Labor, Shadow Unions & Weaponizing AI for Good

Crystal riffs with dear friend Monera about shadow unions, whisper networks, and what actually happens when brand values collide with frontline reality inside a metrics-obsessed workplace. Together they map practical ways to protect your nervous system, document toxic leadership, and use AI to push back — without becoming the next target.

• Choosing the "worst job ever" as a deliberate leadership lab
• Command-and-control restaurant managers colliding with algorithmic metrics they don't understand
• Why untrained leaders transfer emotional labor downward — and how supremacy culture makes accountability feel like identity death
• Somatic leadership at the frontline: praising bathroom breaks, liberating the body, and watching productivity rise
• Flipping the script on documentation — tracking system failures instead of blaming workers
• Weaponizing AI for pattern recognition, HR responses, and law-aware language that speaks power's own dialect
• Retaliation for questioning a 10-degree food safety change and other "don't ask" moments
• Accommodations, dress codes, and Christian deism as low-key sovereignty hacks
• The plantation-to-spreadsheet pipeline: how modern metrics thinking echoes older systems of control
• The two pipelines — private school autonomy vs. public school body-policing — and how they reproduce leadership and labor
• Gen Z, the IEP generation, and mothers with unlimited energy to challenge toxic leaders
• Rebuilding belonging without conditions through co-generational communities and third spaces

Be sure to follow The Human Layer's signals on Substack to stay in the loop! 

Transcript

Cold Open And No Small Talk

SPEAKER_00 0:04

So it's just this little box.

Crystal 0:06

Right?

SPEAKER_00 0:07

That is so like it used to be such a big studio, right? Like I just remember the Howard Stern studio in it. Right? Like Yes. You needed all that equipment to record a conversation like it's a living room.

Crystal 0:21

Basically. I have another kit that's smaller for field work that I use for journalism, and I love that thing. Um but I love the sizes of these. They're so portable.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Okay. And don't yell.

Crystal 0:35

I mean you can yell. I'll just turn you down.

unknown 0:38

Okay.

Crystal 0:40

Okay. Also don't do intros and outros, so we're just gonna roll. Oh, thank God.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

I know, right?

SPEAKER_01 0:46

I hate small talk, so I never know what to say in those.

Crystal 0:51

All right. Thank you for joining us. This is a special edition of the human layer, where we're just gonna riff with a dear, dear friend, Monera. And Monera, do you want to introduce yourself or we just roll?

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Uh no, let's roll. I like the process of just rolling. Awesome.

Crystal 1:09

So let's start with shadow unions and whisper networks. So a little context, um, Monera and I met at Naropa. We worked there together in the marketing department, and we were both students there. And since then, and actually during then, one of the things that we do often is reverse engineer power structures from the patriarchy, all of the things that are manifesting in real time that we're all living through, and we're like, what the fuck just happened? That's the kind of stuff that we like to reverse engineer and find out source or solutions if that's a thing, or just identify it and name it. So, Monero, I'm gonna hand it over to you because you have recently been working at a large corporation that has a very, very, very large footprint on multiple fronts. And I'm gonna let you take it from here and tell us, walk us, give us a little context how we ended up here wanting to record this conversation. And what is Shadow Union?

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Okay, well, so um I decided between my master's degree and my PhD that I wanted to take a frontline job because I'm going to be responsible for a frontline culture in my next founder role. And so I was like, well, I'll learn from this major corporation that is supposedly the best in class in supply chain logistics, and in theory, one of these very neoliberal places to work. And so, but also considered like one of the worst jobs, right? Like e-commerce, shopping, picking that kind of job is not considered, like we've we've seen movies about it at this point. It wasn't Francis McDermott was in a movie about about being kind of a picker, right? Nomad. Nomad, yeah. And so I was like, well, as a personal challenge to myself in this in-between space, I found myself in the work world. Can I make the worst job fun? Can I take all of the juicy, fun facilitator ways that we work with executives at the C-suite and bring that back down to frontline? And will that change the frontline metrics in the way that it changed metrics at that top level, right? So, like that performance management that we delivered at Zappos, I wanted to see if it worked on the frontline of that picking organization. And what I found was there were much more complications, right? Like the sh the hiring process of frontline work, especially in in that grocery industry, is from restaurants. So as much as the brand values and all of those pieces were about like sustainable win-win partnerships and kindness towards employees, you hired like 1990s restaurant managers, and they are command and control leaders.

Crystal 4:37

As a person that spent 20 years in the restaurant industry, I can also confirm that.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Right? And so, and very different from tech leaders, right? Like they're different, you know, so and with no processes of tech, despite it being a giant tech company, right? Like the the normal processes around like escalating bug reports or reporting bugs in the software, none of that actually exists. There's no escalation process if there's something wrong in the system.

Crystal 5:08

Now, for background, this is also a merger of two very distinct businesses that happened a while ago. And it is kind of stunning to me that the supply side did not port over, and the tech side did not port over into the grocery side, but also at the same time, given the history of that, it does kind of make sense too.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Right. And also, I think the the interesting thing about it was there was this deep imposter syndrome from the groceries side because they were acquired by a tech company, that the they didn't really understand the metrics that were going to be imposed upon them because they're restaurant managers, right? Like they're not algorithmic people who understand how tech companies come to these great decisions or or maybe not so great decisions, and so navigating that for them, they didn't know how to do it, right? Like so, and then hold their culture as being valuable against the erosion that was happening, they didn't know how to navigate that either. They didn't know how to defend their culture in a metrics way to Amazon, right? Like that didn't happen. Interesting.

When Values Never Reach The Store

Crystal 6:21

So where what what thread do we want to pick next? Because there there's there's a certain thread with a situation that we can crack into, which I think is fascinating because what you're looking at is co-generational leadership. Yeah. Going through different hierarchical structures, mergers, things didn't port over, there's a legacy in place of culture, and then there's this other entity that's coming that has its own legacy of culture and how it operates. And really now there's this compression happening. Yeah, it's happening system-wide across capitalism. But you can see it very strongly in different microcosms, and I feel like you are in a very fascinating microcosm. So break down what you saw from a co-generate, co-generational and leadership perspective, if if you want.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Yeah, no, so I would I would say like people ask me what my biggest lesson, right, is from this experience, and it's when you do not educate your leaders in a semantically embodied way about your liberal values, it's actually not ever gonna land in the store, right? Like it's and that that's been true of like a lot of brand value conversations, is they're like lovely words that we put up there, kind of like treaties, right? Like, oh, they're awesome, but they don't actually have any action unless you make them have action, right? Because one of the things I think labor never understands is that what a company says in its branding is actually part of the puzzle of its valuation, right? So when you go out into the marketplace and you're saying we're a really great place to work and people are happy, I as a customer assume that if I'm spending money at a high-end grocery store, that those people are well paid, treated nicely, and that's part of the whole sustainability that is being delivered. And so one of the things that labor never knows is that brand valuation piece, right? Like you're not taught how companies are valued at any point in high school, right? So if you're a front-end labor person, you're not gonna know that. And that that brand valuation has teeth. So if you start making the case that when your leadership isn't delivering to you the internal customer, it's brand promise, that that should have consequences, right? So a lot of labor doesn't know that. But um, but if but if you do know that, then you can start holding leaders accountable by documenting moments where they didn't leave up lead up to their brand promises, right? And I always start on a compassionate note, like, hey, we had this moment at work and it didn't feel really nourishing to me. And it didn't feel like we were living up to our brand values, and I give them a chance to kind of course correct. But in toxic leadership, as you know, they don't want to be told that they don't have the positive leadership skills that they think they have because they think that because they have a role title, they have that leadership skill, and that isn't true, right? Like, you you've just done a computer-based training on leadership. Like, what do you really know in that process? Probably nothing, right?

Crystal 9:47

So And you're talking about, for the most part, leaders that are young, so they don't have the embodied experience yet of leadership and of different situations. They are, like you just said, they're they're learning it from a video.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Yeah, they're they're really learning it from a video or whatever the toxic leader. If there's a toxic leader, they're mimicking that behavior. If there's a great leader, they'll probably mimic that behavior too, right? So because there's no leadership somatic practice, there's not a leadership academy, it's not like they go to Esselana Institute and get like a crash course on leadership, like all those things that happen at that executive or vice president level don't happen at frontline leaders. But they're still put in charge of humans, right? So and they don't have, they don't have psychology skills, they don't really have leadership skills, and they almost never have training skills. So now you're trying to get a person who has none of these social emotional skills to deliver against metrics that they feel pressured by but don't understand.

Crystal 10:49

A recipe for disaster, right there.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

Yeah, and and it it is a recipe for disaster, and so what ends up getting replicated is kind of the bad programming they learn from high school. Oh god. Right? And so I think a lot of frontline work maybe feels that way because you are putting on these people who probably went through American in high school, that kind of competitive cutthroat, but also like ambivalent on we inducing, and then they're here in these like leadership piece places, right? So I also think of like the Peter principle, right? Like they often they're young leaders, they follow the rules, they're like super obedient to the system, and then they're put in a position of power, and so they expect that everyone around them is also going to be obedient to the rules, and that because they have a position of power, that is what is supposed to naturally fall in line. And it becomes complicated when you are a person who is empowered just naturally, because you're gonna rub that power structure wrong because you just naturally hold power, and that's what they've desperately wanted and are trying to front, right? So there's this huge imposter syndrome that happens if folks in power meet someone who is naturally powerful.

Crystal 12:15

Oh my god, that's so good. Before we move on from that, because I feel like that we're gonna build on that. I want to return to somatic methodology and leadership because that is not something that gets talked about at all. So, what do you do to break it down like we're five? Like, what do you mean, what would it look like in the situation you're talking about?

SPEAKER_00 12:35

Well, I mean, at the very basic levels, like one of the things that I was so surprised about was I started praising people for drinking water and going to the bathroom for these little acts of self-care. And especially the it's a cross-generational team, so both young Gen Z kids and elder Gen X women were so programmed by school and educational trauma to not pay attention to their somatic needs that praise around paying attention to your somatic needs was a game changer for people, right? Okay, that's wild. Right? I mean, imagine you were a woman from the 80s who now finds herself back in the workplace after being a mom or or being exited from that workplace, and then now you're policed again about whether or not you can go in the bathroom. Like I can't fucking imagine you know, by a 20-year-old.

