Journalist Jennifer Brandel: Strengthening the Connective Tissue Between Us
Season 1 Episode 9
The future is being built in the spaces most of us never learned to see.
In this episode, Lisa talks with journalist and entrepreneur Jennifer Brandel. Jennifer is the co-founder of Zebras Unite, and creator of the Interstitium, a theory of the hidden connective work that keeps communities, movements, and systems alive. Jenn has spent her career naming the “in-between” roles that make change possible and giving shape to the people who do them.
They explore:
The Interstitium Jenn’s new framework for the unseen connective tissue of society
Hexagon people those who bridge local life and global ideas
Sacred hospitality how to create spaces where real transformation can happen
Why connection is the real antidote to loneliness, polarization, and overwhelm
Zebras Unite a model for building companies that are profitable and regenerative
Jenn shares stories from journalism, civic innovation, and community building, showing how naming and noticing these patterns helps people feel less alone.
This conversation is an invitation to reconnect with each other, design healthier ways of working together, and imagine futures built on reciprocity, meaning, and resilience.
Links from the show:
🎧 Listen now:
▶️ Watch now:
📖 Read now:
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
Today, I’m joined by the incredible Jennifer Brandel, who sees connection everywhere she goes. Jenn is a journalist, entrepreneur, and community builder who has spent her career creating new ways for people to participate in civic life. She’s the co-founder of Hearken, Zebras Unite, and most recently, The Interstitium—a project inspired by the connective tissue in our own bodies that reimagines how we might organize and collaborate as a society. I’m so grateful to Jenn for joining me in this expansive conversation. Let’s jump in.
Lisa: I’m going to start off the podcast with a little confession. I know your work has been described in lots of different ways. I think of you a little bit like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, but instead of seeing dead people everywhere, I think you see connectivity everywhere.
Jennifer Brandel: Oh, nice.
Lisa: The way that you show up to bring that to life is so extraordinary. All this to say, I am so delighted you’re here. Thank you. Thank you.
Jennifer: [chuckles] Wow. I hope that if I shave my head, I have as nice of a skull as Bruce Willis. He’s really got a good dome. Thank you for that comparison. I’ll have to rewatch that one.
Lisa: In all the best ways, in all the best ways. I think what you do is give form to things that we are feeling. That’s really what I want to talk about today, some of the different initiatives, but also your approach, because I think it’s so powerful. I want to start with the more recent initiative that you’ve been working on called The Interstitium because it literally says giving voice to the unseen and in between, the language, ideas, and actions towards a more connective future. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit, maybe let’s start there, about The Interstitium and what that’s all about.
Jennifer: Oh my gosh. I’m going to geek out. The Interstitium is a word that describes a “newly discovered organ system” in the human body. You think after being cut open for how many centuries by surgeons and researchers and doctors, we would know exactly what is inside of our bodies. It turns out, due to the way that scientists really study cells and tissue, they would do it in such a way where they would mummify tissue samples and collapse them down. They thought that they were solid, essentially.
They didn’t realize that there was this fluid-filled network made of collagen tissue. Some people who’ve done fascia work before on their bodies, whether that’s rolfing or whatnot, have heard of fascia, and they know that there’s this spongy collagen tissue under the skin and that’s wrapping around every organ, bone, nerve, artery, et cetera. Western scientists got a new microscope eight or nine years ago. When they were looking through it during a live session, going and doing an endoscope thing, putting a microscope either up or in the body, they saw these things that they couldn’t describe.
They were like, “Why are there holes here? We thought it was a solid mass.” What that did is it inspired a lot of questions of like, “What are we seeing? How does it work? What does this mean?” I was lucky enough to talk to some of the scientists and the teams and the doctors who “discovered” this fluid-filled unified network throughout the entire body. Really, to me, it was such an unlock conceptually because what it does is it connects the entire body to itself.
The way that our world has worked for so long, it’s been all about mastery and separation and studying things and categorizing them just to feel like we control the chaos that is the human condition, and trying to grasp what is reality. To me, this idea of the interstitium was like, “Oh, I have been noticing these in-between things in society as well, and I haven’t had language for it. I’ve been also working alongside other people who have been this connective tissue who don’t really belong in “organizations.”
