In this episode we talk to ux writer and Strategic Writing for UX author Torrey Podmajersky about existential dread and, in particular, the dread that comes from having the same conversation over and over and over and over...
We get into how sometimes these conversations are practice and how sometimes they're ways to avoid the *real* conversation we have to have if we ever stop having this conversation over and over, the ways we try to define progress, why do some people prefer authoritarianism, and much, much, more.
Recommended content from this episode
Website
Real Rent Duwamish
Movies
RRR
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Books
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Podcast
Content Strategy Insights
Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander
In this episode we talk to ux writer and Strategic Writing for UX author Torrey Podmajersky about existential dread and, in particular, the dread that comes from having the same conversation over and over and over and over...
We get into how sometimes these conversations are practice and how sometimes they're ways to avoid the *real* conversation we have to have if we ever stop having this conversation over and over, the ways we try to define progress, why do some people prefer authoritarianism, and much, much, more.
Recommended content from this episode
Website
Real Rent Duwamish
Movies
RRR
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Books
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Podcast
Content Strategy Insights
Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander
(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)
David Dylan Thomas
Thank you all for coming to another episode of ‘Lately, I've been thinking about…’. I'm your host, David Dylan Thomas and I am on location in Seattle.
I'm going to introduce my first, my only guest. We do have one guest a show here, you know, that. The lovely Torrey Podmajersky. Did I pronounce your name correctly?
Torrey Podmajersky
You sure did!
David Dylan Thomas
Oh my God, I'm so good at this! Usually, we do two land acknowledgements because I'm interviewing somebody who's far away, but Torrey is sitting right next to me and she actually knows the land acknowledgement because you live here, right?
Torrey Podmajersky
Yes, I live here, yes.
David Dylan Thomas
So, you live here in Seattle. Tell us a little bit about the past of this place with our opening acknowledgement.
Tpj
Yeah, so I want to acknowledge that this is the historic and unceded territory of the Duwamish tribe, which is actually a federally unrecognized tribe that's still working towards federal recognition. It's part of the Coast Salish peoples in the Pacific Northwest. There is an awful lot of friction between the indigenous population, especially because of the lack of acknowledgement, and the way Seattle was settled, the way all of these things have happened.
Seattle was a microcosm of the Pacific Northwest event at that time. For people interested in that area, I recommend the Real Rent Duwamish website and donation.
David Dylan Thomas
Excellent. I'll put that in the show notes for us later. Thank you for that.
So let me introduce our guest – and I will actually, Torrey, let you kind of basically tell us what you're into, how you would like to be kind of recognized and known, or at this moment what you'd like to be known for. So, tell us a little bit about what you get into.
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh, what do I get into? Well, we are here at the Button 2022 conference. I get into an awful lot of UX writing trouble, and by UX writing trouble, I mean less about the words on the screens and much more about the, ‘Hey, did you know those words could work a little harder? Let me tell you all about it. Let me tell you that with numbers. Let me tell you that, executives, let me tell you that, designers, let me tell you that.’
It helps that I wrote a book on it, so people think I get some authority from that. I'm still the same person that was when I wrote the book.
David Dylan Thomas
It's weird though, right? You get this aura. The same thing by the way happens if you have a podcast, you get this aura about you that’s like, ‘Well, they wrote a book; they must know what they're talking about. They have a podcast; they must know what they're talking about.’
Torrey Podmajersky
Little do they know!
David Dylan Thomas
I am curious. I kind of know the answer because I've swam in the same waters, but how much of your job is justifying the existence of your job?
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh, so much! Although less and less.
David Dylan Thomas
Well, that's good!
Torrey Podmajersky
Less and less. I've been doing this since 2010. In Xbox, people came there before me and had already justified it because the 10-year-olds couldn't set up the console. They needed 10-year-olds to be able to set up the console on Christmas morning without waking up mom and dad. To have that super delightful experience and for that to happen, the UX copy needed to be good. Needed to be age appropriate. Needed to be fun.
David Dylan Thomas
Who's harder to write for? 10-year-olds or adults?
Torrey Podmajersky
Adults who write the checks.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh yeah. They're the toughest! So, Torrey, let me ask you the million-dollar question. What have you been thinking about lately?
Torrey Podmajersky
I have been thinking about existential dread.
David Dylan Thomas
Fantastic! One of my favorite topics! Let's get into it. What have you been thinking about existential dread?
Torrey Podmajersky
Well, I've been especially thinking about it in this intersection with content design and with creating user interfaces and working in large corporate environments. I will not name names, but it was the one agenda item on a one-on-one document for a standing one-on-one for a person who I meet with regularly. They had just said, existential dread. And I said, ‘Oh, we better lean into this! We better lean into this.’ It turned out that what we needed to discuss was the sort of Groundhog Day nature.
I don't think this is limited to UX content and UX spaces. I think that any big corporate job or even a small corporate job, there's a little bit of, after you've been in it for a few years, there's a little bit of, ‘Didn't we talk about this already? How am I talking about this again? I think I have talked with you about this before. Why are we talking about it again? Why did we design this three years ago, never ship it and we're designing it again to reship the same thing that we didn't ship? What is happening?’
David Dylan Thomas
There's a reason the movie Groundhog Day is so effective, and it's not because there's a very common experience of being trapped in the same day. It is that the feeling of being trapped in the same day is actually very common and the act of doing the same things over and over again is actually very common.
Torrey Podmajersky
Absolutely. But why is it then, I'm old enough to have lots of daily routines that support my living. If I get up in the morning and I make a high protein breakfast, I am a better human being the rest of the day. I make that a routine. I use the same pan, I use one of two spatulas, right? Because one's probably dirty and then, you know.
