Episode 020 (Bonus): How Do We Build the Places We Want to Work For? Feat. Gautam Srikishan and Snigdha Sur (AAPIHM 3/3)

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Transcript

THEME MUSIC starts

Alex: This is Self Evident, I'm Alex Sujong Laughlin. I'm one of the show's advisors and the guest host for this third and final episode of our series during Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage month. In our last two episodes, we talked about the importance of representation behind the scenes. And one thing that Randy Kim, host of the Bánh Mì Chronicles, said was something I personally understand - that the lack of diversity and representation in newsrooms ultimately made it really difficult for him to want to stick with a career in journalism. 

This really resonated with me. I spent most of my career working at big fancy news organizations. I got the brand name on my resume, but it came at a cost. I also spent a ton of time and energy advocating for change that never really seemed to come. Eventually the fighting didn't feel worth it anymore.

THEME MUSIC ends

It's important to acknowledge that this problem - being the only Asian in a newsroom - is only one example of structural racism in the workplace. There are much larger scale issues with say, mostly Latinx workers in a meat packing facility, or Black and brown workers at an Amazon fulfillment center.

But because journalism and media companies are our own industry and where my personal experiences lie, we wanted to spend this last conversation talking about what it means to be tackling the issue of representation as a producer or a journalist in your own office. 

When do you dig in to change the system? And when do you leave to make your own alternative? I got to talk with two people who've thought a lot about these things, one in starting her own company and the other in organizing a union at his workplace.

Conversation with Gautam Srikishan and Snigdha Sur

Snigdha: My name is Snigdha Sur. My pronouns are she and her. And I'm the founder and CEO of The Juggernaut, a media company and community for South Asian stories.

Gautam: My name is Gautam, my pronouns are he, him, his, and I am an audio producer and audio engineer. And I work at The On Being Project. 

Alex: So we're going to be talking about the stakes of having a more diverse workplace, what that means and what the limits of that are. We can start by talking about some of our own experiences.

I am currently a senior producer at an indie podcast company called Transmitter Media. We make podcasts for other companies, and we also do an assortment of original shows as well, but I've worked at a lot of mainstream news organizations. I worked at the Washington Post and then Buzzfeed and also have kind of flitted in and out of mainstream orgs for contract work, freelance work, client work. 

And I was laid off from Buzzfeed in 2018 when the entire audio team was disbanded. And that was a really radicalizing moment for me because it made me realize once and for all that, like the company that you work for, no matter how warm and good it feels, it's not there to look out for you.

And since then I have been much more interested in working for small independent companies, because I find that working at a big company, there's a lot of effort and energy required of you to make it a better place, justify your existence. Yeah. So I'd love to hear from you all kind of, what are your origin stories and how did you get to where you are now?

Gautam: Yeah. Um, I would say it's in some ways similar and also quite different from your story, Alex, also worked in, in large media companies and small sort of media nonprofits, and I was not laid off luckily, but I did have sort of challenging experiences at those places. I worked at StoryCorps for about three and a half years.

And during that time, you know, watched a lot of co-workers sort of leave out of frustration or kind of be asked to leave. And I had a similar experience of kind of like, the having these rose tinted glasses on at first that were like very viciously pulled off and coming to realize that work won't love you back.

And like your, your colleagues are not your family. They are your employers. And like, there is a necessary sort of a power dynamic to that relationship and that it's necessary to acknowledge. And so my, I guess, journey and like the podcasting world has been one of I think great opportunity, but also kind of a great loss because I've seen a lot of people kind of get pushed out in different ways.

Alex: How about you Snigdha?

Snigdha: In terms of my life in media and journalism, my first professional job was in the world of consulting. I was in McKinsey in New York, and I will say that it was the first time that I saw so many people who sort of looked like me, like I had never seen so many Indian Americans in one place until I went to McKinsey, New York.

I kid you not like almost every single corner, there was like an Indian American partner or senior director. And many of them were actually men. So there was definitely, they did not all look like me, but it made me realize that there was a corner of the business world, where there were a lot of people of certain ethnicities and groups, and it didn't necessarily mean that there was diversity overall. It just meant that there was an over-representation there. 

