Podcasts about so jess

01:22 - Jess’s Superpower: Playing ANY Instrument * Music & Technology * Cultural Expoloration 06:03 - Language Community Ethos (MINASWAN (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN)) * Human-Centered Design * The Joy of Programming Meetup (https://www.meetup.com/Joy-of-Programming-DC/) * Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/sapir-whorf-hypothesis) 13:24 - Inclusive Language: Language Matters * Valheim (https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/) 17:19 - Active Listening and Expressing Point-of-View, and Using Loudness * Vocally For * Vocally Against * Quiet For * Quiet Against 21:51 - Shining Light on Marginalized People & Voices * BULQ (https://www.bulq.com/about-us/) * Metacognition: Asking ourselves, “What are we not thinking about?” * Leadership * Changing Mental Patterns; Take a Different Path 31:30 - Benefits of Having Diverse Teams (Resources) & Risks of Homogeneity * Diversity wins: How inclusion matters (https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-wins-how-inclusion-matters) * Why diversity matters (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters) * The Chevy Nova That Wouldn't Go (https://www.thoughtco.com/chevy-nova-that-wouldnt-go-3078090) * Google Photos labeled black people 'gorillas' (https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/01/google-apologizes-after-photos-identify-black-people-as-gorillas/29567465/) * From transparent staircases to faraway restrooms, why these benign design details can be a nuisance for some women (https://archinect.com/news/article/150073631/from-transparent-staircases-to-faraway-restrooms-why-these-benign-design-details-can-be-a-nuisance-for-some-women) 37:29 - Storytelling * Representation Matters * Normalization Reflections: Jess: We are feeling beings that rationalize. Damien: How technology impacts culture. Casey: Taking loudness for diversity, equity, and inclusion with people who don’t always talk about it. Who is more open to it or not? This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. **Transcript:: DAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 233 of Greater Than Code. I’m Damien Burke and I’m joined here with Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I’m Casey! And I’m here with our guest today, Jess Szmajda. Jess is currently a senior leader at AWS in the EC2 Networking organization. Previously, she was the first female CTO of a major media organization, Axios, and before that, the co-founder and CTO at Optoro, which helps top tier retailers nationwide handle their returned and excess goods. Jess got her start in tech in the 90s writing Perl to configure Solaris machines. Over the years, she’s contributed to Open Source and organized a number of communities. These days, focusing on the DC Tech Slack and the DC-based Joy of Programming Meetup. Outside of the tech world, Jess is a singer-songwriter, an improviser, a gamer, a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, and a Mom to the most wonderful, Minecraft-obsessed 6-year-old imaginable. Welcome Jess. DAMIEN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Jess. JESS: Thank you! It's nice to be here. DAMIEN: So I know someone has prepped you with our first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JESS: My superpower is that I can play any instrument you hand me and I – DAMIEN: Oh. JESS: [laughs] I acquired it by being a giant nerd. [laughs] I went to a special music high school here in the DC area called Suitland High School and I played all kinds of different instruments. I was the principal bassoonist of the DC Youth Orchestra for a while. Music's always been a lifelong love of mine and it's been a mission to find every strange instrument I can find to figure out how it works. So it's challenge [chuckles] to find something that I can't play. [laughs] DAMIEN: Oh, I'm so tempted and of course, the first thing I would have gone with is the double reed bassoon and oboe, but that's too easy. JESS: That’s right. DAMIEN: Banjo, of course, you’ve got steel drum. JESS: Steel drum and plate, yeah. DAMIEN: Cajon. JESS: Cajon. Oh, I have heard of it. DAMIEN: Aha! JESS: I haven't actually touched one. I'll figure it out. [laughs] DAMIEN: It's particularly easy. JESS: Nice. [laughs] CASEY: I don't know very many people who play more than just an instrument, or two. I think it might be like you and I are the two that come to mind for me, honestly. [laughter] I have an instrument in every color, by the way. That's the way I collect them. [laughter] JESS: Nice. CASEY: I’ve got a white accordion. How do you feel like this breadth of instrument ability has affected your life in other ways? JESS: I don't know. That's an interesting question. How has it affected my life in other ways? I mean, there's the obvious tie into music and technology. There's such an incredible confluence of musicians who are engineers and vice versa. I was actually talking to someone at the office earlier about that and she was theorizing it's because all of the patterns and rhythms that we think about and how that ties into a regular patterns and systems that we think about as engineers and I think it's a really interesting way to think about it, for sure. I do think that there's a certain element of cross-culturalism that you get from learning other cultures instruments. Certainly, the berimbau, the Brazilian martial art? [laughs] DAMIEN: Capoeira? JESS: Capoeira, yeah. The capoeira, the berimbau instrument that has the long string and you have the little – I think you learn a lot about what led to developing an instrument so relatively simple, but creating such an incredible art form in the culture where people just wanted to dance and share their heritage with each other and picked up whatever they could find that would make interesting and fun sounds and created an entire culture around that. So for me, it's as much cultural exploration and understanding as it is anything. I think it's wonderful. DAMIEN: Yeah. That's really amazing. I had a tiny insight on this recently. I saw an amazing video about a Jimmy Hendrix song with the basic premise being, what key is this song in? It's a really difficult question because—and I'm going to go a little bit music nerd here—the tonic is e, but the chord progressions and the melodic signature doesn't really fit that. Amazing 20-minute video, but the end conclusion is that using Western art music tonality to describe blues music, American blues music, it's a different tonality. So it doesn't really make sense to say what major key is this in, or what minor key is this in. JESS: Yeah, totally. My partner and I, this morning, we were watching a video about Coltrane's classic—my favorite thing is interpretation in the 60s—and how he's basically playing between these major and minor tonalities constantly. It's not necessarily tonal from the Western sense, but it’s certainly beautiful and I think it's certainly approachable and understandable to any ear regardless of how you decompose it. Anyway, giant music nerd, sorry. [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah, but it ties so closely to what you were talking about as an instrument being cultural. The guitar, the five-string guitar, is tuned for American music, which is a slightly different tonality from Western European music. So when you think about “Okay, well, that's very slightly different. Now, what is it like in Africa, in Australia, in Asia?” Then it gets all, it's got to be very, very different. JESS: Oh, yeah. I saw this guy in Turkey, he's modified a guitar to add quarter tones to it because a lot of Turkish music uses quarter tones and so, it's just like the fretboard is wild. It has all of these extra frets on it and he plays it. It's absolutely incredible, but it's wild. It's amazing. DAMIEN: So I want to tie this into different cultures, frameworks, and technology. How about that? JESS: Yeah, you bet, let's do it. [laughs] CASEY: Good segue. JESS: So actually, that's something that's been on my mind is this Ruby community diaspora in a way. I know Greater Than Code has a lot of Ruby folks on it and I'm not sure about the latest incarnation, but definitely a lot of Ruby roots. I think that we've seen this incredible mixing of culture in the Ruby community that I haven't seen in other places that drives this – well, I think [inaudible], it's a really fantastic way to sum it up like, math is nice and so we are nice. As much as that might be a justification to be nice, be nice anyway, but it's still this ethos of we are nice to each other, we care, and that is baked into the community and my journeys and other language communities, I think haven't shared that perspective that it is good to be nice in general and some of them even are, I think are focused on it's good to fight. [laughs] So I've been really curious about this movement, Rubius’s movement into other language areas, like Go, Rust, and Alexa, et cetera, et cetera, how much of that carries forward and what really can we do to drive that? DAMIEN: Yeah. So my question is how does a technological community, what is it about the community? What is about the technology? Why is it different? You and I both wrote Pearl in the 90s and so, that is a very different community. I look at Ruby and I write mostly Ruby now and I go, “Why is it different? What's different about it?” JESS: Yeah, no, it's a good question. A lot of the early conversation that I remember in the Ruby community was—and just contextually, I've been using Ruby since 2006, or so, so that era. A lot of the early conversation I remember was about develop the language to optimize for developer happiness. I think that's a really unique take and I haven't heard of that in any other place. So I'm wondering how much that might've been the beginnings of this. I don't know. DAMIEN: Something came up in a Twitter conversation, I saw a while back where they compared Ruby and Pearl, I'm pretty sure it was Pearl and well, one of the defining features of Pearl was that there's more than one way to do it and Ruby has that same ethos. Literally, in the standard lib, there’s a lot of aliases and synonyms. It's like, you can call pop, or drop and I can't keep it straight. [chuckles] But anyway, then I thought to myself, “Well, in Pearl, that's an absolute disaster.” I pull up a profile and I'm like, “I don't know what this is because I don't know what's going on.” Whereas, in Ruby, I've loved it so much and so, what's the difference and the difference pointed out to me was that in Ruby, it was for expressiveness. Things have different names so that they can properly express, or better express the intention and in Pearl, that wasn't the case. JESS: Yeah, no, totally. I think actually looking at Ruby and Python, I think were both heavily influenced by Pearl and I think Python definitely took the path of well, all of this nonsense is just nonsense. Let's just have one way to do it. [laughs] Having worked with some Python developers, I think that perspective on there is one correct path really drives that community in a lot of ways. I think some people find that releasing really simplifying for them because they're like, “I got it. I know the answer.” Like it's a math problem almost. As a Rubyist going into the Python community, I was like, “Oh, I'm so stifled.” [laughs] Where is my expressiveness?! I want to write inject, or oh, I can't even think of the opposite of inject. Collect. [laughs] Those are two different words for me. I want to be able to write both, depending on what I'm doing so. It's also interesting, like I see a lot more DSL development in Ruby than I see in any other language and maybe Alexa also. But I think that also comes from the same perspective of there is not one right way to do it. There's the best way for this problem and there's the best way for this kind of communication you're trying to drive. It's interesting, as I'm talking myself into a corner here a bit, Ruby almost emphasizes the communication of code more than the solving of the problem and I think that might actually help drive this community where we care about the other humans we're working with, because we're always thinking about how we communicate with them in a way. CASEY: I think about the term human-centered design a lot lately and that's becoming more and more popular term, a way to describe this thing. Ruby totally did that. Ruby looked at how can we make this easy for humans to use and work with and I think that's beautiful. I keep thinking about a paper I read a long time ago that a professor made-up programming language and varied features of it like, white space matters, or not, and a whole bunch of those and measured which ones were easier for new people to learn and which ones were harder for new people to learn. As a teacher, I want to use whatever is easy for the students to learn so they can get their feet wet, so they can start learning and building and doing things and get excited about it, not get hung up on the syntax. So human-centered design baked into Ruby is, I think partly why the community is so human-centered. I think you're exactly right. JESS: Yeah. That's really interesting. That's a large part of why the Joy of Programming Meetup, I think has been really fun is we get to learn from how different language communities build things. I think it was founded on that kind of thinking is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis for better, or worse theorizes language shapes thought and I think that that is to some degree, at least true in how we think about writing code and solving problems. So the kinds of solutions that you see from different language communities, I think very incredibly. I don't know, even just as simple as from like J2EE, which is the ivory tower of purity in XML [laughs] to obviously, I don't want to pick on Rails, but Rails is an open system. [laughs] An interpretive dance, perhaps. I think it's really interesting, the web frameworks even I see in Haskell almost feel like I'm solving a math problem more than I'm creating an API, or delivering content into somebody. So it's hard for me to separate, is this a community of thought of people who are attracted to a certain way of solving problems? Is this driven by the structure and format of the language? I don't know. DAMIEN: I know you mentioned the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and their research has been shown to be problematic. JESS: Yeah, for sure. DAMIEN: [laughs] But I will say that the hypothesis is that language shapes thought and I would say that the correct state – correct [chuckles] a better description for me is that language is thoughts and so, the language you use is the sort of things you're thinking about. So if you say inject when you mean collect, those are different things, you're going to get different things out of them. This is why we use get annotate instead of get playing. JESS: For sure. Exactly. So at AWS, this is big drive and I'm not speaking for AWS on this, I'm just speaking for me. But I'm noticing this drive for inclusive language and I think it's really beautiful. Connecting that drive, frankly, in the broader tech community to everything that's been going on in this last year in how we interact with each other as humans from different backgrounds, et cetera. It's like, what kinds of dominant culture paradigms have we baked into our code beyond even the very obviously problematic statements, but just the way that we think about, I don't know. Part of me is like, “Well, is object-oriented design driven by certain cultural expectations that we have, or functional?” I don't know. What paradigms would we get if we'd have had a different dominant culture developing technology? I don't know. It's fascinating. DAMIEN: Yeah, and [inaudible] is an excellent example