Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future.
Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.
Chris: Well, Francis, it’s Episode 3 of the Making Better Podcast!
Francis: Awesome! I’m very exciting, because I woke up this morning, I read the headlines, and once again…the Trump administration was at war with the environment, and I felt like, god I gotta do something! We all have to do better, we all have to do more. This aggression will not stand, man! So, I’m really happy that we’re doing this and, you know, in our own little way sending out a positive ripple in the world.
Chris: Well, that’s been the central theme of Making Better since we started, every guest we’ve had, and I think we’ve had nine so far, is somebody who’s out there already making the world a better place.
Francis: Exactly…and that was a Big Lebowski reference, by the way. You know, we are the majority, the amount of people who actually want to have a good life and not destroy the earth and each other, is the vast majority. And I think it’s just a matter of time before all of that effort gets harnessed in a way that the power goes to the people again.
Chris: This episode’s guest is Ann Devereux-Mills. She’s a former advertising executive turned activist, and she’s also a four-time cancer survivor. Her primary organization is called Parlay House, which facilitates communication among women to help them with their careers and with their lives. She’s also the producer of a documentary that aired on PBS called “The Return” and she’s an activist on prison reform issues in California. We had a terrific conversation with Ann, and I hope you will all enjoy it as well.
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Francis: So, I would like to welcome Ann Devereux-Mills to the show today. Hello, Ann..
Ann: Hey there! Nice to be with you.
Francis: It’s great to have you here. Your life story and your work, I think, is a really great platform for discussing a lot of the issues that we’re concerned with here at Making Better. So if I could, if we could just begin with you giving our listeners a brief overview of your story—where you came from, your history as a CEO and in business, and then where you’ve come to today.
Ann: Sure. Well, I grew up in Seattle before Seattle was the Seattle it is today, where the University of Washington was mostly it, but I was lucky enough to go to a little private school where people like Robert Fulghum, who wrote Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, was my English teacher and Bill Gates was a few years ahead of me, you know, doing the amazing things he was doing, it was just one of those kind of special times. And I left Seattle to go straight to Wellesley, where I had four amazing, unexpected years, because I’d been totally boy-crazy. So there I was in an all-female environment for four years, and really found myself on a whole different level that was terrific, and I graduated with a degree in political economy and it was 1984 and it was a recession, not like the 2008 recession but not a good time to get a job, and I got the one job I could get at the time, which was at an insurance broker called Marsh & McClennan. And got to my first day of work and my boss said, “you know, I hadn’t really thought about what you should be doing, why don’t you go home early and come back tomorrow and I’ll figure it out.” Now, many of us would like to be sent home early for a free afternoon by our boss, but this was the beginning of my corporate life and I was sort of distraught about it. But I decided, OK, I’m going to be a New Yorker, and I was really naive, really naive. So I just decided, OK, I’m going to walk up through Central Park, I’m going to walk up Madison Avenue, cross through Central Park and—I was living on the upper West side—and I got through to the middle of the park, and standing under a tree was a tall, handsome man and I had kind of never really talked to a tall, handsome man as an adult, and he had the Village Voice under his arm, and…it was raining and he asked for directions, and I heard one sentence and I immediately thought, Gay English Actor…and I was wrong, wrong and wrong. He was Irish, he was not an actor, he was straight and he was looking for a job and a date. And I was the safest person walking through Central Park and he asked me out for a drink, and luckily I had one friend in New York from Wellesley and she was working as a bartender, so I sort of knew that if he was a serial killer I would have someone who had seen me last…and of course, I ended up marrying him, and so it’s sort of a fun start of a story that didn’t turn out so well, ‘cuz we went our separate ways, but it was the beginning of my experimenting, doing things that were unfamiliar—marrying someone when I didn’t have a lot of relationship experience, and jumping into things pretty quickly. But my career as an insurance person didn’t last very long, because it was a really bad fit for a feminist in a very stodgy, old boys network, where I could do a whole program with you all talking about the sexual harassment of that time, and I won’t . But what I did do was learn how to understand what I do well, understand what I don’t like and don’t do well, and iterate my career until I got to a place that was a good alignment between my strengths and my interests. And that world was the world of advertising. And so I sort of evolved, first to corporate communications and liked that but didn’t like the small reach of just investors and shareholders and so when I got to the world of advertising, it was because Warner-Lambert, which no longer exists but it was a consumer package goods sister company of Parke-Davis, and I helped them get the ADA seal on Lysterine and do things way back in the day when we were starting to understand some of the health benefits of health care related products. And I just kind of got my groove, between the interesting and deep nature of science and the leadership and communications opportunities that sort of played to my natural tendencies. And so, I started the first direct-to-consumer advertising agency, along with some other leaders in the field pretty early in my career. And then I went on to found and build four different healthcare specialties for advertising agencies that you’ve heard of or seen modeled in Mad Men, like, you know, VBDO and TBWA and Chiat-Day and…you know, it was a fascinating career that I didn’t have any comparison to, so I didn’t really know that the pretty male exclusionary