Podcasts about sara it

Sara and Heather dive into what it means when that initial "spark" from early sobriety fades—and how to get it back. Whether you're 30 days in or six years alcohol-free, this episode is for anyone who's ever wondered, "Why doesn't this feel exciting anymore?" In this episode, we cover:

How can you enjoy life if you constantly worry about the others you are responsible for? This is the last episode in the Case Study of Sara- It has a great ending!

Have you tried meditation? There are studies that show many benefits of meditation including lowering your blood pressure, improving your quality of life, and allowing you to become more present. For people suffering with anxiety or other mental health issues, meditation could be key to unlocking your unconscious mind, understanding yourself better, and healing. In this episode of From Survivor to Thriver, we sat down with Sara Webb who has experienced her own healing journey through meditation and now works with others to help them find their inner power.Sara Webb is an author, speaker, and meditation coach. She collaborates with successful leaders with closet anxiety to take back control of their lives by teaching them to relax, so they can have more energy, and focus on what's important. Sara empowers clients with high-functioning anxiety to find their own inner resources, their power within. She teaches pocket-sized techniques to process stress, improve daily happiness, and bring the best versions of themselves to their own lives. Her book “LOOK LUSH” is a collection of poetry outlining her rise from the ashes after a multi-man rape, coming out of the closet, and getting sober / healing addiction through the power within us in conjunction with nature. Sara has a master's degree in Educational Leadership from Purdue, bachelor's degrees from LSU, and has been an entrepreneur since 2015. She lives in sunny Florida, traveling internationally for workshops and speaking engagements.   In today's episode, we cover: How Sara started exploring the healing power of meditationHow to practice your inward spiral and become more present The positive impact meditation can have on your lifeHow your brain reacts to trauma and how meditation helpsThe empowerment we feel from solving our own problemsWhy we shouldn't take things personally How our perception impacts what happens in our livesThe way that Sara helps transform the lives of her clients The different types of meditation and how to find the right one for youWe hope you enjoyed our conversation with Sara! If you want to learn more about meditation or working with her, make sure to visit her website, find her on Instagram, and find her on LinkedIn. Thanks again for tuning in. We are so grateful to each and every one of you. Please remember to leave a rating and review of our show. It helps us grow and reach those who need it. Also, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Links: Visit her websiteFollow her on InstagramConnect with her on LinkedInVisit our websiteFollow us on FacebookFollow us on InstagramGet in touch: amgits.reverse@gmail.com“We are the only ones who can bring ourselves from darkness into light” -Sara “​​It was meditation and sitting with myself with my eyes closed that allowed me to start to see myself from the inside.” -Sara “Many of us suffer alone needlessly.” -Erik “We all feel a little afloat and things don't seem to make sense, but maybe it's giving us permission to make sense of it ourselves.” -Marc 

Sara is a team lead at thoughtbot. She talks about her experience as a professor at Kanazawa Technical College, giant LAN parties in Rochester, transitioning from Java to Ruby, shining a light on maintainers, and her closing thoughts on RubyConf. Recorded at RubyConf 2023 in San Diego. -- A few topics covered: Being an Assistant Arofessor in Kanazawa Teaching naming, formatting, and style Differences between students in Japan vs US Technical terms and programming resources in Japanese LAN parties at Rochester Transitioning from Java to Ruby Consulting The forgotten maintainer RubyConf Other links Sara's mastodon thoughtbot This Week in Open Source testdouble Ruby Central Scholars and Guides Program City Museum Japan International College of Technology Kanazawa RubyKaigi Applying mruby to World-first Small SAR Satellite (Japanese lightning talk) (mruby in space) Rochester Rochester Institute of Technology Electronic Gaming Society Tora-con Strong National Museum of Play Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. [00:00:00] Jeremy: I'm here at RubyConf, San Diego, with Sara Jackson, thank you for joining me today. [00:00:05] Sara: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. [00:00:07] Jeremy: Sara right now you're working at, ThoughtBot, as a, as a Ruby developer, is that right? [00:00:12] Sara: Yes, that is correct. Teaching in Japan [00:00:14] Jeremy: But I think before we kind of talk about that, I mean, we're at a Ruby conference, but something that I, I saw, on your LinkedIn that I thought was really interesting was that you were teaching, I think, programming in. Kanazawa, for a couple years. [00:00:26] Sara: Yeah, that's right. So for those that don't know, Kanazawa is a city on the west coast of Japan. If you draw kind of a horizontal line across Japan from Tokyo, it's, it's pretty much right there on the west coast. I was an associate professor in the Global Information and Management major, which is basically computer science or software development. (laughs) Yep. [00:00:55] Jeremy: Couldn't tell from the title. [00:00:56] Sara: You couldn't. No.. so there I was teaching classes for a bunch of different languages and concepts from Java to Python to Unix and Bash scripting, just kind of all over. [00:01:16] Jeremy: And did you plan the curriculum yourself, or did they have anything for you? [00:01:21] Sara: It depended on the class that I was teaching. So some of them, I was the head teacher. In that case, I would be planning the class myself, the... lectures the assignments and grading them, et cetera. if I was assisting on a class, then usually it would, I would be doing grading and then helping in the class. Most of the classes were, uh, started with a lecture and then. Followed up with a lab immediately after, in person. [00:01:54] Jeremy: And I think you went to, is it University of Rochester? [00:01:58] Sara: Uh, close. Uh, Rochester Institute of Technology. So, same city. Yeah. [00:02:03] Jeremy: And so, you were studying computer science there, is that right? [00:02:07] Sara: I, I studied computer science there, but I got a minor in Japanese language. and that's how, that's kind of my origin story of then teaching in Kanazawa. Because Rochester is actually the sister city with Kanazawa. And RIT has a study abroad program for Japanese learning students to go study at KIT, Kanazawa Institute of Technology, in Kanazawa, do a six week kind of immersive program. And KIT just so happens to be under the same board as the school that I went to teach at. [00:02:46] Jeremy: it's great that you can make that connection and get that opportunity, yeah. [00:02:49] Sara: Absolutely. Networking! [00:02:52] Jeremy: And so, like, as a student in Rochester, you got to see how, I suppose, computer science education was there. How did that compare when you went over to Kanazawa? [00:03:02] Sara: I had a lot of freedom with my curriculum, so I was able to actually lean on some of the things that I learned, some of the, the way that the courses were structured that I took, I remember as a freshman in 2006, one of the first courses that we took, involved, learning Unix, learning the command line, things like that. I was able to look up some of the assignments and some of the information from that course that I took to inform then my curriculum for my course, [00:03:36] Jeremy: That's awesome. Yeah. and I guess you probably also remember how you felt as a student, so you know like what worked and maybe what didn't. [00:03:43] Sara: Absolutely. And I was able to lean on that experience as well as knowing. What's important and what, as a student, I didn't think was important. Naming, formatting, and style [00:03:56] Jeremy: So what were some examples of things that were important and some that weren't? [00:04:01] Sara: Mm hmm. For Java in particular, you don't need any white space between any of your characters, but formatting and following the general Guidelines of style makes your code so much easier to read. It's one of those things that you kind of have to drill into your head through muscle memory. And I also tried to pass that on to my students, in their assignments that it's. It's not just to make it look pretty. It's not just because I'm a mean teacher. It is truly valuable for future developers that will end up reading your code. [00:04:39] Jeremy: Yeah, I remember when I went through school. The intro professor, they would actually, they would print out our code and they would mark it up with red pen, basically like a writing assignment and it would be like a bad variable name and like, white space shouldn't be here, stuff like that. And, it seems kind of funny now, but, it actually makes it makes a lot of sense. [00:04:59] Sara: I did that. [00:04:59] Jeremy: Oh, nice. [00:05:00] Sara: I did that for my students. They were not happy about it. (laughs) [00:05:04] Jeremy: Yeah, at that time they're like, why are you like being so picky, right? [00:05:08] Sara: Exactly. But I, I think back to my student, my experience as a student. in some of the classes I've taken, not even necessarily computer related, the teachers that were the sticklers, those lessons stuck the most for me. I hated it at the time. I learned a lot. [00:05:26] Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. so I guess that's an example of things that, that, that matter. The, the aesthetics or the visual part for understanding. What are some things that they were teaching that you thought like, Oh, maybe this isn't so important. [00:05:40] Sara: Hmm. Pause for effect. (laughs) So I think that there wasn't necessarily Any particular class or topic that I didn't feel was as valuable, but there was some things that I thought were valuable that weren't emphasized very well. One of the things that I feel very strongly about, and I'm sure those of you out there can agree. in RubyWorld, that naming is important. The naming of your variables is valuable. It's useful to have something that's understood. and there were some other teachers that I worked with that didn't care so much in their assignments. And maybe the labs that they assigned had less than useful names for things. And that was kind of a disappointment for me. [00:06:34] Jeremy: Yeah, because I think it's maybe hard to teach, a student because a lot of times you are writing these short term assignments and you have it pass the test or do the thing and then you never look at it again. [00:06:49] Sara: Exactly. [00:06:50] Jeremy: So you don't, you don't feel that pain. Yeah, [00:06:53] Sara: Mm hmm. But it's like when you're learning a new spoken language, getting the foundations correct is super valuable. [00:07:05] Jeremy: Absolutely. Yeah. And so I guess when you were teaching in Kanazawa, was there anything you did in particular to emphasize, you know, these names really matter because otherwise you or other people are not going to understand what you were trying to do here? [00:07:22] Sara: Mm hmm. When I would walk around class during labs, kind of peek over the shoulders of my students, look at what they're doing, it's... Easy to maybe point out at something and be like, well, what is this? I can't tell what this is doing. Can you tell me what this does? Well, maybe that's a better name because somebody else who was looking at this, they won't know, I don't know, you know, it's in your head, but you will not always be working solo. my school, a big portion of the students went on to get technical jobs from after right after graduating. it was when you graduated from the school that I was teaching at, KTC, it was the equivalent of an associate's degree. Maybe 50 percent went off to a tech job. Maybe 50 percent went on to a four year university. And, and so as students, it hadn't. Connected with them always yet that oh, this isn't just about the assignment. This is also about learning how to interact with my co workers in the future. Differences between students [00:08:38] Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, I think It's hard, but, group projects are kind of always, uh, that's kind of where you get to work with other people and, read other people's code, but there's always that potential imbalance of where one person is like, uh, I know how to do this. I'll just do it. Right? So I'm not really sure how to solve that problem. Yeah. [00:09:00] Sara: Mm hmm. That's something that I think probably happens to some degree everywhere, but man, Japan really has groups, group work down. They, that's a super generalization. For my students though, when you would put them in a group, they were, they were usually really organized about who was going to do what and, kept on each other about doing things maybe there were some students that were a little bit more slackers, but it was certainly not the kind of polarized dichotomy you would usually see in an American classroom. [00:09:39] Jeremy: Yeah. I've been on both sides. I've been the person who did the work and the slacker. [00:09:44] Sara: Same. [00:09:46] Jeremy: And, uh, I feel bad about it now, but, uh, [00:09:50] Sara: We did what we had to do. [00:09:52] Jeremy: We all got the degree, so we're good. that is interesting, though. I mean, was there anything else, like, culturally different, you felt, from, you know, the Japanese university? [00:10:04] Sara: Yes. Absolutely. A lot of things. In American university, it's kind of the first time in a young person's life, usually, where they have the freedom to choose what they learn, choose where they live, what they're interested in. And so there's usually a lot of investment in your study and being there, being present, paying attention to the lecture. This is not to say that Japanese college students were the opposite. But the cultural feeling is college is your last time to have fun before you enter the real world of jobs and working too many hours. And so the emphasis on paying Super attention or, being perfect in your assignments. There was, there was a scale. There were some students that were 100 percent there. And then there were some students that were like, I'm here to get a degree and maybe I'm going to sleep in class a little bit. (laughs) That is another major difference, cultural aspect. In America, if you fall asleep in a meeting, you fall asleep in class, super rude. Don't do it. In Japan, if you take a nap at work, you take a nap in class, not rude. It's actually viewed as a sign of you are working really hard. You're usually working maybe late into the night. You're not getting enough sleep. So the fact that you need to take maybe a nap here or two here or there throughout the day means that you have put dedication in. [00:11:50] Jeremy: Even if the reason you're asleep is because you were playing games late at night. [00:11:54] Sara: Yep. [00:11:55] Jeremy: But they don't know that. [00:11:56] Sara: Yeah. But it's usually the case for my students. [00:11:59] Jeremy: Okay. I'm glad they were having fun at least [00:12:02] Sara: Me too. Why she moved back [00:12:04] Jeremy: That sounds like a really interesting experience. You did it for about two years? Three years. [00:12:12] Sara: So I had a three year contract with an option to extend up to five, although I did have a There were other teachers in my same situation who were actually there for like 10 years, so it was flexible. [00:12:27] Jeremy: Yeah. So I guess when you made the decision to, to leave, what was sort of your, your thinking there? [00:12:35] Sara: My fiance was in America [00:12:37] Jeremy: Good. [00:12:37] Sara: he didn't want to move to Japan [00:12:39] Jeremy: Good, reason. [00:12:39] Sara: Yeah, he was waiting three years patiently for me. [00:12:44] Jeremy: Okay. Okay. my heart goes out there . He waited patiently. [00:12:49] Sara: We saw each other. We, we were very lucky enough to see each other every three or four months in person. Either I would visit America or he would come visit me in Kanazawa. [00:12:59] Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. You, you couldn't convince him to, to fall in love with the country. [00:13:03] Sara: I'm getting there [00:13:04] Jeremy: Oh, you're getting Oh, [00:13:05] Sara: it's, We're making, we're making way. [00:13:07] Jeremy: Good, that's good. So are you taking like, like yearly trips or something, or? [00:13:11] Sara: That was, that was always my intention when I moved back so I moved back in the Spring of 2018 to America and I did visit. In 2019, the following year, so I could attend the graduation ceremony for the last group of students that I taught. [00:13:26] Jeremy: That's so sweet. [00:13:27] Sara: And then I had plans to go in 2020. We know what happened in 2020 [00:13:32] Jeremy: Yeah. [00:13:33] Sara: The country did not open to tourism again until the fall of 2022. But I did just make a trip last month. [00:13:40] Jeremy: Nice [00:13:40] Sara: To see some really good friends for the first time in four years. [00:13:43] Jeremy: Amazing, yeah. Where did you go? [00:13:46] Sara: I did a few days in Tokyo. I did a few days in Niigata cause I was with a friend who studied abroad there. And then a few days in Kanazawa. [00:13:56] Jeremy: That's really cool, yeah. yeah, I had a friend who lived there, but they were teaching English, yeah. And, I always have a really good time when I'm out there, yeah. [00:14:08] Sara: Absolutely. If anyone out there visiting wants to go to Japan, this is your push. Go do it. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I will help you plan. [00:14:17] Jeremy: Nice, nice. Um, yeah, I, I, I would say the same. Like, definitely, if you're thinking about it, go. And, uh, sounds like Sara will hook you up. [00:14:28] Sara: Yep, I'm your travel guide. Technical terms in Japanese [00:14:31] Jeremy: So you, you studied, uh, you, you said you had a minor in Japanese? Yeah. So, so when you were teaching there, were you teaching classes in English or was it in Japanese? [00:14:42] Sara: It was a mix. Uh, when I was hired, the job description was no Japanese needed. It was a very, like, Global, international style college, so there was a huge emphasis on learning English. They wanted us to teach only in English. My thought was, it's hard enough learning computer science in your native language, let alone a foreign language, so my lectures were in English, but I would assist the labs in japanese [00:15:14] Jeremy: Oh, nice. Okay. And then, so you were basically fluent then at the time. Middle. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, well, I think if you're able to, to help people, you know, in labs and stuff, and it's a technical topic, right? So that's gotta be kind of a, an interesting challenge [00:15:34] Sara: I did learn a lot of new computer vocabulary. Yes. [00:15:39] Jeremy: So the words are, like, a lot of them are not the same? Or, you know, for, for specifically related to programming, I guess. [00:15:46] Sara: Hmm. Yeah, there are Japanese specific words. There's a lot of loan words that we use. We. Excuse me. There's a lot of loan words that Japanese uses for computer terms, but there's plenty that are just in Japanese. For example, uh, an array is hairetsu. [00:16:08] Jeremy: Okay. [00:16:08] Sara: And like a screen or the display that your monitor is a gamen, but a keyboard would be keyboard... Kībōdo, probably. [00:16:20] Jeremy: Yeah. So just, uh, so that, they use that as a loan word, I guess. But I'm not sure why not the other two. [00:16:27] Sara: Yeah, it's a mystery. [00:16:29] Jeremy: So it's just, it's just a total mix. Yeah. I'm just picturing you thinking like, okay, is it the English word or is it the Japanese word? You know, like each time you're thinking of a technical term. Yeah. [00:16:39] Sara: Mm hmm. I mostly, I, I I went to the internet. I searched for Japanese computer term dictionary website, and kind of just studied the terms. I also paid a lot of attention to the Japanese professors when they were teaching, what words they were using. Tried to integrate. Also, I was able to lean on my study abroad, because it was a technical Japanese, like there were classes that we took that was on technical Japanese. Computer usage, and also eco technology, like green technology. So I had learned a bunch of them previously. [00:17:16] Jeremy: Mm. So was that for like a summer or a year or something [00:17:20] Sara: It was six weeks [00:17:21] Jeremy: Six weeks. [00:17:21] Sara: During the summer, [00:17:22] Jeremy: Got it. So that's okay. So like, yeah, that must have been an experience like going to, I'm assuming that's the first time you had been [00:17:30] Sara: It was actually the second time [00:17:31] Jeremy: The second [00:17:32] Sara: Yeah. That was in 2010 that I studied abroad. [00:17:35] Jeremy: And then the classes, they were in Japanese or? Yeah. Yeah. That's, uh, that's, that's full immersion right there. [00:17:42] Sara: It was, it was very funny in the, in the very first lesson of kind of just the general language course, there was a student that was asking, I, how do I say this? I don't know this. And she was like, Nihongo de. [00:17:55] Jeremy: Oh (laughs) ! [00:17:56] Sara: You must, must ask your question only in [00:17:59] Jeremy: Yeah, Programming resources in Japanesez [00:17:59] Jeremy: yeah. yeah. That's awesome. So, so it's like, I guess the, the professors, they spoke English, but they were really, really pushing you, like, speak Japanese. Yeah, that's awesome. and maybe this is my bias because I'm an English native, but when you look up. Resources, like you look up blog posts and Stack Overflow and all this stuff. It's all in English, right? So I'm wondering for your, your students, when, when they would search, like, I got this error, you know, what do I do about it? Are they looking at the English pages or are they, you know, you know what I mean? [00:18:31] Sara: There are Japanese resources that they would use. They love Guguru (Google) sensei. [00:18:36] Jeremy: Ah okay. Okay. [00:18:38] Sara: Um, but yeah, there are plenty of Japanese language stack overflow equivalents. I'm not sure if they have stack overflow specifically in Japanese. But there are sites like that, that they, that they used. Some of the more invested students would also use English resources, but that was a minority. [00:19:00] Jeremy: Interesting. So there's a, there's a big enough community, I suppose, of people posting and answering questions and stuff where it's, you don't feel like, there aren't people doing the same thing as you out there. [00:19:14] Sara: Absolutely. Yeah. There's, a large world of software development in Japan, that we don't get to hear. There are questions and answers over here because of that language barrier. [00:19:26] Jeremy: Yeah. I would be, like, kind of curious to, to see, the, the languages and the types of problems they have, if they were similar or if it's, like, I don't know, just different. [00:19:38] Sara: Yeah, now I'm interested in that too, and I bet you there is a lot of research that we could do on Ruby, since Ruby is Japanese. [00:19:51] Jeremy: Right. cause something I've, I've often heard is that, when somebody says they're working with Ruby, Here in, um, the United States, a lot of times people assume it's like, Oh, you're doing a Rails app, [00:20:02] Sara: Mm hmm. [00:20:03] Jeremy: Almost, almost everybody who's using Ruby, not everyone, but you know, the majority I think are using it because of Rails. And I've heard that in Japan, there's actually a lot more usage that's, that's not tied to Rails. [00:20:16] Sara: I've also heard that, and I get the sense of that from RubyKaigi as well. Which I have never been lucky enough to attend. But, yeah, the talks that come out of RubyKaigi, very technical, low to the metal of Ruby, because there's that community that's using it for things other than Rails, other than web apps. [00:20:36] Jeremy: Yeah, I think, one of the ones, I don't know if it was a talk or not, but, somebody was saying that there is Ruby in space. [00:20:42] Sara: That's awesome. Ruby's everywhere. LAN parties in college [00:20:44] Jeremy: So yeah, I guess like another thing I saw, during your time at Rochester is you were, involved with like, there's like a gaming club I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your experience with that. [00:20:55] Sara: Absolutely, I can. So, at RIT, I was an executive board member for three or four years at the Electronic Gaming Society. EGS for short, uh, we hosted weekly console game nights in, the student alumni union area, where there's open space, kind of like a cafeteria. We also hosted quarterly land parties, and we would actually get people from out of state sometimes who weren't even students to come. Uh, and we would usually host the bigger ones in the field house, which is also where concerts are held. And we would hold the smaller ones in conference rooms. I think when I started in 2006, the, the, the LANs were pretty small, maybe like 50, 50 people bring your, your, your huge CRT monitor tower in. [00:21:57] Jeremy: Oh yeah, [00:21:57] Sara: In And then by the time I left in 2012. we were over 300 people for a weekend LAN party, um, and we were actually drawing more power than concerts do. [00:22:13] Jeremy: Incredible. what were, what were people playing at the time? Like when they would the LANs like, [00:22:18] Sara: Yep. Fortnite, early League of Legends, Call of Duty. Battlegrounds. And then also just like fun indie games like Armagedtron, which is kind of like a racing game in the style of [00:22:37] Jeremy: okay. Oh, okay, [00:22:39] Sara: Um, any, there are some like fun browser games where you could just mess with each other. Jackbox. Yeah. [00:22:49] Jeremy: Yeah, it's, it's interesting that, you know, you're talking about stuff like Fortnite and, um, what is it? Battlegrounds is [00:22:55] Sara: not Fortnite. Team Fortress. [00:22:58] Jeremy: Oh Team Fortress! [00:22:59] Sara: Sorry. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I got my, my names mixed up. Fortnite, I think, did not exist at the time, but Team Fortress was big. [00:23:11] Jeremy: Yeah. that's really cool that you're able to get such a big group there. is there something about Rochester, I guess, that that was able to bring together this many people for like these big LAN events? Because I'm... I mean, I'm not sure how it is elsewhere, but I feel like that's probably not what was happening elsewhere in the country. [00:23:31] Sara: Yeah, I mean, if you've ever been to, um, DreamHack, that's, that's a huge LAN party and game convention, that's fun. so... EGS started in the early 2000s, even before I joined, and was just a committed group of people. RIT was a very largely technical school. The majority of students were there for math, science, engineering, or they were in the computer college, [00:24:01] Jeremy: Oh, okay. [00:24:01] Sara: GCIS, G C C I S, the Gossano College of Computing and Information Sciences. So there was a lot of us there. [00:24:10] Jeremy: That does make sense. I mean, it's, it's sort of this, this bias that when there's people doing, uh, technical stuff like software, um, you know, and just IT, [00:24:21] Sara: Mm hmm. [00:24:23] Jeremy: there's kind of this assumption that's like, oh, maybe they play games. And it seems like that was accurate [00:24:27] Sara: It was absolutely accurate. And there were plenty of people that came from different majors. but when I started, there were 17, 000 students and so that's a lot of students and obviously not everyone came to our weekly meetings, but we had enough dedicated people that were on the eboard driving, You know, marketing and advertising for, for our events and things like that, that we were able to get, the good community going. I, I wasn't part of it, but the anime club at RIT is also huge. They run a convention every year that is huge, ToraCon, um. And I think it's just kind of the confluence of there being a lot of geeks and nerds on campus and Rochester is a college town. There's maybe like 10 other universities in [00:25:17] Jeremy: Well, sounds like it was a good time. [00:25:19] Sara: Absolutely would recommend. Strong Museum of Play [00:25:22] Jeremy: I've never, I've never been, but the one thing I have heard about Rochester is there's the, the Strong Museum of Play. [00:25:29] Sara: Yeah, that place is so much fun, even as an adult. It's kind of like, um, the, the Children's Museum in Indiana for, for those that might know that. it just has all the historical toys and pop culture and interactive exhibits. It's so fun. [00:25:48] Jeremy: it's not quite the same, but it, when you were mentioning the Children's Museum in, um, I think it's in St. Louis, there's, uh, it's called the City Museum and it's like a, it's like a giant playground, you know, indoors, outdoors, and it's not just for kids, right? And actually some of this stuff seems like kind of sketch in terms of like, you could kind of hurt yourself, you know, climbing [00:26:10] Sara: When was this made? [00:26:12] Jeremy: I'm not sure, but, uh, [00:26:14] Sara: before regulations maybe. ha. [00:26:16] Jeremy: Yeah. It's, uh, but it's really cool. So at the, at the Museum of Play, though, is it, There's like a video game component, right? But then there's also, like, other types of things, [00:26:26] Sara: Yeah, they have, like, a whole section of the museum that's really, really old toys on display, like, 1900s, 1800s. Um, they have a whole Sesame Street section, and other things like that. Yeah. From Java to Ruby [00:26:42] Jeremy: Check it out if you're in Rochester. maybe now we could talk a little bit about, so like now you're working at Thoughtbot as a Ruby developer. but before we started recording, you were telling me that you started, working with Java. And there was like a, a long path I suppose, you know, changing languages. So maybe you can talk a little bit about your experience there. [00:27:06] Sara: Yeah. for other folks who have switched languages, this might be a familiar story for you, where once you get a job in one technology or one stack, one language, you kind of get typecast after a while. Your next job is probably going to be in the same language, same stack. Companies, they hire based on technology and So, it might be hard, even if you've been playing around with Ruby in your free time, to break, make that barrier jump from one language to another, one stack to another. I mean, these technologies, they can take a little while to ramp up on. They can be a little bit different, especially if you're going from a non object oriented language to an object oriented, don't. Lose hope. (laughs) If you have an interest in Ruby and you're not a Rubyist right now, there's a good company for you that will give you a chance. That's the key that I learned, is as a software developer, the skills that you have that are the most important are not the language that you know. It's the type of thinking that you do, the problem solving, communication, documentation, knowledge sharing, Supporting each other, and as Saron the keynote speaker on Wednesday said, the, the word is love. [00:28:35] Jeremy: [00:28:35] Sara: So when I was job hunting, it was really valuable for me to include those important aspects in my skill, in my resume, in my CV, in my interviews, that like, I'm newer to this language because I had learned it at a rudimentary level before. Never worked in it really professionally for a long time. Um, when I was applying, it was like, look, I'm good at ramping up in technologies. I have been doing software for a long time, and I'm very comfortable with the idea of planning, documenting, problem solving. Give me a chance, please. I was lucky enough to find my place at a company that would give me a chance. Test Double hired me in 2019 as a remote. Software Consultant, and it changed my life. [00:29:34] Jeremy: What, what was it about, Ruby that I'm assuming that this is something that you maybe did in your spare time where you were playing with Ruby or? [00:29:43] Sara: I am one of those people that don't really code in their spare time, which I think is valuable for people to say. The image of a software developer being, well, if you're not coding in your spare time, then you're not passionate about it. That's a myth. That's not true. Some of us, we have other hobbies. I have lots of hobbies. Coding is not the one that I carry outside of the workplace, usually, but, I worked at a company called Constant Contact in 2014 and 2015. And while I was there, I was able to learn Ruby on Rails. [00:30:23] Jeremy: Oh, okay. So that was sort of, I guess, your experience there, on the job. I guess you enjoyed something about the language or something about Rails and then that's what made you decide, like, I would really love to, to... do more of this [00:30:38] Sara: Absolutely. It was amazing. It's such a fun language. The first time I heard about it was in college, maybe 2008 or 2009. And I remember learning, this looks like such a fun language. This looks like it would be so interesting to learn. And I didn't think about it again until 2014. And then I was programming in it. Coming from a Java mindset and it blew my mind, the Rails magic also, I was like, what is happening? This is so cool. Because of my typecasting sort of situation of Java, I wasn't able to get back to it until 2019. And I don't want to leave. I'm so happy. I love the language. I love the community. It's fun. [00:31:32] Jeremy: I can totally see that. I mean, when I first tried out Rails, yeah, it, like, you mentioned the magic, and I know some people are like, ah, I don't like the magic, but when, I think, once I saw what you could do, And how, sort of, little you needed to write, and the fact that so many projects kind of look the same. Um, yeah, that really clicked for me, and I really appreciated that. think that and the Rails console. I think the console is amazing. [00:32:05] Sara: Being able to just check real quick. Hmm, I wonder if this will work. Wait, no, I can check right now. I [00:32:12] Jeremy: And I think that's an important point you brought up too, about, like, not... the, the stereotype and I, I kind of, you know, showed it here where I assumed like, Oh, you were doing Java and then you moved to Ruby. It must've been because you were doing Ruby on the side and thought like, Oh, this is cool. I want to do it for my job. but I, I thought that's really cool that you were able to, not only that you, you don't do the programming stuff outside of work, but that you were able to, to find an opportunity where you could try something different, you know, in your job where you're still being paid. And I wonder, was there any, was there any specific intention behind, like, when you took that job, it was so that I can try something different, or did it just kind of happen? I'm curious what your... The appeal of consulting [00:32:58] Sara: I was wanting to try something different. I also really wanted to get into consulting. [00:33:04] Jeremy: Hmm. [00:33:05] Sara: I have ADHD. And working at a product company long term, I think, was never really going to work out for me. another thing you might notice in my LinkedIn is that a lot of my stays at companies have been relatively short. Because, I don't know, I, my brain gets bored. The consultancy environment is... Perfect. You can go to different clients, different engagements, meet new people, learn a different stack, learn how other people are doing things, help them be better, and maybe every two weeks, two months, three months, six months, a year, change and do it all over again. For some people, that sounds awful. For me, it's perfect. [00:33:51] Jeremy: Yeah, I hadn't thought about that with, with consulting. cause I, I suppose, so you said it's, it's usually about half a year between projects or is It [00:34:01] Sara: varies [00:34:01] Jeremy: It varies widely. [00:34:02] Sara: Widely. I think we try to hit the sweet spot of 3-6 months. For an individual working on a project, the actual contract engagement might be longer than that, but, yeah. Maintainers don't get enough credit [00:34:13] Jeremy: Yeah. And, and your point about how some people, they like to jump on different things and some people like to, to stick to the same thing. I mean, that, that makes a lot of, sense in terms of, I think maintaining software and like building new software. It's, they're both development, [00:34:32] Sara: Mm hmm. [00:34:32] Jeremy: they're very different. Right. [00:34:35] Sara: It's so funny that you bring that up because I highly gravitate towards maintaining over making. I love going to different projects, but I have very little interest in Greenfield, very little interest in making something new. I want to get into the weeds, into 10 years that nobody wants to deal with because the weeds are so high and there's dragons in there. I want to cut it away. I want to add documentation. I want to make it better. It's so important for us to maintain our software. It doesn't get nearly enough credit. The people that work on open source, the people that are doing maintenance work on, on apps internally, externally, Upgrades, making sure dependencies are all good and safe and secure. love that stuff. [00:35:29] Jeremy: That's awesome. We, we need more of you. (laughs) [00:35:31] Sara: There's plenty of us out there, but we don't get the credit (laughs) [00:35:34] Jeremy: Yeah, because it's like with maintenance, well, I would say probably both in companies and in open source when everything is working. Then Nobody nobody knows. Nobody says anything. They're just like, Oh, that's great. It's working. And then if it breaks, then everyone's upset. [00:35:51] Sara: Exactly. [00:35:53] Jeremy: And so like, yeah, you're just there to get yelled at when something goes wrong. But when everything's going good, it's like, [00:35:59] Sara: A job well done is, I was never here. [00:36:02] Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how. To, you know, to fix that, I mean, when you think about open source maintainers, right, like a big thing is, is, is burnout, right? Where you are keeping the internet and all of our applications running and, you know, what you get for it is people yelling at you and the issues, right? [00:36:23] Sara: Yeah, it's hard. And I think I actually. Submitted a talk to RubyConf this year about this topic. It didn't get picked. That's okay. Um, we all make mistakes. I'm going to try to give it somewhere in the future, but I think one of the important things that we as an industry should strive for is giving glory. Giving support and kudos to maintenance work. I've been trying to do that. slash I have been doing that at ThoughtBot by, at some cadence. I have been putting out a blog post to the ThoughtBot blog called. This week in open source, the time period that is covered might be a week or longer in those posts. I give a summary of all of the commits that have been made to our open source projects. And the people that made those contributions with highlighting to new version releases, including patch level. And I do this. The time I, I, I took up the torch of doing this from a co worker, Mike Burns, who used to do it 10 years ago. I do this so that people can get acknowledgement for the work they do, even if it's fixing a broken link, even if it's updating some words that maybe don't make sense. All of it is valuable. [00:37:54] Jeremy: Definitely. Yeah. I mean, I, I think that, um, yeah, what's visible to people is when there's a new feature or an API change and Yeah, it's just, uh, people don't, I think a lot of people don't realize, like, how much work goes into just keeping everything running. [00:38:14] Sara: Mm hmm. Especially in the world of open source and Ruby on Rails, all the gems, there's so many different things coming out, things that suddenly this is not compatible. Suddenly you need to change something in your code because a dependency, however many steps apart has changed and it's hard work. The people that do those things are amazing. [00:38:41] Jeremy: So if anybody listening does that work, we, we appreciate you. [00:38:45] Sara: We salute you. Thank you. And if you're interested in contributing to ThoughtBot open source, we have lots of repos. There's one out there for you. Thoughts on RubyConf [00:38:54] Jeremy: You've been doing programming for quite a while, and, you're here at, at RubyConf. I wonder what kind of brings you to these, these conferences? Like, what do you get out of them? Um, I guess, how was this one? That sort of thing. [00:39:09] Sara: Well, first, this one was sick. This one was awesome. Uh, Ruby central pulled out all the stops and that DJ on Monday. In the event, in the exhibit hall. Wow. Amazing. So he told me that he was going to put his set up on Spotify, on Weedmaps Spotify, so go check it out. Anyway, I come to these conferences for people. I just love connecting with people. Those listening might notice that I'm an extrovert. I work remotely. A lot of us work remotely these days. this is an opportunity to see some of my coworkers. There's seven of us here. It's an opportunity to see people I only see at conferences, of which there are a lot. It's a chance to connect with people I've only met on Mastodon, or LinkedIn, or Stack Overflow. It's a chance to meet wonderful podcasters who are putting out great content, keeping our community alive. That's, that's the key for me. And the talks are wonderful, but honestly, they're just a side effect for me. They just come as a result of being here. [00:40:16] Jeremy: Yeah, it's kind of a unique opportunity, you know, to have so many of your, your colleagues and to just all be in the same place. And you know that anybody you talk to here, like if you talk about Ruby or software, they're not going to look at you and go like, I don't know what you're talking about. Like everybody here has at least that in common. So it's, yeah, it's a really cool experience to, to be able to chat with anybody. And it's like, You're all on the same page, [00:40:42] Sara: Mm hmm. We're all in this boat together. [00:40:45] Jeremy: Yup, that we got to keep, got to keep afloat according to matz [00:40:49] Sara: Gotta keep it afloat, yeah. [00:40:51] Jeremy: Though I was like, I was pretty impressed by like during his, his keynote and he had asked, you know, how many of you here, it's your first RubyConf and it felt like it was over half the room. [00:41:04] Sara: Yeah, I got the same sense. I was very glad to see that, very impressed. My first RubyConf was and it was the same sort of showing of [00:41:14] Jeremy: Nice, yeah. Yeah, actually, that was my first one, too. [00:41:17] Sara: Nice! [00:41:19] Jeremy: Uh, that was Nashville, Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, yeah, it's really interesting to see because, the meme online is probably like, Ah, Ruby is dead, or Rails is dead. But like you come to these conferences and yeah, there's, there's so many new people. There's like new people that are learning it and experiencing it and, you know, enjoying it the same way we are. So I, I really hope that the, the community can really, yeah, keep this going. [00:41:49] Sara: Continue, continue to grow and share. I love that we had first timer buttons, buttons where people could self identify as this is my first RubyConf and, and then that opens a conversation immediately. It's like, how are you liking it? What was your favorite talk? [00:42:08] Jeremy: Yeah, that's awesome. okay, I think that's probably a good place to start wrapping it. But is there anything else you wanted to mention or thought we should have talked about? [00:42:18] Sara: Can I do a plug for thoughtbot? [00:42:20] Jeremy: yeah, go for it. [00:42:21] Sara: Alright. For those of you out there that might not know what ThoughtBot does, we are a full software lifecycle or company lifecycle consultancy, so we do everything from market fit and rapid prototyping to MVPs to helping with developed companies, developed teams, maybe do a little bit of a Boost when you have a deadline or doing some tech debt. Pay down. We also have a DevOps team, so if you have an idea or a company or a team, you want a little bit of support, we have been around for 20 years. We are here for you. Reach out to us at thoughtbot.com. [00:43:02] Jeremy: I guess the thing about Thoughtbot is that, within the Ruby community specifically, they've been so involved with sponsorships and, and podcasts. And so, uh, when you hear about consultancies, a lot of times it's kind of like, well, I don't know, are they like any good? Do they know what they're doing? But I, I feel like, ThoughtBot has had enough, like enough of a public record. I feel It's like, okay, if you, if you hire them, um, you should be in good hands. [00:43:30] Sara: Yeah. If you have any questions about our abilities, read the blog. [00:43:35] Jeremy: It is a good blog. Sometimes when I'm, uh, searching for how to do something in Rails, it'll pop up, [00:43:40] Sara: Mm hmm. Me too. Every question I ask, one of the first results is our own blog. I'm like, oh yeah, that makes sense. [00:43:47] Jeremy: Probably the peak is if you've written the blog. [00:43:50] Sara: That has happened to my coworkers They're like, wait, I wrote a blog about this nine years ago. [00:43:55] Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. So maybe, maybe that'll happen to you soon. I, I know definitely people who do, um, Stack Overflow. And it's like, Oh, I like, this is a good answer. Oh, I wrote this. (laughs) yeah. Well, Sara, thank you so much for, for chatting with me today. [00:44:13] Sara: Absolutely, Jeremy. Thank you so much for having me. I was really glad to chat today.

