Anne Petersen – Author of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

Episode 95

Anne Petersen, author of Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, joins me on this episode. Anne is a writer and author. She is a former senior culture writer for BuzzFeed, and now, she writes her newsletter, Culture Study. Anne works full-time for Substack. Her book, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, was based off an article Anne wrote that went viral in 2019. On today's show, Anne talks about millennials experiences with work, how work culture is changing and evolving over time, and more.

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Transcript

 

 

Kara Goldin: Hi, everybody. It’s Kara Goldin. And we are so excited to have our next guest here. This is Anne Peterson, author of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. So excited to have you here, Anne.
Anne Peterson: Hi. So excited to be here.
Kara Goldin: Very, very excited. So, Anne, for those of you who don’t know her, she’s a former senior culture writer for BuzzFeed. She also now writes her newsletter, Culture Study, which is such a cool, cool thing. I love reading it. And has a full-time venture on Substack. And Anne received her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where she focused on the history of celebrity gossip. Amazing. How many other people had that as a focus? I’m just curious.
Anne Peterson: The good thing about PhDs is you kind of find your little research area. And so mine was largely celebrity studies, which is a major area of study within media studies. And then, specifically, the history of celebrity gossip [crosstalk 00:01:16].
Kara Goldin: Oh my God, I love it. I love it. Love it. She focused on that for a PhD. Her previous books, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, lots of toos, and Scandals of Classic Hollywood were featured in NPR, Elle, and The Atlantic. And today we’re going to dive into her new book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Welcome, Anne.
Anne Peterson: Hi.
Kara Goldin: So excited that you’re here. So take us back to the beginning after earning the PhD and this incredibly interesting… I would love to focus on that every single day. I think that’d be really, really, really fun. What made you decide to leave academia to pursue a career in journalism?
Anne Peterson: Well, like a lot of people in the humanities in academia, it wasn’t entirely my decision. There is an overproduction of PhDs right now and not a ton of full-time positions. And so I was assistant professor, visiting assistant professor, for several years and then was on the job market. But at the same time, I had been writing for the internet for several years, kind of on the side, just as using my non-academic voice. Especially since I was writing about celebrity, there’s a real market for that content. And I wasn’t doing People magazine style stuff. It was more like analyzing what was going on in People magazine. And people found that really interesting.
So when I didn’t get a full time tenure track position in academia, I had kind of inadvertently built a life raft for myself for writing online and had some job offers from a couple of different digital publications. This was in 2014 when there was lots of jobs in digital media, or at least places were expanding a lot. And so I gave my last final as a professor. And then the next day I got on a plane, moved to Brooklyn, and started working at BuzzFeed.
Kara Goldin: That’s wild. And so where were you a professor at? At Austin as well?
Anne Peterson: I was at Whitman College, which is a small liberal arts college in Washington state. Which is also where I went to college. So it was like a particularly special time in my life. And I was there for two years. I loved my students. I loved teaching there. I loved the town of Walla Walla, which might sound funny to listeners, but if you’ve ever been there, you probably understand. It’s just a really wonderful little place. And I still really miss it. I miss teaching, but I also feel very lucky that I was able to find slightly less precarious employment in the world of digital media.
Kara Goldin: Yeah, for sure. So you moved to Brooklyn, you get this great role at BuzzFeed and basically having a great time out there, I bet. And then how did you decide to then go and do this newsletter?
Anne Peterson: Well, so depending on your familiarity with online writing, there was this huge explosion of blogs in the mid 2000s, late 2000s. There was really a response to some larger contractions in the media industry. There was just not as many jobs, especially during the great recession. A lot of places shut down, laid off tons of people. And blogs were a way for people to either write for very little, or just to kind of get ideas out there really quickly. The immediacy of instant publishing was really attractive to a lot of people. And a lot of the huge names that we associate with digital media now, whether my former editor and chief Ben Smith, who is at the New York Times. Ezra Klein, who’s one of the co-founders of Vox, they were all blogging during that time.
And I had a blog during that time called Celebrity Gossip Academic Style. It was a little WordPress, free WordPress template. And I used it as this great kind of escape valve for all of the thoughts that I was having, especially while I was studying for my comprehensive exams, while I was writing my dissertation. You’re funneling a lot of this research into pretty rigid academic prose, that there was so much left over that I wanted to play around with. So I was blogging on the side. And some people really thrive in that sort of word dump, instant publishing feedback, generative idea. I love writing in that way. And some people like to only let their stuff out when it’s very, very polished. And I am in awe of those people. But I really missed blogging.
