Today, we are honored to have Alexis Fish, a trailblazer who has been championing LGBTQ and BIPOC visibility in media long before Diversity & Inclusion was part of the conversation. With over 20 years of experience as an executive, producer, and director, Alexis has held influential roles such as VP of Pride at MRC (Billboard/The Hollywood Reporter), founding editor of Condé Nast’s groundbreaking queer vertical 'them,' executive producer of John Cameron Mitchell’s 'Shortbus,' and SVP of the first independent queer television network, QTV, among many others. In this episode, Alexis shares her journey of embracing her identity, defying societal expectations, and carving her own path in the media landscape. She delves into the privilege and responsibility that comes with her role as a queer media expert and the transformative power of media to shift consciousness and save lives. Additionally, Alexis opens up about her most personal and impactful role yet—being a foster parent. Join us for an impactful discussion with Alexis as she takes us through her extraordinary career and the heart and passion behind her advocacy.
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Uncharted Paths, the podcast that dives deep into the journeys of courageous individuals who listen to their inner wisdom and forge paths of authentic expression. In a world where conventional success often overshadows personal passion, we illuminate those who have dared to venture off the beaten track.
In Season One, we're uncovering the untold stories of unique alumni from Harvard-Westlake School. You may recognize names like astronaut Sally Ride, the former mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, and actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, but, now, we're shining a light on the hidden gems. I'm Lindsey, and I'm Kristin.
Join us as we explore the stories of these remarkable individuals, share their triumphs and challenges, and uncover the lesson that can inspire possibility for all, especially today's generation. It's time to follow your heart and chart your own path. Welcome to Uncharted [00:01:00] Paths.
Today, we are honored to have Alexis Fish, a trailblazer who has been championing LGBTQ and BIPOC visibility in media long before diversity and inclusion was part of the conversation. With over 20 years of experience as an executive producer and director, Alexis has held influential roles, such as VP of Pride at MRC, founding editor of Condé Nast's groundbreaking queer vertical, Them, executive producer of John Cameron Mitchell's Short Bus and SVP of the first independent queer television network, QTV, among many others. In this episode, Alexis shares her journey of embracing her identity, defying societal expectations and carving her own path in the media landscape.
She delves into the privilege and responsibility that comes with her role as a queer media expert and the transformative power of media to shift [00:02:00] consciousness and save lives. Additionally, Alexis opens up about her most personal and impactful role yet, being a foster parent. Join us for an impactful discussion with Alexis as she takes us through her extraordinary career and the heart and passion behind her advocacy.
Alexis, thank you for being here with us today.
What led you to say 'yes' when we reached out?
Anytime I can be of service to especially younger folx, primarily queer folx, but really younger folx in the universe, like that is just a huge part of what brings me the greatest joy in my life.
And when you hear the word 'uncharted,' what comes to mind?
Road less traveled. I don't know how many Westlake folx are going to be watching this. Nat Reynolds used to take us on this seventh grade retreat to Idyllwild, and he would ask people to talk about what the Robert Frost poem meant to [00:03:00] them.
He, essentially, was making us read it and digest it, not just follow along. We had an assembly, I think the first assembly of the year, he would talk about it. I remember he actually asked me if I would be one of the people who came up and discussed it, and I was too nervous. I didn't want to get up at the big auditorium and talk in front of all the really cool girls.
I guess it's in my DNA, but I'm always taking the divergent path. I'm always going left when everyone's going right. I think because of the experiences of my childhood, and I guess, innately who I am, or parenting, or whatever it was, I've always felt 'other.' I think that I've always viewed things a little differently than most people, and I've always thought about things a little differently, and approached things differently, and effectively chosen unchartered life and career trajectory.
What did that look like at Harvard-Westlake? What were those pivotal choices you made that were uncharted compared to your [00:04:00] peers?
The first really fundamental thing that happened is there was a assembly in eighth grade where this program called Brotherhood-Sisterhood came and spoke to us.
