Unbehaved

"Too many people make the mistake of thinking that a job is the safe option. It's not."
Cindy Gallop was 45 when she sat down on her birthday to take stock, realized she'd given sixteen years to the same advertising agency, and resigned as chairman of BBH New York with no job to go to and no idea what came next. Twenty-one years later, she has never regretted it. The one thing she'd tell her younger self: start working for yourself a damn sight sooner.
Then there's her grandmother's saying, which opens this episode: the fool says evil cannot touch me, but drop by drop the pitcher fills. Cindy's version, for every woman currently telling herself she can stick it out two more years — the timeline is not the point. Every daily micro-sexism and microaggression is eroding your confidence and your belief in what you're capable of. Get out now.
What she built instead, starting at 45 and from nothing, is Make Love Not Porn — a real-world sex video sharing platform she launched from the TED stage in 2009, in a talk that's since been watched nearly three million times. Seventeen years later she's still fighting for it, and her LinkedIn headline still says "I like to blow shit up." She's 66. She is nowhere near done.
CONTENT NOTE: this episode touches on sexual assault. It isn't the focus, but it comes up more than once. Take care of yourself.
WHAT WE COVER
- Why a job is the riskiest place to put your future — "whose hands would you rather place your future in?"
- Her grandmother's pitcher, and why "I'll stick it out two more years" might be the most expensive sentence in your working life
- "There is only one thing holding women back in every industry, and that is insecure men"
- Why she calls her own award-winning career luck — including never having been harassed in a way that ended it
- At 32 she stopped looking for "the one," and had, in her words, a whale of a time for the next thirty years
- Red hot rage as a renewable resource: nice girls don't get angry, and that's exactly why we should
- Algorithmic suppression as economic oppression — and the moment I admitted I'd turned a platform problem into a story about my own writing not being good enough
- Giving the first public talk anyone had given on porn as sex education, to a room that went completely silent — and what Robin Williams said to her at the coffee break afterward
- What it actually costs to build a business the infrastructure refuses to serve: debanked three times in two months, 12% of monthly revenue to payment processing against a 3% standard, and a total ban on advertising anywhere
- The letters that keep her going — from young people, from couples, and from survivors who say it helped them reclaim their bodies
- Liquidating her retirement fund at 66 to keep it alive, and why she's going back out to raise again anyway
- Her permission slip, and the one small thing she promises will change your life: say what you actually think. Out loud. Starting today.
 
ABOUT THE GUEST
Cindy Gallop is the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, the world's first and only user-generated, human-curated, real-world sex video sharing platform — launched at TED in 2009 as a direct counterpoint to the harmful scripts of mainstream pornography.
Before founding MLNP, Cindy spent decades in advertising, including starting up the New York office of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) in 1998 and serving as its chairman. She was named Advertising Woman of the Year in 2003. She is also the founder of IfWeRanTheWorld, a co-action software platform launched at TED 2010.
Business Insider named her one of the 15 Most Important Marketing Strategy Thinkers Today (alongside Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin), and Campaign named her their Top Trailblazer for both 2016 and 2017. She is the author of Make Love Not Porn: Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior (TED Books).
Her 2009 TED talk has nearly 3 million views. She has been fighting the systemic barriers to funding, banking, advertising, and scaling MakeLoveNotPorn for 17 years — and she is currently gearing up to raise a new round of equity funding to scale the platform's mission of helping end rape culture globally.
 
PULL QUOTES
"The fool says evil cannot touch me, but drop by drop the pitcher fills."
— Cindy's English grandmother, quoted by Cindy throughout her life
"Every daily micro-sexism, micro-aggression, micro-racism is eroding your self-confidence, taking away your belief in what you're capable of, and destroying your soul. Get the fuck out now."
— Cindy Gallop
"Too many people make the mistake of thinking that a job is the safe option. It's not."
— Cindy Gallop
"I'm not looking for the one anymore. And my God, the relief."
— Cindy Gallop, on the day in her early 30s she opted out of the search-for-a-partner trap
"There is only one thing holding women back in every industry, and that is insecure men."
— Cindy Gallop
"Tell me it can't be done, I'm gonna fucking well show you. Put a barrier in my path, I'm gonna fucking well show you. I take all that daily demoralization, discouragement and depression, and I turn it into motivation and inspiration."
— Cindy Gallop
"I have destroyed myself financially to keep this business going."
— Cindy Gallop
"I am driven by red-hot rage."
— Cindy Gallop, on how she keeps posting on LinkedIn despite algorithmic suppression
"Algorithmic suppression is economic oppression."
— Cindy Gallop
"Say what you really think. No, really, say what you really think. Because we don't. Every day we suppress what we really think. Starting today, just start saying what you really think out loud. It'll change your life."
— Cindy Gallop
 
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Cold open: the grandmother's pitcher metaphor + "get the fuck out now"
00:34 — Meghan's intro (with content warning about sexual assault)
02:56 — Interview begins: "Cindy fucking Gallop"
03:15 — Growing up with a Tiger Mother in Brunei
05:17 — Opting out of the "search for the one" trap in her early 30s
08:05 — The 45th birthday review that led her to leave BBH
10:00 — Why "working for yourself" is the actual safe option
12:28 — Cindy's coaching practice + why she tells women to work for themselves
13:00 — The ONE thing holding women back in every industry: insecure men
14:00 — The grandmother's saying + "Get the fuck out now"
15:29 — Being "incredibly lucky" at BBH — and what Cindy means by that
17:46 — The 2009 TED talk + the nervous laughter
20:18 — The Robin Williams coffee-break story
22:18 — 17 years of business barriers to keeping MakeLoveNotPorn alive
28:04 — The three things that keep Cindy going (including "I have destroyed myself financially")
33:07 — Not giving a shit what family and friends think
34:35 — The loneliness question — and Cindy's honest answer
37:22 — LinkedIn algorithmic suppression as economic oppression
38:34 — Why Cindy is "driven by red-hot rage"
40:00 — Proxy bias explained: how LinkedIn's "unbiased" algorithm actively suppresses women
42:00 — Why Cindy still hasn't been able to raise the funding she needs — and the opportunity cost
43:48 — The one thing Cindy wants from the universe right now
44:41 — The permission slip: "Say what you really think."
46:45 — Where to find Cindy + how to support MakeLoveNotPorn
48:16 — Unbehaved Lessons of the Day
50:00 — Sign-off
 
RESOURCES MENTIONED
People + organizations referenced:
- Cindy Gallop — Founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, founder of IfWeRanTheWorld
- MakeLoveNotPorn — makelovenotporn.com — the world's first and only user-generated, human-curated, real-world sex video sharing platform
- MakeLoveNotPorn.Academy — makelovenotporn.academy — Cindy's new zero-to-18-and-beyond sex education platform (in early beta)
- Dear Cindy — cindygallop.substack.com — Cindy's advice Substack (archives full of advice on business, life, dating, relationships, beauty, travel)
- Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) — the advertising agency where Cindy worked for 16 years, including starting up the New York office in 1998
- Jane Wurwand — co-founder of Dermalogica, referenced by Meghan for her definition of success as "choices, opportunities, and freedom"
- Robin Williams — comedian who riffed on MakeLoveNotPorn during a TED coffee break in 2009
- Martyn Redstone — AI tech specialist in Europe who identified LinkedIn's "proxy bias" problem
- TED — where Cindy launched MakeLoveNotPorn in 2009 (talk now has nearly 3 million views)
Concepts + frameworks referenced:
- Proxy bias — the dynamic where an algorithm trained on historical patterns (business credibility defined by white male output) actively suppresses women and marginalized groups even when "unbiased" by design
- Microactions — small, simple, easy-to-do actions that cumulatively create enormous change (from Cindy's first startup, IfWeRanTheWorld)
- The one microaction that changes everything: Say what you really think.
CONNECT WITH CINDY
- cindygallop.com
- MakeLoveNotPorn.com (subscriptions start at $10/month)
- MakeLoveNotPorn.Academy
- Dear Cindy on Substack: cindygallop.substack.com
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/cindygallop
- Twitter/X: @cindygallop
CONNECT WITH MEGHAN & UNBEHAVED
- Book: This Isn't Working 
- Website: meghanfrenchdunbar.com
- Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com
- Instagram: @meghanfrenchdunbar
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meghanfrenchdunbar
 
FULL TRANSCRIPT
COLD OPEN
Cindy Gallop (00:00)
There was one saying of my grandmother's: the fool says evil cannot touch me, but drop by drop the pitcher fills.
 
And what I say to the women in this situation is, you may think you can stick this out for whatever period of time, but I'm here to tell you that every daily micro-sexism, micro-aggression, micro-racism is eroding your self-confidence, taking away your belief in what you're capable of, and destroying your soul. Get the fuck out now.
 
---
 
MEGHAN'S INTRO
 
Meghan (00:34)
Hello, lovely human. I'm Meghan French Dunbar, and welcome to Unbehaved.
 
You just heard from the one and only Cindy Gallop. And if you don't know her yet, brace yourself. Her title on LinkedIn legit says, "I like to blow shit up." She's pretty much the poster child for Unbehaved and who I want to be when I grow up.
 
But before I go any further, I do want to note that today's conversation touches on sexual assault. It's not the focus, but it does come up more than once. If that feels too heavy right now, I see you. Take care of yourself. You don't need to listen to this one today.
 
So back to Cindy. Cindy built an award-winning career in advertising, and then she walked away from it all at age 45 to explore a new purpose — something she decided to, you know, just casually announce from the main TED stage in 2009, in a talk that has garnered nearly three million views since. Her new purpose? Porn. Yes, porn.
 
Specifically, she'd noticed that young people were learning about sex from hardcore porn. A lot of that porn treats aggression, objectification, and the absence of consent as normal — a dynamic that promotes rape culture. Research has since linked that content to harmful beliefs about sex and consent. So she built the alternative: Make Love Not Porn. The platform shows real people having incredible, communicative, consensual sex — modeling what fantastic sex can and should look like.
 
She has spent 17 years building it against more roadblocks than any founder I've ever met. And it is working. Every day, people write to her to say that it's changed how they approach sex, or it's saved their relationship. Survivors of sexual assault tell her it's helped them reclaim their bodies.
 
And it absolutely breaks my heart how relevant this entire conversation is after the Cornell case that made national headlines last week.
 
But this conversation goes way beyond porn. We get into why she thinks sticking it out at your job isn't actually the safe option. The specific belief she let go of that unlocked the life she actually wanted. What keeps her going on those days when it feels like the odds are stacked against her. And the single small thing that you can do today that will change your work and your life.
 
I'm so damn thrilled you're here. Let's get into it.
 
---
 
THE INTERVIEW
 
Meghan (02:56)
I honestly feel like I need to start this by saying, like, "Cindy fucking Gallop," but I probably don't — you've probably changed your middle name at this point. I want to go back to young Cindy. What was your idea of success growing up, and where did that come from?
 
Cindy Gallop (03:15)
Honestly, I think given the generation I am, my idea of success didn't even come into it. I am half English, half Chinese. My father was English. My mother was Malaysian Chinese. I was born in the UK, but when I was six, we moved to Brunei in Borneo. So I grew up in Asia. And I was very much subject to the especially Asian syndrome of a childhood characterized by massive academic pressure. My mother was Tiger Mother par excellence. My father was very old-fashioned Brit. It was "come top of the class or don't come home."
 
So it's very much — success was you studied really hard, you went to a good university — in my case, Oxford, Somerville College, which I graduated from. So I didn't even myself think about what I deemed success. And again, bear in mind, I'm 66. This is long before the age of the internet, and absolutely no social media and other characterizations of success around me.
 
Meghan (04:29)
So this contrasts so starkly with where you are today, the anti-status-quo. And so I'm curious — was the unbehaved ethos there from the start? Was there a part of you that was quietly rebelling against having to be the top of the class and everything being the best and achievement-oriented? Or did that come later?
 
Cindy Gallop (04:50)
I think that really just came with growing older. I always say that my life is a series of accidents. Nothing was consciously or intentionally planned. So — entirely organic.
 
Meghan (05:04)
Are there any beliefs that you had as a child or as an adolescent or a young adult that you are very clear that you left behind or that were holding you back in some reason?
 
Cindy Gallop (05:17)
Only all the usual ones for girls and women, and again, especially growing up with a Chinese mother growing up in Asia. The presumption was absolutely that as a woman, you get married, you have children.
 
And in my teens and early twenties, I presumed that at some point I would. And then gradually over time I realized I had no desire to be married and I had no desire to have children. And also, from the moment we're born as girls and women, everything around us tells us that our entire life is a search for the one. Every fairy tale, every aspect of popular culture. And the real bummer about that is we spend our teens and our 20s going to every social occasion thinking "will he be there" — and I speak as a straight woman. And the aggravating thing about that is that first of all, it means you spend bloody hours on makeup, outfits, getting ready. What a waste of time.
 
You go to that event, the search for the one forces you to compete with other women, a dynamic that I deplore. And at the end of the night you schlep home going, "he wasn't there again tonight, maybe next time." And sometime in my early 30s, I went, "fuck this. I'm not looking for the one anymore." And my God, the relief.
 
I could just go to social occasions and enjoy myself. So I exhort everyone to think about what would really make them happy, because maybe it's not the search for the one, and maybe that needn't define everything you do and everything you're hoping for.
 
Meghan (07:11)
I love this. Because I also feel like there's this dynamic of people saying, "once you stop looking for him, that's when he comes." And your story is very much, once I stopped looking for the one —
 
Cindy Gallop (07:24)
I had a whale of a time!
 
Meghan (07:27)
And I still am having that whale of a time 30 years later. I love this.
 
Cindy Gallop (07:30)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
 
Meghan (07:34)
So I want to talk about leaving this huge career that you built for yourself. You had essentially made it to the upper echelons of the advertising elite. You were influencer, award winner, all of these things. And you stepped away from it all. What was the point in there where you were deciding "I want to pivot"? And what gave you the courage to actually walk away from such an established career?
 
Cindy Gallop (08:05)
So there wasn't. Again, as I've said previously, nothing about my life has been planned and intentional. I turned 45 back in 2005 and I'd always thought of 45 as kind of a midlife point. Obviously, by the way, in the happy assumption one lives to be 90 — fingers crossed. But in the couple of years running up to my 45th birthday, I thought: one's 45th birthday is the moment when you should pause, take stock, reflect and review — where have I been, where am I going, all that good stuff.
 
So on February 1, 2005, my 45th birthday, I duly did that. And that was the point at which I went, "my God, I've just worked 16 years for the same advertising agency." Absolutely wonderful advertising agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty — BBH. I'd worked for them in London. I'd gone out to Singapore to help start up and run the Asia Pacific office. I'm here in New York because I came here in 1998 to start up their American office for them. But honestly, the years had flown by, and I went, "bloody hell, 16 years. I think it might be time to do something different."
 
And then the issue was: I hadn't the faintest idea what. Because I had said to people over the years, I don't plan to work in advertising forever, don't plan to work at BBH forever, but advertising is a really great industry to work in to come across what you want to do next. Because when you work in advertising, you come into contact with so many different industries, companies, people, brands, organizations. And so I guess I'd always thought that my next big thing would bubble up from the ether one of these days. And there I was at the age of 45, and it hadn't.
 
So vast amounts of thought and angsting ensued, and eventually I went, "if I want to review every possible option open to me for what is effectively the second half of my life, maybe the best thing to do is to put myself on the market very publicly and go, okay guys, here I am, what do you got? And see what comes."
 
So I took a massive leap into the unknown. I resigned as chairman of BBH New York in the summer of 2005 without a job to go to. And honestly, it was the best thing I could have done with my life.
 
I say that because, referencing what I mentioned earlier, Meghan — I am of the generation where you basically went to school, you studied hard, you got a good degree, you got a good job. The word "entrepreneurship," the concept of working for yourself, did not come into it at all. When I'm asked in interviews if I have any regrets, I don't — but honestly, the one thing, if I was gonna talk to my younger self, the one thing I would have said is: start working for yourself a damn sight sooner. Because I am now evangelical about being your own boss.
 
Too many people make the mistake of thinking that a job is the safe option. It's not. Because in a job, you are at the complete mercy of management changes, industry downturns, marketplace dynamics. I say to people — whose hands would you rather place your future in? Those of a large corporate entity who at the end of the day doesn't give a shit about you, or someone who will always have your best interests at heart — i.e., you?
 
And so that's how I began working for myself.
 
Meghan (11:49)
Jane Wurwand, the co-founder of Dermalogica, told me that her idea of success has transitioned into being choices, opportunities, and freedom. And that's such a big element of working for yourself. I've worked for myself for quite a long time now. And the thing that I run into when I stand on my soapbox and tell other women that I want them to do this is: this believing in themselves, or "I'm too old to change," or "that's too scary."
 
How do you move people through this worrying about this feels scary because it's change — toward a place of "you can fucking do it"?
 
Cindy Gallop (12:28)
Well, I have a personal coaching practice and I coach women and men across a whole range of industries. My only criteria for who I work with is: you need to have something you need help with and I help you. It doesn't matter who you are or what stage you're at. But I bring that up because I coach — especially, and by the way, I have this conversation with men as well, but I especially have with women — I coach many brilliant women who have no idea how brilliant they are. Because for their entire careers they've been held back by men, kept down by men, had their careers sabotaged by men, had their ambitions derailed by men. And I make this point publicly, very vocally:
 
There is only one thing holding women back in every industry, and that is insecure men. Insecure men can do a huge amount of damage. And I really encourage women in this scenario to absolutely work for themselves and to do their own thing.
 
There's a mindset that goes, "well, if I stick it out for two more years, I'll have enough saved to blah, blah, blah." And I go: no, no, no, no. The last thing that should impact your thinking in this situation is timeline. Because — I mentioned I'm half English, half Chinese. My English grandmother, my father's mother, was a very formative influence for me and my sisters and my cousins. Amazing woman.
 
She was Christian, but she was very interested in Buddhism. She was a pillar of the Buddhist society in the UK. And so I remember her quoting Buddhist sayings to me and my sisters when we were young. And there was one saying of my grandmother's which I've had occasion to quote to many other people. And the saying goes: "the fool says evil cannot touch me, but drop by drop the pitcher fills."
 
And what I say to the women in this situation is, you may think you can stick this out for whatever period of time, but I'm here to tell you that every daily micro-sexism, micro-aggression, micro-racism is eroding your self-confidence, taking away your belief in what you're capable of, and destroying your soul. Get the fuck out now.
 
Meghan (15:13)
I just wanna carry you around in my purse with me all day every day. Did you ever have instances of dealing with these insecure men yourself as you were coming up at BBH, and what was your experience of addressing it — or did you?
 
Cindy Gallop (15:29)
Do you know, I was incredibly lucky, and I make this point publicly all the time as well, because I want this point to land. My so-called successful advertising career was entirely down to luck. The first is: I was lucky because I was never sexually harassed in a way that ended my career. I was absolutely sexually harassed, but not as happens to so many women — where you object, you are retaliated against, you are forced out of the company and you are forced out of the industry.
 
And secondly, I was lucky because I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of female bosses I had in my entire advertising career. I've virtually always worked for men. But I was lucky enough at every agency I worked at to work for men who saw my potential before I did, actively wanted me to succeed, championed me, and gave me every opportunity to do so. And that is not the experience of most women in every industry. So I was incredibly lucky.
 
Meghan (16:43)
I feel so heartened that you were lucky — and I hate that that is what we consider luck.
 
Speaking of men — I watched your TED talk again yesterday in the airport. And there were occasional moments where I could hear people in the audience laughing. And it was almost always a man. And it was almost always at a moment in which you weren't trying to be funny.
 
There are a few things that struck me about this. One: so many of our worst fears are getting up on stage and having people openly laugh at us. And two — the story I was telling myself was a lot of them were laughing because they were incredibly uncomfortable. And many of us are trained to never make men specifically uncomfortable. And here you are standing on stage doing both of those things.
 
Where does the courage come from? How did you — how do you stand on stage with people openly laughing in the audience and making them viscerally uncomfortable to be able to talk about these sorts of topics?
 
Cindy Gallop (17:46)
Well, a number of things to be aware of about my TED Talk. The first is that by that stage in 2009, I'd been going to TED for many years. So I was a member of the TED community and I absolutely loved it — loved seeing the same people every year.
 
Also — because it's funny looking back now, 17 and a half years later — I gave that talk before TED.com really took off. And so as far as I was concerned, I was only giving that talk to the people in the room. I would not think about the fact that talk would shoot around the world and still be watched all these years later.
 
But also, I was just talking about something that to me was very important. And the interesting thing about it is that you're absolutely right — that was nervous laughter. Because 17 and a half years ago, what I was saying was the first time the audience had ever heard this issue raised in public. And it's ironic that today in 2026, the world has finally caught up with what I was very early to market with.
 
Because — for the benefit of our listeners — we're talking about the fact that 18, 19 years ago, I realized through my habit of dating younger men as someone who does not want to marry, doesn't want children — I realized long before anybody else did, through having sex with younger men, that when we don't talk openly and honestly about sex in the real world, porn becomes sex education by default in not a good way.
 
I'm a naturally action-oriented person. I went, "right, gonna do something about this." And so 17 and a half years ago, at the time Pure as a side venture, I put up for no money a tiny clunky website at makelovenotporn.com that in its original form was kind of a public service announcement: Porn World versus Real World. Here's what happens in the porn world. Here's what really happens in the real world.
 
So when I launched Make Love Not Porn at TED in 2009, I was the very first person to identify this issue on a public stage. And you can literally hear a pin drop in the audience as I start talking before the nervous laughter comes in. And that talk just exploded.
 
Cindy Gallop (20:18)
So for the rest of the week at TED, people came up and went, "my God, that was incredible," shared their own experiences. Also, by the way, talking about laughter — in the audience for my TED talk in 2009 was Robin Williams, who was a regular TED star until he very sadly died some years back. And he could not believe what he was hearing.
 
During the coffee break, Robin Williams came up to me, went, "I cannot believe I just heard you say 'come on my face' on the TED Stage." And then, because he was a brilliant improviser, he launched into this entire comedy routine about Make Love Not Porn and my talk. And he was hysterical.
 
A little group gathered around us. Actually, one young man did film part of it on his phone, put it on YouTube — but then it got taken down. So I think somebody with Robin Williams had that removed. But I wish to God I had a recording of that, because Robin Williams riffing on Make Love Not Porn was side-splittingly funny.
 
So, yep. As far as I was concerned, I was just sharing this very interesting thing I'd observed with my community at TED. And then the entire world responded. And I realized I'd uncovered a huge global social issue. And so that was when I launched Make Love Not Porn as a business — user-generated, importantly 100% human-curated, real-world sex video sharing platform as a counterpoint to porn.
 
Meghan (21:51)
I've seen many times you talking about Make Love Not Porn, and oftentimes through a lens of barriers that are standing in your way — whether it be fundraising or even finding financial platforms or getting taken down on certain social media. How has the journey been over the last 17 years? But also — what are some of the major barriers that you keep hitting up against that you shouldn't be?
 
Cindy Gallop (22:18)
So I had no idea when I embarked on this that I and my tiny team would fight an enormous battle every day — not even to grow Make Love Not Porn, just to keep it alive. Basically because every piece of business infrastructure other tech startups can just take for granted, I can't. The small print always says "no adult content."
 
And that is all-pervasive across every single area of the business in ways that people outside the sphere do not realize. I cannot get funded. I cannot get banked. Last year, Make Love Not Porn was debanked three times in two months. Every single tech service I need to use to run a video platform — hosting, encoding, encrypting — the terms of service always say "no adult content." In every case, I have to go to the people at the top of the company, explain what I'm doing, beg to be allowed to use their service. Sometimes they let me, sometimes they don't. It's very labor-intensive. I never get to work with best-in-class of anything, business partner-wise. I never get to work with best value. I'm in no position to negotiate.
 
My two biggest pain points are: number one, payments. PayPal, Stripe, etc., will not work with adult content. I have to work with the murky subculture of adult-friendly payment processors who charge extortionate fees. I pay out 12% of my revenue every month in payment processing fees alone, when mainstream rates are 3% or less. That's a massive business growth inhibitor.
 
And another pain point is that we are banned from advertising and promoting Make Love Not Porn anywhere. We cannot advertise or promote on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, YouTube, Reddit. Look at what's on Reddit — they ban us advertising. Look at what's on Twitter/X — they ban us advertising.
 
And the irony there is: our mission at Make Love Not Porn ultimately is to help end rape culture globally. Now that may sound a very big mission, but we have 14 years of proof of concept at a micro level. We help end rape culture by doing something very simple that nevertheless nobody else is doing anywhere. We show you how wonderful, great, consensual, communicative sex is in the real world.
 
Our social sex videos role-model good sexual values and good sexual behavior. And here's the important part: we make all of that aspirational, versus what you see in porn and popular culture.
 
One young man wrote to me and said, "Your website makes me want to have sex in a more grown-up, honest, and respectful way." Another man left a comment on a video saying, "This video makes me want to be a better man in the bedroom and in life." And a young woman left a comment on a video saying, "After watching this video, I feel more empowered and enabled in my own sexual agency. Thank you for this gift."
 
We give women sexual agency to have the kind of sex they want to have. That is the business that investors refuse to fund and philanthropists refuse to donate to. And the only thing holding me back from scaling that impact to help end rape culture globally is lack of access to capital. Lack of funding — all the other barriers I could overcome with money.
 
And the very frustrating thing is my challenge finding investors, finding donors — and by the way, I mentioned philanthropic capital because we have a nonprofit vehicle. We can accept donations and philanthropic investments. I know that my investors and donors are out there, and there are a lot of them.
 
And by the way, there are a lot of them in every country in the world. No matter how repressed you think a country is, my potential investors and philanthropic donors are there. They are impossible for me to find by the conventional means, because they all have one thing in common: your willingness to fund what I do, to fund Make Love Not Porn, is entirely a function of your personal sexual journey.
 
It's a function of your personal lens on sex and sexuality that's been shaped by your own experience of it. And I obviously have no way to research and target for that. Not least because sex is the area where you cannot tell from the outside what anybody thinks on the inside. The people who look like they would totally get it, don't. The people who look like complete prudes, do. And so I have to put what I'm doing out there all the time, because I have to find ways to attract those investors to me.
 
And by the way, if your personal experience of sex was negative, there is no rational business argument on earth that is ever going to find its way through that. So I have a very self-selecting group that I need to try to get my message to.
 
