November 5, 2025 • 62 mins
Robert Reich has spent a lifetime standing up to bullies—from the playground to the halls of power. Now, the former Labor Secretary and bestselling author reveals what we must do to take a stand against social injustice while democracy itself is under attack.
Find out why the most impactful leaders might be the ones who never hold public office and why he still believes the antidote to darkness isn’t optimism—but action.
Follow Robert on Substack: https://robertreich.substack.com/
Learn how you can host or attend a screening of Professor Reich's documentary at https://www.thelastclassfilm.com/
Find his memoir "Coming Up Short" at bookshop.org.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome to work in Progress. High
wif smarties. Today we are joined by someone who I
think is actually one of the smartest people that I know.
(00:23):
And that's not hyperbole, that's just a fact. If you
are wondering how we got here, meaning this present moment
in American and global history, or what the is going
on in the world or what we do about it,
today's guest is for you. Today we're joined by none
other than Robert Reisch. You likely know him from his
(00:47):
incredible social media content from Instagram to substack. He is
an incredible academic, a professor at Berkeley, one of the
most brilliant economists of our time. He has spent his
life in public service, serving as the Labor Secretary under
Bill Clinton. He is a best selling author, as I mentioned,
(01:08):
a professor, and he is one of the most recognizable
voices on inequality in America. And in his newest memoir,
Coming Up Short, he's looking back on his life from
growing up after World War Two to serving in politics
and teaching, and he's reflecting on what his generation got right,
where they fell short, and how we can still reclaim
(01:31):
a fairer and more democratic America. Whether he is leading
a classroom or writing on a page or in a
public forum, Robert has spent his lifetime guiding others to
see not just what is, but what could be. And
that's part of what excites me so much about the
fact that I get to call him my friend because
(01:53):
he's someone I can ask about what America is, not
just in data or policy, but as a story, what
our dream could be. And he manages to be so
incredibly inspiring and also really sobering about what we're up
against and where we can go. So let's dive in
(02:15):
with Robert Reich.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Sophia.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Hello, Robert, how are you?
Speaker 2 (02:31):
I'm very good. How are you?
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I'm great. I'm just thrilled to see you. I adore you.
I've been thinking about you a lot, given the craziness
of this year, and it certainly makes me realize we're
very long overdue for a meal's rite.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Well, I'll tell you whenever you get to the Bay Area.
Where are you are you located.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Most of the time at this point, I'm mostly on
the East Coast, just outside of New York City, and
my family's still on the West Coast. I am out
there quite a bit good.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Well, I promise you a meal at Saul's Delhi Dau.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
That's perfect for me.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
One of the nice things about New Jersey is we
also have very good delis, so it's nice to be here.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
We don't is the only deli on the West coast?
Now that can't be the case.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Well, we've got a few in LA, but that's not
really helping you up at Berkeley.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
No, And as you know, northern California is a completely
different state from southern California, so we know we need
our deli up here. But back to your point, yes, well,
well we'll we'll talk about all this. It's it's much
worse than I ever expected it would be.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, I'm uh, I'm finding myself constantly on this kind
of seesaw between absolute shock and somehow being unsurprised, and
it's a weird place to be.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Well, I'm probably on the same seesaw as you are.
But I think the real one that I keep on
going back and forth on is is despair and and
anger versus absolute resolution to do something about it and
(04:22):
to change it. Yeah, certainly in my lifetime, certainly, which
is getting smaller, shorter and.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Shorter, no, don't say it. You know, it's it's something
I admire so much about you, not only your willingness to,
you know, really confront truth in ways that are so
deeply factual that you manage to take some of the
(04:51):
hysterics out of it. And despite the fact that so
much of what you talk to us about is math
and data, you manage to make it emotionally resonant. And
I've been reflecting on this a lot lately because people
have asked me why is this so important to you?
(05:12):
You know, why is it so important to you to
fight for democracy? You know, fill in the blank whatever
question they want to ask, And the only way I
know how to respond is to say, I can't not
do it. And you strike me as a person who
feels that, who can't not do this, who can't not
(05:32):
show up for other people? Have you always felt like that?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
There never seemed to me to be a choice for
you when you say can't not. I didn't even go
that far. It just seemed to me that I was
doing it. It was part of my being. And a
lot of people talk about callings, but I think it's
it's more profound than that, not only for me, but
(05:58):
for I dare say you and most other people who
feel strongly that they have got to take action, speak out,
speak up, stand up to I mean, we're talking about
our country and our society. We're talking about the world.
It goes way beyond the United States. We're talking about
(06:18):
issues of social justice and the fundamental questions of what
we owe one another as members of the same society.
These are the most fundamental moral questions that anyone addresses
and their personal but they're public at the same time,
and we can't not address them. I mean, even if
(06:40):
we think we are not addressing them, we are addressing them.
By not addressing them, we are making choices, all of us.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Indeed, do you think back, because you're you're clearly doing
a lot of reflection about your life. You know, I
had such a lovely time watching your documentary and I
can't wait to dive into it. But it struck me
so much the way that you've been thinking about how
(07:09):
to communicate with your students, the sort of evolution of
what you understand about the young people who walk into
your classroom, And I wonder about that reflection not just
for them, but for you. If you could, at this
stage from this place. You know, say, walk onto the
(07:29):
quad on your campus and run into yourself at ten
years old or maybe a high school age Robert, do
you think you would see yourself in him?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yes, I'm afraid so. I mean a lot of people
I think have the delight and luxury of thinking about
themselves when they were ten or fifteen or even twenty
and thinking back and saying, well, I've changed a lot.
I mean, I was a totally different person then. I
don't have that luxury. I just look back and I've
(08:03):
always been pretty much who I am now. In fact,
the startling thing to me is that I look in
the mirror and I'm not the person I believe I
am now. I think I'm still that you know, young
person who I would meet in your metaphor. You know.
(08:23):
The arc of one's life is a very difficult thing
to describe because we don't fundamentally understand it. We understand
that we do have youth, and we do have middle age,
we do have old age, and we have another final stage,
which I describe in the book as you look great,
Because some very old people, when I see them and
(08:46):
I say you look great, they say to me, well,
that's the last stage of my life. But we don't
really understand much about that's great arc, and we certainly
don't understand much about the arc when it applies to societies.
When we look at what is the arc of America.
(09:09):
Henry Luce, Time Magazine's founder, said that the twentieth century
was the American century. He said that after World War Two,
and I remember that I heard stories. I was very young,
but I heard stories my father and my mother and
my grandparents talking about going through the Depression and World
(09:33):
War II and making the sacrifices they needed to make
in order to both survive personally but also to make
sure that the values they believed in inside the American
culture also survived. But what I get to in the
book is the sense that my generation, and perhaps yours
(09:55):
and other generations took for granted a lot of things.
But my parents and grandparents did not take for granted.
They couldn't take for granted. They were confronted with, you know,
an economy that really had crashed. They were confronted with
Nazi Germany. They were confronted with a world that was
(10:16):
threatening the basic tenets of their lives, and so they
had to rise to the occasion. We have not had
to rise the occasion until yeah, well until now.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Why do you suppose it is then that, when we've
been met with these moments to rise to an occasion
to have our generations freedom bonds and freedom fries and
all the things that are supposed to make you really
double down on your country. And I mean this in
(10:52):
terms of a global health crisis with COVID, in terms
of the looming authoritarian threat and now full blown authoritarianism
we see with a second Trump term. Why do you
think so many people are leaning gleefully into the harm
being done around them. Is that a cognitive dissonance or
(11:16):
is it this sort of slight detachment from impending doom
that makes you think, oh, well, it's happening over there,
but not over here, not to me. Why do you
think we're not reacting to what should be a rallying
cry for the nation as a nation.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
A lot of people, number one, are in denial. It's
easy to be in denial. In fact, it's a comfortable place.
A lot of people, even in conversations I have had
over the last month or two, they tell me it's
not that bad, you're being alarmist. Well, it is that bad.
(11:57):
Other people are in total despair. They are feeling that
there's nothing they can do. They feel helpless, they feel powerless,
they feel alone, demoralized, depressed. I've come into contact with
a lot of those people too. But what I often
(12:20):
say and certainly believe, is that these two responses to
the crisis, we're in denial or despair, are both useless.
