but gaveóvjennifer, what was yor path at levi's? slow and ste b almost the way to the top. i started in 1999 as a marketing assistant entry level, the lowest of the low, but worked my way up to chief marketing officer by 2013. held that post for eight years, which is a really long time to be a cmo. most people average tenure■abou. they get fired. but i did a good job. help the company go public became the brand president. but then i was very outspoken about the need to open public schools during covid after a two year conflict internally, i was cmo, what's the job of aor me chief marketing officer? oh, let's see. how can i put it into words? i mean, you're responsible for image. you're responsible for generating demand, revenue,

profitable revenue. the communication that goes into establishing what the brand stands for, what the products are from the brand, all of that, all of the advertising using the pr and the very sort of tactical search marketing, what the website stores look like, it's a lot of stuff is in was levi's a good corporate did it live up to its profits through principles motto? no i would argue absolute not. were you part of pushing that, though, pushing the profits to principles? i was. i was really proud of that. i believed in that. that's a mantra for people that don't know that the company often cites. principles. we believe that you can i'm saying we like i still work there but you know we can make ■owe■2 can off t greatpeople.■'s product that makes their lives better and we can treat employees fairly, pay workers fairly. i believe in that.

and, you know, for a very long time, levi's furthered employee principles that i was really proud of. they integrated factories in the south before the law required it. they were the first fortune 500 company to offer same sex partner benefits. i was proud of these things. you know, this was about extending rights to all employees. but in the say 5 to 8 years, that's not really how it is and it is really about a confmistultu demand is obediea single point of view and everyone else is either silenced or pushed out the door. and what is that conformist point of view? it's left wing party orthodoxy. simplyut, what would you have considered your politics to be when you were working in levi's? left wing. left wing? i would have considered myself left of left of center my whole life. voted democrat or further left. i sometimes voted green party my whole life.

but i was i asked a lot of questions during covid about the policies that were furthered by the left wing governors and mayors, policies around lockdowns and school closures. and you you know, i found these policies to illiberal, but harmful to the people they were claiming to protect, which is true, this is what we've learned. it has harmed these policies, harmed children, and they harmed the poorest and most disadvantaged its children the most, which to my mind was obvious, is what was going to lt antithetical to what it meant to be a democrat, to me. we were supposed to be the champion of the underdog and yet we were punishing them while s, sending our own kids, not mine. but, you know, to private schools. i really found tha hypocrisy, intolerable, intolerable and harmful. and it just made me feel like the entire dogma platform was a

brand president, you can explain what that exactly is. were you reporting were you trad to be potentially ceo? i was as the cmo. i was even reporting directly to the ceo, which is sortoj unusual. but i became the brand president, which meant i went from not just owning all the marketing and communication, but all the pr jeans, the shirts like the design team reported to me merchandizing, which is like the business side of product, a bunch of other stuff. but that's the main sort of difference interact with as a levi's consumer that came from me and my team. if you saw an ad, if you put on a pair of pants, we did that. so who was chip? who is chip? bergh shipper is, the ceo of levi's remaining today, still the ceo, although he has stated that he will probably retire soon. i think he's■" and his youth wot

procter and gamble for over 20 years. and then moved over to become the ceo of levi's in 2011. he wouldguy. i think his politics were probably fairly conservative i mean, he said that to me directly, but moving to san francisco opened his eyes and, you know, he took more and more very left wing stances personally. i've done so personally as well, forcing that on all of your allowing them to express any sort of dissenting view from that. that is not profits through principles. do you consider chip friend and a mentor? did you at one time, not a friend, but a did you trust him at one time? not entirely, no.

i mean, i had a love hate. no one's asked me this before. it's a good question. you write about him a lot in levi's. yeah, yeah, i'm very i was very grateful to chip in 2011 when he joined. you know, i had been at the company for 11 or 12 years at that point started as a very youn■dg person. and your managers have a tendency to see you as you were then. so i had a hard time kind of breaking through, me with fresh eyes. i was just the i don't know what i was at the time vp of something and he was like, wow, she's good. and he gave me a lot of opportunities. he also overlooked me for a lot of opportunities that i deserved. some of which i didn't actually include in the book because it's boring andt' inside baseball. but i was passed over for several jobs. he promised me. so no, i didn't totally trust him. but i do really good at what i did. i do. why did you not get the ceo job?

