YouSaid · the spoken record

Aminatou Sow

lines on the record: 78
first: 2020-06-24
most recent: 2020-06-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, it is not a common thing at all as our therapist told us. She was very willing to work with us because she does this thing called emotionally focused therapy that's really about repairing bonds between people who love each other. So it's usually like parents and children or like couples, like romantic couples. But the model that we have for this Kara actually comes straight out of Silicon Valley. Like years ago, I had read an account of, I believe it was the founders of genius. Going to therapy together?”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just didn't have a model for it, but I think that my motivation and ultimately like Anne's motivation too was that could you really say I have done everything to help this relationship if we didn't try this one kooky thing? And it turns out it's actually not that kooky. And so we went a couple's therapy. It is very much if you've been to couples therapy, you know what it's like. It is frustrating and it is painful, but it is also very deeply rewarding. And no matter the outcome of the therapy, you actually find out a lot about yourself.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's true, it happens with friends too, but we were just at an impasse where we were in the cycle where for a year or more, we were both trying to come back to the friendship that we had in the beginning. And it was just not working. I was really frustrated with my efforts with Anne. She was very frustrated with her efforts with me. And we would still talk about it because we are, you know, at this point, we're co-workers also. And finally, it was actually a talk about work that led to this because we were having a lot of difficulties communicating with each other. And, you know, we finally just put it all on the table and it was like, hi, like I don't know how to talk to you and how do we go about doing this. And so therapy came up and it sounds really extravagant and wild. I know that. We did not tell a lot of people because it, you know, there is a stigma that comes with it. And also.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Anne and I were at a point in our friendship where, you know, and I think this is like very natural. We have never really had a fight. So there's not a like, you did this thing or this like catalyzing incident, which in some ways I feel like if there had been would have been so much easier to point to, it's like someone did this. How do we address it? But instead, it was just the natural, in marriage, they have a thing for this. We grew apart.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The illustration is two somber looking people on a couch. This lack of resources is flat out ridiculous when you consider that friendship can be one of life's most intimate relationship. Sure, some friends are just former classmates you struggle to keep up with or people you see for dinner twice a year. Maybe they're easy to forget, but we're talking about real friends, big friends, friends who know your worst shit and have stuck around anyway, friends who have seen you grow and change and heard you tell your stories over and over. If intimacy is what makes family and romantic relationship both so rewarding and complicated, why would it be any different for a big friendship? When two people entangle their emotional lives, it's bound to be difficult sometimes. Not all friendship look the same for the long haul, but one thing is guaranteed. Any big friendship will face existential threats.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's an expectation that friendship is the easy part of life, all support, no strife. If it gets hard, well, guess it was meant to be. While there are piles and piles of books to help you through a crisis in your marriage and offer you advice on repairing estranged family relationships, not much guidance exists for best friends who can sense things falling apart but don't know how to put them back together. Our Google searches for help, I think my friend is breaking up with me, brought more anxiety than answers. We found a lot of articles about how painful friend splits can be, and almost all of them carried an overwhelming sense of fatalism, as if it were the only natural outcome for a friendship on the rocks. But how do you go about saving a friendship? An extremely chipper wiki-how entry suggests. Fortunately, you can revive a dying friendship by reaching out to your friend and showing them you care. If you've had a fight with your friend, apologize for your role in the fight and talk things out. Additionally, help your friend grow by making new memories with your friend and learning to come.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I agree with you. I think that there are a lot of reasons for which you can kind of sideline your friendships. And I think that that's a thing that's actually really good about friendship is that it's the most flexible relationship you can have with someone. In a friendship, you can tell someone this year is going to be tough. I'm having kids and I'm going to have to take some time for my family. You can do that in friendship and create these kind of boundaries and have agreements that you cannot necessarily do in other forms of relationships. And so I find that with good communication, friends are usually very forgiving and flexible about all of the things that life can throw your way.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the idea is that you take it from the sideshow or the side dish to the center of your lives. Because I think most people actually, their friendships are often more important than they realize or they acknowledge, not realize. I think they realize it.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In writing the book, we were really trying to come up with a vocabulary for how important it is. And I'm glad that you mentioned the Ferrante books because we have read so many books about friendship between two people. And I love them. And they're mostly fiction. There was not an account of two people simultaneously telling you what it felt like to be in the same relationship. And so we don't do dueling chapters. It's written in a wee voice because we really needed to come to some really concrete truths together.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My head, I do. Listen, everyone stack ranks prince. Truth, but you know what I mean? There is just not, we don't have a good vocabulary for saying this person and my friend, they mean a lot to me and I want them there every step of the way. Like we don't have paperwork for that. There is no policy for that if you're romantic partner breaks up with you. There's a script for people feeling sorry about you and you could maybe even eke a couple days out of work for it. If you have like a breakup with your friend, your big friend, can you really go to your boss and be like, I'm heartbroken, I don't think I can come here today? You know, I was like, well, it's not a thing that we really take seriously. And so.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We call it big friendship because we think that best friend is a little infantilizing when you are our age. And also really what we were trying to do is create a vocabulary for those extremely significant relationships. All of us have a lot of friends. Kara, you have so many friends. You have so many tier one friends as you would call them.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you call it big friendship because the idea of that people do have several significant friendships in their lives and lots of literature is based on that. I mean, you could go on and on. One of the more popular book series is about two friends over the Ferrante books.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have never thought one person had everything for you. I think also as a default, my friends quickly became my chosen family in a really, really early era of my life for structural family reasons and all sorts of things. And so I think that I just understood really early on that you could build a life where your friends were really important people to you. Like my friends are my family. The people on my 401k recipient is my friend, but the person who has power of attorney over me when I'm sick is my friend. You know, like, and you know this, like chosen family is not a new concept. Queer people have been doing it forever and ever and ever and ever because in the absence of, you know, your biological family stepping up for you, you can create, you can recreate that bond with people that you are not, you know, that you don't share DNA with. And there is nothing wrong with that.