And when I started The Juggernaut, that was really important to me because it was so evident that of all the place I had been, so much of the stories we tell is so determined by the gatekeepers at top. So even if newer companies like, you know, as you mentioned, Alex, Buzzfeed, or even Vice are more diverse in the journalist level, some of the executive editors and people at the top are not diverse. And so what they choose and deems newsworthy is very different from the perspective somebody else would bring. And so when we started The Juggernaut, that was one of the first things we knew we were going to be different. So over 90% of our journalists are people of color, over 80% are women or non-binary.

And it was part conscious, part design, and then part like reinforcement, which is we realized that, "Hey, this works because these stories aren't being told." So there's a certain value there because nobody else will tell them. And that kind of really helped us underline that mission. 

Alex: So when you think about the phrase diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace, what do you think of? Like what comes up for you? 

Snigdha: Okay. Sorry. It's like such a tough question to answer directly. I'm going to answer it in a roundabout way first, but I will get to it. I swear. Um, one of the things I keep on hearing from a lot of my friends who work in DEI is that sometimes these words sort of lose meaning because they become so popularized.

So, you know, we hear the word diversity equity inclusion, so often that sometimes, we don't really know what they mean for ourselves anymore, let alone our institutions or companies or any groups of people. 

And so when I hear those words, I always think about continual improvement, meaning that I never think that those things are outcomes. I always think that there are processes that need to be worked on so you can get better and better and better. And that sometimes the standards of what can be possible is so limited by past behaviors. So for example, right, like people think that equity or diversity could mean when we have a workforce that's 50% male and 50% female.

That's all good and well, right? Because that sounds really equitable. That sounds really fair. That sounds really diverse, but I always say context matters. You know, we know that there are more female college graduates actually than male college graduates. So it's like 56% female, 46% male. What if you're specifically part of an industry, I'm making this up, like PhDs. Maybe it needs to be 56% female. That's just like one example I'm putting up. 

And so for us, the way I think about it at The Juggernaut is we're not perfect. We're not the best at it necessarily. We're great at it, according to these really age old benchmarks, but we can keep doing better. And so whenever people push us, like, "Hey, this wasn't good enough!"

I take that feedback really to heart. And I think people forget that it's more about the intention and the process people use more so than the definite number they're at. So even though I'm at 90% people of color, I don't necessarily know if that's success yet, because guess what? There's so much intersectionality in South Asian culture, there's country of origin, there's religion, there's cast, there's gender identity. There's so much more to unpack than just, you know, one number.

Alex: Yeah, I love thinking of this as a process and not an outcome. It's a thoughtful, and I think more sustainable way to think about this. 

Gautam: I guess for me, the word that comes up is just sort of like all encompassing. Um, I think D E and I work really only works if it's sort of implemented at every level, right, if it's coming from the top down and from the bottom up. 

But I also think of it in like a, almost like a temporal sense. I feel like it's in the foreground of like every interaction I have, right. When we were going into offices before the pandemic, it's like something that I see as like, it follows you into the office, right?

The conversations you have when you bump into people, as you're walking in, it's in the emails I'm writing when I sit down at my desk to start the day, it's in the Slack conversations, it's in who we're choosing to feature on our shows when we have guests on, um, and making sure that that's, you know, representative.

Yeah. I just kind of think of it as like this all encompassing thing. 

Alex: And that brings me to something I want to talk about with both of you, which is based on my own experiences, working at larger organizations, like I said, so much of your time and energy is often spent trying to make a place be better.

It becomes part of your job almost. I have a lot of friends who. You know, are in their first or second jobs at large media organizations and they spend a significant amount of their time pressuring their workplaces to be better, to be more inclusive, to change the way that it covers stories, to pay equitably, to help start a union.

And when I see people burning out, and when I see journalists of color specifically burning out, what I'm seeing is that people are not burning out necessarily on the work that they're being paid for. But it's the combination of that work and this extra job of like holding their workplace accountable.

And I'm wondering, does that resonate with you? 

Gautam: Yeah. Big time. I so appreciate you naming that, that it is in a lot of ways, an extra job, or like, you know, uh, extra hours at least tacked onto all of the work that one is already doing in the workplace. That was precisely my experience. When it came time to organize at StoryCorps, it really was like working an extra 10, 15, sometimes 20 hours a week because all of that work has to happen on not on company time, essentially.

