Speaker 1 00:00:14 Mika, good morning. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2 00:00:16 I'm doing good. How are you? Doing well this afternoon for you. I guess
Speaker 1 00:00:19 It is afternoon for me. Yes. Um, I've, I've already had a full day and this is the last hour of my day. I know this is probably before the first hour of your day, and you were kind enough to join me super, super early.
Speaker 2 00:00:29 Yeah. Awesome. Not a problem,
Speaker 1 00:00:31 <laugh>. Great. So before we get started, for those folks who don't know who, who M is, maybe if you could just give us a brief introduction, who you are, what you do, and where you're from in the world.
Speaker 2 00:00:40 Uh, I'm Mika Epstein. I live in California, somewhere in the Disneyland area, which is huge. Uh, I work for Dream Host as a ho, a managed WordPress technician. I'm a full stack developer. I work on everything from making sure WordPress is installed properly. WP CLI is working with all of our various server images, building the server images, testing out the full stack, all the way from cashing down to the nitty gritty building at HT access and php. And then I spend what time I have left in my workday, reviewing plug-ins on wordpress.org and offering a shoulder for the support team that I used to be the, uh, the rep for. I have been the representative for the wordpress.org plugin review team since whenever the first word camp US was <laugh>. I think that's when I took over. Um, and my responsibilities for that include making sure every plugin is reviewed within seven business days.
Speaker 2 00:01:40 All security issues that are reported are handled properly by the right person on the team, that people don't break the behavioral guidelines, uh, which is, you know, don't go and harass people. Don't be, as we say, don't be a jerk. Come on man. Um, <laugh> and, uh, liaising with other teams on wordpress.org to make sure that everything is happy. Like, especially when we get plugins like Gutenberg, like I knew about Gutenberg months before a lot of other people had even an idea that it was happening because I had to block out that particular slug to make sure nobody took it.
Speaker 1 00:02:12 Wow. Okay. I I didn't even think of that. Wow. That's, that's quite
Speaker 2 00:02:15 Interesting. Yeah. It's like if you sell a plugin, sometimes they'll reach out to me first and say, Hey, I'm selling to this person. What do I need to do? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So like, I've known of, of certain sales in advance and I'm like, man, if this stuff was on the market, I could go killing an insider trading.
Speaker 1 00:02:28 Wow. Amazing. Amazing. And tell me, seeing, as seeing as I know that you started your day super early for me, um, what are you, what are you drinking today to get you going?
Speaker 2 00:02:37 Uh, this is ice cold water. Okay. As it happens. Um, okay. But I had a cup of coffee. I ha I am a one cup of coffee a day person, and then the rest of my day is, uh, water. I'm, I'm a, wow. I jokingly call myself a hydro homo <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:02:52 Wow. Teach me your ways. I don't know if I could do a one cup of coffee a day. I, I'm not there yet. I,
Speaker 2 00:02:57 I, uh, well, I had a, I had high blood pressure, um, when I was younger, and it's hereditary, so like my whole family has had this problem. So my doctor said right when I started drinking coffee a lot, working in tech in my twenties, she's like, you have to not drink a lot of caffeine. No sodas, no, not a lot of coffee. No coffee after 5:00 PM I might break that one occasionally, especially when I'm in Europe and I can get a really good cup of Turkish coffee after dinner. Like, no, I'm, I'm having that, but Right. I, I have no, I don't like sodas. I have never liked them. So it, so water is super easy for me. Right.
Speaker 1 00:03:34 That's honey. Yeah. I, everybody
Speaker 2 00:03:35 Should drink water. It's great. It's a, it's a human right?
Speaker 1 00:03:37 Absolutely. I, I grew up in a family that wasn't too thing about sodas, so I, sodas was part of my life. Um, and then I met my wife who was very much like you, maybe one cup of coffee and then water. So I've definitely transitioned from having four to five cups a day to maybe having two a day and then water the rest of the day. Um, yeah, hill Helen was, was a big part of that as well. She was tweeting a while back about monitoring her sleep patterns when she had drunk coffee after lunch or not, and how she knows that that Oh, yeah. Um, she wasn't sleeping well after drinking coffee after lunch. I've stopped doing that as well, but I, I, I have to have my two or three cups before lunch to keep me going. <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:04:11 I, it, it's really, it, it's really addictive. Like, I love the taste and I love the, the way it makes me feel. But, um, and I, I have a lot of friends with ADHD and drinking coffee calms them down. Wow. Which is wild. Wow. Uh, but it does not do the same for me. Uh, it gives me, I can actually go an entire day without coffee and have no ill effect, which freaks people out. <laugh> <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:04:36 I can imagine. So, so let's talk a little bit about your open source history. You did, you did, uh, mention it earlier on, but I'd like to kind of dig in. Oh, boy. And go, go back in time. Can you remember what your first open source contribution was?
Speaker 2 00:04:48 Yes, I do. It was a plugin for BB Press when it used to be a totally separate project. Um, so Okay. My introduction to open source happened in I, uh, in the 1990s. Um, I have been running websites for over 25 years, and I say that because certain website of mine is about to hit 25. This, uh, this coming November. Wow. Uh, the site has been up since I was in college. The URLs, if you were hit to hit an old url, it still redirects you around. There are no broken links, no dead links. I have maintained this off and on by myself. A friend of mine, uh, helps me out with the server stuff now because I'm just too busy. Um, uh, but I have been doing this for quite a while, and originally I wrote the whole thing myself. Hmm. And then I started adding things like a photo gallery, and I realized I'm kind of getting in out of my depth. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, maybe I should look up software. And from that, I actually did not use WordPress or at, at that time, cafe blog. B2 Cafe blog. This was free. Ok. So you're,
Speaker 3 00:06:00 So you're OG
Speaker 2 00:06:01 <laugh>. I, I'm, I'm OG here. Um, I did not start using WordPress until, I wanna say 1.3 or 1.5. I, I, I talked about this with, uh, OTO Sam Wood. He, he also works for Audrey Capital and mm-hmm. <affirmative> and does a lot of plug-in stuff. And we're, we're, we work together a lot. Um, but I remember when widgets were introduced to WordPress, I like to put it that way. Uh, right. You couldn't, right. You had to edit your theme directly to add things to your sidebar. Right. Um, and it was because of that. I didn't wanna use WordPress, but once they introduced widgets, I was like, well, all right, let me see. Uh, but originally I was using movable type to manage my blog, and then I shifted over to WordPress. And, but the first thing I did to contribute was for the site I was running, I needed a spoiler tag.
Speaker 2 00:06:53 I needed a way for people to be able to not see a secret until they clicked on it. And it displayed, and, you know, this was like really early in c s s land, like ca the idea of, of compiling your c s s was still a pipe dream. Mm-hmm. Uh, so hours and hours on Dialup internet, doing the research, figuring it out, testing it, and testing it live, because I had no way to test it locally on my, you know, my, my MAC tower, which weighed a million pounds, <laugh>, uh, it was a G three <laugh>, this is a while ago. Uh, and, uh, I made a plug-in for BB Press that was called Spoiler Tags, and you would put, you know, square bracket spoiler, and then whatever you wanted to say and, and end it like a short tag. Um, I eventually, I, I went from that to, okay, I have a problem with mod security that I don't understand.
