Aggressively Human went on hiatus for July, and we’re back to talk about what the break actually looked like!
In this episode, we catch up on what our month off actually looked like — Jessica’s West Coast “book tour” meeting Deeper Foundations members across four cities, and Meg’s glaucoma surgery and a quieter, more foundational summer of business work.
We talk about travel, illness, eye surgery, membership relaunches, and the discomfort of resting without immediately filling the space with something new — plus why a genuine pause turned out to be exactly what both the business and the podcast needed.
Why Jessica took her book on an unofficial “tour” through Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and LA
The public transit challenge: one rideshare in twelve days across four major cities
Meg’s glaucoma surgery, what a week without screen time actually looks like, and why she scheduled it for the slow season
What it actually looks like to let go of “big, hairy, ferocious projects” for a season without the business falling apart
Relaunching the Deeper Foundations membership without ever having done a formal launch sequence before
The “collective pause”: a shared sense that clients, colleagues, and the industry at large all pulled back at the same time this summer
Why reflection is the step that gets skipped in a weekly podcast cadence — and why that’s a problem worth solving
The World Cup as a rare moment of monoculture in an increasingly fractured media landscape
What “resting but not regenerating” feels like when travel and motion replace actual stillness
“I think sometimes when you’re in a production content creation process, you don’t have a chance for reflection. When it comes to podcasting, because of the weekly cadence, you’re always gathering ideas, lining up guests, and thinking about what you want to talk about. Then we have to get together, we have to record, we have to produce, we have to create the show notes — we have to do all these different things. And that fourth step, reflect, is the easiest one to miss, because the cadence has been determined, and we lose sight of what it is we’re trying to do here.” -Meg
Resources
Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez
Succubus Blues series by Richelle Mead
School of Moxie with Mary Williams
