What Do You Mean By That?

Early voting is already underway, and along with it comes the reemergence of age-old election-integrity claims. Let's be 100% clear: there was no systemic voter fraud in 2020. But these claims aren't from a new playbook.  "Ballot integrity" campaigns, fraud accusations, and even people saying they were entitled to take over because the elected government wasn't "fit to run" have been around almost...

Five years ago, Sara and Misasha published Dear White Women: Let's Get (Un)comfortable Talking About Racism - and almost immediately got an email accusing them of being the racist ones for naming it.  On this anniversary episode, they finally answer the questions they've never asked each other out loud: What was the hardest feedback they ever received? What's the most quoted, most powerful section...

Picture a newsroom in Rome under dictator Benito Mussolini's fascist regime in the 1930s. A censor's red pencil moves down a page before it ever reaches a printing press.  Now picture a cell phone, right now, tonight: someone typing out a post, reading it back to themselves, and deleting it before they hit send.   Two moments, nearly a hundred years apart, but with the same instinct.  Silence isn'...

If you were with us back in our early days, you remember we did a whole episode on redlining: the history of it, the literal red lines drawn on maps in the 1930s to keep Black and immigrant families out of the mortgage market, and how that legacy still shapes segregation and the racial wealth gap today. We're including that full episode, edited slightly for context, in this conversation.   What we...

Here's your chance to listen to a firsthand account of one of the most horrible parts of our recent human history, and how we stop it from happening again. This episode features a conversation with a psychologist whose life's work sits at the intersection of two of humanity's most extreme capacities: the capacity for cruelty, and the capacity for courage.  A survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary, h...

Do you know someone who's been incarcerated? Have you ever actually asked them their story, instead of judging them on that one fact? Because 95% of incarcerated people eventually leave prison and come home. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, our family members.  Here's why this is relevant to you today: This administration has made "tough on crime" the centerpiece of its second term - among o...

On June 30th, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that states can bar transgender girls and women from competing on girls' and women's teams. Six to three. It's now the law in over half the country.   And however you feel about that ruling, here's what we noticed in the days after it came down: almost none of the coverage actually talked to a transgender kid, or the parent raising one. It was all policy...

Crystal Echo Hawk's daughter gets asked if she still lives in a teepee. And Crystal's response isn't rage - it's something more unsettling.  She gets it.  Because 87% of American schools stop teaching about Native peoples after 1900, and 78% of Americans know very little about Native people. So that question, as painful as it is, makes a terrible kind of sense. The last data point most Americans h...

Imagine you're six years old. You look out past a barbed wire fence at a highway in the desert, and every single car that passes by is driven by someone white. The teachers who come to your school? White. The guards in the towers above you, also white. And you think to yourself: is this America? Or is America out there?  That child was John Tateishi. He was almost three years old when the U.S. gov...

Six people. That's all it took. Six young men sitting in a law office in Pulaski, Tennessee, in December of 1865 - just eight months after the Civil War ended - decided to start a secret club. One that, 150 years later, still impacts our country today.  To combat the recent erasure of history and ensure these stories remain not only alive but top of mind, this summer we are re-releasing some of ou...

What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be Asian American — and why, in 2026, are so many of us still leading with worry ? Today, in honor of AANHPI Heritage Month, we're diving into the TAAF STAATUS Index 2026 by unpacking some stats that are eye-opening, some that are infuriating, and some that are deeply familiar. We'll talk about how Asian Americans are seen - and how we see our...

What if the thing holding back justice isn't lack of will — it's lack of access?  Today's guest is doing something about that after coming up from a really rough time in high school, a near-fatal car crash, a parent who believed in him endlessly, and ending up not only at Stanford Law but also with one of the most powerful mentors in the field of law. For those of you who - like Sara - have liked...

The choice before us in 2026 is similar to the choice before Americans in the latter half of the 19th century, and the way we're framing it today is this:  Which straight White male President's line of thinking do you want to get behind? Choice #1 is Abraham Lincoln, who not only signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but was a firm believer in human rights for all, or Choice #2, the President who...

7 Years, One Big Rebrand, and Everything We Know Now: An Honest Anniversary Conversation Have we ever thought about quitting the podcast? What did we think when we were starting Dear White Women seven years ago? Why did we rebrand the show to What Do You Mean By That? What do we want the next chapter of this show to feel like? Those are all questions that we're asking each other as we celebrate SE...

Sara. Misasha. Megumi. All three of us are the daughter of one Japanese parent and one White parent each. All three of us had dual citizenship with the United States and Japan at one point. But the trajectories of our citizenship are distinctly different, and only one of us holds a Japanese passport now. Are we all still Japanese?   Today, we speak with Megumi Nishikura, a documentary filmmaker wh...

What if the very programs designed to make workplaces fairer are actually making the problem worse? In this episode, we begin with the famous "Cobra Effect"—a colonial-era policy that unintentionally increased the problem it was meant to solve—and explore how the same dynamic shows up in modern diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Our guest, Lily Zhang, argues that many corporate DEI initiati...

Today's conversation is one about history — but also about now. About 1968 and about 2026. About who gets control over their own body — and who never truly has. About the quiet, complicated ways parents try to protect their children, and the unintended harm that can hide inside "what's best." About the tension between safety and freedom. Between acceptance and autonomy. Between love and control. W...

Here we are, February, which is also Black History Month (and for the record: Black history is American history. We'll say this all day, every day, until everyone gets on this train.). It's not lost on us that this is the shortest month of the year. It's also not lost on us that, currently, our administration is actively erasing or whitewashing our nation's history in real time, including this mon...

*** We recorded this episode before ICE murdered Alex Pretti, a 37 year old ICU nurse who was attempting to help a woman up who had been pushed to the ground by ICE agents in Minneapolis on the morning of January 24, 2026. Despite the administration's attempt to cover up and justify this murder by claiming that Pretti was holding a gun (he wasn't, it was a phone), the facts are clear: ICE is murde...

If you're a repeat listener to the podcast over the last almost SEVEN years, you know that sometimes, we've done seasonal arcs in which we focus on a topic or theme for the season. (And if you've just found us - hello!)  This year, we're doing something different: a year-long focus on action, which is the third pillar of our listen, learn, and act framework. It moves us from "what can I do?" to "h...

We've had rough years before—but 2025? This one hit different.  If you've been listening to us for the last six years, you know we're no strangers to hard conversations. DEI. Wellbeing. Systems that don't work the way they should. And this year pushed all of that—from the global to the deeply personal. So what did we learn when everything felt heavier than usual? Let's talk about the biggest lesso...

In today's episode, we sit down with feminist author and activist Soraya Chemaly for a conversation that feels both urgent and deeply grounding. Soraya's new book, All We Want Is Everything , traces how male supremacy shows up everywhere—our politics, our homes, our faith spaces, our workplaces, and especially in the lives of our children. Together, we talk about the rising backlash against women...

In an age where AI can fake a video, social platforms reward outrage, and even the word 'misinformation' means different things to different people, one question rises above the noise: how do we know what to trust?   Today, we're joined by Vanessa Otero, the lawyer-turned-media-analyst behind Ad Fontes Media and its well-known Media Bias Chart, to explore exactly that. Vanessa takes us inside the...

Are you a little worried about holiday conversations with your relatives and family members in this increasingly polarized political climate? You're not alone. Welcome to something new – a live discussion with our guest, Dr. Bill Doherty, co-founder of Braver Angels and a deeply experienced relationship therapist, coaching one of us (Sara) through how to have difficult conversations, not in theory...

When we have repeat guests back on the pod, it's because we love them, their work, and the message that they're not only sending out into the world but embodying themselves. And we think all of this can be said a million times over for today's guest and her brand new book (out today!).   As we think about this conversation, which we can't wait for you to listen to, there were those mic drop moment...