Speaker 2 00:07:45 Let me, and it's specific to WordPress. Let me ask in the forums, and this was back in the day when, when you built code for, like, what I did for my, my work at a bank at that time was I would build code and I'd have to compile it and compiling it would suck up my computer so much that literally the only thing I could do was surf the web. Mm-hmm. And even then, I could only go to really simple websites. Uh, and I was like, well, I'll just learn about WordPress because that'll let me play with some really easy PHP code that doesn't need to be compiled, and then I can learn something. Uh, and while I was waiting for somebody to help me out with my problem, I started answering other people's problems. I'm like, oh, I know this one. It's HT access.
Speaker 2 00:08:27 I solved it last week. Let me help you. Hmm. And what that ended up becoming was like, every time my code was compiling, or every time I was on a lunch break, I would pop into the WordPress forums. I would look for questions I knew the answers to, or ones I kind of thought I might, but not really. Mm. And I teach myself by helping others. Right. Which I still to this day, feel that watching what other people do that you would never imagine mm-hmm. <affirmative> that will teach you so much more about a product than anything else. Like even today, I love plugin reviews because I'm like, I would never have thought of making a plugin for that. That's cool. Right. And then sometimes it's like, okay, this is the 79th plugin I've seen for snowball <laugh>, but it's in a new way. I'll let it go.
Speaker 1 00:09:14 I love that snowfall. That's awesome. Oh
Speaker 2 00:09:16 My God. I, I, I don't, because I mean, you, you can't see you who are listening to the podcast, but I have Coke bottle lens glasses. I, I have like, uh, my, my vision is negative 11 and negative 12. Wow. I have a severe astigmatism, so Snowflake snowfalls on my screen freak me out. And I have friends who are, um, what you call it, uh, uh, they have seizures and they have epilepsy, and it, it can trigger some of them. So I'm really antis snowflake for that reason. But I, I do recognize that other people like it and, you know, a lot of, so, uh, so I went from helping people to finding problems in plug-ins and reporting them to the plug-ins team until Otto, who was in charge back then said, for crying out loud, you're just joining the team now and your job is to tell us what has broken and help us get them fixed.
Speaker 1 00:10:06 Ah,
Speaker 2 00:10:06 That's nice. And then it transitioned into, well, why don't you try your hand at reviewing a couple of things? Hmm. Um, and so I started reviewing the really simple things first. Like if I downloaded it and I had no idea what it was doing, I left it alone. Um, but over time, Otto and the fellow who was running the team at the time, who has since, uh, moved on due to family issues and a couple of the other people, they all started teaching me like, okay, this is how you fix it and here's why it works this way. And they were a phenomenal. And then, you know, over the course of a few years, I became the lead of the reviewers mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, which was not in charge of the team. I was just, my primary job was to pick up the reviews, to send off that initial review.
Speaker 2 00:10:49 And I started streamlining my process, like downloading it. I had saved replies that I used to say, okay, this is a very common problem. Now I have a script that I'm building that lets me scan a plugin. And I, I mean, people like wire reviews actually so fast. And the answer is, I know exactly what I'm looking for because I can highlight the big problems. Mm-hmm. And they're like, well, do you use like P H P C S with WPC s to scan? I'm like, no, they take too long. Um, <laugh>, my scanner literally looks for the most obvious things that you would think that people could miss. And I found that by finding those, I can easily look at the code and go, okay, this code is called here. Let's see. Oh yeah. There's the problem. And I can review most plugins in under five minutes now, which is Wow. Kind of crazy. Cuz it used to be like 10 to 20 minutes per plugin. And now I'm like, I can get through 30 in an hour. Easy.
Speaker 1 00:11:44 Wow. Wow. That's amazing. And, and so the <laugh> well that's, that's, that kinda leads me onto my next question quite nicely. I hadn't planned this, but I just thought about this. Um, is this something that you think eventually, because, you know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a husband and a father, so I need to think about the future. I need to think about one day I be around. So, you know, I have to plan for life,
Speaker 2 00:12:04 Is how I always think about the world.
Speaker 1 00:12:06 Is this something that eventually you'll be able to just hand over to somebody else?
Speaker 2 00:12:09 Yes. Absolutely. The actual goal is, my personal goal is to be able to take this, to use it to scan things and send a reviewer a preliminary report.
Speaker 1 00:12:22 Right.
Speaker 2 00:12:23 And then a human can just go through and say, okay, this one's actually okay, this one's not. This one is, this one's weird in a different way. So that to expedite the obvious problems mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and we've actually started incorporating some of this into, um, we're using a very simplified scan tool now on the back end of plugins where if you're a plugin reviewer, you can log in and see a list of, right now it's, uh, dodgy sequel calls, as it as it were. Um, and we're, we're working on what's the best way to inform people, what's the best way to explain these things to people? Because part of the problem isn't just finding the errors. It's how do I tell somebody your code has a problem? And avoiding the two biggest issues. One is, I have to educate you because I don't know how much you know about WordPress.
Speaker 2 00:13:14 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I don't know how much you know about coding. A lot of people, this is your first time writing code. And above all, I don't wanna scare you off. I don't want you to think this is insurmountable, but I have to tell you things like, Hey, this isn't sanitized. It matters because now here's the mon, you know, and I even, like, I have a, a, a mantra that I put in there now that says, uh, sanitizer early, escape, late, always validate. Mm. Nice. And I feel like those three things kind of, that, that covers the majority of issues that people have with plugins, which is really, well, you know, why do I need to sanitize this if an admin is only the ever gonna be clicking a button? I'm like, cuz admins are stupid. <laugh> admins are humans. <laugh> admins are your parents. Admins are, you know, my aunt and uncle who I love them dearly, but they are not technical. They work in, you know, my uncle's a lighting tech for Broadway. My aunt is, uh, a, a, well, I'm trying to figure out how to describe what she did. She just retired, but she used to work in, in a dance and not as a dancer anymore, but like helping, uh, dance organizations. And, you know, my father was an enj, was a computer engineer. Okay. He actually wrote software. Uh Oh wow. And yeah. Oh yeah. And do you think,
Speaker 1 00:14:31 Do you think that was the reason that you got into it?
Speaker 2 00:14:33 No. No. Okay. Um, I got into tech. I have a natural inclination to tech. Um, I was even before I really understood what my dad was doing, and this like goes back to when I was a five year old living in Cleveland, Ohio. Um, I was always fascinated with this idea that I could tell this box a thing. Hmm. And it could tell me something back. So like, my first experience with computers and solving tech problems was when I was, uh, this is a story my family loves telling. I was four years old. Uh, we had a dial up modem. One of those, like you had a, on an old rotary phone, you dialed a number mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And once it started making the tones back, you put it in a cradle. Um, my grandmother had it set up in her house or her, her condo so that she could work from home on weekends and reconcile the accounts for her business.
