Amrit Tietz: DJ and Co-Founder of Spread the Jelly

22:42Amrit Tietz:And so I got to a really good place towards the end of things. And that also enabled me to save and have enough of a comfort level to transition over. But, you know, COVID happened and the world shut down for two years. No music jobs were happening. So there's planning, but you never know. Talk to me a little bit about making the transition to DJing full time. How did you think through sort of your time spent and getting more work? There was a lot of strategy behind the approach. So some things were for alignment, some things were for the check, some things were for the consistency. So, you know, I had residencies from the Soho houses and the hotels, things like that.

23:25Amrit Tietz:Ace Hotel, Soho Grand Hotel. Those are two places who were regularly programming at the time. So I had residencies and consistent checks, and then I would have sort of the alignment gigs, which I would be doing more so to be considered in that space. And then I would have consistent brand clients. And eventually those alignment gigs paid off and is kind of the space that I am in now today. Wait, what's an alignment gig? It was the Dior, the Prada, the Tiffany's, the Nike. It was, you kind of do it to get in. And And I thankfully turned those people into clients, consistent clients. But at the time, you don't have that much to negotiate with when you really just want an in.

24:05Amrit Tietz:And I would open for bigger DJs. I would say like, hey, I'll do the first hour for you and I'll do it for pretty much next to nothing just to get in, just to show I'm capable and I'm hireable and desirable and I can read the room and I can bring the right type of people to an event. And it's just really showing, proving your work and worth. So how much do you think your music background of, you know, like from the performance side and the school side and all that, how much did that inform your ability to be an excellent DJ? Or are they unrelated? No, they're very much related. Openness to finding new music and really kind of understanding how everything came from jazz.

24:48Amrit Tietz:And so the understanding of that and the history and the theory of all of that definitely very much influences all the work I do today. And even when I'm collaborating with a designer or a show or an artist and they have specific references, having such a wide musical knowledge and being familiar with different genres and different styles, things like that. I might not necessarily have such of a vast kind of knowledge had I not spent five, six years of my life just focusing on that. Because it is easy if you're a club DJ or a festival DJ, it's easy to just stay focused in that lane of what's working right now.

25:27Amrit Tietz:But sometimes when I'm scoring something and we want to pull from the 70s or the 60s or classical string music, I have those references and I'm familiar and comfortable pulling from them. So I do think that's something I find very helpful in work today. And it's interesting time now with TikTok culture. You see these resurgences of old bands and old samples and mashups happening, but a lot of people don't have the reference points to that. I think I saw someone the other day on Twitter, they were like, Frank Ocean's Moon River. And people were like, Frank Ocean's Moon River. But, you know, so I think having a more thorough background is always helpful.

26:10So in addition to all of the DJ work, you also have original music and create original music for film and TV productions and the whole gamut. How did you get into that side of things? And when you look at the scope of the music work, do you have aspects that you like better than others? Like, oh, if I could only do X, I would be super into it. Or do you like having an assortment of things to draw from and work on?

26:39Amrit Tietz:Yeah, I didn't intentionally set out to move into film and TV ever. I was always just creating music, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. And then because COVID forced live music to slow down, I took a lot of that music that I might have toured or performed or promoted in a different way. And I gave it a second life. and I was trying to use it in some way and give it relevancy. And I found I really enjoyed doing that. And I love seeing the collaboration between my music and film and TV. It's a medium I love so much and very cool to watch a show and have my song be in it. I wasn't intentionally making it that way.

27:20Amrit Tietz:And my manager at the time, she connected me to a really great publishing licensing agency who do all the sync work. So I don't work directly with the productions. They kind of have a bank of available music and they'll say, we're looking for XYZ. They also never tell you. So a lot of the times you're playing Nancy Drew, they'll send a brief saying, hey, this is being considered for this HBO TV show by Mindy Kaling. And then I'm like, okay, it's Sex Lives of College. You know, you're figuring it out because they never want to give you the details until the job's confirmed. So a lot of the time you're getting put up for these jobs.

27:54Amrit Tietz:You don't really know what it's for either. And then my husband always teases me because I lack a lot of American cultural references. So I had one of my songs in the Mighty Ducks remake, and I admitted to him I'd never seen the film, the original films. So then we watched all of that. So it's funny because it just kind of manifests in unexpected but really beautiful ways. I love that. We've touched on the pandemic a little bit. Obviously, that disrupted everyone's world, to put it mildly. How did it impact you and your career? And sort of what did you figure out during that time period? Hilary, I ended up hosting a dating show on this shopping platform called Network.