[00:01] Sara: Ready to create rock solid relationships with the people that matter most to you. [00:05] Sara: You are in the right place. [00:07] Sara: My name is Sarah Payne, and I'm a master. Certified relationships coach. And each week I teach you how to create the connection and love that you desire, because you know that the quality of your life is directly related to the quality of your relationships. I'm so glad you're here. Safe episode for you, where I get to interview Marie Poulter, who is a life coach and who specializes in helping people overcome their habit of viewing ***********. And I think this episode will be really insightful for you if either you want to stop looking at *********** or you have someone in your life who wants to stop looking at ***********. Marie's take on *********** is possibly different than any other way that you've thought about it before, and I think that it's so enlightening and refreshing. So tune in to listen to how to overcome your own habit of viewing *********** or to help a loved one who also wants to overcome their *********** habit. And if you want to know more about Marie, you can find out information on her website. She has some resources there and information about how to work with her, and the website is pornographyfreedom.com. All right, I look forward to hearing about how you like this episode. [02:12] Sara: Hey, Marie, welcome to the podcast. [02:15] Marie: Thank you, Sarah. Glad to be here. [02:17] Sara: I'm so glad you're here. This has been a long time in the making. Yeah, we've been talking about this for a while. [02:23] Marie: Yes, it tell. [02:25] Sara: Will you introduce yourself to my audience? [02:28] Marie: Okay, so my name is Marie Poulter, and I am a certified life coach, but I now focus on helping people who want to stop looking at *********** stop looking at ***********. And I think that's really a big key just to start out with. It's people who want to stop. I get a lot of people who are like, will you tell my husband how bad this is? Will you tell my kids how bad this is? That's not really where we're going with our coaching business. We're not trying to do that. There are some really good organizations who are making that stuff happen, but our focus is on those who want to stop, who really have a moral compass for whatever reason. It's just morally, it's not what they want to be doing. Often they're like a high functioning, successful person who has goals and dreams and can really do good at a lot of areas in their life. And for whatever reason, they just can't quite become free from ***********. So that's who we really focus on. And I make it sound like it's men, but we do have women that we work with, and it is definitely both genders, and both genders struggle with this. Men typically are introduced to it at a younger age, and research shows that they are often introduced as early as, like, nine years old. And so my heart goes out to all the little nine year olds right now in 2023, who are devastated that there is a part of them that just hates this when they see it. And then it kind of makes me emotional. Sorry. They're devastated about it, and then they kind of like it, and they don't understand why. And so they start to develop this identity that maybe something is wrong with them. And then we're going to fast forward 20 years, and they've created a life they love. They still have this one little dirty secret, I guess, that they kind of call it, and that's the people we really, really want to help because there's so much misinformation. We were just raised in a totally crazy place about the facts around *********** view. And so I'm so excited to help people with that. [04:38] Sara: I have so many questions already. I'm writing them down because I don't want to interrupt you because you're giving so many nuggets away. But what inspired you to want to work with people who want to stop looking at ***********? [04:50] Marie: So I guess if I back up a little bit and explain where I even found life coaching from. I'm an educator. I have a teaching certification or teaching degree, and I always knew that I love teaching, but I always felt like there was going to be something more. And I would tell my husband, someday I'm going to go back and become a therapist, a counselor. I want to help people more than just teaching them. And so I continued on in my life, raised five kids, or was in the middle of raising five kids, but I noticed that a lot of things happening in my life were just kind of out of my control. I felt a lot of times like, this is just happening to me, and I don't know what to do about it. One such instance was my little son that was six, and he was really struggling with anxiety, and I was so frustrated with him. He was, of all things, anxious that I wasn't going to pick him up from school on time. I'm the mom that gets in line second or third every day. I kind of like getting there, and I'll read for a few minutes, just have some downtime, and so I would get in line and be there. There was one day of all the days of all of my kids that I can't remember, I was a few minutes late, and he had grabbed on to this little anxiety from this one day, and it was all he could see. So I came across something on Instagram that was like, you want to help your kids with anxiety, and it was free. And something happens when something's free, we tend to not do it right away. Right? [06:09] Sara: It's free. [06:10] Marie: Threw it in my inbox for a few months, and then when it kept continuing. I ended up opening it up, and I did what the suggestion was, and it was from a life coach. And Sarah, I'm not kidding. Within one day, the anxiety was just gone. And we haven't ever dealt with it again. This little guy, his name is Chase, and he's now 15, and he is so cute. With anxiety or negative feelings in general. As soon as he sees them coming, he's been trained to say, oh, there it is. And he goes through the process that we process and release emotion, and it's so cool to watch him. So when I saw that, when I saw that in him, it just turned something on in my brain, and I was like, wait a minute. Are you telling me that we have power to change our lives the way that we think, the way that the six year old thinks, that he can actually change something so drastically and affect his result? It just blew my mind. And so I started following coaching and then eventually got coached and then became a coach. And one of the biggest things that I was so excited about was this issue that I had seen in so many family members and loved ones around me. It was kind of quiet. If you look back 30 years ago, 20 years ago, even ten years ago, people with *********** issues, when we would hear about them, we would just be, like, shocked and devastated and so scared. I remember so vividly talking to a church leader about a loved one, and I was so scared for this loved one. And the church leader, in all of his, well, meaningful guidance and love, just said, you know, it's a tough one. They never overcome this. It's pretty hopeless. And I remember my stomach just sank. But there has to be something else. You can't just tell me that they're just sunk. And so when I learned about coaching, it started clicking. What if all these people aren't sunk? What if there actually is an answer for them? And maybe some of the information that we've got is wrong and maybe we can retrain our brains and we can think in a different way that creates success with this. So I had four little boys at the time and one little girl when I started coaching. And I started focusing so much on how do I help them at this tender age when I know they're going to see ***********. 91% of kids by the time they're 16 have used ***********. So we're silly as parents to think not our kids, right? [08:33] Sara: Gone are the days when we can protect them from it. [08:36] Marie: You can have every filter, you can have all the restrictions, you can have a Gab phone, which there's some great things with that, but they are going to see ***********. Research shows that it's factual. So when I started realizing that I could give my kids tools and that I could help them avoid this 2030 years down the road. Then it really started me getting excited. And then as things happen, I started coaching people individually. And I'd be coaching these men and women and they would so shamefully tell me what I've really been struggling with is ***********. I said I was coming to you for marriage coaching or just general coaching in general. And really it would come down to *********** a lot of times. And so as I coached them, it was so humbling to see that so many of the things that they thought were not even real and we could change their thinking and retrain their brain to do something completely different than they'd ever done before. So it's a multileveled process with *********** because there's a lot of emotions that they've been escaping emotion for years. But then one of the things that's really, really big is the lack of understanding of human sexuality. And this is where it got really exciting for me, because I was working with people for a couple of years with ***********, just one on one, and we were seeing great success. And then it hit me. They kept asking me questions that I really wasn't equipped with. I'm over sexualized. I just have a really high sex drive, and I have some pretty perverse ways of thinking about things. And I realized that I was a little bit out of my league. And so my husband is a physician and he's a pain management doctor and anesthesiologist. And I would ask him after I'd worked with a client, I would say, hey, tell me about this. Like with human sexuality, how does this work? How does the body work? Like that? And so he would start giving me information, and I'm like, Wait a minute. They're not hypersexualized. They're not perverted. They were created as humans. We're all created to be sexual beings. And so I brought my husband on board, and he is such a foundational part of the education for my clients because for the first time, they have so much relief. They're like, oh, I'm not disgusting. [10:55] Sara: There's nothing wrong with me. [10:56] Marie: Yeah, there's nothing wrong with me. And even teenage girls and young elementary age kids, they're not getting the information. Like, you were created to be a sexual being. And we're kind of getting that in 2023. We're getting to that place a little bit where we can recognize that that's who we are, that we're created sexually. But I feel like finally, for the first time in my life, I'm taking back sexuality from the yucky, dirty *********** industry and putting it where it belongs, that humans are created as sexual beings and there is healthy sexuality there. [11:37] Sara: Good. [11:38] Marie: So the difference, I think, is that *********** is degrading. Sexuality is not degrading. We have so many people who go into shame with *********** that's the number one thing is shame. [11:48] Sara: I was going to say is that the number one challenge that your clients face is the shame. [11:52] Marie: The number one challenge is just the shame. They are so embarrassed. And a lot of them like, if my wife knew, if my mom we hear this a lot. If my mom knew, bless their hearts. I want to say, though, too, Sarah, that most of the people who want to stop looking at *********** are incredible husbands, incredible workers, incredible students. Whatever phase of life they're in, they're incredible. They're honestly some of the strongest men that I've ever known. And so to be able to work with them and help them see this from a totally different standpoint has been so gratifying. [12:28] Sara: So how do you see this, particularly the shame around ***********? How do you see this affecting the relationships that matter most to your clients? [12:39] Marie: Wow. So research shows there was this big research study a few years ago that showed that men this was just for men. They would rather admit to having an affair if they were married, cheating on either their girlfriend or their wife right. Than they would admit to *********** viewing. [12:57] Sara: Why do you think that is? [12:59] Marie: That's mind blowing to me, right? There's so much pain we have created in our society an awful you are awful. You are disgusting. You are dirty. And don't get me wrong when I say this. I am not talking at all about abuse of any kind. We don't work with if they have a fascination with children or using someone in any way, we get them to the right sources. That's definitely not what we're doing. We are working with healthy brains who want to stop looking, but all of them will come to us and say, I'm addicted, and this is so shameful. [13:36] Sara: Okay, so that label addicted. Tell us more about that because that seems like it could be very detrimental. [13:43] Marie: It's so detrimental because addicted, that is like back to that church leader, right? Like, you have got a label on you. You may as well just put it on your forehead. It's never coming off. [13:54] Sara: And it takes away agency. Like it takes away their right to choose. [13:57] Marie: You have no power. I have multiple stories from clients saying, well, I went to a counselor, I went to a church leader, I went to a parent. And they said, studies have shown that this is harder to quit than heroin. I don't know where those studies were. They're not true. [14:14] Sara: Yeah. [14:15] Marie: Not even real. But how damaging when you hear people say, that is the plague, you have the plague. Right. That's so hard. So there is just so much shame around it. So much shame, so much fear. And then you will have different I don't know what who do I want to say that you hear different leaders of different whether they're thought groups or religious groups or whatever, saying that it's going to lead you to you're going to murder somebody or abuse somebody or you're going to ruin your whole life. That's really scary way to live. [14:53] Sara: And then we wonder why they're ashamed and don't want to tell anybody and they can't tell. [14:57] Marie: Yeah, there's a story of a why. [14:59] Sara: They'D rather admit that they're having an affair than even if they weren't, they'd. [15:02] Marie: Rather just be like, oh, it's an affair, rather than just an affair with my computer. And I get that it's a very sensitive issue. And it's really hard for a spouse or a girlfriend because there is that physical component where they feel like they're being cheated on. And so there's some education for the spouse or whoever's in the relationship with this person because they really have to if they want to be a part of this habit change, then they have some work to do on their own brains. [15:29] Sara: Can we talk about that for a second? Because I'm thinking of my listeners and of course I know that there's some that are like, I need Marie's help, and so we're going to talk about how they can get more help from you. But I'm also thinking of the spouse or the mother or the parent who's thinking like, so and so in my life that I care so much about, really needs this. They need to see that this is a problem. [15:55] Marie: Yeah. And to that, again, it has to be from the person. And we all know if you're eating chocolate cake every day and somebody else tells you you need to stop eating chocolate cake, you're not going to stop eating chocolate cake until you decide that you want to stop eating chocolate cake. But I think that sometimes we'll say the spouse right. We'll say that it's a female espouse. And your husband needs to see you're thinking. He needs to see how tough this is. If you can approach him with, I'm not going anywhere. I'm here for you. I'm going to learn as much about what's going on for you as you are. I'm willing to go all in and I'm not leaving. So often they're like, if I don't get this figured out, she said she's leaving. The shame, fear, and then my whole life is ruined. [16:43] Sara: Some tough, tough things like an ultimatum. [16:46] Marie: Too yes. [16:48] Sara: Which we want to give space for the partner who feels betrayed. [16:52] Marie: Too absolutely. There's big betrayal that happens there. But there are also things that we can do with our brain retraining us right. To look at what is a fact here. Am I really being betrayed? And then set your boundaries. Of course. Set your boundaries and figure things out together. But this is probably a little bit silly that I use this example, but I ask spouses sometimes. So let's say that you have this online shopping habit you got going on, and sometimes the husband will be like, hey, we have to stop doing this. We don't have the money for this isn't healthy. Very seldom do you hear a husband it's like, I'm leaving you if you don't quit shopping at night. [17:33] Sara: Right. [17:34] Marie: But this is tricky because they're like, no, but this is another woman. So we invite spouses, learn as much as you can. And there are coaches who coach with that. In fact, that will be part of our program, where we will have a coach that specifically works with betrayal and. [17:49] Sara: That there is a way. I just want to make sure that that spouse knows that there is a place and a space where you can be in where you actually don't make their *********** use mean anything about you. [18:02] Marie: Absolutely. It isn't about you. And that's one of the things to recognize, too. I would say that 99.9% of the clients that we work with discovered *********** and started struggling with it years and years before they met. You were going to be with yeah. And so then we put it back on the moms, and then the mom's feel terrible. Right. [18:23] Sara: I was going to say, what about the mom who's hearing this? What would you say to her? [18:27] Marie: Yeah, so the mom, if you're my age and you have four, three adult sons, right, and one that's 15, then the work is for you too. To figure out, how do I train my brain to have a relationship with this son that maybe is struggling with this? And rather than beat yourself up and be miserable about it, to train yourself to see things the way they really are, to see the facts, to see this. This didn't have anything to do with you either. [18:55] Sara: This is just one so good. I think that it is work so worth doing as a mother to separate yourself from your children's choices. For all the moms out there, that is work worth doing. And I think about the mom who maybe has little kids that are like five, six, seven years old, who's just like, how can I just get this to never be a problem in my kids lives? Yes, that might be the wrong question to ask. Tell me what you think about that. [19:27] Marie: And I guess I'd say yes, it's the wrong question, but also the right question in some ways. And actually, you should probably get there's. Another coach, actually, my sister, and she is actually coaching moms on what to do, moms and dads, parents, how to create resistant, *********** resistant children. And if I could have had that as a child, that would have been amazing in so many aspects, not just ***********. Right. We've been raised by parents who are like, don't feel your feelings, don't think about things too much. And now we're shifting to where we're learning more about that. And so there are ways that parents today can say, oh, if I can teach my kids how not to escape emotion, how to understand what's going on in their brain, and to process emotion and release emotion, that's a big step in the right direction towards becoming resistant to *********** in the future. Because I don't know that I explained this earlier, but it's really important to recognize that *********** viewing is not about sex. It's always about an escape. Escape from your feelings, escape from whatever. Yes. Whether that was boredom. Some people, even when they get really. [20:43] Sara: Excited, it can be a quote unquote positive emotion, right? [20:47] Marie: Yes, from emotion. [20:48] Sara: We do it with food too. [20:50] Marie: Totally. We do it with food. And I invite the people in relationships with my clients who are viewing **** to just have some mercy and some grace towards the person who is struggling and wants to stop. How would you feel if we saw everything that you did, every piece of cake you ate, everything that you shopped when you didn't need it, every way that you escaped from emotion, if you were in the spotlight for it and everybody's watching, like, you're going to be in big trouble if you don't stop this. So what that does usually is help the client get in a safe space. If they can get in a safe space in their own head and in their own future, knowing that I'm safe here, I can change. Then we can totally work together to create new habits and to let go of the old habits. So right now, I think it's an important thing to point out we have multiple, multiple people just in my little realm of influence that have not had the desire for ****. So it's not just, we're going to help you how to stay away from ****. They lose the desire to look at ***********. [21:56] Sara: So this isn't about you teaching them to resist it forever? [22:00] Marie: No. In fact, I love this well, I hate this story, but I love this little story. I met a man just randomly one afternoon and he was asking me we had some downtime, I was purchasing something from the place he worked. And so we had some downtime, just sitting there, small talk. And I ended up telling him that I work with people who struggle with quitting ***********. And he just slammed his hand down onto the desk and said, where were you three years ago? And I kind of laughed and he said, no, 200 pounds ago, where were you? And he said, I went to get help for years with ***********. My wife had said, I'm leaving if you don't get help. He had struggled with *********** for over 30 years and he said, I haven't looked at it in several years, but I have gained over 200 pounds. [22:43] Sara: Wow. [22:45] Marie: And so yay for him for stopping ***********. But there's a better way. There's a way that we aren't just replacing what those emotions, right? The emotions that we feel, the negative emotions, we're not just going to a different outlet. And so it's exciting. There's so much excitement, really, when you look at it, that you can retrain your brain, you can think a different way. And along the way, you can create a healthy sexual life, the one that you want to have. There's no shame in that. And so some marriages right now that I'm seeing, they're flourishing with some of my clients more than they ever had before. Because they've got right information. [23:24] Sara: Yes. They release the shame. They learned how to process their feelings instead of looking at **** or replacing it with something else. And then it just frees up so much space in your brain to connect with the people that you love. [23:36] Marie: Yes, it really does. Another thing that is really exciting that when you let go of **** and viewing that and that burden, you actually can start creating the life that you want. So we see a lot of people taking up weightlifting or biking or hiking, and it's not because they're replacing it. They're like, I have a new life. I have a new lease on life. There is so much brain space taken up with shame where these poor individuals have spent so much time in just this. I'm living a double life. I'm living a double life. [24:08] Sara: Yeah. [24:09] Marie: That is not addiction. Addiction is you are all day, every day. You cannot have a job, you cannot have relationships, you can't do anything. That's addiction. These are habits that we're dealing with. [24:21] Sara: No, I love that I once heard that distinction. If you can go without whatever it is you are telling yourself you're addicted to, if you can not view **** while you're at work, then you're not addicted. Or if you can think of people say that they're addicted to food. [24:36] Marie: Right. [24:36] Sara: Well, can you go like 4 hours without eating? Then you're not addicted. [24:40] Marie: Yeah. [24:42] Sara: So good. So do you have any more advice for someone who wants to stop looking at ****? Where would you have them start? Aside from, of course, hiring you, which you'll tell us how they can get in contact with you. But what's one first step that they can take? [25:01] Marie: 1St 20 steps. I'm kidding. Okay, so first I would say is to start just noticing when you view ****, what happened just before. [25:09] Sara: Okay. [25:10] Marie: And you will start to notice you're escaping some emotion. There is something negative that happened that is causing you to view ****. Just that one little step really opens up your brain to be like, oh, this is a possibility that I'm just escaping. [25:25] Sara: And it might be something like some kind of shame attack. But it also might just be like, I'm bored. Right? [25:30] Marie: Totally. Yeah. It can be I'm bored, I'm frustrated. Something happened at work, something happened at home. Or just also like, it's this month. There's nothing much going on this month. Or I just got done. We find a lot of times that somebody gets home from vacation, you think that they're just on top of the world. Right. It was just an amazing experience. But then just that what I had to look forward to. Yeah. So just notice what happened before. I call it backwards. Dot to dot. We all remember when we were little kids, right? And we just dot to dot. If you dot to dot backwards, you will find that there's some emotion tied to this, and that's exciting. If there's emotion tied to it, we can work with emotion. You can work to do something different. Right. But if you're an addict, you really can't. But when you have a habit, you can change that. [26:16] Sara: Oh, so good. So just with curiosity, pay attention to what was going on right before they started looking at ****. That's the first step. [26:26] Marie: Okay. [26:26] Sara: And how can they get a hold of you? They want to learn more. [26:29] Marie: So I have just been coaching. We've just been doing one on one coaching, and we decided that I've only have so much time in my life and I can say the same thing over and over again to create that foundation right. The facts that they need about healthy sexuality and what's going on in their brain. So we just created a course that will give access to more people, and I don't have to keep saying the same thing over and over again. So you can find information about that. It's pornographyfreedom.com. And the course is called Freedom from ***********. And I'm really confident that that is what the future holds for upcoming generations to come. We all have cell phones now, right? It's everywhere around us. And we can either wring our hands and be like, oh, we are just in trouble. It's just everywhere. I think the more education that we get, the more understanding that we get of our emotions and our brains and healthy sexuality. In a couple of generations from now, they're going to be like, oh, remember that *********** thing? We got this. [27:29] Sara: I love that. I love that. [27:31] Marie: It's really hopeful. [27:33] Sara: Yes. So hopeful and so just inspiring that this is not something that has to be a problem for you forever or for your loved ones forever. There really are solutions, and it's so much easier than what they're doing now, which is living in shame. What's the word? It's like helplessness, right? And hopelessness. [27:58] Marie: Just hopeless and helpless and dark and just scared. There's just a lot of fear out there. [28:02] Sara: Yeah. So pornographyfreedom.com is where they can yes. [28:06] Marie: And I have to say that I just overcame a lot of fear, and I'm starting an Instagram page. For some reason, this is just so something I never wanted to do. So Mariepolter coaching. [28:18] Sara: They can follow you there as well. Hey, go check Marie out. Thank you for being here, for educating my listeners so much on thank you. [28:28] Marie: So much for letting be. [28:31] Sara: Yes. I can tell it's like oozing from you. And it doesn't have to be something that is a burden for the rest of their life.

Joël is joined by a very special guest, Sara Jackson, a fellow Software Developer at thoughtbot. A few episodes ago, Stephanie and Joël talked about "The Fundamentals" (https://www.bikeshed.fm/371) and how many of the fundamentals of web development line up with a Computer Science degree. Joël made a comment during that episode that his pick for the most underrated CS class that he thinks would benefit most devs is a class called "Discrete Math." Sara weighs in! This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Earlier Bike Shed Episode with Sara (https://www.bikeshed.fm/354) The Linux man-pages project (https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/) Gravity Falls (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1865718/) Elm types as sets (https://guide.elm-lang.org/appendix/types_as_sets.html) Folgers ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7LXSQ85jpw) Brilliant.org's discrete math course (https://brilliant.org/wiki/discrete-mathematics/) mayuko (https://www.youtube.com/@hellomayuko) Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. And today, I'm joined by a special guest, Sara Jackson, who is a fellow developer here at thoughtbot. SARA: Hello. JOËL: And together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Sara, what's new in your world? SARA: Actually, I recently picked up crocheting. JOËL: That's exciting. What is the first project that you've started working on? SARA: I don't know if you happen to be a fan of animation or cartoons, but I love "Gravity Falls." And there's a character, Mabel, who wears many sweaters. I'm working on a sweater. JOËL: Inspired by this character. SARA: Yes. It is a Herculean endeavor for my first crochet project, but we're in it now. JOËL: That does sound like jumping into it and picking a pretty hard project. Is that the way you typically approach new hobbies or new things, you just kind of jump in and pick up something challenging? SARA: Yeah. I definitely think that's a good description of how I approach hobbies. How about you? JOËL: I think I like to ease into things. I'm the kind of person who, if I pick up a video game, I will play the tutorial. SARA: It's so funny you say that because I'm definitely the type of person who also reads manuals. [chuckles] JOËL: [laughs] I'm sure you've probably, at this point, read many sections of the Unix manual. Longtime listeners might recognize you from a previous episode we did on the history of operating systems. SARA: Yes, I am an avid reader of the man pages. In fact, I wish every command-line tool had man pages or at least more detailed man pages. Reading man pages, reading technical documentation, really, I feel like goes right in line with things like needlework, knitting, crocheting. You're following a very technical pattern description of what you should be doing, how many stitches. It's almost algorithmic. JOËL: Do you feel like the fact that you've read a lot of man pages and now that you're getting into reading crochet patterns, do you feel like that's helped you maybe become a better technical writer when you write documentation? SARA: Definitely. Yes. [laughs] There's a common meme going around on the internet of how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: open jar, put knife in jar. And you see somebody putting the knife in handle first because it wasn't specific enough. When you're looking at a crochet pattern, it needs to be written very explicitly, and in the same way, technical documentation needs to be like that too. It needs to be accessible for every audience, well, most audiences. JOËL: That's a big challenge because you want to give enough detail that, like you said, you don't accidentally use the wrong end of the knife to spread your peanut butter. But at the same time, if you give all the little details, you lose the forest for the trees. And people who know how to use a knife are going to struggle to use your documentation. SARA: That is true. That's why I think it is very valuable to do something that you recommend very often, especially when writing blog posts or call for papers is, defining the audience. Who's this for? JOËL: Yeah, knowing your audience is so important when it comes to any kind of media, even if it's a talk or an article, or I guess, a crochet pattern. SARA: Precisely. JOËL: Does the crochet world have sort of the concept of patterns aimed at beginners versus patterns aimed at a more advanced audience? SARA: I would definitely say that is the case. There are more advanced stitches and techniques that you would generally not see in a more beginner pattern. And in more advanced patterns, at least speaking from a knitting perspective...I'm pretty new to crocheting, but I've been knitting for a while. In knitting patterns, simpler techniques might not be described in such detail in a more advanced pattern. JOËL: So a couple of weeks ago, Stephanie and I were discussing the fundamentals, how much of the fundamentals of web development line up with a computer science degree. I had made this comment on that episode that my pick for most underrated CS class that I think would benefit most developers is a class called discrete math. SARA: I remember this class. It was a love-hate relationship. I am a big fan. JOËL: Would you describe yourself as a math person? SARA: I don't think so. No. JOËL: Because I know I hated math for the longest time. And I don't really find that math, in general, has been that helpful for software. There's kind of the stereotype that I'll sometimes hear from people when they find out that I write code for a living. They'll say things like, "Oh, you must be so good at math." And it's like, no, calculus was really hard for me, and I struggled and did not like it. SARA: I feel like that's a big reason why folks go into programming; the computer can do the math for you. JOËL: Right? It is a computer. It is a math machine. SARA: I mean, how many folks in computer-related fields got their start on a TI-83, programming in that thing? JOËL: A lot of people. Someday it might be fun to do an episode on the sort of common origin stories that you hear from people in the software industry, a lot of people programming a calculator, a lot of people I hear coming from Neopets. SARA: Yeah, Neopets and MySpace, editing the profile pages with CSS, HTML. JOËL: But that's an episode for another time. I think, in my experience, discrete math was not like all the other math that I did. It felt so practical, like, this is math for programmers is how I felt it was even though that's not how it's sold in university. What was your experience? SARA: My concept was very much like, this is logic. This is very hard. By hard, I mean firm way of looking at the world and defining the logic behind things when you think about proofs and set theory. JOËL: So we've been throwing around the term discrete math, and many of our listeners might not be familiar with what it is. If you had to describe discrete math to someone who is not familiar with it, what would you say? SARA: Math that's discrete. [laughter] Sorry, sorry. JOËL: What does discrete mean? SARA: When I think of discrete math, I think of logic, definitions, how data relates to each other, that sort of thing, as opposed to ones and zeros. JOËL: Yeah, discrete math; it felt like it was very much like a grab-bag class. It just involved so many different branches of math, and you kind of get a little bit of an intro of like ten different topics, all of which apply and are helpful when you're writing software. So I got a little intro to a couple of different forms of logic, propositional logic, and predicate logic. I got an intro to Boolean algebra. I got an intro to set theory, an intro to combinatorics, talked about recursive functions from a mathematical perspective, an intro to graph theory. Probably like a few more. There are like ten different things. You just got a little intro to them, spent a couple of weeks on each topic. But I felt like that was enough to give me a lot of value that I still reference on a daily basis in my work. SARA: Absolutely. One of the parts of discrete math that really stuck with me are computational models like Turing machines, pushdown automaton, finite-state machines. Learning about those, analyzing them really helped me break down algorithms and break down my code and look at, okay, for this specific input that I have for each of these variables, what are we doing? JOËL: So what does that look like in your daily work? You've got a complex card, and you see that it's a difficult feature to implement. And in your mind, you say, okay, let me try to describe this as a finite-state machine, and maybe you draw a diagram or something like that. SARA: Yeah, I will, actually. I'll draw a diagram, or I'll draw like a pseudocode out on paper. I'll think about all the different kinds of inputs that I would expect or not expect, which itself is not finite, but we try. And then what is the output that I would expect? What is the outcome that I would expect from, say, a user enters one, a user enters Sara, a user enters purple? What would the outcome be? Do I have those vectors captured in my code? And that also goes into TDD. JOËL: Do you feel like knowing about Turing machines or finite-state machines has made it easier for you to PDD? That's a connection I haven't heard before. SARA: Yeah, I think so because a Turing complete computational model is deterministic. That means that every possible path that could be got into from where you're at any path exists between the two. Sometimes it might mean rejection or an error, but the path has been defined. And thinking about that when it comes to tests, I feel like has been so helpful for me of like, I can't just think about the happy path. I can't just think about it's exactly what it needs to be. It's also what if it's not there? What if it doesn't exist? What if it's 0? What if it's empty? What if it's a different data structure? JOËL: That's really fascinating to me because I feel like I encountered some of these practical applications of it much later when I was learning about types and learning about Elm and sort of that community's approach to designing data structures. And one thing that they say a lot is that you should make impossible states impossible when you design a type, and the way that they tend to approach that is thinking of types as if they were sets. And so you think of a set of...the Boolean type is a set that has two elements because there are true and false. An enum might have, you know, if it's a three-element enum, that is, three elements. But then you start having things like records which are kind of like a hash in Ruby, which might have, let's say, two elements in them. And if it has a Boolean and an enum value, now those two multiply times each other. And so now you have two times three, six possible states. And maybe the problem you're trying to model only has five, and so you've sort of inadvertently added an extra state. They tend to talk about it a little bit more through the lens of sets and the lens of combinatorics, which are other elements of discrete math that give you mental models to deal with this. And so talking about all the different possibilities, that's combinatorics. Thinking of a type as a set and talking about its cardinality, that's set theory. So those were things that I would do when I was writing Elm programs on a daily basis, but I never made the connection back to finite-state machines. SARA: I feel like those marry so well together, those concepts. You can see combinatorics and set theory of objects and of where they can go. And that goes right into graph theory. JOËL: Oooh, I love me some graphs. SARA: [laughs] JOËL: Listeners of the show will know that I am a huge fan of dependency graphs and as a tool and as a model that can be applied to a lot of things, so thinking in terms of maybe the dependencies of your program like packages. But it can also be in terms of tasks to be done and so thinking in terms of a larger feature, breaking it down into smaller features, all of which depend on each other. And depending on how that dependency graph is structured, what order do you need to complete them in order to ship them independently? SARA: I love that. And it reminds me of graphs that represent state, like, finite-state machines sort of things where you can actually infer where you're going to end up based on where you are for certain types of graphs. And I feel like you can use that in programming. You can use that in proofs where you have the, okay, you've solved for the zero case. You've solved for the one case. Now let's solve for N+1 anytime in the future. This all feels very full circle in my mind. [chuckles] JOËL: I think that's very apt. And a really powerful thing that I've noticed is having different mental models to approach the same problem or different logical or analysis techniques to interact with the same problem. And so when you look at something through the lens of a finite-state machine, or through the lens of a graph, or through the lens of a set, or through the lens of combinatorics, you might be looking at the same problem. But by having different perspectives to look at it, you gain different insight and hopefully helps you come to a better solution. SARA: Absolutely. And I love that discrete math gives us those different tools to be better programmers. It's something that I enjoy. And I enjoyed the classes as much as they were extremely difficult. And I love the idea of being able to share those tools with other people that might not have learned about them. JOËL: You were talking about seeing things from different perspectives and how they kind of line up. There are some equivalences that I found were really fun between, let's say, sets and Boolean algebra, the operations that you can do. So things like ANDing two values is similar to doing an intersection on two sets, and ORing two values is similar to doing a union. Interestingly, we have preserved that in Ruby. Array has operators where you can combine arrays using set operations, and it has the single pipe, which we typically read as OR to union two arrays. I want to say it has a single AND that you can use. It's used to intersect two arrays. SARA: I actually used that sometime within the last year, I remember. JOËL: So, if you've ever wondered why those two particular operators to do set operations instead of a union method, now you know. SARA: I love set operations. I recently made an update to thoughtbot's internal tool hub, and I used set unions there. [laughs] MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! Airbrake's debugging tool catches all of your project errors, intelligently groups them, and points you to the issue in the code so you can quickly fix the bug before customers are impacted. 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JOËL: If you had to sell a colleague on the value of discrete math, what would be the example that you would use? SARA: What if I told you that you would never have to wonder what the results might be in a given situation of true and false? JOËL: That's deep. Do you want to know all the secrets of the universe? SARA: Let me introduce to you truth tables. JOËL: Oh, I love a good truth table. Yes, such a simple tool, but it pays so much. SARA: Absolutely, especially in a world where we have unless as an operator. JOËL: Unless gets me so much in Ruby, especially when there are compound expressions. So you say do something unless condition one or condition two, and then I have to think, wait, when does this happen? SARA: I have to read it to myself in English, not this and not that. [chuckles] JOËL: So that's interesting because when you translated that in English, you changed the operator that's being used. SARA: I totally did. JOËL: Unless a condition or other condition. And your brain was smart enough to flip that; mine is not. SARA: [laughs] JOËL: But what's happening here is, and you would learn this in a discrete math class, De Morgan's Laws that say what happens when you negate compound conditions. And you have to negate each of the individual conditions and also flip all the operators, so all the ANDs turn into ORs and the ORs turn into ANDs. And so I always have to remember to do that in my mind when I see an unless or when I see someone negating a compound condition. So now, in my mind, every time I'm reviewing code on a pull request, and I see negating a compound condition, it's just a sort of red flag for there's quite possibly a bug here. And maybe leave a comment asking the author, "Did you really mean to do this?" And like you said, maybe even write out a truth table just so that myself I know that the correct behavior is happening. SARA: It is a good example of a code smell because if it's hard for you to understand or me to understand, sure, it made sense when it was written, but code is read more than it's written. It should be easy to read and understand. So it's definitely easy to introduce a bug at that point like you were saying, worth commenting on. JOËL: You log on to your machine at the beginning of the day, open up a PR, and you're just like, oh yes, I love the smell of De Morgan in the morning. SARA: [laughs] Nothing like De Morgan in your cup in the morning. JOËL: [laughs] Yes. Oh, now I really want to -- SARA: A DeMorgan in the morgen. [laughter] JOËL: Now I really want to see a spoof of that Folgers ad. SARA: [laughs] For some reason, the jingle is escaping me, but it's there. JOËL: It's an ad for a brand of American coffee. SARA: Yes, for those that were not in America during the '90s to see the commercial, [singing] the best part of waking up is De Morgan in your cup. JOËL: [chuckles] That was amazing. SARA: [laughs] Hopefully, we don't get a copyright strike for that. [laughter] JOËL: You know what? That is the sell for why you should learn discrete math. SARA: Yes. What are some other ways you find discrete math around in your day-to-day life? JOËL: I think the most practical part is working with Booleans because writing conditional code writing Boolean expressions is something that I do multiple times every day. And I think anybody who's done programming for any length of time gets some amount of intuition around working with Boolean expressions. Having spent a little bit of time studying them, you learn some patterns. You learn ways of working with them. And a common thing that I will often see in Ruby code is people will overuse the if expression when you could have used a Boolean expression instead. So I've seen things like if condition return true, else return false, which is just identity. I've also seen more complex things which will say, "If value one is true and value two is true, return true; otherwise, return false," or some fancy things with early returns that, in the end, are just reimplementing Boolean AND. So knowing about a little bit of basic Boolean algebra, being comfortable with combining things using AND and OR rather than just writing early returns, I think, gives a much richer toolkit and something that is much more scalable. And, of course, for those situations where there are complex conditional code, having truth tables as a tool in your back pocket is just absolutely invaluable. SARA: 100%. When those get so complex, definitely realizing it's worth maybe breaking up a chain of Boolean logic into separate mini-methods if you need to. There's nothing like seeing a whole bunch of stuff ANDed together that are only kind of related. [laughs] JOËL: There's a form of logic that you dig into as well called predicate logic, and there's a whole set of things you can do with it. But two things that stood out to me were these two operators that apply a condition to a whole set of values. And they either claim that a certain thing is true for at least one of the elements in a set or for every value in a set. And the interesting thing is that if you claim that something is true for all elements, in order to falsify that claim, you only need to find one counterexample. You don't need to check every item. If I can find one, and maybe it's the first item in this set that is wrong or that contradicts the logical statement that I'm trying to make, then I've immediately disproved your entire statement because you claimed that this was true for every element. SARA: And it's hard learning these sorts of fundamentals from computer science; it's hard to not apply that to real life and hear somebody using a statement, "Every this, all of that." I immediately come back with, "Well, some of them." [laughs] I'm that guy, yep. JOËL: The person at the end of a conference talk who puts up their hand and says, "So this is not really a question. It's more of a statement." SARA: [laughs] I found this one example. Yeah, I'm a stickler for specificity, for sure. Thanks, discrete math. JOËL: It definitely helped me be much more nuanced in the way that I speak. I tend to not speak in absolutes or superlatives because of that class. SARA: Yeah, I very frequently use the term a non-zero amount of times to describe, for example, there exists one in a set. JOËL: There's also another interesting aspect of this, which is when you see a chain of ANDs, so condition, and condition, and condition, and condition, and condition, you're effectively making the assertion that something is true for all elements or that all these conditions are true. Therefore, it only takes one for the whole thing to evaluate to false. And I want to say the fancy name for this is annihilation, where you can have a giant chain of conditions that are ANDed together, and they're all true, but if any single one of them is false, then the whole chain evaluates to false. SARA: And this is where you can get a little clever with the order in which you put those in your AND where you have the least heavy lifting checks first so that they fail first. Or if you have things that need to check for nil, check them after. Check the basic stuff first. Let it almost short circuit; let it fail fast, as they say. JOËL: Yeah, these are all performance tricks that I think, even if you don't have a discrete math background, you might have picked up. You know about short-circuiting. You know about trying the cheap checks first. And now you know a little bit of the theoretical background of why. SARA: [singing] Where do we go from here? [laughs] JOËL: So we have these sort of logical operators that will claim that something is true for all elements of a set or at least one element of a set, and those are kind of theoretical. They're useful if we're trying to set up a logical proposition. But these exist in code, in Ruby, as part of the enumerable module. Enumerable has two methods; they are any and all. And you can use those methods to claim that all items in an array will evaluate to true when the given block runs or that at least one evaluates to true for items in that array. SARA: What's the word where you're taking out some of a set? Slice but not slice. There's intersection [crosstalk 26:46] union, so not a set theory one, no. JOËL: Like getting the inverse? SARA: Maybe. I don't know. JOËL: I feel like there's a term for getting the inverse of a set. SARA: Not the inverse. JOËL: Because you can get the inverse of the intersection or something. SARA: Yeah. I think I'm just going to go along the lines of being able to slice out what you want with select and how you can then chain an enumerable on that. JOËL: Okay. Okay, I see. So you're making a connection from enumerable to set theory. SARA: Mm-hmm. JOËL: Excellent. SARA: Even if you don't necessarily want every item in your enumerable, your array, your hash, you can use things like select and reject to get a subset for a certain condition, and you can slice out based on a condition. And then you can then apply any or all to that. And so I want all of the even numbers, and now for all of these even numbers, such and such should be true for the set. JOËL: So now we've made a connection between enumerable and predicate logic. And we've also made a connection to set theory. SARA: It's coming full circle again. [laughs] Discrete math is everywhere. JOËL: So if you use the enumerable module in Ruby, which you should be (It's one of the best parts of the language.), you're doing discrete math every day, and you didn't know it. SARA: You're welcome. JOËL: So we've seen that a lot of us are interacting with elements of discrete math every day and that learning a little bit about it more formally can help us be a bit more mindful in how we code every day. It can give us the mental models to solve and analyze problems that we encounter daily. For those listeners who might want to dig a little bit more deeply into discrete math, do you have any resources there that you recommend? SARA: Well, not sponsored, but brilliant.org is a pretty good resource for things like math, computer science, for the very least. I'm sure it has other courses, but those are the ones that I've kind of looked at on some YouTubers' free trial. [chuckles] And I liked their approach to teaching, and I think it has got a low barrier to entry for learning these topics. I would definitely recommend that, so brilliant.org JOËL: It's funny you mentioned that they sponsor a lot of technology, science, and math YouTubers. So for those listeners who are interested in checking it out, maybe look up some YouTubers and see if they have a free sign-up code. SARA: Mayuko is a good YouTuber for that. I believe she gets sponsored by Brilliant occasionally. She's a software engineer out in California. JOËL: Clearly, we're not sponsored because we don't have a code to give out. SARA: [laughs] Sponsor us, Brilliant. JOËL: [laughs] Host at bikeshed.fm SARA: [laughs] JOËL: All right. Well, with that, shall we wrap up? SARA: Yeah, let's do. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.

Joining Carol Pankow in the studio today are Cody Dixon, Director of Operations SARAWorks, and Susan Baker, Program Coordinator II, Alaska VR. SARA provides a solution to VR programs with a client engagement and communications system that automatically gathers needed information at the right time from consumers and providers without staff intervention. SARA uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing and complements CMS functionality. Alaska VR has been an early adapter from SARA's first introduction. Susan tells us how Alaska VR utilizes SARA daily, and Cody brings us up to date with all the latest integrations and new states coming on board with SARA.   Listen Here   Full Transcript   SARA: Technology Solutions States Have Proven to Work -Alaska VR and SARA   {Music} Speaker1: Manager Minute brought to you by the VRTAC for Quality Management, Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host Carol Pankow.   Carol: Well, welcome to the Manager Minute. Joining me in the studio today are Cody Dixon, Director of Operations, SARAWorks, and Susan Baker, Program Coordinator II, Alaska VR. Thanks for joining me today, you guys. So, Cody, how are things going in the world of SARA?   Cody: Good. We've been extremely busy. We've got a number of new states that are coming on board that we're working with and a number of new features that we're rolling out. So really excited to be here with you today.   Carol: Glad to hear that. So, Susan, how are things going for you in Alaska?   Susan: Well, it's pretty good up here in sunny Alaska. Just kidding. It's about 15 degrees. We still love SARA. We're actually getting an upgrade this weekend that we're really looking forward to. Things are going great.   Carol: Awesome to hear that. Well, I'm in Minnesota, so I can empathize with the Alaska climate. Had some interesting winter weather this year for sure. So for some of our listeners, you may remember back to the days of WINTAC and a special project that was done to bring SARA to Voc Rehab, and the original idea was to provide a solution to VR programs that used this new kind of client engagement and communication system that automatically gathered needed information at the right time from consumers and providers without staff intervention. SARA uses artificial intelligence or AI and natural language processing and is complementary to a case management functionality. So if you fast forward seven years, SARA's really undergone some very cool changes and is once again part of a pilot program within our VRTAC for Quality Management. And I'm also really excited about hearing from a state that was at the forefront of using this and has remained a continued champion years later. So let's dig in. So, Cody, I'm going to turn to you first. Can you tell our listeners about yourself and what you do at SARA and a little more about your products?   Cody: Yes, absolutely. So I'm the director of operations for SARAWorks, and we are an extremely small team. We are growing. But essentially, historically, I've been responsible for all of our new customer implementations doing the training, the configuration of SARA, making sure that SARA is doing what it's supposed to do for the agency, and then of course, keeping track of our support staff for our wonderful service that we provide, working with our development team as well. So just kind of making sure that all the day to day stuff is running as it should. We've got our primary product, which is SARA, and SARA is our application for counselors and case managers. And it's used typically to stay in contact with clients or consumers that are receiving services under the idea that we're really trying to use SARA as a communication hub with the idea to bridge that connection gap in human services. We believe that the good technology can be used and is going to be essential for creating human connection so that people don't fall through the cracks. And that's kind of where SARA comes in.   Carol: Yeah, like that, that you use that term communication hub. That sums it up really well. So Susan, can you give our listeners a little more information about yourself? What's your role in Alaska? How many counselors do you have and the number of customers that you all serve?   Susan: Sure. I am a Jill of all trades up there for in Alaska, a program coordinator. So really what that means is responsible for our quality assurance, our program reporting, our data requirements, our policies and procedures. And I'm also in charge of our case management system, our SARA communication system, our SharePoint system. So there's quite a bit of an IT aspect software support that comes out of my role as well. We are, you know, a big state geographically, but a small state population wise. We always like to remind Texas of that, but we only have about 25 counselors spread out through the state, though. But that's over you know, we're talking potentially 2500, 3000 miles apart in some places. And right now, our open caseload right now is around 1000 - 1500. Yeah, we're small, but mighty.   Carol: Wow. That puts some perspective. I didn't realize you had 25 counselors across that expansive Alaska. So do folks have to, like, fly into places? Because I know some of your areas are so remote, how do they get to see certain customers?   Susan: Absolutely. Yes. We have a few counselors that are dedicated to serving our rural populations, flying into hubs like Barrow, Ketchikan, Pretty amazing. It's a kind of a unique situation. They're flying in for about a week, trying to get as many informational referrals out there, then to get as many applications as they can going. And if there are open cases in that area or village, they're trying to work them as well. We do a lot with SARA helping us keep in touch when we're not in the area.   Carol: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That gives such an interesting perspective. So, Cody, I understand SARA's gone through some changes and can you tell us what happened with the company and like where you live right now, it's different.   Cody: Yeah, definitely. So back in September, SARA was acquired the company itself, the Career Index Corporation, the founders of SARA, was acquired by a company called Radical Health, which is a company that acquires software companies that are in the human services space and put together a new division called Radical Apps that SARA was the first product to fall into. And so under radical apps we have SARAWorks, which is how we've rebranded our company. So for some of our folks out there that recognize TCI or the Career Index we are now, SARAworks with our product, SARA. And under Radical, we are working to see how we can grow SARA's reach and help make an impact in other markets and other industries. Radical Health currently works with software companies that are in food banks and community food pantries and things like that, as well as foster care management, behavioral health and homeless management as well. So a couple of other areas that we feel that SARA could really make an impact. And as I mentioned earlier, we've been an extremely small team and so we didn't necessarily have the resources in place to make that happen and continue to see our vision grow. But with the help of Radical, we've got a roadmap to making that happen. And really just overall taking this concept of wanting to foster that connection in human services and helping clients feel like they're more than just a case ID and giving them that voice, using SARA to be able to maintain that connection with their agency and the service workers that are helping them.   Carol: Well, Cody, I remember back to my days in Minnesota and we were trying to get your product and there were definitely some challenges with IT resources. And I understand you have a new venture that eases the burden on IT resources. What is that all about?   Cody: Yeah, absolutely. We actually have a couple of things that we're working on in that regard. First of which was a strategic partnership that we entered into with Alliance Enterprises for their Aware case management solution. And so we are working with them at the moment on creating a way to interface the two systems together that eliminates the need for a state agency's IT department to really be involved. Historically, we've relied upon the state agency to have to install a Windows service and maintain that service on a state server and things like that in order to get data to go back and forth between SARA and the system of record. So what we're working on with Alliance is to, number one, have that connection, bypass the need for the state agency to be involved. And then we're also working on a new API that will be more of a plug and play option for other agencies that might not utilize, Aware, maybe have something that's homegrown or one of the other larger vendors. So it's something that I'm really excited for. We are rolling into some testing right now and should have that solution rolled out by the end of quarter two.   Carol: Wow, that's pretty cool. That's a big deal. I think that'll be a game changer for folks. I know we have a lot of people that are with Alliance, but there are a lot of folks that are not probably half the country is not. It's probably about a half and a half deal. So having that option for other folks as well, I think that is definitely going to be of interest to our listeners. I personally love your whole communication aspect of this and you talked about that communication hub. Can you just explain that a little more like all the things that can go into that?   Cody: Yeah, absolutely. So we you know, we call SARA the communication hub and we continuously try to make improvements and enhancements and bring new features so that, you know, if you think of a way to stay in contact and connect with a client electronically, we want SARA to kind of be your go to source. So SARA has two components. There's an automated side of SARA, and then there's some manual tools that counselors and case managers can use to try and stay in contact. On the automated side of things, we actually configure SARA to typically follow a workflow of the process of the agency mirroring in SARA, what we call tracks, which are the case statuses to the system of record. And we train SARA to understand when clients need to be contacted, what it's regarding, and if there's any data or information that needs to be obtained from that individual in order to successfully move them on to the next case status. And with that, SARA utilizes email and text messaging to stay in contact, reach out and conduct interviews with the clients, find out how they're doing, and then, just like any good assistant would, generate alerts that go back to those counselors and case managers to inform them of what's going on with their client, as well as giving them information so they can make an informed decision of what action to take next. Do I step in and now offer that direct client engagement? And that's where those manual tools come in. We've also got the options for staff to be able to compose emails and compose text messages directly from the SARA application. So from the comfort of their keyboard, they can be sending out messages. They don't have to have their own cell phone or a state agency issued cell phone. They can send out those messages directly through SARA. And then over time, they also start utilizing SARA for sending out emails. And the reason to do that is that everything that SARA does is going to automatically create case notes. So no longer does a counselor have to send out an email in Outlook or their provider of choice and then go back into their system of record and leave a case note about the email they just sent. They just send it off in. SARA It creates that case note. That case note goes from SARA back over to the system of record. So you can imagine the amount of time that is saved over time as staff start utilizing those features. Additionally, we have a document management center that we're actually rolling out this week that includes things like electronic signature. We've got an Outlook calendar integration. SARA's really good at scheduling appointments and allowing opportunities for clients to reschedule appointments based upon counselor availability. And so we can connect with an Outlook calendar so that both the SARA calendar and the outlook calendar are in sync. And SARA truly knows, you know, when that counselor is available for appointments to be scheduled and rescheduled. And then we also have something that really came in handy during the beginning phases of the pandemic when agencies started working remotely but still trying to provide services. And that is a feature that we call ODIN, which is our on demand interview network, and it is a HIPAA compliant tele counseling platform so that counselors can conduct tele counseling sessions with up to nine participants at a time and providing them an opportunity to take case notes throughout that session that are only visible to them. And then at the end of the session, they click a button to save all those case notes. And there's one case note that goes into SARA that kind of documents what that session was regarding who the participants were that attended. And then all of the case notes that the counselor created. And then, of course, those case notes go back over to the system of record. So very cool stuff that we're that we're doing here at SARAWorks.   Carol: Yeah it sounds super exciting. I was sitting in my head thinking, you know, kind of ticking the boxes about how much time you would save with a number of those items. That would be pretty amazing. So, Susan, you have been around since the beginning of SARA. I remember you were part of the pilot states up in Alaska. And I talked actually to the Alaska team. I bet it was maybe, I don't know, 5 or 6 years ago when we were all in Oklahoma at a PEQA conference. And I wanted to find out, like, how did you like it, what was going well? And I know that you all had struggled with some upfront kind of the communication and the implementation of the product. So what are some of the lessons you have learned along the way as you've implemented this?   Susan: Yeah, sure. It's one of the questions I get from many states that reach out to me, and I bet we could have a whole separate podcast about lessons learned. But I do want to give a quick shout out to the Alaska team during that implementation time. It was exciting because we were helping build this product better, you know, like there were a handful of states that were just throwing more feedback back at Cody, Hey, let's try this. Hey, let's try this. And it's really cool to be a part of a product from the beginning and to say that Alaska VR agency was one of the agencies that helped kind of, you know, point it towards a really cool direction. Although I know Cody was always brainstorming, so don't want to take that away from him. But a quick shout out to Alaska VR for that. Hindsight's having stronger procedures and understanding your staff's capability in technology. Now, it's easy. Don't get me wrong, I love this product. I can't say enough about it. However, we do have to consider who we're serving and who our workforce is. So in hindsight, I wish I had prepared better procedures for them because it was scary at first. You know, change is hard. That would be the first one that I could go into. I often found myself saying, Well, what would you normally do when you get a message? And it was also during a time where we were just still kind of, you know, feeling it out. So if I had come on with SARA outside of that pilot world, I would have prepped with stronger instructions, if you will.   Carol: Sure, that makes some sense. I get that. So how are you using SARA today? Because Cody just talked about all these cool new things, like are you guys implementing some of that or. I know some things are rolling out shortly, but how are you? Yeah, how are you using it today?   Susan: Oh, our staff still rocks it. They're making appointments daily. I mean, how often we would get stood up pre-SARA to now is just so ridiculously less. I mean to have that reminder texts come in and remind the client that they have an appointment is just golden. We're kind of working with our IT to turn on that calendar integration. It's in progress, I'll say. But they would absolutely love that. That's kind of out of their hands at the moment. They are in it every day. New employees come in, we have training and it's a whole new feel about like people understand that the phone is dead. Mean, it's a little dramatic, you know, unless you're calling your doctor's office or your parents or family members or whatnot. But outside of that, I'm getting you know, I just got a reminder text from a chiropractor appointment. I have a couple of days, you know, the hair appointment that's around the corner. I mean, this is the age that we live in in terms of like helping us be where we need to be in one example. But on the other end, like, oh yeah, like I have this connection. I'm doing something with this place. And our clients, our clients really love it. You're going to have any type of survey you send out, you never know what kind of feedback you're going to get. But overwhelmingly, our clients enjoyed hearing like, okay, I've got something here, I've got a connection. So staff and clients do enjoy the product.   Carol: That's awesome to hear. I wondered about that, how your staff and clients were responding to that. So that is terrific. Well, Cody, I understand you also have some exciting new things happening. What are you able to say? The new states that are being rolled out, you talked about you have a number of them. I don't know if you're able to disclose or not, but sometimes folks love to hear like, who are all the people I can talk to about that are using this product?   Cody: Yeah, absolutely. One of our states we're working with right now is New Hampshire. They're actually working with us in conjunction with Alliance with the Aware Integration. And I think most of the customers or potential customers that we have at some point find their way to Susan and kind of lean on some of her expertise, as you know, with what Alaska has learned. And so we really value having Susan available to talk to a lot of these customers. Additionally, we are in the midst of rolling out Texas, so TWC, they are going through training with their statewide rollout right now that we hope to have finished in April. That's been a really exciting project for us, learning a lot along the way in terms of some additional areas that SARA might be able to help with down the road with different surveys and working with businesses and other employer vendors and things like that. So that's been exciting. And then we've got South Dakota and Maryland that are also coming up as well.   Carol: Wow, that's very cool. You know, I was just thinking about all the complexities of these different states. You know, Texas is ginormous and they're also ginormous as far as staff and clients, whereas Alaska is ginormous but maybe has a smaller population of people. But how this application works across anybody and thinking about a lot of our states that may be smaller, but they have a lot of rural components. I think that's very interesting because it fits all the different sizes for sure. Now we have, SARA included, just for full disclosure, as a special project within the VRTAC for quality management. Can you talk about that just for a minute, Cody, what that's all about?   Cody: Yes, absolutely. So the SARA portion of that project has actually allocated 220 SARA licenses, and that's how we market. SARA as a SaaS company is a subscription model and we've got 220 licenses that we're looking to disperse over 2 to 3 states that right now we are in the process of providing demonstrations, you know, working with business analysts and ITdepartments to determine what states might be a good fit to take on a SARA pilot. So that's very exciting. And we're hoping to have the states finalized here in the next month or two so that we can get rolling on those new SARA pilots.   Carol: Oh, that's cool. That's really cool. So, Susan, what advice would you give to new states that are either just getting started with the system or they're considering using this as a communication solution for them?   Susan: Well, it's funny because I just got a follow up email from Maryland this morning, Cody, because everyone does seem to find their way to me, and I love that because it's a conversation I can have with them that talks about, again, more of those lessons learned. Knowing your staff, knowing your population you serve, understanding who is it that is going to be your champions, What is your management structure? And start small. SARA In terms of Cody mentioned, there are two sides of SARA and there are two very different sides. I call them, you know, the automated side and the direct side, the direct side being the human, you know, shouting out those texts on the fly or hey, hey, you know, come get your bus pass, you know, things like that. You know, the quick human aspect. And then you have the automated side, which is kind of awesome because you'll find information that you had no idea was happening or out there. I've heard scenarios where SARA finds out the client's employed and we're like, Wait, what? So it's kind of great to catch up on that. And I think what people at least to have committed in your first step is you're looking and you're trying to figure out what you want that awesome automated side to do for you and is to start small. Don't try and have an awesome long conversation with the SARA system because it's cool that she can do that. And I apologize. I have been trying not to give pronouns to SARA, but after seven years just she has just come out of my mouth occasionally, but start small and include your counselors include your counselors include your counselors. They are the ones who are going to need to be your champions. Because as you're starting off with this system, you want that participant to engage with it. And if you're not presenting that information from a comfortable standpoint, meaning your assistant staff or your counselor staff who are first talking about SARA in maybe an intake appointment or some, you know, the first opportunity to speak about the system, you have to prepare your staff to be able to talk someone through that. That was something I didn't quite hit. Let's just say that was a swing and a miss, as that one was. So yeah, that's all I can think of at the moment. Really include your staff what you, meaning you know you at the quality or implementation level think might be really cool, may not be really cool. It's something you can get to I think like I'm on version four of what is known as the rules for SARA, meaning what the robotic side will have to say in a conversation. And the first time I did it was just sort of, I don't know, let's try this. And then then I got to realize, no, I got a few more revisions. So start small. Include your staff and it is pretty awesome.   Carol: I am really glad you said that. Include your staff because I remember because I talked to Kentucky and it was, I believe Nevada and then the Alaska folks and you all three had that similar experience where I think everybody was like, Woo, this is a great new thing. This is super exciting. Everybody's going to love it. Well, not everybody just loved it right off the get go because they didn't understand it and they hadn't been included in all the conversations. And I can see that happening. I would have that tendency to I'd be like, Woo, this is super exciting. We're going to do this really fun thing. And then you go, Oh my gosh, we got to get everybody on board with that. So I had heard that back in the day too, that to definitely talk with the counselors because you have to get them used to this idea because while it will help them, at first they're thinking, what? What on earth? Because don't you have to develop Susan some scripts or you know, like AI doesn't know what to exactly say. You do have to program that, correct?   Susan: That is correct, yes. You do want to prompt a path for certain questions that you ask. And what I learned over the years is and this I might want to say that, you know, this is perhaps unique to the VR world because SARA is applicable in other worlds outside of VR, right? So when we're thinking about the population that VR serves, we want to maybe make our questions to the point and as short as possible. You know, I'm thinking about keeping it at a grade level that is appropriate. Whereas if you're out maybe outside and you're dealing with a different population and then there's this ability to like, you could do so many things with it, you know, as long as you have that engaged person on the other end who's answering, I mean, you can ask and get so much information out of a text message. It is amazing. But what I learned just from knowing my client base is that less is more. I went to more specific questions. And if something didn't work out with that response, I just sort of kind of turn it back and say, okay, we're going to get with you. You know, like, let's not try and text anymore. Let's actually try and, you know, let's connect. But we wouldn't know or we wouldn't have that ability to say, Hey, let's connect if SARA hadn't started the conversation.   Carol: Right, yeah, no, I get that. I think that's just awesome advice. So, Susan, I think you were also the one I had heard that created this idea of having a SARA Summit quarterly with all the users. Can you tell me a little bit about that?   Susan: Yeah, sure. You know, I've been a customer of software and implementing software for over 20 years, and there's been, you know, a handful of vendors that, you know, really get that extra step, which is you got to embrace your customer and let them have perhaps a ground to just grumble and celebrate. But, you know, it comes to having a bit of a united front around the user, if you will, talking with other users of the company. How do you have this program or how is SARA doing that? You know, I feel like that is the next step that I think SARAworks is going towards and I'm so happy to help with if it comes to fruition because it is so cool as a person who is sometimes at least up in Alaska, I know my team, you know, we're trudging through something and we're, you know, trying to figure out if that's the setting that we want. And then all of a sudden, you know, I'm on a national call with like 50 other states that use this product. And we've got this like great conversation going and people are helping other people and people are like, Oh, yeah, heads up. This doesn't work. I mean, it's just a pool for knowledge. And I think that's a good step to move forward with SARAworks too.   Carol: Yeah, I think that'd be really smart because you look at all these new states coming on board and the one thing I've always loved about VR is how giving people are I mean, everybody wants to help other people out, and I love that. It isn't like, Oh, I know this and we created that and we're not going to help you. Everybody's like, Here, have it. You know, this is how we're doing it. So that is pretty cool.   Susan: Yeah, totally.   Carol: So, Susan, what is the number one thing you'd want people to take away from this conversation today? Like our listeners, What would be the number one thing you want them to take away?   Susan: Well, I struggled with this one when you sent this out, because I almost have two. My number one and I tell this to every state that is inquiring with me about SARA and it's kind of geeky. It's not flashy. It's the quality management side of me that's going to speak out for a minute. And it's the fact that we're required to check in with our clients a year after exit actually, you know, second, fourth quarter after exit. This is a federal requirement. And the thought of having our counselors manage what happens a year later after they close the client was, I can't I have no idea how other states are doing this. I have an automatic system that does it and I don't have to even think about it. And it's the most beautiful thing ever, done. I mean, I don't know what else to say. Like it's an entire data element of compliance that I barely even have to think about. It's beautiful. Thank you, Cody.   Carol: It makes me think of, like, boom, mic drop. That's the end.   Susan: And guess my number two is that there's a reason this started seven years ago, and it had to do with we need to communicate more with the individuals that we serve. I see it in case reviews that I do. And this is the tool. There's my other mic drop. They're out there, they're listening. You got to do it.   Carol: Absolutely. And you look at now the third thing that is rolling across the nation is really there are no staff. And so we need to keep in communication. We have less people to do so. So we've got to leverage other things to make that happen so that can continue to live into its mission. And we're trying to get people into competitive, integrated employment. And to do that, we need to be in contact with them.   Susan: Exactly.   Carol: And keep moving through that case. Absolutely.   Susan: Well, and I think just to add to it, it's important that at least from our standpoint, like this is not counseling. This doesn't count as a contact. We have trained our staff to say, SARA is that icebreaker and it helps you. Yes, keep in touch. But it by no means substitutes the actual counseling guidance that is required. You actually speaking with the client, not through text messaging, not through email. If anyone was listening thinking, well, are they counting that? No, not counting that as a contact at all. It just helps get in contact if need be.   Carol: Right. Well, and it helps to smooth out those contacts you need as you're chasing for things, you're chasing for a transcript, you're trying to chase people down for certain stuff. Those items, those kind of more busy calls that you have to do and all of that, it can help completely in that area. And like you said, the year after closure, like follow it up with people because that's tough to keep track of all of that.   Susan: Yeah., and I think the second day we turned on SARA, staff was saying, oh my gosh, I was about to close this client. I haven't heard from him. And I mean, it works, you know, it really does. And the fact that it keeps in touch with your clients and it's making you compliant with one of the most, like, strangely weird ways to track something a year later. God bless you, Cody. Right on.   Carol: So, Cody, what is the number one thing you'd like people to take away from this conversation today?   Cody: Well, Susan did a great job expressing it. You know, really, it's the fact that, like you mentioned, we're losing resources in terms of the number of staff, while the number of folks receiving services and needing services are increasing. So if, you know, agencies are looking for a digital assistant software that allows case managers and counselors to shift their focus, not make less work, not take things away, but really shift their focus from the administration to client outcomes by automating some of their communication and compliance. That's. SARA.   Carol: That's awesome. So, Cody, how can people get in contact with you for more information?   Cody: The best way is to go to our website. That's SARAWorks.com and you can request a demonstration and that comes directly to me. I can also be reached via email. Cody.Dixon, That's D i x o n, at SARAWorks.com.   Carol: Thank you. And Susan, I'm sure they're going to be people that are going to want to reach out to you as well and listen to your sparkling story. I love it. You have a lot of high energy, which is great. So how could folks best get in contact with you?   Susan: I would say my email would be the best way to go. Susan.Baker, b a k e r, @alaska.gov.   Carol: Well, I sure appreciate you both being on today. I think this was an important conversation to have. I'm super excited to hear about all the upgrades and the ways that SARAWorks has improved and that Alaska State that's been in it from the beginning is still using this product. So good for you guys. I hope you have a great day. Thanks much.   Susan: Thanks for having me, Carol.   Cody: Thank you, Carol. Thank you, Susan.   Susan: Yep, Thank you.   {Music} Speaker1: Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time, brought to you by the VR TAC for Quality Management. Catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening!  

What you'll learn in this episode: Why ancient Nubian jewelry is still significant today How the Kingdom of Kush rose and fell How ancient jewelry motifs, techniques and materials were shared and adapted between cultures Why the Museum of Fine Arts Boston has a significant collection of ancient Nubian art, and why it's being exhibited at the Getty Villa Why jewelry is often one of the only pathways to understand ancient cultures About Dr. Sara E. Cole Sara E. Cole is Assistant Curator of Antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum (Villa). She holds a PhD in Ancient History from Yale University. At the Getty, she is part of the Classical World in Context initiative, which seeks to highlight cross-cultural interactions in antiquity and explore the diversity and interconnectedness of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East through a series of special exhibitions and related publications and public programs. She has curated or assisted with exhibitions of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Neo-Assyrian, Persian, and Nubian art. About “Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan” from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston October 12, 2022 - April 3, 2023 Getty Villa Museum For nearly 3,000 years a series of kingdoms - collectively known as the Kingdom of Kush - flourished in ancient Nubia (present-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan). The region was rich in sought-after resources such as gold and ivory and its trade networks reached Egypt, Greece, Rome, and central Africa. This exhibition presents highlights from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's extensive collection of Nubian objects and features superbly crafted jewelry, metalwork, and sculpture exhibiting the wealth and splendor of Nubian society. Learn more about the exhibit at https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/nubian_jewelry/ Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com Transcript: Nubian jewelry is often overshadowed by Egyptian and Greco-Roman jewelry, but the ancient Nubians were the world's first jewelry pioneers. Their influential work is currently on display at “Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan,” an exhibit at the Getty Villa featuring pieces from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Dr. Sara E. Cole, assistant curator of the exhibit, joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about how Nubians developed their own enameling techniques; why jewelry is the key to understanding ancient cultures; and how iconography was shared and adapted throughout the ancient world. Read the episode transcript here.   Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the second part of a two-part episode. If you haven't heard part one, please head to TheJewelryJourney.com. Today, my guest is Sara Cole, who's the Assistant Curator of Antiquities at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California. She's the curator of “Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan,” an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston which showcases Nubian material. These finds were jointly executed early in the last century by Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibit is now open until April 3. Welcome back. Can you look at a piece of jewelry and say, maybe not exactly where it came from, but the period? It's late; it's early? Can you look at one and know? Sara: To put it in a bigger perspective, something about this collection of material that makes it so special is that it is all from documented archaeological excavations that were carried out in the early 20th century. Jewelry can be quite challenging if you have no context for a piece other than by comparing it stylistically to other known examples. It can be quite difficult sometimes to try to approximate when and where something was made, or to say with 100% certainty that it's even ancient if you have no context for it. A lot of the same materials and techniques that were used in antiquity are used or can be mimicked today. But with all of this material, it came from documented archaeological excavation, so we know exactly where it was found. Thanks to that context, we are able to say approximately the time period in which it must have been made and used and placed in the tomb. I suppose you could compare other surviving examples with what we now know from the archaeological record, but with this material, we are able to be absolutely certain of its authenticity and the time period in which it was being made and used because we have that archaeological context. Because Nubia had such a close relationship with Egypt and they engaged in so much exchange, there are some pieces that are found in Nubian contexts that might have been made in Egypt and imported to Nubia. It's often very difficult to say precisely where something was made because they were using very similar techniques and materials and iconography. So, there are a number of pieces in the exhibition that we think might have been manufactured in Egypt and then imported into Nubia. But even where that's the case, those objects clearly have value to the Nubians because they speak to their cultural and religious beliefs and priorities. Sharon: So, people would wear this jewelry in life, the pectorals or amulets. Did they have the same thing in their grave? Were they buried with what they wore, or did they have something special for it? Is it something made just to be buried with? Sara: It's both, actually. These royal tombs contained rich assemblages of jewelry. Some of the items do appear, based on signs of wear, to have actually been worn in life and then placed in the tomb with the deceased. There are also pieces that appear to have been made specifically to go in the burial, things that are very, very delicate and seem like they would not have been able to work in real life, or certain objects that are made specifically for funerary contexts. There's one piece in the exhibition from the Napatan Period that's really exquisite. It's this large, gold repoussé image of the goddess Isis, who is kneeling and stretching her wings out in a protective gesture, but at the tips of her wings and below her legs are these little tabs that each have a hole punched in them. The piece is too delicate, it seems, to have been something that someone would wear in life. And because of those little tabs with the punched holes, we believe it was probably manufactured specifically for this king's burial, and that it was meant to be sewn into the linen mummy wrappings that were used to mummify his body. Often there were amulets, protective icons, pieces of jewelry that were incorporated into the wrappings during the mummification process. So, it's both. Some of these pieces were probably worn in life and then taken to the tomb, and some of them were made specifically for the burial context. Sharon: I'm surprised you can even tell the difference between Egypt and Nubia with the cross-pollination. You talk about Isis. Being an expert, how does somebody know it was Egyptian? The only thing I've heard is that earrings were Egyptian. There weren't earrings before that. Sara: It's actually the other way around. This is one of the areas where the Nubians may have influenced the Egyptians. Earrings appear in Nubia before they appear in Egypt, so it's possible the Egyptians got the idea for earrings from the Nubians. As I mentioned, too, the fly pendant ornament originates in Nubia and gets adopted by the Egyptians. So, there is influence going in both directions, and where the Nubians incorporate Egyptian religious ideas, religious iconography, protective icons, they're still adapting it. They're not directly copying it necessarily. They're adapting it to their local traditions, to the types of materials they work with, to the types of objects and ornaments they make. It's not necessarily just a direct copy. In some instances, it is hard to tell whether a specific piece was made in Nubia versus Egypt. But with the burials themselves, we know these are Nubians and not Egyptians because we're looking not just at the jewelry, but at the overall burial itself, the whole object assemblage, the types of materials they're being buried with. In addition to the jewelry, there would be things like vessels, pottery, tools, weapons, things that give us a bigger picture. The cultural identity is not just the jewelry, but also the way in which they're buried and the place in which they're buried. In the Kerma Period, they used a very distinctive type of burial. They used tumulus burials, these big, beehive-shaped mounds, which was a distinctive type of burial. Over time those mounds get larger and larger, and we can tell that some of them must have belonged to Kerma rulers. Even though there are now written records during that period, we're going strictly by the archaeological record. In the Napatan Period, they actually used Egyptian hieroglyphs for monumental inscriptions. We do start to get some written records that we can read, and when these kings' and queens' tombs were excavated, there were often items within the tomb inscribed with their names. So, we know who these tombs belonged to, and they belonged to Nubian and Napatan kings and queens. It's really looking at the big picture and not just at the jewelry specifically to identify who these items belonged to and whose burials they come from. Sharon: First, I want to know how anybody even knew these tombs were there. Everything you're describing, at least from the description of what was in the tombs, is what Carter found when he opened the tomb just a few years later, maybe 10 years later. I'm just wondering how they knew these tombs were there. How did they know that? Was it just the beehives that were standing on a farm? Sara: The material that's in the MFA Boston was all excavated in the early 20th century, from 1913 to 1932, by a joint Harvard/MFA Boston expedition led by an American archaeologist named George Reisner, who worked in both Egypt and Sudan. He took a team to Sudan that ended up excavating at Kerma, Napata and Meroë. He was tremendously successful in what he discovered, and he essentially rediscovered the city of Kerma. There have been excavations within the city itself, but they also discovered this vast cemetery outside of the city containing tens of thousands of these tumulus burials. Then at Napata and Meroë, they're utilizing pyramid burials, which are still visible on the landscape. You can walk up to them. He was really the first to do these rigorously documented, professional archaeological excavations of these places, and he found a tremendous amount of material. I should also mention the way it ended up in Boston is that, at the time, Sudan practiced the partage system, so he finds would essentially be split 50-50. About half the materials remain in Sudan, where it is now in the national museum in Khartoum, and about half the material was allowed to be taken back to Boston by Reisner, where it became part of the MFA collection. So, the MFA is now home to the largest and most significant collection of Nubian archaeological material in the world outside of Khartoum. Sharon: Did they suspect that there were these kingdoms, but nobody ever found them? Is that what happened? How did he start digging? Sara: To be perfectly honest, I would have to go back and double check how he determined exactly where he wanted to begin. Sharon: Why should we care about the Nubians? Why should we care about these kingdoms? You describe how it kept moving further south. That's usually because of agriculture. What caused them to move, besides invasion? Sara: That's a broad question. I don't know that we necessarily know for certain what was motivating them to move from one city to the next. In terms of the question of why we should care, that's something we could ask about any ancient civilization. It does raise this broader question about relevance that a lot of audiences are asking. I would say for Nubia especially, this is the region in northeastern Africa where some of the earliest civilizations of ancient Africa are arising. This is an incredibly important region that was also a real crossroads for international trade, given their connections to the Red Sea, into central Africa, into sub-Saharan Africa, and eventually out into the broader Mediterranean world. This was a very interconnected place with rich natural resources where some of the earliest complex civilizations of ancient Africa arise, so I think we absolutely should care about it. Speaking in terms of jewelry specifically, this is the place where some of the most exquisitely crafted, sophisticated pieces of ancient jewelry in the world were produced. They were incredibly skilled artisans who developed techniques for working with these materials that in some cases, like I mentioned with the enameling, were believed to have been invented in the modern era until recently. Sharon: That's amazing. I always have to think about the fact that they didn't have electric lights and they had to work by candlelight. They had to deal with sunlight only. I don't know exactly how to phrase this, but most of the time, if I were to take a piece from the little room of jewelry at the Getty Villa, and I want to take it out and put it on my wrists, nobody would know the difference. Would you say that's the same with a lot of this? Sara: I think so. It always strikes people how contemporary some of these pieces look. They look like things that could have been made today. Sharon: Were they going back or was this the start of it? Were they going back and building on what had been done before? Sara: They were really pioneers. They were developing new techniques and new styles for working with this material. In the pre-Kerma phase, in the archaeological record, there are items of personal adornment that are made from things like shell or imported faience sometimes, simple strings of beads, that kind of thing. But then as they develop kiln technology to make pottery, they're also able to apply that to making faience and eventually glass. They develop, as I mentioned, these very sophisticated techniques for working with different semiprecious stones, for working with gold, for working with glass and enameling. They're really not looking back to any existing precedent. They are developing these techniques for the first time. Sharon: That's amazing. You wonder why each civilization or each culture seems to have certain things that are ubiquitous, like a ram's head. You wonder, where did it start? What keeps your attention about all of this? Is it the cross-pollination? Sara: I don't even know where to begin answering that. I find this material endlessly fascinating. Every time you look at it, you see or appreciate something new, the intricacy of it, or as I mentioned, the ways in which this jewelry for the ancient Nubians is not just a status item. It's not just something beautiful to look at and wear. It's imbued with all of these layers of meaning. It reflects so many aspects of Nubian society and Nubian beliefs and Nubian practices. Because of the relative lack of written records from ancient Nubia, we are reliant on the archaeological record. So much of this jewelry helps us more broadly understand ancient Nubian society. I think you can come back to it and look at it over and over again and find new levels of meaning in it every time, as well as being able to appreciate how beautiful it is. Sharon: But you must have seen a lot of ancient jewelry. You've seen Greek and Roman and Egyptian and Nubian. What keeps your attention? What's so fascinating that it would keep your attention for so long? Sara: I think everything I just mentioned. The jewelry across ancient societies is fascinating for those same reasons, that it typically is not just about beauty and personal adornment. It's also reflective of cultural and religious beliefs, but I think it's the fact that this material is some of the earliest of its kind as well. As I mentioned, they're pioneers in developing new techniques or adopting techniques from other places and reengineering them as they did with faience, which was being made in Egypt prior to Nubia. They reengineered it, figured out how to make it for themselves. They were developing these unique techniques like the glazed quartz, the enameling techniques. It's incredible to think that 3,000, 4,000 years ago, people were making these items and developing these technologies and with handmade tools and natural light, and it would be very difficult to control temperatures of a kiln. It's incredible. Sharon: It is incredible. I know the Getty Villa is different than the Getty Center. The Getty Villa is a replica of a Roman villa, and it has a little room that has just jewelry. It's very small. It's a jewel box of a room, really. Do they have Nubian jewelry in there? Sara: We do not. We do not own any ancient Nubian jewelry in our permanent collection at the Villa. The Villa is a separate site from the Getty Center. We are home to the Getty Museum's Antiquities Collection specifically. Our permanent collection of antiquities is predominantly Greek, Roman and Etruscan. This Nubian exhibition is part of a broader initiative we've been engaged in in recent years, where we're trying to bring in special exhibitions featuring material from other ancient cultures and civilizations so our visitors can get a bigger picture of the ancient world. It's also so we're not perpetuating this idea that in antiquity, Greek and Roman are all there is. There's so much more than that. What's reflected in our permanent collection is Greek and Roman. So, through this special exhibition program, we're able to highlight other cultures. We also recently had a big exhibition on ancient Persia that included some stunning items of Persian jewelry. Sharon: I missed that one. Sara: We don't have any Nubian or Egyptian jewelry in our antiquities collection, so this is a unique opportunity. As I mentioned, this material is housed at the MFA Boston, so it's a unique opportunity for people on the West Coast to see a major exhibition of ancient Nubian material, but it is quite different. You can see some stylistic similarities like I mentioned with the Meroitic Period, when they have those trade connections to the Greco-Roman world. You can see stylistic similarities between some of our Greco-Roman pieces and some of the pieces in the Meroitic section of the exhibition, but it is very distinctive. It's a nice counterpoint. We have at the Getty a pretty significant collection of ancient, engraved gemstones as well as some Hellenistic gold jewelry and finger rings. You can see similarities. Finger rings with carved bezzles became very popular during the Meroitic Period as well, so you can see some similarities there with the rings being made in the Greco-Roman world. Sharon: If you haven't seen the little room with jewelry there, you could take any piece from the Greco-Roman era—and it's probably true of the Nubian era, too—and put it on, and nobody would know the difference if you went to the market. Sara: Yeah. Sharon: Something I came across mentioned the role of women in Nubia, that there was a stronger role. Can you tell us something about that? Sara: Yes, it seems throughout ancient Nubian history, in the Kingdom of Kush, royal women held particularly high status. We can see that in a few different ways. We can see that in their burials. We can see it some of their individual items of jewelry, which I'll mention, and we also see it in some of the practices that were being implemented, the roles that royal women had. In the Napatan period, there were a group of royal women who became associated with the god Amun and were sent to Thebes in Egypt, which was the Egyptian center of the worship of Egyptian Amun. These women were made into high priestesses of the god at his temple there. So, they held these very high-ranking, powerful positions, and these were royal women who were relatives of the Napatan kings who were also ruling in Egypt. They had great religious significance in this very important role, where they were sent to Egypt as god's wives of Amun, what we call them, or high priestesses of Amun. During the same period, there are some items of jewelry in royal women's tombs at Napata that speak to their importance. For instance, there's a piece in the exhibition that is easy to overlook because it's very small, but it's definitely worth taking the time to look at. It's a little silver pendant that shows the goddess Hathor, who I mentioned previously is the goddess of love and fertility and motherhood who gets adopted and becomes very important in the Nubian culture. It's an image of Hathor, and she is nursing a Nubian queen named Nefrukakashta. The item was found in her tomb. So, she is receiving, essentially, divine lifeforce from Hathor through being nursed by her. This is important because this was also a composition we see in Egypt,  but there it's only the kings who appear being nursed by Hathor. The king is embodying a divine role as pharaoh, so he receives divine lifeforce from Hathor. You never see royal women in ancient Egypt in this pose being nursed by Hathor, but in Nubia, we see it. The status of royal woman is higher there. They're considered worthy of being show in this position of being nursed by the goddess herself. By the time we get to the Meroitic Period, the final phase of the kingdom, there's actually a series of queens who take the throne for themselves and they rule as sole rules. These were very powerful women ruling over the Kingdom of Kush in its final phase, one of whom even famously fought off attempts at invasion by the Roman emperor Augusts. She signed a peace treaty with him to protect the border between Nubia and Egypt, which at that time had become a Roman province. So, royal women in ancient Nubia achieved very high status. Sharon: I think that's very interesting. I could talk to you for hours about the history of women and what happened after that. Thank you so much, Sara, for being with us today. I just want to remind you about the exhibit. I listened to a webinar and looked at the press release. It looks like it will be a very interesting exhibit. I look forward to seeing it in person live. It's through April 13. Dr. Sara Cole is the assistant curator. Thank you very much for being here today. Sara: Thank you so much for having me. We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to TheJewelryJourney.com to check them out. Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.

What you'll learn in this episode: Why ancient Nubian jewelry is still significant today How the Kingdom of Kush rose and fell How ancient jewelry motifs, techniques and materials were shared and adapted between cultures Why the Museum of Fine Arts Boston has a significant collection of ancient Nubian art, and why it's being exhibited at the Getty Villa Why jewelry is often one of the only pathways to understand ancient cultures About Dr. Sara E. Cole Sara E. Cole is Assistant Curator of Antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum (Villa). She holds a PhD in Ancient History from Yale University. At the Getty, she is part of the Classical World in Context initiative, which seeks to highlight cross-cultural interactions in antiquity and explore the diversity and interconnectedness of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East through a series of special exhibitions and related publications and public programs. She has curated or assisted with exhibitions of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Neo-Assyrian, Persian, and Nubian art. About “Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan” from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston October 12, 2022 - April 3, 2023 Getty Villa Museum For nearly 3,000 years a series of kingdoms - collectively known as the Kingdom of Kush - flourished in ancient Nubia (present-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan). The region was rich in sought-after resources such as gold and ivory and its trade networks reached Egypt, Greece, Rome, and central Africa. This exhibition presents highlights from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's extensive collection of Nubian objects and features superbly crafted jewelry, metalwork, and sculpture exhibiting the wealth and splendor of Nubian society. Learn more about the exhibit at https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/nubian_jewelry/ Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com Transcript: Nubian jewelry is often overshadowed by Egyptian and Greco-Roman jewelry, but the ancient Nubians were the world's first jewelry pioneers. Their influential work is currently on display at “Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan,” an exhibit at the Getty Villa featuring pieces from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Dr. Sara E. Cole, assistant curator of the exhibit, joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about how Nubians developed their own enameling techniques; why jewelry is the key to understanding ancient cultures; and how iconography was shared and adapted throughout the ancient world. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the first part of a two-part episode. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it's released later this week. Today, my guest is Sara Cole, who's the Assistant Curator of Antiquities at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California. She's the curator of “Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan,” an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston which showcases Nubian material. These finds were jointly executed early in the last century by Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibit is now open until April 3. Sara received her Ph.D. from Yale, which is amazing. She's an expert in ancient history and a specialist in material culture of Greco-Roman Egypt. She has studied the cross-pollination of cultures, and we'll hear a lot more about it today. Sara, welcome to the program. Sara: Thank you for having me. Sharon: So glad to have you. Tell us about your own journey. Did you come to jewelry through antiquities or archaeology, or the other way around? Sara: Yes, through my study of archaeology and Egyptology as a graduate student. That was primarily my introduction to this material. I became familiar with Nubia primarily through the MFA Boston's tremendous archaeological collection of Nubian material. When I was a graduate student at Yale back in, I think, 2011, I took a graduate seminar on Nubian archaeology with a Nubian specialist named Maria Gatto. In one of our classes, we took the train to Boston and got to spend a day going through the storerooms of the MFA looking at Nubian material. We were primarily looking at pottery that day, but we did get to see some other objects as well. In 2014, MFA put on its own small exhibition featuring their Nubian jewelry collection, so that brought that material a little bit more into public view. Then in 2019, the MFA did a big exhibition bringing out highlights of their full Nubian collection that was called “Ancient Nubia Now.” Since 2019, they very generously sent parts of this collection to different museums for exhibitions around the world. We're very fortunate at the Getty Villa that we were able to borrow some of these stunning pieces of jewelry and personal adornment from that collection for this current exhibition. Sharon: I have to ask you. When you were younger, you say you were interested in Egypt and ancient periods, but very few people go into archaeology. How is it that you stuck with it? Sara: Museums were really my entry point to the ancient world as a child, which I think is true for a lot of us. I grew up in a small town in Virginia and wasn't exposed to major museum collections as kid, but we had a small, local museum. It featured mostly local contemporary artists, but one summer they put on view a small touring exhibition of Egyptian material from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. I was probably 11 or 12 years old. That was my first exposure to ancient Egyptian material, and I just found it incredibly captivating and compelling, and I stuck with that interest. I ended up doing a bachelor's degree in classics and then my Ph.D. in ancient history, where I studied a combination of Egyptology, classics and art history. But I've always had a great passion for museums in particular because it was my personal entry point to the ancient world. We do have the opportunity, through putting on exhibitions like this, to reach such wide audiences and to bring this material to their attention, things they've maybe never seen or considered before. It's a really wonderful opportunity. Sharon: It really is. When you say Nubia, a lot of us haven't really thought about Nubia or Nubian jewels. That's the entry point or the foundation. What is Nubia? What do you mean by Nubian? Sara: That's a great question, because I think a lot of people have heard of Nubia but they're not quite sure what it is. Traditionally it has received a lot less attention than ancient Egypt, which is this huge, looming civilization. When we talk about ancient Nubia, we're really talking about a geographical region that was located immediately south of ancient Egypt. They were neighbors. In terms of modern-day geography, it reached essentially from Aswan in what is now southern Egypt down to about Khartoum in present-day Sudan. The contemporary political border between Egypt and Sudan cuts across part of what was ancient Nubia, when the border was located further north between Nubia and Egypt. So, it's essentially this geographical region going across part of what is today southern Egypt and northern Sudan. For parts of its ancient history, Nubia as a region was actually home to several different cultural groups. It wasn't always a single, unified culture. So, when we talk about Nubia, we're talking about the geographical area, and then there were different cultures that lived within Nubia. Around the third millennium B.C., a political institute called the Kingdom of Kush—because the region was known as Kush in antiquity—arose at the city of Karma in what is today Sudan. It eventually came to conquer essentially all of the region of Nubia. The Kingdom of Kush lasted on and off for a period of almost 3,000 years, and it moved to different capital cities in different phases. It first arose at Kerma in the third millennium B.C., then moved further south to a capital called Napata, which was also along the Nile River, around 750 B.C. Then in its final phase, starting around 350 B.C., it was centered at a city even further south on the Nile River called Meroë. So, when we talk about ancient Nubia, we're talking about that region, but for this exhibition, we're really focusing on items of jewelry that were worn by royalty and the elite of the Kingdom of Kush that were found at these three successive capital cities. Sharon: I was going to ask you if Napata and—is it Morocco? Sara: Meroë. Sharon: Meroë. I've heard so much about it, but did they all have jewelry? Did the royalty all have jewelry at all three of these sites? Sara: Yes, absolutely. Throughout human history, I think in all cultures we see personal adornment as a universal means of self-expression. It's a means of expressing status and power. But also in antiquity, much of this jewelry, either the materials themselves or the iconography incorporated into it, had symbolic religious significance. Items of jewelry were often amuletic and protective, or they could signify one's status in society, one's role. They reflect a lot about an ancient culture's social organization, religious beliefs, communities, etc. These items of jewelry speak to so much more than being aesthetically beautiful status items. So, yes, even very early in Kerma and even in pre-Kerma archaeology, we find items of jewelry in the archaeological record. Jewelry was very essential, especially for rulers and for individuals of high status, to express themselves in ancient Nubia. Sharon: Did both men and women have jewelry? Sara: Yes, they did. Men, women, children, and sometimes even very prized royal animals were adorned with jewelry. Sharon: Were these from tombs or graves? Sara: Yes, essentially all of the items in this exhibition were excavated from royal and wealthy burials. This was material that people valued in life but also chose to take with them to the grave. As a I mentioned, a lot of these pieces have iconography that is protective or amuletic, which would have particular significance in the context of the tomb. These are images that are going to protect you as you are making your transition to the afterlife. So, all of the material was excavated from burials. That is primarily where we find these high-status jewelry items still surviving. They survive because they were buried, and people didn't have the opportunity to reuse them or repurpose the materials. Sharon: First of all, I think I forgot to say that this exhibit is only on until April 3, which comes up quickly. I can't remember if I said that or not. Sara: Yes, two more months to go see it at the Villa. Sharon: When you say it's like a dynasty or the Kingdom of Kush lasted 3,000 years, I have this idea that it rose high and then it was—I don't want to say nothing, but they weren't reading. It was like the Dark Ages in a sense, really dark, and then it rose again in a different place. How did that work? Sara: The Kingdom of Kush went through fluctuations over that 3,000-year period. I wouldn't necessarily call it dark ages. The Nubians simply never developed the same tradition of extensive written records like we get from Egypt, so much of our knowledge of Nubia comes from the archaeological material. We just don't have extensive written historical documentation from this region. It wasn't part of the culture. They had a very complicated relationship with their neighbor to the north, Egypt, which is largely the reason for these periods of rise and fall. The Kingdom of Kush arose, like I mentioned, at Kerma in Sudan, during which time in northern Nubia, there were other cultural groups inhabiting that region who were in conflict with Egypt. The Kingdom of Kush eventually was able to take that region and unify Nubia under its rule. Kerma flourished for almost 1,000 years, from about 2,400 B.C. until roughly 1,550 B.C. But what happened around 1,550 was that Egypt entered into a very powerful period in its history, the New Kingdom, the rise of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and those kings invaded Nubia and took over. They occupied Nubia for about 500 years, during which time we don't have a tremendous amount of archaeological evidence for what was going on. But it seems like Nubians and Egyptians were essentially coexisting in Nubia during this period. As you can imagine, over 500 years, there's a huge amount of cross-cultural exchange as a result of the Egyptian presence in Nubia. Some Egyptian religious ideas get incorporated into local Nubian tradition, as does a lot of iconography. There are a lot of ways in which the Nubians start adapting some Egyptian concepts to their own local practices. Then the Egyptians get pushed out of Nubia around 1,000 B.C. approximately. The Kingdom of Kush starts to regroup and rebuild itself, and it reappears fully around 750 B.C., now at the capital city of Napata. What's interesting at the beginning of the Napatan phase is that the Nubians turn the tables on Egypt and invade them. They take over Egypt and rule for about 80 years. For that 80-year period, staring around 725 B.C., the Kingdom of Kush is at its greatest extent, going all the way from what is today Sudan up to the Mediterranean coast, ruling over both Nubia and Egypt. After that 80-year period, they get pushed out of Egypt but are still ruling the Kingdom of Kush from Napata. We see some really interesting ways in which the rulers of that 80-year period adapted an Egyptian mode of self-presentation. They're trying to present themselves as legitimate pharaohs in Egypt. They start presenting themselves in a way that is adapted from earlier pharaonic styles of self-presentation. Even though the Nubian kings are spending some time in Egypt, they choose to be sent back to Napata for their royal burials, and they start using pyramid tombs during this period. They start practicing mummification and incorporating some Egyptian-style object assemblages into their burials. We see some of those practices get adapted during this 80-year period, including the incorporation of a lot of Egyptian religious iconography into their jewelry. We see those trends continue later, even when they're no longer ruling in Egypt. Then during this Napatan phase, which lasts roughly 400 years, they start to gradually shift the capital further south to this third city of Meroë. By around 350 B.C., both the administrative capital and the royal cemetery have moved to Meroë, and this is the final phase of the Kingdom of Kush. This is a phase that lasts from roughly 350 B.C. to 350 A.D., when the Kingdom of Kush falls. It corresponds with the conquests of Alexander the Great throughout the eastern Mediterranean and ancient Near East, the rise of his successor kingdoms and then the rise of the Roman Empire. But throughout all of this, the Kingdom of Kush maintained its political independence. It never became part of Alexander's territories; it never became part of the Roman Empire, unlike Egypt, which did. They had a complex relationship with Rome, who at times tried to take Nubia unsuccessfully, but they were also connected to these vast trade networks that connected the Mediterranean and the Near East throughout the Roman Empire. It was a very cosmopolitan place, ancient Meroë. They were very closely connected through trade networks to the rest of the world. They were also producing some incredibly high-status pieces of jewelry with really exquisite craftsmanship. Then the Kingdom of Kush falls around 350 A.D. That's the big picture of what we're looking at here, with the history of the Kingdom of Kush and its different phases. Sharon: When you say Nubia, is that the same as the Kingdom of Kush? Do you mean the Kingdom of Kush or Nubia are one in the same, I guess? Sara: Nubia in antiquity was known as Kush, and then the Kingdom of Kush is the political entity ruling over that region. Sharon: Did the jewelry change over the years? Sara: It did, yes. We do see that even across these different phases, each one has a distinctive aesthetic. There is no single, unified Nubian look to the jewelry. Different fashions change over time. Different popular materials come in and out of fashion. In Kerma, in the earliest phases, we see jewelers making items out of locally available and imported organic materials. They're making use of things like hippo and elephant ivory to create cuff bracelets. They're making use of shells they imported from the Red Sea coast and fashioned into different items. They were also importing faience from Egypt. Ancient faience was a man-made, blue-green, glazed, quartz-based ceramic material that was very popular in Egypt. The Kermans were importing it initially, but then they developed their own faience-making technology and were able to produce their own. So, we start to see the use of this man-made material. They're using gold. Nubia in antiquity is known primarily as a land of gold because of their rich gold resources in the Eastern Desert. That was their main coveted natural resource. They had incredibly skillful techniques in working with gold. We see them using locally available semiprecious stones, things like carnelian and amethyst. They work with quartz in some really interesting ways. Quartz is found alongside gold, so it was probably symbolically associated with gold. Gold was valued not only because it was this very prized economic resource, but it was also an imperishable material. It was associated with immortality and the sun, and it was very highly symbolically valued. They would take quartz and do an interesting treatment that, as far as I am aware, is distinctive to ancient Kerma. They would take the quartz, either shaping it into spherical beads or taking chunks of it in its raw form to use as pendants, and they would put a blue-green glaze over it and fire it in a kiln to create a hard, shiny, translucent blue surface that creates this stunning, glass-like appearance when it's done successfully. It was a delicate technique. You had to be very careful, because if you raised the temperature in the kiln too quickly, the quartz would fracture and burst, and you would lose your item of jewelry you were making. They had to be very careful in this process, but again, as far as I know, this is a distinctive Kerman technique, a distinctive way of working with quartz. Those were the types of materials they were utilizing to make items of jewelry. There's also a particular ornament we start to see in Kerma that is really interesting and later gets adopted by the Egyptians, which is the fly pendant. They are these large pendants that were often worn in pairs strung around the neck, and they represent flies. We have an example in the exhibition where the head is made of gilded bronze and the wings are carved out of ivory. These are found in soldiers' tombs. They appear to have been given as a medal of honor to high-status members of the Nubian military. We can ask why they would choose a fly of all things to honor a member of the military, and we believe it's because if you go to Egypt, if you go to the Nile Valley, you will experience that the flies are very big and mean and aggressive. So, we think these fly pendants are a way of associating the aggression and the tenacity of the Nilotic flies with the aggression and the tenacity of Nubian warriors. Later these fly pendants actually get adopted in Egypt as well as a military medal of honor. So, those were the kinds of things we find at Kerma. As I mentioned, that period comes to an end with this big invasion of the Egyptians around 1,500 B.C. Then when the Kingdom of Kush rearises at Napata around 750 B.C., they invade Egypt. They take over, and we start to see how this 500-year period of intense cross-cultural interaction has resulted in the introduction of a lot of Egyptian iconography into the royal jewelry. We start to see a lot of images of goddesses like Hathor and Isis, who became very important in the Nubian pantheon. There is an Egyptian god called Amun who becomes introduced as the supreme god of ancient Nubia, but in his Nubian form specifically, he takes the form of a ram or a man with a ram's head. We believe that before this period, there was probably an indigenous ram god who Amun became assimilated with. So, we see a lot of ram iconography in the jewelry. There's a lot of iconography associated with the goddess Hathor, who was this Egyptian goddess of love, fertility, beauty and motherhood with whom Nubian queens and royal women became particularly associated. We see a lot of that kind of iconography. We see protective icons that have been introduced from Egypt, things like the Eye of Floridus, the scarab beetle, that kind of thing. They're working a lot in faience still. There are some queens' tombs from this period where these large faience plaques are very popular, again in the shapes of religious protective imagery, amuletic icons, gods and goddesses. They were big plaques that were strung on strings of beads and worn around the neck, essentially meant to sit over the chest to protect the pectorals. We see a lot of that kind of thing, this incorporation of new iconography, new religious ideas, sometimes a very Egyptian mode of self-presentation that they've adopted from the Egyptians. They're working in faience; they're working in gold. We do see some silver during this period. Silver was not locally available; it was an imported material, but we do see a lot of skilled gold work during this phase. They are developing some very sophisticated techniques for how to fashion items of jewelry, but also things like golden vessels. This is a phase where we start to see that Egyptian influence and some increasing sophistication in the techniques with which they're working, with both these man-made and locally available resources. In the Meroitic Period, we see those gold working techniques really hit their stride. There is some tremendously sophisticated gold work made during the Meroitic Period, where they're using techniques like granulation and filigree and very delicate wirework. At Meroë, they also start producing glass. Glass beads start to appear in the jewelry. Something that Meroë distinctively is also known for is the use of a wide range of enameling techniques. They would take powdered glass and apply it to the surface of items of jewelry, and then heat it to fuse it and create it a hard, shiny, colorful surface. There were multiple enameling techniques they developed at Meroë, some of which, prior to their discovery at Meroë, were thought to have not been invented until the modern era. There were techniques they developed at Meroë, and the knowledge of that technology was lost and rediscovered in modern times. This is also a phase during which we see, as I mentioned, a kind of cosmopolitan international style developing. We do see some Greco-Roman influences coming into play in the form of large, dangly pendant earrings and the development of new color schemes, for instance. There was a color scheme at Meroë that was especially popular, which was red, white and black. They would use cornelian, which was a popular material, to achieve the red and then import obsidian for black and travertine for white. Each phase has its own distinctive repertoire of objects and iconography and manufacturing techniques that were being used. Sharon: We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to TheJewelryJourney.com to check them out. END OF PART ONE

Why does the history of computing matter? Joël and Developer at thoughtbot Sara Jackson, ponder this and share some cool stories (and trivia!!) behind the tools we use in the industry. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Sara on Twitter (https://twitter.com/csarajackson) UNIX philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy) Hillel Wayne on why we ask linked list questions (https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. And today, I'm joined by fellow thoughtboter, Team Lead, and Developer Sara Jackson. SARA: Hello, happy to be here. JOËL: Together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Sara, what's new in your world? SARA: Well, Joël, you might know that recently our team had a small get-together in Toronto. JOËL: And our team, for those who are not aware, is fully remote distributed across multiple countries. So this was a chance to get together in person. SARA: Yes, correct. This was a chance for those on the Boost team to get together and work together as if we had a physical office. JOËL: Was this your first time meeting some members of the team? SARA: It was my second, for the most part. So I joined thoughtbot, but after thoughtbot had already gotten remote. Fortunately, I was able to meet many other thoughtboters in May at our summit. JOËL: Had you worked at a remote company before coming to thoughtbot? SARA: Yes, I actually started working remotely in 2019, but even then, that wasn't my first time working remotely. I actually had a full year of internship in college that was remote. JOËL: So you were a pro at this long before the pandemic made us all try it out. SARA: I don't know about that, but I've certainly dealt with the idiosyncrasies that come with remote work for longer. JOËL: What do you think are some of the challenges of remote work as opposed to working in person in an office? SARA: I think definitely growing and maintaining a culture. When you're in an office, it's easy to create ad hoc conversations and have events that are small that build on the culture. But when you're remote, it has to be a lot more intentional. JOËL: That definitely rings true for me. One of the things that I really appreciated about in-person office culture was the serendipity that you have those sort of random meetings at the water cooler, those conversations, waiting for coffee with people who are not necessarily on the same team or the same project as you are. SARA: I also really miss being able to have lunch in person with folks where I can casually gripe about an issue I might be having, and almost certainly, someone would have the answer. Now, if I'm having an issue, I have to intentionally seek help. [chuckles] JOËL: One of the funny things that often happened, at least the office where I worked at, was that lunches would often devolve into taxonomy conversations. SARA: I wish I had been there for that. [laughter] JOËL: Well, we do have a taxonomy channel on Slack to somewhat continue that legacy. SARA: Do you have a favorite taxonomy lunch discussion that you recall? JOËL: I definitely got to the point where I hated the classifying a sandwich. That one has been way overdone. SARA: Absolutely. JOËL: There was an interesting one about motorcycles, and mopeds, and bicycles, and e-bikes, and trying to see how do you distinguish one from the other. Is it an electric motor? Is it the power of the engine that you have? Is it the size? SARA: My brain is already turning on those thoughts. I feel like I could get lost down that rabbit hole very easily. [laughter] JOËL: Maybe that should be like a special anniversary episode for The Bike Shed, just one long taxonomy ramble. SARA: Where we talk about bikes. JOËL: Ooh, that's so perfect. I love it. One thing that I really appreciated during our time in Toronto was that we actually got to have lunch in person again. SARA: Yeah, that was so wonderful. Having folks coming together that had maybe never worked together directly on clients just getting to sit down and talk about our day. JOËL: Yeah, and talk about maybe it's work-related, maybe it's not. There's a lot of power to having some amount of deeper interpersonal connection with your co-workers beyond just the we work on a project together. SARA: Yeah, it's like camaraderie beyond the shared mission of the company. It's the shared interpersonal mission, like you say. Did you have any in-person pairing sessions in Toronto? JOËL: I did. It was actually kind of serendipitous. Someone was stuck with a weird failing test because somehow the order factories were getting created in was not behaving in the expected way, and we herd on it, dug into it, found some weird thing with composite primary keys, and solved the issue. SARA: That's wonderful. I love that. I wonder if that interaction would have happened or gotten solved as quickly if we hadn't been in person. JOËL: I don't know about you, but I feel like I sometimes struggle to ask for help or ask for a pair more when I'm online. SARA: Yeah, I agree. It's easier to feel like you're not as big of an impediment when you're in person. You tap someone on the shoulder, "Hey, can you take a look at this?" JOËL: Especially when they're on the same team as you, they're sitting at the next desk over. I don't know; it just felt easier. Even though it's literally one button press to get Tuple to make a call, somehow, I feel like I'm interrupting more. SARA: To combat that, I've been trying to pair more frequently and consistently regardless of if I'm struggling with a problem. JOËL: Has that worked pretty well? SARA: It's been wonderful. The only downside has been pairing fatigue. JOËL: Pairing fatigue is real. SARA: But other than that, problems have gotten solved quickly. We've all learned something for those that I've paired with. It goes faster. JOËL: So it was really great that we had this experience of doing our daily work but co-located in person; we have these experiences of working together. What would you say has been one of the highlights for you of that time? SARA: 100% karaoke. JOËL: [laughs] SARA: Only two folks did not attend. Many of the folks that did attend told me they weren't going to sing, but they were just going to watch. By the end of the night, everyone had sung. We were there for nearly three and a half hours. [laughs] JOËL: It was a good time all around. SARA: I saw a different side to Chad. JOËL: [laughs] SARA: And everyone, honestly. Were there any musical choices that surprised you? JOËL: Not particularly. Karaoke is always fun when you have a group of people that you trust to be a little bit foolish in front of to put yourself out there. I really appreciated the style that we went for, where we have a private room for just the people who were there as opposed to a stage in a bar somewhere. I think that makes it a little bit more accessible to pick up the mic and try to sing a song. SARA: I agree. That style of karaoke is a lot more popular in Asia, having your private room. Sometimes you can find it in major cities. But I also prefer it for that reason. JOËL: One of my highlights of this trip was this very sort of serendipitous moment that happened. Someone was asking a question about the difference between a Mac and Linux operating systems. And then just an impromptu gathering happened. And you pulled up a chair, and you're like, gather around, everyone. In the beginning, there was Multics. It was amazing. SARA: I felt like some kind of historian or librarian coming out from the deep. Let me tell you about this random operating system knowledge that I have. [laughs] JOËL: The ancient lore. SARA: The ancient lore in the year 1969. JOËL: [laughs] And then yeah, we had a conversation walking the history of operating systems, and why we have macOS and Linux, and why they're different, and why Windows is a totally different kind of family there. SARA: Yeah, macOS and Linux are sort of like cousins coming from the same tree. JOËL: Is that because they're both related through Unix? SARA: Yes. Linux and macOS are both built based off of different versions of Unix. Over the years, there's almost like a family tree of these different Nix operating systems as they're called. JOËL: I've sometimes seen asterisk N-I-X. This is what you're referring to as Nix. SARA: Yes, where the asterisk is like the RegEx catch-all. JOËL: So this might be Unix. It might be Linux. It might be... SARA: Minix. JOËL: All of those. SARA: Do you know the origin of the name Unix? JOËL: I do not. SARA: It's kind of a fun trivia piece. So, in the beginning, there was Multics spelled M-U-L-T-I-C-S, standing for the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson of Bell Labs famous for the C programming language... JOËL: You may have heard of it. SARA: You may have heard of it maybe on a different podcast. They were employees at Bell Labs when Multics was being created. They felt that Multics was very bulky and heavy. It was trying to do too many things at once. It did have a few good concepts. So they developed their own smaller Unix originally, Unics, the Uniplexed Information and Computing Service, Uniplexed versus Multiplexed. We do one thing really well. JOËL: And that's the Unix philosophy. SARA: It absolutely is. The Unix philosophy developed out of the creation of Unix and C. Do you know the four main points? JOËL: No, is it small sharp tools? It's the main one I hear. SARA: Yes, that is the kind of quippy version that has come out for sure. JOËL: But there is a formal four-point manifesto. SARA: I believe it's evolved over the years. But it's interesting looking at the Unix philosophy and seeing how relevant it is today in web development. The four points being make each program do one thing well. To this end, don't add features; make a new program. I feel like we have this a lot in encapsulation. JOËL: Hmm, maybe even the open-closed principle. SARA: Absolutely. JOËL: Similar idea. SARA: Another part of the philosophy is expecting output of your program to become input of another program that is yet unknown. The key being don't clutter your output; don't have extraneous text. This feels very similar to how we develop APIs. JOËL: With a focus on composability. SARA: Absolutely. Being able to chain commands together like you see in Ruby all the time. JOËL: I love being able to do this, for example, the enumerable API in Ruby and just being able to chain all these methods together to just very nicely do some pretty big transformations on an array or some other data structure. SARA: 100% agree there. That ability almost certainly came out of following the tenets of this philosophy, maybe not knowingly so but maybe knowingly so. [chuckles] JOËL: So is that three or four? SARA: So that was two. The third being what we know as agile. JOËL: Really? SARA: Yeah, right? The '70s brought us agile. Design and build software to be tried early, and don't hesitate to throw away clumsy parts and rebuild. JOËL: Hmmm. SARA: Even in those days, despite waterfall style still coming on the horizon. It was known for those writing software that it was important to iterate quickly. JOËL: Wow, I would never have known. SARA: It's neat having this history available to us. It's sort of like a lens at where we came from. Another piece of this history that might seem like a more modern concept but was a very big part of the movement in the '70s and the '80s was using tools rather than unskilled help or trying to struggle through something yourself when you're lightening a programming task. We see this all the time at thoughtbot. Folks do this many times there is an issue on a client code. We are able to generalize the solution, extract into a tool that can then be reused. JOËL: So that's the same kind of genesis as a lot of thoughtbot's open-source gems, so I'm thinking of FactoryBot, Clearance, Paperclip, the old-timey file upload gem, Suspenders, the Rails app generator, and the list goes on. SARA: I love that in this last point of the Unix philosophy, they specifically call out that you should create a new tool, even if it means detouring, even if it means throwing the tools out later. JOËL: What impact do you think that has had on the way that tooling in the Unix, or maybe I should say *Nix, ecosystem has developed? SARA: It was a major aspect of the Nix environment community because Unix was available, not free, but very inexpensively to educational institutions. And because of how lightweight it was and its focus on single-use programs, programs that were designed to do one thing, and also the way the shell was allowing you to use commands directly and having it be the same language as the shell scripting language, users, students, amateurs, and I say that in a loving way, were able to create their own tools very quickly. It was almost like a renaissance of Homebrew. JOËL: Not Homebrew as in the macOS package manager. SARA: [laughs] And also not Homebrew as in the alcoholic beverage. JOËL: [laughs] So, this kind of history is fun trivia to know. Is it really something valuable for us as a jobbing developer in 2022? SARA: I would say it's a difficult question. If you are someone that doesn't dive into the why of something, especially when something goes wrong, maybe it wouldn't be important or useful. But what sparked the conversation in Toronto was trying to determine why we as thoughtbot tend to prefer using Macs to develop on versus Linux or Windows. There is a reason, and the reason is in the history. Knowing that can clarify decisions and can give meaning where it feels like an arbitrary decision. JOËL: Right. We're not just picking Macs because they're shiny. SARA: They are certainly shiny. And the first thing I did was to put a matte case on it. JOËL: [laughs] So no shiny in your office. SARA: If there were too many shiny things in my office, boy, I would never get work done. The cats would be all over me. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers, that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? 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From testing to production, Airbrake notifiers have your back. Your time is valuable, so why waste it combing through logs, waiting for user reports, or retrofitting other tools to monitor your application? You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! JOËL: So we've talked a little bit about Unix or *Nix, this evolution of systems. I've also heard the term POSIX thrown around when talking about things that seem to encompass both macOS and Linux. How does that fit into this history? SARA: POSIX is sort of an umbrella of standards around operating systems that was based on Unix and the things that were standard in Unix. It stands for the Portable Operating System Interface. This allowed for compatibility between OSs, very similar to USB being the standard for peripherals. JOËL: So, if I was implementing my own Unix-like operating system in the '80s, I would try to conform to the POSIX standard. SARA: Absolutely. Now, not every Nix operating system is POSIX-compliant, but most are or at least 90% of the way there. JOËL: Are any of the big ones that people tend to think about not compliant? SARA: A major player in the operating system space that is not generally considered POSIX-compliant is Microsoft Windows. JOËL: [laughs] It doesn't even try to be Unix-like, right? It's just its own thing, SARA: It is completely its own thing. I don't think it even has a standard necessarily that it conforms to. JOËL: It is its own standard, its own branch of the family tree. SARA: And that's what happens when your operating system is very proprietary. This has caused folks pain, I'm sure, in the past that may have tried to develop software on their computers using languages that are more readily compatible with POSIX operating systems. JOËL: So would you say that a language like Ruby is more compatible with one of the POSIX-compatible operating systems? SARA: 100% yes. In fact, to even use Ruby as a development tool in Windows, prior to Windows 10, you needed an additional tool. You needed something like Cygwin or MinGW, which were POSIX-compliant programs that it was almost like a shell in your Windows computer that would allow you to run those commands. JOËL: Really? For some reason, I thought that they had some executables that you could run just on Windows by itself. SARA: Now they do, fortunately, to the benefit of Ruby developers everywhere. As of Windows 10, we now have WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux that's built-in. You don't have to worry about installing or configuring some third-party software. JOËL: I guess that kind of almost cheats by just having a POSIX system embedded in your non-POSIX system. SARA: It does feel like a cheat, but I think it was born out of demand. The Windows NT kernel, for example, is mostly POSIX-compliant. JOËL: Really? SARA: As a result of it being used primarily for servers. JOËL: So you mentioned the Ruby tends and the Rails ecosystem tends to run better and much more frequently on the various Nix systems. Did it have to be that way? Or is it just kind of an accident of history that we happen to end up with Ruby and Rails in this ecosystem, but just as easily, it could have evolved in the Windows world? SARA: I think it is an amalgam of things. For example, Unix and Nix operating systems being developed earlier, being widely spread due to being license-free oftentimes, and being widely used in the education space. Also, because it is so lightweight, it is the operating system of choice. For most servers in the world, they're running some form of Unix, Linux, or macOS. JOËL: I don't think I've ever seen a server that runs macOS; exclusively seen it on dev machines. SARA: If you go to an animation company, they have server farms of macOS machines because they're really good at rendering. This might not be the case anymore, but it was at one point. JOËL: That's a whole other world that I've not interacted with a whole lot. SARA: [chuckles] JOËL: It's a fun intersection between software, and design, and storytelling. That is an important part for the software field. SARA: Yeah, it's definitely an aspect that deserves its own deep dive of sorts. If you have a server that's running a Windows-based operating system like NT and you have a website or a program that's designed to be served under a Unix-based server, it can easily be hosted on the Windows server; it's not an issue. The reverse is not true. JOËL: Oh. SARA: And this is why programming on a Nix system is the better choice. JOËL: It's more broadly compatible. SARA: Absolutely. Significantly more compatible with more things. JOËL: So today, when I develop, a lot of the tooling that I use is open source. The open-source movement has created a lot of the languages that we know and love, including Ruby, including Rails. Do you think there's some connection between a lot of that tooling being open source and maybe some of the Unix family of operating systems and movements that came out of that branch of the operating system family tree? SARA: I think that there is a lot of tie-in with today's open-source culture and the computing history that we've been talking about, for example, people finding something that they dislike about the tools that are available and then rolling their own. That's what Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie did. Unix was not an official Bell development. It was a side project for them. JOËL: I love that. SARA: You see this happen a lot in the software world where a program gets shared widely, and due to this, it gains traction and gains buy-in from the community. If your software is easily accessible to students, folks that are learning, and breaking things, and rebuilding, and trying, and inventing, it's going to persist. And we saw that with Unix. JOËL: I feel like this background on where a lot of these operating systems came but then also the ecosystems, the values that evolved with them has given me a deeper appreciation of the tooling, the systems that we work with today. Are there any other advantages, do you think, to trying to learn a little bit of computing history? SARA: I think the main benefit that I mentioned before of if you're a person that wants to know why, then there is a great benefit in knowing some of these details. That being said, you don't need to deep dive or read multiple books or write papers on it. You can get enough information from reading or skimming some Wikipedia pages. But it's interesting to know where we came from and how it still affects us today. Ruby was written in C, for example. Unix was written in C as well, originally Assembly Language, but it got rewritten in C. And understanding the underlying tooling that goes into that that when things go wrong, you know where to look. JOËL: I guess that that is the next question is where do you look if you're kind of interested? Is Wikipedia good enough? You just sort of look up operating system, and it tells you where to go? Or do you have other sources you like to search for or start pulling at those threads to understand history? SARA: That's a great question. And Wikipedia is a wonderful starting point for sure. It has a lot of the abbreviated history and links to better references. I don't have them off the top of my head. So I will find them for you for the show notes. But there are some old esoteric websites with some of this history more thoroughly documented by the people that lived it. JOËL: I feel like those websites always end up being in HTML 2; your very basic text, horizontal rules, no CSS. SARA: Mm-hmm. And those are the sites that have many wonderful kernels of knowledge. JOËL: Uh-huh! Great pun. SARA: [chuckles] Thank you. JOËL: Do you read any content by Hillel Wayne? SARA: I have not. JOËL: So Hillel produces a lot of deep dives into computing history, oftentimes trying to answer very particular questions such as when and why did we start using reversing a linked list as the canonical interview question? And there are often urban legends around like, oh, it's because of this. And then Hillel will do some research and go through actual archives of messages on message boards or...what is that protocol? SARA: BBS. JOËL: Yes. And then find the real answer, like, do actual historical methodology, and I love that. SARA: I had not heard of this before. I don't know how. And that is all I'm going to be doing this weekend is reading these. That kind of history speaks to my heart. I have a random fun fact along those lines that I wanted to bring to the show, which was that the echo command that we know and love in the terminal was first introduced by the Multics operating system. JOËL: Wow. So that's like the most common piece of Multics that as an everyday user of a modern operating system that we would still touch a little bit of that history every day when we work. SARA: Yeah, it's one of those things that we don't think about too much. Where did it come from? How long has it been around? I'm sure the implementation today is very different. But it's like etymology, and like taxonomy, pulling those threads. JOËL: Two fantastic topics. On that wonderful little nugget of knowledge, let's wrap up. Sara, where can people find you online? SARA: You can find me on Twitter at @csarajackson. JOËL: And we will include a link to that in the show notes. SARA: Thank you so much for having me on the show and letting me nerd out about operating system history. JOËL: It's been a pleasure. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. If you have any feedback, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me @joelquen on Twitter or at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. Thank you so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. Byeeeeee!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

For more information about the Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights, see this SCCR website Sara:     Welcome to another episode of copyright chat. Today I have Winston Tabb joining me from Johns Hopkins University he's the University Librarian and a longtime expert adviser to the copyright and other legal matters committee to the IFLA organization. Welcome. Winston: Thank you. Sara: It's so nice to see you and to see you on the verge I understand of your retirement? Winston: Yes. I think it's going to happen sometime. I just don't know exactly when because I had agreed to stay until my successor was in place. So the process is moving along. I heard a rumor the day will come soon. Sara:     Well, congratulations! And I know throughout your career you've had a lot of interest and expertise with international copyright issues, both with the copyright and other legal matters committee and with the World Intellectual Property Organization. And I wanted to take this opportunity to kind of pick your brain about that process of how we the United States and IFLA engage with the World Intellectual Property Organization. From what I've heard, it seems to move pretty slowly and it's a very political process. But, correct me if I'm wrong. Winston: Well, I think one of the first things to understand is what an unusual organization the World Intellectual Property Organization is. Within a particular subgroup, the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, which is the one with which we engage, I don't remember how many branches there are at WIPO, but that's the most important one for us. What I couldn't believe when I went to my first meeting and it still amazes me is that you can have an organization with, I think, 185 of so member-states and WIPO functions entirely by consensus. That is, there is never a vote taken in the sense that you would have your normal body where 51% of the people would be able to prevail if they can do that. So any one country, whether it's Russia or Ukraine, the largest or smallest country, can really bring things to a halt. And that's why it is so frustrating sometimes because the progress is so glacial. On the other hand, when you do have a victory in an environment like this, it's really a major one. So the most important thing that has happened, I believe that the 20 or so years that I've been engaged there is the adoption of the Marrakesh Treaty and it almost didn't happen and took quite a long time several false starts and starting over. But part of the reason that happens in actual fact is because of the necessity for having consensus. Sara: Yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, I think most people in the world, or I guess maybe not most, but many are aware of that treaty. And it seemed like a pretty smooth process from the outside. But can you give us an insider's view a little bit of how long this was pending and what happened with the treaty? Winston: Well, as I said, there were several false starts. So, I went to WIPO for the first time in 2003, which is the time when I was appointed to be the chair of IFLA's copyright committee. Of course, I was just amazed at how things worked and how they didn't. My very first meeting that I went to was of the cultural administration group. I think you're gonna be working with them, if I understand right. So, we're working on some kind of instrument that would deal with cultures and I was so fascinated to see, but sitting at the table were people from various minority groups. The Sami from the North and the Maori from New Zealand were actually part of the official groups. And it was a very substantive discussion. So I was expecting it to be like that when I went to other meetings such as to the meetings of the standing committee on copyright, but it was definitely not the case. The Standing Committee on Copyright it members of federal agencies only. The United States usually has people there led always by the Patent and Trademark Office because they are the executive branch, but also generally at least one person from the US Copyright Office. But I was really kind of amazed when we first started working on what came to be the Marrakesh Treaty to find that there had been a lot of efforts in the early 1990s to have such a treaty and they finally just completely collapsed. So, this was like a second start. And you never know exactly why something works the second time around. I don't think it was just because we all had t-shirts which we probably wore saying “stop the book famine.” But I think that really helped as a way of kind of characterizing what it would feel like to be blind, able to have access to books it was a book famine. That word famine really just captured people's attention. Nevertheless, it did take at least six or seven years. I can't even remember quite how long it went. At first everyone was kinda just nice about it. And then there's the publishing industry that began to realize this might actually happen. They began to be very, very oppositional—really oppose almost every aspect and were able quite often to get other national entities to agree with them. Probably the most negative force against this treaty and the one that I believe was most susceptible to the publishers was the European Union. So this is another thing that is very unusual about the SCCR, which is that when we're in session, it is possible for someone from Luxembourg to speak or from France in their national capacity. But really the authority speaking comes from the European Union representatives. Of course, in a way it represented  the bureaucrats who speak for that entire group. And the EU was just not willing to have any part of this until this moment that I will never forget in Marrakesh. We finally met and the negotiations were going on. But the EU was not moving. And I saw the then Director General do something that I never saw before or after which was essentially to call out the EU in the public session and basically say you are continuing the book famine. If we can't make some progress here after we've gathered, and made so much progress and get to the finish line, it's going to be on you. And you can just feel the moment when the publishers and their representatives to the EU understood that they were getting ready to come under a very black cloud, so to speak. So it was really one of those wonderful turning moments right in the middle of that week. And then things fairly quickly came to a close, but it was at least a 20 maybe even a 25-year process. So I try to think about what I think our first Copyright Treaty for libraries was only introduced in 2005 or 2006 I think we first began to shop it around. So if you're taking a long view and compare it to what happened with the blind, where we're doing okay. We have to take solace. Sara:  So it's interesting because you are pointing out that the only folks that really have a voice at these treaty discussions are official representatives. So how are the publishers then getting their voices heard? Is this through independent meetings? Do they come to the meeting as an observer? How are they involved? Winston: Yes. Well, they're involved in exactly the same way we are. So one thing I will say about the standing committee on copyright or related rights is very open to NGOs that wanted to come. Usually the very first agenda item after adoption of the agenda is the addition of new members. And so we've never had a problem about that. So we're often actually seat them side-by-side with the publishers that are all as usual people from the licensing agencies. I'm sorry. It's been so long since I was actually there. But we're all sitting there together, representatives from all the NGOs with our label in front of us. Almost always, member states are invited to speak first, and then if there's time, then we will be invited to speak. And I will say, I think we've been treated very fairly. When I put my light on saying I want to speak, I'm almost always the first or one of the very first people who is invited to make what we call an intervention. Sara:  Okay, so. they're there talking with the EU. They're also participating in the group discussions. That makes perfect sense. So, after Marrakesh, where do you see the SCCR headed? What is the next kind of issue that's on the horizon? Winston: Well, the very biggest issue that's on the horizon and the longest there is a broadcasting treaty. So there are basically right now two major issues before the SCCR. There are a few others that are kinda crept in, like the Russians wanting to have theater stage directors rights. But the two topics that are given, roughly four out of the five days, more or less evenly divided are the treaty on broadcasting and then the treaty for libraries, archives, and museums. That one has been under discussion. It was under discussion the first time I went, and it is still under discussion. Glacial progress is made. Then one of the things I need to be clear about another oddity or feature of the SCCR is that regime change really matters. So you can be moving along very nicely and suddenly a country's regime changes. This happened to us very explicitly with Brazil. We had two very, very strong supporters from the Brazilian copyright office working with us very closely who were advocating for us, and would often introduce articles or motions that were in our favor. And one day we were there and they had this panic came across their faces. We found out the regime had changed. They had been summoned home. And the next people who came from Brazil had no interest in library. So that's a whole other reason that it takes so long to get things done because you develop relations and then those people vanish. Another problem is that people who are there usually, not for the United States, for example, who really do come from our federal agencies, but most of the people representing countries there are the ambassador of that country to the United Nations in Geneva. And so they don't have any copyright expertise. There may be meetings that are going on across town, one of the other United Nations agencies, so they may have to divide their time. And of course, as is true with diplomats, they usually have a two or three-year posting. So it's been a constant reeducating for the people who are actually representing the countries and have the vote. So that's another factor that complicates what actually makes speed and possible. We're in the constant educational mode, which is enjoyable from one of view, because you are training people. But it's really sad when you see someone who's really been a strong, fervent supporter from one of the country's depart. And you know, you may not get a good replacement. And you have to start all over again. Sara: It's curious to me that the strong supporter doesn't then talk to their replacement. Because it seems to me that the education could be within the organization instead of from the other participants. Does that ever happen or is that pretty rare? Winston: It does happen and I  could name examples. I won't necessarily here, but there are countries where that has definitely happened. But again, these people are diplomats who aren't necessarily in copyright. They may have much more concerned about human rights, which is across the street, or international trade, which is down the road. So they don't necessarily think that this is even an important topic as compared to others that they would really highlight as putting up the top of the list for their successor. Sara: Well, that makes sense, but it's also seems like it's unfortunate for those folks who are invested. And when you're talking about libraries and archives, are you talking about the ongoing discussions about how we have, for instance, in the United States, exceptions for libraries and archives for preservation is that they issue because I understand Kenny Crews wrote a report years ago for WIPO, kind of outlining the world and how different countries have different laws on this topic. Winston: Yeah. Well, I would say there are three major things that have been wonderful for libraries during the time that I have been working at SCCR. The first one I already talked about was Marrakech. From beginning we're able to see the end of that. The second was that we were invited by the WIPO secretariat in 2003 or 2004, fairly early on in the time that I became engaged, we told them one of the things that was really, really difficult for all of us to know, actually, what were the conditions at all the member states. And WIPO is quite eager and willing to fund nonpartisan kind of activities. And so they asked us to suggest three or four people who might be able to undertake such a study. We put Kenny at the top of our list. I think at the time he was still a Columbia as the copyright librarian. He was engaged to undertake this work, but he did, and it was published. And he was invited to come and do a presentation for, I think a half-day and take questions from the member states about it. So it was the very first time I think there was ever one central place where you could go to see, well how many countries actually have an interlibrary loan provision. About a decade later, WIPO asked Kenny, if he would update that study, which he did. And it's on the SCCR website and has become very, very useful for all of us and providing data that we can actually use, both in our oral presentations that we make, but also in our meetings with the various regional groups. So if I could take another kind of a side note, one of the things I didn't mention, that's also an interesting factor of how we work as a group. Each region has a group, there's an African group, there's a Latin American, Caribbean group, and so on. There is also what's called group B. Which is really the European Union, Canada, the United States. So it's going to be the more developed countries or in a group. And then there's a small subset of the countries of the former Soviet Union and China as its own group, but indicates what we often do both before we get to Geneva, but also while we are there is to arrange meetings with these groups. So quite often at seven o'clock, on a Wednesday morning, we're going in and sitting down with all the representatives from the African countries and talking with them about not only what we want in general, but about what the situation is in those countries. And we've tried with some success to always have a librarian from one of those countries with us because people really prefer to hear someone from Algeria talking about what Africa needs more than they do about someone for the United States. So that's been a wonderful way of making inroads. But again, all of those groups have a one-year term for the chair. So you may have a year when you've got someone from Algeria who loves libraries. The next year? You may get someone from Togo, has no interest at all and doesn't even want to have the library group come and talk to them necessarily. So that's another thing that this constantly changing in interactions with people, because the people changed and then the roles change as well. But anyway, the whole study that was done by Kenny. I think that was one of the most useful things the SCCR has done, and that was our recommendation, but at their expense with something that is still very, very proud of. Sara: You mentioned also there's turnover of the Secretary General. And you also mentioned how instrumental the secretary at was in getting the Marrakesh Treaty past. Does it depend a lot on who that person is? Winston: Yes, it definitely does. And I think what happened with the Marrakesh treaty is that there's a 10-year term of the Director-General and that person's term was coming toward the end. And it's very unusual for that person to be reappointed. So he knew he's going home to Australia. And I think that really made it maybe easier from a practical sense to really press as he did. The good news for us is that we had as the most, the former chair of the standing committee on copyright, the copyright office of Singapore works. And when it came time to choose a new Director General, he was chosen out of several different applicants. So we now have at the top level, within the World Intellectual Property Organization, someone who is himself a copyright specialist, has direct experience of having lead the SCCR for a five-year term. He has continued to be very, very supportive of us. Sara: And what year is he now and his tenure term? Winston: I think it may be so hard to remember anything during COVID. I think it's the fourth year or maybe the fifth, something, something like that, but maybe four years. I think. He also has been very instrumental in helping us get one thing done. The last big thing that I'm really particularly proud of because it is tangible, and that is the preparation is something called the preservation toolkit. So during COVID when meetings weren't being held but there was still hoping there can be some progress. I did reach out to the director general as well as to the Assistant Secretary General who's working in the copyright arena to see if there wasn't something we can do in the preservation. Because that seemed to be something that everyone understood was a problem. But not every country you really has the authority to do copying even for preservation purposes. So what eventually happened was that they said, well, why don't we prepare a toolkit? And that term is extremely important because within the odd way in which WIPO works, a toolkit, didn't require the approval of all the member states. It didn't have to be discussed with the member states, doesn't have to be adopted by the member states. It's a tool that countries may use or not use. So that's why it was able to proceed. Something's better than nothing. I think in this environment. And I'm especially happy we did it because of some of the things that have happened in the course of the preparation of it. Things like the war, Ukraine, things like floods, things like fires, and the National Library of South Africa and the museum and Rio has really made it very clear that if you don't do some preemptive preservation, it's too late and it needs to be cross-border If it's truly gonna be preservation. So the secretary did commission representatives from each of our sectors, libraries, archives, and museum, to prepare this toolkit that has been prepared. And it is going to be presented on-site reading in Geneva at the very end of this month. I'm so sad I'm not able to go to this effect because it exactly coincides with my retirement dinner. So I really didn't have much of a choice about it, but by the end of September, this will have been released, introduced and then we, as librarians at our friends at the archives and museum world, can begin promoting it and using it. We hope that will at least be able to get preservation provisions in national law as well as kind of moving us, we hope toward international instrument at some point that really deals with the cross-border issues. Sara: That sounds like really important work, especially given as you mentioned, all the disasters we've been having. And we're going to have more with natural disasters and fires. And I mean, you name it right. Hurricanes. I think climate change is really threatening our collections and our collective memory institutions. Winston: We keep making the point that after the things are gone, they kept the preserved. It seems so obvious, but this need that you don't have to even prove at this point that something is deteriorating. You just need to be able to get copies of it somewhere that are safe. And that requires that it be at a different location. Maybe ideally multiple locations, even if it's just about to find out at some point, how many is enough? One thing I didn't really mention at the beginning, I should have, because it's a really important part of our collaboration. When we first began, it was libraries. And we actually drafted something we called TLAB the Treaty for Libraries Archives and Museums. And I was really happy working with archives and museums over time that we were able to get them engaged with us as well. So we now have a draft treaty called TLAB treaty for libraries, archives, and museums. And the three entities work very, very closely as we saw with the development of the presentation toolkit. But there was one representatives from each of the sectors that were very much involved in preparation of that. So that's a great step forward as well. I think that thinking about how libraries, archives, and museums are much more alike than they are different and we worked together, not separately or against one another. Sara: Yeah. And I think your point about the many copies is really important because it's not only that you've made the copy which is important, that's a first step. But then if that copy is held on-site and the site is destroyed, you still don't have the copy. So, the cross-border issue really seems central. And I hope that we're able to make some progress on that, too. Winston: I think that it's a fairly, fairly easy within SCCR contexts, it's kinda crazy to say, but I can imagine getting instrument that provides for the preservation. I think the hardest part is going to be about the access part. One of the things we keep saying there needs to be able to be access. You can't just have something that was copied in Algeria and it's being housed in the library in Paris, but can never be open. So, at some point, there has to be reasonable trigger event that would enable the preserve work to actually used. And there are people who still are arguing, yes, but when that happens, there needs to be a fee. And that's it, kinda battle that we'll have to find with the people who want to monetize everything, but at least it's a step in the right direction. And even if we could get, each country has its own preservation provision, that would be a step forward in the right direction too. I think we forget in the United States how it was lucky we really are never entirely satisfied or will we ever be? But when I think about provisions that we have an compared to a lot of our counterparts, including the European Union, we actually are much better off with mitigate them. I think that's true and I think it's part of the reason that this work at, at the international level is so important is to really show that these provisions are important and that these provisions help libraries, archives, museums, and our patrons right to gain access to materials. I think that's something that the United States can really lead on. Well, we keep just saying our information is borderless. I mean, this whole idea that goes back to an era when a book was one place and then it might be the next. Just like that now and I think again with the passage of time and seeing how the Internet has developed and so on. People knowing their hearts, if that really is true, they may not want to get that embedded in a way that is really useful at the national or international level. But there's no denying that we have to be thinking about things not at national level, international level, because of the way in which information is created and shared and stored today. Sara: Very true. Well, this has been a really fascinating conversation. I've learned a lot and I hope the listeners appreciate it too. And congratulations on your well-earned retirement. It sounds like you are going to continue to do wonderful things. I look forward to many, many more years of your engagement with international copyright. Winston: Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed it, bye.