Crystal 13:45

That's gotta be so hard to go home at the end of the day. I I just wow.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Yeah, and so and then so I was I was modeling that it is actually okay to be joyful at work, it is okay for you to take breaks, and what ended up happening was, which is what happened at Zappos too, when you returned a lot of agency back to your to back to labor so that they're like excited about work, they deliver productivity, right? So the more freedom and kindness you you deliver to labor, the more labor returns to you in productivity. And so, like, I've done that forever because I've also done a lot of volunteer stuff. So I used to run the AmeriCorps portfolio for Nevada, um, the Las Vegas side of it. So I'm aware that volunteers will produce a ton of value if you give them a job that actually honors what their particular zone of genius is. And so by ferreting people's genius out, you can kind of like pull together a productive team without doing a lot of work as a leader, but it requires you to like take a step back from what the metrics are or what the rules are, and actually meet the people and then figure out where they fit in your organization in this like interesting way by by like mixing all these pieces together to get the job done, right? So, like the jobs can still get done, productivity can still happen, but people are happier about it because they like what they're doing, because you've talked to them about who they are as people and put them into positions that really showcase their biggest loves and talents.

Merger Culture Clash And Extraction

Crystal 15:37

So basically the human layer. Yeah. So what's popping into my mind as you're saying this is the situation that you just came out of or coming out of involves a very prominent tech arm run by a very prominent tech billionaire, where empathy is obviously not socially acceptable these days in that world.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

Yeah.

Crystal 16:01

And then you have another entity that was built on the polar opposite.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Yeah.

Crystal 16:06

So you have a massive clash of culture and massive friction happening within. And I mean, the thing, the entity in in question here used to be a client of mine and before the acquisition, and it was just a lovely engagement. I was like, oh, this is a large, large corporation, but they at least seem to have created a culture that also because I worked with you know the marketing department, so it it transferred into the corporate office suite.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Yeah, and I I actually think they eliminated the store-level marketing positions that were that were localized. Because there was a point in which that it's it's kind of crazy to me because there's this a mass amount of consolidation and standardization that's happening, which is actually not what American consumers want on a deep level. There was something fun about going to the regional version of the store and it having a New Orleans flavor or having a Vegas flavor or having and so that is being completely it, they want the same experience across the entire chain. Oh, that's right, and so which which that has consolidated all the power to one distributor, which when that distributor got hacked this summer, that was a huge disaster, and there was nothing on our shelves because we no longer ordered from local suppliers. Just right, so that's wild.

Crystal 17:42

And in fact, one of the things I did was document the local suppliers. I would go visually gather their stories so that when you were in the store, you knew where some of your food came from, and you could create that hyper-local connection.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Yeah, and and customers love that, right? Like because they could see themselves, their own locality in it, and all of that has been kind of crushed so that one can compete directly with Walmart, which is weird because our customer base isn't Walmart, right? Like demographically, not a Walmart customer. Yeah. So here we are, because that's the great idea of the new generation of powerful white men is let's do what we did in the 50s.

Crystal 18:28

And I think this also goes back to we're diving right back into patriarchy, but this is extraction on steroids. And what we're living through now in 2026, Q1, is just an acceleration of extraction because we all know inherently we're at the end of it. You can only extract for so long. Yeah. And so these large companies are now trying to figure out how are we going to continue to extract at the scale of the infrastructure we have already built. And the only way to do that is to try to be like a Walmart, like or try to like anyway, boggles the mind.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Yeah, no, I I I agree. And and also, like, they dropped billions of dollars into it not working, right? Like, stunning. They right, like they ended all of their direct Walmart competition stores this year, right? So the the low-priced ones that are selling Pepsi, right? Like all of those stores just died. This they said they were gonna open a hot uh a hundred more by the end of the year, and they shut the entire program down.

unknown 19:39

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

So they'll invest, they will invest in tech, they'll invest in their own hubris, but they will not invest in labor. They will not invest in in training new leaders, right? They'll all because it's all expendable.

Crystal 19:52

I mean, that's that's system-wide right now. Like labor, and we talked about it a lot this summer too. Like, labor is now I don't I don't even know how to describe it. Like it's where you can see so much of the breakdown at the system level, you can see it on the low on the frontline level. You can see it in labor, the way labor it that is the first impact. I mean, the the employment numbers just came out the other day and they're appalling. Right. And we all know it, but now there's metrics to and we know those numbers aren't accurate anyway, because of where they're coming from, but at the same time, they're still bad enough. And labor is the first one to feel it. And if you look across the board right now, they're the ones absorbing the toxicity in a way that should never that it just shouldn't exist. It should never be in a society that claims to just, I don't know, look out for your neighbor. Like, that's just not a thing.

Documentation As Labor Self-Defense

SPEAKER_00 20:45

Yeah, and the other thing that is true is like that scarcity, those employment numbers, that's what's keeping labor in line, right?

Crystal 20:56

So that is fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

You have to survive this toxic workplace, or your family doesn't get to eat, right? Like, so on some level, I'm aware that I came into this frontline labor position from a position of abundance where I that's not a worry of mine. So because it's not a worry of mine, I'm going to use my power in service of labor, right? So, and teach them by modeling that it is possible for frontline employees in the very I am Spartacus way to actually challenge leadership in ways that don't end up causing labor to face the scarcity of losing a job, right?

Crystal 21:46

That's beautiful. All right, I want to unpack that because we started talking about you know shadow unions, and for a lot of these large entities, any any hint, any whiff of a union brings down the hammer. Yeah. Right on. The frontline labor. So, what is the workaround? You don't have to get specific, but what is a workaround for someone who is listening to this right now and is in a similar situation? And say, what can I do to not unionize? Because you don't want to open that can of worms. Yep. But what can you do to address this toxic leadership in a way that empowers labor and doesn't put them at risk?

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Well, so one of the things to know about capitalistic systems is there is an obsession with documentation. Right? So, and they love written documentation and they will weaponize documentation against labor. But what they will never do is teach labor how to use documentation to stand up for their rights, right? So there's a way in which you can use the system, right? Like HR systems are there, but we don't pen test them. We don't say, okay, well, how far can it protect labor, right? How far does it go? Oftentimes what happens is there's some sort of conflict, and the power structure makes it so uncomfortable for the the team member that they quit, right? And and and take the hit themselves. And there's a huge, and you'll see that in toxic leadership a lot, there's a huge transfer of emotional labor to the lower, what is considered the lower class. Yes. Right? So everything, and and you see it in metrics documentation. We never looked for when a team member was doing good. We only looked at when they were failing. So when you're only looking at when someone's doing a bad job and that's all you're writing down, what are you learning as a leader? You're learning what gets me power is is denigrating other people, right? Like what gets me power is documenting how people are failing the system. Instead of saying the system is failing labor in these ways, right? So, like, for instance, they will mark down, oh, this person was late because and their order was late. They don't mark down that four people called out and there's a snowstorm, and that's the reason the order is late.

Crystal 24:22

So it's only the failure, not not the not what caused something to go wrong.

Funding Tech While Starving Training

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Correct. And when I started documenting system failures, instead of placing that documentation onto labor, oh man, the leadership was like, wait, what are you doing? You know, I would document stuff. You underscheduled us. We are under what Amazon says we need. Those people aren't here. That wasn't even call-outs, right? Like they just literally underscheduled us compared to what Amazon said it was going to need to deliver what it had already sold. Wow. Right? So I would document that stuff, and then they would get leadership would get really, really upset that I said that they were underscheduled. But that was the reality of why things were impacting labor. So that was the so I started documenting positives. I also started documenting like when people did good jobs, and that also freaked out leadership because no one has ever documented, no one's told them that it's okay to document what's positive. And I'm like, well, how do you do a job dialogue? Like you only have the this this track record of everything they did wrong and no track record of anything they did right. What? There's no answer to that either. No, they there was no answer to it. And I was like, so I again started adding it into the metrics. They couldn't ignore the fact that people were really trying. They most people really want to do a good job. I think that that is probably true of Americans in general. We're kind of trained in this like productivity cult that we all exist in. Definitely. Right? So they want to do a good job, they want to follow the rules, but we don't we don't give them the rules and give them enough agency to actually deliver the way that we expect them to. Why do you think that is? Um, because probably because it takes money to train leaders. And they don't want to spend it. They'll spend it on can we have a palm reader, right? Like it's weird that tech is what you'll spend money on, even if the tech is sketchy, like palm readers. No one in the world of natural foods wants to scan their palm. Like, if you know anything about the natural foods demographic, they're kind of black helicopter conspiracy theorists.

Crystal 26:51

They don't want a palms. When I saw the palm reader, I was like, absolutely effing not. Like, I'm just gonna go back to cash.

SPEAKER_00 26:58

Like, no. Right? And so, you know, like they'll there's a willingness to make giant tech mistakes, but not a willingness to make invest in employees so that they have a good work environment.

Crystal 27:12

I feel like we just tapped into we're seeing this in AI right now, the circular economics of tech, and how for a palm reader, that is a piece of tech that probably a friend of a friend built or whatever, part of the network, and it's circular. So the money's going into the hardware, it's coming back, it looks good on metrics, it looks good on hey, we installed X amount of these things right here, and this is gonna increase our productivity by XYZ. It's a metric that can be seen. Whereas what we're talking about and investing in leadership, investing in humans, investing in emotional labor, that does not show up on anything. It only shows up in productivity, but it can also be hidden by leaders that do not want that to exist because it's easier to control people when they don't have sovereignty and autonomy than when they're in fear.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Yeah, no, for sure. And then also, if I educate you on positive leadership skills, then perhaps you won't feel dependent on me for my job.

Crystal 28:19

Yes, right. Yeah, because my leadership skills excel where you are because I am taking a different path.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

Yeah, and so like that scarcity mindset underpins almost all of capitalism. Yes, right?

SPEAKER_03 28:34

The whole thing.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

And it's funny because I believe the capitalist imagination of themselves is that we're like distinguished gentlemen who are really good at doing business, right? Like, there's this whole imagination that we're like meeting all of these needs, and then there's like zero investigation of whether or not that's true for people. So people just adhere to the myth.

Crystal 29:00

And the myth has been passed down by men through patriarchal, hierarchical structures for generations, and now we are all just basically beholden to the last gasp of that type of leadership. And we can see, I see it in the ecosystems that we work in, in Ethereum and all these other impact spaces, where this regenerative approach is starting to emerge in the ashes of collapse.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Right.

Crystal 29:25

And that's going to scale at some point.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

And also what I I mean, I suggested this to my leadership as well. I don't think that leadership is really prepared for what is about to happen with them with labor. Because one of the things that has happened is especially around neurodivergence, ADA issues, an entire generation of children have been on IEPs where an institution, i.e., public school, has bended to meet the needs of students in these IEPs. And those students are now entering the labor market. Oh my god, we haven't even talked about this. That's fascinating. Right? And so those students who have had kind of Gen X or millennial moms who are so sick of being trodden on by systems, right? We've taught our children how to stand up to systems. We've taught our children that they have a right as neurospicy people to an education that honors their humanity. Right? So their tolerance for crappy leaders is not the same tolerance as the 1999 restaurant industry. And they are armed with mothers who have unlimited time and resources to teach their children and defend their children against toxic leaders.

