Podcast appearances and mentions of amy well

Amy Spurling is the Founder and CEO of Compt, helping companies build and scale flexible perks, stipends that delight teams. She explains how Compt's approach to benefits aligns with an employee's life stages, and shares insights from data that revealed the vast diversity of vendors utilized by employees. Amy talks about fundraising for Compt, highlighting the gender investment gap and the difficulties faced by female founders. She also shares her personal experiences as a lesbian founder and emphasizes the importance of a diverse workforce. She outlines Compt's mission to provide equitable compensation and foster a broader perspective within companies, the economic miss of not investing in female-founded companies, and the complexities of transitioning into different roles within a startup. Amy's leadership values of balance and belonging are explored, and she shares insights about navigating hurdles like SOC 2 and GDPR compliance. Additionally, they talk about trends in the tech industry, such as AI's use in healthcare and the potential for bias in software, along with data privacy issues. __ Compt.io (https://www.compt.io/) Follow Compt.io on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/compt/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/compthq/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ComptHQ), or Xr (https://twitter.com/ComptHQ). Follow Amy Spurling on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyspurling/) or X (https://twitter.com/amyspurling). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with us today is Amy Spurling, Founder and CEO of Compt, helping companies build and scale flexible perks, stipends that delight teams. Amy, thank you for joining. AMY: Thanks so much for having me. VICTORIA: Amy, I saw in your LinkedIn background that you have a picture of someone hiking in what looks like a very remote area. So, just to start us off today, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that. And what's your hobby there? AMY: Sure. I do spend a lot of time backpacking. That picture, I believe, was actually taken in Mongolia a couple of years ago. We spent ten days kind of hiking around in, I mean, everything is backcountry basically in Mongolia. So, spending a lot of time walking around, looking at mountains, is kind of my pastime. WILL: I have a question around backpacking itself. When you say backpacking, what does that mean? Does it mean you only have a backpack, and you're out in the mountains, and you're just enjoying life? AMY: It depends. So, in Mongolia, there were a couple of folks with camels, so carrying the heavy gear for us but still living in tents. My wife and I just did a backpacking trip in the Accursed Mountains in Albania, though, and everything was on our backpack. So, you're carrying a 35-pound pack. It has all your food, your water, your camping gear, and you just go. And you're just kind of living off the land kind of. I mean, you're taking food, so it's not like I'm foraging or hunting but living in the outback. WILL: Wow. What does that do for you just internally, just getting off the grid, enjoying nature? Because I know with tech and everything now, it's kind of hard to do that. But you've done that, I think you said, for ten days. Like, walk us through that experience a little bit. AMY: Some people use yoga, things like that, to go to a zen place, be calm, you know, help quiet their mind. For me, I need to do something active, and that's what I use this for. So getting off away from my phone, away from my laptop—those are not available to me when I'm in the mountains—and just focusing on being very present and listening to the birds, smelling the flowers. You know, pushing myself to where I'm, you know, exerting a lot of energy hiking and just kind of being is just...it's pretty fantastic. VICTORIA: And I'm curious, what brought you to decide to go to Albania to get to that experience? Because that's not a top destination for many people. But -- AMY: It is not. So, we travel a fair amount, and we backpack a fair amount. And the mountains there are honestly some of the most beautiful I've seen anywhere in the world. And so, we're always looking for, where can you get off the grid pretty quickly? Where can you be in the mountains pretty quickly in a way that still has a path so that you're not putting yourself in danger? Unless...I mean, we've done that too. But you want to make sure you have a guide, obviously, if you're going completely no path, no trail kind of camping, too. But it just looked really beautiful. We planned it actually for three years ago and had to cancel because it was May of 2020. And so, we've had this trip kind of on the books and planned for it for a while. VICTORIA: That's awesome. Yeah, I know of Albania because I had a friend who worked there for a few years. And she said the rock climbing there is amazing. And it actually has one of the last wild rivers in Europe. So, it's just a very remote, very interesting place. So, it's funny that you went there [laughs]. I was like, wait, other people also go to Albania. That's awesome. I love the outdoor space. Well, what a great perk or benefit to working to be able to take those vacations and take that time off and spend it in a way that makes you feel refreshed. Tell me more about Compt and your background. What led you to found this company? AMY: Sure. I've been in tech companies for, you know, over 20 years. I've been a CFO, a COO building other people's dreams, so coming in as a primary executive, you know, first funding round type of person, help scale the team, manage finance and HR. And I loved doing that, but I got really frustrated with the lack of tools that I needed to be able to hire people and to retain people. Because the way we compensate people has changed for the last 10, 15 years. And so, ultimately, decided to build a platform to solve my own problem and my own team's problems, and started that getting close to six years ago now. But wanted to build a tech company in a very different way as well. So, in the same way, I take time off, I want my team to take time off. So, we operate on a basis of everyone should be taking their time off. Don't check in while you're out. We'll make sure we're covered. You know, let's build a sustainable business here. And everybody should be working 40 to 45 hours a week, which is definitely not a startup culture or norm. WILL: Yeah. I love that. I was doing some research on Compt. And so, in your words, can you explain to everyone exactly what your company does? AMY: Sure. So, we build lifestyle benefit accounts for companies. And what that means...and the terminology keeps changing, so some people may call them stipends or allowances. But it's really looking at how you pull together employee perks, benefits that will help compete for talent. And right now, retention is kind of the key driver for most companies. How do I keep the people I have really happy? Competitive salaries are obviously table stakes. Health insurance for most industries is table stakes. So, it's, what else are you offering them? You can offer a grab bag of stuff, which a lot of companies try and do, but you get very low utilization. Or you can do something like a stipend or a lifestyle spending account, which is what we build, which allows for complete flexibility so that every employee can do something different. So that even if you're offering wellness, you know, what the three of us think about as wellness is likely very different. I spend a lot of money at REI, like, they are basically, like, as big as my mortgage. I spend so much money there because I want backpacking gear. Wellness for you folks may be a little bit different. And so, allowing for that personalization so everybody can do something that matters to them. VICTORIA: Right. And I love that it comes from a problem you found in your own experience of working with early-stage startups and being on the executive level and finance and building teams from the ground up. So, I'm curious, what lessons did you find in your previous roles that were maybe ten times more important when you started your own company? AMY: I learned so much through all of my prior companies and pulled in the lessons of the things that worked really well but then also the things that it was, like, wow, I would definitely do that different. DEI is very important to us. I knew building a diverse team was going to be a competitive advantage for us. And none of my prior teams really met that mark. You know, most of them were Boston-based, the usual kind of profile of a tech company: 85%-95% White guys, mostly from MIT, you know, very, very talented, but also coached and trained by the same professors for the last 20 years. So, I knew I wanted different perspectives around the table, and that was going to be really key. So, looking at non-traditional backgrounds, especially as we were looking at hiring engineers, for instance, that was really interesting to me because I knew that would be part of our competitive advantage as we started building up this platform that is employee engagement but very much a tax compliance and budgeting tool as well. VICTORIA: I love hearing that. And it's something I've heard from actually thoughtbot's founder, Chad. That is something he wished he invested more in when he first started it. So, I'm curious as to how that's played out from when you started to where you are now. You said, I think, it's been six years, right? AMY: January will be six years, so five and a half-ish, I guess, right now. I mean, it was a stated part of what we were going to do from day one. All of my prior companies wanted that as well. I don't think anybody starts out and says, "Hey, I'd really love a one-note company." No one says that. Everybody thinks that they're doing the right things and hiring the best talent. But what you do is you end up hiring from your network, which usually looks just like you. And when you get to be, you know, 100, 150 people and you're looking around going, wow, we have some gaps here, it's really hard to fill them because who wants to be the first and the only of whatever? You know, I've been the only woman on most management teams. So, for us, it was day one, make it part of the focus and make sure we're really looking for the best talent and casting a very wide net. So, right now, we're sitting at 56% female and 36% people of color, and somewhere around 18%-19% LGBTQIA. So, we're trying to make sure that we're attracting all those amazing perspectives. And they're from people from around the country, which I also think is really important when you're building a tech company. Don't just build in areas where you're in your little tech bubble. If you want to build a product that actually services everyone, you need to have other kind of cultural and country perspectives as well. VICTORIA: Yeah. And that makes perfect sense for what you described earlier for Compt, that it is supposed to be flexible to provide health benefits or wellness benefits to anyone. And there can be a lot of different definitions of that. So, it makes sense that your team reflects the people that you're building for. AMY: Exactly. WILL: Yeah. How does that work? How does Compt accomplish that? Because I know early on I was doing nonprofits and I was a decent leader. But I struggle to get outside of myself, my own bubble if that makes sense. So, like, that was before I had kids. I had no idea what it meant to have kids and just the struggles and everything if you have kids. So, there's so many different things that I've learned over the years that, like, just people have their own struggles. So, how does Compt accomplish the diversity of a company? AMY: So, it's so interesting you mentioned that. I was on a podcast the other day with somebody who was, like, "You know, we didn't really think about our benefits and how important they were." And then, the founder who was the person on the podcast, and he was like, "But then I had kids. And suddenly, I realized, and we had this amazing aha moment." I'm like, well, it's great you had the aha moment. But let's back it up and do this before the founder has children. Sometimes you need to recognize the entire team needs something different and try and support them. My frustration with the tools out there are there are tools that are like, hey, we're a DE&I platform. We will help you with that. You know, we've got a benefit for fertility. We've got a benefit for, you know, elder care. There's all kinds of benefits. These are great benefits, but they're also very, very specific in how they support an employee. And it's very small moment in time, usually. Whereas with something like Compt, where we say, "Hey, we support family," your version of family, having children is very different from my version of family, where I don't have children, but we both have families. And we can both use that stipend in a way that is meaningful for us. What puts the employee back in charge, what matters in their lives, instead of the company trying to read everyone's mind, which is honestly a no-win situation for anyone. So, it just makes it very, very broad. VICTORIA: Yes. And I've been on both sides, obviously, as an employee, but also previously role of VP of Operations. And trying to design benefits packages that are appealing, and competitive, and fair is a challenging task. So -- AMY: It's impossible. It's impossible. [laughs] VICTORIA: Very hard. And I'm curious what you found in the early stages of Compt that was surprising to you in the discovery process building the product. AMY: So, for me, I mean, discovery was I am the buyer for this product. So, I wanted this about five years before I decided to go and build it. And I was talking to other finance and HR professionals going around going, "All right, are you feeling this exact same pain that I'm feeling? Because it is getting completely insurmountable." We were all being pitched all these different platforms and products. Everybody had something they wanted to sell through HR to help attract, and engage and retain talent and all the things, right? But there's no tracking. It's not taxed correctly. And ultimately, no matter what you bring in, maybe 2% to 3% of your team would use it. So, you're spending all this time and energy in putting all this love into wanting to support your team, and then nobody uses the stuff that you bring in because it just doesn't apply to them. And so, I realized, like, my pivotal moment was, all right, none of this is working. I've been waiting five years for somebody to build it. Let's go build something that is completely vendor-agnostic. There's no vendors on this platform by design because everyone ultimately wants something different. And, you know, through that process, we were, of course, pushed by many VCs who said, "Hey, build your marketplace, build your marketplace, you know, that's going to be your moat and your special sauce." And I said, "No, no, no, that's not what we're going to do here because that doesn't solve that problem." And we finally had the data to prove it, which is fantastic. You know, we actually did a sample of 8,700 people on our platform, and we watched them for a year. And said, "How many different vendors are these 8,700 people going to use?" Because that's the marketplace we'd have to build because we have 91% employee engagement. Nobody can beat us in the industry. We've got the highest employee engagement of any platform in our category. So, how many different vendors could 8,700 people use in that time period? Do you guys have any guesses how many they used in that time period to get to that engagement? VICTORIA: Out of 8,700 vendors? AMY: No, 8,700 employees. So, how many different vendors they used in that time period. VICTORIA: Hmm, like, per employee, I could see maybe, like, 10? I don't know. Two? AMY: We saw 27,000 different vendors used across all the employees, so 27,000 different unique vendors. So, on average, every employee wants three unique vendors that no one else is using. VICTORIA: Oh wow. WILL: Wow. VICTORIA: Yeah, okay. [laughter] Right. AMY: So, it's just you can't build that, I mean, you could build that marketplace, but nobody's going to visit that marketplace because nobody wants to scroll through 27,000 things. And so, it just keeps changing. You know, and I saw that even with the woman who started the company with me, you know, when she...we, of course, use Compt internally. And she started using her wellness stipend. You know, at first, she was doing 5Ks. So, she'd register for the race. She'd go train. She'd do all the things. Then she got pregnant and had a baby and started shifting over to prenatal vitamins, to Lamaze classes, to, you know, mommy yoga, things like that. Then once she had the baby, it shifted again. And so, it allows for a company to flow with an employee's lifecycle without having to get into an employee's life stage and, "Hey, what do you need at this moment in time?" Employees can self-direct that, so it makes it easier for employees and a lot easier for companies who are not trying to...we don't want to map out every single moment of our employee's personal life. We shouldn't be involved in that. And so, this is a way to support them but also give them a little space too. WILL: I absolutely love that because that is, yes, that is a flow. Like, before you have kids, it's, like, yes, I can go run these 5Ks; I can do this. When you have kids, it totally changes. Like, okay, what can I do with my kids? So, workout, or that's my away time. So, I love that it's an ebb and flow with the person. And they can pick their own thing, like -- AMY: Right. We're all adults. WILL: Yes. [laughs] AMY: I think I sat there going; why am I dictating someone's health and wellness regimen? I am not qualified for this on any stretch. Like, why am I dictating what somebody's mental health strategy should be? That's terrifying. You're adults. You work with your professionals. We'll support it. WILL: Yes. I remember at one company I worked for; they had this gym that they had, you know, got a deal with. And I was so frustrated because I was like, that's, like, 45 minutes away from my house. AMY: [laughs] Right. WILL: It's a perk, but it means absolutely nothing to me. I can't use it. So yes, yeah. [laughs] AMY: Well, and, like, not everybody wants to work, say...there was, you know, we see a lot of that is there's been a transition over time. COVID really changed that as people couldn't go to gyms, and companies shifted to stipends. But you may not want to work out with your co-workers, and that's okay, too. Like, it's okay to want to do your own thing and be in your own space, which is where we see this kind of decline of the, you know, on-site company gym, which, you know, some people just don't want to do that. VICTORIA: Yeah. So, I love that you stayed true to this problem that you found and you backed it up with data. So, you're like, here's clear data on, say, why those VCs' advice was bad [laughs] about the marketplace. AMY: Ill-informed. They needed data to see otherwise. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, I'm curious about your experience going through fundraising and starting up for Compt with your background as a CFO and how that was for you. AMY: It was...I naively thought it would be easier for me, and maybe it was because I had all this experience raising money as a CFO in all these prior companies. But the reality is that women receive less than 2% of all funding, even though we start 50% of the businesses. And if you look at, you know, Black female founders, they're receiving, like, 0.3, 0.5% of funding. Like, it's just...it's not nice out there. You know, on average, a lot of VCs are looking at 3,000, 4,000, or 5000 different companies a year and investing in 10. And so, the odds of getting funded are very, very low, which means that you're just going to experience a whole lot of unique situations as a female founder. I saw that you folks work with LOLA, which is fantastic. I'm a huge fan of LOLA and kind of what their founders put together. And I've heard some amazing things about the pitches that she's done for VCs and that she's just not shy about what she's building. And I really appreciate that. It's never a fun situation. And it gets easier the later stages because you have more metrics, and data, and all of that. And we ultimately found phenomenal investors that I'm very, very happy to have as part of our journey. But it's definitely...it's not pretty out there is the reality. VICTORIA: Right. And I saw that you either attended or put on an event about the gender investment gap, which I think is what you just referred to there as well. So, I'm curious how that conversation went and if there were any insights about what the industry can do to promote more investment in women and people of color founders. AMY: So, that's actually coming up August 10th, and so that's coming up in a few weeks that we're going to be hosting that. I'm actually part of a small group that is spearheading some legislation in Massachusetts to help change this funding dynamic for female founders, which I'm pretty excited about. And California also has some legislation they're looking at right now. In Mass, we're looking at how fair lending laws can apply to venture capital. There are laws on the books on how capital gets distributed when you look at the banking system. But there's virtually no regulation when you look at venture funding, and there's no accountability, and there's no metrics that anybody is being held to. I don't believe that you know, just because I pitched a VC that they should be funding me, you know, it needs to be part of their thesis and all of those things. But when you see so much disparity in what is happening out there, bias is coming into play. And there needs to be something that helps level that playing field. And so, that's where legislation comes into play and helps change that dynamic. So, pretty excited about the legislation that's before both the Senate and the Mass State House, likely going to be heard this November. So, we're pretty excited about that. Mid-Roll Ad: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what's important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. WILL: So, Amy, you're talking a lot about diversity, inclusion, and just biases, and things like that. You're doing a great job with it. Your product is perfect for that because it reaches so many different levels. And I just want to ask you, why are you so passionate about it? Why is this so important to you? AMY: For me, personally, I am a lesbian founder. I am the only, you know, LGBTQ in many of my companies. And I'm always the, I mean, very frequently, the only woman in the boardroom, the only woman on the leadership team. That's not super comfortable, honestly. When you are having to fight for your place at the table, and you see things that could be done differently because you're bringing a different perspective, that, to me, is a missed opportunity for companies and for employees as well who, you know, there's amazing talent out there. If you're only looking at one flavor of talent, you're missing the opportunity to really build a world-class organization. And so, to me, it's both the personal side where I want to work with the best people. I want to work with a lot of different perspectives. I want to work with people who are bringing things to the table that I haven't thought about. But also, making sure that we're creating an environment where those people can feel comfortable as well, and so people don't feel marginalized or tokenized and have the ability to really bring their best selves to work. That's really important to me. It's a reflection of the world around us. It's bringing out the best in all of us. And so, for me, that's the environment I want to create in my own company. And it's also what I want to help companies be able to foster within their companies because I think a lot of companies really do want that. They just don't know how to go about it. They don't have actual tools to support a diverse team. You pay for things for the people you have, and then you hire more people like the people you have. We want to be a tool to help them expand that very organically and make it a lot easier to support a broader perspective of people. VICTORIA: I appreciate that. And it speaks to something you said earlier about 50% of the businesses are started by women. And so, if you're not investing in them, there's a huge market and huge potential and opportunity there that's just not -- AMY: The economic miss is in the trillions, is what's been estimated. Like, it's an absolute economic miss. I mean, you also have the statistics of what female-founded companies do. We tend to be more profitable. We tend to be more capital efficient. We tend to, you know, have better outcomes. It's just so the economics of it are there. It's just trying to get folks to understand where their biases are coming into play and funding things that may be a little outside their comfort zone. VICTORIA: Right. That's going to be a big project to undo all of that. So, each piece that works towards it to break it down, I think, is really important. And it seems like Compt is a great tool for companies to start working towards that, at least in the equity of their benefits, which is -- [laughs] AMY: Exactly. Because, I mean, if people can't use a perk, then it's inequitable compensation. And if you have inequitable compensation, you're already going down that path. You end up with wage gaps, and then you end up with promotion gaps. And all these things feed into each other. So, we're just trying to chip away at one piece of the problem. There's lots of places that this needs to be adjusted and changed over time. But we want to at least chip away at that one piece where this piece of compensation can be equitable and support everyone. WILL: Yeah, I love that. I was looking at your LinkedIn. And it looks like you've been almost, later this year, maybe six years of Compt. What was some of the early traction? Like, how was it in the early days for you? AMY: It was an interesting transition for me, going from CFO and COO over to the CEO role. That was easier in some ways than I thought it was going to be and harder in other ways. You know, on the easy side, I've already done fundraising. I understand how to write a business model, and look at financial plans, and make sure the concept is viable and all the things. But I also am not an engineer. I'm not a product designer. And so needed to make sure we immediately surrounded ourselves with the right talent and the right help to make sure that we could build the right product, pull the things out of my brain that are conceptual but definitely not product design. No one wants me touching product design. I've been barred from all codebases in this company. They don't want me touching anything, with good reason. And so, making sure that we have those right people to build and design the software in a way that functionally makes sense. VICTORIA: I think that is great that...I laughed when you said that you are barred from touching any of the code. [laughs] It's like, you're able to...I think a strong leader recognizes when other people have the expertise and makes space for them to do their best work. I also see that, at the same time, you've been a mentor with the MassChallenge group. And I'm curious if you have a most frequent piece of advice that you give to founders and people starting out building great products. AMY: The biggest piece of advice, I think, is to make sure you're taking care of yourself through this process. It's an exhausting process to build a company. And there's always way more that you should be doing every day than you can possibly get done. And if you just completely absorb yourself in it, you're going to end up burning out. So, making sure that you rest, that you still make time to exercise and to move, and that you spend time with family. All of those things, I think, are really, really important. That's been part of our core tenets. From day one, I said, "No more than 40 to 45 hours a week." It doesn't mean I'm not thinking about this business far more than 45 hours a week, but I'm not going to sit behind a computer that many hours in a week because I will burn out. And if I'm out and I'm reading something, or I'm, you know, going for a walk, I'm going to have moments of inspiration because I can actually have those creative thoughts firing when I'm not just putting out fires. And so, I think that's really, really important for founders to make sure they take that time and allow their brains to clear a little bit so that they can build more efficiently, build faster, and have really good critical reasoning skills. WILL: I love that you not only have the product to, you know, help taking time off, but you also are preaching it per se, like, take time off. Don't work more than 40-45 hours. Like, take care of yourself. So, I love that advice that you're giving is right in the message with your product. So, I love it. AMY: Thank you. I do hammer home with this team. What we build is obviously very, very important to me, but how we build this company is equally important. We spend just as much time thinking about how we're building and designing this company internally as we do about our product because they need to be a virtuous cycle between the two, quite frankly. And so, if they aren't aligned, we're going to fail. WILL: Definitely. Wow. Awesome. What does success look like for you and Compt in the next, you know, six months to a year? AMY: For us, it's really about reaching as many people as possible. So, how do we have an impact on as many lives as possible and help people be able to access this piece of their compensation? What is interesting right now is we're in a really interesting moment. The tech industry is going through...shall we call it an awakening? Where money is tighter. There's been some layoffs. You know, it's just a very different world in tech right now. And everybody's in a little bit of a holding pattern to figure out, okay, what's next? What we're seeing across our portfolio of companies is that there's a lot of industries that are, for the first time, really thinking about how do we retain folks? How do we think about hiring in a new way? So, industries like construction and manufacturing. Industries that never had employee kind of lifestyle benefits or perks they're taking a look at that because unemployment is so, so low. And so, for the first time ever, we have the ability to have an impact on groups that never had access to professional development, to wellness, to things like that. And that's really exciting because you can have such a huge, impactful moment where people have just been without for so long. And so, that's pretty exciting for us. VICTORIA: You're touching upon a topic that I've thought about before, where in the tech industry, we're used to having a lot of benefits and perks and that not every industry is the same way. So, I'm curious; you mentioned construction and some other groups that are looking to adopt more of these benefits because unemployment is so low. I'm curious, like, if there are any patterns or things that you see, like, specific industries that are more interested than others, or what's going on there? AMY: Our portfolio of tech companies are only about...they're less than 40% of our customers, actually. So, a relatively low percentage of our customers come from the tech industry. What we find is that healthcare systems this is really important. As you're thinking about how you're going to retain nursing staff, it is incredibly difficult. And so, we see a lot of movement in the healthcare space. We see a lot of movement, again, across manufacturing and construction, you know, financial services. Pretty much anybody who is struggling to hire and is worried about retaining is trying to figure out what's my strategy? How do I do this in the least expensive way possible but reach everyone? Because those employee engagement metrics are so consistently important to look at. And most platforms and things that you could be doing out there are going to give you a 2% to 3% utilization. So, it's very, very low. You know, wellness is by far the most common use case we see companies putting in place. It's good for employees. It's good for the employer. That's by far the most important or the most common. But we also see things like family, and just more of a whole well-being kind of concept as well, so beyond wellness, so allowing for that broader reach. We're also seeing industries where people are starting to age out. So, we've got five generations at work right now. There's industries where folks have historically stayed forever. You know, you've got the people who have been there 20-30 years. Well, those same industries are now sitting there going, all right, how do I get the next two generations to come in here? Because it's such an old-guard and old approach. We've got to change things up. And so, we're seeing a pretty big cultural shift happen within a lot of these more nascent industries. WILL: Yeah. I can definitely see how that would be tough going from, you know, you said five generations are currently in the workforce? AMY: Yep. WILL: I didn't even think about that. Wow. AMY: Yeah, you got a lot of different parts of the life cycle. You know, think about professional development. Professional development for a 22-year-old is very different from professional development for a 65-year-old. But both are in the workplace, and both want to keep learning. It's just what your needs are and what you need to learn. And how you want to learn is going to be very, very different. WILL: Wow. So true. I love how you're talking about your leadership and just the way you lead. I can just hear it in what you're saying. What are some of your core values that drive you every day? AMY: One of the big ones, and it probably goes back to, you know, I'm sure, birth placement, whatever. I'm an oldest child, all the things that come with being an oldest child. But fairness is a really big one for me. And so, it's thinking about how we apply that as a company, so equitable compensation falls under that. Making sure that we've got a team that is balanced and diverse is really important to me. You know, thinking, you know, our core values are balance and belonging. That runs through absolutely everything that we do and is core and central to it. Because, again, how we build this company is just as important to me as what we're building. And so, making sure that we hold true to those values is critical because we have amazing people, and they need to feel supported as well. VICTORIA: Well, that really comes through in everything that you say and that we've talked about so far today, and I really appreciate that. And I'm curious if you could go back in time to when you first started Compt and tell yourself any piece of advice or information; what would you say? AMY: That piece of advice has changed over time; I will tell you that. The one that is most recent for me is really because we're an HR tech platform, and we service, you know, an entire organization, is really thinking about how you support different industries at different moments in time, the concept of product-market fit. When you're that type of a platform, which there aren't many, there's not many platforms that sit across an entire organization, but compensation is one of them. You need to be thinking about which industries are struggling to hire, which are struggling to retain at this moment in time. And so, I don't think there's one place, like, hey, we have product-market fit, now we can scale. I think that's a misnomer for our part of the HR tech space. And so, it's constant experimentation on go-to-market strategy and constant kind of adjustment as markets ebb and flow over time. WILL: What is some of your biggest hurdles right now or even in the future that you can see coming? AMY: If I had a crystal ball, life would definitely be easier. I'd love to know when this economic cycle is going to shift and, you know when things get a little bit easier for companies. You know, HR leaders and finance leaders are not having the most fun at this moment in time. They're being tasked with making everybody happy but on very small budgets, and so they're really challenged with that. And they're really burnt out, and they're exhausted. So, I'm looking forward to a shift so when people can get back to feeling a little bit physically better. But also, it just helps navigate a market and be better able to support your employees. VICTORIA: I've been thinking about that question recently, what I would tell my past self, and I think it's mostly, like, food related. [laughter] AMY: Ooh, interesting. VICTORIA: Use better vinegars, like, invest in fancier olive oil. [laughs] AMY: So, my new luxury pro-tip is you buy a $7 bunch of eucalyptus at the grocery store, and you tie it above your shower head. I'm not kidding; you will feel like you're at a spa. It costs $7. I learned it because I was at some fancy resort. One of my investors, you know, paid for us to go to a conference that I was not paying for. And I was like, that is genius. You suddenly feel like you are in someplace fancy, and it was seven bucks. It's amazing. WILL: Yes. VICTORIA: That sounds incredible. I'm going to do that. WILL: Same. [laughter] VICTORIA: [inaudible 34:35] buy some. No, it's so good. Do you have any questions for us, Amy? AMY: Yeah. I mean, what trends are you seeing in the market right now? Like, what types of companies are being developed? Where do you see growth happening in the market? VICTORIA: That's probably a better question for me. As a managing director, I spend more time networking and going to events. And it's interesting being in San Diego. There's a big biotech startup here. So, I went to an EvoNexus Demo Day and saw the things that people were using. And there seemed to be a trend of using AI and machine learning to create better health outcomes, whether that's for predictors for which people will respond better to anti-cancer drugs, or, you know, how do we monitor the release of drugs for someone's system who's, you know, going through methadone in therapy. So, it's really interesting. I think that you know, you mentioned that there's not the same amount of money in the tech market, but I think there is still a lot of work being done to solve real problems that people have. So yeah, I'm really curious to see those types of projects and which ones are going to be successful, and how much the AI trend will really fade out. Like, clearly, in some use cases, you can see how beneficial it could be. And other times, it seems like it's kind of just like slapped on there for -- AMY: Agreed. VICTORIA: Marketing purposes, so... AMY: That's really just a database query. It's not AI. [laughs] VICTORIA: Right. [laughs] It's interesting because, you know, I just had lunch with a bunch of other CTOs in San Diego, and we were talking about AI, and some of the inherent risks of it, and the damage it can cause. And I always like to bring it back to, like, there are some people who are already harmed by these trends. And we have to work around that. Like, there is some, you know, greater supposed existential threat with AI that I think is rather unlikely. But if we think about that too much and not focus on the current harm that's being done, then that's, you know, more dangerous than the other one. AMY: Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, there's definitely, I mean, even just with facial recognition and how that's applied and what that's used for. I mean, any software that is built with people has bias. And so, whatever biases they're bringing into it is the bias that's going to exist in the software. And so, there's...we already are starting from, you know, going back to our earlier conversation, if companies are not diverse and not building for really diverse perspectives, they're inherently going to build bias software, whether or not, I mean, I don't think that's anybody's intention. But that's what's going to happen because you just didn't think about things you didn't know. VICTORIA: Right. And, of course, I'm here in Southern California. There's the strikes for the actors and writers' strike happening a few hours north of us. And they were actually, you know, for some actors, signing away their rights to their likeness. AMY: Wow. VICTORIA: And then they could make an AI image and -- AMY: Wow. You could just create an entire movie with somebody's image and dub in a voice, and suddenly you don't need actors. VICTORIA: Right. And it's, of course, more often non-White actors and models who are being replaced. And so, I think that's a very interesting trend that people may not have thought about yet. AMY: Fascinating. VICTORIA: So yeah, I mean, having people on your leadership team who are thinking about these [laughs] different types of issues, like, yeah, I think it's really important. And then also, from, like, a data privacy perspective, all the laws that are coming out and that have come out. And I think that some founders and CTOs are really struggling with how to comply and protect everyone's data that way. AMY: No. It's something we think about a lot because we have the potential to have access to a lot of employee data. We take a very minimalist approach stated, not a big data play. That's not what we're here for. That's not what we're trying to do, this mountain of data on people, and then we'll figure out how to monetize it. We want to build something a little bit different. And so using only data that needs to be used so that we can truly support people with what our actual goal and aim is, rather than having that be a secondary cause. VICTORIA: Yeah. And I wanted to ask you about that actually because you have SOC 2 and GDPR compliance. And it's a topic that I think a lot of founders know that security is important, but it can be a significant investment. So, I'm curious your trade-offs and your timing for when you went for those compliance frameworks. AMY: We went early for it. I mean, so our platform, I mean, we're integrated with payroll platforms. We're touching employee data. So, we went for it early because we knew that it was going to be important, and it's a lot easier to do it before you make a mess than it is after the fact. I've done SOC 2 compliance in two prior companies. It's not fun. It is not my most fun thing that I've ever done. Fortunately, there are geniuses out there who built platforms to make this very, very easy now. We use a platform called Vanta that is absolutely incredible, made it super easy to get SOC 2 compliant, go through our audits, do all the things, so that, at least, is a lot easier. But it was something that we needed the funding to invest in. It's not inexpensive. But we knew that it was going to be critical because people need to feel that their data is secure and that you know what you're doing, and that you're not just kind of flying by the seat of your pants. There's a lot of tech companies that operate on, we'll figure out the tax, or we'll figure out the law. We'll figure out the compliance later. And that's been a stated part of their mission. That's just not the way I'm going to operate. And that doesn't work very well when you're dealing with HR, quite frankly, or finance because we have to comply with laws. So, getting ahead of that early was part of our strategy. VICTORIA: That makes sense. Your finance background making it clear what the legal implications are. [laughs] AMY: Exactly. Like, I'm not messing around with the IRS. Nobody wants to get audited by the IRS. It's not fun. Let's just keep things tax compliant. Chances are you're not going to get audited by the IRS. But if you are a tech company, if you do want to go public, if you do want to be acquired likely from a public company, you have to have these things in order because otherwise, it's coming off your purchase price or your stock price because you've got disclosures you've got to put out there, so little hidden, nasty gotchas. And it can be a six-year lookback period. So, you're like, oh, I'll worry about it later. Six years is a long time. And if you start messing around with that, it gets very, very expensive to clean up. So, just do it right from the beginning. You know, the same way you're doing payroll correctly now, invest a little bit, and it makes it a lot easier. VICTORIA: Yeah, I agree. And I think the tooling that's out there makes it a little bit easier; at least then, you know you have the confidence that your data is protected. Especially if you're a non-technical founder, I can imagine that makes you feel better that things are the way they should be. AMY: Exactly. Somebody has looked at this thing. Somebody is making sure that it's working the way it's supposed to. You know, that definitely helps when you're a non-technical founder, or just not a tax expert, or a legal expert, you know, around these things. It's not even the technical founders that have to worry about it. Data comes in all kinds of forms. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. AMY: This has been a fantastic conversation. I've really enjoyed it. VICTORIA: Well, thank you. WILL: Same. VICTORIA: I've enjoyed it as well. I really appreciate you taking the time. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Amy Spurling.

In todays episode Amy and Brian discuss boundaries. Do you have boundaries for yourself? Are your boundaries healthy, plyable or strong. Do they help you reach your goals, are they too rigid? Are they all things good?[00:02:56] Brian: it's a great, great time to do that because of everything you just said, of course, but we're, we're just kicking off with the New Year theme too, and it's a great time right now to reevaluate your boundaries. And, and I don't mean just at a superficial level, I mean at a deep, deep level to really look at are your boundaries in line with your values and your beliefs?[00:30:10] Brian: So therefore, like if you have to shift, because we already said boundaries are pliable, boundaries can shift, boundaries can change. So is your boundary that you're moving, is it, is it a, again, helping, is it moving in a growing kind of way that's helping you grow and evolve because it's important to, to move in that direction[00:56:40] Amy: Well, and I think, yeah, you're saying the right things. Like no matter what, if you're feeling resistance or anger or frustration, that that draw of energy be willing to be honest and real with yourself. You have to look at what if, what are your habits and what are your reactions? Where did you learn these behavior from?One way to build boundaries is to understand that they are there to protect your life's values and your vision for your life,

In this episode of The Antidote, Amy and Grace connect with standup comedian, writer and actor Jordan Carlos in a live conversation from this year's New York Comedy Festival. Jordan joins Amy and Grace in a new segment called The Wellness Shot, where we give advice to our audience and listeners to help solve their real-life issues. Amy and Grace also share their bummer news of the week –  Odell Beckham Jr. was recently removed from an American Airlines flight, and an antibiotic shortage. They also share their antidotes: Broadway and a “hot girl walk.”  Do you have a favorite antidote, or need an antidote suggestion? A question for Grace and Amy, or something you loved that Amy, Grace or one of their guests has said on the podcast? Share a message with The Antidote team: https://mpr.tfaforms.net/111 or tag us on Instagram with the hashtag #ThatsMyAntidote, or leave us a message on our hotline at 833-684-3683. FULL TRANSCRIPT Amy The world is a dumpster fire. I'm Amy. Grace And I'm Grace. Amy And we want to f---ing help. Grace We're comedy writers in Los Angeles. And as a reflex to the madness on the news, we're keeping a positive but opinionated. Amy We talk about cultural moments we love. Grace Talk to people we adore.  Amy Crushes we have. Grace And self-care we stan. Amy During these trying times, we all need a show that focuses on joy. Grace This is The Antidote. Amy Pow, pow, pow. Grace Hi, everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We are back. I'm a little crazy today. We finished shooting last night at 1 a.m. and here I am in the morning and I feel good. I still haven't seen my friend. Hi, amy Amy Yay hi. And also congratulations to my friend for finishing her shoot. Like, literally, I feel like you've lived in New York for nine years. Grace I know I do too. I feel like it's been 20,000 years. I was young when I left. I'm old now. Amy But at the end of it you have a beautiful, magnificent, funny and hilarious show to show the world and hopefully we will be seeing it soon. Grace Yeah, one that my wonderful friend Amy directed two episodes of. So, so, you know, stay tuned for the Amy and Grace collabo with Michelle Buteau and other wonderful people. Amy Yes, that's right. Grace Girl, girl, did you hear about this Good Morning America thing? Amy The Good Morning America scandal is all over my timeline. My thing about the Twitter feed this past week is that I had to come in contact with two people who I did not know who they were. And now I know everything about them. And I'm talking about T.J. Holmes. Yeah. And Amy Robach. Yeah. I'm like, who are y'all? Grace Yeah, I had no idea who they were either. I mean, the T.J. Holmes guy looked a little bit more familiar to me, but I was like, oh, I've maybe seen that before. But that woman, she she looks like a copy of so many other women I've seen on tv. Amy You know, so crazy to me because both of them are married in other relationships. T.J. Holmes, a man I didn't know existed, you know, posted like a tribute to his wife, man, a year ago, like less than a year ago, posted a tribute to his wife about how I tried to make her leave and she won't leave because she's got a black superwoman energy, whatever the f---. And then literally he's out here touching a white woman's ass. And I'm like, I have to say grace. So the there's this woman on Twitter. I don't know her personally, but her handle is batty, ma'am. So that's B.A. YMCA lady. And she has, like, just a little mini thread called Men Will Embarrass You. And this week's Men Men Will Embarrass You is this man, T.J. Holmes, given this tribute to his f---ing wife? And I got to say, lady, I don't know you, but it's time to leave. Grace You got to. Amy Do you need me to show up, need me- to the window? Just lift it up. Help you down. You can Rapunzel throw out your hair and I'll just drag you. Right? Like, I don't know how we. Grace No. Amy Make you leave, but you got to go, girl. Grace It is so embarrassing. And the thing is that they weren't even trying to hide it. They were not being discreet. Nice. And they know they're on TV. I don't know what they thought. That they could just blend in like that. They were just in a bar on the street, grabbing ass, walking through there, walking through the park hand-in-hand. Like at least have the respect for your spouses that have you off again, because I guess they're both separated, right? Amy I don't know if they were. I mean, that feels like new information was like something that was like we were separated. Like, it doesn't I'm like where they. Like, we'll never know. Grace But even like you still have a marital contract, at least don't like be out in the open, go in the hotel room or whatever. You know, don't be just out in the open grabbing booties and stuff, you know. Amy And also grabbing groceries. They were like doing like daily routine things. Like they're a couple when people on TV back to normal, I'm like, y'all, you have faces. People recognize you're in like a million or so homes across America. Every morning y'all are on TV. You can't just be out here acting like you're f---ing Tam and Pam. But you know Pam, like, I don't know, like in Milwaukee who nobody's paying attention to. Like you, literally. I don't know if I would call them famous, but they are you know, they're known. Grace And that's the thing. Like you get the privilege of having millions of dollars and being famous and getting free sh-- because you are on GMA. So you have to accept what comes with that privilege, which is that people know who you are and you can't cheat out in the open. Yeah, probably any Tom, Dick and Harry or whatever. You could go to one city over and you could be acting like y'all married each other. But ya'll can. Amy Also the audacity to cheat in the morning, because that's the other thing. They're Good Morning America. And then they were out in the open in the morning and I'm like, it just was me. I was like, How do we doing out in the morning doing chores? But anyway, I do think that it reminds me of a conversation we had with Jordan. We had a lot of questions about relationships, about being far our guest that's coming up this episode, Jordan Carlos, who did our live show from Brooklyn, New York, which was a part of the New York Comedy Festival on November. BR Well, we had a few questions about relationships, so stick around to hear that in a new segment we created called The Wellness Shop. And if you're in a relationship now, hug your partner, set them free. But don't be doing this sh--. Grace Don't be embarrassed and ask the men or women. Anyway, we wouldn't need the antidote if we didn't have the bummer news. Amy Starting now, top of the hour. Bummer. News of the week. Our first topic is that athlete and you know, hottie with the body. Odell Beckham Jr has been removed from an American Airlines flight recently over, quote unquote, concerns for his health while sleeping with a blanket over his face. Those who don't know Odell Beckham Jr is a very well known wide receiver in the NFL. He catches ball. He's a free agent right now. Yes. He catches balls for a living. Well done. Great for for sports. But he's like a free agent right now, like people trying to court him because, like, you know, he's good at it. Yeah, he's very good. And it's not just because of his looks. Why am I like, oh, I don't know. Well, Beckham, Junior, what a hottie. But anyway, I only know about him because a a few comedians a few years back said some weird sh-- about him. And then part B, there used to be a billboard of him in an underwear ad on La Cienega, and I'd pass it every time I was going to work, and I was like, Who's that? So I learned about sports that day. But anyway, Odell Beckham has a tradition of draping a blanket over his face during long flights so he can sleep, according to his attorney. And this time, while asleep, the flight returned to the gate and Beckham was asked to leave the flight as he had not buckled his seatbelt at the time due to being asleep. Even after offering to buckle his seatbelt, the flight attendant said it's too late now to exit or the entire aircraft would be deplaned in the airports. Report, they claim, quote, he appeared to be coming in and out of consciousness, end quote. And we're concerned he was, quote, seriously ill, end quote, leading to the plane, returning to the gate after the aircraft was deplaned. Beckham left the plane without incident because, you know, he ig but he did tweet that quote, Never in my life have I experienced what just happened to me. I've seen it all. Grace This seems weird to me. I don't know this. I don't know how this happened. Like he was sleepy and ask somebody with a very sleepy friend, Amy, and she's talking about me. She can sleep anywhere. And there have been times where I'm like, Wake up, Amy, wake up. You got to go like, Oh, and it's not like it's sometimes it just doesn't happen. Some people sleep hard and it doesn't feel like a flight attendant would have never seen that before. And then once he said he would buckle a seatbelt, like, you're going to have to deplane everybody. He was nice because I'd be like, literally, you woke me up to buckle my seatbelt and I'm doing it. So like, why can't I go see a Black man? Amy He had to be nice. Like, that's the thing that makes me upset and that's what it's like. He couldn't be like, what? For too long? It's like he's a famous black man and knows it, and he's like, I got to get off this plane. Like, you can't raise a stink. Grace Yeah, it's weird. I have this story. Something seems off. I and I feel bad because I'm sure that was so embarrassing, you know? And then it becomes a whole news story. And, yes, he should have buckled the seatbelt. Yes. But when he offers to buckle it, they should have just let the plane go without incident. Like what was getting him off the flight? Like it wasn't going to delay it more or less. Like you could have just let him stay. So. Boo American Airlines once again. Amy Oh, my God. They're the same airline that f---ed up my luggage and wouldn't replace it. So, American Airlines, you're on notice. I know that's not the only bit of bummer news this week. The other thing that I read about is that RSV, you know, that respiratory syncytial virus. I don't even know how to say that middle word. That's why we abbreviating it. RSV, a virus particularly common among children, is on the rise and may be resulting in an antibiotics shortage. So I read that amoxicillin, one of the most common antibiotics for children, is facing a shortage because despite RSV being a viral infection, amoxicillin is often prescribed as secondary protection for underlying bacterial infections that arise during having RSV. So a doctor in USA Today said quote, For example, in addition to RSV, a child may also have developed an ear infection or pneumonia which could be treated with amoxicillin. And in most people, RSV just causes mild cold like symptoms. But in children, the elderly, in immunocompromised it can be very severe. So now that we're back into a flu season, now that we're back into a COVID surge, our issues are back to being near capacity and we are having a problem with this. So for me, I'm like, the reason this is a bummer to me is like of all the COVID shortages, we had toilet paper that was out, we had restaurant menus, they digital now. We didn't have hand sanitizer. This one really matters. Like, can we figure out how to get the kids their drugs?   Grace I really hope that Congress, useless congress tries to step in and do something.   Amy I feel you because it reminds you of the baby formula shortage that we talked about a few months back on another episode where it was just kind of like, Wait, we really out here? Just be like, babies, y'all good? Like we have to. The future of the country.   Grace I like that. Some say they're more important than the rest of us. You know, first of all, we already ruined the planet for them. We've already like we don't have a good planet to give them the you know, we flooded their schools with guns, so they now have to to go to school and be like father like I make at home today. So at the very least, can we just get the baby some antibiotics, whatever they need to do? Because, you know, there's nothing fatter than like a sick baby, you know?   Amy Yeah, well, I don't know how science works, but I'm thinking about these babies.   Grace Okay, let's get into this antidote, though.   Amy So this is a segment where we tell you about the culture we consumed and things we did this week that made us feel better about the bummer news. What was your antidote this week, Grace?   Grace Broadway, baby.   Amy Oh, hello. Yes. Hello, my darlin. Hello, my baby. Hello. my honey.   Grace Child, so in my previous life, I was a theater actor. So there is just something uniquely beautiful about going to see live theater. And I just I've been in L.A. for a while, and I'm sure there's great productions in Los Angeles as well. People keep telling me, but when you've had Broadway, you know, it's really hard to even imagine going to see live theater anywhere else. So I lived in New York for a very, very long time, and I actually was supposed to go to Mexico over the Thanksgiving holiday. I don't know what I was thinking, like thinking that I, in the middle of production would go to Mexico. Wait, why? Yeah, I was going to go there for the long weekend, so I decided to cancel that trip, and instead I decided to go see two Broadway shows because I've been so busy at work that I haven't gotten a chance to see a lot of Broadway. So I saw Death of a Salesman.   Amy Oh, nice.   Grace Which is like Black Death of a Salesman. Which is like it should be black because it's such a black story. And Wendell Pierce, he was in like, oh, right above. Like, you know, there is a little bit of a little hiccup, Eddie. And it was so fun because they were smoking on stage. And then the fire alarm went off and they stopped and that it was just like, ooh, peek behind the fourth wall. And there's just like had to get off stage of the they it took about 15 minutes to resolve and then they came back wow. And they started the scene all over again like f---ing pros that they are. But yeah.   Amy They started the scene all over. That's great. And then they just weren't smoking.   Grace Yeah. Yeah. And so it was him. It was Sharon Clark who was also incredible, who played his wife. Then there's a guy named Chris Davis who played Biff and McKinley Belcher as happy. And I cannot forget Andre de Shields was in it as well, who is just a magician? Yes.   Amy And he was The Wiz in The Wiz. Holy sh--.   Grace He was the Wiz in the Wiz.    Amy Oh, I knew. I knew that face.   Grace It was incredible. And like, I wept because I thought about all the black men that were alive back then and the lack of opportunity that they had. So it really hit different when you see a black man going to like this white guy to like beg for a job and that he just couldn't make it work with his family. And I know Arthur Miller wrote it, but it was just it just really hit when you think about our ancestors and what they'd been through. Come on. And so and it was just like such a cathartic weeping. And I was just like, thank you for your sacrifice so that this generation could have what they have. So that was the Friday after Thanksgiving and then the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I saw a show called Six.   Amy Oh, my gosh. Tell me about six.   Grace So Six is about Henry the eighth's six different wives.   Amy Oh, that's cool.   Grace So it's like a concert almost. Mm hmm. So basically, the premise of the show is they're just like, who had it worse? Like a six women. So.   Amy Girl, girl, girl. You all had it pretty sh---y.   Grace Yeah, you all had a pretty sh---y cause that guy was that great. So they each get their own song, and all of them just had incredible voices, but in different ways, and they were just singing down.   Amy It's coming to L.A. just so you know. Six is coming to L.A..   Grace I mean, I would see it again. It was so fun. And then it was also short. It was like 80 minutes, no intermission.   Amy Oh, cute. I like it quick.   Grace Yeah, I like it quick. I'm a half hours high, bitch, you know what I'm saying? And they were just so good. Like, you know, you sometimes you got to go to Broadway to hear real ass voices, you know, like there are singers like Beyonce, say, Adele and like Jasmine Sullivan. You know, we have yes, we have girls that can sing them down. Yeah, but.   Amy Broadway is a different type of vocality.   Grace Yeah. Yeah. But it's genuinely great to see it and to know that it was live and they were just incredible. So that was my antidote. Broadway, baby. So what was your antidote this week, Amy?   Amy Well, you know, a few weeks back, we had a guest on a show named Ashley Blaine Feathers and Jenkins. And I literally have been thinking about the fact that she said you should go on a hot girl, walk for weeks. And I love to walk. I love to walk around my neighborhood. I love to take a stroll. I love to take an urban hike. Urban hike means you're walking through the city.   Grace Yes. She doesn't like a regular hike.   Amy And that's my sh--. I don't like a real hike. Grace knows this. I will do a hike, but I won't repeat a hike. And so this week, like, I've been traveling so much, I'm so tired, I'm still jetlagged from going to India. And so I decided that I was going to walk every day for exercise. And that fell apart real quick because I said, haha you thought and it started raining every morning and so I couldn't walk. But before the day it rains I went for a hiker walk. And the reason why this walk was a hardcore walk to me is because I made a point to walk with a smile on my face, which is really silly. But I was like, I've like really I've been so stressed. And I was like, the corners of my mouth are hurting. Like there was a day where I was like, What's wrong with the corner of my mouth? And I realized I'm actually frowning and I'm like, Oh, f--- this. This is how you get wrinkles. And B, I just think it's stress. It's just like exhaustion and stress and travel and all the things. So I went on this walk and I was like, I'm going to take this walking, I'm gonna smile. And I was listening to this woo woo book while I was walking and just smiling while I'm on my on my little stroll. And I walked all the way up to my viewpoint. There was like a beautiful view above my neighborhood where you can just see, like, west l.a. Like, spread out before your eyes. And I walked all the way up there, and there were some men up there who were, like, just, like, chillin, like, because there's also, like, a sports area. So maybe they're about to play some sports. BELL But at any rate, I stopped up there and I was like, I happen to be a hetero female who's attracted to men. So I saw these men and they were good looking and I was like, Here I am with my little smile on my face up here being a hot girl. And I was like, I didn't interact with them. I was like, they could be, you know, terrible. So I was like, I'm not going to interact with them, but I at least got to just, like, be cute and walk past them like athletic men and then continue on the walk. And I was like, this was a hot girl walk. So I started my day. That day feels so good. And I did the silliest thing. I sent like a video of one of my friends being like, I'm going to walk every day this week. I felt so good. And then the next morning it rains. And I think on video being like, I am walking today, bitch.   Grace How come you didn't send me that video? Who's this bitch? Just sell it. Send a video. That's what I'm saying. Just cause I'm gone. Just because I'm in New York City. This is the reason why I got to get back to L.A.. All my friends are forgetting me that.   Amy I'm like, I can't-   Grace My phone still works. So why.   Amy I can't bother Grace, she's on set. I can't just send her this video of me being like, I love walks. She would have been like bitch I've been up since 3 a.m.   Grace Yes, I would love to get that video. Brighten my day for you that I'd be an antidote. So that's what you did.   Amy Yes. Well, if you guys tried any of our antidotes at home, share them with us using the hashtag. That's my antidote. Or leave us a voicemail at 8336, 8436, eight three. Stay tuned. You'll hear more from our live show right after this break.   Grace Our guest today ain't new to this comedy. You know, he is a stand up comedian and actor who just finished costarring and writing on the first season of Freeform's. Everything's Trash with Phoebe Robinson. He co-hosts WNYC Adulting podcast with our friend in Queens, Michelle Buteau. He has also written for HBO Divorce, written and performed for Comedy Central's The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore and Recipes First Wives Club. Please welcome the amazing Jordan Carlos.   Jordan Carlos Good knees, good knees. That's what it's all about. And I feel sorry for the people standing in the back.   Amy No, don't apologize.   Jordan Carlos All right. How's it going? Brooklyn. How we doing? Yeah, I'd like to. I'd like to applaud the people that came early over here. Look at this man. It's modest, but so smug. So smug. Got the good seats. Got the good. Good. Hello, love. Gosh, it's just so good to be here. Surrounded by this black excellence on stage.   Grace I hope you're including yourself upon that number that.   Amy She worked with Jordan this week. He's being very humble. He is an amazing actor and so, so funny. And I got to direct him this week. And I got to tell you, I was a tyrant and he handled it well.   Jordan Carlos Yeah, yeah. What have you. What if I said you were she was in one of those, like, elevated seats, right? Like with a crane. But you were you.   Grace She does like to beat people.   Jordan Carlos She was in this really like, official jumpsuit. You are the official ass jump director. She's like, is she directing Apocalypse Now? Like what?   Amy That is right. I need people to know that I came to work.   Jordan Carlos Work it, but you were great. And I was like, there was one little small scene. Hey, everybody, welcome. You know, if you don't know anything about Hollywood, this is how it works. This is how it works. So you have to be an actor has to be directed, right, to do what they're supposed to do, my dumb ass. I didn't get out of the way. Right? I was like, you're like talking. You say your line and you walk the f--- off. Got it. But I just stayed in the studio, you know?   Amy I can see you. That was. That was my fault. That was my.   Jordan Carlos You know what? It's no one's fault.   Amy You're right. It's Hollywood. It's Hollywood.   Jordan Carlos It's Hollywood. Yeah, well, I had to be here.   Amy Yeah. Thank you so much for coming. It means so much to us. And we're both jointly obsessed with you, as are a lot of people in this audience.   Jordan Carlos So that's very sweet.   Amy Yes. You are the co-host of WNYC, his podcast Adulting, where you provide real life advice. And the quote reads with a heaping portion of hilarity topped with a dollop of truth.   Jordan Carlos Who wrote that.   Amy Yes. I mean, I assume it was you.   Jordan Carlos I swear to God I did not write that.   Amy Okay. Well, Michelle,.   Jordan Carlos In a showing of earnestness. And just like a missed. Misting of your heart.   Amy Yeah, well, as the audience entered tonight, we asked them to write down some questions that the three of us will give real life advice to help solve.   Grace Yeah.   Jordan Carlos I am not an expert. I do love how this guy's arms crossed when you're in the front row and non-verbal. F--- you to start the whole thing. And don't blame me. Don't say it's cold.   Amy No, we read the energy.   Jordan Carlos I do. This guy has Roman emperor energy.   Amy We got to work harder to win your love. don't worry.   Jordan Carlos Come and just relax. So everybody just open up your butthole. We're going to.   Amy Everyone release the anus, and let's just answer a couple of what we got. So first up, first up, and if you some people ask these questions, it might be out getting a drink. But if you are here and this is your question, just give us a little cheer. This first one is I was just offered my dream job in L.A., but my partner doesn't want to leave Brooklyn. Oh. How do you find balance between sacrificing and settling?   Grace Leave him.   Jordan Carlos Wow.   Amy Settling.   Grace Leave him. Drop him off leave him.   Jordan Carlos If you have your dream job. I don't know how how long you've been going out with this person, but if you have your dream job, you will work it out with that person. If relationships are all about like, you know, I've been married for 15 years and if you're married 15. Yeah, I know. Impressive. Impressive.   Amy Wow. Wow, it is 15. Yeah.    Grace Came out the womb married.   Jordan Carlos Came out, in some cultures, that's what we do. Yeah. I think what it is all about, what it's all about is, like, just kind of like figuring out that you want to be in it and you want to be in it every day and not leaving it to chance. Then you will remain in it. If this person like lets you go, not lets you go, go do your thing. Yeah. And see where the chips fall. But make sure that you keep a line and a tethered to that person and make sure that they're a part of it and make sure that you're honest with them about what's going on. You if you like it, if you don't, if you regret it, if not, if you want to stay in it. If you don't, you know what I'm saying? Like you might go out there and figure out that your dream job wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Oh, it's time to come back. Oh, no. But you know who will be in your corner every step of the way? Brooklyn boy. Also, you didn't talk about the dark side of the f---ing person that.   Grace That is something that you do need to know.   Amy She did say settling. So it makes me think that the D is medium to small.   Jordan Carlos Is it is it shmedium? Is it like a short medium?   Grace I'm sorry, I, I mean, my resting advice is I was like, leave you. Yeah. No, but I mean, I do think it's like, first of all, you do need to know, like, how long, like, they've been together and like how deep you are in. And there are some bitches that are career bitches like myself, and there are some girls that, you know, prioritize love and relationships. And you just have to be honest about which type of girl you are, you know.   Jordan Carlos Truly truly.   Amy Yeah, that's really good advice.   Jordan Carlos I know what kind of girl I am and.   Grace I'd like to hear it.   Jordan Carlos It's like we're going to. I'm like, if I can make it happen and split myself in half, I will do it because it's worth it. Yeah. Because I feel like it's just Jordan. Cause I'm just saying. I'm just saying you. You may be remembered on this planet for the things that you do and and and make your mark artistically, creatively, in business. But if you have a love that that respect, you hold on to God.   Amy Did you write From scratch on Netflix? That is beautiful.   Grace Convict me, Jordan.   Amy That is beautiful. Wait, I got to move on to the next question. You want the next question? Yes. So question and again, give a little woo. If it's your question, I want to expand my circle and become one of those people who can get dropped into a party and befriend anyone. But it's not really in my nature. Hashtag introvert. What should I do?   Grace Oh.   Jordan Carlos The extroverted introvert?   Amy That's me. You. I'm an introvert.   Jordan Carlos You're an introvert?   Amy I'm. I'm such people would never guess because I'm like, loud and talkative. But when I get home types, how we're off. Yeah, like, I get home and I just like, right. I literally am a secret introvert. I'm such an introvert. When the pandemic, when everything shut down, I was like, This is nice. I don't have to go anywhere. I was fine. I was like, I like it in here.   Grace I was just.   Jordan Carlos Like, if that is your if that's your jam, you need to host more parties.   Amy Yeah. Oh, you're the middle of the party. If it's your party.   Jordan Carlos To be the host or, you know, better be The Great Gatsby. Have the party. Don't show up.   Grace You will be remembered forever. Very, very good advice.   Amy Yes. Okay. Next question. I'm going to do four because these are good. This one I love the most. Give a little woot if it's yours. I need money, but I don't like working.   Grace Gets you somebody rich to marry one.   Jordan Carlos That's the end of it. I need money, but they don't like their wellness shot.   Amy What's the thing that makes them feel better?   Jordan Carlos I need money, but I don't like working. That's. That sounds like the beginning of a beautiful traps to focus on, like working and.   Grace Get some rich, rich rich.   Amy Do you agree with Grace? Just get someone rich. Is that the answer.   Jordan Carlos I would say get someone rich or understand how to manipulate the market.   Grace Or be like a Fyre Festival person.   Amy Oh yes.   Grace Start a scam. Scam somebody.   Amy But scamming is work.   Grace It is work it.   Amy That guy who started we work. What a scam. But he was working. Yeah. He had to take meetings and get investors. Scamming is work.   Grace It means you have to send out like lots of emails about being a price or something.   Jordan Carlos Mostly it's just like the laws that keep scammers back. Same, whatever. Right.   Grace Yeah. So it feels like just get a rich boo.   Amy I think that might be the answer. If you like money and don't like working, get a rich bill. Yeah.   Jordan Carlos I can't. I really can't help you there because this face, I got to work, you know?   Grace No. And a very handsome face.   Amy Everyone is someone's cup of tea. You just haven't found the rich woman.   Jordan Carlos You sound like my mom. Like the African proverb. There is a lid for every pot.   Amy The lion. The lion cares for the antelope. Okay. All right. Last question for you guys. Okay. Oh, this. Oh. How do you deal with the loneliness that comes with your friends all being in relationships? Oh, wow. These are deep guys. I love these questions.   Jordan Carlos Damn. Damn. How do you deal with the loneliness that comes from your friends all being in relationships? Good question. Great question.   Amy Oh, my God.   Jordan Carlos On a long enough timeline, those relationships will end. And.   Amy Rooting for the failure.   Jordan Carlos No, I'm just. I'm.   Grace Well, 50% of marriages do end in divorce.   Jordan Carlos The other 50 percent end in death. Now. I think this like, you know, those rom coms where it's like somebody tries to stop a wedding, like they're like, I got to stop this. It's like trying to stop a bus with your face. Like, don't do it. Don't stop Americans. Marriage will stop by itself. Okay? I've seen it happen way too many times. I've seen it happen way too many times. Right? Yes. I feel like this like like do not become discouraged by that. You know, let your friends live their life. Yeah. They're going they're out doing what they're doing. You should be doing what you're like, what you're doing. Do the things that they can't.   Amy Oh, make them jel, jel.   Jordan Carlos Make them jealous. Go to a bar, you know, go to a rock climbing thing in like five in the afternoon.   Amy Yeah. I'm saying you're like, I took a nap in the middle of the day because I don't have kids.   Jordan Carlos Mean we see everything on Netflix like you're in a relationship, you have to like. Check with the person that yeah.   Jordan Carlos I watch the show so now. White Lotus was supposed to be ours and.   Amy Relish the fact that you're single. It's better out there.   Jordan Carlos Enjoy it.   Grace Well, I would say that I think that it's not.   Jordan Carlos It's all, it's all. You know what I feel like it's grass is greener on the other side. It's all about what you know. It is hard to be single. Of course.   Amy Of course. Of course. Yeah, I.   Jordan Carlos Sharing all you know, sharing everything. Sharing all the coffee, sharing all the coffee.   Amy Sharing the toilet.   Jordan Carlos Sharing the toilet, sharing the goddamn toothpaste. You know, all that and. All. This other. What's wrong with sharing toothpaste?   Amy I thought you said toothpicks. I'm so sorry. I was.   Grace That would be f---ing nasty.   Jordan Carlos Well, who has toothpicks in their house? What in the Tony Soprano's, it's. It's got to be stuff in the house.   Amy No grass is always greener.   Jordan Carlos But grass is always greener. But you know what? If you like to. If you like. Yeah. And you enjoy your own company. Yeah. As you said, Amy, I enjoy my own company. Lord, when my kids and my wife are out the house, I'm like, I'm single. I'm like Tom Cruise in that movie, like gang, gang, gang, gang. Oh, my God. My hips are so good. All right, so.   Grace The hips don't lie.   Jordan Carlos The hips don't lie. That's a lot of yoga you want to talk about your. And it. My antidote. My antidote is yoga. Wow. Yes, that's right. My wife doing it so much, I was like, I want to live a long time, too. So I got to open. Gentleman.   Amy Men die sooner.   Jordan Carlos Your hips are not open, sir.   Amy Open them up.   Jordan Carlos This guy is forward, like he;s taking a sh--.   Amy Right there.   Jordan Carlos You were totally dragged here, weren't you? Well, whose. Whose idea was it? It was her idea. Na na na na. Yeah, that's right. Know. He's like, if I endure this, maybe they will be sexy.   Amy There will be, there will be. There will be. Yeah, there will be. Guys, guys.   Jordan Carlos I know too much.   Amy This this has been an amazing wellness session from Jordan Carlos. The one. The only the me champagne.   Grace Yeah. Thank you so much, Jordan.   Jordan Carlos Amazing. Goodbye.   Amy Bye, Jordan. Thank you.   Grace Thanks for listening to The Antidote. We hope this injected a little bit of joy into your week. I know it did mine. How about you, Amy?   Amy I feel good, girl. We should do this again sometime. Oh, we'll be here next week.   Grace And in the meantime, if you'd like to follow us on social, follow me. Grace. At Gracyact. That's G-R-A-C-Y-A-C-T.    Amy And follow me. Amy at AmyAniobi. That's A-M-Y-A-N-I-O-B-I and follow the show at theeantidotepod.   Grace That's thee with two E's.   Amy If you like feeling good about yourself, please subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.   Grace Goodbye.   Amy And when in doubt, do it live. The Antidote is hosted by us Amy Aniobi and Grace Edwards. The show's production team includes senior producer Se'era Spragley Ricks and associate producer Jess Penzetta.   Grace Our executive producer is Erica Kraus and our editor is Erika Janik. Sound Mixing by Alex Simpson.   Amy Digital Production by Mijoe Sahiouni. Talent Booking by Marianne Ways. Our theme music was composed and produced by TT The Artist and Cosmo the true.   Grace APM Studio executives in charge are Chandra Kavati, Alex Schaffert and Joanne Griffith. Concept created by Amy Aniobi and Grace Edwards.   Amy Send us your antidotes at Antidoteshow.org, and remember to follow us on social media at theeantidotepod.   Grace The Antidote is the production of American Public Media.   Amy Woot woot.

In This Episode: Amy Mariaskin, PhD shares her new book, Thriving in relationships when you have ocd What is Family accommodation and how does it apply to ocd Ocd family accommodation vs family support,  What is OCD reassurance and how it can creep into one's relationship Relationship ocd, also known as rOCD Relationship issues with ocd and how to manage them Sexual orientation OCD, Gender related OCD, and Harm OCD and the impact this has on relationships Attachment styles in ocd and how to understand them to help you navigate communication.  Links To Things I Talk About: Thriving in Relationships When You Have OCD: How to Keep Obsessions and Compulsions from Sabotaging Love, Friendship, and Family Connections Amy's Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ocdnashville/?hl=en ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor:This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more. Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety...If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION This Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 312.  Welcome back, everybody. This is going to be a really important episode for you to listen to. Today, we have the amazing Dr. Amy Mariaskin, who is what I consider to be a very dear friend, someone I very much respect. She has written a book about relationships and OCD, and we talk all about it. We go deep into some of the core skills and discussions she has in her upcoming book. And this is just going to be an episode I really feel like you could take away and put some skills together right away. I'm so thrilled. So, thank you, Amy, for coming on this show.  But before we do that, I would like to do the review of the week, and I really hope you listen carefully to this. Not because it's reviewing the podcast, but because I actually think the person who wrote this, who put in this review, is following some key points that I want you to consider. And this is what I encourage a lot of people to do. So, let's go.  This is from Detroitreview and they said: “Thank you, I just started listening today after having a few weeks of anxiety and irregular thoughts that I never experienced. I randomly chose your podcast and am thankful for your experience, knowledge and personal and situations. As a 46-year-old father of two boys and loving wife, your podcast gives me a sense of calming. I'm taking notes on each cast.” Guys, I encourage you to do this. This is a free resource. It is jam packed full of skills. I encourage you to take notes. So, I love that you're doing that Detroitreview. “While I started with the most recent, I have listened to #301/302/303.” And then they went on to say: “And they've already given me strategies that I'm using. I decided to start from your first podcast in 2016.” And that is what I encourage you all to do, mainly because those first 11 episodes are core content. I want you to take the content I talk with my patients about all the time. He went on to say, “I have been so impressed. I've listened to 1-2 daily. I'm up to 10 and 11. There's so many things to listen to and I'm so grateful for you. The meditations are amazing. Keep up the great work.” Thank you so much for that review, Detroitreview. That is exactly my intention. This is a free resource, you guys. I want you to take advantage of the skills and tools so that you can have a toolkit for yourself. And so, I'm so thrilled for that review. It just makes me feel like, yes, that's exactly what I want you guys to take from this podcast. Okay, before we get over to the show, let's talk about the “I did a hard thing” segment. This one is from Kelly, and they said: “I recently faced one of my biggest fears – general anesthesia.” Holy moly, Kelly, I feel you on so many levels with this. “I started struggling with some gallbladder issues and was told I needed to have it removed. I was terrified, and I didn't think I could go through with it. Thoughts were racing out of control. I sought help with therapy and your podcast. Thoughts are thoughts and not facts was huge for me. It was calm the day of the surgery, and I did it. Thank you.” That is amazing. You guys, listen, thoughts are thoughts. Just because you have them doesn't mean they're facts. I love that they're bringing in that key concept as well.  Alright, let's go over to the show. This is the amazing Dr. Amy Mariaskin. She's an OCD therapist. She's an advocate. She's an author of an upcoming book. You must go and check it out. I'll leave the link in the show notes. I am so, so honored to have you on the show, Amy. Let's get over to the episode. Kimberley: Welcome, Amy Mariaskin. I am so excited for this episode today. Can you do a little introduction of who you are and all the good things about you? Amy: Yes. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. I'm Dr. Amy Mariaskin. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and owner and director of the Nashville OCD and Anxiety Treatment Center in Brentwood, Tennessee. I've been working with OCD and anxiety for over 15 years now, and I just absolutely love it. Kimberley: And you wrote a book? Amy: And I wrote a book. I know I need to get better about that. I was like, “Oh, do I say it now or do I say it later?” Kimberley: You say it all the way. Amy: All the time. I wrote a book. It was fun and not fun and everything in between. And I think we'll be talking quite a bit about it. It's called Thriving in Relationships When You Have OCD. Kimberley: Right. Now, when you told me that you were going to write this book, I was so excited because I feel like at the crux of everything we do, a lot of the time, the reason people with OCD want to get better or the thing that propels them is how much their OCD impacts relationships. Not always, but I feel like that's such a huge piece of the work. So, I am so grateful for you for writing this book, and it is an amazing book. I've read it myself. You did a beautiful job. And I want to cover some of the main pieces that you cover in your book today and go from there. So, first of all, congratulations. I know writing a book is not easy. Amy: Thank you. Yeah, it's been a dream for a long time. So, I'm excited about the accomplishment and I'm ready to figure out the next topic. When Ocd Is The Third Wheel Kimberley: Yeah. I love it. I love it. Okay. So, Chapter 1, I think it's funny. I'll have to tell you how, when I was reading your book, I was lucky enough to get an early manuscript. I remember sitting, it was with my kids at track and they were running. And I opened the book and the first chapter said, “The Third Wheel: Understanding OCD's Role in Relationships.” And I was like, “That's exactly it.” So, I was excited right off the bat. Tell me, what do you mean by the third wheel? Tell me a little bit about that. Amy: Yeah. First, I should also thank you for writing the wonderful foreword for the book. So, if anybody is a fan of Kimberley, yet another reason that you might be interested in this book. Well, let me think. So, yeah, the third wheel analogy, it felt very apt because when I work with couples, I often imagine, and sometimes I'll have couples imagine that the OCD is like this other presence in the room sitting there with us. Not physically, but in all the things that are important for relationships, all the ways that we develop intimacy, and that we even structure our time or the activities we choose to do together that OCD can wiggle right in there and can be this like third presence. And the thing is, it's really easy, I think, for somebody without OCD if they don't have good education or they don't understand it, to get that third wheel confused with the person with OCD itself. So, like, “Well, you never want to go out,” as opposed to saying, “We both want to go out.” And here's this other guy, OCD, really bossy, really pushy, really oppressive, who's also coming along with us. And even when you do the things that you love, OCD can come along.  So, it felt to me like this sense of something in the relationship that makes it both unbalanced and is this separate component and that both people, in coming together, have to find creative ways to connect around it or eventually connect and evict it more and more. And so, that's why I chose that metaphor. Kimberley: Yeah, I love that. And it's funny because I remember when I was an intern and I was seeing a family or perhaps the wife who had OCD, what was interesting is I'm sitting in my chair and I noticed that the family members always sat across from her as if it was like her versus them, like who's on which side of the team. And a big part of it was like, all you guys need to be over on that side of the room. You're the team. I'll be over here with OCD and we'll work this out. But I think that that, even metaphorically, is such an important part of how OCD can turn everyone against each other. Is that how you've experienced it? Amy: Yeah, I think at times there are a lot of conversations about how everybody has a common goal to figure out how to live with one another, develop intimacy, connections, be they friendships, parenting relationships, romantic relationships, even work relationships, and things like that, how to form those and how to come together around common goals. And sometimes OCD can be, again, confused as a goal that one person in the relationship has. And the truth is, everybody's suffering in a way, and that everybody can be a part of that process of, again, reducing symptoms or evicting it, things like that.  I do the thing as well when I have people in my office to just look at where are they sitting or when OCD comes up, what is the body language? Are both people really like arms crossed? Is the person with OCD hanging their head in shame, which we know could be such a powerful emotion and such an inhibitor of connection and vulnerability. So, I look for some of those and I remind them, “Head up, we're all talking to OCD right now, and we're all working with that, and we're all on the same team.”  Family Accommodation & Ocd Kimberley: Such an important message. Thank you for that. I think that's beautiful. So, let's say the third wheel, I always think of like you go on a date and the third wheel shows up. And we know that definitely happens with OCD. You addressed a lot in your book about family accommodation. Can you share what that means and how that can impact a relationship? Amy: Yeah, absolutely. Accommodation is this thing where we're extending this metaphor. You're on a date, you're with somebody, and the third wheel rolls on up. It's, “Hey, my buddy from college is here, what's up?” Essentially, accommodation is like, “Hey, why don't you have a seat right here? Here's the menu, here's a place mat.” It is anything that the person in the relationship without OCD is doing to make OCD have a comfortable place at the table. So, that's the metaphorical way. That's abstract, but bringing it down to practically what it looks like, it means doing things generally in the service of what feels comfortable in the moment for the person with OCD. We're going on a trip and I have concerns about contamination and I really want you to check all the hotels, do all this research to make sure that none of these places have ever had bedbugs or things like that. Then when we get there, we're dirty from traveling, so I'm going to need you to take a shower. And so, the person, the spouse is taking showers and doing research and perhaps taking over responsibilities from the person with the OCD in order to provide that short-term relief. But it ends up, again, making a place for OCD in the relationship. And it reduces that motivation for the person with OCD to change.  Family Accommodation is tricky. There are a lot of ways that it can happen. I think reassurance-seeking is certainly one that I think we'll talk about, but providing excessive reassurance about things to the person with OCD in a way to keep them comfortable but keep them caught up in compulsions. And I think it's important to note that a lot of times, partners will hear about accommodation. And just as much as we think being apprised of accommodation and looking out for it is important, it's also, I think, really important that partners understand that that's nuanced and that they don't take it to like, “Well, I'm not going to do that for you. That might be accommodation,” or, “I'm not going to reassure you about anything,” or “Is that your OCD?” I guess I say that to say that it's a little tricky, but it's really anything that is preventing the person with OCD from experiencing discomfort and thereby strengthening the cycle. Kimberley: Right. No, I'm grateful that you bring that up actually, because probably the one that I get asked the most from parents, and this not in every relationship, but with parents, is like, okay, my child is having a really hard time getting homework done, their OCD is impacting them. So, if I don't help accommodate them, if I don't do some compulsions for them, read for them or so forth, they won't do their homework. And then there's an additional consequence. So, they'll say like, “I feel like that's too risky. I could actually be letting my kid fall behind, so I can't stop doing this accommodation.” What are your thoughts on that? Again, how would you approach that type of situation? I mean, there's many examples. Amy: Sure. I think with a situation like that, first, I would validate the parents' love and desire for their child to do as well as possible. Most accommodation is coming from a place of love and not a deliberate enabling or anything like that. Of course not. So, I really provide a lot of validation there. And then I help them reframe it as, “One way to be loving and supportive in the long run is to really cheer your child on in taking over, taking on more and more ownership of that.” So, does that mean, “I know that I've been reading. Right now, I've been reading for you, and that makes it easier to do your homework. We also know that you have OCD and we know that your brain tells you, you've got to reread and reread and reread. So, can we be on the same team together, fight that rereading? I'm not going to read it for you because I love you, because I know you can do this. Boy, is it going to be hard at first and I'm going to be there to cheer you on and motivate you.” I sit with kids, I'm always about gamifying it. “Do we want to just race through this? We don't have to be perfect.” Again, it depends on the symptoms, if it's perfectionism or what's getting in the way.  And then what I say is, if a parent says, “Well, then they're really just not going to get their schoolwork done,” sometimes then I'll say, “Well, if it gets to the point where it is interfering with things like that, then it may be that they need a little bit more support.” Because it's like, with kids, your job is school and with the adults, your job can be a job or it can be care taking. It can be a lot of different things. But if one of those major domains of living is affected, then it may just mean that you need more support. So, we might up the number of sessions per week or refer out to another program or things like that.  But those kinds of things would be the same things I would say in any kind of relationship where there's an accommodator, which is, wow, you love your friend or partner or coworker so much that you're willing to do this stuff for them so that they're not suffering or so that they can demonstrate their potential as in the case of the kid with homework. But here's why that's not the loving response in the long run. Ocd Family Accommodation Vs Ocd Support  Kimberley: Right. You're right. I mean, you mentioned like, then we have the complete other end of the spectrum where people are going, “No, I'm cutting you off completely.” And I think too, I think it's important, as you said. Some accommodation happens in every relationship. I don't particularly like cleaning hair out of the sink drain. That's not my favorite. So, I'm going to ask my husband to do it, knowing that I take the trash out or whatever. We trade-off. So, how might people identify accommodation through the lens of OCD compared to loving exchanges of acts of service?  Amy: Right. Oh, I love that question, because essentially, what we call compromise in relationships could be called accommodation – accommodation by a gentler name. And I think part of that has to do with, what's the motivation there? You do such a wonderful job in your podcasts and online and everything of talking about how doing the hard things are important, and how if you're not doing the hard things and you're avoiding difficult things that can really shrink your world over time and put anxiety or OCD in the driver's seat. So, if the motivation, if a child or a spouse or a friend is asking-- well, if you are asking a child or a friend or a spouse, if you're saying, “Hey, can you do this for me,” or “I'd feel a lot more comfortable if you did this,” thinking about, is it a compulsion or a preference to me? There are so many different ways that we can look into that, but is it in the service of just like, I could, but I prefer not to? Or is it, I feel like if I do that, I'm going to be too anxious or I'm going to do too many compulsions, or something bad is going to happen? So, I think if the motivation there is more avoidance due to anxiety as opposed to just preferences, I think that's helpful.  Sometimes I'll say to people when they'll say to me like, “Well--” and I think division of labor in the house is such a good example. When people say, “Well, I don't ever take the trash out,” I will often ask, “Well, what happens when your roommates are out of town?” Let's say they're living in a roommate situation. And if they say, “Well, it just piles up and I can't deal with it,” then I say, “Aha, this might be a place that we need to work on and chip away.” And again, reducing accommodations doesn't mean like all of a sudden, I'm a garbage master and I'm the only one doing it. It might mean that I'm doing some exposures to get up to the point where I can have that role in the household.  So, I love that question of like, well, what if you had to do it? What would that be like? And if it's really hard, then hey, let's help break down some of those barriers and reduce accommodation. OCD Reassurance Kimberley: Yeah. I usually tell clients like, “Okay, let's just do it so that we know you can, and then you can move on to the next exposure.” Tell us about reassurance. You talked about it a little bit. And in your book, actually, the thing I highlighted, because I read it in Kindle, that I love the most is your reassurance tracking. Tell us a little about that.  Amy: Yes. Because again, I love that you're highlighting this because reassurance is something that is okay. Reassurance happens in all relationships. Again, we might call it by different names. It might just be checking in. It might be clarification. It might be getting information from one another. So, I developed a worksheet that's also available with the book that allows for people to track when they're asking for reassurance from loved ones, and to answer a series of questions that aren't going to give you a 100% certain answer of whether or not it's compulsive, but are going to give you some clues. So, on the worksheet, it says, people write down the situation. So, for example, I was asking my friend if she was mad at me. That might be the situation. And then there's a column that says, what were your emotions?  Again, if we're seeing anxiety, guilt, shame, some of those words might be a clue that our OCD is at play, but not always. And then people track, did you ask only once? Because we also know if it's truly the type of reassurance, “Oh, I just need to know. I'm having a vulnerable moment. I just need to know, is this okay with you? Are you upset?” Then asking once and accepting the answer is generally how it goes. So, if you're asking more than once, if you answer no to that, it's a clue that it could be compulsive reassurance. And then also, was the source credible?  I feel like I talk about this example a lot, but I just love it so much, which is that I worked with a little girl who was really worried about getting strep throat. She would ask everybody for reassurance about her tonsils. I mean, anybody and everyone. At one point, she took a picture and she was just old enough that she got social media. She put it on her Instagram and she was like, “Do you guys think I have a strep throat?” That was the caption. That was the little caption, which is like, she was laughing about it afterwards, but that's not a credible source. I mean, she wasn't even friends with all the docs in town or anything, or ear, nose, and throat specialist. So, was the source credible?  Now, often if it's social reassurance, it is a credible source. If I ask you, if I say, “Kimberley, was I too long-winded,” you're going to be able to tell me. So, you would be a credible source. If I leave this room right now after doing this podcast and I ask somebody, “Do you think I was long-winded? Do you think I was?” and they're like, “Well, we weren't there,” that's that answer. That's that question about credibility.  And then the last one is, did you accept the answer? Anxiety and OCD have this way of undermining. Well, pretty much everything, but undermining any answer we get and countering with it. ‘What if,' or ‘Are you sure?' ‘But I think...' So, if it's starting with a ‘but,' a ‘maybe,' a ‘what-if,' then again, it may not be that helpful reassurance-seeking. Relationship Ocd (Rocd) Vs Relationship Issues With Ocd Kimberley: Yeah, I love that. And thank you for adding that because I just love that template so much. That is just like gold. I love it so much. Alright. So, as you move into Chapter 4, I believe it is, you talk about specific subtypes of OCD that are commonly impacted in relationships. Can you share just briefly what your thoughts are around that? Amy: Yeah. I love this question too because as I've been talking about the book, a lot of people are like, “Oh, great, a book about ROCD, or relationship OCD.” And my answer to that, or my response to that is, “Yes, and...” Just a step back, any subtype of OCD can affect and often does affect relationships. Why? Because OCD goes after what's important to us. And for many of us, our connectedness with one another is just so important. That being said, there are subtypes of OCD that are relational in nature. And so, I do have a chapter that is more devoted to these types, and one of which is relationship OCD. This is a passion of mine. I've done now a few iterations of an ROCD treatment group at my clinic, and I have other plans to expand that group and do some cool programming around that.  But relationship OCD, it's basically when OCD symptoms are about the relationship itself or about the person with whom you're in relationship. So, it could be about-- we think about it a lot of times with romantic relationships, but it could be any relationship. To use a different one, it could be, am I a loving enough parent? Do I love my kids enough? How do I know? Do other parents have these thoughts? So, it could be about the relationship or it can be about the individual. Like, my spouse doesn't like the same music that I do, and are we ever going to get past this? And so, something that might be seen as, yes, it's an actual difference, but then there's all this story making around the difference and how the difference is going to be the demise of the relationship. Those are the two flavors of ROCD, relationship and partner-focused.  I also want to pause here and say that oftentimes when people talk about ROCD, I feel like there's this pull to say, “Well, if you know you have ROCD, if relationship issues come up in your relationship, it's probably your ROCD.” And that's just like another backdoor to the certainty that we all want. I think all relationships have some crunchy bits and some edges that chafe. And so, I want the people with ROCD to feel empowered to also develop the relationships that they want and then notice that maybe the ROCD turns up the volume on some of their concerns, if that makes sense.  Kimberley: It's hard, isn't it? Because so many times a patient will say, “But I don't know if I really love-- is he the one?” And we're like, “Well, we'll never know.” There's no way to objectively define that. And then someone, a friend is like, “Well, if you don't know, it must be a problem.” It's so hard for those people because people without OCD also don't know all the time either, so it's a common concern. Sexual Orientation Ocd & Gender Related Ocd Amy: Right. No, that's a great point. So, I have some stuff about relationship OCD in there and then the identity subtypes of OCD as well. So, sexual orientation OCD and gender-related OCD. I put those in there because oftentimes our identity is the foundation from which we interact with others and create relationships and things like that. So, I talk a little bit about sexual orientation OCD, not just even in dating, but in finding a community and friendship and things like that. SOOCD can rear up and lead to lots of social comparisons or it can just really try to sabotage certain relationships, and with gender-related OCD as well, be it somebody who is cisgender and wondering if they are transgender or vice versa. I've worked with people in the transgender community who have OCD and have these unwanted thoughts about like, “Well, what if this is not who I am? What if I've been doing this for attention?” And then, therefore, are wanting to compulsively disengage from their community because of the feeling of like, “Well, I don't feel authentic enough.” So, that's a way in which that can root in relationally. Kimberley: Right. So, we've got relationship OCD and identity. What are the other ones?  Harm Ocd & Its Impact On Relationships Amy: Yeah. And then the last one that I highlighted in here in that section is harm OCD. And I put that in there because harm OCD, which again is a huge category, which I would say under that are anything that's violent. That could be sexual as well. So, sexual violence toward others or sexual intrusive-- obviously, all intrusive thoughts, but intrusive thoughts about being sexual with children. I would roll all that into the harm OCD category. And this one is just, it's always so striking to me the ways in which OCD can take something that's really important. Like, I want to be a good person, I want to be a kind person and then undermine it. So, the amount of people I've worked with harm OCD who are experiencing isolation and really the self-imposed isolation, the irony of which is “I'm isolating myself because I don't want to harm others,” but then they're withholding themselves as this fantastic person to be out in the world. And so, that's what I always say, is you're doing more harm isolating, but sort of. Get out there. You have so much to offer and in fact, your OCD has attacked this area because it's important for you generally to have relations with others. Kimberley: Yeah, I love that. So, I love how you've given us a way, and as you said, it can impact any relationship outside of those subtypes as well. What I'd love to do is give you the mic and tell us just now, in general, give us your best relationship ideas, advice, tips, tools, whatever you want to call them, for the person with OCD and the loved ones of people with OCD. Amy: Yeah. Thank you. I feel like that's a dangerous thing to be giving me the mic. Kimberley: It's all yours. Go for it. What's the main thing you want people to know? Amy: I think I want for people to be able to-- number one, there's no right or wrong way to have a relationship provided that everything is consensual and respectful. And so, taking a step back-- and actually Russ Harris just put out this. I don't know if you saw this, but this incredible list of relational values words. So, there's an activity where-- or I don't know if it's new, it's new to me. That's clarifying what are your relational values and what are they with different relationships? Is it playfulness? Is it intimacy? And so, figuring out what you want and having your spouse do the same. In our relationship OCD group, most recently, we had people and their significant others, I shouldn't say spouse, do this and figuring out ways to connect around those things. I think it comes down to connection and to supporting each person, like supporting each other's goals.  I think I'm bringing this up in part because I think sometimes there are these narratives out there about like, we have to have all the same interests or opposites attract. And again, to that, I say yes, and... For some people, they want people with really similar interests and for others, they want somebody who's going to be different. But I think what we can do is support each other and try to see the world through your loved one's eyes and try to celebrate when they're celebrating.  I think part of this is like, I'm married to somebody who's a huge thrill seeker. He's paragliding. He just got his private pilot's license. He does things that are not in my nature. If he's gone out and he's done some sort of paragliding trip in a different country, and he'll come back and he'll say, “I found a lift here and there were thermals,” in my head, I'm like, “You didn't die. You didn't die. Yeah, you didn't die.” And I have to stop my own anxious story about it or my own interpretation of “I wouldn't like that” and just be there with him in that moment of sharing his joy. It's finding joy in others' joy. It's being there with other people's emotions about whatever they are. Because I think with anxiety and OCD, it can always be this upper-level analytical process of like, “Oof, I don't like that. Is that okay?” or things like that. I know a lot of the Gottman's research will talk as well about how very important it is to just support one another, be cheerleaders, et cetera.  Attachment Style & Ocd  I think too, knowing your attachment style. And this is a whole topic that we could spend forever on, but knowing if you're somebody who-- when you get close to others, do you feel more resistance in getting closer or do you feel worries about like, “Ugh, I don't want to lose myself by merging with someone else”? Or do you have more resistance around, “I'm worried they'll abandon me, I'm worried they won't love me enough?” And that's a very, very, very rudimentary look at two of the concepts of attachment, that more avoidant attachment where it's, “I'm worried I'll be subsumed by the other person and I value independence,” or more anxious attachment, which is, “I'm worried they won't love me enough or I'll be abandoned.” Knowing that and knowing when those thoughts come up, take a pause, take a step back and check in with yourself and your body and the facts and things like that, instead of reacting in that moment. When anxiety is there, it wants us to just react to every alarming or provocative thought that we have. So, yeah, those are some things. I know that I had them scrolling through because I know I had more in the book from the Gottman. They're top of mind. Kimberley: I think back to when I was first married, I was so young. So, if someone had explained to me attachment styles, it would've made the first five years so much easier. You know what I mean? My husband would go away. He's actually away right now. He would go away because he loves to fly fish. And for me, I would feel anxiety because he would leave and I would interpret, because I'm anxious, and I was like, “No, this isn't hard for me to be alone.” It would quickly turn to anger towards him for having a hobby. I'm totally fine to say this too. I'm feeling anxious here by myself. He's off doing something fun for him. So then I got angry that he's doing fun things and leaving me to have my anxiety. He would come home not to a happy wife. He would come home to wife with her hands on her hips. You know what I mean? And I think that that is so common for people with anxiety. When you're feeling anxious, you feel like they're doing it to you like, “Why are you doing this to me?” And then that can create a whole narrative that can interfere in relationship. So, that's just a personal example of how, if I had have known my anxious attachment early in our marriage, I think that would've saved us a lot of fights. Amy: Yeah. Oh, I love that example. And I feel like for me, as somebody who tends toward the other side, I tend to feel more worried about being stifled by relationships. I want to be fully seen and encouraged. And so, sometimes, in particular with friendships, if I've had people who are like, “I've felt exactly the same way,” or “I had the same experience,” or “We should do this all together. Let's get matching jackets,” I'm like, “I am an individual.” I get really threatened because my feeling is-- my brain's automatic interpretation is they don't see you because they think that you are just-- they assume like we're all the same, whereas they're just like, “We want to affiliate.” So, I've had to do some work there as well, even with friendships, to know like it's not-- people aren't trying to kidnap my identity and merge it with theirs. They're actually just being loving.  Kimberley: Right. But it feels threatening. Yeah, absolutely. I think the last question I have for you is, it goes back to that accommodation reassurance piece, particularly related to these dynamics. And maybe this is just my experience, I'd actually love to hear yours. What I do find is, when the person with OCD is coming from an anxious place, like often overanalyzing things, hyper-attending hyperawareness of things, their need for reassurance or their need for everyone to follow what OCD tells the family to do, I have found that the partner, because it's so overwhelming for them, tends to flip to the other end of the spectrum where they don't worry about anything or they're like, “It's fine.” Or maybe even they're frustrated of like, “It's fine, it's fine.” Have you noticed that as a trend in dynamics of a relationship? Amy: Yeah. Sometimes almost like there's a dismissiveness. Yes, I have noticed that and I think that there are so many reasons why that can happen. And I think for the partner and their experience, getting at what that is and what's motivating that is so interesting because, to the person with anxiety or OCD, it can feel really invalidating, or it can feel very comforting. But I think a lot of the times, it can feel invalidating and the partner might be doing it because they might be having their own feelings come up about, “I don't know what to say.” I've tried to use facts and sometimes facts can bounce right off of OCD if you're not in the mindset to accept them. OCD is skeptical about everything. So, I've tried everything and I'm really now at this place of like, “I am so tired.” And it'll come out. “I'm so tired of hearing you talk about this.” And that's when, as a clinician, I see time out. I think you're both really tired of this cycle that OCD has you both in.  So, yeah, I will see that. And I think sometimes when that's the pattern as opposed to a lot of overly accommodating, I think when that's the pattern, the element for me in working with couples to inject back in there is the validation of, “This is really hard.” And also for them to take a step back and realize, well, not everything is going to be OCD either. Sometimes if there is reassurance-- I mean, again, the irony is sometimes this pattern can lead to more reassurance because then it's like, “Well, you just dismissed me. You said that there's nothing wrong in our relationship that you did it in a manner that felt dismissive. And so, now I'm going to ask again.”  So, yeah, deconstructing that pattern. Does the partner feel angry? If so, you're angry at this pattern, not your partner. Does the partner feel helpless, hopeless? Did they feel scared? Are they grasping at straws? So, yeah, that would be how I would look at that when I see it come up. Kimberley: Oh, thank you. I'm so grateful that you shared all that because I think they are all great questions that need to be addressed within the relationship. Thank you. So good. Okay, tell us about your book. I want to be respectful of your time. Tell us about your amazing book, which I think every family that has members should read. Tell us about it. Amy: It's called Thriving in Relationships When You Have OCD: How to Keep Obsessions and Compulsions from Sabotaging Love, Friendship, and Family Connections. It's available for pre-order as of the recording of this, which is in October, but I think this is going to come out later. It will be hot off the presses December 1st from New Harbinger Publications, available on Amazon, available through New Harbinger, I think available on other websites. People keep sending me links and I'm like, “Wow, that's really cool.”  So, yeah, I tried to cover all different kinds of relationships. We talk about family relationships, parenting, romantic relationships, sex and intimacy and those kinds of relationships, friendships, work, and really just a relational lens to what can be a very isolating and security disorder. And I don't want anyone to feel like they have to go at it alone. Kimberley: Thank you. Again, hats off to you. Much respect. You did a beautiful job writing the book. It's an honor. I was so honored to write the foreword. And I think, again, it's like a handbook I think everybody needs to have on the onset of being diagnosed. Here's the book to make sure you can protect your relationship and nurture the relationship outside of OCD. So, thank you. Amy: Well, thank you for having me.