Speaker 2 00:15:27 I wanted french toast <laugh>, grandma was having tech problems. And I said, I can solve it. And she said, okay, look, you have the amount of time it takes to make me paint for me to make you breakfast, but if it's not fixed, we gotta go get your dad. Like, okay. I had it solved before she was done and I downloaded all the stuff she needed and had it all set up for her. Wow. And that was my, that was my introduction of I know how this works because I've been playing with it. Um, and I was playing with it, not because my father introduced it to me, but because of all things. My mother was like, just let her play on the computer while I'm working because I need to get this done for school. My parents were in university at the time. My father was in, uh, uh, studying computer engineering at Case Western Reserve. My mother was studying law at Case Western Reserve. Um, of course, my dad would tell you that I am into technology because I ate his math exam when I was 18 months old. <laugh> I did, I ate the whole, whole damn thing. Wow. And he had to call his teacher and say, I'm really sorry. My kid ate my homework.
Speaker 1 00:16:32 <laugh>, and I'm sure the teacher went mm-hmm. <affirmative> Sure she did <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:16:38 I actually, I I knew the teacher. Uh, he, he passed away a few years ago, but he loved that story so much cuz my dad brought in the soggy remain Oh wow.
Speaker 1 00:16:48 Of
Speaker 2 00:16:48 The paper. And he's like, nah, I've seen your kid. You bring your, my dad would bring me to class. You know? Okay. Okay. He, he, uh, well my, my mom couldn't bring me to law classes because their teacher didn't let her, but my dad could bring me to his classes cuz his teacher was totally down with babies. Like, whatever, they're kids. Okay. Um, but he knew me and he's known that he had known me since I was an infant. And Wow. You know, he, when I went to university, uh, I was studying anthropology and he teased me, he's like, why aren't you studying tech? You, you have this, this natural inclination to problem solving with math. And I, I do, I love math. It's like, it's a dirty secret to tell people that I really do love, uh, the construction of algorithms. Hmm. It just, it delights me. And, uh, so I, like, I do it on my free time.
Speaker 1 00:17:35 Awesome. <laugh>. That's awesome. So, so with work
Speaker 2 00:17:38 Back <laugh>,
Speaker 1 00:17:41 I'm gonna go back a step now. You were talking about the plugin review thing and the whole process and you were talking about that feedback of the user Yeah. Because that, that, that, that delves quite nicely into the reason that I, that I'm wanting to talk to you today. So some time ago, I can't remember exactly when it was, uh, 24th of February, I'm looking at it now. You posted, oh yeah.
Speaker 2 00:17:58 I did
Speaker 1 00:17:58 Something on your blog, which I had been, because I follow you on Twitter. I had, I had seen some idea of what was happening and things that you'd been going through and you'd be talking about it. And then eventually you got to this point where you were able to, to speak about what was going on openly. Yes. Um, for those of you listening, it's titled When It's Not Burnout or Not as in, in, in, um, brackets. Um, I will link to the, to the blog post below this. I do recommend you reading it, um, to get some context for the rest of this, the rest of this episode. But I'm not gonna try and and describe what happened, um, because it's not my story. Yeah. So I would like you to, it's also
Speaker 2 00:18:33 Kinda weird, <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:18:34 I would like you to try and give us a quick introduction to, to why, why that blog post was written.
Speaker 2 00:18:40 Okay. Um, so one of the worst things about plug-in reviews is that it has become our responsibility to tell people there's a problem with your code. Hmm. And the reason that, that's the worst thing is that when I tell you there's a problem with your code, a lot of, especially newer and younger developers here, my code sucks and they take it personally. And I did a talk at Word Camp US Philly, one of the earlier word. Yeah. I think it was the second Philly word camp. Um, and it was about how you are not your code. And, uh, Jonathan and I were talking about this beforehand. You aren't your code, but when somebody tells you your code has a problem, there is no possible way for any normal human not to take that personally. You just can't. This is something you put your blood, sweat, and tears into.
Speaker 2 00:19:38 You've worked on your free hours, you've researched, and now here's some rando on the internet saying, Hey, this is wrong. And it hurts. And I get that. And a lot of the time I spend in plugin reviews now has been carefully rewriting the language we use to be friendlier to, especially to people who don't speak English as their native language of this is what the problem is, this is why it matters. And to be somewhat non-confrontational about it, to just try to be specific and clear. Uh, that has a backfire though English is, in my opinion, a it's not a real language. It's three languages standing on each other's shoulders wearing a trench coat pretending to be a fourth language it, sorry. And what that was the best too much is hilarious.
Speaker 1 00:20:27 That's the best explanation I've ever heard. That's brilliant.
Speaker 2 00:20:31 I, uh, um, I, I tell people I was not raised like a classic American in the sense that I was always made aware of the flaws that happened with our country and with our language, which led led me to learn early on. And, and I have to stress that primarily I think of myself as a writer, not a developer. I'm a writer who loves math and code, not a coder who likes to write. Mm-hmm. And, um, I feel that language and precision and language are important to express meaning. And English has a massive flaw in that tone is really lost and it's very subjective. So when I write, there's a problem with your code and you can hear my voice Right now, I'm pretty light about it. But what other people hear is there's a problem with your code. And I can't change how you hear that.
Speaker 2 00:21:26 I can try with bold and italics, but it doesn't always put the emphasis properly in a way that you're gonna understand. And there's nothing I can do to solve that problem permanently. Mm-hmm. So what I can do is take the time to explain. Now, when you take that and you couple it with the fact that about 30% of the developers these days that I get plug-ins from are e esl, I know that I'm facing an uphill battle when I'm communicating with people about, oh gosh. Let's see. So this was over the last few years, we've transitioned to a new system, UN plugins, uh, things are submitted through WordPress itself, not a BB press plugin like it used to be. And just recently, actually, we've moved over to a new email system, which I love so much because it lets us be anonymous. Hmm. Which all, and then that last part actually stemmed from this specific problem, which was we had a fella who kept making slightly different mistakes, but all in the same vein.
Speaker 2 00:22:33 Uh, his original submission, the code was fine. I, I had no objections. Security was, was enough that I felt it was safe for the community. The documentation was poor, but I understood that he was ESL and wasn't gonna push him about it. He should be allowed to grow. And, you know, we let him know at the time. We're like, Hey, just so you know, you might wanna hire an English per an native English speaker to help you write this because it's a little lacking in these areas and it might impact your ability to grow. And that is honestly, the only reason I'm ever telling anyone to hire a copywriter is that I want you to succeed. I, I strongly feel that group effort is why WordPress has succeeded, which means that group effort is how WordPress and by and large, all plugins and themes will continue.
