Gloria Steinem (Founder & Editor, Ms. Magazine, more)

[BELL RINGING] Hub and spoke. Audio collective. Everything new is new again from Commercial Type. We've got an all new website and three new releases, Aligned, Diplomat, and Successor. Commercial Type and Commercial Classics are now one library under one roof, and we've streamlined our license. We've also added case studies of some of our custom projects, like Vanity Fair, Bloomberg Business Week, and T. Visit CommercialType.com. [BELL RINGING] Not only could you not go into the Oak Room, but if I was interviewing somebody who was staying at the plaza, I couldn't wait by myself in the lobby. I had to get them out of the door, because they were so sure that women waiting by themselves would look like prostitutes or hookers. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is "Prin is Dead," "Long Live Print," a podcast about magazines and the people who made and made them. I'm Depp or Bishop. I'm George Jandran. I'm Patrick Mitchell. This episode is about a girl from East Toledo, Ohio, a girl who taught herself to read by devouring comic books, horse stories, and Louisa May Alcott, a girl who didn't set foot in a school until she was 14. A young woman who went to India for two years to avoid getting married to anyone. A young woman who was described by one Esquire editor as the only writer he knew who could make sex bloring. A woman who has never, ever worked for a paycheck, who made up and launched her own idea for a column in New York magazine, which still kind of exists. A woman who, while on assignment, was kicked out of the lobby of the plaza hotel, because, quote, "she must have been a hooker," because all unascorted women who hung out in hotel lobbies in the '60s must be sex workers, right? A woman who describes herself as a "hopa-holyc." This episode is about Gloria Steinem, the woman who created Ms. Magazine and started a revolution. Our editor at large, George Jandran, caught up with Steinem on the occasion of the magazine's 50th anniversary. - I want to start by asking you, Gloria, before there was Ms. Magazine, there was Gloria Steinem, the journalist. And I think lots more people are familiar with the Ms. legacy than they are with your days as a journalist. Could you go back and tell us a little bit about those early days for you as a journalist? And what the environment was like, particularly for young women, trying to break into journalism then. - Speaking personally, I think I always wanted to be a journalist ever since I was a child. Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women and Men in Books were young people, but also a lot of serious, depressed novels, was a journalist. And in addition, my mother had been a journalist. She was a Toledo blade and always regretted having given up her way of making a living for reasons of my father's, because he moved his altous southern Michigan worry at a dance hall. I mean, there were familial reasons. But altogether from my mother to Louisa May Alcott had back, being a journalist seemed the most attractive, magnetic, full of learning, diverse profession I could imagine. And on top of that, I hated talking in public in any way. And I was only kind of forced to do much later, but the idea of being a writer and not having to talk was very seductive. - At a certain point, I too hated talking in public and when I took over at Boston Magazine, I had to start doing it. And I read a survey, a poll asking Americans, what are their most primal fears? And number two was death by drowning. And number one was speaking before a group. - I'm more surprised by the drowning you're speaking before. - I am too, but that kind of establishes a certain context for both of our fears of public speaking. - No, I only began to do it after New York Magazine had created invitations to do it first in New York and then in other places. And I absolutely couldn't do it by myself. So I recruited a flow candidate. - Do you remember Florence Kennedy? - Sure. - Yeah, fearless. And so we held together and then Dorothy Pittman Hughes. And I never really, I never did it by myself. - So what kind of journals, free-lancing initially? - Yes, no, I've never been on salary. I've always been through. - I think many people probably, when they think of you as a journalist, think back to that article that you wrote for show magazine about being a Playboy bunny. But I'm more interested in your work for New York Magazine. Did you actually create the city-politic column? - Yes, I did. Because we were starting the magazine, all of us together and working out departments and balance between articles and columns and so on. And in the process, I gave myself a column. - Who gave yourself a column? - Right. Well, that's one of the virtues of being there at a startup, right? - Okay. - And what was they and Tom Lowe's and Jimmy Breslin and all the-- - All the-- - Right. - Yeah. You could all laugh by the time I got there, but I was still delivering mail to you somehow. I have no idea how. So what was the city-politic back then? What were you covering? - It was literally events in the city because, I mean, we were the first of the