Pleasure to be here today. So we're going to switch to the front end here and try and analyze what is it about these products, about these companies, that over the past few years, maybe the past five to 10 years, started out as toys, started out as nice to haves, started out as these products that everyone dismissed at first, and yet within the span of a few short years are touching the lives of hundreds of millions of users, if not billions of users, and making hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. So who am I talking about here? I'm talking about Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, and WhatsApp, and not just on the consumer web, but in the enterprise, companies like Slack. What is it about the design of these products and services? What is it about the user experience that makes them so habit-forming? Well, that's been the core of my study for the past several years. I read a book called Hooked, How to Build Habit-Forming Products. It's on Amazon for 14 bucks. If you don't have 14 bucks, no problem. You guys know where to pirate this kind of stuff. Just go get it somewhere. I don't care if you pay for it or not. We're going to do a kind of a brief overview today of how these products form habits in their users. So that we're all on the same page, let's make sure we define habits as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. Now this is about half of what you do every single day is done purely out of habit. These behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. And I believe that we are on the precipice of an age where we can use these habits for good, where we can help people live happier, healthier, more productive, more connected lives by designing these habits. Turns out that what is at the core of every single one of these companies that I just mentioned, what is at the core of their user experience is what's called a hook. A hook is an experience designed to connect the user's problem with your product, with your solution, with enough frequency to form a habit. Connecting the user's problem with your product with enough frequency to form a habit. Now it's through successive cycles through these hooks that our preferences are shaped, that our tastes are formed, and that our habits take hold. So we're gonna spend a few minutes and analyze how you build these hooks into your user experience. Hooks have four parts. A trigger, an action, a reward, and finally an investment. So we're gonna walk through these four basic steps. The first step of every hook is a trigger. And there are two types of trigger. The first type of trigger you'll be very familiar with. These are called external triggers.  Designers, product developers, PMs, we know all about these external triggers. This is our craft, this is what we do for a living. We make these buttons that say click here and buy now and play this. These are all examples of external triggers. We know all about these, right? We see them every day as users of these products. But what we don't think about enough and what turns out to be absolutely critical in forming these long-term habits is creating an association with what's called an internal trigger. An internal trigger prompts the user to action, tells us what to do next, but the information is not in the trigger itself. The information is in the user's brain. So what we do in response to being in a certain place, a certain situation, partaking in a certain routine around certain people, and most frequently when we experience certain emotions, tells us what to do next. Now, the most frequently occurring internal trigger are these emotions, but not just any emotion. They are specifically negative emotions, negative emotions. So what we do when we're feeling bored or lost or indecisive or lonely or fearful, what we do when we experience these negative emotions, prompts us to turn to our devices with little or no conscious thought. Now, there's a lot of studies that show this. One of my favorites was a study a few years ago that found that people suffering from depression check email more. I just saw three or four people put away their phones. What happened there? Why did this study conclude this? What did this study found? This study found that people suffering from clinical depression experience what psychologists call negative valence states. They felt down more frequently than the general population. What were they doing when they felt those negative emotions, when they felt those negative valence states? They were turning to their devices. They were going online. They were checking email more often than the rest of the population. But of course we all do this. You don't have to be clinically depressed. There is only one reason and one reason alone that people use any product or service. You know what that one reason is? To modulate their mood. To make them feel something different. Let me ask you, what website or app do you check when you're feeling lonely? Where do you go? Facebook, right? This guy said Tinder. Also true. Where do we go? Where do we go when we're feeling uncertain? When we're looking for the answer for something before we ask our brain if we know the answer, what are we doing? We Google it, right? And what about when we're feeling bored? You know between two and four o'clock in the afternoon you have that big project you don't feel like working on right now. Where do you go? You go to Reddit. You check New York Times. You check stock prices. You look at sports scores. You look at YouTube. You check out what's happening in the news. All of these products and services are triggered. They cater to this uncomfortable feeling of boredom. And before our brain understands why we are on these sites, why we are checking these apps, we're already on them. So if you're building the kind of product or service that you want to turn into a habit, that you want people to turn to with little or no conscious thought, you have to be able to articulate what is that frequently occurring itch that prompts a user to find relief with your product or service? That's what the internal trigger, that's what the trigger phase is all about. After we've defined our triggers, the next step of the hook is the action phase. The action phase is defined as the simplest behavior done in anticipation of a reward. The simplest behavior the user can do to get some kind of relief from that itch, from that psychological pain they experience in that internal trigger phase. Now, this is something as simple as scrolling on Pinterest or a quick search on Google or simply what could be easier than pushing the play button on YouTube. These incredibly simple behaviors done in anticipation of an immediate reward. Turns out there's actually a formula to help us predict the likelihood of these singular behaviors. It comes to us from a psychologist at Stanford by the name of BJ Fogg. And Fogg tells us that for any human behavior B, any human behavior B, we need three things to occur. We need the user to have sufficient motivation. We need the user to have sufficient ability. Ability is how easy or difficult the behavior is to do. And the trigger must be present. We just talked all about triggers. Let's talk about motivation and ability. Motivation is the energy for action, how much I want to do a particular behavior. Now, when it comes to user motivation, there's only six factors that we can use to increase user motivation. Because all of us as human beings, we seek pleasure, we avoid pain. We seek hope, we avoid fear. We seek social acceptance and we avoid social rejection. So there's only six ways to manipulate user motivation. All of us have these same core six drivers of motivation. Now, let's talk about ability. Ability is the capacity to do a particular behavior, how easy or difficult something is to do. And here again, we have a few levers that we can pull on that make a behavior more likely to occur by making it easier to do. Okay, that is a carnal rule of user experience design. The easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it. So if you reduce the amount of time, money, physical effort, cognitive load, this is a big one when it comes to tech products, the harder something is to understand the less likely you are to do it. Social deviance, non-routine, all of these factors of ability, all of these things that make something hard to do make it less likely that the user will do it. So we can actually plot these three things on a graph, on a conceptual graph and ask ourselves, if the user isn't doing the thing you want them to do, they're not clicking, they're not progressing, they're not buying any single or human behavior we can put on this graph and we can ask ourselves, does the user have sufficient motivation on the y-axis, high motivation, low motivation? Does the user have sufficient ability if something is easy to do, it's on the far right, on the x-axis? If something is hard to do, it's on the left. And when the user has sufficient motivation and sufficient ability, if the trigger is present, the behavior will occur every single time. They cross that red threshold and if the trigger is there, the behavior will occur. Let me demonstrate here. Think of the last time that a phone rang, phone rings in your life, phone rang and you did not pick up the phone. Give me a reason, why didn't you pick up the phone? That's not a reason. You didn't know the number. So somebody said like a telemarketer, you didn't know the number.  