Episode 170: This week's episode is a wide-ranging conversation with future PhD, Kaila Tova. We chat about brand and personal branding, entrepreneurship and the hyperbole and exaggerations being made about how easy it is to run your own business and to make money online. We also cover what it’s like to have an identity online that you realise you now no longer believe in.
After recovering from orthorexia, anorexia, and an exercise addiction, Kaila began a career in marketing while moonlighting as a body image coach for women recovering from disordered eating. She recently released a 15-episode
podcast documentary about marketing literacy, neoliberal feminism, and identity economics in the context of health and fitness entrepreneurship, called Your Body, Your Brand. You can listen to the podcast at http://bodybrandpod.com. This fall, she joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Communication Arts Department to pursue a PhD in Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture.
In her “spare” time, she is the award-winning burlesque dancer and drag artist Will X. Uly (also known as DeeDee Queen). She is the reigning Leading Man of the Hollywood Burlesque Festival, won the 2018 San Francisco Drag King Contest, and was named the 2018 Master of Tassels, Master of Amazement, and Bronze medalist at the California Burlypicks.
Connect with Kaila at kailatovaprins.com or on Twitter or Instagram at @bodybrandpod. (For drag and burlesque, find her on Instagram @performingwoman.)
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 170 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/170.
Welcome to Real Health Radio: Health advice that’s more than just about how you look. Here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining me for another episode of the podcast. There’s just one piece of housekeeping before I get started with this episode. On last week’s show, I announced that Seven Health is hiring. We’re looking for another nutrition practitioner to start working with us. There is a job spec on the site, which you can find at www.seven-health.com/jobs. And then there’s also the last episode, where I go into a lot more detail with what we’re looking for.
If you are a practitioner and you like this podcast and you think that we share similar ideas and interests in terms of the people you’re working with, with disordered eating and eating disorders and overcoming dieting, then please check out the job spec and get in contact.
If you’ve worked with a practitioner and you think they may be interested, then please forward over the job spec or forward over last week’s podcast to them. If you follow someone on Instagram or Facebook or listen to someone else’s podcast that you like their content and you think they could be interested, then DM them or email them and let them know. If you’re a member of a Facebook group and you think there may be someone or many people in there who’d be interested in hearing about this position, then please post a message and link, again, to either the podcast episode or to the job spec page.
Thank you in advance for whatever help you can offer. The job application is closing on Friday the 7th of November, so there’s still a bit over a week from when this episode goes out to the closing date. That’s it for the housekeeping.
00:02:20
On today’s show, it’s a guest interview. It’s a returning guest – although during her first episode, it was Kaila Prins, and now it’s Kaila Tova. After recovering from orthorexia, anorexia, and exercise addiction, Kaila began a career in marketing while moonlighting as a body image coach for women recovering from disordered eating.
She recently released a 15 episode podcast documentary about marketing literacy, neoliberal feminism, and identity economics in the context of health and fitness entrepreneurship called Your Body, Your Brand. You can listen to the podcast at https://bodybrandpod.com. This fall, she joined the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s Communication Arts department to pursue a PhD in Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture.
In her spare time, she is an award-winning burlesque dancer and drag artist. The name, Will X. Uly, also known as DeeDee Queen. She is the reigning Leading Man on the Hollywood Burlesque Festival. She won the 2008 San Francisco Drag King Contest and was named the 2018 Master of Tassels, Master of Amazement, and a bronze medalist at the California Burlypicks.
Kaila first appeared on the show back in May 2016, Episode 38, making it a bit over 3-½ years ago. I highly recommend checking out the first episode. It was rereleased somewhat recently, I think, as a rebroadcast episode. During this conversation, a lot of the focus is on the different themes that Kaila touches in her new podcast, “Your Brand, Your Body.” We look at branding and personal branding, especially in the health and fitness space.
We chat about the huge uptick in people, particularly women, quitting jobs and wanting to work in the health industry. We talk about entrepreneurship and a lot of the lies that are being told about how easy it is to run your own business and to make money online. I open up about my own journey with all of this, because I’ve been in this space running a business for over a decade. Building a successful business has been a real monumental challenge.
We also chat about Kaila returning to school to get her PhD and how this all ties in with what she wants to study, as well as what it’s like to have an identity online that you realize you no longer believe in, which has happened to Kaila on multiple occasions – first as a vegan, and then later as a proponent of paleo, both ideas and identities that she publicly walked away from.
This is probably one of the longest conversations I’ve had on the show, and we cover a lot of ground. Just so you’re clear, given the content of this episode, I’m definitely not against people having an online business, and I’m definitely not against people working in the health field. I love what I do for a living, and if you’re passionate in this area, then, by all means, follow that passion.
But it’s just interesting to explore why this is happening en masse in the way that it is. The promises being made about the financial freedom and living on your own terms and working from some tropical island are mostly fictional, and are the reality for the tiniest fraction of a percentage of people in this field.
With that disclaimer out of the way and this long intro out of the way, let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Kaila Tova.
Hi, Kaila. Thanks for coming back on the show. It’s lovely to be chatting with you again.
Kaila Tova: It is wonderful to chat with you as well. Thank you so much for having me.
00:06:30
Chris Sandel: You first appeared on the show over 3 years ago. At that stage, you were a health coach. You were running “Finding Our Hunger” podcast. I think you’d fairly recently got into burlesque at that stage, or maybe it had been going on longer than I remember.
But yeah, what’s happened in the last 3 years, if you can sum it up shortly?
Kaila Tova: [laughs] What’s happened? Let’s see. You’re correct, I had just started burlesque. I’m now an internationally traveled, award-winning drag king. I perform all over the country. I have performed outside of the country. I was the 2018 San Francisco Drag King Contest winner, and I am currently the reigning Leading Man of the Hollywood Burlesque Festival, so that was cool. [laughs] Minor change.
It must’ve been right after we chatted, actually, I left health coaching and ended the “Finding Our Hunger” podcast, because not only was it no longer something that I felt like I was doing out of passion – it had become a job, and one that I was not only losing money in, but not actually able to help anyone with anymore. So I left health coaching and started working on a brand new podcast that I think we’re going to talk about today.
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Chris Sandel: With that decision to walk away from the “Finding Our Hunger” podcast and to walk away from health coaching, was that a tough decision? How long were you in that place of ambivalence, like “I don’t think this is the right thing to be doing, but I don’t know if I do want to walk away”?
Kaila Tova: That was a decision. I think around 2015, I started realizing that – I had been a paleo health coach, specifically helping people with eating disorder recovery through paleo, which is not a thing. [laughs] As I learned.
I started transitioning away from that and into really doing heavy work with Health at Every Size and fat acceptance and intersectional feminism. Really, really going all-in on re-educating myself so that people could also re-educate themselves about ways of eating and ways of living that were no longer restrictive or punishing or mimicking disordered eating behaviors. I needed to walk my talk, and that meant I had to really shift focus.
I loved the clients that I had. I loved doing that work so much because I did see change for them and that was why I did it. However, I only had a few clients. The amount of work and the amount of time that I was putting into building a business wasn’t paying for the work. I was working a full-time job, and then on the weekends, instead of going out and having fun, I was really just sitting at home writing blog posts and editing podcasts. I was waking up super early in the morning to record. I had no free time. I had no life. And now that I was doing things like burlesque and I was dating, I just saw how much of my own life I was giving up for the very few dividends that were being returned.
But that being said, I kept going because I’d invested in this. I had spent years. I had spent many thousands of dollars. In the twenties. It was a lot of money, because I’d heard the message that you have to spend money to make money, so I was. Also, because I was working full-time and I couldn’t just sit at home and hit “go” on a post at the time I wanted it to go, I was paying for social media scheduling tools. I was paying for websites. I was paying for podcast hosting. I was paying for website themes. It added up and added up. Mailchimp, etc.
It was draining me. It was draining me financially, it was draining me emotionally, and it was draining me of the life that I was working to rebuild through eating disorder recovery.
I recorded a ton of podcasts. Through 2016, I just released them one at a time and let things start to slow down. By September of 2016, I think that’s about when the podcast ended, and I started thinking about, what’s next? What do I need to be doing with my life?
I was also going through a really significant job transition, which was not pleasant. I left a job that I really loved because it became clear that there was no room for growth for me within the company, the way that things were, and also that the dynamics of the company had changed such that as a person who was identified as a woman in the workplace, I was being left out of meetings with my peers who happened to be male. And there wasn’t anyone who was able to go to the mat for me to change that.
So I left my job, I closed down my health coaching, and I decided it was time for a change. I did a one-woman show in New York, because you know, that’s an easy way to decompress. [laughs] It was just a quick workshop, but I was flying back and forth to New York for four weekends, which was fun.