city magazines, but many of the substantive bigger articles were about issues that stretch beyond New York City. - Right. - And I loved New York in the way that only somebody from Toledo, Ohio can love New York. So it felt natural to focus on the city. And also, I had gone to cover an early women's liberation meeting and realized that this was a movement that was not getting covered and I could help to cover it. So when you get a bunch of journalists together, very often the conversation turns to what I refer to as the big break. We are going along and sometimes you don't even realize it's the big break at the time. Looking back, what was your big break as a journalist? - I suppose from an external point of view, writing about being a playboy, Bonnie, was the big break, but certainly not from my point of view, because the kinds of assignments I got, because of it were not assignments I wanted to have. - So what was it? Was your relationship with Clay and New York Magazine that ended up in retrospect being the big break? - I don't even know how it happened 'cause it felt kind of organic. I knew Robert Benton, who was the art director of Esquire at the time. And Esquire was, I believe, looking for someone to write an article about the contraceptive pill, which was then new, and so I wrote that article, and that was the beginning, even though I'm not sure I knew it was the beginning. - That article, Clay Felcoe, was your editor, was it me? - Yes. - And rumor had it in the New York Magazine newsroom that he made you do a major revision of that article. That's just urban legend. - No, I think it's true because I remember him saying to me that I had performed the miracle of making sex boring. Well, that's like Clay doesn't know, don't miss words. So I wanna go back and mention your growing up and your dad and you grew up. A lot of people, a surprising number of people based on my informal survey, don't know about your background. And when I asked them, well, speculate, where do you think Gloria Steinem came from? They say, well, Manhattan, of course. Upper West Side, her parents were, they were professors in NYU or Barnard, or Hunter, and they'd say, well, actually no, East Toledo. They look at you like no way. - We're just thinking of our real background that we don't understand what the impression may be. I didn't realize. - That's true. So talk briefly about your life in a trailer with your mom and dad and your sister. And the passion that that seemed to kindle in you, life long for travel. First, it kindled life without going to school. So I was just constantly reading in the car as we were going to and from Florida or California since my father hated the cold weather. And when the dance pavilion in Michigan, an ocean beach pier, as he called it, dancing over the water and under the stars. That was his slogan. When that was no longer a way to make a living, then he would go to country auctions and buy small antiques and sell them to the shops along the road to Florida or California. So it was just pretty much all that I knew. I might go to school for the first month, but as soon as it got cold, my father wanted to put us all in the house trailer and leave. - So we know what homeschooling is. This was mobile homeschooling. - Yeah, and I was. I mean, I just read all the time. In fact, my mother was more worried about my eyesight reading in the car than she was about my lack of schooling. - So you were self taught, basically? - You might say so, or book taught. - Okay, so I'm curious in reading your memoir about your life on the road, I'm not sure whether you say this explicitly or whether it's implicit that there's something about the kind of traveling that you did that maybe informed and enhanced you as a reporter in terms of your ability to listen in a really profound way. Am I reading too much into this? - No, I think listening was my preferred form of communication because one, I didn't want to speak in public and only much later and with a speaking partner, did I even attempt that. And also, I was following in the track of the adult Louisa Mayalkaad who had done that during the Civil War. - So in addition to Louisa, who else were your role models? - That's interesting. There were not full-time women writers out there that I was aware of. It wasn't necessarily women writers. And my father among his purchases for his antique and other business in the wintertime used to buy entire libraries in order to get one first edition. So he would delete the rest of the entire library in the garage, just scattered on the floor. And I would go out there and randomly pick books to read. So I think I read the history of part of the Civil War. I mean, I was an unguided reader. - I think a lot of us were, frankly, even when we were supposed to be disciplined by, in my case, the Catholic education, but I can't tell you the number of journalists who describe themselves as lifelong promiscuous readers. - Really? Yeah. No, I think that's true. And I didn't experience learning a different way until I was in high school and, of course, college. - So let's go back now. After college, you're in New York. I'm back now in your