So, there's routines, daily routines that are the Groundhog Day parts that I depend on, that when I'm staying in a hotel this week, I really miss, like, oh, I've gotta feed myself something! Oh no. Where does coffee come from? How does that even work?
But then there's the Groundhog Day parts, and I do my job, well, because I get paid, let's be real. But I also love my job. But why do some of those parts feel Groundhog Day in a bad way? When it's like, oh, am I having an argument too many times? But mostly I'm talking about things I love that I believe in, maybe convincing new people, maybe convincing the same person, but it's just not their background. So why is there that dichotomy?
David Dylan Thomas
It's interesting too because you're talking about the routines that we depend on bring us comfort. I like that I know that I'm going to have pancakes on Friday. I have my two spatulas, but there are two spatulas because there are only two spatulas that are wide and flat enough to properly flip pancakes.
Torrey Podmajersky
But blueberries or no blueberries?
David Dylan Thomas
Oh, I'm vanilla. I took a year to perfect the recipe, but it's like Bisquick base, a little bit of apple sauce for moistness, a little bit of vanilla extract for flavor. Vary the milk depending on how much fluffiness you want. Make sure the skillet's already hot and when you drop water on it, the water dances.
Torrey Podmajersky
Recipe in the description?
David Dylan Thomas
This is cobbled together.
Torrey Podmajersky
Recipe in the description of your podcast.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh yeah. You know what we'll do that folks! I'm going to have a cookbook that is going to have two items. One is going to be pancakes and the other is going to be my cheesy spaghetti. That's it – oh, and my pizza bagels! But again, there's no magic to them.
Torrey Podmajersky
Three items, halfway there!
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, exactly. Halfway there to a six-item cookbook! It's like a pamphlet. It's like, so you want to eat like a 12-year-old?
But yeah, those bring us comfort and they're based on something I think, cyclical, right? Every morning I'm going to be hungry at about the same time, you know. Whereas the things you're talking about that are frustrating to repeat are things where we expect progress. I think that's the thing that gets us, right?
So we have this definition of progress and we don't have to go there, but that's very interesting to me on a whole different level because I've been struggling with the idea of progress for a while now, because progress can mean a lot of things to a lot of people and progress may or may not map onto reality in terms of just history or whatever; there's a certain vision of the whole world is actually cyclical.
On the one hand, I want us to make “progress” on race relations or the acceptance of content in industries, but at the same time, I also have to accept that history itself is cyclical. So, there's a balance. There's a nuance I'm still working through.
Torrey Podmajersky
I have so many thoughts here.
David Dylan Thomas
Go, go, go!
Torrey Podmajersky
I have so many thoughts here. So, I was raised by wonderful hippie parents who I adore, and I talk to them on Sunday mornings, and we laugh about how they raised me on Play-Doh stories and I mean, Mom was an anthropology student, Dad was a music student. We had the best grad school parties at the house.
What was impressed on me as a small child – and I didn't know that other people didn't have this background – was that we were always focused on what is the great human experiment? What is the great human purpose? And it is that we are just a moment in the existence of humanity, passing things forward.
We're the atoms, or, I'm sorry, the molecules of water in a wave. None of us are the wave; we all contribute a little bit. We all have our own motion. So, in that case, that forward progress, we might not ever get to see it and that wave that moves forward, you know when you're body surfing on the beach or you're just getting pummeled by the waves? There are parts of the water that are going out to sea while there are parts of the water that are going forward. Sometimes you are part of the water that's going out to sea and that part you're like, ‘I am going backwards! Oh shit!’ Is this a swearing podcast?
David Dylan Thomas
Oh, this is a fucking swearing podcast!
Torrey Podmajersky
But let me build on that a little bit. So, you also said this word cyclical. So, I'm going to switch metaphors from the wave to cyclical. So as a former Physics and Chemistry teacher, I'm going to say so a pendulum is a cyclical motion. If you graph it, you're going up, you're going forward, you're going backward, you're going left, you're going right. We call it cyclical because that is the same motion that going around the same circle makes. Those things blew my goddamn mind when I was a teenager and in my twenties. It's like, ‘Oh, all math is fake then, because these are clearly, this is somewhat linear and this is, maybe the pendulum is swinging in an arc, but it's certainly not a whole circle. All of this is fake.’ I got over that. I did get my physics degree, but…you guys can't see the faces I'm making!
David Dylan Thomas
I'm going to describe them. There's an incredulousness, there's a frustration, there's a humor. I'll just draw word pictures for the rest of the podcast.
Torrey Podmajersky
I’m not used to talking without face-seeing! I think that the pandemic has really spoiled me for that.
David Dylan Thomas
We can get into that later too; I have a whole thing on that!
Torrey Podmajersky
But that cyclical-ness if you think of the circle or the pendulum as precessing, a circle can be spiral in another dimension. A pendulum may not just swing back and forth but might go a little bit east and west as it precesses through a different set of arcs. So, you have to think about it.
David Dylan Thomas
Is that the word for that? When something is moving in one direction, but also another direction?
Torrey Podmajersky
Well yeah, somebody leave a comment in someplace that comments can be left about how I'm wrong about precession. But movement is happening and movement's happening in multiple dimensions.
So, here’s the thing. Progress might be slow, and it might not be where we want it, might not be the obvious thing that is really pissing me off right now. Like, ‘Here I am talking to the same fucking people about the same fucking thing that I always talk about. Are you kidding me?’ But it's the nudges, sure, I'm not making progress, I'm not making headway straight ahead because nobody is open to that argument. They don't know, maybe they've already got callouses against it? Maybe they’ve already got armor built up? But can I get in that side door? Can I precess in a different direction, or can I spiral slowly?