And I think a lot of other people missed blogging and also missed reading blogs. So many people who are, I think, millennials and Gen X bemoan, or really miss, the days of Google Reader. When you could open up the Google Reader tab and then all of your new posts on all of your favorite blogs would be there. And you didn’t have to go into that stew of Facebook and Twitter to find what was interesting.
Kara Goldin: Information. Yeah, totally.
Anne Peterson: And so I think newsletters are a way of recreating that energy and immediacy and community of blogs, in a way that either they can either function like blogs in so much as they are on the internet. You can go to them physically, or you can go to the site on the internet and access them that way. Or if you subscribe, they just come into your inbox.
And I know people who are essentially recreating Google Reader in their Gmail tabs by having all the newsletters that they subscribe to just go into one tab. And then they kind of use it either as, “Oh, at lunchtime, I read my newsletters.” Or, “At night while I’m winding down, I read my newsletters.” Or first thing in the morning. And so I had started a newsletter in 2016, right after the election. And it had been on Tiny Letter, which I chose just because it was free. But I quickly realized the CMS, the operating system, the way that you enter text into it is pretty janky and they weren’t updating it or maintaining it in any capacity. So when Substack came along two years later, at that point I had 5,000 subscribers and I looked at the CMS and I was like, “This is beautiful. This is amazing.” And it was so easy to transfer your subscribers.
So I just switched platforms and was still doing it for free though, as, similarly, to what I was doing back in the late 2000s as this way to just really kind of dump ideas. Dump my reporter’s notebook. Talk about all of the work that I had done to create a piece, kind of the backstory. And I loved it. It made me feel like I was scratching an itch. And so I kept doing that. And eventually, though, Substack made the pitch. After several years, they had been kind of courting me, trying to get me to go full time and to monetize it. And I said, “No, no, no, no, I need this, I need this, I need this.” In terms of, I need legal representation, I need health insurance, I need an editor for longer pieces. And we eventually came to an agreement so that I’d have all of those things.
Kara Goldin: That’s awesome. So your new book coming out is called Can’t Even. And can you tell us a little bit about it?
Anne Peterson: Yeah, this is an outgrowth of an article I wrote in January, 2019 called How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, which is now the subtitle of the book. And I really wrote the article as a way of processing my own burnout, which I didn’t know was burnout. I refused to call it that or acknowledge it as that, I just thought I was good at working all the time. But so I wrote this piece kind of as a way to excavate the different corners of it. And I thought of it, really, as a pretty personal essay that then I tried to expand to some larger generational stuff. And I had no idea that it would do what it did, which was go super viral. It has been read by more than 7 million people, translated into different languages. And so it was pretty easy to think about how I would want to expand that both historically, looking at the historical causes, but then also expand it way beyond like my white, bourgeois, middle-class experience, to think about burnout for a lot of other people.
Kara Goldin: And what do you think is kind of the key reason? What’s sort of the biggest reason why this generation is more prone?
Anne Peterson: I think burnout, both historically, over the last hundred years, and now, has everything to do with precarity. with that feeling of like, “I’m barely keeping my head above water.” And that is a combination of so many things, the huge one is economic. But there are so many other things that can make your life feel really fragile, whether that’s health concerns, things going on with your family, immigration status, race, class, location, all of these things. And I think millennials have this kind of weird stew, when people call us the unlucky generation, but luck implies that there weren’t choices that were made to unravel the safety net in ways that have made it difficult for millennials to find any sort of stability. But also massive amounts of student debt, and then all of that intersecting with the rise of digital technologies that just make it so much easier to work all the time as a coping mechanism for that economic precarity.
Kara Goldin: That’s interesting. I feel the millennial generation too, and this kind of ties into the digital side of things. But it was kind of the generation that I really saw where measurement, like education and measurement, and everything from test scores just really started to be known, right? I think back on it, because I’m not a millennial, but I have managed many millennials and I think it’s just amazing how much information is kind of stored in millennial’s mind about how things work. And how much money they need to make, what the test scores need to be. I had pressures, but I had different pressures.
