people have more privilege in order to make change happen. Um but I went to this conference, I went to DCC, I met Sara. I’m like, “Oh!! There’s designers who really do see the same things I see! Who really are concerned about the same things that I’m concerned about.” And there are people who, like you, Sara, who want better things out of tech, who want designers to do better things — the tech industry to do better things. And so I began to look for places in which I could try to do better things and I could try to learn on how to be a better designer. This is where I’m at right now. Like I’m still working on that. I’m still trying to influence and like bring kindness into the world, bring safety into places where I think people need someone to invite them in or to support them while they’re there. So yeah that’s where I am right now. [35:25] SWB Well, I am so proud and kind of tearing up a little bit to think that I played even just like a tiny, tiny, little role in your story— STAN Big role! SWB —oh gosh! Ok, ok I wouldn’t — I wouldn’t oversell that. I really think like, you know, your work and your what you are bringing to your community is— is big and different than anything that I do. So I definitely don’t want to oversell what I might’ve played a role in. Something that I’m really interested in hearing more about that you mentioned a little bit ago is the work that you’re doing with Out in Schools. So can you tell us a little bit about that organization and how you got involved with them? STAN Yeah, oh. So I guess one of the key parts of the story that was a huge pivot point in my life, that happened shortly before I met Sara, is that I realized that I was queer. And I like to say that I “realized” because it was something that kind of — it’s always been a part of me. It’s who I am. I am a queer person. But I didn’t have the words for it and I didn’t know that’s what other people were calling it and when this happened, I was 27, I had already had my son, Noah, and I had a cis male partner. And realizing I was queer, finding queer community, making queer friends, really like embracing and exploring what that could mean for me was like so amazing! It sounds so cheesy, but I really did feel like I was born again. And I was also really disappointed and sometimes embarrassed to admit that I was 27. And I think about how I grew up with very conservative parents. I think they’re a little bit more liberal now than they used to be but they are conservative, they’re still very Catholic. I grew up in a very Catholic cishet family. And I was also really protected, care for, loved, I still am. And for them, that meant sheltering me from just sexuality in general. And so that included putting me in an all-girls private school um great school, I mean great academics but it was also an all girls Catholic private school. So we didn’t get sex-ed. And when I was 27, I realized that I was queer and I was so happy about it because I think like being queer is so liberating, and so fun. I really wanted to make it happen — or contribute to a culture where queerness is normalized. And so I found the Queer Film Festival, I met some people there, including some facilitators from Out in Schools, and they became my friends. Jen Sung, in particular, reached out and was like, “Hey! You kind of said that you would love to do this. Were you serious?” And I said, “Yes!” And she goes, “Well! We’re hiring! You should submit an application!” And I submitted an application and became an Out in Schools facilitator. So we’re led by Gavin Somers and Brandon Yan, and we go around to high schools, and elementary schools, and we talk to young people about queer and trans issues using media, like using film. So we watch movies with them, we watch music videos with them and we lead discussions. And it’s interesting in the ways in which like that also ties back into the skill I have around facilitation because that’s part of what I do in my job as a designer. So I get to practice, like, being in front of people, and presenting, and engaging with audiences. Like, in everything that I do, in many places in my life. [39:24] SWB That’s such a cool additional piece to your professional profile that I didn’t know about until — you know just now, right? Like you being involved with Out in Schools seems like, in some ways, you know, really different from doing the design work, but it feels very natural, the way that you talk about it all together. STAN Thanks. It feels really natural to me. SWB I’m also curious, you know, you mentioned coming out as queer at 27 and sort of realizing to yourself that that was even the case and I know that in that same time period you also started going by different pronouns, and coming out as non-binary, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what that was like? And especially what was that like, you know, in the context of work where that seems like maybe it could be a challenging thing to do. STAN Well, what had happened was that you did this amazing talk and you were really vulnerable and real and talked about how important it was to like create spaces and technologies that allowed and encouraged people to be who they are uh rather than try to force them to fit in any particular box. And I came up to you and I was in tears, I remember this, because I had this name tag and the name tag actually had my name, like “Stevie” was on it, but Stevie’s like — is not my given name. And I was expressing to you, like, “Oh my god, how amazing is it that, yeah the Eventbrite form for the conference was like, shout out to Steve Fisher and Shannon Fisher for recognizing the significance and importance of this. But the conference signup form allowed me to input my name. Like it didn’t ask me for a piece of ID to like prove that that was my name.” And I’m like tearing up now, thinking about it, but yeah that’s like it was the first piece of paper that I wore around my neck that allowed me to identify myself and identify myself to other people as Stevie. And it was in a professional context. And then all the speakers, everybody that I met that weekend like called me Stevie. Like everybody that knows me from that time onwards, calls me Stevie and so it felt so good. I came back and I didn’t immediately do it but from then on, anytime I introduced myself to somebody I was like, “No, Stevie.” Like I’d been doing this previously, as a nickname to personal friends but not professional contacts. And being at Design and Content, meeting people who would use my name eventually I think, a couple weeks later, gave me the confidence to actually casually, jokingly at work say, “Actually! Like all my friends call me Stevie.” And so my co-workers were like, “Do you want us to call you Stevie?” And I’m like, “Yes!!!” And I had another amazing colleague, like Jason Landry, he reached out to me privately on Slack and said, “Hey, I know that you’re going by Stevie.” And like, “Awesome! Stevie’s a great name. I just wanted to check in. Like have your pronouns changed? Like what pronouns would you like me to refer to you as?” So at the time I said, “Oh um like no, like, she/her is fine.” And she/her is great. I just don’t use she/her anymore. Like they/them is super comfortable to me. Like it makes me feel really good. And so I use they/them and eventually like it was people in my team making me feel like welcome. And doing that work of like welcoming me as opposed to me having to step out and be vulnerable is what allowed me to come to work and tell people, “My name is Stevie.” And now like over time I’ve built enough confidence to include it in my email signature. If I meet someone new, I always say, “Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen. My pronouns: they/them/theirs.” So I try to assert myself and I know that from what we tell young people in schools, every time that I do that, I can help somebody else feel more comfortable sharing their pronouns. And as a practice of allyship, that’s the best thing folks can do is share their pronouns. SWB I love that story so much and I’m so thankful that you had a colleague who reached out to you sort of made it ok for you to say like, “Yeah, actually I prefer to go by different pronouns.” Was that a scary conversation to start to have? Like the first few times you were doing that in these professional settings? STAN Mm hmm yeah. And I mean, let’s be honest, my team, most of the people on my team are great. They use they/them pronouns. Some people still make mistakes. I think it’s interesting the way in which every time someone new comes onto the team, if I don’t already know them, I have to find a time or an opportunity to, hopefully, quickly get in there and let them know that my pronouns are they/them/theirs before they hear maybe the wrong pronoun from somebody else, or make an assumption, and then I eventually have to awkwardly correct them. But yeah it was initially really hard because I didn’t even understand the — like once I understood how it felt empowering to me, it was hard because there was always a lot of explaining. People like need explanations or they look at me, you know, like, “Wait. What does that mean?” And they like — I think — I think people look at me and they’re like, “Wait. What does that mean for your body parts?” SWB Which um is — has nothing to do with it at all. STAN Exactly. But— SWB It is not an appropriate question for work — like pretty much ever. STAN Well it’s just like — I don’t think it needs to be even verbally said sometimes, it’s just like people stop and look like the same way. Some folks know — like particularly feminine-presenting folks knows what it looks when someone looks at you and looks you up and down [mm hmm]. I think like queer and trans and non-binary folks, we know what it looks like when you look at us and you’re like, “Mmm,” like, “What’s under your clothes and how do you have sex?” [44:55] SWB Which I, you know, I understand that it’s kind of uncomfortable for people when they are first presented with pronoun and gender stuff that they’ve not encountered before and that they don’t understand, and um and then even still, you know, I mean I think I, for example, like I have several friends who would identify as non-binary or who identify as, let’s say they’re trans, and I have tried to unlearn some of that like default gender binary language and it’s hard. And I screw it up. And I screw it up oftentimes when I have, you know it’s like something gets coded in my brain early on, whether it’s an assumption, or whether it’s something where, you know, I have a friend who I met when they presented as male and they, at some point, came out as trans. And they’re a woman. And I sometimes still have like that little mental like kind of hiccup right? That like is about the history that I have with them, and sort of having to shift my thinking, I mean that just is what it is but that that’s up to me, right? Like it’s my job. It’s my job to figure that out. It’s not their job to figure that out. And if I feel weird or if I have to like go through an extra like you know mental circuit in order to make sense of it and make sure that I’m doing it correctly, like, that’s work that is on me to do. And that the more I do that kind of work, the easier it becomes. And that’s kind of like the way that I’ve tried to deal with it but I think it’s — I think it’s something that seeing people like you who are willing to be vulnerable and to say, “Hey, this is who I am.” And to know that you might get reactions that aren’t positive and that aren’t good. I think that that’s — it’s such a gift, I think, to the rest of us, in terms of opening our minds and helping us get to a more inclusive place. KL I also just want to say that— that you said something, you said the words, “practice of allyship,” and I wrote that — I just wrote that down because I like that so much and I feel like if we can just share that as much as possible, that is — that is such a gem of a thing to think about. STAN Let me — let me credit that Mariame Kaba who is @prisonculture on Twitter because I heard Mariame — actually I may be pronouncing this wrong: M-A-R-I-A-M-E. I heard her speak on a webinar, which is run by Talila Lewis, TL Lewis, who does not use any pronouns, and this is what they — the whole discussion was about, was about the practice of allyship. That no one gets to say like, “I am an ally! So I am done!” Like it’s not about what this identity, it’s about how do you continue to practice allyship. KL Exactly. It’s like — it really, truly is a practice. It’s like all things that you, you know, I’m — at least I know for myself that I want to get good at, you know, between yoga, and just being a, you know, a better friend and publisher and coworker. It’s— it really, truly takes practice. And you have to be — you have to be aware of that. STAN Yeah, and it takes like that, like what you talked about earlier, Sara, that constant, the constant practice and I think when we’re in community with other people, we’re all practicing our allyship to marginalized people, and marginalized communities, there has to be a practice of forgiveness as well. Like grace, for us as individuals, and the practice