Strong Feelings – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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.

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You deserve an equitable, actionable, and thoughtful performance review. So how do you move forward when you get…something else entirely? 

That’s what we’re tackling in our very first episode. Listen in as Jen and Sara coach people through big dilemmas—and even bigger feelings—about the wild and weird world of performance reviews. You’ll leave with new tools to help you rebound after unfair or unexpected feedback…or at least some good stories for the group chat.    

Links:

• Common cognitive distortions at work
• The 40 Best Questions to Ask in an Interview

Got a work situation eating away at you? Send it to us! Submit your dilemma at PMLEshow.com.

Hey, Strong Feelings fans! We’ve decided to retire the show…so we can focus on a brand-new one! It’s called Per My Last Email, and we cannot wait for you to hear it. The first episode comes out April 13, so if you like this trailer, make sure to subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, or Stitcher—or visit PMLEshow.com to get the details. 

Here’s what it’s all about! Enjoy! —Sara 

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How can I get my boss to advocate for me and have my back? Should I disclose my disability? Why can’t I juggle all of this work? Work raises a lot of questions—and too many of them get stuck in our heads, rattling around until we feel overwhelmed and unqualified. 

No more. Join hosts Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Jen Dionisio for this brand-new podcast designed to help you work through all the big feelings and confusing situations that come up at work. 

Each episode, they’ll share real-life dilemmas listeners are struggling with—from how to respond to passive-aggressive emails to what to do when your boss gives you truly terrible feedback. Then they’ll share the tools they use in their coaching sessions to help listeners get through whatever work throws their way.  

Per My Last Email starts April 13—so subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. Because work gets weird. Sara and Jen can’t wait to help you get through it. 

Submit a dilemma to the show

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Theme music: “(I’m A) Modern Woman” by Maria T

Producer: Emily Duncan

Created by: Active Voice

The pandemic broke our understanding of the world. How do we put the pieces together again? Samira Rajabi joins us to point the way—and it all starts with getting comfortable “sitting in the shit” with each other.

Samira Rajabi is a researcher, writer, and assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado. Her work focuses on the intersection of trauma, social media, disability studies, and feminist theory, and her book, All My Friends Live in My Computer: Tactical Media, Trauma and Meaning Making, came out earlier this year.

I think this impulse to compare comes from this sense that what you're going through is not legible to other people. So we often sort of demean our own suffering because we don't think that it's worthy in the eyes of society, or culture, or our peer group. I think the way to cope with that is to listen better. So rather than being in a space, where it's like, "Oh, you say you're suffering? Well, listen to my suffering," it's, "How might I hear what you're saying with a recognition of who you are, and where you're coming from, and what you need in the moment, and then also offer my testimony about where I am, and what I need, and who I am in the moment?"

—Samira Rajabi, author, All My Friends Live in My Computer

We talk about:

• How Samira’s desire to understand her own experiences with trauma led her to working at the intersection of gender, disability, and  media studies
• How a brain tumor diagnosis and treatment led Samira to find online community, and how that community helped her process grief and trauma
• Why comparing trauma is futile, and how to “sit in the shit” with the people in our lives instead 
• The politics of trauma and traumatic experiences, and how power plays a role in who gets access to care
• What ambiguous grief is and why it matters

Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers ideas for how to listen more deeply and stop trying to “fix” things for the people in our lives. For more tools and practice tips for staying  present to others’ pain, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.

Links:

• Samira Rajabi
• All My Friends Live in My Computer
• Samira’s TEDx talk
• Ronnie Janoff-Bulman: Shattered Assumptions
• The Body Keeps the Score
• Pauline Boss: Ambiguous Loss
• Culture Study with Samira Rajabi and Anne Helen Petersen
• Lisbeth Lipari: Listening, Thinking, Being
• Active Voice

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.
>
> —Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen, designer and educator

Here’s what we get into—and of course, there’s a full transcript, too.

If you didn’t catch the Oscars, don’t worry—we start the show by filling you in on our favorite parts. Of note:

• (Ahem) Janelle Monáe’s pantsuit (photo)
• Jordan Peele’s win for Get Out and the amazing fan art he posts on Instagram
• Frances McDormand’s acceptance speech mentioning inclusion riders (hell yeah)…

…which we go on to explore:

• Did you know Justin Bieber requires that his dressing room be filled with carnations? Riders can be wild.
• More important: Nicole Sanchez writes about taking inclusion riders beyond Hollywood and into fields like tech—and apply them to everything from speaking gigs to job offers. Yep.
• We also touch on Lara Hogan’s wonderful piece about applying inclusiveness to your hiring process, the Enterprise UX Conference’s journey through inclusive programming, how the Design & Content Conference put together a diverse conference production team, and Women Talk Design’s mission to empower organizers to create more diverse events.

It’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:

• Where Stevie lives in Vancouver, which is the unceded land of the Coast Salish people, particularly the Squamish, the Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
• Stevie’s work with Out in Schools, a program that engages students on issues of homophobia, transphobia, and bullying.
• How having a child while establishing a career—and then making choices about your career and your future—become intertwined in a way you never expected.
• What it means to realize you’re queer at 27—and what happens next.
• How we can better support marginalized people by practicing ongoing allyship, and provide safer spaces for those communities. (More on the idea of practicing allyship from Mariame Kaba.)
• Demystifying and sharing pronouns—and deconstructing the hard-coded way we think about each other.

We 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.

This episode of NYG is brought to you by:

Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.

_WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _

Katel 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]
JL Not — not too great um so I think it’s really important, you know, for — to realize too and like it’s a mix of educating also, where I think some people never— never thought about that. And I’m not saying that that’s ok. But like it is — then I become, “Well, here are these questions and why I’m asking them because it’s not ok.”

