Midlife Mixtape

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Ep 110 “New Map of Life” Cartographers Ken Smith and Karen Breslau Nov 30, 2021

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“Stretch the rubber band”: Stanford Center for Longevity’s researcher Ken Smith and co-author Karen Breslau, on conclusions from SCL’s new study that seeks to radically redefine how to live better, when we’re living longer. The New Map of Life from the Stanford Center on Longevity Midlife Mixtape Podcast Ep 52 with Author Mary Laura Philpott – preorder her new book Bomb Shelter now! Alexandra Rosa’s storytelling performance on The Moth, “Call Me The Rock, or Call Me Colombian” This is the OLD map. But a damn good song. Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 110 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on November 30, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email dj@midlifemixtape.com *** Ken Smith 00:00 What is the thing that makes me want to get up in the morning, and how can I actually orient my life more towards that direction as I get older? Nancy Davis Kho 00:09 Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one. [THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent] Nancy 00:33 The presenting sponsor of today’s episode is Kindra. Kindra is a health and wellness company revolutionizing menopause. It is backed by science and made by women, for women, and Kindra’s products help women navigate the most disruptive signs of the change. You all know the deli menu: hot flashes, restless sleep, dryness, brain fog. You may not want to have what she’s having at this particular deli, but isn’t it nice to know that there are products that can help you manage better? At their website, OURKINDRA.com, you can figure out exactly which of their products might be in order by taking their 5 minute online quiz. Listeners, both male and female, let me remind you once again that menopause is a natural stage of life for women and it signals the start of what can be the most powerful and impactful times of our lives, as you’ll hear in today’s episode. So shouldn’t we try a little harder to embrace it? You can head to ourkindra.com. That’s OURKINDRA.COM and use code MIXTAPE20 all caps to get 20% off your first order or subscription. That’s ourkindra.com and MIXTAPE20 to get 20% off! [MUSIC] Hi everyone. I’m Nancy Davis Kho, the host and creator of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, and I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Especially compared to Thanksgiving 2020 where the four of us were all huddled at home already, everyone just came out of the bedroom again for dinner, this year was wonderful. Our older daughter had a friend in for a visit, and our younger daughter had to actually come home from college to spend the holiday with us, which is a beautiful thing. We headed over to my high school friend’s house for a big gathering, the highlight of which to me was when her son asked me in front of the crowd to share a crazy story of his mom from high school. Oh, I had to crack my knuckles! The possibilities… went with the hydroplaning one. Thank you science, thank you vaccines, thank you booster shots and rapid tests. And as always, don’t take any of it for granted. You never know what’s coming next. So we’re heading into the last month of the year and I know that makes many of us feel contemplative about what’s to come. I recently bought my niece a candle for her 30th birthday that says, “Smells like high hopes and low expectations” which I think is probably the right energy for 2022. That is by the way from Anecdote Candles. This is not an ad for them, but their candles crack me up. They smell great. They are really beautiful. So, high hopes and low expectations. But in all seriousness, a writer friend of mine here in Oakland, Karen Breslau, mentioned to me during the fall that she was busy working on the final report for a brand new research study from the Stanford Center on Longevity, called The New Map of Life. Here’s the deal: in the United States, as many as half of today’s 5-year-olds can expect to live to the age of 100, and this once unattainable milestone may become the norm for newborns by 2050. Yet, the social institutions, norms and policies that await these future centenarians evolved when lives were only half as long and they need updating. In 2018, The Stanford Center on Longevity launched an initiative called The New Map of Life, believing that one of the most profound transformations of the human experience calls for equally momentous and creative changes in the ways we lead these 100-year lives, at every stage. I thought that would be a really good backdrop for the kind of planning and thinking you might be doing around your personal goals in 2022. So I invited Karen and Senior Research Scholar at the center, Ken Smith, to join me to talk about this study, which only came out last week! It is poppin’ fresh. Let me tell you a bit about Karen and Ken. Karen Breslau is the founder of Feature Well Stories, a narrative strategy agency in Oakland, California and a co-author of “The New Map of Life” with the Stanford Center on Longevity. She served as foreign, diplomatic and White House correspondent for Newsweek magazine, and was a producer and reporter for NPR. Karen also worked as a speechwriter and communications strategist, and is co-author with Janet Napolitano of “How Safe are We? Homeland Security Since 9/11.” Ken Smith joined the Stanford Center on Longevity in 2009 and is the Senior Research Scholar and Director of Academic and Research Support, as well as the Center’s Mobility Division. He brings a broad background of over 20 years of management and engineering experience to his role, including positions in the computing, aerospace, and solar energy industries. Ken developed a special expertise in working closely with university faculty to develop projects while at Intel, where he was deeply involved in the creation and management of their network of university research labs. So let’s join these cartographers of The New Map of Life and see where they’re leading us. [MUSIC] Nancy 05:10 I’m so pleased to be here today with Ken Smith, the senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on Longevity and Karen Breslau, who is the co-author of the Stanford’s new study, The New Map of Life. Welcome to the show, Karen and Ken. Karen 05:25 Thank you, Nancy. Ken 05:26 Glad to be here. Nancy 05:27 I’m glad you’re here as well and you know, obviously, a key question when it comes to discussing The New Map of Life: hey, what was your first concert and what were the circumstances? I think that’s an important point on everybody’s roadmap of life. So Ken, I’m going to put you on the spot first. Tell us about your first concert. Ken 05:45 Sure. By the way, I love that question. It’s like a social carbon-14 dating process. Nancy 05:50 Okay, wait. What? I was more of a business major. I don’t know what you just said. Ken 05:54 Oh, it’s a method that scientists often use to date things like fossils by how much of this carbon 14 remains in the material. Nancy 05:59 Oh, sure. Ken 06:00 This is just a social version of that. It tells you a lot about sort of where you came from and when you came from at that time. Nancy 06:10 Yes, of course! All of a sudden, I dialed back to high school science classes, which is the last time I took one. So yeah, sorry. Yeah, listeners, I don’t know much about science, but let’s hear about Ken’s concert. Ken 06:20 So my first concert was I saw the Doobie Brothers at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin in 1979. Nancy 06:26 Nice. Ken 06:27 I think it was probably a celebration of freedom of driver’s license. I went with a group of high school friends. That was back in the day where you were at the DMV on the day of your birthday. Nancy 06:36 Right. Ken 06:37 So the first thing we had to do was go to a concert together without the parents, without getting dropped off, so it was kind of a first freedom. Nancy 06:45 That is an amazing way to celebrate stepping into that new phase of life. I mean, holy smokes, who didn’t want to be 16 and get their license if that was on the other side of it. Was it a good show? Ken 06:56 It was a great show. I still remember. Nancy 06:58 Aright, Karen. What about you? Karen 07:00 I wish I had something as cool to report and I did have another concert in mind… and then this grainy newsreel …the sprocket sound came very sharp … Nancy 07:15 You suddenly had a film strip of your life. Karen 07:20 Yes, I wish it were otherwise, but: Glen Campbell at Houston Astrodome. Rhinestone Cowboy. Nancy 07:29 I don’t think that’s anything to apologize for. First of all, oftentimes, I will have people on the show who say well, this is the FIRST show, but the one I want to talk about is… if you want to throw in the one that really meant something to you, the first one where you paid for a ticket with your own money. But look, I love Glen Campbell. I think you should hold your head high on that. Karen 07:48 I was very into sideburns and the fringe. I thought it was crazy cool at the time. Nancy 07:59 I can’t wait to check out your author picture. I hope you’ve got sideburns and fringe. You should consider getting one made. Karen 08:05 As a woman at this age, that can occur. Nancy 08:15 Speaking of the New Map of Life, I always drop a music video into the show notes, and now I’m thinking what Glen Campbell song could I include? Karen 08:23 Rhinestone Cowboy. Check it out. Nancy 08:25 Yeah, I think he’s got other ones though that are… okay. Well, thanks for the invitation to go to the Glen Campbell rabbit hole. So I wanted to have you on because I’m thrilled to be talking with you about this brand new study from the Stanford Center on Longevity called The New Map of Life, and my first question is to you as the cartographers: What made the Stanford Center decide that they wanted to do this study, at this time? Ken 08:51 Really, it’s the culmination of the kind of work that the center has been doing for 12 years – we are really based on the premise that life has expanded over time. I mean, if we look at the last 100 years, the average life expectancy at birth has almost doubled. It’s gone from 47 to somewhere around 80. But we still live in this world that anchors all of the kind of social things that we do to the world 100 years ago. We still go to school for the same number of years. At the same time, we still think about retiring at 65 and really, as we keep getting longer and longer lives, we tend to think about just adding them on to the end. I don’t think when you pull people and you say where would you want to add more years in your life, that you would say, “Old age, that’s where I’m going!” So what we thought about is, if you take a white sheet of paper, or a map in this case, and you think about the road that you take, where would you put those extra years, what would you do differently? How would you lay out life if from the beginning you thought you were going to live to be 100? There’s a number of demographers now that are predicting that as many as half of today’s five year olds can expect to live to be 100. That just changes the dynamics and the distribution of society so that we’re really living in a time where we have a different breakup of younger people, older people, middle life people than we ever had before. We thought this was really something that we needed to undertake. We’ve been doing work in this area for, as I said, about 12 years. But this time, we said it’s time to take a step back, start with a white sheet of paper and say, what are the kinds of things we would do? Nancy 10:25 Who’s the intended audience for this study? What are you hoping that the impact is going to be? Ken 10:31 Well, I was just going to say, I think the goal is impact. The audience for this, I would say if I’m tiering it from top to bottom, would be influencers at the top, people in government. I don’t just mean federal government. This is the kind of stuff that I think you could use as a mayor, or as a councilman, right? We think people who run corporations and make decisions about what their workforces look like, and how that all goes, nonprofits, we’re trying to think about this as sort of a filter for those people. It’s not so much that we want to tell them, here are the five things that you need to do. I think what we want to say is, “Here’s what we have learned about what leads to a long and positive life outcome. And as you start thinking about your own policies and your own decisions, are you making those decisions with that future in mind, or are you making those decisions based on maybe what you thought about in the past?” Nancy 11:21 Can you summarize some of the most important findings of this study because we’ve been talking about it so generally? I want listeners to be oriented to what the real conclusions were that your team drew. Ken 11:33 Sure. It might be worth just saying a few words about how we got to these conclusions, because it’ll make a little more sense about how I couch those. Nancy 11:39 Perfect. Ken 11:40 When we thought about how do we go about studying this – because you’re sort of saying, you’re trying to study life, right? So let’s try to do this without boiling the ocean. We got together a group of 50, 60 experts from sort of all points of the compass. We had economists and pediatricians and engineers and educators together and said, “Where are the places that we actually have an opportunity to make some impact?” For example, one of the best predictors of how long people will live, any individual, is the zip code they’re born in, but you really can’t do much about that. So there’s not much that we think we can make an impact there. So we ended up landing on nine different domains. If it doesn’t take too long, I’ll just I’ll go through them so you know what I’m talking about. Nancy 12:21 Please. Ken 12:22 They are: education, fitness and lifestyle, early childhood influences, intergenerational behaviors, health care, financial security, the built environment, work, and climate. We thought, these are domains in which there are opportunities to make impact, and so we went out and we hired, for each of those domains, a postdoctoral research scholar at Stanford, and they spent the last two years researching what’s known about the relationship between what goes on in these domains, and how that plays out over a lifetime in terms of outcomes. For example, what do we know about how obesity in childhood plays out in terms of long term health? What do we know about what the long term effects of somebody who lives in a house with lead paint, for example? Over those two years, they learned what was known about those relationships. They looked into what had been tried, what worked, what didn’t work, and then really closed by saying, “Okay, based on everything I’ve learned, here’s a list of recommendations for things that we might do going forward that better align us in terms of the lifespan, and society and the way we do things.” So that’s the basis of the report. I think in terms of what’s come out of it – and some of the findings, some of them or maybe the ones you might know about: for example, I think if I told you that exercise, when implemented at any point in the lifespan, helps. It’s good for you to get an education. But there were some results that were maybe a little more surprising, I think. It’s things like – in early childhood, I was expecting our early childhood person to come out and talk about childcare and things like that, which they did, and the value of that is very high. But one of his conclusions was children now, even though we have longer lives – our kids are essentially older at the same age than they were…

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Ep 109 Animal Policy Expert Mark Cushing Nov 16, 2021