of that. It's a punishment. This is wrong. I did a whole talk several years ago about specifications versus tests. I don't want you to write tests for your code; tests are something you do afterwards to see if something is suitable. Write a specification and then if the code and specifications don't match, well, one of them needs to change. [laughs] JESS: That's right. I love that. That's also kind of like the Pact Contract Testing space. It's like, I like this framework because it allows a consumer of an API to say, “This is what I expect you to do,” and then the API almost has to comply. Whenever I've talked about Pact, I think with a lot of developers, they're like, “Wait, what? That doesn't make any sense at all.” I'm like, “Well, no.” In a way, it's like the API’s prerogative to deliver what the customer expects and to be always right. The customer is right here, in this case and I think it's a really great way to look at this differently. CASEY: That should totally be the tagline for Pact: the consumer is always right. JESS: I love it. [laughs] CASEY: Another way language shapes things, I noticed lately is Valheim is a super popular game where you're a Viking and building houses. There's a command you can type called “imacheater” that lets you spawn in equipment and building materials. On all the forums online, people are harassing each other for doing their own creative mode for spawning stuff in because of that language, I suspect. So in a recent patch, they changed it from imacheater to devtools, or something like that and the forums have rebranded. There's a new moderator is posting things and the culture is completely changing because the devs changed that one word in the changelog and it's just so cool to see language matters. JESS: That's amazing. That's so cool. Actually, I'm totally hooked on Valheim also along with probably everybody else. I have my own little server with some friends. Anyway, we noticed on the Valheim server that there was somebody who sort of redid the loading screen and they really hypersexualized the female character in the painting and actually got a surprising amount of feedback like saying, “Please don't do that. We love Valheim because it's not clearly gendered, or particularly one way, or the other,” and the artist actually took that feedback to heart and put together a much better version of the thing where the woman was very well armored and looked ready for battle and it was really cool. I've been thinking about the whole tech community and there's so many connections to the gamer community as well. Ever since Gamergate, I think we've been putting a really hard light on this whole world. It's just so heartwarming and incredible to know that like this Viking destroying trolls game has people who actually care enough to say, “No, let's pay attention to what that woman's wearing. Make sure she wears something that's actually reasonable.” That's cool. We've come a long way. I mean, not perfect, but it's a long way. CASEY: Yeah, a long way. I always think about progress in terms of people in four groups. There's like people who are vocally for something like they would speak up in this case, people who are vocally against it, and then quiet people who are for, or against it. We can see the vocal people who are supporting this now and I love to think about how many people are moving in that direction who are quiet; we can't see. That's the big cultural shift under the covers. JESS: Yeah. That's a big question. That makes me think about when I was at Optoro, we were trying to understand our employee engagement and so, we used this tool, Culture Amp, which I imagine a lot of people have seen. We did a survey and we got all this data and it's like, “Hey, everybody's really engaged. Maybe there's a couple of minor things we can fix.” But then we were talking to some of our Black employees—those of you who can't see me, I'm white—and there was just a lot of like, “Wow, this doesn't represent us.” Like, “What are you doing? We actually aren't don't feel like this is a really great representation.” We're like, “Well, the data says everything's fine.” So what we actually did, the next survey we ran, we included demographic data in the dataset and then we were able to distribute the data across racial demographics and we saw, oh no, our Black employees are pretty much all pissed off. [laughs] We've done a really bad job of including them for a lot of reasons. For example, we had a warehouse and most of our Black employees worked in the warehouse and it turns out that we had a very corporate-based culture and we didn't pay enough attention and we didn't really engage everybody. The fact that they were basically all in the warehouse is kind of also a problem, too. So there was a lot of really great eye-opening things that we got to see by paying attention to that and looking not just at our Black employees, but all our different demographics. We learned a lot and I think we had a real humbling moment and got to listen, but it's really this quiet – either people who don't use their voice, or can't use their voice, or maybe don't know how to use their voice in a lot of different ways. These people, I think make such an incredible impact on the true feeling of a place, of a community, of a company and really sitting down and listening to those people, I think can be really hard in any position. So I was really happy we were able to do that, but I think you're totally right, Casey, that it's not just moving the vocal people to really change the Overton window, I suppose on what's acceptable in a community. But it's fundamentally, how do you change the people who you aren't hearing from? How do you frankly even know? CASEY: Yeah, it's a big question. There's no easy answer. There's a lot of approaches. I'm glad people are talking about that in the meta sense, that's huge. We want to do this as a community, but there's work to be done and then even once people are comfortable expressing their point of view, there are then further tiers we're going to have to go through like that other people around them understand. They're actively listening and they internalize it. And then beyond that, actually acting on it. I've had experiences at work where I'm usually very confident, I'll say my point of view regardless of the context. I like being outspoken like that and represent quieter people, but often leadership and other people around me don't understand, or even if they do, they don't incorporate that into the plan and then everybody is still very frustrated, maybe even more so in a way, because a light is shining on this problem. And that's the same for marginalized voices. If they can just be heard, that's great, but we have to go farther than that, too. JESS: I couldn't agree more. This is the thing that I struggle with sometimes. I love people. I'm very extroverted. I'm very gregarious, [laughs] as I imagine you can tell, and I like to engage with people and I try to listen, but I find that sometimes I have a big personality and that can be tough, [laughs] I think sometimes. So I super value people you Casey, for example, who I think are much better listeners [laughs] and are willing to represent that. So that's huge. I also, though on the flip side, I know that I can use that loudness to help represent at least one aspect of marginalized people. I'm trans and I'm super loud about that and I'm very happy to make all kinds of noise and say, “Don't forget about trans rights!” [laughs] Frankly, I think it's kind of a wedge into I'm one kind of marginalized community, I represent one kind of marginalized community, but there's a lot more and let's talk about that, too. Not to toot my horn, but like I think those of us who are allowed to have a responsibility to use our loudness in a way that I think supports people and also, to listen when we can. DAMIEN: Can we explore a bit into the into the metal problem of hearing from marginalized voices? I'm an engineer at heart, first and foremost, and so, how do we solve this meta problem? You gave a good example with the survey separated by demographics knowing that racial and gender demographics, or well, finding out that [chuckles] racial and gender demographics were important factors than you think, but how do we solve this on a broader issue? I don't know. JESS: No, that's a great question. I think we have so much calcified thinking that at every organization and every place in the world, there's so much like, “Well, this is the way we've done things,” and frankly, it's not even, “This is the way we've done things.” It's just, “This is the way it works and this is what we do,” and just thinking outside the box, I think it's hard. Finding these areas that we are being blind to in the first place, I think it takes a certain amount of just metacognition and patience and self-reflection, and that's very difficult to do, I think for any human. But driving that shows like this, for example, making sure that people care and think about these kinds of problems and maybe take a second. You as a listener, I'm going to challenge you for a second, take a minute at the end of this podcast and think about what am I not thinking about? I don't know, it's a really freaking hard question, but maybe you might find something. But it's politicians, it's media, it's our leaders in every aspect making sure that we shine a light on something that is different, something that is marginalized, I think is incredibly valuable. That's a first step. But then playing that through everything else we do, that's hard. I think it falls on leaders in every realm that we have like, community leaders, conference organizers, people who lead major open source projects. Making sure that people say, “I believe that Black Lives Matter.” “I believe that we should stand against violence against the Asian community.” Those, I think are powerful statements and saying, “Hey, have we heard from somebody that doesn't look like us lately, who doesn't come from our same socioeconomic educational background?” It's tough. I had food, but I grew up relatively poor, and I think even that is such a huge difference of experience and background to a lot of people that I end up working with and I've been able to talk about like, “How are we setting prices?” Well, who are we actually thinking about? We're not thinking about ourselves here. We're thinking about a different market. Let's make sure we talk to those people. Let's make sure we talk to our customers and make sure that this actually works for them. I was really proud. At Optoro, we built a new brand called BULQ where we took – so 2 seconds on Optoro. We took returns and excess goods from major retailers and helped them get more value out of it and a a lot of the time, we built great classification systems to say, “Oh, well this is a belt and I know how to price belts because I can look on eBay and Amazon and determine, et cetera.” But a lot of the times we couldn't build these kinds of models, like auto parts, for example, were notoriously difficult for us. So we could say, “Oh, this is an auto part. But I don’t know, carburetor, manifold? Who knows?” [laughs] So we were able to classify them as auto parts and then we put them into these cases, maybe like 3-foot square large boxes, and then we were able to sell those in lots to basically individual people who had time to learn what they were and then could resell them. The story that I love to tell here is they're a laid-off auto factory worker, knows a ton about auto parts, and can probably scrounge up enough money to afford this $200 to $300 box, brings it to their house, knows exactly what these parts are and knows exactly what the value is and then can resell them for like 3x to 5x on what this person bought them for. I was so proud to be able to have created this kind of entrepreneurial opportunity for people that we would otherwise often forget about because so much of tech, I think is focused on us. So, it's an interesting thing kind of being at AWS, which is very much a tech for tech company. I love it, don't get me wrong, but sometimes I think these opportunities to listen to the rest of the world, we miss out on. DAMIEN: Yeah. You challenged us to ask ourselves the question, what are we not thinking about and that level of metacognition sounds impossible. It might be impossible. It's close to impossible, if it's not. So I can't help to think the only way to really get that knowledge, that insight is to get people who are different from me, who have different backgrounds, who have different life experiences. You got a great example of someone who knows a lot about car parts, bring them in, they have years of experience in car parts and they can do this stuff that you can't do. But then also, along every axis, if you look around. If you look around the leadership and go, “Oh, there's nobody in leadership here who has this type of experience,” that knowledge, that insight and people like that are not going to be served because it's impossible for them. They don't even know. They can't know. JESS: Could not agree more and it is leadership. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. So many times I've seen, having been a leader, ultimately, you end up in a room with other leaders and you end up making decisions. And if you don't have other voices in there, if you don't have diverse voices, you don't get that benefit. Even if you've gone to the trouble of paying attention to diverse voices beforehand, there's always some data, some argument that comes up and it's like, “Oh, well, maybe, maybe not.” Yeah, I cannot agree enough. This is the other flip side of that is that as a business leader, I have to think about prioritizing the outcomes of the business, it is a fact of my position and I like to think that I work in a lot more data to what that means than other business leaders perhaps. Like, impact on the community. [laughs] Impact on the people. But a lot of times, we'll be having these discussions about who to hire and maybe we'll have done a really great job—and this isn't specific to any particular company that I'm talking about, but I know that this kind of thing happens. Maybe we've done a really great job of getting a diverse pipeline and having talked to a bunch of different kinds of candidates, but when it comes down to it, we're trying to make often the lowest risk decision on who to hire and so often, we are too risk averse to somebody whose background doesn't quite line up to what we're expecting, or to what we think we need. I like to think that I push hiring communities in conversations like that and say like, “Look, let's think beyond what's risky here and factor in more of these aspects to the conversation of getting diverse voices.” But too often, it's very easy, I think for leaders to think, “Well, we’re just going to hire the known quantity,” and I think that is again, on the meta, a major thing that we need to fix. There's so much more to being an effective leader than having the standard pedigree. DAMIEN: Well, there's also, like you mentioned, the risk aversion to not want to hire somebody who's not like all the other people, but then what are the huge risks of having only people who are alike in certain aspects? JESS: Exactly. Couldn't agree more. I think there's tons of examples. If we Google right now, we'd find like companies have made really dumb mistakes because they didn't have somebody in the room who could be like, “That?” The first one that comes to mind is the Chevy Nova, they tried to sell that in Spanish speaking countries, [laughter] “doesn't go,” “not going anywhere.” [laughs] I mean, like that could have been avoided, right? [laughs] CASEY: Nova. JESS: Nova. That might be a trivializing one, but there's been a lot worse and that's a major business risk and I