EP 234: Emily Best

Introduction and Update on Julie's Accident

[0:00] Hi friends, you're listening to The Other 50%, a herstory of Hollywood. I'm Julie Harris Oliver. You may have noticed I took a little bit of a break over the summer.

The truth is I had a bit of an accident and I broke my wrist and I had to have surgery and I need those particular parts of me to put this podcast together.

And to be honest, the whole thing just took me out for a bit but not to worry, I'm fine, I'm recovering. Sometimes we just need a season to rest and recuperate.

The only thing I regret is that I did this interview back in June, and now I've taken a long time to get it out. But here we are. I'd like to think it's worth the wait, and I also think it's pretty evergreen.

I caught up with Emily Best, the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, the online crowdfunding platform for creators, and also FilmForward, which is an experiential learning platform designed to activate the full potential of today's dynamic and diverse workforce by replacing boring corporate training videos with a cinematic learning experience built around award-winning short films from around the world. I've seen this program, it is so cool, and she's going to tell us about it.

[1:03] One of the things I love about this business, and I guess about life, is getting to see how people's careers develop and how they grow and evolve. I interviewed Emily a few years ago about Seed&Spark and her origin story and all things crowdfunding on Catch a Break Season 2, Episode 203, so be sure to go and listen to that, and it is linked in the show notes.

But today, I initially reached out to Emily to talk about her newer venture, Film Forward, and the important work she's doing there.

Our conversation expanded to include her thoughts about managing a company with a dispersed and remote workforce and how COVID changed everything, about really intentionally creating culture in a company in those circumstances, how humbling it is to do this work authentically, and trying to shift the American culture to prioritize human dignity above individual achievement.

Emily continues to be an incredibly thoughtful visionary, and I was inspired by this conversation.

You can find the podcast at theotherfiftypercent.com, all spelled out in letters, as well as in all the podcast places, and or you can find the links to everything I'm up to on the link tree that is in the show notes.

Okay, here's my conversation with Emily Best. Here, have a listen.

Introduction and Overview of Seed&Spark

[2:16] I'm here with Emily Best. Welcome to The Other 50%. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so excited to catch up with you. And I'm not going to have you go through your whole origin story and the whole origin story of Seed&Spark because I talked to you for a really long time on the Catch a Break podcast, episode 203. So I encourage everyone to go listen to that, to get up to speed, and then come back and get the update. So, gosh, there's so many things I want to talk to you about and why don't we just do a quick update on where Seed&Spark is right now, because that's the film crowdfunding platform. And I saw something recently where you've eliminated the fees and everything. So why don't you talk about Seed&Spark and tell us where it is?

Well, we launched Seed&Spark back in 2012. And back then the market was dominated by the two major players, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and they've set the rate and set the fees and set how things were done. And we updated a little bit by making it possible for pledgers on Seed&Spark to cover the site fee on behalf of the creators. And that meant that the creators were paying less in site fees and keeping more of their cash. But the more that we looked at the landscape.

[3:25] The biggest player in crowdfunding now is really GoFundMe. That's the one that's because it has replaced the American healthcare system, but that is a tragedy for another podcast.

Right. It's a whole other story.

But now, pretty much everyone has, you know, back when we started Kickstarter and Indiegogo were still like kind of cool, newfangled, not super well known, like, you know, your creator friends knew what they were, but their parents didn't, you know, and now GoFundMe has become a really like intergenerational, everybody's familiar with it, not for good societal reasons, as I mentioned, but they, they're a for profit business and they get a tip.

[4:05] And I was realizing that the main ways people are interacting with digital crowdfunding now, which are political contributions, and GoFundMe, they're being asked to leave a tip.

And that's actually more familiar now to folks than a lot of the other frameworks and creators, like they don't really have much money to spare. So could we move into that model?

And we figured out that like at worst it would basically be.

An even swap from a revenue perspective. And at best, if we do a really good job of articulating our value to our backers, we could do better.

And so January of last year, we removed fees from our creators and we moved to a tipping model with backers.

How's it going?

Yeah, it's break-even or better, actually. And I think what's interesting is that people who are inclined to tip are actually inclined to tip like 20%.

And that's very different from the 5% of before. And then that puts the onus on us to really articulate the value. And I think that's like an appropriate relationship for us to have.

Yeah. And then the creators get more of the money to put on the screen, as they say.

[5:25] Now, I also know you relocated your business to Atlanta. Can you talk about why and how that's going?

Relocating to Atlanta and Remote Work Dynamics

[5:30] I mean, yes, I relocated the business, but I relocated myself to Atlanta.

My team is now everywhere and we had an office in downtown LA until March 2020.

We shut it down a few days before the broader national shutdown. Basically when I saw people disinfecting doorknobs, I was like, let's go home. This is ridiculous. I'm going to move here. And then the shutdown soon followed.

We gave up our office pretty soon after that. And then we, over the next year and a half, we hired from everywhere.

[6:03] And at that point, like, it was clear we were never going back to an office.

And my husband and I had, I didn't, no shade, I didn't particularly enjoy living in Los Angeles.

It just isn't my spot. And we went and moved up to be near my parents during the pandemic in Sacramento and had a little bit more of like a quiet, calm, suburban existence.

Husband had to give up everything he was doing. He's an actor. He also is a really skilled personal trainer, does a lot of like, you know, healing and mobility work with folks.