Then at the same time, I started thinking about this new podcast, Your Body, Your Brand, because I realized that there was a lot I had bought into, literally and figuratively, that wasn’t – not only not serving me, but not serving a larger portion of the population as well. I decided it was time to start doing some research.
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Chris Sandel: I want to chat about that podcast, and that is a lot of the reason why we’re having this conversation today. But there’s just a couple things I want to cover before we get there. First, I don’t want to assume that everyone has heard the previous episode that we recorded or knows who you are. Do you want to just give a little brief background of bio on yourself to bring people up to speed?
Kaila Tova: Yeah. Okay, brief. This is never easy. [laughs] I developed an eating disorder around the age of 13. Because it didn’t present like most clinical eating disorders that you can prescribe therapy for or whatever, nobody said anything. I struggled with orthorexia, which is a focus on clean eating, and exercise addiction. Basically eating a salad and going for a run. Most people say, “Hey, you’re so good,” not “Hey, you might have a problem.”
But I struggled with orthorexia for most of my adult life. I did go to school for dramatic literature, and I was a theatre teacher, and I went back to graduate school for theatre as well, for dramaturgy. I ended up dropping out of graduate school to finally commit to eating disorder recovery – although at the time, I told myself that I was dropping out to become a personal trainer, because #strongnotskinny.
Yeah, it’s always a red flag when somebody in the eating disorder community immediately transitions into working in body work of some kind. But I didn’t know at the time. That was 2010. I’d just gotten out of an abusive relationship and moved home with my parents. Started working in retail. Became a vegan and a bodybuilder and a yogi and was just repeating the same patterns of behavior but under different names.
Finally, when my body started shutting down, because it does not like being a vegan – which is not to say other people can’t do it, but my body didn’t like it. I literally was going through serious cystic acne and amenorrhea and severe depression and anxiety, so I quit being vegan and became paleo instead.
Paleo, on the one hand, saved my life. It really gave me the permission to eat fat again, maybe for the first time since I was 13 years old. It taught me how to eat without counting calories, and it opened up a world of freedom in a way I hadn’t known it other the other various guises like clean eating and veganism, etc. But that being said, paleo is still a restrictive diet, so it gave me just enough freedom to feel safe within the boundaries of my disordered eating.
I became a very minor paleo influencer. I’m not going to say that I was – I wasn’t making any money. I didn’t have any affiliate deals. I wasn’t anywhere near the rest of the paleo muckety-mucks, but I had a podcast, and I did talk about eating disorder recovery through paleo for the first 92 episodes. I spoke at Paleo (f)x, and I allowed myself to go through some of the things that I needed to have gone through in eating disorder recovery, that I didn’t get to do since I didn’t go through a recovery program.
I don’t recommend that, by the way. If you do have an eating disorder, get help. I muscled my way through it, and it was not pretty.
But like I said, around Episode 92 I realized that things were not working, and I started looking outside of paleo to try to understand how to live a life worth living in therapy terms. I did start going to therapy. I did start trying things that scared me. I did start eating bread, which was terrifying because the person I was seeing – who is now my husband – was also paleo. I was terrified he was going to dump me for eating bread. Not the case. We’re married now. [laughs] He’s also no longer paleo.
But it was one of those things where it was a really strange transition period where I just let go of all of the rules, and that was terrifying, but somehow I’m still standing and nothing bad happened.
The other parts about me, I guess, that are relevant, I have been working in marketing for the last 7 or so years in Silicon Valley, and I just recently got into the University of Wisconsin at Madison to get a PhD in Rhetoric, Politics and Culture to look at the ways in which we talk about fitness and bodies online.
Yeah, really long, weird journey, but at almost 33 next month, I’m kind of starting over again. So there you go.
00:18:45
Chris Sandel: Yeah. For more details on that, I think we did cover it a lot more in the first episode.
I can’t remember if I asked you this last time, but how was it going through that transition of being paleo and questioning paleo, and then not being paleo, and doing that somewhat in public considering you had a podcast and had to then talk about “okay, I’ve changed my mind on this” or “I think I was wrong about that”?
Kaila Tova: It’s really freaking hard. Oh my God, it’s so hard. Especially when you have invested in this persona and other people have invested in your persona. Ooh boy. You have your free-range egg on your face, I guess is the way I put it. [laughs]
I’d liken it to what happened when I stopped being vegan. I don’t know if I told this story on your podcast the first time, but when I was vegan, I was very publicly vegan as well. I’d started a cookie company and was selling vegan cookies. Everyone at my job knew I was vegan. I was working in retail at the time.
The day I decided I needed to eat meat again because it was not working, I was on break at my store in the mall, and I brought a can of tuna with me for lunch – which was not a great first reintroduction. Like, dry tuna out of a can. It’s not great, but it felt safe because it was fish. I don’t know, it was a whole – my brain was not in a good place at the time.
But I actually left the breakroom, hid the can in my bag, and walked to the food court and hid underneath a tree – you know, they have fake trees and stuff in the food court. I hid in a booth in the back, underneath a tree, and I opened my can of tuna and tried to eat it without anyone seeing me, and I just cried through the whole thing because I was so ashamed. I was betraying the thing that everyone believed me to be.
I went through something very similar with that in paleo, because I was like, I said all these things about myself. I sold all these things about myself. And now I have to tell people that I was wrong.
I did it anyway, though, because I thought it was important enough to not just disappear. I owed it to the people who had invested in me, especially the people who were recovering from disordered eating and who had looked to me as an example. I owed it to them to say what I had learned, because if I was not honest with them, then I could be potentially perpetrating damage. I could be continuing to hurt people, and that goes against my entire nature.
I remember I actually reached out to Alan Levinovitz. He is a professor at James Madison University and also an author, who wrote the book The Gluten Lie. I was like, “I read your book, and I think you make some really great points and I want to talk to you.” His episode is one that, for months after, I was getting comments on. But that was the one where I kind of came out as “I ate bread.” [laughs]
I’m so grateful to him for doing that episode with me because having somebody else there gave me the ability to talk about this. Somebody else who wasn’t paleo and going to be mad at me, if that makes sense.
Talking about food myths and the ways in which we believe them let me understand that it wasn’t just that I was a bad person and believed something wrongly; it was that there’s a reason why I believe these things, and it’s really hard sometimes to let go of your beliefs. But also, sometimes it’s a really good thing to open your mind to other opportunities and possibilities.
From there, I really made a concerted effort to reach out to people I didn’t agree with, or didn’t know if I agreed with them yet, to ask them questions to help me learn and hopefully help my audience learn too. That’s why I kept the podcast going as long as I did. Even after it had stopped serving my needs, I just felt like there were other people who were at a different point on their journey who could benefit from hearing the conversation. But it was hard.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. This will be something that I want to circle back to, because it’s something that comes up in your new podcast in terms of people’s identity and how that then becomes their brand and their business, and then how people have very similar stories to you, where they realize that what they’ve been doing actually isn’t working for them.
It’s like, what do I do now? Do I keep this going, do I walk away quietly and just shuttle this down and hope no one asks questions? Do I become very public about “okay, maybe I was wrong about this” or “I definitely was wrong about this”? When your business is you as an identity, how difficult that can be.
Kaila Tova: Oh yeah. It’s so difficult because your business – at least for me, I didn’t have – yes, I had a business, but the business was me. For me to be somebody different, that meant that my business was something different. It’s a lot to untangle. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: It’s been interesting with me listening to your podcast, because I’m going through a process now with my own business where I’m going to be taking on another practitioner to help me out because I’m at capacity; I can’t take on any more clients than I currently do, and there’s more people wanting the help. My business is not my name. My business is Seven Health; it’s not Chris Sandel or anything along those lines. I’m being very conscious of trying to think, how can this business not be about me and be a separate entity within itself so that I’m not always the face of the business? It can be other people. It can be something of itself.
This has also come up just in terms of changing belief, changing my mind. Like the last little while, I’ve been doing episodes of the podcast where I’ve been doing second editions of a lot of my earlier shows where they’ve been solo episodes where I’ve talked about food logs or carbohydrates or whatever it may be and doing amendments, like “okay, I’ve changed my mind on this” or “I was wrong on that.”
But I think it’s to a different degree than you have. It wasn’t that this was part of my identity; these were just some beliefs that I had or some ideas that I had that were now wrong. That’s different to – I’ve never been the paleo guy or the vegan guy or the low carb guy or anything along those lines. Maybe that’s just dumb luck more than anything else.