Show notes

“From accessory to center stage”: Mark Cushing, founder of the Animal Policy Group and author of “Pet Nation”, on the emotional, physical, and societal benefits of the human-animal bond at midlife and beyond. Pet Nation: The Inside Story of How Companion Animals Are Transforming Our Homes, Culture, and Economy Animal Policy Group From Sandy Hook to the World by Scarlett Lewis, founder of Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement New in November from the Grown Ass Lady Squad: Are Women’s Lives Just Someone Else’s Business Model? How I quit the diet cycle and refocused on what really matters in life The Secret to a Happy Life? Friendship! DameMagazine.com Modern GenX Woman Podcast Here’s proof that GenX DOES have pets! Thumbs up. Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 109 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on November 16, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email dj@midlifemixtape.com *** Mark Cushing 00:00 I don’t think there’s a time in your life that the companionship of a pet – by the way, it isn’t limited to dogs or cats – can’t make you feel better. Nancy Davis Kho 00:11 Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one. [THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent] Nancy 00:35 The presenting sponsor of today’s episode is Kindra. Kindra is a health and wellness company that is revolutionizing menopause, backed by science and made by women, for women. Their products help women navigate the most disruptive signs of the change, like hot flashes, brain fog, restless sleep, dryness, and more. At their website, OURKINDRA.com, you can figure out exactly which of their products might be in order by taking their 5 minute online quiz, or simply clicking one of the following statements: I’m Dry, I’m Hot, I’m Tired, I Can’t Sleep, and everybody’s favorite – It’s Complicated. Oh honey. Isn’t it just. The change comes for all of us ladies, so isn’t it time we started talking about menopause instead of pretending it’s something that only happens to other people? You can head to ourkindra.com. That’s OURKINDRA.com and use code MIXTAPE20 all caps to get 20% off your first order or subscription. That’s ourkindra.com and MIXTAPE20 to get 20% off! [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome to Episode 109 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast! I’m Nancy Davis Kho, and I’ve been running the show around here since 2017. That feels like a long time ago. Now one of the things I love about this podcast is that – and I’m paraphrasing Vanilla Ice here obviously – if there’s a topic, yo I’ll solve it, check out my guest while the DJ revolves it. In other words, I was kind of curious about why every single person I see on the street is at the end of a dog leash, or has a cockatiel sitting on her shoulder, or is carrying a cat carrier. And I also sensed that adopting our rescue dog, Arlo, last summer was a good thing, net positive for my husband and me to do in midlife. So, thanks to having a podcast, I was able to find someone who can answer questions like that, and that’s the conversation I’m bringing to your ears today. Now, if you are one of the 30% of Americans who don’t have pets – and sorry international listeners, I don’t know what the stats are internationally, but either way this holds for you. Don’t turn this off just because you don’t have a pet. One of the most interesting things I learned in this interview is how even NON-pet owners benefit when the people around them are pet-owners. So I hope you’ll stay tuned, and if you’re one of the many listeners who has sent in pictures of your pets in the past couple of weeks, first of all thank you, because that was a highlight of my day every day. Second, listen all the way to the end of the interview to hear why I wanted that collection, and I’ll tell you where to find it. Today’s guest is Mark Cushing, Founder & CEO of the Animal Policy Group, and author of the brand-new book Pet Nation, a book that tells the inside story of how companion animals are transforming our homes, culture, and economy. A long-time political strategist, government regulatory advisor, corporate executive and former litigator, since 2004, Mark has specialized in animal health, animal welfare, veterinary and veterinary educational issues and accreditation, developing a cutting-edge practice across these sectors. Mark currently leads several industry coalitions and initiatives and is a law school faculty member at Lincoln Memorial, Lewis & Clark and University of Oregon law schools. Ok, sit. I said sit. Sit! Sit! Good girl. Good boy. Alright. Let’s see what Mark has to tell us. [MUSIC] Nancy 03:53 Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, Mark Cushing. It’s so good to have you here today. Mark 03:58 What a great topic. And you’re in the Bay Area. It’s fun for me to connect with old haunts there. So thanks for having me on your show. Nancy 04:05 We’ve already established that we may be interrupted at any time by one of two dogs, or one of two cats on both sides. So I think that is very fitting for the topic we’re covering today. Let’s hope so. Right? Mark 04:18 They only improve every situation they join, right? Nancy 04:22 Well, yes, that’s how I feel. Mark, before we get to the good stuff today about your new book, Pet Nation, I want to ask you the most important question, which is: what was your first concert and what were the circumstances? You must get asked this all the time talking about animal policy, right? Mark 04:39 I want you to know that I actually gave this answer to somebody in June in a different forrm, so it’s fresh in mind. My first concert was at the Armory in Salem, Oregon, a very boring state capitol town. The band was Eric Burdon and the Animals. I was asked back in June, “What’s my favorite all time song?” It’s “House of the Rising Sun”. People said to me, “Of all the songs in the world, why would that be your favorite song?” Well, when I was in middle school- we called the junior high back then – I would always check with the band at a concert – not a big name band, but a local band at a concert- to see what was the song right before “House of the Rising Sun.” Because everybody played that song. Why would I do that? Because that was about an eight and a half minute long, slow dance. So it was important to be strategic. This should maybe scare you away from this interview. But I needed to be strategic about my partner for that song. So if I knew the one before it, I could kind of say, “Goodbye, nice dancing with you!” and shoot across the room to whoever was foolish enough to say yes, for an eight and a half minute dance with me. So, there you go. Nancy 05:56 Mark in junior high playing all the angles. I love it. Mark, your first concert was Eric Burdon and the ANIMALS. Have you reflected upon that? Could that have set you upon your path? Mark 06:09 Of course, I was hoping you’d pick that up. Nancy 06:12 Yeah. Of course, I did. Mark 06:14 They weren’t the Stones, Beatles, Cream level, but they were just below it. Nancy 06:20 Do you have a favorite song about pets or animals? I’ll tell you why I’m asking this. I wrote a book that came out in 2019 called The Thank-You Project and each chapter had a playlist and one of the things I wrote about was – this whole book was about how I wrote gratitude letters to people who had helped shaped and inspired me over the course of this one year. At some point, I started writing letters to not-people, and I talked about writing a thank you note to your dog, to your cat, whatever four-legged or winged or scaled animal companion makes your life better. With the playlist for that chapter, I wanted to include a song about pets and I had a really hard time coming up with one. I ended up using a boygenius song called “Me and My Dog” which is just a beautiful song, but there was not a lot to choose from. Mark 07:11 As you asked me, the only things that came to mind were the theme song for TV shows or movies that have animals on them. This will date me but the theme song to Old Yeller. “Come back Yeller, best doggone dog in the West.” I’ve lived most of my life in the West… not all of it. I grew up outside Portland and went to Stanford and was back east, and the south, and came back to the west. And I would substitute the name of my dog for Yeller and sometimes, sing it to him: “Best doggone dog in the West.” I can’t remember a single lyric of the song beyond that, but Yeller, like Lassie, was a pretty serious dog. Nancy 07:57 Lassie figures large in your book. I learned many facts so let’s just dive into Pet Nation. The book has just come out. It’s called Pet Nation: The inside Story of How Companion Animals Are Transforming Our HOMES, CULTURE, and ECONOMY. One stat jumped right out as a measure of what that change looks and feels like. “Since 1998,” you wrote, “The pet population in the US has almost doubled. About two thirds of the country now owns a pet.” That’s just since 1998. So that’s a major change. Mark, what is going on? Can you give us a brief overview of what the reasons are behind that transformation, behind that expansion of pet ownership in the country? Mark 08:43 Well, it’s more than just the number, but the numbers are staggering. Now, we’re close to 70% of households have a pet. Nancy 08:51 I was just going to jump in for one second to say, all you non-pet owners who are listening, hang in there. Because we are going to talk a little bit about the benefits of other people owning pets to you, because that was something I hadn’t thought about. Sorry, go ahead. Mark 09:06 You have the sheer number growing dramatically faster than the human population. That’s number one, and we’ll talk about that. But the thesis of the book, which I believe is anchored in the reality of the last 30 years: pets went from being an accessory or kind of a sideshow, often in the backyard, little time in the house, but just as I say, kind of an accessory to life to center stage. They came inside. The secret sauce is that term that’s used, called the human-animal bond. That’s a term that psychologists and veterinarians coined back in the 70s and 60s, with the idea that there’s something that goes on between people and an animal beyond just, “Isn’t my puppy cute? Isn’t my cat a darling?” It’s a chemical fact and at first, it was treated almost like your grandmother’s flu remedy. “Yeah, right. I’m sure that’s not science.” Now, Purdue University Veterinary College Library has 31,000 entries related to the human-animal bond, many of those peer reviewed studies. What they found out: engaging with a pet causes a person’s – and by the way, the same thing for the pet – a person’s oxytocin level to go up. Ad oxytocin is the agent of happiness, calm, relaxation in your brain. Basically, you’re happy, your cortisol level goes down. Cortisol is a source of stress, worry, anxiety. I don’t think people studied this in a library and ran home and said, “Let’s go get a dog or a cat.” But they discovered it when pets came inside. They began to engage more, they just felt better, and that began to kind of permeate what I call the childhood of Baby Boomers, the early years of Baby Boomers. Then we watched the show that we’ve already referred to religiously on Sunday evenings: Lassie, the greatest dog in the history of the universe. Loyal, friendly, playful. Nancy 11:15 What’s up with Timmy? Timmy needed to just get himself organized and calm down. Why so much peril, Timmy? Mark 11:21 Tim didn’t know what was behind the tree. It wasn’t a cute little kitty. It was a cougar or a robber or a thug or whomever it might be. Interestingly, to push us way back in time, the author that created Lassie was a friend of Charles Dickens, so she knew something a long time ago. But that confluence of pets inside, people experiencing and enjoying the human-animal bond and then seeing in the media – now all of a sudden pets, Scooby Doo, Peanuts, that series, Old Yeller, Rin Tin Tin, cartoons galore – I mean, they begin to see pets, and what were they always dong? Having fun, they were funny, they were cool. You just want to hang with them. So those two cultural events in my study merged, and they were best captured… I mention this a lot, because I can remember watching this going, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.” It was Subaru and Nissan, two Japanese car manufacturers in the same time period, with brilliant agencies that thought this idea up. They created commercials for their cars as follows. Car going down a California Coastal Highway, Golden Retriever in the front seat, window down, hair flowing, smiling. You weren’t told anything about the car, you weren’t told anything about the engine, about the price. Nothing. I can imagine the CEO turning to the ad agency saying, “When are you going to finish the ad? What are we doing here?” They said, “No, that is the ad. We just want them to connect a happy dog with your brand.” That is the essence of Pet Nation. This notion that’s just associating with a dog in this case brought goodwill. And the sales for those two companies tracked almost to the month in that ad campaign. Nancy 13:19 Wow. Mark 13:20 Now you see that you can barely turn on TV – I watch a lot of ballgames and you can’t go very long, I think almost every other ad has an animal in it in some fashion, not the star but always just there. Because they know what that does – AT&T now has in an ad a bearded dragon and the line is “There’s no dogs so I got this pet.” Those things, the combination of media with the human-animal bond and then what took it over the top was the creation of social media through smartphones. Nancy 13:57 The facet of how technology and the resulting isolation that we all have experienced, when we’re buried in our phones and separate from one another… The fact that that had an impact of increasing our need, our connection to the pets in our lives was fascinating to me. Mark 14:15 Well, you know what happened? I remember early on with the big clunker smartphones, we didn’t call them smartphones, you used to see people show your babies. And you had to be nice and say, “Oh, that’s a cute baby.” Nancy 14:27 “Ya gotta see the baby!” Mark 14:29 Yeah, exactly. I have 5 children, so I’m all for that. But all of a sudden, kids got pushed off the screen because everybody became their own film editor and director, and what do people want to see? “Yeah, you had a baby. Great. Show me you holding your new granddaughter one time. Thank you. Oh, you’ve got a Shih Tzu? Could you every day supply a video of what your Shih Tzu is doing?” Nancy 14:54 “I need a feed of the Shih Tzu. Thank you.” Mark 14:57 There you go. All those forces change and the most visible impact of what I call Pet Nation, this culture of pets, became when dog owners – figuratively now, but it really captures it – marched right out the front door with their dogs and are taking their dogs everywhere in America, to places people never could imagine. I mean, let me give you two examples. They’re my favorites. Most prominently is hospitals. Alright. In my childhood, if you saw a dog in a hospital, you would also see an orderly or a nurse running down the hallway to get that dog outside. Now, in Oakland, try to find a hospital that doesn’t have an animal assisted therapy dog, multiple animal assisted therapy dogs, where the dogs actually are part of the treatment of the patient. Who would’ve thought that? If you told me that as a kid, I would have laughed and said, “Not happening.” The other one was hotels. For most of us, just go back 20 years, walk into a hotel lobby with…

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Ep 108 DryTogether Founders Megan Zesati and Holly Sprague Nov 02, 2021