They talked about this summer camp that dealt with isms, classism, sexism, racism. It didn't pique anyone's interest, and I was like, 'What's that? Well, I want to go do that.' And I did. I was the only person from private school, the summer after eighth grade, and that was the first time that I heard a lot of the ideas that now really inform who I am and what makes me tick from the idea of white privilege, the idea that I was part of a really minute percentage of folx in the world that have had access to a certain level of education or a vacation or a vehicle or never worried about food on my table.
Like, I just had absolutely no point of reference [00:05:00] that I was existing in a sphere of the 1%. I wound up becoming a youth leader in that program and spending a lot of my free time with people who were living in East LA and South LA.
I had such a different experience, an 'othered' experience, and I was able to look at what was happening at school and socially and politically in the world. You know, I was at Harvard-Westlake during Rodney King, and I looked at the merger, and I looked at a lot of things through very different eyes because of that.
And did that also shape what you chose to immerse yourself in at Harvard-Westlake? So, I did three years of Westlake, three years of Harvard-Westlake. My junior year, I did the school year abroad program in France. I think, first of all, it's turned into a different school. I hear about it as this academic powerhouse, and people take [00:06:00] 25 APs and graduate with XYZ, and the pressure and stressors of the academics are enormous.
I didn't feel that here. It felt like I was at junior high and high school, and I could be on the newspaper and be on a team. I wasn't thinking as much about, 'I must achieve XYZ, get into college and have a certain trajectory in life.' Although, I did, certainly, from my parents and just the environment.
I knew doctor and lawyer were what like a little Jewish girl was, was, like, I had heard that trope. What did I do? Photography. I love photography. I was the photo editor of the 'Piece of Pie,' the middle school newspaper, and I was the photographer for the Chronicle.
I loved photography.
It's not shocking where I wound up, but I feel most comfortable witnessing the world through a lens or thinking about how to capture ideas and disseminate them.
I didn't get into video here, which I'm still saddened by, cause I would have met Sherry Golke earlier or [00:07:00] spent more time with Kevin O'Malley. Yeah, you know, Joni Parker, women's studies, volleyball team. I wasn't building a resume here. I can tell you that I was going to high school.
That's refreshing to hear.
Yeah. I was really involved in the social issue work outside of school. I brought the Brotherhood-Sisterhood to Harvard-Westlake. We started a club, and one day, we, I got a half day of programming. They canceled classes, and we got to do all of these exercises that I did in this program.
One of them was, essentially, to explore the idea of privilege and class and around race and all these things. And we had one line of folx and another line of folx, and essentially, if you had two parents or your parents were still together, you went to one side. And, then, if you were white, you went to one side.
It was all of these variances. I remember, if you're on financial aid or any kind of financial assistance at [00:08:00] Harvard-Westlake, go to one side. And I had never talked about the fact that I was on financial assistance, because in seventh grade, in the locker room, this girl had said something like, 'Oh, you totally know who's on financial aid here.'
All of a sudden, it was like, 'Whew, the stigma,' and, in seventh grade, I wasn't, you know, strong enough, brave enough, didn't have a strong enough sense of self to be like, 'Oh, a stigma. Well, then I'm gonna talk about it,' because that's kind of who I am now. I protected that a lot, because I didn't look like whatever that's supposed to mean.
Brotherhood-Sisterhood sounds like a lot of storytelling, understanding people's narratives, stories.
Oh, absolutely. And bringing those stories to other people's eyeballs.
Yeah. Now, I say media has the power to shift consciousness and save lives, and that is the full ideology of me, both personally and professionally. I think about what I can do within the world of [00:09:00] media to save lives. Whether it's about, 'You can't be what you can't see,' or 'How can you best be your authentic self?' and 'How can I show you your authentic self in media?' or 'How can I sit in powerful places with all of the privilege I have as a cis, white, straight passing woman who has this unbelievable pedigree from this school and the college I was able to attend and the access that my vocabulary and all of the nonsense that people look to to let you in those rooms that are gatekept affords me?'
How do I like, how do I fuck shit up?
I keep hearing another theme of rebellion in the name of connection. Giving a voice to people who don't have the microphone or putting a spotlight on the stories that aren't heard. And it sounds like that started so young.
Where did that come from? Was it an inner drive you felt?
