Cara Familian Natterson, Physician to Puberty Influencer

 

Cara Natterson

SPEAKERS

Cara Natterson, Will Bachman,

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Will Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m so happy to be here today with Cara Natterson, who some of you may have known in college as Cara Familian Kara. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Will happy to be here. So Cara, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Cara Natterson  00:27

Well, I left Harvard and I moved to New York City, where I worked at a drug rehabilitation center called Phoenix House, and I I was on a gap year. It wasn’t called a gap year. Then it was called, not sure I wanted to go to medical school, but now it’s called a gap year. And I I finished up in New York and then moved down to Baltimore, where I went to Johns Hopkins Medical School. Spent four years there, and then headed back west. I was born and raised in LA. Frankly, my only goal in life was to not live in LA, and I am currently podcasting from LA, so you’ll see how well that worked out. But, but I ended up training at UCSF in San Francisco, and then moving down to Los Angeles to practice pediatrics. Okay? And tell me a bit about the steps along the way. Yeah. So

 

Cara Natteron  01:29

I started practicing in a large group practice in Santa Monica ended up taking care of a bunch of people from Harvard. Actually had a really nice reconnection with with a bunch of people when I was in practice and I on my I got I got married and and had two kids pretty quickly after going into practice. And it was really a funny constellation of events that ended up determining the rest of my professional course. When I first joined my practice, one of my partners had just signed a publishing contract for a book, and he said to me, Well, you went to Harvard, and you seem smart. So here read my manuscript and tell me what you think of it. So I read his manuscript, and honestly, I thought, wow, if he can write that book, I could write books. And I literally started writing a book the next day. I was all of 31 years old. I had never trained to be a writer, and I knew nothing about what I was doing, but, but I wrote a book, I sold the book, and I ended up spending my time in practice, sort of juggling this secret writing career where I published a couple books and and by the time my kids were two and four, practice was practice was becoming a little untenable. I was working crazy hours. I’m married to a cardiologist who was working crazy hours. We were outsourcing all the care of our kids to people who were loving and wonderful, but it felt too ironic as pediatrician, so I decided to leave clinical medicine and become a full time writer, and I did that in 2008 and then in 2011 had the lucky stroke of speaking down at Mattel, the toy company in LA and very shortly thereafter, I signed on to write the body book series from American Girl. And American girl has a series of books called the Care and Keeping of You. The very first book came out in 1998 while I was a resident my very first day of work, my partners told me about the book and said, if you haven’t read it, you have to read it, because you’ll tell every family about it. And in 2011 I signed on to update that book and to roll out a series. We have five books in the series, including two boy books, the only boy products from American Girl and we have something like, I don’t know, maybe 8 million in in print at this point. I mean, it’s bananas. It was, it was not. I did not see that coming, frankly. And from there, I ended up touring around the country. And now my own kids are in puberty, and you can imagine what it’s like having your mom be the puberty book person when you’re in puberty, that’s no fun. It’s even less fun having her teach your sex ed. That’s what I did, too, but, but I started touring the country, and what became very, very clear to me very fast was that there were all these little books like mine and other wonderful books out there, but there was nothing else. There was nothing else for kids whose bodies were changing and brains were changing and their feelings were changing and their friends were changing. And so that’s when I discovered I was an entrepreneur, and I launched a company that is called less awkward, and I started with direct to consumer products. I made. Bras that actually worked, that were soft and made girls feel comfortable as their bodies were changing. Then I decided, well, puberty happens to everyone. So we launched socks that don’t smell. I think that’s going to be my life saving contribution to the universe, socks that don’t smell, and shorts that are loose and airy and breathable, so they’re functionally antifungal. And for a while, I was just a direct to consumer brand, and then ended up rolling out a bunch of content channels on social media, started podcasting, writing a newsletter, another book, and just in the past year, have rolled all of those channels into two platforms. One’s a health and sex ed curriculum for schools. We’re live in three states already, and we’re haven’t even been live for a year, and then we have all the same content available in a membership so that parents and trusted adults can get all the information they need. And everything is very short form and very funny, very relatable, but it’s also not necessarily available through government websites anymore. You can’t get this information anymore, so people can get it from us. So that’s my journey. It was not a straight line. Okay, so you have worked at a nonprofit like the drug rehab, you’ve been to medical school, you’ve been a physician, you have written books, you’ve been an entrepreneur, and you’ve also done podcasts. Kara, I’m just a little disappointed that you haven’t been to law school, because if you had, you had basically encapsulated our entire class in one person. You’ve done everything. So have to put law school on the list.

