Erica: Hey, girl. By now, you know I have HER Collective, my online community for ambitious women who are done doing it alone. HER Collective is for the women who are smart, capable, and driven, but they find themselves stuck on the sticky floors like self doubt, burnout, and waiting for permission that quite honestly never comes. Inside HER, you get more than motivation. You get real support, real strategies, and real momentum.

Erica: We work on things like clarifying what you want now and what's coming next, building confidence without burning yourself out, navigating hard conversations, career moves, and leadership moments with clarity, and surrounding yourself with women who actually get it. This isn't about hustling harder. It's about moving intentionally with the right tools and the right people in your corner. If you're ready to stop spinning, start choosing yourself, and build a career in life that actually feels aligned, I'd love to welcome you inside HER Collective. You can learn more and join us at www.joinhercollective.com.

Erica: Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone. If you have ever struggled with changing direction, pull up a seat. Valerie Alexander is the CEO of Speak Happiness, and she is a woman that has lived at least five different lives all in one, and she's not done yet. We talk about the sticky floor of sexism, what is the most damaging thing to a woman's career and how you can prevent it, the power of happiness and how you can bring happiness back into your life when you are crushed, and the piece of advice that just might take you by surprise. Welcome to the podcast that empowers women to get seen, get heard, and get promoted. Valerie, I am so excited you are here. You are the CEO of Speak Happiness, and you talk about all the things that I love to talk about. We are talking about outsmarting your unconscious bias, building happier workplaces, and advancing women leaders.

Erica: So, wow, I feel so lucky to have you here today. How are you?

Valerie: Thank you so much, Erica. I'm excited to be here as well. It's going to be a really fun conversation. Well,

Erica: let's kick it off. I would love to dive into what I call the come up story. So who are you today, and what is that journey that brought us here?

Valerie: My story is one of lots of transitions. I'll just start with that. And, also, I want to encourage everyone to embrace one key concept that I had too, which is changing direction is not failure. And a lot of times we get stuck in the same place where we don't belong or we don't want to be because we're afraid that would look like we failed. And first off, who cares what other people think, but also sticking with something that's not right for you is the failure.

Valerie: And so I will share that my career, I guess, started with failure in that when I was in college, I was planning to get a PhD in economics and go on to become an econ professor. And I found out my senior year that the econ department at my small little liberal arts university was not supporting that, and they were not going to write me recommendations to any econ programs. Even though I had a four point o in my major, I was teaching for the Princeton Review at the time. I was teaching LSAT prep, and therefore, I had to take the LSAT as part of my job. I didn't care about law school.

Valerie: I don't wanna go to law school. And when you teach LSAT prep and you don't care about the score, it turns out you can get a really good score on the LSAT. And I had the grades that were trying to get into a PhD program, so I applied to law school. And two weeks in, I knew I was in the wrong place. I knew it wasn't for me.

Valerie: And I also knew that if I left right then, it would look like I failed out, and I had to finish the first year in order to have the opportunities I still wanted. So I finished the first year. I made sure I did really well. I was at Berkeley and took the year off, worked in so many jobs. I had five jobs at one point.

Valerie: Simultaneously. And I started applying to PhD programs, and conveniently, I got into the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Berkeley. And they asked me to do a readmit to the law school so that I wouldn't count in their budget. I would count in the law school budget. And so I did, and I readmitted to the law school.

Valerie: I just finished my coursework for my PhD, and then I got a letter from the law school saying, you've been a student here for three years and haven't taken any classes. This is an issue. So most of my PhD credits transferred over. I took one more year of classes in law school, and I interviewed for law firm jobs because why not? And I got a very good offer to be at one of the premier firms in San Francisco at the start of the Internet era, at the explosion of the Internet.

Valerie: And so I had to make a decision. Do I leave school now and get a job that pays x, or do I stay in school four more years, write a dissertation, and get a job that pays half of x? And it turns out you don't need a PhD in economics to make that choice. So I started practicing law. It was amazing.