life as a journalist. Do you remember the first time an idea for a publication, a magazine for women first struck you? - Well, in between my arrival in New York and the first magazine lived in India for two years. And that was partly because my mother and both grandmothers, even though one family was Jewish and one was Christian, they were all theosophists. So I had grown up on books like Lotus Leaves for the Young. - I grew up in India. - In India. - And because I was engaged in trying not to get married, I fled to India and fell in love with it and by living there for two years. And also writing for Indian newspapers. Oh, that was the beginning for me. Writing college. - That was beautifully put. Engaged in trying hard not to be married. Was you trying hard not to be married to a particular individual or was this just in general? - Also, remember it was the 1950s. And even in my college classes, the number of engagement rings that showed up and junior and senior year was massive. And I was in love with a very interesting guy. So all of it seemed headed toward marriage. And in those days, marriage was more the end than the beginnings for women. - Right, right. So you took the modest step of going to India for two years to get away from this? - Yeah, first I sat in the member pan and, I sat in the office of pan am so long that they finally gave me a free ticket. - Is that true? - Huh. - I told them I would write brochures for them or something, but they finally, I think just to get me out of the office, they gave me a free ticket. - So you're now back from India? - Where and when did the idea from Miz as a magazine come from? - Well, Susanne Levine, who is our managing editor, Pat Karbine, who is our publisher, we had been the editor of Look magazine. And indeed I had written as a freelancer for Pat Karbine there. So most of us had been involved in the magazine business in some way. And we're hyper aware that the magazines for women were catalogues. You were just supposed to write complementary pieces about makeup and all kinds of subjects that were covered editorially. And it was literally complimentary copy for the ads. So they had wanted to be working on a women's magazine that was different. And I also did, and on top of that, I had seen a magazine get started at New York. So I had faith that it was possible. - For the few people who have never heard the story of how that first issue got launched. Can you recreate that? When was the first time you sat down with clay and discussed the idea of Miz as an insert in an issue of New York, which gave you at least for one issue instant circulation or distribution? - It wasn't as direct as that. It was first that clay, who had a great news sense, could see that along with the peace movement, along with the civil rights movement, there was coming to be a women's movement since women had not been able to participate fully. And the other movements, he could see that it was happening and that it was news. So he suggested that I write about that and sent me off on a tour to California and back in a few other places to promote the issue that we did. And I had written the column that I mentioned, which was called After Black Power Women's Liberation. I think with John Mark, I'm not sure I was secure enough to say it without a question mark. - When we're young, we always carry a few question marks around with this. - So it was all blossoming and there were women doing public speakouts against the anti-abortion laws because women were literally dying from and being injured from illegal abortions. We'll be right back. - Printer's dead is made possible with the support of Macculture. Read our online journal, listen to our podcast and visit our shop to discover why we're convinced Printer's very much alive, all available at Macculture.com. - Printer's dead is made possible with the support of AIGA New York, championing the future of design for all. The full value of design can only be realized when all people can participate and to create that future, we must build it together. Learn more at agny.org. - So when you were starting to actually develop the idea for that very first issue that would be inserted in New York, who was your team? Who were the people you turned to for advice or your writers? I'm curious, give us a sense of how that first issue came together. - Well, there were writers that I knew either personally or from New York magazine, Jane O'Reilly, for instance, who wrote the housewives' moment of truth. - And that was a great story. - So it was like spontaneous combustion because there were women who had been writing for women's magazines or for New York. - So the issue gets out. This is again the premier issue in New York. Share what happened. What was the response? - It was an insert. Part of it was an insert in New York magazine. And then other articles were added and it became a kind of one shot on Newstans. I was sent by Clay to go to various cities, including Los Angeles, to get on radio talk shows, anyway, of publicizing it because we both had a fear that this issue was going to lie like a locks. And it was when I was in California that I was on