Kaila Tova: [laughs] It could be, it could be. And it’s a good thing, I think. When you don’t internalize this as “my beliefs are my identity,” in a way, it allows you to go back and make those amendments without it being a soul-rending process. If you are the paleo guy, when you come out and say, “actually, I was wrong,” that is so different from “I’ve been working as a nutritionist, and some of the science that we’ve learned has changed the way that I think.” Or “some of the social science research that I’ve done has changed the way that I think.” It’s very different.
But I think what happens a lot, especially with the way the internet is structured, is a lot of people see the paleo guy and are also paleo, and think “I could do that too.” So they begin building their identities around these – the identity comes first, and then the business. That’s where the problems really tend to come up.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think, as you alluded to before, you spoke at Paleo (f)x, you had other paleo people on your podcast, so it’s not even just “I’m changing my identity.” It’s like “this is heresy against the whole tribe of people that I now belong to.” There is this real push online of like “find your tribe, find your community,” and now you’re having to walk away from that, but also tell people who you’ve had probably enjoyable podcast conversations with previously that “actually, I now don’t believe what I said on that podcast, and I also don’t believe what you said on that podcast.”
Kaila Tova: Yeah, that is a huge – exactly. Personal branding isn’t just about you. It’s about the community you build around your brand. That was probably one of the hardest parts. Like I mentioned, the man who is now my husband, I was afraid he was going to dump me. Over bread. I mean, I still told him, and he was like, “Oh, that’s cool. I’ve been having second thoughts about paleo too.”
But for a lot of people, that’s not the case, and I have not talked to those people in years. There’s a couple of people who have stuck around post-paleo from that specific community and friend group who still reach out when they’re in the area to visit or will comment on a Facebook post. But for the most part, I don’t belong there anymore.
Part of that was intentional on my part because I didn’t want to hear it, but the other part of it was like, we don’t have anything else in common, so why would they stay in touch? Why would they still care?
I think what happens is we build these communities around our identity, and that actually reinforces our identities. I know the whole “you’re in a bubble” conversation has been going on for years, but I don’t think people cognitively realize how much that is true. But once you leave a bubble, once you leave a Facebook group where everyone is having the same conversation and policing each other’s language and spiraling into more rigid and more rigid and more rigid versions of this identity because you need to keep outsiders out and insiders in, once you leave that, it is stark. It is so stark how involved we get with one another and how tightly our identities are bound up in the rules of our interactions with one another.
It’s one of the things that I’m planning to study here at UW Madison because I’m so interested in the ways in which tribalism – and I know that word is very loaded, but Seth Godin, who wrote the book Tribes, it’s a central tenet in digital marketing. I’m so interested in how tribalism and religiosity all factor into these really toxic identity brands that we build.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I’ve done a whole separate episode on tribalism, which I would suggest – if you haven’t listened to it, you might find it interesting, and I would suggest other listeners check it out. I’ve had some pretty good feedback on it.
00:31:25
We were talking earlier about me not having this identity as part of this. I think for me, what’s potentially been easier is that I’ve never felt like I fitted into a tribe. I’ve never become fully enmeshed or fully attached to any one position because I’m always like “I can see why there’s issues with that” or “I can see up until this point, but there’s these edge cases where that just doesn’t make sense.”
So I’ve never had, then, the swell of support of all of these people always following me and inviting me into their group, because I feel slightly like I don’t fit in any group. As much as that can sound like a negative, I actually think it’s a really good positive. And it’s probably part of me being fairly introverted, part of me doing a lot of this work on my own, starting on my own, reading on my own, etc. But it comes with some really good benefits, because I don’t often feel like I’m having to push back against anyone within the in-group because I’m not in the in-group.
Kaila Tova: Yeah. Which is not to say everyone needs to isolate themselves, but I do think that being able to build your own sense of self without relying on other people as the sole arbiter of your identity, I think that can be really, really, really healthy.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. And again, just dumb luck is mostly probably the answer for that.
Kaila Tova: [laughs] Yeah, maybe.
00:32:55
Chris Sandel: Tell me more about the PhD that you’re starting, and then we can talk more specifically about the podcast.
Kaila Tova: Oh, good Lord, how much time do you have? [laughs] Oh boy, this was a decision. I’ve wanted to be an academic my whole life. This is something that matters to me. I’ve also wanted to be a teacher my whole life. I think that was part of what drew me to podcasting and all of that in the first place, and presenting at conferences at stuff. This is what I love to do.
But unfortunately, I graduated during the recession in 2008, and my entire life was derailed at that point. Then by that point, I had not enough money to justify being able to go back to school, because as a T.A. and a grad student, you don’t make a lot of money until you become a real professor. And even then, there’s a lot of question marks.
I just got married this summer, and my husband and I had some conversations about what was going to be the healthiest thing for me to do going forward – and I don’t mean healthy in terms of “lose weight” or “get fit.” I mean healthy in terms of emotional health. Working in marketing was literally dangerous for me, because I was not built for the corporate world. I’ve been in therapy, I have rage-quit four jobs. It just was not a good place for me because I don’t believe in it.
Chris Sandel: I’ve read some of your posts on Medium, and it was interesting. I’d be like, oh, for someone who works in marketing, you have a lot of awful things to say about marketing.
Kaila Tova: [laughs] Exactly. I just hate it. I just think there’s something very nefarious and insidious about it. Part of what made me go back to school is I became kind of an armchair academic. I have an entire shelf of my bookshelf that’s just books about behavioral economics and propaganda. Propaganda is the basis of the ways in which we do marketing now. Marketing, sales, and PR – specifically PR, but a lot of the tactics build from some of the psychological tricks of propaganda.
The more I read those books while I was working in marketing, the more I hated myself for working in marketing. I just couldn’t do it anymore, so I spent all of last year working on applications and visiting schools and trying to see where the best place to do this work would be.
I got into UW Madison’s Rhetoric, Politics and Culture program as part of their Department of Communication Arts. They also have Media and Culture Studies, which is something that I considered, but a lot of that work tends to be around fandoms and television and things like that, which is not really where I’m looking. I’m mostly looking at the internet.
And I’m interested in rhetoric. I’m interested in looking at the texts that we create, if you will. One of my professors hates the word “text.” He prefers “document.” Another professor uses the word “artifact.” Because a text could be a TV show or a social media post or somebody’s drag outfit. It just depends on what you’re trying to “read,” if you will, metaphorically.
So I got in to Madison and I came and visited last year while I was competing at the Burlypicks World Championships in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which was an experience. I used that as an excuse to drive down to Madison and check it out, and I just said, “Okay, we’re going to do this.” Uprooted my life in California, and here we are.
The actual program is very small. You would imagine that not a lot of people are doing rhetoric. However, the Madison rhetoric program is actually the oldest one in the country, and it’s one of the more prestigious, if you will. It’s not specifically why I came here, but it was neat to find that out once I got here. [laughs]
But yeah, I’m really interested – and this may change, but I’m planning on writing my dissertation on the topics that I’m bringing up in my podcast. I’m specifically reading the marketing language that women, specifically female-identifying people, use to target one another and build identity around health and fitness.
That said, I’m also doing some stuff with rhetoric and performance around drag, but that’s less relevant, I think, to this conversation.
Chris Sandel: You said that it’s an area that maybe not as many people are interested in, but I’m thinking of so much conversation around social media, so much conversation around echo chambers and people getting into silos and all that. My sense would be there’s more interest in this now.
Kaila Tova: Yes. That’s why a lot of people go into Media and Culture Studies. There’s a difference in methodology, I would say, in how an MCS (Media and Culture Studies) student would necessarily read a text versus me as a rhetoric student. We have these existential debates in class about “what even is rhetoric?” [laughs] So I’m still kind of figuring out what I’m doing.
But what way I understand it is a lot of people look at a text – and you’ll see this online in the ways in which people do hot takes of whatever the thing du jour is – people will look at a text and approach it with whatever cultural critical theory they already have. I can do a feminist reading of a TV show and pronounce it not feminist because I’ve come at it from a critical viewpoint as my lens.
As a rhetoric person, I can still have a feminist critical lens and read a text, and not see it only through that lens, if that makes sense. I can look at the text and see actually, just on its own, underneath all of the layers of cultural criticism, what is this text doing? And then how does that relate to cultural criticism? So I’m looking at word usage, I’m looking at the ways in which it’s constructed, I’m looking at context, I’m looking at speaker and audience.
Obviously there’s a lot of blurry lines because I’m also a feminist, so I’m coming at things from a feminist cultural critical perspective. I’m somewhere in the critical cultural theory that involves structuralism, but also humanism. I have kind of a socialist take on things, but that being said, I’m really interested in learning to let texts speak so that I can hear what they’re trying to say. If that makes any sense. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: It does. Who picks the texts that you’re going to then make reference to or analyze? Is that you, because you’re the one that’s identifying them in this particular setting or place? Or is this assigned to you?