think those arguments carry some weight. I love that so many organizations are prioritizing hiring more diverse leaders, especially, but this is deep pattern that we've gotten into. So that actually comes to mind when you're thinking about how to change your mental patterns. I'm an improviser, I'm all about trying to change my mental patterns all the time so I can try to be creative. Obviously, there's plenty of silly improv games that you get into, but something that's simple, I think that anybody can do is go for a walk and take a different path. Just turn a different way than how you used to. We, humans love to get into patterns, especially engineers, which I find to be highly ironic. Engineers are all about creating change, but don't like change themselves typically. [laughs] But do something a little different, turn left instead of right today, look up instead of down. Those, I think subtle physical changes really do influence our mental states and I think that can actually lead us to thinking in new ways. CASEY: I love it. That's very actionable. I've been doing a lot of walks and hikes and I actually try to go to a different hiking location each time because of that. I think about that idea all the time, take a different path, and it is great. Every time I do it, I feel amazing. I don’t know, more flexible, I think differently. Yeah, try it, listeners. I dare you. JESS: I love it. CASEY: I'm sure there are papers written showing that having diverse teams have very measured effects, a whole bunch of them, more than I know more, than I've read. Well, I guess first of all, I don't know that the data has been collected in a single spot I can point people to and that would be pretty powerful. But then secondly, even if we had that, I'm not sure that's enough to change minds at companies in any widespread way. It might just help some people, who already care, say their message very clearly. Do you know of anything like that Jess, or Damien, either of you? What's the one resource you would send to someone who wants to be equipped with diversity and inclusion data? JESS: Yeah. This study McKinsey did a while ago that, I think gets a lot of traction here where they demonstrated the companies have better total performance with more diverse groups of people and went into some depth with data. I think it's a fantastic study. It's definitely one that I reference often. I've used it to change minds among people who were like, “Wow, what's it really matter?” No, I’ve got data. [laughs] I know. I can see Casey here on video and Casey's mouth just went open [laughs] It's like, “Yes, no, it's, that's real.” No shade on the people I've worked with, I love them, but like, this is such a thing. There are cynics in corporate leadership who want to focus on profit and sometimes, you have to make a cynical argument in business and a cynical argument can come down to data and this data says, “No, look, if we get more people in here who look different from us, we're going to make more money and that's good for you and your bottom line.” So sometimes you have to walk the argument back to that, even if it feels gross and it does, it's like, “No, this actually matters to your bottom line.” DAMIEN: That's a great argument and it's a positive argument. In my view of corporations, I feel like the larger they get, the more you have an agency problem where people aren't looking to take risks to get the positive benefits, they're going to do things to avoid backlash and negative things. So I think larger company, more middle management, more people you’re answerable to, especially on the short-term, the more people are better motivated by fear. So for that, I want to pull out like, what are the risks of homogeneity? You mentioned the Nova. You mentioned like, oh, there was – [laughs] I pull this out far too often. There was an AI image classifier that classified Black people as gorillas. There was a store. Oh goodness, I think it was an Apple store. Beautiful, beautiful architecture, glass everywhere, including the stairs. These are all the harms that come from homogeneity. [laughs] What was the expensive fixing those stairs? It couldn't have been cheap. JESS: Oh my gosh. [chuckles] I don't even wear skirts that often. [laughs] DAMIEN: And I know that's a problem because when I heard that story, I was multiple paragraphs in before I realized the problem. I wear skirts less than you, I'm sure. [laughter] JESS: For sure. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, I think those stories are really important for us to be able to tell and to share with each other because diversity matters. I think it's easy to say that and especially among people who care, people who prioritize it. We almost take it as like a, “Well, of course,” but I think there is still, getting back to that quiet group of people who don't say what they actually think, there's a lot of people who are on the fence, or maybe frankly disagree. It's like, “Well, you can disagree and I respect your disagreement, but here's the data, here's the results, here's the impact. Let's talk about that. Do you have a better way to handle this? Because I don't.” DAMIEN: So I think the risk is especially acute in tech companies and in tech for tech companies where things are far more homogeneous. Next week on how to pronounce these words. [laughs] So what can we do? Is there anything special that we can do in those sort of environments? JESS: Yeah. Well, besides have the conversation, which I think is something we can all do. Not to fangirl too much about Amazon, but I really do like the company and I'm really enjoying my experience. A lot of it comes down to how we've expressed our leadership principles. We say this is our culture and our values and we actually apply it constantly like, if you ever come to talk to an Amazon person, I'm going to tell you about how I've disagreed and committed and what I'm doing to think big and how I'm customer obsessed. I'm going to talk about those things directly. To this, we say one of our leadership principles is that leaders are right a lot and that feels weird, right? Leaders are right a lot? “Oh, I just happen to know everything.” No, that's not what that means. We actually go into it in more depth and it's like leaders look to disconfirm their beliefs and seek diverse perspectives and we bake that right into one of our core cultural values. I think that that is absolutely critical to our ability to serve the broader tech community effectively. The fact that we hold leaders to being right through having gone through a crucible of finding out how they're wrong, I think is magical and I think that's actually something that a lot more companies could think to do. It's like, you as a tech person and you think, “Oh, I'm going to go sell this great new widget to all of my tech buddies.” Okay. You might be right. But how could you make that bigger? How could you make that better? Like go, try to find out how you're wrong. That should be something we value everywhere. It's like, “No, I'm probably wrong. I want to be right.” So the way to get right is to find out every way I'm wrong and that means talk to everybody you can and find out. CASEY: From our conversation here, I'm picking up a couple of tools we have to help persuade people to get them to be louder, or more proactive at least. Data is one. Telling stories from other companies is another one. And then here, I'm picking up get your own stories that you can really tell from your point of view and that's maybe the strongest of the three, really. The change is you, too. I love that idea. JESS: Yeah. We had a internal conference this week, the networking summit, and there was a great session last night from somebody talking about what customers love and what customers hate about our products. He was just telling story after story about customers saying, “Oh, I'm so frustrated with this.” “I would love to change that.” Those stories, I think have so much more weight in our minds. Humans are evolved to tell the stories to each other. So if we have stories to tell, I think those are so much – they connect at a deeper level almost and they help us think about not just that top of brain logical, almost engineering, binary yes, no, but it's more this deeper heart level. “I understand the story that led to this position. I understand the human that feels this way.” Personally, I think no matter how logical we think we are; [chuckles] we’re still walking bags of meat [laughs] and there's a lot to be said to respect that and to connect with that. So yeah, storytelling is huge. DAMIEN: You brought up, earlier in our conversation, about how things might be different with a different cultural paradigm. This is an enormous example of this. White Western culture overvalues logic and objectivity. It's a by-product of the culture and there's a conflation between objectivity and rationality and rightness. Weirdly enough, in my experience, that makes people less able to be rational and objective. It's quite amazing, ironic, and tragic. But if you follow the science, you follow the logic, you follow the rationality; what you'll discover is that humans are not naturally logical, rational beings. We are not rational beings that feel; we are feeling beings that rationalize. From the beginning from the birth of humans as a species, stories and communication have been how we navigate the world, how we see the world, how our beliefs and behaviors change and you can see that throughout all of history and it's the narratives that change everything. So that's something that is super important to have, to know and especially if you want to be effective. Having grown up in this culture, though, it amuses me to no end how little I use that knowledge. [laughs] I argue with logic and facts and wonder why don't people don't understand when I have all the logic and facts that tell me that that's not going to change what they do. [laughs] JESS: Oh, yeah. Honestly, I think our political climate right now is representative of that because it's like, I don't know, I feel like it's so logical and factual, my political perspectives, and then I'll talk to somebody else and they feel the exact same way. Having been in media, I've seen like a lot of what we end up believing is how we sold it to ourselves and the stories that we've told around it and what we've paid attention to. We've listened to it. It's so easy to develop this cognitive filter on the stories that don't line up to your expectations. I don't know. This is, I think an area that engineers really overlook time and time again, is the power of media and the power of the stories that we tell. Being a trans person, I didn't come out until I was in my late 30s because the stories, I grew up with of trans people were stories of serial killers, rapists, murderers, and people who were at the very edges of society and like, I'm like, “Well, I'm not that. I can't be trans.” [laughs] It wasn't until we had these news stories of love, or hate. Caitlyn Jenner, I think set a new story on the world and a lot of things changed around then where we were able to see ourselves in a light that wasn't just pain and I think that we've seen a lot more trans people come out because they're able to see themselves in these happier stories and better stories. So we need more stories like that. Like Pose, I think is amazing and great stories of standing up in a hard place and owning your power, even under all this adversity, I think it's incredible. Those set of stories, I think are just so incredible for everybody and we just need so much more. I could rant for a while. [laughs] CASEY: Yeah. I'm totally on board with this as a queer man, I wasn't comfortable for a lot of my life being that because of the representation. I'm not into drag, but that's not a requirement. [chuckles] A friend of mine just shared a list of children's books that are incidentally queer and I just think that's so cool. The phrase, even. They're just regular storybooks, not about being queer as a topic, but just people doing normal stuff that happened to have including queer characters. JESS: I love that. CASEY: The world is changing. JESS: Yes, and I think we have a responsibility to be a part of that storytelling. Let's tell stories and it doesn't have to be a big deal that the person you’re talking about is a female engineer. No, she just happens to be an engineer. Let's tell stories where he has a husband. Who cares? He has a husband, it's great. It's not the focus of the story. It's just a part of the whole, the melior that we're in. That's really important. So, I think a lot of normalizing – a lot of acceptance comes through normalization and honestly, it's so complicated because there's this tendency to whitewash when you go into this normalizing place. It's like, “Oh, I don't see skin tone.” No, I think that's not the way to do it. I think it's like there are differences in us, in our backgrounds, in our cultures, in our experiences, and that is incredible and that is wonderful, and it's not the story, but it's a part of the story and that's an important part. DAMIEN: Yeah, as a Black man, I've definitely seen this. I like to say Black Panther was the best thing that happened to African-Americans in the history of cinema. Get Out is another example. It's very much about the Black experience, but it's not the old story of what being Black in America is like and so, it's very different. JESS: Definitely. Yeah. CASEY: We're getting near the end of time we have today, let's shift gears into what we normally do at the end, our reflections. What's something that you're going to take away from this conversation? Jess, or Damien, who wants to go first? JESS: I'll start because I already wrote it down here. Damien, you said, “We are feeling beings that rationalize.” That is going to stick with me. That was profound. I love that and it's so obvious, I think but I'd never thought to think of it that way, or to say it that way. So I’ve got to think about that one for a while, but that's, I think really going to stick with me. Thank you. DAMIEN: Thank you, Jess. That's quite an honor. I can drag out like probably a half dozen off the top of my head, or a dozen probably store of scientific studies that show that. [laughs] I never get enough of them mostly because I've been rationalizing more. Anyway, my reflection is really on how technology impacts culture, both within the technologists and how that relates to storytelling, communication, and language. All those things are creating culture and all those things exist in technology, in between technologists, and that's how we can make our culture. It's something that I want it to be, or more like something I want it to be. So thank you. JESS: That's awesome. CASEY: I think my takeaway is I'm noticing that I said I'm very loud and outspoken about a lot of stuff, and I care a lot about diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially when I’m groups of people talking about it, I talk about that all the time. But can I and how can I take that loudness for diversity, equity, and inclusion with people who don't always talk about it? Who can I approach and how can I tell who is more open to it or not? That's always a big open question for me. I guess, I'll be thinking about that especially this week. JESS: Well, this was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. DAMIEN: This was great, Jess. Thank you so much for joining us. JESS: Yeah, it was delightful. DAMIEN: I suppose this might be a good time to plug our Slack community, which is available to all Patreon for the podcast and also, all of our guests. So Jess, if you want to join us there and we can nerd out some more. I’ll keep throwing you instruments to try and stump you. JESS: Yes! Bring it on! [laughs] Special Guest: Jess Szmajda.

One of my favourite humans to follow on Insta is my dear friend Jessica Benstock. Not just because she is my buddy, but because she has a way of looking at assumed notions and flipping them upside down to look at them from multiple perspectives.Currently, the conversation about narcissistic and empathetic personality traits is “narcissists bad” and “empaths good”. So Jess and I decided to look at this dynamic from a different perspective. In reality, both narcissistic and empathic traits create a whole lot of suffering for all parties involved. When we notice these shadowy aspects that we see either in ourselves or our partners, we have a tendency to disown those parts of ourselves or judge those parts of our partners as being “bad”. This creates a fractured relationship with a very real aspect of the human experience.This conversation is going to be helpful for anyone who has been with or been the partner in a relationship who has struggled with: boundaries control power dynamicsself-worthWhich is really just another way of saying that if you are a human interacting with other humans, you’re going to want to tune into this episode. What You'll Learn in this Episode: Understand the spectrum of narcissistic and empathic qualities as survival mechanismsDiscuss how the conversation around narcissistic and empathic traits needs to change to be empowering for both to heal Explore how narcissistic and empathetic qualities are manifestations of immature masculine/feminine energies Dive into how Ego Death is an avenue to dissolve narcissistic and empathic traits without shameYour Speakers:Kat Lee is an Intimacy + Relationship Coach, Podcast Host and Creator of The Heart Lab, who guides folks to alchemize their emotions, cultivate conscious relationships and embody their healing journey.Kat Lee's Website // InstagramJessica Benstock helps scaling female CEOs end their anxiety, depression, & overwhelm + create thriving mental, emotional & sexual lives through the use of subconscious therapies, mindfulness practices, meditation, trauma informed leadership techniques, and energetic cultivation.Jessica's InstagramThis podcast is made possible with sound production by Andre Lagace.Original music by Mayan KitesSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=34245616)

When the food industry promises to police itself and pledges to improve nutrition in public health, can it be trusted to make meaningful change or must government mandate those changes? Our two guests today have done groundbreaking work to help address this very question. Dr. Jessica Fanzo, Professor of Global Food and Agricultural Policy and Ethics at Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Jennifer Harris is Senior Research Advisor for Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut. Interview Summary So Jess, let's begin with you. You coauthored what I thought was a very important and novel report released by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition on product reformulation by the food industry. Would you might explain what's meant by reformulation? When we think about reformulation, it's really defined as the process of all-terrain a food or a beverage product. You can alter that by improving the products' health profile or reducing the content of harmful nutrients or ingredients. So it's a process of either removing those negative ingredients or nutrients or adding back positive ones into foods. Why is that done? Because people consume a lot of processed foods. Almost every food that we consume has gone through some form of processing, but there's a whole range of that processing from very minimal to very highly processed, what's often called ultra-processed or junk food that doesn't have a lot of nutritional value. In the report, we were looking at what are the challenges with reformulating food? What are some of the opportunities to reformulate food? And in the realm of reformulation, has it had a positive impact on public health? So we were looking at those aspects of the reformulation of processed foods. So I'm assuming there could be enormous advances to public health if reformulation were done on a broad scale and or if it were done in a meaningful way. So what were your main findings then? Have there been examples of industry being successful with voluntary reformulation? Somewhat. And absolutely it could have potentially really important positive impacts for public health, but it's also not a panacea for improving diets and nutrition. And while there are some examples where voluntary reformulation has had some impact, the UK with salt and some other examples, overall we found that it's important for governments to mandate reformulation through different tools, whether it's labeling, taxes, et cetera. For foods that are not reformulated, we felt that it was really important for governments to mandate with clear, transparent and direct targets, particularly removing the unhealthy ingredients like added sugars, salts, unhealthy fats like trans fats. The food industry should be involved in implementing reformulation policies but not in their design. And governments need to really step in and step up. But that said, that doesn't mean that reformulation is going to solve all the problems. Governments also need to invest in many other tools to protect consumers and to invest in other ways to improve diets for nutrition. So reformulation shouldn't be the only answer. So I'm assuming the reason that food industry won't go far enough on their own is that these things that make the food less healthy also tend to make them pretty palatable, or give them long shelf life or properties that make people enjoy them a lot. And that why in the world would they do something that would make their products less desirable? Does that pretty much the case or do you see other reasons why? That's definitely true. I mean, these highly processed foods are cheap in their ingredients to make, they are very palatable, there's a high demand for them. We're seeing this shift now into low-income countries like with tobacco when consumers catch on that these foods are not so healthy, they go to populations where there's a bit of a lag in that knowledge. But also reformulating foods from the industry's perspective is not so easy. It's quite expensive to do it. It's difficult to reduce salt and sugar, which are vital not only for the taste of foods, but for their composition and shelf-life and texture. So it has a lot of ramifications to remove those ingredients. So meeting government mandates around reformulation can be really challenging and sometimes impossible for companies. So they often will deal with getting a warning label, for the example in Chile, they'll just take the warning label because they can't reformulate some foods. But there's a change in consumer demand and tastes. Consumers like their brands, but the more and more consumers are caring about clean labels, environmental sustainability, their health, people are concerned about the amount of sugar in foods so they're going to have to answer to that, that changing demand as consumers demand better foods whether it's from a health or sustainability or transparency perspective. Let me ask one more question related to this. Is it also the case that it's pretty difficult for some company to be the first out of the gate if they were inclined to do this voluntarily because then their products would become less desirable and their competitors would be kinda stuck in the old ways? So isn't that another argument for government intervening that everybody is on the same playing field? Absolutely, yes. I mean, why not hold every player accountable and to the same standards and mandates? It pushes them all to take action. So when we were interviewing some of the industry players, they really struggle because when they did try to reformulate some of the foods, consumers no longer bought them because they're very wedded to their brands, they're wedded to certain tastes, it's a real challenge for them to keep their consumer base. But at the same time, try to adhere to government mandate. And some companies care more about health and sustainability than others. We definitely learn that some companies have no interest in that, because they know they'll always be a big consumer base for these quote less healthy foods. So there's a real issue from company to company of who's willing to take more action to reformulate and who doesn't really care to reformulate at all and they're willing to live with warning stickers and taxes. So Jennifer, let's turn to you. So you've done really pioneering work on the impact of food marketing on children that began when we were colleagues together at the Rudd Center when it was at Yale University. And there I was witness to the fact that you created a very impressive methodology for studying what's a pretty complicated issue. And you paid a lot of attention to industry promises for self-policing of children's food marketing. Do you mind giving us a quick sense of what's being marketed to who and how, and how much marketing children are exposed to? Annually, companies spend over $13 billion in advertising food to all consumers. And just to put that number in perspective, the whole chronic disease prevention budget at the CDC is 1 billion. So the companies are really controlling the messages about what people should eat. And most of that money is spent to advertise very unhealthy products. The products that are contributing to poor diet and disease in this country. The biggest ones are fast food, sugary drinks, sweet and salty snacks and candy. Those categories represent about 80% of all foods that are advertised. Healthier categories of foods, if you look at all of juice, water, fruits, and vegetables and nuts combined, it's less than 3% of the total. So they're really pushing these very high fat, high sugar, high salt products extensively. Companies spend most of their advertising dollars on television ads. On an annual basis, kids see about 4,000 of those ads per year. So almost 4,000 ads, that's over 10 a day for unhealthy food. Kids of color, so black kids see twice as many of those ads. A lot of the worst products, their advertising is targeted to Black and Hispanic communities and especially adolescents. But TV isn't the only way companies advertise. And in the last few years, the ways that companies market just increased exponentially. Now with smartphones and tablets, they can reach kids any place and any time through things like ads on YouTube videos, social media, smartphone apps, with games and ordering programs, even educational websites teachers are using in grade school have ads on them. This kind of marketing is personalized. So what you see depends on what you do online. They know who you are and they can reach you. And unfortunately, this kind of marketing also is the kind of thing that parents can't monitor as easily as what your child is watching on TV. So the companies basically try to be wherever the consumer is to reach them with their advertising. Well those are really stunning numbers. I know one of the arguments the industry has made for years, and one of the things that you've addressed directly in your research is their claim that this food advertising doesn't really make kids or adults eat an unhealthy diet, it just shifts their preference from brand to brand. So if Coke is advertising a lot, they might say, "Well we just wanna take market share from Pepsi, "but we're not encouraging sugar beverage consumption." What would you say to that? That is something they've argued for a long time. And one thing that we showed is that just watching a television program with food advertising makes kids and adults eat a lot more both while they're watching and afterwards. And another of our colleagues, Ashley Gearhardt has done some really interesting research showing how the food advertising actually activates the reward regions of the brain and leads to increased consumption. So that's one way that food marketing affects more than brand preferences. There's also been a lot of research showing that if you advertise Coke, it increases consumption and purchases of all sugary drinks. They also affect sales of the categories, not just the specific brands. So with you and others doing so much work showing how much of the marketing there is and how disastrous the impact is, you can imagine the industry feels vulnerable to the possibility of outside regulation or perhaps even litigation. And so one of the things the industry has done and this links back to what Jessica was talking about in the context of reformulation, is to say that they can police themselves. So can you explain how they've gone about doing that? Well in the US there's a program called the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, which is the food industry self-regulatory program to address food advertising to kids. And there are similar programs in countries around the world. But basically what the industry has promised is that they will only advertise products that meet nutrition standards in child directed media. That sounds really great. They implemented the program in 2007, but you said Kelly, we've done a lot of research showing how many limitations and loopholes there are in this program. One is that they only define children as 11 years and younger. So they only have promised to reduce unhealthy advertising to young children. And more and more of the research is showing that adolescents are just as affected and maybe even more effected by the advertising. Since their program was implemented, they've increased their advertising to the slightly older group that isn't covered by the CFBAI. Another limitation is their definition of what is child directed is advertising in media where children are the primary audience. So on television that would basically be children's TV. So Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, those kinds of programs. But children watch a lot more television than just children's television. And so they can still advertise anything they want on programs that are also watched by adults and older children. And then the third major limitation is that they've set their own nutrition standards. So they have defined what is healthy. And maybe not surprisingly, a lot of the products that they say are healthier choices that can be advertised to kids are things like sugary cereals, fruit drinks that maybe have less sugar but they also have artificial sweeteners in them. Things like goldfish crackers, fast-food kids' meals, all of those can still be advertised to children under their nutrition standards. What we found is since the program was implemented in 2007, food advertising on children's television has gone down quite a bit, 45%. But at the same time, advertising on other types of television that children watch has gone up about 30%. So now kids see almost as much food advertising as they used to, but most of it is not on children's television, it's on the other kinds of television that they're watching. And a lot of the harder things to monitor, things like apps and social media and websites do not qualify as child directed media under this program. Now the reason I asked both of you to be on this podcast at the same time as I figured there would be interesting similarities, even though you're working on somewhat different topics, and boy does it turn out to be they're real themes weave through this. So let's talk next about what might be done then. So Jessica, with your work on industry reformulation, what have you concluded can be done voluntarily? Kelly, I think government needs to be much more involved than they are. The challenges that we see with voluntary regulation, whether it's in reformulation or marketing of unhealthy foods to children, we know that voluntary reformulation, industry sets its own agenda, they set their own targets, they have no accountability to meet those targets, they may pledge to reduce harmful ingredients but if the product has a very high level of these unhealthy ingredients, the reformulation may not make much of a difference from a public health point of view. So I think we need much more regulation. Governments need to hold industry accountable and ensure that they are meeting national standards for public health. I think government has been too laissez-faire about industry and the power that they hold. And I think now we're seeing the consequences of that not only in the United States, but everywhere in the world with rising levels of obesity and NCDs and unhealthy diets being a big risk factor with these processed foods playing a huge role in that. So we really need to see government step up in a much more profound way and hold industry having public health goals. It's a little bit of enough is enough. So Jess, just out of curiosity, let's say you were the government official in charge of taking such action and you have the authority to do it, where would you start? Would you start with particular nutrients across the food chain or would you start with certain categories of food and would you worry first about sugar, salt, fat? That's a good question. In the paper we outline four types of processed foods. To me I would probably look across the entire food supply chain at those highly, highly processed foods. And it would be good to start with at least the three categories of sugars, salt, and trans fats to even start with and setting key targets for those and marking those ultra-processed foods that go beyond that target. Chile had the great food law that's been enacted that's put warning labels on the front of packages and has regulated I think some of the advertising of those foods. Jennifer you probably know about this. And I think that's been an important case study for the rest of the world to look at of how Chile has done that because sales of those foods that have the warning label have gone down somewhere in the ballpark of I think between 23 and 28%, depending on the population. But I think there's lessons to be learned of how Chile has done that that other governments could learn from. Now I'm happy that you pointed out the advances in Chile because there have been some very impressive impacts reported from the studies that have been done so far. So I agree that that is really a model to look to. So Jennifer, let's just get your opinion on this. Where do you come down on this issue of voluntary versus mandated? So we've given the industry 12 years now to show that they can market healthier products to kids. And basically what they've done is they're marketing slightly healthier products to kids but the products they're marketing are not nutritious products that children should be consuming a lot of like sugared cereals. So it's pretty clear that they can't do it on their own and that regulation is required. In the US, we have a little bit of an issue that not all countries have because of the First Amendment. And advertising is protected speech according to the Supreme Court. So we can't just say companies cannot advertise anything. So we have to be more strategic about the kinds of regulations that we can implement here. If we could do anything we wanted, Chile is a great example. In the next year, they won't be able to advertise any products that are high in fat, sugar and salt before 9:00 p.m. So it's not just children's programming, they won't be able to advertise it. They had to take all their characters off their packages. And so Tony the Tiger can't be on the package of frosted flakes anymore because it's high in sugar. They've done a lot of great things in Chile and sure we can adapt some of what they've done. In other countries also, for example the UK has very strong laws about marketing foods in digital media. So that would be another thing that we could import from other countries.   Bios   Jessica Fanzo, Ph.D., is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food Policy and Ethics at the Berman Institute of Bioethics, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at the Johns Hopkins University in the USA. She also serves as the Director of Hopkins' Global Food Policy and Ethics Program, and as Director of Food & Nutrition Security at the JHU Alliance for a Healthier World.  From 2017 to 2019, Jessica served as the Co-Chair of the Global Nutrition Report and the UN High Level Panel of Experts on Food Systems and Nutrition. Before coming to Hopkins, she has also held positions at Columbia University, the Earth Institute, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Food Programme, Bioversity International, and the Millennium Development Goal Centre at the World Agroforestry Center in Kenya. She was the first laureate of the Carasso Foundation's Sustainable Diets Prize in 2012 for her research on sustainable food and diets for long-term human health. Jennifer Harris, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Advisor, Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Center. Previously, Dr. Harris worked as Director of Marketing Initiatives and was an Associate Professor in Allied Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Harris received her B.A. from Northwestern University and M.B.A. in Marketing from The Wharton School. Before returning to graduate school, she was a marketing executive for eighteen years, including at American Express as a Vice President in consumer marketing and as principal in a marketing strategy consulting firm. Harris completed her PhD in Social Psychology at Yale University with John Bargh and Kelly Brownell.