Speaker 2 00:23:21 Mm-hmm. If we all work together, we will continue to grow. You know, I, I started WordPress with 0% of the world. Now it's up to 41% of the top 1 million websites. It's insane. But that also means that now my responsibility for reviewing has grown. Hmm. Because, you know, as we all might know from a recent campaign, from a certain company, I will not name, uh, plug-in incompatibility is a huge issue. We have over 90,000 plug-ins at some point in the directory. Of those just over half are still active mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, the ones that aren't active, some of them were rejected, some of them were closed, some of them the developer said, you know, I'm done. And you know, that those are all totally valid things. Um, but as, as I'm working through making sure people are educated, people are instructed, people are helped going forward, you run into specific problems that happen over and over again.
Speaker 2 00:24:16 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, like somebody names their plugin, um, the best anti-spam plugin ever, better than a kismet. And I gotta go and reach out to this person and say, look, I get what you're trying to say here, but a couple of things you need to know. First of all, users aren't that stupid <laugh>, they know hyperbole when they see it. So when you say, I am the best plugin ever, they're gonna look at you. And, and if you're from, uh, the United States and you're of a certain age, you know the Brady Bunch meme? Sure. Jan <laugh>. Uh, and honestly, that is how a lot of people look at your, your code or your project, when you say the best ever. Hmm. They're like, yeah, okay, sure. You're really the best ever. And I try to tell people, you don't wanna do that. Don't, don't use your, your plugin name as your branding advertisement.
Speaker 2 00:25:05 Your plugin name should literally be, I've named my project applesauce, and somebody's gonna go applesauce. And then they'll look down and see the description. Applesauce is a spam blocking plugin that works with a kismet and these other tools to do blah. Well, now you have my attention. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> users are smarter than we give them credit for A lot of the time. They, they will read these things. But when I see somebody say, you know, the best spam plugin ever better than a kismet, I have to tell them two things. First of all, stop with a hyperbole. Nobody cares. Secondly, please don't name your competitor. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> in your plug-in name. That's not only is that technically a trademark violation in the United States and a couple of other places like the eu, it's not really kind to the community. You're gonna get hits for a kismet, which I know is what you want, but you're not gonna get good hits.
Speaker 2 00:25:57 You're getting people who know, oh, this is somebody who's dragging down the competition. And that's just, I know I'm a bad marketer, but that's just bad business because that makes people mad. Mm-hmm. Especially people who like the other product. Mm-hmm. They'll get angry at you. Well, this guy happens to name his plugin. Uh, I believe it was something along the lines of, you know, uh, plugin name, the best image plugin ever Better than, and it, it was like 18, 19 words long. And the first email we had sent out to them was from, uh, somebody else. It wasn't me who said, Hey, your plugin name is in violation of our guidelines, which actually say don't spam, which is what you're doing here. We need you to change it. Oh, okay. I understand. Says the guy, he changes it, everything's fine. Six-ish months later, another problem pops up.
Speaker 2 00:26:51 He started putting affiliate links in a readme. Okay. Hmm. We need you to not do that unless they're disclosed. Hmm. Yeah. He was using U R L shorteners so that you couldn't tell they were affiliate links. We're like, look, there's nothing wrong. First of all, you can't have affiliate links in your readme that's actually said in the guidelines. You can have them in your plugin on the admin page for it, but they have to be the full url. So if I hover over it, I see what the URL is. Hmm hmm. Okay. Sorry. I'll fix it. No problem. And these little issues like that just kind of kept going on and on. Finally, one day I get an email and I, I caught it. It was like, you know, 10 in the morning of a woman saying, Hey, this plug and developer is stalking me on Facebook.
Speaker 2 00:27:34 Now I'm a woman in tech. I take these things very seriously because I have been stalked before, before I ever started WordPress, I had to put a restraining order out on somebody because of that 25 year old website I run mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I had to put a restraining order on, on a guy who mailed me physical mail to my address, well, to the address for my site, which was not my own address. I properly used, you know, hide your address stuff from a very young age. Mm-hmm. Um, which by the way, everybody, if you have the ability to hide the address for your domain registration, I strongly recommend you do so. Because if one person gets ticked off at you mm-hmm. It's terrifying. Protect yourself. That's super simple, straightforward way to do, talk to your d n s registrar about how to handle that. Um, so I've had experience with stalkers before I knew what that was.
Speaker 2 00:28:26 I said, could you take a screenshot or maybe send me a link? Um, I will ask you for a friend invite. I very rarely will ever consider doing that. But this person happened to be somebody I recognized, I knew them in the community, and I felt confident that she was not going to betray this specific confidence. Hmm. And I looked at it and I read, and she sent me a copy of it. And I, I read it and I'm like, y this person was going after her because she had left a two star review. Hmm. Which was basically, I wanted to do these things with this plugin. It didn't really work. It wasn't really great. These were the problems I faced. They weren't able to solve them two stars. Hmm. And then I went and checked in the forums to see what, what had led them to Facebook harass this poor person.
Speaker 2 00:29:12 And the replies to the review kind of struck me strangely. I I looked at them, I'm like, well, first off, they're all from different IP addresses. I'm an admin on wordpress.org, the forums. Hmm. I can see everyone's IP address when they post a comment, when they post on the forums. I, I can see who you are. I can see your email. I am sorry if that scares someone. Um, and I saw conversations from multiple IP addresses written in slightly different language. And now I said earlier, I, I think of myself as a writer, part of being a writer is learning how to read. And it's not just like I know how to read a book. It's, I know how to read writing patterns. Mm. Different. Every single person writes differently. No matter how hard you try to disguise who you are and how you write it is noticeable to someone who is familiar enough with your work.
Speaker 2 00:30:02 Mm-hmm. So I took the time to study the emails we had gotten from this person, and then I compared them to the posts and the forms and they don't match. Mm-hmm. Now that tells me, okay, we've got a, we might have a problem with account sharing going on here. For whatever reason, people like to share accounts on wordpress.org. I don't understand why, because it's five minutes to make a new account added as a, as a support tech to your plugin. And let's let them handle themselves. But instead, we had one person leaving one account, multiple people. Right. I was pretty confident about that, but I didn't wanna say anything just yet. So what I did say was I emailed them with a warning and I said, Hey, we've been talking to you for the last year or so about minor issues with your WordPress plugins.
Speaker 2 00:30:47 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, we are now issuing a final warning about your behavior in WordPress because the way that you're acting tells us you never read the forum guidelines properly. You never read the plugging guidelines. What you're doing is harassment and it stops, or we will ban you. Hmm. And that was, I wanna say 2017. Wow. Things were pretty co Yeah. Well, that's how best Yeah. It, yeah. And to be honest, that seemed to be the end of it for about six or eight months. And over that time, we had updated the forum guidelines. Uh, we were trying to rewrite them for clarity. I spent the better part of a year going to different word camps, asking people their opinions. Hey, could you read this one guideline and tell me what you think? I sat in a room in New York with a bunch of people going through two guidelines, just two for two hours to try to clarify them, because I wanted them to be e more easily understood.
