Work In Progress: Shannon Watts

Activist and author Shannon Watts has an important message for women - it is not too late — and you are not too old! — to go after what you really want.

The founder of Moms Demand Action is back on the pod with Sophia to chat about the inspiration and message behind her new book, "Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age." Shannon opens up about the turning point in her life, the phone call from Maria Shriver that led to her new book, and the inspirational stories from women living their most authentic lives. 

Plus, real talk from Sophia and Shannon about living with ADHD, Michelle Obama's parenting advice, and the importance of practicing hope . . . especially through the next four years.

"Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age" will be available for purchase on June 17. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome to Work in Progress. Hello,
and welcome back to Work in Progress friends. Today we
are joined by an old friend of the podcast who

(00:21):
is absolutely one of the most inspiring humans that I know,
none other than Shannon Watts, the founder of Mom's Demand Action,
which is the nation's largest grassroots group fighting against gun violence.
She has gathered over ten million women from disparate geographies, backgrounds,

(00:41):
political parties. She is known as a summoner of women's audacity,
and she used Mom's Demand Action not only to fight
for the future of our families and our children, but
also as a field experiment for mobilizing women. She has
figured out what fires us up up and keeps us engaged.

(01:02):
And though she passed the baton of leadership at Mom's
Demand Action to another leader so she could take a
much deserved year off after working seven days a week,
almost twenty four hours a day for eleven straight years
on this, did she take a sabbatical. No, she decided
to write a book. Shannon is here to discuss her
new book, Fired Up, How to turn your Spark into

(01:24):
a flame and come Alive at any age. I can't
wait to hear about the lessons that she's learned, the
gems that she's gleaned, and the way that she sees
women as a bonfire when they gather together, work for community,
and figure out what truly makes them happy. Let's dive

(01:46):
in with Shannon Watts. Hi, my dear, and welcome back
to the show.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
I'm so thrilled to be here with you.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
I'm just so excited we're here in person too. I
feel like you and I have to so often when
we want to be together figure out what city we're
going to overlap in during what month of the year,
and so to get you, I want to squeeze you.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
You're just far in a way that I can squeeze me.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
I will. I'll squeeze you again after we're done. I
know this is a really loaded question these days, But
how are you?

Speaker 2 (02:27):
It is a loaded question. You know, I'm good. I think,
as the famous activist has said, Mariam Cambay, that hope
it is a discipline that's always been my mindset, that
it is very easy to be cynical and therefore disengaged.
If you actually practice hope, if you look around for
the things that are hopeful, yeah, then you can stay

(02:50):
engaged and you can take breaks, but come back to
the work. And I think the next four years is
going to be a discipline, a practice.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yeah, I love that. I think it's a thing I've
been I don't want to say meditating on but really
thinking a lot about and trying to do so consciously
is what it means to hold so many things to
be true at the same time, especially when some of
those things feel oppositional to each other. Things are wonderful

(03:22):
and terrible. There is joy, there is pain. You know
how you can be grateful for your own life inside
the four walls of your home and also really know
that the world around you needs help and figure out
how to give to your point the hope, to both
the joy and the hurting.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Yeah, joy, I think is a really important word. When
I started Moms to Be in Action, we came together
each year, all the volunteer leadership and it was a
weekend for training and lifting up the stories of survivors
and talking about legislation. You know, it was tough stuff,
and we decided to add a dance party at the
end of the weekend, and there was a lot of pushback,

(04:06):
particularly from non survivors, who said like, is this appropriate?
Are we being unserious? It ended up being the most
popular part of that weekend. The lights went off, people
took up their shoes, they got all sweaty, they danced,
and they had joy. What is the point of activism
or life without joy? And so to imagine that we're

(04:28):
going to get through this next four years just bare
knuckling it and still be able to be activists and
it's just not possible. We have to look for joy
and that comes in community, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
And I think that the idea that you have to
bare knuckle it or you're unseerious, particularly for women, is
such a vestige of patriarchy, you know, this thing that
we're meant to suffer. It's why so many women get
so burned out, yes, because we're told our joy makes
us unseerious, unprofessional. And I love the way that, even

(05:03):
in this break that you've taken from Mom's demand, you know,
you're stepping back from running the organization, you've really leaned
into your activism as a woman, having frank conversations about
burnout and joy and aging and life. And it's been
really beautiful to watch you put this sort of energy

(05:27):
and specificity that you poured into an organization and out
into the world for so long into you, and then
by seeing you do it, I think we all feel
we have permission to do it.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
That means a lot to me. I think what I
realized in creating Mom's dem in Action, which was not
only the largest women led nonprofit in the nation with
ten million supporters, but it also became the largest real
life laboratory for what empowers women, what makes them come alive.

(05:58):
I saw this over and over again, and you were
just talking about women and suffering. What I saw so
many times and even in my own life, is that
women are taught to fulfill their obligations and men are
taught to follow their desires. Yes, and what would our
lives be like if the only question we asked ourselves
was what do we want?

Speaker 1 (06:20):
I love that you said that, because it is the
emotional version of what happens to women versus men around money.
If men are taught to chase and fulfill their desires,
they are taught to seek and be poured in to
pour into themselves. If women are taught to fulfill their obligations,
they're taught to give and give and give and give

(06:41):
and give to others. And one of the things that
was the most arresting to me really starting to work
on gender equity in terms of finance, in terms of
access to capital. The work Nia and I do at
the First Women's Bank is the data around how when
women begin to accrue any version of personal wealth it

(07:01):
can be five thousand dollars or five million dollars, they
are approached to become philanthropic donors. And when men begin
accruing any version of personal wealth, they get approached to
invest it. So they get approached to go out and
fulfill and pour into and make more. And women are
asked to give and give and give and give and gift.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
It's so interesting you bring this up because I talk
about this, which is in many ways the bucket of
the passion tex Because women are passionate about something, because
they care about something, they're expected to do it for free.
I am guilty of this me too. I worked at
Mom's Demand Action. I say worked. I was a full
time volunteer for eleven years. I do not take a dime. Yeah,