And none of that was happening in person. And I was trying to rescue Seed and Spark from certain extinction. And so he became full time dad. And he stayed with two small kids. And he stayed, that way until three weeks ago when he went back to work full time. But moving to Atlanta gave him an opportunity to, without going back to LA, to still participate in the entertainment industry. So we got back here, he got an agent, he started auditioning again, then the strike happened. So he was like, okay, I'm just gonna, you know, I'm gonna go get some, some training work, which is what he's doing now. But part of it was, it's affordable to live here.

[7:14] If you are a person who is very interested in your kids going to public school and then also interested in your kids going to diverse public school and also in your kids going to diverse public school where there's enough resources to actually create good educational outcomes, you don't actually have that many choices in the entire country.

Yeah. But Gwinnett County, which is the largest county in Georgia, we managed to find a house, a walking distance from the most diverse public school in the state of Georgia, in one of the most diverse counties in America. And that was really important to us. So entertainment was one, education for the kids, affordable housing. We wanted enough space to grow things and we wanted a climate in which we could feel like we've responsibly grown them. Like, I know that California is having a record weather year, but it's not actually curing the drought and it's exacerbated a lot of really longstanding climate issues. And we we're looking for a slightly more stable piece of land where water fell out of the sky in reasonable intervals, where we could grow things and just live a little bit more of a sustainable existence.

And so that's what we've done.

[8:26] I love it. I'm such a proponent of public school. And- I love public school.

Yeah, I think it's so important. And we can talk about diversity all day long, but then if we keep our white children in these really expensive private schools, we're undermining the whole effort, but don’t get me started.

That's what private schools were built for, was to keep the white kids with the white kids. So that's what you get when you go there.

By design. Yes. Well, along the way, it seems that you've proven you can run a company with a diverse, diverse isn't the word I was looking for, although also that, but you can run a company- Distributed.

Yes, thank you. You're welcome.

The Benefits of Working from Home and Accessibility Accommodations

[9:09] Can you talk about that a bit? In a time where there's a lot of pressure to bring people back to the office and I'm having trouble figuring out why.

Well, bringing people back to the office in a forced way is sexist and ableist.

I'm just going to go ahead and say that, because the accessibility accommodations that were created almost overnight at the top of the pandemic so that people could work from home were things that disability activists had been screaming to make available for decades. And they were like, oh, so it was that easy. How interesting. Yeah. Suddenly it wasn't hard.

Yeah. When it really got her to the bottom line. Right. And so for me, the idea of going back to the office with all that we have gained from it in mobility, people being able to move where they want to move, you know, live the lifestyles they want to live, I think is really important. I think, three years in, I am having some major aha moments about assumptions that I held onto around how work would still be even though we were distributed, especially as the team changed. And And we didn't have trust that was built in person.

And the idea that, distributed work requires so much more attention to process and practice.

The Challenges of Remote Work and Communication Overload

[10:38] Because you can't learn things by osmosis. Just follow someone around and hear your leader talk and figure it out.

Exactly, and because conflict will get, conflict that might happen in a meeting gets resolved just between the two people and then you don't get to see them talking at the water cooler later and knowing then getting like a visual cue that like, oh, that's been resolved and feeling that relief. There are just a whole lot of community and like.

[11:07] It's also annoying because things that could be like, hey, over your shoulder, let me ask you this thing, become a meeting, or a Slack message or whatever.

I think the inundation of communication is really intense and it drove a ton of burnout that I couldn't explain because everybody's like, you're working from home, how could you be burned out?

It's like, well, no, now work in people's living rooms.

It's exhausting and constant.

[11:37] Yes, it's exhausting and constant. We have to pay way more attention to little details.

We have to do way more documentation.

We're having to learn and implement, experiment with, learn from, and implement new processes, figure out that those aren't working, or reset expectations for people who are like, I don't like this.

And you're like, yeah, well, unfortunately, we're going to have to do it anyway. And I'm sorry about that. That's a trade-off that we're making. If you want to stay home, this is now a trade-off that we're making.

It's really hard. I didn't have the skills for it. I didn't... I was not trained for it. I was learning along the way and fell on my face so many times. I'm super lucky to have a really brilliant COO who can see and has a lot more experience than I do and can really see things for what they are. And we hired some big gun outside consultants to help us work on the DEI side in the distributed environment, in the expectation setting, in the trust building. And we had to undertake a really intentional culture design that is taking literally years to implement because we also have to run this business and there aren't that many of us to run it, right? So it's been hugely challenging. And I think also challenging for me to set healthy boundaries.

And so, you know, the four-day week was something that we implemented last year.

[13:04] My gosh. Again, what's time? What is time?

About a year ago, just to try to address some of that digital burnout piece, like, Julie, I'm on 14 Zooms a day sometimes. And like, that's pretty regular. That's a lot.

You know what I mean? Like, I couldn't do it. I'd die if I had to do that five days a week.

Yeah. different level of like attentiveness and energy and all of those things.

Am I hearing a, and yet it's worth it at the end of this?

[13:35] You mean for working at home? Absolutely. Because the advantages are managing care for my kids.

The advantages are I can cook dinner. It's not just like I make it home in time for dinner, but I can cook dinner, which I love to do. For some people, I know that's a terrible chore.

For me, I love to do it. It's part of how I make a break from my day and reconnect with, with my family and myself, it allows us to hire brilliant people from absolutely anywhere.

Like I think about, this is just like one of our most recent hires is a guy named Mike Moran and he's in Rhode Island. And like, he's so stinking good at his job.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And there's no way we'd ever work, I would not know he existed otherwise and I'm so, so grateful for his work and his contributions.