In this episode of The Antidote, Amy and Grace connect with actress, podcaster, and beauty maven Ashley Blaine Featherson-Jenkins about how we all can benefit from a ‘hot girl walk', the act of surrendering, and falling in love with New York City again. Amy and Grace share their bummer news of the week –  racist backlash over The Lord of The Rings series on Amazon, and the state of Texas sending students home with DNA kits so their bodies can be identified “in case of emergency.” They also share their antidote: an overnight mask and showering at night.  This week's Creative Tap-In:  “A creative life is an amplified life.” -Elizabeth Gilbert Do you have a favorite antidote, or need an antidote suggestion? A question for Grace and Amy, or something you loved that Amy, Grace or one of their guests has said on the podcast? Share a message with The Antidote team: https://mpr.tfaforms.net/111 or tag us on Instagram with the hashtag #ThatsMyAntidote, or leave us a message on our hotline at 833-684-3683. Sponsors: BetterHelp Online Therapy -  betterhelp.com/ANTIDOTE FULL TRANSCRIPT Amy The world is a dumpster fire. I'm Amy. Grace And I'm Grace. Amy And we want to f---in help. Grace We're comedy writers in Los Angeles. And as a reflex to the madness on the news, we're keeping it positive, but opinionated. Amy We talk about cultural moments we love. Grace Talk to people we adore. Amy Crushes we have. Grace And self-care we stan. Amy During these trying times we all need to show that focuses on joy. Grace This is The Antidote. Hey, everybody. You're back for another week. Amy Ooh, I love. Wow. Grace given us Broadway. Give it up. Musical theater. Grace Give you some vocal stylings, I guess. I don't know what that was. But thank you for coming to The Antidote for yet another week, friends. Amy Yeah, and thank you guys for attending our live show in New York. Grace Oh, it's so great to see you. Amy The listeners who were able to make it. It was so awesome. For those who weren't able to attend. Stay tuned to our live show. We're going to be putting out a recording as a future episode. You can kind of experience it. You know, it won't be the same, but it'll be similar. Grace Yeah, but we'd love to do more live shows in 2023, so stay tuned and see when our next one is. Amy Yeah. Anyway, I know this is kind of old, but I guess I was just like going back. There are old texts or something. Grace and I saw the video of Maxwell breaking it down on stage with his niece. Grace Yes. I was like is Uncle season now here? Okay. He came to make the aunties first and Auntie Junior is like myself. Because I was like, ok Maxwell. And the funniest tweet that I thought about it was. Like when he was like. Doing his little Meghan thee stallion knees move Like they're like there's literally no song Maxwell has that justifies this cause, because somebody put it over this woman's work. So it's like. Amy And I just want to be like n---- stand up. Grace But like he, you know, we got all our jokes off our Black Twitter and Instagram. And so he responded, he's just like, Y'all could never and so he made it the Maxwell Challenge, I believe. Amy Oh, I love it because I love the Maxwell Challenge. I need to see some more men doing that. Well, need is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but I would not mind saying, but it really is a good season. Like you said. Grace I'm just really happy that Maxwell is getting his flowers. You know, new people are discovering Maxwell, those of us who are around the first time around, they're just like, Oh, Maxwell, I'm glad you still doing it. And I'm glad your knees are still good. Amy I actually really love that Maxwell is getting his flowers and all of the Zaddy's. I mean Ginuwine he out here. Grace Oh yeah. Same ol G. Amy And also Usher singing to Issa Rae on stage. Grace Oh she deserves all the songs right to her face. Amy I mean, I do love all these nineties men turn it up and also through dance, like dancing is a source of joy. We love to dance. And I know that our guest, you guys stay around for our guest, Ashley Blaine Feathers. And she actually talks about the joy of dance and our interview with her. So it'll be really fun to revisit this topic. Grace And beautiful, funny and profound. Queen. Yes. I can't wait for you to hear this interview. But honestly, Amy, we wouldn't need the antidotes if we didn't have something to get an antidote from. Amy Starting now, top with our bummer news of the week. First of all, this is an ongoing bummer news issue. Oh, gosh. But I feel like we just kind of got to talk about it a little bit. There's been so much racist backlash over the new Lord of the Rings series on Amazon. There have been all these trolls or like Middle-Earth, it has elves and hobbits and wizards, you know, fictional things. But people are having problems with the color skin of some of the actors being cast in the show. Much like people having problems with the fictional mermaid Ariel being a different color than they wanted to be. So there's an actor named Cynthia Robinson who portrays the Queen region of New Manaugh, I think is how it's pronounced. Cynthia Robinson portrays the Queen region of this fictional city, and people are mad at her in response to the backlash, she said. My focus, especially as more of the show has aired, has been the more joyful aspects of what this story means to people, end quote. And I love that she's turning it into a little bit more positive of a message. She's basically saying, block the haters and the real fans who like the work that they're doing, which I really appreciate. It can be really hard to be brought down by sh-- like this. But I do have to say, for a bunch of people who are like full nerds watching this stuff and I'm a nerd about a lot of things, but fantasy ain't my sh--, but it is fantasy. And so it always kind of rocks me a little weird when people are like, Oh, but this thing that is fantasy isn't what I find. Like Harry Potter, like Hermoine with her kinky hair. And I'm like, her name's Hermoine she might be Black, you know, like, doesn't really bother me. But I think it's because as Black people, we're used to imagining different types of worlds, and white people don't really have to. Grace Yeah. And I'm just sad. Like, when I hear that quote from her. Oh, it makes me think about is like all the many times as Black women that were expected to rise above that, we're expected to make a positive. We're expected to, like, not show if we are upset about racism. You know, I'm sure, you know, maybe in her quiet moments, she's not bothered by it. But in my quiet moments, I'm continuously bothered by it because I was just like, What do you want? Like, do you want do you want worlds where we don't exist? And I'm sorry, but we exist, you know, and because we exist on a lot of amazing things exists because Black people exist. Yeah. And I'm sorry that you want to be in a world where we don't exist, but you're not going to get that. Sorry. In 2022 and 2023. You're just not going to get it. Amy And not in the future and not in fantasy. Grace Exactly. And so my question is always like, are we still doing this? Like every single time, y'all do not look good. Whoever is making these racist statements, it doesn't make you look good. It doesn't make you look good to your friends. It doesn't make you look good. Your family members, maybe they all races too. But like all the justification about why. He's like, well, this would have been in Europe. Or whatever. No, it wouldn't have been in Europe because it is not real. And guess what? We were in Europe, too, back then. You know what I'm saying? Like that this whole, like, fantasy that we weren't in Europe or where we were in any of these places is a fantasy because we were there the entire time. Like. Amy I was Black. Grace You know what I'm saying? Even like Shakespeare wrote about the Moors, like you wrote Othello. We were there. We were there. So, like, this whole thing, like, you're just racist. Just stand ten toes down and say, I'm a racist piece of sh-- so we can know which way to categorize you and keep it moving. Like, it's just sad that these actors who are getting an amazing opportunity, like a lot of these times, like these actors, this is their first, like, big thing and they have to f---ing be subjected to all this backlash that doesn't have to do with them. They didn't cast themselves. Amy Yeah, they didn't cast themselves. Exactly. What you just said makes me think of people who are mad at Ariel and they're like, well, technically, the Little Mermaid was written by Danish Man and it's from Denmark, so shouldn't she be blind? And I'm just like, y'all are so weird. Like, I'm like, it's fictional. Grace She's a mermaid. I saw this tweet about how they didn't believe that Ariel would be black. And literally it was. So after all the Africans y'all threw in the ocean, y'all surprised the mermaid is Black. Amy Yeah, that's real. By that. Grace And that's by thatwitchbitch. Fair point, girl. Amy Fair point. Think we didn't learn how to live down there yet? And that's my issue is like they're using, like, nerd logic to try and justify their racism. And you're absolutely right. Like, just say you're racist. Like you're saying all these technically is an actual these and well, if you really think about it and it's like, no, no, now you're just not creative enough to imagine a world that could look different from you. So just admit that that's not the only bit of bummer news this week. There's also this coming out of my home state. Apparently, Texas parents have been given DNA kits to help identify their children. In case of an emergency.   Grace Damn.   Amy And I'm like, How f---ed up is this? The state of Texas is sending students home with DNA kits so their bodies can be identified in case of an emergency. Today has stated that, quote, The threefold pamphlets allow caregivers to store their children's DNA and fingerprints at home, which could then be turned over to law enforcement agencies and, quote, presumably in order to identify their bodies. It sends a clear message that the government of Texas is not going to do anything to stop these types of shootings from happening.   Grace I know Texas is such a red, red, red state, as blue as California, New York are is this red as Texas is? So here's the thing about this country, and I don't know how else to say it is. I just don't understand how some people think. Yeah. I really don't understand. So y'all would rather do this, then? Gun control. Mm hmm. Y'all would rather send your kids home with DNA kits, then be like, Hey, how about we don't let regular people have weapons of war? That's what you would rather have.   Amy When I think about this sh--, I get so, so frustrated. How do you feel, Grace?   Grace Yeah, terrible. I mean, that DNA kid thing is super, super, super, super sad. And then. Okay. Like, racism exists. We all know it, but every time it hits, it's still like a terrible moment in your day. How about you?   Amy Yeah, very much the same.   Grace Okay, let's get into the antidote.   Amy So this is the segment where we tell you about the culture we consumed and things we did this week that made us feel better about the bummer news, which we need. What was your antidote this week, Grace?   Grace Okay, so, you know, I'm away from home, which is great in many ways, but also sad anyways. And so, you know, when you're you're away from home, you pack your essentials and sometimes you don't you forget something back at home or whatever. And so what I've been enjoying as part of my self-care routine is an overnight mask. Ooh. So the one I have in L.A. is called Drunk Elephant. I like, you know, just smear that on is the last part of my evening skincare routine. But I left it in L.A. So I was telling my showrunner this this is the type of small talk that I subject my showrunner to. Bougie complaints. Like, Oh, I left my overnight meal and yeah.   Amy In my other abode.   Grace My God. So she's like, Oh, I actually have a recommendation for one that I really, really love. And she's a very beautiful lady and she has lovely skin. So I was just like, Oh, okay, let me tell Danielle, please tell me which one you like. And so she recommended this one buy fresh and it's the fresh black tea firming over night mask. And so all right, let's try it out. And it is so good.   Amy Really. Is it like a mask? Like a physical mask or like a cream or a gel?   Grace It's a cream.   Amy How it's go on?   Grace So basically every night I smear on some lactic acid, which is very hard about keeping your skin cheap. And then I do some like a retinol cream or whatever, and then I put on some hydration, but my skin is very, very dry, especially in the winter. And I'm in New York now, which means I'm in heating. So it's a very dry air. So I decided to try this out and oh, it goes on. It's like very thick. You know, I'm working on a show called Survival of the Fittest, so we like it thick. And so I smeared it on and oh my God, I woke up in the morning and my skin felt so buttery and they want you to rinse it off in the morning. So I was just like, okay, whatever feels buttery now, but when I get in the shower and I run there, it's going to feel like my normal ass dry skin again. But no, I rinsed it off and my skin still felt very hydrated, very soft, and yeah, it was just a really lovely thing. So now instead of being fat that I left my favorite overnight mask in L.A., I discovered this brand new one, which is really, really lovely, smells great, very hydrating. So, you know, I took a negative situation. I turned it into a positive.   Amy I agree with that. You definitely did. And, yeah, we need to be luxuriating in our skin. Yeah, why not? It sounds great.   Grace And so what is your antidote this week, Amy?   Amy Well, this is hilarious. It's actually kind of tied to yours. You know, I've been coming through with the real basic antidotes, but it's like when I'm thinking of, like, a choice that I make as opposed to a thing that I just do by routine or like that's in my schedule or that I wrote down on my to do list. But I'm like, This is a choice I'm making. This actually has become an antidote for me during production. I shower at night. I'm mostly like a morning shower. I like to shower to start my day to wake me up. But during production, our days start very early. So like my pick up on Monday is at 5:45 a.m.. So that means I got to wake up before that. So my antidote during production is that I shower at night and it kind of has like a twofold thing for me is that I get to kind of wash the day away like you're moving around. I sweat no matter what. Like, you're just, like, walking around really quickly, all day long, you're running back and forth. But by the end of the day, I feel like a little weird. Like, you know, it's just like, physically, I'm like I'm kind of, like murky, let's say, all over. And so showering at night is such like, I always think of a shower as something that wakes me up. But I will say that during production, I'm so damn tired, nothing is going to like, Oh, I can't sleep now. So I'm like, I shower at night and then I get to go to bed feeling really fresh and I'm not climbing in my bed all grimy. I'm like getting bad, feeling really, really good. And because it's winter, it's like cool sheets on my warm skin. I'm just like, Ooh, I love this. And then I haven't done an overnight mask. I've been washing my face in the shower, then I wash it in the morning, but now I'm like, Oh, maybe I should do an overnight mask and then just wash my face in the morning. And that'll still be like a refreshing little me moment before I start my day. But yeah, I love both are antidotes. Great, because they're both so simple and doable, but they are about like kind of like snatch and a little bit of self-care back from a busy day. And I just love that they're both about taking care of our bodies, which are the vessels through which we do all our work.   Grace And literally, you're teaching me something to I mean, I sometimes shower at night, but yeah, we have to get up bad early, bitch. Man, I'm not showering at night right now because, yeah, what I'm doing is like waking myself up like an extra 20 minutes early so I can have in the shower before work. Because even though I don't feel like it at that hour in the morning, I'm not going to penalize anybody else for that.   Amy Yeah.   Grace And no. But yeah, I'm going to start showering at night too.   Amy Yeah. Nice. Well, listeners, if you guys tried any of our antidotes at home, share them with us using the hashtag. That's my antidote. Or leave us a voicemail at 8336843683. And we'll be back after the break.   Grace Welcome back to The Antidote. We have a special guest today. Who is it, Amy?   Amy Our guest today is an actress, podcaster and beauty maven. You know her luscious bass from Netflix's Dear White People, NBC's Grand Crew and the movie Bad Hair. And she just debuted the first original podcast from the Oprah Winfrey Network called Trials Two Triumphs. She is still basking in newlywed bliss, the picks on idea. She loves therapy, documentaries and being an inspiration in every way she can get cozy. Take your plastic off the sofa and please welcome the Multi-hyphenate talent. Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, yes. I mean, I. I mean, you guys have another career in life. I mean, you guys are going to be hosting the Oscars.   Amy From your lips to God's ears.   Grace From your lips to God's ears. Okay. You know.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I mean. That was fantastic. I don't know if I've ever been intro'd any better.   Amy Well, you are easy to intro because that's how fantastic you are.   Grace I mean, everything we said was true.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Y'all got me feeling like Beyoncé.   Amy That's why I had to sprinkle some references in there. Because you's a queen.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, thank you my sisters. Yes. Oh, I'm so excited to be here.   Grace Thank you. We're excited to have you. Well, she's very, very impressive, isn't she, Amy? But we aren't here to talk about your many, many, many accomplishments. We are here to get deep.   Amy Yeah, yeah. Let's check in first. How are you feeling today? Like, for real? Not small talk. Is there anything weighing on you? Making you feel good?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Here's the tea. I am feeling amazing.   Amy Yes.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins It is. No, I really am. And I'm really happy that I. You know, last week I didn't feel amazing. Yesterday I did not feel amazing. I legit had like I was like kind of moping around, but I'm sad. I kind of start like, yeah, dragging my feet and like, you know, honestly, a lot of it's unconscious, but my husband Darryl will notice he was like, What's wrong? And I was like, I don't know what's wrong. And, and I, you know, I, I'm getting better at doing like. America has a problem, everyone. oh, yes. I mean, you know, here's the thing. I think it's all of the things, but I think I was just feeling really overwhelmed. And I'm one of those people that, like, I don't I'm trying to get better at feeling the hard stuff in the moment rather than letting it kind of seep in more and more. And so I didn't. So I let it out. I had a good cry and I feel fantastic. Today is the first of the month. Yeah. You know, bills are paid. You know, I look good. I smell good. Yeah.   Grace Okay, we can confirm she looks good as f---. Okay.   Amy Yeah, and she looks like she smells good. You know, we haven't gotten into smellavision yet, but. Yeah, I buy it.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins But, you know, I really this month, it's kind of taken me eight months of the year to do it. But this month I really have that feeling of like I feel extremely motivated to really feel build this month up with good death. I feel deeply inspired by I love that.   Amy I mean, I do think there's, you know, maybe it's the Renaissance, the fact we are in a period of like a bad like a black bitch renaissance. We are literally in that period right now.   Grace I just wanted to say I really love what you said, because I do think that every day that we wake up, we do kind of have a choice. Like, I love how you are already like framing your entire mom to be like, I'm going to fill this month up with goodness. And I bet because you have declared that you definitely will.   Amy Let's keep the good vibes going, y'all. We need that right now. This show is called The Antidote because life is hard and we all need different antidotes to deal with the bullsh--. So tell us, Ashley, what is your antidote? In other words, what is something non-work-related that's bringing you joy this week or this month?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I am committing to doing Hot Girl Walks every day.   Amy I need more info about.   Grace What's a hot girl walk?   Amy What's a hot girl walk?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh my goodness. So actually my friend JP Jennifer Pauline, who's just one of the most wonderful human beings in the world. She. So she invited me on a hot girl walk. Right. This is such an L.A. story. So she invited she was like, girl, we got to go for a walk. And I was like, yes. And I thought she was just like coining it that herself. You know? And I was like, that's what's up. But then she was like, No, it's a thing. So then, of course, I went to, you know where. Tiktok.   Amy Yes.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Of course.   Grace Where the children tell us what's cool. Yes.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Because I don't know what's going on. I'd be like, okay, let me go to Texas. And it's a whole trend that's going on where it's for anybody. But I you know, this this girl, I forgot her name, but she started this thing called a hot girl walks where you walk. Well, for her, it was four miles a day.   Amy Four miles? Oh, it's physically hot. I see.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Yea, I don't think I can do four miles a day because that seems like a lot like I think, you know, if you live somewhere like New York, you can easily do that day in two days, whatever. But the point is, it's not about how far you go, how long you go. It's just about committing to going on a walk. That is not. The goal is not to change anything physically about yourself. The goal is really just to spend time with yourself and to think about yourself as being sexy and confident and strong and all of the good things you can think about yourself. And she suggests while doing so, listen to a podcast she actually has. That is like the thing you should do. And I, you know, I did it today and I get why the kids are doing it. I mean, I feel I mean, I feel lifted. Yeah, I am together. I'm gathered. I feel so great. I feel so great. And I think a lot of times, you know, I'm always, like, working out for, like, the physical part of it, you know, and not just because. I want to feel good or just spend time with myself, but it doesn't always have to be like strenuous exercise. Like I work out. It can just be I took a walk, 4.8, nine mile, you know. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't have to be a whole thing.   Amy You know, the best part about it, like the coining of it, of a hot girl. What? To me, I was like, Oh, I want to feel hot like my beautiful hot while I'm walking, as opposed to feeling like I'm working, if you will. Yeah, because I do a lot of walking, like you said, for exercise, but just to like be with myself and like look around, take in my surroundings, like enjoy my body's movement. I'll do a lot of that. And now I want to.   Grace That is so cool because you know what? I stopped walking as much because during like the early days of the pandemic, we still in this pandemonium, and now we got monkeypox. Okay? But we're about to talk about that right now.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I cannot with the monkeypox.   Grace But during that time, I remember, you know, I was working at Insecure with this queen. And I remember we would have our our break for lunch. And I would always I would eat first and then I would go for a walk just to get out of the house for a bit. But I have stopped doing that so much. I mean, I love walking. I lived in New York for 15 years and I moved to this part of L.A. in particular so I could walk to the grocery store, walk to target, whatever. Right, right. But I stopped taking walks for pleasure. And I think this is a lovely reminder that I did enjoy it. Like sometimes I'll be walking down the street. I was like, one of those crazy people you would know was in my headphones because I would be either singing it loud or I would stop for a moment for a little dance break. Yeah, I didn't give a f---. I was just like. You can look at me if you want to.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I love it. I love it. But that's the goal. Like, get back to that, you back to that. Like that's what I'm on. And.   Amy We're going to do.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins That's my antidote.   Amy I love that. Like Grace. We're going to go for a hot girl walk.   Grace Let's go for our girl walk. I mean, I won't make you hike because I know you don't like that, but you can go.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins No, it's a walk not a hike. It's not a hot girl hike.   Amy Well, now, since we're talking a little just a little bit, we'll get off the pandemic a little bit. But you got married in the pandemic. And I want to know, like the pandemic was like a testing ground. Yes, it was a testing ground for relations. Some somehow got further apart and some got closer together. Are there any lessons or things you've learned about sharing space with your partner during this crazy time?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, my goodness, I. I think the biggest like lesson is to be grateful for the time. You know, like Daryl and I had the perspective of, like. I remember early on in the pandemic, I remember he said to me, We better cherish this because we're probably never going to have it again. And he's right. You know, I don't know. You know, another time, hopefully we are not stuck in the house again in the same way during a pandemic. Right.   Amy Hold my collar y'all, I'm like, oh, my God, give me out this house.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins You all. She started hyperventilating. Okay. No. And but but I'm grateful that I had a partner who rather had been lamenting and was like, This is great. We get to spend time and, you know, just do things like we would dance around the house or, you know, like, I don't know, just binge watch things all day that we just don't have the time to do anymore, you know, stay up late. Yeah. You know, until the wee hours of morning into the wee hours of the morning. Just so many things that we look back on now and are like, that was a really crazy but beautiful time for us. And I think that it really so much good came out of it. You know, in the pandemic, we bought our first home, we got married, we honeymooned. We, you know, we've done so many, so many amazing things. And I think it taught us to like. What's for you? Even a pandemic can't stop humans. You know, like this ship is going to keep sailing, this ball is going to keep rolling. And it really is just about how you choose to receive it.   Grace What was your favorite thing like from that time, spending time in the house with each other? What was your favorite thing that you guys did together during that time?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins My husband Darryl's from Detroit, MI.   Grace Me too. Do you know where he's from in Detroit? Like which part?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Yeah, he's from the east side of Detroit. Okay, cool. He grew up off of Hannah. Yeah, he went to Cass.   Grace Oh, he went to Cass Tech, okay.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Okay, so he's like a real. He's a michigan guy. Okay, I went to Howard, and, you know, a lot of my a lot of my friends at Howard were from the Midwest and, you know, Detroit or Chicago. And so early on in Howard, I learned how to like hustle and all that type of stuff. So I found out in the pandemic, which I've known Daryl for almost 13 years, so I don't know how this went over my head. He didn't know how to hustle. And so I taught him, Oh.   Amy That's incredible.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Sorry, Daryl, I'm exposing you to all the Detroit people. But I taught him how to hustle. Yes in our at the time, we were in, like, a little cute, but like a little non air conditioning apartment in Beverly Hills at the time. And so we were just hustling up in that one bedroom apartment and it was it was just like and I recorded us like I got my phone up in a row, like I have my hair wrapped, but I just was like, this is a memory we'll look back on and be like, Oh. What this is insane.   Grace You taught him how to hustle, that's so cute.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins That was a fun night. Yeah, yeah, that was a fun night.   Grace I mean, he should take you to the car show, like the auto show sometime, cause that's the big Detroit thing. Yes.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I got to do that. So many things.   Amy I feel like that period in your life, like, obviously I don't I don't want to forget that the pandemic, a lot of people experience a lot of loss, but all of this like is about surrender. And you talk about that so much about how to surrender. And sometimes you don't have control. I mean, none of us had control over what was happening. Those of us who lost a lot and those of us who had the luxury to get introspective and like really sit with ourselves and you really got to surrender and have a partner through it, which is really beautiful. Yeah. And as we're, like growing now, are there ways that you find surrender in your day to day, even like the processing of emotions that you talked about, like having a rough month and having to cry it out? Is that a form of surrender for you? Like sitting in it.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins For sure. I think, you know, as you were talking, I was thinking about surrender. And like you said, it's a if you know me, if you listen to anything I say, I'm always saying I'm trying to get better at the art of surrender. But what I'm realizing is that, like, there's the step after surrender, right? So like, surrendering is giving it up and saying, okay, you know, Jesus, take the money, but. On the other side of the step after surrender, I think, is acceptance. And you have to accept whatever may come from the surrender. You can't surrender and then lack acceptance. Yeah. Because then you're kind of in the same between. Right. You're still not where you need to be. And so that's that's what I'm trying to work on. Tubas, like both of them. It's like surrendering and then being confident about the acceptance of whatever may come. And I do that in sometimes it's crying it out, sometimes it's talking it out. Sometimes it's actually saying it out loud, like. This is too much for me. You got it. Wow. Look, I can't. I can't do this or. You know what? I trust you more than I trust myself. So please, you know, order my steps. Sometimes it's bad, but I just, you know, honestly, surrender is a muscle. It's a muscle muscle that we all have to work.   Grace And the process of surrender, I really think, like in our work, in our business, I think it's so important to have that kind of perspective because there's so much that we cannot control. You know, you cannot control like who greenlights your stuff or you can't control like when you go into an audition whether you're going to get it or not. But like that act of surrendering, knowing that you're going to be okay or like that you're giving it over to a higher power to help you deal with it like that. I think it's so important rather than trying to control everything, because we in our human powers cannot we cannot control it.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins We just can't can't do it. No.   Amy Have you taken any good trips recently now that we get back outside?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, my gosh. So I just got back from Austin, Texas.   Amy Oh, I love Austin.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Do you? It's not, you know, I don't know.   Amy Okay, well, here's what I'll say. Here's what I say. I'm from Texas, I'm from Dallas. And Austin is like the to me, it's the best parts of Dallas and with a little bit of California sprinkled in. So that's why I like Austin. But I'm curious, what's your take on it? I mean, I don't want you to, like, slammed the city.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Well, no. no, no. I'm not going to slam the city. I my first time going was in, oh, 2017. We actually premiered Dear White People. There was my first time there at South by Southwest. And then I went I just went this past weekend on a my 15 and my 15 year anniversary trip with my line sisters. Yes. And my sister. So so it was amazing because I was with some of my favorite people on the face of the planet and we just had a good time. We're always going to make a good time wherever we go. So I did that. I've actually been traveling a time this year. I was in New York and May in like New York. I just.   Amy That's Grace's city.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins New York makes me feel I could cry thinking about New York. Something about New York.   Grace Thank you Ashley.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I love that city. New York. If I literally would wake up like, good morning, New York.Like, I just I was skipping down the street, it was raining, and I was just like I was like that that video of Drew Barrymore in the rain.   Amy Yes.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins That's what I look like. And I wonder everyone's like clowning her for it. But I'm like, no, I understand why she felt like that. So I was in New York and then yeah, but I mean, I've been to New York many times, but something about this last trip, I was there for work, but I kind of made into like play and I just fell in love with New York all over again.   Grace New York is kind of like one of those places where, like, I lived there for 15 years before I moved to L.A. and New York was kind of one of those places. Like, I would still like ten, 12, 13, 14, 15 years, and I would just be walking down the street and I would like look up and see, like the Chrysler Building all lit, lit up. And I was like, Wow, I'm here. You know, I did it. I made it here. You know, it's like there's there's always just. Such a special energy that's there. So I completely get it in New York in the room.   Amy You mean, you don't do that on the 405?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Question. Do you ever feel like that in LA?   Amy You don't do it on the 405? When you in traffic?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Have you had the feeling of like, I'm here, I've made it like do you have that here.   Grace I mean, it's just a different feeling. I mean, like New York just has, like, things that you can look at. Whereas L.A., sometimes when I am like, you know, it's a pretty sunny day out and I'm driving down like a row of palm trees and I can see the Hollywood sign in the distance. I'm just like, okay, you cue L.A., like, Yeah, I'm here. I made it. You know, I used to always dream about Los Angeles as a little girl, so 100% I do have those moments. But yeah, right now I'm in a missing New York moment. So that really spoke to me.   Amy Wow, Ashley, I feel so much better now that we've talked to you.   Grace Yes, she's right.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Ditto.   Grace It's still 2022, and it's due in 2022 things. But we feel so much better now that we've chatted with you today.   Amy Yes. Yes. Do you have anything coming up you want to tell us about anything you'd like to plug? You can even be something you just love, not something you've created.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, my goodness. Well, obviously, I have my podcast new episodes every Monday. Anywhere you listen to podcast trials to triumphs.   Amy And last but not least, where can people find you on the Internets?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, yes, you can find me at Ashley Blaine, B-L-A-I-N-E. Ashley spelled the original way. On Instagram and Twitter. Yeah, that's it. Yeah.   Amy Well, thank you so much, Ashley. This has been great talk.   Grace Thank you so much, Ashley.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I adore you two. Thank you.   Grace Thank you. Bye. Okay to close us out. We're doing our creative tap in, which is our segment about creativity. Amy, are you ready for this week's quote?   Amy As ready as I'll ever be.   Grace Okay. Here we go. A creative life is an amplified life. That is by Elizabeth Gilbert. Say one more time. A creative life is an amplified life. Elizabeth Gilbert.   Amy Okay. I love Elizabeth Gilbert. She's the author of Big Magic. Right. We both know that. Yeah. Yeah, we both love that book. You told me about it. That's why I read it as you recommended it to me. So I'm a I'm a Liz Gill fan because of you. And I'm going to get a little literal on the quote amplified is like to increase the volume of turn something up. Mm hmm. So a creative life is a life that's been turned up a notch. And I agree with that. And I don't think it means having a creative career like you don't have to have a creative career to have a creative life. It's just how you creatively put things in your life, like what you do to express yourself creatively and to live creatively and to switch up your routine every now and then is going to like change, you know, raise the volume, raise the vibration on your life. So I think that is a very simple like, simply put quotes. But being creative raises your vibration is sort of how I am reading it. And I believe that is true. I strive to be creative, even beyond writing, however I can, even if not every day weekly, to try and just, like, keep my vibration high. And so I'm going to remember that. Liz. What about you, Grace? What does it make you think?   Grace Well, it makes me think about how often as writers, what we do is notice and amplify, you know? Oh, so we so we notice things that are going on in front of our eyes, in front of the world, you know? So I might walk down the street and just see, like, a guy or a girl like me dancing by herself. So I get to be I say down the street, and I make a character out of that. I'm just like, Oh, why is she dancing? Who is she? Where is she from? Is she happy, as she said? Is she dancing it out because, you know, something that happened in her life or is she just so joyously happy that she's dancing down the street like? So I think our job as artists at times is to take the things that happen in our lives, the things that we see, the things that we experience, and we amplify them to make art. So it makes me think of that, but it also makes me think of how blessed I feel to have creativity in my life. Yeah, because I feel like because I have creativity in my life, there are so many things that I can process, good or bad, through the lens of my creativity. Like even if I have a really bad experience, if I have a bad date, which I often did in New York, I was always on some bad dates, some man was ruining my day. But at the even in the midst of it, I would be like. You know, what is this, a character? You know what? I'm going to put this in something I write someday. So even though even when the bad things happen to me, I have the gift of being able to process it through my art. So when I hear creativity, a creative life is an amplified life. It just makes me think of all the ways that I can use what happens to me, good or bad, to to amplify, to create something that people can find some sort of relate ability in. Because, you know, we always say in writing that the specific is universal. So the things that happen in our everyday lives, if we can get specific, there's often people who can relate to it on some level, even if it's not exactly so. So, yeah, that's it kind of makes me think about, about the gift of being able to process trauma and joy through the lens of creativity.   Amy It was a simple quote, but I really love both our interpretations of it.   Grace Uh. Me too. Thanks for listening to the antidote. We hope this injected a little bit of joy into your week. I know it did mine. How about you, Amy?   Amy I feel good, girl. We should do this again sometime. Oh, we'll be here next week.   Grace And in the meantime, if you'd like to follow us on social, follow me. Grace. At Gracyact. That's G-R-A-C-Y-A-C-T.   Amy And follow me. Amy at AmyAniobi. That's A-M-Y-A-N-I-O-B-I and follow the show at theeantidotepod.   Grace That's thee with two E's.   Amy If you like, feeling good about yourself. Please subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.   Grace Goodbye.   Amy And next time you're out for a walk, twerk it out a little bit. And the antidote is hosted by us, Amy Ameobi and Grace Edwards. The show's production team includes senior producer Se'era Spragley Ricks and associate producer Jess Penzetta.   Grace Our executive producer is Erica Kraus, and our editor is Erika Janik. Sound Mixing by Alex Samson.   Amy Digital Production by Mijoe Sahiouni. Talent Booking by Marianne Ways. Our theme music was composed and produced by TT the artist and Cosmo The Truth.   Grace APM Studio executives in charge are Chandra Kavati, Alex Schaffert and Joanne Griffith. Concept created by Amy Aniobi and Grace Edwards.   Amy Send us your antidotes at AntidoteShow.org and remember to follow us on social media at theeantidotepod. That's thee with two E's.   Grace The Antidote is a production of American Public Media.   Amy What, what!

About AmyAmy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.Links Referenced: Equinix: https://metal.equinix.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, and this episode is another one of those real profiles in shitposting type of episodes. I am joined again from a few months ago by Amy Tobey, who is a Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix, back for more. Amy, thank you so much for joining me.Amy: Welcome. To your show. [laugh].Corey: Exactly. So, one thing that we have been seeing a lot over the past year, and you struck me as one of the best people to talk about what you're seeing in the wilderness perspective, has been the idea of cloud repatriation. It started off with something that came out of Andreessen Horowitz toward the start of the year about the trillion-dollar paradox, how, at a certain point of scale, repatriating to a data center is the smart and right move. And oh, my stars that ruffle some feathers for people?Amy: Well, I spent all this money moving to the cloud. That was just mean.Corey: I know. Why would I want to leave the cloud? I mean, for God's sake, my account manager named his kid after me. Wait a minute, how much am I spending on that? Yeah—Amy: Good question.Corey: —there is that ever-growing problem. And there have been the examples that people have given of Dropbox classically did a cloud repatriation exercise, and a second example that no one can ever name. And it seems like okay, this might not necessarily be the direction that the industry is going. But I also tend to not be completely naive when it comes to these things. And I can see repatriation making sense on a workload-by-workload basis.What that implies is that yeah, but a lot of other workloads are not going to be going to a data center. They're going to stay in a cloud provider, who would like very much if you never read a word of this to anyone in public.Amy: Absolutely, yeah.Corey: So, if there are workloads repatriating, it would occur to me that there's a vested interest on the part of every major cloud provider to do their best to, I don't know if saying suppress the story is too strongly worded, but it is directionally what I mean.Amy: They aren't helping get the story out. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, it's like, “That's a great observation. Could you maybe shut the hell up and never make it ever again in public, or we will end you?” Yeah. Your Amazon. What are you going to do, launch a shitty Amazon Basics version of what my company does? Good luck. Have fun. You're probably doing it already.But the reason I want to talk to you on this is a confluence of a few things. One, as I mentioned back in May when you were on the show, I am incensed and annoyed that we've been talking for as long as we have, and somehow I never had you on the show. So, great. Come back, please. You're always welcome here. Secondly, you work at Equinix, which is, effectively—let's be relatively direct—it is functionally a data center as far as how people wind up contextualizing this. Yes, you have higher level—Amy: Yeah I guess people contextualize it that way. But we'll get into that.Corey: Yeah, from the outside. I don't work there, to be clear. My talking points don't exist for this. But I think of oh, Equinix. Oh, that means you basically have a colo or colo equivalent. The pricing dynamics have radically different; it looks a lot closer to a data center in my imagination than it does a traditional public cloud. I would also argue that if someone migrates from AWS to Equinix, that would be viewed—arguably correctly—as something of a repatriation. Is that directionally correct?Amy: I would argue incorrectly. For Metal, right?Corey: Ah.Amy: So, Equinix is a data center company, right? Like that's why everybody knows us as. Equinix Metal is a bare metal primitive service, right? So, it's a lot more of a cloud workflow, right, except that you're not getting the rich services that you get in a technically full cloud, right? Like, there's no RDS; there's no S3, even. What you get is bare metal primitives, right? With a really fast network that isn't going to—Corey: Are you really a cloud provider without some ridiculous machine-learning-powered service that's going to wind up taking pictures, perform incredibly expensive operations on it, and then return something that's more than a little racist? I mean, come on. That's not—you're not a cloud until you can do that, right?Amy: We can do that. We have customers that do that. Well, not specifically that, but um—Corey: Yeah, but they have to build it themselves. You don't have the high-level managed service that basically serves as, functionally, bias laundering.Amy: Yeah, you don't get it in a box, right? So, a lot of our customers are doing things that are unique, right, that are maybe not exactly fit into the cloud well. And it comes back down to a lot of Equinix's roots, which is—we talk but going into the cloud, and it's this kind of abstract environment we're reaching for, you know, up in the sky. And it's like, we don't know where it is, except we have regions that—okay, so it's in Virginia. But the rule of real estate applies to technology as often as not, which is location, location, location, right?When we're talking about a lot of applications, a challenge that we face, say in gaming, is that the latency from the customer, so that last mile to your data center, can often be extremely important, right, so a few milliseconds even. And a lot of, like, SaaS applications, the typical stuff that really the cloud was built on, 10 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds, nobody's really going to notice that, right? But in a gaming environment or some very low latency application that needs to run extremely close to the customer, it's hard to do that in the cloud. They're building this stuff out, right? Like, I see, you know, different ones [unintelligible 00:05:53] opening new regions but, you know, there's this other side of the cloud, which is, like, the edge computing thing that's coming alive, and that's more where I think about it.And again, location, location, location. The speed of light is really fast, but as most of us in tech know, if you want to go across from the East Coast to the West Coast, you're talking about 80 milliseconds, on average, right? I think that's what it is. I haven't checked in a while. Yeah, that's just basic fundamental speed of light. And so, if everything's in us-east-1—and this is why we do multi-region, sometimes—the latency from the West Coast isn't going to be great. And so, we run the application on both sides.Corey: It has improved though. If you want to talk old school things that are seared into my brain from over 20 years ago, every person who's worked in data centers—or in technology, as a general rule—has a few IP addresses seared. And the one that I've always had on my mind was 130.111.32.11. Kind of arbitrary and ridiculous, but it was one of the two recursive resolvers provided at the University of Maine where I had my first help desk job.And it lives on-prem, in Maine. And generally speaking, I tended to always accept that no matter where I was—unless I was in a data center somewhere—it was about 120 milliseconds. And I just checked now; it is 85 and change from where I am in San Francisco. So, the internet or the speed of light have improved. So, good for whichever one of those it was. But yeah, you've just updated my understanding of these things. All of this is, which is to say, yes, latency is very important.Amy: Right. Let's forget repatriation to really be really honest. Even the Dropbox case or any of them, right? Like, there's an economic story here that I think all of us that have been doing cloud work for a while see pretty clearly that maybe not everybody's seeing that—that's thinking from an on-prem kind of situation, which is that—you know, and I know you do this all the time, right, is, you don't just look at the cost of the data center and the servers and the network, the technical components, the bill of materials—Corey: Oh, lies, damned lies, and TCO analyses. Yeah.Amy: —but there's all these people on top of it, and the organizational complexity, and the contracts that you got to manage. And it's this big, huge operation that is incredibly complex to do well that is almost nobody's business. So the way I look at this, right, and the way I even talk to customers about it is, like, “What is your produ—” And I talk to people internally about this way? It's like, “What are you trying to build?” “Well, I want to build a SaaS.” “Okay. Do you need data center expertise to build a SaaS?” “No.” “Then why the hell are you putting it in a data center?” Like we—you know, and speaking for my employer, right, like, we have Equinix Metal right here. You can build on that and you don't have to do all the most complex part of this, at least in terms of, like, the physical plant, right? Like, right, getting a bare metal server available, we take care of all of that. Even at the primitive level, where we sit, it's higher level than, say, colo.Corey: There's also the question of economics as it ties into it. It's never just a raw cost-of-materials type of approach. Like, my original job in a data center was basically to walk around and replace hard drives, and apparently, to insult people. Now, the cloud has taken one of those two aspects away, and you can follow my Twitter account and figure out which one of those two it is, but what I keep seeing now is there is value to having that task done, but in a cloud environment—and Equinix Metal, let's be clear—that has slipped below the surface level of awareness. And well, what are the economic implications of that?Well, okay, you have a whole team of people at large companies whose job it is to do precisely that. Okay, we're going to upskill them and train them to use cloud. Okay. First, not everyone is going to be capable or willing to make that leap from hard drive replacement to, “Congratulations and welcome to JavaScript. You're about to hate everything that comes next.”And if they do make that leap, their baseline market value—by which I mean what the market is willing to pay for them—approximately will double. And whether they wind up being paid more by their current employer or they take a job somewhere else with those skills and get paid what they are worth, the company still has that economic problem. Like it or not, you will generally get what you pay for whether you want to or not; that is the reality of it. And as companies are thinking about this, well, what gets into the TCO analysis and what doesn't, I have yet to see one where the outcome was not predetermined. They're less, let's figure out in good faith whether it's going to be more expensive to move to the cloud, or move out of the cloud, or just burn the building down for insurance money. The outcome is generally the one that the person who commissioned the TCO analysis wants. So, when a vendor is trying to get you to switch to them, and they do one for you, yeah. And I'm not saying they're lying, but there's so much judgment that goes into this. And what do you include and what do you not include? That's hard.Amy: And there's so many hidden costs. And that's one of the things that I love about working at a cloud provider is that I still get to play with all that stuff, and like, I get to see those hidden costs, right? Like you were talking about the person who goes around and swaps out the hard drives. Or early in my career, right, I worked with someone whose job it was this every day, she would go into data center, she'd swap out the tapes, you know, and do a few things other around and, like, take care of the billing system. And that was a job where it was kind of going around and stewarding a whole bunch of things that kind of kept the whole machine running, but most people outside of being right next to the data center didn't have any idea that stuff even happen, right, that went into it.And so, like you were saying, like, when you go to do the TCO analysis, I mean, I've been through this a couple of times prior in my career, where people will look at it and go like, “Well, of course we're not going to list—we'll put, like, two headcount on there.” And it's always a lie because it's never just to headcount. It's never just the network person, or the SRE, or the person who's racking the servers. It's also, like, finance has to do all this extra work, and there's all the logistic work, and there is just so much stuff that just is really hard to include. Not only do people leave it out, but it's also just really hard for people to grapple with the complexity of all the things it takes to run a data center, which is, like, one of the most complex machines on the planet, any single data center.Corey: I've worked in small-scale environments, maybe a couple of mid-sized ones, but never the type of hyperscale facility that you folks have, which I would say is if it's not hyperscale, it's at least directionally close to it. We're talking thousands of servers, and hundreds of racks.Amy: Right.Corey: I've started getting into that, on some level. Now, I guess when we say ‘hyperscale,' we're talking about AWS-size things where, oh, that's a region and it's going to have three dozen data center facilities in it. Yeah, I don't work in places like that because honestly, have you met me? Would you trust me around something that's that critical infrastructure? No, you would not, unless you have terrible judgment, which means you should not be working in those environments to begin with.Amy: I mean, you're like a walking chaos exercise. Maybe I would let you in.Corey: Oh, I bring my hardware destruction aura near anything expensive and things are terrible. It's awful. But as I looked at the cloud, regardless of cloud, there is another economic element that I think is underappreciated, and to be fair, this does, I believe, apply as much to Equinix Metal as it does to the public hyperscale cloud providers that have problems with naming things well. And that is, when you are provisioning something as a customer of one of these places, you have an unbounded growth problem. When you're in a data center, you are not going to just absentmindedly sign an $8 million purchase order for new servers—you know, a second time—and then that means you're eventually run out of power, space, places to put things, and you have to go find it somewhere.Whereas in cloud, the only limit is basically your budget where there is no forcing function that reminds you to go and clean up that experiment from five years ago. You have people with three petabytes of data they were using for a project, but they haven't worked there in five years and nothing's touched it since. Because the failure mode of deleting things that are important, or disasters—Amy: That's why Glacier exists.Corey: Oh, exactly. But that failure mode of deleting things that should not be deleted are disastrous for a company, whereas if you've leave them there, well, it's only money. And there's no forcing function to do that, which means you have this infinite growth problem with no natural limit slash predator around it. And that is the economic analysis that I do not see playing out basically anywhere. Because oh, by the time that becomes a problem, we'll have good governance in place. Yeah, pull the other one. It has bells on it.Amy: That's the funny thing, right, is a lot of the early drive in the cloud was those of us who wanted to go faster and we were up against the limitations of our data centers. And then we go out and go, like, “Hey, we got this cloud thing. I'll just, you know, put the credit card in there and I'll spin up a few instances, and ‘hey, I delivered your product.'” And everybody goes, “Yeah, hey, happy.” And then like you mentioned, right, and then we get down the road here, and it's like, “Oh, my God, how much are we spending on this?”And then you're in that funny boat where you have both. But yeah, I mean, like, that's just typical engineering problem, where, you know, we have to deal with our constraints. And the cloud has constraints, right? Like when I was at Netflix, one of the things we would do frequently is bump up against instance limits. And then we go talk to our TAM and be like, “Hey, buddy. Can we have some more instance limit?” And then take care of that, right?But there are some bounds on that. Of course, in the cloud providers—you know, if I have my cloud provider shoes on, I don't necessarily want to put those limits to law because it's a business, the business wants to hoover up all the money. That's what businesses do. So, I guess it's just a different constraint that is maybe much too easy to knock down, right? Because as you mentioned, in a data center or in a colo space, I outgrow my cage and I filled up all that space I have, I have to either order more space from my colo provider, I expand to the cloud, right?Corey: The scale I was always at, the limit was not the space because I assure you with enough shoving all things are possible. Don't believe me? Look at what people are putting in the overhead bin on any airline. Enough shoving, you'll get a Volkswagen in there. But it was always power constrained is what I dealt with it. And it's like, “Eh, they're just being conservative.” And the whole building room dies.Amy: You want blade servers because that's how you get blade servers, right? That movement was about bringing the density up and putting more servers in a rack. You know, there were some management stuff and [unintelligible 00:16:08], but a lot of it was just about, like, you know, I remember I'm picturing it, right—Corey: Even without that, I was still power constrained because you have to remember, a lot of my experiences were not in, shall we say, data center facilities that you would call, you know, good.Amy: Well, that brings up a fun thing that's happening, which is that the power envelope of servers is still growing. The newest Intel chips, especially the ones they're shipping for hyperscale and stuff like that, with the really high core counts, and the faster clock speeds, you know, these things are pulling, like, 300 watts. And they also have to egress all that heat. And so, that's one of the places where we're doing some innovations—I think there's a couple of blog posts out about it around—like, liquid cooling or multimode cooling. And what's interesting about this from a cloud or data center perspective, is that the tools and skills and everything has to come together to run a, you know, this year's or next year's servers, where we're pushing thousands of kilowatts into a rack. Thousands; one rack right?The bar to actually bootstrap and run this stuff successfully is rising again, compared to I take my pizza box servers, right—and I worked at a gaming company a long time ago, right, and they would just, like, stack them on the floor. It was just a stack of servers. Like, they were in between the rails, but they weren't screwed down or anything, right? And they would network them all up. Because basically, like, the game would spin up on the servers and if they died, they would just unplug that one and leave it there and spin up another one.It was like you could just stack stuff up and, like, be slinging cables across the data center and stuff back then. I wouldn't do it that way now, but when you add, say liquid cooling and some of these, like, extremely high power situations into the mix, now you need to have, for example, if you're using liquid cooling, you don't want that stuff leaking, right? And so, it's good as the pressure fittings and blind mating and all this stuff that's coming around gets, you still have that element of additional training, and skill, and possibility for mistakes.Corey: The thing that I see as I look at this across the space is that, on some level, it's gotten harder to run a data center than it ever did before. Because again, another reason I wanted to have you on this show is that you do not carry a quota. Although you do often carry the conversation, when you have boring people around you, but quotas, no. You are not here selling things to people. You're not actively incentivized to get people to see things a certain way.You are very clearly an engineer in the right ways. I will further point out though, that you do not sound like an engineer, by which I mean, you're going to basically belittle people, in many cases, in the name of being technically correct. You're a human being with a frickin soul. And believe me, it is noticed.Amy: I really appreciate that. If somebody's just listening to hearing my voice and in my name, right, like, I have a low voice. And in most of my career, I was extremely technical, like, to the point where you know, if something was wrong technically, I would fight to the death to get the right technical solution and maybe not see the complexity around the decisions, and why things were the way they were in the way I can today. And that's changed how I sound. It's changed how I talk. It's changed how I look at and talk about technology as well, right? I'm just not that interested in Kubernetes. Because I've kind of started looking up the stack in this kind of pursuit.Corey: Yeah, when I say you don't sound like an engineer, I am in no way shape or form—Amy: I know.Corey: —alluding in any respect to your technical acumen. I feel the need to clarify that statement for people who might be listening, and say, “Hey, wait a minute. Is he being a shithead?” No.Amy: No, no, no.Corey: Well, not the kind you're worried I'm being anyway; I'm a different breed of shithead and that's fine.Amy: Yeah, I should remember that other people don't know we've had conversations that are deeply technical, that aren't on air, that aren't context anybody else has. And so, like, I bring that deep technical knowledge, you know, the ability to talk about PCI Express, and kilovolts [unintelligible 00:19:58] rack, and top-of-rack switches, and network topologies, all of that together now, but what's really fascinating is where the really big impact is, for reliability, for security, for quality, the things that me as a person, that I'm driven by—products are cool, but, like, I like them to be reliable; that's the part that I like—really come down to more leadership, and business acumen, and understanding the business constraints, and then being able to get heard by an audience that isn't necessarily technical, that doesn't necessarily understand the difference between PCI, PCI-X, and PCI Express. There's a difference between those. It doesn't mean anything to the business, right, so when we want to go and talk about why are we doing, for example, multi-region deployment of our application? If I come in and say, “Well, because we want to use Raft.” That's going to fall flat, right?The business is going to go, “I don't care about Raft. What does that have to do with my customers?” Which is the right question to always ask. Instead, when I show up and say, “Okay, what's going on here is we have this application sits in a single region—or in a single data center or whatever, right? I'm using region because that's probably what most of the people listening understand—you know, so I put my application in a single region and it goes down, our customers are going to be unhappy. We have the alternative to spend, okay, not a little bit more money, probably a lot more money to build a second region, and the benefit we will get is that our customers will be able to access the service 24x7, and it will always work and they'll have a wonderful experience. And maybe they'll keep coming back and buy more stuff from us.”And so, when I talk about it in those terms, right—and it's usually more nuanced than that—then I start to get the movement at the macro level, right, in the systemic level of the business in the direction I want it to go, which is for the product group to understand why reliability matters to the customer, you know? For the individual engineers to understand why it matters that we use secure coding practices.[midroll 00:21:56]Corey: Getting back to the reason I said that you are not quota-carrying and you are not incentivized to push things in a particular way is that often we'll meet zealots, and I've never known you to be one, you have always been a strong advocate for doing the right thing, even if it doesn't directly benefit any given random employer that you might have. And as a result, one of the things that you've said to me repeatedly is if you're building something from scratch, for God's sake, put it in cloud. What is wrong with you? Do that. The idea of building it yourself on low-lying, underlying primitives for almost every modern SaaS style workload, there's no reason to consider doing something else in almost any case. Is that a fair representation of your position on this?Amy: It is. I mean, the simpler version right, “Is why the hell are you doing undifferentiated lifting?” Right? Things that don't differentiate your product, why would you do it?Corey: The thing that this has empowered then is I can build an experiment tonight—I don't have to wait for provisioning and signed contracts and do all the rest. I can spend 25 cents and get the experiment up and running. If it takes off, though, it has changed how I move going forward as well because there's no difference in the way that there was back when we were in data centers. I'm going to try and experiment I'm going to run it in this, I don't know, crappy Raspberry Pi or my desktop or something under my desk somewhere. And if it takes off and I have to scale up, I got to do a giant migration to real enterprise-grade hardware. With cloud, you are getting all of that out of the box, even if all you're doing with it is something ridiculous and nonsensical.Amy: And you're often getting, like, ridiculously better service. So, 20 years ago, if you and I sat down to build a SaaS app, we would have spun up a Linux box somewhere in a colo, and we would have spun up Apache, MySQL, maybe some Perl or PHP if we were feeling frisky. And the availability of that would be one machine could do, what we could handle in terms of one MySQL instance. But today if I'm spinning up a new stack for some the same kind of SaaS, I'm going to probably deploy it into an ASG, I'm probably going to have some kind of high availability database be on it—and I'm going to use Aurora as an example—because, like, the availability of an Aurora instance, in terms of, like, if I'm building myself up with even the very best kit available in databases, it's going to be really hard to hit the same availability that Aurora does because Aurora is not just a software solution, it's also got a team around it that stewards that 24/7. And it continues to evolve on its own.And so, like, the base, when we start that little tiny startup, instead of being that one machine, we're actually starting at a much higher level of quality, and availability, and even security sometimes because of these primitives that were available. And I probably should go on to extend on the thought of undifferentiated lifting, right, and coming back to the colo or the edge story, which is that there are still some little edge cases, right? Like I think for SaaS, duh right? Like, go straight to. But there are still some really interesting things where there's, like, hardware innovations where they're doing things with GPUs and stuff like that.Where the colo experience may be better because you're trying to do, like, custom hardware, in which case you are in a colo. There are businesses doing some really interesting stuff with custom hardware that's behind an application stack. What's really cool about some of that, from my perspective, is that some of that might be sitting on, say, bare metal with us, and maybe the front-end is sitting somewhere else. Because the other thing Equinix does really well is this product we call a Fabric which lets us basically do peering with any of the cloud providers.Corey: Yeah, the reason, I guess I don't consider you as a quote-unquote, “Cloud,” is first and foremost, rooted in the fact that you don't have a bandwidth model that is free and grass and criminally expensive to send it anywhere that isn't to you folks. Like, are you really a cloud if you're not just gouging the living piss out of your customers every time they want to send data somewhere else?Amy: Well, I mean, we like to say we're part of the cloud. And really, that's actually my favorite feature of Metal is that you get, I think—Corey: Yeah, this was a compliment, to be very clear. I'm a big fan of not paying 1998 bandwidth pricing anymore.Amy: Yeah, but this is the part where I get to do a little bit of, like, showing off for Metal a little bit, in that, like, when you buy a Metal server, there's different configurations, right, but, like, I think the lowest one, you have dual 10 Gig ports to the server that you can get either in a bonded mode so that you have a single 20 Gig interface in your operating system, or you can actually do L3 and you can do BGP to your server. And so, this is a capability that you really can't get at all on the other clouds, right? This lets you do things with the network, not only the bandwidth, right, that you have available. Like, you want to stream out 25 gigs of bandwidth out of us, I think that's pretty doable. And the rates—I've only seen a couple of comparisons—are pretty good.So, this is like where some of the business opportunities, right—and I can't get too much into it, but, like, this is all public stuff I've talked about so far—which is, that's part of the opportunity there is sitting at the crossroads of the internet, we can give you a server that has really great networking, and you can do all the cool custom stuff with it, like, BGP, right? Like, so that you can do Anycast, right? You can build Anycast applications.Corey: I miss the days when that was a thing that made sense.Amy: [laugh].Corey: I mean that in the context of, you know, with the internet and networks. These days, it always feels like the network engineering as slipped away within the cloud because you have overlays on top of overlays and it's all abstractions that are living out there right until suddenly you really need to know what's going on. But it has abstracted so much of this away. And that, on some level, is the surprise people are often in for when they wind up outgrowing the cloud for a workload and wanting to move it someplace that doesn't, you know, ride them like naughty ponies for bandwidth. And they have to rediscover things that we've mostly forgotten about.I remember having to architect significantly around the context of hard drive failures. I know we've talked about that a fair bit as a thing, but yeah, it's spinning metal, it throws off heat and if you lose the wrong one, your data is gone and you now have serious business problems. In cloud, at least AWS-land, that's not really a thing anymore. The way EBS is provisioned, there's a slight tick in latency if you're looking at just the right time for what I think is a hard drive failure, but it's there. You don't have to think about this anymore.Migrate that workload to a pile of servers in a colo somewhere, guess what? Suddenly your reliability is going to decrease. Amazon, and the other cloud providers as well, have gotten to a point where they are better at operations than you are at your relatively small company with your nascent sysadmin team. I promise. There is an economy of scale here.Amy: And it doesn't have to be good or better, right? It's just simply better resourced—Corey: Yeah.Amy: Than most anybody else can hope. Amazon can throw a billion dollars at it and never miss it. In most organizations out there, you know, and most of the especially enterprise, people are scratching and trying to get resources wherever they can, right? They're all competing for people, for time, for engineering resources, and that's one of the things that gets freed up when you just basically bang an API and you get the thing you want. You don't have to go through that kind of old world internal process that is usually slow and often painful.Just because they're not resourced as well; they're not automated as well. Maybe they could be. I'm sure most of them could, in theory be, but we come back to undifferentiated lifting. None of this helps, say—let me think of another random business—Claire's, whatever, like, any of the shops in the mall, they all have some kind of enterprise behind them for cash processing and all that stuff, point of sale, none of this stuff is differentiating for them because it doesn't impact anything to do with where the money comes in. So again, we're back at why are you doing this?Corey: I think that's also the big challenge as well, when people start talking about repatriation and talking about this idea that they are going to, oh, that cloud is too expensive; we're going to move out. And they make the economics work. Again, I do firmly believe that, by and large, businesses do not intentionally go out and make poor decisions. I think when we see a company doing something inscrutable, there's always context that we're missing, and I think as a general rule of thumb, that at these companies do not hire people who are fools. And there are always constraints that they cannot talk about in public.My general position as a consultant, and ideally as someone who aspires to be a decent human being, is that when I see something I don't understand, I assume that there's simply a lack of context, not that everyone involved in this has been foolish enough to make giant blunders that I can pick out in the first five seconds of looking at it. I'm not quite that self-confident yet.Amy: I mean, that's a big part of, like, the career progression into above senior engineer, right, is, you don't get to sit in your chair and go, like, “Oh, those dummies,” right? You actually have—I don't know about ‘have to,' but, like, the way I operate now, right, is I remember in my youth, I used to be like, “Oh, those business people. They don't know, nothing. Like, what are they doing?” You know, it's goofy what they're doing.And then now I have a different mode, which is, “Oh, that's interesting. Can you tell me more?” The feeling is still there, right? Like, “Oh, my God, what is going on here?” But then I get curious, and I go, “So, how did we get here?” [laugh]. And you get that story, and the stories are always fascinating, and they always involve, like, constraints, immovable objects, people doing the best they can with what they have available.Corey: Always. And I want to be clear that very rarely is it the right answer to walk into a room and say, look at the architecture and, “All right, what moron built this?” Because always you're going to be asking that question to said moron. And it doesn't matter how right you are, they're never going to listen to another thing out of your mouth again. And have some respect for what came before even if it's potentially wrong answer, well, great. “Why didn't you just use this service to do this instead?” “Yeah, because this thing predates that by five years, jackass.”There are reasons things are the way they are, if you take any architecture in the world and tell people to rebuild it greenfield, almost none of them would look the same as they do today because we learn things by getting it wrong. That's a great teacher, and it hurts. But it's also true.Amy: And we got to build, right? Like, that's what we're here to do. If we just kind of cycle waiting for the perfect technology, the right choices—and again, to come back to the people who built it at the time used—you know, often we can fault people for this—used the things they know or the things that are nearby, and they make it work. And that's kind of amazing sometimes, right?Like, I'm sure you see architectures frequently, and I see them too, probably less frequently, where you just go, how does this even work in the first place? Like how did you get this to work? Because I'm looking at this diagram or whatever, and I don't understand how this works. Maybe that's a thing that's more a me thing, like, because usually, I can look at a—skim over an architecture document and be, like, be able to build the model up into, like, “Okay, I can see how that kind of works and how the data flows through it.” I get that pretty quickly.And comes back to that, like, just, again, asking, “How did we get here?” And then the cool part about asking how did we get here is it sets everybody up in the room, not just you as the person trying to drive change, but the people you're trying to bring along, the original architects, original engineers, when you ask, how did we get here, you've started them on the path to coming along with you in the future, which is kind of cool. But until—that storytelling mode, again, is so powerful at almost every level of the stack, right? And that's why I just, like, when we were talking about how technical I bring things in, again, like, I'm just not that interested in, like, are you Little Endian or Big Endian? How did we get here is kind of cool. You built a Big Endian architecture in 2022? Like, “Ohh. [laugh]. How do we do that?”Corey: Hey, leave me to my own devices, and I need to build something super quickly to get it up and running, well, what I'm going to do, for a lot of answers is going to look an awful lot like the traditional three-tier architecture that I was running back in 2008. Because I know it, it works well, and I can iterate rapidly on it. Is it a best practice? Absolutely not, but given the constraints, sometimes it's the fastest thing to grab? “Well, if you built this in serverless technologies, it would run at a fraction of the cost.” It's, “Yes, but if I run this thing, the way that I'm running it now, it'll be $20 a month, it'll take me two hours instead of 20. And what exactly is your time worth, again?” It comes down to the better economic model of all these things.Amy: Any time you're trying to make a case to the business, the economic model is going to always go further. Just general tip for tech people, right? Like if you can make the better economic case and you go to the business with an economic case that is clear. Businesses listen to that. They're not going to listen to us go on and on about distributed systems.Somebody in finance trying to make a decision about, like, do we go and spend a million bucks on this, that's not really the material thing. It's like, well, how is this going to move the business forward? And how much is it going to cost us to do it? And what other opportunities are we giving up to do that?Corey: I think that's probably a good place to leave it because there's no good answer. We can all think about that until the next episode. I really want to thank you for spending so much time talking to me again. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Amy: Always Twitter for me, MissAmyTobey, and I'll see you there. Say hi.Corey: Thank you again for being as generous with your time as you are. It's deeply appreciated.Amy: It's always fun.Corey: Amy Tobey, Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix Metal. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that tells me exactly what we got wrong in this episode in the best dialect you have of condescending engineer with zero people skills. I look forward to reading it.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