And for, you know, for the safety of the organization process, you know, it also has to happen outside of the workplace physically, most of the time. And so, yeah, it, it looks like going to the union offices for two hour meetings on Wednesdays, for instance, it looks like having phone conversations or, you know, grabbing coffee and taking walks to chat with people and kind of get a sense for where, where people are at and how they feel about the process of unionization, it looks like taking time out in the middle of the day to like research, frankly, and just sort of educate yourself and sort of strategize. 

I came into it, not even knowing that much about unions. And so a lot of it was just actually sort of doing the homework, but yeah, you're right, it is extra time. It is extra energy and there's kind of no way around it, unfortunately. 

Alex: Yeah. I, I think about this as very much the difference between working within the system and working outside of the system. And for me, after several years of working within the system, trying to change the big machine, I just saw that the payoff wasn't enough for me.

And so that's why I, I left. I mean, I also lost my job, but I didn't return to big organizations like that because they were too slow. They were moving too slowly. And that's why, you know, I think that we definitely wanted to have a founder in here and somebody who started their own organization, because that is kind of the alternative. It's like, do you try to make the good thing within the big organization? Or do you just do your own thing? So, yeah. I'm curious, Snigdha, does any of this resonate with you? And if so, like how have you dealt with that? 

Snigdha: Yeah, Alex, you and Gautam have raised so many issues that, you know, I kind of want to not necessarily reframe, but repeat back with another framing. 

I think the natural predilection of any person at a workplace to want to make that workplace better is so great. The fact that you, Alex, and you, Gautam, already wanted to do that is amazing. But then Alex, what you said, the reason that kind of effort leads to burnout is when you don't see the change fast enough. 

Because I'm looking back to all my job experiences, I too wanted to like change things for the better. And the big difference of when I felt burnt out versus when I didn't was when I felt that somebody was listening to me and trying to make something happen. So when that happened - even if I put in more effort into changing my workplace or put in more effort to being like this needs to change - as soon as I saw some change happening, I felt a bit better. And that's kind of how I felt like I was able to stay on for some of my early experiences. 

But that trust is broken when that change doesn't happen. Or never materializes. And I think that's when burnout happens. And then the second part, yes, I totally agree with you, which is, you know, I was looking into the world of media and I had worked at a few media companies by the time I decided to start my own.

And I just felt that, connecting the dots, the change would be too, too long. Like I have interviewed at the likes of the New York Times and there's parts of each of those companies' cultures that I've loved, but I can see from the writing that they have, and not trying to belittle any of the amazing diverse workforce that does create that and goes to the effort to create that, but I could see for me, it wasn't enough. Like I didn't want like one article in the New York Times about my culture, once every two months written by a famous South Asian person, I wanted that moment every day and every minute. And so if I want to see that change, I felt like I had to create it myself, just to tie the dots together.

But yeah, I think that's what seems like it's been broken hearing both of your stories. And the social contract is like, you want to see good things happen, you're putting in the effort to see it happen, and then you're not getting that feedback cycle of change happening. 

Alex: Yeah, that is so apt. I think that, that, I mean, if you look up like writing about burnout in any realm, I think that the perception of a lack of efficacy of your efforts is a huge contributor to burnout.

So let's talk about funding because I think that Snigdha, what you were talking about regarding interviewing at big companies and deciding that you wanted to start your own instead, what it comes down to a lot of the time is who's at the top, like you said, at the beginning. 

But when you start your own organization, money is obviously front and center part of the equation of like, how are you actually gonna do this? And I will say that for me, when I think about media organizations that are sort of funded or engaged with the venture capital economy, or just sort of that Silicon Valley world, I get really nervous because of my own experiences.

But also, you know, I think that the ethos of VC is one that prizes exponential growth and lucrative exits over sustainability, or, you know, building something that's going to last. And I think about Mic, which got a huge influx of VC cash a few years ago, and they had this fancy office in the World Trade Center and about a year later, they laid off most of their staff because they had tied a lot of their editorial strategy and their revenue to Facebook. 

