Last Updated
November 8, 2019
In this episode, Tim chats with Lauren Ruffin about the launch of a new AR/VR co-op, Black capitalism, Work as the new religion, Vocations & Callings, Figuring out physical mail distribution for an entirely virtual workplace, and at what point you might own too many bicycles.
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guest
LAUREN OLIVIA RUFFIN currently serves as Fractured Atlas’s Chief External Relations Officer where she is responsible for the organization’s marketing, communications, community engagement, and fundraising. Prior to joining the team at Fractured Atlas, Lauren served as Director of Development for DC-based organizations Martha’s Table and the National Center for Children and Families. She was also fortunate to serve in various roles at and various positions at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Children’s Defense Fund, New Leaders, and AAUW. Before entering the nonprofit sector, Lauren held the position of Assistant Director of Government Affairs for Gray Global Advisors, a bipartisan government relations firm. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science and obtained a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law. Previously, she served on the Board of Directors of Black Girls Code. And in her spare time, she can be found mountain biking or gesturing wildly at the teevee in support of Duke University’s men’s basketball team.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hey, this is Tim. I wanted to include a quick preamble to this episode. We've envisioned the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. podcast to have two different formats. For some of our episodes, I'll be conducting one-on-one interviews. For others, I'll be co-hosting episodes with my friend and colleague, Lauren Ruffin. To get to know Lauren a little bit better, we sat down to record this get to know you episode at the Eaton Hotel in Washington, D.C. Eaton loaned us their radio studio, so we likely are launching this podcast series in the fanciest way possible and it's all downhill from here. Without further ado, here you go.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, we've got like 30 hours worth of time here, so.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh, yeah.
Tim Cynova:
We're going to be good. It's like three o'clock. No, we're going all the way to Tuesday. Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck., a podcast about that. Today I'm joined by Lauren Ruffin. She does fascinating things. I'm lucky to actually be coworkers and colleagues with her at Fractured Atlas. Welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. podcast, Lauren.
Lauren Ruffin:
Well thanks, Tim. We're back in D.C. Together. Very cool of you to make the trip down Amtrak, riding our country's aging infrastructure to get from point A to point B.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, that's great. For those who don't know you, you're currently the Chief Operating Officer at Fractured Atlas.
Lauren Ruffin:
No, that's you.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, that's right. You are not.
Lauren Ruffin:
That's you.
Tim Cynova:
We spend so much time together, you're actually taking on my job. One less thing on my plate.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. No, you're the Chief External Relations Officer at Fractured Atlas where the two of us are two of a four part shared nonhierarchical leadership team. You are the co-founder of Crux, working in Black Storytelling in Immersive Technology. You are currently on the board of Black Girls CODE. You are the founder of Artist Campaign School. You're on faculty at New York University where you're teaching a course this semester and you are an avid fan of world-building games.
Lauren Ruffin:
And Duke basketball.
Tim Cynova:
And Duke basketball. We will cover, how do you decide who's a bigger basketball fan later in the show because we have a colleague, L J, who I think come March madness, there's going to be some tension in the office.
Lauren Ruffin:
I can't wait for there actually to be tension in the office. Just really excited that someone else cares about the best month of the year.
Tim Cynova:
We'll have to do an episode with you and L J come March.
Lauren Ruffin:
We should. That's a great idea.
Tim Cynova:
One more...
Lauren Ruffin:
It has to be video because she and I have to do the map on the wall.
Tim Cynova:
Okay. Want to talk about a couple of different things with you because you're engaged with and co-creating around the future of work in a number of different capacities. Do you consider yourself a futurist?
Lauren Ruffin:
I know people who are actually futurists who would hate that I would co-op up that term. So no, I don't. I think that I am good at reading data and turning data that feels far out into action now. So when you look at some of the data points around work and around the future. There was an interesting article that ran, I think, and I read in the Times last year that talks about how our government was almost defunded.
Lauren Ruffin:
We almost ran out of cash because so many people filed for extensions. And when you dig deeper into the data around, because I was like that's really curious. Why so many extensions this year in particular? Is everyone a conscientious tax abstainer? I was like that'd be really cool. But it turns out there are 40 million people who are on the verge of having to file some sort of 1099 and with that comes a different way for taxes to work because all of a sudden tax dollars aren't automatically being deposited into government accounts. So what do we do about that? I don't know, but I just think about the way that we work is going to change the way for everything. And I think there probably aren't a lot of people thinking about it. So how do we prepare for that and how do we talk about it?
Tim Cynova:
I was thinking about how is work going to change? You are in leadership of two different organizations that have shared leadership teams both at Crux and at Fractured Atlas.
