Annie Lennox:  00:03 If you use the term global feminism to describe what you represent and what you stand for, you understand feminism all around the world. It is not only from a western perspective.

Annie Lennox:  00:22  Hopefully I galvanize and inspire people to get off their sofas to realize that actually we could all be change agents and we could all transform the world in our own way. We don’t have to be Bill Gates, you know, we don’t have to be billionaires.

Edie Lush: 00:41  Improving the lives of women and girls is the key to a better world. We say that all the time on the Global Goalscast,

Claudia Edelman:   00:58  But how do we assure that that happens? What role must men play in this world where the gender battle is playing out? What is the future of masculinity and in this context does the traditional concept of feminism for short, is it too exclusive? Is it only for women? In this episode we talk with an expert. She’s both a genuine global activist and an icon of the gender bending 1980s and she says we need an inclusive kind of feminism, something she calls global feminism.

Edie Lush: 01:34  So you know, our guest is a rockstar with the eurhythmics, her electro beat and sexy androgynous look caught that MTV moment and her solo career turned her into an icon, but she has gone on to stand for so much more than pop music.

Annie Lennox: 01:51  Actually, my name really is Ann Lennox. I was called Ann Lennox for years until someone changed it at the age of 16 a friend said, started calling me Annie. So my name is Annie Lennox. Ever since I was 16

Edie Lush:  02:09 Yes, our special guest is Annie Lennox. We’re going to talk about her music and about the sustainable development goals because for more than a decade and has been focused on raising awareness and money for HIV and AIDS, as well as building circles of women in developed countries in order to help women in less advantaged parts of the world. We’ll hear all about it right after this

Claudia Edelman:  02:38  Season Two of Global GoalsCast is sponsored by Mastercard. Stay tuned later for an interview with Shamina Singh. as she tells us about mastercard’s index of women entrepreneurs and also thanks to CBS News, digital and to Harmon. The official sound of Global GoalsCast

Edie Lush:  03:02  This is the Global Goals Cast, the podcast that asks how we can change the world. I’m Edie Lush

Claudia Edelman:  03:08  And I am Claudia Romo Edelman. Edie, so great that you were able to talk to Annie Lennox. Isn’t she cool and amazing? I mean, I know her from even before I was working on public health when I was working at the World Economic Forum, probably like 18 – 20 years ago. She was already there like one of the first ever very serious and articulated celebrities that was putting her heart on her mouth into the real action, but she also came across as a very humble, normal, and actually authentic human being. What was your impression?

Edie Lush:  03:42  She came across as very human to me as well. She’s clearly worked incredibly hard to master talking about sustainable development goals without sucking away the credit from the people who are out there in the field helping to achieve them.

Edie Lush:  03:59 I met up with her in the electric club in Notting Hill in London. So I set us up in this room above the club and there was a little bit of a buzzing sound from a generator next door. But I figured Simon James, who’s our sound maestro could do magic and rid of the buzzing. But she came in and she looked at me and went, I thought you were a podcaster. This buzzing is going to give your listeners and me and you a migraine. So we gotta move. We gotta move next door. So in fact we did move to the next room. She was right. Buzzing was less and all. And on we went.

Annie Lennox:    04:38  For well over a decade now. I’ve been very involved in advocacy and activism. First of all, it was in connection with HIV and AIDS is it affected women and girls. And then after awhile I, I became really aware that there were so many issues affecting girls and women, particularly in the developing countries. And the roots of all of this came down to global disempowerment. And so HIV and AIDS is one issue. People are less aware of it and the western world because they tend to have a different concept of HIV, but the HIV aids pandemic, that really was at its very, very worst in the late nineties and early two thousands was affecting women on an unimaginable scale and still is because in Africa for example, AIDS is one of the leading causes of death for girls and women of reproductive age and we don’t talk about that. We’re not aware of it. And that’s partly what I suppose makes me so passionately committed to being an advocate is the fact that we just don’t know about how girls and women live around the world.

Edie Lush:  05:55 It was over 15 years ago that you started down this journey and I believe it was when you met Nelson Mandela. Is that right?

