Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome to Work in Progress. High
Speaker 1: whip Smarties. Today we are joined by one of my
Speaker 1: smartest friends and someone that I look up to in
Speaker 1: every single way, both from the way she lives her
Speaker 1: life and runs her career to who she is as
Speaker 1: a person. Today, I'm sitting down with Serlina Maxwell, who
Speaker 1: you likely know as an incredible American cable television host,
Speaker 1: political analyst, commentator, speaker, and author. She writes and speaks
Speaker 1: about everything politics, culture, gender inequity, sexual consent, racism, and
Speaker 1: so many other topics that affect all of us. She
Speaker 1: is a survivor and an activist. She holds a degree
Speaker 1: from Rutgers Law School. Started out as a field organizer
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight on the Obama campaign and then
Speaker 1: was the director of Progressive Media for the Hillary Clinton
Speaker 1: campaign in twenty sixteen. She is a director of Programming
Speaker 1: at SiriusXM, now hosts her weekly show on Sirius called
Speaker 1: Signal Boost and her daily show Mornings with Zerlina on
Speaker 1: SERRIOUSXM Channel one twenty seven. And as if that wasn't enough,
Speaker 1: she wrote an incredible book called The End of Wait Politics,
Speaker 1: which we're kind of having to reanalyze now because a
Speaker 1: lot of fear mongering decided the last election. I'm going
Speaker 1: to talk to her today about the way that she
Speaker 1: sees the current state of things, how she's figuring out
Speaker 1: how to communicate that the political is actually everywhere around
Speaker 1: us and is so deeply personal with her audience with
Speaker 1: people who agree with her and people who don't. And
Speaker 1: she's going to give us a little preview in her
Speaker 1: next project, she is launching a new substack called the
Speaker 1: Inner Work Dispatch on Monday mornings because she realized, like
Speaker 1: many of us, that she needs to do a little
Speaker 1: more work on her mental health care and on her
Speaker 1: own wellness. She tries to ensure the wellness of the world.
Speaker 1: I cannot wait to dive in today. Let's hear from Serlina.
Speaker 1: I how where are you?
Speaker 2: I'm okay. I actually I just moved.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you saw on the thread or
Speaker 3: if they told you that, or if I mentioned that
Speaker 3: I was moving to Sicily, and so I just literally
Speaker 3: to Sunday, I moved to Sicily. So it's been a
Speaker 3: little bit crazy this week, just like because you have
Speaker 3: to like do all this stuff, like when you first
Speaker 3: move in terms of like your resident your permit to stay,
Speaker 3: and so getting a Italian phone number. Like, there's just
Speaker 3: a lot going on. But why I'm able to like
Speaker 3: do my show from.
Speaker 1: Me, I was gonna ask, how does that work?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it looks it works out for me pretty
Speaker 3: well because the show's at seven o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 3: so here it's not.
Speaker 2: Seven o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But uh, and and it just like gives me a
Speaker 3: different quality of life. You know, I can I live
Speaker 3: by the water, I can, you know, go from my
Speaker 3: run or walk by the water.
Speaker 2: And I just I don't know. I was here.
Speaker 3: I was in Italy in Rome for like five months
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty four, and then I spent the last
Speaker 3: month ironically the I spent the election day and day
Speaker 3: weeks after here in Palermo. And I I feel like
Speaker 3: it was meant to be that way, because I was
Speaker 3: like obviously stunned, just like everybody else, but I was
Speaker 3: also in like I felt removed from it, so my
Speaker 3: head was.
Speaker 1: Clear, Yeah, you had a little distance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and.
Speaker 3: I was able to like form thoughts about it in
Speaker 3: a way that I didn't I after in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3: I was just like couldn't speak, you know, like it
Speaker 3: was different than that. Yeah, and so yeah, I'm here
Speaker 3: for at least a year.
Speaker 2: That's what the visas for. So we'll just we'll see.
Speaker 1: That's so exciting. I spent some time near the end
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty three in Italy with my mom's family,
Speaker 1: and it was so special and I definitely had sort
Speaker 1: of thoughts of maybe this is what I do, Maybe
Speaker 1: this is where I go, maybe I start over.
Speaker 3: There's something special about Italy. I think a lot of people.
Speaker 3: I mean, obviously it's a popular place for people to
Speaker 3: go on vacation, but I quickly learned and just talking
Speaker 3: to people, first of all, I mean it depends where
Speaker 3: you are obviously in Italy, but in southern Italy and
Speaker 3: in Sicily, the people their warmth is real, Like that's real,
Speaker 3: and they I don't know, there's the way they are
Speaker 3: is different, and it's actually very I learn a lot
Speaker 3: about like being present and you know, when I go out,
Speaker 3: not having my phone out, and talking to people face
Speaker 3: to face and having like face to face interactions and
Speaker 3: like connecting with people in a way that I just
Speaker 3: wasn't doing.
Speaker 2: I lived in Washington, d C.
Speaker 3: Before I started my trips to Italy, and I was
Speaker 3: the most I mean, my mother died at the end
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty two, so I was like in a
Speaker 3: period of grief and like all of that, but like
Speaker 3: also in Washington, d C. I was the most sad
Speaker 3: I've been since I was like maybe nineteen, and I
Speaker 3: was like, I have to get out of here. My
Speaker 3: therapist like, you can move, you were remotely.
Speaker 1: So do you think that's sadness? I mean, of course,
Speaker 1: losing your mom is like, what a deep wall of
Speaker 1: grief to have to fall into. But do you think
Speaker 1: some of that larger sadness geographically was coming from a
Speaker 1: sensitivity to just how crazy things have gotten in our system?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, we we're all old enough to remember,
Speaker 1: you know, policy fights and debates about legislation and budgets
Speaker 1: and priorities and things. But the Pandora's box that the
Speaker 1: first not even election, I would say, the first Trump campaign, yeah,
Speaker 1: opened right, you know in twenty fifteen leading into twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: I I like, you can't believe we're back here. I
Speaker 1: was so shocked and also not at all surprised, which
Speaker 1: is a sort of heartbreak that I had to wrestle
Speaker 1: with for a few months. You know, the experience of
Speaker 1: I believe we're better than this. I guess we're just not.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: I literally, well, my book is about how we are
Speaker 3: better than this. I thought I thought we would be
Speaker 3: in a very different place. I did not allow my
Speaker 3: brain to think that she may not win. I knew
Speaker 3: obviously that it was going to be really hard, right,
Speaker 3: and also she's a woman, and she's a black woman,
Speaker 3: and she onlyan one hundred days, like yeah, one hundred
Speaker 3: and seven, So all those things. I just didn't allow
Speaker 3: my brain to even go there. So when it happened,
Speaker 3: I was like, this is not happening. I don't I
Speaker 3: just sat there for a second and I was like, Okay,
Speaker 3: thank god I'm here because I can go and run
Speaker 3: and listen to loud Regie music and just like get
Speaker 3: that out of my body. Because I was like, it
Speaker 3: was like a primal screen almost like yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think, what's hard to you know, and now
Speaker 1: that we're in it, let's be in it. I think
Speaker 1: what's hard for me is to see the level of
Speaker 1: destruction and the sort of shock that a lot of
Speaker 1: people are in that he's actually doing what he said
Speaker 1: he would do, right, And many of us are like,
Speaker 1: he told you the whole time he was going to
Speaker 1: do this, Like what are you what are you talking about?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and.