On the run from Maverick Chen, the Daleks, and an unexpected old Enemy, Team TARDIS flees with the taranium across time and space...._______STEVEN: You killed Bret! You just shot him down.SARA: He was a traitor. Between the three of you, you had stolen the taranium, the most valuable mineral in the universe. It was needed desperately to spread the peace which was founded in the solar system, to reach the whole galaxy.STEVEN: What was the taranium going to do?SARA: How should I know? I had my orders.STEVEN: Your orders. And even though it meant killing one of your own people, you obeyed them blindly, without question?SARA: One does not question the orders of the Guardian.STEVEN: You didn't stop to think how it came to happen that a space security agent, one of your own people, was a traitor?SARA: No!STEVEN: You didn't give Bret a chance, did you. You couldn't question Chen and you wouldn't question Bret.SARA: Look, what do you want me to say? That I believe your fantastic story?STEVEN: It's true.SARA: It mustn't be.DOCTOR: I'm afraid it is, my dear.STEVEN: But Bret had to be killed.SARA: Shut up! Bret Vyon was my brother.____CHEN: Without me, their plan cannot completely work. Without me, they are but nothing. Nothing! When I am next to the Daleks, only they stand between me and the highest position in the universe. Then will be the time for me to take complete control!... You are a fortunate man, Karlton. You will have a high place in galactic history.KARLTON: The highest, next to you._________CHEN: Three time machines in one infinitesimal speck of space and time. Of course, a coincidence is possible, but hardly likely. You would agree?MONK: Oh, yes, I would agree.CHEN: Then why have you arrived here?MONK: Three, three time-machines? Yes, well, the odd one out belongs to a certain Doctor.DALEK: The enemy ship!MONK: Yes, that's right. The enemy. I have an old score to settle with him, but I'm sure yours is the prior claim.CHEN: He is a friend of yours?MONK: Friend? No, no, an enemy. An enemy to end all enemies! I came here to inflict a terrible vengeance on him. I mean, we're all on the same side here, aren't we.Upcoming:Serial #21: The Dalek's Master Plan, Part III (Episodes 11-12: "The Abandoned Planet" & "The Destruction of Time" ) We will also discuss the serial overall.Both missingMonday, June 20thThe First Doctor and The DaleksA special episode looking back on all the First Doctor Dalek serials and considering how they shaped the show and the Doctor. Monday, June 27thSpecial thanks to Cathlyn "Happigal" Driscoll for providing the beautiful artwork for this podcast. You can view her work at https://www.happigal.com/ Do feel free to get in touch to share the love of all things Doctor Who: throughthevortexpodcast@gmail.com

I've struggled with phone addiction for years now and finally came up with a way to stop the addiction every time within a few minutes. The fun part about it is that it's a game I play with myself. Listen to the episode to learn how to play "The Dope Game" too. GIVEAWAY DETAILS: If you want to share the podcast, I've been giving away 2 free 1 month Audible gift cards every week this May. This isn't sponsored by Audible, but because I know most everyone has done their free trial already, I wanted a way for you to get another free audiobook. This is a gift card that will still work even if you already have an account! You'll get a free credit for an audiobook of your choice + 1 month access to their Plus catalog which includes thousands of audiobooks with no credits needed. All you have to do to enter to win is take a screenshot of this podcast and share it on your Instagram while tagging the account @ifthenpodcast in the post or story. And, also, be sure to follow @ifthenpodcast on Instagram to find out if you're the winner each week. If we get 100 shares by the end of the month, each of you will be entered to win a pair of AirPods.  WEBSITE: https://www.ifthenpodcast.com CREDITS: Samuel Smith as the realtor: https://www.samuelsmithvoice.com Sara Taylor as herself: https://www.instagram.com/life_as_saylor/ Transcript: My name is Jordan Taylor, and welcome to the If then podcast. Our brains our a conglomerate of if/then statements, like in computer code, and oftentimes new lines of code are hard to write in our mind when we're trying new things. For example, if I want to play piano, then I need to read music. Sitting down and coding that particular if then statement could take years of dedication, but when we do sit down and create new then statements for a complicated if, it feels freaking amazing. This podcast is your weekly motivation, and mine, to get uncomfortable and write some neurological code. “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.”—Robert Collier When I got married and immediately bought my first house, I knew nothing. Realtor: “Congratulations kids, here's the keys.” Jordan: “Thank you sir.” Realtor: [Walks to car and gets in] “Oh and don't forget to change the locks.” [Drives off] Jordan: “Oh right…Alright, Sara, so…should we go to Home Depot or something to get those?” See I lived with my parents up until then, and I'm ashamed to say just how little I knew. I saved a lot of money that route which helped me out in the long run, but at the cost of not knowing some basic things. Jordan: “What time is it?” Sara: "Uh... 6:00PM” Jordan: “You've gotta be kidding me. 4 hours?? Why is this taking so long?”  How do you pay an electric bill, or set up your water? Sara: “What's that man doing out front?” Jordan: “I'm not sure. Is that the water meter, dude? Like the meter reader or whatever?” Sara: “It looks like it. He's opening the water meter. Why don't you go talk to him?” Jordan: “Ehhh…alright. Sir? SIR?? Hey, what?….sir??? I don't know, I think he was just reading it.” Sara: “Jordan, the water's off.” Jordan: “Are you serious? We just bought this place today” [BUZZ] "....and there goes the electricity." Before you ask, yes, that was a true story. Other things like, what supplies do you need in your house at all times? What insurance should I get? How do I fix a leaky faucet, replace an entire toilet? This was one of the more frustrating times of my life. All at once, tons of if then statements needed to be formed, and fast. Very fast. My home didn't just depend on it, but my self-image and mental state. I struggled with feelings of inadequacy. I felt like a loser. In a way, I kind of was. Here I was mid-20s, struggling to pay a water bill. To this day, it's hard to admit that. Every single day was a day filled with ifs and no thens. Things that should take 10 minutes took me hours of writing and deleting buggy code in my mind before I got to anything even remotely workable—the code not clean, but hey, at least it ran. For now. Kind of. I'd worry about the rest later. At some point, scrolling the internet was just easier. After all, that was something that was already hardwired in my brain. It gave me immense temporary comfort, but there was a cost. We were living in only one room of our 2,000 square foot house. We were essentially living in a small apartment with unfinished projects piled up in each room of our fixer upper. Sara: “Jordan the faucet's been leaking for weeks now.” Jordan: “I know, I'm gonna do it now, ok?” Getting up off the couch, I knew that that probe was a four hour if/then trudge. It felt nearly impossible to force myself off my computer to do. I was working off of a cedar chest in the living room that my wife's grandfather made. A make-ship desk for the time being—it had been too much time though. It felt like an ultra-marathon through the desert to get from that chest to that bathroom, stepping over piles of half-done things, to pick up the tools I didn't know how to use, to begin to make countless mistakes before the drips stopped—for now at least. The thing I realized, though, was that once I started working on the project, it was never as bad as it was built up in my mind. Yes, it took me a shameful amount of time to do what seemed like screwing in a lightbulb, but it felt rewarding. It was valuable. It made me feel useful and capable. But even though I knew that, it was still nearly impossible to get off my make shift computer chair—a turned around IKEA couch, facing the wall and cedar chest. After years of struggling and a lot of wasted time, I developed a trick, more like a game—something I could do to get myself up off the comfy couch, out from under that warm blanket, off my phone, and into an uncomfortable situation to better myself. I had to convert the pain into a game. I called it The Dope Game. I would start my watch and begin the action of fixing the faucet. As soon as I felt the urge to pick up my phone to get that dopamine rush, I would stop the clock. 5 seconds. And then reset it to 0, and start again. I was amazed with how many times my mind instinctively gravitated to Instagram, the news, youtube. Every time I felt like I “accomplished” something, I would get that urge for the reward of a phone scroll, no matter how pitiful the accomplishment. Get off the couch, urge, clock, 15 seconds. Walk into the bathroom, urge, clock, 12 seconds. Find the right tool, urge, clock, 20 seconds. Assess how to engage tool with faucet, urge, clock—hey, a minute this time. Without fail the clock would extent on a graph up and up, not the smoothest curve mind you, but a curve nonetheless. And by monitoring the addictive behavior, I was able to begin looking at it more objectively. I was able to see, with real numbers, the damage I had programmed into my brain's reward system. All at once, it was very real. I was outside of the program, actively adjusting the code, desperately rewriting it from my proverbial keyboard, the stop watch. I could see progress as the urges's spacing increased more and more: 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour. I could feel my brain calm, peace abounding even as a demanding problem was reached within the engaged project. What size pipes are these? Are there different sizes of copper pipes? Surely there are. How do you solder? Is that even something I should attempt? At some point, my brain would be so engaged that I completely forgot about the clock until I would wonder what time it was, and looking down, see the timer going—and all at once feeling proud that I had forgot. Soon enough, or not so soon enough, the faucet was fixed. The Dope Game has been one of the most valuable concepts I have come up with to get myself uncomfortable and write new neurological code. This small effort, repeated daily if need be, is highly effective for one reason. It rewrites buggy code. It's taught me that before writing new code, new if then statements, I have to first reprogram old, buggy if then statements. If pick up tool, then check phone; if walk down hall, then check phone are terrible pieces of code that I unwittingly wrote along the way. I might have written that same type of code 100 different ways in 100 different scenarios, but The Dope Game is like writing a function within a program that finds all of those faulty if then statements and corrects them automatically without having to individually find each one buried within the brain's folds. It resets the brain and allows for new useful if thens to be written on a fresh slate. So I'll leave you with this, “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.”—Robert Collier Thank you so much for listening to the second episode of the If Then Podcast. If you have feedback you want to give me or if you have anything you want to say, email me at contact@ifthenpodcast.com. And if you would, leave me a 5 star review if you found this podcast valuable. It really helps the podcast to get seen by other people like yourself. We're almost at 100 on Apple Podcasts and 150 on Spotify. And as an extra bonus, for those of you who help me spread the word, I've been giving away 2 free 1 month Audible gift cards every week this May. Last week, Daniel and Sammy won a free credit for an audiobook of their choice + access to their Plus catalog which includes thousands of audiobooks with no credits needed. And if you win this week, don't worry the gift card is available to you even if you already have an Audible account. All you have to do to enter to win is take a screenshot of this podcast and share it on your Instagram while tagging the account @ifthenpodcast in the post or story. If you shared the last episode, you can also share this one too to be entered to win again. And, also, be sure to follow @ifthenpodcast on Instagram to find out if you're the winner this week. If we get 100 shares by the end of the month, each of you will be entered to win a pair of AirPods. We're a third of the way there, so keep sharing! Thank you so much for listening, my name is Jordan Taylor, and what if/then will you write today?

HIGHLIGHTSFrom advertising to Scale-upsWorking in a high-powered, male-dominant sales environment Keeping up with male activities was a part of the job Dealing with sexual harassment and sexism in the workplace What women can and cannot do in business in different culturesAlways be direct and very clearly manage expectations How to create healthy business relationshipsSilence does not mean yesQUOTESSara: “I noticed when I did not go to the pub with the team, I was out of the loop. I didn't get the referrals from other colleagues, I wouldn't get a heads-up like hey we have this meeting make sure that you've prepared. I didn't get any of that. I was almost losing myself as a woman and the things I liked to do because I want to be part of the guys.”Sara: “I sometimes find it very hard to speak up because I don't want to rock the boat, I don't want to make people feel uncomfortable even though I'm the one feeling uncomfortable. I don't want the situation to feel weird.” Walker: “The goal of the friendship should just be the friendship itself. Anything more than that, I like the ide of having healthy business relationships. Which means two or more people that are actively trying to help each other reach their own business goals.”Sara: "It's important to find an environment and a culture that fits you. I would definitely speak up whenever you feel uncomfortable. And I know that's a very easy advice to say because I still struggle with that every single day when I have environments that I think are... this is not great. But discuss it with friends, discuss it with other people so when you are in a similar situation next time, you are prepared."Where to find Sara:LinkedIn WebsiteWhere to find Walker:LinkedInTwitterInstagramwww.walkermckay.com

Sara Helmy is CEO at Tribu (tribe in Latin), a 20-employee digital marketing and branding agency that prides itself on “building tribes for the brands that we serve.” Sara, with a passion for SEO, started the agency ten years ago with about $6,000, no outside funding, no debt . . . and for the first three years, doubled-down, boot-strapped, added things over time, and eventually morphed the agency into a branding powerhouse with close to $3 million in service revenue this year. Tribu serves a diverse group of clients . . . facilitating government-supported projects (like San Antonio's 300-year anniversary celebration), B2C (Devils River Whiskey), B2B, and healthcare . . . but most clients have one thing in common: They have high, ambitious growth goals . . . and they want to be disruptive in some sense. Tribu's view of “brand” is far broader than having a logo and a website. Sara includes in “brand” the assets a company creates and deploys, the nurturing, the daily “rock pounding,” the tribe growing, the follower building, and the activities compelling potential customers to sign up for email lists. Branding efforts may be for a brand that never existed before or for existing brands that are looking to “reinvent themselves.”  Sara says that branding (and rebranding) are more about identifying and extracting value that is already there, something unique that will resonate with customers, rather than in creating something new that didn't exist before. The invention part comes in creating a new way to communicate that message. When the agency works with a new brand, there is more freedom . . . but, without an existing customer base, Sara says, “You're a little bit more blind.” A brand may think it knows itself, but often, Tribu has to collect data from potential customers and focus groups to show companies how they are “seen.” Sara says “95% of good businesses are going to choose to honor their customers.” When a company already has an existing customer base, rebranding may be easier because customers will tell you who you are . . . but it is also harder because, if the business direction changes substantially, you risk alienating existing customers who got you to where you are.  In this interview, Sara offers two important business tips:  Invest in “A” players, because they are the ones who will solve your problems, help navigate, and help your agency grow. Plan, nurture, and control your culture . . . the health of your finances will often match the health of your agency culture. Sara can be reached on her agency's website at: Wearetribu.com – and from the beginning to this day, the onsite contact form goes straight to her personal mailbox! Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Sara Helmy, CEO at Tribu based in San Antonio, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Sara. SARA: Thank you for having me, Rob. I'm excited to be here. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by introducing us to Tribu? What should we know? What is your specialty? SARA: Tribu means “tribe” in Latin. We pride ourselves on building tribes for the brands that we serve. More literally, I guess you could consider us a digital marketing and branding agency. We've been around since 2011, so this year will be our 10th year in November. We're very excited about that. In general, that's Tribu. We're a tribe of 20 people today. When we started, we started with about $6,000. No outside funding, no debt. Just doing really good work and climbing ladders. We're still a small agency. We'll do probably about $3 million in service revenue this year with our tribe. (That's what we call our team of 20.) But in 10 years, no outside funding, no debt. That's just been organic growth by serving a whole bunch of partners we're really thrilled and excited to have every day. ROB: Congratulations on 10 years, on $3 million, on 20 people. I'm sure there's days when that feels like a lot of responsibility. Dig a little deeper with the brands you serve. Is there a typical example you can give us of who you work with, what the scope of the engagement or the range perhaps can look like? SARA: Absolutely. We're actually a little bit everywhere when it comes to industry. We don't have a particular industry niche. But most everybody that we work with has really high and ambitious growth goals, and they want to be disruptive in some sense. So far, for us at times that's spanned government – it's a lot of B2C, B2B, healthcare. We're literally everywhere. What they have in common is they've got some project or some initiative that they consider disruptive and they really want to grow it fast. More specific examples. Devils River Whiskey was one that we worked with for very many years. Travis Park, which is one of the oldest municipal parks in the United States, was one that we rebranded and revamped. When San Antonio turned 300 years old, we helped them put on that celebration. Then we'll also serve the plastic surgeon who's got really high ambitious goals, or we'll partner up with a private equity who buys companies and turns them around and plug in as their marketing partner. So we're a little bit everywhere in that sense, but what they all have in common is they want to disrupt and they want to grow very fast. ROB: It seems like that branding component of what you do – I think a trick with branding agencies can often be the “What next?” I did the brand and then the engagement falls off. It sounds like you have this pairing of people who are using the rebrand as a jumping-off point to get more aggressive overall. SARA: Yes, I would say that's pretty accurate. It's either a ground-up brand that hasn't existed before, or there's a big rebrand initiative in there somewhere. One of the things we deal with all the time is that your brand is so much more than a logo and a website. Those are assets that you created, that you smartly deployed, but brands aren't created just when you create those things. They're created through nurturing, through pounding the rock every single day, growing a tribe, amassing a following, giving people a compelling reason to sign up for an email list. When we say brand building, we mean so much more down the line than just getting a new website or designing a logo. ROB: Sure. Brand is also partly who you actually are. It's who you actually are when you are out in the market. How do you take a client who is looking to rebrand and get past who they think they are or who they think they should be and get to who they actually can be and break through with that? SARA: I love that question. I think a lot of people think when you're rebranding or something, you're creating something new. In actuality, you're extracting, with a very good strategic understanding, what's compelling that lives there. A lot of times, a partner or business will come in and tell you all about their brand, all about what they do, all about their history. I think what we're doing is inventing the way that's communicated, but it's so much more than inventing things to invent things. You're extracting something that's there. Typically there's a differentiator. There's something unique about them, and it's just hidden. When we enter a rebrand, or when we decide we're going to brand something from the ground up for somebody, we're extracting more than we are inventing what's valuable there. What is there that would truly resonate with a tribe or an audience? Who is that audience, and where's the match? So it's more extracting. It's more strategic identifying of those things, and then you build a brand around that – the more traditional, well-known aspects of it, like what it looks like, the tone of voice, the colors and the typography, and our strategy for getting in front of this tribe, or what most people refer to as target audiences. ROB: Is there an aspect of that that is easier when there's also an existing customer base? Because in some cases then the customers actually tell you who you are. SARA: Yeah, it's easier and harder when there's an existing customer base, I think. Easier in the sense that you've got the best resource ever. You've got customers, and exactly what you said, you can ask them and they'll tell you. Harder in the sense that if the business's goals are to substantially change, you have to consider the existing customer. You can't just 180. You've got to love the people that got you where you are. So preserving equity and being mindful in how you do that sometimes makes those circumstances more complex than when you're starting something at the ground floor and you have a little bit more freedom to work with. But also, you're a little bit more blind because there's not a customer base that you can tap into at that point. ROB: How do you help someone when they have this conception of themselves and there's a better dimension of themselves that they actually need to be highlighting, because they really can't inhabit the brand of what they think they are? SARA: I think you show them. That's one of the most beautiful parts of the digital marketing world and living in the technology we live today. There's a way to show them. There's data, where maybe previously marketers had to fly a little bit more blind. It's super easy these days to ask a question and get a response. You don't necessarily have to always have a 10- or 15-person, immaculately sourced focus group, conducted very formally. So in that situation, you show them, and at that point you let the business decide. I think 95% of good businesses are going to choose to honor their customers. ROB: I get it. You mentioned 10 years ago, $6,000 to start; what led up to that moment, though? What led you to say, “I have this $6,000” – maybe you saved it up, maybe you didn't – “and I'm going to put it on the line to make Tribu happen”? What did that look like? SARA: What a bootstrap startup, right? I was young. I was 22 years old at the time. My father had passed away, unfortunately, probably two years before that. So I had learned life is short, and I was a little bit less scared of entrepreneurship failure potential as a result. Also, when you're young, it's easier to get something off the ground when you consider that you don't have a mortgage to worry about or a family to feed at that point. I happened to be working in SEO, and I absolutely love SEO. That's the service in this world where I got my start. I was fortunate to, at such a young age, be an operations manager for an SEO division inside of an agency. The entrepreneurial itch, the combination of losing my dad and realizing that life is short, finding an industry that I absolutely loved, a field of study I was completely passionate about – it collided. Also, because I was young, I just didn't really have that much money. Hello. [laughs] So $6,000 was what I could put in. I was fortunate enough that I had a little bit of a measly extra that I could live off for that first year, really. So it had to work within that year, at least enough to get me to the next year. That was pretty much the backstory of how Tribu started. ROB: When you're bootstrapped, it's a little bit harder to decide those moments when you're going to actually – you make decisions to invest in the business sometimes, especially in the services thing, no investors. You can take the money out or you can double down on certain aspects of the business. What were some of those bets you made early to invest in particular aspects of the business that were maybe some key decisions? SARA: In hindsight – I don't know that I was doing this then; it just seemed like what you had to do when you're bootstrapped. But I think we doubled down a zillion times. I paid our staff before I ever paid myself. There were several years in Tribu's early start that I would pull enough out in terms of – I didn't get a salary. I would distribute enough that I could eat a meal if I needed to. In the meantime, there were graphic designers who were employed and we were doubling down in the sense that the money was going to that. We doubled down when we purchased our own building, probably about four or five years in. I hope I didn't fail to answer your question, Rob, and go roundabout, but I think there was a series of doing nothing but doubling down in those first three years, probably, of Tribu's life. ROB: Sure. There's an extent to which every hire is an investment into the business. Some make you choke on payroll a little bit harder than others, when you're like, “We're going to hire somebody who makes what?” Then you have to say, “Yeah, I guess we're going to do that.” SARA: [laughs] Yep. ROB: How do you make the jump, or connect the dots, then, between SEO and brand? I might see a shadow of it, but it's not a common conversation, right? Most folks in SEO don't get really excited about rebranding, except for what keywords they're going to target. How did you get there? SARA: I love that question. Honestly, I think when you get really, really deep into SEO and you start trying to guess the algorithm and what Google's up to and what it's going to change towards and what's going to be their next move – the deeper you go, the more you find that the algorithm – my theory is that it's going to go towards what is genuinely, authentically inspiring to another human being. That's what we want to show in our result when someone enters in a query. And that's what led me to, okay, brand really, really matters from SEO, if that makes sense. I think that's where the connection was made. I also think good SEO strategies, good organics, really focus on – even though it's not stereotypical in an SEO's mind, engagement rate really matters. What's your popularity? That's a very big one in terms of SEO. In order to get there, sure, you can do all these little tips and tricks and technical hacks, and it's really good to know them, but in order to get there you've got to have some substance. You've got to have a good brand. That's where the interest came from. I also think previously, I was very rebellious when I was young. [laughs] I did not know that I was going to necessarily love a subject of any sort in school, but I absolutely loved creativity. I know this is marketing, but business and entrepreneurship is a very good way for a rebel to be a productive person to society. So you take that and you combine that with creativity and this fortunate thing that I landed in SEO, honestly, and it all hodgepodged, and that's how we went from SEO to brand. ROB: The connection's definitely there. There's all of the parlor tricks, and then there's the conviction that eventually what Google's going to keep doing is optimizing for giving people what they want. If that aligns to who you are – the essence of the brand is who you are, and the essence of SEO is what people want, and you put those together. It ties, but it's not often in the same conversation. I haven't heard it very much. It's fascinating coming through who you are. SARA: It makes it an interesting combination for Tribu, honestly. It's a cool combination for our partners to enjoy. There's that very technical, astute digital marketing aspect and strategy, but there's also that very award-winning, strong creativity coming out of Tribu. I feel like a lot of times when partners or customers in the marketplace hire agencies – not every agency puts them in this, but a lot of agencies put you into making a choice. Like, “I can hire really good strategy, really good technical stuff, or I can hire really creative stuff, but I don't know that the message is ever going to completely go as far as it could go.” We're not the only agency that does this, but we do pride ourselves on it at Tribu. We try really hard to be the agency where you don't have to compromise between creativity and strategy and the digital, technical stuff that helps brands really grow. ROB: Absolutely, for sure. It's very self-aware, and I think it's important for entrepreneurs to keep in mind their rebellious streaks. I went through a profile of one sort or another this past week, and basically, I scored ultimately on this axis where it's like “If somebody tells you to do something, you're probably going to do the opposite.” Another entrepreneur who was in that conversation – I think a lot of us, especially in the services world, have this acquisition fantasy that someone's going to show up someday and drop a big pile of cash on the front door and acquire your business. But most of the time, that actually ends up looking like an earnout. So someone I know who's in the middle of that had this rebellious streak, the want-to-be-the-lead-horse streak, and this particular analysis – they didn't know anything about what the person's experience was, but it said, “Something in your life is out of alignment here. At work, you are not being that lead horse that you usually are.” It was because they had a boss. Have you ever contemplated this sort of agency acquisition fantasy that some of us have? Or maybe you just realized that wouldn't go well? How do you think about it? SARA: I don't know. I hope I'm self-aware in that regard. What you just explained, I am so guilty of, which is like as soon as you add the boss on top of me, I'm a miserable person, even if the boss didn't tell me anything. [laughs] But yeah, in terms of Tribu's future, I don't know, maybe one day there will be an exit. I'm not ever going to say never. But we're not working towards that right now. That's not our strategy. That's not where our eyes are at. We're still at that phase in business where we're realizing our own best and obsessed enough with figuring that out for ourselves and especially for the people we serve. I think knowing about exit strategy, even not wanting to right now, is valuable in the sense that what you have to do to prepare for an exit makes you a better business. It makes you cleaner on financials. It makes you put together core processes that help everybody get more aligned. So we like to know about exits, and sure, we think about them sometimes because it makes you a better business, but we're not coming at it from the perspective of hoping for an exit. That's not in the plans right now. ROB: That's so key, and people don't realize it when they start to look at the checklists of especially what makes a services firm worth more than like 1x revenue on an earnout. It's all of those things. How well does this thing operate without you? How are the processes? How are the renewals? It's all of these things. Do you have a particular set of tools you have found work really well for you to store and maintain and update processes in a way that everybody knows where to look? Do you have anything that's working? SARA: We struggled with that for a couple of years when we started. Where we landed was Asana, which is our project management system. It's also where we store all of our core processes so that if you're working at Tribu, the program that everybody, regardless of your position, is working in is also the place where you can find all the core processes. That's pretty much what we landed on in terms of tools for that. We at one point had one-sheeters on everything we could think of in Google Drive, and then everybody would forget what one-sheeters existed. I don't know if that was too literal of an answer, or if that's what you meant by systems, but literally we decided to store them all in Asana. ROB: That's right. It's interesting at two levels. There's one that is the lesson that there is one place and that's where you go. You don't have to say, “Is this in Drive or in Gmail or in Dropbox?”, all the way down the line. I think it helps you realize why there's so many of these systems out there, but also why people switch. People switch when they can't find a way to invest enough in their PM tool to make it the source of truth. SARA: Yeah, honestly, in marketing, that's one of the things that's happening in general. There's so many tools out there, so many things you can use. I think in marketing in general, that's one of the things that makes it more fun – I like change – but it makes it harder to play. I mean, how much momentum and how deep can you get if you're changing the tool you're using every four months? We just made the decision that we don't need it to be the most perfect thing, but we need it to be a stable thing. We need it to be a constant thing. We need it to be a thing that maybe doesn't have every feature that we want, but is going to do the job really well. ROB: But commit to it. SARA: Yes. ROB: Sara, when you rewind this journey, these 10 years so far, what are some lessons you've learned that you might wish you could go back and tell yourself to do a little bit differently, if you were intercepting yourself in that moment of the business? SARA: Oh God, so many. I think we're a great business today, but we're definitely not perfect and we have our moments in history where we look back and go, “Uh, we should've thought about that one a little bit more.” I think the biggest takeaway is ‘A' players. Nothing replaces ‘A' players, whatever ‘A' players is to your agency. There were times where I think we compromised out of desperation. We grew too fast, like “We need to fill this role – someone get a body in there.” But we've I think learned the hard way that you never compromise on ‘A' players. You figure out whatever you have to figure out, but get the ‘A' players in because they're going to solve the problems. You get them in, you take care of them, and you trust them. They're going to solve the problems. They're going to help navigate. They're going to help grow. That was a big lesson learned for us, painfully at times, as we were getting to where we are today. Another lesson that I think goes along with that is – and it's the most stereotypical thing; you hear it all the time – but culture. Culture is the thing that has to be managed and taken care of and nurtured and planned and intentional and worked at. Don't just let it be a thing that roams free and gets away from you. Controlling that is so important. I've seen times in these short 10 years where I wasn't very proud of the culture we had at that moment in time, and I've seen times where I'm like, oh my God, how can I clone this cultural moment? You can basically put those times alongside our financials, and they match. [laughs] The good times, the finances look good; the times that culture's not so great, the finances don't look so great. So ‘A' players and culture. Those are things I would've – it's 20/20 hindsight, always, but I would've put more importance on those things earlier if I could go back in time. ROB: That's another area where I think we get tempted to fake it, on culture. You feel like you need to make up some values or something like that. But it doesn't work until it's real, and you can't keep the ‘A' players until that part's real also. A question that comes to mind right where we are right now, October 2021 – I'm sure you spent at least some, if not a lot, of last year working apart where maybe you were accustomed to working together. How do you think about spreading, driving, reinforcing culture when you're not in the same place, and maybe the patterns that helped form it before aren't available? SARA: How do I answer that? There's so much to say there. That's such a great question. That was actually something that in some ways we did so excellent last year, and in some ways we did so poorly. It was such a year of learning. One of the things I think we did excellent in terms of “How did we do that and retain it?” was just surprises. When you're inside an office, operating in a good culture, there are pleasant surprises that happen in your day that you don't necessarily think about because that's just your day. That's just every day. So being intentional about creating those surprises when we were all apart from each other, whether that was mailing everybody a cookie kit or something that they didn't know was going to come, but they can do with their kids and send pictures and create conversation about that maybe had nothing to do with work, but to make up for that passing hallway conversation that you miss out on – those are things I look at last year and I'm like, that was pretty cool that we did that. Patting ourselves on the back, that was smart. There are other things that I look at that we did last year as we were learning to navigate remote where, now that we've been doing it longer, I'm like, we should've done that better. Like making time to say, “How are you?”, not “How's this project?” And then also – and this one surprised me – I think most executives were worried about productivity drops. We had a productivity skyrocket. People could not turn it off. So something that I didn't learn, because I was actually expecting in part an opposite result, but we had to help our team turn it off. That was a surprise to us and something I think we would've done better, or do better now, honestly. When you've got Slack going and everybody's remote, it's so easy for someone to send you a Slack message at 8:30, 9:00, and it's totally fine to let that wait till the next morning, but you just don't want to do that to your peer, your coworker, your friend. And then eventually it just never stopped. So that was a surprise to us. ROB: Definitely, my own habit, I'm a sloppy Slacker. I tell everybody involved with me, look, if I don't send you this Slack message right now, I'm going to forget this thing, and it's important, but you should not respond to it if it's the weekend, if it's the evening. SARA: Of course you can read it, right? [laughs] ROB: You should just hold it right there, and when you get to work on Monday or in the morning, pay attention then. Please do not – unless I tell you “Do this now,” which just doesn't happen – because if something's on fire, they're already responding to it. They understand urgency. That false urgency is potentially pretty dangerous. Sara, when you think about what's coming up for Tribu and the kind of work that you all do, what are you excited about? What's next? SARA: Again, bootstrapped, organic growth. We've had to add things over time. We recently this year formally added videography and production in-house. We were collaborating with an awesome group of freelancers and many people before to fill those needs. I'm very excited about having that in-house. It makes everything else we're already offering much more powerful. And then in general, the industry, what's coming up that I'm super excited about – and I think all of us at Tribu are – things like TikTok. Not necessarily that there's a new social media platform. It's more so the format change that a platform like TikTok is driving – that informal, very human, fun, relatable, just people being goofy. That type of content. That's just so exciting that brands are going to get to play in that space. As the world's moved – we talked about it when we were talking about SEO – whatever's really core and authentic to a human's heart, to those tribes, seems to be the good business move in terms of brand building as well. So to see that that's an opportunity for brands to have more fun and be lighthearted and participate in those types of conversations, to show more of their human side because of platforms like TikTok and the formats they're encouraging, that I'm very excited about. I think we all are at Tribu. ROB: It's a great point. It's almost like TikTok broke all of us, in a way, because you could kind of pretend that every channel was the same if you really were committed to it, and it just breaks the narrative. I think it helps you be who you need to be on Twitter versus LinkedIn versus Facebook. It fractures everything by making more than one message. I think it helps people get channel-specific, even if they're not even touching TikTok, because sometimes it might not make sense. Maybe it always makes sense if you can figure it out. I don't know. SARA: If you're on alcohol, they don't let you play on it right now. So sometimes even if it did make sense, it's not an option yet. [laughs] But yeah, for sure. You said it so spot-on. TikTok really is breaking that format, and it's going to inspire a lot of channel specificity in marketing, which we're excited about. ROB: Especially with that video capability. Sara, when people want to find you and Tribu, where should they go to connect with you? SARA: Oh, thank you. Wearetribu.com. A little fun secret is that as we've scaled, the one thing I refuse to change is that that contact form goes straight to my inbox. So if ever anybody wants to send in a message, I'd love to hear from anybody. ROB: Fantastic. We'll get the site dialed into the show notes as well. Sara, congratulations on everything so far. Looking forward to what comes next as well. Thanks for coming on and sharing with us. SARA: Thanks for having me. ROB: You bet. Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

The many questions about how we reach net-zero In a special edition, Leon Daniels swaps notes with Sara Sloman, who hosts sister-ITT Hub podcast Talking Net Zero.  In a wide-ranging, engaging and lively chat we discover Sara's ‘all-time gripe' about ‘all-things-green and sustainable', but they start by talking about a bottle of wine, before moving onto the controversial residents' parking scheme in Bristol.  Designed to encourage people out of their cars, rather than driving to within a mile of the city centre and then parking on residential streets the scheme's introduction was the source of much angst.  This question gives rise to the topic of forcing people to change their travel behaviour. It seems that whatever you do in transport, it's often just ‘shunting the problem', reckons Sara: “It's coastal erosion with cars!” Local politics come into play and the challenge that metro-mayors face of four-year terms – and having to rely on a second term, and being at the mercy of shifts of change in public opinion – means that four years is not long enough to do anything in the transport sector, we discover. Leon recalls advice he gave to London Mayor Boris Johnson, and asks if mayors are ready to make really tough decisions within the first few weeks of taking office. This leads to a discussion about the ‘short term of everything', the need for consistency and why ‘engineers are biting their nails' when announcements are made. Are we too hung up on on-street charging and is the on-street charging issue overblown, Leon asks Sara, before they chat about micro-mobility and why people on eScooters are happy. “You never see a jogger smiling,” observes Leon, while Sara explains the importance of how travel makes you feel. “Does it put a smile on your face?” She explains the enjoyment of a journey, how underrated bus travel is for the ‘pleasure of the journey' and why sustainable travel ‘gives you your life back'. Is the solution for certain occasional travel car clubs? Sara and Leon swap tales about their car club experiences which include an egg, rubber gloves and an underground car park….

