Melissa Eggleston - Trauma

Content warning: This episode contains discussions of trauma and suicidality. Listener discretion is advised. If you or someone you know has concerns about suicide, one resource is the National Suicide Hotline which you can learn more about here: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

In this episode we talk to designer, researcher, business owner, and mom Melissa Eggleston about trauma. How should it inform design? What is a B-Corp and how can they make it easier to for companies to behave in a way that is more trauma-informed? How do we need to attend to our own trauma before we can help others? And much, much more.

Recommended content from this episode:

Books
Deep Work  by Cal Newport
The Empathetic Workplace  by Katharine Manning

Websites
Solutions Journalism Network story tracker
Good News Network
BBC News
Al Jazeera
Resources for Trauma-Informed UX Design
AO3 (Archive of Our Own)
B Lab Global Site

Podcasts
Brené Brown with Dr. Shawn Ginwright on The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves

Movies
The Breakfast Club

Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander

Transcript

(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)

David Dylan Thomas

Welcome to “Lately, I've been thinking about…”. I'm your host, David Dylan Thomas, coming in from Media, Pennsylvania, which is the former home of the Lenni-Lenape people. Today I have my very special guest, Melissa Eggleston. I'm going to ask you Melissa, tell us what you get up to?

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, Dave.

So, I am a designer and a researcher and I'm a mom and I'm very interested in trauma-informed design, which is kind of my thing. Then when I'm not working, I'm usually walking in the woods near my house in Durham, North Carolina. Carolina has like eight different tribes from around here and The Lumbee I think was kind of in my area, or you'll find me maybe doing yoga, which I find pretty healing. But this is in all my free time, which is not a lot!

But I'm a researcher. I do have my own company, Birdcall, so I teach through that. I teach classes and UX, but I also worked for the US digital service, so I should say right away, I do not represent the government. I'm chatting on my personal behalf. None of my views reflect those of the government, of the Office of Management and Budget, etc., all that stuff. I'm just talking from my perspective.

David Dylan Thomas

Okay. Excellent. So, speaking of your perspective, let's ask the million-dollar question.  Melissa, what have you been thinking about lately?

Melissa Eggleston

So lately, I feel like it's been all about trauma and that's partially because that's what I've been working on since like 2016, when I was first introduced to this idea of trauma-informed.

But then with the tragedies that have happened recently in terms of school shootings in New York and the grocery store and innocent people just trying to live their lives, it's just up, because people are bringing it to their workplaces and bringing it to conversations and it's all over the place.

I limit my exposure to the news a lot. I really am very limited in what I allow myself to take in, but you don't even have to take in very much before you go, well, this is just heartbreaking. I've been thinking a lot about trauma. That's kind of what's coming up for me. 

I'm also on a project at work where we're working with the new 9-8-8 number, which is going to be replacing the long 10-digit suicide hotline. It's going to be just 9-8-8 so people can call that number if they're feeling suicidal or having a major emotional crisis. I've been working on projects related to that for work. So, I've been having a lot of interviews around suicide and things like that too. It's been heavy.

David Dylan Thomas

I should say for context, because sometimes these episodes air long after they're recorded, we're recording this on Memorial Day 2022. So, we are in the shadow of a horrible school shooting in Texas, a horrible shooting in Buffalo, a shooting at a church in California, it is just piling on. It's interesting we've gotten to the point where even the news is toxic. Even just trying to stay informed can be emotionally damaging.

Melissa Eggleston

Absolutely. I ran into somebody not that long ago, who was talking about trying to make the news being trauma-informed. I was just like, wow, good luck with that! We have a long way to go, but I think that's a great idea! 

I mean, I really limit it in the sense that I'm looking online. I'm not looking at the TV very often at all. I limit myself to Wednesdays and Sundays. Those are the days I check news. I figure if something's super important, I will hear about it another way.

David Dylan Thomas

That’s interesting because when I think about that I’m like how do you go a whole day without checking in at least once? But what you say feels pretty true to me, for reasons passing explanation, when I get up and I'm making breakfast, I'm like, “Alexa, what's the news?” And I keep waiting for her to answer, “You don't want to know, just don't ask today.”

But I'll get like the headlines wherever, or my homepage when I bring up my browser's AP, so I see the top three headlines and Alexa’s trying right now.  I think she heard me, and she was like, “I'll tell you what's up” and gonna have to tell her to stop, “Alexa, stop!” Okay.

But it's the same thing. If I only checked Wednesdays and Sundays, I would bet you I would get just as much because every day recently it’s either a school shooting or Ukraine, that's it. And so, if I only did that Wednesdays and Sundays, I probably get about the same amount of information.

Melissa Eggleston

You do, you do. And that's really worked for me. I read a book, Deep Work by Cal Newport, I guess it was really just talking about how we spend our time and that we need more people thinking and spending time. It just made me think a lot about how am I spending my time, maybe reduce exposure to social media for sure.

The news is something that- I'm one of those folks. I think there's a lot of out there that once we get an image in our head, we can't get it out and I can even put images in my own head just when I read. And so, I'm working through my own process around letting go of things, but I just find that a little bit less news or even like the school shooting happens or something, waiting a day and check it on Wikipedia where it's more fact-based, I hope, and just not as alarmist.

Those kinds of things seem to help me. We want to be informed, but we don't need to be informed every hour. We don't need to be checking our news and phones as much as we do. I'm trying to reduce that.

David Dylan Thomas

Well, it's interesting too because you sort of have to ask yourself, why? Because most of the things we read about, we can't actually do anything about. Like local news makes sense to check more frequently because that could be something you could do something about or avoid or whatever. Whereas like at a national level, I can't do anything right now, specifically about Ukraine. I can't do anything specifically right now about the school shooting. There's sort of tangential fifth degree of separation things I can do, and I can certainly vote for certain things that are advocate for certain things. But the right now urgency of news, you need to go deal with this right now, or in the next three days. There's nothing in the national news that like affects me that way.

Melissa Eggleston

It's not my whole hula-hoop, not in my sphere. It’s not in my hula-hoop. I need to stay in my hula-hoop and do what I can do. I think you bring up a great point. I mean, it's amazing how – I will include myself in this – ignorant I can be at times about local politics or what's going on when those are the things that actually do affect me and my family, my neighbors, my community, more than something that the leader of Russia said, or whatever.

