Episode 22: Transcript
"I'm never going to do that again, where I don't say exactly what I mean." - with Elisa Camahort Page
Magda: The other thing is, it's Monday morning here in Natick, Massachusetts. Every Monday is Leaf Blower Day, but there are none happening today.
Doug: For the same reason class is cancelled.
Magda: Because of ghosts?
Doug: Yes.
Magda: Hungarian class is cancelled because it's All Saints Day in Hungary, which is a national, it's a bank holiday and everything, I guess.
Doug: Right, well I do think we should pursue the idea that the leaf blowers are all scared of ghosts and that's why they're taking the day off.
Magda: That would be pretty funny. Maybe they are, you know.
Doug: Is Halloween going to be a big thing at your house? Are you going to get a lot of candy traffic?
Magda: I don't know. Mike said last year he got like, in the teens, number of kids, like 15.
Doug: Candy traffic is way down here.
Magda: I think that it's the rise of “trunk or treat” as a thing.
Doug: Yeah, the whole process is conveniently truncated to like, costume candy, got it. It's very transactional, very quick, you're in and out in 45 minutes.
Magda: What I miss is when we lived in New York City and there was the kids parade. At 4 o'clock on Halloween day, all the kids who were within striking distance would show up at the park and there would be a parade walking around the square. Then you'd make like two or three loops and people from local buildings and businesses and stuff would come out and would hand out candy to the kids and it was just that to me was really wonderful. The kids got to show off their costumes, they got candy. You know, it was really like people finding their other people.
Doug: Right, but when we got here we had a great thing going because I love walking around with the kids and I don't dig giving out candy all that much. And you’re the opposite. So you got to stay in your house and give out candy, and I got to walk around with the boys in their costumes.
Magda: Do you remember the broom corn lady?
Doug: Oh, of course! “Dad, what is this?”
Magda: Okay, so it was the first year that we lived in Ann Arbor.
Doug: And we got to the house, which made a point of never tending the lawn. It was a natural growth front lawn. Everything was about three feet high.
Magda: And some friends of mine who lived in the same neighborhood had reported on Facebook that their kids had come home and said there was a tree handing out corn. And they're like, “what's going on?” And then you showed up with the kids back at my house and you're like, “well, this is the most Ann Arbor thing ever.”
Doug: It was just the most surreal thing just because where do you start with that? What benefit could it possibly give?
Magda: Okay, so it was a lady who had dressed up as a tree. And instead of handing out candy, or quarters or pennies, or even toothbrushes, she was handing out sprigs of what's called broom corn. And you know, when you go by those like, those like colonial tourism places, and they hand out the old fashioned things, or you can buy an old-fashioned broom that's made out of sticks and then like stuff that looks kind of like wheat. It turns out that stuff that kind of looks like wheat that makes the bristles is called broom corn. It's a form of corn. It looks like wheat. It's ornamental. You can't eat it. But she was handing out these sprigs with seeds of the broom corn that was stapled to a little thing that said, save this over the winter and plant it next spring and then you'll be able to grow it and make your own broom. And it's like, hey, just what a six year old loves, a broom and keep track of seeds.
Doug: Yes, because every parent knows that the two best things to a six-year-old are long-term planning and cleaning up after yourself.
Magda: All right, so we talked this week to Elisa Camahort-Page, and she was one of the very, very, very earliest bloggers and she was a political blogger and some dudes basically were like, oh, girls can't hang in the blogging world, which is utterly ridiculous.
Doug: We have since learned that is very much the opposite.
Magda: She was introduced to two other women who were also bloggers and who had also been told that same line about women not being able to blog well. And so they started this conference called BlogHer, and it sold out their first year and then just became a huge juggernaut. It was the conference for women in blogging. So she has just so much knowledge of the period when blogs were huge, of what happened to them, of which direction they went in. I know that you and I were just so in the world of parent blogging, and it was very interesting to me when we were talking to her about these other blogging areas.
Doug: Yeah, well that's what predated parent blogging was stuff like Gawker and the whole sense of media was being disrupted in a very particular way and parent blogging was just a very small arm of it at the time. BlogHer was all about women's success in media and business. And what I was really happy about was I met her a couple of times, clearly, because I'd spoken at BlogHer a couple of times, but she really wanted to talk about what her 50s had been like. I just love how she is just, she shoots from the hip because she's like, “we're not taking this anymore. I was told my 50s had to be X and boy, they were totally Y. And I'm going to tell you why they were Y.”
Magda: It was kind of the executive summary of this entire podcast.
Doug: Right, and even when I was programming the conference, I always wanted to give people an opportunity to speak about something they weren't normally known for. So when someone who is a coach, and an entrepreneur, and a writer, and a speaker, and is very knowledgeable about all those things, can just have a chinwag about like, “goddammit these 50s, holy shit.” You know, that's the best stuff for me. Whenever that happens and whenever someone's willing to come on and talk about stuff that they don't normally get a chance to talk about, that's the jam for me. I really love that. So I'm really grateful she did that.
Magda: Yeah, I am too. When we booked her as a guest, I kind of was a little bit worried that it was going to be a little bit too inside baseball with the blogging thing. You know, because I think like if you were a blogger, wow, that took over your entire life. Her entire business at the time was about blogging. You know, people who didn't blog sometimes didn't care and certainly don't care now. But I thought this is a very approachable episode for people our age.
Doug: Well, we should have more Mondays When Hungarian is Cancelled.
Magda: Nincs magyaróra.
Doug: Yeah, you wrote that to me this morning as if I'm supposed to know what that means.
Magda: Look, I've been taking Hungarian for three years, so you should at least learn some basic phrases. So, nincs means there is not.
Doug: Yes….
Magda: And magyar is Hungarian, and ora means either hour or class, so magyar ora is Hungarian class, so “nincs magyaróra.”
Doug: Well, please accept this in the context of the moment, and with all due respect that I have nincs interest in this conversation.
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Doug: Also, Magda, I don't know if you were on, I forget if you were on, but yeah, her name is pronounced “Eh-LEE-sa.”.
Magda: I was going to ask that because there are a lot of different spellings and a lot of different pronunciations.
Elisa Camahort Page: “Elisa,” yeah.
Doug: Well, yeah, in the time that we had intersected, I'd never had the opportunity to address her directly. We just kind of said, “hi, hey, how are you?”
Magda: Well, I mean, I think that's one big thing about the blogging age was that people knew intimate details of other people, but either didn't know their real names or had no idea how their names were actually pronounced.
Doug: Well, that's a greater theme of like false intimacy, you know, the way it was really cool and surreal.
Elisa: You know, there's a woman who came to my wedding who I've known in real life for more than 20 years, and she pronounces my first name wrong. And I got used to sort of answering to a lot of variations on my name. And then we weren't we weren't that close for a while. Like it's like we would run into each other, we knew each other. And so I let it go. And then once you've let it go for a certain amount of time, you can't like 10 years later after they've been to your wedding, be like, “Oh, you know what? You've been saying my first name wrong all these years.” And every time we would be in a space together, I would try to introduce myself to other people. And like, some people cannot hear how my name is pronounced. They just cannot hear it. It's Elisa, which to me is so easy. It's Lisa with an “Eh” in front of it. You know, they know intellectually that's what it's supposed to be, but they will call me something else.
