Podcast appearances and mentions of nicole sanchez

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 20, 2018 46:26

Do you feel like you see yourself and your friendships reflected in most TVs or movies? We sure don’t. Emily Best tells us why we won’t get more diverse representations of women on screen unless we change the way films and shows are funded and distributed—and how she plans to do just that. Emily is a producer, director, and the founder and CEO of Seed & Spark, a new crowdfunding and streaming platform that wants to change the way entertainment is made and distributed—so that independent creators can actually be independent. She started Seed & Spark after making her own first film, where she learned just how little Hollywood’s middlemen understood about reaching women. > I started thinking of all the movies I had ever watched and everything that was available to me and I was like, “where are my friendships? Where are the women I admire?” And they were nowhere to be found. And so, that summer we started toying with the idea of making a movie that would represent female friendships the way that we understood them. And I didn’t know that this was a radical idea. > — Emily Best , founder of Seed & Spark, on why she made her first film We talk about: Why the film industry doesn’t see women as a viable audience (spoiler: they’re wrong about that). Using a wedding registry website to create a crowdfunding campaign for her first film. Why Seed & Spark is the only streaming service with a pay-what-you-can model—and a community where creators and fans build real connection. Why algorithmic content recommendations—a la Netflix—lead us to an unsatisfying place (and how to change that). The importance of creating a code of conduct for online communities—_before_ you’ve got trolls and Nazis. Fck Yes!, a webseries about consent that shows what happens when people actually talk in the bedroom—and how awkward moments can turn into extremely sexy ones. What’s next for Emily: A documentary project about the Equal Rights Amendment (which is still not ratified). Follow Emily : Twitter | Medium Plus: Sara and Katel get real about their own failures when it comes to diversifying who’s involved in what, and talk about their fave subject: female friendship (and donuts). > By doing the thing that was easy, which was bringing in somebody who was already connected to us, who we knew would be a good fit, we weren’t able to think about the benefits of bringing in somebody from a different background. > —Sara Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more. Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Try it free, then use code NOYOUGO to get 50% off your first paid month. Transcript Sara Wachter-Boettcher Today’s episode is brought to you by Harvest, the makers of time-tracking and project-planning tools for all kinds of businesses. Track vendors, map out complex tasks and team schedules, send invoices, and just look cool, calm, and collected the whole time. Try it free at getharvest.com, and when you upgrade to a paid account, make sure to use the code “noyougo” for 50% off your first paid month. That is getharvest.com, offer code “noyougo.” [intro music plays for 12 seconds] Katel LeDû Hey everyone, I’m Katel. SWB And I’m Sara! KL And you’re listening to No, You Go, the show about building satisfying careers and businesses— SWB —getting free of toxic bullshit— KL —and living your best, feminist life at work. On today’s show, we’re talking with Emily Best. She’s the founder and CEO of Seed & Spark, which is a platform for crowdfunding and streaming TV and movies. She’s also a producer and director herself, and she’s just really fucking cool. She’s here to talk with us about what it’s like as a woman creator in Hollywood, and what she’s doing to change that for everyone. SWB I am so glad we got to talk to Emily about this, because I feel like this has been such a big conversation in Hollywood the past couple of years—talking about things like pay inequality or—you know—#oscarssowhite, or even the #metoo movement. Looking at representation in entertainment is such a big deal, but it also really got me thinking about just how systems of inequality are perpetuated in general, like the way that across industries, people who already have connections, who are already in the right networks, they’re the ones who get to have new opportunities, and other people just stay shut out. And it’s this “rich get richer” sort of thing. And that’s definitely not just in entertainment, I mean that’s absolutely something we’ve talked about in tech. You know, I remember when we had Nicole Sanchez on the show and, you know, she does diversity and inclusion consulting, and she talked about going into different companies to try to help them de-bias their hiring processes, and what she would find is that these companies would still ultimately want to hire people from the exact same backgrounds as always, right? So even though they said they didn’t want to be biased, they would want to hire people who went to the same schools that they had gone to, or who had worked the same companies that they had also worked at. So, what you end are with are these systems that are just circular, right? So, it’s the same people hiring the same people over and over again. And obviously, I think that that is bad—I think that if you’re listening to this show, you know where we stand on that—but what I really had to think about that I want to talk more about is the way that I’m also part of that system. And—you know—like you and me, right? We’ve actually even I think been a little bit part of that system on the show. So, for example, a while back we decided we wanted to bring somebody on to help us a few hours a week just to help us have our shit together and up our game, right? So, helping us share more cool stuff on social media and help us manage our inbox, and email guests—things like that. So, we were basically looking for a production coordinator and we ended up hiring someone awesome. Her name is Sarah Blackstock and shoutout to her, we love her. But she wasn’t someone from outside of our network. Katel, she was somebody that you already knew. [3:06] KL Yeah, and I totally agree with this and Sarah does this kind of work part-time with us at A Book Apart and I suggested to you that we should consider her because I thought, “damn, she’d be a great fit.” And she is a great fit. She’s awesome at managing social stuff and just totally vibes with us in terms of caring about—you know—our podcast, the same issues that we want to talk about, which is great. But it’s true, she got this gig because she was—you know—already in our orbit. And granted, it’s—you know—it’s not like a full-time thing, it’s—it’s a few hours a week, but we didn’t search for her. SWB Yeah, and I guess what that fundamentally comes down to is that our show ends up still being—you know—created and produced by a bunch of white women. And all the time I am talking about how I want to make sure we’re elevating the voices of people who aren’t white, people who are different than us, and it’s really easy to rely on the same old, same old. And when you’re white, that ends up tending to be other white people. And so—you know—obviously, we’ve put effort into making sure we have diverse people on the show and I—and I think that we’ve done a reasonable job there—not always perfect, but I think that’s definitely something that you can see—you know—in the history that we have. But I think we need to acknowledge something here. And I think what we need to acknowledge is that by doing the thing that was easy, which was bringing in somebody who was already connected to us, who we knew would be a good fit, we weren’t able to think about the benefits of bringing in somebody from a different background and what that might bring to the show that would be different and equally as good or potentially even better. Who knows, right? Because it wasn’t even on our radar. KL Yeah. SWB So—you know—Sarah’s awesome and—and I don’t want to minimize that because she’s great and I love her and I want to keep her on the show, but I do feel like I just want to be honest about that. I don’t think I thought enough about what we might be missing out on by not casting a wider net. And so I feel like it’s important to talk about that publicly because if we keep growing, and I really hope that we do, I want to make sure that we’re doing better next time, that we’re really thinking about that and thinking about who we are going to and how we are going about those decisions. Because I think even at the small scale, they’re so crucial. [5:09] KL Yeah, this is something I think about a lot too when it comes to who we’re working with at A Book Apart. And I definitely don’t think we talk about it enough and we haven’t done a good enough job. And we need to be up front about that because who we work with is very public. It’s obvious if you look at who our authors are, who we’ve published—it’s a lot of white guys. So, I think when I realized this was a problem, and that was a couple of years ago, I started doing a lot of things differently and I—and I still—you know—there’s still work to do. But I thought about, I need to make our proposal submission process a lot more open and visible and push it out to—you know—to people who might not have seen it or might not have thought to contribute something. So, I published the outline and a form on our website and I wrote a blog post about it and I was hoping to share it with communities that would circulate it. And that’s still just small percentage of what I could be doing to do more outreach. I’m also looking actively for people who are speaking and writing about things that we might publish, and I think the challenge that I run into a lot is that I’m one person. So, I can get to a bunch of—or a couple of—conferences a year and sort of look for talent, but it’s time consuming, all of that takes time. And I think when I look at bringing on different voices, if I sign somebody today, their book might not come out for another year or two, so—you know—talking about that sort of moment I recognized this big problem, next year I think our lineup is maybe 90% women authors, which is so rad, I’m so proud of that. But that—that took a long time. SWB Totally. I mean, it takes forever to even figure out when you’re talking to somebody if they really are ready to write a book and want to write a book badly enough to actually do it, and then want to invest the time in fleshing it out and then also even what their idea is. All that stuff just takes forever, it’s not—it’s nothing you can kind of short-shrift. KL Right, exactly. And I—that’s one of my favorite parts of the process is working with folks to make that happen. And if you don’t do it in the beginning, it’s like you’re playing catch-up and trying to solve this much bigger problem later on. [7:25] SWB Yes. And that actually reminds me of something that Emily said in her interview, which I thought was really helpful and a really great conversation, where she was talking about setting up boundaries for building an inclusive community and a community that doesn’t tolerate harassment and she was like, “well, we haven’t had any problems with that yet, but I decided to write a code of conduct before we had problems.” And I think that’s exactly the right approach for so much of this, right? You have to build in that inclusion from the beginning because otherwise it’s really hard and slow to try to right that ship down the line, because you’re trying to undo stuff, or you’re in a defensive position. And so, it means that—you know—you really cannot start out by only thinking about desired outcomes. You can’t just think about all the positives, you have to think about the negatives, or you have to think about who you could be leaving out or who could be hurt by whatever it is that you’re doing. And so—you know—that’s something I think about when it comes back to us. It’s like we were thinking about all the positives of working with Sarah that we didn’t think about what we might be missing out on by not opening it up to other people. And I think that’s on us, and that’s something that I’m definitely going to be thinking about for a while. KL Yeah, totally, me too. Well, Emily said so much inspiring stuff, do you want to take a listen? SWB Yes. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out][8:38] Sponsor: Harvest SWB So, our friends at Harvest asked us if we could try using their time tracking software for something a little bit different. So, Katel, do you have any personal time problems we can solve? KL I actually do. So, I’ve been knitting this blanket and I have actually been working on it for two years. And I can only seem to get myself to work on it in the winter and it’s just taking forever. I just counted and I have done 180 rows so far, and that means I have 252 more rows to complete the pattern. SWB Oh my god, that sounds like so much! It’s going to be three more years! KL Ugh, I know. [laughs] And I just can’t work on this for that long, I need to set a schedule and get it done or I’m going to give up. SWB Okay, so how long does it take you to knit one row? KL Well, I tracked my time working on it yesterday and it takes me about ten minutes. SWB Okay, so you’ve got 2,520 minutes. So 2,520 divided by 60 is exactly 42 hours. So, okay. If you just made knitting this blanket your full-time job for a week—I mean, on top of your other full-time job and this podcast—you could get it done! KL Right. Yeah… SWB Okay, okay, so you’re not going to do that. Okay, so we have—we have to do some project planning. So, it is six weeks until January 1st. If you knit for seven hours a week until the end of the year, you could have this completely done. You could do this in an hour a day! KL Ooh! Or like two episodes of the new Charmed every day. I think I can do that. SWB I think you can definitely watch two episodes of Charmed. [laughs] But you’re going to run out of Charmed, right? How many episodes are there? KL There are only a few. SWB Oh, okay, what else is in your queue? Are you caught up on Riverdale? KL Definitely gotta catch up on that. Um and I might need another show in the queue—if anyone has suggestions. SWB Send them in! But also, this is pretty doable, right? Just an hour a night watching your teen dramas, knitting your rows, and you’ll get it done! So, all it took was some time tracking and some forecasting and now you can—you know—put it in your schedule and stick with it, which is exactly what Harvest tries to help you with. So, they’ve got this tool called Forecast where you can schedule teams out across projects and then track how booked up different people are or how free people are. And that way, you know just how much people can fit into their schedules or how many Charmed episodes they can watch. So, check it out at getharvest.com/forecast. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out] [11:00] Interview: Emily Best KL Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed & Spark, a new crowdfunding and streaming platform that wants to change the way entertainment is made and distributed. She’s also an advocate for diversity in entertainment and a producer and director in her own right. Her current creative project is “Fuck Yes,” a web series about sexual consent. Uhh… fuck yes to that! Emily, welcome to No, You Go. Emily Best Thank you so much for having me. KL So, let’s start with Seed & Spark. Can you tell us about it and how it came to be? EB Yeah. So, we built something that hasn’t been built before, which is that we’ve combined crowdfunding and subscription streaming into a single platform. So, I think rather than thinking of us like a crowdfunding platform, we’re more like a creative marketplace akin to Etsy, where we’ve built the tools for thousands of small businesses and content to power themselves. So, funding audience building and obviously being able to stream, so that audiences can watch stuff is all part and parcel of the same platform. In 2010, I was producing a play in New York City. It is—Hedda Gabler is to women actors what Hamlet is to male actors. It’s like a seminal role for a younger woman. And there aren’t many of those in theater, as there aren’t in film. We were producing this play—I never thought of myself as someone who would get into cinema, but my friend Caitlin Fitzgerald, who was playing the lead, she was on the up and up. She had done some really big movies and she was starting to sort of get into that role that young, beautiful women get into of auditioning for all these parts. And so she would come to set where we were working with this brilliant material and she would bring the sides for her auditions the next day and the parts that she was being asked to audition for were so insulting to women. And it was a wakeup call for me. All of a sudden I started thinking of all the movies I had ever watched and everything that was available to me and I was like, “where are my friendships? Where are the women I admire?” and they were nowhere to be found. [laughs] And so, that summer we started toying with the idea of making a movie that would represent female friendships the way that we understood them [laughs], right? And I didn’t know that this was a radical idea. So, the lessons that we would get from trying to make a movie that would eventually be called “Like the Water” were really the foundations of starting Seed & Spark. [13:33] KL That’s so awesome. When you were sort of first starting out, what was your experience as a first-time producer? And what was that beginning like? EB Yeah. So, I got lied to is how it happened. Caitlin was making a movie that summer with Ed Burns, and it was 2010, right? So, there were some interesting things that had just happened. Canon made a camera that put a full-frame sensor in a photography camera and that turned it into a high-resolution video camera, and all of a sudden, high resolution video was accessible to everyone. KL Yes, I remember that. EB Right? So, this was like a boom. Well, Ed Burns was one of the first independent filmmakers to adopt this technology for his own purposes. Caitlin invited me to set one day to see what they were doing, and I knock on this apartment door in Tribeca, and I went and watched them shoot a scene. And it was the cinematographer just holding a 5D camera, and it was a guy with a boom, and Eddy was like rewriting on the fly, which I think is something that he does, and they shot the scene. And that was it! There was no crew, there were no lights, there was nothing! And so, Caitlin brings me to see this and she’s like, “we could make a movie, it’s so easy!” [KL & SWB laugh] So, Caitlin would go on to co-write a script with our friend Caroline Von Kuhn, who would go on to direct, that was the opposite of the kind of movie that you are able to make for $9,000 theatrically. So, Ed Burns was making a run-and-gun, mockumentary-style Manhattan kind of captured-in-the-streets film. Caitlin and Caroline wrote a slow, contemplative drama about a young journalist who goes home to her childhood town in Maine to write the eulogy for her best childhood friend who has died. And so once we got a cinematographer involved—a woman who is now one of my best friends, Eve Cohen—Eve Cohen was like, “you can’t shoot this movie the way he shot that movie.” And so, all of a sudden this $9,000 idea we thought we had was much larger in scope. And so now I was just producing a legit nearly $200,000 independent feature. And I got really lucky. My dad goes to his—I think it’s his 45th high school reunion and hooks up with a guy name Bar Potter who he went to high school with and turns out, Bar Potter has been in LA producing movies for 30 years. And Bar Potter basically took me under his wing and taught me how to produce movies, step by step. I was very lucky because he was an attorney first and contracts are really what a producer needs to be good at in the end. So, I got very, very lucky to have that education. But then when I started the fundraising process and I started talking to people about the kind of movie we wanted to make and the kind of women we wanted to put on screen that was different from anything that’s been done before, I found out that innovation is not a good pitch in movies actually. [laugh] They were like—they want to know that there’s a tried and true audience for this thing. It wasn’t that people were surprised that women weren’t represented, they were like, “yeah, but that’s because there’s no audience for it.” So, it was really hard to raise money. [laughs] We raised some money from let’s call it friends, family, and fools—affectionately. And then we—Caitlin got a big, residual check from her work in “It’s Complicated” and put some of that into the movie. And then we were still like $20,000 from what we needed to go and shoot the movie. And the interesting thing also about 2010, 2011 was this was the rise of crowdfunding out of the ashes out of the financial crisis. And so Kickstarter and Indiegogo were starting to become kind of all the rage in the filmmaker community. And our filmmaker friends knew very well about it, but our friends’ parents did not, right? [laughs] And we figured we needed to get to our friends’ parents if we were going to have any hope of raising any money. So, instead of running a crowdfunding campaign on a newfangled crowdfunding platform, we built a wedding registry of all of the items that we needed—the camera, and the car rentals, and—we were going to Maine in the summer—so the bug spray, and the sunscreen, and the food, and the makeup, and the coffee—you name it, right? We built this long wedding registry and we sent it everyone we knew and a really interesting thing happened when people could see what their participation was—you know—like “oh, I’m not just giving money so these girls can fuck off to Maine for the summer, we are participating in helping them achieve this thing that they want to achieve.” What was more surprising to me and the big revelation was, “okay, now I have got to sell this movie and get it distributed.” And I started talking to sales agents and distributors and they weren’t particularly interested in us until we told them about what we did and how many people had contributed and how at every screening we had anywhere in the world, including places where I was not aware we knew people, like Oaxaca and Romania, people who contributed to our campaign either showed up or sent their friends. And so it was this really powerful tool for building community around a project that was trying to do something differently. And this project was trying to do something differently in a year when I sat across from a sales agent, who after telling him about what this movie is about, it’s a—it’s really a friendship drama about a women discovering—you know—rediscovering herself after the death of her childhood friend, he said, “well, if you could put some lesbian erotica in it, I could sell it.” KL [inhales sharply] Yeah… EB He wasn’t talking about lesbian erotica for lesbians. He was trying to think of, how do we make this movie palatable for a male audience? And it was like a wakeup call moment of like, “oh, it’s that nobody—none of the middlemen actually know how to reach women, and so they assume they’re not a valuable audience.” KL Yeah. EB Right? And this would be the beginning of unravelling sort of a century of institutional bias. I realized that if you wanted to reach an audience that wasn’t being reached, there were literally structures in place to make sure you couldn’t do it around projects. And so I started ideating with a friend of mine about well, what if we made this tool for creating a wedding registry for your movie or show available to more filmmakers. And I was like, “well, it doesn’t have to be filmmakers, it could be, like, journalists and dancers and writers and whatever.” And the idea was that it would really help you gather and understand your audience, because my experience was when I went into the room with those third-party gatekeepers—if I knew about the audience and if I had data about the audience, then I could get them to listen to me and pay attention. And I was very interested in going from feeling like I had no power in any of those discussions to feeling like I had some power and authority to explain why my project had value and why my IP had value. And I think the biggest realization for me at that time was—you know—independent film quote-unquote for so long has been you have to independently finance, write, edit, produce, direct, sound design, color correct, etc. And then you have to wait to get picked by a festival and wait to get picked by a sales agent and wait to get picked by a distributor and I’m sorry, but what the fuck about that is independent? [21:08] KL [laughs] Yeah. EB Like actually what happened is I woke up one day and I was like, independent filmmaking is dependent filmmaking, and the internet should make it possible for us to be actually independent, but there’s a lot of work to be done. And part of that work is deprogramming the filmmaker brain that what you have to do is work hard and if you’re just special enough, you’ll get picked. Because that I think is the thing that we’re working against the hardest. KL Yeah, I feel that so much and I mean you went from filmmaking to also changing—you know—how entertainment is being created and funded, and it’s like changing who holds the power, which is really fucking incredible. What was the driving force behind that part of it? EB Education. As we were going and testing this—like I took this wireframe to Sundance in 2012 and I talked to every filmmaker who would possibly talk to me. And the filmmakers, many of whom had crowdfunded at that point, said, “yeah, so these are the things that are hard about crowdfunding, but what’s really hard is distribution.” And boy did I not want to get into the distribution business, but it was shouting at me loud and clear that actually the only solution that’s going to be really valuable to filmmakers is an end-to-end one, where the work that you do up front to raise money and gather audience has to be meaningful to your ability to secure distribution, monetize distribution, pick a good path for distribution, etc. So, the beginning of the film business, there is no audience data because people are pushing nickels through a window, right? [laughs] They’re going to the nickelodeon literally, and so you don’t have any audience data because it’s just a cash business. And oh by the way, even if you did, there are Jim Crow laws and shit governing who can and can’t go into theaters, so you wouldn’t get audience—good audience data anyway. And then they put a box in your living room called a TV and then you can watch whatever you want and nobody really knows what or why. And then they start spying on you with your permission through Nielsen, right? And Nielsen started to deliver sort of aggregated data, like here’s how many people watched a thing. But they had to make a lot of assumptions about why or what motivated that watching behavior. And so, in absence of any real audience data, the film business grew its marketing capacity based around assumptions about what made stuff successful or not. All of the greenlighting that was happening in Hollywood and otherwise was backward-looking. This is what performed well before, and therefore this is what will perform well in the future. And then it got really interesting in the 2000s. Two things happened simultaneously: the internet hit the film business, the DVD market collapses almost overnight, and for unrelated reasons, the censorship rules lighten up in Russia and China. And so, Hollywood starts to see that if they can make movies that play well in China, that gives rise to the Hollywood mega-blockbuster. Because all of a sudden, they’re not making 500 million dollars on a movie, they can make a billion plus dollars on a movie. And that had never been true before. And ever since then, Hollywood has been making these super mega-movies for international audiences. And in the meantime, Netflix, who saw all of this coming, went to the studios and was like, “hey, I see what you’re doing in movies, we will pay you x plus one for those syndication deals. And just like the rest of your world, we will also not give you audience data.” And the studios were like, “fine, we’ve never had audience data, we don’t give a shit about audience data.” And that would set a precedent that the platforms like Netflix would get all of the audience data and the producers from the studios all the way down to little, old me trying to make my movie would get no audience data through distribution. The film business has basically been set up to completely segregate the producers and even the distributors of content from the data that would help them make smart and efficient marketing decisions on the internet, and it has created a massive power imbalance, worse than even when the studios were basically giant monopolies. Because without that data, filmmakers are completely dependent on the platforms to just get their movie out there, but they can’t compete with the platforms because they have no data transparency. And because Netflix got so much data and got so powerful, it’s driven a ton of consolidation in the last 24 months, right? You have AT&T buying Time Warner, which means Turner and HBO and everybody, and they’ve shut down FilmStruck because it’s not a billion dollar business, right? And that kind of consolidation has never ever been good for the independent creator. And ultimately, that was why I thought crowdfunding was so valuable because crowdfunding was the first time that filmmakers could go directly to their audiences and transact and get all of the data from those audiences and be in direct contact with them. And it continues to be one of the only ways that they can do that. And that’s why we then moved into the streaming space, is because we realized that there were no real streaming services being offered that also disintermediated the relationship between filmmaker and audience and would allow a savvy filmmaker or a savvy distributor to just open up Google Analytics and make some smart marketing decisions about how to drive more traffic to their projects. [26:54] KL So, then speaking of streaming, you’ve noted before that human curation versus feeds driven by algorithms was pretty critical to how Seed & Spark works for end users, which is different than what you see on all the other platforms. Why is that so important? EB Well, first of all—fundamentally—algorithms don’t curate. Algorithms recommend, humans curate. KL Right. EB So, right now there is more audio/visual content out there than could ever possibly be watched by a single person, or even thousands of people, for the rest of their lives for all of time. So, algorithms, not dissimilar to what happens in your social media sphere, they tend to create a bit of a bubble. And my fear about algorithmic recommendation is really—the same thing that happens on Facebook or otherwise—is the echo chamber effect. So, I think what we’re all trying to do is build empathy and build bridges. And an algorithm is trying to recommend to me the thing that is most similar to the other things that I’ve watched, which creates a little echo chamber of I’m probably only all of a sudden getting recommended things that look like me. And I think why we make movies is to get us to recognize ourselves in the other. And that’s really why we’ve taken a human curation approach. So, you can tell us a little bit about how you’re feeling—like what your mood is or what kind of theme you’re interested in—and we will recommend for you no more than four movies at a time that fit kind of the thing that you’re interested in at the moment. And those are decided by people—how those things get structured and categorized and recommended are decided by people. We design playlists, so that if you’re interested in a certain topic or theme, you can move through a bunch of different movies that will give you really, really different experiences around that theme. Because ultimately, the point of storytelling has always been to connect us to each other and I think algorithms are actually very divisive, and that’s something that fundamentally we don’t want to build into our technology. SWB Yes! And one of the things I think a lot about is just like the extreme examples, right? So, if you look at the way that say YouTube will send you toward more and more and more extreme content. So you can go really quic KL y from, let’s say, you watch a Jordan Peterson video—I don’t know if you’re familiar with him— EB Yep. Unfortunately. SWB Unfortunately. A right-wing academic from Canada who says a lot of trash stuff about Muslims and women and a lot of other groups. But you might end up on a video from him, somebody links to it, or you Google something and end up on a video from him. And he’s fairly abhorrent—but, you know, if you start watching videos like that, there have been studies that show that within one or two clicks of watching related content, all of a sudden you’re on explicit propaganda videos that are anti-black, for example. And that kind of stuff, that algorithmic function is—algorithms just want to get to some sort of finite right answer, and so they’re just going to go further and further and further, And that’s—there’s no joy there. And what you’re describing is fundamentally about finding joy and connection and that’s so different. [30:11] EB That’s right. Computers are not going to help us do complicated human things like build empathy. I don’t think the internet will ever replace or supplant community building. Community building has to happen in communities. It doesn’t happen on the internet. Now, the internet can be a tool that aids different kinds of community building. And that’s why on the crowdfunding side—you know—the way that we went about building our business. You know, when we—[laughs] when we launched, I raised like $245,000 and then in the first two years, I think I raised a total of a million dollars. And during this time, IndieGoGo raised like 65 million dollars and Kickstarter raised—I don’t know—20 million dollars or something like that. There was just no way that I was ever going to compete with their resources. So, we went on the road—literally went on the road. I got in my car in LA and drove all the way across the country and all the way back and we taught workshops about how to help filmmakers use the tools of the internet to build and amplify the community-building efforts that they needed to do in order to build enough support and funding around their projects. And that turned into what is now a national education program. In 2018, we will teach 137 live workshops in person, not only for us to build human connection with them, but for them to build human connection with each other. And if you look at why do people choose Seed & Spark, it’s because—so, some of it is because they heard about us at one of these events, but more often than not, it’s that they heard about us from a friend who attended one of these events. And that I think is, to me, like, an example of the power of… there is stuff that you can only do in person, and you can’t build math functions to replace that. SWB I love that so much. And we see a lot of people who will just try to plunk humans into the same digital space and call it a community, which is not actually a community. And so I really like calling out that a community means something. And so related to that, I wanted to ask you about something you wrote about recently, which is having a code of conduct for your community. So, in the technology industry, there has been lots of debate about codes of conduct—should we even have them and whether there’s even a safety problem we should be dealing with at all. So, I’m really curious how you decided what would be in the code of conduct for Seed & Spark, and how that came to be. EB So, our community was increasingly demanding more ways to speak directly to one another. And separate from that, I had heard from my friend Eileen Carey, who is an entrepreneur, about some of the problems that corporations were facing with their Slacks—that harassment was happening in one-to-one communications in Slack channels, and there was no transparency for the corporation into those channels. And then also the reverse, that there is like a super function where you can go and look at people’s Slack messages and then their safety was being—anyway! There was like a bunch of issues around one-to-one communication that is enabled by a platform, either inside a company or inside a community. That it seemed to me—I didn’t want people to think that if you weren’t posting it publicly, but you were using our website to communicate with people in ways that would make them feel uncomfortable or shut them out or shut them down, that we wouldn’t have a say in that. I don’t subscribe to the notion that my job on a tech platform is to protect free speech, because free speech is protected in the Constitution. And all it means is that you can’t get arrested for your asshole opinion. But I don’t need to let you run around with your asshole opinion and shut people down on my website. I don’t have to tolerate that, right? [laughs] And since we’re trying to build a community that is about engagement, empathy, support, diversity, it means there can be lots of different kinds of opinions and that has to be okay and there has to be an environment that encourages lots of different kinds of opinions. Now, this is a sort of statement that an asshole will love to glom onto and be like, “well, you don’t like my conservative opinion,” and I was like, “no, I don’t like your racist opinion.” Because your racist opinion is fundamentally saying that other people’s opinions don’t belong there, and that is not the same. My opinion that you shouldn’t be able to shut people down is not the same thing as your opinion that other people shouldn’t be shut down and guess what? I get to fucking decide. So, if you’re a person who wants to use the internet to be terrible and shut people down, that’s fine. My corner of the internet is not for you. And so, we want to make sure that everybody feels like they have a pathway for notifying us if they feel like there is rude or harassing language or other ways that people use the internet to spam and be crappy. [laughs] We just want to make sure that people can feel like they have some control over their experience, and also I think that encourages it to be a safer place to disagree. And that’s—that to me is like, the code of conduct is about kicking the discussion level up a notch and demanding a little more from people than just whatever the fuck the first thing was you thought to say. And to be honest, we haven’t had these problems really before at all on the site at all, but I also just wanted to put a stake in the ground about why we don’t want to see them in the future either. [36:07] SWB Yeah, I love that because I think that part of the way that you prevent those problems is by putting your stake in the ground while you’re small enough for that to be a really easy thing to do, instead of waiting until you’re big and then pretending it’s hard. EB For me, it was like we have to release the code of conduct in conjunction with these new functions. It can’t be as a reparative measure, it has to be as a proactive measure. When you work in diversity and inclusion generally speaking, you have to be thinking about being proactive and not reactive. Because reactive is where the discrimination often happens and it gets defensive. And we didn’t want to come from a defensive position, we really wanted to come from a really proactive and positive place of like, “hey guys, here’s what we’re trying to do here. As such, here are some things you shouldn’t do here because we’re trying to do this other thing here.” And then, because I am not a person who tries to, like, assault other people on the internet, you actually have to go through some mental exercises around, like, “what is a terrible thing that somebody could think to do that I wouldn’t normally think to do?” That part’s hard. So it is helpful to look at other codes of conduct, because other people will have thought of nefarious behaviors that didn’t occur to you. SWB Yes, yes. So, I want to switch gears a bit and ask about something that I think is also pretty exciting and pretty important, which is your series “Fuck Yes,” which talks about consent. Can you tell us about that? EB “Fuck Yes” is a web series, they are digital shorts about consent. And they’re really meant to be examples of what effectively navigating consent situations would look like. So, rather than being—I think so much of sex education is about what not do. These are really just vignettes about different kinds of couples navigating what to do. And we came together and sort of decided that a Fuck Yes episode is a couple that comes to sort of an awkward moment, and they navigate an awkward moment, and guess what happens? Nobody dies from awkward. And maybe it’s a little bit funny and sweet. And what happens after the awkward is it gets way sexier, because actually communication is such a core part of what makes sex sexy. It’s like we spend so much time as humans talking, and then most people get into the bedroom and just completely stop talking, as if that’s not allowed as part of the sexual experience. And that’s so weird if you actually think about it. Because talking is as much a part of what can make something sexy. And that’s sort of core to the episodes. They pretty much all have moments of humor to navigate the situations, and ultimately, the important thing is both parties arrive to something that feels like a fuck yes. So, not just a yes, but a fuck yes. KL I love that and I think I speak for both of us—we are so excited about that and encourage everyone listening to check it out. So, let’s look into the future a little bit. What are you working on next and what are you excited about? [39:17] EB I’m excited there’s like 100 women going to Congress. I am working next on a documentary about the Equal Rights Amendment. It’s actually a fact that most people don’t know that we never passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Or rather, we passed the Equal Rights Amendment, but it’s never been ratified. We are one state away from ratification, but there are massive, massive legal challenges stacked up against it even once it does get ratified. And there are huge implications to the fact that women are not equally protected under the law. And it goes to reproductive rights, it goes to domestic violence, it goes to pregnancy discrimination, it goes to workplace and wage discrimination—all of these things and it’s in part because we don’t have language in the Constitution to protect us, so it’s been my latest obsession and that’s what we’re working on now. SWB That sounds amazing. KL So, is there someplace we can follow along to see that when it’s viewable? EB Probably in the mid to late spring there will be a place where you can start to follow along, and our hope is to release something for the 100th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage in early 2020. KL Amazing. EB But nationally speaking, everybody should be following what’s happening in Virginia. Their legislative sessions opens on January I think 19 or so, and that is the next likeliest place to ratify, at which point 38 states will have ratified, and then shit starts to get really interesting. KL That’s amazing. SWB Emily, it has been so awesome to talk with you. We have one last question, which is just where can folks learn more about you, Seed & Spark, and everything you’re working on? EB Well, I’m easy to find on Twitter @emilybest. Seed & Spark is seedandspark.com. I would really encourage everyone to go and subscribe. We are the only pay-what-you-can streaming service, meaning you can pay anywhere from $2–10 for the exact same service, whatever you can afford. And I believe we are the only streaming service on the planet right now that has 50/50 gender parity among the directors for the movies and shows on our site, and there’s a lot of really awesome stuff to watch. KL Well, that sounds excellent. Thank you for sharing all of that and thank you so much for all of the incredible work you are doing. We are so excited about it and we are so excited to talk to you today. Seed & Spark is so cool—everyone, you should check it out right now, it’s at seedandspark.com. And thank you again. EB Thank you so much for having me. SWB Yeah, fuck yes to all of this! [EB laughs][music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out] [41:58] Career Chat with Shopify SWB Hey y’all, it’s career chat time with Shopify. This week we have Courtney Symons. She’s a lead writer working in Shopify’s Office of the CEO, and she’s got advice to help you take what you’re passionate about and turn it into the next phase of your career. Courtney, let’s hear it. Courtney Symons I was on the marketing team at Shopify for four years, but my real love has always been writing. I made a point of having conversations with our CEO Tobi Lutke about my passion for writing. And without even realizing it, I planted a seed in his mind that created a connection: when he thought about writing, he thought about me. And when he decided he needed a writer, he offered me the job. I learned that when you want something, you need to throw it out to the universe. You can’t just wait for things to happen to you. Being bold about my ambitions has paved the way for so many incredible career opportunities. SWB As someone who also loves writing and finds a way to make it part of everything I do, I love this. And I love that Shopify has so many roles I never would have expected. Maybe even one for you! Visit Shopify.com/careers to see what they’re hiring for today. [43:03] Fuck Yeah of the Week KL So, we already talked about “Fuck Yes” with Emily, which was really awesome and we just have to fuck yeah to, but do we have anything else this week? SWB Yeah, so I definitely have a fuck yeah to anything regarding consent, but I have something else that Emily talked about that I want to give a fuck yeah to, and that is female friendships. So, she is so right. Female friendships are not depicted enough in media, or at least not in their actual depth or in all of their glory. There is so much about female friendship that gets reduced down to like, oh we go to book club, or drink wine together, which like, maybe, but I think there’s so much more to it than that. And I think she’s totally right that we need to be able too see more of that and that there is an audience for that. And so first of all, fuck yeah to the female friendships I have, and particularly to you, Katel, you know? Our friendship on and off the show this year has just been so incredible to me. KL I think the other day we realized that we were seeing each other like every other day. And maybe it’s not that often all the time, but it’s very frequent. And it’s not just because we’re friends and we like hanging out, because we obviously do. But I don’t know, I’m really excited about the show and a bunch of stuff we’re working on, and it really makes me happy to talk about it because when I moved to Philly a couple of years ago, I wasn’t sure what my friend network was going to be like, and I definitely wasn’t sure if I’d find a best friend here. And Sara, you are one of my soulmates. So if you get sick of me, I’m sorry, but I promise I will at least always bring donuts. SWB Oh, I appreciate that, but I don’t think I’m going to get sick of you. I’ll probably get sick of the donuts first. [laughs] KL [laughing] Yes! SWB I also though want to give a fuck yeah to something else in this too, which is us being able to share our friendship on the show. Because, you know, I hope it starts to change in some small way the thing that Emily was talking about, right? That lack of depiction of female friendships. Because I think hearing us talk publicly about our relationship and sort of demonstrating the trust we feel for each other and the way that we’re really willing to be vulnerable with each other and be there for each other, demonstrating that to people and kind of putting it out there as like an awesome thing that we have, I think that that’s really, really great. And people need to hear stories about people being best fucking friends and working on badass projects together and celebrating that. So, I’m glad we’re telling them. KL Ugh, fuck yeah to that! SWB That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and it is produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Emily Best for being our guest today. And if you loved today’s show as much as we did, you should definitely make sure that you give us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever it is that you listen to your favorite shows, because your support helps us do what we do and grow this little baby into a grown-up podcast! Thanks for listening and see you next week. [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, and fades out]