(07:46):
all the money I made from my book from speeches
all got funneled back into the organization. And I write
about this in the book that we're going to talk about.
And I thought I was being really noble, and maybe
I was actually being a martin. I thought I was
a good girl for doing this, and that no one
could point a finger at me and say, oh, look
at that woman. She's enriching herself because of you know,

(08:09):
gun violence or all the different reasons I had for
why I shouldn't take a salary, and yet all of
the other, mostly men, who were working in the organization
did and it set an example for our volunteers, right
chapter leaders. It's all volunteer work, and so I think
there's a really important conversation to be had about why
do we expect women to put their blood, sweat and

(08:29):
tears into things and not be compensated and that isn't
the case for men.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
Yeah, it's so surreal. You know, we talked about this
because you were one of my first guests in twenty nineteen,
So thank you so much for having a longtime friend
of the podcast. I know that I asked you then
what it would be like if you could spend some
time with your younger self, if you would see yourself
in her, if you think she would be like I

(08:56):
get how I turned into that woman. What does it
feel like now, you know, almost six years later, after
you've been through so many life shifts, when you think
about maybe more than one of the younger versions of
yourself that you carry with the woman you are today,
what would have changed? What's the advice you might give

(09:19):
yourself in college or yourself in middle school from this seat,
at this table, on this day.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
Oh, I love this question. So when we met for
this podcast, you know, five years ago, I was in
a very different place. You know, I still had young
kids or youngish kids who were teens, and I was
kind of figuring out who I was as an activist
and what was next. And here I am now, a
fifty four year old woman who's gone through menopause, who

(09:46):
has grown children. And what is really interesting to me
is that for I interviewed over seventy women for this book,
and when I asked them what they were worried their deathbed,
regret would be almost all of them, maybe one or two,
Almost all of them said to me, I will regret

(10:07):
not having spent more time with my children while pursuing
what was important to me, which is tragic because I
don't think there is a man who would have the
same answer. And now that I'm on the other side
of that fifty four years old, my youngest is twenty four,
I can promise you that my kids have not once
said to me you missed the soccer game in two

(10:29):
thousand and two, or you didn't come to the fifth
showing of my Peter Pan play. What they say is,
we are so incredibly proud of you. We are so
grateful you took us along on your activism journey. You
gave us permission to pursue what is important to us.
I think it's really important for women to remember that
they are human beings before and after their children, and

(10:52):
that you don't want to get to the end of
your life and feel like you didn't burn. You want
to have lived a life that is fulfilling to you,
and that doesn't make you a bad parent. And so
that's who I am right now, trying to tell all
the women who are worried about that, who are fulfilling
their obligations instead of wondering what their desires are, that
you can do all of it.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
And I think it's important to realize not only to
you as an individual outside of your children, your marriage,
your career deserve it, but that you model it for
your kids. Yes, you know. Two of the most profound
parenting lessons I've been given in the last few weeks.

(11:32):
One was on this show and one was at our
home for Easter weekend with some friends. And the person
who came on the show, what an insane sentence, like
we've done some really cool stuff. You know you and
I I know you have these things where you go.
I can't believe what I'm about to say out loud.
When Michelle Obama was on the show two weeks ago.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
I would just open every show with that, right be like, just.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
Engage you missited she was here. She said something to
me when I asked her about, you know, this empty
nest phase which people talk about like it's a bad thing,
And I'm like, you have like a freedom nest.

Speaker 2 (12:06):
You taught them to fly, they flew. What are you
doing in your big nest?

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Now? You know, we're laughing about some things. And she
said that it would be really impossible to talk about
the ways that she learned to mother without lessons from
her own mother, and how her mother said to her
her whole life, I'm not raising babies, I'm raising adults
and empowered her and her brother to feel like they

(12:33):
could have agency, to feel like they were in control
of things, you know, to learn lessons and know that
they were pursuing their adult nests. And then my friend
Genevieve this weekend said, the best thing you can do,
especially for your daughters, is to live a full life
as a woman in front of them. Yes, And so

(12:55):
she was talking about her six year old and how
she makes sure she meditates some of her daughter. She
makes sure to move her body in front of her daughter.
She makes sure to go over her calendar for the
day the night before in front of her daughter, so
her daughter sees her having executive meetings, understands it. On
a Tuesday night, she has a business dinner, but she'll

(13:16):
see her when she gets home. And on Wednesday night
they'll be home together and they'll cook. And she talked
about the balance because she wants her daughter to be
able to do exactly what you're discussing and to always
know that she can not to feel like she's starting
to reclaim her time in her mid forties or in
her mid fifties or in her mid sixties. Event, and

(13:37):
it's such a generational shift because, and I don't say
it critically, my mom made her whole life about me
and my life, and it was a really jarring transition
for her to then have me leave to go to college.
I was going off to learn something, and when I left,
she had to learn a whole new thing too. And

(13:59):
we talk a lot of about out how in our
adulthood together we found a different way of being. And
I just, I don't know. I think it's really profound
what you're talking about and what you're helping encourage other
women to do, because maybe our generation gets to be
the one that helps shift it for our kids.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
What you're talking about is leaving a legacy, and I
don't think we ask women a lot what they want
their legacy to be. We think of legacy as your
name on a hospital or a huge endowment or a foundation,
but it's not. It's simply knowing that you lived a
life that is true to you. And what you're talking
about is the second half of life, which my mother's

(14:40):
generation was not expected to have. You turned forty forty five,
and you were sort of invisible, and you went off
and did whatever until you know the end of your
life that isn't true anymore. I'm fifty four. I feel
like I'm just getting started.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
Well, also, look at your face. You have perfect skin,
enviable hair like and it goes back to that thing
where women and are supposed to be serious or they're
just girly. Yes, I'm like, no way, I'm coming in
with the hair out and the outfit on. I know
all the points of this policy. We're arguing, and we're
going to go lobby in DC and figure out it.

(15:13):
We can do it all. Yes, I just think we
have to give ourselves permission to actually do what we want.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
And to have the courage right and to ask yourself
to check in regularly at all stages of your life.
What am I doing? Is this fulfilling to me? Am
I leaving anything on the table? You know? And I
don't want to get to the end of my life
and feel like I haven't burned. I mean that's the
whole That's the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
Okay. So can I ask you, because you use that
phrase a lot and for people at home, what do
you mean by burned? You want to feel like you
haven't burned? Yes? How do you How did you select
that word? And what's the ethos for you.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
So the metaphor for the book came up because I
was talking about I was at the home of an
author who was helping me figure out my book after
Maria Striver made the generous offer of writing about what
I'd learned about women, which is sort of you know
a lot. How do you boil that down? And this woman,
this author, said to me, you're very fiery, like that
is your personality, that is who you are. And so

(16:13):
fire became the metaphor of the book. And when I
started to think about what is living on fire, it
is it is the ability to see things clearly, two
specific things. What is limiting you and what is calling you?
And there is a very specific formula for that that
I learned in my life, but that I saw women
come into Mom's men action and replicate over and over

(16:35):
and over again. And that is what are your abilities?
What are your values? And what are your desires? Because
when those three things come together, you are burning. You
are creating a fire in your life. And your life
is a series of fires. It's not just one thing.
It's not this. You know, sometimes we're sold this idea
about purpose, as if we're only here for one thing,

(16:56):
and if we don't figure out what that is, we've somehow,
you know, are not living a life that is true
to us. That's not true. You know, after Mom's de
man action was over and for me, I stepped away
in twenty twenty three, I thought, who am I without
Mom's de man action? This has become my identity. And
yet I started another fire. I wrote a book, I

(17:17):
became a surrogate for Kamala Harris. You know, after this,
there are more things that I want to do, and
I will continue to implement that formula in order to
make those things happen. And I want every woman to
try this formula right now. Out in the zeitgeist, there's
so much about what what are women in midlife doing?
What are older women doing? Not a lot of how

(17:38):
I want to show women, how how do you get
to where these other women are that you're learning about,
because you can do it too.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
I love that We'll be back in just a minute
after a few words from our favorite sponsors. To your point,
you know, I I think this idea, even when we
talk about midlife, when we talk about older women, all
of the terminology has been used to kind of shame us,

(18:12):
even you know, you hear those things in society like, oh, well,
men just get better looking with age and women just age,
And it's like again, I look around at our group
of friends, I'm like, I actually think we've never looked better.
I think I'm way cuter than I was in my twenties.
Early odds fashion was very questionable and horrible. I had
a very bad haircut. We are well also same Yeah

(18:32):
those thank god there were no iPhones. Then those pictures
are buried and locked away forever. I overplucked my eyebrows
for a while. I mean, just not good. And I'm
excited about this fiery woman kind of iconography because what
I've realized in doing this myself is we only grow

(18:56):
in power and purpose. And I think when you have
the courage to reinvent yourself or to say I'm not
having a good time at this party, I'm leaving and
I'm going to plan another, it can be so jarring
for people because they're not used to seeing us choose ourselves.
I experienced that going through a divorce. I've watched women

(19:17):
other friends of mine experience it in that way. Leaving careers,
changing careers, moving to another country, you know, whatever, it
might be women choosing themselves seems like it freaks people out.
So when you think about how you began to focus
on this and I want to hear that Maria Shreve

(19:38):
her phone call story. But how you began to say, Okay,
I'm going to interview all these women about how they
burst into flame in like the most beautiful way. How
did you even really know where to start or were
you Also? Do you think the questions came from you
saying I'm doing this and I want to know who
else is doing this? Sometimes from when I think I'm

(20:00):
going to do something terrifying or requires so much courage,
it's really helpful for me to know other people doing it. Yes,
like my best friend in the world and I literally
got We got engaged and then married and then divorced
in the same timeline together and we were like, wow,
do we just learn lessons like the hard way?

Speaker 2 (20:20):
Or can we only do things together?

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Maybe we should have gone on a trip.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Would have been so much cheaper than this life.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
Lesson, you know, But there is something about having someone
you love model that kind of courage for you, you know,
make legal recommendations for you, teach you how to go
get a job, or have a baby, or whatever it is.
So do you think the book came from you seeking

(20:48):
out other women doing the next stage of life? Fire building? Oh?

Speaker 2 (20:53):
Absolutely, you know. I start with my story, and I
had this experience. I lived a very me life, I
call it until I was in my forties because I
married right out of college. My parents were going through
a horrible divorce, and so I think I was seeking
out solace of my college boyfriend. I got pregnant three
months later. I got pregnant three months after that baby

(21:15):
was born. By the time I was twenty nine, I
had three children. I was married to someone I wouldn't
have married had I waited until I was after thirty
years old. I was in a job I didn't like.
I wanted to be an investigative journalist and I was
doing public relations. And I found myself one day in
the emergency room absolutely covered head to toe and ezema
in every orifice, on my eyelids, on my ears. I mean,

(21:36):
They're horrific. I couldn't sleep, I was miserable. I was suffering.
And I tell the story of being in that office
and the doctor really connecting with me, and I just
had a breakdown. And I realized I was at a crossroads.

Speaker 1 (21:50):
Right.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
I could look at my life and the mistakes I'd
made and make different choices going forward, or I could
continue to live this life. And it wasn't easy to
leave a marriage and leave my career and start all
over again. And I'm so glad I did, because I
would never have started Mom's de man action. I would
never be where I am now. And so I wanted

(22:11):
to talk to other women who had had those experiences.
And I tell so many stories because I think stories
are the model to help other women do these things.
And so I talked to one woman named Amber Goodwin
who applied to law school almost two dozen right out
of college, didn't get in. Then, when she was forty
years old, after Donald Trump was elected, she decided, you know,

(22:33):
if he can be president, I can become a lawyer.
So she applied again in her forties, got in, and
ended up being the president of her law school and
now is working to get other women of color into
law schools all over the country. I talked to a
woman who wanted to be an author. Because of her
financial circumstances, she took a job as a gym teacher.
Did that for thirty years, retired, started volunteering at an

(22:56):
animal shelter, came up with this idea in her head
of a love story between two people who meet at
the shelter. Taught herself how to write dialogue, how to
create a book, wrote a book, and then decided she
deserved to have it published. She sent it to two
hundred and eighteen publishing houses and got rejected every time.
On the two hundred and nineteenth she got a two
book deal and became a published author in her seventies. Wow,