And when Facebook shifted its priorities, they lost their money. They lost the ability to exist. I also think about Gimlet, which has these expectations to produce really high quality narrative work on tight timelines with tiny teams.

And that, that goal is not necessarily to serve the work or to serve the audience, but to serve investors and to get them a lucrative return on their investment. And, you know, when they sell to Spotify, that was a great investment for the investors. 

I know that Snigdha, you have participated in Y Combinator, which is a really prestigious accelerator in the Silicon Valley world. And I know that you're coming to the media world with a sort of business oriented perspective. So what's it like to run a media organization in conversation with those worlds?

Snigdha:  Yeah, no, I'm, thanks so much for being so honest about, you know, your perspective on some of these things. And I totally understand why you feel that way.

In fact, several investors feel the same exact way you do Alex, which is really kind of interesting. Right? I know like you're viewing them as these like, shrewd capitalistic, greedy folks who are just trying to get lucrative returns at the expense of people's livelihoods. I, I'm going to go revisit history for a second, if that's okay, if you'll indulge me.

Alex: Yeah! Go for it. 

Snigdha: Many of these companies like Mic or Buzzfeed or Vice they raised hundreds of millions of dollars. And the promise that they sold investors was that, hey, you, people are going to come to us instead of anyone else because we're us and we're so amazing. And we're great. The big problem here was that they were trying to be everything to everyone because they were trying to exactly compete with Facebook and Google for ad dollars.

The problem with this business model is that Facebook and Google got increasingly powerful, as you pointed out Alex. And so they never really had a shot. They really truly didn't. And so what you ended up having is this really weird situation where so many journalists, I see it when I try to recruit, are so fearful of new media companies.

They're so fearful of VC, but I think going back to like this phrase I use all the time, context matters so much. Who is building these companies? By the way, many of them were white men. Who was building these companies? What kind of vision are they selling to investors? And can they actually fulfill that vision?

And when we set out to build The Juggernaut, let's be real, we're a very different company. We're very targeted. We're for a very specific audience. Our diversity numbers are exactly opposite to that of US newsrooms. We never raised that much money and our people on the other side, is we wanted to give more money into the hands of diverse journalists and illustrators and artists.

We didn't even want to do ads. We weren't trying to say we were going to be everything to everyone. We said, Hey, we're not even going to compete with that. We're going to be very specific and targeted to our audience. And we're going to align incentives by asking our own audience to pay for us so that we can then pay our journalists equitably and responsibly.

So, I think it's a very, very different social contract in that sense. And for me, I've always wanted to build a sustainable business. In 2020, The Juggernaut was actually gross profitable, which means that we have a pathway to overall profitability. We don't see it yet, but we do have a pathway and we've been very, very careful to do a lot with a very small team.

I think it's really important what certain media entities are doing with the money and opportunity they have, how they're thinking about hiring, how are they thinking about it, they're setting their editorial vision, what problems do they think they're solving. 

For us, we think we're solving the problem of diversity and media. We think we're solving the problem of underserved communities. We think we're solving the problem of some stories never being told at all, and it's reflected even in the diversity of our investor base. So over 50% of our investment value, by the way, funded by Black investors. So, you know, when journalists are like scared of VC, I always, you know, turn it around to them and ask, well, what's the context of a company you're looking at in front of you at hand, who are the people running it, who are the investors backing it? What are the values of investors and do they jive with you? 

Alex: So with both of these stories, with Mic and with Gimlet, something that I didn't mention when I talked about it at first is that both of them have actively had unionization efforts at their workplaces. At Mic, the staff was in the process of unionizing when a lot of the employees were laid off and Gimlet also had a very big unionization effort and they actually did start a union right before the sale to Spotify. 

And I think this intersection of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and unionization is a really interesting intersection that we saw play out in this Reply All, Bon Appetit debacle that's gone on over the last few months.

And I'll just give a quick TLDR for anybody listening who needs it. So last summer there was a meltdown over the work culture at Bon Appetit, the food magazine. Lots of people resigned. In short, the workers of color were not being compensated for highly visible work that they were doing. And then in January, Reply All, the internet podcast at Gimlet that is kind of their shining star,  crown jewel of the company, released the first few episodes of a series breaking down the whole thing. 