I grew [00:10:00] up in an abusive home. Again, stigma around abuse. It's okay to talk about it.
It's okay to talk about the effects of an unstable home life and how you see the world differently. I'm a foster parent now, and anyone out there who knows about ACES, like, when you live in a challenging home environment, community, your brain literally doesn't get to form as well.
First, I grew up really quickly, as you do, in abuse. And I think I developed an acute sense of empathy, an awareness of my surroundings, as children do in those situations. And then that just played into all of the spaces where I existed. I don't know, I've just always been aware of taking the temperature in the room and understanding maybe why someone is comfortable and not comfortable.
And then with the awareness of what Brotherhood-Sisterhood had brought to me and realizing, 'Oh, that could be around race or [00:11:00] gender or sexuality or class.' And now I would add body and neurodivergence and all the other things that I now recognize are things we use to make people feel like shit.
You mentioned stigma. What were the things you were taught to reject about yourself?
Well, I have ADHD totally undiagnosed all through Harvard-Westlake, all through college, all through my life. But if you look at the kind of producer I am, it's someone who knows so many people, because I can't sit still at an event.
I can't stay in a conversation. My brain's like ten steps ahead. I'm flitting about the room, because I can't focus. But that actually has made me sort of a master networker. And I genuinely like getting to know people and collecting them and knowing their strengths. That's the sort of empathy. And then being like, 'Oh, you should come and work with this person' and, 'Oh, I'm going to do a project on this.' I [00:12:00] recently have been talking to a lot of students who are studying media about whether they want to follow the sort of development exec trajectory or like assistant development exec, stay in the system, which affords you a lot of security, or what I did, which was really this non-linear, forge my own universe trajectory.
But that was because it's really hard for me to go to the same job every day and work nine to five, and that's because I'm neurodivergent. 'Wow. I see things so differently than everybody.' I now sit as a vice president in a huge media corporation who didn't come up through this ladder that really starts to mold how you think.
I'm just an out of the box thinker. And that is, again, that is my neurodivergence, that is my completely different vantage point from so many other people. I really like it, and a lot of people like it and pay me for it, hire me for it.
And [00:13:00] along your path, say, after leaving Harvard-Westlake, going to college, where were those milestones you felt because you had to pave your own road and you weren't following an easy corporate ladder?
Well, I really want to say that there were milestones that were great and there were milestones that were horrible. As important as it is for me to acknowledge, like, ' Oh, I got my first job on XYZ,' I also experienced my first severe depression, because everybody else was going to grad school and everybody else was getting engaged and everybody else was getting pregnant and everybody else was this and buying their first house, and it's just really important to me that living that was also like getting through those times and doing the work to learn how to live in happiness and sadness and the roller coaster of life is as important a milestone to my success. Let me think. What was a milestone? When I [00:14:00] was, actually I don't want to talk about age, because it just doesn't matter when it happens. Everyone thinks by 25 you need to this, and if you're not this by 30, and if you didn't by 40.
At one point, I had focused a lot of my attention on creating LGBTQ media, because when I decided that I wanted to be of service to a community, I knew it was my community, my queer community. I made a lot of work, short films, and I sort of became known as a, I guess at the time, lesbian producer. There was a man who was starting the first queer television network, and through some friends, they got in touch with me. I think that was the first time, when I was hired there, I really owned that I was a producer who really knew my community and could feel good and responsible about making media for my community and that I could be trusted with that, because it felt very precious.
That was a milestone for me. The next milestone was [00:15:00] when I was able to say, because I really spent so much time working towards this craft and attending labs and the Sundance Producers Lab and the Film Independent, and I didn't go to film school. I don't really excel in academic environments.
Shocking based on how my brain works.
I will put an age to this one. When I was 25, I was working on The Apprentice as a field producer, which, at the time, was the biggest reality show on television. It was because I desperately needed money and absolutely did not fall in line with the ideologies of the media I wanted to make.