SPEAKER_03 31:04

Oh, that's a good one. Right?

SPEAKER_00 31:07

So Kami Ma has been slowly building, right? Generally, rationally building. Then, like my daughters, my daughter fired a principal because of dress code, right? Like she got a public school principal fired because he tried to impose his Christian ideas into the public science magnet, and she was like, Nope, not gonna do that, and documented her case, presented it to the media, and they removed him from being a principal at the school.

Crystal 31:39

The kids are gonna be okay.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

The kids are gonna be okay.

Crystal 31:42

That's amazing. That is actually one of the things a lot of our events in Ethereum, especially some one of the local ones we just had Eve Boulder a few weeks ago, and it was very much an intentional space, it was co-generational. We made sure it was a hot it was a beautiful hot mess. The mess was contained, the the team did a great job of this event, and it allowed emergence to happen within the mess. And I feel like that is something that Gen Z wants and will force. Right. Because our target for that event was the younger generation, and then watching them, but but it was very co- We had plenty of Gen X in the house, a couple boomers. So there was this balancing act, which was really lovely to see. What I thought was fascinating is listening to the conversations and watching Gen Z and Alpha begin to create their own version of a quote career with agents, with AI agents, and saying, fuck all of this shit that y'all have done.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

Right.

Crystal 32:38

We are not participating. And that to me, and I know it's not at scale yet, but that to me is an indication one that the kids are okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

Yeah.

Crystal 32:46

What you just described, that like a lot of the neurodivergence and a lot of the accommodations that they demand, if they can't find it, they'll just build their own systems. Right. And they know the systems they're in are corrupt and broken and they do not want to participate.

unknown 32:59

Yeah.

Crystal 33:00

And I feel like our job now, across the board and whatever communities you roll in, is to make sure the communities stay co-generational, but that the generations listen to each other and that Gen X, because we have no fucks left to give. Our filters are gone, especially the women of Gen X. We're done, absolutely not, not participating. We're gonna help Gen Z find their path because it needs to be their path, not ours. We just need to keep the path clear so they can build it.

SPEAKER_00 33:26

Right. And also the other thing that leadership is not prepared for is Gen Z, especially Gen Z who has grown up in alternative public schools, but in general, like they've been in flipped classrooms. Right? So they've been in classrooms where teachers have turned over power, so they haven't been in command and control classrooms. Oh, fascinating. Right? They've been in flipped classrooms, and if you look at like private school education, those kids have a lot of autonomy. So if if kids don't need to be policed in for bathrooms and don't need to their bodies don't need to be policed in a private school, then it doesn't need to happen in a public school, and it definitely doesn't need to happen at frontline labor, right? So like if it's good for rich private school kids, that's what labor wants when it's wanting leadership. Like whatever you deploy for rich kids, that's what we all want, right? Like we all want to be treated with respect and dignity, like we're curious beings who are trying to help and co-create the universe together, right? Like, and everyone is capable of that, but when you have leaders who are locked into toxic ideas around supremacy, they're not capable of seeing labor as unique, individual, interesting beings who are capable of delivering productivity to the company in the ways that rich white kids are.

SPEAKER_03 34:54

Damn.

Crystal 34:55

I want to unpack that. I don't know where to start. I think so. One thing that surfaced, and this is not new by any means. I mean, if anybody's read Howard's Inn, you know this. Yep. Um, the robber baron class built the education system, Rockefeller's all that. Yeah. Built it to have that separation you just described. You've got the working class, and then you've got the rich elite class. Yep. And the patriarchy stems from that rich elite class, that is usually where the leadership layer comes from. That is a very different, entirely different patriarchal structure than what is in place for labor. And I was reading an article this morning that talked about how the scarcity itself is also baked in at the same time. So we are put in these situations where labor is supposed to compete with each other to be the one that gets the resource that is limited by design, and we all pretty much know that that is where we are. So trying to crack that system from the inside, all collie-like, you know, how how are we gonna like burn this bitch down? And and I don't know, there is no clean answer. I feel like when we were, you know, at Naropa, a lot of the when I worked in classrooms with activists, one of the things that I would always say is you have to have someone on the inside pushing from the inside, yeah, and then you also have to have people from the outside pushing onto the structure. And when those two meet, then the cracks can form, and then you can put something regenerative as the cracks begin to crumble and collapse the system.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

Right. And the, I mean, and the thing to know is like most of the times, especially colonial systems or institutional systems, they're not pen tested for folks standing up to them. So when you are a leader who thinks of themselves in a privileged way, there's a hubris around, well, I'm untouchable. I have this role, I'm supposed to be here, everyone likes me, so then I'm untouchable, and you little peons of labor could never do anything to disrupt my powers. So they never see it coming, right? So they never see someone powerful entering the front line. Because why would we? Right? Like we would be up here with the elite class, you know, and one of the things I've learned in my many years and and very strange career is the elite class seems to be painfully inauthentic, sad, like there's there's something about patriarchy that enslaves rich people and powerful people in ways they don't even understand what they're enslaved to.

Emotional Labor Transfer Explained

Crystal 37:38

That is so accurate. The past three years in my corporate experience, that is it. And I think like one of the things, too, I know we agree on, or at least part of this, is the wellness theater around the mindfulness industries that uh, you know, are under surveillance now as they should be. Um they also are part of the problem. It gives incoming dogs right here in the background. We're gonna hit pause for a hot second. And we're back. Yay! So there's now a new dog in the house. The next door neighbor's pup is here. So there will be a background noise with dogs. Yay! And we are gonna get into something fun. I can't remember where we we were on a good point, but I then I just lost it when the pups entered. So we're gonna pivot slightly, not really pivot. But there's something I want to tap into because you mentioned it a little while ago. And it's something that I we have all experienced it over and over again. I didn't have language for it until recently. And there were some situations I went through recently where that was definitely what happened. And it was fascinating because I was unpacking the things and trying to understand, and I use AI to unpack a lot of this stuff for pattern recognition. And you mentioned emotional labor transfer. Yeah. And then I was like, oh fuck, I know I heard that somewhere. So then I started cracking that into the pattern recognition that I was following, and it nailed it. And so what I want to talk about is A, explain it to us like we're five. Okay. Because I think what a lot of this comes down to with toxic leadership is a patriarchal structure where this thing exists in almost all of our systems. We don't have language to identify it, but we have all been at the brunt of this. And this, I feel like, is what really is at the heart of a lot of it.

SPEAKER_00 39:43

Well, yeah, it's that idea. I think the way that a lot of people experience this when it happens to them is that idea of like the impossible mom in which you're supposed to read their mind and know what they're thinking and then deliver whatever thing they supposedly wanted, right? Like, and so there's that that's why I think we get patriarchy creates these loops of people pleasing, because we're trained to people please those above us, right? And so, and then what happens is those quote above us are given power with no emotional, they're given power with like without earning it.

Crystal 40:34

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 40:35

So and privilege, power by privilege, yeah, power by privilege, and so then they they want you to obey them because they don't know how to explain it to you, they don't know how to ask you, they don't know how to be like, hey, Chris, they don't know how to invite you on the journey of labor, of doing the job, right? And in volunteerism, you have to figure this out because otherwise your labor's free, right? And they will leave. Yeah. So if you're a volunteer manager, oftentimes you have developed the social emotional skills to keep people happy so that they continue to be on your volunteer projects, right? But that doesn't happen when your leader comes from rising because they're good at their job and didn't get that leadership training or were placed into leadership from a place of privilege without ever earning it because they came from an Ivy League background or whatever. And and that's not something that you're trained as you go through that academic process to in development, right? So, but the way that emotional labor transfer often will happen is stuff like, and you'll see stuff like I'm not explaining to you what I'm telling you about. Like, I'm assuming you just know all the information because I know it, without taking that beginner's mind approach of, hey, I'm gonna explain this process to you, and as I'm you're five, right? Like, not in a condescending way, but like this is what the process is, or this is what this acronym means, or those like steps to get people to understand what you're talking about are just skipped over. And then when you add to that institutional jargon, it leaves labor feeling lost by design, because then I can say, well, you didn't live up to this expectation, but uh labor doesn't really know that that expectation exists, right? So, like you're always in trouble for not living up to an expectation that you've never been communicated. Okay, that's fascinating.

Crystal 42:42

And some of the experiences I've had over the last few years, it's also been deployed when leadership made certain decisions that they knew were wrong or found out after the fact were not right, and instead of saying, hey, I fuck that up, they push the emotional labor down to labor. Yeah. And then never and then everyone's like, ah, what just happened, you know?

SPEAKER_00 43:03

Oh yeah, the the the inability to take accountability is a huge gap in the difference between positive leaders who are socially, emotionally solid as leaders and toxic leaders, right? Like, because if you take if you're held to a standard of perfection, which is kind of what supremacy is holding you towards, right? Then admitting you're wrong is admitting that you're not perfect, which means you don't belong to the system, which means you can't have power. So it's like the it it like cascades, right? Oh yeah. So then your ego can't do that, it has no practice taking accountability. If your leaders aren't modeling accountability, then and and a modeling that it's okay to take accountability, and you're not gonna be fired. So one of the frustrating things is what are the most optimal Fun, interesting management styles was the Toyota way, right? Like a long time ago, Toyota told its engineers it should question everything and bring it up the chain. And so they created a culture where there was iterative design. There was accountability. This didn't work. This button didn't work. This wasn't a good enough engineered piece. And then they got better. But what happens in American companies where we're not taught to take accountability, question things, it's okay to fail in the way that you are taught in it, like maybe a Japanese company. You get a bunch of people who, when they make a mistake, they have to hide it. Yeah. Right? Like, and and so you you saw this catastrophically at Boeing, right? You've got the downward pressure of capitalism who you gotta make it as cheap and fast as possible, right? And you're never allowed to question leadership because they're in charge. So then your engineers stop questioning things and stop bringing because it's you created the conditions in which it's not safe, it's not a trusting environment, and so you miss the opportunity to course correct all along the way, causing millions and billions of dollars in damage, probably all throughout every large organization, right? Because you're so unwilling to just be wrong.

Crystal 45:26

And we just tapped into toxic masculinity, yeah. And how that is also perpetuated through different leadership styles. One of the things I studied at Neuropa was conscious leadership and regenerative leadership, and tried to bring that into corporate America when I got hired at a crypto corporation right out of Naropa. And my naive little ass thought, yeah, we're gonna compassion in the code. And I'm like, I got chewed up, spit out, as soon as I like started whistleblowing. You're like, no, you can go now. We're done with you.