Sound Devices MixPre-3: Pro Audio for Live Streaming, Podcasting & YouTube Videos (Ep17)

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 5, 2018 18:05

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep17 (Sound Devices)Joel Pare discusses the sound quality and durability of the MixPre-3.Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks audio recording, mixing and streaming with Joel Pare from Sound Devices. Joel shares the many the different features of, and uses for, the MixPre-3 and shares how it can be used by both beginners and advanced audio professionals as well as musicians.Sound Devices is a company with a strong reputation for making extremely high-quality audio gear that is portable and durable. The MixPre-3 serves as the audio hub of both my home studio and mobile rig.MIXPRE-3The MixPre-3 is a pro audio device that serves as a mixer, recorder and audio interface. What makes it unique in comparison to other field recorders/interfaces is that it can perform both tasks, recording and working as your audio interface, at the same time. This makes it extremely useful for podcasters and live streamers who want to capture a high-quality local audio recording (in the MixPre) while streaming audio to their computer using the MixPre as an audio interface. Check out the MIxPre-3: https://amzn.to/2Q8jK3d.FACEBOOK LIVE SHOWIn addition to our conversation with Joel about the Sound Devices' MixPre-3, our November 2018 Facebook Live show features Jeremy Vest of YouTube growth software, VidIQ, and Randall Harp of Chapel Hill Media, a video production company. Look for Rob Balasabas of Thinkific wll join us on our December Facebook Live show. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page: http://LivestreamDeals.com.ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMITAt VidSummit 2018 in Los Angeles, Ross conducted interviews with video influencers, including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from #VidSummit2018 with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at http://LivestreamDeals.com.LIKE US ON FACEBOOKWe have a brand new Facebook page just for Livestream Deals. We will feature special offers, discounted products and updates from past shows. Don't miss out on the chance to save on the products you want, while keeping some extra cash in your pocket. Like and follow us at http://Facebook.com/LivestreamDeals.BRAND ON BROADCASTINGWe have another podcast you’ll want to check out. It’s Brand on Broadcasting. Listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spreaker or Stitcher.ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCESNot sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more. http://LivestreamUniverse.com/ResourcesABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALSLivestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Each of those episodes features 4 products or services for live streamers… as well as products of interest to podcasters and online content creators. On the podcast edition, we will focus on one product per episode. Some content will come from our livestream shows and some will be exclusive to the podcast. You can learn more about products featured on the show at https://LivestreamDeals.com.LINKShttps://LivestreamDeals.comhttp://LivestreamUniverse.com/ResourcesSUBSCRIBEiTunes: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iTunesSpreaker: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpreakerStitcher: https://LivestreamDeals.com/StitcherSpotify: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpotifyiHeartRadio: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iHeartRadio

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Pioneering Live Streaming in the Enterprise with Nicole Sanchez

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2018 4:30

Episode 006: On Brand on Broadcasting with Ross Brand, we talk with Nicole Sanchez about how she build a strong live streaming presence for Cisco on social media, including more than a million views on Facebook. We also discuss the challenges of pioneering live streaming at a big organization and how to overcome resistance. Episode 006 was recorded live and in-person at #VidSummit2018 in Los Angeles, powered by the LiveU Solo. Visit http://livestreamuniverse.com/resources (http://LivestreamUniverse.com/resources) for more on the LiveU Solo. Nicole Sanchez is a live video creator and host, video marketing and social media strategist, presentation design and development expert. Clients include Cisco, HPE and Night Ranger. She believes that video changes how companies engage with their audience and is the best way to build a relationship with their buying audience. Nicole draws on years of experience in both sales and business development along with extensive experience in various worldwide marketing communications roles including all aspects of social media, hosting live video events and presentation development. She helps her clients standout from today's digital noise, by investing in telling their story and building their digital presence. Brand On Broadcasting is a Livestream Universe production: http://livestreamuniverse.com/ (http://LivestreamUniverse.com) About Ross Brand Ross Brand is a pioneer in the livestreaming field as both a prolific content creator and thought-leader exploring the different ways to leverage live video to grow your business or brand. Named the world's number 1 livestreaming expert to follow on social media by Klout and selected as one of “5 live video experts to follow” by Switcher Studio, Ross made the successful transition from terrestrial radio to live streaming, founding LivestreamUniverse.com to empower other live video creators by showcasing their content through updates and shows. Ross also runs the LivestreamDeals.com website and creates audio content for podcasts and Alexa Flash Briefings. Find him on Twitter: @iRossBrand. His Instagram username is @RossBrand1.

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Pioneering Live Streaming in the Enterprise with Nicole Sanchez (Ep 006)

Brand on Broadcasting

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 3, 2018 4:31

Episode 006:On Brand on Broadcasting with Ross Brand, we talk with Nicole Sanchez about how she build a strong live streaming presence for Cisco on social media, including more than a million views on Facebook. We also discuss the challenges of pioneering live streaming at a big organization and how to overcome resistance. Episode 006 was recorded live and in-person at #VidSummit2018 in Los Angeles, powered by the LiveU Solo. Visit http://LivestreamUniverse.com/resources for more on the LiveU Solo.Nicole Sanchez is a live video creator and host, video marketing and social media strategist, presentation design and development expert. Clients include Cisco, HPE and Night Ranger. She believes that video changes how companies engage with their audience and is the best way to build a relationship with their buying audience.Nicole draws on years of experience in both sales and business development along with extensive experience in various worldwide marketing communications roles including all aspects of social media, hosting live video events and presentation development. She helps her clients standout from today's digital noise, by investing in telling their story and building their digital presence. Brand On Broadcasting is a Livestream Universe production: http://LivestreamUniverse.comSubscribe to podcast on ApplePodcasts: http://LivestreamUniverse.com/brand-iTunes/About Ross BrandRoss Brand is a pioneer in the livestreaming field as both a prolific content creator and thought-leader exploring the different ways to leverage live video to grow your business or brand.Named the world’s number 1 livestreaming expert to follow on social media by Klout and selected as one of “5 live video experts to follow” by Switcher Studio, Ross made the successful transition from terrestrial radio to live streaming, founding LivestreamUniverse.com to empower other live video creators by showcasing their content through updates and shows.Ross also runs the LivestreamDeals.com website and creates audio content for podcasts and Alexa Flash Briefings. Find him on Twitter: @iRossBrand. His Instagram username is @RossBrand1.

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Sound Devices MixPre-3: Pro Audio for Live Streaming, Podcasting & YouTube Videos

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2018 18:05

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep17 (Sound Devices) Joel Pare discusses the sound quality and durability of the MixPre-3. Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks audio recording, mixing and streaming with Joel Pare from Sound Devices. Joel shares the many the different features of, and uses for, the MixPre-3 and shares how it can be used by both beginners and advanced audio professionals as well as musicians. Sound Devices is a company with a strong reputation for making extremely high-quality audio gear that is portable and durable. The MixPre-3 serves as the audio hub of both my home studio and mobile rig. MIXPRE-3 The MixPre-3 is a pro audio device that serves as a mixer, recorder and audio interface. What makes it unique in comparison to other field recorders/interfaces is that it can perform both tasks, recording and working as your audio interface, at the same time. This makes it extremely useful for podcasters and live streamers who want to capture a high-quality local audio recording (in the MixPre) while streaming audio to their computer using the MixPre as an audio interface. Check out the MIxPre-3: https://amzn.to/2Q8jK3d (https://amzn.to/2Q8jK3d). FACEBOOK LIVE SHOW In addition to our conversation with Joel about the Sound Devices' MixPre-3, our November 2018 Facebook Live show features Jeremy Vest of YouTube growth software, VidIQ, and Randall Harp of Chapel Hill Media, a video production company. Look for Rob Balasabas of Thinkific wll join us on our December Facebook Live show. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page: http://livestreamdeals.com/ (http://LivestreamDeals.com). ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMIT At VidSummit 2018 in Los Angeles, Ross conducted interviews with video influencers, including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from #VidSummit2018 with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at http://livestreamdeals.com/ (http://LivestreamDeals.com). ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Not sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more. http://livestreamuniverse.com/Resources (http://LivestreamUniverse.com/Resources) ABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALS Livestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Each of those episodes features 4 products or services for live streamers… as well as products of interest to podcasters and online content creators. On the podcast edition, we will focus on one product per episode. Some content will come from our livestream shows and some will be exclusive to the podcast. You can learn more about products featured on the show at https://livestreamdeals.com/ (https://LivestreamDeals.com). LINKS https://livestreamdeals.com/ (https://LivestreamDeals.com) http://livestreamuniverse.com/Resources (http://LivestreamUniverse.com/Resources) Livestream Deals features direct sales expert Vicki Fitch, who plans to write 12 books in 12 months. Hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Subscribe to the podcast: https://rossbrandrecordings.com/ (https://rossbrandrecordings.com). Originally livestreamed on the Livestream Universe Facebook page (7K views)

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Make Money as a Voiceover Artist with Mike Wilkerson of Voice Farm (Ep16)

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2018 20:07

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep16 (Voice Farm)Mike Wilkerson talks about opportunities to make money as a voiceover artist.Welcome to Episode 16 (Ep16) of the Livestream Deals podcast. Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks voiceover careers with podcaster and voiceover artist Mike Wilkerson. Mike runs Voice Farm, where he coaches aspiring voiceover artists on obtaining the performance skills and industry savvy needed to succeed in an industry where there is opportunity for those who can navigate the landscape to find work. Voice Farm also has a talent roster of active voiceover artists for professional projects.OUR GUESTMike Wilkerson has created a vibrant, outside-the-box Original Content Podcast Network from the ground up based on the traffic from his 2GuysTalking Podcast Traffic over the last 5 years. In addition to hosting his own shows, Mike provides a variety of graphic design solutions for people all over the nation, showcases the new tech sensation "Podcast Bug" and gives new up-and-coming Podcasts a great kick start.With thousands of listeners and website visitors each week, and a network of 50+ shows available, The 2GuysTalking Podcast Network is a breeding ground for innovative, educational thought, the sharing of skill sets and entertainment consumption.FACEBOOK LIVE SHOWIn addition to our conversation with Mike about Voice Farm, our September 2018 Facebook Live show features Rudy J. Ellis of multi-channel live streaming platform Switchboard Live, Coach Jennie, co-founder of the Brilliance & Badassery conference for solopreneurs, and Jim Collison, host of livestreams and podcast for Gallup CliftonStrenths program. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page. View the full show at http://RossBrand.Live.ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMITAt VidSummit 2018 in Los Angeles, Ross conducted interviews with video influencers, including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from #VidSummit2018 with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at http://LivestreamDeals.com.LIKE US ON FACEBOOKWe have a brand new Facebook page just for Livestream Deals. We will feature special offers, discounted products and updates from past shows. Don't miss out on the chance to save on the products you want, while keeping some extra cash in your pocket. Like and follow us at http://Facebook.com/LivestreamDeals.BRAND ON BROADCASTINGWe have another podcast you’ll want to check out. It’s Brand on Broadcasting. Listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spreaker or Stitcher.ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCESNot sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more.ABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALSLivestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Each of those episodes features 4 products or services for live streamers… as well as products of interest to podcasters and online content creators. On the podcast edition, we will focus on one product per episode. Some content will come from our livestream shows and some will be exclusive to the podcast. You can learn more about products featured on the show at https://LivestreamDeals.com.LINKShttps://LivestreamDeals.comhttp://LivestreamUniverse.com/ResourcesSUBSCRIBEiTunes: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iTunesSpreaker: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpreakerStitcher: https://LivestreamDeals.com/StitcherSpotify: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpotifyiHeartRadio: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iHeartRadio

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Simplecast: Podcasting Made Easy with Addy Saucedo

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 30, 2018 8:35

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep15 (Simplecast) Addy Saucedo talks about how Simplecast makes it easy to launch, migrate and publish your podcasts. Welcome to Episode 15 (Ep15) of the Livestream Deals podcast recorded live at VidSummit 2018 in Los Angeles. Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks with Addy Saucedo of Simplecast about recent developments with the podcast hosting and publishing platform. Addy supports podcasters using Simplecast. She's also a podcaster, speaker, host of the PMX competition at Podcast Movement, and the author of The Podcast Planner, which was featured in Episode 5 of the Livestream Deals podcast. LIVEU LiveU's patented cellular bonding technology is powering both the IRL livestreams and the official conference livestreams during VidSummit. Thanks to LIveU for providing Ross with the LiveU Solo for our LIvestream Universe, Livestream Deals and Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit. Take 10% off the LiveU Solo at http://livestreamdeals.com/ (http://LivestreamDeals.com). ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMIT Ross conducted interviews during the conference with video influencers including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at http://livestreamdeals.com/ (http://LivestreamDeals.com). #VIDSUMMIT2018 & #VIDSUMMIT2019 Purchase the 2018 Virtual Pass for replays plus tickets to the 2019 conference at http://vidsummit.com/ (http://VidSummit.com). FACEBOOK LIVE SHOW Our October Facebook Live show has a strong focus on VidSummit. Derral Eves, VidSummit founder, joined us to discuss his IRL livestreams and the official event livestreams at #VidSummit2018. Claudia Barbiero, VP of Marketing at LiveU, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how the LiveU Solo supports creators and events going live from the most bandwidth-challenged environments. We also talked with DC Podfest co-fouder Jennifer Crawford the upcoming 2018 conference and business coach Vicki Fitch about writing 12 books in 12 months. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page. View the full show at http://rossbrand.live/ (http://RossBrand.Live). ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Not sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more: http://livestreamuniverse.com/resources (http://LivestreamUniverse.com/resources). ABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALS Livestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Each of those episodes features 4 products or services for live streamers… as well as products of interest to podcasters and online content creators. On the podcast edition, we will focus on one product per episode. Some content will come from our livestream shows and some will be exclusive to the podcast. You can learn more about products featured on the show at https://livestreamdeals.com/ (https://LivestreamDeals.com). LINKS https://livestreamdeals.com/ (https://LivestreamDeals.com) http://livestreamuniverse.com/Resources (http://LivestreamUniverse.com/Resources)

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Simplecast: Podcasting Made Easy with Addy Saucedo (Ep15)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 30, 2018 8:35

