There Are No Girls on the Internet - TANGOTI Classic: She built a movement to take on Breitbart

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Nandini Jammi co founded Sleeping Giants, one of the most influential activist campaigns of the Trump era. But she was almost completely left out of the movement she helped build. Nandini's Medium piece: https://medium.com/@nandoodles/im-leaving-sleeping-giants-but-not-because-i-want-to-d9c4f488642Wired piece on Check My Ads: https://www.wired.com/story/she-helped-wreck-the-news-business-heres-her-plan-to-fix-it/We'd love to hear from you! [e-mail] Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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844-844-I-Hart. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. And nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where SportsSlice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves.

Their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to SportsSlic on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slic Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. There Are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Last night, the Louisville Courier Journal reported that Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly, one of the police officers involved in the death of Brianna Taylor last March, had secured a book distribution deal with an imprint of Simon & Schuster

to publish a book called The Fight for Truth, the inside story behind the Brianna Taylor tragedy. You might also recall that Maddenley also tried to sue Brianna Taylor's boyfriend for emotional distress. Activist Nandini Jami started a petition on moveon.org to stop Maddingly from profiting from Brianna Taylor's death and story through this book deal. Her petition got over 30,000 signatures in just five hours, and Simon and Schuster ultimately announced they would no longer be involved in distributing this book.

Now, this is a great reminder that anyone can use their voice to make an impact. We heard from Nandini last fall when she opened up about her work tracking how brands are funding online hate through ad dollars. Let's revisit her story on Speaking Up. and how learning to own your voice can change the world. Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy. There's no hiring bias against women in tech. They just suck at interviews.

Will you rather your child have feminism or cancer? All of these completely messed up headlines were actual headlines of stories published on the far right website, brightbark.com, known for publishing misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist articles, dangerous conspiracy theories, and deliberately misleading stories. It's also one of the most important sites in the era of Trump. Their former chairman, Steve Bannon, even served as Trump's chief strategist. And where there's an online website, there's brands keeping that website afloat

by giving them money to run ads on that website. But one group went on a mission to make that kind of racism, misogyny, and hate speech unprofitable. Sleeping Giants became one of the most influential activist organization. organizations of the Trump era. Their strategy involved urging their members to tweet screenshots of brands, running ads on websites that support and publish hate speech, asking if those sites match their values and urging them to pull their ads. In doing so, they learn that oftentimes reputable brands have no idea what sites their ads run on. Sleeping Giants was run anonymously

to create the impression that it was run by more than just two people. After the conservative news Outlet Daily Caller published a piece outing one person behind Sleeping Giants, Matt Rivitz. He and his family faced death threats. Later, Matt was profiled in a New York Times piece alongside Sleeping Giants co-founder Nandini Jammie. Sleeping Giants was so successful that they contributed to Breitbart seeing a 90% drop in ad revenue. They also contributed to a broader conversation about how reputable brands are funding extremism by spending ad money on websites that published hate speech. So this should be a success story, right? In July, Nandini published a scathing piece on Medium, saying that while she believed she was working with Matt as a partner,

he gaslighted her out of the movement they built together. While their working relationship started on a good note, Matt began taking high-profile speaking engagements and obscuring her role in their work, eventually erasing her altogether. She writes, I want to share with you my journey with sleeping giants, while taking credit matters and while you must fight for yourself as hard as you fight for your cause. I want to show you how a woman of color almost disappeared from the movement she built, and what you can achieve when you refuse to follow the rules your white male leader sets for you. I hope other brilliant women of color and marginalized folks see yourselves in me and don't wait as long as I did. The stakes are too high for you to disappear.