world that I was in didn’t have to be my story, but it was my story. And sort of getting out of the marriage that didn’t go well, it was a very abusive situation and not good, and I ended up being a single mom and running companies, and that was my life. My life was get up at 4:45 in the morning, drive into Manhattan, go to the gym, get to the office, run a company, get home and be a dedicated mom. And that’s very exhausting, mentally and physically, and what happened was, I had a series of cancers, and had some pretty major surgery when going through my divorce, and thought that would be the end of that. And then unfortunately a number of years later when I was in Uganda, where I’d helped start a school for kids who had very little access to anything, I got a call from my oncologist after just a usual follow-up, and he said “eh, sorry to tell you this, but your cancer has accelerated and we have to do some more major surgery. And so I just did what I’m used to doing, and I walked into my boss’s office and I said, “I know it’s…this is a tough economy (this is 2009) very tough time for businesses, and I know it’s not good for me to take two or three weeks off to have the surgery but I gotta do it, so I can live, but I’ll be back and I’ll run the company”…He said, “oh, I’m gonna have someone else run the company.” And in one week, I lost my job, my health and my youngest daughter was heading off to college, so my identity was just exploded, in one single week. So what do you do when…you know, I used to walk into the room and either, “Hi, I’m Ann, I’m the CEO” or “Hi, I’m Ann, I’m the mother of one of these two daughters”…what do you do when all those ways you defined yourself don’t exist anymore? It felt like a betrayal of someone that I’d built companies for and trusted, it felt like confusion because I’d always been a high performer and had multiple successful CEO roles, and the only thing that I had left that hadn’t been exploded that week was a relationship, long-distance relationship that I had with the man who is now my husband. But he was living in Santa Cruz and said “hey, why don’t you, after the surgery, why don’t you come and move out west?” and I’m kind of like, you know, I’m a city girl, I don’t think I can move to Santa Cruz, but if we can negotiate and move to San Francisco, why not? And I had to go through a lot of introspection, of what do I do now? Do I run a business in San Francisco?…but I had time, you know, I don’t think most of us as adults have the benefit of time to stop and think about, do I keep pushing hard against that door that’s straight ahead, or do I stop and look to the sides and around and recalibrate. And I decided to recalibrate, and when I did an assessment of my life to that time, I realized that when I was growing up I was one of three daughters, and when I was at Wellesley I was among 2,000 women, and when I was a mom, a single mom that was the house of hormones with my two daughters and me, and then I spent 20-some years sort of slugging it out in a very male world. And when I got sick, there were very few people who were there for me. And the people that were there for me were a few girlfriends, mostly not from business, and I realized that all the time in business it had been exceptionally transactional. and if I wasn’t in power, people didn’t need me anymore. And that made me long for authentic and meaningful relationships—for myself, I did not start out on a mission to build relationships for anybody but me, but I felt like I needed some intimacy, I needed a trusting environment and to have conversations about things that we weren’t talking about, like what it feels like to be a woman in a man’s world. This is way before MeToo was MeToo…but, you know, what it feels like to be afraid about your health, what it feels like to, you know, have female health challenges that no one talks about. You know, what it feels like to start a new relationship at the age of 50, what it feels like to no longer be the definition of who you were before. And so I just started asking friends of friends, since I didn’t know anyone except my boyfriend at the time in San Francisco, who do you know and do they want to come..and come over to my house and, you know, have a glass of champagne and talk about stuff? And so we did an experiment, and I think there are 12, 15 people in the room, and we had a marvelous time, and really got to talking about meaningful things early, early in the conversation, and at the end of the night, we sort of said, “hey, do you want to do that again?” And everyone sort of agreed and we said, well, why don’t you bring another woman who you think might enjoy this kind of conversation, that’s sort of around content, around some sort of speaker or panel or something. And the next thing I knew, there were 30 and then 50 and pretty soon 2,000 members in San Francisco who would gather (not all 2,000 at one time) in small groups at my home on a monthly basis, and really started to build an authentic conversation and a community of trust that’s way outside of our bubbles. And we’re 20 year olds, and we’re 80 year olds, and we’re working women and we’re women who’ve chosen to stay home or women who have retired or women whose careers haven’t started yet, and a broad range of interests, and….you know, it’s just turned into this sort of magical community that then has been replicated in New York, and now L.A., and London and, you know, I hope soon Washington DC. It was sort of a proof point that the loneliness and need for connection that I felt was actually a much more universal experience, probably even beyond women, but certainly with women that have become part of my extended network. So that was a very long answer to your life story question, but that’s where we are today, is 4,000 women in four cities, soon to be five, and hopefully many hundreds in the years to come.
Chris: I very much identify with having to make a major change in one’s life: before I went blind, I was, you know, this hotshot software engineer/contractor working for a lot of start-ups and venture capitalists on turnaround projects, making a real lot of money, and then the world found out I was blind, and my phone stopped ringing. And, you know, maybe there were still a handful of friends , you know, but as you discussed the transactional nature of relationships, I suddenly realized that almost all the relationships in my life were that way, they were people who wanted something from me rather than actually being friends.