Our language follows the framework of the world being separate and categorizable. Sorry, this is a long explanation, but interstitionaries, as we’ve dubbed them, are the people who are playing the same function in society as the interstitium is playing within our actual body; bringing information, bringing flow, helping to lubricate ideas and interactions from one place to another, and trying to optimize for the health of everything and not being stuck in one spot. That’s a long explanation, but [chuckles] that’s why it’s called that.
Lisa: It is perfect. When I first read about it, I thought, “Oh my gosh, she sees me. That’s what I do.” For a long time, I’ve thought about the fact that we are in these roles that somebody created. Somebody made up these careers.
Jennifer: Totally.
Lisa: That’s not how the world works. We are dynamic, fluid organisms that are connected with each other. It’s incredible when you allow yourself to think about it in a much broader network. It’s uncomfortable because we’re not taught to think of it that way. This gift of, “Hey, I’m going to invite you to think about how you move in the world differently. I’m not going to even just do it by making up a word, I’m going to connect it to a concept that already exists in nature.”
In doing so, you learn more about your body. Oh my gosh, wonder, awe, discovery-
Jennifer: Yes, it is wild.
Lisa: -and it invites you to think broader about what you do outside of the systems and boundaries. I know this is just your latest initiative, but I think that really represents how I’ve seen you move in the world. This idea of noticing, questioning, trying, building. We, of course, might call that a design process, but that’s another geeky rat hole we could go down. Tell me more about how this is playing out. You started working on this idea, but now you’re bringing it into the world. What’s happening?
Jennifer: It was one of those things where I was struggling for language to describe these people that I saw working in the world in these different ways. I am one of them. For a long time, I’ve been trapped within a company that I’ve created myself and not able to work as interstitionarily as I would like to, where you’re connecting those dots. I was doing it in the margins where I could, versus it being my whole shtick, which is what I really thrive in doing, is seeing the patterns play out, connecting people to one another, connecting ideas, connecting industries.
What could we learn from X, Y, Z? Trying to deseparate, connect, reconnect, and remember the ways that all of these things actually are saying similar, if not the same things, and how we can work together across silos. I did a story for Radiolab, which is a great science podcast about the world and how things work, looking at the science of the interstitium, of what happened, how was it discovered, what are its implications for cancer research, and all sorts of things, which is in and of itself, immense and wild and wonderful and continues to unfold.
It really is helping to bridge Eastern and Western medicine because Eastern medicine has long inferred the interstitium and been working with it, like acupuncture, Reiki, some of these practices that work on meridians and work on flow more than object. There’s that science part, but then what I was really interested in is what are the sociological mental models that this can help break? If we have been taught you go into school, you go to these different disciplines, and you’ve got math class, and you have English, and then you have science, and then you have to choose a career in some sector or industry, and that always felt so wrong to me.
It just felt like not only limiting, because I wanted to do a little bit of everything, but also just categorically not how the world works. This was, to me, a way of trying to break that thinking model and provide just a higher-altitude metaphor that we could work from. Me and a couple of friends who’ve just been, we are interstitionaries, we do this work, we feel it in our bones, literally, and it is wrapped around our bones, literally.
We have been trying to just figure out, off the side of our desks, in addition to all the paid projects and companies and work we’re doing, is how do we start to give language and frameworks to this so that the people who do this work are seen, first and foremost, they’re valued. They’re not only valued as like, “Oh, I respect that you do something that is hard to talk about and categorize,” but then also valued, like remunerated for the work that they do because it is so important.
Being an interstitionary isn’t just someone connecting sectors and flying around the world doing all these fun things, but it’s like the parent and the family, often the women, who are connecting all the other relatives, getting them together for dinners. It’s the block captain. It’s the person who knows what’s happening and connecting everybody that is an interstitionary. I think that role is like… it’s unpaid labor. It’s hugely important labor. It’s not recognized. There aren’t job descriptions necessarily for it all the time.
I think it’s really like we depend to solve some of these wicked problems that we’re in the midst of right now, polycrisis, et cetera. It’s not going to come from any one discipline or any one person. There’s a layer of funded, seen, networked, and connected.
Lisa: It’s so powerful, and I just personally resonate on so many levels. I have been doing a lot of civic work. It’s one of the ways that we got connected. The way I would talk about it is I’ve been doing it as my moonlighting project. Doing it after hours, between the hours, when I would wake up in the morning. It was exhausting, yes, but it was also incredibly fueling and energizing. Even though I didn’t quite have a language for it, “Is this an initiative? Is it a movement?” I knew we were putting value in the world. I knew we were putting points on the board.