They are dangerous. It is very important that we understand
what's happening, face it directly and clearly, and that we
(12:45):
understand our obligation to fight it now. I don't mean
in the streets. In fact, I think it would be
foolish right now to give Trump ammunition in terms of
his attempts to take over American cities and states and
trigger the Insurrection Act. But there are countless ways we
can fight back, and we should and will fight back
(13:07):
and are fighting back. I come in contact with so
many people who are doing so many important things. We
used to call it in the first Trump administration resistance.
I think it's more than resistance. It's now a kind
of empowerment that is critical, and we can talk about that.
(13:29):
I don't think there's anything particularly dramatic. It's a frame
of mind as much as it is particular actions.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
And now a word from our sponsors that I really
enjoy and I think you will too. Do you think
some of that clarity for you comes from your own
personal experience as a kid, And I mean that because
(13:59):
you write in your book, you know really beautifully about
what it was like to be bullied as a child,
and how you actually had wonderful educators that helped you
accept yourself, that enabled you to be yourself. And I
(14:19):
think about that in terms of mentorship and in terms
of the things we passed down, and it sort of
feels like you learned as a young person to trust
the helpers, and you've become a helper, and it seems
to me that you want to empower the rest of
us to trust the helpers and be the helpers. Do
you think those things are correlated.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
I think they're very closely connected. Because as a kid,
because I was very short still am, I was bullieved,
I was harassed, I was teased, and many children are bullied,
harassed and teased, but I was in a very extreme
way to the where I didn't want to get on
the school bus in the morning, and I didn't want
(15:04):
to be on the playground, and I didn't want to
even go to the boys room because I was felt
really seriously endangered. But I also felt shamed. I felt
that I was a kind of a lesser human being,
(15:24):
if you will, I felt and turned that vulnerability and
powerlessness into a kind of self loathing. I think that
much of America, not because of Donald Trump, but even
before Donald Trump, because of so many decades of bullying
(15:47):
by employers, by the system, by insurance companies and landlords,
by you name the bully, and I will give you examples.
Americans have felt this sense so many of powerlessness, of anger, vulnerability,
and to some extent that has turned into shame and
(16:11):
an anger, but anger toward themselves. And so when Donald
Trump came along in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen and
said to Americans, I am your savior, I am you,
I will speak for you. I will, in effect, I
will be your bully. I will bully the rest of
the system for you. That's what people have heard, and
(16:34):
obviously it was a fake. He was a stalking horse
for the wealthy. He gave them a gigantic tax cut.
He's given them another gigantic tax cut. He wants to
protect wealth, he wants to amass his own wealth. He
is not a tribune of the people. He's a tribune
(16:56):
of the billionaires. But nevertheless, he talks as if he
represents average people who are being bullied. And when he talks,
he has this swagger, this anger, this ridicule, this kind
of attitude that a lot of people in America also have.
(17:18):
And I think that it's not because of Donald Trump alone.
It's because he has legitimized their decades, in decades and decades,
feelings of powerlessness, of self blame. And I think that's
where his power comes from. And that's why I've said,
(17:39):
and I've said this for years, that if Democrats want
to be relevant, if Democrats want to be a party
that is still important to average working people into much
of the country, they have got to stop worrying about
the suburban swing votes and stop worrying about big corporation
(18:00):
and wealthy people who might donate to the Democratic Party,
but instead change entirely their approach and really be truly
the tribunes of the people.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
How does that go over?
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Well, it hasn't. I haven't. I haven't swayed too many
people yet. But Sophia, I think that it is inevitable
this bully in the White House named Donald Trump will
go the way of all bullies. I mean, all bullies
historically end up in the dust heap of history. I
(18:40):
can't tell you exactly how he's going to end and
how much so called collateral damage there will be on
the way, and I worry about that a lot. But
undoubtedly he and his reign and his bullying will end.
But the way you deal and this is what I
learned on the high school or school it wasn't even
(19:01):
high school, on the grade school, playground, kindergarten, the way
you deal with bullies is you can't try to appease them.