of forgiveness for each other. Like I wouldn’t know anything I know if somebody didn’t tell me I was wrong if somebody didn’t like — wouldn’t forgive me, and like didn’t cast me out of their life because I made a mistake, but it also has to come from a place of like being willing to sit around and like shut up sometimes. SWB So as somebody who has gotten more comfortable bringing your whole identity to work, and who has kind of gone through some of those scary parts, what would you tell someone or what advice would you have for somebody who is thinking about some of the same things, about being able to be more of their authentic selves in their professional environments and being able to kind of fuse maybe some of the stuff that they’ve kept personal or private with the way that they present professionally. [49:40] STAN Hmm. What would I tell someone? I think the first thing I would want to make sure is that person feels safe. And I know this word like “safe” or “safety” gets thrown around a lot. But, quite honestly, what are your risks and dangers? And what violence may you face if you fully — if you bring yourself fully? And this is me speaking from a position of privilege of where I am able to bring myself to work, where every part of me is at least, at the very least, recognized and acknowledged. And then I would say: surround yourself in community and with allies to support you through it. I don’t think I could do it if I didn’t think — like I don’t think I could show up, assert my name, assert my pronouns, talk about my politics, if I thought that I would be attacked in any way, or punished in any way. And so that — that’s sort of required first. Make sure you’re safe and make sure you have support. And then, like show up and be real. This — it’s, again, cheesy sayings but I was tweeting, I tweeted about it this morning. But this idea of like nobody — I don’t know anything other than my own experience and I have so little that I know, but all I know is like myself. And so if I show up at work as myself, then I’m in a state of being in my greatest power. And I think if you can find a workplace where they want you to be there in your greatest power, then like, yeah, show up. This is how you do it. KL I love that. STAN Does that help? SWB That’s so great. That is so great. Yeah. So, very last question then is you mentioned safety and the importance for people who are going to do something vulnerable, whether that’s you know coming out at work or anything else, to feel like they have some sense of safety. So what can listeners do who feel like they can — they have some power in their workplace or in the organizations they’re part of, to help foster that safety for people. Like what are some of the ways that we can ensure that more of the people that we work with feel safe around us? STAN Well I think for people of marginalized identities, yeah, showing up so that you can be that example, so that you can be another person who like makes someone feel safe because you see someone who’s similar to you. That’s one way. But if you aren’t, like if you are someone who is in a position of privilege and power, gosh, like: not punishing people. How do you make — how do you make that space? Inviting it? Educating yourself? Like and making it — like I’ll bring it back to the beginning: like making it personal. I think if you genuinely care about the people in your company, then these are things worth learning about and these are things worth like not just acknowledging and recognizing and forgiving, for some reason, like if you think it’s wrong and you “forgive” them for this thing. Like get past that point where you can love them for that. [55:08] STAN I think that’s it. FYOTWSWB I have a pretty important Fuck Yeah tonight. It’s the Fuck Yeah to the um real champagne that Katel brought over today. KL Uh we have to take this moment to say a little “Fuck yeah” to ourselves because we made it onto the New and Noteworthy in Apple Podcasts and I’m really excited because we are a little, indie podcast that we started because we just really wanted to talk to each other and see where this went and, I’m psyched. SWB We started talking a while back about how much we were really hoping we could get onto the New and Noteworthy list because it’s a really good way to get new audience, and have people kind of be aware of you, plus it just feels good to know that what you’re doing is working. And, when I started looking at the other shows that were on there, almost all of them were supported by a bigger brand. It was like a podcast coming from Gimlet, or a podcast coming from Slate, or some other organization that was backing them and funding them, and so it’s a kind of a big deal to have a podcast like this that’s completely independently run be able to make it onto that list. Or at least, it feels like a big deal to me. JL Fuck yeah! It’s a big deal! KL Feels like a huge deal. SWB And I was also thinking about how much of a big deal to see a podcast ran by women, and more podcast run by women coming out because I feel like for a long time, there were just so few. I remember seeing a stat the other day that was like something like 70 percent of podcasts are run by men. And I don’t know if that’s true. Like it wasn’t the kind of stat that I felt like I could easily back up. But it is something that’s talked about quite a lot in the industry is just how male-dominated podcasting is. And how almost all of the biggest name podcasts are run by men. And, you know, there’s some really great podcasts run by men. It’s not like there aren’t but like man, there are so many interesting women doing interesting things. And I would love to hear from more of them. And, like, that’s what we’re doing. JL Yeah! I mean, also, fuck yeah women’s history month! And with that in mind I just started looking — I went a little Google-wild again and I just started looking at all these like, you know there’s all these lists, it’s the internet; of course there’s lists. But I just started looking into more like women-run podcasts and I just started going through them all — and I just — I have so many queued up right now. I’m so excited to listen to them all because I feel like, again, the more we support each other as women podcasters, the more that we get our — like we share our message! And we keep listening to each other and raising each other up! So it’s been so fun to try to listen to some of these other podcasts also. Katel, I know that you have been like super into one recently. KL Yeah, I gotta be honest: I’m actively looking for more podcasts that are just basically more diverse voices. And one that I really like lately is by a music artist that I just really love, her name is Lizzo. And if you don’t know her, just Spotify that shit immediately because it will make you feel good and it’s totally worth it. But she has a new podcast, that I think launched like right around the same time ours did, which is so cool, and it’s on Spotify. She describes it as, “A safe space for the baddest women in music.” She’s an alternative rapper, she sits down with iconic queens and rising stars and basically sets the record straight on making a name in a very male-dominated world in music. So I just love that. I love her. I’m so happy that I get to hear her not only sing but also talk and talk with other women. JL What’s the podcast called? KL Sorry, I should’ve said that! It’s called Good As Hell which is also just a really fucking good name. And yeah it’s really inspiring and you should take a listen. JL Maybe we could do a crossover episode: No, You Good. KL That would be amazing! SWB I love this whole concept because it feels like a sister podcast to No, You Go. Because I think that that’s really like — similar stuff we’re trying to do. Obviously we don’t have as many connections in music but if any, like, musical stars want to be on our show, that’s great. JL Kesha! [Ahem.] SWB Kesha is definitely like Jen’s number one dream guest. She’s literally on a spreadsheet right now. But I think that — that’s a lot of the same stuff that we’re trying to talk about, right? It’s like who are the most badass women and non-binary people we have encountered in our professional lives who are doing great things and who have something to say to the world? And how can we talk about ways to elevate their voices and make spaces that are more inclusive? So fuck yeah to women-run podcasts. JL Fuck yeah! KL Fuck yeah on New and Noteworthy. [59:59] 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 Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing on our podcast, we would love it if you subscribed and rated us on Apple Podcast where we’ve been New and Noteworthy! And fuck yeah! New and Noteworthy! Deserved! Your support really helps us spread the word. We’ll be back next week with another great guest. | |||
| 20 Mar 2018 | All In with Leah Culver | 00:59:21 | |
We made it to Episode 10, y’all! That’s a wrap on Season 1!Who better to close out our first season than an engineer, entrepreneur, and general superstar we’ve loved for, like, a full decade? Yep, our guest today is Leah Culver, the co-founder and CTO of Breaker, a social podcast app that we’ve all just started using (if you have an iPhone, check it out. Android is coming soon). > I can only do the things I can do. I can keep trying to get better, but I can’t beat myself up about not being like someone else. I just have to sort of be myself and work with what I have and take it to that—that next step. But Breaker’s not the first startup Leah’s co-founded—in fact, Jenn fell hard for her very first company, Pownce, a microblogging platform that launched way back in 2007. We talk about that journey, plus:
Also on the agenda: letting people carry things for you (literally and figuratively), peeing with your therapist (no, really), and all the “tiny revelations” we’ve had this season. Thanks so much for joining us for Season 1! We’re taking a couple weeks off, but we’ll be back strong with Season 2 starting April 17. In the meantime, make sure to sign up for the new NYG Newsletter, coming April 20. SponsorsThis 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. _
_ TranscriptKatel LeDû Shopify is on a mission to make commerce better for everyone. In fact, they’re the leading global commerce for entrepreneurs. And did you know that they’re hiring? That’s right! And they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply to you. Join a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team where you’ll get shit done. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. 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. JL Hey! It’s Season 1 finale time! How did we make it through 10 episodes? Well it certainly helps to be working on something that we all love. That concept’s no stranger to our guest today, founder Leah Culver, currently CTO of Breaker, a social podcast app. We’ll also talk about tech today versus 10 years ago, using an accelerator application to let you know if you’re ready to leave your job for your startup idea, and the importance and difficulties of self-evaluation. Dun dun dun. But first! How about we check in with ourselves? How y’all doin’, ladies? KL Doing alright. Doing good. How about you? JL I’m—do you ever feel like sometimes you just sigh? But you know what? I read a study one time that sighing is actually healthy for you, so that’s ok. I’m doing ok. I’m doing ok. SWB It was funny, my husband was just telling me that his barber that you shouldn’t sigh because a monk told her not to once. And so I think about that sometimes when I let out a big sigh but I’ve been sighing a lot recently. Like, in fact, kind of a bummer couple of weeks, you know? I uh I tore my ACL which is a little unpleasant. And Jenn and Katel know this because they’re constantly offering to like carry things for me up the stairs such as like glasses of wine, my laptop— JL But we only barely know this because Sara would try as much as she can to hide this fact from most of us. You could barely tell based on your attitude and uh go—go-get-em-ness. KL Yeah and in fact I think we ran on your bad ACL a couple times. So. SWB Actually, they think my ACL has been torn for 14 months and I didn’t know it until I uh twisted something and actually injured myself because the ACL was unstable. And so it’s probably a little bit more torn now. And you know, it really took me out there for a couple of days and then for the past couple of weeks I’ve just been adjusting to what’s essentially like a long-term pre-op lifestyle. Like I have to get surgery. It’s probably not going to happen until September because of a lot of other stuff going on in the meantime—and so I’m at this place where it’s like I’m ok but I can’t do certain things. And some of those are things that are—are really bumming me out. Like I can’t run. And that is a major way that I organize my weeks and think about my time and so I’m kind of adjusting to a lifestyle where I—you know, have to be very careful about certain stuff and I have to wear a brace when I’m out walking for any length of time or trying to do anything physical. And I have to just kind of accept a slower