Hello and welcome to Money Talks. It's a special extra episode of Slate Money

where we chat with brilliant and interesting people. I'm Emily Peck, I write the

Market's newsletter at Axios and I'm co-host of Slate Money, and I'm here today with Semita Mukopadai, the former executive

editor of Teen Vogue, and the author of a new book called The Myth of Making It a Workplace Reckoning.

The book goes deep on what Sumida calls the having it all

industrial complex, the harmful and misleading myths sold to women, sold to everyone

really, about what it means to be ambitious starting decades ago with

Helen Gurley Brown the iconic editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan who made the phrase

famous and ending maybe with girl girl boss hustle culture and taking us through

the workplace reckoning, she says in the title, that we're still living in now that kind of started with the pandemic and

Samita had her own reckoning in the pandemic that will definitely want to talk about

so Samita welcome to money. So good to be here.

So the book is this like really deep story about women,

these myths were sold, about ambition, what it means to succeed,

but it's also your personal your personal journey so I think I want to start there

you're known for being executive editor of Teen Vogue a big accomplished job but in the book you say you took the job as kind of like a rebound

relationship. A little bit. I mean, working in media, it's hard to always identify what's, you know, a real and exciting opportunity and what's kind of just, it's sometimes hard to recover because the nature of these jobs

moves so quickly right and I think that I had never really thought that I would

end up in a role like that like let alone be faced with the possibility of

interviewing with Anna Winter or even be considered for a role like that. I was a blogger, I was

like a self-made writer who got a job at a startup and it was an exciting opportunity but it also felt like my one shot and so when I lost it I was just like devastated by that and I write about that quite a bit in the book and you know and I know there's this like long history of like you know feel like in the business world where it's like failing is a part of accomplishing and I'm like that's great if you're a white man but for me it felt like that was my one shot and then I lost it and so what was going to happen after that? I was fine. I got another job. I got it. I got a great job but I definitely was at that point a little bit jaded about the

stability of the industry and what ultimately this job would mean for me.

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