Narrative Dive: Recent Episodes
Jessica Buchleitner and Angela Natividad
Whether you're aware of them or not, narratives permeate our consciousness. They influence our decisions and perceptions in invisible yet powerful ways. They also become our legacies and convictions, driving cultures, politics, media, economics, art, literature, sex, and spirituality. On Narrative Dive, journalist Jessica Buchleitner, mythologist Angela Natividad, and notable guests deliver thoughtful, creative analyses of the stories dominating our minds and lives. Join their quest to uncover the constitutions of our cultural programming. Each episode is a dose of awareness.
WTF is up with the job market?! Floods of workers are taking to LinkedIn to vent about their frustrations searching for a new role. What is happening and why are so many talented, qualified people out of work despite a steady flow of job openings? The narratives around today’s job seeking experience range from grim to hopeful and can cause emotional confusion. Albert Qian, founder of Albert’s List, a 50k+ member group of recruiters, job seekers, and hiring managers in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond discuss reasons for current job market fluctuations, the impact of AI on job applications, Applicant Tracking Systems and recruitment, and the psychological effects of prolonged job searching.
Albert illustrates key background factors driving the challenges faced by job seekers while sharing winning insights from his community on how they can persevere.
Albert explains how:
-The job market is currently experiencing significant challenges due to an amalgamy of factors, from economics, technology, and the onset of AI.
-Albert's List was created to address the difficulties of job searching from a community level, as referrals and personal contacts are more effective.
-AI has disrupted traditional recruitment processes via Applicant Tracking Systems and the technology tools recruiters use to choose and hire candidates.
-Prolonged job searches have negative impacts on job seeker self esteem, especially the stories job seekers tell themselves about their own worthiness and success.
-Applicant Tracking Systems can hinder qualified candidates from being seen if their resume is not an exact match to the system’s parameters.
-Refining your personal narrative and ensuring your LinkedIn profile and application documents clearly communicate them is crucial to stand out in an applicant pool.
The founder–investor world often transactional, misaligned, and void of deeper values.
In this conversation, economist Danetha Doe shares a different vision. She’s redefining how entrepreneurs and investors connect—prioritizing shared values over pitch decks and financial projections. Through her work launching luxury brands, Danetha challenges the tired idea that innovation must be born from solving pain points, instead making a case for pleasure and cultural capital as real drivers of a brand’s iconic success.
She introduces the Glamour Economist and the Legacy Circle frameworksto show how authenticity, values alignment, and global perspectives on inclusion can reshape how capital flows. This episode unpacks not just business and investment transactions, but how we choose to build legacies rooted in meaning.
Danetha explains how:
- storytelling is essential for aligning investors and entrepreneurs.
- cultural capital is key to a brand's iconic status.
- the funding narrative needs to be rewritten to support diverse founders.
- securing financing is akin to dating; alignment is crucial.
- the 'Glamour Economist' philosophy centers on beauty, desire, and passion.
- luxury brands focus on craftsmanship and legacy, differing from traditional startups.
- values alignment between founders and investors is critical for success.
- the 'Legacy Circle' empowers founders to choose their investors wisely.
- authenticity in pitching can protect a founder's vision.
- pleasure can drive profit, challenging traditional narratives.
Visit Danetha's website here.
Negotiation and conflict resolution expert Dr. Beth Fisher-Yoshida offers insights into navigating everyday interactions to life-course altering conversations from her extensive experience in negotiation and communication. Using her How can I use that? approach, Beth emphasizes the importance of personal narratives and emotional intelligence in effective negotiation while highlighting the impact of cultural and gender narratives on negotiation styles. Beth also addresses the challenges of impostor syndrome, often driven by the stories that we take with us into our conversations.
Beth is the author of New Story, New Power: A Woman’s Guide to Negotiation and a Professor of Practice, M.S. in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University School of Professional Studies
Takeaways
-Effective communication shapes our social worlds.
-Personal experiences significantly influence negotiation strategies.
-Identifying and rewriting personal narratives can enhance negotiation skills.
-Emotions play a crucial role in negotiation outcomes.
-Past failures can undermine confidence in negotiations.
-Childhood experiences shape negotiation behaviors and beliefs.
-Gender narratives affect how women negotiate and advocate for themselves.
-Cultural differences impact negotiation styles and effectiveness.
In an era whereanyone with a laptop can become a media outlet, what does "media" even mean anymore? Simon Owens - a seasoned journalist and publisher of a newsletter dedicated to exploring the media industry - joins me to dive into the seismic shifts reshaping how we consume, create, and monetize information.
From the democratization of expert voices to the rise of newsletter-preneurs, we explore how creators are bypassing traditional gatekeepers and building direct relationships with audiences, including navigating the signal-to-noise ratio in our increasingly content-saturated world.
Simon shares real strategies and innovative monetization models that media entrepreneurs are using to build sustainable, profitable brands and muses on the future collision course between traditional media and AI-generated content.
Amanda Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit. At the heart of her wrongful conviction was the power of sensational “sticky” media narratives—stories shaped more by spectacle than truth, and weaponized in particular ways against women.
Amanda reflects on the journey of reclaiming her voice from the grip of global tabloids. She unpacks how the media often distorts female identity through the lens of sexuality to vilify women and sway public perception, especially during criminal trials. She also shares the surprising emotional work of coming to see her prosecutor—the man who helped orchestrate her wrongful conviction—as a human being.
But this conversation isn’t only about the past. Amanda also emphasizes today’s attention economy, where facts often lose to the most compelling narrative, and where the line between reality and fiction grows ever thinner.
-Visit Amanda's website here.
-Order Amanda's new book, Free: My Search for Meaning here (released in March 2025):
*This episode is an extension of FAWCO’s recent expert panel at the United Nations 69th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and NGO-CSW, which examined the growing threat of Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII), including real and deepfake content, as a tool of gendered abuse, especially targeting women in the public eye.
Watch the full panel discussion here featuring Andrea Powell, Susanna Gibson, Breeze Liu, Noelle Martin, and Silvia Semenzin.
AI's rapid ubiquity is exciting and threatening, especially to those outside of its development. Emmanuel Acheampong, the visionary co-founder of yShade.ai, has meticulously curated a dataset of 12 million diverse skin tones. This feat isn't just transforming the beauty industry's approach to inclusion—it's poised to enhance safety standards for autonomous industrial machines, prevent fatal accidents in self-driving vehicles, and revolutionize dermatological diagnostics.
With host Jessica Buchleitner, Emmanuel challenges the prevalent Value Neutrality Thesis of technology—the widely accepted narrative that technology emerges as neutral and becomes imbued with traits based on its user behavior. Through compelling examples, he reveals AI as a ubiquitous microcosm, where small enclaves of engineers and technologists create solutions for global populations while primarily addressing scenarios relevant to their limited perspectives.
What sets his approach apart is his human-centered methodology of building a diverse AI dataset through qualitative research interviews with beauty industry experts and medical professionals. This provides a stark contrast to the narrative that AI datasets are built solely by scraping the internet. As DEI measures disappear in government and private companies, he explains how economic forces remain the beauty industry's driver for inclusivity.
One conclusion is apparent from this conversation: Our understanding is fundamentally limited by our datasets, and we don't know what our data fails to show us.
Connect:
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Emmanuel's LinkedIn
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yShade.ai
Imagine waking up to find your most intimate images plastered across social media platforms and search engines—whether authentic or AI-generated. How would you cope? What could you do?Host Jessica Buchleitner delves into the dark side of media technology, exploring how the transition from 90s VHS tapes to today’s generative AI has fueled the rise of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), also known as "deepfake pornography" and "revenge porn." Joined by Susanna Gibson, founder of My Own PAC, and Andrea Powell, co-founder of Alecto AI, the discussion uncovers the devastating toll NCII takes on victims' mental health, reputations, and professional lives.Their discussion addresses narratives inducing cultural stigmas, victim blaming, and the significant legal hurdles victims face. They highlight the latest advancements in U.S. state, federal, and international laws and offer actionable advice for those affected. This episode is a call to action, urging collective efforts to combat and criminalize NCII while empowering listeners to be a culture of change.Resources-DMCA takedown request: https://copyrightalliance.org/educati...-Cyber Civil Rights Initiative: https://cybercivilrights.org/-My Own PAC: https://www.myownpac.org/-Alecto AI: https://alectoai.com/Susanna Gibson, My Own PACSusanna Gibson is a Nurse Practitioner and advocate. She currently serves on the board of Her Bold Move, and has worked in healthcare for over 15 years, including several years as the Lead Advanced Practice Provider for the VCU Health Division of Geriatrics. During her tenure with the division, she served as the clinical lead for a joint medical home model venture between Medicaid, Virginia Premier Health Insurance and VCU Health, as well as participated in the CMS Demonstration Project Independence at Home. She is a passionate advocate for health equity and justice, and has a unique insight into the intersectionality of health with economic stability, education, environmental justice, gender, discrimination, social support systems, gun violence, and much more, from spending years providing home-based primary care in her community.Susanna served as the 2023 democratic nominee for the Virginia House District 57 and understands firsthand the distinct challenges female candidates face in the political arena. In 2024 she established "MyOwn" PAC as a direct response to her experience during her political campaign, when she realized she had been the target of nonconsensual pornography while simultaneously being subjected to Nonconsensual Distribution of Intimate Images as well as to severe and prolonged Image-Based Sexual Abuse, both online and in person. Andrea Powell, Alecto, AIAndrea Powell is the co-founder of Alecto-AI and former Executive Director of Karana Rising where she supports advocacy and care for survivors of sex trafficking whose own trafficking led to their arrest and incarceration.. For the past 18 years, she has led national and international efforts to develop services, housing, and policies to advance the rights and healing of survivors of human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and sexual abuse. Andrea is also the Director of The Reclaim Coalition at Panorama, a global movement to end online image based sexual violence.In 2004, Andrea co-founded FAIR Girls, where she led her team for 14 years in providing case management services and establishing a safe home for survivors in Washington, D.C, and played a leadership role with the DC Human Trafficking Task Force. At Karana Rising, co-founded by Andrea in 2019, survivors lead to advance justice and healing with and for survivors who have experienced arrest and incarceration as a result of their own trafficking. Through these efforts, Andrea has served and interfaced with over 2,000 survivors of trafficking and gender-based violence in the United States, the Balkans, Russia, Bangladesh, India, and Uganda.
America is Angry. Companies and individuals are profiting from our current state.
The Anger Industrial Complex - the interconnected relationship between economics, business and online vitriol - has plagued the United States since the 2016 presidential election (and arguably even before), driving our societal fault lines deeper, post after post on social media.
Jessica Buchleitner joins multi-award-winning journalist and documentarian Michele Mitchell to discuss its origins and how economic pressures facing journalism today are contributing to its amplification. Packed with decades of media experience and knowledge, they delve into how the shift from traditional news to infotainment, and then to social media has affected public discourse since the mid 1990s while emphasizing the importance of mobilizing community coalitions as an antidote to paralyzing cynicism, frustration, and outright online rage complaining. An episode after Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election news we can all use!
About Michele Mitchell
Michele Mitchell's award-winning career as a human rights filmmaker includes Haiti: Where Did the Money Go? (airing on PBS over 1,100 times) and the feature documentary The Uncondemned, which had a US theatrical release in 40 cities, has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is translated into six languages, and has continuously toured the world since 2017. She is the recipient of the National Edward R. Murrow for Best Television Documentary, Gracie Award for Best Investigative Documentary, CINE Golden Eagle and CINE Special Jury Award for Best Investigative Documentary, Gracie Award for Best Investigative Feature, Brizzolara Family Foundation Award for Peace & Resolution, Rabinowitz Award for Social Justice, among others. As an investigative correspondent for Bill Moyers on "NOW" (PBS), her critically acclaimed work spanned political corruption, economic issues and modern-day indentured servitude. As political anchor at CNN Headline News, she focused on US elections and post-9/11 legislative issues regarding terrorism and corruption. An Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University's Dart Center for Trauma in Journalism, Michele's human rights work includes an investigative stint with the USC Shoah Foundation to gather evidentiary testimonials from Rohingya survivors fleeing Myanmar. Her podcast The Cocktail Conversations is focused on unraveling the "anger industrial complex" in the United States (with a little help from wine!). She is the author of three books and began her career on Capitol Hill. Currently in production on her new nonfiction feature OG (Right Side of History, Wrong Side of the Law), she is strongly against the Oxford comma and her new favorite word to drop in conversation is kakistocracy.
About Narrative Dive
Your partner in narrative.
Whether you're aware of them or not, narratives permeate our consciousness, influencing our decisions and perceptions in powerful ways. They become our legacies and convictions, driving culture, politics, media, economics, art, literature, sex, spirituality, and ultimately how we communicate. Now in its second season after a minimum viable product (MVP) first season, Jessica Buchleitner, Angela Natividad, and notable guests deliver thoughtful analyses of the stories dominating our world, uncovering the constitutions of our cultural programming to help you create a healthy info diet.
Let's build a world of better communicators.
Jessica Buchleitner sits down with Marla Sofer to unpack the complex narratives surrounding personal finance that begin with parentally instilled beliefs and end with a crowded financial services ecosystem often too confusing for the average consumer to navigate. Marla shares her journey to founding Knomee, a financial wellness platform that offers the tools to understand your unique financial identity, and her insights on breaking free from limiting beliefs and using money for personal growth and impact. She highlights how to take charge and leverage an important digital age tool - our personal data - to set financial goals that will lead to more fulfillment via the right advisors.
This episode explores:
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The dangers of living reactively vs. the importance of crafting a clear vision for your financial future.
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How shame narratives drive us into money-avoidant behaviors.
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How the “hedonic treadmill” creates a reactive and constant search for meaning and happiness.
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The role of personal agency and data ownership in making informed financial decisions.
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Challenging societal narratives that undermine women’s financial confidence.
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How technology can revolutionize financial services to empower individuals.
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Blocker narratives exist to make us think that we are not worthy of having something for some reason.
About Marla Sofer
Marla Sofer, Founder and CEO of Knomee, is a financial services and fintech executive, founder of two women’s networks driving change and inclusion in corporations, frequent speaker on topics related to the future of financial services, wealth, and asset management, startup advisor, 2020 Woman of Silicon Valley, 2021 Woman in WealthTech to Watch, and proud mom, and wife. She led partnerships quantified in billions of dollars at J.P. Morgan and BlackRock before leaping into fintech in 2015 to improve customer experiences. Her experiences at Microsoft, Carta, Invesco, Xignite, and Lending Club influenced her decision to create a solution that would improve personal financial wellness and enable financial services companies to better serve their customers and prospects.
Visit Knomee’s website here.
Read this blog when you feel financially stuck.
financial wellness, women empowerment, personal finance, financial identity, technology in finance, financial narratives, data ownership, personal agency, financial services, overcoming shame
Author Hillary Augustine and host Jessica Buchleitner deep dive into the currency paradigm: a gestalt view of four individual, yet interwoven currencies: Time, Money, Energy, and Space. This four-currency guidance system is rooted in one simple concept: if you want to experience a greater sense of wholeness, you must acknowledge total currency flow. Augustine discusses the monocurrency world - our current reality that focuses solely on money while largely ignoring that the other three dimensions affect our wellbeing and success, especially in cross-cultural contexts:
- space as a container currency and the need to prioritize personal space for our well-being.
- Time is seen as a connector currency that can be fluid and flexible, challenging the structured narratives we have about it.
- Money as a companion currency that reflects our fears, exposes our wounds, and resources our dreams and the need to reframe our narratives about money and exploring its role as a companion in our lives.
- energy is recognized as a nuanced currency that often gets overlooked, but has a significant impact on our well-being and decision-making and is one of the first to be depleted when we allow it.
Check out the Currency Paradigm book here and on Amazon.
More about Hillary Augustine here.
Can the location of your birth and era affect the stories you conceive of and tell?
Birth narratives take on intricacies beyond their literal meaning by signifying new beginnings, conceptualizations around motherhood and the creation of life, and a notion of self-recreation that leads to perceived redemption. Angela and Jessica dive deep into their intricate tapestry, unraveling the complexities of how the stories we tell ourselves about creation intersect with concepts in sociology, psychology, and economics.
