🎙Big Tech’s AI OverHype: The Social Impacts of AI

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I am so excited to host my friend and AI expert, Dr Linda Berberich, on the podcast this month! We dove into the intersectionality of AI and its impacts on society, especially marginalized communities. We spoke of the real harms that AI poses to society, but also how technology can be used to augment human behavior and learning. Our discussion delved into:

• What is AI behind the hype and media's misconceptions
• The challenges of consent and regulation in the digital space
• The repercussions of AI on creativity and authenticity in society
• Ethical implications of technology – facial recognition technology and data privacy

I especially loved hearing about Linda's experiences in Big Tech and how her own experiences of misogyny reflect the broader historical context of misogyny and white supremacy in the development of AI. We end our conversation on a hopeful note, discussing the launch of ChatBlack GPT last month. I hope you enjoy the conversation!

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About Dr. Linda Berberich, PhD (she/her)

Dr Linda Berberich, Founder and Chief Learning Architect at Linda B. Learning, a consulting company based in the greater Seattle area, focused on innovation in learning design and learning technology. With a 30-year track record of designing learning experiences and technologies that revolutionize how people learn, her expertise helps tech leaders develop innovative learning products in record time.

• Learn more about Linda B. Learning
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• Follow Linda B. Learning on LinkedIn

About Sam & Roots of Change

Sam Chavez is a storyteller, strategist, and curious human. She founded Roots of Change, a storytelling agency for activists, non-profits, and political organizations in 2020. Sam is a queer, white, LatinX activist who’s passionate about a livable planet & equitable societies.

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📖 Read Today’s Interview 👩🏻‍🏫

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Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — Hey, y'all. This is Sam from the Roots of Change podcast. And I am so excited to have my friend, Dr. Linda Berberich on, who is the founder and chief learning architect at Linda Bee Learning and is an innovative learning technology specialist. Linda, welcome.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — Thank you for having me, Sam. I'm so happy to be here and chatting with you today.

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — Yeah, me too! We are getting into AI this month and so I'm really excited to dig into this with you because you really understand like the intersectionality of AI and its impacts on our society and especially people who are marginalized. So I would love to just start a little bit with your background and then we can get into our AI conversation.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — Yeah, yeah. So I moved to the United States in 1991 to go to graduate school in West Virginia. It was a full ride kind of thing, a behavior analysis program. And back then I was, as now, I was super interested in human behavior and how technology can be used to augment human behavior. Development, human change, learning, all the things. I was one of those kids that always caught on to stuff really, really fast. And so my teacher would say, oh, go help Johnny. He's struggling. Go help him. And so it always occurred to me, wouldn't it be cool if rather than that, that the curriculum that you learn in school would just adapt to you? So me being the kid who is wicked smart, can you just, why do I have to go up to the grade four classroom where my brother is and embarrass him, why can't the curriculum just adapt to me? That was always something in my head.

Then, of course, as I got a little older, my father and I would have conversations together. He would say, well, you realize you have to have standards in place. In order to create something adaptive like that, it has to be standardized. He goes, Linda, there's no such thing as standard curriculum. He says that as someone who was born in Germany and immigrated to Canada. He He was born in Germany in 1931, he immigrated to Canada in the mid-1950s, before I was born. So he had a very different perspective of world events and world histories, obviously, than what I learned as a kid growing up in British Columbia in the 70s and 80s, and then even having conversations with my mom, who grew up She is of the similar descent as my dad, but was actually born in Canada in Saskatchewan. So she learned about the world in the 1950s in Saskatchewan part of Canada. So even being in different provinces, we learn different things about history, even Canadian history. Like for example, if I threw out Louis Riel, most Americans would not know who I'm talking about, but Louis Riel had a different interpretation. If you had learned about him in the 1950s, in Saskatchewan versus me learning about him in the 1970s in British Columbia. And in fact, my first encounter with him was when I was seven years old, Canadian Children's Magazine. I'd published a poem, and there happened to be an article about Louis Riel in there. And so I was reading the Children's Magazine because of my poem and seeing how that was there, but then I was reading about the rest of it, right? And Louis Riel was in there. And so I told my mom about, oh, I was just reading about this Canadian hero named Louis Riel. And she's all like, I think you read that wrong, because I was only seven. Here's my mom gaslighting her seven-year-old daughter. Awesome. Thank you. I appreciate it. It wasn't until I actually showed her the article, because again, if you know Canadian history, that's where Louis Riel was executed, was in Regina, Saskatchewan. She learned about him as a villain. I learned about him as a hero. Therefore, at seven years old, I realized, history is written differently depending on who's the victor and who's the not victor. And so there's lots of things that are from my personal background that you would never be able to tell just from looking at me that inform the way that I think today. And I know you can relate to that, Sam. I can, yes.