David Dylan Thomas

It’s interesting too, because from a trial perspective, I would hope that local news is less frequently triggering than the national news or international news, which is extremely frequently triggering.

Melissa Eggleston

So I would argue the opposite actually. My daughter doesn't generally watch the news, but when we were kind of displaced just a little bit for a week, we were watching the national news. It was kinda national versus local, and I said, “I'm willing to let you watch the national news, but let's not watch local”. Local tends to cover tons of shootings and fires and catastrophes whereas national, it will hit on some other issues. But the local I find, I remember going into the YMCA when she was very little and we'd be in the locker room and the news would be on, the local news, just flashing, murders and all kinds of things that we don't need to increase our exposure to. 

So that actually has been kind of interesting, but we really limit exposure and trust that we're going to dig into issues we want to learn more about. Long-form journalism, longer articles, the things that come out on a Sunday, that have been thought about for a while or months even planned. That's where I want to spend more of my time. I don't want to see how CNN have changed their headline since the last hour.

David Dylan Thomas

Oh my God. Let me tell you a story about that. So, I got a new TV recently and I was consulting with a friend about what model to get. And he said, well, these models sometimes have what's called a burn-in where if an image is on the screen long enough, it'll kind of have a ghost image that stays there later. So this could be a problem if you're gaming or something. 

The best story he told was he like came home after his parents or in-laws or whatever had been watching TV all day and the burn-in on the bottom of the screen was CNN breaking news. So, they left the breaking news up so long. It's like, was there really that much breaking news where it got burned into the screen? I don’t think it’s breaking at that point?!

Melissa Eggleston

It is definitely not breaking. That is interesting. I also think just paying attention where we get our news sources. When I'm checking the news, which I do on Wednesdays and Sundays, I hit various sites, just to get a little bit of variety and try to expose myself to different viewpoints. So that's another thing.

David Dylan Thomas

Do you mind mentioning which ones you go to?

Melissa Eggleston

I’ll go to BBC, I'll go to Al Jazeera, I'll go to some international stuff.

David Dylan Thomas

I’ve got to check out Al Jazeera, every time I've heard stuff that's been really interesting and I see, oh, well it came from Al Jazeera, interesting.

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah, it's surprising, but it's interesting to kind of get an international perspective on what's going on at times.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah. That's true. Let me ask you this, do you ever specifically seek out more positive news? I'm thinking of the Solutions Journalism Network, places like that?

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah. I've done like the Good News network. Sometimes I'll be like, all right, I'm going to go to the Good News network, and I'll seek out some positive news there, which is great. But I feel like I tend more to just try to limit my negative, like just catch myself when I'm about to check it again on a Wednesday and go, it probably hasn't changed. 

Then if I wake up the next morning and I go, oh, I never really checked it near the end of the day, I go, oh, well, you'll know by Sunday. If there's a tornado warning, or if there's something huge, you'll hear about it. Somebody will say something to you.

David Dylan Thomas

It’s funny, it’s almost like there are people who are like, “Oh, do you ever go to Tik Tok?” And it's like, well, actually if I just look at Tumblr or Twitter, the best of Tik ToK will come to me. So, no. If I just wait, some of the best, the most biggest stories will just come to me. I don't need to go to seeking them out.

Melissa Eggleston

I know algorithms play a role in what comes to us, but you've got to have a strategy because information is coming at you from all times all sources. If you expose yourself to all of it, I think it is exposing yourself to trauma. I think it is exposing yourself to negativity and events that are unique because for example, yes, there are awful things that happen, but many good things happen during the day, too.

Keep a perspective of what's going on in the world, which is why we have things like vicarious trauma and secondary trauma that happen because we're sharing really, really rough stories all the time with other people.

David Dylan Thomas

Well, it's weird it took us too, I'd like to in a minute, talk about like your definition of trauma, but it feels like trauma is something that prior to the recent moment is something that could just arrive like a hurricane out of nowhere. It's this like once in a lifetime thing, or just a relatively rare thing that just sort of pops up out of nowhere and we just have to deal with it and then life gets back to normal. Whereas recently trauma feels more like this just substance, like COVID in the atmosphere that it's just there and now you have to like actively avoid it.

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah. David, I would argue that it's always been there, but we're finding ways to name it and we're able to see it, we're able to see that racism is traumatic. We're able to see some systemic issues that we couldn't see before, where it's easy to point to like war – traumatic. There's certain things that we can all agree is a traumatic event, but there's things like complex trauma where it's repeated exposure to multiple events, often very personal, often in the household of the children, for example, and the effect that has on somebody, maybe it's not like a big tsunami but it's a lot of little waves over and over that are knocking a kid down and that trauma needs to be dealt with. 

So, I think we've learned that trauma research is really striking. There's lots of different kinds. People react to it differently. What might be troubling for you might not be troubling for me and vice versa in a given situation and that's the thing that's really tricky about trauma. It's not the same for every person. So we can't do this like, well, I went through that and I was fine. That attitude is it's not helpful because people are having different kinds of experiences. 

That said, I will say that the word “traumatic” is overused. It is sometimes used, I think, in place of “annoyed” or “frustrating” or a “little bit scary” or that sort of thing and it gives a gravity to it that I don't think it's deserved. But again, that's hard to say, depending on what the person's history is and what their responses to trauma and that's how I've kind of learned the definition of trauma. It's the emotional response to a terrible event. 

There are some events we can agree we can describe as traumatic, but the response to them that is the problem. It's the PTSD that keeps soldiers up at night and wreaks havoc on their lives. It’s the ongoing effects. It's the person who had something awful happened to them and they didn't have anybody to talk to, and so they just are silent with that inside. And when we saw some, that stuff come out, during “Me Too” and different movements. 

It's the being alone with stuff that seems incredibly problematic versus being able to share the trauma with somebody else and work through it, process it where then it feels like you have more of a chance of moving past it and not getting stuck in it or having it ruin your life.

There was this quote I heard and it's from this woman, Katharine Manning who wrote this book called The Empathetic Workplace, which I haven't read, but I really liked this quote, she was talking about workplaces, and she was talking about trauma isn't this jacket you can just take off at work. I liked that, that trauma is something we carry with us and I think we all have it in various ways. Some of us have a little bit and some of us have a lot and some people in between, and it's not a competition and some are big, and some are little, but I don't think anybody gets out unscathed. It's just a matter of when. 