Human history is obsessed with virgins and virginity. They’re in religious texts, as alternating terms in our vernacular, peppered throughout our mythology, and embodied in our urban legend horror movies, teen dramas, and novels. We use the term “virgin” to refer to both purity and our first time trying something new. But what is actually behind the virgin curtain?
This episode delves into the complex and often stigmatized narratives surrounding virginity, especially on the roots of its significance and meaning and the role of media in shaping perceptions.
What do fraternities, sororities, the Barbie movie, and Taylor Swift fans have in common with Jim Jones? Cult narratives.We explore the blurred lines between zombie-stoked paranoia and end-of-times claims to die-hard, dedicated brand fans, challenging what makes a cult an actual cult.
We’ve all heard of boogeymen as children- the fabled creatures who live under our beds, ready to strike if we wander around at night or act mischievous. Now, boogeymen have found their way into every facet of our lives via the algorithms and platforms where we engage and via the news we consume.A "boogeyman" is a media catchword, phrase, or individual symbolizing a larger group of people or an event that has created collective fear. From #COVID-19 to Weapons of Mass Destruction, they stoke anger, outrage, and terror. Recognizing these narratives will help you shift from an emotional frame of mind to better analyze your expanded circumstances. In this episode, we’re calling them out and challenging how they are formed and why they exist.
Beginning in childhood, we are inundated with “good guy vs. bad guy” tales in society, religion, and culture. According to structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, binary narratives are a necessary way for us to interpret our world, but at what cost? Angela and Jessica analyze the origins of these two-headed stories via current and past events, mythological origins, and societal influence to understand their role in limiting our thinking, shrinking our perceptions, and distracting us from the more holistic picture.
A core question remains: are we capable of foregoing this one-size-fits-all approach to narratives or are we programmed to automatically take sides?
Since 2021, the dystopian classic 1984 topped Amazon’s bestseller list despite being written in the 1940s. Dystopian narratives are common these days due to escalating geopolitics and the conspiracy theory rife COVID-19 pandemic. But why would we want to conceptualize worst-case scenarios? Angela and Jessica explore this narrative's origins and how, despite being fiction, it encourages us to reimagine moral views often justifying real acts of violence and rebellion. While most contemporary mainstream dystopian narratives envision the fall of the United States, others present critical themes echoing throughout human history: central authoritarian control in 1984, oppression of women in The Handmaid’s Tale, forced plastic surgery in the Uglies series, and a re-imagination of the Second World War’s outcome in The Man in the High Castle. Will we learn from past atrocities or will the historical pendulum swing us ever back?
Every nation has its legends who begin as flesh and blood people until stories evolve them into undefeatable, superhuman god-like legacies through time. With each passing century, they become more powerful, more immortal, and more unbreakable. Angela and Jessica dive into the Narrative of the Unbreakable Warrior to uncover justifications for hustle culture, breeds of nationalism, Donald Trump’s self-perception as a post-industrial revolution titan of industry, and how French knight Geoffroi de Charny boasts an Amazon author page 700 years posthumously for his endearing 1356 testament, “A Knights Own Book of Chivalry."
500 years from now, how will stories about our celebrities, heroes, and sports stars grow exponentially? Perhaps the Narrative of the Unbreakable warrior exists to advance our own ideas of progress. Perhaps also because it promises us immortality as a cure for our finiteness.
What do The Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars saga, millennial optimization, and the Greek myth Jason and the Argonauts have in common? The Hero’s Journey. Heroes are central to all stories as our celebrated protagonists embarking on quests for truth and wisdom. The Hero’s Journey narrative is prevalent in world religions, literature, mythology, and psychology and is a popular storyline in Hollywood movies for its promise that our tribulations will redeem and evolve us. Angela and Jessica uncover this narrative template, tracing it back thousands of years to our present key reference, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Is there a template for the narratives we’re bombarded with in our daily media consumption? Where do they come from? In this inaugural episode, Jessica and Angela discuss Metanarratives - overarching and dominant anecdotes represented throughout history and cultures. Think of them as cultural software programs running in the background and powering our constructs. As templates for stories that continue to replicate and compound through time, it is important to recognize their hold and power. As Angela references, stories are ancient technologies, vessels for whatever we want to put inside them.