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — Yeah, and I think that's where I'm so fascinated by AI because, and I will step back, I'm not fascinated by the hype of AI, but fascinated by the potential of what AI could be from a supportive humanitarian perspective. Absolutely.

And so I wanted to kind of start our AI conversation with kind of a lay of the land. I know everyone has a different idea of what AI is. There's a lot of different disinformation about AI. So can you give us just a brief explanation of what AI is and what you would say the state of AI is today as we're speaking on July 2024?

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — Sure, I'll give you my hard, no-holds-barred opinion on what AI is. Is a marketing term and was introduced as such in the 1950s. What we're talking about here is machine learning. Machine learning, as we know it currently, is statistical learning. Does it need to be that way? No, absolutely not. In fact, AI is not new at all. If we take you back to the 90s and you remember the times before the internet was widely available, You would remember Gary Kasparov playing chess against Big Blue. Big Blue is IBM's AI, right? But here's the thing about that. Is most things in life like playing chess? Right. It's not, right? There's all kinds of diversity of human behavior. Not all of it is based on probability, chance, outcome, not even chance outcome. If you know chess really, really well, you know that there's a finite number of moves that can be made and there's better moves that can be made at any time. So it's really not a good model for modeling all of what encompasses human behavior. And it's also rife with bias, depending on who is putting together the datasets that are informing this AI. That's what my dad meant about standardized curriculum, by the way. And by the way, I also point this out, my dad refused to have the internet when the internet came out. I did have an Apple IIe computer very, very early on, both myself, it was actually my older brother's computer, but I taught myself how to code on it, but no internet. My dad had a very big problem with that because my dad was a very wise person. So that's a little bit about what AI really is versus machine learning, which it actually is.

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. Because my next question is like, what does the media get wrong about AI? And like, I, as someone who has been in the marketing and advertising industry for over 10 I have seen AI before AI happens. And and we see how all of the the data that they're collecting and the information about us and our browsing behavior, the words that are coming out of our phone and microphones are all informing our online experiences. And I think a lot of people really miss that because the hype is so hypey. Yes. So like, yeah, what else do they miss about AI right now?

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — So you bring up a really good point about talking about the browser and the advent of cloud computing. What the advent of cloud computing also brought with it was the Internet of Things. So we're not just talking about screens anymore, and we're not just talking about phones anymore. We're talking about any kind of device that has internet access affiliated with it, and whether or not we even know if that's been turned on. If you don't watch, if you don't follow Marcus Brownlee, I always say do because he gives really insightful tech reviews. And he recently talked about Apple flipping the switch on so it could be able to record things. And let me give you another example that you may not have thought of, right? So we've talked about the microphones and these in-home devices that are available to you, Alexa and so forth. But have you ever thought about your gaming headsets? So when you're doing virtual reality or extended reality, so if you've got like, say, you've got the MetaQuest Pro on your head, right? When you're getting used to what is the boundaries or the parameters around what is gonna be your working space, that's your working space as the user. Guess what else? Anything else that is captured while you are in the headset is data that is captured in mind as well. So there's a lot of, that's one of the things I really take issue with These platforms were created to collect data, basically to extract from us. And I'm not about being extractive. Mine is all about, if you're going to use our data, how about compensating us for that? And first of all, how about letting us consent and truly know what we're consenting to? Because as I alluded to before, if you're just flipping on a switch, if I am trying to turn my microphone off when I leave the room and it is not off, we have a problem. Because the off button suggests to me that it's off and that I am not consenting to being recorded when I believe my recording device is turned off. That's very problematic. But similarly, whenever we have conversations on these platforms like we were forced to do when the big COVID happened and the big shutdown happened, all of the data that is collected in these online environments are video which can be used to train deep fake? Our audio, which can be used to train deep fake? Did you consent to that? And it's like, oh no, it's a cyber attack. It's the bad guys. Is it? Is it? Do you tell?