 

Will Bachman  06:44

I mean, okay, wow. There is a lot to dive into here. Wow. What a journey, fun ride. You know, you never know. It’s been great. An influencer, a puberty influencer,

 

Cara Natterson  07:00

wow. I mean, why don’t you start by telling us some things about puberty, that those of us who are of our age, right, we’re not taught in school that maybe we should have been, that you are, you know, you’re providing the gouge now to to young people. What are some of the things that you know, that you that people find most helpful, that you’re sharing about this whole period in life, some fun facts well about puberty. Well, let’s start with this. When we all went through it, the average age for girls to enter puberty was 11, and the average age for boys was 11 and a half. And today, the average age for girls is between eight and nine, and the average age for boys is between nine and 10 and less. Do you think it’s going faster? It is not. It is going slower. We all went through it in a sprint of three to four years, and now it takes almost a decade. So that’s a that’s a fun conversation starter right there. When you think about second and third and fourth graders, they’re all in it. And you know, sometimes the first sign is breast budding, sometimes the first sign is testicular growth, but frankly, most of the time, the first sign is a slamming door. So anyone who has a kid who’s seven or eight or nine or 10, yeah, that’s your sign you’re looking for. And you know, these kids today, they’re growing up in a world that’s obviously very, very different than the world we grew up in. So, you know, there’s a lot to be said about devices and phones, and we can have that conversation if we want. But I think the most interesting fact, and this is a humongous driver of what I do and the conversations that any trusted adult should have, so parent, family member, coach, mentor, healthcare provider, educator, doesn’t matter how you connect with kids if you wear any of those hats, you should know that the average age of first porn exposure in this country is 12, that 15% of 10 year olds have seen porn. And so if we’re not talking about bodies and body parts and sex, they’re getting educated elsewhere. And that’s not the education that most people want the kids in their lives to have. It’s, you know, we’re not talking about like ethical paywall porn. We’re talking about free porn, and that free porn is generally violent and aggressive and not the sex any adult wants the kid in their life to have. So it’s time to shed all the awkwardness. I mean it literally. That’s why the company is called less awkward, because, like, you gotta get over it and just shed it, because gotta be in conversations with kids about all this stuff.

 

Will Bachman  09:48

Tell me about the launching your product company. Like, what was that process? Like, first conceiving of it, and then, yeah, like, what was the first moves? How did you source. Manufacturers Walk, walk us through that story. Yeah, so,

 