You can't try to humor them, you can't give in
to them. You've got to stick stand up to them.
And you've got to use and bring and unite with
other people to stand up to them. An individual college president,
for example, cannot hope, even if it's Harvard University, can't
(19:25):
hope to deal with the bully of Trump alone. You know,
you need all of the universities working together. A single
law firm. I can't hope to deal with the bully alone.
All the law firms have to work together the same
as the media companies and the museums and libraries. And
(19:47):
we have to approach this as if he is trying
to bully all of us simultaneously, and he is. He is,
of course he is, and present a united front. I mean,
it's not you know, Chicago versus Washington, versus versus Oakland, California,
or Baltimore when he sends in troops. It's all of us.
(20:07):
All of us need to create a united front.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Why do you think so many corporations, law firms, newsrooms,
Why are people bending a nee to this man? Because
what he's doing is clearly and plainly illegal. It's unconstitutional,
it's outside of the purview of power of the president
in the first place. And yet he's making us pay
(20:37):
for his golf trips. He's made almost four billion dollars
since he took office. Again, he's more than doubled his
personal fortune, and everyone's kind of going, well, that's Trump, Like,
how is this happening?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
I think partly if you're talking about the private sector,
that is, take for example, Amazon, Jeff Bezos has a
lot of businesses and he is I won't call him greedy.
I mean all people who are in business want to
make as much money as they possibly can. It's the
nature of capitalism, I suppose. And Jeff by Bezos is
(21:13):
therefore going to tell the Washington Post editorial page you
will not criticize Donald Trump. I don't want you to
editorially endorse Pamla Harris. I want you to do nothing
that's going to antagonize this man, because this man could
make very make things very hard for me as a
(21:35):
business person. The same goes with CBS. I mean CBS
as a profit making corporation and its owner than paramount,
did not want to do anything to in any way
antagonize the bully. Wherever you look in the private sector, greed,
greed takes precedence over principle, and that's I don't think new.
(22:02):
I think that's the way the private sector capitalism works.
It's the public sector, or the not for profit sector
that I think is the surprise. When university how to Trump,
When Columbia University says, okay, we'll give you whatever you want.
When Harvard is now in the process of making a deal,
(22:25):
or any other university, why don't the universities work together?
Why do they feel that they can get away with
an individual deal. I think, Sophia, it's partly because they
are all in competition with one another for students, for money,
for prestige, for faculty. They don't know what it means
(22:49):
to collaborate against. I kind of believe.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
How do you make sense of our economics stories, the
pr machine that makes us think, oh, everyone's this greedy
and if I'm lucky, I'll get into the greed class
and then screw everybody else, Like we know that so
much of what the ultra wealthy tell us about this
(23:18):
is the way it is isn't true. It's a story.
It's a result of policy. It's a result, as you said,
of the second over one trillion dollar tax cut that
Trump has given to the wealthiest people in the world,
again at the expense of rural hospitals, public transportation, safety
(23:40):
nets for our communities. So, as a professor, as a
brilliant academic and an economic mind, how do you help
people make sense of the math and not get so
bored because it's math that they stop listening. How do
you do what you do well?
Speaker 2 (23:58):
You deal with power. You don't talk about math. You
talk about who has the power to do what and
what has happened in the United States is a very
simple story in one way, and that story starts in
nineteen seventy one when a lawyer in Richmond, Virginia named Powell,
(24:21):
not your own Powell, this is a Powell who became
a Supreme Court justice. This particular Powell was asked by
the United States Chamber of Commerce to come up with
a memo telling American business what they should do to
fight off what at that time seemed like a tsunami
(24:43):
of special interests, environmentalists, neighbor organizations, nader Nator's raiders, consumer groups,
all claiming that American corporations, big corporations, were nefarious, that
the were doing bad things. And what Lewis Powell did
(25:04):
in nineteen seventy nine with that seventy one, with that memo,
very very important document, is he told American business that
they should pour a lot of money into American politics
and into public relations. That is, they should have trade
associations in Washington. They would tell America a story, a
(25:28):
fabricated story actually, about how the kinds of things that
you and I think are necessary, the kinds of dividends
that Americans should get out of their tax payments, what
we owe each other as members of the same society.