Food Safety Questions And Retaliation

SPEAKER_00 45:54

Right, yeah, because you can't you can't ask questions, you can't question. There was a moment where the tech company couldn't manufacture enough cold bags to keep grocery cold as it was transported from our store to your house. And so the guideline was if it was 75 degrees or higher, it had to go in these bags because it was essential for food safety for it to deliver to the customer. They, when they ran into a manufacturing issue in producing the bags, raised it to 85 degrees.

unknown 46:42

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 46:43

That's a 10-degree difference in food safety. That is a huge difference. I asked the question, I was like, hey, um this represents a significant change. If there's a 10-degree difference on our hot bar, we would throw everything away. How do we know for sure that the food is safe when you have been telling us that it was essential to do it at 75 degrees for months, right? Like, so now 85 degrees is okay just because we're in a manufacturing issue problem, right? Not because it's better for food safety, not because we tested it in any way. And I was like, all I'm asking you to do is tell me some team tested 85 degrees and it delivered safely to customers, and it was okay. That's all I wanted you to tell me. I wanted you to confirm that you have done the testing, and I got retaliated again so hard for asking the question. Literally, my store leader was not even scheduled that day. You saw him blare in in his Tesla, screech into the parking lot. Fool, I didn't know it was him because someone, I only knew because someone was like in hot like this. And he he comes in, I get called into the office, and he's like, How dare you question this decision we made? I was like, Well, I am asking a question, but also I would like to point you to the fact that we have an open door policy. And he just ripped into me, and from that point, he banned me from going to any culture meetings. I was one of the five advanced culture trained people in the store. There were about 50 not advanced trainers, and and the culture department in the store was responsible for team member appreciation event production, and I am probably the most skilled event producer in that store.

SPEAKER_03 48:56

Yeah.

AI As A Shadow Union Tool

Metrics Culture And Slavery Roots

SPEAKER_00 48:56

And I was not a I I all of a sudden was no longer invited to the culture meetings. So the retaliation was really clear and very documented, right? So that's where we get back to that shatter union piece. I started just writing HR and being like, hey, I just had this meeting with my store leader, and I just asked a question, and he did this. And so, and then I would send all of the things that were happening to me through AI, asking it to look at relevant Colorado law, asking it to look at Sedgwick's processes in general, asking it to look at RHR documentation, which was downloadable, and craft responses to what was happening to me at the store level. And so, and and just started documenting it, partly because I wanted to see what would happen, right? And also I wanted to model for the employees who were in this toxic work culture that it was possible for change to happen if we organized in the way that mutual aid organization is happening. Like, we don't have to go to daddy union to get union results, right? And in fact, I would argue that a union at this point, I look, I love the history of unions. I grew up in Vegas, unions were a real thing, and but the reality is, like all large institutions, they too are subject to Leviathan, they too are too big, right? And so you get back to that same toxic culture, so you're just like leaving one bad boss for another bad boss, instead of labor learning how to become their own union boss and standing out for themselves. And you saw that at Naropa too, right? Like there was some part of Naropa that didn't really want students to stand up, yeah, right? And and you're like, wait, what? And so that's what is true about kind of patriarchal, it doesn't want or it isn't prepared for anyone to say no, yeah, right, or withdraw consent. And when you do that, it the the panic that happens because that there's an identity crisis that's happening. Yeah, you know, how dare you say no to me, right? Like, but how dare you assume I said yes to everything? How dare you assume that about me as labor, right? Like, that's what we should all be asking. I never agreed to be a slave to a corporation, I don't think anyone did. Yeah, but that's how we're treated, right? Like, that's how frontline labor is treated. Why? And part of that is that the history of where metrics-based leadership comes from, which is slavery.

Crystal 51:55

Tap into that because you told me that earlier and it blew my mind.

SPEAKER_00 51:57

Well, I okay, so I think it's called Masters of Account. There is a McKinse consultant who wrote about it and it's really fascinating. Um, but I didn't know this too, because you know, in the tech world, your entire life is pretty much gant charts.

Crystal 52:14

Yeah. It's like the Bible, right?

SPEAKER_00 52:17

And everything's in a little unit, and it's right. So the autist in me kind of loved it, right? Because everything is easy and and structured, but it comes from this tainted history of slavery, right? Like, and that humans are essentially because Ganthard's kept track of both labor and re like physical resources, cows, grain, boats, ships, right? So we're just objects in this game of business. And the only humans are the leaders, right? They're those are the only people who have real humanity as imagined by the power structure.

SPEAKER_03 53:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:06

Is the leaders. Everyone else is just an object to be played in some sort of weird business game that is being played at scale.

Crystal 53:15

That is dying. Yeah. And that is kind of fascinating too. Like, and I want to go back to the AI aspect of this because weaponizing documentation with AI is something that I don't think most people understand they can do, and I've done it multiple times. And as a documentarian, it's my nature to document, especially when I see things going sideways. I'm like, oh, time to start documenting it. And then with AI, this the last few situations I've been in where they were long term and there was leadership issues and all the things. And I'm trying to understand it through my lens, through my spiritual lens, through the patriarchy lens, because that's the system I'm in. Like, what does all this look like? So I run these documents through pattern recognition. AI's best use case, really, is pattern recognition. That is what it is very good at. So use it for that. And this weaponization of your documentation, like you're describing, like that becomes the shadow union. That becomes the thing, all of the things that are shared in whisper networks. We share those whisper networks partially on channels that can be screenshot, that can be brought into an AI and say, am I crazy here? Or what am I not seeing? Why is this person behaving this way? And here's the situation, and here's their background, here's my background. Tell me, and this is what I do this all the time with my clawed ed. Tell me what I'm missing, and then help me prepare to deal with the power situation, to break the power situation, or just give me a lesson so that I can see it next time faster.

SPEAKER_00 54:49

Right. Yeah, and we're at this unprecedented moment with AI, especially like what I did while I was documenting this process was I fed it a lot of thought leaders in organizational psychology and performance metrics, right? So, and I fed it hundreds of Harvard Business Review, right? All of the institutional power structure that would be respected by a power structure, I fed it to serve my labor case, right? And so then now I'm making a labor case from the position of colonial power and they don't know how to handle it because I'm speaking their language, I'm playing the game within their system, right at the edge of their system, and they don't know how to respond. So, one of the things, if I'm if you're documenting issues, the first thing you want to do is actually document your needs, right? So for anyone who's like neurodivergent or has ADA issues, you want to go through that accommodations process and have it documented by the third party. Lots of corporations use a third-party accommodation group, and it's an onerous process. I'm not gonna lie, it's not fun. You have to like explain it to your doctor, you have to explain what your job is, you have to explain what you need from your job and what accommodations you need, and then put it all together and then present it. But there's a standard way, because standardization is how capitalistic systems work, there's a standard way that they're going to respond, right? And so getting all of that documented first allows you, if lay if you're abused by your leadership, allows you to use the existing accommodations as evidence for abuse when they're violated, right? So I've pre-di it's essentially like you know, if if we have a prenup, I've agreed to these conditions for us to break up, but and and it's all up front, right? So, like, and when and when you violate those conditions, there's penalties in there. So it's kind of contractual, but this is how you start building the skills of being your own union boss, right? Is so I got interesting things documented. I got my neurodiversity documented. Um, I asked for a dress code um accommodation so that I didn't have to adhere to dress code, but really so that white people didn't police my dress code. That's that's why I got it, because uh I was I was pretty aware early on that it was a toxic leader I was dealing with. And one of the first things toxic leaders tend to do is try to police the body, right? And so, and that's because the entire patriarchal capitalistic control system uses invisible chains of policing the body through purity culture so that you're policing your own body. I don't have to. That's why the leaders are emotionally lazy because you've already policed it. You've showed up in your exacting obedience dress code, you've done your hair in the white professional way, you you've you've policed yourself. I didn't have to.

SPEAKER_03 58:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:30

So I don't know really how to keep you under control because you're used to policing yourself.

Crystal 58:36

That's kind of mind-melting right there.

SPEAKER_00 58:38

I know. That's why I've always dressed code. When you police the body, and that's so when I was working as a leader to liberate my team and and lean into a liberated leadership style, which was a higher performing team, the first thing I did was liberate the body. I allowed for bathroom breaks when they were needed, I allowed for water breaks, I allowed for you were having a hard day with a customer and needed to go outside and scream. Cool, go and do it. Right? Like, I let you be in your body and have your emotions.

SPEAKER_03 59:12

That's such a simple thing.

SPEAKER_00 59:14

I know.

Crystal 59:14

So, like, I mean it's and I don't want to simple does not demean it. I it just that should be standard. Like, that shouldn't oh, jigzy. I nobody.

SPEAKER_00 59:25

But you know what it where it is standard in private schools, right? If if I go to a rich private school, I've taught in many, many weird private school situations, those kids have bathrooms whenever they want, they can turn in homework whenever they want, right? Like there's like much more grace and flexibility growing up as a rich kid than you get as a poor kid, right? Your body is policed in the public school system, it's trained to be policed by the government, essentially. So we're we've acculturated it.

Crystal 59:59

Yeah, and those are the two pipelines we were talking about earlier. You've got one pipeline that's going into leadership, and the other pipeline's going into labor.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:05

Yep. And that's that's it, that's it. Yeah, and then the labor that rises to the leadership pipeline, but doesn't have the social emotional skills that you might have learned at the rich kids school is not prepared to be a leader the way that those leaders at the rich kids school were.

Crystal 1:00:25

That's where the imposter syndrome and the insecurity never get addressed. Once they leap make that leap into the leadership class, a class that is very foreign to them because of how they were raised, that perpetual imposter syndrome and insecurity never gets removed, really.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:44

Yeah, no, and and when you're insecure, what do you try to do emotionally, psychologically? You try to control the situation so that you can feel safe again.

Crystal 1:00:56

And so you can belong. Yeah, and by controlling the situation, you then are accepted by the leadership class.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:02

Yeah, but you're not accepted, you won't be accepted, you'll and you'll be separated from the labor class.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:07

Which is what you want because you you don't want to be there, right? So but I don't know, frontline worker, the reason I do frontline work, they're more authentic. Frontline workers are real, they're real people, they're humans, they're they're kind people, and like one of the most heartbreaking things is that frontline, those frontline jobs is often first jobs. So our first interaction as a new being who's coming into capitalism is yet another toxic leader. You just came out of probably a toxic educational system that massively failed you during COVID, right? We saw the institutional failures of large educational systems at COVID, right? And so you have these toxic leaders and these people like playing in the system that they don't really understand.