Ann: Yep. It’s a sad state of our society…and I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, you know, does it go back to biblical references, whether it’s on the negative, an eye for an eye, or the sense of do unto others as you’d have them do unto you in sort of a transactional way, or is it about how we behave in the world. And I had a really interesting email exchange with a woman who I respect so highly, who’s been another senior woman multiple-time success, and she sort of said, I was talking about how challenging it is to roll out Parlay* House in cities where I don’t have someone who has the time and the means that I have to really build the content and post these on an ongoing basis, and we were talking about how much do you give of, you know, whether it’s the Parlay House list and community to someone who has something similar for a partnership; and it’s very hard to know what sorts of tradeoffs and exchanges that benefit both organizations, or both people, are meaningful and what are extractive. And I don’t have a clear answer to that.
Francis: I had a friend post something on Facebook today which was a question, “were you happier before or after social media?’ And I just thought that was kind of an interesting question to pose to people…and I love how Parlay House creates these connections, but it’s also, it seems to me, answering the limitations of the connectedness that we all have now through social media, which in some ways makes people and information so available, but at the same time there’s something lacking.
Ann: It’s so interesting you say that, Francis. One of my members in New York is an amazing young woman who has started an online movement called Half the Story, you can look at it, #HalftheStory, and she’s on a mission to encourage young people (she’s in her 20’s), to encourage young people to not just present their most beautiful, most perfect selves on social media but to really talk about things that we don’t talk about. And it’s a strong parallel to what we’re doing at Parlay House. You know, we’re sort of the opposite of social media in that we’re not forcing, but really setting the stage for conversations that are not the conversations that you have on social media. Like how do you rise to the top of a career while you’re battling mental illness or an eating disorder. We’ve talked about that. How do you take some pretty tough setbacks and turn it into strengths later on. We had a woman and her husband who had fallen into a cult and lived in a cult for 20 plus years, they had a child, they were an arranged marriage…they finally escaped the cult, how do you re-enter society after you’ve been living in another, false world? We usually talk about victories and ignore the struggles. And yet everyone struggles. I really made mistakes as a parent, I look back and think, what would I have done differently? I have these two phenomenal daughters, but they both worry when they are struggling, because I never talked about when I was struggling. I was so protecting them, ‘cuz they’d already been through a lot between the divorce and other stuff, I sort of felt like I needed to show them that you could be and do, you know, anything, and be superwoman. And all of a sudden, then, when they had normal people problems and struggles and fears and anxieties that everybody has, they somehow felt they shouldn’t have them, because their mother didn’t have them. And so I’m kind of on a, you know, trying to re-write that story in the second half of my life by talking openly about the things that are hard, and by setting the stage for us to talk about the truths of the human experience, which are so imperfect, and that’s just the nature of humanity.
Chris: I see that in the blindness community all the time, where organizations like the National Federal of the Blind, it’s the biggest membership organization in our space, seem to almost trivialize how hard it is to go through life on a day to day basis in a community with an 80% rate of unemployment, and, you know, they seem to suggest that, you know, blindness is just an inconvenience, and in fact it’s really, really hard, and I think they almost anti-motivate people when they show off, you know, somebody like Eric Weiihenmayer, the first blind man to climb Mount Everest. And I think a lot of people look at Eric, who is a very good guy, he’s a friend of mine, and say, you know, he climbed Mount Everest, you know, I have trouble getting to the Post Office or something, you know, I can’t do anything when we focus so much on the savants, so to speak.
Ann: Yeah, the outliers, sure. Sure, I think that’s true, and that’s why I’m sort of on a mission to create safe spaces to have the conversations that are the real ones. I mean, it’s great to have, we sometimes have superstars, women who have done things that very few women have ever done before, and I think we all get motivated by those stories of, sort of amazing achievement. But that can’t be the only conversation, because it just isn’t reality for most of us, even for those of us who want to be those outliers, those super-high achievers. We’re just not telling the story of their hardship, which I’m sure was there. I don’t know Eric’s story at all, but I’m sure that achievement was not a straight line of “I want to do it, and therefore it’s so.” I’m sure there were setbacks and challenges and risks and we’ve got to talk about those.
Francis: Can you give examples of how what has transpired at Parlay House has …tangible examples of how it’s changed people’s lives?
Ann: Sure. What it does is, it facilitates conversations, either at the event or after the event, that creates bonds that wouldn’t have been there. So we had a health-related topic, and two women were sitting on the coach who were strangers, next to each other, and they started talking about their personal health experiences and it turned out that both of them had ulcerative colitis, which is a painful and often embarrassing disease that affects your ability to have competent relationships, and sexual relationships. And they’d never talked to anyone else about this problem, and they happened to be sitting next to another woman in a safe space who had the same issue, and all of a sudden neither one felt alone. Now that’s a small example, it’s just two people, but it’s two people who all of a sudden didn’t feel alone in the world. And you know, we’ve had other examples, like we had a panel of these women who had followed their husband’s careers to Hong Kong, and they’d sort of put their own ambitions in the back burner because they were supporting the family, and they all sort of realized that they were letting go of themselves and their own goals and they formed a group that was called “the re-group” and they were holding each other accountable. This was not just a career oriented thing: one wanted to write a book, one … each wanted to do something different, but they met on an ongoing basis to hold each other accountable. Well, I didn’t know that in the audience that night were a number of women who, by anybody’s definition, would seem to be happy and successful and whatever, but they were feeling the same way, they were feeling stuck, and they were feeling like they need somebody to work with them, to sort of get on track to the next thing they wanted to do. And so another group that was very very similar was formed by women that I didn’t know and I didn’t know was happening, but happened because someone was willing to talk about that journey. So, there are so many examples. There are people who have gotten jobs, there have been people who have found an outlet for interests in philanthropy or supporting a cause, but most of the examples are the really personal one, where there’s all of a sudden an empathy, and I think empathy is kind of the most, most important component to everything that I’m trying to do is this ability to see and hear and not judge, but actually just see yourself in the position of another and hear and listen to what they need and somehow provide some of that as one new human to another.
Chris: I guess it must also help people feel less like the “other”…
Ann: Exactly. Exactly, and you know, when you look at our gatherings, you really see a diversity that, you know, the streets of San Francisco are generally not filled with people of color. And I see the difference, because I’m bi-coastal, I see the difference in New York where, at least visually, there’s a greater range of skin color on the streets than there is in the city of San Francisco. But in all of our gatherings, whether it’s San Francisco or New York, not only do we have age diversity, but we have, we have racial diversity, we have income diversity, we have diversity of sexual orientation…and it just feels so great to be…be finding connections that appreciate our differences. It’s not finding the similarities, because I think that’s…kind of bullshit, I think it’s recognizing that in our differences there are opportunities to learn, opportunities to feel yourself in someone else’s shoes, to think outside of your norm, to, you know, to just connect and stretch in ways that aren’t in our little bubbles. And I love that.
Francis: We were talking earlier about the transactional nature of business and you know, to a large extent, capitalism as it’s being practiced in this country today…and also talking about this idea of connection with people and the value of that. But, there are some people for whom these, like that transactional type of environment, it suits them, and it serves them very well. And I think partly one of the reasons why you see such a concentration of people who are more predatory and lack empathy in the higher stratas of business is because it’s sort of where their—at least in the system as it is right now, it’s where, it’s their comfort zone to some extent. So, given the heterogenous nature of our society, how do we say who have lots of empathy and want connection that’s meaningful and soulful between people in community, like, how do we have our needs met and they also have their needs met? Are they in conflict?
Ann: That’s a complex and interesting question. I mean, one of the experts that we’ve had speak to Parlay House a few times, and it’s always sold out, is a woman named Wendy Bahari who’s one of the national experts on narcissism. She talks about how to deal with the narcissists in your life. And, you know, we have a narcissist as our President right now, most of us have worked with narcissists in our career, and there’s a lot of data that shows that many of the most successful leaders have very significant elements of narcissism as part of their personalities. But, you know, we’re at a stage in society right now where we’re sort of looking at people as awful, or wonderful, as, you know, horrific or like a deity, and you know, I think that that’s a big mistake. And so there are people who are much more out for themselves and are willing to throw other people under the bus to achieve their own successes, and, you know, I don’t think we can control them, I think we can only control our own personal behaviors. But when you understand what is happening behind, in the emotional self, of those people who act in a narcissistic or self-absorbed way, a lot of times it’s actually driven by really significant insecurities that are being sort of masked and covered up by this aggressive, bullying, selfish behavior. And the more we can understand and empathize, even with those people whose behaviors seem more like terrorists than like humans, it helps understand where they’re coming from, it helps bridge the communication gap and helps us to not take those behaviors personally. I think we all have choice, of some…to some extent, but those of us who are able to make our own choices on how we want to live in the world, to try to find understanding for those who live very differently than us as much as possible, that’s sort of all we have control over. All we really have control over are ourselves and our …our decisions on how we live our lives. So I can’t reconcile that, but I can tell you, we’re not as black and white as it might seem when you cut it, cut it the way you just cut it.
