Hello everybody, and welcome back to If I'm Honest with Julia Landauer. Today was a very special recording. We had a guest from out of town, and Valerie Chapman is the co-founder and CEO of Ruth AI, an AI-powered career platform building agents to close the $1.6 trillion gender wage gap through personal branding, salary negotiation, and career advancement. Her Fortune op-ed on the AI gender gap, informed by a conversation with Open AI CEO Sam Altman, has become a defining piece in the national conversation around women and artificial intelligence. Valerie has generated over 120 million impressions across platforms, teaching women about how to use AI, and she has hosted hackathons at San Francisco's TransAmerica Pyramid and New York's Hearst Tower in partnership with Open AI and Hearst Lab, bringing together women builders to create AI tools for social good. A graduate of New York University, Valerie is based in San Francisco, and this was really fun because Valerie is in the thick of building right now, and she was in stealth mode, she recognized a social good mission that she could lend her expertise and her experience to, and in today's conversation we go through everything from how her previous career as a fashion model and as a brand consultant led her to recognize this opportunity that she could build in, and she gets very transparent about what goes into the building process while in stealth mode. How she met her co-founder. Why helping to give women the tools to be able to help shape the infrastructure of AI is really important, and we get into some of the backlash that certain celebrities have faced with trying to push women into AI, but we also address the problems that happen when any kind of technology is built off of a single type of user, and so she gives her perspective as to why this is a really important conversation. We talk about some of the ways that you can onboard into using AI, and at the very least educate yourself to be able to make an informed decision as to whether or not you're going to use it. So this was really fun. We, we had a really great time. It was so cool to see this young, young woman building so much cool stuff, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. Valerie, thank you so much for joining me on If I'm Honest. Thank you so much for having me. So, this is really fun how this came together, and I'm so glad that we're matching. For listeners, we're both wearing yellow, which is not the most common color. I don't think it's my best color, it's a great color on you. Thank you. You know, I actually asked ChatGPT. I was like, "Is this in my color season? Oh my goodness, like, yes, that's a great use of ChatGPT. I kind.. I do, at some point, want to get my like colors analyzed. I work with a stylist, so I trust her, and like, if I see something, especially like pastel colors that I think make me look a little washed out, I just don't wear them, but I'd love to. Yeah, yeah, no, I've been doing Rent the Runway lately, not an ad, but no, but like they want a sponsor, I use them all the time, so it's like leveled me up for sure, and I've used it to like I'll analyze my cart, and then I'll be like, okay, what's my color like based on the selfie that I've just given you, and it'll be like, yeah, take out that gray thing, take out this, take out that, and then I just don't do those, and then I feel like I do have a stylist. It's that's amazing. Yeah, and I think also, like with gray in particular, like it's such a good, like it's such a good safe color, but I have a very hard time finding the right shade for my complexion, so yeah, struggles. But anyway, I know, so hard, so hard, and we women are, I think, assessed a lot more on what we're wearing and how we look. Yeah, I think about it a lot, because, like you said, like you know, there's that standard, and especially like if you're on podcasts or you're going to meetings with people, like it is something you have to think about totally. So I cold reached out to you, like the other week this came together very quickly, because you live in San Francisco, which we love, San Francisco, but you're in New York, so what's bringing you to New York right now? Yeah, I'm actually in town. I'm also doing some interviews. I've been getting more into interviewing more like C-suite people, so I recently did the CMO of LinkedIn [Jessica Jensen], and gonna get more into that. So here for that, just like business meetings overall, I feel like, and some like VC kind of like warm like meetings that I'm having at the moment, yeah. So we're gonna get into why you're having those meetings for your company, but when you're interviewing these people, do you enjoy, like, do you have a lot of fun doing it, or is it kind of like information gathering? Like, how do you approach it? Yeah, I think I do have a lot of fun with it. I feel like as a child I was very much like the person who would like put on their camera on their Mac and be like, welcome to my show. Yeah, so it's actually very fun and very full circle to kind of be doing this work now, because it's not like I like came out of college and was like, I want to interview people or I want to like, you know, have this company that like closes the wage gap. It definitely did not start like that, and so I think it's kind of cool to like be now in a place where I'm like, wow, I'm actually living a life that's pretty aligned to something I was doing as a child, too. That's cool, and, like, I don't know, I find it just so fun, like, you never know the synergies you're gonna have with someone, and I personally feel like all the benefits that technology and social media have, like that in-person human connection is lacking, I think, in. Lot of people's lives, and so to be able to kind of have that in a like for your own creative endeavors, but then also for that business building, it's just a really cool. I'm loving it. I'm loving all the women like starting podcasts, like you know, I'm like thinking about that, like eventually. Right now, I'm just doing like the interviews, kind of just to get them up on like LinkedIn. I think it helps like your personal brand and your presence to, like, be, you know, having a conversation with, you know, another leader in the space. So, yeah, I think that's where things are moving, and people want to watch them, especially now that, like, Spotify has, like, the video podcasting. So I think it's kind of only just beginning, and even though people have said, like, oh, the podcast space is too saturated, I don't think that's true at all. I think everything's gonna have listenership, and like, a lot of people will turn, tune in for you specifically, or the content, and like, yes, some will be super massive with tons of downloads and everything, but it is a labor of love. I will say, if you ever jump into the podcast, I actually used to like be a podcast producer, I've had like so many different hustles in my time, I love it. We're gonna go, how, how much it takes. Yeah, no, it's a lot in the whole video. Like, I, I outsource for a video editor named Emmie Leary. Shout out to Emmy, because she does an amazing show. I mean, yeah, because I really don't like video editing, and so, like, I really applaud the podcasters who are taking that on themselves too, because it's just, it's to me, it's so, so hard to do that video, but back to you. You are the founder of Ruth, which Ruth's mission is to use AI to close the gender wage gap and to help advance women's careers. And I mentioned this before we started recording, like I'm so excited to be talking to you now, because I've spoken with other people who have already built what they're doing, or like are in a further along stage in their career, but you're like really in the thick of it, like you kind of just launched publicly, right? Yeah, that's correct. We actually came out of stealth in about December. Okay, so and I feel like we've taken a very unconventional approach. I think a lot of people come out and they're like, okay, here's our beta, use our product asap, and I think that is what Silicon Valley would definitely promote, so like, just get it out there, have people use it, but my co-founder and I feel like our expertise has been in community building and bringing the right rooms together, so we really wanted to lean into our strengths, and so we decided actually to come out of Stealth at an in-person event that we hosted, so we hosted one of America's first ever women's vibe coding hackathons at the Transamerica Pyramid Center in November, and that's when we officially came out of style to that, like, small group of some VCs, some, you know, content creators in the tech space, as well as the builders who were in our hackathon, and it was a very intimate moment that we then turned into a content moment, and then, you know, a few, you know, about a week later, did the big, like, reveal on social launched a whole like cinematic video, and we just felt like there was a big part of what we were building that needed more storytelling. So we came out with the video that kind of like went viral, where it showcased what it would look like to have more women building and like making decisions in the boardroom. So I think with our company, because the mission is so