You know your body. You know when something isn't quite right. Your symptoms have a cause and you shouldn't accept comfortability. Join a conversation on recognizing discomfort and making a change with a certified nutritional practitioner and professional basketball player.  If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co . And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe.In this episode you will learn about:The support and lifestyle of women in professional basketball Starting before being the expertSpace and grace in the comparison game Your optimal health shouldn't be a dreamIdentifying and getting over our fear of failure. Episode References/Links:Flo By Alisa VittiIG @coachamyraeGuest Bio:Hello! I'm Amy, a retired professional athlete who was diagnosed with my 2nd autoimmune disorder in 2016. I went from playing professional basketball all over the world to battling professional fatigue and not recognizing myself in the mirror. From my rock bottom moment, I felt a nudge that told me there had to be a better way & I relied on my mindset built within my athletic career to pave the way to feeling like myself again--and even better! Currently, I'm certified as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP), specializing in thyroid health, striving to support women in advocating for their health, getting their energy back, and feeling like themselves again  If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox.ResourcesWatch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube!Lesley Logan websiteBe It Till You See It PodcastOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley LoganOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTubeProfitable PilatesSocial MediaInstagramFacebookLinkedInEpisode Transcript:Lesley Logan 0:00  Hey, Be It listener. What's up? Okay, so I just love, I love the way the world works. I love that how you can meet people and have conversations with people and learn something you never knew you'd have. And I don't think we do that enough. So if you are feeling stuck, if you are feeling alone, if you are feeling like uninspired. I want you to have a conversation with someone you don't know. I want you to ask them questions. So if you're like, "How do I do that? I'm so scared. I'm an introvert." Look at the local meetups, look at Eventbrite, look at like opportunities that are happening for a networking situation. And then you're gonna find someone who makes eye contact with you. And you're gonna smile at them. And then you're just going to ask them questions, you don't have to a... you don't have to say anything. You can just ask them questions like think 40 Old Virgin just like ask a question, if you don't know what to say ask a question. And the reason is, people do like to talk about themselves, but also going to learn something about somebody. And I think we underestimate how inspiring it can be to learn another person's story and what they're going through. And even if it maybe not inspiring, but maybe you feel seen, and feeling seen as something that we all truly, truly want. And so my next guest for you this week is Amy, Amy Denson, and I am really excited for you to hear her story. And I want you to listen to her story because maybe you don't have this story. Like maybe you weren't this like professional and NB like women's basketball player. I certainly wasn't. But as I listened to her story, I thought about my health story. And I thought about some of the health stories of people who have listened to the show and written in. And I truly think that a lot of times we think we're alone, and this is only happening to us. And I know for myself, when I started actually sharing my story about my stomach, I started of find out how many people had stomach issues. And I wish I had started talking about earlier, it was embarrassing. So I didn't want to but I wouldn't have felt alone. And so as you listen to today's interview, I really want you to hear her story and see yourself in it. And I, I really am excited for you to hear what she's up to, which is excited about next, how she got on this mission that she's on. And also, of course, you know, I love those BE IT action items that hers are really cool. And they're going to challenge you in the best ways. So after this message here, Amy.Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast, where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guests will bring Bold, Executable, Intrinsic and Targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started.All right, Be It listeners I have a very special special guest Amy Denson here. Amy has an incredible story, I've be... I'm really excited for you to hear it because I think it's really easy to think, "Well, it must be easy for them. But I've got these things going on or I have this setback or this obstacle." And we can kind of let those obstacles become just like a reason to not do something. And Amy is certainly not letting that happen. So, I'm excited for you to be inspired by her and hear how she did it. So Amy, tell everyone who you are and how you got here.Amy Denson 3:42  Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and to meet you. Um, so my story is, you know, it's all of ours probably could go on forever. But I grew up playing basketball and I always knew that in my heart. That was what I was supposed to do. And I you know, felt most in my skin and confident and as a pretty tall, broad shouldered, strong young woman who did not fit in in any other scene. Basketball was really home for me. I received a full ride scholarship to Arizona State University. We did some amazing things there. We created history there. We were the first team to make it into the Sweet 16 tournament of the NCAA tournament. (Lesley: Whoa! That's a insane journey.) Oh, yeah. So. Yeah, yes. And it was really cool because we had a really young team. So for the majority of my career, I got to play with the same people which is very, very special. (Lesley: That's incredible) Yeah, and then after I graduated, I just wasn't done and I signed with an agent and then I ended up playing overseas professionally for eight years. So I played in Puerto Rico for four seasons. I played in Australia for three years. I played in Poland, Romania and Spain. And so ...Lesley Logan 5:04  What a life? Like how (Amy: Yeah) cool. I so when we moved to Las Vegas there, I mean, LA had a WNBA team but I'm not going to downtown. So but the Las Vegas team is like (Amy: The Aces) ... Yeah, the Aces. (Amy: Yeah) It's a short stint down the street actually from (Amy: Yeah) where I live, like really close and my Dad and I would go we'd like, "Oh, hey, there's a game today. Let's go." And it was Brad came and it was so fun we get, we actually probably get the worst seats in the house. And most people think but like it's just the side of this of the of the basket. So it's like all the action is there the whole game (Amy: Yeah) and it's like, so fun. (Amy: That's so awesome.) Those women are amazing. I mean, (Amy: Yeah) as were you but like, it's kind of crazy. I don't think people realize that. (Amy: No) So many female basketball players spend most of their life playing for multiple teams at the same time and around the world. Like you're, they're not (Amy: Yeah) making NBA wages, which is really annoying.Amy Denson 5:53  No. And that's the thing. Yeah. And so really the WNBA I mean, it's, you know, still probably the best league in the world, but women make their money overseas. And so unless you know, do get some sponsorships here as well as your pay. You know, if you do have WNBA on your resume, you can make pretty decent money overseas and overseas is much different as far as like really even support wise for women. And I don't think that women, even young women in college, understand maybe they do more so now but when I was in college, how many opportunities there are to play at a next level? And yes, sometimes, I mean, there's just so many different options, maybe that just means you get paid, you know, a little bit extra, but you get your room and board and you know, a couple of meals, but you you're basically traveling for free, right, you're seeing the world for free. I was able to make a pretty decent wage. And I you know, really kind of moved up the ranks and played in some really amazing conferences against some really amazing athletes. And I think, you know, people may not like to, you know, I think put the women's game down quite a bit as far as pace and athleticism and all that kind of stuff. But I do think, I don't think people understand the amount of effort it takes to be professional edit anything. (Lesley: Yeah. No I don't think so.) Right. And then you add anything physical in there. And yeah, physical is a huge part of it. But the once you're at a professional level, it's the mental game, right? It's an emotional game. It's, it's a, you know, the battle to how do I, how do I beat my opponent? That's probably just as good or better than me, you know. SoLesley Logan 7:27  Right. That might, that you might end up being on the team with in another time.Amy Denson 7:32  Right. Yeah, so it was a beautiful experience. I actually, I really miss traveling, like to my core right now. I just I lived out of a suitcase and had a laptop for eight years. And it just was the most amazing experience. It was hard. And it was isolating at times, especially (Lesley: Yeah) with language barriers, but I got to get paid and travel in my gift for my gift. And so I was so blessed because I got to live out my first dream. (Lesley: Yeah.) And I don't know how many people can really, you know, say that when, as you're growing up, and it's just something that I always knew that I was going to do. And it was, there was no doubt or question in my mind.Lesley Logan 8:12  Yeah, I think that thank you for saying that. Because I do think a lot of people make sacrifices or they think, "Okay, I went to college, and I gotta do this, I gotta go be a grown up." And like, you know, you are one of the few people who's like, "You know, I'm gonna keep doing my passion." And, and yeah, it's not making you the money that's going to like, put a house on the ground or anything like that. But it did allow you to see the world and experience the highs and the lows from that. And so, you know, I cut you off in your story. Like, what made you leave? Did you just like injure out? Did you age out? Did you get (Amy: Yeah) tired of what was that? What was the next step?Amy Denson 8:47  I don't know why, but I always had it in my mind that I would probably retire by around age 30. And I was really, I was just kind of burnt out. I was really tired. I'd been playing year around for a long time. I just needed a break more so emotionally and mentally. And I also was getting into a serious relationship with my best friend who is my now my husband. And I just felt in my heart. It was time. (Lesley: Yeah.) And so when I came back to the United States, it was it was so hard because I hadn't lived here for eight years. I couldn't get a job. Nobody would look at my professional history as a job. So it looks like to them I had gra... unless they had a sports background. Like I'd graduated college and then I just showed back up when I was you know 30. (Lesley: That's so interesting.) Yeah, it was just ...Lesley Logan 9:45  I never would have thought about that. Like it would be so it's like your resume like doesn't start and so they're like, you have no experience except for that you (Amy: Right) like so much experience like what it takes to be (Amy: Right) on a team, what it takes to win a game like you know, like you're right unless they know sports, they don't see a talent, skill set there.Amy Denson 10:00  Yeah. And so there was like a major, major identity crisis. You know, I didn't really understand or know how to introduce myself without saying, "Hi, Amy, I'm played professional basketball." It was it was just everything, you know, it was my pride, it was my joy, it was everything. And so to now really kind of step back and, and not only not be acknowledged for that effort, but really have to start over not only like career wise, but for my for myself, like, who am I without basketball, (Lesley: Yeah) which was very hard, and I knew it was going to be hard to retire. But it did not know how hard it was gonna be. I didn't know, I didn't realize the grieving process I would have. (Lesley: Yeah.) And so I just kind of floated around, I got my personal training and certification so that well, this is obviously the next thing. I still want to be active. You know, I didn't know what to do. And ...Lesley Logan 10:52  But you know, what all I see is like, of course, like, who wouldn't want to train with like, I mean ...Amy Denson 10:56  Yeah, why not? I want to work out. Let's work out together, you know.Lesley Logan 10:59  Yeah. Who would want to train with a WNBA player or a women's (Amy: Yeah) basketball player? Like, I like that would be a great calling card. (Lesley laughs) (Amy: Yeah, exactly.) I mean, you'd have to want to do it. So how, so you went and got your training? (Amy: Yeah) And how did that go?Amy Denson 11:11  It went okay. It was just, it was just a hard time, it was a really hard time, it was a rough transition for a couple years, I ended up landing in a college coaching position for a small division one at college in Oregon. And I thought, "Well, duh, this is what I'm supposed to do, hello." And I actually, I loved it, I really think that it could have been a really good path for me, it's just again, for women's basketball, the money is nothing, which is not everything, but we've got to live (Lesley: We got a paying bills. Yeah) We gotta pay. And it's just, you know, it just, I wasn't in a very good working environment as far as with the other adults, unfortunately. And this is when I started to really experience some symptoms that I wasn't used to. So I only knew how to work out one way. If I was dealing with anything stress wise, you know, lifewise, for me working out with, you know, it's a much as a mental and emotional release as it is a physical, so I only knew how to work out one way, which is like, balls to the wall. Like, if you're not close to puking, and you push through the wall, all of these things that we had, like we did to (Lesley: Yeah) stay in shape, right. But I noticed like it wasn't really quote unquote, "working" like it used to, I noticed, like I was just so fatigued, I was really, really high stressed. I just felt like, emotionally a little out of control. And (Lesley: Yeah) I wasn't sure I don't know how to describe that I just did not feel like myself. And ...Lesley Logan 12:45  And I can resonate with that though, Amy because it's like, a you like you're already in a transition of some kind anyways, like your life as you knew it has changed. And you're, it's not like it was like easy to step back into the world. And so then you're like trying different careers out. And then also the way you train isn't working the way it used to. And also like, our bodies are getting older, like there is this weird thing because I was an athlete too. And then like, you hit 30 and you're like, "Wow, I can't do two a days anymore. Should I be doing two a days?" (Amy: Right) But like, I also don't know a different way. (Amy: Right) So, (Amy: Yeah) you know, you're kind of going, like, in, in your health and your workouts in every part of your life. Everything is different and out of control. So of course you're gonna feel stressed. (Amy: Yeah) And all these things, and it's hard to articulate when you're in it.Amy Denson 13:31  Absolutely. And so I started to go to a couple doctors for some help. And, you know, just kept getting the all, "Eat less and workout more," duh. (Lesley laughs) Cool. (Lesley: Okay thanks.) I just really felt like in my experience. You know, after seeing multiple doctors, I started to lose my hair. I started my hair was thinning. I just noticed all of these things. And I was like, "My God I just ..." I just feel off, right? I just feel off. I went I was just you know, as we do, I was like on Google and this and that. So I I read that a dermatologist could help with hair. So I went to a dermatologist who told me I was prematurely balding at 33 and I was like, "Are you sure? Like is like really?" And so I ended up going to an endocrinologist who one of the top and in the field for Oregon. And I had gone to the ER because I had I have nosebleeds or I had nosebleeds that I couldn't get stopped. So I had to go to the ER. And when I leaned back for them to, to basically cauterize my nose, I have two huge nodules on my neck and the guy was like, "Have you gotten those checked out?" And I said, "No, I didn't even know that they were there." So I went to this endocrinologist. We did an ultrasound and she's like, "Yep, you've got Hashimotos." And I was like, "Okay, what, what's Hashimotos?" And she's like, "Well, it's an autoimmune disorder where your body is attacking your thyroid tissue" because it thinks that there's a foreign invader, something's going on. I'm like, "Okay, well, does this explain, you know." Because a lot of times Hashimotos and hypothyroidism go hand in hand. "So does this explain me having cold hands and feet?" So poor circulation? "Does this explain me losing hair? Does this explain me gaining weight specifically around my midsection? Does this explain me feeling like I'm losing my GD mind?" She said, "Yeah." And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, great. So like, what do we do about it?" She goes, "Nothing. (Lesley: No) We wait, we wait until your body attacks your thyroid so much that it doesn't work anymore. And then we will start hormones."Lesley Logan 15:31  That is not an option. That is, so you just have to suffer?Amy Denson 15:34  And I think, I think it's really interesting because, you know, the way that I was raised to is like, well, she obviously knows more than me, right? Because she's a doctor. (Lesley: Yeah.) And so I walked away from that feeling, obviously very defeated. And also, the way that I approach things as an athlete is like, I'm going to control it as much as I possibly can. So what can I do? What can I do? Not knowing the things that I was doing, were probably escalating it. (Lesley: Yeah) Um, and so it was about two years later that I, we had some people over for Memorial Day, and I got incredibly sick. And I literally remember, like shutting the door that like saying our goodbyes, and as soon as I shut the door, I just started crying. And I just said, "I can't live the rest of my life like this. Something is wrong, something is off. And I need help." (Lesley: Yeah) And from that day forward, that has been my mission. And now that I have more information, because Hashimotos is my actual life, my second autoimmune disorder. And with thyroid related disorders, illnesses, whatever, it's so common, and there's just so much that goes into it. And a lot of it kind of goes against the grain of like our diet culture, workout culture, and all of that. So there's so much mental and emotional stuff that's tied up into that, you know, the two a days or the, you know, anyway, working out, eating less all of that. So, once I kind of started on my own health journey, I've now made it my mission to help other women not feel alone, and really to feel like themselves again, because I really think the biggest thing that's missing right now, in like, our standard medical care system is that we're just there's no empathy. I don't think we're even being heard. (Lesley: Yeah.) And of course, you know, I think a lot of times, which is okay, I'm not saying anything is wrong with medication, but I do think we have to also be aware of everything else that goes into the healing process, besides support for medication. (Lesley: Yeah) I have absolutely nothing against it, if it if it helps people, I am on it. But that's not the only thing that we can't just pop a pill and it be okay, we can't just pop a pill and not address our stress levels.Lesley Logan 17:58  You're... (Amy: You know) that's just it and like, I think, you know, some... one of my, my previous assistant was amazing. And she actually teaches people on how to be their own health advocate, or how to be an advocate for others. (Amy: Yes.) And I think we all like I'm sure, maybe generations younger than us, maybe they they are wise and all knowing that the doctors ... (Amy: Probably, they probably. Yeah) they're they come out knowing that no one knows what they're doing. (Amy: Yes) We, I grew up like the doctor knows they knew everything. (Amy: Well, yeah.) They went to school. They're the most educated person. (Amy: Absolutely.) And I had similar, like health issues where like, they literally like, "Well, you have IBS, so just, you know, eat like this, don't eat these things." I mean, those are very nutritional things. I think I'm probably supposed to eat those. You know, and I wasn't my own advocate, I probably wouldn't, I probably be dead right now, to be honest, because I was just like, suffering so much. And it was I my nutritional levels were so bad that I like had no B 12, no vitamin D, all these things. I think I would probably be divorced. And, and (Amy: Yeah) and a shell of a human. So I want to go back to something though, because you've made it this mission to like really help women who are going through this? Because you're going through this, I think the question is like, how do, how, what were the first steps or what the steps that you took to help other women go through something that you yourself, were still learning? Because I do think a lot of listeners get stuck in that they're like, "Well, I'm not the expert yet. So I can't do the thing that I'm feeling called to do." And you were like, "I'm being called do this." How did you do that? How did you kind of wrap your (Amy: Yeah) head around that?Amy Denson 19:32  Well, I think you know, it really started with obviously my own, getting my own ish together, and I don't have it together. But I do have a lot of knowledge around it. I do have a lot of knowledge around what works for me and what doesn't, which I feel like provides a lot of I don't know security, or when we feel out of control and we don't know what's causing what. It's like we just go down this rabbit hole of symptoms or what did I eat? What did I not eat? How did they move? What did I do different here? And that's all I used to do. And it was just so time consuming and energy sucking and defeating. So I think really, for me, the first step was, if anybody is out there, find some a doctor of some sort that's going to support you and has experience in whatever if you do know your diagnosis or don't know, I found a naturopath that it like changed my life, and I'm still with her today. I think that's your first step. I think me going on my own health journey, and then feeling a little bit better, always helps to like feel like I have capacity to help other people. (Lesley: Yeah) And I really think that the health journey is all it is, is a trial and error, I think we get so stuck in doing the right and wrong things. That it just, it's just like destabilizes us. And it's just trying this, see how this works. How does your body feel in this? Hey, if it doesn't feel good here, let's, let's tweak it and try try this and like just keep continuing to do that along the way with the intention of healing your body or with the intention of supporting your journey supporting your body in that. I think we just we've got to be a little bit more flexible in our thinking, and what we are willing to try it and not try or you know, really not get stuck and what diet worked for for your best friend. And it's not working for you now. I think we really get stuck in food specifically. (Lesley: Yeah.) Where I think that we don't always need to be, we don't need to always label how we eat as a diet. It's just how we eat. (Lesley: Yeah.) You don't need to be in a specific lane all the time. And I think that so, (Lesley: Yeah.) I would just say just being a couple steps ahead. Those couple steps make a really big difference for somebody else. And I (Lesley: Yeah.) always tell myself, "If I could help this person feel 10% better? How would their life improve?" Because when I was at my rock bottom, when I shut that door and said goodbye and started crying, I would have given anything to feel a little bit better. Or I would have given anything to have a little bit more knowledge around, "What the hell is going on with my body?"Lesley Logan 22:13  Yeah, um, I thank you for sharing that because I do I do believe like, people think that they have to be 15 steps ahead, the people that they're going to help. And it's like, you just have to be a couple steps ahead. Like, you know, because 15 steps ahead is like, you know, I know like, well, look like, well let's just talk about we're on a podcast, you're listening to this. Some of the people I look up to have like, a thousand episodes. I'm like, "That is overwhelming. That is like, yes, it's yes, inspiring. Yes, it's showing me the what's possible." But also like to think of it from, I don't know what episode this is going to be while we're recording it, but it's at least 100 and I don't know, eight. And, (Amy: Ah, that'a awesome.) you know, and so that that feels like a big gap. But I was just talking to somebody yesterday who has 300 episodes, and he was giving me some tips. And those felt very doable. He's only a few steps ahead of me, right. So I love that you share that. And I also think it's like not to underestimate like the power that you can help someone even if it's a couple percentage, you know, a little bit, (Amy: Yeah) and then you're because you're working on yourself, you're getting a couple more steps ahead. And so you're bringing (Amy: Right) everybody with you. (Amy: Right.) So thank you for sharing that. And I also think, you know, and I don't know, you'll have to tell me how long was for you. But I don't think a lot of people give the things that they're trying out enough time. (Amy: Absolutely not.) You know, like, Jenn Pike has been on our podcast before. She says, "When it comes to your hormones, it's 100 days. So the things we're doing, you're like, you don't get to even tell me anything for 100 days, like maybe you're gonna feel better right away. But the reality is, is like, it's going to take some time because the you know, like, the stuff we did has already affected what's happening right now."Amy Denson 23:51  Right? You know, it's taken us, you know, for a lot of clients or people that are around me, or that I work with, it's probably, you know, mid 30s, 40s. It's taken, we've been through a lot of shit by now. It's taken us a while to get here. And I don't think we realize just like you said, our habits and actions and everything. It's all led up to this. So in, you know, thinking back, we didn't necessarily get away with eating and drinking and moving a certain way. It's just where we've kind of caught up to this moment. And in this moment, and so, yeah, in our 20s we I feel like we're always in this comparison mode, but you have a family now, we have responsibilities. It looks different now, you know, our stress level is so incredibly high. And we keep addressing everything as, well, it's not mean it's not too high. It's probably normal, right? No, it's absolutely not and we don't realize that, all of that that how that is affecting our health. And even you know, my clients I work with 1 on 1, 6 months is probably the baseline. And that's just getting started. And I think that people feel like at the beginning at the starting line, like six months, like, "Oh my gosh, that's so long." But we're talking about the rest of your life. Six months is nothing and, and I'm not trying to, like, (Lesley: It's like, diminish or...) If you feel bad. Yeah, it make you feel bad, but like, we're just getting started. (Lesley: Oh, yeah.) We're just getting started this and I think that we just have this, you know, I think getting ready for a wedding or getting ready for a vacation or whatever, there's always a start and an end and a start and end, which is creating this yo yo dieting, culture mindset. And it literally like indicates it like as a, our blood pressure's going up and down, up and down, up and down, which is so hard on our body, we've got to instill some consistency within our, our health, within our life. And that comes with time, we never give anything enough time. And if we would just do really tiny things like tiny steps, and did them consistently for 90 days, for 100 days, for six months, for a year, we we discredit the amount of momentum we could build by (Lesley: Yeah) just doing small things, we think we have to start the diet on Monday, we think we have to, you know, start working out five days a week, no excuses, all of this kind of language, which yes, it worked for us at one time, and I was a part of all of that. But if we are going to be sustainable over a life, and you are dealing with health issues, and you have stress in your life, and and and you're a woman, (Lesley: Right) we have to, we have to find a different way.Lesley Logan 26:53  There has been a lot, there's like space and grace, it's like, I think you men... you mentioned it before, like there's comparison in there, we're comparing ourselves to like other people, even our own age, and it's like, like, specifically specifically for you, you have two autoimmune diseases, you said, just like two up two that's a lot. Like one's a lot. Two is different, right? So you can't compare yourself to somebody that have any, just like, I can't compare myself to somebody who never who never had an injury or never like, and I think we're wasting a lot of time there. We're also not giving ourselves credit for what we did do to get here. (Amy: Right. Absolutely.) And, and, you know, you said earlier, like six months sounds like a long time. But like, I dealt with some issues for 10 years, 10 years. And so I can say now that I am like, six years post, like actually got the diagnosis actually figured the thing. Now when I have a flare up, I'm like, "Oh, I know exactly what the trigger is." (Amy: Yes.) I'm stressed out. I'm stressed out and I am not being kind to my body. I need to bring everything all the (Amy: Yeah) cortisol down where and you know, I am I ended up even using this tracking app for my cycle, because I filmed for workout. So I'm there are some weeks where I'm filming 14 workouts, which in the grand scheme of things, it's like an hour of workout. So I so I, it's like the workout for the day, right? But I should not be doing that one of the weeks of everyone, that week, (Amy: Yeah) I should not be doing that I should be like, "Okay, I can go for my walk" I can do you know, like run, but I'm not going to like push myself, that needs to be low impact really kind in my body, stretchy stuff. And so when they changed once I had that information, I changed when I was working when I was filming, my inflammation and my stomach issues also went down. And so (Amy: Yeah) it's this thing that like we sometimes we take things like that's just how it is. And other times we think like, (Amy: Right) "Oh, that's too long, I don't have that kind of time." But to your credits, like once you have the information you start to have the healing process, then you have your whole life ahead of you and like that's gonna be a lot longer than the six months of like, (Amy: Yeah) having to trial and error and figure things out.Amy Denson 28:56  Yeah, I think there's just so much reassurance and, and really getting to know your body. And I you know, I think we talk so much about things that are common, but they're not normal. So your body is talking to you all the time. And we've got to start listening. We have to, we cannot push it aside and just keep pushing forward. I'll sleep later all, I'll put myself first later right or when when this ends, then you know when summer starts, whatever that is, because if you are having awful periods, your body's screaming at you. If you are having bloating, gassing, women if you are not pooping every day, your body is telling you something. So so many things that I think that you know, for a long time I just thought well, my cramps feeling awful for for the first day or two my period or the week up to, it's just how my mom experienced it. That's just how it is for me. Absolutely not. We are not meant to feel in this comfort most of our life. (Lesley: Right.) And so I think really starting to listen to your body and that is the information that we can work with.Lesley Logan 30:09  So can we talk about that? Because I think that that is a really important thing that some people like, "Now I like, I listen to my body." And then there's the perfectionist and overachievers listen to like, "But wait. Like, what does that mean? How do I do that?" So you mentioned, we gonna poop everyday ladies. You also mentioned like, serious cramps, like, yeah, people like, "Oh, I have PCOS or I have this." It's like, yeah, but even people with that don't have to have the worst cramps, there (Amy: Right) are still things you can do. So, (Amy: Absolutely) you know, because I used to have a friend, I had a friend of my practice, I remember, she was only going to the bathroom once every two weeks. And she was (Amy: Right) going to the doctor for this. And the doctor was like, "You just have a really lazy colon." And she's like, "I got that, you didn't, I don't need your medical opinion for that." She's like, I (Amy: Right) she did not have a lazy colon, though (Lesley laughs) (Amy: Right) like rolling faster.Amy Denson 30:56  My colon is not inherently lazy. It's not a choice. It's not on the couch watching Netflix like what do we need to do here?Lesley Logan 31:02  Yeah. So what are some others like, what are some? It maybe they're not easy, but what are some ways that people could listen to their body? Do they journal? Like, is there an app? Like what tool did you use to start listening to your body and paying attention to signs?Amy Denson 31:16  Um, I think my I mean, my awareness is pretty high. I've been listening to my body for a while, as an athlete, I had to, to make sure we're good to go, you know, all of that. But I mean, I think journaling is is a great form. I think really listening to podcasts, listening or books information. Alisa Vitti has a great book in the flow about women's cycle, about even like you were saying, how do you, how can we move within our cycle to really support our cycle? How can I eat within my cycle to really support my cycle? So I think if you're experiencing any discomfort, I would just note that or even imagine like, if, if I imagined my health is like, optimal, though, you know, I imagined myself like, walking through a beautiful field and, you know, the sun shining, and I just feel my absolute best. What does that look like? It does that look like I don't have heartburn anymore? Does that look like I don't have awful periods? Does that look like you know, my hair isn't thinning? Does that look like I don't feel cold all the time? Or I feel like I'm in control of my body. And I'm not just gaining weight all of a sudden, I don't know why? You know, what is that, what is that perfect ish health look like for you? And what symptoms are you experiencing that you would like to either reduce or eliminate?Lesley Logan 32:54  Yeah, I like that, I think because that's like, that allows every single listener to choose it for themselves. And you're not comparing my loves because that's not going to get you, (Amy: No, no, no.) you can't like everyone's going to have something that's a different optimal health. But I do think that like, you know, like, so if you're listening to this, if you heard any symptoms that she mentioned there, you're like, "Oh, the I have heartburn." Like, you don't have to have heartburn. And you don't have to take the Prilosec or whatever it's called to like, get rid of it every time you eat. Like, there are things you know, and holistic doctors, like I love mine. She's she's been on the (Amy: Right) podcast before and like, there's things I'm like, "Oh, I just live with this." And she's like, "No, you don't, actually."Amy Denson 33:34  Not necessary. (Lesley laughs) And it's just it's just really, it's about what can we do in specifically with heartburn, your body is just telling you, there is a need for some functional support there. We are, you know, and so what can we do to get your body to start performing digestively a little bit more optimally, so that we are not only reducing you taking any like, you know, Prilosec or PPI or anything like that. But we want to reduce the heartburn because it's just an indication that your body is not properly digesting, which (Lesley: Yeah) is everything. (Lesley: Right and that's all your nutrition and all the things. Yeah.) Yeah, just another, it's just another symptom. It's just another way of your body's saying and it. You know, there's no shame around our symptoms. (Lesley: Yeah.) And I think we really need to step away, step back from that. Even weight gain, that's a symptom of something. Right? Weight loss is a symptom of something. So let's figure it out. And you know, I don't think, you know, a lot of time we keep going back to, "Well, I ate this, I didn't eat that. I can't eat this because this causes that." It's a matter of function and really supporting that, rather than having to pick out which foods that you can and can't eat for the rest of your life. (Lesley: Yeah) We really need to get down to the root of what's going on and just say, "Hey, this is what I'm experiencing. I'd like some relief in these areas or more knowledge around these areas. And let's make a plan to move forward." But because you're experiencing something, you are not doing anything wrong. We just need to get more knowledge around what the heck is going on. And I understand that there is hope for some relief. And for a long time, I didn't feel like I had a lot of hope it was something that I had to deal with. (Lesley: Yeah) And so I would get so hard on myself for doing this or doing that, and then my symptoms would pop up, or symptoms would pop up. (Lesley: Yeah) And I felt like I would personally attack myself for, for doing this and that. So let's, let's try to take that off of there as well. And just look at it as information. And that can direct us on where we need to go.Lesley Logan 35:50  That's... Yes, all the yeses, because I, you know, I was like you're talking, I was thinking like, so many of these listeners are moms and 100% if their kid was saying something hurt or burned, or they're tired, they would be like figuring out all the things (Amy: Yeah) that would go on to make sure that that was not there. But when it comes to our own bodies, we excuse it away, or "Oh, it's just because I ate that," or "Oh, I shouldn't have ate that. And I know I shouldn't eat that." And that's why it was it's like we're not taking the same care to to make sure that our bodies which are the vessels that you need to continue to be the parent to your the person you love for as long as you can as seriously and I think like we that, that we all could bit change that. And also, I hear you saying a lot of things like being kind. I mean, really kind of yourself because your body's just trying to tell you something, and it's not like you did anything and you're wrong. And I love what you said about the symptoms like think it's amazing. So currently, Amy, before we wrap this up, what are you? Right now, is there anything that you are being it till you see it like? Are you taking new steps, new leaps? Like how are you, how is this mission going for you? And what are you doing that maybe you've never done before but you're working on figuring it out?Amy Denson 37:04  Yeah. Well, I mean, I literally just yesterday found out I finished my restorative wellness practitioner certification. You guys, I can test poop now. And I'm so excited. (Lesley laughs) I know not many people would be like, "What are you talking about?" And I actually I have nothing to do with it. But so ...Lesley Logan 37:25  You can ask, you can get the test for the, (Amy: I can now...) people to send the poop to the place. (Amy: Yes) Yes.Amy Denson 37:29  So I can now offer it's called the GI-MAP. And I can now offer an MRT, which is not a food sensitivities test, it's a test to see what foods are causing inflammation in your body, which is really what we want to get that inflammation down. So with that GI-MAP, we can, we can see the good bacteria, the not so good bacteria, we can see information, we can see auto immune activity. And we can we can really pair that with that MRT test so that we can have a plan to see, "Hey, this is what's going on inside of your gut. Everybody wants to talk about gut health. Well, let's look inside your dang, gut." And this really, really will help with them. I mean, everything lives in our gut. It's our second brain. It has a ton to do with our thyroid functioning, our you know, HPA axis, all of that. So I, I I am pursuing a deep dive into really finding out what's going on for people. So we can try to get to some root causes and really see where we need to support overall function and digestively to (Lesley: So cool.) and I think that that'll just be kind of a waterfall effect for most people's symptoms. So I am so excited. I think this is going to be a game changer.Lesley Logan 38:41  I cannot (Amy: ... feeling) I cannot even wait for my husband to listen to this. And he (Amy: Yeah) like, he'll be like, "All of a sudden it's like all this stuff and health. It's great and be kind. And it's like I'm excited because we can test poop now." Like he'll laughs so hard.Amy Denson 38:54  Yeah, absolutely.Lesley Logan 38:55  Oh my gosh, this is amazing, Amy. I'm really excited for our listeners to hear this and I can't wait to hear how they take away but before we let you go we have to hear your BE IT action items after this brief message.Okay, Amy, how can people find you, follow you, get to know you more?Amy Denson 39:14  Sure. I'm on Instagram at @coachamyrae and you can email me at amyraenutrition@gmail.com The website is getting a beautiful reboost which will be done in a couple of weeks. And yeah and then I also have a podcast as well called The Chronic Athletes and really just featuring stories of resilience inspiration and all things wellness just to you know show proof that it can be done in exactly what you're doing as well. SoLesley Logan 39:44  Oh, I love that so much. Okay, well that's cool because we definitely have some some athletes that are listening and also I had a girl on I'll have to connect you, I have to look it up. She actually was a D1 athlete as well. And then she wrote a book on like, how do you like go into life ...Amy Denson 40:01  Oh my gosh, that's so needed. The transition is so yep, (Lesley: Yeah) that's so cool.Lesley Logan 40:04  I'll I'll, I'll find (Amy: Oh great) her episode and I'll connect you two because like, yeah, it's amazing. (Amy: Thank you.) So okay, before we let you go, bold, executable, intrinsic or targeted steps people can take to be it till they see it. What do you have for us?Amy Denson 40:17  Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this and I just listened to, to a message the other day. And I think, really identifying and getting over our fear of failure. And I think really just going, just going after it, right, whether it's your health, whether it's your career, whether it's your family, whether it's just getting to know yourself, and understanding that if we are in pursuit of something with intention, there, there really is no failure, right, there's only going to be maybe learning lessons along the way. But if we're not ever pursuing anything, obviously, we're not going to be growing. But I think the pursuit is something is really what starts open more doors in your life, it starts to create that momentum. And I think if we can look at it as more of an opportunity in our pursuit, rather than the lens of failure of something, and really focus on the process, rather than the outcome, right. So a lot of people come with the goal is weight loss, which is great. But what else can we get out of the process? (Lesley: Yeah) What else can we get out of, of you taking that step forward for yourself and your health? Just just, you know, in that pursuit of intention, so I think really letting go of that, that lens of fear of failure, (Lesley: Yeah) and pursuing everything with with that lens of opportunity.Lesley Logan 41:49  Oh, I love this. I love those so much. Thank you. That another amazing and unique and I love them. Y'all, how are you use these tips in your life? Co... you're gonna tag @coachamyrae and the @be_it_pod and let us know. Post this on your socials, so we can see your takeaways, so we can shout you out, so we can share it. So we can also just see what you're up to and also what's resonating. If you're like, "I don't know how to do that." Then text this message, send this podcast to a friend. And that is not only how we get Amy's message, it's also how podcasts get heard. And the you have no idea how every single download matters. So every single one of you listen to this, it really does matter to all of us because we can't do this without you. So we want to know how you're using this in your life. Tag us both. And until next time, Be It Till You See It.That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review. And follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcasts. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the @be_it_pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day!'Be It Till You See It' is a production of 'As The Crows Fly Media'.Brad Crowell 43:09  It's written, produced, filmed and recorded by your host Lesley Logan and me, Brad Crowell. Our Associate Producer is Amanda Frattarelli.Lesley Logan 43:20  Kevin Perez at Disenyo handles all of our audio editing.Brad Crowell 43:25  Our theme music is by Ali at APEX Production Music. And our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 43:33  Special thanks to our designer Jaira Mandal for creating all of our visuals (which you can't see because this is a podcast) and our digital producer, Jay Pedroso for editing all video each week so you can.Brad Crowell 43:45  And to Angelina Herico for transcribing each of our episodes so you can find them on our website. And, finally to Meridith Crowell for keeping us all on point and on time.Transcribed by https://otter.aiSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/be-it-till-you-see-it/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

About AmyAmy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.Links Referenced: Equinix Metal: https://metal.equinix.com Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey Personal Blog: https://tobert.github.io/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Optimized cloud compute plans have landed at Vultr to deliver lightning-fast processing power, courtesy of third-gen AMD EPYC processors without the IO or hardware limitations of a traditional multi-tenant cloud server. Starting at just 28 bucks a month, users can deploy general-purpose, CPU, memory, or storage optimized cloud instances in more than 20 locations across five continents. Without looking, I know that once again, Antarctica has gotten the short end of the stick. Launch your Vultr optimized compute instance in 60 seconds or less on your choice of included operating systems, or bring your own. It's time to ditch convoluted and unpredictable giant tech company billing practices and say goodbye to noisy neighbors and egregious egress forever. Vultr delivers the power of the cloud with none of the bloat. “Screaming in the Cloud” listeners can try Vultr for free today with a $150 in credit when they visit getvultr.com/screaming. That's G-E-T-V-U-L-T-R dot com slash screaming. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck! And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS, forgettaboutit! But that's where DuploCloud can help. Their comprehensive no-code/low-code software platform guarantees a secure and compliant infrastructure in as little as two weeks, while automating the full DevSecOps lifestyle. Get started with DevOps-as-a-Service from DuploCloud so that your cloud configurations are done right the first time. Tell them I sent you and your first two months are free. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/duplo. Thats's snark.cloud/D-U-P-L-O-C-L-O-U-D.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while I catch up with someone that it feels like I've known for ages, and I realize somehow I have never been able to line up getting them on this show as a guest. Today is just one of those days. And my guest is Amy Tobey who has been someone I've been talking to for ages, even in the before-times, if you can remember such a thing. Today, she's a Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix. Amy, thank you for finally giving in to my endless wheedling.Amy: Thanks for having me. You mentioned the before-times. Like, I remember it was, like, right before the pandemic we had beers in San Francisco wasn't it? There was Ian there—Corey: Yeah, I—Amy: —and a couple other people. It was a really great time. And then—Corey: I vaguely remember beer. Yeah. And then—Amy: And then the world ended.Corey: Oh, my God. Yes. It's still March of 2020, right?Amy: As far as I know. Like, I haven't checked in a couple years.Corey: So, you do an awful lot. And it's always a difficult question to ask someone, so can you encapsulate your entire existence in a paragraph? It's—Amy: [sigh].Corey: —awful, so I'd like to give a bit more structure to it. Let's start with the introduction: You are a Senior Principal Engineer. We know it's high level because of all the adjectives that get put in there, and none of those adjectives are ‘associate' or ‘beginner' or ‘junior,' or all the other diminutives that companies like to play games with to justify paying people less. And you're at Equinix, which is a company that is a bit unlike most of the, shall we say, traditional cloud providers. What do you do over there and both as a company, as a person?Amy: So, as a company Equinix, what most people know about is that we have a whole bunch of data centers all over the world. I think we have the most of any company. And what we do is we lease out space in that data center, and then we have a number of other products that people don't know as well, which one is Equinix Metal, which is what I specifically work on, where we rent you bare-metal servers. None of that fancy stuff that you get any other clouds on top of it, there's things you can get that are… partner things that you can add-on, like, you know, storage and other things like that, but we just deliver you bare-metal servers with really great networking. So, what I work on is the reliability of that whole system. All of the things that go into provisioning the servers, making them come up, making sure that they get delivered to the server, make sure the API works right, all of that stuff.Corey: So, you're on the Equinix cloud side of the world more so than you are on the building data centers by the sweat of your brow, as they say?Amy: Correct. Yeah, yeah. Software side.Corey: Excellent. I spent some time in data centers in the early part of my career before cloud ate that. That was sort of cotemporaneous with the discovery that I'm the hardware destruction bunny, and I should go to great pains to keep my aura from anything expensive and important, like, you know, the SAN. So—Amy: Right, yeah.Corey: Companies moving out of data centers, and me getting out was a great thing.Amy: But the thing about SANs though, is, like, it might not be you. They're just kind of cursed from the start, right? They just always were kind of fussy and easy to break.Corey: Oh, yeah. I used to think—and I kid you not—that I had a limited upside to my career in tech because I sometimes got sloppy and I was fairly slow at crimping ethernet cables.Amy: [laugh].Corey: That is very similar to growing up in third grade when it became apparent that I was going to have problems in my career because my handwriting was sloppy. Yeah, it turns out the future doesn't look like we predicted it would.Amy: Oh, gosh. Are we going to talk about, like, neurological development now or… [laugh] okay, that's a thing I struggle with, too right, is I started typing as soon as they would let—in fact, before they would let me. I remember in high school, I had teachers who would grade me down for typing a paper out. They want me to handwrite it and I would go, “Cool. Go ahead and take a grade off because if I handwrite it, you're going to take two grades off my handwriting, so I'm cool with this deal.”Corey: Yeah, it was pretty easy early on. I don't know when the actual shift was, but it became more and more apparent that more and more things are moving towards a world where you could type. And I was almost five when I started working on that stuff, and that really wound up changing a lot of aspects of how I started seeing things. One thing I think you're probably fairly well known for is incidents. I want to be clear when I say that you are not the root cause as—“So, why are things broken?” “It's Amy again. What's she gotten into this time?” Great.Amy: [laugh]. But it does happen, but not all the time.Corey: Exa—it's a learning experience.Amy: Right.Corey: You've also been deeply involved with SREcon and a number of—a lot of aspects of what I will term—and please don't yell at me for this—SRE culture—Amy: Yeah.Corey: Which is sometimes a challenging thing to wind up describing or putting a definition around. The one that I've always been somewhat partial to is, “SRE is DevOps, except you worked at Google for a while.” I don't know how necessarily accurate that is, but it does rile people up.Amy: Yeah, it does. Dave Stanke actually did a really great talk at SREcon San Francisco just a couple weeks ago, about the DORA report. And the new DORA report, they split SRE out into its own function and kind of is pushing against that old model, which actually comes from Liz Fong-Jones—I think it's from her, or older—about, like, class SRE implements DevOps, which is kind of this idea that, like, SREs make DevOps happen. Things have evolved, right, since then. Things have evolved since Google released those books, and we're all just figured out what works and what doesn't a little bit.And so, it's not that we're implementing DevOps so much. In fact, it's that ops stuff that kind of holds us back from the really high impact work that SREs, I think, should be doing, that aren't just, like, fixing the problems, the symptoms down at the bottom layer, right? Like what we did as sysadmins 20 years ago. You know, we'd go and a lot of people are SREs that came out of the sysadmin world and still think in that mode, where it's like, “Well, I set up the systems, and when things break, I go and I fix them.” And, “Why did the developers keep writing crappy code? Why do I have to always getting up in the middle of the night because this thing crashed?”And it turns out that the work we need to do to make things more reliable, there's a ceiling to how far away the platform can take us, right? Like, we can have the best platform in the world with redundancy, and, you know, nine-way replicated data storage and all this crazy stuff, and still if we put crappy software on top, it's going to be unreliable. So, how do we make less crappy software? And for most of my career, people would be, like, “Well, you should test it.” And so, we started doing that, and we still have crappy software, so what's going on here? We still have incidents.So, we write more tests, and we still have incidents. We had a QA group, we still have incidents. We send the developers to training, and we still have incidents. So like, what is the thing we need to do to make things more reliable? And it turns out, most of it is culture work.Corey: My perspective on this stems from being a grumpy old sysadmin. And at some point, I started calling myself a systems engineer or DevOps or production engineer, or SRE. It was all from my point of view, the same job, but you know, if you call yourself a sysadmin, you're just asking for a 40% pay cut off the top.Amy: [laugh].Corey: But I still tended to view the world through that lens. I tended to be very good at Linux systems internals, for example, understanding system calls and the rest, but increasingly, as the DevOps wave or SRE wave, or Google-isation of the internet wound up being more and more of a thing, I found myself increasingly in job interviews, where, “Great, now, can you go wind up implementing a sorting algorithm on the whiteboard?” “What on earth? No.” Like, my lingua franca is shitty Bash, and no one tends to write that without a bunch of tab completions and quick checking with manpages—die.net or whatnot—on the fly as you go down that path.And it was awful, and I felt… like my skill set was increasingly eroding. And it wasn't honestly until I started this place where I really got into writing a fair bit of code to do different things because it felt like an orthogonal skill set, but the fullness of time, it seems like it's not. And it's a reskilling. And it made me wonder, does this mean that the areas of technology that I focused on early in my career, was that all a waste? And the answer is not really. Sometimes, sure, in that I don't spend nearly as much time worrying about inodes—for example—as I once did. But every once in a while, I'll run into something and I looked like a wizard from the future, but instead, I'm a wizard from the past.Amy: Yeah, I find that a lot in my work, now. Sometimes things I did 20 years ago, come back, and it's like, oh, yeah, I remember I did all that threading work in 2002 in Perl, and I learned everything the very, very, very hard way. And then, you know, this January, did some threading work to fix some stability issues, and all of it came flooding back, right? Just that the experiences really, more than the code or the learning or the text and stuff; more just the, like, this feels like threads [BLEEP]-ery. Is a diagnostic thing that sometimes we have to say.And then people are like, “Can you prove it?” And I'm like, “Not really,” because it's literally thread [BLEEP]-ery. Like, the definition of it is that there's weird stuff happening that we can't figure out why it's happening. There's something acting in the system that isn't synchronized, that isn't connected to other things, that's happening out of order from what we expect, and if we had a clear signal, we would just fix it, but we don't. We just have, like, weird stuff happening over here and then over there and over there and over there.And, like, that tells me there's just something happening at that layer and then have to go and dig into that right, and like, just basically charge through. My colleagues are like, “Well, maybe you should look at this, and go look at the database,” the things that they're used to looking at and that their experiences inform, whereas then I bring that ancient toiling through the threading mines experiences back and go, “Oh, yeah. So, let's go find where this is happening, where people are doing dangerous things with threads, and see if we can spot something.” But that came from that experience.Corey: And there's so much that just repeats itself. And history rhymes. The challenge is that, do you have 20 years of experience, or do you have one year of experience repeated 20 times? And as the tide rises, doing the same task by hand, it really is just a matter of time before your full-time job winds up being something a piece of software does. An easy example is, “Oh, what's your job?” “I manually place containers onto specific hosts.” “Well, I've got news for you, and you're not going to like it at all.”Amy: Yeah, yeah. I think that we share a little bit. I'm allergic to repeated work. I don't know if allergic is the right word, but you know, if I sit and I do something once, fine. Like, I'll just crank it out, you know, it's this form, or it's a datafile I got to write and I'll—fine I'll type it in and do the manual labor.The second time, the difficulty goes up by ten, right? Like, just mentally, just to do it, be like, I've already done this once. Doing it again is anathema to everything that I am. And then sometimes I'll get through it, but after that, like, writing a program is so much easier because it's like exponential, almost, growth in difficulty. You know, the third time I have to do the same thing that's like just typing the same stuff—like, look over here, read this thing and type it over here—I'm out; I can't do it. You know, I got to find a way to automate. And I don't know, maybe normal people aren't driven to live this way, but it's kept me from getting stuck in those spots, too.Corey: It was weird because I spent a lot of time as a consultant going from place to place and it led to some weird changes. For example, “Oh, thank God, I don't have to think about that whole messaging queue thing.” Sure enough, next engagement, it's message queue time. Fantastic. I found that repeating myself drove me nuts, but you also have to be very sensitive not to wind up, you know, stealing IP from the people that you're working with.Amy: Right.Corey: But what I loved about the sysadmin side of the world is that the vast majority of stuff that I've taken with me, lives in my shell config. And what I mean by that is I'm not—there's nothing in there is proprietary, but when you have a weird problem with trying to figure out the best way to figure out which Ruby process is stealing all the CPU, great, turns out that you can chain seven or eight different shell commands together through a bunch of pipes. I don't want to remember that forever. So, that's the sort of thing I would wind up committing as I learned it. I don't remember what company I picked that up at, but it was one of those things that was super helpful.I have a sarcastic—it's a one-liner, except no sane editor setting is going to show it in any less than three—of a whole bunch of Perl, piped into du, piped into the rest, that tells you one of the largest consumers of files in a given part of the system. And it rates them with stars and it winds up doing some neat stuff. I would never sit down and reinvent something like that today, but the fact that it's there means that I can do all kinds of neat tricks when I need to. It's making sure that as you move through your career, on some level, you're picking up skills that are repeatable and applicable beyond one company.Amy: Skills and tooling—Corey: Yeah.Amy: —right? Like, you just described the tool. Another SREcon talk was John Allspaw and Dr. Richard Cook talking about above the line; below the line. And they started with these metaphors about tools, right, showing all the different kinds of hammers.And if you're a blacksmith, a lot of times you craft specialized hammers for very specific jobs. And that's one of the properties of a tool that they were trying to get people to think about, right, is that tools get crafted to the job. And what you just described as a bespoke tool that you had created on the fly, that kind of floated under the radar of intellectual property. [laugh].So, let's not tell the security or IP people right? Like, because there's probably billions and billions of dollars of technically, like, made-up IP value—I'm doing air quotes with my fingers—you know, that's just basically people's shell profiles. And my God, the Emacs automation that people have done. If you've ever really seen somebody who's amazing at Emacs and is 10, 20, 30, maybe 40 years of experience encoded in their emacs settings, it's a wonder to behold. Like, I look at it and I go, “Man, I wish I could do that.”It's like listening to a really great guitar player and be like, “Wow, I wish I could play like them.” You see them just flying through stuff. But all that IP in there is both that person's collection of wisdom and experience and working with that code, but also encodes that stuff like you described, right? It's just all these little systems tricks and little fiddly commands and things we don't want to remember and so we encode them into our toolset.Corey: Oh, yeah. Anything I wound up taking, I always would share it with people internally, too. I'd mention, “Yeah, I'm keeping this in my shell files.” Because I disclosed it, which solves a lot of the problem. And also, none of it was even close to proprietary or anything like that. I'm sorry, but the way that you wind up figuring out how much of a disk is being eaten up and where in a more pleasing way, is not a competitive advantage. It just isn't.Amy: It isn't to you or me, but, you know, back in the beginning of our careers, people thought it was worth money and should be proprietary. You know, like, oh, that disk-checking script as a competitive advantage for our company because there are only a few of us doing this work. Like, it was actually being able to, like, manage your—[laugh] actually manage your servers was a competitive advantage. Now, it's kind of commodity.Corey: Let's also be clear that the world has moved on. I wound up buying a DaisyDisk a while back for Mac, which I love. It is a fantastic, pretty effective, “Where's all the stuff on your disk going?” And it does a scan and you can drive and collect things and delete them when trying to clean things out. I was using it the other day, so it's top of mind at the moment.But it's way more polished than that crappy Perl three-liner. And I see both sides, truly I do. The trick also, for those wondering [unintelligible 00:15:45], like, “Where is the line?” It's super easy. Disclose it, what you're doing, in those scenarios in the event someone is no because they believe that finding the right man page section for something is somehow proprietary.Great. When you go home that evening in a completely separate environment, build it yourself from scratch to solve the problem, reimplement it and save that. And you're done. There are lots of ways to do this. Don't steal from your employer, but your employer employs you; they don't own you and the way that you think about these problems.Every person I've met who has had a career that's longer than 20 minutes has a giant doc somewhere on some system of all of the scripts that they wound up putting together, all of the one-liners, the notes on, “Next time you see this, this is the thing to check.”Amy: Yeah, the cheat sheet or the notebook with all the little commands, or again the Emacs config, sometimes for some people, or shell profiles. Yeah.Corey: Here's the awk one-liner that I put that automatically spits out from an Apache log file what—the httpd log file that just tells me what are the most frequent talkers, and what are the—Amy: You should probably let go of that one. You know, like, I think that one's lifetime is kind of past, Corey. Maybe you—Corey: I just have to get it working with Nginx, and we're good to go.Amy: Oh, yeah, there you go. [laugh].Corey: Or S3 access logs. Perish the thought. But yeah, like, what are the five most high-volume talkers, and what are those relative to each other? Huh, that one thing seems super crappy and it's coming from Russia. But that's—hmm, one starts to wonder; maybe it's time to dig back in.So, one of the things that I have found is that a lot of the people talking about SRE seem to have descended from an ivory tower somewhere. And they're talking about how some of the best-in-class companies out there, renowned for their technical cultures—at least externally—are doing these things. But there's a lot more folks who are not there. And honestly, I consider myself one of those people who is not there. I was a competent engineer, but never a terrific one.And looking at the way this was described, I often came away thinking, “Okay, it was the purpose of this conference talk just to reinforce how smart people are, and how I'm not,” and/or, “There are the 18 cultural changes you need to make to your company, and then you can do something kind of like we were just talking about on stage.” It feels like there's a combination of problems here. One is making this stuff more accessible to folks who are not themselves in those environments, and two, how to drive cultural change as an individual contributor if that's even possible. And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have thoughts on both aspects of that, and probably some more hit me, please.Amy: So, the ivory tower, right. Let's just be straight up, like, the ivory tower is Google. I mean, that's where it started. And we get it from the other large companies that, you know, want to do conference talks about what this stuff means and what it does. What I've kind of come around to in the last couple of years is that those talks don't really reach the vast majority of engineers, they don't really apply to a large swath of the enterprise especially, which is, like, where a lot of the—the bulk of our industry sits, right? We spend a lot of time talking about the darlings out here on the West Coast in high tech culture and startups and so on.But, like, we were talking about before we started the show, right, like, the interior of even just America, is filled with all these, like, insurance and banks and all of these companies that are cranking out tons of code and servers and stuff, and they're trying to figure out the same problems. But they're structured in companies where their tech arm is still, in most cases, considered a cost center, often is bundled under finance, for—that's a whole show of itself about that historical blunder. And so, the tech culture is tend to be very, very different from what we experience in—what do we call it anymore? Like, I don't even want to say West Coast anymore because we've gone remote, but, like, high tech culture we'll say. And so, like, thinking about how to make SRE and all this stuff more accessible comes down to, like, thinking about who those engineers are that are sitting at the computers, writing all the code that runs our banks, all the code that makes sure that—I'm trying to think of examples that are more enterprise-y right?Or shoot buying clothes online. You go to Macy's for example. They have a whole bunch of servers that run their online store and stuff. They have internal IT-ish people who keep all this stuff running and write that code and probably integrating open-source stuff much like we all do. But when you go to try to put in a reliability program that's based on the current SRE models, like SLOs; you put in SLOs and you start doing, like, this incident management program that's, like, you know, you have a form you fill out after every incident, and then you [unintelligible 00:20:25] retros.And it turns out that those things are very high-level skills, skills and capabilities in an organization. And so, when you have this kind of IT mindset or the enterprise mindset, bringing the culture together to make those things work often doesn't happen. Because, you know, they'll go with the prescriptive model and say, like, okay, we're going to implement SLOs, we're going to start measuring SLIs on all of the services, and we're going to hold you accountable for meeting those targets. If you just do that, right, you're just doing more gatekeeping and policing of your tech environment. My bet is, reliability almost never improves in those cases.And that's been my experience, too, and why I get charged up about this is, if you just go slam in these practices, people end up miserable, the practices then become tarnished because people experienced the worst version of them. And then—Corey: And with the remote explosion as well, it turns out that changing jobs basically means their company sends you a different Mac, and the next Monday, you wind up signing into a different Slack team.Amy: Yeah, so the culture really matters, right? You can't cover it over with foosball tables and great lunch. You actually have to deliver tools that developers want to use and you have to deliver a software engineering culture that brings out the best in developers instead of demanding the best from developers. I think that's a fundamental business shift that's kind of happening. If I'm putting on my wizard hat and looking into the future and dreaming about what might change in the world, right, is that there's kind of a change in how we do leadership and how we do business that's shifting more towards that model where we look at what people are capable of and we trust in our people, and we get more out of them, the knowledge work model.If we want more knowledge work, we need people to be happy and to feel engaged in their community. And suddenly we start to see these kind of generational, bigger-pie kind of things start to happen. But how do we get there? It's not SLOs. It maybe it's a little bit starting with incidents. That's where I've had the most success, and you asked me about that. So, getting practical, incident management is probably—Corey: Right. Well, as I see it, the problem with SLOs across the board is it feels like it's a very insular community so far, and communicating it to engineers seems to be the focus of where the community has been, but from my understanding of it, you absolutely need buy-in at significantly high executive levels, to at the very least by you air cover while you're doing these things and making these changes, but also to help drive that cultural shift. None of this is something I have the slightest clue how to do, let's be very clear. If I knew how to change a company's culture, I'd have a different job.Amy: Yeah. [laugh]. The biggest omission in the Google SRE books was [Ers 00:22:58]. There was a guy at Google named Ers who owns availability for Google, and when anything is, like, in dispute and bubbles up the management team, it goes to Ers, and he says, “Thou shalt…” right? Makes the call. And that's why it works, right?Like, it's not just that one person, but that system of management where the whole leadership team—there's a large, very well-funded team with a lot of power in the organization that can drive availability, and they can say, this is how you're going to do metrics for your service, and this is the system that you're in. And it's kind of, yeah, sure it works for them because they have all the organizational support in place. What I was saying to my team just the other day—because we're in the middle of our SLO rollout—is that really, I think an SLO program isn't [clear throat] about the engineers at all until late in the game. At the beginning of the game, it's really about getting the leadership team on board to say, “Hey, we want to put in SLIs and SLOs to start to understand the functioning of our software system.” But if they don't have that curiosity in the first place, that desire to understand how well their teams are doing, how healthy their teams are, don't do it. It's not going to work. It's just going to make everyone miserable.Corey: It feels like it's one of those difficult to sell problems as well, in that it requires some tooling changes, absolutely. It requires cultural change and buy-in and whatnot, but in order for that to happen, there has to be a painful problem that a company recognizes and is willing to pay to make go away. The problem with stuff like this is that once you pay, there's a lot of extra work that goes on top of it as well, that does not have a perception—rightly or wrongly—of contributing to feature velocity, of hitting the next milestone. It's, “Really? So, we're going to be spending how much money to make engineers happier? They should get paid an awful lot and they're still complaining and never seem happy. Why do I care if they're happy other than the pure mercenary perspective of otherwise they'll quit?” I'm not saying that it's not worth pursuing; it's not a worthy goal. I am saying that it becomes a very difficult thing to wind up selling as a product.Amy: Well, as a product for sure, right? Because—[sigh] gosh, I have friends in the space who work on these tools. And I want to be careful.Corey: Of course. Nothing but love for all of those people, let's be very clear.Amy: But a lot of them, you know, they're pulling metrics from existing monitoring systems, they are doing some interesting math on them, but what you get at the end is a nice service catalog and dashboard, which are things we've been trying to land as products in this industry for as long as I can remember, and—Corey: “We've got it this time, though. This time we'll crack the nut.” Yeah. Get off the island, Gilligan.Amy: And then the other, like, risky thing, right, is the other part that makes me uncomfortable about SLOs, and why I will often tell folks that I talk to out in the industry that are asking me about this, like, one-on-one, “Should I do it here?” And it's like, you can bring the tool in, and if you have a management team that's just looking to have metrics to drive productivity, instead of you know, trying to drive better knowledge work, what you get is just a fancier version of more Taylorism, right, which is basically scientific management, this idea that we can, like, drive workers to maximum efficiency by measuring random things about them and driving those numbers. It turns out, that doesn't really work very well, even in industrial scale, it just happened to work because, you know, we have a bloody enough society that we pushed people into it. But the reality is, if you implement SLOs badly, you get more really bad Taylorism that's bad for you developers. And my suspicion is that you will get worse availability out of it than you would if you just didn't do it at all.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means “I reveal.” Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes—but isn't limited to—talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States, so you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service, so you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming.Corey: That is part of the problem is, in some cases, to drive some of these improvements, you have to go backwards to move forwards. And it's one of those, “Great, so we spent all this effort and money in the rest of now things are worse?” No, not necessarily, but suddenly are aware of things that were slipping through the cracks previously.Amy: Yeah. Yeah.Corey: Like, the most realistic thing about first The Phoenix Project and then The Unicorn Project, both by Gene Kim, has been the fact that companies have these problems and actively cared enough to change it. In my experience, that feels a little on the rare side.Amy: Yeah, and I think that's actually the key, right? It's for the culture change, and for, like, if you really looking to be, like, do I want to work at this company? Am I investing my myself in here? Is look at the leadership team and be, like, do these people actually give a crap? Are they looking just to punt another number down the road?That's the real question, right? Like, the technology and stuff, at the point where I'm at in my career, I just don't care that much anymore. [laugh]. Just… fine, use Kubernetes, use Postgres, [unintelligible 00:27:30], I don't care. I just don't. Like, Oracle, I might have to ask, you know, go to finance and be like, “Hey, can we spend 20 million for a database?” But like, nobody really asks for that anymore, so. [laugh].Corey: As one does. I will say that I mostly agree with you, but a technology that I found myself getting excited about, given the time of the recording on this is… fun, I spent a bit of time yesterday—from when we're recording this—teaching myself just enough Go to wind up being together a binary that I needed to do something actively ridiculous for my camera here. And I found myself coming away deeply impressed by a lot of things about it, how prescriptive it was for one, how self-contained for another. And after spending far too many years of my life writing shitty Perl, and shitty Bash, and worse Python, et cetera, et cetera, the prescriptiveness was great. The fact that it wound up giving me something I could just run, I could cross-compile for anything I need to run it on, and it just worked. It's been a while since I found a technology that got me this interested in exploring further.Amy: Go is great for that. You mentioned one of my two favorite features of Go. One is usually when a program compiles—at least the way I code in Go—it usually works. I've been working with Go since about 0.9, like, just a little bit before it was released as 1.0, and that's what I've noticed over the years of working with it is that most of the time, if you have a pretty good data structure design and you get the code to compile, usually it's going to work, unless you're doing weird stuff.The other thing I really love about Go and that maybe you'll discover over time is the malleability of it. And the reason why I think about that more than probably most folks is that I work on other people's code most of the time. And maybe this is something that you probably run into with your business, too, right, where you're working on other people's infrastructure. And the way that we encode business rules and things in the languages, in our programming language or our config syntax and stuff has a huge impact on folks like us and how quickly we can come into a situation, assess, figure out what's going on, figure out where things are laid out, and start making changes with confidence.Corey: Forget other people for a minute they're looking at what I built out three or four years ago here, myself, like, I look at past me, it's like, “What was that rat bastard thinking? This is awful.” And it's—forget other people's code; hell is your own code, on some level, too, once it's slipped out of the mental stack and you have to re-explore it and, “Oh, well thank God I defensively wound up not including any comments whatsoever explaining what the living hell this thing was.” It's terrible. But you're right, the other people's shell scripts are finicky and odd.I started poking around for help when I got stuck on something, by looking at GitHub, and a few bit of searching here and there. Even these large, complex, well-used projects started making sense to me in a way that I very rarely find. It's, “What the hell is that thing?” is my most common refrain when I'm looking at other people's code, and Go for whatever reason avoids that, I think because it is so prescriptive about formatting, about how things should be done, about the vision that it has. Maybe I'm romanticizing it and I'll hate it and a week from now, and I want to go back and remove this recording, but.Amy: The size of the language helps a lot.Corey: Yeah.Amy: But probably my favorite. It's more of a convention, which actually funny the way I'm going to talk about this because the two languages I work on the most right now are Ruby and Go. And I don't feel like two languages could really be more different.Syntax-wise, they share some things, but really, like, the mental models are so very, very different. Ruby is all the way in on object-oriented programming, and, like, the actual real kind of object-oriented with messaging and stuff, and, like, the whole language kind of springs from that. And it kind of requires you to understand all of these concepts very deeply to be effective in large programs. So, what I find is, when I approach Ruby codebase, I have to load all this crap into my head and remember, “Okay, so yeah, there's this convention, when you do this kind of thing in Ruby”—or especially Ruby on Rails is even worse because they go deep into convention over configuration. But what that's code for is, this code is accessible to people who have a lot of free cognitive capacity to load all this convention into their heads and keep it in their heads so that the code looks pretty, right?And so, that's the trade-off as you said, okay, my developers have to be these people with all these spare brain cycles to understand, like, why I would put the code here in this place versus this place? And all these, like, things that are in the code, like, very compact, dense concepts. And then you go to something like Go, which is, like, “Nah, we're not going to do Lambdas. Nah”—[laugh]—“We're not doing all this fancy stuff.” So, everything is there on the page.This drives some people crazy, right, is that there's all this boilerplate, boilerplate, boilerplate. But the reality is, I can read most Go files from top to the bottom and understand what the hell it's doing, whereas I can go sometimes look at, like, a Ruby thing, or sometimes Python and e—Perl is just [unintelligible 00:32:19] all the time, right, it's there's so much indirection. And it just be, like, “What the [BLEEP] is going on? This is so dense. I'm going to have to sit down and write it out in longhand so I can understand what the developer was even doing here.” And—Corey: Well, that's why I got the Mac Studio; for when I'm not doing A/V stuff with it, that means that I'll have one core that I can use for, you know, front-end processing and the rest, and the other 19 cores can be put to work failing to build Nokogiri in Ruby yet again.Amy: [laugh].Corey: I remember the travails of working with Ruby, and the problem—I have similar problems with Python, specifically in that—I don't know if I'm special like this—it feels like it's a SRE DevOps style of working, but I am grabbing random crap off a GitHub constantly and running it, like, small scripts other people have built. And let's be clear, I run them on my test AWS account that has nothing important because I'm not a fool that I read most of it before I run it, but I also—it wants a different version of Python every single time. It wants a whole bunch of other things, too. And okay, so I use ASDF as my version manager for these things, which for whatever reason, does not work for the way that I think about this ergonomically. Okay, great.And I wind up with detritus scattered throughout my system. It's, “Hey, can you make this reproducible on my machine?” “Almost certainly not, but thank you for asking.” It's like ‘Step 17: Master the Wolf' level of instructions.Amy: And I think Docker generally… papers over the worst of it, right, is when we built all this stuff in the aughts, you know, [CPAN 00:33:45]—Corey: Dev containers and VS Code are very nice.Amy: Yeah, yeah. You know, like, we had CPAN back in the day, I was doing chroots, I think in, like, '04 or '05, you know, to solve this problem, right, which is basically I just—screw it; I will compile an entire distro into a directory with a Perl and all of its dependencies so that I can isolate it from the other things I want to run on this machine and not screw up and not have these interactions. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about is, like, the old model, when we deployed servers, there was one of us sitting there and then we'd log into the server and be like, I'm going to install the Perl. You know, I'll compile it into, like, [/app/perl 558 00:34:21] whatever, and then I'll CPAN all this stuff in, and I'll give it over to the developer, tell them to set their shebang to that and everything just works. And now we're in a mode where it's like, okay, you got to set up a thousand of those. “Okay, well, I'll make a tarball.” [laugh]. But it's still like we had to just—Corey: DevOps, but [unintelligible 00:34:37] dev closer to ops. You're interrelating all the time. Yeah, then Docker comes along, and add dev is, like, “Well, here's the container. Good luck, asshole.” And it feels like it's been cast into your yard to worry about.Amy: Yeah, well, I mean, that's just kind of business, or just—Corey: Yeah. Yeah.Amy: I'm not sure if it's business or capitalism or something like that, but just the idea that, you know, if I can hand off the shitty work to some other poor schlub, why wouldn't I? I mean, that's most folks, right? Like, just be like, “Well”—Corey: Which is fair.Amy: —“I got it working. Like, my part is done, I did what I was supposed to do.” And now there's a lot of folks out there, that's how they work, right? “I hit done. I'm done. I shipped it. Sure. It's an old [unintelligible 00:35:16] Ubuntu. Sure, there's a bunch of shell scripts that rip through things. Sure”—you know, like, I've worked on repos where there's hundreds of things that need to be addressed.Corey: And passing to someone else is fine. I'm thrilled to do it. Where I run into problems with it is where people assume that well, my part was the hard part and anything you schlubs do is easy. I don't—Amy: Well, that's the underclass. Yeah. That's—Corey: Forget engineering for a second; I throw things to the people over in the finance group here at The Duckbill Group because those people are wizards at solving for this thing. And it's—Amy: Well, that's how we want to do things.Corey: Yeah, specialization works.Amy: But we have this—it's probably more cultural. I don't want to pick, like, capitalism to beat on because this is really, like, human cultural thing, and it's not even really particularly Western. Is the idea that, like, “If I have an underclass, why would I give a shit what their experience is?” And this is why I say, like, ops teams, like, get out of here because most ops teams, the extant ops teams are still called ops, and a lot of them have been renamed SRE—but they still do the same job—are an underclass. And I don't mean that those people are below us. People are treated as an underclass, and they shouldn't be. Absolutely not.Corey: Yes.Amy: Because the idea is that, like, well, I'm a fancy person who writes code at my ivory tower, and then it all flows down, and those people, just faceless people, do the deployment stuff that's beneath me. That attitude is the most toxic thing, I think, in tech orgs to address. Like, if you're trying to be like, “Well, our liability is bad, we have security problems, people won't fix their code.” And go look around and you will find people that are treated as an underclass that are given codes thrown over the wall at them and then they just have to toil through and make it work. I've worked on that a number of times in my career.And I think just like saying, underclass, right, or caste system, is what I found is the most effective way to get people actually thinking about what the hell is going on here. Because most people are just, like, “Well, that's just the way things are. It's just how we've always done it. The developers write to code, then give it to the sysadmins. The sysadmins deploy the code. Isn't that how it always works?”Corey: You'd really like to hope, wouldn't you?Amy: [laugh]. Not me. [laugh].Corey: Again, the way I see it is, in theory—in theory—sysadmins, ops, or that should not exist. People should theoretically be able to write code as developers that just works, the end. And write it correct the first time and never have to change it again. Yeah. There's a reason that I always like to call staging environments in places I work ‘theory' because it works in theory, but not in production, and that is fundamentally the—like, that entire job role is the difference between theory and practice.Amy: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's the problem with it. We're already so disconnected from the physical world, right? Like, you and I right now are talking over multiple strands of glass and digital transcodings and things right now, right? Like, we are detached from the physical reality.You mentioned earlier working in data centers, right? The thing I miss about it is, like, the physicality of it. Like, actually, like, I held a server in my arms and put it in the rack and slid it into the rails. I plugged into power myself; I pushed the power button myself. There's a server there. I physically touched it.Developers who don't work in production, we talked about empathy and stuff, but really, I think the big problem is when they work out in their idea space and just writing code, they write the unit tests, if we're very lucky, they'll write a functional test, and then they hand that wad off to some poor ops group. They're detached from the reality of operations. It's not even about accountability; it's about experience. The ability to see all of the weird crap we deal with, right? You know, like, “Well, we pushed the code to that server, but there were three bit flips, so we had to do it again. And then the other server, the disk failed. And on the other server…” You know? [laugh].It's just, there's all this weird crap that happens, these systems are so complex that they're always doing something weird. And if you're a developer that just spends all day in your IDE, you don't get to see that. And I can't really be mad at those folks, as individuals, for not understanding our world. I figure out how to help them, and the best thing we've come up with so far is, like, well, we start giving this—some responsibility in a production environment so that they can learn that. People do that, again, is another one that can be done wrong, where it turns into kind of a forced empathy.I actually really hate that mode, where it's like, “We're forcing all the developers online whether they like it or not. On-call whether they like it or not because they have to learn this.” And it's like, you know, maybe slow your roll a little buddy because the stuff is actually hard to learn. Again, minimizing how hard ops work is. “Oh, we'll just put the developers on it. They'll figure it out, right? They're software engineers. They're probably smarter than you sysadmins.” Is the unstated thing when we do that, right? When we throw them in the pit and be like, “Yeah, they'll get it.” [laugh].Corey: And that was my problem [unintelligible 00:39:49] the interview stuff. It was in the write code on a whiteboard. It's, “Look, I understood how the system fundamentally worked under the hood.” Being able to power my way through to get to an outcome even in language I don't know, was sort of part and parcel of the job. But this idea of doing it in artificially constrained environment, in a language I'm not super familiar with, off the top of my head, it took me years to get to a point of being able to do it with a Bash script because who ever starts with an empty editor and starts getting to work in a lot of these scenarios? Especially in an ops role where we're not building something from scratch.Amy: That's the interesting thing, right? In the majority of tech work today—maybe 20 years ago, we did it more because we were literally building the internet we have today. But today, most of the engineers out there working—most of us working stiffs—are working on stuff that already exists. We're making small incremental changes, which is great that's what we're doing. And we're dealing with old code.Corey: We're gluing APIs together, and that's fine. Ugh. I really want to thank you for taking so much time to talk to me about how you see all these things. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where's the best place to find you?Amy: I'm on Twitter every once in a while as @MissAmyTobey, M-I-S-S-A-M-Y-T-O-B-E-Y. I have a blog I don't write on enough. And there's a couple things on the Equinix Metal blog that I've written, so if you're looking for that. Otherwise, mainly Twitter.Corey: And those links will of course be in the [show notes 00:41:08]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Amy: I had fun. Thank you.Corey: As did I. Amy Tobey, Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, or on the YouTubes, smash the like and subscribe buttons, as the kids say. Whereas if you've hated this episode, same thing, five-star review all the platforms, smash the buttons, but also include an angry comment telling me that you're about to wind up subpoenaing a copy of my shell script because you're convinced that your intellectual property and secrets are buried within.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Amy Chin is the founder of Calm Better Days, where she educates clients on CBD, its uses, different delivery methods and figuring out the proper dosage. As someone who has suffered from anxiety and depression, she found great relief with CBD and knew she had to help and educate others. By sharing her personal findings, Amy helps clients find a tailored CBD regime based on needs and lifestyle, so they can dive into their CBD journey and live calm, better days. More about Amy Chin. More about The Passionistas Project. FULL TRANSCRIPT: Passionistas: Hi, and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast, where we talk with women who are following their passions to inspire you to do the same. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with Amy Chin, the founder of Calm Better Days. As someone who suffered from anxiety and postpartum depression, she found great relief with CBD and knew she had to help others understand how CBD could help them in a myriad of ways so she became a CBD educator. Calm Better Days walks clients through what CBD is, what you use it for, different delivery methods and how to find their dosage. Clients also receive a tailored CBD regimen based on the individual's needs and lifestyle, so they can dive into their CBD journey. So please welcome to the show, Amy Chin. Amy: Hi. Hi Nancy. Hi Amy. Thank you for having me on today. Passionistas: We're really excited about CBD and want to learn all about it. Tell us what's the one thing you're most passionate about. Amy: Well, it's cannabis. I'm most passionate about plant medicine. It is a gift that can heal in so many ways. And I think that, you know, as a society, we need to learn to tap into that. And I think that we are gearing into that category as we are learning that, you know, health these days is a integrated health, right. That means eating more plant-based diet, as well as doing your exercise, meditation, getting adequate sleep, all those play a role into our health. Passionistas: And so how does that translate into what you do for a living? Amy: Understanding that everything is integrative, right. I always talk to my clients and remind them that CBD will fast-track your health to where you want it to be, but will slow down depending on your other health lifestyle habits. So for example, let's say two people are battling, you know, hormonal imbalance. And if one is doing everything, having healthy habits in terms of sleep, exercise, diet, and let's say spiritually, they're going to be healthier, faster. However, if one is not adapting to those, you know, healthier lifestyle habits, it will take much longer. So that's how it all relates. And I think that we're all learning that as we go now, especially with COVID around. Passionistas: Well, let's take a little step back. Tell us where you grew up and what your childhood was like. Amy: I grew up in New York City, born and raised right in Chinatown. And being in a Chinese household, we didn't really speak much about health. We didn't speak much about feelings and emotions as well in a Chinese household. So for me, growing up now as a mom and being diagnosed with anxiety and postpartum depression was very new to me. I was very thankful it was diagnosed by my marriage therapist because I was not aware of the symptoms because we never spoke about it in my household. And that's why I love talking about it. Because now that I realize when it was diagnosed, I can then treat it. I can address it and take care of myself. When I didn't know what it was at the time, I just thought, oh, this is part of motherhood. This is something that I have to learn to deal with. And I assumed that this was just how it was. So I was very thankful it was diagnosed. And it was my marriage therapist who recommended CBD to me because I was leaning toward a more holistic life after being a mom. And I was not having good reactions from pharmaceutical meds. So I was very thankful that she did recommend something that was more holistic. And this was about eight years ago. At the time that was when you actually had to get a medical card to get CBD. And I got my card and started taking CBD. And that's when my life changed. It went from that cranky, irritable yelling mom that flew off the handle. And I hated who I was. I hated how I was with my children. And once I started taking CBD, I became so much more patient, so much more present and mindful. I was able to enjoy the time when I was interacting with my kids and realize, oh my goodness, life can be like this. It didn't have to be the way it was before. And when I felt that change in myself, it was so eye opening. I was finally able to respond to the days, you know, challenges instead of reacting. And once I felt that calm and ease, I was just like, I knew that I had to get the word out there. Because I knew that if I one, didn't also knew I had anxiety and postpartum depression, I was sure that other moms out there maybe going through the same thing, and may not be aware of it. And knowing that there's a natural alternative out there with no side effects, it is such a big, great help. And so that's how I started Calm Better Days, to help people find their calm better day. I know we go through that a lot where we're just living and, you know, suffering from something, right. Everyone's suffering from something, whether it's pain, whether it's mental, whether it's, you know, different health conditions. And that's the great thing about CBD is that it can address so many different issues, so many different health issues. You almost wonder how can it be? How can it be so wonderful that it addresses so many different health issues from anxiety, epilepsy, Alzheimers, heart disease, arthritis. It's almost too good to be true, but it really does. Passionistas: So I think there are misconceptions about what CBD is, and especially as it relates to cannabis and marijuana and people getting high and all that. So can you kind of talk about the myth of CBD and clarify for people that are listening, what it is? Amy: Absolutely. So CBD and THC, there are both cannabinoids found in a cannabis plant. And THC is the cannabinoid known to get you euphorically high and CBD does not get you euphorically high. They are however, both cycle active in the sense that if I have depression, a person who takes CBD, their moods and feelings will be elevated in terms of not feeling depressed, however, not intoxicated. So that's the big difference between CBD and THC. And because you don't get that euphoric high with CBD, a lot of people sometimes don't know when it's working. Because with THC, you know it's working when you get that euphoric high. But with CBD, because you're not getting that euphoric high people are like, well, what am I supposed to be feeling? And so I describe it as you know it's working when you're not feeling the negative symptoms that you're normally experiencing. So that can be that anxiety, right. With anxiety might come that overwhelm, that high level of stress, that tightness in your chest, or pain for some people, right. So when you're not feeling those negative symptoms anymore, that's when you know CBD is working. It makes you feel normal, not suffering. CBD is a potent bioaccumulator. So what that means is, it's going to soak up all the toxins in the soil, which can be heavy metal, fungi, mold, pesticide, mycotoxins. These are things we do not want to ingest. So always buy organic. And you know, hemp is such a potent bioaccumulator, they actually planted at Chernobyl to clean up the soil from the radiation. So if you're not buying organic and you're not looking at the certificate of analysis that every quality CBD product comes with, you can be ingesting toxins that will set off at another health condition. Passionistas: Is that what inspired you to found Calm Better Days? And what was the process of starting it? And what's your mission? Amy: I started Calm Better Days at the end of 2019, right before the pandemic started. So what happened was in 2018, the Farm Bill was passed. So CBD was federally legal and you did not need a medical card anymore to buy CBD. So that's when we saw that the market was getting saturated. We saw CBD products everywhere. And I saw two issues for new consumers. And that was one: because CBD was so new, not everyone understood how to properly use CBD to really access the benefits from the plan. And then two: because it's such a saturated market now, finding a safe and quality product was another unknown for new consumers. And so that's when I wanted to address both issues. So, what I do is... people can sign up for a virtual consultation, so it can be done anywhere, any state. And I walk people through the basics because if you don't understand the basics, you're not going to really be able to access and understand the plant fully. So when I say the basics, I mean, what is CBD? How does it work in your body that it can address so many different symptoms? And then walking the person through the different delivery methods between tinctures, edibles, vaporizers. What are their different activation times and how long they last for in your body? Understanding that makes it easier for you to develop a routine that works for you. And then also understanding your dosage. Everybody's dosage is very unique. And we're used to going to a doctor's office, let's say. And your doctor says, let's say you're starting an SSRI. We'll start you on a certain milligram. And the doctor will say, well, come back in a month and let's see how that works, and we'll adjust the dosage if necessary. And with plant medicine, it's no different, except that you're able to... if you're able to track and learn to read what your body is telling you, your body will tell you how much CBD you need. And I teach, you know, people that tracking system so that they can find out what works best for themselves. And lastly, after the education portion, I take a look at your specific health condition to recommend the best products for you. Everybody suffers from different things. And, you know, we're learning that CBD is just scratching the surface. There are other cannabinoids and other turpines that play a role in each product and, and the effect. So if you're telling me your issue is say Crohn's disease or a gut issue, then there is a cannabinoid CBG that is great for that, that will help clean up the gut, promote good gut flora, and also help with digestive issues. But let's say your issue is sleep. Then there is another cannabinoid, CBN, that is great for that. So this cuts down on time and money for the consumer because now they don't have to waste money on thinking, well, I think this product might work for me. And then also, you know, they're finding relief faster because now that they have the products in hand that are right for them, now they know how to use it as well. So that's how Calm Better Days was born and the mission behind it. I also carry about 15 to 20 different brands. And I support and focus on small farmed, women own and BIPOC owned brands. One, I believe that small farm that's where the quality is. I don't believe in, you know, huge commercial grows. The standards are very different, as well as you know, I like to look into the company's mission. I want to make sure that they're really about helping people and growing quality product. And that's why I believe that, you know, especially people new to this industry, right. They may not be aware of the history behind it and what goes on. So I want to steer them toward good quality companies that are, you know, really focus on the quality of the product and really helping people. Passionistas: So how do you go from being diagnosed, that this is a treatment that will work for you as an individual, to gaining all this knowledge that you now have, where you can help other people? What kind of studying and practices did you do to get to this place? Amy: Before I started CBD, I was a cannabis enthusiast. And once I discovered the CBD side, I was just blown away. I was like, is there anything this plant cannot do? And it was when I felt the results with CBD, that I started diving into it myself, doing all the research possible. And once I knew what I wanted to do and start my company, I then became cannabis licensed with Dr. Mary Clifton. She is a board certified internal doctor who specializes in cannabis. And the studies don't stop because every day we're now finding new studies, right? Because now we can study the plant. Before we were not able to study the plant because it was, you know, it's still a Schedule 1 drug, and that's why there are no studies beforehand. But like I was saying, now studies are coming out. So it doesn't stop. And every day there are new industry trends that I need to keep up on. But I love, I love finding out all this information. So I take what I've, you know, been consuming myself for years, as well as the studies that are now available, and apply that to people who are looking for new alternatives to health. Passionistas: Tell us a little bit about the pop-ups that you do.. Amy: So I do a lot of pop-ups. I don't have a brick and mortar store, so I do a lot of pop-ups. Especially at women networking events, because, you know, I am a mom. And I know that moms ,we take on so much that our anxiety and stress is... I think a lot of moms suffer. So I'm hoping one day we'll have a brick and mortar so that I can do more explaining and education in the store. I find that right now, although people are in need of it, I think because we're all so busy right now with COVID and everything is online, we're just too busy to sometimes even have that consultation. Or even too busy to go online to order things. So pop-ups are helpful to be right in front of them. Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington, and you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Amy Chin. To learn more about her CBD related personal events, group and individual consultations, and pop-ups, visit calmbetterdays.co. If you're enjoying this interview and would like to help us to continue creating inspiring content, please consider becoming a patron by visiting thepassionistasproject.com/podcast and clicking on the patron button. Even $1 a month can help us continue our mission of inspiring women to follow their passions. Now here's more of our interview with Amy. You talked a little bit about the different forms that people can take CBD in. Can you kind of talk a little bit more in detail about that? Amy: So back then the only, not the only, but the most common way was through inhalation, smoking a joint or a blunt. Nowadays, we have vaporizers. And I love vaporizers because one, you're not burning carcinogens. Like before with the joint you had the paper, the flour is all burning and that's consuming carcinogens. Which I want to save my throat, so I don't consume flower anymore in that form, but I do use vaporizers. There's no scent to it. There is no carcinogens in my throat, so it saves my throat. But also I love it because it provides the quickest onset. So you'll feel it within 5 to 10 minutes. And this is great for, let's say a person suffering from panic attacks or anxiety attacks, and they need that quick relief. Or maybe they have severe, intense back pain that they need real quick relief from. The vaporizer will get to that quickest. But I also understand that, you know, for some people they just don't want to inhale anything. And that's where, you know, the industry has been so innovative in the different formats that CBD comes in. So there are edibles. And edibles are gummies, honey, chocolate, anything that needs to go through your stomach and liver to metabolize. But because it has to go through your stomach, it will take much longer to kick in. So it takes about 30 to 90 minutes. But people love it because it's portable. It's easy to consume. You just, if it's a gummy, you could put it in your bag, just pop one when you need it. And, it does last much longer than a vaporizer. It can last from 4 to 6 hours, even 8 hours for some people. So when we think about different delivery methods, you want to think about what's going to make it easy for us to consume on a daily basis. Because then you make it easy as part of your routine. But if you're doing something that you don't like, and it's difficult, then it doesn't become part of your routine. So other formats are tinctures. Tinctures are CBD suspended in MCT oil. And it comes in a bottle with a dropper. And normally you want to drop it underneath your tongue. Hold it there for 60 seconds before you swallow. And that allows it to be absorbed into your bloodstream and will take about 20 to 40 minutes to activate. And will last about four hours. And when I talk about delivery methods, there is a time and place for everything. So what I mean by that is we want to think about our situation, what we need to address, and then also about the place where we're at, right? Because we want it to be easy and convenient. Once I wake up. That's when my anxiety and depression is at its worse, right. It's hard to be motivated. I'm, you know, don't want to get out of bed. And it's hard for me to be focused and productive. So I know right away in the morning, I either use my vaporizer or my tincture because I want to set the tone for my day. And I want it to be quick to get out of that slump and kind of like jumpstart my day. So, I either do one of those two things. And then after that, because I know it lasts for about four hours and I work at home, thankfully. So that's when I take an edible. I pop a gummy right before my lunch, because I know I have a long afternoon ahead and I don't want to have to think about redosing. And I take it right before my lunch, because I want it to go down with the good fat from my diet. Because then your body will absorb more of the CBD and also quicker, versus taking it on an empty stomach where your stomach acids might get to it first, or after a full meal where your liver just has to metabolize more. And then after the gummy wears off is probably around dinner time/after dinner. And it depends on what I need to do. If I need to do more, then I'll dose accordingly. But let's say, you know, I put in a hard day's work. I really want to relax. I don't want to think about work, then I can also do something relaxing, like a tea to kind of like set the mood for my night. Set myself up for good sleep and have a really relaxing night. And that's a great thing about it. Is that now with so many different products, it feels like a self treat. I can do an afternoon little chocolate piece or, you know, have my tea, right. Or maybe it's honey drizzled on top or fruit as my dessert after dinner. So there are different ways of consuming it. And not only that, but after my shower, you know, my muscles usually there's like soreness or stress from my neck down. And I love after a shower putting on a good CBD lotion just to melt all that tension, all that stress away. And that also eases me into my, you know, good nights rest. Passionistas: I think everybody associates weed with patchouli. Like these creams and the tinctures and everything. Do they smell like cannabis or do they come now in like lavender? Amy: They do. They come in so many different formats, so many different scents, and I love it. I have this one by Common Ground and it's bergamot and I love bergamot. And it goes on so smooth, so luxurious. So satiny too. I'm loving the creams that they come up with now because it doesn't smell like cannabis and it goes on so nice. It feels like any other luxurious cream, you wouldn't . Even know that it's, you know, specifically CBD. Not only does it smell great, but it really helps ease that tension, melt away any stress or pain that you may have. It's great because it's anti-inflammatory, which can be acne, rosacea, the redness, right. That's all inflammation. So that takes care of that. It also regulates your sebum control. So back then, when I was hormonally imbalanced, I had horrible cystic acne. My face would get shiny in an hour because I was over producing oil. So the CBD oil helps balance out your sebum. So instead of over-producing oil, it was balancing that out. So now my face doesn't get shiny in an hour. And also my cystic acne, it would hurt less because the CBD oil was taking care of the pain, as well as the inflammation. So CBD facial oil is also anti-aging and anti-oxidant. So it's great for the face. And I use it every day. It's cleaned up my skin regimen. Like before I used to apply so much acne medication, so many different retinals this and that. Now is just double cleanse and the facial moisturizers, CBD facial moisturizer and nothing else. It will take out the puffiness. I have an eye serum. And also for dark spots. Because it quickens the cellular turnover, so the dark spots will fade quicker as well. So it's cut down my steps and products. I love it. I recommend it for everyone. Passionistas: What if someone is on traditional medication? Are there interactions that they should speak with a doctor about before starting a regimen? Amy: Always speak with your doctor especially when you are on pharmaceutical drugs. And on my website, I have a partnership with Leaf411, which is a nonprofit organization of cannabis nurses. So what that means is you can call them and say, you know, you were referred from Calm Better Days. And that makes the call free. You do have to pay for the service, but because I have the partnership, it is free. And what you can do is say, "I am on medication X, Y, Z. Will CBD interact with it?" For the most part, CBD does not interact with most drugs. The only concern is if you are on blood thinners or blood pressure medication. Anything that interacts with grapefruit and you cannot take, CBD works like that grapefruit. It's, an enzyme inhibitor. So that you would have to watch. Passionistas: You talked a little bit about how your personal life has changed from making this discovery. But tell us a little bit more about, kind of, the transformation you personally have made since you started using CBD in this way. Amy: Well, let's see, I've been on it for about, CBD specifically, for over eight years now. Cannabis in general, probably over a decade. So I have now become a more mindful person, definitely more aware about my health. And this was also after becoming a mom, more holistic, more plant-based. Because when I was at my darkest point with anxiety and postpartum depression, that's when my health was out of balance. I was hormonally imbalanced. I wasn't eating right at that time. So during the time when I was consuming CBD was also when I was making healthier lifestyle changes in terms of my diet, more plant-based. And as a mom, you know, I know I'm supposed to exercise more and also get adequate sleep. However, it's very hard to fit those two things in as a busy mom, also running her own company. And I know that, right. And that is why I make sure to take my CBD every day. So at least then my body won't crack from not doing the things that I know I'm supposed to do. If I can, I do try to, of course do it. But in terms of lifestyle, that's how it's changed. I'm more aware of what I do need to do, as well as my mental state. I would say before CBD, I felt like my life felt like, you know, how, when you're that hamster on the hamster wheel and it's constantly going. And you just feel that you have to. And then once I took CBD, it kind of took me out of that hamster wheel and I could see, oh my gosh, I'm that hamster. And it didn't have to be like that. It allowed me to have calmness and mindfulness so I can see and be aware of what goes on in my life. And the funny thing is, you know, they always suggest therapy and all that. And I have been going to years of that and try to practice meditation and yoga, but my mind would not be still. And I just could not tap into it no matter how hard I tried. But with the CBD, I was able to finally tap into that and calm my mind and be aware of everything that was going on, so that now if I take CBD before a yoga session or a meditation, it just enhances that session because now I can really focus in and tap into that. Whereas before I just could not calm my mind to, to focus in on that. Passionistas: Do you find that people are, like who don't get it, who don't understand it personally, like are judgmental about the concept of CBD? And how do you address people who come at you in that way? Amy: Absolutely. I get a lot of people who don't understand it. And that's why I love to talk about it. And I get that they don't understand it. And sometimes it comes with, of course, you don't get it because you don't have the basic fundamentals. And, and that's why I'm here to help you understand that, because I feel that once you understand that, then everything starts clicking. And then after that is you have to experiment and try it. And you know, we've been so conditioned as a society to think that, okay, a doctor is here, they prescribe medicine. And then you just take it blindly, right? And with plant medicine, it's a different approach in that you can do it yourself, but you have to be patient. You have to be open to it and you have to be open to tracking it so that you can tell yourself, well, how much does my body need? But we haven't listened to our bodies in so long that it seems like a new practice. And we have to remember that herbs, cannabis, that was the original medicine of days long ago before pharmaceutical medicine was made in a lab. So we have to understand that that's what we started with and it's going back to that. And I understand sometimes even with the education, it may still be hard to understand. But once that person tries it and they feel it, then that is like, I'm hooked now. Now I want to understand more and dive into it more. And sometimes it's all about finding the right dosage to get you there. Or finding the right product because everyone is going to respond differently to a vaporizer versus a tincture versus an edible. You know, for some people edibles, for whatever reason, doesn't work for them, for their body, their genetic makeup. So sometimes that's when a vaporizer can really help. And I love vaporizers because I find that because of the quick onset, that people really feel it. Where sometimes when they're waiting for an edible to kick in, they forget that they're waiting and then the day goes by and then they're not mindful of, oh, my day actually went by smoother. I wasn't blowing up at everything, right. But sometimes people don't notice that because we're not mindful. We're not reading what our body is telling us. And usually we only hear what our body is telling us when it's screaming, right. And that's when it's like suffering from a pain or suffering from something that happened in our body. Passionistas: From all the people that you've worked with, is there like one specific example that you can think of as like a success story that you're especially blown away by? Amy: Well, right now, a lot of clients are coming to me for sleep issues and stress issues and actually gut issues. Well, gut and mind is all related. So that's why stress and gut health are like hand in hand. And that's why a lot of people are coming for that. But sleep. So I've seen a lot of people come back and say, you know what? I've been getting good sleep. And stress has been lowered. I've had a lot of clients who were on pharmaceutical meds for anxiety, stress, depression, and have weaned off of it. When I hear that they've weaned off of pharmaceutical meds and still feeling great, I am so happy because I know that they're feeling better because they're no longer feeling the side effects from the pharmaceutical drugs. Which was the main reason why a lot of them wanted to get off of that. So when I hear that, I just know that, you know, that makes me feel wonderful that I'm actually helping people feel better. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to our interview with Amy Chin. To learn more about her CBD related personal events, group and individual consultations, and pop-ups visit calmbetterdays.co. Please visit thepassionistasproject.com to learn more about our podcast and subscription box, filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. This quarter's box is a collaboration with the MOB Nation and features products from mom owned business. Get a free mystery box with a one-year subscription using the code SPRINGGOODIES. And be sure to subscribe to The Passionistas Project Podcast, so you don't miss any of our upcoming, inspiring guests. Until next time, stay well and stay passionate.  