Welcome (back)! This week in celebration of National Mental Health Awareness Month and National Women's Health Month, Jess is teaming up with Blex Technologies to provide info and tools on the benefits of a healthy sex life. So Jess is running back her conversation with Blex Technologies COO, Shalita Smith. Blex Technologies is a house of direct-to-consumer brands in the sexual health + wellness space. The company owns and operates multiple brands catering specifically to the Black community: from a sex and relationship coaching app to an intimacy, a health-based subscription box. If you're following along in the Not Carrie Bradshaw universe, Jess has also partnered with Blex Technologies on a giveaway of one of their awesome sexual wellness subscription boxes. Check Jess's Instagram @notcarriebradshaw for details on how to enter. If you don't win, don't fret, as they have given us a discount code for 25% off of your entire order at https://blextechnologies.com/blexbox. That code is: HEALTHISWEALTH Follow Blex on Twitter @blex_app to follow along with the Twitter chat on sex, dating, and intimacy during the pandemic on May 26th at 7 PM EST. Jess will be a virtual panelist! Like, comment, share, subscribe, and review!

Sheletta is taking over the world! We gush over the incredible tenacity the this woman had after attending She Podcasts Live and taking action. We comment on the new series by Gimlet Media, all the network shows creating podcasts and how so many folks can work in podcasting without having to podcasts. Sending a great congratulations to Podchaser! And finishing off with a discussion on the suing podcasters! Send us your feedback, email feedback@shepodcasts.com! We can’t wait to hear from you! HAVE YOU GOTTEN YOUR VIRTUAL TICKET FOR THE SHE PODCASTS LIVE 2019? DO IT TODAY! Join the She Podcasts Super Squad for exclusive coaching and attention to you from Jess and Elsie for only $5 a month! (Only until January 2020 - after that price goes up to $10/mo) Episode Recap: length 44:43 Catching up on Jess’s cold…and it’s kinda gross Sheletta’s story on how she found the She Podcasts Live Conference via Facebook Ads! Jess reads Sheletta’s email! OMG that was amazing! Elsie adores everything that Sheletta has done and she shares the awesomeness of how she launched her new network If you attend a conference and take action like Sheletta you would conquer the world 8:23 NEWS Spotify has released a new podcast series produced and hosted by the Gimlet Media dudes Even though she went into listening to the Gimlet Media podcast series rolling her eyes, she now says to LISTEN TO IT There are some differences to remember when listening, we don’t have a team to do all the things - we are our own team Elsie is writing a new how to podcast series! 15:04 Little America is getting it’s own podcast and we’re so excited We need a name for a new segment all about streaming - send us feedback What all of these podcast production initiatives are doing is to expand what it means to work in podcasting The team discusses what other kinds of jobs they could have working in podcasting We get a bit of jewish guilt from Jess LIVE 24:47 congrats to the Podchaser team for raising more money - also have you followed us on Podchaser? A history of #PodRevMo started by one of our very own Super Squad peeps! And we support you reviewing us on Podchaser! 28:37 Y’all, we’re keeping an eye on this story where S-Town is being sued for making money off of a podcast without getting permission - albeit it’s journalism - what to do! Jess starts to speculate on what she could do that could get Elsie to sue her And OMG what a convoluted arguement and no one knows what’s going on, so if YOU can clear up our wrongness, do send us some audio feedback! So Jess’s computer shut off on her and we had to finish the show without her! GAH! Links! [ONE of Sheletta’s tweets!][https://twitter.com/TwoHauteMamas1/status/1223625056397529088] You need to read this! New platform spotlights black podcasters in the Twin Cities How a Tyler Perry speech inspired a podcasting platform Elsie’s tweet supporting Sheletta wearing her t-shirt Sheletta Makes Me Laugh! Her website!!! Gimlet Academy Has Arrived! How To Start A Podcast - Step By Step For Every Kind of Podcast Apple TV+ show ‘Little America’ to get a companion podcast, exec producer says | TechCrunch The ‘IMDb of Podcasting’ is finally here – Podchaser raises $1.65m to expand database, launch Podchaser Connect She Podcasts on Podchaser follow us! Today is #PodRevDay: A Day to Thank Podcasters! Lawsuit over popular ‘S-Town’ podcast headed to mediation - ABC News She Podcasts thank-you to our Sponsors! Our editor John from Audio Editing Solutions. He is so good you need to hire him STAT! For $5 per month get exclusive access to coaching with Jess and Elsie Get special time with Jess and Elsie weekly over in the She Podcasts Supersquad! All you need to do is to sign up to be a $5 per month Patreon. We are waaaaaay worth more than a cup of coffee. Patreon Help Us Spread The Word! It would be stellar if you shared She Podcasts with your fellow women podcasters on twitter. Click here to tweet some love! If this episode got you all fired up SUBSCRIBE wherever you get your podcasts! ONE CLICK! Feedback + Promotion for Women Podcasters You can ask your questions by emailing feedback@shepodcasts.com. We love audio feedback! Let your voice be heard, record your voice via voice memo in your smartphone and send it over! You can also join the She Podcasts Facebook group !

Hey Guys! Welcome to episode 16 were Mere has read: The Acid Bath Murderer: A Terrifying True Story of one of the Worst British Serial Killers. This one of the more unique and well known British serial killers, John George Haigh. John Haigh would kill simply because he wanted more.John had learned an skill while in jail and this was how to dissolve a body in sulfuric acid. This episode you all voted for Crop Circles on what was gonna tickle your pickle. So Jess covers some stories and some facts on crop circles. She also reads from actual news articles from 1967 in a magazine she found an antique store. Last but not least, as always the girls munch and crunch on a pickle product. This week they are trying Pringles Dill Pickle Chips (how have we not tried these yet?!)We hope you enjoy and thanks for listening!! **(WARNING:This story contains details of murder that some listeners may find disturbing.)

The Future of Food Our food system is described as ‘broken’ and held responsible for biodiversity loss, deforestation, desertification and high carbon emissions. So Jess and Livvy explore how it has got like this and what the future of food could look like. Be prepared for some time-travelling and interviews with India Langley from LettUsGrow. LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE & FURTHER READING Sapiens LettUs Grow Post War Agriculture 60 Harvests Left Food waste issues Solar Geoengineering Small Robot Company GMOs Lab meat Lab grown mean could be on UK Shelves within 5 years! Cow methane Insects for protein Why Eat Insects? Eat less meat campaign Red Bull Tonic Water The Impossible Burger Street Goat Pig Co-Operatives Food Waste Apps Too Good To Go Olio Community Fridges We are offering Woke &Confused Workplace sessions - Contact us! Send us your dilemmas, stories and episode requests! If you like what you hear, please give us a rating and leave a review! Follow us on Twitter and Instagram! If you like what you hear, please give us a rating and leave a review! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wokeandconfused/message

So Jess is like a sister to Tiff. They have known each other since Jess was about 9 or 10 years old. Now Jess has an 18month old. Boy does time fly! We were so compelled to have Jess on the show because she’s not only well spoken and specializes in western medicine like essential oil‘s, but she’s also the founder of a popular Facebook group called Bad Moms of BC! This group was intended for open dialogue of parenthood. But it doesn’t stop there because what Jess noticed in other groups was a lot of cliques and judging. Know anybody who is a parent is knows that being a parent is the hardest job you could ever have on the face of this earth other than working on a marriage. The last thing any parent needs to feel is judgment from people throwing rocks at glass houses.