Speaker 1: It's odd. It's been odd for me. You know. There's
Speaker 1: another woman kind of who is in our long time
Speaker 1: sphere of political activists who I just kind of caught
Speaker 1: online the other day and I was like, oh, you're
Speaker 1: you're a traitor, got it. You You thought that by
Speaker 1: demonizing trans folks in America it might protect you. But
Speaker 1: you you're a woman, and by the way, you're not
Speaker 1: even a white woman. And this, this, this is not
Speaker 1: good for women like me, let alone for any other woman, Like, like,
Speaker 1: everybody has a target on their back unless they're you know,
Speaker 1: a billionaire. And I think it's hard for me to
Speaker 1: watch the swiftness and the cruelty. And also I think
Speaker 1: it's why so many of us have been saying, listen
Speaker 1: to the historians who are warning you about one hundred
Speaker 1: year cycles, like this shit is not new. We can
Speaker 1: tell you exactly where it starts, and we can tell
Speaker 1: you exactly where it goes. And by the way, you know,
Speaker 1: Hitler didn't start with Jews. He started with trans people,
Speaker 1: That's where he started.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So literally, people who are like, what do you mean,
Speaker 1: I'm like, this is why they've been banning books and
Speaker 1: attacking the American education system for forty years, Like Mitch
Speaker 1: McConnell's forty year plan is literally bearing fruit. I think
Speaker 1: it can be tough when you've dedicated so much of
Speaker 1: your life to understanding both history, potential and politics and
Speaker 1: how it's actually in everything to figure out how to
Speaker 1: communicate when you have a large platform like I do,
Speaker 1: or you do with folks who just don't have as
Speaker 1: many political touch points, who haven't been as in the
Speaker 1: weeds for so long. And I guess before we get
Speaker 1: into where you are, I just want everybody listening to
Speaker 1: understand your background. We've done a lot of shows together,
Speaker 1: so I don't want to ask you questions we've already
Speaker 1: gone through. But I do want for somebody who maybe
Speaker 1: this is their first time hearing us talk on my
Speaker 1: show or yours, I want people to understand your background.
Speaker 1: You know, like what first sparked your passion for politics?
Speaker 1: When did you know that you wanted? And I don't
Speaker 1: even want to call it political commentary. I think about
Speaker 1: it as like political communication, like it's translation of a
Speaker 1: system into words most of us can understand. When did
Speaker 1: you know that you wanted that to be your life,
Speaker 1: your career.
Speaker 3: I feel like I knew that during the administration of
Speaker 3: George W.
Speaker 2: Bush.
Speaker 3: And I've always been somebody who's been obsessed with politics
Speaker 3: since I was a little kid.
Speaker 2: I remember vividly.
Speaker 3: I was eight and I was outside of school and
Speaker 3: we were lined up to like go in. I think
Speaker 3: I was in second or third grade back then, and
Speaker 3: it was the election.
Speaker 2: With George H. W. Bush and Michael Ducaccus.
Speaker 3: And I remember like doing a little speech in front
Speaker 3: of the school in elementary school telling the kids to
Speaker 3: tell their parents to vote for Michael Ducaccus.
Speaker 2: Now, no one told me to do this.
Speaker 3: My parents, both of my parents, like I think my
Speaker 3: mom was mostly a Democratic voter when I was growing up.
Speaker 3: My dad actually was voted for a few Republicans there.
Speaker 2: So nobody told me to do this. This was just like.
Speaker 3: Completely me sitting in front of the TV as a little kid,
Speaker 3: deciding I agree with those people and not those people
Speaker 3: like that. It was a very like visceral thing for
Speaker 3: me as a little kid, So fast forward to George W.
Speaker 3: Bush's administration. I was literally obsessed, in part because at
Speaker 3: the time I thought that was the worst we could do,
Speaker 3: and I just couldn't imagine not trying to prevent his
Speaker 3: you know, Republicans from continuing down this pass. So I
Speaker 3: ended up on the Obama campaign in two thousand and
Speaker 3: eight because I was like, if I don't do something well. One,
Speaker 3: I felt like I couldn't complain if it didn't if
Speaker 3: it didn't go well.
Speaker 2: But also I was like, I have I need skin
Speaker 2: in the game.
Speaker 3: And I lived in New Jersey at the time, and
Speaker 3: I decided I was like, well, New Jersey's not a
Speaker 3: battleground state. So I think it was Chuck Todd in
Speaker 3: his map, and I picked a yellow state, two yellow
Speaker 3: states to apply it to Virginia and Pennsylvania. I got
Speaker 3: jobs in both, but then decided to go to Virginia,
Speaker 3: a state that I'm very closely connected to my family now.
Speaker 3: My parents retired in Virginia, so Virginia is like a
Speaker 3: state I know they're politics well, and I've been in
Speaker 3: that state for many, many years. But I moved down
Speaker 3: to Virginia. I worked for the Obama campaign as a
Speaker 3: field organizer. This is before even my career in political
Speaker 3: communications took time off law school went down. Was a
Speaker 3: field organizer, knock on doors, and I really just learned
Speaker 3: what organizing is all about. I mean, I think everybody
Speaker 3: who starts in campaigns as a field organizer, that's like,
Speaker 3: that's the grunt work. But it's the best work because
Speaker 3: it teaches you all the different aspects of what's going
Speaker 3: on in a campaign because people are coming in and
Speaker 3: out of your field office.
Speaker 2: But also you learn how to talk to people.
Speaker 3: You learn how to communicate with people about what they
Speaker 3: care about. Right, all kinds of people are coming into
Speaker 3: your field office every day, mostly for yard signs, but
Speaker 3: sometimes with other types of questions. And they really just
Speaker 3: taught me that there's people of all ages and all backgrounds,
Speaker 3: and you know, with so many different concerns, I mean,
Speaker 3: and politics is one way to address those concerns. When
Speaker 3: I first got that job in two thousand and eight
Speaker 3: and all the organizers stood up and they were asked like,
Speaker 3: why are you here, we went around the realm of
Speaker 3: hundreds of people, and ninety five percent of the people
Speaker 3: said health insurance. Healthcare was the reason why they were there,
Speaker 3: So they had been impacted directly because parent, her grandparent,
Speaker 3: and for me, I think that was a really emotional
Speaker 3: experience because I realized that it's not just politics, right,
Speaker 3: it's I mean a lot of people think politics is
Speaker 3: a thing that doesn't affect them because they're not paying
Speaker 3: attention to it. Right. It's, oh, well, that's that's politics,
Speaker 3: that's Democrats and Republicans. No, it's it affects you every
Speaker 3: single day, whether you know it or not. So I
Speaker 3: think I learned in that in the grassroots way, how
Speaker 3: politics intimately affects people, and I learned how to organize
Speaker 3: on that campaign. The second campaign I worked was Hillary
Speaker 3: Clinton in twenty sixteen. In between, I became a writer
Speaker 3: and sort of had a profile as a writer and
Speaker 3: a media personality and ended up on Hillary's campaign in
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen based on that experience and what I learned
Speaker 3: were on that campaign, I mean, it was a really
Speaker 3: different job. I was a community communication staffer working on messaging.
Speaker 2: I think that's how we started.
Speaker 3: Communicating with each other because at the time Jess McIntosh,
Speaker 3: my partner in feminism, as I like to describe her,
Speaker 3: we were messaging to influencers, which no one knew what
Speaker 3: that meant. Bay twenty sixteen, they were like, what what
Speaker 3: is influencers? And we're like, we're doing influencer messaging and
Speaker 3: they were like, yeah.
Speaker 2: What does that mean?
Speaker 3: But I think in twenty sixteen, what I learned in
Speaker 3: that experience is that you really have to hit people
Speaker 3: in the heart.
Speaker 2: You know. There's something that.
Speaker 3: We and I've been thinking about this idea all year
Speaker 3: because there's something that is disconnected between what policies democrats
Speaker 3: are talking about and what people are feeling, even if those.
Speaker 2: Policies would would help with that.
