This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves.

Welcome to the waves. Slates podcast about gender, feminism, and girl bosses. Every episode,

you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing we can't get off of our minds.

And today you've got me, Shannon Paullis, a senior editor at Slate covering health and science.

And I'm Emily Peck. I co-host Slates Money Podcast. I write a newsletter for fortune about the workplace.

And I'm content director at Funrise. I've basically been leaning in for a long time.

And also covering leaning in for a long time.

And today we're going to talk about girl bosses, women entrepreneurs, and the fall of Elizabeth Holmes,

who may or may not be a girl boss. She's currently awaiting trial for fraud for her company,

Theranos. I'm interested in talking about this because I feel like I have been kind of a target

audience for a lot of the girl boss stuff. I read Sophia and Maruso's book, Hashtag Girl Boss,

when it came out in 2014. I watched the rise of Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos with a mix of like awe

and jealousy. And over the past few days preparing for this, I've been thinking about why I was so

attracted to the rhetoric, especially in Sophia and Maruso's book. And I think the main thing that drove

me to it was that, you know, I was like 24 or 25 when I read that book. And this idea of conjuring

a world where you were successful and powerful, like really appealed to me. I didn't like make

up very much at the time. And I was kind of doing what in hindsight was like the slow hard tedious work

of building skills and figuring out where I fit into the journalism world and trying things that

didn't work. And being a girl boss in some ways just sort of seemed to be like skipping all of that.

Yeah, I mean, that I wanted to talk about the girl boss because I mean, I've just been thinking

about girl bosses. Maybe even before the term girl bosses was a thing, maybe since I first,

in 2010 or 2011, watched Cheryl Sandberg's TED Talk, Cheryl Sandberg is the Facebook chief

...