in a nutshell, because i was outspoken about covid restrictions and when you say outspoken, you mean on social media, not just social media era. yes, social media. but i also wrote op ads, attended school board meetings, led rallies to get schools and playgroundswasn't just this sort of keyboard warrior. i was active in my community. i take my civic responsibilities seriously. and so i was participating in that process. did you enjoy your time at levi's? i did until the last two years. the last two years were very difficult. you have to understand, you know, i spent over two decades, i had a lot of friends. i you know, if you that long at long at a place you go to baby showers, weddings, funerals, these are people you believe are your friends and not a single person stood by me. jennifer, say you in the subtitle of your book, you talk about the woke mob. i want to quote from levi's unbuttoned woke capitalismks

to build consumer loyalty through social justice stances rather than what the company makes and sells. woke capitalism tries to convince buyers that companies are in business to do good and make the world a better place, not make money. woke capitalism seeksmessage the about employees even when they lay them off. atheam time as they are delivering unimaginable wealth to shareholders and executor is through dividends and stock price inces right. yeah, i mean, that's my issue with it is it's a lie. it's reputation stated inside the boardrooms and executive conference rooms is something akin to if we take this stance and align with their values, their values being the consumer or the perceived consumer, they will like us more and they will buy more■a stuff.

that's what they say. i was that room for ten years. that's what they say. the younger employees believe they're they're true believers, most of them. and some of the executives believe in it, most of them. it is a very cynical way to wrap themselves in virtue appeal to consumer is they think although we see that's backfiring to some extent, but keep all the money for themselves and there's so much hypocrisy in it. i'll give you one example, which i cite in the book. levi's laid off 15% of the corporate workforce. as we said, we did it with empathy. that's what the headlines read at that same time. in that same time frame, the ceo cashed out $43 million of stock that is not empathy for the co■

autobiography because you talk about your early life and what you were doing before le's, but where did you spring from, so to speak? i was an elite gymnast as a child. i wrote my first book called chalked up about that experience, wh bit of a whistleblower account as well. i train from the time i was six until i was 19. of like levi's. it's a pretty cruel and abusive culture physically, emotionally, and there is sexual abuse that's rampant that was exposed by the case of larry nass the team doctor for usa gymnastics for over years. you were the national champion in 1986? that's correct. that is correct. how much pain were you in? a lot of pain, yeah. i won that on a broken ankle. my ankle was broken that night. was that typical yep. to perform in that type of shape? yep. what did that do to you as you grew

it's kind of it's pretty soul crushing. i mean, to live in that much physical pain is very, very difficult to be told at the same 's nothing wrong and you're being a wimp and you're a lazy piece of garbage. and to have doctors telling you there's nothing wrong because the' influenced the coaches, it will make you a little crazy. and i started unravel i think emotionally physically i couldn't do the sport at the end like i lost an ability to do it because i was mentally kind of i'm traveling. we were also starving ourselves to death. you know, anorexia is very common in the sport. it was enforced, forced fully by our coaches, meaning you need to lose £3 by tomorrow. i■; these things were literally said to us. so, you know, i was starving my ankle wasdeteriorating by the d. and i ended up walking away from the sport a few months before the olympic trials in 1988, i

lost simone biles in tokyo. well, she didn't during the competition. i did it before. i advised to do it before, not ■cduring what was a reaction to people when you walked away as as the defending national champion, correct. i wasn't. in 1987. prior, you know, i was i was not a national #%champion that was really embraced by the community. i was even the night i won. and this was very difficult. everybody said she didn't deserve it. she's the worst national champion we've ever had. so i obviously had a very■3 co relationship with even having won, you know, i'm this 17 year old kid who never expected this to happen. i was the best on that day. best that year doesn't matter. it's a competition. who's best that day. and they sort of tore me down. ;expected me to even be at that competition because i had broken my femur. only nine months earlier. so everyone thought was out for the count down the count as of