Now, Nandini is done letting her voice be left out of the narrative. So how did you get started in this work? In November 2016, I was working as head of growth for a tech startup. And I went to visit brightbart.com for the first time after the elections. Just like everyone else, I was trying to figure out what happened and what we're dealing with here. And the first thing I noticed was ads for some of the biggest companies. needs in the world on this website. You know, we've been hearing a lot about how it was putting out hate speech and,

you know, misinformation and fake stories and all that stuff, but no one had ever really talked about the ads and the ads are how that website makes money. So I'm no genius. I just, I had like run a Google ad campaign like once a couple of months before that. And I had been quite particular about where my ads were going. I was curious and interested in making sure they were appearing in sort of reputable places on the internet. And so the first thing I thought of was, you know, the site placements. You know, the marketers for running their campaigns are not looking at their site placements.

And all we have to do is get these folks to add brightbart.com. to their exclusion list. If they do that, then Breitbart will no longer make money. Like, it was kind of like a crazy idea because there are so many companies who have Google ads, like possibly millions. And the idea was to get all of them to one by one to drop Breitbart. So I wrote a little, I wrote a medium post.

and hoped for it to go viral, where I basically sort of outlined this crackpot idea where I was like, we should all just go into our Google ads, added to our exclusion list, and then Breitbart won't receive our money anymore, and then they'll go out of business. And while that piece didn't go viral, the concept of tweeting at a company, which is something that I did as well, I tweeted out at like Old Navy, that was the first ad I saw, and letting them know that their ad is funding this hateful website was something that took off. Someone else on the other side of the country, my partner, who became my partner, had the same idea.

We sort of went into business in that sense in terms of reaching out to companies and asking them to check their ads and make sure that they have bright, on their exclusion list, and it just kind of took off from there. So from you writing this piece, urging these brands to block, you know, ad spins on Breitbart, this is how you first got connected with Matt. Matt reached out to you from this piece and thought, we should work together. How did this, how did your relationship with Matt and Sleeping Giants come to be? So I wrote this piece on, I believe it was November 23rd, and then by the next day, he had,

tech like tweeted at me saying awesome article we're doing the same thing we should you know um you should join us and i was like super excited to to see that someone else had the same idea we moved very quickly from dms to email to phone um turns out like we just have a lot in common we're both copyrators um we're both originally from maryland um and and yeah he seemed really cool so i wanted to of course i wanted to work together. I think, like, for me, joining forces meant that we were, like, partners. He had just started Slipping Giants as an account a week before,

and it was still nothing. You know, there was maybe a couple dozen, maybe a couple hundred followers. What we decided to do was I would run the Facebook page. So we started up the Facebook page, which I became responsible for, and he continued to run the Twitter account. And there was no, like, formal agreement or anything like that

because we never imagined that it would turn into anything. So we were just like, all right, like it was just taken it one day at a time, flying by the seat of our pants kind of a deal. Nondini and Matt hit on something big. By harnessing the power of collective social media users to pressure brands out of funding hate, they were having a real impact.

They got thousands of brands like AT&T, BMW, Visa, Lyft, and Warby Parker to stop running ads on Breitbart. Steve Bannon was even recorded talking about Sleeping Giants at a dinner in 2018. When I left in the take order to campaign, we were going to make like $8 million a free cash flow that was. After we won this group called Sleeping Giants, a group of tech. They literally stripped out. They went to the 35 exchanges that sell the ads, 31-101. So the ad revenue dropped like 90%. They even got Breitbart so mad that after Kellogg's pulled their ads,

Breitbart tried to organize an embarrassingly unsuccessful counter-boycott, which Kellogg said had no discernible impact on their sales. After it was revealed that Fox News's Bill O'Reilly settled five different sexual harassment suits, Sleeping Giants pressured brands to stop advertising on his show. In a week's time, the O'Reilly factory, lost more than half of its advertisers. And Bill O'Reilly went on vacation and never returned. What were some of the successes that you all had with Sleeping Giants that you were really

proud of? My God, we did so much. I mean, there was just the daily grind of getting ads to drop. We, I mean, just the first few months, the first few months of this campaign was every day, you know, a couple dozen brands or whatever would drop. Bright Bart, sometimes it would be like really big ones. So our first big win was Kellogg's. That was like that resulted in Bright Bart starting a campaign called,

I think it was like dump Kellogg's or something. And it was, it completely backfired. They were like, Kellogg's, Kellogg's doesn't support our, you know, uh bright brought readers so we're going we're gonna we're gonna dump kellogs in the sink or something like that it was so stupid um but it gave us our first international headline so that was really cool um but yeah the first the first couple of months was just like just like every every so often some big brand would come out and be like yeah we're not we don't support this shit and then um after a while we we felt like we could, you know, start working on other things. The first time we moved out of the,

sort of grew out of the Breitbart work was when we decided to target Bill O'Reilly's advertisers. Bill O'Reilly had been sexually harassing his colleagues in the workplace for a period of decades and the New York Times reported on it. We were like, well, this really does, this fits into our mission statement of making bigotry and sexism unprofitable. And we felt like this is something we could take on. So we decided to contact Bill O'Reilly advertisers using the same exact MO that we did with Breitbart, just presenting them with the information and letting them make their own decision. And Bill O'Reilly lost dozens of advertisers.

And a couple months later, he was on Facebook. spring break or an unplanned vacation or whatever. Heavy scare quotes around that. I know, right? Yeah, and then he was gone and they were like, wow, we're really on to something. And then we went on to Target Tucker Carlson's advertisers. He's lost over, I believe, 80 advertisers over the past two years that we've been working on that. his show is basically

unprofitable. It's one of the highest rated shows on television. It just doesn't bring in any money. Yeah, just as a side note, one of my day jobs involves working with a feminist activist group, and we've targeted Tucker Carlson over the years. And I don't know what the deal is, but it's like that guy just keeps hanging on. We can't, we can't seem to get him out of here. I think it's a lot of personal spite, to be honest, because after we got, we got, there was one advertiser who, uh, they're, uh, their, their language learning app called Babel and they put out quite the blistering statement on their Tucker Carlson ads. Um, they were sort of caught, uh, caught unawares and they responded to our tweet saying,

uh, this is, uh, we're so sorry. We never, um, you know, we're just appointed that our ads showed up on Tucker Carlson, we find his rhetoric to be repugnant, and that just triggered them. They released, I think, their first statement specifically calling us out. It was us,

Media Matters, and MoveOn.org, and it was actually, I mean, I was very proud of that. I mean, we're just two people running an account in our spare time. So I felt like, I felt pretty proud of

Proud of ourselves, then. You should definitely feel so proud of the work that you accomplished with Sleeping Giants, even though it, you know, you should, no one can take that away from you. Those are huge wins and also huge, you know, culture-changing moments. You know, this idea that, yeah, brands do have a responsibility to be a little bit choosy about what their money goes, we should be pressuring brands to open their eyes to where they spend their money. Like, that's a huge cultural shift that I don't think existed before your work.

So you should definitely feel very, very proud and accomplished about that. Thank you. So when did things start to feel not so good working with Matt on Sleeping Giants? Yeah. So we had a really good relationship from the beginning. He was very nice to me. And I also, I admired him a lot. And I never imagined that there would ever be problems because it was like,

We're both here every day putting in the work and I think there was a lot of neutral respect. At least that's what it felt like. When Matt realized that he was about to be doxed by the Daily Caller, he went to the New York Times to sort of get ahead of the story. And during that time, asked me whether I would like to be interviewed for the story. And I guess I, I mean, when he said that, I think I assumed that I was being asked as a partner. I spoke to the reporter. I told her, you know, how I was involved and all the stuff that we were doing and, you know, a little bit of background detail on how we worked. And she asked me

if I was, she asked me what my title was. And I said, co-founder. And then she was like, great. And then she comes back the next day and does a little fact-checking. And she's like, by the way, your partner said that you are not a co-founder. And I was like, oh, okay and I didn't want to make a big deal out of it so I didn't I was like just go with whatever he says but that was sort of the first indicator that something was off and then after that my you know the story came out and my partner went on to take interviews with sort of high profile outlets like Plotsie of America with um he spoke with Kara Swisher, spoke of with Katie Courag and it was after his interview with Ad Week that I became concerned about

about everything because he, he had called himself, he was positioning himself as co-founder, which was fine by me, but in that article, I was positioned or portrayed as one of the individuals helping him run the accounts. So at that point, I called a meeting and I said, hey, listen, I don't want to be portrayed as your helper or your assistant. It's important that I, that I'm also portrayed as a leader because, you know, I, I have been involved in this work for the whole time. And I realize that I'm in a really unique position. Like both of us, we're both in a very unique position to be able to influence the advertising industry. And I want to be able to be able to speak at conferences and events and I want to be present at the table when some of these big decisions

are being made. And that's why it's important to me to have a title. So we had that discussion and he said, I completely understand let's get you a title. You can call yourself, you know, whatever you want, obviously not founder. I'm the founder. So you can call yourself, you know, come up with a name. So I said, how about founding organizer? and he agreed to that. So that is, that's what I called myself for about a year. During that time, he continued to position himself as founder, of course, and was able to leverage that to get invited to big conferences,

you know, I don't know, for example, South by Southwest and advertising week and so on. And I just kind of felt like I was flailing. I didn't really have an opportunity to, you know, to speak at anything like that because I, I mean, I, A, didn't have a title and B, I didn't have any contacts in the industry. I truly was sort of cast out on my own. Again, like, advertising isn't really my world. I don't have connections in that industry. I worked in, like, the tech startup scene. It's a totally different world. So it was a, it was, It was frustrating. I couldn't get to where I wanted to be. So what I did was I asked him for, I basically asked him for the scraps. I was like, can I, like, would you mind telling me about some of these conferences that you're going to?

I would love to come along. I would like to be your plus one. You know, we can work the room together. We can meet more people together. You know, I was always really careful about I don't want to steal your thunder. I don't want the attention. I just want to be working in the background. to, I don't know, to make something happen.

And he would, you know, there was, there was a power differential there because he, this is his industry and he's older than me and he knows more people than me. And he would bring that up quite frequently in the calls that we had where I was sort of outlining my issues. So he never really, you know, he'd always say, yeah, sure, I will, you know, I'll, you know, I'll let you know. I'll give you a shout if these things happened, but he never did. There was a couple of other things that concerned me. I didn't have any access to the general inquiries email. Just like I just didn't know what was coming into the organization.

Like was he receiving media opportunities there or opportunities to speak, private consulting opportunities. These were the kinds of things that weren't coming to me necessarily. He was asking me to, he had asked me to send all press requests to him because that would help us stay on message. So you don't want too many people speaking to the press. I thought that was a little weird because, you know, I was running the Facebook account completely independently. it's not like I was getting permission from him before I wrote posts or anything like that. So it's not like I would muddle the message because I know what the message is. I write the message every day.

I don't, I just, I don't like, I'm not involved in anything related to the merch shop. I don't know how much money is being made. I don't know how it's being spent. When I asked for access to that, he said, you're just going to have to trust me. And yeah, I didn't know what to do with that. We'll be right back. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. me, I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.

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Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies,

and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them.

Listen to Sports Slice on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Life throws hurdles big and small. Question is, how do you conquer them? On hurdle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that.

Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ledecki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world.

Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports.

Let's get right back into it. As Matt's public profile grew, Nandini's role in Sleeping Giants was obscured. As she writes in her medium piece, on Twitter, Matt began to replace what was once a collective we with I and My. The work I had done with Sleeping Giants was also appearing on his conference bio, the vagueness that once helped us look like a mysterious group, bigger than we were, was now being claimed solely by him. I didn't have the media attention or connections that Matt did. I wasn't 45, white, and I certainly didn't know anybody in advertising.

I was young, unknown, and invisible. It's difficult for me to hear about Nandini's experience with Sleeping Giants. I certainly know what it's like to be passed over for being credited or compensated for my work, and if you're a woman, especially a woman of color, you probably know what that feels like, too. I've avoided speaking up because I didn't want to seem like a bragger or someone who couldn't share the spotlight. Or worse, someone who was only interested in accolades. And in our deeply sexist culture, is there anything more shameful than being a woman who want success? And it's especially tricky when you're working for social change. The implication being that we should all be doing the work just because we care about making change, not because we want

credit. But this line of thinking can actually be kind of a trap that keeps us from taking what's ours while our wins are claimed by somebody else. You're not an attention seeker for wanting to be acknowledged for your work. One thing that I hear time and time again is why it's important to get credit. I feel like people really need to understand that it's not about fame and fortune and the limelight. Unfortunately, the way that it works in many tech industries is if you don't have a title or if you're not able to point to something and say, yeah, I did that, you're not going to get invited to the conference. You're not going to get invited to speak. You're not going to get, you know, the consulting opportunity. You're not going to be able to build up your platform to be

able to have a bigger footprint to do the kind of work and make the kind of change that you want to make. And so when women, particularly women of color, advocate for themselves to get the title, to get the credit, it's not because we're fame-hungry, you know, attention-hungry, you know, spotlight hogs. It's because if we don't have those things, we're not going to be able to have the kind of impact that we want to be able to have. And so I think that, I mean, I guess I know that I have often felt a little skittish about asking for a title or because I don't want to look like I'm trying to, you know, be a fame, a fame hog or something. When in reality, it's just how, It's just the nature of how a lot of these businesses work.

I mean, you said it. That's exactly right. I was so afraid of looking like or being perceived as someone who just wanted attention that I tried to sidestep that issue by denied myself credit and by sort of actively staying away from the titles that would have given me the power I needed. as a co-founder, when I finally made that shift from a nonsense title, founding organizer doesn't mean anything. It's like assistant to the regional manager.

When I made that shift, I just, I found that people responded to me differently. I found that I took myself more seriously. it was really eye-opening to me, to see how important titles are for people who are not traditionally viewed as leaders in the society. I almost underestimated myself, like, how, I guess I didn't realize how the world sees me. That was something that I kind of learned the hard way. the world, you know, despite the fact that I was good at what I do, that I had demonstrated my abilities, people looked at me and didn't see me as a leader. I'm sure a lot of people still don't. So really claiming that title is one of the most important things that you can do. And I don't

want anyone to think that doing that is some kind of making a beeline for the fame and fortune or the glory of it all. Nandini decided that she was going to stop playing by the rules Matt set for her. The rules that allowed him to grow his public profile while she went forgotten and overlooked. The rules that allowed Matt to fly to France to accept the prestigious Canes Lion award, essentially the Oscars of the creative industry, on behalf of the organization they created together without even telling her. So when did you decide I am going to claim this title for myself? I'm going to walk in this title and walk in this purpose and I don't care what Matt thinks.

It was after he DMs me a picture of himself accepting a canned gold lion in June 2019. And it was super casual like, hey, we should. just want a Can Gold Lion and he hadn't told me he was going to be in France. He hadn't told, like I found out through Instagram that he was in Can. I had to DM him and be like, oh, cool, you're in Europe. And yeah, it was, it was, it was really shocking. And I had, that was a very difficult week for me because, first of all, I, as I said, I'm not from the industry. So I, I knew the Can Gold Line was a big deal, but I didn't realize that it was like the Oscars of the ad industry. And I was receiving messages from all sorts of people that I, that never talked to me

were like, wow, congratulations. And it was, it was, it was like additional emotional labor for me. I had to I had to basically lie on his behalf. You know, people asked me why I wasn't there.

And if I said the truth, I wasn't invited, I wasn't told. That would sort of blow our cover, right? And I didn't want to create problems for sleeping giants. So I just, I was like,

yeah, I just couldn't make it. So I realized at that point that I was, I was not actually ever going to be made a part of this campaign. I was being actively erased from the story. I was not mentioned anywhere at one of our sort of highest points of our campaign. And I realized that all the things that I had been doing over the past year

were only serving him and allowing him to sort of accumulate power. and I was giving up my power. I was giving up my power when I sent over press requests to him, which allowed him to build out his resume and say, you know, I've spoken to where I have been quoted in all these news outlets. I was giving up my ability to do the same. I was giving up my power when I allowed myself to be called founding organizer and being consistently seen as a number two

and someone who doesn't necessarily know what's going on or can speak for the organization. So I made an executive decision over my own life. I promoted myself to co-founder. And the first opportunity I had to do that was about two months later. It was actually this, exactly this time last year when I was preparing for presentation for a talk in Scotland.

And just a few days before I was looking for a fresh example of tech platforms being irresponsible. And I went to the Ku Klux Plans website and found PayPal a PayPal widget on their site. And my brain's so broken that I don't know what a big deal is anymore. I just tweeted it out like I tweet a million other things. And I moved on, you know. And a couple days later, just right after I gave that big talk, where someone had changed my title, bless them, from founding organizer to co-founder without my knowledge,

but, you know, again, bless them. So a couple days after that, PayPal banned the KKKKKKK, from their services. And the BBC called me asking for a quote. And I told them that I was co-founder of Sleeping Giants. The day after that, I got a co-file out in an ad industry magazine called The Drum. It turns out that the reporter that I spoke to, the first reporter I spoke to after the conference was doing a profile on me. And so I had this, all of a sudden I had this profile on me calling me the co-founder of Sleeping Giants.

And they had, you know, they had, it was like a full piece on what I think of the ad industry and how things are going. Wow. What did that feel like for you? It felt like I had just come into my power. Like I had just stepped into my power. I was actually, I was with my. friend Claire, who is now my business partner, and we just looked at each other. She knew that I had been going through a lot, and we just looked at each other, and we were like, wow, everything is turning

around. Look how quickly things turn around when you claim what's yours. Fuck, yeah. I'm like, I'm like on the verge of tears listening to this. I think your story is, your story is my story. Your story is a story of so many women of color out there. I think that we are often told that there is virtue in just keep your head down and do your work and be behind the scenes. There's virtue in making yourself small and not claiming that power. And then when you, when you ride in that lane of making yourself small, of not walking in your power, and then you finally say, I'm done with this. Today is the day that I, that I abandoned that and I walk in my power. The feeling, like, it is like nothing else and it comes from inside right and i think that we are sold this lie that

the path of just keep grinding keep your head down and you'll get your you'll get your reward you'll get your credit someday maybe it just really doesn't it doesn't serve us no it doesn't i i spent i can't imagine what i could have accomplished if you know what i could have accomplished even sooner if I hadn't, you know, if I had chosen to step into that power before. What I did instead, because after that can incident, I was, I was going to leave. I mean, I had deeply considered leaving Sleeping Giant because I wasn't getting the respect I was asking for, because I was going to, all I was going to get was the crumbs in the relationship in the way that it stood at that point in time.

What I did instead was I decided to stay and I decided that I would change the roles. I wasn't going to play by the roles that were made for me. I guess the moment that I stopped playing by the rules and when I started to speak to the press, to start writing under my own name, which is something that I hadn't been doing, people started to see, first of all,

people just started to see me. I just became more visible. And that put me in a position where people wanted to reach out to me because they wanted to talk to me about my thoughts. And that allowed me to start connecting with people in the industry. And that's what helped me to meet the people who would become my allies, the people who would make introductions for me in the industry, you know, the people who would become my future business partner. And it was a slow-moving situation. None of it happened overnight. But really that investment in building relationships and building my knowledge was what

helped me get to the point where I could just come out and say, I am co-founder. and this is who I am. You talked earlier about your allies. You have this great line on your medium peace that I love. You say, it costs nothing to make space for me. It costs nothing to ceasy me in. It costs nothing to empower other people to achieve their goals. And I think you just really hit the nail on the head.

All of the people in my life who have been my allies and my co-conspirators, they are the ones who are down to send the email, down to write a reference, down to connect me with an opportunity. because it doesn't cost them anything. And I really think we need to reject this mindset that tells us that we have to be stingy when it comes to resources or putting somebody else on. Because what's better is if we lift others up as we climb. And all of our work is better when we empower each other.

There's truly enough room for all of us. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there were so many times where I, I mean, I learned so much in the past year. and many times I offered to get on calls with my partner and brief him on what I had learned. And I wanted to make it work. And to the point that I was willing to continue working with someone who was fairly toxic towards me in the way that he spoke to me at times. But I wanted to make it work because the movement that we have here, the movement that we have built is

more important than either one of our egos. Do you ever feel that, you know, I don't really even know how to put this. Like, in work that involves tech and the internet, we have this myth that there's this one genius, usually a white dude, but it's usually this like one genius who does everything. Like, we love the idea that there's, you know, one lone wolf who is doing this really cool work. And that really denies what we know is the truth that so much of this work is collaborative. So much of it is, you know, people working together. Do you think that's a, like a problem in the tech space and in the sort of ad space in general? Oh, yeah. I mean, I could see the press was dying to find their lone wolf hero for this sleeping giant story. Like,

I just don't think they knew what to do with a woman, like in the story, which made no sense to me because in the New York Times article, in our big coming out article, we were equally weighted visually. You know, the pictures were the same size. Why did no one ask about me? Like, where did the girl go? Where is she at? What does she think about the issues? I mean, it is a campaign against bigotry and sexism. Where is the brown girl? So, yeah, I think the industry as well as the media is looking for their, for their white man savior, which is a problem.

But I believe that I believe that I, I mean, I've taken those lessons to heart and I see how these stories are built now. And I am dead set on never letting that happen. Again, at least in my life and in my work and the people whose lives that I touch. With the company that Claire and I ended up starting after a year of working together, researching things together, interviewing people together,

we launched this company as co-founders, as equal partners. There was never any question about it. And I have name dropped her in, well, I guess in our relationship now, as we started as we started this company, I'm sort of the more well-known person. And I, that sort of gives me, that sort of puts me in a place of privilege in our relationship. And so I use that to name drop her in everything that I do. And when I see an opportunity where I think, you know, an opportunity comes to me that I think she's better suited for, I send it over to her. And she does the same for me.

Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation.

The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged.

One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You love me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

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This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines.

We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaders to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slicelife Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network

on TikTok. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout, Kate Martin, and rising hockey star, Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it.

An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladecki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning.

It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. And we're back. Alongside her partner Claire Atkin, Nandini now runs Check My Ads, an organization that helps brands keep their ad money away from fake news, disinformation, and hate speech.

And as much behind-the-scenes success as she had getting brands to pull their ad dollars away from inflammatory sites, with Sleeping Giants, their work created another kind of problem. Brands concerned about ending up and sleeping giants as crosshairs and weary of being associated with anything negative, started using keyword blocking software to make sure their ads weren't running on controversial topics. Now, Wired reports that these ad blockers actually end up blocking terms in kind of half-hazard ways. The magazine publisher Hearst complained that articles about Megan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, spelled S-U-S-E-X, were being blocked because the word, Sex appeared on block lists. What's worse, terms like lesbian and bisexual were blocked for being controversial.

Some blocklists also blocked ad placements on news articles from reputable sites about coronavirus information. And some brands were blocking their ads from news sites in general, creating less ad money for an already struggling news industry. Her new company, Check My Ads, aims to tackle the issues her work with Sleeping Giants might have inadvertently contributed to. So I want to talk about Check My Ads. I was just reading the wired piece about Check My Ads. So in a kind of way, and forgive me if I bungle this and feel free to correct me, I'm no ad tech person, but I thought I got a handle on it. So in a kind of way, sleeping giants as many successes as y'all had, in a kind of way, it kind of made the media landscape a bit worse because some brands were then like, oh, well, if I'm going to get dinged for having my. ad next to, you know, a hate site, I'm just going to have my ads pulled from anything that could be

possibly, you know, read as controversial, even things like COVID, you know. And so it really kind of created a problem for how ad dollars were spent in the media landscape more generally. Is that, is that sort of correct? That's 100% correct. What I never anticipated working on this campaign when, you know, when we, when we started tweeting at companies, we were very clear that we think that they should look at their ad placement on Breitbart because it is, you know, we use very specific descriptors like homophobic, xenophobic, racist, white nationalist. What we did not realize or anticipate was that the way that that work would be interpreted in the boardroom would be, oh, these guys are just going after. content they don't agree with and content that is like so-called controversial because the boardrooms are filled with mostly white people. The ad the ad industry is mostly white guys. And the tech industry and the ad tech industry are mostly white people. So they don't feel

comfortable having conversations about racism or even using that word. So they literally just swapped out racist with the word controversial or offensive or even yikes, yikes. Yikes moments. Not yikes. Not yikes. It's called hate speech. Oh, oh, that really, ooh, they will do some, like, I love the like euphemisms for not having to use the word racist. It's a yikes moment. Yep. So, check. by ads is we started it as a brand safety consultancy to, A, help companies check their ads to understand where their ads are going to help them identify hate speech and disinformation in their media buy. And we also, on the other hand, help them to become

more intentional about what they want to support. Because that's sort of what brands are looking at these days. There's so many, there's so many reasons that our existing channels are toxic or brand unsafe or causing trouble in society that brands and marketers are really starting to explore ways to be smarter and spend their money in a way that's more aligned with their values. So we're helping brands to define. their own rules and define where the line is when it comes to their media buy. So that really helps them to start thinking about what they want to support in a way that doesn't feel political.

We want them to be able to have that conversation through a shared language where they are able to sit down and say, we shouldn't be advertising on a website like this because it's not aligned with, you know, this value or, you know, or this campaign that we have in place. And to do so in a way that doesn't make people feel uncomfortable. So we want people to, we want to be able to facilitate those conversations within a company so they can make those decisions ahead of time instead of having to respond to them, you know, when it turns into a massive issue on social media. Nandini is fully a leader in her industry.

Her innovative work helps shift culture and bold. builds paths for accountability online, that anyone with a Twitter account can participate in. And now, she's building on what she's learned to refine the way she makes change. None of this would be possible if she had just kept her head down, made herself small, and followed somebody else's plan for her life. After she published her medium piece, in a tweet, Matt apologized and acknowledged Nandini as a rightful co-founder of sleeping giants. And now, she wants to make sure that other women know there's nothing.

wrong with one in credit for your work. What would you say to a woman out there that's listening that, you know, is quick keeping your head down, she's doing the grind, she's afraid to step into her power, as you put it, you know, she wants credit, she wants that title, but she doesn't know where to start and she's afraid to even start that journey. What would you say to someone like that? I would say that she can start building her own power today by writing. I was able to start building my power when I had nothing and nobody simply by writing a little bit on LinkedIn every day. Just a little bit about current events, about how I feel about something that happened, my opinion, my perspective. No one asked.

And for a long time, no one cared. But when you do it every day, you demonstrate your knowledge and your insight. You represent what you're capable of. you show people how you think and how you approach problems. And people do start to pay attention. You do start to build out the people who care, the people who want to engage with you. And from there, you grow out the,

you can start building out the relationships that you need to either, you know, find your next place, a less toxic place, a place where you can be more powerful. and at the very least to build your personal influence. That was something that really helped me was just positioning myself as a thought leader, even if it was to no one but me, right? Exactly.

You get used to saying, that was something that I never did because I thought, who cares what I think, right? I don't even care what I think. That was the attitude I had about myself. So just the simple act of saying I, this is what I think, was quite radical for me. Because what you think matters. So what you write matters too. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi?

You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangooty.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our personal. producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer.

I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, Help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.

Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward.

At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. And nobody's telling you exactly what happened.

That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. And every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the big, moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to SportsSlic on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slical Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok.

Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hardway with your favorite therapist and host, Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor. It signals to the world that you're not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. Listen to learn the hard way on the IHard radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHart podcast.

Guaranteed Human. Thank you.