pace, like literally a slower pace! [Mm hmm] And the kinds of stuff that I thought I could do really quickly like, “Oh I’m just going to pop downstairs in between these conference and grab something to drink,” is no longer so quick feeling. And like that is very difficult for me. And I’ve been thinking about like, “Damn. This is going to make me learn some lessons, huh?” Like not just the lessons of, you know, like trying not to injure yourself but the lessons of like, “It’s ok to move more slowly,” and like, “It’s ok to have people help you.” I don’t want to. I don’t want to learn any of those lessons! I’m sorry I don’t want to, I’m sorry I don’t want to learn them at all. They just suck! JL It’s hard, you know, we’ve talked about this on the show before but asking for help is—is really difficult. And even, you know, just something like, “Hey, could you carry this for me?” A few days before I found out I was pregnant, I was in a bike accident and broke my elbow and my ribs, and uh so I had broken ribs, broken elbow, pregnant, and I had to be like, “Hey, can you carry my laptop?” Like everywhere I went because I couldn’t pick up anything. And it was really difficult but I mean I was at the point where, you know, Sutter had to wash my hair because both my elbows… and so I mean you know it’s like—I had not choice but to ask for help. You know, there’s a lot of things as like, you know, generally able-bodied women that, you know, you—you don’t think about. And, you know, you go through life, you’re going, ok, you know, “I’m brushing I’m teeth. I’m able to brush my teeth.” And then all of a sudden you can’t. And it’s so hard! I’ve read a lot about how people with disabilities live their day-to-day lives and go through routines of things that, often, you know, we don’t think about. And when you’re faced with a temporary physical state in which, you know, you can’t do things as fast as you want to. You know, all of a sudden, your world is sort of like turned upside down. You can’t really figure out what’s what and how to get through your day. [5:07] SWB And I feel like, you know, and I mean it’s also, change is just hard for anybody. And I think that what you realize is both how badass people are who, like, figure out how to get through stuff that’s really hard, whether it’s physical or otherwise, and then you also think about how adaptable, in a lot of ways, people are. Right? Like you really can adapt to a lot that you didn’t necessarily realize you could adapt to. And, you know, something that—that I’ve also really been thinking a ton about is the way that—we have talked about sort of like the highs and lows or the peaks and valleys of work and of life, but like, that often that those things are happening at the same time. Like this has been a really good year so far in some ways, for me at least. Where it’s like I’ve got this fucking podcast and it’s going really well and I’m excited about a lot of the stuff that I’m working on and—and at the same time, like not only did I tear my ACL, like I had a pet die earlier this year and it was really hard. Like it was crushingly difficult for me, and I wanted to talk about it on the show, but it was like such a tremendous fresh wound, I couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t do it in any way where I could like get through it and out the other end into something anybody would want to listen to. I mean, 45 minutes of ugly crying is fun, I guess, for some people, but like I didn’t—I didn’t want to subject people to that, especially not, like, Episode 2. KL I think it’s really helpful to hear both of you talk about just kind of figuring out how you’re going to move around these things that, you know, become a challenge, right? Or just completely throw you off the way that you think you’re going to get through a day. And I feel like, I mean I’ve struggled with depression my entire life and, I think, over the last year I’ve gone through sort of peaks and valleys, just in that alone, you know? Along with sort of day to day life stuff. And sometimes I—I worry because I feel like not being able to cope, let’s say, on a certain day because of, you know, something that is—just isn’t working right in my brain chemistry or I, you know, just haven’t been able to—to rally around the thing I’m supposed to do that day, is—is really difficult to kind of put a structure around that and to say, “I just need some help today,” or, “I just need to like find a different way to do this because it’s so intangible.” JL And—and it’s interesting like when you hear, you know, “I just need some help today.” Or like Sara, you know, there’s times where like the few times you’ve let us help you carry [chuckling] things up the stairs, on my end, like, it feels good to help. Like [KL absolutely] I want to help. And I think that’s the thing that we sort of have to think of, like the times that I mean you both have helped me on countless situations, I mean like … it feels good to help your friends and, I think, sometimes that makes it easier for me to ask for help [KL definitely]. So think about the fact that like we want to be there and support each other. KL Yeah. And I think that is—that is ultimately—that is the absolute silver lining because I think about everything we’ve just been talking about and the fact that like, Jenn, when you were, you know, saying we want to help Sara carry stuff up the stairs. I’m like, “Oh my gosh! This is all I want to do!” Right? I’m like, “If she needs help doing stuff because she tore her ACL,” I’m like, “You better tell me when you need something because I’ll be at your house the next day.” And I think that we all feel that way. And we all have a lot more people in our lives that—that are willing to do that than we think. And we just have to accept that and ask, you know? JL And I think even like, you know, there’s big things like I—I couldn’t type for a little bit so I had people that would have to like dictate for if we were trying to get stuff done. SWB Would people dictate—like you would dictate code to people?! JL It was like the most intense pair programming. KL You’re like, “Div—no, div!” JL So I mean, you know, but there were small things too like I would be really thirsty and I couldn’t carry like a container of water and like my coworker was like, “Let me get that water for you,” you know? It wasn’t like I was like, “Buy me water!” I just needed someone to just— KL “Just, like, hand it to me!” JL —carry it. KL It’s silly the things that we, you know, don’t think about asking for help or think are too small or whatever. I mean just today, this morning, I was uh at therapy and I was sitting there and I had been thinking for the last five minutes how badly I had to pee and I had the thought, “You can just get through it for the next half hour, it’ll be fine. Like, don’t bother anyone.” JL Half an hour!!! KL I know! And then I was like, “No, I can’t—I can’t even concentrate like this is—this is so dumb. I’m like—I’m not going to get out what I need to get out of the session just because I have to pee.” So I finally, said, “I’m so sorry, I just—I really have to pee all of a sudden. You know, do you mind if I just go?” And she was like, “Oh yeah, you know, of course!” And she kind of paused and she’s like, “Do you mind if I go with you?” And I was like, “Of—of course. Sure!” And she was like, “I’m so sorry. I really have to pee too.” And we just both felt so overwhelmingly like, you know, embarrassed but also relieved and so we did and we moved on and it was great. We both like came back to the session. We were like, “Ahhh!” [10:30] SWB I mean it’s funny though because it’s like there’s little things and that’s—I mean I feel like that could be a metaphor for a lot of parts of life where these little things that sometimes you deny yourself because you’re worried that, I don’t know, you’ll make somebody else like think something weird about you or that somehow it’s more important that you pretend like you’re this perfect … stoic, non-peeing person. I don’t know what that means but— KL Or that you—right, that you can just do everything and carry everything and— SWB Right and like that you never have to make space for your own needs, right? That you can always sandwich your needs into like some other time nobody cares about and that whenever you have to like be like, “Actually, I’m going to raise my hand and say, ‘I need a thing right now,’” that’s uncomfortable and, I don’t know, like uh I think that you should be able to pee when you want to. JL I used to feel that way a lot, too, about like personal things. I would be like, “Well,” I think it’s because I was—I was an on-site consultant for so long that I had to keep my personal stuff a little bit away and now I’m full-time at Urban and I think one of the things is I still felt like, “Oh I can’t tell you what’s going on.” And last week, my son had to have surgery for um—it’s a common surgery, it’s ear tubes, but, you know, he’s a year and it’s anesthesia and there’s a lot of risks and it was scary. And normally I would never tell the to anyone. I would keep that inside, and keep that anxiety and nerves, and like to myself and then I—I’ve been trying something new recently which is where I tell people these things when I’m thinking like, “What’s going on?” And so you know, I’d just be like, “Oh I won’t be here on Friday.” I would just leave it at that. And now I’m like, “My son’s having surgery.” And like not because like I want people’s pity, or I want them—and I think that’s sort of why I never really said anything because it’s like, “Oh, you know, feel bad and worry for me!” It was like, “No, I just want you to know what’s going on in my life because, you know, I’m not going to be able to answer emails because my mind is someplace else right now.” KL Right. And you care deeply about this thing that’s happening and the people you’re telling probably do too because they care about you. SWB And also like you’re a person working with other people. And I think—I think there’s a lot about work culture that encourages us to not come to work as humans and to come to work as workers. And I’ve realized that that doesn’t serve anybody very well. And like I’m still a person when I’m working and—and I even like I’m a consultant still and I—I find myself being much more kind of open about who I am and things I care about. Obviously, you know, you put boundaries around stuff, for sure, but I, you know, like I was talking to a client today about like, “Yup, ACL is torn!” And I was describing like, you know, “I’m really bummed about not being able to run. But, you know, here we are.” And—and then, you know, this client started talking to me about how they just had MRI as well, they have a different knee problem, and it’s like—it’s kind of nice to—you know, you don’t want to necessarily say everything about everything but to be able to bring more of yourself to work. I mean we talked to Stevie last week, I think that was one of the things that they really were communicating was like how wonderful it is when you find a place that wants you to bring more of yourself to work. And that recognizes that there is value in being a human at work. And I think it is valuable to think about like, “Yeah, real people have kids who have to go through surgery like all the time. It happens to people.” And it’s ok. And you’re still awesome at your job. [14:00] JL So I’m really glad you said that about how our workplace, you know, isn’t just about us being workers, it’s about us being people. And I think that our guest today has a lot of great things to say about that. Not just as being the founder of a company like Breaker and a CTO but also as someone who hires for the company and has interviewed at a lot of places, and has had a lot of thoughts about what it’s like to find a good culture fit, and being comfortable at where you work. So I’m really excited to get to our interview with Leah. [Music fades in.] SponsorsJL Today’s show is brought to you by CodePen, a social development environment for frontend designers and developers. Ever want a place to share code with co-workers? Maybe even a potential employer? Your profile on CodePen is like your front end development portfolio. And if you love it like I do, be sure to check out CodePen Pro. 