And I think it’s fascinating. And I often think about, where is that stop gap? Because if that amount of information increases over time, what are we setting this next generation up for, and the generation after that? So I think it’s fascinating. And I think it’s part of the reason too, why I think some people are sort of doing their own kind of conclusions too, to say like, “Maybe I don’t need to go to college.” And they’re opting out of some of these things, but I’m so curious to hear your perspective.
Anne Peterson: Yeah, so one of the things that I found in my research that was really interesting is the way that this idea of college at any cost, it’s part and parcel of this larger idea that’s known as the education gospel. Which is that it’s best for as many people as possible to go to college. And that kind of got twisted into, you need to go to the best college that you can possibly get into. So for some people that just means you have to go to college, whether that’s a state college, whatever. And then for some people, it means you need to orient your entire life after age 10, or even before age 10, into getting into the best college possible. And both of those paths, I think, can be harmful in that some people, to do the job that you want to do, you don’t need to go to college.
Or if there are things in your life that are more meaningful to you and you kind of just want your job to be something you do with a third of your time, but it’s not going to be your identity, there are all sorts of jobs that are really stable that do not require a traditional four-year degree. And I think that there has been this real… This way that we label those sorts of jobs as somehow not as good, not as prestigious, not as desirable, I think there is a big backlash amongst millennials, in particular, who are like, “Well, who cares about if my job is cool, if I have no benefits and no stability? And I’m dealing with rolling layoffs all the time, or I’m a gig worker and constantly looking for the next contract piece of work when I could be an HVAC installer. Or I could be an electrician and be part of a union and have stability.”
There are just different options. And I do think that that Gen Z, in part because of Gen X parents who I think have slightly different ideas about some of these things, but also just probably watching millennials, are maybe going to resist some of these ideologies about what the best way to go forward is. Especially with just the towering amounts of student debt that millennials have hanging around our necks as sort of an albatross and no stability, oftentimes, to show for it.
Kara Goldin: Yeah, and I think during COVID, I’m sure that there is a lot of thought on this. I am a Gen X-er and I’ve got three kids in college and there’s been no discount of any sort on these out-of-state tuitions, whatsoever. And it’s just kind of comical. I think, by January, there’s going to be a mass exit from a lot of these people’s opinions and especially if you’re paying for it on your own. I graduated with student debt and I was in-state tuition. If I would’ve had out-of-state tuition and this would have been going on, I think I would have said, “Sorry, I’m not in.” So I think it’ll be a very, very interesting time, for sure.
Another thing that, as you’re talking about this, it just made me think, I had worked for the Obama administration on trying to build jobs in America. And it was one of the things that we were focusing on is trying to figure out how the middle of the country, ultimately, creates jobs. And this just talks about sort of how we identify ourself. It was interesting how, at one point, we were talking to some people who were former coal miners. And coal mines had shut down. And we were talking about the different types of jobs, like call centers, or could we actually create a factory where you were taking plastics that had been recycled from plastic bottles and turn them into shirts and bags. And the minute that the word factory came up, it wasn’t like, “Okay, I get it. You’re creating things.” It was like, “Wait, factory? That’s so much worse than actually being a coal miner.”
And it was fascinating to me. It was the first time where I really, really opened my ears to this concept that we’ve, in many ways, kind of ruined it for people where they think that there are certain jobs that are not sort of what should be doing. Because maybe that’s not aspirational at all. So I’d be so curious to hear your thoughts on that as well.
Anne Peterson: Yeah, I think that there’s all sorts of jobs that if those jobs paid a living wage and had non exploitative working conditions, and didn’t make you feel like crap all the time, and this can be physical labor or call center labor, that would just be known as good jobs. Steady jobs. My granddad was an accountant for 3M. He worked there his entire life. I do not think he ever was like, “3M is my life.” He never thought of himself as purely an accountant. Accounting was not his identity. It was what he did. It was his vocation, it was not his identity. He retired when he was 55 with a full pension. So he still had 30 years of his life to live out, divorced from that identity. And part of the reason he was able to do that was because 3M, especially then, people had pretty steady working hours.
Everyone from the janitor to an accountant like him, to engineers, were given things like benefits and pensions. It was, what we call now, a good job. And so I think that we oftentimes now substitute in passion, like, “Do what you love and you won’t work a day for the rest of your life,” for actual good working conditions. And I think that millennials were trained. We kind of grew up on that idea of finding a job that is cool, that your parents will think is good, and that your friends will think is cool and have made lots of sacrifices at that altar.