28:33Amrit Tietz:And it all stemmed from sharing dating experiences online and just posting silly memes about dating culture. And I also had an endless amount of time. I was bored. I broke third wall. I was speaking to my camera, which, you know, before that, I never really utilized social media in that way. I was really just posting, touring, gigs, and just so music focused. And suddenly that went away. It shifted to me what I was cooking at home, what I was wearing for a first date, books I was reading. And then that kind of evolved because someone from their team who was building out original content wanted to discuss this idea of hosting a dating show.

29:14Amrit Tietz:And we did two seasons. It was really fun. And eventually we kind of moved into different directions and that became a short-lived podcast. And then I kind of knew I wanted to do storytelling in a different platform. And then, you know, it was always kind of storytelling at the core. Everything evolved. People always talk about pivoting with my career, but I actually don't feel like I've pivoted at all. I've always been a storyteller and the mediums just always changed. First it was in music, then it was through brand collaboration, still is through brand collaboration. Did it in sustainability, now in motherhood.

29:45Amrit Tietz:it's always just connection and community. But the dating thing was really funny because I'd never really been a very public person in that way. It was always kept my private life offline, still due to a degree. I'm not always posting my child. My husband's relatively offline. I don't post family as a role, like extended family. So sharing that was a new experience for me. And ultimately I don't think it's for me. And I got approached to a lot of reality after that. And that just wasn't the space I wanted to go into. I shared and then I felt like it was enough sharing. I get it. And you're allowed to change your mind.

30:21Like that's the beauty of all of this. So talk to me about your newest venture, Spread the Jelly, which I absolutely love. I think what you're doing is incredible. For anyone who doesn't know, you have to go and check it out immediately. It's an independent online platform that's dedicated to modern motherhood in a way that actually feels like cool and aspirational and relatable. And the folks who are featured, the storytelling, like it's so good. So talk to me a little bit about what the idea was for starting it and how you actually like got something up and running.

31:06Amrit Tietz:First of all, what a big compliment to get from a pioneer in legacy media. So thank you. I'm honored. I was the first of my friends to have kids. Immediate friendship circle. It was tough. And also, especially when you live in these cities like New York and LA and family aren't around and you're struggling. I saw so many people experiencing similar alone and isolated. And I obviously read the books and I went on the websites and I got as much information as I could. deep dives on Reddit, but it never felt peer to peer. It was either expert driven or do this, do that. This is the best way to parent.

31:44Amrit Tietz:This is the best way to advocate for yourself in the birthing situation. But it was never lifestyle focused. And it's hard to know who you can trust when you're reading, you know, an anonymous online forum with 35 ,000 people. And it's, you don't understand the context of everything. Do they have a lifestyle similar to me? I remember when we had Sophia Rowe on the platform, she talks about how she didn't want to look at baby registries from anybody that didn't live in the city because, you know, it's just unrealistic that your registry would apply to my life. And so much of parenting and motherhood is like that.

32:17Amrit Tietz:I found the way people approached me when I started sharing motherhood, the shift was so dramatic. I had an identity crisis. It's like, you're a mom now. Everything else was dismissed. People would ask me, what are you going to do after you become a mom? Are you still going to DJ. And you would never ask a man that question, by the way, you would never ask a dad if he would keep working or keep doing what he spent his entire life building towards. And so caring and mothering is so undervalued, especially in America. And there wasn't anywhere that for me, I felt like aspirational versions of that lived.

32:53Amrit Tietz:And it wasn't reduced to just parenting or fear mongering or you should be doing this you should be doing that and a lot of the parenting and motherhood you know information I was consuming was also making me feel worse because it felt like I was never doing enough and I didn't know enough and couldn't remember the birthing class or anything like that and Lauren and I have always been friends my co-founder I DJ'd her wedding I met her husband when he was at Vice he actually licensed one of my songs for show he was producing. Yeah, we clicked and she's a year ahead of me in parenting. And so I was looking at my wider network of who do I know that's doing this that does it in a way that feels aspirational to me.

33:34Amrit Tietz:She's a mom, but it's not her entire identity. She has kept all the elements of herself that I would love for myself. She does things. She's integrated her child into her life in a way that feels relatable to me. And so I reached out to her and just wanted to reconnect and we reconnected over motherhood. And we eventually both agreed on how sort of out of touch motherhood was presented and diminished. And it didn't really tell the full spectrum of what it was like and womanhood in general, actually. Because it's so often gets really kid centric and baby centric. And you're like, where is mom in all of this?