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Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyyougo for 15 percent off your brand-new website. Interview: Leah CulverJL I first became familiar with Leah Culver around 10 years ago when she brilliantly financed her new MacBook by selling ad space laser etched on it. I then became a super fan when she co-founded the social media site Pownce. Those who knew me then know how much I loved the micro-blogging platform and one thing I thought was so, so cool about it was that one of the founders was a woman and she was an engineer. As a developer, it was inspiring to see the awesome projects Leah was creating. Since then, she’s authored the OAuth and OEmbed API specifications and has gone onto found Convor and Grove, real time chat programs, and is now the CTO of Breaker, a social app for listening to podcasts. I’m thrilled to have her here to talk with us today. Welcome to the show, Leah. Leah Culver Hi! Thank you so much for having me, Jenn. JL Yeah, as I mentioned, it’s like such an honor for us to have you here. I’m a big fan of the work that you’ve done so far which, speaking of, I’d love if you tell us a little bit about Breaker, how it came to be, and what makes it so awesome. LC Sure! And I’m actually a fan of yours too. So this is—this is a pretty fun interview to do. JL Ah thanks! Podcast high five! LC Awesome! The idea behind Breaker was really—I started to get into podcasting a couple years ago um when Serial came out. I don’t know if you guys all listened to Serial. JL Yup, definitely. LC The biggest podcast to ever come out, right? As basically the “hit show” of podcasting. But I hadn’t really been into podcasts before that. I had maybe listened to an episode or two on my computer when someone sent me something. But it wasn’t like I was a regular podcast listener. But I started listening to Serial and I was run—I was training for a marathon at the same time. So, I would listen to episodes when I was training, and I wouldn’t let myself listen to any episodes when I wasn’t running, so it like actually kind of motivated me to get my butt out the door. JL That’s awesome. LC —and do my running. Yeah. So it was great but then when the season ended, I didn’t really know what else to listen to. Or I wanted to listen to other things that were like Serial. Like high-quality podcasts as opposed to, you know, two people chatting and the audio quality being bad and things like that. I was like, “Where can I find really great podcasts?” So I tried like the Apple charts. So I was using the Apple Podcast app on my phone. And I tried looking at the charts, and I didn’t have a ton of success because I didn’t really know how—like I knew that someone picked these shows and these episodes but I didn’t really know how. You know? Like what they caught their eye and like what about them was good. JL Yeah. LC So that’s how I kind of got the idea behind like, “Hey, there could be something better here.” Like I wanted a player where I could also see like—like similar to like Spotify or YouTube. Like how many people are liking this thing? What are the comments on it? You know sort of what’s going on around this content. And that was the idea behind Breaker. JL I love that you found an interest in something and were like, “Well, there’s a gap, there’s something missing that I want.” And instead of just being like, “Well, this sucks. This doesn’t exist,” you created it. LC Yeah! I think that’s the power of being a developer, a designer, or someone that makes things is when you find something in a space that you’re like, “Hey, this thing should exist,” and then the next thought might be like, “Oh. I can make that exist.” JL That’s so cool. So how has it been like has the shift in focusing on podcasting, are you now finding yourself completely involved, not just in running the company of Breaker, but like the podcasting culture? LC Yeah, it’s —it’s been super weird. I’m trying to keep like my Twitter feed non-podcast people so I have like a good sense of how popular podcasting is and it seems like it’s on the rise, even amongst people who haven’t been in the industry a long time, but it’s also getting into that podcasting use has been really interesting. It’s a really old medium, right? Like podcasting has been around since there was—probably like forever, if you think radio. But sort of in its current incarnation of like mobile devices and sort of since the iPod, 2006. But I think it was so difficult then to sort of have like a podcast app or to make it easy to listen, like you had to like download files on your phone and things—that really there was this big opportunity to make things better and I don’t think it’s changed a ton since then. I mean only within probably the past year or two, maybe three years, had there been any new companies in the space. JL Yeah, speaking of the last few years, there’s been quite a few articles that have come out about the lack of diversity in podcasting. Have you found the numbers for women and other minorities in podcasts to be growing? [19:59] LC Yeah! Well, I hope so. I’m pretty optimistic about it. I do see a lot of podcasts and a lot of them still are, you know, two guys discussing a topic. And, actually, that’s my favorite search term to use to get like a lot of results is like podcasts called “Two Guys” dot, dot, dot. But you know I think there are many more women podcasters and I think there is a desire in our culture to hear from voices that aren’t, you know, straight white men, right? So I think there’s a desire for that content. And so I think those are actually like the hottest areas of podcasts to go into. And I wanted to bring it up just because it’s recent news: Edison published The Podcast Consumer 2017 and it’s about podcast listeners, specifically, not podcasters and, overall, the monthly podcast listening for men has not grown at all in—from 2017 to 2018 but podcast listening from women has gone from 21 percent to 24 percent of women listening to a podcast every month. So all of the recent growth in podcasting, you could say, has been attributed to women which I think is great. JL Wow. LC Yeah. JL Yeah that’s amazing. LC Yeah in terms of listenership and I think in terms of content production, we’re seeing the same thing as well. JL What do you hope to see happen in the podcasting industry over the next year or two years or five years? LC Yeah, I just want to see more good content, more great shows. I think it’s still really early days and so there’s a lot of opportunity to really build amazing quality content on a sort of new platform in a sense. And I don’t think that all the experimentation has been done yet, right? So there’s things like smart devices, for example, Gimlet which is a podcast producer, just came out with a new show for the Alexa. Like a show specifically made for that device [hmm] and it’s—the idea is like to get kids to brush their teeth. So it’s like a two-minute long podcast and you say, like, “Alexa, you know, play this podcast.” And it’s such a—I don’t have kids so I haven’t even tried it yet but it’s such like a interesting concept that, you know, we have these new devices that can do things with audio that we couldn’t do before. So I’m—I’m curious about that. I’m curious about audio in cars. Headphones. There’s a lot of stuff that’s going on in the technology space, in like the hardware space that makes podcasting really exciting. JL Yeah wow that is—that is so cool. My son’s one, so we are now brushing but eventually, I think that’s a brilliant idea. LC But yeah, yeah so there’s a lot of—I think there’s a lot of opportunity driven also by the hardware that’s—that’s coming up now and sort of how we’re thinking about our daily activities and how we interact with media. JL That’s so neat, I think a lot of times people get discouraged to try something new like a podcast or writing or anything because they think everything’s been before. So I love this idea of looking at it in a completely new way. LC Oh no. It’s still so early days for podcasting. You—I mean, I feel like back in the day it was like, “Let’s start a blog for this topic,” or, “You should start a Tumblr on this topic.” And now it’s like, “Oh you should do a podcast!” JL Yeah. I’d love to know your opinion is on like podcasting versus vlogging or any sort of video news. LC Uh so I’m actually not much of a video watcher myself. I always like to be doing things and be on the move. Like it’s hard for me to like focus on even watching like a TV show or a movie. Like I listen to podcasts when I’m doing something else, right? So I’ll be cleaning my house, or going for a run, or walking someplace. Like I don’t drive but I would listen—I do listen to podcasts when I do ride in the car which is very rarely. For me it’s about the ability to be like multitasking. So that’s why I’m a little I guess biased against vlogs or video podcasts is I just feel that they don’t feed the same need for me, personally. JL Yeah that makes sense. Yeah I listen to them sometimes when I’m in Lyfts, sometimes because I’m really into something, or sometimes just to avoid awkward driver conversation, but and then also, yeah, when I’m doing stuff around the house. So I’m totally with you on that. So with Breaker, you started that at Y Combinator, along with Convore, can you give our listeners an overview of Y Combinator and what that is and how it helped you get started? LC Sure! Uh so Breaker was my second time doing the Y Combinator program. They offer a three month program twice a year to entrepreneurs, you apply, and hopefully get accepted, and then get to go to Mountain View for three months, and work with the partners there who are a team of really, really smart people. And I was lucky enough to do it back in 2011, for my second startup, and then I purposely sort of applied again for my third startup because I thought it was such a good experience, I think all the partners are really smart, and it’s really nice to have a connection with a lot of founders. It really is like a good network. I think that’s the—the thing that’s most surprising after joining Y Combinator is how much of the value of the program is more from the network than anything else. JL What advice would you give to someone who is thinking about applying but unsure if they should, you know, go all in with their idea for a program like that? [24:48] LC So an interesting thing lately is Y Combinator has been a little more intern—they look for smart founders but they also kind of look for commitment to ideas. So I’d maybe wait til you were pretty sure that you wanted to do it as a startup. We were kind of at the point where we switching from Breaker being a side project and a hobby project, which we actually ran it as a hobby project for about nine months. And then switched over to being full-time just before we were accepted to Y Combinator, we kind of both quit our jobs. So, lucky we got in. But we probably would’ve done it anyways. And I think that’s sort of what they’re looking for is like, “Hey! It’s something I’m really excited about and committed to,” because if you end up doing a startup, you end up kind of doing it for life. But beyond that, it’s good to just fill out the application with yourself and your cofounders because there are a lot of questions in there, in the application itself, that are very clarifying. Like they ask, “What is your equity split?” And they ask things like, “Where will you live?” And then more complex questions like, “Who are your competitors?” And, “What are you afraid of?” And sort of really gets into all sorts of aspects of really early stage startups that are—you know it’s valuable to ask yourself those questions, even if you don’t end up submitting the application. I’d encourage anyone just to fill it out, submit the application, it never hurts, like nothing bad happens if—if it doesn’t get accepted. It doesn’t mean anything. There are so many great companies that are rejected from Y Combinator, because they get thousands of applicants, right? Like they can’t give every single great company—and oftentimes they’ll see a company apply in a year and not get accepted and then they’ll be accepted the next year or the next—in the next six months, you know? JL Yeah, I love that. I think that people are so scared of rejection sometimes that it’s really—it makes it hard to put yourself out there. LC Yeah, I agree and what’s funny is being on the other side of it. So running a startup now I’m hiring people and for me that’s weird because I’m like, “Oh! Sometimes the hiring decision—” that we’re like, “Oh! We’re not hiring right now.” Or, “Oh! You’re not right—quite the right fit.” Really has nothing to do with them as a person. It could just be like the stage our company is at or, you know, something totally out of their control that has nothing to do with the quality of their work. Or the quality of them as a person. So it’s like it’s been very comforting to me, knowing that—so the last time I applied for a job, I applied for 30 different jobs [oh wow!] which is a pretty—yeah it was actually great but I didn’t have that fear of rejection and I actually rejected companies. I actually went in—I actually walked out of two interviews. JL Yeah. Wow. Good for you! LC Because I just—I, you know, I did it because I wanted to save their engineers time. Like they were interviewing me and it was, you know, I didn’t want to waste their time if I didn’t think it was a good fit for me. And I think a lot of the times getting into the company, like visiting their space, having lunch with the team, things like that, really get you that really quick, “Hey, is this the right place for me?” And in this particular case—when I just remember I went in and talked to someone on their product team and I was like, “I just don’t really feel this product vision.” And I was like, “You know I don’t think if I feel the product vision I could be into working here.” Um so it was nothing personal, it was just like, “Uh, I don’t think this is the right fit for me.” JL I love this idea of, you know, I