Lauren Ruffin:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tim Cynova:
And Crux is working in some really cool new ways around structure. So you just had a convening, an uncommon Crux convening what, what went on and what are you just launching? What have you just launched?
Lauren Ruffin:
For the last 18 months, Crux has been a public benefit corporation. It's really designed to partner with black artists as we begin to think about the future of immersive storytelling look like. Virtual reality, augmented reality as an industry doesn't really exist outside of a handful of large corporations. So how do black people start to organize now before all the money and all the content is being concentrated and sucked up by a couple of big studios. And then two weeks ago we announced that we had formed a cooperative. We have an opportunity for us to begin to pull our resources to fund our own content so that we can retain our own intellectual property and begin to carve out a brand in this new space. So that's crux in a nutshell, but really thinking about the entire pipeline of creation from sort of when we first begin, when people first need $2,000 to spend some time working on a script all the way through to distribution. So the cooperative will begin to accept members at the middle of December and then we'll soft launch the distribution platform for XR content in January. So things are moving.
Tim Cynova:
You just came off of a presentation at COCAP called "You Can Keep Your Black Capitalism" and based on the enthusiasm that I heard on the recording, it was incredibly well received. Can you talk to me about that?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot. You hear about these singular black people who are wealthy, billionaires, millionaires, Bob Johnson, Oprah. There is this question out there which is, do black people have a history or do we have a duty to treat our workers differently because of our history in this country as enslaved persons? Should we spend some time thinking about how we organize and how we start our businesses, what our business do and how we operate and how we create and share wealth because we were marginalized for so long? There's a current controversy with Jay-Z and the NFL. When you look at black capitalists, there's something more disappointing in it because they've not chosen to take a different path. And then you have to ask how much is enough? At some point, you have to think about what would your ancestors want?
Lauren Ruffin:
And I don't know that our ancestors would have wanted us to sort of hoard wealth in the same way that your traditional capitalists do. So that's where that really sprung from. And then just at a basic level, Bob Johnson was the first black billionaire. And I keep thinking what if BT had been a cooperative? What would our country look like if there had been, instead of one billionaire, there had been thousands of black millionaires? How would that wealth have been distributed differently? What would our communities look like? What would the narrative around black wealth and wealth disparity, how would that have changed? So yeah, you can keep your black capitalism, Tim.
Tim Cynova:
And that's the show. So what was the reaction like after your presentation? Because it was about a five minute long presentation that you gave.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. It was just a quick one. I think people were interested. I think I was the second or third person. It was a lightning round type thing. I'm always surprised that I think back to the world building and some of the things that you and I talk about a lot. I'm always surprised that people don't ask why more often and I think there are people who were like, I had never thought about that before. And I'm like, that's why you're so sad when you have essentially capitalism has pitted Jay-Z against Colin Kaepernick. That's why it feels that way because we do have sort of different expectations of a guy who grew up in poverty, selling drugs and has made it. We want him to do something different with his wealth. And the reality is, he hasn't and people are sad about it. We don't have the words to talk about it.
Tim Cynova:
You said people don't ask why enough. We've had conversations recently around the why around virtual work and fully distributed organizations and sort of the disconnect that people have with even imagining what the future of work might look like when it does include a physical space. Has that conversation surprised you in any way or what do you think that will help connect the disconnects?
Lauren Ruffin:
There are a couple of things happening. One is the shift in just the demographics of the workforce in the U.S. generally. Folks in leadership tend to be a little bit older and have really latched onto this notion of the idea that you owe some loyalty to your employer and what the employer, the sort of worker-owner relationship looks like. I mean since I'd been in the workforce even, last 15, 20 years, that's changed right down to how much, one like technological advances mean that you really can have almost the same level of oversight. I'm going to use that word with air quotes up. You can have the same level of oversight of virtual workers that you can, and in some cases even more depending upon how like creepy you want to be with Big Brother technology, than you can when they're in your work environment.
Lauren Ruffin:
There's a health and wellness piece. So many of our staff members at Fractured Atlas live in New York. I got to say like, how can you expect someone to bring their best selves to work when several of our employees who are black and brown people and especially women of color, have experienced harassment in the subway system? How can we expect them to have to do that, to show up to work and do their best work when at some point there's got to be some nervousness about what it feels like to just get on a train? I think there are a lot of sort of reasons why virtual work works, but I think it's definitely the right choice for us, for our sort of tenants of trust the people you work with to do their job and leave them alone. Let them figure out when they want to do it, where do they want to do it, how they want to do it, and trust that they're going to give you the best work possible because we're a cool organization and we're fun to work with.