How do you achieve your ROI goals in today's property investment market? Hear our projections for the housing market for the rest of 2021, and Glenn speaks with Amy, a Memphis-based investor, who describes her experiences of managing tenants for her own real estate investments. 2021 Housing Market Projections & Achieving ROI in Today's Real Estate Market Richard: So in this segment, we're going to talk about 2021 and where we are now nearing the end of the second quarter. How do you think things are going to go for the rest of the year guys? And how do you see mortgage rates changing and the demand for property? Brett: Personally, I think that what we are now seeing is a cooling. Not a major cooling, but a little bit of a dip. In the first quarter, we would write 40 offers and get 3 accepted. Now, we are writing 20 offers and getting 8 accepted, so we are starting to see a better advantage for our investors. I still believe the best time to buy is going to be October, November, December, and January. Aaron: It's been such an odd year for us. I've seen in my own neighborhood recently, in Germantown, an increase in the number of days on market. In my neighborhood in particular, which we would consider a move-up neighborhood, a move-up neighborhood would be your next step up from an entry-level house. Where we live would be like a very nice house. I'd say that we live in a very modest home in Germantown, in one of the more affluent communities in the Shelby County and Memphis area. There are more houses on the market right now. There are for sale signs that don't have those little sliders across the top that say contract pending or sold, or under contract, and those houses have been out there for several weeks. Brett: The reason being is because almost everybody tried to get their property purchased and get it closed. They get settled in and have two or three weeks for the kids before they are back to school. So the good news for homeowners that are looking for a home, is that there's a lot of inventory now. Not a lot, but there's more inventory than there has been in 6-months for real estate investors. As the owner-occupant market cools, the investor market will cool. I don't know why investors do this, but many property investors, not good investors, but some of these investors follow the leader too much. In other words, they follow them right off of a cliff.  Richard: So, like lemmings? Brett: Right. Exactly. So, why wouldn't you wait until the property market takes a little dip and wait to buy in October, November, December, and buy a better deal. I'm hoping these so-called experts that just put out their discussion about how property values are gonna continue to increase, and they predict the next five years is gonna be a substantial increase. I tend to think they're wrong. After all, what drives the market up? It is demand. The demand is eventually going to stop. I believe that the hedge fund groups are the ones that drove the demand for property. Once that took off, then homeowners panicked, they started buying, and they ended up overshooting prices, and real estate prices snowballed. But now all that's coming to an end. So I predict we're going to see some normalcy back in the housing market. I think the so-called experts, who probably have never held a real job, are wrong in my opinion.  Glenn: Well, and keep in mind that when they talk about the market in general, they're not really talking about real estate investors, as that's a totally different game. I would never dissuade one of my investors from buying, but I told several of them to wait, until Q4. Wait until the winter or once thanksgiving hits. That's our time to start looking through the end of the year because then you're gonna have more opportunity because fewer owner-occupants are going to be buying. Brett: When the market is hot as soon as wintertime gets here, what do investors do? They just go silent and cool off. It's the holidays they are going to enjoy time with their family and will pick back up buying properties come April when everybody and their mother is trying to buy. A smart real estate investor needs to be buying between Halloween and February 1st. That's when you need to be buying. Richard: So if you feel cold, go and buy a house! Brett: Yes exactly, that should be the new rule. If you're chilly, go and buy an investment property.   Experiences of a local Memphis Real Estate Investor Glenn: Amy, welcome to the Behind the Curtain Podcast. Here we talk about real estate investing in the southwest Tennessee market, and Amy is an investor that's been working with me for a few years, right here in Memphis, Tennessee. I've helped her find a few properties, she's one of the rare local investors that I have. So Amy, tell us a little bit about why you chose to invest in real estate versus stocks and bonds of Wall Street. Amy: First, I just wanted to thank you for having me on your podcast today. I'm really grateful for this opportunity. Amy:  So you asked why I was interested in investing in real estate versus stocks and bonds? I'm really attracted to something that I can see and hold, and look at, Numbers on the spreadsheet are not very interesting to me and I don't understand them, at least not how they go up and down. I know that everybody needs a house and I know what I would like to have in a house, so to be able to go and look at those sorts of things and meet and interact with actual real people, that's just a good fit for me. You know, you said I was local, I do like to go and put eyes on my property and I talk to all of my prospective tenants before and throughout the rental process. So I really enjoy that active aspect of a real estate investment. Glenn: Well, you know Amy, part of my job is to find the right properties for you. You and I have looked at many properties together that you didn't make a bid on, or that we bid on that you didn't win, and that's just a part of my job for every 10 that we look at. We might find one that works for you and those are the ones that count. So what kind of real estate have you invested in Memphis? Amy: Well, so far I have two single-family homes and I have a duplex. You found the duplex for me and it wasn't something I'd asked you to look for, however, it's been my most profitable unit by far. So I'm definitely interested in acquiring more multi-family housing as well as single-family homes. I've never flipped anything, but I'd be interested in doing that because I really enjoy puzzles and decorating and looking at tile, and all that kind of stuff. Rather than split, I think I'd redo and then hold. So yeah, I would repair and hold. Glenn: So how well have they performed for you? Amy: Thus far, extremely well! I've never had any vacancies. I started in early 2017. I've never had more than two or three days, that it took me to clean out the property, worth of vacancy. I've been extremely fortunate to have, never had any missed rent payments. I mean, part of that is doing a good job, screening tenants, but all of my properties in Memphis have been profitable and in demand. Glenn: Did you have any issues as a result of COVID? Do that impact your tenants?  Amy: I did have tenants that lost their job, but they were all able to get the $600 payment, and while I gave options to help out my tenants, nobody took me up on our offering. They all continued to pay their rent on time.  Glenn: Well that's outstanding. Amy: Yeah. Glenn: What are you looking forward to in the future in terms of real estate? How many more investment properties do you plan to pick up? What's your long-term objective in this? Amy: Well, you know, eventually I'd like to quit my day job and live off the somewhat passive income. I have been inactively managing it. It's not like I have to go into the office every day. But that's the passive part of it I would say. So I would love to have maybe 20 houses or 20 doors. Glenn: Right now you have four doors basically?  Amy: Yeah.  Glenn: Now, are you self-managing or using enterprise for your property management? Amy: Well, since I am local to Memphis, and I do enjoy the interaction with the tenants and all that comes with it, I am self-managing. Glenn: And how has that going for you? Do you have any issues with it? Amy: Yeah, some days are better than others. Things don't break when it's convenient. So, I've been staying on top of a lot of preventative maintenance, and as I said, I really thoroughly screen tenants before I rent out. So I've not had any issues with any tenants. So, it's really just been routine maintenance. Air conditioners break, so getting those fixed when that does happen - but it hasn't been bad. It's been manageable, of course, but it's a thing of scale. I might need to look into services with EPM to help with the volume.    Learn more about real estate investing at: https://epmrealestate.com/podcast/2021-housing-market-projections-achieving-roi--local-memphis-investor-interview  

About Amy Arambulo NegretteWith over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo!, Fantasy Sports, and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. She has built APIs for enterprise clients for cloud consulting firms and led a team of Cloud Software Engineers. Currently, she works as a Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group doing bill analyses and leading cost optimization projects. Amy has survived acquisitions, layoffs, and balancing life with two small children.Website: www.amy-codes.comTwitter: @nerdypawsLinkedin: linkedin.com/in/amycodesWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xc2rkR5VCxoThis episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo.TranscriptJeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm joined by Amy Arambulo Negrette. Hey, Amy thanks for joining me.Amy: Thank you, glad to be here.Jeremy: You are a Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do at the Duckbill Group.Amy: Sure thing. I used to be an application developer, I did a bunch of AWS stuff for a while, and now at the Duckbill Group, a cloud economist is someone who goes through cost explorer and your usage report and tries to figure out where you're spending too much money and how the best to help you. It is the best-known use of a small skill I have, which is about being able to dig through someone's receipts and find out what their story is.Jeremy: Sounds like a forensic accountant, maybe forensic cloud economist or something to that effect.Amy: Yep. That's basically what we do.Jeremy: Well, I'm super excited to have you here. First of all, I have to ask this question, I've known Corey for quite some time, and I can imagine that working with him is either amazing or an absolute nightmare. I'm just curious, which one is it?Amy: It is not my job to control Corey, so it's great. He's great to talk to. He really is fully engaged in any conversation you have with him. You've talked to him before, I'm sure you know that. He loves knowing what other people think on things, which I think is a really healthy attitude to have.Jeremy: I totally agree, and hopefully he will subtweet this episode. Anyways, getting into this episode, one of the things that I've noticed that you've done quite a bit, is you create technical content. I've seen a lot of the talks that you've given, and I think that's something that you've done such a great job of not only coming up with content and making content interesting.Sometimes when you put together technical content, it's not super exciting. But you have a very good way of taking that technical content and making it interesting. But then also, following up with it. You have this series of talks where you started talking about managing FaaS, and then you went to the whole frenemies thing with Fargate versus Lambda. Now we're talking about, I think the latest one you did was about Lambda and the container support within Lambda. Maybe we can just go back, or start at a point where, for people who are interested in maybe doing talks, what is the reason for even creating some of these talks in the first place?Amy: I feel a lot of engineers have the same problem, just day-to-day where they will run into a bug, and then they'll go hit the all-knowing software engineer, which is the Google search engine, and have absolutely either nothing come up or have six posts that say, I'm having this problem, but you won't ever get an answer. This is just a fast way of answering those questions before someone has to ask.Jeremy: Right. When you come up with these ... You run into this bug, and you're thinking to yourself, you can't find the answer. So, you do the research, you spend the time digging through, and finding the right way to solve it. When you put these talks together, do you get a sense that it's helping people and then that it's just another way to connect with the community?Amy: Yeah. When I do it, it's really great, because after our talk, I'll see people either in the hallway, or I'll meet someone at a booth, and they'll even say, it's like, I ran into this exact same problem, and I gave up because it was such a strange edge case that it was too hard to fix, and we just moved on to another solution, which is entirely possible.I also get to express to just the general public that I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about, because someone has given me a stage to talk for 30 minutes, and just put up all of my proofs. That's an actually fun and weirdly empowering place to be.Jeremy: Yeah. I actually think that's really interesting. Again, for me, I loved your talks, and some of those things are ... I put those things at the back of my mind, but I know for people who give talks, who maybe get judged for other reasons or whatever, that it certainly is empowering. Is that something where you certainly shouldn't have to do it. There certainly should be that same level of respect. But is that something that you found that doing these talks really just sets the tone, right off the bat?Amy: Yeah, I feel it does. It helps that when someone Googles you, a bunch of YouTube videos on how to solve their problem comes up, that is extremely helpful, especially ... I do a lot of consulting, so if I ever have to go onsite, and someone wants to know what I do, I can pull up an actual YouTube playlist of things that I've done. It's like being in developer relations without having to write all of that content, I get to write a fraction of that content.Jeremy: Right. Unfortunately, that is a fact that we live with right now, which is, it is completely unfair, but I think that, again, the fact that you do that, you put that out there, and that gives you that credibility, which again, you should have from your resume, but at the same time, I think it's an interesting way to circumvent that, given the current world we live in.Amy: It also helps when there are either younger engineers or even other younger professionals who are looking at the tech industry, and the tech industry, especially right now, it does not have the best reputation to be able to see that there are people who are from different backgrounds, either educationally or financially, or what have you, and are able to go out and see someone who has something similar being a subject matter expert in whatever it is that they're talking about.Jeremy: Right. I definitely agree with that. That's that thing, where the more that we can amplify those types of voices and make sure that people can see that diversity, it's incredibly important. Good for you, obviously, for pushing through that, because I know that I've heard a lot of horror stories around that stuff that makes my blood boil.Let's talk to some of these people out here who potentially want to do some of these talks, and want to use this as a way to, again, sell themselves. Because I can tell you one thing, once I started writing blog posts and doing talks and doing those sorts of things, clearly, I have a very different background, but it just gave me a bunch of exposure; job offers and consulting clients and things like that, those just become much easier to get when you can actually go out there and do some of this stuff.If you're interested in doing that, I think one of the hard things for most people is, what even makes a good talk? You've come up with some really great talks. What's that secret sauce? How do you do that?Amy: I think it can also be very intimidating since a lot of the talks that get a lot of promotion are always huge vendor events that they're trying to push their product, they're trying to push a solution. That usually takes up a lot of advertising real estate, essentially, where that's what you see, that's what you see all the threads and everything. When you actually get to these community conferences, or even when I would speak at AWS Summit, it was ... I had a very specific problem that I needed to solve. I ran into a bug, the bug was not in the documentation, because why would it be?Jeremy: Why would you put that in there, right?Amy: Of course. Then Google, three pages down, maybe put me on the path to finding the right answer, and it's the journey of trying to put all of the bug fixes in place to make it work for your specific environment and then being able to share that.Jeremy: Right, yeah. That idea of taking these experiences that you've had, or trying to solve a problem, and then finding the nuances maybe in solving the problem as opposed to the happy path, which it's always great when you're following a blog post and it says, run this command, then run this command, then run this command. Well, what happens on that third command when the thing blows up, and you have no idea what to do? Then you end up Googling for five hours trying to find your way out of that.You take this path of, find those bugs or find that non-happy path and solve it. Then what do you do around there? How do you then take that ... You got to make that interesting somehow.Amy: Yes. A lot of people use gifs and memes. I use pictures of food and screencaps from Dungeons and Dragons. That's usually just different enough that it'll snap someone just out of their phone going, "Why is there a huge elf on my screen trying to attack people screaming elf errors." Well, that's because that's what they thought it would be great to call it. It's not a great error code. It doesn't explain what it is, and it makes you very confused.Jeremy: Right. Part of that is, and again, there's that relatability when you create talks, and you want to connect with the audience in some way. But you also ... This is the other thing that I've always found the hardest when I'm creating talks, is trying to find the right level. Because AWS always does this thing where they're like, it's a 200 level, or it's a 400 level, and so forth. I think that's helpful, but you're going to get people of all different skill levels, and so forth. How do you take a problem like that, and then make it relatable, or understandable, probably? Find that right level?Amy: The way I see it, there's going to be at least one person of these two types in the room that are not going to be your target audience, someone who doesn't know what you're talking about, but sees that a tool that they're considering is going to pose a problem, and they want to know how difficult it is to fix it. Or there's going to be a business person who has no technical background, and they just want to know if what they're evaluating is worth evaluating, if this error is going to be so difficult to narrow down and try to resolve that, yes, why would we go through something that my engineers are going to spend hours to try to fix something that's essentially a configuration issue?When I write any section of a talk, I make sure that it addresses a person who may not have come into that with that exact problem in mind. For the people who have, they'll understand the ... In animation, it's called key images, where there are very specific slots where you understand the topic of what is happening and the context around it. I always produce more verbose notes that go with my presentation. I usually release it either at the end of the day, or later on that week, once everyone has had time to settle, and it provides a tutorial-esque experience where this is what you saw, this is how you would actually do it if you were in front of a screen.Jeremy: Yeah.Amy: There are people who go to technical talks with a laptop on their lap because they're also working while they're trying to do it. But most of the time, they're not going to have the console open while you're walking through the demo. So, how are you going to address that issue? It's just easier that way.Jeremy: I like that idea too, of ... I try to do high-level bullet points, and then talk about the bullet point. Because one thing that I try to do, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this as well. Here I am picking your brain trying to make my own talks better. But basically, I do a bullet point, and then I talk through it. I actually animate the bullet points coming in.I'm not a huge fan of showing an entire slide with all the bullet points and then letting people read ahead, I bring a bullet point in, talk about the bullet point, bring another bullet point in. Is that something you recommend doing too? Or do you just present all the concepts and then walk people through it?Amy: I think it depends. I tend to have very dense slides, which is not great for reading, especially if you're several rows back. I truly understand that. But the way I see it, because I also talk very fast when I'm on stage that I want there to be enough context around what's happening, so that if I gloss over a concept, then you visually can understand what's happening.That said, if that's because the entire bullet block on my slide is going to be about a very specific thing that's happening. It's not something that you have to view step-by-step. Now, I do have a few where, especially in a more workshop scenario, where you're going, I want you to think about this first and then go on to this next concept. I totally hide stuff. I just discovered for a talk that I was constructing the other day, that there's an animation that drops them down like index cards, and that's now my favorite animation right now.Jeremy: When you're doing that, like because this is the other thing, just for people who have ever ... If you're out there and you've ever written a talker or you've given a talk, the first iteration of it is never going to be the right one. You have to go through and you have to revise. It is sort of weird, and I don't know, maybe you felt this way too, in the pre-pandemic world, when you would give talks in person, most of the time, you'd give it to a relatively small audience, a couple of hundred people or whatever, as opposed to now, when we do talks, post-pandemic, and they're online, it's like, they're immediately available online.It's hard to give the same talk over and over and over and over again, without somebody potentially having seen it. A lot of work goes into a single talk. Not being able to use the same time over and over again, is not great. But, how do you refine it? Is it that you tested it with a live audience, or do you use a family member or a friend, or a colleague? How do you test and refine your talks?Amy: I'm actually an organizer at a meetup group, and specifically built around giving people of marginalized gender identities, and a place to stage and write technical content. It is a very specific audience.Jeremy: I can imagine.Amy: But it addresses that issue I had earlier about visibility, it also does help you ... If you don't have a lot of contacts in this industry, just as an aside, technical speaking is a way to do it, because everyone loves talking to each other after the stress has worn off, and you become the friendliest person after you've done that.But also, there are meetup groups out there, specifically about doing technical feedback, or just general speaking feedback. If you want to do something general, Toastmasters is a great organization to do. If you want to do strictly technical, if you do any cloud-related stuff, the DevOps communities are super friendly, even if it's not specifically about DevOps. I'm not a DevOps person, but I have a lot of DevOps friends. Some of my best friends are DevOps people.And you can get on a meetup or a Zoom call and just burn through your slides for about 10 or 15 minutes and see ... Your friends will be very honest with you, in a small group.Jeremy: Right. One of the things I did notice, too, giving a speech in person or giving your talk in person versus giving a talk via Zoom call, is sometimes when you don't hear any laughs or chuckles from a little joke that you make in there, it can feel very lonely in that space after you're waiting for something in there, but. It's a little bit ...Amy: It's worse when there are people in the room. I assure you, it is so much worse.Jeremy: That is very true. If something falls flat, that's a good point. Just going back to more this idea of creating good talks, and what makes a good talk. Where do you find ... You mentioned, maybe it's a vendor conference or something and you maybe install the vendor stuff, and you find the bugs and so forth. But is there any other places that you get inspiration from? Are there any resources you use to sort build some of these talks?Amy: Again, the communities help. The communities will tell you, really, it's like, I don't understand this thing, can someone hop on a call with me for real quick minute and explain why this concept is so hard? That's a very good place to base your talk off. As far as making them engaging, and interesting, I tend to clone video gaming videos, just because that's what I watch. I know, if it's going to be interesting to me, then it will probably be at least different than the content that's out there.Jeremy: Right. That's a good way to think of things too, is if it's something that you find interesting, chances are, there are lots of other people that will find that interesting. All right, let's go back to just this idea of creating new talks. You had mentioned this idea of, again, finding the bugs and so forth. But one of the things that I think we see quite a bit is always that bleeding edge stuff. People always want to write content about something new that happened.I'm guilty of this, I would think from a serverless standpoint where you're talking about things that are really, really bleeding edge. It's useful and they're interesting. Certainly, if you go to a conference about serverless, then it's really nice to see you have these talks and what might be possible. But sometimes when you're going to more practical type things. Again, even DevOps Days, and some of those other things, I think you've got attendees or talk listeners who are looking for very practical advice.I guess the question is like, how do you take a new piece of content, one of these problems, whatever it is. I guess, how do you keep finding new content is probably the better way to ask that question?Amy: Well, to just roll back just a little bit. My problem with bleeding edge content, I love watching it, but bleeding edge content will almost always be a product demo because it's someone who developed a new solution, and they want to share with everybody, which is just going to walk you through how it's used, which is great, except, and this is just a nature of what the cloud industry is like, all of this stuff, it changes day-to-day.These tools may not be applicable in a few months, or they may become the new standard. There's no way to tell until you're already six months out, and by then, they've already gone through several product revisions. I once did a talk where I was talking about best practices, and AWS released their updated best practices the day before my talk, and I had to update three slides. It threw off my timing, it was great.That's just one of those kind of pitfalls that you have to roll with. As far as getting new content, though, especially if you're dealing ... It depends who your audience is, because my audience tends to be either ICs or technical leads, and by then you're usually in a company ... If you're not developing these bleeding edge solutions, you're just using the tools that's out there already.You had brought up my "Serverless Frenemies," which is still my favorite title of any talk that I've ever made, because when I did the managing containers one, and I love all my Devro friends, but they all got into my mentions about why don't you just use Fargate? If you're at the containerization stage, why don't you just use Fargate, because it's not even close to the same thing, it is closer to Kubernetes than it is to Lambda, and I'm looking for a Lambda-like solution. That's what that whole deal was about, and I was able to stretch that out into I think 30 minutes because Twitter will tell you what's wrong, whether or not it's accurate or not, and whether or not they're actually your friends. They are my friends, but come on.Jeremy: Twitter can definitely be brutal. I think that, and maybe unpack a little bit what you were saying, is you're creating content around existing tools. One way to do it is, you're using existing tools, you're creating content around that, or you can create content around that. Looking at those solutions, you introduce a new solution to something, or you're even using an existing tool, nothing's perfect. You had mentioned that idea of bugs and so forth. But just, I guess new solutions, or just solutions, in general, maybe higher-level abstractions, everything creates some new type of problem that you have to deal with, and that's probably a pretty effective way to generate new content.Amy: It is. If you ever have to write down an RCA, which, for those who have not had the pleasure of doing one is called a root cause analysis, where you took down production, and you had to explain why.Jeremy: Yep.Amy: Or you ever did this, hopefully, in stage, or hopefully, in development where you ran into a situation where ... I had a situation once where Lambda would not delete itself. I call it my Skynet problem where it just hit a stage where it was both trying to save and delete at the same time. It would lock itself and I had to destroy the entire stack and send that command several times just to force that command through.If you ever have a problem like that, that is a thing that you write up instantly, and then you turn it into slide decks, and then you go to SlidesCarnival, you throw a very flashy background on it, and next thing you know, you have a TED talk, or a technical talk.Jeremy: Right. The other thing too, is, I find use cases to be an interesting, just like ... Non-traditional use cases are kind of fun too, how can I use this in a way that it wasn't meant to be used, and do something like that?Amy: I love those. Those are my favorite. I love watching people break away from what the tutorial says you have to do, and I'm going to get a little weird with it, and that to me is totally fascinating. When the whole, I fed these scripts into a computer meme came out, I thought that was super fascinating because that was something a company I had worked for did, they used analytics ... I used to work for Fantasy Sports, to write color commentary for your Fantasy Football team, and they would send it out.If you did really well, you would get a really raving review, and if you did really poorly, you would get roasted by a computer, and then that gets sent to everyone in the league, and it's hilarious. But that is not a thing that you would just assume a computer would do, is just write hot takes on your Fantasy Football team.Jeremy: That's ... Sure, go ahead.Amy: It's so much fun. I love watching people get weird with the tools that are there.Jeremy: There are times where you could do something like that, you could maybe create a content around some strange use case or whatever, and I love that idea of getting weird with that. The other part of it, though, is that, I guess, if you're sitting through a talk, and it's some super interesting problem that you're listening to, and again, I don't know, maybe it's some database replication thing, that you're just really into, whatever. That makes sense. But I think the majority of problems that developers have, are not that interesting, they're just frustrating.Probably the worst thing to do is wanting to sit through a talk that talks about some frustrating issue you have. Is there a way to basically say, "Look, I have a problem that I want to talk about. It's not the most interesting problem, but how can you flip that and take a problem that's not interesting and make it interesting?Amy: The batching containers and the frenemies talk was all based off of a bin library error from within the Lambda AMI. That, on paper is extremely boring, and should be a thing that you can easily look up, it is not. When I went around it trying to make tracking down library errors interesting, just saying it is very slow and can drain the energy out of your voice.But, I put a lot of energy into my work in general, and that's just how I had to approach pulling these talk is like, I like what I do, just, generally. When I try to explain what I do to people, it sounds super boring, and I own that. Now I'm doing it with spreadsheets, which is much, much worse. But when I tell people, it's not about the error itself, it's about everything that happened to make this one particular error happen. The reason why this error happened was because Lambda uses AWS's very specific Linux AMI when they did not used to, and they left stuff out for either security or performance purposes.Whether or not we as a group agree with that, that's a business decision that they made. How does their business decision affect your future business decisions and your future technical ones? Well, that becomes a way more interesting conversation, because it's like, we know this is going to break at this part, do we still want to use SSH? Do we still need it for this reason? You can approach it more from a narrative standpoint of, I wasted way too much time with this, did I need to? It's like, well, you shouldn't have, this should not have happened, but no bug should have happened, right?Jeremy: Right.Amy: You work through your process of finding a solution instead of concentrating on what the solution is because the solution they can look up in your show notes later.Jeremy: Right. No, I love that idea of documenting your process as opposed to just the solution itself. You find the problem, you pull the thread and where does that take you? I think to myself, a lot of times I go down the rabbit hole on trying to find the solution to a problem that I have or a bug fix, whatever. Sometimes, the resolution is underwhelming. Maybe it's not worth sharing. But other times, there's a revelation in there. I think you're right, with a little bit of storytelling, you can usually take that and turn that into a really interesting talk.Amy: One of the things it will also do, if you look at it from a process and from a narrative standpoint, is that when you take this video, and you send it to either a technical lead or a product manager, they'll understand what the problem was because you did not bog it down with code. There's very little live code in mine because I understand that people build things differently, just because every code is as different as every person. I get that and I've come to terms with it. This is the best way to share that information.Jeremy: Absolutely. All right, let's wrap up the idea of building talks. What is your advice to someone who is starting out new? What's the best way for them to get started, or what's just some general advice for people starting to build talks?Amy: The best content new engineers can do, and that's mostly because this is never the standpoint from which tutorials are ever written in, is that, as someone who knows very little of the way a language or a framework should work, write down your process, the entire thing on you getting either a framework onboarded, how you build, and a messaging system, things that people have written a billion times because chances are, one, you got that work from someone else's blog post or their documentation, and you can cite that. And two, when you do it that way, you not only get into the habit of writing, but you get in the habit of editing it in a way that makes it more palatable for people who are not in your specific experience.When you do it this way, people can actually see, from an outsider's perspective, exactly what is hard about the thing that they built, or what people who do not have a different level of experience are going through. If a tutorial is targeted at engineers who know where the memory leaks in PHP are, that's the thing that comes with experience, that is not the thing that can be trained.When a new engineer hits that point, and they found it in a new framework where you fix it, then you start knowing where to fix other problems. That way more senior engineers and more vetted people can learn from your experience, and then they will contact you and they will teach you how to find these issues, so you don't run into them again, and you end up with someone you can just bounce ideas off of. That's how you get pulled into these technical communities. It's a really self-healing process.Jeremy: Yeah. I love that. I think this idea of you approaching something from a slightly different angle, your experience, the way that you do it, the way that you see it, the way that you perceive the word or the next prompt that comes back, or how you read an error message or any of those things, you sharing your experience around that is hugely valuable to the people that are building these things. But also, you may run into problems that other people like you run into, and it's just ... Sometimes, all it takes is just a tiny twisting of the words, rearranging a sentence in a way that now that clicks with somebody where the other time it didn't. I love that.That's why I always encourage people, just even if somebody has written his content 100 times before, whatever slight difference there is in your content, that could have a powerful effect on someone else.Amy: Yeah, it really can.Jeremy: Awesome. All right, let me ask you a couple of questions about Lambda and Functions as a Service because I know that you spent quite a bit of time on this stuff. I guess a question, especially, maybe even from a cloud economist, what's next for Lambda and Functions as a Service? Because I know you've written about the Lambda containers, but what's maybe that next evolution?Amy: What AWS did recently when they released Lambda Containers is basically put it at feature parity with Azure and GCP, which already had that ability, they had either a function service or a function to Json service where you could upload your own container. They finally released the base image, where, granted, if you knew where to look, you could get it before, but they actually released it, and announced it to the general public, so you don't have to know someone in order to be able to use it.What I see a lot of people being able to do with this now is they really want to do local development testing, so they don't have to push anything to their account and rack up those charges, when all that you want to do is make sure that whatever one line update you made, actually worked and you didn't put the space or the cab in the wrong place, which is, I guess, how it works now and it takes down the entire stack, which again, we've all done at least once, so don't worry about it. If you've ever taken down production, don't worry, you're not the only one, I promise you. You can't throw a t-shirt into an empty conference room and not hit a dude who took down production. I'm going to save that for later.Local development testing, live simulation is a really big thing. I've seen asked to do full-on data science just on Lambda containers, so they don't have to use Kubernetes anymore, because speaking of cost stuff, it's easier to track cost-wise than Kubernetes is, because Kubernetes is purely consumption-based, and you have to tie a bunch of stuff together in order to make that tracking work. That would be great.I think from here on, and a lot of the FaaS changes, they're not going to be front ends anymore, it's all going to be optimizations by the providers, you're not going to see much of that anymore. It's not like before, where they would add three more fields and make a blog post about it. I think everything is just going to be tuning just from Lambda's perspective now. That and hooking it to more things, because they love their integrations. What good is Lambda if you can't integrate it yourself?Jeremy: Right, if you can't hook it up to events. It's interesting, though, this move to support containers as a packaging format. You're right, I think this has been available in IBM, it's been available in Google, it's been available in Microsoft, these capabilities have existed for a while to use a container, and again, that's a very overloaded word, I know, but to use that as a packaging format. But moving to that, the parity there with the other cloud providers is one thing, but who's that conversation for? Whose mind does that change about serverless, or FaaS, I guess.Amy: The security team.Jeremy: Security, okay.Amy: Because if you talk to any engineer, if it's a technical problem, they'll find a way to fix it. That's just the way, especially at the individual contributor level, that's how the brain works is like, oh, this is a small thing, I bet I can fix it with a few days, or a weekend. Weekend turns into a month, but that's a completely different problem. I've had clients who did not want to use Lambda because they could not control the containerization system. You would be pushing your code into containers that were owned by Amazon, and the way they saw that, they saw that as liability.While it does have some very strong technical implications, because you're now able to choose the kind of runtime you do, easier than trying to hamstring layers together, because I know layers is supposed to fix this problem, but it's so hard. It's so hard for something that you should be able to download off of Docker and then play with it and then put it back. It's so unnecessarily hard, and it makes me so angry.If you're willing to incur that responsibility, you can tweak your memory and you have more technical control, but also you have more control at a business level too, and that is a conversation that will go way easier as far as adoption.Jeremy: Right. The other thing, in terms of, I guess the complexity of running K8s or running Kubernetes is one of those things where that just seems like a lot of complexity. You mentioned the billing aspect of it and trying to track cost. Not that everyone's trying to narrow down exactly how much this Lambda container ran them, maybe you have more insight into that than I do, but the idea of just the complexity.It seems to me that if you start thinking about cost, that the total cost of ownership of running a container and a Lambda function or running it in Fargate, versus having to install and maintain ... I would say, even if you're using one of the managed services like EKS, or something like that, that the total cost of ownership of going down the serverless route has got to be better.Amy: Yeah, especially if you're one of these apps that are very user generater based. You're tracking mostly events and content, and not even a huge amount of content, you're not streaming video, you're sharing pictures, or sharing ... If you were trying to rebuild Foursquare, you would just be sharing Geo data, which is comparatively an extremely small piece of data.You don't need an entire instance, or an entire container to do that. You can do that on a very small scale, and build that out really quickly. That said, if you go from one of these three-person teams, and then there's interest in your product, for whatever reason, and it explodes, then not just your cost, but if you had to manage the traffic of that, if you had to manage the actual resources of that, and you did not think your usage would stick with your bill, that's not great.Being able to, at least in the first few years of the company, just use Lambda for everything, that's probably just a safer solution, because you're still rapidly iterating, and you're still changing things very quickly, and you're still transmitting very small bits of data. That said, it's like there are also large enterprise companies that are heavy Lambda users, and even their Lambda bill compared to their Kubernetes bill, it is ... If you round it to down there Kubernetes bill, you would get their Lambda bill.Jeremy: Right. Gotcha. I think that's really interesting because I do ... I actually would love to know your thoughts and whether you even see this. I don't know if we have enough data yet to know this, but this idea of using Lambda, especially early on in startups, or even projects within an enterprise, being able to have that flexibility and the low operational overhead and so forth, I think is really great. But do you see that, or is that something that you think will happen is, you'll get to a point where you'll say we've found some sort of stability point with this product, where we now need to move it over to something like Kubernetes, or a container management system because overall, it's going to end up being cheaper in the long run.Amy: What usually happens when you're making that transition from Lambda to either even ECS or Fargate, or eventually Kubernetes is that your business logic has now become so complex, or your infrastructure requirements have become so complex that Lambda can't do it cleanly anymore. You end up maxing out on either memory or CPU utilization, or because you're ... Apparently Lambda has a limit on how many times you can invoke it at the same time, which some people have hit in real life.Those are times when it stops being a cheaper solution, and it stops being a target solution because you can run your own FaaS environment within instances, and then you can have a similar environment to what you're building so you don't have to rebuild everything, but you don't have to incur that on-demand cost anymore. That's one path I've seen someone take, and that's usually the decision is that Lambda, before, when it was limited, can't hold it.Now that you can put your own container, so long as it fits in that requirement, you can pad that runway out a little bit, and you can stretch out how long you have before you do a full conversion to ECS environment. But that is usually how it is because you just try to overload or you have, maybe, 50 Lambdas trying to support one application, which is totally a thing you can do, it may not be the best ... Even with Step, even with everything else. When that becomes too complex, and you end up just going through containers, anyway.Jeremy: Right. I think that's interesting, and I think any company that grows to the point where that they need to start thinking about that next little infrastructure, it's probably a good thing. It's a good point to start having those conversations.All right, I got just one more question for you, because I'm really interested. You mentioned what you do as a cloud economist, reading through people's bills and things like that. Now, I thought Corey just made this thing up. I didn't even know this thing existed until, Corey comes out, and he probably coined the term. But in terms of that ...Amy: That's what he tells people.Jeremy: He does tell people that, right. I think he did. So, I will definitely give him credit there. But in terms of that role, of being a cloud economist and having to look through people's bills, and trying to find them ways to save it, that's pretty insane that we need people like you to do that, isn't it?Amy: Yes, it's a bananas job. I cannot believe this is a job that I'm actually doing. It's also a lot of fun. But if you think about it, that when I was starting out, and everything was LAMP stack, when I started. That was a hot new tech when I started, was the LAMP stack. The solution to all of those problems were we're going to throw more hardware at it. Then the following question was, why are we spending so much on hardware?Their solution to that problem was, we're going to buy real estate to store all of the hardware on. Now that you don't have to do that, you still have the problem of, I'm going to solve this problem by throwing more hardware at it. That's still a mindset that is alive and well, and you still end up with the same problem, except now you don't have the excuse that at least we own the facility that data is in because you don't anymore.Since you don't actually own the cases and the plates and everything, you don't have to worry about disposing of them and having to use stuff that you don't actually use anymore. A lot of my problems are, one of our services has gone out of control, we don't know why. Then I will tell you, who is spending that money. I will talk to that team to make sure that they know that it's happening because sometimes they don't even know what's happening. Something got spun up into their account, and maybe it was a testbed, maybe it was a demo, maybe they hired a vendor to load something into their environment and those costs got out of control.It's not like I'm going out trying to tell you that you did something wrong. It's like, this is where the problem is, let's go find out what happened. Forensic cloud bill person, I'm going to workshop that into a business card, because that sounds way better than the title that Corey uses.Jeremy: Forensic cloud accountant or something like that.Amy: Yes.Jeremy: I think it's also interesting that billing is, and the bills you get from AWS are a leading indicator of things that are potentially going wrong. Interesting, because I don't know if people connect this. Maybe I'm underestimating people here, but the idea that a bill that runs, or that you're seeing EC2 instances cost spiking, or you're seeing a higher load or higher bandwidth or things like that. Those can all be indicators of poorly written code, it can be indicators of the bad compression or missing compression settings, all kinds of things that it can jump out at you. Unless somebody is paying attention to those bills, I don't think most developers and most teams, they're not going to see that.Amy: Yeah. The only time they pay attention when things start spiraling out of control, and ... Okay, this sounds like an intuitive issue, and first thing people will do, will go, "We're going to log everything, and we're going to find out where the problem is."Jeremy: It'll cost you more money.Amy: There is a threshold where cloud watch becomes very expensive.Jeremy: Right, absolutely.Amy: Then they hit that threshold, and now their bill is four times as much.Jeremy: Right.Amy: A lot of the times it's misconfiguration, it's like, very rarely does any product get to the point where they just can't ... It's built so poorly that it can barely hold itself up. That's never been the case. It's always been, this has been turned off, or AWS also offers S3 analytics. You have to turn them on per bucket, that's not a policy that's usually written in anyone's AWS config. When they launch it, they just launch it without any analytics. They don't know if the thing is supposed to be sending things to Glacier, if it's highly used data, there's no way to tell.It's trying to find little holes like that, where it seems like it shouldn't be a problem, but the minute it becomes a problem, it's because you spent $20,000.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. No, you can spend money very, very fast in the cloud. I think that is a lesson learned by many, many people.Amy: The difference between being on metal and throwing hardware at a problem and being on the cloud and throwing hardware at a problem is that you can throw hardware at a problem at scale on the cloud.Jeremy: Exactly. Right. There's no stopping point like we have to go by using servers ...Amy: No one will stop you.Jeremy: No one will stop you. Just maybe the credit card company or whatever. Anyways, Amy, you are doing some amazing work with that, because I actually find that to be very, very fascinating. I think, in terms of what that can do, and the need for it, it's a fascinating field, and super interesting. Good for Corey for really digging into that and calling it out. Then again, for people like you who are willing to take that job, because that seems to me like poring through those numbers can't be the most interesting thing to do. But it must feel good when you do find a way to save somebody some money.Amy: Spreadsheets can be interesting. Again, it's like everything else about my job. If I try to explain why it's interesting, I just make it sound more boring.Jeremy: Awesome. All right. Well, let's leave it there. Amy, thank you again, for joining me, this was awesome. If people want to find out more about you, or maybe they have horribly large AWS cloud bills, and they want to check out the Duckbill Group, how do they do that?Amy: Honestly, if you search for Corey Quinn, you can find the Duckbill Group real fast. If you want to go talk to me because I like doing community engagement, and I like doing talks, and I like roasting people on Twitter just about different stuff, you can hit me up on Twitter @nerdypaws. If you want to be a professional, I'm also on LinkedIn under Amy Codes.Jeremy: All right, and then you also have a website, Amy-codes.com.Amy: Amy-codes.com is the archive of all my talks. It's currently only showing the talks from last year because for some reason, it's somehow became very hard to find a spot for the past year. Who knew?Jeremy: A lot of people doing talks. But anyways, all right, Amy, thank you again. Appreciate it.Amy: Thank you. Had so much fun.

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Negrette.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we’ve seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure because I mean, who doesn’t love to complain about AWS? I feel like that’s always a good thing that we can talk about, no matter the topic. Today, we’re going to be talking about the ‘cloud cost management starter kit.’ So, the starter kit seems to be a big fad that’s going around. If you’re listening to this episode, you’re probably thinking, “It’s already done. It’s over.”But I still want to talk about it. I think that this is a really relevant topic because I think a lot of companies are trying to get started, get their hands started in cloud cost management. So, I think this would be a great thing for us to talk about: what’s in our cloud cost management starter kit?Amy: And it really will help answer that question that I get asked a lot on: what is even a cloud economist, and what do you do?Jesse: Yeah, I mean, given the current timeframe, I haven’t gone to any parties recently to talk about what I do, but I do feel like anytime I try to explain to somebody what I do, there’s always that moment of, “Okay. Yes, I work with computers, and we’ll just leave it at that.”Amy: It’s easier to just think about it as we look at receipts, and we kind of figure things out. But when you try to get into the nuts and bolts of it, it’s a very esoteric idea that we’re trying to explain. And no, I don’t know why this is a real job. And yet it is.Jesse: This is one of the things that always fascinates me. I absolutely love the work that I do, and I definitely think that it is important work that needs to be done for any organization, to work on their cloud cost management best practices, but it also boggles my mind that AWS, Azure, GCP, haven’t figured out how to bake this in more clearly and easily to all of their workflows and all their services. It still boggles my mind that this is something that exists as—Amy: As a thing we have to do.Jesse: As a thing we have to do. Yeah, absolutely.Amy: Well, the good news is, they’re going to change their practices once every six weeks, and we’ll have a new thing to figure it out. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. So, let’s get started with the first item on our cloud cost management starter kit. This one is something that Amy is definitely passionate about; I am definitely passionate about, as well. Amy, what is it?Amy: Turn on your CUR. Turn on your CUr. If you don’t know what it is, just Google AWS CUR. Turn it on. It will save you a headache, and it will save anyone you bring in to help you [laugh] [unintelligible 00:02:59] a huge headache. And it keeps us from having to yell at people, even though that’s the thing that if you pay us to do it, we will totally do it for you.Jesse: If you take nothing away from this episode, go check out the AWS Cost and Usage Report—otherwise known as CUR—turn it on for your accounts, ideally enable it in Parquet format because that’s going to allow you to get all that sweet, sweet data in an optimized manner, living in your S3 bucket. It is a godsend. It gives you all the data from Cost Explorer, and then some. It allows you to do all sorts of really interesting business intelligence analytics on your billing data. It’s absolutely fantastic.Amy: It’s like getting all of those juicy infrastructure metrics, except getting that with a dollar sign attached to it so you know what you actually doing with that money.Jesse: Yeah, this definitely is, like, the first step towards doing any kind of showback models, or chargeback models, or even unit economics to figuring out where your spend is going. The Cost and Usage Report is going to be a huge first step in that direction.Amy: Now, the reason why we yell at people about this—or at least I do—is because AWS will only show you the data from the time that it is turned on. They do have it for historical periods, but if you enable it at a specific point, all of your reports are going to start there. So, if you’re looking to do forecasting, or you want to be able to know what your usage is going to be looking like from this point on, turn it on as early as possible.Jesse: Absolutely. If you are listening to this now and you don’t have the CUR enabled, definitely go pause this episode, enable it now, and come back and listen to the rest of the episode because the sooner you have the CUR enabled, the sooner you’ll be able to get those sweet, sweet metrics for all of your—Amy: And it’s free.Jesse: [laugh]. Yeah, that’s even the more important part. It’s free. There’s going to be a little bit of data storage costs if you send this data to S3, but overall, the amount of money that you spend on that storage is going to be optimized because you’re saving that CUR data in Parquet format. It’s absolutely worthwhile.All right, so number two; the second item on our cloud cost management starter kit, is getting to know your AWS account manager and account team. This one, I feel like a lot of people don’t actually know that they have an AWS account manager. But let me tell you now: if you have an AWS account, you have an AWS account manager. Even if they haven’t reached out to you before they do exist, you have access to them, and you should absolutely start building a rapport with them.Amy: Anytime you are paying for a support plan, you also have an account manager. This isn’t just true for AWS; I would be very surprised for any service that charged you for support but did not give you an account manager.Jesse: So, for those of you who aren’t familiar with your account manager, they are generally somebody who will be able to help you navigate some of the more complex parts of AWS, especially when you have any kind of questions about your bill or about technical things using AWS. They will help you navigate those resources and make sure that your questions are getting to the teams that can actually answer them, and then make sure that those questions are actually getting answered. They are the best champion for you within AWS.If you have more than a certain threshold of spend on AWS, if you’re paying for enterprise support, you likely also have a dedicated technical account manager as well, who will be basically your point person for any technical questions. They are a great resource for any technical questions, making sure that your technical questions are answered, making sure that any concerns that you have are addressed, and that they get to the right teams. They can give you some guidance on possibly how to set up new features, new architecture within AWS. They can give you some great, great guidance about the best ways to use AWS to accomplish whatever your use case is. So, in the cases where you’ve got a dedicated technical account manager as well, get to know them because again, they are going to be your champion. They are here to help you. Both your account manager and your technical account manager want to make sure that you are happy with AWS and continue to use AWS.Amy: And the thing to know about the account manager is, like, if you ever run into that situation where, oh, something was left on erroneously and we ended up with a spike, or this is how I was understanding the service to work and it didn’t work that way, and now I have some weird spend, but I turned it off immediately, if you ever want to get a refund or a credit or anything, these are the people to talk to; they’re the ones who are going to help you out.Jesse: Yeah, that’s a great point. It’s like, whenever you call into any kind of customer support center, if you treat the person who answers the phone with kindness, they are generally more likely to help you solve your problem, or generally more likely to go out of their way to help you solve your problem. Whereas if you just call in and yell at them, they have no interest in helping you. So—Amy: You’ll never see that refund.Jesse: Exactly. So, the more that you can create that rapport with your account manager—and your technical account manager if you have one—the better chances that they will fight for you internally to go above and beyond to make sure that you can get a refund if you accidentally left something running, or make sure that any billing issues are taken care of extremely fast because they ultimately have already built that rapport with you. They care about you and the way that you care about them and the way that you care about continuing to use AWS.Amy: There’s another note about the technical managers where if you are very open with them on what your architecture plans are—“We’re going to move into this type of EKS deployment. This is the kind of traffic we think we’re going to run, and we think it’s going to be shaped this way”—they’ll help you out and build that in most efficient way possible because they also don’t want the resources out there either being overutilized or just being run poorly. They’ll help you out in trying to figure out the best way of building that. They’ll also—if AWS launches a new program and you spent a lot of money on AWS, maybe there’s a preview program that they think will help you solve a very edge case kind of issue that you didn’t think you had before.Jesse: Absolutely.Amy: Yeah. So, it’s a great way to get these paths and get these relationships because it helps both parties out.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by VM Ware. Because lets face it, the past year hasn’t been kind to our AWS bills or, honestly, any cloud bills. The pandemic had a bunch of impacts. It forced us to move workloads to the cloud sooner than we would otherwise. We saw strange patterns such as user traffic drops off but infrastructure spend doesn't. What do you do about it? Well, the CloudLive 2021 Virtual Conference is your chance to connect with people wrestling with the same type of thing. Be they practitioners, vendors in the space, leaders of thought—ahem, ahem. And get some behind the scenes look into the various ways different companies are handling this. Hosted by Cloudhealth by VM Ware on May 20th the CloudLive 2021 Conference will be 100% virtual and 100% free to attend. So you really have no excuses for missing out on this opportunity to deal with people who care about cloud bills. Vist cloudlive.com/corey to learn more and save your virtual seat today. Thats cloud l-i-v-e.com/corey c-o-r-e-y. Drop the “e,” we’re all in trouble. My thanks for VM Ware for sponsoring this ridiculous episode.Jesse: So, the third item on our cloud cost management starter kit is identifying all of your contracts. Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “Well, wait. I’ve just got my AWS bill, what else should I be thinking about?” There’s other contracts that you might have with AWS. Now, you as the engineer may not know this, but there may be other agreements that your company has entered into with AWS: you might have an enterprise discount program agreement, you might have a private pricing addendum agreement, you might have an acceleration program—migration program—agreement. There’s multiple different contracts that your company might have with AWS, and you definitely want to make sure that you know about all of them.Amy: If you’re ever in charge of an architecture, you’re going to want to know not just what your costs are at the end of the day, but also what they are before all your discounts because those discounts can maybe camouflage a heavy usage if you’re also getting that usage covered by refunds and discounts.Jesse: Absolutely, totally agreed. Yeah, it’s really, really important to understand, not just your net spend at the end of the day, but your actual usage spend. And that’s a big one that I think a lot of people don’t think about regularly and is definitely important to think about when you’re looking at cloud cost management best practices and understanding how much your architecture is actually costing you on a team-by-team or product-by-product basis.Amy: Also, make sure if you’re doing reservations that you know when those reservations and savings plans ent—Jesse: Yes.Amy: —because you don’t want to have to answer the question, “Why did all of your costs go up when you actually have made no changes in your infrastructure?”Jesse: Yeah. Half the battle here is knowing that these contracts and reservations exist; the other half of the battle is knowing when they expire so that you can start having proactive conversations with teams about their usage patterns to make sure that they’re actually fully utilizing the reservations, and fully utilizing these discounts, and that they’re going to continue utilizing those discounts, continue utilizing those reservations so that you could ultimately end up purchasing the right reservations going forward, or ultimately end up renegotiating at the correct discount amount or commitment amount so that you are getting the best discount for how much money you’re actually spending.So, the last item on our cloud cost management starter kit is thinking about the non-technical parts of projects. Amy, when you think about the non-technical parts of projects, what do you think about?Amy: Non-technical always makes you think of people and process. So, this would be the leadership making the decisions on what those cost initiatives are. Maybe they want to push this down to the team lead level: it would include that. Or maybe they want to push it down to the engineering level, or the individual contributor level. There are some companies that are small enough that an engineer can be completely cognizant and responsible for the spend that they make.Jesse: Yeah. I think that this is a really, really critical item to include in our starter kit because leadership needs to be bought into and back whatever work is being done, whatever cloud cost management work is being done. But also teams need to be empowered to make the changes that they want to make, make the changes that will ultimately provide those cloud cost management optimization opportunities and better cost visibility across teams. So, does everybody know what their teams are empowered to do, what their teams are capable of? Does everybody know what their teams are responsible for on the flip side? Do they ultimately know that they are responsible for managing their own spend, or do they think that the spend belongs to somebody else? Also, do they understand which resources are part of their budget or part of their spend?Amy: It’s the idea that ownership of—whether it’s a bill, whether it’s a resource—comes down to communication, and level setting. Do we know who owns this? Do we know who’s paying for it? Do they know the information in the same way? Is there someone who’s outside who can figure out this information for themselves? Just making sure that it’s done in a clear enough way that everyone knows what’s going on.Jesse: Absolutely. Well, that will do it for us this week. Those are our four main items for our cloud cost management starter kits. If you’ve got questions you’d like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, fill out the fields and submit your questions.If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us, what would you put in your ideal starter kit?Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Negrette.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we’ve seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure because I mean, who doesn’t love to complain about AWS? I feel like that’s always a good thing that we can talk about, no matter the topic. Today, we’re going to be talking about the ‘cloud cost management starter kit.’ So, the starter kit seems to be a big fad that’s going around. If you’re listening to this episode, you’re probably thinking, “It’s already done. It’s over.”But I still want to talk about it. I think that this is a really relevant topic because I think a lot of companies are trying to get started, get their hands started in cloud cost management. So, I think this would be a great thing for us to talk about: what’s in our cloud cost management starter kit?Amy: And it really will help answer that question that I get asked a lot on: what is even a cloud economist, and what do you do?Jesse: Yeah, I mean, given the current timeframe, I haven’t gone to any parties recently to talk about what I do, but I do feel like anytime I try to explain to somebody what I do, there’s always that moment of, “Okay. Yes, I work with computers, and we’ll just leave it at that.”Amy: It’s easier to just think about it as we look at receipts, and we kind of figure things out. But when you try to get into the nuts and bolts of it, it’s a very esoteric idea that we’re trying to explain. And no, I don’t know why this is a real job. And yet it is.Jesse: This is one of the things that always fascinates me. I absolutely love the work that I do, and I definitely think that it is important work that needs to be done for any organization, to work on their cloud cost management best practices, but it also boggles my mind that AWS, Azure, GCP, haven’t figured out how to bake this in more clearly and easily to all of their workflows and all their services. It still boggles my mind that this is something that exists as—Amy: As a thing we have to do.Jesse: As a thing we have to do. Yeah, absolutely.Amy: Well, the good news is, they’re going to change their practices once every six weeks, and we’ll have a new thing to figure it out. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. So, let’s get started with the first item on our cloud cost management starter kit. This one is something that Amy is definitely passionate about; I am definitely passionate about, as well. Amy, what is it?Amy: Turn on your CUR. Turn on your CUr. If you don’t know what it is, just Google AWS CUR. Turn it on. It will save you a headache, and it will save anyone you bring in to help you [laugh] [unintelligible 00:02:59] a huge headache. And it keeps us from having to yell at people, even though that’s the thing that if you pay us to do it, we will totally do it for you.Jesse: If you take nothing away from this episode, go check out the AWS Cost and Usage Report—otherwise known as CUR—turn it on for your accounts, ideally enable it in Parquet format because that’s going to allow you to get all that sweet, sweet data in an optimized manner, living in your S3 bucket. It is a godsend. It gives you all the data from Cost Explorer, and then some. It allows you to do all sorts of really interesting business intelligence analytics on your billing data. It’s absolutely fantastic.Amy: It’s like getting all of those juicy infrastructure metrics, except getting that with a dollar sign attached to it so you know what you actually doing with that money.Jesse: Yeah, this definitely is, like, the first step towards doing any kind of showback models, or chargeback models, or even unit economics to figuring out where your spend is going. The Cost and Usage Report is going to be a huge first step in that direction.Amy: Now, the reason why we yell at people about this—or at least I do—is because AWS will only show you the data from the time that it is turned on. They do have it for historical periods, but if you enable it at a specific point, all of your reports are going to start there. So, if you’re looking to do forecasting, or you want to be able to know what your usage is going to be looking like from this point on, turn it on as early as possible.Jesse: Absolutely. If you are listening to this now and you don’t have the CUR enabled, definitely go pause this episode, enable it now, and come back and listen to the rest of the episode because the sooner you have the CUR enabled, the sooner you’ll be able to get those sweet, sweet metrics for all of your—Amy: And it’s free.Jesse: [laugh]. Yeah, that’s even the more important part. It’s free. There’s going to be a little bit of data storage costs if you send this data to S3, but overall, the amount of money that you spend on that storage is going to be optimized because you’re saving that CUR data in Parquet format. It’s absolutely worthwhile.All right, so number two; the second item on our cloud cost management starter kit, is getting to know your AWS account manager and account team. This one, I feel like a lot of people don’t actually know that they have an AWS account manager. But let me tell you now: if you have an AWS account, you have an AWS account manager. Even if they haven’t reached out to you before they do exist, you have access to them, and you should absolutely start building a rapport with them.Amy: Anytime you are paying for a support plan, you also have an account manager. This isn’t just true for AWS; I would be very surprised for any service that charged you for support but did not give you an account manager.Jesse: So, for those of you who aren’t familiar with your account manager, they are generally somebody who will be able to help you navigate some of the more complex parts of AWS, especially when you have any kind of questions about your bill or about technical things using AWS. They will help you navigate those resources and make sure that your questions are getting to the teams that can actually answer them, and then make sure that those questions are actually getting answered. They are the best champion for you within AWS.If you have more than a certain threshold of spend on AWS, if you’re paying for enterprise support, you likely also have a dedicated technical account manager as well, who will be basically your point person for any technical questions. They are a great resource for any technical questions, making sure that your technical questions are answered, making sure that any concerns that you have are addressed, and that they get to the right teams. They can give you some guidance on possibly how to set up new features, new architecture within AWS. They can give you some great, great guidance about the best ways to use AWS to accomplish whatever your use case is. So, in the cases where you’ve got a dedicated technical account manager as well, get to know them because again, they are going to be your champion. They are here to help you. Both your account manager and your technical account manager want to make sure that you are happy with AWS and continue to use AWS.Amy: And the thing to know about the account manager is, like, if you ever run into that situation where, oh, something was left on erroneously and we ended up with a spike, or this is how I was understanding the service to work and it didn’t work that way, and now I have some weird spend, but I turned it off immediately, if you ever want to get a refund or a credit or anything, these are the people to talk to; they’re the ones who are going to help you out.Jesse: Yeah, that’s a great point. It’s like, whenever you call into any kind of customer support center, if you treat the person who answers the phone with kindness, they are generally more likely to help you solve your problem, or generally more likely to go out of their way to help you solve your problem. Whereas if you just call in and yell at them, they have no interest in helping you. So—Amy: You’ll never see that refund.Jesse: Exactly. So, the more that you can create that rapport with your account manager—and your technical account manager if you have one—the better chances that they will fight for you internally to go above and beyond to make sure that you can get a refund if you accidentally left something running, or make sure that any billing issues are taken care of extremely fast because they ultimately have already built that rapport with you. They care about you and the way that you care about them and the way that you care about continuing to use AWS.Amy: There’s another note about the technical managers where if you are very open with them on what your architecture plans are—“We’re going to move into this type of EKS deployment. This is the kind of traffic we think we’re going to run, and we think it’s going to be shaped this way”—they’ll help you out and build that in most efficient way possible because they also don’t want the resources out there either being overutilized or just being run poorly. They’ll help you out in trying to figure out the best way of building that. They’ll also—if AWS launches a new program and you spent a lot of money on AWS, maybe there’s a preview program that they think will help you solve a very edge case kind of issue that you didn’t think you had before.Jesse: Absolutely.Amy: Yeah. So, it’s a great way to get these paths and get these relationships because it helps both parties out.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by VM Ware. Because lets face it, the past year hasn’t been kind to our AWS bills or, honestly, any cloud bills. The pandemic had a bunch of impacts. It forced us to move workloads to the cloud sooner than we would otherwise. We saw strange patterns such as user traffic drops off but infrastructure spend doesn't. What do you do about it? Well, the CloudLive 2021 Virtual Conference is your chance to connect with people wrestling with the same type of thing. Be they practitioners, vendors in the space, leaders of thought—ahem, ahem. And get some behind the scenes look into the various ways different companies are handling this. Hosted by Cloudhealth by VM Ware on May 20th the CloudLive 2021 Conference will be 100% virtual and 100% free to attend. So you really have no excuses for missing out on this opportunity to deal with people who care about cloud bills. Vist cloudlive.com/corey to learn more and save your virtual seat today. Thats cloud l-i-v-e.com/corey c-o-r-e-y. Drop the “e,” we’re all in trouble. My thanks for VM Ware for sponsoring this ridiculous episode.Jesse: So, the third item on our cloud cost management starter kit is identifying all of your contracts. Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “Well, wait. I’ve just got my AWS bill, what else should I be thinking about?” There’s other contracts that you might have with AWS. Now, you as the engineer may not know this, but there may be other agreements that your company has entered into with AWS: you might have an enterprise discount program agreement, you might have a private pricing addendum agreement, you might have an acceleration program—migration program—agreement. There’s multiple different contracts that your company might have with AWS, and you definitely want to make sure that you know about all of them.Amy: If you’re ever in charge of an architecture, you’re going to want to know not just what your costs are at the end of the day, but also what they are before all your discounts because those discounts can maybe camouflage a heavy usage if you’re also getting that usage covered by refunds and discounts.Jesse: Absolutely, totally agreed. Yeah, it’s really, really important to understand, not just your net spend at the end of the day, but your actual usage spend. And that’s a big one that I think a lot of people don’t think about regularly and is definitely important to think about when you’re looking at cloud cost management best practices and understanding how much your architecture is actually costing you on a team-by-team or product-by-product basis.Amy: Also, make sure if you’re doing reservations that you know when those reservations and savings plans ent—Jesse: Yes.Amy: —because you don’t want to have to answer the question, “Why did all of your costs go up when you actually have made no changes in your infrastructure?”Jesse: Yeah. Half the battle here is knowing that these contracts and reservations exist; the other half of the battle is knowing when they expire so that you can start having proactive conversations with teams about their usage patterns to make sure that they’re actually fully utilizing the reservations, and fully utilizing these discounts, and that they’re going to continue utilizing those discounts, continue utilizing those reservations so that you could ultimately end up purchasing the right reservations going forward, or ultimately end up renegotiating at the correct discount amount or commitment amount so that you are getting the best discount for how much money you’re actually spending.So, the last item on our cloud cost management starter kit is thinking about the non-technical parts of projects. Amy, when you think about the non-technical parts of projects, what do you think about?Amy: Non-technical always makes you think of people and process. So, this would be the leadership making the decisions on what those cost initiatives are. Maybe they want to push this down to the team lead level: it would include that. Or maybe they want to push it down to the engineering level, or the individual contributor level. There are some companies that are small enough that an engineer can be completely cognizant and responsible for the spend that they make.Jesse: Yeah. I think that this is a really, really critical item to include in our starter kit because leadership needs to be bought into and back whatever work is being done, whatever cloud cost management work is being done. But also teams need to be empowered to make the changes that they want to make, make the changes that will ultimately provide those cloud cost management optimization opportunities and better cost visibility across teams. So, does everybody know what their teams are empowered to do, what their teams are capable of? Does everybody know what their teams are responsible for on the flip side? Do they ultimately know that they are responsible for managing their own spend, or do they think that the spend belongs to somebody else? Also, do they understand which resources are part of their budget or part of their spend?Amy: It’s the idea that ownership of—whether it’s a bill, whether it’s a resource—comes down to communication, and level setting. Do we know who owns this? Do we know who’s paying for it? Do they know the information in the same way? Is there someone who’s outside who can figure out this information for themselves? Just making sure that it’s done in a clear enough way that everyone knows what’s going on.Jesse: Absolutely. Well, that will do it for us this week. Those are our four main items for our cloud cost management starter kits. If you’ve got questions you’d like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, fill out the fields and submit your questions.If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us, what would you put in your ideal starter kit?Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Welcome to Burnt Toast, a newsletter from Virginia Sole-Smith, which you can read about here. If you like what you read today, please subscribe and/or share it with someone else who would too.This week, I’m trying out my first audio newsletter! If that’s a confusing concept for you, I get it. Technology is so extra. Think of this as a podcast in your email. You can listen to the episode right here and now, or you can add it to the podcast player of your choice and listen whenever. And just in case you don’t like listening, or that’s not accessible to you, I’m including a full transcript (edited lightly for clarity) below. I’d love to know what you think of this conversation, and of the whole audio newsletter idea — should we do more? (Leave a comment or hit reply to let me know.) I really miss my old podcast (more on that below), and I’d love to bring you more of my conversations with favorite researchers, activists, weight-inclusive healthcare providers and other writers I love.For now, here’s my conversation with Amy Palanjian, the creator of Yummy Toddler Food. She answers your questions about picky 1-year-olds, ice cream-shaming 3-year-olds, raising intuitive eaters with food allergies, and more. Virginia Hello, and welcome to the first audio version of Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a feminist writer and author of The Eating Instinct. And joining me today is Amy Palanjian, the creator of Yummy Toddler Food. Amy, welcome! Amy Hello! Virginia Thank you for being here with me. For those of you who don’t know, Amy and I are also best friends. And we are co-hosts of the currently-on-hiatus podcast Comfort Food. But Amy is also many other things. So Amy, why don’t you tell people about yourself and your work? Amy Sure. So my primary work right now is on YummyToddlerFood.com. I do recipes, feeding advice, sanity — sanity for parents with little kids...Virginia I thought you were gonna say “sanity” full stop. And I was like, that’s amazing.Amy I wish! I am also the author of a kids cookbook called Busy Little Hands: Food Play. And what else? I have three little kids. I live outside of Des Moines, in Iowa. And I’m, you know, so tired of cooking like everybody else.Virginia And she’s not getting a dog because we were just talking about that and about how I have a dog that maybe I shouldn’t have. But she’s smarter than me. So I mean, we used to do this podcast Comfort Food, and we hope to someday do it again, when there’s not a pandemic, and we have more reliable childcare than we have in our lives these days. But if you guys like this conversation, and you want more of me and Amy, you can find, I don’t know, like 80 episodes or so, that we did over at ComfortFoodPodcast.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I’ll do that plug. And of course, all of Amy’s work is YummyToddlerFood.com. So the reason I wanted to have Amy on is because lots of folks have been sending in questions that are very small-child-specific. And while I have parented small children, I don’t consider myself an expert at feeding them. But Amy, not only parents them, but also, you know, has helped thousands and thousands of parents figure this stuff out. So the first question we’re going to answer is one that I think every parent has, at some point, which is: My baby used to eat everything. And now at 13 months, 15 months, 19 months, it seems like she’s dropping foods every week. Am I really supposed to just let her decide how much to eat?Amy Well, you don’t have to... but you maybe should. Okay, so this is an incredibly common question. I think the thing that most parents don’t realize is that 1-year-olds grow less slowly than they did as babies. And so they are naturally less hungry, even though they are more mobile and all over the place. And so your baby, as a baby might have eaten all sorts of things, because their hunger and just what else was going on in their life was very different. And now as a toddler, they may be less hungry, and more interested in all the other things that they now realize they can do. And so parents often see this as picky eating, when, if they’re just less hungry, they’re not going to eat as much or as many foods. And it can sort of snowball, if you then put yourself in the position of trying to figure out what they’ll eat. Because even if they’re not actually hungry, they may still eat some favorite snacky foods because those are easy to eat. And they’re comforting, they taste really good. But they may not eat other foods that you want them to eat. And so then you’re like narrowing the list of foods that they may eat. So what I recommend instead is just continuing with the Division Of Responsibility, which, if anyone follows Virginia, you probably know what this is. But it’s where it’s clearly delineated what your job is, at meals, your job is to decide what’s served, your job is to decide when the meal is and where it happens. And then we leave the kids to decide which foods and how much of them to eat, if at all. And by doing that, you really free yourself up from worrying about how many bites they took. Because as you know, as an adult, if anyone tells you how much to eat, or ask you to eat more or less, you’re going to have an immediate emotional reaction that is very disconnected from actual hunger. And so the less we can make that happen with this age, in particular, when all they really want is control, the better. And I think the saner everyone will feel during mealtimes. That may mean that your kids eat a lot less than you expect. But it also means that you’re not going to be fighting with them to get them to take a certain amount of bites at every meal.Virginia Which is exhausting and crazy-making. Amy And I think too, if you can consider what they’re eating over the course of a week or even two weeks, it’s probably going to look a lot better than what they didn’t eat for lunch today. Because they may eat a ton of breakfast and then not eat a lot of dinner. Or every other Tuesday, they may eat seven meals. There’s no one right way for kids to eat. And I think a lot of times, we’re trying to force them into this mode of eating certain amounts of food groups at every meal. And that’s just not the way that kids naturally eat.Virginia Yeah. And this phase can go on for many years, we should say, too. I mean, I have a 7-year-old, you have an 8-year-old, and we still see, you know, not this exactly. But versions of this from time to time. So don’t feel bad, if you’re listening and have an older kiddo still in this phase. Amy Well, and at least as they get older, they can verbalize more. And you can suss out what the true issue is. With 1-year-olds, it’s really hard because even if they can talk, they cannot always use the right words, or explain things exactly. And so it’s the combination of all of those challenges that make 1-year-olds tricky. And also, it can just be really jarring for parents to give their kid dinner, and then they just don’t want any of it. Virginia Yes. It is super maddening. For sure. Okay, that is really helpful. And for anyone who’s like Division Of Responsibility?! I will link to some stuff in the transcript. So those words that I just said, probably have a link on them if you’re reading this, and you can learn more. So okay, next question. And this, I think, is going to kind of build on what we were just talking about: How do you get kids to eat the stuff their body needs without them thinking all the "other stuff" is bad? One of mine won’t eat veggies unless I sing each body part saying thank you, like her eyes sing thank you when she eats a carrot.I don’t mean to be laughing at the mom who sent in this question. But I do feel like you’re making your meals harder than they need to be? Or perhaps just more musical. Yeah. Amy over to you!Amy So my initial response is: How do you know exactly how much their body needs? Does anyone know exactly how much anyone’s body needs? Virginia It’s not X number of carrots achieve eyesight. Amy Right. I think when we see portion size recommendations, and we see charts, and we see plates with servings on them, we assume that that is the perfect amount that our child needs. But it may or may not be. And so a lot of times we’re chasing these very arbitrary amounts that may or may or may not be what our kids actually need. So I think it’s very difficult in the culture that we live in, to not feel this pressure. Because we’re getting it from all sides. Like all day long, I feel like my inbox is filled with pitches for kids products that are like going to do all of you know, all of the things.Virginia Get them into Harvard and make a ton of money. Amy You know, I see products developed by neuroscientists. But food doesn’t really work that way. And so I think, honestly, if you just don’t worry about that, and you serve a range of foods, with a range of flavors, and a range of textures, and colors, you’re going to get all of that stuff in what you’re offering your kids without having to do math, without having to count grams, or percentages of vitamin A. And it’s much more pleasant to, to come at it from the side of, “food is delicious, in all of these many ways.” How can I prepare this in a way that that’s easy for my kids to eat? That has a flavor that they like, and that I want to eat, too? You don’t need a master’s degree in nutrition science. I think we’ve like lost the plot a little bit on what matters, sort of big picture when we’re feeding our kids. Because this anxiety is not helpful to anyone. It’s not helpful to that mom, I bet she’s not enjoying her meals, and it’s certainly not helpful for that kiddo. And those nutrition messages for little kids are incredibly confusing. And I just think are beyond comprehension for the age group.Virginia Agreed, agreed. That said, if the carrot song was really good, I kind of want to hear it? But yeah, I feel like, unless you’re, I don’t know, very musically inclined, this is maybe more work than you need to be doing. But I think what this question kind of also gets at, and that you’ve touched on a little bit, is that we have this idea of how our kids should eat, which is not based in the reality of how kids really eat or how most families can really manage to eat. And it really mostly comes from diet culture, right? It comes from, as you said, these people sending press releases for crazy products, or the influencers we see on social media claiming that this is the perfect way to eat. So can you connect the dots on some of the subtle ways you see diet culture showing up but family mealtimes?Amy Sure. A big part of it is the control. It’s the question of, can I really just let my child eat fill in the blank, and really trust them to eat according to their own hunger. It's the doubt. We just don’t believe that our kids are capable of this. We’ve been told that we’re not capable of it. And so why on earth would we trust tiny little kids to do something that we can’t do? And so that’s one thing. Another is the pressure to have, quote, unquote, balanced meals. I remember seeing a post that was like, “an apple is not a balanced snack,” and you have to add all these other things. And that’s great. But that doesn’t mean your kid’s going to want to eat all those other things…Virginia Or sometimes you just want an apple, right?Amy And that’s not a bad thing. Just because you don’t eat a protein at every meal or snack, does it mean that you’ve done something wrong? I think about all of those subtle messages about the way in which we’re serving foods, that some things are not right, or that some things are not good enough. I mean marketing, yes, is one thing. But I sort of think that the way that we talk to each other about food is even worse. It’s the way that someone in your family, their relationship with food, might influence you, in ways that are less overt than a message on a package about it not being junk food or something. It’s much harder. That’s sort of a depressing road to go down, because it’s harder to deal with. But I think the subtlety of those messages that we’re hearing, just in our day-to-day life, are really hard to block out. And they really make feeding kids confusing when it doesn’t have to be.Virginia Yes. I think, as parents, we often need to sit with: Am I really worried about my kids intake here? Or am I worried about how I’m being perceived as their parent because we tie so much of our self-worth as a parent to their eating performance in a way that’s problematic. And if it’s more that you’re like, “Grandma’s gonna make a comment” or “my friends’ kids all eat XYZ and my kids don’t.” I think that’s a good way of being able to tell that this is more of a cultural noise thing.Amy I mean, even just think about — well, this isn’t gonna apply to you, because I know you don’t care about this the way a lot of people do. But let’s say, you have a meal, like a dinner, and there’s no vegetable —Virginia It is Wednesday at my house. Continue.AmyFor many, many people, the immediate feeling is that you’ve somehow failed, you somehow didn’t do it right. And that meal is incomplete. But that’s not true. I think, if we’re trying to check off boxes of “I got my protein in today, I got all of these like macronutrients,” I just think we're going to make ourselves crazy. VirginiaEspecially with kids who, as you said, their intake varies over a day over a week, like this might not be a day when they’re eating vegetables, right? Amy I have sometimes have to almost force myself to just give them mac and cheese. And to just prove to myself that everyone is fine. Sometimes you just need to see it to believe that it’s fine. And then the next day, your kids might eat all the broccoli. You know, there’s other messaging around like feeding babies, where if they eat certain foods as babies, that will [supposedly] prevent picky eating, or if you feed them a certain way with solids, you’ll skip the picky eating phase all together. And it’s not true. And it’s incredibly damaging to parents who have more challenging kids, because it just sets you up to feel like you did something wrong.Virginia Yeah, totally. I think that’s so true. It’s really sad. Okay, this question is maybe a little bit diet culture and a little bit manners, and I just didn’t even really know what to say, so I’m making you answer it. Okay. She writes: Before COVID, I met my boyfriend’s cousins and their children for the first time. It was a birthday party celebration with lots of food. I had a piece of cake and was also offered a packaged ice cream sandwich, which I accepted. [Virginia: That sounds like a great combination.] The 3-year-old daughter of one of the cousins took it from me to put back in the freezer, because I already had a piece of cake and two desserts wasn’t healthy for me. I was pretty shocked but didn’t insist on eating the ice cream sandwich. I haven’t seen them since. But I expect we’ll get together late this summer when we’re all vaccinated. If a situation like this happens again, how would you suggest I handle it?Amy Maybe you invite them over and have a dessert bar, and everyone gets to eat as much as they want? Just, take it to the other extreme? I don’t know. I mean, I totally understand like, in the moment, that would be difficult to react to if you had no inkling that it was coming. Virginia Yeah, if a 3-year-old just stole your ice cream sandwich and also shamed you for it. Yeah.Amy I think, if it were to happen again, you can say something like, “These both sound really delicious to me, I’m going to eat them!” The End. Or “This is what I’m having for dessert!” The End.Virginia I like that you’re making it about your own choice versus like, needing to sort of chastise the child who, let’s be honest, is being pretty rude in that moment.Amy Mind your own business?Virginia Yeah. But you don’t want to make it into a parenting thing. You don’t have to parent that child around this issue.Amy Right. I think that that’s where you would probably get into a very murky territory. But if you can just claim it as, “This is mine. It is not yours, and you don’t need to worry about it.” I mean, then that goes with anything that’s on your plate, or your life, or whatever. Virginia So many of us are thinking about family gatherings that haven’t happened in a long time now. And I hear a lot of folks worried about, “my mother always makes this comment about what I eat,” or other relatives weighing in on things. So it’s helpful to just be able to set that boundary of what’s on my plate is my business. Amy Yeah, I always like to do a very short sentence, and then change the subject. So, “This is what I’m having. What color are your shoes?”Virginia That works for mothers and 3-year-olds. Amy Because 3-year-olds are really great at redirection. You can totally change the direction of their attention.Virginia It’s so true. Just ask a completely random other question.Amy “Where is your baseball bat?”Virginia “What are you being for Halloween?” Never mind that it’s summertime. Yes, absolutely. That’s really great. For parents — it’s hard to give advice for parents in that situation. But I mean, as a general rule, like, do you feel like it’s important to communicate to your kids that we don’t comment on other people’s eating habits? And is that something you are aware of teaching them? Or has it not really come up?Amy So we don’t really have comments at our table about the amounts that other people are eating. But we do have a lot of the “that looks yucky” type of comment. So we do regularly talk about how, you know, everyone gets to decide what they think is delicious. “This tastes really delicious to me.” And my 4-year-old will now use that language of “This tastes...” Usually “this tastes yucky to me,” which, at least she’s owning that as a specific thing. She’s not casting the blame more broadly. Because you want your kids to be able to go to school and not be judging other people’s food. So I think definitely working on that a little bit at the table in your own house when it comes up can be helpful. I mean, we’ve had like, only Christmas meals with extended families. We have not eaten anything with anyone else in a long time.Virginia Period. This is reminding me, I’m trying to teach my kids to say “This is not my favorite,” rather than “I hate it” and putting their heads down and sobbing as sometimes happens. And I realized the other day, my 3-year-old is mishearing me because she sat down and said, “This is my favorite! I’m not eating it.” And it’s about my pasta sauce. So it really hurts. Because my sauce is amazing. But yeah, “This is my favorite! I’m not eating it today.”Amy I do often have to remind the kids that not every meal will be their favorite and that it is okay for sometimes it to be mommy’s favorite, or other people’s favorite. And that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with the meal or that it’s bad, but we can eat the fruit on the side or whatever. Virginia Yes. There will always be something you can eat, but it might not be your favorite tonight. Yeah, I’ve recently announced that Tuesday is the night when I cook whatever I want because I felt like, we were getting into a slippery slope of all the meals being just their favorites. Which — you should serve your children’s favorite foods. That’s not a bad thing. But you know, Monday night is pesto pasta, that’s their absolute favorite. And Mondays are tiring, and I don’t want any fights at dinner on Mondays. And Wednesdays is taco night, which is their other favorite. And so I was like, you know what, Tuesdays are going to be whatever I pick. And it’s going to change week to week and they don’t love it. But they’re coping.Amy If I’m making one of my favorites, I almost always serve flat bread on the side. Because then I know that they have nothing to complain about because they like bread. Yeah, and usually the things that I want to make myself have Indian sauces or things, and so a flatbread kind of makes sense. Virginia I keep a lot of packages of dinner rolls in the freezer for this purpose. Other than occasionally, they get sick of the favorite. That really screws you. But anyway, that’s a whole other thing. My kids are quick to fall out of love with their favorites and have new favorites. It’s hard to keep up. Okay, the last question is: How do I do Division Of Responsibility when my child has food allergies? This question has come in a bunch of different ways. I’m not going to read them all, because they’re all very specific. But I think what people are generally struggling with is, you’ve got this one big, scary food your kid can’t have. And somehow that feels like it’s blurring the lines of this responsibility question.Amy I mean, I guess there could be an issue, if like your kid was allergic to dairy, but you still kept dairy in the house? How do you not make them feel excluded? Is that the question?Virginia I don’t exactly know what the intent of it is. But I think it’s probably something like that, like, “Can we serve ice cream, with dinner or whatever, if one kid can’t eat it?”Amy I mean, I think you need to have a replacement for it, you need to somehow make the playing field fair. So you need to lean on other types of things that the kid can eat, like, make a list of all the delicious things that that everybody in the family can eat, put it on the fridge, where you can look at it. And then maybe like, when your kid is at school or at daycare, that’s when you can eat some of the other foods that they can’t eat. But I think make them feel like they are part of the family. And they’re a part of your food experience as much as possible, rather than making it their issue. And I think a lot of families are really good at this. I mean, there are so many products now that make this so much easier than even just a few years ago. So I think you just do Division Of Responsibility in the same way. But you have to just rethink what the foods are a little bit. Virginia That makes sense. Often the tone coming across in these emails, and certainly this is something I remember dealing with when my older daughter had more medical food issues, is: Often there’s a lot of anxiety about growth with a kid who’s got a lot of allergies and whether they’re eating enough, And so maybe this is also about, “Can I trust their fullness?” And I feel like, for the most part, the answer is absolutely yes. You can still trust your child to know their hunger and fullness even if they can’t eat certain foods. Right?Amy Yes. If there is a medically indicated reason that the kid can’t feel their hunger or their appetite levels are skewed because of medication or some other issue, you want to talk to your doctor and find a feeding therapist who is trained in those specific things. Because navigating that alone is going to be incredibly challenging. But otherwise, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to trust your child with whatever the food is, whether or not it has nuts or doesn’t have nuts. And you know, I think on the growth issue, this is a whole other topic. But if your child is growing, even if it’s not like leaps and bounds, if they are growing, if they’re meeting their milestones, if they seem happy, if they seem like themselves, you probably should just leave them alone. If they’re dropping off of their growth curve, and your doctor is really concerned, that’s a different issue. But just because you’re at the lower end of the growth scale, or the higher end, doesn’t mean that there’s a problem.Virginia Yes, absolutely. And I’ll put some links to folks that Amy and I both really trust if anyone is looking for feeding therapy help along those lines. [Check out: Helping Your Child With Extreme Picky Eating, Thrive By Spectrum Pediatrics, and Responsive Feeding Therapy.]But yeah, I think the fundamental message of even if this is a kid who’s got certain foods they can’t eat, and maybe that means you’re worried about their overall nutritional makeup (because you’re having to skip out on certain food groups) — still, working on how to trust their hunger and fullness cues is going to be super, super important. You know, maybe even more important for a kid who’s got to navigate food in a slightly more fraught way. Amy Yes. And if anyone’s looking for like specific substitutions that you can’t find it just email me and I’ll poll my Instagram community because someone recommended a dairy-free parmesan today that I didn’t know about. Virginia That’s awesome. And check out Amy’s website, because all her recipes always have notes about substitutions you can make if you need to take out a common food allergen. She’s amazing at figuring this out.Amy Well not 100%. But I try! Virginia Well, okay, you aren’t 100% amazing. Maybe not 100% of the recipes have this, but I have noticed this as a recurring theme. Amy, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. Again, I’ll put links in the transcript to YummyToddlerFood, and to our old podcast archives for anyone who wants to go down that rabbit hole with us. Amy Thanks for having me!You’re reading Burnt Toast, a newsletter by Virginia Sole-Smith. Virginia is a feminist writer, and author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. Comments? Questions? Email Virginia. If a friend forwarded this to you and you want to subscribe, sign up here: This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Amy: How about you? Have you ever been in an accident?Paul: Not a car accident. I was in a bicycle accident.Amy: Yeah?Paul: I laugh now but at the time, it was pretty bad.Amy: What happened?Paul: It was dark and it was Christmas day. And I was on my bicycle going down a quite steep slope and my telephone rang. And I looked at my mobile phone and I took it out of my pocket whilst riding my bike. And looked at it and noticed it was my dad and he was ringing to wish me a happy Christmas.So I felt sort of compelled to answer the phone. So answering the phone, still going down the hill, probably gathering speed. It's dark and I'm trying to get my dad off the phone as soon as I can. And before I knew it, I drove straight into the back of a parked black car.Amy: Oh no.Paul: I saw it at the very last minute. So I hit the back of it and my body slammed into the ground, and I broke a few bones, yeah. Yeah.Amy: Oh no.Paul: Yeah, yeah. It was a pretty miserable Christmas to be honest with you.Amy: I'd say it's terrible. That's the worst.Paul: Yeah.Amy: Did the owner of the car see what happened? Did you damage the car?Paul: I didn't stay long enough. I got out of there pretty quickly.Amy: And went to the hospital.Paul: No, I was a bit stubborn. I don't know why. I was the worst night sleep I've ever had but yeah, I didn't go to the hospital until the next day.Amy: What bones did you break?Paul: I broke my collarbone, the clavicle.Amy: Oh, a nightmare.Paul: And I broke a few ribs.Amy: Oh no, ribs. That's the worst because they can't do anything for it. They just send you on your way and you just have to cough in pain.Paul: Hmm.Amy: Oh no.Paul: Yeah. But it could have been a lot worse, you know.Amy: Hmm, that's true.Paul: Yeah. I could have broken my neck.Amy: So how long did it take you to recover?Paul: It took me about probably six weeks, I suppose.Amy: Hmm.Paul: Yeah, because then—actually, in the following —it happened on Christmas day, so three months later in the March, I was lucky enough to win a place in the Tokyo marathon. And I really wanted to do it because it's quite difficult to get. It's like a lottery now. There's so many people who apply to get a position.So I wasn't going to let this accident stop me from running the Tokyo marathon. So I was trying to rush it, really and I shouldn't have. But I did. I've run there.Amy: Did you?Paul: Yeah.Amy: Oh, my goodness.Paul: Yeah, I finished it but—Amy: Congratulations. But how were you? That must have really hindered your recovery.Paul: It hindered my training period for the marathon, yeah, so.Amy: But you finished it though.Paul: I finished it, yeah.Amy: Well done.Paul: I wouldn't do it again. Marathons are miserable things to be. Really. Why put yourselves through that pain? I still like running so maybe in the future, I'd do a half marathon or something, yeah. But a full marathon—my marathon days are over, I think. Yeah.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Amy: How about you? Have you ever been in an accident?Paul: Not a car accident. I was in a bicycle accident.Amy: Yeah?Paul: I laugh now but at the time, it was pretty bad.Amy: What happened?Paul: It was dark and it was Christmas day. And I was on my bicycle going down a quite steep slope and my telephone rang. And I looked at my mobile phone and I took it out of my pocket whilst riding my bike. And looked at it and noticed it was my dad and he was ringing to wish me a happy Christmas.So I felt sort of compelled to answer the phone. So answering the phone, still going down the hill, probably gathering speed. It's dark and I'm trying to get my dad off the phone as soon as I can. And before I knew it, I drove straight into the back of a parked black car.Amy: Oh no.Paul: I saw it at the very last minute. So I hit the back of it and my body slammed into the ground, and I broke a few bones, yeah. Yeah.Amy: Oh no.Paul: Yeah, yeah. It was a pretty miserable Christmas to be honest with you.Amy: I'd say it's terrible. That's the worst.Paul: Yeah.Amy: Did the owner of the car see what happened? Did you damage the car?Paul: I didn't stay long enough. I got out of there pretty quickly.Amy: And went to the hospital.Paul: No, I was a bit stubborn. I don't know why. I was the worst night sleep I've ever had but yeah, I didn't go to the hospital until the next day.Amy: What bones did you break?Paul: I broke my collarbone, the clavicle.Amy: Oh, a nightmare.Paul: And I broke a few ribs.Amy: Oh no, ribs. That's the worst because they can't do anything for it. They just send you on your way and you just have to cough in pain.Paul: Hmm.Amy: Oh no.Paul: Yeah. But it could have been a lot worse, you know.Amy: Hmm, that's true.Paul: Yeah. I could have broken my neck.Amy: So how long did it take you to recover?Paul: It took me about probably six weeks, I suppose.Amy: Hmm.Paul: Yeah, because then—actually, in the following —it happened on Christmas day, so three months later in the March, I was lucky enough to win a place in the Tokyo marathon. And I really wanted to do it because it's quite difficult to get. It's like a lottery now. There's so many people who apply to get a position.So I wasn't going to let this accident stop me from running the Tokyo marathon. So I was trying to rush it, really and I shouldn't have. But I did. I've run there.Amy: Did you?Paul: Yeah.Amy: Oh, my goodness.Paul: Yeah, I finished it but—Amy: Congratulations. But how were you? That must have really hindered your recovery.Paul: It hindered my training period for the marathon, yeah, so.Amy: But you finished it though.Paul: I finished it, yeah.Amy: Well done.Paul: I wouldn't do it again. Marathons are miserable things to be. Really. Why put yourselves through that pain? I still like running so maybe in the future, I'd do a half marathon or something, yeah. But a full marathon—my marathon days are over, I think. Yeah.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Amy: How about you? Have you ever been in an accident?Paul: Not a car accident. I was in a bicycle accident.Amy: Yeah?Paul: I laugh now but at the time, it was pretty bad.Amy: What happened?Paul: It was dark and it was Christmas day. And I was on my bicycle going down a quite steep slope and my telephone rang. And I looked at my mobile phone and I took it out of my pocket whilst riding my bike. And looked at it and noticed it was my dad and he was ringing to wish me a happy Christmas.So I felt sort of compelled to answer the phone. So answering the phone, still going down the hill, probably gathering speed. It's dark and I'm trying to get my dad off the phone as soon as I can. And before I knew it, I drove straight into the back of a parked black car.Amy: Oh no.Paul: I saw it at the very last minute. So I hit the back of it and my body slammed into the ground, and I broke a few bones, yeah. Yeah.Amy: Oh no.Paul: Yeah, yeah. It was a pretty miserable Christmas to be honest with you.Amy: I'd say it's terrible. That's the worst.Paul: Yeah.Amy: Did the owner of the car see what happened? Did you damage the car?Paul: I didn't stay long enough. I got out of there pretty quickly.Amy: And went to the hospital.Paul: No, I was a bit stubborn. I don't know why. I was the worst night sleep I've ever had but yeah, I didn't go to the hospital until the next day.Amy: What bones did you break?Paul: I broke my collarbone, the clavicle.Amy: Oh, a nightmare.Paul: And I broke a few ribs.Amy: Oh no, ribs. That's the worst because they can't do anything for it. They just send you on your way and you just have to cough in pain.Paul: Hmm.Amy: Oh no.Paul: Yeah. But it could have been a lot worse, you know.Amy: Hmm, that's true.Paul: Yeah. I could have broken my neck.Amy: So how long did it take you to recover?Paul: It took me about probably six weeks, I suppose.Amy: Hmm.Paul: Yeah, because then—actually, in the following —it happened on Christmas day, so three months later in the March, I was lucky enough to win a place in the Tokyo marathon. And I really wanted to do it because it's quite difficult to get. It's like a lottery now. There's so many people who apply to get a position.So I wasn't going to let this accident stop me from running the Tokyo marathon. So I was trying to rush it, really and I shouldn't have. But I did. I've run there.Amy: Did you?Paul: Yeah.Amy: Oh, my goodness.Paul: Yeah, I finished it but—Amy: Congratulations. But how were you? That must have really hindered your recovery.Paul: It hindered my training period for the marathon, yeah, so.Amy: But you finished it though.Paul: I finished it, yeah.Amy: Well done.Paul: I wouldn't do it again. Marathons are miserable things to be. Really. Why put yourselves through that pain? I still like running so maybe in the future, I'd do a half marathon or something, yeah. But a full marathon—my marathon days are over, I think. Yeah.