Francis: Well, you know, with regards to our President, he is definitely, I think, making the paradigm for change that we have right now…seem much more like it needs to be evolved to…I think a lot of the old ways that we’ve relied on for change, like say marches and activism…it doesn’t seem like they really do much anymore…
Ann: Well, I guess that’s…I think that might be a little bit instrumentalist. I mean, I know that when Trump was elected and I was in Washington at the first Women’s March and I was there with my daughter who is of a whole different generation, I’ve always been someone who is a thoughtful and engaged member of society, or I’ve at least tried to be. But I was not an activist in the marching, protesting sort of way, and I think that there was an element of momentum that happened, that isn’t sort of end-result oriented but is part of this process of learning about our sense of power. And I think what you’re getting at, Francis, and I probably agree with you, is that the system is so broken that this two-party system, even our Constitution and how some of the things are being interpreted, related to gun control and other stuff, just doesn’t serve our society as well as our Founding Fathers intended. And to really move forward as a society, we might need to go to that really scary place that is after what was, and before we figured out what will be, and that’s a really hard thing to do. I mean I’ve done that as a human, as a personal…on my personal path, where I had to end my career in order to have the time to think about what else I valued. Can we do that as a society without it being too scary or chaotic? Or, you know, having the fear that an equally horrible next person will take over? I don’t know. But I agree with you that just going down the same path and making tiny jogs to the left or the right, in terms of political parties or policies, isn’t making the massive level change that we probably need to be a good society.
Francis: And massive level change is something that you in your own personal life know well…
Ann: Yeah. Some of that was forced on me, and when I realized that things were, the rug was pulled out from under me, I chose to take a really scary leap. I mean, it was so scary to not just do what I knew how to do, and just go back and run another company and have the same identity and, you know, build my self-image around this idea that I was a CEO because that gave me comfort. You know, to sort of start again and say, how do I define myself next, and how do I reconcile that I’m not the only bread earner in the family, that I’m contributing in a way that some, who are very income-oriented, or title-oriented, might not value. You know, I still find myself, when people say “what do you do?” I sometimes just subconsciously revert to, “well, I used to run advertising agencies, and now I…” you know, fill in the blank. Instead of just having the confidence to say, “I founded an organization that’s on a mission to empower women and to create safe spaces for the conversations that they can’t have other places. I mean, that sounds pretty good, when you…but it doesn’t feel as much of a success in the societal norms as I would want it to. I still fall back, sometimes, on what I used to do, and that’s a shame.
Francis: It’s also understandable, given how successful you were…that is pretty significant.
Ann: Yeah, but you know, when, when I’m at the end of my life, and I now know that could be any day, just because I’ve faced that reality, having been a CEO is not the most meaningful thing to me. I mean, I loved it, It’s in my wheelhouse, it’s where I feel very comfortable, but the level of pride that I feel about that is very different than—and not meaningful to me—as the level of pride I have with finding things that help people on a more empathetic level.
Francis: And perhaps even the sublime is relative…
Ann: Yeah. It is. he-he.
Chris: We were just talking about massive change that needs to happen in society, but taking on massive change all in one lump seems rather difficult. And I think I read this in some of your blog articles—making small, minor changes a little at a time and, you know sort of like the butterfly effect, seeing them spread?
Ann: Absolutely. And, you know, I write a monthly blog called One Small Thing. And it’s really a way of trying to say to all of us who feel overwhelmed by the amount of change that we feel needs to happen in society, to not be paralyzed by the size of the problem, but rather be empowered by the types of things I talked about that happen at Parlay House, by one conversation that might be meaningful, by one action that can start a cascade for someone else and someone else after them. And I just—I’m finishing up a research project that’s part of a book that I’m writing, where we tracked…you know, it’s hard to know what, I call it the “thing after the thing” is…so you do something without the expectation of return for someone else. It’s a stranger, or someone that you know that could use your help, and you assume that it was positively received and maybe even that something happened that they passed it on in some way after that, but you don’t know. So, we conducted this research study that we’re just getting the results in now, where we grouped people by whether they were an instigator of one of those actions that were meaningful to someone else, whether they were the recipient of something and what they did with it, or whether they witnessed it, was the third category, and what happens when people witness a meaningful action from one human to another. And the amazing thing was, that not only was there something that the recipient did for another person based on the recognition of how they benefitted from the kindness, but the witnesses also were motivated to behave in a very similar way. So that gave me a sense that this doesn’t even have to be a one to one to one cascade, but that there’s a multiplier effect when people understand their own power to help another in some way and then feel inspired to do it.
Chris: One thought that comes to mind is, I don’t know if you know the city of San Francisco has a law against restaurants giving free food to homeless people, and I know a terrific restaurant that I enjoy, and it’s actually kind of on the expensive side, but every night they take all the food that wasn’t served and one of their people bring it to a park and feed all the homeless people, it’s…some homeless people who recognize me walking down the street will whisper to me where the food will be that night.
Ann: That’s really awesome. I love that story. Yeah, that’s harmless anarchy, in my opinion. Maybe I don’t know all of the potential fears and risks, whether it’s tainted food or who knows what, what…
Chris: No, it has nothing to do with tainted food, it had to do with…it made homeless people hang out…and, you know, wait for the food, for the free food. It was a way to keep the homeless people away from the restaurants.