Tim Cynova:
I read an article recently about work as the new religion and it included a lot of statistics about the changing demographics around those who consider themselves affiliated with organized religion. I don't know the exact specific, but between 18 and 25, those who identify as being a part of organized religion is so much smaller than it was in previous generations and how there's this effect where work you see work as your calling, as your religion. And I've been wrestling with this idea of how do organizations take care of those who work for them and what's the line? But this shouldn't be your entire life. And even if you see it as a calling, it shouldn't be your entire life because you're missing a lot and you'll probably burn out really quickly.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, that's really interesting. I grew up in the country, in a rural community, that still had a vocational school and I also grew up in the church. So we talked a lot about sort of vocations generally and to sort of feel like you had a calling and everything else. I remember that's so interesting that the trades, like my friends who would go off and get their CDL or become a hairdresser or barber at vo-tech would have like a vocation. Meanwhile, I was just in college prep and I was like, well that just means I haven't found my calling yet and I guess that was always the way I thought about it.
Lauren Ruffin:
There's something to that. I'm going to have... But I also think that there, and we struggle with this at Fractured Atlas as well, because I mean I feel like you and I are the ones who are like, please don't bring your whole self to work. Bring 85% of you and I don't bring my entire self to work. I think that work has started filling a void in some way and I don't quite have the words for it, but there are moments at work where I'm like, something's going on with this person that I care about, but that isn't my family. I don't want them to think that we're family, but I care about them and I want them to be happy. But I also feel like this is a job. I don't know. I don't know how to fix it.
Tim Cynova:
Calibrating caring.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh yeah. I mean, I don't... It's a struggle, right?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. Well, I think of the work that Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton are doing around job career and calling and how you perceive what you do. One of our former colleagues went to a dinner party once where people weren't allowed to talk about what they did for work. You could talk about anything else, but you couldn't talk about what you did. So this is a similar conversation or a question in my mind about if you view your work as a calling, that can be difficult to have a conversation where you're like, I don't know. I mean my dad was a Lutheran pastor and viewed his as a religious calling. I don't know. I guess these are points I'm wrestling with as we think about what does the future of work look like and where are healthy boundaries so that people can bring as much of themselves as they want to work but also don't end up in a charred mess because they can't calibrate that and turn it off.
Lauren Ruffin:
Fractured Atlas for me was sort of a random place to end up because I'm not an artist and I didn't know anything about the arts. Fractured Atlas for me is not a vocation. It's a job that I enjoy my colleagues, I like the work, I like the autonomy but it's in this weird place where it's not a calling but it's also not a job because I bartended forever and I bartended all through law school. I loved that I didn't have to take that work home with me but I take Fractured Atlas home with me and there are two things I miss about work. The first is that like just having a job and the second is because I feel like even if Fractured Atlas was my only sort of hat I was wearing, we still do so many things and add on to all the other things I'm doing.
Lauren Ruffin:
I miss that feeling you have when you're in school where you get to go into the library, walk into the stacks and spend hours sort of pulling every book off the shelf about a topic until you get to know that topic really, really well and I feel like I don't know anything really deeply anymore. People will call me an expert and I have to push back because I'm like, I remember what expertise looked like. I wrote a paper on Jim Jones. I was an expert in that for this finite period of time. I read everything that the library had on it, as much of an expert as you can be at 19, but do you feel like you are an expert in anything or do you feel like the more you learn, the more you like are like, Oh, I really don't know this at all?
Tim Cynova:
Two different ways of looking at this? Yes. I think the more I learn on various things, I think, Oh God, there's so much more to learn about this and you just realize you're never going to get that curve that never reaches a hundred. The closer you get, the farther you are away from it. And then at the same time though, there's moments where you can pull yourself out of the thing that you're in and realize, wow, we've done a lot on this. We've thought a lot about this and I probably know a lot more about this than I thought and sort of that perspective shift of saying, Oh right, everyone else hasn't been thinking about in an entirely virtual organization, how should mail work? We have colleagues that spent a lot of time, like granular stuff like how do you deal with 13 different mail flows where you have no physical place to send the mail?