Speaker 2 00:31:41 Right. The original plugin guidelines, I wanna say auto wrote them in like half an hour. And they were more or less, please don't be a damn dirty spammer. Please treat people nicely. Please don't lie. Oh, and everything has to be GPL L Right. <laugh>. And since then, it's kind of expanded to, you have to be G P L, you can't lie to people. You, you can't do illegal things. You, you, you know, and, and we try to keep them as guidelines simple and clear. And it's hard to do that because, you know, if I tell somebody, Hey, don't lie, and they're like, well, I'm not lying. Like, okay, I, I get that this is subjective. So, you know, here's why this is lying. And, you know, truth and lies can be very subjective to the person who's saying them. If you really believe what you're saying, it's not a lie. Right. Mm-hmm. This is true. So I, I try hard now not to say the word lie. I try to say you are unintentionally misleading people.
Speaker 2 00:32:38 Okay. But that's a great song. <laugh>, sorry, sweet child of mine by, uh, guns N Roses just played in the background <laugh>. I know that guitar riff so well. Um, so, uh, where was I? Okay. Right. So, uh, lying. Lying, yeah. So I try to say, you are suggesting, you are implying you are misleading. And, you know, that has its own negative connotations when you get told that, which sucks. Mm-hmm. And I get that too. Um, so this guy got a final warning, and about six months pass, we've updated the guidelines. And something very similar happens again, where they go off on somebody in the forums. This time they don't chase them home, but they're incredibly rude in the forums and almost threatening. I send another warning. I said, look, we've just updated the guidelines so you are getting a second final warning because we're not monsters.
Speaker 2 00:33:31 Look, what you're doing is bad, and if you don't stop or you can't stop, we won't host your code. Hmm. And I didn't really think much of that because usually people see the words in all bold final notice regarding your behavior on wordpress.org from
[email protected]. And they go, oh, maybe I should rethink what I'm doing. I mean, the vast majority of people who get a final warning, I never have to talk to again about that. It's fantastic. But about 5% of those people come back and continue to show their worst inclinations. And sadly, this person got a final warning. And, uh, Thanksgiving 2018, and I only remember that because I had logged in to clear out the spam. There was a message from a forum moderator going, Hey, I saw this note because I left a, I properly left a note in his account that said, Hey, if any, if this person violates any forum guidelines, please contact the plugins team immediately.
Speaker 2 00:34:32 Do not attempt to deal with it on your own. Because I'm trying to take the burden off of the forum developers. It's formed moderators, it is not their responsibility to nanny gate. Everybody, especially a plug-in dev who's been warned by plug-ins, that is now my responsibility. And somebody said, Hey, I know it's Thanksgiving in the States, but this is really looking bad to me. And I went and I looked, and it was pretty awful. It had threats, it had direct threats to moderators saying, if you won't let, we had him a moderation watch. So every time he post, somebody had to go and approve it. And the last post one we never approved was basically telling the moderators off that if we weren't going to approve their posts automatically then just delete their plugins. And I looked at it and I'm like, this is, they're not getting it.
Speaker 2 00:35:22 This is not kind to the community. And then on top of that, the person to whom they were being aggressive had emailed us and said, Hey, this person followed me home to Facebook. And I said, all that's it. We're done. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So, you know, Thanksgiving, I put the Turkey in the oven, I banned the account, I logged off. And I, I told them, well, I emailed them. I said, your account has been banned. Here are all of the things we've warned you about. Here are all the problems we've had with you, and here's what you did today, we're done. Hmm. Do not make a new account. Do not try to work around this ban. You are free to reply to this email if you think that it was made an error. But you know, the odds are yank coming back. Hmm. Now, I, I will say a total of two people over the time I've been in charge of the plugins team have received a final warning and a ban and come back.
Speaker 2 00:36:11 Hmm. Because they both demonstrated actual remorse for their actions. They demonstrated that they understood how badly they'd made a mistake, and they apologized sincerely and expected nothing after that. They just said, I'm sorry, I was wrong. Not just, there was a longer conversation, but I said, okay, look, in six months I will re-review this situation personally. Hmm. And I did. And I pinged them. I said, Hey, look, you, you, I see the work you're doing on GitHub. I see the work you're doing over here. You're still helping people. Would you like your plug-ins back? And both people were elated and they've been model members of the community ever since. The reason we never name who they are is that I don't want the world to know that. That's why their plugins were closed for six months. Hmm mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I don't want people to know all it, all they, all anyone would ever know is that it says guideline violation. And that's really broad because it, it encompasses a number of things at the time. It encomp trademark violations, licensing issues, uh, phoning home tracking users. We're slightly more specific now, but still vague enough that, uh, if you see guideline violations, that could still really be a lot of different things. The only thing you know now is that it's not security.
Speaker 2 00:37:26 So this person though, I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, there's really no chance that this guy's coming back. And I wanna say that I, I wrote it down in the, in the post, and you can read it, but there were over a dozen emails in the next 48 hours. It was like every five minutes I was, I saw an email come in and I got pinged by, by somebody else on the team who went, Hey, have you noticed this guy's just going nutty? Mm-hmm. And I looked at them and I finally said, dude, you need to not reply for at least 72 hours at this point. Calm down. Mm-hmm. We can re-review this, but if you keep emailing us like this, we are going to consider it harassment and your account will be permanently banned. Uh, that escalated him and he started emailing. I don't know how he found them, uh, email accounts of mine that I have, but I don't use like a, a dormant Gmail account.
Speaker 2 00:38:15 An AOL account that I didn't even know. I still had it just email after email after email. And, you know, I, I posted kind of the summary. I have a spreadsheet, uh, that details by year, all of the emails he ever sent me, what the subject are and the date. Mm. It, it, that's all it says. I, I didn't bother to save the rest because why <laugh>? Um, but I kept a record of what was going on, and I, I think I still have, like, I saved the raw email log somewhere in a zip and just threw it up on a, on a share drive and sent it to a couple of people. Um, right.
Speaker 1 00:38:47 So in your, in your, in your post, you, you detail quite a bit of this. Yeah. And I just, I just wanna quickly read from the post before I ask my next question. So you're talking about, uh, and the heading is, and then it escalated from November 24th to the end of that year, 77 separate email chains were sent in 2019. There were over 600 separate email chains from 126 separate email addresses, 20, 20, 34 separate email chains, 2021. And this was February only three email chains, but it's only February. Um,
Speaker 2 00:39:13 It's five now.
Speaker 1 00:39:15 <laugh>. Well, there we go. The harassment continue. So,
Speaker 2 00:39:18 Uh, yeah, the last email was, uh, uh, 15, 20 days ago.