Magda: It's the same with Magda. There are people who cannot hear the difference between Magda and Magda.
Elisa: Oh, interesting.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: Yeah. And just Doug just kind of sits there.
Magda: Yeah. You know, “a dull slate gray.” I don't know if anybody mispronounces that.
Doug: Thanks a lot, Pork Roast.
Magda: I moved on from pork roast. I don't know what Mike's last name means. But I love that it's only five letters and that it starts with a Z. That's cool.
Elisa: I would not have minded changing my last name. As you can see, I have affixed it with no hyphen, but Camahort is an extremely unusual name. Most, you know, you run into someone named Camahort, they probably are related to me in some way. And I was really the only Camahort with any internet juice back when I got married, which is now 16 years ago. And meanwhile, “page” is the most generic word on the internet because everything is a page. And the thing I will say is that sure, patriarchy, but you know, Camahort, it's also patriarchy. It's my dad's name. So it's either you're the property of your dad until you become the property of your husband. They're both patriarchal traditions. It's interesting because my dad had his mother's maiden name affixed to the end, as is done in most Spanish-speaking cultures. But yeah, there are other Elisa Pages in the world, but there's no other Elisa Camahort, except my great-grandmother in the Philippines, who's on the internet because at some point the Philippines put all of their legal casework online, and she was sued by her husband's siblings after he died because she was a wanton woman who had had an affair, and so they didn't think she should inherit anything. I mean, this is a whole series, and she's the other Elisa Camahort.
Doug: Oh, my God. We're going to talk to you for like eight podcast episodes. This is great.
Elisa: You know, when you live this long, you got a lot of stories.
Doug: Right, but this is the back story already. I'm hooked. I'm there. There's also the issue of pronunciation, right? I think it's important that you and your brother were the first generation to pronounce it correctly.
Magda: I mean, okay, so there are others across the United States. It wasn't just like my little family, but the pronunciation got changed and the spelling stayed, which is kind of silly because the spelling is the problem. I think that CS combination is difficult for people. And so people who've known me from elementary school and high school call me one pronunciation and everybody else calls me the other.
Elisa: I think it's true of my BlogHer co-founder, Jory, too. I think she grew up outside Chicago, and I believe she said that for a while her parents pronounced it Desjardins or something like that.
Doug: Oh, God.
Elisa: Right. And of course, the proper French pronunciation is Desjardins, you know, which is so much prettier, too, but no offense.
Doug: Right. Absolutely. Desjardins. Desjardins.
Elisa: I hope I'm not having a false memory there, but I'm pretty sure she wrote that.
Doug: Oh, but you sound like a tourist in Paris talking about the Champs Elysees.
Elisa: Which way to Desjardins?
Doug: Yeah. Well, and in the interest of time, we could just talk about our etymologies forever. Yes. But I want to say you'll will notice in Friday Flames this week Magda Zarin anagrams to “amazing rad.”
Magda: That's nice.
Doug: Okay. You're not impressed by that? See, this is why we're not married anymore, because she doesn't enjoy geek dopey stuff like this.
But I wanted to thank you for coming on to talk to us, Elisa. I want to thank you for BlogHer, just for the role that played in my life as a blogger, and later as a conference organizer. I first I wanted to tell you that I began, you know, dad blogging when our son was 15 months old. I'd just been laid off from a job. And I started reading these women who had started blogging. And then I saw in 2005, they were all hanging out together. And I thought, I really want to meet these people. And so sure enough, in 2006, I made it out and it was transformative.
Elisa: Oh, awesome. Thank you so much for saying so.
Doug: I made it to seven or eight of them, spoke at several of them. But I've always wanted to know, mostly, I mean, it's not hard to discern what your motivations were to start it.
Elisa: Yeah.
Doug: But how the three of you came together, you and Jory and Lisa, and how this three-headed partnership came to be, how you found your roles. And then when it finally came to be in 2005, what that must have been like after all that prep.
Elisa: What's interesting about Lisa, Jory, and me is that we didn't know each other. We weren't friends. We weren't former colleagues. First, I met Lisa through a mutual friend. And at the time, in late 2004, I was writing a political blog, and she was covering the political conventions in a blog for the LA Times. So we were both talking to him a lot about politics and blogging. And he was like, you know, you got to meet my friend Lisa, you got to meet my friend Elisa. And I think his plan was just to get us talking to one another so we would stop talking to him about politics and blogging. And we met at a restaurant called Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto.
Which if you're from this area, I mean, it's not surprising at all that a company might be born at Coupa Cafe. And I always thought it was auspicious that I saw Michelle Pfeiffer leaving Coupa Cafe as I was arriving because she and her family live in Woodside, which is not far from Palo Alto. And I'm a total Michelle Pfeiffer stan and she was just, you know, she has a ray of light following her around.
We didn't really cook up a company. What happened is that we were talking about a lot of conversations that were happening in the zeitgeist around blogging, one of which was about a post that had been written by a very, very prominent male political blogger saying, “Where are all the women who blog?” And it was a rhetorical question because his answer in the column to follow was that women couldn't take the rough and tumble world of political blogging and stand up to being challenged, blah, blah, blah. It was like the worst. And we were just complaining about this, that, and the other thing. And the whole environment in late 2004 was they had just elected Congress and and it was still only like 20% women and all sorts of things. Carly Fiorina had just gotten pushed out of HP.
So there were very, very few women CEOs. So Lisa said, you know, I was thinking, you know, what if we did, what if someone did like a tech conference or a blog conference where all the experts and speakers just happened to be women? Do you think anyone would be interested in that? And I said, Oh, I would totally go to that. And then I said the fateful words, “why don't we just do that?” and she said okay and that was it. Now then we started to like work on it. Neither of us had produced an event before and we were like, “oh, this is gonna be a lot of work you know,” and I had met Jory sitting next to her at a blog business
blogging summit that was more about the business, potential business of blogging. And we connected because we were sitting in this session room next to each other and she and I were the only ones taking notes in a notebook and everyone else had their laptops, their heads buried in the laptop. And so we were like, haha, it's kind of ironic to be here at this blogging conference and be like Luddites with our paper notebooks.
And we just talked for like 45 minutes. But you know, sometimes you just meet someone and 45 minutes is all you need to know. They're cool. They're smart. We're on the same wavelength. We had a vibe. So when Lisa and I were like, Oh, we hadn't even found a venue yet. And we need someone else to help. And Jory lived in the East Bay. I lived in the South Bay and Lisa lived coastside, which for Bay Area people will know that that's like we were in three different countries, basically. So I called up Jory and said, “Hey, I'm working on this thing. Do you want to pitch in?
