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REIN: Welcome to Episode 213 of Greater Than Code, I’m co-host Rein Henrichs and I’m here with my co-host, John Sawers.

JOHN: And I’m here with co-host, Jerome Hardaway and our guest, Cher.

Cher is a self-taught software engineer currently at Apple. With 20 years of experience, and a difficult, atypical background, Cher attributes her skills and success to compassionate curiosity. Cher's favorite things include being a mom, photography, stargazing, and making hot sauce.

Welcome to the show, Cher.

REIN: So Cher, this is usually the point where we ask you what your superpower is, but I've already figured it out and it's making and collecting hot sauce, which is extremely cool and I was hoping you could talk to us about how you got into that.

CHER: So I am a recovering bulimic. That's an eating disorder and unfortunately, I relapsed this past spring. I went through a really stressful time and thankfully, I didn't turn back to drugs, but unfortunately, I did turn to that horrible habit and I got really sick because of the most recent time. 

So I ended up having surgery and I was recently diagnosed with a chronic issue called gastroparesis, which means a part of my stomach is paralyzed and it means that 90% of the time I eat, I either end up not being able to eat very much at a time or I end up getting sick afterwards. So eating these small amounts frequently, they need to be more exciting because ordinarily, you get like let's say, I have a big salad and the lettuce really adds a texture to the food that is crunch and chill and it's all this interesting stuff that goes into eating and I can't have lettuce anymore. It is one of the things I don't know why that really triggers my condition so I can't have lettuce anymore and there's a lot of foods, if I start listing them out, that I literally just can't eat right now because I just can't do it, it triggers the condition. 

And so, hot sauce is something that is so – hot peppers in general are so dynamic because of the way that they interact with your taste buds and the receptors in your mouth and sugar together can bring out all of these different flavors and it really makes food exciting for me to eat still in such very small portions. Making hot sauce has been such an exploration in that, because I can reach for let's say, there's a salad that I really liked eating. What were the flavors in that salad and how can I still capture that same feeling that I got from that particular salad without being able to actually make that salad because I can't have lettuce?

REIN: So would you describe this as a coping mechanism now? 

CHER: Yes. [laughs]

REIN: I don't mean that in a pejorative way at all. I think coping mechanism is great.

CHER: It’s okay.

REIN: Was it a hobby before it became a coping mechanism or was it a coping mechanism before it became a hobby?

CHER: It was definitely a hobby before, because like I said, I was already collecting. I think I had probably like 90 to 100 different hot sauces as of 4 years ago, it was the last time I had posted something about it because somebody was like, “You don't even like hot sauce,” and I was like, “Um, I definitely do,” but it wasn't to what it is now where I'm like talking about it and of course, actually making it. 

One of the things I started doing before I started making it, was I was mixing different hot sauces together to try recreate these different flavor profiles that I literally felt like I couldn't enjoy because of this condition that I have now.

REIN: It strikes me that you took something that was a fun thing you did on the side and it became something that it really improves your quality of life. 

CHER: Yes, exactly.

REIN: I think that's really cool.

JEROME: Going from hot sauce, let's try to take it to programming in that aspect. You said about mixing these recipes up in your head or this type of hot sauces in your head to try to get a different flavor profile that you missed, or the idea of building projects from beginning to end and while you're making your own hot sauce as well and I really see that there's a knowledge transfer there. 

I'm picking up that passion of building the process of hot sauce and getting into where you want it to be as well as taking a product from one end point to the next and getting that to where you want it to be. They both flow together well and I wanted to know, have you ever always noticed that you had this knowledge transfer, almost ownership from end to end of the things that you love to do?

CHER: Yeah, and I definitely think it's a combination of that innate curiosity that I always attribute everything that I do in my life to and then also, that I have this innate drive to execute on the things that I think about, I guess, that I'm curious about and I think that part of that isn't always a good thing. I've had to learn over the course of my career when to one, let other people do the executing and two, that sometimes I can feel like I have too much ownership over something because I have an idea in my head of how I think that it should be and there's a lot of rigid inflexibility in that. 