David Dylan Thomas
Right.
Torrey Podmajersky
Is there a less obvious direction that I can strategically move toward?
David Dylan Thomas
Well, the whole cyclical thing, because the other thing I start to think of when we were talking about that spiral motion, I think about the motion of the actual universe. I used to think it's like, okay, so we've got the earth, it's rotating on its axis, right? And it's rotating on its axis, and then it's also itself moving in a circle around the sun. Then I learned, oh yeah, the whole solar system also moves – very, very fast. So, you're getting this sort of corkscrew motion and then the thing it’s in is all motion.
Torrey Podmajersky and, and we,
This is why I can get lost walking down the Seattle city streets that I've known for 20 years! I'm pretty sure that that's why.
David Dylan Thomas
Well, that and the fact that it's like, oh, you're in a grid system except wait out, here's this random diagonal street that's super important out of nowhere that screws up your Google map and makes you think you're there when you're not. That's a whole other topic!
Torrey Podmajersky
It is!
David Dylan Thomas
We layer even that purely cyclical motion of going around the sun once a year.
Torrey Podmajersky
Purely elliptical.
David Dylan Thomas
Elliptical, yeah, thank you! Told you she's a physicist. But that motion we ascribe meaning and the meaning is where the progress come from because like, ‘Oh, that time around the sun, that was 2020. Oh, this next time around the sun? That's 2021. That's a totally different time around the sun. What are you crazy? How can you compare the two? They're not the same thing.’ I think that actually is where it gets interesting. I think we as human beings ascribe meaning to things, and that meaning is where we get, ‘It’s progress. It's not progress. It's this, it's not that.’
Torrey Podmajersky
Okay, so Plato's Cave. Are you familiar?
David Dylan Thomas
For the readers or users or just for me having morphed it in my head over time. Let's do this.
Torrey Podmajersky
Okay. So, reality is happening in this sort of outside the cave. What we can perceive of reality is within the cave, the shadows that it forms blocking us from the light.
David Dylan Thomas
So, you've got a bunch of people sitting in the cave, looking at shadows. And the source of the shadows is activity that's happening outside the cave, that's the actual reality.
Torrey Podmajersky
I mean, I guess it's actually the light on the wall is the reality. I mean it's a long metaphor. It's beautifully illustrated in some books. It's that all we ever get is a partial glimpse and a not true glimpse.
David Dylan Thomas
A partial, very, very skewed glimpse.
Torrey Podmajersky
A very, very distorted glimpse of what's actually happening. So then, my mother – we've been calling her the wet blanket for years, very lovingly – and she's really good at it, and extremely competent engineer and thinker. She says, ‘Ah, do you really want to make big change?’ And she is my biggest supporter for making big change. She says, ‘You really just want to make a nudge because you don't have enough information to make a big change. Make a nudge, wait’ – I am bad at weight. ‘Make a nudge. Wait, then think about your next nudge. Think about whether that next nudge is needed.’
David Dylan Thomas
That’s a tough one.
Torrey Podmajersky
It’s so tough especially when you're like, I have been in this nudging business for so long now and is it even going in the right direction? Am I on the circle or am I paying attention to the spiral that is slower?
David Dylan Thomas
There's a lot there too. There’s a little bit of how do you know It's a nudge? Something I struggle with is understanding – there’s a line in this amazing movie called ‘RRR’, are you familiar with this?
Torrey Podmajersky
I have not watched it yet. I have had it recommended to me.
David Dylan Thomas
If you can see it in a theater with people, that's even better. But it’s kind of this amazing thing. But there's this one moment where you have a character who's in prison and he's being tortured and when they come to find him, they expect him to be all starved and beaten. When they actually come to his cell, he's working out, just getting buff. They're like, ‘What are you doing? We're going to kill you tomorrow. What are you doing?’ And he is like, ‘I have every reason to work towards my goal and I have no reason to expect the outcome.’ And it's like, wow!
Part of that is this sort of stoic whatever, but part of it is also chaos. We don't know, we can't know, the impact our actions have. We can have probabilities, certainly, and we can have intention, but we will never truly know. If that is the case, we might as well do the right thing. We might as well be kind. That to quote another great movie from this here, ‘Everything Everywhere, All at Once.’ Have you seen this?
Torrey Podmajersky
I have not seen it, but that is the top of my list.
David Dylan Thomas
It is so good. And there's a moment where a character says, ‘In this world that's full of uncertainty’, I'm going to paraphrase, this world that has all this uncertainty and we have absolutely no idea what's going on, why not be kind? What else do you have to go on? But, that kindness, we do not know the outcome. It could go nowhere. It could affect someone, keep someone from committing suicide that we will never meet.
Torrey Podmajersky
I was just stopped before this interview, before this podcast, we were in a talk then we all got released for snacks for a break, and somebody came right up to me and said, ‘Hi, you don't remember me, but I was part of the group at the place that hosted your book launch event, and you had the big sheet cake with the book cover on it. I got your book, and now I am a content designer where I wasn't before and now,I'm working at this other company doing this thing. And you changed my life.’
I mean, I could not have predicted that. How kind was this person to just come up and say that too? And the reason that the event was in their space is because they have this like, oh, can we throw a party? That company is Blink UX. Go throw some business to Blink UX, folks, they're great people and they love throwing a party. Another guy in the community had said, ‘Hey, you spoke at my meetup group for newbie UXers. I want to throw your book party. Can I throw a book launch party for you?’ He went out and arranged this with Blink. So, it was a chain of kindness that just made this person's whole career change.
We don't know the nudges we're making, at all.
