Audacity is Shit2TalkAbout S3 EP1
Sh!t You Don’t Want to Talk About is back with Shit2TalkAbout for Season 3. In this solo episode host Jenn Junod talks about audacity, why there was a big gap between seasons two and three, and what to expect with the new season.
Jenn Junod: I think I subconsciously saw disadvantages that society gave someone and made me want to fight so hard for others to not have that disadvantage.
Hello, hello, beautiful humans. Welcome to Shit You Don't Want To Talk About. I'm here to get the conversation started. You're here to get uncomfortable. It's your choice to be a part of the change. Changing shit you don't want to talk about into shit to talk about.
The goal of season three is to have the audacity to step out of our comfort zones. And I know that I talk a lot about Arlen Hamilton's, uh, books, and especially her second one, Your, Your First Million, and having the audacity to do things is, is something that I keep struggling with, and I'm going, fuck that, we're not going to do that anymore, and we're gonna have the audacity to really get uncomfortable this season, and just, just for my own sake, I chat GPT'd “Audacity.”
I do live in the tech world, so chat GPT has become one of my best friends. So, I'll read what it gave me as a definition, and I have Googled it, it's pretty close, and also, um, a, it resonates with me pretty well.
Audacity is a boldness with a dash of sass. At its core, audacity is about bold or daring behavior.
It's like a friend who wears sunglasses indoors. Bold, maybe a bit cheeky, but definitely not afraid to stand out. Two flavors, spicy and sweet. Audacity can have two sides. One is positive, like having the courage to take your Chase your dreams. The other side, well, it can be seen as a little too bold, disrespectful, like jumping at the cue at your favorite coffee shop.
Audacity, in a nutshell, is boldness. It's like being daring and taking risks. To perspective, uh, can be seen as positive and brave or negative and rude. And context matters. The setting and how it's perceived plays a big role. And that's why I'm saying this season is about having the audacity to get uncomfortable.
It takes bravery to really think about these topics and go, that's icky. I don't want to feel that way, so please go away. Yet at the same time, shit you don't want to talk about is, as a, a future guest, Whitney said, it's kind of like eavesdropping on a conversation to learn more about it, but you can walk away.
And it's truly, to me, this season is about learning about how pop culture has fucked with our heads from the beginning and our entire lives and what goes into that. Uh, we talk about embryo donation, which thinking about how different Like, I'm, I'm not somebody with kids, but for someone to experience having embryos and worrying about what that might happen to their embryos, but also the entire queer fertility is very different and something I don't know a lot about, um, leadership inside and outside the military and being a woman in tech.
Burnout, which comes from an interesting perspective, yet so, so beneficial. We also talk about recovery and what life is like after alcoholism and in a couple episodes and one that I'm really nervous, excited about is there's going to be an episode where I ask a lot of questions that you don't ask people of color to people of color, and we're going to unpack why you don't ask those questions. What is the story behind it? Why is it rude? Why is it none of our business? And being able to learn a bit more of why someone tells you that. You cannot touch their hair. It is important. Also, don't touch people without their consent and you don't need to touch a stranger. Just saying. And my hope that, that each one of you walk away with having the audacity to continue this conversation.
We're here to get the conversation started and get uncomfortable, but it's going to be up to you to change shit you don't want to talk about into shit to talk about.
For those of you who are just starting to listen, welcome to season three. For those of you who have, are, may also be, uh, the type I know I am for listening to a new podcast from the very beginning. You may see that season one has like 50 some episodes, season two has like three, and now we're on season three.
And I want to share a bit about the journey behind the scenes of what happened to get us to season three. I, oh wow, just thinking back on, I felt like back in my youth, it's. Y'all, it's only been like a couple years. So I had this mindset that I had to get everything done right away as quickly as possible, push myself as hard as possible, and put out any and all content, doing that with a full-time job.
And also in 2021, my father-in-law moved in with us and was on his recovery journey. It, it was a lot in our household, and adding on top of that. So I launched the show in 2021. So about only a few months into it, January 2022, I was laid off and I was like, cool, I am going to go gun-ho and go after my job.
Like I'm, or go after the show. I'm just going to become a public speaker and I'm going to be able to talk to everybody about having these really difficult conversations. It's gonna happen. It's just gonna happen. Whale, uh, doesn't help when, uh, you go to Denver Pride and you're too scared to talk to anybody and you just want to talk to people and tell them about the podcast.
So you keep handing out cards and asking people to follow on Instagram and thank you for everybody that did. I met some Of the most amazing humans at the end of this, this is June 2022, and they were so kind. I had a group of people that I tried walking up to them, talked to them, and they kind of stumped me off, which, you know, I don't know what vibes I was giving off that day, so totally, probably called for.
And. There's these, uh, group of, of, uh, a few people and they let me sit down and talk to them and I'm like, Hey, I'm just, can I just chill with you guys for a bit? Because I'm here by myself and I am just having a really hard time talking about the podcast and Talking about getting out there, and I'm really not sure how I'm gonna do this, like, I feel like the podcast is so important and people really need to talk about these difficult topics, yet I don't know how to.
I don't know how to actually talk to strangers about it. And y'all, they were so kind. They started like handing out the cards to other people and telling them to follow the show, and we're, we've kept in touch since then, and it was so cool, and this is like, second to the last week of June 2022, and I'm still unemployed, really struggling.
And at the same time, somebody told me about something called a developer advocate. And a developer advocate is a role in the tech world. Uh, that is basically if you take computer engineering, software engineering, and put a marketing and sales and content person all into one human. And people were like, yo, if you do this job, if you become a developer advocate, you can advocate for those who go unheard.
I'm like, fuck yes. That is what I need to do in my life. At this point, I had never touched Twitter. Like, shit, you don't want to talk about Twitter was run by other people. And as you can tell, like, probably if you ever look at it, it just chills. I didn't know what Twitter did. And I knew someone from another A past job that I did follow on Twitter and they posted, Hey, anyone that is in DevRel, the short, it's also called developer relations.
That's why it's called DevRel instead of developer advocates. Sometimes, uh, if anyone's in DevRel, you can, uh, please post here if you're okay with people reaching out to you. I was like, cool, dope, I'm gonna do this. But I asked this person on LinkedIn if I could reply to their Twitter thread, um, which for those who know Twitter are totally laughing at me.
For those who don't know Twitter, um, don't worry about it. It's, it's its own weird world, Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it. And so I start replying to each of these people and I, I made a, uh, a call with, um, one of our, uh, one of the few episodes on season two with Wesley Faulkner. And he was talking to me about being dyslexic and ADHD and he's in the community world and a developer advocate.
And I was like, yo, you can be dyslexic and still do this. I like literally quit, like, going into computer engineering in school because I didn't know I was dyslexic back then. It's like, yeah, dude, you, you got the personality, but you don't have the content and you don't have the tech. I was like, oh, okay.
So the next person I talked to, Ramon, uh, who this was supposed to be a 30-minute call, ended up being like two and a half hours. And he was like, yo, you want to do pair programming? I'm like, what is that? And he's like, It's where we work on coding something together. I was like, Oh, okay, cool. Sure. Why not?
And he's like, I have a live stream on Twitch. You should do it with me. Uh, okay. And then by the third person I talked to Anthony was like, yo, you should definitely do this. You should do a live stream that will make content and you'll learn tech, but not anything about web three. And I was like, okay, I don't even know what web three is, but I'm just going to say, okay, and within a week, this is like June 22nd that I started having these conversations, July 1st. I started Teach Jen Tech and it was a live stream where I learned to code. I mentioned those dates because it took six months or more, uh, on trying to get shit you don't want to talk about started. I was so nervous about this show and I'm so passionate about it that I second-guessed everything I was doing for it.
For Teach Jen Tech, I was like, fuck it, we're going to figure it out. I don't know. And I did. It was crazy. It's still up on YouTube if you want to go look it up, but it's where I live-streamed on Twitch for two hours, a few days a week, learning from people, learning how to code, and that really My, my trust in myself was really shaken.
I lost my job. I wasn't able to find another job. And then going to Pride, there's so many beautiful people there that I would just be like, I can't talk to any of you. I don't know how to talk to anybody. Um, and I really put my worth was wrapped up in all of this and I was like, I'm never going to do anything in my life and slowly but surely each person I had on the live stream, I started seeing how much access I was starting to get to a lot of people that others didn't have access to, and it wasn't worth it.