big, right, like AI agents to close the gender wage gap. We felt we kind of had to put out, like, a certain level of, like, propaganda in a way, or like, change people's perception of, like, you know, women building. And so we're kind of taking a different approach, in the sense that we care a lot about building community, building, like, digital storytelling. And then, of course, you know, in the next month or so, we're going to put out our beta. Yeah. Okay. Cool. So, for anyone who doesn't know, can you explain vibe coding? Yes. So, vibe coding basically allows you to talk to a chat bot in real plain English, and be like, okay, I want my user interface to look like this, I want a nav page that looks like this. You don't even have to get that granular now anymore. You can just kind of be like, this is the idea that I have for this app. So, you could be like, I want to build AI agents to close the gender wage gap. These are some of the topics that I'm thinking of tackling. In my case, it's like negotiation, personal branding, not me giving away my playbook. No, you're good, but that's just like kind of how you do it, right? Like, you have more of like a bigger vision. So, I think for people who are good at like the strategy and the overall like high level, vibe coding is perfect for them, and that's why I'm really bullish on more women, specifically vibe coding, like, of course, it's democratizing access to so many people who previously couldn't build. Yeah, but I think women, in particular, are so good at delegating, or like, telling someone, like, oh, this is what you have to do, and that's exactly the skill set that you need when you're vibe coding. Well, thank you for that. And also, I'm, I want to dive into some of the more nitty gritty of how you're building in a second, but I do want to go back to the mission of Ruth and what sparked that specific obviously wage gap, closing the gender wage gap is really important. There are so many snowball effects of not having that equality, and I love that you were just talking about some of the specific strengths that women have with delegating with, and all of that, but like, kind of what was your like aha moment that this is what you were gonna dedicate your time to? Yeah, I think for me growing up I was always very entrepreneurial, I didn't grow up around entrepreneurs, though, like I did not grow up around that world, my whole. Family, for the most part, I come from like a lineage of engineers, but I feel like I was never like conditioned to go down the typical engineering path, like even though my mom is an engineer, like she wasn't like, "go be an engineer, yeah, and so I always was just like obsessed with building businesses. I started my first one, probably when I was like 14, through this entrepreneurial program in high school, and so I always had, like, this bug to, like, be a builder, and was always building, like, prototypes and things like that, and so that was never something that, like, was a question. I always wanted to build my own thing, but you know, I wanted to also make my mom happy, and she was like, "You're gonna go to NYU, then you're gonna get a normal job, and so I just wanted to make her happy. So the first job I got, you know, I went into sales, and you know, I ended up unfortunately getting laid off twice before I was even 25 years old, and so I was like, okay, job security doesn't really exist, let me kind of do things on my own terms, and so Ruth was really born out of this experience that I had, going through these layoffs, learning simultaneously things like women using AI tools about 25% less than men, and connecting the dots, and being like that's going to cause an existential, you know, crisis. Women aren't using these tools at the same rate as men, and so initially I was like, I'm going to make content, and if more women see another woman making content about AI, perhaps that can, you know, do something to close the adoption gap. So it started with content, and then I started to get, you know, millions of views on my content, and from there I realized, you know, I had this distribution channel, I want to start building a software, so that we can truly reach a lot of women at scale, and help position them as thought leaders, help them, you know, negotiate their salaries, hopefully with a little bit of bias mitigation there, and so we can get into more of that, yeah, we're going to, yeah, but yeah, it kind of, it started just by realizing, like, I don't want to give anyone the opportunity to lay me off again, yeah, yeah, and I think that ownership is so important, and it's so hard, right, and especially as I think even, even if you have a really well-paying job and a good title, and you've been there for a long time, like, life is so expensive, and like the salaries are not increasing at the same rate as what the cost of living is, and everything, and so I think it becomes, for better or worse, even that much more critical to kind of find potentially other ways to add revenue streams to what you're doing. Absolutely, and layoffs, especially tech layoffs, they disproportionately affect women, and so more women are going to be experiencing layoffs. I feel like, in a way, I almost got a head start, right? Like, my layoffs happened kind of before this whole moment in AI, and now you know a lot of people, unfortunately, are going to go through the same thing as me, and they're going to look in the mirror and go, like, I don't know what to do now. Yeah, and so I hope that, like, my content and what I'm building with Ruth kind of inspires people, like, this is where you go next. Yeah, do you almost feel like maybe it was luckier to have gotten laid off earlier on in your career when you're only a little bit out of college, and like I would assume, like no dependents, or like you know, like you're kind of still able to be a little scrappy in a sense. Yeah, definitely, definitely. I mean, I think, like, you know, it's a privilege to, right now, not have a family that I have to, like, worry about, but it's still super stressful. There's so much, like, sacrifice that goes into it. Like, having a business is like having a baby in a way, like, you're investing into it, you're putting money into it. So, yeah, freelancing is right on top of that, like, like, I know that you're not freelancing, but like that same kind of startup entrepreneurial, like reading, and I am very familiar with like the whole freelancing world, because I did that all throughout college. I just, I also have a hot take about freelancing. I think women should stop saying that they're freelancers and say that they're entrepreneurs, way my earlierness. Yes, like I'm like you're not a freelancer, like you just have a couple clients and you need to make an LLC for your business, so call to action. Yeah, every woman said they're an entrepreneur instead of a freelancer. Yeah, like I.. it's that's the real F word. I really.. I had never thought of that, but.. and like I used freelancer when I was speaking only and not working corporate yet, but you're right, it's. it's a different cache than entrepreneur. Think about it, a man has an idea, and they're like, I'm an entrepreneur, yeah, like just, yeah, the idea, yeah. I think, like, women, like, need to take a page out of that book and realize, like, actually, I do have something here, I have skills, I have, you know, real output that I'm creating for clients, like, it's not just, you don't, a hobby that you're making some money from, exactly, and it's not like some in-between thing, like it's that's kind of like a limiting thought to have. Thank you for that. Yeah, I like that. So, kind of diving into that a little bit, you do have a very diverse professional background, and I think you're quite a bit younger than I am, so I'm super impressed. I feel like I'm getting old enough when I can look at the next generation, like, oh, you're doing so great, but you've been in media production, content creation, business development, brand consulting, and a fashion model, right? Yeah, what are some things that you learned from everything before Ruth that really helped you right now? Yeah, so my career as a fashion model, I feel like is what kind of helped me become. I'm a better entrepreneur, and I think that is in part because when I first moved, I'm from Miami, so I moved from Miami to New York to model around like 15, 16, years old, and that world exposed me to, you know, fashion houses in Paris, and like a lot of wealth, or like, you know, oftentimes businessmen, and so I'm often I was oftentimes like at tables, of course, like as the model at this table, but I'm like listening in on conversations with like huge like business executives, so I think that really taught me like how important is to just like be in the room, like even like I don't care how you get in the room, just get in the room. Yes, one of the things that I definitely learned from that experience of modeling, and you know, being also I think, like modeling also teaches you like people skills every single day, you're on set, you're with a different makeup artist, you're with a different, you know, stylist, so you really have to have like your interpersonal, you know, dynamics, and like the way that you communicate needs to