Pearl - September 28, 2024＂My SECRETARY Would Ask MY DAUGHTER If She Did Her HOMEWORK!＂ Former CEO of PEPSICO ｜ Pearl Daily
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
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Summary
In this episode, we discuss the role of women in society and the impact it has on their relationships with their children and family. We also talk about the challenges of being a wife, a mother and a career woman in today's society.
Transcript
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So I saw a clip of the CEO of Pepsi talking about if women can have it all.
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I saw another clip of Michelle Obama talking about if women could have it all.
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And this is a phrase I think the media and movies have really pushed that women can work,
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they can be good mothers, and they can do it all at the same time.
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And I wanted to see the women that supposedly had it all, they have careers, their mothers,
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their wives. I wanted to predict if they agreed that you can in fact have it all because that is
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what the media pushes. And that is what we as women are pushed to do. I don't know many 18,
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19, 20 year old homemakers, but I do know that most women go and get jobs or go to college.
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that is what is normal. And what they don't tell you is life is about choices and trade-offs. So
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I wanted to start by showing this video of the CEO of Pepsi talking about if she thinks women
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can have it all. I don't think women can have it all. I just don't think so. We pretend we have it
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all. You know, my husband and I married for 34 years and we have two daughters. And every day
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you have to make a decision on whether you are going to be a wife or a mother. In fact, many
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times during the day, you have to make those decisions. And you have to co-opt a lot of people
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to help you. We co-opted our families to help us. We plan our lives meticulously so we can be decent
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parents. But if you ask our daughters, I'm not sure they will say that I've been a good mom.
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I'm not sure. I think that is the most honest response I have ever heard from a career woman.
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Many career women's children are afraid of their mothers, and they're not overly honest about the impact it had on them for them being gone all of those years.
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I'm not saying it's right or wrong. Different families have to make different choices.
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But life is about choices and trade-offs, and I think so often we think we can have it all with no trade-off.
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I try all kinds of coping mechanisms. I mean, I'll tell you a story that happened when
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my daughter went to Catholic school, Convent of Sacred Heart, and every Wednesday morning
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they have class coffee with mothers. Class coffee with mothers for a working woman,
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how is it going to work? How am I going to take off nine o'clock on Wednesday mornings to go for
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class coffee? So I miss most class coffees. My daughter would come home and she'd say,
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list of all the mothers that were there and you were not their mom. First few times I would die
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with guilt. But I developed coping mechanisms. I called the school and I said, give me a list of
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mothers who are not there. So when she came home in the evening, she'd say, you were not there,
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you were not there. I said, uh-huh, Mrs. Rag wasn't there, you know, Mrs. So-and-so wasn't there.
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So I'm not the only bad mother. You know, you have to cope because you die with guilt. You just die
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with guilt. My observation, David, is that... See, this is what we talk about. This is the example
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of a woman that is more on the selfish side in a selfless role. And it's not necessarily that
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she's a bad person or even would be a bad mother. It's that the circumstances she chose in life
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didn't give her the time to put her family first. And her kids are the ones who suffer.
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The biological clock and the career clock are in total conflict with each other.
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When you have to have kids, you have to build your career.
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And that's the time your husband becomes a teenager too.
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And as you grow even more, your parents need you because they're aging.
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I mean, we have no, we have no, we cannot have it all.
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it all but you know what coping mechanism mechanisms train people at work and this is
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always what i hear i guess i don't hear but i see it constantly when we put our career first
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once we have a family the kids are the ones who suffer and this is the ceo of pepsi telling us
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that so if the ceo of pepsi is saying you know i couldn't do it all and this is probably a woman
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with a super high iq very intelligent if she could be the ceo of pepsi she's probably good
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with people to some degree and managing things who are we average women train your family to
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be your extended family you know when i when i'm in pepsico i travel a lot and and now she's saying
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i i had to push on raising my kids onto my family so my extended family had to raise my kids for me
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When my kids were tiny, especially my second one, we had strict rules on playing Nintendo.