Valerie: I was working in IPOs, which are initial public offerings. Again, at the time of the Internet explosion, I was one of the lead attorneys for E*Trade when they went public. I left that and started a consulting firm to help early stage startups get their funding. I did that successfully for a year and got kind of acqui-hired out of that by an investment bank to help launch their internet banking practice. I left that to go be the VP of business development at an internet startup, and at no point did it matter what I looked like or what body parts I had, because, again, the work was so plentiful.

Valerie: In 2000, my mom had a brain tumor, and my internet company, of which I was the second ranking executive officer, wasn't doing well. And I was having issues with my boyfriend, and I just decided, done, I don't need to be in Silicon Valley anymore. I quit everything. I sold my house. I sold my car.

Valerie: I gave away all my furniture with two suitcases and a dog. I moved back to Indiana to take care of my mom, which was great. By the way, she's still with us. I was on the phone with her ten minutes before we started this call, so that was also a good decision for that reason. And that was the best year ever.

Valerie: But I guess in my absence, Silicon Valley collapsed, because I left in 2000. And by the time my mom was better and living her own life independently and I was ready to go back to California, there was nothing to go back to in Silicon Valley. And luckily, I had done well, and so I had a little bit of a cushion. And I thought, what do I really want to do with my life? And I thought, I really want to make movies.

Valerie: So when I came back to California, instead of turning right and going to the Bay Area, I turned left and went to Los Angeles. And I gave myself two years to make money as a screenwriter, because I only had two years worth of money in the bank before going back to practicing law. And a year and ten months later, I was sitting in Joel Schumacher's living room pitching a movie that became my first project that I got paid to write. And then I had a fun and successful career as a screenwriter briefly. And I'll share two reasons why, one which we will get into in depth, which is how horrible liberal, democratic, left wing Hollywood is to women.

Valerie: And then my union went on strike. We were on strike in 2007. And I was one of the 80% of the union members whose career didn't fully recover from the strike. But during the strike, I started writing books, and then I started being asked to speak about the topics of my books. And that turned into a speaking career of great excitement and great reward.

Valerie: And then in 2016, I had an idea for a tech company, and I started that company. And we grew fast, and we made incredible things. We were building communication tools for people in committed relationships. Our slogan was, we make it easier for you to make the people you love happy. It was all about happiness and brain science. And we lasted until 2019 when I shut that company down and just focused completely on keynote speaking.

Valerie: And during the course of being the CEO of that company, I was asked to give a TED talk on the bias I faced as the female CEO over 40 of a tech startup, of which there was a lot. So I gave the TED talk, How to Outsmart Your Own Unconscious Bias, and that became very popular. And as a result, again, I was being asked to talk about bias in a lot of places. And not just the bias against me as a woman, I was being asked to talk about all kinds of bias: racial bias, sexual orientation bias, religious bias.

Erica: Okay. This is crazy, though, because you have literally lived like five people's careers,

Valerie: like, full on careers. Yes. I'm still that one. Yeah. Oh, I know. Who knows what's

Erica: next? So let me ask you this question, because, you know, this is our first conversation, so I don't know you. But you seem so bold, and your story is like, wow. I would choose the word fearless to describe you, because you went after all of these things. You're like, I'm gonna leave my job, go take care of my mom.

Erica: I'm gonna come back. I'm gonna explore this thing that I love. But I know, like, it can't be perfect. Right? This is just life, and we all have our sticky floors and the things that are deep inside of us, those limiting beliefs that hold us back or keep us stuck.

Erica: Where did that exist for you in your life? Hey there, listeners. If you have ever felt like you're stuck in a place, held back by self doubt, perfectionism, or that pesky inner critic, you're not alone. We all face those sticky floors that keep us from reaching the heights we dream of. But guess what?

Erica: It's time to shatter those limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors to uncover infinite possibilities. My book, Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, is your ultimate guide to smashing through barriers, overcoming limiting beliefs, and stepping into your full potential. This book has been endorsed by none other than the great Mel Robbins, best selling author and motivational powerhouse. It's also been featured in Success Magazine, so you know it's packed with insights that work. Inside, you'll find real life sticky floor stories, practical strategies to help you navigate your own sticky floor moments, and a whole lot of inspiration to keep you climbing.