And so, having to say, “Okay, it's great that you have all of these ideas and yes, they're all really good, but maybe there's other information out there that can help shape something better.” That comes from other people and while I was working at Blizzard Entertainment, I really learned that I could hear every voice can matter and that good ideas can come from anywhere and that if you bring all of those ideas together, generally, you always end up with something that is way better and that's really informed, I think my understanding of why things like diversity are so important because you're actually having those voices in at the beginning. The past 6 or years of my career, I would say that's graduating into more senior, mentoring kind of things. You start to learn that you can't always execute on everything yourself and it's actually better if you don't.

JOHN: I'd love to hear more about the process of learning that over time. Was it something that you noticed and then explicitly changed or was it sort of a gradual thing that evolved over time or some combination of the two?

CHER: I would say it was definitely gradual because the way that it was expressed to me and feedback from my managers wasn't that it didn't have that level of clarity, it was more like, “You talk a lot in meetings and you have a lot of really great ideas and some people feel that you maybe think that you have the only good ideas,” which of course, was not ever the case. It's just was more of the drive to execute. 

The other piece of feedback that I had gotten a lot in my earlier career was that I never said no and I wasn't willing to give up on things. So when you're building software, you have to be able to give up on something sometimes and it's not always because you can't make that thing work, but sometimes it's because you can't make that thing work that way under these particular conditions, whether that's a time constraint or a financial constraint, whatever the case may be.

So I think that those two facets of feedback that I was getting once I was sort of surpassing being a mid-level engineer and I could see that they were wanting to promote me to senior and into different types of leadership, but I was missing these two key pieces of being able to be that mentor or leader. I think just reflecting on those pieces of feedback and applying them to what that means for me and then what that also means for my teammates and why it's for the overall greater good, it evolved for me into the understanding that I'm at now, which I think that everything in my head, I have to have a big picture understanding of and I'm the kind of person that—and I know that people see this about me—it seems like I have to know everything, which I think is that curiosity. 

I remember when I was in school, there were a lot of kids that didn't like me growing up and I was always referred to as a know-it-all, but then they would always say stuff like oh, somebody would ask a question about something, they'd be like, “Oh, ask Cher, she seems to know everything,” and it's not that I knew everything, it's just that I had to know as much as possible in order to feel like I understood the best possible outcome of something or how to move forward or something. 

I have that need to understand how things work together and I think it ended up being a positive thing, even though I know that it can come across to people as like, how do you fit all of this information in your head and why do you know so much useless things? I think it's just because I've always just needed to understand the big picture and so, growing over these past several years, after getting this feedback how do I make myself a better person and how do I apply this feedback in a more broad way that makes me better for myself and also me better for other people, whether that be clients or mentees or teammates or my boss or the company, whatever that is, how do I apply that feedback? I think that's how I landed where I am at today in terms of dialing it back a little and letting other people get involved or do the execution, delegating.

JOHN: It sounds like what you've done there is an important task of taking the strengths that you're aware of within yourself and not diminishing those, but figuring out how those are impacting the people around you and then executing them differently or presenting them differently so that you're still doing those things that you're good at, but you're aware of that impact and you can make sure that it's a positive impact rather than a oh, I didn't realize this was completely horrible for you kind of impact.

CHER: Yeah. I totally think that the combination of seeking feedback from the people around you and then introspecting feedback from yourself, that is a core skill that everybody needs. There's a lot of people—and I'm sure that I did this when I was younger—where when you hear feedback, you automatically can either apply at all and then think that like oh, wow, I'm this horrible person, I need to change all of these things about myself, all of these things about myself are horrible, or the opposite, shut down and think that that person is a complete jerk and not do anything to change at all. 

These two very binary options, it's really about how do I treat myself as I want to be treated and make sure that others are treating me that way as well, but then also make sure that what I'm communicating, what I'm putting out there is what I actually intend because everybody else is not the same as me.

JOHN: Yeah, and I think that goes back to the empathy you were talking about earlier. Again, that's also another one of those superpowers that’s compensating for something that maybe isn't as strong as you were saying earlier about being able to read faces and emotions versus just feeling them directly out of another person.