Restaurant Belonging Versus Grocery Metrics

Crystal 1:02:00

So it makes total sense. I when I look back at my wild ass career, if you even call it that, I don't think you call it a career. It's just a path. Um you know, I started in labor at age, I was telling you the story earlier, at 15, because I mean I had an allowance, and my dad was like, all right, here's your allowance, here's your budget, you have to make those things match by the end of the month, and it was too exhausting. I'm like, Dad, I don't want to do a budget. He's like, Well, you know, that's on you. Do you want an allowance? I'm like, no, I want a job. He's like, go get one. Like, okay, cool. So I went and worked in a restaurant at 15, and it would just like crack my brain wide open. And I got to, I mean, I basically stayed in frontline labor for almost my first 15 years of my career. Like, uh, even as a freelance journalist, I was still, you're you're the low low one on the wrong as a freelancer, especially as a photojournalist. Like you're you're in the bottom. And I actually really loved it. Like my experience working in restaurants, when I start looking at those stories, and and even my customers, I mean, most of them, I worked in tourism industries, but I also had regulars who were building construction. I had plenty of mafia customers. I mean, if I needed to take care of someone, I just make Uncle Louis. This guy just did XYZ. Can you take care of it? He's like, I got you. I'm like, okay, cool. So I learned how the world worked. I learned how it worked from the shadow networks, from the underground. And that I think is one of the best educations, especially because it was the 90s and the 2000s. Like, what an education.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:23

But you know, it's interesting because I grew up in Vegas and and also Italian leadership style. And I would say, you know, the big difference there, like, at least my felt difference, was there's something different because they're not WASP, right? And they're they're not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who are locked into a Calvinist idea that wealth is godliness, right? And they're Catholic. And I there's there's much more of a community leadership style, even though it felt dangerous on some ends, right? Absolutely. But there was still kind of a well, you gotta take care of your people.

Crystal 1:04:06

That I was just getting ready to say that. Like you knew you were part of a community, even there was fucked up, like the things we did. When I watched like the movie Waiting, like from the night with Ryan Reynolds. I'm like, I watched that the other night, I'm like, God, I kind of miss that. You know, none of that is socially acceptable right now. But you knew you belonged. Yeah. I knew that if I needed someone to get my back, they were there instantly, even though we wouldn't really grab a beer afterward, because they kind of annoyed me, but they still had my back and I had theirs.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:32

Yeah, and also, I don't know if that you felt the same way as a woman, but there was an old school gentlemanness around you don't talk to a woman like that, right? So, like, even like if someone was like really gruff with me, there was a man who came and defended it. That does not exist in wasp culture. No, not at all.

Crystal 1:04:55

And that is actually what I really you named something that I really found comfort in as a female bartender. And I I for a lot of that those years, I was a raw bartender. I shucked oysters for a living. Oh, like when my first day, the waitresses were like, this bitch ain't gonna be able to do it. I'm like, fuck all y'all, I got this. And I figured it out. But yes, there was always even and and like we talked about earlier, like I I thrive in masculine spaces. We were raised by I was raised by girl dad. And my dad was like, All right, you know, this is the world you're in, you gotta navigate it. So I was taught to understand masculinity and power and my role in it. And I think in restaurants, everything is so raw and everything is so in your face, and you can't put a mask on. Yeah, and plenty of people try, but that mask falls off when you got 10 tickets and uh the bar's three deep and the kitchen's on 10 types of cocaine, spitting food out at speed, and you're like, holy shit, what's happening right here? And it's this beautiful chaos machine. Like, I had regular customers who would come in just to watch the chaos, they would sit down. For hours, like this is great. And I do it now. I go to bars when I know they're the crazy. I'm like, I'm gonna sit here and watch y'all because this is awesome. It's human orchestration, but it works because it is that frontline labor, and because you know that if you drop the ball, the person next to you is gonna help you pick the ball up, and together you're gonna put it all back together.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:18

Right. Well, the other thing that happens that that didn't translate from restaurant culture, it's funny because I feel like they got the worst of all the worlds is restaurant culture had family meals. Yes, we did. Right? Like before the restaurant opened, there were family meals, you shot the shit with the that does not happen in groceries. Such a good point, right? Like it and so you don't ever really get to know. You're you're just stuck in this metric slavery around how fast you can slice a pineapple. And then you don't have each other's back against leadership. No, absolutely and leadership gaslights you that this is your issue. No one else is having a problem. It's only you that's having a problem. I've never heard this from anyone else. Bullshit. Bullshit. You've heard that from someone else. You just don't want to tell us.

Crystal 1:07:10

And that separation is how you control people. Right. And that I'm I'm so glad you bought the restaurant thing. I forgot about the family meals. And like in the one restaurant that I worked the longest, we were a tiny restaurant. We were definitely a fucked up family. We had table one was off to the side, and before every shift, we all gathered around table one and we just told the most ridiculous sex stories for like 60 minutes while we ate. Somebody like smoked something, somebody drank something, and then we went to go do that crazy work for five hours. Then we'd come back to table one, bitch about all the things we saw, talk about the sex we were gonna have that night, and then half the table will go home with each other. I'm like, okay, cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:48

But that was family. But you were having a human layer experience. Absolutely. But but that when when you become so metrics focused that everything, there's no time ever for connection as employees, yeah. Then you kind of like in education right now, the the the worst ways that education is being redoeized at the moment, especially with computer-based learning, is that you're just trapped in the box and you're not interacting with your fellow students. And so it's breaking the connective capacity of Gen Z. So that's where, you know, probably for labor, right? For labor down the road, because we saw that the flipped classroom created labor, that's like, nah, man, right? Like, you know, so now you've got all of these people producing tech solutions, and you have the tech market really trying to push education content at the lowest cost, right? Not uh stuff that tech executives would never deploy on their own children, yeah. In order to prevent this labor issue that's probably gonna happen, right? Which is, you know, and so now, like you'll see that piece. Well, we'll see where that happens, because I think Gen Alpha is just so sick of everything.

Crystal 1:09:10

Yeah, they're not they're gonna go back, they're already using analog. Yeah, I know. They're gonna go back to the restaurants and the family tables. And like at those family tables, this is before social networking, this is before Facebook. There was never a phone on the table. Right. You had to look each other in the eye, put your shit on the table, and then at the end of the day, and you're gonna have to sit at the table again and like have it out. So you kept you kept it together while you worked.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:36

Right. And there was also some amount of like shared fate because you were like in the shit together, right?

Crystal 1:09:41

Yeah, you're on the same ship. You're like, all right, we got the ship, we're gonna get to the end of the shift, and then you know, we're all gonna survive, or we're all gonna go drown our sorrows in the next bottle of booze.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:50

Right? You know, and there are ways to like bring that back easily, right? Like, I did that with my team a lot, where I'm like, hey, it's we're gonna be three hours of late. That's what's gonna happen. Like, if we're down four shoppers, it's you're gonna be late until probably 10 o'clock today. And it's not your fault, right? And so I would just be like, hey, it's not your fault. This is where we're at it as a department. I was very honest and transparent with folks, and guess what? They delivered. They were like, oh man, department's down, and Monero's in charge. Cool, let's let's like get it back. And I would get it, I would recover faster than other leaders would because my team, I would because I gave them the the loadout. I told them what was happening, I told them it wasn't their fault. I I prepared their nervous system that I know that you're trained, that time matters in this very structured way, but it's okay, right? Like, and there's also nothing you can do about it, right? Like, so it's gonna be late, right?

Crystal 1:10:59

Like, yeah, that's fascinating. That my first corporate America stint, I had a tiny team, and we were charged with making this one program, and it was something I already knew how to do inherently. I'm like, okay, cool. And they already had some structure in place when someone else had tried to do it and couldn't do it. And so my team was amazing, and I was like, all right, let's just do the thing. And I didn't know, I didn't know what the acronyms were. I didn't, people were spiraling in meetings all over the place, or nervous systems were I'm like, I don't know what is going on over here in my division. Like, no idea, but this little pod over here, we're just gonna make this thing. I didn't even know how to work a budget. I launched a program with no money in three months, and everybody who'd been there forever, like, what did you just do? I'm like, what you told me to do? I did my job. And I kind of rallied my team and we did it together, and we busted this thing out, and it ended up being beautiful. But no one, especially in leadership, they just would look at me like I had five heads because I didn't use the money, or because I didn't do this, or because I did it so fast. I'm like, what have y'all been doing all this time? Right?

Break Policing Quiet Quitting Burnout

SPEAKER_00 1:11:59

It's not rocket science. You did it nicely, right? Like that that freaks people out. Like, one of the things that freaked people out a lot, which was crazy to me because it's just math, right? And so this is uh an argument for good math education. So as a leader, we had to recover breaks. So, like, if someone went on a break for 10 minutes, we needed, we owed Amazon 10 minutes. That's wild. They thought it was a one-to-one, like you go away for 10 minutes, I must come in right now. Amazon isn't tracking at that level of of metrics, they're doing hours, it it's it's a moving curve along a complicated algorithm. So as a leader, instead of one minute at a time, I'm like always constantly, my mind is on time. If I know 30 minutes of breaks have to happen in the next hour, because I could just shop for 30 minutes. I don't have to like constantly be on people to make sure that the head count was covered in the the the algorithm doesn't know the statistical difference once it averages itself out of whether or not this was one to one minute matched.

unknown 1:13:14

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:15

It does and but explaining that to people who didn't understand calculus and couldn't understand that when you have to plus 30 minutes somewhere, that you can do that whenever you want in the hour, and it didn't have to be exactly when the person logged off so that your mind could be free to do that when it was next available to do it, right? Like, and that freaked folks out a lot, but it never changed the metric picture at all. So there was there was all of this angst that I wasn't covering breaks detailed enough, and I'm like, but never were were we dinged for the fact that I was doing it in a more liberated way.

Crystal 1:14:00

Fascinating, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:02

Like, you know, and why and they would freak out if two people went on break at the same time. I'm like, but it doesn't really matter because you just owe the system 30 minutes. So if two people took it at the same time, you still owe the system 20 minutes, and it doesn't matter when it happens. So why police people? Yeah, for what? Like they'll be happier if they go on break together, they'll come back happier for fear.

Crystal 1:14:28

Because you keep people afraid and then obedient.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:31

But I think it's they're also their fear, their fear that they don't matter unless they're policing people, right? And that's what I would call like the internal overseer, right? Like, that's the overseer ancestor who was part of the plantation system who abused slaves to justify their payments, right? Like, that's where and that comes from the metric world, right? Like the metric world never measures overseers. It doesn't have metrics for overseers.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:08

That's fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:08

It could have metrics for overseers, attrition, transfer requests, whether or not people start becoming late, whether or not they start skipping work, right? Like all of those things in the way that you over-measure labor could be measuring leadership. And we could be creating health scores of leaders and whether or not they're effective based on very trackable metrics that we're already probably tracking because we're tracking lates and we're tracking all of the um I would look at healthcare utilization, like are more toxic workplaces. I think research has shown that toxic workplaces cause health care to go up, right? Like, so I know in my own case, I was granted four hours of or four days of intermittent leave a month because the workplace was so toxic. I took them. I took all four days every month because it was so bad.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:07

And you know, that was an income loss to myself, but also it was necessary to survive for burnout. Now, if you can't afford to take those those days off, or which is the case of most people on frontline labor, then you're stuck in burnout.