And so I think about that and I think about Jade Flower in Baltimore, Maryland, like just these are unicorn humans.

Remote Work and Talent Attraction

[14:39] That like are not in Los Angeles and what we would be missing out on from a talent perspective and that the attributes of a four-day week and remote work are really attractive to folks.

[14:53] Yeah, it's brilliant. Can you talk a little bit how you think about the setting up the DEI culture of it all when, everyone's remote?

It's really hard. It's really hard. I've made a lot of mistakes.

I think the truth is like the DEI culture of it all means different things to different organizations and I have an organization where every single person in it has extraordinarily high expectations about the culture and the experience here. And there's, you know, honestly, less in like, nobody's in it for the money, right? It's not that people don't want to and deserve to be paid at whatever, but like, you don't come to work at Seed&Spark because you're like, I'm going to get wealthy, like a lot of startups. It's like, I am really mission aligned. Yeah. Right.

And so I didn't understand for a long time, because I obviously I give my heart to this thing because it's mine, but like I didn't understand the ways in which other folks also are really in it with their hearts.

And that actually is a much more delicate environment in which to work where like things that that.

[16:13] In other workplaces wouldn't even register as a blip are really significant in our workplace because people are in it with their hearts, right? So at Seed&Spark, nobody's ever been fired for disagreeing with something or... You know what I mean? You don't have that sort of thing. But people take conflict really personally because we think of ourselves as a really loving, empathetic, et cetera, place. And so conflict feels like really terrifying. And it's hard to like innovate and push and go forward and have no conflict. And when you're really trying to suppress conflict, that can create a lot of challenges. And so for us, it was really about sort of getting to the root of what are we trying to do here together? Can we really clearly define the roles that everyone is playing and the expectations for those roles. And can we make it very clear what decisions people are responsible for, which is super important in a distributed environment, what they're just a stakeholder in? Meaning you can expect to have meaningful input, but you don't get to make that call. And so the decisions that you're charged to make, you have to decide what trade-offs are being made and take responsibility for those trade-offs.

Balancing Conflict and Innovation in a Heartfelt Workplace

[17:34] In other cases, you may be mad about the trade... If you're just a stakeholder, you may be mad about the trade-offs that are being made. But it's just important that you understand why they're being made. And like this is... I'm saying this to you with language I have today that I didn't have 4, 6, 12. And so we're doing all those things. And then we're having to do them again and again as the business changes and shifts because we're a startup and stuff changes really fast. And so we are constantly having to redefine those things and also prioritize them amid all of the work that actually needs to get done.

But I have come to really believe that it's about expectation setting.

[18:11] And you do that through job descriptions. You do that through objectives and key results. You do that through... Charts that I'm having trouble thinking of the name of it. But where you're like, who's responsible, who's informed, who's a stakeholder, who's... Yeah, exactly. There are lots of really great frameworks for this that I really like. But I think at the end of the day, it's also about like demonstrating the practices, right?

So having meetings where there's an agenda and there are notes and there are action items. And that at the end of the day, everybody knows who's responsible for what action item because meetings are costly, right?

Interpersonally, making sure that people leave them being like, oh, I'm glad I was in that meeting. And I know what to do next.

Yeah, clarity is incredibly important. And it sounds like a lot of emotional labor but scaffolded by a lot of tools and clarity and steps.

Thank you for saying that. This is something that I now say to people coming into a distributed workplace that I did not know to say for like the first two years we were hiring, which is that distributed workplace requires a high degree of emotional labor.

And I learned this phrase from my friend Carla Monterosso, emotional discipline.

[19:28] Say more. Well, Number one is really getting to the, like, the emotional labor piece is trying to be really attentive to the visual cues, right?

There is digital body language, virtual body language, somebody's with their camera off or somebody's not really engaged, right? Somebody's not participating in the chat when they're asking to, et cetera.

There's digital body language that's important to acknowledge, but it's also really important when you're being triggered and you're having big feelings about something to try to actually unpack what's going on.

Accountability and Managing Triggers in Remote Work

[20:06] Before sort of really acting out in all of that reaction and being patient.

So I think the emotional discipline is really about patience with people needing to get to a place at their pace and trying to make sure that everybody has what they need to get where you go together.

And I think it's about constantly interrogating how information moves around the organization. And how accountability is practiced in the organization. But the, but accountability, real accountability is emotional labor.

Yeah, there was a part in the middle that I just felt so deeply having worked, you know, in large corporations in this remote business where there are times when you can be so triggered and the discipline of not having a rant on your Zoom.

[21:06] Is a challenge. Yeah. Yeah. I think what I've seen my, we have used a lot of practices over the months and one of our board members, who's a brilliant coach, and entrepreneur in her own right, Virginia Bauman, she gave us the framework of red, yellow, green, where you just do a little check-in with yourself And then, you know, at the beginning of a meeting, you can say, I'm green.

I'm like, I'm here. I'm present. I'm ready to go. I'm feeling good.

I'm yellow. I'm distracted or agitated, whatever. I'm red is red.

And my team, because we're artists, like have all different shades.

Importance of Acknowledging Our Protected Class Status

[21:46] Very popular. And I think in part it's because. We're a team where every single individual is in a protected class. Every single individual in our team is a member of a protected class. And so the society is not terribly friendly to us right now, in different ways at different times for different people. And we need to be able to acknowledge what we're walking into the room with.

And I have seen times when we've practiced red, yellow, green, And somebody has been like, not quite their full selves, but they said they were like orange.

