On not doing it alone (and doing it for more than yourself)

Sam Sanders just left your podcast Vibe Check after three years. I’m curious how you felt when Sam said he was leaving.

It was complicated for a few reasons. One, the show began as a threesome, so to break it up and not be the original three felt very much like I was living out Destiny’s Child’s history, which was my favorite pop girl group as a kid. There’s that first very human reaction of, “Oh God, my life’s about to change.” And that sucks because change is scary.

As a friend, I was not surprised at all. Sam is such a force within the podcasting space, and because we are very close, and we live in the same city and we’re together a lot, I began to notice that juggling the two shows and other ambitions he had creatively was a lot, and he was really close to burnout if he didn’t take a break. When we found out that all our shows were going [up to] twice a week, that just became the big sign flashing in the sky that something needed to change for us all to keep building these things. That’s when the decision became real.

It was a shock but not a shock. It became a real good test of our friendship, which still remains very strong and intact. We even did a show together after that live at The Ford, so it worked out.

Sam did something about the burnout before you could, but did you have any moments where you were like, “I should talk to him about this”?

Oh, yeah. We’re friends, and doing anything with your friends, you have good days, bad days, weird days, and really wonderful days. I could tell things were getting tough to manage for all of us.

When the new contract negotiations came up, he and I had really frank conversations—we all did—about, “Should you stay? Should you go? Is this an opportunity?” I looked to the universe for guidance, and weirdly enough, so much hit at once. All of our contracts were coming up at the same time. He had an opportunity to expand the show that’s under his actual name, which means a lot to him. Sam had a podcasting career before we had the show, and he’ll have one after our show.

As we were having that conversation, it was mostly about, “How can you keep having a good life creatively?” It became very obvious that Vibe Check maybe isn’t the thing for this chapter, but it could be for the next chapter.

As friends, you do sense things, and it does come up. It wasn’t a surprise once it happened, but in the moment, it’s like a breakup. You’re like, “Oh my God, you’re leaving me?” And then you take a second and think, “You haven’t been calling as much,” or, “This has been tough. We have been arguing more.” This had its own similarities of, like, “Things were a lot, and now, we’re going to double it. Let’s all come together and figure out a way through.” And we did.

On the note of doubling it, I’d love to hear how that decision came about.

I put it in motion, and not by accident, but more just looking at the show and thinking, “How do we keep things interesting and continue to build on the momentum?” A lot of our contemporaries were going twice a week.

It’s a business at the end of the day, and we’re with SiriusXM. I was like, “We could go double, and people would listen, and it would be good for business.” I planted the seed six months ago. I was like, “We could do another day and make it something interesting.”

It was talked about very briefly, but because I’m not a SiriusXM employee, I didn’t know there were real big meetings happening about this. I said it off the cuff and was kind of exploring on my end, and then it came to life, and they came back to us and said, “Do you want to double it? Do you want to try out a bunch of things over a few months and [have] some runway to be new versions of yourselves and bring on new people?”

It’s funny, as we’re in this new era, it’s still retrofitted to being a Sam Sanders-friendly era, and that’s why he will be able to jump in and out if he chooses to, if he has the time. But if you look at our shows, [Vibe Check] now comes out on the same days [as The Sam Sanders Show]. That was becoming apparent as we were like, “I had this idea, now it’s becoming real. And oh shit, production would require us to go head-to-head,” which is fine because our shows are good companions, but Sam would be the one that suffered the most in that equation, and we have to take care of each other.

How have you accommodated scaling it up to twice a week? I run a small publication and realized that people would pay more attention if I scaled it up, but that’s been a little exhausting.

It’s so exhausting, and it’s not just double the work. When I had the idea, I thought, “It’s just the same show twice. We’ll be able to replicate the exact same production over and over,” but that’s not how things actually play out. We’re not robots. You can’t just go into a calculator of your life and put “times two” and [have] things be equal in that multiplication. Having two shows actually brings with it a lot of complications.

Our wonderful producer Shantel [Holder], who does a lot of the heavy lifting on the show, was like, “Yes, let’s do two shows,” but she also has to do other shows. And then, she’s like, “These eight hour days I was working are now creeping into 10 or 11 [hours].” We’re also having to have calls earlier. I’m having to record at 7 a.m. and not 8 a.m. to accommodate production. When we go from theory to practice, it is way different, and it feels very different in the body.

What we’ve been doing really well within this new production space is, we’ve elevated people who’ve been with us. My producer Giulia Leo, she’s with us a lot more now. We have more folks getting paid real money to be working on a creative project, which is really exciting. And due to having all these resources and people feeling taken care of, we can say no in ways that make sense.

There was a day where I, to prep for the launch of all the new episodes, was doing a bunch of speaking engagements, and I was like, “Maybe I’ll do all these engagements, and we use it for the show.” As we got into meetings, it editorially didn’t fit, and we had to create new episodes, and I had to reckon with this new reality I created for myself: “Oh no, we have to make sure the show is still the show and not just quick-solves and checking boxes.” Within that, I had to be open and say, “I totally agree, we need to record something new. I can’t do it today. Can I do it tomorrow? Can I get just a little more sleep and wake up then?”

My no’s have become really instructive of how to get to yeses. That’s been a good test for my humanity. I’m not a superhero, I do get tired. I have a dog now, I have a partner, I have family I have to see. December is different than June. My ambitions and the things I’m called to do in different times of my life are fluctuating. Everything works in theory, but once it starts actually playing out in life, it will feel different, and I have to have space to let it be different and know where my limits sit.

Learning to say no is such an important thing as a creative person. Is that something you’ve always been good at, or have you had to learn it recently?