Do you want to help?” She was like, sure. And she asked us first thing, she's like, how are you going to pay for this? And Lisa and I were like, well, we're going to charge people $99, you know, we want it to be accessible, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, so are you planning to have, like, AV projectors, are you planning to have microphones? She had worked for a conference producer. She wasn’t on the event management side, but she had seen a very big conference in action. And she’s like, are you going to have any food, are you going to have internet, are you going to have, like, all these things? She was trying to, like, get a sense of did we even kind of get what we were budgeting for. And we were like, “we wanted to have all of that.” And she’s like, Um, you need my help. Like, you need to actually have sponsors. If all you’re going to charge is 99 dollars, you need sponsors. And so that’s how we came together. We weren’t a company. That conference was 120 days after that coffee with Lisa. And it was only after the first conference, which sold out and got all this kind of disproportionate attention, mostly because a couple of prominent male bloggers said we were sexist. So that just got us. Yeah, yeah, it was awesome.
Doug: Yeah, it was always like, thank you very much.
Elisa: Yeah, thank you. That's awesome. So it was after that that we sat in Lisa's kitchen and said, there's so much pent up interest and demand here because all these women showed up thinking they were the only ones, the only ones who had found this way to express themselves, the only ones who had found a sort of outlet for what they were going through, and the only ones who were thinking about how could I do more than this? All those people showed up and weren't really sure what they were going to find, but what they found was a community of other people who were thinking like that, who were using that as an outlet, who were expressing themselves, and for some of them who were wishing they could figure out a way to contribute to their livelihood doing this because they felt good at it and they felt like it was something that had value.
You know, at the time there wasn't really anybody there to validate anyone doing this. There were models for people who were super big already, but there was no model for the average blogger who wanted to grow what they were doing but weren't there yet. There wasn't really a model for them. And we were like, all this micro influence put together is mega influence. And I will say, once we decided to form a company, we hired a lawyer and did an LLC, we hired a bookkeeper, an accountant to do our like, we took that stuff seriously from the beginning, which I think is often the downfall of a lot of companies that kind of grow out of this kind of experience is that they try and DIY the stuff you shouldn't DIY.
And we were like, nope, let's not DIY that stuff. And I think it served us well from there.
Doug: So you were thinking that big that soon.
Elisa: Yes, after the first conference, we were like, first, we knew we wanted to launch a website. We wanted to promote people's work and give exposure. And then we knew we didn't want to be a pink and purple lady silo on the internet. We wanted to talk about tech and career and money and politics and news. And we didn't want to be like a lifestyle only. We wanted to be lifestyle and all the other stuff that women are thinking about, and then we launched the ad network within six months.
We had a little beta group of 30 people, and then we opened it up wider at the next blogger conference, which was in July of 2006.
Doug: That's when I got to, yeah, and I'd heard of, scuttlebutt was this had already gotten much bigger than the first one.
Elisa: Yeah, it probably doubled in size from the first to the second. And yeah, we basically thought that other women's media companies were just being patronizing and dictatorial about what we should be interested in. And yeah, we used to joke, but not a joke, that what we were really looking for was world domination. So here's the thing, our timing was perfect. We were the ones who jumped in and said, well, let's just do it.
Even though we, none of the three of us were like famous bloggers and there were by then already some famous bloggers, you know, for sure.
And then we had all worked in startups where we had seen things go wrong. Cause we had just come out of–people might not remember, but the dot com boom and then the dot com bust and the bottom of that was in 2003. And then we're launching in the middle of 2005. So we'd seen a lot of mistakes get made and lots of things we didn't want to replicate about how, let's face it, mostly male-dominated tech and media companies that we had all worked in, how they were run. And so we just wanted to do it differently.
Doug: Okay, here's a quick sidebar. Is there a plaque in that restaurant where the three of you met to hatch this company?
Elisa: No.
Doug: The reason I ask is Alexis Ohanian is a UVA graduate, and he talks, he tells the story of how he bought up Reddit in that Waffle House in Charlottesville. And there is an actual plaque in that booth.
Elisa: No way. It moved. It doesn't exist in that space anymore. So there's no plaque, sadly. And the first venue, Tech Mart, where we did the first conference has closed. So there's no opportunity for a plaque to be there either.
Doug: See, now this is going to be part of the theme when we talk about, you know, what was created 10 years ago and what remains of that now and what our options are to try and regenerate that kind of enthusiasm and momentum just because of how isolated we've become and fragmented we've become.
Elisa: Yeah, you know, there was no social media then, right? It was blogging. There was some online community. My first experience of online community was Yahoo Groups. YouTube started right around the same time we did. Facebook was existing, but just for college students.
And Twitter was another year and a half away. It was a very zeitgeisty time, and then as the social media started to explode, the thing about social media is that you can be super creative in social media. I actually enjoyed the challenge of creating the perfect 140-character tweet, and how many ways could I compress what I wanted to say to its very essence.
Magda: I thought that was awesome. I loved that.
Elisa: But blogging was really about creation in a different way. And that's hard to replicate these days.
Doug: I love conversations like this with people like you who have the long view about this was just 20 years ago, when you think about where it was, and you were actually, the decision to have internet at your conference was a consideration.
Elisa: Yes, yes. And they didn't know how to do it, by the way, like the internet, the first two years of BlogHers sucked for two different reasons, both of which being about these venues didn't really know how to facilitate awesome internet for a moving population across a venue.
So the first year, this is just totally nerding out, but like the first year we had 300 attendees, we sold out the venue and we had told them we would have 300 attendees. But they had provisioned for 300 attendees across the venue. When we were going to be 300 attendees at once in the main room and then 300 attendees at once over here in the breakouts. So they only really provisioned 50%. The next year, we had told them we were going to have 600 or 650 attendees, but they had not counted on the ubiquity of everyone wanting to be on at the same time.
That's so funny. Funny.
Magda: Well, do you remember when technology was leading us, right?
Like the first time you used a word processor, the first time you used something that was object-oriented, stuff like that, right? It was like, we hadn't imagined this stuff could exist. The first time you went on a bulletin board, right? Like there were guys, all guys, in my high school class who were hosting bulletin boards out of a computer in their bedrooms, right? But most people didn't know that. And so they'd be introduced to it and be like, whoa. And, you know, I got an email address that first year I went to college and all this kind of stuff. But then at a certain point it flipped and consumer demand was leading and the technology couldn't catch up to it. And I remember I had some job where I had to do web conferences and WebEx just could not do what I wanted it to do. And I remember being super frustrated and it seems like the hotel connectivity problem was like another example of that.Like you had this idea of exactly what you needed and it just didn't occur to you that they wouldn't be able to provide it because why would they not be able to provide it?
Elisa: Yeah. It used to be so expensive to get internet for a conference, used to be so expensive. Now they are all just, it's built in and provisioned. The other thing I will say is that culturally I saw a real change happen with social media because the companies that started blogging, the Flickers, the Blogger, Six Apart, if you remember them, they did Google Type and TypePad. Those were all founded by male-female duo founders. In each case, they were originally a couple. And I think there was an innate sense of community building in a diverse environment that came with having a diverse founding group.