some talk radio show and people called in, women called in and said, we can't find it on the Newstans. I called Clay in a pan. I can't say that it never got here somehow. And he called the distributor and discovered it had sold out. That was sold out in eight days, even though it was covered in a spring because we thought it was gonna lie on the Newstans for so long. - Is that one of those moments, Clay, where you think to yourself, damn, maybe this is gonna really work? - Well, I didn't know what the it was. I certainly didn't see myself as I'd never had a job. I'd always been to the lights, sir. And it was only because, that car vine who had been the publisher of Look magazine, as I said, well, we understood the magazine business. And Suzanne Levine, who also had been the editor of another magazine that it was possible. - So when you were doing that very first issue, you weren't necessarily thinking about this as the launch of a monthly magazine. - No, no. No, the one that was internal to New York magazine, I was thinking of as a one shot, as they say. - When did it occur to you and your colleagues that well, maybe this is more than a one shot? - When in our little office where we had produced this one shot, we got bails and bails and bails of letters. Just every day, hundreds, even thousands of letters arrived with women saying at last, here's a magazine that isn't just about cooking and raising children that treats me like an adult. And I loved this article and didn't like that one. Just nail bags full of letters. It was stunning. And we saved them all. I think they still exist someplace. - Yeah, you've given a lot of your papers to Smith. - Yes. - Haven't you? - Yes, right. - For anybody interested, I'd say you're in the neighborhood. I think Smith has those letters, so if I'm mistaken. - Maybe earlier, so there may be one of the other women's colleges that had the first letters. - No, okay. - So you guys get together and decide, maybe we've got an idea for a sustainable magazine here. You do a business plan, go out and look for money. What do you do? - Yes, we, I'm trying to remember the sequence of events right now, but water communications was at the time a company that made all or most of its money from parking lots. And of course, they did. And they may again in the future. - Right, and we're wanting to be known as a name in print and magazines, not just parking lots. So they gave us enough money for the first issues. Like $8,000, it wasn't a lot, but it made all the difference. - And they had done Wonder Woman, right? - Yes, and we put one on the cover because Wonder Woman, who was a figure of my and many other women's childhoods, had suddenly lost all her magical powers and become like a car hop, no more magic glass. So because of the company that owned her, it transformed her. So with the original Wonder Woman on the cover, striding across the city as a colossus, giving out food with one hand and rescuing people with the other. And after it was very successful, the creators of Wonder Woman called up and said, okay, all right, she's got her magic glass of back. She's got her invisible wound back. Now will you leave us alone? - So you were partially responsible for revitalizing Wonder Woman. - Yeah, well, I mean, it was Wonder Woman herself in her original form, and then because we put her on the cover, yes. - So there must have been an enormous number of people, mostly men who, when they heard the idea that you were going to take this first issue and now create a monthly magazine around it, thought you were absolutely crazy. And I'm curious, what was the most colorful, negative feedback you got? 'Cause I know, man, you got everybody in every aspect of the culture, telling you you're out of your mind. - Yeah, well, we had a collection of women editors who believed in this, so that made a huge difference. - Sure. - But aside from Clay, who was at least inadvertently encouraging by a person, when the magazine, I don't remember anybody else who was encouraging. - I remember one rainy afternoon in New York magazine, a bunch of people didn't want to go out in the rain to have lunch and so we had somebody bring it in. And I was talking to Jane Maxwell, Clay's assistant, and Jane said that Clay's response after the first issue, when he heard that you were going to do a monthly magazine, was, well, now what are they going to write about? As if, okay, you would cover everything that need to be covered. - True, when Clay felt that one issue was it, true. - Okay, did he ever formally acknowledge that he was wrong? I know a lot of well-known people did, including Harry Reasoner on the air, right? - Oh, yeah, so if that's very smart of you to remember that, I'd forgot. - Oh, yeah. - It wasn't frequent that those guys ever acknowledge changing their mind. - I don't think Clay formally apologized, but he acknowledged that. - So I'm curious, whenever you read anything about the early days of Mizz, I actually have the first 12 issues in the magazine sitting right here. Your mad-set is really interesting because it's, there's no hierarchy. - Yeah, it was by function, then alphabetical. - Yeah, but I'm