Speaker 1 00:39:25 Crazy. Absolutely crazy. So I want people to go and read this article. Um, Mika's great at, at expressing everything that's going on there. Um, what I wanna start digging into now is understanding what that feels like. Um, if you don't mind, like what does it feel like to have, because you are in this position where you are just trying to help people. You are just trying to do a thing that not many other people would want to do. Um, you know, it's, it's a, it's an open source project, so you're dealing with all different kinds of people. Um, and I wanna kind of get into the language thing in a second, and I want to kind of use some of my own experiences and talk about that in a second. But what does that feel like when somebody, when somebody starts that process, do, do you, do you kind of just go and I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it first for you, so it'll make it easier. Yeah. Do, do you just kinda get to a point where you go, you know what, fuck it, I'm just gonna walk away. Um, or, or, or how do you get through that?
Speaker 2 00:40:18 Well, first of all, I have a very understanding wife. I have a lot of really good friends, and I have a therapist, um, <laugh>, there's no shame in therapy folks. Uh, and it's not like you see it on tv. It's not like you're gonna go in and they're gonna tell you everything that's wrong about you. Sometimes you go in and it's like, Hey, I saw this meme and I thought of you. Which is like the coolest thing that a therapist has ever done for me. Um, I now actually only talk to them, uh, I think every, uh, what is it? Every nine weeks, give or take, because I'm, I I, we both feel that I'm actually doing all things considered, uh, pretty good right now. Um, I do phone therapy at this, uh, and have for quite a while. Um, it was terrifying only because of the volume and, and anybody who saw my talk, I did a talk called, uh, lesbians Damn Lesbians and Statistics at Word Camp Nashville.
Speaker 2 00:41:15 Mm. Um, and if anybody noticed, there was a, a very big guy standing in the back of the room when I gave that talk. And he was a security guard. Wow. And he was there because somebody had made a credible threat against myself and another member of the plugin review team, and specifically told us not to walk down dark alleys by ourselves at Word Camp Nashville, or we would regret it. This person was registered at Word Camp Us. I talked it over with my wife first. I read the email a couple of times and I showed it to her and I said, am I just like being a little bit in too neurotic, or does this actually look credible? And she read the chain and she's like, who do we call? And I said, I know exactly who to contact. And I pinged, uh, Andrea Middleton, who got me in touch with the right people right away.
Speaker 2 00:42:03 She is a godsend to the community. And I will not hear anyone say anything bad about her <laugh> ever. Um, I'm, I'm like, I hadn't ar I had a guard at a Word camp because somebody had made a credible threat against my safety. So this was not the first time that something along these lines had had occurred. However, there's a big difference between one person making a threat like that and another person who is inundating themself in every social aspect of your life. This person made a change.org. Petition change.org, by the way, was incredibly responsive when I emailed them, said, hi, I'm the person that they made this about. I'm happy to share the information with you, but this is, you know, this is a BS thing. They took it down the next day, no more issues. And they said, we've banned him from our, from our platform.
Speaker 2 00:42:53 Hmm. Uh, I reported this person to, you know, he started using disposable emails. I reported that to the disposable email people. They took care of it as much as they could. Um, a couple of them, I'm very disappointed to say that they will tell you we have no way to block people from our platform. And that terrifies me in a different way, <laugh>. Um, but it was, it was the sheer volume. I was freaked out. And then when something showed up at my physical office, I legit had a panic attack and went home. Hmm. I, I, I, I showed up at home. My wife's like, why are you home early? And I'm like, I cannot deal with this. Here's what happened. And my office is, is amazing. They're darling, they had known about this beforehand, uh, before it got bad because the guy had right before I told them, like, I had a meeting that afternoon to explain the situation with hr.
Speaker 2 00:43:43 The guy pops into the o uh, to the office chat, uh, as if he was a customer, and starts making demands that I'd be fired. And the poor tech support person was like, Nika, I don't know what to do. <laugh>, what is this guy on about? And I'm like, hand this over to your management. Do not reply. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I'll be in the office in half an hour. I was on my, I was about to get on my bicycle to get to work, um, <laugh> cuz I like to bike to, to the office man. Um, and, but at that point, I started to get a little bit scared and I was nervous about going to Word camps because this is a person in another country. And given the state of our then administration, I was fairly confident this person was never gonna be allowed in the States because of where they were from and the Visa requirements.
Speaker 2 00:44:29 But they kept saying they were gonna come to la, which is where one of our offices is. Mm-hmm. Uh, they kept saying they were gonna come to a Word camp. And I'm like, I'm a little bit nervous to go to Word camps in certain countries now because there's a possibility. Hmm. Um, and then <laugh>, my dad died. Uh hmm. So it started in November and in February my dad died very suddenly. And I was a, I was a mess. Like, I, I'm welling up now because I miss this guy every day of my life. My dad was this huge pillar of everything. He and I lived alone together for five years. My cousin moved in with us in the eighties. And you know, my dad was a great guy. Not to say he is perfect, you know, everybody's got their flaws. But I love that guy and I miss him every day. And I was dealing with that, and I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna step away, but I'm not gonna step away from plug-in reviews. I'm gonna step away from word camps. And I didn't do a single word camp. Uh, from when he died until, uh, Berlin, that was the first word, camp I felt like I could go back to. Mostly because I felt, and it's hilarious to say this is a Jewish lesbian. I felt safer in Berlin. <laugh>, I feel like my ancestors are all going. You what?
Speaker 1 00:45:46 Wow.
Speaker 2 00:45:47 You understand that we lost a lot of us there, <laugh>. Oh.
Speaker 1 00:45:50 And, and I had no idea when, cause I met you for the first time in Berlin. And, and now I understand why you were probably very hesitant to speak to some random stranger. Um, I knew who had, I knew what he looked,
Speaker 2 00:45:59 I knew who he was, and I knew kind of what he looked like. And I knew that you were, it just, I was kind of dealing with a lot mm-hmm. <affirmative> I was going, I'm still, you know, it's been a couple of years. I'm still working my way through the grief of loss and the stress of this, this person. But I was a, I was a fucking mess for quite a while. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And I, I was lashing out to people in a bad way. And I, I very much thank my friend Tracy Leveck, who works, she owns, uh, she and her wife own Yikes. Uh, and she called me outta my bullshit once and was, and I, I've told her this before, and she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it actually like, was like a, it felt like a slap in the face to remind me, Hey, you idiot, they're humans.
Speaker 2 00:46:43 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And I still think of that as the turning point to get me back to being me again. Hmm mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And it was just a, a kind comment from a friend going, Hey, you're acting like a bitch. Hmm. And, you know, she said it in a very nice way and it really, it, it resonated with me. And, you know, I I tell my friends all the time, like, Hey, if I'm being a, if I'm being an asshole, please tell me <laugh> and God bless Tracy. She did. And it was very instrumental to remind me, don't be that person. And I, I still, you know, she's gonna think it was a nothing comment. And you know, the thing is that a lot of things we say are nothing comments, but they're instrumental in changing somebody else's life.