34:13I always found that really challenging where it's like, why when one of my friends when anyone I know has a kid like how's baby great but like how are you because no one

34:23Amrit Tietz:asks about mom no one and of course they're your priority but you still matter your stories still matter your experiences still matter and we've so often been relinquished to xx's mom right and we're still as diverse and interested in all the other things art sex culture politics and it felt so dismissive to me to only relegate them to this mom title. And the cool thing about the talent we feature, personally, I feel like they're so interesting. The motherhood thing is just one of the many, many cool things they do. We wanted to celebrate that. And so Lauren and I were sort of sharing, I had a tough pregnancy.

35:01Amrit Tietz:She had an amazing pregnancy. I love acknowledging that too, because there's so much fear mongering. You know, as soon as you're pregnant, people tell you want to tell you their horrible birth story. And we wanted to share all these diverse experiences and give it a home. And it didn't feel like it existed for us. And we were always kind of building this larger universe, but more so we knew that community was the crux of what we wanted to build. It's the most important thing we do. It's sharing stories and validating every experience. And the hundreds of interviews we've had have been radically different and there's no right way to do it.

35:34Amrit Tietz:Same with parenting. We wanted people to feel acknowledged and be able to cherry pick what resonated with them and be able to learn from something and say, that's not for me or I really relate to that or wow I've never heard anybody publicly talk about that and so much of motherhood is like that and it kind of feels like you don't really know until you're in it and I felt that way about my own personal experiences with pregnancy loss and preeclampsia and misdiagnosis with genetic testing and when I read the other stories too I learn so much. And so it's such a welcomed experience from everybody, not just mothers, because I think too, not to get so heavy into this, but the problem here in America is that motherhood is relegated to moms and we actually need everybody to participate.

36:21Amrit Tietz:So whether you have a child or not, we need, because we all benefit from motherhood, is to sort of have more empathy and awareness. And the only way we can do that is by sharing those stories. The cool thing about that is all my friends who don't have kids have showed up in a way that has really surprised me because I truly believe it's from reading these stories and really understanding what being a mom is like, because how would they know? I didn't know. I was a terrible friend to my mom friends before I had kids. Same. I didn't know. How would you know? When women share stories, it helps like, for example, I remember reading a story about someone who had gone through IVF.

36:57And even though my best friend had gone through that, I didn't really understand some of like the complexities of it until I read about it. And I just remember I was like sitting there crying, feeling like, oh my God, I wasn't there for you. Or like now I understand. And it's helped me show up as a better friend, understanding the wide range of it. And as someone who had a really difficult birth situation, both times, but definitely with my first, the mom community, like women will reach out to you, strangers, there's so much care there that women have for other women. And being able to really harness that community and show people there are lots of ways that you can do this, your experience is not unique in the best possible way.

37:40Like there's always going to be someone who knows what you have gone through. Like there's so much power and all of that. But the part that I like the best is, as you alluded to, it's a very well rounded picture of parenting. Like, yes, It's just one aspect of here's your birth story or here's this or here's whatever, but you see someone in the fullness of who they are. They're not just a parent. Parenting is one part of who they are. Now, you've mentioned Lauren. So for anyone who doesn't know, she is a creative director and a content strategist in her background. She's worked with brands like Reformation and Starface and Girlfriend Collective and more.

38:17as two creatives, I'm curious about what your process was like for getting Spread the Jelly off the ground and divvying up work, how you thought through who owns what.

38:31Amrit Tietz:That's a great question. That has evolved over time and shifted into unexpected ways. I've taken the lead on certain things we assumed she would and vice versa, because this is new for us So we're trying things out. We're learning along the way. We're both storytellers. We've always been driven through powerful stories. So the immediate aspect of casting, storytelling, booking photographers, getting all of that up and running, we were familiar with, thankfully. And Lauren is definitely visually driven. She sees things in a way that's so beautiful. Sometimes I'm like, I'm so sorry, I'm going to destroy this perfect mood board you've made or destroy this beautiful visual experience you've done.

39:11Amrit Tietz:And I'm kind of more of the functional, practical day-to-day. And she leads with big ideas and I kind of defer to executing a little bit, but it's very collaborative. And we're in such early stages, I would say that we work hand in hand on those things right now. There are certain things too where, you know, I make all of our social and in the beginning, in the early days, her background is in creative and content strategy. So we assumed she would take that lead, but I sort of enjoyed doing it more. And so we've shifted a little bit. We equally split the interviews. So we interview all of our talent that we feature.