Annie Lennox:  06:02 Well, Nelson Mandela became very active in advocating and trying to make change with regards to South Africa, his country, because the pandemic, the AIDS pandemic at the time was wiping out over 2000 people on a daily basis and no one was getting access to treatment. So it was really a dire, unbelievable sort of, he called it a genocide actually, so he founded an organization called 46664 – his HIV aids foundation, and there was a concert who launched the foundation in November of 2003 which is held in Cape Town. We were invited to perform and because of that I had the possibility to visit health care facilities, orphanages, clinics, people’s homes where people were affected by HIV and aids, and I saw the pandemic personally, and that witnessing of the reality hit me so hard that it completely changed the paradigm of my perception as to what poverty looks like, what lack of empowerment looks like, what HIV and AIDS is about. if you can’t get access to treatment.

Annie Lennox: 07:20 Ever since then, really I felt I had to use my platform in some way, become an yeah, become an activist really.

Edie Lush: 07:28  And you have created your own organization now called The Circle. What was the inspiration behind founding that?

Annie Lennox:  07:36 Well, I don’t like to think of the circle is my organization. I had an idea about what could be done and I founded something that ended up being called The Circle, but in the initial thinking behind The Circle is basically that women in the western world are hugely resourced. Whether we realize it or not, we have access to just about everything we want. We have had the vote for several years now and we have access to running water, clean, running water, hot and called out of our tops, sanitation, health care. I mean so many things that we take for granted, but women in the so called developing world have very little of that and they’re nowhere near even the bottom most rung of the ladder when it comes to their rights, to their human rights.

Annie Lennox: 08:25  Basically the circle supports grassroots organizations that are run by women or for women and really the issues could be anything ranging from access to primary school education to healthcare, to knowing one’s rights, physical violence, sex trafficking, child brides. There are so many issues that girls face. You know, I’m kind of amazed that more people don’t know about what the truth about girls’ and women’s rights living in countries where the really basically have almost none. That’s why I endorsed the term global feminism and I described myself as a global feminist and I encourage boys and men to be part of this inclusive term. If you describe yourself as a global feminist, basically you’re representing millions of girls and women that just don’t have a voice and you’re making them present and known and you’re giving value to that term.

Edie Lush:  09:41 She told me that global feminism was a term she’d picked up from Bell Hooks, the feminist author hooks wrote a book called Feminism is for Everyone, which is sometimes described as the answer to the question, when’s international Men’s Day? I asked Annie to describe how the projects at The Circle, were advancing global feminism.

Annie Lennox: 10:00  So altogether at the moment we have 11 circles trying to make a difference and transform situations with different organizations that are grassroots organizations. So, for example, we have the Marie Colvin journalists circle, which works with female journalists in the Middle East trying to advise, mentor, empower them and advise them to keep their lives safe. This is because of Marie Colvin, the renowned war correspondent who was killed in Homs about seven years ago. There’s a currently as a film about Marie that people may or may not have seen called A Private War

Annie Lennox: 10:42  We also have an organization in South Africa called Nonceba that we support. It’s a shelter for really victims of violence, domestic violence. They come there with their children and they have a safe haven. There’s accommodation for a few families and basically, you know, you’re, you’re talking about a township, let’s say Khayelitsha which is outside of Cape Town, which, um, has about one and a half million residents. And as a woman living, there trying to raise a family. You’re in a very precarious situation with a violent partner of violent father violence all around you and rape. You know, one in four men in the country have said that they rape and it’s actually looked on as quite normal practice

Edie Lush: 11:28 At the Global GoalsCast. We love to focus on the stories of success, how we are making the world a better place, but we also sometimes like to look

Annie Lennox:   11:37 I think we’re far from success

Edie Lush:  11:37  Yeah. Well, sometimes we like to look at the things that haven’t gone so well. The missteps,

Annie Lennox:  11:41 Almost everything. I can say is that when you look at the UN goal number five, which purports to aspire to equality for girls and women around the globe. At the same time, we know that we are so, so far away from it that people describe progress is being glacially slow. I cannot sit here in all honesty and tell you that I feel hugely optimistic because the statistics that we quote about global feminism are just so unbearable. I mean to actually think that one in three women around the world have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. It’s, it’s the the scale of this abuse is so horrendous and you wonder, well, where do you start? Where do you begin to even respond to something like that? And what I feel is that it takes a whole cultural, social, psychological, Zeitgeist shift in attitude, attitudes need to change before behavior can be changed.