And I was so depressed. The first time in my life that I really experienced serious depression. It was the first time I was put on medication, which has been a gift for me. Thanks to a good friend who was like, 'You need to go talk to my therapist.' The tools that I learned during that time to [00:16:00] be able to talk to people about where I was at, to be able to take the time I needed to heal myself, to learn, 'Oh wow, I might have a chemical imbalance and I need medication,' or, 'I might need to do some therapeutic work and learn how to get back to a place of serenity.'
The self-care necessary, the change in diet, the change in exercise, like that experience has given me the tools to get through so much in my life. I don't even think about the fact that I was a blah blah blah on the da da da show; although, I have to say that having that on my resume then led to the next, you know, I think that the guy that ran the queer television network really wanted a young lesbian who had this big powerhouse experience on her resume.
But what I took from that experience was, 'Oh my God, I never want to make media that's that stupid again' and, 'Wow, I can pull myself out of a really dark place.'
I really like how you pointed out that milestones don't [00:17:00] have to be these benchmarks for what we think of as success, but they can be huge influential growth points in our life.
We've been talking a lot about resilience and the resilience required for the uncharted path. You know, the Pioneer game, I forgot, Pioneer Trail, or Oregon Trail.
Oregon Trail! You lose a wagon wheel. Can I figure this out? Then there's 'Uh, oh, we can't get across the river.' A lot of your story, I'm hearing, when you're in that mud pit, how do I get myself out of this? And what did I learn from it?
Oh my God. And my trajectory has been beautiful peaks and unbelievable lows. And still, I mean, four years ago, I had this dream job. I always, I get these dream jobs. And often times, places will only fund queer stuff for about two years, which I now really understand. And I'm just like, blowing open the doors and providing jobs and [00:18:00] opportunity for all these people.
I place a lot of focus right now on QT BIPOC folx and then they stop funding it, and I'm laid off. I have been laid off so many times from the most phenomenal highs. I was, I guess, 45 the last time it happened. I'm now 47. And it's just like, 'Oh my God,' and I go home, and I get to bed, and it breaks my heart. I just have learned through the milestones of both success and not failure, just life.
And I'm so grateful that people are talking more about what it really looks like.
What you just shared reminded me of a lot of themes that have been coming up in our conversations is closed doors. When you said laid off, I was thinking, if you weren't laid off from that, you wouldn't get to help the next door that opens.
Our society has this feeling of, 'Oh, you should get a job and then stay in that position' and [00:19:00] 'staying is successful' or 'rising up the ladder,' but it's like you get to blow open all these doors.
And leaving toxic environments is so successful, because you're protecting your ability to go and do the other work you were meant to do. I haven't spent a lot of time in corporate spaces, which I'm actually extremely grateful for.
As much as there's some amazing things happening in corporate spaces and big thinking, there's just a lot of groupthink. I'm not really good at groupthink.
They need those innovators and disruptors to come in and shake things up.
How have you found that inner drive or courage to keep walking the unknown?
Because I'm protecting my sanity. I shrivel and die when I am not doing work that I think makes a difference. And 30 years into my career now, I [00:20:00] am so fortunate that when Condé Nast decides they want to start a new queer vertical, my name comes up, and they let me come in and be a founder. When Billboard magazine is running a queer vertical, they bring me in to shapeshift it. Even though I know nothing about music, but what I know, I am now absolutely, unequivocally an expert in it, like I am a queer media expert. So, as much as there have been times that I'm like, 'Just go fucking work at Starbucks, Alexis. Like, go get a job. Go make some money. Stop being so scared.' But I just can't do it, because I'm like, 'No, I would rather spend 40 hours a week giving my time away and living on a thousand dollars a month to help the queer cafe make a Kickstarter video, or be on the board of OutFest, or whatever it is I do.' I just, I [00:21:00] can't. Much to the chagrin of my mom. It's like, 'Alexis, come on.' As a queer woman, my options for pregnancy were IUI, ICI and IVF, all of which cost a lot of money, and I could never afford to freeze my eggs. I never worked at a Netflix or an Apple that gave you the insurance to try that, and when I was able to cobble together enough money to try it, it didn't work. That's one of the greatest regrets of my life, that I never made enough money to have a family. My story is that I didn't get to have kids in my 30s when everyone around me was, and it was so painful. It was so painful and didn't find partnership like many other people found partnership.