Couldn’t necessarily measure it in the way that people like to measure it, but it was invaluable. I knew that I was uniquely able to do it because I understood the different worlds. I knew when to ask questions and when to ship and when to connect. Your point about this being unpaid labor, about not knowing how to talk about it, is just so powerful for the people that show up and saying, “Look, I know that the ‘we,’” which is in part why this podcast is called How We Future, “the ‘we’ need to be doing some work together in some way that is maybe outside of some of the traditional norms of how it gets done.”
This invitation to, first of all, understand what the pull is, because it is, I think, a very connected, resilient, abundant way of looking at it, a very healthy way of looking at it. We need a way to think about it. We also need some new ways to honor it and to value it. I just think it is incredibly powerful.
Jennifer: Oh, well, I’m thrilled to hear that. Honestly, it fuels me and my collaborators, Christine Lai and Ariel Brooks, to find people who resonate with it deeply. What we’re trying to do right now is connect them with one another so, one, they don’t feel alone. Two, they can start to vibe off of each other, make their own connections. Then three, we can start to learn what are the different flavors and shapes and ways that people show up in this way, so we can build out more of a vocabulary and frameworks for how people do this work, how they get paid for it, how they don’t get paid for it, and shining a light on not yet another sector, but more like a way of being that needs, I think, some cash in this moment, [laughs] to put it bluntly.
Lisa: Yes, some support in all the ways. I’ll just share one more personal layer, and I’ll be curious to get your thoughts on it. For a good chunk of my career, the way that it has felt comfortable for me to show up has been in a space of learning, connection, and even generosity. As I got fortunate enough to be on stages, I would often bring in other people’s work or showcase somebody else that wasn’t me or just to try to connect dots to uplift.
Over the years, not all the time, but I definitely got feedback that said, “Lisa, why are you giving away your power? You don’t need to do that.” I just kept thinking, “I just don’t see the world that way.” Maybe a difference between a zero-sum world and the infinite game, positive possibilities world. It was so interesting how often I heard that, and even connecting. Of course, you were saying often it’s the women doing the work. I was like, “This is not a vulnerability. This is a source of abundance.”
Again, maybe that’s just another reason why I’m like, “Yes.” A, I’m not alone, which is exactly why you were doing it. B, what if we socialized that this is actually not only a better way to show up for society because communities get strengthened, but a better way to show up for your own personal health in a moment where, yes, we have polycrisis, but we also have loneliness at such an extreme level. Neither of those are good things.
Jennifer: No, absolutely. I think so much of this just points to understanding of reality, which is that everything is relational. Everything is relational. You cannot separate things and have them make sense up into a certain point. Even our bodies, they only look like our bodies at a certain scale. When you look at them in other scales, we’re just a collection of cells vibrating. Being stuck in this one lens that we’ve been stuck in of separating everything, I think, is what’s gotten us into a lot of trouble.
It has been the source of immense innovation in many different ways, so no shade to the fact that there has been a lot that we’ve learned from this view of dissecting everything and separating it and trying to understand and control for it. That’s just not, at the end of the day, how ecosystems, reality, fields, interconnected worlds work. COVID was a perfect example of our interconnectedness at play. I think the folks who are trying to cling to control or power or containing the world in some way that they can master, I think it’s just not going to work anymore.
How do we start to organize and find ways of being together in a healthier way for the current context, which is complex, fraught, [chuckles] and ever-evolving?
Lisa: Ever-evolving, and not going to get simple on its own. It’s we who have to adapt and evolve. The way that I’ve been thinking about it is—because I’ve been doing so much work with student athletes in the civic realm and working with coaches—trying to get them to see that, by having a different model of connecting with each other, we’re playing optimistic offense.
Jennifer: Ooh, I like that.
Lisa: That is a better stance than playing defense or being in reaction mode all the time, which was, again, another motivation for putting these conversations out in the world was to help more people learn more ways to play optimistic offense.
Jennifer: Yes. I think a lot about the Two Loops theory from the Berkana Institute that Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze came up with, where you have two loops going at any given time in any living system. In an organization, a group, a connection, a university, a town, whatever, those are all living systems too. They’re comprised of living things. There’s always the loop that is not working anymore, the dominant loop that, when the context shifts, it just starts to break. We see that happening all around us in our institutions and many spaces.