So first of all, when someone says red, I'm usually like, do you need to be like, can we just take notes for you? And do you want to take time? And if they say like, no, I need to be here. I want to do work. I'm like, cool. I'm gonna respect that. But you've also told us how we need to treat what's coming out, right?

And I've watched the team like adjust around somebody who's like really trying to make it work that day.

And I've also seen times when we haven't done red, yellow, green, and things have fallen apart and we've had to repair it. And it was just, it's a really stark reminder for me of how important some of those things are when you can't literally feel someone's energy anymore.

Yeah, and you could be making up stories about the reaction that you're getting, having no idea.

Prioritizing Mental Health and Well-being in the Workplace

[23:11] Yeah. God, that is the work, isn't it? Yeah.

So we talk about this a lot in the realm of production, you know, instead of just barreling into your day, having a moment and checking in with people.

And then that step of if there are things people are dealing with, or they're not at top capacity, how do you manage that besides saying, okay, great, we're carrying on anyhow. Keep up.

You know, we have unlimited PTO and people take mental health days all the time. I don't want people to work sick and or tired. And I think the hardest lesson for me is to use that also.

Oh, you have to model it or no one will take it. Yeah, well, I mean, they, I would say everybody else the company is better at it than I am. Oh, they're doing it.

Yeah, with the exception of one person and she knows who she is and I'm constantly encouraging her to take a little bit more. But yeah, I mean, I think that piece of it too which is just building frameworks And if you know what work you're responsible for and what metrics you have to hit. We trust people's discernment to say, I'm down today, it's not gonna be worth the effort. Tomorrow when I come back, I'm gonna still hit my numbers and we move on. Because I don't think the quantity of work is important.

[24:35] Well, and that also shifts, my favorite article is that Harvard Business Review article of why there are no obstacles for incompetent white men.And the thesis is because we value Face Time, confidence, 

[24:53] Speaking up, bragging, telling us how great you are and see that as leadership and see that as productivity, when in fact it's none of those things.

And so it seems like when you're really looking at, you know, work quality and you're not having people fight for attention in a boardroom. It shifts the whole dynamic.

Yes. And I want to be clear, like, I don't think I'm killing it at this. I think I am. I am in a deep state of perpetual humility around this stuff that like, just when I think I've got it, something else comes up. And I'm like, Nope, I don't got it.

But I'm grateful that I'm, you know, I have a team that holds me accountable, which is the best thing you can ask for, because if they're not, you better wonder why.

And more than that, I'm surrounded by some really brilliant like leaders and advisors who have given me language and tools to actually tackle this and to have some awareness of the things that make me successful as a founder, are not the same skills that make me successful as a leader.

[26:05] I would argue that your humility and thoughtfulness about it is probably what makes you successful.

Maybe. I don't know what successful means, really, is in that I've messed it up royally on multiple occasions and have had to really re-evaluate my approach to things and apologize to people and, and figure it out.

And I, I feel like a perpetual beginner, but my title says I should know something about it. Right.

So, so I think there's my dog always having something to say about everything. It's the real working from home. Yeah. This is real work from home stuff. Yeah.

No, I really do feel like a perpetual beginner in many ways where I get excited is when we implement a new, you know, when I can pull something from one of these folks and we can implement it and it works is like really exciting. It's really and then you can see everybody else being like, oh retrospectives. Yeah, you know, it's like, it's awesome. It's awesome because like that's a tool they can then turn and use in their smaller teams in their meetings. And it's, it's really invigorating and I can see what it does to the energy of folks who may have been previously a little more disengaged. But I also look like Working remotely is not my dream.

Working alone vs. working with a room full of people

[27:30] This is like the truth, just speaking solely personally for me, like working alone in an office in my house, however creatively I get to decorate it, I don't like being by myself all day and I do work much better, like where my actual skill set is helping a room full of people move through some really hard ideas and big questions to action. That is actually my core capacity and And I can't do, you can't do it on Zoom in the same way.

Didn't you start WIMPs?

I did. As a salon in your house? Yes. Yeah, okay. Gathering groups of people.

[28:09] And asking really hard questions and trying to make space for people to grapple with the answers. That's what that group was about. As soon as it became sort of an organization that people were using digitally to like get jobs, I was no longer the right person to manage that.

And it really, WIMPs, Women in Moving Pictures Salon, for the people who are like, what is that?

Was literally meant to be a monthly gathering of people. And then the women in the group were like, hey, we'd really like this to be a listserv so we can hire each other and we can get help with things, and you need a rubber chicken on set Sunday morning, who's got one? That was a real request. I need somebody with expertise about sea lions.

But I mean, women were really hiring each other in droves. But once the list grew larger than the people who could meet, there was no longer mutual responsibility to one another and the mutual trust that came out of that core.

And like, I think about a lot about that as a founder that like.

[29:16] I am a zero-to-one founder. I'm like, what is the big brewing challenge here? And how can we, as a group of people, come to a really cool next solution? And how can we build some community around that? But the organizational piece is not my zone of genius. And so I learn it because it is my responsibility. But it's not what I bring to the table. You know what I mean?

[29:42] Are you able to do some of those gatherings? Yeah.

So we I tried to get together with team members and the team is awesome. Like they make efforts if they're traveling to see each other as well. You know, we just don't have the budgets to bring 20 people together from all over the country. That's the thing about is like, if we could get together on a quarterly or even semiannual basis without thinking twice about it, I think it would feel really different than it does today.