But, now I'm a foster parent. Now, I'm going to be able to use this duplex that I bought 20 years ago after I had one really big job running that queer television network in Halton City, Texas. And, I'm [00:22:00] gonna find queer youth who are aging out of the system, and I'm gonna adopt them, and I'm gonna be their forever mama. They're gonna get this home that I found 20 years ago, and there's going to be more than one, because, as a single parent, I probably could have never had more than one child. As I now have fostered toddlers and see how incredibly difficult it was, there's no way that the kind of jobs that I had, so many of the big jobs I had, they're like 60, 70, 80 hour a week jobs, and there's just no way I could have done it.
And yet, here I am, in such an amazing position to help these kiddos. And it's one of the greatest gifts of my life.
What is that, window closes, door opens. I mean, that is a huge window door situation.
We were talking about how failure, what if it was completely reframed as redirection. Ugh. Just take that word out of the dictionary and just replace it with redirection.
I think of it as 'change your story.' [00:23:00] Mentorship is a really, it's a humongous part of what I do now. Just mentoring a lot of queer youth, and I'm always asking them to think about the story and like, 'What if we shifted the story and believed a different story?' It's such a game changer.
And do you feel like where you're at now, you have the flexibility to decide, 'Okay, now I'm going to do this or that?' Do you feel that sense of choice right now?
I have an idea of something I really want to do that's very scary to me. It's a business plan I wrote when I was 21. I think of my neurodivergence, because of my weird issues around money, having been on scholarship here, having always felt really uncomfortable about asking for money and needing things and not having access to it.
I think, for us Harvard-Westlake folx growing up in Hollywood, we know there's the studio system. There's the indie route. You have to raise money. And there's so many amazing stories [00:24:00] that need to get made, especially by queer, non-binary, and trans folx of color in the world I work in.
They just have no access to raising funds for the one-offs that they want to make. There really needs to be a film fund for this. And applying for grants and this process is just so painful. For a long time, I really wanted to put together this slate of projects for a film fund, but I now realize it's just supposed to be a nonprofit.
And it's time for me to like access what I have access to in a major way and fund a nonprofit and use my experience to help a lot of folx make media that needs to get made, desperately needs to get made, to tell stories and help mentor them through it, like in an EP role or whatnot.
We're talking about $200,000 films and $30,000 shorts, but really help them with all of my [00:25:00] experience and contacts and knowledge crew up and make media that's gonna get out there into the world. And I'm scared to death to do that. But if, you know, pick any company in the world hired me and said, 'Here, we empower you to do this, Alexis,' I would do it with a blindfold on and both hands tied behind my back. But now that I'm going to step into it, and I'm going to step into the room and say, 'Yeah, here's my 30 years of experience. I can do this. I want to do this.' And I'm scared to death to do it. It's scary at 47. It's scary at 22.
I will still take the road less traveled, and I'm going to do it.
Sometimes I think about that as a teeter totter. The fear and the passion, mission. Yeah. And until it flips, it can feel almost impossible. What is that mission, purpose, inner drive that tips the scales on fear versus mission?
When I sit down and think about the absolute [00:26:00] best way I can take all of this experience and all of these connections and all of this passion, this is absolutely what I have to do. There's no other choice.
I'm at a place in my life now where I'm a consultant, as well as producing a lot of other things. And if you call me, I am honored. And you can't hire me unless you also hire a QT BIPOC person to speak to their experiences, because in consulting it's often like a very personal, this is what I've done and this is now what I want to impart to you.
It's often educating around queer media, and, as a cis white woman, how could I possibly speak to a QT BIPOC experience, which is so much of the work that needs to be done. We need to get, like, 'never about us without us.' So, if you're gonna go write a storyline or be an agency and bring in, like, the best and the brightest of XYZ talent, you gotta have those people in the room, and they have to be [00:27:00] at the highest echelon making decisions.
So, if you want to hire me, you gotta hire a QT BIPOC person, pay them the same rate as me, give them as much time as I am given, and you can't change our rates once you find out that that's how you get me. And that is my politic now around what it is to be a white, anti-racist, anti-violent woman in the world.