be on lock, and then also like when you go into a casting, like your energy has to be good, or else you're not getting it, and I think entrepreneurship is similar in the way that, like, right now, as I'm like going through VC meetings, like, I have to have the right energy, yeah, like, the, so it's like this whole game, and I think, yeah, I learned a lot through that, and then, of course, I went through, you know, college, and I was working with different social media clients, and I had a social media agency at the time that I could have easily been like, I'm a freelancer, but it was a social media agency, and that is kind of where I started to really hone my more like business skills, and the whole like managing of clients, and the invoicing, and that kind of skill set, all of the like backend admin work that like taking over, and there are so many cool tools to help out, like QuickBooks is really easy, as one example, and that's like what I use, but it's like there's so much there, but I would also have to assume that with modeling, like resilience is a key thing that you learn, and as I was with actors and auditioning, or whatever, like you, I don't know what an average booking rate is, but I would assume there's a lot of rejection. Oh, there's so much. I'm honestly shocked I didn't start with that. Yeah, yeah, every day you're just told no, right? And you're often told no on the basis of how you look, not even like how smart you are. So, actually, I'll never forget the first, like, when I decided I'm not going to model anymore. Actually, walked out of my agency in Miami, and I was just like, they were like judging me on, like, my appearance, and, like, oh, you have to be skinnier this and that, and I just, like, remember being like, I'm too smart for this, and, like, you know, at that point I was just like, it's time to like go build an empire, like I feel like I've always like really wanted to build an empire, even from like a young age, like before I even like knew what that meant, yeah, or even knew like oh I could use social media to create a quote unquote empire, and so now that I've gotten older, I've gone through so much rejection, like I've been told no, like so many times, like I can't even count probably hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of times, yeah. And it's definitely helped me as I'm navigating VC meetings, because that's a period of like a lot of rejection as well, and just like through so much, right? Like, nothing can really get me down, because I'm like, right. Well, and you learn that I think when you, when you have that kind of rejection, which, like, I think a lot of racers have when they're pitching sponsorship, right? Like, sponsorship is so hard to come by, and you like, you, you learn, like, okay, what could I have done differently, but so much is really out of your control in terms of like what they're looking for, or like what a company's brand strategy is going to be for the next year, and whether or not you fit in it, and so I think it also helps to understand, like, to not take things as personally, I think sometimes even maybe in modeling a little difference, it's like your face or like your body type or whatever, but it, but it's not really a reflection of you, it's kind of the circumstances, yeah, and I think it also taught me it's like it's a numbers game, right, so I experienced all that rejection through the modeling industry, and then I quickly went into sales, where there's a lot of rejection, too. Right, you're cold emailing, cold emailing, maybe 100 people, you might get one or two responses back. And in a way, that's the game I love. Yeah, like I live for the thrill of, like, who's gonna answer me? Oh, the chase is so fun. I love that. Yeah, and I like, do you feel that you saw other models that were kind of approaching in a similar way, because I feel like now we are seeing so many people anchor, anchored like the start of their careers and what they're building in either like reality TV or modeling, and like kind of having creating that platform. So, were you were you talking with other women or people who were doing that as well? Yeah, well, it's interesting. When I started, it was probably around like 2015 2016 So, influencer marketing did not exist. It was starting, yeah. And I, you know, started posting on Instagram initially, because I had a modeling agent who was like, you are really good at taking photos, you have like a whole vibe, like you should start posting on Instagram. I was like, okay, bet, let's go. And so I started posting, and actually, before there was infrastructure for this whole industry, I had like this this idea to be like I email like 100 brands and like ask them to send me stuff, because like I'll tell them I'm a model, I'll make content, and so I actually started my page just doing it all manually before there were now there's platforms and people get. Brand deals through those things and through agencies that did not exist, though. Yeah, and so I, I just made it up, and I actually was like, I'm gonna email. I was probably like 17, 18, at this point, like emailing every single day in my like room during the holidays, and I'd be like, hey, like I didn't even know I was doing sales at the time. Yeah, and then all of a sudden, you know, I was like living actually at my like brother's like on my brother's couch in the Upper East Side, because I didn't even have a place to live other than like with my brother, and he would see like all these packages started to arrive, and he'd be like, Valerie, you have a shopping problem, right? And I'd be like, no, like, you don't get it, like, for free, like, after your job, can you take photos of me, like, yeah, and so he really helped me, and like took photos, and like that's kind of how I got started. So I probably like would say like I grew like the beginning of my follower account, like through doing brand partnerships like that in the really early days. That's awesome. And I also think, and I talked with another guest about this, but like even if there are platforms and ways to kind of build quickly in that influence marketing space, like there's still something to be said for the relationships that you can build with a slightly more personal approach, and I know that you recently posted something about, like, the power and love for cold emails, yeah, and, like, doing that a lot, and I totally agree, I think, like, you gotta shoot your shot, and also, like, I've learned that you can't rely on other people to connect the dots that you see, like even though if I think, okay, I'm promoting X about myself, and like it's going to Y, so like clearly there's a synergy. Sometimes you have to force the synopsis together, right? So, can you talk a little bit more about like your approach to cold emailing? 100% my boyfriend and I, we actually met because, like, we bonded over the email. We're gonna take a quick break, and we'll be right back. We're back on If I'm Honest with Julia Landauer. So, for me, I actually have this terminology that I created, called the Silver Platter Method, when I'm going about emailing random strangers, and basically what that means is you want to present the vision that you have on a silver platter to this person, so kind of like how you did for me, right? You emailed me, you said, like, I have this in this podcast, usually what I do in a, in a pitch, like let's say I want to work with HubSpot or Salesforce, I will craft a pitch because I'm fully self-managed, so I will craft a pitch with a concept that I think, like, totally makes sense. And another thing I do is I include social proof, so this is actually a really good hack that I tell all the women that I talk to. Tell us the hack. So, if you've been creating content a long time, you've amassed a lot of impressions over that period of time. A lot of the times, what I have found is like people will only say the amount of impressions maybe they got on one viral video, as opposed to accumulating it and being like, these are all the impressions I've gotten in my whole time doing content, and that really changes the perception when you go and email someone. So, when I email someone, I don't go, "Oh, check out my latest viral video, it has 3 million impressions. I go, you know, this is my series, Gen Z woman in business. I'll do and stay in the life. The series has amassed over 100 million impressions across platforms. That's way more impressive. Yeah, but it's very easy to be like, here's my last one, right? And think that you're doing a good pitch, when, of course, like, you know, the bigger numbers, they make a difference. Yeah, they'll often get you a response. Yeah. Oh, well, thank you for that pro tip. Yeah, we'll do that differently. It's a tiny tweak, and it makes a big difference. Yeah, but and I get the, the, the initial hunch to kind of show specific pieces that do well, but to your point, it's a cumulative effect that a lot of brands will be looking for. Yeah, and I think another thing I specifically did was, I created a series that I almost like commoditized, like it could have been very easy to just make a bunch of single videos, but I knew that I had to productize it in a way, so I created the like day in my life as a Gen Z woman in business series, and that allows me to go to conferences for free, it allows me to, you know, go pitch a brand and be like, let me just plug you into this already existing viral series that my audience already loves. Yeah, and so then what happens is the brand feels like they get to be a part of an existing universe, as opposed to like a more one-off campaign that, like, may or may not do well, totally. And I think also, like, especially if you're a multi-hyphenate, like, got a lot of different facets, like to be able to lean into different elements of your brand that maybe not all of your audience is going to engage with or feel most resonant with Gen Z businesswoman, but a large chunk, and then you go to the other one that other people will latch onto, and then that's how it grows. So that's really, really, really cool. I do want to go back to you mentioned how you were fired twice by the age of 25 and we talked about for the term laid off. Sorry, I will, I will semantics. I can, I can. Let me restart that. No, you don't have to. Oh, okay, perfect. I'll leave that in. I'll figure that out. But so you were laid off twice by the time you were 25 and we talked about how you pivoted to work into your for yourself. Self, did you have any unexpected challenges in that transition from working for someone to working for yourself? And, obviously, you mentioned you were an entrepreneur from a young age, but when you, when you decide, okay, we're not pursuing working for someone else, like anything unexpected. Yeah, I mean, every day is an unexpected challenge, honestly. But, well, okay, so let me backtrack, right? So you open your laptop and you're like, I have a meeting on my calendar, not sure what this is about. Then you get off and you're like, okay, I don't have a job. So I like to like start with that moment, because for me, I gave myself three months. I was like, I'm gonna give myself three months to build the infrastructure of a one person business. So that's where it started. It didn't start with, like, okay, I got laid off, let me go build this company called Ruth AI agents to close the gender wage gap. It did not happen like that. What actually happened was, you know, I ended up working in this job, I was doing business development for an influencer marketing agency, and they had actually encouraged me to start posting on LinkedIn as if I was a LinkedIn thought leader, and I was like, "Why are you even talking about? Because up until that point, I was super bullish on Instagram and on TikTok, and it was growing my audiences there. But LinkedIn was just a place to go find a job for me. I had never seen it as this place where I could build my thought leadership. Yeah, so this company, like, actually changed my life. The fact that they opened my eyes to this, and so I'm someone that, like, I like to do everything with the spirit of excellence, and so when they told me, "Go be a thought leader, I was like, "Okay, I want to go be the best thought leader anyone has ever seen. And so I actually, you know, enter ChatGPT, right? That's when I started using AI. I was like, "Hey, like, I gave up my resume, I said, 'Hey, help me connect the dots to my super nonlinear career path, so that I can figure out what the heck I need to be a thought leader in, and then I watched, you know, different content creators like Courtney Johnson and Justin Welsh, and these were people who were making content that I found very inspiring at the time, and so that obviously made a big impact, and then from there, you know, it's just about getting the reps in, I started just posting like written content, I wasn't even talking about AI when I first started. I was talking about body language, and I was like analyzing Oprah's handshake, and like all this stuff, because I had studied human behavior in college, and I knew that if I talked about like one thing that I could like stick to it. And so that's kind of how it started, and then as I continued to come across more information, as I was thinking, like, what do I post today? That's when I unlocked this one article that was on Fast Company, that was like, Gen Z women use AI tools less than men, and I was like, boom, I have to make content about AI, because that's a huge problem. Yeah, and so I was like, literally sitting in my apartment in Crown Heights at the time, and I read this stat, and I had like a light bulb moment, this was like post layoff, so like in that first like three months, and I was just like, oh my gosh, women not using AI could make the wage gap worse, and I like don't even know how I came up with this concept that like maybe AI could be the thing that helps close it, but I did, and I just ran with it like a crazy person, that's amazing, and that sets me up perfectly for my next question. So, thank you. Because AI is a very polarizing topic in general, and I want to specifically dive into something that we saw a lot of backlash with, which was when celebrities like Reese Witherspoon and Mel Robbins and influencers were saying women aren't using AI as much, and I know that some of their posts had partnered tags on them, and so there was some, some conversation and kind of backlash around that, the way it came off as like infantilizing women, or that talking about how, like, champions of human artistry were pushing for AI, like all this stuff, and obviously the very male dominated nature of AI, but I think obviously, like headlines can be louder than maybe like the meaning behind it, but I guess could you talk a little bit about like your reaction to those reactions? Yeah, that was a really interesting week when Reese Witherspoon came out about this, because I had been talking about this statistic for two years on LinkedIn, like that is like what made my personal brand was the fact that I was the girl who talked about the AI gap, and so I had no idea that this statistic would ever reach mainstream media. I felt like I was screaming into a void, so for me, when I saw someone like Reese Witherspoon actually talk about it, I'm like, oh my gosh, like, did she see one of my videos? Like, maybe her team did, like, obviously, like, I don't know, yeah, but you know, for the most part, I was like, it got through the zeitgeist somehow, some way. And so, initially, I was, I was like, wow, that's amazing, like, we need more people to talk about this. And then, of course, you know, comes the backlash, right? And so I think, for me, I totally understand where women are coming from, because I hear it all the time, like I'm getting messages on LinkedIn every single day from women who are a, either really excited about it, and finally, like, feeling empowered to go start their businesses because of this, and then, b, you know, really apprehensive about AI, because of the implications in terms of climate change, right? Like, women care more about climate change than men, like, it's been reported. Yeah, and I think that's super valid. I think about it all the time. I'm constantly like, what can I learn about data centers? What can I learn about, you know, how AI is affecting communities, and, like, you know, like water, or for people. Like, I don't want to be a part of something that's, you know, evil, right? But with that said, I think it's so important that, like, we have women in this industry, like, and so for me, I care more about, like, how can I be a role model, so that more women are building, and that's why I do these hackathons, where it's all women building AI for social good, because I don't think AI is inherently demonic or evil, or that it's going to inherently take so much power from the people, like I'm really one of those people who I think, like, AI should be for the people, and so what I'm kind of more against, which is interesting, I would say, is like I think AI should empower people, and I think where it gets dangerous is like when corporations have too much power. So I totally do resonate with a lot of women who are maybe anti-AI for similar reasons, but I think that opting out completely just leaves it in the hands of men, which is not going to make the situation better. Well, and I think also like big AI models like learn off of the data that is inputted, and if majority of that data is from a male perspective or male experience, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it just doesn't address half the population, and it's like the same, you know, that women weren't used in research studies for so many things for so long, so you can't get an accurate output, and we see, we see the headlines of, like, you know, people asking what compensation should be for a job, and it varies widely if the agent thinks, or the chat thinks that the user is a man or woman, and so you have these very real problems, and I also, I really believe also that it's important to, at the very least, educate yourself about the technology, whether it's AI or if it was something different in the past, right? Yeah, but to educate yourself and to understand pretty thoroughly pros, cons, and weighing these things, so that you can make an informed decision as to whether you're going to use it and engage versus to step away. I don't think that's specific to women, but just people in general, like, yeah, learn about it before writing it off. Totally, I think one thing that's been fascinating is I feel like from the people who I've spoken to who are anti-AI, they've never even used it. I'm like, how are you going to judge something you've never, like, never interacted with, yeah. So, you don't even know what the power is on this side of this moment, but you're only thinking about all the things that could go wrong, so you're not coming from a place of, you know, being educated, yeah, and a place of curiosity. And, like, look, I get that change is hard. Like, humans do not like change in general, and it's moving so quickly. And I think AI is also paired with loss of jobs or reallocation of jobs away from people, and so, like, there's a very.. it's hard to separate the emotional elements with the more, like, you know, just the technology that's there. But I totally agree that you should experiment, and I also get.. I also get being concerned about privacy, or not wanting to, you know, train models on your data, and like, always be diligent, like, don't I would never suggest that you upload all of your financial data and any sensitive information and account numbers into an AI bot, but, like, yeah, I would never advise that either. But have I done it? Maybe. Well, we can ask the studio rubs and laughter. Well, yeah, but also like you can do it in like a numbers perspective, and like I think there are ways to be safe about it, right? And, but, but I'm saying that more from like the I get the hesitation, but just like anything, you're you should be double checking where you're putting like your social and online if you need to sign, like, you know, like the IRS, or whatever, like you're diligent about that stuff, so it's kind of just an extension of that. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, will you be willing to share kind of some of the main ways that you're seeing men using AI more in a day-to-day than women, and like, it kind of like an easy starting point for women and people if they're interested in getting on board? Well, I think by far men are in the rooms where, like, the infrastructure layer is being built, and way more, way more than women. So, I think that we hopefully need to see a shift, and is that in the.. sorry to interrupt, is that, like, in the, like, the ones that are building? Yeah, so, for instance, I just recently went to Microsoft Build, and I was one of their partners, but one of the things that I noticed, you know, like I love Microsoft, I love them, but you know, one of the things I noticed is at this conference I'm like, okay, I need to go to the restroom, and typically there's a huge line for the women's restroom, but at a developer conference, the line for the men's bathroom had over 20 guys, so that I think just speaks to like who is building this technology. Yeah, and it was, you know, a developer conference, so it's not even talking about, you know, marketing and AI, and it's talking about, like, who's building the chips, who's building data centers, the part that really matters. So, I think we need more women on that side of the front, 100% I can't say that's, like, my forte or my specialty. Do I have an interest in. Curiosity, absolutely. Am I going to go build, you know, in deep tech? Probably not, but I think we need more women in that space. What I feel like I advocate for the most, though, is the interdisciplinary connection between using AI to build one's personal brand. So, you were talking about the importance of the training data, so one of the reasons why I think Ruth like needs to exist, especially at a time like this, is because we're all about like how can we position any woman as a thought leader, and what that comes down to is the flower emoji on your Instagram post isn't going to cut it, because you're not going to populate within LLM searches, so if women are not sharing their business acumen on platforms like LinkedIn platforms, like what you're doing, you know, on Spotify, or all that stuff, like all of that is being scraped by these LLMs, so that people know, like, oh, that's Julia, who has this podcast, you should probably go reach out to her. So now that we're in this like wave of AI agents, it's even more important for women to be writing deep thoughts about how they think, because that's all training these models, yeah. And so the hope with Ruth is like, women come to our platform to build out their thought leadership content, and at scale, you know, if we get, you know, 1000s of users, millions of users, that is all trading data that otherwise wouldn't exist. Yeah, that's so true. And yeah, and so, like, any opportunity to write and to get the thoughts out there and the perspective out there, regardless of what platform it's on, it is going to get picked up. Okay, super smart. Yeah, and then very important. Yeah, and then eventually you can get to the point, especially if you're using whether it's a ChatGPT or Claude, or whatever, that you know you can really streamline that process for if you have thoughts, and obviously, like, if you want to write the whole piece by yourself, write the whole piece by yourself, but like, even I find, for you know, podcast descriptions, and you know, caption suggestions, like, I'll give the idea, like, I'll, you know, it'll know my tone, it'll know my style, and the idea of what I want to get across, but it can probably write it a little better than I can, and saves me time, because girl's busy, and I mean, that's the, that's the big thing, right there, is time, right? Like, it's one thing to be like, okay, women go post more content, talk about how smart you are, and your great ideas, and it's another thing to completely avoid the fact that there's so much invisible labor that women do. Yeah, even when women work full-time jobs, full-time jobs, they're often taking a lot of the home labor, taking care of kids, maybe they have multiple jobs, if they don't have a family, or if they do, so they're constantly juggling everything, and all this like cognitive overload. And so I was really like, How do we make this as easy as possible for, like, a teacher in Kansas who maybe doesn't use a ChatGPT, or, you know, a woman in Miami who maybe is a teacher but wants to be an entrepreneur, and so how can we build for that type of woman, and I think right now what's happening is like the spokespeople within the AI industry are primarily men, and so we need more leaders who are women who are saying, like, I'm building these solutions with women in mind, in the same way that we're seeing more people, more women specifically, in the health space now building solutions for women's health, like that's, you know, it's a really good analogy, is a gender issue, because we are different. Yeah, yeah, no, that's a really good analogy. And I also think, I don't know if you're seeing this as well, but like, in going back to, like, the celebrity backlash, like, I wonder if there's a difference with kind of this AI adoption discussion coming from people who aren't like seen as on a pedestal or like kind of living in a different world than a lot of like your average women and average people who are just existing, and so I wonder if kind of again more not saying that you're not on a pedestal because you're doing amazing work, but like more people who are clearly just like doing the grunt work and the building and the and the experimenting and the learning and kind of sharing those stories, if that's more likely to kind of make it an inviting space. Yeah, I think so. And I think I think that the reason why maybe I haven't gotten as much hate is obviously because I'm not as big as Reese Witherspoon, but also I think because people have seen my journey, they've seen how I've gone from layoff to like now building this, and so I feel like my audience really has been on this journey with me. Yeah, and seen in real time how AI has helped me. Yeah, and so I think it's really important to have more examples of like that, more conversations with people who've actually seen the impact of AI, because you know AI is like, oh, it's like literally two letters, so it can be very abstract. People are like, I don't even know what that means, especially if, like, you're in the middle of America, like, you don't care about AI. Yeah, you're just trying to pay your bills and, like, make a decent living. And so I think you know we need to just continue to have conversations about the real impact of it, instead of being like, this makes us more productive, and you know, this is how my job is implementing it. I wish more people thought about how can I use AI for, like, myself to bring more, you know, empowerment to what I care about in my mission. So, like, even with Ruth, like, I'm on a mission to sure make every woman a thought leader, but also help them figure out what is their mission, right? Like, if you can only solve one thing on this planet, what is it? I think more women need to ask. That question, because that's kind of how I landed on the gender wage gap. Yeah, I asked myself, what's if I can only solve one thing, what is it? And I was like, wow, it'd be so cool if I could make an impact in terms of helping close the gender wage gap. Yeah, and so I think that can be true for a lot of women, like it might be climate change for them, or housing insecurity, or food insecurity. There's all these systemic problems out there that no one's even like bothered to take a stab at with AI, but I think now we're at a pretty interesting inflection point, and there's also an element of like putting your own oxygen mask on first, and like to your point, like how can you use AI and other available tools for your own personal brand or your own personal development to then be in a position where you have a new level of expertise or you have tools to be able to put stuff out there, and so I firmly believe that it can be like both self-serving and good for general public in pursuing this for one's own satisfaction, and like the ability to discover new things. I mean, it's a big world out there, and there's so much cool stuff that we don't know about, totally. I mean, even as a founder, like I was on the plane over from San Francisco to here, and I mean, I'm talking to AI, probably like the whole flight. I'm like, okay, as the founder of Ruth, what are the different topics that I need to learn about? Like, that's so I'm constantly like, the wheels are always moving in terms of what else can I learn about. So, I think, like, for people who are super curious, AI was like paid for them, or for people who have so many ideas happening at once, like this is their moment. It's really helped me kind of take all these different dots and connect them. Yeah, and I think AI is really good for finding your blind spots, like even the smartest people are going to see the world through their lens, and so, if you can, you know, outline a process or a framework that you're trying to put together, and then figure out what you're missing, it then makes your approach so much better. And I think that's a lot of how, like, you can talk about it in terms of, like, you know, job safety, or in your workplace, like, how do you use a tool to make you better at your job, not how is this going to replace my job 100% Yeah, yeah, 100% yeah. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back. We are back on If I'm Honest with Julia Landauer. So I want to dive into a little bit on, like, the tactical building of, you know, starting a company, and you're in the space, and you're a co-founder, and I guess, can you share kind of what you focused on while in stealth mode? And I've never been in stealth mode for a company, so I have, I don't know, but like, what you worked on, and when you knew it was time to go public. Yeah, so like I said, I had experienced this layoff. I want to say it was like October 2024 Okay, so right after those first few months, like I said, I was creating a one person business, and so I wasn't getting brand deals right out of the gate. So initially my income stream was actually leading women's workshops and doing one on ones, so at that point I had amassed a few million impressions on LinkedIn, and I was like, I can go teach other women how to build their personal brands. I'd also, you know, done the whole social media thing, so I had enough to go and know, like, I could charge a couple thousand dollars to some, you know, awesome women entrepreneurs and really help them. So I initially started with that, and I would help women figure out what's my I help statement. I would do like a whole rebrand for them, and I was obsessed with it. I felt like it was almost like what I was born to do, but then you know, I just felt limited, like I only had one person who's whose life I could impact. And then even when I went on to do workshops of rooms of 50 women, I still felt capped, and it still felt like there were so many more women who really needed the support in the personal branding space, and so in about March or so is when I started actually building roots, and so I started by just downloading Lovable, which is like, you know, now a very popular vibe coding platform, but at the time it had just come out, it wasn't that good, but I, I knew, I think mainly because I'm Gen Z, like I knew the importance of being an early adopter, and he knew that I didn't want to miss this moment, so I invested in it. I bought it, and I started building Ruth in March of last year, and the interface has changed so much, but I was okay with it maybe taking longer, because I knew that if I had started using it on day one, I'd be one of the best vibe coders in the world, and, like, you know, like, who knows, I'm sure people are amazing, but I do feel like I'm a very good vibe coder, to the point where I felt confident enough to come out and be like, I'm building this product for people, and I think also, because I had experience in user interface design, like, this was, like, I felt this was my moment to start building, actually creating a product, so yeah, I started in, in March, and have been building ever since, and that that part of being in stealth mode is definitely exciting, but at some point you know you can't be in stealth forever, yeah, and so I'm very much the one who's like, I'd rather just talk about it like sooner rather than later, because I think a lot of. People get in their head, or like they start things that are like secret in their bedroom, and then like it never leaves their bedroom. Yeah, I am not one of those people. I'm just like, let's get it out there. Yeah. And how did you connect with your co-founder? So we actually had a company together before, oh, called Inform, and it was like a creative agency, so we would actually help different companies, like Sparkling Ice and Box Media. We would help them curate their guest list for different events that they would do. So we were basically in charge of, like, we were vibe curators, I guess. Got it? We're in charge of bringing all the Gen Z thought leaders and all the influencers into the space. So, because he came from the entertainment world and music production, he had a very big network, and then I had my network of models, and you know, having been in New York the last 10 years, so we kind of combined forces, did that sort of work, and then we decided to move to San Francisco, and as we, you know, built out Ruth, we wanted to take that similar, you know, community building approach and that curation into the hackathon space, and so when we hosted this hackathon at the Transamerica Pyramid Center, just a month after we moved, we knew that we needed to curate the room in a very similar way to how we were doing it for our past clients. Yeah, that's awesome. And I think you talking about hackathons, that's another area where you know, for so long they've been so male dominated, and like I think I graduated from Stanford in 2014 so it was like at the boom of software engineering and coding, and like people were leaving and getting jobs with like massive six figure salaries, and like, and you saw that so many of these hackathons were were male focused and like male driven, and so I do love that in this next iteration of more AI hackathons that you've got this focus on women, because it's so important, and, and the space that you create is really critical, and culturally, like, there are differences, and so just a shout out that I, I applaud you on that, because I think it's so important to provide that safe space for people who might feel like the other in the room, yeah, because it, it can be very intimidating to be the minority in any room, especially with such, like, a hot topic technology that's being built. I mean, when we moved, we were going to all these different hackathons, and I realized it was all men, and oftentimes there were like red solo cups and potato chips just scattered on the table. I'm like, of course, women aren't here, you know? They haven't created the ambiance, yeah. And so, you know, within three weeks we put together this hackathon, like it was insane, but we just felt that San Francisco needed it, and what came out of it was actually, you know, 25 amazing builders who worked on projects that are like AI for social good, so they all tackle different systemic problems, and what's so unique about that is that they were building from a lens of like serious empathy that you would arguably not see at a typical hackathon, because let's say it's a group of five at a hackathon, and maybe there's one woman in that group, they're not doing the woman's idea, you know, so then you see the complete contrary of that with a hackathon, it's all women's ideas. Yeah, like, oh my gosh, that's what's possible in terms of solutions, and you're like, whoa, these women are so smart. So, I feel like, first off, these kinds of things are never amplified to the to the level that we're hoping to do them, and that's also why we do them in skyscrapers, is to send a message like women belong in these sorts of rooms, and so there's also something I like to think is like a little bit poetic as well, very, and I think in general when we're trying to see this kind of more seismic change, or trying to create this kind of change, it does require more proactive activation energy to get to get the landscape shifting, and I think of, you know, I've spoken with founders, women founders, and they talk about their experience with fundraising, or going to VCs, or investment firms, too, and like the problems that they are solving that are very real problems, whether it's in the feminine hygiene space or in the baby space, like very real problems that affect so many people, where if it's all guys in the room writing the checks, they might not get the importance of it, and so you know, I love seeing the various VC farms that are focused on women's startups, and not just like women's women founders, but like specifically products towards women and kids and families, because women typically are the caretakers, and so just it has to be a concentrated effort initially to make that change, even if it feels like you've got to work harder initially, totally. And I actually often make this joke because I'll be at like founder dinners and it'll be like 12 men, three women, and that's being generous on the numbers. And one of the questions I often ask is like, I'll ask the men, I'll be like, what would you do if you were a billionaire, and they're like, oh, I'd buy this ranch in South Dakota, I do this, and they list off all these like material things that they would do, and my response is often like I would go invest in every woman that all these VCs have like said no to, and then I feel like I become a trillionaire. Yeah, because like it's like such a missed opportunity that they're completely missing because they're like, oh, what a cute little idea, yeah, when in reality it's. Like big problems that are being solved, and you see that in consumer goods, you see it in medicine, you see it in women's sports. I mean, like, in with the influx of women of funding into women's sports, you then see the growth of those sports, and it's like this is not a radical concept, but just we've been underserved for, yeah, for a long time, but I will say one thing that does give me hope in that arena is that I'm seeing more kind of like creators join the venture conversation, I don't know if you're seeing that, like BulletPitch, like these like dinners where shout out to Felix and the team, and maybe he's not the founder, but yeah, BulletPitch is awesome, yeah, like they're getting more creators in the room to like be on cap tables too, so I think there's like that shift where creators are realizing, okay, I don't just want a one off brand deal, I actually think that like I deserve equity in this company, so that I think is fantastic, but I also think just it goes to show like the importance of a personal brand for a woman is going to give them leverage, whether it's you're gonna maybe get some inbound from VCs, which has happened to me, which like that wouldn't happen otherwise, like no one's inbounding a woman, right? But if you have a personal brand, they just might. Yeah, so to that point, I'm talking about Ruth more specifically. So beta is best come out, right? And so what can users expect from your platform and from the services that you offer? Yeah, for our beta. Initially, we're going to be coming out with our visibility agents, so that includes a personal brand builder, and that's really all about helping position any woman as a thought leader, so getting content out as frictionless as possible. So, we have the personal brand builder, and then our content partner. So, that content partner will allow a woman to take a seat of an idea that maybe they had on a walk while they were walking their kid, it'll allow them to take that idea and get it across, you know, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and it'll write the caption and really optimize it, so they don't have to sit there and be like, "Let me go change this and then go change that, because I really wanted it to be as easy as possible, so that women could keep up with the demands of the algorithm. Yeah, and so eventually we definitely want to make it easy for women to generate Substack newsletters through the same kind of principle, because it's going to be more important than ever that women keep up with these demands of the algorithm, because it almost feels like nowadays that you have to have a Substack and a LinkedIn and a TikTok and an Instagram, or else you don't exist, and that very much is kind of what's happening, especially with the whole AI agents conversation, yeah, and I guess also, like, obviously, there's a lot of millennials and Gen Z, but I think older people in the workforce, and people who are, you see, many people in their 50s and 60s who are not even 70s, who are getting on the bandwagon and creating more and having this next chapter of their career, so when you're thinking about like the platforms on which you can interact with Ruth, whether it's mobile focused or desktop, like, is it kind of accessible across all platforms? Yeah, eventually it will be. We're building right now the beta will be for desktop, but eventually, yeah, I want women to feel like they can take out, you know, their phone, and be like, just had this like bad meeting, like, can you walk me through it? So Ruth would really be like a coach that they can talk to at any point when they're dealing with those kinds of situations. It'll kind of give them the pep talk that they need. Think it's, it's been fascinating because we've been hearing a lot about, like, sycophancy, and I think, of course, that's dangerous, like, oh, like, where the AI chat bots are telling people that, like, they're the best thing, and yeah, on God's green earth, yeah. And, but what's interesting about that conversation to me is that I could see how this idea of sycophancy could be very dangerous to men, because, like, they'll be like, "Okay, let me go do that, like, let me go do something like dangerous thing, because AI told me about it, whereas I feel like women would actually maybe benefit from a little of that, because there is a maybe a little lack of confidence, or you know, so for me, I'm like, I actually want Ruth to be to give a pep talk, because that, I think, is what a lot of women need. Yeah, and I mean, boys and girls are often raised differently, and whether it's conscious or subconscious, I think, well, I do think there's a lot of subconscious bias that goes into parenting, in terms of how we push girls to be uncomfortable or don't, or you know, encourage a lot of experiences versus not, and I think that is different, and research shows that it's different between boys and girls a lot of the time, and so really you kind of gotta like aggressively work on shifting the mindset, and so that's a tool where it can be really helpful, and I like, I use ChatGPT to, like, I'll put on the audio and say an answer to something, whether it's like an interview or whether it's a keynote that I like, an element I want to try, and say it, and then kind of get some feedback, because it's just, it's so helpful, it's a safe space, and it's can be done in the privacy of your home, so they're just like so many tools like that that I think are so cool to lean into. I agree that feedback is life changing for me, right? To have a thought partner helps me so much in terms of just like every decision, I'm like, okay, what do you think about this email? Like, otherwise I might send it to a friend, like I'll have time to wait for like a friend or even my co-founder to go answer and tell me if my email is good, but. Like I just sometimes need that little reassurance, like I don't know what it is, maybe it's that subconscious, like you know that maybe women overthink, like I don't know, I don't want to even like generalize too much, because everyone's experience is different, but for me it's definitely been very, very helpful, so helpful again. I think it's also like no one's perfect, like I feel like I'm a smart person, but I know that I write in a run-on way, and I write the way I talk, and I know that that's not an efficient way to get an idea across, and my parents might argue that I should spend time learning how to write better, but there's a lot going on, and so, like, knowing that that's a small example, but just recognizing where maybe you've got some weaknesses, or just things that you want to be done better, and it's not saying you have to use exactly what AI throws back at you, but to give you a sense of like where you could be having those blind spots again is just so helpful, because I don't even like how AI writes, no, I don't like what it's telling me, but I do like options, like so, if anything, I feel like I've stepped more into this role of like curator and editor, because I can go, oh, I love that, that's a bar, or I love that, let me move that, and so I feel like now I am there almost to just like Frankenstein it all together, yeah. No, I love that, and like, and like, AI is not particularly good at like repeating something, like if you want something changed, I find that it, what it gets back to you is not the original thing, with that little change is a whole new thing, and so, like, yes, there's there's certain lines that are great, and then maybe the tone is a little wrong, or the general vibe isn't what you're going for, but you get those little snippets that can be great, and, and I think that goes back to then also, like, you can't trust everything that comes out of it, and that's why it's that understanding how to have the, how to use it as a tool rather than like a solution necessarily, and that is like what we've spent the most time building on the back end, is like fixing the tone and like you know making it so