So having more empathy and being a little bit more thoughtful in our designs for people who are going through a challenging period in their life, it'll be you one day. It might be somebody else today and let's make this website easier for them, this app easier, whatever it happens to be, accessing that government service.

David Dylan Thomas

So many things to dig into there, but in the immediate term, what you say reminds me of our approach to accessibility. I wonder like with accessibility, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, feels more uniform that if we're dealing with an accessibility issue around vision, we've kind of learned these kind of key lessons. If there are certain neurodivergence ways of interacting with technology. With trauma, trauma sounds so personal and idiosyncratic in certain ways, I wonder how do we think about design for trauma, which is something that feels a little more subjective?

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah, I think it's a good point. Accessibility has been more formalized, it's kind of a legal term in many ways. Trauma is earlier, I think the understanding of trauma is earlier in its development, but there is tons of research around what would make something trauma informed, not tech, but just in general.

We kind of know the things that are really important and SAMHSA, which is the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, they've put out these pillars that are really important for somebody to be trauma-informed in their approach and there are things like safety and transparency and peer empowerment, community, that sort of thing.

Then I've just been trying to say, how can we do that with tech? How can it tech be more trauma…how do we take these ideas of safety and apply it to tech, because there's a lot of overlap with, I think user experience, principles of heuristics we follow already, but it just requires a little bit of attention depending on first off who you're designing for.

It's a different ball game when I'm designing for survivors of human trafficking versus another group, but there are some things that kind of like with accessibility and if you kind of make an improvement here, a curb cut example that we've heard probably way too much. Where the curb cuts are very helpful for people who are in wheelchairs, but they're also helpful for people pushing a stroller, people who are dragging luggage. I think there's things around being trauma-informed in our tech work that will be appreciated by those who have been harmed by systems before or have had a bad experience with tech or have had a lot of trauma and other people will just be like, oh, that was easy. They won't necessarily notice, but “Oh, that form actually told me what they were going to do with my information.” You know, it explained it like there was transparency involved. 

So, I think it's one of those things similar to accessibility, when you cover for everybody, you're going to end up really serving the people who are most vulnerable perhaps, and then helping out other folks as well. So there are similarities. Absolutely. That was along answer!

David Dylan Thomas

No, I love long answers! So this is one story I just got to tell whether it makes sense or not. I was in Copenhagen and there's an observatory, like a telescope, like an observatory there. There’s this big cylindrical building that was made in like 16-whatever, very, very old building.

I went inside and I noticed to go up to the top, you just go up this long spiraling ramp all the way to the top and then you go to the top and you see the stuff, that’s cool, and as I was going through, I was like, this building was accessible in like 16-diggity-do. Accessibility is not some totally intangible concept that only the bleeding edge of technology can handle.  I don't know if the intent was to make this successful. I don't even know if field trips existed when this building was built, but it's accessible now.

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah, no, it's interesting to think about and I think it's the same with trauma-informed. People have been trying to apply this in other ways, it's kind of like when I teach an introductory to UX class, there's always a few people who are like, I've kind of been doing this in some way. I’m like, yes, let me give you the word for it. Let me give you some language around it and maybe some guidelines to follow, just some guard rails. I think that's a great example. 

David Dylan Thomas

A lot of this isn't necessarily – like in my bias work, I find there are procedures in place that have anticipated unnamed biases but that later we're like, oh, that's why we do it that way. So, the reason that when we vote, we go into a secret place to do it is because if we see how everyone else is voting, it will influence our vote. It's why it's actually kind of sketchy to do polling data during an election because you can actually sway the vote.

Melissa Eggleston

That is interesting. But I never thought about that when I go to vote. That's why I'm in my own little place. 

David Dylan Thomas

It’s a bias called a bandwagon effect that's been studied, and it's been shown that, Hey, if I see a whole bunch of other people for Clinton and I'm the only one in the room who hasn’t voted for Clinton, it's more likely I'm going to vote for Clinton. Whereas if you just put me in a room alone, you might get a more “honest” reaction out of me. 

The solution of, Hey, let's not let everyone see how each other's voting. That's much older than the studies around, so yeah, I think there are some things instinctively that we've been doing.

And I'm curious, off the top of your head, if you know what some of those things are in the trauma-informed arena that we kind of already maybe sort of do and can just lead into more?

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah. So I think, for example, we know now we must be mobile friendly. We've got that, but that is critical to somebody who's in a traumatic situation. Be it a weather event or be it, you've got 90 seconds in the bathroom by yourself without your partner there. If it's mobile friendly and you can quickly see a resource, click on a phone to call, text somebody. So being mobile friendly is something that we were trying to do anyway, but becomes of great importance to people who are in any kind of challenging situation like that.

We also know that that's an equity issue too. If you care about equity, you have to be mobile-friendly or else you don't care about equity, because people are accessing the internet on phones. Many people do not have computers.

David Dylan Thomas

Even that I think gets very quickly to a policy issue of just broadband access and access to phones. A long time ago, there was this guy, Bruce Sterling was giving a talk and he was saying – and this is 10, 20 years ago. He was saying you're going to find that cell phones are going to be actually the hallmark of poverty. He'd been like in some of the mega cities in India and seeing even the people who don't have toilets, have phones, because you cannot live without it. You cannot get a job; you cannot get access to services. If that's the deal you're going to strike, then you damn well better make sure that people have access to phones, people have access to broadband. All of that suddenly goes from being, oh, this luxury item, to like water.

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a good way to put it. I was doing some research before a talk I was giving and I was looking for an example of a nonprofit on mobile because I think nonprofits often need to work a lot in this area, I would say, around being mobile-friendly. I came to this great place; I'll say it was in Florida and it was showing a list of resources for low-cost medical. I was like, this is great, but I click on it and It's a PDF. It doesn't even load. That's just a lost opportunity to help somebody. We just put like a barrier there. So, there's another example, I mean, there's just a lot of little things like that.

They can't be afterthoughts, from the get-go someone needs to be like, Hey, wait, we gotta think about mobile. We gotta think about people who are in low bandwidth situations. We need to think about, do we really need this stupid photo that takes up all the room? No. 