Cara Natterson  10:06

so I’ll start here. I went to medical school one year at a time. I was not the person who thought I would go to medical school and complete medical school. I was a person who thought medical school sounded really interesting, but I wasn’t sure it was for me. And I say that because it turns out that I’m probably more of a creative and the the direct to consumer product business checked all these boxes for me that I hadn’t realized I wanted to have checked. So I was touring around the country with American Girl and and I got a call from a friend of mine who said, hey, where do you get your daughter bras? And I said, Well, I don’t get her bras because they’re all horrible. They’re just like garbage. So you know she’s fine without one. And my friend said, Actually, I know your daughter, your daughter needs a bra. So my mom is a sewer, and my mom made one that’s actually comfortable and that works, and can I show it to you? Will you tell me if it’s healthy? That was her question. So she comes over, and our two daughters didn’t really know each other, and they had a little playdate. This was fourth grade. My daughter is now a junior at Harvard, and this one, she was in fourth grade and and the girls emerged from the playdate an hour later, and they just declare their best friends. Why are they best friends? Because there are two of them, and there’s only one of these bras, and they both want and I was like, there is something special about this garment. So I partnered with that woman, and we developed, over many, many years, a product, I made every mistake in the book. I had no idea what I was doing. I ended up finding an incredible team of, you know, designers and sourcers and all these people who could pull it together, because this is an area I know nothing about. I just understood the physiology, right? I understood that girls wanted these very pesky breast buds to go away and to be hidden because the whole world sees them. But if you bind a chest, that’s not the healthiest way to grow and develop. So how could you help girls feel comfortable and actually do it in a healthy way? And we figured it out, we patented and we put this product to market, and we were ready to launch in March of 2020. It took a long time. We already launched in March of 2020, and of course, you know that story. So what we did is we took the bra, which sort of looks a little bit like a sports bra in style, and that also looks a little bit like a face mask, go with me on this, and we found material that we could adhere to the inside that was filter material. And we actually launched the company in the beginning of COVID as a mask company, and we started our distribution and production channels doing masks instead of bras. We figured out that whole deal, and then six months later, we launched bras, and it was a great way to do it, because we could, you know, everything about what I do in life is trying to do well and do good at the same time. And that felt like the perfect combination. Okay, and then how about just the, you know, tell us about the team that you pulled together to, you know, put make a, I don’t know, Shopify store, and do the digital marketing, and do the, all the, you know, all the branding images, yeah, talk us through the whole process. Yeah. I mean, it’s a it’s a process. And, you know, I used to think I was an introvert. I think this process has taught me I’m an introverted extrovert, because I like my alone time, but I need people. I didn’t have any of these skills. And the one thing I learned in medical school, the paradigm through which I see all of life, is nowhere to look for answers, right? And know when to say I don’t know. And that is what has served me the best in terms of building this team. So I started by finding a designer tried a few, a few were not fits, found the right one, who was an incredible team member from there, found a place to manufacture our material, actually, in Los Angeles, which was kind of incredible, because it was local to us, and we were able to support a local factory when things were shutting down over COVID, and then, through a bunch of happenstance, ended up finding a woman who runs all of our production and distribution, who’s on the east side of La she she is so Cool, she has a brand that that’s her own brand, that is cycling clothes, but they’re not cycling clothes that you would wear like while you were racing on a bike. They’re cycling clothes. They’re sort of athleisure for people who ride bicycles and then jump off the bicycle and go to work or go. Out. And so they are these, like, unbelievable, it’s all menswear, and they’re unbelievably technical. And she’s, she is just a really thoughtful, skillful person. And she was like, What’s the opposite of menswear? It’s puberty wear. I’ll do that. And she and I have been partnered now for five years, and she’s really been the glue that holds the whole production team together, because I spend about 10 or 15% of my time on the consumer product, and I spend about 85 or 90% of my time creating content and and content channels. And so she really runs the production side of things. And she’s amazing. She’s a great innovator, and I love working with her.

 

Will Bachman  15:44

Tell us a bit more. Let’s get into more detail about all of those content channels. Maybe first, just maybe name your different podcasts or different video, different things you produce. Sure. So

 

Cara Natterson  15:58

our podcast used to be called the puberty podcast. It is now called This is so awkward the podcast that’s just because people are really unclear about how long puberty stretches. And frankly, it’s the awkwardness that draws people in. Anyways. My podcasting partner is a woman named Vanessa Kroll Bennett. She and I met. She lives in New York, and she and I met through a mutual friend. She taught puberty classes in New York and was coming out to LA to do at her she’s very funny. Her brother is the comedian Nick Kroll and and it’s a familial trait. And so we ended up hitting it off and and starting this podcast, and we drop two episodes a week, which will given what you’re doing. You know what a heavy lift that is, but it’s fun. It’s amazing. We give we do lots of background episodes where we walk people through little corners of puberty, and then we do a ton of guested episodes with experts from all over. So that’s, this is so awkward, awkward. The podcast we, the two of us, put out a book in October of 2023 called This is so awkward. Aptly named, this is so awkward. It was actually my 10th title. It was Vanessa’s first it was so fun to write with someone, I can’t even tell you how much fun that was. And that book, The subtitle is modern puberty explained, and it walks through how puberty has changed, and then kind of part by part, what’s going on, how to talk about it. And then there are these essays written by kids just out the other side, talking about their cringy experiences with acne or first period or first heartbreak. They’re amazing essays so that that’s, that’s sort of the latest book, if you will. Our social channels, we’re on Instagram and Tiktok at less dot awkward. We used to be spilling the puberty, which I was very proud of that name, but you can see that we’re consolidating the brand now, so everything is under the less awkward banner, and and our website is less awkwarddotcom where all of that content is housed on the less awkward hub and and then we have this school based health and sex ed curriculum that is called that health class, because it is, I mean, because,