Speaker 1 00:47:27 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's so, so important. So the, the sort of second to last question I wanna ask you about this because there are some other shorter questions I wanna get to as well. Sure. But the second to last question I wanna ask you is you are, you've, you've, you've just mentioned it yourself amazingly, you are a woman. Yes. You are Jewish and you're very open about being a lesbian. Yep. I am. I'm none of those things. I'm a white male in tech, so I am in the majority. Do you believe, or do you think at least that those factors played a role in how this person treated you? Or do you think it would've happened if it was someone like Samuel who was replying?
Speaker 2 00:48:05 There's this weird thing when you're a woman in tech, when you're a minority of any sort, and it's a game you play, are they just a, a general asshole or are they a misogynist? Are they racist? Are they homophobic? And
Speaker 2 00:48:24 I spend a lot of time when somebody goes off after me and you know, it, it, uh, <laugh>, I, I laugh because actually, like two days ago, uh, somebody was kind of being a little shirty in the forums and I, there were no other, uh, senior moderators around. And I happened to be there and I stepped in. I told the guy, I'm like, Hey, I flagged your account for moderation. Please pull back on the vulgarities. And by the way, being a jerk to people is not gonna get you the answers you, you want that they're not gonna give you the help you want. Try being nicer. And, uh, his reply was S t f U u, diesel Dyke <laugh>. And it went on from there. Right. And I, I was, I have been laughing about that because that's actually kind of funny in, in my head.
Speaker 2 00:49:05 But, so I post that and it's like less than 10 minutes later as his reply, which means that in the span of 10 minutes, somebody clicked on my profile, went to my website, read what I do, and came back that response that is sexism and homophobia folks that he went to the effort of finding out those things and throwing them at me as if they were insult. Now they're not insults. I've actually hired a local artist to paint me a, uh, diesel dyke painting that's gonna go on my wall. Nice. <laugh> nice. Cause I'm like, that is the coolest phrase. Hang on a second. <laugh>. And, you know, my wife, she, she, I tell her this and she's like, but you're a soft butch at best. And I'm just like laughing and laughing because it's, that's funny. Mm-hmm. Um, do I think that this specific guy is homophobic?
Speaker 2 00:49:51 No, I think he's uneducated when it comes to that. Mm-hmm. Do I think that he's a misogynist though? Absolutely. Mm-hmm. The way that he l he used language, the way that things were phrased and the way that he has specifically targeted me and not Sam. Mm. Otto also told him to stop emailing. In fact, I stopped talking to him after like the fourth day. Mm. And Otto was the only person that's talked to him since, and specifically from his own email. And he still goes after me. Right. Yeah. Oh yeah. Right. He, he, he does, he, he, now that said, given where he happens to be from, I think that a lot of that is cultural. Hmm. But it's cultural misogyny. And that doesn't mean that he's not a misogynist. I think that if I'd been a man, the attacks would've been different. Hmm. Um, but like the weirdest thing that's happened from this whole thing recently was I got an email from Google saying, somebody is slandering you on our Google forums and we've removed part of it, but here's the other thing.
Speaker 2 00:50:55 And I'm like, that's a weird email to get, but okay, let me go look and, uh, the guy, basically, he got kicked off of Google Ads, apparently. Um, news to me, I don't know. I don't really pay attention to him. Um, and he said that some crazy lesbian goes after him. And I'm like, oh, yeah, okay. Hmm. Hmm. And I don't know what else was said because they just said they removed it, but, um, they left that part in, because it doesn't mention me by name, but I'm like, oh, yeah, no, that's me. All right. <laugh>, I didn't go after him though. I, I've never reported him to Google ADSD since, why would I? Right, right. That said, his website has no content, so no wonder he got kicked off of Google ads. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 00:51:32 Mm-hmm. No, that's, no, that's interesting. So that, so that leads me to my last question. And, and I'll be honest, I could chat to you about this all day. Maybe we can even do a follow up in a year's time or whatever, but Yeah. But I do, I wanna respect your time and I also wanna respect my listeners' time, but I do wanna kind of end off the section with this question, and I'm gonna preface it with a statement. I can't change anybody's way of thinking, but I can change what I do. Yes. So, in your opinion, as a plugin developer, as a member of the WordPress community, what could I be doing to help prevent this kind of thing happening to someone else who is not as amazing as you are at dealing with it?
Speaker 2 00:52:12 There are two sides to that answer. Uh, the first side is the easy side, and it's the technical side. And it's this, when you built a product, ask yourself, how can this be abused? What is the worst thing I could possibly do with this? And I'm gonna give an example, and I apologize to my friends who work on this specific product. Uh, Jonathan, I have your email address because you emailed me to set this whole thing up. I could go and make a lot of fake Viagra posts on a lot of blogs using A V P N, and a kismet would start to flag your email address and your name as spam, and you would start being blocked by a kismet. And that would take me maybe 20 minutes to set up as a script rotate through VPNs, call it a day. I could really screw up your ability to work.
Speaker 2 00:53:00 Hmm. Uh, again, I'm really sorry to my friends who work on a kismat that I just mentioned this. I'm sure that they've got some things built in that kind of check for that, but at least I hope they do. But like, that's the first thing that came to mind when a kismet came out to me of, oh, I could really screw somebody over with this. Hmm. Um, you look at things like the WordPress forums, anybody can make an account and claim to be anyone. Hmm. One of the plugins I actually, uh, manage, pardon me. It was written by somebody named Skippy, who has left the community for his own reasons. Um, and he let me adopt it. It's called Imposter Side. And what it does is it prevents people from impersonating you on your own blog. Right. So they can't use your email, they can't use your name.
Speaker 2 00:53:46 If you wanna set it up that way, they can't use your, uh, your website. I think I took that off because I had a pair of friends who used the same website. Uh, my, my delightful friends, Ron and Andrea, uh, Renick from Canada, and <laugh> caught them as spam. I'm like, oh, I gotta dial that back a bit. Um, but like, you know, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog as something we used to say way back in the day, and mm-hmm. It's still true. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So, you know, question one, uh, solution one is think about the worst thing people can do with your product and then try to stop it. Hmm. But the other answer is really hard, and it's, what can I do to make things better overall? And that's really complicated because I'm gonna disagree with you. You absolutely can, can change how someone else thinks.
Speaker 2 00:54:35 And you do it by being the person we need to be. Hmm. You do it by calling out somebody else going, Hey, I get that you're angry, but what you just said is over the line. Are you? And if it's a friend, you say, are you okay? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And if it's not a friend, you say, you can't behave like this in public. It's not okay. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but we start calling people out. Um, in America, a huge argument goes around, and I know this is in other places too, that if a woman dresses provocatively, she's asking to be raped, which is absolutely bullshit. Anybody with a brain knows this. Mm-hmm. But we're, when you hear people say that, you think, wait a minute, we're attacking this on the wrong side, the problem is not how women dress. The problem is that men are not calling each other out.