39:48Amrit Tietz:And our amazing editorial director, Ana Maria, turns those into the pieces you see. We couldn't do it without her. She also writes our newsletter and supports some social copy. And so we have a team. And we just brought in someone to support on brand partnerships too. So we all kind of work collaboratively. we have weekly meetings and we're all new moms by the way so anna maria and the one who leads brand for us also just had babies so everybody has a radically different parenting and birth experience so pitching is a full team effort executing is we have our little work streams of you know brand writing more of the visuals of booking photographers concepting mood boards for shoots coming up with ideas on how to interface with talent and then more of like the subject type stuff.

40:37Amrit Tietz:We split all of that up. But I would say as a whole, we work pretty collaboratively because it's also such a personal thing for all of us. We all want the stories, we're interested in it to be told. So sometimes when one person really wants the future to come to life because we're a startup and we're doing everything ourselves, they'll take the lead on it and they'll reach out to talent themselves. They'll book it directly. They'll pull together everything that needs to do. They'll execute the shoot and they'll round it up until the story's live on the site. So we're in that early stage too of if you want something to happen, you need to do it yourself.

41:11Amrit Tietz:And we like to say we embrace the sticky. So that's sort of our sweet spot. We want to acknowledge all the things that have felt dismissed or overlooked. And that's wide on the spectrum of womanhood. It can be pregnancy curious. It can be egg freezing. It could be IVF. It could be surrogacy. It could be adoption. It could be loss. It could be parenting with a disability. It could be getting your kids into college, perimenopause, everything that's sort of been really overlooked. And that also, you know, helps with the issue of like maternal mental health. It's sort of acknowledging all of the stickiness so you don't feel gaslit.

41:47Amrit Tietz:You're not like, how come I don't see myself in any of this? And the nice thing for us is a lot of the community outreach we get from women saying we feel so validated by these stories. We feel understood. We haven't seen these sort of been acknowledged in a public way. And I would say something that's a top performer for us are the personal essays. Talk to me about some of the content that has been really well received or gotten an oversized response from your audience. We have an internal joke. Every feature that goes live, I say is my favorite. But I truly feel that way because they're just such diverse perspectives.

42:20Amrit Tietz:Stories that have really resonated. Carrie Maitoza did a really good one on her ovaries never screaming, but she had a baby anyway. and maternal ambivalence and how, you know, she didn't have this sort of blueprint of like, okay, I feel it now. I'm going to have a kid. And she reconnected with a college sweetheart late. They had babies in a different way. And that performed really well for us because I think so many women feel this pressure of like, okay, now's the time when you know, you know, and life is just different now. And that resonated with a lot of people. And there's a really, beautiful story by Holly Perkins.

42:58Amrit Tietz:She talks about who am I without the possibility of motherhood and, you know, going through life and having everything sort of built up around that being the end goal and re-imagining the potential or possibility of life without that. And so that was a really interesting one too. Yeah, they're all my favorite stories. So I've read that for the next phase that you are redeveloping the website to orient it towards more community engagement, chat features, commenting, all of that. Talk to me a little bit about Spread the Jelly 2.0 and what else you have on the horizon from this community aspect. Yeah.

43:37Amrit Tietz:So, you know, we're just adapting to the needs of the community and of what they would love. We're always evolving to build a better version of Spread the Jelly. And we know women are seeking connection first and foremost, and we want to streamline that and make that as easy as possible. And right now, the way it works is obviously they interact through social, but we have to interface everything, a lot of the conversations, and sometimes they can reach out to talent directly, but the bigger the talent, the less access they have. For example, you can't email Alana Glazer or Alison Roman. Their email isn't floating around.

44:15Amrit Tietz:And so we wanted to enable people to interact in a way that was possible. So things like redesigning and redeveloping the website so people can comment directly and enabling sharing a little easier. And of course, now we're trying to bring this digital footprint in real life activations across not just New York and LA, but all through the country. So that's a big priority for us too. And sort of giving moms the in-person support that they need. But outside of that, fun. Like we all just want to have fun and connect and relate. And so that's Spread the Jelly 2.0. I'm so excited. So we always talk about mistakes on this podcast.

44:55And I think it's important because we all make them in our career and we don't always talk about some of the mess of it and how you can recover. Can you tell me about a mistake that you've made at any point in your career and what you've learned from it?

45:08Amrit Tietz:Get a really good lawyer, number one. Yeah. Get everything buttoned. It's worth investing in these things. Setting yourself up for financial success and freedom and getting all your paperwork done in time. get people to sign NDAs from the get-go in business nobody's your friend unfortunately we're still sort of working through certain corporation and formation docs that we haven't been able to get access to because we worked with a lawyer that disappeared so cleaning up the mess of all of those things I think we could have been buttoned up from day one I also don't think we expected the success to happen as quickly as it did we only launched six months ago and so So we thought we had a lot of time to get to certain things, which I probably would have done first.