HOPE.  I am hopeful about the future, and this podcast...news about that in my intro, and the changes that are coming soon! Here’s this week’s breakdown: 1: Let's Rock with Amy: Well, this week basically changes my entire outlook and attitude toward hope! I have started to realize that hope is foundational in all the actions that we take, and I look at the big picture of the world right now and what might be the opposite of hope. I've felt devoid of hope in the past and I talk about what that was like and how it has changed for me. Don't forget you can sign up for my newsletter, and my free 5-step habit building guide is still available, too. 2: The Interview (12:47): Interview this week is with Susie Moore, life coach, writer, and contributor to The Today Show, Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and many more. Susie is also the author of a new book "Stop Checking Your Likes: Shake Off the Need for Approval and Live an Incredible Life. Susie and I talk a bit about her book, social media, and the understanding that there is so much more than that to us as people and how our worthiness is fixed. Susie says that hope is the most powerful human emotion; she adds that the currency of hope is very high and can move you forward. She turns hope around for me by saying the control that we do have with it, and how surrendering it can be a way to hide ourselves. We also get into staying in our own business, she reveals her practical strategies for the actions she takes when she doesn’t feel hopeful, and I had to ask her about hard work and the idea of “let it be easy.” I love that part! So work easy and find her and the book at susie-moore.com and on Instagram at @susie.moore! 3: Go Aff Yourself (33:15) with Affirmation Maven Jill Faulkner of stickwithit.co: Jill has HOPE tattooed on her was a reminder… of what, exactly? We cover that, the difference between hope and the energy of hopefulness, and whether we attach to certain outcomes with hope. Jill talks about hope creating a sense of continued longing, and I ask if it makes us delay happiness sometimes. How do we have hope and detach from outcome? And our Aff this week is: Hope Reminds Me to Trust. 4: BYOBBB(50:31) Build Your Own Brand, Biz + Brain with Bijou Finney: We get immediately into how much we need hope these days, and we dive into hopes around making money. Does hoping imply lack of confidence in business? She pairs hope with a plan, hard (??) work (listen to the interview with Susie for more on that!), and diligence. We also talk about the relationship between hope and faith, how hope can look during COVID times, and the unknowns we all face. On the brain front, I ask Bijou how she views hope with psychedelics and more. And don't forget, too, you can still access our free pdf that can help you with your brand values and the action you take. Please rate, review, and subscribe! For the references in today's episode, go to amyedwards.com/blog for links and more that are referenced in the show, and to sign up for the newsletter! See omnystudio.com/policies/listener for privacy information.

Even in a virtual world, you still sweat. That's why it's important to keep your HMDs clean, especially if there's multiple users. Cleanbox devised UV light technology for just such a purpose, then found a higher calling during the Coronavirus. Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here, with the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're speaking with Amy Hedrick, co-founder and CEO of Cleanbox, a smart technology hygiene company that's providing hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware, which I guess we can all agree right now, is very necessary in the current situation. In this podcast, we'll also learn how the team at Cleanbox is helping hospitals maintain mask hygiene. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast. Amy, welcome. Amy: Thank you, Alan. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for taking time. I know you are crazy busy, working probably 20 hour days right now. You are on the front lines, bringing hygiene in a time where it could not be more important. So thank you for joining us and taking the time. Amy: It's my pleasure. I'm happy to do it. And you're right. It is very timely. Everybody's focus right now -- globally -- is on hygiene and public safety and public responsibility, and how we can better stay safe when we're able to go back out in the world. Alan: Absolutely. So I'm going to get right into it. I know you were working with the VR community very heavily, but I think right now this is just kind of top of mind with everybody. So maybe in your own words, you can explain what Cleanbox Technologies does. Amy: Sure. Well, OK, so Cleanbox technology provides hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware. We designed our core technology with-- actually with XR in mind, with the idea and the belief that virtual and augmented reality had great potential in terms of business and enterprise purposes, as well as in healthcare, and of course, entertainment. Seeing the value there and thinking ahead of what would be the pain points that would prevent a successful global deployment, or a successful corporate deployment, and adequate actual consumer adoption. Few years ago, thinking back on how we would be able to meet some of those pain points and eliminate them and lower the barrier of entry, hygiene seemed to be one of those things that was easy to forget. So with XR technology, it's so sexy and there's a lot of very interesting and cool and unique things you can do with it. So the logistics sometimes gets gets a little bit lost. We came at the XR community from the point of risk mitigation. How could we reduce the risk of contagion transfer and thus some detrimental event happening within the industry? And we've grown since then. Alan: So right now it's an interesting time, because we're all stuck at home. So things like location based entertainment facilities are empty. Where is your business coming from now? I know you-- from speaking with one of your advisors, Terry Schussler, that you're booming right now. You can't fulfill the orders fast enough. Where's this business coming from, if it's not coming from location based entertainment? Amy: Well, we've always been addressing multiple markets at once. Location based entertainment is, of course, first and foremost in people's minds because that's -- I guess -- the best education for the average consumer into what immersive technology can do. So it's-- and it's very dear to my origins and we definitely take care of the LB community. On that note, I would say that there are plenty of organizations looking forward to the day that they can reopen, and realizing that not only just the idea of hygiene, but actual hygiene is really critically important to reopening those busine

Even in a virtual world, you still sweat. That’s why it’s important to keep your HMDs clean, especially if there’s multiple users. Cleanbox devised UV light technology for just such a purpose, then found a higher calling during the Coronavirus. Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here, with the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're speaking with Amy Hedrick, co-founder and CEO of Cleanbox, a smart technology hygiene company that's providing hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware, which I guess we can all agree right now, is very necessary in the current situation. In this podcast, we'll also learn how the team at Cleanbox is helping hospitals maintain mask hygiene. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast. Amy, welcome. Amy: Thank you, Alan. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for taking time. I know you are crazy busy, working probably 20 hour days right now. You are on the front lines, bringing hygiene in a time where it could not be more important. So thank you for joining us and taking the time. Amy: It's my pleasure. I'm happy to do it. And you're right. It is very timely. Everybody's focus right now -- globally -- is on hygiene and public safety and public responsibility, and how we can better stay safe when we're able to go back out in the world. Alan: Absolutely. So I'm going to get right into it. I know you were working with the VR community very heavily, but I think right now this is just kind of top of mind with everybody. So maybe in your own words, you can explain what Cleanbox Technologies does. Amy: Sure. Well, OK, so Cleanbox technology provides hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware. We designed our core technology with-- actually with XR in mind, with the idea and the belief that virtual and augmented reality had great potential in terms of business and enterprise purposes, as well as in healthcare, and of course, entertainment. Seeing the value there and thinking ahead of what would be the pain points that would prevent a successful global deployment, or a successful corporate deployment, and adequate actual consumer adoption. Few years ago, thinking back on how we would be able to meet some of those pain points and eliminate them and lower the barrier of entry, hygiene seemed to be one of those things that was easy to forget. So with XR technology, it's so sexy and there's a lot of very interesting and cool and unique things you can do with it. So the logistics sometimes gets gets a little bit lost. We came at the XR community from the point of risk mitigation. How could we reduce the risk of contagion transfer and thus some detrimental event happening within the industry? And we've grown since then. Alan: So right now it's an interesting time, because we're all stuck at home. So things like location based entertainment facilities are empty. Where is your business coming from now? I know you-- from speaking with one of your advisors, Terry Schussler, that you're booming right now. You can't fulfill the orders fast enough. Where's this business coming from, if it's not coming from location based entertainment? Amy: Well, we've always been addressing multiple markets at once. Location based entertainment is, of course, first and foremost in people's minds because that's -- I guess -- the best education for the average consumer into what immersive technology can do. So it's-- and it's very dear to my origins and we definitely take care of the LB community. On that note, I would say that there are plenty of organizations looking forward to the day that they can reopen, and realizing that not only just the idea of hygiene, but actual hygiene is really critically important to reopening those busine

On the thirteenth installment of our See It to Be It podcast series, Amy C. Waninger speaks with Traci Adedeji, the AIO program lead at AIPSO and president elect of the Rhode Island Chapter of the CPCU Society, in a wide-ranging interview about her unique role, her unconventional journey into the insurance industry, and so much more. Traci espouses the importance of establishing mentoring relationships at work and shares some advice on how to foster a very strong professional network on LinkedIn. Check the links in the show notes to connect with her and find out more about the CPCU Society!Connect with Traci on LinkedIn.http://bit.ly/2T9giYRFind out more about the CPCU Society on their website. They're also on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Links in order, beginning with their website:https://bit.ly/3cWpbh7https://bit.ly/3giUQeGhttps://bit.ly/2WUwfFuhttps://bit.ly/3e6nON4Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here or below.https://bit.ly/2Ug4l5KHelp food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org:https://bit.ly/2WD73UkCheck out our website.https://bit.ly/living-corporateTRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach Nunn. Now, listen here. Y'all know what we're trying to do. We're trying to build, inspire, encourage, empower, all on a platform that affirms black and brown experiences in corporate America. And it's interesting because as I came up just kind of coming into myself as a professional, I didn't see a lot of people that looked like me in consulting. I didn't see a lot of people that looked like me in human resources either. But when I would come across someone who looked like me doing something I wanted to do, it gave me encouragement. It gave me a stronger sense of hope that I could do it too, and so it's with that that we're really excited to talk to y'all about and bring you another entry, actually, into our See It to Be It series. So the next thing you're gonna hear is an interview between Amy C. Waninger, a guest on the show, a member of the team, and the author of Network Beyond Bias, and a leader who just happens to be an ethnic minority. In fact, yo, Sound Man, give me some air horns right HERE for my leaders. [he complies] Yo, and give me some more air horns right HERE [he complies again] for the See It to Be It series. So catch y'all next time. I know you're gonna enjoy this. Peace.Amy: Hi, Traci. Thank you so much for joining me today.Traci: Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm honored that you asked me to join you.Amy: Well, I am excited, because you and I have worked together before on committees and projects, but never in the same company, although we are at least in part in the same industry, in the insurance industry. And so I was wondering if you could tell me just a little bit--because your job title is program manager, but a lot of people who are not in a project management space or in a corporate space with a lot of projects may not understand what a program manager does, so can we just start there with kind of what is that job?Traci: Okay. So technically it's "program lead." I work for AIPSO, which is not an insurance company, but we provide services to the insurance industry. So the easiest example that I can offer for what we do would be let's say that in the state of Rhode Island, most--every state actually has a mechanism to handle what's called residual market business for automobile insurance, because in just about every state you have to have automobile insurance to be able to drive. So what happens is that, you know, if Allstate writes 40% of all of the standard automobile business in a state, the state will say, "Well, you also have to write 40% of the residual market business in that state," and--Amy: And the residual market is typically, like, really high-risk drivers that couldn't get insurance other ways, right?Traci: Essentially--exactly, people who are unable to get insurance through the standard market for a variety of reasons. So what Allstate might say is, "We know we have to write this business, but we really don't want to program our systems to handle this business. We don't want to hire people to handle this business that's underwritten and processed a little bit differently than our standard business, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna hire AIPSO or a company like AIPSO to handle it on our behalf." So that's probably the cleanest example I can give of what we do. There's some variations on the ways those different mechanisms work, but that's probably the clearest example. As the program lead, my responsibility is a little bit of underwriting, a little bit of program or project work. If we have to implement changes in the system, I'd be involved in the business requirements and working with the technical folks to make sure that our systems can accomodate what it is that we need to do from an underwriting and processing perspective.Amy: Thank you for that. I appreciate that. So how did you get involved in the insurance industry? Because I'm guessing, based on all of the people I've talked to in the insurance industry, that when you were 5 years old and, you know, you went to a family event and Grandma said, "And Traci, what do you want to be when you grow up?" You probably didn't say, "I want to be an insurance program lead." [both laugh]Traci: You are absolutely correct, although I do love insurance so much that I think we have to get to a point where, especially little brown boys and girls say, "We want to work in insurance." I was--I'm 54 years old. I'll be 55 in April. And when I was 16 years old, I was a teen mom, and when I was 17 years old I had another baby. So here I am, two children, college dropout, and my parents said, "You gotta get a job. You gotta do something to take care of your babies." So I got a job working at an insurance agency as a file clerk, and one day everybody was busy, the phone rang, I answered the phone, and it was a very simple call that I was able to answer because I had been listening to the people who were customer service representatives, so I just handled the call. I got promoted to customer service [?], and this was in 1984, and just worked my way up. I went from working on the agency side of the business to the company side of the business, as an assistant underwriter to an underwriter to an underwriting manager in different companies around the New York City area. In 2007, I thought I was in love, [laughs] and actually left the industry and moved from the New York City area to Rochester, New York. That relationship and the business that we were trying to build together in a different industry didn't work out, and I had to get a job, and insurance was all I knew at that point, 'cause at that point I had worked in the industry for over 20 years. So I came to Amica in Rochester, moved to Rhode Island, and, you know, Amica is an amazing place to work. I was very happy working there, but I got a call one day from a recruiter--that's what happens when, you know, people have your information out there when you're networking, and the gentleman said, "I've got this position I'm trying to fill. Do you know anyone who would be interested?" And when I looked at it, it looked like it was the perfect storm of everything that I'd learned to do in all of the different positions that I'd had in insurance. So I went on to interview and I said to myself, "Okay, I really don't want to leave Amica [?], but, you know, this is a really cool opportunity." So I had a number in my mind. I said, "Okay, if they come back at that number, that's gonna be the universe telling me that this job is for me." I interviewed on a Wednesday, and on Friday I got an offer at the exact number that I had in my mind.Amy: That's amazing. So I always tell people, "When a recruiter calls, answer, because you never know what's waiting on the other side of the phone for you," and if not for you, then someone that you know, right? You may think, "Oh, I have no interest in that whatsoever, but I know someone," and if you can connect those two people, you've just created something amazing for someone else.Traci: Exactly, which was also the relationship with that recruiter, because if you then get to the point where you legitimately are looking for a position, they're gonna remember how you helped them out when they were trying to place folks and they're gonna do their best for you.Amy: Absolutely. And sometimes you even get a little referral bonus out of it if you--[both laugh] if you, you know, send them to somebody that they can place. So I've had that work out for me too. I was never expecting it, but when it happened it was always nice. So you've already told me about the different types of positions that you've held in the industry, but, you know, you came into this industry kind of by chance, right? You just happened to get a job at an agency. What has been the biggest surprise to you about working in insurance that you didn't realize as someone from outside?Traci: This is something that I've known for a while, but I think the thing that solidfied my interest in insurance and was my "a-ha" moment was when I started studying insurance, when I started studying--I actually started studying for my CPCU, which is, as you know, a professional designation in the industry. I started studying for my designation in 1992, and in studying insurance I came to have an appreciation for first of all how important insurance is, but also how diverse the industry is. Pretty much any discipline that you would be interested in studying, there is a job for you in the insurance industry, and that is I think the coolest thing about insurance.Amy: Yeah, I had a similar experience. So I came into the insurance industry as an IT professional. That was my background. No insurance background whatsoever, but I just happened to be a consultant that got placed at an insurance company, and when I then later got hired by the insurance company, somebody told me about the CPCU designation, which--it stands for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter. It's a professional designation that requires 8 courses to complete. You have to pass some tests, which thank goodness they're multiple choice now. They used to be blue book.Traci: [laughs] Yeah, I remember the books.Amy: No, thank you. I wouldn't have done it. I would've been too scared. But anyway, I started studying because, you know, I wanted to prove myself in this industry, and I wanted to frankly get the bonus that came with getting the designation that my employer offered at that time, and I was amazed by the scope of the insurance industry and the mission of the insurance industry, and when people ask me "Why do you love insurance?" And, you know, my focus of my company is not insurance-specific, although maybe it will be someday, but I think insurance is so fascinating because it does two things. It makes all economic investment possible. There's no part of the economy that insurance is not affected by or that it affects, right? I mean, every single transaction that happens is backed somewhere by an insurer. And the other thing we do in the insurance industry is we're there when people need us most. I mean, on somebody's worst day, we're there to help in, you know, ways that we can to make them whole and get them back on their feet, and I can't even imagine a more meaningful industry than that. So if somebody who has maybe never considered the insurance industry before and wants to learn more about the kinds of jobs available and how to get in--you know, how to kind of break into this industry, where would you recommend that they go?Traci: I would recommend that they get in touch with the local chapter of CPCU. I would also recommend that they get in touch with professional insurance agents and brokers, because they have professional organizations. Depending on where they are in their career, I would, you know, for example, if they're a high school or college student who's interested in the industry, I would look at internships with companies, with insurance companies. So those would be my suggestions. I do also know that through professional organizations, those of us who are invested enough in the industry and in our careers to be a part of these organizations have a tendency to be pretty generous people, so it would be pretty easy to even get a one-on-one informal, or even formal, mentoring relationship with someone who is in the industry that could offer some guidance.Amy: That's a great idea, and I know that there are a number of formal programs, but like you said, LinkedIn is a great way to just connect with someone if you have a target company in mind and you want to learn more about it. Most people are open to a phone call or at least exchanging emails and, you know, seeing what they can do to help. That is true. So, you know, the insurance industry has a reputation--and I won't say whether I feel that this is deserved or not, and you know exactly where I'm going--but the insurance industry has this reputation for being stale, pale, and male, and it's all a bunch of old white men, and that's it, right? And I know a lot of different industries suffer from this stigma, but for people who are maybe not older or white or men, what resources have you found that can help them kind of find their place in the industry, feel connected to others, feel a sense of community so that we can retain that talent in this industry and not lose it to somebody else?Traci: For me, I think back to a company that I worked for in 1990, and that was where I really got my start as an insurance professional and learned the most about the industry, but it's also where I recognized that at that particular company, in 1990, the early '90s, if I wasn't a white man with a degree from the right school, there was a very distinct feeling on how far I was going to progress in my career, and that was why I ended up leaving the company. I think that we--you know, it's great to join organizations, but I'm a grassroots kind of chick. I think that it is important to give back to each other, whether it's women, whether it's people of color. It's, like, whatever commonality you have with someone, if you see someone that's struggling or you see someone who's where you were previously in your career, you have a responsibility to reach out to that person and to offer them guidance if they're receptive to it. I'm the type of person that I have no qualms about reaching out to other women, to women of color, to just form those informal mentoring relationships, even if it's just "Let's have lunch once a month." There's people I don't even work with anymore. It just might be, like, an email or a LinkedIn message every now and then. So I think there's great value in forming those types of relationships. Yes, it's professional, but I think that if it's sort of a little more casual where you bond with that person and feel comfortable speaking with them, they're gonna be able to really guide you in a meaningful way.Amy: So that leads me right into my next question, which is I've noticed about you that you have a very strong professional network. I mean, you know everybody it seems like. [both laugh] And not all the same kind of people. Like, you really know people up and down the hierarchy. You know people across the industry, and when we were together at a conference last year I was just so impressed by the span of the network that you have, and so I was wondering what's your approach or what are your tips to networking and how do you stay connected with so many people with such limited time?Traci: LinkedIn makes it easy, because I can be on my computer at, I don't know, 2:00 in the morning when I wake up and can't sleep, and I can pop in and see what people have posted. I don't even have to tell you I absolutely adore your content, and every single thing you post I read and I share, you know, because I just find a lot of value in what you post, and I do the same for other people who are a part of my network. As far as I guess connecting with people, my advice would be ask. It's simply to ask. There's a woman who worked at a previous company, and she was pretty high up, you know, in the food chain if you will, and we didn't really--I mean, we had casually and in passing at work spoke, but it's not like we had a relationship. She ended up leaving the company, and I had no qualms about sending her a connection request on LinkedIn. I said, "Well, the worst that could happen is that she won't accept it, and if she says no I'm no worse off than I was before." I think that everyone has something to offer, regardless of their discipline, regardless of their position or title. I think that a lot of times we don't make those connections because we pre-judge and make assumptions. So I think that you just ask. Amy: That's good advice: So I have a friend in the speaking industry who says, "Every time you ask you risk getting a yes," and I really like that, and so I tried to kind of shore up my nerve to ask more, because I would not mind risking getting a yes.Traci: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I tell people this. I am by nature a pretty shy and reserved person. I grew up as the kid who got teased a lot in school and, you know, that whole thing, so not a lot of self-confidence in my younger years, but when you get to a point where you've got kids to feed and you recognize that the higher you achieve in your career the more money you're gonna make, you kind of put that to the side, you put your game face on, and you make what magic happen you need to make happen, and what happens is that as you practice that, even if you say to yourself "I'm gonna try to connect with one new person this week at work," "I'm gonna try to make a connection with one person who I've not had a connection with previously." The more you do it the more comfortable it becomes and the more confident you are in doing it.Amy: That is absolutely true, and I think a lot of people see networking as something very fake and forced and inauthentic, and they don't feel good about it, right? It kind of leaves, like, an icky, like, feeling about it, and when you approach it from, you know, almost gamifying it--I've done that in the past, right? "I'm gonna meet three people today. I'm gonna help three people with something," whether it's, you know, I'm gonna carry somebody's bag or I'm gonna hold open a door and say hello. Like, something, and so I think sometimes just kind of reframing how we think about networking can make a huge difference in our behaviors and our attitudes and ultimately in our results.Traci: Right. You actually said something that I think is very important, that networking and connecting with people if you treat it as "What can you do for that person?" versus "What can I get from that person?" Because people know when you're being fake. People know when you, you know, just have your hand out or you're looking for something, but we need to first of all not undervalue ourselves and recognize that we each bring something unique, but there's only one me. Nobody else brings exactly what I bring in this combination, and we have to recognize that that has value and that other people will see that value, and if we focus on "What can we offer others, even if it's a small kindness?" You know, those things, the universe will bring those things back to you.Amy: Absolutely. So I know that in addition to your day job you also volunteer with the CPCU Society's diversity and inclusion committee, and I know what a time commitment that is because I'm on the committee as well, but can you tell me how and why you got involved?Traci: I got involved because I was asked. [?]. I was new to Rhode Island, and I actually got--I'm on the board of the local chapter [?], and I was moving to Rhode Island. I said, "I don't know anyone. I want to, you know, meet folks, so joining this organization would be a great way to make friends and immerse myself even more deeply in my industry." So my request to volunteer resulted in me being asked to be on the board, and my relationship with David resulted in him asking if I was interested in being on the diversity committee. And it's a lot of work, but I think that it is important. I think the idea of diversity and inclusion has evolved so much over the years. When a lot of people hear diversity, you know, they think racial diversity, they think gender diversity, but there are so many other types of diversity, and it really I think is about making sure that there are opportunities for everyone, but I think it's also toward being a catalyst for the mindset that needs to happen so that opportunities are there for everyone automatically. We don't have to say, you know, "Oh, we have to go out and make sure that we have a person of color," there's a person of color because we just organically created a culture and a society with people of color in our community, so of course they're gonna have a role in our company, in our organization.Amy: Absolutely. And I tell people, "If you look around and you don't see someone's group represented, it's because you've got work to do to make people feel welcome and make people feel comfortable there." The responsibility is not on others to seek you out, right? And so, you know, I'm thrilled to be a part of the diversity and inclusion committee because I see that what's coming for us in terms of our talent, right, we have so many people on the verge of retirement in the insurance industry, and we just don't have the groundswell of interest among people, you know, that we need to replace all of that knowledge and all of that talent, and so I think, you know, we're gonna have to get beyond the "certain people from certain schools" and, you know, really reach out broadly and show people what we've got and why we're such a good place to have a career.Traci: Right. I think it's about building the excitement about the industry. You know, insurance isn't sexy to most people, and I think that, you know, the work that we do, particularly with the CPCU Society and the diversity and inclusion committee, is to educate the public about the excitement. Like, it's kind of our job to get them excited about insurance and to show them what next level opportunities there are. It's not just sitting behind a desk in a blue suit and white shirt and red tie. [both laugh]Amy: Absolutely true. So I wanted to ask you too about role models. Do you have any professional role models, and if so, what about them inspires you? Traci: So there's a woman--the woman that I mentioned that used to work with me, and I consider her a role model. So a few things about her that resonated with me... first of all, she's very tall like I am. [laughs] And that's something that it took a lot of years for me to overcome, because there's a tendency when you're quite tall to not want to intimidate people, so you tend to kind of--you slump a little, you try to make yourself small. So it takes a courage to just be, to stand up and just be who you are and recognize that you're putting that in your mind about, you know, your stature intimidates people, but she had such a grace about her and just a way of connecting with people. I don't know. She just had influence. She had such presence and influence, and that is something that I admire greatly and something that I work toward emulating.Amy: That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. So I hear men a lot of times will talk about "tall privilege," right? So if you're a tall man, and the statistics bear this out, tall men make more money than short men. They get promoted to higher positions. Like, we revere tall men in our society. Tall women have a different set of characteristics ascribed to them, and I am--I am not blessed with height. I'm only 5'3", but I can--you know, I can imagine how that might play out and how that might affect the way you show up. And, you know, if you're trying to make yourself smaller physically, you're probably also trying to minimize your presence in a room and minimize your contribution and not call attention to yourself and not let the best of you thrive in an environment. Traci: Actually it's interesting, 'cause I had a conversation with someone probably about six weeks ago about the idea that as a very tall not petite woman of color, if I am annoyed at work or if I feel very passionately about something, I feel that I don't have the luxury of being as vocal as someone who is not of my stature and my pigmentation, because it's perceived differently. Amy: If you're vocal about a frustration, I would imagine that the word that comes back to you is "angry" or "aggressive." If I get upset about something, if I'm frustrated and I express my frustration, I'm [BLEEP], right? I'm not angry 'cause I'm white and I'm not aggressive 'cause I'm short, but I'm [BLEEP] or I'm overreacting or I'm sensitive, right? And so I think that we all kind of operate in these constraints of words that are going to be used to describe us to kind of keep us in check, 'cause I don't like it when people say that I'm being sensitive. It's like, "No, I'm not being sensitive. You're being a jerk." But--[both laugh] that's not on me. So I can understand how that would be a struggle. So what advice do you have for young people of color in navigating those kinds of interactions? Because you want people to be, I'm guessing--I mean, we want people to show up authentically, right, but we don't want to lay a trap for people who the moment they speak up and advocate for themselves they get labeled in a way that's damaging to their careers.Traci: I can tell you what's worked for me. I think--to your point, it is important that you be who you are. So I'm 5'10". I'm gonna wear my four-inch heels because that's what I want to wear. If I think that something is not right, I am going to speak up about it. What I try to do is--and I'm just gonna say it, because I don't want to suggest that anyone be manipulative, but in a business setting, okay, what I do is I say to myself, "What is it that I want to get out of this exchange?" And, you know, know who my audience is and know what I need to say and how I need to say it to get what I need out of this interaction. You know, and I'm not talking about things where, like, I don't know, I'm being discriminated against or harassed or something like that, 'cause that's a whole different--and that's, thank God, never happened to me to my knowledge, but that's a whole other kind of conversation, but just an every day--you know, your boss has said something that you didn't like, or you've been assigned something that you don't think you should have to do or something to that affect. I think that it's important to always conduct yourself professionally. I think it's also important to separate your feelings from what the situation is, because just like the other person has their biases and this whole set of ideas and backgrounds that's influencing their behavior, so do we, and we have to recognize, like, the things that we're sensitive about. We have to recognize how we might have contributed to that situation, and we need to present our case in a constructive way. And it's interesting, because I have a 25-year-old daughter who's going through this at work right now, and what I've encouraged her to do is, you know, write down what you want to say. Ask your boss for a meeting, and even if you need to have that piece of paper in front of you, make your point. You know, if you feel a certain way, rather than saying, "You, you, you, you, you make me feel, you did, you, you, you," I would turn that around and say, "When you say or do, I perceive it as," because what you're then doing is you're taking ownership of your feelings and you're very clearly drawing that path from "This is what happened, this is how I felt, and this is how I responded to it. What are we gonna do now to fix it?"Amy: Mm-hmm. And so really what you're describing is emotional intelligence, and, you know, in my experience I've found that I am the most emotionally intelligent when I am the least represented in the room, and I am probably the least emotionally intelligent when I am most represented in the room, and so I try--once I recognized that about myself, I try very hard to think about the dynamics of a meeting or the dynamics of a conversation and "Do I need to kind of practice some of those skills because I'm dominating and maybe running over someone who doesn't feel safe to speak up with me?" Right? And so I think that if we can all do our part, right, to recognize when maybe we've got a little bit more influence or a little bit more social power and kind of back off a little bit and make some space.Traci: Yeah, and there's actually power in being able to do that I think, right? I think that when your peers see you navigate let's say a contentious situation, you know, if everybody's on 15 on a scale of 1 to 10 and you're on maybe 7 and bring everybody down to where it can be resolved, then people are gonna look at you as a change agent, if you will. So I just think that that's powerful.Amy: Yeah, absolutely. And that's leadership, right? Leadership is getting everybody to a better place together. So no, I think that's great. In the time that we have left, I'd like to ask you to finish my sentence. First is "I feel included when ______."Traci: I feel included when I am able to express myself.Amy: Oh, I like that. And then the second part is "When I feel included, I ______."Traci: When I feel included, I'm able to include others.Amy: I love that. I love having people answer this, because everybody answers differently, and it's always powerful. So Traci feels included when she's allowed to express herself, and when she feels included, she is able to include others, and I don't know that there's anything more powerful than that, to be able to widen that circle and bring others in. So that's fantastic. Traci, thank you so much for your time today.Traci: Oh, it was my pleasure. I appreciate you so much.Amy: Oh, thank you very much.

For those not in the know, The Mars Agency is an independent agency that combines the best of technology with the best human intelligence to provide solutions to businesses throughout the world of retail and eCommerce. And one of the Martians who leads the charge at Mars is Amy Andrews, the SVP Business Development & eCommerce. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Amy walked us through all the trends she’s been seeing in the eCommerce industry, including the changing consumer behavior, the rise of omnichannel experiences, and why companies that can crack the code of using voice plus video technology could see a huge payoff. Key Takeaways: There is an opportunity to merge eCommerce and influencer content in order to make a more relevant and personalized shopping experience The amount of data in the eCommerce world is overwhelming and can lead to losing the humanity of the work, which Mars tries to avoid by having a blend of the best technology and the smartest humanity Voice shopping still hasn’t reached its tipping point, but there is data that shows that voice technology is growing in the world of eCommerce For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible eCommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce, this is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org and your host of this lovely podcast. Today we're joined by Amy Andrews, SEP of business development and eCommerce at the Mars Agency. Amy, how are you? Amy: I'm doing well Stephanie, how are you doing? Stephanie: Doing great, yeah as great as can be. So, when I heard of the Mars Agency, I saw that you called your, was it your customers or your employees Martians? Amy: We call our employees Martians, very lovingly. Stephanie: Oh man, I love that. I was trying to think of a name I wanted to give our employees, but nothing comes close to that. Tell me a little bit about the Mars Agency and how all that came about. Amy: Sure. So the Mars Agency has been around for over 45 years, started by an amazing woman, Marilyn Barnett, and really our focus has been on marketing to shoppers over that last, almost half a century. And Marilyn was really a pioneer in this space, she used to be when she started kind of the grocery model who would hold the box of laundry detergent as people walked by. And really just, yeah, and talk about women in business. She was just such an interesting leader and saw that as a marketing opportunity for brands at retail, and started the Mars Agency. And we have a long history in shopper marketing, and shopper marketing is really just marketing to shoppers so, as that has evolved and how people shop has evolved, we followed them and led them to all those different places. Stephanie: Got it. So are you working with large brands to kind of teach them the trends in the industry and how to market to, like you said, the shoppers, is that how to think about the Mars Agency? Amy: Yep. We work with a lot of large consumer package good clients so, like Campbell Soup, Nestle Waters, several others across top retailers. So Walmart, Target, and for me in the eCommerce space, Amazon is definitely a huge player. Stephanie: Okay, cool. And what is your day to day look like there, what is your role look like? Amy: So I lead our eCommerce team, which I mentioned some of the retailers but we really work across all eCommerce retailers and digital platforms. If you think about things that some of you probably use more recently than others like Instacart and other delivery services. We help brands market to their shoppers in those spaces, and really anywhere that you can buy a product online. Which used to be physical stores would convert it online, or your kind of Amazon, Pure Play retailers, and now as I'm sure you've experienced definitely, there's a lot of different options to buy online as you're scrolling through. Instagram you can shop now and kind of always be almost we're moving towards one click away from a purchase in any environment so, that's really what my team focuses on, for our clients, how do we help them market and ultimately sell more online? Stephanie: Got it. Has everything with COVID-19 kind of adjusted your strategy of what you're advising your clients to do? Or what kind of shifts have you made when it comes to that advisory role? Amy: Yeah that's a great question. I think we have seen a lot of data as this, sadly continues for us. But it has definitely had a huge impact on the eCommerce space, particularly for grocery, since a lot of our clients are the CPG packaged clients. We've seen online grocery projections in the last couple of weeks reach what we thought they would be in 2025. So there's been, yeah huge growth in this space, and a lot of new users to this space so, we know that's out of necessity, but again as this kind of continues, we think that a lot of these people, like 60% of people tried a delivery service for the first time in the last six weeks. That's a ton of new people who are buying new groceries online and, yeah there's been a lot of experience as I'm sure you've heard with, not being able to find what you want, or having slow delivery time- Stephanie: Yeah. Being out of stock of my favorite matcha tea, very disappointing. Amy: Out of stock, yes. Which is a little bit easier to deal with than toilet paper but- Stephanie: Yeah, I guess. Amy: I guess it depends on where you are on both with your supply but, no we've had ... Yeah, a lot of people are having to make different choices and having to try things but as this continues, I think people are forming new habits, and even new preferences, so it's definitely influencing how we're advising our clients and where they should invest. I think what's also interesting is because of a lot of those issues, a lot of our clients and a lot of retailers have just put their marketing on pause, to make sure that they can get things in stock, and for retailers to make sure that they're not price scourging or kind of promoting things in the wrong way that would send the wrong message. Amy: So I think what will be interesting long term is, some retailers and brands kind of catch that, and once they have products in stock, once, even Amazon this week has fixed some of their Amazon Fresh delivery issues. As those things start getting worked out, I think they'll be a lot more interesting marketing opportunities, especially as you think about all those new users, either to a retailer or to a brand. I don't know if you bought a different tea brand when you couldn't find yours. Stephanie: I did, I did. Amy: Yeah, a lot of people are having that experience right, so then it's like how does that new brand try and keep you and then how does your old brand try and get you back? So we're definitely working with our clients on all those types of questions. Stephanie: Got it. Do you think clients should be turning off their marketing budgets? As you mentioned, a lot of them are doing that right now, do you think that's a good strategy, or should they till be maybe thinking of ways to experiment because this is a whole new world, it might be actually a good opportunity to kind of experiment a bit without offending people if possible? Amy: Yeah, no, I think ... Yeah, I think it is a bit of both. I think initially, not just marketing but a lot of businesses and industries, just kind of paused to figure out and make sense of what was going on and determine what they should do next. And I think that was, probably a smart move at the time, just to not make any rash decisions. But we're definitely partnering with our clients now on, what is the right way to market. I think one of the trends that we'll see is probably a lot more regional and geographic differences. Like we in the Bay Area are still sheltering in place for another month. So, online shopping here will be very different than other states that are opening up. Amy: And, marketing to those people might be very appropriate now, and I would definitely recommend testing and trying things in that space. Stephanie: Got it. Amy: So I think it's going to have to be a combination. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. Do you see the companies you work with coming to you with similar struggles? Like other themes that you're hearing and any advice around some of those struggles that they're experiencing? Amy: Yeah. I think a lot of the marketing struggles, or just some of the struggles on a more macro level of just the unknown, especially in terms of timing and how long it will continue. And then we kind of have some of the same issues in terms of data, you know there's so much out there, like when you turn on the news, you see so many different stories and different points, sometimes it's kind of hard to determine what are the right guidelines, or what's the right data that you should follow. So, we're really treating this as an ongoing conversation with our clients. And it does differ by geography, it does differ by category or industry. So, I think taking a really custom approach and being able to adapt now, and have a strategy where you're also able to easily adapt moving forward, is going to be really important. Amy: We typically do annual planning with our brands, and we've already been talking, you know we're already in the stages of re-planning but, I think re-planning will be something we do all year now, I don't think it's kind of the pre COVID plan and the post COVID plan, I think it's going to be continuing to adapt. And the brands and retailers that are able to evolve in that way are probably going to be the most successful. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. It seems like a good time to kind of pivot in certain areas, cut projects that aren't, maybe as necessary, and thinking in a completely new light based on everything that's happening. What kind of things do you see being cut or changes be made in these re-planning sessions at these companies? Amy: I mean, the big question now, which the Mars Agency is tackling with our clients is, what might come back in-store and what might not, in terms of marketing and planning around that? There's the kind of legal or even not legal, but kind of the official guidelines or restrictions side of things, in terms of how people shop and how many people can enter the store at what time. But then I think there's also a very real consumer behavior piece of it. So, one thing that has happened in stores and that a lot of our brands being food brands, we've done is, things around sampling and trying new products. And whether that's a cooked piece of food outside of a wrapper, or a sealed up new product, I think in both of those cases, I don't know if for myself, and if I think about other shoppers, I don't know how eager we're going to be to take either one of those samples now. Amy: So, we're trying to rethink things like that that have been really traditional vehicles to encourage trial, how do we think about that in a new way? Either if that's a re-plan in terms of, what do we do with those dollars and invest them in something else? Or what I think is maybe more creative and exciting is, how do we think about sampling in a new way? Or how do we think about demos in a new way? And that's where we really see the in-store and the eComm world kind of colliding, and really creating some of these omnichannel is the word that we use a lot. Stephanie: Yeah. Amy: Omnichannel experiences, so that we're moving towards that anyway, and I think COVID has been an interesting tipping point to, as you said, kind of pivot and think about these things, and push ourselves to think about them even more differently now, to deliver the best shopper experience. Stephanie: Yeah, it seems like it could be with everything bad that happened, maybe a good forcing function to kind of push some brands into the eCommerce world who maybe weren't fully utilizing it before, or not at all. Do you see them being able to adapt to some of these changes that you're recommending them or being able to shift something that they've always been focused on selling in-store, always focused on someone having that in-person experience, like you said, whether it's a sample, a demo, have you seen them be able to pivot on to eCommerce, or being open to that, or even having the technology to do it? Amy: Yeah. I mean I'm pretty optimistic, so I think yes, I think all brands can do this and adapt and pivot and do so relatively easily. I think that was a big question before all of this, and the crisis was just how quickly should each, brand based on their category, be moving into this space? And a lot of brands were over-invested in eCommerce because they felt that that was going to be the future so they're a bit of a step ahead. And that doesn't mean that other brands can't catch up but, I think COVID has just been a kind of internal tipping point for a lot of organizations to think about how they're treating eCommerce and maybe prioritizing it a little bit differently. Amy: So, yeah for brands or companies who weren't thinking about it before, I would definitely say, now's the time. And, because the whole industry and the whole world is really shaken up, it's a great time to think about how you're treating eCommerce differently, and then within the eCommerce space, what we can be doing differently there as well. Stephanie: Got it. Is there anyone that you ever looked to in the industry, where you maybe point your clients in that direction of being like, hey, here's an industry leader when it comes to the checkout experience, or the shopping experience, or the unboxing, or anything like that? Anyone that you guys kind of look to as like a leader in the space? Amy: Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are a lot of examples of brands or retailers doing, I would say pieces of the puzzle really well. The one that comes to mind for me as someone who is creating a really holistic, best in class experience, is actually a retailer. I think IKEA does a phenomenal job in this space, in terms of just digital experiences. They have different digital technologies, and apps and platforms, and AI, and all of that, that is really just helping recreate the experience of going to an enormous, huge physical retail destination, I mean, I can't think of a more traditional shopping experience than kind of browsing through those huge displays in IKEA. Stephanie: So many levels, at least here in Palo Alto. Amy: Yes, definitely. I think of like a huge retail footprint that they've had to translate into a digital experience. There's one now where instead of IKEA saying, what's the best .com site or digital catalog? They are thinking what's the best shopping experience? And now you can as a shopper, walk through an IKEA store, through virtual reality, and pick different products, and then also using AI to see them in your own bedroom. So I think they've just done a great- Stephanie: Oh wow, that's awesome. Amy: ... Job. Yeah, I think I've just done a great job of thinking about it a little bit differently, and kind of doing it in a fun way that that's the biggest piece for myself as a shopper as well, that's sometimes missing from the online shopping experience. It's so convenient, and there are so many wonderful, wonderful benefits that come along with that. But you do lose kind of the fun of shopping, and browsing around, and I think IKEA has done a nice job of bringing some of that physical experience in a fun, very branded IKEA way, to their shoppers digitally. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. I think sometimes people forget that it's not just shopping and trying to buy the thing, but really, like when I go to IKEA, it's my day. It's a whole experience, I'm ready, I'm prepared, I've had my snack, and I'm ready to go through every single setup area to like look at their bedroom, and see how they set it up, and look at this living room setup and incorporating VR into that shows that they know exactly why their customers, at least customers like me come there, is to be able to experience it like I'm actually there. So yeah, that's great. Are you advising other companies to kind of, not only think that way but maybe moving into technologies like that, that they weren't utilizing before? Whether it's VR, or AR, or any of that kind of stuff? Amy: Yes. And I would say just even more broadly, we're advising our clients, and working with a lot of our clients right now on, how do we create the best digital content that's going to be relevant for an eCommerce shopping experience? So, yes that could be an amazing VR IKEA type experience, or that could be a six-second video on a product page, that tells you exactly what you need to know about the benefits of this new water that you're drinking. So I think it's about, what's right for those different brands and, then having that content strategy that then dictates what technology you might need to use to deliver it. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah, I definitely see that shift of a lot of companies, brands, turning into kind of their own media companies when it comes to producing their content, and focusing heavier on that, and not just on a paid strategy where maybe that's been, how it's been for a couple of years. Amy: Yeah, I think I've also seen brands, hopefully, using technology to deliver experience instead of just kind of using or testing, technology for technology's sake, or to have something new. So, it used to be QR codes, and then maybe some AR that just, is just kind of there for the fun, cool factor, that's interesting. In some cases, it's kind of fun, but I think if you're just doing it for the tech's sake, and it doesn't deliver a consumer, or a shopper benefit, it's really a fad and kind of dies quickly. So, we're always trying to think about, what's the need first, and then what can we use to deliver against that? Stephanie: Yeah, it's good to flip that mindset when it comes to that, because yeah I can think of, especially QR code, that's a good example. I've seen random places it's on there, like a cereal box or something that delivers no value, and I don't actually want to even see what's behind that QR code, it seems like it was just placed there because everyone was doing it. So- Amy: Right someone told that- Stephanie: ... You definitely- Amy: ... Told that marketer, "You need a QR code." And they checked that box. Stephanie: They did it. Amy: Yeah. Stephanie: Have you, when it comes to content, I know a lot of brands right now like you said, are focused on that and trying to make sure they get, of course, new customers in that vertical, and also make sure they put out great content. Have you seen any best practices with their clients around like you said, short product videos seem to really increase conversions where you know, like something on YouTube, if you've never been on YouTube maybe isn't the best way to go? Is there any themes around that? Amy: Yeah. I would say generally we always start with what's going to be the right message for the type of media, or for the type of tactics. So, you mentioned YouTube, that's obviously a very different format than say Pinterest, who's also having quite a moment with everyone at home looking for inspiration and recipes, and all of that. Obviously, that type of content you would develop for that would be very relevant to our brands, but also relevant to that platform and what we know people are looking for there. Yeah, I think we're definitely moving towards kind of more bite-size, or smaller content formats, in general. So definitely short format, we always give the example of, you don't want to have your 30 second or 67, 60 second, excuse me, TV spot and just use that everywhere, on your eCommerce sites or on your digital media more broadly, we want to be tailoring it for the environment. Amy: I think another thing that we're trying to do a lot more of now, in terms of a trend, is how are we leveraging influencer and user-generated content in a new way? So, if we talk about relevancy, especially in the eComm world where reviews are so important, and the new mom, you might go on and you're testing the reviews of a stroller, or a really important product for your baby more than you trust advice from your own parent, or from your mom peer group even right? So, people play a ton of influence on that, especially in the eComm space. So, thinking about how we merge eCommerce and influencers, has been really interesting and we've been working with our clients on taking influencer content from a particular shopper since we're in that space. Amy: So, how do you leverage Walmart influencer content on walmart.com, and Amazon influencer content on their site? And in doing so, you create an even more relevant experience for the shopper, because not only do they have those product details and reviews, but you've kind of put all that influencer content in one place, so they can have more ideas on how to use your products, or just more relevant images and messages based on people like them. Stephanie: Yeah, that completely makes sense. I wonder if right now, with how the market is, if it'll kind of give the wrong signals to companies. Like maybe, you have all these people at home so, if you see content is very easy to get right now, you have people maybe at home who actually want the longer podcast and the longer clips. Whereas after all this starts to calm down, I wonder if it'll be hard for brands to kind of pivot again, if all that reverses. And, all of a sudden there's not many consumers who want to create content for free anymore, and long reviews and, people want those shorter clips, like you talked about. Do you see any problems coming up by brands acting too quickly right now, to kind of pivot to what the environment is now? To then it reversing maybe again in a month or six months. Amy: Yeah, I think that's a good question, and that's why I think, as I kind of mentioned earlier, we're taking a proactive but kind of cautious approach. So, one thing we did for one of our brands was, we just went out immediately and pulled out content that, I don't want to say offensive, because that's almost too strong of a word, but pulled out content that wasn't culturally sensitive. For example, a group of people in a home that was more than 10 people. Stephanie: Got it. Amy: We went in and took all of that content down, you know, just to make sure we were being sensitive, and we were also being relevant. Even if someone wasn't particularly upset about it, and maybe they had no thought on it, but we want to make sure we're giving them the most relevant message of how our brand can be used in their lives. So I think that it is going to be an evolution, it's going to be really interesting to see kind of what behaviors stick. I think bread makers was one of the top terms searched on Amazon, the last several weeks. So, I wonder if we're going to get burnt out on making bread anytime soon. Stephanie: That does sound delightful but I'm like, yeah, I don't know how long that trend will last because, my mother-in-law makes bread, and man is it a process. Amy: Well, maybe she needs a bread maker. Stephanie: I know, she does. Amy: But yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how much of those are kind of the COVID trends that then people get sick of it, or people want to, I'm not sure, maybe people will want to race back to the stores like you said, it'll be maybe really exciting when an IKEA opens, and you can go back in, and browse around and get your meatballs and all that. And I'm thinking people are going to do that in a different way. And I think that we're going to have to continue to evolve. So, that's what I mentioned about the kind of planning, I think annual planning is dead. I think we're going to be planning over and over again, if that's monthly if we can get kind of more on a routine, or maybe that's just continuous as things change, and as the news changes. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree. So, the Mars Agency has been around for almost 50 years I think, how does the company and the Martians of the company, recognize trends and then act on it quick enough to help your clients? Amy: Yeah, I think, I honestly think that's why we have been able to be around so long. In the marketing and advertising world, we're one of the few independents who's left, we're still family-run, the company is now run by Marilyn's son and Ken Barnett. And I think that having that independence, and having really just a lot of still that entrepreneurial spirit, has allowed us to really adapt as the industry has adapted and, in most cases kind of stay one step ahead. We talk a lot about our Martians, as you said, and really think that there's a balance between, our people and our technology. So, over the years we've, of course, as most industries have invested more in technology and data, and all of that, we've also really balanced that with our Martians and having, what we say is the latest technology and the smartest humanity. Amy: I think some companies, especially in the eCommerce space, because there's so much data there, and so many different tech platforms, I think if you go too far in that direction, well one, there can just be kind of data overload, and you're not able to find the insights and all the data. But two, I think you just lose a lot of that humanity, and kind of that person who we like to be who's saying, "Well, why is that the case? And, what does that data point mean?" And kind of taking it that step deeper, so that we can really understand what the human behavior is because I think that's where you have the best marketing ideas that really resonate with people, instead of just kind of trying to attack a data point. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. Are there certain metrics or data points that you've seen many brands use that you're like, you guys are all using this, but it actually doesn't really tell you much. Instead, maybe you should look at this instead. Amy: Well, because we're focused on shopper marketing and conversion, I mean, our ultimate data point is always sales. So we're always looking at, how many products were we able to sell as a result. Along with that though, you obviously want to understand what other impact you might have had on engagement. Or, in some cases, there are other circumstances that are affecting sales that are out of our control. We, of course, want to measure all the other media metrics as well. I think to answer your question on, are there certain metrics that brands are looking at that they shouldn't? I don't know if I would say you shouldn't look at this, but I think a lot of brands are placing a disproportionate kind of weight in the eCommerce based on their ROAS or their return on ad spend. Amy: And there's just some interesting ... There are some ways that you can get a very high ROAS, and that a lot of media companies or retailers will say, you had a very high ROAS and it's typically because you are reaching people who would have purchased anyway. So I think that's one where, it does beg the question of sometimes having a person or maybe a smarter data set that's kind of suggesting, why is that the case? And digging a little bit deeper to understand the why behind that metric. Stephanie: Yeah, that seems like an easy way for someone to be like, hey, look how great those ads doing when you're like, all those people were already previous customers so. Amy: Right if you're ... Yes, if you're targeting past purchasers, you can typically get a pretty high ROAS so. Stephanie: Yeah, that's pretty funny. Are there any new emerging technologies that you're advising marketers to look at or other like eCommerce platforms that you're telling people to check out? Amy: I don't know if I would say this is an emerging technology, but just in light of all of the changes around COVID, I would say looking more at new delivery platforms or channels. And this is something that, we're just having early conversations with our clients on now. But, there are a lot of what used to be in the world of retail, relatively niche players You see a lot of those platforms having really explosive growth now, kind of during this COVID period. So it'll be interesting to see how that behavior might change over time. Amy: I think we're also seeing some really interesting partnerships, so you can have your 7-Eleven order delivered by DoorDash. Or you can make a reservation to shop at a local store on OpenTable. Again, those aren't new technologies, but I think it's kind of new platforms and new channels that will be really interesting to test and learn as we go, as you're suggesting, and then also as things, hopefully at some point, kind of start to normalize. Stephanie: Yeah, cool. And then how do you think about, I saw on your website that you were talking about getting the most out of voice technology and how to conquer Amazon? Do you think, I know voice technology, it feels like it's been trying to ... It's been like that up and up for a while and no one's really cracked it. Even when I was at Google, it still felt like they couldn't crack it. How do you think about incorporating that into what your clients are doing? And same with Amazon as well? Amy: Yeah, that's a great question and you nailed it. I think it has been growing, we have on my eCommerce team, a dedicated voice specialist has a background in user experience. And, similarly, I think we've had tons of great conversations around voice, we've seen tons of great data in terms of how it's growing, but I don't think we've reached the tipping point yet of voice shopping. I think it's still, some of the data and it'll be interesting again, to see kind of how this being at home more might change that. But, there are definitely different behaviors that have grown with voice more than shopping has. We're still actively pursuing and exploring that with our clients. Mars is the preferred Alexa developer, we also work with Google Voice as you mentioned. Amy: But I think it just comes back to, really the foundation of what we do which is, how can we create better shopper experiences, and voice definitely has the technology to do that. I think it's just about the adoption, especially in the shopping space. So to date, we've worked with our clients on, creating skills that can be useful to shoppers based on their different categories. But I think it'll be interesting to maybe see how COVID changes the voice space as well. Stephanie: Yeah, I could see that becoming useful, especially as the catalogs get bigger of what the brands are putting on their eCommerce sites. It'll be easier if you're able just to tell the website like, I want to find this, instead of having to go through the whole catalog and try and find exactly what you want, and it probably growing by 50% from the time you were there maybe two months ago if they can crack, getting the voice technology to actually work and be seamless, and not an extra step. Amy: Yeah. And then I think another thing that'll be interesting now is just, I even have to remind myself as we're talking because typically we think voice and we think, speaking into the speaker, but with the combination of voice and video. Plus people being at home and maybe wanting more, we know there's been a huge surge in recipe searches for example. I think having the voice plus visual is a different way that brands should be thinking about voice now, and something that we're working with some of our clients on. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. And what about the conquering Amazon piece? I'm only thinking about how that maybe has shifted a lot, especially lately because of everything Amazon is doing of like, only surfacing maybe essential things, and changing shipping times, and maybe kind of burying certain retailers if they didn't view them as essential. I could see a lot of people kind of getting scared about relying on Amazon as their platform to sell from, and maybe moving away from that and trying to build their own eCommerce store on their own, and just do their own thing. Do you see that kind of happening? Or what are your thoughts around Amazon? Amy: Yeah I mean, Amazon could probably be a whole nother topic or hour. Stephanie: A whole podcast one. Amy: Exactly, I'm sure there are millions. But, I think in terms of, we've been really digging into what has this last six or so weeks meant? And where have we seen new growth? Walmart.com in March was the number one downloaded app in the grocery space and surpassed Amazon for the first time. So, it's interesting to kind of see all these stats and you think, oh, maybe Amazon isn't as important. Amazon just still dominates the eCommerce space. Which is why you mentioned, we have it on our website. I would say even as of two months ago, people were using Amazon and eComm interchangeably, almost. Amy: So, it's great and it's exciting to see that, and as we have always advised our clients, we should think about this holistically across this space and across all different retailer dot-coms and delivery platforms like your eCommerce strategy should be comprehensive. But I don't see Amazon ever not being a component of that, at least not in the near future. There are a lot of issues now from a user experience, from a shopping experience, also as you mentioned with brands and maybe being deprioritized for essentials or not being able to market in the way that they have been able to before. But it still really is the lion's share, it's still seeing the most growth during this time period. Amy: So it's not, I don't think it's a place that brands can afford not to be, with the exception of maybe a couple of the really big ones. But I think the idea of trying to tackle eCommerce without Amazon, or without having a strategy around Amazon, and there's by the way, a bunch of different ways that you can do that, it definitely doesn't have to be every brand's number one eCommerce retailer. But I think it probably has to be part of the strategy, just because of the number of shoppers that are using that as their primary eCommerce destination. Stephanie: Yeah, agree. So earlier we were talking about brands creating content, how do you think about the intersection, or what do you advise your clients when it comes to the intersection of content management system, their commerce platform, and their CRM? How do you see that working in their space are any best practices around that or advice? Amy: Yeah, I think, I mean one is to be thinking about the total experiences we've been talking about, and making sure that, no matter what agencies or, in our case, we're oftentimes working with a lot of other agencies either at different parts of the funnel or that the brand is working with for different pieces of their advertising. A lot of our clients are large enough that they're hiring multiple agencies. So I think it's, having IT as planning processes that are very integrated, and making sure you're connecting all the different partners so that you can leverage all of the different content and all of the different wonderful assets. Amy: In terms of, what should the content strategy be, I think it comes back to, what's going to be best and what's going to be needed and relevant for the shopper in that environment. So, we're really working with our brands in the eCommerce space on, how are you creating eComm content that typically doesn't always exist in other brand channels? So, how are you creating content for your product pages with information that people need to know when they're at that point of buying you versus buying a competitor. If you don't have that right content, let's create it, we help our clients map that out on what's needed in terms of assets, and videos, and enhanced content, and all of that. Amy: And then really track that over time to make sure that we're constantly optimizing it. We have a new technology, an eShelf maximizer tool that uses data to look across different websites, and identify across thousands of skews for a lot of our brands, what product pages might have some issues or some areas of opportunity, and then we can fix those right away. And with the retailer's constantly changing their algorithms and limitations, and all of that. This is kind of a huge pain point for our brands so, even though we'll optimize content as brands change their packaging, or new products launch, there's kind of continual issues and continued opportunities to optimize. So we're using technology to make sure that we can stay ahead of that and be really proactive for our brands. Stephanie: Got it. Do you see them being able to kind of manage that in a way that stays organized? Because, I kind of view a lot of brands having their content management as one silo, and their CRMs another one, and their commerce platforms another one, it doesn't seem like they've been able to integrate like, well, here's how our content is affecting our customers and actual conversions. Do you see that kind of shifting now? Or are a lot of your brands already ahead and they're already kind of all intertwined, and they got it? Amy: Oh, I wish that was the case. No, I think, I mean, I think we have silos within the Mars Agency, I think most companies have silos, I think most of our clients would say that they have silos within their companies as well. Unfortunately, I think that is a reality so I don't want to gloss over that picture too much. I think it's about, how do you look for ways to work and collaborate across those silos, for more of a common goal? So, I think eComm has been a silo for a lot of brands today. We've kind of siloed it off and said, let's deal with that separately because we don't quite know what to do with it, or maybe it's still a little bit too new for our brand or company. Amy: And this is really a moment when I think we can be integrating it in, we certainly have done that at Mars. Our team is now integrated with our customer development team. So when we're working on a Walmart plan, it's not the Walmart in-store plan and the walmart.com plan, we're all one team. So I think hopefully, that would be an outcome of this time period is kind of breaking down some of the eCommerce silos. But I think as you pointed out, there's definitely still an opportunity for, I would say most brands, to kind of better connect. I think content and eComm are coming together much more naturally. I think CRM is still a piece that we could, as an industry, probably better connect to some of the other pieces. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree. Have you seen, like what do you think the first step is to that digital transformation? Or have you seen a company really do it well? Is it like start from scratch, throw everything away and start over? Or, how have you seen that work? Amy: I think that actually, most companies have kind of, that we've worked with, have kind of taken eComm out and brought it back in, or taking the digital team out and brought it back in. And I think that's actually an okay approach in terms of, especially where you are with your company's growth in this space, some kind of half joking that eComm has been a silo. But, in a way that's been necessary for some companies because, as eCommerce has grown, it typically starts off as an add on within a current team, and then as it grows, it kind of gets its own silo, or its own little team on the side, and then as they get big enough, they come back into the integrated team, typically the marketing team, or in some cases, the sales team. Amy: And I think that that makes sense because, as the space grows for different clients, it needs different resources. I think a lot of companies are going to be fast tracking that now, so they might skip that step of having the separate eCommerce team and just automatically integrate it. I don't think that's a bad thing, I think that could be beneficial to, instead of kind of separating it or starting from scratch, just integrating in from the team from the beginning. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. That sounds like good advice. So, do you see any disruptions coming to eCommerce? Like one thing I've been paying close attention to, or reading up a bit is about these pop up retail stores. And I think maybe that could be a trend that a lot of retail stores are closing down right now, and people might be scared to actually set up locations for 10 year leases, after all this dies down. So I'm wondering how maybe that could influence the future of retail and eCommerce. Do you see any disruptions like that that is on the horizon that you guys are looking into when it comes to eCommerce? Amy: Yeah. I mean I think there's going to continue to be a lot of disruptions, and probably a fast tracking of what would have happened anyway. So, some, as we've seen in the last several years, some really established big box retailers have closed down, or shut several of their locations, because that huge size of space didn't make sense anymore, and to your point that frees up space for other types of retailer formats. I think coming out of this that, one of the disruptions will be, what we go to a physical store for, versus what we continue to buy online. So I think there's going to be a lot of differences in those categories, and even in in subcategories within that. I think what's going to be interesting about the physical stores is just, how do we deliver an experience in those stores that is worth kind of leaving your house for? Amy: And I think some of the best retailers, and some of the best brands have been talking about that for years, right? How do we create a physical experience of our brand? If you think of like the flagship stores, that's meant to be bringing the brand to life and delivering on that experience, and then you think of retailers who have been improving their in store experience, to get people to browse other categories, or browse other sections. I think a lot of that was a trend that will now really be pushed and challenged, and fast tracked as we rethink about what that physical space means to a shopper. So, pop ups, as you mentioned, were great because they were delivering a different experience and that was a reason to go, see something new, or maybe see something that you could only buy there. Amy: I think exclusives will probably continue and be played around with in a new way in terms of what's exclusive online versus in store. But I think it's a little early to tell what disruptions are going to continue, and how people are going to use those physical spaces. I mentioned it earlier, but I could also see there being a big difference in geographies. The coasts have always been a little different anyway, but I could see the the retail experience on the coasts being a little bit slower to change at first, and then probably having more disruptions in the end. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. I can see also when they start streamlining the return process, I've already started see that at least with Amazon, where it's like, you don't even have to bring a box now or anything, just bring the good back there. Once that starts feeling easier, it seems like a lot of things could shift because, to me that's been the biggest hang up of ordering things online and, not knowing how to really return it, and not knowing if I'm going to feel like doing it, and keeping the box, and printing out the label and all that stuff. It seems like that could be a big shift too, and it's kind of already been forced that way over the past couple months. Amy: Yeah, no, that's a great example of now people are having to get creative in how they do things, both retailers and shoppers. And also, just as you try things and get used to it, you might realize that the return process wasn't as bad as you thought. Or the delivery window that your groceries came was actually more convenient than what you'd wanted before. So, I think some of those habits are going to change, which is always interesting to see, because now we're still in kind of the survey phase of, what do you predict that you're going to do? Or will you use this service again? And it's always interesting of course, to see what people say versus what they actually do. Stephanie: Yeah. Amy: And I think just over time as we all keep doing this, we could say, we hate it and it's a pain. But some of that we're going to be adopting those new habits that will stick with us in the longer term. Stephanie: Yeah that'll be really interesting to see what actually comes from that. So before we move into our lightning round, is there any other thoughts you have for eCommerce leaders or trends or anything else you want to highlight? Amy: No, I think you've covered it. I mean, I think this is just such an interesting time for the eCommerce space that, if you talk to someone else next week, they might say something different, and that's what's kind of exciting about it is watching how quickly it's changing, and just really being able to adapt quickly to stay relevant. Stephanie: Yeah, that's why this podcast is so fun. All right. So the lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where you answer each question in a minute or less. So you have a minute, you don't have to rush too much, but it's kind of whatever comes top of mind. Sound good? Amy: Great. Stephanie: All right, I'll start with the easier ones first, and then move to the harder one towards the end. What's Up next on your Netflix queue? Amy: Oh, this is the lightning round. Let's see. Stephanie: When your eight month old and three year old aren't hanging on you. Amy: Exactly. I have to move into my adult entertainment mode which also doesn't sound like the right phrase to use, so that shows that I've been watching a lot of cartoons lately. Stephanie: No more Daniel Tiger for you. Amy: I know I'm just glad that I can get off Disney Plus and over to Netflix. We are big fans of Nailed It, and with the at home baking, I know I'm a season behind on nailed it, so I need to get caught up on that. Stephanie: Cool. What's up next in your travel destinations after the pandemic is over? Amy: Oh, we were supposed to go to Vienna for my husband's 40th, so hopefully we can get that back on the agenda. But, next week I'm going to be driving from the Bay Area to Aspen to see my new niece so- Stephanie: Oh fun. Amy: It will be a road trip. Stephanie: Sounds awesome. What is the best shopping experience that comes to mind that you've had lately? Other than being in a store? Amy: Yes, I have not been in a store lately, nor had a good experience in a store lately. Well, just this week was the first time that I could get an Amazon Fresh order, and I am a pretty heavy user. So they had a lot of issues, so I was really excited this morning at 7:00 AM when my Amazon Fresh order arrived. Stephanie: Yeah, that's game changing. I love seeing them come up and deliver it. I'm like, this is nice. Not having to do it. Amy: Yes. Stephanie: What was the last thing you bought from an ad? If you remember? Amy: The last thing I bought from an ad. That wasn't one of my clients products? Stephanie: Yes, yep, that wasn't one of your clients [inaudible 00:51:31]. Amy: Yes, that I was actually buying as a consumer, let's see. I bought some Hannah Andersen Star Wars pajamas recently for my three year old. They're very cute and available now and actually they did arrive quite quickly so. Stephanie: Awesome- Amy: I'd recommend that for the- Stephanie: ... For PJ's. Amy: Yes for the toddler PJ's, they are great. Stephanie: Yep, I know all about that. All right, and the hard one, what's up next for eCommerce pros? Amy: Oh, that's a big switch from PJ. Stephanie: I know, that's why I saved it for last. Amy: Yeah, I think eCommerce pros are going to be ... Have much higher regard in their own industries, and have a lot more influence. So, hopefully what's next for them is being able to kind of take a greater role in that brand and marketing experience across retailers. I know we've talked a lot about Amazon, but I think it's, how do we integrate eCommerce and into everything that we're doing, and that should be really exciting for the eComm pros. Stephanie: Cool. Love it. All right thanks so much for coming on the show Amy, this has been fun. Amy: Thank you so much. Appreciate you having me.