(23:18):
so that's what I wanted to convey to other women.
It's never too late. You're not too old. You have
something important to offer, no matter what age you are,
no matter what stage of life, if you pursue it.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Yeah, I love that. Did you see that that talk
that went sort of viral online? I feel like we
have similar algorithms, so maybe you saw it as well.
Of a professor, we'll have to do a little research
and put it in the show notes. He gave a
talk at a university. I think he's a I don't
know if he's a biology teacher, essentially asking the question,

(23:54):
what are women in their third in their last third
of life? Four, and you know, the class kind of
gets like and you hear the murmurs, and he says,
and I don't mean that in the way that you
think he said, but you know, men can be fathers
into their eighties. No one judges them when they do that,
by the way, but God forbid a woman in her
forties as a kid. That's verse every day. But he

(24:18):
was saying, you know, women, once you go through men
a pause, you cease being able to birth a child.
So societally, what are women for? And he says, you know,
we outlive men almost always and by quite a long time.
And essentially a long story longer I'll try to paraphrase,

(24:40):
is that he pausits that women, as they enter the
grandmother stage, whether that's you have grandchildren or you are
a grandmother, in society, that we are the ones who
are the wisdom givers. Yes, we are actually the teachers.
And I thought about it for weeks after I watch

(25:00):
this talk, because I thought, oh, women have actually been
taught that our only value, our biggest value in society
is motherhood. But actually, essentially men's only value, add is
fatherhood and they can do it forever. We literally have
a third of our lives where that is not our value,

(25:21):
where we serve a greater purpose. And when he started
to talk about us being the wisdom givers, the teachers,
the ones who continue to shepherd's society, I was like, Oh,
we've inverted our roles. There's a reason that women have been,
you know, removed from so many of the holy books
around the world. Right, It's that they're scared of our power. Yes,

(25:45):
the divine veeminine there used to be the goddess for
the God and they've tried to, you know, really reduce us.
And it makes me feel like we're finally getting back
to something as I look around at all my friends
their forties to their seventies doing what you're talking about,
because I actually look at women as the ones who

(26:07):
hold the most power and the greatest ideas, and who
teach the most generously and to pursue a book, a
second career. Whatever it is you love feeds you as well.
So I think it shifts that give give give versus take, take, take,
and it actually creates a healthier cycle, something more natural

(26:31):
that moves, you know, in and out, ebb and flow
all the time. Do you feel like you've got your
personal ebb and flow in a place where you love it.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
I do right now, I do, But I want to
be clear like it does ebb and flow. Yeah, you're
going to have ups and downs. Yeah, that doesn't mean
you should back down.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
Right.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
I made a choice when I started Mom'stuman Action and
I started receiving all these threats that I didn't expect.
You know, I had to back down or double down,
and I decided to double down. And you know, I
had someone say to me when I was writing this book,
I wish I had had a handbook for all the
blowback that I will receive. It doesn't mean you're starting
a huge thing like an organization. It may be just

(27:15):
a difficult conversation. Maybe you're getting out of a relationship,
maybe you're pursuing another job. It can be personal, political, professional.
But if you apply this formula and if you know
what to expect, you know that you will feel imposter syndrome,
that your perfectionism will get in the way, that you
will start to think people don't want to hear your
story or you don't have a story to tell. If

(27:36):
you know there will be a messy middle, then you
can get through it. And that is what this is really,
you know, a guide for that.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
Wow, messy middle.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
Messy middle can be brutal. It's hard, but you learn
so much there you do.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
But I think you're right. A guidebook would have been helpful.
You know, we bonded and became friends in activism. Yeah,
I was not prepared either for not only how much
the world hates an outspoken woman, a politically educated woman.
Oh God, here we go. And you know, nobody tells
you how to deal with the threats. Nobody tells you

(28:11):
how to deal with you know, the blowback. And it's
not lost on me that I think as an observer,
you can tell me if it's correct. I think part
of the reason so many people were so incensed by
Mom's demand is that it was so nonpartisan. You got
so many people who have been cultured or encouraged or

(28:33):
algorithmically targeted to fight a culture war, a red versus blue,
a left versus right, YadA, YadA, YadA. You got them
all to say, oh, yeah, every country in the world
has mental health issues. Every country in the world on
par with ours, has access to the same video games.
Everywhere is basically the same. When you are in a

(28:54):
similar country of you know, population and economic means and
all the things. The only difference here is the access
to the guns. It's the guns, It's not anything else.
And I say, this is a kid who got her
first gun for her twelfth birthday. You know, people are
always very shocked when they find out that, like they're
liberal Hollywood blah blah blah. Person they want to scream

(29:15):
about is like actually a sharpshooter. Yeah, we can mean
many things, guys. It's the guns. Yes. And when you
had moms from San Francisco to Oakland, to Texas to
New Mexico to Florida to Northern Vermont rallying together, I

(29:35):
think you really scared a lot of people because they
knew that the truth was more powerful than the pr Oh,
the facts are more powerful than any money the gun
lobby spends. And you can't unsee something once you know it.
And yet we find ourselves back here in this dystopian

(29:58):
Trump two point oh Land, How I know you took
a break which you deserved. You know, you did the
most wonderful thing that I think women do, which is
they build power and then share it. You say, I'm
going to run Mom's demand until the day I die
because it's fine, you pass the baton, but from outside,

(30:20):
still having built it and being so close to it,
how do you? How do you want to speak to
those women about what we do now? Because it feels
like it for all this progress we've made, the people
with the most money who want the progress for themselves
and not for any of us, are winning in this moment,

(30:43):
and they're just they're lighting everything on fire, and not
in a good way, not in a fired up way,
in like I've burdened all burnt, all down, nightmare kind
of way. So what do you if you were still
at the home of Mom's demand, or if you were
just going to talk to us I don't know on
Instagram on Saturday morning, like what would you? What do
you want to say to the women who go? But Shannon,

(31:04):
what do we do now? You know?

