ASHOOH: Thank you so much. Welcome, everybody to today's Council on Foreign Relations meeting Conference on Diversity in International Affairs concurrent session on building your brand. I'm Jessica Ashooh and I'll be presiding over today's discussion. We're joined today by two fascinating women. Hagar Chemali is founder and CEO of Greenwich Media Strategies, which she founded after a twelve-year career in the U.S. government that included stints in the White House National Security Council, the U.S. delegation to the UN, and the Department of the Treasury. Latoya Peterson is cofounder and chief experience officer at Glow Up Games. A storytelling technologist, she's also the founder and editor of racialicious.com, a Technorati top 5000 blog. She's also worked in numerous traditional media roles, including at ESPN fusion and Al Jazeera English. Warm welcome to both of you.
Now we've got a relatively younger audience today, including many who are just starting out in the workforce or earlier in their careers and they're facing the notion of having to brand themselves for the first time. Hagar, I'll direct this one to you first, and then turn to you, Latoya. How do you go about starting a new personal brand? This is something that you've done recently with your transition from government, and could you speak to what are the key questions you need to ask yourself at the beginning of this endeavor?
CHEMALI: Sure, thank you. Thank you, Jessica, and it's great to be on this panel with Latoya, and I'm a huge fan of the Council on Foreign Relations and I'm just so happy to be here. This is a great question, because building a personal brand is very different than building a business brand, right? But both actually come with similar questions, which is ultimately identifying and answering who it is you are, what are you authentic to, and what is it that you want to achieve? And so I'll give you an example. When I left the U.S. government after twelve years—and that's all I knew, I left grad school, I went straight to the U.S. government, I was there for twelve years working in national security positions and public affairs positions—and I left, I had specific goals in mind. And that's really more career related, obviously. I had specific goals. I knew I wanted to do foreign policy commentary on the major networks and I knew I wanted to continue in my field, which was national security, public affairs, and so on.
So okay, identifying that was great but I what I needed to actually answer was, who am I? Who am I now? And what do I want to project to everybody else? And the things I wanted everybody to know, I wanted them to know that I was a foreign policy expert, I wanted people to understand that I had a unique voice, and that that voice was informed by not only my twelve years in government and the professional experience I had, but also my personal background as an American of Lebanese descent. So I wanted to make sure to carry that through and I wanted to make sure that in my business that I launched at that time, that the clients I wanted to help had a specific story to tell in the fields that I was an expert in, but that these were stories that were worth covering that weren't getting shared, so clients that I could be proud to work with and so on is what I mean.
My point is, I had to sit and try and ask myself, in order for me to position myself from somebody who was fighting for a mission and fighting for a cause, how do I transition myself to the private sector, where I'm not really that typical private sector run for the money type of gal? I still wanted to make sure I had a certain mission, but what was that mission? So I had to ask myself that question. And over time, I have found I that evolved, right, it doesn't mean that when you figure that out that you had to stick to it. I've done career switches since I launched a world news show a year ago, and that really required me to ask a lot of questions about, really about my personal brand and about the brand of my show, which was, who am I? And what do I want to give to the world? And what do I want people to understand from me?
ASHOOH: Thank you so much. Latoya, you have been building a brand in a very different space from Hagar. What's been your experience in that and what might be important for young people to know who maybe want to get more into the technology side of things?
PETERSON: Yeah, absolutely. So at this point, my career I've built a brand twice. So the first time I was more a journalist and policy expert and did a lot of stuff on race and gender in particular and how things work globally, and that was a very different world. Twitter was new when I got off that platform like these are new things. WordPress was new when we were doing blogging. So yeah, he's a top Technorati blogger, I don't think I've talked about Technorati in 10 years, I forgot that that was the thing that we used to look look at. But it's been ages and ages. And so back then it was all about if you were a person [inaudible], if you were a news professional, media professional, if you're doing foreign policy, the main platform was Twitter. You could have presence other places like Facebook and things like that but the main platforms will be Twitter, and a lot of it was around you as a curator, can I be the go to person when someone's looking for a good take on the news of the day? A smart opinion?
What goes on, and is filtering out all these different things. And so I built that brand then I kind of pivoted for a while sorting things out, started a game studio, very different world, and then had to rebrand, right, because suddenly it's like, oh, okay, well, yes, I still do these other things, too and I still care a lot about [inaudible] and I still talk a lot about foreign policy, especially in the game space, but there's all this disinformation running around and like people were recruiting and it's just it's a lot going on. So what we ended up doing was going okay, well, we need to rebrand for this space. But the world has both changed, right? Everything's a lot more visual now. So I came up in the time of blogs, Twitter, and things like that, and I think the foreign policy world is still more printed word focused and then also major broadcast focused and like, how do I get on [inaudible], how do I get on ABCs? The week? How do I get on 60 minutes, those types of places? Whereas now, in gaming, it's all about are you on Twitch? Are you on TikTok? Do you stream?
Everything is extremely video focused in a way that I never had to think about before and the attitude that you approach as someone on social media is very different. So even in the beginning of my time, it still seemed a little bit weird to kind of self disclose all the time, about your own personal stuff, it was very easy to maintain a separate professional brand. And now what you see is this definite push people want to get to know you and they want to see all the different sides of you, TikTok in particular is this whole other space of everybody's got their lace front off and you can just be whoever you are, and just prop up your TikTok and start getting this huge following and start working with big brands. It's a very different world. And it's a really tricky world, particularly for those of us who are in public service and for those of us who work on platforms. Like the things that you say and post on social media really do come back to bite you and come back to haunt you in many different ways. We're seeing Chrissy Teigan get dragged right now for stuff she said ten years ago, right, and so there's no one that's immune to this.
And so I think it's a lot tougher road to walk now because one, the level of visual literacy is so much higher, people are so much more curated, there's so much more branding that you have to do. Whereas before I was sitting behind [inaudible], whatever, and it's fine and now people expect you to almost have like a graphics package for yourself of what your brand looks like? What your Instagram grid looks like, making sure you're on all the different social channels. So it's very stressful. And then also when you deal with sensitive information and sensitive behaviors, being sure that what you're doing on social media is not, one, jeopardizing the future career prospects, the big one, and then two, jeopardizing your personal safety. I spent a lot of my career fighting white supremacy and online white supremacists, and so in gaming, we had GamerGate, there's [inaudible], and there's a lot that goes on around how people find you.
Good friends of mine, including Melissa Chan is also a term member here at CFR, she's been stalked by the Chinese government. There's a lot of stuff in terms of digital surveillance that everything you do on social media feeds into that bread crumb of information that people are gathering about you. So it's definitely something that you want to pursue, and you want to be authentic, you want to be yourself, but also, always keep in mind the goal that you have of how you're engaging and realizing that you are the only person that sets the terms of how you want to engage on social media. There's a bunch of recommendations, but you have to do with you feel comfortable with because you're the person that lives with all the consequences.
ASHOOH: Thanks, that really great, and I want to kind of pick up on that thread, because I think, as you mentioned, the wall between the personal brand and the professional brand is in many ways breaking down and I think a lot of more privacy oriented people might be uncomfortable with that. How do you navigate needing to have a presence and own your presence for career purposes, while avoiding kind of some of those more privacy oriented pitfalls, or avoiding putting so much of yourself out there that, as you said, it comes back to bite you later when kind of social contexts have moved on and things aren't appropriate anymore?
PETERSON: Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just, you know, figuring out what you want, at any given time, right? If your biggest thing is that I want to be a brand, regardless of—my brand is me, it's whatever I'm going to do. You're also going to accept the consequences that not everyone's going to really like my brand, that I might lose opportunities, because it's more important for me to speak up. You're seeing this right now with the Israel Palestine conflict, as soon as anyone speaks up there are immediate repercussions of what's happening, and you just choose to accept those things. So I think that's just part of what you're understanding, what you're stepping into. And you're also just thinking about again, am I doing something for clout? Or am I doing something because it's advancing my strategy of who I want to be online. But a lot of it is about that internal kind of self check in.
So even with me, there's a very popular way to do game streaming and again, I'm not knocking the folks who view it this way, where it's definitely all about making sure that your makeup is perfect, make sure your outfits are perfect, running your stream, teasing your followers, being very cute, things like that. I'm a business owner, I do business, I run a company. There's not much information out there about that. That is my brand online and that is the brand that we're now focusing and working on building now that our first game is going to launch and things like that, really coming forward and being like, oh, no, there's other ways to be a woman in this space besides eye candy. If you want to be eye candy, that's fine, too, it just depends on what the space is. Women in STEM, we always kind of go back and forth about this, in a lot of ways, because there's this idea of what will women in STEM looks like and particularly for both me and my partner, we don't fit the paradigm of when somebody is like, oh, these are girls who build video games, or these are, you know, women who work in artificial intelligence, things like that.
We don't fit the look that anyone thinks and that is now a part of our brand that, yeah, you can wear cute clothes and have fun with your outfits, or I can dress like a professional and be—(laughs)—your head and not, I don't have to wear gamer tshirts and hoodies [inaudible] all of these things have become parts of the things that we're thinking about in terms of what we put for personal brand. But you know, I'm also a mother, I'm also a parent. Those are things I don't talk about as much. Even back in the blog days, when this was very popular, I never talked about my personal relationships, my relationship with my husband online. You set your boundaries and so things that become popular, you can see people just kind of like being as self disclosing as they want to be, you have to think about for the career and path that you want and the opportunities you want in the future, how do you want to present yourself?
ASHOOH: Great. We've talked a lot thus far about social media but both of you have worked in traditional media and that still very much in the mix. So Hagar, could you speak to how you think about using traditional media, publishing op eds, publishing longer pieces, appearing on—making television appearances? How do those fit into a branding strategy and how are you strategic about thinking about the mix between social and traditional?
CHEMALI: Sure. Latoya actually touched a little bit on this at the beginning. And by the way, everything she said, it's like she's speaking to my soul because all of the things she said are things that I have learned along the way in launching my own show, which is video based and it also sums up the path that I took. So when I left government, and toward the end of my government career, I was watching—cable news was everything—and, by the way, that was not the case for the rest of the world. That was the case just for Washington, DC, which is a very tiny microcosm, but when you're there, it doesn't feel like that. So when I was in DC, whomever was on Andrea Mitchell's show that day was like, it was the most important thing and I watched all these hosts and knowing my own love of talking foreign policy and how I talk about it, and I talk about it in a very colloquial and I try to make it funny, way I kept telling myself, I really would love to host a show, I could be good at it I know, I could, I think people would like it, and so on.
So it was something I had identified early on and when I left government a lot of people advised me in order for me to get from point A to point B, if point B was hosting a show that I should try and pitch myself as commentator as Latoya said, as the go to expert on certain issues and I was able to do that. So after a while of working it and making friends with the producers, doing some TV hits, I became the go to person for sanctions in particular and Middle East, for some time for some channels and shows it was just on foreign policy in general. And I thought I was living the dream, like I'm getting all gussied up and going into the city and you know, it's lights and camera and makeup and I just I loved and relished every minute of it. And it was for me at least two years ago, where a mentor of mine, Gretchen Carlson, I'm sure you all know her, she's the one who was with Fox News who sued Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, and she's a friend and mentor and she sat me down and she was like, listen, you are doing all this effort to give these networks these huge networks all this commentating and you're not getting paid for it, which, by the way, those jobs are not paid gigs, very rarely are they paid.
And, by the way, they are even less so paid for a woman, a woman of color, especially in foreign policy, it is painful to watch how few women and women of color are asked to be commentators or paid contributors on these networks. And so something to say she's telling me you're not getting paid and this has to stop. It's not helping you. It's not helping you advance your career, what is it you want to do, and let's help you get there. And I told her, I was like at the end of the day I want to host a show, and I know that sounds crazy because that's not my background but that's really what I want to do. She was like so just go do it. Like, who cares about the major networks, those are not the center of the world anymore, and having worked in when I left government, and I started working on the outside and advising clients on the outside, that was very obvious to me.
The example that I always give to people is the most watched show at the time, and it's still highly ranked, I don't know if it's the most watched show anymore, but Rachel Maddow Show, on a good night, is 900,000 viewers. And you hear the cable networks constantly saying oh, you know, increase this quarter and we're the most watched and blah, blah, blah, and I see Latoya nodding her head. For the same network, Savannah Sellers who had a show on Snapchat, as of a year ago because I haven't checked in a year, was 13 million subscribers and the downloads were four to five million downloads per show. So the comparison is there is no comparison, and in my view it's a matter of time before the advertisers catch on—and I think they already catching on—that they don't need to be paying as much as they pay for TV ads when they could pay way less for digital marketing to squeeze into these shows on the social media platforms of which there are many, and YouTube of course, for way less and achieve a much broader reach and a much larger audience.
So I factored that in when I was pursuing my own show, but it is also something that I advise clients all the time because I tell them, you know what, they feel that getting that hit on CNN is the biggest and best thing but I can tell you from my own experience that if I do a hit on CNN or MSNBC or Cheddar or any of them, and I enjoy doing it, obviously, I'll get like a few people who tweet at me maybe one or two subscribers to my YouTube channel, which is called "Oh my World," by the way, for any of you who want to go look at it, but it's when I get real people who follow it's when I post an Instagram reel that goes viral. That's what gets me the subscribers. If I post a TikTok video, and I'm a big fan of TikTok, I know I shouldn't say that as a national security—
PETERSON: —I love TikTok, but there's a lot. There's so there's a TikTok for everybody.
CHEMALI: I'm a big fan. The majority of Gen Z gets their news on TikTok and when I first saw that in an article on this a year ago, I was like, how could that be? That's 15 seconds, 60 seconds. Okay, well, I'm doing it now. Like, it's an when—those those videos will again, get me more followers. But the cable news networks to tell you the truth, they just ended up—they feel like a lot of pomp and circ*mstance. They are important for a brand but they really are only part and parcel. Op eds can take you farther, I would say an op ed is better in terms of taking your brand and getting noticed noticed and getting activity on Twitter like people to engage with you, I would say that, because they live a bit longe and people just feel more empowered to engage with the author. And so those can be really helpful but I tell people that social media is here to stay, first of all, and it is ever changing. I mean, every six months, there's something new, there's something new to learn, something new to get used to and jump on, so that you're not behind. And I think that that trend is only going to grow further and that digital marketing will be really where the center is. And I have to be honest with you—and last point because I know I've spoken for a while—but every day, I am grateful that I launched my brand because I am transitioning myself from my consulting business to doing my brand full time and I'm grateful for it because I actually think people like me who worked in getting people coverage in traditional media, I think that that's going to be in less demand aand that people who have digital marketing experience and social media savvy that that's the most in demand and for obvious reasons.
PETERSON: Yeah, you brought in so much knowledge. I would love to just quickly touch on a couple of the points that you made, just because I saw some questions that popped up in the chat around cash and cash flow and how all this stuff actually like manages out and I'm like, oh, that's important to actually know, I wish somebody told me at the beginning of our career what that is. So with one on those unpaid spots for you to be an expert, absolutely, and they're unpaid, frequently to, again, women of color and people of color. Whereas white men will get paid and so, frequently, that is their compensation associated with this, sometimes it's as little as 100 bucks. But some people, like I used to do NPR, I did all these other places radio hits, and you would just find consistently the people who asked, we're always getting paid. And so we could all be on the same section and two people were unpaid, and two people were like, "oh, no, I normally have $500 rate to be coming on and doing this 20 minute hit," and they would get a check.
So just being careful about what you need to ask—and you always need to ask what's going on. It gets more interesting to become a personal brand on social media, because of the way that advertisers certainly look at campaigns. So when I worked at Nu Skin, I tried to hire a bunch of people from Vine, which was a hot network at the time pre-TikTok blowing up, hired a bunch of people from Vine and I talked to these young Viners and they were like, "my rate starts at $20,000 for a campaign," and I was like, "oh, our day rate is seven hundred." Like, we have a disconnect here. Now, half of them do not have careers anymore. The other half didn't make it. But it's a very difficult thing to parse. And then second, like the traditional media route is really helpful for establishing your credibility in certain spaces. So if you think about what space you want to be in, if you're talking to other youth or you're trying to figure out what's going on, like a lot of the stuff that was happening to the Rohingya was playing out on WhatsApp.
If you are not there, if you're not paying attention to what's going on there, you are not going to be credible, you're not in that space. As opposed to, you know, a lot of times [inaudible] you would go and you would look at a traditional news broadcast and it would be seven older white guys talking about China who haven't worked in the last 25 years and have no idea how the country functions anymore, but those guys are also getting paid. Quite a few of my friends, so like Wadjha Ali who wass the host of the show that I produced [inaudible], Maria Teresa Kumar of Voto Latino, let me think—Joshua Johnson, he used to host One A, all of them have parlayed all of those freebies and commentaries into these paid gigs that at their top, or their peak, are like a quarter million, $300,000 exclusive contracts and they can be something that you can grow into.
But it's not a path—tt's a shrinking path, I should say, because again, as Hagar was mentioning, the influence of mainstream media is really waning. And media in general, has been in the state of contraction for the last 10 years. It's one of the reasons why a lot of us have broken out and gone other places just because there's not the opportunities to be there. At the same time, like especially if you mean gaming, you start realizing that people who are getting clout and influence and making hundreds of millions of dollars off their YouTube channels, or their Twitch channels, their streams, were frequently like these radicalized, horrific or horrificly racist, and there were no answers on this side because most of us who were in policy, aren't engaging on those platforms. We're on Twitter. We are not doing four hour long Twitch streams about anything that comes to our minds around all these things. And so when you get something like we just had another video games competition about Six Days in Fallujah, which is a game that was around, again, the bloodiest conflict of the Iraq War. There are almost no scholars talking about this.
There's a whole bunch people in games, and they're like, "well we interviewed 20 Iraqis and we're putting them in the interstitials between the like tactical shooter part, should be great. No problem." And so, there's a lot of work that could be done. I was like, let me just make some phone calls and make this Twitch stream because this cannot stand. But it really starts to focus on where do you want to focus your work. In the beginning, I was fighting online misinformation around race, in particular racism and the alt right, which we now call them the alt right but before it was just white supremacy, and now with the ways in which they started to migrate and equally target people in these different regions, what we saw with the fifty named different Corporation, aka ISO, like all of these different folks having their own media brand, part like they were vice, like thinking about the ways in which the national security realm and the global security realm has changed, and making sure that we're also adapting.
So yes, if you want a book deal, you need to be writing an op ed, if you want to make sure that the Washington chatter class knows who you are, then you're on Meet the Press and you're on NPR, you're doing those things. And if you're in the trenches, trying to fight and figure out what people are, you are where they are, you are on the social media platforms that they're using. You are figuring out where they're getting the information from that is where you have your base.
ASHOOH: Great. It's about time to turn to audience questions, and there are a lot of rich ones just in the chat. So, Sara, operator, could I please ask you to remind the participants how to ask their questions?
STAFF: (Gives queuing instructions)
We will take the first question from Ethan Rab.
Q: Hello, thank you for having me. My name is Ethan Rab, I'm a junior at Carnegie Mellon University, pursuing majors in Policy Management and Master's in Public Policy Management. Thank you for having me. I wrote my question in the chat before and I said, Do you often face misinformation and/or disinformation regarding your brand personally? How do you actively combat it? Or do you even go out of your way to combat it at all?
ASHOOH: Great one. Do you feed the trolls? Tell us.
PETERSON: I don't even know if you can say that anymore honestly, because everybody's a troll. There's incentives. There's a whole bunch of money in being a troll. What is Fox News at this point, but a bunch of trolling? Let's just be real. (Laughs.) Okay. So I was like, wow, I guess we're not worried about journalism no more. (Laughs.) You have to be concerned about—good luck, Dominion voting systems. Anyway. So it's a how do you face it regarding your brand, it's probably going to happen. Other countries have stricter laws around this. So like, South Korea has a lot of cyber stalking laws and things that you can't say, Responsible Medicine type laws, and so folks who do eSports, which is part of an offshoot of gaming where I tend to look at people who do eSports, if you're in South Korea and you're being harassed like that, there's actually more avenues for restitution than you'll find the United States—the United States is like, pfft, they don't care. This is the wild, wild west, you call FBI cybercrime, which we've had to do a few times about stalking and things like that and they're just like it didn't happen yet so like, you know, call us back if it kills you, I guess.
That is what you get. So a lot of this is really, one, figuring out who's worth engaging with, because a lot of people again they're making their reputation on being a jerk. Again, if you look at a lot of the media personalities that are working now, they're making their reputation on being competitive and on provoking. They don't care about truth. They don't care about getting to a solution. They don't care about justice, they don't care about facts, information, or the corporate state, they only care about their own personal brands, sort of the toxic part of this that has taken over and as a result, engaging with those people I find is almost like more harm than good. Because you're legitimizing them by saying, "Okay, I'm going to fight with you about this." Obviously, untrue things are said about me and again, it happens to everyone across the spectrum, it just is What you can do to combat is, one, making sure that you are in control of your own online reputation and self.
And there's places you can pay, which is, you know, when you get bigger and bigger, but let's say it's just like a small smear campaign or something, making sure people can see clearly from you, your body of work, how it was presented, what happened so that when it comes down to "Oh, they said this, oh hold on, wait, the tweet is still up." I said this, you doctored that you can't—don't come and meet with this stuff. So there's a lot that I guess you learn, one, to have a very thick skin especially if you were on the internet in early days, like you just, there's people are gonna say a lot of stuff, who want to say stuff about just how your eyebrows look, how your face looks that day. What they feel like you should look like to be in a certain space. Don't worry about that stuff, making sure the records are clear on the stuff that you care about, and making sure that you have the documentation. I at this point have a fifteen plus year online reputation, you're going to go through some archives if you're trying to dig up some dirt on me, and you probably won't find much because I was thinking about these things the whole time. What am I doing? My brain is antiracist, dealing with my brain and now they're moving to the [inaudible].
I don't use social media as the place where I like to pop off, which a lot of people like to do. That's the thing that tends to get you the most trouble. Much better to just kind of be like, you know what, my lane is here. This is what I want to talk about. This is what I want to hold accountable. That's what I'm doing. And as long as you're consistent with that, public opinion tides will change. I mean, like, look at Monica Lewinsky's come up, okay. I remember that first trial, I was in middle school. They were dragging that woman through the mud and she has been able to reinvent herself. She's not the villain no more. (Laughs.) Everything changed in twenty years, and you see this over—I'm looking forward to the Mike Tyson documentary because I wanna see what they do, what is this brand now? (Laughs.) What happens? So things will change and a lot of times, it's better to take just a meditative breath when stuff is happening, because it's probably going to pass. And if it doesn't pass, if it's something that you can't get over, it's probably a good indication that there was something that was too unresolved in the way you were presenting yourself online, that allowed that vulnerability to be exploited. So I would think about it in terms of metrics. What are the vulnerabilities I need to make sure are controlled? What are things that could possibly come out? And then again, knowing that public opinion will change over time. Don't sweat it.
CHEMALI: I love how Latoya broke it down because this is exactly my experience. And when I was in government as a spokesperson, it was very different because we were pummeled with articles that were wrong, and still the training that we were given was, "Don't legitimize that with a response, because it's so outrageous that it doesn't deserve a response, and it's going to die down." And that is the case for a lot of them, but then there are moments where as Latoya said it ended up—I remember when I was a Treasury spokesperson, in particular, because of sanctions and the misinformation around sanctions. That was the thing that I remember I kept thinking, I was like, no, it means that we're not communicating this properly for people to think this. It means that we're not out there enough.
And so we have to pick and choose and be very smart about like, okay, you know, what, this person we're gonna come out and say, you know what, they came out with this and we're gonna explain this, and then for these others, they're basically like trolls and we're not going to waste our time. For social media, you can't almost in this day and age, you can't have a public social media presence and not receive trolls, some kind of harassment, direct messages as well that are really inappropriate, a wide range of things. So I, as a rule, I never respond, ever, to haters and my categories, if I can dump them into categories, if people will do a one off like, you know, "hey, Miss Piggy, you know, whatever," Okay, you ignore. If they come off with like—like I did a breakdown on Israel and Gaza, I actually really didn't want to do the breakdown on Israel Gaza, for the reasons that Latoya talked about before (Laughs) because you literally cannot talk about that topic.—
PETERSON: No. No.
CHEMALI: —People are throwing tomatoes at you. And I made a joke about it on my show. I literally said, I was like, people will throw tomatoes at you and then I had a scene where people were throwing tomatoes at me. And because it's just such a wildly controversial topic now, but I had no choice I work in world news, it would be crazy if I didn't address it. Okay, so some dude called me a Zionist islamophobe because of what he heard and I'm sitting there reading this being like, no one has been louder against the genocide, against the Uighers but me, like how can you call me this? (Laughs.) But it wasn't worth it because, you know, you think in your mind like this cool response that you're going to have. And you can at most draft it and then delete it. Those comments are not worth responding to ever. If I get direct messages that are inappropriate, which happens a lot unfortunately as a woman, it says my internet connection is unstable. I hope you can—oh my God, my son is here.—
PETERSON: —We're all going through the same thing. (Laughs.) Hey, are you are good.
CHEMALI: —He's like on Zoom. (Laughs.) So this is Benjamin.—So, if I get inappropriate messages in my direct messages, again, I ignore it. When I start getting—if I get like a real troll that's harassing where they start just spewing racist vitriol or, you know, and it's repeated, and it's in every—it's like, on my Twitter and it's multiple posts, then I block them because then I worry that I just don't want them to see me. I don't want them to get fired up about me. Or, if if people start, like people will disagree with my opinion, totally fair. But if it gets ugly, like really ugly, and people will start—it just turns into an awkward conversation, then I mute it, because I'm like, okay, I don't want to block you, you're entitled to your opinion, but like, you're kind of upsetting me and distracting me so I'm just going to mute you. So I've been fortunate—knock on wood—that I have not had to deal with anything worse than that because I too have heard that, like the FBI and the police are really pretty much not helpful, and I hope that the U.S. figures that out because that's pretty concerning. But the bottom line, as Latoya said, is you really should never respond to a hater. Haters gonna hate. It's just part of the game. And what I tell people is this, when the haters come out it means you're doing something right. It means that you're fighting for something that you believe in, that's true to your authenticity, that's authentic to your brand and yourself and it will harm you if you respond because that's what the hater wants. They want you to respond. You not responding irks them and then they move on. It's better that way. But then move on. You don't want them in your hair.
ASHOOH: Great. Operator next question, please.
STAFF: Alright, we will take the next question from Sarah Hunady.
Q: Thank you. Hi, my name is Sarah Hunady, I am from Syria and I'm also half Lebanese, but you know, from my mom's side, so—
CHEMALI: Me too!
Q: —[inaudible] give us citizenship! (Laughs.) But, yeah, I am a former refugee and currently a political asylee here in the U.S. I'm a writer and communications professional, and I'm here on affiliation with the Syria campaign. I wanted to ask about well, branding can be a bit confusing, but when you have a cause that you're fighting for, things get easier. But what about the logistics? It's really hard sometimes to do everything on your own and, for example, like I know Hajar did her own show, but how can you be like the camera man, the scriptwriter, the person in front of the camera and everything? So I really just want to understand a little bit of logistics behind the scenes and yeah, any tips on practical steps that one can take. Thank you.
CHEMALI: Sure, okay, so I'll start first, if you don't mind. This is such a good question because I am not, I was not, an expert at all in producing or posting a show. In fact, when I had the concept for my show, I was pitching it to a bunch of different platforms and networks and they kind of all said the same thing—and this should be of interest to you—they literally all loved the show, they loved me, and they all said, they were like, you got to grow your following, you don't have a big enough following and they were right and I understood that. A lot of people encouraged me to do it on my own on YouTube because the argument—in fact, my entertainment attorney she only has female clients, she's all about empowering and making sure that we get the best deal possible.
And she told me, she was like, it's not worth wasting your time pitching yourself where people are going to control the content of the IP and they're going to own it, and you're going to be on salary, and you're not going to be happy with it, you go out and do your thing and let them pitch you in two years. And she was right, only nine episodes in is when I had the first request for syndication. So I had to kind of figure it out. So my point is that anybody can do this because I literally knew nothing and it is a total bootstrap operation. The only paid person on my team is my video editor. Otherwise what I did, in case it's helpful to you, I was very fortunate to have the help of my husband. They say that picking your spouse is one of the most important business decisions you can make and that is very true. (Laughs.) So he watched YouTube shows to research the best equipment to buy. If you're interested, Sean Cannell on YouTube, he is great at this. So first, we bought the equipment, which was cheaper than me renting a studio and going to the studio. And it's also great, because then I can use it as often as I want, it's like right here in my house, which as a mom of three kids—you saw one of them—especially during a pandemic, was really great. A lot of times I'm gonna blow my brains out, but you know, hopefully these will return to normal soon. (Laughs.) So we bought the equipment, that's the first and he watched YouTube videos on lighting, on how to operate everything. So that's the first.
The video editor is necessary because that was just not a skill that I was going to learn. I didn't have time to learn it and I just really wanted someone great for this, and to be perfectly honest with you, I hired somebody in Lebanon, this just really young talented kid, and it was great. Now, I'm fortunate to be able to do that because I have family there who can pay him so otherwise it can be a bit difficult. So that is my video editor, and I paid for help for some graphics. So for the graphics of my show, for example, that was like a one time payment to a branding firm and so that was me just investing in it. But, logistically, I taped the show, I write and research the show, I have some interns who are researchers who help me research, I write it, my camera man is my husband again who I want to fire every week.
But you know, that's life. So he's free so he tapes it, I download it on my computer, I send it to the editor, and then after that I tell the editor like, okay, paste in this photograph and here's an article that you should show and hey, can you do sound effects for this? I mean, he's really the guy who kind of makes it into magic. And that's it, he sends it back to me and I'm the one who posts it. I upload it on YouTube. And I again, watched videos on that, on how to work YouTube, how to optimize the search function on YouTube, and things like that. And there you go, and that's it. So if you watch it, it looks like nicely produced—I hope you think it looks nicely produced—but it really is a bootstrap operation that is at the lowest budget I can think of because I'm paying for it out of pocket now.
But I will tell you, as my entertainment attorney told me, it is already paying off because now people want me for paid speaking engagements. I have somebody interested in a paid podcast. Like putting myself out there, really, and on my own where I own IP really did help. Logistically, it can seem daunting, but you can do it and reach out to me, find me on Instagram and reach out to me, I'd be happy to help because it took navigating. But it's not difficult. If I can do it—trust me because I'm not tech savvy—if I can do it, you could do it.
ASHOOH: Latoya, how about you? What type of resources do you have to help you logistically and how did you build to that point when you didn't have resources?
PETERSON: Oh, yeah, Jesus. (Laughs.) I think the biggest thing is being focused. So like everything that Hagar said is true. And, again, don't forget these influencers, the people who are doing this, they have teams of people behind the scenes making everything look good. People hire makeup artists before they're getting paid—at somebody else's fun—so before they're getting paid, they're hiring videographers, hiring makeup artists, they're having photoshoots. One of my homegirls Carmen Sognonvi, who was actually the founder of Racialicious—I was the editor owner, but she's the founder of Racialicious—and her partner, Jen Chau, she is now a luxury lifestyle blogger for kids. So part of her ongoing expenses is that she has two photographers on retainer, just following them around and make sure that the best photos of them doing all kinds of activities as a family are there and that's part of her business expenses, because she's so in her lifestyle. So, like, you did not teach yourself all this other stuff I mean you can hack stuff together, I can definitely DIY, and then like phones have come so far in the tech where you can just replace so many things you used to do in a studio with like a phone setup.
I say this as a person, again, worked with ESPN, where they're like, do you want this $400,000 studio system, and then everybody sees a file. We're all on iPhone now, so I can get these accessories and these things, it's more nimble so we're good to go. It's just starting to change in a very dramatic way. So I think one is you're not going to be everything to everyone on every platform. Give that up. Don't worry about it. Where are the people that you want to talk to? So again, like I said, I'm in gaming, I could be on Twitter, there's people there, but it's not really where a lot of the competitions are happening, it's not really where younger people are. For that I had to go outside to Twitch and I had to get over all of my old person hang ups about like how I look in photos. I came of age before this was like really normal, where you take 25 million pictures of yourself just to post one. So I'm like, okay, I just have to get over it and get on camera and start talking. (Laughs.)
I would say too if you have limited resources, particularly if like your brand, in a lot of ways for a lot of people is their main job, and so they spend a lot of time maintaining themselves, because you are your brand and you spend a lot of time being like this is you need to build it, I need more followers and [inaudible]. There's a lot you do on that. I have a business, and so am I a brand? Kind of. Yeah, I want to make sure I can get a book deal and nobody's like playing me, you 20 years from now they're like, "Well, you know, you don't have 500,000 people on you know, whatever the new network sort of events I show or whatever. You don't have 500,000 followers on [inaudible] to sign this book deal. So just making sure that I have that maintenance going but for the most part I have a business to run, and there's just only so many hours in the day. So one of the reasons why we haven't started all of our official blow up video channels is because I have to go business manage.
So a lot of this is around figuring out for me, I've always been a writer and editor that's always been my heart. People do still read blogs surprisingly, especially if you're writing about topics that don't normally get covered like the business of video games. So it's like okay, so blogging is easy for me and writing is easy for me so I write pieces, I still blog. Short form video is a lot of work but also very rewarding in a lot of ways and it helps to get your message out more quickly. So I've been spending a lot more time on TikTok and playing around with that. I haven't put a lot of stuff public yet, but just building out and looking at do I want to be the person who does trends? Do I just want to have my little channel and keep rolling? And then I always remember, again on TikTok, one of my favorite people is this guy who talks in a monotone who does machine learning tests of makeup brands. (Laughs.) It's just the weirdest, it is absolutely not influencer bait content, but it's super poppin, bro. (Laughs.)
Like, wait, so Maybelline really does work better than this—(Laughs.)—he's using machine learning to detect like your face, this whole thing, but like, you can be yourself on certain types of platforms and other ones maybe don't feel as normal to you and you don't need to keep investing. Honestly, you don't need to do it. Instagram, I'm kind of like I hate it. It's just way too stained. It's way too big. I have a very bare minimal presence on that, just not squatting on my screen name and doing crazy stuff. But for the most part, I leave that alone. And I look at Okay, what am I going to invest in? Invest in Twitch channel, invest in the YouTube channel because it's an archive, invest in writing because, again, how people search is still very much text based. So you look at like, again, how the internet actually works. They're still indexing your text more than anything else. So thinking about what are those things that are important to you and again, who do you want to talk to, and trying to just have fun with it as well. Because the problem is anything that becomes a chore, just like blogging did back in the day, you get to burnout and then you don't want to do it anymore. You go silent. I had five years off basically from actively trying to maintain social media because I was so burnt out from an opinion all the time.
Like I don't want to have an opinion anymore. I'm done having opinions about things, just don't ask me anything. I will just be in the background. (Laughs.) And so now it's like, oh, okay, well, there's a message, there's something else I want to do, let's build toward that, but building it again. I can have fun with this, I'm going to do this, I bought a little TikTokker ring light, because we are all here now where we're going to be and that's what I'm going to hang out with. So, blogs, TikTok for me, video platforms, and then that's where I will stay. Some folks SoundCloud is where they stay, some folks it's imager, some folks are like giving magnates and I have no idea how that even works, but it's whatever you feel like you could express yourself and that you can keep doing for some time to build up the following. So I would just say, look at it as an investment of time and it's an investment against everything else you could be doing in your life, including writing a book, including raising your kids, all this other stuff. So make sure it's something that you want to actually invest in, that you're not just trying to keep up because someone else told you to do so.
ASHOOH: Operator, next question, please.
STAFF: We will take the next question from Tina Singleton.
Q: Hi. So my name is Tina Singleton. I am the director of programs at YWCA greater Charleston and I also am the founder of Transformation Table. I think, Latoya, you kind of already started answering my question. I'm a writer as well and I've been trying to figure out what—because there's so much social media out there—I've been trying to figure out, are blogs still relevant? You know, I have a couple of books in me. So I guess I one of my questions is where do you put this material out there? Like, do I do a blog? Do I just go ahead and write my book? I guess I'm just a little confused about where I should put my put my writing focus?
PETERSON: Yeah, that's a really good question. The shift from textual to visual and the modern Internet has been a really big boon to folks who are more visually oriented and a tougher thing for writers. So before, like, witty tweets, crafted tweets, long blog posts, those kind of took the internet, and now that's changed, but not fully. So some of the like more popular Instagram accounts, and I said I don't do it, but you have people everyone is [inaudible] gets controversial. But yet, a young poet was able to carve out a big space for herself by just taking photos of her poems and putting that journal on Instagram and letting them go viral. Same thing with that person that now has a book "Notes From Your Therapist," and literally, this is just like a therapist just writing out like a little reminder and posting it every single day and having that be the main representation of their work.
On TikTok, you see a lot of things from BookTok, where authors are both illuminating how they write books, but then also like acting out or pretending to be characters from their own work to showcase and get more ideas and more traction around the things that they're writing, particularly romance novelists. So I find that really fascinating. So what I would suggest is finding five or six writers you really look up to, like people that you're just like their work is just fantastic, and see where they are online. Who is finding them? Where are you following them? How is this working? How are we promoting these things? What are their main platforms that they're the most accurate on? And see how that goes. There's all these ways to adapt your favorite platform for the thing that you're trying to do, but I would look at that in terms of just trying to find ideas. Blogs are hard to discover these days. There's not the built in virality the way there used to be, RSS readers are pretty much dead, they're a very difficult thing to try to get to go pop. If not, you're just like your personal media, or substack, or wherever. But, if you can find other unique ways to put parts of your work out, to do stages, to do readings, figure out where is the place that you're communicating the most with people who are the most interested in your work. That's the big spot.
ASHOOH: Right, next question, please operator.
STAFF: We will take the next question from Danielle Obisi Orly.
Q: Hi, my name is Daniela Obisi Orly. I am an undergraduate student, a third-year student at the University of Pittsburgh and I study international and area studies, political science, all the jazz. My question was to both the panelists and once you find your niche or your area of expertise, whether it's through research or it's personal experience, my research particularly being the different expressions of xenophobia, depending on your region, how do people of color especially women of color combat the imposter syndrome that they might feel when they inevitably start to develop their brand in a predominantly white or male space and start to establish the truth through their story? Thank you.
PETERSON: Hagar, you want to start with that one? Because I feel—
CHEMALI: Sure! That's a good question and I'll give you some examples. So one of the things I tell people all the time is that you always feel, and by you I mean the general you, women suffer from this the most, where women tend to feel like they're never really the expert in something even if they are or that they have to cross their T's and dot their I's before launching something or before even speaking up and raising their hands. Whereas men generally, as a rule, they tend to be more comfortable winging it, or just kind of faking it till they make it. And this plays out everywhere. This isn't just for a brand. I know I'm over generalizing here, but it happens in business a lot. It happens in fighting for jobs, and in interviews, and it happens—it's just kind of across the board and it's something that women have to be aware of so that they can tackle. And imposter syndrome is not something that's really tied to age because it happens at every age and it happens at every level of experience.
One of the things I learned, I will say, when I was in government, I didn't suffer from it at all and I don't know why. Maybe that's because it was like I was in this bubble and I had a very unique experience in government, in part because of starting out at the Treasury Department, and the Treasury Department tended to be very flat organization. When I got there, it was majority men, men leaders, but they were very empowering and they very much wanted to empower the women there, hire more women, and promote the women into leadership positions. And they were very supportive of that. I really benefited from that, from the male leaders I had there who consistently pushed me to be at the table, consistently pushed me to be at a meeting and to speak up or to present my ideas. And that lives with me. By the way, I think I also benefited I had gone to all girl schools growing up, and I'm sure that played a role in that, but not everybody. I think I'm the exception that way. My point is, so I had this in government, and this was the world I lived in and when I left government is suddenly when I was really surprised. I left Washington—not that Washington is great on that, just the government experience I had—when I went to New York, and I really found that that was really not the case, writ large at all.
I have numerous stories of sometimes I was told this where I would be placed on a panel on television only because they needed a woman, not because they actually thought what I had to say was very interesting. And by the way, it was very obvious because then the anchor would not really call on me in any way. I'd have to really try and find a way to interject and fight to say something. Or there were many times that I would be on air, especially in foreign policy and national security, this is the world that you're entering and so you'll see this and I think this is changing, but nine out of ten times I'm on a panel of older white men, and those older white men think they know better than me. There were so many times when I would let them think that and I would let them manterrupt or I would let them mansplain to me. I'm not trying to hate on them, by the way, because I know there are a lot of men here, but this would happen and I would just kind of sit there kind of stunned especially when you're on air live and what I found I had to do is remind myself that, no, I am the expert.
I'm not trying to sound overconfident here, but you do have to tell yourself that like, no, I studied this, no, I worked in this, no, I spent twelve years doing this, no, I just did this, you haven't done it for thirty years. If you have this in the back of your mind, it's really all about mindset, to give yourself the public confidence you need and certainly internal confidence. But if you don't have the internal confidence in the moment, you at least want to project confidence and remind yourself it is very unlikely that what you have to think and say that someone else has the same. I'm not saying that there aren't other experts out there, but what you have to say has value always at every age and every experience, and you just have to remind yourself to combat that because it is inevitable, you will always face it and I find there really there are ways to do it in a way that isn't combative. Those times that I was manterrupted on air, I think I probably should have been a bit more combative, but, you know, there are ways to say so.
For example, one of the tips that one of my former bosses gave to me that I always tell people is you can always give a little bit of context to prove your credibility. So I'll always say for example, "when I was in the White House, blah blah blah blah blah blah," or, "when I worked in sanctions, blah blah, blah, blah, whatever," or, "as an American of Lebanese descent," so all these people already hear a tiny bit of your resume to understand why what you're saying has credibility, why you're the expert in what you're saying, or why you feel your opinion should be valued. And that helps enormously and I know, for me, when I'm putting a panel on television, or in general, it helps me set myself apart and say, like, wait a minute, I have something to say here that's really important, given my experience, and you can say it with just like a half sentence. But a lot of it is mindset. Don't forget that you have value, that you bring value, and if you sense the imposter syndrome coming, because it will, just try and knock it out. Identify it and be like, "No, no, I can do this. If that person can do this, I can."
ASHOOH: Latoya, anything to add before we move on to the next question?
PETERSON: I mean, all excellent points, Hagar, and I love it because all of your advice is spot on. And he had the exact opposite way of dealing with this. That's what I love. Because there's nothing you said that is wrong. Everything's right. It's just the way they want you to feel that okay. My favorite quote on "This is Jessica Williams." She's doing the Daily Show and she was giving an interview one time, I think it's on The Cut, and she's just like looking down at the camera and she's like, "Yeah, I know, so many brilliant, talented women who just continue to doubt themselves as he goes. And I know so many people who think they're brilliant. And they have no reason to think that and I like that." I was like, "Yes, girl." Because when you work regularly in medium to these high levels, you start realizing that wait a minute, nobody has this figured out. No one has any of this figured out. I walked into a machine learning conference and I'm like, a bachelor's degree. I don't do any better. It's like, wow, I have a Bachelors of a PhD. I have never done but as an academic poster, even why did they take me for this.
And a lot of times what it was I went to the blacks in the workshop at juris in case for anybody who's in science aside, that's a super prestigious continent like Yan Lake, who was doing all this stuff, Facebook around machine learning. So in this space, the videos like all those people go and sit and have a little Kiki and it will take time. And when I come back, a lot of times what happens is you can get very intimidated by looking at everybody else's credentials. Why am I bringing to the table here, or you can realize that if you're in this space, something brought you there. And all you need to do is really just show up. And that'll be fine. So all of these guys who have all of these amazing PhDs and stuff like that doesn't understand how the real world works don't understand how like pattern matching work, stuff like that, which is how they define a space today, I was good at figuring out why these things were happening in the way that they were right. I'm never going to be a top computer scientist.
I don't have the background. It's not going to happen. But the place that I want to make the impact is making sure that your racist bias thing that you built because you have no life experience. And you have never had a sensor fail to read your skin. And you have never had to sit there and explain why a VR headset get stuck in your natural hair. Never had to do those things. Let me tell you how this is actually going to work right? That is more important, because normally all the big problems in society have not been solved yet. Right? They were solved. It was it was solvable to go to LSE or go to Oxford, it would have been solved. It's not that I don't worry about it, ESPN really beat that out of me. Because I would just be surrounded by men and they had no frame of reference for anybody remotely like me, there weren't that many black female managers, there weren't any that were doing technology. I didn't like sports. So that was a whole really weird job to do. And if you don't like sports, I was in video games, it was a mess.
And so when I showed up, they were just like, okay, a lot going on here. We're all just gonna have to make this work, we all showed up, you got a job to do, let's get it done. And I don't really spend a lot of time entertaining or even trying to explain myself to other people anymore. So there used to be a time where it was both like the credibility part where you're like, when I worked, or when I did this, and the benefit, because again, you guys started your career. So it's tough, right? Because you're like, I'm trying to prove myself here like, mistakes, oh, my God, there will come a point, when you are sitting back like, the first you need to impresses me, my friend is not you, you are not the future I am. So you know, go ahead and having a party over there. That's okay. We will be over here. And things will tend to work out, it's very hard, because people will try to tell you in your face, your research isn't worth it, what you're doing isn't worth it. You just don't you don't fit the type, which we know, we know the type was racist, I'm sorry, I'm not.
I'm not a white dude, it's not going to happen for me in that way. You haven't seen somebody like because I was supposed to be here. But surprise. We are all together. And so now, this is your problem. And if you choose to let your bias miss out on what I can offer, my my problem is always other rooms, there's always another way to get to what you want. So it's not a thing I stress about anymore. I say that with the position of privilege of having fought through that part of the career having a lot of expertise. And now again, when I was at ESPN, I was a boss with a budget and money and that beautiful purple card, they give you a Disney, and I had two male employees as in loaners who I've worked with since they were like 24 years old love and most men would routinely come to us and be like, oh, what's going on? And Ozzy would always come back and be like, that's the boss over there. You guys talk to her? I don't know. Let them be embarrassed for their behavior, because it's unacceptable. It's a new world.
You could come, you could not come. We're already seeing the last gasps, but there's old dead races Empire. Hhold on to that as long as you can. Because you don't have anything else beyond that to offer. And then we need to remember what Toni Morrison always said is that racism is a distraction from your real work. So distraction, the whole function is to distract you from what you're supposed to be doing. Those people will always be there, they will always be hating, they will always be backing them from the sideline. Let them be on their way, because it has nothing to do with how people remember your work with EG what is supposed to happen. As long as you are taking those steps, you're gonna be okay.
ASHOOH: Right. And before we move on to the next question, just because we've got a young audience here, many of them will be entering the workforce for the first time. I think it's important to point out a statistic from a famous Hewlett Packard study that demonstrated that men will apply to a job if they meet 60% of the qualifications. Women don't apply unless they meet 100% of the qualifications. So don't take yourself out of the running before someone else does. I think it's really important to just go for things.
PETERSON: There's a flip side to that, though, I'm gonna put that out because that is absolutely true. Women tend to judge ourselves harshly, but it's because we are judged more harshly when we get somewhere. And so that's one of those. I love that phrase, "Oh, don't take yourself out of the running." But then you're sitting there and you're like, no, I am qualified. I could tell you the amount of venture capitalists that have sat and listened to my cofounder with her PhD in VR, AR, and circle technology, and me with my years of career designing go, you guys are so impressive, amazing, we haven't refused this will work, we just kind of don't see the need for this. And then we'll go off in front five white guys who have a screen and no nothing, no degrees, no pre-launch, anything. It's not about that a lot of times, it's a lot about how people perceive you, in a lot of ways. So, yeah, don't take yourself out of the running for any given thing, always just go shoot your shot.