Meghan (27:32)
I remember fundraising for my small company, and I was on the fundraising trail for 18 months. And by the end of it, I was like, "I will never do that again. I am exhausted. This is the worst." You're talking 17 years. And I imagine that there's some level of seeing the emails and seeing the comments that is in fact one of the things that's helping to keep you going. And what is actually keeping you fucking going right now? Because from where I'm sitting, I don't understand how you could be doing this for so long against so many odds.
 
Cindy Gallop (28:04)
Well, there are three things that keep me going, Meghan.
 
The first is, as you observe quite rightly, the comments and the emails and the conversations that I have every single day. I've spent 17 years seeing firsthand the enormous human misery and unhappiness caused by the shame, embarrassment, and guilt that we've imbued sex with. And every day our community at Make Love Not Porn — and now Make Love Not Porn Academy, because we've released this year in early-stage beta our sex education extension — every day people write to us and tell us how we've changed their lives.
 
And the interesting thing about that, by the way, is as with any disruptive technology, use cases emerge that the founder never dreamt of originally when concepting the venture. So we hear from countless young people whom we've taught porn is not sex in the real world. We hear from people who tell us we've saved their marriages, saved their relationships, inspired communications breakthroughs for couples around sex. We also hear from survivors of rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse. We hear from female survivors, male survivors, trans, non-binary survivors. They tell us that Make Love Not Porn helped them reclaim their bodies.
 
We help them feel able to be sexual again post-trauma in a situation where porn is way too triggering. And it's not just people who watch our videos — we have several Make Love Not Porn stars, as we call our contributors, who tell us being able to share themselves sexually in a completely safe and trustworthy space has helped them process and heal from sexual trauma. I never thought of that as a use case when I came up with this idea. I'm obviously so happy that it is.
 
So number one, what keeps me going is knowing that I've built something that can absolutely do what I set out to do. It is truly effective, and I absolutely have to keep it going long enough to be able to scale that impact.
 
The second thing that keeps me going is — fortunately, the thing that most motivates me to do anything is the dynamic that I characterize as "I'm going to fucking well show you." Tell me it can't be done, I'm gonna fucking well show you. Put a barrier in my path, I'm gonna fucking well show you. I take all that daily demoralization, discouragement and depression, and I turn it into motivation and inspiration.
 
And then the third thing that keeps me going is a very practical, pragmatic thing — which is I've put everything I have into Make Love Not Porn to keep it going for 17 years. All my savings. I've liquidated my tiny retirement fund — very bad idea at the age of 66. I have destroyed myself financially to keep this business going. I have to scale it to make it make money, as much because I need to get back what I've put into it, as much as pay my lovely, small but dedicated group of investors back. So I literally cannot afford not to keep going, because with all the money I've put into this, I've got to find a way to pay myself back as well as my investors.
 
So those are the three things that keep me going. But as I say, Meghan — the encouraging thing in 2026 is: look at the horrific headlines all around us every day. At least now people understand exactly why I do what I do. And so I am currently gearing up to set out to raise a round of equity funding. And I'm really hoping that this time, 17 years on, I'll be able to find the investors who get it, to enable me to scale the impact of Make Love Not Porn, but also absolutely do good and make an absolute god-and-fucking shit ton of money simultaneously.
 
Meghan (32:10)
My experience in getting older is: as I'm getting older, I'm coming more into my own. I'm loving myself. I'm finding my voice, talking about my needs. And it's like, the same time that that happens for women, that's when the shame around sex and our ability to be sexual beings societally is just hammered down. That as women are getting older, of course we shouldn't be talking about sex. And so much of the time, the things that we feel shame about — they are given power because we won't give voice to them. And you just literally went up on the TED stage and started talking about this.
 
So I'm curious: the things that you're talking about openly that a lot of people have shame about — how does one do this in the context of family or friends or people that you are worried about what they are going to think about you?
 
Cindy Gallop (33:07)
I'm not remotely worried about any of that.
 
In 17 years, Make Love Not Porn has had a universally positive response from people all around the world. My only barriers have been the ones I referenced: infrastructure, financial, business barriers.
 
With my parents when they were alive — we didn't talk openly about this, but I knew they both knew that I was doing something good, and they approved of that. My sisters — I have three sisters — their families, my family generally are all enormously supportive. My mother was one of ten Chinese brothers and sisters. I have a lot of Chinese cousins all around the world, whom I see reasonably regularly. And they've said to me, "the older generation of the family never talks about what you're doing, but the young ones talk about it all the time, and we think it's fantastic."
 
So no, I'm not remotely bothered what people think. But I can tell you everybody loves what I'm doing.
 
And I also support myself through paid speaking. And I talk about Make Love Not Porn in corporate environments because it exemplifies all of my business philosophies as well. When people ask me how I can bring Make Love Not Porn up in a corporate business environment, I go — that's because when I speak about Make Love Not Porn, no matter how corporate the environment, I know every single person in the audience knows exactly what I'm talking about.
 
Meghan (34:35)
I'm curious about if you ever feel lonely on this journey. I started my first business with a co-founder. I have a partner, a romantic partner of 17 years. And oftentimes when the going gets tough, you fall back on those partnerships. And you are solopreneur, you are not married. Is there any aspect of this that feels particularly lonely for you?
 
Cindy Gallop (35:02)
I mean, not in the strictest sense of the word, because I have amazing family and amazing friends that I can talk to when things are tough.
 
I will say that I do feel very strongly the lack of support for founders like me who are doing something that is very badly needed in the world, but because it is a topic that people struggle with, we have trouble finding not only the funding but the support that we need. If I were operating in a more conventional field, I would find it so much easier to raise funding. And while women founders still struggle to raise funding, nevertheless — I represent all the things that VCs and investors claim they want to back: persistence, resilience, determination, vision, etc.
 
So it only feels lonely in the sense of: it is enormously difficult to find investors and philanthropists who get it. And even before the very clear, by the way, business opportunity in what I'm doing — I'm looking for people who realize that it's really important to the world that Make Love Not Porn exists and is enabled to go on existing.
 
If I go under because I've exhausted all my own financial resources, and if investors refuse to fund me any further — to remove the only counter-documentary to porn's Hollywood blockbuster movie from the world would leave the world with absolutely no counterpoint and complement to the extreme porn that is taking over everything, including AI deepfake sexualization, intimate image abuse, etc., as we speak.
 
And so I make it very clear to investors that first and foremost I want Make Love Not Porn to make an absolute god and fucking shit ton of money. But I do also need support from people who realize that what I'm doing needs to exist because nobody else is doing this, and nobody else will.
 
Meghan (37:22)
Yes. So one of the other ways that you and I connected in the last year was when I got enraged at LinkedIn and decided to go post an entire thing about why I was not renewing my LinkedIn Premium account because the algorithm is very clearly suppressing women's voices. And this is something that I've watched you over the last year. You have over 150,000 followers, and consistently — as recently as a couple weeks ago — you'll put something up and it'll be seen by a hundred, two hundred people.
 
And you say this algorithmic suppression is economic oppression. And for me, I have gotten to a point where I'm like, you know what? Fuck this platform. I'm done. I'm not even gonna post on here anymore. I'm so tired of this. And then I watch people like you who keep showing up.
 
How do you keep showing up when it is the systemic — and we are dealing with systemic oppression in all facets of society. LinkedIn is just this microcosm of it. But how do you keep showing up on the day-to-day and keep chipping away at this garbage?
 
Cindy Gallop (38:34)
Because I am driven by red-hot rage.
 
And Meghan, this is why for years — well, for decades actually — I've been exhorting women to get very, very angry. And I do that because as women, we are never encouraged to get angry. Nice girls don't do that. And I say to women, I want you to get very, very angry — because when we get angry, we make shit happen.
 
And boy, right now do we ever have a lot to be angry about. And so I keep posting on LinkedIn because I'm fucking furious.
 
And for the benefit of our listeners — algorithmic suppression is a very, very big issue in a way that LinkedIn is refusing to acknowledge. Because what is happening? I've been spearheading the LinkedIn Resistance for the past now over one and a half years, since the algorithm changed in February 2025 and my impressions fell off a cliff. And the timing of that — post-inauguration and in the height of anti-wokeness — is not coincidental, I don't believe.
 
And LinkedIn will tell you that their algorithm is completely unbiased. The issue is what one member of my resistance group, Martyn Redstone, who's based in Europe — he's an AI tech specialist in the area of HR and work — identified: something called proxy bias.
 
So proxy bias happens when the algorithm is theoretically built to be unbiased, but it's been trained on what has historically been deemed most business-credible, of most business value, of most gravitas — which is the output of white men. And so an algorithm that is purporting to be unbiased is actually actively suppressing women, marginalized groups, minorities — which by the way, I hate the term "minority" because we're talking like the Global South on a global platform.
 
And what is infuriating is LinkedIn refuses to engage on this, and also to do anything about it — because if you truly want the algorithm to be unbiased, you have to actively make it unbiased. And the problem is: LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. What the LinkedIn algorithm is trained on is what Microsoft's office products are trained on, which are integrated into workplaces all around the world. This is a very bad sign for our AI-driven future.
 
And so that's why I keep calling this out on LinkedIn. And why, by the way, I yearn for someone to build a competitor. And that is fifth on my product roadmap after a number of Make Love Not Porn products I have to build first. But one day, if I can get funding, I absolutely will.
 
And by the way, Meghan — I will just call out: it is an absolute crime that in 17 years I've not been able to raise the funding I've been trying to raise. Make Love Not Porn — not only because I have a whole range of products in the pipeline and never been able to launch (we were only able to launch the Academy this year, and I had the idea for Make Love Not Porn Academy 11 years ago), but also because it's an enormous waste of my brain.
 
White tech bros have no problem raising hundreds of millions in funding, which enables them to scale their ventures, to exit massively, make a shit ton of money, and move on to the next one. Because once we've had one exit, VCs fall over themselves to fund them again. And so on and so forth. Female founders do not get to be serial entrepreneurs — or very few of us do. I would absolutely be building that LinkedIn competitor through the female lens right now if I'd been able to raise the funding to build out Make Love Not Porn and the Academy and scale and exit and be a repeat entrepreneur many years earlier.
 
Meghan (42:30)
What came up for me also while you were talking about this is I realized — so my book came out in August of 2025, and my publisher encouraged me, "LinkedIn is your place." So they encouraged me in February of 2025 to start posting consistently on LinkedIn. And I did. And I had my little following growing, whatever. And it wasn't growing nearly as much as they predicted that it would, because the algorithm had just changed. And so I lost my confidence. I started convincing myself that my content wasn't good because it's being suppressed. And this was like the whole clusterfuck of the whole thing is that it's systemic oppression, but we're convincing ourselves it's a personal problem.
 
Cindy Gallop (43:11)
Yeah. And it totally is not. There are so many people on LinkedIn who would love to see what you post who will never get to.
 
Meghan (43:22)
I did post a fabulous video from my wedding 13 years ago where I did a flash mob to Celine Dion and it got 200 views and I was like, "Y'all are missing out. Everyone in the world is missing out." Anyway.
 
You are known for a lot of things. What is something that nobody ever asks you about that you wish you got to talk about more, that you were more well known for?
 
Cindy Gallop (43:48)
I mean, I'll be frank — I do a lot of interviews. And with me, what you see is what you get. So pretty much I put it all out there. So honestly, I just wish people would do something about what I keep talking about. I just want someone to write me a very large check. Investors, philanthropists — somebody write me a very large check. That's the only thing I want from the universe right now. For Make Love Not Porn, obviously, by the way. That's all I want.
 
Meghan (44:18)
I'm manifesting that. If my little tiny show can somehow produce that, I will feel like I have accomplished all I'm here to do on this planet.
 
Final question. If you were to give listeners a permission slip to unbehave in a certain way — to release a societal script or personal narrative around what they're supposed to do to behave — what would your permission slip be?
 
Cindy Gallop (44:41)
So when Make Love Not Porn blew up, I was working on my first startup, If We Ran the World, which was based on my observation that the single biggest pool of untapped natural resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action. And I also observed that there is an equally large pool of untapped resource, which is corporate good intentions. Because companies have good intentions too, but just like people, find it very hard to find quick, easy, simple ways to act on them.
 
So If We Ran the World brought human good intentions and corporate good intentions together to enable both sets to work collaboratively on making great things happen in the real world. And If We Ran the World was built around the concept of the microaction.
 
So — a microaction is a small, simple, easy-to-do action, so easy to do: why won't you do it? Because I believe that change happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Every one of us every day undertaking microactions to change what we want to see change add up cumulatively to enormous impact.
 
So when I talk about microactions, I explain to people that there is one single microaction you can begin taking immediately that will have the biggest impact on your life and work. It's a very easy microaction, doesn't require any specific talent, expertise, experience. But it is the one microaction where when you begin doing this, you will see a dramatic impact.
 
And it's very simply this: say what you think. No, really — say what you really think. Because we don't. Every day we suppress what we really think.
 
And so what I would say to our listeners is: starting today, just start saying what you really think out loud. In meetings at work, in your friend group, on social — say what you really think. It'll change your life.
 
Meghan (46:45)
Cindy fucking Gallop. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I will put in the show notes where everyone can find you. Is there anything that specifically — besides the fundraising — people can do to support you right now?
 
Cindy Gallop (46:58)
Well, I'd love everyone listening to go to makelovenotporn.com, subscribe. Subscriptions start at $10 a month, very affordable. Consider becoming a Make Love Not Porn star. We have a revenue-share model, so you can make half of all the income that your video rentals generate. And by the way, you can be anonymous. We take your videos down when you don't want them up anymore. We're the safest place on the internet.
 
Go to MakeLoveNotPorn.Academy. This is the zero-to-18-and-beyond sex education platform we've just taken live in very early-stage beta because parents and teachers have been begging me for this for 17 years. And the Academy is free for everybody. It's a global aggregator hub for the best of the world's sex ed content. It is already out there — it's been blocked, censored, and deplatformed everywhere. But it's the museum model. If you like what I'm doing there, please join as a paid member to help fund our operations.
 
And then the last thing I'd say is: I have a Substack called Dear Cindy. Please subscribe to that. You can write in and ask me any question you want. I answer a question a week. The archives are full of advice on business, life, dating, relationships, beauty, travel, whatever. All subscriptions from Dear Cindy go to support Make Love Not Porn.
 
Meghan (48:12)
Thank you. Thank you.
 
Cindy Gallop (48:13)
Yeah, we're ready.
 
---
 
UNBEHAVED LESSONS OF THE DAY
 
Meghan (48:16)
All right, my friends. Before we wrap up, let's do the key Unbehaved lessons of the day.
 
Number one: your job might not be as safe as you think. Cindy's one piece of advice to her younger self was: start working for yourself sooner. She said, "Too many people make the mistake of thinking that a job is the safe option. It's not. You're at the mercy of management changes, downturns, and market shifts." So she asks you — whose hands would you rather place your future in?
 
Lesson number two: sticking it out might be costing you more than you realize. Cindy's grandmother had a saying — "the fool says evil cannot touch me, but drop by drop the pitcher fills." She talked about how every daily micro-sexism, microaggression, and micro-racism is eroding your self-confidence, taking away your belief in what you're capable of, and destroying your soul. Her conclusion was: get the fuck out now. Which felt like a bit of a mic drop. And I know that not everyone can walk out tomorrow, but hopefully Cindy's words can help you stop sticking it out and start making a plan for making it better.
 
Lesson number three: use that rage. When I asked Cindy what keeps her going, she said: red-hot rage. Women are taught that nice girls don't get angry. So we build this big dam and we hold it all back. Cindy's advice was pretty much just to blow that open. She told us: "I want you to get very, very angry, because when we get angry, we make shit happen." And boy, do we have a lot to be angry about right now.
 
Lesson number four: the smallest action you can take with the biggest payoff is to just say what you really think. Not what you think you're supposed to say. Not what you think someone else wants to hear. What you really think. In meetings, with your friends, on social media. Cindy's promise to all of us: it will change your life.
 
That's all for today. I wrote a deeper piece on what Cindy is fighting in the porn industry and why it gave me hope after the Cornell story. It's on my Substack called Unbehaved. Links are in the show notes.
 
I'm so damn grateful you joined me today. Until next time.
 
---
 
[End of transcript]

Is there a voice in your head telling you that your story isn't interesting, that your idea isn't good enough, or that everyone else is somehow doing it better? Then this is the episode you've been waiting for.
You'll meet Francesca Donner, who spent two decades in the biggest newsrooms in the country — The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, editing the paper's pioneering In Her Words newsletter — watching women's stories get buried on page 50 of the paper.
Two years ago, Francesa got fed up with the lack of women's stories in the news and launched her own media company, The Persistent, with zero business background. And promptly won two Webbys.
In this conversation, Francesca and Unbehaved host Meghan French Dunbar unpack why so many of us have been conditioned to believe our stories don't matter. Francesca also tells the story of the "failed" mug email that became her favorite permission slip, why she says clarity only ever comes in motion, and the game-changing practice she gave herself this year for silencing the negative talk that runs in every high-achieving woman's head.
WHAT WE COVER
The DNA of the newsroom — why women's stories get buried, and why it happens everywhere, not just in journalism
The Carol Hymowitz mentor moment that changed how Francesca reads every publication
Why "until you have it pointed out, you tend not to notice it" is Francesca's foundational insight — and how it applies to every meeting you sit in
The 75% stat: men are quoted as experts in news stories about three-quarters of the time
The mug email: 650 of Francesca's most engaged subscribers, a 97% open rate, and zero paid conversions — and why she's glad she sent it anyway
Why the New York Times shutting down In Her Words was the door that opened The Persistent
Launching a company with zero business background — and why muddling through is a legitimate strategy
The moment her team told her "people actually want to hear from you" — and the negative loop every high-achieving woman recognizes
The editor's-note thumbprint: how Francesca found her own voice inside a publication that isn't supposed to be about her
The Webbys reveal: two days of celebration if you win, two weeks of spiraling if you lose — and what to do about that imbalance
Amina AlTai's "clarity comes in motion" — and why Francesca uses it as her North Star
ABOUT THE GUEST
Francesca Donner is the founder and editor of The Persistent. She has worked in newsrooms including The New York Times, where she was the gender director and the editor of In Her Words, and The Wall Street Journal, where she was a deputy editor. The Persistent won two Webby Awards for Independent Publisher — the People's Voice Award and the judge-selected award — in 2026.
Find her at https://www.thepersistent.com/
Subscribe. Read. Share. And put your money where your values are.
PULL QUOTES
"We don't see our stories on the front page of XYZ newspaper, because our stories aren't told, because they're relegated to page 50 of the paper, because they're told on the second day, because they're told as an afterthought or a sidebar. That is why. We can't believe that we've got a story to tell because we're so rarely in the center of the story." — Francesca Donner
"Until you have it pointed out, you tend not to notice it. Until you have pointed out the fact that men are quoted as experts in news stories about 75% of the time." — Francesca Donner
"I'm so boring. Nobody wants to hear from me. I'm da da da da da da. Right? And around and around in circles." — Francesca Donner, on the voice in her head when her team asked her to start telling her story
"That particular email had a 97% open rate. And do you know how many people upgraded to paid? Zero. Zero. Absolutely not one person." — Francesca Donner, on the now-legendary mug email
"Everything is a stepping stone. So many things are mistakes — but mistakes are data." — Francesca Donner
"If we had not won these awards — if we'd been only a finalist, or hadn't been in consideration at all — do you know how much brain space I would have given to that? I would have spent days and days thinking about all the things wrong. Instead of just saying, okay." — Francesca Donner
"Give yourself some grace. Give others some grace. We are all doing our best. We're all muddling through." — Francesca Donner
"Clarity comes in motion. As soon as you stop thinking and start doing, that's where the clarity comes." — Meghan French Dunbar, quoting Amina AlTai
"Everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn. Everyone's story is valid and interesting. And we are so conditioned to believe that it is not — including you and me, literally storytellers." — Meghan French Dunbar
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Cold open: "we're so rarely in the center of the story"
00:24 — Meghan's intro
01:46 — Career journey: from GQ to the Wall Street Journal
04:00 — Being the squeaky wheel at the WSJ in 2007–2008
05:54 — The New York Times Gender Initiative and In Her Words
08:17 — Why the Journal wasn't the curmudgeon — and the DNA of the newsroom
09:05 — Carol Hymowitz mentor moment: "until you have it pointed out, you tend not to notice it"
13:38 — Being armed with data: the pain of what's obvious to you but not to them
15:47 — "Everything you do is data" — planting the seed
17:48 — Everything is a stepping stone. Mistakes are data.
19:00 — The mug email: 650 subscribers, 97% open rate, zero paid conversions
22:39 — The double standard for women and people of color making mistakes
24:15 — Meghan on Conscious Company Magazine — and the parallel-founder exchange
25:43 — Why she launched The Persistent in 2024
28:00 — Launching a business with zero business background — the muddling-through method
31:14 — Clarity comes in motion (Amina AlTai reference)
31:57 — First two years of The Persistent: the toddler analogy
33:08 — The two Webby Awards
35:00 — The hard bit: how do you make people pay for media?
37:15 — Stepping out of the editor's shadow into the founder's spotlight
40:13 — "I'm so boring. Nobody wants to hear from me."
41:00 — The editor's-note thumbprint
42:32 — Meghan's parallel story: the book deal and hating social media
44:30 — Everyone has something to teach, everyone has something to learn
44:54 — Francesca's full-circle answer: this is why we can't believe we have a story
45:29 — The book prop moment: This Isn't Working
46:26 — Meghan asks for Francesca's permission slip
46:53 — Give yourself some grace (her permission slip)
47:30 — The Webby brain-space observation
49:56 — How to find and support The Persistent
51:17 — Unbehaved Lessons of the Day
THE UNBEHAVED LESSONS OF THE DAY
Your story matters. You've been conditioned to believe it doesn't. That you're not interesting, that no one wants to hear from you, or that you should just amplify everyone else. Even Francesca — a former New York Times editor with two Webbys on her shelf — still hears "I'm so boring, nobody wants to hear from me" in her head. You're not alone in that voice. But it isn't right. Your story is interesting, and it's important. So start telling it.
There's often opportunity in your frustration. Pay attention to what you wish were different. That gap might just be your next thing. Francesca launched The Persistent because she was furious that women's stories were being buried on page 50 of the paper. She didn't have a business background, but she dove in anyway. Two years later, she has an award-winning media company. You don't have to know everything to get started — you can figure things out as you go.
Clarity comes from taking action. You can focus-group a decision to death. You can plan the pros and cons and think about all the things that could go wrong. But clarity comes from doing. Francesca launched The Persistent before she'd figured out whether to be an LLC, how to write a contract, or how to make people pay for media. And the failed mug email gave her more clarity in five minutes than five months of theorizing would have. If you've been thinking about the thing for a while, this is your permission slip to just start.
Until something's pointed out, we tend not to notice it. Things that are obvious to you might not be obvious to everyone else. Simply starting the conversation and planting the seed matters. Even if you don't see the fruit of your labor right away, it can impact others in unexpected ways — and it can grow into something that shapes the rest of your career.
Give yourself some damn grace. The Persistent won two Webby Awards, and Francesca barely celebrated. But if they had lost, she said she would have spent days spiraling on everything her team did wrong. That imbalance is how so many of us are wired. We give hours of brain space to what went wrong and only seconds to what went right. Give yourself some grace. Give other people some grace. We're all doing our best. We're all muddling through — and that includes you, my friend.
Pay for good quality journalism. This one's on us, listeners. Put your money where your values are. If you want more stories like the ones Francesca is telling, we need to pay people for them.
RESOURCES MENTIONED
People + companies referenced:
Francesca Donner — founder and editor of The Persistent
The Persistent — thepersistent.com
Carol Hymowitz — Francesca's mentor at the Wall Street Journal
In Her Words — the New York Times newsletter Francesca edited
Amina AlTai — quoted on "clarity comes in motion" (see her Unbehaved episode)
Harvey Weinstein story (NYT) — referenced as example of long-form investigative reporting
Meghan's book: This Isn't Working (Hachette, 2025) — meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book
Conscious Company Magazine — Meghan's media company (2015–2020)
Webby Awards — The Persistent won two for Independent Publisher
Statistics referenced:
Men are quoted as experts in news stories about 75% of the time
The mug email: 650 subscribers, 97% open rate, zero paid conversions
CONNECT WITH MEGHAN
Book: This Isn't Working
Website: meghanfrenchdunbar.com
Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com
Instagram: @meghanfrenchdunbar
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meghanfrenchdunbar
Full Transcript (Cleaned)
Final edit — includes cold open, Meghan's intro, and the six Unbehaved Lessons of the Day.
Francesca Donner (00:00): We don't see our stories on the front page of XYZ newspaper, because our stories aren't told, because they're relegated to page 50 of the paper, because they're told on the second day, because they're told as an afterthought or a sidebar. That is why. We can't believe that we've got a story to tell because we're so rarely in the center of the story.
 
MEGHAN'S INTRO
Meghan French Dunbar (00:24): I'm Meghan French Dunbar, and welcome to Unbehaved.
 
You just heard from Francesca Donner, founder and editor of The Persistent, a media company dedicated to amplifying women's voices.
 
And I'm gonna be honest here, folks — I was kind of nervous heading into this interview because Francesca is pretty fancy. She's the former gender director for the New York frickin' Times, editor of the Times' pioneering newsletter In Her Words, and the former deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal — just among other things.
 
So I made some assumptions. Like that she'd be super serious and kind of posh and that she wouldn't really appreciate my whole unbehaved vibe.
 
How very wrong I was. I think I may have laughed more on this episode than any other one to date.
 
Francesca is refreshingly open, humble, hilarious, and deeply charming. And in this episode, we discuss how she launched a business with zero business background, the gift of failure — including the now legendary mug email that flopped so spectacularly it sent us both into a fit of giggles — why so many of us are taught to think our stories don't matter, and how to use your voice, no matter your role, to bring attention to issues that truly matter.
 
I'm so grateful you're here, and I can't wait for you to hear Francesca's inspiring story.
 
Let's get into it.
 
THE INTERVIEW
Meghan French Dunbar (01:46): So, if we could have the nutshell of the career journey and how it has led to The Persistent.
 
Francesca Donner (01:53): So my career begins quite a few years ago now because I'm older than I once was. It happens.
 
Meghan French Dunbar: If we're lucky, it happens.
 
Francesca Donner: My career journey begins a couple of decades back, when I began working in newsrooms — big mainstream newsrooms. I'd always been interested in media and the idea of editing. I had a brief stint at GQ, which was not the ideal fit for me, but was very eye-opening. From GQ to The Persistent — covering women for a change. Educational, right?
 