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She'd call the office. She didn't care whether I was in China or Japan or India or wherever.
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She'd call the office, the receptionist pick up the phone.
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Everybody knows if somebody says, can I speak to mommy, it's my daughter.
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So she'd say, yes, Tara, what can I do for you?
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You see, I say this because that's what it takes.
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This is what the sequence of questions I went through.
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If you don't develop mechanisms with your secretaries,
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with the extended office, with everybody around you,
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Being a CEO of a company is three full-time jobs rolled into one.
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The person that hurts the most with this whole thing is your spouse.
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I'm never going to hate on someone that's being honest about the consequences of the choices she made.
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but I think it's good that we see, even from top performing women, this is what comes with it.
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Your list is PepsiCo, PepsiCo, PepsiCo, your two kids, our two kids, your mom,
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and then at the bottom of the list is me. There are two ways to look at it.
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You should be happy you're on the list. American women, am I right? Actually,
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I don't even think she is, but I don't even know if she's American. She might,
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anyways, it doesn't matter. But yeah, this is what happens. The husband comes last.
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and this is why men often feel like a sperm donor in this country because they come after her career
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after the kids then comes his needs he's barely on the list he should be happy to be there and
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you know they're laughing everyone's laughing at this joke because that's how they feel they're
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being honest so don't don't complain just don't complain he is on the list very much on the list
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That was example number one. So let me go to the next one. And this is Oprah and Michelle Obama talking about if women can have it all.
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Here's the question that comes up over and over and over. And we talked a little bit about it. This idea of balance. Is that a false notion for women? Because can we really, are we ever going to have it all?
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I used to say, you can have it all, you just can't have it all at one time.
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Look, I am always irritated by the you can have it all statement.
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And I grew irritated with that phrase and that expectation the older I got, as you're trying to have it all.
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So these are liberal career women saying that that's not possible.
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I mean, Michelle Obama, you could argue if she's a career woman, but Oprah is saying no, not possible.
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Yourself up and feeling less than because you aren't having it all.
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Especially if you're looking at everybody else's Facebook page.
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be real about the fact that you know no one gets everything that was one of the first rules you
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learned as a little kid you don't always get your way come on people you don't always get what you
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want all the time and that's true in life so what I've told many young people is that you can have
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it all but oftentimes it's hard to get it all at the same time I believe you know so it's just a
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matter of managing expectations. So for me, for example, you know, when your husband is president
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of the United States and you have children, something's got to give. You know, I've made
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compromises in my life and my career, but I've also in exchange gained a wonderful platform to
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do some great work. Who would have ever imagined that we would make the inroads we've made on
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healthy eating and changing the way our kids are fed. She had to pick between her career and her
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husband's career. Now, obviously this is extreme. Her husband is the president of the United States.
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Obviously that's going to come first, but I see this in movies all the time where the new lead
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protagonist generally is a woman and the man follows her career. And that's fine. You can do
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that. But life comes with choices and trade-offs. And are we ready for what comes with that?
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School and, you know, I can point to so many things that I've had, that I've been able to do.
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If I want to be heavily involved in my girls' lives, that means that sometimes I have to put
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some things on the back burner to give them what they need. So it's hard to have it all.
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But that's where you go back to knowing who you are and knowing that, you know, you're really living through phases.
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And if you don't, if you're compromising through one phase of your journey, you're not giving it all up.
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You're just, you're compromising for that phase.
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There's another phase that's coming up where you might be able to have more of what you thought you wanted.
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You know, you get to know yourself a little bit more.
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So, no, I don't want young women out there to have the expectation that if they're not having it all, that somehow they're failing.
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If you maintain your health, which is one of the reasons why we talk about health, talk about taking care of yourself,
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because you want to get to the next phases in life where you can do more of what you want to do at any given time.
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You want to be wherever you are right now, and just like you say, I'm not through.
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So that's example two. Now, example three came from TikTok a couple of weeks ago. So there is
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a woman, her name is Kelsey. Her name is Kelsey and she's the wife of, I forgot his name, but
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basically there is a trad wife couple. They make trad wife content, our traditional content on
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Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and they are very famous. And this couple came from New York.