When you started to have companies like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, when it went public, I mean public to everyone being able to use it, Instagram, all of those were founded by all male founding teams.
And I think culturally, they didn't inhabit the same space as women did in the world. So they didn't anticipate the issues that could happen in, you know, these kinds of environments, which are kind of free-for-alls. They didn't see the same need for community. And worst of all, they didn't believe the people who started to tell them what was happening in their spaces. Or if they believed them, they didn't want to think it was their problem to handle. And by then, because they didn't build it into their model, it would have been an expensive problem for them to handle.
And their response was sort of like, “Well, I don't see that. Like, no one's coming to me saying horrible, sexually violent things to me. Like, that must just be so anomalous.” And when you speak about being isolated and disaggregated from one another and sort of separated instead of brought together, I always say I was one of those original digital utopians. All I could see was the promise, and it’s was going to break down barriers and that was my big dream. Like you’re going to hear from feet on the street all over the world what’s happening where they really are, and they’ll break down barriers. And what we didn’t see is we would carry the things that keep us apart in really life, we were just going to carry them right online, and if we weren’t careful they would separate us just like they do in the real world.
Doug: If we were to graph your perception of digital utopia. Would you want a pretty consistent rise throughout your tenure at BlogHer and how your standing rose when people learned to take you seriously when you were influencing 100 million people, 100 million women?
Elisa: My perception of the ability to have a digital utopia did not last as long as BlogHer lasted because we saw what was happening to women in our network, in our community. And in fact, one of our women employees was stalked and harassed and threatened on Twitter. And they did like literally nothing about it. They didn't respond to her, they didn't respond to me. And I knew people there. They didn't respond to her local law enforcement. I'm just like, we're fucked. If we can't do something about this kind of behavior, because we're saying this is the speech that must be protected. I'm not on Twitter anymore. I finally took my account private and stopped engaging. And I think Mellon Husk, as I like to call him, you know, Twitter was bad before he came on board. Like it wasn't, it was long ago.
Magda: Well, if Twitter hadn't been bad, he wouldn't A, have wanted it and B, been able to get it.
Elisa: So I got off it years ago because I was just being harassed. I, you know, I had some good times on Twitter. I definitely did, but you know, it's, it's RIP Twitter, you know, but that I think is this abdication of responsibility. And I always quote Anil Dash, who's another OG dude and Web 2.0 who said, “if your site is full of assholes, it's your fault.” We used to do a research study every year on what platforms women used. Women were the majority user of most social media platforms. Women were the reason for these billion dollar valuations that we as bloggers couldn't get because we were women doing a womany thing, and except for two platforms that women shunned and that was YouTube and Reddit, and that's because those places were cesspools and full of misogyny, but I'm sure it's a better place now. My husband loves Reddit. Every now and then I get pulled into it like seeing. When I'm searching for some specific information, there are Reddit threads about everything, but I still can't bring myself to rely on it because I can't forget what it used to be like.
Doug: Well, I remember when they started advertising a bit because they really wanted to attract more advertisers to the site, and their whole thing was, “We've started cleaning it up. It's not nearly as horrible as it was.”
Elisa: And that's such an empowering tagline, “Not nearly as horrible as it was.”
Doug: What a low bar to clear. To your point about digital utopianism because I think when you organize a conference that's trying to reestablish gender roles, you really think you're out there to move the river.
Elisa: And I think we did to a point.
Doug: If you, as you look back on that now, you know, eight, 10 years since that happened, where do you think we're headed with this? I mean, as I think there's been a resurgence, a pushback among our society for the worse. And how do you think now as an entrepreneur, the overall environment has changed and what do you think you can achieve in it?
Elisa: Yeah. You know, on the one hand, I think we created a market, you know, and that eventually became today's influencer society that everyone loves to decry. People forget that people love to decry women bloggers.
Magda: Oh yeah. I 100% agree with you. You created that market. You absolutely created it.
Elisa: There was always a faction of people who were offended by the very idea of what the women in our network did. Always. And people are even more offended now by what influencers, you know, and creators do now. But to me, the way we thought about work and working has been being disrupted over and over for the last 25 years. We had 9/11, then the dot-com bust, then the Great Recession. Then when Silicon Valley started coming back anyway, it was all about the gig economy. No one wants anyone to be an employee anymore. And it's all about concentrating wealth, right? It's all about keeping ownership out of the hands of the people who actually make the product, who actually deliver the service. Now, of course, you've got the pandemic, the lockdown, the Great Resignation, and now you've got people losing their minds about workers being like, “You know what? Fuck all y'all. I don't really want to work the way I used to work.”
And this is why you see all these CEOs being about all of a sudden, even though their workers made their companies continue to tick for three years working at home, overnight, leaving their personal stuff in cubicles thinking they'd be back in two weeks, and not going back for more than two years. Everybody kept doing their job despite people dying around them, getting sick around them, despite the fear, despite the anxiety, despite the uncertainty, and it was global. And the thanks all those workers get is, you aren't really committed if you won't come into the office. And, oh, you aren't really as productive if you won't come into the office. So the trust between employer and employee has been at its breaking point. And it's not just about the pandemic. It dates back 20 years. You know, private companies used to give pensions to do they anymore? No, it's all about bullshit. Yeah, so there's, there's all these reasons. And so that is why people are seeking their own control and agency over their livelihood. And that is why if they can find a way to contribute to their livelihood that doesn't make them dependent on someone who doesn't give a fuck about them anyway, like, have at it.
That is my perspective.
If you wanted this influencer society not to exist, then make working in a more traditional way, more valuable, more future looking so that you aren't looking ahead and wondering, how am I ever going to retire? And so many people don't say, oh, I'm never going to be able to retire. Raise your minimum wage that hasn't been raised in those last 20 fucking years. We are lying in a bed we made by policy, by policy and political decisions.
Doug: Right, and the shareholder culture that's just robbing us all of our dignity.
Magda: And companies principally do not understand that the real legacy of the pandemic is that people finally, the other shoe dropped, and they realized that they could not be treated like shit on a daily basis anymore, that they would rather be unemployed than be subject to all of the crap that these companies were trying to tell us we were lucky to have.
Doug: And I'm actually very glad the two of you are talking about this because Magda does a lot of work in management consulting and making work more family friendly and working with companies in particular. So she gets just as activated as at this as you do. And I could I could go out for a coffee at this point. And you guys can just, I'll record the whole thing.
Elisa: The other thing is, here's what we got a sense of during the lockdown. We got a sense of what it would be like if we had Universal Basic Income and universal health care, right? They increased the amount of unemployment people get, got. If you needed any treatment for COVID, testing or treatment, it was free. No anywhere, no questions asked. You had lots of programs that got homeless people off the streets. I mean, I'm talking about my California, maybe it wasn't the same everywhere, but there were lots of programs and initiatives to feed people, to house people, to give people subsistence income so they would not fall through the cracks, to give people healthcare for the public health emergency that was happening. It gave people some space to see, oh, see life could be like this. Why is life not like this? Life is not like this because of choices that get made about what's important. Yeah, if you've got the promise of trying to become a creator or an influencer who can bolster what you're doing? Like, why wouldn't you do it?