I started out in magazines and then rapidly shifted over to news and newsrooms, and that was really where I found my fit. One of my first big grown-up jobs was at the Wall Street Journal. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I don't know how many of your audience have worked in newsrooms, but there is definitely an energy in there that just feels so good and kind of addictive in a positive way.
 
I started at the Journal, and almost immediately I started thinking about how we were covering women — or not covering women. This was probably around 2007, 2008, right before the financial crisis.
 
I was thinking a lot about why were there just no women in our stories? You could turn page after page of the Wall Street Journal and not find any women's voices at all. And sure, you can sit there and say, well, business is so male-dominated, most men are running all the companies — which is true, and still kind of true today. But it still felt really, really lopsided and problematic.
 
So while I was there, I started thinking about how we could make a more concerted effort to cover women. Which was a good idea that was way, way before its time. People weren't really ready for this idea. People were still thinking, "there is no difference between women and men, we'll just wear those awkward 1980s ties with big shoulder pads and no one will notice the difference."
 
What I was frustrated with was really just not seeing women in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. And I got pushback — pushback from readers, pushback even in the newsroom itself. The reader pushback came from this idea of, "well, are you just saying women should only read these stories? Are you just saying women only belong in a single section of the Wall Street Journal?" And I was saying — no. No. That's not the intention. The intention is: if we don't make a concerted effort to cover women, women just won't really be covered at all.
 
Eventually I ended up at the New York Times. And long after the sort of 2007, 2008 "how are we covering women?" question, I ended up joining something at the New York Times called the Gender Initiative. When they asked me to join, I thought, "oh my God, I don't know if I have the stomach to do this again. I was so scarred."
 
But what's so interesting is: I was scarred because of the reader pushback, but it was so inherent in me — how I was reporting on stories, how I was editing, how I was thinking about who got covered and who got voiced and who didn't. It was really integral in how I edited already.
 
So at the New York Times, we started the Gender Initiative around 2016, right around the time that Trump was getting elected into office the first time. It was a really groundbreaking moment for women, for women's stories to be centered. The Me Too movement had basically put all of this stuff that everyone knew was happening — but no one was talking about — center stage. You couldn't look away from it. It was a completely different time to be deliberately covering women.
 
While I was at the Times, among many projects, we ended up launching a newsletter called In Her Words. Really trying to center women in the story. Ran that for a couple of years. I think we did a really good job, but ultimately the Times decided that it was no longer needed. So that was Sunset.
 
I ended up leaving the Times, took a job in sort of business journalism briefly. But at the end of the day, I really felt like there are so many stories waiting to be told. When you look at mainstream journalism, women's stories tend to be told — if they're told at all — as an afterthought, as the sidebar, delivered with a giant dose of eye roll, or a cute pat on the head, or "this is all really nice and cutesy, but we'll put it on page 50 of the paper." Not delivered with the seriousness of purpose that it deserves.
 
Because women's issues — and I hate even that term because it sounds belittling — but women's issues are everyone issues. They're economic. The gender pay gap. Unpaid labor. If women weren't doing the unpaid labor, there would be no global economy at all.
 
And that sort of brings you up to today. And then I launched The Persistent — and we can talk about that.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (08:17): Okay. The Wall Street Journal — if you were to think of the most curmudgeonly old-white-man thing in journalism, I'd be like, "meh, probably the Wall Street Journal." And there's also the social conditioning that many women have around not making people uncomfortable. We don't want to be the squeaky wheel. And yet, you're there way before your time being the squeaky wheel. Where does this come from — the courage to stand up for the thing that you think is right, even in a historic institution that is so counter to what you're advocating for?
 
Francesca Donner (08:54): So, firstly — the Wall Street Journal might appear on the outside to be curmudgeonly, but inside, it's filled with fantastic reporters and editors. I truly, truly enjoyed working there. I recognize that the opinion pages may be a little radical — they are completely separate from the newsroom. In my time, it was filled with fantastic journalists doing fantastic work, getting the story no matter what — tenacious and smart.
 
In terms of being the squeaky wheel — I don't think this is Journal-specific. Any time anyone says, "hey, what are we doing about covering women?" there's this knee-jerk reaction of, "oh my God, here comes the gender police. They're coming to tell us we're doing everything wrong. We don't want to hear from them at all." I don't think it's a Journal thing. I think it's an everywhere thing.
 
I call it the DNA of the newsroom. The choices people make about stories, the hierarchy of things they think are important. At the Journal, the hierarchy of important things was markets, economics, politics, business — and down the list it went. If you're deliberately covering women, it tends to muck up the DNA and the hierarchy and the way things are done.
 
And this is the secret, I think: Until you have it pointed out, you tend not to notice it. Until you have it pointed out that men are quoted as experts in news stories about 75% of the time. Until you start looking at who's writing the story, who's taking the photographs, who's represented in the photographs — is it man, man, man, man, man? Beyond women — are there people of color? Disabled bodies? Trans people? Until you start looking for that, you don't see it. Because we are all socialized to see the world the way we've been taught to see it.
 
When I was at the Journal, I had an amazing mentor — Carol Hymowitz. She said, "Francesca, we've got this real issue because we're not covering women enough." And I thought — what are you talking about? Then you start looking critically. Turn the pages. Are there any stories about women? There aren't. Where are their voices? Why are women always the people in the story to whom things happen? Why are men always positioned as the hero? Once you start to see it, it's really hard to unsee.
 
And it's the same thing in our lives. In meetings — men tend to speak more. Women are asked to take notes. Women are spoken over. Their ideas are co-opted and presented as someone else's idea. And if someone doesn't point out those things, you just bobble along and think, "oh, that's just the way a meeting is."
 
Meghan French Dunbar (13:38): A couple things come up — one is being armed with data. Here's the fact, so it's irrefutable. And two — some of the things we might feel are obvious still need to be pointed out. They're obvious to us because they're happening to us. But they are not obvious to the other people who are not having that happen to them. Which is something I feel like I need to remind myself of constantly — not assuming any sort of knowledge on anyone's part.
 
Francesca Donner (14:10): This is so interesting — because it's not obvious. So we have to point it out. But even after we point it out, there's a tendency among certain people to say, "well, that's fine, but what's in it for me?" I get that women aren't being paid as much as men, or that they're not escalating in their jobs the same way, or that there's a motherhood penalty — but what's in it for me if I try and correct that? Is there any incentive?
 
Even when you show the data — actually, more diverse teams make more money, more diverse teams yield better ideas and better products — there's still this heels-stuck-in-the-mud part of people. "Yeah, but I don't know, I don't believe it. Other people can do that, but not on my watch."
 
Meghan French Dunbar (15:47): With the Wall Street Journal — you mentioned pushback. Did you feel there were parts of your efforts that were successful?
 
Francesca Donner (15:57): Look — I was a really, really young editor at the time. I don't want to say they didn't take me seriously, because that would be unfair. It's not like I was running the paper. I think we were successful insofar as we even started the conversation. Even saying, "have you thought about this? Could that change how you report something?" — planting the seed. Maybe that's a bit generous. But if nothing else, it planted the seed in my own head and became the through line of my career.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (16:45): I feel like a lot of women come and talk to me about an idea or something they want to change in their workplace. And they run into: what if it doesn't work? My response is always — everything you do is data. Even efforts I've undertaken that were 100% values-aligned that didn't pan out — 10 years later I look back and go, "oh, now I understand. I have this knowledge or experience I wouldn't have had if I hadn't tried the thing." So it makes the idea of quote-failure a little more palatable. Do you feel what you did at the Wall Street Journal ultimately was part of the reason you were able to move into that role at the New York Times?
 
Francesca Donner (17:48): Absolutely. Everything is a stepping stone. So many things are mistakes — but mistakes are data. I'm not scared to make mistakes because at the end of the day, we're not sending COVID vaccines around the world. We're not making sure astronauts in space stay alive. We're just doing this publication. I say to my team all the time — let's give it a go. If it's a disaster, guess what? We won't do it again. We really won't.
 
And I'm happy to talk about a mistake. It was a mistake, but it was a learning. So — one of the challenges I'm facing right now: I'm a media company. It's very, very, very hard to get people to pay for media. People will pay for their food, their clothes, their rent, concert tickets, water, electricity, their car. Other than the air they breathe — and sometimes even that — they're paying for everything except media. That's where people draw the line.
 
We were looking at our subscribers, and we found this really passionate cohort. We have a big universe of free subscribers, of which a portion pays. And we found a special cohort of people who were absolutely addicted to The Persistent. They were opening it at 100%.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (19:48): Yes, I love these people.
 
Francesca Donner (19:49): Okay, love them. They are literally the very heart and soul of what we do. But they weren't paying. So we thought — let's see if we can encourage these people to pay. Small cohort — maybe 650 people. Special. We sent them an email: "We know how much you love The Persistent. We thought you might want to consider upgrading your subscription to paid. And if you do, we're going to send you a free Persistent mug. Who wouldn't want that, right?"
 
That particular email had — as will be no surprise to you — a 97% open rate. And do you know how many people upgraded to paid?
 
Meghan French Dunbar (21:08): Four. Zero. No.
 
Francesca Donner (21:09): Zero. Zero. Absolutely not one person. And I got two lovely emails from two women who said, "I love the idea of a free mug, but I'm not in a position to be able to pay for The Persistent." And that was it. That was the beginning and the end.
 
You can sit here and say, gosh, what a failure. Or — gosh, what a learning. Maybe a mug isn't going to make people upgrade. Maybe our offerings aren't quite right. Maybe we need to do something really different to encourage people to pay for media. But if we hadn't tried it, we wouldn't know, right?
 
And now I know a lot about those 650 people. They're still opening every email. So maybe there's something different we can do with them. I only raise it because that was a big fail. Zero percent uptake is almost impressively bad. It would be worse.
 
We won't do that again. But I'm glad we did it. And I can laugh about it. The stakes were low enough — it was sending one email — and we learned a lot. There's such a double standard, as you well know, for people of color and women making mistakes. The minute a woman or a person of color makes a mistake, it's "well, you see, we shouldn't have hired her." The rubber band springs back to the safe white male candidates. When a man makes a mistake, he's not noticeable because he's just one of many. We internalize it so deeply that we feel like "our mistakes are so awful."
 
But if the stakes are low enough — like the mug email — we can just have the courage to do it, then talk about it and say, "guess what? That was a big F fail. But it wasn't really, because now I know."
 
Meghan French Dunbar (24:15): I love this. For everyone's context — this is Francesca and I's first time meeting. We haven't compared notes about our careers. But the hilarious overlap: launching our own media companies. Mine was Conscious Company Magazine from 2015 to 2020. I was exhausted watching business stories that only celebrated companies because they made the most money. So I launched that ridiculous magazine — I shouldn't say ridiculous —
 
Francesca Donner (24:54): That was a mistake. That was a mistake.
 
Meghan French Dunbar: That unbelievable magazine. Our first issue got put in every Whole Foods, Target, Barnes and Noble. Built the whole media company. And I was like — this is the stupidest business model on the face of the planet, because even if 100% of people buy our products on the shelves, we still have to get advertisers. It was exhausting. But I used to say to my team, "we're not neurosurgeons. No one's going to die today if we don't get this to the printer." So 10 years later — I guess this was eight years later when you launched — how? Why? Why did you launch a media company, Francesca? Why did you do it?
 
Francesca Donner (25:43): I don't know. I launched The Persistent in 2024 because it was so important to me. I knew from the work I'd done at the New York Times running In Her Words — the traction we'd built. And the Times is a completely different animal. You don't have to explain yourself. You don't have to explain the brand. You can pop something on the New York Times homepage and people are reading it whether they're interested or not.
 
But so many readers felt seen. They felt heard. They felt we were going to places other publications really weren't going. When the Times shut down In Her Words, I had hundreds and hundreds of readers writing to me — "I'm very upset. What else can I read in this space?" I tried to write back to everyone and say, "well, there's this and that." But I kind of realized the space just felt so empty.
 
The work people were doing in the space was really, really fantastic. My whole mission at The Persistent and in life is to amplify and uplift — because we get much better results if we celebrate each other than if we elbow each other out. But as I looked at that space, I thought, "this is so empty. You could hear a pin drop. That is not good enough for me."
 
I also felt a deep sense of frustration with the stories being told broadly across media. That there was this oversight, or the idea that "these kinds of stories aren't that interesting." Certain topics are so saturated, certain people covered over and over. But there are so many remarkable women doing amazing things, with brilliant stories that just weren't being told. And whether you love him or don't love him — I'm not sure the world needs more Trump stories. He's very well covered.
 
I didn't know anything about starting a media company. It wasn't on my dream list or bucket list. But I sure as hell knew how to edit. I knew what made a good story. I brought with me the arrogance, I guess, of assuming people would want to talk to us — because I'd been in such big newsrooms before, where people were always like, "yes, we'd love to be in the Journal, we'd love to be in the Times."
 
In terms of starting a company, as you no doubt discovered — it's so bonkers. Everything from "should this be an LLC? How do I get a business account? How do I pay people? How do I write a contract? Should I pay them by the hour? On retainer?" And nobody tells you. You just muddle through and get to the end of the week and go, "okay, we're still here, that's great."
 
I realized I could sit there all day making plans and explaining it to people. "Yes, it's going to be a newsletter." — "Okay, everyone has a newsletter." — "Yes, but it's going to cover women." — "Okay, so do all these magazines cover women." — "Yes, but it's going to be really well done." — "Okay, I'll believe it when I see it."
 
It became really clear to me that I just had to get it out there and do it. Rather than talking and thinking and wondering. You can wonder all day, but it's only with the doing — and the making of mistakes and the realizing "oh my God, I'll never do that again" — that you actually move forward. Even now, two years in, the evolution is significant from what we thought at the beginning. But here it is in the world. It just kind of had to be born.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (31:14): My friend Amina, who was on the show recently, said that clarity comes in motion. As soon as you stop thinking and start doing, that's where the clarity comes. So just keep putting one foot after the other.
 
Francesca Donner (31:25): I love that. That's really true — because you can focus-group every single problem until you're blue in the face. But it's the mug email — only in the doing did we get clarity around it. We just did it.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (31:51): So how have the first two years been? What's happening? What's going well? What are we struggling with?
 
Francesca Donner (31:57): Well, two years old — I like to think that if this were a baby, it would be toddling around, covered in snot, with a dribble napkin around its neck, falling down but making progress. It can walk and sort of feed itself if you don't mind getting food everywhere.
 
It's been such fun. Being able to tell stories, looking back at what we've done over two years — the work we've produced just piles up in the best way. And you sit there and think, "oh, I remember that story. I remember working with this writer." It produces this wonderful body of work of which I'm so incredibly proud.
 
We actually just won some awards, which is really cool.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (33:06): Like such as?
 
Francesca Donner (33:08): So we won two Webby Awards for independent publisher. We won the People's Voice Award, which is the one everybody votes for, and we also won the one chosen by the judges. So it felt gratifying to have people rally and vote for us, and also to be chosen by the judges. When we launched, there was definitely an expectation of "oh, that's so great, we'll see if you're there a month from now." But we launched go-big-or-go-home. You are getting this newsletter out twice a week, come hell or high water. And we've done it.
 
Two years in, it's like — wow. This is here. The slight shifts in the wind. PR people coming and saying, "how about this? How about that?" Collaborations with other media companies — in the beginning it was, "that's nice, you look kind of cute." But now it's, "no, no — we're kind of here."
 
The really wonderful things: growing our pool of writers. We work with a lot of writers by design because I want that multiplicity of voices. A lot of illustrators — our illustrations are really quite beautiful.
 
The hard bit — which I've already been through — is: how do you make people pay for media? This was even a problem when I was at the New York Times. Essentially the consumer will read a story — it takes them about 30 seconds, maybe two whole minutes. But it could have been a story that took two photographers and a reporter three nights sleeping under tents in the Amazon. All of that mountain of work, condensed into a little tiny story that someone would be like, "yeah, okay, that's interesting."
 
Meghan French Dunbar (37:15): Editor-wise — you're kind of the person behind the scenes helping someone else shine. And you had the double benefit of being excellent at what you do plus the New York Times behind you. Now you're stepping out on your own without the backing of the prestigious name. And you're still the editor, but now you're the founder — the face of the thing. How has this been for you in terms of stepping into your own voice as you're giving other women more of a voice? Pros — and what's been kind of scary?
 
Francesca Donner (38:07): I love this question. Listen — we had to have some talks early on because we, the team —
 
Meghan French Dunbar: Yeah, I was like, "is this the proverbial we?"
 
Francesca Donner (38:22): So yes — the editor is behind the scenes. My job — and I am an editor who cannot help being an editor. I love being an editor. I love working with writers. I love making their work the very best it can be. That's just who I am.
 
When I started The Persistent, one of the things I thought very clearly was: this is not Francesca Donner's Substack. That's not very interesting. This is bringing in writers. It's bringing in perspectives. The very mission of The Persistent is to amplify women's voices, stories, perspectives, and ideas. And I mean that in every sense. If we're working with writers, I want people to sign up for their Substack. Buy their book. Listen to their podcast. I put bios of writers at the bottom of every piece. Bios of illustrators — so someone might find an illustrator and go look at their Instagram and maybe commission them. Everything is in the service of amplifying.
 
So when I started, I thought — everything is amplifying everybody else. I'm just the enabler. I've created this table and I want to bring everybody up to it. Within reason — you have to be a very good writer. That's my only snobby part. And a very good illustrator. Really I was saying — I'll create the space, and everybody else is the part that shines.
 
And as I said, we had to have some talks, because my team was like, "okay, for Francesca that's great. But people actually want to hear from you."
 
Meghan French Dunbar (39:57): That's a cute idea.
 
Francesca Donner: "That's nice — but people really want to hear from you." And you know, I'm sure you can guess what my instant gut reaction to that was. Can you?
 
Meghan French Dunbar: "I'm not that interesting. I have no story to tell."
 
Francesca Donner (40:13): I'm so boring. Nobody wants to hear from me. I'm da da da da da da. Right? And around and around in circles. And they're like, "sorry, but they do want to hear from you."
 
So I thought — okay, fine. I'll start telling my story. Under the table, my knees are doing knee-jerk reactions going "but your story is not that interesting." As I even say that, I'm trying to stop myself. "And I know my story is not that interesting." Okay. It's really interesting. As you can tell, I'm not shy. I can be theatrical enough to make it interesting. But I realized I just have to tell the story — and if it's not interesting to someone, they can go read something else.
 
The other thing I did, which I've ended up loving: at the top of every newsletter I put a teeny tiny editor's note. A mini reflection — what I loved in the story, something the story sparked in me, how I met the writer, why we commissioned it. Some little piece of connective tissue at the top.
 
A lot of readers have said, "I really love your little editor's note." It's this little thumbprint — "hello, I'm Francesca. This is the reporter. This is the piece. Here's all the big stuff. But there's just a little thumbprint from me." A wave. And that's a nice connection of the dots, because we work with so many different writers and cover so many different topics — sports one time, politics the next, wealth and money after. Because of that diverse range, the thumbprint is a sort of familiarity.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (42:32): We have had such interesting parallel stories. I wish I'd had the team that helped me feel my story was worth telling at Conscious Company Media. We had the CCM social media — but I didn't have my own. Same thing. "Nobody wants to hear from me. It's about the brand." Then when I got the book deal in 2023, they were like, "you have to have social media." And I was like — I hate — I do not — I don't want to do this. Really hate it. But like your editor's notes, I'm finding ways to do it my own way that feels palatable to me. But my God.
 
Francesca Donner (43:15): I hear you. But I'm here on the other side — I'm going to encourage you. You've got such a voice, such a personality. I know your job as host is to be host and just be quiet — but your personality is bubbling over the top of it anyway. So give yourself some grace and some credit. I think everyone is interesting other than myself, obviously.
 
Meghan French Dunbar: See?
 
Francesca Donner (43:43): Everyone has such a cool story to tell. I'm sitting here going — I'm dying to read about the magazine project and what happened. And we're all kind of struggling and muddling through. So I want to hear — how was it for you? What have you learned? This is really off-piste, but — we all have stories. Everyone listening to this has a story. They all do. We're all trying to figure it out. And we're all interesting other than you and me.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (44:13): Including you.
 
I had all the events my business partner Jocelyn and I used to host — women-only events, two or three hundred women in a room for three days. And at the beginning, one of our community practices we invited everyone to steep in was: everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn. Everyone's story is valid and interesting. And we are so conditioned to believe that it is not — including you and me, literally storytellers.
 
Francesca Donner (44:54): Wait — I know you're going to be mad, but I have to add something. Why are we conditioned to believe it's not? Because to go full circle back in this conversation — because we don't see our stories on the front page of XYZ newspaper. Because our stories aren't told. Because they're relegated to page 50 of the paper. Because they're told on the second day. Because they're told as an afterthought or a sidebar. That is why. We can't believe that we've got a story to tell because we're so rarely in the center of the story.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (45:29): My book is called This Isn't Working — and I have the prop. Everyone — I mean, I love you, and this is my podcast, so I talk about it all the time.
 
Francesca Donner: Why don't — can you just show the book so everyone can see? Okay, everyone — buy the book. And then get one for your friend.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (45:50): Oh, we're nailing this. In the book, I told my editor — I want to only interview women and fluid leaders. And my editor initially was like, "is there going to be enough of them?" And I was like — oh. I have nearly 100 in the book that I got to talk to. And I said no to a ton of people. There are so many stories to tell. Everyone go buy The Persistent now. Okay — we're gonna just be schlepping each other's products for the rest of the time. Keep listening.
 
If you were able to give women a permission slip to do something in a kind of unbehaved way — not behaving by the standards that we typically set for ourselves — what would be one permission you would give to people?
 
Francesca Donner (46:46): You sprung this question upon me. This is the permission — I already touched on it — but this is the permission I gave myself at the beginning of this year. Give yourself some grace. Give yourself some grace. Give others some grace. We are all doing our best. We're all muddling through.
 
Life is complicated. Families are complicated. The sandwich generation is complicated. Starting a business is complicated. Working is complicated. There are so many times when we go wrong, or say something that was foot-in-the-mouth, or make a mistake, or something that didn't work out the way we wanted it to, or we accidentally hurt someone's feelings, or someone accidentally hurt ours. In those moments — just say, "I'm going to give that person some grace. I'm going to give myself some grace. They were really super annoying, but you know what? They didn't mean to. I made a stupid mistake, but you know what? That's okay."
 
We hold ourselves to these impossibly high standards. We are really rough with ourselves when we make mistakes. Really rough. "How could you? What's wrong with you? Why are you so stupid? You shouldn't be doing this. You don't deserve it." It's incredible how many upsetting and insulting things we can say to ourselves instead of, "it's okay. It's okay."
 
Remember earlier in this podcast — you asked what's gone right, and I said, well, I won these two Webbys, isn't that cool? So cool. After I won them, lots of friends and people said, "my gosh, it's so exciting. Tell me all about it." And I said, well — it's great, we won these awards, that's so great. I thought about it and I thought — I have nothing to say about it other than how nice it is. Slap a smile on my face and moving on.
 
If we had not won these awards — if we'd been only a finalist, or hadn't been in consideration at all — do you know how much brain space I would have given to that? "We didn't measure up. We're not good enough. Those other people are so much better. How are we going to do it? I don't think we've got enough supporters. We couldn't make it on the people's vote. The judges thought we were lousy. What we're doing is no good. Maybe we should shut this up." I would have spent days and days thinking about all the things wrong.
 
And that is how the brain works. We think about all the things we did wrong. Everything bad. All the failures. All the disasters. Instead of just saying, "okay." So instead of beating ourselves up — the negative, negative, negative ticker tape going on in our heads — just say, "it's okay. Moving on. I give myself some grace."
 
Meghan French Dunbar (49:56): I love this. I'm actually realizing my cheeks are hurting right now because of how much I've been smiling for a full hour straight. You are so freaking lovely. How do humans find you? How do we support you?
 
Francesca Donner (50:17): Bless. Come find The Persistent — you can Google it, "The Persistent covering women for a change." You'll find our website. We have a variety of subscription offerings — if you'd like to try and taste The Persistent for free, that's okay. But if you'd like to pay for this fantastic work, I certainly won't complain. Once you subscribe, send it to your friends. Tell 10 or 20 or 50 of your friends. Share the stories. Talk about the stories. Put them on social media. Spread the word.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (51:04): Yay! Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is incredible. I'm so happy to have gotten an hour with you. Your story is exceptional.
 
Francesca Donner: It's so good.
 
UNBEHAVED LESSONS OF THE DAY
Meghan (51:17): All right, before we wrap up, let's do our Unbehaved lessons of the day.
 
Number one — your story matters. You've just been conditioned to believe it doesn't. That you're not interesting, that no one wants to hear from you, or that you should just amplify everyone else. Even Francesca — a former New York Times editor with two Webbys on her shelf — still hears "I'm so boring, nobody wants to hear from me" in her head. You're not alone in that voice. But it isn't right. Your story is interesting, and it's important. So start telling it.
 
Lesson number two — there's often opportunity in your frustration. Pay attention to what you wish were different. That gap might just be your next thing. Francesca launched The Persistent because she was furious that women's stories were being buried on page 50 of the paper. She didn't have a business background, but she dove in anyway. Two years later, she has an award-winning media company. You don't have to know everything to get started. You can figure things out as you go.
 
Lesson number three — clarity comes from taking action. You can focus-group a decision to death. You can plan the pros and the cons and think about all the things that could go wrong. But clarity comes from taking action. Francesca launched The Persistent before she'd figured out whether to be an LLC, or how to write a contract, or how to make people even pay for media. She figured it out by doing it. And the failed mug email — that gave her more clarity in like five minutes than five months of theorizing what would have worked. So if you've been thinking about the thing for a while, this is your permission slip to just get started. Just put one foot in front of the other and start doing things.
 
Lesson number four — until something's pointed out, we tend not to notice it. Things that are obvious to you might not be obvious to everyone else. Simply starting the conversation and planting the seed matters. Like Francesca did at the Wall Street Journal. Even if you don't see the fruit of your labor right away, it can impact others in unexpected ways — and it can also grow into something that shapes the rest of your career.
 
Lesson number five — give yourself some damn grace. The Persistent won two Webby Awards, people, and Francesca barely celebrated. But if they had lost, she said she would have spent days spiraling on everything that her team did wrong. That imbalance is how so many of us are wired. We give hours of brain space to what went wrong and blaming ourselves — and only seconds to what went right. So give yourself some grace. Give other people some grace. We're all doing our best. We're all muddling through — and that includes you, my friend.
 
And lesson number six — pay for good quality journalism. This one's on us, listeners. We need to start paying for good media. Put your money where your values are. If you want more stories like the ones Francesca is telling, we need to pay people for them.
 