That's what I do. So, yeah, I walked in this room and I clocked like how many people of color in here are working on this? And what is the gender variance? And, you know, I guess that's part of my otherness too. That's the lens with which I look through the world and want to affect change.
Where have you found community or support along your path? Where have you been helped?
Well, there's definitely some brilliant like-minded folx out there. I am not the only one in that they are my community. Black trans women are my heroes. The majority of the work I'm doing now is with black trans women. There's so many people in the social [00:28:00] justice space. They don't have to be in media. Just people who get that there's something horrifically wrong, and we have to do something about it.
It doesn't mean doing the work 24/7, but just in awareness and in using your voice, in knowing what your power is and using it.
The image was Oregon trail and the wheel falls off your wagon. And just so happens that there's someone that has an extra wheel right on the side of the road.
People have serendipitously shown up on your path to help pick you up when you've fallen.
I definitely looked outside of the communities that my parents put me in, and that's what they knew. You do what you know. So, I had to look outside of places that were known to me, and I still do.
I'm a very, very curious person. So, a Harvard-Westlake friend and I, he was actually, I think the only out [00:29:00] person in the 90s at Harvard-Westlake. And it's so funny, when people find out that Chris Stevies and I are still very close and take vacations together,
they're like, 'Can I get his information? I really want to apologize to him.' I can't tell you how many people want to apologize to him because of their greater understanding now about queerness and youth and identity. We talk a lot about coming into our 50th years and
the choices we've made and the communities we've been parts of. We both went off to New York and really existed in queer spaces that were just so very different from how we grew up.
And where that journey took us and where we've arrived now. As we think about retirement and the security or lack of security we might have because of the choices we made, we're both in agreement that we absolutely wouldn't have wanted it to have been any other [00:30:00] way, because, wow. The things we've seen. The people we've met. The journeys have been and continue to be extraordinary.
And what does success mean to you?
I've had the greatest pleasure of making some media that people have seen, and they have come back to me and said, 'That saved my life' or 'That forever changed my life' or 'That led me on the path that I'm now on today'. Specifically, there was an independent film that I made, and I was a producer on in 2005 that was the first and only of its kind.
It's sort of now part of the queer canon, and when people find out that I made that film, and they saw it back then, inevitably, the response is like, 'Oh my God, that movie changed my life,' and for many people that they've said, 'That movie saved my life.'
And I've had the privilege of making some other media [00:31:00] that I know has had enormous effects on people's understanding that they can be their authentic self, that they are loved for exactly who they are. I've made media around raising trans kids, and parents have told me that I saved their children's life, because they were making so many mistakes that they didn't even realize, and no one had really presented it in the format that I presented it. I mean, that's it.
That's it. Like, that's everything. Full stop.
Would it be accurate to say that you're a storyteller but also an educator? Oh. And an activist. What are those other aspects of yourself that feel like North Stars?
Yes, a storyteller. Yes, an activist. I'm an anarchist in drag. I really firmly believe that we need, at this point, like I love all the programs where people can shadow folx in media [00:32:00] and where you can have internships at various levels, and I know that those are access points. We need people in the highest vice president, president levels who are representative of diversity and divergent ideas. Full stop. It cannot be the land of cis white folx and men. We're never gonna affect change. So, I have access to those spaces.
I was vice president at a huge media company, and because I can look this way, and because I was given this vocabulary, and this school and my education gave me this ability to communicate this way, and this brain that was fine tuned by all of this access to education, I can go in and say, 'Okay, HR, we're doing away with college requirements. We're doing away with high school requirements. And I want you to stop throwing away cover letters that have grammatical errors.'
Because it doesn't matter. [00:33:00] Because some kids in high school don't get to focus on doing their homework. I barely got to focus on doing my homework, because there was a lot of stuff happening in my home. It was really challenging. I had the easiest road compared to so many other people that I've met, because I have the ability to access all of these spaces because of the things I've been afforded in my life, including this brilliant school and the gifts I was given here.
I think something else that I'm, I really, I have a really amazing business acumen. I see myself as a person who celebrates and lifts up and helps make the ephemeral tangible for artists.
