Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - suck my dick and balls i work for nasa: the naomi h story

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

This week, Jamie solves an age-old internet mystery -- whatever happened to Naomi H, the Twitter furry who lost an internship after telling off a man she didn't realize was on the National Space Council to "suck my dick and balls?" After half a decade, Jamie speaks exclusively with Naomi H to get to the bottom of it, and talk about how the internet has shaped Naomi H's life for better and for worse. Follow Naomi H: https://x.com/NaomiH_Origins See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. It's Black Business Month and Money and Wealth podcast with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth, create opportunities, and move from surviving to thriving.

It's time to talk about ownership, equity, and everything in between. Black and brown communities have historically been last in life. Let me just say this. AI is moving faster than civil rights legislation ever did. Listen to Money and Wealth from the Black Effect Podcast Network on IHeart Radio. Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, the saying it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole.

The Unwanted Sorority is where black women, fims, and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence, rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leitra Tate. Listen to The Unwanted Sorority, new episodes every year, Thursday on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CoolZone Media. Some kids played football. Homer built rockets. Everyone knows a kid like that from high school, right? Like while you were stoned out of your mind slogging through the newest Final Fantasy

game and getting fingered at the latest worst installment of Indiana Jones, not speaking from experience, and ambitious few were building fucking rockets. Such was the case for Homer Hickham in the fall of 1957, when he was just 14 years old. And I know we're supposed to be like, oh, a prodigy, but they're just making the rest of us look bad. I mean, unbelievable. But if there were ever a time for kids to be interested in building rockets, this was the time. 1957 marked the beginning of the space race between the U.S. and Russia, who if you didn't know are totally cool with each other now. Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, was launched by the USSR on October 4th. As if this weren't cool enough, they then launched a damn dog into

space. Shout out Laika that November. Meanwhile, in Colwood, West Virginia, Homer Hecum tried his first rocket experiment, inspired by seeing Sputnik 1 launched. It was a crude, cherry bomb-powered rocket made with a model airplane and the tube of a flashlight. And it's his first time. It doesn't work. The rocket explodes and never takes off. To improve upon this, he decides to call in The Boys and get ready for some of the most mid-century American names you've ever heard. Homer calls in his buddies Quentin Wilson, Roy Lee Cook, Sherman Sears, Jimmy Odell Carroll, and Billy Rose, who all joined the fold to build a rocket and get out of Colwood for good upon graduating high school. The next rocket the group launches

is more successful. They call it the Ock One, and it flies six entire feet. From there, they start calling their operation the Big Creek Missile Agency, and keep at developing these rockets for the next three years. The space race continues in the background of all of this, and the BCMA are hopeful that they may get jobs at NASA after they get their college degrees. The first U.S. satellite, the Explorer, is launched in February 1958, followed by the first group of astronauts announced in 1959. That's the round with John Glenn, remember him? Loud and clear, he reports back to Mercury Control, reading off his instruments, commenting

on his reactions, all as coolly and calmly as if he was commuting on the 827. Glenn is able to control the yaw and pitch of the vehicle himself. My dad was born that year. How fun. The BCMA, now more frequently called the Rocket Boys, persist. They try out mixing different fuels with ingredients like, like zinc dust, moonshine, and sulfur, and they launched 35 rockets in total, while still teenagers. The boys' final year of high school, they win a gold medal at the National Science Fair.

And at this point, if you're wondering, wait, isn't this the plot to a Jake Gyllenhaal movie? Yes, it is. To everyone else, it was just a light in the sky. Let them have outer space. We got rock and roll. But to Homer Hickham, it was the future. Sputnik is a milestone in history. And just maybe a way out.

College scholarships were winning a science fair? I'm going to build a rocket. You better take an interest in your own town. Just don't blow yourself up. October Sky. This is the plot to the movie October Sky, which happens to be based on the memoir, Rocket Boys, by Homer Hickham. Also, Rocket Boys and October Sky are anagrams.

I just think that's fun. So yes, from a young age, Homer Hickham's place in history seems kind of inevitable. He goes on to graduate from Virginia Tech with a degree in industrial engineering. He serves in the Vietnam War in the Army, and he continues to work for the U.S. aviation and missile command through the 70s. Only ethical things, I'm sure. And then, at long last, Homer joins NASA in the 1980s as an aerospace engineer. He's done it, and his career there is a storied one. Homer has worked with the Hubble Space Telescope. He's worked with with the space lab and space shuttle mission astronauts.

And just before retiring from NASA in 1998, he was the payload training manager for the international fucking space station. But even with this successful career at NASA, he still wasn't done. Homer's memoir, Rocket Boys, went to number one on the bestseller list in 1998. In October Sky, the Jake Gyllenhaal movie,

came out in 99, which launched Homer a long and successful writing career, writing in both fiction and memoir. But he still isn't done. Almost 20 years after retiring in 2017, he was appointed to the National Space Council by objectively horrible, recently, almost assassinated former President Donald Trump.

But, as I would imagine, to Homer Hickham's chagrin, it is in 2018, as far as the entire internet is concerned, that Homer Hickham, the Rocket Boy, made his greatest historical contribution, when he had a now legendary run-in with Twitter user Naomi H. Because one thing about Homer Hickham is that he kept up with The Times. In 2018, he had a pretty active Twitter account and tweeted mostly things related to NASA or to his career.

But in August 2018, if they replied to a tweet from a user named Naomi H, whose Twitter avatar is a gorgeous anthropomorphic deer in front of a trans pride flag, Naomi H.'s tweet, in all caps, reads, everyone shut the fuck up. I got accepted for a NASA internship. 19 hours after the post went live, it was gathering some steam, and it ends up reaching Homer Hickham.

Homer, whose Twitter avatar is a picture of himself, Homer Hickham, replies. Language. But Naomi H. will not be silent. She replies, Suck my dick in balls. I'm working at nudge. NASA. And then Homer Hickham with the gut punch. And I am on the National Space Council

that oversees NASA. Fatality. Oh yes. Oh yes. Naomi H., your 16th minute starts now. Let's take it too far Then give me one more more Let me see it! Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of fame One more minute of fame

You're not so bad when you're taking on my life. You guys, I'm very excited for this one. It happened only six years ago, but six years online. we are talking about the ballad of Naomi H. and Homer Hickham. And if you were on Twitter at the time, you almost certainly knew about it. So let's just jump in. Come with me, if you will, to August 2018. Election rigging in Zimbabwe prompts an uprising, which the government reacts to with big surprise, extreme violence. Pope Francis declares that he wants to work toward the abolition of the death penalty. I have my birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese this month because I love

animatronics first and attention in a very close second. And this now legendary Twitter interaction takes place between college student Naomi H. and esteemed NASA alumnus Homer Hickham. One of the many reasons I find this story to be unique is that in part it seems as if it's endured because of the dangling mystery that's implied. A mystery, by the way, that my interview with Naomi H. today solves entirely. But contextually, you need to understand that this is a Twitter story. And in 2018, this is a very particular moment in how the platform works. This is a few years before the formal Elon Musk takeover,

but the late 2010s is rife with pushes for infinite user growth and algorithmic shifts that simultaneously push for a safer and more engaged online community, which, in this reporter's opinion, is basically a fool's errand. During this time, Twitter is trying to have it both ways. In fact, in May of 2018, Twitter encouraged a lot of hype over a change to their algorithm that they claimed would encourage quote-unquote health in what users were shown to deter people from trolling other users. It's not the first time the then-12-year-old platform had tried and failed to address this problem. A few years earlier in 2015, the then CEO Dick Costello acknowledged that the company said the platform, quote, sucks at dealing with abuse and trolls, unquote, radical honesty, thrilling.

But by 2018, Twitter and every other major social media platform was on the defensive about their various failures to prevent misinformation from influencing the result of the 2016 presidential election in America. Addressing misinformation was actually a steeper request for the likes of Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube. Because both of these companies' algorithms had intentionally pushed misinformation via engagement and utterly failed to moderate their content whatsoever, which led to annoyance at very best and a genocide in Myanmar at worst. In his testimony, he was asked about, for instance, the effect that Facebook has had in, Myanmar in the massacre of the Rohingya there, it has played a critical role in mobilizing Buddhist opinion, in radicalizing Buddhist opinion, in creating an environment where you could have what amounts to something very close at least to a genocide and certainly to ethnic cleansing.

For Twitter, whose algorithm at this time was still fairly linear, the real issue was assessing which users were misusing the platform to harass and silence others. Regardless, Donald Trump's win in 2016, in no small part due to misinformation and high engagement, meant that all social media platforms were under fire, and a lack of response could have meant a decline in user popularity. So Twitter announced that they were taking a more aggressive stance against the abuse of conduct that had become prevalent in the users that posted the most. Co-founder Jack Dorsey said at the time,

it's shaping up to be one of the highest impact things that we've done. The spirit of the thing is that we want to take the burden off the person receiving abuse and mob-like behavior. If there's any indication that this policy was not successful, it's the one I'm about to tell you. Because the Ballad of Naomi Agent Homer, in the space of just two interactions between strangers, contains so much of what makes the internet and Twitter specifically empowering of our worst instincts. The follow-out of this story going viral started conversations about modern work. workplace ethics, generational divides, transphobia, targeted harassment campaigns, misinformation, and false demonization, and a general confusion around furries conceptually. And yet,

you are listening to this podcast on the internet. And yet, Naomi H. loves the internet. And prior to this interaction, had no bones about enjoying the internet. And in fact, could attribute a lot of her self-discovery to the internet. You get it. At whatever point you logged on for the first time, your relationship to yourself became complicated forever. But today, we are discussing what actually happened in this story. First, let's talk about this story as far as the public is concerned,

because this is the narrative that appears to have calcified in the general internet imagination. Naomi tweets about getting the internship. Naomi tells Homer Hickham to suck her dick after being told to watch her language and then maybe loses the internship and maybe doesn't. The jury remains out on that issue. And while this story took place

over half a decade ago, the Reddit thread on R slash NASA I'm quoting from here is less than a year old. People really remember Naomi H. There's something about this story that gets to people in their marrow. The Reddit post says,

Did Naomi H ever get a job? I really hope she did, especially considering I would be the one to screw up as bad as she did. The whole thing made me really, really sad. One of the replies links to a Snopes article that tentatively concludes that Naomi H. did, indeed, lose her internship at NASA, but the evidence that it points to to illustrate this point isn't exactly conclusive. A different Reddit user replies, so in essence, we don't know? Someone else chimes in, correct. And this kind of confusion is not surprising at all, especially given the way this story rolled out. After the initial interaction went viral on Twitter, both Naomi H. and Homer Hickham seemed to struggle to know what the best way to respond to the virality is. And of course, their respective

reactions are informed by a lot of different things. It's informed by power dynamic. It's informed by generation gaps, and it's informed by the nebulous question, how many people have been in this specific situation before? And we'll get to Naomi H's line of thought shortly, because folks, this is a 16th minute exclusive. And so while Naomi H. has not said very much about the fallout of this story, Homer Hickham did, but his reaction to the story going viral is, in my opinion, sort of misremembered, and that affects the way that this story is remembered down the line into today. And to be clear, this is a Naomi H. Stan podcast. Personally, I think she is guilty of nothing but enthusiasm and being a little young and naive and being funny. Right,

but the way that both parties in this interaction are characterized makes a huge difference here. And when I hear people talk about this story, they generally choose one person. as right and one person as wrong because the internet is populated by either people who do not understand that two things can be true or people who understand two things can be true but are really annoying about it so it's easy to ignore them and so at different times many people have positioned Homer Hickham as the villain of the story and I very much hesitate to say that's the case and while I don't particularly like when someone language police is online I don't think

there is a villain of this story. I think a lot of what happened here can be attributed to the Streisand effect, which is not what happens to a person when they star in Funny Girl on Broadway in the 70s and subsequently become a beloved American gem whose directorial career should be referenced as historical more frequently. But it does reference that Streisand, comma, Barbara. If you don't know, the Streisand effect references an incident from 2003 when Barbara Streisand's lawyer tried to prevent a picture of her Malibu mansion from being published, and in doing so, drew a shitload of attention to said picture that probably would never have happened if they had not insisted on it never appearing anywhere. So it became shorthand for the thing

where you're in the middle of a room full of people not paying attention to you, and you scream for seemingly no reason, please don't look at me. Basically a situation where you'd be better off just letting it lie. So if you are either Naomi H. or Homer Hickham, the first mistake you make is that after this interaction takes off in mid-August 2018, neither of them delete it. And we can speculate as to why. Per Naomi H., she's a college student who thinks it's kind of funny and doesn't expect that it will cost her arguably the biggest opportunity of her life. And as far as Homer Hickham goes, he's a 75-year-old on Twitter whose online behavior was generally pretty lighthearted up to this point. In spite of his position, Hickham was still mostly retired and he weighed in on NASA news

and would occasionally reply to colleagues, but just about space. Homer's stuff. He's one of the rocket boys. But what we do know is that the tweet found its way to him. And the fact that the original interaction was still shareable days after it happened and the interaction ended inconclusively, kept people talking about it. Again, think about Homer's final reply, the... And I am on the National Space Council that oversees NASA. Pretty understandably, this is often interpreted as a death knell for our heroine, Naomi H. But where the Streisand effect really comes in is how the controversy is addressed

after this initial bump in engagement. Because the longer this thing stays up, the more the bell can't be on wrong. A lot of users have already taken Homer Hickham's original response to Naomi H as one that warned that he would cause her to lose her job. And the first wave of discourse around this story kind of revolves around this assumption. Here's an example. An intern told an overseer of NASA to suck her dick and balls. And there are actually people in the comments who think firing her was an abuse of power, L.O.L. There's people reacting who think that anyone who doesn't know,

Hickham's relevance within NASA doesn't deserve the job anyway. I can't believe NASA gave an internship to someone who didn't know who Homer Hickham was. And no, this user did not spell Homer Hickham's name correctly. And then there's people who are leaning into Naomi H's identity, which should be unrelated to the story. But we're going to talk about it at length this week. More specifically, how Naomi H's identity as both a trans woman and a furry, were repeatedly referenced in the reaction to this story. Here is a light example of that.

The furry became an intern for NASA and got instantly fired after telling someone on their counsel to suck their dick because this is 2018. Buddy, join us in 2024. The water's fine. But if you've been on social media for a while, you recognize this rhetorical format. This is a historically popular way

to talk about things that the writer wants you to feel is uniquely, modernly absurd. In this case, the user is pointing to the fact that Naomi H. is a furry. That is true. At this time, Naomi H's Twitter was a mix of random personal thoughts, some gaming takes,

and yes, furry content. And I really hope this doesn't come off as patronizing. Furries, for my listeners that live under a rock, hello, hope the rock is doing well, just so you know, furries are defined in the Oxford Dictionary as an enthusiast for animal characters with human characteristics. In particular, a person who

dresses up in costume as such a character or uses one as an avatar online. A few of you were just like, oh, the mascot costume community. Correct. And to get rid of any confusion right here and now, make no mistake, I ride for furries, because like many unusual communities, they are not hurting anyone, and moreover, I can confirm that furries make excellent stand-up comedy audiences. So yeah, I ride for furries. If you're a better audience member than a garden variety bachelorette party, I am your ally, 100%. But furries are not just an in-person community, as the definition implies. Furies have always operated via both public and niche channels, ranging all the way back to the underground comic scene in the 1970s and in their present iteration,

in online communities that can often lead to in-person meetups. The online community is often a starting point, and trust me when I say that the attendance for in-person furry conferences is huge. So a new world record was set last weekend, but at the same time, I feel like everyone saw it coming. Of course, I'm talking about Anthrocon and the 17,639 of y'all that attended. And so, while anecdotally, I have found the community to be completely, lovely, conflating someone who identifies as a furry as someone inherently ridiculous is still

a common lazy punchline. And I suspect that this has to do with the fact that much of the furry community identifies as LGBTQ plus. And since the dawn of the internet, furs have been very online. The furry community can be participated in just digitally via fursona's, which is the anthropomorphic animal character that furies interact as and often will commission custom art to represent themselves as. For instance, a gorgeous anthropomorphic deer like the one in Naomi H's profile picture. But since furries have been a subject of low-hanging fruit mockery for decades by the time these comments are made, and Homer Hickham is objectively a weird person to see indirect conversation. with a furry who is a half-century his junior.

But remember, this furry art has a background of a trans pride flag because Naomi H. is trans. And it's here that I'll state the obvious and say when bigoted assholes perceive a trans person doing anything, there is a contingency that will relentlessly harass, docs, and dehumanize them, just for existing. And while I have no way of knowing if Homer Hickham knew this, that is exactly where this story's virality leads. So if you're lucky, you won't recognize the

names of hate speech forums like 8chan and Kiwi Farms, but if you're listening to this show, I suspect you might. Both of these forums were inspired by a different forum called Forchan. The famous anonymous forum founded in 2003 by a 15-year-old who had pulled code from a forum board called, sorry, anime death, tentacle rape, horror house. But once 4chan is founded, the site's threads range from the innocuous to the depraved. And it made way for some deeply hateful communities that encouraged harassment, doxing, hate speech, and probably a bunch of shorthand terms for those things that I have refused to learn. So off of the success of 4chan, 8chan and Kiwi farms are founded the same year, 2013,

and are built on the same dog-whisly innocuous term. Free speech. In this case and many others, this term roughly translated to hate speech, which became even more clear just a year later in 2014 when 8chan in particular became a critical player in the Gamergate saga. And that's an episode unto itself, because free Palestine. But this was a period of months in which people, nearly always women and queer people, who had expressed interest in virtually. any progressive values with regards to feminism or representation in video games in general were made to fear for their lives due to intricate, terrifying anonymous online harassment campaigns. Remarkably, Kiwi Farms manages to be even worse.

Here are headlines about the continued effort to shut the website down from the last two years. From the Hill in 2022, why anti-trans web forum Kiwi Farms was erased from the internet, from the Washington Post in 2023, the endless battle to ban the world's most notorious anti-trans stalker website. And from Mother Jones in 2023, the website that wants you to kill yourself and won't die. Unfortunately, at the time I'm recording this, this last headline is still correct,

and Kiwi Farms is still not dead. And we suffer for every moment that that remains true. And these hate sites would very frequently mock, harass and docks trans people. And in the case of Kiwi farms, that was often the point of the entire platform. Because users on these sites are cowards unwilling to put their names to their own horrific, hateful views, which means that they walk among us. Fuck you!

The fact that Naomi H. was targeted and harassed on these sites, not for being an intern who was fired, but a trans intern who had the audacity to exist at NASA. And on these disgusting sites, the combined effect of disappointment at losing the internship, the influx of attention, and the hatefulness directed at her general existence made her a prime candidate to feel unsafe. And I can't say enough, I'm so glad that this story has a happy ending, but holy shit, with trans people experience online can be just as traumatizing as it is in real life, and even more so.

And while these hate forums have since mutated, they're still around, and the transphobic harassment that Naomi H. received in 2018 is pulled from a disturbing playbook that is still very much with us. And we wouldn't be talking about this story now unless there had been the classic backlash to the backlash, right? It reminds me a lot of our episode on Coffee Wife from a few months ago. It's another story that starts with a wave of shaming followed by a. an equal, sometimes more intense backlash to the backlash, that implies that the first wave of reaction wasn't fair. In Naomi H's case, many came to her defense as strangers, and friends she knew from the furry community came to her defense in a public way, which is a noble thing to do, but almost guarantees that the story is not going to go away the way that Naomi H. might have

liked it to by then. And these defenses of Naomi H. start to portray home. Homer Hickham as a villain. Here are some examples. Wow. Homer Hickham is kind of a jerk. Naomi did the right thing. This hectoring old Dullard needs to be told off more. I hope they get their internship back. Being told by an old white dude to mind your language is irritating as fuck. And it is true that Homer Hickham's old person response of language. And Naomi H.'s young person response of,

suck my dick and balls, does directly lead to her losing the NASA internship. But the way much of the public remembers it now, it's as if Homer Hickham picked up the phone, dialed 1,800 NASA, and demanded that Naomi H. be fired. The truth is, Homer Hickham did not lose Naomi H. That internship,

at least not directly. The Streisand effect did, because the more people talked about this, and the longer the posts stayed up, the more likely it became that someone at NASA was going to find out. And they did. When Homer finds out on, that Naomi lost the internship, he spoke out against NASA's decision publicly. Here's a blog post

from his website from August 21st, 2018, entitled Social Media. It reads, Recently, it was called to my attention on Twitter that someone was being hired by NASA and that they were using the F word in a tweet about it. I'm a Vietnam vet and not at all offended by the F word. However, when I saw NASA and the word used together, it occurred to me that this young person might get in trouble if NASA saw it.

So I tweeted to her one word, language, and intended to leave it at that. Soon, her friends took umbrage and said a lot of unkind things, but long after I was gone, and I immediately deleted my comments

and blocked all concerned. Later, I learned she had lost her offer for an internship with NASA. This I had nothing to do with, nor could I, since I do not hire and fire at the agency or have any say on employment whatsoever. As it turned out, it was due to the NASA hashtag her friends used that called the agency's attention to it long after my comments were gone. She reached out to me with an unnecessary apology, which I heartily accepted and returned with my own. After talking to her, I am certain she deserves a position in the aerospace industry and i'm doing all i can to secure her one

that will be better than she lost i have also talked to the folks that had to do with her internship and made absolutely certain that there will be no black mark on her record signed homer hickham homer hickham does delete this blog post the next day but let's pause on it because it's a rich text. His post implies that what lost Naomi H. the internship was not what she herself said. It was what her supporters said to Hickham, a respected NASA engineer, and it was the slandering of him and NASA itself that lost their friend the internship. And if this is true, I find this to be really unfair. I have no doubt that Homer Hickham's information from NASA is sound, but that means that NASA has all but admitted that they took an opportunity from a college student

because of things other people said. And some of Naomi H.'s supporters seem to recognize this after Hickham's statement was released. One furry tweeted, The full Homer Hickham story is a ride. As usual, furry Twitter simultaneously makes a dumb situation worse while never actually posting the full story. Y'all? Naomi H. said at the time and since, that it appears that Homer Hickham did, did genuinely try to get her internship back,

and that she reached out with a sincere apology that Homer told her was unnecessary. The only problem was, exclusive. He was unsuccessful in getting her the internship back. And people rarely talk about Homer Hickham's contextual explanation here because it was swiftly deleted in a way that I think confused the narrative for many people. In the moment, Naomi H. doesn't. really seem to know how to react. She's kind of panicking. Because here's this thing she thought

was a little Twitter bit that wouldn't affect her career. And now the internship she was doubling down on being excited about is gone. And then shortly after, she's subjected to transphobic harassment. She's subjected to mockery and threats of violence. So she kind of stops posting. She makes her Twitter account private and then tries exploring her feelings on everything on a Twitter wannabe platform called Mastodon. Unfortunately, people find her there, and her personal struggle through this time is kind of laid bare for the public. And when it's confirmed that Naomi H's internship has really and truly been lost as a result of this interaction, that is when the mainstream media hits hard and fast. BuzzFeed News. A woman was fired from NASA after they saw her

tweet, suck my dick and balls, I'm working at NASA. USA Today, would-be NASA intern loses gig after vulgar tweet to NASA alum Homer Hickham, reports say, business insider. A woman lost a NASA scholarship after getting into Twitter beef with a member of NASA Space Council. Most of these articles imply that Naomi H. is either the victim of the world's cruelest joke or was genuinely foolish to have posted that in the first place. The pieces express sympathy, but don't imply that Homer Hickham spoke out of turn. And some of the coverage references the transphobic harassment as a major part of what fueled the story.

But after this wave of mainstream attention, the ballot of Naomi H. and Homer Hickham doesn't progress all that much. Once these stories come out, both parties stop responding for comment. So within a few days of this story going mainstream, Naomi H.'s internship is left. lost. Homer Hickham releases a statement saying he's going to try and help her get it back,

then deletes it. And finally, Naomi H. crops up on Twitter on August 23rd to say the following. I think I might get my internship again. Thank you all for the support. And for me, at this point, there's really only one ingredient missing in the story. What explanation does NASA have for any of this? And while they're too classy NASA to comment on this incident specifically, they did tell Dan Yvonne at Snopes that their justification for firing Naomi Age was related to their social media code of conduct. Ah, yes, the corporate social media code of conduct, a fearsome era of workplace policy that directly led to me losing a job at the Boston Globe for saying, I come so hard that I bleed.

when I was 22 years old. A story for another day. NASA tells Dan Yvonne at Snopes. Privacy regulations prohibit the agency from discussing specific details. Interns do receive a manual that includes expectations regarding use of social media. If a student is rejected, they can reapply for the program. And from here, Naomi H. goes silent or private online for a while. Homer Hickham returns to posting as usual and never reinstates that misdain.

mysterious, deleted blog post, and the whole story becomes a bit of an unsolved online mystery. Until now. The most recent time I saw this story be re-invoked by a viral tweet, I gave it a shot and quote tweeted, Naomi H. DM me, knowing that for sure she wouldn't answer. But several hours later, that same day, a Twitter account replies with an avatar that is a gorgeous, anthropomorphic deer. The reply reads, Hi, I'm Naomi H.

And a reply to the reply, it won't let me DM you. And finally, incredibly, Jamie, please. When we come back, I talk exclusively with the one, the only Naomi H.

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And here is my interview with Naomi H. My name's Naomi. I often go by Naomi H on the internet. You'll forgive me if I don't really feel like giving out my full name. Absolutely. And I'm a transgender woman. We can get into that a little bit later. But the big thing, what brings me to this podcast, is that in August of 2018, I landed and then fumbled a NASA internship in a very hilarious way because I just couldn't stop myself from posting about it. in my in my hubris i sort of assumed that nothing bad would happen i love telling this story to people because it's a whole in in the time since people have a lot of misconceptions about it right people have this idea that i got the internship back or something um and i just want to come out and say that's not

true i did not get the internship back okay that was because it does seem to be a rare still mystery of the internet. Homer tried very hard to get me unfired, but they had already kind of made up their mind. We'll get into it. Starting from the top, it's the spring, summer of 2018. Around like May, I think, I had applied for some NASA internship that had opened up at NASA Glen in Cleveland because I was going to school in Cleveland studying engineering. So I applied for it. Didn't get it, but, you know, my information, my resume was in their system. The rest of the summer goes by, you know, and that was, I had just started hormone therapy. I was like just starting the process of coming out to people as transgender, which is a very scary time in my life.

You know, it's, it's, I'm glad I did it, but it's, it's really hard to put yourself out there like that. So anyways, so it's August, and I'm just like chilling in my room. we're like maybe three or four weeks away from class starting i had already like picked up my classes for the fall semester and everything um and i get i don't remember if it was an email or a phone call but they're like hey we have your resume in the system we see that you have a lot of experience with cad um and this internship like what's that oh cad is is computer assisted drawing it's um it's like you know in 3D modeling in engineering for like manufacturing and designing and all sorts of stuff.

Fascinated. Yeah. You will find that many of my questions are like, huh? That's okay. So yeah, it was something that I had a lot of experience with. So I get this call and they're like, hey, this internship doing CAD work like just opened up. Are you interested?

And I'm just like, well, fuck yeah, I am. So like, you know, they schedule like a video interview for. like a day or two after that maybe like the next day uh i get the offer letter in in my email and i sign it and i fill it out now i am like out of my gourd excited of course that's of course it's it's a big fucking deal so yeah i was specifically i was studying aerospace engineering and if you are like in the aerospace industry in general if you have NASA on your resume you can basically do anything you fucking want like you know it's it's it's it was such an insanely huge thing for my career yeah um and for context um my younger sister sophy she's two years younger than me

she was a physics student at university of michigan and she had gotten all sorts of these crazy internships over her time including one or two at nassasa studying like astrophysics and stuff so whoa like a whole stem family that's Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's where a bunch of overachievers, which I didn't really realize how sort of abnormal that is until I like went to college and kind of got out of my bubble. Yeah. I grew up in a very extremely like white, extremely privileged life. And I don't want to be like one of these white people who is just like absolutely clueless about like shitty things happening in the world. My parents are doctors. Like, they paid for pretty much my entire undergraduate education.

Okay. You know, I got as far as I did because I had a lot of advantages on my side. But that's a little off topic. So you get the internship and it's really fucking exciting. Yeah, it's so exciting. This is like the biggest thing ever for me. So this was on like maybe like a Wednesday or a Thursday. So I spend the weekend just kind of like telling my friends and everyone's really excited for me. You know, people are really happy. I start like trying to arrange like housing. Like I'm going to be down there for like five or six months. Where am I going to live?

I'm going to need a car because it's fucking Houston. The weekend rolls by, you know, we're all, we're all drinking. We're all celebrating. Tuesday decides to roll around. And like Tuesday evening or afternoon after I get up from work, I make the fateful decision. and I log onto my Twitter account and I make that famous post all caps I say

everyone shut the fuck up I just got a NASA internship and it starts to get some attention you know people are pretty happy for me it's got like a thousand likes 2,000 a lot of attention but still kind of rookie numbers some of my friends even go so far

as to say to me like hey Naomi like maybe you want to delete this like this isn't a good look um and and NASA as they warned me and I later learned they're they're very particular about their presence on social media it's they have a whole they have a whole guidebook for it a guidebook that I did not read until way too late I guess this is where I will reveal I don't think you did anything wrong like I don't think I think I think that if I had made different decisions than the ones I made. I could have come out without losing the internship, but I have to acknowledge that

there is, a lot of it comes from hubris on my part. We'll get to that. So then this like, you know, one afternoon, a day or two after the fact, I log on. And this, like, old-ass man, he's not verified, he's got, like, no information on his account or whatever he he responds to me he says just one word language i'm like who the fuck does this guy think he is i don't know you like can't you just be happy for me like fuck you old man so i said back to him what i thought and i maintained was a pretty funny thing to say back i said suck my dick and balls i'm working at nassah it's a very thorough retort yeah yeah yeah um i think i

picked up that phrase from a video game bunky video YouTuber I used to watch a lot of so anyways and then he responds to me and he says I'm on the National Space Council that oversees NASA I'm like wait what I Google who is Homer Hickham like Wikipedia.com and it turns out Homer Hickham is a pretty important dude

in the space industry do you know the movie October Sky Yes, that's what I was going to say. Yeah. I have, to this day, I've never seen the movie. But I later learned that they made a movie about this guy. Really important, he is on the National Space Council that oversees NASA. And so I'm like, wow, this exchange is really fucking funny.

And this is when some of my friends were like, Naomi, I really think you need to start deleting this. And I'm like, no, it'll be fine. Everything's fine. This is just a funny thing happening on the internet. Everything is going to be fine. So I leave it up for, I don't know, a week, two weeks. And it is getting like a lot of attention, like tens of thousands. Yeah.

I think this is when I didn't see the post before the interaction took place. Yeah. Well, this is, at this point, it's still just online. It hasn't even leaked out into real life yet. Okay. So anyways, so now we come back to my brother's wedding. Thing ahead, it's August 2018. I am back in Buffalo, New York, because my older brother is getting married.

It's a Friday night. I'm, like, getting dressed to go to the rehearsal dinner, and I get this phone call from the NASA people, and they're like, hey, did you post this? What I should have done is I should have said, yes, that was me. I can delete the post right now if there's a problem. That's not what I said. Okay. We're like, again, like, 30, I'm, like, dressed in, like, a nice shirt and pants for my brother's rehearsal dinner for his fucking wedding.

Of course, it's, yeah, like the most high-stakes situation you could possibly be in. I'm, like, sitting in my room looking at housing in Houston, and I get this call. They're like, was this you? And I panicked. And I tried to lie my way out of it. I was like, no, it was a friend, but, you know, I don't even remember. remember what I said. I stammered my way through some very obviously fake, very obviously bullshit excuse. They're like, we'll be in touch. I'm sitting there in my room and I'm like,

oh my God, I just fucked up so bad. My stomach just like turned. Yeah. That's not something you want to hear from NASA. You don't ever want to hear someone say, we'll be in touch in that tone of voice. I was like I have never fucked up this hard before. Maybe 10 minutes later I get an email from them saying in writing that my internship offer has been rescinded. I'm like, ah, fuck. I don't know why in this moment I felt the need to tell my family, but I was like, guys, I just lost the NASA internship. We're like leaving to go to the dinner. We're like out the fucking door. And everyone's like, Naomi, why are you telling us this now? And everyone's excited for Max's wedding and I'm having just the worst day of my fucking life. Yeah. Yeah. So where we are at the rehearsal dinner and one of

my friends hits me up on Discord and they're like, Naomi, like you're a really good friend of mind like I can't just stand idly by and do nothing so they like on my behalf like reached out to Homer Hickham and like oh so I'm like it was so sweet of them and I'm really grateful that they did that and this like I didn't speak to him over the phone and anything but I like stepped outside during the dinner and I'm like hey Homer man like I'm really fucking sorry you know I didn't mean anything by it and he's like oh you know i used to be a navy pilot like i'm no stranger to foul language like yeah you know he was he was just like you know trying he didn't really mean for this to blow up this way either he's not on the bleeding edge of the internet right he wasn't even

verified which this was back in the days when that made when that meant something yeah that's true i mean so when you spoke to homer uh did you speak on the phone did you speak uh it was it was it was it was over email but he was pretty quick to respond and he was like hey you know I feel really bad about this like let me basically I don't remember his exact turn of phrase he basically said like let me see what I can do okay and he like made this like whole post on like his own personal blog right and this is where people get the misconception that I got the internship back because Homer basically came out and said I'm going to get her her internship back but he didn't the people at NASA had basically already made up their minds.

And it was like two, maybe three weeks before class started back up again. So I was like, fuck it. I'm just going to go take my classes and finish my degree. And by the way, at the rehearsal dinner and at the wedding, because I was like, I do want to know how the rest of the wedding goes after you drop this bomb. It was a gorgeous wedding. The food was great. On paper, it was a lot of fun.

And like, you know, I'm really happy for my brother and his wife. but I was, like, trying to have a good time to be happy for my brother. But on the inside, I was just so miserable. Of course. People kept coming up to me, and they were like, Naomi, I heard about the NASA thing. Congratulations. And I kept having to be, like, about that. Oh, my God.

It was, it was brutal. It was the worst. I have to imagine, yeah, your family must have been stoked. And did you get into it at the wedding? Or were you like, oh, that didn't work out? People, I mean, I told my family about it and they, my dad just sort of shook his head and went like, you know, like, we didn't really get into it, but I could tell they were like not happy. It's after the wedding. Fast forward to Monday. Okay. The story gets picked up by like the local news in Houston. They're like, here's an interesting thing that happened. You know, it's just because of their 20-year-old intern that they figure it out.

Yeah, probably. Yeah. The local news in Houston picks it up. And then from there, like, USA Today picks it up. And then it's on BuzzFeed. And then it's on Fox. At this point, I had deleted the post, but I left my account up. And this is, I started to have reporters, like, hitting me up in my inbox.

They're like, can I talk to you? and the advice I was getting from everyone is Naomi, just shut up and keep your head down and wait for this to blow over. Yeah. Which was the right move. So I deleted, I nuked that account and waited for it to blow over.

But like, it was everywhere, everywhere for months. I mean, you know, my roommate who was a grad student at the university and did some work at NASA in Cleveland was like, yeah, Naomi, like even I heard about, He had heard about it independently of me telling him. Is it well known, like, within your, like, college friends and everyone, like, does everyone know, like, this happened to you? Yeah, because I love telling this story, because at the, so for a long time, I was very, very

bitter about it. I mean, how could you not be, right? Of course. And every time, every time I heard about anything cool happening in, like, the space industry in general, that, like, bitterness. would come back, especially when I was sort of struggling to get my job and my career off the ground. But six years later, you know, I live with my girlfriend, who I love very much, she's so good to me. And I've got a good job going, and I'm back in the aerospace industry.

That is, oh, I feel like you were going to be really happy to that. I took such a roundabout way to get back into it, and I'm not doing space. I do commercial jet engine stuff. Wild time to be in that industry. You're fucking telling me. Boeing killed a guy. Boeing killed a guy. There's no way around it.

And they asked the CEO in front of Congress and he's just like, I know what happens. And I'm like, what do you mean you know what happens? You know you killed a guy? What? It's just, it's insane. Yeah. The whole thing topped up.

bottom is so, even as someone who knows stuff about airplanes and the FAA and engineering and stuff, like, the more I learn about it, the more I'm like, Jesus fucking Christ. Aerospace is lucky to have you back. Oh, well, thank you. Yeah. Everything has a way of working out. I'm glad that it shook out. But of course, and it's like, that has to be a very bizarre thing to be triggered by space.

conceptually. Yeah. And, you know, I'm, I guess now that I'm doing better, I'm over all of that. But for a long time, I had a lot of very bitter feelings about it. And when I would express this, people would nod and be like, yeah, I guess that makes sense that you would feel that way. We'll be back with more in just a moment. I don't know what the ads about to play are. Sent it by Capital One is coming back to Las Vegas. Vegas. September 19th and 20th. On your feet.

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Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get you. your podcast. Welcome back to 16th minute. I keep drinking this thing called vibe wine that I'm pretty sure could fuel a plane. And here is the rest of my interview with the incredible Naomi H. Going back, it's like August or like early September 2018, I just deleted my Twitter account and tried to keep my head down for a little while. But like, you know, it was everywhere. I had a hard time getting away from it. At that time, I was like still among, among transgender women, we call it boy moating. I was still boy moating. Because I was like on HRT and it was obvious that something was up. But I wasn't like out to people and I was still

going by like my old, my dead name, even though that was not the name I used on Twitter. That was how my parents found out that I had chosen the name Naomi, by the way. I hadn't told them that detail yet. Yeah. They were like, why are you Naomi? And I was like, do you remember like three months ago when I came out as transgender? That's how they learned

your name. So that's how they learned that my chosen name was Naomi. This is wild. Okay, so this is like a pivotal moment for, I mean, in more ways than one. I'm like

I'm like back at school one day a lot of my close friends were like they were like you know Naomi like you've got you've got threads about you like on kiwi farms

which do you know kiwi farms I wish I didn't but yeah I know that the fortune and the kiwi farm they found out about they want nuts

they want nuts they want nuts about it and I have to say although I do have some responsibility on my own end for how I handled it. I definitely think that that crowd shares a lot of the blame for basically taking umbrage with the fact that a transgender person had something good happening to them.

And they just sort of like mass reported me at NASA until I assume like the thing actually came to their fucking attention. Otherwise it would have just blown over. So this is, just to get the timeline for, so like when the original Twitter interaction is going viral, it's not Homer who reports you to NASA. No, he's some old fucking man. Homer tried very hard to get me unfired. Yeah. To be clear, it sounds like he didn't even really give a shit that I said a swear word on the internet.

He was just like sort of trying to be like a funny old man. He came back to me like a couple days later. and he was like, I'm sorry, but like, I can't help you. You know, they've made up their minds already. And I, at this point, it was blowing up. And it was on the news and shit. And I just wanted it to go away. So I was like, dude, don't worry about it.

I'm just going to go back to taking class. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I guess that that's like a thread that I feel like was really lost. Even though the 4chan people and the Kiwi firms people were mentioned in the original reporting, it was never clear that they were the ones mass reporting you who are likely very responsible. I don't really know for sure, but I mean, I have to assume, right? Like, this sort of thing happens very often, you know, some transgender woman says or does something online and everyone fucking gangs up on it.

I mean, you see it all the fucking time. Yeah, it's like a part of like the Kiwi Farms playbook is just to assess. by any means. There's so much going on at once and that this is going on right as you're starting to come out. Like, yeah, it was a really, it was a really complicated and difficult time in my life. I was also in this relationship with my girlfriend at the time that with the gift of retrospect, I could say that that whole relationship was like a little abusive. It was definitely bad. I have not spoken to her since we broke up. I saw her at a furry convention. Did I not mention that? I'm like a huge terminally online piece of shit furry weed nerd. We have so much going on

that I was like, I'll get to furries. We'll talk about that. Like I saw her a few times at the convention. We never spoke. I would just like see her in the crowd and then like, turn around and leave, basically. Wow. Another really cinematic moment. Yeah, basically. Going back a little bit, when this happened, because you just said you're a terminally online furry weeb, I want to know a little bit about your history of your relationship

with the internet and with social media. Like how do we get from zero to August 2018 interaction with Homer Hickham? When I was a young and when I was maybe 14 or 15, I was really into reading comics on the internet, as any teenage boy is. Yeah. I guess not really a teenage boy, but I was 14. I had no concept of that at the time. So we'll say I was a boy. Okay.

And I'm sure someone is going to get mad at me for describing myself that way, but I don't care. And I stumbled into what I now recognize as furry web comics. And I was reading one in particular. I think it still exists. It's called Bittersweet Candy Bowl. Okay, good title. It was about a bunch of, like, they're like teenage, they're like, they're all cats, they're all cat furries.

One of them, the comic relief character is a dog. Anyways, I'm just on Facebook like shit posting, but like in a way where I was like, I guess trying to be low key about being a furry because I was like for whatever reason terrified of people finding that out about me. Because I guess I perceived it as being like cringe and weird. So you're a kid in Buffalo. You've found

these furry comics. Yeah, what was your conception of how furries were perceived at that time? Because this would have been what, like early 2010s? This would have been around 2010 to 2012 era. And I mean, you know, I wasn't like someone who was active on like the forefront

of the website of the internet. I like maybe went on Reddit a little bit, but I was mostly on Facebook and like nine gag, like just looking at shitty memes. Oh my God, I haven't thought about nine gag in a decade. Wow. Yeah, me either. But that's, I guess I didn't, I didn't know any better. So that was how I sort of got into being a huge furry. I was always for a long time, like too afraid to like post about any of that stuff. Maybe this is like me projecting some of my own anxieties or whatever, but I was like really terrified of people finding that out about me until when I and like three maybe four years later I was

a senior in high school my friend Josh like really introduced me um to like furries as like a concept fast forward a few years I'm like 18 years old I'm a freshman in college and I'm like chilling in my dorm doing doing homework one day um and I promise these stories are connected I trust you and this dude Derek walks out without his shirt on. Now, Derek was on the swim team. So he just, he was dumb as hell, but he was just this gorgeous, gorgeous dude. I mean, like, just gorgeous. That was sort of like one of the first inklings that I might not be, like, exactly 100% straight. Of course, up to this point, I had been cranking my hog to gay furry porn for years for whatever reason with the furry porn and the furry oo-woo femboys. There's like enough of like a cognitive dissonance where it didn't really

register that that was like gang. Like that was not heterosexual behavior. Sure. But it reached a point where I couldn't really ignore it. Um, so, so fast forward another couple of years. It's, it's 2017 now. I was having a lot of strange feelings about my gender and my body that I, I, I really didn't understand at a time. I just knew that I was like really uncomfortable and sad and frustrated a lot and I really didn't know why. The one sort of consistent feeling that I had was like, oh man, like, like girls are like so pretty. Like I wish I could be that pretty or something. It sort of reached a point where I could like no longer ignore it. So it's 2017 and I'm like, okay, like, you know, furies are it was an online group I was really was kind of still am really involved with

and they're overwhelmingly LGBT I don't remember if this was an idea I came up with myself or if someone suggested it to me but the idea came to me to just sort of like try making a persona that's a girl just dip your toe and see how that makes you feel and had your previous fers not been all all guys okay you know cycled through a couple but I don't have any of any of the art of them. It's all buried on like old hard drives buried in a cardboard box somewhere in the basement, I think. So I was trying a different persona.

I made a persona that was, you know, a girl. And I specifically, I made a persona that was a deer because I really liked the imagery of having like a female deer that still had the distinctly male antlers as like, you know, transgender imagery. That felt very compelling to me. I don't want to say it happened instantly, but it happened very quickly where I just had a moment where I was just like, oh, fuck. I realized I was actually transgender by, you know, being a

queer furry on the internet. The wider quote unquote furry community is not really something I really associate myself with anymore. But like, you know, it definitely, I can't deny that it was something that was really important to me for a long time. And it was like this really critical avenue for me to like have this space where you can explore yourself like that. And I find out that this is super common for trans people to have this exact experience. Wow. It happens all the time. It's a space where you can literally like, you literally invent a persona for yourself and then you sort of interact through that persona. So that's a really, really powerful thing for a lot of people. I am curious about if, you know, NASA, Homer, suck my dick and balls

gate. Did it affect, choose your title? Just float. No, I like, I like dick and balls gate. Let's go with that. Did it change the way you use social media? Did it change the way you relate to the internet? It definitely, it definitely did. For a long time, I didn't go back on Twitter for about a year or two. I maintained my presence on Tumblr because Tumblr was still is low-key enough that you can just use Tumblr and it's very difficult to trace that back to like real life shit. I used something called Mastodon for a little bit while. It was a fad at the time. In like the immediate weeks after I made some posts on Mastodon about my own feelings of it. And I was in a very vulnerable place. And I remember seeing those screenshots of my very vulnerable posts being

like circulated around because I didn't really understand how to use the privacy setting. So everything I was saying was like viewable to the public. These days I am on Twitter. And I guess you could say I've kind of come back to the posting where I was before. It's weird because in some ways I love to just like you know post with reckless abandon you know I definitely understand that if you go too wild and too out there that things can circle back and bite you in the ass I definitely understand that now but like I'm on social media just kind of doing whatever the hell I want because it's like I guess the perspective is it feels like well I already had the worst fucking thing possible that could happen to me over social media has already happened

And I survived, so I don't give a shit anymore. Like, what are you going to do? Make me lose my NASA internship, you know? With regards to the 2018, suck my dick in Balls Gate, do you have any regrets? Would you change anything? Well, I wouldn't have lied and said that someone else made the post. I wouldn't have done that. I mean, like, you know, there's plenty of things I can look back and say, if I had behaved differently, I could have kept the interiors.

but it's kind of hard for me to say that because that happening was such a turning point in my life that sort of indirectly led to me being where I'm at today and it sucked for a long time but it had to be like that to get to where I'm at now and where I'm at now is really good that's amazing thank you thank you so much for for being willing to talk about this experience and just and solve one of the internet's great mysteries Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Ah, this interview was genuinely so exciting. Thank you so much to Naomi H.

And you can follow her at the links in the description. I mean, listeners, my sweet, sweet listeners, it was such a joy to talk to Naomi and hear that in spite of this one-off interaction, literally changing the course of her life, that she's happy with where she is now. And fuck you, she is. working aerospace engineer, and maybe Boeing should stop bragging about killing that guy. While some still find heroes and villains in the ballad of Naomi H. and Homer Hickham,

what I've learned in the course of revisiting this story is what I learned so often in the making of this show, that both parties were just people, behaving in their respective flawed ways, and that while the consequences of that harmed them both, it certainly harmed Naomi H. more she made a mistake an internet mistake not an aerospace mistake and the fact that something innocuous like that can lead to a targeted transphobic harassment campaign and fundamentally change relationship dynamics with parents and friends is i don't know it makes one want to go to the rooftops and scream at the gaping maw of the night sky suck my dick and balls She was right to say that, right?

And Naomi H., your 16th minute, ends now. Okay, for this week's moment of fun. Here is Jake Gyllenhaal claiming he met Homer Hickham before he played him in a movie. But listen to the answer. I don't believe him. What did you learn about him or some of his experiences that are not in the movie? Well, I think reading the book, there are certain experiences that you don't find in the movie.

There's the, there are many times in which it didn't get in, unfortunately, because certain things are just as interesting. I think that always there's different aspects of life and the ambiguity of life that don't get completely filled in movies because it is a separate reality. And it's not as, and reality is slower than the drama in which movies run in. So, um, I, I'm, I'm not totally, I'm not sure. I, because I forgot the question.

16th minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Heart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor, our theme song is by Sad 13 and pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson my cats flea and Casper and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all bye welcome to pretty private with Ebeney the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free I'm Ebeney and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around

you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. It's Black Business Month and Money and Wealth podcast with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth, create opportunities, and move from surviving to thriving. It's time to talk about ownership, equity, and everything in between. Black and brown communities have historically been last in life. Let me just say this. AI is moving faster than civil rights legislation ever did.

Listen to money and wealth from the Black Effect Podcast Network on IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.