Kaila Tova: Especially with a PhD, I get to pick which topics I’m interested in. One of the members of the rhetoric program, I think she’s writing about Twitch for her dissertation, the app Twitch, or social networking program. And then I have another compatriot who is studying Harry Styles. She’s so cool. I love that that’s a thing you can do. She’s still doing Media and Culture Studies – same with the other member of my program – but they’re doing it through a rhetorical lens. There’s somebody doing Cold War rhetoric. I have a professor who does religious vernacular in online forums.
There’s very specific things that everyone is doing, but we pick which texts we’re looking at. Obviously the idea is not to necessarily cherry-pick things to prove a point. It’s to look at how texts interact with one another. What I’m really interested in is online marketing, specifically around health and wellness – which obviously there’s a wide-open playing field, and you do have to pick a narrow – but I think there’s enough conversation and enough similar conversation that finding examples of the ways in which we market to one another will not be very difficult.
Chris Sandel: Do you have an idea of “I’m definitely going to do this one,” like specifics in mind?
Kaila Tova: No, not yet. The thing about this program, I’m getting both a Master’s and a PhD, so I have 3 years of coursework, a thesis, and preliminary tests that I have to do before I can even start working on my dissertation. I have 5 years of funding, 3 years of coursework. Hoping I can expedite as much as possible, but right now I’m actually in the phase where they’re breaking down everything that I ever thought I knew, and hopefully, I’ll be rebuilding that in the next couple of years. [laughs]
But it’s interesting because on the one hand, I love the idea of doing rhetoric, but on the other, I’m really interested in history and economics.
One of the cool things about this program is they require you to minor as well, so I’m currently taking a class in the history department called Food and Power, and I’m going to be writing a paper about the modern development of orthorexia, I think. Don’t quote me on this; I’ll tell you in a couple weeks if this is true. But that’s where I’m looking. I’m in the process of trying to think through, what texts do I want to look at? I specifically want to look at healthy living blogs. But the early stages, like using the Wayback Machine to look at healthy living blogs in 2007. So we’ll see with that.
I’m also writing a paper right now about drag. There’s a TV show on Amazon called Dragula, and I’m using one of the characters – I say “character”; he’s a real person – I’m using Landon Cider as a text, if you will, to read drag, basically. It’s very esoteric and it’s a little like “okay, sure, I’ll buy that.” But it’s been a really interesting experience to start learning how to do that, I think. I’m reading a lot of theory right now, is really what I’m doing. Trying to understand how to do it all.
Chris Sandel: I will continue over the next months and years to keep checking in and finding out what things are becoming relevant to you and you think are interesting. I will definitely want to check that out.
Kaila Tova: Yeah. It’s a very interesting experience, and definitely I’m loving it. It’s just, it is a lot. [laughs]
00:45:20
Chris Sandel: I can imagine. Let’s chat, then, about your podcast. It’s called Your Body, Your Brand. I want to delve into some of the specifics of different things you touch on, but I guess start bigger picture. What is the podcast about?
Kaila Tova: That’s really interesting, because what it was originally about is not what it’s about anymore. In 2017, when I first started recording this podcast, I was really interested in the ways in which women marketed to one another, and specifically the ways in which people who were listeners to my podcast all of a sudden were health coaches or body image coaches or whatever. It was like, how are we replicating ourselves, and why? Why do people keep insisting on becoming brands?
But I had a couple of conversations early enough on that it made me realize there was a larger question, which is: what is it about work that is making women look – and I say “women” as a large category, so if you identify as a woman, that counts. If people identify you as a woman or treat you as a woman in the world, that counts. But what is it about people who identify as female or are treated as female in our culture that makes us want to drop out of the workforce and pursue these entrepreneurial goals? Specifically around our bodies.
Specifically, the two conversations that I had were with Carrie Ingoglia – who explicitly was like, “Women are dropping out”; I was like, oh, yes, that’s what this is about – and Dana Schorr, who I interviewed for my multilevel marketing episode – which at the time of this recording, has not yet dropped. That one comes out in 3 weeks from when you and I are talking.
For that episode, Dana was talking about – I have to set this up. Multilevel marketing tends to get a bad rap. Understandably so. I personally think it’s the worst.
Chris Sandel: John Oliver did quite a good piece on it.
Kaila Tova: Oh yeah. That was so good. There’s also a really great podcast called The Dream which definitely deep-dives into some of the darkest stuff. So there’s plenty of information out there about why multilevel marketing isn’t good.
But what I was interested in was talking to women who still liked it – and not because I wanted them to give me propaganda, although I did get some propaganda in the course of those conversations, and not so that I could prove that it was good for some people, but rather so that I could understand the motivation for being there and for continuing to believe even when things weren’t going as well as maybe they thought it should be. There’s research that says something like 92% of women, or people, who join a multilevel marketing don’t make money.
But I was talking to Dana, and what she said to me – and y’all will hear this in the multilevel marketing episode if you listen – she was like, “I went to the yearly conference, and the people getting awards were women.” The people telling their transformation stories of how they made money and built a business were women. The CEO of this company was a woman. If there were men there, it was because they were there to help their wives build a business. Some of them had even dropped out of their jobs to help their wives, but it wasn’t about them. It was about their wives. She was just like, “Is this what men feel all the time?”
That made me realize that there’s something deeper going on. There is a larger conversation that we need to be having about the nature of work.
Now, granted, this is not an essentialist conversation. Over the past several years, I’ve been reckoning with gender, and I don’t even think that I am a woman. When I perform in drag, I actually feel more like myself than when I’m out in the world, being identified as a woman.
So I think these categories are fluid; it’s more how we have been raised and are expected to exist in the world, and what energies get privileged, if you will. Masculine energy can be something that anyone can access. Masculine is just this word that you and I understand what that means, that it’s an aggressive energy. It tends to be less nurturing, more self-focused. You’ve got drive, you’ve got power, that kind of thing.
That’s more what I mean. It has less to do with being a man. But people who don’t have that masculine energy or don’t want to use that masculine energy for their work tend to suffer in situations where that is required. For women who do want to care and nurture, not because it’s their nature, but because that’s how they were raised or that’s what their energy is telling them they want to do, for them there is no real place.
If I were to say, “If you just want to be a caretaker, why don’t you just be a mom or a nanny or a teacher or a social worker or a therapist?”, you’d probably look at me and go, “Yeah, but I want to make money.” Right? [laughs] The world is awful right now. I don’t want 17 side hustles. I want to be able to make money, and I don’t want to come home exhausted and drained from being a caretaker for minimum wage.
So what happens is we then turn to the internet and see these successful people doing their successful businesses about being successful and also healthy, and we go “I’m sitting in a job where there’s a dead-end, or I’m trapped for 8 hours a day because they won’t let me work from home, and I can’t be with my kids or I can’t be out building a life” or whatever. It’s not just for people who are mothers.
But we sit there in jobs that don’t align with our values or our desires or our needs, and then we look at the internet – because that’s what we do when we’re sitting in an office for 8 hours because we have to be there, and we’re bored, so we’re scrolling Twitter or Facebook or joining a group or on Instagram or whatever – and we say, “Oh, somebody else was successful by selling their own body image. Interesting.” And then we get really tied up in their communities or their identity and say, “If the paleo guy could do it, I can probably do it too. I’m paleo.”
Then we say, “Okay, I’m going to start a blog.” So we start a blog and we end up replicating a lot of the stuff that we’ve already seen on the internet, which tends to be pretty privileged and white. Just to be explicit about it, a lot of the stuff we replicate, regardless of our own race, gender, social class, is to give the impression of a certain type of person because we see that that’s what works. When we read marketing blogs and sales blogs and internet success blogs and join all those groups, these are the things that get privilege because they “work.” And because they work, then they get replicated, so they continue working, so then we say “oh yes, that definitely works.”
But a lot of times that means really a heavy focus, especially in the health and wellness world, on our weight and our shape and our ability to be healthy. Even in the body image world, where there is fat positivity, there’s still this really heavy emphasis on health in terms of “I have freedom, I can sleep more, I can eat nourishing foods regardless of my size, I exercise and I feel good, and I’m an affiliate for this company.” It’s not about necessarily your ideology so much as it is about replicating your ability to access health in both the restrictive health community and the Health at Every Size community.
That image then gets into other people’s brains, because now they’re following you and they’re going, “I’m sitting at my desk and I’m eating day-old crackers or whatever because that’s all that’s left in the kitchen, and I can’t leave, and I had to scarf down a sad lunch at my desk because I had a meeting, and now I’m going to be stuck in traffic, so I’m not going to have time to make dinner. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just be free for a little bit?” This stuff self-replicates, basically.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that work is broken. A lot of it. It also has to do with neoliberalism, which we can talk about if you’re interested, but I do think people have internalized this idea that being an entrepreneur is the ultimate expression of success, and that’s because that’s what our society says: that everything is a market commodity, that even your personhood is human capital, and that is expressed and optimized by becoming an entrepreneur of the self.