Then there’s the emergent loop, which is where you’re trying to figure out what works now for the new context. To me, I think of that as playing offense rather than playing defense and trying to stop the world from crumbling as quickly as it is, which we need people to do that. That is a good thing because people will be harmed if things break too quickly before the new way of doing things is stabilized. That’s not where I want to play. I want to play on offense. I want to be on that optimistic offense like you described. Thanks for giving me that language.
Lisa: Oh, I’m so glad. I’ve seen you talk about that loop as it being emergent and networked and connected, which requires, of course, a comfort with ambiguity, a comfort with, “I can’t quite give you the answer. I can invite you to join, and I hope you will. I could try to create safe conditions where you can be a part of it.” I want to build on that. You also recently wrote about hexagon people. Tell me about hexagon people.
Jennifer: Oh, yes. That’s a fun one. That was just like the muse struck, and I was like, “Let me just vomit out this idea and see if it resonates, [laughs] and it has, which is great. Hexagon people are a type of interstitionary that I’ve started to notice, and part of it has been through conversation with others and pattern matching, and being like, “What are you noticing?” This was kind of birthed out of a conversation I had with a few different folks, but one of which is John Paul Lederach, who’s an amazing international legendary peace builder.
We were talking just about the divides in the country right now and how people are conceptualizing them, and so much of it is urban versus rural or college-educated versus not. He was like, I wonder if the real dividing line of just experience right now is whether people are locally rooted and grounded, as in they need to make sense of the world and depend on things in their geographic proximity, and those who are more floaters or ephemeral, who are living in the world of remote digital life, and if they left where they’re living, no one would probably notice. The fabric of where they’re living is neither enhanced nor whatever by their presence.
I was thinking about some of the folks I know who are living these very dynamic lives at both levels, who are contributing a ton locally to where they live and helping to weave that civic interstitium on the ground, but also are working in the ether as well, in shaping industries or conversations about broader things that are not geographically grounded. Thinking about the triangulation that’s happening in all those places, when you start to triangulate enough and put enough triangles together, you get a hexagon as a shape, and a hexagon is the strongest shape in nature, or that and the triangle are the strongest shape.
We’re just thinking about what’s a name for these kind of people who are both able to do this weaving on a grounded level and also in the cloud, so to speak, or in the broader global conversation. To me, it’s an amazing place to be able to play because you can see patterns playing out at different levels and altitudes.
Then, if you’re working with other people who are doing that too, there’s a ton you can understand for what will work for different contexts and starting to build out whether that’s a vocabulary or playbook or formulas or recipes or whatever for what works in these times and these moments, and just starting to get better at it because we’re going to live and die by how well we communicate and figure out how to solve problems together right now.
If we’re separating ourselves continually and not connecting with others locally, we stand far less of a good chance of making it through. Whether there’s a climate collapse, catastrophe, school shooting, any manner of things that are already happening and coming to places where they haven’t been yet.
Lisa: I love that this came from observing and pattern matching and realizing that we don’t have to be untethered. It is, again, another response. Of course, working in design for such a long time, we’ve talked a lot about the T-shaped person that has broad and depth, or then the pie-shaped person, which has another layer. What I love about the hexagon is that they can build with each other, and that together they make a beehive formation, or that they can collect, that they’re not individual.
By identifying that now, ahead of more troubling things to come, whether it’s a climate, more climate, we’re not going to have less climate disasters. By identifying that there is an approach that can ground us, that can stabilize us, that can help us feel tethered and connected while also still exploring. I often say better be prepared for the future than be blindsided by the present. Putting this out there, I just think is so powerful for people who feel like, “I don’t know where to go. I feel hopeless right now.”
Jennifer: I completely agree that if these hexagon people are working collectively or at least in community together, they can tessellate like a tile or that honeycomb. Actually, the interstitium itself, the collagen fibers, are hexagon-shaped, and they’re fractal. At every level of the body, they are these hexagon-shaped threads going through from micro to macro. That’s how I see it societally as well.
I’m also just trying, in the work that I do, not to say I know what the hell I’m talking about, because I don’t [laughs]. Of trying to design biomimetically, how do we understand how nature has figured it out over millions and millions of years? How do we learn from her rather than trying to develop our own playbooks that are divorced from the broader context that we’re living in?