Crystal 1:16:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:24

Right. And so Yeah.

Crystal 1:16:26

And then also on salary labor, at the where I was at, I was in leadership and you expected to work 70, 80 hour weeks, and I did it for nine months, even though I know better. Even though I have a thousand hours of advanced yogic training on the nervous system, I have a degree on my nervous system, and I broke that bitch in nine months.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:48

Yeah.

Crystal 1:16:48

And I was like, oh my god. Like I tried to after every after I broke my spine essentially, I was like, oh my god, I gotta take a day off. And my boss wouldn't even approve my and it wasn't it wasn't sick leave. I like I knew that that might have to happen, but it was just I need five days off, and I had not taken the time off at all. I tried once to take the time off, did it on the fly because I was just like, fuck everybody, and like halfway through this whole adventure, and then I got yelled at for it. I'm like, I don't care anymore.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:16

Right.

Crystal 1:17:17

And then finally, like five days got approved, but at that point everything was broken, and then I had to use so much healthcare.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:24

I got but anyway, there's a whole thing there, but yeah, right, and at the microcosm level, that also happens. Like, if I tell you that you can't go on a break, I don't think that increases your productivity in the next 20 minutes. Yeah, I think it radically decreases it. I think there's a big fuck you that is happening. Like, oh, I can't go on break, cool. I'll just go on break as I'm working, right? Like, I'll I'll be in the bathroom for a while, right? Like all the ways that people escape abusive situations happen when you don't give people autonomy. Exactly.

Crystal 1:18:05

And that's why now, I mean, I I'm not a fan of quiet quitting, but I actually do. There are times because I mentor a lot of Gen Zs, and I'm like, they're in a toxic leadership situation. I'm like, you need to quiet quit that shit while you look for another job.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:17

Yeah.

Crystal 1:18:18

Because you can't just quit a job these days and like take some time off. That's like not a really a thing anymore in this job market. But it's okay to quiet quit in that situation because you have to protect yourself. Right. And if you don't do that, you end up in my situation. I'm two and a half years out of this thing, and now it's a chronic condition, I'm gonna have to live with the rest of my life because I didn't say, fuck this shit. I need time off. I'm not gonna work 80 hours a week, and I'm not gonna let this toxicity be internalized. Which, even though I, with all that training, I did it anyway. So, like, I it gave me so much, much deeper understanding of why so many people working in corporate America, and I think this does apply to labor, not completely, but to frontline labor, but why so many people in corporate America are coming to yoga studios. And that was one of the things I was always curious about. Like, I knew it intellectually, like, yes, they're stressed, they need to learn how to relax, this is one way to do it, but I didn't know what that felt like. I didn't that was not embodied because in the past, I'm like, hey, I'm gonna take some time off, and I take off four months and just go wander somewhere and then come back. I'm like, all right, let me get some clients. Like, that's just it. So it was fascinating to see it from the inside and to then also become a victim, or not a victim, but but become part of it and part of the problem because I did not stand up to the power structure I was in.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:38

Yeah.

Crystal 1:19:39

Granted, you know, now I know better, but and it's why this podcast exists, really.

Policy Pen Tests And Accommodations

SPEAKER_00 1:19:44

Yeah, I mean, the other fun shadow labor, like shadow union things I played with, and again, I encourage everyone, we should pen test corporate America systems together, right? Like, and we should work together to pen test them. You know, one of the things that labor in the days of early labor unions fought for was an eight-hour workday. Yes. I got them to approve a religious accommodation that as a deist, which is the Christian religion of Thomas Jefferson, which essentially advocates for a personal relationship with God that is rooted in reality. And so as a Christian deist, I give eight hours to God, I give eight hours to work, and I give eight hours to rest. The Benjamin Franklin way.

unknown 1:20:45

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:45

And so I used all of the symbols of the patriarchy, founding fathers, Christian deism, to create the case of a liberated labor member, right? Wow. And so the one I wanted to test, but I didn't get a chance to test, so I want someone to test this, is one of the things that happens, especially in frontline labor, is you have to be available 24 hours a day, or you are not deemed a good enough employee to hire. Yeah, that means your body is enslaved and your circadian rhythm is enslaved to this ping-ponging of when you're at work.

unknown 1:21:30

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:31

Right? So, and as someone who's autistic and neurospicy, I actually think there could be as and Christian Diaz, the covenant of the circadian rhythm. Right? That that I really want someone to pen test this idea that I either should work in the mornings or in the evenings. You don't have the right to schedule me across 24 hours. It's one circadian rhythm or the other. Even Vegas was actually more liberated in this way because you were either night shift or day shift.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:08

Right? It wasn't like you were night shift three days a week and you were day shift this time, right? Like in that stuff messes with your entire nervous system and you're always exhausted. Yeah. And then you're too exhausted to fight back. To fight back. Yeah. Right. And so that so that is the one I didn't get a chance to pen test, but would be would have been my next pen test one. But I started encoding both in Sedgwick accommodations around being neurotypical and in religious accommodations around being a Christian deist, all of these documented accommodations that allowed for my liberation to happen. I got them to agree in the way that a Christian missionary would be given time off from corporate America to go on a mission, I got them to agree that as an artist, if I was following God's plan to create art, I had the right to go on an art mission, a creative mission for my soul, essentially a sabbatical, without them, with 30 days' notice. So I could give them, like a Christian ministry person, as someone who is very liberated, this notice, and I can go on mission. And they would have to come, I would have a job when I came back.

unknown 1:23:30

Wow.

Crystal 1:23:31

There's so many ways to hack the system that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:34

Yeah.

Crystal 1:23:34

And that is what AI allows you to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:36

Yeah, for sure, right? Like, and and it's a it's and using colonial structures, they're not used to folks using colonial structures for liberation. And the only reason I know how to do this is because I grew up inside of colonial structures. I was raised to be the man, right? Like on a deep level. I was raised in a military family with a bunch of business leaders. I had male business leader mentors my entire life, and I was raised to be the man. And then thankfully, in the good days of Tony Shea and delivering happiness, I saw that the most productive leadership style was actually kindness, which was brought me back to like when I was a child. I grew up in Japan, and Japan has much more of a like social system driven by community. Yeah, and so it was very confusing to me to not speak Japanese and be accepted by Japanese kids, and then come to America where I'm technically an American in a military family, and then be treated like I'm a foreigner when I get to San Diego. Right? Like, and so that was always really confusing, and kids were meaner, teachers were meaner, like it was all of it was so there's part of me that really truly believes that American culture is meaner, and there are other cultures that don't exist this way.

Crystal 1:25:18

And that goes back to the separation and the independence, and there's there's definitely things about America and that I am patriotic about, and our independence is definitely a one beautiful part, but it's got a catch. And the catch is what you just described, and you don't really realize it until you spend time. Like I last year I got to go to an off-site for a job and was in Thailand for three weeks and got to experience Buddhist culture, just that is inherent.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:45

Right.

Crystal 1:25:45

And everything is it's just beautiful, and same with you know, Japanese culture is driven by community, everything is community-driven. Yeah, and yet in America, everything it goes back to the robber baron and just just back to our genesis, really. Our Genesis story is about individualism, competition, and imperialism.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:03

Yeah, and also this imagination that we are the rebels who are not imperialist, right?

Crystal 1:26:14

That we're the liberators. Right. That's our myth. That's that's the myth.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:19

But at every turn, we replicate empire. I know.

Crystal 1:26:23

The irony, like, we didn't learn the lesson because the myth was just told to us.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:28

I mean, it's don't you think it's kind of staggeringly interesting that like we as a country started out because we didn't like a crazy king who used to throw tantrums for no reason, didn't and he probably because of inbreeding, right? Like, probably because his genetic stock actually is not in alignment with reality, and and there is nothing really supreme about incestuous genetic stock, right? Like, that's not a real thing. Everything about biology would say that was delusional, but white supremacy continues to say, oh, our genetic stock is so great. How could it be?

Crystal 1:27:11

I I think the irony, yes, you're exactly right. I think the irony too is that we are very close to ending this country with the crazy monarch. That is what you just described, all of it. Like that's the the arc there is fascinating. But I think it also goes back to the fact that we don't have to go deep down this rabbit hole, but you know, look at how this country started. Like, look who we stole the land from, look how we enslaved, look how we created these systems, and then how we are now at the end of systems that were never designed for long term sustainability. They were designed for short term profit and extraction at all costs. Yeah, and it's not sustainable at scale. Soci humans are meant to be that way. We just, you know, that was just the ship we were in for so many years. Um and labor was always shut down when it tried. To rise up against it. And the when labor was able to at least break through, and we got things like the middle class and we had FDR and we got social safety nets, it worked. Yeah. But then you have power that comes back in and says, no, it's ours again. And then the system gets dismantled because it had too much, you know, equality baked into it, even though it wasn't fully equal. It never was.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:27

Well, one of the crazy things about patriarchy is that it has this delusional belief in its own meritocracy. And that meritocracy doesn't exist because if you were truly meritorious, that would be the people who are actually doing the work. Not the people who are overseeing the work.

Crystal 1:28:48

And benefiting from the work.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:50

Right? And and I mean, and not to go down a Marxist rabbit hole, but like there is something about controlling the means of production, and that the people who are producing the objects and goods are actually doing the real hard work of the thing, right? Like they're they're in it.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:11

And the overseers are extracting from that, right? Like, and so that dichotomy just happens in in our system. As if that's the only way it can be, right? Like our founders were just dudes who were like, okay, well, that monarchy system didn't work. Well, we're just people, also.

Crystal 1:29:33

And they were young dudes. Yeah. That's the thing that always because again, the myth. The myth, you know, they're the wise old founding fathers. No, just a bunch of bunch of fucking young guys playing with governance.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:44

Right. And and experimenting with governance and arguing. I mean, I've read a lot of Federalist paper arguing about govern governance. Yeah. And I mean, I do think part of the dark seed of America is we we were at a point at our founding where we could have said no to slavery.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:05

And I think had we done that, we would have lived up to the promise of America. But because we didn't have the moral courage to do that, we are suffering the consequences at this very moment. Yes. And the legacy of our founding fathers, who again grew up loving a military family, right? Like the legacy of our founding fathers is really this kind of fiction that doesn't address the fact that these men didn't have the moral courage to say no to slavery. And that is antithetical to any sense of whatever Christian morality they claim to have is. Because when did Christ say, oh yeah, let's get more slaves? Like he doesn't say that.

