Without Permission

In Part 2, Arundhati Sridhar and Vaish talk about building community in a world where power is never evenly spread.

Aru grew up being raised by a village in Gujarat, and she says her life has been leading to one thing: building community. We talk about why you have to be a villager to have a village, how the lens of power changes who gets heard, and what it takes to stay in community through loss and disagreement.

And in the last few minutes, Aru asks a question that stuck with me: what if the people with power sought permission from the people they affect? She’d like a world with less permission and more consent.

Part 1 is out now too: The Permission She Inherited and the Kind She Had to Claim.

Arundhati, feminist movement-builder, participatory facilitator, researcher, and fellow podcaster, grew up in a family that had already broken the rules. Her parents were doctors doing pro bono work in the middle of nowhere. Her grandmother lived her entire life seeking permission from the men in her life, and only in her twilight years began to discover what she liked to cook, where she wanted to go and what she really liked.

In Part 1, Aru and Vaish talk about the permission structures we're born into, what it means to stand on the shoulders of generations of work, and why Aru's first reaction to every limit she encounters is actually simple: why not?

Part 2 drops next week.

Before she was a software engineer, Stephanie Page was a model, in retail, and a business grad still figuring out what she wanted to be. In this episode, we talk about what it actually takes to keep reinventing yourself, what she carried with her from every chapter before this one, and how a community built for people breaking into tech helped her find her footing. Stephanie's story is proof that no version of yourself is wasted time, it's all just material for the next leap.

Jaime Waterfield spent years building at the highest levels of tech: leading teams, driving results, and checking every box that was supposed to mean success. Then she hit burnout. Not once. Three times.

In this episode, Jaime and I get into the conversation a lot of women are having quietly: that the skills that got us here won't always get us there. That being good at something doesn't mean it's aligned. That the invisible load is real, the double standard is real, and so is the cost of waiting for permission to lead in a way that actually fits who you are.

We talk about the inner, and environmental, critics that keeps high-achieving women small, the unlearning that had to happen before she could build something of her own, and why radical candor, holding both strength and empathy, isn't a compromise. It's the whole point.

Jaime now runs her own leadership coaching practice supporting women to find clarity, confidence, and a way forward that doesn't require burning out to get there.

This one is for the woman who's performing well and quietly wondering if there's something more aligned on the other side.

Without Permission is a podcast about those who build things on their own terms; outside conventional paths, without waiting for approval. Each episode is a real conversation with someone who figured it out by doing it, not by following a script someone else wrote. New episodes every month.

Nisha has been in my corner for almost 18 years, through cross-continent moves, career pivots, and the kind of life chapters that don't have clean endings. She's also the reason my husband and I found each other in the first place.

In this episode, we talk about what it means to question the systems we take for granted. Nisha has spent her career at the intersection of tech and regulation, and recently that curiosity turned toward datacenters, AI infrastructure, and the environmental cost hiding behind our everyday convenience: water scarcity, "forever chemicals," and the communities in the US and India who are living with the consequences.

We also talk about what it means to grow up as the eldest daughter, the weight of being a "parentified kid," and how she's learned to sit with loneliness instead of running from it. She ends the episode with a line I haven't stopped thinking about: staying true to yourself is your north star. It's the seed you keep watering. The rest is noise.

Without Permission is a podcast about women who build things on their own terms. Nobody gave us a script. We built it anyway.

Without Permission is a podcast about those who build things on their own terms; outside conventional paths, without waiting for approval. Each episode is a real conversation with someone who figured it out by doing it, not by following a script someone else wrote. New episodes every month.

She was sitting at home on a quiet evening. Husband out golfing. Kids away. And she had an idea: a supper club. A way to bring people together around a table.

She sat with it for a moment. And then asked herself: what am I waiting for?

This is the story of Radha, founder of Oakville Supper Club, and the moment she stopped waiting for permission to build something for herself. In this episode, we talk about giving ourselves permission, what our upbringing did and didn't teach us about building, visibility and visibility at different life stages, family support, and why authenticity became her biggest asset.

Radha is the first guest on Without Permission: a podcast about those who build things on their own terms, outside the conventional paths, without a script.

Link to Radha's Supper Club: www.instagram.com/oakvillesupperclub
Follow Without Permission: https://youtu.be/4mGYW4n_pI0?si=N0RfB2arcDdzbwAd

Without Permission is a podcast about those who build things on their own terms; outside conventional paths, without waiting for approval. Each episode is a real conversation with someone who figured it out by doing it, not by following a script someone else wrote. New episodes every month.