That's all for today. Thanks so much for joining me. See you next time.
[End of transcript]
 

Every once in a while you meet someone who is so unapologetically themselves that just being near them gives you permission to be your full self as well. Kirsten Ludwig is that person.
Co-founder of the brand agency In Good Co, veteran of Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, Anthropologie, Fred Siegel, and Stella & Dot, and co-creator of the 17,000-subscriber Substack Good Thinking — Kirsten's career reads like a masterclass. But that's not why Meghan invited her on the show.
She invited her because Kirsten is the kind of woman who, at a fancy CEO summit years ago, stood up and mama-beared Meghan (then five weeks pregnant and dying inside) out of a conversation after a man wouldn't stop talking. That story opens the episode — and it's the perfect setup for everything that follows.
This one is about the courage to stop shrinking. Kirsten's signature framework — lean into the cringe — is the idea that the uncomfortable, courageous move almost always pays off tenfold what you were avoiding. She and Meghan get into the two-week maternity leave she still carries shame about, the friendship-based business partnership with her co-founder Chris, the "one pizza can feed" team philosophy at In Good Co, and the permission slip that all of us need to hear. 
Quick heads up: Kirsten and Meghan 100% set a new Unbehaved record for cursing in this one. If that's your love language, buckle in. If it's not your vibe, no hard feelings — this one might not be your jam.
WHAT WE COVER
The CEO-summit cold-open story — Meghan five weeks pregnant, a man accusing her of looking bored, and Kirsten standing up to mama bear her out of the situation
Lean into the cringe — Kirsten's signature framework: the uncomfortable, courageous move almost always pays off tenfold what you were avoiding
Why "you can have it all and balance it all" is complete BS — and how to make the trade-off intentional instead
Kirsten's arc from fashion in-house (Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, Anthro, Fred Siegel) → Stella & Dot → building an experiential agency from 30 to 230 people → founding In Good Co
The Stella & Dot contrast: coming from a boys-club culture where meetings ran until 7 or 8 PM (because no one wanted to go home) into a company run by "badass women" who got the work done by 5:30 because they had families waiting
The two-week maternity leave shame — Kirsten as chief creative officer taking only two weeks with her daughter, and why the regret isn't about the bond but about the example she set for everyone watching
How In Good Co became a B Corp before Kirsten even knew what a B Corp was
"One pizza can feed" — In Good Co's team-size philosophy
The COVID pivot to a curated contractor model — and why it makes the work better
The business partnership with Chris — friendship-based first, "we do the work in it," and the "beautiful soup" of talking about everything without limits
How Good Thinking (the 17K-subscriber Substack) became a media platform without ever intending to
Working with brands like Sex with Emily — and why the real unlock is shame → okay → empowering
The Fordham "light too bright" moment — the student who told Meghan she was always afraid her light was too bright
Kirsten on turning 50 and giving zero fucks — and why that's actually about leaning into your truth, not not caring
The permission slip: "Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Don't even think about permission. Do the thing that lights you up."
About the Guest
Kirsten Ludwig is the co-founder of In Good Co, a B Corp brand agency, and the co-creator of Good Thinking, a 17K-subscriber Substack and podcast on brand, trends, and culture. A veteran of Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, Anthropologie, Fred Siegel, and Stella & Dot, she now works with brands like Sex with Emily on the conversations most people are too afraid to have.
PULL QUOTES
"The more that I lean into what I call the cringe — the uncomfortable moments — that is where I find the beauty. And on the other side is tenfold whatever I've experienced prior." — Kirsten Ludwig
"This idea that you can have it all and balance all the things is complete bullshit. Somebody's always gonna lose. So at least make that decision intentional." — Kirsten Ludwig
"The shame doesn't come from that I don't feel bonded with my daughter. The shame comes from being that example. The fact that I, as chief creative officer of this agency, was an example to all of these women and men to say, this is okay." — Kirsten Ludwig on taking two weeks of maternity leave
"You didn't have to be an asshole to make money. You could be a good fucking human and also make money. Two things can be true." — Kirsten Ludwig
"We always wanted to be the size of team that one pizza can feed." — Kirsten Ludwig, on In Good Co's team philosophy
"We do the work in the relationship. Something comes up, we don't let it fester. We bring it up. It's a beautiful soup of all the parts and pieces, and there isn't anything that's off limits." — Kirsten Ludwig on her partnership with co-founder Chris
"Let's remove the shame — and not only remove it and make it okay, but let's make it empowering. And how do we do that, and how do you create inspiration within all that? Those are the conversations. That's the unlock." — Kirsten Ludwig
"I just wanna have a conversation and talk heart to heart. I don't wanna have this bullshit exterior. It's gonna be one of those conversations that you can feel something — versus like, 'well, I've accomplished this and I've done this.' Great, but tell me about you." — Kirsten Ludwig
"I want people to live their best life. Have the most fun, have the most sense of freedom, do all the things. Whatever is your truth. And to show people — like, shine fucking bright, babe." — Kirsten Ludwig
"Ask for forgiveness, not permission. That's it. Don't even think about permission. Do the thing that lights you up. And if someone calls you on it, deal with it then." — Kirsten Ludwig's permission slip
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Cold open: "I want people to live their best life... shine f*cking bright, babe."
00:29 — Meghan's intro: who Kirsten is, why she invited her on, and a language heads-up
02:21 — The CEO-summit story: five weeks pregnant, a man droning on, and Kirsten's mama-bear rescue
03:40 — Lean into the cringe — Kirsten's signature framework
04:55 — Motherhood, intentionality, and why "you can have it all" is bullshit
06:01 — What keeps Kirsten clear on her intention: the ongoing self-evolution work
07:20 — The stories Kirsten has had to unlearn
07:38 — The Stella & Dot vs. boys-club contrast — and the two-week maternity leave shame
10:48 — How In Good Co started (and how her prior agency imploded after a successful sale)
12:41 — Finding the courage to leave the C-suite treadmill
16:25 — Reimagining success around autonomy and freedom
19:05 — Building the company: B Corp from inception, the "one pizza can feed" team, the COVID pivot
23:59 — The business partnership with Chris — friendship first, "we do the work in it"
26:43 — Fashion, body image, and refusing to shame yourself for wanting to look and feel your best
29:41 — Working with Sex with Emily and other counterculture brands: from shame → okay → empowering
32:22 — Leaning into the cringe + naming the shame both require vulnerability
34:18 — The Fordham "light too bright" moment
36:36 — The likability conversation: hitting 50 and giving zero fucks
38:19 — What Kirsten wishes we'd talked about: the personal and work journey are one
40:15 — Meghan's four-year-old daughter, sensitivity as a superpower, and reparenting yourself
41:56 — The permission slip: ask for forgiveness, not permission
42:28 — Where to find Kirsten (Substack, LinkedIn)
42:56 — Meghan's four Unbehaved Lessons of the Day
RESOURCES MENTIONED
People + companies referenced:
Kirsten Ludwig — co-founder of In Good Co, a B Corp brand agency
Stella & Dot — the "badass women" company that hired Kirsten at five months pregnant and gave her three months of maternity leave
Sex with Emily / Emily Morse — one of the brands Kirsten works with; a masterclass in shame → empowerment
B Corp — the certification In Good Co has held since inception
CONNECT WITH KIRSTEN
In Good Co
Substack: Good Thinking — 17,000+ subscribers on brand, trends, and culture
Podcast: Good Thinking (via the Substack)
LinkedIn: Kirsten Ludwig
CONNECT WITH MEGHAN & UNBEHAVED
Book: This Isn't Working — available wherever you buy books
Website: meghanfrenchdunbar.com
Substack: subscribe for weekly insights + tools for building a better relationship with work
Podcast: Unbehaved — new episodes weekly wherever you get podcasts
FULL TRANSCRIPT
[Editor's note: Lightly cleaned for readability. Preserves original voice + delivery.]
 
Kirsten Ludwig (00:00): I want people to live their best life. Have the most fun, have the most sense of freedom, do all the things. Whatever is your truth. Everybody's truth is different. The life I lead is too crazy or whatever for a lot of people — they don't want to lead that life. Cool. But whatever their version is, I want to give people permission or inspiration or whatever it might be to lead their best version of that. And I think that's exactly what you do. And to show people — like, shine fucking bright, babe.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (00:29): Hello, lovely human. My name is Meghan French Dunbar, and welcome to Unbehaved. You just heard from the force of nature that is Kirsten Ludwig. Kirsten's the co-founder of In Good Co — a B Corp certified brand agency — and her professional background is pretty much a laundry list of the who's who in the fashion world: Ralph Lauren, Anthropologie, Stella & Dot, and many more.
 
But her impressive career isn't why I invited her on the show today. I wanted to talk to Kirsten because she's someone I've always looked up to. She and I met a number of years ago through the B Corp and Conscious Capitalism communities, and we shared a mutual passion for using business as a force for good.
 
And I don't know if you've ever come across someone like this — but every time I saw Kirsten, she was just so unapologetically herself. She said what she wanted to say. She wore what she wanted to wear. She stood up for the things she believed in. And it was so inspiring — especially back then, when I was a young female founder who thought I had to shrink myself or mold myself into something I wasn't in order to succeed.
 
So that's what we're gonna talk about today: how to nurture your individual light so it shines at its very brightest, instead of constantly trying to dim yourself for others. How leaning into the cringe — the uncomfortable, courageous moves — often pay off ten times bigger than whatever you were avoiding. The single biggest regret Kirsten has from her career. And what it looks like to stop putting up with the corporate BS and build the company that you'd want to work for instead.
 
And just a quick heads up — Kirsten and I 100% set a new Unbehaved record for cursing in this particular episode. So if that's your love language, buckle in. If it's not your vibe, no hard feelings. This one just might not be your jam.
 
Let's get into it.
Meghan French Dunbar (02:21): So I'm going to start this with a story — which is actually the last time you and I saw each other. It was a moment of unbehaving. We were sitting at a super fancy schmancy CEO summit with all these mostly men. And you and I were sitting at a picnic table outside, and we were listening to a man talk to us. And he stopped mid-conversation, looked at me, and said something like, "I can tell by your face that I'm just totally boring you."
 
And I was like, "I'm sorry, I'm five weeks pregnant and I feel like I'm about to die."
 
And you just mama-beared. You stood up and you evacuated me out of the situation. You were like, "You need to go to bed. What are you doing?"
 
What was happening for me was — I was 34 at the time, and I was still really holding on to the people-pleasing. I'm at this conference. Even though I literally feel like I'm about to throw up, I need to listen to this man and try to pretend I'm engaged. And you were just like, "Fuck no. We are not doing that. We're not pretending." And you just got me out of there.
 
Kirsten Ludwig: Love it.
 
Meghan French Dunbar: This has been how I've always experienced you — as someone who is just a bit courageous in the ability to do things differently and to not care how it's making other people uncomfortable or the societal scripts. Where does this come from?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (03:40): Well, first of all, thank you. That compliment means the world to me. Honestly, Meghan, that is everything I aspire and hope to be. The honest answer is — I don't know. But what I do know is that was six or seven years ago, right? I was going through a pivotal time in my life then — a full awakening, divorce, all the things.
 
And I think one thing I know absolutely certain is that the more I lean into what I call the cringe — the uncomfortable moments — that is where I find the beauty. And on the other side is tenfold whatever I've experienced prior. When I really lean into the thing that is courageous, the thing that is uncomfortable — on the other side of that, there are great, great rewards.
 
And so for sure, I do that more and more. Not just to be an asshole or do things that make people uncomfortable — though that has its own — but really about what do we all need in this moment, listening more to our truth, and empowering myself and others to identify that and speak it.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (04:55): Do you have good examples of that? Good stories?
 
Kirsten Ludwig: I think motherhood, right? My kids are now 11 and 14. And motherhood kind of forces us — or that's when we come to realize — what decision are you making? Because it's very, very clear. And this idea that you can have it all and do all the things and balance all the things is complete bullshit. Somebody's always gonna lose. So at least make that decision intentional.
 
Sometimes it's a work trip. Sometimes it's, "Hey guys, I'm going and doing this — you're with your dad at this time and here's what's gonna happen." But there is then growth for them, and independence, and all the things on that end. And then I'll go and do work. And sometimes it's telling my business partner, "Hey, this has come up with my kids. Can you cover for me? I've got to focus on this." For me, it's just really about being intentional around that decision-making.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (06:01): Is there anything that helps you remain clear on what your intention is?
 
Kirsten Ludwig: I think self-evolution. I'm somebody who has realized — initially it was just self-help books, and then it became a lot of other things: plant medicine, therapy, divorce, all of it — that for me, becoming a better version of myself tomorrow than today is a great objective and goal. It's not to say I'm not comfortable with who I am today. It's just to say that's exciting to me — interesting to see and explore what that growth looks like.
 
My values are very much around freedom, empowerment, aspiration, being kind. Those things come from establishing work, establishing families, establishing my independence, establishing myself as a woman — all the parts and pieces have happened probably fairly organically through my life path. But not without fight, and not without intention.
 
The older I get, the more I really understand that leaning into the cringe, leaning into the discomfort, just greatly expands who I am, what I can do, how confident I feel, how empowered I am, and the magic I can do in the world.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (07:20): The evolution you talk about of getting older and expanding — are there certain stories or beliefs you used to have that you had to release or unlearn in the process?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (07:38): Oh man, so many, so many. I just talked to somebody this week who's pregnant and reached out to a group I'm in for advice. And I said, "Listen, let's chat. I'm always happy to give my experience." I feel like I've done it in both really great ways and really shitty ways, right?
 
One of the biggest shames that comes up for me work-wise is — with my son, I worked with this amazing company called Stella & Dot. They hired me at five months pregnant. I had three months maternity leave and it was pro-moms.
 
That was actually an interesting experience because I'd come from what was more of a boys' club — where you'd have meetings till like 7 and 8 at night. It was just a bunch of men sitting around and you'd realize, well, they probably didn't want to go home to their wives.
 
And then in contrast, I came to Stella & Dot, and it was a company really run by badass women. And these women were like, "We gotta get this shit done. We gotta get out by 5, 5:30, because we've got families to go home to." The contrast of that was like, wow. Fuck. That was a great learning.
 
Then I go, okay — what version do I wanna lean into when I create my company? And that to me was very clear. So that's kind of an example of how that evolution has happened.
 
So I had this great three months of proper maternity with my son. And then with my daughter, I was building up an agency as the chief creative officer — and I took two weeks.
 
And here's the thing — the shame doesn't come from that I don't feel bonded with my daughter. We're very, very close. There was nothing lost in that experience — she was tethered to me, I was flying around and doing meetings and she was tethered to me. But the shame, the negative experience, comes from being that example.
 
The fact that I, as chief creative officer of this agency, was an example to all of these women and men to say — this is okay. That's really where the shame is. That was a lesson learned. So many of my lessons — I think many people's are what not to do. Especially in career. And so I've learned it. And very much I tell that story so people understand — it's not something I would do again, but I learned from doing the shitty version of it.
 
The negativity was really telling people that that was okay, even though on the inside I was fighting for internal change within the company. People didn't necessarily know or see. But that didn't matter. What mattered was what I was representing.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (10:33): Was the pressure to only take two weeks coming mainly from yourself or from the group you were working with?
 
Kirsten Ludwig: Yeah — the group.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (10:45): [laughing] I'm gonna set my rage aside. So — your own agency. I wanna hear the story. This is a story I've actually never heard from you. How did In Good Co start? Tell us the journey.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (10:57): Sure. So my background's been mainly on the fashion and retail side. I worked in-house at Ralph Lauren, American Eagle Outfitters, Anthro, Fred Siegel — then moved to Stella & Dot, and then moved to the agency side.
 
That was my first foray into the agency world. I built up an experiential agency. We went through hyper-growth — in under three years, we started at about 30 people and when I left, we were 230. We went from one office to four, including London through an acquisition. Hyper, hyper growth.
 
My first foray into the agency world — it can be quite intense. I learned a lot of lessons, many of them good, many of them bad. And I came out of that leaning into my idealism and my optimism and saying, I only want to do it if I can do it this way. I want the culture to be the most important thing.
 
I wanted to give people the space, the creativity, and the inspiration to do their best work. That doesn't look like working in a cubicle. That looks like working in an office like The Wing when it was around, or Soho House. It looks like giving people not an hour to say "be creative and do this project," but giving people the space to be like, "Oh, you need to go to a park today to get inspired for this project? Great, go do that."
 
So it was really built around: what does the culture look like that I want to be working in, that the team wants to be working in, and how do we create that? Because knowing that's going to lead to the best work. That's the opposite of a business plan. If you do the thing where the creatives, the team, the strategists are in a space to create the best work — the clients, the money, all of that will come.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (12:41): So a lot of the women I talk to who are on the corporate treadmill have gotten to certain levels in the executive C-suite. They can say things like, "We've got four offices in London," all the fancy things. And there's a sense of self-worth tied up in that role — how large the entity is, how established they are. So they just stay there, even though there are so many things they wish they could change.
 
How did you find the courage to just not stay in the easy, comfortable space of the big agency — and set out on your own, and not just say you wanted to do it differently, but actually do it?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (13:24): Well — I don't know if I set off on my own. It was a bit by force. That relationship ended quite dramatically. We had positioned and sold the company — my now business partner at In Good Co and my right-hand — we'd led that process. And then it all imploded for me after we properly and successfully positioned and sold. That's another story.
 
Like anything in my life — maybe it's come about in extremes. It just becomes very, very obvious. That was the beginning of an awakening for me: what is happening? Is this the life you want? What do you want to be doing?
 
I came out of that and said, okay, what do I want to do? I took a minute — literally about a minute — and moved out of New York. We had been ready to go back to LA, where my family was, all my kids' dad's family was, ready to go back to California lifestyle.
 
Thought about what I wanted to do. Do I go back to an agency? Do I go back on the brand side? One thing I realized was — I love fashion because of the innovation behind it. At that time, innovation was really behind social. What Instagram was doing, what Facebook was doing. This was 12 years ago. So I went and started interviewing with those guys, and that kind of felt like meh.
 
Then it was like, well, do I start my own thing? So much of what I love doing is having a team, inspiring the team — but also being smart enough to get the fuck out of their way.
 
I started up, and very shortly thereafter connected with who my right-hand was at the agency — one of the smartest, coolest, most intentional people I've ever met. Our brains think very, very similarly. We've always had a shorthand.
 
She and I created In Good Co. with this very optimistic, we only want to do it if we can do it this way mentality. I think it's who I am in my soul. The things I've gone through have chipped away at the armor and led me more toward my truth — really leaning into optimism, doing the right thing, being empowered. Knowing there is a better path — and maybe not choosing this path or that path, but finding my own and forging my own. Everything I go through, from career to divorce to whatever — helped me see that.
 
The path isn't already there. But I can instinctually lead it. And then other people are going to come with me on my path. Rad, let's do this.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (16:25): So one thing you touched on is something that's been evolving for me over the last few years: reimagining my idea of success. One of the central pillars for me is autonomy. I get to choose how I work, who I work with, what I'm working on, when I'm working, how I feel while I'm working. I'm a solopreneur. I don't even have a team at this point. And yes, there's the financial stability part, which sometimes is more stressful. But the trade-off of extreme autonomy — to live in alignment with my values, do the things I want to do, say no to people I don't want to work with — completely changed my life. I'm hearing that in your story too. How has your definition of success changed?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (17:09): It's a great point. And it goes back to your question around the title, right? For me — I think it's age, but who knows, maybe slash experience. The time when I finally had the title, whether it was creative director, chief creative officer, whatever — it didn't matter anymore. Maybe it was because I had it, or maybe it was age or experience — but it just stopped mattering.
 
Similarly with success. Sure, there's a financial component. I transparently lean into that. Part of what I wanted to do with In Good Co is show that you didn't have to be an asshole to make money. And I know you have that with Conscious Magazine — you have the exact same — which is probably why we identified and connected so early on. You can be a good fucking human, but also make money. Two things can be true.
 
So success does have a financial component. But it's also — I travel whenever I want. My business partner is one of my best friends. I'm able to do and live in a way that leans into everything I want to do and be. There's not this sectioning of, "Oh shit, I got the Sunday scaries because I've got to go into the office." It's, "Oh great, I get to do this."
 
Autonomy, freedom, choosing my own hours. My calendar is a crazy person's calendar. I have business partners in Europe, so I'll work in the morning, then go for a workout, then come back and do some work, then depending on if I have my kids or not I'll be with them or go for another workout. It's a very me calendar of what I want to be doing with my time. Then of course however I show up, I'm a better version of myself because I really want to be there for whatever I'm doing.
 
For me, autonomy and freedom is at the top of what success looks like. Because it's time. What else is there really?
 
Meghan French Dunbar (19:05): I'm curious — the ways you wanted to build the company differently, what does it actually look like? And what are the ways you're running things that you're hoping other business owners could start paying attention to?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (19:22): So we are a B Corp, and we've been a B Corp since inception. Like anything I do, it was never really a business development ploy — not to say that's good or bad, I'm just not great at that. It's really about what do I think is the right thing to do, and what do I want to do?
 
We'd actually set up our ethos before we even found out what a B Corp was. My mom gave me an article — the CEO of Patagonia was on the cover of Fortune. She was like, "Look at this thing." I was like, B Corp, what's a B Corp? Found all about it. And then just to find that there was literally a certification that matched what I wanted to be — felt good and aligned.
 
How we work today is very different than how we were before. We had a mix of a curated team and an in-house team. Then in COVID, we played the whole dance of — do we get the loan? Do we not get the loan? — and that coincided with ultimately having to let go. We had a pretty small team and we never wanted to be large. We always wanted to be the size of team that one pizza can feed — that was our philosophy.
 
[Meghan laughs]
 
We had no interest in being a ginormous agency. We'd experienced that and determined it was not for us. So we played that dance through COVID, which was rough. It was quite a blow for me. And a blow for the team, because we'd built so much around culture. That was the inception and the belief.
 
Ego-wise — how I defined myself as, look, I've been able to be successful, create this company, have this team of people that's inspired, excited — part of our Monday call was a personal check-in of "how the fuck are you?" Because asking that question and really listening determines how you're going to show up at work, how I can support you, how you can support me. "All right, let's talk about that project that's due in an hour." — "Fuck that. Let's talk about how you are and who you are, and how you can show up, and how I can support that." It was built into everything.
 
So letting go of that, letting go of people — was really, really hard. That was a terrible moment. But like anything in my life — when you lean into the discomfort, on the other side of it, beautiful things happen. The team has gone on to do amazing things on their own and with other companies.
 
We have a model now that's a consultant base. These are people we've worked with for years. As I'm sure you know — the best people are not in-house anymore. They're all independent contractors. And now we get to do these great projects where we get to reach out individually and say, "Hey Diane, we have this rad pet company we're working on. You're in love with dogs and your dog has a great story. Do you want to come help us do copy and strategy?" And then they get to raise their hand and say, "Yeah, I want to work on that particular project" — versus, "Hey Joe, you're sitting around, can you jump on this Nike project that came in?" It feels much different — much more intentional, much more inspired.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (22:32): And it also gives people flexibility to say yes to the things they actually want to work on — or tone down the amount of work they're doing if they need caregiving or other things.
 
Kirsten Ludwig: Totally, totally. And it makes the work better because they're excited about what they're signing up for. That makes all the difference in the world.
 
And then about two years ago, my business partner Chris started writing a Substack. She was always reading everything trends-based, and we'd be sharing this with a particular client, and she'd be Slacking or texting me about it. She was always in the know. She finally was like, "I'm consuming too much." After a breakthrough with her therapist, she was told she had to figure out a medium to do this. So she created a newsletter on Substack — because she knew two years ago that was where things were moving.
 
That's become Good Thinking, which is really a media platform for us now. Certainly didn't start that way, but it's a Substack now with about 17,000 subscribers. It's around brand and trends and culture. Then we have a podcast off of that. We do talks. Happy hours. Dinners. We're hosting a CMO dinner at Cannes coming up. When we lean into where the flow is, and where the fun is, and what's really working — that's where the magic happens.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (23:59): With Chris — co-founder relationships are real tough. They're often one of the primary reasons companies go under. How have you built such a solid relationship with Chris? What have you done right? And what's one thing you did wrong?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (24:17): Great question. We talk about our partnership a lot, because it's one of the things people should just talk about more. The good and the bad, for sure.
 
But I've been really lucky. We've been really lucky in this. And I think, quite honestly — because it's friendship-based first. We met through work. She was the first person I hired at the agency. She was my right-hand. We instantly created a shorthand.
 
Quickly thereafter, her and her then-boyfriend, now-husband, were around in Brooklyn. We ran into each other, came and joined us — we just got drunk one day at a Mexican bar, and the rest is history.
 
That friendship base is everything. She has been through all of the things with me. She's literally one of my absolute best friends. I confide in her all the time. She's the person I probably talk to the most. She's my work wife.
 
And I think the most recent thing I've identified — we do the work in it. We have this great connection. There are lots of advantages in having a business partner — it scales it, it allows you to bounce ideas off of somebody. I don't know if we'd still be here if it was just one of us. Being an entrepreneur is rough. There's great parts, but there's also really challenging parts. So it's nice to have somebody you trust so much, who has your back in those moments.
 
But — we do the work in the relationship. Something comes up, we don't let it fester. We bring it up. "Hey, on our last trip, something was up for you, something was going on — let's talk about that." We're both people who want to talk about it and get it out. Sometimes it's like, "Oh shit — you felt that from me? I didn't realize I was doing that." That helps me to think about it for two days.
 
We're constantly like an ADD mess of talking about all the work things, all the personal things, all the issues coming up with kids or whatever it might be personally. It's a beautiful soup of all those parts and pieces, and there isn't anything that's off limits.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (26:43): What a gift. I want to go back to one thing — fashion. You mentioned the innovation that's inherent in that industry. How did it shape the way you think about your body image? The things fashion has influenced with how women tell ourselves certain stories?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (27:02): This is my perspective, and this is just how my brain is built — which leans toward more optimism. It's not something I try to be. It's just what comes into my head.
 
I'm a huge believer that fashion is creative expression. I dress based on my mood — so who knows how it's gonna show up. The more we lean into whatever we're trying to express creatively — through writing, through arts, through whatever — I think fashion for me is a huge part of that.
 
The challenges I've had in the fashion industry — I don't necessarily think they're particular to fashion — but they've been more about "this has been a boys' club" or "this is the way we've always done things, so this is the way we should always do things." And I've always been like, huh, that doesn't feel right to me. Maybe we should look at that.
 