There’s a chapter in my book, that’s called Do What You Love and You’ll Still Work Every Day for the Rest of Your Life. So how can we think about creating jobs that aren’t cool? That aren’t demanding you to funnel every part of your personality into them in order to find success, but are just jobs that make it so that you can have that buzzword that politicians use that I think is oftentimes evacuated meaning, jobs that have dignity. And what dignity means is not being exploited. And that sometimes you need unions in order to do that. And sometimes you need good companies in order to do that. And sometimes you need government regulations to do that. Really, you need all three. And that’s what I’m hoping.
I think people can see that more and more, is that if you just leave it to companies to be like, “Oh, create some new, good jobs,” it’s not going to happen. The vast majority of jobs that were added, readded, to the economy after the great recession were pretty crappy, contingent or temp, or jobs that don’t have any sort of stability with them.
Whether that’s permalancing, or driving Uber, plus doing another job on the side, they’re not good jobs. So that’s what I think millennials need to understand what the parameters of a good job are. And one of those parameters are boundaries that allow you to have some form of the rest of your life, right?
Kara Goldin: Yeah, totally. Well, and I think that’s always been kind of part, for me, the millennials that have worked with me, I think that they really do value having downtime. Which I think is great. I think being able to have a life outside of the office is always… To many people in my generation, was just not doable if you wanted to be in New York City or in sort of a job that was really kind of prestigious in some ways. How do you think COVID is changing that? I was on a panel with the CFO of Zoom the other day and she was announcing that all of their employees can now work remotely for the next year and a half. They basically said, “You guys can go and work wherever you want.”
And she said the happiness factor definitely went up. People could be closer to their aging parents or they could still make their nice salary, but be doing it remotely. I think it’s great if you work for a company like Zoom, but there might be some other businesses that just can’t really do that, for example. But I feel like there’s a lot more options in 2020 with COVID for people to kind of like… If you want to live in Montana and you want to do something that you would normally be doing in New York or Silicon Valley, maybe you could actually do it.
I don’t know if you could do it right out of college. You might have to really get the experience and know that people could trust you to… Trust is the wrong word, but really that you had sort of the ability to kind of work remotely. Because I think that’s another piece of this too. I’m throwing a lot of things in here, but I think it’s another thing where I think community is also such a big part of millennials and also Gen Z. And I feel like a lot of that is really missing and mental health is becoming more and more of an important discussion, which I think is real. I’m curious how you think about that as well.
Anne Peterson: So great question. Because it’s the topic of the next book that I’m working on, which is with partner Charlie Warzel, he’s a technology writer for the New York Times. And it is about basically the big problem of work from home. All the ways that the crappy parts of work could get worse, like the surveillance, and the lack of boundaries between home and work, and all those sorts of things. But also the bigger promise. And I think the big thing is that the work that we’re doing right now from home, it’s not working from home. We are working from home during a pandemic. So many people are dealing with their kids at home. They’re dealing with safety issues. There are so many additional stressors that you have to imagine, “What would this be like if I could live in proximity to my parents or my in-laws and have that additional caretaking? If I could have friends who were part of this larger community with me? If I could not be worried every time I go out into a public space? if I wasn’t stressed out about my democracy all the time?”
If there were all of these things that [crosstalk 00:24:46].
Kara Goldin: I think about this all the time. It’s true, yeah.
Anne Peterson: And if you could be working from home in that scenario, and maybe even more importantly, because I don’t think that the future is not everyone work from home all the time. We’re talking specifically about people who worked in offices, doing “knowledge work” in some capacity. And also it probably doesn’t mean the end of offices. It means like increased flexibility. So if you live in the suburbs, maybe you go in once or twice a week instead of making that commute every day, just because. Or if you live in Montana and your headquarters is somewhere else, then you go in for a week, once a quarter, and you have actually really dedicated, devoted time. That you aren’t just like trying to be creative because you’re passing someone on the way to the bathroom. Which is always the vaunted thing about open offices. It’s like, “Oh, you have all these people in one space, they’re going to be so creative.” Mostly they’re just less creative and [crosstalk 00:25:47].
Kara Goldin: I agree.
Anne Peterson: So if you have times that are really meant for that sort of collaboration and creativity and brainstorming, and in real time spent with one another, instead of frantically trying to wedge in meetings amidst doing the rest of your work, I think it could be incredible. And I had a version of this, pre pandemic, when I was based in Montana and still working for BuzzFeed, which the headquarters was in Brooklyn. And people talk all the time about like, how are we going to revive rural areas? How do we have more representation and thoughtfulness about places that aren’t just the coast? One way is letting people live where they want to live.
I grew up in Idaho, the landscape of Idaho and Montana and the mountain West is my landscape. It’s where I feel really happy. And I didn’t hate Brooklyn. I liked living in New York. It’s an easy place to feel addicted to living. I couldn’t save any money because the cost of living was so high. I couldn’t consider ever having a family. But what is given back to you when you allow people to make decisions about where they want to live? Some people love cities, that’s great. But giving people some freedom and not having their location be dictated purely by the kind of happenstance of there being a handful of big cities where corporations are currently headquartered, could be really, really huge for our country.
Kara Goldin: I think it’s huge. And I’ll be very, very interested to see what comes about by next spring and hopefully having a vaccine and all of those things I think will factor into it. But it will be very, very interesting. Because I think there are a lot of my friends who are millennials who have said, the fact that tech offices are closed until whenever, at least till next summer. And especially women. The number of women who are kind of faced with raising their kids, even though they have great husbands, maybe. But at the end of the day, the buck kind of stops back with them. And they’ve just felt like, “Okay, I’m just going to do this right now because I just don’t want the chaos.” And so then they ended up stopping working for now.
And as I’ve said to many of those people, I actually, between my previous gig before running Hint, I was running the e-commerce and shopping for AOL. And I took, at that time, in the early 2000s, I took off two years. Which was basically I had just put my gravestone down. Everybody was like, “Wait, what? How can you take two years off?” And I wanted to be with my family. I had young kids at the time, but I also just wanted to just breathe. And I think sometimes we just have to remind ourselves that it’s okay to actually do what we want to do.
Anne Peterson: This is the hard thing is that this is the first female recession of all of the major recessions that we’ve had as a country. Hundreds of thousands of women are leaving the workplace. I’m working on a piece right now, those that are interested can go to my Substack, but I was looking at working on a piece that talks about, I think in just September, over 800,000 women left the workforce. And I think it’s only around 150,000 men. So the wage gap is predicted, after years of finally closing in just a little bit, so it’s like 82 cents that women make to a man’s dollar, the wage gap is predicted to spread again during this recession. We are taking steps back. And that is because we have this massive societal problem because of the pandemic, and the government is not responding in a way that actually fixes it.
And so who’s solving the problem? Women. And we’re solving it. I think a lot of women feel relieved in some ways to take a step back from the workplace. But a lot of that relief stems from the fact that they were working two full-time jobs before. So now they’re just quitting the one job for which they were monetarily compensated. And this [inaudible 00:30:17]
Kara Goldin: No, it is. Totally, it’s a lot. So you’ve been up in Montana now for a few years-
Anne Peterson: Three years.
Kara Goldin: And what do you think is the biggest thing… You’ve obviously been able to get lots done, and get your work done. And it’s probably was a little scary when you first kind of made that leap, but did you find that you were able to do kind of what you ultimately set out to do?
Anne Peterson: What I like about what I’m doing now, especially on Substack, which I moved from BuzzFeed to full-time at Substack in August, is I just feel in control of my own destiny, for better or for worse. I was a little fatigued with… First, the contingency and precarity of academia, and then going into digital media where it’s like, “Oh, well, this is your success or failure.” It’s like the intersection of the venture capital and then also the media industry, it’s just two roller coasters at once that go up and down. And I always worried about like, “Oh, are there going to be layoffs? Are they’re going to be pay decreases? What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen with our company?” And so I like that a little bit more, just having some of that stability. And I’m far enough along in my career that I’m insulated from some of the larger risk that is often associated with going freelance when you’re younger. And I have a partner, so I have that insulation as well. And also I have health insurance. So there were things put in place that made it less risky for me.
And then I like being in a place that feels like it’s nourishing to me. I can do those things that I feel are burnout antidotes, which to me is… I use this definition of solitude that’s borrowed from some other thinkers, that’s freedom from other people’s minds. You don’t actually have to be alone to have solitude. You just need to not have someone’s mind going inside your mind, whether through a podcast or you’re talking to other people. And it’s easy to cultivate solitude in the great state of Montana, population 1 million. And also just being in outdoor spaces is the real sell for me.