David Dylan Thomas

I sort of don't have an ulterior motive here, but speaking of great UX experiences around accessing services, I'm just going to throw out there that the Planned Parenthood website makes it really easy to donate. Just throwing that out there for no particular reason. But even before the current terribleness, I was making a donation, we do monthly, but I was doing like this one-off for a friend who wanted their payment in terms of a donation to Planned Parenthood and no kidding, 10 seconds, not even kidding, get to this website, see the donate button, donate button pops up, see the PayPal link, automatically goes in and it's like, thank you for your donation. I mean, I don't want to say that's a trauma-informed per se, but I do want to say that is ease-informed. I want to say that is low-barrier entry-informed and I will also say probably makes it more likely people are going to donate-informed.

Melissa Eggleston

Absolutely. I mean, honestly that sounds very similar to what my people, my friends who work in, e-commerce talk about, they're like, “I want you to shake your butt and buy something”, accidentally in your pocket. It's that easy. 

We don't want that to happen necessarily, but those ideas. I mean the one place where it's not hard to get a lot of research done is in e-commerce. You can directly tie the research to the dollars. It's the easiest place. o we can look at how they do things and go, well, a lot of this is research backed and let's see how we can apply this to other causes, whether it be a Kickstarter or a donate to something we believe in or that sort of thing.

David Dylan Thomas

I'd be curious to hear your take on this. I talk a lot about like low friction and high friction experiences and in design there's this assumption that everything should be frictionless by default and so the e-commerce example, it’s like, maybe I want you to think a little before you spend a thousand dollars on this jacket, but at the same time, I wonder if in social justice, there's maybe a little more room for low friction. Maybe that's where some of that frictionless effort should be spent.

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah. Wouldn't it be great if were spending more time on social justice issues and kind of focusing on that sort of stuff versus shopping, which is very easy to do online. It's easy to pop on a phone or whatever and start shopping online and they're really good at making it frictionless and as easy as possible. And we need to do that for other things. We need to do that for people getting government services, we need to do that for whatever the things are. Especially for people who are going through something hard, it shouldn't be hard, and you shouldn't have to, before you try to do a chat because you're feeling suicidal, you shouldn't have to fill out a survey.

David Dylan Thomas

Oh man, tell me that isn't true? Oh my God. Oh my God!

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah. It’s true. stuff like that, we just need to up our game, basically. There's a lot of work. I really would love for more people who are in the tech space to work in more areas of social good, because there's such a high need for it. You can take your expertise from Google or Facebook or whatever and apply it in other realms where it's really needed. It's hard work, but t's worthwhile, you know,

David Dylan Thomas

There’s an interesting dichotomy there too, I think because even in those spaces. e-commerce or any kind of tech, there is already trauma. I want to go back to something you said earlier, it's not a jacket you can take off when you get to work. I want to talk a little bit about how I think capitalism gives very little room for trauma. It kind of wants to pretend it doesn't exist. So, when you get to work and a whole bunch of people got shot and you are part of that class of people, you're expected to work just as hard and just as normally as everyone else for whom it was terrible, but it wasn't directed at them. You know what I mean? 

Melissa Eggleston

Yes. I mean, capitalism is about productivity and things that harm productivity are externalities, I would say, from a capitalist perspective. It is a real problem, I think. I would imagine that a number of people have trouble functioning in the last couple of weeks because of some of the news events that were unavoidable and horrific, and that's a human response to a tragic event. It's not business as usual.

When we try to roll as business as usual, when all this other stuff is happening, whether it's all of the stuff around George Floyd and the social movement we had between 2015, 2020, in that area, people just trying to function at work as if everything's normal or act like it's not happening or put it aside in a little box, it doesn't work. It comes out sideways. It comes out sideways at people, comes out in frustration. It comes out in people leaving their jobs because they're frustrated with their employers who didn't have the flexibility or the – I don't know, the grace to give people the space they need to work through and process these events because it could be happening in your hometown. It could be happening across the globe. 

There's going to be different effects no matter what, but we're so interconnected and we watch it. I mean, you were around in 9/11. How many times did you watch 9/11? How many times did you watch that tower go down? I watched it a zillion times that morning. That wasn't good.  I wouldn't make that choice now, but we're affected by these things and to try to, I don't know, I've appreciated employers who have given me space or time and genuinely said, “Please take the time you need.” Genuinely said, I will cover that interview for you if you can't pull it off, and that's okay.” And really feel like you really can, not the values on the wall, we really care about people, but then that isn't matched up by the actions. That's not a trauma-informed workplace by any means.

David Dylan Thomas

I feel like it comes down to how does the organization exists in the world? Does it exist as this money-making machine that just is expected to spit out cash regardless of the environment that it's placed into, or does it exist as like a tree that when it's cold, there's no leaves and when it's warm, there's leaves and it is a part of the world that is in and reacts to the world that is in organically and that's okay.

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah. I love the tree analogy. I think it's a great analogy. I was just thinking about B Corp's, right? So B Corporation, when I set up my company, I did it in that way. It's where you got to actually think about the social impact and the environmental impact of the decisions you make as a business.

The biggest, most well-known B Corporation is Patagonia. You can learn about their work and that sort of thing, but there's like 5,000 businesses around the world that have kind of committed to not just being focused on profit, but actually thinking about, who am I buying this from? Is it somebody local? Is it a minority? Just being conscious about it and then making conscious decisions that are good for the community, the local community, as well as like society as a whole. There is some accountability there too, because you actually get audited every three years, so that's good. 

I had to show to somebody I actually did donate to all these places, that sort of thing. So that feels like a step in the right direction because unbridled capitalism is problematic. We know that the experiment has happened, and it is a mess, right?

Just like your experiment with, you know, unrestricted access to guns. It's not working well. So yeah, we got to come up with alternative ways to do things and it starts with people talking about it on podcasts and other places and saying, we can do this different, we can do this better. Tech doesn't have to be a place that's hard to work in as a person of color or as a woman, what can happen to make it better? It's just really getting the accountability piece right because you've had to align all the economic interests to really make change, to truly make change.

David Dylan Thomas

Unpack that a little for me. What do you mean by aligning the interest to make change?

Melissa Eggleston

Well, I think we just respond to incentives. I think we do. I think we do tend to act in our best interest. I do think we're altruistic at times, but even I think we're altruistic to serve our best interests because we know we'll feel good about ourselves by being altruistic. I mean, there's some self-interest there, no matter what and so I think trying to line it up where it is in a company's best interest to do the right thing and that will benefit them financially or there's just different ways, or they won't be penalized because they did something wrong, like dumped a bunch of oil in the middle of the sea or whatever.

It's making sure that the carrots and sticks are in the right place. It feels like really important to truly change society And that's hard. That's really hard. Small companies just trying to keep people in alignment, whether it's a group of five or 12 or 16,000 or 150,000, is that how many people work at Google? That's a lot of people to stay in alignment on a mission. Having a mission that's worthy of our time and energy, and then keeping everybody aligned towards that worthy mission – that's hard. 

David Dylan Thomas

I keep thinking about whenever anyone says something is hard, A, I believe them, but B my, my brain immediately starts looking for, has anyone pulled this off? The closest thing I can think of, and this is kind of where my mind often goes with this stuff, is fandom. 

So, think about being a Buffalo Bills fan. I had a friend who was a Buffalo Bills fan when I was in college, which was in the early nineties. Each of the four years I was in college, the Buffalo Bills got to the Super Bowl and lost. I felt so bad for my friend. And it was like, is this because we're in college? But he never wavered. Imagine, it isn't as intricate as saying, I need a hundred thousand people to do this exact particular job or these functions at a departmental level, but it is a matter of in your own way, celebrate the Bills or in your own way, support the Bills, come to games and do these things and just engage in this community. 

I feel like – a community isn't a company, let's not make that mistake, but I feel like community is the largest scale at which the idea of lots of individual people working towards a common vision kind of plays out that I can think of. Sports teams are probably the most common and well-funded version of this, but I also think of like, I'm a Doctor Who fan, so fandoms, sci-fi fandoms, all of the work that goes into fan art and fan creation. This is a lot of valuable – like if you want to think of it economically – really valuable work hours that go into this, not just creating things, AO3, which is Archive of Our Own is a volunteer website that is maintained as a very intricately maintained database for fan art that won a Hugo for their creative endeavors. That's how quality it is. But that is a very large body of people coming together. The organizers are a smaller body, but what they're supporting is a huge body of people coming together to do something with a common vision and generally a common set of values.

I don't know if that is as close as we can get to the challenge of organization you're talking about, but it's intriguing to me that what can we learn from that when we're trying to do it? What does a fandom social justice look like? You know what I mean?

Melissa Eggleston

Yes, that's very interesting. I wasn't even very aware of fandoms until recently. My ten-year-old is super into them. She's super into Wings of Fire and she's super into Warriors and now Star Wars. 

David Dylan Thomas

What is Wings of Fire?

Melissa Eggleston

Wings of Fire are these books about dragons that are extremely violent, but she loves them!

David Dylan Thomas

Is Warriors the one with the cats?

Melissa Eggleston

There’s cats, and I think other animals.

David Dylan Thomas

Okay, because I have a 13-year-old. He’s read up on Warriors and then Star Wars.

Melissa Eggleston

The fandom is huge for these groups and the fan art, and the amount of time spent with the animation. I mean, I feel like passionate, but I think that's, I think it's interesting, like what can we learn from them? I do feel like the B Corp community has a lot of passion in that area and they've kind of put forth social justice, environmental justice, these are things that we care about. But I think it's that it's that North Star. It's that go here, and you might be here in your own way, but going here and this is a good place to go, everybody.

Sports teams, that's a great example. People will be loyal for their whole life. Even sports brands know this, because you're going to be a Nike guy for the rest of your life or whatever it happens to be. I loved how you were talking about companies. Companies are communities. They are not families. It drives me bonkers when companies say, “we're a family.”

David Dylan Thomas

Let’s not say “Work fam”!

Melissa Eggleston

No. They're not families. Families are different construct. You will get laid off by your work family if you need to be, if it doesn't serve the company. But I do think that's a really interesting thing to see. What keeps people together, what keeps your friend going when Buffalo Bills keep losing 10 times in a row. That's worth digging into.

David Dylan Thomas

I want to talk a little more about B Corps, because I do like this idea of not just having something we're moving away from, but something we're moving towards or alternatives. So give me like B Corp 101. What is it? If I want to form one, what do I gotta do?

Melissa Eggleston

So there literally is a B Corp 101. There's like classes you can take. There's this thing called B Lab and they are the ones who kind of certify people in that sort of thing. So I started off by asking a friend of mine who was running one. She focuses on accessibility for WordPress websites, really good stuff. She’s been there five years and I was like, “How did you become a B Corp?” Because I really like that B Corp’s are required in their legal documents to say they will consider the community and the environmental impact.

I liked that being in my actual articles of organization, business charter, that sort of stuff. She was like, “Oh, you take the B Corp assessment and then you'll see what are the things that are important to them.” And so, I just went online, and I punched in B Corp assessment. I started answering questions and started to understand what are the things that are important to being a B Corp. So you start to understand, oh, it's important where you spend your money, who are your vendors, does your work have any environmental or social impact? Do you donate money to any organizations? What are you doing?

It starts to ask you those questions and it starts to make me think, am I already doing some of this maybe? Because a lot of people already doing it somewhere and it's just a matter of formalizing it and adding an accountability. Then I ended up going through B Corp Clinic, because it wasn't super easy. It didn't feel super easy to me. And so I went through a clinic at NC State University and these MBA students helped me answer the questions in a way that made sense. I'd signed and kind of gotten onto the wrong track because they have to be on the right track for the size. I'm just a one person show, Patagonia is a very big show and there's all kinds of organizations in between who are different sizes and industries and that sort of thing.

They kinda helped me through that and then I applied and then I think I got audited, maybe six months after I applied where got on the phone with somebody and she was like, “Hey, I need to see the backup for this or for this. Tell me more about this.” I'm part of the system and I pay a fee to be able to be called a B Corp.

There are some barriers there for sure. I think especially for the smaller folks, but I just feel like we're at this place where we're like, we’ve got to try some other stuff. There's Sistema B, so it's happening in Latin America, too. It's happening worldwide. It’s in other languages which is nice to see.

I'm all for people doing cooperatives. Other kinds of business models, organization models that are less maybe extractive on the communities, not just trying to keep themselves alive, which is an issue with lots of nonprofits where it's like, do you really want to be obsolete? Or would you just like more funding? Are we really working to eradicate this issue so that we don't matter anymore, and we can actually get smaller?