45:55Amrit Tietz:That's been a learning lesson for us. We're still in that every day. And the other thing I would say, too, is being open to advice and criticism, but leaning into intuition. Ultimately, you know what you're doing. And we had so many people tell us that media was a failing industry and people were pivoting and no one was interested in these women, mothers, by the way. and we were slowed down a lot by taking on you know feedback and criticism that now in hindsight was unnecessary and I encourage everybody to practice intuition in every aspect of their life intuitive eating intuitive business intuitive parenting you know what's best for you especially as newer greener entrepreneurs we would sort of walk into these meetings business meetings investor meetings even from a storytelling standpoint of this is the right angle and being persuaded otherwise.

46:48Amrit Tietz:And later in hindsight, being like, we should have led with our gut instinct. And so being buttoned up, having a good lawyer, leading into intuition in my top three. Well, I know that you've been a storyteller throughout your career. You have made some industry pivots, certainly. And a lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are in their first lives. They know that they want to evolve their careers. Maybe it's in the same industry. maybe it's moving into a different industry. As someone who continues to iterate in her career, what advice would you give someone who's standing there thinking about evolving, but is scared or hasn't made the leap quite yet?

47:30Amrit Tietz:First, I want to acknowledge that before I lead into this, being able to take on real life experiences comes with a certain set of privilege. So financial security, always be in the room and always take on more than you're expected to. Try new things. I would have never in my wildest dreams expected motherhood to be the core of my career path. And that just stemmed from me sharing my experiences online with fertility issues and seeing the community response there and partnering with the right person at the right time. but through the many pivots that I've sort of encountered over my career and different chapters has always been through trying new things.

48:09Amrit Tietz:And a large part of that is also, we started with sort of the working in the bank is, you know, figuring out what I didn't want to do. And thankfully, I tried a lot. I threw a lot of things at the wall to figure out what stuck. So there are three different buckets, right? What sticks? What do you enjoy doing? Because sometimes things stick that you realize you don't want to do. What makes you happy? What can you sustain yourself financially doing? And what kind of space is there for that to continue to live on? So my last question, also my favorite question, which is if you could get into a time machine and go back in time and give yourself some career advice at any point in your career, what would you say?

48:52Amrit Tietz:I would have probably taken the leap a lot earlier into talent and music. I had a lot of self-doubt. I would say I spent about 18 months wondering if I could do it, which by the way, all experience is good experience. That extra 18 months, I learned a lot of things from. I was ready to take the leap a lot earlier than I did. And I just want to say one thing. There is no shame in having a full-time job. That gets left out of the conversation a lot. And a lot of people don't realize how long I worked full-time at the agency before pivoting or worked in hospitality while working at the agency before stepping away from that.

49:32Amrit Tietz:Financial freedom is everything. And there's really no shame in taking care of what you need financially first. And if you need to take that second job, if you need to work somewhere full time, that's totally fine. Yep. I think that there's a lot of unspoken privilege that goes on in the entrepreneurial world. And it's fine to have privilege. I certainly have privilege, but there are different levels of it. And you have to acknowledge, like, there are people who can say like, oh, well, I was able to do this because my husband could fund X for our life at this point in time, or we had family money, or we had an investor or whatever it is, there's a balance to all of it.

50:10And you have to talk about it. Whatever the answer is, it's okay. I'm not mad about anyone's experience, but I think transparency is really important. All of the stories are valid, but we have to acknowledge the stories.

50:23Amrit Tietz:1000%. Thank you so much. This was such a pleasure and truly congratulations on everything that you have built. I am very much enjoying it from the outside. And it was a treat to get to hear a little bit about the inside today. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

50:46That was DJ and co-founder of Spread the Jelly, Amrit Teets. For more inspiring interviews with women like Amrit, head on over to secondlifepod.com, where we have so many more for you to peruse. If you like today's show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review us. We love seeing you spread the word on social. And now you can tag us in your posts. We are at Second Life Pod on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We always want to know who you're interested in hearing from on the show. So send in your requests to hello at secondlifepod.com or you can DM us on Instagram.

51:27I'm at Hilary Kerr. The show is at Second Life Pod. Our DMs are always open. I'm Hilary Kerr,

51:34Amrit Tietz:and you've been listening to Second Life. This episode was produced by Hilary Kerr, Summer Hammeris, and Natalie Thurman. Our editor is Natalia Perez. Our audio engineers are at Treehouse Recording in Los Angeles, California, and our music is by Jonathan Leahy.

51:57Thank you.