Annie Lennox: 12:50  You know, misogyny is about an attitude and after attitude becomes behavior – misbehavior. And I’m a heterosexual woman and I love men. And part of my sort of resistance years ago to describing myself as a feminist was because I actually felt that that stridency against men was not very helpful cause I really liked men and I wanted to kind of be their friend. But later on now, much later on down the line, I totally get it. And I actually really believe stridency is hugely important and it’s part of that kind of, how would I say? Like there’s all kinds of extremes in a movement. You get very, very strident and very, very angry, very, very extreme that matters. People are angry and then you get middle ground people that say, yeah, well I’m not really, you know, a feminist but kind of get it. Uh, and there’s just all kinds of ways to interpret feminism. And you know what? I think at this point in the stage of the game, we must look at ways of being inclusive of everyone. If we call ourselves feminists, we must include the world. So we must also use the term global feminism and that kind of sums it all up. That is an umbrella term that brings us all to the table and creates a sort of harmony rather than this polarization that tends to occur. The splitting that occurs, the factiousness, which I think is not helpful.

Edie Lush: 14:30 How do you bring more men and boys along in this journey do you think?

Annie Lennox:  14:38 I think first of all, by giving the permission to come on, there are many man, many, many men who know that feminism just makes absolute sense and they endorse it, but there be feeling the unwelcome and that has been expressed for many years vociferously that men are not welcome, that we can do it. Of course we can do things, but without men’s support, yes, I realize that, but wouldn’t it be better if we had men and boys on board the debate so that we could help them to be agents of change, change their attitudes, change their cultural behavior, the historical behavior? I think men must be part of this whole picture.

Edie Lush: 15:24  Can you define what is a global feminist? How is it different from a normal feminist?

Annie Lennox: 15:31  If you use the term global feminism to describe what you represent and what you stand for – you understand feminism all around the world. It is not only from a western perspective, you know, for example, that one out of three women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. You know, for example, that HIV and AIDS is one of the biggest killers of girls of reproductive age in Africa. You know that the facts are so outrageous, so extreme. The disempowerment is so extreme. You know what you’re representing. You also could be a man or a young man can comfortably describe themselves as a global feminist without feeling uncomfortable with the term. It wasn’t that long ago when we couldn’t really comfortably use the word feminist that people that actually were feminists were uncomfortable with it because it may be said, oh, maybe it means I hate man.

Edie Lush: 16:40 Did you feel that?

Annie Lennox: 16:42  Back in the 70s I felt that I wasn’t strident enough. I felt that I was too soft, you know, because I wanted to wear high heels and I wanted to wear red lipstick and I wanted to shave my legs and dye my hair and do what wear makeup. So I thought maybe I’m just not good enough to be a feminist because I’m kind of betraying, you know, something. It’s so interesting because attitudes change and shift. And then as I grew older I realized, oh my goodness, I so am a feminist. That’s really, no, no. I said I’m a global feminist because I want to always incorporate everything that’s happening in the world, not just in the, you know, in the western countries.

Claudia Edelman:  17:36 After the break, we will hear more from Annie Lennox on feminism, gay rights, her music and being a mom. By the way. Edie, did I tell you that my daughter and her last concert in school sang sweet dreams are made this

Edie Lush:  17:50  That’s so cool

Claudia Edelman: 17:50  Should I send, should I send an audio recording of it? I think you should anyways, first before going any further with Annie Lennox and having the temptation of singing to you all, which we could, could we not? We could.

Edie Lush:  18:04  We totally could. Let us share our conversation with that top executive at our sponsor Mastercard. Her name is Shamina Singh, President of the Mastercard Center for inclusive growth.

Shamina Singh:  18:21  It’s important to really think about entrepreneurism growing business and think about women in the same conversation. A little known fact is women actually hold the majority of business licenses around the world. What unfortunately, again, the potential of reaching business growth is something that they haven’t achieved and the numbers that we’d like to see. So we’ve actually developed an index of women entrepreneurs that we’ve released the second version and we look around the globe and we examine sort of what’s happening and where. What we’re finding is that indeed to no surprise in the developing markets where there are more contracts and rules of the road – formalized protocols, women have a better chance of succeeding. In places where it is a little bit less structured in developing markets. At this point, women don’t have as much access. So land rights for example, and access to capital, things of that sort of – harder to achieve.