How all of that was hokum. All of that was inefficient,
(25:52):
It was dangerous. It would undermine the se news of America.
They called it, yes, socialism or communist, they had a
lot of words for it, but fundamentally they were scared
of it. Fundamentally they did not want the public to speak.
They did not want big corporations to have to respond
(26:13):
to workers and communities and the environment. And so that
was the beginning. I saw it, Sophia. I was working
at government in the late seventies and then again in
the eighties, and then with Secretary of Labor in the
nineties and help Barack Obama in the early part of
this century. I saw it. It was there, I saw
(26:36):
the money flowing in. This is about power. It's about money.
It's not about mathematics. It's not about economic formulae. It's
not something that eyes should glaze over over. This is reality.
This is about big corporations and some extraordinarily wealthy people
(26:57):
who became far wealthier, far more power powerful. Big corporations
become far far bigger, monopolizing entire industries. And today what
do we have. We have more tax cuts for the wealthy,
more tax cuts for big corporations, fewer regulations we have.
Climate change is threatening the entire world that we are
(27:20):
living with, and we have somebody in the White House
who is as close to a tyrant as we have come. Well,
I say the story begins in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
And now for our sponsors. Interesting too, that that story,
that timeline where everyone was so threatened to your point
by labor unions. I was like termind people. My listeners
(27:55):
know this. But for anyone who might be new to
the show, thanks to your presence on it, I can
only go to the doctor because I'm in a union.
You know, everybody assumes you work on TV, you work
in Hollywood. Everyone's just like swimming and pools of money,
like Scrooge McDuck. That ain't it. I have health care
because I am a member of the Screen Actors Guild union.
(28:19):
I know what the power of collective bargaining is for people.
I know what it meant to my grandfather. I know
why my dad chose to immigrate to America to start
a business here because of what was possible and this
shift toward lobbying and more dominant control to your point,
corporations wanting to gobble up other corporations and become these
(28:42):
you know, monopolies, megaopolies. It's not lost on me that
it was happening in such a moment societally of progressive
social power. You know, we had come through the civil
rights movement, not to say by any means we had
racial justice equity, but we were having national conversations. People
(29:03):
couldn't unsee what they'd seen, the photographs from the Freedom Rides,
the death of doctor King. It was undeniable. Women were
building power. We were on the precipice of Roe becoming
the settled law of the land, which you know, to
reference the top lying tyrant in the White House. He
also put lying tyrants on the Supreme Court, who said
(29:25):
they'd honored settled law and then overturned it. So apparently
we can't trust any of our institutions anymore. I feel
the emotional reality of all that data, and I was
just I was so tickled watching the doc and for
our friends at home, the most gorgeous documentary about Professor
(29:46):
Reich is called The Last Class Is. It is so
beautiful about your final semester teaching. Also, it makes me
want to sob because I'd always planned on coming and
taking your class, and life has just been busy and
here we are, so we might have to do it
on zoom. We'll talk about it later, but you talk
in it. You literally say about the graphs. On day
(30:10):
one of the class.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
You go.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
You know, they're not reacting to the graphs the way
I do. They don't love the graphs the way I do.
We have to reach their emotions, to reach their minds.
And you start to talk about how you're going to
communicate the emotional reality of data, and I was like,
this is why he's my brain person. How did you
come to understand this grander concept? Because you are a
(30:35):
walking encyclopedia of days and times and facts and math
and all the numbers and all the things that I
just wish we could shake everyone in the world and
say this is what you should be focusing on. But
you figured out, as you said, how to talk about power,
to communicate the math, how to talk about justice, to
communicate about policy. How did you come to this theory?
(31:00):
And when did you have your aha moment of Oh,
there is an emotional reality of data, and if I
can give it to my students, they will be inspired
to change the world.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Sophia. I think it happened when Mickey Schwarner, Michael Schwarner,
who was about five or six years older than me,
I had asked him one summer to be a kind
of lookout for me, protector of me from the bullies.