curious, what was your role? Because people will often say, oh, so and so was really kind of acting as the functional editor, and people always referred to you as a co-founder. - That's true, because as I was saying, Patricia Carbine was the only person who really understood the magazine business because of look magazine. - So was she kind of the publisher? - Yeah, she was the publisher. Suzanne Braun-Lavine was really the editor. She was the one who had all the assigned articles on her wall, and when they were so close to coming in, she was the one who was a truly a managing editor. But other than that, we had meetings of not only everybody in the magazine, but women who happened to be passing through New York from New Delhi, Arizona, somebody who would come to our editorial meetings and make suggestions. - At some point you were quoted as saying something about how sitting around an editorial meeting with a group of people where you can say anything you want, you know, if you're worried, but not about right or wrong, that's more brainstorming. You've got diverse points of view, was just absolutely thrilling for you. - It was, it was, and it was different because unlike New York magazine, much as I loved it, when we were sitting on a meeting there, we were all trying to interest and intrigue clay. But in this meeting, there was not that kind of all powerful individual, it was just all of us sitting in a circle or around a conference table together, trying to figure out what was exciting, what we wanted to do, what writer would be good for what's up. - But it was, it was, it was, somebody has to make decisions, right? - Yeah, I knew. - And to that article and at least for now, we're not going to do the other one. - Yeah, and that was really Suzanne Bron-Lovine, who was the managing editor. - And you were willing, egotistically, you were willing to accept that, despite the fact that you were Ms. Magazine in the public imagination. - No, I was somebody who was the traveler. I was out there bringing back little bits of paper, information and article ideas and here's a writer. I was the wanderer and coming back to editorial meetings, but Suzanne was really the editor. - When I was talking to Corey, one of your assistants, well, we were setting this up, I said to her, if I had to guess at what title Gloria might have bestowed on herself was editor at large, because you always talk about coming back from the road with tons of story ideas and scraps of paper and notes and it sounded like once again, you were the traveler. - That's true, but we listed ourselves alphabetically. So the ex-accept the art director, I mean, some people had distinctive functions, but the rest of us were listed alphabetically. - Well, what kind of resistance did you get from the ad community? I mean, they're notoriously risk averse when it comes to anything new and suddenly, people knocking on their door, even someone as well known and highly regarded as Pat Carbine. - Same, well, we've got this great new idea for a magazine. What was the response on Madison Avenue? - It was very negative, especially in the universe of women's magazines, where the editorial is dictated by ads, that you have home decorating and all kinds of cooking articles and articles about family and the fun, and it's really mostly about the ads. So our secret weapon in going around to advertising agencies was the one who worked in those agencies because, for the first-- - That's interesting. - In any case, they would want to come to the meeting too, and they had not, whatever their job was, didn't call for that, didn't demand that, but they wanted to come too. But we also, at the same time, got resistance and hostility from a few of the men in the agencies. - Yeah, how could you not write? That was still kind of the tail end of Mad Men era. - Yeah, people would even throw the magazine down on their desks or on the floor or demonstrate that this was just a fad or were not interested or it's hostile to what normal women want. There was a fair amount of hostility. But what made the difference was that we would be at J. Walter Thompson or some agency where the men in power did not see that this was a good option, but the women in the office wanted to come to the meeting for the first time, so that helped. - Yeah, I think from time to time, I teach undergraduates and I'm struck sometimes by how to them the '60s and the '70s are ancient history, in some ways, and there'd be times when I would say something really simple. I don't know and respond to a question about something in the newsroom and I'd say, well, we're not computer and I've heard processors, we had typewriters or at one point somebody was asking me about, well, how did you get the magazine to your printer? I said, well, I messaged you and they were like, by what? - No, I agree with you. We could do a kind of chronological set of translators. - Yeah, but I sometimes think when reading your memoirs in particular, even for me, I mean, here's an example. So my mom, Brooklyn girl, had grown up, she loved the Oak Room, the Plaza, and it used to infuriate her that she could never meet her friends for lunch. And when