The Curious Middle

Elizabeth Rusch is the award-winning author of more than 20 books and more than a hundred articles in publications such as The New York Times, Smithsonian, and Harper's. Elizabeth also speaks at schools and organizations across the country about writing, teen activism, science heroes, and the state of our democracy.

In our conversation, we discuss Elizabeth’s new book, You Call This Democracy, a dive into the shortcomings in our political system and possible solutions for each problem. We also talk about the unique ways Elizabeth is creating interactive digital content to share her research with a wider audience, including the 50 State Report Card and Flash Course on Democracy.

Elizabeth shares how her passion for public policy began when she was just a kid and how she has built a career that lets her explore her endless curiosity, share knowledge, and inspire countless young people.  

Elizabeth has a bachelors in economics from Duke University, a masters in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and has served as a Jacob K. Javits Fellow in the U.S. Senate.

Writer, editor, co-founder of Today I noticed and friend of the podcast Willow Older joins as a co-host for this special conversation.

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We often hear that volunteering can lead you to places that will change your life. For Jessica Goudeau, volunteering led to starting a nonprofit that provided supplemental income for Burmese refugee artisans for seven years and then to writing After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America, which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice book.

Jessica has a PHD n literature from the University of Texas and has spent over 10 years working with refugees in Austin. In our conversation, we discuss how Jessica's friendships with "Mu Naw" and "Hasna" , inspired her to devote two years to writing her first book, and the ways her experiences helping refugees has transformed her life. We also discuss how the sentiment towards towards refugee resettlement in the USA has changed, and a few ways the refugee resettlement program is evolving.

Jessica's book recommendations:

Kao Kalia Yang, Somewhere in the Unknown World

Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

Ahmed Badr, While the Earth Sleeps We Travel

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Displaced

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We've all been through heartache and heartbreak, but Amy Chan has made a career of it. Amy is the founder of Renew Breakup Bootcamp, a retreat that takes a scientific and spiritual approach to healing the heart. If you or someone you know is reeling from the pain of a breakup, attending one of these workshops can be transformative. During Covid, the bootcamps are going strong with online sessions. Amy was a guest on the podcast in episode 100 to discuss her career path and how she started Renew Breakup Bootcamp.

In our latest conversation, Amy joins us to discuss her new book, Breakup Bootcamp. Amy shares highlights from her book and we discuss some of the book's themes such as recognizing love addiction, tools for getting over breakups and understanding our love compass. Amy shares how the many breaks ups she endured gave her an understanding of common dating patterns and the different ways we can sabotage ourselves in love or get stuck in suffering during breakups. Amy has poured all the research and learnings from her career and fours years of break up bootcamps into this must-read book on dealing with dating and breakups.

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Gianna Stanley made a huge career pivot when she realized her post college dream job for a boutique marketing and consulting agency was not the the path she wanted for the rest of her career. Instead of staying stuck and unhappy, Gianna made a bold move to leave her job, and then another bold move by deciding to go to the Institute of Culinary Education in NYC. The decision to go to culinary school actually came out of Gianna's volunteering at the St Francis House Day shelter. After leaving her job, Gianna increased her volunteer hours at the shelter and soon realized the work of cooking and feeding people gave her the joy and purpose she was craving.

At the Institute of Culinary Education, Gianna fully embraced the intensity of the cooking program and took advantage of various internships and opportunities to learn. After finishing the program, Gianna got an externship at Blue Hill and then accepted a position as a private chef along with a side job as a chef with a pop-up event company called The Underground Kitchen. In addition to her cooking jobs, Covid led Gianna to another side gig as a food photographer. In our conversation, Gianna shares her career story and how she started and grew her food photography business. If you have a career switch on your mind or are curious about starting a new side hustle, you will love learning how Gianna has followed her heart to a create her own recipe for a meaningful career.

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Jung Lee’s vision, creativity and work ethic has made her one of the top event architects in the world. Jung understands how to create breathtakingly unique events that are personalized to the smallest detail. In our conversation, Jung shares what drive her creativity, the roots of her work ethic, and walks us through the evolution of her portfolio career. In addition to managing Fête, Jung’s full service event planning business, Jung also opened Jung Lee NY, a home decor store in NYC, and recently launched Slowdance, a bridal registry.

Jung credits much of her success and work ethic to her upbringing and family.  Jung was born in South Korea, raised in New York City and lived a lifestyle centered around hard work and business. Jung worked in her family food stores while growing up, allowing her to gain invaluable experience in running a business, alongside exposure to designing stores. Today,  Jung is managing her thriving businesses and planning future projects such as a boutique hotel and hosting events on her property in Connecticut. Listen to hear how Jung created multiple dream jobs for herself through the force of her creativity and relentless work values.

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Have you ever thought about what it's like to work as a financial advisor? Kristin O'Keeffe Merrick, a money expert with 19 years of professional experience in the financial industry, is a financial advisor at her family-run firm, O'Keeffe Financial Partners. Kristin shares her career path story and why more women should consider financial advising as a career option. We discuss the challenges Kristin faced when transitioning to a financial advisor role and advice on how to get started in this field.

We also discuss the project Kristin started with her close friend, Lindsay Shookus, Women Work F#cking Hard, a networking group that is bringing together women with the goal of helping women business owners. Kristin also writes about money for leading publications such as Forbes, NY Magazine and she is a frequent guest on Today Show, the NBC Nightly News and Yahoo Finance Kristin was recently named as 2020 Badass 50 by InStyle Magazine.

Quilt is a new type of social media platform for real time audio connections. Quilt users can choose to join a variety of audio discussions topics such as “How do I raise capital” or “What to cook for dinner tonight”. Quilt was designed to be a safe and supportive community for women to build connections and create meaningful conversations.

In this conversation, Ashley Sumner shares the career and life path that led her to the idea for Quilt. Before starting Quilt, Ashley spent 12 year in community building including roles at Wanderlust and NeueHouse. If you are curious how someone without a technical background can start an app, Ashley shares how she found her technical co-founder and grew the app, including making some major pivots during Covid. 

Try using Quilt

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Grief Warrior was born out of Leslie Barber's tragic personal experience—the sudden death of her husband, Steve, at 46 years old. This life-changing event, and the grief Leslie has since endured, led her to found Grief Warrior. The company is dedicated to changing how individuals, companies, and our society at large thinks about and handles grief.

Grief Warrior is both a mission and a movement. What began as a thoughtful gift box for grievers has evolved into a comprehensive selection of offerings including a training series for managers and HR, a Grief Squad crisis response team, 1:1 coaching and counseling, digital courses, and keynote presentations.

In this conversation, Leslie shares why it's so important for leaders to learn how to be compassionate, empathetic, and supportive during an employee's most difficult time. Such efforts include learning what we shouldn't say to someone who's grieving. (For example, never start a sentence with "At least …" or suggest that, "God needed another angel.") Leslie points out that mastering such so-called "soft" skills to support grievers can directly improve things like productivity, morale, and retention. In other words, learning how to help people "feel human at work" (as one Grief Warrior participant put it), is fundamentally good for business.

With an impressive NPS score of 85, it's clear that Grief Warrior's services are effective—and essential. Leslie explains how she has grown Grief Warrior to a team of 20 and how she's continuing to expand her business. As she tells us about her mission to become the "Brene Brown of grief," Leslie says, "We can't make grief better, but maybe we can make it less awful."

Willow Older, a friend of the podcast, is a co-host on this episode. Willow is writer, editor, and co-founder of the must-follow Instagram account called Today I Noticed (@today.i.noticed).

Jenny Rustemeyer, a writer and producer with Peg Leg Films, shares her career path story and how she ended up as a documentary film producer. Jenny has produced This Mountain Life, The Clean Bin Project, and Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story which won multiple festival awards and took home the Leo for Best Feature Length Documentary. If you want to learn and be entertained at the same time without being overwhelmed, Jenny's films are infused with humor and information about a variety of environmental issues. When you want to watch a documentary but are not ready for a heavy dose of reality, Jenny's films are a perfect blend of documentary style information combined with reality based storytelling. In our conversation, Jenny shares how her film partnership with her husband, Grant Baldwin, evolved, and how they have turned their love for each other and the environment into entertaining, thought provoking films. Add these films to your must watch queue today!

Topics Discussed:

• Clean Bin Project
• Just Eat It
• Chris Jordan's art
• How Jenny made her first and second films: funding, filming distribution
• The problem of food waste

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Esther Wojcicki joins I want Her Job for a third time to discuss her latest project, Tract.app, a new student directed online resource for peer to peer learning where teenagers create content for children 8+. 

The Tract leaning pathways contain courses that your kids will actually want to learn. Courses such as The Science and Ethics of Junk Food Engineering, How Cheetahs Run as Fast as a Car, What does it take to become a comic book artist, What Makes a Great Soccer Player, Pokémon Plant & Animal Biology are created by teenagers and have a project based approach. This learning community supports Esther’s core belief in giving kids 20% of their time to independently pursue their interests.

Esther Wojcicki has experienced tremendous success as a mother and a teacher. Each of her daughters have impressive career achievements. Daughter Susan Wojcicki, is the CEO of YouTube, Janet Wojcicki, is a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco; and Anne Wokcicki is the founder and CEO of genetic testing company 23andMe.

Esther has been squarely at the center of Silicon Valley for her entire career as an influential, deeply loved and respected teacher. Thousands of students who went through the journalism program Esther created at Palo Alto High School (and later on to pivotal roles in the tech industry and others) often consider the experience life-changing both for the work they did, and for the respect, autonomy and the bar set by Esther.

Given her wisdom and experience as a mother and teacher, we spoke with Esther in May 2020, in episode 117, about her thoughts on opportunities for the K-12 education system to evolve throughout the COVID-19 crisis. As Esther shared in our conversation, the current education system is operating at a model that is 100 years old. Esther shared ideas for modernizing education through a hybrid model that encourages students to practice creativity, while also spending a portion of their time on projects they are interested in pursuing. Esther shared tips for parents on how to inspire younger, and older, students during homeschooling. The new Tract.app is a perfect extension of Esther’s goals to help students thrive. 

Once you listen to episode #117, we recommend you go back and download episode #96, recorded in 2019. In that conversation Esther shared the guiding principles she has used to raise her wildly successful daughters, as well as empower students through her journalism program. We discussed Esther’s best-selling book, How To Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons For Radical Results, and the parenting philosophy Esther uses called TRICK: trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness. 

If you want to be a part of the Tract.app pilot group, sign up with the code “WOJSPECIAL”  and receive free access for a year. As a. Member of the pilot group, you will be asked to offer your feedback on the tract.app and courses.

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