Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

It sounded like such a sweet gig.  I’d have to take a few days off from the farm, but I’d get to travel to the Pacific Northwest where I’d advise for a living history project about meat production and cooking during the Pioneer days.  

“So we just need you to answer a few more questions, then we’ll schedule another interview,” the woman on the other end of the call says.  “Would you call yourself an expert?”

I doodle my pen on the pad where I’m taking notes.  “An — expert?”

“Would you call yourself an expert in this area?”

“Well…” I prevaricate. “Ummm…well…I couldn’t walk into this job cold.  I’d want to do my research first.”

“But would you call yourself an expert?”

“Well, I’d really need to spend time looking at what was happening in those years in that region.  I’d need to know what the grazing was like, because I think you’re getting into the period of the Range wars…”

“But would you call yourself an expert?”

“And I’d need to know how that was impacting what was happening in a homesteading situation…”

“So would you say you’re an expert in this?”

I set my pen down and draw a breath.

“I’m a woman,” I finally quip.  “I’ve never call myself an expert.”

She has the good grace to laugh.  

Then I add, “If you’re asking if I have the experience to tackle this, then yes.  I have the experience.  I’ve researched the cookbooks from that time period, I’m familiar with the farming practices that were employed.  But I wouldn’t walk onto a job like that without doing extensive research.”

“Thank you, we’ll let you know.”

And that was that.  Door closed.  Opportunity gone.

Because I couldn’t unequivocally say “Yes. I’m an expert.”

“A Ph.D. is about the inquiry!”  Dad leans forward over cocktails before Sunday dinner as I retell the story.  “It’s about questioning yourself and pushing to learn more.  That’s what makes a true expert!  Not someone who spouts the same information over and over again and doesn’t think they have more to learn!”

“I think there’s a simple mathematical answer,” Jack tells me the following Saturday as I’m driving him back to college after we close the cafe.  Jack is majoring in math and computer science.  Of course he would know of a  mathematical answer. “An expert has at least 10,000 hours of experience.  Do you have 10,000 hours experience with meat and cooking?”  We do a quick tally — 2,500 hours roughly to research and test recipes for the cookbooks, 5000 hours as chef for the cafe, another 3,600 or so working with meat customers and troubleshooting their culinary questions, 7488 hours personal time in the kitchen experimenting and cooking meat, about 1000 hours working in cutting rooms, plus the years spent on our farm, the years spent working on the farm up the road who’s inhabitants had been on that land since 1906; plus those years spent studying agriculture in grad school.  We stop adding when I cross 18,000 hours.  According to Jack’s quantitative methodology, I crossed that “expert” mark ages ago.

But I couldn’t say it.  I couldn’t say, “I’m an expert.”

I’m considering this yesterday afternoon while I’m out with my friend Bethany, on a short hike up Panther Creek.  We stand down by the water and marvel how the flow has altered…yet again.  Panther Creek seems to change her morphology from week to week in the decades I’ve known her.  Bethany has Muck boots and can cross, but I’ve only worn my hiking shoes.  The flow is fast, and we want to cross to the other side, where a beam of sunlight is warming the rocks.  

Bethany lives only ten minutes from my house.  But it has taken me months to come down and see her.  During the first weeks of January, as we were reviewing the farm books and taking inventory, I figured out that the farm’s website, SapBushFarmStore.com, had never been optimized for search engines when we launched it at the start of the pandemic.  We lost labor and had to pull out of our farmers market, and we moved our entire farm inventory online.  It was the digital equivalent of opening a shop on the back forty and never telling anyone it existed and never installing a road to get to it.  Our faithful customers beat a path to it anyhow, but in January we finally figured out why we weren’t seeing new customers.  We had disappeared off the web.   I pushed aside dates with friends, and I spent the bare minimum of time in the kitchen.  If I wasn’t down on the farm helping, I was burning my eyes on a computer screen, updating keywords, adding text to describe images, building landing pages, and editing text for search results.  It didn’t matter what my expertise was.  This had to get done, and I had to learn on the fly.

“Your site is a mess,” a man tells me over a call  

Some time in March, when I didn’t think I could bear to spend one more minute in front a computer screen, I set up a call with a man who was recommended to us to help with our digital marketing efforts.  “I mean, you need to just throw this out.  You need to build a whole new site.  And you need to leave your current sales platform.  You need to switch to Shopify.”

I’m writing madly as he speaks.  But I stop. 

“Shopify?  Are you serious?  I left Shopify at the start of the pandemic because they couldn’t accommodate the business properly.  Our current platform is the only one I’ve found that can handle our diverse needs.”

“Yeah.  You need Shopify.  You can’t be on Square.  Shopify is what you need.  And you need to get rid of everything here.  Then we need to do a S.W.O.T. analysis and come up with a high-impact marketing plan.”

My hands shake.  I’d spent So.Much.Time. correcting everything on this site, trying to get it more operational.  And here is someone I’ve never met telling me it was all garbage, that I had to go back to the way we were doing things four years ago, even though I’d determined that the prior system wasn’t a match.  

“Do you….Do you….Do you know how to work with any other platforms?  Or are you only familiar with Shopify?”

“Well, of course I can work with other platforms.  It’s just that Shopify is the best.  If you want to do this right, that’s how we’ll proceed.  But.  You know.  That’s all up to you.  I mean, I don’t want to scare you or anything, but you could be really successful.  You just have to decide.”

