Speaker 1: So I was such a nerd and I did model
Speaker 1: you in, and I was on the yearbook staff, and
Speaker 1: then I was the editor of the yearbook. I went
Speaker 1: to math camp when I was a kid, did here,
Speaker 1: Yes I did, I know, And I have this vivid memory.
Speaker 1: Actually during the two thousand I think it was during
Speaker 1: the two thousand and eight campaign, I was campaigning. I
Speaker 1: can't remember actually I was campaigning for my mom or
Speaker 1: later for President Obama. But I was somewhere and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, I was like shaking someone's hand. I
Speaker 1: was saying, like, oh, you know, please don't forget to vote.
Speaker 1: And this guy was like, we were in math camp together.
Speaker 1: We did the unit on fractals together at the campaign staff.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my god, she's like even more
Speaker 1: of a nerd than we thought she was already. I
Speaker 1: was like, yes, I did. I went to math camp
Speaker 1: and yearbook camp and language camp and model you in
Speaker 1: and I did all sorts of nerdy thing. You did
Speaker 1: all the camps. Hello, I'm Mini driver and welcome to
Speaker 1: many questions. I've always loved Prius question ap It was
Speaker 1: originally an eighteenth century polor game meant to reveal an
Speaker 1: individual's true nature, But with so many questions and there
Speaker 1: wasn't really an opportunity to expand on anything. So I
Speaker 1: took the format of Proof's questionnaire and adapted What I
Speaker 1: think are seven of the most important questions you could
Speaker 1: ever ask someone. They are when and where were you happiest?
Speaker 1: What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship,
Speaker 1: real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would
Speaker 1: you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has
Speaker 1: shaped you the most? What would be your last meal?
Speaker 1: And can you tell me something in your life that
Speaker 1: has grown out of a personal disaster. The more people
Speaker 1: we ask, the more we begin to see what makes
Speaker 1: us similar and what makes us individual. I've gathered a
Speaker 1: group of really remarkable people who I am honored and
Speaker 1: humbled to have had a chance to engage with today.
Speaker 1: My guest is Chelsea Clinton, one of the most multidimensional
Speaker 1: people I've had the pleasure of speaking to. And as
Speaker 1: someone who studied acting as opposed to going to a
Speaker 1: traditional university, I am always inspired by true academics. What
Speaker 1: strikes me is even more impressive about Chelsea is that
Speaker 1: with her doctor in international relations and her master's in
Speaker 1: public health. She's carved out a space where her voice
Speaker 1: and expertise can create real change in the world. There's
Speaker 1: also a grace and a persistence with which she's explored
Speaker 1: her influence outside of the towering presence of both her parents.
Speaker 1: No mean feat. So I admit I just had a
Speaker 1: moment which this is like so mortifying, but now I
Speaker 1: have to have to say this because it was in
Speaker 1: my head and I started to say it and I
Speaker 1: was like, do I want to say it? And I
Speaker 1: was like yes. I went on a date to Circle
Speaker 1: of Friends many many years ago with very sweet Rory Aigan,
Speaker 1: who was my high school boyfriend. But I think it
Speaker 1: was like the second date we went on, so when
Speaker 1: I was steering and I was like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I was like ricocheted backed going on a date at
Speaker 1: the movie theater on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: I love that, you know that. I love that. That
Speaker 1: is like a grandmother didn't memory. That's great, and like
Speaker 1: we didn't share popcorn because I was like that felt
Speaker 1: too awkward. He was like, do you want popcorn? And
Speaker 1: I remember being like, no, we do I want popcorn.
Speaker 1: What's the right romantic answer here? I was like a
Speaker 1: very awkward teenager, so you know what, so was I,
Speaker 1: which is what I think I got that part in
Speaker 1: that film because I was just completely exactly what. I
Speaker 1: was just kind of overgrown with mental hair and didn't
Speaker 1: really know which way was up. So glad that was
Speaker 1: your first date. You and Popcorn my boyfriend, who, by
Speaker 1: the way, did model you end with you in New York? Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: he did what music did. So I was Brazil and
Speaker 1: Canada in different years. One year I was Brazil and
Speaker 1: one year I was Canada or not not just me,
Speaker 1: my my high school team. So you'll have to ask him,
Speaker 1: does he remember? He didn't want me to mention it
Speaker 1: at all, but now I have. But anyway, we got again.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get a to it. When and when were
Speaker 1: you happiest. I'm happiest with my kids, I really am.
Speaker 1: I'm happiest when my kids are laughing. I'm happiest when
Speaker 1: my kids are like crawling all over me and tickling me.