Ann: You know, a lot of these laws sort of, think, happen because you have a reactionary or strong person who’s pissed off about something, and they go over the top in creating legislation that makes things hard on humanity. My husband and I spent a number of years working on a Proposition in California that was in response to a very similar type of thing, it was the father of Polly Klaas who was unfortunately kidnapped from her home and killed by someone who was a formerly incarcerated person. And her dad was obviously, as we all would be, so distraught about what had happened that he was behind an initiative that resulted in California having one of the most tough 3-strikes laws in the country, and that meant if you had two prior felonies, and you were convicted of anything—and by anything, I mean, we have examples of stealing a piece of pizza, or a golf club from a store, or writing a bad check—these are not violent acts, these are, you know, small…you were sentenced to life in prison. And we have thousands of people in the California prison system who ended up with their lives taken away from them because of that law that was based on someone’s personal and traumatic experience, but resulted in a lack of fairness for everybody affected afterwards. And you know, we were fortunate enough to have our Proposition win with 70% of Californians supporting a much more fair third-strike policy that required that third strike be serious and violent before you take away someone’s entire life. And 3,000 people had their sentences re-assessed and have returned to the community with very low recidivism rates…it’s proof that we have to beware of reactionary laws that are disproportionate, and as a society if we can sort of base our actions on concepts of fairness or empathy rather than fear, I think we’re gonna make some progress. And again, that was a very small change to one law in one state, but the cascade that happened at that time was, it went from 3,000 Californians having their sentences retroactively re-evaluated to a new and fairer policy which meant people who were arrested subsequently did not face that same penalty, and rolled all the way to the White House, where Obama, before he left office, began pardoning people for minor third strike drug offenses across the country. And so that’s just an example of how—this was a lot work, but it was a very small Proposition related to one law in one state, and it ended up being a national phenomenon. And so that’s what gives me hope in this time where there doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of hope.
Chris: You made a documentary about someone released after the 3-strikes…
Ann: I did. Yeah.
Chris: I tried to find it, I couldn’t find it online, and…
Ann: It’s on Netflix, it’s called “The Return,” it was a PBS sponsored film and it was, we won an Emmy nomination for it, and it was an amazing story that uncovered the experience of not only the individuals, as they returned to society, but their families, and really uncovered, sort of, the next issue my husband and I are working on, which is related to mental illness as a huge problem in our society that’s contributing to our packed prisons and, you know, we have many, many, many people who don’t have access to mental health care in terms of diagnosis, in terms of treatment, in terms of care, and then they’re afraid or they’re confused and they break into an empty building because they don’t have a place to stay, or they act out because they don’t have access to medical care, and instead of helping them we throw them in prisons where their disease just gets worse. And so, that film not only was our way of telling the story about the importance of hiring and understanding the side of people who are re-entering society, but also helped us understand what to do next and what to focus on next in terms of helping restore mental health support. You know, Reagan, when he was President, understood that the mental health care system was relatively broken in our country, and so he did away with mental health institutions. And I don’t think it was completely ill-motivated, because they were pretty bad institutions, but what it means now is we’re starting from scratch and trying to find ways to support people who have not had the benefits of mental health care that we, who are more privileged, have.
Chris: I had a good friend released from jail here in Florida, he was junkie…and it was just a minor stealing thing, but his lawyer negotiated probation for him, and he was released from County jail with absolutely nothing waiting for him on the outside, and within four weeks he was back on the heroin, he overdosed and died in July.
Ann: Unfortunately, the situation of your friend is all too common, and we have, as part of our 3-strikes work, heard many stories of people being released from prison in paper suits, without the $200 they’re supposed to have to get them to wherever they’re going next, and many of them, because they don’t have a choice, return to either the abusive homes or the gangs or, you know, because they don’t have a plan and a program, there are terrible stories of people released in a wheelchair, at night, without any support, who sleep in alleys until they can figure out how to get to a place that can help them. One of the programs that my husband and I have been sponsoring is a program called Ride Home, where it’s run by people who are formerly incarcerated themselves, and they wait outside of the prisons, knowing that our Prop 36 folks are being released, and they help them create a plan to get to transitional housing that helps coach them on getting a job and developing a resume and giving them a safe space to transition back into society. But, you know, there aren’t enough of those Ride Home people all over the country to help other have that re-entry that can hopefully make them successful. And, you know, sadly your friend’s situation where, because he didn’t have any support and he didn’t have any money and, you know, where he went straight back to the drug addicted life that he had had before, is all too common. Again, what’s an easy thing that we can do to help create change, if that’s an issue that you care about, contributing towards a Ride Home program or offering an entry-level job to someone who is coming back into society is one of the greatest things that you can do that truly has meaning for someone else.
Chris: I find it interesting that the prison reform issue doesn’t seem to be a hardline left or right wing thing. I mean, we have Bernie Sanders working with Rand Paul in the United States Senate on sentencing reform, and you’d never think those two guys would work together on anything.