Shamina Singh: 19:21 If you think about developing markets and the amount of land that’s used for agriculture and who’s working that land, it’s women. And if you think about the fact that maybe in one particular village or something like that, if a person has five acres of land, it all depends on your ability to access the, the tools, the equipment, the information you need to produce that land in a way that works for you and works for your village. Women have to work harder to get the same amount of information that they need to till the soil. It sounds strange, but it’s true. And so we’ve really worked on creating products and technology solutions that recognize that all things don’t apply to all people everywhere. So we really have customized something that we’re calling the Mastercard farmer’s network. It’s a way that we really think we can reach women who frankly are the majority of small holder farmers in the world. This allows women to negotiate from their farm to say, okay, here comes the order. Here’s what I have, here’s what I can produce, here’s when I can send it, and then the money comes directly to the woman. So think about that.

Shamina Singh: 20:36   There are probably five intermediaries normally between cash changing hands – between the market owner to the bicycle owner to the motorcycle to this to finally gets to the woman – this cuts it all out and says, here’s the price, here’s how much, here’s when and the market sends the transportation out to pick up the produce and bring it back.

Claudia Edelman:  21:04 Welcome back in the second half of your interview with Annie Lennox, it sounds like you tried to get a little bit more personal.

Edie Lush: 21:13 In fact, Annie started turning the questions on me and even helping me out, asking my own questions.

Annie Lennox:  21:20 What do you think a strong woman is?

Edie Lush:  21:22 I think somebody who’s okay with who they are and being comfortable in your own skin. I have also heard people say that, you know, you became a bit of a, an icon within the gay and Trans Community because of the way you dressed at the time with suits and great hair and – does the sexual ambiguity from the time of the eighties and the nineties uh, and how it’s kind of become,

Annie Lennox:  21:46  hmm. Well that’s interesting.

Edie Lush:   21:48  I don’t know, does it?

Annie Lennox:  21:48 Well, it’s interesting how you want to, I know what you’re trying to – I think I know the question that you’ve kind of,

Edie Lush: 21:54 I don’t really know what I’m actually saying.

Annie Lennox:  21:56  What you’re saying is times have changed so significantly over the decades. You know, when I came down to London, I really didn’t think I knew anybody who was gay. I didn’t even know the word gay because there wasn’t a word. And when I came to the Royal Academy of Music, I met lots and lots of gay men mainly, and they were kind of in the closet. And so looking back, I’ve seen how hard it’s been for queer people as I hate these labels, you know, but the self identified queer people to come out of the closet and be comfortable in a world that was always dangerous for them, where they were all was being mugged.

Annie Lennox: 22:34 It’s still a world like that it can still be a world where you’re bullied. And now with the millennial generation, that would be my daughter’s generation. There’s a whole other take on gender orientation and sexuality, which is so many light years away from decades ago. And it’s really interesting and it’s in transit, it’s changing all the time and people are struggling, they’re looking for labels – they’re looking for what is politically correct, what is politically incorrect. And sometimes older generation has difficulty to, you know, to kind of catch up with it all. But I think that’s why a general term like global feminism, which is inclusive is a beautiful thing because it’s very harmonious. So it’s very accepting of everything and everyone in a way. And it’s saying that yes, feminism can be all things to all people in. But actually could we just look at the bigger picture as well?

Edie Lush:  23:40  So in the episode that I just finished that, and in fact launched today, had a young comic who, Israeli comic who left peacebuilding because she found that she could do much more in terms of bringing Jews and Arabs together through comedy than she could actually as a peace builder. So I wonder if you feel like you’re reaching more people now through your activism than you were as a musician?

Annie Lennox: 24:06 It’s a very good question. As a musician? You know, personally I wanted to touch people’s emotions, their intellect and articulate feelings through songs, you know songs are great messages for everyone they’re – You live with songs, they’re the background of your life, you know? And for me, there was never really very often any kind of messaging behind them other than just what the songs had to save themselves with the exception of maybe sisters are doing it for themselves, which was a very much a feminist anthem back in the 80s and it was very specific as a celebration of female empowerment

Annie Lennox:   24:43  For me now, you know, the music industry has changed so much. It’s become more a place of celebrity in a way. Although music still there, but you know, I would not really personally want to enter into the music industry as it stands now because it’s not really a place that I feel as drawn to. I think you go through your life evolving, hopefully not, not being stuck. I don’t want to be stuck in any decades that may, people may think of me, Oh yeah, you know, the eighties the nineties or whatever. People have remembered me in popular terms, that’s fine, but that was then. This is now, this is who I’ve been for quite a long time.