I've been fortunate — anytime I've been in a corporate environment, I've had more of an entrepreneurial position. I've had an agency as my team, or something that gave me outside perspective. So I've been able to push and be in more forward-thinking positions. In Anthro, I was brought in to make the brand cooler, give it more of an edge. So I'd try to push that through.
 
To me, it's just — what is the best version of yourself? Fashion can be part of helping you tell that story. It can lead to confidence, self-expression, so many parts and pieces. The more I lean into that — and not into huh, what should I wear to the corporate office is a success — I mean, I'm 52, so I'm in it. And it's really leaning into: yeah, of course I wanna look the best version of myself. Of course I wanna work out. Of course I want to get facials and figure out the best hydrating skincare. I don't shame myself for wanting to do those things. I don't shame my 11-year-old daughter for wanting to learn more about skincare, as long as it's safe.
 
I always skew on all of those things to pull out just the things that are empowering me, that are inspiring me. I'm not shaming myself in any way for wanting to look the best version. If that's younger — my biological age is almost 10 years younger — great, I'm doing something right. I lean into those things with inspiration versus a "fuck, am I getting old? Am I getting past it?" mentality.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (29:41): I love that. So some of the brands you work with now, like Sex with Emily — there's this counterculture, "we don't talk about women's pleasure and women's power." What has working with those brands done, or helped you see, or changed your mindset in any way?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (30:01): So much. It's been so transformational. It's one of my favorite topics because it's about shame. We have so much fucking shame. And the brands that are leaning into those things, I think, are the most exciting for us right now — or the brands that are at the precipice of that. It's really unlocking something.
 
When you can lean in and give voice to the shadow conversations, the whisper conversations — the things nobody's saying but the shame everybody's feeling. And not just say, "Hey, it's okay, we're all doing it, everybody's thinking that." To say — not just it's okay, but also to actually empower people to do it. Yeah, you should feel good having sex. Whatever the empowerment is.
 
Emily's a rad human, and she is empowering men and women and anybody to feel good about how they're approaching sex and whatever that looks like for them. For us to be a part of those conversations, a part of a brand that can really connect with somebody — and not just say "it's okay," but actually move that okay into empowerment — I'm here for all of those conversations. Menopause, anything around sex, sexuality.
 
Chris is really into the aging conversation. Think about Silvers — how we thought about people at like, no, it's gotta go up now — 75. Think about how we thought about all these people. The Golden Girls comparison, the meme that we all see. Demi Moore's killing it, and she's not going anywhere.
 
Let's take all of those stories, let's remove the shame — and not only remove it and make it okay, but let's make it empowering. How do we do that, and how do we create inspiration within all that? Those are the conversations. That's the unlock. Because when somebody feels that from a brand, from a person, from anything — that does something, and you connect with that. Those are the brands, those are the stories, those are the things we want to be a part of.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (32:22): Leaning into the cringe, naming the shame — these feel very complementary, if not the same thing. They both very much require vulnerability. Go, go, go — say whatever's coming up with the big breath.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (32:38): Vulnerability is probably my favorite word. Chris will send me so many memes about it. I'm a Scorpio — all we want to do is have the really deep, vulnerable conversations. Which is true.
 
The more I've done my own work — all I wanna do is take off all the masks and get deeper and deeper into my truth. And that's all I wanna do with you, right? I just wanna have a conversation and talk heart to heart with you, Meghan. I don't wanna have this bullshit exterior. I'm not interested in those conversations, and I know you're not either. That's why, honestly, it's one of the reasons I was so excited this morning. I was like — I get to talk to Meghan, and we haven't caught up in forever, and it's gonna be so great. Because you know it's gonna be one of those conversations where you can feel something. Where we're really both present and excited to be in — versus like, "Well, I've accomplished this and I've done this." Great, but tell me about you.
 
The conversations I'm most interested in — the ones that really cut through, the only ones I want to have — are the heartfelt ones. I don't think it's something that requires a specific question to unlock. But I can tell you — I jump on a handful of calls almost every day, and it could be somebody I've never met before. You both end up cutting through the bullshit — but somebody does it first. Somebody leans in and exposes themselves first. Be that person.
 
For me, it's a constant evolution — of taking off the mask, getting closer to vulnerability, finding more of my truth. The more I do the work, the more interesting it is. That's how I want to show up with people. Those are the people I want to be around. How about you?
 
Meghan French Dunbar (34:18): What comes up for me is — the more you are leaning into your truth and living out loud as your highest and best self, the more you're modeling that as the way people can be. It's giving permission for people to not have to be cookie cutter and homogenous and playing by the same script. Giving people the permission to actually just be authentic. Live into what they want to be.
 
The more I do it, the more other people feel like they can do it as well. And that keeps helping me return back to it.
 
I gave a little talk in New York recently, and I came off the stage and this wonderful student at Fordham University where I was speaking came up and said, "I'm always afraid that my light is too bright. But then I just saw you shining so brightly on the stage that it encouraged me — like, you can be successful and be really different." And I was like — fuck yes. That was so awesome.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (35:18): That's fucking great. That's fucking great. Like — that's a life moment. God, are you afraid your light's... I mean, I hope nobody is. But of course, if —
 
Meghan French Dunbar: I think most of us are. I don't know. I have been my whole life. Like — yeah. Anyway. That's a whole other story.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (35:38): But it's a great point — especially if she's thinking it, people are thinking that. And especially as women, we have an onus. We need to do that more, because as people who have a platform and the ability to articulate it — I think we have an onus to share that. It's giving people permission to do the thing.
 
I want people to live their best life. Have the most fun, have the most sense of freedom, do all the things. Whatever is your truth. Everybody's truth is different. The life I lead is too crazy or whatever for a lot of people. Cool. But whatever their version is — I want to give people permission or inspiration or whatever it might be to lead their best version of that. And I think that's exactly what you do. To show people — like, shine fucking bright, babe.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (36:36): Yes. Ooh. Well — I guess the question I have there is the likability conversation. Of, am I too much? It feels to me — the story I tell myself about you is that ship has sailed. You are just not interested in being liked. You are very much who you are — take it or leave it. Does that feel true? And how long has that been true for you?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (37:05): Yes, yes, yes. That feels true for me. It's something I've leaned into more and more. And I do think it's true that once you hit 50, you give zero fucks. You really, really give — you're like, "I don't care." Not in an offensive way like "I'm just going to fucking offend everybody" — but more in a way of being able to lean into my truth more and more, and really know what that is.
 
There's a confidence and a commitment and an ability that comes with that. And then a lessening of caring what people think. It's really that balance for me — leaning more into my truth, being able to really identify it, really know it, and a confidence that comes with that. Giving shit less what people think. And then you hit 50 and you're like — I give zero fucks. Zero fucks. And it's really true.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (38:07): Aging is awesome. I'm really enjoying it.
 
Kirsten Ludwig: It really is. I'm in. I'm in. Cause also — the alternative's not great.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (38:19): Right. All right — is there anything that you wish I had asked you about that we didn't talk about?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (38:26): For me — the things that continue to blur the lines are my personal journey and my work journey. They're one and the same, because certainly one affects the other. I don't know how much people are still kind of coming up and believing that "well, this is separate from this, and you can still have it all and you do this and separate those things."
 
I think that's one of the things I like about LinkedIn — I like when people tell their personal stories. I like to know more about people versus "hey, I just won this award, I just got this." You get to know more about people when they share that. Weaving together and really understanding where somebody is today is really about that personal journey.
 
That's an hour-long conversation, ideally over a bottle or two of wine, that we need to do. But it's the journey of the becoming, the undoing. The idea of the unbehaving — we should be doing all of that more.
 
As somebody who has an 11-year-old daughter — what do I want her to do and think about? It's not to get permission from me. It's not, "Mom, do you think this is okay?" I want her to grow up with her own sense of self and know: this is what I want to do, and I'm going to go do it — respectfully, but whether people like it or not.
 
Those are the type of women that I think we need more of. Things are not even. We don't have enough of a voice. The more we can lean into raising and creating and supporting and mentoring those abilities — that's the world I want to live in.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (40:15): I have a four-year-old daughter, and she is a spicy little meatball. And I am so excited to nurture her wild flame instead of trying to crush it. The experience of getting to reparent her and just let her go be her wildest, most beautiful, spirited soul in this world — instead of telling her that it's wrong. That's some of the work that I'm here to do on this planet. That's one of the reasons I feel like I'm here. It's so fucking beautiful.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (40:44): Totally. But isn't that amazing — to go through and have a moment? I go through and have those moments and I identify them with her. But then I also go — what if I, instead of having to relearn that, just learned that that was okay? What if I just learned to lean into that? What if I learned that sensitivity is a superpower versus don't be so sensitive? What if you had a complete reframe on all of this?
 
We have the ability and onus to do that. With our daughters. And in the workforce — being people who are visible, sharing that. You're certainly doing that on your podcast, with your book, all the places. We need to be that platform. We need to mentor. We need to support. We need to empower. We need to inspire. That's the work we all collectively are doing.
 
Once you break down any kind of societal norm — they kind of all come crushing down. Menopause. Aging. Sexuality. Divorce. It's all of the things. Once you break down one, you're like — did they all really exist? Were any of these real? And it's like — fuck no. They weren't real.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (41:56): Permission slip. If you were giving listeners a permission slip — what is the permission you give people to start unbehaving in some certain way?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (42:07): I would tell them to ask for forgiveness, not permission. That's it. Don't even think about permission. It's more about — do the thing that lights you up. And then if you needed permission, you can ask for forgiveness if anybody calls you on it.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (42:28): How do people find you and support you and learn about all your work — besides Substack, Good Thinking, the podcast? Where are the places people find you?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (42:37): Yeah — sign up on our Substack, Good Thinking, for the podcast and the Substack. And hit me up on LinkedIn.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (42:43): Yay. Thank you, thank you. My heart feels so damn full. I'm just in awe of you, and I adore you, and I'm so grateful.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (42:53): Thank you, thank you for having me. It was so, so good to catch up with you.
Meghan French Dunbar (42:56): All right, my friend — before we wrap up completely, here are my key Unbehaved lessons of the day from Kirsten.
 
Lesson number one: Lean into the cringe. Kirsten highlighted the fact that it's often when we lean into those uncomfortable, courageous moves — instead of avoiding them — that there's something beautiful on the other side. She said the reward is often tenfold whatever it is you are avoiding. It made me wonder — what things am I avoiding right now that I might need to lean into instead? And I would ask the same question of you.
 
Lesson number two: "You can have it all and balance it all" — the whole thing is bullshit. Be intentional instead. I love how Kirsten reframed this for us — the unbehaving move isn't pretending you can do it all. It's being conscious and intentional about the trade-off that matters. How can you go on that work trip in a good way? What do you communicate to the people you love in those moments when you have to prioritize your work for a bit? That's the good stuff.
 
Lesson number three: Model the behavior you want other people to feel permission to do. Kirsten talked about the fact that the two-week maternity leave shame wasn't about the bond with her daughter. It was about modeling that only taking two weeks off is okay. I felt this one in my bones. Oftentimes setting healthy boundaries, prioritizing what matters, or even just taking care of yourself — isn't just benefiting you. It's giving other people permission, and sometimes even a blueprint, to do the same thing themselves.
 
Lesson number four — an oldie but a goodie: Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Kirsten's permission slip right at the end. Just don't overthink it. Unapologetically do the thing that lights you up. And if someone calls you on it, deal with it then — but stop waiting for approval before you just do the damn thing.
 
That's all for today, my friends. If you enjoyed the episode, maybe share it with a friend or leave a good review. Any support for the show means more to me than I can ever express.
 
Until next time.

There's a job you've thought about leaving. A sabbatical you'd take if you weren't worried about being judged for it. Something you want to write, or start, or say out loud — and the thing stopping you isn't whether you want to do it. It's what other people will think.
In this episode of Unbehaved, you’ll hear from Al and Leanne Elliott — the married couple behind the UK's #1 management podcast, Truth, Lies and Work — who’ve built one of the most enviable-looking lives you'll come across. Digital nomads for six years. Working together. Making a living doing what they love. All because they refuse to build a life based on what other people think. 
At 19, Al Elliott sat across from a deputy headmaster who told him that if he worked hard for twenty years, he could have that man's job and earn £28,000. Al's internal response: f*ck this. He walked out of teaching and never went back.
Leanne spent from 28 to 35 waiting for the maternal feeling everyone promised was coming. It never arrived. It took her mother saying "that's okay" for her to believe it might be.
Between them, Al and Leanne have refused nearly every script they were handed — about careers, children, where to live, and whether you should ever go into business with your spouse. 
In this conversation, they walk through exactly what it looks like to stop making decisions based on what other people think — and start listening to what YOU want instead.
Content note: this episode includes a story about a suicide-in-progress call, at around the six-minute mark. Resources at the bottom.
What We Cover:
The paper airplane that said "help" — how they met on an overnight Samaritans shift (03:53)
Working with your spouse without wrecking either one (15:03)
The story of success you were handed as a child (24:01)
Money is a river: unlearning the family rule that you don't discuss it (27:41)
Waiting for a feeling that never came (28:23)
Nothing is wasted — relational beats transactional (36:13)
What's genuinely different about work in 2026: AI fear, DEI backlash, and "pick a side" (41:30)
The hardest truth Al ever heard: "You're not that important." (48:15)
The permission slip — and how to work out whose voice is calling your idea stupid (51:29)
About The Guests:
Al & Leanne Elliott host Truth, Lies & Work, part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. Leanne is a business psychologist; Al is a serial entrepreneur. truthliesandwork.com — and find Leanne on LinkedIn, where she answers every single comment.
PULL QUOTES
"Stop behaving in the way you think other people expect. Stop trying to make decisions based on what you think other people think is right or is the norm. Make decisions based on what YOU want and what works for you and your values." — Leanne Elliott
"If you work as hard as you seem to be working right now, then in about 20 years time, you can be sitting in my seat and you can be earning upwards of 28,000 pounds a year. And I sat there and I went, fuck this." — Al Elliott
"The way we talk on microphone is the way we talk in real life. That's kind of what people say when they meet us — you're just exactly the same as you sound on the pod. Yeah. Because we enjoy doing it." — Al Elliott
"Nothing is wasted. Even when you find yourself in a situation doing work on something you're not really getting paid for or not very much for and it's taking more of your time. Our mantra is always nothing is wasted, because we're learning something. We're making a connection here." — Leanne Elliott
"The voice that tells you you're wrong and it's a stupid idea — try and identify whose voice that is. Because if that's your parents, that's your grandparents, that's a friend — that's probably the person who's holding you back the most." — Al Elliott
"The fact is you've got to fall in love with the medium. If you hate it, it's like writing blogs — you're not going to stick at it. You absolutely have to love it." — Al Elliott
"If they've got my phone number, then they should really be talking to me. If they've not — I don't know them, whatever. And I think that's kind of how when you're creating content and putting stuff out into the world, it needs to be about, I don't know you, whatever." — Al Elliott (on trolls)
"It's almost like a bank account. If I've paid into somebody's bank account with goodwill and helping them over the years, and they certainly need to make a withdrawal, they're much more likely to be there to help me. That's how the world should work." — Leanne Elliott
"Just because you're a manager doesn't mean you're that important. You're not that important. You're disposable if you don't do a good job. He was right. Brutal, but right." — Al Elliott (hardest truth he's had to accept)
CHAPTERS: 
00:00 Cold open: "Fuck this"
00:35 Welcome + episode setup
02:55 The interview begins: how did you build this life?
03:55 How they met on an overnight shift at the Samaritans
04:51 The suicide-in-progress call
07:20 The 6am callback that changed everything
08:44 Why they were volunteering in the first place
10:13 Fast-forward: marriage, moving to Spain, Brexit, becoming digital nomads
12:12 Expert host vs. unexpert host: how their paths converged
14:37 Working with your spouse: the boundaries + osmosis framework
17:34 The honest truth about building a podcast from nothing
22:00 The 1% better principle
23:10 Childhood stories of success: what you were handed
26:00 Al's "fuck this" £28K teaching moment
27:30 Stories they had to let go of (money for Al, having kids for Leanne)
30:50 Currently in Bosnia — permission to live wherever
33:00 A typical week + how the podcast provides livelihood
35:14 Transactional vs. relational: being of service
36:13 The "nothing is wasted" mantra + the Nico story
41:30 Patterns in 2026: AI fear, DEI pushback, polarization
45:20 How to deal with trolls
47:54 Rapid fire: hardest truth
48:53 Rapid fire: biggest lie
50:43 Most outdated work norm
51:14 The permission slip to unbehave
52:32 Where to find Al and Leanne
53:14 Meghan's Unbehaved Lessons of the Day
 
RESOURCES MENTIONED
Truth, Lies and Work — Al and Leanne's podcast: truthliesandwork.com
Oblong — Al and Leanne's consultancy: https://oblonghq.com
The Samaritans — UK crisis listening service where Al and Leanne met: samaritans.org
Content note referenced in the episode:
If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US (call or text 988), or the Samaritans in the UK at 116 123.
CONNECT WITH AL & LEANNE:
Podcast: Truth, Lies and Work
Leanne on LinkedIn
Al on LinkedIn
 
CONNECT WITH MEGHAN + UNBEHAVED:
Website
Substack: Unbehaved
Book: This Isn't Working
LinkedIn: @meghanfrenchdunbar
Instagram: @meghanfrenchdunbar
 
FULL TRANSCRIPT (CLEANED)
Lightly edited for readability. Filler words, false starts, and transcription artifacts removed. Al's, Leanne's, and Meghan's voices preserved throughout.
[Cold Open — Al]
I remember distinctly, I was sitting in front of the deputy headmaster. I must have been what, 19, on my first teaching practice? And the deputy master says, "If you work as hard as you seem to be working right now, then in about 20 years time, you can be sitting in my seat and you can be earning upwards of 28,000 pounds a year." And I sat there and I went — fuck this.
 
Meghan: (laughing) Hard pass.
 
Al: There's gotta be a better life than that.
[Meghan — Welcome]
 
Hello there, lovely human, and welcome to Unbehaved. I'm Meghan French Dunbar, and that was Al Elliott — one half of the extraordinary duo I get to talk to today. The other half is his wife, Leanne.
 
One of the reasons I'm so excited about this episode is that Al and Leanne are going to walk us through what it actually looks like to stop making decisions based on what other people think.
 
And I don't know about you, but this is something that shows up in so many aspects of my life. That tension where you know you want to do something, but then you start questioning yourself because you're worried about what other people might think. Maybe it's the job you want to leave, but you don't quite know what your colleagues are gonna say. Maybe it's the sabbatical you'd like to take, but you're worried you'll be judged for taking time off. Or the Substack or the podcast or the content that you want to start putting out there, but you're worried about what other people are going to think about what you have to say.
 
Whatever it is, I hear this from so many people — they aren't living the life they actually want because of other people's opinions.
 
Today, Al and Leanne are gonna show us what it looks like to listen to what YOU want instead of what others want for you. And for them, it's resulted in the two of them leading a pretty epic life. Together, they co-host the UK's #1 management podcast, Truth, Lies, and Work, which they record and produce from wherever they want. In the last decade, they've lived in different European countries pretty much every few months.
 
So today I got to turn the tables on them and ask them the questions. And our conversation surfaced one of the most touching meet-cute stories I've ever heard that I totally wasn't expecting. It also brought up refreshingly honest wisdom for anyone who's trying to build something from the ground up — whether it's a small business, an art studio, anything in between. We also talk about one potentially overlooked practice they lean on (and I do as well) that has become foundational to their success.
 
One quick heads up before we dive in: this episode opens with a story about a suicide-in-progress call from Al and Leanne's early days as volunteers at the Samaritans, a crisis listening service in the UK. If that's not something you're up for today, feel free to skip ahead — it's at about the six-minute mark in the interview. Resources are also in the show notes.
 
Otherwise, let's get into it.
The interview begins
Meghan: From where I'm sitting here in Boulder, Colorado, it seems as though you two have nailed life. You get to live wherever you want, you work together, you've got this free-flowing, gorgeous number one show in the UK — all the things. What the fuck? How did you do this? I want the unedited version of how you built the number one management show in the UK as a couple. Go.
 
Al: Pure dumb luck after one too many whiskeys.
 
Meghan: Same answer as all entrepreneurs. Okay, cool.
 
Al: Well, Leanne, tell the story. There's a whole story before Truth, Lies and Work happened…
 
Meghan: Let's start there. Do it. I want it all.
 
Al: Where's a logical place to start?
 
Meghan: How did you two meet? And then how did the show become a thing? Let's do that.
How they met at the Samaritans
Leanne: This is a good story. Go, Lee. So I met Al when we were both volunteering for a charity called the Samaritans in the UK. We worked at the Manchester and Salford branch — it's a listening service for people who are in distress or despair and maybe feeling suicidal. I went in for an overnight shift, 11pm to 7am.
 
I met in the corridor a guy called Rob, who was the chairman of our branch. He was like, "You're all right — oh, you're on with Elliott tonight. I think you'll like him." I went, "Oh yeah? Is he all right?" "Yeah, yeah, he's into property, he's really sound, quite funny. I think you'll really like him." I said, "Oh, nice — it's always good to do an overnight shift with someone you get on with, isn't it?" He went, "No, but I think you two will really get on. I think you'll really like him." I was like, "All right, Rob. This isn't blind date."
 
Meghan: No pressure.
 
Leanne: So I walked into the room and I laid eyes on him — and I know they sound so cheesy — but I looked, and I was like, huh. Okay. Yeah. All right. There's something here. Okay.
 
We sat down at separate phones doing our calls. And then Al got a call about 4am.
 
Al: Leanne was my boss, basically. I'm nearly 50 now, Leanne's just turned 40, so there's a big age difference. Leanne was my supervisor for the night, looking out for me, training me. I get a call. It's the most serious kind of call — you only get maybe one a week across a thousand calls or so. It's a suicide-in-progress.
 
By the way, you may have to put some triggers on this. The woman said, "I don't want to live anymore." I won't go into too much detail, but basically it was a long — an hour-long call — where she was in the process of ending her life.
 
I was like, oh my God, what do I do? So I threw a paper airplane to Leanne — I opened it up on her side and it said "help." And Leanne came across. She's able to listen in but not speak. So she was giving me notes on what to say and stuff.
 
Without going too much into the gory details, the line went dead. After about five minutes of silence, I put the phone down and I was like, wow. It was one of the most impactful moments of my life.
 
We went to the kitchen, we got a cup of tea. Leanne's like, "How do you feel?" I said, "I don't know — this has never happened to me before." Leanne was great. She was talking me down, asking me questions. The idea of the Samaritans is that if you take a difficult call, then another Samaritan will ask you about it and almost take some of the pressure off you.
 
Leanne: So that all happened. About an hour later, I got a phone call. The Samaritans is a national organization, but they typically try and route calls to the local branch. On an overnight shift, that's hard, because only maybe 30% of branches in the country are open 24 hours. So it's really rare that you hear any outcome to a suicide-in-progress call — either way, whatever happened. And it's very rare that you'll get a call back into the same branch on an overnight shift.
 
The phone rings at about 6am. I answer. It's the same woman that Al had been speaking to. And she said, "I don't know if it's possible, but if you can find the man I was chatting to, can you please tell him thank you? I've woken up, I've been sick, and I feel hope. I've called an ambulance and I'm going to try and live."
 
Every goosebump on me just popped out of my body. Al was on another call, so I couldn't even grab him over to listen. So I probably only talked to her for a couple of minutes. The ambulance arrived and took her away.
 
Afterward, we'd shared not only this first incredibly intense moment — and it sounds so weird to people who maybe aren't ingrained in the Samaritans philosophy, but we're trained that it's a privilege to share that vulnerable moment with somebody. So to have shared that moment — and then to have shared an outcome that we rarely, rarely hear about, and for it to be such a positive outcome — it was very much a bonding experience.
 
That was the beginning. There you go. That's probably not the story you expected, was it?
 
Meghan: That's the best meeting story I've ever heard. I'm so glad we went there. Also — how old were you two when you met?
 
Al: I was 22. So I was 29.
 
Meghan: What type of humans are you that at 22 and 29 you're volunteering to stay up all night and help people in crisis? I mean, I know you're wonderful human beings — but this is deepening my love for you.
 
Leanne: I need to hold my hand up, Meghan. My reason was not selfless. I was doing my undergrad in psychology at the time — I thought I wanted to go into clinical counseling, and I was advised by someone at university to join a listening service. So I joined the Samaritans. I quickly realized I didn't want to go into that area of psychology because the emotional labor is so high — but I loved the work and stayed with the Samaritans for five years, long after I graduated. So my initial reason for joining wasn't that altruistic. Whereas yours was.
 
Al: No, she's being British. It was probably 70% altruistic and 30% — what's the opposite of altruistic? Whatever that is. Edit that back in. Put a fancy word in there, Meg.
 
But really briefly — it was the Year of the Volunteer 2007, I think it was, in the UK. And they were like, you should go and volunteer. It was like tithing of your money — 10% of your income going to the church. They were like, well, what if 10% of your working week went to volunteering? So I did a couple of volunteering things.
 
But anyway, being British — let's move on. Because that's a cool story, and we're very proud of the way we met, and we don't often tell it. In fact, this might be the first time, Meghan, we've told that story on somebody else's podcast.
 
Meghan: So honored. So how did we get from there to where we are now? Because this is now almost 20 years later?
 
Al: Yeah. Thank you for that, Meghan. We feel great.
 
Meghan: My husband and I just had the 17th anniversary of our first date. We can be — I'm not even gonna say middle-aged, I love this age, this is the fabulous age. We can be fabulous age together.
 
Al: You beautiful women are very far from middle-aged. I'm knocking on the door of 50, so I'm definitely middle-aged. I can't get out of bed without making noises. Real quick — please don't click that and take it out of context. Fast-forward.
 
So — 2007 to about 2012, ish. We were dating, living together, got married in Gibraltar, which is a tiny little enclave in the corner of Spain. Had a reception in Spain. Then a year later decided to basically put our life into the huge blender of random and say, right — we're going to go live in Europe. So we went to Spain and lived there for five years. And then Brexit happened.
 
Now, in case anyone's not sure — Brexit essentially meant that we, as Brits, couldn't live in Europe long-term. We still live in the UK. That'd be weird if we couldn't live in the UK.
 
Meghan: Right, that wasn't my understanding.
 
Al: Maybe I'm not qualified to explain what Brexit is. Basically, it would be much harder for us to stay in Europe long-term. So I had this idea: what if — because Brexit was going to take a couple of years to go through — what if we tried to visit every country in Europe before it becomes really hard for us to do that?
 