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — No, I 100% am on board. And I'm like, where do we go from here? Because there's so much to talk about there. I mean, the first is regulation. And the legality of AI in general. I mean, for me as a creative person, a writer, I went to film school. I do not want to see any of my output given to tech companies to do with and frankly manipulate there's no real like set of standards because of the deregulation that we've seen in our political forces. So it's really kind of a societal wide harm because we don't have the structures.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — Well, I would say... Yeah. I would say in the United States, that is definitely the case. It is absolutely the wild, wild west out here. In Europe, in the EU, at least there's a GDRP, right? So there's at least that. But then again, look at that carefully. Who is benefiting from that and who's being marginalized by that set of guidelines? Every time a set of guidelines is put into place, the questions you have to ask yourself is, Who decides what the guidelines are, and who is marginalized as a consequence of those guidelines? If you're not able to answer those questions satisfactorily, are you really building responsibly? I think that those are absolutely big plays. I think that the big problem with the Wild Wild West being here is because also big tech is here.

Not all of them. Most of the major players are based in the United States. And then, of course, that gives us the battle of the United States versus the world, you know, and then that's where does how does that sound familiar? You know, America, you know, globalization.

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — I mean, we're talking about China right now. Anything that our politicians are saying, it's all about tech and business.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) —Okay, so to be fair, though, there is some validity. If you've seen Coded Bias came out, I want to say 2020 on Netflix. And yeah, you should be concerned about what's going on in China, because there's a lot of people who are doing really interesting things with face recognition, with voice synthesis and voice recognition. And I would encourage people if you haven't seen that film, watch it, because that was out It was released in 2020, meaning that, you know, you know this as someone who builds films, that means it was in production prior to that. They show on the ground footage from China and what I refer to as the harmony model, even back then. And here we are with the TikTok battle that we have, and of course, TikTok being a very, very huge player in social media and not American, it all becomes, you know, a game of connect the dots, friends.

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — Well, and I think I want to go back to, to the platforms part of it, because I think what is so challenging is like, there's no consent to using the data, but we don't really have choices from an online perspective right now to live outside of these platforms. Um, and so we're kind of forced, like I had a whole conversation. Do I want to post this video of myself on Instagram? Because I know what they're doing with those videos. And do I, am I on there at all, or am I just off completely? And that seems to be the only choice for a lot of people right now.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — That, and that is exactly the conundrum that these platforms want you to be in. It's like, yes, you have the benefit of being able to reach a broader audience. Do you? Or does suppression ever occur? Pin on that, pin in that. But then also the fact that your video is out there, but even if your video isn't on there, so Sam, I'll give you an example. So I created a series. I used to be an exercise master trainer. I was on TV shows. I have professional videos, whatever. I published a series of videos for figure skaters. They were produced on DVD and I was shocked to find my entire DVD freely available online. And easy to find, easy to find. I did absolutely not consent to that. And so to your point, your digital content, which you're getting royalties from, obviously, that was not a self-published move.

Coach's Choice, they're a professional publishing company that focuses on athletic conditioning and training athletes, and that's what those were. But now I don't get royalties on those because someone decided to put it online and give it away for free, and I didn't consent to that. And it's not like we don't have a model. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Napster came out and how that actually was used to revolutionize music. And if you even think about just music alone, and music is just one aspect, and then if we put on the whole piece of, you know, we can recreate people. Like, we can do propaganda so well now. Like, compared to what was available during World War II, compared to now, most people can't tell the difference. And so they ask me, well, how do you know that's a deepfake? I'm like, like, I'm going to say this on the internet so that you can then, you know, build a better bot. You know, like, no, no, I, if I'm going to build a better, it's going to be your bots against my bots. I'm not going to tell you what my bots know how to do that yours don't. I mean, duh.

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — I think the challenge with that too is I'm like thinking about the Hollywood strikes and seeing that trajectory. Like we saw during those negotiations, the conversation around AI, but we really weren't touching the surface of like what the reality really could be. And now we're seeing like, yes, people won during that strike, but they didn't win everything because there is a huge slowdown in film production, TV production. There's going to be a lot of like crappy, crappy content on these services. Yeah. And like the thing that really angers me about that is we do lose out on us as a society. Of course we do lose out on creativity and authenticity.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — It makes me so sad. I liken it back to my fitness background. I used to love teaching at the boutique gyms, the ones that were a little quirky, a little special. I remember in the late 90s with the advent of 24-hour fitness and the chain gyms and what I call the McDonaldization of fitness, where you're basically offering not just a change in experience, but even the classes that you teach. Okay. So Sam, this is a real thing that pre-choreographed, pre-formatted classes. So someone else packages it up and says, here, just, just memorize it and perform rather than, you know, when I taught fitness classes, it's about you know, recognizing the people that show up in your class, you know, introducing yourself, getting to know them, what their background is, if they had any experience with the format before, if they have any injuries, contraindications, you know, that you do that quickly in like two minutes, like any seasoned fitness instructor will do that. That's the first two minutes of your class. And in fact, I was an alpha you know, master trainer, that's one of the certifying bodies. If you wanted to get app-certified, you probably were app-certified by me or someone like me, right, who came in and said, no, you need to do this in a class. This is how you teach safe and effective exercise-based group classes, right? So as we saw these pre-formatted classes come in, we saw people were just performing. And that's what we're seeing now is all this performative, can I swear? Yeah, go ahead. All this performative bullshit that no one really needs. When people ask me about bullshit, I always refer them back to the original text because I do mean it the way that Frankfurt wrote about it. So if you're not familiar with Frankfurt's on bullshit, yeah, read that and then come back to me about what you think about the current state of generative AI.