Annie Lennox:  25:30 I’m very outraged and I’m a sensitive person, so I see a lot of injustice wherever I go. And being a woman and being a mother was really another, well, the huge, huge life changer for me. But I understood when you’re a mother, what you want to do is to protect your child. If she’s a girl and you’re thinking she’s going to grow up into a misogynistic world where she’s going to experience the kinds of abuses, whether they’d be verbal, physical, mental, whatever they are, or the disempowerment that girls grow up into. It’s not something that you look forward to. I look at women who are mothers with awe and respect because I know because of my own experience, just what it takes to bring up a child into this world. And really that was one of the reasons why I felt so strongly about pregnant women who are HIV positive and why they had a human right to deliver an HIV negative baby, which is absolutely possible to do.

Edie Lush: 26:40 So I wonder what your aspirations are for the next few years. What does success look like for you?

Annie Lennox: 26:50 Changes is interesting. You think Sam Cook this fantastic song called change is gonna come just shortly before he died, I believe he was killed the sixties or in civil rights movement. And around that time in the late sixties you know, you really did think of change was going to come, that racism and bigotry and hatred would cease. And after apartheid, you thought that would be the end, you know, to this hideous racism, for example, I’m talking about one issue now that still permeates the entire globe. So things get better, things get worse. I think for me, all I could say is personally I try to contribute and make the difference that I can. Hopefully I galvanize and inspire people to get off their sofas to realize that actually we could all be change agents and we could all transform the world in our own way. We don’t have to be Bill Gates, you know, we don’t have to be billionaires.

Annie Lennox:  27:52  We don’t necessarily have to do that though or leave them to do it. For example, if you’re listening to this now and you’re thinking, well, what is a global feminist? Maybe I’m a global feminist and you understand what a global feminist means and you are, you are already becoming an agent for change by endorsing and identifying that title. And that’s very powerful. You know, society just changes. Cultures Change, the environments change. I hope in my lifetime to see something for the better. And I have seen things change for the better. I’ve also seen them change for the worse. So, um, I would say, you know, you live your life day to day, you try to meet your contribution if you can, and your own way. We would love to see the eradication of poverty. We would love to see the reduction of maternal mortality rates in the developing world. We’d love to see women more empowered, respected, we’d love to see men, uh, changing attitudes and behaviors in terms of rape, abuse and violence against girls and women. There’s so many things I’d love to see changed. The list is endless.

Edie Lush:  29:02 So you seem very settled and passionate as an activist. Do you miss writing music at all?

Annie Lennox:  29:07 No, I don’t. I did write a song recently and that it went on the film, A Private War and that was the song about Marie Colvin, or for Marie really, I made music so intensely for decades I performed. It, I wrote it, I recorded, it was the absolute center of my life. And then I had children and I tried to do what women do, which is multitask with my children, tried to be a good mother and be there for my kids, but at the same time keep my artistry up and know I’m in another phase and I’m not saying that I would never write music. But you know, activism really gives this platform to express really what is much, much more important than entertainment. Not that I feel that music is always entertainment, but in a way there’s an aspect of entertainment and celebrity that I’m not comfortable with anymore. I’m really not comfortable with it. And that life of being told that you are a celebrity rather than being an artist or perceived as being a musician, you know, someone with an intelligence, it really is diminishing.

Edie Lush:  30:18 I read that you in an interview, a previous interview that you liked the song. I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair and from from south Pacific, which is both my mom’s and my favourite song,

Annie Lennox:  30:32 It’s you know, it’s very cool. And I remember when I was a little girl watching South Pacific, you know, Bali Hai. And though the fantastic songs,

Edie Lush: 30:40  Did you feel uh, um, I dunno, a moment in that song we thought, God there, you know, there’s this sort of feminist aspect of it

Annie Lennox:   30:46 I was four years old. I didn’t even know the word. You know, it’s so funny because when you look back on your life through the decades, and you think about like what you were exposed to at the time, what were the social behavioral norms and how did you yourself see yourself in relation to the world? You evolve if you’re fortunate – you evolve or not. And I think that through life I have been fortunate in that I have evolved and you know, people think, oh, you have one attitude and it never changes and you’ll always think that. I disagree. I think you can see many aspects. There are many truths and many different perspectives and different ways of seeing things. And as I get older, I don’t want to get stuck. You know, I want to always look forward and be curious about life.