So yeah, there’s a lot of competing factors. That’s the long-winded way of saying that the podcast is about making your body your brand. [laughs]
00:55:40
Chris Sandel: There was lots there that I want to tap back into. I guess to start with, you said that women are dropping out, and I know as part of the podcast – I think it’s even in the intro – they’re dropping out to become yoga teachers and they’re opting out of STEM to sell paleo cookbooks. Are there stats around this that you know? When did this start to happen? Because obviously the internet is since ’95, but I’m imagining it’s going to be a lot later than that.
Kaila Tova: Yeah. Here’s the thing; I don’t have stats, and that’s part of why I’m in grad school, to do some of that research. I don’t think anyone’s studying this. This is the thing. I don’t think anyone thinks this is important enough to study. But almost everyone I’ve talked to has been like, “Oh yeah, I have a friend who did that, or a family member who’s a yoga teacher,” or “Oh my God, I have a friend who just started a blog” or “That was me. I did that.”
In terms of anecdotal evidence, I would say this started sometime around 2007. That was when the healthy living blog really started picking up steam. I don’t think people were considering dropping out necessarily at that point. They weren’t looking at this as a business; it was for fun. It was something that was community-building. Accountability maybe, for a lot of these health bloggers. So it was about community-building and talking about their running goals and sharing recipes.
I don’t think that people entered into blogging, at least in the healthy living world – from what I can understand, and from what I have found so far – and again, I plan on doing this research, so quote me only as far as you can on this. But it seems like people really were just there for the social capital aspect of it. Getting validation and accountability for their workouts and their recipes and their diets and things like that.
I think what happened is that advertisers saw the growth in social capital and capitalized on it. You started to see a lot of affiliate posts, and people were getting yelled at for selling out, because “I’ll send you this box of protein bars. Just review that as one of your posts.”
I’ll be honest; I started following these blogs. I started reading blogs daily in 2005, and I can say that by 2008, that was when I really started seeing the affiliate posts and the marketing, and people were starting to consolidate brands. These went from simple WordPress websites to fully-owned domains. They went from basic design to consciously chosen colors. Things like that. Which doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is.
Chris Sandel: I also remember for me, I finished studying in 2008, and then had my first website in either end of 2008 or beginning of 2009. Yeah, I thought about photos and colors and stuff then, but it was still pretty clunky at that stage. If I’m thinking for me, I probably started reading blogs more around that time, so definitely not as early as you. But it felt like it was more 2010-2011 that that then really started to kick off.
Kaila Tova: Yes, that’s the thing.
Chris Sandel: Or maybe that’s just my perspective and that’s not actually true.
Kaila Tova: No, I think you’re absolutely right. By 2010-2011, that was when the internet really became the internet – at least, the foundation for the internet that we know today. It’s funny to think about it because it was such a short time ago, but how much things have changed since then.
By 2012, I would say that was really the moment when I first started hearing the word “personal brand” come about as a term that was being leveraged by people. I say leveraged consciously, because that is a marketing term. And actually, 2012 was when I started working in marketing. I was writing blog posts about why it’s important to merge your personal and professional brand for this company that I was working for, and I didn’t know. I thought that was a great idea. I think it’s the moment when we really started hearing things like “lean in” as well.
This was a tipping point for what Catherine Rottenberg, who’s a professor in the UK, calls neoliberal feminism. We talk about it on Episode 10 of my podcast. So yeah, things accelerated I’d say between 2008 and 2010 to set the stage for the 2012 tipping point.
Again, a lot of this is anecdotal and I’ve got a lot of research ahead of me so that I can either prove or disprove this, but I really think there was a point when people started seeing their blog as a way to monetize, and once they did, it was like “this is over for all of us.” [laughs]
And of course, then the gig economy became a thing and people began looking at blogs specifically as a way to monetize first. The idea of being able to make money with your blog was the first thought, and the second thought was “and I could write about my body” or “and I could write about my workouts” or “and I can write about whatever.” There’s always that idea lurking in the back of your mind, like “Oh, it’s super easy. I’ve seen other people do it, and there’s a bunch of free tools. I can just get started today.”
That’s not the case. Yes, you can just get started today, but it’s a lot harder than that to make money.
Chris Sandel: Yes. It’s a lot easier to get started, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to make any money.
Kaila Tova: Exactly.
01:02:40
Chris Sandel: I want to talk about the entrepreneurship side of it, but let’s come back to the brand part. What is brand, or what is personal brand? I know these may seem like obvious questions, but I’d like to drill down and get your perspective on them.
Kaila Tova: A brand – when we think about it in terms of advertising and marketing, we think about corporations. The brand is the way that you recognize and differentiate a company from another company.
Think about their logo or a certain commercial or a feeling that you get when you think about (insert brand here), like Coca-Cola. What things do you think about? You think about the script lettering on their cans, the red and white. That to me is the first thing I think about. You think about McDonald’s, the golden arches. The brand may be something visual, it may be something audio, it may be some larger concept that you think about. When I think about Southwest Airlines, for example, I think about how I get to sit wherever I want and they have really good customer service. That’s just what I know about them.
So the brand is something you both own and is also created by your audience. A brand is something that you can consciously work to cultivate. At the same time, if you screw it up, you do something real terrible, that’s what you get remembered for. So that goes into the brand-building as well. Does that make sense?
Chris Sandel: Yep, definitely. I was thinking of Yuval Noah Harari. I know in Sapiens, he talks about brand and how humans are able to come up with a concept like this in the way that no other animal is, and it’s led to both the benefits of civilization and also some of its demise.
Kaila Tova: Yeah, for sure. Branding is essentially a modern-day way of signaling identity and building community. That’s really what it is. It’s just that it’s the corporatized version of it.
Now, we live in a world that has consciously and unconsciously internalized the idea of human capital. Here’s my critical socialist side coming on out. Basically, we look at ourselves as money-making machines, optimizing our own personal potential to work. This starts at a very young age, at least for my generation, and I know the generations that have come after me, because all of my students have anxiety right now.
I know that I had multiple nervous breakdowns in high school about which college I was going to get into and how my grades were, because I was consciously positioning myself to get into an Ivy League. Fun fact, I got in and left. [laughs] Twice. For me, it was about I have to get the right grades. I have to be able to make the most money and make the most impact and not only win the ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ award in high school – which I did – but also do that succeeding. I’m still not there yet. [laughs] At least, based on what I thought success looked like.
But that’s what we’re doing. We’re constantly optimizing ourselves in order to be able to earn more money, whether or not we’re thinking that’s what we’re doing. But we’ve internalized this concept of being human capital.
If you want to get into the economic discussion, this is part of neoliberalism that we have all internalized. I really recommend that people go out and read – there’s a small textbook called Neoliberalism by Julie A. Wilson. It’s helped me understand the historical reasons why we believe these things about the allision between the corporate marketplace and our own personal lives and the government.
There is no public center anymore. It pretty much is we’re all thinking like we’re units of the marketplace. We all think of ourselves as stocks that we’re constantly trying to appreciate. My stock will go up or down based on my ability to earn social and financial capital from other people.
One of the ways that we have been taught about social capital specifically – but now financial capital because of the internet – is health. Visibly signaling my healthiness to you, and my ability to teach you how to do it, because we value health in this society as an indicator of other things about our own value as human beings – which we can talk about why that maybe is not a great concept. But that is, in fact, a thing that happens, whether or not we consciously realize we’re doing that.
So if I can signal to you that I can teach you how to become as healthy as me, because as I’ve signaled, my health makes me more valuable, then you’re going to want to give me your money to make you more valuable too. That’s what’s happened in terms of the reasons why we might’ve been moving towards branding.
01:08:45
Now, the internet has literally given us the ability to build brands in ways that were not available to all of us before. Now that we can each build a personal website and create a Facebook profile or a Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever, now that we can consciously curate ourselves in the same way that a brand like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola would do, we can choose our colors.
We can signal things about ourselves and filter content to make sure that people only see the parts of ourselves that we want to get out there, and we can do damage control and community building and all of the things that brands themselves do on the exact same platform, using the exact same tools. Now we know how to do that ourselves, so why not do it?
Then, of course, the concepts of branding have now been folded into our corporate system as well, so now you have to have a personal brand because otherwise you can’t get hired for a job. Now you’re required to do this, so now we’re all thinking about it. It gets to a point where we’ve internalized it so much in the past 9 years or whatever, almost 10 years since 2010, that it just seems like “well, of course; isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Kaila Tova: Right? But what I’m suggesting is that this constant filtering and image building and self-evaluation and asking for capital from others isn’t necessarily a good thing, especially when we start to tie that value into how healthy we appear to other people.