Somebody you didn't want to talk to. What's another reason why you may not pick up the call? What's another reason? Somebody said you were in the middle of my talk, exactly, right? So let's say you're in the middle of my talk, the phone rings, you hear it ring, the trigger was present, okay?  You don't want to be that one person in the middle of the aisle that crawls through and says, oh, I gotta take this call right now, sorry. That's difficult to do, it's hard, right? So you lack ability, you're way over here on the left, even with high motivation. By the way, when people use our tech products and they want to use them, but they don't because they're too difficult, that's in that top left, right? High motivation, low ability. You know what that is called, that little circle there between the red line and the black line? That's called frustration, right? High motivation, low ability. So the best thing we can do to make a behavior more likely to occur is not start with motivation. Many people think, particularly when it comes to enterprise products, that if we just talk to the user, if we convince the user, if we show them more testimonials and videos, then we'll boost motivation and they'll do the thing we designed for them to do. But that's not the first place to start. The first place to always start is to make sure a clear trigger is present. I can't tell you how many times I work with my clients and I say, where's the trigger? What do you want me to do here? Or remove the cognitive clutter. This happens a lot of times when engineers design products, folks. There are six million things you could do but no clear call to action. I see this every single day. The easiest thing you can do if you want to get a behavior to occur more frequently is to make that behavior easier, increase user ability, okay? The next step of the hook is the reward phase of the hook. This is where the user gets what they came for. Now, when we talk about rewards, we have to talk about the brain. And in particular, an area of the brain that we know today as the nucleus accumbens. Now the nucleus accumbens was first studied by two Canadian researchers by the name of Olden Milner back in the 1940s. And Olden Milner did some very interesting experiments. They took electrodes and they inserted these electrodes inside the brains of lab animals. And they connected those electrodes to a little lever that the lab animals could push on. And every time the lab animal pushed on this lever, they would receive an electrical jolt to their nucleus accumbens. What Olden Milner discovered was that these lab animals wanted nothing but stimulating their nucleus accumbens. They would forgo food and water. They would run across painful electrified grids just to continue to activate this part of the brain. In later experiments done on people, they observed similar results that when people were given these little buttons to press on and every time they pressed on these buttons, they would receive an electrical jolt to their nucleus accumbens. They did so hundreds of times. Some of the people in the studies had to have the machines forcibly removed from them to get them to stop pressing on these buttons. Now, turns out we don't need electrodes in people's brains to get people to push buttons today. Today, you know where I'm going with this, all sorts of things activate the nucleus accumbens. Junk food, sex, luxury goods, and of course, these devices. All of these things activate the very same part of the brain, the nucleus accumbens. Now, for decades, the psychology community believed that the purpose of the nucleus accumbens was to stimulate pleasure, right? Why else would lab animals and later people incessantly activate this part of the brain if it wasn't because it felt good, right? Not exactly. What we now know is that the nucleus accumbens becomes most active in anticipation of the reward, but when we actually get the thing we want, the thing that's gonna make us feel good and finally make us happy, that's when the nucleus accumbens becomes less active.  It's by stimulating this itch that we seek to scratch. And it turns out, folks, that there is a way to supercharge this desirous response. Did you know that there is a way to manufacture desire? And I can tell you how to do it. Does anybody here want to know how to manufacture desire? I'm doing it to you right now. So when I took that 10-second pause and I stopped talking for a second, some of you perked up. Why isn't he talking anymore? What's going on? Did he forget what he was going to say? What's gonna happen next? And it turns out that the unknown is fascinating. A bit of uncertainty, a bit of mystery causes us to engage, causes us to focus, and it is highly habit-forming. This comes from the work of B.F. Skinner. Back in the 1940s and 50s, Skinner took his little pigeons, he put them in a little box, and he gave them a disk to peck at. And every time the pigeon pecked at the disk, they would receive a reward, a little food pellet. So very quickly, Skinner could train his pigeons to peck at the disk, receive a reward. This is called operant conditioning, right? Terrific, worked great. But then Skinner wanted to see what would happen if he gave these food pellets every once in a while. So sometimes a pigeon would peck at the disk, no food pellet, no reward. The next time the pigeon would peck at the disk, they would receive a reward. And what Skinner observed was that the rate of response, the number of times that these pigeons pecked at the disk increased when the reward was given on a variable schedule of reinforcement. And so when we look at the world around us and we think about the things that are most engaging, most habit-forming, the things that capture your attention and won't let go, you will find one or more of these three types of variable rewards. What I call rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt and rewards of the self. Let me show you some examples. Let's start first with rewards of the tribe. Rewards of the tribe are things that feel good, that have this element of variability and come from other people. Best example online is of course social media. When you open up Facebook, you're never quite sure what you're going to see. What did people post? What are the comments going to say? How many likes does something get? High degree of variability when we use a site like Facebook, by the way, we see the same exact thing on Stack Overflow with all those upvotes. Same exact phenomenon going on. The next type of variable reward is what we call rewards of the hunt. Rewards of the hunt are about the search for material possessions and we buy these material possessions with money and today also that information is used to get money and material rewards. When many people think of variable rewards, they think about slot machines, right? They think about Las Vegas casinos where the uncertainty involves what we might win when we play one of these games of chance, right? Well, I'm here to tell you that the exact same psychology at work on these slot machines is at work online. Consider for a moment, the feed. Have we all noticed how prevalent the feed is today? Every product today somehow has this feed mechanic. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Slack. Everything today is a feed. Why is that? Well, let's take a look at Twitter just as an example but you could substitute on any number of different apps here. If I look at that first tweet, yeah, that's not that interesting. Maybe the second tweet, that's not interesting. Maybe the third or fourth tweet is interesting though. So what do I have to do to see more interesting content? What do I have to do? Scroll. All I gotta do is scroll and that's scrolling and scrolling uses the exact same psychology as pulling on a slot machine. Both variable rewards of the hunt at work. Searching and searching and never done searching for the next variable reward. That next interesting piece of information. The third type of variable reward is what I call rewards of the self. Rewards of the self are things that feel good that have this element of variability but they don't involve other people and are about these material or information rewards. These are things that are intrinsically pleasurable. They feel good in and of themselves. It's about the search for mastery, consistency, competency and control. Best example online is game play, right? So when people play Clash of Clans or Angry Birds or any of these other online games, they're not necessarily playing them with other people. They're not really winning anything in terms of any kind of material goods but there's something fun about getting to the next level, the next accomplishment, the next achievement. And I know many of us here we're very serious business people.  Does this look familiar? Getting to that unread message in your inbox? Finishing the to-dos on your to-do list or the thing that always gets me is clearing that one notification on my home screen so I can open it and clear it away. Those are all examples of rewards of the hunt, the search for mastery, consistency, competency and control. Finally, the fourth step of the hook is the investment phase. This is probably the most overlooked of the four steps of the hook. The investment phase is where the user puts something into the product that makes it better and better with use. And this is what is so magical and different about tech products versus physical goods. Physical goods, things made out of atoms as opposed to things made out of bits, they depreciate with wear and tear. My clothing, these chairs, everything in the material world loses value with wear and tear, right? But habit-forming technology should do the opposite. Habit-forming products should appreciate with use. They should get better and better the more we use them, right? That's amazing. So based on how much content we give to a site, how much data we give into them, how many followers follow us, how much our reputation increases on a site, all of these things make the product better and better and better with use. That investment phase is critical to forming these long-term habit-forming products. Now, as you notice, through these investments, the products become a little bit stickier. They become a little bit harder to stop using, in fact, even if a better product or service comes along, which brings me to this cold, hard fact you are not gonna like. There is a myth that's been perpetuating our industry that all we need to do is to have the best technology because the best technology will win. That's a lie. It's not the best product that wins. It's the product that captures the monopoly of the mind, the product that we turn to first. That's the product that captures the market because it's through successive cycles through these hooks that trigger action-reward investment. This is how product preferences are shaped, how our tastes are formed, and how these habits take hold. Now, many folks, when I tell them about this hook model and how it's built into many of the world's most habit-forming products and services like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat, the reaction is like, ooh, that's kind of mind control. I'm not sure, is this ethical? Is this okay to do to people? And I think that's missing the point because that's not my audience, right? The gaming companies and the social media companies, they already know all this. That's who I studied to be here with you today.   So my incentive, the reason I'm here with you today, the reason I study habit-forming technology is because I believe that we can build a world where technology products help people do things they want to do but for lack of good product design don't do. And to show you I put my money where my mouth is, let me give you one quick example before I go. This is a company called Seven Cups. The founder is a guy by the name of Glenn Moriarty. He's a psychotherapist out of Virginia Beach. He called me up a few years ago after he read my book and he said, look, Nia, I got this idea for an app I wanna share with you. Here's my hook. As a psychotherapist, I know lots of folks don't come get the service they need, right? A parent of a child with a disability, a soldier suffering from PTSD. They don't go get therapy because it's hard, it's expensive, there's social stigma around it. So here's the app I'm going to build. Here's my hook. The internal trigger is seeking connection. It's loneliness. It's when someone needs to connect with another human being. The action phase of the hook is to just open the app, doesn't cost a dime. You push one button and you're instantly connected to another person that's ready to listen. That's the variable reward, rewards of the tribe. This communication that you get, this variable reward from another human being. And finally, the investment phase, the more you interact with seven cups hook, the more you begin to be offered this opportunity to learn how to be a trained listener yourself. And it turns out that people who use this product have found it to be as effective, according to a third party study, as traditional psychotherapy. This one app conducts 180,000 sessions every single week. Talk about the amazing power of habit forming technologies. So with that, I encourage you to build the change you want to see in the world, to find one of the world's problems to fix, because I truly do believe that using the power of habit forming technology, we can help use habits for good. Thank you very much. One more quick thing. Yeah, no, no, go for it. One more quick thing. I saw lots of people taking pictures of the slides. That's fantastic. I want to make it easier for you. If you want the slides you just saw, please go to this URL, opinion2.us, opinion2.us, not .com, opinion2.us. There's a very, very short survey. I just have five questions. Would love to know what you thought of the presentation. As soon as you click submit, you'll be taken to my slide share page, where you can have all the slides you just saw. Look for the one that says hook talk. That's the slide presentation you just saw. There's also a lot of other resources there. For example, if you work at an enterprise company and you say, oh, these are lots of consumer web examples, look for the presentation that says hooked in the enterprise. All kinds of enterprise examples in that presentation. And one more announcement. Tomorrow evening at 6 p.m., I will be giving a three-hour workshop on this material for a small group of folks. There are still a few tickets available. We're gonna be doing it at the hotel, at the Marriott. And those tickets are available at that URL. And with that, thank you so much. All right. I have one quick question before you go, you know. And I think you already answered it. I know what some of these folks are thinking, wow, the consumer thing. And then your definition of enterprise might be a CRM application. Their definition of enterprise is underlying infrastructure software, right? Cloud management tool. So it's really about frequency. That's the critical question. It's not industry sector. It's not consumer web or enterprise. It's frequency. If you're building the kind of product that is kind of bought and then tucked away somewhere and never used again, like insurance, for example. Insurance, car insurance, does not need to be a habit. Geico's never gonna become a habit. Of course, the problem with those type of products is that it's very easy. Geico comes in and says, we're gonna save you 15% on car insurance. It's very easy for the next person to come in and say, oh yeah, we're gonna save you 20% on car insurance. And they take you away. So it's not that non-habit forming products are bad businesses. They're perfectly fine businesses. It's just that they operate in a different way. Whereas these habit forming products build in customer loyalty and retention in a way that doesn't require them to spend a ton of money on constantly advertising and spamming people. People are using these products on their own. So to qualify and see if you even need to form a habit, the first question is, is your product used with sufficient frequency? Got it, great tip. Thank you. Get the book. We can always improve the habit forming nature of open source software. Thank you very much.


Welcome to our interview show in which we interview LGBTQ guests who are important contributors to our community. We want to acknowledge that all things LGBTQ is produced at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which is unceded Indigenous land. Enjoy the show. Hi everybody. I'm here with Rob Phelps, the editor-in-chief of Boston Spirit Magazine, a wonderful publication coming out of Boston. It's a bi-monthly news, arts, and lifestyle print publication and website. It covers the LGBTQ community in New England and we'll talk a little more about that during our conversation. Previously, Rob has served as Boston Spirit's managing editor and before that wrote freelance articles for The Spirit and he's been doing that since 2004. Long tenure so far and you've risen through the ranks. Before coming to Boston Spirit as managing editor, Rob was the arts editor for the Provincetown banner. You were the development editor for Fairchild Books, a division of Conde Nast in New York, where you work closely with authors to publish more than 25 best-selling college textbooks in fashion and design. Sometimes they switch to the second person. I hope during reading people's bios. I hope you don't mind. That's more direct. You were also a staff writer for the Harvard University Gazette. You received your BA from Boston University. What did you major in? English literature. Oh, good major and an MFA in writing from Bennington College, so germ for a moment there. You were born in Washington, D.C., who up in the Maryland suburbs until coming to Boston where you fell in love with both New England and your husband, a playwright, some note and we hope to have him as a guest on the show at some future point. You've been involved for 29 years, also impressive. Except for a few great years in New York City, I had some great years in New York City. It was fun.  Very nice. Welcome, Rob. Thank you. What can you tell us? What can you add to your biography? First of all, you have a wonderful website that is full of much more than this abbreviated bio would suggest, but tell us more. What else would you like to tell us? Well, I guess to my website, lots and lots and lots of freelance writing and editing in between. Not all of all which I added because it would be too much and it would be really off the point. For instance, I never expected to be an editor in fashion and design, but it turned out when I worked with people that were experts in that, we were a pretty good match. So it was fun to edit. What else can I tell you? The bio that you read is very, those are kind of like the highlights, but all through that it's just a big, messy career of writing and editing and also personal issues that came in. Early on in my career, well, I'm a long-term aid survivor. So in the late 80s, not long after I graduated from Boston University, and while I was working at Harvard is when I was diagnosed. And that detoured my career pretty sharply. I was working in the news office at Harvard University and my first job there was editorial assistant. And so I did just about everything that you could do and eventually became a staff writer there. And around that time is when I started to develop some illness. And so basically, that changed everything. Not to get into that whole story, but I was very fortunate to be where I was in the Boston area with all of the great medical schools, Harvard in particular. There was a lot of all the new pretty inhibitors and all of the new meds were coming out and I had the opportunity to get on the trials and the tests very early. So I spent a large portion of the early 90s. That was probably my full-time job taking care of the health and participating in the trials and whatnot. A little activism in there too, when I felt strong enough. But as I got better, I discovered that I really wanted to live in Provincetown. I wasn't sure how long I would live, all of this. And so it just seems like, what are you going to do with your life? Well, I love Massachusetts, I love the beach, I love the gay community. And so that's where I went. And within a couple of weeks, I was working at the local newspaper there. And I kind of, that was an ongoing part of my career working with the banner. I actually started with the Provincetown advocate, but they were bought by the banner while I was there. So I went to the banner. And I did almost every job you could do. I never was sold ads. I probably wouldn't have been very good at it. But I would have probably given it a try if they gave that to me too. But I wrote a lot, I became their copy editor. I did a lot of stories. My first beat was the drag queen beat. So I used to interview everyone who came to town and all those who lived there. And I love to interview them first out of their character, out of the drag persona. No pictures, you know, nothing like that. And then once they went into the drag persona, then I would go to the show and do a review, but also with this great backstory of what they told me and who they were and where they came from. And that's when I started to really write the feature stories. And I moved on to other areas as well as the drag scene. But so sort of living in Provincetown, which is so, so supportive of being LGBTQ, I just, it was, that was part of the world.  But now, you know, as an adult, as someone who is well again, because, you know, we could do this HIV and AIDS, but we all know how that's gone. I've been extremely fortunate with that. But, but so my career was there. And my partner and I, I'm really rambling all over the place right now. You know, I think it's very interesting because, you know, resumes are so limited. And I've always felt that there should be an indendum on everybody else. For example, when I started graduate school for Miami program, I discovered I was type one diabetic. And that changed everything. But, you know, all of my grades and incompletes and, you know, so we get a fuller picture and I appreciate your giving it to us. And viewers, I think would be interested in that. I was living in Boston, as I said, in the early 80s. And I remember the activism, the AIDS activism and all those, you know, it was a scary, scary time. It was a terribly scary time. But it was also incredibly empowering. And I cannot stress how lucky and frankly, privileged I was to have happened into that job where there I was, you know, with the Harvard Medical School.   