David Dylan Thomas

I think of, I was having a similar discussion with someone about unions. I'm very pro-union, but there are situations where the union gets to a size or maturity where it's only interest, or its highest interest is in preserving itself. That's when you get a lot of the sort of bad side and violent side, sometimes of unions as well, that starts to give it a bad name, give people excuses to tear them down.

What it reminds me of, in terms of that obsolescence is sort of like what's been happening to televised entertainment over the past 10 years, 20 years. We went from – and I think the business model matters – so we went from, in America anyway, largely advertising-based model where you would have a show that would have 20 episodes, 22 episodes in a season, for a particular time of year and that was based on the ad sales model, the ad schedule, the ad calendar. Ideas that would go as long as possible until the ratings dropped, which meant from a plot perspective, nothing really changed, things would kind of reset to zero at the end of every episode. 

Then as you get more modern and some of the business models change, and you're going more to subscription-based, all of a sudden you start to see limited series. So maybe 13 episodes and maybe it's actually planned to only be four seasons. As we speak the latest season of Stranger Things dropped and in season one, they asked the Duffer brothers, “What's this going to be?” They're like, “Four seasons and we’re out. That's all we’re going to do.”

One of the reasons they said that is because these are kids and it's just cruel to keep doing bad things to kids for longer than four seasons! But I think it's also just narratively it’s tighter. It makes more sense. It lets you experiment with the storytelling and say, hey, maybe things aren't the same at the end of season one, as they were at the beginning?

What's been amazing about watching people try different things in that space is now we've come to expect it. Now it's weird when a show has 22 episodes, and nothing changes. It’s like, where's the cliffhanger? Now we wait during the credits of movies to see what's the next little bit.

It's so weird how little, we think we're dealing with things like the typical way of setting up a for-profit or not-for-profit and we're like, well, that's just immutable law and it's amazing how quickly we can actually get to this point of why is it acting that way? I would love to see this happen with B Corp's where it's like, well, why isn't that a B Corp? 

Melissa Eggleston

I have that thought sometimes where I'm like, this company feels like it's doing all the right stuff. Is it aware of B Corp’s? Is it aware it could be a model for others? You can be part of this community. B Corp's in some way, I feel, like they're still getting off the ground, even though they'd been around for probably 15 years or so.

David Dylan Thomas

I remember going to a Ted Talk in Philly where I'm pretty sure it was the founder or one of the founders of B Corps, because it starts somewhere in Pennsylvania, I think. It was like, “We've got this new thing, it's called the B Corp.” I'm like, “This sounds awesome. I hope it succeeds!”

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah. There's been a lot of interest in the last few years, I think as we've seen in like the tech world too, there's design for good Slacks and there's now ethical design Slacks. We’re seeing interests that we didn't have 10 years ago, so that's really interesting. It is interesting how there can be more than one model. We can try different things and sometimes it ends up being better, so you don't have the same stupid story every time, everything doesn't have to reset. It can continue on, and things can be limited. 

People can say, “I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. I don't have to be stuck in this thing.” I always feel bad when I go to a concert and somebody is playing a song that was a big hit for them 15 years ago, because everybody wants that song, but to them, they're probably like, “I hate this song”, that would drive me bonkers if I had to do a lot of stuff I was doing 15 years ago. 

I feel like I got way off topic! 

David Dylan Thomas

I mean, speaking of off topic, I wonder if that is in some way related to our fear of death? I'm seeing more of this now. So again, that tie between, “I'm going to make a TV series that's going to last for 25 years and everything's going to be the same forever” versus, “Hey, I've got a five-season story to tell about a guy who goes from being a chemist to a drug dealer and that’s it, we're done.”

Being able to be done with things, I feel like in Western culture in general, but I think in America in particular, there's like this fear of death where it's like, no, I have to hold on as long as possible because if this series can end, maybe I can end.

I feel that culturally as we start to get a more okay with impermanence, I think it becomes easier because then we open up ourselves things like being vulnerable. I'm very curious to see how this all relates towards influenced by trauma. But if we have a culture that's more accepting of, do this for a while. You don't have to do it forever. If you don't like it, do something else. 

The example I think of is I have a friend who runs a company here in Philly called Sear and his attitude to his employees is thus, he knows he hires the best people. He knows those people who are getting LinkedIn offers every damn day. Instead of trying to lure them with “Oh, we've got a chocolate fountain in the thing and you're gonna stay here...”  He perceives them as people who are on a journey, he doesn’t want them, necessarily, to be there forever. He certainly doesn't expect them to be there forever. He knows this is where they are on their journey. 

He wants to help them and while they're there, he's really thinking, “what can I give you to help you on your next step in the journey?” He's already thinking about their exit the day he hires them. Not in a need to get them out the door kind of way, but it's like for a time we are going to be helping each other out and there's going to come a time when actually, the best thing for you and/or for us is for you to move on to the next stage of your life. But he's not thinking of it as I need to collect and accumulate people and keep them with me forever.

Melissa Eggleston

I love it. Yes! It's like a lack of possessiveness and the reality of people are on journeys that may or may not be long-term with you. I have a friend here who similarly has conversations with her employees about if it's not working out, we'll look at changing seats. Maybe you're just in the wrong role or we'll look at a continuation plan, which is basically to help you find your next thing – and I love that. 

I don't know if you've ever worked somewhere where you're trying to just make it to your two years or whatever it happens to be, and your heart's not in anymore. And you're just like, “ahhhh”, but you can't be honest. I don't know. I think we worried sometimes that everything’s just going to disintegrate if we are that like vulnerable and honest, but things do end.

You mentioned the fear of death. I don't know what it is. When I was a kid, I just kind of wanted to be friends with everybody and I wanted everybody to live on my street – for the rest of our life. We were like, “when we’re in sixth grade you’ll live on my street and we're gonna be friends for the rest of our life.” And then we'd just keep collecting people. 

Then as soon as you get to high school or college, you start to realize that people come in and out of your life. You have people who you're close to for a season and gone for a season and some people who come back around, down the line and those friendships are not stagnant. Neither the individual friendships, nor your friendship groups and the people you're close to. 