Honestly, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the garden at the end of my street that’s free and looking at the plants, and trying to be like, “Oh, how do you work with others? What’s your defense mechanisms? How do you propagate?” Just being like, all the information is out there if you can observe it. Then if you can apply it to the way that humans organize, hopefully, you shorten the learning curve because you’re building on patterns that have worked for living things.
Lisa: Ever the futurist, Jenn. I can’t help but think we’re going to have a class called How to Be a Hexagon Person. In fact, maybe we should. I think we should prototype that this year during your time at Stanford. I’m in. I’m in. I want to talk about your time at Stanford. First, before, one more point on this, because for folks listening, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, this makes so much sense to me. I want to lean in. I don’t exactly know where to begin.”
I want to pick up on a concept that, really, I think, bridges the abstract to concrete, which is this notion of sacred hospitality and this idea that we’re all capable of it, which I think could be some of the grounding. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jennifer: Yes. I give full credit to my work wife, Mara Zepeda, who we’ve created a lot of things together. As we joke, we’ve had a lot of Google Docs over the years [chuckles]. If we print it out, the docs we’ve created, it would fill a truck.
She is one who’s brought me back to this remembering of the fact that when you bring people together, if you don’t just think about it of cerebrally, “Hey, these people are going to be in the same room, what are we going to talk about or what are we going to do?” But really what’s the experience like, and how do you honor people in their presence and the gift of their time and attention, which right now is the most precious resource that you can ask from anyone given the demands and distractions?
Sacred hospitality is really recognizing that when you are gathered, you have an obligation and an opportunity to create a meaningful experience for people and to think about it and to consider, to whatever extent you can, but the lighting, the mood, the music, what are people’s needs? How are they sitting? How might we facilitate people connecting and feeling safe and able to be vulnerable with one another so that they can come away changed from however they came in, versus just coming in, extracting some information or networking or whatever, and then leaving?
How are you creating the conditions for transformation? Food, spending time meaningfully with people, that is what happens. That’s how we learn. There’s this great word called Symmathesy from Nora Bateson, who has this amazing warm data lab and talks about the relational data, which is really hard to quantify, but is how everything works. That’s about just learning together in relationships. That’s really how most people change.
You can read a book and be like, “Oh, that’s great,” but if you’re not practicing it with people and you’re not experiencing it on a deeper level, then it just stays at the level of abstraction. To me, sacred hospitality is something I’m-- I’ve always been someone who’s naturally liked to host and do things, but Mara and others are just helping to push it to whole new levels of organizing bigger and more ambitious things that allow people to feel really moved in a soulful way and convey really important information, but not in a Sheridan Ballroom or a conference center; different approach.
Lisa: I resonate with that so much. It’s really the foundation for the book that I wrote over 10 years ago about how we can design strategic conversations to accelerate change and the idea that these conversations can be designed if you pay attention to the environment, how you welcome people in, who is in the room, and to get people into a discovering mode and a learning mode, as opposed to, again, a defending mode or a posturing mode.
So powerful, particularly when we are together trying to come up with new ideas towards complex adaptive challenges that require all of our thinking to be in the room and even taking a step or a cue from sacred hospitality. Again, Jenn, thanks for giving me language. It’s how, particularly after COVID, I’ve tried to structure our classroom or my classroom to welcome students in, back from being behind the screen, back from being protected against social media, to really try to help them feel seen and heard by an adult that may not necessarily have had a long connection with them, to remind them that people can care. It’s been transformational for them.
Jennifer: Wow. Oh my gosh. I’m so curious to know what have been the design changes you’ve made to the classroom. Is it the seating, the welcoming, how you start class? What have you done?
Lisa: Yes, all of those things. Let’s start in a circle. Let’s do something that checks in and gets you present, some sort of thing that’s connected to what we’re going to talk about, but it’s still joyful. Maybe it’s the music. I always choose thematic music, so when they come in, there’s something happening. At one point, this was closer to the return from the pandemic, I really noticed that, even though they were physically present, they weren’t present. If they were present, only part of them was present.
I started to create this moment in class where I talked about sharing some good news. “Who has some good news to share? We want to hear it. We want to hear what’s going on.” Even I knew that one of my students had just won an NCAA championship and was not sharing it. I was like, “For example, does anyone--”
Jennifer: Did anyone win an NCAA [chuckles] championship recently?