Crystal 1:30:56

No, that's economics. Yeah, that is just economics.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:59

It just the idea that, and then these slavers took the Bible, they removed the Moses story out of it, and are like, you must convert to Christianity, but forget this liberation story inside of it. We don't need that, right? Like you don't think that there's gonna be bad magic or consequences to the fact that you removed some of the most human-layer, human-centric Christ teachings out of your patriarchal system? Yeah, of course, these are the consequences. Yeah, and 250 years later, you know, generational.

Spotting Patriarchy And Saying No

Crystal 1:31:37

So we've been going for a while. Yep. There's one more topic because we are talking about the patriarchy here that I do want to touch on because I feel like this is something that people can begin to craft in themselves. And it's something that given my background and recent education and all of the wisdom tradition, all that seeing patriarchy in real time is becoming something that I am beginning to accelerate that skill set through AI, through pattern recognition. Like there are moments where I'm around uh an older male or something, and they're doing a certain thing that my nervous system is perceiving as violence, but I don't have language for. And that is patriarchy. Also colonialism. You have a gift of spotting it and instinctively calling it out in the moment to both process and to both just shed light on it. Where for like someone like me, it is getting faster because it's a skill set that I'm cultivating now with pattern recognition. But how can people begin to see patriarchy faster or just have the empowerment to speak out against it? Maybe not in the moment, because not every moment is safe to say you XYZ.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:57

Absolutely.

Crystal 1:32:58

But you can say later, like if there's a man in the room and say, hey, this is what happened, and this is actually what this is, and our men need to stand up and say, Yes, that is patriarchal behavior that does lead to violence. It all leads to violence at some point if it is not stopped.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:13

Yeah, because I mean the idea that you control someone else or get to control anyone besides yourself is a violent idea, right? Like I'm only in control of me. I don't get to tell you what to do. In fact, I trust if we're in a liberated society that our founding fathers were really talking about, a free society, I would trust your human layer to meet me at my human layer, and we can have a convention of policy, right? Like that's that's what actually happened is there was a lot of trust that that was between the founding fathers when we got there, right? And there's a lack of imagination that that trust could be had with people who don't look like you, who are from a different class from you, right? And so I just like we're stuck in this story that patriarchy has told us that is really, really narrow. And just because patriarchy can't imagine it doesn't mean it's true, right? Like, and just like the founding, no one imagined a little upstart America was going to say no to Britain, yeah, right? Just so like call in that. We all as Americans have that founding father ancestry energy in us. Call in that energy, call in that energy to be like, wait a second, I don't want to see my fellow men abused by a tyrannical system. Because that's what it means to be patriarchal. I mean, to be a patriot in an American system, not patriarchal, but like a real patriot. Yeah. Is it used to mean defending your fellow men against tyranny? And right now, being a patriot means obeying a delusional god king who would have made I think King George feel really sane. That's fucked up.

Crystal 1:35:15

You know. That's really good. Because oh um, there's like 5,000 thoughts that just rushed into my brain right there. Because I don't think we talk about that part of it either. That one of the things that I mean, both of us have a lot of masculine energy.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:34

Yep.

Crystal 1:35:34

I work in I I am more comfortable working with men than women.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:38

Me too.

Crystal 1:35:38

My my female circle is very small, but it's very tight. Like you know, lifelong friends here. And with men, men need to also be protected from patriarchy. Oh, they're the most abused. And they don't under I was having this conversation recently with with someone who wants to start a type of healing center for men, and I and he was he's new to all of this world that you and I are already like well steeped in. And I said, Look, you know, one of the things that men really need, and what he was trying to do is he's in his mid-30s, he wants to break the pattern so that when you hit your 40s and 50s and 60s, you're not still dwelling in toxic masculinity because it burns everything down. It does. And one of the things that I told him, I said, Look, men need spaces with other men where they can be vulnerable and emotional without judgment. Yeah. So that they can continue to be to understand their emotions, to express them to another human, and to process it. And in doing that, when then a man comes into a a co space with women and has to step into a protector role because you know, sometimes that is the male role.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:50

Yeah.

Crystal 1:36:50

Then they also are supported because it's not coming from a place of violence or attack, it's coming from a place of vulnerability and protection.

unknown 1:37:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:02

Well, and when you have a system that doesn't prepare men for vulnerability, it feels to them like violence.

Crystal 1:37:12

Yes. Right?

SPEAKER_00 1:37:13

Like it feels right, like it to them. That's why it's hard for men to step into vulnerability because and that's why you see all of that angst around like anti-wokeness. I think that angst is we're not good at being woke. We don't really understand what it is. And instead of learning how to be in good relationship with women, which is really kind of what woke woke culture was about, was like, hey guys, we can have literally more sex and more fun if there's consent. Shocking. Right? And I mean, that's what the scary woke culture. Like, that's what it was. It was like more if we talked about it and we had consent and everyone was free, and and we were all liberated people coming to the container. There will be more sex. There will be more fun, the parties will be more fun, right? And it and it was true, unless you were the kind of dude who needed people to bow down to you and you come into the container, and then you made the container not fun. Yeah. Right? Like it was you, and you bringing in that patriarchal idea because you weren't vulnerable enough to receive the community gift of emotional care, yeah, and you came into the container and said, I have role power and I deserve you to bow down to me. And you, and anytime that happens to a counterculture container, that container will fall unless it stands up to that person and ousts them. And so when you see powerful men getting ousted from counterculture containers that they really want to belong to, then all of a sudden it's the container's fault that emotional labor gets transferred again. It's not my fault I'm Elon Musk and don't have social emotional skills. It's your culture's fault. You woke people to your fault that I'm I can't emotionally regulate or be feel like I'm a human and I feel like I'm an imposter syndrome. Well, my friend, that was your dad. That was patriarchy who enslaved you into this idea that you were never allowed to be vulnerable.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:28

Right? That was and you and men are enslaved, and then I think women are enslaved in this other way in which they're privileged in this kind of ivory tower that men are using a lot of kind of mental energy to build a castle that is safe for their bride or right, their wife or and children. Like so, you and you'll see all these castle defense laws, and so you're you create this container, but just like you say there's a need for men's spaces, there's not really at that level for women who are in those power situations, women's spaces either, right? Like if you if you think of like Melania or Christy Nome, they have to be perfectly beautiful, poised, talk this way. They're so tightly controlled. Yeah, they're not free people. No, so there's this whole mythology: we are a free nation, but even at the top of the power structure, people are not free because they have to be enslaved to obeying the power structure, or they'll lose access to the power structure.

Co-Regulation And Beautiful Oopsies

Crystal 1:40:37

That's fascinating. And that I think for me is one of the most shocking things is to watch women in positions of power have to deploy toxic masculinity to survive. And then what that does over time, like when I entered leadership, most of the women that were in these positions had been there for decades. Yep. So their toxic masculinity was functioning at such a high rate as a survival mechanism that it was being internalized. And and quite a few of them had narcissistic personality disorders on steroids. Oh, yeah. And you you can go back to, you know, some of them had traumatic childhoods that never dealt with the trauma or thought they had, but obviously hadn't. Right. Some of them come from privilege, and they just never had to understand the what any any of it. They always had a protective bubble around them. And so if they had to lean into toxic masculinity to get the job done, to have that role in leadership and meet those metrics, it was socially acceptable to do that. And then they could bifurcate and then head over to a wellness scenario in a yoga studio and talk about you know all the good things that are that are going on in the world, and that that wellness language, and this is something I'm beginning to unpack more and more now, is is the toxicity of the wellness industry and that wellness theater, and what that then allows that type of a leader to do, which is justify their toxicity because they've done the work in quotation marks of showing up on the mat and breathing, but then as soon as that mat's rolled up, that shit's gone. Which is not like yoga, it's all yoga. That's what the sign is on my counter right there. It's all yoga. That's a Ram Das thing. But once I realized that, and I realized it early enough when I was entering corporate America, that it's all yoga. It all is, it has nothing to do with my mat.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:29

Yeah, no, the work is how you're interacting with your fellow humans on the human layer, and whether or not you are contributing to the co-regulation of humanity, right? Like that is the actual yoga. And if you are a good leader, you're co-regulating your team. Yes. Right? Like, and co-regulated teams are more creative, they have more fun, they're productive. And they handle pressure.

Crystal 1:42:56

Yeah. That was one of the beautiful things that I told my team in that situation I was talking about earlier. And we ended up building a program of developers. It was a community builder for developers, and we had an ambassador program, and these were highly skilled Ethereum developers. And the the I told my team from the beginning, I said, we're gonna take my niece's at the time she was like five or six. I was like, we're gonna take her concept, which is called beautiful oopsies. If you make a mistake, I I made a bucket in Slack. I was like, put your beautiful mistake, your beautiful oopsie, right here. And we're just gonna like look at it, laugh at it, find a solution, and and brush it off. And we're gonna move on. Right. So that from the very beginning, they knew they never had to hide a mistake from me. They could like, hey man, I fucked that shit up. I'm like, yeah, you did that was great. Let's not do that again. But hey, next time maybe try this. And I'm like, okay, cool. Right. So then, like the day that we launched the program, I fucked up the wiki Five Ways a Sunday, took down a page, and the thing was launched in two hours. My other team, like, they're they were on traveling, the internet didn't work. All these ambassadors rolled in. I'm like, hey guys, we have this concept called beautiful oopsies, and we're just gonna start there because I did this and he did this and we did this, and everyone just kind of looked around. They've never been given permission to just be like, Oh yeah, I screwed that up.

unknown 1:44:06

Yeah.

Crystal 1:44:06

And then when we got into pressure situations later, and there was one time where I wasn't with the team because they were across seas, and uh, and I the wheels flew off, and then my team was like, Oh yeah, I screwed that up. And then when I got on the phone, because it was like 5 a.m. when it happened, like 9 a.m., they'd already dealt with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:23

Right.

Crystal 1:44:24

And the other team that didn't have that skill set went to HR and it would ended up being a whole thing. Oh yeah, and then I told my team, like, y'all did it right, you did that, you did amazing, and thank you. And then everyone's like, Yeah, that's cool. That empowerment to own a failure is is huge, and Gen Z doesn't have like Gen Z, because we raised them to like get the trophies and everybody wins, and I love that in concept, but in reality, that just sometimes it doesn't work. You have to own a mistake and see it, or else it festers.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:53

Yeah, and and the other thing that happens, which I don't know if you noticed also, is like when you have that beautiful oopsie and your team still accepts you. Yes, what that does for your nervous system, what that does for your sense of belonging. Oh my gosh, I made a mistake and I'm still accepted by my team, that starts building confidence, yes, right, in this real way, and creates more confident people. And I think more confident people want to co-create instead of destroy. Yes, they they want to make instead of consume, they want to be in the world with each other, they can't accept anything else, and I think we undermine that confidence, but it we don't have to, right? Like, and the more don't you want to be on a team where people are more confident with each other? Like, I wouldn't want to work with people who are insecure, yeah. It's not fun.