Sara Ku is the founder of Kaya Essentials, a skincare and lifestyle company based in Koreatown, Los Angeles. The seeds of the company were planted when Sara was a young girl and would make coconut hair masks with her mother. Her research on fair trade coconut oil inspired her to turn those early experiences into a company, which not only creates amazing products but gives back to the Filipino community. She recently expanded the company by partnering with female Filipino artisans to bring their one-of-a-kind pieces to a global market. More about Kaya Essentials. Learn more about The Passionistas Project. Full Transcript: Passionistas: Hi, and welcome to the Passionista Project Podcast, where we tell the stories of empowered women who are following their passions to inspire you to do the same. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. And today we're talking with Sara Ku. Sara is the founder of Kaya Essentials, a skincare and lifestyle company based in Koreatown, Los Angeles. The seeds of her company were planted when Sara was a young girl and would make coconut hair masks with her mother, her research on fair trade coconut oil inspired her to turn those early experiences into a company which not only creates amazing products, but gives back to the Filipino community. She recently expanded the company by partnering with female Filipino artisans to bring their one-of-a-kind pieces to the global market. So please welcome to the show, Sarah Ku. Sara: Hi guys. Thank you so much for having me. Passionistas: What's the one thing you're most passionate about? Sara: I'm most passionate about making a social impact, you know, focusing on how on the individual level each and every person can make a difference and the importance of small steps, small acts of kindness that together have a big impact when you bring community together. And that brought me to create my business Kaya Essentials. Passionistas: So, tell us about that. Sara: Kaya Essentials is a clean organic coconut skincare line, and we recently expanded to a lifestyle, um, with artisan goods, but it really started, you know, um, about five years ago when I was first introduced to the concept of a social business. And that was when I was in college, I was studying history. Um, it's something that I wasn't really passionate about doing, but I was so nervous as to what my career was going to be. So instead of going to art school, which was always my passion growing up, it's really funny how, when you look back and look at your most memorable, enjoyable times, um, you know, it's really the things that you know, that you're passionate about, but you never really realized that, you know, that's going to bring you the most purpose in life. Um, so I ended up studying history and I really knew that I wasn't in the right space. I was trying so hard to, you know, succeed in, in my studies and, and you know, it wasn't something that came naturally to me, but at the same time, I was studying Asian history, which I was really passionate about because I'm half Filipino, half English. I was born in Hong Kong. So I have a very international background, kind of a third culture kid to the max. Um, so I was born in Hong Kong, lived there for 10 years, lived in India for two years, um, Istanbul in Turkey for three years, and then finally moved to the UK and, and lived there for five years before moving to LA. So yeah, I was really passionate about studying Asian history, getting to know my culture in more in depth, and I saw on our career bulletin board that there was a talk on a Filipino nonprofit called Gawad Kalinga, and the founder was going to talk about entrepreneurship and social business. And I had, had never heard of the word entrepreneurship or social purpose, social impact, um, but being a Filipino nonprofit, I was really interested. And so that's when I attended that talk and he really, you know, spoke about the communities that are most in poverty and their lack of access to diversify crops, for example, in the Philippines, because we have very fertile land. And so for example, we've had Cocao farms for centuries yet there was no Filipino bean to bar, um, Filipino chocolate company. And he was saying, you know, there's really a missed opportunity here. And it dawned on me that Philippines has a very big import culture. And so they had an internship opening and I immediately applied and I was a research assistant at first. And then, um, after college I continued my work with them. And I specifically helped with in facilitating European business students to help with their social businesses that they created at their farm. And that was everything from, like I said, the chocolate company to using our local dairy, which is from a Carabao, which is our local cow and using their milk to make ice cream. Um, and also from mushrooms, for example, because mushroom, wasn't a big staple in Filipino cuisine, but with the rise of international restaurants, you know, restaurants in the, in the main city was needing it more. And so they worked with farmers from different local communities to diversify their crops and add more value. So I was helping with that. And then at the same time, as you mentioned, I was my mom. She was a very big DIY or like she would make her own cleaning products. She would use ketchup, vinegar, vinegar. We always had so much vinegar in the house. And also with, um, her skincare, she would always make her own lotions, deodorant and everything. And so one thing that we did religiously was, um, make a coconut oil hair mask. And in the summers, when we were in the Philippines, we would scrape the coconut meat from the, from the actual coconut and then boil it into an oil and then apply that into our skull, you know, to, to promote like growth and get rid of dandruff to our, to the ends of our hair. And at the same time, I also learned that 60% of coconut farmers in the Philippines lived below the poverty line and the particular jar that I was using, I, um, was a French brand called Latuda Anjell. And then when I turned it over in small letters, it had said made in the Philippines. And then that's when it really sh… you know, struck me that this was going to be my lifetime passion. This is when I say my coconut dream came to life when I really wanted to create a clean coconut skincare brand that, you know, really promoted the Filipino coconut oil as a point of pride for Filipinos and for the rest of the world. And I knew that coconut oil, um, especially from the Philippines dominated the beauty and skincare market, and even, you know, with coconut food products, you know, we have it in everything and coconut sugar, coconut flour yet, you know, I really wanted to break that disparity and promote fair trade farming. Um, and so through, um, the nonprofit that I was working for Gawad Kalinga I connected with their fair trade coconut farm, and really that's where it all started, that I had the first jar of coconut oil. And the first idea that came to mind was to make lip balm actually. And the reason why was because lip balm was something small, it was something that everybody needed. I wasn't even thinking from a business mindset so much at that point, I was thinking it's for men, it's for women. It's for all ages, it's for kids, I can sell it to everybody. And with each one, we would donate a school meal back to the local community. And that part was really important to me, going back to what I'm most passionate about. I think that with change that we want to make, it can seem very overwhelming. So I really wanted to show that small acts of change, small acts of kindness can really make a big impact and to have something in your everyday life that you would use that, you know, contributed into making that change. So I started with lip balms. I had two flavors at the very beginning. One was lemon grass, and the other was calamansi. And calamansi is a Filipino lemon that only exists in the Philippines. It's a very light citrus. And that was the second moment where I knew this was meant to be because I had found a family business in the Philippines that made this into an essential oil, because, you know, you need thousands of calamansi to make any essential oil. And when I first made that lip balm, I thought I loved it because I was Filipino. So of course I'm going to love it. But, you know, after sharing it with friends and family, you know, people were very excited to also try something different and, you know, try the taste of the Philippines in a very unique way. So those were the two first lip balms that I had. Passionistas: What are some of the other products that you offer now, as time has gone by? Sara: My first pop-up market, I actually only was selling lip balms. And so before I even had a website, I started looking at craft markets, farmer's markets, and I had my lip balms there. And for the lip balm tester jars, I had them into small jars and several customers that were trying the testers were saying, can I buy this jar? Can I, can I, because I use body balms, I use this all over my body. I use it for my cuticles and for my elbows. And I didn't even think about expanding into different products first. And so really that's where the idea came first to get into body balms. And it was also really the idea to have a very minimalistic approach to your skincare so that, you know, you can, you can have something clean and organic and something that was really affordable as well that was really important to me because what I realized in the beauty world is, you know, I would kind of steal some jars from my mom, you know, in her skincare when I was growing up, because, you know, it was, it was for like, it was very luxurious and I would only use like a little pea sized amount and only use it on the weekend and, and only use it when I really needed it. And really skincare is your life is supposed to be part of your lifestyle. Something that you, you, you can use every single day without feeling bad about the price tag that's attached to it Passionistas: Talk a little bit about the working conditions and the financial situation of a lot of the farmers in the Philippines. Why was it so important for you to work with those people specifically? Sara: So, it was really important for me to work with fair trade farming, because I think that in the last decade, there's been a strong focus on organic ingredients, which is really great, and we're moving towards the right way because we know that what we put on our skin absorbs into our bloodstream. But the way that I like to explain it is that how these organic ingredients are grown, isn't necessarily grown in a very organic way with the people that they employ. And so that's where fair trade really comes in. Is that it really ensures that the working conditions are safe and that they know their rights. And also that they're not overworked. That was a very big thing that I had learned from the nonprofit that I worked with, that, you know, especially a father who was a farmer and had two or three children and had to, you know, pay for bills and schools and everything would end up working, you know, 12 hour days, 16 hour days, not knowing when their breaks could be not having, you know, sick days, you know, sick pay days. And, um, so that's where the fair trade, you know, really comp like adds onto the organic. And I really love connecting with different customers that really care about this advocacy in supporting fair trade ingredients as well. Passionistas: What does Kaya mean? Why did you choose that as the name of the company? Sara: That's the first question I get a lot, um, in pop-ups is, is your name Kaya. Hi Kaya. And I love the Kaya, but my name is Sara, but Kaya in Filipino means we can do it. So, um, Kaya koa in Tagalog means I can do it. And it's really a personal affirmation back to, you know, what I'm most passionate about is, you know, focusing on the individual level that each person can make a difference. And so it's that affirmation and really that when you come together as a community Kaya, nothin, which means we can do it, you really see that's where changes made. That's where the biggest impact is and the power of the people as well. You see in that. So I knew I wanted it to also have a Filipino name because in the Philippines, there's this strong notion that anything that is high quality has a very Western name. And I really wanted to bring that point of pride to Filipinos that, you know, a love for our culture and our ingredients and our language as well. Passionistas: You use a lot of Filipino phrases in your branding. Why did you want to do that? Sara: It was really important for me to honor where the, where we're rooted out, which is in the Philippines. And, you know, that is where we source our coconut oil from. And something that we launched this year in 2020 is our artists and goods collection. And really that was my connection to the nonprofit. I've been connected to all these artisan communities that was upcycling fabrics, creating, you know, beautiful jewelry, beautiful home pieces. And going back to my mission, which with Kaya Essentials, it's a lifelong business, it's a lifelong passion. It's not, I'm not here to have an exit strategy and really looking at how, where can I make more of an impact? And so that's where we launched our lifestyle line. And that was really difficult for me too, because I had introduced Kaya Essentials for the last three years as a skincare brand. And I kind of, you know, was scared to kind of go out of my comfort zone or, or, or be put into a different box. And I realized I was limiting myself. And then I realized, wait a second, I'm the founder, I'm a solo entrepreneur as well. I own a hundred percent of the business. Why can't I do this? And so that's where, um, I began, you know, really connecting with the artistsan communities and figuring out the best pieces to first introduce the collection. Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Sarah Ku. To learn more about Kaya Essentials, visit Kaya Essentials.com. Now here's more of our interview with Sara. So, what are some of the challenges you face starting your own business? Sara: So, as I mentioned, I'm a solo entrepreneur, so that it's really difficult when you have to be your own cheerleader and your biggest critic at the same time. And there's not really, you know, strong markers of success because you don't have a template to follow. You don't have goals that you've set with a team. And so really you have to have a lot of discipline. Um, and especially at the start, when you're doing everything, you're like every single part of building your business is a whole new template for you to learn. And so there was a lot of Googling. Luckily I'm very autodidactic and would connect with any expert in one particular field, but it really got to me because a lot of days it felt very slow. And I realized I had to lean into those slow days and realize that, you know, slow progress is the best progress because I really wanted to focus on getting this right, and really having an organic growth that would last for decades to come. But, you know, it's hard. It was hard to, especially at the start, have that motivation had that belief in myself. And so, yeah, that was the biggest challenge. And also, you know, imposter syndrome is very real. And for me, I don't have a business background. I lean towards more of the creative side. So in building the product in, in coming up with my marketing materials or anything that never came from the point of view of, okay, what's the trend right now in skincare? What, what are consumers, you know, gravitating towards? And it really just came from an artistic approach. And so that was really difficult when for example, I would share it with different communities, different people and not having the strength to really believe, um, to, to hold that up. And I really, um, really loved when I heard Sara Blakely. Uh, so she she's, uh, she pronounces her name, Sara, um, the founder of Spanx, the first self-made female billionaire in America. And she said, when she had the idea for Spanx, she didn't share it for the first year. She didn't even share it with her own boyfriend or her family. And she said, when something is an idea, so close to you so that your, so that's your little baby it's that you're so passionate about. You have to really take care of it. That really made an impression on me. And so I learned the hard way to be careful in, you know, what I would share, how I would grow and, you know, really finding the confidence in myself and carrying that through, even in the very slow days, Passionistas: What are the challenges of working internationally? Sara: Luckily, I have a business partner here in LA and we source our coconut the fair trade coconut oil together, which, um, you know, when you find, I really believe in the law of attraction and we were both connected to the Filipino nonprofit Gawad Kalinga. And when that happened to be, it, it was just, it laid it all out. Um, but you know, there's a lot of planning ahead. And for someone who, I'm a type of person who wants instant gratification, and also I have a huge attention to detail, which I really think that your best qualities can also be your worst qualities. And so it is really great, especially as a solo entrepreneur, because, you know, getting your website, ready, doing packaging, doing customer service, everything it's, you know, it's good that, you know, I have my lists and everything, but at the same time, especially with international, um, orders, for example, in sourcing the ingredients, you know, there is that, you know, that over time where you have the waiting period and also that period of uncertainty sometimes, and not only from the international side of things, but just in the business side of things that I personally find really difficult. Um, and so again, it's just, you know, going with the flow, going with the ride and realizing and accepting that, you know, every single day something's going to come up, there's going to be things that are short-term focuses for the next month. And then, you know, some things that are long-term, but, um, you know, carrying that through is, is a challenge, but it's also really exciting and really, really, um, gratifying as well to challenge yourself, um, and see what you can do. Passionistas: How has the COVID-19 crisis affected your business and maybe in particular working international? Sara: Yeah. So with this COVID-19, I mean, for everyone, you know, especially small business owners that have a face-to-face, um, element, you know, we've been put out of stock and for key essentials, that was mainly our pop-ups our farmer's markets, our, um, you know, craft markets and everything that is where a lot of our businesses from as well. And also with distribution too, you know, we're in over 20 boutiques all over the US um, you know, unfortunately they've had to close as well. And so, um, what we've been doing is kind of, you know, putting our focus into our online community and recognizing that, you know, social distancing doesn't mean that it's a time, you know, to shut off and really finding ways to connect with one another. Um, so that's been our main focus during this time. And we, um, launched a program this week where for every single body bomb we sell, we are donating a body bomb to the front lines and seeing how we can best, you know, make an impact again, during this time. Where, where possible Passionistas: Tell us a bit about your production process? Do you make everything yourself? Sara: Yes. So, uh, everything is handmade by me in my studio. So everything is made in small batches and really where I started, which was in the lip balm that took me over a year to formulate. And even though it's three simple organic ingredients, it's [inaudiable], mango, butter, coconut oil, um, all the different levels of the texture of butter and how that works in, um, you know, in the heat when you have in your bag to when it's cold and the coconut oil and how that blends in. So that took me a really long time to perfect, but from there, it gave me a base to create our body balms. And also our body balms are all infused with essential oils. And that was really important for me too, because one of the biggest chemicals in skincare is fragrances and fragrances is basically a chemical construct to smell like a certain things. So for example, anything that smells like a banana isn't from a banana, it's impossible to get it from a banana. Um, so it's all chemically formulated. And so that's where essential oils are really great because they come from the actual herb or flower. And yeah, so everything is made in small batches. And that's really important too, because we don't use any silicones. So that's where the formula, um, you know, to get a very smooth formula silicones provides that gel consistency. But for us, we make it in small batches so that we don't have to use any silicones. Passionistas: You talk about the cold centrifuge, virgin coconut oil? So tell us what that is and what are the benefits of it? Sara: Cold centrifuge, coconut oil is a spinning process that spins the coconut meat out from the coconut oil. And as it's the spinning process, it doesn't use any heat to boil the coconut oil out. And really that gives a more refined coconut oil that has that retains more of its antioxidants, vitamins, nutrients, and really is coconut oil for your skincare that goes directly onto your skin or your hair, which is different to coconut oil that you cook with, where they boil it, because you're going to heat it up anyway. And it's much faster for production, um, to heat it up and really in the Philippines they've been using this type of process, um, for coconut oil for decades. And, you know, that's something that, that differentiation, not a lot of people know about. And so I really wanted to share, you know, their specialty and how they take care in processing this coconut oil that takes over three days to process from the coconut meat to the oil. Passionistas: What's your dream for the future of Kaya Essentials? Sara: My dream for Kaya Essentials is really to focus on how more we can make an impact. So something that we also launched last year was our Conscious Coconut Club. And really that came from the idea of bringing community together to give back where I recognized that there was a space for galas and, you know, those, these big events, but usually the, the cost for, you know, a meal ticket. Wasn't a, and I really felt that there was a lot of people that wanted to be part of giving back part of this initiative. And, you know, they weren't able to take part in something like that. And so we hosted a dinner where each person, you know, came together. We had a meal and we provided a meal back to the Philippines and something that we've also introduced is providing school meals back to our local communities in the US and that's our partnership with no kid hungry. And that really came from our community as well. That really wanted to take part in giving back locally to, you know, now with this new lifestyle line that we have, um, it's also just looking, you know, expanding our brand, um, but always focusing on where we can more make an impact. Passionistas: What's the biggest risk you ever took and how did it pay off? Sara: I think the biggest risk I ever took was really focusing on what success meant to me and canceling out the noise and not comparing myself to others. And I say that because, because when you don't have that business background, when you are every single day, not knowing where the template is, and, you know, even just being an entrepreneur is a risk in itself. It, it, you know, um, it's not the easy path. It's not comfortable. You have to find the comfort in the uncomfortable situations, and that's a big risk. Um, but like any risk, you know, it's very satisfying. It's very, um, it's great to put yourself out of your comfort zone and after having lived all over the world and also, you know, having parents that are, you know, that take a lot of risks. My dad left England when, you know, he was in his twenties and lived in and is a civil engineer and worked in Africa, worked all over Asia. I think that just from a young age, kind of just going over the cliff and just going for it is, is, is the way that I've operated. Um, but I would say that's the biggest risk. Passionistas: You just mentioned finding out what success means to you. So what is your definition of success? Sara: Definition of success is really in a business sense, looking at what is my mission, where I want to make, where I can make the most impact and how that all fits with the rest of my life. I think balance is so important and I know balance gets thrown around a lot, but really crafting recognizing that you are the one that crafts and cultivates your life. And so you are in full charge of that. And, you know, really living the life where, you know, you don't want to look back and have regrets. And really trying, you know, as the most, you know, trying, despite having any fears, um, you know, to me, is living a very successful life. Passionistas: Is there any particular trait that you have that you feel has helped your success? Sara: I would say the particular trait that's really helped me succeed with Kaya Essentials is being very frugal and scrappy and not afraid to get into everything. I think that first had the idea for Kaya Essentials. I was in my early twenties. I didn't have a lot of savings or any savings actually. Um, and it was an idea that I had that I said, okay, that's going to, I'm going to do that. Maybe in my early retirement. That's how far ahead I was thinking, because I didn't know, you know, what you, like, I thought you needed so much investment and, you know, capital to really start a business. And also not trusting myself that I would be able to learn all the different areas. And so, as I mentioned before, being autodidactic, and just not afraid to learn everything from building a website on Shopify, to researching all the different packaging. That's something that I underestimated as well in building a business is how much thought and care has to go into packaging and how, you know, that really depends on, on so many things. And, um, I, my friends will always say that I am the most frugal person that they've ever met. Um, and it's just something that always came naturally to me. My mom was a domestic helper. Um, when she was 17, she moved from the Philippines to Hong Kong. And, you know, she, she grew up in poverty in the Philippines. And she worked, um, you know, under the table with, with her mom, with my grandma, um, in the factory because my grandma was paid on the quantity of snacks that they were producing, that they were packaging, you know, without an hourly wage. And so she brought her daughters, um, you know, to help out. And my mom always taught me, you know, to have a really strong work ethic and, and not being afraid to, you know, do the tasks that are, you know, um, that are very time consuming as well. Because I think that when you start a business, um, you really have to do every single part. And so, for example, like I mentioned, I, um, crafting all of our products and also packaging as well. And with each package, I write a personalized note to our customer. And that's something that I never want to let go of because for me, someone who's joined our community and given me their hard working dollars to, you know, part of this, you know, it really means a lot. And so, um, you know, I really love connecting with my customers in that way. And so that's something that I'm never going to stop doing, but yeah, not being afraid to be scrappy. And when I talk to other female entrepreneurs that have an idea that are starting out, um, you know, I really say that there are so many different ways to grow a business and, you know, do what feels right to you. It's really good to know every single pathway and whether that's going down the investment route, route, you know, having angel investors or, you know, um, whatever it is and knowing your strategy as well. So is that going to be wholesale? So do you need a manufacturer? How much quantity do you need? Do you want to be able to produce and breaking that down as well? Because you know, your profit in the end is different for all of those outcomes. And really focusing on what makes sense for you not being afraid to start small either. I always share that, you know, the lip balm formula took me over a year to perfect. I was selling it, you know, first with just friends and family. And then with, you know, in pop-up markets, farmer's markets before I even had a website, because I couldn't even, you know, put that on my plate to begin to think how it would look like to have a Kaya Essentials website, you know, and I, and I still cringe at the first iteration of the website, you know, and I love sharing that because I say, you know, taking your time organically going through it, um, you know, is the best way because I learned so much that I couldn't rush. Um, so not being afraid, you know, be frugal scrappy and take your time and define your own success as well and how you want to build your passion. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast, and our interview with Saraj Ku. To learn more about Kaya Essentials, visit KayaEssentials.com. And visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and subscription box filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. The winter box — with the theme Passionistas Pamper — is on sale now, and will ship just-in-time for the holidays. Sign up for our mailing list to get 10% off your first purchase. And be sure to subscribe to the Passionistas Project Podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests. Until next time stay well and stay passionate.

Podcast: The ALPS In Brief PodcastEpisode: Episode 15: 2017 ALPS Year in ReviewPub date: 2018-05-29ALPS recently released our 2017 Annual Report online. Mark Bassingthwaighte was able to sit down with ALPS CFO Sara Smith as she elaborated on a year that was marked by growth and excitement for the company.  ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. Transcript: MARK: Hello. Welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast. We're coming to you from the ALPS' home office in the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the ALPS risk manager, and I have the pleasure today of sitting down with our corporate CFO Sara Smith. MARK: We're going to be talking today about the ALPS annual report which is just out. But before we get into that, Sara, can you just take a little time to share with our audience? Tell us a little bit about yourself. SARA: Sure. Thanks, Mark. My name is Sara Smith. I've been with ALPS for 15 years. Prior to that, I had a pretty diverse background working at retail and coal bed methane exploration. MARK: Wow. SARA: All sorts of different things. I didn't think insurance would be where I would end up, but I have found it challenging and fun and quite exhilarating at times. I've enjoyed my career here at ALPS. MARK: Very good. Very good. Well, we are here to talk about the annual report, the numbers from 2017 and all the good things that have been happening around here. Why don't we start with some of the most basics, the things that people are most curious about. Can you share a little bit about revenue? What's been happening? SARA: Sure. I think the exciting thing happening at ALPS is just our growth and we have a great trajectory going forward, but we also had a fantastic 2017. We saw growth in key states like Washington and Colorado, where we saw tripled digit growth- MARK: Wow, nice. SARA: ... which is super exciting, and so our overall top-line grew about 6%, which in this competitive and market environment, it's a great achievement. MARK: Yeah. Very good. Not only is growth important in terms of just an insurance company, but claims frequency is also a significant thing. What happened on the frequency front? SARA: Well, we started to think that maybe attorneys weren't having claims anymore the way the frequency number dropped. We have seen this in the industry overall in 2017, but it was great to see in ALPS as well. Our frequency dropped right below 3% so it was great, great year. MARK: Wow. Those are great numbers. Growth is not always built on just revenue in terms of playing with premium numbers and having savings and frequency. Can you share a little bit about what's happening in terms of policies, number of policies, number of attorneys? How are those numbers playing out this year? SARA: Both policies and attorneys grew over 7% in 2017 over '16. That translates to almost 18,000 attorneys in ALPS portfolio at the end of '17. MARK: That's a significant change from when we started all those years ago. SARA: It is. MARK: It's a very different company which is a good thing. SARA: It is a good thing. MARK: Another key component for insurance carriers is just, in terms of their overall stability as measured by surplus. What's happening in the surplus? SARA: Well, surplus is so important and so critical for all insurance carriers and, as a policy holder, it's something you should be concerned with when you look at your own insurance carrier. Basically, that is the actual money available to policy holders beyond what's established for reserves. It's the foundation of security and stability within an insurance company. Our surplus grew 6% in 2017. We're just up over $40 million at the end of the year. So we're in sound financial shape. MARK: Yeah and I think that's a good point in terms of having lawyers understand how insurance companies ... How to judge and determine how secure and stable a company is in terms of longterm presence in a market. SARA: Absolutely. MARK: Or just the ability to pay claims going forward. And these surplus numbers are key. I'd like, shortly, to shift into a little softer side of this discussion, but before we jump there, I would like to make our listeners aware. We have put up the annual report. As I understand it, it's all on our website, interactive. Do you have any comments about that? It's just ... Just go to alpsnet.com. SARA: Correct. MARK: I just encourage you folks, if you have any interest to dig into the numbers a little bit more, all of this information is available. Let's talk about the soft stuff in 2017. SARA: Yeah. MARK: You've shared some things about growth. Lots of great things happening with the company. Just fill us in. SARA: I think that sometimes there's a tendency to look just at the numbers and they tell a great story in 2017 but there is also a lot of foundational work that went into 2017 that is really priming the pump for 2018 and beyond. A couple of those things are ... We did a full rate study of our entire 30 years of data, right? What do we know about our attorneys and what do we not know? What are the assumptions we've made over the years and what are the surprises? So, that was a huge undertaking. Took a lot of time and I think we got some valid information out of that. SARA: The other thing we did is we heard from our policy holders that maybe there was some things that we could do in our policy forms that would be better and more customizable to them. We took a hard look at our policy and developed three new policy forms to better serve our customers. That is a tremendous amount of work. MARK: Yeah. SARA: We spent most of '17 working on that. Of course, that's just the easy part. Now, we have to ... At the end of the year, we started filing our forms and rates and policies in all of our states. So, now we're hurry up and wait and see what happens. MARK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're also at a point where we're beginning to expand jurisdictionally. Any comments on what's happening there? SARA: Yeah, we have really put some effort forward to diversify our book both geographically as well as just from a demographic perspective.  We did see significant growth in Washington and Colorado and we're going to continue to see that expansion play out. We recently were approved in Texas and starting writing business in April. So that's really exciting. We're on the march to get the last couple of states and get our Certificate of Authority. I expect that our footprint will be much different by the end of '18 then it even was in 2017. MARK: And while we have been recognized as a national insurer, we really now are on the verge of truly being national in terms of just a presence throughout the entire United States, which is exciting. SARA: It is exciting. MARK: It really is. Lots of opportunities coming. There's been some investments in technology as well. Can you share a little bit about what we're doing? SARA: Sure. I think that the consumers ... Consumers overall are changing and they're changing their purchasing patterns and the way that they like to access their information. MARK: Yes, right. SARA: I think that it's hard for insurance companies especially. We all have legacy platforms and we have to sometimes just rip the band aid off. Start over. We are working on finally e-delivery and being able to get our customers what they want, when they want it. So I think it's a huge task and it's much more complicated than you think it would be, but we're getting there. MARK: Very good. Very good. That's pretty much what we wanted to share. Do you have any closing comments? Exciting things to look forward in 2018? What's on your radar? SARA: Wow. So, 2018 right now is ... I'm really watching our rate implementation and execution and making sure that we're doing that in the right way. I think that going into new states is super exciting. How do we build traction? What does that look like? What are we going to learn? Cause you know we're going to learn a lot. We just don't know what it is at the point right now. MARK: And I'm looking forward myself in terms of one of the guys getting on the airplane so we can go to a few new places. Get a few more miles but- SARA: Right, right, right. MARK: To meet some new folks out in these new states. Doing some lecturing and what not. They are exciting times. Well, Sara, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. To all of you listening, I hope you found something of value today and I encourage you, if you have any interest in learning more about what is happening here at ALPS, to visit alpsnet.com. There is a link to the annual report interactive and there's some great information there. In addition, if any of you have any questions or topics that you would like to see addressed in the future ... Or even speakers you'd like to hear on the podcast, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at mbass@alpsnet.com. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.  The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from ALPS Lawyer's Malpractice Insurance, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

SHOW NOTES Big Ideas Honor end of summer or start of school traditions as much as possible—even if they look different. Consider creating a mini-school or co-op with another family or neighbor. Help your kids reflect on the spring and get ready for school by asking open-ended questions such as: What did you like about online school last spring? How did it go? What worked? What did not work? What do you feel like you accomplished or learned or feel more confident around? Where did you feel like you kept tripping up? Where would you like some additional support? Download a PDF of these questions to print out! Quotes Sara: This is a time for innovation and looking at things with new lenses. Sara: As the parent, a lot of times my attitude leaks into other's attitudes Audrey: When you're looking back on this time, 10 years from now, what are the things that you're going to want to be able to say about this time? Sara: I hope my kids and for all of us, our kids can look back and say, “I had extra time with my parents and while it was confusing sometimes, I really appreciate it.I enjoyed that time.” Audrey: This is an opportunity for us as parents to really start helping our kids develop more autonomy. Sara: This is an amazing time to hold each other accountable for not doing too much. Audrey: We have no control over when it's going to change, when we're going to go back to “normal,” but between now and that point, we can focus on what's really important. Sara: It can be really challenging because there's different reasons why children fight the homework. Audrey: We need, as parents, to really partner with the teachers and administrators. Audrey: Let's start the school year just knowing that we're all on the same team, we all will make mistakes. Our kids will, the teachers will, the schools will—things will go wrong. Some things will go right. Audrey: It's going to be okay. Sara: I really hope we all can move forward with the mindset that my child isn't going to be all behind—all is not lost. Sara: Let's take some of the burden and the pressure off and go back to: What is the best way for my kiddo to learn right now? Audrey: Let's all just go into this fall with the reset button. Audrey: Push the reset button, rethink, reevaluate, do a do over from the spring, have that meeting with your kids, focus more on your relationship and autonomy development. Links The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey

Show notes & links available here. In this episode, my friend Sara Kuljis and I are back together talking about uncluttering our schedules and our homes. Sara and her husband Steve Kuljis are the owners and directors of Yosemite Sierra Summer Camp and Emerald Cove Day Camp. Sara is also a certified Gallup Strengths Coach. Sara and I have been friends for two decades, and she has been a regular guest on the podcast talking in past episodes about strengths, sibling conflicts & relationships, gratitude, how to compliment our kids, grit, and more. Together we also do a live parenting workshop. Big Ideas Uncluttering our Schedules Look back at past events that family members enjoyed and identify what was special about those experiences to help you determine what your family values. Talk about people or families you admire and why you admire them. Use their example to inspire your family's values or actions. Look at your calendar of activities to see which ones support your values. Note where the gaps of downtime are so that you can make time for activities that move your values forward. Consider using the values worksheet to assess what you value most individually or as a family. If your kids are younger, select one or two to focus on for a season or year. Some questions to consider: What are our family values? What are the things we hope our family is known for? Try to identify two 0r three characteristics or values you'd like to be hallmarks of your family. What are qualities we want to develop? If you want to do a deeper dive into your family values, consider downloading Sara's Family Pace & Space worksheet (also available in the resource section of Happy Campers). Consider coming up with a short family motto or song that represents something that's important to you. One of Audrey's favorites that she put on a poster photo of her kids was from Lee Brice's song Love Like Crazy: Be a best friend, tell the truth, and overuse I love you Go to work, do your best, don't outsmart your common sense Never let your prayin' knees get lazy And love like crazy Uncluttering our Homes Involve the whole family in a decluttering project! Decide together where to donate any used items in good condition. Keep the time short and model how to give things away and clean out your spaces. Consider using something like Amazon's givebackbox to make it easy to donate. Quotes Audrey: "Life is so busy and chaotic and so we have to be really intentional about making it not that way." Audrey: "Spring is a time when it is starting to get warmer, flowers are blooming outside and it always feels kind of like a fresh start. We can think of this as our psychological spring cleaning." Sara: "When our schedules are so packed and our children are racing from one thing to the next, it is really hard--perhaps even impossible--to be the parent we want to be, the spouse we want to be, the family we want to be. That's because we love others slowly, not quickly. We serve each other slowly, not quickly. We empathize slowly, not quickly. Some of the best things in life have to be slowed down enough to do well." Sara: "At summer camp, we have kids show up and they're just exhausted. They've had no downtime, no unorganized playtime, no just hanging out with mom and dad time. They are as exhausted as I am after a heavy-duty month of work and that is not our best space in which to grow and learn and thrive." Sara: "What are our family values? What are the things our family stands on? What do we hope our family is known for? What are the qualities that we honestly want our kids to be learning? There are a number of amazing values that we can build into our family culture if we do it intentionally and involve everybody. Identify two or three values that are going to be the hallmarks of your family." Audrey: "Businesses have taglines or vision statements. It's kind of fun to think about what your family's motto could be." Sara: "It's helpful to look at the calendar of a given week or month together and look at the balance of activities. Mark the ones that match your values. It's scary to realize that only one thing our family did actually supported that value. All the rest were very busy and demanding things, but they didn't actually help move our family along in that value. That indicates our activities are not reflecting our values." Sara: "Sometimes we, as parents, in our anxiousness for our kids to be successful adults, add activities to our kids' schedule like extra tutors, extra club sports, and very academic, achievement-focused activities and we're overlooking those activities that actually build character and the human being parts of them that are the real things that create future success, healthy relationships, strong communities, sense of identity and self-confidence." Audrey: "I always thought the service/volunteering things we do need to be grand gestures, but a lot of times what our kids will remember might be more of the simple gestures." Sara: "Most things aren't grand. Most of life is every day. So how do we make these things an everyday moment?" Sara: "I would urge us not to add anything to our schedule unless we cut something out. That's just more stress, more anxiety, more feeling overwhelmed." Sara: "Decluttering is skill we can teach our children. It's way more fun to declutter together than all by yourself. Consider spending even only an hour and inviting your kids to help choose something to declutter." Audrey: "If we just take 30 minutes and each person picks what thing they are going to organize and together come up with one bag to donate or declutter the house, it would really move the needle and make your home feel less cluttered." Audrey: "I'm a believer that outer order leads to inner calm and so I think this is a great practice." Resources/Related Ep. 7: Family Pace & Space with Sara & Audrey Ep. 108: Simple Acts of Giving Back with Natalie Silverstein Does our Family’s Schedule Reflect our Values? Ep. 120: Family Traditions & Rituals Getting Organized Gretchen Rubin book, Outer Order Inner Calm

In this episode, I talk with Jenessa Berg. She shares her thoughts about motherhood as a creative process, birth-related terms that can be taken multiple ways, and the circle of support during birth.   TRANSCRIPT: Sara: On today's podcast, I will be talking with my friend Jenessa Berg. Jenessa is the mother to three children, a dancer and dance teacher, and an aspiring birth worker. Welcome, Jenessa to the Birth Words podcast.   Jenessa: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.   Sara: I'm really looking forward to hearing your perspective and sharing it with our listeners today. So, I was really interested when we were messaging before that you mentioned that you see motherhood as an artistic and creative process. So tell me more about that.   Jenessa: Yeah, okay. So I think it might help to tell a little bit about my, my story. I started going to BYU a few years ago as a freshman and I was in the nursing program. And I, I was thinking, you know, I really want to be a nurse and probably a midwife later, I was really interested in you know, science and, and I like math and I was like, this seems like you know, like a good thing for me and, but then as I started getting more into it, I just felt like that wasn't going to be the best use of my talents. And like I could maybe be a good nurse, but that wasn't what I was supposed to do. And I'm a praying person and I prayed a lot about it, and I ended up switching to dance, which is a very different thing and part of me was like embarrassed because I thought that people were going to think that like, I wasn't smart or something. But as I got more involved in the arts, I experienced a lot of healing and, and my health got a lot better than it had been. And it was an interesting shift going from, you know, being you know, in this medical world to this artistic world, and my health was so much better. So now I've had I've had three children and as I've had my kids, I've recognized that yes, it is. It is. There is a lot of it that is medical. There's there's a lot of math and science involved in how it all works. But it's also so much more than that. And so, I've realized that you can move beyond the statistics and the evidence and everything and it's, and it's your story, and you get to create it. It’s not just you know, you just have to live something out. Like it's, it's something that you get to be a very active part of, if you choose to be. And you can make it into something really beautiful. So I've started kind of thinking of, I guess over the past three births. I've come to think of the whole process is more of a, you know, this is my story that we're creating. And, and these are moments that I get to choose. You know, I don't get to choose everything but I get to choose. I get to choose quite a lot actually. And it is a creative process and trying to make your life and the life that you're bringing into the world, making it all a beautiful process. Sara: Love that. So how do you think that that perspective comes out when you're interacting with other parents in your community?   Jenessa: Yeah, so that's an interesting question. Um, I think that it's very common to kind of just stop at the, “you know, this is what happened to me. And these are the, these are the are, these are the facts or this is how it worked, or this is how it happened” instead of really taking it a step further and saying, but this is my story, and I choose how it plays out. And so, a lot of times when I have conversations with people, you know, you hear a story and sometimes a birth story is like, well, I went to the hospital and then I and then I had this intervention in this intervention and then my baby was born. And I guess I, I just want people to have stories that they're proud of. And so that's part of why I've become more passionate about birth is because, you know, my first birth I kind of did that, you know. I just kind of, well, you know, I'll just go in and, you know, do what all the experts are telling me here and we'll see how it goes. And it didn't go very well. And when I kind of took things into my own hands and said, “You know, this is my story, and I'm the hero of the story. I'm going to make this a good story.” Yeah, it's just so much better when I've when I've changed that. And so when I when I interact with other people now I, I guess I try to help other people to recognize that it's their story and that they get to choose how it is. And that it's not just, you know, you just have to live it out whatever happens to you.   Sara: Yeah, I love that. So we're kind of jumping all over the place. We have it just a short amount of time, but you had so many good ideas that I was like, Yes, we have to talk about all of them. But only for a few minutes each.   Jenessa: We’ll have to have another session where you just talk… can be a sleepover.   Sara: Sounds good. Okay, so when you reached out to me, you mentioned that a topic that interests you, is that different words or phrases have very different connotations for different people. So can you give some examples of that?   Jenessa: Yeah. So, um, since I originally kind of had this idea that I shared with you, I've been making a list, so I'm just going to kind of read through and just give a little blurb about them. So one thing is, when people say, “we're pregnant,” instead of “I'm pregnant.” Some people think that that's like, a really great way of looking at it like “yes, I am the husband. We're pregnant, and we're doing this together and working together,” and some people take a lot of offense. “Yeah, excuse me. You don't have heartburn. You don't have to, you know, you don't have hemorrhoids. You you're not dealing with this. You're not carrying this baby around all the time. Like, how dare you say that?” You know, “we're pregnant.”   Sara: But yeah, some people are totally like, this is a dual process. And that's how I'm going to express it. So that's very…   Jenessa: Right. And for some people, I think that's a good thing for them.   Sara: Yeah. It's good to know where you fit in.   Jenessa: Yeah.   Sara: And where your partner fits in, so that you’re not…   Jenessa: Definitely. So the next one here, and this is one that you've talked about before, especially with Rebecca Decker, from Evidence Based Birth: delivery or deliver in birth. Um, some people just don't even think of that as a word that could be offensive. And some people are really upset by it because they think my baby is delivered from me like, right? No, my baby is like, it's not taken from me to free me of it or you know, so there's that one. Sometimes there's just words that are just…it's like they started out meaning one thing and then just got confused. So the word postpartum? It means the time period after birth, but a lot of people use it to refer to postpartum depression, right? Which can make it confusing. Yeah, like after I had my baby a few months ago, um, I had a friend and she was like, “Hey, how are you doing?” And I was like, “Oh, you know, just the, you know, postpartum is crazy.” And she was like, “Oh my gosh, like, let me come and like, help you out. Like I had postpartum depression too.” And like she… And I was like, you know, like, I'm, I'm.. I appreciate your concern and help but that's not what I was saying.   Sara: Yeah, it's interesting, because I think that it means that we have an increased awareness of it. But then we have this conflation of this term that just means like, yeah, time after baby's born and I’m adjusting to real life as a mother.   Jenessa: Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So, Oh, here's a here's a phrase that yo some can be very comforting and to some just makes you very angry. And it's, “there's no trophy.”   Sara: Oh!   Jenessa: And I think most people have feelings about that   Sara: Right! Some people probably feel like, “Oh, you're right, that means I can do it my way. This is my story it doesn't matter, there's no prize!”   Jenessa: Exactly, right, like, I don’t have to worry about other people. And other people are like, “you think that I did that for a trophy? Like how shallow do you think I am? You know, like that's usually that's a—you know—phrase it's usually used in like, whether someone got an epidural or not. And, like of course it's not about a trophy, but some people can get… some people take great comfort from that phrase and other people, it just kind of lights a fire underneath them.. Another one very similar to that is, “you don't have to be a hero.”   Sara: MmmHmm.   Jenessa: Um, this one I thought was interesting. I heard a woman recently who had had a stillborn baby and she was really upset when people used the term “angel baby” and talking about her “angel baby” because she doesn't believe in God. And she doesn't have that belief. And she felt like people were always like giving her false hope. Like, no, like,   Sara: Not validating her grief.   Jenessa: Yeah, right. Exactly. Not validating her grief. Another phrase is, “leave it to the experts.” usually referring to medical professionals.   Just the phrase, or the word “natural.”   Sara: Yeah. That one can be so controversial.   Jenessa: Yeah. And it's funny because like, you know, they're just words, but we attach these meanings to them. And when we come at them from different directions, they can be hurtful or they can be… anyway, they can just have such different meanings.   Sara: You have such a good list. Can I like…?   Jenessa: Yeah, I'll send it to.   Sara: And maybe piggyback off of it for future episodes?   Jenessa: Yeah, totally. Totally.   Sara: You’ve got such a good list.   Jenessa: Yeah, I got another one. And this one, I also got from listening to this podcast—such a good podcast—when The VBAC Link was on here, and they talked about belly births, and how, you know, some women like that phrase and like, “Oh, yeah, like my cesarean birth was also a birth” and some people feel like “no, my cesearean birth was not a birth. That was something that I was robbed of.”   Sara: Right.   Jenessa: So yeah, it's interesting, like you wanna you just want to validate people, but sometimes the words that we use, they actually get some harm.   Sara: Yeah, because they come… and the words that I use or that you use They’re symbols that represent all of our lived experience relating to that concept, right? And like for you, and for me, we have totally different lived experiences. A lot of similarities, a lot of differences… and one little word, just a few letters packaged together can mean so much. Something so different to me than it does to you, than somebody in another state, another country, especially as we get into a wider circle.   Jenessa: Definitely. A couple more. There's when people say “easy way out.” And this is another one that’s sometimes with the cesarean section where people will say like, “No, that wasn't the easy way out, you know, like, how dare you say that?” And the interesting thing that I have noticed without phrases that I usually hear it in people who haven't given birth before, and they usually say it.. and it's just because they just don't know they just think “oh, like, I've heard that labor is terrible. So a cesarean section seems like the easy way out, so she must have chosen the easy way out.” You've had a C-section.   Sara: No, it’s not the easy way out! I had labor and a c-section, so…   Jenessa: Yeah, but just don't ever, I think pretty much don't ever tell a woman that she took the easy way ever.   Sara: Yeah. Or any person ever.   Jenessa: The easy way… I had I have an aunt who adopted three children. And someone told her once, “Oh, you went…you took it the easy way.” Because, you know, she didn't have pregnancy or labor, but she was like, okay, like all the years of therapy, like the years of waiting the years of infertility, all of the you know, like, what about the time where I thought that I was going to have a baby and I went and I met him and then his birth mother decided to keep him and you know, like that all this heartbreak years and years of heartbreak? Like, no, that was not the easy way. Ah, anyway, so that was really hurtful to her. And yeah, so I don't know. I don't know that that phrase is really helpful to anyone   Sara: It’s not a two-way think, it’s just a “Don't say that!”   Jenessa: But I think that that it is good to recognize though that a lot of people don't realize that got that that phrase can be so upsetting.     Sara: Wow. Okay. You've given me lots of things to think about over the coming weeks and months. I'm excited. Um, another topic… was that positions of authority in the birth experience. That's important to you. So what's your perspective about who is or who are the authority figures in birth and what responsibilities does an authority figure have?   Jenessa: Perfect. Okay, so um, I think that our society's general view of looking at birth and authority figures is kind of a hierarchy. And you have doctors up at the top, and then midwives because like, they're still pretty smart, but they're not doctors. And then underneath that, you have nurses. And then underneath that you have doulas and then at the bottom is mothers. And I heard someone say something recently about like if we're going to make any change in our maternity care, then it's got to start from the bottom—like you mothers—and I was like you've got to you've…you're at the bottom? …. Like I understood the point, but I was kind of bothered by that because, like—wait, mothers are at the bottom of the maternity care system?   Sara: Right, I have life inside of my body!   Jenessa: There would be no maternity care system without the mothers! Anyway. So like, I think that we need to stop with the whole hierarchy thing. And I'm not saying that we should switch it either. I'm not saying like mothers at the top and everybody else just bow to them. Because it's not quite that either. So I think like if… I'm a really visual person, so like… the way I like to think about it is more like the mother is the center. Everybody else… we're all on the same standing. Right? We're all people, we're all humans, we're all important. And birth professionals certainly have, you know, they're doing great work and they are important. It's not like you know, like they don't matter all. But the mother is in the center because she's the one that is bringing the life into the world and everyone else is surrounding her. It's a circle. A circle of support…   Sara   Do you want to like draw…? I think we can all probably imagine a circle. I love that visual. That's really powerful.   Jenessa: Yeah, I thought of that visual. Mostly… Well, as I was thinking about this, like, I just had this visual from when I was watching, when I was recently watching the video of my most recent birth, yeah. And Sara was my doula. You were my doula for that. And I also had, like, my mom was there and, and I had my midwife, my husband, and right at the part where it was just the very most difficult and I was like, Yeah, “oh, man, like, why am I doing this? Can I really do this? I don't think I can do this!” when I was in that moment. I was surrounded.   Sara: That’s beautiful   Jenessa: There were literally people you know, like there was someone holding each hand, there was someone behind me doing counter pressure. My midwife was there getting ready to catch the baby… like it was it was literally…and someone else was… I had like the nurse was, you know, checking for the fetal heart rate, and it was just really, like that felt right, you know, to be in the center of a circle.   Sara: It was beautiful to be on the outside of the circle too supporting you. Your birth was so beautiful. I love that too. Because so your videographer from that birth, Sarah Asay, also has a website and social media platform called Birth Circle. And that is the metaphor that she uses so much. And I've been doing some business training with her. She talks so much about we don't…this hierarchy is all wrong in…   Jenessa: It's just silly.   Sara: Yeah. Not just in the birth space. But if we think about businesses working that way, that's just not how we support one another. And I love the circle that she's creating of support for women and that she so beautifully took a video of so that you could see that visual. That's… Yes. Thank you for sharing. Yeah, I love all of this. Thanks so much for being on the podcast today. If you had to summarize your feelings about birth, pregnancy, postpartum in one… and I don't mean depression, just the postpartum experience… In one word, what word would you choose?   Jenessa: Birth is sacred.   Sara: I love that. I really think that's beautiful. I agree. Thank you.   Jenessa: Thank you.   Outro: Did words play an important role in your birth experience? If you're interested in sharing your story on the podcast, go to www.birthwords.com. If you're liking what you hear on the podcast, please leave a review on your podcast app. For more resources about harnessing the power of words to benefit the birth experience, visit birthwords.com   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