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — I love that and I will definitely put a pin on that and go in there and do some more exploration. I want to like, let's just get to the heart of the matter because we're kind of dancing around it, but it's all very misogynistic, very white supremacist. Like, how did we get here? why? Can you just explain a little bit of that in terms of like how AI is Well, that would that would require a brief history of the development of the tech industry in the United States. So don't worry, I've got my book right here ready to go.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — Well, just to just to talk. So I did mention about IBM and Big Blue and that piece of it. But ultimately, I mean, most of us who worked in tech, so I should just preface that by saying I've worked in the tech industry first here in Seattle and then working and then transitioning to Silicon Valley about 2008 when I first started working for Sun Microsystems. And so I've worked in big tech for a very long time. And one of the things that, you know, you do know the tech bros. They're a reason that they're called tech bros because they are a species in and unto themselves, right? And if you are not a part, like one of the other things that I think is really interesting being a femme presenting person is that I always got told that there's a term that's called high-tech hot, okay? So if you're a femme presenting person, if you're a woman, you don't have to be hot. It's good enough to be high-tech hot. Okay, so the hot is here, high tech hot is here because you're a girl and you're talking to me, okay? So as someone who was actually deemed hot and not just high tech hot, you can imagine, and plus, I look like a lot of things that I'm not, I got harassed a lot on the job. I think the first time I got hurt, I don't even remember, maybe 2001 when I was working for the National Guard on a military project, And I was like the second in command there. So there's only one person who is above me. And of course, that's the dude who has to sexually harass me. Right. So that's the dude. So throughout my career, I experienced a ton of sexual harassment and even worse. And I think this is even more insidious, Sam. And you definitely see this. I post this online all the time. What I'm referring to is intellectual harassment. Some people call it mansplaining, but quite frankly, it's not just cis men who do it. So to me, it's intellectual harassment. And that's this notion that you're not technical enough. You don't know what you're talking about. And this unnecessary bullshit gaslighting that you experience as a person who's not part of the tech bro club, You were completely invalidated, no matter what you do. I wrote my first program when I was 14 years old on an Apple IIe that was literally an AI program. I had a problem I needed to solve. I was a theater kid. I needed to run lines. And I was driving all my friends crazy, driving my parents crazy. So I wrote a computer program to run lines with me. And so all I had to do was feed it in the script, and what was the character who was prompting me, and then who was I? And so we would just go back and forth, and that's how I memorized lines. And actually, that's how I got into university as an undergrad, got a theater scholarship. Because I had my nines down pat. I always had my lines, right? So that was why. And that's how I always teach people about tech now is like, don't write tech because the tech is cool. Figure out a problem you wanna solve and let technology help you solve that problem. So yeah, the tech bros have developed, it's very much a white supremacist patriarchal approach and that everyone else doesn't know what they're talking about. And really what we're seeing with generative AI is just simply an amplification of that voice. Yeah, absolutely. So I should tell you one other story too, because this one's actually really interesting. So back in was 2022, actually approached by OpenAI to go work for them. So August just been going through some horrible stuff. I got laid off from the job that I loved. And then my father, who I'm very, very close to, had passed away. So not even two weeks after that, which is, of course, oh, are you listening, guys? Because Linda's in a vulnerable moment at the moment. So yeah, I got a headhunter, an executive recruiting firm asked me to interview, went through this whole loop interviewing there. And I'd been following OpenAI for a while, I've been following the developments and I was pretty concerned about the Harmony model. I've already alluded to that, because again, I saw it in is 2022, years later. And so when I inquired about that to one of the, I think she was maybe 30 years old, product manager that I was talking to, She told me, I don't know what I'm talking about and I don't know how to get along with people. And yeah, so I'm like, okay, that's in an interview loop. So I, of course, I contact the recruiter and I contacted the person who the headhunter got me into the loop. And I just basically said, please remove me from consideration. And immediately got to work about thinking, okay, that could have been a setback, but let's make this an opportunity. If they're gonna do the harmony model, what's the opposite of that? What's a different approach? Fast forward a couple of years. And the book Unmasking AI by Dr. Joy Bulianwini is released. And we're looking at a book tour, right? And so she's released all of these places that she's going to be visiting. And I noticed that Seattle wasn't on the list. And I thought, you know, that's weird because we have a really big AI ecosystem here in Seattle. There's a lot of tech here, right? So I reached out to Dr. Joy and I said, would you mind coming to Seattle? I think it would be really cool if we got You came up to the UW, we got Dr. Emily Bender to interview you. You could tease the book. I think your energy would be really good together. Have some other events. There's lots of people who'd be interested in having you come. And Dr. Joy, ask and you shall receive. So shortly there, so that would have been November, 2023. Shortly after there, I connect with this young woman in Seattle who I thought was really smart and really talented and really scrappy named Erin Reddick. And we were conversing, going back and forth over LinkedIn. And I'm like, she's in Seattle. I need to meet her. I need to talk with her because this is awesome. And so we'd been communicating back and forth. I'd mentioned to her that Dr. Joy was coming to town. Dr. Joy happened to be an idol of hers, someone that she really wanted to meet. So I'm like, hey, she's looking for someone to pick her up at the airport. Erin being the person that she is, she's not one to miss an opportunity. She picked up Dr. Joy from the airport. They form a relationship. She took her to the glass museum, did a little bit of sightseeing with her, ended up at one of her other, I think it was through one of the bookstores, local bookstores, where Dr. Joy was doing a talk. It was before the one at the UW. Dr. Joy actually called Erin on stage to tease what she was building, which, of course, was Chat Black GPT. And so I was sitting here in my home office watching from afar and I happened to be on the live stream and I happened to be recording the live stream. And so when I mentioned to Erin, I said that you were awesome on stage. She's all like, she goes, what are you talking about? I'm on the live stream right now. She's like, what? And so of course I sent her the link. And so she was able to tease that part. And because I did that, I said to her, I go, are you planning on being up at the UW event on Tuesday? And she goes, are you going to be there? And I said, yes, I am super busy. I have class at four o'clock that I need, you know, astrology class. But anyway, that's another story. But I can be there for the book event because I really want to meet Dr. Joy in person and just, you know, have that conversation, let her know I'm the one who said come to Seattle. And also, you know, Emily Bender's there. I mean, you don't want to miss that, you know, it was just such an intimate, cool event. And I hadn't been up to the UW in forever. So we go up there. That was the first time I met Aaron Reddick in person, met Dr. Joy in person, got Dr. Joy's autograph on my copy of Unmasking AI. But more than anything, it was connecting with Aaron. And Aaron, like a lot of people are very extractive in the way that they work with me. Like they'll pick my brain, let's go out for coffee and like just chitchat and get caught up. In the meantime, they're just like in there, okay, what do you know? What do you know? What do you know? And it's all like, you know, really I have, a consulting offer, if that's what you wanted to do, you could have just booked that and paid me. But no, you chose to be extractive. So cool, bro. Anyway, Erin was straight up. She just said, look, I know you're expensive to work with because when you get quality, speed, what's the other variable, right? It's money, right? I'm not cheap.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — But because she was honest with me and she was so gritty and determined to build something better than what was already out there, we started having conversations. She'd already started her beta. She'd already started to build the original chatbot GPT, which is freely available, by the way, the beta version, on top of OpenAI's platform. She built it on top of chatGBT.

I know other people have said this to it, too, so I'm not the only one who said it, too. I go, you know you won't own the data, the IP, any of it if you're building on top. Plus, worse than that, you're also feeding into the machine that way. You really need to have your own GPT. You really need to have it in your own closed system in order for it to be truly your vision of what it's going to be. And that was, yeah, that was, gosh, I don't know, February. By April, I was sitting on her board and on June 19th, the MVP of Chat Black GPT launched and it's out testing in our community right now. And I'm very proud to say that is not built on anybody else's platform, that's built on our platform. So yeah, so I sit on her advisory board. That's how I can help. That's how I can, you know, sometimes that help is just when she's, you know, taking a speaking engagement to speak in Florida all the way across the country, only to find out it's a complete sham and they're trying to, you know, whatever. There's lots of things that happen on a founder's journey. And especially with Erin, who's been very much about doing this of her own accord. She's got a deep tech background, like she's only 30 years old, but she's been working in tech for a very long time. And she's been an entrepreneurial minded person for a very long time. So Erin is, the golden child of the kind of clients that I work with. And I'm so proud of her, of her team, of how she's built her empire thus far. And that's just the first one that we released. We've got more coming down the pipe. I'm so excited about the direction. So to your point, Sam, where there's control, there's counter control. And it's just about understanding, you know, when do you infiltrate and do it from the inside? When do you build up from the outside? And is it possible to do both? And in a lot of cases, like I said, there's benefit to being able to pass too. It's not just, it sucks and everyone's saying, oh, white woman, blah, blah, blah. It's like, first of all, no, no. Light complected, yes, but sorry about it. That's genetics, right? But white woman, absolutely not.