Speaker 3: I think, long story short, to bring it back around,
Speaker 3: I think my experience both in two thousand and eight
Speaker 3: and twenty sixteen taught me from different perspectives how to
Speaker 3: actually reach people, right what do people care about, and
Speaker 3: how to talk to them so they feel like you
Speaker 3: hear them. And the things that you're talking about as
Speaker 3: it relates to politics, which affects everybody, are all things
Speaker 3: that they're like, oh, okay, I see how that can
Speaker 3: help me, and they're not so defensive right away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll be back in just a minute. But here's
Speaker 1: a word from our sponsors. There's a few things that
Speaker 1: kind of come up for me, and I'm curious about
Speaker 1: your lens, you know, much like you. The Oait election
Speaker 1: for President Obama was that was my first it's a
Speaker 1: political volunteer, and you know, by the time we all
Speaker 1: got onto Hillary's campaign in twenty sixteen, I think we
Speaker 1: were like, oh, we know what we're doing. We know
Speaker 1: how to do this. Part of the reason storytellers are
Speaker 1: so effective is because we can remind people take it
Speaker 1: out of the policy specific language and talk about how
Speaker 1: policy is personal. And one of the things that I
Speaker 1: see now is and we knew this right. We know
Speaker 1: a lie travels sixteen hundred times faster online than the truth.
Speaker 1: We know that soundbites float around and complex conversation doesn't.
Speaker 1: We know that the black and white is something that
Speaker 1: causes reactivity and nuance, which is required to run a
Speaker 1: country of this size, and also to understand all the
Speaker 1: people in it often doesn't translate or become clickbait. What
Speaker 1: I think I struggle with now is knowing not only
Speaker 1: those facts, but knowing how effective fear and othering are
Speaker 1: as a message, and to know that for our current administration,
Speaker 1: the cruelty is the point. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that I think we have failed at assuming we've had
Speaker 1: all these wins, we've had all this progress. You know,
Speaker 1: we were all born when a woman could get a
Speaker 1: credit card without her husband signing for it. We were
Speaker 1: born when a woman could rent an apartment without a man.
Speaker 1: Some of our elders, you know, the women that we
Speaker 1: look up to, were not. They remember the difference. And
Speaker 1: what I think we have failed at is communicating well
Speaker 1: that progress requires time and destruction is relatively immediate. If
Speaker 1: you drop a beautiful piece of pottery, it shatters the
Speaker 1: second it hits the floor. To make that pot on
Speaker 1: a wheel took time and clay and water and shaping
Speaker 1: and attempts and might have failed, and then begin again,
Speaker 1: and then it gets fired, and then it gets glazed,
Speaker 1: and then it gets fired again. Political progress or requires
Speaker 1: an investment of time and patience. But it's why we
Speaker 1: have these systems that seem to simply exist, and we
Speaker 1: haven't explained how they exist. The fact that we both
Speaker 1: have power in our homes is politics. The fact that
Speaker 1: we can turn on a faucet and drink water that
Speaker 1: hopefully won't kill us is politics. The fact that we
Speaker 1: have roads to drive on politics. When you bitch about
Speaker 1: the pothole in your neighborhood. Bad politics, Like people have
Speaker 1: forgotten that schools and clean air and water and electricity
Speaker 1: and a grocery store, all of it is politics. And
Speaker 1: so now politics has become these people who want to
Speaker 1: give your stuff away versus these mean people who'll do
Speaker 1: anything to give it back, And like that just ain't it? Like,
Speaker 1: it's not how it works. And when you think about
Speaker 1: you know, your show, your right, your activism, your political organizing,
Speaker 1: how do you begin to make the political personal? Because
Speaker 1: that difference between what we know and what we feel like,
Speaker 1: that's the gap. I think, So how do we help
Speaker 1: people understand how personal every single political decision is.
Speaker 3: I've been thinking about this for the last three weeks
Speaker 3: because one of the things that folks call my show,
Speaker 3: and they call from all over the country, they're like.
Speaker 2: What can we do? What can Democrats do? You know,
Speaker 2: how do we stop this?
Speaker 3: And it's in part I think there is a disconnect
Speaker 3: between some Democrats and what they say and some of
Speaker 3: the democratic messaging and what really resonates with people emotionally.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: I think that is why Trump succeeds in communicating to
Speaker 3: his base of support, because he taps in to them emotionally.
Speaker 1: Even though he's lying.
Speaker 3: To that, right, right, Like, that's what makes me crazy,
Speaker 3: you know me too, Me just.
Speaker 1: Lies and people go, yep, that's it.
Speaker 3: Right, And and unfortunately there are some people who want
Speaker 3: to be lied to, so some people do. They They
Speaker 3: may even if you got them, you know, in a
Speaker 3: corner and you were like, you know, that's not true,
Speaker 3: and they probably you probably could get them to admit that.
Speaker 3: But but I do think that one of the things
Speaker 3: that we sometimes miss on the left, and I hate
Speaker 3: even doing like right left, like on my show, I
Speaker 3: feel like we're humans, We're trying to survive, we're trying
Speaker 3: to be happy. We're all like have sort of the
Speaker 3: same goals here, and he's hurting everybody. It doesn't matter
Speaker 3: what side of the spectrum you fall on. He's he's
Speaker 3: firing government employees that voted for.
Speaker 1: Him, right, I mean, just gutted the VA.
Speaker 3: Exactly, literally veterans losing their And one of the things
Speaker 3: I've been thinking about in the last couple of weeks
Speaker 3: is the way in which Democrats can start talking about
Speaker 3: what's happening with Doggie. I don't even call it dose
Speaker 3: because Jess McIntosh and I just call it doggy.
Speaker 2: Because it sounds funny.
Speaker 3: What stories we can start telling about what's happening, right,
Speaker 3: It's not you know, there have been twenty thousand people
Speaker 3: who have been laid off. It's let's go talk to
Speaker 3: those people who are they it's a mom. It's probably
Speaker 3: a mom of three who worked for the federal government,
Speaker 3: maybe in a health agency, maybe in the Consumer Financial
Speaker 3: Protection Bureau making sure that people aren't getting scammed by
Speaker 3: credit card companies, and they're not. They're going to miss
Speaker 3: the payment for their mortgage, They're not going to be
Speaker 3: able to pay their their bills, they're not going to
Speaker 3: be able to pay tuition for their child. There you know,
Speaker 3: they may not be able to put gas in the car,
Speaker 3: much less afford eggs that have not gone down in price.
Speaker 3: So I think that the storytelling element that you that
Speaker 3: you referenced is the key, right. And I think sometimes
Speaker 3: we can get caught up in statistics and numbers as
Speaker 3: opposed to really talk to people's hearts, not their heads.
Speaker 2: And I actually I.
Speaker 3: Was having a conversation with somebody in Europe after the
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four election, and that is the conversation we were
Speaker 3: having because it wasn't just about the United States. It
Speaker 3: was about the left globally and how they sometimes struggle
Speaker 3: talking to people's hearts. And I mean in the context,
Speaker 3: the context was sort of like feeding people, you know,
Speaker 3: talking over a good meal and really just talking in
Speaker 3: a way that sounds human. And it's not that Democrats
Speaker 3: are not and it's not that they don't care about people,
Speaker 3: but I think sometimes we can get caught up in
Speaker 3: the numbers. And I was actually even in the first
Speaker 3: couple of weeks, not sure if even attacking Elon Musk
Speaker 3: was necessarily the best message quote unquote for the this
Speaker 3: particular moment, even though I think that couldn't be part
Speaker 3: of the message, that could be the only message, because
Speaker 3: I almost was like, I'm not sure, because there's a
Speaker 3: lot of people who look up to him of all backgrounds.
Speaker 2: Right he is the world's richest man.
Speaker 3: There are people backgrounds that look up to him because
Speaker 3: they don't know anything other than that's it.