Magda: It's like we've been in this society that thought it was so technological and so amazing. But really, it was just like the bowels of capitalism. Like really, what is the difference between working for one of these dumbass companies that thinks you should be grateful for coming in and having, like, free soda in the refrigerator, and working for Scrooge.
Elisa: I read a book last year by David Gellis called The Man Who Broke Capitalism. And it's about Jack Welch and about how he was really the innovator in constant mass layoffs, the innovator in offshoring and outsourcing, and that he trained up a whole generation of executives that then other companies hired. He kind of tracks the roots of Jack Welch.
Magda:
Wasn't it called “The GE Way” or something like that?
Elisa: Yes, probably. And it really goes to show you that we talk about capitalism a lot. It's our flavor of capitalism. We take our own version of capitalism. His point was that before, GE itself–before Jack Welch was CEO–used to talk about in their annual report, how they took care of their employees and how they took care of their community. And what we see now is a pushback on that with all this pushback on ESG, you know, pushback on diversity. We are in a real reactionary period of time.
Doug: You look at the path of GE, the company in terms of, yeah, what a juggernaut it was and what's happened to it. I mean, it's even stropped out of the Dow, hasn't it?
Magda: Well, okay, so I just want to say that when I was in business school, it was probably 2012, I was in a strategy class, our strategy professor was saying like, sort of, you know, one of the most elementary concepts in business was “Don't be a conglomerate. Have a business.
And if you want to start another business, spin it off, be another business, but don't be a conglomerate because it's not efficient.” And there was a guy in the class who works for GE who said, “well, but GE makes a ton of money and they're a conglomerate.” And the professor just looked him dead in the eyes and said, “Yeah, but they could make a lot more money if they weren't a conglomerate.” And everybody in the class was like, WHOA. Okay.
Doug: You know, it's kind of a shame that, you know, you two women would be just so much more successful if you had a bit more passion.
There's just this lethargy vibe I'm getting off of both of you that I just, I wish you could shake.
Magda: I know.
Doug: Also, I should let you know that I did look up General Electric and Dow, and yes, it was dropped from the Dow in 2018. But more importantly, when I was typing in Dow, Google autofilled with “downfall.”
Elisa: Nice.
Doug: That's kind of how we segue to the present day because now you're an entrepreneur, you're a solo shingle, you're speaking, you're writing, you are a media presence. So when you think about the essence of Elisa CP in this newest iteration, where do you get most animated by and how do you think the best way to fight for the things you stand for exists in this current climate?
Elisa: Well, it's interesting because before we started BlogHer, I was, as I said, a political blogger, but I was also consulting. I left big tech, like corporate tech, and I was consulting with companies who wanted to start blogs. I had a bunch of different blogs about a bunch of different topics. And on all of them, I would have a blog role of my own blogs, including the political one. And people used to say to me, aren't you afraid you'll lose half your potential customer base? Because I was blogging for a political party. It was, like, quite partisan. And I would say at the time, like, oh, if anybody wouldn't work with me on marketing and blogging and online community because they don't agree with my politics, it's best we don't work together. Like, that's fine. The other thing I would say is, listen, I should be so lucky as like 100% of people would work with me if only it weren't for my politics. Like, how about being clear about who I am and what my values are actually galvanize some people to work with me because they don't vibe. Like, that's how I chose to look at it.
When we started BlogHer, though, and when we decided we were going to cover politics, you know, we wanted to be omnipartisan. We wanted to have room for all reasonable voices who would stay within our community guidelines. I understood that it would be very hard for someone who didn't super know me well, if I went and invited them to come join a panel about politics and told them very earnestly about how we wanted to be omnipartisan, it would be very hard for them if I was still speaking and writing like I did in 2004 to take me seriously. So I found a different way of communicating that was within our community guidelines too, you know, and was very much about ideas and not attacking people. And so I found a different way of communicating around my values and politics. And as I was leaving the company that acquired BlogHer, I went to the CEO of that company a week before the 2016 election to say that I thought I would like to transition to consulting until the next annual conference and then gracefully exit. I had been politically activating, but I had also been sort of very still circumspect and trying not to be so heavily partisan. And when that election happened, I was like, and I knew I was leaving, I was like, fuck it, you know, I'm never going to do that again, where I don't say exactly what I mean, with as much passion as I have, and don't speak as strongly and I don't have to anymore. I can spend the rest of my life doing things that allow me to be super clear and honest.
Now, some good habits of communicating that way throughout all the years of blogger have stuck with me. So I'm never going to go back to maybe some of the ways I was a partisan hack. But like I still try to be really mindful about how I'm communicating, but it's really important to me to be able to speak out. I think our country has been at a precipice for the last eight years and we need people to be clear and I will be clear. And that means that I've gone kind of in and out. I've worked full time, you know, for early stage startups a couple of times since I left that company in 2017. I've consulted and coached and each time I've said to them, look, this is who I am. You can look at my podcast and my newsletter and here's where I write about things. And like, I'm not going to really stop doing that. That's a beautiful thing.
If we’re talking about midlife, one of the advantages of midlife is that, and I found it to be an advantage of going through a pretty shitty perimenopause experience is that I was so depleted by my perimenopause experience throughout the first half of my 50s that I was done by like three o'clock in the afternoon, I'd be like wiped. It turned out I had no iron, I had no B12, and I had, you know, because I was bleeding so fucking much, right? And it really made me think about energy management. Like, what am I expending my energy on? And if I only have so much energy on this day, like it better be doing stuff that I really feel committed to and is important. Intellectual me, you know, my conscious self knows that I don't have to be liked by everybody and I am not for everybody and that that's okay.
Magda: One of the gifts of perimenopause for me is that I have, you know, because I know that I'm a people pleaser too, but I've always thought like, Oh, I don't have to be liked. What I realized was I do like to be liked by the people I like. And so it felt like it was very easy to just sort of jettison everybody else.
Doug: You want to be liked on your own terms.
Elisa: Yeah, absolutely.
Doug: That's it. Because if you're a pleaser, you're not liked on your own terms.
Elisa: You're a doormat.
Magda: I also started realizing that I didn't trust people who were actual people pleasers, and that I didn't want people to feel that way about me.
Elisa: That's interesting.
Magda: People who were really pleasing were just saying what they needed to say to feel like they were getting approval by other people. So I couldn't trust that that was what they really thought.
Doug: So did I understand correctly that you referred to perimenopause in the past tense? Are you mostly through the woods?
Elisa: Yes, I'm done. Listen, no one warned me. Actually, Doug, I would be really interested in whether men get sold this bill of goods. Women get sold this bill of goods that, oh, when you are like in your forties and your fifties and you can't see me, everyone, but I am flouncing my hair and like...
Doug: She is. For the record, I will corroborate that she has gone full runway model.