CHER: Yeah. 

JEROME: One thing I really want to get into is the aspect of bravery, especially when it comes to me. People see that me, I want to talk about bravery, talk about veterans, things like that. 

But you're very open with your story and the things you've had to endure and to get to where you are and to me, that's the ultimate type of bravery to be able to see and talk about the ups and downs and tribulations of life and be absolute raw about it in a place, especially a world like Twitter where things get discombobulated and people can be jackasses and being this uniquely raw individual where you're telling people, Take me as I am, this is the type of things I've endured. If I've done it and you can do it, too. I'm here to share my story, to help people avoid the type of pitfalls that I have.” 

What was, I call it the FIM moment and VWC is, I don't know if I can say it on here, but it's like Foxtrot Unicorn Charlie Kilo it moment—I used phonetic alphabet, so I don't get in trouble. Just say screw it. I'm going to be me, I'm going to be open and honest and raw and essentially, brave. So when did that happen? When did that moment, just that epiphany started?

CHER: I can't tell you exactly the single moment in terms of the time or what exactly occurred, but I can tell you the mind thing that I went through. I know that all people, especially that are underrepresented in tech pretty much have imposter syndrome. But it's like the more of those things you have stacked against you, the more imposter syndrome you feel. So I think that part of the reason that I hid all of those things for so long is because I felt like okay, yeah, everybody thinks they're an imposter, but I actually am an imposter and here's my list of reasons why and it was like all of those things. 

What started to happen is that I started to have this following on Twitter and people thought of me not just from Twitter, but from the tech space in web and frontend web, especially in the places where I'd worked like in DC and in Seattle, it's like people knew who I was and they respected me as an engineer. But the way that people talked about me was like I didn't have all of these things. People thought that I had graduated from college because of the way that I present myself, the way that I speak all of the things that I know about so people just automatically assume like, oh, she has like a Master’s or a PhD or it's some sort of science and I saw that and I accepted that. I was fine with that because why would I want to argue that? 

Until I started noticing the gatekeeping that was happening with things that were true about me and in the moment, in particular, was something about being educated and it was just that moment, it just was like, I tore the lid off. I was like, “You know what? I am tired of people saying that you have to meet these certain stringent requirements and you can't have come from A, B, or C place and not get to where we are because you know what, I did that. Here are all of the reasons that you would say that I can't do this job today that I am doing now.”

If I had come out with all of this stuff 10, 15 years ago, people would be like, “Oh no, no, no, no, you can't be a software engineer. You will never work at Apple as a software engineer. You will never be a principal engineer, that will never happen for you,” and I've had the privilege of being able to hide all of those things. I already accomplished those things so now I can come out and say, “Yes, you can have been a sex worker and become a software engineer. You can have dropped out of high school and become an engineer at a thing company. You can have dropped out of college and never finished. You can have grown up extremely poor and become a principal engineer.” 

You don't need all of these things that people are claiming that you need to be at that level and I can tell you that because those people already see me at that level and they didn't know all of this stuff about me. So obviously, none of those things have a real impact on your ability to overcome those things. Now, of course, we all have our different opportunities and ways that we have to overcome obstacles. So there are reasons I was able to go past those things that were a struggle and will be a different kind of struggle for other people, but those are not my defining features at all and they're not anybody else's defining features either.

JEROME: Isn't it weird sometimes being in a room and you hear those gatekeeping things or the things that people assume about you and you're like, “No, none of that's true.” In my tenure of being in programming, people have said things like, “Oh, he's Air Force. He was intelligence. He once worked in Intel or some of them” like, no, that is not what happened at all. I was security forces and stuff like that and people's eyes just open because they decided that because you're in the room with them, you can't come from humble beginnings or you couldn't have willed your way and pushed your way into these environments. 

And I'm hearing a lot of that coming from your story in which you saw that you opened up because you're running around and just because you're in the room with these people already, they're assuming and making these assumptions that not only that you didn't come from these places, but people that are like you can't do the work that you're doing today and you're like, “That's not right.” You do the craziest thing possible. You put yourself out there on a limb and let the internet judge to showcase that hey, this is a 100% possible and you, too can be where I'm at, which like I said, that's super brave because people in general, they're jackasses.