It's going to be the same for companies and it's the same for communities. I don't know that our structures allow for that kind of flow. Maybe it goes back to the capitalism thing of like, must be productive at all costs. Must grow at all costs. That's ridiculous. We don't need to grow at all costs. Growth as a goal doesn't feel like a great goal at many times.

David Dylan Thomas

I think I talked about this in a previous episode, but this idea that growth at all costs if you're an organism, basically means your cancer, that's literally the definition. It’s like unregulated cell growth. It's just going to keep dividing, then dividing, then dividing. And then that that's literally a cancer versus like the body itself understands age. It understands when it is time to grow, when it is time to shrink, again, it understands it's part of a system and acts accordingly. It doesn't say, “Well, I'm the heart. So, I'm going to keep all the blood.” It's like, no, that actually will kill us. Don't do that!

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah, I think it's really interesting. I'm sure there's research on this, but I'm really curious as to when things start to fall apart in companies and that sort of thing, like when we become less adaptable and flexible and flowing. Does that start at a certain number of people? Is it started by the tone of the founders? How does that all work? Is there an ideal size where a company can be malleable enough to be having the kinds of conversations like it sounds like your friend is having, thoughtful conversations of journey in and out. 

Or do we have issues with the labor market where the supply is so thin and we're trying so hard to grow so fast. I don't know. I think it's a lot about sustainable growth and that's where I do think B Corps are on the right track of trying to be mindful about how we're growing, and we should be being mindful about how we're doing things in tech. That's why the trauma-informed thing comes into play. Just more thought and less activity.

David Dylan Thomas

Oh, I like that! Yeah.

Melissa Eggleston

I don't know about you, but I feel super busy and I'm like, is this busy-ness what I want to be doing? Is this busy-ness effective? Or is this just extra work? Because I don't want to do the scary work. That I'm avoiding. I think humans are tricky and we trick ourselves.

I think I should say that I think part of the journey to being a more trauma-informed or mindful individual is doing our own trauma work. It’s dealing with our own mental baggage and the stuff we bring to our workplaces, because some of these workplaces can just feel like everybody's working out their dysfunctional family life, so we can work on our own stuff so at least to the table, we are trying to be a productive and helpful member of the community and not just acting out our issues with our mom, with our boss or whatever it happens to be.

I just think if we can give ourselves time for self-growth, for reflection, that's how I think we get to better workplaces, to better society, to empathy. I don't know anybody who's a very empathetic person who doesn't have empathy for themselves. People I know who are empathetic are empathetic for themselves, too. They have self-care, they understand boundaries, they will speak up for themselves and then they can also have that energy to empathize with other people. But if you don't have that, if you're not in touch with yourself, it's going to be hard for you to be empathetic to others and kind.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah, this is wild. I was just literally earlier today doing the dishes, listening to a Brené Brown podcast with someone – I'm blanking on their name – it’s an about the four pivots is the thing they were talking about. I will link to it in the show notes so people can experience it, but it was very much around this idea of if you can't, they call it mirror work, if you can't know thyself and reckon with thyself and be honest with thyself, you are going to have a very hard time helping anyone else.

You're going have a very hard time making those transformative changes we've been talking about. I've been seeing that theme kind of reappear, and they even talked about the notion of always feeling busy, “I feel like I always have to be doing something” might actually be your way of avoiding the actual more valuable work of dealing with your own stuff.

I know in my life getting therapy, really learning how to value myself, even just being able to repeat the words in my head, “I am worthy” – and this is a fairly recent development in therapy, but It's remarkably tough. Put it this way, it had been up until that point way easier for me to say, “I am worthless,” than to say, “I am worthy.”

It was a much more comfortable message – and think about that. How mean and how just weird is it that it felt more comfortable and socially acceptable for me to call myself worthless than to call myself worthy. That’s something that right there.

Melissa Eggleston

Yeah. Something's not right there. And it's so common, the thing is maybe you've got these things going on in your head, other people do too, but nobody's talking about it or they're not feeling safe enough to talk about it in a group or that sort of thing. And you just start to get alone in your own things and I just think that leads to all kinds of problems. We've got to get it up and out and through, and that's interesting. I will have to check out that podcast you recommend.

David Dylan Thomas

Absolutely. I'll send you the link and then when the thing goes live, I'll make sure everyone else gets the link. It's a great, great episode.

Melissa Eggleston

That sounds really good. I feel like I spend a lot of my adulthood on learning what I learned in my childhood. There was some trauma and just, you know, the way things were and knowing that there's just a different way to do it. I think until I started to get self-awareness, I didn't realize all the choices I had.

David Dylan Thomas

That's a great way of putting it.

Melissa Eggleston

I just didn't realize how many choices I had. Now that you're aware of the voices in your head, you can be like, “oh, That's BS. That's not true,” and you can switch it around or you can write it out or whatever, there's all kinds of techniques to help us. But until that self-awareness is there it's hard to make progress. 

David Dylan Thomas

We should wrap it up soon, but I want to kind of make sure we circle back. When we decided, okay, the thing I'm thinking about is trauma. What in particular about were you thinking about?

Melissa Eggleston

Well, I mean, it was really on this playground in 2015, listening to this person, I was talking to this woman who was an educator, and she would help doctors and nurses learn how to be more trauma-informed around the birth experience. Somebody might be a survivor of sexual assault and might have challenges during the birth experience. 

Understandably it makes sense, but I’d never thought about it before. I was listening to her, and she kept using this word trauma-informed and I didn't know what that meant. That's when I started to ask, what do you mean trauma informed? She's explaining, she’s talking, it's about recognizing people have a lot of trauma in their lives, different kinds of trauma. It's being careful not to re-traumatize people. It's the nurse who explains why they are asking you questions on the medical form that seem kind of personal around past sexual history and it was getting written down on my record that X has been communicated by the nurse or it's the police officer who gets down at the same height as the little children that they've come upon in the scene.

It's all these kinds of interactions. When she started talking about it, I was just like, wow, I've never heard this before. I had not heard it before, and I've worked around trauma stuff. Prior to trauma-informed becoming a thing I worked at Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, I had purple hair, I wore overalls, and I could tell you how to get to the drug clinic. That was my first real job out of college. And I worked at a recovery center, and I'd gone into files and I had to identify who had had gun violence in their past, which was basically everybody. 