Speaker 2 (31:06):
I knew intuitively the day after the santy Hook School
shooting that women were the secret sauce to taking on
the largest, most powerful, wealthy special interests that's ever existed,
right the gun lobby. And I simply put out a
plea on Facebook that women come together like they did
through Mothers against Drunk Driving, which was so incredibly influential

(31:28):
to me as a teen in the eighties. They made
unbelievable progress in under a decade. So I thought, okay,
we need women to take on the gun lobby. And
I was right. This was the gun lobby's worst nightmare,
that women would rise up against them to protect their
children in their communities because women are so powerful. Yes,
we only hold twenty five percent of the five hundred

(31:48):
thousand elected positions in this country. We are less than
five percent of fortunate one thousand CEOs, so we're not
pulling the levers of power that really make the policies
that protect our families and communities. But we're the majority
of the voting population and we can use our voices.
So when you combine voices and votes, we're unstoppable. And

(32:09):
so that is why when millions of women began to
show up in their state houses, in their city councils,
even at Congress, we went from a corp of all
Democrats in Congress having an A rating from the NA
to none. Now it's a seismic shift in American politics.
It's how we passed the first federal gun safety legislation

(32:29):
in twenty two in a generation and that is a
formula just like living on fire, right, that is the
formula for successful activism. Women have immense power when we
come together in community. And I talk about this in
the book is building a bonfire? You know, you take
your flame and you put it with other women's and
it just becomes this huge, unstoppable fire that you know,

(32:51):
shows you what you want to do, but also shows
you the people you want to do it with. And
that is what Moms to Men action became. And so
I think in this moment, it is so we're all
talking about community. It is so important to find your community.
It doesn't have to be gun safety activism, it doesn't
even have to be activism, but find your community and

(33:11):
find your strength because that is what we need to
get us through the next four years. And I will
just say that as an Emerge America board member, this
is an organization that trains women to run profice. I
think there's a moral imperative for women to run profice
in this country. Yes, I don't care if it's county corner,
I don't care if it's city's sheriff. It can be

(33:33):
a very small elected officials office. But if we are
able to do it. We need to do it because
only having twenty five percent of the elected positions. You know,
the saying is when you don't have a seat at
the table, you're probably on the menu. Many women right
now in this country are the main course.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yes, and now a word from our sponsors that I
really enjoy and I think you will too. Well. I
saw a statistic today. The administration is saying they want
to give baby bonuses, they want more children born in America.

(34:10):
And I'm like, oh, you mean you want to give
families a baby bonus that's over one thousand dollars less
than the child tax credit that you're party killed that
lifted fifty percent of all families in poverty out of poverty. Interesting,
So you want women to have more babies in a
country where you are making it impossible to access maternal healthcare,
where you're defunding cancer research for children, where you are

(34:32):
trying to take away women's rights to IVF so if
they actually want to have children, they can't. And the
list just goes on. You're defunding education, You want everybody
to have guns. Why do you think people maybe are
scared to bring children into this world? Weird? It's so
crazy making. And I think it's why it's so important

(34:54):
what you're putting in the book and also what you're
reminding us out in the world is to see and
identify the problem and then congregate in community to figure
out how to fix it. And you are right. One
of the ways we have to fix it is by
taking those seats women running for office, whether it's you know,

(35:15):
Emerge America or Emily's List or any of these groups
that is helping she should run. Yes, helping run for something. Oh,
that really feels like a shift that has been a
long time coming from your vantage point. Do you see
more women in your peer group? You know, women whose

(35:36):
kids are off in college and so they're beginning to
reclaim more of their daily time. Do you see more
women talking about it, thinking about it, gearing up for it?

Speaker 2 (35:46):
I do? You know? Women don't not live on fire
because they're weak. It's because they're wise. They see the
system is set up for them to fail and the
only way to fix that is to find the courage
to step out into the arena. And you know this
formula I was talking about your abilities, your values, and
your desires. That is different for every single person. My

(36:07):
abilities were my communication skills. I had been in comms
for almost twenty years before I started Mom's Demand Action.
My values were protecting my family and my community, and
my desire was to be an activist. I had grown
up in Rochester, New York, where I was taught that
people I carry at Tubman and Susan b. Anthony and
I think she's been canceled now. But like all these
different activists right who sort of were women at the forefront,

(36:31):
and each one of us has that different recipe, the
different formula that will come into play.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
You know.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
I've seen women come into Mom's de Maan Action and
they decided to be a data lead because maybe they
were an accountant in their professional life, and they come
into the organization and they're surrounded by other supportive women
and they think, wow, I'm really good at being a
data lead. I'm really doing a great job at this.
Maybe I'll try to be the chapter leader. And then
they become the chapter leader and they say, wow, you know,

(36:57):
I'm really smart and I'm getting people to feel good
about themselves and to make progress. Maybe I will run
for city council and they do and they win, and
it is just really those it's like taking the next
buyery step over and over again.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
Yeah. So, coming into writing the book, you dropped this
gem earlier that you got a phone call from Maria Shriver?
Did you have a book in the works, and she
heard about it? What happened? Tell me that story, because
that feels very cool.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
I had just step back from Moms to Man Action,
and I thought, Okay, I'm going to take a year
off figure out what's next. You know, I'd been working
seven days a week as a full time volunteer for
over a decade and Maria Shriver had DMed me out
of the blue on Instagram and said, can I have
your phone number? And you know, this was a few
weeks went by. I'm running on the treadmill and I
looked down on my phone and it says Maria Shriver,

(37:53):
And obviously I get off the treadmill and answer the phone,
and she says, you know, I so admire your voice.
I think you have a lot to tell women. I
have a book imprint called Open Field. Would you write
a book for me? Which you know is a very
big question, like you can write about whatever you want?
And I said yes. You know I could have said no.
I could have said I'm not the right person, I'm

(38:15):
not an author, I'm not I don't have anything to tell.
But I knew that wasn't true, you know. I knew
that I did have something to say to women that
I had learned so much through my leadership of Moms
U Man Action, and then I wanted to empower other women,
especially women my age, to keep doing things till their end,
till the end of their life. And so I said yes.

(38:36):
And I had written a book before, but I had
written it with a co author, and it was very
fact based about gun violence. This was something different. This
was my story and the stories of other women. And
I'm not going to say it wasn't hard. You know.
There were days when I thought, why did I take
this on? Why am I not on vacation? What if

(38:57):
this isn't good? What if people don't like it? And
I had to push through all those feelings, all these stories,
these narratives that I was making up and telling myself.
And I've gotten such incredible feedback. I mean, the poet
Maggie Smith blurbed this book and she was reading it
and she would email me and say, I wish I
had had this book when I was getting divorced. So
many women who I admire have supported the book, are

(39:21):
supporting the book, women like you, and I'm just so
glad I said yes to Maurice Shriver, a perfect stranger
who has become a friend and is interviewed in the book.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
That's so cool. That's just so cool. Something that you've
also talked about, which I really cherish because it's been
my journey as well, seems common in our kind of
overlapping generation. You've opened up a lot about your struggle
with untreated ADHD getting diagnosed later in life. You and

(39:53):
me both sister, and in one way, I feel so
relieved to understand that some of what is hard for
me is not a personal failing. It's literally how my
brain is wired. It also is probably part of the
reason I can go through policies so quickly, because I

(40:16):
have a weird memory for that kind of stuff. Don't
ask me what day it is, anytime, any anywhere. What
was the kind of push pull, the relief and the
Oh I wish I'd understood this earlier for you.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
You know what's interesting is I was a speaker at
a conference a couple of weeks ago in Orlando, and
I was asked by the moderator, what did you learn
while interviewing women for this book? And I said over
a third of them had ADHD, either undiagnosed or late
in life diagnosed, and that it was the secret sauce
for becoming who they are. Now do you know that

(40:52):
the entire audience began to cheer and some of the
women started crying, Like that touched women so much, this
phenomenon of ADHD. I was actually diagnosed when I was fourteen,
really in the eighties, So that tells you how bad
my ADHD was. Wow, because women, girls were not being
diagnosed in the eighties.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
Oh uncommon, I mean then, and especially thing for young
women now.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
And I had all the comorbidities. I had OCD, I
had anxiety, I had skin picking, I had nervous ticks.
Like I was, you know, a kid who was really struggling.
And I started to fail out of school in the
eighth grade and that's when I got diagnosed. But there
was such a stigma around medication that I was never medicated,
and so it didn't get better. It got worse right

(41:34):
throughout my lifetime. And it wasn't until I was in
my mid twenties, and I think my brain was fully
developed that I would learned workarounds for things that come
intuitively to other people. But it was a real struggle.
I tried medicating myself when I went through menopause because
I saw the symptoms becoming so much more severe, and
it just didn't work for me. I think my brain

(41:56):
is so now solidified in the way I do things
to get around the ADHD obstacles. But this is a
real thing, particularly for gen X women, who you know.
I have a lot of resentment for the way that
my parents handled it, the school system handled it. I
was treated as someone who was weird or different or unsuccessful,

(42:18):
right like, like I was always destined to be a loser.
I tell this story of I was in Catholic school
and there was an English assignment sent home and it
was compare your daughter to someone in history. I was
in an all girls school and people would come in
and their parents would have compared them to Joan of
Arc or you know, the Virgin Mother. My parents compared

(42:38):
me to Willie Lowman, the tragic figure and death of
a salesman. Oh my god. Because I was kind of
a loser, right like, I had potential, but I couldn't
live up to it, and that's how I felt my
whole life. And my parents, you know, I don't mean
to be too harsh on them, but you know, as
an only child, and they they didn't know why I

(43:00):
was so different. But I'm so grateful now that I
had that experience, and it certainly prepared me to be
the parent of three of my children have ADHD, right,
and so I think that that made me who I am.
And you were talking about hyperfocus. How else could I
have worked on gun mine with prevention seven days a week,
twelve hours a day for eleven years only because of

(43:20):
my ADHD.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yes, absolutely, Because people will say to me, how do
you get so much done in a day, and my
response is always I never even get halfway through my
to do list. Yes, And then people who love me
have had to sit me down and say, I think
you do too much in a day. I think you
need to go for a walk. Like it's going to
sound so crazy, but I know you'll get it. My

(43:42):
therapist gave me an exercise and said, when you are
working from home, or you know, when you wrap a
podcast or whatever it is, because obviously not everything can
be broken into these increments. But when you're in control
of your timing, I want you to set a thirty
minute timer and when it goes off, I don't care

(44:02):
what you're doing, stop doing it and walk outside to
the end of the block and back, take five minutes
and go for a walk, and then come back and
start the thirty minute timer again. That's thirty on five off,
thirty on five off. For me, that feels like learning Mandarin.
We're not in the same alphabet, we're not in a
language I understand, and it's so simple. But what it's

(44:27):
beginning to do is help my brain take a breath,
because hyperfocus can feel like holding your breath all day. Yes,
and it shouldn't be that hard for a forty two
year old woman to walk to the end of the
block and back, But it's hard for me to stop
doing what I'm doing. And I am learning this thing
that would probably be easy for a five year old,

(44:49):
but for me is difficult, and it is really transforming
not only the way I learn to pause, but what
I what I realized kind of emotionally recently, was much
like you in my own way, I was going through
my own massive life shift and the exzema, and the

(45:11):
sort of physical stress response was my body. My body
had been trying to talk to me for so long
that it stopped talking and it started screaming, and I
had to start to pay attention to it. And the
coolest side effect I've realized of this thirty on to
five off thing is that I'm teaching my body it
can trust me. When the alarm goes off and I

(45:34):
get up and I go for a walk and I
look at the sun and I take deep breaths and
I jump around and then I come back to work.
My body knows I'm going to give it what it needs.
I'm not going to ignore what it needs. And in
this very weird way, I almost feel like I'm reparenting
myself now that I understand how my brain works.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
And it's so difficult in a relationship too, because what
you're talking about, you know, is the same thing with
my husban been wondering where do I go and when
I become so immersed in something, you know, I organized
a zoom conference to raise money for Kamala Harris, the
White Woman answer the calls.