Lisa: My colleague, [unintelligible 00:26:25], had this great quote. He said, “Our students, it feels like they’re having a crisis of enthusiasm. They are not comfortable showing joy because there’s been so much trauma.” I thought, “Oh my gosh, how do we model that it’s okay to feel hard things and still be joyful? That you’re not going to get judged, you’re not going to be deemed a wrong person?”
Just scaffolding that, I was surprised about how much more scaffolding was needed. Another thing I did, I said, “Listen, you have to meet me for office hours. They’re no longer optional. You have to come. 15 minutes. Just have an adult conversation.” All of those things, I think, are what I call micro moments of connection. I like this idea of sacred hospitality.
Jennifer: I love what you’ve done there. I think the intentionality of what are we doing in the space, how do we maximize the meaning and the time we’re having together is something that a lot of people who have the gift of other people’s attention do not do. I’m very glad you’re doing it. I actually just got off the phone earlier today, had one of those random serendipitous calls with a Romanian architect, Oana Stănescu, who’s doing this incredible work and thinking about how do you design physical architectural spaces for different kinds of interactions.
I think a lot about, too, what is the space and what is the script that comes with a space when you walk into the room? If all the chairs are facing one direction, what do you do? Mara, my work wife, and I did a conference in Romania recently about the power of connection. That was the theme of it. The whole conference was wonderful, but it was speakers on stage speaking to the audience. We’re like, “Wait a second. We need the audience to speak to one another, and we need to all connect and do things.” We really pushed the envelope of what was allowed by the script in that space.
We weren’t actually allowed to physically move the chairs because they’re all connected and union rules and whatnot. We ended up ending with a dance party with the entire room and turning the lights out, and having people roll their water bottles across the floor, and all sorts of stuff, where they were like, “Whoa, you’re pushing it there. At the end of the day, everyone was able to have this cathartic moment of connection because we changed the script of what the space was telling you was possible.
Lisa: Absolutely. So much of it is finding that sweet spot. Can we stretch you just a bit? Not break you, just stretch you. Remind yourself of your humanity and make it okay. Create the conditions. That’s so much of what our book was about. It was about inviting the humanity into the room and not to go to, as you said, the typical place where you’re like, “Oh, it’s an important conversation. Let’s go to the boardroom with fancy chairs and a fancy table.” I was like, “What happens?” Status alert, threat alert, all the things that prevent you from being a generous and generative thinker.
I love that you’re doing that. That’s amazing. I want to talk about, Jenn—we’re catching you, we’re so lucky to have this opportunity before you start another chapter where you will be coming to Stanford as a JSK fellow—tell us about what you are excited to explore during your time at Stanford.
Jennifer: Oh, wow. Where to begin? I’ve been here for three weeks, and I feel like I’ve been dropped into another universe already [chuckles]. Just coming to grips with the different environment that is here, even though I haven’t even been to any classes yet, but just between the campus and the neighborhood that I’m in and the space, it’s just like, “Wow, okay, adjusting all the levels here for what it means to have this incredible resource here of this university.”
There’s a few things that I’m really excited about. There’s, on the personal level, I’ve had a hell of a last couple of years [chuckles]. Family-wise, I have a toddler who was diagnosed with cancer at her third birthday. She’s doing great right now, and thankfully, we have the amazing children’s hospital right here to go to. Then another child just came into my life through a friend, someone we both know, who passed away from ovarian cancer, so now there’s two children.
I’m wrapping up a tour of my company for 10 years and feeling like, “All right, it’s time to start a new chapter.” I’m in between a lot of things. Some of this time is really just reconnecting and being like, “What the hell just happened? Where can I be most useful going forward once I’ve reintegrated myself from a lot of these really intense experiences?” Some of the things I’m really excited about are-- The project I applied for the fellowship for was this idea of how might you create an unkillable newsroom because newsrooms are dying every day in the US from various afflictions, whether it’s political overreach or it’s defunding, economic models, all sorts of manner of reasons.
Is there a way we might create what a good local news network in its best days could do without having a lot of those pitfalls of the things that are taking down newsrooms right now? Maybe the answer is, it’s not a newsroom. You have to make an unkillable connective tissue network that is resilient and whatnot. That’s one thing I’m going to be looking at, but I also just want to take all the classes that stir my heart. Someone told me about the history of handwriting or something as a class. I’m like, “I want to take that.” [chuckles]
Lisa: Amazing.