the 1985 world championships. but i was the comeback kid. how much of your identity from age 4 to 17nastics? 200%. all of it. i didn't have an identity outside of the sport, and that's what's so dficult about leaving not just for me, but for any elite level athlete. you have no identity outside of your sport and then you have to go become a regular person. it's very difficult, it' and iny with people was a new thing for you at that point. i was very mature and sophisticated. i'd traveled all around the world. i'd lived on my own, you know, with a coach in other ways. i was so completely immature, you know, i'd neveen on date. i you just i didn't have normal social interactions, but i went to college, you know, you went to stanford. i went to stanford, yeah. and i was just on a mission to be a normal kid, and i got a little rebellious, which i think was probably healthy. no.e you on

didn't go that route. i wanted to get in on my own merits. so after starting four, what happened? where did you go? i moved to san francisco in 1992. upon graduation it was the best place i ever lived in my life. i loved it so much. it was really the home for anyone who ever felt like a weirdo, you know? it was just embracing was welco. and you could be as weird as you wanted to be. and i wanted to be weird. i had been so obedient and conformist as a child, i really wanted to kind ofbit. so i really loved it. and at the time it was filled with artists and, you know, young people t' afford to live e now. it's tech millionaires. that's it. but i loved it for so long. it's difficult. i left2021, so my children could attend the school and i missed what it was though. it's not what is we'll

get to 21 in just a sec. you took series of jobs, roommates? i did no money. yeah, everybody did. that's what you do when you're young. know, i lived with four or five other girls. i worked odd jobs. it was fun, you know. and i eventually landed adverts as an agency in 1994 and found myself eventually on the levi's account, which, you know, how that all ended up happening. at what point in your7@ jennifer, say, did you were you making the kind of money that a cmo or a group vice president? group president you would be making could live comfortably in san francisco? probably by the time i was cmo, which was 2013, i was very bad at advocating for myself in terms of compensation and all of that. i was remember i became the cmo, somebody accidentally sent me. i don't think this is in the book like a spreadsheet with everyone ist mean to

send that to me and i was the lowest paid person and i was like, what? i'm the highest performer. but i had just always not been very good at that. it felt gross to me. you do tell story in the book about meetingh h.r. and then telling you knowing increase in pay. yeah. take the good job. right. and i agreed to that but that was stupid. so at what point did you start to become known as the trouble maker at leaving? i didn't, you know, i don't think is that, you know, i hate to use that word if it's not. that's a nice way to put it. i mean, i think the real way would have been like not a troublemaker, but a q and on conspiracy theorist is what i kind of became known as. i mean, i started i was pretty outspoken right from the start of code like march 2020, i questioned the school closures. i didn't a call from anyone

internally until september of 2020. you know, i knew it was controversial. i knew my friends were what are you doing? but no one called. so i was like, okay, maybe they're not on twitter. maybe they just didn't notice. 20, 20 from my peer was the head of corporate communications saying people are noticing don't like it so and i said, oh, so your kids are in school, right? she said, yeah. why were her kids in school in years? not because the private schools opened. the private schools were opened. her kids were going to private public schools. closed? yeah, mine. and more importantly, the 60% of whom were lowt at home to mind them. you know, my kids were luckier than most. obviously in public schools. i was concerned about all the children at that level that you

were at. jennifer sey is it tempting to go the private route? i was never interested it. i feel like we're part the city and the community we live in and i don't want to be cordoned off from it. i think it's like raising veal and a pen when you like cordon your children off from like real life and real their neighbors i want to be part of the city we live in. we're not better than the people we live around. back to levi's unbuttoned quote and this is your inner voice talking to yourself. this is the way you wrote this. you you can put up we care about profits through principles face and you can post about blm and lgbtq and all the other lrsroa'e benjamins, as they say, and desperate to maintain this harder right over easier, wrong. we really care ethos.