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep15 (Simplecast)Addy Saucedo talks about how Simplecast makes it easy to launch, migrate and publish your podcasts.Welcome to Episode 15 (Ep15) of the Livestream Deals podcast recorded live at VidSummit 2018 in Los Angeles. Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks with Addy Saucedo of Simplecast about recent developments with the podcast hosting and publishing platform. Addy supports podcasters using Simplecast. She's also a podcaster, speaker, host of the PMX competition at Podcast Movement, and the author of The Podcast Planner, which was featured in Episode 5 of the Livestream Deals podcast.LIVEULiveU's patented cellular bonding technology is powering both the IRL livestreams and the official conference livestreams during VidSummit. Thanks to LIveU for providing Ross with the LiveU Solo for our LIvestream Universe, Livestream Deals and Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit. Take 10% off the LiveU Solo at http://LivestreamDeals.com.ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMITRoss conducted interviews during the conference with video influencers including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at http://LivestreamDeals.com.#VIDSUMMIT2018 & #VIDSUMMIT2019Purchase the 2018 Virtual Pass for replays plus tickets to the 2019 conference at http://VidSummit.com.FACEBOOK LIVE SHOWOur October Facebook Live show has a strong focus on VidSummit. Derral Eves, VidSummit founder, joined us to discuss his IRL livestreams and the official event livestreams at #VidSummit2018. Claudia Barbiero, VP of Marketing at LiveU, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how the LiveU Solo supports creators and events going live from the most bandwidth-challenged environments. We also talked with DC Podfest co-fouder Jennifer Crawford the upcoming 2018 conference and business coach Vicki Fitch about writing 12 books in 12 months. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page. View the full show at http://RossBrand.Live.LIKE US ON FACEBOOKWe have a brand new Facebook page just for Livestream Deals. We will feature special offers, discounted products and updates from past shows. Don't miss out on the chance to save on the products you want, while keeping some extra cash in your pocket. Like and follow us at http://Facebook.com/LivestreamDeals.BRAND ON BROADCASTINGWe have another podcast you’ll want to check out. It’s Brand on Broadcasting. Listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spreaker or Stitcher.ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCESNot sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more: http://LivestreamUniverse.com/resources.ABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALSLivestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Each of those episodes features 4 products or services for live streamers… as well as products of interest to podcasters and online content creators. On the podcast edition, we will focus on one product per episode. Some content will come from our livestream shows and some will be exclusive to the podcast. You can learn more about products featured on the show at https://LivestreamDeals.com.LINKShttps://LivestreamDeals.comhttp://LivestreamUniverse.com/ResourcesSUBSCRIBEiTunes: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iTunesSpreaker: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpreakerStitcher: https://LivestreamDeals.com/StitcherSpotify: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpotifyiHeartRadio: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iHeartRadio

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Wirecast 11: Live Streaming Video Production Software Update

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2018 15:13

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep14 (Wirecast 11) Andrew Haley talks about the new features for live streaming and live video production in Wirecast 11. Welcome to Episode 14 (Ep14) of the Livestream Deals podcast recorded live at VidSummit 2018 in Los Angeles. Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks with #WirecastLive host Andrew Haley about the new features and upgrades coming to the latest version of Wirecast, the leading live video production and streaming software. Andrew serves as Telestream's Product Marketing Manager and Live Streaming Product Evangelist. He hosts #WirecastLive at 5:30pm ET, Thursdays on the Telestream Wirecast Facebook page. If you want to improve the quality of your broadcasts, stand out from the crowd, brand your livestreams with your own colors and logos, and have total control of the content you are creating, Wirecast is the best software option. I use it almost daily and not only for livestreaming. The exceptional scene/shot creation, switching and recording capabilities enable me to produce high-quality recorded videos and cut down on post-production time in the process. There is a free trial version at the http://livestreamdeals.com/ (http://LivestreamDeals.com) website. Click the Wirecast image near the top of the home page. SCREENFLOW From Telestream, the makers of Wirecast, ScreenFlow is not only a great screencasting and screen recording solution, it is also a video editor that can more than handle everyday editing needs. Get the free trial version at http://livestreamdeals.com/ (http://LivestreamDeals.com) by clicking the Wirecast image near the top of the home page. LIVEU LiveU's patented cellular bonding technology is powering both the IRL livestreams and the official conference livestreams during VidSummit. Thanks to LIveU for providing Ross with the LiveU Solo for our LIvestream Universe, Livestream Deals and Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit. Take 10% off the LiveU Solo at http://livestreamdeals.com/ (http://LivestreamDeals.com) (near top of home page) through Nov 2, 2018. ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMIT Ross conducted interviews during the conference with video influencers including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at LivestreamDeals.com. #VIDSUMMIT2018 & #VIDSUMMIT2019 Purchase the 2018 Virtual Pass for replays plus tickets to the 2019 conference at http://vidsummit.com/ (http://VidSummit.com). FACEBOOK LIVE SHOW Our October Facebook Live show has a strong focus on VidSummit. Derral Eves, VidSummit founder, joined us to discuss his IRL livestreams and the official event livestreams at #VidSummit2018. Claudia Barbiero, VP of Marketing at LiveU, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how the LiveU Solo supports creators and events going live from the most bandwidth-challenged environments. We also talked with DC Podfest co-fouder Jennifer Crawford the upcoming 2018 conference and business coach Vicki Fitch about writing 12 books in 12 months. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page. View the full show at http://rossbrand.live/ (http://RossBrand.Live). ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Not sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more. http://livestreamuniverse.com/resources (http://LivestreamUniverse.com/resources). ABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALS Livestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe....

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Wirecast 11: Live Streaming Video Production Software Update (Ep14)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2018 15:13

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep14 (Wirecast 11)Andrew Haley talks about the new features for live streaming and live video production in Wirecast 11.Welcome to Episode 14 (Ep14) of the Livestream Deals podcast recorded live at VidSummit 2018 in Los Angeles. Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks with #WirecastLive host Andrew Haley about the new features and upgrades coming to the latest version of Wirecast, the leading live video production and streaming software. Andrew serves as Telestream's Product Marketing Manager and Live Streaming Product Evangelist. He hosts #WirecastLive at 5:30pm ET, Thursdays on the Telestream Wirecast Facebook page. If you want to improve the quality of your broadcasts, stand out from the crowd, brand your livestreams with your own colors and logos, and have total control of the content you are creating, Wirecast is the best software option. I use it almost daily and not only for livestreaming. The exceptional scene/shot creation, switching and recording capabilities enable me to produce high-quality recorded videos and cut down on post-production time in the process. There is a free trial version at the http://LivestreamDeals.com website. Click the Wirecast image near the top of the home page.SCREENFLOWFrom Telestream, the makers of Wirecast, ScreenFlow is not only a great screencasting and screen recording solution, it is also a video editor that can more than handle everyday editing needs. Get the free trial version at http://LivestreamDeals.com by clicking the Wirecast image near the top of the home page.LIVEULiveU's patented cellular bonding technology is powering both the IRL livestreams and the official conference livestreams during VidSummit. Thanks to LIveU for providing Ross with the LiveU Solo for our LIvestream Universe, Livestream Deals and Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit. Take 10% off the LiveU Solo at http://LivestreamDeals.com (near top of home page) through Nov 2, 2018.ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMITRoss conducted interviews during the conference with video influencers including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at LivestreamDeals.com.#VIDSUMMIT2018 & #VIDSUMMIT2019Purchase the 2018 Virtual Pass for replays plus tickets to the 2019 conference at http://VidSummit.com.FACEBOOK LIVE SHOWOur October Facebook Live show has a strong focus on VidSummit. Derral Eves, VidSummit founder, joined us to discuss his IRL livestreams and the official event livestreams at #VidSummit2018. Claudia Barbiero, VP of Marketing at LiveU, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how the LiveU Solo supports creators and events going live from the most bandwidth-challenged environments. We also talked with DC Podfest co-fouder Jennifer Crawford the upcoming 2018 conference and business coach Vicki Fitch about writing 12 books in 12 months. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page. View the full show at http://RossBrand.Live.LIKE US ON FACEBOOKWe have a brand new Facebook page just for Livestream Deals. We will feature special offers, discounted products and updates from past shows. Don't miss out on the chance to save on the products you want, while keeping some extra cash in your pocket. Like and follow us at http://Facebook.com/LivestreamDeals.BRAND ON BROADCASTINGWe have another podcast you’ll want to check out. It’s Brand on Broadcasting. Listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spreaker or Stitcher.ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCESNot sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more. http://LivestreamUniverse.com/resources.ABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALSLivestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Each of those episodes features 4 products or services for live streamers… as well as products of interest to podcasters and online content creators. On the podcast edition, we will focus on one product per episode. Some content will come from our livestream shows and some will be exclusive to the podcast. You can learn more about products featured on the show at https://LivestreamDeals.com.LINKShttps://LivestreamDeals.comhttp://LivestreamUniverse.com/ResourcesSUBSCRIBEiTunes: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iTunesSpreaker: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpreakerStitcher: https://LivestreamDeals.com/StitcherSpotify: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpotifyiHeartRadio: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iHeartRadio

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DC Podfest: Co-Founder Jennifer Crawford Previews the 4th Annual Podcast Intensive (Ep13)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 23, 2018 13:22

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep13 (DC Podfest)Co-founder Jennifer Crawford talks about what's coming up at DC Podfest 2018Welcome to Episode 13 (Ep13) of the Livestream Deals podcast. Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks DC Podfest co-founder Jennifer Crawford about the fourth annual conference held November 9-10 in Arlington, Virginia. DC PodFest brings podcasters and digital influencers together for two days of learning, networking, workshops, live performances and fun. The organizers think of it as an independent podcast intensive for podcasters and podcast fanatics.SPECIAL OFFERGet an all-access pass to DC Podfest for $99 using the discount code LIVESTREAMDEALS. Click the DC Podfest image on the home page at LivestreamDeals.com for tickets and information.OUR GUESTJennifer Crawford is the co-founder of DC Podfest. Her passion is helping people grow their businesses. In addition to business and conference consulting, she owns Social Media Rescue, an agency specializing in online crisis management and customer service. She is also the co-founder of a recently launched company, Sparent–a virtual temp agency staffed by stay at home moms with skills to spare. When she is not all up in your business, she performs with The Improv Imps, produces the Podcasting Smarter Podcast for Podbean, and listens to podcasts, of course! She lives with her hunk of spunk husband, Thor and their 140 lb. drool beast, Meatball in Fairfax, VA.FACEBOOK LIVE SHOWIn addition to our conversation with Jennifer about DC Podfest, our October Facebook Live show has a strong focus on VidSummit. Derral Eves, VidSummit founder, joined us to discuss his IRL livestreams and the official event livestreams at #VidSummit2018. Claudia Barbiero, VP of Marketing at LiveU, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how the LiveU Solo supports creators and events going live from the most bandwidth-challenged environments. We also talked business coach Vicki Fitch about writing 12 books in 12 months. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page. View the full show at http://RossBrand.Live.ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMITAlso, in October 2018, at VidSummit in Los Angeles, Ross conducted interviews with video influencers, including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from #VidSummit2018 with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at LivestreamDeals.com.LIKE US ON FACEBOOKWe have a brand new Facebook page just for Livestream Deals. We will feature special offers, discounted products and updates from past shows. Don't miss out on the chance to save on the products you want, while keeping some extra cash in your pocket. Like and follow us at Facebook.com/LivestreamDeals.BRAND ON BROADCASTINGWe have another podcast you’ll want to check out. It’s Brand on Broadcasting. Listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spreaker or Stitcher.ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCESNot sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more.ABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALSLivestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Each of those episodes features 4 products or services for live streamers… as well as products of interest to podcasters and online content creators. On the podcast edition, we will focus on one product per episode. Some content will come from our livestream shows and some will be exclusive to the podcast. You can learn more about products featured on the show at https://LivestreamDeals.com.LINKShttps://LivestreamDeals.comhttp://LivestreamUniverse.com/ResourcesSUBSCRIBEiTunes: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iTunesSpreaker: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpreakerStitcher: https://LivestreamDeals.com/StitcherSpotify: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpotifyiHeartRadio: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iHeartRadio

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YouTube Secrets: Grow and Monetize Your Channel with Sean Cannell

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2018 6:41

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep12 (YouTube Secrets) Sean Cannell talks about growing an audience and making money on YouTube. Welcome to Episode 12 (Ep12) of the Livestream Deals podcast from VidSummit 2018 in Los Angeles. Coming up, Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks with YouTube Secrets co-author and keynote speaker Sean Cannell, a video marketing strategist who has helped clients generate over $5 million in revenue. He built his YouTube business into a multiple-six-figure success story in less than a year. In the number one best-seller YouTube Secrets, online video experts Sean Cannell and Benji Travis draw on a decade of experience as well as interviews with more than one hundred top creators to give you a step-by-step YouTube success playbook. You'll learn: The seven essential ingredients for a profitable channel New strategies for getting views and subscribers Ten ways to make money on YouTube Cannell and Travis run the Video Influencers platform, which was included on Forbes' “Top 20 Must-Watch YouTube Channels” list, alongside Tony Robbins and Gary Vaynerchuk. LIVEU LiveU's patented cellular bonding technology is powering both the IRL livestreams and the official conference livestreams during VidSummit. Thanks to LIveU for providing Ross with the LiveU Solo for our LIvestream Universe, Livestream Deals and Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit. Take 10% off the LiveU Solo here. ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMIT Ross conducted interviews during the conference with video influencers including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at LivestreamDeals.com. #VIDSUMMIT2018 & #VIDSUMMIT2019 Purchase the 2018 Virtual Pass for livestreams and replays plus tickets to the 2019 conference at http://vidsummit.com/ (http://VidSummit.com). FACEBOOK LIVE SHOW Our October Facebook Live show has a strong focus on VidSummit. Derral Eves, VidSummit founder, joined us to discuss his IRL livestreams and the official event livestreams at #VidSummit2018. Claudia Barbiero, VP of Marketing at LiveU, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how the LiveU Solo supports creators and events going live from the most bandwidth-challenged environments. We also talked with DC Podfest co-fouder Jennifer Crawford the upcoming 2018 conference and business coach Vicki Fitch about writing 12 books in 12 months. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page. ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Not sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more. ABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALS Livestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Each of those episodes features 4 products or services for live streamers… as well as products of interest to podcasters and online content creators. On the podcast edition, we will focus on one product per episode. Some content will come from our livestream shows and some will be exclusive to the podcast. You can learn more about products featured on the show at https://livestreamdeals.com/ (https://LivestreamDeals.com). LINKS https://livestreamdeals.com/ (https://LivestreamDeals.com) http://livestreamuniverse.com/Resources (http://LivestreamUniverse.com/Resources)

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YouTube Secrets: Grow and Monetize Your Channel with Sean Cannell (Ep12)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 15, 2018 6:41

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep12 (YouTube Secrets)Sean Cannell talks about growing an audience and making money on YouTube.Welcome to Episode 12 (Ep12) of the Livestream Deals podcast from VidSummit 2018 in Los Angeles. Coming up, Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks with YouTube Secrets co-author and keynote speaker Sean Cannell, a video marketing strategist who has helped clients generate over $5 million in revenue. He built his YouTube business into a multiple-six-figure success story in less than a year.In the number one best-seller YouTube Secrets, online video experts Sean Cannell and Benji Travis draw on a decade of experience as well as interviews with more than one hundred top creators to give you a step-by-step YouTube success playbook. You’ll learn:The seven essential ingredients for a profitable channelNew strategies for getting views and subscribersTen ways to make money on YouTubeCannell and Travis run the Video Influencers platform, which was included on Forbes’ “Top 20 Must-Watch YouTube Channels” list, alongside Tony Robbins and Gary Vaynerchuk.LIVEULiveU's patented cellular bonding technology is powering both the IRL livestreams and the official conference livestreams during VidSummit. Thanks to LIveU for providing Ross with the LiveU Solo for our LIvestream Universe, Livestream Deals and Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit. Take 10% off the LiveU Solo here.ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMITRoss conducted interviews during the conference with video influencers including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from VidSummit with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at LivestreamDeals.com.#VIDSUMMIT2018 & #VIDSUMMIT2019Purchase the 2018 Virtual Pass for livestreams and replays plus tickets to the 2019 conference at http://VidSummit.com.FACEBOOK LIVE SHOWOur October Facebook Live show has a strong focus on VidSummit. Derral Eves, VidSummit founder, joined us to discuss his IRL livestreams and the official event livestreams at #VidSummit2018. Claudia Barbiero, VP of Marketing at LiveU, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how the LiveU Solo supports creators and events going live from the most bandwidth-challenged environments. We also talked with DC Podfest co-fouder Jennifer Crawford the upcoming 2018 conference and business coach Vicki Fitch about writing 12 books in 12 months. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page. LIKE US ON FACEBOOKWe have a brand new Facebook page just for Livestream Deals. We will feature special offers, discounted products and updates from past shows. Don't miss out on the chance to save on the products you want, while keeping some extra cash in your pocket. Like and follow us at Facebook.com/LivestreamDeals.BRAND ON BROADCASTINGWe have another podcast you’ll want to check out. It’s Brand on Broadcasting. Listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spreaker or Stitcher.ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCESNot sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more.ABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALSLivestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Each of those episodes features 4 products or services for live streamers… as well as products of interest to podcasters and online content creators. On the podcast edition, we will focus on one product per episode. Some content will come from our livestream shows and some will be exclusive to the podcast. You can learn more about products featured on the show at https://LivestreamDeals.com.LINKShttps://LivestreamDeals.comhttp://LivestreamUniverse.com/ResourcesSUBSCRIBEiTunes: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iTunesSpreaker: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpreakerStitcher: https://LivestreamDeals.com/StitcherSpotify: https://LivestreamDeals.com/SpotifyiHeartRadio: https://LivestreamDeals.com/iHeartRadio

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DC Podfest: Co-Founder Jennifer Crawford Previews the 4th Annual Podcast Intensive

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 4, 2018 13:22

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep13 (DC Podfest) Co-founder Jennifer Crawford talks about what's coming up at DC Podfest 2018 Welcome to Episode 13 (Ep13) of the Livestream Deals podcast. Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks DC Podfest co-founder Jennifer Crawford about the fourth annual conference held November 9-10 in Arlington, Virginia. DC PodFest brings podcasters and digital influencers together for two days of learning, networking, workshops, live performances and fun. The organizers think of it as an independent podcast intensive for podcasters and podcast fanatics. SPECIAL OFFER Get an all-access pass to DC Podfest for $99 using the discount code LIVESTREAMDEALS. Click the DC Podfest image on the home page at LivestreamDeals.com for tickets and information. OUR GUEST Jennifer Crawford is the co-founder of DC Podfest. Her passion is helping people grow their businesses. In addition to business and conference consulting, she owns Social Media Rescue, an agency specializing in online crisis management and customer service. She is also the co-founder of a recently launched company, Sparent–a virtual temp agency staffed by stay at home moms with skills to spare. When she is not all up in your business, she performs with The Improv Imps, produces the Podcasting Smarter Podcast for Podbean, and listens to podcasts, of course! She lives with her hunk of spunk husband, Thor and their 140 lb. drool beast, Meatball in Fairfax, VA. FACEBOOK LIVE SHOW In addition to our conversation with Jennifer about DC Podfest, our October Facebook Live show has a strong focus on VidSummit. Derral Eves, VidSummit founder, joined us to discuss his IRL livestreams and the official event livestreams at #VidSummit2018. Claudia Barbiero, VP of Marketing at LiveU, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how the LiveU Solo supports creators and events going live from the most bandwidth-challenged environments. We also talked business coach Vicki Fitch about writing 12 books in 12 months. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page. View the full show at http://rossbrand.live/ (http://RossBrand.Live). ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMIT Also, in October 2018, at VidSummit in Los Angeles, Ross conducted interviews with video influencers, including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from #VidSummit2018 with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at LivestreamDeals.com. ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Not sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more. ABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALS Livestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Each of those episodes features 4 products or services for live streamers… as well as products of interest to podcasters and online content creators. On the podcast edition, we will focus on one product per episode. Some content will come from our livestream shows and some will be exclusive to the podcast. You can learn more about products featured on the show at https://livestreamdeals.com/ (https://LivestreamDeals.com). LINKS https://livestreamdeals.com/ (https://LivestreamDeals.com) http://livestreamuniverse.com/Resources (http://LivestreamUniverse.com/Resources) Livestream Deals features direct sales expert Vicki Fitch, who plans to write 12 books in 12 months. Hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Subscribe to the podcast: https://rossbrandrecordings.com/ (https://rossbrandrecordings.com). Originally livestreamed on the...

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Make Money as a Voiceover Artist with Mike Wilkerson of Voice Farm

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2018 20:06

LIVESTREAM DEALS Ep16 (Voice Farm) Mike Wilkerson talks about opportunities to make money as a voiceover artist. Welcome to Episode 16 (Ep16) of the Livestream Deals podcast. Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks voiceover careers with podcaster and voiceover artist Mike Wilkerson. Mike runs Voice Farm, where he coaches aspiring voiceover artists on obtaining the performance skills and industry savvy needed to succeed in an industry where there is opportunity for those who can navigate the landscape to find work. Voice Farm also has a talent roster of active voiceover artists for professional projects. OUR GUEST Mike Wilkerson has created a vibrant, outside-the-box Original Content Podcast Network from the ground up based on the traffic from his 2GuysTalking Podcast Traffic over the last 5 years. In addition to hosting his own shows, Mike provides a variety of graphic design solutions for people all over the nation, showcases the new tech sensation "Podcast Bug" and gives new up-and-coming Podcasts a great kick start. With thousands of listeners and website visitors each week, and a network of 50+ shows available, The 2GuysTalking Podcast Network is a breeding ground for innovative, educational thought, the sharing of skill sets and entertainment consumption. FACEBOOK LIVE SHOW In addition to our conversation with Mike about Voice Farm, our September 2018 Facebook Live show features Rudy J. Ellis of multi-channel live streaming platform Switchboard Live, Coach Jennie, co-founder of the Brilliance & Badassery conference for solopreneurs, and Jim Collison, host of livestreams and podcast for Gallup CliftonStrenths program. See info and purchase products on the LivestreamDeals home page. View the full show at http://rossbrand.live/ (http://RossBrand.Live). ROSS BRAND AT VIDSUMMIT At VidSummit 2018 in Los Angeles, Ross conducted interviews with video influencers, including episodes of LivestreamDeals featuring Sean Cannel on his new book YouTube Secrets, Andrew Haley on new features in Wirecast, and Addy Saucedo on podcasting with Simplecast. Also check out Brand on Broadcasting interviews from #VidSummit2018 with Nick Nimmin, Steve Dotto, Carlos Gil, Nicole Sanchez, Dan Norton and Jason Liebman. All interviews were livestreamed to Facebook Live using the LiveU Solo. More info and special offers at http://livestreamdeals.com/ (http://LivestreamDeals.com). ROSS' RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Not sure where to start when it comes to livestreaming and podcasting gear or need a recommendation for a specific product? Our Livestream Universe Resources page has my recommendations for gear, books, courses, software and more. ABOUT LIVESTREAM DEALS Livestream Deals has been a monthly Facebook Live show hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Each of those episodes features 4 products or services for live streamers… as well as products of interest to podcasters and online content creators. On the podcast edition, we will focus on one product per episode. Some content will come from our livestream shows and some will be exclusive to the podcast. You can learn more about products featured on the show at https://livestreamdeals.com/ (https://LivestreamDeals.com). LINKS https://livestreamdeals.com/ (https://LivestreamDeals.com) http://livestreamuniverse.com/Resources (http://LivestreamUniverse.com/Resources) Originally livestreamed on the Livestream Universe Facebook page (4.2K views)

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Show Me the Data with Tracy Chou