So we became what the kids call digital nomads. It was meant to be a six-to-twelve-month thing. We did it for six years, which is awesome. We traveled around Europe, went to Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand. It was wonderful. We were working remotely, but working remotely separately. And then around COVID time, we started working together. We set up Oblong, our consultancy — and then Truth, Lies and Work came from that.
The expert host and the unexpert host
Meghan: On the website it says Leanne, you're the expert host, and Al, you're the unexpert host. There's a bit of research and data on one side and the real-world experience on the other. How did the paths deviate and then come back together in terms of what you both were doing at that time?
 
Leanne: I was mainly working freelance for an Australian company doing recruitment management training for a fully remote team. Around COVID, unsurprisingly, I was getting asked more about remote work and how to manage teams that way. That's when I kind of started freelance.
 
Al and I would always talk about work, as any couple does over a glass of wine in the evening. And we realized that a lot of what we do is the same thing, but coming from a different perspective. Al was very much into sales and marketing as a serial entrepreneur — how do we sell a dream to people, how do we engage people in a product or an organization we want to sell, how do we create an experience they love and thrive from?
 
So it became clear that we were talking about the same thing, but from different perspectives. My concern with organizational psychology is that sometimes the lack of commercial focus makes it less relevant to smaller organizations. So we saw this as an opportunity to bring our skills together and make a way of working that traditionally lived in very large corporate or public sector available to entrepreneur-led businesses that are agile and enjoy change and experimenting with new things.
 
Al: Just to add to that — the books I read, Leanne thinks are boring and ridiculous, because they're all about how you can make a million dollars in an hour. And the books Leanne reads are boring to me because they use words and statistics I don't understand, and the people who write them have more names after their name than are in my name.
 
So we were like, hang on a minute. I translate what Leanne does, but Leanne keeps me on track to ensure it's rooted in science. That's been a really good partnership. It seems to have done us quite well, I think.
Working with your spouse
Meghan: So as you're thinking about building a consultancy together AND doing the show, every human around you is probably saying some version of, "What are you guys thinking? Don't work with your spouse. It's a terrible idea." How was it imagining, "I'm going to do this with you"? Did you have any agreements at the beginning about how the relationship would continue and how you would cultivate it while also working together?
 
Leanne: That's a good question. From a starting point, Al and I are in a slightly different position than maybe the majority of couples that might go into business together — because as I mentioned, we're digital nomads. So we were traveling together, living together, without much of a social network around us for big chunks of time. We were very used to spending every hour together and, when not working with each other, literally working next to each other. So we were already kind of used to that level of intensity.
 
When we started working together, it was pretty soon after that Al was like, "I think we might need to talk about boundaries" — which was impressive as a psychologist. I know, I know.
 
Al: I didn't really understand what the word meant. But we kind of said, well, I'm in charge of this bit and I have a budget for this bit, and Leanne's in charge of this bit and that's her realm.
 
However, what's been interesting over the last five years — and I'm going to use another word I'm not sure I know the meaning of — osmosis. Leanne will start saying stuff and I'm like, "How the hell do you know that?" I'm like, "Because I've sat opposite you for 310 episodes and you've talked amazing stuff." And then she'll go, "I've got a great idea for a potential product." And I'm like, "How do you know how to create a product?" She's like, "Well, because I've been with you for 17, 18 years."
 
The key thing is: define your boundaries, allow osmosis, and then don't hold on. Don't make your entire ego around "I'm the sales and marketing guy" or "I'm the product management guy." Because then if your partner comes in and says, "I've got a great idea," your instincts go, "No, no, no — stick to your lane." But if you've got a great relationship and a great working relationship, you're like, "Cool. Tell me." And you're a bit like, "I wish I'd thought of that, but God, I'm glad one of us did."
 
One of the best things we did in terms of trying to separate work and life — we're not always very good at it — but one thing we've consistently done for the last five years is every evening, if we're just sat chilling out, Al will say (or I will say), "Are you okay to talk about work?" And it's absolutely fine for the other person to go, "No, can we talk about it tomorrow?" Yep, no worries. If it's out of hours, you need to ask permission — and if permission isn't granted, that's okay.
Building a podcast from nothing
Meghan: So you're like, "We're gonna do a podcast." And at the moment I came on your show, it was the #1 management show in the UK. I'm sure that just happened overnight — just super easy success, like it was just luck. How did you actually do that? Especially for baby podcasters such as myself who are dreaming of one day having a full-time podcast and getting paid to do this thing that we love — I'm asking for all the other podcasters, not myself. I'm totally asking for myself.
 
How do you stick with it at the beginning, in the building stages, when you have a story of how much momentum you "should" have and all the things you "should" be doing — and actually get to a place where you have significant numbers and are making a serious impact?
 
Al: Can I take this for a second? First of all, if you ask us how we grew from zero to where we are now — six figures — we have no fricking idea. We've got guesses. But there's a famous quote: "I know that 10 of my advertising dollars out of a hundred work very well. I just don't know which 10." I think it's kind of that. So we just threw a lot of the proverbial at the wall. Some of it stuck.
 
Leanne is phenomenal on LinkedIn — that's one thing that really helped. There's lots more we can do. We should be clipping more. We should be posting more.
 
What I can say categorically is that the majority of baby podcasters (using your words — I'm not being provocative) get to episode 30 and go, "It's not working, let's not do it." Our first podcast, we got to episode 120 and nobody was listening. We got like 20,000 listeners in total over three years. But we LOVED having our podcast. We loved doing it. I'll be honest, probably a full 60 of those episodes, we were quite drunk. But we really enjoyed the medium and we built and honed our craft.
 
Just to be clear, our first podcast was about travel when we were nomading. It wasn't that we were talking about serious business stuff — a couple of bottles of wine, talking about travel.
 
Leanne: One bottle of wine. Let's tone that down.
 
Al: With the second one, one of the things that kept us going was that very early on, I applied for the HubSpot podcast network. It's kind of like VC where you get like a seed round, a Series A, and so on. I was exuberant and cocky, and I jumped on the website and applied. To my surprise, they replied — and it wasn't the reply I was expecting, which was going to have profanity. They said, "Yeah, we'd like to talk to you more about this." We chatted more and more. We went on maybe about episode nine.
 
That's what kept us going. We had to do it, because we were contracted to. We probably would have kept doing it — but I can't imagine we would have tried to make it better every single episode. Whereas genuinely from episode 20, we've looked at every single facet of it. We want every episode to be 1% better than the previous one. That's what drives us.
 
Also — the way we talk on microphone is the way we talk in real life. That's what people say when they meet us: "You're just exactly the same as you sound on the pod." We're like, "Yeah — because we enjoy doing it." This is not, "Oh my God, I'm going to sit down, record a pod, I hate my own voice, editing is so much work." The fact is: you've got to fall in love with the medium.
 
If you hate it, it's like writing blogs. People who don't like writing blogs, you're not going to stick at it. You absolutely have to love it. You need the consistency. You need the momentum.
 
Not everyone is going to be able to just apply to a network and get on to get the initial funding, accountability, support, and mentoring. We were very fortunate to get that so early. But what you CAN replicate is accountability. Partner up with other podcasters trying to build a show and commit to the schedule.
 
Network is so important. Just talk to anyone who loves podcasting or wants to be on podcasting — they'll share your podcast with everybody. One thing that worked really well for us was in-person events. We did three in-person events over 12 months where we literally turned up with a pod and recorded from there. I'm not exaggerating when I say each event doubled our numbers — because so many eyes in our audience. It was wellbeing shows, people and culture shows. They were our audience, watching our people do what we do in real life. That made a huge difference.
 
Leanne: But the reality is we love it. We have so much fun doing it. And it's really, really fricking hard. There are as many days we don't want to do it as we do. When you're 310 episodes in, it gets a little relentless. But you've got to find that joy, and you've got to find the conversation you're excited about.
The old playbook and childhood stories of success
Meghan: The thing about your show is: there's research and real-world experience. There's business acumen where you're getting insights, and there's humor and warmth and quirkiness and playfulness. I feel like it speaks to the broader theme I see from both of you, which is simply letting the old playbook go — this idea that business has to be serious. And there's the old paradigm story that you need to have a stable job and live in the same place, blah blah blah. And you all haven't done that either.
 
So this goes all the way back to your childhood. What was the story of success you were handed as a child? How has it evolved to present day, and why?
 
Leanne: Oh man. I think I have clear ones actually. Two things: I was the youngest of three girls. My dad was born in Liverpool in England to Irish Catholic parents who got divorced. He came from a very poor upbringing, with a lot of judgment at the time — solo parent family, Catholic Irish, there's a lot in there. So he worked really hard to get an apprenticeship, get himself to university, become an electrical engineer.
 
I always say my dad is the first feminist I ever met. He was like, "I've got three girls, and you can do whatever you want. You don't need to rely on a man. You don't need to rely on anybody. You pick your profession, you work hard, you make sure you can stand on your own two feet." And his belief was that education was behind that. So education was important. We were expected to go to school, to university, to pick a profession. And we all did. My eldest sister is a head teacher, my middle sister is a chartered accountant, I'm a psychologist. Education was baked in as a lever of success.
 
The second thing: there's a bit of an age gap between me and my sisters. Before I was born, my family spent five years living in Saudi Arabia, where my dad worked as an electrical engineer. The stories I heard from that and the adventures they had living abroad — that was something I always wanted to do. That was another pillar of success for me: being able to work abroad and take your life somewhere else while building your career.
 
Those are the two things from my childhood I took with me. What were yours?
 
Al: Similar kind of thing with education — my parents were pushing me. Well, I say pushing — encouraging me to become a teacher. This was the early 90s. I did my GCSEs (which is like year 11, kind of like freshman year in the US — about 16 years old). I did all right in them. And they said, "Right, you're going to be a teacher." I was like, "Okay." They said, "Go and do these A-levels."
 
So I did four A-levels and I failed three of them and got an E in maths. So I was going to be a maths teacher, because that's the only level I passed. I scraped into university in the North, and they were like, "Okay, yeah, I suppose you can come in."
 
And I remember distinctly — I was sitting in front of the deputy headmaster. I must have been 19 on my first teaching practice. We were in a school, doing eight weeks teaching practice. And the deputy master says, "If you work as hard as you seem to be working right now, then in about 20 years time you can be sitting in my seat and you can be earning upwards of 28,000 pounds a year."
 
And I sat there and I went — fuck this.
 
Meghan: (laughing) Hard pass.
 
Al: There's got to be a better life than that. And I hate kids as well. So I was like, yeah, let's not do that. I blew it all up, left university, went into sales for like three years — door-to-door, phone sales, all that kind of stuff. Started a business, went well, didn't go well, went bankrupt. That story is on the episode you referenced when we first chatted. But basically I was like, "No — I'm not having that kind of life. Thank you very much."
Stories they had to let go of
Meghan: Were there any stories that you were handed as children, adolescents, that you had to let go of — or that held you back from actually living into the life you have right now?
 
Al: Yes. I want to be really careful when I say this — I'm not blaming anyone in my family. But we came from a family where it was forbidden to talk about money, particularly at the dining table. It was rude to ask how much someone earned. Money was something nobody ever talked about. And I have to be honest — that's something I rebelled so hard against, and went way too far the other way. Because that story of "money is dirty" — I had to work with, like…
 
I read something — I'm sure it was Norman Vincent Peale or Jim Rohn or Tony Robbins — where they said, look at how the people around you describe money. They say, "He or she is filthy rich." They say, "Money is the root of all evil," when the quote is actually "the love of money is the root of all evil." There's resentment, all that — and you have to let it all go.
 
Deepak Chopra, I think, said that money is like a river. As soon as you try to keep it, it stagnates and damages the entire cash fund. But if it's like a river where you can dip in anytime you want, take as much as you want, then it's cool. So that's why: when you get money, spend money, give it away. Don't feel like it's something you're never going to get again.
 
That was really freaking tough. Took me 10 years of reading all these wanky self-help books to understand and change my language and thoughts around it. I don't blame my parents — that's just the way stories are handed down. But that was mine.
 
Leanne: I was pretty fortunate, actually, as the youngest. By the time it got to me, my parents were like, whatever — as long as you go to university, you're cool. So probably the only thing was around having a family. I guess I — I'm an old millennial, I'm 41 — I always assumed I was gonna have kids. Go to school, to uni, get a job, have children, maybe go back to work part-time, or try to figure out that dynamic. And as I got older, I was waiting for that desire to kick in — "I'm ready to have kids, I want to have kids now."
 
And it never really did.
 
I felt really uncomfortable, probably from age 28 to 35, when it's like — this is the time — and it never kicked in. I remember driving to see my friend, and my mom was with me, and my friend had just had a baby. My mom just said to me, "Do you ever think you'll have children?" And at that point, I was probably about 35. I said, "I've been waiting for that feeling to kick in — that maternal feeling — and it just hasn't happened." And she said, "That's okay."
 
I think that was a moment where I said, "Okay, maybe it IS okay. All right then." Since then, it's just been something that isn't going to be a part of my life. At this point, I don't think it was ever meant to be. But when I was younger, I guess I assumed — or felt pressured — that it should be.
Permission to live wherever you want
Meghan: Sometimes it's the stories where we need someone else to just say "that's okay." And sometimes it's ourselves who need to say that's okay for you to just do the thing that you want to do. Where do you live currently?
 
Leanne: Bosnia and Herzegovina, near Croatia.
 
Meghan: Every time I talk to you, you're in a different place. Do you feel like you've had to give yourselves permission to do this? Or has it ever been something you've worried about?
 
Al: I'm not sure I've ever worried about that. Have you? What I've worried about is that a lot of our friends will describe our life as, "It sounds amazing. I mean, it's not for me." And that is a very odd thing to hear — someone go, "Well, it clearly sounds cool. Not for me." It took me a long while to realize that they were essentially closing that door so they didn't feel like they were missing out. That's my interpretation.
 
This is typical white male privilege, isn't it? Deciding how other people are thinking. But this is what I was thinking — that potentially that's what they're doing. Just like I've probably done the same with children. I've gone, "It's not for me," because then I don't need to worry about it anymore, don't need to regret it. I'd rather regret not having children than regret having them. So — okay, cool.
 
I suppose the bit that did bother me at first was — I was one of those ex-pat idiots who'd come back and be like, "I forgot the name for this. What is it? I knew the Spanish word for it." I was trying to make it work too hard. So I was a bit unbearable.
 
Leanne: I think during that time — maybe it was my context — I was working for Fleur, and the MD and her husband were in business together and working remotely and traveled. Members of the team traveled and lived in different places. So I was in an environment where lots of people were doing it. It didn't feel like I was very unique in that. Within our friendship group, yes — but not in terms of people in my work world.
A typical week + livelihood
Meghan: How is your livelihood made up right now? Are you working full-time? What does a typical day or week look like?
 
Al: When we first started doing the pod, we were doing 30 hours each a week on the podcast. I had Final Cut Pro up with side chains, adding effects, cutting everything. We've realized there's an 80-20 to that, and we've managed to get it down to probably 10 to 15 hours each week. Typically Monday and Tuesday are podcast days — we record, we do two episodes a week, so we record those, prep whatever we need for the coming week. We'll maybe do two to three interviews a week. So it's part-time, the podcast.
 
Leanne: Consultancy rolls in and rolls out as the nature of any consultancy or freelancer will know. Sometimes it's busy, sometimes it's not. The key thing for us in that downtime is constantly thinking about three things:
 
One — how do we improve the podcast? How do we continue to innovate it and make it interesting so people still listen? What formats are getting tired? How do we appeal to a broader audience? Do we go back to video? All these big questions. We probably spend as much time talking about podcasts as we do creating it, in terms of how we can make it better, who we want on as guests, what we want to be talking about. That includes a lot of research and reading what's happening in the news and the world of work.
 
The second thing is products for our consultancy clients. We have our own employee engagement product that we've had for a while. We're currently developing a management training product, which has been taking up some of our time.
 
The third thing, if I'm being honest, is around life planning. How and where do we want to live is a fair conversation we have most weeks — especially when you live abroad and you're battling with visas and the Foreign Office doesn't know and you have to leave the country for three months and go to Bulgaria. Some of our choices and our working week is filled up with, "How do we stay in this country we're currently in?"
 
That's how our time is split. And being completely transparent financially — right now, the majority comes from the podcast.
Transactional vs. relational
Meghan: That's a dream. One thing you mentioned on the podcast I listened to — I'll put it in the show notes — was that you see the show as a vehicle for highlighting other people and celebrating them and making them look good. I feel like this is a common thread throughout a lot of what I've heard both of you talking about, all the way from the Samaritans through where we are today — which is helping other people.
 
It's part of a transition I advocate for — moving from transactional to relational, being of service to people and not trying to squeeze the most out of everyone you meet. For the humans out there who want to push back and say, "Well, you could get more out of those relationships" — how do we help people understand the profound beauty and value of being relational instead of transactional?
 
Al: First of all — read your book, because your story around the magazine you built, everything you've done — it just seems so relational.
 
I think a lot of people are self-centered — because that's the nature of being human. You have to look out for yourself. But if you can start to expand away from that and go, "Right — I'm going to be okay if I can help as many other people be okay as possible," magical things happen. That quote I keep saying and cringing every time — something like, "The quickest way to get what you want is to help other people get what they want."
 
Think about sales. Demonstrate you can help someone by actually helping them. If I went to you and you said, "I want to grow my pod," and I said, "Tell you what — have a look at your analytics next week," and suddenly you had an extra 5,000 listeners and I said, "I did that. Do you want to give me five grand a month and I'll get you another 10,000?" — you may or may not say yes, but you're certainly not going to tell me to go away. You're going to consider it. Because I've helped you. I've demonstrated I can help you BY actually helping you.
 
I feel like I've gone a little bit 70s hippie here — we should be passing around a wet cigarette. Lee, can you put a little skin on those bones?
 
Leanne: A mantra Al and I have is: nothing is wasted. Even when you find yourself doing work on something you're not really getting paid for — or not very much for — and it's taking more of your time, our mantra is: nothing is wasted. Because we're learning something. We're making a connection.
 
There have been so many examples where later down the line, by nurturing that relationship, by giving that time to somebody, it has come back — in terms of either a paid job, or a connection to somebody else who becomes a client, or just the opportunity to have conversations with people who feed you, especially in times like this. Even in the bad times, nothing is wasted.
 
I'm a big fan of positive psychology, and I can get a little bit woo with it. I don't get woo often — but I do with this. Because you have to train yourself to be positive. You have to train yourself to be grateful. And you have to train yourself, through that, to be resilient.
 
Like I joked before about getting kicked out of Bosnia and having to move to Bulgaria for three months — we did that last summer, and we had two days notice to uproot our entire life in a house we'd rented for nine months and wouldn't get the money back for. We had to find somewhere.
 
Three years before that, when we were nomading, we were in Bulgaria with a guy called Nico — lovely, a bit chaotic, a bit crazy. I loved him. Describe him as a toddler with wine — and a helicopter. Crazy guy. We put our time in with him. We really enjoyed spending time with him — though I think he enjoyed spending time with us more than we did with him at times. But we welcomed him in and kept that relationship going.
 
So when this happened to us — and we hadn't seen him for three or four years — we messaged him: "Nico, bit of a pickle, we need to leave the country. Any chance we can stay in that house you rented to us six years ago?" He's like, "Yeah, of course you can. See you in a week."
 
There are always things you're going to come back to when you need help. If you've helped somebody, if you're paying it forward — it sounds so cheesy — but it's just the way humanity works. It's almost like a bank account. If I've paid into somebody's bank account with goodwill and helping them over the years, when they need to make a withdrawal, they're much more likely to be there to help me. And that's how the world should work.
 
Al: I like that. So you're saying: pay into your bank account before you try to make a withdrawal, or they should be overdrawn on goodwill. That should be a book.
 
Leanne: I think it probably is. I think I stole it from somebody else.
 
Al: Also, just a really quick practical thing for your listeners: if anyone's considering creating a podcast, or already has a nascent one — stop making it about you and getting your name out there. Make it about getting other people. The number of people who — you can email them and they're like your Level 4 and they're Level 100, and you go, "Would you like to come on the podcast?" And they go, "Sure." And you're like, "How the hell am I speaking to this person I've been worshipping my entire life?" You're obviously nodding. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
 
Meghan: I mean — I was 29 years old and I sent a cold email to John Mackey, the co-founder of Whole Foods, and said, "Do you want to be on the cover of my business magazine? PS, it doesn't even exist yet. I'm gonna crowdfund it this summer." And he was like, "Sure." And I was like, "Okay. Cool cool cool cool." And then I had to do it. And then he was on the cover of the damn magazine — and that's how we got into every Whole Foods in the country.
Patterns in 2026
Meghan: Speaking of helping people — you all take lots of people's questions in your workplace surgery segment. What are some of the patterns or trends you're seeing in 2026 that feel different than the last couple of years?
 
Leanne: Fear around AI. And I mean fear — it's not stress, it's not insecurity, it's fear. The livelihoods, the professions, the identities people have built over decades being taken away by something we don't quite know. I think that's been a big shift.
 
More nuanced — a couple of years ago, talking about wellbeing and DEI was a very positive space to be. Now, wellbeing has become a bit of a buzzword. DEI — the pushback is brutal. People are feeling that. We had one recently about somebody whose DEI programs were being rolled back and values being changed on the website and how do they respond?
 
A lot around identity. Before, work was part of our identity — with things wrapped up in that, especially around burnout, which could be very difficult for entrepreneurs to deal with. But in terms of threats to identity, a depth I've not seen in my career.
 
Al: I'd add to that — the polarization that's happened. It happened on social media. Now it's happening at work, where people ask, "I'm now working for a boomer. How am I supposed to deal with a boomer, because I'm a Gen Z?" And it's like — you probably have grandparents. How do you deal with them? You have to go over and reset their router, replace the batteries in the remote control. But otherwise, you know how to talk to them.
 
Why are we making it all about "them and us"? That's one of the things that's so sad about the DEI stuff — DEI was meant to bring us together. Now it seems like, "They're the kind of company that does DEI, but we're not, because we are smart." And then you see it all like — you know, that man, are you against that man? Are you this? Are you that? Boomers versus this? Pick a side.
 
People say, "Stop being sheep." It's like — hold on a minute. Sheep is lovely. Sheep is how we existed for 10,000 years — as an entire herd of people, of organizations. That's how we protected ourselves. Now we're going, "Well, Europe's crap because they do this," and then Europe's going, "Yeah, but if we break our leg, it doesn't cost us anything, does it?" Wait — aren't we all just nice people trying to get along in the world and do the best with what we've got?
 
That's where we get most of our — we don't get trolled very often, unless we mention certain words. The T word. Every time — trolled. Even if it's just been passing.
 
Leanne: For engagement, though.
 
Al: Yeah, it's good for engagement.
 
Leanne: But we get trolled on things we more recently — anything around diversity, inclusion, belonging. We did an episode on transgender rights. My goodness — the comments we had on that episode. Between 2022 and 2024, we would talk about these things openly and people would be supportive, would comment, share. Now all of those topics have become — you're absolutely right — points of divide. People just want to stamp where they stand. And it's a bit frightening.
Dealing with trolls
Meghan: How do you deal with the trolls?
 
Al: First of all — when we start getting trolls, it means we're getting attention. It means we've probably made it. Yeah, no — we don't mean like "made it," but you know what I mean. The opposite of love isn't hate — it's ambivalence. So we're still on the spectrum of love and hate. We're on that side. People care enough to sit there and go, "I'm going to write to these very strange English people and tell them the man has got a face like a melted candle."
 
Leanne: The only trolls I ever rise to are the ones who question the evidence. If it's a point of opinion — that's fine. Unless it's discrimination or hatred. Then you're not welcome here. I think I've only ever deleted a handful of comments, and most of those were on the transgender episode — because they just don't need to be in the world and our guests don't need to see that. But it's around the evidence.
 
So I get into arguments with people who — like, I'll talk about diverse teams and how diverse thinking and demographic diversity can also be good for team performance. And someone was like, "Cite your source." And I was like — fair. I didn't mention my source. Here you go. Hold my beer.
 
Meghan: Yep. Receipt, receipt, receipt.
 
Leanne: Exactly. So that's how I push back — with evidence. Otherwise, it's people's opinions. Unless it's discrimination or hatred, which we just delete and remove. As Al said — let them go. It's engagement. They tend to tie themselves in knots more than we do. They don't need our intervention most of the time.
 
Also, Meghan — you probably notice this yourself. I know you're nowhere near as old as us, but when you get a little older, you're sort of like, "I don't really care what you think, if the truth be told." If I know you, I still probably don't care much about what you think about me. But if I don't know you? I couldn't give a shiny shite.
 
Al: I saw Tom Holland — I'm not a big fan, but I don't dislike the guy, I don't know him — he was on Instagram and somebody asked him about handling criticism. He said, "If somebody says something bad about me, my only concern is: have they got my phone number? If they've got my phone number, then they should really be talking to me and saying, 'That's my face.' If they've not — I don't know them, whatever." I think that's kind of how, when you're creating content and putting stuff out into the world, it needs to be about — I don't know you, whatever.
 
Meghan: Also, Leanne and I are exactly the same age. So I just got into the "genuinely couldn't give two shits" stage. And it is glorious and wonderful.
Rapid fire round
Meghan: All right, we have our rapid-fire round. Truth, lies, work. Hardest truth you've ever had to come to terms with.
 
Al: You're not that important. When I got my first management job, my HR director sat me down and went, "Just because you're a manager doesn't mean you're that important. You're not that important. You're disposable if you don't do a good job." He was right. Brutal, but right.
 
Leanne: Wow. That is so much better than mine. Mine's really cheesy — money doesn't make you happy. The lack of money doesn't make you happy. Yeah. I'm going to leave it there. There's so many tones on that I don't need to go into.
 
Meghan: Okay. The biggest lie you've ever been told. Or the best lie you've ever told. We both look at Al.
 
Al: Okay — biggest lie I ever told, Meghan, was that I was running a legal off-license that delivered alcohol. When in actual fact, what I'd done is basically ordered everything for every single person in the world and printed out an order sheet. I had literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper. So if the police came in and said, "Why did Meghan order three bottles of wine?" I'd go, "Give me a minute, I'll go find it." And I proved it. That's probably the biggest lie I've ever told.
 
Meghan: This was to get around licensing restrictions.
 
Al: Sorry — yes, I should have given that context. That's also very niche because that's English licensing law from like 2001. Who cares about that? The point is, the licensing man said no. And I went, "Hold my beer. I will print out every possible order should I ever get audited." If you can imagine me as a much more British, not as good-looking, slightly less cool Mike Ross from Suits — that was my role in that business.
 