people are like, “Oh I don’t know if I can apply to this job.” And it’s like, “Well, why apply for one? Apply for 30”. LC Yeah definitely! JL I mean I love—I love it. LC And then if you don’t get it, if you don’t get one, it doesn’t really matter because you have 29 more! KL I love that too and the idea that, you know, there is—there is actually room to interview the company that’s hiring. I mean I think a lot of people just don’t even think that that’s a thing that they can do and it absolutely is. It’s something that you should do when you’re trying to feel out what you’re going to do next. It’s like—it’s a big change. LC Yeah and oftentimes in a interview, the interviewer will ask you, “Hey! Do you have any questions about this company?” And like you should have questions, you know, and hard questions. I don’t think anyone gets offended if you’re really evaluating them as well. You’re right. You’re totally right. JL Do you have any favorite questions that you like to ask? Well I mean when you were interviewing, now you’re doing the interview on the other side. LC This is going to sound so petty, but I always wanted to know what their food situation was like because I thought it said a lot about the culture. So I’m a Diet Coke addict, I absolutely love Diet Coke. And it’s super unhealthy, right? Like no one’s going to be like, “Oh yeah, Diet Coke should be in every corporate office.” But I did judge companies based on whether they stocked Diet Coke or not because I would go to interview at some place and they’d be like, “Oh we only do healthy snacks.” But they’d have like really sugary like fruit bars and stuff. And I was like, “Really?” Like snacks are just, you know, such like a privilege anyways. It’s just such like a silly—a silly thing to look at a company for but because of that I think it really is telling in how—how much independence they believe you have as sort of an employee. JL Yeah. I think that’s—I think it’s really neat. I think snacks, the office space, the office space, and like how people are set up and where they’re—like their seating situation. There’s just a lot you can tell with like things you might not think of. Are there windows? LC Yes! Yes! I went to an interview at a major company, I will not tell you which one, and I walked in—and it was for a role that was not like one of their core products. And I walked in and the room—it was freezing cold, there was no windows, and everyone was working in tiny offices like all sectioned off from each other and I knew immediately. I was like, “This is not the job for me.” So yeah I think it all matters. [30:07] JL We mentioned that Breaker was your third startup. Your first was Pownce, which you founded soon after college. What was it like to have big early success like that and, you know, eventually you were acquired by Six Apart. So what was it like to have that success and then letting go of what you made with your first big—big product? LC So I started when I was 24, fresh out of college. I had worked a couple programming jobs in the Bay Area before then. I had moved to the Bay Area because I didn’t like Minnesota winters but also just to have this new opportunity. To be away—none of my family lives in the Bay Area, I didn’t know anyone, it was a chance to be doing something new. And I loved programming. I wanted to do the best I could do. And I felt like that was in the Bay Area and what happened was I met my co-founders Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka and they said, “Hey, we’re thinking about doing this project but we need someone to build it.” Kevin’s a business guy and Daniel’s a designer, and they wanted someone to write the code and I had never built anything of substantial or like a completed app or anything like that. And I just said, “Ok. I’ll do it.” And I think that—I actually remember exactly where I was when I said, “Yeah I’ll do it,” I was in a cafe in Potrero. And I remember saying like, “Yeah, I can do this,” and being like, “I don’t know that I can actually do this.” But I did! I just built it and everything I didn’t know how to do, I looked up on the internet or asked someone else for help. It’s so funny because I was asking all these Django developer—this was the early days of the Django web framework in Python and all these Django developers, I was asking them questions, I was asking them the weirdest questions. Like, “How do I do this like very particular thing?” And they’re like, “I don’t think you need to do that unless you’re building like, I don’t know, like some big site. Like what are you—you know like why do you need to know how to do this crazy, you know, social networking concept?” Like at the time there was really only like Facebook. So it’s like, “Why do you need to know how to do this?” And it’s funny to look back later and I ran into someone and they were like, “Oh, that’s so funny that you said that.” And I ended up building Pownce and I was way in over my head, I had no idea what I was doing, and because Kevin was so popular, he was running Digg at the time. So he was a founder of Digg. He had a ton of followers and people paying attention to him and so he announced, “Hey! Here’s my new project,” and we got hundreds of thousands of new users instantly. And we had an invite-only system and people were selling invites on eBay, and like the whole thing was just weird. And the whole invite—like I had written the whole invite system, so I was thinking, like, they’re selling something on eBay that’s my code, you know? It’s so weird. It was so weird to me but it was such a great experience. What’s funny is I think it has really shaped my whole career in terms of—since then I’ve always been someone who just loves to ship things and get things done and figure it out as I go and I don’t think that would’ve been the case if I hadn’t done Pownce. I probably would’ve followed a more traditional engineering path. JL We’ve talked about this a little bit with Katel, with her role at A Book Apart and sort of saying yes to things even if you’re like, “Well, I haven’t done it before but I’m pretty sure I can do it.” KL And then you’re like, “What the hell?” LC Yeah! Yeah but then you’re like, “Well I could really do anything.” JL Yeah. LC You know? Like once you do the thing, you’re like, “Oh! Well that wasn’t so bad.” KL Yeah. Totally. It’s true. I feel like you—you learn a lot about yourself in a very short amount of time, and I—I definitely wasn’t expecting that. So, I mean, that was a great outcome. LC That’s amazing. JL I love that too like the um—like the retrospect of it in that like, “Well, if—if I went through this, I can do anything.” I was thinking today, I was like, “Ugh, you know I haven’t had much sleep,” and I was like, “Ah I gotta do this podcasting thing,” and I was like, “Well, you know, I also got thrown up by my—by my one-year-old all last night, and if I can do that, I’m pretty sure I can do anything.” KL You survived it! LC This is way less disgusting I hope! Much less! JL Yes. It is much less. So thank you. So Pownce was acquired by Six Apart, what was that like? LC It was an interesting time. I think it was sort of during the sort of tech downturn in 2009. A lot of companies were being acquired or shutting down, and I—when we were acquired I didn’t know they were going to shut down Pownce but they ended up closing down the site, which for me was pretty sad, but I didn’t feel… I was so—I wish I had then felt like I had more control over it. I didn’t feel like I had a ton of control over the acquisition or what happened. I had two co-founders, I was a little bit in over my head, and I think things are much different now. One of the things I’m starting to learn is that a company is more about the longevity. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint” is probably the cliche way to say it, but yeah if companies—I draw a lot of inspiration from companies like VenMo, where the company had been around for years and years with no success or with little success and then managed to blow up and become a whole thing and a household name and things like that. And to realize that success isn’t instant and at Pownce I felt very lucky that we did have a lot of success but we didn’t have enough instantly for I think our team to really—to raise money and to feel like it was going some place, and there were a lot of other pressures going on, and I wish I had had the confidence then in what I know now is like, “Oh, hang in there. Keep going.” Then I learned a little bit more with my second startup as well. I was way in over my head, I was the only person working there, and I didn’t feel like I could fundraise. I didn’t feel like I could raise money, even though the product was making money, I didn’t know how to hire, I didn’t know how to do all these things. So, with Breaker, I feel like I’m really getting that third chance but I feel much—I think this time I have that patience and that commitment to sticking through with it for a long time, which before, I think, when you’re an engineer, you’re just like, “Ah! I’ll just move on to the next project or do the next thing,” is very tempting. [36:02] JL Yeah that’s such a—it is such like a complete mindshift as like you mentioned that I can say, and I think that’s one of the things that I always love about being a developer is I have uh started and abandoned many a projects. I have—I own many domain names and then I’m like, “Well, I’ll just let that one go.” So I love it that like you have to make this shift and to run a startup you have to really see it through. LC Yeah and I think the moment that we ended up, you know, really converting it to a company as opposed to a side project for Breaker was the moment it was like, “Ok this is really happening. We’re going to be in this for a long time.” And I feel so lucky because it’s so nice to make a podcast listening app, like, it really is enjoyable. It’s not a painful product to work on, it’s really great. Like I use the product all the time. So it’s really easy. JL So what you’re saying is make something that you love, if you’re going to do it. LC Oh, absolutely. Or something that you care about. You know if it’s a—a cause that you’re passionate about, or if it’s an area that you’re very knowledgeable in, I mean it doesn’t have to be—I’m partial to social networks and communication. So anything about media, communication, social networks is really my wheelhouse. But I think each founder has their own like passion and the thing that they love to do. JL So you are also an author of the OAuth and OEmbed API specifications, which I just think is so cool. So I’d love if you could talk to us a little bit about that and sort of explain to our listeners what that is. LC Sure! So OAuth, the easy way to explain it is: if you every click “Connect with Facebook” to login with a site or “Connect with Twitter,” you’re using OAuth, that’s the backend technology for it. I got involved with helping to build it—it’s actually like, I was one of the original like 12 authors, something like that, of the first specification and I got involved through working on Pownce. We needed a way to authenticate and authorize users to use our API. And through that it’s just become something almost completely different from what it was intended for. It was really intended for API access and now it’s just sort of been this defacto way to like quickly login on the web which I think is fantastic. It’s really cool. It’s like a really interesting turn and one of the things I’m most proud of is helping to come up with like sort of that user interface flow that really I think enable it to become this huge thing. So if you’re going to talk about like, “Oh it’s like the coolest thing that you probably like worked on that, you know, people would actually know,” it’s probably, you know, “Login with Facebook.” My dad said recently, he was like, “Oh you always wanted to be an inventor when you grew up, what happened to that?” And I was like, “Have you ever clicked ‘Login with Facebook’ on a website?!” Yeah but it’s so cool. It’s such a little thing, too, in the whole scheme of the web, it’s so cool to think that like developers have these small like little claims to fame on the web, that’s something that like outlives you and continues on is pretty cool, and I just feel so lucky to be like such a small part of that history. JL That’s really neat. I love that. And then, you know, I also like—I feel like if your—if your dad was like, “Oh yeah, wait! I’ve clicked that!” And then I don’t know, it’s such like, it’s a feel good moment. LC Yeah, yeah. That was pretty funny. JL So before Pownce and before OAuth, one of the things that I think was so cool that you did is similar to, if those that remember the million-dollar website where people had sold pixel space for an advertisement, or some people sold tattoos on their body for funding, but what you did was a lot smarter! I’d like to say, in that you raised money for a new laptop by selling advertising space on it. And I just remember thinking that was so cool and such like an innovative way to use the internet and get social funding for your new laptop. And one of the things I was looking at when