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2018 50:08

We’ve all heard companies talk big about how they value diversity. But many still aren’t willing to quantify how they’re doing: who works there? Who’s getting hired and promoted? Are people being paid equitably? On today’s show, we talk about diversity, data, and how one engineer’s call for hard numbers shook things up. That engineer was Tracy Chou—a leading voice in tech industry diversity and inclusion conversations. She’s a wildly talented software engineer who believes in the importance of increasing transparency among tech companies, the need for tech to value a humanities education, and the pleasures of spending way too much time on Twitter. > As an engineer, I’m so used to having to have data for everything. But the lack of data on the workforce side just felt so hypocritical to me. It seemed like it wasn’t really a problem that we wanted to solve if we weren’t even looking at the data. > —**Tracy Chou, Project Include founding advisor ** We talked with Tracy about: What the real picture of diversity in tech companies looks like and where the numbers are. Why it’s important for tech companies to get comfortable releasing data about their workforce, and why it’s critical to consider the intersectionality of diversity efforts. A nonprofit Tracy helped to found called Project Include, which shares best practices around implementing diversity and inclusion solutions. Plus, we talk about ch-ch-ch-changes and asking for help: Specifically, change at work—how we deal with it and how it can affect us emotionally and physically. And yup, we constantly have to remind ourselves that it’s ok to ask for help. The good news is, we’re helping each other do it more. Jenn even got to take a vacation complete with funnel cake, because she asked for help with childcare. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more. Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Try it free, then use code NOYOUGO to get 50% off your first paid month. Transcript [Ad spot] SWB Harvest makes awesome software for tracking time, planning projects, sending invoices, and generally helping me keep it all together at work. Or at least look like I have it all together—even if I’m actually still wearing sweatpants. I love how easy it is to use, whether I’m working solo or scaling up a larger team for a big project. You’ll love Harvest, too. Go to getharvest.com to try it free, and if you’re ready for a paid account, use code noyougo to get 50% off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, code noyougo. [intro music plays for 12 seconds] Jenn Lukas Hey friends, welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. And today we are talking to Tracy Chou, who is an entrepreneur and an engineer whose push for tech companies to start revealing employee diversity data back in 2013 kickstarted a lot of huge changes in Silicon Valley, and put her on the cover of The Atlantic and Wired and a whole bunch of other stuff. It also led her to become a founding member of Project Include, which is a non-profit that is on a mission to accelerate diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. So we chat with Tracy about how she became a diversity advocate, how that’s changed her career and what she’s learned along the way. But before we do that, I just want to kind of check in with everyone. So, how’s life? JL Life’s been a little wild this week. We kicked off some really big team changes at work. You know, some small changes, some big changes, but some people’s day to days got pretty changed up. And of course, seating changes. KL Oh gosh, that can be a big doozy. How’s it going? JL [sighs] Well, I can say this. People really just don’t care for change. [All three laugh] SWB [still laughing] No! Not at all. JL You know, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about like why do people hate change so much? SWB Because we all have habits and comforts and then you take them away and it’s very hard because inside we’re all just delicate little flowers. [Katel laughs] SWB Seriously! We are! KL Yeah! SWB We are! It’s hard! KL You get used to something and you’re like ‘wait, now everything’s changing and how am I going to adapt and how am I going to deal with this.’ And I think yeah, it just, it feels like it— it can feel overwhelming and especially when it has to do with sort of changing folks that you’re working with or places you’re sitting. Like I think physical changes can impact you a lot. SWB And maybe also the thing with physical change like where you’re sitting is that nobody really realizes that it’s impacting them so much, right? People will underestimate how much of an impact that can have and so it’s the kind of change that can really affect your day to day, but that nobody’s kind of taking stock of and and it’s sort of assumed that that will just be fine. And I think that those changes are hard, right? The ones that we don’t invest enough time in planning for and understanding that there is an emotional component to it. The other thing I think about when it comes to change is that oftentimes people will know that the company needs to change and they’ll complain about the way it’s organized and it’s so hard to get anything done and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And yet when you try to enact changes, it’s really difficult to get people on board. And I think part of that is also like change that people are choosing for themselves versus change that is being done to them. And the reality is, nobody likes to feel like there is something being done to them and so that’s one of the biggest things I always think about is how do you make this something that people feel a little bit included in or consulted on? Or at least how can you put it into terms that will help them see it as something that is going to help them in their day to day or take away some of the pain that they were experiencing in terms of workflow or whatever. And of course, that’s not always invested in and it’s also not always true! Like for some people it’s it’s not actually solving the personal problems they had even if it’s solving company problems. And then it’s like okay, how do you get people on board and sort of get them through that hard part of of shifting gears? JL One of the things we do with team changes that I think is really good is re-establish team norms. So sit down with everyone and everyone sort of discusses just like, what are the routines and what are the beliefs and the things that are important to people as a team. And I think that can really be helpful with new teammates to be like ‘here are things that are important to me, what are things that are important to you, and what’s it going to be like to live together at work?’ KL Yeah. SWB Do you have any sort of particular structure for doing something like that? JL We have the scrum masters run that and sort of they have a questionnaire list that brings stuff up. So, people eating lunch at their desks or how you use the shared space or the tables. So we—like I said, we switched the teams so we had to discuss ‘hey, can we still use this table to watch Jeopardy at lunch?’ [All three laugh] KL Very important! JL [laughing] Yeah! SWB Yeah, bullet point number one: Jeopardy! JL Right? But I mean also things like how you point stories. So pointing stories is basically a level of effort of how much an effort will take to get some sort of feature work done or something at work. We do daily stand ups at work where people tell you what your status are at meetings. You know, what time is that? Or are you doing them over Slack or like virtual stand ups? I think it can also be things like ‘here’s how I receive feedback best’ or ‘here’s how I think we should handle reviews of other people’s work.’ [5:18] SWB Yeah, I mean there’re so many questions that come up when there’s any kind of change like that. Since I don’t work in a company—but the kind of consulting I do with companies is always about change because invariably they are coming to me because they realize that their content or their user experience isn’t working as they want it to and the reason that it’s not working is always rooted in their not being able to make it work as a company. The way that they’re organized, the way they do things, who’s in charge of what. So, I have to talk to people about how their jobs are going to change and how things are going to be different. And I’m a big fan of having people practice some of those skills. So if it’s like okay, we are going to do a different kind of writing process where instead of—you know—you produce this content over here in this department and then you ship it out the door to this other department, there’s going to be a collaborative process. Well then, okay, we should practice that. And so we’ll do that in a workshop setting where we’ll pair people up and we’ll actually practice—how do we work on these things together, how do we share drafts and get feedback from each other? And I think that those kinds of low stakes practice sessions—because you’re not doing your real job, you’re just kind of practicing the new thing in a short period of time—I think that that can help people feel more comfortable with talking to people they aren’t used to talking with. JL Yeah and I mean I also think that it lets you feel more in control, and sometimes if you embrace that, if you know change is coming, you can do more exercises like that. And sort of prepare and be ready for this. So if you are expecting change or just knowing it can happen or knowing specifics, you can just be better ready I think to deal with it. KL I love thinking about kind of how a different perspective or sort of embracing a different kind of approach to the change can kind of help you through it. It makes me think of when I was at National Geographic, we would go through organization changes from time to time, but at a certain point, we actually went through a really big physical change where we went from everyone was in cubicles and not just cubes that were like low sort of where you can see everyone. It was like six feet tall and offices and everyone went to cubes that were like four feet high. So, everybody could see everybody—including managers, it was all sorts of like all different levels, and people were really freaked out. And one thing that we realized immediately was going from sort of a perceived sense of privacy to not having any, meant that we kind of had to think about the workplace etiquette a little differently and just no one had thought about that. Like no one. It wasn’t—you know—a matter of management doing something wrong or folks not thinking about it, it just was like ‘oh, wait we have to work together a little bit differently.’ And something I’ve actually seen work really well is at a co-working space I go to here in Philly. [Laughs] Someone made these little coasters that were like red light, green light. So basically you put your little green circle up if you were ready to chat to people or didn’t mind having people coming up to your desk, or you put the red one up if you were like ‘I’m going to be heads down and working on something.’ So—I just think this idea of kind of looking at things a little differently too can help. JL It’s like Fogo de Chão, [Katel laughs] the Brazilian steakhouse where green means bring me more meat and red means no I’ve had enough. KL [Laughing] Exactly. JL Yeah I mean I really like that because we used to say the universal sign was headphones, but I think we all know that doesn’t work. I was reading a bit on Harvard Business Review about this. They had some interesting things about finding humor in the situation, talk about problems more than feelings, don’t stress out about stressing out, focus on your values more than your fears—this idea that remembering that you’re you no matter what the change is can really help you. The change doesn’t have to define who you are. But something else I really liked was this like ‘don’t expect stability,’ where they talk about this 70’s research that was done where they studied two groups of managers and one group thrived and the other didn’t. And they said—you know—the adaptive leaders chose to view all changes as an expected part of the human experience, rather than as a tragic anomaly that victimizes unlucky people. KL Yeah! JL And then the struggling leaders were ones who were consumed by thoughts of quote on quote the good, old days. And they spent their energy trying to figure out why their luck had suddenly turned sour—because they kept looking back to something that wasn’t there anymore. SWB That’s so interesting too because that just reminds me so much of politics, right? You have so many people who are talking about the good, old days. And you’re like ‘wait, when were the good, old days and for whom exactly?’ And I think it’s true at work too where it’s like when people get obsessed with the good, old days, those are probably also mythical. Right? KL Yeah.. SWB They may have been good for some people in the organization but it’s undoubtedly that they weren’t working for other people. JL And the other thing that you might like if you dig in, you might be like ‘okay, well this part was good, but this part wasn’t’ and you can think about how to get that good part back. So if what you missed was that you sat with someone or you worked with someone really closely that you didn’t—you know—make sure you’re setting up time for lunch with them or maybe you set up pairing sessions where you still work together. But you know, trying to figure out what it is that you did like and then what are things you can apply moving on? What are the things that you’re excited about now? And what are the things maybe that you didn’t really like then? And maybe you didn’t get a chance to work on these exciting things or work with this person and now you do get to work with this new person or you do get to work on this new project. Or maybe this new seat allowed you to clear off the desk that you’ve been meaning to do. [Laughs] It’s funny, I was actually like—in the seating change I ended up not moving seats and I’m like ‘ugh, but I’ve got all these boxes I’ve got to bring down.’ [All laugh] KL [Laughing] You’re like ‘no, I need a move to help me reorganize.’ JL *[laughs] *Yeah, so just—like you’re saying. Trying to figure out really what are the positives moving forward? If there are things you will miss from those days, how do you keep them up and try to make the best going forward, as much as you can. I mean, It’s always hard and I don’t want to make it ever sound like that’s easy, but I think we can all do it. [11:26] [Music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out] Time Trivia SWB So we’ve been talking a lot about change and our interviewee today definitely talks a lot about change in the tech industry as well so I’d like to get to that interview, but before we do, we have one last little segment. It is brand new, it is called Time Trivia. Because we talk about time on this show all the time! We need more time, we try to balance the time we have, we rant about how we are sometimes feeling a little bit unbalanced. And so our friends at Harvest wanted to see if we could stump each other when it comes to time. So let’s see. Katel, you’re up today and our theme is women authors. Are you ready? KL Oh gosh, let’s do it. JL Okay, Katel. Here is your first question. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter manuscript was rejected twelve times before it sold for an advance of only £1,500. Now she’s sold more than four hundred million copies. How long did it take her to write that manuscript? A) 5,000 hours, B) 15,000 hours, or C) 50,000 hours. KL Oh my gosh, this is already a lot of numbers. I’m going to say C) 50,000 hours. JL Katel— that is correct! KL [Gasps] Yayy! JL It took her six years to write Harry Potter. KL That’s a lot of hours! SWB We even tried to stump you with the twelve times £1,500, 400 million copies—you were unstumpable. Question two. More math, sorry. [Katel laughs] Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847. If she’d been paid a freelance rate of $50 an hour – pretty good in 1847—how much would she have earned for her wild, passionate tale of Katherine and Heathcliff’s love? KL Ugh, I love this book. SWB Is it A) $740,000, B) $60,000, or C) $330,000? KL Ohhh my gosh, I’m going to go with B) $60,000 even though I feel like it should be more. SWB It is way more. It is actually $330,000 because it took her nine months to write that book, which is still a real short time considering how great that book is, ugh. KL Yeah, it is! I’m glad it was more than $60k. JL Okay, Katel, last question. Stephanie Myer’s classic tale of vampire love and lust—yes, Twilight—[laughs] has become a five-film series. If Stephanie had been billing her time to clients instead, how many 15 minute increments would she have billed? A) 870, B) 8,700, or C) 87,000? KL Ooh. 8,700? JL Katel, you know your 15 minute increments. That is correct! B) 8,700. SWB Two out of three, not bad. I think that’s a winning score! So, thank you so much to Harvest for sponsoring our time trivia today and for supporting women authors, which they do, and women podcasters. So check them out at getharvest.com. [Music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out] [14:34] Interview: Tracy Chou SWB Tracy Chou is a wildly talented software engineer, who has also become a leading voice in tech industry diversity and inclusion conversations. She has been an engineer at Quora and Pinterest, an advisor to the US Digital Service and is one of the cofounders of an organization I am personally super fond of and that’s Project Include. She was named on Forbes’ 30 under 30 tech list in 2014 and she has been profiled in everything from Vogue to Mother Jones. So I am extremely excited to welcome Tracy to the show today. Tracy, thank you so much for being here. So, you went to Stanford, you interned at Facebook, you were one of the first engineers at Quora and one of the first engineers at Pinterest. That is kind of like a perfect Silicon Valley pedigree to a lot of people. Except, you’ve also written about feeling out of place during a lot of that time and not necessarily feeling like the industry was designed for you. And I’m wondering if we can start there—what was it like in the beginning of your career? And what was exciting about it and maybe what was not so great about it? Tracy Chou Yeah, so I grew up in the Bay Area surrounded by tech and I think that made it very easy for me to naturally fall into the tech industry. When I started working in tech I think I just accepted things for the way they were, including the lack of gender diversity, racial diversity. I honestly didn’t notice or think that things should be different. But there definitely were experiences I had when I started working that felt off, but I didn’t know how to articulate or pinpoint them. I tended to blame myself or think that there was something wrong with me when I had a lot of coworkers hitting on me all the time, for example when I was interning. And—you know—when I started working and felt like I might be treated differently, I assumed that it was because I wasn’t as qualified or there was something about the the way that I was approaching my work that was inferior and therefore caused people to treat me differently. So it took a while for me to put all the pieces together, and so I was just talking to a lot of other people in industry, other female engineers. One of my early conversations that really started to make me aware of these sorts of issues systemically, was with Tristan Walker who is an African American founder. And he had reached out to say that he had seen some of my writing about being female in engineering and wanted to share that he had similar experiences even though he wasn’t technical and he wasn’t a woman. Being the only black person in the room oftentimes felt as alienating and he could really identify with a lot of the things that I was saying. And that helped me to see how pervasive the sort of experience of marginalization is. Even though the tech industry is one that tries to pride itself on being so innovative and designing the future, being this engine of progress, there are so many ways in which it is still very backwards. SWB What year was that? That was like 2010,11,12 in there that you were really kind of getting going in your career and having those experiences? TC Yeah, the first sort of Silicon Valley tech internship I had was in 2007, but I started working full time in 2010. SWB So in 2013, you wrote this post on Medium that got kind of a lot of attention, where you were calling out the lack of data about women who are working in tech—and maybe specifically working in engineering, and the lack of success metrics attached to company’s diversity efforts. So if companies maybe had diversity efforts, they didn’t necessarily have any sense of whether they were working or not. And so that post kind of blew up and a lot of companies started sharing their numbers in a GitHub repo. And for listeners who aren’t familiar with GitHub repos, it’s just a site where you can work collaboratively usually on software projects, but you can also do things like collaboratively share data. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that happened. First up, what made you sit down and write that blog post and did it feel risky when you did it? TC I had been working in the industry for a few years at that point and had gotten to know a number of the female engineers at other companies. And it started to be this thing that I would keep track of in the back of my head like which startups, which companies had which female engineers. Whenever I went into rooms I would automatically start counting, so it was just something that I was keeping tabs on personally. At the same time, I was looking at diversity at Pinterest and I wanted to make recommendations to the team about what we should do to be more diverse and inclusive. Facebook and Google were getting a lot of really good press around their parental leave policies, for example, and lots of companies were talking about how they were sending lots of people to the Grace Hopper conference, which is this big annual conference of women in computing. But I found it very hard to justify recommending any of those things to Pinterest because there were no success metrics. So these kind of thoughts were swirling around in my head when I went to Grace Hopper that year—this was October 2013—and I was at a breakfast where Sheryl Sandberg was speaking in front of the room and she made a comment about how the numbers of women in tech were dropping precipitously. Which, I didn’t disagree with the sentiment of, but it made me wonder what numbers she was talking about, because to my knowledge there were no numbers really out there. And so when I got home with all these thoughts rolling around my head, I ended up writing this post around diversity data. I was also reflecting on how the way we treated workforce issues was so different from the way we treated product development. As an engineer, I’m so used to having to have data for everything. We’re pretty religious about tracking all this data on our users [laughs] and understanding their behavior and that’s the way that we approach problem solving in product development. But the lack of data on the workforce side just felt so hypocritical to me. It seemed like it wasn’t really a problem that we wanted to solve if we weren’t even looking at the data. And of course I understood all the reasons why companies were skittish about even tracking the data because it would also mean that they would start to acknowledge the problem and have to solve it. But when I wrote the post, I wasn’t expecting much of a response. I didn’t think that it would be something that many people would even read, much less act on. I would also add though that in hindsight it seems like this post became big immediately and started this whole movement, but it did take some time as well. It was more of a slow, snowball effect. And so there were smaller companies that contributed their data first and the bigger companies took a little bit more time to process and work through what they wanted to do before they all started releasing their reports as well. [21:05] SWB When I look back on it, it kind of reminds me of in some ways like the moment that happened last year when Susan Fowler published her Uber blog post where there was this moment—the table had already been set for this conversation and it was just it pushed it over the edge or something. And I’m not sure if it’s exactly the same by any means, but it did really feel like a moment was happening and I’m curious, why do you think it ended up really snowballing? What was it about that moment that you think caught on? TC I think there was general appetite to do something about diversity and inclusion. More people were acknowledging that it was a problem. And I think the way that I framed it, which was, “let’s just start sharing some data,” made the problem seem a little bit more tractable. At least there was a first step that people could take. There was one thing that an individual contributor, for example, could do. So if you’re working at a small startup, you can look around the room and see how many engineers and how many female engineers and count that up and submit that data into the repository. And it felt easy, actionable, and also clear that this would contribute to a broader cause. I think I had a little bit more credibility as an engineer working at a company that a lot of people knew. And I think that piece is still important, I could speak from the perspective of being on the inside. And I think also I just got lucky. In a lot of ways I think of this project as a startup where startups have the markets that they’re going after, the products they’re trying to build. Sometimes they’re too early and the market isn’t ready for them, sometimes the product isn’t just quite right yet for people to want to engage with it. A lot of things have to come together all at once and luck, timing, all of that plays in. And somehow this Medium post in a row and the GitHub repository that I set up just happened to be just right at that time to capitalize on this increasing intent from people in the community to do something. And I think I was the right person at the right time to be pushing on that message. SWB If you’re an engineer or anybody who uses GitHub already, it’s also like, it feels sort of a natural place or a more comfortable place. TC Yeah, I think the GitHub angle was also interesting because it spoke more to engineers and people who write code, as opposed to HR. So it was getting engineers submitting their data through pull requests, and those people were less encumbered by thinking through, what are the legal ramifications and what are the HR risks here. They’re just thinking, like, this is the team that I work on, I want to report the data on the team. KL This is so fascinating to me too because in that post in 2013 you also focused really narrowly on defining the technical roles. You wanted companies to talk about actual engineers—not every other role, not business development or whatever. Sort of as a way of saying companies shouldn’t pad their numbers about the women they hire if women aren’t in those roles. And I see that point. I’m also curious if that perspective has shifted over the past few years or changed at all? TC One of the reasons why I wanted to be really specific about just tracking women in engineering is that for something that was crowdsourced, it had to be as simple as possible to contribute that data. The more you ask from people, the more drop off you get in that flow. So I wanted to make it super simple. But the other point about just looking at engineering versus the rest of it was that I did want to get away from that sort of padding of the numbers. And in the tech industry engineers are very much valued because they are the ones—we are the ones—building the products that are being sold, very close to the core value of the companies. So there’s this idea of looking at where the prestige is and how much inclusion you have there. Now that there’s more data coming out, we can see that even if you have a reasonable amount of representation across the companies, usually they’re lower ranked, few of those people are in decision-making roles. One interesting data point that I would love to see that is very hard to get is diversity on the cap table, and so that’s looking at ownership of the company—like who owns the shares. And I would suspect that ownership in these different tech companies skews very heavily white and male, because founders will have a lot of stock, early employees will have much more because the stock grants are risk-adjusted so people who are joining early will get much more stock, investors get stock, executives get a lot of stock. So even if your company has a lot of women, but they’re all in the lower-ranked, non-technical roles, the value that they get out of the company doing well is much less. So I really wanted to dig in on engineering within tech because that is so close to the core of Silicon Valley. [26:05] SWB One thing I’d love to ask about—we talked with Nicole Sanchez of Vaya Consulting back in June and her company focuses on diversity and inclusion in tech and consults with a lot of tech companies. And one of the things she said to us was that she flat out does not love the way that the numbers are being reported by tech companies right now, that there’s still a lot of gaming of the system because so much of the numbers is just about percentage of people in full and percentage of new hires, right? And that there’s not a lot of information about things like retention of those employees and seniority of those employees and, as you mentioned, who is actually getting a cut of these companies, right? Like who’s really taking home money? And so it sounds like—and I’m curious about your thoughts on this—but it sounds like the way that you were initially looking at some of these metrics was sort of really, really important at the time, but maybe isn’t quite enough to answer the questions that we have about how that industry is doing and to answer the questions that we have about whether things are getting better. TC Absolutely. I think we need much more comprehensive metrics and there is certainly gamification of the current metrics that get released. I think getting people even into the flow of releasing any data was a pretty big step. And I think it’s good to keep pushing on companies to release better data. So one obvious thing is intersectionality—instead of just putting gender on one side, race on one side, looking at those intersectional cuts and just see is it just white men and white women getting promoted? How does it look for women of color? Those sorts of questions can’t be answered if all the data is being split out. I’ve been relatively heartened by how much companies have been willing to release—enough that we can look at their data and see that in the last few years even if we’ve made some progress on gender diversity, we’ve had backsliding on racial diversity, which is not a good statement on the industry, but at least we have that data that we can even point that out and see that some of these diversity efforts aren’t uniformly benefitting different people and, in fact, are causing some harm to different groups. SWB So another thing I was really hoping to dig into that I think you kind of touched on a little bit when you were kind of talking about technical versus non-technical roles, is I’m also curious how you feel about who’s considered technical in Silicon Valley and sort of the valuing of engineers when you are also kind of thinking about sort of the appreciation for what it takes to build tech products? I was reading an article you wrote—I think last year—about realizing that it’s not really just about engineering, and realizing the value of learning things like understanding people and human behavior and communication skills and—you know—liberal arts and humanities. And the stuff that you hadn’t necessarily taken that seriously when you were in college as something that was important for ensuring that the things we’re making aren’t laced with bias or harmful to people, and being able to think through sort of the impact of our work. And so I’m curious how you think about those things together. Like okay—we value technical roles a lot and so it’s important to look at who are in the roles that we value the most. But are there also issues around the kinds of roles that are valued or the kinds of roles that even exist? And how do we sort of make sense of that? [30:25] TC Yeah, absolutely. I think our whole way of approaching technology building right now is pretty flawed. I think for a long time we’ve unquestioningly assumed that technology is always progress. So whatever we do in the software realm will be positive. And we’re seeing very clearly now that that’s not the case. It’s very easy for the software products that we’re building to be used for harm or used in ways that we didn’t anticipate. And for the people who are building these products, whether it’s the engineers running the code or everyone else involved, we do need to think more holistically and broadly and contextualize our work in society and understand what the impacts of technology are before we can assume that we’re doing good. Some people have drawn analogies after the election cycles in the last couple of years to the sorts of ethics considerations that other domains have had—so, chemical engineering or in physics. When the people in those fields realized that their work could be used to create weapons, they had to think pretty hard about doing science or doing this kind of research and I think the people in the tech industry and in software right now really need to have that same sort of introspection and deep questioning. For a long time in the tech industry, we’ve really downplayed the value of a humanities education and and I think that is problematic. You see that reflected in compensation. For example, who gets these big payouts, who gets really big salaries. It’s tricky because also the sorts of value of someone who can bring in terms of the ethical reasoning and product guidance, that work is not as easy to value, put a dollar amount on. It’s a little bit easier to look at what an engineer is producing or what a designer is producing and say this is the value of their work and it ties very directly to the final output and I think if the whole system is fundamentally shifted around, we can start to see the value that non-technical folks are bringing, then hopefully that is reflected in the compensation and payouts as well. At the same time, you have this very classic supply and demand type issues around sorts of talent that you need, so the engineering salaries will be high for a while because engineering is very obviously needed and there aren’t enough engineers to fill all the roles. Even if we were to recognize the value of the non technical work that needs to be done, if there is such a mismatch in supply and demand on the technical side, the salaries will still be higher there. So there’s a lot of things to address systemically, but I think one starting point even just within the companies that we’re looking at is trying to shift the culture to acknowledge the different viewpoints that different people from different educational backgrounds and different training can bring. SWB I think one of the things that’s also interesting and maybe compounds all of this, is the way that a lot of the kinds of roles that are more based in humanities or social sciences or that would benefit from that kind of background, they are tending to have a lot more representation of women in them, and so then you kind of have this interesting cross section of the skills are in less demand. Also we’re used to paying women less, or we’re used to putting women into sort of more caring roles versus rational roles, and so it’s hard to tease out all of those different issues that intertwine and result in gendering of who’s in what kinds of roles, and devaluing of some roles, and then also to have the conversation about well, “why is it that so many women are in these kinds of roles and not in these other kinds of roles?” And to be able to talk about all those things at the same time I think is really hard for a lot of people. It takes a lot of investment in the discussion to be able to pick apart things with that level of nuance, and I think a lot of the time organizations aren’t there yet. TC Yeah, I completely agree. [Laughs] There has been some research into when professions become more lucrative and prestigious how they—how the men tend to crowd the women out. So, there used to be more women in software engineering and they were kind of pushed out. So the 37% of CS degrees in 1984 went to women and it’s been declining, the percentage has been declining since then. But in other industries as well, one that I found kind of interesting was beer making used to be mostly women and then men found out that beer making was cool and it became all male brewmasters.  Even in things like cooking, when men reach the top and become these top chefs, it’s very prestigious. Even though women still do most of the cooking around the world, it’s just not viewed as as prestigious or lucrative for them. So as you were saying, there’s all these interesting dynamics at play and it’s really hard to tease out specific effects. SWB Yeah totally—I think about some of the conversations I’ve had with folks when startups starting hiring people to do quote growth hacking and you’re like ‘wait a second—isn’t that—wait, aren’t they—isn’t that marketing? I think they’re doing marketing!’ [Laughter] But marketing was always more women in the field and growth hacking was this very hardcore bro kind of role. If anybody out there is a quote growth hacker as their title, I’m sorry if I’m making fun of your profession. But it is, it’s one of these made up titles that’s almost—I think—masculinized a lot of skill sets that were traditionally perceived as being more feminine. And then low and behold, those people are being paid a lot more money. TC I think you also see this reflected in the maker movement—where it’s been rebranded as this very male type of thing where you’re making things. But if you actually look at what is being done—creating things from the raw materials—that’s stuff that a lot of women have been doing in different domains, but it had to get rebranded for men to be super into it and for it to become prestigious. SWB Totally, like what’s not being a maker about being a knitter? TC Yeah! SWB You’re literally making things out of thread, right? [Laughs] TC Yep. SWB I’m amazed that we have not gotten to this yet because it’s so important, I want to talk about it. Okay, we have not talked about Project Include. So, you started doing all of this work to share this data that you were gathering and to talk about this issue. Can you tell us a little bit about how that grew into founding Project Include? TC Project Include was eight of us women in tech getting together a couple of years ago. So, there was a lot of discussion in the broader sphere about the problems and everything that was going wrong, but not nearly enough about solutions. And for the people that wanted to do the right thing, they still didn’t know what to do. So, we thought that the highest leverage thing we could do was write down our recommendations and resource—what we knew to be best practice around implementing diversity and inclusion. Our initial launch was just a website with a lot of recommendations—everything from defining culture, to implementing culture, to doing training, hiring, resolving conflicts, measuring progress, and also a framework to think about all those things, so it’s not just like pick and choose some of these tactics and apply them to your org and then you’ll be fine, but thinking through more holistically how to approach diversity and inclusion truly inclusively so it’s not just gender or just race or just one facet of diversity and then being very intentional about measuring progress. So, there was a bunch of these recommendations we wrote down. The feedback we got from the community was really positive and people wanted us to do more with it, which is how we ended up incorporating as a non profit and adding Startup Include as a program where we actually work with cohorts of companies on implementing these recommendations. But our hope is really to drive these solutions forward and we’re focused on startups for now. We think that the highest leverage opportunity is with startups before they become too big and are hard to steer—try to get those good practices and processes in early and hopefully some of the startups that are thinking about D&I early will end up becoming the big companies of tomorrow and they’ll already have baked in these best practices. We also acknowledge that what we think to be best practice now may change and so we really do want to build more of a community around these issues and solutions and kind of in the same way that open source software works where you put stuff out there, everyone can benefit from it. As they’re using it, they may think of ways to extend it or improve on it and they’re contributing that back to the community—we want that sort of a community around diversity and inclusion. SWB Yeah, that’s really interesting and I think it’s one thing to identify problems, it’s one thing to try to address them, but we clearly don’t really know how to fix this yet. So, I’m curious is there anything that you’ve found as you’ve been advising Project Include and sort of seeing it grow and adapt—is there anything that you’ve seen out there that you’ve really feel like you’ve been able to learn from and that’s helped to shape where you’re making recommendations now? [39:54] TC The biggest takeaways still are that you need metrics to understand where the opportunities are and also where things are going well. So we recommend that all companies do look at their data. It’s cool to see so many people trying out different things. I think it will take some amount of time before we learn which things really work in a long term sustainable way, but definitely excited to see lots of people experimenting with D&I now. SWB So Project Include, that was founded in 2016, right? You’ve got a couple of years of kind of starting to shape the organization and provide more than just your manifesto, but also the actual community and practices and working with these companies. So I’m excited to see what else comes out of that. TC Yeah, one thing we’ve been thinking a lot more about is how to achieve leverage impact across the industry and some of that is going to be working with other organizations. Earlier this year, a couple of us launched this project called Moving Forward to get venture capital firms to first of all, have anti-harassment policies and then publish them, make them available to founders and then also have points of contact as accountability. And so this came out of some of the #metoo harassment stuff that came out last year, where what we saw was that in that relationship between founders who were trying to raise money and venture capitalists that control this money, there is this gray zone of interaction where they’re not necessarily in a professional relationship yet. As in cases where there is a power imbalance, sometimes there are abuses of that power. So our idea was to push venture capital firms to be very explicit about what’s acceptable behavior between people that work at the firm and potential founders that they might want to be investing in or other people in the community. And so we launched Moving Forward, now have over one hundred firms that have their anti-harassment policies out there and the points of contact. This is something where I worked on that separate to Project Include, but we ended up realizing that there was a good opportunity for collaboration between Project Include and Moving Forward so I could serve as a little bit of that bridge. SWB That’s so cool, it’s sounds like you just have your hands into so many different parts of this problem and like trying to sort of untie the knot from lots of different angles, which I really love. TC Yeah, I mean there’s a lot to be done here—so lots of opportunity. KL That is so true. I feel like we’ve been talking a lot about your work as a diversity advocate and I just want to go back to you for a minute, because I saw you write a while ago that you don’t want to just work on diversity issues because you love to code and you like your life a lot more with that in it. How do you balance those things and stay excited about both? TC I still identify as a software engineer and someone that likes to build products and build things. Sometimes that means building teams and companies, but the diversity and inclusion piece will, I think, always be a part of my life and that conversation is still just so prominent in the industry, it’s hard to not take part of it. So that always be a part of what I do, but in my more full time capacity, I do like to be thinking just about technology, how powerful it is and how it can be used to hopefully impact the world for better. KL I’m also curious—you know—if the move from San Francisco to New York has had any impact? TC When so many things change all at once, it’s hard to say. I do think being in New York has helped to broaden my perspectives quite a bit. I’m not surrounded by tech people all the time and I like being around people who don’t think about the same things I do all the time and just to be surrounded by this greater diversity of people. SWB We talk a lot about place on the show because I feel like so many conversations in design or tech or publishing or whatever can be so limited to such narrow places, so I’m always interested in—you know—kinds of perspectives that people can bring in. So we are just about out of time and before we go, I wanted to say: Tracy, I have been personally inspired by your work for a long time and I know I’m not the only one. So I want to thank you for being on the show and ask you, is there anywhere that our listeners can better keep up with everything that you’re up to? TC The best place to keep up with me is Twitter, so I’m @triketora on Twitter. It’s t-r-i-k-e-t-o-r-a. I tweet a lot, so I also will not be offended if you follow and then unfollow because there’s too much going on, but that’s the best place to keep up with me. SWB Well I know that a lot of our listeners will definitely want to hear everything you have to say, even if you tweet all day. Thank you so much for being on the show. TC Ahh, thank you for having me! [music fades in, plays alone for five seconds, fades out] Career CHAT KL Hey y’all, time to talk careers with our friends at Shopify. This week we’ve got a tip on what to look for in a company from Shannon Gallagher, a product manager on the merchant analytics team. SG: Being a lifelong learner is super important to me. I need to constantly grow and push my boundaries. The nice thing is, that’s one of Shopify’s core values, too. When you make a positive impact here, you can move into new roles, new disciplines, and new spaces. That’s had a huge impact on my career. Two years ago, I was on the recruiting team. Now, I’m in product management… And I’m still expanding my knowledge and reaching for new goals every day. This kind of environment means I’ll never get bored—or feel like I’m stuck in one place. The point is, you’ll love work so much more if you’re with a company where the goal is growth! KL Thanks, Shannon! If you want to join a team where you can keep learning and make unexpected and wonderful moves—if you want—then you should check out Shopify. They’re growing globally, and they might just have the perfect role for you. See what’s new this week at shopify.com/careers. FYOTW JL Okay, so I’ve got a fuck yeah this week, ladies. KL Let’s hear it. JL Sutter and I are taking a vacation this week. SWB Fuck yeah! [Laughs] JL [Laughs] I know, I mean we could just stop there, mic drop. [All three laugh] JL But this vacation is to Wildwood, New Jersey—and for those unaware of the magic that is Wildwood—it’s a wonderful place at the Jersey Shore with boardwalk, food and funnel cake, and soft serve ice cream. And perhaps most importantly—it’s only a bit over an hour from Philadelphia. And here’s what we knew. We wanted some time to get away to ourselves, but we’re not really in the place where we wanted to plan something big or get on a flight. We just wanted some time with each other. That’s not because we don’t love our son, but two years ago we took a babymoon, which we gave ourselves a long weekend before a major change in our family. And we’re going to have that again soon, so we wanted to do something like that. But how do you get that time to yourselves when you have a toddler? So we were really thrown off and honestly I just—was like ‘that’s fine, we don’t really have to do it,’ like—not a big deal. But then this wild idea came to us. Why don’t we ask his parents if they’re available to watch Cooper for two nights? [45:48] KL What did they say? JL [Laughing] They said yes! KL Yaaay! JL And so it’s amazing what happens when you ask for help! KL That’s awesome. And also grandparents love to help in that way. JL It’s like—I don’t know why, but asking for what you need can be such a hard hurdle to overcome, but it can totally pay off awesomely, so I am saying fuck yeah to asking for help! KL That’s awesome. This actually resonates with me, too, because when I take time off at A Book Apart, I have to make a point of putting it on the calendar and asking folks to cover some stuff while I’m out so that I don’t have to worry about it or think about it. Because otherwise I would never actually really get time off. Like I have to actually set up that—you know—those boundaries and ask for help and I didn’t realize that until late in the game and I was like ‘oh, I actually need to raise my hand and do this so I can properly take some time off.’ So I love this. SWB I love this too because it’s actually a really good reminder for me. Because I think as both of you know—because you’ve called me on it before—I do not like to ask for help and I sort of take it almost as a point of pride to do it all myself. And that’s been good for me in some ways, but everybody needs help, myself included. And it’s one thing to ask for help, but it’s also another thing to actually accept the help and let go, right? Because part of what you’re saying, Katel, is that when you set that boundary where you’re like ‘okay, I’m taking a real vacation, can you please handle this for me’—you’re also saying ‘and I’m not going to check in so I need to be confident that it’s handled.’ KL [Laughing] Yeah. SWB Right? And I think that’s something that’s hard for me—just to fully let go and to just say ‘nope, this is handled and I’m not going to get all anxious about this, I’m just going to accept that it’s handled.’ And I realize it’s not a lack of trust—it’s like I trust them—but it’s almost like my brain doesn’t trust me enough to fully let go, you know? [Laughter] KL Yeah. SWB I have to remind myself like no no no no no, you asked for help, now your job is to take the help and then walk away. JL Yeah and it’s—it is hard to do things like that, but I think it gets better with practice. I mean, I read a bunch last year—some manager books and they talk a lot about just delegating things, delegating tasks and how important that is. But what’s really important is when you delegate the tasks, to trust that they’re going to get done and then be okay with the fact that whoever does them will probably veer from the way you were going to do it. So, we left an agenda or notes of what Coop’s normal day is for the grandparents and not to be like ‘you have to do it this way,’ but just so they have a guide-ish like ‘here’s what we would do.’ But I understand if you’re not going to do it exactly the same way and you know what, that’s okay. I’m okay with that, thank you for the help. I’m going to be able to now focus on other things that are more important than making sure that you did this exactly the way I would have done it. KL Yeah, I think that is so true. I’m thinking about this and I feel like we need to come up with an acronym for all the parts so… accept help, let go, enjoy—ALE! [Laughter] SWB That’s also what I would like to have on my next vacation. KL Yeah, exactly. [laughs] Well, fuck yeah to asking for help and to getting it, and we hope you enjoy. SWB Eat some funnel cake for me. JL Okay. [Laughing] You got it! SWB Well, that is it for this week’s episode of No, You Go—the show about being ambitious and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and is produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thank you so much to Tracy Chou for being on the show today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, thank you so much, you’re the best. And you could be even more the best if you would take a moment to leave us a rating or review on your podcast listening app of choice and let your friends know about No, You Go because we’d love to have them here too. We’ll be back again next week! [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, fades out to end]