I didn't mean to. I just went, hey dude, do you want to teach me this thing that you know, come on my livestream. Let's talk about it. And a lot of companies said yes because it gave them awareness and things like that and I started seeing that because I had a live stream and because one person was on the show, other people trusted becoming, being on the show.
And it was really crazy that that started taking off. But at the same time, I wasn't doing shit you don't want to talk about. But every person I met, I was like, yeah, I host a podcast called shit you don't want to talk about. I have a live stream called Teach Jen Tech. And I'm working on becoming a developer out of KIT.
But you don't want to talk about never left in, even though I wasn't doing the podcast actively and never left my bio, never left my passion. It was always in the back of my mind and I, uh, ended up getting, uh, a job in a very, very technical part of the, uh, niche of tech. And it was when I started, uh, a year ago to the day of recording this, I was like, I don't know why I'm here.
And they were like, you have really good ideas. I was like, nah, nah. And, and this is something that the CMO and my boss, and other people kept reminding me that. Jen, you didn't fool us into hiring you. You, you didn't manipulate us. We know what you can do. We, we know that you, like, you can do this and you can't do this, or we know that you can push harder and do this better, or you, it'll take you time to grow.
You did not fool us into hiring you. And I was like, nah, nah, I don't believe him. And it took within, uh, starting in February 2023, At, uh, this company, I, we had an offsite for our team to go to Finland, which y'all this has been another big dream of mine is to travel and the company that I work for is based, um, uh, in Europe and, uh, we flew to Finland.
I've been unemployed for over a year. First thing I do when I talk to the bigwig that I'm there. I have a podcast called shit You don't want to talk about. Oh, and I have a show called Teach Jen Tech and now I work here and he's like, okay yeah, and and we got to talk about it and I got to hear about his experiences in it and also starting to have conversations of hearing how there are a lot of people in power that are inherently good humans and want to learn from their mistakes, yet isolated because they made a lot of decisions that they may have not been best for everyone or for themselves, and didn't know how to get the assistance that they needed and since starting the podcast. And taking this time off I said in front of a room full of people that we should pay attention to white dudes in power and they need psychological safety. And I was like, fuck, that is not what I meant to say whatsoever, what I was trying to say is, if we give people psychological safety that are currently in power, it'll give space for those who deserved power that haven't in the past.
And I recovered from it and I recovered from getting really sick in Finland. My first few weeks getting there, I came home and had bronchitis pneumonia, and COVID. And I was out on my ass for weeks and I still had a job and they checked in to see if I was okay. And I started doing talks about mental health and neurodiversity and tech to start talking about unconscious biases.
So we would start talking about all these really important conversations. And I'm still employed. I was like, why is this bananas? And slowly but surely I started to build trust in myself and trust in my team. And it was through floundering and there's been a lot of floundering. There's been a lot of, oh shit, I do know what I'm talking about.
And then going, wow. Thinking and reading Arlen Hamilton's book, I, I limited myself and had my own barriers. They kept me from so much, meaning like we each, if trusting in ourselves and having the audacity to, to follow our dreams and yeah, it may come off rude. It may come off as dude, why aren't you helping me out? And, you know, having this focus that. I can do so much more to help others if I'm taking care of myself. And that trusting in myself and saying, Jen, you actually are really good at randomly going up in front of people and talking to people and talking to strangers and starting the conversation and hearing about stories.
It's, why season two only lasted a couple episodes because I couldn't keep it all up, and a big reason why starting for season three. I actually have help and I'm very excited about it. And as I'm recording this Jules is producing the show this season and is kind enough to help me record this because I kept getting stuck and going, I'm not figuring this out, I can't do it, and going, “Oh, I, I can do things” “Oh, I might just need some help and finding the right people to surround myself with” and knowing that I wouldn't have started from season, season one without, without, uh, bill and Tron. And there's gonna be people along the way that make shit you don't wanna talk about happen.
This isn't a solo Jenn show. This is, I happen to talk to people and really like people getting uncomfortable. This is something that we all do this and we all need to be in this together because I may be here to start the conversation. You need to continue it.
Thank you for joining Sh!t You Don't Want to Talk About. I'm here to get the conversation started. It's your turn to continue the conversation. Don't know where to start. Here are a few ways. Rate and review the show. Send this episode to someone and let us know on social media. What Sh!t You Want to Talk About
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