I was just researching is that I found some of the articles from then and some of them were like, “Cute Girl Sells Laser-etched Macbook Advertising.” And I was like, wow! I was like, I forgot that that existed. [39:49] LC Yeah, the internet was a different—it was a different time and a different place back then. What’s really interesting is I got started in that project because the company I was working for at the time is Instructables and they had a laser etcher and so the idea was—So I had a really old computer and all of the people that worked at, you know, Squid Labs and Instructables at the time had these like newer laptops and they were all etching them with this laser etcher but I didn’t even have a laptop. So that—the idea came pretty easily. It was like, “Oh! I don’t have a laptop but I have a laser etcher and everyone is etching stuff onto their laptop,” so it really was not like the most genius plan. It was sort of a circumstantial thing but I mean it was really an interesting exercise in marketing more than anything else. I had never really done any marketing on the internet or really been out there at all. I don’t even think I had a blog. I had like no internet presence. There was no such thing as Instagram and Twitter. So really I wasn’t on the web at all and I think what you brought up about sort of the way the media portrayed it is so different than how it would be done today. It’s so—it’s so funny. Like, “Young Cute Girl Does Something on the Internet” like you’d never see that anymore. JL Oh, thankfully. LC It’s probably a good thing. Yeah. Yeah yeah but it wasn’t just that, there were like these “Sexiest Geeks” lists and things like that, and it just would not fly nowadays. JL I mean—I know that we still have like a lot more work to do in terms of, you know, equal pay and equal representation but at least we have made it past some of these. LC Yeah. One of the things I’m actually kind of bothered by recently is I—I’m all for the #metoo movement, but I think what’s kind of slightly disturbing to me about is that we want—I think there’s this desire to talk about workplace inequality and the fact that it kind of gets turned into something sexual or has like this focus on sexual assault. It’s like, “Well, can we make the conversation a little broader?” Like can we talk about power dynamics and women in leadership? And we do but I think it’s less salacious and it doesn’t get as much media attention. And so I’m a little disappointed in that angle of it but hopefully we’ll get there. JL Yeah it’s like there are so many battles—there are so many battles to fight. LC Yeah! Which one? Yeah you know? JL I know it’s like I can—I can like only laugh at it because otherwise I just like, my sighs, sometimes my sighs are so loud. But I just like what are we— LC Yeah so it’s—you’re right. I think maybe it is good to just focus on one bat—one battle at a time but also to have like tangible goals. Like what is the tangible goal of a certain movement? And I think movements are most effective when they have like a piece of legislation you can pass or you know some rules that companies now enact. I think people want simple solutions for complex problems and I think bridging that gap is something that’s really difficult to do. JL Yeah, that is a hundred percent accurate. I think sometimes when we can’t find those solutions, then we feel a little hopeless and I think hopefully though the more that—more people put their heads together about it, the more that those solutions will come. LC And everything changes, and everything gets better. I just listened to an episode of The Modern Love podcast, reading an essay from 2012, which I totally recommend people go check out the latest episode of Modern Love podcast. But it was basically a father talking about his gay son and his gay son’s desire to marry his partner and the essay just feels dated. And it’s not that old. You know? And I think that’s so shocking: how fast things change. And for the better. I mean it’s a good thing. It made me sad and hopeful at the same time. JL So, speaking of getting along and, you know, optimism and productivity, before your role now at Breaker, you were an engineer at Dropbox working on engineer productivity and happiness, which I think just sounds amazing. Can you tell us more about your role there? LC So at Dropbox I ended up working on the engineering product design team, helping—basically helping engineers and designers throughout their lifecycle at Dropbox. So from the time they first joined Dropbox in their first day through moving around between teams or moving up to become a manager or they’re at sort of the exit interview, if they left Dropbox. And it was pretty interesting. So I ended up on that team because I helped build an internal tool for Dropbox, actually a framework for hosting internal tools called AppBox. And I built it sort of during Hack Week, we had these—Dropbox has these like Hack—Hack Weeks where you can work on anything you want and a lot of the times what people work on is stuff for Dropbox. So, you know, a lunch menu, or a seating chart, or all these tools that people at Dropbox use all the time that aren’t, you know, readily available. So their priority tools are—you want to build with like a special sort of like internal company feel to them. So I built this platform for building new tools on top of and then recruited engineers during these Hack Weeks to like build new tools on top of it. So that’s actually what most of what I did was run that project so I can talk about internal too—we didn’t have like an internal tools team, we had like an internal developer tools, sort of more focused on build process and things like that. But what I was working on was more social, and so it didn’t quite fit into that space. So I ended up on this team that worked on the entire engineer’s life cycle which was super interesting. It’s like an interesting problem to think about. [45:10] JL Yeah, I love that. We are constantly trying to figure out how, I mean day one of someone starting new I feel like is one of the most difficult things to work with, starting from like, “Ok, let’s make sure we—they have a computer.” So you’re actually joining us today from New Zealand and you were recently a judge at Webstock. Was that totally awesome? LC Yes! It was so fun. I loved Webstock. It was great. It was the first one I’d ever been able to go to because it’s in New Zealand. And I basically said, “Hey! I’m going to be in New Zealand. I didn’t know Webstock was happening at the time, is there anything I can do to help?” And they were like, “Oh, come be a judge for our startup competition.” I thought that was so great and such an honor. It was really fun. JL Is it hard as a judge to give feedback to others about their products? LC Absolutely. I think it’s hard because I see it from their side, right? Like I’ve done three startups. I’ve done startup competitions. You know, I’ve gone to hackathons and competed and submitted my projects before judges. And, like I said, I think on the hiring side of things it applies here as well, on the judging side, it’s like I think so many of the decisions are just arbitrary. Like you happen to answer a question in the particular right way that the judge wanted to hear, you had like a good looking slide that got people’s attention. Like it seems—it just all seems so arbitrary and all of the competitors this year at Webstock and the BNZ startup competition were all just fantastic. And so it was really hard to say like, “This company is better than another company,” because it’s just—that’s not the way it is. They are just very different. And, like I said, they were all really good. JL So for something like that, what do you find the best way for feedback—like do you find like the line it’s hard to like discourage people because like their project is great but they can’t all win? LC Yeah! I actually went up to most—I tried to make a point to go up to most of the folks who didn’t win and talk with them about their projects just to, you know, I think what matters when you’re building a company is it’s always nice to see someone who cares, who paid attention, and knows what you’re doing, and has follow-up questions, and—and I saw this as well with the other panelists and judges they actually offered to help companies. Like, “Hey, you know, BNZ you didn’t win the competition but how can we help you? Who can we connect you with to take you to that next step?” Because startups, it’s not like you win or lose, it’s like always a constant journey, right? Like even—even when you’re a giant company, you’re not always winning. It’s this constant process. So I think a lot of it is asking those startups, “Hey, how can we help and how can we take you to that next level?” And sometimes that pride of winning the prize matters and sometimes it doesn’t. One of the judges actually lost the same competition she had entered years before and had lost and came back as a judge and has a successful startup here in New Zealand. So— JL I think it’s so important, again, you know we’ve talked about this a lot is like how to keep going with these like products that you obviously love because you’re working on them and putting your heart into and so just wrapping up here: I’d love to hear more about your approach at looking at your work and looking back and saying, “What am I doing right? What are things I wish I’m doing differently?” And like how—how you handle that. LC I actually spend a lot of time doing self-evaluation. And I think mostly because I’m kind of someone who worries a lot. So I’m always sort of thinking about, “Hey, could I be doing this better?” And sometimes I have to sort of almost take that pressure off of myself. One of the things I struggle with personally is that I don’t feel like I act or look like other founders, especially in my attitudes around building product, getting users, things like that. I don’t think I’m completely like your typical startup founder and I have to sort of talk myself into, “You can only be the best person you can be.” And this is like kind of the thing I get pumped up about. I’m like, ok, I can only do the things I can do. I can keep trying to get better, but I can’t beat myself up about not being like someone else. I just have to sort of be myself and work with what I have and take it to that—that next step. So that’s—that’s sort of what I’m always thinking about in terms of self-improvement. And there are definitely things I’m working on right now. I’m working on giving better feedback. That’s something I’m always working on is how can I give feedback well and really help other people as opposed to just like saying what I think which I think is always a struggle. KL Yeah. We’re dying to know. JL That’s great. When you find an answer, please let us know. [49:35] LC I think—yeah I don’t know. I don’t know. I think one of the things I’ve learned is like give feedback in—or, give criticism in private, give praise in public. Really work on how to articulate how I feel about something or think about something. A lot of times I just assume other people think the same way I do which is not true at all, right? Like we think everyone’s like us and our reaction to something is going to be the same reaction that everyone has to that thing and that’s not true. So it’s like how to explain like—like just today I gave feedback on like sort of an unread count of something and I had to say, “Hey, I’m the kind of person where I see an unread number and it makes me anxious and x, y, and z and blah blah blah blah.” And I wasn’t actually complaining about the teacher, I think the teacher’s great, but it was like, “How can we make this a comfortable process for people who are—people who like to check things off their inbox and have everything be done versus someone who just kind of lets things go and doesn’t really care about that. I think those are two very different personality types and so I think a lot of the struggle is like realizing what type of personality I am and how to express that as a user and then looking at other personality types. Like how do users who care about personal stats treat like a product? So I’m not someone who cares about every single stat, about what episodes I listen to or like, or things like that. Like they’re kind of fun to me, I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” There’s some people who are like—coming at this whole game like, “Hey, I want to listen to more episodes of a podcast this week than I did last week.” And so how do put myself in their shoes or like understand that we have users that are—have different mindsets than myself. So that’s—I’m kind of working on that as well. JL That’s awesome. I think those people would not like my 35,000 unread email messages bubble. That’s the thing. LC As long as you’re ok with it. As long as you personally— JL Thank you! It does not bother me. LC I’m so glad I don’t work on email. That’s like the one communication tool I’m like, I say this now, and like say in 20 years, we forget about email. It’ll just be like, “Oh god, ok yeah.” JL Well, I hope we get to have you back on the show then to talk about your new email