 

Will Bachman  18:37

and what, what do doctors pediatricians not know about puberty that they should? Yeah, so let

 

Cara Natterson  18:50

me just start by saying I love pediatricians. They’re generally amazing people. They are kind. They have enormous hearts. They are overwhelmed right now the world is so much more complicated than it ever has been, and so much more information is getting delivered, not just to the doctors, but also to the patients. And there’s a lot to be weighted through. There’s also much more access to a lot, whether it’s digital content, or nicotine, or whatever the substance of the day is. Kids are, you know, you can, you can order a lot online, and parents have a lot of trouble running interference. There are, there are, there are privacy gates around kids lives and and it’s very hard for not just parents, but also healthcare providers, to sometimes penetrate those when kids will have, you know, a social media account that’s public, and then a secret social media account where they’re communicating with their friends. So the amount of data and worry and overwhelm coming pediatricians, way is it’s really. Really hard to describe. And, you know, they’re, they’re still taking care of all the asthmatics who are wheezing, and they’re putting stitches in deep cuts, and they’re, you know, trying to convince kids to put on helmets and seat belts and then all this other stuff, which is a long way of saying, the changes in puberty aren’t at the top of the list for a lot of pediatricians. This is not, this is not something that pediatricians. They see it in their office. They know that second and third graders are in puberty. A lot of them like by fourth grade. Half of them, right. They see it. But how much time and bandwidth they have to give to these topics, especially what we call anticipatory guidance, kind of getting in front of the things that are coming, instead of dealing with the things that kids are trying to manage. That it’s really hard for them, especially, I mean, we’ve got a mental health crisis among kids. They these pediatricians are often the first line of defense against anxiety and depression. So so they don’t know a lot, but it’s not because they don’t want to. It’s because their bandwidth. I mean, they’re only 24 hours in a day. You can only read so much or listen to so many podcasts or talk to so many people, and so one thing that’s been pretty interesting is that our content, we trained an AI bot on all of our content, and it turns out the pediatricians are starting to point to it as a healthcare solution, that when they don’t have the time to give an answer to a family or to anticipate what’s coming, they can point people to our bot, and it’s reliable because it’s gated and it’s only trained on good data, and it’s funny. I mean, you have to be you can’t be Debbie Downer and all these conversations, because no one will engage in them. So there’s a levity to it, there’s a warmth to it that we worked really hard to train, and pediatricians are starting to use it, which is really fun, by

 

Will Bachman  21:59

the way. I meant to ask you earlier, what do we know? Doctors know why puberty is happening now, like three to two years earlier than it used to. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the data is not new. The data actually started rolling out in 1997

 

Cara Natterson  22:18

the first study was published, and that amazingly in a full circle moment, that is why the first American Girl body book came out. The the founder of American Girl read the same New York Times story that everyone else did in 1997 saying, girls are entering puberty earlier. And she went to her team and said, Oh, this is our buyer. These are the girls who buy our dolls. So let’s write a book for them. And that was the beginning of this series, which is fascinating. So that data in 1997 said the average age had moved from 11 to 10. And then a follow up study that was published in 2010 said, No, it’s not 10. It’s now between eight and nine, and the answer to why is under heavy investigation, but really it boils down to a couple of different things. So one is stress. Stress in the body causes cortisol surges, and it looks like cortisol and other stress hormones either go into the brain and tip the brain to release its hormones, LH and FSH, that tip a body into puberty, or they those stress hormones work directly on the ovaries or the testicles, and have them start surging their hormones, estrogen and testosterone, and those hormones then sort of start a backwards they’re sort of like a back end into telling the brain, wait a second. Here. You got to get on board. And here puberty should begin. Stress comes in a lot of forms. So there are things called aces, adverse childhood experiences. These are significant stressors that are measured by social scientists all the time now, things like being bearing witness to trauma or drug abuse, not having a stable home, not having a regular supply of food so financial insecurity, food insecurity, kids who are abused Have these adverse childhood experiences. And if you there’s a list of several of them, and if you have a certain number, your risk of entering puberty early goes up. And so this makes good sense, because if you think about it, evolutionarily, the human body is meant to reproduce before it’s done. And so the idea is, put your foot on the gas and get to reproductive maturity so that you can reproduce before the life is over, at least. That’s sort of what the general stress response. Evolutionary theory is about earlier development, you know. So that’s one. Bucket. Another is antibiotics. This is an amazing bucket. It’s not the antibiotics that people take for ear infections or strep throat, it’s all the antibiotics that’s used to manage our food supply. So it’s the antibiotics that are given to poultry, and, you know, all the animals that are then ending up in our diet or in our food chain, those antibiotics have, they trickle down through the the food chain, um, including, sort of there, there are studies that look at cows grazing and manure and then plants being harvested where there’s exposure. And ultimately, the The belief is that those antibiotics change either change the microbiome in our guts, or that they introduce a cascade of inflammation in our guts, which changes the microbiome. And either way, that shift is altering the hormonostat, as we call it, like the way hormones are balanced. And that should that is looking like it is a driver of earlier puberty. There’s a woman named Louise Greenspan who wrote a book called The New puberty came out in 2014 it’s amazing. And she’s doing a lot of this work and looking into antibiotics, so she’s she’s pretty incredible. Just