In this episode, I continue the conversation from previous episodes about the language surrounding infertility. Natasha Marchand, co-founder of Bebo Mia, discusses the unique situations of would-be expectant parents facing infertility, and what helpful and non-helpful language looks like.   TRANSCRIPT: Sara Pixton: Welcome to today's episode. Before we jump in, I just want to say if you have listened to the podcast before and you are loving it, please leave a review on your podcast app, so more people can find out about Birth Words and be touched by the things that we're talking about here. And now for today's episode. Natasha has been working with women to support their wellness goals for over a decade. She is a doula trainer, a hypnotherapist, prenatal fitness and yoga instructor, and a fertility specialist. As the co-founder of Bebo Mia and co-owner of Baby and Me Fitness, she loves helping women feel stronger and more confident in their lives, whether that is in their birth business, or as they move fertility all the way to parenting. She is also the proud mother of seven-year-old Sadie, conceived with ART after a four-year struggle, and recently gave birth to her second daughter, Margo. Welcome Natasha, to the Birth Words podcast.   Natasha Marchand: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.   Sara: I'm so excited to talk with you and for our listeners to gain your perspective. Do you want to give just a quick introduction of yourself and your business and what you're doing here on the podcast?   Natasha: Sure. Well, my name is Natasha, like you said. I struggled myself with infertility for four years before having my first daughter and then six years later, had my second daughter so there's quite a bit of a gap. And so there was many years where I struggled with infertility, but my background is in yoga and hypnotherapy, and obviously I'm a birth doula and of course to a trainer as well. So I use a lot of that to create programming for people who are struggling with infertility, because I felt like it was not only a professional thing for me but also really personal. And Bebo Mia itself as a doula training organization, or a training organization that works with birth workers who want to become doulas, for example, or perhaps work in the world of infertility or fertility as a fertility doula, which is something that's new and happening right now as awareness for infertility moves forward.   Sara: I love that. And one of the reasons I reached out to you specifically is because I saw that fertility doula training program on your website, and that really struck me. Like you said, it's not something that I'm really familiar with. I don't know any fertility doulas personally, but having had a small infertility journey of my own—Wow, I wish I had a doula there to guide me through it! Because It can be so difficult to navigate. So I'm so glad you have that going.   Natasha: Yeah, I didn’t have a fertility doula myself either. But because I was a doula at the time—I was a doula for many years before I had children of my own—so when I learned that this was going to be a struggle for me when I was figuring that out, I just started applying my work as a doula into my own life. And then recognizing that there were so many other people out there who didn't have support, who were doing this on their own or in silence, or in shame even. And so I started that to apply that into group work and into other people until eventually it just became my work as a fertility doula.   Sara: I love it. That's awesome. I am so excited to pick your brain a little bit here today. So I have some questions for you. The first one is: What unique challenges do would-be expectant parents meet when they first come face to face with fertility struggles?   Natasaha: I, you know, I can speak to my own experience and I can also speak to the experience of other people that I've witnessed. But the biggest thing is that realization that, you know, the idea of having children goes from that, like, when will I have children? to IF I'll have children. That's such a shift in everybody's mind frame. You know, you kind of grow up thinking okay, I'll do what everyone tells me I have to do you know, I'll go to college, I'll meet somebody, we’ll have a family, we’ll buy a house… all of those things will happen. And then suddenly, your expectations aren't meeting reality anymore, and that just kind of like flips everything on its side. Especially if you're someone like me who's like, I'm a planner. Like, I was like, yep, I turned 30, I'll have my kids, I’ll do… You know? I had it all planned out. And then suddenly it's like, will I even have kids? And if I don't—Who am I? Yeah, you know?   Sara: Yeah. And this episode I wanted to build on Episode number seven. I talked about my infertility journey and some research that I've come across. That goes a lot along with what you're saying of this idea of a reproductive story, that some people have it more consciously. Some people, it's more subconscious, but it totally disrupts that when you're faced with like, not when but if, and just it's a really challenging journey.   Natasha: Yeah. And it's, it really is what is this thing about me? You know, because like when you talk about language and you talk about infertility, like there's still really is this… It's not even unspoken, it's this value that's placed on women, in particular, to have children. Like that's part of our value. Like who are we, if we can’t have children. And now that that conversation is changing, but there still is these words that are used for people who don't have children, you know, like we hear it all the time. Like you're selfish or you'll change your mind, or you're too self-absorbed, or like all of this language that goes around, you know, choosing to not have children. Yeah.   Sara: Especially difficult when…   Natasha: There’s so much language around that. Yeah, like, Is there something I did wrong? Am I being punished? there's something wrong with me. So like, you can't really, you can't win, right? Because our value is so intertwined as women in particular, to having children. And that’s something we learn so early on, as young girls.   Sara: Yeah, all of this discourse that just surrounds us as we go. And then facing like, Oh, is that… Is that what I want for myself? Is that possible? with the infertility struggle, right? And you said, Am I doing something wrong? And I mentioned to you and now to our listeners that this episode is also building on a previous episode with Margaret Quinlan, who's a professor of Communications, who wrote… You're Doing it Wrong is the name of her book, because that's what people feel a lot from just the common rhetoric around pregnancy and motherhood and fertility. And that's a really, really difficult thing to be told either explicitly or implicitly and a really difficult thing to feel.   Natasha: Yeah, yeah. And I think that there are so many people out there who think that by giving advice, they're trying to help you, or they are helping you, because they do think that there’s something you're doing wrong, you know? Are you putting your legs up on the wall for 30 minutes after you have intercourse? No, Aunt Edna, I'm not. Like what? Like, you know, there's just so much. As soon as you say… as soon as you're brave enough to say that this is something you're struggling with, that's when you get all of this information that is not helping you at all. Really, it is just telling you what you said you're doing it wrong. And… these days. Are you relaxed enough? Are you going on vacation? Are you taking time for yourself? All of that is just blaming.   Sara: And that's so difficult when you said like, it's so vulnerable to open up and say, Hey, this is something that I'm struggling with, and then to be hit with all of that does not honor the vulnerability, right?   Natasha: That's right. And I if, if there was anything I wish I could do to change the language in this space, or to change the culture, in this space is to, to really have people understand how to best support somebody going through infertility. And like to explain that, quite often this unsolicited advice is not really welcome. You know, and even as, as birth professionals like we are, this can be a hard line for us because we want to believe in hope and to give people hope. And we can try it on this fine line where it's like, you know, if you do this, then you'll get pregnant, the same way often birth professionals can make that mistake of saying, if you have a birth plan, and if you give birth with this health care provider, and if you give birth at home or whatever, you know, your plan is, then you'll have the birth that you want. But really, that's, you know, we don't want to give people false hope, with infertility. You can do all of this thing, you can do everything. You can put your legs on the wall, you can go on vacation, you can do IVF. And still at the end of the day, not have a baby. Right? So we have to be really careful and mindful of our language and not offer this hope. Or it's like, oh, well, if you just did this, this would happen. Yeah.   Sara: So what can we do? We're wanting to support people struggling with infertility. We know a lot of the things we shouldn't say. We know why… we've talked about why it matters, the way that we talk. You can add more thoughts about that if you want, but what do we do? What do we say what is helpful?   Natasha: You know, I think being there for somebody and telling somebody that you're there for them is the most important thing we can do. Allowing them to be seen by you and allowing them the space to be vulnerable and, and validating the pain that they're going through is more important than anything else. Because that's what's not happening for them right now is they're saying that they're struggling, they're going through infertility. And what is coming back at them is usually something in between ‘you're doing it wrong’ or ‘it's really not that bad.’ I have a friend who has been struggling for four years or, you know, it's hovering somewhere in between that there. So what we need to do as healthcare practitioners is be okay with sitting in this uncomfortable space. Of this is just—can I swear?—this is just shitty. And that's what it is. And I am here to witness that with you and allow you to say how shitty this is to me.   Sara: And friends and family. Oh, sorry, I jumped in before you were done. And you said, like as professionals, but also like as friends and family, too, we've got a mixed listenership on this podcast. And I think that that applies to both. Would you agree?   Natasha: Absolutely agree. It applies. I agree. Yeah, that's right. There needs to be a shift in the way that we treat people going through infertility, because we don't talk the same way with people who have just been injured. You know? We don't talk to the same way who maybe just had a cancer diagnosis. We… this is a very special way that we talked to people who are going through infertility: we try to minimize it, or we try to be helpful, but we say the wrong things. Or we… there's not a recognition of how hard this really is. You know, just the little things that which I've heard, I'm sure you've heard before is like, once you realize it's going to be a struggle for you to have children, if that's something you truly desire to do, even things like getting a baby shower invitation in the mail is really hard. It can put you on the ground for, you know, days or weeks. And a lot of people don't understand that. They don't understand why you wouldn't show up. There really is not the validation around how painful this really is, how it leads to depression, how the stress rates are high for people who are going through infertility as people who are going through cancer treatments. There's not a recognition around that. It really is like, you know, ‘it will happen when it happens,’ or you know, ‘maybe it's not your time.’ There's such a minimization of the struggle that somebody is going through. Anyway, I get it. You can't really understand it until you've gone through it. But I'd love to see the culture change.   Sara: Yeah, me too. I think those are really powerful thoughts. And I think I'm… Once you have gone through it, too, there's also this temptation to like, use it as your chance to be like, “Oh, I know, it's hard because let me tell you about how hard it was for me,” which is also not a helpful response. Right? And if we're truly validating someone else's grief, we're not in platforming to, like, jump into our own, right?   Natasha: Yes. As professionals, I find that's a hard line to walk regardless of if you're a fertility doula or a birth doula, right, because our own experiences shape what we think is good, you know, what, what we think are good decisions. And, and that's just human nature, but our job is to come at things in an unbiased way. And so when we're working with infertility, you know, as a professional, we're not really able to say, you know, well for me, this works and so it should work for you. It really still…we have to really come back to being like, here's all the information, what decision do you want to make? And also support you through that?   Sara: Yeah, I appreciate that perspective. Another question for you. So how can those dealing with infertility harness the power of our words to help them in their journey?   Natasha: One of the big things that I do in my work as a fertility doula is, is to look at the language we're using with ourselves now, and so for many of us, well for me, when I first began this journey of infertility, it was really like I was really down on myself, I really questioned my lifestyle, I really question things I had done in my past, I had a lot of negative self-talk. And, and I knew better because this is what I do for a living. And so I had to work really hard to fix that. And I'm not trying to say that everything we have to say is positive. And when it comes to fertility, like I said, I don't want to be giving false hope. I don't want to give people you know, thoughts…try to put thoughts in people's heads that are like, ‘I will for sure have a baby’ or, you know, ‘close your eyes and imagine your baby.’ That can be so hard and triggering for somebody who's going through infertility. So let's work on our thought process in not in a way that's like positive or nothing. But in a way that's like, how can we reframe this so it feels healthier in our in our bodies? So we're not hurting ourselves and causing ourselves harm as we go through this. Like we're not making it worse. And so what we do a lot of the times is come up with balanced statements. So statements that feel true, or can stop that negative cycle that causes us like a downward spiral each day, you know, like when you wake up your ‘I'll never have a kid’ and, you know, ‘why? Why would I get up off the floor right now?’ Like all those…that kind of language that spirals and changes your actions throughout the day? Like how can we create a kinder and more gentle thing that you can say in the morning? You know, so, rather than saying, ‘I'll never have children,’ we don't go right to positive and say, ‘I will have children’ and wake up and expect that that's going to be the outcome. But how can we say, ‘you know what, today is the day that I'm going to practice my breathing techniques,’ or work a little bit more on myself, or you know, spend the day, you know, whatever it is. I really do sit down and spend a lot of time with my clients to figure out what wording would work best for them to be gentler to themselves, so the day doesn't feel as hard. Yeah, you know, what, what can you be doing each and every day to make this journey better? And how can we implant that language into our subconscious rather than what was fed to us?   Sara: I love all of your thoughts about that. And because I feel similarly with just my goal with this podcast and the other work that I do with Birth Words, the goal is not to be like, only positive talk, because sometimes there's some really negative stuff that already exists that you have to work through. But I like how you said, Let's reframe this, so it feels healthy in your body. And I think that reframing is critical.   Natasha: Yeah. And it's really like when I sit with my clients, and I do this work, there are questions that I asked, you know, if your negative self-thought is ‘I'll never have children, I'll never have children.’ You say that over and over again in your head. Okay, so, just what about that statement is true? You know, have you been told that you'll never have children? Are all paths towards having children closed to you? What are you willing to do to have children? You know, like really start dissecting where that negative thought comes from. Who told you that if you never have children, you're not a good woman, you know, or good person? You know, where are these thoughts coming from so that we can look at it and be like, Oh, that statement’s not really true. What is true is that I'm, I'm trying this avenue right now, and I'm giving it my best shot. And if this doesn't work, I'm willing to try another avenue. That sounds better, right?   Sara: And you sound so much more like an agent, making choices, being thoughtful about, ‘these are my options and this is the path that I can pursue,’ instead of being like this passive recipient of your fate, right?   Natasha: That's right. That's right. And putting some control into that because there is obviously the sense of a loss of control. Right? When you have when you have a plan and that plan is not happening for you.   Sara: K, I love, I so appreciate our conversation. I'm going to wrap it up with two quick questions here. The first one is, if you had to describe in one word, your feelings or beliefs about the fertility journey, what one word would you choose?   Natasha: The fertility journey or mine?   Sara: However you want to interpret it, and if you need to throw out a few we can, we can work with that.   Natasha: I wouldn't label it as… you know, it did change. But the beginning when I was just hearing about this and learning what a struggle it was going to be for me, I would have called it suffering.   Sara: Okay. And I love the thoughts that you've shared to help, again reframe that, to make it feel less like suffering, but also the earlier thoughts you shared about having other people recognize, this feels like intense suffering. I think that's, that's really fitting.   Natasha: Yeah. And it really was, I was gonna say it really was the, the getting out of that thought process and say, What can I do with this information now that I have it? How can I pull parts of my life to make a change to make this better? I feel very fortunate that I was already kind of in this birth world when I encountered this, because I was able to pull things together and create out of it, which really lifted me out of that suffering place. But not only that, it led me to find other people who were going through it. So I could say I'm suffering and they could say back to me, I'm suffering too. And that's still so much. Just being able to create that in my world was so important.   Sara: Thank you for sharing your story and your wisdom. How can we connect with you? Follow you personally or Bebo Mia, or whatever you want to throw out there.   Natasha: Sure, you can visit us at bebomia.com. We also have a blog post on this that comes with like a really large ebook just on how we can best support our clients who are going through infertility or who are now pregnant after infertility. So you can go to bebomia.com/birthwords. And that will be up for anybody who ever wants to see it. And if anybody ever wanted to join any of our programs, we have a BIRTHWORDS code for 15% off anything you'd ever want to join us with and become part of our community.   Sara: Love it. Thank you so much for your generosity and go head over to their website. Check it out. They have so many resources for birth professionals and really are doing something dynamic and new with the way that they're approaching all of it, so go check it out. It's worth it.   Natasha: Thank you so much. Thank you for allowing me to be on the podcast.   Sara: It was so great to have you. Thanks so much, Natasha.   Natasha: Thank you.   Outro: Did words play an important role in your birth experience? If you're interested in sharing your story on the podcast, go to www.birthwords.com. If you're liking what you hear on the podcast, please leave a review on your podcast app. For more resources about harnessing the power of words to benefit the birth experience, visit birthwords.com   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

In this week's episode, I interview Kelly Buck, a Dunstan Baby Language Educator and doula. She talks about the Dunstan Baby Language program and how it gives us a window into the first communicative interactions between baby and caregiver. From birth, babies make sounds that are reflex-based. When we understand what these sounds mean, we can respond to and interact with babies more confidently and effectively.   TRANSCRIPT: Sara: Hi, welcome to the Birth Words podcast. Today, I'm chatting with my friend and fellow doula Kelly Buck. Kelly is also a Dunstan Baby Language educator. And today on the podcast, I'm going to ask her more about the work she does with Dunstan Baby Language. So hi, Kelly, welcome to the podcast. Kelly: Hi, thank you for having me. Sara: It's great to have you. I'm going to just ask you a bit about your background with Dunstan Baby Language and the work that you're doing with that. So I'll jump into my first question. Kelly: Okay, sure! Sara: Great. So how did you find out about Dunstan Baby Language? Kelly: So, I learned about the program in 2008 when I had just given birth to my oldest. Sara: Oh, good. Kelly: Yes. And I was one of the rare cases of postpartum depression that happens almost immediately. Yeah, we’re talking, I was bawling in the recovery room. So and add to that, that my son was actually really colicky. And he had a lot of trouble latching. And I was just kind of like an emotional wreck. So, one day I was kind of I was on the phone with my mom. And she mentioned that she had seen the episode, an episode of Oprah where there was this lady that said she could understand why babies cry and I was like, okay, maybe I will look this up. Sara: Yeah. Kelly: Yeah. So that led me to looking up the video on YouTube and learning more about Patricia Dunstan and her programs. So at the time, you could only order the program online for DVDs. And so I did. And I'm telling you, it was a game changer for me. It was amazing. My husband and I both listened to it and we were just like this is… this is working! We tried it with with our son and he seemed to calm down. I still had a little bit of the depression, but I felt like I could at least care for my son, you know, do what he needed. So that I could, I could do that. And so I started like lending out all my DVDs telling my friends who were pregnant or who just had babies and I guess you could kind of say that new learning about Dunstan Baby Language actually kind of sort of paved the way for me to becoming a doula because I love talking about birth and babies and how just how much it did for me, specifically for my postpartum depression. So, so yeah, that's how I got my start. And then I, I went on to become a doula and then later on, I was thinking okay, what can I offer to my clients? What can I do and then I, I went online and lo and behold, you could certify to be an instructor. So I did, and I was like this is this it! And yeah, so I'm about six months into being an instructor and I love it. It's an awesome program. Sara: So sounds awesome. Kelly and I were chatting before we press record about how I was not as fortunate as Kelly that I didn't find out about Dunstan Baby Language until after one of my clients introduced me to it. And I had three kids that were well beyond the baby language stage. So I'm glad that you found that at a fortuitous moment for you and I'm sure all the friends that you shared it with, were glad, too. And now all your clients that you can share, but with your formal training, that's awesome. So, can you give an overview of just the premise of the program, like the main points that it operates on? Kelly: Absolutely. So the main points of the program are that infants are automatically born with certain reflexes that they are using to kind of communicate with us. And they've kind of boiled it down to five specific sounds that all newborns make. And again, like I said, they're based on reflexes that are happening in the body. And when you add sound to those you get these Dunstan baby words that can help parents understand what their baby needs. It's really a program all about helping families bond and bond from an early, age. Sara: That's huge. And it's true for whatever language the baby goes on, is exposed to and goes on to acquire Is that correct? Kelly: Absolutely. They have done studies with over—their first study was with over 400 mothers and parents and babies and they all found that whatever language they spoke these babies still made the same sounds. And so and also it applies to even autistic children. I can attest with my oldest who's autistic—he still made the sounds even though he has difficulty communicating. But I honestly believe that because I was able to respond to his needs so quickly that it might have helped a little bit with that. I can't say specifically or scientifically, but that's just my opinion, because he is high functioning and is able to speak. So… Sara: But that makes a big difference like you said before with bonding and with him recognizing that he has needs that he can express and that you can respond to them because you know what they are. That's huge, and I feel like so many young parents with little babies making sound that have no idea what they're saying, just feel this frustration. And it affects the bond that can happen when you can't communicate with your child. Kelly: Right, right. And I just think about those parents who are like, what happens now after the hospital doors closed, you know? And if I can give them these tools to say, okay, you don't have to feel that sense of kind of dread as what you do now that you can go home and be confident and in your ability to be a good parent. Sara: That's huge. Cool. So I have another question for you. That's a little long, but… So in one of my classes, we were talking about language acquisition—first language acquisition—and I read an article about how older babies are, “learning how to mean,” meaning that they're exploring with language and how they're able to communicate their needs and ideas with others through it. But as I was reading it, I felt like the author wasn't giving really young babies enough credit. He claimed that it was past six months, past nine months, even, that babies realized that they can learn how to mean. But I want to hear your opinion, when do you think that infants begin attempting to meaningfully communicate and what avenues do they use? Kelly: So, like I said, our philosophy is that infants are, are kind of unconsciously communicating from day one. And again, it starts off on these basic, these very primal reflexes, but they're finding that if parents respond to the sounds that our babies, babies are making, that they… They're finding that if, if are not responded to the sound, usually about after three months, they kind of stopped making the sound. But they found that if parents are responding with the sounds and with these words that babies will kind of learn to associate that, and keep on making these sounds well past three months. It honestly, I believe it. It's my belief that, that it's helping babies communicate earlier. It's helping babies learn how to trust earlier. Because they know that their needs are being met. And so they're, they're calmer. So, yeah, does that does answer your question? Sara: Totally. And that makes a lot of sense to me because like you said, initially, it's a physiological reflex-based, like not a conscious attempt to communicate. But when you realize that, hey, when I make this sound like I am communicating this message with my parents or other caregivers, then that invites communication earlier. I think that's great. I think that makes a lot ofsense. Kelly: Yeah. And and it also kind of dispels the belief that that babies are manipulating you. Because young babies actually can't. They don't… Sara: Right. Kelly: It’s not like they consciously choose at two or three weeks to, you know, be colicky, they don't choose these things. So it's, it's your understanding that changes your whole perspective. Sara: I think that's a really good point because we kind of thrust our perspective upon a baby like, oh, they're manipulating me. If you sat down with somebody who said that, they probably realize that didn't actually literally mean that they felt that their baby had the ability to like, recognize their desires and then thwart them by doing something different, right? Like toddlers, we know they do that, right? But little tiny babies, right? But if you shift the perspective and say, okay, where is the baby coming from and what cues is the baby responding to and what physiological things are going on? When we shift our perspective instead of putting our perspective upon our babies makes a really big difference. Kelly: Yeah, exactly. Sara: You're totally selling me. I love it. My next question I've kind of touched on before so if you don't have anything else to add, that's fine. But how has your work as a Dunstan Baby Language educator influenced your personal experiences, and then the work you do as a doula?   Kelly: Um, it To be honest, I love it so much. So sometimes it's hard to hold back, especially here in Utah, with so many women who are pregnant and then like.. YOU NEED THIS! But I hold back. And oftentimes, they'll be, I'll be in church or something and there’ll be a baby crying and I'm like, “I think that baby needs to burp.” But, you know, I just I can't just go up and say that to somebody. But there have been times where like, I've had family members who've had babies and, and I've listened to them and I'm like, “I think that baby is kind of gassy” and she's like, “No, she just pooped” or something. I'm like, “well, try this or try doing this…” And sure enough, 30 minutes later, the baby will pass gas again or, you know, if they, they'll be like, the baby will be hungry. And they're like, “Oh, they just ate” and I'm like, “no, they're still hungry.” So yeah, they'll latch right on. So, but I, I just I love being able to offer this to women to, again to just be able to build that family bond. And the other thing that I love about is that we focus a lot on the dad. And we… my husband was actually much better at hearing the sounds in my son that I was and it is kind of forced me to stop and listen to him and trust his instincts and improve my communication with him. I know a lot of times, moms are hesitant to, I guess leave their baby with her husband or something like that because they feel like they have to do everything. But couples who learn this are kind of able to let that go and say, “Okay, my husband knows what to do.” And a lot of dads will come in and be like, “I feel so good because I know what to do.” Sara: Awesome. Kelly: So yeah, I love that family bonding. Sara: Yeah! And empowering for for both parents. Because it can be disempowering for a mother to feel like I am the sole provider for my baby physically, emotionally… Especially a breastfeeding mom who has literally… her body is producing all of its food and then feeling like its emotional needs can only be met through her, that can be disempowering for her. And it's great that you can flip it and empower for the husband as well for everybody to work together as a team. And even outside of that, you know, if you have other caregivers or grandparents or partner, whoever is helping to care, that's huge. Kelly: Absolutely. This isn't just for for new parents. It’s or anybody who's working with newborns, just to be able to improve their confidence and their skills. So yeah, I tell I tell my clients all the time that if grandma is watching baby then teach them these sounds so that she can respond quicker. But yeah, I love empowering the dad. That was my that's kind of why I do doula work as well. It's fun to see the dads in the birth room and see them transform into fathers. So giving them another tool is just, it's just a great opportunity. Sara: So that's huge. Okay, you've totally sold me. I'm going to talk with you more and more about this and send my clients to you to take your classes and all of this. I think this is important work that you're doing. And I have two quick questions for you to wrap up. One is if you had to choose just one word to describe your views about birth and the surrounding perinatal period, what word would it be? Kelly: life-changing? Is that one word? Sara: Oh yeah, just stick a hyphen in there—totally one word. Kelly: And no matter how your birth goes it's definitely going to permanently affect you and in whatever way, it's something that always stays with you. You can ask any person who's given birth. If any person has given birth, they may not be able to remember what they ate yesterday, but I guarantee you they can tell you every single detail of their birth and their story. Sara: Great. Life-changing. I love it. And I feel like that applies, too, to the work you're doing with the Dunstan Baby Language that could be life-changing. Kelly: Thank you. Sara: My last question is, how can listeners follow you on social media or your website? How can they connect with you? Kelly: Absolutely. So my website is shebirthservices.com, and you can follow me on Facebook at SHE Birth Services. And Instagram is the same thing: SHE Birth Services. So I’d love for anybody who wants to come and take a class. You're welcome to. Sara: Great. Thank you so much Kelly. It was great to have you. Kelly: Oh, thank you.   Outro: Did words play an important role in your birth experience? If you're interested in sharing your story on the podcast, go to www.birthwords.com. If you're liking what you hear on the podcast, please leave a review on your podcast app. For more resources about harnessing the power of words to benefit the birth experience, visit birthwords.com   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

What comes before gratitude in our children? In this episode, Sara and I discuss how we can prepare our kids to become grateful people. Sara and I talked about gratitude last year in this episode about Growing Gratitude. Big Ideas As the Thanksgiving holiday nears, it is important to remember that we can cultivate a heart of gratitude all year long. Good manners are important but employing these "precursors" to gratitude can help instill our family values in a deeper and more meaningful way. Precursors to growing gratitude: Avoid over-giving, as it can lead to entitlement. When we earn what we have, we value it more. Cultivate empathy. When kids realize that there is a cost (money, time, energy or thought) associated with everything they have, they are more grateful. Model gratefulness. When kids hear their parents thanking each other, showing respect and demonstrating gratitude, they are more likely to adopt the same habit. Be exposed to seeing how most of the world lives or not always having daily comforts. A vacation from things like big meals and hot showers, such as in camping situations or while traveling, can help us to realize a greater appreciation for all we have. Quotes Audrey: "You can't just start saying thank you or start doing gratitude practices and suddenly become this grateful person. There are precursors to gratitude." Sara: "When our kids are little, one of the first things we teach them is to say please and thank you. As my kids grew, I wanted their thank yous to come from inside them, not from me reminding them." Sara: "It's my work to do as a parent to set these things up and to cultivate these habits in myself and in my home so that when it's time for our kids to build the muscle of gratitude, it fits in. It's kind of super-powered and more authentic." Audrey: "Practicing kindness and practicing gratitude is good because you build the muscle." Audrey: "The depth is what we're talking about. It's almost like a mindset, a way of thinking about things and remembering the impact of what we do." Sara: "As parents, we so long to meet (our kids') needs well, but we also feel compelled to meet all their wants. By 'needs' I mean shelter, love, food, medical care, sleep, all the things we need to thrive. But then we get on this hamster wheel of, 'well, they better have the newest iPhone, or best kind of tennis shoes, or the tutor everyone else is going to,' and we can over-give. We can over-meet their wants to a place where they develop an entitlement." Sara: "We've really got to guard our choices. We're developing grown-ups eventually who can work and earn something, who can long for something, who can have an appreciation because they had to wait or they had to grow into it." Audrey: "The expression 'delayed gratification' has 'grateful' in it." Audrey: "It's just kind of balancing. Are we giving in a good way? Are we overdoing it? It's the 'over-giving'. It's not to not-give to our kids, it's to give in a way that we're thinking through, is it the right amount?" Audrey: "You have to do things. You have to gain competence to earn confidence. You can't make someone confident. It has to take some time. It comes from learning that it's okay to make mistakes, you're not going to be good at everything the first, second, third, even 20th time." Sara: "When we help kids understand 'what did it cost that other human to provide this to me,' it naturally grows gratitude in them." Audrey: "Young kids are made to be self-focused. That's normal developmentally. Anything we can do to get them out of their head helps. I do think empathy is such a key thing." Sara: "I think sometimes our kids hear us being critical of things or dissatisfied with things more often than they hear us being grateful. Make thanking each other, thanking your spouse for something that he or she did, a really normal thing." Sara: "If our kids never see us being grateful, how will they suddenly become grateful people?" Audrey: "If you're only living in the bubble of your neighbor, which likely is safe, or you're own home, which likely has electricity and your kids have their own beds and running water, I think that we can get almost desensitized." Audrey: "We can just set our kids up, get that soil ready to really build their gratitude muscles." Sara: "Whenever we do something in the daily flow of life, it just becomes part of who we are as a family. Finding a habit or a ritual (not just around the Thanksgiving table--although that's awesome!) where we get to name something that we're grateful for, or practice thanking another person for something, done daily or weekly makes things stick." Audrey: "When we adults practice this ourselves it goes a long way in setting our kids up to be more grateful." Resources/Related Posts Three Good Things A Grateful Family is a Happy Family: 5 Gratitude Practices Ep. 63: Growing Gratitude with Sara Kuljis Gratitude Revisited 5 Ways to Create a Happy Thanksgiving

Sarah Roberts, birth photographer, shares her birth experiences and journey to becoming a birth photographer. We discuss the rhetorical role of being a birth photographer in the community and how her profession honors the birth experience.   TRANSCRIPT:   Sara Welcome to the Birth Words podcast. Today we have a special guest, my friend Sarah Roberts. She is a lifestyle photographer and specializes in birth photography. She is here today to tell us about her stories of birth with her three children and the role that language played in those births. So welcome, Sarah!   Sarah Thank you!   Sara It's great to have you here. I'm going to just jump in with some questions. And for any of these, feel free to answer them specific to one of your pregnancies and births or kind of touch on all of them, whatever just comes to mind as being most relevant. Because I know you have three different experiences to draw from. So, my first question is, what words did you use to identify yourself as an expectant mother and as a laboring mother, and where did these words come from? Did you read books? Did they come from family members, your personal experiences, or maybe from your care provider? Where did these words come from? That you identified yourself with.   Sarah I think that's kind of hard, I didn't really enjoy, like, during the actual pregnancy, I don't think I really identified with any particular words. I think in my mind I was like, feeling: how do I want for this to go? Do I want to lean towards my friends who went unmedicated and all natural or do I just want to lean towards, you know, having a hospital birth and having the medications that I need, and that will help. So I kind of identified myself in those terms. And I really felt like I didn't have any other knowledge. And I'm thinking specifically more of my first pregnancy because it was, I felt like, just the most impactful for me because it was the first one. But I think maybe the biggest thing that I identified with was, which is kind of sad, it was dealing towards the weight gain. I had I gained about 40-ish pounds during that pregnancy, which was, you know, it's hard. It's hard to do that. And then, one of my doctors mentioned to me that I shouldn't gain any more weight. And I was about six months in, or maybe halfway I can't remember. And that was so hard for me to hear because, here I am feeling like I'm doing all I can, I'm working to create, I'm creating a child within me, and then to mention that what I'm doing is something wrong because I'm eating too much and being too lazy, I don't know. And I was, I felt kind of stuck. I didn't know what to do about that, like, how do I, I mean, I have these cravings, I'm hungry all the time, and you're telling me not to gain any more weight. And so that was kind of impactful for me. And in fact, when I went into labor, he was there, he was the doctor on call, and I was really disappointed. I didn't want him to be there during something so pivotal. Luckily, he was there while I went into the hospital, and I just was like, I don't want to deal with him. I have really hard feelings about it what he told me.  But fortunately, all he did was break my water, and administer and he left and there was a shift change. And so, by the time I delivered, it was a new doctor who I felt more comfortable with. So, anyway, there you go!   Sara No, thank you for sharing that. I think that's really important because, like, this one thing that he said, totally affected your relationship with him and the trust that you felt and the comfort, the level of comfort that you had when you were doing this awesome work not only during birth, but throughout your pregnancy. And, you felt like his words acknowledged only one thing that he was judging wasn't being done, as he would recommend, and didn't acknowledge all the amazing things that you were doing exactly as you should be doing and that were going so well. And it sounds like he didn't give any additional advice. Like, if he really was concerned that there shouldn't be more weight gain, then you'd hope that he would also give some tips or like guidance about how to healthfully manage that and still be able to get the nutrients that you and your baby need. And you know, and it sounds like it--    Sarah Yeah well, and even if he did, I probably wouldn't hear it, you know, because I was so focused on how he said it. And the way he said it was just so negative to me. And if I had a better relationship before with him, maybe it would have made a difference to or even mentioned, the more positive things. I don't remember any of that. So it was just that negative thing that I focused on.   Sara That makes a lot of sense. Because, when you are an expectant woman, you are doing so much good and there are some really hard things that you're sacrificing for, and it's really hard to not have people verbally acknowledge that and only verbally acknowledge, like, what you feel like they're saying you're doing wrong. I think that's huge. I'm sorry that that happened. I hope that you had more supportive care providers in the future, and sounds like even among the team of doctors, you were working with that was just kind of one thing that you were glad to get away from. Okay. And let's talk about your birth experiences. Can you remember any words that you used, or that others use, to help you frame the experience? Some people have, you know, preconceived ideas about how birth is going to feel either physically, emotionally, or what. What it is like what is the process of birth? Can you remember in your different birth experiences, how you approach the idea of labor and birth?   Sarah I, I don't know.  I don't feel like I have anything like that shaped what I knew. I mean, all I was just thinking for each one, it was going to be a big surprise. Like, I didn't know what would happen. Even though, I mean granted, yeah, your cervix is going to dilate and you're going to... Your water is going to break, you know, but the sequence of things… how that’s going to happen, the station of baby, you know... I really feel like I just did myself a huge disservice and not finding out, or, you know, having responsibility enough to look up that stuff on my own. I read some of the materials from, like, the offices that I went to, but it was more like the process of birth and, I don't know, I don't feel like, I don't know, I've kind of detached from that. And so, I guess I don't have any. I mean, I think it was more of an unknown, and a little bit of fear because each one was just different, but it's kind of the same process. With the last one I was a little bit more experienced obviously, having two, but at the same time, deciding to go unmedicated for the third one, just I think I went in very unprepared to know what, because if I had gone in knowing: “okay, here's where I am at now, I'm heading into transition, and this is what I can expect it's going to get hard, but then it's going to be close to being done,” you know, but I didn't have that. And I don't remember my moto, I feel like it was such a quiet you know, thing, you know, even in the visits beforehand, nothing like to help prepare me and I don't know, maybe I just didn't ask questions. I didn't know what to ask still, even the third time around. It's so embarrassing to me, but I share this because I want others to not do this too. And it's not until I got into birth photography that really understand it so much better now, and I'm close friends with all these doulas and I hear this all the time and it's like, “Okay, the next time around, I know what's going to happen. I know what to anticipate. It’s going to be kind of different. Because of my experience with the third one.” Anyways, so I don't know if that answers your question.   Sara I think you make really good points by just saying, I think there's no reason to feel embarrassed or sad because so many women approach birth exactly the way that you did and that I did with my first birth experience.  In that, many people do all the time that they don't really have, like you said, I say: “What words did you use to frame your experience?” And you're like: “I don't know, it just kind of went into it.” And I think it's reflective of, I mean, I think that we use language, we use words, in part to reflect our knowledge and experiences, and you didn't really have knowledge or experiences. So it makes sense that you didn't have any words to frame the experience for you. But I love that you're saying that you want that to be not the norm, right? You want that to be different for other women because I think part of the thing is that we don't like birth, it’s a taboo subject in some circles. I've been a doula for a couple of years and like, just this last time I was with my parents was the first time that I felt like my dad was like actually asking questions about it.  He's not, like, getting into the nitty gritty details of birth, but, like, actually asking, “so what do you do with your clients?” And before, he was just kind of like, “Oh, you do that birth stuff, like that's weird” and would just, like, I just felt uncomfortable every time we had an exchange because it felt like something he didn't feel comfortable talking about, which made me feel devalued. And I think that we need to, in our society, show that we value birth more just by speaking about it more. Because not having words to talk about something means that you're lacking a lot more than just words. So, does that ring true with what you're saying?   Sarah Yes. And also, as you're talking it made me also realize, like, I associate pregnancy birth with pain, right? Because, there's the epidural. That's the fallback. You know, if you're in pain, just get an epidural and, and even like, baby showers are kind of a weird thing to go to, people have weird feelings about baby showers. Some love going to or you know, maybe it's for the social aspect. But others view it as a place in the platform to talk about their negative birth experiences. Because I think that they end up having these negative experiences because of the way birth is shaped for them, like, whether it's what people other people have said, you know, negative birth experiences, like just kind of create more negative birth experiences, just because that's what you think, that's what you hear. And you think that's the norm. And so, then women want to feel maybe validated in their decisions to use interventions, you know, or to just be a passive participant and have the doctor just tell them what to do. Or they just have these painful experiences that they just didn't get to process and work through. And so they use baby showers as a place to do that. And so here they are, talking about negative birth experiences in front of an expectant mother who's going to have a baby soon. It's like the worst place ever for that. So we need to change our, we need to change our society and how we, we talk about birth. And we like granted Yeah, if you had a bad experience, yeah, let's talk about it and let's work through it. And but let's see how we can change it to it doesn't always have to be like that it can be power empowering, and it burns is such a sacred event and you're creating life and you're helping a little person come into this world. And it's so special and it's so amazing. And we need to give it that. It's not just some terrible ordeal that women have to go through. And it's something like, oh, we're we're all victims in this.  No, we are not victims, and we are not martyrs. And, we can be champions as we bring in the next generation and if we can help others, and cheer them on to do the same.    Sara I love everything that you just said. I just want to like stamp a big “amen!” right there. That's awesome. I think that critically important, everything you just said. And it made me want to know how you got involved in birth photography and what role you see that playing in like this societal change that you feel like needs to happen around birth?   Sarah Well, I feel like it was just such a thing I stumbled on. I really didn't, I didn't anticipate myself ever doing this. I've always been interested in photography. But I think what made the huge difference for me was my friend and neighbor Danny Reed, becoming a doula and her passion for birth. It just is so infectious. It just, uh, she would talk about it and talk about positive things about birth and her excitement with helping women having a positive birth experience by helping them give them extra support and whatnot. And was just so pivotal in my, in my direction, and  I have a new birth photographer. She lives in my neighborhood area and I didn't even think of that. But when I went to my sister's baby shower, she lived in Idaho at the time, and she was going to be scheduled for a C section because her baby was breached and I had brought my camera.  I went up with my other sister, we were going to have a weekend of it, and the next day was going to be her baby shower and we found out that the doctor changed the induction date to, or the C section date to the day of the baby shower. And so, I don't know what, not what possessed me, but I don’t know what came into my mind like, I should take a picture of a birth like, I didn't even think of the other birth photographer I knew.  I didn't even think of it being a, like, a career option for myself. I just thought that would be fun to document and see and I want to see it I you know, I was kind of fascinated by a C section and so the stars aligned, I was able to be in the room with everyone and take pictures and it was such an emotional, amazing event, watching my nephew be born. And I get a little emotional, because it was so wonderful to see, so beautiful.  And my sister, of course, is emotional and she was able to see her her precious little boy being born and I got to document what was happening.  And, because she is there on the table, couldn't really see much, and her baby was passed through the little window to be cleaned up and foot stamped and measured and all that stuff and so she didn't get to see all that.  And, I got to get those first pictures of them as a family and and then later on I did some of her nursing him, and for the first time I got pictures of him getting bathed for the first time, and all of that was just like wow! What a high and emotional high was on. I wanted to do it again and again and again. And so that's, that was my start of it. And so it was it was a really amazing event for me.   Sara That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that.   Sarah I guess I didn't really finish your other question was, well, and now I see so many others have experiences where they're just like, you know, birth is not such an amazing event for them, for whatever reason or another, whether it was in their control or not. And, I want to help change that.  I view myself as a birth worker even though I'm just documenting things, I feel like it's an important aspect of birth work and making changes.  In the birth photography course i'm actually taking right now, it's saying they are saying people have used, like providers have looked at photography from birth, and seen things like, “Oh, we can change this, we can make this better for the patient.” And so, positive changes are happening and people are even like, I didn't know I, I could do this option, but because I saw it in a picture; until I saw that, I didn't know it was an option. And so you know, women are seeing these options happen, and it's empowering them more. And I think the more we empower women in birth, the more that they will be able to recover after birth and be able to pick themselves up and have less problems with postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety. I feel like those are major, major, not consequences, but things that happened because of poor birth experiences, just things that, traumatic things that happened to them during labor and delivery. And so we can, if we can avoid it, as best as we can, then let's do that and help these women to not, not have as bad a time with depression and anxiety afterwards.   Sara I think that's huge. And I think you were talking earlier about how birth is a sacred event. And like, I think that as you are a photographer in that situation, you're showing your belief that it's just this beautiful, transformative sacred event. And being a photographer there like legitimizes that, that sanctity. Just like you would want a wedding photographer at a really that really important event and you would want it at your baby's christening or blessing or whatever, we photograph important moments in our lives. So I think that you're doing a huge service of removing the stigma or the taboo of birth by just saying, “Look at this beautiful, amazing transformative experience.” And I want it to be memorable and shareable. So I think that's huge.   Sarah Yes, exactly. And, I was able to photograph Danny's pregnancy or, excuse me, birth a couple years ago with her last baby and she kept saying how, how she was able to process her birth again, because I think we want to, we want to talk about our birth story over and over again. It's, it's helpful, it's processing, you know, it's healthy to process that and to remember what happened and the events that happened. And when you have pictures to add to that or video which I am working on too, but video even and hearing the noises and seeing the baby come out. it's just so empowering. You don't really remember those things when you're in the moment giving birth. And so it helps to have the words with it, as well as the images together to help create, recreate that, that event and that story that forms you. That's part of your history. That's, that's who you are.   Sara Thank you. I'm going to keep thinking about all those things you just said, because I've been thinking a lot about birth stories and why we tell them and what sort of like what the rhetorical purposes and I think that photography is a really important part of that. So, I'm going to keep thinking about that. And I feel like our interview has gone a different way than, like, with the questions that I sent to you. But I'm so glad that it did, because I really appreciate all the thoughts that you've shared. And I think that our listeners will too. So before we wrap up, will you let them know how they can follow you on social media, your website, all of those things.   Sarah Okay, my website is www.yellowkitephoto.com and, using that handle @yellowkitephoto, you can reach me on Instagram and Facebook. And, I just would love if you followed me, even if you're not interested or, or whatever, it's important to share and to embrace the stigma of birth being a taboo thing, something that shouldn't be seen and, so give it a follow and share with others if you feel like it's inspiring to you and would inspire others.   Sara Great. Thank you so much, Sarah!   Sarah Thank you. This is so wonderful to talk about. I love talking about birth!   Sara Great. Me too!