Show notes

“A spirit of curiosity”: Megan Zesati and Holly Sprague, founders of the DryTogether alcohol-free living community for midlife moms, on the benefits of teaming up to cut back on booze, the media messages that boost our consumption, and living AF(AF.) DryTogether.org Harvard Health Article on Women, Alcohol, and COVID-19 Outlander #1 – your gateway read Presenting sponsor Kindra – use the code MIXTAPE20 for 20% off your first order! Unlock Your Life Podcast with Lori A. Harris Freedom to make the best choices for yourself at midlife, and to worship George Michael. Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 108 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on November 2, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email dj@midlifemixtape.com *** Holly Sprague 00:01 In my life right now, I’ve got so much going on up there that I need some space, and I need some area that is not consumed with how much I drank last night or how much I’m going to drink tonight. Nancy Davis Kho 00:16 Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one. 00:26 [THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent] Nancy 00:40 The presenting sponsor of today’s episode of Midlife Mixtape is Kindra. Kindra is a health and wellness company that is revolutionizing menopause. Their products help women navigate the most disruptive signs of the change, like hot flashes, brain fog, restless sleep, dryness, and more. That’s the cafeteria menu you want none of. Kindra is science backed and it’s made for women and by women, and yeah, I’ll go ahead and say I think it’s probably better to get your menopause support products developed by people who have also whipped off a cardigan sweater and shoved their hair into a messy bun in the middle of a meeting, while fanning themselves off with a sheaf of paper. Kindra makes it easy to get personalized product recommendations and educational content with their online quiz. It just takes 5 minutes. Isn’t it time we started talking about the change and embracing it? You can head to ourkindra.com – that’s OURKINDRA.COM and use code MIXTAPE20 – all caps – to get 20% off your first order or subscription. That’s ourkindra.com and the code is MIXTAPE20 to get 20% off! [MUSIC] Nancy 01:48 Hello to all of you who know exactly who will be there wanting some when you try new soft and juicy Bubble Yum… I’m going to give you a minute… It’s the Flavor Fiend. Hi, it’s Nancy Davis Kho. I’m the host and creator of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. I have considered doing an episode where I just have you guys all record yourselves singing your favorite 70s or 80s ad jingles, but that would create earworms that might actually be fatal to us at our ages. Who wears short shorts? I’m not even going to give you an answer to that. Actually, I do have an ask for you, before we get to today’s episode. We’re going to be talking soon about pets and midlife in an upcoming show and I want you to send me pictures of yours – the pandemic puppies, the covid cats, friends from the more exotic aisles in the pet store. I’m going to put together a slideshow of the pets that make the lives of Midlife Mixtape listeners better, and I want to make your furry, or winged, or scaled buddy to be included. Just send the pic to dj@midlifemixtape.com before November 11th. That’s it. Send me some cute animals’ pics, please. Make my day. So, I got pitched by today’s guests a few months back, and I was immediately intrigued. Megan Barnes Zesati and Holly Sprague are the founders DryTogether, which is an alcohol-free community for midlife moms that brings together women ages 35-60 years old from around the country. Through virtual events and a robust member-only online forum, the DryTogether community facilitates a safe space for mothers to connect and explore this stage in life – without alcohol. I will cop to being one of the 41% of women who increased her drinking during the pandemic. The RAND did a study and it’s cited in a Harvard business review story on the topic and I’m going to include in the show notes if you want to check it out. I’ve always enjoyed my daily beer, and since college, with a few memorable exceptions, I’ve always been able to stop when I’ve had enough. I guess this is true confessions time for you. Hope you’re ready for this. But when the pandemic started, and especially as it dragged on and the grief and losses piled up, I definitely allowed myself to drink more than I normally would. Studies and anecdotal evidence will tell you that drinking more is common response to dealing with stress, and I ain’t special. I’m pretty common. But recently, my friend Maria and I talked about how women seem to be drinking all the time, way more than our moms and grandmas did. That was even before the pandemic started. The same Harvard article bears out the theory that Maria and I had. Between 2001 and 2013, there was a 16% increase in the proportion of women who drink alcohol, a 58% increase in women’s heavy drinking (versus a rise of 16% in men), and an 84% increase in women’s one-year prevalence of an alcohol use disorder (versus 35% in men). So, basically, women have been drinking more since this was measured in 2001 across the board. I think that’s been influenced a lot by the media we consume that makes drinking seem like the behavioral baseline. I present to you myself as Exhibit A: have you read the Outlander series? Okay. If you haven’t read this yet or if you haven’t seen the show on Starz: it’s basically Scottish Kilt Porn. There’s Time Travel and there are Highlanders, and at all times one of four things is happening in this book series: someone is bleeding, someone is plotting, someone is making love, and someone is drinking whiskey. I started reading the series during the pandemic and let me say: I love these books. I will read them forever. I want to read about Jamie and Clare’s generous and steamy nonagenarian sex life someday. I’ve read10,000 pages of this series since March 2020. They’re literary comfort food to me. But I find when I read them: I want to drink more. BECAUSE EVERYONE IN THIS BOOK IS DRINKING WHISKEY ALL THE TIME. And TONS of whiskey. I can tell when I’m reading them, I’m like, “I think I’ll have a beer while I read!” so I know I get impacted by what I’m reading, watching, and consuming. Then when you see that level of drinking on TV, and in ads, and in everybody’s memes and on Instagram: Mommy drinks to cope, it’s time for Mommy juice, you’ve earned your drink, you start thinking: maybe 2 drinks a night is normal? Maybe 3 is? I don’t know what normal is anymore. I don’t know if you guys are into horoscopes – I am thanks to Aunt Noonie. I am an April baby so my sign is Taurus. It’s the sign of the zodiac that can be really sybaritic – very self-indulgent, with a tendency to overdo all the earthly luxuries like good food and good drink and cashmere on sale at Garnet Hill. So believe me, I’m the last person to judge anyone else about how you’ve handled the past year and a half, what your preferences are. I am not judging. But I found that for myself by summer of this year 2021, I was getting sick of it. I was feeling really bored of relying on the second drink more often than not, and since then I’ve been working really hard to cut back to my regular baseline of a single daily beer with a goal someday even to get below that. It’s not been easy. It’s amazing how quickly that became habitual. I sometimes wonder if just not drinking altogether would be a better option for me at this stage of life. I think it would be hard because it IS so enmeshed in the culture, and that’s why I invited Holly and Megan on today, and that’s what the conversation is that I have with them. I hope will be of service to you, whoever you are and whatever amount you find yourself about thinking and drinking at midlife. Let’s put on the teakettle and sit down with Holly and Megan of DryTogether. Nancy Davis Kho 07:14 Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, the cofounders of DryTogether, Holly Sprague and Megan Zesati. We’re so happy to have you here today. Holly Sprague 07:22 Hi, thank you so much for having us. Nancy 07:24 Of course, I need to know before we get down to business, and I’m always curious when I have two people on the show whether you know this about each other. Holly, what was your first concert and what were the circumstances? And Megan, you know this question is come in for you next so think it over. Holly 07:39 My first concert was Cyndi Lauper. Yes, I’m a midlife mother right now. My father took me. He was really into getting me into music. That was like one of the good ways that we did bond because after that, he took me to Michael Jackson. So, come on. Nancy 07:56 Wow. And he stayed in the concert venue with you? Holly 07:59 Yeah, he did. Nancy 08:01 He was a trendsetter, because sometimes my guests and I talk about the fact that our parents were the ones who drove us to Syracuse or to Rockport or wherever to go to the show, and then they sat in their car with the newspaper and read that until the concert was over. But as parents ourselves, we go in with the kids. So your dad was kind of cutting edge. Holly 08:18 That’s right. I guess so. I think he really just likes music and he wanted to hear it. Nancy 08:23 Megan, what was your first concert and what were the circumstances? Megan Zesati 08:27 Okay, seventh grade. George Michael, Freedom, Reunion Arena in Dallas, and my friend’s very cool mother brought the two of us. Nancy 08:39 You must be young Gen Xers. That’s what I think, because us old Gen Xers, the older sisters, our parents never stuck around. But your mom would have been crazy to leave a George Michael show. Megan 08:52 Right. Nancy 08:53 Was it everything you dreamed of and more as a seventh grader? Megan 08:55 It really was. It was like a highlight, and I’ve got a string of those that just kicked off a few great music experiences. Nancy 09:03 What would you follow it up with, Megan? Megan 09:05 Oh, Paul Simon was another just life altering experience, and that was a few years down the road, also like a big mega concert. Nancy 09:15 So many good shows, never enough time! Let’s start by talking a bit about what DryTogether is. I gave a very quick intro on the way in, but why don’t you guys tell me, not just what it is, but the moment where you decided to start it. I want to hear the origin story. Who’s going to take that, Holly or Megan? Holly 09:33 Either one. Megan, do you want to go, or you want me to? Megan 09:36 I don’t know if there was a single moment when we decided to start it. It’s like it decided to start and in some ways we started with an experiment, an idea and we have been following it, evolving. What we did initially decide to start began in January of this year, in 2021, and we started with the shared challenge of doing a dry month together for anyone who wanted to do that experiment, for any reason at all. Nancy 10:07 I’m going to ask a lot of questions just so everybody’s clear on this. Complete abstinence from alcohol for a month? That was what the challenge was. Megan 10:16 It was the intention to abstain from alcohol with the larger purpose, and this is really more of the spirit of it, is to see kind of what you learn about yourself and your relationship with alcohol, by stepping away from it. It’s not really an accountability group, nobody got dinged or in trouble if they drank during that time. Truly, nobody was checking. The spirit of it is less about restriction and taking something away, and more about seeing what you learned about yourself by stepping away. Nancy 10:48 And you guys knew each other how? I’m curious to know why you two came together over this issue. Holly 10:55 Yeah, we were college roommates. We’re both from Dallas, and then we met at the University of Texas in Austin, and we’re very good friends and stayed in touch throughout the years. That was, what? 25 plus years ago. I live in Boulder, Colorado, and have lived here for about 20 years now. Megan’s in Austin, and we’ve kept in touch along the way, obviously, shared our lives with each other. Then just recently, in the last two years, we really found out that both of us were alcohol free and that we had stopped drinking for our own reasons, kind of on our own. We were sharing a lot about that with each other, in terms of how it impacted our lives being alcohol free in a very alcohol-soaked society, and a lot of people around us were still drinking, and we were trying not to and what did that look like. So, we kind of started talking a lot about that. What got us to DryTogether is kind of a continuation of those conversations. Nancy 12:01 I have to just interject here and say that the AF all over the DryTogether website stands for alcohol free, not what Nancy thought. When I first thought I was like, oh, okay. Alright. They’re a little edgy with the AF and then I’m like, oh, I think that means alcohol free. Holly 12:16 Well, we tried to be a little edgy actually. Nancy 12:19 Okay. Megan 12:20 Because we are also midlife AF. Nancy 12:22 Right. Perfect. Megan 12:23 So we are an alcohol free community for mothers in midlife, and that’s really what this community is about. It is the place where you can come if you are a mother at this age and stage in life. Nancy 12:39 What is it about midlife mothers and drinking, or not drinking AF as the case may be, that is uniquely challenging? Megan 12:47 This is a pandemic project. The way that it came about is that during the pandemic, the messaging to women and to mothers coming at us from a number of sources, and also just how we speak with each other, was definitely like, “We’re going to need to drink to power through this experience.” That was where Holly and my conversations and idea for doing this dry month together would give us just a different experience of trying to cope and connect during what were pretty dark days in the pandemic. Nancy 13:23 But I feel like it even started before the pandemic, and I’m curious, since you work in this space, if you would agree with me, or if you’ve seen research to bear this out. I feel like the media and especially social media make it seem like everybody’s drinking all the time, and especially moms are. I have to tell you this whole trope of “Mommy juice!” on a wine glass, or “Mommy drinking blah, blah, blah” – it makes me crazy. I think that is different from our parents’ generation, our mother’s generation, our grandmother’s generation, I wonder if you’ve ever seen research that shows that to be the case? Holly 13:55 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve seen research come out of the pandemic that shows 41% of women were binge drinking during the pandemic, and that’s a pretty high number. I think for so long, it was our generations’ way of coping and this was how you can stay young, and this is how you can get through things. It was just a message we were given, that that was the really best way to go about doing it. Nancy 14:23 I hadn’t thought about that, but it makes sense to me that it’s one of the ways that you present to the world that you’re young: you can still go out and get smashed and have fun at a bar or whatever, even if you’re in your 40s and in your 50s. But we all know we don’t recover like we used to when we were in college. So at some point, you have to think about recalibrating your relationship to alcohol and what you use it for and what looks like healthy, sane consumption. Holly 14:51 Right. I think we question a lot in midlife and I think especially, our generation and my friends and I t…