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they met in New York, and the woman went to Juilliard, and she was set to be a ballerina.
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And if you know anything about Juilliard, there is a 5% acceptance rate. You have to be a very,
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very good ballerina to go to Juilliard. And she was living in New York City, and that was her dream.
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And then she met a billionaire. And she was willing to, I can't imagine why, right? I can't
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imagine. But very quickly she said, you know what? I'm okay on the, on the Juilliard stuff. You know
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what? I'll just have your children. And now they live on a ranch in the middle of nowhere and they
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make TikTok content and she makes everything from scratch. And I want to show you how the women of
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today react to this. So what they'll do is say that she is somehow abused, coerced into these
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decisions when this is the wife of a billionaire family. And somehow the internet took this as
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she should have gone to Juilliard instead of getting married. And it's interesting because
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feminists always parade around that it's great for women to have choices. But whenever women
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make a choice that doesn't go with their narrative, we end up with videos like this. So I'm going to
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show you guys a essay done by a woman who's like anti-traditional something i don't know
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but i want to show you her take on this whole situation there was this times article with this
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woman called hannah neilman and she has a tiktok account called ballerina farm she also has her
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own tiktok account called hannah neilman i think she had that tiktok account before the ballerina
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farm one she is the pinnacle mormon trad wife she makes everything from scratch she's always got
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children dangling off of her. Daniel really doesn't seem to be about as much, although he pops in and
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out. Paints this very serene image of this woman who just loves taking care of the family, who makes
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everything from scratch, who, you know, who gives her life to her children and her family. Scratching
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on the surface, this seems like very aspirational content and when this Times article came out it
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then made it quite clear to a lot of different people that maybe, just maybe, her situation isn't
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exactly as it seems i will just so this couple invites a new york times reporter into their home
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to do an interview and this new york times reporter decides to make this into a hit piece about their
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family hey is that there are a lot of people number one saying that she is being controlled
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as got her freedom taken away she is deeply saddened it's about patriarchy and it's about
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feminism and it's about men trying to take away women's you know voices argument number two
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author of this piece was just dramatizing everything and actually maybe that was her
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career maybe maybe she didn't actually want to do ballet maybe she didn't want a different life
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you know it's very possible that she's very very happy you guys are making a mountain out of a mole
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hill hannah neilman is a victim or oppressed based on this article it's because it was
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manipulative journalism the one thing i will say which is what i just said a minute ago
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their faith their faith comes into us in a very very very big way people who are ex-mormon who
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have in their own words left their cult were basically indoctrinated these are their words
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not mine they left their husbands they managed to free themselves and they are also chiming in on
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this conversation this is a woman who is not an autonomous individual and i've seen women on so
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this is my question. This woman is not an autonomous individual. Are we adults or are we
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children? Because if we're children, then that would say that we can't make decisions on our own.
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But if we're adults, then we got to be responsible for the decisions that we choose. And this is a
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woman. She's ex-Mormon. So she did the Mormon thing and it didn't work out for whatever reason.
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maybe she decided she didn't like her husband maybe he divorced her I don't know but what
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happens instead of taking the loss we have a tendency to blame it on everybody else
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you're saying things like well I don't want to speak about her life because she is a grown woman
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she is an autonomous person she has free will she's making choices no she isn't she isn't she
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is being indoctrinated and has been indoctrinated since the day she was born in i don't want to hear
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anything about indoctrination we have google yep you have access to the internet you can google
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whatever you want you really can to the mormon cult okay she's not making choices that are
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informed she's being told that she has to obey her husband talking about neilman even they said
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devout mormon who was raised in a mormon family she bakes perfectly scored sourdough loaves milks
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cows straight into her coffee cup and gives birth by candlelight with no pain relief straight off
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the bat hannah neilman was a juilliard ballet dancer she actually had one year left of her
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undergraduate she had one year left and that was going to be it her career was going to be ballet
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hence the reason why it is a little bit strange how it's called you know ballerina farm i mean
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it's not strange but it is strange once we get into this in just a moment grew up in a very
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mormon family okay both her parents were very mormon she went away and she was in juilliard
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and that is what she wanted to do when she was asked you know is this something that you've
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always wanted to do she says no i mean i was like my goal was new york city i left home at 17 and i
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was so excited to get there i just loved that energy and i was going to be a ballerina i was a
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good ballerina she pauses again but i know that when i started to have kids my life would look
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different well i think one of the best things about a social media business in our case is that
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we get to work together growing up and when they were both asked about you know the reasoning why
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they're having so many kids she says it's god's plan whenever she has a baby give it another year
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she then asks god and god says yes have another baby one baby after another after another okay
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this is by far the number one question that we've gotten most of how many kids we're gonna have well
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don't know we don't really have a number we're just kind of going for it when asked you know are
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you going to fill your 15 seater van daniel the husband says you know yes and she says well i'm
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a little bit tired now in a very coincidental chain of events hannah was actually on her way back
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to new york from salt lake city she was going to go back go back to juilliard and she was going to
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go and finish and what ended up happening was that daniel now husband what happened was daniel's dad
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is actually the owner of jet blue airlines and daniel knew that she was going to be getting on
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that flight so he managed to wiggle it and get a seat right next to her in his words she didn't
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realize his dad owned the airline so daniel was like i'm on that same flight she says i remember
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checking in and them saying you're 5a and you're 5b i just thought no way that's crazy daniel smiles
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i made a call he had pulled strings at jet blue and so began their first date back then i thought
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we should date for a year before marriage she continues so i could finish school and whatever
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and daniel was like it's not going to work we've got to get married now after a month they were
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engaged two months after that they were married moving into an apartment daniel rented on the
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upper west side and three months after that she was pregnant the first juilliard undergraduate to
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be expecting in modern history when they were then probed on you know have you had to give up that
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much she says that you know we've all had to make sacrifices our first few years of marriage were
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really hard okay so what did she give up in order to get married to a high level guy i mean i think
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a billion dollars most most women might you know they think about but regardless right in order to
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get married to a high level guy she said within a couple of months he said i'm ready for kids and
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marriage now and she said okay how do you guys think her life would have turned out if she said
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you know what i need a year i need to finish juilliard how would that have gone sacrificed a
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lot but we did have this vision this dream and daniel interrupts we still do what kind of
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sacrifices i ask her well i gave up dance which was hard you give up a piece of yourself and daniel
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gave up his career ambitions now there's a very common theme in this the way that the journalist
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writes is that daniel keeps on cutting her off one of the sad things actually was when they then moved
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out to this ranch to this farm that they now call ballerina farm she really wanted for this
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particular shed slash barn to be made into a ballet studio just do what she loves doing
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and he dismissed it and he decided to turn it into a kid's home schooling room so i'm here in the
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school room if you followed for any amount of time you know that this building actually used
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to be where we shipped and fulfilled all our orders here on the farm now keep this in mind
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they have a lot of money but where his dad comes from the amount of money they're able to make off
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the farm they actually sell their meat i believe that they sell their cow meat and they do it
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online and all this kind of stuff so they have quite a good business as well as their social
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media so they rake in a hell of a lot of money they are not poor and he still would not either
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build her a ballet studio or have the ballet studio that she wanted the acceptance rate to
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get into juilliard is between five and eight percent i say this because i saw a comment of
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a woman who said they too had hobbies they gave up after they became a mother you know you just
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give up things when you become a mother no one is arguing that but please don't compare your hobbies
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to being a juilliard level ballet dancer unless you were training to be a professional athlete or
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training to be an olympian you and her are not the same journalists did pick up on this she says i
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look out at the vastness and i don't totally agree daniel wanted to live in the great western wild
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okay so what did she do she gave up what she wanted for what he wanted now we could say right
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wrong doesn't matter that's what she chose to do and what the general public comes out and does
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is say that she does not have agency and that she cannot be possibly making these decisions