But, you know, I signed the dotted line on a lot of drug trials. Those were pretty scary, too. But again, to get to do that was incredible. I can't wait to read Sarah Shulman's new book. Oh, yeah. You know, we interviewed Sarah Shulman in The Last Issue. Oh, you did. A Boston spirit. Yes. We have a fabulous arts editor, Lauren King, who's writing for the Boston Globe and she writes for a lot of other publications. But every issue, she's got about six or seven stories where she goes and finds what she can, you know, who's doing what. And Sarah Shulman is one of the stories and one of the interviews she did. Fantastic. Speaking of the magazine, maybe we should turn to that. I have many more questions, but we should move to the spirit. And maybe you could show us some actual issues and tell us a little more about it. Sure. Well, this is our latest issue. Actually, our very latest issue is coming out in about a week. But this is actually the, which one is this? This is the May, June issue. And our next issue will be July, August, which we put to bed about a week ago. And we've already started working on the fall. So that's why I have to check to see what date we've got up there. But in this, we have a great, we actually have an op ed from David Sicily, and he wrote the piece himself for us about the Equality Act and where it's at. So that's a very good piece of it. But Boston Spirit, we're a bi-monthly magazine. So we come out every two months, six times a year, we're a free publication. You can subscribe at our website for free to get it in your mailbox. You can also pick up copies at a couple of locations in Boston. But it's primarily by subscription. So we've got about 20,000 subscribers in the, primarily in the Boston area, greater Boston area, but also throughout New England. And also I know, for instance, my mom gets it in Maryland. So we do send it all over the country as well. Vermont, too. Oh, that's great. Well, we try to cover as much as we can and throughout New England.  And we're located in Boston. And so I'd say the majority of our stories and focus probably is in this area or the state of Massachusetts. But we also, you know, our stories cover all six states. For instance, in this last issue, I got to interview state representative Taylor Small. A friend of the show. I thought you might. We love Taylor. Oh, incredible. Yeah. One of the most upbeat and inspiring people I've ever met. I know. She's fabulous. I interviewed her myself. Speaking of the magazine then, what's the average day? I know you have no average days. Nobody does. But how often, if you could select maybe a representative day of your life as editor-in-chief, right? You know, you probably take a week off after each issue or something. It slows down. It really does. The last, you know, maybe month really has been really intense. And it builds and builds and builds up until like, you know, we're working through the weekend. It's really hard. This last weekend, there were events that I wanted to go to forget it.  But an average day involves working with, you know, talking with the different writers. We have, can I tell you our staff size? Oh, please. Okay. So it's pretty small, the core group of us. My publisher, David Simmerman, who started the magazine, myself, who's the editor. And then we have a lifestyle editor, Scott Kiernan and Lauren King, who's our arts editor. We have an art director who is Dean Burchell. And those are, that's the core group. But then we've got, you know, maybe about between a half dozen to a dozen and a half, really incredible writers, a lot of whom will write, you know, from one issue to the next. We also have a copy editor who and a proofreader who, you know, I send them stories out to. We have no central office. We started out with one before I got there, but it's everybody is out and about and working remotely. So it just works that way better. I meet with the publisher, you know, now and then we will have coffee together and go over notes and we're on email and zoom and, you know, you name it all the time. So an average day would be sort of checking in with not everybody because, you know, I sort of check in to see where I think everybody is. And if there's anybody who needs to speak with me directly at any point, then that's what I'll do. Also spending time just going through, you know, online, trying to find all the news that is happening either in our area, throughout New England, and or national or even international that might affect us. And trying to figure out how that that what that means to our mag, how can we can reach readers what we need to help with. I also do a daily blog post. So that's often, you know, from these stories that I'll see, or from press releases. I get a lot of press releases from the different organizations, Pride Center, Vermont, out main, you know, glad HRC. And just trying to, you probably know, that's all it's a lot to go through. But the things that you'll see that people are doing it's all it's overwhelming and so important all at once. You know, so, so that's what I'll do, you know, maybe I'll spend an hour or so working on the blog post.  So, you know, I'll be working on that. You do write a lot of copy. I was looking at your resume, and you've seems to have done it, you know, all your life writing a lot of copy for the publication. Yeah, I like to write very much. I also know that I'm better at some stories, and other people are better at other stories. And part of my job is the editors to make sure that I know which ones I really need to let, you know, or in some cases, you know, beg other people to do. So would you say it's an eight hour, 12 hour, 24 hour day? I bet it varies. Oh, it totally varies.  It's a full time job. As we get closer, it's, you know, I need to sleep. I know I need to get away from the computer. My eyes start to, you know, go crazy. But yeah. As you know, Boston has a very rich publication history involved produced by the LGBTQ community. In fact, as I was living in Boston, when that fateful fire occurred at GCN. Oh yeah. Yeah. And the feminist public, when I was there, feminist publications were everywhere. Bay windows had just started. Where does Boston's spirit fit in that rich tradition and climate? That is such a big question. I know. And it's tough to say because I think in a way, we almost have to look back and see, you know, what we did when we've been here. I think right now, I hope that we're, you know, our mission is basically to provide a platform to amplify LGBT voices in the community. Everybody. Yeah, I know. And so, you know, I trust, I know that we're doing that from the feedback that I get from some people. And then there's a lot of silent people. And then there's a lot of, there's people sometimes that I say, you do what? Is that Boston Magazine? No. It's Boston Spirit Magazine. But I hope also being, you know, a free publication, we really, we show up to a lot of the, well, we're corporate, not corporate sponsors or media sponsors for like the GLAAD, the big HRC dinner and the GLAAD dinner and the Fenway Hall. And so, I hope that our role is our mission, you know, that we do provide that forum is where do we fit into the history of it? I mean, I remember when I came to Boston in 1984, and in the, and there was, well, GCN and when Boston Bay windows started, it became so important. You know, I used to go to the bookstores. I used to, that was like the, that was the place. We didn't have the internet, you know, we didn't. And so. A heady time in many ways. Oh, yeah, really exciting and also, you know, kind of, kind of scary because, you know, I just saw the the Boston LGBT, the history projects, did a co zoom presentation with the Boston Historical Society on on the early days of the publications. And so Michael Bronsky was there. I think that was Fagrag. There was, oh, I mean, it's escaping my mind, but there was somebody from Sojourner, I believe. Yes, Sojourner. I remember it was another feminist magazine. Oh, yeah. And so they were talking about this. I mean, there was GCN, there was Fagrag, there was Amy Hoffman was there. I should work at GCN, I think. Yeah, the stories, but also Dallas, I believe from, from the tapestry, who really, you know, foundational publications, communications work with transgender community. It's a really rich history. And I think you're a lot to it. It's really a worthy goal. And you seem to be fulfilling your mission of elevating LGBTQ voices in a world where they are not always heard in mainstream media. And may I say also, but I'm hoping that we provide sort of a forum so different parts of our community, much like what you do as well, can hear from each other. So you have younger people reading our senior spirit column, you know, you have people that don't have any idea of what's going on in the legal world reading the monthly column or the five monthly column from GLAD.  I mean, just connecting. That's what I'm hoping that we have some, I believe that we do have a place in our community to do that. We do. I think you heard it. And it's really a great publication. I encourage our audience to take a look at it and subscribe. We'll have your contact information on the Chiron below. This is the time has flown by. I hope you'll look back and tell us what you're up to. Sure. Once again, Rob Phillips, editor-in-chief of Boston Spirit Magazine. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much, Jan. Well, hi, Sue. I would like to welcome you to all things LGBT. This is Sue Katz, who if you don't know, you will know. I can't imagine you don't. But if you don't, let me read a small introduction. Welcome. Hi. Hi. Thank you for having me, Linda. Okay. So Sue Katz's business card identifies her as a wordsmith and rebel. Her journalism and fiction have been published in anthologies, magazines, and online on three continents where she's lived, worked, and roused rabble. She has been a martial arts master, promoted traditional volunteering, and partner danced more than her feet could bear. She began her lifelong activism in the civil rights movement in the early 60s and was on the ground floor of Boston's women's and gay liberation movements. Her first play was produced by the prestigious The Theater Offensive in honor of Stonewall 50. Her fiction books, often focusing on the lives of elders, include A Raisin in My Cleavage, Short and Shorter Stories, Lilian's Last Affair, and Other Stories, and Lilian in Love. Visit her running blog, consentingadult, at www.suekatz.com. And also in addition to that wonderful resume is Sue is also, she lived in Israel. Is that 14 years? 14 years. In Israel as an anti-occupation activist, anti-quando master and 10 years in London, where she worked in international volunteerism and was active politically with an incredible group of women from around the world called Women Against Fundamentalism.  So that is quite impressive, I must say. So you're originally from Pittsburgh. How did you, I know you're in Arlington, Massachusetts.  So we can learn a little more about you. I come from a working class family and I was born in the project in the same, anyway, in the project and at three we moved out into a little house and then we moved on. Pittsburgh, just as I was becoming a teenager and whatnot, was really a dying city with the mills closing. It was a steel mill town. It was a coal town and all of that was closing and those jobs were going overseas. So it was a lot of misery in Pittsburgh and it was a big immigrant town and it was very segregated when I was growing up. I cut my political teeth in the civil rights movement, but I was too young to go on any of the buses for registering voters or anything like that. So we started, some friends and I, our own civil rights group in Pittsburgh, I don't know, we were maybe 14, but there wasn't even anywhere we could meet because no place would allow a group of mixed race kids to meet in their facility, no church, no community center. So Pittsburgh was kind of to me a rough place and I had won a scholarship to a posh school between my junior and senior year in the Phillips Andover Academy in Andover, and I went for six weeks and I saw New England and I saw the ocean, which I had never seen, and you know, yeah, so I decided to go to New England, yeah, and I got a full scholarship and I went to Boston University when I was 17 and 1965. And you finished there and then so you went to Israel. What years were that and how did you find that experience being, you know, working on Palestinian issues, I imagine, and how did it feel being there and what was your response there? So while I was in Boston was the founding of the Women's Liberation Movement and then the Gay Liberation Movement and I was very, very involved in those kind of politics. And in fact, from Boston, I moved to California for about five years with my collective. We had a working class dyke collective, anarchist collective, and we were out in California. From there I went to Israel. I didn't know anything about Israel. I certainly wasn't a Zionist. I had no, you know, I'd never gone to Sunday school or Hebrew school or anything, but I had never been abroad. I didn't know the first thing about anything, but I went and by then I had my black belt and in California I founded the first Women's Martial Arts Institute in California.  And I went off to Israel intending to go to Hebrew school for half a year, then maybe work for half a year and then come back. I've never, in my wildest dreams that I think I'd stay there 14 years, but there were, I was the first woman black belt there and the first professional martial arts master. And my career just took off. I mean, I really had a lot of success. And I built friendships in the anti-occupation movement with other women from women in black and other organizations, anti-occupation. I built friendships that just were incredibly intense and important to me. And I ended up staying for 14 years out of that one year. As for the politics, it was very, very clear. There is no, I never had a doubt in my mind. I didn't know anything when I got there, but as soon as I got there and I saw what was happening on the ground, it was so clear that this very powerful military force, the Israeli army, was occupying a very impoverished people and it was horrible. It was just terrible. So the first women's group we had was women in white against the invasion of Lebanon. And that must have been 82. That must have been 82, the war in Lebanon where Israel got very involved in their allies in southern Shatila, a massacre and horrible. And then after the anti-faza, women in black started, was sort of like an offshoot of that. It started in Jerusalem and then it was very big in Tel Aviv and it was founded in my apartment as a matter of fact. Yeah, so that was it. But I was to some degree certainly professionally in the closet again. After like being on the ground floor of gay liberation, lesbian liberation, all of a sudden I was like in the closet again. So that was kind of a drag. And I wrote when I was there. I've always written. We could talk about how I got started, but I wrote while I was there. I had my own column of self-defense tips and the history of the martial arts and different things, but they had to have it translated. And that's about money. And the newspapers got like kind of poorer and poorer and they didn't really want to translate. And a lot I left for London. One of the great appeals was that I could write in public there in English without it being a hassle. So why London?  And it was a lesbian erotica collection that was going to be put out by this women's press called Sheba Press, Sheba Publishing. And I submitted a story, actually a story I had written to try to seduce this girl that I met in London.  And she read it.  I don't like this at all. It didn't work. It didn't work at all. But I was published in this collection and I went over there to help promote and I made a lot of friends amongst a lot of writers and it just seemed like a good thing.  And I have always danced and loved dancing and my parents were, you know, the dance generation, the World War II dance generation. And when I interviewed my parents, they each said of the other, interviewed them separately, why did I marry him or why did I marry her? Best dancer on the floor. I mean, really, it was all they had in common. Yeah, so when the ballroom in Latin American lessons started, and we had teachers, one named Ralph, one named Glenn, who were major professional people and competitors, I mean, really high level. And I was able to lead without it being a hassle. And it was like a dream country. That was a very big attraction. And did you find writing communities wherever you were to? My writing community. I certainly did in London. I met there, a writer named Elizabeth Woodcraft, who's a Lambo winner and whatnot. She's a very brilliant writer. And we became writing partners and now during the pandemic, and still today, every weekday, we write together on a silent Zoom. We get on a Zoom together. We say good morning. And then we write for an hour and read to each other. And then we get off the Zoom and we do it every day. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. It's been fantastic. I've been so productive. It's amazing how much I get done in that one hour where I'm not allowed to talk or do anything else. And so you ended up back in Boston. So did you go to Boston after London? I did what? Pardon me? Go back to Boston after London? Yes, I came back to Boston after I lost my job in London due to a restructuring where they removed everyone, a whole bunch of middle managers. And I couldn't get another job because I was over 50. And it's very difficult in Europe ever to get a job when you're over 50. And I was offered a job here. And I came back to Boston for a job, which I hated, and I only lasted like a year and a half. And then I stopped it. But I came back to Boston because I still had friends here from college and from the women's movement and the gay movement. And I have dear friends who live nearby in Vermont that I wanted to be close to. And it seemed like the place to be. And I heard your name in a movie about storming a building in Harvard.  No, no, no, that's done. Pearl. It's called the movie is called left in Pearl. Yes. Yes. I'm one of the people interviewed, one of many interviewed. It's about the best film on earth, more or less. And anybody that hasn't seen it should see it. And it was a takeover. Well, we held a building for 10 days and nights. And out of it came the Cambridge Women's Center, which is still running today. That was in 1971. Still going today. It's the longest running women's center in the country. And we won it from Harvard. And, you know, the movie, I liked the movie. It was good. And it was fun to see you there, too. Yeah. So who are you writing influences? And did you always know you were going to be a writer? I don't know. I, you know, I have always written, but not necessarily been a writer in the sense that I was a martial arts master for 20 years. That was my first career. That was my, that was a dream, dream profession for a woman in those days, you know. And, but I have always been writing. And I started writing for political reasons. Inside the anti-war movement, I think were my first political essays.  I wrote a lot of things there. And they've since been reproduced. But I never really had time for books to write a book. I wrote some books, but I always got in fights with publishers and I never published them. I have always, I don't get on with publishers. And even when they've commissioned a book in the end, it doesn't happen. We don't see eye to eye. They don't like my language. They don't, they want me to tone down. I'm not a tone down kind of girl. Yes. So then tell by the title of your book, a raisin. A raisin in my cleavage. Yes.  And maybe we'll pick out a few specific things to talk about. I'm trying to give the audience an overall view of you. So if you wouldn't mind picking something that you could read for us, we'd really appreciate it. Well, I thought I would. This is a raisin in my cleavage and the front cover is by a lesbian who is a working marble sculptor in Italy and let me use her image. And one of the things that I've really gotten into is flash writing, which means very short writing under a thousand words, stories or essays that are under a thousand words. But my absolute absolute favorite is writing stories that are exactly 100 words, not 99, not 101, but precisely 100 words. I love it. I love doing it. So I thought I'd read two of them because they only take, they take less than a minute to read each one. Wonderful. Okay. So this was the first one that I ever published and it's still my favorite. It's called The Heartbreaker. And I hope I read this well because when you have a hundred words that you have to do a beginning, a middle, an end, a storyline, a conflict, some characters in a hundred words, every word counts. So I have to read this well. All right. So I might read a little slow. Pearl fell in love at 101. And although she adored her younger lovers caresses, she'd be damned if she ever caught his name. Her roommate, Lydia, teased Pearl about her boy toy because the gentleman was merely 93. Although this fellow was devoted to her, she kept her options open. One night, after the nurse settled Pearl into bed, Lydia limped over to say her customary good night. She bent to kiss Pearl on the forehead, as usual. But Pearl lifted her chin for a lips kiss. And by the next morning, she was forced to break the young guy's heart. That's great.  And one is a novel. Lillian in Love is a novel. All three are mainly about old people. That's my subject. So here is, I think it's, is it the final? Yeah, it's the final story in A Raisin in My Cleavage. And it's also a hundred words. And it's called My Mysterious Crotch Heirs. Aging is playing havoc with my body. Bumps, lumps, spots, moles, broken blood vessels and wrinkles are turning up uninvited in places both public and private.  I was paranoid about all the fruit flies that suddenly invaded my house until I realized that in fact, they're retinal floaters. And where the hell's all my body hair? Even my eyebrows and arms are under armpits are sparse. But most mysteriously, why is my crotch hair fleeing to my chin? That's great. You know, there are really stories that, you know, for at a certain age, you can really, you can really understand. That's great. When I read that story to a young audience, silence, they have no idea what I'm talking about. When I read it to women or age, everybody falls on the floor. It's a great. I like the wrinkles uninvited. Yeah. That's great. Thank you so much. And we're going to have a link underneath the interview that tells people where they can purchase your work and how to be in touch with you if they want to do interviews or, you know, find out more information. So I really appreciate your being here. This is wonderful. And we will see you soon. And I will send you the link when it comes up and have a great day. I appreciate being invited. I've enjoyed so many of your shows. This has been great. Thank you. On a most recent episode of All Things LGBTQ, we highlighted a new activity that's occurring in Montpelier and its queer critical mass. So we thought we'd take this opportunity to invite the organizer of such a punchy-sounding event to come and talk to us about it. So please welcome to All Things Kelly Arbor from Vermont Cares. Welcome, Kelly. Thanks, Keith. So nice to be here. We're so glad, one, that you are creating this event and you were able to join us. So why don't we start with how did you happen to come to Vermont Cares and what is it that you do for Vermont Cares? That's a great question, Keith. A lot of my position has recently been defunded. We, I came to Vermont Cares in 2017 and I came in first as a client. I'm HIV positive. I'm also assigned female at birth and identify in the gender queer fluid spectrum. And so I landed at Cares first as a participant in the HIV case management program and then came in as a case manager and then came into the Montpelier office and also moved into the testing and education manager role. So for the last couple of years, that's the hat I've been wearing and through a good chunk of COVID. So we don't really like, we go out and talk to the schools a little bit, but less and less. And I grew up doing health prevention work through the dare and other programs as a kid. So I was doing stage based performative edutainment as a kid for substance, for sex and drugs.  Now we have the language. Now we're like pleasure based. When I came into that role, I went undiagnosed for a decade. And for me, as somebody gender non normative and being told that I don't have risk for HIV was like a really harmful almost, you know, I almost died. Like that was nobody should get to where I got in my health status. So now working at Cares and doing health justice work and trying to raise like the fun, which is where the bike rides come in because we've worked the shadows and HIV really well for 40 plus years with resilience and deep love with a big L. Like it's amazing. And like in the shadows because there's so much stigma for sex and drugs. So I'm like trying to take it to the streets more. I'll act up. They did things like made media, they edutained and educated the crowds and created participatory events that one might run amok and learn some new skills about community relationship building.  I went to UVM. I am not fresh to Vermont. I've spent over a decade in the communities and I've always found that when an event is activity based and not identity based, you get a more diverse crowd and people connect in a different kind of way because we're sort of a bowl of nuts, the LGBTQI plus, plus, plus, plus, plus community. And you can take one thing out of a bowl of nuts and it doesn't change. But when you make and stew a community that is this beautiful, delicious soup in this amazing container, I don't know what happens out of that because it's dialogue, right? You, something new emerges out of the whole system. It's greater than the sum of the parts. So the bike rides have become this incredible activity. I've always loved biking. I love an activity that anybody can come out to. I run rides that are anywhere from three to eight miles with no major hills around Montpelier. We've got beautiful bike paths. We've been doing a loop down route to toward Middlesex that has a nice bike lane. And then we cut onto the three mile bridge road and pop over to the dog river and have a little swim moment. So there's always a little social piece of it. And our pack rides, we're like a slow chill ride. And then we swim and we hang out and we ride back into Montpelier and have our like, what's up, charliots and ring our bells and wave our flags. And we wore the interdependence day parade in Montpelier last year. And we will be again this year. So that's a really fun one. Like, that's a hard time a year for me to see the US flag go up a lot extra. So last year we made an eight by 10 foot rainbow flag for BIPOC solidarity and bringing back the hot pink and turquoise into the flag because magic, sex and art. I'm like, that's where we want to stray. Let's war back to the original. Okay, so was the queer critical mass something that came out of remote cares wanting to reach out more within the community? Or was this something that you personally wanted to do? I definitely was wearing my Kelly as a rascal hat as a primary, but I always had this conversation with Peter, our executive director who's wonderful and lets me free range, like try things out because we don't know like what prevention, you know, what's most effective prevention, that's a constant moving conversation and very individual and harm reduction, like us losing funding for testing. I don't know what my job is going to look like at cares, but I know that there's a need for this type of holistic wellness and because bicycles bring an environmental conversation, they bring in transportation conversation because Vermont's pretty inaccessible. But if you have a bike, you can take that on the bus. And I think if more people knew about these beautiful nature rides, and that's cancer prevention, this is how we keep our knees into our adulthood. We ride bikes, that's like a real low barrier physical activity. So now I'm wearing that hat as cares a little bit more intentionally and like this is an activity that we can host as prevention and bring resources, the Burlington rides, the Trans Black Lives Matter rides, I made spoke cards this year and like, you don't see Vermont cares on that pink triangle. But if you know the pink triangle, you know, it's like leading with the message and like we donated all those supplies and staff labor to create them. So yes, that's a cares activity, but we don't need to be the front like logo on some of these things. It's more about like this amazing thing is happening. And this is for our community. And who is our community? Who's showing up? We had 45 riders in Burlington last year, the first critical mass in Montpelier, we had 24 riders.  It was like... I want pictures of the dog in the cart. Yes. But I want to back up a little bit because you're talking a little bit or you've referenced here and there about losing funding, not able to do testing anymore, looking at some of those restrictions to which you have alluded, what is the prospect for the office in Montpelier and what are the services that you're going to be able to provide? Definitely. And funding, like somebody to run our testing program and us having a testing program are two different conversations. And I think that's for us a shuffle. Like I still were an education manager hat, but we rarely get paid by a school. Like what school can really afford and then it's still inequitable in that what school can get me on their schedule that we can get there. I want to make them videos.  We made pamphlets for HIV basics. Like let's just make them resources. And so I'm trying to make it more of a holistic like prevention. We need to talk about sex and drugs together. So our funding like is very like a little bit of everything helps fund all of our positions. So I mean, I was like, do I worry about my job? But as much as any of us would, right, we're nonprofit, like we could all lose funding tomorrow. So absolutely, we're going to do testing. We're retraining this week. And I think our first event testing because that's our bread and butter at Cares is event based testing. We have a mobile VD8, the Department of Health Certified testing van. So we can go to a field like we'll bring it to the cabarets in Montpelier. And we test in like pop up community spaces. And then we do office based by appointment. So we'll start in person testing in the next few weeks, people can start scheduling with us. And our Montpelier office is actually moving, which is really exciting for us. It's like hard to think about leaving the capital. But I'm like extra putting right rainbow flags around Montpelier and like live here. But Barry is where we've run our syringe service program for years. We've been popping up every Monday at the People's Health and Wellness Center. And now that they're moving into a new space that they're going to own in 10 years, I love that Barry is doing this. They are so thoughtful around getting people into these like projects. And People's Health and Wellness is moving down to the end of on Church Street on that little field granite worker guild. So Vermont will have an office upstairs. We'll finally have an office where our SSP is. We'll be able to test people. And we're right down the hill from Planned Parenthood. We're in the city that I think Barry is the only city that has a community disposal program across the city where there's big sharps containers that people can dispose of sharps. Anybody, all sorts of people use sharps. I use injectables. So it's like testosterone, diabetes, like all the stuff. So that's going to be really awesome for CARES. And I'm really excited about this edutaining harm reduction model of getting out of the box, going and doing fun stuff. We've got a prep cornhole. I've got a dildo ring toss. I just we made these really cute little condom distribution like cases so we can mobilize. We're going to extra be getting out fentanyl testing strips and naloxone access to folks. I organize local cabarets in Montpelier with a health and wellness resource wrap around it so that you can come and get services and see a really swanky show. Okay. So when is the move to Barry anticipated? And should we be looking for a grand opening event? I really hope that Barry Heritage Fest is going to happen this year. We're looking at fall. I think that people's health and wellness is targeting like August or September. I mean, they they stripped down and they're building out the old guild. It is going to be, oh, it's just going to be such a dream for people's health and wellness. They'll be out of the flood plain. They do such great low barrier work. And they serve the whole kingdom, which I didn't realize. So Barry Heritage Fest has traditionally been in September, I think. And then overdose awareness day is August 31st, which falls within the Pride Week of Burlington's Pride Fest. So we're hoping to do a multi site overdose awareness prevention. We did a pop up in Saint Jay with some collaborators. There's no reason why we can't do it all over the state at once. We have the staff to come out and do that with our awesome community partners. It's like, let's have a gender neutral drop and swap. Let's get folks some food, like get them the naloxone, all the condoms. People are playing extra. Do it safer. And with that, thank you so much for spending this time with us. And when the open house is scheduled, we'll invite you and Peter both back. Please. And we're going to want to walk through. Oh, definitely. Definitely. So nice. Thank you, Keith. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you in two weeks. But in the meantime, resist.