Leanne: I'm not sure anyone told me this, but I think it's a lie that I believed to be a thing — that psychologists have to be very professional and put-together and speak well and not swear and remember the big words and present themselves to the world in an Oxford, Cambridge, Ivy League way. I've learned very recently that that's a lie. People want authenticity — how it is. And I don't use the big words, because I can't remember them. And I'm from the north of England, so I don't sound posh and fancy. But hopefully I can talk about psychology in a way that makes sense to people who aren't psychologists.
 
Meghan: Most outdated work norm or practice that you wish people would change.
 
Leanne: Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs. Please, for the love of everything in the world — can we put Myers-Briggs in the bin already, please?
 
Al: Yes, I think you know what Leanne feels about that. I would probably say the whole return-to-office thing — where offices in certain cases do make a big difference, if you're in a very creative environment where you need to be around people. Mad Men, for example, wouldn't have worked if they all worked at home.
The permission slip
Meghan: If you were to give people a permission slip to unbehave around anything — a societal script, a workplace script, whatever — what is the permission slip you wish you could give people to stop behaving in one certain way?
 
Leanne: Stop behaving in the way you think other people expect. Whether it's in your life, your career, where you live, how you work, what you do. Stop trying to make decisions based on what you think other people think is right or is the norm. So — you have my permission slip: make decisions based on what YOU want and what works for you and your values and the way you want to live. Do that.
 
Al: Wow. I cannot beat that. So I'm just going to add the tiny thing of — if you say, "I'm going to go and live in [not Bali, but] Lombok, or something. I'm going to go for nine months to Germany," and the voice that tells you you're wrong and it's a stupid idea — try and identify whose voice that is. Because if that's your parents, that's your grandparents, that's a friend — that's probably the person who's holding you back the most.
 
Permission to pursue the stupid ideas.
 
Meghan: Look at that mic drop.
Where to find them
Meghan: We've mentioned the podcast many times. Where do people find you? How do people best support you?
 
Al: Basically just search online — Truth, Lies and Work. We come up any way you look. The website's truthliesandwork.com. Spotify or wherever you get your podcast, search for Truth, Lies and Work. And more importantly — go search for Leanne Elliott on LinkedIn, because she is the LinkedIn queen. She responds to every single comment, good or bad. Don't search for me. Eventually, it sometimes takes me a little while — but that's where you should go.
 
Meghan: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
 
Al & Leanne: Thank you so much for having me. Amazing questions. We love you so much. We do love you so much.
 
Meghan: I love you guys.
[Meghan — Outro / Unbehaved Lessons of the Day]
 
Alright, my friend — before I sign off for the day, here are my key Unbehaved Lessons that I took away from today's episode.
 
Number one: sometimes that "fuck this" moment is the most important career decision you're ever gonna make. Al's moment sitting in front of the deputy headmaster at age 19, hearing about his £28,000 future and firmly saying "nope," is pretty much the seed of what he and Leanne have built — the ability to listen to that voice inside of you that pushes back and tells you something is wrong or not for you, no matter what you feel like you should be doing.
 
Number two: authenticity is the name of the game. Al put it best: "The way we talk on the microphone is the way we talk in real life." That's what draws people to their show. Every attempt to manufacture a more professional version of yourself is a barrier between you and the people who would actually resonate with you. This is how they built the UK's #1 management podcast — by refusing to sound like every other management podcast out there. Leanne's closing line speaks to this as well: "Stop behaving in the way you think other people expect. Make decisions based on what YOU want, what works for you, and your values." That IS authenticity. It's the whole shift. Every big decision that changed their lives came from letting go of seeking external approval.
 
Number three: true success is built on being relational instead of transactional. Leanne talking about how nothing is wasted, especially when it's in service of other people or helping someone else — you never know when it's gonna come back around. Think of it as paying into that bank account with goodwill. Every relationship you nurture without expectation of return compounds and creates a better future for you AND the other person you're helping.
 
Number four: when you're in the trenches building something new and it starts to feel hard — the key steps they brought up were: fall in love with what you're doing, make sure you're having fun, strive for continual improvement (just getting 1% better each time), and do it your own way.
 
That's all for today. If you liked the episode, maybe share it with someone who needs it. And check out Truth, Lies and Work and Unbehaved on any major podcast platform. And maybe even subscribe or write something nice. It would make my entire damn day.
 
Until next time.
 

Deb Liu — former CEO of Ancestry, creator of Facebook Marketplace, and a household name in the tech industry — spent decades being underestimated in every room she walked into.
In this episode of Unbehaved, she shares exactly how she unlearned the "play small, stay safe" survival strategy that shaped her early career, and the deliberate practices she used to become a leader who now owns the room.
If you've ever been talked over in a meeting, struggled to speak up for yourself, or watched someone else get credit for your idea, this episode is for you.
WHAT WE COVER:
Why "playing small" starts as a survival strategy but stops working at a certain point
How anyone can learn to own a room, regardless of their personality
What happened when a room of women in tech decided to "make it awkward" and stop being ignored 
The Secret Bias no one talks about — and how it silences the smartest people in the room
Why self-advocacy is actually an act of generosity (not self-promotion)
The Supreme Court research on female justices being interrupted — and how they fixed it
Why Deb went public about her breast cancer diagnosis (and the 100K-reaction LinkedIn post that followed)
The origin of "The Blank Name Tag Club" and Deb's Reset / Reflect / Reimagine framework for career transitions
The permission slip: rewriting the story before it rewrites you
ABOUT THE GUEST
Deb Liu is the author of Take Back Your Power and is currently writing her next book about navigating career and life transitions. Her companion Substack piece for this episode dropped today at debliu.substack.com.

A few weeks ago, I laid down on a futon in Denver, drank orange juice with three grams of psilocybin in it, and spent eight hours next to a licensed therapist named Mikki Vogt. I recently told you what happened for me during that session. This week, you get to meet the woman who held the container.
Mikki Vogt is a licensed counselor, co-founder of one of Colorado's first licensed psilocybin healing centers, and one of the people who co-wrote the safety screening protocols for psilocybin-assisted therapy now used across Colorado and Oregon. Before she was any of that, she spent years working in prisons and community mental health before deciding to start facilitating psilocybin sessions as a harm reduction provider. Before it was legal. When it could have cost her everything.
This is Mikki's first podcast interview. She's spent years training other facilitators and building the regulatory framework other states are now adopting. But this is the first time she's sat down for a long-form public conversation about how psilocybin therapy actually works, why it seems to break through what traditional therapy can't, and what it really takes to make this field safe.
In this conversation, we get into why she made the call to do this work before it was legal, why traditional talk therapy hits a ceiling that psychedelic-assisted therapy seems to break through, the story of a young man who'd had daily seizures for 17 years and what happened during his psilocybin session with her, what a bad trip actually is versus a challenging one, and why the model of legal psilocybin therapy that we're building in this country — the model Mikki helped write — needs public support to survive. 
If you listened to Part 1 and wondered how any of this is actually possible, this is the episode that answers that question. And if you haven't heard Part 1 and are just curious about the current landscape and real benefits of psilocybin-assisted therapy, you'll walk away with everything you need to understand what's happening in this field right now.
 
WHAT YOU'LL WALK AWAY WITH
Why Mikki risked her professional license to facilitate psilocybin sessions before it was legal
Why traditional talk therapy hits a ceiling that psychedelic-assisted therapy seems to break through — the rational vs. felt-sense framework
The story of a young man who'd had daily seizures for 17 years and what happened during his psilocybin session with Mikki
What a bad trip actually is versus a challenging experience
The three tiers of adverse events every legitimate facilitator should be trained on
How Colorado built the first regulated psilocybin therapy framework — and what New Mexico and Oregon are doing differently
The specific questions to ask a potential facilitator before you commit
Who psilocybin therapy is NOT for
Why the model needs public support to survive — and how you can help
ABOUT THE GUEST
Mikki Vogt is a licensed professional counselor, licensed addictions counselor, and natural medicine facilitator with a master's degree in forensic psychology. She's the co-founder and clinical director of one of Colorado's first licensed psilocybin healing centers, has facilitated 300-500 psilocybin sessions over the last five years, and co-authored the standardized safety screening protocols now used across Colorado and adopted in Oregon. She trains other facilitators in psilocybin-assisted therapy through her work with the Psychedelic Public Policy Partnership. She lives in Colorado with her husband and two children. You can find more about her and her work at neuroalchemycenter.com.
PULL QUOTES
"I called my mom and I said, Mom, I just had the most professionally and personally affirming experience of my entire life. I feel like I have finally found where I'm supposed to be, what I was born to do, what my life's purpose and calling is."
"If regulatory agencies don't like the way that I'm doing it, then maybe I don't need the regulatory agency. And that was kind of — I don't know if that was stupid or courageous, or maybe a little bit of both."
"I know I'm smart. I know I'm likable. I know I'm worthy of taking up space. People tell them to me every day. And there is a part of me that knows that rationally to be true. But the belief system that I have developed in experiential, repetitive, time-based learning throughout my life is I'm not worthy, I'm not lovable, everybody will abandon me, and I will never be somebody's first pick."
"Psychedelics are unique in that they seem to be this bridge between what I rationally know insightfully up in my brain and what I at a gut instinct, gut level, feel to be true."
"You can't take the medicine out of the ecosystem and expect it to do the same thing. We need to remember that what we're trying to do is rejoin the ecosystem — we're shifting, not the medicine."
"It's as if I can see an entity or a form trying to push the seizure toward my body." (from the seizure patient during his psilocybin session) 
"Any time I go to journey, I'm nervous as fuck. Like, my gosh. And that's great — because that's our nervous system doing its job. It's a reminder that I am functioning the way I'm supposed to function."
"We are self-healing systems — biologically, physiologically, emotionally, soulfully, spiritually. That's how we were created. And we live in a self-healing ecosystem, our world." 
"If we want this to be safe, we need to make it familiar. What makes things unsafe is a lack of familiarity."
"It's the mushrooms. Like, you find the person you're connected with who you can trust to keep you safe. But the awareness gained, the insight, the self-love and acceptance — that's your inner healer and the mushrooms. That has nothing to do with me."
 
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Cold open: "the most professionally and personally affirming experience of my life"
00:28 — Welcome + episode setup
02:13 — Mikki's origin story: her first facilitated session
03:59 — From forensic psychology to prisons and community mental health
08:30 — Discovering psychedelic research and starting private practice
10:12 — Facilitating psilocybin sessions before it was legal
13:12 — Why she risked her practice to do this work
15:21 — Why traditional therapy hits a ceiling: rational vs. felt-sense
19:16 — What the research is showing
22:00 — Why we need to rejoin the ecosystem
23:57 — The seizure story: 17 years of daily seizures
28:52 — The second session and integration
31:00 — Bridging the sacred and the clinical
33:38 — Meghan's fear of vulnerability
35:00 — Mikki's response: "I'm nervous as fuck"
38:04 — Prep and integration protocol
40:58 — Adverse events and the three tiers of safety
43:00 — Bad trip vs. challenging experience
44:43 — How Colorado built the psilocybin program
49:15 — Mikki's role in co-writing the safety protocols
49:34 — Why psilocybin isn't more accessible
53:17 — Business leaders and the mental health thesis
54:44 — How to help others step into this work
57:00 — The funding critique
59:37 — How people can support the work
 
RESOURCES MENTIONED
Colorado Proposition 122 (2022) — the framework that made regulated psilocybin therapy legal in Colorado
Oregon Measure 109 (2020) — the first state to launch a legal psilocybin program
Senate Bill 290 (Colorado Natural Medicine Health Act) — the legislation Mikki helped shape
Healing Advocacy Fund — the primary organization advocating for psilocybin therapy access
Psychedelic Public Policy Partnership (PPPP) — the volunteer coalition Mikki works with
Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics — psychedelics.berkeley.edu/law
David Anka — referenced for his framing of psilocybin as reconnection with the soul
Companion episode:
Part 1 — Why I'm a Mom Who Does Drugs: My Legal Psilocybin Therapy Journey — Meghan's solo episode telling her own story from the inside
Written versions on Meghan's Substack:
Part 1 — To Shroom or Not to Shroom?
Part 2 — Why I'm a Mom Who Does Drugs
 
CONNECT WITH MEGHAN + UNBEHAVED
Subscribe to the Unbehaved Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com
Meghan on LinkedIn: Meghan French Dunbar
Meghan on Instagram: @meghanfrenchdunbar
The Book — This Isn't Working: meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book
 
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Lightly cleaned for readability. Filler words, false starts, and transcription artifacts removed. Mikki's and Meghan's voices preserved throughout.
[Cold Open — Mikki]
The first time I ever did a facilitated session for somebody — at the end of the session, when she was gone, I'm packing my stuff. I get in the car, and tears just started streaming down my face. And I called my mom and I said, Mom, I just had the most professionally and personally affirming experience of my entire life. I feel like I have finally found where I'm supposed to be, what I was born to do, what my life's purpose and calling is.
 