01:10:30
Chris Sandel: In terms of the economic side of this, you’re talking about it starting around 2010. I also wonder, maybe 2008 and the economic crash that happened then, how much that then pushed people towards doing this because it’s like, “I need to do this now to make a living.” Now over the last decade, we’ve seen such a shift of being able to get online and to create the presence that you’re talking about in easier ways. It almost feels like this is the smart move.
Kaila Tova: Absolutely. I interviewed Rachel O’Neill, who at the time I believe was a fellow at the London School of Economics. She’s also doing her research on healthy living bloggers. She and I were discussing how precarity has really been a huge factor in this, because you’re absolutely right – after the recession, getting a job wasn’t just not a guarantee; it was real hard.
The gig economy over the last couple of years has, of course, picked up steam because these companies that have shot up around that time have gained a lot more notoriety and accessibility and better technology. But for a lot of people, “real” jobs with real security and long-term potential don’t exist anymore.
I think for a lot of companies in the recovery after the recession, they started looking to contingent labor because they couldn’t afford to have long-term investment in employees. Everybody is contingent now, and even employees who have “long-term employment” are not expected to stay. There’s some studies that if you stay in a job for more than 2 years, you actually limit your potential for salary growth. So people are job-hopping, companies don’t want to invest in people because they know they’re going to job-hop, so everybody is contingent.
Also, housing – and I’m speaking from somebody who’s living in California for the last 7 years, almost 8 years. We can’t afford housing. Our wages aren’t rising to meet the demands. I had to leave my – we had a really cute duplex, one house connected to another, in Mountainview. It wasn’t even in the nice part of Mountainview. It was on the border of Sunnyvale. Anyone who lives in California will know this. I say California – anyone who lives in the Bay Area will know what I’m talking about. It wasn’t like the Google area of Mountainview. [laughs] Which is fine. I loved where we lived. We had a little park. It was perfect. My dog was happy, I was happy, my partner was happy.
And then they raised our rate to $3,200 a month. Even with dual income, that’s not possible. For a two-bedroom, one bath, very small house – like, yes, we’re near a freeway, but $3,200 a month. So we left. If people who are making good salaries, as we were, can’t do it, who can? So, of course you need a side hustle. Of course you need to be thinking about ways in which you can make money online. Now we’re pushing people into this.
And there are people who got in early and/or learned how to growth hack who are being successful at this, or who have been working for years to build this kind of thing. There’s a lot of people jumping in going, “This is going to be quick, it’s going to be easy, because the internet told me it was,” and it floods the market.
Now there’s a million people who are health coaches, and they’re all selling the same thing. But they’re told, “It doesn’t matter if you’re selling the same product because what you’re really selling is you. You’re selling your brand. No one can do it just the way you do.” Which is complete B.S. But anyway, of course no one can do it the way you do, but if you’re selling the exact same thing as the coach you bought it from, do we need your services?
The market is just flooded, and now nobody’s making any money. Part of the reason why I had to leave health coaching was because I started doing body image coaching, and then a whole bunch of people who had huge audiences who were doing health coaching were like, “I think I’m also going to do body image coaching.” So they brought their huge audiences with them, so there wasn’t any audience growth for me.
And then all of their audience members and my audience members were like, “I could do this too,” and then they all started doing it. So now we’re all offering ourselves, selling the same thing to each other, and nobody needs it. It’s almost like multilevel marketing at that point. Anyway, sorry, I got off on a total rant.
Chris Sandel: No, that makes sense, and it was something I wanted to chat about. I see why there is this pull towards doing it, where you’re like “I can have this side hustle” or “I can quit my job and I can make all of this money.” But there’s a real mismatch between what is sold online and then what is the reality. The idea that “I quit my job and 6 months later I was making seven figures” or “I’ve got a list of 100,000 people” – do I think that that never happens? No. I think it does. But it’s the tiniest percentage of people where that really happens. For everyone else, it is a complete struggle.
01:16:30
It’s been interesting when I was putting together the questions and thinking about this, thinking about my own business. I started – like you, I finished school in 2008, so starting in 2009. Terrible time to be starting a business, especially over here. For the first 3 or 4 of those years, I was still having to do a job. I think I quit my job in 2011, and then within 3 months realized that that was a mistake and I couldn’t make it work. Took me another 3 months to find a part-time job, and then I did that for another 18 months before I was then able to quit that and do this full-time.
The only reason I was able to do this full-time to get to a point where this has now become my life was my parents were very generous. When there were times where I was like, “I can’t make the rent this month,” they paid my rent. That is a huge thing that most people don’t have. That just allowed me to be able to keep doing this when at other points, other people would’ve had to quit.
I then was able to get to a stage where we were earning enough money because we moved out of London into a countryside cottage, where my rent was halved from what it had been. I then spent a couple of years barely going out or doing anything apart from working, until I’d got to a position where this is now a job that provides me with a decent livelihood. But it took me a decade to get to that place, and it’s probably been in the last 2 years that this has been able to provide me what I would think of as a decent income.
I remember recently, we built an office on our house in the garden, and as part of that I was chucking out old files and all that and found pay slips from when I was first over here in 2005. I earned more in 2005 doing a pretty dead-end job working for local government than I did in 2014, 2015, a decade on.
So yeah, I really do want to dispel the myth of this is some lucrative job that if you’re not making huge amounts of money in a year or two years, you’re doing something wrong. I still don’t know why I’ve been able to do what I’ve been able to do. Again, I said at the start, it’s like dumb luck. Yeah, I’ve written a lot and I’ve put out consistent content, but there’s a lot of people who’ve done the same.
When I reflect on all the people I went to nutrition school with, I can count on one hand the amount of people that I know of who are doing this as a full-time job, just because it is so difficult to make work, despite how it’s being sold. And I don’t want to say all this so people think “I shouldn’t do this job.” If this is what you’re passionate about and you really want to do it, then fine. But don’t be under any misconceptions that this is going to be your path to an early retirement.
Kaila Tova: [laughs] Yeah, about that. Exactly. You said something that I think deserves repeating. You had help.
One of the things that made me quit health coaching – I was at a point where I’d just moved out of my mom’s house, and I was super grateful to even stay rent-free. Even then, when I first started working in marketing, I was making less than I had made as a teacher, so that’s saying something. But I’d finally moved out, but I didn’t have a partner or somebody who could – my mom wasn’t going to lend me money; she was just giving me a place to stay. So it wasn’t like I had somebody who could help me build a business once I left.
I talked to a lot of coaches. I recorded the podcast for a couple years, and I talked to a lot of coaches off-record, and a lot of what I heard when I asked “How are you making it work?” is “I have a husband or a partner or a parent who can help. This alone would not be enough.” Or also, “I have another job. I have a full-time job, a part-time job,” etc.
The thing is, when we show our businesses as our brands online, we conceal that because we want people to think that we’re successful so that they’ll work with us. It’s not about being dishonest or untruthful or deceptive. I don’t want to suggest that that is a thing. It’s about image building and brand building. There’s just something to be said for seeing somebody who is already successful and going, “I want to work with them.” That’s a human impulse. Of course, you want to see somebody being successful. You don’t want to work with someone who’s not successful. Of course. That’s psychology.
I know that part of why I struggled is because I was honest about the fact that I wasn’t successful. I was still building and working and struggling really hard. I have the same problem in burlesque and drag. I am successful. I’m a titleholder. I’ve done a ton of festivals. People respect my art. And at the same time, I’m not making any money. I tried to produce a show and I can’t get people to show up. Everybody online clicked “like” when I said I was doing it, and they were like, “Tell me when it is!” Then I did, and I could barely fill a theatre because people didn’t show up. It’s a struggle. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: It’s really funny, because then you want to be authentic in branding, but it’s like, be authentic, but not about those parts.
Kaila Tova: Yeah. That’s the thing. Authenticity isn’t what we say it is anymore. Authenticity is staged. I don’t care how authentic you are online, I don’t’ care how much of your body you’re showing online or how many times you post about yourself crying because you’re having a panic attack; every single choice you make about what you post online limits your authenticity because it’s a choice about what to post online. It’s not an indictment on anyone who does this. I post a lot online, and I make conscious choices – sometimes bad choices – about what to post online. [laughs] It’s just a fact.
On the podcast, I actually interviewed Sarah Banet-Weiser. She’s the Head of the Department of Communications at the London School of Economics, and she was at the University of Southern California before that. She’s a feminist media critic and absolutely brilliant. She has a book called Authenticity. It’s a critical study, so if you don’t want to read about affect and a whole bunch of scholarly terms, it’s maybe not for you. But I’d recommend it anyway. It’s on the reading list on my website.
Chris Sandel: I will put all the things that you make reference to in the show notes for this podcast.
Kaila Tova: For sure. Thank you. It’s so good because I think it’s a critical understanding – sorry, it’s AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. It’s about branding. It’s about self-branding. This, again, was written a while ago, so she’s talked about potentially updating it for today, but I do think that it’s worth reading to understand how all authenticity is performative once it becomes enfolded into a brand. It’s just a fact, and when you recognize that, you can work within it a little bit more holistically, I think.
It drives me crazy when people are using their authentic stories of overcoming mental health or eating disorders or (insert your whatever thing here) to talk about whatever it is they want to sell, because it loses a layer of authenticity once it becomes tied to the sale and tied to your brand and tied to this idea that you can overcome.
Sometimes authenticity looks like failure, and not the kind of failure that’s leveraged to continue selling you, but the kind that is just failure. Or that doesn’t have a clear Instagram caption tied to it. Sometimes there is some ambivalence about whether things are good or bad or helpful or not, and that’s what being human is about.
Being a brand, unfortunately – I mean, here’s the thing: a lot of us need it, because life is precarious, because jobs are precarious, because money is precarious, because wages are not keeping up with housing or inflation. I get it, and we’ve also internalized for the last 10+ years that this is the only way to make things work.
From my perspective, there’s a systems thing that needs to be changed, n a systemic level and not just something that we tweet about, but actual systems change, which requires activism and government interference. And I don’t mean coup. No coups, please. I mean like becoming a politician and doing that work, becoming a lobbyist, or whatever it is you have to do. People who have that kind of skill or leverage, go for it.
Things have to be changed from a policy level and just us taking that personal initiative to be – it’s not just about being slightly more authentic and slightly more human on the internet, on an individual level. There’s that part of the awareness, but then there’s also a systems change, like an entire mindset shift that we have to do on a social level as well.
01:27:25
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I know we chatted a lot about the entrepreneurship side of it or the economic side of it, but not as much on the body part of it or brand and the wellness side of things. Let’s start to chat a bit more about that side of things. I’m going to leave that open, and you can go in whatever direction, and then I can have questions off the back.
Kaila Tova: It’s funny – you and I were talking about this a little bit before we started recording, but I’ve found it really interesting that people are resonating most with the conversation about body before brand in my podcast, which is called Your Body, Your Brand.
People are most interested in hearing about Health at Every Size and fat phobia and the ways in which selling wellness is not so great, and may be less interested in me going on a rant about neoliberal feminism. Which is understandable. [laughs]
But I do think that the body part of it is particularly interesting, because even though there are other kinds of gigs and other kinds of brands – people are selling business stuff and relationship advice and all kinds of other things on the internet. They’re not just selling wellness. But I find wellness to be a particularly ripe area for case studies because of the ways in which we tie value to our bodies, because of the ways in which wellness is so prioritized in our culture.
It’s interesting because I know that right now, the zeitgeist is really leaning heavily towards fat acceptance and Health at Every Size, but even a few years ago that wasn’t the case. I don’t know what it will be in the next few years, but I do know that wellness seems to be one of those things that is perennial and won’t really go away.
Chris Sandel: And it will then just shift. It was clean eating; now it’s wellness through keto or carnivore or whatever, and it will just pop up in different ways or different guises, but it’s still about health as a moral thing that you need to do, or looking after your body, and how I can teach you how to do that. It’s the same thing, but we’re just using different words or creating different demons as part of it.
Kaila Tova: Yeah. It’s actually really interesting – I mentioned I’m taking a class called Food and Power in the history department right now, and we just read a book called The Organic Profit written by Andrew Case, who I am going to reach out to and be like “thank you for writing this book.” It’s about Rodale and the start of the publication company that is now the company behind Men’s Health and Women’s Health, Runner’s World, Prevention, all of those.
But it’s so funny because reading that book made me realize all of the stuff that I rail against on the internet, all of the “health nut” conversations about – it’s not quite anti-science; it’s like anti-doctor, but “using science to prove the points that I want to prove” kind of deal – that’s been going on since like 1942. Maybe earlier. It’s just that people were doing it by writing letters to the editor and forming small health clubs in their communities based on the stuff they read in this one magazine. Now it’s happening at scale here, through the internet and more globally.
But this impulse to prove that you’re healthy and to be pure and organic and clean and whatever version of it you want to call – we’re literally just doing the same thing that happened like two generations ago. We think that right now – and this was literally me till last week – we’re living in this particularly special time where this is a problem. I will say that yes, it is more widespread, more accessible, and a little bit I would say more dangerous, because we’ve now added self-quant apps and different ways to keep each other accountable to these lifestyles that were never available before, and especially not available at scale.
But this has been going on for years. Years and years and years and decades and decades and decades. This obsession with wellness as a way of proving one’s purity or goodness or cleanness or “I know something you don’t know” – it’s almost overwhelming, when you think about it from a historical scale, how this seems to just be a thing we do. That doesn’t make it a good thing. It’s just that there’s a class of people who have the means to purchase organic food or follow a certain lifestyle because they have the time or the help or the money, and they can use that as a way to leverage their own privilege, I guess, over other people.
01:33:15
Chris Sandel: When you look at the stats around this, is it skewing pretty much the majority of it, or predominantly, white, middle class, etc.? Are there many people who are of lower socioeconomics who are getting into becoming health coaches? Or is that not happening? Or if they’re getting into it, they’re getting into it more at the MLM/multilevel marketing side of things as opposed to doing the more personal brand stuff?
Kaila Tova: That’s a really great question. Again, there aren’t stats on it that I’ve been able to find, so I can’t give you numbers. However, I would say that MLMs do have a tendency to target lower – it’s interesting; there are people in higher socioeconomic classes that they will target because they have networks of people who will definitely spend money, and then there are people in lower socioeconomic communities and also marginalized communities specifically that they’ll target because they need an extra way to make money.
I’m trying to remember which podcast I heard this on, but they were discussing specifically in Latinx communities how MLM becomes this really dangerous and insidious scourge that comes in and takes advantage of people.
Chris Sandel: There’s a documentary called Betting on Zero. I can’t remember – I’m going to probably mess up what I’m going to say here, but someone bought a whole heap of stock or some kind of stock. I don’t know how you do it, but basically –
Kaila Tova: Oh, Herbalife, right?
Chris Sandel: Herbalife, yeah. Basically, if they then crashed and the company goes under, the person who had bought this derivative or whatever it is then make a huge amount of money off of that. They then created this documentary about how bad Herbalife was and how it was hurting so many people, and there was a real focus as part of that on Latin communities and how they had been done over by Herbalife.
Kaila Tova: Yeah. Herbalife is one of the worst offenders. Especially the diet MLMs. God, they’re just so bad. But yeah, when you think about health coaching, there’s no stats on this that I’ve been able to find because it is such a weird and dispersed – and because it’s not through a company, so they’re not reporting on their finances or their membership or anything to keep the FTC at bay.
I don’t know how to do that work except to do kind of a meta-analysis of the internet, which seems like it’s going to be a big job. But what happens is a lot of what gets replicated is middle class whiteness. On my podcast, I did my best to reach out to women of color and to queer people to hear what their experiences with this were, and their stories are all pretty similar in terms of “this didn’t work, but I thought it was going to.”
It’s awful because I think for people who are really struggling, like in food deserts and stuff like that, I don’t think that this health coaching thing even crosses their mind as a “this is the next logical step.” But I do think for people who are lower middle class, seeing middle and upper middle class people who are modeling this version of success seems like a good way to get to the middle or upper middle class.
Which is doubly exploitative if you are then pouring money in – “spend money to make money” – if you’re pouring money in to build a business with very little chance of doing it quick and in a way that will provide you with a real return on investment, especially if you don’t have help.
Part of what I’m interested in doing for future seasons of my podcast is talking to people, because unfortunately, since I don’t think there’s an easy way to do a meta-analysis of the internet – and my area of focus is not communication science, so it’s less data-driven and more critique and analysis-driven – I am, however, interested in doing ethnography and understanding this from the level of story, from the level of lived experience.
So while it’s not a broad pronouncement, like “everyone in a lower socioeconomic class doesn’t do this and does it this way,” I’m more interested in hearing how this actually affects people.
If there are any listeners – I don’t really care what class you’re from or what your heritage is or whatever; I’m just interested in talking to anyone who’s willing to talk to me about this. I want to hear people’s stories. I want to hear both the successes and the failures, and I want to hear the ways in which this can be exploitative, not just financially, but also emotionally. How businesses take over people’s lives. How the promises from business coaches fall through.