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.

SWB 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.

SWB 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.

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.

> 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.
>
> —Erika Hall, Mule Design

Here’s what we get into—and of course, there’s a full transcript, too.

First, 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.

Designer, 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:

• How she started Mule Design and how the agency—and their work—has changed since 2001.
• Being outspoken online and fighting the trolls who live in our review systems.
• Why it’s critical to bring empathy into our working relationships as well as our personal ones—and how feeling comfortable being uncomfortable can be the most powerful thing you can do.
  Why we won’t solve gender bias with education alone; we have to change our own habits and help others learn to do the same.
• Her new book, Conversational Design, all about how to use conversation as a model for designing interactive digital products and services that are less robotic and more real.
• The joys and horrors of writing: making it through 2017, surviving the myth that your second book will be easier than your first, overcoming a health setback—but getting through it all to launch a book.
• Finding inspiration IRL—no, really, sometimes stepping away from our screens and talking to our neighbors is the best way to rediscover the good in the world. And listening to Oprah. And Ru Paul.

We 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.

• Tweet from David Hogg
• RuPaul’s Drag Race
• BBC’s In Our Time
• The 9 Rules of Design Research
• Be a Pal, My Dude
• Just Enough Research
• Conversational Design
• Mule Design’s Gender Bias Workshop

This episode of NYG is brought to you by:

Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.

_WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _

Sara 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.]

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KL [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.]

JL 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].

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.

> 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.
>
> —Sydette Harry

Here’s what we cover—and of course, we’ve got a full transcript, too.

A 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.)

Get 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:

• Sydette’s work with the Coral Project.
• Why she’s calling out media for telling amazing people that they don’t belong.
• How Twitter’s insistence it was the “free speech wing of the free speech party” left it vulnerable to abuse.
• The Prep for Prep program, the Bronx is Burning era, and the limitations of teaching kids from under-resourced areas how to fit into elite circles.
• Presentation voice, “home” voice, and the politics of code-switching (or not).
• Rebuilding life and family in the wake of her father’s deportation under IIRIRA.
• Managing polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), getting medical care in a fat-phobic society, and how dramatic weight loss changed the way Sydette was treated.

We’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.

This episode of NYG is brought to you by:

Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.

_WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _

Katel 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].

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.

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.

> 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.
>
> —Allison Crimmins, climate scientist

Here’s what’s in store in Episode 6 (and as always, there’s a full transcript):

First 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:

• How we stayed (and stay) focused amidst a never-ending news cycle
• Why asking for help is important
• Why being accountable to something or someone can serve as a bright north star

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.

Our 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:

• Doing good work during crap times.
• How limitations and constraints can feel frustrating but also provide opportunities to be more creative and strategic about accomplishing goals.
• Why good communication matters—and if you truly understand and believe in your work, you should know how to talk about it.
• Being seen and heard as a woman in a male-heavy field, and normalizing it so we can talk more about the actual work we’re doing.
• Cutting through the mysticism around science and STEM, and how you don’t have to be a super nerdy genius to be a scientist—you just have to be curious.
• When kids draw what they think a scientists looks like, the results will astound you! (No, they won’t, but we need to change that.)
• How bobsledding and curling might just reignite our faith in the human spirit.

Finally, 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.

This episode of NYG is brought to you by:

Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.

_WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _

_CodePen—a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. _

Katel 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?

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JL You know what else has always been super reliable for me? Our other sponsor: CodePen. CodePen is a social development environment for front-end developers and designers. 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].

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.

> 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.
> —Elizabeth Fiedler, Candidate for PA House District 184

Here’s what’s on the docket in Episode 5:

First 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.

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.
How much we need single-payer healthcare in Pennsylvania—and everywhere.
Wearing blue blazers and real pants. Like, without stretch.
How to know if you should run for office (hint: if you’re thinking about it, you probably should do it).

We love Lizz. Here’s where to get all the deets on her campaign:

• Campaign website
• Facebook
• Twitter

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:

• Pennsylvania has never sent a woman to the US Senate.
• It’s never had a woman governor.
• We currently have ZERO women elected to the US House—out of 18 representatives!
• Only 19% of the Pennsylvania Legislature is made up of women.

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.

This episode of NYG is brought to you by:

Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.

_WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _

[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].

SWB 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.

JL 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].

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.

> 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.
>
> —Alisha Ramos, founder of Girls’ Night In

Here’s what we covered (and as always, you can find the full transcript below).

Did 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:

• How great friends are also generous with their friends
• Why you have to get over the fear of rejection when trying to keep adult friendships alive
• Why loneliness is bad for your health

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:

• The magic of book clubs—especially when your new book BFFs also invite you to a potluck
• Celeste Ng’s excellent second novel, Little Fires Everywhere
• Relaxing, relaxing, and more relaxing—Alisha recommends watching The Crown and re-watching I, Tonya (and if you hate Tonya Harding, read this first).

Also in this episode:

• Thanks to a reader recommendation, Katel’s back in the fiction game with Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan.
• Did you know that Tinder for moms is a thing? (It’s called Peanut.)
• It’s reboot time in Hollywood! Still! Apparently! First up: get your blazers pressed: Murphy Brown is back, baby! Let’s hope Dan Quayle doesn’t show up to shame her again. An Overboard reboot is also coming, which we’re not feeling great about, given that the plot centers around tricking a woman with amnesia into being your wife—as a comedy!
• What the world really needs is some of that patented Sugarbaker Sass.

This episode of NYG is brought to you by:

Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about.

_WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _

Sara 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].

JL [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].

KL [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.

So 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].

SWB 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].