Something for early stage startups to really consider is that like, fine, hire people in 10 states, but what does it cost to like fly and put them up to get them together? It's not insignificant. Yeah. And if you don't have that budget, you're making a pretty significant trade off. And those are things that like, I didn't, I didn't think were priority to think about for a while. And so now we find ways around them, you know, like we travel, we meet at festivals for work events and you know, we do it in smaller groups. Sure. Now, Can we shift a bit and talk about FilmForward?

Prioritizing in-person gatherings for remote teams

[30:41] I remember seeing your presentation on it and I think it's such an exciting thing and I talk about it to whoever will listen. So why don't you tell us about what FilmForward is?

[30:49] Sure. FilmForward replaces boring, crappy corporate professional development training with experiential learning programs built around some of the world's best short cinema.

[31:02] And the genesis of FilmForward was from our creators. is that like around 2018, Seed&Spark had been in market for six years and we had tried to do all sorts of things around film distribution to try to connect our creators.

[31:18] To larger and larger audiences. But our creators came to us and they were like, hey, so now no matter how successful we are, we can get picked up by a big distributor out of a big festival, we are marketed on social media and we are streamed on streaming platforms. And the reviews written about us are distributed through digital media platforms.

And so everything about us and every delivery mechanism that we're put out through is being delivered via algorithm, like a heat seeking missile to people who already look like us and already think like us. And that is not why we make work. We make work to change people's minds and challenge their worldview.

Identifying the challenge of delivering films to diverse audiences

[31:56] And I remember where I was standing when the enormity of this problem actually hit me. And I was like, aha, okay. So the challenge is how do we deliver films to audiences at scale? Audiences who don't identify as the audience for the work in any digital way. And we can't really use social media or streaming because those are all using algorithms. Cool. What? How? And a really smart advisor of mine said, Emily, did you know the workplace is the most diverse place most people are in their lives? I was like, oh, that's really interesting.

But we didn't, you know, we'd been a crowdfunding marketplace for six years, like we didn't know from enterprise. And so we did a six-month research project and we talked to hundreds and hundreds of enterprise leaders. So primarily in the C-suite, chief diversity officers, people, I like to talk to CFOs, so you know how the money moves in an organization. We talked to employee resource group leaders and consultants and academics.

[33:05] And you know, the number one thing we heard, the easiest piece of information we could glean is nobody likes corporate training videos or believes they're particularly effective.

Not. And many times in the category of professional development, the framework was perpetuating harm, because it was sort of like giving people a certificate for things they were not ready to practice and hadn't been given the opportunity to practice. Or in the case of DEI, it was relying a lot on getting groups of people together for brave conversations that they were not prepared or resourced to have. And then the marginalized folks in the room were being asked to perform their trauma for their colleagues so that the like white or straight or cis or male, colleagues in the room would empathize.

[33:53] Then those folks felt good about themselves. And the marginalized folks would be like, cool, that's not gonna change anything.

And now my emotional labor has been used for the benefit of my white colleagues. I'm like, what did I get out of this? And this was actually sowing division. And we were like, well, that's a really cool problem to solve because we use movies for collective sense-making all the time. And in fact, all the other challenges we were really hearing them talk about, right?

So organizational adaptability and resilience to globalization or global markets or global audiences, retention and engagement of employees because we needed to develop more psychologically safe mechanisms in the workplace, leadership, just as a category, leadership.

These are all actually like stories that we tell about how we do things here, right?

Yeah. And we use films for collective sense-making all the time, but because of the algorithmification, it's definitely really hard to have a water cooler around which we can all gather and talk about one thing we've all seen.

[34:59] And so we started with this sort of idea that we're gonna bring the water cooler conversation back with a purpose, but we realized that we had to go far beyond just making better video experiences, that actually we needed to engage a very different theory of change, that moved people from experience.

Scaling practice from individuals to teams and creating organizational accountability

[35:23] Through like framework understanding to action and lasting practice behavior change. And that couldn't happen just at the individual level. It needed to, we needed individuals to have experiences and reflection and frameworks so that they could actually map this stuff into their brains in the way that it would stick.

We needed to scale that practice into teams.

And then we needed to create some organizational accountability This we do through executive insight data that actually helps organizations understand where their policies, practices, and structures are impeding professional development in the organization.

Okay, so many layers to that. Because a big part of it sounds like the shared experience and the shared agreement of what we saw means. Yeah, that's right.

And then how we're going to use that to affect change and hold ourselves accountable.

Love it. Can you give us an example?

Sure. We have this really incredible Norwegian short film called The Affected. And The Affected takes place on an airplane, on a tarmac. It's a crowded airplane, a busy tarmac.

[36:34] And off camera, so you're spending a little bit of time with the pilot and the stewardesses, and I don't know, you call them flight attendants, and you're sort of traveling around with different passengers. And then off camera, you can hear a woman stand up and starting to to protest that somebody on the plane is going to be deported and she won't sit down until this person is moved to safety. And so this protest is happening and now you're traveling back through and listening to how they all react. And the captain has to make a decision, and he's like, just, you know, tell her to get off the plane, whatever we, you know, we got to go. And you see this whole thing deteriorate and the captain makes a decision that his first mate or whatever that guy's called supports or ostensibly supports. And, then as it's clear that was like a very unpopular decision, the first mate says, well, I never agreed with it.

Now corporate is calling, right? And the captain gets ousted off the plane and replaced by somebody who makes a very magnanimous statement about how I have decided to stop the deportation, which is not something an individual captain can do.

