I am squeaky with excitement.

This week I interviewed a personal hero of mine– Jes Baker.

If you missed it, here’s what went down:

Mike Jeffries, CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, said some of the meanest, most hateful, dumb-ass things a CEO could say.  About cool kids and fat kids, and about who gets to be considered beautiful.  (Only anorexic airbrushed teenagers, basically.)

It ignited a firestorm of fury across the internet, but Jes decided that instead of getting flustered, she’d get brilliant.

She created a series of photos riffing on A&F’s familiar advertising campaigns.  Not only are the photographs gorgeous, they’re an astute skewering of the way we’re used to seeing beauty.

I was so moved– not just by the elegance of her response to a jerk, but by how eloquently she called into question our cultural assumptions around womanhood, femininity, and power.

If you haven’t seen her original post, you can read the letter she wrote and see all the photographshere.  Within days she was on The Today Show, CNN, the BBC, everywhere.  Within weeks she was organizing a national conference, The Body Love Conference.

I watched, rapt.

With a few photographs and a single blog post, this young woman changed the course of an international conversation around beauty and our bodies.  She tipped the power scale against a giant, mean-spirited corporation.  She spoke up for every single woman on this planet.

I was rabidly curious about how she made this happen– so quickly!  so beautifully!  so bravely!  How did she do it????

I was dying to know.

So I reached out to her, and she graciously let me interview her.  I asked her about fear, about taking action, and about turning a good idea into something real and world-changing.

You can listen to our whole conversation here— it’ll trickle into your soul and feed you.