So when I first heard about you, I was like, “Yo, that's like the wildest thing I've seen in 2020” like listen, I have seen a lot. So I was like, “I want to make sure that we got that.” There's insane level of rawness and integrity about who you are to ensure that people know that guess what, you, too can be where I'm at.

CHER: And I think that one of the greatest things and maybe you've experienced this with some of the things you've shared out there in terms of what you actually did in the military or, whatever before that, is that a lot of people who also have that same level of notoriety that you do, or even more start coming out and saying like, “Yeah, actually same.” Or, “Here's the things that you assumed about me that aren't true and here's actually the things that I've had to overcome that you assumed somebody like that couldn't possibly be here.” 

I think that when we did that Authen(Thec) little mini thing with all of these folks who had dropped out of high school, it was so eye-opening for people to see somebody like me or somebody like, what’s his name? Nader, Nadir, Nadeer?

JEROME: I know. I know who you're talking about. I think it's Nader. Yo fam, if you hear this, we apologize in advance for messing up your name. He's with the AWS Amplify team, he’s DevRel on there. We are so sorry. We love you. Don't add us on Twitter. [laughs]

I know who you're talking about, but yeah, he has a crazy story. I want to say Nader, but I can't, in great confidence, say that I'm getting it right.

CHER: I'm so sorry. [laughs] But him, so I'm going to say Nader Dabit. Last name, I'm probably pronouncing wrong, too. 

REIN: Don’t be mad at us.

CHER: Kurt Kemple, he also dropped out of high school and then Kurt, like me, talked about his history with addiction and he's somebody who, he came out with that stuff after he was already respected by the community as well. 

So, all it takes is like for one person to say, “You know what, this is me and other people can get here, too,” and suddenly, you start to realize that you're not actually alone.

JEROME: I think that's the biggest thing that comes from sharing your story is we are eradicating stigmas. Like Kurt and I, we spoke about his work and his journey with incarceration, addiction, things of that nature and how he's overcome that and how he tries to give – he works so hard to give back and want to create pathways for other people. It's a very inspiring story just because of the fact why it's all about showcasing that hey, if I did this, I'm no one special, which is, I think as a group, we always would try and let people know I'm no one special. So if I did this, you can do it, too. 

That's your thing, like, “I'm far from special.” But you’re saying special like I'm going from the wrong special that you're probably thinking for, but I have encountered and endured all of this and I am here and you, too can get here as well. So you don't have an excuse more so beyond the fact that this is what I want and companies don't have an excuse because you've already showcased that people like you can do the work. It's a duality of breaking multiple stereotypes on both sides of the coin. I just think it’s just utterly inspiring.

CHER: Yeah. It's interesting. You talked about that like, I'm not special, but I mean, I am special, but I think everybody is special and has their own special gifts or talents to bring to an organization, or a team, or a thing you're building, whatever the case may be, project. But the thing that we have to remember is that I think what a lot of the time, especially in my early career, the way that it has changed for women, since I became a software engineer, it's night and day difference from when I first started. 

But the way that I was always thought of, even before people knew about all this stuff about me, was as an exception. Men that I didn't necessarily work directly with, but worked with, or I knew in the communities where I was in tech, they would say things about women engineers and then I would be like, “Uh,” and they're like, “Oh well, not you, you're different. You're basically a male engineer, but you just have a woman's body,” and I'm like, “No, I am not! I am just an engineer! But I would still be a woman.” [chuckles] 

I'm not an exception to some sort of rule that says that women don't make good engineers or women aren't good at math, that's just a whole other thing. I'm not an exception and I think it's really hard for people to both, feel like okay, I'm unique and special in certain ways, but I'm not an exception to some rule. I may be exceptional, but I am not an exception.