 

Will Bachman  26:22

getting back to your content creation, Ira Glass, who’s the producer of This American Life. I once saw him give a talk, and he said that to produce a good radio show, you should first produce 500 bad episodes, right? And so I’m curious what’s been your journey with content creation. It sounds like you’re really on a roll now. What was it like getting started? Was there a period of experimentation where you sort of found your voice and format and style? Oh my. Well, I’ve done plenty of bad writing, lots of it. I actually tried writing a novel once. That was how it’s big mistake.

 

Cara Natterson  27:06

I’ve, you know, I’ve learned as I’ve gone so plenty of dud podcast episodes, for sure. If you ever want to see lack of success, just start posting on social media and seeing how that goes because the world tells you when you’re failing. And so, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of that. The the way I see what we’re doing at this point is I used to not know who my audience was, right, because I go into schools and I talk to kids, or I used to be in the office, and I was taking care of the kids. So my my fantasy is that the kids are my primary audience. But the reality, and this has been clear to me for a long time now, is that kids, whether they’re my own or someone else’s, yeah, they like hearing from someone who has a degree, right? They understand the validity of that information or that that sort of that gate, but honestly, they would rather get their information from someone who is just out the other side. A 14 year old is much more influenced on a certain level by an 18 or 21 year old influencer than they are necessarily by a pediatrician they’re going to see once a year. And so what we do now is we do a lot of direct content to be passed along to kids, but we really are content for the adults, for the parents and trusted adults, educators, healthcare providers, and then we are the We Are the voice in the ear of younger voices who can go direct to consumer to the kids. So on our social media channel, we have these man on the street interviews, and it’s a 21 year old asking 1819, 20 year olds about the most embarrassing puberty experience they ever had. If I asked that question, it would not land. But when a 21 year old is asking it, not only does it land, but those are the videos that go viral, right and and by the way, you can’t believe what people will share. It’s amazing. It’s amazing.

 

Will Bachman  29:16

We gotta check that out. How do you How did the demographics of your listeners breakdown in terms of male female.

 

Cara Natterson  29:24

Shockingly, we thought it was gonna be all female. We have nearly 20% male listenership, which is apparently humongous in the parenting world. So that’s great. But you know, as long as I’ve been writing, I’ve been getting emails from dads saying, I don’t have the equipment, but I want to be able to talk to my daughter. So can you help me? And that’s, you know, I’ve been writing for 20 years. So this is not a new phenomenon that.

 

Will Bachman  30:00

That all parents, regardless of gender, want to be in on these conversations. They just need a garden path. Yeah. Well, I see that one of your books is decoding boys, the new science behind the subtle art of raising sons. Tell us about some things about raising sons that we should know some of us have have kids that are approaching this age. Yeah, nephews.