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — Chat Black GPT is just such a perfect example of that dichotomy of like, we do not have to build it the way big tech does. And Chat Black GPT is like, that is what it can be. Like we can build this with We are. We are.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — We are building. There we go. Yes. We are building it with good data. Chad Black GPT is just one example. Latimer is out there. Sage is out there. Poe is out there. Pi is out there. And there's many, many more. The Black AI think tank has been popping since January. So please, there's a lot going on. And the message that I'd just like to tell people is, You can do it. We can do it. Let's go." That's part of my job too. It's like, yes, I'm very technical. Yes, I can help you move your prototype to an MVP, but I'm also going to be your biggest cheerleader along the way. I will do what you need to do. I always say like this, right? Have a conversation with me. You want to rip any of that? You want to rip some audio? You want to rip some video? This is my gift to you. Do it use your skills to be able to build your dream.

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — I'm about it Yeah Well, that was perfect And I think we are gonna end on that for from like the free version of this But I think we're gonna have a little bit of an after-party after this so for any paid subscribers you can keep listening and we'll keep chatting and going deep because I do have a few more questions about just what we do technically and like how we use AI and what we can use it for good and when we shouldn't use it. So to wrap up this portion of the conversation, I have one final question that I ask everyone, which is, how do you stay sane in this wild world?

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — I am all about finding your own joy. And believe me, if you don't know how to make it, you know, RuPaul said it best. You know what I'm going to say, right?

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — I hope so!

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — If you can't love yourself, how the hell are you going to love someone else? Can I get an amen?

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — Amen! We are binge watching RuPaul all Pride season long here at my house. So, yes.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — So I always say, you know, RuPaul is when people ask me, what should I do to celebrate your folks? I say, OK, there's a couple of things. So absolutely, if you haven't watched Drag Race, please do yourself a favor and watch Drag Race. All of it. Go back to the very first season because the evolution is so cool. But also because I'm because I'm a person who's been on the planet for many, many moons. Go back and watch Queer as Folk, because that series came out when I was in my 20s, and a lot of those questions, a lot of those scenarios are still in play today. In fact, we've gone backwards in some of them.

So I find my joy. I am a competitive figure skater because I sucked at figure skating. Maybe I still suck at figure skating, but I enjoy it. I love it. I love the feel of skating. I love how it feels in my body. And I know this because we couldn't do it during COVID for a while and I missed it so much. So figure skating is a big one for me. Gardening, like literally grounding yourself. Growing my own food.

You've got to find the things that give you joy. So I remember people have ripped on me for the things that I find fun, because people will do that. People will try to steal your joy. But your joy is for you. It's not for anybody else. So as long as you can hold on to that and keep it dear, you're golden.

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — I love that. Thank you. Um, I will, I'm going to hold that with me. Um, this is, we're recording this right before, um, pride weekend. So yeah, here too. Right. Watch some drag race. Uh, we just watched Paris is burning. Oh, love that.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — Well, that's, that's like the prelude. So that's like the pre-work before you watch drag race, watch that, watch, um, pose poses. Another good one to watch.

There's so many. I mean, you know, like do some home, do your own homework. There's so much out there.

Sam Chavez at The Roots of Change Agency (she/her) — OK. The final message for today is Queer Your Life by Sam and Linda. And yeah, well, we'll talk to you again soon. Awesome.

Dr. Linda Berberich (she/her) — Thanks, Sam.