I have crashed out many times because I’ve said yes to everything. As the pandemic was rolling in, I was anchoring morning news over at BuzzFeed with AM To DM, a show on Twitter. I’d be on set at 5 or 6 in the morning every day. I was the editor-in-chief of The Advocate. By the time we wrapped the show at noon Eastern, my team in LA was just getting to the office at 9. I’d jump into an editorial meeting around 9 a.m. [and] be working till 10 o’clock at night. Throughout the day, I also hosted a podcast at Luminary, so we would be taping the podcast. I also was doing speaking engagements [and] working on other projects.

I wasn’t sleeping much, and I was working too much, and I said yes to everything because it was so exciting. I looked to people like Oprah or Gayle King or so many other media executives and leaders I’d seen who had it all, who were working a thousand jobs. I was like, “I can do this, I can do this.” But what they don’t tell you is that they don’t do that stuff alone, and I was doing it alone a lot. That’s where all my yeses led me to crashing out.

[It’s] been a really important thing for me creatively that I don’t live my life in a vacuum. Other people are impacted by these decisions, and my body is supremely impacted by it. Now, I’m much more gentle with myself, and I try to take a breath when an opportunity comes in, and I don’t say yes too fast. I give myself 24 hours, unless it’s something I’ve been really praying on for a long time—then, it’s a quick yes. But I try to be like, “Okay, that’s there, it’s a door. Just because it’s open doesn’t mean I have to walk through it.” That’s something I only learned with maturity.

When you’ve switched publications, what were the reasons for the change? Were they creative reasons? Were they financial reasons?

I can be honest and say they were never financial reasons. I always have this belief, knock on wood, that I will always figure out how to have resources to eat, live, breathe, [and] pay my rent. I try not to move through the world from a scarcity mentality of, “I will not have something to help me in the future.”

I really focus on abundance, even though Ezra Klein has really fucked that word for me lately. I was thinking about abundance way before him, and I would say abundance comes from Black feminist thought and thinkers. Same with self-care. When I made those decisions, it was always because I had a vision for my life and the work I wanted to do and the place in which I was doing that work couldn’t support it anymore.

Grindr, very publicly—I was in great tension with our new owners, a company called Kunlun out of China. It’s very well-documented that Trump investigated us under the Department of Treasury. We were the first company that he blocked any foreign investment from, and now, Grindr is American-owned, which is great. But I was there to that moment, [when] the Trump administration was literally in our offices dealing with things. It became untenable to run an LGBTQ+ magazine out of a company that was being pushed to a country in which I couldn’t do the work if it was there. And if we’d stayed in the U.S., we were facing such mounting pressure that the company and its board didn’t see it as economically viable.

When The Advocate called, it was a bridge for me to have a job and be able to do the work of an editor, but also to hire many staff that were working with me and bring them over. Many of them did join Pride Media after that. Every time I make a decision, I try to think of a collective “we” in it, not just, “What do I get out of this, but what [do] we?” Am I contributing something in the culture that I’m proud of, or can I hire folks that I love working with, that love working with me, and give them resources in healthcare or just an extra dollar so they’re not stressed? I try not to make it so ego-driven only.

Of course, I am in my ego at times, and being offered editor-in-chief of a magazine that I read as a young person and into my adulthood is exciting for the ego. But at that time, it was about continuing the work of trying to support queer media. When I left, it was because a pandemic had hit and things were shutting down, and we had to restructure all the creative businesses I was in to make them sustainable for someone, and that someone wasn’t me. I had to go at the moments I had to go.

I appreciate you saying “all the creative businesses I was in,” because as a non-fiction writer and journalist,sometimes, I feel like the work I’m doing isn’t creative. Creativity brings to mind music, painting, things like that. Is that a notion you’ve ever encountered or put upon yourself? How do you counter it?

I hear it all the time. I’m in this era of my life where I work a lot across film, television, theater—I work with incredible playwrights who have won a Pulitzer for their writing and see that their work is art, but they don’t see journalistic work all the time as art, or they see it as adversarial. Artists sometimes think journalists or critics are out to get them. I don’t share that belief. I think criticism is really important for the arts. I think feedback is incredibly important. If you create things in public, part of being in public is to have public weigh-in. We make things for people to react to, and you can’t control how they react. It has been helpful for my soul to see the work that I do as creative.

I was with Pam Grossman last night. She runs a podcast called The Witch Wave. She also is the author of the book Magic Maker. She thinks of magic as pulling from the realm of your imagination and bringing it into the physical. Anything that goes through that process is magic but is, in its most pure sense, creative. It helped me hearing those words from her last night, and in her work, to understand that my podcast is creative, my takes on news and media are creative, my ambition to survive the fallout of media collapsing is creative, and we as humans are just creative beings. Especially if we are, as many believe—and I believe this too—the universe experiencing itself over and over again. That’s why we’re all connected. The reason we’re experiencing ourselves is that we’re experiencing the creativity of that universe, and we are all the products of that.

I pushed back on this idea when I had to deal with a journalistic issue like why the Chicago Police are disappearing thousands of Black people into police stations and why those are called black sites. That was a creative practice that was also journalistic and criminally involved, because I had to do creative things to get to that answer as a journalist.

We have to expand our notions of what creative means. We have to expand our notions of what art-making is. People make fun of Rothko because they’re like, “I could do that.” Or Pollock, they’re like, “I could splatter.” Well, you didn’t when he did it. He did it, and he made it his thing, and he got better at it. I think we have to be more generous in our definitions of creativity and understand that we’re all engaged. Whether you work at a Burger King or you work at the Met, you are engaging in creativity on some level, period.