Speaker 1 (46:11):
Let's get into that I disappeared.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
For like four days. If my husband would just bring
me power bars in liquid and he's had to adjust too, right, like,
this is what she does, this is where she goes.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
But it's also part of your superpower. Yes, that's your
hero stuff. And what I think is really precious is
especially when you've tried to do what the world tells
you to do and you have woken up realizing you're
in the wrong marriage, and you go, okay, I have
to start over. I think when you are in the
right one and someone sees you and says, don't get up,

(46:44):
but I'm going to slide this bullet food in front
of your face.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
This is who you are, and I'm going to take
care of you.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
You know, during the election, much like you, I was
just in it. I was on a plane every day
when I was home. I was on forty zooms a day,
it felt like, and I'd be on a zoom and
I would just I would like, see appear from the
left and she'd hand me this like beautifully cooked breakfast
and and just you know, pat my arm off camera

(47:09):
and walk away. And I was like, you, angel, we have.

Speaker 2 (47:11):
The same partner, right, Like, what is it like to
be loved?

Speaker 1 (47:15):
What?

Speaker 2 (47:15):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (47:16):
And I think there's something so special in when you're
seen and supported so you can be who you are.
And I don't know if you have this, I do
know it's quite a common thing for people with ADHD.
You know, we start to do something and then get distracted.
And I know for someone like her, who is the

(47:36):
most orderly, cleanly person, clutter or a mess can drive
her crazy. And instead of losing her mind when she finds, like,
next to the bookshelf my plate with peanut butter toast
half eaten amidst the books, she just texts me pictures
of the weird places that I leave things around the
house and is like, you're ridiculous. I love you, and

(47:57):
it makes us both laugh and so's so sweet because
I'm like, that's where I left that, Like I couldn't
find my smoothie and it was like, you know, on
a shelf in the hall closet. And it's so different
to have a person who can see your thing. Yes,
you know, you've got someone with an endless supply of

(48:19):
power bars because he knows and loves you and it's
really special. And now a word from our sponsors. How
was the call organizing itself? You're obviously so amazing at it.

(48:41):
I mean, you know, ten million women you organized from
every disparate place space, political background for Mom's demand. You
mentioned earlier, you got the first gun legislation in a
generation passed. Then you decide to take a break, and
then we get into an incredibly consequent election, and as

(49:01):
you do, you do things big and you organize this
call that really helped collect a lot of women that
look like us. I remember because I was in France
for the Olympics and I was on the HRC call,
which was at the same time as your call. So
I had two computers open, going back and forth, you know,

(49:24):
making sure I could do my speaking thing and watch
everybody here. And I was like, God, I'm so inspired.
I'm sad now obviously.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
Thinking about it, but there was so much energy. Well yeah,
what did it feel like?

Speaker 1 (49:37):
And how how did you build it?

Speaker 2 (49:39):
So I was reading on Twitter there were these tweets
from a woman named Joteika Edie. She's who has run
when with black women for a long time, and I
saw all these black women on Instagram and Twitter saying
I'm on this call for Kamala Harris. Now there's a
thousand people. Now there's five thousand people. Now there's ten
thousand people. We have to call Zoom, they have to

(50:00):
open up. I mean, it was so exciting, and they
raised millions of dollars right. And then the next day,
my friend Roland Martin got together with a group of
black men and did the same thing, and they had
even more people and raised more money. And as I
do when I wake up in the middle of the
morning because of menopause, like at four am, I just
tweeted out into the ether, when are white women going

(50:22):
to do the same thing? Yeah, not thinking, oh, I'm
going to organize this, you.

Speaker 1 (50:27):
Were like I turns out I volunteered as trick.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
That was a question, not a suggestion.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
It was just a question.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
So all of these women start dming me I'm in,
I'm in, I'm in. When is this? Tell us when?
And so that was the beginning, and I got connected
to Joe Tika and thought, Okay, this seems like there's
a lot of interest. But I never imagined it would
be what it was. I mean, we used a simple
Zoom link, and we used my own fundraising link that

(50:54):
I had from the campaign, not even Act Blue right
just to my link. Suddenly the zooms started and coming
back on it was like we were writing waves. We
got an email from Zoom saying congratulations, this is a
large Zoom call in history. By the end of the call,
we knew from my link we'd raise two million dollars,
and I thought, well, that's great, that's good. Cool. The
next morning I get a call. Now it's five million,

(51:16):
then it was eight million, then it was ended up
being eleven million dollars in two hours. And look, I
still am disappointed in the way white women voted, but
there was a five point increase from Biden among college
educated white women. I hope we can build on that
progress going forward. And you know, people always are bashing

(51:36):
so called identity of politics. I think it was a
really important conversation that needed to be had, which is,
why do white women vote in their own self interests
and not in all women's best interests.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
But I think the question goes deeper than that, because
white women are not voting in their own self interest.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
They think they are, they think.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
They are, they think they're voting to uphold some semblance
of normalcy for their family, their husband, their neighborhood, but
they're actually voting against all of our interests.

Speaker 2 (52:12):
As my friend Brittany Pagnet Cunningham says, my favorite, lady,
your whiteness will not save you from what the patriarchy
has in store for you.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
And I think that's the illusion that patriarchy has given
to us, is that you know these men are here
to protect us. I look at women and I go
protect us from who men? Men. I don't want to
be protected from them. I want to be protected in
the law. I want to be protected in ways that

(52:42):
can't change with their mood. Because you see these men
in power now, you see Donald Trump, you see j
ad Vance. What they say is not what they're doing,
and what they're doing is so abhorrent, especially for women,
And I guess I want to know why you think
so many white women Bristle had the phrase white women?

(53:04):
Why why do so many white women get upset when
we say, hey, if we center black women in American politics,
American politics will get better for every woman, including with yes.
Why do you think that makes people feel so upset
or so left out, or so like high school click terrible?

(53:30):
What is that reaction about?

Speaker 2 (53:33):
I think because we know that deep down inside there
is truth to the fact that we vote with white men,
whether it's our fathers, husbands, sons, and not with the
backbone of the party and the people who are truly
the most vulnerable and the people who would truly benefit
from our votes going in their favor. And that doesn't

(53:53):
feel great, right, there's sort of an innate defensiveness. I remember,
you know, after Hillary Clinton lost and there was a
discussion about this. I wasn't quite there yet. I was like,
don't criticize me. I voted for Hillary Clinton. And then
I thought, there's actually so much more I can do
because a lot of white women in my family did
not vote for Hillary Clinton. Ye, And those are conversations
I'm obligated to have. That's an not the work of

(54:14):
black women or women of color. It is the work
of white women who are positioned in friends and families
and who have impact and affluence that say here's how
I'm voting and here's why. And that is almost like
living on fire.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
Right.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
That is a brave and important conversation to have.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
Yeah, it's a thing we have to do, and it's interesting.
I have a woman in my life who if we
met today, we would not be friends. But we've known
each other a long time. We have fought over equality, equity,
civil rights for a long time, and I have people
in my life who say, just be done with it.