And as soon as the episodes started coming out, former employees started speaking up about Reply All, about PJ Vogt, um, and about Sruthi Pinnamaneni, who is the lead producer on the series, saying that they were actively anti unionization and contributed to an overall toxic environment at Gimlet. And Reply All made the decision not to finish reporting out those stories and both PJ and Sruthi stepped away from Reply All. 

Now I bring all of that up not because I want to sort of re-litigate what happened there, but what I want to talk about is that intersection of unionization and diversity. And also this question of, you know, if, if the people who have the microphones, if the people with power are the ones reporting out stories, these important stories about shedding the light on the way things are not working, it feels inevitable to me that they are also going to be the ones who have the skeletons in the closets. 

And so I just wonder, like, how should we have these conversations? How can we have these conversations moving forward, given that the power that exists is allocated the way it is? Gautam, what are your thoughts?

Gautam: Yeah. Would a big and like impossible to answer a question, but I will do my best. My first reaction on the intersection of D E and I work and unionization and organizing in general, is just to say like, identity won't save you, I guess is what I, I feel. 

As you pointed out, Sruthi Pinnamaneni, for instance, you know, is a person of color, right? Like Snigdha and I, she is Indian and she was actually, you know, one of the people that was actually very anti-union in that process. And so I think there's this perception maybe from the outside looking in that like, oh, you're a person of color, a woman of color, whatever sort of marginalized identity, then you must be sort of in support of, uh, building a better workplaces in this way. I should say, I think probably everyone is in support of the idea of building better workplaces, but we all have, of course, disagreements about how to get there. 

But yeah, I mean, that experience was definitely born out in my own story as well when we were organizing at StoryCorps. Like it was not a united front necessarily. There were people who didn't agree that this was the right way to go. They were people of color. Sometimes that happens. 

My feeling on this is just that it is a process and conversations sort of have to be ongoing and frequent and long and difficult because yeah, like I said, I mean, there's always going to be sort of disagreements about the exact means we use to get to our ends. But I believe that there is potential for, you know, for minds and hearts to be changed if you're kind of willing to just go there and spend that time. And have those difficult conversations. 

Alex: Were there any critical moments or conversations during that process that were really tough for you to grapple with? Like, would you be willing to get into some specifics without obviously naming people? 

Gautam: Yeah, I can think of two separate times that I had approached someone who was not sort of already in the organizing process or aware of it, thinking that they would probably be, you know, pretty sympathetic to what we were doing. Because many of them were in a similar position to myself and to other colleagues, you know, being like vastly underpaid, very overworked and not having sort of much say or any say in editorial direction of things we were putting out and both of them were people of color.

Uh, you know, to my surprise, they kind of rebuked me in a way, they were kind of like, no, this is, this is wrong and, you know, I don't really believe the organization can, or even should change in this way. It was really eye-opening. But I think it's also important to say that, like, we didn't give up on them.

It's not like I never talked to them again. You know, we kept trying to have conversations and trying to understand where they coming from. And in one case their opinion changed and the other case that didn't, it was kind of a 50/50 split.

Alex: Oh God. Were you able to see where they were coming from? 

Gautam: I was, yeah, I, I really genuinely was because none of us are managers. You can't be in a manager and be in a union. And so all of us had some experience with someone above us making some decision that, you know, impacted us in sort of an out-sized negative way and us having no say in it. And so I could certainly understand what that does to you over time. 

One of my colleagues was just of the belief that it's not even worth trying because I've got my own life to live, I don't really want to dedicate all of these extra hours to trying to make a workplace better that I don't even fundamentally believe can be better. I understand that. And I have like deep empathy for that, because on my worst days, I'm also feeling pretty jaded about some of these things. So yeah, I understand.

Snigdha: I loved how you said that, you know, most everyone agrees that we need better workplaces, but people don't agree on how to get there. What are some of the biggest kind of differences in frameworks you've seen as you've been doing organizing work?

Gautam:  You know, in those conversations with the members of the unit who didn't agree that a union was the right way to go, uh, different reasons I heard were things like, I think a union would slow us down, I'm worried about union dues, things like that. 

