She Was Twelve, Ghanaian, and Already Planning for Medical School.
Then a Teacher Read Her Writing Out Loud.
Nothing Went According to Plan After That.

The Bozoma Saint John Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"There is a structural pattern to the people who really change your trajectory... Each one names something in you that you hadn't quite seen in yourself."

- David Begnaud to Bozoma Saint John

Thirty Seconds Into the Interview, Bozoma Was In Tears. We Had Only Said the Teacher's Name.

She got to Colorado Springs at twelve. What she knew about Africa was that it was a magnificent place with history and richness and culture, something to be admired. Her classmates knew what they had seen on television - the children with flies on their eyes and distended bellies, worth a cent a day. Those images were on her classmates' refrigerators at home. "When they would come to school, they would look at me and only see the image of that desolate person who had nothing to contribute to the planet except to beg."

Her family did not bend to it. Her father was a reverend with a double PhD in ethnomusicology who had played clarinet in the Ghana Army; her mother was a fashion designer by trade. They did not allow the usual assimilation - including American names. "I come from people who know exactly who they are." They were equally emphatic about education. Four daughters, each with her own academic lane. Bozoma's was math and science, with Latin picked up alongside it, plus track and cheerleading. She knew she was going to be a doctor at twelve, because that was the path set out for her. She has written since about not being able to find the line between what she wanted for herself and what her parents wanted for her.

Then came eleventh-grade English. The assignment was to write about yourself in a different location - imagine yourself somewhere else, and write it in third person, as if it were somebody else. She used metaphor and what she calls flowery language to describe the environment and the things this other Bozoma would want to be doing. Miss Wood held it up in class and read it out loud. Bozoma was terrified.

It was not the attention. It was that creative work has no right answer. In math or science or Latin, she says, you got it right or you got it wrong; there is no in between. Here, somebody could listen and decide it wasn't good. She was in eleventh grade, five years into living in the country, writing in a language that was not her first, hearing it read to classmates who had at one time made fun of her accent - and who came from a place where people would pretend not to understand her father when he spoke to a congregation. The room was silent.

She stayed pre-med at Wesleyan and added English, and then African American studies - Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, W. E. B. Du Bois. She also carries a line from her father, delivered at the top of a talk he gave at a church he was visiting: don't concentrate on the way that I pronounce words, concentrate on the message. "It never left me, because I understood how people can turn off when they see someone or hear someone that they think is not like them."

▶ Watch on YouTube: Miss Wood, and the assignment that changed the plan - ~7:25

A Hostess Cupcake Instead of a Wedding Cake. She Says It Is Still the Best Yes She Ever Gave.

They married in 2003. Peter was six foot five, white, from Worcester, Massachusetts, out of a very strong Italian Catholic family in which no one had married outside the community. Her father was also determined that this was not the relationship he would expect of his eldest and very proud Ghanaian daughter. The pressure was not something they invented, she says - it came from outside. They would walk down the street in New York City, one of the most diverse cities on the planet, and still get pummeled with comments and looks.

Their first daughter, Eve, was born early after Bozoma developed preeclampsia, and died. Nobody had prepared them for the possibility; people talk about glowing and preparing a nursery, not about the dangers. "Instead of facing the world together and saying, hey, look, we're united, we're married, we love each other - we started looking at each other and saying, but isn't it your fault that this happened?" They had called themselves Team Peeboz, for Peter and Boz; she told David she had never said it out loud before. Three months after Eve died she was pregnant with Lael, against her doctor's advice and against Peter's. David asked whether she hoped a new child would put the relationship back together. She said no, and she was blunt about it: she was in too deep a grief about lost motherhood to be concerned with the relationship. The pregnancy did not lift the depression - it made it worse. She describes her daughter Lael's birth as terror and anger and grief, with a little bit of joy when she looked at her, followed immediately by fear. A year later she asked for a separation.

They were still separated when Peter was diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma in May 2013. Both of their mothers had battled breast cancer and survived; her own mother was in treatment for a second cancer while Peter was sick. They had a full plan to fight. In October, his oncologist said it was not going to work - it was terminal. And Peter asked her to put the divorce aside. You took vows. You said till death. So what are you going to do?

He proposed again - sixty pounds lighter than the first time, his hair gone, his jacket no longer fitting. She said yes again. They watched their wedding video and ate a Hostess cupcake instead of a wedding cake. She has pictures of it. She calls it probably the best yes she ever said. Peter died four days before his forty-fourth birthday. What she remembers from the receiving line at his funeral is people telling her he died so young, and agreeing with them, and being furious anyway - because she knew the things he had wanted to do. He loved wine. He collected it. He wanted to open a wine shop, and he was busy climbing the ladder in his career and never got to it. She still has some of his bottles.

That is where the "urgent life" came from, and she is precise that it does not mean a fast life. It means an intentional one: if there is something she wants to do, it might take a year or it might take twelve, but nobody gets to distract her off the path. The bucket list she and Peter kept was not Kilimanjaro or the Sahara. It was go eat gelato. Let me make him his last lasagna. Things get simple very quickly. She had heard a version of the same thing at twenty-two, at a funeral in Geneva for her college boyfriend Ben - an artist with more ideas than he could ever execute, who died by suicide - where everyone talked about what he was going to do. Her fear, she says, is not of dying young, and it is not about the list. "I think it's the fear of not having had an impact."

▶ Watch on YouTube: Peter, Eve, and the birth of the urgent life - ~17:05

She Was Answering His Phones. She Gave Him Notes on His Script. The Whole Office Went Silent.

Medical school was supposed to follow a gap year. She moved to New York after college, signed up for temp work, and landed at Spike Lee's company on her very first placement. The job was answering phones. She saw him carrying something under his arm - the script for Bamboozled - and asked to read it. She came back with notes.