Ann: It’s so funny that you say that, because we noticed, when we were doing our fundraising for the Proposition, that we actually got…we tend to lean left in our political views, and we got as much or more support from Republicans as we did from Democrats, and in fact this was not a party-oriented initiative, it was a belief of people who value fairness over other measures that came together and supported and passed this. You know, when you pass with 70% of the vote, you’ve got to have a lot of people on both sides that believe in what you’re doing, and I love the fact that Bernie and Rand Paul are working together, or whatever those random divides are that we call Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and liberals, because it really, what they’re uniting on are shared values…and that’s what we should be doing as a nation, to be honest. You know, this party system is so kind of arbitrary, and it forces us to dig our heels in without thinking. And I think if we did a little more thinking and feeling and a little less rule-following, we might benefit.
Francis: I agree with you so much about that. Part of the impetus to create this podcast for me was to try to start staking out alternatives to those kind of nineteenth, twentieth century political…the vocabulary, and just the boxes it puts people in…because I think a lot of that has lost its usefulness to us now.
Ann: Right. Completely agree.
Francis: I think there’s also two really different orientations towards how we relate to each other. And one is sort of the Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest…you know, it’s more of like, I guess what you would associate with a male kind of energy, which is predatory and…it’s about, if anything, thinning the herd. But then you also have another completely almost opposite approach, which is that we should be focussing on the weakest link, and that the health of the whole is something that is going to be increased by us helping each other, and those in most need. They’re very, very different approaches, I guess, to how the world functions, as a result.
Ann: Yeah, my reaction to that is, you’re right, and both are pretty polar in their approach. I’m not so sure that “thinning of the herd” or focussing exclusively on those with the most need is going to be the answer, and I think it’s just got to be brought down to a much more micro and individual level. I just think we, as a society, are talking so much in black and whites, in polarizing and sort of, if you’re not with me, you’re horrible, rather than, if you’re not with me, you might have something I can learn from that makes me more well rounded…I’m just feeling a little exasperated by the state of our thought processes, that “are you with me or are you against me” with nothing in the middle.
Francis: What I wanted to relate that to, as well, is you’re very active in…women’s movements, and you’re like a real trailblazer in terms of women in business, and I think right now what I’m starting to see, could be wrong, but are…people who are coming up and shaking things up, women, who almost seem like a new sort of archetype than we had before, because, say like in the days of Thatcher, for example. You had women who took offices of power, but a lot of their policies were indistinguishable from men, in any way. But I’m wondering if there is something uniquely feminine, to me, it would be something that was less like that survival-of-the-fittest kind of mindset, but something that we really actually need as a society right now, especially with regards to the state of the environment and our..
Ann: Yeah. You know, my gut reaction to that—and it’s probably not fair, because I know plenty of men who have this trait too—but I think there is the female desire to nurture, that comes from bearing children, and, you know, needing to support lives that are not sustainable on their own, that we sort of do when we have newborn babies that came out of our bodies…there is something about tending to and nurturing others that is more female, at least historically has been more female. I know many nurturing men as well, but, you know, I would say in my experience that quality is predominantly female quality. And you know, men needed to defend, and while they were off, you know, hunting and fighting off enemies, women were tending to families and tending to the land, and those genetics stay with us through the generations, and I think to be more nurturing as a society incorporates the empathy that I talked about earlier, and the awareness of, and value of, human life and what we need to survive. And that includes the earth being a healthy and sustainable place and, you know, it’s a whole cascade of what we need in order to not only live, but to be good humans. And so my new archetype is a weird combination of a stereotypic nurturing woman, but she’s now powerful and capable of not only nurturing in the home, but nurturing as a leader. And I tried, I don’t know what, I don’t know retrospectively what kind of leader I was, but I always intended to be a leader who empowered and nurtured and helped those that worked with me thrive. And, you know, I kind of think instead of trying to be masculine and gain power by behaving in the same way that our male successful predecessors have behaved, that there is an opportunity for all of us to take on some of those more loving qualities. And I know loving in a work sense, in a leadership sense, is kind of a weird idea. But if we make it acceptable to feel and care in addition to winning, I think it’s gonna create a better society.
Francis: I agree. Well my own personal evidence for it was, raising a son, I believed very strongly when I first had him that any kind of male-female sort of…I thought it was just modeling and what they were nurtured into being, and then what I discovered is that when he was like four, he was running around playing with trucks and stuff, and most of the girls were playing with dolls, and that wasn’t 100%, but it’s just one example of how, like at a really young age, he was very boyish.
Ann: Yep. And my sister did a very similar experiment. She had a son, she’s the only one of the three girls who has not had just daughters, and she had a son and wanted him to play with dolls and not have weapons and…he would turn anything into a weapon just by nature. And he’s the sweetest, nicest human. He’s not, you know, he’s not a violent kid or anything else, completely normal, now lovely man, but she tried to take away those gender stereotypes and he just, without even knowing, just created them in his own way himself.