[Meghan — Welcome]
Welcome to Unbehaved. I'm Meghan French Dunbar, and you just heard from the incredible Mikki Vogt. And if you listened to Part 1 of the series last week — yes, this is that Mikki. If you haven't had a chance to listen to the previous episode yet, Mikki is the facilitator who did my psilocybin-assisted therapy session that I detail in Part 1. But Mikki's story is so much bigger than my experience with her. 
Mikki is a licensed counselor and entrepreneur, co-founder of one of Colorado's first licensed psilocybin healing centers, and one of the people who literally co-wrote the safety screening protocols used in Colorado for psilocybin-assisted therapy that have now been adopted in Oregon as well. Before she was any of that, she spent years working in prisons, then in community mental health, before deciding to start facilitating psilocybin sessions as a harm reduction provider. But that was before it was even legal — when it could have cost her everything. 
In this conversation, we get into why she made that call. Why traditional therapy hits a ceiling that psychedelic-assisted therapy seems to break through. The story of a young man who'd had daily seizures for 17 years and what happened during his psilocybin session with her. What a bad trip actually is versus a challenging one. And why the model of legal psilocybin therapy that we're building in this country — the model Mikki helped write — needs public support to survive.
If you've been listening to Part 1 and wondering how any of this is actually possible, this is the episode that answers that question. And even if you haven't listened to Part 1 and are just curious about the current landscape and benefits of psilocybin-assisted therapy, you'll learn everything you want to know and more in this episode.
Let's get into it. 
The origin story — Mikki's first facilitated session
Meghan: Mikki, Mikki, Mikki. My experience with you is that you are doing the thing that you are lit up about. You're passionate about it, you're excellent at it, and you care about it. How did you come to be in this very unique profession? 
Mikki: That is a great question.
I am lit up about it. I'm super passionate about it. It feels like for the last five or six years, I've been living, breathing, sleeping, eating this. And I remember the first time I ever did a facilitated session for somebody. It had been a client of mine who knew it was the first time for me and trusted me to hold that container for her — which was in and of itself just beautiful. And I remember at the end of the session, when she was gone, I'm packing my stuff. I get in the car, and tears just started streaming down my face. And I called my mom and I said, Mom, I just had the most professionally and personally affirming experience of my entire life. I feel like I have finally found where I'm supposed to be, what I was born to do, what my life's purpose and calling is.
That was probably about six years ago now. And I had told myself, not everyone you do is going to be like this. Over time, it's not going to be as exciting, it's not going to feel the same way. And I was so wrong. Every single one of these I do is beautiful and profound. The connection I have with the journeyer is probably one of the greatest gifts I'll ever experience. And getting to witness such a sacred experience for them is just such an honor. 
Every single one, it fills me up. I'm super jazzed. I'm rejuvenated. I come home on a total high. And I haven't even touched the medicine myself.
So I absolutely love what I do. I would have never thought that I would be here.
From forensic psychology to prisons
My master's degree is in forensic psychology. And so when I first started working in the field, I was primarily working in prisons, jails, correctional facilities, community re-entry programs — working with really severe pervasive mental illness, dual diagnosis, co-occurring substance abuse disorders, incarceration, all of that kind of stuff. High rates of recidivism, high rates of homelessness, high rates of emergency system use. 
So I got to work with the real nitty-gritty. And in doing so, I got to create these amazing relationships with populations that are so typically unseen and disregarded and stigmatized. In getting to work with these individuals, it really was a reminder that we are all just human — trying to survive, trying to make our way through this planet and the life that we're dealt. 
These people are just like you and me. They have learned a set of coping responses. They have learned how to survive in a way that keeps them moving forward. And while the behaviors they've chosen might be maladaptive and cause a lot of consequences, the need is relevant. If we can see them as humans with relevant needs that are the same as yours and mine, all of a sudden they're not this bad, terrible person. They're somebody who has been wounded by society and needs repair. Needs support. Needs to be seen. Needs love and affection and attention.
When they start to receive that, it's a completely different version of them that you get to work with. That was just a totally amazing experience for me, and really confirmed why I do this work.
At some point, I did get really tired of going to prison every day for work. I am a colorful person. I'm very bubbly. And it really started to wear on me — going through the whole check-in process, hearing the gates and the bars closing behind me, being in this drab, poorly lit place. It got to be a bit overwhelming, and I started to burn out. Which wasn't fair to the people I was working with.
Transitioning to community mental health
So I decided to transition into community mental health — high-intensity treatment settings and community-based services. Very similar populations, still did a lot of the community re-entry stuff. Where I was getting to work with people I had worked in corrections with as they were coming out. Supporting them in stabilization, mental health treatment, housing, vocational support. 
That was where I really got to see the power of interdisciplinary wraparound services and how important community is, in general, for health and wellness. 
During this period, I started tracking all of the research going on with MDMA and veterans and PTSD. I was blown away by some of the outcomes we were seeing. I was facing a reality that I really wanted to work in that psychedelic realm, but was not going to be able to do so within community mental health — that's all state government funding and evidence-based practices, and that's not where psychedelics were at the time.
So I started to develop my own private practice on the side. Not working with psychedelics yet — just building a practice, learning how to manage it, figuring out the ins and outs of being a business owner. Because as a clinician, I'm not inherently an entrepreneur — which people find very surprising when they meet me and are like, wow, you own three businesses. That's definitely been the hard way. Which seems to be my forte: doing things the hard way.
Right before COVID, I fully transitioned to private practice. Never looked back. Got myself credentialed with insurance and Medicaid because I still wanted to promote accessibility. And then really dove into research on psychedelics — experimenting with my own relationship.
The underground practitioner experience
I got to have a really beautiful experience with an underground practitioner who held space for me. Such a transformative experience. I'd used mushrooms, MDMA, psychedelics before, and already knew there was something significant there. But then having that specific container being held in such an intentional way — I got to see what the outcomes can be when you bring intention and mindfulness into it, have the safe space to have the experience, and then really focus on integration afterwards. 
It's also an experience that taught me some of the risks of doing this in an unregulated setting. Coming to that as a clinician, I'm familiar with best practices and ethics, and wasn't seeing all of those being championed in that space. I felt like — okay, yes, I really want this for my clients, but I want to do this in a way that is ethical and safe.
So at that point I started hammering out my own safety screening protocols in alignment with what I'd been taught as a therapist and addictions counselor. Looking at the research about drug interactions, doing my best to screen out anybody that wasn't relevant for this. And at this time I only started to offer this to clients in my private practice who I'd been working with for quite some time. 
Meghan: Is it still technically illegal at this point?
Mikki: Technically, this was not yet decriminalized. And so I was doing this as a harm reduction provider as an addictions counselor. I would go into details with my clients about what that meant, what kind of services I was providing, clarity that I'm not the one giving them the medicine — the medicine is being sourced from somewhere else by them, and they're just asking me to sit with them for harm reduction purposes. All of those things to try to keep it as up-and-up as possible.
Why I risked my practice
When people were asking me, well, what if you get grieved? What if you get reported? I said, that's a risk I'm willing to take. Because at that point I was taking significant safety precautions, had consulted with other people to really understand the risks I was taking on when it came to health and wellness for the clients I was working with. 
At any point, the client being considered was only pursued if I felt very strongly that the potential benefits outweighed any obvious risks after doing all the screening and assessments. In the idea of taking an oath to do no harm, my thought was: if I've been working with a client for so long and they've tried treatment with me and treatment with others and different modalities and haven't gotten to where they want to be — and I've now screened them and shown that the risk of doing this is significantly low and the potential benefit is there — then would withholding something I know would work and wouldn't be harmful itself be doing harm? 
In my head, it felt like it would be. 
If I know something works, and I know they're eligible for it, and it's not going to put them in danger — why wouldn't we try it? Especially given psilocybin has such a high safety profile. It's one of the safest molecules we have. It's even safer than Benadryl. It doesn't have any risk of dependence. There's no risk of overdose. It's not going to give you stomach ulcers or ruin your kidneys like Tylenol. If we're so willing to put all these other things into our bodies without a second thought — why wouldn't we use a natural medicine, plant medicine that is shown to have one of the highest safety profiles? 
It just didn't make a lot of sense to me. So that's where I decided: I came here to do a job. I came here to help people and support people and see them as a person, not just a file or a client number. And I'm going to continue doing that. And if regulatory agencies don't like the way I'm doing it, then maybe I don't need the regulatory agency. 
And that was kind of — I don't know if that was stupid or courageous. Or maybe a little bit of both.
Meghan: Those are the best decisions, in my opinion. And this is the first time I'm hearing this story. I feel in awe of what you did, because you were so convinced of the efficacy of this and you understood the risks and you understood the literature — but you were putting your own private practice on the line to do this.
Mikki: It took — yeah, it took... I mean, there were definitely moments where I was questioning why am I doing this? And what kept coming back to me was: because I really believe in this.
I didn't start doing it with people until after I'd already received training. At that point we didn't have DORA-approved training programs, but there were absolutely training providers out there for harm reduction purposes providing courses in psilocybin and harm reduction services. So I did a lot of training from various different providers. A lot of apprenticing, shadowing, seeing how other people were doing it. A lot of understanding of the indigenous roots of the medicine — what does ceremony mean, who am I and who am I not, what is my own lineage with natural medicine.
I really explored all of those things before ever feeling like I was in a position where I could confidently do this with somebody else. So by the time I did start doing it, I felt pretty convinced: if I'm going to get reported or grieved, I have a good argument. And if they decide they're not on the bandwagon with this, then I'll find a different way to make a living. 
I don't know. I say that out loud and I'm like — and I'm a mom and a wife, and they probably were not very appreciative that I was willing to risk everything.
Why traditional therapy hits a ceiling
Meghan: That also speaks to how powerful this is. You talked about your first time facilitating and calling your mom and crying. What did you experience in those first few sessions in terms of the healing that people were able to do that felt so different than all the work you'd done before? 
Mikki: What I was getting to see is — in traditional therapy, even when we start using somatic experiencing therapies like EMDR, where we're really trying to approach the whole system, not just the cognitive approach — it seemed like you would get to this point where we have the insight. 
I know I'm smart. I know I'm likable. I know I'm worthy of taking up space. I know I can be successful. I know I'm competent. I know I'm significant. I know these things up here. People tell them to me every day. And there is a part of me that knows that rationally to be true. 
But the belief system that I have developed in experiential, repetitive, time-based learning throughout my life is not the insight. The belief system is: I'm not worthy. I'm not lovable. Everybody will abandon me. I will always have to try again. I will never be somebody's first pick. 
Right? That's the felt-sense belief. Which is ultimately what ends up guiding the way we experience ourselves, others, and the world around us. We see everything through this colored lens of the belief system — not of rational insight. There's this disconnect. 
EMDR seems to get us a little bit closer to bridging those two things, but I was still finding that clients were falling short. Maybe I'm just not doing the EMDR effectively — I don't want to blame any modality for not working. There are so many great modalities out there. But I think psychedelics specifically are unique in that they seem to be this bridge between what I rationally know insightfully up in my brain and what I at a gut instinct, gut level, feel to be true. In my nervous system, in my body, in my heart, in my soul.
When we can bridge those two things, all of a sudden I'm able to experience myself, others, and the world around me in a completely different light. I'm able to engage with information that has always been up there, but see it in so many different ways. My consciousness now has become so expanded that I can consider so many different things and choose what I want for myself. Not feel like I've got these blinders on that only allow me to see one path forward.
That's what I think is so profound about psychedelics. And what I love is that the research is showing this. It's going in and creating this high level of entropy or chaos in the brain, which is allowing us to break free of all these rigid belief patterns, neural pathways, and connections that dictate how we organize information about the world and ourselves. We ascend above that. We get to see everything as fluid and say — how would I like to organize information moving forward? Not this is the way, I have to believe this. 
Sometimes that's small things. Sometimes that's huge things — the philosophical meaning of life versus the routine I want to engage with every morning. 
Acknowledging these other modalities, I really think that psychedelics is one more tool in our tool belt that should be used in conjunction with other approaches to transformation, healing, expanded consciousness. If you're going to get trained in something like IFS or somatic experiencing, why not also get trained in this? It's not for everybody, in the same way that those modalities are not for everybody. It's just one more tool.
What the research is showing
Meghan: All right, I want to keep going on the research part. Is there anything research-wise that blew you away at the start that you were like, I have to engage with this? What is the research telling us? 
Mikki: I was really lucky in that I got to work as a therapist on the CU Anschutz clinical trials focusing on using psilocybin to address depression and existential distress related to end-of-life and cancer diagnoses. That's where I really got to see how this addresses more existential experiencing — the things that contribute to some of the distress we walk through life with. 
What is the meaning of life? What does it mean to live a full life? What does it mean to die? What is a legacy? What do I believe happens next? What do I believe makes this life worth it? Who do I want to be in this world? How do I want to be remembered? 
All of those things come up in these sessions when that's the intention. And in that clinical setting, it was profound. I got to witness people going from this place of severe depression and just devastation and defeat to feeling like they could go through the active stage of dying — because that's just one stage of our cyclical life — with agency, with hope, with optimism about what that process was going to look like, how it was going to feel, what values they were championing during that process. 
They weren't just focused on the end. They were focused on processing time left. That really changes a lot of things for people. 
The other thing with the research: these individuals are coming in with a significant sense of hope, and in these double-blind, random control trials, they may or may not be getting the medicine. There's a fifty percent chance they're going to end up in the placebo group. So it was also a reminder of how hopeful other people are — that even at that point in life, they're willing to engage with this, not knowing what outcome will be for them, just because they're hopeful enough. 
That's a big chunk of the research — end-of-life palliative care. But we're also seeing research in PTSD, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, traumatic brain injury. Dementia and Alzheimer's. Chronic pain management like fibromyalgia and chronic pain from injury. Regaining movement after paralysis from West Nile virus. Seizure disorders. 
There's research coming out about so many different areas that when people say, what can you use this for?, I'm starting to find the list is shorter to acknowledge what we probably couldn't use this for. Which is exciting. 
I say that with a caveat: these medicines have been stewarded by peoples for thousands and thousands of years. It's an ancient wisdom and an ancient practice. And the molecule is not doing this alone.
Rejoining the ecosystem
In all of these settings, but specifically in the original — the OG, where did this come from — what makes this profound is the community. It's the preparation, the container, the integration happening afterward. It's the connection with self and others. It's experiencing that you matter in a greater system, that people see you, and that your transformation is worthy of being witnessed. 
When you look at indigenous cultures who have been doing this — we talk about prep and integration. It's not talked about there, not because it's absent, but because that's the lived experience. They do this in a communal setting with family members, with community members. Their living preparation, then their living integration. It's built in. They wouldn't consider doing this outside of that. They wouldn't consider just going into the doctor, taking it, and then going home and not talking to anybody about it. 
We use this language — prep, integration — as a way to streamline this into the system we're familiar with. But we have to understand that we can't use natural medicines, which work in an ecosystem we are a part of, and expect to take the medicine out of the ecosystem and have it do the same thing. We need to remember that what we're trying to do is rejoin the ecosystem. We're shifting — not the medicine.
The seizure story
Meghan: You mentioned epilepsy. And at the end of our session together, you were telling my husband and me a story about a gentleman you worked with with epilepsy. I would love to help bring the research to life a little bit. Can you help us understand what happened? 
Mikki: Yes — and I want to put out there, this is anecdotal. And it's profound. 
This gentleman contracted an infection — an illness that turned into a brain infection at the age of 10 or 11. With that, he started experiencing severe seizures. Five, six seizures a day. Full seizures. Totally disruptive to his life.
His family took him to doctors and treatment teams. He went through all this imaging. Different medical teams were in disagreement about the origin site of the seizures. You'd think they would have approached this with conservatism since the boy was so young and they didn't really know what was going on. Unfortunately, what we think should happen is not always what happens. This poor gentleman went through three brain resections and five depth probes — all before he was 13 years old. 
It did not make anything better. It only made things worse. It severely slowed down his cognitive processing. It made it so he couldn't get through a whole day of school. It really disrupted life. 
Now he's in his late 20s. He's been dealing with this for 15 to 17 years — daily seizures.
He tried different medications. He finally got on a medication that reduced the seizures down to two or three a day. Significant improvement, but still not great. And then his neurologist had been reading about psilocybin and the potential of what it's doing. His neurologist and his parents reached out to me and said, how do you feel about working with him? We know you can't guarantee anything, but per what the neurologist was reading, it might be interesting to try to do this once every three months and see what might happen. 
So I started working with this individual. We did a lot of prep. For this individual, it wasn't like two prep sessions and then we're in. We did a lot of prep. I got to know him, his family, his story, his background — what his dreams and aspirations were, what supports were already available, what he wanted life to look like moving forward. Truly amazing individual. 
We got to his first administration session, December 2025. I had gone over the safety plan and emergency response plan for if a seizure starts during the session. His mom stayed on site. I had direct contact with his neurologist. We had all the safety things in place. 
We get an hour in, and he is smiling and relaxed in ways I've never gotten to witness him in the last several months. It was beautiful. 
Because of that, we're like, let's go ahead and do the booster. So we give him a small booster dose. And within about 15 minutes of giving him the booster, I witness his body seize and just lock up. He does this quick inhale. And I'm thinking in my head, oh God, here we go. I'm getting really nervous. 
Per our safety plan, his mom had said, don't administer the emergency medicine until the seizure has lasted longer than five minutes. So I see him lock up. I see the breath. I see his eyes glaze. And I start the timer. 
Here's what's interesting. Up to this point he had been talking to me with his eyes closed. And he said: "It's as if I can see an entity or a form trying to push the seizure toward my body." And then he seized. He locked up. He starts to seize and twitch. 
Eight seconds go by.
And it stops. He breathes out. And he says: "And I'm able to just push the form away from my body, and it pushes the seizure out." 
And then he dropped back into his journey. 
Which had nothing to do with his seizures. He journeyed for the next six hours with no seizure at all. Completely calm. His body completely relaxed. His hands — he had one hand that was really tight and painful. By the end, it was completely loose and he was using it, saying my gosh, my hand.
Between that session and March, which is when we did his second session, he had one seizure. One. 
We did his second administration in March. Almost the exact same thing happened. First hour in, everything's great. I give him a booster. About seven minutes after the booster, we see the seizure onset. I start the timer. Eleven seconds in, it's finished. And he drops back into his journey.
I've been doing ongoing integration with him, working with his neurologist. It's an ongoing care plan. He's got a lot of wraparound support. He's in vocational stuff, art, a coding program. Part of that integration is that while he's in that state of neuroplasticity, we're really putting in all the other supports that are going to benefit him in learning new skills and starting new behaviors. And it's just been profound. The outcome — he's now in a coding program. He's teaching art classes. It's really amazing. Truly amazing.
Meghan: With the seizure he had between the first and second sessions, even though he wasn't using the medicine — was it still the same experience for him where he could see the entity and push it away? 
Mikki: Yes. Yes. In integration I had him draw out the entity — the form he had seen. It was like this metal sphere thing. He drew it out, and we started doing imagery exercises. When he starts to feel the aura or the tremors — because there's always some kind of sign — he starts imagining the form he saw in the journey bringing the seizure to his body. And he immediately starts this imagery of pushing back toward it, both physically and energetically.
The seizure he had between sessions, we think was actually brought on by significant heat. He was at the gym, sitting in the sauna. But that one lasted for maybe two minutes, and then he was fine.
Bridging the sacred and the clinical
So this is where I like to acknowledge — we need to bridge the sacred with the clinical. 
I think that's a really good example. We can say we're going to be able to see a lot through science. Through imaging, blood work, pre- and post-measurements, assessments, evaluations. That's amazing. And ultimately, there is something at work here that is ancient and profound and sacred that I truly believe will never be caught in an image, will not be caught in a random control trial. There is something greater that happens when you reconnect with Earth and the ecosystem you're a very natural part of.
When we're in right relationship with the system we originated from, that in and of itself is going to change how we're experiencing self and the world and our health and wellness. 
We know that mindset is profound. We look at a lot of research where cancer patients who have a really hopeful mindset and do a lot of visualization during chemo — their prognosis is better, they have better outcomes. Whereas those who go into it with a really poor mindset and have succumbed to defeat don't get the same results.
There is this piece of how connected do I feel with this? How much do I believe in it? And also realizing again — it's not just the molecule. It is our relationship with it and what we're willing to do. Are we willing to be a contributing party to our self-healing?
Are we willing to acknowledge and return to the reality that we are self-healing systems? Biologically, physiologically, emotionally, soulfully, spiritually — we are self-healing systems. That's how we were created. We live in a self-healing ecosystem, our world.
It's only been in recent hundreds of years that we've started to externalize this source of expertise — on how many letters are at the end of somebody's name, so they can tell me about me instead of my body and my mind and my soul telling me about me. Now I need somebody who's gone through eight years of medical school and who doesn't know me, but they're going to tell me about me. 
Instead of saying, no. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna work with this natural medicine that is of the earth, that has really low risk to it, and I'm going to unlock communication with that medicine with my inner healing wisdom. And the medicine and my inner healer are going to do for me what needs to be done. And they're gonna show me what I need to do to use insight and awareness gained and turn it into embodied lasting change. 
That's the work that I will do.
Meghan's fear of vulnerability
Meghan: So I did a journey with you, and I've talked to quite a few people about it because for me it was profound. When I talk to people about this, a lot of people say — I want to contribute to my self-healing, but I'm afraid of letting go of control.
I understand that. Especially if you've never even experimented with these things recreationally. Which I had beforehand — so I had some level of comfort. And I was like — so Mikki, you're saying you're going to give me the largest dose of mushrooms I've ever had in my entire life, and then I'm going to sit with you in a room for six to eight hours while you are stone cold sober, and be just tripping balls and like the most vulnerable version of myself. And you're just going to sit there and watch me?
I was like, I am not comfortable with that level of vulnerability. And you were like, this is what I do. You helped me work through it. So for the folks who are on the I don't want to let go of control, I'm terrified of being that vulnerable in front of another human train — what do we say to them?
Mikki: I would say — that checks out. You're human. 
If you're not nervous at all about this experience, I kind of ask you — are you familiar with what we will be doing? 
Even in my shoes, when I think about being the journeyer, no matter how many times I've done this — facilitated or journeyed myself — any time I go to journey, I'm nervous as fuck. Like, my gosh. 
Even in my head, there's that rational part, the insightful part that says, Mikki, you've done this, you're familiar with it, you know what it is, you're gonna come out on the other side. But then there's the felt sense that's like — but I'm giving up control, and I don't know where I'm going to go, and I don't know what I'm going to see, and I don't know if I feel equipped for that. 
And I don't. It's all the uncertainty that inherently breeds anxiety. And that's great, because that's our nervous system — from an IFS perspective, our protectors doing their job to protect us. It's a reminder that I am functioning the way I'm supposed to function. 
In that place, I say — it's good that you're nervous. It means that you're invested in this. You care about your wellness and well-being. You want to be careful that you're not doing something in which the risk outweighs any benefit.
That's why I'm here. My role is to promise that I'm going to do everything I can — screening-wise, preparation-wise, day-of and follow-up — to ensure that you're having the safest experience possible. That we're minimizing as much harm and discomfort as possible. Giving you a safe container in which you can shift your relationship with distress. So that that idea of not always being in control is not as scary moving forward.
Not being in total control in and of itself is not a life threat. Is it anxiety-provoking? For sure. There are a lot of variables I need to be prepared for that I don't control, but I need to be able to respond to. But when we can change our relationship to distress and say — distress in and of itself is not a bad thing. When I respond to distress effectively, the way I'm supposed to, distress is helpful — I don't need to get distressed that I'm distressed. 
That's the importance of prep.
What I'm hearing you say is — you don't trust me enough yet to be that vulnerable in front of me. That's fine. Let's do a few more sessions. What do you need to know about me? Would you like to meet here in the space where we're going to journey? What do you want to know about my background, my relationship with medicine? 
Let me walk you through the approach and what's going to happen the day of. What do you need to feel ready? What do your parts need to feel ready? What are your protectors saying they're concerned is going to happen? Let's address that directly, so that the whole system of you is coming on this journey — and that we are, for the first time in your life, not steamrolling any part of you and making them suck it.
Prep and integration protocol
Meghan: Such a way of putting things in a way that my brain is like — thank you. So my experience: we did three prep calls on Zoom where I literally came with notes. Here's all the intellectual insights I've done in six years of therapy. I have them in chronological order. Here's all my garbage. Then we did a full day of the plant medicine. I arrived at nine. I left around 3:30 when my husband picked me up. And then we did three integration Zoom calls afterwards. Is that pretty standard? 
Mikki: My bare minimum that I insist upon is two prep, two integration. The container, I think, is the most crucial part of this experience. How well are you prepping them for the experience so they can be equipped to navigate any uncertainty, any destabilization or dysregulation that happens. And then the integration — they know they have support, they can talk about the awareness gained, the confusion of anything that came up. They can create meaning. 
You work together to create a tangible plan for movement forward. How do I want to apply this awareness? What am I changing in a day-to-day that will help me embody greater change, a higher quality of life, a more fulfilling experience?
Minimum of two on each side. Ideally, I believe that three to four integrations is absolutely wonderful. And it's about having community. Even if you're not doing more than two to three integrations with me, we've got you set up in a community that supports you — where you have places and other people you can talk to about it and process through it. Whether that's another therapist, a coach, a yogi, a best friend, a community integration circle that meets once a month.
A community activity where you've got individuals who are like-minded, and as you're transforming and becoming what you want to be, a community that's going to support you in that — and not question why you need to change, but just cheerlead the change. 
Okay, I'm seen. I'm heard. There's a place for me to go, and I'm a part of something greater.
The integration is huge. The community piece — having a psychedelic family — I think is one of the most important parts. I've said this before: we're going to treat an individual over and over and over again. We're going to continue to do the same thing over and over until we treat the community that continues to wound the individual. If we're not approaching this in a community way, we're not learning anything from the medicine.
Adverse events and bad trip vs. challenging experience
Meghan: So how many journeys have you facilitated, and through all of those, have you ever had a negative response — health issues, calling the hospital, something very bad? 
Mikki: Over the last five years, I've probably facilitated somewhere between three to five hundred sessions. Some have been repeat journeys where we've done multiple sessions; some are people who only do it once or twice.
When it comes to adverse events, what I teach my learners is that there are three tiers you want to consider.
The first is acute expected effects of psilocybin. Things like transient high blood pressure, feelings of queasiness, feelings of anxiety, distress, crying, sadness, grief. Yes — in fact, I'm hoping some of these things happen for you so we can change your relationship with distress. I don't want you to have a terrible time. I want you to have a meaningful time. So I'm hoping for some of those things.
Then it's when you take a lot of those acute expected effects and they become very severe, or you've got a combination of them — sweating, higher blood pressure, flushing in the skin — where then I'm like, ooh, do we have a cardiovascular event risk right now? This is where you need to use clinical judgment, listen to your intuition, know their medical background and history, have done all the consulting and safety clearances. So you can determine when an acute effect combined with other things or heightened in severity becomes an adverse event where there needs to be some type of intervention. 
Then what takes that from an adverse event you're dealing with in the session to a reportable adverse event — calling DORA, calling EMS, getting outside emergency medical services involved. That would be a full-on adverse event. I've never — knock on wood — had to do that. 
If you're diligently following best practices and ethical standards, screening, considering background, asking about medications, asking the hard questions, and not facilitating through a scarcity mindset — meaning you're willing to say no to people — that's not going to happen. You've screened out the possibility for it to happen. So I've never had to deal with that. 
I think there's a difference between a bad trip and a challenging experience. And again — set and setting and prep and integration are the biggest factors that delineate between those two things. 
You're likely going to have a challenging experience with me. I hope you do. That's really what I want you to have.
What we do with that challenging experience is what makes it not a bad trip. The way I respond to you in your challenging experience and support you in that moment. What we do in integration with that experience — finding the meaning in it, how we're using the awareness gained. That's what makes it not a bad trip. 
A bad trip happens when we're not in a safe container. We don't have somebody who's holding space for our safety. We have mixed it with other substances. We haven't set an intention. We haven't gone through informed consent. We don't know what the risks are. We don't know how much we're taking. We don't know if the medicine is pure or what its potency is. We don't have mental health support. We have nobody to talk to afterwards.
That is the recipe for a bad trip. That's not what we work on in the regulated space.
How Colorado built the psilocybin program
Meghan: Speaking of the regulated space — I believe Colorado, Oregon, and New Mexico are the only places where we can do this at this point. How did this come to be? How are we so lucky to be in Colorado? And what was your role? 
Mikki: We passed Senate Bill 290 back in 2022. That established the Natural Medicine Health Act, which decriminalized psilocybin among four other natural plant medicines and set up an advisory board to create the regulated program. 
What sets us apart from New Mexico is that we don't do this in just a medical or clinical setting. You don't have to have a diagnosis to do this. There doesn't need to be a referral from a treatment provider. You can come for spirituality purposes, consciousness expansion, personal transformation. You don't need to be pathologized in order to be relevant.
I love that about how we've set that up. Psilocybin is not supposed to be a mental health medicine. It never was. It's not here to treat mental health. It's here to reconnect us with the soul that we are, and the light that we're here to shine — quoting David Anka. That's what psilocybin is supposed to do. It's not about resolving a diagnostic pathology. 
We started with that bill. Created the advisory board. Set up the regulations. Got the program started. It went live January 1st, 2025, when people were able to apply to be licensed facilitators. They could apply as natural medicine businesses to get licensed as healing centers, cultivators, manufacturers. You can get a licensed natural medicine handler license to provide support services in a healing center.
There are all these different roles you can play within the system. DORA oversees licensing for facilitators and training programs. The Natural Medicine Division at DOR oversees licensing for natural medicine businesses — healing centers, cultivators, manufacturers. So DOR is the business side. DORA is the individual side and the education side. Those two agencies have come together and are overseeing. 
We've also brought in Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. They do the data collection for the program and oversee licensing for testing labs. All regulated medicine goes through testing, so we understand the purity and potency of each thing and know exactly to the milligram how much medicine we're giving an individual, and how much of the other alkaloids are present.
Mikki's role in the safety protocols
I came into this having been working on the research at CU Anschutz. I became a part of an organization called the Psychedelic Public Policy Partnership — PPPP, lots of Ps. All volunteers, passionate about this, believing in it, volunteering our time. We started doing white papers and research to help advise and inform the advisory board on the regulatory rules and requirements. 
Then I took the safety screening I had already created in my private practice, and with two other volunteers — Erica Messenger and Kristen Speer, two women I have a lot of admiration for — we co-authored the standardized safety screening now used throughout Colorado and adopted by Oregon. Erica is in medicine and Kristen is in pharmacy, so they built out the pharmacological and medical areas while I continued to build out the mental health area. 
We really promoted that being something that was always going to be free and available — not a for-cost thing. We wanted to reduce anything that was going to increase barriers to access.
Now there's a board overseeing the updates and maintenance of that screening form. Because psychedelic research is moving quickly and we're learning new things every day. That form at the minimum is going to need to be updated on an annual basis. We've got this board committed to doing that.
Meghan: You volunteered to do this. You have your own business. You have kids. You are just like everyone else — very busy. And you believe in this so much that you decided, yeah, I'm going to volunteer my time to make sure this is as safe as possible. Thank you. Period. Thank you.
Why psilocybin isn't more accessible
Meghan: Why isn't this more accessible in the United States? Why are we one of the only states that has this? 
Mikki: There are a lot of reasons.
From a policy legal standpoint — we had the war on drugs and all these substances got put on the FDA's Schedule One. I could go into the politics and theories behind why psilocybin ended up on that list, but that's a completely different podcast episode. Psilocybin is considered a Schedule One substance by the FDA and so is federally illegal, and has not yet been rescheduled. So it's on a state-by-state basis that we're creating these acts and regulatory programs — that the state is approving under the awareness that federally, it's still illegal.
For doctors who hold DEA licenses, there's a level of liability and risk that some people are just not willing to take on. Which I completely understand. 
I also think there's a huge stigma against psychedelics because of the war on drugs era. The propaganda that was put out — ice cream scoops out of your brain, your brain melting into your spinal cord, this is your brain on drugs, the scrambled egg. That's not true. But we were so inundated with that. Previous generations were so inundated with those images and beliefs, that's what was taught to us: this is a drug, drugs are bad, this is going to kill you. 
Part of what we're having to do is this whole education initiative. Overcoming the false stigma, the false narratives about what this is, what we're doing, why it's useful, and the context in which it's relevant. 
You'll never hear me say this is not relevant in a fun social recreational setting. Psilocybin at a musical venue, listening to some soulful thing, is going to be extremely powerful and profound all on its own. Be with people you trust. Be in a safe setting. Know what you're doing beforehand. Get it from a trusted source. Test your medicine. All the things.
That is still a relevant experience. But it's acknowledging — you're not coming to your therapist's office or facilitator's office to party. That's not what's happening. Your facilitator is not engaging in the medicine with you. We're not raving. There are no light shows. You've prepped. We've come to intention. You've created a really deep connection with your facilitator, who is holding this safe container for you. And you're journeying inward.  
It's not about your external environment. You've got the eyemask on. You've got the headphones on. There's no wrong way to journey — you can take those off, it's fine, but it helps you drop in. You're journeying internally. You're going to places within you've never been before. You're peeling back the veil so you can see beyond the rigidity of what has been propagated unto you.
I think there are groups out there who do believe in some of the old information, and so they are afraid — afraid for their kids, for their animals, for their communities. I get it. We're afraid of the unknown. Understandable.
We just need to educate. And no — it's not for everybody. This medicine, like anything else, is not for everybody. There are some people who won't respond well to this and shouldn't be messing with it. They will find that out in the regulated setting. Whereas in the unregulated setting, there's a high risk they won't — until it's too late.
Business leaders and the mental health thesis
Meghan: The thing that comes over me when I bring this back to my work of business leaders and making work better is this statistic: 70% of people say that their manager or leader at work has as much or more of an impact on their mental health as their spouse does. And we have a lot of people heading into the workplace, in charge of other people, who have not done any healing work themselves. So they're bringing their own shit into the office. And that disproportionately impacts the people around them.
I've had people be like — my God, are you going to talk about this on the podcast? I'm like — absolutely. Because for me, when you talk about reconnecting with the soul — there were lingering pockets of deep insecurity that I have held, that I've been aware of, that I have not been able to extricate myself from through six years of therapy and EMDR and all these things. No matter what I do, I am still bringing those into professional spaces. How I respond to people. The way I'm showing up in the world.
If I can't heal those parts of myself, it is going to impact the people around me. We know it's effective. We're watching how much this is healing people. There's tons of data and research and anecdotal evidence. How do we convince other people? And I'm not being like — how do we browbeat people into doing this? But for someone listening who's like I don't know what people are going to think of me, but I'd like to try it — how do we help them step into this and do their own work in this way?
Mikki: It's things like what we're doing right now — talking about it openly and calmly and without fear. Having the recent legislation and policy and programs that have been created is a major help. It legitimizes and gives credibility to what we're doing here. It makes professionals more willing to speak freely about what they are and have been doing for a while.
We need to talk about this just like we talk about any other medication or substance — with ourselves, with our kids, with our coworkers, with teachers. 
If we want this to be safe, we need to make it familiar. What makes things unsafe is a lack of familiarity. Do I want my 16-year-old tripping on shrooms right now? Absolutely not. But do I want her to think that they're a drug to be partied with? No. I need her to be aware of what those things are before she goes to college. I want her to understand the sacred roots of this. I want her to understand this isn't a toy to play with. I want her to understand this is for profound self-transformation and expansion — and that when she's at a point in her life where she'd like to do that, this is available to her with no judgment, with support.
But I don't want her partying with it with her 16-year-old friends in the backyard. No.
The more we can talk about this like anything else we talk about and normalize it in that way, the more we reduce the stigma by increasing familiarity with what this is — and acknowledging what it isn't.
The more people we can get at the table, the more collaboration and community partnerships we have. That's how to steward this in a really safe way.
The funding critique
Which brings me back to your access question — why is this not more accessible? 
Because of the fear. Because of the legal setting. Right now there's no coverage for it, there's no funding for it. People are really scared. It's hard to even get insurance as a facilitator to do this work. Everything is really pricey because everybody sees this huge sense of liability and risk — because they're not understanding that when done effectively, prep is amazing. You just really need to make sure that your providers are doing prep and integration, and then you don't have to worry about what happens during the administration session. 
Because there is no funding, all of this is personally funded by those of us in the industry. If I want to go home and feed my family and be able to continue to sustain doing this, I have to charge out of pocket for it. And I have to charge for an entire day of my time, plus all the hours for prep, all the hours for integration. 
I have to pay for regulated medicine. Are mushrooms inexpensive to grow? They absolutely are. Can anybody grow their own mushrooms? They absolutely can, and I encourage you to do so. But to get them tested, cultivators are having to take huge portions of their flushes — a flush is what you gather from one harvest — to homogenize and send to the lab and have it all tested. They're paying for that. Then it gets sent back to them, and they have to pay for compliant packaging, driving it everywhere. All of that cost gets added to the medicine.
Then I have to pay for the medicine. I have to pay for my training. I have to pay for my licensing. 
Because this program is not funded — how are we paying the regulators overseeing the program? Through our licensing fees. As a healing center, I have to pay for a license. As an owner, I have to pay for a license. As a clinical facilitator, I have to pay for a license. As a training program, I have to pay for a license. And all of those licenses have to be renewed every single year.
On top of that, I have to pay for insurance, which right now is not less than $6,000 a year. For the majority of us, we're used to paying about $600 a year. 
When you look at all of these as annual expenses — and then I need the space to do this in — when we talk about why are the costs so high? People keep complaining that the costs are so high, it's inaccessible. Right now, until we get funding, until people understand what this is and get on this bandwagon, it's going to be hard to streamline and reduce costs. Because the people in the program are the people funding the program.
How to support the work
Meghan: All right. That'll bring us to our last question. Someone's listening — they don't live in Colorado or Oregon, and they're like I want to do the thing. Can they come to Colorado and do this? What's the future of the space? And how can people help make it so that you're not funding the whole damn thing yourself? 
Mikki: Yes, they can absolutely come to Colorado and do this. 
For supporting the work — I'd suggest going to the Healing Advocacy Fund website. There's a lot of information there on what this is, how to get involved, how to support the programs, what different states are doing. Great resource.
Inform yourselves. Inform your colleagues. If you run a group practice, invite a trained facilitator or a natural medicine educator to come in and inform your group practice on what it is and what type of clients they'd be referring to it.
Contribute to research if you're willing to be a research participant. All of the data from research is what we're giving to the FDA for rescheduling. The more likely we are to get it rescheduled, the more likely it is to get this covered by insurance, to demonstrate cost effectiveness.
For those of us who are already doing this — demonstrating how this has reduced expenditure on other high-level services that come from taxpayer money and other funding sources. So those funding sources say — hey, we're already spending this money, we're going to spend it on this because it's more efficient.
All those ways — we can start to gather and contribute to the evidence that this is more effective, more efficient, and less dangerous than almost anything else we have available to us. That's how we can get this in. And we need to understand the languages we're speaking depending on which audience is in front of us.
Closing
Meghan: Lovely humans — Mikki Vogt. I will just underscore how profound this was for me. For my husband. For our relationship. For our relationship with our children. For my entire life. And to hear just a smidge of what you have done to bring this to the world.
The individual experience I had with you was immense. I literally saw you in person last night and ran up to you and hugged you like I was embracing my long-lost friend. It deepened the connection I have with you. It deepened the connection I have with myself. It is profound. I have a deep and unending well of gratitude for all that you have done to bring this to space and to help people. It is incredible. 
So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Mikki: I am so glad. I'm so glad. That makes my heart sing. It was so beautiful to see last night. That connection is so real. And imagine that being so much greater amongst so many more people — what our world would be like.
So yeah. I just thank you. I'm glad the experience was so amazing for you.
And it's the mushrooms, right? Like — you find the person you're connected with who you can trust to keep you safe. But the awareness gained, the insight, the self-love and acceptance — that's your inner healer and the mushrooms. That has nothing to do with me.