 

Cara Natterson  30:26

So I wrote this book because I have a daughter and a son, and my daughter in a very sort of stereotypical characterization, told me everything she was, like, I mean, I would use the word NARC, but that has a negative connotation. But like, I knew all the tea and my son was a very stereotypical male communicator through his tweens and teens, where I would get a grunt or a nod, if I was lucky and I’m out here, like doing this work, talk about failure, like all I do is talk about bodies and brains and open conversation and at home. How are you fine? And that’s it. You know, nothing more. So I wanted to understand if it was, and I knew it wasn’t just my kid, but I wanted to understand, like, what is it? What is driving that? And so I wrote decoding boys. Decoding boys basically argues that there is no data on the connection between testosterone and silence, but someone needs to go do those studies. There’s a lot of data on the connection between testosterone and rage, but the other side of that coin is what is so commonly seen among frankly, kids across the gender spectrum, which really you don’t have to be male to want to be silent and shut your parent out, but it’s so common among males in the especially in the tween years, and it’s not that they all go to just grunting, but the really talkative ones tend to get less talkative, and the barely talkative ones tend to retreat and Go silence. Some of it is socialization, for sure. It’s the way we tell males in our society to be masculine, which, I think that narrative is being rewritten in a really good way right now by a lot of people who are trying really hard, but a lot of it feels chemical and and my my book was about, no one knows exactly why, but this is the reality. So what do you do about it? Like, how do you actually connect with and have a conversation with a tween or teen boy in your life? Because it turns out here’s a dirty little secret. They want to talk. They really do. The girls do too. Kids want to talk. They want a trusted adult, and it’s just, they just may want to do it on different terms or in different ways, or not with deep eye contact in a, you know, meaningful kumbaya moment, but they really do want to share and connect. And the question is, how do you get them to do that when the their internal chemistry and the world around them is working at odds with it? Yeah, what are some tips for that? Oh, well, I shared a lot of personal strategies. Like I used to go sit my son is now freshman in college. So this was, you know, he has a they emerge. They emerge. Well, like you and I are having this conversation, they emerge. But I used to go sit on this the other side of his closed door, and I would say, Hey, I’m here. I’m just hanging out on the other side of your closed door, and I’m gonna be here for like, 10 minutes. So if there’s anything you want to talk about, now is a great time, and you do not have to open the door. And that was actually how we started to get in a conversation, because he he did have things he wanted to talk about. He had no interest in looking me in the eye and making it a deep and meaningful moment like that was what I wanted. That was not what he wanted. And then we would, we evolved to I would go into his room, because he would leave the door open, which was an amazing step, and I would lay down on his bed. He’d be sitting at his desk doing his work or whatever. And I would lay down on his bed and look up at the ceiling and I would ask him a question, or he would just start talking his back to me, and it’s Vanessa and I had our sons. We had our two oldest kids on the podcast before they went to college, and then we had our two second borns, our sons on the podcast just this last fall as they. Were going to college, and I almost started crying because my son, rye told the story of how he learned to talk to me when I would just lay on his bed, and I didn’t look at him and I didn’t push him. And that worked for him, and so it made me feel very validated, because I always thought it was like my fantasy of creating the narrative of our relationship, and he’s like, no, no, it was. It was a good move, Mom, it worked. Wow. What’s a typical week look like for you? You know, kind of narrate us a typical calendar of of a week in terms of Yeah, creation and speaking and curriculum creation and yeah, socks selling. It’s not so. Vanessa lives in New York, so we spend the first half of every day on Zoom. Sort of my eight, 830 until noon or one. That’s zoom with Vanessa. And so we’ll record two podcast episodes a week. We will build curriculum together. We’ll write our newsletter together. We don’t outsource any of our content creation. So we’ll have conversations with heads of schools who are looking to put our curriculum into their school. We will meet with big thinkers, and look at collaborations. We just did one with Emily Oster, who’s an economist at Brown and she runs parent data. Emily Oster is amazing. She is hilariously funny, and she always says, I will cover everything from fertility all the way through the lifespan, except adolescents. You guys get that, and we’re like, we’ll take it, because she that is not her happy place. But she just did. She just guessed it on our in our newsletter, and did a piece about why it’s important to talk about fertility when you’re talking about reproductive health with kids, which is a topic no one ever talks about with kids, and it’s great. So so the days, I mean, every day is different, but the mornings are zoom, and then my afternoons are often one on one meetings. I will film a lot of social media videos, which I hate filming social media, I like, it’s like, nails on a chalkboard for me, Vanessa loves it. She’s like, woo. Let’s go. And I just drag my feet, drag my feet, drag my feet. So I do that in the afternoons. Yeah. I mean, literally, will there no two days are the same? Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  37:46