GUEST BIO: Jess Dodson is a Windows Administrator living in Queensland, Australia.  Jess describes herself as a Microsoft fan girl and for the past couple of years she has been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional.  Jess is also keen to pass on information to others that is technically relevant, as well as other useful information for those in system administration. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Jess Dodson is Phil’s guest on today’s show. She has been supporting, managing and administering Active Directory & Windows Servers platforms. Her work has enabled her to become a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. She specializes in Windows Server Operating Systems, Active Directory, Group Policy, File and Print, OS Lifecycle management, information & account security services. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (0.58) – So Jess, can you expand on that summary and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Jess explains that, after 15 years in the industry, she is now focusing more on Active Directory identity and security. In Australia, she is also heavily involved with the IT Professional Association. Their aim is to advance the practice of Information Technology as a profession. Currently, they are working to increase visibility and demonstrating the fact that the profession is not as boring as people make it out to be. She uses social media to convince people to give working in the administration side of IT, a go. Rather than automatically pursue a career on the developer side of things. (2,15) – Phil wants to know if Jess has noticed a big difference in the operational side of the companies she has worked for. So far, Jess has only worked for two organizations. A university and government department and she have found that they work in a very similar way on the organization side, but she is aware that in the corporate world culture differences are definitely there. (3.20) – Phil asks Jess for a unique IT career tip. Jess’ number one tip is that getting into IT and enjoying the career you want isn’t a straight line. There is no you get this degree to get this specific job path, in the IT industry. The best approach is to do what works for you. For some people, that is getting a degree, for others it means going straight from school into a mundane IT job and starting at the bottom of the ladder. You just need to do what works for you. (4.35) – Jess is asked to share her worst career moment and what she learned from that experience. She goes onto share two experiences, because she could not decide which of them was worst. The first one was when she did some live testing on her employee’s production website and wiped it out. They were able to restore it, from backup, but it was a hard way to learn never to do any testing on a production website. The 2nd one happened when she needed to delete a production server from her employee’s Windows Update server. A server that had been decommissioned so did not need updates. But, instead of deleting just that server, she deleted the entire production server group. More than 500 servers could not receive Windows update. This happened the day before the production patches were due to be deployed. Jess realized her mistake within seconds. The delete computer and delete group buttons were side by side and she knew instantly that she had hit the wrong one. For Jess, the lesson from that unfortunate mistake was to admit your mistakes immediately. She turned to a close colleague who had some experience in scripting and together they were able to fix the problem within an hour. If she had not admitted it, she would have had to fix it manually, which would have taken all night. Working as a team the problem was solved really quickly. (7.25) – Phil asks Jess what her best career moment was. She says it was speaking at Microsoft Ignite in Australia in 2013. She had never spoken publically before, so was very pleased when her speech was voted the third best of the conference. If you want to hear it you can do so here. Her speech was all about Active Directory & Domain Security, Administration & Maintenance and is called Righting the Right Rights. (8.26) – Phil asks how Jess practiced for her talk at Microsoft Ignite. She said she went online and did some research about technical speaking and followed the advice to practice 10 times the amount of time you are due to speak for. Jess has gone on to speak at Microsoft Ignite three more times and she may be speaking at the big Ignite conference that is on tour and coming to Sydney in February 2019. (9.51) – Phil asks what excites Jess about the future of the IT industry. The fact that everything changes so fast, is something that Jess finds exciting. You have to be really good at learning and keeping up. The shift into a whole range of areas that were not even thought of 10 years ago is really exciting. She also likes the fact that security is becoming increasingly important. (11.01) – Are there any other technologies that are of interest to you outside of your general remit? Jess explains that she just loves what she does so much that she is really focused on the Microsoft sphere of technology stack. (11.40) – Phil wants to know what brand of phone Jess uses. It is an Android model and jokes that she is a Google fangirl as well as a Microsoft one. (12.11) – What drew you to a career in IT, Jess? She explains that her dad was a systems engineer. From a very young age she wanted to be like her dad, which, naturally, meant a career in IT. (12.27) – What is the best career advice you were given? Stand up for what you know is right. Find a way to convince your managers or, if you need to, go around them especially if it is related to security. (12.53) – If you were to start your IT career again, now, what would you do? If she were to start again Jess would focus on the cloud and brush up on her coding and scripting skills. (13.09) – Phil asks Jess what career objectives she currently has. Right now, Jess is focusing on Azure, Microsoft’s Cloud solution. As well as moving more into the security and identity space. (13.35) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you in your IT career, so far? Her response is people skills. Your network of people is a crucial asset. You need people you can rely on, so you need to “find your tribe.” (14.11) – Phil asks Jess to share a final piece of career advice. She says “love what you do”. You cannot just do this job to pay the bills. You need to be realistic and realize that it is not always possible to “do what you love”. Sometimes you are going to end up having to learn to “love what you do”. Taking this approach ensures that you get the most out of whatever situation you find yourself in and do a good job. BEST MOMENTS: (4.03) JESS – “Every person that I've ever met in IT has completely different ways that they've gotten into the industry. So, follow the path that works for you.” (7.17) JESS – “One person can get some things done. But as a team, you can get so much more done if you work together.” (11.01) PHIL – “Security is definitely going to be a hot topic over the next 10 15 years” (13.00) JESS – “Starting from now, focus on the cloud. Focus very heavily on the cloud. (13.47) JESS – “The network of people that you know, and that you can call on, it's your number one asset. You need a tribe to rely on.” CONTACT JESS DODSON: Twitter: https://twitter.com/girlgerms LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrdodson/ Website: https://girl-germs.com/

So Jess and I were walking around the GCSU campus just talking about everything and nothing at all.

“It’s not that birth is painful. It’s that women are strong.” Due to her bicornuate uterus, Jess was told that she could only ever have Cesarean births. When her first birth experience involved a rough surgery and brutal recovery, Jess was tempted to wonder if she even wanted to get pregnant again in the future. Then, she made a choice. Jess decided to trust in her intuition, in a supportive birth team, and in the natural process of birth. She chose to believe in her body and chose to take a risk. Jess’ VBAC story is fast, furious, and magical. She found the mental strength to fully commit and the physical strength to achieve the unmedicated VBAC she was told she’d never have. Jess is truly a woman of strength and so are you. *Additional links* The VBAC Link Facebook Community ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/VbacLinkGroup/ ) How to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for Parents ( https://www.thevbaclink.com/product/how-to-vbac/ ) JessandBabe YouTube Channel ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv-KpKaYHRC__UQ9m9-GNvw ) *************** Full transcript *************** Note: All transcripts are edited to correct grammar and to eliminate false starts and filler words. *Julie:* Welcome, welcome. This is The VBAC Link podcast and we are really excited to be here with you today. I feel like it’s been a while since we have been recording. I guess it hasn’t really been that long, but it just feels like a long time since we have been talking to people. We have a really fun guest with us today. Her name is Jess. She is a full-time mom. She has two girls and she has a bicornuate-- however you say it-- uterus where it’s a heart-shape, right? *Jess:* Mhmm, yep. *Julie:* That can sometimes cause problems conceiving. It can cause problems with baby’s positioning. She has a really, really cool story about her VBAC with a heart-shaped uterus. I am just not going to try and pronounce it anymore. But I am really excited to talk with Jess today because we actually had her scheduled to record a couple of weeks ago, but they had an ice storm. She lives in Oregon and they had an ice storm in Oregon that shut down power and internet for days. At that time, we hadn’t had any more recording sessions planned, but then all of a sudden we decided to open this huge day. We are recording a ton of podcasts today and Jess, you are our very first one. We are so excited that you are not iced in anymore-- *Jess* : Me too. *Julie:* -- and that your power is back on and you can share your story with us. But before we do that, as always, we have a Review of the Week and Meagan is going to read that for us. ------------------ Review of the Week ------------------ *Meagan:* Thank you. Okay. So this is a review that is actually from a listener from Ireland which is super awesome. The title is, “So informative.” It says, “Hoping to have a VBAC in July. Listening to all the podcast episodes in preparation for my VBAC. Really positive and informative. I feel the more stories I hear, the more prepared I am for every eventuality. Fingers crossed. Thank you, Julie and Meagan.” And that was in May of last year, so I am assuming she has had her baby by now. So, “duffipe” *Julie:* Duffy- pee , duffy- pay , duh- fee -pay? *Meagan:* I don’t know, yeah. *Jess:* I like duh- fee -pay. *Meagan:* Yes. If you are still listening, we would love you to message us and let us know how things are going and how things went. *Julie:* I feel like if people tell us in their review that they are pregnant, they need to put their name so we can go and stalk them in our Facebook community ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/VbacLinkGroup/ ) because I just don’t like not having closure for these types of things. I can’t handle it. *Meagan:* Yeah. I know, right? I know. Okay well, I’m going to turn the time back over to you, Julie, so we can hear this awesome story from Jess. ------------ Jess’s story ------------ *Julie:* Awesome story. Okay. Jess, Jess, Jess. I am so excited. Let me just tell you guys a little bit about Jess. She came on here and she was so happy and so smiley, and her voice is just-- as soon as she started talking, I started smiling. I don’t think I’m going to stop smiling this whole entire episode. I think my cheeks will hurt by the end. She just is so fun and so cute. She is going to tell her stories about her Cesarean and then her magical, unmedicated VBAC. So Jess, without further ado, I’m just going to go ahead and turn it over to you. *Jess:* Okay. So my first pregnancy, I actually had a really smooth pregnancy. Very uneventful. The only thing was that after one of my earlier ultrasounds, we had found out that I had a bicornuate uterus. The midwife that I was seeing at the time, her main concern was me either not being able to carry to term and that there was always a chance that I could miscarry. Obviously, it freaked me out the beginning, but honestly, after taking some time to think about it, I just knew deep down that I was meant to have a baby and that everything was going to be okay. The midwife that I started off with only saw women up until we were about 20 weeks and then we automatically got transferred over to a different practice that was with a group of midwives. I think there were probably about five or six midwives that were working there at the time and whenever I transferred over there, they didn’t really seem that concerned about me having a bicornuate uterus. They said that there wasn’t any reason why I shouldn’t be able to deliver vaginally. We will just keep an eye on it and everything should be okay. So I took their word for it and I didn’t think anything of it. Throughout my entire pregnancy, I had this really hard bulge up on the right-hand side of my ribcage. Every time that I went in, we would see a different midwife. It was very rare that we would see the same one back-to-back, so every midwife that we saw would check the baby’s position manually. Every single one told me that baby felt head down and that everything was great, and I had nothing to worry about. Again, I didn’t have any reason to disagree with them. You know, first-time mom, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what it felt like at all. So we got up to our 38-week appointment and my husband had come with me that day. We were curious about belly mapping. We were chatting with the midwife about belly mapping and wanted to know how to do it and all that stuff because we were super interested in it. And so, the midwife checked my belly again. She feels that hard spot that has been there the entire time and she goes, “You know, I’m pretty sure that that is the baby’s bum, but it’s a really slow day today in the office. We have a portable ultrasound machine. Let me go and grab that real quick. We will take a look and see where baby is hanging out.” Gabe and I were obviously super excited because we hadn’t been able to see her since our anatomy scan. And so, she came in, and as soon as she put that doppler on the hard spot on my stomach, you could see on the screen the outline of a perfectly round head. Right whenever she saw that, the mood in the room definitely took a shift. Things got very serious very quickly and she was like, “Oh, okay. So that is definitely the baby’s head.” Immediately she was like, “Okay. We are going to send you in for an official ultrasound tomorrow to get it confirmed. If it is, then you’re going to have a scheduled C-section next week.” H onestly, as a first-time mom hearing that I was going to be having a C-section, I do have to say that in a way I did feel a little bit of relief at the time because I, you know, first-time mom, I didn’t know how to deliver vaginally. You can take all the birthing classes you want and I personally still didn’t feel prepared. And so, just knowing that a C-section I would know exactly the time, day, when, and how-- all of that stuff was going to be covered. That, in a way, brought a sense of relief. But anyway, we went in. We got the ultrasound. I don’t know if there is a specific name, but she was definitely breech. She was on the right-hand side of my uterus since I have the septum going down the middle. Her feet-- she was completely bent in half, basically. Her feet were all the way up to her back behind her head. So she had no room at all. There always was the option of having an inversion, but because I had a bicornuate uterus, they weren’t willing to even attempt it because they said that it would put too much stress on me and the baby. Obviously, I didn’t want to do anything that would put either of us at risk, so we ended up having a C-section the following week. The C-section itself was not the smoothest. It was actually a very rough procedure. I got a spinal block and I had to end up getting two because the first one didn’t work. The babe was actually stuck up at my ribcage, so my incision ended up having to be twice as long, so that way the surgeon could reach his hand up there to wiggle his finger into baby’s mouth to pull her head down a certain way in order to get her to be delivered. So because of that, she came out with a bruised tongue, really tight TMJ muscles and she was not breathing whenever she came out. Immediately, she was taken over to the warming cart. Nobody was talking. It was pure silence. There were probably about five or six nurses that were over there trying to get her going and at that point, I didn’t feel very good. I was, obviously, still laying flat on my back and I just wasn’t feeling very well. I didn’t trust myself to have her on my chest and to do the immediate skin-to-skin because I didn’t want to drop her, so she actually got to have the first skin-to-skin moment with Gabe. I am very grateful and very glad that they were able to have that special moment, but I do think that looking back, that is one of my biggest regrets is not doing the immediate skin-to-skin because the connection just wasn’t there. The connection wasn’t as immediate as I thought it would be. I wasn’t able to hold her until we got back into our room, which, I don’t know how long it was-- maybe a half an hour or so after she was born. It just lead to a whole bunch of other tough stuff. I had a really tough recovery. We had a horrible time breastfeeding. I had a really hard time with the connection and a couple of times in specific while we were there. This all happened while I was still numb from the surgery. I hadn’t even gotten up and taken my first steps yet, but I had the surgeon and a couple of other doctors come in and tell me that I am always going to be a C-section mom. There is no other way around it. One of the baby’s pediatricians came in and told me that if I ever wanted to have kids again, I would have to have surgery to have the septum removed from my bicornuate uterus, or else I would miscarry. *Meagan:* Whoa. That’s heavy. *Jess* : Yeah. So, yeah. That definitely left a sour taste in my mouth. In the end, I ended up struggling really hard with some pretty severe postpartum anxiety, and depression, and mom rage, and all that stuff. But, yeah. That’s basically how the first baby got here. So then moving onto my second one, by the time that I had gotten done with my recovery with the first baby, I still had the thoughts in the back of my head of always being a C-section mom and remembering how hard both mentally and physically the recovery was. There honestly was a really short time where I didn’t know if I wanted to have more kids because I just didn’t think that I could go through that recovery again. And so, I ended up getting pregnant with my second shortly after my first’s first birthday. I didn’t decide that I wanted to shoot for a VBAC until I was about 20-some weeks of my pregnancy. The practice that I delivered with, the midwife clinic, they were all very VBAC-friendly. They were the ones that kept bringing it up and saying, “Hey, do you want to try and have a VBAC? You’re a really good candidate. I think you would have a success,” and all of that. I was the one that was on the fence because I had it in the back of my mind that I couldn’t deliver vaginally because of my uterus, and just that my body was broken and that I wasn’t able to do this vaginally. So one of the main driving factors for me wanting to try and have a VBAC was because I remembered how difficult the recovery was and I just kept thinking to myself, if I had that hard of a recovery with just a baby, I couldn’t even imagine having to do it again with a newborn and a not even two-year-old at home. That was the main reason why I wanted to try and have a VBAC. Once I made the decision to have the VBAC, I dove in headfirst and did absolutely everything under the sun that I could to prepare. First and foremost, I found this amazing podcast, The VBAC Link, and I took your Parent’s Prep VBAC Course ( https://www.thevbaclink.com/product/how-to-vbac/ ) which I cannot recommend enough. *Julie:* Holla. Shoutout to the course. *Jess* : Yeah. If I had to recommend anything to anyone that wanted to try and have a VBAC, it would definitely be to listen to this podcast and take the class because like I said, I am the type of person where the more prepared and everything that I can be, the better for me. Literally, everything that I needed to know about how to have a VBAC, and all the medical terminology, and the statistics, and all that stuff was literally in that book. All the questions that I ever had were answered. So I did that. I started doing the Spinning Babies® daily essential stretches video every day. I was going on walks. I decided to do HypnoBirthing as my form of, I don’t know what you call it, but the way to cope through the contractions I guess I should say. Because one of the things that I had learned in your class was to go as long as I could without having any sort of medical intervention, that being an epidural. So those are all of the things that I did. There actually was one short moment whenever I thought that the baby was going to be head up again. I went in and I requested a couple of ultrasounds because I had to actually tell them, “This is what happened to me last time. I do not want it to happen again and I need to have some ultrasounds so that where we can clearly confirm that baby is in the right position.” Baby thankfully was in the right position. There was one midwife there that I really enjoyed. And she-- I don’t even know what it was called, but if I had to describe it, it was the perfect line between chiropractic care and prenatal massage where she would go through from head to toe and she would feel all up and down my body, baby included, to feel any points of tension in my body, and then she would hold just the slightest bit of pressure until the tension naturally released. I just knew that was another thing that was going to help my VBAC success because my body was in alignment, which meant that the baby was going to have an easier time getting into the proper position. As I got further along in my pregnancy, at the time were they start doing the checks to see how far you are dilated, I chose not to get checked very often. I think I only ended up getting checked twice throughout my entire pregnancy and it wasn’t because they wanted me to get checked, it was just out of pure curiosity. I wanted to see what was going on and if my body was doing anything yet. The first time that I got checked, I can’t even remember how far along I was in my pregnancy at this point, but I was already dilated to a 1. Now, I was super excited to be dilated to a 1 because with my first baby, I remember as part of the pre-op stuff, I had to get checked. I was 38.5 weeks and I was all zeros across-the-board. So the fact that I was already at 1, I thought that was a huge accomplishment for me because I knew that my body was actually doing what it was literally made to do. The midwife that I was seeing that day in particular, I didn’t exactly vibe with that much. She was nice, but she wasn’t my favorite and she didn’t seem to think that being dilated to a 1 was good enough. She thought that at this point, that my body should have been progressed more and that’s when she had started pushing more of doing all the things like the evening primrose oil, eating the dates, doing all the things to your body to get it ready for birth before your body is actually ready. And then, she just really got into my head. She started saying how if I didn’t do this stuff that they don’t do the Foley bulb, so that’s not an option. If I wanted a Foley bulb, I would have to transfer to a completely different hospital an hour away. She jumped off the deep end a little bit and I’ve got to say, she really got into my head. After I went home, cried to Gabe a little bit, I pulled myself together and I advocated for myself. I called the midwife clinic and I said, “I need to schedule out the rest of my appointments and I cannot see that midwife,” because I just knew that mentally, I didn’t need to have that negative energy in my space as I was preparing for birth. I did not do any of the induction techniques. I didn’t eat the dates. I didn’t take the evening primrose oil. I didn’t get membrane sweeps. I didn’t do any of that. I just completely and fully sat back, relaxed, trusted in my body, and knew that whenever it was ready to deliver this baby, that it would do what it was meant to do. That’s what actually happened. So the day that I actually went into labor, it was July 29th at 5:00 in the morning. My husband had just gotten home from work. He got stuck at work late, so he had only been asleep-- it was maybe only half an hour. I remember I was sleeping and I got woken up by some really light, deep cramps. My eyes shot open and I remember thinking, “My midwife said that this would happen whenever I was going into labor,” but it wasn’t super intense. I brushed it off and I went back to sleep because I was like, “Oh, it is probably just round ligament pain. I’m only 39 and 1 day. This isn’t happening. Not even five minutes later, I felt this really faint pop. It’s so hard to describe, but it’s almost like a water balloon inside of you is popping. I was like, “Wow, okay. That’s weird. I’ve never felt anything like that before.” I was like, “Oh my gosh. My midwife said that if my water broke, that this is what it could feel like. So I woke Gabe up, who had just fallen asleep, and I was like, “I don’t know for certain, but I am pretty sure that something might be happening.” I walked to the bathroom to go and scope things out. As I am pulling down my pants to sit on the toilet, my waters fall out. I just stopped completely in my tracks and I am like, “Oh my gosh. My water just broke on its own. We are doing this thing.” I am texting Gabe back-and-forth from the bathroom being like, “Oh my gosh. My water broke. We need to call the midwife. We need to call my mom to come and stay with Audrey.” I was just going down all of the lists of things that I had to do because I just knew it was go time. So we called the midwife. She had wanted me to go ahead and get ready to come into the hospital because I had tested positive for-- I think, is it Group B? Something like that. She wanted to get medication started. *Meagan* : Yeah. Group B Strep. *Jess* : Yes. So I had tested positive for that and she wanted me to come in so that way we could get the medication started. But we ended up calling her back because I really wanted to labor at home for as long as I could so that way the chances of intervention were smaller. Thinking back, I don’t know why I thought I had more time than I actually did. But right off the bat, my contractions were probably 2 to 3 minutes apart, 30 seconds long and it was just back-to-back-to-back. I guess I thought that I had more time than I actually did because they weren’t as intense as I thought they would be yet. I was still able to shower and all of that stuff, and get my stuff ready, and talk, and breathe through them, and all that. I guess I thought that I had more time than I did. I definitely did not. It was a very close call. The contractions immediately got really intense and at this point, we are just waiting for my mom to come. She lives about half an hour away from us, so we are waiting for her to get to the house so she could stay with Audrey. By the time my mom had gotten-- I mean, she said that she could hear me. She was standing outside and she could hear me laboring in the bathroom. It was super intense and I don’t even remember looking at her or talking to her. I just passed by her to get into the car. I told Gabe, I was like, “We have got to get to the hospital. I don’t think we are going to make it.” So, I had a couple more contractions before I was able to get myself into the car. I was afraid to get into the car because I didn’t want to sit. Sitting was extremely, extremely uncomfortable for me. When I tell you that that was the longest car ride of my entire life, I cannot even tell you how hard of a car ride that was. *Meagan:* It’s hard to sit there. *Jess:* Oh my gosh. It was so hard. The hospital we were delivering at was half an hour away, so Gabe was booking it. I was contracting so, so hard, but thankfully we made it. The hospital that we delivered at is actually pretty small, so there are only two entrances. There is the maternity entrance and then there is an emergency room entrance, and it’s just on either side of the parking lot. So obviously, we had pulled into the maternity entrance. After we got out of the car and walked up to the door, we see that because of COVID, everyone has to check-in through the emergency room entrance. I was like, “Oh my gosh. This literally cannot be happening to me right now. Gabe was like, “Okay well, do you want to walk over there or do you want to get in the car and do you want to drive over there?” You can see the other entrance, like I said, from the door where we were standing and I was like, “I am not sitting down again. Let’s just walk.” Thinking of that, it would have been much faster if we just zoomed right over there really quick, but for whatever reason, I wanted to walk. I was laboring so, so hard throughout the entire parking lot. Whenever people say that whenever you are in the middle of delivering your baby that you go into a completely different world, that is 100% true. At that point, I didn’t care who saw me. I don’t care what I was doing. I didn’t care how loud I was. There were people walking out to their cars. There were nurses and doctors everywhere and I was just in the zone trying to breathe through these tough contractions. So of course with COVID, before we were actually able to go to the maternity entrance, we had to go through this checkpoint and questionnaire for all of this COVID screening. I had to get my temperature taken. I had to get a badge. I had to answer all of these questions. Again, while not even really being able to talk. The nurse was very persistent. I know everyone has got their job to do, but I was like, “Come on, lady. I’m about to pop this baby out right now. I can’t.” Anyway, after we got done with all of the questions she was like, “Okay. Do you want to walk or do you want to go in a wheelchair?” I was like, “I do not care. Just whatever gets me there faster.” I ended up sitting in the wheelchair. Gabe pushed me and we sprinted down the really long hallway before we had to go through another checkpoint. They were like, “Are you the VBAC patient? Everyone is waiting for you.” At that point, after I heard that, I just felt a sense of relief like, “Okay. We are going to be okay. We are going to do this.” Because they were prepared for me and as soon as the big doors opened, my entire birth team was there. My midwife was there. The nurses, there were other doctors. Everybody was just there and they were waiting for me. *Julie* : Aw. That probably feels really good. *Jess:* Yeah. Yeah. I just-- I was like, “Okay. I’m not going to do this by myself. I am in good hands here.” As soon as I lay eyes on my midwife, the first words out of my mouth were, “I need an epidural.” She goes, “Okay,” super calm and collected. “Okay well, let’s go and get you back to your room. We will check and see how far along you are. Now, if you are pretty progressed, do you still want to have an epidural?” I was like, “I don’t know, but I have got to have something.” Giving birth is such an athletic event. It is so athletic. So at this point, I am so tired and I am sweating to death. I am like, “Holy crap. This is so much.” And so, we got into the room and there were so many people in that room. It was me, Gabe, the midwife, and there were honestly probably three other nurses and then eventually, I call him the epidural guy, the anesthesiologist. I don’t know. He was in there at one point. And so, I’m at the foot of my bed. I ripped off my pants. The midwife was already down behind me and she was checking and she goes, “Okay well, you are 8 centimeters dilated.” And I was like, “Okay.” So she is down behind me the entire time. I have another nurse who is in front of me who has a doppler on the tummy to keep an eye on baby. Gabe is sitting down in a chair being a great support for me, and then I am gripping onto the foot of the bed railing going through the contractions, and up in front of me are all of the nurses, plus the anesthesiologist, who are trying to get an IV in me and all that stuff in case I needed it. I was extremely dehydrated come to find out, so they had a very difficult time getting an IV started. I think I ended up getting poked probably, I don’t know, maybe eight times honestly. Every time they are like, “I am so sorry we have to do this. I am so sorry we have to do this.” In between contractions, I looked at them and I was like, “Literally, I do not care what you are doing to me right now because I don’t feel it.” Eventually, they got one started, but it took forever. The biggest thing that I was saying throughout the contractions was, “I feel like I am going to poop my pants. I feel like I’m going to poop,” and my midwife kept telling me, she’s like, “That’s good. That’s good. That means your baby is coming.” I was like, “Oh my gosh. I am literally about to poop myself right now. I can feel it.” She brought over a chair and I was still standing in front of the bed. She had me put one foot up on a chair. She checked again and she goes, “Okay. You are now a full 10, so baby is going to be here in just a second.” This was probably in the span of maybe half an hour. One of the things I remember is that I had a heart monitor, the finger heart monitor thing, on and I kept flicking it off my finger during contractions because I couldn’t fully grip onto the bed railings, so the nurse had to stick one on my pinky toe so that way she could keep an eye on me. After one of my last contractions, my midwife was telling me that she felt like I was clenching like I was holding my baby in a little bit. I was like, “Okay.” She was like, “How about next contraction, after that one is over, we have you crawl up on the bed on all fours and we will see if that helps?” I was like, “I don’t think I can crawl up on that bed right now. I don’t.” She is like, “It’s okay. We will bring the bed down. It will be easy peasy. You can just crawl right up.” So I crawled up on all fours. She was definitely coaching me. She was telling me how to breathe because obviously, I had to get very vocal throughout the contractions. She was telling me to really breathe and dig deep with the contractions and use the contractions as a way to push the baby out. I did that. I pushed one more time and out came the baby. It was the most magical, healing experience for me of my entire life. I was able to do the immediate skin-to-skin. We were able to do that delayed cord clamping. I actually cut the cord myself. I was able to see my placenta. It was just the most magical experience that I have ever had because I completely, 100% trusted my body to do what I knew it could do and it worked. So, yeah. Those are my stories. ---------------------- VBAC prep and planning ---------------------- *Meagan:* I love that. I love that you say, “I 100% trusted in my body and knew that I was able to do it,” because this is something that I even found so hard. *Jess:* Yeah. *Meagan:* Because I’d be like, “Okay. I know I can do it, but can I?” *Jess:* Exactly. *Meagan* : “Okay, no. I can. But really, can I?” You know? Even during the birth, I am like, “Wait. Okay. I can do this. I can keep going.” *Jess:* “Can I do this?” Yeah. *Meagan:* Unfortunately, I did not have a fast, intense experience. I had a slow, turtle-paced labor. There were times where I am like, “No. No,” and then my husband would look at me and be like, “Remember, this is what you wanted. You can do this.” I am like, “Oh yeah. Okay, okay, okay. I can do it.” You know? We have to believe in ourselves and even in the moments that we doubt, we have our teams. That’s why I think having a team is so important and I loved that when the big doors opened, your team was there and waiting for you because I truly can only imagine how that felt for you. *Jess:* Oh yeah. It was such a huge sigh of relief because like I said, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have a choice except to just work through it and I was like, “I need a professional here that actually knows what’s going on to help me.” So, yeah. It was great seeing them there. *Meagan* : I love that. *Julie:* How comforting. That part of your story warmed my heart so much. You get there. You’re in active labor. You are really excited. Your whole entire team welcomes you and then you’re 8 centimeters dilated. What a high to keep going on. *Meagan:* I know. *Jess:* I know. Gabe and I would go, “Oh my gosh. What if there was a car accident or r road work?” Or it was during the summer, so we’d always have a bunch of farming equipment on the road. We were like, “Oh my gosh. I would have had my baby in the car if we showed up a minute later.” It was just crazy. *Meagan:* Yup. Oh my gosh. I love it. Something I love too is how you said in the beginning, “My provider is like, ‘Yeah, you are a great candidate for a VBAC,’” and you were like, “No.” You weren’t super on board and you weren’t for it at that time. We find that that is the case sometimes. It’s okay when those cases stay the same or they’re like, “Yeah, no. VBAC just really isn’t for me.” But I think something that Julie and I like to encourage people to do is, educate yourself on both sides so you truly know what the best route is for you. If it is the VBAC, awesome. And if it’s not a VBAC and if it’s a CBAC, yes. Great. Do what’s best for you. So, I love that you found out your options, and then eventually you were like, “Oh, this is totally what I want to do,” and you went with it. Because it is. There is something to say when you feel empowered for making the choice for you. When you are being told, “Okay so, you always have to have a C-section and you’re going to have to have surgery,” that’s daunting and scary. You’re like, “Whoa. That’s overwhelming.” *Jess:* Yeah. For sure. For sure. Yeah. I think something that’s really important is just because you can have a VBAC doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best option for you. And same goals with a C-section. I think that every woman is different and it’s just important for you to take a step back, go through all of your options, like you said, and pick what’s best for you. That’s why I honestly, truly cannot thank your VBAC prep course enough because it laid out all of the options for me. I knew how to have a C-section for my first time and I felt way prepared and more after going through your VBAC prep course. *Meagan* : Yeah. I love it. *Julie:* Well, thank you so much. Yeah. That’s one of the things we go over in the course is-- I don’t know. I am going to mush our course and what I go over with my clients in our prenatal visits for my doula work. Have a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C. Plan A is your perfect plan. If everything goes the way you want, what does that look like? Plan B is your backup plan. So if you’re planning to go unmedicated, what if you need an epidural? What if you need to be induced? Things like that, your backup plan. And plan C is your Cesarean plan. So it’s really funny-- funny is probably not the right word, but it is interesting as I talk to people because I don’t make them create a Cesarean plan. We always have a backup plan, but I ask them, “If you need a Cesarean--” whether it’s first-time moms or birth after a Cesarean or whatever. “If you need a Cesarean, do you want to know what options are available for you, and do you want to have information about that?” Some people are like, “Oh no, no, no, no, no. I don’t want to say the C-word. I only want good vibes. We are only projecting vaginal birth. I feel like if I talk about it and create that, it’s setting myself up for a Cesarean.” For some people, I think that maybe they just don’t have the mental space to go there, but it’s probably a sign that you need to do some kind of processing work in order to get your mind in a better spot because when you fear something and then it happens to you, it makes a possibility of trauma way more likely. But having a backup Cesarean plan, like you said, if your birth ends up that way, you can enter into all the different changes of labor and birth with confidence because you already know about them. You don’t have to tell your doctor to explain the risks and benefits of things to you, which you should still do because maybe there is something you don’t know about. But learning about all of the different options can help you be more confident. As Meagan and I work with our doula clients and every one of you at The VBAC Link, that is the number one thing that people say they wish they had more of going into their VBAC. It’s confidence. Confidence in themselves, confidence in their provider, and confidence that they will know how to make the right decisions if something doesn’t go as expected. *Jess:* Yeah. *Meagan:* Mhmm. *Jess:* I think that’s why it shows that it takes just as much physical prep as it does mental prep because you can do everything that you can under the sun to prep your body physically for birth, but birth is such a mental game. If you don’t have the preparation that you need and you haven’t processed the things that you need, it can be difficult. *Julie* : Absolutely. That’s why we go over all of that in our course, too. In fact, we start out with the mental prep just because it’s probably the most important part. Entering the rest of the course with a free mind can really open you up to more learning. Now, Meagan and I were texting while you were talking and we are like, “Wait. Her voice sounds so familiar.” *Meagan* : Yeah. I was like, “I know her.” *Julie:* We know you. *Meagan:* Well, I was like, “I know her.” When you popped up, I was like, “I know her face.” And I am like, “Wait.” So then 10 minutes in, I am like, “Julie. This is the YouTube girl that shared about our course on YouTube.” She is like, “Oh my gosh.” So we are like, “Oh my heavens.” I just love you. I am like, “I know I know her face and her voice.” Julie is like, “Yeah, I know. I remember.” *Julie:* I am like, “I think it’s that girl that made the cute YouTube video.” But Jess, why don’t you tell people where to find your YouTube channel because I am pretty sure everyone should watch it because she talks all about all of the things that she did to prepare for her VBAC both mentally and emotionally and on the educational side. So, yeah. Share it with everybody because everyone needs to go and watch this video. It is so fun. *Jess:* Yeah so, my YouTube channel is called JessandBabe ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv-KpKaYHRC__UQ9m9-GNvw ). It is all one word. I actually started it whenever I was postpartum with my first baby. Like I said, I got diagnosed with pretty bad mom rage and postpartum anxiety. I just found that creating videos that I wished I would have seen whenever I was postpartum would have helped me if that makes sense. I wanted to make the videos that I wish I would’ve seen. It was just a really great form of therapy I have to say, knowing that I am helping people. It’s not a huge YouTube channel yet by any means. It’s very small, but I know that the videos that I make are helping people. I talk about all things. The VBAC video is the one that I just recently had posted, but I’ve talked about sleep training, breastfeeding, we have got some vlogs if you want to see my adorable babies and all of that stuff. *Julie:* Yeah. It’s so much fun. So much fun. Oh my gosh. I am so glad that we have come full circle. But you talked about coming full circle before we started recording about how you were listening to the podcast and you were like, “Oh my gosh. What if I could be on the podcast one day?” You are full circle here and I feel like we are full circle now because we saw your YouTube video, and now we get to hear your story again on The VBAC Link podcast, and everyone else is going to hear your story, and you are just so uplifting. You are a great light and you’re going to inspire so many women. It makes my heart so happy. *Jess:* Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Before I say goodbye, I have something to share that I think would actually fit your whole vision for The VBAC Link and everything. It’s actually a quote that I saw yesterday and it says, “It’s not that birth is painful. It’s that women are strong.” *Julie:* Yes. *Meagan:* Oh, I love that. *Jess:* I saw that and I was like, “I have got to share that tomorrow on The VBAC Link,” because that is exactly what you guys are sharing. I even had your “We are Women of Strength” card that came in your class. I had that set as my screensaver throughout my entire pregnancy. *Julie:* Awesome. Oh, I love it. *Jess* : I just thought it was fitting. *Julie:* That is really neat. *Meagan:* That makes me so happy. *Jess:* Yeah. *Meagan:* I just love you. We need to be friends when I come to Oregon someday. *Jess:* I would love to be your friend! *Julie:* Yes. Let’s be friends. *Meagan* : Oh my gosh. I know. I am like, “Can we go to Oregon just to come see you?” Oh my gosh. That would be so awesome. *Julie:* Oh my gosh. I just was really bummed because 2020 ruined plans for everybody, but we had these big plans. We were scheduled to go to three or four different cities in the country to teach in-person classes for parents and doulas. *Jess:* That would have been amazing. *Julie:* All of that got canceled because of COVID. *Jess:* Thanks COVID. *Julie* : I know. As soon as travel restrictions are more clear and we can have more people in a course at a time, then we are going to start traveling again. And Meagan, gosh. There are so many places that we need to go. How are we going to choose? There are so many amazing people, but I definitely think Oregon should be on our destination list. *Meagan:* Totally. I would love it. I have never been. I would love to go. *Jess:* You totally should. It’s great. *Julie:* Well, I hear it’s very beautiful. I got jealous from one of my friends posting pictures of going up there to the Pacific Northwest and I am thinking we need to make a little road trip up there. Or fly. *Meagan:* Back in the day when I did Worker’s Comp., I serviced Washington and Oregon. It was always so fun to talk to them about the weather and everything that was going on, so one day. One day I am going to make it back up there. *Julie:* One day. All right. Well, Jess. Thank you so much for sharing your story with everybody. We truly just absolutely adore you and are so grateful for you for sharing your story. *Jess:* Thank you. *Julie:* That YouTube video is so much fun and anyone that wants more information about our VBAC parents prep course, you can just go to thevbaclink.com/shop ( https://www.thevbaclink.com/shop/ ) and it will have the course right there for you so you can take it. Get enrolled. Get educated so that you can safely and confidently navigate all the twists and turns birth might take. ------- Closing ------- Would you like to be a guest on the podcast? Head over to thevbaclink.com/share ( http://www.thevbaclink.com/share ) and submit your story. For all things VBAC, including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Julie and Meagan’s bios, head over to thevbaclink.com ( http://www.thevbaclink.com ). Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy