Just a note, before we get started, there's a little bit of salty language in this episode.

All right, so let's open up that phone. Let's see. This is about two women who are trying to raise money for a start at making a tampon alternative.

Investor says that sounds like a very niche market.

Anna Weiner has always written little emails like this to herself.

Observations, moments she wanted to remember.

Just snippets of dialogue or things that I had seen on the street or sentences that came to mind.

It was sort of like a substitute for a notekeeping practice.

And as she was working in Silicon Valley in the middle of the startup boom,

the emails piled up, as Anna noted what was going on around her.

A lot of them are in shorthand. It's sort of like tweets to myself.

So I know what I'm referring to, but out of context, they seem strange.

So here's one.

Picnic. The boys had packed everything but paper plates and napkins.

They didn't need an IPO.

They needed a mother.

Ian got stuck behind a self-driving car struggling to merge.

This is true.

He got stuck trying to get on the highway behind a self-driving car that was really timid

and just couldn't merge

into rush hour traffic. He was there for like 45 minutes. A beautiful metaphor for my job,

always on the Wi-Fi network guest. Anna's job, or rather a series of her tech jobs from

2013 to 2018, are the subject and the setting of her new book, Uncanny Valley.

...