It feels like I'm on this journey of my own healing and realizing that like, oh, this is important. I've been thinking about where do I want to spend my time? What's a good use of time? What's a worthy use of my time? Then I think helping people not be re-traumatized by bad design and tech choices feels worthwhile. Making sure people are having research interviews that are trauma-informed, that are not disempowering them and making it more difficult for their lives, that that feels worthwhile.

Then I just decided, I'm all in. I've gotten to have a lot of opportunities to spend work in this area and I'm going to keep studying it too. I'll be starting a grad program in the fall. I'm still do it while I'm working, so we'll see how that goes! That might be its own trauma.

I think as you get older, you realize you’re not going to live forever, and what do I want to do that feels meaningful? This just feels really meaningful. It feels rich. There's just no way you can start to kind of do work in being trauma-informed without kind of doing your own stuff because it just comes all up all over the place and you just gotta deal with it. You’ve got to do the therapy work or the rebirthing work or the yoga work or whatever the work is that you need to do. I do think yoga is pretty awesome for that reason. It is very healing.

David Dylan Thomas

For me it's been more on the meditation front, but it's been good just as a practice while I'm doing it, but it's informed all these other things that I did not expect it to inform.

Find your thing, find your thing that helps you work on you and know that it isn't selfish. Know that it is actually very selfless because you're not going to be nearly as helpful if you're not a hundred percent.

Melissa Eggleston

That's right. That's right. And when you're in the middle of it, you're just trying to get through. When I was growing up, sports was like my refuge. Soccer, various sports, but then ended up being soccer and I tell you, thank God for my coaches. They gave me a structure and direction and male figures, that was really top-notch coaching, especially in high school and got on to play in college and that was really great. I needed that during that time. 

When you're in the middle of a trauma, whether it's a weather event or whatever awful personal thing that happened, it is often just about how do we get through this next hour? That's a totally appropriate place to be, but then once you're on the other side of it, it is worthwhile to go back and do the processing. It is worthwhile to unlearn the habits you learn. We weren't talking about compassion on the soccer field. We weren't talking about take care of yourself today. It's not what we do. But I think it's like a new stage of life. Where you’re kind of like, I'm through it, now I'm going to heal from it and learn from it. Then I can be a helpful and productive member of my community and I can contribute without all the stuff coming out sideways. Without me throwing my feelings at you because that's all I can do in the moment because I haven't processed some really.

David Dylan Thomas

Well, it's about healing, right? You’ve got to get through the thing, but once you get through the thing and you’ve got space, you’ve got to heal.

Melissa Eggleston

That's right. Give yourself the chance to heal. At this point I’m an adult and I have choices. I can give myself that space or I could turn over my power and just work 90 hours a week. Everybody’s got choices and I don't know. I think choosing healing is a worthwhile choice, even though it's hard. Who wants to be like, “Wahoo, I go to therapy today!” nobody's really excited about that or nobody's like, “I'm going to write my journal.” Maybe some people are, but usually if you're talking about dealing with heavy stuff from childhood, but it's fruitful. The more you talk about it and the more you find, well, I'm just one of many. I'm not alone in thinking I'm worthless or that I'm not good enough or whatever it is. There's a bunch of people who also have felt like that and have gotten to the other side. That's when you realize you’re just another member of the human race.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah. Even if you could just go through it or be going through and be sharing that, it's powerful. When we were talking earlier about 9-8-8, I'm very curious to see that roll out. But I know for me, when I was in my teens and twenties, I was suicidal. I know how much it would have helped me. I mean, thank God I got through it, but I know how much it would have helped me.

Actually, it's problematic in many ways but the movie, The Breakfast Club actually helped me a lot because there's a character in there who's a geek and he's there because he tried to commit suicide basically. h hit me so hard, but it was so comforting to know that there's a movie nerd who got through that. Like, it's a weird like thing, but I'm so glad he put that in the movie because, oh my God, that might've saved my life. But you're right. The loneliness is almost the hardest part of it thinking you're the only, that may be the most destructive part.

Melissa Eggleston

I think some psychologists may argue that that is the destructive part. It's not whatever happened, it's the aftermath. It's the loneliness. It's the lack of connection, I think.  I'm not a psychologist or a therapist, but from what I've read, that is a big part of it all. I relate, I used to have suicidal thoughts pretty regularly starting at age 12. It's nice not to be there anymore.

For me, like I found comfort in 12 step groups. There's kind of like, whatever your thing is, be it drugs or alcohol, money, gambling, whatever, there's a 12-step group for you now. What I liked about it was the peer support where I could just talk to other people and I can remember just my jaw dropping because I couldn't believe how honest people were. “Did I really hear her say that like? Whoa!” and people admitting things. I can remember being in a meeting and people that were newly married, one person said, “I'm worried I made a big mistake.” And then the next four people shared, “I had that same thought too! I was convinced in my first year I’d made a terrible error!” When I got married, I remembered that. I remembered that conversation. I can remember how everybody, because it had been, the shameful thought or whatever it is, put it out there and you realize, “oh, it's got much worse in my head.”

David Dylan Thomas

That's the thing. There is, I don't think in English we have a word for it, but it's probably like, there's some German word that combines relief, surprise and something else, and lack of shame. That feeling when you realize that that shameful thought is shared by many, and you are not alone. There's a relief that comes with it. There is an opening up. Again, I don't think we have a good English word for it, but it is this very distinct, even as you're describing that, I'm like, yeah, I can remember times in my life when I just came out and said the thing and people are like, “Oh my God, that's exactly how I feel.” I'm like, “Oh, thank God!”

Melissa Eggleston

Yes! And we need people who are willing to step up and say that too. The elephant in the room that nobody's saying, and that's hard. That's hard at work, especially, I think. It's easier in personal situations, but good for you for being the one to speak up.

It is true that it models good behavior. For other people that good behavior of sharing of not being alone with our problems.  I have a friend who would say, “My head is a bad neighborhood, I don't want to go in there alone.” That's a pretty common thing in the recovery 12-step. They'll say things like, 
 Well, yeah, your head is a bad neighborhood” and it's true, and it can change though.

David Dylan Thomas

Melissa, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. We must do it again sometime.

Melissa Eggleston

I enjoyed it! I feel like we could talk all day long, but this is fun. Thank you for having me!

David Dylan Thomas

For the “Lately, I've been thinking about…” podcast, I'm David Dylan Thomas, and we will see you next time!