You try to prepare as much as you can but it's much better to give it a shot instead of not trying to take it. But, on the flip side, just remember that some of us are going to be judged more harshly than others. That's why we say we have to be twice as good to go half as far. It's why we feel like we need to show up on point for all these different things. Every time I've been on a panel at CFR I make sure that I'm going to bring something to the table, that I'm not trying to compete with anybody else, especially as I'm bringing my own way to this so that we're not having that conversation. Just figuring those things out because we will be judged differently and we are just different. We see it in funding gaps, in the promotions gap. You see it in what they call the glass cliff where they will hire a riskier hire like a person of color or a woman when everything else has failed, they have let seven other people drop the ball, and then if you don't clean it up, well, it was failing anyway. You have to watch for those kinds of things. So sometimes some of us are going to be held with different standards. Does it suck? Yes. Let it make you better and just move on.
ASHOOH: Next question please, operator.
STAFF: We will take the next question from Caroline Preston.
Q: Hi, thank you both so much for your time. My name is Caroline Preston and I am a senior policy associate at Business Executives for National Security. My question is in more of a personal lens, how do you build or what are some tips that we can use to build an effective elevator elevator pitch or first introduction that effectively complements our personal brand?
CHEMALI: I can start with this because I've done this twice in particular for my own personal—well, elevator pitches are important for anything, like whether it's an interview or even if you're pitching a story to a reporter, whatever it is, an elevator pitch is really important. I remember the process I went through actually to hone in the elevator pitch for my consulting business first and then my show was a real process that I went through. And the way I got to it was really—so okay, I'll give you both and so hopefully it helps. I know CFR has rules against advertising your business, I'm trying to take this for examples. So my business I honed in like, okay, well, what is it I want to do? Who are the clients I'm trying to achieve? What is the work I'm trying to do? I asked myself all these questions and then when I did—an elevator pitch really should be one sentence that summarizes what it is you're doing and who the audience is, or who the intended audience is, so that people can see that and know whatever it is, is for them.
So for my business I said, okay, well, we won't do business because maybe business is not good for for my show. I said, in ten minutes once a week I cover the top world news stories in a fun and easy way, in an approach that explains to an American viewer why this matters. So automatically in one sentence you know exactly what it is I do, how the show should look, and who the audience should be. I actually say young American viewers, it's targeted for Gen Z and young millennials. And getting to that was just a process of figuring out—it took a long time, what I did was not just like, okay, when I refined the concept over and over again, when I got to how long should it be, how do I want to explain these issues, what type of stories am I going to do, but a lot of it was actually thinking about the intended user. When I thought about who is the ideal end user and what's their story? What or who do they look like? What are they working in? Are they working? Are they a student? Where geographically are they based? And starting backwards is when I was able to kind of hone the concept of my show and get that one elevator pitch.
And an elevator pitch is so important in, like I said, in anything, whether you're going into an interview and you're saying I worked in government for twelve years in national security and public affairs positions and that I know that I can handle whatever it is, commentating on China, I mean, whatever it is. Knowing that and preparing that is so important, but the way to get to it is thinking, first, who's receiving this information, and then what is it I'm trying to communicate or achieve and then how can I hone that into one sentence that's fun and exciting. And taglines help too by the way, like that's a piece of advice I got when I launched my show was people were like, what's your tagline? And I was like, I don't know...and that took a while. I came up with a bunch and then I polled all my friends. So my tagline is—and the show's called, "Oh my World," like, oh my god—so it's "Oh my World, your weekly world news quick and dirty." Again, that's not an elevator pitch, but the short sentence is meant for you to understand without reading the description exactly what it is you're getting. It's weekly. It's world news. It's quick and dirty probably assumes that it's not formal, or not snob speak like most of the time foreign policy can be. So yeah, Latoya, what do you think? And by the way, can I just add this is a tangent, Latoya, if you ever think of changing your brand, you should be a motivational speaker.
ASHOOH: I'm sitting here like nodding yes.
PETERSON: (Laughs.) I do this for like burnt out journalists all the time, that's my secret. So people who know they'll call me and be like what's going on out newsroom? I'm like [inaudible] who you are, who pats you back for that? (Laughs.) Anyway, so to Hagar's point, excellent, like taglines are super helpful. I think the two tools that have helped me the most when developing with these brands, one I learned from journalism, and particularly the Women's Media Center, because their goal is to get more women into areas of expertise, essentially, to be on the cable shows, to be writing op eds, and things like that. So these have a program called progressive women's voices that would teach you how to do media training and they really hammered on the messaging triangle. What are the three points no matter where you are, no matter what you're trying to do, that you want someone to take from your message when you're on there?
I still do that when I do interviews like this. What are the three main points that they take if nothing else, if they can't remember anything else that I said, what are the three things I want them to remember? And that's a really helpful exercise you need to tone it down. Because I mean, again you pick a topic, Israel, Palestine, white supremacy, like you could talk for days but you're not going to be able to if you only have a five minute spot. So what are the three things that you want somebody to make sure they get out of that, and that'll help you with the tag line. The flip side in the new career. So we are one of the few games companies that went to the TechStars accelerator, which is a startup accelerator program, which just went along with Y Combinator, and so they make you do your elevator pitch at the beginning of every single meeting for weeks, by the end you can do it in your sleep. I think one time my son was like beating the dog up and I got called on and I was just like running through the house giving my elevator pitch while I'm trying to like pull them apart. (Laughs.)
Just because they make you do it so much and to the point you hate it, you're refining it over and over again to the 32nd version, 62nd version, the 92nd version, the core is always, again, checking in with what is the heart of your message that you need people to know. The more you practice it on people, the more you start realizing where they're asking questions, what makes us different than anybody else. We're like, well, you know, Mitzi and I were both gamers and when we grew up, we never saw stories like ourselves, we never saw faces like ours as protagonists, we wanted a world where everyone can play. That became the genesis for how we talk about Glow Up Games and how we actually frame anything that we're doing in the business.
But it came back from that one personal story of why did we want to do this in the first place? What was the point of founding this company? Right? And why be in this competitive industry that nobody wants to fund you in anyway? So figuring out kind of like that heart, and then looking at it and relentlessly practicing it and then hearing what other people are telling you, because wherever they have questions, and if you keep hearing the same questions over and over again, that helps. We had to add in, hey, we're creative technologists. Why? Because people looked at two women of color and did not assume that we had computer chops, did not assume—Mitzi's the technical cofounder—did not assume that I've been working in AR and VR. They assumed that we did not know what we were doing just two cute girls propping this thing up and there was some white engineer in the back.
We always joke now we have [inaudible] and we always joke a woman's put in the front of you like [inaudible] because we're not dealing with this anymore. (Laughs.) We went through this so many times you realize, okay, creative technologists is the new tagline. Games has to be in the tagline because people are like, well you guys get the early media brand and you do this, you can do that. So when you start hearing that pushback from the people around your message, that is actually really useful feedback on how you need to hone it to have people understand what you [inaudble].
ASHOOH: Great. And I think we'll have to leave it there with the last word as we're at time. I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of the questions. Thank you so much for such a rich discussion. This was really, really valuable. So please, thank you to Hagar and Latoya. Please note that the audio and transcript of today's meeting will be posted on the CFR website. And thank you everybody for joining us.