Speaker 1: People look up to him because they don't know how
Speaker 1: he got rich, and they don't know where he comes
Speaker 1: from exactly, and they don't know what he's done to
Speaker 1: people exactly exactly. And we this is the irony, though,
Speaker 1: And I'm curious what you think here, because Trump has
Speaker 1: demonized the quote elite public servants who make not a
Speaker 1: lot of money compared to people like Donald Trump and
Speaker 1: his friends. He's demonized folks like you in the news media,
Speaker 1: folks like me who you know work on TV sometimes
Speaker 1: and I'm like bro, most of us with sad cards,
Speaker 1: you know, screen actors, guild actors like I only have
Speaker 1: healthcare because I'm in a union, right, Like, that's literally
Speaker 1: how I go to the doctor. You know, I if
Speaker 1: I make a dollar, my agent makes ten cents, my
Speaker 1: manager makes ten cents, my assistant makes ten cents, my
Speaker 1: lawyer makes fifty cents. Like I support a whole team
Speaker 1: of people when I work, and when I don't, we're
Speaker 1: all stressed out. Like we aren't like him. We don't
Speaker 1: fly around in private jets. We don't, you know, have
Speaker 1: endlessly expendable money. And yet a man who is a
Speaker 1: billionaire who launched a meme coin which was likely allegedly
Speaker 1: a money laundering scam, who went from having a four
Speaker 1: billion dollar net worth to having a twenty nine billion
Speaker 1: dollar net worth at the weekend of his coin launch,
Speaker 1: and then the coin tanked once he sold all his shares.
Speaker 1: I'm like, that's a straight up twenty five billion dollar grift.
Speaker 1: And your friend is the world's richest man who is
Speaker 1: about to be the first trillionaire, who, by the way,
Speaker 1: said to the World Health Organization, tell me how I
Speaker 1: could solve world hunger. They gave him a plan and
Speaker 1: said it would only cost you six billion dollars. He
Speaker 1: announced publicly he was going to do it, and then
Speaker 1: he was like, psych I got all the good press.
Speaker 1: What I'm going to do is go buy Twitter for
Speaker 1: forty four billion dollars instead. Like these are bad people.
Speaker 1: These are like movie villain rich terrible people. And somehow
Speaker 1: they've managed to convince people with so much less, people
Speaker 1: whose livelihoods are at risk from paycheck to paycheck, that
Speaker 1: those of us who have been in paycheck to paycheck
Speaker 1: positions aren't like them. But the billionaire class is like,
Speaker 1: how how, why? What is that? Are we just all
Speaker 1: so secretly sure that if we got a reality show
Speaker 1: or I don't know, fathered seventeen children with however many women,
Speaker 1: Elon has that like, we could be rich too. What
Speaker 1: what is that in our psyche that puts us in
Speaker 1: these crazy places where we are like the characters in
Speaker 1: that kid's book The Emperor has no clothes, and we're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: great robe to the naked guy, Like what why are
Speaker 1: we like this?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I wish I knew the answer. I think part of
Speaker 3: it we're delusional. There's a lot of people who are
Speaker 3: delusional these days, and I think it goes back to
Speaker 3: in all serious it's the point you mentioned earlier about
Speaker 3: disinformation and misinformation. So number one, even the story that
Speaker 3: you just told about Elon Musk and Donald Trump and
Speaker 3: the meme coin, a lot of people don't know that
Speaker 3: detail because that's not detail that is in their siloed
Speaker 3: media environment.
Speaker 2: So they're not even getting the facts right.
Speaker 3: They are poureding off from fact telling right if they're
Speaker 3: just watching Fox News, if their algorithm is only feeding
Speaker 3: them right winging voices, they are not getting any of
Speaker 3: the facts and that it's it's so because I feel
Speaker 3: like one of the things that happened in the first
Speaker 3: couple of weeks and it's still happening now with all
Speaker 3: the federal layoffs, is people who voted for Trump are like,
Speaker 3: I got fired today or I did not, I lost
Speaker 3: my snap benefits today or I couldn't access my step
Speaker 3: menefits because of the initial funding freeze. I think that
Speaker 3: people are now starting to see that, wait a minute,
Speaker 3: he's doing things that are affecting me, that are harming me.
Speaker 3: And he didn't say he was going to do that.
Speaker 3: He said he was going to deport all of the
Speaker 3: brown people, all the undocumented people that I thought he
Speaker 3: was going to do that. I didn't think he was
Speaker 3: going to do this. And I think that the storytelling
Speaker 3: plus the making sure they have access to the facts,
Speaker 3: I think that there can be a really critical combination
Speaker 3: of those two things that can help at least get
Speaker 3: us part of the way. But unfortunately, for the next
Speaker 3: couple of years, until at least the midtrum elections, it's
Speaker 3: going to be incredibly hard. And I think that one
Speaker 3: of the things that I know that I've been doing
Speaker 3: on my show, I know that AOC has been doing
Speaker 3: that every time she goes on IG Live, is really
Speaker 3: level setting with people and saying, look, we're not in
Speaker 3: power as Democrats, not in the Senate, not in the House.
Speaker 3: There's very little that we can do. There's I mean,
Speaker 3: I would argue there there's more they could do. But
Speaker 3: there's not a whole lot they can do. They can't
Speaker 3: stop things whole claw.
Speaker 1: And not only can they not stop things, but when
Speaker 1: when the federal government, when our federal courts say, this
Speaker 1: is outside the scope of presidential power. You are infringing
Speaker 1: on the other branches of the judiciary, this is not
Speaker 1: within the scope of executive power. You are breaking the law.
Speaker 1: And he says, so, yeah, we've never had that. I mean,
Speaker 1: it is truly.
Speaker 2: It's not hyperbole.
Speaker 1: It's not people, you know, being sensitive or fantastical or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's a true constitutional crisis or in the person who
Speaker 1: occupies the O office, I am not going to respect
Speaker 1: any other branch of the federal government, and I am
Speaker 1: not going to listen to the law of the land,
Speaker 1: nor will I follow the letter of the Constitution. We
Speaker 1: have a problem.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, no, it's a huge problem. I asked Senator
Speaker 3: Chris Murphy recently the same exact question. I was like,
Speaker 3: I know, But I was also like, well, what do
Speaker 3: we do because we have to assume he's not going
Speaker 3: to follow any of what the judges saying. Even if
Speaker 3: the judges are like, you're in the law, He's going
Speaker 3: to be like so what, I'm gonna do what I want.
Speaker 3: It's unconstitutional. He's like, so what, I don't care, and
Speaker 3: we have to just assume that he's I think that
Speaker 3: Senator Murphy pointed made the most important point. One of
Speaker 3: the first things he did was was a signal. He
Speaker 3: pardoned the January sixth insurrectionists. That was the mall we
Speaker 3: all should have known from day one that he is
Speaker 3: not going to respect the rule of law.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean, he's going in there as a convicted felon,
Speaker 3: but we know he's not going to respect the rule
Speaker 3: of law because he pardoned the people who attacked the capitol.
Speaker 2: In January sixth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so that was the signal that if you
Speaker 3: ever commit acts of violence or break the law for me,
Speaker 3: you'll be fine. And that is the same thing is
Speaker 3: true about mister Elon Musk, Right, if he breaks the
Speaker 3: law and a judge is like, stop doing that, he's
Speaker 3: gonna make so what because he knows that his buddy
Speaker 3: President Trump can pardon him.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So I think one of the things that.
Speaker 3: So many people are not really grasping right now is
Speaker 3: not only did they tell us they were going to
Speaker 3: do all of this, they wrote it all down on
Speaker 3: probably twenty twenty five, And I remember saying on MSNBC
Speaker 3: before the election, the combination of Projecly twenty twenty five
Speaker 3: in the presidential immunity decision, that is what a dictatorship is.
Speaker 3: Those two things together combined make a dictator And I
Speaker 3: don't think people were really getting it. And the pushback
Speaker 3: that I got in talking about democracy and protecting democracy
Speaker 3: was that people really care.
Speaker 2: About the cost of eggs.
Speaker 3: And while I think that there are people out there
Speaker 3: that did care about the cost of eggs, they that
Speaker 3: was just their cover for not really admitting that they
Speaker 3: wanted to deport some of these brown people and that
Speaker 3: was the real reason why they were supporting Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: And it frustrated me that we couldn't really get to
Speaker 3: the heart of the matter. And now people are stunned
Speaker 3: that he's breaking the democracy because they told us they
Speaker 3: were going to break the democracy. They had a plan
Speaker 3: to break the democracy, and he's using Elon Musk to
Speaker 3: do it.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in just a minute after a few
Speaker 1: words from our favorite sponsors. To go back to that
Speaker 1: pottery analogy. When I think about the outbreak of a
Speaker 1: global pandemic, the first in one hundred years. You know,
Speaker 1: you think the Spanish fluid in nineteen eighteen, and then COVID,
Speaker 1: you know, granted we know now that it was beginning
Speaker 1: to spread in twenty nineteen, but really went global twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: shut down the entire global economy, supply chains, factories, shipping routes.
Speaker 1: To build that back up requires a building, almost from scratch.
Speaker 1: Once the well oiled machine stops, it takes a lot
Speaker 1: to get the machine going again. And when economists were
Speaker 1: talking about how President Biden had done such incredible work
Speaker 1: to stop inflation and manage to do it without starting
Speaker 1: a recession and brought American inflation below three percent in
Speaker 1: just three years, and did it so effectively that it
Speaker 1: actually began lowering inflation rates in other countries, people were like,
Speaker 1: what are you talking about?
Speaker 2: And when I would.
Speaker 1: Quote to friends and say, have you seen the studies?
Speaker 1: Do you understand that inflation in Australia went over twenty percent,
Speaker 1: that inflation in Argentina reached twenty two percent, that inflation
Speaker 1: in Europe in certain areas was over nineteen percent, And
Speaker 1: people were like, wait, what I'm going How much do
Speaker 1: you think eggs cost there? And yes, things are not
Speaker 1: perfect again here yet, but everything is trending in the
Speaker 1: right direction. But for some reason, we are so impatient
Speaker 1: with the fix, right, we are impatient with the work,
Speaker 1: even though the work for America alone has to be
Speaker 1: done for three hundred and thirty two million people. Like,
Speaker 1: think about how crazy the freeway looks at five o'clock,
Speaker 1: Like there aren't even a million people on the freeway
Speaker 1: and you're in a bumper to bumper parking lot. Like
Speaker 1: to move hundreds of millions of people back into a
Speaker 1: sort of synchronized efficiency takes time, and for some reason
Speaker 1: that time, rather than looking at it and saying, wow,
Speaker 1: we are so proud to be leading the world on
Speaker 1: global recovery, it turned into they're not doing things fast enough.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to the other guy. And it feels,
Speaker 1: you know, it feels to me like we are in
Speaker 1: the upside down. And to your point, it feels like
Speaker 1: because these are complex conversations right the left or the
Speaker 1: you know, folks that want everybody to have rights and
Speaker 1: that want kids to have lunch in school. Because I'm
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm done like you with the right and
Speaker 1: the left thing. I'm like, you either want kids to
Speaker 1: be able to eat in school or you don't.
Speaker 2: That's it right to me, just basic human decency.
Speaker 1: And so the pro kids having school lunch's side, for
Speaker 1: some reason can't seem to harness the messaging on what
Speaker 1: they're doing well. And so the other side, despite everyone
Speaker 1: know they're lying, keeps lying and then the lies hit
Speaker 1: the airways and here we are. So how do you think,
Speaker 1: you know, Chris Murphy, I think one of our best
Speaker 1: messages AOC doing an incredible job. How do you think
Speaker 1: we can begin to cut through some of the bs
Speaker 1: and some of the unwillingness for people to listen to
Speaker 1: anyone who thinks, yes, I kids should eat lunch in school.
Speaker 1: How do we like right the ship a little bit here?
Speaker 3: Well, one of the things I think is that we
Speaker 3: have to be better about putting on a show.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: One of the things that Donald Trump did well, I mean,
Speaker 3: for lack of a better description, in the twenty twenty
Speaker 3: four election, is he put on you know, it was
Speaker 3: silly and and even and I was making fun of
Speaker 3: it at the time because it looks silly, But when
Speaker 3: he kept standing in front of a bunch of groceries, right,
Speaker 3: it was just a visual reminder to people that he
Speaker 3: was going to solve that problem for them, even though
Speaker 3: he didn't do anything about it. He hasn't done anything
Speaker 3: about it since becoming president, and he doesn't intend on
Speaker 3: doing anything about it. We just have to tell better stories,
Speaker 3: and we have to do it in a way that
Speaker 3: is visually compelling. So I have been critical on my
Speaker 3: show in the past couple of weeks just in terms
Speaker 3: of I think that Democrats showing up at protests outside
Speaker 3: of federal agency buildings is great. And I know that
Speaker 3: there are like regularly scheduled press availabilities and press conferences
Speaker 3: that are inside of Congress because our government has, you know,
Speaker 3: things that standard procedure, but we're not.
Speaker 2: In that moment.
Speaker 3: So I I've grown tired of seeing any Democrats stand
Speaker 3: in front of a podium inside of the Capitol building.
Speaker 3: I do not understand why they're not standing at a
Speaker 3: coffee shop with real people who have been fired from
Speaker 3: their jobs. That is what I think they need to
Speaker 3: do more of. They need to be in with the people.
Speaker 3: I know that they have jobs, and they got to
Speaker 3: vote on legs. Well, they have to vote on procedural
Speaker 3: things and confirmations obviously happening with the cabinet, or hopefully
Speaker 3: they're voting in opposition to that cabinet. But I think
Speaker 3: that part of the problem and the disconnect sometimes comes
Speaker 3: from they're not putting on a good enough show and
Speaker 3: it seems silly. It seems like, well, isn't it about substance.
Speaker 3: It is, but you do have to make it digestible
Speaker 3: for people. Going back to the food analogy, you do
Speaker 3: have to to make it so that people are like, oh, okay,
Speaker 3: they're gonna they're gonna make sure that.
Speaker 2: You know, I can afford my groceries.
Speaker 3: Now, the president can't do anything about gas prices per se,
Speaker 3: but I think that you know, Trump does. That doesn't
Speaker 3: make mean that Trump doesn't say he can do something
Speaker 3: about that. He still lies and says that you know,
Speaker 3: it's all because of him, even though it isn't.
Speaker 2: But Democrats just have to tell better stories. They're not that.
Speaker 2: Sometimes they can get into the weeds they.
Speaker 3: Want to they want And I do this a lot
Speaker 3: of the time, Like I have to catch myself sometimes
Speaker 3: doing this. And I think on my radio show, if
Speaker 3: you like listen, over the years, I think that I
Speaker 3: talk more like a regular person and less like a
Speaker 3: strategist now because I realized that actually coming with all
Speaker 3: of my facts and all of my data and all
Speaker 3: of my talking points is not actually persuasive as persuasive
Speaker 3: it as it is to just talk to another person,
Speaker 3: hear them out, listen to what they're saying.
Speaker 2: And then be like, but what about what about this?
Speaker 2: Isn't that? Isn't that a better idea?
Speaker 3: And just and talk to them in a way that
Speaker 3: they feel heard, but then understand that what you're suggesting
Speaker 3: in terms of a policy is actually going to help
Speaker 3: them and is for their benefit, like that you don't
Speaker 3: have some sort of other agenda going on as well.
Speaker 2: And I think we can get to in the weeds.
Speaker 3: We're talking in too many stats and numbers, and we
Speaker 3: just have to get to people's hearts, right, go talk
Speaker 3: to their heads, talk to their hearts.
Speaker 1: Well, I hear you. And then it feels so tricky
Speaker 1: because yes, a lot of people talked about the price
Speaker 1: of eggs, and now eggs are twice as expensive approximately.
Speaker 1: I think the numbers change every day as they were
Speaker 1: during the last administration. Nobody's talking about it. You know,
Speaker 1: the AP is getting banned from the Oval Office, because
Speaker 1: they are still referring to the Gulf of Mexico as
Speaker 1: the Gulf of Mexico because that's its name, right.
Speaker 2: You know. Some of this stuff is so crazy, you know.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, oh, so you do understand name changes
Speaker 1: in pronoun changes. Actually yeah, Trump government got ithilarious loll
Speaker 1: but also not funny. You know. Everything he's doing is
Speaker 1: it's happening so fast, and we are getting caught on
Speaker 1: these things. Gulf of Mexico versus Golf of America was
Speaker 1: a week long discourse and it's not even a thing
Speaker 1: that matters. It's a distraction to the gutting of the VA.
Speaker 1: It's a distraction to the fact that someone with no
Speaker 1: government oversight, who has not been vetted, is essentially acting
Speaker 1: as a shadow president, someone who comes from a generational
Speaker 1: family that supported apartheid, that are allegedly active Nazis, that
Speaker 1: are you know, doing Nazi salutes on stages and courting
Speaker 1: the far right German Party and interfering in European elections
Speaker 1: and buying media outlets. I mean, this is this is
Speaker 1: the playbook of the twenties and thirties on steroids, yea,
Speaker 1: And people are getting really caught up in dumb shit.
Speaker 1: So I almost wonder if the bigger systemic problem. I
Speaker 1: think a lot about this with anti vaxers. Okay, people
Speaker 1: are convinced that rather than having better science and us
Speaker 1: being able to understand the full spectrum of neurodiversity in humans,
Speaker 1: thus we understand more people exist on an autism spectrum,
Speaker 1: more people are a neurodivergent ADHD. They're actually beginning to
Speaker 1: prove was a superpower in hunter gatherer times because you
Speaker 1: could really focus and get all the berries and then
Speaker 1: go home when you felt like you did your task.
Speaker 1: You know, none of this is actually a bad thing.
Speaker 1: But now suddenly everybody's like, oh, it must have been
Speaker 1: this one vaccine dose my kid got that did something
Speaker 1: to them, even though the tighters are all lower than
Speaker 1: they were when we were kids, even though the vaccine
Speaker 1: amounts are lower than they were, even though there's more
Speaker 1: arsenic in a pair from the pesticides it grows in
Speaker 1: than there is in the totality of all vaccines you'll
Speaker 1: ever get in your life. Like, I think, it's easier
Speaker 1: to blame the one thing that maybe you could avoid it,
Speaker 1: even though avoiding it could kill you, than to admit Oh,
Speaker 1: our government's been poisoning the land on both sides of
Speaker 1: the aisle with glycassate for fifty years. Oh, we know
Speaker 1: that the pipes in Flint are full of lead and
Speaker 1: they're giving kids brain damage, but we're not replacing them. Oh,
Speaker 1: we clearly have a problem, you know, after the wildfires
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles with water system contamination by a Brita like.
Speaker 1: I think it's easier to try to point to the
Speaker 1: quickest insult to your safety than to analyze systemic problems. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and to require then that these sides work across the
Speaker 1: aisle to solve the problems for all people and all voters,
Speaker 1: no matter how you identify. It's easier to harp on
Speaker 1: something that you think you can avoid than to say, Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm a cog in a very big machine that might
Speaker 1: not care about me. Do you think that's part of it? Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's interesting that you talk about food policy, because ironically,
Speaker 3: when I spend out a lot of time in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four in Europe, that was like, the first thing
Speaker 3: I noticed was that fruit tasted like fruit, and I
Speaker 3: was like, wait, what is this paar taste sweet and
Speaker 3: what's going on.
Speaker 1: Instead of like foam exactly.
Speaker 3: And I actually had Governor Walls on to talk about
Speaker 3: school lunches as a part of a food policy special
Speaker 3: that we did on my radio show, and I learned
Speaker 3: so much about not just the difference between food policy
Speaker 3: and Europe versus food policy in the United States, but
Speaker 3: I think the way in which we've been blocked from
Speaker 3: actually changing it, and the way in which the lobby
Speaker 3: just makes it completely impossible to change how we make food,
Speaker 3: consume food, and what's in our food. And that's a
Speaker 3: much more important conversation than any conversation about a vaccine
Speaker 3: that has been tested.
Speaker 1: And now for our sponsors. If we made the lobbying
Speaker 1: and the money and politics illegal, all of this would change.
Speaker 1: It's not actually about the law or the die, which
Speaker 1: by the way, is still in food in Europe. They're
Speaker 1: just called different things. It's not even that. And it's
Speaker 1: really not lost on me as a California And you know,
Speaker 1: a year and a half ago, when Gavin Newsom tried
Speaker 1: to ban five substances from the California food system, he
Speaker 1: was called a communist. People were like, how Dario tell
Speaker 1: Us what we can eat. And so was Michelle Obama.
Speaker 1: When she tried to say, you can't classify pizza as
Speaker 1: a vegetable in school for kids because it has tomato sauce.
Speaker 1: You have to give them actual vegetables. People called her
Speaker 1: a communist. They said she was meddling. They said she
Speaker 1: didn't have the presidential oversight to do this. And now
Speaker 1: we're just handing the whole kit in kaboodle over to
Speaker 1: RFK who's making millions of dollars a year selling people
Speaker 1: supplements that aren't even tested by the FDA. No, I
Speaker 1: mean upside down.
Speaker 3: Money in politics is the problem. Right, So everything we're
Speaker 3: talking about today, the problem is money in politics.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: If we did something about that, we would go a
Speaker 3: long way to solve all of the other problems. It's
Speaker 3: like when you make your list of goals at the
Speaker 3: beginning of the year, and you have ten goals written
Speaker 3: down on your paper, and there's that one or two
Speaker 3: goals that if you actually accomplished those, it would make
Speaker 3: the others easier. That's the problem, right, That is the problem.
Speaker 3: I remember back when Citizens United was decided. I remember
Speaker 3: I was sitting at home watching Keith Olberman because That
Speaker 3: was the show eight o'clock on MSNBC at the time,
Speaker 3: and he was talking about the danger of a decision
Speaker 3: like citizens United. And I won't ever forget what he said,
Speaker 3: because we're living through it. He said, imagine a president
Speaker 3: Sarah Palin paid for by Citybank. Now we're not living
Speaker 3: exactly in that reality. However, how different is it the
Speaker 3: reality we're living in now versus President Sarah Palin paid
Speaker 3: for by City Bank. We're living in a president Donald
Speaker 3: Trump two point zho paid for by Elon Musk. Yes,
Speaker 3: it's yes, literally what he predicted that night, says, since
Speaker 3: United was decided.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, and I read something last night, and you know,
Speaker 1: forgive me, and we'll have to double check it in
Speaker 1: the notes for the episode. But you know, Elon Musk
Speaker 1: spent close to three hundred million dollars buying his presidency
Speaker 1: for Donald Trump, and now he's been awarded nearly eight
Speaker 1: billion dollars more in government contracts.
Speaker 2: I'm going, hello, It's is Carlos, plain and simple.
Speaker 1: The Fox is in the Henhouse. Yeah, and I guess
Speaker 1: we talked about this, you know, when we first jumped
Speaker 1: on that. In a weird way, we're not at all surprised,
Speaker 1: but we're absolutely rocked and shocked. When you wrote your
Speaker 1: book about, you know, healing a liberal divide, you analyze
Speaker 1: past and present problems of the we want children to
Speaker 1: have luncheon School's side. But you called the book the
Speaker 1: end of White politics because the idea here is that, like,
Speaker 1: these systems aren't protecting us, these sort of bastardized ideas
Speaker 1: around quote unquote supremacy are hurting everyone. And by the way,
Speaker 1: the men like the President who want it the most.
Speaker 1: It's like it's older white men that are killing themselves
Speaker 1: at the highest rates, so they're clearly suffering in all
Speaker 1: of this too. How does it feel to have that
Speaker 1: book exist post this election, post the world turning upside down?
Speaker 1: How do you make sense of your thoughts and feelings
Speaker 1: your analysis? Are there things you wish you could add
Speaker 1: to it? Is that where the substack comes from, Like,
Speaker 1: how does it all work for you now? From here?
Speaker 3: Well, my substack, which is launching very soon called the
Speaker 3: Inner Work Dispatch, is going to focus on mental health
Speaker 3: and mental wellbeing because I think that as we are activists,
Speaker 3: as we are organizers, as we are thinkers in this space,
Speaker 3: we have to also learn how to take care of ourselves.
Speaker 3: That's something that I am learning, like I actually need too, right,
Speaker 3: like take care of my mental well being before I
Speaker 3: can go out and fight fight the man.
Speaker 1: And I feel like I'm learning as an academic quote
Speaker 1: unquote expert in certain arenas. I feel like I'm signing
Speaker 1: up for kindergarten learning how to actually prioritize my own
Speaker 1: health and wellness and mental health.
Speaker 2: I just have to.
Speaker 3: I mean, I've been more intentional in recent years about Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm going to read the news now out why I'm
Speaker 3: putting it down. I'm not going to look at it.
Speaker 3: I you know, push notifications. They're not even on my
Speaker 3: phone anymore. And I work in news, so that's like
Speaker 3: actually insane. But also I make sure like I'm checking
Speaker 3: it with intention.
Speaker 2: I'm doing that on purpose.
Speaker 3: I'm not accidentally seeing something, and so that go a
Speaker 3: long way in making sure you're mentally okay. But back
Speaker 3: to the book question, I feel like I don't know
Speaker 3: that was a version of me. I wrote that book
Speaker 3: completely before COVID, by the way, I didn't realize that
Speaker 3: it came out in July twenty twenty. So I wrote
Speaker 3: the book before COVID even happened, and I had to
Speaker 3: write it a forward.
Speaker 2: For the paperback post Insurrection. So the Ford and the Pape's.
Speaker 1: Way, Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, because I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: why do I feel like it was so much more
Speaker 1: recent than that? And that's why, because the words in
Speaker 1: that forward, I know, really stuck with me.
Speaker 2: It's the forward.
Speaker 3: I read it the Ford a lot, actually, because I
Speaker 3: think I sometimes I feel like I'm like a couple
Speaker 3: of years ahead of like where the political analysis is,
Speaker 3: and that's not twenty my own horn. That's just like
Speaker 3: sometimes I'm like, I see the matrix, and how come
Speaker 3: nobody else sees this? So I knew that, and I
Speaker 3: have a chapter of the white resistance in the book.
Speaker 3: I knew that there was going to be a backlash
Speaker 3: to the evolution of American demographics.
Speaker 2: I knew that.
Speaker 3: I knew it right there was going to be. I mean,
Speaker 3: we're living through that backlash right now.
Speaker 2: Now. I don't know what happens on the other side
Speaker 2: of this backlash. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know if we actually reach a place and
Speaker 3: still have a democracy where we can have a multi
Speaker 3: racial and functioning democracy. I don't know the answer to
Speaker 3: that question anymore, because I don't know what happens after
Speaker 3: this administration. Do we have a democracy to even engage
Speaker 3: with right, I don't know. I don't think anybody knows
Speaker 3: the answer to that because we're in such unprecedented times.
Speaker 3: But I do know that the evolution and demographics of
Speaker 3: the country. That's why they're trying to mass support eleven
Speaker 3: million undocumented people right now.
Speaker 2: Those people weren't.
Speaker 3: Even voting, but it's like a show and it makes
Speaker 3: them feel better about the fact that American's demographics are shifting,
Speaker 3: that is happening now. They might try to prevent that
Speaker 3: evolution right in ways that I don't even want to
Speaker 3: talk about because I don't want to allow my brain
Speaker 3: to even go there thinking about those horrors that potentially
Speaker 3: ways in which they could stop that evolution demographically.
Speaker 1: Their private prison contracts to be modern day concentration camps
Speaker 1: are pretty indicative of there.
Speaker 3: There are ways they can do it. We know from
Speaker 3: history and also the present. Really scary conversation, but I
Speaker 3: will say that I am somebody who comes from an
Speaker 3: ancestry that has survived, works, and somehow holds onto some
Speaker 3: form of optimism and hope and even the worst moments.
Speaker 3: So for me, it's like, we can reach that place,
Speaker 3: but we all have to stay really focused in this
Speaker 3: moment so that we actually have a democracy to engage
Speaker 3: with when our demographics shift and when we could have
Speaker 3: a multi racial democracy. But I think about a lot
Speaker 3: about the fact that I thought I didn't know that
Speaker 3: we would live through quite a dismantling of the democracy
Speaker 3: at the pace in the last month that we've seen
Speaker 3: under a second Trump like term.
Speaker 2: I really didn't.
Speaker 3: I thought that the first Trump term was the backlash.
Speaker 3: Biden winning in twenty twenty was the signal that we
Speaker 3: were going in the right direction.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that we were so.
Speaker 3: Quickly going to make a turn, a U turn. But
Speaker 3: I feel like in some ways that was almost naive
Speaker 3: because history, and Melissa Harris Perry said this a long
Speaker 3: time ago, we always we make progress and then we
Speaker 3: go back. We fight and we fail, and we fight
Speaker 3: and we fail, And that's sort of how progress happens
Speaker 3: is you fight and you fail, you go a little
Speaker 3: bit further, you fail, you go a little bit further,
Speaker 3: you fail.
Speaker 2: And so I'm hopeful that.
Speaker 3: We don't go backwards so far that even catching up
Speaker 3: to where we started, that the status quo of twenty
Speaker 3: twenty is impossible, I don't think.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's impossible.
Speaker 3: I think that as AOC always says, like, some of
Speaker 3: the power is an illusion, right they you know, some
Speaker 3: of it is an illusion. Some of it's real, but
Speaker 3: some of it is an illusion. And I think that
Speaker 3: the power of the people in this country, we the people.
Speaker 3: It's still true, our collective. They change things that they
Speaker 3: were doing the initial days of the administration because of
Speaker 3: the backlash publicly, and so I think that as long
Speaker 3: as that is still true, we can do everything in
Speaker 3: our disposal, you know, through our grassroots organizing, through our
Speaker 3: political pressure, and you know, in the arena of public opinion,
Speaker 3: we can do those things to try to mitigate the damage,
Speaker 3: because it's not going to prevent it, but it can
Speaker 3: mitigate it somewhat well.
Speaker 1: And I think that's really important to remind people. It
Speaker 1: feels hopeless by design, But the more noise we make,
Speaker 1: the more quickly they do retreat. Funding freezes are stopped,
Speaker 1: they try to rehire the team working on bird flu,
Speaker 1: they rehire the people with the nuclear codes.
Speaker 3: You know, shocker, and you imagine getting rid of the
Speaker 3: people working on bird flu.
Speaker 1: I can because you know, he disbanded our pandemic response
Speaker 1: network in twenty seventeen. And I know that because I
Speaker 1: had a friend who worked for it. So I'm not surprised,
Speaker 1: but I am rather shocked that humans who can't go
Speaker 1: live in bunkers aren't hitting the streets. It's also not
Speaker 1: lost on me that there were mass protests on Monday
Speaker 1: and I didn't see them on a single news network.
Speaker 1: I saw them on Instagram, I saw them on TikTok.
Speaker 1: We need to not only apply pressure to the government
Speaker 1: to stop allowing the president to act like a dictator,
Speaker 1: but we also have to apply pressure to the news
Speaker 1: to not bend the knee in advance, to not refuse
Speaker 1: to cover the protests, to not ignore the horrors, to
Speaker 1: talk about the fact that our veterans no longer have
Speaker 1: access to mental health care benefits and treatment for their injuries.
Speaker 1: You know, we need to continue to apply the pressure.
Speaker 1: It's why I think five calls dot org is such
Speaker 1: a good website. It's why I will remind everyone listening
Speaker 1: to listen to your show Mornings with Zerlina As on
Speaker 1: Serious XM one twenty seven. It is certainly one of
Speaker 1: the first places I turn to when I'm pissed and
Speaker 1: stressed and I just need to listen to somebody top
Speaker 1: me down a little bit and remind me of what matters.
Speaker 1: So thank you for that. I really do think we
Speaker 1: have to be reminded that we are in this together,
Speaker 1: and there are more of us than there are of
Speaker 1: the billionaire oligarchy. Certainly, and as so many people who
Speaker 1: did vot for him, I would like to think because
Speaker 1: their information was siloed, not because they overtly or consciously
Speaker 1: agree with the cruelty. I know some do, but I
Speaker 1: want to appeal to the ones that don't. I hope
Speaker 1: that the people who believed what they were being sold
Speaker 1: who will need our help, I hope those are people
Speaker 1: we can welcome to build a new political future. And
Speaker 1: just thank you for keeping keeping up the work. Thank
Speaker 1: you for the substack that's coming. I need it so badly,
Speaker 1: and I guess I mean it feels like you've done
Speaker 1: such amazing work, not just in your career but in
Speaker 1: your life. To give yourself a fuller life, to find respite,
Speaker 1: to find joy so you can stay in the fight
Speaker 1: long term. Is the joyful part of resistance. What feels
Speaker 1: like you're work in progress right now? Because I know
Speaker 1: moving is a literal work in progress. But but is
Speaker 1: it is it sort of that whole shift in life,
Speaker 1: or is it something else that I'm not even thinking of.
Speaker 3: I think that the joy is part of my journey.
Speaker 3: It has to be part of my journey. And I
Speaker 3: think it's because of who my mom was. My late
Speaker 3: mother was a psychotherapist, so she was always very you know,
Speaker 3: she was always inquiring like, how are you feeling, what
Speaker 3: are you feeling, what are you thinking? She was always
Speaker 3: asking questions like that, And it didn't occur to me
Speaker 3: until later in my life that not everybody's parents are
Speaker 3: asking them those questions. But one of the things that
Speaker 3: she always used to say is that you have to
Speaker 3: She called it sole care, right, and you have to care.
Speaker 3: You have to be very, very intentional and care about
Speaker 3: what you let enter your spirit.
Speaker 2: That's how she used to talk about it.
Speaker 3: And because I work in news, and you know, consuming
Speaker 3: news all day is you're allowing the worst things that
Speaker 3: are happening to enter into your spirit every day. And
Speaker 3: because I'm empathetic and compassionate, it affects me. It's not
Speaker 3: just reading statistics. I feel those things really deeply. I
Speaker 3: had to I had to get to a place where
Speaker 3: I could could create space, right to actually live a full,
Speaker 3: beautiful life that wasn't just news and politics and reaction
Speaker 3: to what Trump did and reaction to what Republicans did,
Speaker 3: and and and.
Speaker 2: I realized that I just wasn't.
Speaker 3: I mean, the whole day would go, you know, front
Speaker 3: to back, and I'd be like, what did I do
Speaker 3: today that was fun? Did I do anything today that
Speaker 3: was fun at all?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 2: And and I think.
Speaker 3: That who wants to live a life where they are
Speaker 3: not enjoying at least a moment of your day?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: And and that's not to say that And again, I
Speaker 3: am incredibly privileged, right, I'm incredibly but I work remotely.
Speaker 3: I'm able to create a life in a way that
Speaker 3: I know that that is a privilege that I enjoy.
Speaker 3: But I also know that my mother, she always used
Speaker 3: to say to me, you know, it's really not you
Speaker 3: know any kids, you're not married. She's like, you can
Speaker 3: go anywhere, you can do whatever you want. And I
Speaker 3: think that those messages that she always used to say
Speaker 3: to me, they started ringing in my brain. You know,
Speaker 3: when I was living in Washington, d C. In like
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three, and I was like, I can go anywhere,
Speaker 3: I can do what I want, and I think I
Speaker 3: should do it because what am I waiting for? And
Speaker 3: now that Trump is back at the White House, it
Speaker 3: really feels like, Okay, I'm glad.
Speaker 2: I made the move.
Speaker 3: I took the leap of faith because you know, you
Speaker 3: can't take anything for granted.
Speaker 2: You can't take anything for granted. So for me, it's
Speaker 2: about I say this.
Speaker 3: I start my show every single morning with a moment
Speaker 3: of gratitude, Like even if I in some days I'm like,
Speaker 3: I don't even know what I'm grateful.
Speaker 2: I don't know, like I'm trying to think. It was
Speaker 2: hard to think of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I actually do that to model for everybody
Speaker 3: listening that they should do that in their own mourning,
Speaker 3: because you have to sort of late have that be
Speaker 3: the foundation of what you're doing. And then at the
Speaker 3: end of the show every day most days, I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 3: do something that sparks joy today, please, Like, I don't
Speaker 3: care what it is, but you're going to do that.
Speaker 3: And we have a weekly segment mental health Mondays, because
Speaker 3: if you're going to listen to a new show to
Speaker 3: start your morning, I'm going to have to give you
Speaker 3: a little bit to help you with your mental health
Speaker 3: and your mental well being because this is hard. This
Speaker 3: is hard, and no sugarcoating that.
Speaker 1: I love that. It really reminds. What you're reminding me
Speaker 1: is that we live so much of our life and reactivity.
Speaker 1: It's the nature of the world, especially if you care
Speaker 1: about the world, that to dedicate real routine time, even
Speaker 1: if it's five minutes to proactivity, is something that you deserve.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have to do something that you enjoy. I mean,
Speaker 3: I had someone ask me recently. They were like, so,
Speaker 3: what do you like to do for fun? And I
Speaker 3: was like, I don't understand the question. And they were like,
Speaker 3: is there anything that you do that it wouldn't matter
Speaker 3: if you weren't good at.
Speaker 2: It, you just enjoy doing it. I was like, I.
Speaker 3: Really don't understand your question. I don't understand. What do
Speaker 3: you mean I'm not good at it? Like I'm doing
Speaker 3: something and I'm not good at it, Like I don't there's.
Speaker 2: Nothing that I do that's like that. I don't have
Speaker 2: things like that. They're like, well, this is what you're
Speaker 2: gonna do.
Speaker 1: This is the beginning of the jet this is.
Speaker 3: How you need to tap into doing things for the
Speaker 3: pure enjoyment of it.
Speaker 2: And so that's sort of the journey I'm on.
Speaker 3: Right now because I realized that I was, I mean,
Speaker 3: like so many other people, you know, you're just focused
Speaker 3: on your kids, your work, your career.
Speaker 1: And then years go by and you go, wait.
Speaker 2: Wait, wait a minute, what happen?
Speaker 1: Wait a minute. I like being encouraged to take a minute.
Speaker 1: Thank you, and thank you for all of the work,
Speaker 1: for the writing and the show and the soon to
Speaker 1: be substack and all of it. You know, you you
Speaker 1: really as both a you know, a friend and a
Speaker 1: sort of compatriot out there in the world. You always
Speaker 1: remind me to be good to myself and to others.
Speaker 1: So thank you for that.
Speaker 2: Thank you