Speaker 2 00:55:24 Hmm. Saying, Hey, bro, no, that's not okay. Hmm. So when people say, Hey, I'm a cis white Christian male, what can I possibly do? And I say, you hold your fellow dudes accountable. If you hate hearing, you know, if you, if you're one of those guys that says, not all men are assholes, you need to stop and say, why are people saying that? Men, some men are assholes. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and it all comes together. It, we can absolutely change how people think. It's hard, though. It, it's a fight, it's a struggle. And, and people of color share the burden of this way more than the rest of us. People just expect them to explain racism every day. And that's, that's unreasonable. Hmm. And, and on top of that, a lot of people act like concern trolls, like, or, or, or sea lions, which is to say that they, they have kind of semi bad faith arguments. Like, well, I'm not a bad person. Why do you think that all men are bad? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And it's like, look, it's not that we think all men are bad, it's that we literally can't tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. And you all aren't calling each other out. Mm-hmm. How? Cause
Speaker 1 00:56:30 The good guys aren't even doing what the good guys should be doing.
Speaker 2 00:56:33 Right. So the answer to how do I change things, be the good guy. Mm-hmm. And, and it's really hard though. And like you say, and you're like, well, that should be easy if I see somebody doing something bad. The thing is, is that microaggressions are really hard to spot unless you've been targeted by them. It, it's, it's crazy hard. And like I studied social anthropology and university, and a lot of the things that they taught us was how to throw out your preconceived notions and how to listen broadly to the communities that you're learning about. Because as an anthropologist, you are not supposed to put your own preconceived beliefs, your ideals, your history on someone else. You have to listen to them, the stories they tell, and learn what they mean to those people, and then grow mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And that's hard. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it's like, I'm not great at it.
Speaker 2 00:57:27 I, I still have moments of, of massive bias. Like, uh, I went and got my vaccine yesterday, my first one. Yay. And there are police officers guarding the whole thing, like it's a drive through too. So like, it was like the worst Disney ride in the world, by the way. Cause it was two hour, wait, five second jab, 15 minute wait, then you leave <laugh>. But I am constantly faced with this dilemma of, on the one hand, I wanna thank the police officers for doing the work and making sure everybody's okay. And on the other hand, police officers are murdering people in America. Left right. And center it, it happened again this morning. Mm-hmm. How do I thank somebody for the service that is necessary, that protects me while at the same time not making them feel like I'm supporting this other thing. And I don't know how to do that.
Speaker 2 00:58:13 Mm-hmm. And I've stuck with, I'm, I'm, I'm trapped in this weird hole of, some people are good, some people are bad, but the good people aren't stopping enough of the bad people. So I have to lump them together. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And I don't know what the right answer is anymore. I just know that there are so many wrong ones, and every answer I would pick would be wrong. And I am still struggling to learn how to be the better person in these moments, how to do the right thing. And there's no quick answer to that. It it, but when I say this, I'll say this, if you wanna be a better person, if you wanna make things better for the people who aren't me, who don't have the damnit all willpower to just say, fuck it, I'm not letting this stop me. Which is literally what I did in February.
Speaker 2 00:59:02 Uh, it, and this was, you know, a year of therapy, of going through, of like, I don't want this to define me. I'm taking control of my story, and I'm making sure the world knows that this happens. Because if I say nothing, no one will ever know mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And if no one knows nothing changes. Right. And if nothing changes, this will happen to someone else. And I will not stand for that. And if you are listening and thinking, gosh, she sounds kind of mad, I am livid. Because the fact that this happens every day to women and to people of color and to minorities who have no ability to protect themselves is vile. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 00:59:40 Mm-hmm. And if I can help one person and give them a chance, then I've done something positive here. Which is why I agreed to be on Jonathan's podcast was that I, I listened to what he did, and I thought this is a possibility to make people realize that, to change the world, to make it better for all of us, we all are responsible for each other. Hmm. It, it, my father lived in Japan for the last 20 ish, 25, hang on, 30 years of his life. Oh my God. His wife was Japanese. My brother and I, we went out and visited him a bunch of times in Japan. They have kind of this social understanding because they are on an island. Hmm. That what you do impacts others. Hmm. While I was there, there was a bus strike. And the way that they did it was the bus drivers just didn't accept money.
Speaker 2 01:00:34 You rode the bus for free because they knew that if they struck and stopped riding, it would impact negatively all these other people. The first time I was in Japan, some kid robbed somebody or no, robbed. He stole a bus, is what it was. And his parents had to go to the house of everyone who was negatively impacted by the bus not stopping and picking people up and getting them where they needed to go to personally apologize for the inconvenience of their child. Hmm. And some people are going, that's really excessive. And on the other hand, I'm going, that's people who understand social impact of a community. We're a global comu. We're a global community. Now we have to be considerate of our impact on everyone.
Speaker 1 01:01:16 Absolutely. I'm glad you said that because, because Japanese culture is something that, that I actually not studied, but I, I, I had a project that I had to do when I was at college about culture. And because I'm into martial arts, I chose the Japanese culture and I learned that about them. And so I've always tried to, to learn as much about that kind of process, about it. Everything, everything that I do doesn't just affect me and those directly around me, but it has a knock on effect. Um, so I normally at the end of the podcast would go into a bunch of other questions. I don't want to because that's the perfect way to end the off. Um, so I'm gonna leave it right there. The other thing I normally do is I say to my guests, uh, if people wanna get hold of you, where can they, and I'm not gonna do that either because <laugh>, you know, you don't need more people getting hold of you. <laugh>.
Speaker 2 01:01:58 If people wanna follow me on Twitter, my handle is IPS tou. I P S T E N U. I will warn you in advance, uh, most of what I post is nothing about WordPress. It'll be about queer television because I run a site called Les Watch tv. It'll be about baseball because I have a problematically named baseball team that I, I like. They're from Cleveland, Ohio. I apologize for their name. They're changing it next year. Um, you know, I talk about all sorts of random crap <laugh>. So follow me if you want to. But to be honest, uh, following me isn't gonna change your life. Find somebody from a completely different background from you and follow them and listen. Don't reply, listen and learn. Do that. You'll be better off.
Speaker 1 01:02:43 Amazing. Amazing. Mika, that's the perfect way to end this. Thank you very much. So I wanna thank you so much for your time today. It was lovely to chat to you. Um, if you're, if you're open to it, I'd love to do a follow up to this, maybe six months to a year from now and just kind of see if it's still happening or if anything's changed. Yeah. Or just how you're doing. Yeah, sure. Um, it's been, it's been wonderful
Speaker 2 01:03:00 Set schedule.
Speaker 1 01:03:02 Absolutely. And, uh, yeah, I hope you have a great 2021. It sounds like it's already starting off better than, than 2020 did for you. Um, and I wish you all the best.
Speaker 2 01:03:10 Thank you.