you seem to be having, you know, fun here in this, in this discussion, what is it different for you doing a social media video versus doing a live podcast? What, what? What’s what sort of is? Uh, so, so, yeah, disagreeable about the video piece. I mean, it’s, I don’t know I I’m just of, I think I’m of the wrong generation to be doing. I’m just staring at myself, you know, in in the camera, and I’m just sharing this information that sometimes feels like an amazing delivery and sometimes feels like bloviating and I never know, and you know, and it’s

 

Cara Natterson  38:24

I don’t know. I like connecting with people. I like hearing about their experiences. I like understanding their questions. And the social media of it all is very it’s unidirectional, and I personally thrive off of bi directional conversation and communication. I mean, once it’s out there, there’s a bi directionality to it. It’s not always nice, but, you know, people have a lot to say, and then you can choose to respond or not, but like the creation of that content, unless there’s someone filming me and it’s fun and it’s social and that I like, but when it’s just me and my phone, just, you know, you’re good at some things and you’re not good at other that is one I would say. I’m arguably not, you know, it’s, it’s a skill I’m I’m working on not great at it.

 

Will Bachman  39:25

Go back to school. Tell us a bit about any courses or professors at Harvard that continue to resonate with you.

 

Cara Natterson  39:33

Yeah, so this will probably not surprise you, given what I did with my career. I made up a major at Harvard, and I combined sociology and biological anthropology, which turns out to be basically what I do for a living, which is hilarious, because at the time, it made no sense that those two things would go together. And I.

 

40:00

Wrote

 

Cara Natterson  40:01

my junior paper. I mean, like it seems so obvious where my life ended up, but at the time, this did not seem obvious. I wrote my junior paper about Gen female genital mutilation in Africa, and I wrote my thesis about HIV prevention in teenagers in Boston suburbs, and I went to schools and I talked to kids about condom use. And it was right at the beginning of sort of, you know, HIV and AIDS had been around for several years at that point, but it was when, when they were starting to be some, some very well known celebrities who are coming out and disclosing their diagnoses and and it was, I have a very, very vivid memory of one of the schools that I went into to collect my data. And the kids taught me a lot I did not know. A lot of the things that they were telling me, which is, I think it’s to your last question, what do I like about conversation and not about social media? You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re in a conversation with someone, and when a when a 15 year old is teaching you about what breaks down a condom, and you’re like, Okay, I have a lot to learn. It was, it was an amazing experience. And my thesis advisor was Irv DeVore, who is this incredible biological anthropologist, and he just my, my most vivid memory was we would meet at lunch in his office. I would go into the that anthropology museum back behind the Science Center, and he he would take out his lunch, which was a cheese sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise. I’ll never forget it. And he would just sit and patiently eat his cheese sandwich while I would describe this slightly bananas thesis idea that I had. And he was very patient with me, and helped me fit it into sure that we could, we could say, this is bio Anthro. Let’s do that, and let’s figure out a way to make it work. And and he was just a he was a really interesting thinker, so that that is my the most. That was the most Sentinel relationship I had, and the most kind of important dynamic I had with a professor. So your path was set, but you just did not know it. I mean, I guess, right, it’s so funny. It’s so funny. Kara, where can listeners find you online, give us, give us some websites and some links. Yeah, and so social media less awkwarddotcom. Is the website, and on there you’ll see every content channel. So if you’re interested in learning about the school curriculum, there’s a curriculum tab if you want access to the whole hub of information. Right now, the tab says community, but it’s soon going to be called Essentials, so it’s all there, and there’s contact email link at the bottom, and you can email that way or on social less dot awkward. I also have a personal Instagram. Kara naderson, I am terrible on social media, including DMS and things like that, but I try, and I like getting them, so that’s a way to reach me. And yeah, and if you know, certainly, if you’re coming through LA I am here. I’m also on the road a lot so, so as I head to different cities, I try to get it out there on social where I’m going to be and when, but, but if anyone’s through, LA, I would love to hear from them. Amazing. Kara, thank you so much for joining today. Thanks so much. Will you.