In this episode of Out of the Clouds, host Anne Muhlethaler interviews fashion journalist and writer Ana Santi.
Ana has held various roles, including deputy editor at Drapers Magazine, a renowned UK fashion trade magazine, before going in-house at a brand called Jigsaw, where she became their first editor in chief. There she launched an in-house magazine and even published a book, called “Comfort Zones”, a collection of original stories by 28 women writers, including Pandora Sykes, Elizabeth Day, and Emma Gannon among others for the charity Women for Women International.
Her new book, “Three Things to Help Heal the Planet”, was published in May 2022, and Anne was very keen to get into it with her and to have a conversation about the important topics that are covered across the 21 essays that make up the book.
So in this interview, the two talk about Ana’s journey, from her native Brazil to the UK as an eight-year-old, her love of languages and what brought her to journalism.
Ana shares how and why working as a fashion reporter was a launching pad towards this new book to talk about sustainability and the possibility of individual action to help the planet — something she outlines is meant for ‘people who have choices’, as she goes on to explain.
The two end on discussing why we should learn to be better ancestors, and how that possibly will help us leave the planet in what is hopefully a better state than it currently is.
A thought-provoking, enjoyable interview that will hopefully leave listeners with the desire to both read the book and, if they have the choice, do their bit to help heal the planet.
Happy listening!
Selected links from episode
You can find Ana at ana-santi.com/
on Instagram @anasanti1
on Twitter @ana_C_Santi
on LinkedIn Ana Santi
And find all her info and up to date links via her Link Tree
The publication Drapers online
The book Comfort Zones
British brand Jigsaw
Mums for Lungs, the charity
This Could Be our Future, the book by Yancey Strickler
To Sell is Human, book by Daniel Pink
We Are the Weather, book by Jonathan Safran Foer
A Beautiful Constraint, book by Adam Morgan and Mark Bardem
Tristram Stuart, the food waste campaigner
Robert McKee, author and teacher
Goooders, ethical and sustainable fashion and accessories
Jennifer Martel, contributor to Ana’s book – Indigenous People’s Movement
Alasdair Roxburgh, also a contributor to the book – @Alroxburgh
Sapiens, the book by Yuval Noah Harari
The quote by Ernest Hemingway, about ‘finding the emotion’
Catch 22, the book by Joseph Heller –
Full episode transcript
Anne Muhlethaler:
Hi. Hello. Bonjour and namaste. This is Out of the Clouds, a podcast at the crossroads between business and mindfulness. I’m your host, Anne Muhlethaler.
Today, my guest is a journalist and writer called Ana Santi. Ana had various roles as a journalist, first at Drapers, a renowned UK fashion trade magazine. Later on, she went in-house, in a brand called Jigsaw, which if you live in the UK you may be familiar with, where she became their first editor-in-chief.
There, she launched an in-house magazine. She even published a book called Comfort Zones, a collection of original stories by 28 women writers, including Pandora Sykes, Emma Gannon, for the charity, Women for Women International.
Her new book, Three Things to Help Heal the Planet was published earlier this year. I was very keen to talk about it with Ana, as you hope probably noticed.
I really wanted to have a conversation around some of the very important topics that she covers across the 21 essays that make up the book.
In this interview, we talk, of course, about Ana’s journey from her native Brazil to the UK first, what brought her to journalism. We also talk about how and why working as a fashion reporter became a launching pad towards this book, to talk about sustainability and individual action.
Of course, we get into the essays, the mission of the book. Among many other things, we talk about why we should learn to be a better ancestor.
I hope that this intrigues you. I am very excited to be bringing you this interview. So let’s get into it. Happy listening!
Ana, thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to Out of the Clouds.
Ana Santi:
Thank you for having me.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, I’m so happy that we’re seeing each other today. So as you already know, the podcast is the crossroads between business and mindfulness.
Anne Muhlethaler:
What I normally like is start by asking my guests to share and tell their stories quite freely, instead of starting with a deep dive, because I find that it’s really interesting to understand more about how who are and what motivates us before we get into the work and what we do. I’d like to invite you to tell us who you are and where you’re from.
Ana Santi:
Okay. Thank you. I feel like I should start here. I was born in Brazil. I grew up there until I was about eight and a half, in a town called Santos, which is in São Paulo, in the state of São Paulo. I had a lovely childhood.
Ana Santi:
Then when I was eight and a half, we moved to Bristol, a city in England. From then on, that’s where I grew up, until I went to university just outside London, where I studied French.
Ana Santi:
I don’t know if this is true or not, but I wonder whether I developed a love for language and linguistics by arriving in a country completely unable to speak the language.
Ana Santi:
I remember going to primary school. My mom had to sit next to me when I first went, which I just don’t think would happen today. I don’t know.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh my God, that’s so sweet.
Ana Santi:
I know. She just sat next to me and would translate workbooks because I could do the work. If I had a math textbook, I could do the math, well, some of it anyway, but I couldn’t understand the questions, the problems being asked, for example.
Ana Santi:
So she almost became a bit of a teaching assistant, because then all the other children were like, “Oh, can you help me with this? Can you help me with that?” My mom is a teacher.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, okay. That’s even better.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. I think the primary school were actually really quite shocked that that happened. They were like, “Oh, okay, an additional teaching assistant.” So yeah, I wonder whether my love for language and linguistics perhaps came from that.
Ana Santi:
I also then remember in secondary school, when we started learning French. I could speak French. I started the same place as everybody else did, but I would know the meaning of words. Our French teacher say, “Right. Does anyone know what that means?” I remember ‘la mode’ I thought, that sounds like ‘la moda’ in Portuguese, so I would make those connections.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Can I add something to that? I found years ago, the first time I went to visit Brazil, I was in São Paulo for work, and there was a whole bunch of actually fashion magazines, because I worked in fashion. I realized, was surprise how close written Portuguese is to French. So, I could understand roughly 50% of what was on the page. Could not understand a word of what anyone said to me when there were speaking.
Ana Santi:
That is so true. You’re given a bit of time. Aren’t you? And it’s written down, rather than someone talking at you. You can read it and take your time, remember that.
Ana Santi:
So yeah, I studied French at university, language and literature, which I loved. Oh, I wish I could go back to university and just do it all over again. I love it. Love learning. I’m a bit of a geek maybe.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, I feel you.
Ana Santi:
All those books and those reading weeks, you’d actually get given time to just read. At the time, I don’t know whether I actually appreciated that enough, but my gosh, if I was given a reading week now, that would be so lovely.
Ana Santi:
Yes. Then after university, I moved to London. My university was just outside London anyway. I started in PR.
Ana Santi:
Even though I actually wanted to be a journalist, I was getting some advice after my university degree. Everyone said to me, “Well, if you want to be a journalist, you should really do a journalism course.”
Ana Santi:
I was 22 because doing French, I spent a year abroad in France, teaching. So I thought, oh, I don’t want to do more courses, more learning. I want to get out there and start working. So, I went into PR.
Ana Santi:
I did that for two and a half years. Then I did do journalism course and I became a journalist, which I still am. That’s been my career for 15 years. It’s just that, it has broadened out a lot more now.
Ana Santi:
I freelance. I’m not employed like I used to. I don’t write for one publication. I freelance. Now I write and I’ve written for and continue to write for brands. So, it’s a much broader piece.
Ana Santi:
I continue to live in London. I don’t know if I told it freely. I don’t know. I just think, when you get asked to tell your story… I don’t know if you find this through, all the people that you interview, whether we do seem to default to our jobs. I really didn’t want to do that. I hope I haven’t done that too much.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Not too much. Well, the fact that you shared how much you loved reading, for example, and your love of language, I think is something really interesting to note.
Anne Muhlethaler:
But before we go any further, I want to already leave some of my questions and go back to your upbringing in Brazil. I was reading last night, a passage from your book, the introduction to Wear, I absolutely loved the fact that you started the chapter by saying, “My Barbie was always the best dressed.”
Ana Santi:
She was.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Can you please tell us that story and tell us about your grandmother?
Ana Santi:
Yeah. Oh my gosh, my Barbie looked amazing.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’m sorry. I’m going to request pictures, ’cause I want to see what she looked like.
Ana Santi:
Oh, gosh. [inaudible 00:08:18] Oh my gosh, do I have some? Now you’ve made me want to try and uncover these photos. I bet we have them somewhere.
Ana Santi:
Yes, my grandmother was a seamstress. So she had a converted garage in her house in Brazil. She made bespoke dresses. She did wedding dresses, guest wedding dresses, but they were beautiful. They were all done by hand. These dresses were heavy.
Ana Santi:
From the scraps of these incredibly beautiful and intricate and well-made dresses, she would make dresses for my Barbie and for my sister’s Barbie.
Ana Santi:
Oh, I remember them all so well. There was this emerald green dress with these beautiful sequins. There was this white one. I think it was sort of a jacquard-y kind of fabric, but it had a sweetheart neckline and then a really full skirt, that we would spin our Barbies around when they were dancing. They fit the Barbie so perfectly.
Ana Santi:
I think I might have said when I was writing, I’m not sure, that I wouldn’t be surprised if she cut them from a pattern or she was just so super clever. She could just make these fit so perfectly.
Ana Santi:
Sister and I would have all these parties for our Barbies. They would just arrive with these amazing dresses. I just felt so lucky. They were bespoke. No one else had them.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s amazing. Then you explain that every year, your grandmother, whose name was Irene?
Ana Santi:
Yeah. Irene. Yeah. Irene in Portuguese.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Irene! That she would treat herself to one new skirt every year. She would do a catwalk and everything.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. It was so cool. My grandparents, for most of the time that we lived in Brazil, they had this marble staircase that went from the living room upstairs, which sounds really fancy, but you didn’t have carpet in Brazil. It’s too hot. So, it was sort of a necessity, but it was really lovely.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. She would treat herself to a new skirt every year, and she would get dressed for it.
Ana Santi:
My granddad’s really funny, loves a bit of drama in theater. So, we would be waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He would announce her.
Ana Santi:
Then she would really play up to it as well. She was good. She would walk down slowly, treating it as a catwalk. I cannot see a can of Elnett hairspray and not think of her.
Ana Santi:
She just had her hair all made up, her red lipstick. She would work it. She would walk down the staircase, really, really working it.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. It would just be, every year she’d treat herself. It was always a skirt. It was never anything else. I mean, she wore other things, but skirts were her trademark.
Anne Muhlethaler:
What a gorgeous story. All right.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. She’s lovely.
Anne Muhlethaler:
You’re making me think of my great-grandmother who when you say Elnett, that’s who I think of. ’cause she had what I like to call the helmet of older ladies, when no hair ever comes out of place because it’s so [inaudible 00:11:40].
Ana Santi:
I know. It’s incredible, isn’t it?
Anne Muhlethaler:
I think the reason why I’m thinking of her is because the one thing I have from her is one unbelievably beautiful black tie, black silk skirt, floor-length. That’s the only thing I have from her. Well, no, that and a really amazing cocktail ring.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. My gran rings too, actually. So, yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. The last couple of years have not really helped me figure out where I could wear that skirt, but here’s hoping one day
Ana Santi:
You will, one day. I just think you will never. Never, ever replace it. Never give it away.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, no. Oh, no. No. No. No.
Ana Santi:
No. No.
Anne Muhlethaler:
One of the things I wanted to ask you, before we move forward, is when did you realize that you wanted to write for a living?
Ana Santi:
I knew I wanted to be a journalist. I thought I’d clarified that, more than a writer in general. I don’t know if that’s when I knew, but I certainly remember this moment really vividly.
Ana Santi:
I must’ve been 14 or 15. We had a project at school. It was a week-long project where our class had to produce a newspaper. I remember being so excited about that project.
Ana Santi:
The teacher needed an editor and a deputy editor. I really wanted to do it, but I’m not the life and soul of a party. I’m not unconfident, but I don’t think that I can do everything.
Ana Santi:
I thought, oh, I’d really like to do this. My friends were saying, “You should do it. You should do it. Put your hand up.” I said, “No, no, I can’t. I can’t.” So they said, “Right, hands up for editor.”
Ana Santi:
I didn’t put my hand up, even though everyone was telling me to do it. They said, “Right. Who wants to be?” The class voted for who they want it to be, but I didn’t put my hand up for that.
Ana Santi:
Then for deputy editor, I think it was the friend next to me, shoved my hand up for deputy editor. She put it up there. You got to do it. I got voted to do it.
Ana Santi:
That made me feel so good because I wasn’t, like I said, the well-known kid in the class or anything like that, but they wanted me to do it. That made me feel really good.
Ana Santi:
We did this amazing newspaper. I got so into it. I picked my reporters, then the subeditors to write headlines. We had so much fun.
Ana Santi:
I think from that moment on, I knew I wanted to be a journalist. I don’t know what led to that moment, but I do remember that sticking out for me.
Ana Santi:
I wonder also whether, what I said earlier, about language and just really feeling very comfortable and confident and in love with words. When you find the most perfect word to describe something, I get such satisfaction from that. I just wonder whether that was always there as well, even if I couldn’t maybe articulate it when I was younger.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It strikes me that yeah, having more than one language is probably really encouraging you in that direction.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. Yeah. Because I think that, obviously you can translate languages. We know that, but sometimes there are words that just work so much better in their mother tongue.
Ana Santi:
Of course, you can translate anything. You can get the meaning across, but sometimes you can’t quite get the feeling across, that perfect feeling, that a word in one language creates for you.
Ana Santi:
So I think I’ve always liked to be able to read and communicate in different languages, because I think you are able to express yourself much more clearly and much more accurately if you’ve got the precise word to do so.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I was going to bring you there. I was thinking, there’s a lot to be said about self-expression and the ability that we may have to do.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So, you really did make the difference when you answered that last question by saying you wanted to be a journalist, not a writer. Yet here you are, a writer. How did that happen?
Ana Santi:
Oh, that makes you feel… if you’ll allow me a moment of pride, because it is [inaudible 00:16:17]. It’s so nice.
Ana Santi:
The writer part, how did that come about? I mean, I think you’ll probably agree that with my latest book, with Three Things to Help Heal the Planet, that I think the writing does come from journalism. It does have that about it, the research behind it, the structure of it, the fact that it’s nonfiction. So, it does have a lot of parallels to journalism.
Ana Santi:
I think that going from journalist to writer… or not from journalists to writer, adding writer to journalism has come from, I think just wanting to take it further.
Ana Santi:
I’ve been a journalist for 15 years. I feel that I’m a good journalist. I know how to be a good journalist, from everything that comes, from everything that allows you to do that.
Ana Santi:
Looking at the writing alone… and journalism is absolutely not just the writing, but if you do take the writing, I feel like I’ve done that well. So for me, it was a question of, where do I go next? How do I keep writing? How do I keep getting that joy from writing? What else could I do?
Ana Santi:
I wanted to just explore different forms. I think nonfiction felt like good next step from journalism. And yeah, just also a place from where I could do more of it, more writing.
Ana Santi:
I love writing. It’s an absolute privilege to be able to do it for a living. So, I started asking myself, how can I constantly write?
Ana Santi:
I got to a deputy editor when I was at Drapers Magazine, fashion trade magazine in the UK. I left there after nine years as deputy editor.
Ana Santi:
When you get to that kind of level at a magazine, quite rightly, you start to write less because you manage more people and you have to be more strategic. I enjoyed that very much, but it came, I had to sacrifice the writing for it.
Ana Santi:
Then I just wanted to write more and more and more. So, I started to think, well, how can I do that? Why not a book?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Why not a book? I just want to point out that you had the same title when you did your… was it school or high school newspaper, as the title that you had at Drapers, which is deputy editor.
Ana Santi:
My gosh, [inaudible 00:19:03]. I never thought of that, but yeah, you’re right.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Coincidence?
Ana Santi:
What does that mean, Anne?
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s quite an arc, in any case.
Ana Santi:
It is. As I said, I never thought of that.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I mean, you had this wonderful career as a journalist, and then as you mentioned, you joined a brand. You worked for jigsaw, which not everyone outside of the UK is going to be familiar with.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So, we could talk about fashion. We could talk about retail because we certainly have that in common, the two of us. I think we probably have quite a lot of people that we know in common as well.
Ana Santi:
I bet. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Actually one of whom is Tamsin, who’s one of the contributors to your book.
Ana Santi:
Oh, you know Tamsin as well? Oh.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I don’t want to talk about that, because I think your book is too important. I’d like us to really concentrate on this.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I was wondering if there’s perhaps a bridge. The question I had for you is, how did writing about fashion and retail prepare you to write a book about the climate crisis and the possibility of individual action?
Ana Santi:
That’s a good question. I joined Drapers as a reporter, gosh, almost 15 years ago. One of my beats was ethical fashion. One of the areas I covered was ethical fashion, at a time when ethical fashion meant very, very little to many, many people.
Ana Santi:
I could count the number of contacts I had in one hand, when it came to ethical fashion, to the point that I wondered whether it was given to me because I was the newbie. I was this junior reporter who walked in. They had to give it to somebody. Oh, let’s give it to her. Yeah.
Ana Santi:
On the other side, I was also given the value sector as an area to cover. Everybody loved the value sector. All the supermarkets who were bringing out clothing ranges and it was so at odds with the ethical side.
Ana Santi:
I wonder whether that has always stayed with me, because I interviewed pioneers, certainly in the UK, at Drapers.
Ana Santi:
I do have that knowledge, and I built that knowledge from the ground up. So, I think that could’ve played a part in this, in writing this book, because when it came to splitting the book into chapters…
Ana Santi:
It’s split into seven chapters and each chapter is a part of our lives that we can do something about. One of the chapters that was very, very easy for me to decide on was fashion. I mean, it’s called Wear in the book, because every chapter is a verb because the idea is it’s for action.
Ana Santi:
I want people to act. So every chapter is very active, but it is based on fashion. That was probably the easiest one to write, the easiest one to get contributors for, because I knew them. Although to be fair, one of them is someone I’ve met very, very recently, but yeah. I had three chapters to begin with and fashion was one of them. It was very, very natural to me, to do that one.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks so much. I was wondering if you had an origin story for when you became disturbed by the lack of action with regards to the climate crisis.
Ana Santi:
I wish that I did have this epiphany, this moment, that it would be so easy for me to say, “Oh, yes. It was then that it happened.” But actually, I think what it was is little things and the cumulative effect of those little, things that actually aren’t very little at all, when you think about them. But they were numerous, rather than one big moment.
Ana Santi:
I remember things like watching the news one evening. There I was in my living room, which is pretty comfortable and a nice sofa. I was watching, seeing images of the Amazon rainforest being burnt.
Ana Santi:
I’m Brazilian. I grew up in Brazil. I felt very disconnected. I felt, look at me in my comfort and well, look at them. Them, gosh, what does that even mean? I mean, you’ve got indigenous people living in the Amazon, and then you’ve got the trickle-down effect of what burning those forests mean for everybody.
Ana Santi:
It was more, I was sitting there thinking, oh my gosh, this can’t be right, that I’m here and that’s happening. I want to do something about that. What can I do?
Ana Santi:
I let that linger for a bit. Then I remember moving to where I live now, in Southwest London. My daughter started a nursery. One of the mums there said, would I want to join a local campaign group called Mums for Lungs, who are trying to raise awareness of air pollution.
Ana Santi:
I don’t know why she asked me. I think she was just asking everybody because she kept trying to canvas support. It happened to land with me, I think partly because my daughter had suspected asthma. Then I don’t know whether it was just a fortuitous moment, where this lady said to me, do I want to do this?
Ana Santi:
It’s all these little things and then obviously, just reading about the problems. I’m a Guardian reader, so I will…
Anne Muhlethaler:
I know what that means.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. I know. I know. I don’t know how people feel about that. But what that means, in terms of this conversation, is that I read a lot about environmental problems.
Ana Santi:
This is, I think what I was feeling, that I was consuming information. I was consuming newspaper articles or watching the news or listening to a podcast, but I wasn’t feeling like I could do anything about it.
Ana Santi:
I was feeling like all these things that I was consuming was telling me about problems, but actually making me feel overwhelmed and anxious by them. I didn’t know where to go for solutions.
Ana Santi:
I think maybe, when you asked, is there a story, a moment, I do remember this very clearly, which I think I wrote about in the book, actually.
Ana Santi:
When I worked for Jigsaw, it was about two miles from my house. I used to either walk or cycle to work, ’cause the public transport was ridiculous. It would take ages to get there, so I would always walk or cycle.
Ana Santi:
I remember this day, it was pouring with rain. I thought, oh God, I don’t want to get wet. I’m just going to get in my car. A journey that would normally take me about 15 minutes on a bike, took about 45 minutes in the car.
Ana Santi:
I just sat in traffic for ages, pumping out just horribly polluted air. I was sitting there as these school… because it was obviously on my way to work, as these school children were walking to school, carrying umbrellas.
Ana Santi:
Honestly, and I started crying because I thought, one of those children will be my daughter. I’m sitting here in the dry. I’m pumping out my horrible fumes while these children who, they’re just carrying umbrellas. Why don’t I carry an umbrella? Why don’t we all carry umbrellas?
Ana Santi:
I said to myself, I’m not doing this again because it’s two miles away. If they can get to school with an umbrella, I think I can walk two miles with an umbrella. That was a bit of a moment for me, and I haven’t done it since.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks for sharing that.
Ana Santi:
Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I think, probably the first time that we met, when we had our first conversation, I already mentioned this to you, or if I didn’t. I remember very accurately, the first time I really queried the system.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It was in my kitchen back home, where I grew up. It was a tiny kitchen. I remember where I was physically. I think I was doing the dishes or clearing something out after lunch. My dad was next to me. I must have just seen the news or something, because I was confused as to why we were using chemicals in household products that would be contaminating water, when we knew that we shouldn’t.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So a very naive 17, 18 or a 19 year old me said to my dad something like, “But why doesn’t the government make it illegal and just sets a rule? I understand that there’s an industry living from this, but we can give them a number of years to adapt and then they can figure out their formulations.” I had a plan, you see. I wasn’t just querying it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
My dad just went. “Yeah, that’s not how this works.” I just remember looking outside the window and thinking, but why?
Ana Santi:
Why? Why not? Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
The thing is it must have been, I don’t know, 1990, 1992. It’s been 30 years. If I walk the aisles of my supermarket today, I would gather… this is an estimate, I could go out and count, that 80% of the brands on the shelves and the product being sold is still not good for the environment. This leaves me wondering, what the hell are we doing?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Anyways, as you are, I’m just considering at this late stage in my life or let’s say, building up to starting my own family. I think our conversation is making me wonder, why would I want to bring a child into this world if we can’t get it together?
Ana Santi:
Gosh, I know exactly how you feel. I do have a daughter. There were lots of discussions between my husband and I, as to… This was eight years ago. I only have one.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah, one child. I understand. You’re like, yes.
Ana Santi:
You make that what you will.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yes. I understand.
Ana Santi:
I completely know where you’re coming from. I think my daughter has played a huge part in where I am today, with all this stuff.
Ana Santi:
The book is dedicated to her. A lot of the actions I now take or don’t take, I think of her. Do you know what? If I think too much, I have to stop myself because it gets a bit too much.
Ana Santi:
I think this is partly the… I don’t know if problem is the right word, but certainly a consequence of working in this space is that, the more you know, the more you want to find out more, but you can’t unknow stuff.
Ana Santi:
Some days are good days, when you think that you’ve come across a really good solution or you hear about work done by big groups of people, particularly young people, where you think, we could really see some change now. This is excellent. I’m feeling really optimistic.
Ana Santi:
But then there are other days when all I can think about is, what is life going to be like for her? What have I done? I’ve brought her into this world. I have partly contributed to the world that I’ve brought her into. What world is she going to be living in when I’m not here anymore? Sometimes if I think about that too much, I start to well up and I have to stop.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. It’s strange you should say that because I was wondering about that exact thing this morning. Because if I have a child by next year, she will be 24, 25, 26 by the time 2050 rolls around.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I don’t know whether you’ve ever come across the work of Yancey Strickler, who used to be the ex-co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter.
Ana Santi:
No, I haven’t.
Anne Muhlethaler:
He’s written a wonderful book. I can send you the details, called This Could Be Our Future, which I think you’ll enjoy. He’d started this thing called The Bento, as a way to go beyond near-term orientation, to help us make the right decisions.
Anne Muhlethaler:
One of the things that I appreciate from his method, I’ve recently discovered different ways of explaining it through a book by Dan Pink. It’s actually about selling, it’s called, To Sell Is Human.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Essentially what academics have found and scientists, is that it’s very hard for humans to connect to their future selves. It’s almost, there’s a lack of empathy that is essentially identical to a stranger.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So, our incapacity to project or connect to who we will be in the future, is one of the reasons why we continuously seem to be making decisions that only service in the here and now.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I think that you probably have much stronger empathy for your child, than you would even for your future yourself.
Anne Muhlethaler:
For people who don’t have children, I could see why we continuously think about what we need right now, rather than thinking about the collective benefits or our own wellbeing in the future.
Ana Santi:
Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. You only have to look at our governments to see how true that is, decisions that are made, based on the short term, based on the here and now.
Ana Santi:
I think another book that deals with that really well is Jonathan Safran Foer, is We Are The Weather, an extract of which is in my book, in Three Things.
Ana Santi:
Even though his book is an argument against eating animal products, he goes into so much detail about that. Not just in terms of what it means, but he goes into a lot of detail about what it takes for us to get there and this idea of connecting us to the future and how we find it difficult to believe. We find it difficult to see that there could be something really quite catastrophic happening. It just doesn’t feel real.
Ana Santi:
He writes very, very eloquently about those feelings and about seeing or not seeing the future and the consequences of that.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s interesting, because one of the things I wanted to ask you was disconnection. I felt like there was a very strong thread, since the first pages of the book, about opposing values of connection and disconnection.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Actually, if I pick up his chapter, I highlighted this. He says, “When it comes to food, a major reason that stops us from making fundamental changes is our increasing disconnection to food and nature.”
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’d love for you to perhaps tell me what you’ve learned about this disconnection and why that’s a problem that we need to look at.
Ana Santi:
I completely agree. I think I would say exactly what you’ve said, that disconnection is such a key them that brings all these essays together. It comes down, I think to the fact that we…
Ana Santi:
When I say we, by the way, I feel like I should qualify this. When I talk about we in reference to this book and what it represents more widely, is people who have a choice.
Ana Santi:
I have a choice as to where I buy my food from, to some extent. I can choose what to wear. I can choose who to bank with. I have pretty wide choices in my life. I can make choices. So, this book is for anyone who can make a choice.
Ana Santi:
This idea of disconnection, I think comes from the fact that we have become so comfortable. We are so used to everything just being… We talk about food. Quite literally, we are handed things on a plate.
Ana Santi:
When you’re eating your dinner, whether it’s at home or in a restaurant or if you’re buying it from a supermarket, how often do you think about where that carrot originated from? How did that carrot get into your mouth? How did it get into that meal that you are eating?
Ana Santi:
Do you think about where it was grown? Do we think about who grew it? Do we think about how long it took to get to us? Do we think about everything that was used to bring that carrot to us?
Ana Santi:
When we get dressed in the morning, I’ve got this spotty T-shirt on, do I know who made? If I to break it down, what were the materials used to make it? How much water was used to make it? Did people get paid enough for it?
Ana Santi:
Our banks, I mentioned I can choose who I bank with. Our global high street banks get a lot of money. What do they do with that? Do we know? Do we know the breakdown?
Ana Santi:
I think because life is so easy for so many of us… and I go back to who I identified as the we, we’ve stopped thinking. We’ve just become very, very comfortable. And as a result, we have become disconnected to the value of the things that we consume.
Ana Santi:
We don’t really think enough about how those things have landed so neatly in front of us, with seemingly no obstacles. It’s just there.
Ana Santi:
It takes a lot for that carrot to land on our plate. It takes a lot for me to wear what I have chosen to wear, but I don’t think we are thinking about these things enough, because we’ve just become so used to not. It’s a habit.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I’d like to pick up a couple of different threads from what you just said. The first one is, the other week I was interviewing a young entrepreneur in India, Nishanth Chopra. He has started enterprise that is Seed-to-Sew.
Anne Muhlethaler:
They actually do regenerating farming. Grow the cotton, work with the local weavers, all the way down to the sewed product. They have their own collections, but they now supply other sustainable or responsible brands.
Anne Muhlethaler:
He was reminding me, because he was in Milan not long ago, that sometimes when you go to a fancy restaurant or it could be just a local gastro pub, sometimes you have the name of the farm or they tell you the potatoes are from X, Y, Z or the whatever.
Anne Muhlethaler:
You’re right. This is something that we get to experience or to see, when we have choice, when we have means.
Anne Muhlethaler:
But most of the time, we have no idea. Also, all of the external negative things that have touched that product.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Now, I grew up in the countryside in a tiny, tiny, tiny village at the back end of the county of Geneva, at the border of France. Below my house was just fields of wheat and other kind of cereals and corn.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I grew up with a dad who was much older. He grew up in the mountains. I had stories of, they would only eat chicken once a year. That was for the holidays. Oranges were what you would have on Christmas Eve, for dessert. That would be like a once a year kind of treat.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That certainly, obviously marked me because I still remember that and I understand the value of it. But then, this is someone who then grew up. I’m thinking of older generations as the ones least likely to want to make change. Because for him, I think a meal was meat and two veg, probably because he came of this sense of lack.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I was wondering. How would you imagine approaching this conversation with people who have grown up with this sense of, this is what is right, when it comes to food in particular?
Ana Santi:
Yeah. That is such a good question. I wish I had a really neat answer to it because that is a huge part of the problem, that we’re all different. We all have different beliefs and values. We don’t necessarily like to be told that we are doing something wrong, which is perhaps why that isn’t the best way to go into a conversation.
Ana Santi:
I don’t know. Perhaps it’s more about maybe cooking him the most delicious vegetarian meal and saying, “Doesn’t this taste great?” Really go out of your way to make the best vegetarian meal you have ever made and just blow him away with supper.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Sorry. I need to tell you that you’re making me hungry because it’s nearly lunch here.
Ana Santi:
Oh, right. Then that becomes a bit of a conversation in itself, over a nice thing. It comes from a positive place rather than, you are so bad. You are doing this wrong.
Ana Santi:
I don’t know. We’re all different. That’s why communication is so important. That’s finding a way to talk to people. It’s partly why I’ve got in my book, 21 different people, 21 very different people, I’m hoping that even if just one resonates. It’s about, be empathetic, be creative, be positive.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I was going to say you, one of the things that most of us forget is, we are incredibly adaptable as a species. So, if we can just remind each other that actually, it’s not hard to change. It’s how we relate to change, the stories we tell ourselves, that stop us from making the change.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I can’t remember the name. There was a fantastic TED Talk that dates back from years ago, that even went to great lengths to show how human beings have a way to rewrite their own story, to be happy with the choices they’ve made, even when it was hard. Essentially, we’re also built in with an ability to cope and to feel good about the changes we’ve made.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I became meat-free, gluten-free and dairy-free, I’d say about six years ago. And apart from the fact that I’m pretty healthy, let’s be honest. I’ve also developed an immense love of vegetables.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s a little bit of a surprise that I love them that much. I mean, who knew I could get so creative with parsnips or whatever? But it’s actually possible. I think we could all do well to remind each other that we have that capacity, if only we allow ourselves to try something different.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. I completely agree. I guess the difficulty is sometimes, that we are often driven to change out of necessity. The danger is, we change when the problem is already there.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That is true. That is true.
Ana Santi:
This is another thing that Jonathan Safran Foer, in his book, discusses this idea of we react when we’re forced to. We’re forced to when the problem happens. We’re very, very bad at preventative measures.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yes, absolutely. I agree. I think that we can all realize that the problem is here.
Ana Santi:
Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
There’s an amazing book, called A Beautiful Constraint. I don’t remember the name of the authors. It was showing that, the more difficult the boundaries, the more creative we can be.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I think this is something that some of the people that you’ve interviewed and who’ve written it in the book were talking about, but I also wanted to…
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. Actually, the Fridge-Raid Frittata was one of the things that I was thinking of, when we talk about creativity.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I was very interested for you to tell me a bit more about this concept of also throwing a better party. I thought that was kind of a winning angle.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s probably one of my top five favorite lines in the book. It was said by Tristram Stuart, who is a food waste campaigner, well, anti-food waste campaigner.
Ana Santi:
He is also the first contributor. He’s the first person I contacted to be part of my book. So, I’ll be eternally grateful for him because he helped kickstart the whole thing.
Ana Santi:
He embodies that of mentality being very, very positive, but realistic about what is happening, but doing something with… but tackling it with energy and with enthusiasm. His mantra is, if you want to change the world, you have to throw a better party.
Ana Santi:
The meat and two veg guy… and actually, he had a great example of that because he said he… I can’t remember who the person was, but he said that someone came up to him once and said, “Tristram I’ve really taken onboard what you are saying about not eating so much meat. Now I only meat once a day.” This is the guy who would eat it twice a day, every day.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Wow.
Ana Santi:
Tristram’s whole thing is that you’ve got to make it fun. You’ve got to make it feel like you are still living. That is really important, because we are partly where we are because we have created some incredible things. It’s human nature to innovate and to grow and to develop.
Ana Santi:
With Tristam, he organized Feeding the 5000, quite a few years ago now, maybe 10 years ago. Where a huge collective effort, but in a nutshell, he threw a party for 5,000 people in Trafalgar Square in London, where everyone got to eat free food.
Ana Santi:
The food was made from leftovers. It was cooked by incredible chefs, really well-known chefs. It tasted delicious, and it was a party.
Ana Santi:
This is what we can do. Saving the world, in inverted commas, does not have to be boring. It doesn’t have to be depressing. There are ways around it.
Ana Santi:
He goes on to say, “I intend to live the good life while fighting the good fight.” So, he’s not going to give up. He’s going to carry on, but he’s going to find the joy in the day as he does it.
Ana Santi:
I think it’s a brilliant line. I’ve quoted him outside this book so many times, he should probably trademark.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I think he should.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. I use it too much, but I do credit him every time. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Have you ever heard of Robert McKee?
Ana Santi:
McKee?
Anne Muhlethaler:
He’s a very famous professor and speaker who wrote a seminal book called Story. It’s a Bible for people who want to get into the screenwriting business.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I took a seminar with him, not long ago. Essentially what he was saying, he said that the core of any story worth telling, there should be a move between values, from negative to positive, positive to negative. There’s always a combined set of values.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I think that from what I gather, the one most important thing that came through for me, as I read each of these essays or all of the ones I did read, was this idea that many things are obscure, hidden.
Anne Muhlethaler:
What really we’re lacking is a transparency. Sometimes a transparency simply starts with a conversation. Is this something that rings true to you?
Ana Santi:
Absolutely. I think it goes back to what you picked up on earlier, about this idea of disconnection. I think part of the reason that we are so disconnected is because we don’t see, whether it’s the human effort or the environmental effort that goes into giving us all the wonderful things that we have. We don’t see it.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. Going back to the example of food, we don’t see the people who are growing it for us. We don’t see the amount of water being used to grow it for us. We don’t see when it goes wrong. When there are crop failures, we don’t see that. We just see the food that is on our plate.
Ana Santi:
Another example that I use is, when we wash our hair, we don’t see… our hair or our clothes, we don’t see the tiny microplastics, then go down the drain and into our water systems and into our rivers and out into the sea and back into us again, because our fish are eating it. We’re eating the fish.
Ana Santi:
We’re seeing evidence now of babies, a fetus in their mother’s stomachs, that have plastic in them. It’s all connected. It’s all circular.
Ana Santi:
These things are so transparent, whether literally so, in the case of microplastics or whether just because we didn’t take the trouble or don’t think about the fact that there are people and resources being used to make the things that we consume.
Ana Santi:
So, I think the two are very closely connected, the disconnection and the obscured and the lack of transparency. I think they’re very, very closely linked.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. There was a passage in Grow Food, Dismantle the System that I wanted to read.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So many actively engaged human hands, participate in the systems of growing, producing, processing, packaging and delivering our food, until it’s exchanged for money. But we don’t see these hands.
Anne Muhlethaler:
These processes are obscured on purpose. They’re obscured, and it causes the people do that work to be devalued. They’re obscured, and it causes the natural world to be devalued.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Learning how to grow food enabled me to see the exploitation behind this garden, in the food system first, but then in everything else.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s very hard for me to concentrate because the kitten was attacking the furry thing on the cat tree next to me. It’s the first time she’s been interested in it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’m talking to you, and she’s eating that fiber. Now I’m thinking, what is going in her system? Anyways, excuse me. I derail.
Ana Santi:
That is a great paragraph to pick out ’cause I think it sums it up so perfectly. That was Claire, Claire Ratinon. Yeah, she summed that up really, really well. It can be applied to pretty much any aspect of life, whether it’s what your kitten is eating or anything else. We just don’t know as much as we should.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I’m very grateful she’s stepped off and now she’s behind the computer screen.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Now another line I picked out, which I thought was really powerful, was this. The most sustainable product is the one you already own. Can you tell me more about that?
Ana Santi:
Yes. We buy a lot, essentially. I think that’s what it comes down to. We think we need so much. We don’t just use what you’ve got left in your cupboard.
Ana Santi:
If it’s a shampoo, use it until you’ve finished it. If it’s in your fridge, eat everything that’s in there first. That’s on a really immediate and practical level. But the idea behind that is also to think more long-term and to actually think before you buy anything.
Ana Santi:
A lot of the problems that we have, in another essay by J.B. MacKinnon, the Canadian author, he talks very much about that and the idea of consumption.
Ana Santi:
Things are relatively cheap for many of us. I really need to reiterate again who this book is for, for us, people who have a choice.
Ana Santi:
I think we are too quick to replace things. I think sometimes, we don’t see the value in something. We think everything is replaceable. That’s because, actually it sort of is. It’s all there. But we need to think about what it takes to replace something we already own, with a new thing when we don’t need that new thing, because a lot has gone into creating that new thing that we don’t need. When you think about it that way, it’s crazy.
Ana Santi:
I was looking to buy a swimming costume ’cause I’m going on holiday. The one I currently have doesn’t really fit me very well. As someone who has written a book like this, the idea of buying anything now fills me with horror because I have to make sure I make the right choices.
Ana Santi:
The thing that struck me the most was that, I saw hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of swimming costumes online. I wasted about 45 minutes of my life, scrolling through my phone, trying to find a swimming costume. I thought, my God, swimming costumes have been produced, and I don’t like a single one of them. There is so much out there.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yep.
Ana Santi:
Do you know what I did? I put my phone away because I was getting so angry. I went into my drawer, and I got every item of swimwear I own. It’s a surprising amount, given that I felt I needed to buy a new swimming costume. I tried them all on again. You know what? They fit okay.
Ana Santi:
I am a swimmer. So, I do have my actual, proper swimming costume where I do proper swimming in and then I have my beach ones. You know what? Those beach ones are fine. They’re okay. I have not bought a new one.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s interesting you should mention that, because I actually wrote about… following an article I saw in, I think it was in Vogue Business, I wrote about in my weekly newsletter, about the difficulty around swimwear.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Now, personally, swimwear, once it’s out of shape and is sagging around the bottom… I have big double D breasts. So when it no longer holds, it’s not a possibility.
Anne Muhlethaler:
But I realized all of the difficulties of finding something that fitted and also that was ethically in my wheelhouse. You are right. There are millions of pieces of swimwear.
Anne Muhlethaler:
One of my favorite people, who is a very engaged, active person called Eva Geraldine Fontanelli, who has a beautiful website and movement called GOOOders, she said the most sustainable thing is something beautiful that you’re going to keep forever.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So for those of us who are making the choice of buying a new piece of swimwear, just remember, just make sure that this is something that you really, really, really love and will treat really well, so it lasts as long as possible.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I think that sometimes, it’s also how we care for the items that we already have, that will give them the lasting life that they could have, whether it’s in our cupboards or somewhere else.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I wanted to segue for a second and talk about repairs, ’cause I’ve seen that the rise of repairs is something that is becoming interesting in and around luxury fashion and something that I’m not seeing a lot of pickup on in my corner of the world in Switzerland.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I know that there are a number of interesting startups in the UK that are looking at this, because conscious consumers don’t want to throw stuff away. But sometimes the problem is, how do you get stuff fixed?
Anne Muhlethaler:
I know that this is one of the ways that we can really extend the life of what we own and stop this constant consumer cycle.
Ana Santi:
Definitely. People might be surprised about this. As a fashion journalists for 15 years, I actually hate shopping. Oh God, I love nice clothes. I do. I like clothes that fit well and look great. But my God, I hate shopping.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Totally.
Ana Santi:
The idea that I’ve got something in my wardrobe that I know looks good and fits me, has a hole in it, if I can get that fixed instead of having to start the process again, I mean to me that’s a no brainer because then I don’t have to go shopping.
Ana Santi:
I found a local tailor. That’s the thing as well. I think they’re around more than you think.
Ana Santi:
To give you an example, I can’t fight off every trend. I really wanted to buy into the miniskirt trend this season ’cause I think it’s nice in the summer, especially when you come wear flat shoes.
Ana Santi:
I thought, oh, but I’ve just written a book about not buying stuff. So, I’m not going to go and buy a mini skirt ’cause I didn’t need one. It was just a whim.
Ana Santi:
I was going through my wardrobe. I had this A-line suede skirt that I haven’t worn for about 10 years. I put it on. I got some pair pins, and I started pinning it up, to see what it might look like if I got it shortened. I thought, this looks nice.
Ana Santi:
So I sent a message to a local WhatsApp group of local friends. I said, “Does anyone know a tailor?” Everyone came back with suggestions. So, I took this skirt down the road and he shortened it for me. Now I have a miniskirt that I can wear, which I really like.
Ana Santi:
Let’s hope I don’t then want it to be A-line again because that can’t go back. But that was really nice, because I felt like I got a new item of clothing without actually having to shop for it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. It’s funny you should say that because there’s one shirt dress I own, that felt right when I lived in Rome. But now in Geneva, I don’t know, there’s something about it. It’s not quite right. It’s too long, the sleeves or something.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’ve just got this new dry cleaner and they have a great seamstress. I think I’m going to take it there, so she can change the color and change the sleeves and perhaps take in the length as well. Then this will become something I’m going to use all the time. But right now, as it is, it’s just not getting air time outside of my closet.
Ana Santi:
Do you know what? You should follow that instinct because I am doing the same thing with a shirt dress myself. It’s just not the right length. I haven’t taken it to have it changed yet, but I will do. It is a shirt dress and it’s something to do with the length, so we’re on the same wavelength here.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh. Yeah. There was one other example that came to mind for me, around furniture, ’cause I think that one of the pieces that you talk about as well is value. That comes through a lot, throughout the book and are missing the value of the things that we own because of the way that they’ve been produced.
Anne Muhlethaler:
We don’t understand the price, when it’s low. A lot of people don’t understand the price when it’s high, because we’ve lost this connection with who makes things. How are they made with? How much time does it take?
Anne Muhlethaler:
For as long as I remember, my dad had this broken armchair in his study. It was his dad’s armchair. It was broken. It was kind of nice. It remained broken until I moved here.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I just thought I’ve moved around a lot, and I’ve actually taken all my furniture with me, from London to New York, to New York to Paris, to Rome, to Geneva.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Some of it did not enjoy all of the travel and so they need a bit of TLC. They need a bit of care and repair. After a couple of things were broken, I was actually, put in touch by the insurance company and the movers to, let’s see, a specialist that can repair things.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I can’t do it all because it would be a lot of money to get everything fixed exactly and put back in the right condition, but I started where I could.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Sure, I could have bought a whole bunch of chairs if I’d gone to Ikea, instead of repairing this one wooden and leather armchair.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s now in my office. It looks beautiful. I think that I can invest every year, getting one piece restored or fixed up here and there. It feels wonderful.
Ana Santi:
It does. Doesn’t it?
Anne Muhlethaler:
By the way, I did put a bit of time and effort trying to figure out, where could I buy another chair? How much money would it be to get the same one? Actually, I could get a cheap chair, but an equivalent to this would’ve sent me back quite a lot of money.
Ana Santi:
So you feel pride, don’t you, in restoring it as well? There’s a story behind it then. It’s nice. Nice.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. But on the other hand, for people who say, oh, my couch is falling apart, the difficulty is, I had an upholsterer give me an appraisal. I could buy two sets of sofas for the money that he quoted me. So, I had to get clever and find other ways to clean it and to get rid of the evidence of a cat having clawed its way through it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Anyways, as you said, when we have constraints, we can get creative. But I think that understanding the value of how things are made is something we can get in contact with when we try to repair them, because we see the cost of the repair. That hints at the cost of making it, the actual value of making it in the first place.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Now in one of the essays called We Are The Weather, that you mentioned before, there was a sentence that gave us the root, the etymology of the word crisis, which comes from Greek.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I love linguistics too. In Greek, crisis, I’m going to try to give the accent, means decision. Later, you quoted one of my favorite writers, Yuval Noah Harari, who said in one of his books that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’d go further, in saying that we are emotional beings who rationalize our emotional choices. How can we get people to feel more connected?
Ana Santi:
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I am reminded back to when you gave the example again, of them eating meat and two veg every day. I said, cook him a brilliant vegetarian dinner.
Ana Santi:
It’s hard to fabricate an emotional connection. It’s hard to do that. I think what I have felt is, the more you do, the more you feel, the more action you take, the more you’re willing to engage in the bigger efforts of what needs to be done.
Ana Santi:
I think that we will, many of us will feel this a lot more. When I talk about this, the climate and the ecological crisis. I think we are learning more and more about it. We are making more and more connections between the scale of the problem, how it impacts us and what we can do about it.
Ana Santi:
I think that every small step someone takes leads to something bigger. So, I think that is a way that we are going to feel it more, because we are going to learn more about it and make those connections.
Ana Santi:
I think, how do we feel more? How do get those emotions more? I know the answer to that. I guess that’s why I’ve written this book and why I have spoken to 21 people and not two people, why I’ve chosen to for these 21 very different people to tell very different stories.
Ana Santi:
Stories that, whilst they might be peppered with facts and statistics, are actually very personal in one way or another or very emotive or bring certain things to life or transport you somewhere.
Ana Santi:
That’s why I wanted to do it that way. Because if you don’t have… as in my case, if you don’t have a daughter who has asthma and you’re worried that part of the reason for that is how much we drive, or if you don’t sit in front of the TV and feel something when you’re watching the country that you used to live in be burned down, then I’m hoping…
Ana Santi:
I don’t know. My very, very small contribution is to create a book that tells stories that hopefully will resonate with people and drive them to action.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thank you so much. I remember that the first time we talked, you were touched by a story. I wonder if that was from that group, Mums for Lungs-
Ana Santi:
That’s right. Mm-hmm.
Anne Muhlethaler:
… about a little girl whose life was lost. Am I correct?
Ana Santi:
Is she from Mums for Lungs? The mother lives very locally. She lives down the road from me. Yeah. Her daughter Ella, died eight years ago from…
Ana Santi:
Okay. To give context of the story, her little girl had asthma and suffered severely from it. Rosamund, her mother, believed that it was linked to the fact that they lived off the South Circular, which is a road in Southwest London that regularly breaches safe levels of air pollution. Rosamund was convinced that the two were linked.
Ana Santi:
She fought tirelessly and campaigned for that link to be acknowledged and then acted upon. She eventually won a landmark hearing that said that yes, air pollution contributed to her daughter’s death.
Ana Santi:
They made the link between the number of times that Ella went to hospital with an asthma attack, to peaks in air pollution coming off that road. Those two measurements matched up.
Ana Santi:
Ella is, at the time of speaking, the only person in the world to have air pollution listed on her death certificate. I think that, if that doesn’t move someone to action, then well, you need to look inside yourself a little bit.
Anne Muhlethaler:
The same guy that I mentioned before, Yancey Strickler, he had founded a group called The Bento Society. Awe were working on a weekly basis, as little groups and doing exercises to work on ourselves, so that we would make better decisions for what he called Now Me, Now Us, Future Me, Future Us.
Anne Muhlethaler:
To have that contact with what he called Bento, so beyond near term, so that we would see a better 2015.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I remember there was one exercise that I felt a little bit disconnected to originally, which had to do with understanding or connecting with our ancestors.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I note the last line of your book in Transform is, be a good ancestor, leave the world in a better place than you found it. Strangely, whilst I don’t find that I have a strong sense of connection with my own ancestors, asking me to consider how to be a good ancestor is something that I find actually motivating.
Anne Muhlethaler:
How would I like people to remember my contribution on this planet? Maybe it’s egotistic, but suddenly it feels personal.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. I think it’s really interesting that you say that it’s not necessarily a direct connection to your own ancestors, but a much bigger thing. I actually think that’s way more powerful.
Ana Santi:
Where that saying comes from, so it’s the last essay in Transform is by Jennifer Martel, who is the co-founder of Indigenous People’s Movement. She lives in an indigenous tribe between North and South Dakota. That is what they live by.
Ana Santi:
Certainly, you don’t have to see it as being in bloodlines. We’re all living on in one place. It’s one planet. We’re all inheriting it and passing it on. So, I actually think the fact that you feel that way is so lovely because that is much more powerful. Yeah.
Ana Santi:
I think I say this in the book, maybe in my conclusion, that if there is one thing that you do from the… one thing that you take away from the book, it’s that one. Because if you can be a good ancestor, then you’re pretty much doing everything.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Cool. I mean, okay, so I got it then.
Ana Santi:
Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
We’re going to come to a close because I have some more questions that I like to ask all my guests. I want to ask you two more questions.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’m sure you’ve got feedback from people who’ve read your book already and perhaps friends and family. Do you see anything in specific that you think can move people to action?
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’m just curious for a reader who’s thinking, yeah, well, if I read a book, is that really going to move me to do anything?
Ana Santi:
Right. Okay. Two things. The first one you see, now if you had feedback from readers. Something that people have been speaking to me about, which they said, “I didn’t know this,” was the essay around beauty care. Well, personal care, around shampoo and moisturizer and hair gels, everything like that, how people are just not aware of the things in our everyday products.
Ana Santi:
Lots of people have come to me and said, “I didn’t know that my conditioner was problematic.” We often tend to think about packaging, when it comes to stuff like that, but it’s actually the ingredients in there.
Ana Santi:
They are relatively small changes we can make. Although going back to the emotional stuff, we do care about the shampoo that… well, not all of us, but lots of us do care about the shampoo and the moisturizer that we use. So, it can be a bit of a leap to change, but then you are sending a message back to that brand, that they need to make changes.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. That’s such a good point. Yeah.
Ana Santi:
The other one that I think that there is a criticism that I completely take onboard and agree with, is that, how can I really make a difference with a simple action? You can’t simplify a problem that’s so big.
Ana Santi:
Well, if we all changed our banks collectively, we would make one hell of a difference, unless obviously, you already bank with an ethical bank.
Ana Santi:
I banked with my bank for about 20 years, not thinking, not caring, not knowing about what they did with my money. Then I spoke to Alasdair Roxburgh from Friends of the Earth, for the book. He painted a very vivid picture.
Ana Santi:
So, yeah. I mean, I don’t know if that’s the right way of putting it because I think all the essays are important, but money matters. We know that. If we could come together and change that. Changing who you bank with, that’s what I would say.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Finally, why Three Things?
Ana Santi:
When I was learning how to become a journalist, my first job anyway, at Drapers, I kept being told about the rule of three. I was a news reporter. I broke stories. My news editor said, it’s not a story until you can get three reliable sources to corroborate. So, you need three.
Ana Santi:
Obviously, as a fashion journalist, I wrote about trends. So unless you see at least three times, it’s not a trend. So it’s that.
Ana Santi:
Then I started thinking about the rule of three. You think about, like in storytelling and you’ve got The Three Little Pigs, you’ve got Three Billy Goats Gruff. There is something manageable about three. It’s doable. I’m not going to, oh, here is 1,227 things you can do.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, come on.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. Three is repetitive. We use it in writing. You think about making an impact in your writing. You get those staccato sentences, and you do three things.
Ana Santi:
You can’t do two because it’s not quite enough. You do four and you lose people. So, you need three. It’s more of a writing technique.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I understand. Thank you so much for indulging me.
Ana Santi:
Oh, thank you for asking.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Before we go to my closing questions, is there anything else you would like to add that we haven’t covered? I mean, I could have you on the Zoom for the next six hours, easily.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. Gosh, I think we have. I think we have covered it all. I think you’ve asked some really insightful questions, that really made me think again and showed me how, actually the work has never done. I know I’ve written this book, but it keeps going. There’s more to learn. That should be an exciting thing.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Perhaps the most important thing that you can do, and it’s not something that I would normally say to people, is promote the book. Now is the most important part. You’ve done such a great piece of work.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I say this to the listeners, knowing I’ve only read half of the book, but the first half has left me profoundly moved and challenged. Yes, friends and family, you will all get a copy.
Anne Muhlethaler:
But now, if I can say anything that I want you to feel from me, is go and talk about it. Let’s make people read this, because we can see in these pages that individual action matters. Every time that we feel disconnected and that we sense that we have no power, we are wrong. We have power. Every small decision, every small choice that we can make can move the needle.
Ana Santi:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for saying that. That is the impact that I wanted the book to have. That’s just so lovely to hear you say it. Thank you.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, I’m convinced. All right. So now onto other matters.
Ana Santi:
Okay.
Anne Muhlethaler:
What is your favorite word and one that you could tattoo on yourself?
Ana Santi:
Oh, as a writer, I didn’t get asked that. What’s my favorite word? I don’t have one. I’m loathe to make one up just for the sake of answering the question.
Ana Santi:
I can’t give you a word, but I can give you a type of word. I love verbs. I am completely obsessed with them. When I write, I will agonize over a single sentence because I’m trying to find the right verb.
Ana Santi:
I don’t know whether that comes from my background as a journalist. I don’t know whether that comes from the writers I admire, who are quite economical with language. But I just think if you have the right verb, you can do away with a lot of adjectives, with unnecessary words. Is that an annoying answer for you?
Anne Muhlethaler:
No answer is annoying.
Ana Santi:
Okay.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’m trying to ask these to understand the breadth of difference and the commonalities that we all have with each other.
Ana Santi:
All right.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s why I like to ask the same questions at the end.
Ana Santi:
Oh, okay. Okay. Well, thank you.
Anne Muhlethaler:
You’re welcome. I feel like I’m always surprised by what people choose. I like to be surprised.
Ana Santi:
Oh, really? Oh, good.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Because the podcast, like me, is at the crossroads between business and mindfulness, can you tell me about what mindful rituals, what keeps you grounded? What keeps you balanced? What works for you?
Ana Santi:
Swimming. I swim a lot. I’m going now, after this interview. I put a slot in the outdoor pool. Running, weirdly. I’m a terrible runner, but I do it because it’s easy. I just can walk out of the door and run.
Ana Santi:
I don’t like saying it out loud in case I jinx it one day, but it’s a really good problem solver. If I’m struggling with writing a sentence or an angle to take on a piece of work, I go for a run. I don’t know, eight times out 10, I come back with the answer.
Ana Santi:
My family. I don’t know. Really, ultimately that’s what matters, when things get really, really hard, provided that they’re here and they’re with me and they’re safe. That helps.
Anne Muhlethaler:
What is the sweetest thing that’s ever happened to you?
Ana Santi:
Okay. My now husband, but when we first started going out, he encouraged me to become a journalist. I was still working in PR at the time, knowing I wanted to be a journalist, but not really doing anything about it.
Ana Santi:
He bought me a notebook, a leather-bound notebook. On the very first page, he’d wrote out an Ernest Hemingway quote. You don’t remember it word for word. It’s a little bit chunky, but it’s a quote that he says, “Find the emotion, find what it was that gave you the emotion and then write it down.”
Ana Santi:
I always think about it. It’s just that simplicity. I don’t know. I think we try to use the language a bit too much, as in we get a bit caught up in long fancy words. There was something so lovely and simple.
Ana Santi:
I’m a writer now. I wasn’t until he gave me that book. So, I think there’s a lot to be said for that.
Anne Muhlethaler:
For sure. Thank you so much. What is a secret superpower that you have? Oh, and before you answer, I want to tell you. I don’t know if you remember, but Freddie, our common friend Freda, her secret superpower is to make a meal out of nothing, which I think is very in line with your book.
Ana Santi:
Yeah, that is good. That is. I can vouch for that as well, I’m sure. Not vouch for as I think she’s ever made that for me, but I can see that she could do that.
Ana Santi:
My superpower, oh gosh. I can write anywhere. I can write standing up on a packed loud train. I can write for you.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That is a pretty strong superpower. What is a favorite book that you can share with us?
Ana Santi:
One favorite book? I’m going to say Catch-22, because it’s the book that I remember thinking about, in terms of how it was written. I think I read it when I was 14. It was the first time I considered a book for its writing and what it was doing to me, rather than just consuming it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Fantastic. Thank you. Where is somewhere you visited that you felt really had an impact on who you are today?
Ana Santi:
I remember when I went back to Brazil, actually with my husband. We were going out at the time. It was the first time I’d gone back without the rest of my family.
Ana Santi:
We went, just the two of us. I hadn’t been back for a long time. Ugh, it might sound a bit, I don’t know, cheesy, but it felt quite Proustian, the smells and the senses. I really felt a connection, as sensual connection to a place, which I don’t think I have before.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Last but not least, my favorite question. What brings you happiness?
Ana Santi:
Seeing my daughter sit on my husband’s lap. They look like a delicious shade of caramel. They’re the same coloring.
Ana Santi:
Hitting a really good beforehand. Doesn’t happen very often, but when I do it’s really good. And dipping my head under water. Just being with my family. That’s it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That sounds wonderful. Thank you, really. Connected to hitting that forehand, I’ll think of you next time I hit one.
Ana Santi:
Yeah. Thank you.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thank you so much for the time that you’ve given me today. It’s such a pleasure to talk to you. I mean, since the first day that we had a chance to exchange, I felt such a kinship. I am in awe of the book and what you’ve started with it. It’s truly wonderful.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I hope that our conversation today will encourage people to get it. Knowing that we don’t have to do everything, but that we can get inspired and also let things percolate and see.
Anne Muhlethaler:
We don’t need to know everything and get everything right now, but hopefully there’s going to be seeds planted, positive seeds of change.
Ana Santi:
Thank you so much.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I invite everyone to go and buy the book. Where can people find you if they’d like to connect with you, find more about what else you’ve done and the other book that we’ve never talked about actually, over the course of this interview?
Ana Santi:
Oh. Well, I have a website, Ana-Santi.com. I’m on Instagram. I’m on Twitter. You can always email me. Yeah. I’m on LinkedIn.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Wonderful. I will put all of the links in the show notes as well.
Ana Santi:
Thank you.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Once again, thank you so much, Ana. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Hopefully we’ll talk again soon.
Ana Santi:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really humbled to be asked. Thank you very much.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s my pleasure. Have a great day.
Ana Santi:
You too.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Bye.
Ana Santi:
Bye.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks again to Ana for being my guest on the show today. As always, you can find the relevant links of what we talked about, in the show notes.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So friends and listeners, thank you again for joining me. If you’d like to hear more, you can subscribe to the show on the platform of your choice. If you’d like to connect, you can get in touch with me @annvi on Twitter or Anne Muhlethaler on LinkedIn and @_outoftheclouds on Instagram, where I also shared daily musings about mindfulness.
Anne Muhlethaler:
You can find all of the episodes of the podcast and more on my website AnneVMuhlethaler.com. If you don’t know how to spell it, that’s also in the show notes.
Anne Muhlethaler:
To get regular news direct to your inbox, I invite you to sign up to my monthly newsletter.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening to Out of the Clouds. I hope that you’ll join me again next time. Until then, be well, be safe and take care.