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, then talk about this idea of a friendship in the middle of it, because friendships are sort of, I wouldn't say a dessert more like an appetizer or a side dish kind of thing to everyone has their significant relationship and then friendships. I have never thought that was true. I never thought one person had everything for you. I'm always been someone who doesn't believe that.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“a lot of comedy we do a lot of comedy not really but you know at its core it's really about like two women who like each other who like want to keep talking to each other”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, but don't you have friends like this, friends who you love very much, who live far away from you and you catch up with them? And so Anna and I did that, our catch up, we did it in a really regimented way because we're nerds. So we would always make an agenda for our catch-up calls. Like, I have a hundred things to talk to you about and we're not going to get through all of them if you don't put them in a Google Doc that we are methodically going to go down the list for. And that's what the show was at the beginning. I think six years in, it's changed a lot. We do a lot of interviews. We talk to a lot of people, but at its core.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am not particularly a person who is good at sharing my feelings or being emotional in that way, but I find a lot of reward in working through professional queries, for example. And so we had tried a couple things. And another friend of ours approached us about making a podcast. I had never made one before. I was seduced by the idea that I could spend more time with Anne and Gina Dalvac, who's our producer. If they had come to me and they'd said, Amina, do you want to make a really popular podcast and run a small business media company? I would have probably said no because that sounded like work. But instead, Gina said, I think this could be really fun. Do you want to try to figure out how to make audio? And that's how I got bamboozled into getting business married with these ladies.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love it, love it. I didn't know about that podcast two weeks ago and now I am fully caught up. It's amazing. Anyway, promo for another show. You know, Anna and I had like, we had been friends for a couple years when we started doing these very low-level collaborations together. Like we had a blog together. We, you know, like we would write things together. And I think we really recognize now that that was really us trying to figure out a way of exploring each other's ideas together. You know, like the thing that I always say about Anne is that I love her brain. I feel that way about all of my friends. Like I love your brain, Kara. Thank you. And when you are people who, your identity is a little bit wrapped up in work and you are also ideas people, a really easy way to communicate with each other is to try to make things together.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Call your girl member. It's a song by Robin that we really liked. If we had to rename the podcast something today, we would probably not be called that. But the podcast was really, well, because call your girlfriend is not specific to the show that we do. And I also think that it a lot of people might believe that we are two women in love, like listening to the show. Oh, yeah, two. In a romantic relationship as opposed to not, which...”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have Scott on the other one, but it's like carrying four people in that case. No, it's an interesting, I like working alone. I'm a staff. I'm trying to get to staff zero, but not friend zero. Talk about you. So you started this point. You were friends and then how did you decide to do something called call your girlfriend? Because that's something people say when you have problems. boy man problems or relationship problems or whatever it's a call your girlfriend”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is really important to remember that friendship as an institution is a site of politics and it is a site of activism and only speaking for myself I will say that like I have learned a lot about how to be a person in the world because of the people that are in my life and they are friends.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, over the course of our relationship, we have changed a lot. We've changed a lot, but we are still in each other's lives. And we have just been really exploring this question of what does life look like if you put friendship in really at the center of your life? What happens if friendship is a main course and not a dessert at the end of a life well-lived? It's not a question that is new. I think that the work that we were trying to do in writing this book together, which it's a memoir, there are like, there's still like interviews with experts and like some smart pop psychology about friendship, but the real meat of it is that it's a memoir about us. But in writing the book, what we realized is that there's actually nothing special or particular about our friendship. People since the beginning of time have been trying to really center these platonic bonds in an important way. And when I think about what's going on right now and the fraught moment that we were living in,”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I wrote this book, Big Friendship, with my best friend and longtime collaborator, Anne Friedman, who is amazing. We've had all sorts of collaborations and she is truly my dream person to work with. So that worked out really well for me. And the book is really born out of conversations that we have had for years. So we work together, we host a podcast together called Call Your Girlfriend where we talk about feminism and power and politics and pop culture and all of these things. But the real through line of our show is that the two of us are friends who live in two different cities and want to catch up with each other. And we've been friends for exactly a decade now, which in our estimation is the bare minimum that it takes to be in a big friendship with someone.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are really who we are accepting into our lives in the media world, as you and I are recording this, things are also moving really, really, really fast. Over the last couple of days, there have been some really intense allegations of racial misconduct. It's not even a phrase you can use, racial misconduct. Against a lot of people. And that is obviously on the heels of the national conversation that we're having about racial justice and what it really means to be a black person in America. And so I think that I am personally very exhausted. There is so much happening on a personal level, on a national level, on a global level. But I'm also really heartened because I do think that this is a moment where friendship is actually like intensely important.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It feels like that's the whole, you know, like that's the whole class and it's going to be a nightmare. So the moment right now, like where do you even start? I think the pandemic is obviously top of mind. We are living in a way that we have just never lived before, completely isolated from each other and forced to make really tough choices about who we are touching and who.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really funny, one of the kids in our house was studying for an AP exam, and I remember feeling very excited and happy. I will never be submitted to answering questions about the year 2020 because”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because as a tenth of a parent, the disruption is real. So you probably will hear all of my kids on this podcast at some point.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am socially distancing with my quarantine pod in Long Island, New York. For the first time in my life, I am surrounded by many children and it's 100% a challenge to my work life. So I salute all of the parents out there. I don't know how you do it.”
2020-06-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Aminatou Sow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT