Diana Edelman introduces her new podcast, Emergency Drinks, and shares her motivation for starting it. She discusses her background as the founder of Vegans Baby and her desire to expand her content beyond just food. Diana explains the concept of ’emergency drinks’ and how it became a safe space for her and her coworker to have open and judgment-free conversations. She expresses her vision for the podcast as a platform to discuss various topics, including veganism, travel, human rights, and more.  

Transcript:

Diana Edelman: Hi, I am Diana Edelman, and I am the host of Emergency Drinks. This is the, I guess, official first episode. Bear with me while I am relearning how to run a podcast. It has been a while, and I’m a little rusty on this. So I tried to do this yesterday, but clearly I don’t enjoy reading instructions. I don’t know if any of you all can identify with that. I’m sure some of you can. And I didn’t read the instructions and my mic didn’t work. So I have 12 minutes of me basically lip syncing or something like that. I don’t recommend it, but I did test it again and it is working now. I hope we’re going to knock on wood about that.     But anyway, welcome to Emergency Drinks. This is, as I said, my new podcast. If you have been following Vegans Baby for any bit of time, you know, in 2020, during the pandemic, I launched another podcast called Good Fork. It was around for quite a few episodes, but then it just kind of faded off into the background of my life as the pandemic wore on. But now things are a little bit different. I launched emergency drinks because I feel like I have a lot to say. And particularly over the last eight months, I’ve become quite more vocal in my thoughts.     For those of you just finding out about me for the first time, I’m Diana. I’m the founder of Vegans Baby, but I’m so much more than that. I am obviously vegan, but I am a world traveler, I am a writer, I am a social media expert, and I’m a human being. And all of those things make me who I am. For a really long time, I was a Vegans Baby, and that’s how I was defined. I was vegan, and I talked about… food, which was wonderful. I worked with the James Beard House. I worked with the huge music festival in Las Vegas. I ran international tours. And I love all of those things, but I love a lot of other things, too. I’m very much an intersectional vegan. I believe that everything is connected, and you can’t have liberation and freedom for one unless you have freedom for all. And I have three animals. I am currently pitching a TV show. And I’m a journalist. So there’s a lot to me.     When I changed my name from Vegans Baby to just Diana back in March on Instagram, I got surprisingly a little bit of backlash because I guess people online don’t always care who you are, which is fine. You know, you’re following strangers on the internet. Are you supposed to care about them or just what they’re giving you? But people were quite upset that I wasn’t just going to be talking about food, that I was going to be contributing other things to my content. But that’s okay, I’m not for everybody and I know that.     But here we are.     So, Emergency Drinks. I envision Emergency Drinks to be a few things. And I’ll start by saying this. I have always kind of dealt with imposter syndrome and feeling like what I had to say wasn’t necessarily relevant. And then back in March, I accepted a job and somehow I ended up being the cohost of the podcast for the owner of this agency that I was working part -time with. And I realized through that, that I actually do have a lot to say. And during that time as well, I started speaking out quite a bit more about the genocide, about being a Jewish person, about the indoctrination I had into Zionism, going on Birthright trip, how I’ve lost a lot of people in my life because I was speaking out against the killing of innocent people. And I just kind of felt like I had a lot to say. And so I started thinking again about a podcast and I decided that, yeah, you know what? I was gonna start one. And I kind of sat on it because I really liked to just … talk about things and not always do them. Like, it depends.   I’m one of those people that I will wake up one day and say, you know what, I’m gonna start a vegan food tour in Las Vegas. And I do it. Or I wake up one day and say, I’m gonna start a podcast. And I talk about it and talk about it and talk about it until I finally do it.   But I finally did it.   I actually resigned from the job I had with, which included being a cohost on this podcast and decided I wanted to go back into work for myself. I am much happier working for me. So that is where we are. And Emergency Drinks was born.     So if you will, we’re going to travel back basically 20 years ago. And I was living in Maryland. That’s where I was born and raised. And I was relocating to Las Vegas. And I was relocating to Las Vegas for a reason I’m sure many of you listeners can identify with. I was in a bad relationship. It was just a very toxic, unhealthy relationship with somebody and I knew we would never stop being around each other unless I left. We, as he said, we’re like oil and water and in a way we were and so I decided I was going to move to Las Vegas. And so I was looking into jobs. At that time I really wanted to be a publicist and I was looking at jobs in Las Vegas, flying to Las Vegas for interviews and I found a job and was offered a job with a PR agency that was a few years old at the time. They are no longer in existence as they were then. Now they are a different PR company with my old boss and one of my favorite humans in the world, a coworker, still working there. So 20 years later, which I’m so happy that they’re still around, but I moved to Las Vegas for this job. And it was doing PR and my goal eventually was to be a publicist. And then I realized later, after working in publicity and PR long enough, I really didn’t like being a publicist and I really didn’t like doing PR. But anyway, I’m digressing.     So I didn’t have any friends when I moved to Las Vegas. I knew nobody. And that’s kind of been my MO through life, which we’ll definitely talk about as I go through these episodes. I knew nobody. And so my coworker and I, Courtney, who I hope she’s listening because I love her — we became friends in the office. We had an open office. And so there was no privacy, there was nothing. So every now and then I’d look over, because we shared like the same corner of a room, and I’d be like “drinks?” And so we would go get drinks at this resort in Las Vegas called the Tuscany.     If you’re familiar with Las Vegas, you know you have the Strip, you have downtown, and then you have some hotels Off Strip. Well, Tuscany was one of those hotels Off Strip, but near the Strip. Like it’s where people stayed when they didn’t want to spend a whole lot of money on the Strip or wanted to just be able to walk to the strip. It was close. And it was like an Italian themed place, smoke filled casino and we would go there and our drinks of choice, mine would be Grand Marnier because that’s how I was spent my early 20s doing symbols of Grand Marnier and shitty beer and cigarettes and we would sit and talk about everything. Marriage, dating, holidays, kids, you name it, work and it became emergency drinks. So.     Whenever we knew we needed to get away and talk, I would be like, “do you want to get emergency drinks?” Or she would say, “do you want to get emergency drinks?” And that was our code word, let’s have a talk. Let’s go sit somewhere and just be comfortable with each other and be able to have a conversation where there is no judgment, but we can share how we feel and talk openly and safely. And in those two years that Courtney and I worked together, emergency drinks became a big thing. Tuscany became our hangout, which is just the wildest thing to me because it’s not a place you hang out, but it became our place. And soon we had other coworkers coming, we had reporters that we were friends with coming, and emergency drinks became this bigger thing. And so I really wanted with this podcast, with Emergency Drinks, to be a safe space for people to come, to share how they feel, to have conversations about life and what’s important. And for me, what’s important to me, obviously,     I’m vegan, so talking about veganism in an approachable way, travel, working for non -profits, I used to work with elephants and was an expat and that played a very big role in who I am today, talking about work and human rights and women’s rights and animal rights and everything. Basically, Emergency Drinks is a place for you to come to feel safe, hopefully learn something, and to know that we’ll be talking about things that are issues, whether it is, like I said, genocide, Zionism, women’s rights, travel, being 44 and single and choosing not to have kids. All of these things. I, the other night, poured a nice little glass of scotch and took a few hits off a joint and came up with 57 topics that I wanted to talk about and 57 people that I wanted to have on my podcast.     Now, most of the people I am inviting on my podcast are people I know very well, are people that I have a close relationship with, are people that I know feel safe talking to me and I feel safe talking with, and people that have something to say. And so if I don’t know the person well, they are people that I probably stalk online and have a hell of a lot of respect for and admire and desperately want them on the podcast and probably to make them my best friend as well. But this is your space.     I am open to topics. I am open to everything. And I just want to say welcome to Emergency Drinks. I’m so happy to have you here. Forgive me if this was rambling. I am excited. I’m hoping this all recorded. And I feel like I don’t want to say a whole lot if it didn’t, because then I’m going to have to do it again. And there’s only so many times you can redo things before you just want to be like, no more. But yeah, so here we are.     Welcome to Emergency Drinks. I am so happy to have you and stay tuned. We have a great, great season coming up for you.