project so— LC Oh my god no. JL Leah, anything else you’d like to share with our listeners uh today? LC I guess what I’d like to say is definitely check out Breaker, let me know what you think. I actually read every single feedback email people send us, I may not reply personally, but I definitely read them. So if you have feedback uh let us know, we’ve actually really worked hard to create a company based on user feedback because we understand that not everyone is like ourselves. So you could listen to the next episode of this podcast on Breaker. Let us know what you think. JL Well, Leah, thank you so much for joining us today. It was super awesome. LC Thank you so much for having me. Fuck Yeah of the Season: Tiny RevelationsSWB So usually, right before we wrap up, we have our Fuck Yeah of the Week. And that’s something or someone we’re super hyped about during that given week. But here we are, this is Episode 10, and we’re taking a couple weeks off after this. And so I think it’s appropriate to not just have a Fuck Yeah of the Week, but to have a Fuck Yeah of the Season because it’s been kind of a badass season for us here at No, You Go. So I’d like to give a big Fuck Yeah to all of the people who have shared their ideas with us and have been so generous with their time and so many of them have given me what I’m calling, like, tiny revelations where they said something kind of off the cuff, they said this one little sentence, and I find it, like, sticking in my brain and I think about over and over and over again and I think we should take a couple of minutes and talk about what some of those are. Katel, what’s your tiny revelation? KL Yeah. Gosh. I think a really recent episode we did with Stevie where they talked about the sentiment of the practice of allyship, has just stuck with me so much and just the idea that we can constantly be working on this, that we can constantly practice being better to each other, being better supporters of each other, and just that it’s a work in progress. I think that that is so important and something that we can all think about and do in very little ways that amount to something much bigger. JL Yeah, that was a great one. Oh, there are so many great ones. One of the ones that really sticks with me is I loved Sara Chipps’ interview. And one of the things Sara said was, “Everyone has a good idea, right? But how do you—how do you get that started?” And she said, “Ideas are worthless unless it’s something that gets made.” So you know if it’s going to take a thousand baby steps then if you start today you’ll only have 999 left. But if you don’t, then it’s never going to happen. And I love that. You know I’ve talked about this before, I’m a really big fan of the—of, you know, the getting things done method and how you go from idea to really getting it somewhere and we talked about that with Leah today and I also loved so many things that Leah said about this, because I feel like I always have so many ideas in my head and I want to be able to take them from that into something tangible and so I loved the advice that Sara had about how to get your product out and running. I just think it’s so cool. KL Sara, what about you? [54:30] SWB It’s really hard to pick because there’s so many things that I find myself returning to but one of the ones that has sort of lodged itself in my brain where like sometimes I’ll literally be in the middle of working on something, or I’ll be like getting ready for bed, brushing my teeth, whatever, and I find myself thinking it is what Eileen Webb said way back in episode two. She said, “Why should my work get all of my best brain?” And I think what made me really get stuck on that was how much it upended assumptions that I had that I didn’t know that I had about work. Like, that I’d always sort of assumed that spending my best brain, like the—the—the parts of the day where I feel the smartest and most competent, spending the bulk of my time on my work was like inherently good. And an inherently like good way to prioritize. And this isn’t to say like you know, you should like short shrift your work or anything like that but just to say like, to question like is that always helpful? Is that always right? Is that always good? Why? Why do you feel like you owe that to your work? And particularly like why do you feel like you owe that to a company? And I think that I do absolutely owe my clients expertise and intelligence and insight and thoughtfulness. It’s not to say I should like do a bad job, by any means, like hi clients, if you’re listening, I like to do a good job. But I think what it means is like it is ok to retain something for yourself, it is ok to retain something that doesn’t have quote/unquote “productivity”, it is ok to say that I’m going to use the smartest parts of myself today to plan out the garden, or whatever. Right? Like that is an ok thing to do and sometimes that is, in fact, probably the best thing you can do. And so I’m trying to remember that and keep that in mind. KL In fact, I think it’s—it makes you better at your work if you give yourself that time. I mean I think we can all say that to ourselves and it’s true but it’s—it’s very hard to put that into practice if we don’t you know really think about it and really do it. But I think that actually—it’s cyclical. It like feeds back in on itself and makes you even more of an expert. SWB Yeah and something you said there brings me back to what you said was your favorite thing which was practice. And I think about the concept of practice a lot. And I think about the concept of like how we build habits, and how we sort of build like a life that makes sense to us, and that works for us. None of us is good at something right off the bat. Even if you’re hyper-talented, it’s—you don’t necessarily have any nuance or skill until you give yourself time and space to practice. And so something I really want to bring away from our first few episodes is like how much I need to practice anything that I want to be good at in my life and whether that’s podcasting, or taking a break, or whether it’s knowing it’s going to take a lot of steps to get something done and giving myself the time to have that actually happen. Like none of those things happened without building them as part of a practice and I think that there’s a level of sort of like patience that comes along with that, that is not necessarily I’m good. That’s something I’m actually pretty bad at. And I’m really looking forward to you know, hearing from more guests who are going to keep me thinking like this because I feel like it’s like done good stuff for my brain. KL Well, that wraps up season one of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. We’re taking a couple of weeks off, but we’ll be back in April. While we’re on break check out all our past episodes. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate the show. And definitely check us out on Breaker. Your support helps us spread the word. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Leah Culver for being our wonderful guest today, and thank you for a great first season. Transcript by Second Hand Scribe. | |||
| 29 Mar 2018 | Introducing: I Love That | 00:00:58 | |
Hey listeners! We’re taking a tiny break while we get Season 2 rolling—launching April 17!—but we wanted to make sure you heard about the latest addition to the NYG family: I Love That, our biweekly newsletter of all the stuff we can’t stop thinking about. Every other Friday, you’ll get:
We’ll also answer your questions, share tips and resources, and basically get you hyped. So come on and add a little more fuck yeah to your inbox. Sign up now.
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| 05 Apr 2018 | Welcome to Season 2: Living our best feminist lives at work | 00:03:11 | |
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. | |||
| 17 Apr 2018 | Defining Ambition with Neha Gandhi | 00:56:31 | |
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. 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
SponsorsThis 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. _ TranscriptKatel 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.] | |||
| 24 Apr 2018 | I Gotta Make Art with Carmen Maria Machado | 00:52:54 | |
It’s not every day we chat with someone the New York Times has listed as part of “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. Here’s what we cover:
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. SponsorsThis 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. _ _ TranscriptKatel 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]. | |||
| 01 May 2018 | Doing it Right with Adda Birnir | 00:48:10 | |
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. Listen in for a super-real convo about:
Plus:
SponsorsThis 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.
_ _ TranscriptSara 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 sponsorsSWB [Ad spot] Have you visited noyougoshow.com yet? Well, you should. Because that’s where you sign up for our brand-new email newsletter, “I Love That.” And guess what? We made that site with our awesome sponsor, WordPress. We love them, too. WordPress gives us tons of flexibility, so we can add whatever features we want easily. You can even use it for ecommerce. Whether you want to add a simple “buy” button, or have a whole online store, make your site your own when you build it on wordpress.com. You don’t need to do the coding or design. WordPress customer support team is there 24/7 to make sure things are [kisses index and thumb] chef-finger-kiss good. 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. We’re also hyped to be supported this week by CodePen, a powerful tool that allows designers and developers to write code like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript directly in a browser and see the results as you build. It’s like a big, virtual sandbox where you can learn new skills, show off your work, get help, and more. Not only is CodePen an awesome community but they’re also doing this awesome giveaway. They’re giving away three free Pro Developer accounts. Enter to win at codepen.io/nyg by answering just one question: What do you love about CodePen? And if you don’t use CodePen yet, you can still win. You just need to 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. Visit codepen.io/nyg. That’s C-O-D-E-P-E-N dot I-O slash N-Y-G [music fades in, plays alone for two seconds, fades out]. [10:16] Interview: Adda BirnirKL 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 WeekKL 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]. | |||
| 08 May 2018 | Supporting Others with Sarah Drasner | 00:56:19 | |
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. We talk with Sarah about:
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.
SponsorsThis 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.
_ _ TranscriptSara 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]. JL [Ad spot] Not only is CodePen an awesome tool for designers and developers to write code directly in the browser, it’s also a great place to find a job. Are you a frontend developer or designer? They have a radical job board with opportunities all over the world: New York, California, Australia—those opportunities are all there. Check out codepen.io/jobs. Also, are you a company looking to hiring those folks? Hit up support@codepen.io and say you’d like to try the job board for free, and they’ll set you right up for that. CodePen also offers great functionality for helping you interview your candidates. With CodePen Collab Mode you don’t need to be in the same place for a whiteboarding session. You can join online and work together on a coding challenge. Check out the blog at codepen.io to find even more ways to make CodePen work for you. [13:35] SWB [Ad spot] We are also super excited to once again be supported by our friends at WordPress. You know about WordPress, right? You know, the company behind like 30 percent of all websites? We love WordPress because it’s flexible, it’s super customizable, and it’s extremely affordable. Plans starts at just four dollars a month which makes it easy for a growing podcast like ours. But WordPress can do so much more including manage your whole online store. And their customer support is there 24/7 to help. So if you haven’t checked WordPress out yet, you totally should. It’s the easiest way to make your site your own without doing all the coding and design. 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. KL [Ad spot] A Book Apart runs on Shopify, and that’s because we know we’ll be supported by a team of 3,000 folks around the globe who are focused on building products that help business owners every day. And they’re growing their team. I’m looking at their listings, and they’ve got 166 openings right now. 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. | |||
| 22 May 2018 | We Think We Know What We Need with Dr. Allison Chabot | 00:58:49 | |
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? Links from this episode:
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. SponsorsThis 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.