Elisa: That's right. “Forties are fabulous. The fifties are fabulous. You have no more fucks to give and that makes life awesome.” Sure. That's one element of it, but I have asked forever, what is the evolutionary purpose that there are so many different possible symptoms that there's a different combination in every woman? And so it takes a long time to coalesce and realize, “Oh, that's what's happening here.”
I was seeing my gynecologist and my primary care, and no one was connecting the dots that the reason I had this complete, utter fatigue was because I was completely lacking in B12 and iron, and no one was connecting that to the gynecological issues, and we could have all resolved this a lot sooner if we had. I don't think people really talk about it enough, but as soon as I would talk to any woman who was past 45, they'd be like, oh, I thought that was just me. I couldn't tell what was wrong with me. So that was the whole first half of my 50s. I didn't hit menopause until I was 58. And I was like, the average age women do is 52. And I'm like, what is going on? Why is this happening? This is not acceptable. Unacceptable.
Doug: So then how did you react when you got the first hot flash at 58?
Elisa: So I don't get hot flashes.
Doug: Oh, okay. And living in the Bay Area, you already carry around eight different garments at any moment of the day anyway.
Elisa: Exactly. So it's interesting that I asked my mom what her menopause was like, and she didn't remember what it was like. She didn't remember it being a big deal. And I was like, I did not have kids.
So this was like your one job with me is to be able to guide me on this.
You know, I don't need any parenting advice. The other thing I think people don't really warn you about is when you get to the age where your parents need care and you are in some ways parenting your parents. And that's been like the second half of my 50s. That is a different kind of like, it's just mentally and emotionally really challenging. And I don't think people talk about it at all.
I'm so surprised when I bring it up how many people I know who are having the exact same issues. And sometimes it's cognitive issues.
Sometimes it's physical issues. But so many people you get to a certain age. And if I guess you're lucky enough that your parents are alive, my husband, you know, his dad died when he was like in his 20s. And his mom died almost 20 years ago. So I guess I had no either. So I had no model either with him. Like he didn't have aging parents and all of these things have a tremendous impact on your ability to work and your ability to focus on your ability to stay on stable ground yourself. So imagine like there's all this shit going down in your life, you know, and you're not really planning for it. Now you've got to actually also stay on top of all this shit going down in someone else's life.
Doug: And so much happens, you're under emotional duress. There are very quick deadlines to meet. Often things come very unexpectedly and very abruptly.
Elisa: And the really bad thing is that I've been relatively, again, knock on wood, been a relatively healthy adult. I finally had my gallbladder out last year. It's the first time I ever had-
Doug: Hey, congratulations.
Elisa: Thank you. It's the first time I ever had had an IV, let alone surgery.
So I just really hadn't dealt with our healthcare system. Let me just say that the last couple of years, being my mom's representative to try and deal with healthcare things, it's unbelievable how you get treated as a customer of healthcare services.
Magda: It's crushing.
Elisa: It's so inefficient. I can't tell you the wasted calls, the wasted messages, the people who are supposed to be in a position to know things who just don't tell you, you know, go call this number and ask for that. And then they'll be like, “well, did they give you this?” And I'm like, no. ‘’ “Well, you need that.” And I'm like, well, shouldn't they have known I need that? And they're like, “I don't know, they should have.” And then you go back to them. And then shit, like, we are like supposedly a first world country.
Doug: What about the siblings? We talked to
and they each talked about the pros and cons of each but what's your situation and how has that affected your relationship?
Elisa: I have a younger sister and she and I are very tight and we live about a mile and a half from one another and in fact in March we got our mom to move to a community that's like smack dab between us, because we were doing the lion's share of the support. My sister has a traditional full-time, super high-level job, but still, the pandemic has been, in a way, a godsend. She has never yet gone back to working full-time in an office, so she has the ability, if she needs to, to step in and help. This all kind of came to light because my stepdad died about almost exactly, oh, I missed the anniversary. It was five days ago, two years. And I think they were really a self-contained unit. That's the other thing that, we weren't like, I know people who talk to their mom every day or talk to their dad every day or see them. Like we weren't that family. Like we certainly saw each other. Although during the pandemic, we would like drop things on the doorstep and then stand on the sidewalk and wave, you know, but we were, I wasn't a talk-to-my-mom-every-day person before.
My mom and stepdad were super active and engaged and happy. And I think they just you know, they had a lot going on and it wasn't all revolving around their kids who were all grown adults. So when he died, a lot of things came to light about her health. And also, I just think it left this huge void. So my stepsister lost her dad and her own mother is alive and battling cancer and she works full time. And they start wanting her to come back into the office, even though the rest of her team is remote and her office is an hour commute. So she's got a lot going on. And then my brother lives up in San Francisco and also works full time. And, you know, from everything I hear, boys are kind of useless. Like, you know,
Doug: See, that's our problem. We have two boys, which means when I get old, I'm completely fucked.
Elisa: You're fucked, man.
Doug: Yeah. Has there been a noticeable change since your stepdad passed? I mean, they say once one partner goes, there's a change can be abrupt.
Elisa: That is a really good question because we weren't like totally in their business all the time. We don't really know if they were already covering a little bit. Like if some stuff was already happening, but they kind of... Because he did everything. He did everything around the house.
He did everything around their finances. He did everything. He was a school teacher and he retired at like 57, but my mom was a badass executive woman who worked until she was 70. And so he had just taken over doing everything domestically.
Doug: Why am I not surprised by that, by the way? What a role model. You talked about it. I've seen how you mentioned her as a mentor many times.
Elisa: Yes, she was my role model. When we were first going to the neurologist, he's like, everything you're describing could be about grief and depression, but we won't, we don't really know. And so then you try, you're dealing with medication and you're trying to see if you can address that. And then as it gets a little worse, then there become other kind of, you can do an MRI, you can see certain things are happening. She's still sad. They were married 37 years. They were very, very joined at the hip.
She still brings him up and is just mad and sad that he's gone. That was too soon. That was too young. He was fighting cancer off and on for more than a decade and he always beat it back until he didn't.
Doug: And how has your relationship with your husband been affected by this? I mean, he doesn't have his parents, so he can be an asset in a way, I guess. His attentions are probably less divided than they might be.
Elisa: None of the sibling spouses are really directly doing a lot. And also my mom, it's not like she wants everybody in her business all the time. So she kind of, of course she wants everyone to call and she wants to feel that people, you know, she's not being forgotten and all that. But she also doesn't like that we're taking care of her.
Doug: She's a recovering mover and a shaker and now she's...
Elisa: Well, that's why it's incredibly frustrating for her. So when she was living back in the two-story house I grew up in after my stepdad died, and we were super concerned about that, she agreed to have someone come in and help her like four hours a day, three days a week. And I used to say, she can't decide whether this person is a friend or an employee of hers. She didn't quite grok. Like they're there to help you do things that are more difficult, but she would want to either like sit around and chat with them or have very specific, like a scope of work.
a look.
So she finally just recently agreed to have a person again, and they just started three weeks ago. And she's already saying things like, “I just don't know if I have enough tasks.” And I'm like, it's not like you are doing career development and having to make sure that they feel fully subscribed on their bandwidth.