But I have a really strong business acumen and that is something that certain producers have, and I love that part of myself too.
What would you want people to put in their pocket to take away from this conversation?
Think about where you put your energy and focus. Course it should be on yourself and your [00:34:00] family and your children. Of course.
We have so much to give, especially those of us who have a roof over our head and food on our table, and health care. We have so many things that we don't have to worry about, and that affords us the ability to have so much more time and resources to be of service. Think about affecting change with that extra time and energy that we have because of what we're given through birthright or the color of our skin or graduating from this school and going on to a four year college that then sets us up for something else.
Life is wonderful highs and, in hindsight, wonderful lows. Maturity is experience, and you have to go through all of these different experiences to learn how to stay humble in the highs and find serenity in the lows.
Look [00:35:00] around the spaces that you exist in, professionally and personally, and take stock of the races and classes and ideology and all of the isms of the people around you. Please try and find yourself in different community or invite people into your community so that you have a wonderfully wide variance of ideology, and maybe you'll start thinking differently and bringing different things to the table in the spaces where you do exist, where you do hold power and authority.
That is a brilliant way to affect change. And if you do look around in the spaces where authority is being held, and you don't see a beautiful rainbow of identity, [00:36:00] actually, no. Until I look around, and I see a true representative room of what this world looks like, we're not being of service.
We're not doing right by this company, this writer's room, this advertising space, this restaurant, this shoot, this whatever it is. We each have to take it upon ourselves. It's our responsibility now in 2024 to say, 'Actually no.' And ideally be able to make recommendations. If you can't find someone like me who can, who's made it her life to know as many, divergent, amazing folx, mainly in the media space, but, and say like, 'Oh, oh, you're missing, oh, here, look, what, what, what, oh, look, oh, this is this website, do this, do this, do this.' That's how we're going to change things. That's how things are [00:37:00] changing.
And is there anything else from today or even just now that's on your mind that you want to share in the space?
There's a woman named Colette Bowers who I believe in who went to Harvard-Westlake. You should interview her. You should all go read her work and see what she wants to do in the educational space. She has the solutions. I don't. When she told me the solutions, I said, 'Can I film your process?'
So, I have been filming Colette, trying to put together this new concept for a school that fixes all the ills in education, and I hope she gets to come into this space and talk to them about the work she's doing. I hope she gets it off the ground, and, if she does, I will have the media that tells the story of how it was done so that people can recreate that wheel.
I spend a lot of time thinking about QTBIPOC youth. I just can't, as a responsible human in media, not acknowledge the bullying that is transpiring on social media and bullying in general. It is so [00:38:00] important that our educators and parents are hyper-aware of the effects of that and are in communication with students and their kids at all times.
It's so important that our kiddos understand that at no time in the world did people have to deal with this. It's unprecedented. The psychological effects we're starting to see what they really are. And bullying isn't even, you know, 'You're XYZ.' It's that you saw you weren't invited to a party or you have access to see a lifestyle that is being shown in the absolute most amazing light, but isn't the real world whatsoever.
The feelings you have around those are real, and you need to reach out and talk to people about it or you need to limit your access to those spaces. When you go to an ashram when you're in your 30s, and they talk to you about your brain being like a body of water, [00:39:00] and we want to get it as mellow and calm as it can, and everything you put into it affects that.
I think about social media as just a freaking tsunami, even for adults. So, please be aware that you are living in unprecedented times. The bullying and the imagery that you have access to, your brains shouldn't be able to comprehend it. We weren't set up this way. We haven't evolved to get this right.
Please be careful. Please be careful with your precious life. And please, if your parents can't see who you are as your authentic self and if your educators can't see it, you can find community. I know it's out there. I know it's out there, and I desperately, you know, I'm in LA trying to help create spaces like that, or in media, create spaces like that.
Thank you so much for sharing your story [00:40:00] with us. It's my pleasure.Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Uncharted Paths. We hope you feel inspired to carve out your own unique journey and embrace the courage to follow your passions. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. Stay connected with us on social media for updates and behind the scenes content.
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Until next time, keep exploring, dreaming, and charting your own uncharted path.