JEROME: That sounds like a clean Weezy lyric, I guess. [laughter] I remember we had that conversation we were talking about how we're both big hip-hop fans and how back in the day, Lil Wayne, he would murder everybody on their own music and I was like, “I would never let that guy ever be on my records ever.” That's like, how you do that type Lil Wayne/Fat Rabbit Light or is it White Rabbit? I don't know. What’s the character that Eminem played in 8 Mile? 

CHER: Rabbit.

JEROME: Rabbit? Okay. So basically, he used everything that people use against him to show how great he was, or showcased his skill. It's like, I'm great in spite of these things. Same way with Lil Wayne, how he uses the hardships of his life to create this crazy flow that, at least back in the day, [inaudible] in a while, started supporting a fat fascist. It’s really memorable. So it just reminds me of how crazy you've used your journey to empower so many people.

CHER: Yeah, and it's funny you bring that up because I was trying to find the tweet, but when I first started revealing more stuff about – because the mental health came first and I started talking about I didn't come from money or anything, that I came from a poor background, and people were starting to try to use a lot of things against me that you could find by Googling me. 

So that's one of the times I just started listing everything off and I remember I put a GIF of Rabbit dropping the mic and it's like, tell them something they don't know about me because I felt like I had to do that. I'm like, “You know what, you think that all of these things about me that I've been hiding, I've been hiding because I view them as insulting, but I actually don't view them that way. I just don't want to be ostracized and since I'm out here saying these things, I'm going to go ahead and say them. I'm the only one who can use those things against me.” 

It's like if you have a sibling and you can call them a moron or some other word, but if somebody else calls them that it's not okay. Only you can make fun of your sibling. It's the same thing with yourself like, I can be like, “Oh, I'm ashamed of all of these things,” but the second somebody else starts doing it, I have way too much personal… I don't know what the word is, pride in myself? I don't know.

JEROME: You gangsta. That’s what it is, you gangsta. But what I say about me and what you can say about me are two very different things.

CHER: They are two very different things. 

JEROME: You know what we say? [inaudible]? No, f around to find out. It's okay. Sometimes we just got to let them know, I'm right there with you. Like veterans, we have our interservice arguments and stuff like what we were talking about, they call Air Force cheer for us and then we call Marines crayons. It’s like we can say that. A civilian rolls up and says that, the whole party is going to stop and we're going to like, “Okay, you made several mistakes and we're going to give you a chance to fix right now.” So definitely, I'm right there with you. Absolutely love it. 

REIN: So there was a thing I wanted to bring up, but I thought there would be no possible way to make it relevant, but Jerome, you just made it possible. So now I'm going to bring it up to him. Jerome, do you know who Marlon Craft is?

JEROME: Can’t say I do.

REIN: So Marlon Craft is a white kid from the Bronx who just did a freestyle on funk flex a few weeks ago. He is a poor white kid from the Bronx who suffered from anxiety, who was bullied, and he is now completely killing it. He did a freestyle on funk flex, which is a big deal and it was really good. The reason I wanted to mention this is because of two things you said. One was, I'm making a living now off of what ate me up privately. 

So he turned what he went through into that now part of his voice what he talks about and then the other thing was, I was thinking about how we were talking about what it's like to grow up with these challenges and whether that has an impact on what you can achieve. Some people, when they have these challenges, there seems to be two really interesting things that happen. One is that they become really selfish. Like you've seen white dudes that are like, they grew up poor and are like, “Racism doesn't exist because of what I went through.” Then you have this guy who was a white guy growing up in Hell's Kitchen, getting bullied all the time, and he says, “It ain't really about your aptitude, it's more geographical rules where you’re unilateral than practical. It's more based on the tone of your skin than anything factual. A lot of folks are entitled to what they ain’t give no action to.”

CHER: Yeah. I feel that.

JEROME: [inaudible].

CHER: It's interesting is that my husband, he was in prison—he's a felon—and he grew up even more poor than I did, went through harder stuff. Our moms were best friends growing up and our stepdads worked together, which is how we knew each other. Having to help him through the same conversations like when you grow up really poor and you're white, you don't see things that you might see outside of that space. 