Francis: It’s something you see universally in that age group. It was, it was very surprising to me. But, you know, there’s a way to work with it, I think, that…what I tried to do is figure out role models for my son, where he could feel like embracing that sort of warrior energy, but directing it in positive way. And honestly, it’s really hard to find good male role models in the media, because I guess the media doesn’t really benefit very much from these people who are living these quiet, heroic lives, there has to be like some huge conflict or something. So, I had a really hard time doing that, but what we came down to is that Mother Earth needs to be protected, and it’s your job to protect Mother Earth. So it became a way for him to sort of use his masculinity but at the service of the feminine. And I think that really stuck with him. It directs it in a way, I think, that’s necessary right now.
Ann: What’s he doing now, Francis?
Francis: He just got accepted to a high school that I’m really happy about, and he’s taking Kung Fu and Yoga, and I work very hard to keep him off of the video games…and that’s been a really big challenge. His generation is growing up with video games and YouTubers and all this stuff that we never had, and it’s…it’s new, it’s a little hard to navigate it as a parent.
Ann: It is.
Francis: Regarding the future, do you feel optimistic about the future, and if so why?
Ann: You know, I’m inherently an optimistic person, and so I’m not sure I could say I feel optimistic, there are things I worry about. I certainly worry about our environment and its ability to sustain us, given how we’re treating it, but I also feel that the pendulum historically in our nation and in our world has swung back towards center always. So for those of us who feel right now like the emphasis is on things that are not according to our values, and our leadership is not supporting what we feel is important and how we would want to behave as humans, I have to have a longer term view, and know that, you know, when I look through history in the times I wasn’t alive, or even earlier in my life when people were either running our country or massive acts of destruction or murder or violence made us fearful about what our society was, that there is some balance that’s in our system that will allow us to have more positive and better feeling times in the future. I just have to believe that in order to, in order to live and so…you know, I believe in good humans acting in small ways towards others to do what they can do personally, and I believe in our system in some form to get that pendulum back, back to a place where we all feel we can live with it a little more. And, you know, sadly I fear that it might take another five years before we see the pendulum swing back, but I hope to still be alive and making positive changes both in the meantime and when it comes back in to accelerate the ways that we can be a kinder society. So I’m working on it on a day to day basis, and I haven’t lost hope. I don’t think you can. We can’t throw up our arms, and we have to just keep doing whatever we can do, given the current circumstance. I’m on a mission to do that.
Francis: Yeah, I think a lot of us are, actually. You know who I think are, one of our big hopes is? My son’s generation…they’re growing up knowing that there’s an urgent need to change the way we’re interacting with the environment, and that sort of thing.
Chris: For the first time in decades, we’re starting to see young people organize among themselves. We have the Parkland kids, and now we have the climate kids who are skipping school every Friday to protest…I mean, I think we’re actually seeing energy among young people for the first time in what I think is a couple of decades.
Ann: Yeah, and I see my kids, who are little bit older than Francis’s, not being willing to take jobs unless there are good for society components in the actual companies. And, you know, I didn’t grow up in a time where we gave that thought. Corporate social responsibility was emerging, you know, fifteen years ago, and everybody thought, wow, that’s an amazing idea, a company can do well and also do good, and now the next generation is saying, well, we’re not going to work for you unless you do both. That’s awesome.
Francis: It is. I think our kids’ generation are gonna see people that came before them sort as, like, these crazy kids who just trash the place, and it’s time to clean up. And they’ll have, I’m sure when technology is really applied to the service of, say, cleaning the oceans, and cleaning the air, and…what we’re capable of doing is gonna be stunning. And it’s just a matter of will, and it’s a matter of, I guess, somehow creating the choice for people in the way that they recognize that, in a very clear, finite way.
Ann: Yep.
Chris: I had a young friend write to me this morning, he just turned down a job well over $200,000 a year—this kid’s only 23 years old—because he did not want to work on artificial intelligence drones that are used to kill people, and he accepted a job paying about half of what he was offered, where he could work for a company that does accounting software or something..benign.
Ann: Well, it’s very enlightened of a young person, you know, to be led by values rather than by money, that’s fabulous. He probably can live with himself and feel good, that’s awesome.
Chris: Well, we always end just with the same basic question: Do you have anything you’d like to plug, or…promote or…whether it’s something you’re working on, or something somebody else is working on, or just something you’d like to put out there that people might be interested in?
Ann: Sure. I would say if you want the monthly reminder of small ways that you can personally make a difference in the world, go on my website anndevereuxmills.com and sign up for One Small Thing, which is that monthly newsletter/blog. But I think, assuming that you don’t need that reminder and you just have a way to live your life each day where, at the end of the day, you sort of say, “was I the person that I would like to have been” and if so, great, ‘cuz I helped someone or I did something that feels additive to society, and if I didn’t, it’s OK, I thought about it and tomorrow’s another day to do that. So I’d encourage you to live the small life, because if we all do that, we’re gonna end up creating big and meaningful positive changes at a time when it feels like the world needs it most.
Chris: Well, thank you so much for coming on Making Better.
Ann: Well, thank you for making it better.
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Ann: Chris, you have a phenomenal voice. I’m sure people have told you that before, but this is a good vehicle for you, cuz your voice is very soothing….