I tell my daughters that story, they look at me like, well, that's just fiction that there was a time, that must have been like in the Victorian era and I'm like, that wasn't that long ago. - Oh, not only could you not go into the Oak Room, but you also couldn't wait by yourself, if I was interviewing somebody who was staying at the Plaza, I couldn't wait by myself in the lobby. I had to get them out outside the door because they were so sure that women waiting by themselves would look like prostitutes or hookers. - I know you probably have told us a million times, but I'm gonna ask you to tell it one more time. Tell us your famous Plaza Hotel lobby story. - Well, because I was interviewing someone or because there are various stories. One is that it wasn't me. I'm trying to think who it was. Is this somebody famous like Greta Gardman? Couldn't have been Greta. Anyway, some famous actress was told that she could not enter the dining room because she was wearing a pantsuit. And so she stood in the door, took off her pants, and he had black hair. - That one I had on her. Thank you very much. - Great. - But there's one in which you are the protagonist and you were escorted out of the lobby while you were on assignment. - Yes, because literally they thought we would look like or could look like call girls. Single women were not allowed or single women of a certain age anyway. - They're not allowed to sit in the lobby. - But you went back and you confronted that person. - Not just we in the magazine, but other women's groups too confronted that and Devon's braided against it. - In fact, I think somewhere there's a video of you doing some kind of a reenactment on PBS. Remember that? - No, it wasn't. - You actually reenact being escorted out of the lobby but then coming back later. And in your memoirs, it's interesting because you talk about kind of the process of building self-confidence and self-esteem and situations like that, which is crucial for reporters, but they're essential for everybody in life. - It's essential for everybody. And the problem of the era was that even the word self-esteem was thought to be some squishy, unworthy, unserious California concern. - You could put that with your book, right? - Yeah, there was some resistance to even discussing it in those terms. - We'll be right back. - Print is dead is made possible with the support of Issues Magazine Shop. Much like this podcast, we exist to celebrate the people and projects keeping print alive. We sell a mix of independent and commercial titles from around the world, shipping globally from our retail shop in Toronto, Canada. Visit us online at issuesmakeshop.com. - Stack the independent magazine club delivers a different publication every month to our subscribers all around the world. You never know what we're gonna send next, but you do know it'll be a beautiful, intelligent independent magazine that deserves a place on your shelf. We'd love to start sending something your way so go to stackmagazines.com to sign up and start receiving a surprise magazine every month. - Print is dead is made possible by the support of the Society of Publication Designers. The SPD powers the future of visual storytelling, setting the standard for editorial excellence and shaping the future of visual culture. For more information, visit spd.org. - I wanna talk a bit about young journalists today and this is not just true for young journalists. It's true for young men and women in general, of course, activists, I'm sure, are dealing with this, but what advice do you give to a young woman who comes to you and wants to do something in media at a time when you could argue that the whole industry across the spectrum is in a state of complete disarray, but somebody who wants to do what you did with myth, something comparable. What advice do you give them? How do you help them make sense of kind of this incredible fragmentation that's taking place in media? - Well, I think I first ask them, what do they love to do? What do they love to do so much? They forget what climate is when they're doing it. Where and how do they feel understood? Are their websites or from treaties or preventments or ways of contacting other like-minded people if so, start there, expand that. Because the path is not the thing, of course, for everybody, but there's usually in the story that you hear a beginning of the path that's right that person. - How do you feel personally about social media? - Well, I'm probably not the best judge because I'm not in it in the same way that longer generations are in it, but most of all, it worries me that there's no fact checking, that you can say anything, and it assumes the life online, even if it's nearly false or negative or libelous. Can anybody's skin sure libel on them? - Yeah, I haven't heard of anybody doing that. - Is your ego also an issue here? Here's what I mean by that. I rarely like memoirs, and yet I love your book about being on the road. I've recommended it to everybody. And one of the things that I find really striking about it, and I'm not saying this to flatter you now, my wife can attest to the fact that I felt this way and said this long before I knew who was gonna be doing a podcast with you, is that you don't have the kind of ego that today we associate with people who have accomplished and achieved what you've achieved. We live in an era of monumental egos, and it seems like so much of social media is clamoring for attention. It's pay attention to me, pay attention to me, and I wonder, do you have just a personal aversion to that? - I don't know if it's an aversion, but I'm just communicating in a way that's natural for me, and that isn't it. And sometimes the online pattern of communication sounds to me like what when I was in sixth grade or whatever, we used to call personality books. Did you have those? - You do. - You know, like the Despercarel handbooks and people were put the name of an individual student on the top of the page, and then people would anonymously write what they thought about that person on the page. So it would say things like cute, but knows it. - Well, that was a precursor to social media, wasn't it? - Yeah, no, it was. So at a basic level, what troubles me is no fact-checking. At another basic level, what troubles me is that huge swaths of the world have no electricity. The internet is dividing us in very crucial ways because it's very limited in people who have access to it. - I'm gonna switch gears slightly here for a second and go back to a comment you made earlier, which is an obvious characterization of the '60s and '70s when we were experiencing the feminist revolution, anti-war revolution, civil rights revolution to an extraordinary extent. And there is and was something absolutely exhilarating about that. And yet, you could argue maybe that it was a precursor to the complete lack of trust we have these days and institutions, complete lack of trust in government, education, business, capitalism, on and on and on. And so it seems to me that those institutions up until the '60s, they were the ways in which we, for better or worse, made meaning in our lives, that provided meaning for us. Now we're pretty much on our own and alone trying to figure out how you do that. Do you agree with that or disagree with that? And if you agree with that, what advice do you have for people? - If you want to think of real examples, I mean, there are obviously individual people who we trust as sources. There are media that we trust more or less as sources. I think we are striving or looking forward our own system of reliability, fact checking, trustworthiness, whether from an individual human being or a particular newspaper. Yes, I trust the New York Times and the Boston Globe but I'm not so sure about it. I mean, we figure it out on a daily basis and through friends we trust. - So when you see a poll that talks about the lowest theme that media in general is held in or Congress, if your response would be, but within that, there are individuals and individual organizations that we do trust. - Yes, I think it's too amorphous and general to say Congress because that includes completely disparate people from Trump to write. It's, it's specificity is very helpful. - Okay, here's another kind of non-sequitur, but I think these are related. There's been a lot written lately. In fact, lately I'd describe it as almost an avalanche of articles about men, but also about boys being in peril. And I'm not sure why that surfaced so much recently, but as a father of three daughters and a son, this is something my wife and I have been watching for decades now. I can still remember the first time we had a conversation about this when my oldest daughter in eighth grade was being inducted into honors society or something like that. And there were 24 students from her school and there were 22 females and two boys. And afterwards we went up and talked to the teacher about what was going on, so we don't really know. It's probably just an aberration, but we saw this start to repeat itself. Over and over and over again. And a lot of iterations of it. - That's interesting because you're in a better position than I am to experience that. What's your instinct about the why? - I think that there's been a process that has supported girls in a way that produces girls, not young women, but girls, first and foremost, who are more centered. They have a greater level of self-esteem. They still experience a lot of the craziness that accompanies young girls as they're growing up that I'd discover. I grew up in a family of four brothers and so, man, this was a shock to me that you guys are a handful. But I think as girls and then young women started to flourish as a result of a lot of the changes that we've been talking about and more, I think it was threatening to boys. And I think it began to raise really serious questions for them of which they weren't aware, of course, at that age development about where they belonged. How do they fit into this? I'm not being very articulate about it because of course it's a long and mental issue. - I see what you mean. And there is no masculine or feminine, there's human. But we are still in a time when we have, a lot of us anyway, have been trained to think in terms of masculine or feminine. And there's