And then it becomes clear over the credits that the airline is just moving this person to the next flight to try to ameliorate the problem. And it's 11 minutes. And at the end of it, we can ask really interesting conversations about accountability.

Conversations about accountability and the cost of masking in the workplace

[37:53] Who is accountable for the decision-making? What tools did they have available? What mistakes did they make? And you also get all the different perspectives on what's happening from the people on the airplane. My favorite question that we open a lot of our discussions with is like, who are you?

[38:10] In the film. Yeah, who are you in the film? And it's just absolutely fascinating what opens up because I think actually it's less important that we necessarily have a shared meaning about what happens, but that people start to hear, the very different perspectives people have about what happened based on their lived experience.

And so it is a practice of perspective taking, which is super important to building any sort of like shared agreement or innovation or anything like that. And it starts to allow people to be like, Oh, wow, that person comes from a very different vantage point than I do. And they revealed something to me that I never otherwise would have seen.

The next time I'm in a meeting and they're saying something that feels out of left field to me, I'm going to be like, no, that comes from just a very different vantage point and I'm going to dig in, there. Right.

So it's really about using films as a very safe place to learn some of these pretty hard relational skills.

[39:11] Yeah, the asking of the questions, because my first thought would be, oh, well, that would very quickly devolve into an argument about immigration, which- Yeah, we don't go there.

That part is so much less important than really talking about who was holding the decision-making power and why were people's decisions what they were and yeah, do you know what I mean?

Yeah. the discussion part of it is so important. And your platform is both, right?

You share the film and then you have, is it modules about it and then also in-person discussion?

But usually we do, the most typical engagement is six to 12 learning modules and most companies roll them out at the rate of a module a month.

[40:01] And then, and a module is a film and a set of reflection questions and then frameworks and actions and tools and resources.

So you can learn a lot of things and we will usually charge you with some behavior experiments for the next month that we check on subsequently.

And then every two modules, we do a facilitated session to unpack across two films.

And part of that is to really dig at the intersections of experience, right?

So that like, we're not just talking in this case about immigration, and it really wasn't so much about immigration as like, what was everyone experiencing on that airplane and what were their perspectives on it?

But in that same session, we're also talking about an incredible film about a young trans woman.

[40:51] Who is working in her father's auto body shop and masking her true gender because the place is called Miller and Son.

And that is really about inclusive communication.

It is about the, like, what is it to feel psychologically unsafe in a workplace? What is it to have to mask? What is the cost of that, right? There's some really powerful pieces in there.

And so you layer that in with conversations about accountability, and now you have a really interesting and rich landscape for people to start to understand what the connections are between these issues and how they relate to the, we'll call it the DEI of it all, because what we're really talking about are like, what are the skills we need to have, like an actually effective and psychologically safe workplace?

[41:40] And the DEI of it all is like, how do we just learn as a baseline to respect the humanity of people who are different from us? That's what it is, why is it so hard?

The lack of human dignity as a foundational value in American culture

[41:53] Because human dignity is not a foundational value in American culture.

Say more. Individual achievement is our foundational value. Human dignity is not a foundational value. We don't assign people dignity at birth. They have to earn it through their hard work and their wealth and their, then their performances.

And usually they have to earn it much more if they are born poor and or black and or any degree of difference from the like, you know, white patriarchal sort of perfection.

And because if human dignity were a foundational value, we would not tolerate one child shot by a gun. We would not tolerate one unhoused person. We wouldn't tolerate it. We would not be able to imagine that was possible.

But instead, it's like, well, if it infringes on my individual liberty or my individual achievement, that's on you.

So yeah, I think the reason that we have to train it in the US is because it's not foundational. And unfortunately we outsource everything to the private sector.

[43:03] And so trying to make a shift in our human values as part of what we're outsourcing to the private sector because the lack of value of human dignity is materially impacting our productivity.

[43:17] And if what you really value is productivity, you might think differently about why DEI exists. And I don't personally believe that we're on this planet to produce work output. That's actually not my fundamental feeling, but I'm like, is that the lever we have, to get people to really prioritize the work of human dignity? Fine, that's a lever I would use.

Yeah.

I think Film Forward is genius. Cause we know entertainment shapes culture and we know what a powerful tool it is in every aspect of our lives. And so then to use it in that way, I just think it just makes it so accessible and in a way that people will engage and not do something else while the Zoom is on.

How is it performing?

I didn't really know what to compare it to because I've never launched a SaaS company before, but my understanding is everybody says like, oh, getting to a million in ARR is nearly impossible.

We did it in like 16 months. Well done.

And that's less of the excitement of the value then that our existing clients are constantly expanding with us and wanting to roll out new curricula and wanting us to solve other organizational challenges that we're like, we'll get there, we need some time.

But I think for me, the most exciting piece of it is these really small aha moments where you can see people's perspective has meaningfully shifted.

[44:45] It's this incredible film. It was crowdfunded on Seed&Spark. It was nominated for an Oscar, and now it's one of the core pieces of one of our best-selling curricula, which is called Behaviors of Belonging. And it's a film about this beautiful little one-night friendship struck up between an unhoused young man and a deafblind man who enlists his help to get on a bus. And And that is the film we use to introduce the concept of privilege to people.

And there's nobody working in a modern workplace who can watch that film and come out the other side and be like, I don't have any privilege. I don't get it.