Speaker 1: I'm happiest when we are reading a book together or
Speaker 1: baking together. We bake a lot, even pre pandemic. We
Speaker 1: just have baked more in the pandemic, which is probably
Speaker 1: not good. For any of us. It's been a lot
Speaker 1: of fun, and we try to watch a family movie
Speaker 1: every weekend um and I love listening to my kids,
Speaker 1: and I've had these quite deep conversations about trolls or monsters,
Speaker 1: inc Or most recently Ryan and the Last Dragon. Well,
Speaker 1: my two older kids who are four and six, not
Speaker 1: my youngest, who's one, who doesn't really stay still for
Speaker 1: the family book reading or baking or movie watching. But
Speaker 1: that's when I'm happiest. I'm happiest when I feel my
Speaker 1: children's laughter fill my body and in my heart. Did
Speaker 1: you enter sicipate that before you were a mother, did
Speaker 1: you anticipate what that feeling of your children's laughter insidet
Speaker 1: you would feel? Like? No, No, I mean like I
Speaker 1: love my husband. We always knew that we'd hope to
Speaker 1: have children. I was so excited to be a mom
Speaker 1: when I was pregnant with all three of our children.
Speaker 1: And yet this is gonna sound so crazy. I don't
Speaker 1: think I've actually ever said this in any public format,
Speaker 1: But my husband Mark and I were watching that show
Speaker 1: in the History Channel of the Vikings. I love that,
Speaker 1: and right after Charlotte was supporting in the hospital like
Speaker 1: in the operating room because I had to have an
Speaker 1: emergency C section, and I had the sense of like,
Speaker 1: if the Vikings come through here, I'm gonna get off
Speaker 1: the table, even if my guts are literally like spilling
Speaker 1: all over the place, and protect my child. And it
Speaker 1: just it felt so primal. I love it, and I
Speaker 1: was like, who is this person? I'm no fair? What
Speaker 1: is this person that has just taken over my body?
Speaker 1: You had a full Viking flashbang. I love the fact
Speaker 1: that you were envisioning Vikings and that you would fight
Speaker 1: the Vikings. I just say, if they were going to
Speaker 1: come marauding through the operating room, I was ready. I
Speaker 1: didn't know how I would be ready, but I was
Speaker 1: ready to protect. And I was trying to explain this
Speaker 1: to my husband. He was like, what are you talking
Speaker 1: about again? But I'm ready, And he was like, talking
Speaker 1: about but I'm ready. I have my mace, I think
Speaker 1: exactly under the table. I just felt like all of
Speaker 1: a sudden I had become a mother and that this
Speaker 1: was the most important part of my life and what
Speaker 1: an extraordinary not only gift but new reality. I've been
Speaker 1: given to love this little person and then to love
Speaker 1: her brothers and so It's not what I'd anticipated, and
Speaker 1: yet I could not imagine my life any other way.
Speaker 1: Did he give context to the things that you were
Speaker 1: already interested in? Yes? Yes. Did it make you want
Speaker 1: to make the world a better place? Yes? And it
Speaker 1: made me feel even more intensely about the things I
Speaker 1: already felt strongly about, which I didn't know it was possible.
Speaker 1: How frustrating it is actually this kind of sometimes conceit
Speaker 1: of the young people will save us, right, Like why
Speaker 1: do the young people have to save us? Like shouldn't
Speaker 1: we be saving us so they don't have to? Yeah,
Speaker 1: my job as a parent isn't to say, oh, congratulations,
Speaker 1: here's the mess I left for you, but don't worry,
Speaker 1: like I'm going to give me the duel to tackle
Speaker 1: it and take this. Here's a dumpster fire for you,
Speaker 1: good luck, I love for you, goodbye, But I'm going
Speaker 1: to make you a really big, bright, sparkly sign on
Speaker 1: the sideline. It's like cheering you on, like in a
Speaker 1: helicopter around the dumpster file. Right, it's so perverse to me,
Speaker 1: But it just everything got sharper and felt like more
Speaker 1: urgency and energy and kind of a vibration of like, oh,
Speaker 1: like I have to do this now, like I have
Speaker 1: to write, I had to teach these classes. I have
Speaker 1: to do this work. I have to try to help
Speaker 1: people care. I have to get people focused on public health.
Speaker 1: And now it's easier because we're in the midst of
Speaker 1: a pandemic and all my friends are like, Oh, this
Speaker 1: is what you do, this is why you've been talking
Speaker 1: about for years. I know what an extraordinary lens as well?
Speaker 1: Do they have a pandemic actually bring into even further
Speaker 1: focused the work that you've been doing all your life
Speaker 1: as an adults too suddenly go here, here it is illustrated,
Speaker 1: laid out before you, and once again, you know, in
Speaker 1: the same way that the Reagan administration refused to deal
Speaker 1: with the HIV AIDS crisis, the same way the Trump
Speaker 1: administration refused to admit that there was even a problem
Speaker 1: with COVID nineteen and that it was going to somehow
Speaker 1: disappear painful painful echoes. Because I remember where I was
Speaker 1: when Magic Johnson talked about being HIV positive, and I
Speaker 1: remember reading and then later watching the extraordinary movie that
Speaker 1: came out of and the band played on, and I remember,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to consume everything I could about act
Speaker 1: up and just the deeply visceral residence of silence equals death.
Speaker 1: And then I remember thinking I will never be there again,
Speaker 1: right like, even though there's so many things that I
Speaker 1: wish had been different, you know, at the New Year
Speaker 1: of last year, I just never thought that you would
Speaker 1: have had even under the Trump administration, an administration that
Speaker 1: kind of had the echoes of the worst of the
Speaker 1: Reagan era, of ignorance and dismissiveness and the discrediting of
Speaker 1: kind of science and facts and the kind of wilful
Speaker 1: trafficking and things that are so unscientific and not based
Speaker 1: in facts. I know that you are a baker, will
Speaker 1: be your lost mail. O good lord. I was a
Speaker 1: vegetarian for many years. I gave up bread meat when
Speaker 1: I was eleven, and I gave up all of meat
Speaker 1: when I was thirteen. It was a little bit, a
Speaker 1: little bit rebellion and a little bit motivated by cruelty
Speaker 1: toward cattle and slaughterhouses and concerns about excess of red
Speaker 1: meat on your body. But it would be totally disingenuous
Speaker 1: if I didn't also just own that it was a
Speaker 1: little bit rebellious, which all my friends were like this
Speaker 1: is how you're rebelling. It was like such a rebel,
Speaker 1: shall say that as the rebellion of somebody who goes
Speaker 1: to math camp. I won't eat meat and I will
Speaker 1: do fractals. Yeah, so you know, and I like, you know,
Speaker 1: I had to give my mother all of these back
Speaker 1: in the old days when you would you know, have
Speaker 1: to write things out right out, like don't worry mom,
Speaker 1: I know how to have a well balanced meal. But
Speaker 1: for some reason, when I was twenty nine, I just
Speaker 1: start to crave red meat. I don't know if that.
Speaker 1: I was also running so much the time, so I
Speaker 1: don't know if it was I needed the iron or
Speaker 1: I needed the protein. And I'm a big believer in
Speaker 1: listening to our bodies. And I don't eat a lot
Speaker 1: of beatus. I'm still very mindful of the kind of
Speaker 1: environmental effects, but I do I do love a really
Speaker 1: good like flat iron steak or skirt steak or cheeseburger,
Speaker 1: So I would probably have one of those, not all
Speaker 1: of those. Can have a buy a full three maybe no,
Speaker 1: well no no, because like I just and like a
Speaker 1: really good arrugala salad is that for ring? And I
Speaker 1: love broccoli, so there'd be some broccoli and some roasted
Speaker 1: Brussels sprouts, and I would have to have a really
Speaker 1: decadent piece of Maybe do you know I'm going to
Speaker 1: not have a piece of cake. I'm gonna have dark
Speaker 1: chocolate movese with some whipped cream on top. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to have a really large espresso at the end
Speaker 1: of the meal. Oh and I definitely. And I want
Speaker 1: a glass of red wine during the meal. So I
Speaker 1: want my glass of red wine. I want my steak.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go steak, not cheeseborg I want my steak,
Speaker 1: I want all my green vegetables. I want my chocolate
Speaker 1: moves with my glass of red wine. And then I
Speaker 1: want to have a big espresso and I hug for
Speaker 1: my kids, and then I guess I can die happy.
Speaker 1: If that's where this conversation is going. It's quite triggering
Speaker 1: this question because you know your last meal, you know,
Speaker 1: before you get on the greyhound to go to Wyoming.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but last meal. It does sound like
Speaker 1: you know it's your last meal before you're going to die.
Speaker 1: But you were going to say a piece of what
Speaker 1: you went for the chocolate movese, But you did say
Speaker 1: I will have a huge piece of Yeah, I love
Speaker 1: red velvet cake. I have a red velvet cake in
Speaker 1: my refrige itater we made a few days ago. Well,
Speaker 1: you can have the red velvet cake and cho Jessie
Speaker 1: like this is an interesting I feel like you really,
Speaker 1: even when you're given carte blash to have your your
Speaker 1: still abstomust. I don't want to be even at the end,
Speaker 1: right up to the end. She wasn't a glutton. She
Speaker 1: only had the moves, she didn't have the cake. Let
Speaker 1: it be known. That's a good epitaph. Can you just
Speaker 1: tell me what flavor is red velvet? Because I don't understand.
Speaker 1: In England we didn't have it. It seems to me
Speaker 1: that it is just red food coloring in plain cake.
Speaker 1: What's the flavor meant to be? There are quite intense.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's opperstating it. Maybe it's just intense. If you
Speaker 1: care about Southern Baby, I think they're very intense debates.
Speaker 1: Then I think this really needs a little bit of
Speaker 1: a few red velvet platforms. Aren't you just like red groups?
Speaker 1: The origins of red velvet are a bit shrouded in mystery.
Speaker 1: Some people say red velvet originated um beat sugar and
Speaker 1: beat food coloring when sugar was expensive and harder to
Speaker 1: come by, and beats or not, and so the red
Speaker 1: color comes from beats. That is the best explanation I
Speaker 1: have heard yet. That's what I had heard growing up.
Speaker 1: I now know though that others say, no, Actually, it
Speaker 1: was about the texture of the cake. It was the
Speaker 1: texture of the cake that was velvety that if you
Speaker 1: were using lighter chocolate kind of the light brown looked
Speaker 1: a little red and red sounded more novel, and so
Speaker 1: it was kind of marketed as red velvet cake even
Speaker 1: before it had the color red. So that's some people's explanation.
Speaker 1: So I don't want to go definitively like on this
Speaker 1: because I'm now gonna have baking forms being like she
Speaker 1: was not truthful about this. I don't think you are.
Speaker 1: I think they're going to be happy that you're talking
Speaker 1: about cake at all, because I know I am. I
Speaker 1: think it doesn't get enough play. Well. So we love
Speaker 1: the Great British Baking Show in our family, it's the
Speaker 1: greatest show ever made. I think that it might be.
Speaker 1: I think that it might be. Why couldn't they just
Speaker 1: have made endless versions of that show to help us
Speaker 1: through the last fourteen months, to give us like the joy.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to Telly, but in England that did this
Speaker 1: thing where they had celebrities on to bake people who
Speaker 1: maybe have never baked before, and it was all for
Speaker 1: stand up to cancer. I've heard my English friends have
Speaker 1: really they haven't been very kind and like rubbing it
Speaker 1: in my face. They have had a lot more content.
Speaker 1: It's been the best thing about being in England. There
Speaker 1: is a lot more bake off. What person, place, or
Speaker 1: experience has most altered your life, Well, probably the honest
Speaker 1: answer is when my father won the election and we
Speaker 1: moved to Washington, d C. When you moved from little
Speaker 1: Rok to d C, did things become sacrisancs? Did you
Speaker 1: take things with you that made it home, that made
Speaker 1: this transition somehow easier or made it more familiar completely.
Speaker 1: One of the things I'm so thankful to my parents
Speaker 1: for doing is there were very much the rhythms of
Speaker 1: our life and that we still had family dinner every night,
Speaker 1: so that was very sacrisaying time. Even if my parents
Speaker 1: had to go out to an event, or if my
Speaker 1: father had to go back to the Oval office, he
Speaker 1: would come home, my parents would come home. We had
Speaker 1: dinner every night together. We went to church on Sundays,
Speaker 1: and we had family lunch after church. That also was
Speaker 1: really sacrisying family tradition and all of that translated. I
Speaker 1: grew up playing just huge numbers of games with my
Speaker 1: parents and with my grandparents, my uncle's and we I
Speaker 1: think played games every week, if not kind of more frequently,
Speaker 1: card games, board games, depending on how we're all feeling.
Speaker 1: Sometimes tarades, I mean, just we had so many games.
Speaker 1: When my father won is probably the event in my
Speaker 1: life that externally most kind of influenced my life, but
Speaker 1: certainly internally what most influenced my life was when I
Speaker 1: became a mother. Oh yeah, I often won about the
Speaker 1: parallel life if I hadn't had henry of carrying on
Speaker 1: doing and exploring the things all that I'm interested in
Speaker 1: a living what can't help but be a fairly sort
Speaker 1: of selfish life in terms of just living for yourself
Speaker 1: with no dependence. But I wonder what else would have
Speaker 1: filled that space, Because once you know what that feeling
Speaker 1: is to love a child, once you have had that
Speaker 1: explosion inside, it's hard to imagine like what it would
Speaker 1: have been like without them, I can't my imagination fails.
Speaker 1: I just I can't. I can't see it. Like, I
Speaker 1: don't know what happens to me after when I became
Speaker 1: a mom. It's just empty. And I have a pretty
Speaker 1: good imagination, Like I make up magical stories every night
Speaker 1: for my kids. Do you. Yeah, we have Maya the Dragon,
Speaker 1: the Blue Dragon, We have Cadrew the Penguin. We have
Speaker 1: all sorts of characters in our kind of magical menagerie.
Speaker 1: My dad used to tell me my sister the story
Speaker 1: about Charlie the Fox, which we now embellish. I mean,
Speaker 1: this fox has really been through the ring at this point,
Speaker 1: because we add an embellished. But but he's still here, right,
Speaker 1: Charlie Fox has survived. Oh yeah he was. He was survived,
Speaker 1: but he's lost most of his tail at this point
Speaker 1: because the grounds now getting his tail off. They didn't
Speaker 1: use to, but they get it now. God, what does
Speaker 1: that say about our world? You know what? That you
Speaker 1: can still carry on without a tail? Yeah? Who needs it?
Speaker 1: But do you remember back to your pre children days? Totally?
Speaker 1: I remember pre children, But I can't imagine life without
Speaker 1: my kids. Yeah, because the vikings really and just the
Speaker 1: love that I just felt like I could feel my
Speaker 1: heart in a way like I remember when I went
Speaker 1: through puberty and like I would have a crush and
Speaker 1: a boy and I already you know, told you I
Speaker 1: went on a date to your movie Circle of Friends.
Speaker 1: So I remember feeling like, oh, like flutters and overwhelmed
Speaker 1: and happy when my husband proposed to me. And so
Speaker 1: I felt connected to this organ. But it really wasn't
Speaker 1: until I met Charlotte, our our first child. I was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: this is a this organ that I could feel when
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a big runner, so like when I was
Speaker 1: going for longer distances or running really fast, and I
Speaker 1: of course could feel my heart beating quite literally, but
Speaker 1: I just felt like, oh, that's what else you're for.
Speaker 1: And have you read that book Born to Run by
Speaker 1: Christopher McDougall. Yes, my dad gave me that book because
Speaker 1: he reads it seemingly like everything the day after it
Speaker 1: comes out. Gave it to me probably like two weeks
Speaker 1: after it came out. Was like, I thought, of you,
Speaker 1: did you get rid of your big, chunky Nike running
Speaker 1: shoes and get some minimalist sandals, because I did so,
Speaker 1: I didn't try the running sandals, but I did try
Speaker 1: like the very thin running shoes, and I just I'm
Speaker 1: not proud, but I my feet hurt. I was trying
Speaker 1: to think of like a more elegant way to say
Speaker 1: that my feet hurt. So I went back to my
Speaker 1: more kind of clunky shoes that my feet don't hurt. Wow.
Speaker 1: Using do you run to get away from stuff or
Speaker 1: do you run for health rees or a mixture of both.
Speaker 1: So I run, yes, absolutely, because you know, I think
Speaker 1: it's important to exercise and like good for my health.
Speaker 1: I also run, though very much for my mental health.
Speaker 1: That is the time when I disconnect. It's the time
Speaker 1: when I get closest to what I would think of
Speaker 1: as meditating, where my brain really kind of clears out.
Speaker 1: And when i'm going, especially for longer runs, in the
Speaker 1: first half of my run, I will listen to music
Speaker 1: or I listen to a podcast, and then I always,
Speaker 1: at least I try unless I'm like totally enwrapped or
Speaker 1: whenever I'm listening to stop stop listening about halfway through
Speaker 1: my run to force myself to kind of be in
Speaker 1: that silence of my own mind. How far to you
Speaker 1: run totally depends on how much time I have, does it, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: So if if I can like wake up early and
Speaker 1: I have time, I can go for a longer run.
Speaker 1: But oftentimes I have like forty minutes, so I get changed,
Speaker 1: I run like, you know, three and a half miles,
Speaker 1: I come back, and I kind of go back to
Speaker 1: my day. So it just really depends on how much
Speaker 1: time I have. Before I became a parent, I often
Speaker 1: would run at night. Would yeah, I mean, but with
Speaker 1: like reflectors, I was safe. I would safe. I always
Speaker 1: feel like I have because my my poor mother would
Speaker 1: be like, you need to call me when you get home,
Speaker 1: and I would be like, I'm thirty two, I've been
Speaker 1: running at night for a long time, Like I know
Speaker 1: how to keep myself safe. Also I'm married, Like you're
Speaker 1: gonna know if I if I don't come home, like
Speaker 1: Mark will call you. And she would be like, I
Speaker 1: just you'll understand one day when you're a mother, And
Speaker 1: sure enough, I now do. So I used to run
Speaker 1: a lot at night, and I used to actually love
Speaker 1: to run later at night, as kind of creepy as
Speaker 1: that may sound, because New York City would just be quieter.
Speaker 1: And in the same way, I would love to run
Speaker 1: like very early in the morning. Also, Mom, if you're
Speaker 1: listening like with lectures on like very safe on the
Speaker 1: West Side Highway and not on the roads, do you
Speaker 1: think it's because there's a lot in your life. There's
Speaker 1: this huge public persona, but all of the work that
Speaker 1: you do and teaching and a marriage and children, and
Speaker 1: it makes perfect sense to me to go early or
Speaker 1: late at night to find the quietest moment, to find
Speaker 1: the quietest moment in yourself would be exactly what you
Speaker 1: would need. So I don't go at night any longer,
Speaker 1: but I do go early in the morning when I can,
Speaker 1: and I largely just don't go at nate because sometimes
Speaker 1: your kids wake up and I want to be here
Speaker 1: if they wake up, So I always be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I can go in the morning. It's okay, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean your kids a little So it's all those considerations.
Speaker 1: It's finny you'll find you'll reach a point where they're
Speaker 1: older and then suddenly you'll be like, oh, it's eleven PM.
Speaker 1: They're going to go into a ten K They're going
Speaker 1: to be teenagers and a sleep. Because I do the
Speaker 1: same thing, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about like, if he wakes up, he'll
Speaker 1: just go back to sleep. He'll be fine. Word right now,
Speaker 1: my kids wake up, they've had a nightmare. They need
Speaker 1: a glass of water, to care about Petro the penguin.
Speaker 1: And it's lovely. Enjoy every second of it. What's the
Speaker 1: quality that you least like about yourself? Oh? I least
Speaker 1: like my perfectionism. I really am hoping that maybe in
Speaker 1: this decade, my fifth decade on planet Earth, I will
Speaker 1: be able to possibly mature out of it. How does
Speaker 1: it negatively affect you personally? You being a perfectionist, I
Speaker 1: would say in two ways. It creates a lot of
Speaker 1: anxiety and then inefficiency when I am obsessing over which
Speaker 1: word is going to be most perfect, when actually both
Speaker 1: words and something I'm writing are probably like equally good.
Speaker 1: So it's not my persistence to finish what I start
Speaker 1: and do the best that I can those I think
Speaker 1: are good qualities. But it's sometimes the fact that I
Speaker 1: fall into thinking like, oh, it doesn't just have to
Speaker 1: be best or excellent, very good. It something has to
Speaker 1: be perfect. But often what I'm thinking of is perfect
Speaker 1: is a morphous Oh totally, there's no there there, right,
Speaker 1: It's just like this spinning that is just not helpful
Speaker 1: or actually ultimately productive, unlike the drive to excellence and
Speaker 1: thankfully the inborn and I think kind of nurtured persistence
Speaker 1: in the sense that you really have to finish what
Speaker 1: you start, and kind of what my grandmother always called
Speaker 1: the ministry of showing up in life for our friends,
Speaker 1: the cause we believe in, but also for ourselves. Those
Speaker 1: are all good things, but perfectionism is not good. I
Speaker 1: found it quite hard to teach that with my son,
Speaker 1: but it's kind of that notion of go for excellence,
Speaker 1: to do your best, to not give up. And it's
Speaker 1: funny because I feel like maybe because of what he's
Speaker 1: observed of how I interact and suffer from the same thing,
Speaker 1: which is too much attention to detail when actually it
Speaker 1: should let a little bit more go. And he then
Speaker 1: funnels that into this idea of what really trying, really
Speaker 1: hard at something is. And I've noticed this perfectionism exactly
Speaker 1: what you're talking about, and I realized that I've been
Speaker 1: demonstrating it. And we actually had a conversation on the
Speaker 1: night about it where I was like, I'm failing at
Speaker 1: being perfect and it's a good thing, and it's a
Speaker 1: really important nuance and and I don't know how to
Speaker 1: teach that either, but we are trying, and I don't
Speaker 1: know we'll be successful, but at least with our kids,
Speaker 1: were trying to distinguish between like your best and the best,
Speaker 1: because because what does it mean like to be the best? Right?
Speaker 1: But you need to do your best. We care a
Speaker 1: lot that you try hard, and we talk a lot
Speaker 1: with our kids about how the most important things in
Speaker 1: life are to be brave and to be kind, because
Speaker 1: I think if you're brave and you're kind, you're going
Speaker 1: to be a good person. You're going to be a
Speaker 1: good person to yourself, You're going to be a good
Speaker 1: person to your siblings, to our family, kind of community,
Speaker 1: the world. So I don't know if kind of this
Speaker 1: distinction between you were best and the best will will work,
Speaker 1: but I hope it will because I don't want I
Speaker 1: don't want my kids to emulate this. And when I'm
Speaker 1: like rereading something for truly the seventeenth time, and like,
Speaker 1: probably it needed to be reread three times the next
Speaker 1: fourteen times, we're probably not necessary, I as a panic
Speaker 1: in my voice goes up a little bit, and it
Speaker 1: all just becomes a bit tight and it's really not
Speaker 1: that important, like you said, the choice between two words
Speaker 1: that really have fundamentally the same meaning and getting stressed
Speaker 1: or demonstrating that stress. But maybe they also learned by
Speaker 1: us catching ourselves and going, you know what that right there,
Speaker 1: what you just saw, that was exactly what it isn't what?
Speaker 1: That is exactly what I'm trying, you know, at fifty one,
Speaker 1: trying to learn to do differently. So perhaps if we
Speaker 1: pers if we catch ourselves as we're doing it, it teaches. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And we do talk with our kids about how we
Speaker 1: make mistakes. You know, sometimes they're really small mistakes, Like
Speaker 1: you know, back when we weren't in a pandemic, and
Speaker 1: my husband said he was going to pick up the
Speaker 1: dry cleaning on the way home, and like he forgot
Speaker 1: to pick up the dry cleaning and I really wanted
Speaker 1: to wear like this shirt the next day. And he's like,
Speaker 1: oh god, I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, you know what, and I don't need
Speaker 1: to wear that shirt. It was like a noyed for
Speaker 1: like two seconds that I was like, it's really not
Speaker 1: a big deal. God, I might have been annoyed for
Speaker 1: a bit longer than that, I must I might still
Speaker 1: be annoyed by that. Chelsea. As to tell you the truth,
Speaker 1: if Addison didn't pick up the dry cleaning at the
Speaker 1: shirt that I'm going to wear, right, you're a better
Speaker 1: person off we go. But we would talk about that
Speaker 1: our kids, like like, we make mistakes because we don't
Speaker 1: want them to be self conscious about talking about those
Speaker 1: mistakes with us. Whatever those mistakes. Maybe, yeah, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: It's how we love. It's by being forgiving of the
Speaker 1: of the imperfections. Right. So the last question is in
Speaker 1: your life, can you tell me about something that has
Speaker 1: grown out of a personal disaster. I think I've been
Speaker 1: really blessed. I can't really think of anything that's been
Speaker 1: a personal disaster. I mean, there are things that have
Speaker 1: been disappointing, their things that have been sad, but in
Speaker 1: a professional sense. I took my first tour through graduate
Speaker 1: school right after I finished Stanford, so I went straightaway
Speaker 1: to Oxford. I knew that I was really interested in
Speaker 1: global public health. I knew kind of exactly who I
Speaker 1: wanted to study with. I thought about getting my doctorate
Speaker 1: at the time, and I just had this sense of, oh,
Speaker 1: my goodness, I'm going to wake up and be twenty eight,
Speaker 1: which feels very old when you're twenty two and you're like, right,
Speaker 1: which just be so old. And I'm going to know
Speaker 1: so much about one thing, a really important thing, but
Speaker 1: like one thing, and oh, I don't know if I
Speaker 1: want to do that. And so I went and I
Speaker 1: worked in consulting, and then I worked on Wall Street
Speaker 1: as an analyst, and then I went back and I
Speaker 1: got my doctorate at you know, the ripe old age
Speaker 1: of or thirty. I can remember now when I started
Speaker 1: again in my PhD program, But I had this sense
Speaker 1: of like, oh God, did I waste all this time?
Speaker 1: And I spent a lot of time thinking like, oh gosh,
Speaker 1: did I just take this major diversion from my kind
Speaker 1: of academic, intellectual, professional personal passion around public health. But
Speaker 1: I don't think so, because I think the time that
Speaker 1: I spent in consulting, the time that I spent as
Speaker 1: an investment analyst, really helped me in my professional life.
Speaker 1: And I don't think I was ready. I think I
Speaker 1: would have been really lonely, because working on your dissertation
Speaker 1: is really a lonely enterprise, like you're trying to do
Speaker 1: something no one's done before. You spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time researching and analyzing and writing. I spent hundreds, probably
Speaker 1: thousands of hours alone. And I think if I had
Speaker 1: done that, you know, a decade earlier, I think it
Speaker 1: would have been a lot harder for me. So, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's like a succinct answer to
Speaker 1: your question. It's an honest one, though, it's an honest one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you had the temerity to you know, you'd left, if
Speaker 1: you're you're working as an analyst, then you're working on
Speaker 1: wool Street, to then saying, you know, I'm going back
Speaker 1: to walks, so I'm going to go back. Maybe you
Speaker 1: know you had to do that in order to know that. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I do want to go and spend hundreds of hours
Speaker 1: by myself and explore this to the subject. And I
Speaker 1: think the other answer to your question, though, when he
Speaker 1: was like for a long time, I tried, Really, I
Speaker 1: don't think I tried. I really was a very private person,
Speaker 1: like in the public domain, where I was incredibly proud
Speaker 1: of both my parents. I was incredibly proud to support
Speaker 1: both my parents. I was incredibly proud to sort of
Speaker 1: stand on a stage or sit on a stage behind them,
Speaker 1: or kind of hand out stickers like American flags or signs.
Speaker 1: I didn't, though, kind of see myself as as any
Speaker 1: more than that. I didn't want to be any more
Speaker 1: than that. And then, you know, in in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, when my mom was running, and then later
Speaker 1: when President Obama was running, I just felt like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: I people are paying attention to me, whether I want
Speaker 1: them to or not, Like I'm I'm I might as
Speaker 1: well try to redirect that attention onto why so strongly
Speaker 1: believe in and support my mom. And then later after
Speaker 1: the campaign and after thankfully President Obama won and I
Speaker 1: guess became President Obama, I tried to, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of go back a bit more to being a private person,
Speaker 1: and yet there still was just all this attention on me,
Speaker 1: and I just had to then think again, like how
Speaker 1: can I redirect it? It's here inevitably, like whether it's
Speaker 1: the paparazzi following me around, or people wondering on cable
Speaker 1: talk shows or in the pages of magazines or newspapers,
Speaker 1: like what I think about things or kind of do
Speaker 1: I have a view on something that kind of my
Speaker 1: parents were doing, and so I just thought, well, largely
Speaker 1: prompted by my grandmother consistently telling me that I had
Speaker 1: a responsibility to do something kind of with this resource
Speaker 1: I had been given, even if it wasn't one that
Speaker 1: I necessarily wanted. It either could kind of be fallow
Speaker 1: or it could be you know, put to good purpose.
Speaker 1: So it didn't feel like my parents choices were a
Speaker 1: disaster for me at all. Ever, Thankfully, it just felt
Speaker 1: like that had happened to me. And that's not a
Speaker 1: good place to be. It's much better to feel like, okay,
Speaker 1: and then here is now what I am doing. I
Speaker 1: am in the active part of it and not just
Speaker 1: in the recipient of it. You embrace the agency, Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's about using the energy of
Speaker 1: other people's decisions create circumstance in your life. What you
Speaker 1: then do with it, how you choose to be creative
Speaker 1: with the stuff that life is inevitably going to throw
Speaker 1: at you is really what defines us. So how how
Speaker 1: Berlyn that you did that. How brilliant to take something
Speaker 1: and to turn it into something else. And again, it's
Speaker 1: one of my favorite things that I've heard you say
Speaker 1: of that idea about regeneration and generating, to keep turning
Speaker 1: it into something, to keep using their energy, to move
Speaker 1: forward and to expand, because what else is there except
Speaker 1: to keep reaching? Agreed? Agreed, Well, I am incredibly grateful
Speaker 1: for your time. I know you're a very busy lady,
Speaker 1: and thank you very very very much for coming on
Speaker 1: the show. It's lovely hearing about your kids and and
Speaker 1: you being a Viking mother is most most excellent. I
Speaker 1: can concur Thanks so much, Chelsee, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Chelsea's podcast, In Fact, has new episodes out every Tuesday.
Speaker 1: It's a podcast that takes a look into the world
Speaker 1: of public health through shared stories. This week, Chelsea sits
Speaker 1: down with three people who share a deep commitment to
Speaker 1: environmental justice. Also check out her She Persisted series of
Speaker 1: children's books as they are truly excellent. Mini Questions is
Speaker 1: hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer Aaron Kaufman,
Speaker 1: Producer Morgan Lavoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown. Original music Sorry
Speaker 1: Baby by Mini Driver, Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Executive
Speaker 1: produced by Me and man Gesh Hettidor. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson Addison, No Day Lisa Castella and
Speaker 1: Annique Oppenheim at w kPr de La Pescadore, Kate Driver
Speaker 1: and Jason Weinberg, and for constantly solicited tech support Henry Driver,