it's good writing, and so like with Ruth, we've actually trained it on the back end on all of my viral posts on LinkedIn from the past like two ish years, and you know, on like just overall frameworks and tweaks, like, but I only know how to do that because, like, you know, I have this expertise in knowing how to position someone as a thought leader. Yeah, and so I think, like, for people who are deep experts in something, like, they should be thinking, like, what can I vibe code around this, because it will only help them, like, have a bigger scale, like a wider reach. Yeah, it's fun, like it's fun to just experiment, even if you never do anything with it, to kind of.. it's a self-expansion journey in a sense. And I think that can be really invigorating, exciting. And then maybe can like spur an idea that you wouldn't have had, whether or not it relates to AI, and building with AI specifically, and it's just fun. I've been seeing a lot of people come into, like, community, or, like, a lot of girls, like, we'll meet up and vibe code together, so I think there's ways to make it, to make it more fun. Yeah, totally. The last thing I want to ask you about with building rooms, before we get into our closing segments, I can't believe we're at time already. You talk about how you want to get the conversation about Ruth out there, and you want to kind of organically get your users and your customers. Do you have any specific things that are guiding you for that customer acquisition beyond just you posting about it? Yeah, definitely. For us, that IRL experience has been life changing, and also it's helped Ruth grow so much. Like, I feel like now, like you know, if I asked someone, like they're like, 'Oh, I've, I've heard of Ruth, and I think that is actually not necessarily because I'm posting all of the time, but also because word of mouth travels, and we've done several events, so we do our AI for social good hackathons, and that's going to continue to be a series where we do these events in skyscrapers around the world. I love that. So, we did, you know, San Francisco at the Transamerica Pyramid Center, and then we did Hearst Tower, and we partnered with Open AI. So, really, you know, thinking, how can we bring these big institutional companies or nonprofits into the fold and create a room where, like, women feel like I'm excited to build the future, and so the goal is obviously to take that on a more global scale and figure out, you know, what other skyscrapers can we put women in, and that is something that we feel is instrumental in helping build the movement, right? Like, we don't want to just come out and like build a product, like we're definitely all about, like, how do we build a movement, yeah, and you know, with that, I think we're focused on also doing more research in the space, so we have a really exciting big research poll that we're going to put out in the next few weeks. I can't, like, talk about it too much, but because the landscape doesn't have that much data around how women are thinking about AI, we're actually doing one in partnership with an amazing pollster company, and we're going to be pulling over 1000 women, that's great. So, you know, our hope is like we can almost have like a research lab of sorts, like that kind of arm where we can help contribute to the ecosystem from a data perspective, and you know, of course, then have like the software have these IRL moments, so we're really taking like a more multi-prong approach because. I think is what it's going to take to do something, as you know, bold as closing the wage gap. Yeah, and like obviously you are a builder, you're enthusiastic about it, that's awesome. Are is any of it a little overwhelming at the same time? It's overwhelming every day. Okay, cool. I'm gonna keep it real, it's super overwhelming every single day. Yeah, but you know that you have that North Star, and you know why you're doing exactly for me. Like, the mission has been such a guiding light, that's why, like, I'm so like all about telling women, like, figure out what that mission is, because the days are going to be hard. Yeah, the days are hard when you work for someone that you don't like. Yeah, so it's like, it's like when people say, like, choose your heart, like I'd rather wake up and, and maybe get a message from someone who's like, your work and your mission at Ruth is so inspiring, and I get those messages every day, so even though it's hard, and you know, maybe there's like some financial instability in the weeds there too, like that keeps me going, and I can see what the bigger picture is. Yeah, and for me, like, it would be way worse if I just decided, like, I'm not going to do this anymore, because who else is building to close the wage gap? Like, I almost feel like it's on me. Yeah, and that's special. And so I just am like, if you don't quit, you win. Yeah, and and it's gonna be uncomfortable, and it's gonna be exciting, and it sounds like that that that excitement will continue to drive, and so, thank you for kind of investing back in women, and I think you know, women helping women is so, so, so important. And even though, like, when I was growing up, I felt like media pitted women against each other all the time, even in media, we're seeing that change, and so to have that change across the landscape, I think is so powerful. And something that I'll say in my keynotes is, like, if women aren't helping women, how can we expect men to help us too? And so building for women, and it doesn't all have to be like charitable, it can be for profit, it can be to better everyone, it can be for financial gain, and then also for social and cultural change. So, thank you for doing all of that. Yeah, thank you, thank you so much for having me. You bet. So, we're gonna go into our closing segment. I'd like to ask my guest to complete the sentence if I'm honest, and it's meant to just be parting wisdom for our listeners that's on brand to the show. So, can you complete the sentence if I'm honest? Yes, if I'm honest, I think that LinkedIn has the best infrastructure for people to be building their personal brands right now in the age of AI, and I think that is because there are like less bots on LinkedIn, so I think people don't talk about that enough. And then you can also have so much data on the person, so you know where someone went to school, you know where they went to work, and so when you go and you outreach to someone, there's just a lot more context that you can work with. And so I think it's the most powerful platform, it's the one that allowed me to go on and work for myself, so I would strongly encourage any of your viewers to start posting on LinkedIn. I love that, because I also love LinkedIn, and I hear from some of my peers that they don't. I'm like, ah, but it's so cool, and it's so random, like in some ways, like you just, you get so many degrees of separation where you can meet cool people, or like sequel people. So very cool. Thank you. So now we're gonna go into the rapid fire, if you're honest. Okay? What is your favorite app at the moment? My favorite app right now is probably Claude. Okay, very cool. What item do you hope will be obsolete in 20 years? Item, like physical item, yeah, cars that you have to drive. Oh, that hurts my feelings a little bit, but that's okay. Well, we'll let that slide, because the guest is always right. What I always say, that because I don't have my driver's license. I get super biased. Look, look, I know that I'm a race car driver, and or was, but I don't have a car right now either, so I get not loving driving. My husband always drove us around, but that's okay. Next one, what is something you always buy on your grocery run? Berries. Oh, what kind? All the kinds. I always get raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. The trio, lovely. If you could, would you go to outer space? Yeah, you're bolder than I am, because there's no way in hell that I would, yeah, I'd give it a whirl. Good for you. And then the last, if you're honest, what's something that you're grateful for right now? Probably opportunities like this, right? Like posting on LinkedIn has opened doors for me to have conversations with people like you, who I find inspiring. So I'm super grateful for that, and hope to do it a lot more. Oh, amazing. So I'm assuming people can find you at Valerie Chapman on LinkedIn, yes, and Instagram, TikTok, same username @ValerieChapman. And then, if they want to join the wait list for Ruth, it's at Ruthapp.ai Amazing, is that after Ruth Bader Ginsburg? It is love that. Well, Valerie, thank you so much for joining us, and for being honest, and good luck with Ruth. I'm so excited to follow. Thank you so much for having me, team. Thank you for joining us on If I'm Honest with Julia Landauer. I hope you enjoyed listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed recording it with our guest. And if you liked the episode, please subscribe to the podcast on your preferred platform to get new episodes when they drop. It would also. A huge help if you can leave a rating on that page, write a comment, and share the episode with someone who you think might enjoy it. As always, thank you for letting us be honest with you, and I'll see you next week. Bye.