But I think there was this belief in sort of leadership that there would be meaningful change now that things have sort of reached this point and that, you know, we can, as Alex was saying, sort of work within the system, right? Just like on an individual level, you know, continue to sort of push for the types of changes we want to see in ways that we can, in things like your relationship with your manager or perhaps within your team, you know, it might not be necessarily org-wide. But I think there is that belief in incremental change from like small scale actions like that.

Um, I mean, that's something that I didn't agree with. Right. I believe that the union was the way to go. I believed that formalized processes are the best way to approach that and to have a seat at the table is really important to me and was really important to, to our union. 

Alex: So I've had a lot of fraught experiences trying to convince management that diversity is good for business because on the one hand, I think that when you are trying to persuade managers or the powers that be that, you know, your workplace should be more equitable in one way or another, they're not going to listen to you if you just say, because it's the right thing to do, because it makes me feel good. You have to give them hard evidence. You have to say, this is good for business for XYZ reason and bring it down to this practical economic level.

Did you have to make that argument? And how did that make you feel to make that kind of argument?

Gautam: Honestly, I don't think there was a point where leadership agreed. So even though we did try to make that argument in different ways and try to point out all of the ways in which a union would benefit StoryCorps, I think it's important to say that there was resistance to the end and probably to this day, I'm not there anymore.

The organization had really high turnover and that is costly, right? Having to train new producers and facilitators every year or two, that training is not cheap. It's two weeks of eight hour days, access to equipment that, you know, needs to be used and replaced and, you know, wear and tear all that stuff.

So, you know, we tried to make sort of that argument for it. Just the fact that if there's a union and employees feel better represented and respected, better paid, and with better benefits, like they will stick around longer. It will, in the end, would be better for business in that sense. But yeah, I don't, I don't think that was convincing to them.

Alex: How about you Snigdha? Is this idea that diversity is good for business part of how you approach what you do? 

Snigdha: It's so funny because I don't even justify that diversity is good for business anymore. I just say it. I'm like, I just don't, I can't even justify it. I'm just like, Hey, we're great because we're diverse and we're serving underserved people.

You know, one thing that Y Combinator is very famous for saying is make something people want. And that's so basic. But when you really think about it, that does encompass diversity. Because then that word people, there's many people there and that are not being served. And if you can make something that people want, the world's your oyster, basically, like you're doing something. This is where I was going, like sometimes capitalism can be good, which is like, you're proving to the world, hey, I'm making something people want, people are paying for it and I'm going to continuously serve them. 

And similarly, you know, going back to investors, something that is kind of a much more nuanced argument is some of my investors they're limited partners. So the people giving my investors their money are often also diverse groups of people. So like, it's really, really important to like understand even where your venture investors money is coming from, right? Like who are they fighting for? Not everybody is the same and not every company is the same and not every venture capitalist or VC firm is the same.

And so I stopped justifying why diversity is good. I just say, Hey, we're diverse. And we're making something that people want. And the proof is in the numbers and in the pudding and in our traffic and in our reactions and what customers say about us. There's nothing more, and there's nothing less, if that makes sense.

Like, I don't want to have to keep justifying this because you know, the numbers speak for themselves, right? 

Gautam: Yeah. I mean, it comes up so often in workplaces today, it certainly comes up in my workplace currently, there is this question of economics and, you know, diversity is better for business, et cetera, et cetera.

And I kind of always make it a point to just like, pull back from that and also just say like, it's a moral imperative. There is, there's a reason deeper than sort of just money for doing this. I think that's, you know, I think, you know, all of us on this call know that, but I feel it's important to name just sort of every time as just like a reminder of like, yes, there is a reason that we do this, that it's ethical and not just sort of tied to our paychecks. 

Snigdha: No, a hundred percent Gautam, which is why I wanted to underline like, I'm tired of certain folks asking us to justify it. If that makes sense, it should be like breathing air.

Alex: So do we over romanticize the importance of working at a place that shares our values? 

Gautam: Hmm. I need, I need to think about that for a moment.

Alex: I can, I can throw out my thoughts on this. 

Gautam: Yeah, please. 

Alex: I don't think that I romanticize the importance, necessarily, of working at a place that shares my values. I don't need my workplace to, you know, sponsor a float at Pride and, you know, give us special days off throughout the year, according to whatever national or informal holidays are popping up.

But I think that for me, a lot of this organization and all of this work that I've done has been around just making a workplace that treats me and people like me like we are the norm. And values us and gives us an opportunity to succeed the way any other employee would succeed. I don't think that that's such a big thing to ask for, but it seems like in order for that to happen so much has to change.

Snigdha: You know, I loved what you said about, you know, it's not just about the days off, but it's about how the company makes you feel. And you know, that Maya Angelou quote, where it's like, it's not about what, what you do, you never forget how people make you feel. And I think about that a lot, especially in the world of internet activism.

Right. And I think we see examples of this, where some of it might feel performative. Where, you know, some companies, I feel like are, are quote, unquote, donating or doing things because they feel like they need to, or they'll be called out otherwise. It's actually not their default, going back to defaults.

And then in terms of how they actually change how they treat their employees and their customers, it hasn't changed. And I think that's what bothers me a lot is because sometimes in this world where we're like, hey, this internet activism has worked. We never really pause to think about, well, going back to process, has it changed any of the processes?

So like in the future, will this company need another activist to tell them to donate or will they just do it? Because they know it's the right thing? In the future, will like other kinds of workplace violations come out because they haven't changed how they treat people? 

Because you can change things that people do on the outside, but it's far harder to change how, like an institution naturally behaves. Culture is what you do when things are gray, when things are not black and white.

And so my quick thoughts for your point about, are we romanticizing? I think it's going back to, do you feel like you are being valued at the workplace? And again, if you are acting for change and asking for, or give feedback for things to improve, are those things happening? And if those things aren't happening, then it's all right, it's very natural for somebody to be like, I'm unhappy at work. I got to see things change and leave. 

Gautam: Yeah. I largely agree with everything. It's sad. I really don't have anything to add. 

Alex: Amazing. So thank you both so much for joining me today. I loved getting to talk to you about these issues, which are so thorny and will just persist. So I'm excited to see what both of you continue doing.

Snigdha: Alex, thanks so much for all the questions. Really deep, insightful, like making me think about values, all the good stuff. 

Gautam: Yeah. Thank you, Alex. Appreciate you sharing your perspective as well. 

MUSIC starts

Alex: Where can people follow your work? 

Gautam: Uh, my Twitter is @gsrikishan, G-S-R-I-K-I-S-H-A-N. My Instagram, where I post more of my music stuff, cause I'm a composer, is @floatingfast, and that's my website as well. 

Snigdha: Awesome. If you want to follow The Juggernaut and not me, our Twitter handle is @bethejuggernaut. Please give it some love. Our Instagram is doing fine and you can check it out @_thejuggernaut, T-H-E-J-U-G-G-E-R-N-A-U-T. And if you Google my name, my name is just my handle on everything because my parents gave me such a difficult name that it's very SEO optimized.

So I'm just this full name, everywhere that you can find anything on the internet. 

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Credits

Alex: Thanks again to Gautam and Snigdha for talking with me. You can find out more about them in our show notes.

THEME MUSIC starts

Alex: We'd love to hear what you think about these bonus episodes, too. So if you have any feedback, you can email team@selfevidentshow.com to let us know.

Today's episode was produced by James Boo and Julia Shu with help from Harsha Nahata and Timothy Lou Ly. Our senior producer is Julia Shu. Our executive producer is Ken Ikeda. Make sure to subscribe where you get your podcasts and you can follow us on social media @selfevidentshow, where our team is sharing events, movies, music, and books that we're excited about.

Self Evident is a Studiotobe production. Our show is made with support from PRX and the Google Podcast Creator Program. And of course from our listener community.

THEME MUSIC ends

Alex: I'm Alex Sujong Laughlin, thanks for listening.

BEAT

Snigdha: Can go to, oh yeah, go ahead. Gautam, first. 

Gautam: Okay. Go for it. 

Snigdha: Go for it. Go for it. 

Alex: It's so hard doing this virtually!

Gautam: I know, it's, it's very awkward.