David Dylan Thomas
Yes. That's the thing, we may think we're doing a nudge, but we're actually doing a big change and they may think we're doing a big change, but we're actually doing a nudge. I think there’s only so much you can do. There's only so much you can be aware of to do. So, again, what you do have control, to some extent, because even there we don't have quite as much control as we think we think we do, is the intent. I intend for this to be a big change and I'm going to take this accountability over it. I intend for this to be a nudge, so I'm going to take this accountability for it.
There's this limited scope, we have every right to take the action. We have zero right to expect the outcome.
Torrey Podmajersky
Right, and we still have to be accountable for the effect.
David Dylan Thomas
Yes, exactly right. I can't expect that this might have been harmful, but if I found that it has been okay, I gotta do something.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah. You gotta take responsibility for it. Oh man, things are hard.
David Dylan Thomas
So, I'm going to go back to the existential dread piece of it though.
Torrey Podmajersky
That's not something you hear often, ‘Let's go back to existential dread!’
David Dylan Thomas
Let me circle back to that existential dread. Let's put a pin in that existential dread. So, there's a few thoughts. When I ask myself, why is that conversation happening again and again and again? So, the conversation, I was talking to someone last night about how, if you look at the. of James Baldwin, if you look at the work of Angela Davis and the time in which they're writing and you lift that language and say, ‘Oh, that was written yesterday.’ It's plausible. If you look at the 10 points the Black Panthers were asking for.
Torrey Podmajersky
Bell Hooks or Octavia Butler…
David Dylan Thomas
Just lift it to now, and it's like, oh, they probably wrote that yesterday. It's totally plausible and it's like, talk about having the same conversation over and over. How about having the same murder over and over. Or the elephant in the room, Hey, bet you thought that Roe v Wade conversation was over? It's not.
So, when I think about that, I find myself. wanting to go back and look at, okay, well when have there actually been? Is it all really cyclical or when have there been these huge pivots? And are those repeated conversations part of the recipe? There was a black preacher talking about this. Do you need the Dread Scott decision to happen in order to get to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing? Do you need all these Supreme Court decisions supporting slavery to get to a point where this happens? Which is not to say that's the only path or even the ideal path, but it's more to say that nothing is wasted. Is that possible as well?
Torrey Podmajersky
I think that cuts both ways.
David Dylan Thomas
Sure.
Torrey Podmajersky
Do you need a Barack Obama to get a Donald Trump?
David Dylan Thomas
Oh yeah, that’s a really good question!
Torrey Podmajersky
I should not have said that while you were drinking. I'm sorry that was impolite!
David Dylan Thomas
Oh, we are yet to have a spit-take on this show, but we’re working towards it. That’s actually a really good question as when I think about what precipitated Trump, it’s the Southern Strategy.
You can all Google the Southern strategy, but basically Republicans figured out a good racist way to get more votes in the sixties. That to me is the moment, but I think there are accelerators. I think yes, Obama and as much the 2008 financial crisis. That is how you get Trump, when you get Trump. I think you were going to get Trump eventually, but the reason you get him, when you get him, I think is those two things.
Torrey Podmajersky
I remember on Inauguration Day, first Inauguration Day for Barack Obama. Watching that and thinking, good God, don't shoot him.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh, totally. Totally!
Torrey Podmajersky
At the same time, thinking this is one end of this pendulum swing right now. We're about to pivot and I am not going to like the other end of that swing. I didn't share that broadly then, because it was a moment to celebrate and take stop and all of that. But the shadows were coming. And the shadows were consolidating.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh yeah, but they’ve been consolidating since the eighties.
Torrey Podmajersky
I mean, yeah, this is true. This has been coming for a while. So that existential dread with it all building over time and what are these mountains we are – actually not even mountains, what are the piles of history that are still relevant, that are relevant like they are yesterday and how do we use that as practice instead of burden?
David Dylan Thomas
Yes. I mean, I think, there's a great conversation to be had here about practice because I love to tell the story of Stacey Abrams taking on the tea party. She tells a story about how she had to convince the tea party to vote against this legislation that was going to be bad for the environment. The way she puts it, she didn't go and try to convince them that climate change was real, that'd be a waste of time. She tried to convince them that property taxes were real. Because she knows for the tea party, taxes are the thing that keeps them up at night. So, she says, ‘Hey, if this legislation goes through, the erosion of the soil bed is going to ruin the property value here. You should vote against this legislation.’ And they did.
Torrey Podmajersky
She worked on the precession instead of the pendulum.
David Dylan Thomas
Yes, that’s a great way to put it. To me, when I compare that to having the same conversation over and over again, she could have gone in there – she knew that if she had gone in there and talked about climate change that would be the same conversation over and over again. She learned from the previous conversation, ‘Okay, that won't work. What will?’ I think one of the questions we have to ask ourselves, and this is not to say, well, you should have tried harder or tried different conversation. But it is to say, when you think of it in terms of practice, is there a methodology that says, okay, if you find yourself having the same conversation, look closely to see are those conversations any different? What are you learning from that process? Is there anything you learn from that process that can inform the next conversation?
I mean, really, we're just talking about a less douchey version of Lean Startup methodology, but yes, can you build, measure, learn around some of these same conversations we keep happening?
Torrey Podmajersky
Absolutely. People ask me how did you get started writing the book? How did you get started speaking about these things? How did you move your career forward into doing more strategic work work or write even more strings, you can only write so many good strings a day, frankly.
David Dylan Thomas
Can we back up for a second and I can get real with you here? I'm sitting here at a UX writing conference and I don't know what a string is?
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh, I'm sorry and thank you for saying that because we do this all the time. A string is the super nerdy early programming word for a set of characters, usually enclosed in quotation marks. So that's how it's coded as a character string.
David Dylan Thomas
Okay. And what does that character string do?
Torrey Podmajersky
That character string then is usually displayed to a user. So it is text.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh, okay.
Torrey Podmajersky
It is text on a screen eventually.
David Dylan Thomas
Okay. But the string is the super fancy way of talking about it?
Torrey Podmajersky
They're all strings. Yeah.
David Dylan Thomas
Got it.
Torrey Podmajersky
And by super fancy it's the way that you can unambiguously say, this is text that is unlikely to be paragraphs and paragraphs that go in a book or on a website as an article or in all of these other ways. This is stuff I intend to go into code as part of the software. Does that make sense?
David Dylan Thomas
A little more? If I'm looking at a website, what would be an example of something I would see that, ‘Oh, that? That's a string text.’
Torrey Podmajersky
Text on a button.
David Dylan Thomas
On a button, you say? The name of the conference right now is called Button. Got it – string, button, perfect!
Torrey Podmajersky
Okay, now what was I talking about?
David Dylan Thomas
I don't know! Existential dread, having conversations over and over again. How did you get where you are? How did you write your book?
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh, how did I write my book? How did I get to Carnegie Hall? I have not played Carnegie Hall. I don't intend to. I don't see that happening.
David Dylan Thomas
Is Carnegie Hall still there?
Torrey Podmajersky
Shut your mouth!
David Dylan Thomas
I don't know!
Torrey Podmajersky
This is not even a question you ask, and you do not spring that on a person!
David Dylan Thomas
I'm so sorry.
Torrey Podmajersky
Carnegie Hall is just fine.
David Dylan Thomas
Okay, good. No, I'm glad – a lot of things are having problems right now. I just want to make sure.
Torrey Podmajersky
I actually don't know, but it's sort of one of those fundamental things like, does Rockefeller…what about the Rockettes?!
David Dylan Thomas
I keep derailing you, so anyway…
Torrey Podmajersky
So how do you know about what is the function of the cyclical nature of these things? What is the function of Groundhog Day? What is the function of doing that? And it is goddamn practice.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh, that's interesting.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah. So, I had a lot of conversations; I wrote a lot of strings. I wrote a lot of text for screens, I did a lot of design work, but until I was the first and only content person in a 300 person organization and needed to be telling them, be the only one telling them, here's what I do and why I do it and how I you should work with me, and all of these things. I was super awkward at it, I had a theoretical working knowledge of things, but I'd always had other people backing me up before already having the right information to some extent, but I needed to formulate that. I needed to practice it and then I started teaching about it.
So, teaching the fundamental skills of, How do I think about this user journey? How do I think about the conversation within that user journey? How do I teach that and then get better and better at talking about it? I then went to conferences and did some speaking, and I was bad at that. I got better at it. Turns out practice kind of works. I started writing about it and then editing.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, yeah, it is.
Torrey Podmajersky
I had that same conversation for not quite 10 years and that's how I was able to convince my publisher that, yes, this is a reasonable book. I would not have been able to convince them to publish the book if there hadn't already also been a market that was demonstrable. I'm not saying that I had like, ‘Hey, everybody should know about this and I'm going to totally sell you on why with no evidence from anywhere else,’ that would not have worked. But because they could see other evidence, that became possible.
So, it wasn't just my work on the pendulum, it was other people also working on the pendulum, I think I'm stretching the pendulum now.
David Dylan Thomas
Title of the next book – ‘Stretching the Pendulum!’
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh my goodness! But it was because of that practice and the bodies of work. We are better at talking about civil equity on many axes because we have the work of James Baldwin to pull from, because we have all of this work lying around.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. It's interesting. First, let's establish what is your book? Because I don't think we ever did that. So let's do that.
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh, I'm sorry. The book is ‘Strategic Writing for UX’, published by O'Reilly in 2019…I'm making a face.
David Dylan Thomas
The past four years are the same year. So, it doesn't really matter.
Torrey Podmajersky
It's no longer March, 2020 as we are recording.
David Dylan Thomas
Because these things take so long, because I post them all at once when all the podcasts have been recorded, I always feel like I should say, ‘Hey, we are recording this on October 7th, 8th, 9th…?
Torrey Podmajersky
11th.
David Dylan Thomas
11th – close! 2022, who knows what the world will be like and what's going on and if anything we say, if there even will be pendulums anymore, when this actually gets posted in, I don't know, December, who knows.
Another piece of that though, I think we should talk about is this idea that, because again, going back to the Groundhog Day movie and you talk about the purpose. In the movie the untold purpose of him going through this day over and over again is basically to make him a better person and to unlock the achievement of getting to the next day. He has to basically just work on himself, which actually is super rare in movies where you have a movie, especially romantic comedy, where it's about the dude working on himself.
Torrey Podmajersky
I mean I can’t think of any others.
David Dylan Thomas
In movies how many movies do you think of where you actually have a main male character who works on themselves?
Torrey Podmajersky
I mean, that is the plot for many romcoms for the woman.
David Dylan Thomas
Exactly. In the romcom.
Torrey Podmajersky
She also needs to take off the glasses.
David Dylan Thomas
Clearly. Whenever I see that in movie, it's always used to piss me off. Going back to fricking ‘Can't Buy Me Love.’ You take off the glasses and I’m like, they can't see now. They're not hipsters, they don't have lens-less glasses. They can't see now!
Torrey Podmajersky
Yes. But now that I've derailed you, yeah, there we go.
David Dylan Thomas
Exactly. I wonder when we talk about having the same conversation over and over again in some cases is it because we're actually having this the wrong conversation? Because we haven't gotten to the real conversation.