On the twelfth entry of our See It to Be It podcast series, Amy C. Waninger speaks with OJ Gordon about his entering the real estate industry from the insurance industry and the unique role he's taking on in doing so. OJ also suggests that people interested in getting started or learning more about the industry look into getting involved with the local chapter of their National Real Estate Investors Association (REIA). Check out the show notes to find out more!Click here to find your local National REIA chapter.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. Now, look, every now and then we try to mix it up for y'all. So look, dependency and consistency is really important, but even within those lanes of consistency, you gotta have a little bit of variety, you know what I mean? You don't come home and just eat the same thing every day, or even if you do--you know, you got a meal prep thing--maybe sometimes you put a little red sauce. Maybe sometimes you put a little green sauce. You know, you gotta just, you know, mix it up from time to time. Maybe sometimes you grill it. Maybe sometimes you saute. Maybe sometimes you rotisserie. You gotta just--am I hungry? Yes, I'm hungry, y'all. My bad. Listen, check it out. We have another entry for y'all from our See It to Be It series. Amy C. Waninger, CEO of Lead at Any Level as well as the author of Network Beyond Bias, she's actually been a member of the team for a while now, so shout-out to you, Amy. Yes, thank you very much for all of your work here. And part of her work has been in driving this series called See It to Be It, and the purpose of the series is to actually highlight black and brown professionals in these prestigious roles, like, within industries that maybe we--and when I say we I mean black and brown folks, I see y'all--may not even know exist or envision ourselves in, hence the name of the series, right? So check this out. We're gonna go ahead and transition from here. The next thing you're gonna hear is an interview with Amy C. Waninger and a super dope professional. I know y'all are gonna love it. Catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Hi, OJ. Thank you so much for joining me today.OJ: Hey, thank you for having me. Glad to be here.Amy: Oh, it's great talking to you again. So you're one of my Network Beyond Bias success stories because you and I met at my very first ever industry conference when we were both in Hawaii for the CPCU conference, and you were part of my "I'm gonna talk to three people today if it kills me" program, and we were both sitting front and center at a big session, and I think I turned to you and said, "Hi, you're sitting front and center too. We should probably talk," or something really dorky like that, and then we became friends from that. So you were one of the people that I kind of collected at that conference just because I forced myself to talk, and I'm so glad I did.OJ: And I'm glad you did as well, absolutely.Amy: Well, thank you. So we're gonna talk today about your entering the real estate industry--and the role that you're taking on is a little unique from what most people think of in terms of real estate, so can you tell me first what it is that you do, who you help and how you help them?OJ: Sure, absolutely. So my primary focus is helping people who have real estate problems. So folks who have repairs that they can't make at their home. They have code liens, tax liens, debt that they can't pay off, or for whatever reason they need to get out of the home that they're in and they don't have a solution that traditional real estate can help [?]. So for whatever reason they can't put this house up on the market. They can't make a profit selling that house on the market. Planning unique solutions to help them get to where they want to be.Amy: And so this is--like I said, it's kind of a special situation that you're creating, a special opportunity that you're creating for yourself. Can you tell me how you got involved in this and sort of what about it appealed to you?OJ: Yeah, absolutely. So as you know I work in insurance, and there are many times where you run into a situation where there's something not covered by a policy, and that could be a $10,000, $15,000, $100,000 problem, and when someone has an issue like that and they're not able to get financing or fix the problem, you know, it becomes a safety issue where they're living in a home that's potentially unsafe, they're living in a situation where, you know, no one should be living, and I got into insurance because I wanted to help people, and for the most part we can. There are tons of things that are covered, but in those situations where something isn't covered and, you know, there are people who feel helpless, they don't know what to do, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to [?]. So I started looking into different solutions, and I actually met a couple real estate investors who were like, "What? That's exactly what we're looking for." I was like, "Why would you want this house that has, you know, $30,000 worth of damage? There's a mortgage on it. There's all these issues," and they were like, "This is exactly the situation that we're looking for. We want to help people who are in these situations, because we want to get them living somewhere safe, and we want to take that home and put in a position where someone can live in it again." So it just really appealed to me. You get the opportunity to help people. You kind of get to be thrifty and take something that was broken and fix it, and just, for those reasons, this industry really appeals to me.Amy: That's fantastic. So I recently moved into a new home about three years ago, and it had a lot of problems that we weren't anticipating. You know, we knew it would need a new roof for example. We didn't know that within the first year of ownership we were gonna lose our water heater, our HVAC system, our sump pump, you know, and have problems with some other things, and so I can see how very easily, even without, like, a traditional insurable loss--like, you know, there was no fire, there was no flood, right, it was just wear and tear on a house that had not been maintained for 20 years--and, you know, it was expensive, and we were already sort of maxed out on the mortgage, and so, you know, we had to kind of take out a second mortgage. It's really embarrassing to say, but we had to take out a second mortgage to pay for, you know, several thousands of dollars worth of repairs to a house so we could live in it, 'cause you can't live in a house in Indiana without heat, right? You can't live in a house in Indiana, you know, that's leaking carbon dioxide into your house. So, like, we had real problems, and people don't have a lot of reserves. A lot of people are living paycheck to paycheck. I know that's been my situation for most of my life. You know, it's really easy to get upside down really fast, not just in your mortgage but in your monthly expenses, and then to have somebody who can come in and say, "Hey, I can help with this." You know, "You're not gonna be homeless. You're not gonna lose money on your house." I can see where that would be a really welcome message for folks who are struggling or who are concerned about those things, because I can see how, you know, just a lot of people are just a few thousand dollars from disaster. I know I've been there many times in my life.OJ: Absolutely.Amy: So it's wonderful what you're doing. So what's something--I know you have already alluded to this a little bit, but what's been the biggest surprise to you about this industry? Something that you weren't expecting when you first got into it?OJ: So actually, the thing that surprised me most was, you know, you hear about real estate investors and you're like, "Oh, they're these slimy people and, you know they're just trying to make a quick buck and, you know, they're gonna offer you way less than what your house is worth," and that's kind of the stigma, and there are a few bad people who do those kinds of things, but for the most part everyone I've come across has really just wanted to help people. You know, whether it was me first getting into the industry and wanting to learn, people were willing to take the time out of their day to explain things to me, to walk me through processes. Their main focus is not how much money I've made, it's how many people did I help, and I think when you can go to bed at night knowing that your main focus is how many people we can help, you can sleep well, and it really kind of changed this thing in my mind. I was thinking, "Oh, man, I'm gonna be one of these slimy real estate investors," and really it's not that. You know, there are many times where a person doesn't need a real estate investor. They just need a real estate agent or, you know, they don't need either one of those things. They need help managing their cash flows, right? They're just spending too much on their discretionary spending, and that's taking away from their needs. And just being able to have those conversations--like, I went and got my real estate license also so that I could help those folks who need, you know, a traditional solution. And, you know, I partnered with some credit repair and some budgeting specialists who can talk to people about money management and focusing on taking care of their needs before going out and, you know, spending on things that they want, and that's really been able to help people, and it's just an amazing feeling knowing, "Hey, you know, I might not have made any money today doing this real estate investing, but I've helped someone, and this thing that I've done is gonna benefit them and it's gonna benefit their kids for years to come."Amy: That is wonderful. And it's always a shame to me when somebody says, "I was surprised by how nice people are," or how much people want to help, because we--I think so many industries have a bad reputation, right, that people are only out for themselves, you know, they're snakes in the grass and they're just waiting to attack, you know, and I have found too, as I've shifted my career a few times now, that there are always people willing to help. If your heart's in the right place--and you do have to be careful about it, right? Because there are some people who are out there looking to take advantage, but I would say probably 99% of the people that I've met at different stages of my career, when I'm ready to take on something new or make a jump or learn about something new, 99% of the people I meet are genuinely helpful, genuinely want to have a positive impact and, you know, show me something that will help me move forward. OJ: Right, and I've been fortunate to come across those people and really--in the real estate industry you kind of hear, you know, it's cutthroat, and I have not encountered that. I'm really--maybe I've been lucky. Maybe this is just the norm. But I've been fortunate to meet people who are genuinely interested in helping me to develop, helping me to learn what I needed to know so that I could help more people.Amy: That's fantastic. So if somebody's not in real estate today and they're interested in getting started or learning more, what resources are available to them or where would you suggest that they start?OJ: Sure. I would suggest find the local chapter of the National REIA. Here in Orlando there's CFRI, Central Florida Real Estate Investors. It's a nonprofit group that focuses on real estate investment education, you know? There's an ethics course that you have to go through, and it's really designed to help real estate investors who are starting off in the business start making the right decisions for the right reasons and to be well-informed, and it's a great way to just network and meet with people who have been in the industry for a very long time, meet people who have just started, and kind of be able to pick their brains and partner with them and figure out how you can come together to find solutions for folks. So definitely get involved with the local chapter of your national REIA.Amy: And REIA is a Real Estate Investors Association? REIA.OJ: Right. Correct.Amy: Okay. And so just to be clear about this, you didn't take--I'm gonna pick on Trump University. You didn't take a Trump University $30,000 real estate course to figure out how to do this, right? You went and talked to people who were really doing this every day who are in it for the right reasons, who are highly ethical and willing to help you without thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in investment. Is that correct?OJ: Absolutely correct, and don't think that you have nothing to offer, right? So my background is in insurance, right? Well, if you're buying homes you need insurance, so knowing about the insurance industry--and, you know, I've been an adjuster and I've been writing estimates, so I have, you know, building [trades?] knowledge, and, you know, bringing whatever you have from whatever it is you do can benefit you, right? Like if you're an accountant, well, you're gonna need to be able to keep track of a lot of moving parts and a lot of numbers, so that's a skill that's needed. You know, if you work with your hands--if you're an electrician or a plumber or a carpenter, these are skills that are needed to get these homes up to code and make them safe for people. So, you know, having that trade knowledge is something that's tremendously beneficial. So this isn't limited to, you know, white collar jobs, blue collar jobs, anyone can do this. Amy: That's excellent, and I love that message, that you bring what you have and you find a way to contribute and people are there to help you and guide you and partner with you along the way.OJ: Absolutely. Amy: And, you know, that builds such a sense of community in an industry, when you know that you can't know everything, right? The accountant is probably not gonna be the plumbing guy also or, you know, vice versa. So I think that's a wonderful message, and I think it's important for people to realize that so many skills are transferable from one industry to another, and it sounds like this is an industry where maybe more than usual skills are transferable in.OJ: Absolutely. Amy: That's wonderful. So what are your thoughts on where this is headed in the future? Is this industry gonna need more people, or do you see this as a short-term set of problems that maybe in five to ten years will sort of take care of itself? Like, what do you see as the talent needs going forward? OJ: So just like the market is cyclical, the real estate investing needs are cyclical, and so this isn't something that's going away. People need to live somewhere. Anyone can come across a real estate problem. Like, when I bought this house, Matthew hit in Florida and destroyed, you know, pretty much everything in my backyard, and I did not realize how expensive fencing could be.Amy: And you're an insurance guy. You should know how expensive fencing can be, OJ. Come on! [laughs]OJ: And so I had a huge lot, right--the house sits on a third of an acre, and most of it is the backyard, so I was actually deployed helping folks who had damages at their home and I find out "Hey, you know, your fence is down," and I have a pool so I can't leave holes in the fence because that is a huge liability issue. So I called around to get some folks to kind of get me an estimate, and the first guy called back and said, "You have 321 linear feet of fence and two gates," and I just knew. I was like, "Oh, man. This is terrible," and, you know, he quoted me a price, and, you know, if it hadn't been a catastrophe, that was not something that I would have been able to do. And so, you know, I know how real these problems are, these things that come up are. And the policy I had didn't have a ton of adjacent structures coverage, and so, you know, the policy was only gonna cover a small portion of it anyway, so I had to pay for that fence out of pocket, and if I had to charge that to a credit card and make those payments, that would have been tough for me. And so I realized just how tough it is when those unexpected events happen, and sometimes your insurance can't help you or, you know, the things that you were counting on just don't work out for whatever reason, and it's, again, just something that isn't going away. This is an industry that will be here. As the market changes the needs change, and so we'll be here finding solutions for folks.Amy: So I want to take a step back for a minute because, you know, insurance--and I've worked in insurance for 10, 12 years now, right, insurance is one of those things that people hate paying for and they hate using it, right? Because if you're using your insurance it means something horrible has happened, and it's something that we think, "Okay, I want my premium as low as possible because the threat of having a claim is a remote possibility that we don't really know how to calculate," right? We don't know how to calculate that risk. What are the odds that I'm going to use this? We're afraid to use it sometimes if it's, you know, a minor thing. Who can people--let's talk about prevention for just a second. Who's the best person for someone to talk to when they purchase a house or even if they're renting about what kind of coverage they need and what they should be paying for coverage? Because that sounds like a first step to preventing getting yourself into this sort of a financial crisis to begin with, right?OJ: Right, and so if you have a financial planner, that's someone who you should talk to. There are agents everywhere. Go talk to an agent. You know, I sold insurance when I first got into insurance, and the way I look at insurance is you pay me your premium and I give you peace of mind, right? So I need to make sure that this policy that you're purchasing is going to give you that peace of mind, and so when you're purchasing insurance you shouldn't start off with how much premium you want to pay. You should start off with "How much coverage do I need to have peace of mind?" Right? So if you have a home that would cost $300,000 to rebuild if there was a total loss, total fire, and you only have $50,000 of insurance, you do not have peace of mind. You are not going to be able to rebuild that home, right? And so you just want to talk to your agent and talk to your financial planner. Understand the costs, you know? You don't have to become a builder, right, but understand the costs associated with rebuilding a home or, you know, if you're getting an auto policy, right, if you cause an accident, right, there are financial implications. You could end up liable for thousands of thousands of dollars of someone's medical bills, lost wages. You could be hurt and not be able to work, right? And so these are situations that your agents and your claims professionals come across every day, and, you know, I've been on the liability side, and I've seen where someone, you know, got hit by an uninsured driver and had $10,000 of uninsured motorist coverage but $50,000 worth of medical bills, and, you know, they were trying to keep their premium low, and you're not doing yourself a justice by saving $20 in premium when that $20 in premium is tens of thousands of dollars of additional coverage, and you don't know when you're gonna have an accident. That's why people call them accidents. You don't know when you're gonna have a fire. You don't know when these unexpected events are gonna come. If you're purchasing a policy, don't do it because a state says you have to do it. Don't do it because, you know, your mortgage company is saying you have to do it. Do it because you understand that this policy is gonna provide peace of mind in a time where you need peace of mind. The stress of going through these things, right, is overwhelming sometimes, right? And just having, you know, a professional on the other end who can say, you know, "Hey, I know what you're going through. These are the things that are gonna happen and, you know, here's how we can help," is tremendously beneficial.Amy: Absolutely. And, you know, higher premiums don't mean better coverage. OJ: Right. Read your policy. [laughs]Amy: Read your policy, but not just that. Shop it around, right? Because I had--so when we moved into our house I went through the insurer that I had on our old house, and I won't name names, but we'll call them Company A, and Company A, my premiums on my new house were about $4,000 a year, and my coverage was I want to say about four... no, it was about $500 worth of coverage on just the house, and about a year later I decided I was gonna shop it just to see because it was coming up for renewal, and I got coverage through Company B, and Company B was $1,300 a year, and they estimated the rebuild cost of my house at over $700,000, and that's what they insured me at. So I was paying a lot more--I was paying three times the amount that I could have been for about half of the coverage with the first company versus the second, and it's all about how much do they know about your area, how much do they know about the kind of house that they're insuring, how much do they know about the risks and the likelihood of risk where you live, and how good is their math, right, when they're running those numbers, and so I think it really pays for people to talk to different companies and find out, because if I thought when I bought myself--I didn't pay $700,000 for my house, but if I had thought when I bought my house I needed $700,000 for the replacement cost coverage, I would not have insured it for $450 or $500,000, right? Because the other thing that happens that people don't know--and I don't want to go off on a big insurance thing, but the other thing that happens that people don't know is if you do have a total loss and you're under-insured, you don't get all the money your insurance company promised you at the beginning.OJ: Right. So there's that [?] percent co-insurance and [?] the cash value. Right.Amy: Right, so if you have a $200,000 house, let's say, and you have $100,000 worth of coverage on it, and you have a total loss, your insurance company will say, "Well, you know what, it's a lot more common to have a $100,000 loss on a $200,000 house than it is to have a $100,000 loss on a $100,000 house," right? "So we're only gonna pay 50% of your policy payout, or 80% of your policy payout, because you weren't insured to the full amount of your home." And so not only are you not getting the full value of your home, you're not even getting the full value of your policy at that point. You really want to make sure you've got full replacement cost on your home.OJ: Right. So, again, start with the amount of coverage that you need and then shop based on the coverage that you need. So compare apples to apples, right? 'Cause one company, like you said, could offer you--like, let's say Company A offered you $400,000 worth of coverage for the same $700,000, right, and then Company B said, "Hey, we'll offer you, you know, $700,000 worth of coverage for $1,000," right, you're getting the same coverage, right, but if Company A was saying, "Hey, $1,300 a year for $700,000 worth of coverage," and Company B said, "$1,000 for $400,000 worth of coverage," you're paying a lower premium, but you're also getting less out of the transaction, definitely. Your starting point should be "How much coverage do I need?" And then shop around, and always say "Hey, these are the limits that I want. This is the coverage that I need. How much are you charging for that amount of coverage?"Amy: Yep. Absolutely. Thank you, OJ, so much. That is so helpful, and I see several spinoff topics on this conversation, because I think it is important, and I think people really don't understand this. Insurance is kind of a black box, right? I pay a premium and then I pray I never use it, and we need to be more educated consumers about that, definitely. So I wanted to ask you a little bit, any other recommendations for our listeners about what they might want to learn about this industry or where they might go, you know? Articles or places that they might just show up and read or listen to learn more.OJ: Sure, sure. So there are tons of podcasts out there about real estate investing. There are seminars that happen throughout the year, but some of those seminars are thousands and thousands of dollars. I wouldn't recommend that you pay thousands and thousands of dollars starting off, especially not knowing if you're gonna dive in full-time, right? You don't want to spend $30,000 on something that might be a hobby, right? But just definitely reach out to folks. So if you get involved in your national REIA there are Facebook groups, and just reach out to folks who are in the industry and talk to them. I mean, the best value that I've gotten is just conversations with folks and learning things that I never would have thought about, right? I remember one conversation I was having with a guy named Bill Cook, who's a really successful real estate investor, and we were talking about mobile homes, and it was like, "Well, why would anyone want to buy a mobile home," right? And he shared with me that during the recession that was the best investment that he could make, because people were calling him and saying, "Hey, I need somewhere to rent, and I can't spend $700 or $800 a month. Do you have anything for $450?" And his phone is just ringing and ringing and ringing, and he had nothing in his inventory that he could rent for $700 or $850 a month, and then he got into investing in mobile homes, and he was able to now provide clean, safe housing for folks who couldn't afford $700 or $800 a month, but they could afford $450, and it was a smaller investment for him, right? Instead of buying a stick-built home you buy a mobile home, right, the costs are way different, and so he could make that work in his business model and help folks out who needed somewhere to live. And so, like, just having those conversations and understanding that, you know, you might have a preconception or you might be thinking of something in a way that is gonna prevent you from helping people, and just really having those conversations and being open-minded.Amy: That's fantastic. I would like to ask you to finish this sentence. "I feel included when ________."OJ: The people around me are laughing.Amy: Well, OJ, I can tell you that I am so happy to have you in my network and count you among my friends. I have so much fun talking to you, and I think the world of you. I think that you are on just this meteoric rise, and I expect great things from you. You're somebody that I want to, from the moment I met you I wanted to invest in you personally, because I wanted to see what you would become and what you would do in the world, and so I want to thank you for letting me be a part of your journey and thank you for joining me today.OJ: And I want to thank you for having me. It has been truly amazing getting to know you and seeing all of the wonderful things that you're doing and all of the value that you're bringing and all of the awareness that you're bringing just on the side. We had a conversation about intersectionality, and there was a talk on intersectionality here in Orlando, and I went, and, you know, I figured "I'm a person of color. I kind of understand other folks," and it was astounding how much I didn't know, right? And so just kind of--that conversation with you kind of inspired me to kind of go and learn about different groups and, you know, I actually had a mentor who identifies as a gay man, and I had no idea, and we were having a conversation surrounding intersectionality, and he confided in me, "Hey, you know, I've been a gay man for my whole life, and I don't share that with people because I've been ostracized." And, you know, here's a guy who's, you know, in his 50s, right, who doesn't feel comfortable being himself or expressing himself. And I had known him for quite a while and didn't know this about him, and it was kind of humbling to have him share that with me and realize that, you know, while I may have had my struggles, there are other people who are experiencing different struggles, and, you know, there are conversations that need to be had so that those people are empowered, right? And it was at that talk about intersectionality that, you know, we kind of talked about identity privilege, and I didn't realize how much identity privilege I experienced, and it was really eye-opening that, you know, here I am as a minority, but I experience identity privilege, and there are things that I need to do to empower those who don't have the same identity privilege that I do, and so I want to thank you for just bringing awareness to me and inspiring me to kind of go out and learn more, because it really is important.Amy: Thank you so much for saying that. I think one of those most powerful things that we can do as people, right, not as managers, not as coworkers, not as in whatever role but just as people, is ask questions and give each other the space to share, because it's in those spaces where we learn and we grow and we really build connection. And, you know, in the talks that I give I always tell people, "Look, if you think no one in your inner circle is LGBTQ, there's a really good chance you're wrong about that. And it's not that they're not there, it's that they're not comfortable talking to you about it." And the same goes for a lot of other identities too, right? You know, I know a lot of white people who will say, "Oh, I'm friends with--you know, I have lots of black friends," which is always a sign that they don't of course, but when you ask, like, "Who?" You know, it's usually somebody at work that they kinda sorta know, and, like, "Have you ever talked to them about their experience being black in the workplace?" "Well, no." I'm like, "Well, you're not a very good friend, are you?" [laughs] Wouldn't you want to know what that experience is like for your friend? So no, thank you so much for opening yourself up to those conversations and for sharing so much of yourself with me. I'm just honored to know you, OJ. I really am.OJ: Thank you. The feeling is very mutual, Amy.

Amy C. Waninger fills in for Zach to interview Dr. Robin DiAngelo, author of "White Fragility," about just that. She helpfully unpacks the concept of whiteness and what it means in the context of American society, defines the term white solidarity and discusses its impact on black and brown people at work, and talks about what it looks like for white people to take responsibility for being less fragile. She also touches on the topic of diversity of thought and explains why she believes that it is the way that homogeneous groups protect their hold on institutional power.Connect with Robin on social media! She's on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.Find out more about Robin's book "White Fragility" on Amazon.Check out her website.Read her piece, "Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions," by clicking here.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and look, really good news. First of all--the first thing. The first thing, right, 'cause I have two things. The first thing is my wife and I have welcomed our first child into the world. Her name is Emory, and she is great. In fact, her full name is Emory Jean Nunn. Beautiful. Gorgeous. I don't post pictures of my kids on social media, so if you don't really know me like that, if we're not really close, you're not going to get a picture from me. But that's okay, 'cause you don't have to see her. You know? It's okay. It's kind of like--who doesn't post pictures of their kids? Oh, no, Sia doesn't show her face. But, like, you know how Sia doesn't show her face? Like, that's how I'ma do my kids. Like, you know, you'll never see her face, but, like, she'll be covered up with, like, a lamp or something like that. But anyway, really excited about the fact that I'm a father. Really thankful for my wife. I was in the delivery room when she had her daughter, when she had our daughter, and man, just the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Shout-out to you, Candis. You're beautiful. Really thankful and appreciative to you for making me a girl dad, and yeah, that's the first thing. Like, that's the headline, okay? And then the second thing, far distant but still pretty cool news, we were able to get a very special guest today, and her name is Robin DiAngelo, Dr. Robin DiAngelo, and, you know, it was interesting because I was supposed to be the person who was to interview Dr. DiAngelo, but the date that we had to interview directly interfered with me welcoming my daughter into the world. So I was still in the hospital during my interview date. So I was able to prep Amy C. Waninger, wonderful consultant, subject matter expert, executive coach and member of Living Corporate and founder of her own company Lead at Any Level. She actually facilitated this conversation in my stead, and I just think that's really cool for a couple different reasons. One, Living Corporate has now gotten to the size and scope that we're able to attract a Dr. DiAngelo, but also our team is so capable that, you know, someone can check in the game and I can check out without there being a huge issue, and so shout-out to you, Amy. Thank you so much for facilitating this conversation. I know you all are gonna love this conversation, so make sure you check it out, and I'll catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Robin, welcome to the show. How are you?Robin: Well, I'm overall well in a very uncertain and frightening time.Amy: So let's get right into it, Robin. So before we talk about white fragility, can we unpack the concept of whiteness? Which is something we don't talk about a lot, and what that means in the context of American society?Robin: Yeah. So let's hold that note that you just made, that we don't talk about it a lot, because it's a key way that it stays intact and protected. So I'm gonna use Ruth Frankenberg. She's a sociologist, and she makes three points about whiteness, three dimensions. So it's a location of structural advantage, a position if you will within society, within institutions. It's a standpoint from which white people look out at ourselves, at others, and at society, and it's a set of cultural practices that are not named or acknowledged, right? And so to say that it's a standpoint is to say that it's a significant aspect of white identity, to see one's self as an individual outside or innocent of race, right? Just human. For most white people it's the last thing. [laughs] We'd have to be prompted to include being white in a list of, you know, "What you need to know about me," right? Characteristics of myself, things that have shaped my life. We're rarely going to name race as one of those things and yet, you know, before I took my first breath, the fact that my mother and I are white was shaping the trajectory of my life, and certainly the outcome of my very birth, right? So all of these things come together to create what you think of as whiteness, kind of the water that we interact within.Amy: I like that you called out "it's unnamed cultural norms," and I know in your book, and we'll talk about this in a minute, but naming those cultural norms, it violates the norms.Robin: It's this odd kind of tension if you will, right, that in talking about whiteness, of course, we're centering whiteness, right? We're kind of, you know, as always, positioning white people in the middle of the conversation, but in a very curious way whiteness stays centered by not being named, by not being acknowledged, and so to disrupt it you have to expose it. You have to make it visible. We can see this with patriarchy, right? The kind of unmarked, unnamed norm is "male" and then everything else is named as a specific position so that maleness is just human, and then femaleness is a variation and a deficient one of that, and the same of race. White is human, and everything else is a particular kind, and to be honest, a less than version of that human, and so by never naming that center from which we're proceeding you protect it.Amy: Absolutely. And I want to be sure and call this out right now, because when Zach asked me to stand in for him, you know, he knew that this interview was happening around the time of the birth of his daughter, and he called me and asked me if I would step in and sub for him, and I laughed and I said, "Really, Zach? You want a white woman--the only white woman on your team--to interview a white woman on a podcast for black and brown people?" You know? And I said "Are you sure that's what you want to do?" And he said, "Lean into that, go with it, and don't be afraid to call it out," and so I want to make sure that the audience knows that I know that I'm white, Robin and I both know that.Robin: Oh, I'm acutely aware.Amy: And yet we are recording this, you know, with the intent of sharing this conversation with a predominantly black and brown audience, and so I want to really, like, unpack this and do this justice, because I think we have such a unique opportunity here. You've used several times, in your book and in your talks, the term "white solidarity." Can you explain to us what that term means?Robin: Yeah. Maybe a couple of remarks about what you had just acknowledged, right? First of all, I actually think people of color know what it means to be white, know about dynamics such as white fragility to a degree that I never will, because they've been navigating it their entire lives. I think about it as it comes from me, not at me, right? And as an insider to whiteness, you and I do have something to offer, right, that people of color can't know or understand, and one piece of what we can offer is just to freaking admit to this, right? I mean, that in and of itself, you know, helps with the gaslighting, right? But I also want to be clear that--and I'm pretty sure this speaks for you too--we were not raised to see ourselves as white. Right now us acknowledging that, it's taken, you know, 20 years of my life's work to come to understand that I am white and that it shapes everything that I do. So it's not something that we are set up to understand at all, which of course is part of how it stays protected. And then to not name this, right? Audre Lorde has a beautiful quote about the master's tools. "How do you dismantle the master's house when you only have the master's tools?" So as you and I are two white people having this conversation, of course we're reinforcing whiteness, right? But for me to not use this position, this platform, this voice, this automatic granting of credibility and benefit of the doubt, to not use that to interrupt whiteness is to really be white. [laughs] And I'd like to be a little less white. And I always want to be really clear. What I mean when I say a little less white, I am not gonna tell you or tell white people that the answer to racism is to claim our ethnic roots, right? I'm not gonna say, "Let's all go and be Italian-American and Irish-American." No, for me to be a little less white means to be--to put it bluntly--a little less racially oppressive, a little less racially ignorant and yet arrogant in my ignorance, right? A little less certain and complacent and apathetic and silent and a little more humble and curious and breaking with white solidarity. So that leads us to that question. I see white solidarity as the unspoken agreement amongst white people that we'll keep each other comfortable around our racism, that we will privilege one another's saving face over actually being in our integrity and interrupted racism. So you say something, I'm cringing, right? I'm like, "Ugh," but I don't want to embarrass you so I'm not gonna say anything, plus I'm so relieved that it wasn't me, right? "It was you, not me!" You know, there's that individual piece where I think "Hey, as long as I didn't say it I'm not complicit with it," but of course my silence is complicit with what you just said, right? Yeah, so it's that dynamic of protecting one another, protecting our positions within this system. No matter how we rationalize it, that is what we're doing through white solidarity. Kind of pulling ranks.Amy: Mm-hmm. And there are real consequences for breaking with white solidarity, just like there are real consequences for not being white, and so as white folks we can either choose to remain protected by standing in solidarity with people that we maybe disagree with or have made us uncomfortable or we can choose to shed that protection and shed some of that privilege, but then we're also opening ourselves up to the same kinds of in the moment--not universally, but in the moment the same types of social outcasting we might receive if we were in fact other.Robin: Yes. You know, let's be really clear. There are consequences to white people for breaking with white solidarity. I mean, the term race traitor has an origin, right? And so that's in large part why we often don't break with it, but I also want to distinguish the differences, right? We're in this moment, right? We're at the dinner table. Uncle Bob says that thing. Everybody's cringing. Nobody wants to ruin the dinner. And I often ask, "Jeez, why would interrupting racism ruin the dinner and not interrupting racism not ruin this dinner," right? And yet, you know, i t's gonna erupt in conflict and so we keep quiet. So, you know, there are consequences, such as being dismissed, being trivialized, "You ruined the dinner," but it doesn't rest on a history. It doesn't trigger a history of harm, right, that it does for people of color when they break that silence, right? So that's one piece, and another piece is I am probably not going to lose my job. I am probably not going to be criminalized. I am probably not going to be institutionalized. But those threats and those fears are out there kind of circulating around people of color when they challenge white people, right? This is very real. The consequences are real.Amy: Absolutely. So let's talk about how white solidarity shows up at work, and specifically what are the impacts to black and brown folks at work when white people are engaging in white solidarity?Robin: Well, one of the ways it shows up is privileging white people's feelings over racism, right? So all of this, you know, tiptoeing and tying people in knots to, you know, make sure that white people are comfortable in this conversation, and we have to create a safe space, and we can't go too fast, and, you know, "Let's not call it racial equity. Let's call it D&I and D&E and DEI and everything, you know, vague other than racial justice, right? Because we need to keep white people comfortable," right? Let's get everything on the table. Well, how does that function? By getting everything on the table you can't do justice to anything, and you certainly can't do justice to race, right? So those are some really common ways that institutions privilege and protect white people's delicate sensibilities over the very real pain that people of color in primarily-white organizations are experiencing daily.Amy: Absolutely, and I want to be very clear about this. So it seems like the higher up people are in the organizational food chain, if you will, the more fragile they are, and the more power they have the more fragile they are in terms of conversations about race, the more they cling to that power and weaponize it. Do you think that's a fair take?Robin: Yes. Certainly, I mean, you see white fragility across, you know, wherever you have white people, but the impact of it is greater the higher your status is, right? So my training is in sociology, and it's just been invaluable to me, right? And there's a question that's just never failed me in my efforts, right, to unpack, you know, how do we keep getting these outcomes despite all the things that white people are gonna claim? And that question is not is this true or is this false, is this right or is this wrong, but how does it function? Who does it serve? So how does it function and who does it serve when the people with the most institutional power are the most fragile? Well, they certainly have the most to lose in a way, right? They are protecting their positions and their status. They likely feel the most threatened by a question, and I'm gonna offer they likely feel the most entitled to what they have, and so they have no ability or stamina to withstand questioning what they have, right? I mean, you're up against now idealogies of meritocracy, that "I have what I have because I'm the cream of the crop, and cream rises, and I've worked hard, and, you know, I'm special, and I went to the finest schools." You're questioning all of that idealogy when you challenge those at the top. Maybe there's something more going on here than just the cream rising. And I just have to say I grew up in poverty, so I didn't go to college until I was in my 30s, and I really did think that the smartest kids went to college. And then I got to college and I was dumbfounded, quite frankly, and then I went on to teach college, and I can assure you that the cream does not rise, that the smartest kids don't go to college, and that Ivy League schools are not filled with the best and the brightest. It's about access and opportunity, but that's a hard thing to look at when all your life you've been told how special you are.Amy: Absolutely. Now, in your book you said--and I'm quoting from your book here--"It's white people's responsibility to be less fragile. People of color don't need to twist themselves into knots trying to navigate us as painlessly as possible," and this seems to fly in the face of a lot of, you know, diversity and inclusion work that's being done in corporations right now. You alluded to this earlier, right? We call it everything but anti-racism, we call it everything but racial equity, and, you know, there seems to be a lot of making people comfortable, you know, setting ground rules so no one gets upset when we have these conversations at work, and kind of the prevailing notion or the unwritten, unspoken rule is "Both sides need to put in a lot of emotional labor to make this change happen." So let me ask you - what does it look like for white people to take responsibility for being less fragile? How do we do that?Robin: Let's back up a little bit and talk about that dynamic, right, where everyone's equally responsible. That does not account for the difference in power, in structural and institutional power. So that's like saying, if we're looking--I draw from patriarchy and sexism a lot. I'm a cis woman. You know, she/her pronouns. I'm white. And it's just so clear when I think about it. Well, both men and women have equal responsibility to dismantle patriarchy. Well, we all play a role, but who controls the institutions, right? Who holds that power? And so the weight of that responsibility I believe is in the hands of those who have more institutional power. And people of color of course have a role to play, in the same way that women have a role to play in challenging sexism and patriarchy, but it's a very different role. In a lot of ways it's about developing critical consciousness. It's about surviving the dynamics, supporting each other, getting away--getting space away from white people. I mean, these are the kinds of things that people of color--that have been in my life--have shared that they need to have, right? This is how they can kind of survive this whiteness that they're embedded in all the time, is to surround themselves with people who understand their experiences and share their experiences, right? So what are some of the things that white people can do? We simply cannot get where we need to go from the current paradigm, which is--this is the average white person's definition of what it means to be racist, right? A racist is an individual who consciously does not like people based on race and is intentionally mean to them. Individual, conscious mal-intent across race. That's racism, or a racist, and I don't know that you could come up with a more effective way to protect systemic racism than that definition, because it absolves virtually all white people. Most of the racism--I would say actually all of the racism--I have perpetrated in my life has been unintentional and unaware. That does not mean that the impact of it hasn't been harmful and painful, right? So you pretty much guarantee defensiveness and denial when that is what you think it means to be racist. You know, the average white person--I mean, I've been asking this question for 20 years - "What does it mean to be white?" - and most white people can't answer that question, and that's not benign or innocent or neutral. You know, the collective inability of white people to answer that question creates a hostile environment, because if I can't tell you what it means to be white, I cannot hold what it means not to be white, right? I'm gonna have no critical thinking on that. I'm gonna have no skills to navigate the conversation, and I'm gonna have no emotional capacity to withstand the discomfort of that conversation, and what that means is that people of color in primarily white environments can't be their authentic selves. They can't talk to us about what they're experiencing because things tend to get worse for them, not better for them, when they challenge us, right? So we white people have to stop thinking about racism as just people walking around saying the N word, you know, and going to rallies in Charlottesville. That's real too. That's another conversation, but again, it's the more--I'm gonna put air quotes around it--"subtle," but it's that inability to understand our own racial perspective and positions that creates that climate for people of color working with us, right? And that leads to this idea that racism is their problem, right? I mean, I was raised to see race as what--oh, let's name somebody. Van Jones has race, right? I don't have race, right? I'm just regular, you know? In my day we said things like "I'm just white bread," "I'm just Heinz 57," right? They have race, and so they also have the problems associated with race, and so you get this idea that they'll have to work that out, but thank goodness I'm not a part of that. I'll never forget a student--I used to always start my classes with that question, you know, how has your race shaped your life? And a white student wrote, "Well, I was really lucky. I grew up in an all-white neighborhood, and so I've never learned anything about racism." Amy: They've learned everything.Robin: Just in that one sentence, I mean, we can unpack--I could teach a whole freaking seminar on that one sentence it's so loaded. We could do some beautiful discourse analysis, right? But this idea that we're innocent of race, that white space is unracialized space and that we've absorbed nothing in that space--Amy: And I think that we're not missing anything by being in that space, right? [?] anything that would benefit us by staying in those, you know, all-white neighborhoods that are privileged, you know? It's just such a sadness to me. It's such a sickness that we have, that we think that by excluding ourselves from the conversation we are in some way privileging ourselves, when I believe the exact opposite is true.Robin: Yeah. I actually think the deepest message of all, of white supremacy--and let me just pause for a minute, because that's a charged term for a lot of white people. Yes, it includes people wearing white hoods. You know, that's how I was raised to understand the term, but it's actually a highly descriptive sociological term for the society we live in, one in which elevates white people as the norm for humanity, a lot of what we've already been talking about, and I think one of the deepest messages of white supremacy is this idea that there's nothing of value lost in white segregation, and in fact, that segregation is what we use to define that space as good. The whiter it is, the more it will be perceived as "good," valuable, safe. The profundity of that message is so deep. I just wish white people would just sit with it for a minute. "Wow," right? To call white segregated space good, right? We just came out of February, which was Black History Month, where we talk about the tragedy of enforced segregation of blacks in the Jim Crow South, and every day we talk in celebratory terms about white segregation. Those are very deep messages that we have to look at. Again, it's not the N-word for somebody like me, but it's that. Amy: Right, it's the coded language of good schools, good neighborhoods, low crime, you know, nice areas of town, good parts of town, right?Robin: Mm-hmm. "Oh, I'm shocked that crime happened here." Well, where is it supposed to happen?Amy: Right, or we don't even define it as crime when white people do it. White collar crime is its own kind of crime because certainly people who are in white collar jobs who are white people are not engaged in normal crime, right? Normal crime is for other people. And yeah, the vernacular around this, we could go on forever, but I want to get to Zach's questions because he's my boss. Robin: Yeah. Well, I want to say something about the ground rules. You mentioned ground rules, right? 'Cause we're talking about corporate settings. So you have these seminars and workshops and, you know, these guidelines for having a conversation, but they always assume equal power relations, right? There's no one set of guidelines that will ensure a quote-unquote "safe space" for everybody. Usually what they are all about is niceness, and a culture of niceness is just kind of deadly in terms of racial justice because challenging racism, naming racism, will not be perceived as "nice," right? "You've hurt my feelings," you know? "How could you assume I would be racist?" And so as long as everybody has to be nice, we can have no conflict or no strong feelings and we can't express ourselves in any kind of strong way. And so usually those ground rules function to stifle authentic conversation, authentic expression of pain that people of color are often in in primarily white spaces, particularly primarily white-controlled spaces.Amy: Well, it becomes another form of gatekeeping that white people do on conversations that don't center them. And so we keep those conversations to a minimum, we make sure that we reframe it so that it's palatable for the people that pay our salaries and that sort of thing, and, you know, I think to me one of the things that we can do as white people is to put ourselves less often in gatekeeper roles where we are, you know, less responsible for things like merit decisions or, you know, pay decisions, promotion decisions, content or tone decisions, right? Where we're not policing those things, we are handing that off to someone who is, you know, superbly capable of doing it from a completely different perspective, and I think especially in those kinds of conversations where we're in racial equity conversations, I think it's incumbent upon white folks, just like when you're in a performance review and your boss gives you feedback you don't like, you don't argue with them and cry and throw things and, you know, tell them, you know, "I can't believe you thought I did a bad job on that report," right? We don't do that because it would be ridiculous to do that in any other professional context, but then somehow we put ourselves in the position of gatekeeping on those conversations again through the weaponizing of our emotions in those conversations.Robin: Yeah, it reminds me of--as a woman in a male-dominated environment, I am not going to cry. No way. I might go in the bathroom and cry, but I am not gonna cry in front of those men. And yet, white women, how free do we feel to cry in front of people of color when charged with racism, right? When held accountable for our behavior, which is very revealing about our understanding of where the power lies, right? What is the difference between my tears in each of those contexts, right? And so your question about, you know, "How do we get there?" And I was saying we can't get there from the current paradigm, right? We just have to start from the premise, white people have to start from the premise, that we have been thoroughly indoctrinated and socialized into white supremacy and into ways of seeing and being that uphold white supremacy, and once you start there it's actually incredibly liberating, right? It's just transformative. I can stop defending, denying, debating, you know, and start just getting to work trying to unpack, well, how is that indoctrination into white supremacy manifesting in my life, in my work? It's such a different question because it rests on a very different premise, right? And so when you talk about white people kind of turning over some of those decisions in the workplace, I want to put in a plug here for, you know, if you're gonna put people of color on committees and, you know, token representation, they need to be paid more for that work, right? They need to be compensated for the psychic, emotional and intellectual labor that they're doing and the expertise that they're bringing that the rest of us don't have, right? And tart acknowledging--Amy: And not just one person of color on that board. You need a critical mass of people who can, you know, almost be a block of voices, because one person cannot do that work alone. I mean, that's violent to put one person in that position.Robin: Yes, yes.Amy: So let me ask you this while we're on the subject of corporate America and the way that we talk about diversity concepts. You know, we hear a lot about--so there are a couple places I want to go with this. The first is "Well, what about diversity of thought?" And I have so many things I'd love to save about that, but the other is, you know, this focus on gender as if gender equity is one thing. And so I want to leave that there and kind of get your response to those two terms. Robin: So we might as well just go for it. Diversity of thought is ridiculous - ridiculous. That is the way that homogeneous groups protect their hold on institutional power, right? "Yeah," you know, "There's all kinds of things," you know? "Somebody likes soccer and somebody likes volleyball." There are many forms of difference between us, but those seem, like, personality kinds of things, right? Race is very, very real. Racism is very, very real. That lack of representation is very real. We have to get real about it, right? Hold on, though. The other piece you asked--Amy: The gender equity piece.Robin: Yeah, I have to be careful here. So I think there's--Amy: Stop there for a second. I want to know, why do you feel you have to be careful there?Robin: Because there's a lot of social power behind the push for acknowledging gender binaries and gender diversity as you call it, and I do believe that there's a reason that that has spread. Look, I do not want to downplay patriarchy and sexism and heterosexism and transphobia. I don't want to downplay those things, and I think there's a reason that that has flourished in a way that you're gonna see on people's signatures their gender pronouns, but you are not going to see their race, and I'd like to see their race on there too. I'd like if, before we start a meeting, we go around the room, we say our gender pronouns, sure, but we also say our race, so we start noticing who's at this table and who's not at this table, you know? What decisions are being made at this table and who are they going to impact in what ways, and how do we know, and who's missing? So I think, again, I want to acknowledge that all of those variations of that oppression are real, but there's still a reason that that has become more widespread and acceptable, and I think it's because everyone pretty much knows somebody who is queer or non-binary. They're your brothers, your sisters, your family members, your cousins. So there's a human face to that, but most white people live profoundly racially segregated lives, and so we don't see that humanity in the same way.Amy: I think that's fair, and I think, you know, a lot of the gender equity focus, like, when a lot of companies do diveristy initiatives in their companies or inclusion initiatives, they start with gender because gender seems the most safe thing or the most relatable thing, and typically the beneficiaries of those initiatives are white women only, because what works for white women in corporate settings doesn't work for black women, Indian women, you know, Chinese-American women, indigenous women, Latinx women, right? And it's another way, I believe, of reinforcing the primacy of whiteness in the space as opposed to really making gains broadly in diversity and inclusion. Would you agree with that?Robin: Well, I see a lot of white gay men in positions, you know, head of diversity and equity in organizations, and I also notice that many of them have no racial analysis. So again, you want to use your oppressed experience, right, your oppressed identities, as a way in, not as a way out, right? So how can you use that understanding to see, "All right, well, where am I complicit in somebody else's oppression?" And I move back to gender and patriarchy a lot because I've thought about it most of my life. I was in my 30s before I ever considered how I was complicit with somebody else's oppression. So great, a white, gay man who has a strong anti-racist analysis? That's fantastic, but without that you're just gonna reproduce the same kind of daily agony for the people of color in your organization.Amy: Right, absolutely. Absolutely. And I want to get into this just a little bit, Robin, because, you know, we do similar work in that we are trying to, you know, build a more equitable culture, build more inclusive cultures within organizations, within our communities, within our country. You know, there is this fine line that people like you and I walk in speaking truth to power and getting paid, and I'm curious, because I know that that's a struggle not just for us, right? And we are maybe a little--it's maybe a little easier for us to do that because of our whiteness, but folks who really want to speak truth to power but have value to offer an organization and, you know, expect to be paid for their work, how do you balance that? What advice do you have for folks who are out there every day kind of balancing on that razor's edge?Robin: Yeah. Well, the first thought is relating to--we were just talking about who tends to be in these positions, right, and I want to be really clear that I don't think it's automatically people of color should be leading all of the diversity efforts. I think that's also problematic, right? We put them in those positions. We'll cover everything else, and we'll give them race work, even as they're not going to be listened to and heard in the same way. So it's not a given, right? So again, a white person in that position with a very strong anti-racist analysis can be incredibly effective, in some ways more effective in certain areas. My ideal is interracial teams that you actually put the resources behind, an interracial team at the head of your diversity initiative, because each member of that team can bring something and challenge something differently than somebody else, right? So I used to be a co-director with a black woman of equity at an organization. You know, there were things that I could push that she couldn't, and there were things of course that she could bring that I couldn't, and so that's for me a much more ideal than any just one person, 'cause that's a setup, you know, regardless. How I have reconciled that dilemma, right, in various ways. So first of all, sometimes people say "You're being paid for racism," and I would basically say, "Well, I'm being paid for anti-racism." My work is anti-racism, and we could make a case that everybody--if you are not anti-racist, you are racist, right? So as Ibram Kendi beautifully says, "The opposite of racist isn't not racist. It's anti-racist." So in a society in which racism is the norm, not an aberration, all of us are contributing to that if we're not explicitly challenging it, right? So the one way that I think about what I do, when I come into an organization and I give a presentation on whiteness and white fragility, I'm tilling the soil, if you will, as an outsider, as somebody with a lot of credibility behind my name and as a white person, there's a way in which I can challenge white people that I couldn't if I was inside that organization and that people of color are not gonna be able to, so let me come in and do that really hard, say that really hard stuff and soften the soil in a way that then people can hear the people of color inside that organization, right? And the white people inside that white organization. That is one of the ways I think about what I do, but let me name some of the ways that I seek to be accountable. I donate a percentage of my income to racial justice organizations that are led by people of color. I channel work to people of color. I promote the work of people of color. I have a platform to do that. When I am presenting more than a few hours I co-present in an interracial team. I have white people in my life with a strong anti-racist analysis that I consult with and work through my feelings with. You know, I'm not saying I don't get called in and have feelings about it and need to work through those feelings, but I also have a circle of people of color coaches who have agreed to coach me, to be there for me if I need to work through something, and I pay them for their time. That is critical. It is not something that I turn to them and expect for them to give me. And this is another challenge in organizations, is that labor is just expected with no sense of compensation. So I pay them for that time. Now, occasionally the people of color in my life say, you know, "We're friends, I'm not taking your money," and I say, "Great. I'm donating for the hour you just spent with me to a racial justice organization." I also pay rent in Seattle to the Duwamish people, who are the original peoples. This is the ancestral territories of the Duwamish, and I pay rent to the Duwamish people because they have yet to be federally recognized in the Seattle area. So I could go on, but those are some of the ways I seek to be accountable.Amy: Thank you for that, and, you know, I think that as we look at, you know, it is so easy to not be held accountable, right, as white people in this work and in this society. So one of the things that I've noticed--and Zach and I were talking about this the other day--you know, if certain things that I wrote in my book or that you wrote in your book that you say to white people, you know, is really ground-breaking, right, in an all-white room. Like, people are like, "Oh, my God. That's so radical. I can't believe we're having this conversation," right? They've never heard it before, you know? They've gotten to their mid-fifties and they've never heard somebody say some of these things before, and this is dinner time conversation for black families, right? And so one of the things I've noticed is a lot of times white people can't hear it if a white person doesn't say it, but--and I'll say that out loud, I'll say that in a group of people, and, you know, I'll see women of color especially nodding their heads, but, you know, how much of this work do you feel you're creating something new versus--and I don't mean this as a criticism. I think about this a lot myself. How much of this is you're creating something new versus you're taking what's being said around dinner tables in black families every day and just saying it in a different space where no one's heard it before?Robin: Yeah. Well, so the first thing I think about is that there's simply no clean space. In other words, there's no place outside of this. This is always going to be a [both and?]. You know, as we seek to de-center whiteness, we're centering whiteness, right? Again, we're in it. We're inside this construct. So you do your best to be as accountable as you can, but I don't know that we can ever get it exactly right, right? And the way that I think about what I do, absolutely, years and years and years of mentorship from people of color, years and years of being in rooms and hearing and bearing witness to the testifying of people of color, you know? Years of studying the works of people of color and years of self-analysis, self-reflection, talking to other white people. I do have the ability to take fairly high-level academic concepts and make them very accessible, right? I did put language to something that pretty much everybody recognizes, right? I mean, even people who are fragile around whiteness kind of recognize once you give language to it, and a lot of people of color have said, "Thank you for that language. I absolutely see this. I've dealt with it. I didn't even know how to express it," right? So I have something to contribute, and yes, I stand on the shoulders of countless people of color, right? I can't live with not expressing this, right? I can't live with being silent because of those dilemmas. I try to be as much in my integrity as I can. I try to get it as right as I can as often as I can by as many as I can. [laughs] And I'll never get it right by everybody. It's way too loaded. It's way too charged. It's way too messy.Amy: Absolutely, and I think too in the work of anti-racism it's a moment by moment choice for so many of us, right? That we're either actively deconstructing racism in this moment or we are actively not, and it's something that, coming from a place of privilege, we can choose to do or not, right? We don't have to do that work. No one will think less of us if we don't except that we'll think less of ourselves for those of us who are committed to this kind of thing, but at the same time it is--there's a balance there, right, of taking up space when it's needed and taking up space that we should or should not, and I think there's a lot of calculus that we need to do there, and I see you doing a lot of that in your work. Robin: Yeah. You know, I have a piece called "Nothing to Add: The Role of White Silence in Cross-racial Discussions." You know, I think silence from a position of power is a power move, right? So that's not the alternative either, and one of the things that I'm arguing in that piece is that any way that I engage that is a default, right, like, "Okay, I'm not gonna say a word in this conversation," right? "I don't want to get it wrong. I don't want to make a mistake. I don't want to dominate." Whatever my rationale is, "I'm just gonna listen." Or the other end, right? "I'm gonna speak up whenever I feel moved to speak up." Those are defaults. Those are not "I'm paying attention in every moment, and in each moment I'm asking myself what's happening in the room right now? What are the dynamics at play? What is my position within those dynamics? And given that, what would be the most strategic, constructive, anti-racist move?" And sometimes it would be silence, and sometimes it would be speaking up, and I'm not going to get that call right by everybody in the room, but that's the call I need to be constantly making. Paying attention and, to the best of my ability, using my position in strategic, anti-racist ways, right? Any default is problematic, I believe. Any kind of just--Amy: I agree, yeah. Because once you stop making conscious decisions, you're making decisions without realizing it, and making decisions without realizing you're making them is always a problem.Robin: Well, they tend to function for your own comfort. The "I'm not gonna say a word in case I make a mistake," come on. You don't want to take any risks. You know, you're looking to save face. "I don't want to show myself," right? "Lest you think I'm racist," and I always like to laugh. "Look, I already think you're racist, all right? I start from that premise." Let me just go there - all white people are racist in the sense that all white people have been socialized into a racist world view because we were born into a racist culture in which it's embedded, and we're back to just start from that premise and then get to work trying to impact how you were socialized into it and how you might challenge it rather than this constant denial, you know? That just because you don't want to be means you aren't.Amy: Right, absolutely. So I want to go back to this notion about people of color twisting themselves into knots to avoid, you know, weaponized whiteness so to not be punished. So recognizing of course that we're both white women having this conversation, you know, what do you think is left for people of color to do?Robin: Honestly? Like, survive this, navigate this in as healthy a way as possible. You know, I always feel a little uncomfortable, a little sheepish around telling people of color what is there for them to do, but Glenn Singleton, he is a black man who founded Courageous Conversations, and I've done a couple presentations for him at his conferences, and he has, like, a principle that everybody has a role, and he pushes me to speak to that very question. So with Glenn, I'll imagine him standing beside me saying "Go for it, Robin." [laughs] I mean, my work is to challenge white people, right? But there are a couple of very sensitive questions I do offer people of color, and one is what does anti-blackness look like among your group? Because anti-blackness runs across the spectrum of race, and anti-blackness runs amongst people of color. It runs amongst black people. So what does it look like amongst your group, and who have you aligned with? In particular for Asian heritage people who are often more likely to be comfortable for white people. This does not mean they don't experience racism, but the reality is that white people are more comfortable, in some ways because of our particular racism, because of the invisibility, some of the stereotypes we project onto Asian heritage people, but nonetheless, we are more comfortable overall, right? So I would offer that question to Asian heritage people in the workplace. Who have you aligned with? Have you taken up with the struggles of African-Americans in this country or have you aligned with whiteness, and what have been the rewards, and what has been the price that you paid for that alignment? So there's that work. There's the work of challenging the messages, you know? For white people, we need to challenge the messages of internalized superiority, and there's an opposite message for people of color to look at, and also just, like I said earlier, to get away from white people and build community in people of color spaces, you know? I'm a big believer in affinity work in the workplace, right?Amy: Mm-hmm, yes, and I would like to add to that if I may. I think it's incumbent upon people of color, when you find an ally, hold us accountable.Robin: Oh, yes. Thank you. Mm-hmm.Amy: Because we need that, right? We don't always see, and we may not be holding ourselves to a high enough standard, and, you know, if you have someone you consider a true ally, please, you know, call me on it. I want to know. And, you know, I will do my best to process it in a way that doesn't involve you, right? [laughs] But, you know, please hold us accountable as allies in this work, because, you know, if we aren't getting it right, we have, you know, a pretty poor shot of helping anyone else get there.Robin: Yeah, and what I would add is that then we also have to help each other as white people to hold each other accountable, because it's a tall order for people of color, right? Not only, you know, are there risks that we will respond well, but, you know, we're all inside this construct, so in the same way that, sure, I can seek as a woman to hold men accountable for sexism, half the sexism that's going around me I don't even see because I've been conditioned to collude with it, right? So if you just put it on my shoulders--you know, sometimes you can imagine a man saying, "Hey, just let me know if I do anything sexist," and then he's covered, right? Off he goes, and now I get to carry that, right? So we have to watch that piece of it, right, where a lot of white people will say, "Hey, let me know if I do anything," and now we can relax because they'll let us know. Well, that's a pretty tall order, right? So we have to do our work and hold each other accountable too, develop the capacity so that I can also call myself in, I can realize that I just stepped in it. I'm not completely dependent on people of color helping me with that.Amy: Absolutely, and, you know, there will be times when we step in it with each other, and there will be times we step in it when we're not around for each other, and so I think it's a team sport here, accountability is. So, you know, it's election year again here in 2020, and, you know, Zach says, you know, we're gonna relive the same frustrations and feelings of hopelessness and ostracization that black and brown folks felt in 2016. In addition to that, we have generational shifts coming in the workforce. We have a lot of changing demographics, right? We're at a tipping point demographically in this company in a lot of different fronts. Do you see this as a unique point in time, and if so, what are some things that leaders can do to capitalize on this moment in history to build more equitable outcomes for the future?Robin: Yeah. I think yes, I see it as a unique time in the sense that it's so much more explicit than it's been in a while. So what this is helping us see is that history is not just this arc of progress the way that I was taught to see it, that it's cyclic, and that you can never rest and never be complacent, right? So even the Voting Rights Act has almost been dismantled, something that you'd like to take for granted but you cannot take for granted. So this kind of "We're post-racial because we had Obama as a president," we're done with that nonsense, right? I mean, nobody pretty much that I'm working with is in denial. It was actually harder to do my work during the Obama years because so many people used that as their evidence that we were post-racial. Well, you know, we're so far from post-racial right now, so the explicitness of it, the permission that I actually think the resentment about Obama brought to the surface--it was always simmering under there, but there wasn't permission to express it, you know, post-civil rights. Well, you know, from the highest point we have that permission now, so that has exposed both the enduring nation of white hostility, white resentment, the cyclic nature of history so that we can never be complacent. And in the same way that it has made it more acceptable to be openly racist, it has put on--I never thought in my lifetime, on a debate stage, people would be talking about reparations for African-Americans, right? So there are also ideas that have been given air and legitimacy that we could never bring up before. So it's kind of this push/pull, right, that's going on. As far as the generational shift, I think one of the things we're up against with younger people is they believe that they are post-racial because "Oh, I'm fine with black people. I was on a sports team in school and it's no big deal," and so they have this really simplistic idea, again, of what it means to be racist, and one of the things that stood out to me--I did a year of intensive workshops for a large tech company that for some legal reason must remain unnamed, and what really struck me was that most of the employees there were under 30, and when we would have these workshops and people of color, black people in particular, would share the pain that they were in, their white colleagues under 30 years of age were dumbfounded. They were, like, flabbergasted that their colleagues were in so much pain. They simply had no idea, which means they have no critical thinking and they have no skills and they have no awareness even as they say, you know, they party on the beach with their black friend. That doesn't mean they're able to engage with what their friend is experiencing. This is a challenge we have with the new generation. And so organizations have to truly demonstrate that they're committed to this. They have to put some teeth behind their claim that they value diversity and take a stand, right? If you're gonna work for this company, you have to be able to engage with some complexity and nuance in this conversation, and if you can't you are not qualified to work here. If it was a qualification to be able to engage with some nuance in conversations about race, most of the people leading the organizations that are listening right now wouldn't have their jobs. Let's be honest. It doesn't mean you can't gain that, but you better show some capacity to gain that nuance and complexity or you're not qualified to work here. That's what I would love to see in corporate America.Amy: That would be beautiful. And with that, Robin, I thank you for your time. I thank you for joining us on Living Corporate. On Zach's behalf, I'd like to thank you for being here, and I know that he's thrilled to be home with the baby right now, but I know that he was so disappointed that he had to pass this off, so. It has been an absolute honor and privilege to talk to you today. Thank you so much.Robin: Well, you are so welcome.

Following a couple of months out of the spotlight, Beto O'Rourke is back and he's brought all of his supporters with him! Powered By People is Beto's new initiative that he is using to help get out the vote in Texas. On this week's episode of Looking Ahead to Beto Days, Beto O'Rourke sits down with Ryan to discuss his presidential campaign, his new initiative, and some other fun questions! We know you have been just dying to know who, if Cory Booker plays Beto in his biopic, who will play Amy? Well, we've got your answer right here! Tune In!

In our fifth See It to Be It podcast interview, Amy C. Waninger chats with Barrington Salmon, an award-winning journalist and writer with over 30 years of experience in the newspaper journalism field. They talk a bit about how he got into journalism, and Barrington offers a few pieces of advice for aspiring professionals looking to break into this industry. These discussions highlight professional role models in a variety of industries, and our goal is to draw attention to the vast array of possibilities available to emerging and aspiring professionals, with particular attention paid to support black and brown professionals. Check out some of the SI2BI blogs we've posted while you wait for the next episode!Connect with Barrington on LinkedIn or Twitter!Read the blog post here!Visit our website!TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach Nunn. Now, listen here. Y'all know what we're trying to do. We're trying to build, inspire, encourage, empower, all on a platform that affirms black and brown experiences in corporate America. And it's interesting because as I came up just kind of coming into myself as a professional, I didn't see a lot of people that looked like me in consulting. I didn't see a lot of people that looked like me in human resources either. But when I would come across someone who looked like me doing something I wanted to do, it gave me encouragement. It gave me a stronger sense of hope that I could do it too, and so it's with that that we're really excited to talk to y'all about and bring you another entry, actually, into our See It to Be It series. So the next thing you're gonna hear is an interview between Amy C. Waninger, a guest on the show, a member of the team, and the author of Network Beyond Bias, and a leader who just happens to be an ethnic minority. In fact, yo, Sound Man, give me some air horns right HERE for my leaders. [he complies] Yo, and give me some more air horns right HERE [he complies again] for the See It to Be It series. So catch y'all next time. I know you're gonna enjoy this. Peace.Amy: So Barrington, thank you for joining me today. I am so glad to have you here. Barrington: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.Amy: And you are a journalist, and specifically a journalist within black media and black reporting, and so I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how you got into journalism and what about it appealed to you.Barrington: I'd always [known] since I was, like, four years old, that I wanted [to write.] I was fascinated with words, fascinated with the concept of putting thought to paper, and so I knew that I wanted to write. I didn't know it was gonna be journalism. So I went to Miami-Dade Community College and Florida State. I did three years, like, three-and-a-half years of international relations, and then I was like, "Why am I even doing this?" So I said, "I need to find something that I'm gonna enjoy" and that I was hopefully gonna get paid for. So I went to a small newspaper that was in Tallahassee called the Florida Flambeau. Tallahassee had, like, the first hurricane in its history, like, recorded history, like, in... it was, like, in '84, and I had a friend who went out to the cape because he had never experienced a hurricane and he almost got blown away. So I wrote the story, and when I brought it back the guy said to me "I don't believe you wrote this." So I told him "I'll sit in the office, you give me a topic to write, I'll find people and do the research and do a story." And when I did that he was like, "Oh, well, I guess you really wrote it." [laughs] So I worked for them in the evenings, and public relations always paid more, so I've always gone back and forth between public relations and journalism. So I got a job with the Department of Labor, the Florida Department of Labor, as a writer. So I worked for them in the morning and worked for the newspaper in the evening. I finally got to a point where I got a job with the Tallahassee Democrat, which is the main paper in Tallahassee, and I've been doing that for 34 years. It's only been in the past maybe ten years that I've really begun to focus on--and it wasn't even intentional. I kept on pitching my stories and pitching ideas and trying to get a foot in, a leg in, somewhere, 'cause it really is about who you know. You have lots of talented people running around who nobody knows about who can't get a leg, a foot in the door, that type of thing, and so you have to first be persistent. You know, my sister said to me "I couldn't do your job because you always have people telling you no." "No, I'm not interested in talking to you. No, get out of my face. No, I don't like the media." And I said, "Rejection is a part of what I do." So you gotta have thick skin, and you gotta be persistent, and every now and then you have to find an angel, because I went to the Democrat--I sent in applications seven times, and they told me no seven times, and the eighth time I went in and I said to the managing editor, "I need for you to give me a chance, because I need--" I was getting ready to get kicked out of the job at the other [?] I was working for because I was really clashing with the guy who was my boss. And he said, "Give me some of your stories." He called me back and he said, "I believe I'm gonna give you a chance." And that's how I became a journalist.Amy: That's wonderful that you had somebody in your corner that believed in you.Barrington: Yeah, and I've been fortunate that way. I've met people who see something and who have--you know, they've gotten an opportunity and they're paying it forward. So yeah, and if you--you know, for the young people who might be thinking about doing this, you've gotta read. You've gotta read everything. You've gotta read every day. You've gotta read incessantly to keep up with what's going on, of course, you know, in this digital age. Watch the news. I don't like American news, because there are 204 countries in the world, and most times you don't hear anything about the ones--particularly, you know, countries in Africa, African countries or countries with people who aren't white unless it's a drought or a famine or a war. And there's so much more. Like, one of the things that has been news that isn't really news here is that ten of Africa's 54 countries have the fastest-growing economies in the world. Africa is the youngest continent in the world. The young people I think under 18 is the highest of any continent in the world, so they are the future, and these young people in a lot of cases are doing with much less than people do here, and they're doing fantastic things in technology. My job has always been really to let people know what's going in the world, why it's important, why they should care, especially black people. So I write--I used to write for seven newspapers. I'm now down to four, because the same type of [?] you see in--I don't know if you know, but last week more than 1,000 people got fired from Buzzfeed and Huffington Post and Gannett. And so journalism has been reeling since the internet really took off. Amy: I was gonna ask you about that. We went from a 24-hour news cycle to an on-demand news cycle, and I think journalism has seen a lot of disruption in the last 10, 20 years.Barrington: And I keep on thinking I'm crazy because "Why am I still doing this?" But it's what I love. I've been in several instances where I've been at a crossroads in my life, and I've always been like "I don't know what else I want to do." So I'm still [?]. And you find different ways. I write for--I do web content. I write speeches for non-profit CEOs. I got married a month ago, and my wife is a filmmaker, and she's into all of this other stuff. She has a radio show on WPFW. So we did our first co-hosting thing last week. It was pretty cool. I was scared to death. [laughs] But we're gonna do that. So, you know, you just gotta find ways to--you gotta adapt. Adapt or die. So I'm adapting, always looking for opportunities. The thing is is that when you put in the work and you're able to attain a certain level of excellence, if you want to call it that, and you show consistency in what you do, people are gonna see it. Now, I don't need to be, like, one of them dudes in New York, like, on NBC and that type of stuff. I don't like the limelight. I've always been content to kind of be in the background and do what I do. So that's what [?].Amy: That's wonderful. So can you tell me about a story or the impact of a story that you're particularly proud of in your career?Barrington: I got called by a lady who's a program coordinator for the College of Health, the Annenberg College of Health in health communications at USC in California, and she said, you know, "We're looking for some fellows. If you have a good idea, give us an idea, and if we like it we'll, you know, give you a stipend and bring you out for a week to talk to other fellows and learn some things, how to develop and push your story." So gentrification has been ravaging Washington, D.C. and its surrounding areas. We've seen people like me, who are medium-income people, middle-income people, we can't afford to live in D.C., you know? $5,000 rents, million-dollar houses, $800, 900, 1 million dollars for a house--a regular house. You know, nothing fancy [?]. And so it's a phenomenon that has raged across the U.S. San Francisco. Oakland is out of control. You know, wherever people are living in Silicon Valley, you have the techies making millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they can afford to live, and other people are living in their cars or living on the streets or having to find somewhere else to live. I've moved about four or five times in the Washington, D.C. metro area, because it's like a ripple. You know, I lived in a community called Hyattsville, and five years ago it was about maybe $600 or $700 a month for rent. When I left it was $1,300 a month. And so that's the type of stuff that we're dealing with. I have a friend in Indianapolis, and she's always like "Come on out. At least you can afford a house out here." Amy: Exactly. Exactly what I was thinking, yes, because I live in Indy. [laughs]Barrington: Yeah. So I did a three-part series on the health effects of gentrification on displaced D.C. residents, and it's gotten a lot of buzz. I went to a friend's play. The play was about gentrification, and the director asked me to come up and talk to and field questions from the audience about, you know, my stories, my research, and the effects. I was invited to Anacostia Smithsonian Museum to give a presentation about it. And, you know, it's just something that is on people's mind, and people are living through the experience. So I don't know if that--I think the greatest thing that reporters love is when you do a story and there's a policy change [and] the policy makers or the elected officials see it, and it hasn't gotten to that because there's so many moving parts and it's so complex, but it's one that I'm very proud of.Amy: That's wonderful.Barrington: It took me 18 months to do it, and I think I interviewed about 30 people. I read about 100 stories and research paper and everything. It took forever, but I'm very proud of what I did.Amy: That's wonderful. So would you liken the health effects or the--and pardon me if there's ignorance in this question, but it almost sounds like a refugee situation. Like, what we're seeing in other parts of--Barrington: Yeah, it is. It is, because D.C. has [lost] about 60,000 residents in the past maybe five years, long-time residents, native Washingtonians who have had to move because they couldn't afford it. I've talked to researchers and scientists, and they talk about the fact that the stress and the anxiety of trying to find somewhere to live, the stress of trying to find the money if you decide to stay there, the clash of cultures--because D.C. used to be 72% black. It's now 49%, and the folks who are coming in are mostly white, mostly young, and the biggest complaint that residents have is that these folks come in and they want to change the names of streets. They want to change the names of communities. They want to erase and whitewash the history that is D.C. So that has been problematic. For example--let me give you an example. It's a common thing in D.C. where black people live to sit on the stoop, especially in the summer time when it's hot. These guys are calling the police because they don't want them sitting on the stoop. On Sundays it's always been a wink and a nod that if people were going to church, you could double-park in front of the church instead of having to park down--you know, a mile down the road. They have been calling the police to move people's cars. So there's a disconnect and a lack of respect for the folks who have been there before. And economically, I mean, the D.C. government has a bunch of programs to help fire fighters, teachers, and other middle-income people to stay in D.C., because without, you know, things like [?], which is a housing program where you can get, like, $10,000 for a down payment and extra money if you live in D.C. So there are different things that they're trying to do to get people to stay, because you have folks who--there are cops and fire department people who live in West Virginia, who drive in New Jersey, who commute to work, which to me is crazy. Amy: That's ridiculous, yeah.Barrington: So think about the stress. Think about the wear and tear. It's just nuts. Amy: Well, and everybody--I mean, I think there's some consensus that if you want effective law enforcement in your communities, law enforcement needs to come from and reside in those communities, right? Not the kind of job you want to outsource.Barrington: Yeah, and that's been a big issue, because folks complain, you know? "These guys don't live here. These guys don't know who we are. These guys don't care who we are. They don't respect what we've done here. They just look at us as people, black people, more than not likely to have committed a crime." [laughs] And so that's where they're coming from. So it's a multi-faceted complex, crazy issue, and as long as money is the god of this country it will continue, because, you know--in the same way that we're looking at... like, I worry about automation. AI, automation, man versus machine. After a while, you know, people need to start trying to figure out "What are we gonna do when automation takes over?" Because it's much cheaper. So they hire the outsourcing jobs to China or overseas or in Mexico or it's AI. So folks who have been working their whole life and don't know any other paradigm are at a point where they don't have a job. And I read a piece last week that said that the corporate so-called brains of this country are saying that they only have enough money to pay for a quarter of the retraining that people are gonna need if they want a different type of job, and so it's gonna fall on who? The taxpayers. Amy: That's right. As it always does, right?Barrington: Yeah. So they have made choices and done things to make sure that they continue making money, and we're not benefiting from none of that, but we're gonna end up paying for them. And for me, the outrage of those types of issues are things that drive me to write certain stories. I did a story recently about the fact that most people can't live--most people have to have two, three, four jobs in order to make a living, in order to stay above water. What does that do for your family? What does that do for relationships? What does that do for you in terms of your health? It's crazy, you know? So those are the issues I explore.Amy: That's fascinating. So do your assignments come from the newspapers that you work for, or are you out there kind of figuring out what it is that interests you and what you want to write about?Barrington: It's a mixture.Amy: A mixture? Okay.Barrington: I'm always reading, talking to people, looking at stories and looking for unusual angles, and in several cases I have the type of relationships with editors who they'll call me and say, "Can you do this story? I want you to do this story." So it's a mixture.Amy: Excellent. So what's different about working for or pitching to black media outlets as opposed to kind of the big corporate, you know, white media outlets that most people see on TV?Barrington: I think that one of the problems that we have--I always criticize mainstream, what I call corporate, media, because they'll send a reporter to Amy and say, "Amy, you have a corporation with 10,000 people and you only have 3 black people in your entire organization, and woe is me, and how could you do that?" And blah blah blah, and the exact same thing that they're criticizing other people for are the exact same things going on in journalism. I see different figures--it might be 10%. I think it might be less than that. 80% of newsrooms do not have a person of color--a Native-American, an Asian, a black person, a Latino, at all. All white men. And the problem with that--Amy: How can they--how can they tell stories that they don't know exist or that they can't understand?Barrington: They're arrogant, because they think that they know, and I've been in--I'll give you an example. I worked for The Washington Times when I came to D.C. in '96, and I went out on an assignment and came back and I saw a group of guys laughing and joking, and so I walk over and there was a picture of a black man in handcuffs, and they were talking about what a fantastic picture it was and the quality of the picture and da-da-da, and I said to them, "Have you thought about the fact that you have a black man in handcuffs? Why isn't it a white boy? Why isn't it some other person?" I said, "All you're doing is perpetuating a negative stereotype, because all of us aren't criminals." And they were like, "[gasps]". They hadn't thought of that. So you need women, and you need people who don't have the same cultural experience to be in the room, you know? 'Cause usually in larger newsrooms you have meetings twice a day, news meetings twice a day, to figure out what stories you're gonna put in the paper next day. That process in itself blew my mind, because the arbitariness and the randomness of the way that they chose stories, I was like, "Whoa." It just--and it... [sighs] the thing is that they find stories and the angles of stories and the types of stories that they do are stories that they feel comfortable with. If they're not comfortable, they're not doing it. And my thing is that as a journalist, [I'm?] supposed to be uncomfortable every day, whether it's in the places that I go, whether it's the people I talk to. I went to Baltimore to do a story after Freddie Gray had gotten killed by the police, and my editor kept on telling me "You need to go on the street. You need to talk to people." It was the best thing I did. Now, I know people at all of the papers that I've worked who would not go into the quote-unquote ghetto or a rough neighborhood because they're afraid. I've been in situations with civil disturbances where people were throwing stones and bottles at the media. I've been in situations where they've sent me out for stories where people are shooting at people, and you don't know--you know, you're crouching down because you may get shot, you know? You talk to people who are like, "I don't like you. I think you guys are just like cops. Get out of my face." So you have to deal with a lot of stuff you don't necessarily want to deal with, but how else are you gonna get the story?Amy: Right. Well, it's much more fun to cover the new menu at the country club.Barrington: I guess...Amy: But it's not very interesting, is it?Barrington: No, yeah. And how many times are you gonna do that, you know? And everybody has a story. I believe that everybody has a story, and our responsibility is to give them an opportunity. So one of the things that some of my friends laugh at is that every time I do a story, I interview an equal number of men and women, because I believe that we are not the same as women, we don't think the way that women do, and to me they bring a special flavor and a sauce to any situation that men don't bring. I want to hear what they're saying, and to me it's a good balance when you have men and women, because men will look at something one way, and you talk to a woman and she has a completely different perspective, and you go, "Oh, I never thought of that." So it's a constantly evolving process. You know, you're constantly changing. I love that I'm always learning, because I'll talk to people and I'll think, "Well, I don't know where this interview is gonna go," and it just goes off a tangent and you go, "Oh." That may end up the tangent. It may end up being the story. So you've got to be flexible, because you get--some incident has occurred or something, you go to an event, and you may be talking to someone, and there's something that they say that you go, "Oh, that's the real story." So you have to put aside what you came for and just pursue, go wherever you need to go with that. So that's something that I've learned over my 34, 35 years as a journalist. [laughs]Amy: That's awesome. Thank you, Barrington, so much, for sharing this, all of this, with me. I really appreciate it. In the couple minutes that we have left, I'm hoping that you will finish a couple of sentences for me. The first is "I feel included when __________."Barrington: When I'm allowed to voice my opinion. When I am not ignored or overlooked.Amy: And the second question is "When I feel included, I ________."Barrington: I feel on top of the world. I feel like a human being. I feel like someone whose thoughts and ideas are valued.Amy: That's wonderful. Thank you so much.Barrington: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. This has been fun.