[45:27] Yeah. And so we'll see people be like, I used to think the concept of privilege meant that you didn't work for what you had. But now I see that actually it's real and that it operates and I'm going to be more mindful of that in the future. And like, that's actually a million mile leap for someone, right? Because they've shifted from fixed mindset to growth mindset.

And we see these over and over again.

One of my favorite things is the CEO of one of the companies we work for said, I took one of the films home and watched it with my kids and it opened up a conversation about, race in our family that we've never had before.

And I just get chills. I get chills every time I tell that story, because it's like, the other thing I think is actually happening with Film Forward is people are being reminded of why art is important, and that it's important everywhere.

It's not just important after 7 p.m. or on the weekends, it's important everywhere. It can be valuable all the time. And that like, the work of artists is not limited to entertainment. It's not limited to free time, it's actually essential work.

Personal Relationships and the Political Landscape

[46:37] Right, for people's interpersonal relationships in their families, in their workplaces, right, with themselves. And that's the piece of the work that gets me out of bed every day.

Yeah. I could just listen to you talk all day, swear to God. I wanted to revisit a conversation that we had before we turned on the recorder, because I think it's also important if we could just recreate that conversation. Because we were talking about, I was telling you how my husband lives in Tennessee and we have a lot of talk about do we stay in Tennessee or how much time are we gonna spend there considering the political landscape and the vulnerable people in our family? And is that a compatible thing?

And everyone is uncomfortable being there. And you were talking a bit about living in your neighborhood in Atlanta. Go.

[47:24] Oh, well, listen, I think, look, I have the privilege of mobility, right?

So my family could pick up and live in a lot of places And we have a lot of privilege of choice right now. Our kids are small, we're done having children. And so we can kind of weather some of the, more fascist policies that are being rolled out in red states.

And that's, you know, that's privilege that we have. And we moved here because we wanted to enroll our kids in a really diverse public school system that we felt like that was well-resourced and like. That's hard to find anywhere in the nation. It happens to exist in Gwinnett County, which is the largest county in Georgia. My son goes to the most diverse school in the state.

[48:14] And it's a really sweet elementary school and we love it here.

[48:18] And moving here has brought so many good things to our lives. We moved primarily because we work in entertainment. Atlanta is a good entertainment town. But I'm also working in the corporate sales side and Atlanta is a huge corporate town. And climate, you know, this is a really like climate stable place. We can grow things, we can afford to buy a house, which we couldn't, at any point at any time in California, nor any time in the future. And when we moved here, like the really regressive laws hadn't started passing, right? So we moved here, I think with a little bit with stars in our eyes, not realizing how quickly things were going to deteriorate post the overturn of Roe v. Wade. And that said, I live on a really interesting cul-de-sac where some of the original, this whole cul-de-sac was built in the 70s.

And a couple of the original owners still live here. My neighbor, Bill, he's 95. And my neighbors down the street, whose names I will leave out because of what I'm about to say. access on the internet?

Interacting with Neighbors Holding Conflicting Beliefs

[49:23] Bill's probably not hanging out with me. But our neighbors at the end of the street have been here since the 70s. They're in their 80s. They're a really lovely and kind and generous and thoughtful couple that really cares about the neighborhood.

And I didn't have a chance to really know that about them because when I moved here, they were flying an American flag and a Confederate flag. And I was like, well, I'm not gonna really spend more time with them.

And Bill's caretaker, who is a black woman in her

[49:52] I don't know, early 50s, probably, like, I, she was one of the first people I met in the neighborhood. And I was like, alright, give me the skinny.

Like, what's up? How does it feel? You know? And she was from California originally, also. And I was like, like, what's up with those people down the street?

She's like, you know what, they're really kind people. And I was like, what's up with the flag? And she's like, you know, sort of shrugged her shoulders and was like, you know, it doesn't seem to impact how they treat people. And I thought, well, that's very interesting.

It's not what I would expect. And then my husband got in a conversation with that neighbor. And because the kids were playing at the end of the cul-de-sac.

And he was saying, you know, when we moved here in the 70s, it was all young families and it was all white families. And now, and he sort of gave an inventory of the diversity of the block. And my husband was like, oh my God, where is this going? And the man says, you know, it's really changed. It's much more diverse, all for the better, I think.

[50:44] Said the guy with the Confederate flag. The guy with the Confederate flag.

My husband and I were like, the cognitive dissonance is shattering. And then, like, a really, the loveliest, they've become like family to us, a gay couple down the street moved in with their adopted son. And, you know, the dynamics of the neighborhood shifted enough. And, um, it's sort of weirdly seemed to intersect with our latest election here in Georgia, which we had another close call, the Confederate flag came down and the Georgia state flag went up. And I really believe that one of his kids or somebody in the neighborhood was like, hey, don't think you're signaling what you mean to be signaling. Because if what you're signaling is like pride of place, you're doing it in a way that's not really going to jive for everyone else in the neighborhood. And I think the Georgia state flag is probably closer to what he means.

But what I think is like fascinating is, and you said this earlier, you know, Michelle Obama says it's hard to hate someone up close. What he really cares about is neighborliness.

[51:57] Do you know what I mean? Like he talks about himself as sort of like the protector of that end of the cul-de-sac. And we got the guy up here who has a thin blue line flag in his front yard, who's the protector of his part of the cul-de-sac. And they are really good neighbors to an extraordinarily diverse group of people.

And so it's really confusing to me how they hold these two things side by side.

And also it's really interesting to me to actually witness incremental change, even in the people that we will be like, ah, you know, it was a different time. You know, yeah, we, there's a real ageism in the growth mindset piece, right? That like, oh, you know, he's never gonna change his ways. And I just like, I saw it happen. Yeah.