Full show notes at the publisher

Ep 107 Listeners’ Halloween Stories Oct 19, 2021

Show notes

“Who’s Slash?”: Listeners – and Nancy – share stories of their memorable Gen X Halloweens past, from decidedly non-sexy costume strategies, to 7th graders on the cusp, to home bat invasions. The Perfect Cocktails for Your Perimenopause Party by Wendi Aarons, Gloria Fallon, and Marilyn Naron Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender (or how I became a punk rock lawyer) by Juanita E. Mantz, Esq Happy Halloween, you grown up goths. Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 107 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on October 19, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email dj@midlifemixtape.com *** Wendi Aarons 00:00 We learned our lesson that is probably not a great idea to dress like a ‘60s burnout named Touch Me Don’t Touch Me when we’re trying to get some action at a fraternity party. 00:11 Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one. [THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent] The Presenting Sponsor of Midlife Mixtape is Kindra. Kindra is revolutionizing menopause. They are a health and wellness company helping women navigate the most disruptive signs of the change including hot flashes, brain fog, restless sleep, dryness, and more. It’s science backed and made by women, for women. And as I’ve said on this show before, it’s probably going to be up to GenX to normalize open discussion of this entirely normal phase of life. Like at this conference I just attended, when I leaned over in front of a group of four women I’d never met before, all younger than me, and pulled out the Take 5 bars out of the stash of fun-sized candy that organizers had dumped in the center of the table. And I said to them, “Back when I still had eggs this was the perfect candy for that monthly salty/sweet craving, but now I can eat them whenever I want!” I’m just normalizing it, ladies. You can find your personalized product recommendations and educational content with a quiz that just takes 5 minutes. Isn’t it time we started talking about the change and embraced it? You can head to ourkindra.com and use code MIXTAPE20 (ALL CAPS) to get 20% off your first order or subscription. That’s ourkindra.com and the code is MIXTAPE20, to get 20% off your first order or subscription from Kindra. I also wanted to make sure you guys are aware of a really cool new little chat book, a little tiny pamphlet-sized fiction collection called Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender (or how I became a punk rock lawyer) . It’s by Juanita E. Mantz Esquire – that’s M-A-N-T-Z – and it’s a multi genre chat book containing memoir pieces, social justice, essays and poetry. It describes the author’s love of punk rock and Juanita’s quest to challenge the system of mass incarceration as a deputy public defender. She talks a lot about the intersection between punk rock and public defense. It’s an insider’s view of a system that is badly broken, but it’s done with love and compassion and a belief that we can do better, we can imagine a better way out of incarceration, especially for people who are mentally ill. The books out now from Bamboo Dart Press – you can find it at www.BambooDartPress.com – look for Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender (or how I became a punk rock lawyer) . [MUSIC] Nancy 02.58 Hi there and welcome to this special Halloween Edition of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho, your host, the creator of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast and the author of the book, The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. Midlife Halloween has its own kind of terror because what is scarier than waking up and seeing your own parents looking back at you from the mirror? It’s absolutely terrifying. So I put out a call on social media and the blog for your GenX Halloween stories. My theory was that GenX never took itself too seriously and would have some fun with the prompt – as exemplified by the story Erin sent in: She wrote, My most unsexy costume was when I dressed as a porta-potty for my department’s Halloween group theme. We were a bunch of Austin City Limits Music Festival survivors. This contest was during the early 00s, so the fest wasn’t quite the well-oiled machine it is today. The costume consisted of many large boxes and a halved broom handle stuck in the middle that I could hold onto to carry that sucker while inside. There was also tons of blue paint and two eyeholes. My porta-potty addition didn’t secure the gold. We came in second place to the Beetlejuice folks. But heck, they deserved it. As someone whose favorite all time Halloween costume was the mailbox my dad built me out of cardboard when I was in 5th grade, I totally respect the Porta Potty game Erin is playing here. By the way, the mailbox design was perfect for late October in Upstate NY because you could put your park on underneath it, and it included a curved top that repelled water in case it jumped above 32 degrees on Halloween night. Which wasn’t often. Because – you guys know this – back then most of us weren’t so worried about being Sexy Nurse or Sexy Ladybug or Sexy PortaPotty. Here’s Susan Rietano Davey, the career reentry expert and one of the co-founders of Prepare to Launch U who I interviewed back in Episode 47: Susan Rietano Davey 03:10 Hi Nancy – It’s Susan here in Connecticut, and I’m calling in with my Halloween story. When I was a freshman in high school about 40 years ago, I was desperate to become cool. And my dear friend Karen was much closer to that than I. So through her, we got an invitation to Ellen’s the Halloween party. Now Ellen was a junior, and the coolest of cool, the top of the heap. And we were so excited to knock her socks off with great Halloween costumes. So we rummaged through Karen’s father’s closet – he was an Army veteran – and we found two perfectly intact army uniforms. So that’s what we dressed up as. And we pulled our hair back severely and we greased it down so it stay under the hats and we even painted bushy mustaches and bushy eyebrows on each other. We showed up on Halloween night at Ellen’s house and we rang the doorbell. She answered it dressed as Scarlett O’Hara. And as we entered her foyer, we saw that all of Ellen’s cool, beautiful friends were dressed as Cinderella, or Snow White, or Charlie’s Angels, and there we were, as two infantry men. Suffice it to say we did not advance our coolness that night. We were never invited back to Ellen’s future parties, but we cemented our friendship that night for sure. And it has lasted all these years later. Nancy 04:30 Was there something in the water for people who would eventually grow up to become Midlife Mixtape listeners? Humor writer Wendi Aarons definitely got the non-sexy memo. Wendi Aarons 04:38 Hi, this is Wendi Aarons and my favorite Halloween memory is from freshman year of college at University of Oregon. My best friend Megan and I were looking for a costume to go to one of the fraternity parties. Those are the big bashes and we were so excited, because it was our first time being at what we thought was a real adult party. We talked and talked about what costume we should wear and finally landed on something that was very genius: dressing up like one of the guys who got to Eugene, Oregon, sometime in the ‘70s by following the Grateful Dead, and never left. He just sat on a bench on campus and yelled “Touch Me Don’t Touch Me.” So we thought it’d be a great idea to dress up like Touch Me Don’t Touch Me. We went to Goodwill and just bought a whole bunch of random giant shirts and pants. And we dressed in those and then we dressed in everything that our dorm mates would give us. And basically we looked like that episode of Friends where Joey puts on all of Chandler’s clothes and walks around. We were like sumo wrestlers or something. So we get to the fraternity party and quickly realized that we didn’t get the memo that everybody else did. All the other girls were Sexy Something – not to the extent they are now, where you have, like, a Sexy Tooth Cavity. But everybody was Sexy Kitten or Sexy Genie Dancer or Sexy what have you. And here we roll in, dressed in approximately 500 layers of clothing and sweating our little butts off. And then we actually stood there and were surprised that not even any of the horny fraternity guys would come up and talk to us; we were that repellent. So the next year we took off a few more layers. We never quite got down to the sexy costume level. But we learned our lesson that is probably not a great idea to dress like a ‘60s burnout named Touch Me Don’t Touch Me when we’re trying to get some action at a fraternity party. Nancy 06:52 By the way, did you see Wendi’s latest essay in McSweeney’s called The Perfect Cocktails for Your Perimenopause Party? I’ll put that link in the show notes, right after I mix myself up a “Chin Hair of the Dog.” But of course the exception that proves the rule – we’ve got Carrie from San Francisco who remembers, “When we first moved to Noe Valley” – that’s a neighborhood in San Francisco for those who don’t live near me – Carrie says, “When we first moved to Noe Valley, I dressed up as a goth French maid and dressed up my husband as Captain Jack Morgan and we went around bars and offered to buy anyone a shot of Captain Jack if they let me draw the red lipstick mustache on them.” She says it was the Wet and Wild .99 cent brand that doesn’t wash off. She says, “Had Instagram existed then I might have racked up some serious advertising influencer points. We bought a lot of shots that night.” Carrie’s always been a bit of a trendsetter. Her story reminds me of the time in college, I thought I was going dressed as a woman from the Renaissance period. And then everyone thought I was the St. Pauli Girl, so I just went with that. [MUSIC] Nancy 07:52 I just loved this sweet story from Ann Imig. Ann Imig 07:54 It was Halloween, probably 1987, maybe ‘86. We’re in seventh grade and at our first/boy girl Halloween party. And as you can imagine, we were going insane with our hormones and our volume and our activity in a uniquely Middle School pitch. And as a result, my best friend at the time, Megan, went flying into the plate glass window by the doorway, in an attempt to avoid some boy chasing her. So this starts out as a minor tragedy because she did need to go to the ER – she was okay. But as a result, on Trick or Treat night, the next night, she had her hand in a splint and couldn’t do much and it was raining. And it ended up just to be the two of us trick or treating. And as much as I was so sad for her injury, I was secretly really pleased to have Megan all to myself, because she was very popular and normally would have wanted to be where the action was. But as a result, we just pulled some old clothing out of my parents closet and went as Sue Ellen and JR, I think? and trick or treated. I still remember this corny little song we made up along the way, just being totally goofy, and back to our little girl selves. Thanks, Nancy. Nancy 09:09 And then, as I’m putting this episode together, record scratch: Facebook and Instagram went down. You know, to be candid, my first reaction was please please please let them stay down and may Twitter be felled by the same outage. Because even though there are aspects of social media that I adore, like seeing all your cute pandemic pets and watching kids who I’ve never met hit milestones like fifth grade graduation, and then high school graduation and more, I do think social media networks have contributed to the great coarsening of American culture and maybe we’d all be a bit better off if we took a long break from it. But my second reaction was shared by creatives of all types: oh shizzle. How am I going to let my readers/listeners/followers know when there’s something new they may want to check out? I know a LOT of listeners find out about new episodes when I post about them on FB and IG. That’s great but…what if those go away? How do we stay in touch? Back in the olden days I had a blog – and technically I still have it, at MidlifeMixtape.com. I used to write essays aka blog posts twice a week, religiously, back in 2011 when I first started it. And people who subscribed to the blog got an email from me whenever there was a new post. Now they only get a notice twice a month that a new podcast episode is available, along with all the juicy show notes I’m always referring to in the episodes themselves. Anyway ALL that writing I’ve is still at MidlifeMixtape.com, buried under years of other writing, and then writing and podcast episodes on top of that. So it occurred to me that I might go over to the blog and excavate a few of my OWN stories from the blog archive about Halloween, and fall, and other Halloween-adjacent topics, and share them with you. Like this one from 2011. All you need to know here is that our dog at the time was a hunting dog, a German Shorthaired pointer named Achilles. This one is called My Office is Not Your Belfry. In the middle of a bright, sunny weekday earlier this month, a bat flew into my small home office. The thoughts that followed riffled past like so many index cards in a library file cabinet, I thought I might just share the journey. Thought 1: That’s a really big moth…batbaTbAT BAT! BAT! Ohmygod that’s a BAT! BAT! BAT! IT JUST HIT ME IN THE BACK! IT JUST DID IT AGAIN! AGGGGH! (Note: the bat never once touched me, being fully engaged with battering itself against my “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster. It was the zipper of my jacket flapping against my back as I tore out of my office towards the upstairs at a pace that would have left Usain Bolt eating my dust.) Thought 2: Where is my dog and why isn’t he addressing this? He’s a hunting dog, fer chrissakes, he chases rolling clods of dirt and he’s going to ignore a bat? Where is Achilles? My adrenaline-fueled sprint enabled me to reach the living room upstairs and catch Achilles unawares where he was napping on the good couch in the living room. Allow me to translate his response: “Oh, uh, hey lady. I’m probably not supposed to be on the couch, right? I love you. Hi! I love you.” Thought 3: Of course my husband is out of town. He’s ALWAYS out of town when there’s an Urban Wildlife Interface Incident. The redtailed hawk immolating itself on the power line behind the house and starting a brush fire; the time that two rat traps were sprung simultaneously in the spooky back storage area; the time a herd of turkeys walked regally through the front yard and caused Achilles, on the other side of the living room window, to suffer a permanent mental breakdown. What was the movie on your flight to St. Louis, dear? Sorry about the message I left on your cell phone while you were watching it. Thought 4: Who else’s husband can I borrow? I thought of all the dads in the ‘hood with home offices and remembered that two of the three now have to work in their corporate location due to work pressure – Thanks For Nothing, Recession! [Remember I wrote this in 2011. Little did we know, right?] The third was probably traveling and, let’s be frank, would have been more horrified by the bat than I was. Thought 5: If I don’t take care of this, we will never set foot on the lower floor again. Besides my home office, we have our laundry room, second bathroom, and our one TV down there. Clearly I was going to have to address this before the girls came home from school, or we’d never wear clean clothes, have a moment’s peace in the bathroom, or watch Glee again. [Again, it’s a 2011 post.] Thought 6: I am not scared of bats. It’s true; of all the pests, bats are…

Full show notes at the publisher

Ep 106 Singer/Songwriter Bob Schneider Oct 05, 2021

Show notes

“Something besides yourself to love”: Austin music legend Bob Schneider on his latest album, “In a Roomful of Blood With a Sleeping Tiger”, non-autobiographical songs written with autobiographical emotion, and why he shouldn’t rule the world. BobSchneider.com Bob on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Collective Effervescence essay by Adam Grant – New York Times Contact Nancy to set up Thank-You Project Event this fall! Don’t forget to share your GenX Halloween stories! More here… Since we talked about his ’99 song “2002” so much in our convo…here it is: Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 106 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on October 5, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email dj@midlifemixtape.com *** Bob Schneider 00:01 I want to be Will Rogers at some point in my life, where there’s nobody on earth that’s not a friend of mine. Nancy Davis Kho 00:08 Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one. [THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent] 00:32 Hey there and welcome to Episode 106 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, where we have so much going on today. I’m Nancy Davis Kho, and I’m the host and creator of the podcast, and there are two things I want to tell you quickly and then I promise we are getting right into the interview. First! We have another Listeners’ Stories episode coming up next time and I need your stories! You know how this works. I give you a topic, you guys write in, record yourselves, drop me a comment, and whatever prompt I give you, and this time it is: GenX Halloween. I KNOW you have something to say: your ‘70s, ‘80s, and ’90s Halloween memories. The kind of stories that our Gen Z kids and our Boomer older siblings just couldn’t relate to. Maybe it was the smell of those plastic masks that your parents bought you at the drugstore. Remember those in the cellophane boxes? Maybe it was the lady around the corner that everybody knew put razor blades in apples. Why would she spend time doing that? She was watching General Hospital. She wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. Maybe you went dressed as a mailbox, because back then being clever or weird was better than being sexy. There were no sexy mail boxes. That was maybe just me. I don’t know. Whatever the prompt GenX Halloween brings to mind, we all want to hear it! So you know the drill. You can leave me a voice mail right from your computer! You just go to https://www.speakpipe.com/MidlifeMixtape and you can start recording there with one click. I LOVE when people do this, because then I can incorporate the actual voice of our listeners in the episode. There’s a 90 second limit on these recordings, and you can re-record it as many times as you want. If you’ve got a longer story, just record that into your phone as a voice memo and email it to me. The email is dj@midlifemixtape.com and again, I love hearing these stories in your actual voice. You can send me an email with your story typed out to dj@midlifemixtape.com and I’ll share it in the episode, or you can always send me a Facebook message, a tweet or an Instagram comment. I’m @midlifemixtape So, I need those by October 12th, please, and I’ve already gotten some great ones in, including one that actually took place recently, but it was such a perfect Get Off My Lawn, Gen Z moment that it fits right into the theme. So, Gen X Halloween: what have you got? Second thing I wanted to just say briefly is that this is the time of the year when lots of people start thinking about gratitude, in the run up to Thanksgiving, and I’ve been doing a bunch of virtual and live events about my book, The Thank-You Project. But I still have room for a few more, and I love doing this. Do you have an organization, a club, a class, maybe your work colleagues, just a group that could benefit by knowing more about the power of gratitude letters? Hit me up at dj@midlifemixtape.com and we’ll get the ball rolling. I just did one with an organization called The Choose Love Movement. This is a group founded by the mom of one of the Sandy Hook victims, and it was such an honor to connect with Choose Love and its monthly book club. I love doing it. So, if you have a group and you want to talk about gratitude and thank you letters, I’m your man. Your woman. So, here’s the deal. About 10 years ago I joined a gang. It was a gang of lady humor writers and our main weaponry is the cutting remark, but a bunch of them are based in Austin and told me back then, “You have GOT to check out this musician, Bob Schneider. He’s an amazing performer based in Austin.” So, I did and I’ve been a fan of Bob ever since. Is his music funk, R&B, Latin, Americana? Yes! That and more. It’s everything, and it’s all done with such a great sense of humor, and I’ve had the chance to see Bob play live a whole slew of times in the Bay Area over the past decade. But of course, with the pandemic, concert going ground to a halt. Luckily, I am connected to this concert promoter in San Francisco named KC Turner. You can find KC at KCTurnerPresents.com and at KC Turner Presents on social. And you should, because he is always bringing great acts to the Bay Area. Anyway, I got an email from KC earlier this year saying that he was doing a backyard concert series with different artists and these were really small, like 30 people, everybody had to be fully vaccinated. And one day the email came that one of the artists he was bringing to town was Bob Schneider. I JUMPED at the chance to hear Bob in such an intimate setting, and so did my friends, and long story short: Bob Schneider played a backyard show for a bunch of us here in Oakland at the end of July, and if you go over to my Instagram @midlifemixtape, you can see some of the pics from that day. It was magical, and I finally met Bob in person for the first time, and I’m so glad he agreed to come visit us on the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. Let me tell you a little about him. Bob is as mentioned based in Austin, Texas. He is a singer-songwriter and former front man of The Ugly Americans and The Scabs. He has become one of the most celebrated musicians in the live music capital. Drawing from a range of diverse musicals styles, Schneider’s talent has defied genres. Combining elements of funk, country, rock, and folk with the more traditional singer/songwriter aesthetic, Schneider draws inspiration from the ’70s but with a modern twist. He has won more than 59 Austin Music Awards including Best Album, Best Songwriter, Best Musician, and Best Male Vocals making him the most decorated artist in Austin music history. If you have ever been to Austin, you know what kind of a music city that is. So, that’s quite an accomplishment. But Schneider’s fan base reaches far beyond the city limits of Austin. He started gaining national recognition when he released 2001’s Lonelyland, his major-label debut for Universal Records, and since then he’s released more than a dozen albums, written over 1,000 songs, he is a published author, he is an avid painter and collage artist, and he’s not planning on slowing down anytime soon. Bob’s newest record is called In A Roomful Of Blood with A Sleeping Tiger. It came out in August 2021, and we’re going to hear some tracks from it today. I love it! So, let’s go with the flow with Bob Schneider. [MUSIC] Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, Bob Schneider. I’m so happy to have you here today. Bob 06:22 You sound so professional. Nancy 06:24 Thank you. I think it’s the sound of the dog licking himself in the background that really sells it because he waits until he knows I’ve hit record and then he’s like, “You know what I need to do? Clean up house.” Bob 06:35 Wow. That’s a good visual that I’ve got now. Nancy 06:38 Yeah, well, that’s Arlo. Welcome to the show. It’s me and Arlo Kho. Bob, I’ve got a question for you. What was your first concert, and what were the circumstances? Bob 06:49 Well, the first concert that I paid to go see was Earth, Wind & Fire, and I think the year was 1981, if I’m correct, and they were touring, like they had all their hits. It was the most amazing concert I think I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Now, I was raised by a musician, my dad. Nancy 07:11 He’s an opera singer, right? Bob 07:12 He’s an opera singer, but he would also moonlight in a cover band, and he worked his way through college playing in cover bands, and I know I was at many of those shows before I was even born, and then when I was 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. So I watched him play a lot of shows. But the first official one that I take responsibility for was Earth, Wind & Fire. Nancy 07:36 And where was it? Bob 07:37 It was in Germany. Nancy 07:39 Okay. Bob 07:40 It was in Bremen, Germany. Nancy 07:42 So, I did not realize you were raised in Germany. I saw that in a bio when I was doing my research this week. I also lived in Germany and Bob: I saw Earth, Wind & Fire play while I lived in Germany. Bob 07:52 What year was it? Nancy 07:53 It was not ’81. It would have been at ‘88 or ‘89, and what I remember about it, Bob, is that I went with my American friend Kristen, and we stood up and danced. And the Germans, I don’t know if this was your experience in Bremen – nobody was dancing, they are an orderly people, they sat still. And somebody fired a beer can at my head because I was obstructing their view. Bob 08:14 They are very orderly. But they also… Nancy 08:16 But how do you sit down at an Earth, Wind & Fire concert? That’s not normal human behavior. Bob 08:24 Well, if you’re German, you are very… it’s called Pünktlichkeit and Ordnung. I think it’s that or something, I don’t know. I might have made up that word. But here’s what I know about Germans. They’re very chill at concerts unless they get upset, and then, they’re super quick to start firing beer cans at whatever they don’t like. I saw the Rolling Stones also in ’81 not long after that, and there were three bands. Man, I’m spacing on the first band. What’s the band that did “My Angel is a Centerfold”? Nancy 09:02 Oh, J. Geils. Bob 09:04 The J. Geils Band were the first band. They were amazing. One of the best bands I’ve ever seen. Nancy 09:07 Okay. Bob 09:08 Then another a guy named Peter Maffay, he was like the German Kris Kristofferson. Nancy 09:13 Oh sure. I remember that guy’s name. Bob 09:17 Yeah, yeah. So, he gets up there and he’s got an acoustic guitar and he’s singing in German [Bob imitates some guttural fake German], and the Germans, en masse, start throwing, not cans, but beer bottles onto the stage trying to hit him. He had to leave after the second song. Nancy 09:34 Oh my God. Bob 09:35 Yeah, they don’t mess around. But here’s the crazy thing. So, I went to all these concerts in Germany, and I feel like when the concert was going on, people were very respectful. They would politely clap after every song. They would listen, and if they liked what you did, they didn’t tell you with beer bottles. Now, I go to the States and the first concert I see there is U2, the Rattle and Hum Concert. Nancy 10:01 Okay. Bob 10:02 And I get in the audience, and everybody in the audience is losing their minds. They’re going crazy. They’re up on your feet, they’re shouting, they’re screaming, and it’s the concert where they had the light that they would shine into the audience. Nancy 10:17 Right. Bob 10:18 And whenever they would shine the light on the audience, people would… Nancy 10:22 Go ballistic. Bob 10:23 …act like they just won $10 million, and I was like, “They are just shining an annoying light in your face, what is wrong with all this?” It was such a culture shock coming from Germany to the United States. Nancy 10:36 How old were you when you lived in Germany? What were your years there? Bob 10:39 I moved there when I was two, and then I did spend four years in El Paso from third grade through seventh grade. But other than that, I was over there until I was 20. Nancy 10:48 Wow, okay. Bob 10:49 So, I went to college over there and I went to high school, which, by the way, if you’re going to be a teenager, Germany was the best place to be a teenager. Because the drinking age was 13. You couldn’t drive, you couldn’t even get a license until you’re 18. But then it was thousands of dollars to get a license, which I didn’t have. But the public transportation system is great. Nancy 11:08 It’s awesome. Bob 11:09 And it’s really safe. Nancy 11:10 Yeah. Bob 11:11 So, I had a wonderful time kind of partying as a teenager. Nancy 11:16 Well, first of all your song “2002” makes a lot more sense to me now, because there’s a little riff in there about how you went back to Germany. Whenever I hear that I wonder what that’s about. I get it. Bob 11:26 I will interrupt you and tell you that that entire song is made up. Nancy 11:30 Okay. Well, yeah, hopefully. HOPEFULLY. Bob 11:35 Yeah, because it mentions that I was addicted to heroin when I wrote it. Nancy 11:37 He’s kind of a pathetic guy. A lovable guy, but… Bob 11:41 Well, see I wrote that song in 1998 after – I wouldn’t say a breakup, I was dating a girl who I was madly in love with, and we only dated for a few weeks. But I feel like the most intense love is that under-two- months kind of unrequited love. Nancy 11:59 Right. Because you don’t have time to figure out the flaws. It’s just perfect all the way through, for the two weeks. Bob 12:04 Yeah, they never become a real person. They’re kind of this idealized version of a person, and you think, “Oh, this is the thing that’s going to make me happy.” And then oh, they’re gone, and it’s so hard to deal with. Anyway, I wrote this song knowing oh, by the time 2002 rolls around, I’ll be over this lovely lady, and so I wrote the song. And then 2002 has come and gone and now people are like, “Oh, that’s an autobiographical song that happened in 2002.” Nancy 12:34 You heard it on the record here. No, it ain’t. No, it ain’t. I have to tell you my decision to just… we’ll leave Germany at some point, listeners. We won’t always be talking about Germany, but I do love talking to anybody who lived there, because I had such formative few years there after college. One of the biggest factors in my decision to move home was one night in Munich and listen – it’s a really safe country and I really appreciated that as a young woman who liked her beer. So, I was walking home from a tavern, pub, whatever it was, at like 2am listening to my Walkman, and there’s no traffic. It’s the middle of the night. And I jaywalked in Germany. And two drunk men across the street who were so drunk, that they were teepeeing against each other. They were holding each other up in an A frame situation in their leder hosen. They started yelling at me and they said in German, “Don’t walk against the light. You have to be an example to the children.” And I’m like, if you can be that drunk and still a rule follower and still yelling at other people, this is not a country for me anymore. I just want to go home where jaywalking on an empty street, that’s just common sense. Bob 13:51 That’s the thing I love the most about Germany. I love rules. I really do. No, I love rules, and I love following rules and I love people who follow rules. I went to Mexico with my wife and she had a wonderful time. We went Tulum and there were no rules and I was like… Nancy 14:08 Were you itchy the whole time? Bob 14:11 Oh, I had my first like, full blown panic attack when I was there, because I’m like, if there are no rules, what do I … Nancy 14:20 What does anything mean? Bob 14:22 I mean, human beings are wild, dangerous, insane animals…

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Ep 105 Grateful Living Guide Kristi Nelson Sep 21, 2021

Show notes

“Stop, Look, Go”: Kristi Nelson, author of “Wake Up Grateful,” on transforming her Stage IV cancer survival into a lifetime practice of more grateful living, midlife carpe diem, and an unusual way to embrace that middle-of-the-night restiveness. About Kristi Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted Nancy’s AAA Playlist on Apple Music Live from Budokan, it’s… Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 105 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on September 21, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email dj@midlifemixtape.com *** Kristi Nelson 00:01 At this stage in life, so many of us have had wake-up calls. So many of the difficult experiences of life actually make it more possible to connect with feeling grateful. Nancy Davis Kho 00:14 Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one. [THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent] Nancy 00:38 I just want to make sure that you have all checked out the great new September content from fellow members of the G.A.L.S squad. That’s – plug your ears little one – G.A.L.S, as in Grown Ass Ladies. Over on tuenight.com, there’s a great essay by my pal, Wendi Aarons, about the joys of going to a movie theater solo. I would actually just love to go to a movie theater. I haven’t done that in a year and a half. Going solo, that would be the icing on top. Jumbleandflow.com has a piece on finding your flow with tarot card readings. Damemagazine.com asks, “Do we have the space to grieve anymore?” That is a dang good question. That’s damemagazine.com. And heyperry.com, that’s H-E-Y-P-E-R-R-Y.C-O-M has the ever popular topic “Perimenopause periods: WTF is happening?” Make sure to check out all these sites designed for people in the years between being hip and breaking one. The G.A.L.S. always have great new stuff coming out. [MUSIC] Welcome to Episode 105 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast! I’m Nancy Davis Kho, host and creatress of the show, and I’m really glad you’re tuning in today. September 21st happens to be World Gratitude Day, a topic I know a little bit about…but I thought that for a refreshing change of pace, instead of talking to you about Gratitude Letters and the book I wrote, The Thank-You Project, I’d bring in a guest who could share a different perspective on incorporating more gratefulness and grateful living into our lives. That seemed especially important in a week where two different friends have said to me, “You know what? Relatively speaking, I don’t have anything to feel down about.” And they are kind of kicking themselves for feeling low and I was like, “You are now the human embodiment of that cartoon dog in the fedora sitting with his coffee as the flames rise up around him.” NO ONE IS OK. EVERYBODY HAS SOMETHING TO FEEL DOWN ABOUT AFTER 18 MONTHS OF THIS PANDEMIC – and I recently read that 1 in 3 Americans has been affected by a weather disaster made worse by climate change. It’s ok, and it’s normal, to not be ok. Speaking of the climate change thing, have you checked out sciencemoms.com yet? Go back to Episode 102 for all the details on that. Anyway, goes for me, too. Ever since my mom’s memorial service in August, I have to say I have been feeling a lot more subdued and frankly, a little hopeless, moreso than at any other time during the past 18 months. So today’s guest, and her reminder of how these wake-up calls in our lives can enrich them if we look at them from the right perspective, seems especially timely. Kristi Nelson is the Executive Director of A Network for Grateful Living, and the author of Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted. Imagine that?! Kristi’s life’s work in the non-profit sector has focused on leading, inspiring, and strengthening organizations committed to progressive social and spiritual change. Being a long-time stage IV cancer survivor moves her every day to support others in living and loving with great fullness of heart. In 2001 – after five years leading a regional Women’s Fund – Kristi founded a values-based fundraising consulting and coaching company, and in this capacity, she has worked with organizations like Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Institute for Jewish Spirituality, Wisdom 2.0, and The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, among others. She has also been founding Director of Soul of Money Institute with Lynne Twist, Director of Development at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, and Director of Development and Community Relations for the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society. So take a deep calming breath, and join me as I talk with gratefulness guru, Kristi Nelson. [MUSIC] Nancy 04:16 I want to welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, Kristi Nelson. Thanks so much for being on the show today. Kristi 04:22 I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Nancy 04:25 Well, it’s a special day today because the day this episode drops is World Gratitude Day. So I wanted to have somebody on who could provide a different lens into the topic of gratefulness and gratitude, and I’m excited to talk about your book, Wake Up Grateful. But first, Kristi, obviously, we have to ask you this question, which is what was your first concert and what were the circumstances? Kristi 04:47 This has caused me to do research and verification. Nancy 04:51 Oh. I love giving a guest homework. That’s fabulous. Kristi 04:54 Actually, it was so great. I believe … because you know now that I’m in my 60s, it’s actually long term memory issues. So I believe that it was Cheap Trick. Nancy 05:07 Really? Kristi 05:08 It was 1976 and I couldn’t find their tour dates to confirm, but it was somewhere I think either Springfield Massachusetts or somewhere in the close environs and this is just the funniest thing. Their song that I loved and used to sing at the top of my possible voice spectrum, I’d sing, “I want you to want me, I need you to need me. I’d love you to love me.” Nancy 05:32 Sure. Kristi 05:33 That’s like their big song. Nancy 05:35 And you were what? Nine years old, singing that? No, I’m kidding. Kristi 05:38 No. Yeah, that’s funny. I was 16, and it was probably one of those things that it was a celebration of my 16th birthday and passing to some kind of new level of trustworthiness that I could go off and I’m sure I wasn’t worthy of it at all. Nancy 05:53 In the 70s, the bar for trustworthiness in kids was awfully low compared to where it is now. We hear these stories over and over on this show of people doing stuff that they would never let their kids do now. Kristi 06:05 Yeah, so true. Nancy 06:06 So I love that concert for you. I’m trying to remember which Cheap Trick song it was… my friend and I were getting coffee at a coffee shop one day and it came on over the Muzak. She and I started singing both sides of it at each other, really aggressively, and the poor coffee girl who was a Millennial just looked at us in absolute horror. Appropriately so. Cheap Trick, you’ve got to sing along. It’s very much a sing along kind of a band. I wondered if there is a way that music plays into your efforts to live gratefully, playing a song that makes you feel grateful, or amplifying your mood or anything like that. Is there a way that music plays a role for you? Kristi 06:43 Hugely, I would say. And it’s interesting, because I always say that gratitude waits for something good to happen and gratefulness actually waits for us to just be awake. So for me, what that means when I’m awake is awake and tuned in to what I can create for experiences that bring about more grateful awareness, and so that helps shift my perspective. That’s what I’m a big believer in. So I use music a lot to enhance my perspective. When I come home, and I’m tired at the end of the day, or I’ve done a lot of things that have been exhausting at a particular level mentally or physically, if I put on music, Pharrell William’s, “Happy”… Nancy 07:26 Sure. The theme song. Kristi 07:27 It is absolutely irresistible, right? So there’s so many songs like that, that energize me and completely shift my mood and music has an unparalleled ability to do that in my life. Nancy 07:41 I agree so much. At some point during the pandemic, last year, I made a playlist on my phone called the AAA playlist, and it is only songs that make me get a little shiver when they come on, like I go, “Oh my god, I love this song too.” If it doesn’t elicit that response, I take it off the playlist. We were driving recently – My husband and I drove down to LA to drop our daughter off at school and it’s been a pandemic, it’s been 18 months of difficult things and we were coming back and I was like, “You know what? I need to listen that playlist right now, because I’m feeling…” I was missing my daughter already. There’re just any number of things that are hard and I knew if I just put this on, oh, it’s so good. I wish you could all listen to my AAA playlist. But I think the better thing is for everybody to make an AAA playlist that is personal to you, that gives you that little jolt. Because it works exactly like you’re saying. It just kind of puts you in a better space. And that’s something to be grateful for. Kristi 08:38 You got that. Thank you. I love that and I love that you’ve just assigned us more homework. Nancy 08:43 Yes, go make your playlist. Report back. Tell me what’s on it. I mentioned today is World Gratitude Day and anybody who’s listened to this podcast has heard me talk ad infinitum about gratitude letters, which is the tool that I used back in 2016 to kind of acknowledge all the good people around me, all the things that I had to be thankful for up to that point in my life. It was a benchmark birthday and I was really trying to think deliberately about the helpers who had come along the way. And I swear by gratitude letters still, I know how powerful they are and I know from readers who have bought and read my book, The Thank-You Project that they work really well. But, 18 months into this pandemic, Kristi, I need some backup. I feel like I need more arrows in my gratitude quiver and I think part of this today is going to be like a therapy session for me. I’m just being honest with you and with the listeners: I feel really flat sometimes these days and I’m worn out of working so hard to stay healthy and I’m worn out of watching friends who have suffered and I’m worn out of looking at the bigger world around me and feeling so overwhelmed some days. And it’s part of why I do this podcast, because I’m always connecting with people every two weeks, who have a different, a dynamic way of looking at the world around them, and that’s one of the things that helps me so much. But you have written this book called Wake Up Grateful, where you talk about how we can have grateful living and you just mentioned the difference between gratitude and gratefulness. Talk a little bit more about that. How do you see them as different things? Kristi 10:24 Sure. Well, I’m super excited to be here and talk about this and I also want you to know that all of us, I think, are struggling through this time in ways that we didn’t anticipate and could have never imagined, and so it’s all new again, and here we are. The most important thing I think that helps me is admitting it, and connecting with people around it, feeling the normalcy of it, and how this is the new normal for a lot of us is working through these experiences of feeling more separate from each other. So admitting it is the first part and making a space to really own that this, too, is part of living gratefully…actually acknowledging that having these emotions points us to the things that we’re most grateful for, that we’ve lost touch with. For me to be able to feel strong emotions, is something I’m thankful for, actually. Sometimes that’s grief and sometimes I think – this is the time of great grief actually. Grief and gratitude are close kin with one another, in my experience. We can always be pointed back to those things which have enriched our lives and which we can connect with in other more creative ways that draws on resourcefulness. I mean, I think we really need to pull out of the bottom of our quiver. It’s not just grabbing the arrows that we’re used to grabbing, it’s reaching for different things. So gratefulness and grateful living, I think are really important as distinctions. Gratitude is awesome and it’s very difficult to connect with in every moment. Gratefulness is something that allows us to connect with gratitude in every moment, because it’s a state of being grateful from the inside out. As I said, it doesn’t wait for anything. It’s not a response. It’s a proactive approach to life, it’s a way that we orient to life is gratefully. And what that means is remembering that it’s an inside job, and that we can have a lot of agency over our experience of being grateful. We often see it as kind of a passive thing; I think it’s transactional. It’s relational, but super fleeting, and so finding the ways that we can cultivate an interior experience of gratefulness to deeply ground ourselves in that. I call it many different things, gratefulness. But one of the things is it is “the opposite of taking life for granted.” So the shift for me is, what am I taking for granted right now that I can lift up in my awareness, that reconnects me to how grateful I am for life? Nancy 12:58 I love the way you put it in your book, “It’s not about whether the glass is half empty or half full. It’s being grateful that you have a glass.” Kristi 13:04 Yes, exactly. That comes from being a cancer survivor for me, very advanced cancer that I expected it to take my life. Nancy 13:14 And at a young age. Kristi 13:15 At 33. Surviving that and recognizing also, Nancy, how easy it is to lose the appreciation for still being alive, that it’s so easy to get sunk, it’s so easy to get down, and yet, then I remember Oh, my God, remember how grateful you were not to have died? WOW! Every single day that we’re alive is another day that we didn’t die. And so I have to literally remind myself that it’s a gift to be alive, and that every single moment that I can breathe, that I can reconnect with myself, even my heartbreak is an opportunity that I don’t want to squander, I don’t want to miss it, I want to remember I’m alive, recognize I’m alive, celebrate the fact that I’m alive. That’s grounded in what I call gratefulness and grateful living. It’s a distinction from gratitude that I think is important, because we have a lot of concepts around gratitude that can keep us from really taking charge of our experience of that and knowing that it’s very deeply internal. Nancy 14:21 Sorry, I’m listening to you so deeply that I forgot what the next question was that I was going to ask you. Kristi 14:27 That’s a compliment. Thanks. Nancy 14:30 Well, I appreciate the frankness with what you write in your book that grateful living and retaining that sense of gratefulness just as you move through your day is a practice. I mean, that was a really powerful message, right from the beginning, that you had been a cancer survivor. There was a period of time after you recovered that you were grateful just naturally, just to be alive, just to wake-up every day. But that over time that faded away, and I think that was really relatable because there are a lot of things if we sit and think about them, we think, wow, I am really glad I have a roof over my head and I do really appreciate clean air on a fall day here in the Bay Area. But ask me in two weeks, I…

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Ep 103 “First Date Stories” Author Jodi Klein Aug 24, 2021

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“Dating is a skill”: Jodi Klein, author and podcast host of “First Date Stories”, on the benefits and challenges of being a “seasoned” dater, her Ninja midlife dating tips, and Midlife Mixtape listeners’ own memorable First Date Stories. Find Jodi on: Facebook https://www.facebook.com/1stdates/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/1st_DateStories/ Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/firstdatestories Website https://firstdatestories.com/ The only Goo Goo Dolls song I knew of theirs, back in 1990 when I asked this cute guy on a first date with the free tickets I’d won. Thanks for being so loud that the guy suggested we leave and go get a coffee and talk, Goos! I still respect this video hard for all the nods to our mutual hometowns in Western New York, FWIW ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 103 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on August 24, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email dj@midlifemixtape.com ***Jodi Klein 00:01 Think about who you were in your twenties, versus who you are in your forties or fifties. You are a different person, and you know so much better who you are, what’s important to you, and you show up without being as concerned about the unimportant things. Nancy Davis Kho 00:17 Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one. [THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent] Nancy 00:42 This episode of The Midlife Mixtape Podcast is brought to you by Audible. Get a free audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.AudibleTrial.com/midlifemixtape. Over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or mp3 player. And you know what? One of those 180,000 titles is my book, THE THANK-YOU PROJECT: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. It’s about a year I spent writing thank you letters to people who had helped, shaped, or inspired me from my AP English teacher from high school who I hadn’t seen in 30 years to my husband who I had seen five minutes before I started writing the letter. It gives readers a blueprint for doing it themselves, and explains the science about why gratitude and happiness work so well together. I hope readers will find it to be a tool that helps them emerge from this difficult period a little bit more gracefully. So go to www.AudibleTrial.com/midlifemixtape for your free audiobook. [MUSIC] Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho, the creator and host of the show, and I’ve missed you over the past month while I was out on vacation. But don’t you feel like absence probably made our hearts grow fonder for one another? I think it did. That topic of mutual affection is actually a specialty for today’s guest. Do you see what I did there? Did I segue like a boss? Yes, I’ve still got it! My guest today is Jodie Klein, the author of First Date Stories: Women’s Romantic and Ridiculous Midlife Adventures, which comes out on September 14th 2021. A demanding career and desire to find the right “Mr. Yes” for her led to Jodi becoming an alumna of nearly 400 dates over the course of 26 years. She founded “First Date Stories” both the podcast and the blog, as a platform for GenX women to share their tales and wisdom so that others can overcome the trials of dating in midlife and find the long-term love they seek. Jodi is a graduate of UC Davis and holds an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and she lives with her husband in San Francisco. Yes, spoiler alert. She found her husband. She found “Mr. Yes.” Now, after I’d spoken with Jodi – I was so intrigued by the book, I really enjoyed reading First Date Stories, I loved talking with her about it. And then I thought, you know who I bet has some good first date stories? The people who listen to this podcast. So I sent out a call on Facebook and said, “Real quick, everybody. Send me a great first date story.” And as usual, you delivered. So stay tuned all the way to the end of the episode because I’m going to share some of your stories about memorable, magical and some pretty bad first dates. But for now, fix your hair. Check your teeth for broccoli. We’re sitting down with Jodi Klein to discuss First Date Stories. [MUSIC] Nancy 03:30 Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, Jodi Klein. Thank you for coming today. Glad to have you on the show. Jodi Klein 03:36 It is terrific to be here. I’m such a fan. Nancy 03:39 Well, that’s nice of you to say. I have to tell you, I have been so intrigued by the book, First Date Stories, we’re going to talk a lot about it. But the first question for you, Jodi Klein is, what was your first concert and what were the circumstances? Jodi 03:52 My first concert is one that I will never forget. It was Styx — Paradise Theater tour at the Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, California. Nancy 04:03 Oh my God! Tell me all about it. Jodi 04:06 It was the last show on their world tour. I went with two girlfriends. We were dropped off. We waited in line for six hours and as the line grew, so did our anticipation. We rushed in to the Coliseum. We grabbed our seats, we got pretty good seats. But, we did not spend much time in those seats because the show was so amazing that we ended up heading down to the floor and the light show, the singing, the whole thing, it just blew my mind. Nancy 04:43 How old were you? Jodi 04:44 I had just finished my freshman year of high school. Nancy 04:48 See, I think 14 is the formative year. That’s the age everybody should get to see their first show because it really means something. Jodi 04:55 It did. I feel so fortunate to have had that as my first show. I really couldn’t have asked for a better debut concert experience. Nancy 05:04 I’m going to ask you a question about Gen X and music. You’re a dating specialist, so I will ask you this. Did we not perfect the mixtape as a dating artifact that in fact caused people to fall in love? Jodi 05:20 We did. Nancy 05:23 I mean, if you’re listening: raise your hand if you either formulated or received a mixtape that was designed to make love happen. Jodi 05:32 For sure. In fact, I seem to remember a movie or two where the mixtape was essential in the storyline to woo the woman, and I think many of us had those tapes given to us. Some of us, like me, may have it still in a box somewhere. Nancy 05:50 Totally. Actually – I don’t know why I just remembered this out of the blue. But when I was in high school, there was this boy that I liked, and he was going on a road trip because his grandma had passed away. He was going to his grandma’s funeral and I didn’t know him very well, but I thought he was a nice guy, and I made him a mixtape. And he came back and he immediately broke up with me. He was like, “There’s no future here because I like you too much. The mixtape was so good that it scared me, and I’m not ready for that kind of commitment,” which began a whole run of boys who would break up with me saying, “I love you too much to date you any longer.” That was Nancy from ages 15 to 19. But I couldn’t help it. I make a good mixtape. If it scares you, that’s on you, buddy. Jodi 06:34 Exactly. If they couldn’t take it, you needed to move on. Nancy 06:38 Have you had a mixtape figure into any of the first date stories? A first date mixtape, that’s a lot. That’s too much pressure. Jodi 06:46 It’s way too much pressure. Nancy 06:47 Yeah, I would be like, “Sir, you don’t know me well enough to create a mixtape for me. Back off.” Jodi 06:51 Yeah, I have not heard any of those stories. No. Nancy 06:55 Will you call if you do? Jodi 06:57 I certainly will. Nancy 07:00 Alright. Well, Jodi, we’re going to talk about your book, First Date Stories. But I want to start with a little background because there is also a podcast and a blog that are related, and it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing and I hope that you could explain to everybody who’s listening how these all interrelate and came to be. Jodi 07:16 To do that, I’d like to set the context. And that is that I created all of this – because there are millions of uncoupled women who are Gen Xers, whether they’ve never been married, or in a long term committed relationship or are divorced or widowed – these ladies do not get enough recognition or connection. They’re not celebrated enough. They’re not supported enough, not what they deserve, and I’m trying to fill some of that void. Nancy 07:49 First of all, women are overlooked, Gen Xers are overlooked, so Gen X women: it’s like the perfect, terrible storm. We started talking about that when Ada Calhoun was on the show with Why We Can’t Sleep about why Gen X women are trying to make changes. Because it’s so right in our faces that we’re not being served with the answers and the attention that we deserve. So I hear you. I totally hear what you’re saying. Jodi 08:15 It really goes back to when we were little girls. A lot of us have created movie trailers in our minds of what our lives were going to look like, from the time that we were little girls – and, of course, this is not representative of everybody. But I think a lot of us thought, okay, we will go to high school, we will go perhaps to college or get some other training, we will get a job, and then when we are in our 20s or at the latest, our early 30s, a partner is going to show up in our lives and we will be coupled and we will live ongoing as a couple person. That is a result of all the media, the books, the movies, the TV shows that we used to see in the 70s and 80s. Because let’s face it, no Disney Princess got divorced, no Disney Princess led a kingdom, no Disney Princess ran a company, right? I mean, seriously. The princesses let down their hair, they ate poisoned apples, they lost their slipper, and a prince always came to rescue them. Right? Nancy 09:23 Right. Sure. How did you go from that understanding to deciding that you were going to put together this forum for sharing stories about dating at midlife? Jodi 09:33 Well, we as women connect around our stories. It is the way we come to understand ourselves and each other. It is a way in which we give and receive empathy. It’s a way in which we validate our lives. But what happens when you are still in the dating world – a lot of the people who you once were in the dating world with, your girlfriends from when you were in your 20s and 30s, suddenly aren’t there anymore. You’re kind of a lone warrior in your own mind in this journey, and you don’t hear those stories. You then don’t get that validation and you start to feel disconnected and perhaps questioning things and lonely. Then, you could very well pull out of the dating world, because you don’t want it to be such a solo journey. Or if you find yourself coming out of unexpectedly of what you thought was a long term relationship, then you may not re-enter the dating world. So there’s that truism. Now, the next truism is that you have to show up for a first date to meet the person who you will be coupled with. So if you have stepped away from the dating world, you won’t do that. Right? You’ve got to go on a first date, a second, a tenth, a hundredth in order to be with that partner. My idea was to couple those two concepts together, to have women share their stories with other women about how they kept showing up for what they hoped would be love, or a meaningful friendship or companionship, and in doing so, share their learnings as well. So that the women listening to the podcast and soon reading the book, would learn from them, enjoy the tales, not feel disconnected and continue pressing forward, if it is, in fact, important for them to find a loving partner in their lives. Nancy 11:39 Right. Because we’re acknowledging that not everybody wants that, and just because you’re single, doesn’t mean you want to be coupled. So anybody who’s listening, no one’s saying you have to do this. But if you want to, it sure is easier, I think, to do it with some company and some validation that you’re not the only one who is out there showing up for the coffees and the glass of wine with the stranger. Jodi 11:59 I couldn’t agree with you more. I have been there. I came to a point in my life where I thought, okay, I’m not going to live a coupled life, and I am okay with that, and I am 100% a believer that a woman can and should live a very meaningful, joyful, fulfilling life without a partner in it. Nancy 12:22 Yes, and I think that goes also for those of us who are married. You have to be comfortable with your own company, be comfortable inside your own skin. Where do you find the guests whose stories you share across? Just to reiterate, the podcast and the blog are both also called First Date Stories. How do you find your guests, and how do you select them because I’m sure you hear a lot of stories that maybe are not as educational? Having read the book, I thought it was great and it presented a really wide variety of circumstances. So I’m sure that as you are deciding what story to share further you’re looking for, okay, does this one have a learning moment in it basically? Jodi 13:05 Exactly. I guess I kind of categorize them into three: hopeful stories, hilarious stories and horrific stories. We all enjoy a horrific story, right? Nancy 13:15 Oh, my God. Can I mention in the book, there’s a story of a guy who shows up for a date, and he’s like, oh, I’m off the clock. He’s a professional man, and then he just is like, this is where I get all my swearing out. I like to swear, and then he curses his way through the entire date. That is rude as shit, sir. That is very rude. I mean, oh, my God, that poor woman on that date. Jodi 13:41 Yes, that poor woman and the way he spoke to her, and the way that he treated her was awful. But hey, it made for a memorable story. Nancy 13:49 It was an early tell. There was no ambiguity there. Jodi 13:51 Exactly. I do receive a lot of different people’s stories and we take a look at them and try to figure out, are there nuggets in here that listeners can benefit from? Is it entertaining? Is it something that will help move this whole initiative forward? Now, I want to mention that the stories in the book are entirely different from the stories in the podcast. So when it came to selecting the stories for the book, the idea was to put a collection of stories together that different dating takeaway tips could be drawn out of, because none of the stories there have overlapping tips. I authored those tips based on my personal, very long journey in the dating world and so it kind of gives an overall view to someone reading it of all different aspects of things that they can think about as they are out there in the dating world. Because this is really about just helping women become in-the-know, confident daters and have fun. Nancy 15:04 Yeah, each chapter of the book is a first date story, and then it includes “the rest of the story”, so you find out what happened to the couple after the fact – some of which were they never saw each other again – and then the dating takeaway tips. I mean, you mentioned based on your own experience, but were those also from stories you’d heard? I know you have dating experts come on the blog, too. So you’ve brought in a wide variety of viewpoints to look at, what are the things we can learn and do better in dating going forward? Jodi 15:33 Yes, I did author of first draft of them all, and then run them by professional dating coaches. There were two people who worked with me on this project through the time it was in development. So we got to professional’s eye on them, and hopefully, they will be helpful to readers. Nancy 15:54 They are really good common sense, like a) be punctual.…