Erica: This isn't just a book. It's your road map to success, confidence, and freedom. Grab your copy of Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors today at www.ericaandersonrooney.com. Whether you're in the boardroom, the classroom, or just starting out, this book is for you because no one, and I mean no one, deserves to stay stuck, no one deserves to feel small, and you have glass ceilings to shatter. Let's do this.

Valerie: I'm going to credit my parents with the fact that I don't really have self limiting beliefs. And I realize I'm going against a lot of people right now on parenting, but I'm saying my parents were hands off. Hands off is the understatement of the decade. I grew up in Indiana, but my dad lived in California my whole life. And so my sister and I would spend every summer in California.

Valerie: And the summer I was 15, I got a job, and she had a job, and we discovered we really needed a car out there, especially the next summer when I was 16. And both my parents were like, well, you're not getting a car in California if you want a car. And so we were like, well, I guess we'll just drive ours out there. I was 16 and my sister was 18, and we didn't have a credit card.

Valerie: This was long before cell phones. I was

Erica: gonna say no cell phones.

Valerie: No cell phones. Nope. No credit card. We had $500 in cash, and we drove a '79 Volkswagen Rabbit that was not structurally sound from Indiana to California by ourselves. It didn't even occur to us not to do it, and it didn't occur to either of them to say don't do it.

Valerie: By the time my dad left and my mom moved us to Indiana, she kind of behaved like we were three roommates. I was nine when that happened. So I kind of got to do life on my own. It was a combo of many things, but I strongly encourage parents, as much as possible, to let your kids fail. Let them fail, because that will create a lot of positive future output.

Valerie: And I'm gonna make a very quick plug, because I wrote the books Happiness as a Second Language and Success as a Second Language. So I don't have self limiting beliefs because I had parents who kind of didn't notice whether I was there or not. But that's not the way to do it. There are different directions you can go, but there were a lot of advantages to growing up on my own. Now, what is my big sticky floor?

Valerie: I can share this with you, and I alluded to it earlier. Hollywood is the most sexist industry I've ever been involved with in my life. I mean, it is extraordinarily sexist. I would have had a wildly different screenwriting career if I was a man, and I mean wildly different. And I'm at the point where I don't work as a screenwriter anymore.

Valerie: So, again, because changing direction is not failure. But I would have been more successful as a screenwriter. And the reason I don't care anymore is this: I'm about to name names. I was on my way to a meeting with a showrunner for a television staff. My agent called me in my car on the way to the meeting and said, oh, the meeting's canceled.

Valerie: They had an offer out to another woman, and she accepted. And I said, so does that make them fully staffed? And he said, no. They're just not meeting any more women. Literally, they're not meeting any more women.

Valerie: In other words, we've filled our one woman slot. We don't care how good a writer you are. We don't care how much you might contribute. You have ovaries, and therefore, you're not necessary in our room. And I have half a dozen stories like that.

Valerie: The one I will never forget, and again, I'm happy to name names: there was a project called Justice Deferred, a legal thriller based on a book. They brought in 22 writers to pitch their take on what the movie could be. The producers were Tobey Maguire, and a guy named Ilya Infacelli Smith, who is now one of the biggest agents in town. And by the way, none of these people are responsible for what I'm about to share.

Valerie: They were wonderful, actually. But I figured out how to solve the problems in the book, and my take was the best take. The producers went back to Warner Brothers and said, hey, we wanna hire Valerie for this. And the executive at Warner Brothers said, oh, no.

Valerie: There's no women in the book, so we don't need to hire a woman to write it. And Warner Brothers wouldn't meet with me.

Erica: Wow.

Valerie: So I wanna share two things about that. First off, clearly, at Warner Brothers, to write a legal thriller, it's more important to have a penis than a law degree, because I was the only one of the 22 writers they brought in who was a lawyer. So if you got the job writing Justice Deferred, you weren't the best writer for the job. You didn't get it on merit. You got it because you were a man, and somehow the executive had in his head that because the lead character was a man and all the bad guys were men and everybody else in the book was a man, it had to be written by a man.