I think what happens is a lot of us get trapped in this idea that “if it fails, it’s my fault.” Which in some instances, of course. Sometimes you screw up and you don’t do the right things or whatever. Sure. I’m not going to say that any failure is never your fault.
But I think there’s this idea that – and this is the same thing for both business and wellness, by the way – “If this magic prescription doesn’t work for you the way it did for me as your coach, then it must be your fault. You did it wrong. I’m correct that this will work, so if you don’t succeed, whether it’s at weight loss or at curing your autoimmune disease or becoming a faster runner or getting into the CrossFit games or starting a health coaching business, if you don’t succeed the way I succeeded because I’ve set this arbitrary standard of success, then it just must be your fault. Because I’ve worked with other people and they’ve made it work, so why can’t you do it?”
01:40:10
Chris Sandel: I think part of where I see you pointing the podcast towards and why you think it’s such a problem is because what’s being sold to people is pretty much disordered eating.
I think it’d be one thing if you were like, “I think what these people are selling is really good and really beneficial, and on the whole it’s doing a really good job” – yeah, we could have chats around the economics and that not everyone’s going to survive and that’s a problem. But it would be less of an issue. But when you’re like, “but I don’t believe any of what they’re selling,” I think that’s also a big part of it.
Kaila Tova: Yeah. Actually, Episode 5 of the podcast, which is out now, is all about that. I think part of the problem with this health coaching thing is that it also allows people with eating disorders to mask their disorder by being called healthy and having people give them social capital for that “health.”
Also being able to say “if other people have given me capital, then it must be that I’m not sick.” They’re masking their eating disorder by being called healthy, the way I did for 13 years. I’m mad that nobody kicked me in the shins and said “Quit it!” [laughs] When I was like, “Oh, no, I can’t have XYZ food because XYZ reason,” that was all made-up rules. But anyway, there’s that side of it.
And then also, a lot of these behaviors that we’ve just internalized as healthy for years are disordered to begin with, and they reinforce disordered behavior. Dieting behavior, restricting behavior. Specifically elimination diet style eating, like Whole30, all of that. Keto, intermittent fasting. Any of those things reinforce disordered behavior in people who do not have eating disorders.
So even if they are not mentally ill in the same way that somebody who receives a diagnosis of anorexia and requires some kind of intervention, even if they’re not necessarily mentally ill, the behavior is reinforced as healthy, so they continue practicing it even though it may be actually emotionally and physically damaging to them.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. As you’re talking about this, I keep thinking of this Father John Misty lyric of “How’s this for irony? Their idea of being free is a prison of beliefs.”
Kaila Tova: Yeah. Oh my God, yes. That’s exactly what it is. Episode 6 is called “A Cage with the Bars Labeled ‘Freedom’.” That was a quote from Pace Smith, who was featured on the episode. Pace is a Pathfinding coach, and we were discussing brand as a cage with the bars labeled “freedom.”
But, even as we discussed almost two hours ago, when we were talking about me being paleo, that was the first time I felt free to eat in years, since I was a child, basically. But it was still a cage. It was still a prison of beliefs. You’re absolutely right. It kept me from fully growing, even though I got a little bit more room to move around in my cage, if that makes sense.
01:43:45
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think the final thing I want to ask is – I’m not going to be shutting down my business. I like doing what I’m doing.
Kaila Tova: [laughs] Good. Don’t.
Chris Sandel: I guess it’s like – and maybe you don’t have the answer to this yet, or maybe you do – how can I or people within this industry be doing better in terms of their marketing, how they brand, how they speak? I know I’m probably asking a ridiculously big question that should’ve been asked at the beginning of the two hours, but any parting thoughts?
Kaila Tova: That is the question, isn’t it? I think until we have a systems change, I’m not sure on the individual level there’s a specific thing that you can do that’s going to fix it for everybody.
But I do think being honest about – even just having this conversation right now and you saying “I had help. I had a decade of hard work. This isn’t a side hustle, this isn’t a get-rich-quick. And I’m willing to be challenged on my beliefs.” Leaving yourself open to learning new things I think is great, and not building your brand around your identity. Go for it.
Also being honest about what this is. If this is a business, this isn’t your personal brand. This isn’t your get-rich-quick scheme. You have a specific reason for being here. People who think that this is a great business plan who really do want to invest the time and the money to build this, I don’t want people to feel discouraged and not want to help people, because I also think that that’s dangerous. If we all stop helping each other, that’s probably bad too.
But I think we need to be doing it consciously and honestly, and with as much authenticity as we can possibly do without performing it, if that makes sense. Not performing that authenticity for the social capital to get more people to trust you and like you and buy from you, but rather just to be honest and say “if this is something you’re really considering, this is how this works.”
I think the other part of it is looking for alternative business models, building collectives and ways in which we support one another. If we’re not thinking about just building individual businesses and we do want to help people, some of that comes from building collectives, from creating opportunities to bring other people up with us or to help one another.
Especially for people who identify as female and who maybe don’t have as much privilege in certain senses or who come from different socioeconomic classes, who don’t have a side job or don’t have a parent with a couple extra bucks or a spouse or whatever. How do we build things together, so it’s not about me being a brand, but about us building a collective business that collectively supports and encourages and provides?
That’s really utopian and idealistic, and I recognize that. But I think it’s also important to be utopian and radically realist. I think that this isn’t going to be fixed overnight, and I think that there’s a lot that needs to happen at the governmental level to change the ways in which we interact with the world. But I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen.
So looking for alternative business models. Being honest and authentic in a nonperformative way. And if you do want to do this hard work, do it. But don’t do it to be about yourself.
Chris Sandel: I know you said earlier all brand is performance, or all authenticity is performance, and I agree with you. But I would say for me, what has worked fairly well is what people see online and what happens in my real life, there is no difference. I’m not wearing a mask online, and then behind closed doors I’m doing something different.
That’s because I’m very lucky to be in a situation where I haven’t had an eating disorder. I’ve lived in a body that is accepted by society. I have all of these different privileges, but it then makes that job so much easier because I’m not having to play this mental game of trying to think of what would be the right thing to say here that’s different to what I’m currently doing. It’s just like what people see is what I’m genuinely like.
Kaila Tova: Yeah. In a lot of ways, sometimes that is what you have to do to be actually authentic. I just think that people hear that and stage that for people. So there’s a fine line, and sometimes it’s hard to find it.
I do think that for people who identify as women in the world, that authenticity has to be a little more performative because there are so many dangers to being called out and attacked on the internet for just existing. There is almost more of – as Kelly Diels says on the podcast, “All women are brands to begin with.”
But yeah, it’s a conversation I think we just need to keep having because I don’t have all the answers. I don’t want to pretend to be the expert, because then that makes me the branded expert of personal brand, and that’s not true. I’m not an expert. I’m learning, and I want people to understand that. That’s why I keep saying I don’t have this research yet. I’m still figuring out what rhetoric even means, and what is a text. I’m learning. I want to keep learning. I want to stay open to the idea that there are things I don’t know.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I also know I’m seeing this through the lens of my lived experience as a guy and who has gone through certain things in his life, so that colors my perspective on things.
Kaila Tova: Yeah. But we can learn from each other too, and I think that that’s important, and having these conversations is important. I don’t know. I’m leaving everyone at a place of severe ambivalence, but if it’s got you thinking about any of this, then I feel like I’ve done my part for today and I’ll keep working on it tomorrow. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Perfect. If people are wanting to hear more of this kind of stuff, where should they be going? Any social media? Tell people.
Kaila Tova: I hate being a personal brand. I also hate using social media. But if you do want social media stuff, you can connect with me anywhere on social media @bodybrandpod. On Facebook, Your Body, Your Brand. Twitter, @bodybrandpod. Instagram, @bodybrandpod.
I’m going to be honest; if you comment, I’ll comment back, but I’m not putting out memes of how to feel better about yourself all day because I’m in school. On Twitter, I mostly just post about how frustrated I am with capitalism and wellness, so that’s probably the best place to connect with me social media-wise.
But really, I encourage you to listen to the podcast. It’s at https://bodybrandpod.com if you want to it on the internet, read the show notes, whatever, find the reading list. Otherwise, on any podcast platform, I’m everywhere. It’s Your Body, Your Brand.
Then I also really like email and voicemail, so if you want to record a voice memo for me to tell me your story or your thoughts or your feedback – or your disagreement, even – I’m cool with that. Or just type it out. I don’t care either way. That’s just yourbodyyourbrand@gmail.com. Those are the ways to get in touch.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put all those in the show notes. Thank you so much for this. It was such a great conversation.
Kaila Tova: Yeah, thank you. This was fun.
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