Welcome to Season 3: Finding a Reason to Say “F*** Yeah!”

oregon voices pollinators pollination pollinator week nicole sanchez

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 2, 2018 2:34

Welcome to Season 3 of No, You Go—a weekly show about ambition, friendship, feminism…and always finding something to say fuck yeah about. Starting August 14, we’ll be back and better than ever, talking to some of our favorite activists, authors, entrepreneurs, and more about how they got where they are, what they learned in the process, and how they keep their heads up in tough times. Here’s just a taste of what’s in store. Transcript Sara Wachter-Boettcher: If we got Slim Jim as a sponsor, I would say yes. I’m sorry, I would take that money” [Musical transition] SWB Hey everyone, we are back from sipping cool drinks by the pool, and we are so hyped to tell you about Season 3 of No, You Go—a weekly show about ambition, friendship, feminism…and always finding something to say fuck yeah about. JL We didn’t sign Slim Jim as a sponsor, but we did scheme up tons of ways to make NYG better than ever. Starting August 14, we’ll be talking to some of our favorite activists, authors, entrepreneurs, and more about how they got where they are, what they learned in the process, and how they keep their heads up in tough times. I’m Jenn Lukas, and hey, I’m pregnant again! I’m looking forward to talking about juggling my career, toddler, and upcoming new baby. I can’t wait to explore how major life changes affect—or don’t affect—our career ambitions…and to see if I ever get sick of ice cream. I’m really living the pregnant-lady stereotype over here! Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDu, and I look like I have my shit together most of the time. (Secret: I don’t, and it’s ok!) And you know what? That inspires me to keep talking about what it takes to live my best, healthiest life at work and at home. I hope our stories help—and I hope you’ll join us. SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and I am so ready to keep having conversations that make me think and feel—about issues like gender, race, class, mental health, and more. And I’m excited to share those conversations with you, so we can all get better at talking about tough stuff—together. Plus, we’re gonna keep on interviewing the coolest women and nonbinary people we can find. From guests who make us feel like burning shit down… Nicole Sanchez clip It’s a Benetton ad. You know? If you can make your website of your company feature a black employee, you’re good. Like that’s where we are now. That’s the bar. JL To guests who make us pump our fists with joy… Saron Yitbarek clip And she looked at me and she said, “I don’t believe in stepping stones.” And it just gave me chills. And I was like, “Ahhhh! I too do not believe in stepping stones.” It was amazing. SWB And guests who get super real. Jolie Kerr clip It was subversive to have a Seven Sisters-educated woman writing about cum stains. And that’s who I am. KL Oh my god. I still can’t get over that one. And we’re only just getting started! New episodes of No, You Go start August 14th, and you won’t want to miss a single one. Because everyone deserves a group of badass women in their corner. Especially you. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. JL And if you like NYG, don’t miss I Love That, our biweekly newsletter! Head to noyougoshow.com/ILoveThat to sign up. [Musical outro]

head musical slim jims nyg benetton seven sisters starting august f yeah saron yitbarek sara wachter boettcher nicole sanchez jolie kerr

58 Pollinators and their People: The voices of Oregon Pollinator Week 2018

PolliNation

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 2, 2018 41:58

Listen in to this special episode to learn how young students can learn about pollinator science and health, and the way education is changing young minds. “It's so cool to see so many kids out here checking out pollinators, and how sophisticated they are and how they really do know a lot about these insects already.” - Nicole Sanchez. Learn more about this episode of PolliNation at http://bit.ly/PN-OPW-2018

The System is Rigged with Nicole Sanchez

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 26, 2018 58:01

And that’s a wrap on Season 2! What better way to head into a summer break than with Nicole Sanchez, one of the smartest, sharpest, most trusted voices on building diverse and inclusive workplaces? We talk with the founder of Vaya Consulting and lecturer at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business about what has and hasn’t changed in tech culture, how companies try to shortcut diversity efforts, and why well-intentioned white people often screw up. > We’re taking on 500 years of colonial America when we talk about race. And nobody can be expected to do that in a training… We’ve hit this mainstream complacency with, “Great. You hit 4% black people in your company. Wonderful. Oh. You have 6% Latinx. Wow! You’re really doing well.” Like that’s kind of where the conversation is stuck. It’s a Benetton ad. > —Nicole Sanchez, founder of Vaya Consulting We’re taking a few weeks off, but don’t worry: Nicole’s going to leave you fired up all summer. And look for new episodes of NYG in August! Links on links on links: Nicole’s company, Vaya Consulting (and their new management training courses) “Diversity in tech and what we’ve already lost,” Nicole’s moving essay about her father and STEM Ijeoma Oluo’s stellar read, So You Want to Talk About Race Starbucks, anti-blackness, and why unconscious bias training isn’t enough Also in this episode We, like, talk about our word choice on the show and off—from “I think” to “I don’t know”—and debate the benefits and drawbacks of changing how we speak. Just Not Sorry, an app that “warns you when you write emails using words which undermine your message” (we’re skeptical) “From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We ‘Policing’ Young Women’s Voices?” Turns out, men use filler words more than women Have a bitchin’ summer, everyone! Stay sweet and we’ll see you in August! Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Try it free, then use code NOYOUGO to get 50% off your first paid month. Transcript Jenn Lukas [Ad spot] Today’s episode is supported by Shopify. Shopify makes great software that helps anyone with a great idea build a successful business—and they’re growing. Join the more than 3,000 diverse, passionate problem-solvers around the world who already call Shopify their professional home. Visit shopify.com/careers for all the info, including office locations, open positions, and more about what makes them so great [music fades in, plays for ten seconds, fades out]. Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and welcome to our Season 2 Finale! JL Woo! SWB We can’t believe we’re already at 20 episodes, plus a bonus-ode, and five editions of our biweekly newsletter. P.S. Are you getting our newsletter yet? It’s called I Love That, and you will love it. Sign up at noyougoshow.com/ilovethat, because Edition 6 is going to come out this Friday, June 29th. To round off the season we will be digging deep into the world of diversity and inclusion with none other than Nicole Sanchez, founder of Vaya Consulting and one of the smartest, loudest, most trusted voices in workplace inclusion. But before we do, let’s talk about something that I think we’ve all noticed this season and that is the way we speak. Like… you know… word choice? KL So my friend Allison Crimmins, who we had on the show in Season 1, wrote to me and said that she noticed that we say “I think” a lot. She noticed in one episode that we said it, like… a lot [chuckles]. Which made her think about how many times she writes it in emails and speaks it out loud when she’s not really even meaning to, along with other words or phrases like “I just,” “perhaps,” “maybe,” and starting sentences with “I’m sorry.” Ugh! I do that too. I do it all the time. And there was a period of time where I looked at my emails and would scrub them out. I would scrub them out of the beginning of emails and was like, “What am I doing?” So basically all of those things that we say, qualifying statements that make us sound like we’re basically apologizing for [chuckles], you know, existing or, you know, taking up space. I came across this article and this app called Just Not Sorry that you can install and it will alert you to when you use “I’m sorry,” “I think,” “I just,” “maybe,” and let you do that more easily when you send emails. So I thought that was really interesting. JL Part of me when I hear things like this, or I hear other people critique people’s language, I sort of want to be like, “You know what? Like, who cares? Eff those people, because that’s not really what like the main meat of a conversation is,” and part of it really frustrates me. And then part of me thinks realistically in life there’s a lot of things that people do that really frustrate me and they’re going to judge me for it. So I have two options: either, like, eff it and don’t, or think about how that affects my life and career and consider whether or not I want to make a change. [3:10] SWB I think in this whole conversation it’s really useful to kind of parse out, when are these kinds of softening words being used in ways that are helpful and beneficial to conversation and that show that you are listening and sort of in a conversational moment with somebody, you’re not just like talking at them, and when are we using this kind of language to kind of hedge what we actually think, or to even obscure what we actually think, or to, you know, make it easier for people to walk all over us? And I guess something I think a lot about is how often is that sort of like your default state—“sorry for existing” and “sorry for saying anything”—versus when is an “I’m sorry” an appropriate kind of interjection in a conversation? And so I guess I think a lot of that gets flattened in this conversation, right? Because so much of the advice that you read out there, you can find like—if you Google this, you can find a hundred articles about this in about a minute that’ll just be like, “Just remove ‘justs’ from your emails, get rid of every single time you say ‘maybe’ or ‘I think’,” and the reality is that, what if the problem isn’t that women say those things too often? What if the problem is that men aren’t socialized to say those things enough? And I think that that is part of the problem, too. JL Yeah I know we’ve talked about this in the past before is like hey, you know, really being careful about, you know, as an engineer who gives feedback to people, how we give that feedback. And me saying something like, “I think you could rework this by adding an attribute here,” is better than, “Add an attribute here.” It just like—especially because you’re communicating online and not face-to-face with someone that you’re not necessarily knowing the inflection that I have. So, “I think we should go get ice cream,” versus, “We should get ice cream!” SWB Wait! Hold on. Hold on. We should get ice cream. KL I mean that should be a statement always [laughs]. A lot of times when I start speaking with someone, especially if I’m trying to have a conversation that’s a little bit more difficult, I find myself softening things and I think, you know, in that case that’s really valuable and I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to lose touch of that. But I do—I think it is good to just keep an eye out on like instances where I could be a little bit more assertive or, like I said, concise and clear. JL Yeah for me when I communicate, especially at work, I want people to know that I’m confident in the things that I’m recommending. KL Right. JL And I think a lot of this is making sure that you do sound more confident. SWB My sense is that focusing on clarity and making sure that we are hitting specific points in the way we want to and feeling confident about the things we are saying, that’s really valuable, right? Like, we are sending this information out to the world and we want as many people as possible to hear it and have it resonate with them, and I think that when we are focused and when we can cut out sort of too much extraneous stuff, that’s really helpful. On the other hand, people use filler words. That’s a human thing to do. The kinds of—_kind of, sort of, um, uh, you know_. Everybody has different filler words that they rely on, but the reality is that people use filler words. And in fact they’re have been a lot of studies that men use them just as much as women, but women tend to be criticized for them. And a huge piece of this is just the way that we end up policing women’s language as being somehow not up to par with men’s language when the reality is, it tends to be a little bit different and it also just tends to be more, like, hyper-watched, right? Like you feel like people are paying so much more attention to it. I mean that’s one of the reasons I know women radio hosts get so much mail about their voice. I am just waiting for us to get some angry email about vocal fry because I feel like that’s a rite of passage [Katel laughs]. I’m not actually waiting for that email. Please don’t send it. [7:17] KL Yeah we’re really not trying to will that into the universe. But at the end of the day I do think that I would rather sound more human than just completely cold and assertive and confident. And I know that that might be the ideal in a lot of people’s minds, but, I don’t know… I’m going to strive for not apologizing when I know what I’m saying, but also making sure I make my point as clearly as possible. JL I definitely find that I try to be more careful with this in written communication. And I try not to hyper-focus on editing myself when I’m speaking. I’ve done, as a public speaker, you know, I’ve watched recordings of myself, which is painful, but you do learn a lot. But that doesn’t mean I’ve watched every recording of myself. And it doesn’t mean that I do it at a regular basis. You know every once in awhile I go, “Oh. Maybe that’s something I want to think about,” but I definitely don’t harp on it, because again that balance of, like, where I feel more comfortable. Now I know I just said ‘like’ in that last sentence, but you know what? I’m ok. SWB So I’m the person who listens to all the raw recordings and goes through— KL [Laughs] God bless you. SWB—everything that we produce and then provides notes to our producer about, you know, where I think the good bits are and what we can probably cut out. And I will say that one of the things that I’ve really noticed is that we talk like people actually talk. We talk like friends talk over drinks. That is part of the show. Like that is part of the point. And removing that is, I think, not the goal. At least not my goal. However, I think that there are also things that I find all of us end up over-relying on, and I think actually in terms of this conversation something that I wish we all said less of… it’s not “like”—I could give a fuck about “like”—it’s “I don’t know.” And I think that one’s really easy when we don’t want to assume that the other two of us agree with us and so we’ll make a point and then we’ll kind of say, “I don’t know,” as if we’re not certain that we actually believe the thing that we just said. That’s one that I want to be more cautious of. But some of this other stuff, I just look at it as like when people have conversations, they speak naturally. Natural language has filler words, filler words are fine, and we edit out and clean out some of the stuff that doesn’t go anywhere, but we’re not going to edit out every example of that, because that would make it feel stilted and weird, and it wouldn’t give it that sense of, like, you’re sitting around the table with us having snacks. [9:50] KL And I just want to say that, you know, I want to thank Allison for bringing this up because it is clearly so complex, and I’m sure that we will talk about this a little bit more. So, I don’t know, I’m glad that it came up [laughs]. God fucking damn it! I said “I don’t know.” [Music fades in, plays for three seconds, fades out]. Sponsors KL Hey, everyone, taking a quick break to talk about some of our favorite people, our sponsors. And not just because they support the show but because we actually use their services like WordPress, the people behind almost one in three websites—including ours. If you need a website that’s reliable, looks good, and is super-easy to customize to your needs, then you need to check out WordPress. They’ve got it all: awesome designs, custom domain names, tons of integrations with other services you use, and maybe best of all, incredible customer support 24/7. We know because we’ve used it. And all this starts at just $4 a month. Four bucks! So start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off your brand-new website. SWB [Ad spot] We’d also like to thank Harvest for their support once again. Harvest helps teams keep track of the time they spend working on different projects and clients, and it’s one of my favorite tools. Use their simple software to assign tasks, set deadlines, manage projections, and so much more. You can even use it to run business reports and find out how healthy your projects really are. Personally I love using Harvest for invoicing. In fact I just looked today, and I have sent 355 invoices using their system so far. JL 355?!? SWB That’s totally real. JL That’s a lot of invoices. SWB If you are a freelancer, consultant like me, or an agency, you should check out Harvest. Visit getharvest.com to try it for free and get 15 percent off your first paid month with the code noyougo. That’s getharvest.com, offer code noyougo [music fades in, plays alone for three seconds, fades out]. [11:45] Interview: Nicole Sanchez SWB Today’s guest is someone I have personally admired for a long time now, and that is Nicole Sanchez. She is the founder of Vaya Consulting, a firm that’s pioneering solutions to tech’s culture problems. Problems like lack of diversity, pay inequity, and biased hiring practices. She also earned an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and now teaches a workplace diversity course there. Nicole, I have about a hundred things I want to talk with you about [laughter] and thank you so much for being on the show today! Nicole Sanchez Oh no, thank you. I am such a fan of your book. I love it so much. I have given to many people, Technically Wrong is just such a good read. So thank you for that. SWB Uh, thank you! But we did not bring you on here to plug my book— NS [Laughs] Ok. SWB Because we gotta talk about what you are up to. There’s so much here. So first off: can you tell our listeners a little bit more about Vaya, like what your work looks like, and sort of what made you found this company? NS Sure. So I’ve been working on workplace diversity and inclusion for 24 years, and my first job doing it in tech was actually in 1999. And what I started learning there and continued to learn is that people are very interesting in groups, and they do interesting things, but they don’t generally do new things. They keep doing the same things over and over, which means some of the same ways of success, but also some of the same mistakes. And where it gets really interesting to me and why I ultimately started my firm is that when we look at groups behave and we purposefully try to make them diverse—in a lot of ways, but specifically in terms of race and ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic background—really fascinating things happen. And it’s not… my work isn’t so much about rectifying the past, even though that is definitely some of what my inspiration and what my motivation. It is more about, we build better things in diverse teams that are working well. We as humans, we as people in the United States, we in tech, when we have a diverse group of people who are behaving inside an inclusive structure— meaning everybody has a voice, everybody has a shot, everybody has an equitable stake in what’s going on in the outcome—the kinds of things that are produced are unparalleled, when you compare them to some of the more traditional ways, especially the way tech has been built by more homogenous groups of people who share the same class background or the same education. People mostly have their heads wrapped around, “Ok diversity is good and we need more of it,” but they don’t know how to get it and they certainly often don’t know what to do with it once they have it. So we’ve really rolled up our sleeves and get into the tactical work of revamping a hiring system, for example, or doing executive coaching for the executive who just isn’t fluent in this conversation yet but really needs to be. And so in any of our dozen clients, there are different points in their trajectory, but always pointed towards building a culture of inclusion with a diverse group of people running and working inside it. [14:47] SWB And so I know that this issue is near and dear to you because of your own experience in the world, but you also wrote before that this was something that was important because of your father’s story. And you wrote this really moving article about it and I would love to talk a little bit about that and how that story has driven or affected, you know, the work that you do now. NS Ah thanks. We just passed the third anniversary of my father’s passing. I wrote it for him, really, about six months after he passed and it’s called “Diversity and Tech and What We’ve Already Lost.” And my dad grew up the youngest of 11 kids in East LA, and then later in Montebello, for anybody who is from Southern California and for whom that matters, and he met my mother at Montebello High. And my dad was a fantastic student, specifically in math and science, and his dream was to go to UC Berkeley. And his parents couldn’t afford it, so he had to figure out first of all how to get in, which he did. And then how to get himself up to Berkeley, which is where I live now, and how to pay for school, and where to live, and—and everything. This was 1962. The fall of 1962. There was no affirmative action. Very little financial aid to be had. And so he was really scraping it together. And over the course of his first two years he really met head-on the ugly twins: poverty and racism! Poverty and racism are an evil pair, and he really just clearly fell victim to both of those things, and ended up having to drop out, go back down to Los Angeles, he and my mom—they ended up getting married, they lived together in [chuckling] relative happiness for over 50 years, they have four children, all of us girls, and he didn’t get to finish at UC Berkeley. He didn’t get to finish his degree, which was absolutely his dream. And when I go back and think about his story, and now that so much of the history is online and searchable, I look at who some of his classmates were in his math classes and in very early computer classes. Because UC Berkeley was one of the only—well, was one of the first universities to make computers accessible to students—and he was learning how to program them and playing on them. And his classmates were people who went on to be pioneers in tech. And my dad ended up spending 35 years working at a fast food restaurant, which he ultimately owned. My dad did get a degree later on at Cal State East Bay, which was great, but his health was failing at that point and he didn’t ever get to actually be the inventor, teacher, computer scientist, mathematician that we knew he always wanted to be. And it had nothing to do with his potential, had nothing to do with how hard he worked—because he worked harder than anybody I’ve ever known. It had everything to do with being born in a certain package compared to a different one. And that is how we lose talent in tech. It isn’t always as obvious as the racism my dad faced, but there are so many barriers to people like him today with accessing the field of technology and certainly being entrepreneurs or having ownership stakes in valuable companies, or inventing really cool things that are going to go to Mars. There are so many barriers being born the youngest of 11 in East LA and actually achieving that dream. And we, you know, we’ve done a decent job at removing some of those barriers, but they’re not all gone, and I worry daily about the talent that we’ve lost in our sector as a result. [18:06] SWB That story is so moving and, I mean, first off: it’s just such a moving tribute to your dad. And we’ll link to it in the show notes, of course, so everybody can read it. And the other thing that really struck me about it is that it was such a perfect encapsulation of the problems that we face when we start trying to talk about things like meritocracy or we talk about the way that the tech industry almost acts like there is no past. Like that everything is new, and so everything is a fresh start all the time, and I think it kind of creates this culture where we’re not thinking about the way that people are being shut out before they can have any chance to make anything at all. NS Yeah. That’s right. And our system here in Silicon Valley and in tech overall, although I think it’s probably most present here in the Bay Area, is that somehow on the one hand, we want to talk about how fair and meritocratic everything is, and if you just work hard and grind, if you hustle and do all the things, then you will achieve success. And then on the other hand, the same system is creating the barriers to entry, creating the barriers to resource access, creating the barriers that continue to allow the “winners,” quote/unquote, the “winners” to keep “winning” and those of us who are trying to come in, you can’t get a foothold. The system is so really rigged against that, you know, you just think about somebody who has a great idea that could be the next billion-dollar company, or $10 billion company, and if you come in from a background where you don’t have any financial security of your own, you don’t have the network to talk to the people who can help you get the capital, you don’t know what the right events to be at are, you are—you stick out like a sore thumb for whatever reason, whatever the package you’re in causes you to stick out as not according to the pattern of the rest of Silicon Valley. It is very difficult literally, like logistically, as well as psychologically, to make those breakthroughs. And I don’t see many people who have access to the resources that maybe, you know, VCs do or CEOs of companies, I don’t see them going out of their way to very effectively remove those barriers to new talent. And it is intellectually dishonest when we say, “We want the best,” but we’re also going to simultaneously create barriers to some of the best getting inside the system. SWB Yes! All of this talk about, “We want to get the best,” I’m like, “Y’all don’t even know what the best means!” [Nicole laughs] Like, “How would you even know what that is if all you’ve ever seen is this one very narrow slice? How do you even know you have the best? Like you actually don’t.” NS [Chuckles] Well I had one client, just to give you an example of that, who had hired me to identify bias in their hiring system. They brought my consulting firm in and I was sitting in a candidate review process where they were going over their docket of candidates for jobs, technical and non-technical. And my job was to raise my hand and say, “Hey, I think bias has crept up into the system.” And the first candidate that I witnessed be evaluated by this group, the candidate wasn’t there, they had already gone through the whole system. The candidate docket, somebody puts it down on the table and says, “Well, this guy went to Harvard and worked at Facebook, so obviously we’re hiring him.” And so I hadn’t been sitting down but for 30 seconds [chuckling] and raised my hand and say, “If that’s what you think the best is, why did you spend tens of thousands of dollars to interview him? When you could’ve found that out from LinkedIn, if you looked—or his resume?” You say, “Yup. Harvard: check. Facebook: check. Great: you’re hired.” If that’s ultimately what you’re using to make your decision then don’t—don’t waste your time meeting the person. Just go look for people who worked at Facebook and went to Harvard. And we see this over and over again. This lazy shortcut for validation. People, for example, wanting to use GitHub commit graphs as an indication of how strong of an engineer you are. That doesn’t—that’s not how that works, because that’s a subset of the talent you want to be pulling from. So it is very lazy to say, “Ok, anybody who’s in open source, anybody who has the time to dabble in these public projects, great: you have a leg up.” You’ve now advantaged the already advantaged in that hiring process. And we just see this happen over and over, and it’s not as simple as somebody sitting there saying, “I don’t think women are smart enough to work at my company.” Like those are easy. Those are easy to spot and extract. It is much harder to get into the systems that have petrified around those beliefs. [22:43] SWB So this completely brings us to the next thing I wanted to talk about which is like, ok, you have been doing this work for more than a couple of decades. Two full decades in the tech industry! [Nicole laughing] And so I saw that you recently gave this talk, a keynote that was called “Diversity and Inclusion Hit the Mainstream, Now What?” And I think that that’s—that’s kind of my question. Well, so now what? Like we—we’re talking about this stuff. Companies are increasingly willing to hire people like you to help them fix it. But where have we started making progress? And where are we still stuck? And how do we move beyond lip service in this conversation? NS I think we understand diversity on some level, even though we can’t all agree on it, what it really means when you get to the granular look at it. We know it means bringing lots of different kinds of people together and that something good’s supposed to happen, but along the way one of the stops we’ve taken in this conversation is enumerating transgressions, which is very important because people deserve to be heard when they’ve been wronged. And we have invested a lot in individual stories of individual people who have suffered inside a system. And, like I said, that’s really important, and it’s not to invalidate their experience, but we haven’t done a good job of indicting the system that allowed that to happen, because you cannot pick out every bad actor one by one, first of all. And second of all, the system is much more strained than any individual. I meet with clients all the time and I’m just going to—I’m just going to tell it [chuckles] kind of like it is, which is what I said in my talk. I meet a lot of well-meaning white people in particular. I meet a lot of white women specifically who say, “I can’t figure out why in my HR system I still can’t convince a black woman to come work here.” Right? And it’s just tons of good intentions that still don’t add up to progress, and so we’re stalled on this. We say, “I’m not—” You know, people say, “I’m not racist. Ok. I’m not racist. I’m not sexist. I’m not homophobic.” Great. Why are we still seeing the yield that we’re seeing? And the answer is that we’re not digging into understanding the systems. One of the systems that has yet to be indicted is, for example, the system of how equity is distributed in a company in Silicon Valley. That in my opinion and from my experience has a much greater potential for impact on the people we want to benefit from our diversity and inclusion initiatives the most, and to move the needle most significantly. If we can actually indict the system of how VCs in particular set up equity distribution, we’re going to make a much bigger impact than, “Let’s hear another story about another person who transgressed or had something bad happen to them.” Again, people deserve to tell their stories, but it is not the thing that’s going to get us to the next level as a sector. And so that’s where my talk was really about like, “Ok. We get it. It’s bad. It hurts. So then what? Let’s talk about equity distribution, let’s talk about executive compensation, let’s talk about your hiring practices, let’s talk about recruitment practices, let’s talk about promotion and evaluation inside the company,” the real nitty gritty that actually makes up the results that you’re seeking to impact. People think, “Well, yay, we’re talking about it, and therefore it must be better.” And that’s not true. It’s actually driven some conversations further underground. It’s stalled other efforts. And I think people would find it surprising to know that I don’t love the way that we report our data, our diversity data as a sector right now. I don’t. I think it actually paused some efforts and slowed them down in ways that where I would’ve wanted to have seen much more traction by now. [26:44] SWB Can you tell me more about what you mean by that? So, what don’t you love about the way that diversity is being reported? And for those who aren’t familiar with it, like can you just describe a little bit about how you see it being reported, and maybe what you’d like to see different? NS Sure! So it’s still voluntary. Companies are not compelled by anything other than social pressure to release their diversity data. And what companies who do it generally do is they say, “Here’s how many men, here’s how many woman,” and there isn’t a lot of reporting off of the binary. “Here are the men in our company, here are the women in our women in our company; here’s technical versus non-technical,” and we know that inside a company that’s very [sighs] that’s very company specific. You know you may be inside one company where the support team is highly technical and another one where they’re not. So it’s very difficult to know what we’re actually measuring there. And then they say, you know, “Leadership/non-leadership,” and then they say, “Here’s race and ethnicity.” And that’s basically it. And so what companies have done is they’ve been able put their best foot forward because it’s simply a snapshot. It’s a snapshot that counts