Like you said, a lot of these white people who grew up poor, they grow up thinking racism doesn't exist because we all have the same—I'm air quoting right here—“the same struggle” and I had to help him through understanding that even though he was seeing the same struggle because of where he lived that these others were, I wasn't. I saw a different struggle because of where I lived was more upper class and it's more that we couldn't really afford to live there, but my Mom did anyway kind of thing. 

But helping him get through understanding that he was given a lot more opportunities or not denied, I guess, as many opportunities because he's white. That's been a really big struggle and it also gave me a lot of perspective on how people like I grew up with, how they end up on the other side of this mental battle about these sort of topics and not understanding that they're not – it's so hard to word this stuff. But it's like it's not that they have all of this privilege. He doesn't have financial privilege, he doesn't have a lot of privileges, but he does have the privilege of being white and it doesn't negate the fact that he has struggled in other ways. It's just that it's different and in helping him understand that, he now understands why things like classism and racism are so closely intertwined.

JEROME: The way we say it is that with white privilege, it's not saying that your life is more difficult or you don't have trials and tribulations. What it’s stating is that you will not ever have to have race be a component of those trials and tribulations. For instance, I live in Nashville and being a minority, as a Black man, you have a 24% chance higher getting a harsher treatment from the police here in Nashville and Nashville on the Metro side is super Blue. But then as you get further in for that, like most Southern places, cities are Blue, suburbs get redder and redder the further you get. Pretty much every 10 miles, it gets Red there. So that's like how we try to explain it. 

When we say white privilege, it's not about, “Oh, your life can't be hard because you're privileged.” No, what we're saying is that hey, you have the privilege that no one's going to assume that by the color of your skin, how your hair looks, or how your name appears that you are a horrible person or they’re not going to treat you by that, right?

CHER: Yeah.

JEROME: I understand because I come from a poor background as well and so, when you've had to try – I'm in the South so I'm surrounded by Republicans left and right. I'm like the lone Biden person on my street. It is horrifying. Biden one is a nightmare like, they were so sad. It was like ghost town here. I enjoyed this year. I'm not going to lie, but—I'm sorry I'm being mean a lot. 

But we try to do the explanations to my Southern peers. It's always about hell yes, we absolutely did grow up in the same schools and stuff, but then guess what happened when we started applying for the same jobs? Do you know how your dad was able to put a word in for you or you didn't have to get word in, you didn't have –? Once you graduated high school, you were able to get a job at FedEx and FedEx, without your degree, they quickly ramped you up to get into corporate, they did all these programs, you quickly got a mentor and things of that nature. Well, guess what? I have people who – there are people who look just like you, they've been in FedEx 10, 15 years, and they've never had any of those opportunities and they're still working in the warehouse. 

These are the problems or those things that are problematic within our culture or how I like to – I tell people well, my first experience while being in tech, when it came to racism and things of that nature, where there was just a person who, regardless of what you did wrong, you could not speak truth to power and I spoke truth to power and I ended up having situations—we've talked about it, Cher—where hey, I'm in there meeting the President of the United States and they gave me a paragraph, not a paragraph but a sentence in the news, a story about White House Demo Day because this guy was mad at me and no one else wanted to piss him off. This dude is not the mayor or something, just guy in a startup incubator. This is a huge deal, but that's where racism and white privilege comes into play. If I was a white guy invited to meet the President of United States, would you really take this person's feelings into account the same way versus it being me? 

So I definitely understand the hardship of trying to explain it. It's an emotional thing because deep down you know that this person is good, they just don't understand and they’re feeling attacked or accosted as if they did something wrong. We're trying to say, “You're not saying that you are perpetuating or other system, we are saying that you benefit from the system and for you to be conscious of it so that way, you can see these things and be able to call them out or stop them when you see them.” Not saying that all of you white persons, you’re default horrible. Like no, it's just saying that hey, there's a privilege there. We're going to show you the dog whistles of that privilege so when you see it in play, you can do something about it.” See something, say something. 

That's how I've explained it to people. I just wanted to throw that out there. I feel like that's an easier way to do it in a manner where people don't get offended as such, especially to the loved ones. I’m like, “Girl, I can't.” Your conversation had to be tough because this is a person and you're going to be raising kids with and stuff so there had to be a tough conversation.