(54:54):
And the thing I keep saying is I will not
sick this woman on any woman of color that I love.
It's not their job to teach her. Part of my
job is to sit with her and work on these issues,
explaining the truth, work on helping her undo her own
internalized misogyny, her own illusions that whiteness is going to

(55:16):
protect her these things. And it feels important to me
because it doesn't feel by accident, and I think that
has been a great learning for me. In twenty sixteen,
I was like, if you voted this way, we cannot
be friends. I am done. This isn't political, this is

(55:36):
about humanity. And I realize that that's actually a very
privileged reaction. Yes, because I can be done, but many
of the women in my life can't be. And so
I've actually doubled down on long patient conversations where I
don't get into any facts for thirty minutes to an hour,

(55:59):
I talk about personal experience, emotion, my own story, their
own story, and then it's this will bump into your
confirmation bias. You will not want to believe what I'm
about to show you because it will trigger shame. We
can talk about our shame together. Here's what's really going on.
Here's the bills they've passed. Here's what they're doing to IVF,

(56:22):
Here's what they're doing to access for hungry children to
have food in school. Here's what they're doing. Let's talk
about it. And it requires an immense amount of work,
but I do feel like for me, it is part
of my flame. I've learned that that's part of my fire.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
And what you're talking about is incremental progress.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
And oh but it's so hard to be so pacious.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
It is, and it's such a dirty word, particularly with
young people, incrementalism. But I have seen incrementalism lead to revolutions.

Speaker 1 (56:57):
Well, that's it.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
And I think I think also when you talk about privilege,
you know, Rebecca Tracter, the feminist rights about this, women,
White women are used to winning, and when they don't win,
they walk away. And so we really do have to
not back down but double down and keep going even
when it's hard.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
Yeah, I think it's really really important to be willing
to do that. And I also think it's really important
on this subject of walking away, you know, to to
do that self inventory and figure out when we want
to walk away, maybe why, But then to also take

(57:38):
that out into the community and be really honest about
the fact that activism doesn't end after an election. Yea,
you know, there would have been a lot. Had Kamala want,
there would have been a lot we would have been
pressing her on. There would have been a lot we
would have pressed that administration on. I think we would

(57:59):
be in such a better position, but we would have
still had work to do. Now we are in a
worse position, and we have so much more work to do.
How do you inspire listeners or suggest that they not

(58:21):
lose hope despite the amount of backsliding we're seeing because
we didn't. We didn't start a little ahead and then
get ways to go. We started potentially a little ahead
and then we slid all the way back. And how
we got a double you know the yardage essentially, how.

Speaker 2 (58:39):
Do you.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
Not just get exhausted and stop?

Speaker 2 (58:44):
You know, it is a marathon, not a sprint, but
it's also a relay race, and when you have to
pass the baton, you do that right. I had many
instances during the eleven years I led Moms to Me
in action where I had a kid in crisis, or
I had other things in my life I had to
pay attention to. And you know, I think women are
reluctant to give other people their work. They feel guilty,
or they feel worried that other people might, you know,

(59:07):
do it better. There's all that stuff built into us.
And I felt that way. And what I realized was
when I came back, the work was still there, and
other people brought their energy and their ideas to it.
That's what it makes That's what makes a community right,
leaning on one another. So I would say think of
it as a relay race, but also loose forward. And

(59:27):
this was a motto at Mom's to me in action,
you were going to lose. It's always going to be
two steps forward, one step back. It's the incrementalism we
talked about. But look for the hope, look for the wins.
Maybe you lost on a legislation that you were trying
to pass, but what did you win. You grew your chapter,
You created new relationships with lawmakers, You figured out what

(59:49):
it will take to win the next time. And I
saw this happen over and over again, where you know,
in states, you would think we would never make progress,
either by defeating bad bills or passing go bills, and
we did. It's cyclical. Politics is cyclical. What we're going
through now will not last forever. So build that foundation
you can build on when we win again.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
I love that when you talk about Emerge America and
she should run in all these organizations, do you ever
see yourself leaving for elected office?

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
I get asked a lot. I never say never. I'm
actually becoming a resident of Florida, which is exciting to
me because California is great, but it's not as much
of a pill battle as Florida, which I think will
be fun to kind of get in the middle of.

Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
Oh she's ready.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
But you know, I think what I learned during Moms
Do in action. Yes, I'm passionate about gun safety, but
that wasn't what kept me going. I live to some
in the audacity of other women, and so encouraging other
women to step up to run, showing them they can
do this, show them they can do anything personal, political, professional.
That is what I'm focused on.

Speaker 1 (01:00:59):
Right Yeah. I love that. So then what feels like
you're work in progress right now?

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
My work in progress is bringing this book into the world.
It has been like giving birth, writing it and now
announcing that it's here and letting people read it and
getting their reactions. I'm so excited about that. Fire Starter
University is going to start in the fall, so it's
a year long online program based on the book. And
you know, then maybe I'll say, oh, I'm taking that

(01:01:26):
break that I talked about last time, and he knows
what will pop up.

Speaker 1 (01:01:30):
I know, I think back to when we were all
away for our friend's birthday and you were like, guys,
I'm going to do it. I'm going to take a sabbatical.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Yep, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see.

Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
We can plan more getaways in the meantime. Maybe our
sabbaticals are just meant to be seventy two hours a time.
That's okay, you know, good bottle of wine. Nice you,
and then we're right back at it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
We're done.

Speaker 1 (01:01:55):
Thank you so much for coming today. Thank you for
the book. It it really is I'll echo, Maggie, it
really is exactly what we all needed and I'm glad
it's here.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Thank you.