heads. How many people are here today on this day that we recorded? And it doesn’t tell you any story. So every company now knows that as long as you’re on a cadence where you feel good about your hiring, and let’s say you start cohorts in September, and you particularly start new hires in September, and you’ve made great efforts to diversify your new hires. If you report your data in September, your snapshot looks really good. But we’re not reporting six months later where we learn people of color start to fall out of the system and start to go, “You know what? Turns out this culture isn’t actually that welcoming for people like me.” And so within the first six to 12 months you may lose all those people you reported in September. But you got another, you know, amount of time to make up for it again, by the time you have to report again. So it is in some ways very easy to mislead people into thinking, “This is who’s always working at our company.” [28:44] NS [Continued] One example that a client gave me was saying that, “We report every June, and in July of last year we lost 30 women. Out of a company of 500, we lost 30 women within two months because of something that happened. But we know we have 10 months to hire 30 women back and show no blip at all in our reporting,” which actually tells a story of what’s going on inside the company. If that makes sense. And so that to me is where it set us back. It didn’t help people on the culture part, it got the diversity part but it didn’t get the inclusion part or the equity part or the belonging part. SWB Yeah, that’s so telling, too. It’s managing to the metric, right. So now there’s a scorecard out there and you’re like me in a class I didn’t like in high school being like, “Ok. What’s the minimum I can do and still get an A because this is not going to touch my GPA?” Right? Like that’s— NS That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. And also because we’re so opaque as an industry. You can lose 30 women and then deceptively hire 30 new women without them knowing potentially that this is a terrible place for women to work. And so you haven’t fixed anything but—but your public face looks great. SWB So—and this brings me back to something that I know was tweeted from that talk, which was that the money shows us where people’s priorities really are. And so, what would it look like for a company to really invest in the kind of shift that you’re talking about? NS So yeah the adage that I like using is, “Don’t tell me what your priorities are, show me your budget and I’ll tell you your priorities.” And priorities in Silicon Valley in particular and in tech overall—and I guess in business overall, I mean let’s just be honest—whose upside looks like what is going to tell you what is actually valued. So if you can say—and the reason I think that it’s—that it’s remained a secret is that people know that the disparity is actually shameful. There is no way that you can say, “Oh yes that single engineer who did so much for our work once we went public made $200,000 on our big exit. I, however, as CEO, who was really a pain in the ass to deal with, just walked away with a billion.” Like that’s the scale that we’re actually talking about. And then that doesn’t even bring it into account the custodial staff, the food service staff, the security staff, you know, working at your front door. Those people have been erased from the equation. And so until Silicon Valley is really ready to—until companies say, “All right, we’re going to tell you our percentages of distribution and we can actually report it publically and we want everybody to know because we stand by our method.” Until a company can do that, including their board and investors: “Here’s who owns what part of the company.” And it’s generally that about ten percent own 90 percent of the company and then vice versa. Right? [31:35] SWB Mm hmm. NS And so once people start to get wise to that and demand that as a metric of reporting, I think we will start to see some stuff happening. I have yet to meet a company that has said, “We’re very transparent with this. I know what I own and I know what our CEO owns and I’m ok with it.” That just doesn’t happen, and until we hit that level of transparency with our resources, I think there’s a lot of shell games that can be played with diversity and inclusion. But follow the money, like Robert Reich always says, former labor secretary, “Follow the money. Follow the money. Follow the money, it’ll give you all your answers.” The same goes for tech. So I—I unfortunately get asked quite often, “Tell me a company that has got this figured out.” And the answer is there isn’t one. And I don’t mean that to be really depressing, because I think there are companies that actually are moving forward and trending well but no, there isn’t a company that has modelled this in the way that it needs to—that it needs to actually look in order for this to be successful in the next generation. SWB Yeah, you know, so much of this reminds me of just like how easy it is anytime there’s change to be made, anytime there’s like big organizational shift to be made, to want to go to those shortcuts and to go like, “Ok. How do we get the benefits or whatever this thing is but without actually doing the painful part of having to [Nicole chuckles] operate differently? And commit to operating differently?” Like, you know, there’s no—there’s no shortcut to this and then the reality is that this is having a dramatic effect on, you know, the most marginalized groups. NS That’s right, and I also think that some people have figured out that you can make money doing this. I mean I definitely am making a living working on diversity and inclusion and I stand by my methods and, you know, I’ve been at this for a very long time. We are seeing the market start to be flooded with people who offer advice, who offer consulting services, and we know, for example, there’s no race lens on what they do. Or they’re not pushing on—on the question of resources and equity. The rise of mediocre D&I advice [chuckles] that actually isn’t going to move the needle, but placates lots of people. And they go, “Well, see that wasn’t so scary, that wasn’t so hard.” Like, this work is hard, and we’re taking on 500 years of colonial America when we talk about race. And nobody can be expected to do that in a training. And you can’t—you literally, scientifically cannot undo unconscious bias with a training. And we’re still sort of messing around on the edges going, “Gosh. That was fascinating. Ok. Going back to my job, which is now operating same way it did yesterday.” If that’s how we’re going to do it and that’s what’s being sold, and that’s what people buy, I’m very nervous that we’re going to just hit this—this is the second part of the talk I gave—we’ve hit this mainstream complacency with, “Great. You hit four percent black people in your company. Wonderful. Oh. You have six percent Latinx. Wow! You’re really doing well.” Like that’s kind of where the conversation is stuck. It’s a Benetton ad. You know? A Benetton ad [Sara laughs] if you can—if you can make your website of your company feature a black employee, you’re good. Like that’s where we are now [chuckles]. That’s the bar. “Don’t—don’t look too hard at our board of directors [chuckles] because yeah. But we’ve got our Latina. We’ve got our black man. We’ve got our, you know, gender-ambiguous person. And we’ve got like your standard white guy representing our company.” And you know that’s not representative of their company, but they were smart enough to say, “Ok this is a marketing effort. Let’s show different people.” Great. [35:19] SWB So I’d love to ask about something that I think this really kind of connects to, which is that whole unconscious bias training thing you mentioned. So just recently we had, back I guess in May, Starbucks did its company-wide unconscious bias training day. And I was really interested in something you wrote about that, where you talked about the problems with unconscious bias training, as well as the problems with sort of like, positioning what happened at Starbucks—which if anybody doesn’t remember, is a Starbucks here in Philadelphia. Two young black men came in, sat down, didn’t order anything, they were waiting for somebody to show up who they were having a meeting with, and the police ended up being called on them. And so in the uproar over this, Starbucks decided it would do unconscious bias training for all employees. So one of the things you mentioned was also that this is not just like a quote/unquote “diversity” issue, this is about anti-blackness and anti-black behaviors, and that it was important to talk about that. So I’d love to kind of dig into that. Like, why it’s important specifically to name what’s going on, and what the limitations are of doing something like unconscious bias training, which I think a lot of people think of as generally good. NS Ooh! So, I’ll start with the unconscious bias piece. Certainly when I’m teaching my class at Haas, I talk about unconscious bias. It is a fascinating and very real phenomenon that most people don’t know is going on, and it basically runs in the background of your mind. We’ve all been primed by images and messages over the course of our life about good, bad, pretty, ugly, you know, worthy, unworthy, safe, dangerous. And whether we like it or not, and we can’t control it, those things get triggered, especially under pressure. And we do and say stupid things and we treat people differently according to how these biases are running in our background. And so it has been really well documented around things like juries, right? Even if you factor—because anybody can do it to anybody. It’s—I as a Latina can do it to another Latina. It’s not—it’s not as conscious as, “I’m Latina and I know that stereotypes are not real, therefore I’m not going to treat another Latina that way.” That’s not how it actually works. But it runs so deep and far in the background of our minds that we can’t access it through introspection. You have to access it by putting it under pressure and then you see it come out. So it’s a fascinating concept. What I have seen happen in this conversation is that it allows people to forget about the nuances of different kinds of racism or sexism or any phobia. Pick your [chuckles] favorite phobia. It lets people off the hook and thinks that all things are treated equally. “Well I didn’t know that I had a bias against Asian people, therefore I’m—but now I’m working on it, therefore that must automatically extend to black people, too, because I’m learning how to not be racist.” And that’s just not how it works, because context is everything. And who is on the receiving end of your bias is really what’s critical here, because your bias will not be the same for a light-skinned Latina like myself as it might be for a dark-skinned black man like in the Starbucks in Philadelphia. And so what folks aren’t talking about is that anti-blackness as a subset of racism is its own thing. And racism is both enacted by individuals, we know, but racism on a much larger level is a system where people who are in the majority and in power control the system to the detriment of people who do not share that same racial—those same racial identifiers. [39:04] NS [Continued] In this case, what happened in that Starbucks was anti-black racism. There were presumably other people of color in the room and who had come in and out during the day and had, you know, not ordered anything, had used the bathroom, lots of different people of color. But it was two black men who were—who received the bias. And I don’t even think it’s unconscious bias. This was an overt bias of having the police called on them in a Starbucks. Talking about anti-blackness in America is not the same thing as talking about racism in America, and if I could get one thing across to people who are working on issues of identity and the isms and the phobias is that context is everything, and that once you’ve solved one type of -ism, you have not solved them all. And so this is a constant drumbeat for me, is like, when you say that there’s an event for women in tech—and I wrote a piece called “Which Women in Tech?”—if you just bill it as just “women in tech,” who you’re going to get is white, and maybe some Asian, women coming to that event. That is what “women” as the overall banner means. And so you don’t get into the nuance of, what are black women in tech facing specifically? And what a white woman who is much more enfranchised and towards the center of an equation, of a system, experiences in her sexism is very, very different than what a black woman living closer to the edges of a system experiences. You’ve got intersectionality. You’ve got anti-black racism, anti-blackness, that she has to navigate. And so women as an umbrella term for “Let’s decrease sexism in tech. So c’mon women, let’s all get together.” Women of color, for the most part, do not hear it as an inclusive term. And so when people say “racism” it’s much easier to say racism as the umbrella term than it is to say, “That was some anti-blackness. That was some violence enacted on black bodies by calling the police,” and that is a kind of—that is a way that racism and bias shows up. But implicit bias or unconscious bias as a solution to one of your baristas calling the cops—they’re not related to each other all that much. What would have been much more effective for Starbucks is to clarify the policies that the company has for when the police get called into a cafe. That would’ve been a much more direct response to what actually happened which is, “Everybody is allowed to sit here and not order anything. Everybody is allowed to use our bathroom. The police only get called if somebody believes they’re in imminent danger. If you call the police simply because you thought somebody looked suspicious, you will be penalized or fired.” Right? That’s a much stronger statement in direct response to what happened, but what Starbucks did is they’re like, “Let’s take on all of racism. Let’s take on all of unconscious bias.” And now you’re—you’re just on a different—it’s just a different conversation. And unconscious bias trainings themselves have actually shown to potentially be counterproductive because they enact—they start to trigger biases that people weren’t previously aware of and create very awkward situations in the future. [42:20] SWB You know just today I was having a conversation with somebody where we were talking about why it’s important to—to name things and it kind of hit me that, you know, as a white woman, something that I realized is that I think that the way that we—we meaning like white people like me [chuckles]—like the way that we tend to avoid the specificity of language around saying something like “anti-black” and want to call it something like “bias” or even, if we have to do, maybe we’ll use the ‘r’ word. Right? Like maybe we’ll call it racism, if we have to. But one of the reasons I think that happens is that it’s a way to protect white feelings, like it’s a way to make it more comfortable and more palatable for me, because it is—it is uncomfortable when you get into the specificity of saying “violence against black bodies,” right? Like that is—that is more painful and— NS That’s radical [laughs] right. Right. SWB And so—and so it’s like, oh. It’s—even if well intentioned, it’s like the effect is that it allows me to stay emotionally distant from the harm. And when I’m emotionally distant from the harm and I’m also not experiencing the harm because I’m a white person, I am much less of capable of doing anything about it or interested in doing anything about it. And that that is like—the way that that functions, it ends up being, even if it’s well intentioned, it—it ends up reinforcing all of the things about white supremacy that we say we want to change, because we’re unable to call it what it is. NS Yeah! I mean it’s a very important thing for all of us to realize that we need to talk about hard stuff better. We need a better framework for doing that. And when companies ask me my advice and they say, “Where should we start?” One of my first bits of advice is, “Normalize a conversation around race.” I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone into a company and even when I say “black” and you can see people—like, I have one client, I’m done with them right now, but I had one client, and the CEO of this company, who was white, could not bring themself to say “black,” to describe somebody as black. Because it had been so ingrained in this person that recognizing race was somehow rude, and was somehow racist in and of itself, rather than just being a descriptor. But that’s about the value of the word that you’ve been taught, not about the value of the actual fact that I am brown. And if someone says, “Oh I didn’t even recognize that you were Latina!” I’m like, “That’s not true. Don’t say that.” [Sara laughs] Like, you know, like oh nobody—you just can’t be like, “Oh describe Serena Williams.” “Oh well she’s a tennis player, she’s a very strong woman, she’s tall, she’s very, very muscular, she’s very—” I’m like, “Yeah Serena Williams is black!” Like, you have to be able to say it because there’s no—there’s nothing wrong with that word. And so we have to work on there being nothing wrong with that. And what I’ve noticed a lot in working with white folks is that they need permission and coaching on how to start saying the precise words. They know them. You know them. You know that somebody is black. But you may say, “Gosh, am I supposed to say ‘African American’ or ‘black’?” And so that by the time it comes out of your mouth, it sounds unnatural because you’ve overthought and now you, whoever, the white person in the equation, has made race an issue by tipping their hand to the other person and going, “Oh ok. I see.” You don’t even know how to start this conversation. So I talk to companies about normalizing a conversation on race, because if you can do that, there’s nothing harder. 81 percent of millennials do not want to talk about race in mixed company because it just goes off the rails so fast. You need strong facilitation. You need a framework. You need good reading material like Ijeoma Oluo’s So You want to Talk About Race, which is mandatory reading if you care about this at this point. And in so doing, anything else that comes up to people who have—to a diverse group of people who have wrestled with a conversation on race—nothing is scarier than that in the United States. No conversation is scarier than talking about racial backgrounds and in mixed company. [46:32] NS [Continued] And for people of color the anxiety comes from like, “Ugh! Who’s going to—who am I going to have to decide I can’t trust anymore?” [Chuckling] Right? Like, “I don’t really want to know that you’re secretly struggling with these things, because I really like you and it’s just easy to go out to lunch with you,” and that’s the calculus that a person of color might be doing on the—on the light end. On the heavy end it’s like, “Am I safe here?” And a white person may be going to the calculus of, “I don’t want to inadvertently offend somebody. I don’t want to hurt any feelings. I don’t want to sound like a fool. I don’t want to make a mistake.” And that’s generally the calculus that’s going on in the room. So if you can actually help people get good vocabulary and use precise language, like I think—“I think this company is racist.” “Ok. You think this company is racist. Tell me how you saw that show up. Is it showing up across all—all groups? Are you seeing it specifically targeted at groups? Is it showing up on—you know, socially? Is it showing up in compensation? Tell me why you think this company is racist,” and helping people get to many levels below that so that we can actually unearth—like to keep talking about digging up, I just imagine digging stuff up and like tossing it out. Once you’ve dug deep enough to find it and you can toss it out because it doesn’t serve you anymore, we have to have language be our guide on that. And we have to teach people how to mess up. And how to rebound from that. And be ok with the fact that this is hard and uncomfortable and you’re all going to be ok when we’re done with this conversation. Provided you have good facilitation. Otherwise the same people who always get hurt are the same people who get hurt in that situation. SWB I love this so much. I—[NS laughs]—you know I mean it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about and trying to talk to people about is like, if we don’t do it, we will—whatever it is. If you don’t do it, you will stay bad at it. You cannot get better at something if you keep not doing it [chuckles] right? If you keep avoiding it, you will never get better at it, and this always be a conversation that you’re bad at having. And so you’re going to have to figure out a way to practice having these conversations. So but not everybody has realized that there are people like you who can maybe help their companies have these conversations. So what are the kinds of things you’re working on right now that some of our listeners’ companies might be interested in? [48:46] NS Oh thank you for asking! So we’re for hire: Vaya Consulting, vayaconsulting.com. One of the things that we’re launching in the fall is management training because rather than saying, “Ok we’re going to take on diversity and inclusion and let us train your managers about diversity and inclusion.” That’s not as helpful as saying, “Here’s how to be a good manager through the lens of inclusion.” And—and so we’re launching on that um in the fall and so anybody who’s interested, you can go to vayaconsulting.com/inclusive-management-training. If you just have a question you can write to inquiry@vayaconsulting.com as well. SWB And for all of you out there who don’t have like a company you run, but you’re interested in this topic, which I think is a lot of you, definitely check out Nicole on Twitter and on Medium, because I learn a lot by following her those places. Nicole, it has been so great to have you on the show today. NS Thank you! Thank you! It’s been really nice to be here [music fades in, plays for three seconds, fades out]. Fuck Yeah of the Season SWB Hey, ladies, do you know what season it is? KL What season? SWB It’s fuckin’ summertime! KL Yes!! SWB I’m so hyped for summertime, even though I’m a little bit sad, because this is the last episode of Season 2, and we are going on a little bit of a summer vacation. But I’m also extremely hyped because we’re taking a summer vacation! KL Yay! Before we put our flip flops on and walk into the sunset, can we just reminisce a little bit about maybe some of our favorite moments or favorite Fuck Yeahs? JL Fuck yeah we can. You know what I really loved this season? Way back in Season 2, Episode 1, we interviewed Neha Gandhi and she said, “It’s Monday today, and what’s the one thing that I need to do in order to feel like I’ve really accomplished something meaningful by Friday?” And I loved that! I just think it’s so neat to set up your goals for the week. I’ve become really into using Evernote and planning out what I’m going to do this week. I stole this from my coworker, Matt, who’s like a really hardcore Evernote user, and it’s just like a really nice way to set up your week to be like, “What do I need to focus on now?” So I really, I really liked when she talked about that. [51:00] KL It’s nice because it’s also like you can deal with a week at a time. [Chuckles] It feels very doable. SWB I mean I have a lot of to-do lists, but I’m not that great about being like, “What do I need to accomplish to feel good on Friday?” So have you been feeling like you feel more of a fuck yeah! on Fridays now? JL It’s like my whole week, I feel like I have a general really nice roundabout view of and so I—sometimes I have to switch it. It’s not the same on Monday as it is on Friday. But by Friday I feel good going into the weekend, and I know I’ll be ready to set myself up. I set up a “What’s going to happen on Monday” also. So I feel ready, and it like really cuts that anxiety of Sunday of like, “Oh! What’s coming up next?” So. SWB I do that week planning, too, but I think I what I need to add to it is something that is more on that like satisfaction end. Not just like, “Here is what my week is going to look like.” But, “Here’s how I’m going to feel when these things are done at the end of the week,” and use that as a little bit of that North Star throughout the week. JL It’s definitely a prioritizing tool for me, figuring out, like, “What’s really the most important thing that I need to get done at this point?” SWB Something I really loved that I think about a lot is this quote from Saron Yitbarek, where she was mentioning advice that she received from somebody else, who said, “I don’t believe in stepping stones,” and when I heard that, I was sitting in my office all by myself and I swear to God I fistpumped in the air [laughter]. KL That was very cool. SWB It was very good to hear it and it felt so natural coming from Saron. And I think one of the reasons it really stuck with me—it’s not to say that sometimes stepping stones aren’t helpful or that everybody should think that way—but it was so refreshing and exciting for me to hear somebody just owning that they want to do big things and they’re not sitting around waiting. That they are not trying to take baby steps, that they are going to get out and makes things happen for themselves. And they were saying it in such a way—like the way that she said it was not aggressive, not like crushing it! It was just so confident and in control and I just loved it. KL I mean I’m biased, but I loved having my therapist on the show. That was really cool and I know we’ve talked about it a bunch, but it was also really surprising to me that I had kind of a realization as we were talking to her, and that was really cool. It was when she was talking about how, you know, when you get sort of further along in therapy and you start to actually look at the relationship between you yourself and the therapist and use that as a tool for evolution of the therapy itself. I was kind of like, “Oh my god! My head is like exploding!” And it was really cool to have that happen on the show. [53:50] SWB I don’t think that it is selfish for you to talk about that episode, because that episode was really, really great for me, too! I thought it was so valuable and so wonderful to both kind of like take the veil off of the therapy experience, and also just to kind of like see you open up to the world and say, “Yup! I’m in therapy, my therapist is awesome! Here she is! And it’s the most normal thing in the world!” KL Yeah. Yeah. It’s taken a long time but I totally believe that. JL I also really loved that we heard about mentoring a lot this season from Sarah Drasner and from Lilly Chin, and just like different ways you can get into mentoring and how important that is [KL yeah] and that it doesn’t have to be something that’s like a lot of roadblocks to get into. You can mentor people and different ways to get into that. SWB Something else I want to give a big fuck yeah to is not something that happened on the show, but it’s something that we started getting in our inbox. So, over the course of this season, we received a whole bunch of emails from people who wanted to suggest themselves as guests on the show. And apologies if we have not gotten back to you about that. We are definitely looking at topics and themes and what we really want to dig into over the next few months but we love you, and we really want to be able to say like, “Look: it is fucking rad to put yourself out there and to send an email that is like even suggesting yourself as a guest.” That is awesome and I definitely want to hear from anybody who thinks they’d be a rad guest on the show, whether we end up having a space for them or not. JL Yeah I love these ideas of ways to put yourself out there because you don’t know until you try and so I just think it’s really cool. Plus I get to like learn more about what other people are doing, and what awesome things you all are doing. KL So, one last thing I will just throw out there is that I’ve had a couple of friends separately say to me that when they listen it feels like there not just keeping up with me but they’re hanging out with me and hanging out with us, and that is so fucking cool. I just never dreamt that that would be an outcome of the show, and that has just been such a cool thing to hear. And I think about that every time we record now. SWB I mean, I think that’s awesome, and I think it totally speaks to why we can have natural like fucking language like, you know? [Laughter] And it is—it is like hanging out with people, and so we are not going to lose that in this whole conversation. [56:17] JL I can’t wait till one day we have a No, You Go hang session with all of our listeners. KL Oh my gosh! A No, You Go meetup! JL Aaaah! Awesome. SWB You know what I’m really waiting for? This will be my sign that we’ve made it: No, You Go fan fiction [Katel laughs]. Please and thank you. KL Maybe like some fan art. SWB Yes! KL That would be cool. SWB We are definitely. We are always waiting for fan art. KL [Laughs] On that note, fuck yeah to Season 2! Fuck yeah to you both. And fuck yeah to all y’all who have been listening. It’s been so rad. We’re so excited to be here. SWB And we’re taking a little break, but don’t worry: we will be back very soon. So look for new episodes from us in August. JL And that’s it for this season of No, You Go, the show about ambitious—and sticking together. No, You Go is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, still the Super Bowl champions, and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Nicole Sanchez for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us wherever you listen to our show. Your support helps us spread the word. We’ll be back in August [music fades in, plays for 32 seconds, fades out to end].