In our third See It to Be It podcast interview, Amy C. Waninger chats with PraiseWorks Health and Wellness founder Lynnis Woods-Mullins, a holistic living and wellness expert who focuses on helping women ages 40 and over embark on a successful journey to total wellness for their mind, body, and spirit using holistic practices, nutrition, and fitness. She shares with us how she navigated the transition from corporate America to where she is now and a lot more. These discussions highlight professional role models in a variety of industries, and our goal is to draw attention to the vast array of possibilities available to emerging and aspiring professionals, with particular attention paid to support black and brown professionals. Check out some of the SI2BI blogs we've posted while you wait for the next episode!Connect with Lynnis on LinkedIn and Facebook! She also has Twitter and Instagram!Check out the PraiseWorks website!Read about "Power Up, Super Women: Stories of Courage and Empowerment" on Amazon!Visit Living-Corporate.com!TRANSCRIPTAmy: Lynnis, thank you so much for joining me today.Lynnis: Well, thank you so much for asking me. It's an honor to be able to share with you, Amy.Amy: Well, it's an honor to speak with you. So I was wondering if you could share a little bit about the work that you do. I know that you're a health and wellness expert and a wellness coach, and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what that means, what do your clients look like, what do you do for your clients, and we'll start there.Lynnis: Okay. Well, I'm a certified health and wellness coach, and I specialize in working with women over 40, teaching them how to be well and how to live a more holistic life, and I do that through my online magazine. I have online classes. I also have coaching services for groups and 1-on-1. I have a podcast and webcast, and I also just recently wrote a book, as you know, and I focus on helping women make incremental lifestyle changes that can give them big results. I have a weight loss, or what I like to call a weight release, program. I also talk with women specifically about hormonal changes. You know, things that happen as we age and how we can minimize the impact of the aging process. I talk a lot about stress reduction. That's my specialty, stress reduction and anxiety and depression, of which I suffered from all three. And so I really focus on those kinds of things that happen as we age from 40 on, because after 40 there's some things that start happening that are really interesting, and many times you think perhaps you're prepared for that because you've heard your girlfriends talk about it. You might have not heard your mom talk about it, but you witnessed certain things. I'm telling you, everyone is different and every experience is different, and what I really try to lay out to women is that they're not alone in terms of going through that experience, but sometimes it can be a lonely experience because while you're going through it, a lot of times it's you get this inclination to [?] out and suffer in silence by yourself. You don't have to do that. And so my job or my role is to familiarize women with all of the different symptoms that might happen and to give them some encouragement to get knowledge on how to deal with it, because I truly believe that knowledge is power.Amy: You know, as you're speaking, I'm reminded of this thought that I've had repeatedly, that to be a woman is to live in stages of secrets and shame. Lynnis: That's true.Amy: When we're very young, you know, we get the talk about what's gonna happen to our bodies in adolescence, and we're pulled aside, and it's all in very hushed tones and, you know, like, girls passing tampons, you know, like, in middle school. You know, like, you don't want to be found out, right? And then, you know, in our teens, 20s, even our 30s, you know, pregnancy is--there's a lot of mystery surrounding pregnancy, right? Women throughout history have gotten pregnant. Women throughout history have miscarried. Women throughout history have had complications with their pregnancies. But we don't hear those stories. We sort of--like you said, we suffer in silence. We suffer alone. We don't talk about it. We're taught to feel shame about it. And I guess it never occurred to me that I'm on the cusp of yet another, you know, quietly--"go quietly into the night" sort of process and that that's another aspect of our lives as women that we don't talk publicly about.Lynnis: No, you're absolutely right. And yeah, suffering in silence is really true on so many different levels, but I can just share from my own experience. Each time that I got pregnant--and I have four daughters, they're all grown. They're all in their 30s and stuff. Well, one will be 27--each time that I got pregnant, I didn't tell anybody right away. My first pregnancy I wasn't married, so I didn't tell anybody, not even my mom, until I was, like, about seven months pregnant. I lived in a different city, so I just didn't want to talk [about it] because I wasn't married, you know? And I invited her to come and see me for the weekend, and she knew as soon as I opened the door. It might have been because my face was fuller, 'cause normally I'm a really, really thin person. You know, that might have been it, but she said she felt it even before that time. And I think with the other ones I didn't want to tell anybody because I didn't want to be judged by my family or my friends. I was married, but it was like, "Again?" Because they were so close together. One of my daughters--the two middle ones, were born 17 months apart. And, you know, I just didn't want to deal with that. "Don't you know about birth control?" and "How can you be a career person?" and all that, so I didn't tell anybody, and I look back at that and now I'm thinking, "How silly." I was married. It certainly was my prerogative if I wanted to have children. They were not planned. They were all, you know, wonderful "uh-ohs," but I think my biggest thing was that this went against the grain in terms of all of my preparation when it comes to climbing the corporate ladder and here I am pregnant again. I was pregnant basically for 10 years. Basically, you know? Because the ages of my children now are 27, 30, 32, and 34. So pretty close together, and I just didn't want to deal with that "Again?" kind of thing, so I didn't tell anybody. I look back at that now and I'm thinking, you know, "How much did we as women, no matter what the age is, become vested in people's opinion of us?" You know? We spend a lot of time preoccupied with that, and it's very painful because of course we can't read their minds and many times what we're thinking they may be thinking--which many times they're not even close to that, they're too busy with their own stuff--is really just projections on how we feel about ourselves, and I think the biggest message that I'd like to try to send to women in particular over 40, even at that stage when we should be so wise and know it all and know it more, is the need for self-love, because we just don't do that. We are our harshest critics. We don't give ourselves a break, and our breaks--if we do give ourselves a break, there's all this [?] that goes with it. There's that shame and guilt. And in order to really be well, there comes a point in your life when you really have to make a decision to let all that go and to be more present and stop worrying so much about what happened in the past, because what happened in the past really has added to who you are as a person, and that's a good thing. And not to be too preoccupied with the future or the lack of it, depending on your age, because, you know, the future never comes. Tomorrow never comes. It's always today today. And learning how to be more present in terms of your day-to-day existence.Amy: So thank you for that. I think that's absolutely true, and I would imagine that a lot of wellness comes from mindfulness and presence. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into this work?Lynnis: Sure. I have another life. I have had three lives, maybe. Three main lives. You know, [?] this was my third life. Before this, my second life I was a human resource professional and did very well and got up to the, you know, director level, and I had the equivalent of what could be considered the American dream. I was married, had four kids, a big house in [?] and kids going to school and doing well, you know, husband very successful. You know, all of the stuff that you would think is supposed to be the American dream, and being a woman of color even more so, you know? As an African-American, I was earning the upper .5% for an African-American woman and for a woman in general the upper 2%. So I was doing well. But there was something missing in my life, and I had developed an anxiety disorder and didn't even know it, and my anxiety disorder was based upon post-traumatic stress, and my post-traumatic stress was based upon an incident that happened in my life that was a total surprise. I didn't know how to quite deal with it, and my really dealing with had to do with, you know, controlling the outcome. No matter what happened, I was gonna control it. Whether it was controlling my coworkers, my kids, my husband, my neighbors, my friends, you know? My life in general. I was going to control it in such a way where there would never be anymore surprises, which of course is insane.Amy: Yeah, that's not possible.Lynnis: Right? That's insane. It's not possible. So over time, after 27 years of that, I finally had an epiphany--or a breakdown, whatever you want to call it--to the point where I had to take a sabbatical, and I left this wonderful job for a year with the idea of going back, and after a year of reflection and going to--you know, really digging down deeper, I realized that I wasn't happy and I needed to figure out what would make me happy. And in my exploration of what kinds of things I could do to heal myself from this anxiety disorder, because I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and they put me on medication. And I realize now that I was never good at pills and things. I've always been interested in nutrition. I was a dancer in my first life, you know, and I was a nutrition minor in college, so I decided that I was going to find out more about this mind, body, spirit wellness movement, which started, you know, a while back. I got started in 2009. This has been almost 10 years now that I've been in business. It'll be 10 years in April of 2019. So I decided that I wanted to figure out a way to help women not go through what I went through and to begin to take a look at how can we be well in our mind, body, and spirit and to make that our quest? Our quest to be well in our minds, in our bodies, and in our spirits, because it's a continuum. It's not all about the body. It's not all about your spirit. It's not all about your mind. It is a continuum, and if any of those things aren't being cared for, then we're off-kilter and we risk the possibility of being unwell. And so that's how it all started. I put together a company called PraiseWorks, because at that time I thought I would teach women over 40 how to dance, praise dance. I am a classically trained ballet dancer. I have danced professionally. And then when I got in my late 40s, I started doing praise dance at my church. So I was gonna teach them how to dance, and I quickly found out after my first few classes that these women needed so much more than just dance. I had women who were [?] survivors. I had women who were dealing with empty nests and [?] relationships [?] that ended through divorce. Women who had high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, and hormonal. Menopause. All of the things that you begin to deal with as you age, and so I thought "Okay, what else can I do?" And so that's when I went back, got my certification in nutrition and health and holistic living and yoga and Pilates and all this stuff, and came up with these different virtual programs that can help women to be well. And it's been really interesting. It's been quite an adventure, because one of the things that I didn't anticipate, which I'm learning now, is that a lot of the women who were my age--'cause at that time I was ... 51 when I [?]. I still had another 15 years or so of working for corporate America. So everybody thought I was nuts. "How could you just leave, you know, a six-figure salary like that and start your own thing from scratch?" But, you know, I think in many ways I saved my life. I could have still been there, still been working, probably doing okay, making lots of money, but would have had the anxiety disorder or would have gained a whole lot of weight as a result of the medication they wanted to put me on and probably would have began to start falling apart, because any time you're on any kind of medication, if it's not organic or holistic--any kind of pharmaceutical--it fixes normally the symptom and not the causation, and it causes other symptoms later on. So I feel like I saved my own life, and in the process of saving my own life I'm hoping that I've helped women begin to save theirs in terms of making other choices for their lives. And so that began my goal to really get the word out, virtually at first, even though like I said it was a challenge 'cause a lot of women my age, you know, weren't really into, you know, social media and things like that back in 2009, but that's changed over the years. [?] to not just inspire women 40 and over, but my children are saying "Mom, millennials, we need this kind of stuff. We need to know." They're on a quest and searching, and I never really thought about that, but they're right. So now I'm beginning to think about approaching--if you want to get to my age, [laughs] the ripe-old age of almost 62, then you're gonna want to do some of this stuff that, you know, I've [?] over the last 10 years.Amy: Absolutely. It's so much easier to prevent diabetes, heart disease and those kinds of things than it is to recover from them. High blood pressure, high cholesterol. The list goes on, right?Lynnis: And so many of those kinds of diseases, so many of them are lifestyle choices. And then coupled with the fact that growing older your body is gonna go through some changes anyway, and if you had decided to make a lifestyle choice to exercise more, to eat differently, to lower your stress levels, then your aging process could have been a lot more of a positive experience, and I'm trying to send that message out to women and all of the people who love them that there is a different way, that you don't have to go down that road.Amy: And I think, you know, going back to what you said about millennials, I just hearing millennial burnout is such a problem. You know, millennials and Gen Z are taking on so much stress because, you know, for example, college has gotten--the cost of college has gotten out of control. The return on that investment has diminished almost to nothing for a lot of people, and so they're trying to pay back more debt with worse--you know, with lower income than their parents, and then there's still the pressure of "When are you gonna start a family? When are you gonna buy a house?" Right? All of those expectations that we put on people basically from the 1940s, right? "When are you going to fulfill the American dream that's almost 100 years old?"Lynnis: Which is really the American nightmare, trying to achieve that right now, 'cause right now I'm visiting my daughter in D.C., and first of all, I'm immensely proud of her because she has done this by herself, and sometimes I would feel guilty about not being able to help her more once she finished her education, but I'm glad ultimately that she went this way, because I'm not always gonna be here. My husband's not gonna always be here. I had three other daughters I had to try to get through their phases of education, but it's interesting, the lifestyle that she's living is great, but it's extremely expensive. You know, her rent is more than my mortgage--and I live in California, so I don't have a cheap mortgage. But I look at how these--I don't want to say young people. I hate using that phrase because it makes me seem like I'm 1,000 years old, but I'm looking at how they're living and the pace within which you're living. I mean, they never--they're on all the time. They never relax. Even their social thing is--I don't want to say it's a competition, but it's stressful, you know, getting to the place because of the traffic, finding a place to park if you are driving. Or being in public transportation, having to be aware of your surroundings all the time. Then you get there and you have to deal with in your mind, "Okay, how much can I afford?" You know, when the bill comes, and then in-between that you're constantly on your phone. While you're talking to your friends and stuff, you're on the phone, you're doing all this stuff, and I'm thinking, "Wow, this is a lot of fun, but it's stressful fun." There's never a point where people just stop and just be, unless [?], like, "Yoga time," or "Medication time," you know? There's not--there doesn't seem to be a point of really disconnecting. And you're right, we in this society, no matter what age we are, have a tendency to want to meet the expectations of whatever was set before us. You know, for me it was being raised in the 70s and trying to meet the expectations of where my parents were, because they happened to have been college-educated, which was, you know, very unusual back then, because they were still in the early 50s. But now the expectation is my children do the same, but I realize that two of my girls, who had children in their late 20s, it might be a little bit more difficult for them to achieve the same level as I have, because times are different. Times are different. And so I think that part of being well is realizing that and giving yourself a break and realizing that these times are different, and you have to set your own expectations based upon what it is you want for your life. I mean, if you enjoy that pace and that's where you're at that's fine, but if you know that there's something else that you want to do, that's okay too. And with the college experience, I'm telling you--I've always felt this way, but I especially feel this way now. I wish we had more of the European model that gives people opportunities for apprenticeships and things like that, because college is not for everyone, and that does not mean that they're dumb or stupid or any of that. Ask Bill Gates. He'll tell you that, okay? And some of the other folks sitting up there in Google right now. They don't necessarily have, you know, grad degrees. The idea of getting a degree and then going on and getting the grad degree, because you don't know what else you're going to do, and then going on and getting your Ph.D., and then, you know, [?], I don't think that was the expectation at the time. So I think maybe perhaps we need to be more--I hate to use the word authentic. It's become such a buzzword. But more true to ourselves and that inner desire and tapping into that, because I do believe where your passion is, so lies your treasure. Amy: That's a beautiful sentiment. I love that. So for people who are where you were a few years ago, still climbing the corporate ladder, still trying to secure the bag, right, what can you offer them in terms of--what are the signs that they're approaching an unhealthy place? What do they need to watch for?Lynnis: Well, never disconnecting. For me it was two cell phones and a pager and my laptop, and this started back in '92 and went on until 2008, and I was raising kids at the same time and traveling. At one time I was about 60, 70% travel. I would make a turn-around--I would do a red-eye... an early-morning flight to Texas from California and take a red-eye back to be able to get there in time before they woke up the next morning, and then I would work from home because--I would, you know, dial into a landline or whatever back in the 90s, but never disconnecting and thinking that, by never disconnecting, you are being the best that you can be, that you're really doing a great job. The reality is more than likely you're not doing a great job. More than likely mistakes are going to happen. Disconnecting, and you start seeing those little mistakes pop up that, you know, normally you would not make. That's a sign, especially when you know that this a job that you're prepared for and that you're confident in and all of a sudden things start happening. Another sign is the inability to sleep, to be able to disconnect enough to sleep to calm down. Or if you're sleeping, your sleep is constantly interrupted by waking up, going to the bathroom several times during the course of the night, not having a deep sleep. That's a sign. Another sign is when you begin to realize that you don't have any relationships, and I'm not talking about love relationships. I'm talking about friendships. Your friendships are also tied to work, which is not a bad thing, but there was a time where you didn't work at that place and you had friends outside of work or friends outside of your profession. So disconnecting from relationships that aren't work-related. Also not being able to just sit and be. Feeling the need to always be doing something. And I'm not talking--and you can sit and be and binge watch, but you're still doing something, but the idea of just being in a state of being, if you're having problems with any of those things, that's a sign of burnout. Anxiety, which is a common thing that most Americans suffer from that no one is really talking about. My anxiety was so bad for almost 10 years that I thought it was normal. I started drinking coffee because of my anxiety, believe it or not. It seemed to be the only thing that would take away the scary feeling. The scary feeling was I would be going--I would wake up in the morning and it would feel like I was going straight downhill on a roller coaster with no restraints. I mean, like, going down the hill and nothing holding me in, but I'm still in the chair. Somehow I'm not falling out, but can you imagine how scary that is, thinking that you might fall out? That. It was the fear of the unknown. That all came from my post-traumatic stress that I found out later that I had as a result of not really going through the process of grieving. And the post-traumatic stress, and I talk about it in the book, it all came from how I found out that my mother had died. She was hit by a fire truck on her way to work. She was 56 years old. And how I found out was really traumatic, very traumatic, and I had just had a baby, 5 weeks old, and I had a 17-month old and a just turned 4-year-old. So it was--and I was on maternity leave at the time, but I was a regional manager, and I had, like, three or four branches I was in charge of, and what had happened was on the day that she died I had just seen her, and I said I would see her later and went to my office to show everybody my baby. And this was before cell phones. And my dad, I guess I must have mentioned it to him when I was over at the house in the morning, 'cause he was on his way to work too--'cause my parents were in my mid-50s. I was 31. And so I think I had mentioned to them that I was going by my office to show off the baby, and he called me there and he said, "I want you to go home," to the family home, because my grandfather was visiting from Georgia, my dad's dad, and he was just beginning to exhibit signs of dementia. So he wanted me to go home and stay with Grandaddy and that he would meet me there at the house a little bit later 'cause, he said, "Your mom's been in an accident. I don't know how serious it is, but I need you to go home." So I said okay, and, you know, I had a feeling something was wrong, and I had left my organizer--back then they had Ben Franklin organizers. I left my Ben Franklin organizer at work, and we didn't have cell phones back then. Didn't have any [?] numbers. Couldn't remember any numbers 'cause I was so scared. I suddenly wasn't feeling right. So I called my mom's office and, you know, Lucille [?], my mom's secretary, and I said, "Listen, I need to call someone to come and stay with me and I don't have any numbers with me," and she said, "Oh, yeah, I guess you would want to have someone come stay with you. You know, we are so sorry. We loved your mother." And I was like "...E-D? Loved? Past tense? You mean she's gone?" And that's when she realized, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" And then she dropped the phone, and I could hear--then I could hear people in the background crying. 'Cause I mean, it had been, like, not even a whole hour since this had happened, and that's when I began immediately to never have that shock again. Can you imagine? I mean, even now when I think about it I can still feel that... that decision. Boom. Because I have babies to take care of. I've got a job to do. I have a husband. I have a home. And my dad, I've got to be there for him, and I've got to be there for my sister who's still at school, at 17, graduating in a few months, turning 18 next week. I gotta call my sister in LA who just finished her master's [?]. I gotta take care of this stuff, so I don't have time to feel," and, you know, that's where [?], and that's where the anxiety sort of began, that moment, and that was definitely post-traumatic stress. And so I write about that and what I learned from that. They gotta read the book [?].Amy: That's right. So the book that you're mentioning is called Power Up Super Women: Stories of Courage and Empowerment, and Lynnis is one of 17 authors of this anthology, and I'm another author on this anthology. My story is not nearly as traumatic or dramatic, but all of these stories are designed to help women kind of come to terms with who they are, what they want out of life, and how to go about getting it, and there's some truly, truly inspirational stories in this. Lynnis, I have two more questions for you today. I wanted to ask you to finish this sentence. "I feel included when ______."Lynnis: I feel included when I'm contributing something of value to society, to my friends, to my family. I want to be of value. I just don't want to be taking up space. I don't want just because I am successful to be what defines me. I want that success to be tied to adding value, you know? Adding value to someone's life, adding value to someone's experience. I want to build a legacy. I just don't want to be successful and make a lot of money but no one remembers what I did. And I don't know why I tear up [?], but at 62, you know, that's something that's really important to me, to be of value.Amy: Yeah, to leave a lasting impact. I understand that, absolutely. Now can you finish this sentence? "When I feel included, I _______."Lynnis: When I feel included, I feel a sense of joy.Amy: Oh, that's beautiful.Lynnis: Yes. I never really experienced what true joy was until I left corporate America, quite frankly. And it's not that I'm saying corporate America is a bad thing. Corporate America is just a small sliver of what defines you, and if you can arrive at that early on in your career, then you'll be okay, because the real joy you're going to feel are the things that come at you unexpectedly, and in corporate America you don't want any surprises, but in life you do. You want good surprises in terms of, you know, the experiences that you have, and so yeah, it brings me great joy when I am able to feel included that way.Amy: Well, Lynnis, I can tell that you're having an impact, not just on your clients but on everyone around you. You have so much--you exude joy, you exude peace, and I am so grateful to know you. Thank you so much.Lynnis: Well, thank you, Amy. It's really an honor to talk with you. I'm so glad that you asked me. This is exciting.

In our second See It to Be It podcast interview, Amy C. Waninger chats with Regional Consulting founder Juanita Hines, a career optimization consultant who focuses on helping students and professionals learn how to discover and communicate their intrinsic value, effectively transition from high school to college and college to the professional sector, and a whole lot more. These discussions highlight professional role models in a variety of industries, and our goal is to draw attention to the vast array of possibilities available to emerging and aspiring professionals, with particular attention paid to support black and brown professionals. Check out some of the SI2BI blogs we've posted while you wait for the next episode!Connect with Juanita on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter!Learn more about her book on Amazon!Check out Regional Consulting's website!Visit our page!TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. Now, look, for those of y'all who are new here, the purpose of Living Corporate is to create a space that affirms black and brown experiences in the workplace, right? There are certain things that only we can really understand, and when I say we I mean the collective non-white professional [laughs] in corporate America. And when we look around--if you, like, Google being black and brown in corporate America, you may see, like, a post in Huffington Post or something that kind of communicates from a position of lack, but I don't know if we necessarily see a lot of content that empowers and affirms our identity and our experience, and that's really the whole purpose of Living Corporate. It's with that that I'm really excited to talk to y'all about the See It to Be It series. Amy C. Waninger, who has been a guest on the show, who's a writer for Living Corporate, and who's also the author of Network Beyond Bias, she's actually partnered with Living Corporate to actually have an interviewing series where she actually sits down with black and brown professionals so that we can learn about what they actually do and see ourselves in these roles, right? So it's a variety of industries that she's--she's talking to a lot of different types of folks. You're gonna be able to see what they do, and at the same time you're gonna hopefully be able to envision yourself in that role, hence the title See It to Be It, okay? So check this out. The next thing you're gonna hear is this interview with Amy C. Waninger. Y'all hang tight. Catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Hello, Juanita! Thank you so much for joining me today.Juanita: Hello. Thank you for having me on the show, Amy. I'm excited to be here.Amy: I am excited to have you. So you were one of the first people I met when I started going out on my own and doing my own thing, and I don't even remember how we connected originally, but I know that we kind of bonded over the shared experience of having books that we had self-published. Would you tell me just a little bit about what it is exactly that you do and how you got into that work?Juanita: Absolutely. So I am a career optimization consultant. I provide training for both students as well as professionals. I'm dual-focused. With students, I help to provide them with the information that helps them to transition from high school to college and college to the professional sector. So if you think about a lot of the things that you don't necessarily learn in high school or college that you're expected to know when you go in the workforce, things like how to negotiate your salary, how to network, what that means, how to build strategic partnerships and relationships, the importance of managing your social media and really the type of implications that that can have on your future, those are the type of sessions that I work with with college and high school students. And then for professionals, I partner with companies to help them train and retain staff so they don't have to fire and rehire or lose and overuse. So I help people to more effectively engage within their careers, which will in turn help companies to be able to retain talent as well.Amy: That's fantastic, that you found a niche that meets the employer's needs and the employee's needs, but you also work with students, and so I'm imagining that you work a lot with colleges too. Is that correct?Juanita: Yes, absolutely. Amy: Very good. And so how did you get involved in this work? Because this isn't an obvious--like, there's probably not a job posting for this somewhere, right?Juanita: Absolutely. Not at all, [laughs] and if it was I would've loved to find it because, you know, to be under the corporate umbrella of someone that's doing exactly what I'm doing is definitely--would definitely be an interesting perspective. So I was a recruiter initially when I transitioned from college. I'll be honest with you. I initially--when I was looking for jobs upon graduating from college I was applying for all of these public relations positions, and I kept being told I didn't have enough experience, so out of frustration I ended up going into a staffing agency, and I just said, "Look, I need a job," and they said, "Okay. Well, let's see what we have for you. Are you open to recruiting? What are you looking for?" I said, "Honestly I can do anything. I just need someone to give me a chance." And so they sent me out for a two-day position at one of their corporate clients, and they had phenomenal feedback I guess. Like, they were saying "Oh, my goodness, we want to look at hiring her." One of their HR execs came down and said, "I need your resume." I was voluntold to give him my resume, and I gave him my resume.Amy: Wow.Juanita: Yeah. So they called that afternoon because I knew that we weren't supposed to go on the internet and we weren't supposed to give our resume, and after being insisted upon telling him "No, I'm not supposed to give you my resume," he was like, "Look, I don't care about all that. Give me your resume." So when they called I said "Hey, just want to let you know that everything's going well," but he did make me go on the internet and print out my resume. They were like "Juanita, don't worry, you'll never have to go back there again." I was like, "No, no. I'm not saying that it's a bad environment. I love it here." But yeah, so a long story short, they ended up calling me about three minutes after I left that day and asked if I would be open to coming to work as a recruiter--well, to temp in their office until they could afford to hire me because they had to create a position to hire me because they couldn't afford to do it at that moment. And so I went in to assist them, and then I was there for a couple years. So I had the opportunity to function as a recruiter. I loved my job. I loved everything about it, and I was spiritually led to leave. Yeah, about three years or so later I had the--you know, I was really delving into--and I know this is a long way of going about answering your question, but, you know, I was really honing in on my relationship with God and learning, you know, that He talks to you and that kind of thing, and so, you know--and I was like, "Lord, whatever you want me to do, wherever you want me to go, I will do it. Let me know." And so then he said, "Okay, well, I want you to leave your job." Wait. "Lord, are you sure this is You? I don't know that this is You." [laughs] So a long story short, I ended up giving my job a month's notice, and in that time I was praying about my purpose and what I would do. I went to a purpose boot camp the week after I left my job, and at the purpose boot camp they were talking about, you know, your purpose and what you were created for, and on the way back from the purpose boot camp I started getting all of these crazy thoughts, and I said "Maybe I should jot some of this stuff down." And so I'm driving from Maryland to Virginia, and when I get home I look at my notebook and I'm like, "What is this?" And I called my dad. I was like "Hey, Dad, I think God is telling me to start a company," and he was like, "Well, if he's telling you to do it you need to do it." So that's pretty much how I transitioned into having my own company. In terms of career optimization, I was led out of recruiting because I had recruited for about six years or so providing services for a variety of different companies within oil and gas, energy, travel, a variety of different companies that partnered with me, and then God said "Okay, now you're done with that, so it's time for you to leave that." And I said "Wait, what am I doing now?" And he gave me the vision to actually start doing what I'm doing now, and it's been about 6.5, 7 years or so. I've gone into high schools here--high schools more so I usually do more local here in the Houston and surrounding areas, but colleges I've branched out and also for organizations as well.Amy: What's the name of the company you run?Juanita: It's called Regional Consulting.Amy: Regional Consulting. And I was gonna get to this later, but we'll just bring it up right now. You have a book.Juanita: I do.Amy: Tell us about your book.Juanita: My book is called Master Your Career Playbook: Resumes. It is actually a book that's about writing resumes, but not just writing resumes. It helps you to more effectively articulate your value, because just like I was in that situation, what I didn't realize was that it wasn't that I did not have the experience. It was that I was not effectively articulating the value that I offered to the employers to which I was applying, and so what I did is I actually--you know, I actually used to write resumes for clients, and I had a client that continued to send me countless individuals, and I jokingly said one day "You know what? I'm gonna write a book just for you, just for you to give to all of your friends," and so I did. So I wrote the book, and--well, actually I wrote 15 pages and I sat on it for 2.5 years, and then people started asking me, like, right when I got ready to start writing it again people kept asking me "When is your book coming out?" "Hey, where is your book?" "Do you have a book?" I was speaking at different conferences and they were like, "Hey, where can I purchase your book?" And I'm just sitting here like, "Oh, my gosh. Are you serious? I don't have a book." And I talked to a speaker, and he was just telling me--he inspired me and connected me with someone who was able to help me get my thoughts down on paper, because the hardest thing or the most challenging part about the writing process is 1. taking the time to do it, but then also making sure that you can effectively articulate the words that you are trying to get across and that it comes across like you intend for it to, especially within resume writing, because no one really gets ecxited like "Oh, my gosh, girl! Guess what I'm doing?" "What?" "I'm reading this book about writing my resume! Yes! I'm so excited!" And you're like, "Oh... okay..." So yeah, that was--and I wanted it to be engaging. I wanted it to be kind of similar to how I present, but I wanted to be honest, and I wanted to give people a very candid view from a recruiter perspective, because I've had the opportunity to place across the employment spectrum, up to senior level executives on down to entry level office support positions.Amy: I think that's such a valuable perspective too. I have people all the time who are wanting me to help them with their resumes, and when they ask me, I always quote them--I ask "What's your budget for this service?" And then they usually are thinking in their heads "I don't want to pay you, I just want you to do it." And then when they say "What do you charge?" I give them a number that they would never, ever, ever pay because I don't want to do that work, but I do recommend your book to them. Because I say "Oh, you need to read this book and this will help you, and I won't." [both laugh] So--isn't that terrible?Juanita: No, it's not terrible, and I will tell you--because resume writing is a very time-consuming process, and a lot of people just think that--you know, the thought process is "I'll just give you a regurgitation of my experience and I'll let you pick and choose what's important out of here and hopefully it will land me the interview." That's not what happens unfortunately.Amy: And I know how to write my own resume 'cause I lived it, but I don't know how to write someone else's and I don't pretend to. So anybody who's listening to this, do not call me for resume advice. Call Juanita. You'll be good.Juanita: Actually, and I'm just--I'm the opposite. I can kick someone else's resume out when I have the details of their experience, but my own resume? Let me tell you how it took me about 2.5 weeks to write my own resume. I'm not kidding. "Well, what do I do about..." I mean, it was really pulling yourself out of the equation and looking at yourself extrospectively. Like, not introspectively, but, you know, "How do I describe this great person that I know she is on paper and how do I get those words down to an employer that will actually help me to be able to get an interview?" And knowing the purpose of a resume, because so many people think that the purpose of a resume is to get you a job, and it's not. [laughs] The point of the resume is to get you the interview, and so so many people just put all of the information into their resumes and they just think "Okay, I'll just throw it on out there and see what happens and hope it lands."Amy: Yeah, wow. Yep, I've seen everything as a hiring manager, but probably nothing compared to what you've seen as a recruiter. [both laugh] So what's something--switching gears a little bit back to your career optimization work, what's something that surprises you about this work or that surprised you when you started it that you weren't expecting?Juanita: You know, I'll be honest, working with students. I wasn't sure how I would respond in working with students. I would say that high school students are not my forte. I always had the impression that high school students were just very disrespectful, they don't listen, and, you know, you see some things outside and what you see on social media and those types of things and you're just like "Oh, I don't want to work with those audiences," and I have gone in and--I will be honest, I have had some of the most amazing students, and what I've learned is that a lot of students are actually eager for the information, but they just have people that talk at them and not talking to them and helping them to understand the importance of the choices and decisions that they make today and how they can potentially impact tomorrow and what their future will look like. So I try to--I try to help them enjoy the process. And I didn't think I would enjoy speaking to students so much, I'll be honest, and now I do. I truly do. And I've had people that say "Well, why don't you choose whether you want to speak with adults or with students?" And honestly I can't choose. I can't choose.Amy: Well, I'm sure it makes you more effective in both camps that you have that interaction in both areas, because, you know, if you don't talk with working professionals, then you wouldn't have the insights to give the students that they need to move forward, right?Juanita: Absolutely, yeah. And if you're talking to students and they're like, "Uh, uh-uh. Who is this lady? I don't want to hear anything that she has to say." You know, it kind of keeps you engaging and it keeps you on your toes, because they will let you know if this is not something that they're feeling. They'll "Uh-uh, no," and--Amy: Yeah, I've got two of 'em in my house and they will tune you out in a hurry. [both laugh]Juanita: Yes, absolutely.Amy: But I like tha tyour surprise was a happy surprise. A lot of times when I ask that question it's like "You know, I had no idea how hard it would be," or "I had no idea, you know, how crazy people were," or whatever, but I love that your surprise was a pleasant one. That's great. So if someone's looking to get into doing this kind of work, if they want to, you know, kind of bridge that gap, that college to workplace gap, where can they start looking for resources or how might they break into this kind of work? Juanita: You know, honestly I would say a lot of it starts with relationships, you know? Building relationships and strategic partnerships. I always tell people "either you're networking or you're not working." We actually met--and I'll answer your question when you said earlier "I can't recall how we met"--I think we met on LinkedIn. And so we connected on LinkedIn, and we started talking--I think we connected over a mutual article or something, and--which is interesting, because you never know how you can make connections and extend the life of whatever you're doing. And, you know, I always tell people it's about selfless networking, not necessarily what's in it for me. It's about really reaching across the aisle and saying "What is it that I can do for you?" And being that supportive person. I think that anyone who knows me or who has been able to build a relationship with me will tell you and attest that I'm very--I try to be very selfless, and I'm--you know, I try to always ask "What can I do to help?" Because that's really what I'm about. And so first and foremost it starts with those strategic partnerships and relationships. If you have companies or corporations that's willing to sponsor you, that's a huge plus right there. That's half the battle, because you can get those sponsors that can sponsor you to go in as opposed to you having to get the organizations to pay for it themselves or the students. And I've actually had student organizations that have sponsors and have paid themselves out of their own budgets, but, you know, sometimes it--depending on what the budgetary allocations are and what your fees are, you know? And often times I will tell people--they think it's really glitzy and glamorous, but it's really a lot of hard work, you know? It's a lot more than just showing up and saying "Okay, yeah, I'm gonna make this fun and engaging," you know? And sometimes people look at it from the outside and they're like "Yes, I can do that. I want to do that," but they don't realize the work that goes into it sometimes.Amy: Yeah. You're not getting paid for the hour on stage. You're getting paid for the 95 hours of prep you put into that hour on stage, right?Juanita: Exactly. [both laugh] Amy: As an entrepreneur, how do you find support for yourself? Like, where do you go for a sense of community in the work that you do?Juanita: Part of where I go--I have a great network of professionals. I'm very actively engaged with my community. I'm actually the chair of the program committee at the Greater Houston Black Chamber [of Commerce?]. I'm a graduate of the Houston Black Leadership Institute, and I'm also involved with the current Houston Black Leadership Institute classes. I'm also a member of the Houston Area Urban League Young Professionals. I try to, you know, have really great networks and people that continue to pour into you. So you have to find out what that niche is for you and find out, you know, where can you impact the greatest? Where can you have the greatest impact? And initially, even before I was with the chamber and the HBLI I was with HAUL YP, and so I joined because they had opportunities to volunteer and give back to the community, and through HAUL YP I've been introduced to all of these other aspects of life and that have poured into me in so many different ways. And so I would say first and foremost find something to get involved in. Find something that you're passionate about and pursue that, because you never know how that can open doors of opportunity for you that you can't even imagine or that you don't even anticipate.Amy: No, that's great advice. It's so true that when you start doing what matters to you, the people that you need kind of show up, and you show up for them, and--it's almost a magic that happens. I don't know if I told you this the first time we talked, but I call it the Billie Jean lights.Juanita: [laughs] Okay.Amy: Do you remember the old Michael Jackson video? [?]Juanita: Yes, when he stands on the little thing [?]--Amy: And they light up, right? And when I started out, when I started doing what I'm doing, it was like I didn't know what the next step was, but I'd put my foot down and it would kind of--the path would start to light up, and I'd put my foot down again and the path would light up, and it was like it just kept going until those lights came so fast that it started to look like a runway, and I knew that that was the right path. But I think, you know, part of it is just, like, taking those steps at first to get the--Juanita: Yeah, absolutely. And that reminds me of Martin Luther King's quote, "Faith is taking the next step without seeing the whole staircase." You know? And so sometimes you can take that, and that was really what it was like for me, except for I didn't even see a house. I just pretty much was like "Wait, where am I stepping?" It was just like "Okay, I'm stepping over a cliff," but then it came into view as I started walking. So I will say, you know--and I tell people "Look, I'm not telling everybody to leave their jobs tomorrow. [laughs] So don't put that on me." Like, "Juanita said I could leave my job today!" [laughs] No, no. That is not--Amy: That's not Juanita's saying.Juanita: Yes, absolutely, let me be clear. But I will say that, you know, if you're willing to put the work in and if you're willing to do what's necessary, it will--it can benefit not just you. And I think your cause has to be greater than just you. It has to be more than just "Okay, I'm doing this for the money." And I'll be honest, I put a lot of sweat equity in early on, so I didn't--there were events that I did not get paid for. I did a lot of volunteering when I initially started speaking with student organizations in probably for the first, what, five or six years or so. So even when I was doing recruiting, when I was doing contractual recruiting, I was still going into organizations. I was volunteering my time, and people got to know me, and so when God called me out and I had that vision to actually start going into the training and development pieces, it was more of a seamless transition. Not effortless, but it was seemingly seamless for most people, like, looking on, because they just thought "Oh, wow. She just stopped recruiting and now she's doing training and development." But that's not how it was. I was actually putting in a lot of sweat equity, and that's the things you don't see from the background.Amy: Absolutely, absolutely. On those days when I'm not seeing results, I try to measure my progress on how many seeds did I plant today, how many seeds am I gonna plant tomorrow, and I keep planting seeds until something starts to sprout, right? And once things start sprouting you keep planting seeds because you're gonna need something to sprout tomorrow and the next day and the next.Juanita: Absolutely, absolutely. You just water it. You can't see exactly when it's growing, exactly when it takes root, you can't see exactly when those roots are extending, but eventually you will start to see the flower when it rises above the ground.Amy: Absolutely. So I would like it if you would answer--just finish the following sentence. "I feel included when ______."Juanita: I feel included when I am amongst people who are open-minded and who are open to listening to other people's perspectives or points of view. Amy: Very good. And then "When I feel included, I _______."Juanita: When I feel included, I soak everything in and I make the best of the opportunity. [laughs] I'm often times a comedian, I'll be honest. So sometimes in those moments I'm so excited, like, my excitement will sometimes make me start--like, I'll start cutting jokes and stuff, and they're like "Oh, my gosh." And so people are like "Wait, is she funny too?" Which is [?]--Amy: You get goofy.Juanita: I do. Well, yes. Professional goofy, yeah, but yeah, it is. [?]. I've actually had students that have asked me at different schools. They're like, "Are you a comedian?" No, I'm not, but I get excited when it's something that, you know, I feel included in, especially when students kind of make you feel included and show you the love, you know?Amy: Mm-hmm. I love that about when students make you feel included, because I think a lot of times students don't realize that they exist in an environment, right, they exist in a culture, and when somebody comes in, even somebody with authority or somebody from the outside, there's still a desire from that person to be included in that group, right? You aren't coming in to be other. You're coming in to have an impact, but you want to be welcomed and you want to be kind of embraced by that group, and I think that's such an important point for people to realize. It doesn't matter what group you're in as an in-group. When somebody's new or somebody's coming in, making them feel welcome will make such a difference in what you get from them and what they take away.Juanita: Yeah, absolutely agreed.Amy: Juanita, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for sharing your journey with us.Juanita: Yes, thank you for having me. I'm excited to--it was just a great experience. I'm excited to be a part of the show and that you thought about me to have me on, so.Amy: Well, of course. Thank you so much.

After becoming the first woman to ever hold the title of Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production at a major movie studio, Amy decided to leave that world behind and start working with Nancy. Together they founded The Passionistas Project to share the stories of strong and empowered women who are following their passions to inspire others to do the same. Read more about The Passionistas Project. Sign up for the mailing list to learn more about The Passionistas Project Pack — a quarterly subscription box launching this fall. FULL TRANSCRIPT: Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. I'm Nancy Harrington and today I'm interviewing my business partner, sister, inspiration and best friend Amy. Amy left home right after college to follow her passion in Hollywood. She quickly rose through the ranks to become the first women to ever hold the title of Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production at a major movie studio. After years in the film world she left all that behind to join forces with me to create the Passionistas Project where we share the stories of strong and empowered women who are following their passions through our podcast and our upcoming subscription box. So please welcome to the show my very special guest, Amy Harrington. What are you most passionate about? Amy: I'm most passionate about fulfilling my sense of curiosity and trying to learn something new every day. When I had my first job on the TV show Matlock, my boss at the time, John McClain told me as long as I learned something new every day, I feel like I had a good day and I've always carried that with me. Passionistas: So how does that translate into what you do for a living and with the Passionistas Project specifically? Amy: Well, when we started working for the Television Academy, 10 years ago at this point, and started to do interviews with people, I realized that that's what I love to do more than anything else. And it really fed into that sense of curiosity that I have because I love to talk to people about what they like to do and what their experiences have been. And I love, in the middle of an interview, when someone says something that triggers a question in my head that we hadn't prepared before. So for me, being able to do that with the Passionistas Project and to use that skill and to focus that passion on women who are following their passions and are really empowering and really inspiring, just brings that all together for me. Passionistas: So, let's talk about your background a little. You spent the summer of 1990 in Los Angeles at the Television Academy as an intern. So talk about what you learned from that experience. Amy: The first half of that summer I had been in New York and I worked at MTV and had an internship there. And that really made me even more excited to get into television because it was fun and energetic and everybody was young and it just felt like you could do anything cause you were, everybody was your age. The executive producers were probably late twenties early thirties so I felt like, okay so this feels doable. And then when I came up later in the summer to California for the Television Academy internship, I really felt like, okay, I am getting my foot in the door. I'm meeting other people my age and people who have experience who have been doing this for a really long time. And as long as I work hard and do a good job and prove myself, then the possibilities are endless. This is not just some crazy dream, a kid from the south shore of Massachusetts was having, but that, I could really move to California. I could really work in television and I could make it happen, you know? And if I hadn't had the Academy internship, I don't know that I would have believed that and I wouldn't have met the friends that I made who helped me get my first job when I moved back the summer after I graduated. Passionistas: Talk about what that first job was and what your path was that first few years of your work in Hollywood. Amy: So when I first came back to LA, I had a roommate lined up, Amy Toomin and she brought me back into a circle of friends that we had made the summer before. And one of them, Carolyn Koppel, who is going to be a Passionista soon, worked on a TV show called Matlock. She suggested I interview for the job of post-production assistant, which I at the time had no desire to be. I wanted to be a sitcom writer and TV producer. And I luckily had a professor in college who had told me, don't be so sure of what you want to do when you go out there, you know, keep your options open because you don't know what you actually are gonna like. And so I started working on Matlock and got into post production and one day my boss, at Matlock said to me, if you could be doing anything in Hollywood, what would you actually want to do? And I said, you know, if I could do anything I would probably want to be in what I thought at the time was called special effects and you know, build creatures. And you know, the Star Wars influence from my childhood was, was still very strong. And I thought like, I would really want to do that. And then coincidentally, my second year on Matlock, I was looking for a summer job and I got hired to be the visual effects coordinator on the feature film Coneheads. And that was how I got into the visual effects industry. So from there I went with that boss John Sheeley to Warner Bros. Where we worked on Louis and Clark and then ultimately helped... I was one of four founding members of Warner Bros. Imaging technology, which we called Wabbit. We actually did hands on visual effects for Warner Bros. projects like Batman Forever and The Adventures of Brisco County on TV. And then after I worked at Wabbit for a couple of years, um, the head of post-production at Warner Brothers proper, the studio proper, Mark Solomon hired John Sheeley and I to come over to the studio and actually be production executives basically dealing with visual at Warner Bros. Passionistas: Talk about your years at Warner Bros. And some of your best memories there.   Amy: So John, Sheely and I went over to Warner Bros. And ultimately he left the studio and I was promoted to Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production, simultaneously. I was the first woman to hold the job of a visual effects executive at a studio. What that meant was with Mark Solomon, who was my boss, we oversaw all of the teams who were doing the visual effects on all of the feature films at Warner Bros. And we oversaw editorial. So that was the editors and music supervisors and post production supervisors. And we basically saw every movie from development through final delivery for the six or seven years that I was in that position at studio. So I worked on movies like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and uh, the Matrix trilogy and Perfect Storm and You've Got Mail. Because we worked in development and because we worked all the way through delivery, we basically touched every movie that came through the studio in the time I was there. So I probably worked on about 200 to 250 movies when all of a sudden done. Obviously some more actively than others, but had at least a hand in seeing a lot of movies through. Passionistas: So in 2004 you and I started working together. So why did you decide to make that leap of faith and do that? Amy: By 2004 I, like I said, I had worked on hundreds of movies in one form or another, and the studio itself had changed significantly. When I started at Warner Bros., It was very old Hollywood. Bob Daly and Terry Semel were still the studio heads. And Lorenzo Di Bonaventura was the head of the creative production. And the film and the filmmakers and the, the movie came first. And by the time 2004 rolled around, the AOL Time Warner merger had happened. Everything was very budget driven. The climate at the studio was very different. And frankly, I remember being in a meeting on the third Harry Potter movie and the creative executive asking me how we were gonna make Harry Potter fly. And we had already made Harry Potter fly into other movies. And I just thought, if they don't understand this by now, am I really gonna spend the rest of my life explaining the same thing to everybody. And there was politics involved. And at the same time you, Nancy, were, you were ready to leave your job. And our friend Lisa Karadjian had an idea for a cable network and it was a great idea. And you and I both had the same time thought, well let's do it. Let's leave the jobs we don't like anymore and do this together. So even though that cable network never came to fruition, it was the stepping stone to moving on. Passionistas: In 2010 we founded Pop Culture Passionistas, and in addition to doing interviews and creating content for our own website, we've worked for a number of clients like the Television Academy and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So what do you think was the most significant work that we did for those clients that led us to the Passionistas Project? Amy: Meeting Karen Herman and starting to do interviews for the Television Academy and what was called the Archive of American Television at the time was the most significant moment in our path. I think of it Pop Culture Passionistas. We had obviously done a lot of interviews before Karen let us do an Archive interview, but they were phone interviews with other bloggers or they were not very high pressure or they were, you know, okay, you can ask a few questions and, and that was it. And then with Karen it became, this is how you sit down with someone for three or four hours and really go deep with questions and really get to know someone. And she just taught us how to do research and she taught us how to structure questions so that there was a flow to the interview. But she also gave us the freedom to ask a question in the middle of an interview if something came up that seemed like it should be followed rather than feeling, you know, tied to every word that was on the page. And I just fell in love with that process. And if we hadn't done the Archive interviews it would never have led to the Passionistas Project because the other interviews we were doing weren't that satisfying to me. They were fun and oh cool, we get to talk to this person and ask a couple of questions. But when you're actually get to sit down with someone and stare them in the eye for three hours and talk about their childhood and talk about those moments that you've seen on TV your whole life that meant so much to you, that was really life changing. Passionistas: We started the Passionistas Project in the advent of the #MeToo and the #TimesUp movement. What was your personal motivation for starting the podcast? Amy: We had wanted to start a podcast for a while. We'd probably been talking about it for a year or so and we were talking about doing a pop culture podcast and we couldn't figure out how to do it differently and make it interesting. And we'd certainly didn't want to do the kind of podcast that was us giving our opinion about pop culture and talking for an hour. You know, we wanted to bring our interview skills into it. So for me, the moment when we, when it came to us to do the Passionistas Project, it just felt 100% like what we had been searching for two years. And for me the idea was just, we were hearing all of these really incredibly important stories from the #MeToo movement about women who had been put in horrible positions and who were being really strong and coming forward and telling stories that absolutely needed to be told and almost everyone we know has experienced in one way or the other. But we also knew in our heart that there were a million stories of women who have had good experiences and have worked really hard and built something or been a part of something that was really positive and so in light of all of the darker stories that were being told, and again, they needed to be, I personally felt like we need to also have a platform or women are showing other women that there's a way to do this. You can do it. You can have a positive experience. You can build your own environment to make a positive experience and that was why I personally wanted to do it. Yes, I had ups and downs at Warner Bros., But I had an incredibly positive experience there. I was the only woman most of the time I was promoted very young. I was given access to everything. I got to work with the greatest directors of the time and the best visual effects people and editors and I was welcomed in to a certain extent, even though I was a woman and I wanted other women to know. It doesn't all have to be the negative side of things. You can follow your passions. Passionistas: What has the podcast meant to you personally? Amy: Now that we're over a year into it? I think the thing that surprised me most about doing it is how connected I feel to the women that we've been interviewing. You know when we do the archive interviews for example, you feel by the end of it, like you have a connection with Julia Louis Dreyfus, but you don't, you know, you're going to see Julia Louis Dreyfus again and she'll say hi cause she's polite but she's not gonna know why she's saying hi to you. I have become used to the fact that I have this intimate experience with someone and then we are strangers. Justifiably. So from that point on. But with the Passionistas Project, I have felt like there's a connection with these women and even if they're not people we're staying in touch with every day or you know, some we seem more than others. I feel like we've got a bond and there's a connection that is really special. And every single woman that we have interviewed has talked about their desire to help other women. And not to bring everything back to Warner Bros. but when I was there, I was the only woman most of the time, or maybe one other woman in a meeting, you know, studio executives. And it was never a real sense of camaraderie with the women. You know, I had my team of women that worked with me and my department and we were close, but the other women in the studio, we were nice to each other, but we didn't bond really. And everyone out to drinks with any of them. I'm finding with the Passionistas Project that women, I think especially in light of the #MeToo  movement, women are looking out for each other. Women are trying to figure out how they can help each other and are trying to move each other's agendas forward in a way that I have never experienced before. I don't think it's unique to what we're doing, but I'm experiencing it first hand in a way I don't think I would be if we weren't doing the podcast. And so that's a selfish answer, but my hope and, and I think what we've already showing that we want to and can do is taking that and connecting people. Oh, you know, we interviewed a woman who has a farm. We interviewed a woman that has a mill, let's introduce them so that maybe they can help each other in some way. Passionistas: What have you learned about yourself from interviewing these women? Amy: I think I've learned that even though I consider myself shy and an introvert, that whether it's because of the project itself or just where I'm at in my life, I am way more determined to step out of my comfort zone and talk to people and open up more about myself than I might have before. Because again, I think the women that we're meeting have made me feel comfortable that flaws are okay in the midst of the positive stuff. And so I feel embraced by them. And so it's letting me, I think because I'm being more open, I'm getting more openness back from them. Passionistas: I'm Nancy Harrington and you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and my interview with my business partner, sister and best friend Nancy Harrington. Join our growing community of women supporting other women who are in pursuit of their passions on The Passionistas Project Facebook Group. And go to ThePassionistasProject.com to sign up for our mailing list and get 10% off our upcoming subscription box. Now here's more of my interview with Amy.  Do you ever feel unmotivated and what do you do to get past that feeling? Amy: I don't feel unmotivated very often. I usually wake up feeling behind in what I wanted to get done for the day, so it's rare that I wake up and go, I don't want to work today. Especially because I love what we're doing so much that it's not like some jobs I've had in the past or it's like, ah, I don't want to. But when I do feel unmotivated, honestly, I just figure out like, okay, but what can I do right now? That's not the least favorite thing that I have to do and if I can get that done, then that'll probably lead me to something else and I try and get the things I want you to do least out of the way first so that I have the carrot of something that I really want to do dangling out there. So it's like, okay, if I get through this, then I will be able to do the thing that I really want to do. Passionistas: Is there one lesson that you've learned on your journey so far that really sticks with you? Amy: I think the thing that I've learned that sticks with me is that I can do anything I set my mind to. And I don't mean that in like a cocky way. I just mean every job I've ever been given or every job I've ever chosen to pursue on my own. I have never known how to do it. When I started to do it, I've never been given a job that was like, oh, we see that you have 10 years of experience in this particular thing, so we want to hire you. It's always been like, well I know you can do this, but now we need someone that can do this and we're going to give you the job. I remember when I Mark Solomon decided to make me Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production at the same time at Warner Bros. He had already asked me to do the visual effects job and then he said, will you do the post production job too? And I said to him, I don't know how to do that. You realize that you're offering me this very like important position that I don't know how to do. And he said, yeah, but I know that you'll figure it out. I know you can do it. And I've been very lucky that a lot of people have thought that of me and it used to be that I didn't necessarily understand why or believed them when they would give me those jobs and now I feel like, okay, I can't, I can do, I can figure anything out, I can Google it. And I think that feeds, this feeds back into my original answer. What I'm most passionate about is like I want to learn new things all the time. So the more opportunities I get to do things I don't know how to do, that's what keeps me interested in working and living. So I feel like I'm finally at a point where I'm more confident in myself that I can take on anything than anybody throws at me. Passionistas: What's been your biggest professional challenge and how have you overcome it? Amy: I think my biggest professional challenge has been confidence in myself. I think when I was at Warner Bros., I was so young to have the job that I had that everybody else believed everything I was saying and I was right about what I was saying. Or I would bring in the right person to answer a question if I didn't know how to answer it. But I think the whole time I felt like they're going to figure out that I don't really. I don't think they should have given me this job even though I was doing a great job. So I think my biggest challenge has always been trusting myself and believing in myself and having the confidence that I belong at the table and that I'm good at what I do when I set my mind to it. So I've learned over the years to have more faith and, and the job at Warner Bros. I think was what taught me that. Like that feeling lasted for a little while and then it was like, oh wait, I have everybody sitting in this room. I actually am the one that knows what the answer to this question is. Once I get over that feeling of being a fraud and realizing I belonged there and that I had earned it since then, I've felt pretty confident and like, especially when the chips are down and I feel like I can really kick in if there's a crisis and take charge of the situation. So, but that was, that was probably my biggest challenge along the way.  Passionistas: What's the most rewarding part of your career? Amy Harrington: Where I'm at right now is the most rewarding part of my career because I'm following my passions, I'm doing it with my best friend and I feel like what we are creating with the Passionistas Project is really important and there's so many elements to it that we haven't even started to explore that are going to give a platform for women and a voice to women and build a community. And so for me, getting to do this every day is so rewarding and I just want to throw all of my energy into it. Passionistas: Looking back on your journey so far, is there one decision that you think was the most courageous that changed your trajectory? Amy: Leaving Warner Bros. Was the most courageous thing because I thought I was going to work there my entire life. I thought, I thought I'd worked there till I was 65 and I would retire and I was making a very good salary. I had a very comfortable life. It was my entire life. During that period, I didn't really have much of a social life because I was so focused on what I was doing. I was the quintessential career girl. So the decision to actually leave all of that, especially because we were working on a cable network, but it wasn't a paid job and it wasn't okay, I'm going from this steady position to another steady situation. It was, I'm basically taking early retirement and figuring out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. It was very scary, but it was the best thing I ever did. Passionistas: When you were a girl, what lessons did your mother teach you about women's roles in society? Amy: Our mother was the greatest mother anybody could ever have. She was incredibly loving. She gave up everything she may have wanted for herself, for her husband and her children. She had studied to be an art teacher, but after she got married, she stopped doing that and she just raised a family, which was a very important job and she was, again, she was the best mother ever. But I remember throughout my life asking her like, will you draw something for me? You are an art teacher. You clearly loved art. You must have loved to draw, which she said she did, but our father was such a good artist that she would not draw because she said he was such a good artist. She didn't want to. Knowing my dad, I believe she didn't want to draw because I think she was probably a really good artist and she didn't want to steal any thunder from him, which was her way and made her as lovely as she was. But it also was an example to me that that's really not the way to live your life. By the time I got to high school, my sisters and brother were older. And I didn't date much in high school. I rarely had a steady boyfriend, but I would say to her, you know, I wish I had a boyfriend. She would say, don't worry about that, you know, don't focus on that. She basically would say to me, follow my dreams and that will come when it's supposed to come. If it comes, you'll be happy. And if it doesn't come, you're still going to be fine. But the most important thing is what do you wanna do and go out and do it. And I think if she had lived in a different time, she would have been an archeologist or she would have been an art teacher or some kind of teacher and she would have done something that she wanted to do. Because she was such a curious person. And I definitely got my sense of curiosity from her. So I know when she saw me come out here and do what I wanted to do and was around long enough to see me do well at it, that she got to live vicariously through me in a way. Passionistas: What about professional mentors along the way? Amy: In terms of what we're doing now and the Passionistas Project, without a doubt, Karen Herman was the biggest mentor that I could have had. She, again, we had some experience doing interviews, but I will never forget the day that she came to us and said, do you want to do an Archive interview and let us interview Melissa Gilbert, who was like the actress I was compared to constantly as a child because I had long hair. And Karen had no idea of that. And really taught us how to do what we're doing and again made it really fun and gave us opportunities like interviewing Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander. And the crown jewel of it all — Laverne and Shirley — partly because I know she trusted us that we would do a good job, but also partly because she knew it meant something to us. She knew that we would have fun doing it together without Karen. I don't know where we would be right now. Passionistas: Who are your favorite cultural heroines? Amy: All my cultural heroines growing up were TV characters. So I would have to say Laverne DeFazio, certainly Mary Richards, not Mary Tyler Moore because she was the go getter career girl working in television. Rhoda because she was the sassy neighbor who said what was on her mind, always made fun of herself so no one else could first. Those strong female TV characters that had a sense of humor and a little bit of an edge and were really super independent. Passionistas: What's your secret to a rewarding life? Amy: My secret to rewarding life is having balance, which I never used to have. So it's getting to do what I want to do for a living with the people I want to do it with and having a really nice home and boyfriend to go home to. And knowing that I can have both of those things even though it's not always easy to balance them. Knowing that I don't have to pick one or the other. Passionistas: Is there a mantra that you live by? Amy: I would say there are two. One comes from one of my favorite movies of all time. The Sound of Music, which is "Mother Superior always says, ‘When the Lord closes a door somewhere, he opens a window.'" And I do believe that as hard as it can be sometimes and you don't think that it's a good thing. Sometimes the universe pushes you, actually pushes you out the door. And slams it behind you so you can't go back in and you gotta climb back into something else or a window. That's that a huge mantra in my life. And the other is something our mother always used to say, which is "everything happens for a reason." And again, you may not always know what that is at that moment, but it always ends up being true. Passionistas: What's your proudest career achievement? Amy: Well, I think I have two, because I feel like I have two, I feel like I have two parts of my career. The first part, which is the Warner Bros. part, I would say I'm proudest of being a woman that accomplished so much, so young and worked so hard to play on that level and to get to work on movies like the first Harry Potter, and A Little Princess and to work with directors like Alfonso Cuaron and Tim Burton and Nora Ephron. To me, I get to, I get to work at these the studio that was at the top of its game and it pushed me to be the best I could be. So for that part of my career, that's my proudest achievement. But now, and forever, I think my proudest achievement is going to be what we're doing right now. I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg of what we're going to build and with the plans that we have to expand it into different areas. I think we are creating something that's going to last forever and be our legacy and carry on after we're gone. And I think it's to help women tell their stories that might not otherwise be heard and to hopefully inspire other women to do the same thing, which is just to follow their passion, whatever that is. I just think being able to do that is a true blessing and I already am proud of it, but I think I'm only gonna become more and more proud of it as we go on. Passionistas:What's your definition of success? Amy: For me, success is just following your passion and being able to sustain the lifestyle that you want to sustain. You don't need to be a gazillionaire. You need to be able to pay your bills and you need to decide what that comfort level is for you in terms of what your finances need to be. But if you're making money, doing something that you love, then you really, really lucky in this life. Passionistas:What does it mean to you to be a female entrepreneur in 2019? Amy: I feel like it's a good time to be a female entrepreneur and I feel like it's an important time for a woman to be an entrepreneur because on the tail of the #MeToo movement, it feels like doors are opening for women. And women are being more supportive of each other. But I think it could very easily slide back in the other direction and just be a moment. So I think it's really important that at this point in time we all do what we can to help each other be as successful as possible so that we build as strong a foundation as possible for women to build upon in the future. So I think what we are, I know what we're trying to do is help spread the word, you know, we're gonna have a subscription box. We're going to help get the product out there. You know, we're going to have an, we have an online community where we're inviting women to help each other. And I think now is a critical time for there to be as many female entrepreneurs in the game and supporting each other as possible. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and my interview with my business partners, sister and best friend Amy Harrington. Join our growing community of women supporting other women who are in pursuit of their passions on The Passionistas Project Facebook Group.  And go to ThePassionistasProject.com to sign up for our mailing list and get 10% off our upcoming subscription box. While you're there, check out the gallery of our childhood photos as ThePassionistasProject.com/blog. And be sure to subscribe to The Passionistas Project Podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.

Welcome to this episode of the Real Fast Results podcast!  Amy Collins is today’s special guest.  She has just recently collaborated on a brand-new book called Write and Grow Rich.  It is now available for a special pre-launch price of just $0.99.  A total of 24 highly-regarded, very successful authors have contributed a chapter to this book.  If you would like to learn the best ways to use your skill of writing to generate vast amounts of income, visit RealFastResults.com/wagr to purchase a copy of the book.  There is a great bonus package that you’ll receive with your purchase as well, but in order to gain access to that and the special price for the book you’ll need to act fast! Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode Amy is going to cover some of these tactics during this episode.  She is one of the very best people to explain this because she has already helped a number of authors go from being struggling writers to becoming financially successful authors, some even becoming superstars in their field.  Amy has worked with Daniel Hall on many occasions, and they currently have a program called Real Fast Library Marketing (RealFastLibraryMarketing.com), which helps authors get their books into libraries.  They also have another program called Real Fast Indie Book Marketing (RealFastIndieBookMarketing.com), and this program helps authors to get their books into indie bookstores and other brick and mortar retailers.  Please welcome Amy to the show… Promise: An Explanation of what Separates an Author from a Successful Author Thanks for having me.  I’ve been thinking about this promise.  Today, I’m going to give you specific activities that successful authors practice and less successful authors don’t.  I’m going to give you a list, and an explanation, of what separates an author from a successful author.  There are a lot of writers out there, and there are a lot of authors, but if you want to know the actual tasks that will allow you to go from being a writer, to an author, to a successful author, I’m going to give you specific things you can do. Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode   Learn Immerse Yourself in Successful Authors from Your Same Genre How to find readers in your genre Taking Part in Your Industry Interact with the Authors and Readers in your Genre Successful Authors are Always Writing Who do you turn to when you need help? Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode Connecting with Amy Well, first of all, you should really pick up a copy of Write and Grow Rich.  At this time, it is in pre-launch status, and you can get a very special deal.  Just visit RealFastResults.com/wagr to grab the book and all of the great bonuses that come with it. Now, I’ve talked a lot about market research and marketing activities.  One of the things that I’ve mentioned once or twice is reviews and where you should go for them.  If you go to NewShelves.com/realfast, you can access a free download.  This is a market research checklist that will help you make sure that you are going to all of the right places to find those bestselling books that you are curious about. If you want to know where to go and how to do this market research, I have actually created a downloadable PDF that gives you the links to exactly where to go.  All you have to do is sign up for my newsletter, and you will get a PDF that actually walks you through the process.  So, that’s NewShelves.com/realfast. Resources Write and Grow Rich NewShelves.com/realfast RealFastLibraryMarketing.com RealFastIndieBookMarketing.com   Real Fast Results Community If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!

