Koa Beck on Quitting Self-Optimization

Koa Beck made it to the top of her field: she was the was the editor-in-chief of Jezebel and before that was the executive editor at Vogue.com with many other coveted roles held along the way, before she left to write a book that guaranteed she'd never be employable by those institutions ever again. But this isn't the story of how Koa managed that transition--it's not her quitting story. It's the story of white feminism and the lie that self-optimization will save us from a system designed to crush us. If we want a different future, there's a lot of things we're going to have to quit individually and collectively; this is a conversation about that. 

About Koa Beck:

KOA BECK is the author of the acclaimed nonfiction book White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind (Simon & Schuster, January 2021), praised by feminist writers Gloria Steinem and Rebecca Traister. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of Jezebel, the executive editor of Vogue.com, and the senior features editor at MarieClaire.com. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the cofounder of Black Lives Matter, describes Koa’s work as “intellectually smart and emotionally intelligent” while the Boston Globe has deemed her “a perceptive cultural critic” and “a visionary.” She is currently working on her second book and lives in Los Angeles with her wife. 

Find Koa at her website, Koabeck.com or follow her on Instagram @koabeck

Quitted is listener-supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted

Host: Holly Whitaker, https://hollywhitaker.substack.com

Host: Emily McDowell, https://emilyonlife.com

Producer: Cathleen Kisich

Sound engineering + edits: Adam Day, https://www.adamdayphotography.com/

Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Africa Brooke Part 2: Knowing Who You Are So You Know How To Act

We’re back with the second installment of Africa Brooke. In this episode we dive into how Africa quit self-sabotaging and censoring and found her own voice and the self-confidence to say the things a lot of people are afraid to say. (Hint: it’s sobriety). We go deep on how identifying our values are the key to helping us remember who we are, what we care about, what we stand for, so we can quit trying to stand for everythingin the news cycle, speaking up about every issue just because everyone else is, and get real with what we personally want to prioritize and put our energy into—so we can all quit self-censoring. Everyone shares their own lists of values, hilarity ensues. 

About Africa Brooke:

Africa Brooke is a globally recognized consultant, coach, speaker, and writer who specializes in helping people move through self-censorship and other forms of self-sabotage. Her work takes a close look at the complexity, mess, and glory that is the human experience, and she makes a strong case for why we need to accept discomfort as an essential part of the growth process. She hosts two podcasts: Beyond the Self & Unfiltered with Africa.

Find Africa on Instagram @africabrooke, listen to her podcast Beyond The Self or at her website, afrciabrooke.com

Quitted is listener-supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted

Host: Holly Whitaker, https://hollywhitaker.substack.com

Host: Emily McDowell, https://emilyonlife.com

Producer: Cathleen Kisich

Sound engineering + edits: Adam Day, https://www.adamdayphotography.com/

Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Africa Brooke and Quitting Self-Censorship

Instagram, and social media, can be an amazing tool for social justice. It can also be an absolute trash fire where nobody listens to each other, everyone is outraged, and there’s an overwhelming pressure to post the right thing at the right time, or have an opinion about everything, and a deep fear of saying the wrong thing by mistake or being misunderstood. This week, we’re talking to Africa Brooke about navigating all this, how to stop self-censoring and self-sabotage (and the relationship between the two), and showing up, both online and in life, in ways that align with our own integrity. 

This is part one of a two part discussion with Africa Brooke. The intro ends, and the interview begins, at 00:20:22

About Africa Brooke:

Africa Brooke is a globally recognized consultant, coach, speaker, and writer who specializes in helping people move through self-censorship and other forms of self-sabotage. Her work takes a close look at the complexity, mess, and glory that is the human experience, and she makes a strong case for why we need to accept discomfort as an essential part of the growth process. She hosts two podcasts: Beyond the Self & Unfiltered with Africa.

Find her on Instagram: @africabrooke

Support us:

Quitted is listener-supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted

Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Sound engineering + edits: Adam Day, https://www.adamdayphotography.com/

Producer: Cathleen Kisich

Host: Holly Whitaker, https://hollywhitaker.substack.com/

Host: Emily McDowell, https://emilyonlife.com

Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon 

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s Quitting Season with Lindsay Crouse

“When the system doesn't historically stand for you, why sacrifice yourself to uphold it?” Today’s guest, Lindsay Crouse, is as close as it gets to a “quitting expert” in her role as writer and producer at The New York Times, and in this episode, we’re talking about some key things she’s learned and observed through her award-winning coverage. When female athletes at the top of their game like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka start saying no, what larger truth does that indicate, and what does it mean for the rest of us? What is the sunk cost fallacy, and how does it make us justify staying in situations we want to leave? What happens when you become a martyr to grit? Why do we celebrate endurance, especially as women, when quitting can actually be self-protection? 