When he was in nineteen sixty four registering voters in
(31:36):
Mississippi along with two other civil rights workers, and he
was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. When I found
out that my protector from the bullies had been murdered
by the real bullies of America, something changed in me.
(31:58):
I saw that emotional connection you're talking about between the
abstract theories and facts and data and the reality of
how we treat one another or don't, or how we
brutalize one another. And I began seeing bullying and brutalization
(32:19):
all over, and brutalizing women, white people, brutalizing black people,
employers brutalizing workers. I began to see that power and
how people exercise power, and how people with power abuse
their power. If they did, some people don't, but if
they did have power, how they abused their power in
(32:42):
order to hurt others. I saw it all over and
it seemed to me that the central struggle of civilization,
the central struggle of creating a social order that was admirable,
was to constrain the bullies. And when I when I teach,
(33:05):
or when I write, or when I do movies or
whatever you're talking about, I think that that moral center
has got to be front and center, because that's what
people respond to. Everybody knows it. Everybody has had some experiences.
I mean, whether it's parents or friends or lovers or uh,
(33:25):
you know, some some some brutalization that they felt in
their past. They know it, they feel it. And so
if you can connect with that, that is where their
understanding of social justice actually comes from. That's where you build,
That's where you connect.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Mmm. That's beautiful, And do you feel like that is
the key to helping to undo the skepticism, helping to
undo this wildly aggressive version of partisanship. It seems to me,
(34:08):
you know, watching, for example, the GOP today suddenly not
care at all about big government or government overreach, or
you know, the militarization of the the armed forces against
our own people. You know, all the things that they
that they claim they're creating militias to fight. It's a
(34:31):
cult mentality. Because Trump is doing it, it's okay, But
if anybody did, anybody from the other side, even spoke
about it, it would be, you know, high crimes. Do
you think that that that willingness to interrogate the way
we treat each other and how we define power, whether
(34:51):
it is brutal or it is righteous, is a way
to undo skepticism? Do you think it gets above the
noise of the donkey or the elephant and gets to
something more human that can make people listen to each
other a little bit better?
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Well, the donkey versus the elephant, the left versus the right,
the Democrats versus Republicans, all that is historical. It's no
longer part of our present. It's no longer relevant. The
Republican Party is not a Republican party. It is as
you say, it is a cult. It is a religion.
It is an angry, bitter religion. It comes out of
(35:34):
people's sense of again being brutalized for years and years
and years by a system that didn't listen to them
or care about them. And it still is that way.
And the Democratic Party lost its bearings. I mean, I
am old enough to remember the legacy of Franklin D.
(35:55):
Roosevelt and a Democratic Party that was built on labor
and farmers and really the people who were at the
grassroots working very hard. But the Democratic Party by the
nineteen nineties, by the beginning of the century, was a
party that was more and more dependent on money, big money,
(36:19):
big corporate money, money from very affluent people, not willing
therefore to bite the hands that feed them. Now, the
question you asked is really the central question to me,
and that is, how do we get people who have
been brutalized, who have been bullied, and who are in
(36:44):
either denial or despair or just pure anchor whether they
call themselves Democrats or Republicans, whoever they are, whatever they
call themselves, how do we get them to understand what
is happening right now under their noses, that this regime
in Washington is really funneling, channeling their money, their investments,
(37:09):
their tax dollars, everything they had worked for into the
pockets of billionaires who have never been as rich as
they are today and taking away their liberties, that is,
the liberties of average people and the freedoms of average people.
And how do we convince people that this is not
a matter of white male Christian nationalism, but it's a
(37:34):
matter of average working people joining together to enjoy the
fruits of their labors, yes, and their investments in our society,
in democracy. It's about a moral understanding of what is happening.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Yeah, we'll be back in just a minute after a
few words from our favorite sponsors. The fact that no
matter what side of the aisle you're on, if you
don't raise forty thousand dollars a day, you lose your
Senate seat. Like, who's going to succeed in this system?