you strike down any view that veers from the orthodoxy. the san francisco bubble democratic party orthodoxy because yes, you're about party, not principles. you're about appealing to the woke to sell jeans because they seem cool to you like they might buy more and spend more than some midwestern on stylish self-avowed patriot. that' part. that's the that's the quiet part being said out loud. correct. i get to do that now. is it i scary to be able to say things? i, you know, write things like this? it's it's refreshing. i mean, obviously, i said what i thought on the issue of covid before, but i was restrained and i look back and i am proud of how i compted myself. and you include a lot of the tweets that you sent in the book? well, i think it's important because any reasonable person reads them now, thinks they're perfectly■g to make that clear

there is i would challenge anyone to challenge anything. i said. i'm nice, i'm diplomatic. i'm restrained. i am never rude. i cite data most people now who are rational look at the things i posting. they're like, i don't get what was wrong with that. yeah, exactly. but i'm more free now to let the inside voice out, which is is freeing. it's liberating. i don't have to think what is somebody going to think? you know, i've also been called every name you can be called at 'm not afraid of what they'll call me. i laugh at it now, who are members of the woke mob that you refer to? well, there's various sort of cohorts. there are young employees, which is a small but punitive minority and so there's there's a cohort of employees who called me all manner of, you know, racist, bigot. q and on conspiracy theorist and

attempted to, you know, struggle session these ideas out of me struggle session yeah. it was like a struggle tour and i was briefed before the apology tour. but this is as brand president. yes, i was already president. i was told i need to do an apology tour. there's actually an email that prepared me for the apology tour that i found after i wrote the bo says, you need to prove you are one of us, not one of them, that you're one of the good gf the bad guys people think you are a racist. your q and on. they think you're a conspiracy theorist and an anti-vaxxer and you need to prove that you are not where did the racist part come in with your tweets about covid? i'll explain that. it's very convoluted, do it quickly. the idea was if you wanted the schools to open, which were disproportionate populated by black and brown you did not care about, black and brown children died.

rationale.he carnival rooted where q and on fall. i don't understand that. and i'm not sure q9 is real to this day. i can't explain the anti-vaccine part. are you vaccinated? which you talk about in the book? i am. and but i was. i want to be. i did it because it was mandated. why did you for your job? yeah. why did y not to. i looked at my risk profile. it was very, very unnecessary. me. other quote from the book. i'm not against capitalism. far from it. i'm against the charade that is social justice. i want to buy stuff because it's the best stuff on the market.

when me over with your excellence, i'll even pay more for it. i'll express my political affiliation with my vote, not my sneakers or soft drink of choice. yeah how can you walk through a crowd and identify people's political affiliations by what they're wearing or carryingy're wearing a you know, like a rainbow swoosh. swoosh is the nike symbol rainbow. it would be their pride month. you know, t shirt. yeah, i guess there's very few brands that express a cause that are aligned wi concern of it. i'm thinking apparel right now? i can't really think of apparel brands that are aligned. they're all left. that's why i have no job. are you financially secure because of your past employment? which is non■of yes, but i can't not work for

the rest of my life. i'm not kind of financially secure. i'm in no danger of my children going hungry and i need job. and you left the of san francisco after all this happened, correct? i did. i left the spring of 21 schools still showed no sign of opening. i had a kindergartner who had never set fo classroom. i have four children, but my kindergartner never been in a classroom. and i his first year of school, i didn't want to be such a disaster. i wanted him to have a■z good experience and have good feeling about school. so we moved to denver. our offices were closed, we were working virtually so that my son could attend school in person. why denver? few reasons. i a city. still, i wasn'tred to kind of move to the burbs or the i just wasn't ready. it was close enough san■l back a day, one day there and

back. and i still had some in-person meetings with my team and i like in colorado, there's a bit of a libertarian. it's very blue now, but they are very welcoming to all viewpoints. i've never felt afraid to raise anything, i think, and have an open, honest conversation with my neighbors and even the governor, jared polis, he's i mean, he's called himself a democratic. so i like that. jennifer, say, do you talk to anyone from levi's anymore? were you, as they say, shunned? i was shunned. i talked to a few people who have left since, who have reached out to me, since leaving. has anyone said sorry? no.■ñfk■@ do yhi a sorry? i do, but i'm not waiting one. how is it that you're able to write what you right here? did you not take a b india? no, i took no nda.

i was offered. so when i was told in■w januaryf 22 there was that i needed to leave. you need to go now. basically what they said you've lost the trust of the team and the eloyees. there's no room for you as a leader at this company. if you sign this nondisclosure agreement, we'll give you $1 million. that was the offer. i decided not to do that because i didn't want to sign a nondisclosure agreement so i could write this book not for the money.y, but because i thought it was so important to tell the story of censorship the fact is i relate it to my story in particular if we had been able collectively to an open and honest conversation about kids in schools and lockdowns, we would have reached very different decisions rather having an open conversation. people like me were demonized and deplatformed and that is verygerous. and is that. the fact that you were demonized

and deplatformed rather than having an open, honest the outcome of discussion might have been? that's the thing that drives you in a sense.■k now, yes, in this particular instance, i think if there had been a suicide city wide conversation with doctors and, you know, epidemiologists and not just sort of government led, talking points because there were people were censored. but if we were permitted to have a conversation, i think we would have reached a different answer, a right answer. and our children for close to 19 months. that caused lot of harm. and but even if we didn't reach that answer, we still need to have those on matters of public concern. you were demonized as well for what your husband, die correct. yeah, so a little misogynistic?

that's a good question. is all conjecture, but i don't think anybody was asking, you know, the ceo what his wife thought. but then again, his wife wasn't probably tweeting a lot like my husband waso but nobody was allt concerned about it. but he was not in favor of the lockdowns. your husband, not in favor. and he was making that known on social media. yes. he was very vocal. he was going to anti-lockdown rallies. i kept my two kids because ioug. you know, people everybody could get behind. we don't want to harm children. my husband was outspoken more about a range of issues pertaining covid. any other more aggressive and challenging tone than i do. but you know what? he doesn't work there. who cares? but apparently if you have a relative that has a viewpoint the company doesn't like, then you don't get to work there anymore. and i just hope everybody what n and he's a trump voter. he's not. but what if he was?

does that mean i can't have a job at levi's is that the world we want to live in? did you know any conservative republicans voted for donald trump atnow not part of the com? no, i will will tell you. i mean, the the headquarters are in was a matter of like, did you vote for the mainstream candidate or the further like, were you a bernie or a bounds ad acceptable. there no republicans but we had an office texas we had distributioniddle of the countrm very certain that there were lots of folks in those locales trump i am very certain they did not feel comfortable saying that or making that known their friends and colleagues back to levi's unbutton yet as i write this, i'm still puzzling over

where i think the lines it for o move beyond employees to taking overtly political stands beyond? the walls of the company still, that line is it's pretty clear when we, along with justice, about every large corporation ie capitalism. summer of 2020. what are we talking about? we're talking about the blm rallies and they accelerate in sort of denunciation of privilege and vowing to fight racism, the rush to hire, you know, heads of deep divisions, hundreds of people elevate our power and influence in these companies. i have no issue with inclusion. this is not inclusion. if it were inclusive, why does it matter what i say and te for out of work, which, by the way, helps the people they say they care about the the student population in san

francisco public schools is desperate. bl brown. so it all just, you know, so many stories of and fired in thr of 2020 for some errant comment from ten years prior. that is somehow in today's context perceived as not anti racist enough. there was a witch hunt going on. well, speaking of that, do you think you could have withstood this■ú■f if you hadn't been in gymnastics in that fire, in that cauldron for, well, 12, 15 years and had that pressure on i mean, i don't think having competed in gymnastics withstood is sufficient because, look, all my peers, you know, i think i will say this. so when i wrote my first book about gymnastics, the was a to blowback there, albeit in a narrower community in the sports community, the olympic

movement. i was really vilified and draggedultimately was redeemed. it took ten years, but i was everybody came around and said john was right. that i held close to me. you know, i felt clear eyed about what i was saying and what the data i was logical and rational and i thought people are go emotional right now but their catch up i believe that's true still it just i did not beat the clock. you know, i lost my job before that happened you you bring up t you see is hypocritical behavior by elite rest yeah especially when it comes to schools yeah i mean the crazy rt is i don't know how schools and covert and locked it shouldn't have been political we about the children it became a sort of woke pillar of the