"My notes were wrong. Let me start there." They were about character development and what she took for deficiencies in the dialogue. She didn't have the context for the story he was actually trying to tell; in hindsight she says the things she said were ridiculous. He read them, went into his office and slammed the door. She sat perched on the edge of her seat waiting to be fired, the office quiet enough to hear a pin drop, everybody shocked. Then he came out: you made some good notes, you can stay. She does not think he meant the notes were good. She thinks he appreciated her critical thinking, and the gumption to tell him even if he disagreed - that he saw someone who would challenge the status quo even when the status quo was supposed to be more knowledgeable than her.

Then Beyoncé and Pepsi. Bozoma told Spike to pitch her, and his senior staff laughed. She did not hesitate, and she says she understood exactly why they laughed: the Billboard charts said a woman coming out of a girl group would not succeed, she wanted to act, and that transition can be turbulent. The articles being written at the time compared her to other artists and said she wasn't going to make it. But Bozoma had watched Carmen: A Hip Hopera, and what she loved was the collision - opera, which she came to through her Latin education, and hip hop, which she had studied and taught a class about. "I didn't think I was doing anything outrageous when I suggested it to Spike. I just wanted him to take a look at her." Spike thought she was brilliant too. The campaign recreated the MTV set in Times Square, Naked Cowboy included. It was the first campaign Pepsi had meant for an African American audience that translated far beyond that audience. When Pepsi asked whose idea Beyoncé had been, Spike told them: she did. Bozoma came in as an assistant brand manager on multicultural marketing and rose to head of music and entertainment marketing across all beverages.

They are still great friends. Years later at Uber, when the creative community had decided the company was a pariah, she called Spike and told him her whole job depended on turning the brand around. He reminded her he had told her not to take that job - and then did the work by collaborating with the brand. When she got to Netflix and he signed an overall deal, the dynamic was different: now she was the one advocating for him and building marketing plans around his projects. At her induction into the hall of achievement for her marketing work, Spike recorded a testimonial saying that back then, he knew that someday he would work for her.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The script notes, the slammed door, and pitching Beyoncé - ~30:59

Every Review Said Be Less. He Was the First Boss Who Ever Said Be More.

Two notes turned up at the bottom of her yearly reviews, and she says they were always the same two. One: she was intimidating to her colleagues - too passionate, too loud, too opinionated. Two: that she thought she had brand Bozoma. No, you work at Pepsi. No, you work at Apple. No, you work at Uber. No, you work at Netflix. It was confusing to her. "I would never go to a hairstylist who had a f***ed up haircut. So why would you trust a marketer who couldn't market themselves?" She had been in the room when Jack Dorsey came to present Twitter at Pepsi, and signed up for a username right there. She says she never wanted to be a celebrity - she wanted to test. If she thought she could make a funny campaign, she'd do a little skit and see whether people laughed. If she wanted something tear-jerking or inspiring, she'd tell a story about herself on socials and watch how people reacted, and then apply the learnings.

He asked for more, not less. Be a maximalist. Come to Endeavor - I've got this enormous group of brands and I don't know how to get them all pointed in the same direction, so come with all of the things you are, add yourself to the mix, and create whatever that thing is that you do over here. And by the way, I'm getting you an agent for TV, and a speaker's agent, and you should have a book, because you are also the star.

She wants people to know something about Ari, because his reputation is complicated. She sat in the boardroom in front of all the top agents and watched him cry because a client hadn't gotten recognition for a role, and rail at his own people - but why? did you call them back? did you call them again? did you tell them what they did? The reputation for being hard or mad comes out of caring, she says. He wants them to succeed and he won't take it lying down. At PepsiCo she had been advised to keep her nails short and without color, because that isn't what an executive looks like. Ari sent her a whole nail kit for her birthday.

David asked whether she has ever felt imposter syndrome. She said no, and explained what she thinks it is: the fear that you don't have what the rest of the room expects you to have. She doesn't pretend to have it. "I'm here because I have this. And this is really great. And so if you don't think it's great, that's okay. But I'm not even gonna pretend that I have the thing that you think I should have that I don't have." She walked into Netflix at the start of the pandemic, subscribers arriving at a historic pace, and was asked to navigate the changes - and she wasn't afraid she couldn't do it, because she understands consumerism, and television, and content. That started as survival: a kid who needed to know John Elway's stats so she'd have something to say at the lunch table and they wouldn't make fun of her.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The reviews that said "be less," and the boss who said "be more" - ~51:48

Three People Believed in Her. She Says That Was Only Half of It.

The episode opens on a line she comes back to in the middle of it: "Somebody can believe in you, but unless you believe in what they are saying to you about you, it doesn't happen." She walked David through the rest of it. It can land on you, and unless you let it sink in, and unless you then let that turn into action - which nobody can do for you - it doesn't happen. She credits the inflection points to the people in her life, and the rest to her own nature, which allowed her to believe what they were saying and therefore act.

David's last question was what she would say to the younger Bozoma if she were sitting in the host's chair. She said it was simple, actually.

Asked to expand on it, she said that even though she has marched to the beat of her own drum for a long time, she has wasted a lot of time contemplating other people's opinions. She talks about her intuition and about following it, about not writing pro and con lists, about not asking people for their opinions on her life - and people tell her anyway. She sticks to her guns, and she still turns their doubt and their criticism over. "I wish I wouldn't waste so much time on it. Cause I'm right."

▶ Watch on YouTube: What she'd tell her younger self - ~1:00:09

"Somebody can believe in you, but unless you believe in what they are saying to you about you, it doesn't happen."