Claudia Edelman: 31:44 I love that conversation. She is such a serious activist. She’s fantastic and she was one of the pioneers in actually making sure that people were using their celebrity and their fame to highlight issues that were important. I knew Annie Lennox the beginning when when I was working for the Forum and there was like the launch for the Global Fund there and then 10 years after by celebrating this incredible institution, she was always there and she’s still there.

Edie Lush: 32:14  She’s still there and the bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has also been part of the Global Fund is still there and I’m only mentioning that because our next podcast is going to feature an interview with Sue Desmond Hellmann, who is the CEO of the bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Claudia, I want you to tell me a little bit about how you see the development community grappling with this issue of masculinity and feminism. How’s that all knitting together?

Claudia Edelman:   32:40  I think that that’s the part where the Annie Lennox episode is so great and so interesting and so rich – to open up the discussion about like, okay, so we’re steer the wheel up. There’s a lot of water unsettled about like gender equality and what does it mean, um, for young generations for you know, like for the Development Community and a lot of the times he’s like now he’s a time to explore what is our role, what is our role to advance the rights of women and girls and also what is the role of man in that equation? Could you be a man and be a feminist? Then what does that mean? Does it mean that you’re interested in putting the agenda forward? Because let’s face it Edie we’ve pushed the envelope a lot but the reality is not there yet. Gender pay is not there.

Claudia Edelman: 33:26  If there’s any kid that likes water, probably is going to be a girl. If there’s someone that has to actually go and fetch the food in a family, probably is going to be the girl. So we have not done there yet

Edie Lush:  33:36 And she asked me if I considered myself a global feminist. She asked me if I liked that term and I thought, you know what? That’s what we’ve been doing. That’s what Claudia and I have been doing with the podcast for the last year. We’ve really been talking about how we put women and girls first. We put their stories first and we have featured those voices from Africa, from Latin America, of those people that you wouldn’t normally hear from, and quite often more than 50% of the time I’d say it, they’re from women and girls.

Claudia Edelman: 34:03 So we understand that poverty is sexist. We could adhere to being global feminist, but we want men as part of the equation.

Claudia Edelman: 34:13 And this is the time for facts and actions. Three facts to be able to show off with your mother-in-law at dinner and three actions that you can take to make a difference

Edie Lush: 34:23 And to give us those facts and actions. We’ve got Sioned Jones who works with Annie Lennox as the Executive director of The Circle and she joined us in the recording of this podcast.

Sioned Jones: 34:36  My three facts, number one, 603 million women live in countries where domestic violence is not considered a crime. Fact Number two. Out of the 757 million adults who cannot read or write, two out of three are women and Fact Number three, over 2.7 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men.

Sioned Jones: 35:03 So my three suggested actions are one. Find out more about the circle and join us at www dot the circle dot NGO number to join our social media campaign this international women’s Day to support being a global feminist. Take one of those facts I just gave you or find another. Write it on a card, hold it up, post it on your social media and Hashtag it with one reason why I’m a global feminist. And number three, support our impactful grassroots projects. Go to our website and donate to one that you choose

Claudia Edelman: 35:43 Sweet dreams to everybody from Edie Lush and Claudia Romo Edelman

Edie Lush: 35:48 This was our interview with Annie Lennox and thank you to Annie Lennox and Sioned Jones and Shamina Singh and goodbye from us.

Claudia Edelman: 35:58  And you must be talking to the angels, the angels in the sky

CREDITS:  36:14 Music in this episode was by Andrew Philips, Angelica Garcia, Simon James, Katie Crone, Amy Edwards, Ashish Pillowall ,Alex Vallejo and Ellis. This episode was made possible thanks to the support of Mastercard, CBS News digital, and HARMAN, the official sound of global goals cast. This episode would not have been possible without Keith Reynolds, founder and president of Spoke Media who lent us his ear.