I thank him for his time, disconnect from the call and burst into tears.  “What an ASSHOLE!”  I scream up at the ceiling.  “And he spoke with so much authority, I nearly BELIEVED him!”  Saoirse, who was quietly doing coursework at the counter beside me during the conversation, slowly closes her laptop and wraps me in a hug.  

“Mom,” she speaks softly.  “I think that man might call himself an expert.”

And she’s really got me thinking.  I’m reminded of a book I picked up on remainder several years ago by Sally Gelgesen and Marshall Goldsmith, How Women Rise.  It outlines twelve behaviors that typically keep women stuck in the work place.  The first three are:

1. Reluctance to claim your achievements
2. Expecting others to spontaneously notice and reward your contributions
3. Overvaluing expertise

I never thought that described me. But now I’m thinking differently.  Maybe it’s a mistake women like me make, but the consequences for stepping out and proclaiming our competency  are more severe.  In Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear…and Why, journalist Sady Doyle chronicles the stories of women who succeed in the public eye, and then, as author Elise Loehnen observes, get “gunned down for flying to high.” In her own book On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good, author Elise Loehnen observes, “We must be likable and unthreatening enough to ensure everyone else feels comfortable – our power must be cushioned…When you win or stand out, be modest, even embarrassed, ideally a little ashamed.  Then deflect.  A girl who is “full of herself” will have no friends”(88).

This idea of the EXPERT – Who gets to award the title, or claim the title, and who feels entitled to brandish it, gnaws at me all spring.  

Until I see this April 8th story in the New York Times: How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I.

In it, I learn what it takes to feed the maw of artificial intelligence:  Online information – “news stories, fictional works, message board posts, Wikipedia articles, computer programs, photos, podcasts and movie clips – has increasingly become the lifeblood of the booming A.I. industry,” the authors explain. “Creating innovative systems depends on having enough data to teach the technologies to instantly produce text, images, sounds and videos that resemble what a human creates….The most prized data, A.I. researchers said, is high-quality information, such as published books and articles, which have been carefully edited by professionals.”

Wait.  What?

I read it again and try to wrap my head around it.

It doesn’t matter whether or not I’m an expert.  Whatever my area of expertise, if I’ve written about it, if it has gone online, if I’ve published about it….It’s nothing more than food for artificial intelligence.  

I grab my phone, open my ChatGPT app and ask it the one thing I’d never have to ask a search engine or artificial intelligence: 

Can you tell me how to properly cook a grass-fed rib eye steak?

Within seconds, my phone is rumbling away as ChatGPT hammers out a complete article on how to properly cook a grass-fed rib eye steak. 

I read closely.  I see a few words that look like they’re taken from things I’ve written in the past.   And I see the ideas of other chefs and farmers.  Nothing is cited, of course.  

And I realize something.  

18,000 hours of expertise, and everything I could offer on a living history consulting gig about meat, cooking and livestock production could probably be generated in a few seconds by this free app on my phone.

Who cares who’s an expert? 

I read ChatGPT’s instructions carefully.  It really does speak with a lot of authority.  But there are definitely culinary errors.  Of course, in an effort to safeguard my now nearly extinct claim on expertise, I’m not going to report where ChatGPT got it wrong…Just suffice to say, If ChatGPT is doing the cooking, please don’t invite me to dinner if you’re having grass-fed rib eyes.  

And so, here I am, back beside the stream with Bethany, contemplating the changing flow of the water, how the land and the rocks cause it all to shift; how the water just keeps flowing around it.  That doesn’t change the fact that she and I want to get to that patch of sunlight on the other side.  So we study the flow, identify the easiest new crossing point, and find rocks to drop into place, creating a fresh bridge to step over.  We are two women with the world changing around us, and still we manage to pick our way across to sit in the sun.

Our new bridge won’t last long.  One good rain storm and the rocks will tumble, or the course of the creek will change once more, and the work we did will be irrelevant.

The same will happen for the 18000 hours  — whether I’m supplanted by a man who speaks more authoritatively, or a robot, or someone else who takes my knowledge and figures out how to do one better.  Either way, the accumulation of my knowledge and experience is as ephemeral as the current path of this water flowing over these rocks.  

And yet  That doesn’t stop my curiosity.  Maybe I have 18000 hours invested into becoming an expert on meat and livestock.  But when I’ve learned everything I need to know there (which I haven’t yet), there’s always music theory, and jazz improvisation, and how to write a good novel (I’m pretty sure I’ve nailed the skills on how to write a bad one…for the record), or the next new recipe I want to try, or the next book I see in the library.  Maybe ChatGPT is still hungry for more knowledge and  will continue to displace experts.  But I’m still learning, too. 

For further reading:

How Women Rise, by Sally Helgesen & Marshall Goldsmith.  2018.  Hatchette Books.

On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good, by Elise Loehnen. 2023. The Dial Press (Division of Penguin Random House).

How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I., by Cade Metz, Cecilia King, Sheri Frankel, Stuart A. Thompson and Nico Grant.  April 6, 2024, New York Times.

 

If you enjoyed this, please share this podcast with friends & family to get the ideas to spread.  Better still, you can help make the magic happen for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes.  Or, if it’s easier, you can also donate to support the podcast by sending a check to Shannon Hayes, ℅ Sap Bush Hollow Farm, 832 W. Fulton Rd, West Fulton, NY  12194.

And that’s a really important thing to do, because all of this— the podcast, the blog, the books and the creative recharging that happens over fall and winter—   are a result of the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Tricia Park and Anne Bogart.  Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you! 

Interested in learning more about Sap Bush Hollow Farm?  You can find it online here.