probably racial parallel to this because the idea of white supremacy was and I'm afraid still is sometimes part of our national culture. So there's an anxiety about the fact that we are now a majority people of color country. I mean, the first generation of babies who are majority babies of color has already been born. And at the outside you get racist rebellions against that fact and insecurity. So it's comfort with the unfamiliar but I still think it's progress because one of us is a unique individual regardless of gender or race or other collective judgments. And hopefully we will get there. - You have often spoken about the fact that one of the effects that travel, how's on you, is it gives you hope. You're traveling less these days. I take it. Are you still hopeful? - Yes, no I am. I'm a hopeaholic probably but just hardwired that way. - Hope is a form of planning. If you have hope, you've are closed off possibilities like being pessimistic. So I don't mean that we should be insane about it beyond all probability. But I do think that hope is crucial, absolutely crucial. - That's nice to hear. It's encouraging for those of us who are glorious times. This is a question that really interests me because having spent a big part of my professional life at the intersection of kind of media and entrepreneurship and innovation, I'm really stunned frankly by the extent to which we are now at a point in our cultural life where we have this mindless love affair with scale. And you can see it of course in a lot of venture back companies that we've thrown really billions of dollars out without necessarily the hope of ever getting any money back. But one of the things I was really struck by thinking about your life and the extraordinary impact you've had is that as you said earlier, you've never had a job. So here we are. We live in a world where frankly, I think there's a common assumption that underlies our obsession with scale which is if you wanna get anything done, you have to be big. You have to have access to unlimited resources. And here you are, never having had a job. And it seems as if you've been able to do what you've done through building relationships, trusting relationships and groups of relationships that have formed personal networks around shared values. You talked about that a little bit. - Well, I think that what you've described is any movement, social justice movement, whether it was against Vietnam or for civil rights or for gay and lesbian and transgender rights. It's the contagion of common sense ideas that are in the end really about mutual respect and need to communicate with each other and meeting each other's living rooms as well as online in order to perpetuate that. But it's the basis of a lot of our actions. I mean, if you get an email or a factoid and you look at the source and consider the person or group that this came from and that dictates or influences at least its credibility and what your action will be, it's always going on. - So we have a tradition here at Print is Dead of asking what we call the billion dollar question. So I'm going to put this to you. Coming on the heels of a question about scale. - No stress here, just a billion dollar question. - Just a billion dollar question exactly. So Lorraine Powell Jobs wants to give glorious Steinem a blank check with one caveat. Well, too, you got to spend a lot of money because otherwise it's not a substantial enough tax deduction to even make it worthwhile to have a conversation. But the other is she requires that you spend the money on creating a 21st century equivalent of Ms. could be a magazine, could be a site, can be an association. What would you do with it? What would you do with this billion dollar blank check? - Ah, very tempting. Well, I'm not enough of a technology person to say this properly, but I think I would create a satellite in the sky that allows people in Central Africa and parts of Asia and parts of this country to communicate, at least the way we are now, who now can't afford to. Because I remember going to Google, and you call us, and they had a giant map on the wall with lines going from Google to individual places on the globe. And there were parts of the globe that were completely dark. - Yeah. - And that's dangerous, I think, that's divisive and dangerous. So I would do my best via satellite in the sky or whatever other available technology to democratize the communication that we already have. For more information on Gloria Steinem, visit GloriaStinem.com. Get a copy of 50 years of Mizz, the best of the Path Finding Magazine that ignited a revolution wherever books are sold. If you'd like to connect more deeply with our guests, be sure to visit our website where we have complete transcripts of all our interviews, along with portfolios, archival photos, links, and other great information. Visit longliveprint.co/interviews for more. In other news, we've got swag. Yep, you can get print is dead merch on our site at longliveprint.co/shop. All purchases go directly to supporting the podcast. Check back often, we're adding new stuff all the time. 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