So I have a similar thing. A lot of us here at this conference and at content strategy in general, we have this story of self-validation where we have to go into a company and prove our worth, blah, blah, blah, blah. I literally had a company where my actual job was to build a content strategy practice. You make these arguments, but I think what I find is depending on the environment, you'll reach a point where you realize, oh, capitalism, that's why you keep doing that thing. If I want to change this, I actually have to talk you out of capitalism, not out of this, this or this, or this practical concern or caring about the user. The reason we keep having this conversation over and over again is because the next conversation that we should be having is too awkward.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yes. We could apply this to race relations. We could apply it to wealth inequality. We could apply it to healthcare in the United States. We could apply that to a lot of things.
David Dylan Thomas
I mean, to get real about it for a second, King was ready to have the inequality conversation beyond the race conversation and that's when he died. Just saying. That's when he was murdered.
Torrey Podmajersky
No, there's no just saying about it. This is an important part of our history. When people reach for power that other people are interested in defending, that gets ugly fast. And so pointlessly, so pointlessly, it comes from this fear mentality. I think that that's part of what the dread part of existential dread comes from is what is the meaning here and what is the purpose? Apparently for some people – it's taken me decades to figure this out, some people believe and feel and know that their purpose is to hold and control power in some way – authority or status or something. It is intangible and we can't convince them that it's not true because for them it is true. I don't know how to deal with that.
I can point to places of status and stature and power in my own life. I can also point to where it makes me uncomfortable and where it makes me very comfortable and I would be very uncomfortable if it were to go away and I would defend against it going away. So that’s the place where I can be like, how do I empathize with people who find this is central to their being?
How do we address people's fears when they believe that they need to maintain status as a singular entity? Things that threatened that status, threatened their existence. Holy crap, my existence is really only threatened by being separated from community and purpose. I think we talked about earlier, the grand purpose of humanity is to move forward as this in integrated wave. I have no interest in being like, no no no, I am this molecule. I am attached to these other molecules. I'm a very important molecule. I am a super important molecule in my molecule.
David Dylan Thomas
What about the molecule? They think they're the wave.
Torrey Podmajersky
And they're not the wave. They can't be the wave. That is not how any of this works.
David Dylan Thomas
And if they’re not the wave, their existence and their identity is threatened.
Torrey Podmajersky
Those poor people!
David Dylan Thomas
There's an old experiment where if you hook someone up to an fMRI and you can kind of see what's happening in their brain and you threaten or talk shit about their favorite political candidate, the part of their brain that lights up isn't some weird abstract political part. It's their identity part. If you have someone who loves Trump and you attack Trump, you attack them, their body will react as if you just pulled a knife on them. That's the level of defense that's happening.
I just read a book called ‘How to Stop Fascism’, and one of the things the author does is to define fascism as the fear of freedom triggered by witnessing freedom.
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh no. Wait. Slow down and say that again. Holy shit!
David Dylan Thomas
We'll dig again. Holy shit. Fascism is the fear of freedom triggered by witnessing freedom.
Torrey Podmajersky
That is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. I see a marriage equality law that now gay people can get married, and my response is fear. It is disgust. I think about, was there a time when that wasn't true? Can we go back to that time? Because another characteristic of fascism is usually, let's go back to this earlier time – when I say earlier, I mean Middle Ages, no joke.
Torrey Podmajersky
European Middle Ages.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. There was Nazi propaganda that was literally the phrase was, ‘We will make it like the French Revolution never happened.’ They wanted to go back to a time with less freedom, because freedom is the enemy. What we are very uncomfortable with, especially in this nation, is the idea that there are people who do not want to be free.
Torrey Podmajersky
There are people who want the security of authority. Somebody having authority over them, them having a predictable amount of authority.
David Dylan Thomas
Knowing their place and knowing everyone else's place.
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh, and not having those people get uppity?
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, and when I said I want to give that person a second, I say it's too late, what I'm being a little facetious about is this idea of that shit starts in childhood. This is someone who's probably grown up in an authoritarian household, and that alone is not enough to determine your future. Very few things alone are enough to determine your future, but one of the possible reactions to that is acclimation. I understand now.
Torrey Podmajersky
It is the safest place.
David Dylan Thomas
I know how to live in an environment where my actions are controlled. I do not know how to live in an environment where my actions and others' actions are not controlled. That can actually become scary.
Torrey Podmajersky
This makes psychological sense to me and I can feel internally this unwillingness, this resistance to acknowledging it as a human reality. I would even say most people are walking around the US on somewhere of the spectrum of preferring authoritarianism to preferring freedom. I have that resistance even though I'm also recognizing we have various species of that. We have the people who say they love freedom. I'm thinking of specific people who are like, ‘I'm libertarian. I believe in freedom’, and they believe in general and the people I know have very limited ideas of what that means for them, and it requires a position of power that they know their place within and that they have more money, more resources, usually more firearms than the people around them. So that in the inevitable doom that is coming, they will be fine and, ‘fuck all y’all.’
I have exactly the opposite. I'm like, no, the right thing to do after doom comes, which around here is more likely to be an earthquake or a volcano or a tsunami than civil war or nuclear war, all of which have been threatened in the past year.
David Dylan Thomas
Still on the table – let’s be clear!
Torrey Podmajersky
All of these are still on the table.
David Dylan Thomas
The night is young!
Torrey Podmajersky
And for all of those, I am absolutely convinced that my best thing to do is to make sure I'm okay, make sure my family's okay. Are we breathing? Can we move? What can we salvage and what can we share? Are my neighbors okay? That is the only successful path forward throughout mammalian history. Way beyond humans here. We have to find out, are we all okay and let's take what we can and survive. And not steal from each other. Take what we can. Let's take and share from our own stores.