Jennifer: Just really, I feel like a kid in a candy shop getting to have access to these classes and professors and people and folks who are focused right now on learning and integrating.
Lisa: We are so grateful to have you on campus, and no doubt we will invite you to spend a lot of time at the d.school and connect you and build our own interstitium there. It feels like you’re modeling again this idea of foundation in values and what you care about, and building on your very long career in journalism of some kind. Hearken was, in fact, the company that you started over 10 years ago, was how we first met. You were a fellow, I think, in the New Media Venture Fund.
Again, from the very beginning, this idea of making journalism more resilient, more connected, more local, more fluid between those that are delivering it, those that are gathering, who has the power to share stories. Again, breaking systems that have been entrenched on behalf of the better is how I think about it. I love that you still hold on to that clarity of vision. We need news in our civic life to be healthy, to be democratic, to be connected. The models are challenging that right now. How might we give birth to a new one?
Jennifer: Absolutely. Check with me in a year; I may have gotten nowhere on that, given the current conditions. I think there’s so much, to your point before, of students and the pandemic, and this moment of it not being cool to be hopeful with all that’s going on in the world. I feel like, gosh, it’s a responsibility to not lose hope in this moment. Not to say that there aren’t moments where I’m reading the news and going, “Oh, shit, I want to go back to bed,” or how are we going to get through this?
It always comes back to the relational. If you find other people who are jazzed about a similar question or animated by something that they’re excited about, that is how all change is made. A few people coming together, one or two, and working with one another. No one wants to hang out with a Debbie Downer, so you’ve got to [chuckles] up your energy to make some of that change if you’re in a spot in a season of life where you feel like you want to contribute.
Lisa: To do it in a way that is positive and honest, which is so much of what we’re trying to do. What I’m trying to do in these conversations is to put models out there. Not perfect, not utopia, but protopia, better than today, and also not reactive to the place where you don’t recognize yourself. I think a lot of people don’t recognize themselves because they’re feeling so distraught or overwhelmed. The question of, you know what, what is a step forward that I can take, maybe towards something bigger, but even towards making my day better and a new model?
Also, there’s just one more of the many things that you’ve brought to the world that I’m excited to talk about because, again, I read it and I was like, “This is so genius,” many years ago, where you and a few others gave birth to this idea of zebras.
Jennifer: Oh, yes.
Lisa: Zebras Unite, and that as a model of working in the world, a model of a company, of an organization that was as sustainable in a business sense, but also didn’t have that exploitative model. It was an alternative to the unicorns that were starting to pop up, these billion-dollar valuations that often didn’t have that same kind of humanity that we wanted to see. Again, I remember reading about the idea, the model of what a unicorn could be, and thinking, “Yes, this is not a reactionary fight against the machine, total departure.”
It was, again, to me, a more organic invitation to say, “How do we not get stuck in the binary of either or, and instead invite you to become part of something that’s possible?” I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about Zebras Unite, the genesis behind it, and just here you are returning to Silicon Valley where the unicorn was born.
Jennifer: Oh my gosh. Yes, that’s one of the things that I’m just wrapping my head around now, is really being in the belly of the beast at this moment of empire collapse, explosion, both. I don’t know. They’re happening simultaneously. Reinvention. Yes, Zebras Unite came out of a shared frustration that I had, along with other founders that I was talking to, people who came out of a really mission-centric place, whether or not they worked for nonprofits or not. They were just motivated by the work of trying to figure out how do you do right by more people in a way with integrity.
I remember going to this conference in San Francisco called SOCAP, which is about social capital, and the idea being that people would put in big investment dollars into companies that had a social good outcome. I was there trying to pitch Hearken, being like, “Hey, better, more representative journalism that’s original and useful and not just about conflict and blah, blah, blah.” I was like, “I can’t find any money here. This is not for me.”
Then I’m like, “Where do I go because I’m not a VC fundable proposition?” Not to say that we couldn’t be successful. We have been successful. We’ve been around for 10 years. We’ve been profitable for many of them. Trying to find aligned capital felt really hard. I went through an accelerator program in San Francisco about 10 years ago. The whole thing was designed to 10X return for people I didn’t know who had enough money to put money into a company to begin with.
I’m like, “Wait, if I’m going for this goal, but you are the ones I actually have to be responsible to at the end of the day, the people who have enough money to put money in and potentially lose it, then we’re already starting off on the wrong foot here because I don’t care about making you more money.” [chuckles] Yes, do I want to give you a return? Do I want it to be a fair transaction? Sure, but that’s not my end goal.
My goal is not for myself to 10X my life and live in a mansion in a yacht. That’s not what’s going to bring me fulfillment. Long story short, Mara Zepeda—the name that keeps coming up—and I, we were both at SOCAP, and she had her company there as well. We just started riffing on how startups just really felt so masculinely designed, and same with the unicorn idea. We wrote a piece called Sex & Startups. It went viral, and we made a lot of sex jokes like startups like the male anatomy are designed for liquidity events. It’s terrible, I know, but it was cheeky, and it got a lot of people saying yes, yes, yes. This is in 2016.
We stated our dissatisfaction pretty clearly, but we didn’t state our vision. What change do we want? It took us about a year, but we had so many people respond to that article saying, “This makes no sense. This whole unicorn game is actually going to destroy democracy and society.” The zebras came up as not the antidote, but another pattern of black and white, for-profit, for-purpose, mutualistic.
Zebras actually, they survive in society by collaborating and cooperating. A herd of zebras is called a dazzle, and that’s how they work to evade predators is they work together. They’re not unicorns. Anyway, there’s a lot more written online. It still exists. We’ve inspired a lot of people to try and figure out zebra ways of being, of keeping their values, and being able to be a profitable for-profit company, or whatever kind they want. We’ve even influenced the capitalism of Japan. The past administration declared the zebra’s ethos their new capitalism, which is crazy. Who knows what comes out of just naming and framing things. That’s what we’re trying to do in the world.
Lisa: I think it’s so powerful. I love that a group of zebras is called a dazzle, and that you have DazzleCon. Again, we’ll link to all of this in the show notes so people can learn more and come back to it. Again, it’s very much what I’m trying to do in this podcast, in these conversations, in the work we’re doing, which is to put models out there that people want to pull towards, as opposed to just push against.
In futures, there’s this concept called the image of the future. The future comes from somewhere. The question is who imagined it. If we allow our imagination to be outsourced to these models that don’t align with our values, that’s when we really feel so disconnected and even hopeless, which is the soul-sucking. Here we are, I think, just trying to say, “No, there are models out there.” We’re not saying that you have to be unable to afford your life because you’re so passion-driven.
We’re saying, how can you imagine a model where it is profitable, it is a for-profit, it is designed for growth, but for sustainable growth, for generative growth, growth that supports the community that’s not at odds, where you don’t feel like you want to go back and, I don’t know, take a shower every day when you’re like, “Oh.” That really jazzes you and makes you the best version of yourself. I love that it’s out there as a model. I think one of my favorite parts of the whole line, when you were talking about it, it’s like, “Well, here’s one thing, zebras are real, unicorns are not,” that they actually exist in the world.
Grounded in this reality that they actually exist and how to extend that model. It’s really exciting. Jenn, thank you so much for coming to spend time with us on How We Future. There’s so much more to talk about. Yes, we’re going to have you back after this year to see what you’ve learned about the unkillable newsroom and yourself. I just want to really thank you personally for all that you’ve done. You are such a bright light.
This gift that you are giving all of us to, as you say, name it, put some concrete shapes around it, give us something to move towards, it’s so positive, it’s so productive, it’s so generous. I personally am so lucky, and I know everyone that listens to this will feel the same. Thank you so much for spending the time with us today.
Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me. I can’t wait to really understand exactly what’s all on offer in this very particular and amazing part of the world that is equally concerning and inspiring [chuckles].
Lisa: It’s not going to be dull, I’ll tell you that.
Lisa: I just loved this conversation with Jenn Brandel. I hope her ideas about the interstitium, that living network between us, invites you to notice the hidden connectors in your own world. Maybe it’s a colleague who quietly keeps projects moving, a neighbor who brings people together, or even you. Holding space for connection in ways you hadn’t yet named.
If this conversation sparks something for you, please take a moment to rate and review the show wherever you’re listening.
It really helps others find these stories. I’d love to hear what kind of interstitionary work you’re doing out in the world.
Until next time, I’m Lisa Kay Solomon. Here’s to building the connective tissue for a more hopeful, healthy future.