TranscriptSara 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]. | |||
| 29 May 2018 | Know Your Numbers with Shannah Compton Game | 00:55:41 | |
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 tells us all about:
Also in this episode:
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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. TranscriptJenn 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]. SponsorsSWB [Ad spot] Hey, everyone! Sara here to tell you a little bit about the people who are making No, You Go possible this week [music fades out]. First up is Harvest. Harvest makes awesome, easy to use software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Seriously, I have actually been a Harvest customer since my very first day as a consultant back in 2011. I love how easy it is to create invoices, add expenses, and tie them back to my projects. Whether you’re a freelancer who just needs to get paid or an agency with complex workflows and lots of people, Harvest has you covered. Try it free for 30 days at getharvest.com and when you sign up with code No, You Go, you’ll also get 50% off your first paid month. That’s getharvest.com, offer code No, You Go. And we’re also proud to be supported by WordPress. Do you need to make a website to post your Riverdale fanfiction? Or promote your awesome new wine bar? Or, well, do basically anything else? Then you need WordPress. We trust WordPress to keep our site running smoothly, and to make it easy to customize, update, and share with the world. And we’re not alone. Nearly 30% of all websites run on WordPress. Maybe yours should too! Plans start at just four dollars a month. So start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15% off any new plan purchase. That’s 15% your brand-new website at wordpress.com/noyougo [music fades in, plays alone for six seconds, fades out]. [13:21] Interview: Shannah Compton GameSWB 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]. FYOTWKL 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]. | |||
| 05 Jun 2018 | Quiet Leadership with Rachel Robertson | 00:49:34 | |
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. 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:
SponsorsThis 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. TranscriptKatel 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 sponsorsSWB [music fades in, plays alone for four seconds, fades out]. [Ad spot] Hey, all! Let’s talk about our sponsors for a sec. So this week we are sponsored by WordPress. WordPress is the place we turn whenever we want to launch a new website. It’s even how we built noyougoshow.com. WordPress is great because you don’t need to do coding or design; you can choose from a ton of gorgeous themes; and if you get stuck, their customer support team is there 24/7. WordPress also has powerful ecommerce options: anything from a simple buy button to a whole online store. And plans start at just four dollars a month. Start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15% off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15% your brand-new website. Next up: do you need to track time on client projects? Send invoices for your work? Or manage profitability and projections? Then you should check out Harvest. Harvest takes the pain out of time tracking by making it part of you and your team’s workflow. In fact, you can even integrate Harvest with other tools you might use like Basecamp, Slack, or Trello. Harvest also makes it easier to get paid. I like that. You can use their automatic tools to create invoices, and instead of writing all of those awkward emails that would follow up on those invoices that are unpaid, Harvest can do that for you. You can even take online payments. Try it for free at getharvest.com and get 50% your first paid month with the code noyougo. That’s getharvest.com, offer code: noyougo [music fades in, plays along for four seconds, fades out]. [13:28] Interview: Rachel RobertsonSWB 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 SwapsJL 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 WeekKL 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]. | |||
| 12 Jun 2018 | Skip the Stepping Stones with Saron Yitbarek | 00:52:39 | |
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. Also in this episode, we:
And don’t forget to check out CodeNewbie’s Twitter chat, podcast, and Codeland conference. SponsorsThis 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.
TranscriptSara 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 sponsorsSWB [Ad spot] But before we get to the interview we have got to tell you about two awesome companies that make No, You Go possible. First up is Harvest, an awesome online tool designed to help teams keep track of time they spend working on different projects and client work. I started using Harvest when I worked at an agency, one of the good ones, and it made it easy for us to see who was working on what and whether we were on track and on budget. I also used Harvest as a consultant because they make it so easy to send invoices and get paid fast. Harvest also has a super sweet timer feature which helps you track how long tasks take and bill accurate hours. You can start the timer on your desktop app and then stop it on your way home from the iPhone app. It’s super easy. Start your free trial now at getharvest.com and when you upgrade to a paid account, enter coupon code no you go for 50% off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, coupon code no you go. KL We’re also supported by our friends at WordPress. They’re the platform we use for noyougoshow.com, and we’re not alone. Nearly 30% of websites run on WordPress. With plans starting at just four dollars a month, they make it easy to get your website, portfolio, or online store up and running in no time, and their friendly customer support is there to lend a hand 24/7. It’s true. We’ve tried it and they’re awesome. So what are you waiting for? Start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15% off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15% off your brand new website [music fades in, plays alone for four seconds, fades out]. Interview: Saron YitbarekKL 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 WeekSWB 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]. | |||
| 19 Jun 2018 | Too PG for Jeopardy with Lilly Chin | 00:41:22 | |
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. _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:
Also in this episode:
SponsorsThis 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.
TranscriptKatel 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] SponsorsSWB [Ad spot] Before we get to our interview with Lilly, we’ve got a couple awesome folks to tell you about. The first is Harvest. Harvest makes software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. It’s super easy to use on the web or via the app, and it’s made my work life way easier over the years. I’ve seriously been a customer since 2011. 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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 ChinJL 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]. | |||
| 26 Jun 2018 | The System is Rigged with Nicole Sanchez | 00:58:01 | |
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. 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:
Also in this episodeWe, 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.
Have a bitchin’ summer, everyone! Stay sweet and we’ll see you in August! SponsorsThis 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.
TranscriptJenn 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]. SponsorsKL 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 SanchezSWB 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 SeasonSWB 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]. | |||
| 02 Aug 2018 | Welcome to Season 3: Finding a Reason to Say “F*** Yeah!” | 00:02:34 | |
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. TranscriptSara 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] | |||
| 07 Aug 2018 | Bonus: NYG Live from Vancouver, BC! | 00:55:54 | |
Yep, we’ve gone international! Our very first live show was a variety hour featuring Katel & Sara at Vancouver’s Design & Content Conference.So listen up if you want to hear about peeing in a jumpsuit, emailing with Christina Aguilera’s mom, editing footage of crop dusting in Saskatchewan, and rocking a sweet feminist boob necklace. (Uh, you definitely do.) Plus, this special treat has not just one but two mini-interviews:
You’ll also hear live career advice, fuck yeahs from the audience, and a ton more. Huge thanks to everyone who made this live show possible!
This episode was recorded live on July 26, 2018, at the York Theatre in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. | |||
| 14 Aug 2018 | Clean Person, Dirty Mind with Jolie Kerr | 00:46:44 | |
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.” Links on links on links:
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). SponsorsThis 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] 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]. | |||
| 21 Aug 2018 | Many Ways of Living and Loving with Ada Powers | 00:59:56 | |
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. She tells us about:
Go be friends with Ada already: Also on our agenda:
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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. ** TranscriptSWB [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]. SWB [Ad spot] Hey everyone, it’s time for career chat, brought to you by Shopify. Today we’ve got a featured job posting from Emma Grant, a recruitment coordinator at Shopify. 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]. | |||
| 28 Aug 2018 | The Ambition Decisions with Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace | 00:47:31 | |
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. We sat down with Hana and Elizabeth to talk about:
Links
Also in this episodeJenn 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:
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TranscriptSara 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 WallaceSWB 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] FYOTWSWB 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]. | |||
| 11 Sep 2018 | Show Me the Data with Tracy Chou | 00:50:08 | |
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. We talked with Tracy about:
Plus, we talk about ch-ch-ch-changes and asking for help:
SponsorsThis 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 Harvest makes awesome software for tracking time, planning projects, sending invoices, and generally helping me keep it all together at work. Or at least look like I have it all together—even if I’m actually still wearing sweatpants. I love how easy it is to use, whether I’m working solo or scaling up a larger team for a big project. You’ll love Harvest, too. Go to getharvest.com to try it 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] 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 TriviaSWB 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 ChouSWB 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 CHATKL 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. FYOTWJL 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] | |||
. Just listen already.
Just start with those baby steps. It’s going to take a thousand baby steps. Everyone has a good idea, right? Everyone. Ideas are worthless unless it’s something that gets made. So you know, if it’s going to take a thousand baby steps, then if you start today, you only have 999 left. But if you don’t, then it’s never going to happen.
Book clubs are just magical, first of all, because books are amazing. But, second of all, it creates a really interesting common ground for everyone… You’re all showing up because you read the same thing, and you are starting off with that common thing and you end up picking up little pieces of the other person’s life as she’s describing how she read the book and interpreted it, and then it kind of like takes the pressure off.
So many of us are held back just by that feeling that like, “Hmm, maybe there’s someone else out there who is more qualified. Maybe there’s someone else who would be better at this.” And in some cases: sure, there is. In many cases, there is not. It’s us! We’re the ones.
I try as much as I can to talk with college kids or high school kids and most of the time my message is just, “Hi, I’m a scientist and I also happen to be a woman.” It doesn’t have to be much more complicated than that.
Yes, in a lot of ways I am more diverse than the average person who shows up to a lot of these things. We’re not going to lie about that. I am, by virtue of being black and female, even though I am a cis, able-bodied person, I am more diverse than the people you usually have in there. That being said, I’m still an Ivy League graduate. I’m still a person of a certain education… So when you say that I am “diversity,” let’s all be clear here: you ain’t doin’ that well, fam. You’re not doing that good.
People are actually terrified of asking questions — and especially people who end up in positions of leadership. To say, “Oh, we don’t know this and we have to find something out, and I don’t have the answer” is really scary, and that’s nothing that we’ve been rewarded for our entire lives. And if you want to have a research mindset or just use evidence to make decisions, you have to be in a constant state of admitting that you don’t have all the answers.