Show Up and Be Real with Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 13, 2018 59:18

In Episode 9, we talk inclusion riders, the importance of pronouns, and how all of us can better support folks from marginalized communities. If there’s one thing we’re sure of, it’s that we’ve got to stick together—and that means supporting and centering the voices of folks with less opportunity and privilege than us. In this episode, we talk with designer and educator Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen about how listening, and finding community, can help us do just that. They also share how parenting shaped their career path, what it was like to come out at work, and why they see allyship as something we practice, not something we have. Listen up. > If I show up at work as myself, then I’m in a state of being in my greatest power. And I think if you can find a workplace where they want you to be there in your greatest power, then like, yeah, show up. This is how you do it. > > —Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen, designer and educator Here’s what we get into—and of course, there’s a full transcript, too. Show notes If you didn’t catch the Oscars, don’t worry—we start the show by filling you in on our favorite parts. Of note: (Ahem) Janelle Monáe’s pantsuit (photo) Jordan Peele’s win for Get Out and the amazing fan art he posts on Instagram Frances McDormand’s acceptance speech mentioning inclusion riders (hell yeah)… …which we go on to explore: Did you know Justin Bieber requires that his dressing room be filled with carnations? Riders can be wild. More important: Nicole Sanchez writes about taking inclusion riders beyond Hollywood and into fields like tech—and apply them to everything from speaking gigs to job offers. Yep. We also touch on Lara Hogan’s wonderful piece about applying inclusiveness to your hiring process, the Enterprise UX Conference’s journey through inclusive programming, how the Design & Content Conference put together a diverse conference production team, and Women Talk Design’s mission to empower organizers to create more diverse events. Interview: Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen It’s not hyperbole to say it was an honor and a pleasure to talk with UX designer and educator Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen. Stevie tells us about the causes that drive them, establishing a career in design, navigating coming out as queer, and what it really means to practice allyship. We talk about: Where Stevie lives in Vancouver, which is the unceded land of the Coast Salish people, particularly the Squamish, the Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Stevie’s work with Out in Schools, a program that engages students on issues of homophobia, transphobia, and bullying. How having a child while establishing a career—and then making choices about your career and your future—become intertwined in a way you never expected. What it means to realize you’re queer at 27—and what happens next. How we can better support marginalized people by practicing ongoing allyship, and provide safer spaces for those communities. (More on the idea of practicing allyship from Mariame Kaba.) Demystifying and sharing pronouns—and deconstructing the hard-coded way we think about each other. FYOTW We end the show with a little self-love and high-five because, fuck yeah!—we made the New & Noteworthy list on Apple Podcasts! AND it reminds us of all the amazing women-hosted podcasts we listen to and love—including a show you should definitely check out, called Good As Hell hosted by Lizzo. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ Transcript Katel LeDû This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by Shopify, the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. And did you know they’re growing? If you want to work with a diverse, passionate team that likes to get shit done, then you should talk to Shopify. The best part: they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply to you. So visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about. Jenn Lukas Hey! And welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. KL I’m Katel LeDû. Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. SWB I’m so excited today to talk about one of my favorite topics: inclusion. And, more specifically, we’re going to talk about how people like me, like all of us, can step up and make an impact for underrepresented groups in any field. To help us out, we sat down with a friend of mine, Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen, to learn more about what real inclusion can look like. But, first up, did you all watch the Oscars last week? JL Nope! KL Uh, I did, and I have a few favorite things I kind of want to share because, first of all — you didn’t have to watch it just to see all the pictures that come out of it but Janelle Monáe’s fire red, like military-inspired pant suit was phenomenal. SWB She looked amazing. KL She looked amazing. I also would really like to make a very genuine request to Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph to run for presidents ASAP. SWB Like, co-presidents? KL Like, yeah, absolutely and then, I mean, to top it all off: Jordan Peele won for best screenplay for Get Out, which is just fucking so awesome. I saw that movie and I was so obsessed, I loved it so much that I started following Jordan Peele on Instagram, and he posts a lot of Get Out fan art, it is absolutely worth following. It’s magical. JL I loved that movie. KL It was so good. [2:02] JL Yeah. Um, also, I love this pantsuit. I just Googled it. SWB Get on the internet right now! “Janelle Monáe Oscars pantsuit.” The cape portion of it or whatever that kind of swoopy back is is amazing! So I loved that she really made it her own. Like it was not the kind of look that not just other women were wearing but that, like, anybody was wearing. But it also felt so completely Oscars. Right? Like it felt like she had the whole vibe — fantastic. Ok. So we can keep talking about the Oscars which I also did not actually watch. Uh I like to look at outfit photos later. But, instead, what I was hoping we could talk a little bit about was the story that came out about Frances McDormand and what she said at the end of her speech. She said something about how she wanted to leave the audience with two words and those words were “inclusion rider” So Nicole Sanchez wrote this piece that Jenn actually sent around to all of us, that was about what inclusion rider means in tech or what they could mean in tech. So Nicole is awesome. She is a diversity consultant who runs a company called Vaya Consulting. So she spent a long time looking at diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. And she wrote this piece where she talked about where inclusion riders come from and what they mean. So she credits Dr. Stacy Smith at USC for originally coming up with this concept, and says that it comes from diversifying talent in the media. And the concept is kind of pretty simple, right? It’s like: if you take a rider, which you may have heard about from the music industry— JL So a rider is like what you request if you are going to be performing somewhere. And it could be something like, “I need to have sparkling water, or I need to have a soundcheck of two hours before I’m going to go on.” It could be— KL A fancy rug. JL Or a fancy rug. It could be all these things, you know, maybe you want to make sure that you’re going to have some sort of food. Or in the famous case of Van Halen, you might say, “I demand there be no brown M&Ms.” Which really wasn’t a demand that they needed, they stuck that in their rider to make sure that it was actually being read. So it was one of those things where if they got to a venue and they saw that there was no brown M&Ms, then that means that someone actually read the rider, and the requests that they were going to do, and that they were going to have a good show. KL Paying attention. I mean it matters. JL That’s why Justin Bieber requests that his hotel room is decked out in carnations of a specific color pattern — I’m not making this up! KL I told you! It’s— [4:30] SWB Ok so, so the Bieber rider is not also what we want to talk about tonight. Although we could. Um instead I mean I really like the way that this concept applies to other facets of life. So what Frances was talking about at the Oscars was like, “Ok. If you are an in-demand name in Hollywood, you have an opportunity, in your contracts, to stipulate that the people who are working on the set, and the people who are working with you, um are coming from diverse backgrounds. You have this, you know, you have the opportunity to say that you want to make sure that they’re being paid fairly. You have an opportunity to make some demands that might actually be relatively small in comparison to what you could be getting paid if you’re a big star, but are really, really huge for people who aren’t you.” And so, what Nicole talks about in her article is really applying that other places like, let’s say, a tech conference. Like, if you’re an in-demand speaker, you also have a lot of power. And you can say, “I would love to speak at your event, but I’m going to need you to do some shit for me first.” And getting really specific about what you expect to make sure that that event is inclusive and welcoming to people who are not in demand like you are. KL Yeah, I really like what Nicole wrote because it made it really obvious and seemed really reasonable to have this filter out into a lot of different areas, right? And, like you were saying, you might not be a speaker who’s super in-demand, you might just be starting out. But I think a lot of it is just knowing that it’s very fair and totally appropriate to ask questions about the thing that you’re about to sign up to do. SWB Totally! That reminds me of what Erika Hall talked about when we interviewed her which is like the importance of asking questions and the power of asking questions. I have been thinking about this a lot and I talked about this a little bit actually on Twitter today. Like, one of the things that I’ve started doing is when I’m asked to speak at conferences which, you know, I’ve written some books, and I’ve done a lot of speaking. So I do get asked which is great but I’ve started asking some questions back and I try to make them pretty consistent, across the board, because I find if I ask the same stuff over and over, I’m more comfortable asking and it also feels a little less weird, like it’s not a special standard, it’s just my standard. And so I have a few things that I would say are kind of in my rider, or at least like, they’re in my Go/No Go [chuckling] kind of file, right? Like I won’t go to your event if you don’t answer these questions in a way that I can live with. So it’s things like, you know, for me I always ask like, “Does your event have a code of conduct?” That’s something that’s on Nicole’s list too. But I also ask things like, “What are you doing to ensure that your event has a diverse lineup?” And I ask it that way specifically because I want to hear how people think about it. And if they tell me things like, “Well, we just want to have the best speakers.” Then that’s a big red flag for me because I question, “Well, how do you know you have the best speakers? ‘Best’ according to whom? According to like people you already knew? People your Twitter connections already knew?” You know it’s like it brings up a lot for me. Or at least it’s an opportunity to have a conversation with them. And depending on how that conversation goes, that can tell me a lot about whether I’m interested in coming there, and also it’ll tell me whether I’m interested in investing time and helping them identify speakers they hadn’t heard about, which I’m super happy to do if I feel confident that, you know, if I recommend a speaker who is from a more marginalized group, who’s maybe less experienced than I am, to go to an event, I don’t want that person to be treated poorly. I want to make sure that I’m sending them to an event where somebody’s going to take them seriously. So I feel like by having those conversations, it gives me a chance to feel out how much somebody’s thought about this, how open they are to change, and how willing they are to kind of put in work. Because it is. It takes work, right? Just like we talked about on an earlier episode: it takes work to think about, you know, not centering all your events on drinking, which is a really answer. It takes worth to think about something like onsite childcare but like every single detail you do as an event planner is work and I want them to think about this as an important piece of their job. [8:33] KL Yeah, I mean, you just said that you have an opportunity to do this and I would almost say that established folks, like yourself, I imagine feel like they have a — an obligation to. SWB Absolutely. I don’t know that everybody does. I wish more people who felt like they had some sway — and I, you know, I have like some level of sway. There’s people who — who are like much more in demand and who make a lot of money speaking in our field. And I think that they have a huge responsibility. But I definitely, 100 percent like I — yes, I think of that as an opportunity in the sense of like, I’m glad to have the opportunity. But 100 percent it is an obligation and it is a responsibility. JL Yeah, um I’ve always did a similar thing to you, Sara, where I had a list of a set of questions that I asked every conference opportunity that came up and, you know, like you’re saying, it helps when you have the standard because then you can send an email back that’s like, “This is what I ask all my conferences. No matter what.” And I wrote a post about this awhile back, mine were focused a little bit more about seeing if they — if speakers were paid, and one of the things that I really like to ask is, “What is the cost of the conference? And how many attendees do you expect?” And then afterwards I would say, “What is your speaker fee?” To make sure that then, you know, if a conference will write back, “Oh our conference cost 12 hundred dollars, we’re expecting, you know, a thousand, 2,000, 5,000 people and then the speaker fee is zero, right? KL Then that math is wrong! SWB That math speaks for itself, right? Like it’s like, “Mmm, hmm, how do you like the way those numbers look on the page?” Right. [10:00] JL Not — not too great um so I think it’s really important, you know, for — to realize too and like it’s a mix of educating also, where I think some people never— never thought about that. And I’m not saying that that’s ok. But like it is — then I become, “Well, here are these questions and why I’m asking them because it’s not ok.” SWB Yeah, I mean I wish that everybody would have thought about this by now. I kind of feel like, “C’mon, like you sh— c’mon, you should be thinking about this already.” However, I also accept that that’s not the case and if my goal is to make more people aware, and hope that more people come along with me on this particular journey, then I do feel like part part of it — being able to do something than education is ok and important. I don’t expect everybody to do that, in all circumstances, but I feel like I have enough like sort of comfort and confidence of where I am that I— I can do that. And I think that’s a service to — I’m not so much worried about doing it as a service to the conference organizer, I think that’s like a side benefit. I think about that as a service to the industry, at large, and to the people who need that information to be more widespread. JL Completely. And, you know, I would say that, as a speaker, I did this but as an attendee I’ve asked for things too. And so I feel like people should feel empowered to ask questions as an attendee also, you know, “Will you have a vegan meal?” “Will you have a vegetarian meal?” And that’s something that I used to ask a lot um you know, “Is there a place to nurse?” Or “Is there a place to pump?” And like, “What sort of facilities will be available?” And, as an attendee, someone who’s paying for a conference, you should definitely feel empowered. I mean as a speaker, you should too, that wasn’t taking away from that. But you should definitely feel empowered to write the organizers and make sure that they will have these things available to you also. SWB And I’m also deeply suspect of any event that makes you feel bad for having— like if some event makes you feel bad because you ask for a vegan meal or you ask for a nursing room, like, “I’m sorry. What the actual fuck?” It’s one thing for them not to necessarily be able to meet every need, that’s like a different conversation. But I think if somebody comes to you with a need, and you write them off, or you minimize it, or you pretend like it doesn’t matter. Like, I don’t want to go that event. And I don’t want — I don’t want those people to have my money, or for them to use like my face and my talk to promote their event. KL Right. SWB Um so there were some things though on Nicole’s list that I’d never thought about before that I’m super glad to have heard about now. So for example, I had not thought about — and I feel silly not having thought about it but I never thought about asking about the people who are working the event. So like the laborers, the people who are doing setup and takedown, the people who are doing food, like how are they being paid? She specifically mentioned, you know, what are the labor conditions, are they part of a union? I think there’s probably a whole lot of different questions you might ask depending on your particular interests or your particular kind of like stance but I think asking about the welfare and the support of the people who are not kind of seen as like part of the conference, but are, in fact, like what makes the conference run. Like that’s a huge area that I’m going to be thinking more about. KL And the fact that, you know, she points out, is there — is there a process for intake of these kinds of requests, or like these kinds of questions, right? For like just handling that and — and talking about them. JL So I think the conversation that keeps coming up again and again, from conference organizers saying, “How do I make this happen? How do I diversify my lineups? How do I diversify my speakers?” And I think some people have provided solutions and ideas for this. An article I read recently on Medium was about the Enterprise UX Conference which um they’ve been working on this for four years and every year have slowly iterated on how they’ve been handling things. And I think one of the things that is really great about that is they didn’t just give up after year one. They’re like, “Well, I don’t know how to do it.” Is that they’ve been slowly trying to improve their process and they wrote about this and they were saying that one of the things they did was make sure to have different people, besides three white men, choosing the lineup and being in charge of the themes. And as soon as they started expanding from that, then so did their speaker lineup. SWB You know one of my favorite conferences, Design and Content, actually a conference that Stevie, our guest today, is going to MC this year, they’ve done a really similar thing where they have a selection committee and what they specifically did is they intentionally went out and identified people from a bunch of different backgrounds and then they paid them for their time to be on that committee. And it dramatically changed how they come up with who’s going to be on the roster for the year. And they’ve written about it publically, we’ll put that in the show notes, because I think that they have a process that is — is something that other people can follow. And, you know, part of it came out of their first year. They had really good intentions. They went out and thought about, you know, “You know let’s make sure we have a good, diverse lineup. Let’s ask some people who we’ve never seen before, and some new faces, et cetera.” And an attendee called them out for it at the event and said you know, “This lineup is really white.” And they had to take a step back and be like, “Yeah, it is.” And sit with that. Right? And figure out what to do about that. And I think that that’s hard but I think that’s one of the responsibilities that we have is to be able to hear those kinds of feedback and say, “Ok I’m going to listen to that and then I’m going to figure out how do I change?” And, you know, and that’s one of the reasons I like to ask these questions I ask, right? Is it’s like, do I get defensiveness? Or do I get somebody who can say, “Yeah, you know, we haven’t that diverse of a lineup in past years. You’re right that’s something we should change. I have some ideas but I would love to hear more,” or whatever it is. But that — that openness is really, really important. So, um, that’s one of the things about Enterprise UX that I think has been great as well is that they’re willing to write about it. Like they’re willing to admit it that it wasn’t great year one! Which is sometimes hard to do, right? You have to be able to look at your work and say like, “Here are the ways that this wasn’t where we wanted to be. And then here’s what we did differently.” [16:11] JL Another site that I found interesting was womentalkdesign.com. Their tagline is that they “elevate the best talks about design from women and empowers event organizers with tools, approaches, and information to engage more women speakers.” So this is a neat project because it’s an answer to that question of, “Well, I don’t know where to find these speakers!” And so I really like it because they went out and tackled this specific question that people kept asking. SWB Yeah, I mean Christina Wodtke who is one of the people who created that site, I know that part of this was born of her frustration. Like, she’s been in the industry a long time, working in tech and in UX. And people would frequently ask her, “Well, where do I find all these diverse speakers?” And now she’s like, “I don’t have to answer that question anymore!” Right? Like she’s like, “They’re out there. You just have to do a little bit of work, to get outside of the bubble that you have,” and then she was like, “Ok, let me go and do some of that work.” And um — and so the result is that it’s like, “Oh! You’re looking for more diverse lineups for your event?” That’s certainly not everybody, by any means, but like if you haven’t at least gone through that, like you’ve done not even the bare minimum. JL And I— I don’t think inclusiveness just stops at these conferences, right? I mean one of the things that came out recently was Lara Hogan wrote a great article about how to apply inclusiveness to your hiring process, and how to like tackle that, and one of the things that she had was to make sure that you have a diverse group of the team interviewing these candidates, and I think that’s great thing: making sure that it’s not just one group of people that are interviewing all of your candidates as they come in. SWB And I think it also goes back to some of the same stuff that we talked for like an inclusion rider is that if you are in a position where you feel like you have some choice about the job that you’re taking, which I recognize not everybody is in, but if you’re in that position and you’re thinking about, “I want a place that’s going to give me the most growth opportunity, I want the place that’s going to offer a really good salary package, et cetera, et cetera,” you know, I think that it’s another responsibility to be able to say, “I want to place that is willing to kind of put its money where its mouth is when it comes to being an inclusive environment,” and to ask those same kinds of questions, right? “So what are you doing to increase diversity in your team?” And “What are you doing to support people who come from different backgrounds? And like — what does that look like?” JL I love this question. I love this so much. Um I think it’s like— as a candidate, as an interviewee, you might be like, “Well, how do I phrase this? How do I make sure that this job is going to be a good job with me?” And I think that’s a great way to phrase it. Um when we interview people, one of the questions I always ask is, um I phrase it as: “Diversity and inclusiveness are really important values to us. What are some important values to you?” And, you know, it’s a very leading question but you’d be surprised at how many people go on some sort of tangent that is, like, “Ah. You know? I want to make sure that I have like — snacks.” No one’s ever said snacks! That’s an exaggeration [sure] but it’s certainly something that’s like, you know, not appropriate for the answer or where I was hoping that they would go. SWB We talk a lot about sort of how this relates to people who are working in like tech and design fields, but this is the kind of thing that I think is really transferrable to almost any field, right? Like that it’s not really about the industry that you’re in, it’s like if you were working in an industry that is not necessarily perfectly inclusive, which is like, newsflash: probably all of them. Then you know I think that the— the same kind of stuff applies and you can kind of bring some of these same principles and ideas along. So I’m really stoked that we’re talking about inclusion riders, I don’t think it necessarily has to be like a contract in every circumstance, I think it’s much more about how can you apply that concept to whatever it is that you’re doing in your professional and however you’re interacting with people who hold power in your industry. [19:55] ** **** JL** [Sponsor] No, You Go is proud to be supported by wordpress.com. Whether you’d like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating your website on wordpress.com can help others find you, remember you, and connect with you. That’s why nearly 30 percent of all websites run on WordPress. You don’t need experience setting up a website, WordPress guides you through the process from start to finish. And takes care of the technical side. In fact, we use WordPress at No, You Go. WordPress also has 24 hour customer support, which is great because we all have different schedules. Plans start at just four dollars a month. Start building your website today! Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off your brand new website. Interview: Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen SWB Our guest today is Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen. I first met Stevie back in the summer of 2015, after I gave a talk at a conference up in Vancouver, and they approached me afterward wanting to chat about my talk, which was very flattering. But more than anything, what I really remember about that conversation was that this person I just met had come to me with so much kind of kindness and generosity, and our conversation felt so uplifting. And over the next few years, I have paid a lot of attention to what Stevie’s been up to and the things that they’re talking about and interested in. And this year, fast forward, Stevie is now going to be the MC of that very event where I met them: the Design & Content Conference. They’re also a UX designer, a design educator who works with youth and teaches in two different university programs, and somebody who’s just really active in their community in Vancouver, and in design in general. I am so excited to welcome Stevie to the show today. Thank you so much for being here. Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen Thank you for having me. Can I add a moment and just also acknowledge that I am also on unceded Coast Salish territories, and while we may call it Vancouver, it is the unceded land of the Coast Salish people, particularly the Squamish, the Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. SWB Thank you for doing that. I think that actually sets the tone for this conversation really well because I think one of the things I would love to talk with you more about is sort of the way that you look at your role as a designer in your community and sort of the impact that you have on community and on the way that people from different backgrounds within your community are represented. So can you tell us a little more— how did you get to this place where you start a conversation and you say, “Actually, can we remind ourselves of the indigenous people whose land this is and this land has always been?” Like, what was your process of getting to a place that you were comfortable doing things like that? STAN Honestly, every time I have these moments where I’m like, “Oh! I need to say something, I should say something, this is the right thing to say,” and it is still really, really hard because I think always makes me uncomfortable not knowing how the other person may respond on the other end. Yeah, these issues are political and they are uncomfortable for people to talk about, hear, or acknowledge. I don’t know if you know what’s happening right now in Canada, but Tina and Coulton were murdered and people don’t talk about it because people don’t care. And so we need to bring these things up even though it’s really hard because people are dying. So that’s my response I guess. When I began to recognize that when we don’t talk about things, people die. And the more personal we make it, the more people who we spend time with who are directly affected by these things, by systemic oppression, the more we recognize the power that we have as individuals when we are in a place where we have to acknowledge these things. SWB That’s a pretty difficult topic and I think that that’s something pretty challenging to our audience — I mean, you mentioned that it’s hard for people to talk about, I think it’s hard to talk about on a podcast like this where we — where we really do want to talk about, you know, finding some joy even when things are difficult. And I don’t that that means erasing talking about the things that are difficult, by any means, and so, with that in mind, what is your day to day work? [25:23] STAN Hmm my day-to-day work probably doesn’t look too different from many people. I’m a parent; I have a five, almost six-year-old, son. And I have shared custody with his father. And so on days when he’s with me, I actually wake up at like 4:30 in the morning, and I wake up, and I shower, and I go to make a matcha latte for myself every morning. And I come out and I answer emails, I try my best to catch up on like Slack, on text messages, on WhatsApp, on Viber, on Signal, on my work email versus my personal email, and um what else is there? Messenger. So that’s kind of normal, I imagine, I think we all have these mornings of having to try to catch up with all that stuff. And then I get him ready for school, take him to school, and it’s a privilege that allows me to do that, and I come back and I work. And so some days that’s with Out in Schools, where I’m talking about queer and gender issues with young people in high schools. And sometimes in elementary schools. And other days it’s going to meet my own clients at their offices. And then other days, it’s staying home um and doing like UX work. So for me that’s everywhere from leading a workshop, like I did this morning, where I’m presenting to clients whatever our ideas are, whatever our proposals are, and then other days I’m heading off to go teach. And then I come home and I try to fit in some yoga somewhere. And pick up my son and then do things with him in the evening, feed him, put him to bed. And do some more work and then go to bed. That’s my day. SWB I think a lot of our listeners can relate to sort of the juggle and trying to figure out what the right mix of things is in a day and how to have some time for yourself amid everything else. Can you tell us more — like what was your journey into becoming a designer? How did you end up in this sort of life that you’ve crafted for yourself now? STAN I lucked into it, I think. I remember I was in high school and I had really no real idea about what I wanted to do and somebody came into the school who was an alumni and did a presentation. And she worked in — she worked in marketing for an ad agency. And I just thought her job sounded really cool. I liked that she got to like talk to people and I liked hearing about how she got to like come up with ideas to do things and like sell things to people, which I feel so much like cringey shame about now. But at the time it sounded really interesting. Um so I went into the university and studied communications but partway through my program, I did a certificate in innovative leadership from SFU, Simon Fraser University, and it was an eight-month program where the first four months we did workshops, and the last four months we got to do like a practical project with a local company. And the company that I happened to work with was a leadership development company. And at the end of this project, which was, funnily enough, all about looking at how people within the organization viewed their leadership skills, as opposed to people who are like several levels away from them. How did those people view their executives leadership skills. At the end of the project, the person I’d been working with at this company said, “Oh I noticed you like — maybe had some graphic skills. You know we really need a graphic designer.” And I’m like, “Well, I’m like — I’m taking my first course in design right now.” “Well, that’s great! That’s more knowledge than we have!” And so they hired me and I started off just like making PowerPoints and doing a lot of things in print, working within business development and supporting people people in sales. Packing suitcases. I did a lot of packing suitcases. But along the way I learned a lot about like leadership and leadership models and um when we talk about adult learning, that realm is something that I gained a lot of experience with over six years. And so at the same time I was still in school, had abandoned communications, and had — was fully in design now, and then I went away on an amazing field school and came back and was pregnant! So I took a year off. And I will say this is like — this is an important part of my professional journey, this is an important part of my growth and journey as a person, because having my son changed everything. I’ve always been someone that was really into research. So the moment I got into something, or the moment I found out about something new, I’d like totally geek out and go read every book, watch every movie and documentary, and talk to every person I could find about the thing. Uh I get really excited about new hobbies and interests. So I got really excited about being pregnant, and about birth, and about breastfeeding, um and about being a parent. And when that happened, I began to see the ways in which I had to make really, really clear decisions. So the same way in marketing or in design, you have to have a reason as to why you’re doing something for a certain desired outcome, I knew that I wanted my son, I wanted my child to be happy, and I knew that I wanted him to be really kind, and I knew that I wanted him to be really safe. Like I wanted him to live. Right? Like that’s all I really wanted and I knew that I had to make decisions to support that. And so that was like — we raised him vegan for the first like year because we felt it was important for him to have the choice, right? It was important for him to know that you don’t have to eat animals but you can and that’s your choice. But do you know what you are doing if you are going to that? So he still doesn’t really eat animals. But that’s still something that applied to me in my life. I began to think about like what am I doing? Is this who I want to be? Is this how — what powers do I have as an individual to like make all those things happen for him? And it made me really political. Like all of a sudden, things that I have always had values about like really mattered because I’d made an investment in the future by having him, and I needed to invest in the future. And then I got laid off from my job. The job that I’d had for six years. I was a marketing assistant or a project assistant but I was never actually a designer. And I was feeling a lot of doubt about this and I have a mentor at school, Russell Taylor, who is kind of the father to like so many of us in this design program. And I reached out to him and I said, “Well, I got laid off. I really love design but I have no design skills. I didn’t finish my degree.” And he goes, “Well come back and teach for me. Um like you know this stuff. You’ve taken this course and I like — I feel confident that you’re going to do a good job in this.” And so he brought me back and had me teaching his second year course with him. And then at the same time he was developing a conference that was in its second year. And at this conference, he brought in agencies and different companies to like do talks but also to do interviews. And while I was teaching, I also applied for an interview at this conference, and I came out of the conference and I was offered — I was offered some jobs! My first job in which I would get to call myself a designer. And so, Sara, this is where it kind of comes back around to you because this job was the first job that I gone in to do the interview and really felt like, “This is who I am. And like I don’t know these things. This is what I’m working on. Um please see some potential in me!” Like, “Please take some faith in me because I think I can do this.” Uh and I felt really good about some of the things that I felt were just really natural and inherent to me. And they absolutely said, “Yeah!” Like, “We think you can do this. We think that you can kick it out of the park. I feel confident putting you in front of like our — any client, right from the getgo.” And this was my manager, Robin Ashmore, and so it was the first job where I’m like, “Oh. Ok. Like I can admit that I don’t really know this but I can learn this and I can develop in these areas where I think I’m good.” And part of how he supported me was allowing me to go to that conference DCC, Design & Content, which is how I met Sara! And at this time though I was beginning to get really bitter, um I was beginning to look around and see that we, as designers, have all this potential to build things that really make a difference in the world and really help people, and yet we’re like focused on how to get snacks. Or we’re building technology that is actually enabling violence against marginalized people. So I — even now I tell people that I feel shame around calling myself a designer because as a whole, this industry is causing so much more problems than it is helping and I think so many of us have this power and opportunity to actually do something about it, and we’re afraid to. And we don’t. For whatever reasons. And some people have more ability to do something about it then others and I really do mean this in like ability, privilege, some people have more privilege in order to make change happen. Um but I went to this conference, I went to DCC, I met Sara. I’m like, “Oh!! There’s designers who really do see the same things I see! Who really are concerned about the same things that I’m concerned about.” And there are people who, like you, Sara, who want better things out of tech, who want designers to do better things — the tech industry to do better things. And so I began to look for places in which I could try to do better things and I could try to learn on how to be a better designer. This is where I’m at right now. Like I’m still working on that. I’m still trying to influence and like bring kindness into the world, bring safety into places where I think people need someone to invite them in or to support them while they’re there. So yeah that’s where I am right now. [35:25] SWB Well, I am so proud and kind of tearing up a little bit to think that I played even just like a tiny, tiny, little role in your story— STAN Big role! SWB —oh gosh! Ok, ok I wouldn’t — I wouldn’t oversell that. I really think like, you know, your work and your what you are bringing to your community is— is big and different than anything that I do. So I definitely don’t want to oversell what I might’ve played a role in. Something that I’m really interested in hearing more about that you mentioned a little bit ago is the work that you’re doing with Out in Schools. So can you tell us a little bit about that organization and how you got involved with them? STAN Yeah, oh. So I guess one of the key parts of the story that was a huge pivot point in my life, that happened shortly before I met Sara, is that I realized that I was queer. And I like to say that I “realized” because it was something that kind of — it’s always been a part of me. It’s who I am. I am a queer person. But I didn’t have the words for it and I didn’t know that’s what other people were calling it and when this happened, I was 27, I had already had my son, Noah, and I had a cis male partner. And realizing I was queer, finding queer community, making queer friends, really like embracing and exploring what that could mean for me was like so amazing! It sounds so cheesy, but I really did feel like I was born again. And I was also really disappointed and sometimes embarrassed to admit that I was 27. And I think about how I grew up with very conservative parents. I think they’re a little bit more liberal now than they used to be but they are conservative, they’re still very Catholic. I grew up in a very Catholic cishet family. And I was also really protected, care for, loved, I still am. And for them, that meant sheltering me from just sexuality in general. And so that included putting me in an all-girls private school um great school, I mean great academics but it was also an all girls Catholic private school. So we didn’t get sex-ed. And when I was 27, I realized that I was queer and I was so happy about it because I think like being queer is so liberating, and so fun. I really wanted to make it happen — or contribute to a culture where queerness is normalized. And so I found the Queer Film Festival, I met some people there, including some facilitators from Out in Schools, and they became my friends. Jen Sung, in particular, reached out and was like, “Hey! You kind of said that you would love to do this. Were you serious?” And I said, “Yes!” And she goes, “Well! We’re hiring! You should submit an application!” And I submitted an application and became an Out in Schools facilitator. So we’re led by Gavin Somers and Brandon Yan, and we go around to high schools, and elementary schools, and we talk to young people about queer and trans issues using media, like using film. So we watch movies with them, we watch music videos with them and we lead discussions. And it’s interesting in the ways in which like that also ties back into the skill I have around facilitation because that’s part of what I do in my job as a designer. So I get to practice, like, being in front of people, and presenting, and engaging with audiences. Like, in everything that I do, in many places in my life. [39:24] SWB That’s such a cool additional piece to your professional profile that I didn’t know about until — you know just now, right? Like you being involved with Out in Schools seems like, in some ways, you know, really different from doing the design work, but it feels very natural, the way that you talk about it all together. STAN Thanks. It feels really natural to me. SWB I’m also curious, you know, you mentioned coming out as queer at 27 and sort of realizing to yourself that that was even the case and I know that in that same time period you also started going by different pronouns, and coming out as non-binary, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what that was like? And especially what was that like, you know, in the context of work where that seems like maybe it could be a challenging thing to do. STAN Well, what had happened was that you did this amazing talk and you were really vulnerable and real and talked about how important it was to like create spaces and technologies that allowed and encouraged people to be who they are uh rather than try to force them to fit in any particular box. And I came up to you and I was in tears, I remember this, because I had this name tag and the name tag actually had my name, like “Stevie” was on it, but Stevie’s like — is not my given name. And I was expressing to you, like, “Oh my god, how amazing is it that, yeah the Eventbrite form for the conference was like, shout out to Steve Fisher and Shannon Fisher for recognizing the significance and importance of this. But the conference signup form allowed me to input my name. Like it didn’t ask me for a piece of ID to like prove that that was my name.” And I’m like tearing up now, thinking about it, but yeah that’s like it was the first piece of paper that I wore around my neck that allowed me to identify myself and identify myself to other people as Stevie. And it was in a professional context. And then all the speakers, everybody that I met that weekend like called me Stevie. Like everybody that knows me from that time onwards, calls me Stevie and so it felt so good. I came back and I didn’t immediately do it but from then on, anytime I introduced myself to somebody I was like, “No, Stevie.” Like I’d been doing this previously, as a nickname to personal friends but not professional contacts. And being at Design and Content, meeting people who would use my name eventually I think, a couple weeks later, gave me the confidence to actually casually, jokingly at work say, “Actually! Like all my friends call me Stevie.” And so my co-workers were like, “Do you want us to call you Stevie?” And I’m like, “Yes!!!” And I had another amazing colleague, like Jason Landry, he reached out to me privately on Slack and said, “Hey, I know that you’re going by Stevie.” And like, “Awesome! Stevie’s a great name. I just wanted to check in. Like have your pronouns changed? Like what pronouns would you like me to refer to you as?” So at the time I said, “Oh um like no, like, she/her is fine.” And she/her is great. I just don’t use she/her anymore. Like they/them is super comfortable to me. Like it makes me feel really good. And so I use they/them and eventually like it was people in my team making me feel like welcome. And doing that work of like welcoming me as opposed to me having to step out and be vulnerable is what allowed me to come to work and tell people, “My name is Stevie.” And now like over time I’ve built enough confidence to include it in my email signature. If I meet someone new, I always say, “Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen. My pronouns: they/them/theirs.” So I try to assert myself and I know that from what we tell young people in schools, every time that I do that, I can help somebody else feel more comfortable sharing their pronouns. And as a practice of allyship, that’s the best thing folks can do is share their pronouns. SWB I love that story so much and I’m so thankful that you had a colleague who reached out to you sort of made it ok for you to say like, “Yeah, actually I prefer to go by different pronouns.” Was that a scary conversation to start to have? Like the first few times you were doing that in these professional settings? STAN Mm hmm yeah. And I mean, let’s be honest, my team, most of the people on my team are great. They use they/them pronouns. Some people still make mistakes. I think it’s interesting the way in which every time someone new comes onto the team, if I don’t already know them, I have to find a time or an opportunity to, hopefully, quickly get in there and let them know that my pronouns are they/them/theirs before they hear maybe the wrong pronoun from somebody else, or make an assumption, and then I eventually have to awkwardly correct them. But yeah it was initially really hard because I didn’t even understand the — like once I understood how it felt empowering to me, it was hard because there was always a lot of explaining. People like need explanations or they look at me, you know, like, “Wait. What does that mean?” And they like — I think — I think people look at me and they’re like, “Wait. What does that mean for your body parts?” SWB Which um is — has nothing to do with it at all. STAN Exactly. But— SWB It is not an appropriate question for work — like pretty much ever. STAN Well it’s just like — I don’t think it needs to be even verbally said sometimes, it’s just like people stop and look like the same way. Some folks know — like particularly feminine-presenting folks knows what it looks when someone looks at you and looks you up and down [mm hmm]. I think like queer and trans and non-binary folks, we know what it looks like when you look at us and you’re like, “Mmm,” like, “What’s under your clothes and how do you have sex?” [44:55] SWB Which I, you know, I understand that it’s kind of uncomfortable for people when they are first presented with pronoun and gender stuff that they’ve not encountered before and that they don’t understand, and um and then even still, you know, I mean I think I, for example, like I have several friends who would identify as non-binary or who identify as, let’s say they’re trans, and I have tried to unlearn some of that like default gender binary language and it’s hard. And I screw it up. And I screw it up oftentimes when I have, you know it’s like something gets coded in my brain early on, whether it’s an assumption, or whether it’s something where, you know, I have a friend who I met when they presented as male and they, at some point, came out as trans. And they’re a woman. And I sometimes still have like that little mental like kind of hiccup right? That like is about the history that I have with them, and sort of having to shift my thinking, I mean that just is what it is but that that’s up to me, right? Like it’s my job. It’s my job to figure that out. It’s not their job to figure that out. And if I feel weird or if I have to like go through an extra like you know mental circuit in order to make sense of it and make sure that I’m doing it correctly, like, that’s work that is on me to do. And that the more I do that kind of work, the easier it becomes. And that’s kind of like the way that I’ve tried to deal with it but I think it’s — I think it’s something that seeing people like you who are willing to be vulnerable and to say, “Hey, this is who I am.” And to know that you might get reactions that aren’t positive and that aren’t good. I think that that’s — it’s such a gift, I think, to the rest of us, in terms of opening our minds and helping us get to a more inclusive place. KL I also just want to say that— that you said something, you said the words, “practice of allyship,” and I wrote that — I just wrote that down because I like that so much and I feel like if we can just share that as much as possible, that is — that is such a gem of a thing to think about. STAN Let me — let me credit that Mariame Kaba who is @prisonculture on Twitter because I heard Mariame — actually I may be pronouncing this wrong: M-A-R-I-A-M-E. I heard her speak on a webinar, which is run by Talila Lewis, TL Lewis, who does not use any pronouns, and this is what they — the whole discussion was about, was about the practice of allyship. That no one gets to say like, “I am an ally! So I am done!” Like it’s not about what this identity, it’s about how do you continue to practice allyship. KL Exactly. It’s like — it really, truly is a practice. It’s like all things that you, you know, I’m — at least I know for myself that I want to get good at, you know, between yoga, and just being a, you know, a better friend and publisher and coworker. It’s— it really, truly takes practice. And you have to be — you have to be aware of that. STAN Yeah, and it takes like that, like what you talked about earlier, Sara, that constant, the constant practice and I think when we’re in community with other people, we’re all practicing our allyship to marginalized people, and marginalized communities, there has to be a practice of forgiveness as well. Like grace, for us as individuals, and the practice of forgiveness for each other. Like I wouldn’t know anything I know if somebody didn’t tell me I was wrong if somebody didn’t like — wouldn’t forgive me, and like didn’t cast me out of their life because I made a mistake, but it also has to come from a place of like being willing to sit around and like shut up sometimes. SWB So as somebody who has gotten more comfortable bringing your whole identity to work, and who has kind of gone through some of those scary parts, what would you tell someone or what advice would you have for somebody who is thinking about some of the same things, about being able to be more of their authentic selves in their professional environments and being able to kind of fuse maybe some of the stuff that they’ve kept personal or private with the way that they present professionally. [49:40] STAN Hmm. What would I tell someone? I think the first thing I would want to make sure is that person feels safe. And I know this word like “safe” or “safety” gets thrown around a lot. But, quite honestly, what are your risks and dangers? And what violence may you face if you fully — if you bring yourself fully? And this is me speaking from a position of privilege of where I am able to bring myself to work, where every part of me is at least, at the very least, recognized and acknowledged. And then I would say: surround yourself in community and with allies to support you through it. I don’t think I could do it if I didn’t think — like I don’t think I could show up, assert my name, assert my pronouns, talk about my politics, if I thought that I would be attacked in any way, or punished in any way. And so that — that’s sort of required first. Make sure you’re safe and make sure you have support. And then, like show up and be real. This — it’s, again, cheesy sayings but I was tweeting, I tweeted about it this morning. But this idea of like nobody — I don’t know anything other than my own experience and I have so little that I know, but all I know is like myself. And so if I show up at work as myself, then I’m in a state of being in my greatest power. And I think if you can find a workplace where they want you to be there in your greatest power, then like, yeah, show up. This is how you do it. KL I love that. STAN Does that help? SWB That’s so great. That is so great. Yeah. So, very last question then is you mentioned safety and the importance for people who are going to do something vulnerable, whether that’s you know coming out at work or anything else, to feel like they have some sense of safety. So what can listeners do who feel like they can — they have some power in their workplace or in the organizations they’re part of, to help foster that safety for people. Like what are some of the ways that we can ensure that more of the people that we work with feel safe around us? STAN Well I think for people of marginalized identities, yeah, showing up so that you can be that example, so that you can be another person who like makes someone feel safe because you see someone who’s similar to you. That’s one way. But if you aren’t, like if you are someone who is in a position of privilege and power, gosh, like: not punishing people. How do you make — how do you make that space? Inviting it? Educating yourself? Like and making it — like I’ll bring it back to the beginning: like making it personal. I think if you genuinely care about the people in your company, then these are things worth learning about and these are things worth like not just acknowledging and recognizing and forgiving, for some reason, like if you think it’s wrong and you “forgive” them for this thing. Like get past that point where you can love them for that. [55:08] STAN I think that’s it. FYOTW SWB I have a pretty important Fuck Yeah tonight. It’s the Fuck Yeah to the um real champagne that Katel brought over today. KL Uh we have to take this moment to say a little “Fuck yeah” to ourselves because we made it onto the New and Noteworthy in Apple Podcasts and I’m really excited because we are a little, indie podcast that we started because we just really wanted to talk to each other and see where this went and, I’m psyched. SWB We started talking a while back about how much we were really hoping we could get onto the New and Noteworthy list because it’s a really good way to get new audience, and have people kind of be aware of you, plus it just feels good to know that what you’re doing is working. And, when I started looking at the other shows that were on there, almost all of them were supported by a bigger brand. It was like a podcast coming from Gimlet, or a podcast coming from Slate, or some other organization that was backing them and funding them, and so it’s a kind of a big deal to have a podcast like this that’s completely independently run be able to make it onto that list. Or at least, it feels like a big deal to me. JL Fuck yeah! It’s a big deal! KL Feels like a huge deal. SWB And I was also thinking about how much of a big deal to see a podcast ran by women, and more podcast run by women coming out because I feel like for a long time, there were just so few. I remember seeing a stat the other day that was like something like 70 percent of podcasts are run by men. And I don’t know if that’s true. Like it wasn’t the kind of stat that I felt like I could easily back up. But it is something that’s talked about quite a lot in the industry is just how male-dominated podcasting is. And how almost all of the biggest name podcasts are run by men. And, you know, there’s some really great podcasts run by men. It’s not like there aren’t but like man, there are so many interesting women doing interesting things. And I would love to hear from more of them. And, like, that’s what we’re doing. JL Yeah! I mean, also, fuck yeah women’s history month! And with that in mind I just started looking — I went a little Google-wild again and I just started looking at all these like, you know there’s all these lists, it’s the internet; of course there’s lists. But I just started looking into more like women-run podcasts and I just started going through them all — and I just — I have so many queued up right now. I’m so excited to listen to them all because I feel like, again, the more we support each other as women podcasters, the more that we get our — like we share our message! And we keep listening to each other and raising each other up! So it’s been so fun to try to listen to some of these other podcasts also. Katel, I know that you have been like super into one recently. KL Yeah, I gotta be honest: I’m actively looking for more podcasts that are just basically more diverse voices. And one that I really like lately is by a music artist that I just really love, her name is Lizzo. And if you don’t know her, just Spotify that shit immediately because it will make you feel good and it’s totally worth it. But she has a new podcast, that I think launched like right around the same time ours did, which is so cool, and it’s on Spotify. She describes it as, “A safe space for the baddest women in music.” She’s an alternative rapper, she sits down with iconic queens and rising stars and basically sets the record straight on making a name in a very male-dominated world in music. So I just love that. I love her. I’m so happy that I get to hear her not only sing but also talk and talk with other women. JL What’s the podcast called? KL Sorry, I should’ve said that! It’s called Good As Hell which is also just a really fucking good name. And yeah it’s really inspiring and you should take a listen. JL Maybe we could do a crossover episode: No, You Good. KL That would be amazing! SWB I love this whole concept because it feels like a sister podcast to No, You Go. Because I think that that’s really like — similar stuff we’re trying to do. Obviously we don’t have as many connections in music but if any, like, musical stars want to be on our show, that’s great. JL Kesha! [Ahem.] SWB Kesha is definitely like Jen’s number one dream guest. She’s literally on a spreadsheet right now. But I think that — that’s a lot of the same stuff that we’re trying to talk about, right? It’s like who are the most badass women and non-binary people we have encountered in our professional lives who are doing great things and who have something to say to the world? And how can we talk about ways to elevate their voices and make spaces that are more inclusive? So fuck yeah to women-run podcasts. JL Fuck yeah! KL Fuck yeah on New and Noteworthy. [59:59] JL Well, that’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go! The show about being ambitious— and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing on our podcast, we would love it if you subscribed and rated us on Apple Podcast where we’ve been New and Noteworthy! And fuck yeah! New and Noteworthy! Deserved! Your support really helps us spread the word. We’ll be back next week with another great guest.

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