CHER: It really was and it wasn't just one conversation, it's been so many. But I do want to touch really fast on, I think it's important that when you're having these conversations, especially with your family or close friends, people that you aren't willing to just wash your hands off and be like, “I can't with this.” I think you have to know that person and you have to use what you know about them to try to help them understand what you're trying to say in a way that like you said. You don't want to offend them, you don't want it to turn into a fight because you care about this person, but also, you need them to understand what it is that they're not seeing. 

So the thing with him, this exercise I went through, is we talked about how living in the suburbs, even the really, really poor suburbs of Seattle, you're still dealing with mostly white people because you are in the vast majority there and especially in the 90s. Did we know some Black people? Yes. But was that the majority? No. Okay, so now the lifestyle that we grew up with, like who are we mostly around? White people. Okay, who are we getting in trouble with the law with? White people. 

But when you went to prison in the state of Washington, what did you see? Not the majority Black people know, but a lot more Black people and I didn't have to tell him that. He said it and I was like, “So if you and one of your Black friends or partners got caught doing something, committing some crime.” I was like, “If I just ask you honestly right now,” I was like, “Who do you think is going to get a harsher sentence even if you both said you did the same thing?” and he's like, “Well, he would,” and I'm like, “And why do you think that?” He's like, “Because I've seen it,” and I was like, “Is that because of the color of his skin” and he's like, “Well, yeah, I guess.” 

That was the thing that completely shifted our conversation because I used an experience that he was able to ascertain yes, I've witnessed this. I just never thought about it in the way that you are framing it to make me see that I am getting more benefit of the doubt than this person, even when I'm feeling like I'm getting no benefit of the doubt.

REIN: Yeah. This is really important to me and this is sort of what I was trying to get at a little bit before, which is some people deal with a few of these experiences and they discover empathy, like you did, and then some people don't. So the question for me is how can we get more of the former? And I think that what you're doing is you're giving us an example of how that can work and that's really important.

CHER: Yeah. I totally agree.

REIN: Also, it seems like to me as well, that once that happens, it's like a light switch turns on and that empathy is sort of self-reinforcing. Once you start seeing the world in this way, you see more of it.

CHER: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's totally like self-reinforcing for sure.

REIN: Yeah, and so for me, the question is really, what are the things that work to flip that switch on for people? And I think it's different for different people, but I think that there are things that you can learn that make it more likely.

CHER: I think that as far as the lessons that I've learned in terms of as a Mom trying to teach my daughter empathy in this particular situation with my husband and then also with myself, is finding the space where you can see yourself in that particular situation. Even if you can't put yourself in that person's shoes, see yourself in that situation because of the way that your brain works.

When you are visualizing things or imagining things, your brain can't necessarily differentiate between the real emotions you feel because of things that you're actually experiencing and the emotions you're feeling because of things that you're pretending to experience. You actually learn… It's like Pavlovian, like you learn those emotional responses in those situations and I think that that is the key is finding those spaces where you yourself or your loved ones or friends or people you're mentoring can see themselves in those situations so that they actually are feeling those emotions.

REIN: And I think he did a thing, which is really important, which is that you didn't just make a general argument about how Black people are treated worse. You told a specific story that that person could relate to and like you were saying, activated their mirror neurons, activated their empathy.

CHER: Yeah, and that's why it's my superpower, right? 

REIN: I would agree. 

John: Yeah.

CHER: I learned something really interesting the other day, which is that I've been reading a lot about witchcraft, which sounds really out there, but anybody that has followed me for a long time or knows me knows that I need everything to have a scientific explanation. 

So sometimes when I read about things that I don't necessarily believe in, sometimes it's just for historical understanding or curiosity or whatever, but in this case, I was really curious where this idea of a witch or witchcraft came from and I came along that there was this word. Witch comes from wicca, but witch is related to the pagan religion. But also, there was another wica, which only had one C in it, which may also be from where witch comes from. If you look at a lot of other translations of witch in other countries or older countries, I should say, they all stem from this original word wica, W-I-C-A, which is supposedly from very old Irish language that meant wise and so, witchcraft was wisdom craft. 