Amy Cunningham is a progressive funeral director and the owner of Fitting Tribute Funeral Services in New York City. A former journalist, Amy co-authors a blog, The Inspired Funeral, with Kateyanne Unullisi. Full Transcript: Intro: This is Tanya Marsh and you’re listening to Death, et seq. The Fall semester just started at Wake Forest, so we’ve gone to episodes every other week for a little while, but the students in my Funeral and Cemetery Law class this semester will be helping me with some episodes, so you can look forward to some interesting topics. In the near future, you can look forward to an interview with Josh Slocum, the Executive Director of Funeral Consumers Alliance, and a conversation with my friend Tim Mossberger, the unofficial archivist of The Avett Brothers, about their music and mortality. But today’s episode is an interview with my friend Amy Cunningham, who is a progressive funeral director in Brooklyn, New York. Amy went to mortuary school in her 50s and embarked on this second career with an incredible amount of energy and empathy. She is the owner of Fitting Tribute Funeral Services and she is one of my favorite people. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Tanya Marsh: I am sitting with Amy Cunningham today in Brooklyn. Thank you, Amy so much for joining me on Death, et seq. Amy Cunningham: Hi Tanya. I’m very excited to be here. Tanya: Amy, I think of you as a non-traditional funeral director for a couple of reasons. You don't come from a funeral family. This is your second career. And you actively promote home funerals, green burials, and a number of other of “non-traditional” processes, rituals, and methods of disposition. And you do all of this in a state, New York, whose licensing makes it particularly difficult to be a non-traditional funeral director because of the licensing requirements. So can you just share your story and what motivated you to become a funeral director? Amy: Sure, it started with my father's death in South Carolina in the care of hospice and you know down there it's obvious to people in the small towns who to call when they need a funeral director—they know the funeral director from the Chamber of Commerce, from Rotary. So when my dad died we gave him a magnificent music-infused funeral service in the Presbyterian Church. I was amazed by the sweetness of the funeral director down there. I came back to Brooklyn. I was then a journalist writing about Buddhism meditations, spirituality, the new spiritual marketplace in the United States, how families were into marrying and mixing faith within their family system. I came back to Brooklyn after Dad's funeral and said to my husband, “gosh I admired that funeral director so much. I wonder what it would be like to be a funeral director. I wonder how you go about doing that.” That was in 2009, and six months later I was enrolled in mortuary school here in New York. It was a very rigorous demanding year and far more embalming and chemistry and science education than I ever anticipated. I'm not bitter about that now, but I was then. I got through all that and then took six months to, at the age of 54, not many funeral homes are eager to hire a mother of two who's had a career in journalism that doesn't seem applicable to the funeral biz. So it took a while to get a residency. But I did land a good one with a marvelous man who trained me and then I stayed there for three years and was always consistently interested in meeting the needs of families with a lot going on in terms of their faith constellation. The average family I meet with in Brooklyn these days—someone's a lapsed Catholic, someone's Jewish, someone's going to Buddhist retreats and practicing yoga. And they're trying to figure out how to arrange a funeral for a grandmother who had no faith at all, but then became a Mormon in the nursing home where she fell in love with the chaplain who was a Mormon and people come to me in that state. And when I sit with the family like that I feel I'm really in my sweet spot that I can truly help validate them and show them that they are not atypical that this is really the way we are right now in the United States. We can build a good ceremony. Tanya: I like that phrase “faith constellation” because that kind of pushes back on the notion—a notion about America in general, but maybe Brooklyn in particular, that we are increasingly unchurched and without faith. But that's suggesting that you actually have this sort of diversity and these mixed families of different ritual backgrounds, different faith backgrounds and so trying to find the middle ground or factors that are common to all of them, something that's meaningful. Amy: And yes there's a core of spirituality there and there may even be prayers or poetry that is loved within that family. So it's finding the right mix of language and music and the flowers and the right casket for that kind of group. They've got a lot going on so they want to keep it simple. And they're terrified about being ripped off or paying too much and too many people come in quite uninformed so to guide that kind of family through an experience that that then leaves them in an exalted, uplifted place is very meaningful work and I love it. Tanya: So what would you say your goal is as a funeral director with respect to families and the funerals that you're trying to accomplish. Amy: While I do a lot of alternative services, home funerals, green burials, witnessed cremations, I start out a bit simpler than that. I just want to give them a kind of ritual, a separation ritual that will be meaningful to them and that will endorse or include the values of the deceased and also send them out of the cemetery or out of the crematory that day off to their luncheon or whatever meal they're going to have after the service send them off in a place where they feel that that deceased person was loved, honored take good care of, and that we really did as a group the best job we possibly could. Tanya: Do you tend to deal with people more on a preneed basis? Do you have a lot of people come to you in advance to arrange their own funerals, or do you find that you're dealing more with families after the fact, or is it a mixture. Amy: Increasingly, as I get better now I've been very fortunate to have some good press, people are coming to me in advance. But I would say more frequently they're calling me the night of or two days prior to the death and the care of hospice occurring. A lot of my folks are dying in the care of hospice. I'm making inroads through hospice and getting known to hospice workers as someone who will take not only take great care of the deceased person but manage that complex family constellation. Tanya: And so mostly you're serving people in Brooklyn? Amy: Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Queens recently. Tanya: And then where are their families located? Are the families predominantly local. Or is an aspect of it that … I mean is part of the reason that people are calling you sort of at the last minute because the families coming in from out of town and nobody has made any arrangements. Amy: Some of that. I'm calling people who are in hospital corridors. But the cell phone will say they live in Portland or Cincinnati or Florida. So a lot of kids with parents dying here in New York because that's got that's got to be a challenge. Tanya: If you're not from a funeral family, you're not inheriting a funeral home or buying into an existing funeral home that has a book of business. Amy: Right. Tanya: Because most funeral consumers, the studies show, don't shop around. And there's an incredible reliance on using the funeral home that you've gone to funerals at before, to stick with a funeral director or a funeral home for multiple generations. So what are some ways just from a marketing perspective, getting started as a new business owner that you've tried to use to combat some of that. Amy: I used my background in journalism to develop some PowerPoint presentations that are purely educational or are not sales pitches. I just show people what a cremation is. What is cremation history. What did cremations look like in ancient Rome. And I started delivering those presentations at the Park Slope Food Co-op. Now we have 15,000 members in an alternative grocery store here in Brooklyn. And then my little show kind of took off and went on the road and Greenwood Cemetery now has me giving those kinds of workshops monthly and that's been great for all of Brooklyn. If someone asks me for a business card I may give it to them but it's not about spreading the word of my company, it's more about just giving them the facts because I think all funeral directors need to see themselves as educators. Death is a rather complicated today and there are a lot of important decisions to make involving thousands of dollars. And families will really feel cared for when they feel like they've been educated not just sold a bunch of goods. Tanya: Is it that younger people? Older people? Amy: It's neat. A lot of older people sometimes maybe couples in their 50s, 60s, 70s saying to each other “we really got to get going on this. We want to spare our children the struggle of putting a funeral together for us.” But then also I'm seeing people in their 20s and 30s are interested in funeral planning but also looking at careers in the end of life sphere. And I love these kids. I'm really impressed with the young people I'm meeting. I tell older people are in good hands because these are the people who are going to be taking care of us. And I think the book has not yet been written on how 9/11 influenced a whole generation of people. and deaths awareness and Caitlin Doughty’s books and all the great articles that have been running in The New York Times about getting ready for death and how to face it with dignity and courage. All of that is feeding a culture of young people who really want to get involved and help do death differently. In whatever way that means. And we used to say … I lead a Death Cafe at the cemetery now and it used to be said that death was the last thing any family wanted to discuss. And it was a forbidden topic. I don't find that to be true anymore. I think podcasts like yours, everything that's going on, has made death much more interesting to folks and a great topic to contemplate daily, just as the Buddhists advocate that life is improved through death and contemplation and then awareness. Tanya: The rural cemetery movement of which Greenwood was a part of, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge Massachusetts as a part, were designed in part to give lessons to the living. They were designed as places of contemplation. I mean that was a thing that was part of our culture not that long ago a century, a century ago, and that we've really lost connection with. That acknowledging death and its inevitability and trying to think about how we want to deal with it both for ourselves and for the people that we care about doesn't have to be a scary icky saying it's actually an affirming thing right. Amy: Right. I may be a funeral director because I spent two weeks every summer of my girlhood in Texas and my grandparents used to take me to church every Sunday. And then after church we would drive to the cemetery. It wasn't even a topic of conversation. We would just go pull weeds up look at the stones and say, oh you know, there's Aunt Mildred. And then just go out to lunch. Nothing was really spoken, that was just a ritual that we had. Tanya: I mean I used to go to Nebraska in the summer of visit my grandparents and my grandmother and I in particular we used to go around to all the cemeteries in the county and she'd point out to me who all our people were. We'd pull grass. We were just in Nebraska about three weeks ago and cleaned up some grass around some of the tombstones, and I think I put on Facebook that were visiting my grandmother. Amy: It’s a lovely thing. Tanya: It's a connection. It's a connection through the generations and your relationships with people don't end at death. So Amy, you've talked about people coming from a whole diversity of backgrounds and positions of faith or ways of looking at the world and what some of the common factors in a good funeral might be. So have you thought about what makes a good funeral regardless of your background? Amy: I think even folks who are secular do well to study the structure of a religious funeral, because there are keys to the high notes and the important moments there. Even the terminology and the names of things are wonderful to study. I was just looking up the “death knell.” They used to ring bells when deaths occurred. There used to be callers out on the street, centuries ago, who would notify the community of the death. Today we have Facebook. We toll the bell in a completely different way, but a good funeral involves acknowledgement of the death, an announcement, an obituary, something like that. Tanya: An acknowledgement to the community and by the community. Amy: Right. And then kind of separating process. You know not all deaths occur in the presence of family. But when that death has occurred in the hospital room and family members are standing there weeping…we need to figure out how to, if there's not going to be a home funeral, preferably, it's wonderful to advise the family, if you get them early enough and can educate them, to spend some time with that deceased person and alert them to the fact that it is perfectly legal to keep that deceased person in a hospital room for three or four hours, or if death has occurred in a home in the care of hospice, that person doesn't need to be whisked away. We shouldn't be afraid of the body that we can actually sit there, cry, tell stories … hold the hand of the deceased, comb the deceased’s hair, maybe dress them, wrap them in a shroud. There's things that we can do at these moments that are very beautiful. So a good funeral I feel involves some involvement with the body. That doesn't mean if it's not your tradition, or not your inclination to be with a deceased person's physical body, you can sit in a quiet chapel at the crematory or at the funeral home in the presence of the body in a closed casket, you're still with the body, the body is still there. So I help people who are intimidated by too big an old fashioned deathbed experience to at least maybe sit in the funeral firm for a moment and have something like a visitation. So the announcement, the body, and then some kind of acknowledgement of the meaningfulness of that deceased person's life through a eulogy, through could be a written statement, something often in the context of a service, I think is great. And just feeling like you said to that person everything you had to say and that if you loved them, you said that in the presence of their body even when life is no longer going on within it. And then I think there should be something having to do with friends and a meal or you know these are the the bits, and I divide it up and look at it. And every family does part of it differently and some families try to forego a lot of it, but if they can just have one piece of it, then I feel like they have something they can talk about later and share with their friends that we did the best we could. We gave mom a good send off … we looked through photo albums. There's just there's a lot to it. And the days that unfold after death in the family… we call it a liminal time and space. Sometimes I call it sacred. If someone is secular and they don't like that word it's a special time. It's not every day you have a death in the family. So do whatever you can carefully try to seal yourself away from work and find activities that that will help you honor that person. It could be as a small ritual as if your grandfather washed his car every Saturday, you could start washing your car every Saturday. Some kind of little funny thing that brings that life back to you. You could change your Facebook password to have that person's name in it. Little teeny salutes to the value of that person's existence. I think make for a pretty good funeral. Tanya: We’ve also talked about that you think the start of a good funeral is with the transfer process and there are improvements that the industry more generally could make to the transfer process. Amy: Tanya, if I could make one change in the funeral business, if I could just help the industry see that that transfer from the place of death is the beginning of the funeral. This is where the healing will begin. To train the people who are coming into hospital, walking down the corridor with the rolling funeral home stretcher or cot and orchestrating a transfer from that bed where the deceased person died in and taking … it's a changing of the guard. It's taking a deceased person out of the hospital or the home and into the funeral home and doing that with grace and art and respect. And so many families come to me and say “oh my god my mother died and these guys came and they asked us to leave the room and then we heard the zipping of this bag and then they left as if they didn't want to talk to us anymore. And that was that. And we felt there was a tremendous rupture and sadness and that's when we began to grieve.” That's an unfortunate moment. So I like to go to hospitals with flowers in my arms. I greet the family. I speak to the deceased person by name. And everybody seems to feel good about that … that they know they're giving me permission to transfer that deceased person and take them into my care. But on a slower schedule, at a pace that they can tolerate, and including them and asking them to put music on a cellphone so that when we walk out the door and down the hospital corridor there's some kind of ballad in the background that articulates something about their love for that person. I have a very pretty cot cover. Nothing's ugly. I put flowers in the arms of the deceased so often. There might be flowers on the window sill that have been languishing there through the whole prolonged end of life period. So I take those flowers and I put them in the deceased’s hands and we cover with a pretty cot cover and we only cover the face when the family has told us it's OK to cover the face. So it's a moment and it's a … I make it a thing. I've tried to bring pageantry and a kind of ecstasy back into the whole period and make people feel like home. Okay, now we can go home we can bathe we can be ourselves for a while and let's get ready for the next phase of this thing. Tanya: I think it's so interesting because I've had a lot of conversations so far with people talking about the diminishment of the ritual as in the funeral. But you're talking about imbuing this whole period right after death with ritual that I think we have not had more broadly speaking right. And you're right. I mean the death of a person is such an abrupt transformation. Psychologists and sociologists have talked about, how at least in Western culture, we view human remains as unclean and that part of the funeral ritual like embalming and dressing and putting makeup on is and making a person look more alive is a way of socially transforming this unclean thing into a clean thing because it appears to be alive. Which is I think sort of, more traditionally for the past century, the way that we've all kind of viewed this and so if you look at it through that lens, yeah, take the unclean thing away immediately and then make it presentable again to be given to the living but you're sort of rejecting that idea. And I don't think you're alone in that. I mean I think there are a number of people who are rejecting that idea and saying that it is in fact that abrupt transformation or wrenching away the body that is unhealthy right to processing grief and saying goodbye. Amy: I think of it energetically and I feel like there's still even after a death has occurred a life energy in the room. So I happen to feel, at least it's very helpful to me. I don't know if a soul exists. It's very helpful to me as a funeral director to believe that one does because I comport myself as if the soul is watching me at all times. And it's a mindfulness practice. You have to feel that that deceased person has their eyes on you and that's a lovely relationship. It's not scary. It's a great thing. I talk to deceased people. I that kind of energy in the room. And I think people respond very positively to that. My funeral families seem to like me for that reason. None of us know. But it’s a good idea to just trust. Tanya: So I I've been asking this question of a lot of people and plan to continue to do and to do so and I think your answer just sort of showed your hand on how you might answer it. But do you think that funerals are for the dead or for the living. In other words, should we be respecting the wishes of the deceased with respect to their own funerals. Or should we be focusing more on what those that they've left behind want out of the whole process. Amy: This is the great mystic question. Actually, it was discussed in the first week mortuary school. And I think the technical answer is that it is for the living. Tanya: What do you mean the technical answer, you mean the answer that funeral school… Amy: Yeah, that you're wanting to engage that family in in a meaningful experience and that they are paying for a meaningful experience. But the wishes of the deceased certainly have to come in there. If grandma was a strict Roman Catholic, many families come to me saying we don't go to Mass anymore but grandma would want us to do this. This is what we're doing. Or they might adapt it a little bit, change it slightly. But I do think sometimes the wishes of the deceased can be disobeyed. And this is my example of that. It's not what you think. A friend of mine's mother said “I will haunt you,” as she was dying, “if you give me any kind of funeral. I don't want any funeral.” And they didn't have a funeral. And months later my friend was saying you know that was like Mom's final deprivation. We should have done something. So I think sometimes dying people may insist they don't want much but I think we can give them more than they ask for. Tanya: Well I think it's interesting especially since you mentioned that in the first week of funeral school that this was something you talked about, because the position of the law, and this has been true since Roman times, is that it's the decedent's wishes that matter. Right now part of this I think in the Anglo-American system had to do with the established Church of England and Christian doctrine about you need to be buried in consecrated ground. You needed to have, you know, the priest or the minister preside over your funeral if you were going to be resurrected eventually. So it was so important for the deceased that there remains be treated in the correct way and their eternal salvation rested upon that. That it was like a social contract. I'll take care of you, if you take care of me. And it was sort of an assumed baseline of what the decedents were going to want. Amy: It’s fascinating. Tanya: So the attitude of the funeral industry is so opposite to the tradition of the law that that's just it's really fascinating to me when you have these kind of incredible tensions and disconnect between two different institutions that are both sort of longstanding. No wonder people are confused, right? Amy: And that makes the appointment of agent to control the disposition of remains that are very important for people who whose wishes run contrary to the wishes of their families and that they want to make sure that they're protected. Tanya: Well and you know a practical problem that I've heard a lot of funeral directors say is that especially if a person died and they didn't have a spouse or their spouse predecease them and they have children where they have you know some other category of people who get to make a decision and that there's disagreement within the category. Divorced parents making a decision for a deceased child or children making a decision on behalf of a parent that you can have real practical problems and try and sort it all out. And that's the deceased left behind instructions then that's going to be a lot easier for everybody. Amy: Exactly. Tanya: So what kind of conversations do you have with people on a preneed or an at-need basis in terms of what kind of goods and services that they're looking for from you. In other words, why are families or soon to be decedents coming to you and so some other funeral establishment. Amy: Well one thing that I offer, and I'm very clear about on my website, is that I make every effort to make the funeral eco-friendly. So my customers tend to come to me because they know I'm going to offer them a simple casket and they also are not interested in embalming. My customer almost uniformly … I think maybe I might have one or two embalmings a year. And I don't mean to upset embalmers or be anti-embalming. It's just interesting to note that my customer is wary of embalming and not desiring that. So they may even ask about it, “You're not going to embalm.” And I say as you know, that's what I say on my website, I make every every effort not to embalm. I partner, I have my registration at a Jewish firm and it has a very large refrigerated space. So all our deceased people live back there, they are kept cool and can last a long time without any chemical intervention. That's … I've found that there are enough New Yorkers who find that important that they come to me and trust me. Tanya: And so a lot of people are coming to because of environmental considerations. Amy: Yes. Tanya: And so you have observed that their objection to embalming is part and parcel of their environmental considerations? Or is there something else going on with their objection to embalming? Amy: That’s a great question. I think they want as little intervention as possible. And here's the key word—they want an authentic experience. They want authenticity the whole way. Tanya: And they're viewing embalming as antithetical to authenticity. Amy: Yes. And I feel that there's a new generation of funeral customer who wants to see what death looks like. I recently had a family that even said “don't even close Dad's mouth.” A lot of funeral directors would find that outrageous, that of course you're going to close the deceased’s mouth for them. But this family said he looks fine. And they want things as natural as possible. And they're sometimes very amenable to viewing with very minimal care. They say goodbye at the hospital. They may take a glance or sit with the open casket for a time and they don't feel that chemicals are useful to them. And this is a customer that wants to watch money. But I also feel like they might be shopping at Whole Foods where they may be paying a bit extra for an organic apple just because it's organic. Tanya: Right. So interest in driving down the price of the funeral is not something that you've observed is a primary consideration. Amy: I tell that to other funeral directors as the good news of this thing because this customer wants it real and is willing to pay for that. Tanya: So what does a home funeral look like in New York City? Because it's always seemed to me that the urban areas were some of the first places where funeral homes became popular and widespread because people simply didn't have enough space in their own parlors. They had to go to a funeral parlor. And you still have some of the space considerations and people don't have cars. I mean you have a lot of sort of practical constraints in a city like this that you don't have in many other places that would that would seem to complicate a home funeral. So are you looking at home funerals and for the folks that come to you, it's like a whole range of different options? Amy: Sometimes a home funeral in New York is a delayed transfer or pickup. I'll get a call from a family they'll say “we've just called hospice. Mom is dead. We'd like four hours.” And I say “great you know let's set a time. Let's send text messages to each other. You tell me when you're ready and we’ll come over.” That's a mini home funeral. You don't need any dry ice for that. Sometimes it's an overnight. We've done quite a few of those. Sometimes it's a longer, more prolonged ritual. I had a Tibetan case where we kept a deceased gentleman in an apartment in Bushwick Brooklyn for almost three days. Tanya: You used dry ice? Amy: I left dry ice there but that particular gentleman was an advanced tantric practitioner. He visited with the Dalai Lama before his death. That gentleman was almost incorruptible. He was magnificent and knew how to die. And if ice was used, it was very little. Quite fascinating. But that was a great experience. But there have been other times where we brought deceased individuals into a brownstone in Brooklyn and laid them out in the parlor in the old fashioned way and then taken them back to the funeral home in the casket that night. So you're right, we have smaller living spaces, I think where the family centered funeral is really inhibited in New York and only at the point of families ever using their own cars or carrying someone out onto West 57th Street. That's not gonna happen anytime soon. I've had conversations with Josh Slocum about this. Much can be overcome that the city does pose some obstacles. Tanya: You mean just the practical realities of living in the city. Amy: I envy the Texans who can put granddad's casket in a pickup truck and take to the cemetery themselves. That's a tall order here in New York. We still have and that's why part of my business is rather conventional. I still use hearses and sometimes limousines. We have old fashioned cortège going to the cemetery and cars in sequence and all the old trapping, but New Yorkers still gravitate to that and want a little bit of pomp and circumstance. Tanya: So you mentioned witnessed cremations a couple of times. And I think that's really interesting to talk about. Because I've been to … Fresh Pond Crematory and toured that and that's a fascinating historical place that is really set up to and oriented to witnessed cremations for people from a whole bunch of different faith perspectives. I mean I think they've made a real effort to be to be inclusive in that way. But not every state has witnessed cremations or makes it very easy to have a witnessed cremation. So what do you think is valuable for families if anything about experiencing a witness cremation? Amy: Witnessed cremation has gone up a lot in my practice in the last two years. I think some people want to accompany their loved one the whole way as far as they can almost as if it's to the edge of a kind of grave they want of an experience. It's not that … I am careful with my language … it's not that they want it but they find benefit in the witness. What is a witness—it means that after the chapel service at the crematory or a funeral home, you can go to the area of the cremation plant or facility and witness the casket entering the cremation chamber or retort. The door is opened. Generally at Green-Wood the casket is on a lift, a hydraulic lift, it lifts up to the height of the retort and then the men gently guide that vessel into the chamber … Tanya: I've been I've been to the crematory at Green-Wood as well, and so the family is standing in a separate room, right? And so there's curtains… Amy: They’ve redesigned it. We’re going into the retort room now because it's so beautifully styled and designed. It's so beautiful back there. The metal of the doors is a kind of bronze and they're symbols of the world of antiquity back there that are very touching and moving. When that chamber opens you see a sort of arch of brick on the top of it and the glow of the embers. You don't see flames but if the family opts for this they can push a button on the wall that then lowers very slowly the door of the retort. It has a kind of magnificence to it. And certainly a finality. I don't use the word closure because there is no such thing as closure. You're going to carry this loss with you for the rest of your life. But it does make people feel like wow I took it as far as I could. I was with her every step of the way. And I was sort of available for every emotional aspect of this experience. People's knees buckle a little bit but they walk out of the room saying “Wow I've never seen anything like that before. Thank you.” Tanya: So that really challenges the notion that people are opting for cremation primarily because of cost. I mean because it was I guess it all has to do with the ritual that surrounds it because the pushing the button and the witnessing seems very similar to a graveside service where you're where you're putting a handful of dirt on the casket. Amy: Yeah. People want to do things even in a time of grief. And when I think of my male compatriots and my teachers in the industry who I love. I notice that in their lovely masculine way they've been depriving people of experiences because they feel that those experiences aren't good for them. And they say we will take it off your hands. We will do it for you. We are here for you. And it's very nice. And some families like that but increasingly families are saying “no we want to do that. We want to be there. You don't have to take it off our hands. We want to pay you to allow us to be there and be fully present.” Tanya: That we're going to get more value as a family from involving ourselves in the process. Amy: I recently had a group of people, a family, seated in the home with the deceased person present. They had on their own after death lit candles, put rose petals around her body, bathed her, brushed her hair, and then they were ready for me to come. I ended up coming with my own two man stretcher which is like a fireman's pallet. And I didn't call the man at the firm that I used to help me with these transfers. I went by myself and we were on the upstairs level of a two-story townhome and I said to the people assembled: “Listen, I thought about you guys, I knew that you have dressed her and cared for her and been here all this time. I thought that you might want to help me carry her out down the stairs.” Not every funeral director would be comfortable with this because there are liabilities, what if somebody stumbles. What if… it's always gone well for me, I don't know how to explain it any better, because it's like this family would have paid more to have the experience of carrying their loved one out of the house. That's an extreme example. But when we got to the bottom of the stairs we put this lovely woman, we covered her respectfully in gorgeous fabric. We put her in the back of my car. I closed the door. I turned to them and the gratitude was amazing to observe. These are very small ways that we can include families and continuing to love the person that they are now missing and help them in their adjustment to the new reality. Tanya: Let me ask you a final question for you but before we get to that this is sort of a mundane question. A lot of the things that you described doing do not fit with the general price list. Amy: Yes. Tanya: So how do you try to forge this new set of services? The gorgeous fabric, the involving the family, and transporting the body, the transfer process. A lot of these things that you're talking about—you did a direct burial not too long ago and there is a play list that you played. These are all services and incredibly important touches. But I'm just wondering how you reconcile that with a very formalized set of requirements imposed by the Funeral Rule. And then also sort of the established norms of how this industry works. Amy: I recently found myself standing in a Bed Bath and Beyond looking for some kind of piece of fabric or throw to put over a casket in the deceased person's favorite shade of robin's egg blue. And I stood there asking myself “how do I get this onto the Price List?” The GPL is not working for me. In time all I can imagine is perhaps getting so well-known for this kind of lovely series of gestures that I could raise my non-negotiable…my arrangements fee. It doesn't fit anywhere else doesn't it well. I mean there's no hourly wage, there's no funeral preparation hourly fee or something like that. I'm not able to monetize it yet. All I'm doing is building my brand and getting the word out that I'm available to you to do these kinds of things right. Tanya: Right. Because I mean the GPL is set up for … even though you still have this non-declinable fee for covering a lot of your profit and, you know, your services in the cost of goods. But if you're not doing an embalming that's out the door. Amy: The caskets aren’t expensive and they’re not marked up. Tanya: So that's a real challenge for people who are sort of pursuing a nontraditional kind of a path. That is much more service oriented. But the question is how do you accurately communicate the cost of those services to families. And right now there's transparency and fairness and that you're getting fully compensated for your time and expertise right and that they know what they're getting themselves into. That's the challenge. Amy: The guys at the funeral home watch me arrange rose petals in the interior of the casket where the deceased is never going to be viewed. They say, “Amy, just close the casket.” Well I want to finesse the shroud a little better. Yeah, I don't know. I mean I don't think I'll ever have any feeling of … I have to learn to protect myself, I guess. But I would love to sit down with others in the industry and figure out how we can offer these kinds of things and really save the funeral industry in so many words because it's not working the way it's set up right now. Tanya: So my final question is what sort of advice do you have for people who are considering following a path like you have. What have you learned? What would you do differently? Do you think that this is a path that others should follow? Amy: I think there are so many opportunities for thoughtful people in this business. And it's such fulfilling work. I would never discourage anyone from getting into it. However there are so many impediments and barriers to entry and hoops to jump through. My husband used to watch me studying late into the night in mortuary school and he'd say “honey this is like a hazing. I can't believe this. You know you want to just do good funeral services why are you having to memorize every bone in the foot.” So one thing I do say is that you really have to want to get into it, if you're in any way unsure then maybe it's not for you. It tends to be a business that is so hard to enter that you really have to want it more than anything else and almost see that there's no other path for you. If that requirement is satisfied then go on, get through the school that will maybe be one of the worst years of your life. But it's only a year you'll get through it. You'll be proud of yourself. Your family will be proud of you. And then try to negotiate the best residency you possibly can in those states that insist upon that yeah. And the embalming requirements are really tough and each state is different. So I was advised to just show my boss what I was good at. And I think he acknowledged after about four months of having me back there in what is known as the pit that really wasn't my gift. So I got through that part with all the legal requirements for residency and licensing in the state of New York and it's good to know a bit about embalming but I don't want to say it's going to be obsolete. There's always going to be a call for it but I don't know that the emphasis in the in the mortuary schools needs to be so focused on it. Tanya: Well there's definitely been some studies have indicated that the number of women who are interested in becoming funeral directors is artificially depressed by the embalming curriculum. Large numbers of women have said that they would be much because they're more interested in the I guess you call “front of the house.” Amy: Right. The suits, yes. The people who want to sell the funerals. Tanya: Well or just be involved in the experiences and helping people have a meaningful experience and funeral but they're not interested in the embalming side of it. And so coupling those two different professions into one. And the requirements to become both into one has cut down on a lot of people who would probably be pretty funeral directors Amy: Yeah, yeah. I am finding that the men in the industry I'm around are very moved by what I do and don't criticize me or make fun of me in any way at this point because they see that this is sort of why they got into the business themselves in the first place. I help remind people of the gorgeous nature of this work. And I think we all need each other and can work together and make for a new way for families to say goodbye. Tanya: Well I think that you are an absolutely inspiring funeral director and you're so positive. And that we could all learn a lot from the experience that you have and what you're trying to bring to families. Amy: Thank you thank you so much. You know by the way I have a blog that I write with Kateyanne Unullisi, a Seattle funeral celebrant, called The Inspired Funeral. And a lot of these ideas are on there. We divide the whole end of life period into nine different moments and we have readings for each of those moments and a lot of good material. Tanya: I'll put that in the show notes. Amy: My life as a journalist continues. Tanya: Awesome. Thank you so much Amy. Amy: Thank you.

In this episode, we discuss the topic of allyship and sit down with Author, Public Speaker, Educator, and CEO of Lead at Any Level, Amy C. Waninger to discuss what allyship looks like practically in the workplace.Length: 45:09Hosts: Zach | Ade#LeadatAnyLevel #Favethings #PatreonOur Patreon (and other links): https://linktr.ee/livingcorporateAmy C. Waninger's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amycwaninger/Buy Amy's book here: https://amzn.to/2ztwZaUTRANSCRIPTAde: “First, I must confess that over the past few years I’ve been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Klu Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” This excerpt from Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham jail highlights a point in his movement where he was particularly frustrated, and as he wrote here, his frustration was not with those who were very clearly against him but were with those who were, in his words, lukewarm to his cause of social equity. From my perspective, I realize that I probably will constantly face opposition. My real question is “What does true support look like?” This is Ade, and you’re listening to Living Corporate. Zach: Whoo, that was a heavy quote. Ade: Yeah. It’s--I mean, it’s kind of weird that so far we haven’t quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., I think. But, you know, whatever. Considering our show. Zach: Fair enough. So today we’re talking about effective allyship in Corporate America, and honestly I’m really excited we’re discussing this today. When you talk about Living Corporate and the fact that we’re trying to highlight the views of under-represented people in Corporate America, a lot of that has to do with how we partner and get partnership from people that don’t look like us. Ade: Right. And honestly, just the world and the context in which we’re living, it’s so weird. Like, it’s, you know, simultaneously more diverse than ever, and more voices are popping up and, you know, demanding to be heard, but at the same time there is this relentless push back, and it feels like the more voices pop up, the more there’s this, like, push to maintain the status quo, just whatever against the idea of recognizing the truth and reality of all of these different experiences. Zach: Oh, you’re absolutely right. I mean, honestly, when you talk about, like, the reality of different experiences at work, right? So at all of the different places I’ve been, every job I’ve had so far had some type of ERG or employee resource group or affinity group or whatever you want to call them, but that’s kind of where they just group people by their identities, right? Or by how they believe people identify themselves primarily, and 99% of the time--I’ll say it this way. I can count on one hand how many discussions I’ve had at work around race that weren’t like, “Oh, you’re black? Well, yeah. We have, like, this black stuff over here.” Like, “You can just go over there with all the other black people, and y’all can be black - together.” Ade: Okay, so I’m curious. Ever, over the course of your professional career, just an instance really of someone being in your corner--someone obviously being someone who did not have a marginalized identity within that context, someone who really practiced effective allyship, who had your back in tense situations. Zach: That’s a really good question. You know what? I think so. So one time I was at work, right? And every time I would be in these meetings, like for a particular project, I would get ignored. Like, I would speak up, and I’d say something. I’d give a point, I’d ask a question. I’d say something, and it would get ignored. But then the people on my project, my colleagues, they would then say what I just said, and then they would get applauded, right? Yes, and it happened all the time. Ade: Ugh. Been there. Zach: So finally this white knight--and no pun intended considering the quote that we gave at the top of the show, it was actually a good thing--this paragon of parity, this champion, he approached the project manager at the end of one of these meetings and in a hushed but direct tone said, “Hey, the way you’re treating Zach seems odd.” Ade: Uh… is that it? Zach: Yeah, that’s it. Ade: Okay. So, um, that sounds nice, and to be real, like, I am not necessarily expecting, you know, knights to come up and, you know, duel people to the death for our honor or throw on their capes and leap from one building of oppression to the next to try to save us all. I just--I feel like it’s hard enough being, like we’ve said multiple times on this show, one of the onlys in a work environment. It’s hard enough when you feel like you’re just at it by yourself. Sometimes, all it really does take is that one quiet conversation to feel like you’re not alone, and I really want to focus on the concept of people who are dedicated, not just, you know, having the idea of allyship but dedicated to using their privilege and their space and their social capital and their power in ways that benefit the people around them who lack that same social capital, and, you know, sometimes a little bit of the coded language, a little bit of the flexing of social capital muscle, goes a really, really long way. Zach: I mean, it would be great if we could speak to someone, perhaps someone who is not an ethnic minority. Someone who maybe they wrote a book about unconscious bias and diversity and inclusion in the workplace? Someone who’s had many public speaking engagements and who’s the CEO of a firm that promotes in the trenches leadership, diversity and inclusion and career management through mentoring, public speaking engagements and other offerings? Ade: Are you talking about our guest, Amy C. Waninger? Zach and Ade: Whaaaaaat? Zach: [imitating air horns] Sound Man, come on, you know what it is. Give me [inaudible]. [Sound Man complies] Ade: Ugly. Ugly. Ugly. Zach: We’re gonna get into our interview with our guest, Amy C. Waninger. Zach: And we’re back, and we said before, we have Amy C. Waninger here with us on the show today. Amy, thank you for joining us today. Amy: Thank you for having me, Zach. I’m excited to be here. Zach: Absolutely, excited to have you here. Would you mind--for those of us who don’t know you, would you mind sharing a little bit about yourself? Amy: Absolutely. I started my career in 1999 as a software developer and, you know, kind of went through all of the bubbles and bursts in the early 2000s in IT. For about the last 10 to 12 years I’ve been in the management space, so progressive management roles in and around information technology, and in the last 10 years I’ve focused on the insurance industry. I recently started my own company, Lead At Any Level, LLC, and through Lead At Any Level I do authorship of, you know, a blog. I have a book out, as you know, and public speaking engagements, training sessions, coaching, individually consulting around career management, diversity and inclusion, and leadership skills. Zach: You have written a book called Network Beyond Bias. Can you explain the title? Amy: Okay, sure. So that--it’s kind of a long story, but I’ll try to make it as quick as I can here. So the word Beyond was really important to me. I did a--I went through a process with a woman named Erin Weed. She has a company called Evoso, and she does this process that she calls a dig, and she helps you get to a word that is powerful for you. It’s this very structured, important, detailed process around how you get to this word, and the word that I chose for myself at the end of this was the word “beyond” because beyond has a lot of power for me, you know? The idea that wherever you are today, you can get beyond. Whatever horizon you can see, you can go beyond it, and so the title comes from the need to network with diverse populations and with people, you know, with all different perspectives, and I don’t believe that we can undo our biases necessarily, and we shouldn’t ignore them. We need to accept that they’re there and then move beyond them, and the subtitle, Making Diversity A Competitive Advantage For Your Career, came from what I saw as a gap in the diversity and inclusion consulting space and even in the writing about diversity and inclusion in the corporate world that we tend to target organizations or senior leaders in that conversation and not engage people at the everyday level. You know, just everyday individual contributors that are maybe trying to move ahead in their careers, and that was important to me for a couple of reasons. Number one, I think people who--by the time they’re in the C-Suite or they’ve got the VP titles or, you know, they’re pretty high up in these large companies, I think they’re very entrenched and engaged in the way things are and not necessarily looking to change because they know how to play the game as it exists today. And, you know, for people who are struggling to get into that in-group that can be really challenging, so I wanted to focus on people who maybe haven’t made it as far as they want to go yet and want to get there but get there in a very inclusive way, and so how can individuals engage in the diversity and inclusion conversation in a way that feels authentic for them? And there’s some element of--I don’t know how to explain it. There’s some element of just because it’s the right thing to do, right? Not altruism, but doing the right thing, but also in a way that helps them move forward in their own careers, because I really feel like if we can engage tomorrow’s leaders today--and I kind of wrap up the book with this--if we can engage tomorrow’s leaders today in being more inclusive and kind of changing the way we network and changing the way these conversations happen for our careers, we can make lasting changes that will get us to, you know, get more diverse representation in the C-Suite. Zach: You know what? It’s interesting that that’s your answer because it leads me into my next question, which is actually--I’m gonna lead in by reading an excerpt from your book, okay? So I’ma read this excerpt. “In the United States, few words are more polarizing than race and racism, yet Americans suffer from constant racial tension, race-based economic disparities and institutionalized racism. If we are to change this, white Americans must listen to those experiences and perspectives that could inform and enlighten us. Our blindness to our privilege is oppressive. Our sense of entitlement is embarrassing.” So I’ve read your book. Really genuinely enjoyed. Amy: Thank you. Zach: Like, as a black man I was like, “Wow, I’m really surprised there’s a white person saying this.” Right? Like, I was very surprised. I’ve read content in the past, like from various authors, who have a similar tone, but they’re typically not white. In this you allude to allyship, so could you first expound on this excerpt and then help us understand what you mean by being an ally and being someone who listens and learns and things of that nature? Amy: Sure. So I’m gonna start by saying that I’m really grateful that you’re calling attention to this chapter. This chapter, writing that chapter about race, was the hardest part of writing the book, and the book almost didn’t get written because I knew that I couldn’t write a book about diversity and inclusion without acknowledging that I’m white, and I didn’t--I struggled so much with how to write about that in a way that was from my perspective but not exclusive of other perspectives, and I struggled with how to write it in a way that was genuine and authentic without--you know, there’s a lot wrapped up in the word “race” for everybody, and, you know, as a white woman I think that, you know, I’ve heard other white people say it’s important for us to talk about this because white folks have access to conversations and audiences that people of color do not, and I think until I wrote about this, on my blog and in my book, I didn’t really understand what that meant. So getting back to your question though, I think allyship is important because as you noted, I--you know, I exist in a white world. I mean, that’s just--that’s my reality, right? The environment that I grew up in--I grew up in southern Indiana in a rural community that was 99.9% white, non-Hispanic, and I was--you know, I was kind of the ethnic one in the room most of the time because I wasn’t German and Catholic, you know? I was different, and I wasn’t that different, right? So, you know, it’s been hard for me to get to a place where I can understand my role in the race conversation, and it wasn’t that I grew up necessarily thinking that--I didn’t grow up thinking that racism was okay. I mean, that was, you know, very ingrained in me from an early age, but what racism meant in an all-white community, it was still racism, right? Even if you weren’t racist, like, it was still a racist environment because there was no--there was no one different. So it’s been an evolution for me over, you know, the course of time, and when I wrote the chapter on race and the blog post on race, I actually reached out to a couple of people of color in my network, and I said, “I would like some feedback on this. I would like some help with this,” and Sabrina Bristow, a friend of mine from North Carolina, she does social justice work in the human services space of government, and she helped me with that chapter. And I actually--I kind of had started a little too advanced, she thought, for most white people, so I had to backtrack a little bit and include, “Okay, here are some things I’m getting right already,” right? By including people of color in my network and, you know, having genuine relationships, and going out of my way to find people and to build relationships across racial boundaries, because it’s very easy for us, for anyone, to stay in their neighborhood, to stay in their enclave, right? And we’re a very segregated society, especially--you know, I think--in the northern states I think we’re a little more segregated even because of public policy that drove segregation kind of under the--you know, under the covers. It wasn’t explicit, right? But it was perhaps--and I hate to use the word effective because it sounds positive and it’s not, but, you know, it was perhaps a more lasting segregation in the north because it was policy that was guiding it, and it was subversive policy at that. You know, in the south, where it was very explicit, it was easier to undo. So I’ve had to learn all of this because this isn’t what we’re taught in schools, and it’s not--you know, if you pick up the newspaper or magazines or, you know, if you read white bloggers, you don’t read about this. What I’ve had to do is I’ve had to expand where I get my information and who I listen to and what those people learn. So, you know, you get a much different perspective if you--I’ll get outside of the black and white, you know, racial categories for a moment--if you read books for Asian-Americans written by Asian-American authors, for example, about the corporate landscape, what you read sounds much different than, you know, what you might get if you are in a meeting with a bunch of managers and there’s, you know, a 5-minute section on how to include Asian-Americans in your work [inaudible], right? It’s just different. It’s a different perspective. Zach: Yeah. Amy: And so, you know, I started listening and learning that I need to go where I’m a fly on the wall listening to how people talk amongst themselves about the problems that they’re facing, and then I need to figure out how I can--when those perspectives are not represented in a room that I’m in, how can I bring those perspectives to light so that the people who are in the room understand that their perspective isn’t the only one that matters just because they’re the only ones in the room? Zach: As an ally, how do you balance being vocal while not, I don’t know, talking too much? Like, do you have any type of rules that you follow to not, in a sense, colonize the movements and spaces you want to support? Amy: Yeah. So I knew that you were gonna ask me that question, so thank you for that in advance, and I struggled with it originally because I don’t have hard and fast rules. I think the guidelines that I try to follow are--I’ve come to the realization that when people are in the majority in a room, any room, they’re very candid, and perhaps too candid sometimes, right, that they divulge things that they probably shouldn’t. People tend to be very candid when they’re in--like, especially in a super majority in a room. People who are in a minority in a room tend to be very emotionally intelligent, right? Because speaking up can be threatening, and so what I’ve found is if I’m in a space where I’m a minority, if, you know, maybe I’m the only white person in the room--maybe I’m the only non-Hispanic in the room, maybe I’m the only woman in the room. That happens quite a bit. You know, I tend to be more in listening mode and receiving mode, and I try not to ask a lot of questions because I don’t want other people to have to educate me, but I think about those questions, and then I can go research them later. I can contemplate or I can read and, you know, not stop the conversation because, you know, the white lady has a question, right? Let the conversation continue as it is, and I can absorb and kind of take that away. But then when something comes up where I feel like someone else is being dismissed, that’s when I speak up. So I have a hard time speaking up for myself. If I’m feeling defensive about--you know, like I said, I grew up in technology, and I started in ‘99, and I was frequently told, you know, “Oh, you’re really analytical for a girl,” or, you know, “Wow, you code really well for a woman,” you know? And I would just kind of roll my eyes, and if I said anything back it was usually not--it was usually not work-appropriate if I said something back. Let’s just leave it at that. And so I got to the point where I was like, “You know what? I’m not even gonna address these things,” but where I have learned that there’s power and where I think you build respect and you can become an ally--I don’t think you make a decision to be an ally and you are one, and I would never use the word ally to describe myself without first saying, “I aspire to be an ally,” because I think it’s ongoing work. I don’t think you can give yourself that title. I think someone else has to give it to you. Zach: Wow, yeah. Amy: But the ways in--I’m sorry, go ahead. Zach: I was just saying wow. Like, yes, absolutely. I’m listening to you. Amy: Yeah. So the way I aspire to be an ally and the way I aspire to do the work of an ally is to recognize what perspectives are missing, and if those perspectives were in the room and had a voice, what would they say? Or if those perspectives are in the room and don’t feel like they have a voice, can I make space for that? Can I stop the conversation so that someone else who is maybe not in the super majority in the room can speak up? Or, even more importantly, can I say “Hold on, I think if we look at this from a different perspective,” and then I can share what I’ve learned by being in those spaces, right? In those spaces that are predominantly of color or, you know, in different ways so that I can help bridge that gap and sort of make that translation so that it doesn’t always fall on the one black person in the room or the one Hispanic person in the room or, you know, the one Asian-American in the room to speak up, right? To me that’s allyship, not making people advocate for themselves all the time. You have to advocate in a way that includes them. Zach: Yeah. You talked a little bit about gender diversity and you being the only woman in the room, and I can empathize. I can’t sympathize, right? But I can empathize, and let me confess something, like, with that in mind. For me, it’s deeply frustrating when I see diversity and inclusion programs only focus on gender diversity, right? So, like, if you look at the tech space, and if you ask, like, the common, average person--we have this app called Fishbowl, which is, like, an anonymous posting app for consultants, and there are times when I’ve seen people post questions like, “What do you think about the diversity and inclusion at your work?” And most people--typically people tend to be a little bit more honest on these anonymous online threads, for good or bad--they’ll say, “Well, it’s good for white women,” right? And so for me, I agree with that, right? Outside looking in as a black man, like, just my perspective, it seems as if these programs are very much so focused on gender diversity but don’t really look at the cross-section of the ethnic diversity or the sexual orientation diversity, right? So in your book you talk about representation in the C-Suite, in chapter 33. Can you talk more about that particular chapter and the things that you wrote around that topic? Amy: Sure, and I don’t have the book in front of me so I’m gonna not speak specifically to the numbers… Zach: Sure. [laughs] Amy: [laughs] Because I don’t have the numbers memorized. That’s why there’s a book. You know, the representation of women I think--of white women, and I want to be clear that we’re talking--and I think you and I spoke about this before we did the interview, right? Zach: Right. Amy: We talked about we get these numbers about, you know, pay disparity, and we say it’s 83 cents on the dollar for women, and that’s not true. It’s 83 cents on the dollar for white women. The numbers for, you know, women of color get worse and worse, right, as you start going down the list. So, you know, black women make less than white women, Latina women make less than that, indigenous women--you know, I don’t even know if they collect the data on that, right? It’s ridiculous the disparity between white women and women of color, and when we talk about women, right, we tend to talk about women as if that’s all women, and it’s not. It’s white women, so let’s be very clear about that. White women make up--and I want to say it’s less than 6% of the C-Suite, right? Of CEO positions in the United States, and I think there were, like, 27 this year out of the Fortune 500. So we’re talking, like, itty-bitty numbers, right? But white women have better representation in the C-Suite at their 4 or 5% or whatever it is, have better representation in the CEO spots of the Fortune 500 than do all people of color, and so I agree with you. I think that it’s a missed opportunity when we--you know, I think ERGs are important, and I talk about that in the book too, employee resource groups and how it can help you connect in spaces that are affinity groups for you, and it can help you connect in spaces that are not affinity groups for you so you can understand different perspectives, but I think one of the things that that can do if we’re not careful is it can kind of divide people up where the employee resource group for women ends up being all white women because women of color identify as, you know, Latina or, you know, African-American first and women second, and the pride ERG is the same way by the way. I think, you know, a lot of times the LGBTQ community is the white LGBTQ community and ignores the perspectives of people of color and, you know, assumes, right, “Well, if they’re here they’ll find us because they’re gay,” and that’s the most important thing to the LGBTQ community that’s white is that they’re gay, but, you know, for--you know, for Asian-Americans or Hispanic-Americans or black Americans that may also be LGBTQ, that’s not the first thing people recognize about them, and so their primary identity is in the racial--you know, in the racial or ethnic category. So all of that to say I don’t think we should cut people up. I think what we should do instead is, you know, recognize that feminism has been white feminism for a long time. You know, white women have benefited a lot from not just their own advocacy but also from the civil rights movement and the African-American civil rights movement of the ‘60s, and instead of claiming ours and then hoping that other people will follow or, you know, “Once we get there we’ll reach out our hand,” I think is the absolute wrong approach. I think what we need to do instead is when white women hear that, oh, we make 83 cents on the dollar, I think it’s incumbent upon us, it’s imperative for us to say, “That’s not the number for women. That’s the number for white women,” and we need to be the ones, white women need to be the ones to stand up to say, “Look, this is not an inclusive conversation just because you’re talking about me. That doesn’t mean you’re being inclusive of everyone.” And, you know, we all face the same systemic issues, right? White women face a lot of the same issues that people of color face that, you know, people who are immigrants face, but the way we’ve carved up the problem it’s like we’re each trying to get our own seat, and what my book seeks to do is to get everybody, like, wherever they are, to start reaching out. So it’s almost--instead of one person trying to break through, it’s more like a game of Red Rover, right, where we’re all holding hands, we’re all moving forward together, and then when we get there we all get there together. And then our C-Suite isn’t, you know, 10 white men and two white women and maybe a person of color, it’s, you know, this whole Red Rover game of black, white, Hispanic, gay, straight, you know, Asian, men, women, non-binary, cisgender, transgender, you know, abled, people with disabilities. You know, it’s all these things, and we all get there together and we all lift each other up. Zach: Hm. So talk to me a little bit about Lead At Any Level. So I know that you intro’d with that, about the company that you’ve started, and you’ve shared that you’re from Indianapolis and that you engage in predominantly white spaces. So I’m not trying to be pessimistic, right, but I’m looking at… Amy: [laughs] Zach: [laughs] I’m looking at American history, and I’m also looking at the words that you wrote in your book, and I’m curious, like, how do you expect to break through and work past, as you’ve described it, the entitlement of white folks? I ask because I’d say any time we as Americans talk about race--so, like, if you want to look at the situation around kneeling, if you want to talk about even how we talk about diversity, and we say, “Well, it’s about thought diversity,” and if you want to talk about--any time that we’ve in the past I would say 54--really the past 400 years, but just looking at, like, our most recent era of just, like, the past 50, 60 years, we talk about race within the context of making sure that the majority is comfortable with the ways that we engage topics around race. So I’m curious as someone who’s starting a company, or rather who has started a company really tackling this subject, how do you plan on breaking through and navigating that? Amy: Sure. So people of color can’t fix racism, right? People of color can--there are all of these--you know, there’s, like, respectability politics, and I know that there’s a lot of code switching, and there are all of these things that happen within communities and within just the mindset and the sort of the self-censoring people of color, right? And no matter what happens, right, whether it’s a protest--you know, someone kneeling for the anthem because of, you know, the pain in this country that’s happening, right, or, you know--it’s one of those things where it’s kind of like you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t, right? If you march, it’s the wrong march. If you speak, it’s the wrong words. If you protest, it’s the wrong protest. If you’re quiet, it’s the wrong thing. You know? We’ve tried every combination of people of color doing things to try to end racism, and where racism needs to end is in white America. Like, white folks are the ones who are gonna have to step up and fix this because we’re the ones that are perpetuating the problem. So I want to be clear. My company is not--the stated purpose of my company is not “end racism in the United States,” and I know there are people for whom that is their mission, right? That is their work. What I want to do is I want to help individuals at all levels of organizations see that if they’re not accepting and welcoming and doing hard work around their own biases and their own privileges and understanding that maybe--you know, maybe yeah, you’re really qualified for this job that you’ve gotten, but you probably got there not just based on your qualifications but also based on, you know, your relationships and based on the network that you have and your ability to say and do the right things and to look a certain way, right? So if I can help people understand, and particularly white folks, right, that hey, if you really want to be a leader, being a leader means standing up for those who don’t have a voice. Being a leader means being courageous. Being a leader means moving beyond where you’re comfortable into where you really need to go. That’s what leadership is, and, you know, through the work that I’m doing, whether it’s, you know, consulting or coaching or classroom training, yeah, I do--some people might say that I soft-pedal it in a way that makes it more palatable, but I think that in a lot of cases unless you can get your foot in the door you can’t even have a conversation. And so, you know, I talk about privilege in terms of, like--in kind of silly terms to start, but it opens people’s minds to the conversation you can have about privilege, you know, if you can just start laying those--you know, putting those seeds in the ground, and then you can build the conversation from there. I think the great tragedy, and I think where privilege is, you know, just at the most basic level, is that, you know, I grew up white. I grew up talking a little bit about race, but it wasn’t an everyday conversation in my household growing up, right, because it wasn’t that my family needed to worry about, and I think that’s the experience of a lot of white folks is that, you know, we--you know, they tell us, “You just treat everybody the same and you’ll be all right,” and that’s not enough, and I think it wasn’t until just the last couple of years where I realized that treating everybody the same and treating everyone respectfully isn’t enough. Like, we have to take steps to undo some of the damage, and we--you know, I don’t think any one of us can do it all, but, you know, if we can all do it in our own way in a way that’s authentic, in a way that gives us life, and not in a way that--and that’s different for everybody, right? There are ways for me to do this that are energizing and there are ways for me to do this that leave me in a crumpled heap on the floor, and so I’ve had to find my own way to have this conversation that I feel is energizing and that I feel is productive and that I feel like is authentic for me, and that won’t be the same for everyone. So I’m not sure I’ve answered the question, but I think because I’m white I can talk about racism without being labeled as angry, you know? But on the flip of that, because I’m a woman, if I talk about sexism or I talk about, you know, gender disparities, or if I call out someone’s micro-aggressions, you know, where they’ve referred to me as a girl, or--you know, people--one of my favorites is when I’m traveling people are like, “Well, who watches your kids?” I’m like, “You have never asked a man that question. Ever.” [laughs] “You have never asked a man who watches his kids when he’s traveling for work.” Like, nobody does that, right? Zach: Right. Amy: But if I call that out as a woman, and not just a white woman but as a woman, I’m too sensitive, right? So I need--in the same way that I need to stand up and say, you know, “Whoa, hold on.” You know, “Don’t insult a person of color by telling them they’re articulate.” You know? Like, why wouldn’t they be art--like, that’s not a compliment, right? That’s a slap in the face. I need to stand up for that because I’m not angry, I’m just pointing out, you know, somebody’s ignorance, right? Whereas if you did that--you could have the exact same conversation, use the same words, the same tone of voice, but then you’re gonna be labeled as angry, right? “Why are you so angry?” And I think in the same way, you know, women need men, not just white men but men of color, and women of color need this as well, for men to say, “Hold up.” You know? “She’s not being sensitive. You’re being a jerk.” Zach: [laughs] Amy: [laughs] And kind of tease that out, and that’s kind of the point of the book about--you know, the whole part about allyship is if you want somebody to stand up for you, you have to be willing to stand up for somebody else first, and that’s what I’m trying to do. Zach: That’s powerful. No, this is amazing, and I’ve really appreciated our conversation. So before we wrap up I want to know, do you have any shout outs? Anybody that you want to recognize and thank? Amy: Oh. Well, first of all I want to shout out to Jennifer Brown. Jennifer Brown is a consultant, a TEDx speaker--or maybe a TED speaker--she’s amazing, and she wrote the foreword to my book. She is one of the most internationally-recognized diversity and inclusion experts in the country, and I want to thank her. She was the first person to encourage me in this work. I just want to thank her for that. She’s been amazing. And I want to shout out to you guys. You guys are doing something--the Living Corporate podcast is doing something that I think is wonderful, where you’re giving a voice and you’re giving kind of the inside scoop to folks who maybe feel like they’re on the outside, and you’re creating a sense of community that is beyond corporate borders, beyond--you know, you’re knocking down walls and reaching out and holding hands, and I think that’s amazing, and I’ve been so impressed with the quality and the insights that you guys provide on this podcast. I think it’s amazing, so I want to shout out to all of you. Zach: Oh, my goodness. Well, thank you so much, and let’s make sure that we link your book, Network Beyond Bias: Making Diversity A Competitive Advantage, in our show notes, and we’ll put it on our Favorite Things so that-- Amy: Oh, thank you. Zach: No problem, ‘cause I really enjoyed it, and I think everyone who’s listening to this should read it. I don’t care where you’re at in the diversity and inclusion discussion or--if you’re listening to this, you should read it. It is a great read. Amy C. Waninger. Thank you so much for your time today. We definitely consider you a friend of the show, and we hope to have you back. Amy: Well, thank you, Zach. I’d love to come back. Zach: Awesome. Peace. Ade: And we’re back. Wow, that was an amazing interview. So real talk, right next to our Preston Mitchum B-Side, that was top 5. Top 5, top 5, top 5. I know Drake’s cancelled, but whatever. [laughs] Zach: That was a really real talk, yeah. I mean, honestly, it was refreshing to have someone who doesn’t look like you empathize with your experiences and be so honest about the reality of the world that we live in, right? Ade: Seriously. I truly appreciated her comments around, you know, gender diversity and LGBTQ diversity. I think that intersectionality is just such a big thing, and it’s very easy to get lost in the sauce, but also we just have to keep in mind the multi-faceted nature of being and also the fact that under-represented and marginalized identities in general experience very, very different things in the spaces we occupy. Zach: Absolutely. And I think ultimately, when I think through my interview with Amy, the biggest step revolves around courage and just speaking up. It’s not like she had some secret formula. She was just speaking truth to power. I mean, we had a section even on there where she said, “Look, there’s a point as a white woman where I have certain privileges where I can speak to race and I can speak to ethnic and diversity, and at the same time, Zach, even though you’re a person of color, as a man you have the opportunity to speak to items around sexism,” right? And patriarchy and things of that nature. So there’s opportunity for us to speak up. Ade: Right, and I think the abiding truth of Living Corporate as a whole is we’re challenging our listeners and ourselves--we’re holding ourselves responsible as well--to live authentically but also with courage, you know? And what the conversation with Amy reminded me of was the fact that--and she sort of alluded to this--we have more power than we believe we do. In a lot of ways we empower each other, we empower ourselves, when we speak up for others, when we utilize our privilege in ways we never have before. When you group with people who look like you and ERGs, affinity groups, happy hours, whatever, all of these things exist because they are necessary and there is a space for them, but even beyond those resources and beyond those spaces, figuring out ways to, you know, plant your roots and insist that you will not be moved, in a lot of ways figuring out how to collaborate with others, support each other, challenge other people, and bringing your whole self--in a professional fashion--to work. Supporting others honestly and truly is really your call to action, I suppose. Zach: Absolutely. Okay, so let’s go ahead and get into our Favorite Things. Ade: Oh, that’s like my favorite. My favorite, my favorite, my favorite. My favorite section. All right, so I hate to sound like the book nerd but I can’t help myself. I’m on, like, my 80th read-through of a book called Sister Outsider by this amazing writer by the name of Audrey Lord. If I ever, ever, ever am blessed to parent a kid, I’d probably name one or several of them Audrey, and yes, I am absolutely willing to have an Audrey 1 and an Audrey 2 in my household just for the sake of having a child named after Audrey Lord. Anyway, that said, if you’ve never read Sister Outsider, Audrey Lord basically has this collection of essays in this book, and if you’re at all interested in black feminist literature she’s a really great place to start. My other favorite thing at this point? I’m really living for thunderstorms. I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times--again, like, I’m a very predictable person so, like, books and water, those are, like, my things. So I’m really into thunderstorms right now. I sleep to the sound of thunderstorms, and this is a complete aside, but there’s this app on my phone and it’s the only thing that gets me to sleep. It’s called Tide, and there is a thunderstorm sound setting on there, and it puts me right to sleep, and it’s the greatest thing ever. So I’m here for actual thunderstorms. I’m here for thunderstorm sounds. I’m here for thunderstorm playlists. So if anybody out there actually has a link for a thunderstorm playlist, hook me up. I’m here for it. That’s all I got. What about you, Zach? Zach: Wow. So first thing is--[laughs]--definitely I love Audrey Lord as well. You know, great work. Beautiful work. The point around thunderstorms is interesting. Technology is crazy. So you’re telling me there’s an app now that actually simulates thunderstorms? Ade: An app. It simulates thunderstorms. It simulates ocean sounds. You can do, like, a focus period. It does naps. It’s frickin’ amazing. Sponsor us, Tide. Zach: Sponsor us, Tide, and we’ll [inaudible]-- Ade: I’m here for you guys. Zach: Ah, yeah. That’s something I’m--I’m trying to get into this. That’s great. [laughs] Ade: [laughs] No, but seriously. Zach: Yeah, no, that’s awesome. Okay, so Tide is the name of the app? Okay, I’m gonna check that out. Ade: It does forest sounds. There are forest sounds, my guy. Zach: Forest sounds? Okay. Well, cool. Look, my favorite thing right now has to be Amy C. Waninger’s book Network Beyond Bias, right? So I shouted it out during the actual interview with Amy, and I told her that I was gonna shout it out during Favorite Things because I really enjoyed it. I read it. Very thoughtful, very frank, very approachable. Definitely a recommended read for anyone interested in learning about diversity and inclusion, leadership development, unconscious bias, effective representation, and a slew of other things. It’s very, very thorough. It covers so many different topics in very--just, again, approachable and transparent ways. Ade: Oh. Well, okay. Great. As a reminder, to see all of our Favorite Things, very, very simple. You just want to go to our website, www.living-corporate.com, and click “FAVES” right across the top. Zach: Yes, and as another reminder, we have a Patreon. In fact, you-- Ade: [imitating air horns] Zach: Okay… Okay, so Sound Man, go ahead and add those horns. [Sound Man complies] Zach: [laughs] As another reminder, we have a Patreon. In fact, Sound Man--so I know you just hit Ade with the horns, but go ahead and hit me with some of that royalty-free jazz music. I mean, I don’t know, you can probably find some tracks from, like, 1970 or something. Just give me something smooth. [Sound Man complies again] Zach: Okay. You playing it? Okay, here we go. So listen, I know you want exclusive content, right? But you can’t get it for free. But guess what? We got it. You want giveaways? We got that. You want extended interviews? We got that. You want exclusive writing written by guests? We got that, and guess what? It only costs a dollar to get in, baby. Just a dollar. Ade: [laughs] Zach: One dollar. So do me a favor, do you a favor, do us a favor, and become a patron. Become a patron today. I got the links in the show notes right there. Open up your phone and press details. You’re gonna see the links all right there. All right, that’s it. I’m done. Sound Man, cut it off. [Sound Man dutifully complies] Ade: I wasn’t ready… So we just got to go home. Okay, guys. That was our show. Thank you for joining us at the Living Corporate podcast. Please make sure to follow us on Instagram @LivingCorporate. We’re also on Twitter at LivingCorp_Pod, and subscribe to our newsletter through www.living-corporate.com. If you have a question you’d like us to answer and read on the show, please make sure you email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. Also, don’t forget to check us out on Patreon at LivingCorporate as well. We’re all over Al Gore’s internet. And that does it for us on this show. My name is Ade. Zach: And this has been Zach. Ade: A pleasure as always. Ade and Zach: Peace. Latricia: Living Corporate is a podcast by Living Corporate, LLC. Our logo was designed by David Dawkins. Our theme music was produced by Ken Brown. Additional music production by Antoine Franklin from Musical Elevation. Post-production is handled by Jeremy Jackson. Got a topic suggestion? Email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. You can find us online on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and living-corporate.com. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned.

【特别感谢热心听友琅琅-FMU-曹英哲Mobey帮忙听写本篇文稿】Heyang: Short of cash doesn&`&t mean you can&`&t see the world. Are you good at squeezing every penny out of budget to give yourself as much travel as possible? As shoestring travel or 穷游 becomes more popular, it is also facing increasing criticism over unexpected risks.So guys, what is 穷游 or shoestring travel?Amy: Shoestring travel is traveling on an extreme budget.HY: Ok, but that is not enough to explain what’s going on here as in China we have these very very cheap tour groups that some claim that they charge you zero Yuan. So can that be categorized as shoestring travel too, Luoyu?LY: no of course. Those people are organized by some of the travel agencies, and you have to be in the group, and you basically visit every single store you have to or purchase something and then make the compensation for the fees, the travel fees.Amy:Yeah, I would say that could be a cheap way to travel but maybe is not the meaning of shoestring travel the way that we are using here in China, right? So what we mean is solo backpackers who are staying in hostels that are very cheap maybe 20 to 30 kuai a night, they hitchhike, ticket around or do some other very cheap travel, they maybe eat instant noodles instead of eating you know in a restaurant wherever they travel, or they impose on the kindness of strangers they might meet along the way, those are the kinds of things that can be shoestring backpacker travel. HY: it&`&s really great that we finally got the definition right. This is something that a lot of people are talking about right 穷游. But sometimes when you are talking about completely different things when the definition hasn&`&t being straighten out in the first place it&`&s just not that useful. So guys, why do you think it is popular?LY：for one thing I think it&`&s a positive effective, because that&`&s the main purpose of traveling, going sightseeing is to explore the outside world. So all the routines are not set, all the routes are not set. If you are the adventurous type, definitely it&`&s a very great thing for you to know different people along the journey, and to share the experiences and you spend a couple of nights in youth hostel. So I think it&`&s a brilliant experience. HY:But is it just the same as not shoestring travel? you get to experience you get to share you get to stay in maybe not hostels but in hotels you still get to interact with other people.Amy: No, different. Very very different. (HY: why is it different?) OK, I can tell you that I&`&ve done this kind of travel. Actually I quit my job, this was five years ago. I sold all my stuff. I got a backpack. And I went traveling around the world for about a year and a half. That was before I came to China. HY: Did you have enough savings?Amy: Well, I worked for 3 years at my jobs, I saved a big sum of money I think I could have been more of a shoestring traveler than I was, I definitely spent more money than I meant to, but you can do around the world travel on a very very cheap budget if you stay in these places, I think this is really really popular among young people especially recent college graduates, and especially because, one, in general, China is more economically prosperous than it ever has been. But two, the economy is slowing down so for recent graduates, it&`&s harder and harder to find a job. So what you do? You go travel. And if you don&`&t have any money, you go travel on a shoestring budget. People have been doing this in Europe and southeast Asia for generations right? And I think China is now just sort of getting into the game. Young people are just in this position where they have enough security back home from maybe your parents or grandparents or whatever, now that they are giving you a lot of money, but you haven&`&t enough security that you feel comfortable just taking off, but you also don&`&t have enough job prospect where you feel like I need to start my career right the second. So I think this generation is stuck in this like I guess perfect gap for this kind of travel. HY: emm interesting, and I’ve always wondered why the people want to leave what they have behind and go on a journey like this, why is it, what did you have in mind Amy?Amy: I wanted to see the world. I mean I always wanted to study abroad when I was in university and I didn&`&t get the chance to do it because I was on such a like focus path to graduation. And then when I finished university I was really really broke. Like too broke to even go shoestring traveling. So I got a job and I got the right opportunity at the right time. And then I sort of came to end of that job I was a little bit like worn out of working there I&`&d saved a little bit of money and I thought if I&`&m not gonna do it now I&`&m never gonna do it. And so that&`&s why I chose that time and that&`&s why I sold all my stuff and went backpacking because there&`&s so much of the world that&`&s to see and I wanted to know how do people live here I wanted to see all these great sites. I wanted to experience life in different places and eat different food and like you know greet people in different ways and how do you say "cheers" in Irish like Gaelic or whatever you know I just wanted...the experience of traveling to me is really exciting. LY: do you think there are many risks as well?HY: Ok, what other risks that you perceive, Luoyu?LY: well we probably be standing in the middle of nowhere, you want to hitch a ride, but you couldn&`&t see any cars, or you&`&ve seen millions of cars passing by still there was not even a driver who like to give you a free trip. HY: and more like scarier than that is you don&`&t know who the driver is and we&`&ve heard these really scary news from... LY: A lot of assault or attacks might be happening. Amy: yeah I think that is definitely something to keep in mind especially for a solo female traveler you should be very careful exercises caution. Eh you know be a bit smarter about how you travel who you take a ride from. Where you go at night, buy yourself that kind of thing. You definitely need to be cautious but being cautious doesn&`&t mean you need to like lock yourself in a room and never see anything, you know. I think that there&`&s a healthy balance there&`&s always risks attached to anything. You could ride the subway and somebody could you know do something to you on the subway.HY: yes, do some research before leaving. You need emergency backup plan. Amy: have a backup. And I think that the more you do this kind of travel, the more you are gonna find other people with similar values and interests who will help you along the way. HY: alright. And we&`&ve got so many messages regarding this topic coming in. Draco says summed up by Amy that is "世界那么大，我想去看看". And there&`&s 段洪林 who says "love you Amy. Gonna miss you". (oh I&`&m gonna miss you too) Oh is that 洪林? (duanhonglin, the name is duanhonglin). Alright ok I know your surname now. She says I will never want to go "穷游" only love rich and luxurious trip. Ok, got it! And 什锦 says traveling will cost you so you know don&`&t take other people&`&s help for granted as you are going on these shoestring travels and don&`&t overstay your welcome. You are listening to round table, that&`&s all we have for today. Bye-bye~~~

In today's Q&A, we are helping Kathy figure out how she can create awesome videos for her online business with affordable video equipment (or what she already has). Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today's expert is Amy from SavvySexySocial.com Amy on Youtube Amy's Podcast iRig Mic Rhode Lapel Mic Let's dive into this week's question! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! You're listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What's going on guys? Welcome back to the Expert edition of the Q&A with S&J and today we are bringing back one of our favorite guests to talk about video and how it can improve your brand. It is Amy Schmittauer; Amy, welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. AMY: Shane and Jocelyn are my favorite people in the world, thanks for having me. SHANE: Love it. JOCELYN: Yeah, we are like super pumped when we talked to Amy a little bit ago that she is in the Eastern Time zone. There are very few people in the Eastern Time Zone. SHANE: This is the only podcast we get to record in the Eastern Time zone is when we get to talk to Amy. AMY: It's so funny because most people don't even believe me when I say I'm in the Eastern Time zone – SHANE: I know. AMY: – they're like, “You're in Ohio, so what does that mean?” SHANE: “Do you even have internet?” AMY: “Is that central time?” I'm like, “Yeah, exactly. I'm on Eastern Time, it's all good.” SHANE: I always say, we have to like plus or minus four from everything we do because of all the people in California. AMY: Oh no. JOCELYN: East Coast represent – SHANE: East Coast is in the house today. JOCELYN: Let's jump into today's question. It's from Cathy, a Flip Your Life member, and she says, “I cannot afford expensive equipment to make videos; what should I do?” SHANE: If we get any video questions, it's this one because you know, when people start out affordability on everything, you got to get hosting and domains and blah-blah-blah and you got to spend some money to get started. But then we're like “Okay, how are you going to use video?” And they're like, “I can't afford a camera.” That's impossible. So what do you say to people when they come to you and they are like “I don't have anything to record with; what do I do?” AMY: Well, it's a bunch of crap, is what it is because you do have something to record with – Cathy, no disrespect. So, most of us have a smartphone and there's no reason to think that if you are going to get serious about video content that you can't use what you already have. I mean, it's actually sort of mind-blowing when you think about the abilities of the cameras that are built into smartphones. This is why the flip camera got discontinued and there are so many other hand-held video cameras nobody is buying because you just have it in something you carry around anyway. So, other than maybe a memory issue, there's no reason for you to say like “I can't use my phone” and there's so many accessories out there to enhance even that product alone if you are worried about internal audio being an issue ‘cause you like to do stuff outside a lot. There's a way of getting a microphone that can just plug into your phone and then you automatically have an upgrade there. So, often times when people are trying to sort of drag their feet on video, they are always talking about equipment and it's just very hard to wrap your mind on what are all the things we need: lighting, sound, quality everything; but if you just start with what you have at that point in time, you are going to prove to yourself that you need better...

In today's Q&A, we are helping Brad figure out how long he should make his Youtube videos for maximum impact and effectiveness for his audience. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Just get to the point! @schmittastic"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today's expert is Amy from SavvySexySocial.com Amy on Youtube Amy's Podcast Let's dive into this week's question! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! You're listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What's going on guys? Welcome back to the Expert Q&A with S&J. This is where members of our Flip Your Life community get to submit questions about their online business and we go find answers from the best experts online. Jocelyn and I are always upfront and say we do not have all the answers but, we do know where to go find them. Today's question is about video and there is nobody else on the planet that I would rather ask a video question to than our guest today; it is Amy Schmittauer. Amy, welcome to the show. AMY: Well hello, what a kind, kind thing to say Shane. SHANE: We have a lot of love for Amy Schmittauer; I'm just saying. AMY: What a stroke for the ego SHANE: That's right, exactly. Bring the value now, bring the value to us. JOCELYN: And some people, you know, we give them the questions ahead of time but not Amy. SHANE: Not Amy – JOCELYN: She's such a pro – SHANE: She's so good, we said, you know what, we're just gonna drop the bomb on her. AMY: And if people send me questions in advance, I'm like, oh, I feel like I'm studying for a test. SHANE: I know. AMY: I can't do it. Just on the fly, I'll have the answers. SHANE: That's right, organic. Everything is organic right here. AMY: Totally. SHANE: Really we just have no time to prep but that's beside the point. All right Jocelyn, let's go with today's question. JOCELYN: All right, today's question is from Brad, one of our Flip Your Life members, and Brad says, “How long should my videos be? All the videos I watch on YouTube seem to be long, but a lot of experts say you should keep it short. Which one is it and what works best?” SHANE: This is very confusing because – it is true, when I read this question, I was like you know, that's true; seems like I'm always trying to learn something that's like 20-minute videos. But then I always hear, “Three to five minutes, get it out there and get it quick” kinda deal. So what do you think about that? AMY: Well it's funny – Brad, really, really good question because that's absolutely right. We are constantly kind of fielding the search results to find the video that's going to be best for us in that moment and no one is saying, “Man, I really hope I find a solid 25-minute video on this.” SHANE: That's right. AMY: No one is doing that. Now, it depends on the situation, it depends on the content; I mean, if it's an intense tutorial, then maybe you do need every minute of that. But I tend to tell people, you know, if you're creating informational content on YouTube, you really want to be between two and five minutes. If you think about the fact that you can inject so much copy into your headline, your description, your tags and you can rank really well for something; but if you end up on the results page with a video that's seven minutes and yours is twenty, and you're supposed to be accomplishing the same thing in that amount of time, you're just not gonna be the option that people choose. So it's really sort of a human SEO factor that I like to talk about is you can tell YouTube how to rank you, but according to the human that sees you when sea...

XH: Recently, the Ministry of Education releases the Top 10 University alma maters that are welcomed by net users. The top three songs are from Zhejiang University, Fudan University and Communication University of China. So a school song is also known as an alma mater, which can also refer to, you know, 校友 in general. Oh no, sorry, 母校 in general， so the university you graduated from. So do you think that why is there a need to have a song for universities? Why is there a need to have 校歌？ Amy: I’m not really sure what the need is but I do know that most universities have one if not all universities, even in America, even your high school has a high school song, fight song, and then some high schools may even have an alma mater as well. LY: I guess because this type of song tends to be anthem, and when you are singing anthem, you tend to be in a high spirit. Maybe, you know be, proud of where I come from, be proud of my school, that kind of thing. Amy: But I feel like the fight song should be enough, right, cause I think a lot of people in the US don’t even know their alma mater, they only know the school fight song. XH: so the fight song is? Amy: the one you sing at the football games, or you know at other sporting events usually, and it’s the one that the cheerleaders, well you know, pom pom to yeah, and the marching band will play it. LY: yeah, I have to agree with Amy. I think, you know, a fight song is probably a better idea for most people, but I guess when it come to Chinese universities again, you know, sometimes they just want something that’s attached to their face because face value is very important. If somehow they don’t have a school-wide song that is a representative of their school, they just don’t feel like this is complete, something is missing. XH: Yeah, that’s probably true, and also I think Mark Griffiths of China Drive was saying that in Britain, there weren’t a lot of those school songs, but it seems that in the US there are a lot, in China there are lot. So I guess there’s a sort of difference country to country. Amy: maybe he doesn’t remember his school song. XH: in fact, I think that a lot of people don’t even know that their schools have a song. LY: Guilty as charged, I never know my school had one song. Amy: Really? Which school? Is yours on this list? LY: It’s actually ranked No.1, Zhejiang University. XH: So actually, let’s take a listen at part of the clip. It’s like a Waltz. You know, it’s like a tune you dance to. Amy: Yeah, it’s very formal. XH: let me get your opinions as DJ’s, cause you guys are DJs as well. Amy: Hehe, terrible. LY: Hahaha, well since it’s my school. I shouldn’t use the word terrible, but that’s how I feel as well, because melody-wise is just it’s not one of those songs that can immediately put you in a good mood. I think as a school song, it should be able to do that. And also, lyric-wise, it’s not modern Chinese. It’s . . . just imagine if we’re talking about a school song in the United States, and the lyrics actually are full of words like Thou, you know, that kind of thing. Of course, it doesn’t make any sense. People would not remember. Amy: Well, actually I think a lot of school songs in the States do have Thou, Thee. I think I’m trying to remember all the words to my alma mater, and it’s like Minnesota~, something, something, I know there’s a Thee like there, ends with Thee, so I think a lot of the school songs were written like a long time ago, in university of Minnesota opened in I think like 1850s something maybe 1860s somewhere in there, but I think a lot of the school songs use this old language, and it’s just not relevant to us now. LY: See, that’s the point, I mean it’s not relevant to us, but we are still the ones who are supposedly singing these songs, so of course it’s very difficult for us to like the song. On the other hand, you can argue that “oh it’s all about tradition, so of course such language is necessary,” but who is your target audience? XH: Yeah, also I think when these songs are chosen a lot of it is about showcasing how long a history we have, so we’ve got use the ancient language. I remember there’s a song in a US university I forget whether it’s Harvard or some other university that’s written in Latin. Actually, there’s not a word that we can understand. Amy: so it has, you know probably a little prententious XH: Yeah, I guess. Also let’s take a listen at a part of the songs and which are the runner up, which is Fudan University and also the third which is the Communication University of China. LY: so this one is from Fudan, right? XH: Yeah, that one.

XH: Recently, the Ministry of Education releases the Top 10 University alma maters that are welcomed by net users. The top three songs are from Zhejiang University, Fudan University and Communication University of China. So a school song is also known as an alma mater, which can also refer to, you know, 校友 in general. Oh no, sorry, 母校 in general， so the university you graduated from. So do you think that why is there a need to have a song for universities? Why is there a need to have 校歌？ Amy: I’m not really sure what the need is but I do know that most universities have one if not all universities, even in America, even your high school has a high school song, fight song, and then some high schools may even have an alma mater as well. LY: I guess because this type of song tends to be anthem, and when you are singing anthem, you tend to be in a high spirit. Maybe, you know be, proud of where I come from, be proud of my school, that kind of thing. Amy: But I feel like the fight song should be enough, right, cause I think a lot of people in the US don’t even know their alma mater, they only know the school fight song. XH: so the fight song is? Amy: the one you sing at the football games, or you know at other sporting events usually, and it’s the one that the cheerleaders, well you know, pom pom to yeah, and the marching band will play it. LY: yeah, I have to agree with Amy. I think, you know, a fight song is probably a better idea for most people, but I guess when it come to Chinese universities again, you know, sometimes they just want something that’s attached to their face because face value is very important. If somehow they don’t have a school-wide song that is a representative of their school, they just don’t feel like this is complete, something is missing. XH: Yeah, that’s probably true, and also I think Mark Griffiths of China Drive was saying that in Britain, there weren’t a lot of those school songs, but it seems that in the US there are a lot, in China there are lot. So I guess there’s a sort of difference country to country. Amy: maybe he doesn’t remember his school song. XH: in fact, I think that a lot of people don’t even know that their schools have a song. LY: Guilty as charged, I never know my school had one song. Amy: Really? Which school? Is yours on this list? LY: It’s actually ranked No.1, Zhejiang University. XH: So actually, let’s take a listen at part of the clip. It’s like a Waltz. You know, it’s like a tune you dance to. Amy: Yeah, it’s very formal. XH: let me get your opinions as DJ’s, cause you guys are DJs as well. Amy: Hehe, terrible. LY: Hahaha, well since it’s my school. I shouldn’t use the word terrible, but that’s how I feel as well, because melody-wise is just it’s not one of those songs that can immediately put you in a good mood. I think as a school song, it should be able to do that. And also, lyric-wise, it’s not modern Chinese. It’s . . . just imagine if we’re talking about a school song in the United States, and the lyrics actually are full of words like Thou, you know, that kind of thing. Of course, it doesn’t make any sense. People would not remember. Amy: Well, actually I think a lot of school songs in the States do have Thou, Thee. I think I’m trying to remember all the words to my alma mater, and it’s like Minnesota~, something, something, I know there’s a Thee like there, ends with Thee, so I think a lot of the school songs were written like a long time ago, in university of Minnesota opened in I think like 1850s something maybe 1860s somewhere in there, but I think a lot of the school songs use this old language, and it’s just not relevant to us now. LY: See, that’s the point, I mean it’s not relevant to us, but we are still the ones who are supposedly singing these songs, so of course it’s very difficult for us to like the song. On the other hand, you can argue that “oh it’s all about tradition, so of course such language is necessary,” but who is your target audience? XH: Yeah, also I think when these songs are chosen a lot of it is about showcasing how long a history we have, so we’ve got use the ancient language. I remember there’s a song in a US university I forget whether it’s Harvard or some other university that’s written in Latin. Actually, there’s not a word that we can understand. Amy: so it has, you know probably a little prententious XH: Yeah, I guess. Also let’s take a listen at a part of the songs and which are the runner up, which is Fudan University and also the third which is the Communication University of China. LY: so this one is from Fudan, right? XH: Actually this one is from Yale University, that’s being played. Actually, that doesn’t sound too bad. It has an ancient feeling to it, as well. Amy: They all have ancient feelings to them, but you know I think that Chinese ones and the Yale one we just heard, and even like my alma mater, they all sound the same. It’s like a choir singing it, and it sounds like you’re in church to for some reason. XH: Yeah, it’s very ceremonial feeling to it. LY: Also like a spiritual experience, I guess, but I have to say I do kind of dig, the song from Communication University of China, because it’s a lot more pop, yeah, than the rest of bunch. And also this one I have to applaud their effort because they do not only have a song, they also shoot a music video for it. ...

John Artman: With mobile devices becoming so popular, people joke that the distance between life and death isn't as far as the distance between people while staring at their phones. Increasingly, we see this happening even in college classrooms. To combat this rising tide of inattention, the Management Department of the Luoyang Institute of Engineering has taken matters into their own hands. Now, students must put their phones into storage bags before the class even starts. So before we look at what the Luoyang Institute of Engineering has done, how serious is the staring at your phone all the time of problem in universities? Amy Daml: I’m not sure this is so different from way it back in the day, when grandma Amy was in university and we used to do crossword puzzles and sudoku , you know, I think it’s exactly the same thing. John: Or doodle. I used to doodle a lot. Amy: You used to doodle? Okay. John: Not diddle, but doodle. Zhou Heyang: Oh god. Amy: I think everybody… college students always find a way to screw around with your time in class whether it’s… you know just have a perfect device helps you do it. ZHY: Yeah, totally, I think people daydream. They… well, college students they just don’t really want to just focus on the books any more since that’s what you have been doing all your life in China, I guess. John: But this isn’t the point that’s going to the university and going into the classrooms for to you to pay attention, I mean that you are paying for, right? ZHY: Totally, but a lot of the times when you are just imagining you in the shoes of a college student, often I think for Chinese college students, it’s just like freedom after years of being, you know, supervised by your teacher and parents all the time, now you have the freedom to do whatever you want. And then people just feel like they have the time to throw around. But that being said, when I first saw this, I just thought, why are we… are we talking about college students? I mean this should be something that high school students or teachers do, I think. I think we you are in college, you are a young adult. Shouldn’t you be, you know, grown up, more grown up than this? John: No! Amy: You’re a young adult, but just barely a young adult, a very young adult, I mean. I remember going to college, and I was like, “Woohoo! I’m out of my parents’ house, and finally I don’t have the try so hard, and I can do ever I want. My classes don’t even start until 11 o’clock, like if I’m gonna go them at all.” You know, it was like this world opened up to me. I had all these choices. And it takes you while as a young adult to be disciplined enough to choose the best thing for yourself. John: Well, also I think it’s a little bit different in terms of Chinese culture, especially with the relationship to technology. It does seem that in general, compared to the US, these new, newer technologies get picked up really, really quickly. And I think that, yeah portable screens, as my mother would call them, are becoming a problem around the world, but especially in China and other Asian cultures, to be honest, the portable screen is… it just kind of sucks people… sucks people’s soul away. They’re there, but they’re not really there. ZHY: But still you are a young adult, that’s, you know, getting your hands onto the device in the first place, and allowing themselves to get sucked into it. John: So blame the parents. Don’t buy the phone, right? Amy: Well, I mean, I would tend to agree with John. I think that this is much more of a technology focused culture than back in the States. At home, you know, we have like, come up with some social rules about when it acceptable to use your iPad, your iPhone or whatever, and so we know that when you go into a movie, you shut your phone off, when you go into class, you shut your phone off, you know, or at least you put it on silence so that the teacher doesn’t catch you to playing games. ZHY: Yeah, but do students actually do shut their phone off in American classrooms, I kind of doubt that. Amy: They put them on silent, I think. John: Well, I don’t know, I mean it’s been so long. Amy and I are so old now. But, seriously because when I was in university, I just had like a little crappy, you know, Samsung feature phone. ZHY: And it doesn’t stop you from texting. John: All you could do was play Snake on it. Amy: Yeah John: But so we’ve gone off on a bit tangent here, but to bring it back, let’s take a look at what the Luoyang Institute of Engineering has done. So again, you have to put your cell phone into a bag before class starts. Do you think this is going to work in terms of attention and getting them to focus on their school work? Amy: Well, so they started this project on April 3, it has even been a week yet, so there’s plenty of time for it to succeed or to fail, but basically, the idea is that they bought a big that I image like a shoe storage a kind of thing, and then you each got a pocket, and then you stick your phone in the pocket at the beginning of the class, you can get it back at the end of the class, but basically you have to voluntarily surrender your phone during class time. ZHY: So do you have to? I think if people who are willing to do so can have it done Yeah, so I guess for those already pretty disciplined, I would say, to be willing to give up their phone during class, then they can do it. I think that is a good way to just physically keep it away from you, then you kind of have to focus on whatever you should be doing. But that doesn’t always work, because for those who want to daydream, I don’t think put your phone away will stop you.