The intro ends, and the interview begins, at 00:16:15.

About Lindsay Crouse:

Lindsay Crouse is a writer and producer in the Opinion section of The New York Times. Drawing on her own experiences as a competitive marathoner, she has spearheaded coverage of women athletes at The Times; the Emmy-nominated video series she produced in 2019, Equal Play, broke news by centering female athletes’ untold experiences and led to widespread reform in women’s sports. Now the Co-Executive Producer of Op-Docs, The Times’s series of short documentaries by independent filmmakers, she has produced more than 300 films, winning four Emmy awards (15 nominations), five Oscar nominations, and two Peabody awards—including the 2022 Oscar nominee “The Queen of Basketball.” She is the author of the forthcoming book

“The Case for Quitting.”

Support us:

Quitted is listener-supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted

Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Sound engineering + edits: Adam Day, https://www.adamdayphotography.com/

Producer: Cathleen Kisich

Host: Holly Whitaker, https://hollywhitaker.substack.com/

Host: Emily McDowell, https://emilyonlife.com

Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Nathalie Dougé Quits Doctoring in the Middle of COVID

Nathalie Dougé always knew she wanted to be a doctor: to help people; to make her family proud; and to advocate for people who looked like her: a first-generation Haitian-American woman from the Bronx. When Covid hit, she was working as a hospitalist in Queens: the epicenter of the pandemic. In this episode, Dr. Nathalie Dougé tells us her story: what it took to become a doctor; what it was like to treat the sickest patients in the early days of Covid; how George Floyd’s murder intersected with what she was going through at work; and, ultimately, the messy, uncertain process of walking away from her calling, her training, and her identity as a physician.

Dr. Dougé was a participant in the award-winning documentary The First Wave, which follows a group of New York City doctors, nurses, and patients for the first four months of the pandemic, as they try desperately to navigate the unknown. You don’t need to have seen The First Wave to listen to this episode, but it’s free on Hulu, and everyone should watch it. We discuss the film in the intro.

The intro ends, and the interview begins, at 00:10:11.

More about The First Wave here: https://films.nationalgeographic.com/the-first-wave

Watch The First Wave on Hulu here: https://www.hulu.com/movie/the-first-wave-5e708670-e586-4a8b-a98c-f5338c4b865a

About Nathalie Dougé, MD:

Nathalie Dougé, MD is a board-certified physician in internal medicine. During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, she served as a hospitalist and assistant professor at a tertiary academic center in Queens, NY. She is one of the participant's in the critically acclaimed 2021 National Geographic documentary film, The First Wave. She has been interviewed and appeared in media outlets, such as Esquire magazine, ABC's Good Morning America and Nightline, Forbes magazine, Amanour & Company on PBS, and MSNBC Politics Nation. She is a board member of the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes Foundation. She lives in Queens, NY and is a doting dog mom to her rescue Mars. She is on IG @ndougemd.

Support us:

Quitted is listener supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted

Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Sound engineering + edits: Adam Day, https://www.adamdayphotography.com/

Producer: Cathleen Kisich

Host: Holly Whitaker, https://hollywhitaker.substack.com/

Host: Emily McDowell, https://emilyonlife.com

Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aki Ito on Hustle Culture & How We Got Here

In white-collar, salaried America, there’s an idea that our jobs are supposed to give our lives meaning. It’s the gospel according to Steve Jobs, who famously said the only way to be truly satisfied is by doing great work. And in many industries, working long hours is a badge of honor. But it wasn’t always this way. Work in America was once viewed as a means to an end, not an end in itself. Up until 1980, salaried Europeans actually worked longer hours than Americans in similar jobs – but today, Americans work ten more weeks per year than Germans do. That is… a lot of hours.

So, uh, what happened? How and why did we get here? And where are we going? This week, we’re talking with business journalist Aki Ito about all this and more.

The intro ends, and the interview begins, at 00:07:50

Aki Ito is a senior correspondent at Insider based in California. She writes features about the economy and the workplace, and she's recently covered everything from the rise of working from home to salary transparency, the Great Resignation, and the history of hustle culture. Aki started her career as an intern at Bloomberg News in Tokyo, and went on to spend a decade at Bloomberg in Tokyo and San Francisco as a reporter, editor, podcast host, and video series host. She grew up in Tokyo and New York, and is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont. You can find her on Twitter at @akiito7.

Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Sound engineering + edits: Adam Day

Producer: Cathleen Kisich

Support us:

Quitted is listener supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted

Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What Is It About Endings?

Quitting is a huge topic, and in this episode, Emily and Holly dive deeper into the angles they most want to talk about. Endings excite Holly and terrify Emily. Why? Holly loves destruction; is she okay? We get into ideas of success and failure and what they are; what “failure porn” is, and the glorification of failure (which doesn’t exist in recovery); how there’s so much guidance for creating and so little around walking away; what happens when you lose your purpose and your passion; do we have one magical assignment?; normalizing and valuing the groundless, hard liminal space before the “comeback;” how and why we don’t talk about death or have rituals for endings; and when our changing makes other people uncomfortable.

Intro Note:

Holly and Emily talk about their shared (and until now, secret) love of ASMR, and we also forget to define what ASMR is. ASMR stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response.” The dictionary calls it “a feeling of well-being combined with a tingling sensation in the scalp and down the back of the neck, as experienced by some people in response to a specific gentle stimulus, often a particular sound.” Mostly people just call it “tingles,” despite the word “tingles” being slightly creepy.

The intro ends, and the episode begins, at 00:06:04

Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Sound engineering + edits: Adam Day

Producer: Cathleen Kisich

Support us:

Quitted is listener supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted

Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Black Diamond Quitter (Part Two)

This is the second half of our two-part episode with bestselling author and extremely wise person Elizabeth Gilbert. (If you missed part one, we aired it last week.) Liz is known for quitting many things, and for having a strong inner compass. She is also a person who Emily and Holly look to for guidance in their own lives (WWLGD?), and this conversation is filled with insight, permission, and surprises. It felt like an exhale to record it; we hope it feels that way to hear it.

In this episode, we talk about a post Liz wrote many years ago about the difference between quitting and surrendering, and how her point of view has changed; the freedom and clarity that come from learning to have our own backs and take loving care of ourselves; the things Liz has quit that feel the most important to her (not the ones the general public knows about!); the liberation to be found in the idea that we don’t have to be special; what “purpose anxiety” is; and what happens when we let go of the idea of having to know our life’s purpose (or even having one!). 

The intro ends, and the interview begins, at 15:42. 

After polling our Patreon community, we’re experimenting with different lengths and styles of intros to our episodes. This one is long and chatty; Holly talks about being terrible at flirting and using Mandy Patinkin as a dating service; Emily talks about her love for punishing rain at the Oregon coast; if you just want to listen to Liz, she comes in at 15:42.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of City of Girls, Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love, as well as several other internationally bestselling books. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is (not) on Instagram at @elizabeth_gilbert_writer.

Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Sound engineering + edits: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Producer: Cathleen Kisich

Support us:

Quitted is listener supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted.

Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Black Diamond Quitter (Part One)

This week and next week, we’re thrilled to have bestselling author and extremely wise person Elizabeth Gilbert on the show. Liz is known for quitting many things, and for having a strong inner compass. She is also a person who Emily and Holly look to for guidance in their own lives (WWLGD?), and this conversation is filled with insight, permission, and surprises. It felt like an exhale to record it; we hope it feels that way to hear it.

In this episode, we talk about why Liz quit social media 14 months ago (it’s probably not what you think) and what that process has been like; the dream career Liz walked away from in order to go write Eat, Pray, Love, and how she made that decision; how Liz’s talent for quitting is, in part, related to her talent for getting herself in trouble; and how to tell the difference between an inner knowing and an emotion-based impulse. 

The intro ends, and the interview begins, at 00:11:22.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of City of Girls, Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love, as well as several other internationally bestselling books. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is (not) on Instagram at @elizabeth_gilbert_writer.

Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Sound engineering + edits: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Producer: Cathleen Kisich

Support us:

Quitted is listener supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted

Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Holly Whitaker Reports From the Liminal Space

What happens when you have to quit the thing you thought you’d never quit? Welcome to the Holly Episode: Who is Quitted co-host Holly Whitaker, how did she get here, and why does she want to talk about quitting stuff? 

Holly is publicly known for quitting things: drinking, drugs, bulimia. Her book is called Quit Like A Woman. What we’re saying is: quitting has been a key part of Holly’s narrative. And getting sober sent her down the path to what became her purpose: creating a personalized recovery model as an alternative to the two existing options of rehab or AA. 

In this episode, Holly shares the story of building her company, Tempest, in the best way she knew how; and then, of leaving it, partially by choice and partially not. What do you do when you have to quit the thing you thought you’d never quit? How do you deal when your identity isn’t your identity anymore, and there’s nothing to replace it with? What comes with an extended stay in the in-between space? Why do we need to turn “failure” into “success” in order for it to be worthy? 2021 was the hardest, worst year of Holly’s life. But also, at the same time, it was beautiful?

About Holly Whitaker: Holly is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol. Her work has been featured in Vogue, The New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and many others. Holly's work focuses on understanding the intersections of systems, culture, and individual experience and identity through the lens of addiction and recovery. She lives in upstate New York. She writes a weekly newsletter called Recovering, and is on Instagram @holly.

Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Sound engineering + edits: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Producer: Cathleen Kisich

Support us:

Quitted is listener-supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted

Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.