So, this knowing one's place and staying within this rigid order is contra-survival.
David Dylan Thomas
Well, in certain contexts, because there are certain contexts where it actually makes sense. So I'll give you an example. One of the things I've been learning about is alternative methods of governance. We have this myth, I'm reading this book now called ‘The Dawn of Everything’ that takes on the myth that there was once a time when human beings were much more equanimous and had more equality. But now, recently, we've had this world that's full of inequality. There's some Garden of Eden time before this where we were all kind of hunter gatherers and what the book is saying, well, if you actually look at historical record, we were all over the place. You had people who had slaves. You had people who lived right next door who thought slaves were terrible, thought it were a terrible idea and reported it. I'm talking about indigenous people here. Right here, where we are in the region of California, what would become California had tribes that were like, yeah, fuck slavery.
Torrey Podmajersky
Not that we're in California right now.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh, oh, sorry. Seattle, west coast. So actually, where we are is where the slave owners were. You had a tribe that was like, yay, slavery, but even deeper than that, there were tribes that in lean time, so during the winter, they would be very authoritarian. It was like, ‘You do this. You do that. Obey these orders or we're going to starve. Go, go, go, go, go.’ Then during more plentiful times when you didn't have to go far to find food, it was like, ‘Okay, everybody do what they want.’
They would flip back and forth between these two extremes of authoritarianism and completely do what the hell you want, every single year. At no point was it like, ‘No, we have to stay authoritarian forever.’ But contextually they were like, ‘This is our best chance of survival is everyone do what I say. Okay, now our best chance of survival is everybody do what the fuck you want.’
Torrey Podmajersky
Okay, so this is not so far from…like I have an example from my own family. As a child, big formal Christmas. Big formal Christmas, everybody getting the whole family together. My mother's whole side of the family, everybody together, there is an order of operations in that kitchen. You do not mess with that. You are not at liberty to change the recipe; you are not to touch that roast. Charlotte wants to make the praline pumpkin pie? Charlotte can make the praline pumpkin pie because she proved her worth making in a test a month earlier, right?
There is a method, there is a hierarchy. There is a method if you're there in the summer, if the family's getting together, then it’s like, ‘Oh, there are potato chips. Everybody run for the potato chips!’ The kitchen has different rules at different times of day and at different events. That's not the same as lean times and hard times.
David Dylan Thomas
Well, yeah but the point is its different contexts. This is not to say the only way to survive when times of need is to go to authoritarianism again, but authoritarianism makes more sense. It’s a survival strategy then.
Torrey Podmajersky
It’s also part of the contract. We know that I am not messing with the roast because not only do I not want the responsibility, somebody else does want that responsibility.
David Dylan Thomas,
Yes! Right.
Torrey Podmajersky
So, this is part of the contract in the family that we can get bent out of shape about, but it's like, don't you want the roast to be good? You're not in charge.
David Dylan Thomas
And just to do a thought experiment here. If everyone is happy, everyone in their station likes their station, but it is still technically authoritarian because you were not allowed to leave your station, is it bad? Down with authoritarianism but basically what I'm saying is you have to get to the why.
Why do I like authoritarianism? The reason I don't like authoritarianism usually is because people probably don't want to be doing what they're doing. There's probably some group of people – just historically how it tends to pan out – there's some group of people, probably lots of people who are being made to do things that are not human, that are being made to feel like they're not human, that are being exploited.
Same thing with capitalism. If capitalism were defined by, ‘Oh yeah, everyone's getting fair value for their work and everybody pretty much can do whatever the hell they want and actually gets fed and blah, blah, blah. If they want to make it really rich, they have to work a little harder. No one's starving here. No one's being exploited.’
I’m like, well, that actually sounds pretty good. Capitalism in practice is sort of like, ‘Ooh, that sounds fucked up.’
Torrey Podmajersky
Right, it is a model of exploitation, that's how it's set up. If, we could go towards only fair value capitalism I don't know how that would be determined.
David Dylan Thomas
You’d have to get her private equity, just saying,
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh man, you sure would!
David Dylan Thomas
That alone I think would take you halfway there.
Torrey Podmajersky
Hmm…I don't remember where I was going because I'm so mad about private equity now. I'm sorry!
David Dylan Thomas
Well, no, so we were basically saying like fair capitalism.
Torrey Podmajersky
It reminds me of what are the things people need in their jobs? They need autonomy, they need purpose, they need something else. What is it?
David Dylan Thomas
Feeling like they’re getting better at something? I’m thinking of happiness but I’m sure they’re related.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah, it's mastery.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. That's what I mean, getting better at something.
Torrey Podmajersky
They need to be able to improve. If you have everybody knowing their role and they have autonomy in their role, they have purpose in their role, their role matters and they're able to get better at it – yes. Hey, it doesn't matter if that's a rigid hierarchy if everybody is happy there. I got to have breakfast with the AV team that is running this amazing show.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh really? Oh, cool!
Torrey Podmajersky
Well, not all of them, but yeah. We were just having breakfast and some of them are employees of the company. Some of them are contractors, some of them are freelance and work for several different companies and they run into each other. This set of people that run so smoothly together, some of them have never worked together before, some of them see each other a few times a year, and all of them have their roles that they do that they are expert in that they are in charge of. They're all going to different cities after this wraps. There is a hierarchy. People are the show caller, people are the stage manager people are these things. People are lights or camera, operator or whatever. They have control where they are and somebody else is in charge of some calls that they need to respond to.
What a highly functional system. Some of them probably don't like each other. But they're not going to let that get in the way of what they're doing. and they're not undermining each other because they all need to be successful. So that's the other part, we need positive interdependence.