Erica: Did you know going into Hollywood that it was sexist like this?

Valerie: No idea. None. I don't think anybody realizes. Even other executives don't. I'll share another story. My husband and I were at a Christmas party a couple years ago with a lot of very high end executives in Hollywood.

Valerie: The party was at the home of the head of a studio. At one point, I wandered over to where he and the heads of several other big companies and studios in town were having a conversation, and it was this really cute conversation about where all of them started. In Hollywood, the phrase is you start on a desk, which means you're somebody's assistant. And they were talking about whose desk they all started on. One of them had started as a dresser, like a costumer assistant on sets, dressing various stars.

Valerie: And they all talked about where they started. It was so cute. Then they started talking about other executives and where they started, whose desk they worked on, or whose agency they were at. Then they got to the first woman that they named. And they said, oh, yeah.

Valerie: She worked for so and so. Then she started sleeping with him. It was literally the second thing they said about one of the most powerful women in Hollywood. As if that is the reason she advanced in her career, which it is not, not even close. That person, whether she ever slept with him or not, which by the way might be completely untrue, did not help her advance in her career anyway.

Valerie: She had to leave that job to get recognized for her talent. But that is the mindset of the men running this industry. We didn't mention, and this is one of my little regrets about myself, I really, really regret that I didn't, at that moment, say, gee, we didn't talk about who anybody else was having sex with, did we?

Valerie: That was not the subject of any of the other stories, who did you sleep with to get ahead in your careers? And instead, I just turned and walked away. These are major leaders in Hollywood who just do not see women as equals. They do not see the value of advancing women in their careers.

Valerie: Every woman who has advanced in Hollywood has done it against all of the odds, and the men can't acknowledge how many free passes they've gotten. They got the free pass. You didn't get the job because you were the most qualified person for the job. You got the job because you were the most qualified white man for the job, and the job was being held open for a white man.

Erica: When you share that story, it made me think of one of my experiences in corporate. There was a younger woman who held a VP level title, probably one of the youngest VPs, beautiful woman, and was very close with the CEO because she had to work very closely with him. And I kid you not, somebody said to me, she's only in that role because she's sleeping with him. And I was like, well, number one, I don't know anybody here.

Erica: So I don't know that to be true or not, but I'm gonna stay out of it. It wasn't until a couple years later, when she and I were having a conversation, and she was mentoring me as I was climbing the ranks in this company, that she said, Erica, you are young. You are gonna be having this role. People are going to say things about you that are not true.

Erica: It just brings me to this point where it's like, people love to just bring other people down. Right? They can't sit there and be like, no, that is something she could do, and that is something that she as a woman would deserve. It's like we've got to throw this other bullshit reason in there instead of admitting she could actually write that story.

Valerie: It's so damaging to women's careers that we have conversations about who they're sleeping with. It is none of your business who anybody else is sleeping with, number one. Number two, almost no women have ever advanced in their careers by sleeping with somebody. It is the rarest of exceptions. And if you're listening to this and you can think of one exception, great.

Valerie: Congratulations. Now think of every single other successful woman you know, and realize how rare that one possible exception is. It happened to a roommate of mine. She worked at Maverick Films, which was Madonna's company. She was an assistant for a number of years, and then she got bumped up to creative executive, which was a huge deal.

Valerie: She made sure they acquired the rights to the book. She met with all the writers to write the script. She was instrumental in hiring the director. When they were going to shoot it, they were going on a location scout. She set up the whole location scout for her boss and the director, and then her boss said, well, you've gotta go.

Valerie: He's like, I don't know this story, I don't know any of these locations. She was so excited. She was in her mid twenties. She'd never gone on a business trip before.

Valerie: She spent a week in Louisiana where they were scouting all the locations, doing amazing work. Her boss was super impressed by her. She got back, and about a week later, a friend of hers in the office made a kind of side comment about her relationship with the boss, and she said, what are you talking about? And the friend said, well, you know, he took you to Louisiana with him instead of his wife.

Valerie: That's the only reason she would get to go on that trip, they said.

Erica: Right.

Valerie: I tell women all the time. If you ever hear a comment like that, shut it down immediately.

Erica: My question is gonna be, what do you do when you find yourself in this kind of situation? Because it isn't just Hollywood. It's all workplaces. It's everywhere women are. So what do you do?

Erica: You shut it down. Any other tips, or what should women be doing in these types of situations?

Valerie: Well, never ever repeat that about another woman. And I hate to say this, but for anyone early in your career, never ever have sex with someone in a superior position. Just don't do it, because that will be said about you, and it will follow you for your whole career. But the challenge is also, don't check out. Don't take yourself out of those opportunities.

Valerie: This happened to another attorney in our firm, a young, beautiful, blonde wife and mother. She was supposed to go on a trip to China with one of our partners, because she spoke Chinese, which nobody knew. It would have been this incredible advantage to have somebody in the room who spoke Chinese that nobody knew spoke Chinese. A week before the trip, the partner's wife saw who was going and said no. That's another big life regret. I was a first year associate.

Valerie: I would have never, but at this point, I would raise holy hell if I found out that happened. Why should her career be limited because he can't be trusted? And so, as a woman, go on those trips.

Valerie: Do that work. If the rumor gets started about you, try to find out who starts it. I honestly go to HR and say, I'm not gonna have this be said about me. I refuse. And if you hear someone say that about another woman, say, I don't ever wanna hear a comment like that.

Valerie: Look at the other woman and say, wow, how small and weak do you have to be that you would sabotage another woman's career in this way?

Erica: Call it.

Valerie: Yeah, call it if men say it, call it if anyone says it, because we have to stop those conversations from even happening, because they are limiting to all women's careers. It's not just that for the one woman who has ever done that to advance her career, it hurts her. It hurts every woman, because it's assumed about us, and we've gotta stop that from happening.

Erica: So Valerie, I'm gonna switch gears on you because you are the happiness queen. I don't know how else to put it, but I wanna know, what is this recipe for happiness and happiness in the workplace?

Valerie: I love that you asked that after what was essentially

Erica: I know, I know, I'm just gonna flip it. We gotta go there though.

Valerie: Ranting like I just did, and happiness are not mutually exclusive. Acknowledging that the world needs to be changed and needs to be fixed and needs to be better for women does not make you not a happy person. There are a couple formulas for happiness. One, you can't be happy all the time. That's an emotion.

Valerie: It comes and goes. Acknowledge when you got the sads. Acknowledge when you got the blues, but you can be a happy person all the time. You can have it at your core. I'm gonna share this because this is for women.

Valerie: After four years and enormous amounts of money on IVF, I got pregnant and did not carry to term. When I miscarried, I had three days that I literally couldn't get out of bed. I never experienced grief like that. It felt like there was a stone on top of my body keeping me in bed. At one point, this is after I'd written the happiness book,

Valerie: I thought, what would the person who wrote that book tell me to do right now? And I said, remind yourself that you're a happy person. So I just started saying, I am a happy person, as often as I could with everything I was doing. I would just say, I'm a happy person, and I wasn't at the moment. It doesn't have to be true when you say it, but saying it gets you back to your normal.

Valerie: It gets you back to it being more true. Another technique I use is to say out loud five things that are making you happy in the moment you're in. If you're at work and you're miserable, you can't say, well, my kids make me happy. Your kids aren't making you happy in that moment. You're trying to train your brain to bounce back to happiness.

Valerie: If you're at work and the boss just screamed at you, you can think, I'm happy I have a job that pays my bills. I'm happy I'm respected in this role generally. I'm happy that my chair spins.

Valerie: I'm happy that there's lunch for me in the fridge. I'm happy that it's Friday, and I am going to train my brain to shut off this work job as soon as I leave this office. You can say things to remind yourself that you are happy even if you're not happy in the moment. Those are important. And personal happiness is of enormous value.

Valerie: So I recommend the book Happiness as a Second Language. But much more important than that, as a leader, as a woman, focus on the happiness of the people who answer to you. And I get people all the time saying, I'm sorry, I can't make other people happy. And that is the God's honest truth.

Valerie: You cannot make another person happy. But workplace happiness is so easy to achieve, and it is something we are never trained for. We are never trained to create happiness for our workforce. Recently, with a client, they said, oh, this is great, but can we talk about engagement? We want our managers to be really focused on engagement, not happiness.

Valerie: My response is, yeah, because engagement is about you. You, the boss, you, the corporation, want engagement. Your employees don't care about engagement. They care about their happiness. It's the exact same managerial behavior to get you engagement versus getting you happiness.

Valerie: But think about it in your relationship. How would you feel if your spouse came home one day and said, I wanna make you more engaged in this relationship? Or if they came home and said, I wanna make you happier? That resonates better. That works better.

Erica: A little more receptive to that.

Valerie: Right. Just someone wanting to make you happier. And workplace happiness, the happiness with our jobs, this is basic, but all of the work I do is based on brain science.

Valerie: I'm a giant brain science wonk. I read all kinds of journals about that. I've studied it extensively. The brain science behind workplace happiness is really simple, and there are three long ranging happiness studies. Harvard Business School, University of California at Riverside, and Gallup all study workplace happiness.

Valerie: It is so simple. Here's what makes all of us love our jobs. As soon as I say this, Erica, you're gonna be like, yes, of course. Your listeners are going to get this right away.

Valerie: Getting a sense of accomplishment.

Erica: Oh, for sure.

Valerie: Yeah, of course. You made a difference, made progress, used your skills. That is what makes people love their jobs. And for some reason, we have structured so many workplaces to rob people of their sense of accomplishment.

Valerie: We give people a goal, and then we change the goal line halfway through. We take a task away from somebody, or we put more tasks on them before they finish the task we gave them. All of these things contribute to somebody feeling like, oh, I guess I'm not contributing. I always ask people, how many times did you get to the end of a day and say, oh, I got nothing done today? One of the things I love is a technique where you write down, at the start of the day, one thing you will do that day.

Valerie: It's an I will do it. It might be, I finally respond to the email from the department head who is bothering me. But write down one thing you will do that day. Put your Post-it note up somewhere where you can see it.

Valerie: And when you get that thing done, take down that Post-it note and celebrate. Say, oh, I got this done today. Then put that Post-it note somewhere else where you can see it, and that's your I got it done pile. If you have a Post-it note that shows you got something done, you're not gonna end your day saying I got nothing done. We've got to release our brains from work.

Valerie: It is not natural or human. No animal can be under stress or at work twenty four seven. So train your brain to release work when you leave work. When you have ended your day, take that Post-it note down, crumple it up, and throw it away. Let that act of crumpling it up and throwing it away give you permission.

Valerie: In the good old days, you used to have a time card. You punched out. Something said your workday has ended. We have taken away, especially with cell phones and email, we have taken away the end of the workday.

Valerie: So give that back to yourself and give it to your employees. I'm gonna spit statistics. A happy workforce has 41% less absenteeism. They have 28% less turnover in high turnover organizations and 58% less turnover in low turnover organizations. They have 21% higher revenues from happy workforces. They have 20% higher profits from happy workforces.

Valerie: They have lower workers' compensation costs. They have fewer workplace injuries. There is less liability for the behavior of your employee towards another employee or towards a customer. There is better customer service. It just goes on and on, the benefits of having happy workers, and it's not about buying lunch or putting in foosball tables.

Valerie: It's about giving people a sense of accomplishment in what they do, letting them put their skills to the best use, and then acknowledging them for doing it. It's that simple. It's those three simple things: autonomy, acknowledgement, and appreciation, and then getting rid of the toxic. When I speak at conferences or in industry groups, I ask how many people have ever worked in a place where someone was toxic. Almost every hand goes up.

Valerie: Then I say, okay, leave your hand up if the company knew that person was toxic and didn't do anything about it. Most of the hands stay up. Then I say, leave your hand up if that toxic person was at least part of the reason you left.

Valerie: Every time, more than 50% of the hands in the room are still up. At that point, I tell everybody, look around the room. Look around at how much incredible talent some company lost because they wouldn't get rid of the toxic employee.

Erica: Amen.

Valerie: And by the way, when a place is toxic, you know who you lose first?

Erica: In HR, you know. Yep. You just said it, say it again. The best ones.

Valerie: Yep. The people with the most options. Because people with options don't stay where it's toxic.

Erica: Nope. I love it. The HR in me is so satisfied right now. Good. Valerie, one question I ask all of my guests at the end of every episode: if you could go back to this Valerie who is living all of these amazing lives, doing all of these things, but going through all these crazy life experiences of sexism in Hollywood, what piece of advice would you give her today?

Valerie: The first piece of advice I would give her is wear sunscreen. I would very much wish I could go back and wear sunscreen. And I'll share the other one: I would go back and tell her, freeze your eggs. These are the things we absolutely never talk about with women, and I think we desperately need to. I am childless.

Valerie: I am not child free. It was not my choice that I don't have children. When I was 30, I went to an OB-GYN and said, what can I do to make sure I preserve my fertility? He was a man, and he's like, oh, start taking folic acid. It kills me because I wish he'd said to me, you're gonna have to freeze your eggs.

Valerie: We're not born with all the eggs we're ever gonna have. That's the great myth. We're born with all the follicles we're ever going to have, and every month, about 15 to 16 follicles start developing eggs and about a thousand follicles die off. At a certain age, we run out of follicles. But it's not just that.

Valerie: The quality changes drastically. If I had frozen eggs at 30, I would probably have the two or three children I always wanted right now. I was the person who was like, oh, there's an entire industry just trying to scare women. I thought it was all just about the money. And by the way, it is about the money.

Valerie: One important thing: IVF and fertility is a business, and a business is negotiable. I negotiated every round of IVF. I negotiated the price and what was gonna be covered in every round. So that's important. But if you are right now, and I talk to so many who say, well, we're gonna try until I'm 35,

Valerie: and then if I'm not successful, that's when we'll do IVF, I'm like, there's a giant drop off in the quality of your eggs at 35. If you're 30 and you're thinking about it and you're unmarried, or whatever your life circumstance, and now is not the time to have children, now is the time to freeze your eggs. Go to what's called natural cycle. There's a thing called natural cycle IVF.

Valerie: They can do IVF very successfully without any of the drugs. The drugs are what's bad for your body. The drugs are what drives up the price. If you're gonna freeze your eggs, negotiate with a place that specializes in natural cycle to get three or five retrieval cycles for one low price, and it can be like $15,000. So for $15,000, you get five retrieval cycles of whatever eggs your body naturally produces, and freeze them.

Valerie: I wish so badly someone had given me this advice when I was 30, when I was 25, even when I was 35, because I didn't get married till I was 38. And then we wanted to see what marriage was like. So we didn't even try till 40. Then at 40, I started trying. And that was too late.

Valerie: Everything else in my life I'm super happy with. I'm happy with every career, every outcome, even the not-as-successful-as-planned screenwriting career. I'm still happy I did it. The things I am not happy with in my life are that I don't have children, which I've always wanted, and that my skin just doesn't, well, Hollywood skews your view of what a person might need

Erica: to look for. Like Sports Illustrated, not less Martha Stewart. I'm less Martha Stewart. But a normal 81 year old doesn't look like that.

Valerie: Right, I'll give that a 100%. Normal 81 year olds don't look like Martha Stewart. They don't look like Jane Fonda. They don't

Erica: I'm here for both of them.

Valerie: Yeah, but we also don't have to go through all the Botox and the injections and whatever else it is. You don't have to do that. Just start taking care of your skin when you're 20.

Erica: Well, I think both of those pieces of advice are amazing, and thank you for sharing them, because it is true. Those are the hard things that not everybody talks about. So thank you.

Valerie: Oh, I'm so happy to be here. This was such a fun conversation.

Erica: I am so glad that you tuned in today. Make sure you follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and all the other socials for more content just like this. But one last thing before you go, this is your reminder that it is time to stop putting a ceiling on what's possible, and it's time to start breaking through it.