In Episode 82, I'm chatting with my friend Sara Kuljis, the owner and director of Yosemite Sierra Summer Camp and Emerald Cove Day Camp. Sara is a 20-year veteran camp director and parenting trainer who has great insights and ideas about parenting and counseling kids. We're starting a new series, about sibling conflict and sibling rivalry, and today we're talking about how to manage the conflict that naturally occurs between siblings. Listener Questions "I’m a mom of 2 kids, an almost 13-year-old girl and a just turned 8-year-old boy. My husband and I have both taught in public and private schools and we’ve been youth leaders in churches. Our current challenge is to help our kids with conflict resolution since it seems they tend to be in conflict fairly often at school and at home. Can’t we just all get along?! The difference in age, personalities, and sexes has made it extra difficult." "My biggest parenting struggle at the moment is sibling rivalry, bickering, one-upping, putting down, etc. I’ve read books, consulted experts, given the “Team [Family Name]” talk, etc., but nothing seems to work.  It may be compounded by the fact that I have twins (age 9), but I talk to my mom friends with different age siblings and it seems pervasive.  Curious to know if you have any words of wisdom from your own experience or your fellow experts."   My Email Response Thank you for reaching out! It's definitely very normal for kids to go through phases where it's harder for them to get along, especially if their personalities clash or they're in different life phases. And it isn't easy! My kids have gone through their phases as well. :) I will say, now that most of them are adults they really do value the time they have together. It sounds like you have a plethora of experience working with youth as well, and I'm excited that you found my blog so that we can connect. I also really think that the key lies in helping each child feel great about themselves - so a focus on their strengths rather than any comparison is good. Finally (again, off the top of my head), I ignored a lot of my kids' smaller squabbles. That's just what siblings do. BIG IDEAS Children don't need to be treated equally. They need to be treated uniquely. Parents need to be intentional about honoring the uniqueness of each of their children. Addressing each of your children uniquely shows them that they are special to you and loved by you. Sibling rivalry and sibling conflict are normal with children. Children tend to outgrow their sibling rivalry and conflicts when they grow up. Instead of giving each child equal time, give time according to each child's need. QUOTES Sara: "The chemistry and the personality and the interests of our children sometimes don't line up." Sara: "It is good as a parent to determine my level of influence, how I influence, and what things do I just need to be patient for." Audrey: "We have to look at the long-term picture. We're hopeful that the things we do as parents will at least promote long-term positive relationships. But even that is not guaranteed." Sara: "As kids growing up, my sister and brother and I were constantly arguing. Constantly. We couldn't get along for more than a day. As adults, we really grew to like each other a lot. We always loved each other, but now we really like each other." Sara: "Take a moment and see if outside the home they have good friends. And if they do have that capacity, they're going to be okay." Sara: "Sometimes we just bring home the pressure and bring home the crankiness, and we spill them on those who are closest to us." Audrey: "I remember several years where I was such a bratty little sister." Audrey: "There are also cases where, realistically, siblings are so different, or your sibling has some kind of mental health issue or something that really does make them very difficult to have any relationship with. And that's something that's just life, right?" Audrey: "If you don't get the positive relationship you need, you need to find it elsewhere." Sara: "As parents, we should be really intentional about honoring the differences and the uniqueness of every child." Sara: "When our kids can articulate it, let's ask. Because it might surprise us what it means to them for us to support them." Audrey: "Addressing each child uniquely is really important to make them feel they're loved and they're special to you, even if they don't do the same things as somebody else." Sara: "Just spend a little time entering his world and understanding what makes him tick around this." Sara: "Space is a really good thing. Time to just quiet one's own heart." Sara: "That argument right after school every day- I started taking snacks in the car when I picked the boys up and the first thing they did was eat. We actually decreased the squabbles, those little naggy squabbles, by a good fifty percent." Sara: "All of us are going to have those really heated moments and a lot of pent-up energy. And having appropriate and safe ways to get it out I think is great! I think a punching-bag is great. Rather a punching-bag than each other! Or go for a run. Go for a bike ride. Let some steam off." Audrey: "Give them some space. Don't try to force people to be together who are just not compatible at the moment or at the age." Sara: "We can't demand closeness and we can't demand that they're best friends. But we can require respect." Sara: "We can start teaching empathy to tiny little kids." From Siblings Without Rivalry- How To Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish: "As I half-listen from the next room, I am surprised at how relaxed I am. I realize how little emotional investment I have in the moment-by-moment temperature of their relationship. I know that the differences in interest and temperament that kept them from being close in childhood are still there but I also know that, over the years, I have helped them build the bridges to span the separate islands of their identities. If they ever need to reach out, they have many ways of getting there."   LINKS Audrey's website: www.sunshine-parenting.com Audrey's email: audrey@sunshine-parenting.com Sara teaches parenting workshops in Southern California. Contact Sara to have her come speak to your group on parenting topics including: • Positive Behavior Shaping • Effective Affirmation • Pace of Life • Listening Skills RELATED POSTS/PODCASTS https://sunshine-parenting.com/2017/04/ep-7-family-pace-space-sara-kuljis/ https://sunshine-parenting.com/2015/05/5-steps-to-help-kids-resolve-conflicts/ Resources Recommended books: Siblings Without Rivalry- How To Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, the authors of  How To Talk So Your Kids Will Listen And Listen So Your Kids Will Talk.                 Quick reference guide: The chart that summarizes Siblings Without Rivalry that we referenced in this episode in at The Montessori Notebook:  https://www.themontessorinotebook.com/siblings-without-rivalry/ Christine Carter, author of Raising Happiness  - 10 Steps to Peace in Your Household (download) - The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman Audrey's book, Happy Campers- Nine Summer Camp Secrets for Raising Kids Who Become Thriving Adults, is coming out on May 7th. It's available now for pre-order. Go to www.happycampersbook.com to find links to all your favorite book retailers where you can pre-order your copy. Audrey will send you some fun freebies, and an invitation to join her private Facebook group once you've completed the pre-order form.

Secrets of Great Second MealsBy Sara Dickerman Intro: Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors. Sara: Hi, I'm Sara Dickerman and this is my latest cookbook, "Secrets of Great Second Meals". Suzy Chase: The last time we chatted was about the "Bon Appetit: Food Lover's Cleanse" cookbook that you wrote. And you even had lunch suggestions based on leftovers from the night before. So you've been a leftover supporter for years now. Talk a little bit about that.Sara: Well yes, the Bon Appetit plans, because there were menus for two weeks of healthy eating, I started thinking about how to make it a little more reasonable, since it was based on home cooking. And even though we all love to cook at home, some days it's just too busy and just really trying to cook every meal at home would be complicated. So I thought about using beautiful leftovers and then reframing them in a way that made them feel new and fresh. So in the case of the Bon Appetit book, it was thinking about a lot of those proteins in salad form, in delicious, crunchy salads. All sorts of textures and all sorts of flavors. And it just reminded me how much I love that part of cooking, the cyclical nature of cooking where one meal trails into the next. I think it's a really beautiful aspect of cooking that allows you to treat your ingredients with the most respect. Of course it allows you to save money because you're not wasting as much food. But there's just something very natural about letting one meal inform the next.Suzy Chase: You take uncommon delight in putting together memorable meals out of the morsels in your fridge. And it definitely comes through in this cookbook. Can you give us a brief history of the L word?Sara: Sure. Leftovers, as such, didn't really have an existence until people had refrigerators, in the sense of a problem of having too much food left around the house. In the past, people probably would've eaten the stew the next morning just to use it up. But when refrigerators started being popular in American culture, first, in the late 19th century, it was ice-based refrigerators and then electric refrigerators, this idea that you have this food that was around and you didn't quite finish it and you could keep it for a while became an issue. And so around that era, at the beginning of the 20th century, cookbooks started to come out dealing with this new thing called leftovers. At the same time, women were encouraged to be very thrifty. This was the heart of the home economics movement in America. So housewives were supposed to use their skills and ingenuity to keep the household finances in good shape and to be creative and use up every little scrap of food in the house. That grew through the beginning of the 20th century. And crowning achievements in the mid-century were like Jello molds with every kind of knickknack in them. And of course the era of casseroles with tinned soup and, yet last, leftover turkey in the casseroles. And of course, naturally, that kind of cooking wore down people's palates and it lost glamour as we moved into the second half of the 20th century. And people got very interesting in farmer's market and fresh foods and really connecting with foods and experimenting with foods from around the world. And that homey cooking I think felt less of the moment at that point. What has happened recently? Well we're all becoming much more aware of the impact of our eating on the environment. So people are thinking a lot about food wastage, which wastes not just our money, our household money, but wastes water and it's a larger carbon footprint. So there is an activist movement that I'd say really got traction in England first and then came here. And you'll see people like Dan Barber really encouraging chef and home cooks alike to think about how much food gets wasted in our environment. There's an estimate that it's about 40% of food gets wasted in the United States. So it's a huge amount. And so I just combined that concern in my book with also the pleasure of creativity. And part of the joy of cooking in the kitchen can be, "Oh, I'm wasting a little bit less food but I'm also having fun thinking about this new environment for whatever I have around the refrigerator." It can make it really fun and a pleasing part of your cooking life.Suzy Chase: In terms of food waste, we're all thinking about food waste these days but no one really talks about this way of thinking and cooking and how it's really budget friendly too. And you mention that in the cookbook. Sara: It is. You need to know what you'll use. And if you can cook a few dishes that you know you'll enjoy and, if you have a family, your family will enjoy, and kind of cook a little more at the beginning of the week. Maybe you cook it kind of simply. Then you can reframe it and it takes a little less time the second time around because you've already cooked whatever that main ingredient is. And then it's also you're conscientiously thinking about different ways to frame your food, and so you have more fun and you're more likely to maybe eat at home instead of ordering takeout. And that also saves money of course. Suzy Chase: It's so expensive. Especially in New York City, you get all these extra charges, the delivery changes. So a family of three, you can easily rack up a $50 bill just getting Chinese food. It's crazy.Sara: Right. I never want to sound scoldy. I get bored very easily. I'm not the kind of person who can eat exactly the same meal days after days in a row. So that's where the fun and the creativity and the transformation comes to play, so that that simple roast chicken you had one day might become a chicken salad like on the cover of the book that has a wonderful ginger soy dressing. Or it might become enchiladas or it might become a Greek style lemon soup. It could go in any of those directions. And that allows for a little bit of spontaneity even if you're trying to be thoughtful.Suzy Chase: You write about the eureka moment. Talk about that. Sara: Oh, it's just, like I said, I think there's this pleasure that cooks take, and maybe not all cooks, but that when you figure out how a few things can fit together and improve each other. And so I think about that when I'm meditating on this little bit of extra pork shoulder I have around and I realize that I could add a little more flavor to the pork shoulder, like adding some annatto and it will taste a little bit like Cochinita Pibil. It won't be a classically prepared Cochinita Pibil but it'll have some of that lovely lemony annatto flavor, and that that could be reframed into tacos after I'd had it maybe in more Italian version of it the night before. And then you just start thinking, "Oh, and then I have that extra half of that onion that's in the fridge." And then I'll pickle that. And then, look, suddenly you have this new meal. And the anticipation of how that meal will come together is what I think of as the eureka moment. Soup is almost always an options. And there's a whole chapter in the book on soups. And that's often the way that you can figure out how to put all those puzzle pieces together.Suzy Chase: So I want to chat about a question you brought up in the cookbook which was if we revered these ingredients that were painstakingly grown in organic fields and handcrafted by food artisans, why do we not also appreciate them after the first meal? And I was wonder why don't we? We're so quick to throw it away.Sara: Yeah, I think we are. Well I think there's a few different camps I would say for sure. There are people who grew up and they just never liked leftovers. And they're a tougher nut to crack. But I think the key is reframing things and making things feel a little new and fresh. And then there's those of us who are more like me probably who just have good intentions and don't get around to it. And it's that delayed virtue thing that I think we all engage in a lot in our modern world. But it's true, I do think that there's a level of respect for ingredients that should extend beyond the farmer's market and extend into our daily lives. And it's always going to look glorious uncooked at the farmer's market. But what happens when it's in your refrigerator or in your freezer? And how can you really bring back that enthusiasm you had for the same thing before it was cooked and before you tried it? And I always say I'm easily bored. So I think of ways of layering in flavors and layering in textures. So even if I'm not preparing one of these recipes from start to finish, I have great condiments in my refrigerator door like a harissa or a gochujang, which are two different chili-based sauces. gochujang, from Korea, which has the miso-y fermented bean taste. And then harissa which has lovely warm spices like cumin and caraway in it. So those are things I would anoint this second-day food with to just bring in that vibrancy. Or maybe I'll grate lemon zest over top of something or add a dollop of yogurt to add a freshness. So always thinking about ways that you can, even very simple ways that you can add another layer of vibrancy to food after it's been in the refrigerator. Of course it can get a little less sharp tasting once it's been sitting in the refrigerator for a little while. So you need to think about ways of reviving food, but really taking pleasure in it.Suzy Chase: Give us some general rules on when to throw things out, like fish and seafood, vinaigrettes, moldy cheese or cooked meats.Sara: Okay, that sounds good. Well with fish and seafood, no one wants old, cooked seafood around. It just really spoils quickly. So I tend to use that the next day. Actually I love having leftover salmon, especially if it's been a little smoked, like if I did it on the barbecue. But I do tend to use it the next day. The one exception might be something like an escabeche, if you've made a vinegar-based marinade, you probably can get away with another day or two. But basically that's a quick thing. Just think of a clever thing to do the next day maybe for brunch. You could make strata and throw in some of the leftover barbecue in that case. With cooked meats, I think they generally can stick around for three days or so. The other thing I would say though is, because we sometimes don't get around to the leftovers we mean to, if it's something saucy or stewy I often just try to throw it in the freezer the next day rather than keep it around if I don't think I might get through it. And the freezer is always a good option for something that's got a lot of liquid in it. It's not such a good option for something that's like a dry roast, like if you just did a pork tenderloin in the pan. That's something you'd want to use from the refrigerator and not freeze. Oh, and then you asked me, the last question was cheeses. Now there's a few recipes in this book that I really love because they're custom made for cleaning out the cheese drawer. And I don't know about you but I have a tendency to get excited about cheeses. And when we eat through two-thirds of it, and then there's this funny little nubbin of cheese that doesn't look quite as pretty anymore.Suzy Chase: Yeah. Exactly.Sara: So all cheese melts together for the most part. And so there's some wonderful recipes. One of my all-time, classic, favorite things to make are gougeres, which are those wonderful cheese puffs. And you can mix those extra cheeses you have around the cheese drawer in a gougeres, and they're just so extraordinarily delicious. The other fun thing is that gougeres I've found bake up best for me if I've actually made the dough, piped them onto the pan and then freeze that dough. I find they bake better from the freezer. So not only am I saving this extra cheese that I've had around the refrigerator, but then I have them in the freezer. And if guests come over and I want a nice little appetizer, it's super easy to just pop into the oven for 20 minutes and you have these wonderful, crisp, fragrant, hot gougeres to serve your friend.Suzy Chase: This is funny. One time I asked Dorie Greenspan what she would offer me if I came to her house, and she said gougeres. I said, "I'll be over in 15 minutes. It's done."Sara: It's just they're so pleasing. Kids love them, adults love them. And very simple. If you want to get fancy, you can cut them in half and put [inaudible 00:13:26] as a little sandwich. But you can also just serve a big pile of them, and next time you turn around they'll be gone. Suzy Chase: So the other night I made your recipe for the sesame roasted winter vegetable party on page 47. It's such a unique way to roast vegetables. I always do the regular olive oil and salt and pepper. But yours mixes together olive oil, tahini, garlic, sea salt and sesame seeds. Describe this dish.Sara: Okay. Well, like you, I often just do the olive oil things. But sometimes I want a little more substance to a roasted vegetable and just a little more flavor. And so I love, when I'm working with sesame, to hit it in more than one way the sesame. So there's the tahini, there's the sesame seeds which toast up in the oven and get crunchy. And then the idea is you make just a big batch of those roasted vegetables. And you might them use them in a salad and just enjoy them throughout the week that way. You can puree them together and make a wonderful soup. But on their own they're also delicious. And that extra sesame flavor just gives them a little richness and a little depth.Suzy Chase: I'm so excited to have this recipe now because I'm so sick of the regular olive oil. It zipped up my vegetables. It was really delicious.Sara: It is fun. Actually roasted vegetables are great that way. There's a couple of other methods that I'll share, that aren't in the book, that I love to do. Sometimes it's really great to cook them simply but then hit them when they're just coming out of the oven with some fresh grated garlic and maybe a little parsley and maybe a little Parmesan. In that case, the hot vegetables hitting the garlic just really adds this big burst of aroma. And that's another fun way to have a little more fun with your roasted vegetables. Suzy Chase: That's a good tip. So here is a brilliant tip that was a light bulb moment for me in this cookbook. Hang a list of what's in your fridge on the front of the fridge. It seems so simple yet so effective. Sara: And one, I will tell you, that I go through phases with because I am a human too. Sometimes I'm better organized than others. But it is, it's true. If you know you have those things that are in the fridge, that's a restaurant, organizational tip. Knowing the inventory of your fridge is really helpful, so if you write it down or even if you just do a visual check. And also, of course, another restaurant tip that's so important is just to make sure to label what you put in the fridge. And again, it's not like I'm perfect with this. But I always regret not labeling things because something gets shoved to the back and then you don't see it. And then it's a week later and you're like, "Oh no, this was that lovely lamb stew."Suzy Chase: I know.Sara: "I intended to do something with it."Suzy Chase: It's the most defeating moment. You're like, "Oh, rest in peace lamb stew."Sara: Exactly. You know what I like to do? And there's many different ways to label. I have a roll of bright yellow masking tape and a sharpie hanging from my kitchen shelf, just like a lot of restaurants do. And I just try my best, even if I had a glass of wine at dinner, when I throw things in the fridge to slap that label just to say what it is. And then it really makes a big different. Suzy Chase: For my segment called My Last Meal, what would you have for your last supper?Sara: Oh, that's such a good one. It would be ... I feel like I just would want a giant bowl of spaghetti bolognese. I just love a meaty spaghetti sauce, I think it's just a childhood memory, with a lot of delicious cheese nearby. And a crisp, green salad too because you need something as a counterpoint. Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Sara: I'm on instagram @saradickerman. And then I've also started a new community on Facebook that I'm hoping people might enjoy that is Second Meals. And that is where people could share their ideas or their creations of great second meals that they've come up with or invented for their leftovers. And then I love Instagram. I'd say that's where I'm most active.Suzy Chase: I'm totally going to check out your Facebook group and join it. That's exciting.Sara: Great. Thank you so much. Suzy Chase: Well thanks, Sara, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast. Sara: Oh, thank you so much for having me. Really great to talk with you.Outro: Follow Suzy Chase on Instagram @cookerybythebook and subscribe at cookerybythebook.com or in Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening to Cookery by the Book podcast, the only podcast devoted to cook books since 2015.

  “The answer to life is in service to others.”   These are not just words spoken by Sara O'Meara, Co-Founder of Childhelp, it's the way she's spent the past 60 years. O'Meara and fellow Childhelp Co-Founder, Yvonne Fedderson, founded the organization in 1959. At the time, they were young Hollywood starlets. By chance they both landed roles on a project that would take them overseas. That assignment would change the course of their lives. Together they began rescuing so-called “throwaway children” in Japan and VIetnam. “We never dreamed it would be our whole life. We were actresses at the time,“ O'Meara says. . They went on to build 9 orphanages, a hospital and a school in Japan and Vietnam. The young actresses were quickly recognized as child advocates in the United States and they were personally asked by Nancy Reagan to lead the fight against child abuse here at home. So they did. “The Ladies” as they are famously known went on to build the very first residential treatment center for child abuse in our nation and defied all of their naysayers along the way. “Anytime you try to do anything good, you are going to have the other side that is not always as complimentary, and other people may find fault,” Sara O'Meara explains. “The main ingredient is perseverance. If you know something is the right thing to do you cannot let anyone discourage you.” Fedderson adds that every step has been guided by faith. “We pray about everything. God is the CEO of our organization … that's for sure.” Led by Sara and Yvonne, Childhelp built advocacy centers and group homes for children already affected by child abuse, created prevention programs like Speak Up Be Safe, which they hope to see implemented in schools nationwide, and established a National Child Abuse Hotline where trained professionals answer the phones in over 150 languages. And recently they added text messaging. Children in crisis can text 1-800-4-A-CHILD and receive immediate help. Now ages 85 and 84 (Yvonne points out she's younger), The Ladies show no signs of slowing down. On February 2, 2019, Childhelp officially kicks off its 60th Anniversary year with the “Drive The Dream Gala”, Chaired by international philanthropists Richard and Dr. Stacie Stephenson. The Gala, which is held in Phoenix, Arizona, draws a celebrity crowd, including longtime Childhelp supporters John Stamos, Kathy Lee Gifford and Cheryl Ladd, among many others. The Ladies left the world of Hollywood long ago. And while they still enjoy the glitz and glamour that comes with their fundraising Galas and events nationwide, what matters most is finishing the job they started in 1959. “As long as there is one hurting child out there, we are going to keep going.” On this 22 minute episode of Carey Pena Reports, The Ladies, in a rare sit down interview, talk about the power of positive change and what others can learn from their story of perseverance. For more information about Childhelp visit https://www.childhelp.org Transcript Carey: Hey everyone, this is a special edition of Carey Pena Reports. Today we are with two trailblazers who founded an organization that to date has saved and changed the lives of more than 10 million children. We sit down with them for a rare interview at their home in Paradise Valley, Arizona to talk about leadership and how you can't let anyone deter you from your dreams. Here's that interview. Carey: We are on location today talking about the power of positive change, and I am here with two very well-known change makers, Yvonne Fedderson and Sara O'Meara, the founders of Child Help. Thank you both so much for joining us today. Sara: Thank you for having us. Yvonne: We love joining you. Carey: Thank you for inviting us into your home and there is so much to talk about. You are celebrating 60 years of Child Help and we will talk about all of the incredible accomplishments, but first, I want to talk to you about the leadership lessons that you've learned over the years. Yvonne: Oh my gosh. Carey: Because you ladies were really change makers before it was en vogue to be so. Where did you find your courage in the late 1950s, early 1960s to stand up and say “we see a problem and we want to change”? Sara: Well, I think it was because we felt so deeply about what was happening to these children. We began taking care of the half American child that were known as throwaway children in Japan and Vietnam and so when we saw their suffering and the fact that these were God's precious children and they were not being taken care of, it was something we just had to do. That gave us the courage to speak out because remember those wars were not exactly popular wars, so to speak. Carey: The opposite. Yvonne: Yeah. Sara: Very much the opposite. Yvonne: Also, we were very young. Sara: Yes. Yvonne: And we just did it, you know? Carey: You saw something. Yvonne: We saw a need and we said we've got to do it and that was it. Sara: We're going to kill it. Carey: You jumped into action. Sara: But we never dreamed it would be our whole life. Yvonne: No. Sara: I mean, we were actresses at the time and so that's what we thought we would be doing, but it ended up that this became our life's mission, and then after we built the orphanages, we built nine orphanages, a hospital for orphans and a school … Yvonne: In Japan and Vietnam. Sara: In Japan and Vietnam. WE thought that that was it, and what happened is when we were speaking as keynote speakers about the Operation Baby Lift, because it was our organization that brought the babies over after the war ended, then Governor Reagan and Mrs. Reagan, Nancy and Ronnie, were there on the dais with us, and Nancy stopped Yvonne and me and said, “You're just the two to do this. You need to do something about child abuse in our country.” Well, no one had ever heard about child abuse. It was never, ever mentioned. All the laws protected… Yvonne: That was way back in '75. Carey: Yeah. Sara: Yes, and the laws protected the perpetrator, not the child. So, we did jump in to do that and state by state we had to help change laws so that we had safety for these children, and then we built villages for abused children, advocacy centers, the national child abuse hotline … Carey: It continued to grow and grow. Sara: It continued to grow. Carey: So Nancy Reagan encouraged you ladies. Yvonne: Oh, they supported us. Carey: She knew that you were the two to do it. So, you had a lot of famous friends, but that's not enough to make an entire organization as big and powerful as yours. What was it, do you think, Yvonne, inside you that made you believe that you could do it, because you have helped change and save the lives of millions of children? Yvonne: Well, we felt this was a calling for both of us because we were selected out of 500 actresses to go on this trip. So even at the time when were selected, we looked at each other and we said, “God must have a plan for this trip, for the two of us to be selected.” They didn't even know we knew each other. So for us to be selected was really something, and then when we found these children, we thought, “That's why we're here. We're supposed to help these children.” Well, one thing led to another. Then when we were asked to do this, we felt within our heart, and of course we pray about everything and we've always dedicated our organization to God. He's really the CEO of our organization. Sara: That's for sure. Yvonne: But we also were blessed to have many fabulous people to support us. Not only the stars, but we have volunteers who have been with us 30 and 40 and 50 years. Now, think about that. So it's become their mission also. Carey: A lifetime. Sara: A lifetime. Carey: A lifetime. Sara: Yeah. Yvonne: A lifetime. Carey: Now, they have so many great star stories. Can't even get into the whole Elvis Presley and all of this, because then I'd just become a fan girl, but I am interested in that passion, and just the concept that you saw when you started to make change that it was possible. Yvonne: Absolutely. Carey: And when you start to see that, because I think a lot of people who are watching and listening to this show, and this show is about the power of positive change, and sometimes we don't know our own power. You ladies were young. Yvonne: Everyone has it. Carey: Everyone has it. Talk to me about that. Yvonne: But they have to use it. Carey: And when you realized that you had it. Sara: We realized we had it when frankly we depended on God, because we always asked to be guided. We don't want our plan because that's a meager plan compared to what God has planned for each one of us. Yvonne: That's right. Sara: He has a plan for every single individual, and we can make changes. Everyone that is on this earth can make a change. They have to choose to want to make a change. That's the difference. They have to know that the answers to life is in service to others, and once you get that, then your life lives outside of yourself. It's not all about me, me, me. Instead you want to reach out. You want to make a difference in people's lives, and you can. There isn't anybody listening, anybody out there that cannot make a change, a difference in someone's life, but in a lot of lives if you so choose. Yvonne: We've been very blessed to attract people that have hearts like that, that want to serve. They have a servant's heart and they're very, very dedicated, and we really love and appreciate them, and all the people … Maybe they can't be a volunteer but they support us in other ways. Whatever way they help, it's wonderful and God will bless them for that. Carey: Because I want to point out that, I mean, you ladies are obviously beautiful to this very day, but when you went on this mission, you were young, hot Hollywood starlets, and you didn't have to put your sort of glamour aside to start rescuing children, but you felt that was your calling. Yvonne: But you see, everything kind of comes together. As you get older, you look back and you realize that being an actress was part of our life and it opened up many, many doors for us to … Of course, I married a Hollywood producer too, which helped, but all those doors opened up different things that help the organization. For instance, the stars. They were a great asset to our organization, but like I say, the volunteers then were great, so it's wonderful how God opens up doors when we open up our heart to serve him. Carey: Were there people along the way who tried to discourage you as Child Help continued to grow? Sara: Oh yes. Yvonne: Oh my goodness, big time. Sara: Every time you do anything good, you're going to have the other side. Yvonne: That's right, of course. Sara: That not always is very complimentary. Other people may find fault with anything that you do. The main ingredient is perseverance. If you know something is right to do, you cannot let anyone discourage you, and when we built the very first residential treatment center for child abuse in our nation, people were saying to us, particularly in social service, “Well, you can't do that. Nobody's been able to do that and you don't have a degree in social service and it will never be a success.” Well, from the day we've opened, it's been successful. That was 40 years ago and we've built other villages for abused children across the nation. So, you cannot let others define who you are and who you want to be. Yvonne: You know what Sara said when she said “when you know something is right,” it's so true because we knew the villages were right. We knew the centers were right. Every time we've opened a program or started a program, it's been a challenge, but when we know something or anyone knows something within your heart that's right to do, just like Sarah said, don't let other people discourage you. Keep your eye on what you're supposed to do. Keep your eye on the gold and you will make it through because it's right for you to do. Carey: Is there any sort of … and I know that you draw so much inspiration from your faith- Yvonne: Absolutely. Carey: Which is so deep and guiding in your life, but where else … I mean, are there sort of affirmations or is it the friendship between the two of you where when one is down, the other one says, “We can continue”? Sara: Well, we realize that it's so much easier when you have a partner, when you have someone that thinks like you do, they're mission driven, and yes, we help each other through our dark times. Everybody has problems. Everybody has obstacles in their families, in their personal life, in their business life. Yvonne: And we've been through it all together. Everything. Sara: Yeah, and so we do help each other through those times and that's been very helpful, but also, you never get through life as a success unless others reach out and help you, and so we have had many wonderful mentors in our life, to whom we could look up and see what made their lives successful and how they react to things, and so we learn from each other. Yvonne: And you also learn through everything that you go through. You think at the time, “Oh, this is terrible. We're never gonna make it through this problem,” but you do, and when you get through it, you use it on something great. It's a great lesson for us to grow. Carey: Let's talk a little bit more about Child Help for those listening and watching who aren't familiar with the organization. Child Help is dedicated to the prevention and treatment of child abuse. According to your website, over 10 million children have been impacted. I want to go through a few of the wins. You have built advocacy centers and group homes for children who have already unfortunately been affected by child abuse. You have created prevention programs like the Child Help Speak Up, Be Safe program which is spreading to more schools. Sara: All across the nation. Carey: In Arizona and across the country. Yvonne: We'd like to be in every school, especially here in Arizona. Carey: Yes, your goals are always lofty, and this one I think is … All of them are important but I love that you established this national child abuse hotline, which, by the way, I want to give out that number, is 1-800-4-A-CHILD, and this is done in multiple languages because I think in my mind about the moment when a child is scared and hiding and doesn't know what to do, and where do you turn? So you ladies have tried to think through those problems. Sara: Yes, and it's the only hotline that has degreed professionals answering the phones, not volunteers, so it's more than a hotline. They're therapists that can talk the child through it, and not just give out a number, even though we do that as well. For the first time in history we're having texting, and that's something else that is new. Carey: Thank you for reminding me about that because that's huge. Sara: It's very huge. Yvonne: It is huge because the children are kind of afraid naturally to talk about what's going on, but they're so used to texting that they go for like 45 minutes and tell you everything, so that's wonderful. Carey: How much does it matter to you that these children have the opportunity to see that life can be beautiful? Child abuse as a news anchor and reporter, I know that it is an uncomfortable conversation. Sara: There's no question about it. Carey: And a lot of people don't like to talk about it, but what is going on in a lot of homes is very, very tragic. How important is it for you ladies to give a resource to children who are suffering? Sara: It means everything because it means the change of their life. It also means they don't have to go through so much suffering. So many, many times we have had survivors come back and say, “Oh, if I'd only known about that 1-800, the number 4, A-CHILD, I could've gotten help, but they didn't know where to go, and they didn't even know they were being abused sometimes because it started so young, they thought everybody was abused like that. So, it means everything because what you're doing is giving safety to a child. You're giving them their life, because child abuse can rob you of your youth, of your young life, and it sticks with you a long time. It takes a lot to overcome that, and one of the first things we do when the children come into our villages is give them a sense of self-worth because they just feel that they're nobody. Sara: We had a child that came in with “bad kid” burned into his back with cigarette burns- Carey: Bad kid. Yvonne: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Sara: When you would ask him what his name was, he'd say “bad kid” because he was called that, and that's what he thought his name was. So, you have to really work with these children to let them know how precious they really are and that there's only one set of fingerprints and that's theirs, and they can make a big difference in their life. Once they know that and they understand how precious they truly are as a human being, the healing can start then, and so, yes, it means everything to see a life change. Carey: So, I'm thinking about all the people out there who are inspired by you and what you've been able to accomplish, and we cannot all be a Sara and Yvonne. You guys have created something truly special, but each in our own way we have the ability. Sara: Absolutely. Carey: Over the years as you've seen one child's life change and another child's life. Yvonne: Many child's … Carey: And then thousands and millions, it truly is a story about all things are possible when we really care. Yvonne: Absolutely, absolutely. Sara: There's no question about it. Caring is a beautiful thing. If you have a caring heart, it takes you down a pathway, a beautiful journey of life because when you truly care about people, you truly care about feelings, you truly care to make that child whole again, then what this does to you on the inside, it develops you as a person and it gives you the strength really from within. You may not know from which it cometh, but that's what gives us the strength, is in order to give back to another. Carey: Has there ever been, and I imagine I know the answer to this, but has there ever been a time where you think, “Okay, we're ready to retire” and- Yvonne: No. Carey: Because when I've been around you ladies, you have to-do lists that puts mine to shame, but you have already accomplished so much, but yet- Yvonne: But there's more to accomplish. There's always more to accomplish. Sara: There's more left to do. Yvonne: Yep. Sara: And we have great plans for developing other programs that have never been developed. We're kind of known as the trailblazers to get out there and start programs that have never been done before. We opened the first advocacy center with everything under one roof … police, the social services, the hospital … Carey: An integrative approach, right. Sara: That's correct. Yvonne: And this new one's going to be like that. Everyone involved. Sara: And then the villages, we were the first ones to open that. We're the first ones for the hotline. We're the first ones to have prevention in our schools, and so we're kind of the trailblazers in that respect. We're not afraid to take risks, but you have to in life. Carey: So let's talk a little bit about that, because I think that's a really important point. Sometimes it can be very scary to be the person- Sara: Yes, of course. Carey: Who says, “Well, we can do it a little differently.” Sara: And there are a lot of naysayers along the way. Carey: And there's a lot of naysayers. Yvonne: We might get scared within ourselves and talk to each other, but we don't let anyone else know. Carey: But how do you fight through that and see that, okay, I have this vision and I know that vision is something that we should try to test out? Sara: Yes, we're working on a vision right now that has never been done before that will integrate all of our programs. It will be literally a city, and so we're working on that now and we hope to see that come to pass. Carey: So you ladies, and I know it's not appropriate to ask age, but you're- Sara: We don't mind that you're asking our age. Carey: Do you care saying how … Sara: No. I'll be 85 in September. Carey: And Yvonne? Yvonne: I'll be 84 in April. Carey: So you're the younger … Yvonne: I'm the young one. Sara: … Your elder. Carey: I appreciate you saying that, because I think as a woman, I look at you ladies and truly you inspire me so much. Yvonne: Well thank you. Carey: To keep going and to keep building. Yvonne: Well as long as we have our health, we're going to continue right on, and we work every day. Carey: And you still see how much you can contribute to your vision. Yvonne: Yes. Sara: Yes, we hope so. Yvonne: But there are a lot of people that help us. Sara: Yes. Yvonne: We have a great staff, we have great volunteers as we mentioned. I mean, they're wonderful. We haven't done this alone. Sara: And look, you're helping us right now. You're getting the word out. Yvonne: That's right. Carey: It really is remarkable, though, to see that 60 years later, you are as enthusiastic, if not more, than when you were those young starlets who got sent on that movie assignment all those years ago. What does it mean to you to be celebrating the 60th year, to know that you've had this kind of impact? Sara: It's a wonderful feeling because we don't think … You know when you start something, you don't think, “Oh, well, in 60 years …” You have no idea. It's just one step at a time, but when we look back over these six decades and the children that have been helped through our organization, we realize that anything is possible. You have to set your goals, as Yvonne said. You have to continue on that pathway. Yvonne: Keep your eyes on the goal. Sara: And not let anyone deter you if you know it's the right way, regardless of what is said, what seems to be a lack at the time, whether it's monetarily or whatever. You'll have to know that it's going to be provided because … We talk about God a lot but we have to because it's the way that it's done. If we didn't depend on God, we wouldn't be here to celebrate the 60th anniversary and have helped 10 and a half million children. Yvonne: And we're just grateful that both of us are here and both of us have our health and be able to celebrate our 60th. Carey: What an incredible journey you've had together. Sara: Yes. Carey: I mean, really, your friendship is something for the ages. Yvonne: And our husbands were best friends. They had to be. Carey: I mean, it just defies what sometimes people think about women not being able to truly be in lockstep with one another, because I see it a whole different way. Sara: A lot of people said that. In fact, a lot of our celebrities that have been with us through the years, you know, Jane Seymour and Cheryl Ladd … Yvonne: Kathie Lee. Sara: Kathie Lee Gifford. Yvonne: The list goes on and on. They've been fabulous. Sara: They will say to us, “The greatest miracle is your friendship, because it's lasted so long and you can work together so harmoniously.” Carey: Yes, it's such a partnership, and on the subject, just as we close things out here, on the subject of celebrities, you ladies have some of the biggest and most extravagant, beautiful galas including the Drive The Dream, which draws a lot of celebrities. It's held in Phoenix, but you also do beautiful galas in California, but … Sara: And back in East in Washington and Tennessee and… Carey: All over, which are beautiful, extravagant affairs, but I do want to point out for the audience who may have heard about these galas, as I've been … and disclaimer here, I'm a volunteer on the Drive the Dream committee, but as I've gotten to know you, yes, the dressing up is fun and yes, the … That's all fun, but what matters to you is what's getting done with the money. Yvonne: That's right. Sara: That's right. Yvonne: That's right. Carey: That's what matters to you because you have big goals and dreams. Even at 84 and 85 years old, you still have a lot to accomplish. Sara: We do, and as long as there's one hurting child out there, we're going to keep going. Carey: Yvonne, what's your final message? Yvonne: We really hope that you young people will carry on when we cross over. We really pray that every night, because… Carey: I only feel like I could be a small portion of filling your shoes but I am so privileged to be a part of it because learning from women like you is really a blessing for me. Thank you both. Yvonne: That's very kind of you to say. Sara: Thank you, you're a blessing to us too. Yvonne: Thank you, and thank all those who are listening to this program today who support Child Help. We really appreciate it and we know the children certainly appreciate it. Their lives would be totally different without their help. Carey: For more information on Child Help, we would love for you to go to the website, ChildHelp.org. Thank you so much for watching and for listening to Carey Pena Reports, and you can find out more information on our website, InspiredMedia360.com. Take care, everyone. The post The Founders of Childhelp Succeed With Perseverance and Prayer appeared first on Inspired Media 360 TV - Inform | Inspire | Engage.

ALPS recently released our 2017 Annual Report online. Mark Bassingthwaighte was able to sit down with ALPS CFO Sara Smith as she elaborated on a year that was marked by growth and excitement for the company.  ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. Transcript: MARK: Hello. Welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast. We're coming to you from the ALPS' home office in the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the ALPS risk manager, and I have the pleasure today of sitting down with our corporate CFO Sara Smith. MARK: We're going to be talking today about the ALPS annual report which is just out. But before we get into that, Sara, can you just take a little time to share with our audience? Tell us a little bit about yourself. SARA: Sure. Thanks, Mark. My name is Sara Smith. I've been with ALPS for 15 years. Prior to that, I had a pretty diverse background working at retail and coal bed methane exploration. MARK: Wow. SARA: All sorts of different things. I didn't think insurance would be where I would end up, but I have found it challenging and fun and quite exhilarating at times. I've enjoyed my career here at ALPS. MARK: Very good. Very good. Well, we are here to talk about the annual report, the numbers from 2017 and all the good things that have been happening around here. Why don't we start with some of the most basics, the things that people are most curious about. Can you share a little bit about revenue? What's been happening? SARA: Sure. I think the exciting thing happening at ALPS is just our growth and we have a great trajectory going forward, but we also had a fantastic 2017. We saw growth in key states like Washington and Colorado, where we saw tripled digit growth- MARK: Wow, nice. SARA: ... which is super exciting, and so our overall top-line grew about 6%, which in this competitive and market environment, it's a great achievement. MARK: Yeah. Very good. Not only is growth important in terms of just an insurance company, but claims frequency is also a significant thing. What happened on the frequency front? SARA: Well, we started to think that maybe attorneys weren't having claims anymore the way the frequency number dropped. We have seen this in the industry overall in 2017, but it was great to see in ALPS as well. Our frequency dropped right below 3% so it was great, great year. MARK: Wow. Those are great numbers. Growth is not always built on just revenue in terms of playing with premium numbers and having savings and frequency. Can you share a little bit about what's happening in terms of policies, number of policies, number of attorneys? How are those numbers playing out this year? SARA: Both policies and attorneys grew over 7% in 2017 over '16. That translates to almost 18,000 attorneys in ALPS portfolio at the end of '17. MARK: That's a significant change from when we started all those years ago. SARA: It is. MARK: It's a very different company which is a good thing. SARA: It is a good thing. MARK: Another key component for insurance carriers is just, in terms of their overall stability as measured by surplus. What's happening in the surplus? SARA: Well, surplus is so important and so critical for all insurance carriers and, as a policy holder, it's something you should be concerned with when you look at your own insurance carrier. Basically, that is the actual money available to policy holders beyond what's established for reserves. It's the foundation of security and stability within an insurance company. Our surplus grew 6% in 2017. We're just up over $40 million at the end of the year. So we're in sound financial shape. MARK: Yeah and I think that's a good point in terms of having lawyers understand how insurance companies ... How to judge and determine how secure and stable a company is in terms of longterm presence in a market. SARA: Absolutely. MARK: Or just the ability to pay claims going forward. And these surplus numbers are key. I'd like, shortly, to shift into a little softer side of this discussion, but before we jump there, I would like to make our listeners aware. We have put up the annual report. As I understand it, it's all on our website, interactive. Do you have any comments about that? It's just ... Just go to alpsnet.com. SARA: Correct. MARK: I just encourage you folks, if you have any interest to dig into the numbers a little bit more, all of this information is available. Let's talk about the soft stuff in 2017. SARA: Yeah. MARK: You've shared some things about growth. Lots of great things happening with the company. Just fill us in. SARA: I think that sometimes there's a tendency to look just at the numbers and they tell a great story in 2017 but there is also a lot of foundational work that went into 2017 that is really priming the pump for 2018 and beyond. A couple of those things are ... We did a full rate study of our entire 30 years of data, right? What do we know about our attorneys and what do we not know? What are the assumptions we've made over the years and what are the surprises? So, that was a huge undertaking. Took a lot of time and I think we got some valid information out of that. SARA: The other thing we did is we heard from our policy holders that maybe there was some things that we could do in our policy forms that would be better and more customizable to them. We took a hard look at our policy and developed three new policy forms to better serve our customers. That is a tremendous amount of work. MARK: Yeah. SARA: We spent most of '17 working on that. Of course, that's just the easy part. Now, we have to ... At the end of the year, we started filing our forms and rates and policies in all of our states. So, now we're hurry up and wait and see what happens. MARK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're also at a point where we're beginning to expand jurisdictionally. Any comments on what's happening there? SARA: Yeah, we have really put some effort forward to diversify our book both geographically as well as just from a demographic perspective.  We did see significant growth in Washington and Colorado and we're going to continue to see that expansion play out. We recently were approved in Texas and starting writing business in April. So that's really exciting. We're on the march to get the last couple of states and get our Certificate of Authority. I expect that our footprint will be much different by the end of '18 then it even was in 2017. MARK: And while we have been recognized as a national insurer, we really now are on the verge of truly being national in terms of just a presence throughout the entire United States, which is exciting. SARA: It is exciting. MARK: It really is. Lots of opportunities coming. There's been some investments in technology as well. Can you share a little bit about what we're doing? SARA: Sure. I think that the consumers ... Consumers overall are changing and they're changing their purchasing patterns and the way that they like to access their information. MARK: Yes, right. SARA: I think that it's hard for insurance companies especially. We all have legacy platforms and we have to sometimes just rip the band aid off. Start over. We are working on finally e-delivery and being able to get our customers what they want, when they want it. So I think it's a huge task and it's much more complicated than you think it would be, but we're getting there. MARK: Very good. Very good. That's pretty much what we wanted to share. Do you have any closing comments? Exciting things to look forward in 2018? What's on your radar? SARA: Wow. So, 2018 right now is ... I'm really watching our rate implementation and execution and making sure that we're doing that in the right way. I think that going into new states is super exciting. How do we build traction? What does that look like? What are we going to learn? Cause you know we're going to learn a lot. We just don't know what it is at the point right now. MARK: And I'm looking forward myself in terms of one of the guys getting on the airplane so we can go to a few new places. Get a few more miles but- SARA: Right, right, right. MARK: To meet some new folks out in these new states. Doing some lecturing and what not. They are exciting times. Well, Sara, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. To all of you listening, I hope you found something of value today and I encourage you, if you have any interest in learning more about what is happening here at ALPS, to visit alpsnet.com. There is a link to the annual report interactive and there's some great information there. In addition, if any of you have any questions or topics that you would like to see addressed in the future ... Or even speakers you'd like to hear on the podcast, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at mbass@alpsnet.com. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.