David Dylan Thomas
So, think that's the word. I keep trying to come up with a word for like nice capitalism or whatever, and rather than an ism, what I really find myself when I'm realizing what I really want is interdependence. That's the thing that makes sense to me.
Torrey Podmajersky
Not co-dependence.
David Dylan Thomas
Not independence, not dependence, not co-dependence. Interdependence. I think about the human body. This is literally a line from the Bible, the eye doesn't say to the hands, ‘I have no use for you.’ The hand doesn’t say to the lungs, ‘I have no use for you.’ This all works together. The heart knows what it’s got to do, the brain knows what it’s got to do. The spleen knows what it’s got to do.
Torrey Podmajersky
I mean, I can still trip on a flat floor, but yes.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. I'm not saying they always do it well! But our bodies don't fight themselves. And when they do, we call it an autoimmune disorder and it is a very, very serious condition. I feel like America has, the world, really, has an autoimmune disorder. It's sort of like we could work in an interdependent manner. It’s sort of like if the spleen had free will.
Torrey Podmajersky
No, we call that cancer.
David Dylan Thomas
Exactly. Well, okay, let's take that metaphor.
Torrey Podmajersky
Okay, to any listeners here, we've started with existential judge, you knew we were going to cancer. I apologize.
David Dylan Thomas
We really knew we were going is capitalism.
Torrey Podmajersky
Capitalism, have a snack, maybe a nice cup of tea.
David Dylan Thomas
When I think about what a corporation is or what a model of growth is, if you're talking about a public corporation, talking about something that has a financial fiduciary commitment to stakeholders, which is a fancy way of saying always make us money all the time.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yes. The corporation has promised to be a cancer.
David Dylan Thomas
Yes, because basically, uncontrolled growth or fast, unfettered growth is literally the definition of cancer. Cancer is basically a cell that just keeps dividing and dividing and dividing and dividing. And once it divides enough, it kills you. My wife is in the medical industry, and she taught me this term, angiogenesis. Have you heard of this?
Torrey Podmajersky
No. It sounds like it’s not going to be good.
David Dylan Thomas
It's not, but it's exactly what corporations do. Angiogenesis is when a cancer gets to a point where it starts sending out instructions to the body to redirect blood vessels so that it gets more blood.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah, angio is the heart.
David Dylan Thomas
So, if you think about a large corporation going to Congress and lobbying for tax policies that are beneficial to itself, it is literally redirecting the flow of money for the country to itself. That is angiogenesis. When we're talking about these conversations we keep having over and over again because we don't want to have the next conversation, the next conversation we don't want to have is, Hey, this thing we keep propping up is killing us. That is a hard Monday morning conversation.
Torrey Podmajersky
This thing we keep propping up is killing us is the conversation that needs to be happening in every family. Yeah, your face just said it.
David Dylan Thomas
I've got this preach sister face on my face right now. Oh my God.
Torrey Podmajersky
It needs to happen in the workplace. That sacred cow, thank it for its service and bid it farewell.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh, you’ve got to Marie Kondo that shit!
We’re going to wrap up now, I like to keep these to about an hour and that’s happening, but what’s also happening is my good friend Larry Swanson that has his own podcast that I’ll put in the show notes, I had to borrow his mic cord because mine burst. I also have to get it back to him so he can record a podcast. So there's several reasons we're going to wrap up now…thank you Larry!
I want us to write a book called ‘This Thing We're Propping Up is Killing Us. You may have actually found the title for my next talk because I've been struggling with the title for next talk, which is going to be super anti-capitalist. I don't even know what's going to happen with it. I think that kind of hits at the urgency and the irony of it because we're used to thinking of the enemy as something that we all rally around to fight. Its villainy is clear.
When I was in Berlin, I saw they keep a lot of their history in general on display, which I think is a great practice and keeps them conscious, but a lot of the wall is still there. I had this thought of like, I wish we had a wall. If you were living in Berlin at the time, no one could say there wasn't a divide between the east and west. No one could say there wasn't a wall. You could disagree about why it's there or what to do it to bring it down, or if it should come down, you could do that. But no one could say that there wasn’t a problem, there wasn’t a thing.
In America when it comes race or when it comes to gender there’s this gas lighting element where it’s like, I first had to convince you that there was even a problem with race. That there’s even a problem with capitalism.
Torrey Podmajersky
And here we are at the existential part.
David Dylan Thomas
Right, and before I can even have the discussion of what do we do about it, so in a weird way I wish there was a race wall, a capitalism wall, a physical thing to point to and say, just look at that.
Torrey Podmajersky
I think this is why race is actually a little easier in the deep south where I came from because there are plantations. We can't say that didn't happen. That's how those old buildings got built.
David Dylan Thomas
You all try but…it isn’t for a lack of trying, but you’re right.
Torrey Podmajersky
It’s right there. How are you going to say that didn’t happen? You’re selling the relics.
David Dylan Thomas
I wish we could keep talking about this all day. We’ll do another one later.
Torrey, thank you so much. Is there anything you want to promote? You should talk about your book and how to get it and how to follow you and whatnot. I'm going to give you that chance.
Torrey Podmajersky
I am @Torreybird on most of the social media. If you are a content and UX and business nerd, sure, buy my book, talk to me about it on the social media stuff. Promote the things, go to conferences, talk to people.
David Dylan Thomas
Yes, talk to people.
Torrey Podmajersky
Don't fight with people. You're not fighting for your next job in this. You're sharing and building an industry
with these people. Share the feast.
David Dylan Thomas
Awesome. Thank you, Torrey. Thank you, listeners, and for ‘Lately, I've been thinking about…’, I'm David Dylan Thomas, and we will see you next time.