democratic party platform i think in our zeal to office, you know, i think that is what started it. and then it just became part of the ether and even though biden won, it kept going, going and going. and the harms became so great that it just became suncor fallacy. we couldn't admit thatt so we're atrocious policies. i think. but yeah, so th■9ere was hycrisn on the part of the senior executives who were all do you know, going to their vacation homes and doing whatever they wanted and claiming all in this together which waseir kids weree school or pods and they're flying to europe, hawaii. but you had the the workers hours that wasn't the case for them but it was like a frenzy in there it was s uniform people believed. and i think by doing bully people believe they were fighting the good fight.

i mean, that's what this was all about, right? you could stay home and do nothing. feel like the most virtuous person in the world who doesn't want to feel virtuous for doing nothing. and you lkwarriors, which i usei would push back on that. but what is a keyboard warrior danger of a person like that? the keyboard warrior moniker is used for the very online people who justy online, you know, thk they're doing good activist oriented because they're, you to take good people down. i get accused of it because, you know guess ultimately my active twitter is at least part of my demise. but i as i said, i was doing all these other things. i was attending every school board meetin school board recall in san francisco, which successful i led rallies. so i was a real life warrior to

do y sll tweet from at jennifer sey? i do and what do you tweet about life covered. i treat a tweet i well i don't really have any rules for myself anymore. so i get to tweet about whatever i nt i definitely talk a lot about the impact to children. i don't want anyone to forget about this. it cannot happen again. our kids are suffering. this has impacted a generation of children. i tweet about issues of, you know, censorship, other various illiberaling right now in country. i don't know anything that teres me in the news with the benefit of a little bit of hindsight and time, would you change anything that you did during this period? no no, i think i did the right thing and i was true to myself. and so i you know, i try to be

grateful that i have the to say anything i want. there's nothing anyone can do. i'm not hurt by the■l names. they call me now. so i don't regret any of it. yeah. who's chris and what happened? chris is? my brother. we used to be close, so i thought we did not agree on code an policy he was a fervent lock down. i was a pretty passionate anti-lockdownbeginning, like thr we talked about our disagreement. but it became too fraught and we haven't spoken several years, two or three years at this point. he, his wife is a doctor and he finds my views to be dangerously critical doctors. i find the position that not

doctor took individually but, that doctors in public health took collectively to be dangerous and a violation of our civil liber unbuttoned. jennifer se writes i unlike some have no real issue with rich people. that's capit few, will make a lot of money. what i do have an issue with is rich masquerading as fierce empe advocates. while they are laying off 15% of their workforce at the same time as they are adding tens of of dollars to their bank accounts. they can't have it both ways. yeah. i don't like hypocrites. people call me a grifter, don't know how they get that, but i'm not a hypocrite. i stand by my word. there's noft in what i'm doing. what's. what's the grift part? i'm trying to. i don't know. it's a stupid thing people say online. they somehow think getting like

money for taking these stances that i could not authentically believe in the things saying, of course, i believe in them. why would i give up everything? i gave up a lucrative career. i u the job had, but this future job of ceo which is what have been an incredibl y i'd worked in 23, 24 years, a brand i love and where a brand i'd worn since i was a child. i mean, the money is cash, $43 million of stock. i gave that up so i could use my voice. isn't, i think it's incomprehensible to some people that you would give up money to sak the truth. it's so they think you must be getting paid by someone to do it. there's no one paying me. t6 say, levi's unbuttoned is the name of the book the woke mob took my job but gave me my voice

latest news about the publishing industry with interesting insider interviews with publishing industry experts. on current nonfiction authors and books. the latest book reviews, and we'll talk about the current nonfiction books featured on c-span book tv. and welcome to about books. now in a few author brad meltzer about his popular children's series ordinary people change the world. it's the 10th anniversary of that book series. but first, here's some of the latest news from the publishing world.