Lauren Ruffin:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tim Cynova:
And so I think things like that. That's why I always people they should write blog posts about it. The work that went into mail distribution and how we handle mail flows. There's so much learning, I think that would be useful. Other organizations just take this and use it, probably not, but I think it shows steps that you walk through that can be applied to different ways of thinking.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Maybe someone on our staff is, well, certainly an expert in how Fractured Atlas has figured out how to deal with it's mail flow. But I think there's just a lot of things, I didn't even name everything that you're involved in and you come and talk to my class at the new school every year and one of the things every year they remark, you're introduced as the Chief External Relations Officer at Fractured Atlas and then we go down the list and they're like, wow, Lauren does a lot of different things and it's so great that she does a lot of different things. It's not just like she's a Director of Development at XPlace. That probably speaks to the type of person you are and the interests you have.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I mean, no shadef to development directors at XPlace. Yeah, that's a hard job.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
But there's a sense of privilege there. Who else has the freedom to start a company openly while they're at another company? How privileged am I? I had a friend who worked on a really cool board game a couple of years ago in DC. She launched her Kickstarter and her company found out about it and they fired her. And I'm like, how could you? Penalizing someone for entrepreneurship really stinks, but that's the reality of being a worker. So I mean there's a lot of privilege there. I come from a family of workers. I kind of expected to be sort of approaching 40 and having to work really, really hard to get to the place where I could do the things that I really wanted to do and do things like this, talk to people I like to talk to and work with people, sort of Marie Kondo my life. I want everything to spark joy. Tim, you spark joy. Working at Eaton sparks joy.
Tim Cynova:
Thanks to Eaton for letting us sit in their cool radio lab here. This is way more professional than inaugural episode or how the podcast should be.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, this is actually, it's all downhill from here.
Tim Cynova:
It is all downhill.
Lauren Ruffin:
I'm pretty sure that it's all downhill.
Tim Cynova:
To both of our listeners, you're welcome. So Lauren, besides working at Eaton, what sparks joy? When you decide what you want to work on, how do you decide if it makes the cut or not?
Lauren Ruffin:
It's that. It's I'm excited to do it. I was a lobbyist for a long time. I worked with a lot of people that did not spark joy in my life. Yeah. It's like, am I excited about the idea of partnering with this person for the next three to six or nine months? And that's really it. Someone would say like, it's either a hell yes or a fuck no. And that's how you make decisions. I want to say it was Warren Buffet, but that feels way too vulgar for him to say publicly. But it's someone who's very wealthy who was like, that is how you make decisions and you should feel that strongly about the work you do. It's pretty simple. People make time for the things they care about. And so when someone approaches me, especially for Crux with a project that I believe in, it's like I find a way to make the work.
Lauren Ruffin:
I find a way to sort of lean in and do these things that I care about. I think we all do that to a certain extent. I feel like I've just had the freedom to kind of be able to do that.
Tim Cynova:
Why do you think that's not the norm in work?
Lauren Ruffin:
It's got to be either scarcity mindset or trust issues. It's kind of the root of all things evil, especially in the work we do.
Tim Cynova:
It starts with resource scarcity.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Yeah, it's got to be either that or just you don't trust the people that are coming to you to do things or you don't trust yourself maybe to make the leap. I don't know.
Tim Cynova:
I wonder if it's just, you don't think about it. It's that thing that you do and it's like this is how an organization should work, this is how a board should work, this is how people should work and you don't ask the why and question it in a way that allows you to see the autonomy and agency that is there.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
That's certainly not the entirety of it. That's probably several books long.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, and someone way smarter than us.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:18:45]
Lauren Ruffin:
Or at least if they're not smarter, they're most certainly more charismatic. They've definitely been thinking about this for awhile.
Tim Cynova:
As we wrap up, I want to know how many bikes is too many bikes to own? You're an avid owner of bikes, so what's too many?
Lauren Ruffin:
This is a really relevant question in my life because I'm moving into a place with a garage.
Tim Cynova:
The sky's the limit.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, that's exactly it. I'm sitting here being like the garage is approximately 200 square feet and each bike takes up this footprint. So, I don't know. There's a difference between having a hobby, which is bike riding, and buying bikes, which is kind of what I do. I buy bikes. I think 10 has to be the number that I have to keep beneath and I'm at five right now.
Tim Cynova:
10 is almost like a small bike shop.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, so I think 10 is my personal bikes, but I also have three other people who I cohabitate with, two who have little bikes and one who has a full size bike. There are nine bikes in the house right now, but I have just limited myself to 10.
Tim Cynova:
If you enjoyed the conversation half as much as we did, you're in luck, maybe a quarter as much as we did, you're in luck. Lauren and I will be co-hosting a mini-series within the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. podcast where we chat with cool friends and colleagues. So stay tuned if you like this or you didn't like it, let your friends and/or people you don't like know. Thumbs up, add stars, whatever combination is on your podcasting platform of preference. But until next time, thanks for listening. Thanks Lauren.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Thanks, Tim.
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