Magda: When I'm old, I would love it if somebody would come in every day, watch Days of Our Lives with me, and talk about Days of Our Lives.
Elisa: See, you're ready. If we could make that happen, you just have to remember this feeling for when you are actually old because it does get very tied up in not wanting to feel weak. And, like, it's very complicated, obviously, and I feel for her that she, you know, there are parts of getting old that suck.
Magda: Yeah. My mom nursed her own mother out. Her mother died at the age of 101.
Elisa: Wow.
Magda: And we had a lot of conversations about like, “don't let me get like this. Remind me of this,” all that kind of stuff. But then, you know, now my mom's there and it's like, I don't know how to say in a loving way, like the you of 10 years ago would be horrified to hear you saying some of these things.
Elisa: I will give my mom this credit. My grandmother lived to be 89. And it all started back when my grandmother was like 79. They basically had told her she needed hip replacement and she didn't want to do it. She said, “Oh, I'm too old to do surgery and I'm too old. And what's the point?
I'm not going to live that much longer. ‘ So she lived another 10 years and she lived in a lot of pain and in her bed and like, yeah. And so my mom actually had her knee replaced the first year of the pandemic. She was 80, I guess, 80. So I say to her all the time, well, at least you, you learned a lesson from grandma and you like, you realize they were suggesting something that could really help you and you did it. Yeah, I mean, I certainly hope someone can remind me of all the things I complained about now.
Doug: You mean you don't keep a complaint journal?
Elisa: I do not keep a complaint journal, but you know, maybe I should start. Maybe that would get it off my chest.
Doug: You know, that would be a hell of a Substack.
Magda: One of the things with Aunt Hazel, my great, great aunt, was that she didn't trust the people in the assisted living that she was at. And she, I don't know what happened, but she needed to go to physical therapy and she refused. She thought they were trying to trick her somehow. And so I remember my mother saying to me, “if this ever happens to me, you need to make sure that I remember that I wanted to trust the people.” But now I'm thinking like, Okay, a couple weeks ago when our younger son was here, we watched the Back to the Future movies. And a big part of those movies was leaving notes, they would write a note to themselves to be passed through. And I'm wondering if I could just leave a note, some sort of notebook that is like, “trust these people, these are the people you trust.”
Doug: But now you're talking more like Memento, right? Remember that movie Memento?
Elisa: Memento, yeah. On a lighter note, it's like 50 first dates, right?
Doug: Yes.
Elisa: Isn't that the one where Drew Barrymore has amnesia and every morning she gets up and watches the video so she can be reminded what her life is like?
Doug: Yeah.
Magda: Yeah. I'm still a newlywed, so every day I wake up and I'm like, oh my God, I'm still married to Mike. This is awesome.
Doug: It's so annoying.
Elisa: Haven't you heard the fifties are fabulous?
Doug: Oh my fabulous. Yes. We're all just Molly Shannon kicking up in our pantsuits.
Magda: I don't think that I got anything about how culturally the forties were great, which was good because my forties sucked. I hit perimenopause hard, like hitting a brick wall the July after I turned 42.
Like I can pinpoint the month when it was different. And, but one of my friends just went through menopause and she was 58. Oh, God, what if it lasts forever? So I have to say I'm not gonna be able to say how my 50s were until I know when this is all over.
Elisa: Yeah, I will say that…Shit, I lost my train of thought again.
Doug: Midlife, man.
Elisa: Midlife, man. Oh, the “50s are fabulous” thing. I think it's all just a graduation of the first you have to be a girl boss, then you have to be a badass. Then you have to be an inspirational, fabulous 50s person. Like, maybe I just run in these women's circles where we think we need to like pump each other up all the time to be, can I live? Can I just live? Like, I don't have to be a boss or badass or fabulous. I can just make it through this thing they call life.
Magda: In my 40s, I was getting a lot of pressure to be Wine Mom.
Doug: Oh, right.
Magda: Like there was a lot of like, “Oh, this is when your kids are horrible.”
Doug: This question occurred to me, and you can shut this down right away if you choose to. I'm sure there are people listening to this who might be curious about this, but we've talked a lot about about parents and kids and you don't have kids. So when you think about aging, what do you think about in terms of your later years? I mean, are you going to rely more on the network of your siblings or do you just content to just figure it out as you go along?
Elisa: We moved into this house nine years ago and I definitely thought of it as a, how is this to be a house to get old in? So it's one story wide hallways. Like actually lately I've been thinking our backyard's pretty big, so I've been looking at ADUs and it's two blocks off of a little downtown that has shops and restaurants. So I've thought of that. Listen, we didn't even do a will and trust until last year. After my stepdad died, they had that and it was still kind of my
Doug: That's how it works, right? You have this traumatic event and you're like, oh shit, there's a lot of stuff I haven't done.
Elisa: So that's kind of on my list to research right now. I have seen the model of my grandmother having a live-in person who just took care of her. And I've seen the model of my mom living in a retirement community. Right now she's in independent living, but she could graduate to assisted living or memory care living. You know, they have it all in one place. Probably if I have to, I'll just move like a mile down the road and go live in this community. I guess I should make better friends with my nieces and nephews. I think that's the moral of this story.
Doug: Well, I think a lot of people listen to our podcast and we kind of bring to light things that are on the backest of burners just because there's so much in the present we have to deal with. And something as mundane as a will, something as mundane as, is your life insurance in order? I mean, this is the kind of stuff and when we talk about the type of planning, there's a common anxiety that you didn't get to it as soon as you should have.
Elisa: So Chris recently left a job he'd been at for 16 years at a very, very large fruit-based tech company. And he's trying to decide, you know, should he really retire or what? And so he's, he's a couple of years younger than me. So I saw a friend of mine who's like one week younger than him. She posted she's retiring at the end of this year. And I was, I messaged her and I was like, “okay, I need to know how you made this decision. What does it look like? How's this happening?" And so she said, buy me a drink, I will tell you everything. And she did. She told me how much money she had in, you know, how many assets she had saved up.
She told me what her financial advisor said that if she did certain things with that money, it would be like making X amount a year for the rest of her life. And you know, they use actuary tables to project. Her husband's quite a bit older. So, you know, When will they take social security? And how long is he likely to live? And how long is she likely to live? And when do you start Medicare? And when all this stuff that I, of course, 10 years ago, I never thought about one iota. And so she introduced me to her advisor, this advisor did a 30 minute free call with us, I gave her all our assets. And then they also asked you, how much do you spend in a year?
So I like added up every possible thing we could spend, I was going for like the worst case scenario. So I just I gave her this really big number and said, this is what we spend every year. This is what we have. And she had some really interesting things to say, which is like, you should take this spending number you say you want to have, get about seven years worth of that and start putting it in all these stair-stepped investments, like three months CDs, six months, nine months, 12 months. And there's pretty high yields right now, right? We sold a condo this year and then our CPA told us how much tax we were going to owe on it, which was a lot because we rented it long enough that it was no longer, we're not getting any married couple discount on the capital gains, like it's a rental property. We sold it in April of this year, so the money, the taxes on it aren't due till April of next year. So I took basically all that tax amount and I set it aside in these CDs and they're making over 5%. And so, so anyway, so I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself that I set aside the money. I can't touch it. I can't spend it. It's going to make a nice little chunk of interest change, and then I'll transfer it back in and pay our taxes. It's basically taking that approach to your whole future spending to sort of parcel out when you'll need to have what kind of funds available
It's a whole long thing, but I thought it was a big deal to get our will and trust done. And then this year I was like, what do we have to do? Because I'm turning 60 in April, which my sister and I were talking about it going, this seems very, very inappropriate. I don't know how this happened. It's not okay. I had a job that I had ended last year, and I had a very small little 401k. And I was like, I have to roll it over into something I've decided where to put it. And then I'm like, No, I don't because it just turned 59 and a half. And I could just ask for a check. Yeah, I did. I'm waiting for it to show up. And I'm like, why am I even messing with this?
Doug: Pay me. There's the motto for that for our time.
Elisa: Yeah, I'm messing with this.
Doug: Just pay me.
Magda: I've mentioned this on previous episodes, but there was some study that showed that people who were 73 years old were happier than any other age of people.
Elisa: I can see that, you know, because, uh, 73 is before the inevitable degradation.
Magda: Yes. But you're like, you're probably out of the woods with dealing with your parents. Your kids, if you have them are launched, you're post-career, so you've made whatever piece with that, right?
Like, it completely makes sense to me. But I find that very hopeful.
Doug: I gotta say, I watched Colbert last night, and Talking Heads were the guests, and they're all in their 70s, and they looked happy as hell.
Magda: Well, David Byrne's just happy that his suit is in style again.
Elisa: I saw his show, American Utopia, a couple years ago in New York.
and listen, if I can have that energy. He was amazing. He's the young one, too. He's just 71 and the rest of them are all like 73, 74. He's the youngest, he's the kid. I looked it up as soon as I saw them. I'm like I gotta find out how old these people are. I spend half my time with my phone as we watch TV going, how old is so-and-so? With Siri, you know, pressing the button for Siri. How old is so-and-so? How old is so-and-so?
Who did I see yesterday that was 66? And I was like, oh, Reba McEntire.
I was watching The Voice. Reba McEntire is 66. And I'm like, that's only seven years older than me. What the fuck? I think, you know.
Magda:
I feel like hasn't Reba McEntire been like 50 forever? She seems like she was 50, like 40 years ago.
Doug: Okay, but we're all still 20 years younger than the president. So then whoever the president is gonna be. It’s like eesh. Well, I want to be mindful of time here. Actually I have a book club to get to and talk about the nature of God and faith and The Awakened Brain. It's about how the idea of spirituality actually biologically staves off depression. And I am just wondering, because I'm, you know, I don't practice, I don't think about a spiritual life at all. But, you know, we're going to have this debate about whether choosing to believe there's an order to this chaos, you know, is that a placebo? Or is that something that's that?
Elisa: I mean, I can't help but think it's just self delusion, you know, but if it works, you know, I was my mom is a Holocaust survivor, but she was she was a baby. I mean, my her parents were really the
Doug: Another podcast episode. Jesus, you buried the lead. I want to talk about the Filipino background. I want to talk about you are a tapestry.
Elisa: So my mom's a Holocaust survivor. As a baby, my dad immigrated here from the Philippines, that's right, to go to grad school. But why did I bring that up? See, this is just happening to me today. I'm tired.
Doug: We're talking about spirituality and faith.
Elisa: Yeah. So my dad was a lapsed Catholic. So he was a scientist.
You know, he got his Ph.D. in chemical engineering or something.
He was a science guy. And some of his siblings, they all moved out here after he got married to my mom, got citizenship. He brought his parents and all his siblings except one over here. And some of them are super Catholic, Catholic, Catholic, Catholic. But my dad was not. And my mom,
they were never really a religious family. Even her growing up, they were not really super religious Jews. I always like to say growing up, I had a Christmas tree, I had a Hanukkah menorah, and I had an Easter egg basket. That was my religious upbringing. I kind of don't get religion.
I just didn't have it, and I don't kind of get it. I feel like that puts the onus on me. Everyone talks all the time about living in the present. Well, yeah, because now's what we've got, like what we can do about our future. That's what we've got. There's no payoff at the end that's going to make it all worthwhile. So you better feel pretty good about what you're doing right now. I'm like, I'm not religious, nor did I ever want to be, or do I ever feel like I'm missing something? And now I've offended probably a bunch of people, but that's just, you know.
Doug: So now as we wind down the conversation, where can people find you online to become even more offended by the things you stand for?
Elisa: Do you really want to be offended by me? So my website is ElisaCP.com and I also have one of those bio sites, bio.site slash ElisaCP and that's where you can find the link to my Substack, This Weekish, to my podcast, The Op-ed Page. I am ElisaCP on Threads, Instagram, and TikTok, which are really the only three socials I use anymore. And most of my posts on Facebook are public. And if you're super professional, then you can see me on LinkedIn.
Doug: Well, we discourage professionalism at every turn.
Elisa: I know.
Doug: I was just thinking about, after Heather Armstrong passed, that I met her at BlogHer. Well, the impact she had on my career, because she would link to me and my users would spike. And she's the reason that I met everybody I started setting up Dad 2.0 with. I met her because of you. So thank you.
Elisa: Oh, well, you're so welcome. I mean, I always tell people that people get very hung up on the idea that you need to find your celebrity keynotes because they'll sell a lot of tickets. And in my experience, that is not the case. Only twice in my long career of blogger events, not just the annual, but all the other events, I only saw two people who had a literal direct spike in ticket sales. I'm not saying people didn't look at the program and were motivated. I'm just saying that announcing a single person only moved the needle twice. One was President Obama via satellite doing the welcome in 2012. The other was Heather Armstrong in 2005. And she wasn't a keynote, she was just on a panel about personal blogging. Once we announced she was coming, you just saw the tickets fly.
Doug: I'm just so grateful you made the time to talk to us today. I've wanted to talk to you for a long time. Knowing you as peripherally as I did, I was always very interested in your backstory, and I'm even more intrigued, and I do want to schedule seven more podcasts with you at your soonest convenience. So thank you so much for coming along.
Elisa: All right. That sounds great. That's awesome. It was great to talk to you. Thank you so much for inviting me. It was super fun.
Doug: And listeners, thank you for listening to Episode 22 of When the Flames Go Up with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Douglas Christopher French. Our guest has been Elisa Camahort Page. I just felt the need to keep up. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms where you get your podcasts. You can also find us at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com.
Please subscribe there. You'll get our twice weekly emails. Thanks again for listening. We'll be back next week. Bye bye.
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Magda: 22 episodes and you still don't have a tagline.
Doug: I just don't care. I just, you know, it's just what Elisa was saying.
Live your best life. I can't please people. Thank you and good night and good luck. Okay, we'll do that. Yes.