Crystal 1:45:55

Exactly. And what I find fascinating too is like I'm still close with them, like I still mentor them, and this is you know, three almost well, two years out, but I'm still involved in their lives, and they still are involved in mine. And like, hey, I mean, I did this thing. I'm like, that's awesome. And I still see them. And when I think of like my other colleagues in different jobs, not just this one, but they didn't maintain that connection. And we were like after the fact, like, I'm like, oh, this is a family, that's cool. And afterwards, like, it's a corporation, there's never a family. I'm like, God, that is such a horrible way to just exist every day. Like, I want to know when something's going on in your life, I want to help you support for that. Like, I want to be involved and I want to watch my team grow. I mean, one of the biggest things as a leader, and we're gonna get into this later um in the season about leadership, but one of the best things about being a leader is stepping away and watching your team go. Oh, yeah. Like watching my team's career trajectories right now, I'm like, oh my god, this is beautiful. And watching them run with it, and that's that's the whole thing of leadership. And I think that's one of the things that's really sad to watch toxic leaders never get that.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:02

Yeah, they they never get the juicy, beautiful team that we get out of people. I'm like, I got the same people as you, and I will get something really lovely out of them, and you won't. And I'm like, you missed out on a whole level of humanity, yes, a whole level of care because you're treating them like resources, and you're still spending eight hours a day together, right?

Crystal 1:47:23

Like or in the remote world, you're just constantly connected, like right?

SPEAKER_00 1:47:27

And yeah, it's so strange. And I will say, like, I don't love the family just because America has is full of toxic families.

Crystal 1:47:36

Oh, I didn't look at it that way. I grew up in a very beautiful family, so for me, it's like, let's all be a family, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:42

Yeah, but like, and we and and part of the reason we have these patriarchal systems is because we grew up, it starts at home. The the fact that we're not liberated starts probably from childhood. Yeah and you belong to your parents and you belong to your parents' ego, right? So, like the bit with men's groups and all these places we're talking about, the easiest way to get back to a sense of autonomy, which you know from yoga, is to own what is happening in your body.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:12

Right? And being in touch with it, which includes my nervous system is dysregulated because my job sucks because I'm in a toxic situation, and I should be listening to my body before it causes cancer, before I get really sick.

Crystal 1:48:28

Before I destroy my family because I don't know how to handle my emotions, because my because I am perpetually dysregulated. Like my first week at corporate America, I was on a Zoom call and I watched, I think there was like five or six of us on the call. I watched people spiral again and again in a 45-minute call, and I just come from a gotten a degree in nervous system. I'm like, oh my god, y'all are in your 40s, you've been doing this for decades, and not a single one of you can control your nervous system on a phone call for work. What is happening? Like that to me was such a I was like, I am not in Kansas anymore.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:04

Because nervous system regulation is woke.

Crystal 1:49:08

Well, and these are people that were going to yoga classes.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:11

Like they like, I'm like, what's what's happening? Like that's while consuming Joe Rogan. Probably. Right? So there's this disconnect. On some other people going to yoga classes are going there for physical optimization and to meet women.

Crystal 1:49:26

That's a good point. Right? Well, and these these are women, these are mostly women that were spiraling like that. Yeah. Because the men would just turn the camera off, and like, I'm not participating in this. I'm just gonna turn the camera off and I'm gonna go read a book or play a video game. And then the women are over here like doing the thing. I'm like, what's going on?

SPEAKER_00 1:49:40

Well, because but that's that's how we train women to have power. They're like competing for male attention.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:49

Oh, that's fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:50

Right? Like, that's if you think about it, there's an entire beauty contest run by powerful people like the president that are about women. Competing for male attention.

Pleasure Practice And Unobeyable Joy

Crystal 1:50:02

Oh my god, that's fantastic. I'm making sure the batteries are still on this thing. We can literally go all night. Oh my god, I love this. And just when Monera and I have coffee, these are four-hour coffee. So we just decided to turn the mics on today. So that's how this happened. Sorry, Taylor.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:16

Um you know, but I mean, reclaiming the body that I really, really, truly believe. And reclaiming your relationship, not with sexual pleasure, but just pleasure.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:32

Talk about that more.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:33

Yeah, like you, like if you really, because your body is an instrument. It's it's an ecosystem, it has early warning signs. It is a system that is meant to protect you as you journey through life, right? And and that protection looks in a bunch of different ways depending on how you were raised and all of the traumas you might have had, but also all of the positive experiences that informed your confidence, right? I know we love that trauma lens, but there's also positive lenses. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:03

Great point.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:04

And you know, like a lot of times when people come to these embodiment practices, they come from this Western lens where the monkey mind is because the only thing that matters in Western culture is the monkey mind.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:17

You don't, you don't matter, like you're either a hot body for a short amount of time as a woman, or you are a mind. Yeah, those are the two things that really matter in this culture. And so anytime you can put the mind aside, and not intellectualism aside, but just the constant anxiety of living up to expectations of culture aside, and come into your body and discover what it has to say to you, and discover like wow, it really feels good to breathe. Whatever the I and again, I'm not talking about sexual pleasure. I'm talking about just like what it feels like when sun hits your skin, right? Like the way that wind feels on your body, right? Like really stepping in to understanding that your body and your occupation of space as a being on earth who is in a spot on earth is all that you actually need to do as a human.

Crystal 1:52:23

And you have permission to enjoy it. Yeah. That is one of the things that gets that squeezed out of us is just the permission to be in your body. Yeah. And to experience the world around you and not be thinking about XYZ that's coming, and da-da-da-da-da-da.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:40

Yeah, and and so, like, I often with like American meditators or folks who are really trying to come into an embodiment pro process, I like the noting process. And instead of like noting just what was happening in your body, only look for pleasure right at the beginning. Just the way, because we've been trained to look for pain, we've been trained to look for you're not doing it right. You're right, like all the ways that we've been trained to criticize, critique, dismantle, deconstruct. We need to untrain ourselves about our own body, right? We don't need to disdestroy our own body, we don't need to critique our own body. We actually need to come into a positive relationship with a body, and then that will liberate the mind. So, what we have in America is a lot of people who have liberated minds, but there's no rooting, yoking that mind to the embodied liberation, because if you were truly liberated, you could co-regulate. If you were truly liberated, you can say no to authority. If you were truly liberated, you don't have to bootlick for power.

Crystal 1:53:55

I mean, we're not gonna go down this rabbit hole, but you just tapped into the whole deep act choper and Epstein right there. I mean, on the one hand, he's saying this, and on the other hand, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:54:08

Yeah, because it's all a mental game for them. And I I like that was my issue with Naropa professors, was it felt like some part of academia, like we're studying this esoteric religion, but we don't really believe it. There's like that same distance between leadership and labor, between mystical, non-logical, experiential knowledge and academia.

Crystal 1:54:38

That's fascinating. Because I I actually got very lucky in what I studied at Naroba. We studied very different things, and my professors embodied it well.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:45

And but you had one that did it.

Crystal 1:54:47

Let's not go there.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:49

Um you could tell though, but yeah, my point is you could tell.

Crystal 1:54:52

Yeah. Okay. So we're gonna wrap it up. Okay. Um we've got just a little bit of battery left. So that is the sign from the universe to stick a fork in it. Um I guess how do I want to wrap this up? So we have danced through so many gorgeous conversations.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:12

Yep.

Crystal 1:55:13

What is okay? First, is there anything you want to shill? Any projects you're getting ready to move into, or anything you want to talk about? And then we'll wrap it.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:23

I mean, my next project is about figuring out how to co-regulate a city.

Crystal 1:55:30

Oh my god, I love that.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:32

And it's a big city, it's a big city, and it's also through the power of community theater and partnerships and capacity building. So it's taking everything I've learned and then trying to put it in service of the greater good. Um, and so I'm really excited because the team is also, they're like super versed in spiral dynamics and integral theory, and they want holocracy, and we're we're deeply versed in what it means to create good working conditions as well as good art conditions, as well as good consumer conditions, and so and we recognize there is a deep need, if we're gonna address mental loneliness, there's a deep need for people to belong without restrictions.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:22

That's beautiful, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:56:24

And so, and what has patriarchy been? Why do we all feel so disconnected? Why do we all feel like imposters? Because our belonging is always conditional. And so, and but does belonging have to be? If you know anything about the queer community or any of your countercultures, sometimes belonging is not conditional, right? Like when it's really juicy, belonging is conditional only on breaking violence, right? Like if you're violent towards me, okay, cool, our our our sense of belonging together has ended, right? And the violence ended in it, right? So, but but other than that, people don't have a place where they can belong to because we don't have third spaces, so it's like churches, you can belong to the government, you can belong to your job, but you really don't belong at work, right? Like, because you always have to pretend. So there's no place where you to have belonging, and often in family structures, there's not places there either. So we're saying, yes, we're saying we would like you to belong, we want to play with you, we want to teach Gen Z how to play again, and so that's kind of what we're my next project is is like how do we build containers of belonging? And if I can create belonging in the worst job ever, and I did, I think I could create it anywhere, right? Like, and so that I think that's the power of playing with the systems, is like you don't get to define how I interact with your system. I'm gonna find joy anyway, right? And that's a revolutionary act because I'm embodied, I find pleasure in my body, I find pleasure in my mind, I find pleasure in my company, and you can't tell me what to do, right? Like, I'm a liberated being, like I'm unobeyable.

Crystal 1:58:13

I'm so bummed you're moving away, but I am so grateful that you are gonna do that mission. And so we are going to, Taylor and I are going to come to your next destination after we'll give it like six months, and then we're gonna come record another human layer with your team, and we'll just like have we're we're just gonna go on the ground and record things and see this beautiful container that you're building in action and just watch it unfold.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:38

I mean, you helped build the first test container at psychedelic sciences.

Crystal 1:58:41

So my god, that was beautiful. I know.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:45

That's part two, and then also King might come back. So hold on.

Crystal 1:58:51

So we're gonna end it on that now, because that is a beautiful note. And I don't know when we're gonna publish this. At some point, it'll be out there. So if it's published before Monera or after Monera gets to her next destination, we'll include the links. If not, stay tuned for the next episode. And the next episode with Monera will un unveil the mystery of what she is building. Yay! And thank you so much for doing the hard work, my friend. I'm gonna miss you, but uh, I'm gonna miss you too. But we will bring the mics, and I will no longer have four-hour coffees down the road, but oh well.

SPEAKER_00 1:59:25

No, we're just gonna have like week adventures.

Crystal 1:59:28

Yeah. Which could be way more interesting.

SPEAKER_00 1:59:31

Yeah, for sure.

Crystal 1:59:34

All right, thank you all for staying with us for this beautiful, long, lovely riff. And till next time.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:42

Bye. Bye.