Kara Goldin: That’s huge. I live in Marin County. And I lived in New York for many years and I lived in San Francisco as well. And when I moved out, I moved to Marin County when I was starting Hint. And I decided that I wanted to find free school, public school. I was the product of public school education. And so that was the main reason. And I went kicking and screaming. I always share with people who are city people because I didn’t know how much I missed the outdoors. I grew up in Scottsdale, but when it was a hundred thousand people in Scottsdale, not what it is today. And my soul needs the outdoors. And so my house now backs up to a hundred acres of state park and I’m in there every day, at least once.
And I’m hiking around and I’ve said it’s saved me through this trying seven months just to be able to have that outdoor space. And I think it’s something that definitely nurtures. But I still love going to the city and I don’t regret ever living in New York or San Francisco. And I’m so curious because one thing that I said to you too is I am kind of challenged by what would you tell your 20, 21 year old self who’s graduating from school, do you have the same options to go… Like I remember my dad said to me, when I was graduating from school, he was like, “Go to a city, go work for a brand, and you’ll never regret it.”
And I still believe… My first job was at Time magazine. And then I went to CNN. I’ve worked for brands and it didn’t even matter what I did at those brands half the time, it’s just… And BuzzFeed. It’s like people remember those brands. And I think that what’s challenging for this next generation, and I have a daughter that’s graduating from school in May, and I think about this too. I don’t know if you can work remotely and still kind of feel what you envision feeling or learning. I don’t know. I think it will be very, very interesting. And I’m not sure any manager can actually say that it’s, “Oh yeah, for sure. You’re going to get the culture. You’re just going to be on the screen doing this.”
Anne Peterson: The one thing about Gen Z is that they know how to form culture online. That is not [inaudible 00:35:28] for them, and younger millennials. And I think that one problem for a lot of Gen Z-ers is that when there was this idea that you had to go to the city and then oftentimes these brands are paying less and less. Or they’re gig jobs that you get, they’re actually subcontractor jobs. So there’s very little and not a lot of security, and the cost of living there is substantial, and the cost of moving is substantial. So it cuts out this whole portion of the workforce that would like to be part of this.
I always thought of this when we were hiring for interns at BuzzFeed, and I would look at the applicant pool and it said like, “Oh yeah, we can look at people from all of the United States.” But really they were looking at people who were in the tri-state area because they knew what they could pay someone. And the cost to have someone relocate from Florida for a three month internship that paid so little, that is an incredible amount of money that most people who either are dealing with student debt, or who don’t have kind of a family safety net, it’s impossible.
So when you open up the workforce to people who don’t necessarily have those connections or that safety net, actually you’re opening up a much broader workforce, I think.
Kara Goldin: No, I think that’s really, really interesting. So Can’t Even, I’m so excited to… Everybody read this book. You are just amazing at following this culture. And I really think culture just overall is something that we’re all trying to figure out with all of these generations. How do we just make things easier for people, and make them happier, make them be who they want to be? I love the fact that you’re really getting people to really focus in on that because I think it’s not just for millennials, but also for people who are managing millennials, or who have kids that are millennials. I really think that’s a much bigger audience than just, “Yeah, I’m in it right now.”
Anne Peterson: Absolutely.
Kara Goldin: Huge. And so I always ask this last question, so what makes you unstoppable?
Anne Peterson: My ability to work all the time, but I’m trying to fix that. So I think that’s the thing that makes me traditionally unstoppable. The thing that I think actually makes me unstoppable is I find pretty much everything interesting. Like everyone’s life stories, weird histories, all sorts of things. Everything can be interesting.
Kara Goldin: I like stories too. It’s interesting finding out people’s stories and where they’re from, and what makes them tick. Super, super interesting. So where do people find you, Anne, and find the book?
Anne Peterson: You can find me at annehelen.substack.com, or just Google my full name and Substack. And you can find the book, if possible, through your local indie bookstore. They need our support more than ever right now. Just call them up, get on the phone, and actually order it. Or a great alternative, if you don’t have a local, is bookshop.org, which donates proceeds to local bookstores.
Kara Goldin: I love it. I love it. Great. Well, thanks everybody. And if you liked this episode, definitely give high marks to Anne and subscribe to our podcast. And everybody have a great rest of the week.