If you think about it with all of these other translations of the word witch that literally translates to “knowing more” and the fact that it used to be more about herbalism and medicine, and really, therapy like counseling services. I just think that it's like this innate wisdom and really what it comes down to from everything that I have learned reading about all of this is that it had to deal with a combination of humility and curiosity and empathy. I think that that is the key to finding peace and health within yourself and then also, harmoniously existing with other people while still standing up for the things that you think are just and morally right.

REIN: Yeah. It's also like it's easy in hindsight to look back on that and say, “Well, look at all the stupid things that they were doing,” but if you think about the people who persecuted the witches, they were people who literally believed that prayer worked.

CHER: Exactly. So like… Well, I won't even get into all of that, but the whole idea is well, if I look at my family and a lot of them are very religious and they definitely believe that prayer works. But when I talk about, because that's just not something I necessarily believe in the terms that they believe in, but I do believe that the kind of energy—and I don't mean like a pseudo energy. I mean really, the things you do in the world; the way you treat people, the way you talk to people and even just the thoughts you have. Those things, they matter because they change people's behavior around you. They change animals’ behavior around you, depending on what kind of energy you're putting out into the world. 

I think that any other form of trying to manifest goodness, by literally just trying to do good things and think good things and be good to people, it's all the same. So it is frustrating to look back at the persecution of witches and just see that they were all really doing the same thing, but one side, maybe even sometimes both sides, couldn't accept that the other person was doing it in a way that was different than them. Even though, ultimately, they have the same intentions.

John: I also love the little detail that the Icelandic word for computer is translated literally as “number witch.”

CHER: I did not know that and I love it.

John: We're getting close to reflection time. So my reflection for today is one that definitely has cropped up a number of times on the show over the last while now, which is the incredible power that we can have as people when we claim our story rather than denying it, rather than pretending we're just like everybody else. Even when those stories are horrible and traumatic and unimaginable for some people, that being able to be honest about that in a public way is incredibly empowering for oneself as well as for all the other people that can see you do that. 

I think your story is another example of the kind of power that you can get from that, which isn't to say that people should have these experiences just because it makes them better or anything like that. But just when you come from that diversity and you've had enough support to get to where we are right now, it can be very inspiring and be a great way to connect with other people.

REIN: I think my reflection is that there is a huge potential for empathy here because these people have quite a bit in common and it's really just about unlocking that potential that already exists. 

CHER: I think my reflection is along the same lines and just the empathy is pretty much, I feel like it's the glue that holds everything together and I think you just threw this conversation and just reinforced how important it is and how interwoven it is to literally everything, whether you're trying to be successful in making some application for other people. If you start thinking about who it's for, instead of how do I make this thing successful like how do I make my target user’s experience successful, then it's likely that your application is going to be successful or that you are going to be successful. So reframing everything that you think about in terms of what you can do for other people is the key to literally everything. 

JEROME: All right, so I guess, it's me. My reflection has really been on the skills transfer of experience in this talk. We've talked about how adversity helps you come through the problems. We've talked about hot sauce and building hot sauce from end-to-end, or mixing two favorite hot sauces to try to get a different flavor profile, or a flavor profile you missed. We’ve talked about engineering. 

But the thing that I really loved about this conversation and from hot sauce to rap to code is that there have been little nuggets that link each one to the other and show no, it's more of a interwoven story over able to share that even though, it looks chaotic and it looks different, these things are all connected on some level and that's why a lesson, I think as engineers and people that we can bring into our daily lives. 

Instead of looking at what makes these things different, let's look at the thing that connects these two things, let's look at the thread that connects this to that. Even when we're trying to share stories to educate our family members on things that they might not agree with, let's look at the thread that connects it and pull it to unravel things we don't think and reveal totally new truths. That's something that I really enjoyed with this talk. 

JOHN: All right, wonderful conversation everybody. 

CHER: Yeah, you too. It was nice talking to all three of you.