[52:48] You know? And so part of it is that, you know, growing up in a liberal bubble, my first instinct was always - a Confederate flag, I'm not gonna build a relationship.

Right, right, I'm out.

[52:57] Yeah, and it gives me no opportunity to actually offer perspective that can make things different.

And I've witnessed that with my, you know, my neighbor's kids who are on the real, neighbors, the kids, they're like in their 70s now. But they're, they have a really different political affiliation, but they, and they were not like, particularly sweet to us when they found out we were from California. I think one of them was like, Oh, we think everybody from California is crazy.

And I was like, sure, is that hospitality because I feel like that was aggressive. But over time, you know, we care for Bill and we bring him food and we make him birthday cakes and my daughter goes to visit and keep some company.

And I think we are doing some deprogramming because I can see how very differently they consider us and consider our ideas when we have, you know, conversations about harder topics.

[53:59] I can get them to agree around points of human dignity and what our culture might look like if human dignity were at the center, right?

And they can really nod their heads and agree with that. And like, I don't think that's necessarily being talked about in their circle. And it only happens if we just step up to have those conversations. And as white people in this country who have that, you know, capacity to move around, I'm going to say this, as white cis straight people.

[54:28] I need to be specific. Let's be very specific, yeah. Yeah.

As white cis straight people, we have a lot of capacity to move around and have these conversations and there's a neighbor on our block who is trans and when the laws started changing down here, we put up a flag to make sure that it was very clear that there's safety here.

And I think that was a demand of this place that I sort of imagined but I didn't really know what it was gonna be like. Yeah. And this is also the work. It's personal and it's one on one.

And it and it's also Sarah Silverman show where she would go into red states and red families and talk to them and humanize ideas and people. Yeah. 

What have I not asked you about that I should have asked you about?

Hold on, I have no idea what anybody wants to know from me at this point.

No, this has been a really interesting conversation. I mean, I think overall, in the course of the questions that you're asking, I realized like I've had to really go back to beginner's mindset because it turned out like I never actually knew the stuff I needed to know at all, because I didn't know I needed to know it.

Until you did. Because I was swimming in the water of white supremacy and that told me like I was fine.

[56:59] Yeah. Right? And so like I can talk about experiences I've had and like lessons I've learned, but it's like practicing and trying and failing every single day in many ways, and then trying to pick myself back up again.

And it has required a level of grace with myself that is very hard for me to muster.

And also a level of like really being comfortable, being uncomfortable that like, I can't attach myself to the idea that everybody's gonna think I'm great at this.

[57:36] Because they don't, they won't, I'm not. and that can't be my goal.

Well, and it feels like a shift to me of...It's not a period of time that we're going to feel uncomfortable and be working this out.

This is just the new normal.

Correct. Because this work isn't going to be done next week.

Correct. Well, I think I would love for us to work towards a society in which, we think more about how to create, this is the human dignity piece, how to create, a sense of comfort and autonomy and connection.

Struggling to Articulate the New Paradigm

[58:16] From the beginning as opposed to having to talk about shared discomfort and inclusion, meaning you're still just inviting people to a table that wasn't theirs originally.

And we have just, there's a real big distance between here and there. Between imperative work and the new paradigm.

Yeah, and I feel like we're still really struggling to articulate what that new paradigm might be. There's no effing political leadership. I mean, that's not true. There is very little political leadership that we can point to that really shows us that.

I don't wanna say none, because I can think of like seven people I would actually point to, but that's not what the sort of national stage is.

That's not what the national paradigm is. And so we are, like all things that we do in this country, is rather than doing systems work, right?

Rather than making massive sweeping corporate level climate change, we're just having individuals recycle. Yeah. That is so useless. Yeah, we're not tackling the corporate plastic usage on a systems level because what we value is individual determination.

Individuals are then responsible for solving these big social challenges and that's a perfect way to get them to break down and give up. And never do it.

[59:36] It. Yeah. So like, I'm feeling all of that all the time. Yeah.

Okay. Give me one of your self care things that you're doing to keep going and not burning out.

[59:48] I took a generative writing class for the last six months. It's been one of the best things I've ever done in my whole life.

What does that mean? So rather than a writing class where you're bringing things in and getting critiqued and trying to work on productive output, it's really just building a practice of writing, getting used to sharing your work, getting feedback that is actually the stuff that you're looking for, building a relationship to your own writerliness. And yeah, it's gotten me back in touch with the fact that movies are not actually my creative medium. Short fiction is my creative medium. And I think once you get into the movie business, every story you tell has to become a script. And I got reminded sometime late last year by a dear friend that like, you know, you can just write short stories. And I was like, I can? And it turns out, yeah, I can. And I am, and I do, and it feels great.

So you're getting back in touch with being an artist, which is what started this whole thing at the very beginning. That's right. That's great. 

Emily Best, I love talking to you. Oh, I love talking to you too. Thank you so much, Julie. I really appreciate your time.

[1:00:54] You've been listening to The Other 50%, a Herstory of Hollywood. I'm Julie Harris Oliver.

Thank you to Emily Best for the conversation and for sharing her story.

Special thanks to Jay Roewe, Dani Rossner, and Alison McQuaid for the music. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and rate and leave a review to help other people find it.

You can find me at julieharrisoliver@gmail.com or find me at physical therapy.

That's where I am all day every day feels like. Thanks for listening. See you next time.