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Ep 102 “Science Mom” Dr. Claudia Benitez-Nelson Jul 20, 2021

Show notes

“Start the conversation”: Oceanographer Dr. Claudia Benitez-Nelson talks about the ScienceMoms.com initiative seeking to apply “Mom Power” in tackling climate change, how midlife made her a better scientist, and why she’s hopeful for the future. ScienceMoms.com website Dr. Benitez-Nelson’s research lab website Dr. Benitez-Nelson interviewed aboard the research vessel Sally Ride What other song could I choose, given my late mom’s affinity for all things John Denver?Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 102 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on July 20, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email dj@midlifemixtape.com *** Dr. Claudia Benitez-Nelson 00:00 You have to believe and have faith in your children, the next generation, that they are going to help move the needle and solve these issues. And our job as parents is to make it happen. Nancy Davis Kho 00:18 Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one. [THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent] Nancy 00:43 Okay, I have another summer book recommendation for you! Check out The People We Keep, by Allie Larkin, which comes out from Simon and Schuster on August 3rd. Allie is the bestselling author of Swimming for Sunlight, and she’s back with a heartbreaking and soul-stirring coming-of-age tale about a young songwriter looking to find a home in the world. Little River, New York, 1994: April Sawicki is living in a run-down motorhome, flunking out of school, and picking up shifts at the local diner. But when April realizes she’s finally had enough, enough of her selfish, absent father and barely surviving in an unfeeling town, she decides to make a break for it. Stealing a car and with only her music to keep her company, April hits the road, determined to live life on her own terms. She manages to scrape together a meaningful existence on the road, encountering people and places that grab hold of her heart. From lifelong friendships to tragic heartbreaks, April chronicles her journey in the beautiful music she creates as she discovers that home is with the people you choose to keep. Fun fact: I know Allie because we are on the same house concert circuit, we’ve bonded over many a living room show, and I know how hard she worked on this book and how long and how much she believed in this story, and it’s just a thrill to see a talented friend like Allie Larkin get chosen by none other than actress Rachel Bilson to be featured as her August Book of the Month Club pick. So preorder The People We Keep by Allie Larkin at your favorite indie bookstore or online now! [MUSIC] Hey party people, hope you’re having a fabulous summer and working on your San Tropez tan. Who remembers that jingle? Bain de Soleil. Well, not really, I think you should be wearing sunscreen and a big hat, but I think that’s been well established between us in many episodes and probably again in today’s. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and I’m the creator and host of this podcast, as well as the author of The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. I hope you’ve had a chance to read my book and if you haven’t, well, there’s probably room in your beach bag. I’m so grateful that you’ve tuned in to today’s episode, and we’re going to get right to it! I love every guest who comes on this program, it’s true, but the ones I put into the “Shero/Hero” mix I might love most of all. These are people putting their midlife acumen to work in service of the wider world, and today’s guest is a shining example. Dr. Claudia Benitez-Nelson is an Associate Dean and Carolina Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on understanding the biogeochemical cycling of nutrients and carbon and how they are influenced by climate change. Her many research honors include the Early Career Award in Oceanography from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for the Sciences of Limnology, which I didn’t know was a word, and Oceanography. Claudia is passionate about teaching and mentoring the next generation and is active in many efforts to increase diversity in science. She’s also a member of Science Moms, a nonpartisan group of climate scientists and mothers. They founded Science Moms – you can find it at sciencemoms.com – to help mothers who are concerned about their children’s planet, but aren’t confident in their knowledge about climate change or how they can help. Together, the Science Moms aim to demystify climate science and motivate urgent action to protect our children’s futures. Put on your life jacket and grab a Dramanine if you are prone to seasickness, like I am… we’re setting sail with oceanographer and Science Mom, Dr. Claudia Benitez-Nelson! [MUSIC] Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. I am so pleased to have you here today. Dr. Benitez-Nelson 04:27 Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here. Nancy 04:31 I’ve known about Science Moms for a couple of months and as soon as I saw that press release, I’m like, oh, yeah, we’re having one of the Science Moms onto the show. But nobody gets past the first question on this podcast, which is what was your first concert and what were the circumstances? Dr. Benitez-Nelson 04:47 Oh my gosh. Okay. Nancy 04:50 I feel like you’re about to blow my mind. Dr. Benitez-Nelson 04:53 Well, yes. The very first concert that I went to, and maybe I’m dating myself is the Grateful Dead, and I went with my parents. Nancy 05:03 Now, they were enlightened. Dr. Benitez-Nelson 05:04 They were very enlightened and I grew up in Seattle, so you can perhaps understand I went to many concerts when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. But no, it was the Grateful Dead. Nancy 05:18 So where was it in Seattle? Dr. Benitez-Nelson 05:20 Well, I was young and so I remember it being this huge space. I think it was the King Dome, which doesn’t exist in the same form now. There were all these people, and they were having such a wonderful time, and everyone was happy. That’s what I really remember most about it. Nancy 05:38 Now, I noticed in your official bio, you mentioned that you have two kids who are 20 and 16. Is that right? Dr. Benitez-Nelson 05:44 Yeah. Nancy 05:45 You mentioned in your bio that your kids have a musical talent. Dr. Benitez-Nelson 05:48 They’re actually musicians in that they play classical instruments, which I have no talent for whatsoever. I can’t hold a tune. I mean, they are my kids but other than that… Nancy 06:02 I think that’s one of the coolest things about watching your kids grow up and find the thing that they love that you have no idea about. Because that’s how we are with ballet – both our daughters became ballerinas, and we learned so much about ballet. We had no idea about that before we had kids, and I would never have thought that that would be something I knew about. But here we are. Dr. Benitez-Nelson 06:21 Well, exactly. Right. My son plays the oboe and I had to look up what an oboe really was. I was like, “What really is that instrument?” My daughter plays the flute, which, I DID know what a flute was. Nancy 06:37 You’re familiar. Alright, so I’m going to call you Dr. Benitez-Nelson because I know you’ve said I can call you Claudia, but I want to put the respect on your name that you have earned. Because it’s been a long path to get where you are. So I want to talk about what compelled you and eight of your fellow mom scientists to start ScienceMoms.com. It started in 2021, right? Dr. Benitez-Nelson 06:59 Actually, it started a couple of years earlier. I’m actually the newest member to the group. This was a group that was started a couple of years ago by Potential Energy, and it was a $10 million ad campaign. Essentially, what they have done is they’ve brought together a bunch of scientists who are mothers to really talk about climate, how our climate is changing. And really the group that we are targeting is other moms. I thought this was fantastic, right? I’m new to the group, I had met these other amazing scientists, and when they were telling me what they were doing, I was like, “I got to get in on this.” So it makes sense, in some ways – research has shown that moms are the group that is both the most concerned about climate change, and the most likely to do something about it. In retrospect, that makes sense. But I didn’t really know that when we started. I just know that I’m really passionate about the future for my kids and the work that I do, being all about climate and how our climate is changing, really has put this in the forefront of the things that I think about. So yeah, that’s how I kind of got involved and it’s been a fantastic experience. Nancy 08:28 Can you talk a little bit about the goals and the components of the project? Dr. Benitez-Nelson 08:34 Yeah, so for us, the real major goal is to give moms the tools and the information that they need to break down this climate change idea in simple and engaging ways. There’s a lot of information out there, a lot of misinformation out there and for me, the science is straight. This isn’t political. It’s all about what the science says. And so any way that me, as a mom in particular, can break this down so that other moms who are just as busy and crazy as I am understand what they can do about it, I’m all in. So that’s really what it is. It’s about engaging moms, showing them that they can do something, and really making it really clear that climate change is happening now, and it’s really on us as moms to make a difference. Because you know when moms get in on it, we know how to make a difference. Nancy 09:39 That’s right. Moms get it done. Because what choice do we have? We’d all rather be lounging, it’s true, but here we are. Dr. Benitez-Nelson 09:45 It’s true. Nancy 09:46 I know that one of the aspects is that you encourage letter writing to your representatives, and there’s also in-person actions. Can you talk about those two different tactics and maybe how those are deployed in a complimentary way? Dr. Benitez-Nelson 10:00 Sure. I think that in general, there’s a kind of a day to day things that we can do as moms to think about climate – recycle, maybe we take the stairs that day. But in reality, if we’re going to make a difference now, it’s all about contacting our local representatives, our state representatives, our federal representatives, and making them understand that this is really important for us, this is an action item that we really need to have now. We know it was 105 degrees in Seattle, like where I grew up. Nancy 10:35 Right. Dr. Benitez-Nelson 09:36 Oh, my goodness. Nancy 09:36 That’s not right. Dr. Benitez-Nelson 10:39 My poor family. I live in South Carolina now. I’m a little bit used to the heat. They were dying. Just not prepared, don’t have the air conditioning. So many people were really suffering. We’ve got to make things happen and we know that you get the government involved, you allow them to help them along and putting those resources in the right place. We can make some change immediately. Nancy 11:06 I think what’s important for people to remember. This really landed for me during the 2020 election cycle when I was calling…somebody had given me the great suggestion to just program your representatives into your phone. In my case, it was Senator Harris, Senator Feinstein, and I have them all programmed in. So when I was sitting in the car it would say, “Call Senator Harris” and I would get her office, and I had it both for California and DC, and I just say, “Hi, I’m a constituent. This is important to me. I wish you would do this.” Then in the next day or two, I’d be sitting in traffic and I would just do it again, because they do look at the volume of calls. They want to know what’s on the mind of their constituents. And importantly, if you have a representative who is tuned in on climate change and doing stuff about it, those calls still matter, because you’re telling them that yes, you’re on the right track, keep pushing for the changes that you’re making. I know a lot of us worry, “I’m in this bubble. Everybody who I’ve elected to office has the same general viewpoint than I do, how does this make a difference?” But the fact is, you are saying to them, yes, keep going, keep going. So whether you’re listening and you’re in a location where maybe your elected representatives are not taking action on this, or they are, either way the calls, the letters, all that stuff can make a difference. Dr. Benitez-Nelson 12:28 Oh, absolutely. I think it’s important to recognize that climate change is not a partisan issue, right? Nancy WELL. Dr. Benitez-Nelson It isn’t about what party you’re in. Here in South Carolina, we have Charleston, it is flooded. We have sunny day flooding: the beautiful day, high tide, that whole beautiful city is flooded. And a lot of people in my state, which is a red state, they think about this, we talk about it, and it’s just bringing it up to the forefront that, hey, you should be thinking about this, too, and take away this political component and let’s have that difficult conversation about why is Charleston flooding. And yeah, why is it October and we’re out here watching our kids play soccer and yet, yes, they have to take another break, because it’s so hot outside? And that does break down barriers. Nancy 13:28 I didn’t mean to be disrespectful, I apologize. I was just going to say a lot of people have spent a lot of time in the past 15 months looking at facts in the face and saying they don’t exist. So do you have suggestions? I know there are lots of resources and facts on the Science Moms website to help us, but just to on a personal basis, I don’t want to fight with people about whether or not climate change exists. I just want to work with them together to end it. What have you learned that would maybe help us have those difficult conversations in a way that’s not an attack and it’s more building solutions? Dr. Benitez-Nelson 14:04 Well, I think that’s the wonderful thing about moms and moms with kids. You’re sitting out there, your kids are playing in the playground, or they’re at the beach, they’re going to school. We share so much in common and for me, it’s all about having the conversation. I think sometimes you’re like, “I’m not going to have that conversation if it’s going to be a tough one. I don’t even want to bring it up.” For me, I think it’s just important to start the conversation, just talk about climate, talk about how things have changed, talk about how hot it is outside. For us, we just had another tropical storm just go through South Carolina, and just lay out the information. Tell people where they can go and find it and talk about what it means if we don’t address this problem. Believe it or not, I do think that when you can take that politics away from it and just really talk about what’s happening, you’d be surprised about how many people, moms, parents in particular are like, “Yeah, no, you’re right. This is something we’ve got to think about and really, what can we do and what is the process?” I’m very optimistic in that space. You’ve got to have the conversations, you’ve got to talk to people, ask them their opinions, why they think that way, and then provide them with the resources to find out some different answers. Nancy 15:38 So what are the impacts that Science Moms has seen from their initiatives so far? Dr. Benitez-Nelson 15…

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