(38:19):
That's bad for our vision. It's almost like we've created
a society where no matter what level you get to,
you're still in scarcity. Like the fact that Jeff Bezos
doesn't think he has enough money. I'm like, bro, how
many yachts do you need? How many pools need to
be at your property? Can you be in more than
(38:40):
one at once? Like, I don't even know what we're
talking about anymore. It seems crazy.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
It seems crazy, and often we don't know what we're
talking about. Yeah, you're saying, Sophia, that there is a
kind of common sense morality here.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
I would hope.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Should be able to take sick kids to a doctor.
That people ought to be able to go take their
kids to a park without worrying that the kids are
going to be shot. And I'll let me add to
that that if somebody is working full time, they should
not be in poverty. They should be earning enough to
lift their family out of poverty. Then everybody who wants
(39:22):
to work and is able to work full time should
be able to get a job that pays enough. I mean,
these are not the kinds of high theoretical, mathematical, economic
complicated issues. These are again, moral questions. And most people
(39:42):
in this country would agree with you and agree with
me about this common sense morality we're talking about. So
who doesn't, Well, I think there are people who are
so injured and angry that they are willing to follow
a strong man named Donald Trump and the regime that
(40:05):
he's created around him into a different kind of society. Now,
the road we were on was a dangerous road. It
was getting worse all the time, more and more money
in politics, wider and wider inequality, greater and greater power
in the hands of fewer and fewer people, Corporations, monopolizing
(40:27):
our economy. I mean, we could not have sustained on
that path if Donald Trump had not come along. Somebody
else would have come along. Our bad fortune was that
it was somebody like Trump. But maybe the silver lining
on this terrible dark cloud is that we are being
(40:48):
shaken up so much that we see that the common
sense morality you and I are talking about really is
the key to the future. That we can get people together.
We can join with people who are maybe in many
ways don't agree with everything that we're saying, but on
(41:09):
this these basic principles, everybody can agree.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Yes, getting back to a little more of a live
and let live. You know, if every human, let's say,
had five most important points to them, they can be
different across a spectrum, but we have to be willing
to defend each other's right to pick our five. And
that that feels like we've lost we've lost some of
(41:35):
that in the weeds. To me, we forget, you know,
what our inalienable rights are meant to be. We forget
what our constitution says. I'm really curious how you think
about that going forward, because clearly we were in the
weeds on this. We all kind of wish we could
shake the nation, But how do you see us organizing out?
(42:01):
What are the things you would say to people at
home feeling paralyzed by despair or overwhelm Are there organizations
you think are doing a particularly great job. Are there
things that are useful locally, no matter where a person lives,
that they could go out and do this weekend or
next Monday and kind of get in the trenches with
(42:22):
their neighbors. Where do you point people.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
In a moment like this, Well, I say, first of all,
that any action, any action that is guided by the
kind of common sense morality we were talking about, and
a love of the country and a sense of duty
to each other, that is at this point in history
critically important. It's the people that don't take the action
(42:49):
that have to be reached. They have to be told
that denial, or their sense of despair, or their refusal
to acknowledge what's happening all of them is very dangerous.
So what do you do? Well, I say to people,
what can you do? Some people say to me, well,
I could call my representatives in Washington and my senators.
(43:11):
I say, do it, and then they say back, But
it's not going to make any difference. I say, look,
I was on Capitol Hill. I know how the system works.
They keep track of how many calls come in, especially
from their constituents, and what the constituents are saying. Don't
think you're powerless in that respect. Or somebody else will
say to me, well, I would really like to boycott
(43:34):
Tesla or or another another company that's that I really
think is cooperating too much with Trump. And then I say, well,
but they say, but my boycott is not going to
make any difference because nobody else is doing it. I say,
it can make a difference. You don't understand how much
these companies spend on their brand images. If you can
(43:58):
just make a real fuss good trouble, as John Lewis
used to say, then you can have a big, big influence.
Other people, I say, who are very concerned about what's
happening to their neighbors who happen to be undocumented, who
have been working in their communities for years, I say, well,
(44:19):
why don't you start a community that is going to
help protect those people from ICE agents? So that you
broadcast to this community where the ICE agents are, what
they're doing, who they're going after, You take pictures, you
take videos of what they are doing. You make sure
(44:41):
the news organizations have that information. We could go on
and on and on, Sophia. It's not so much what
people do. It doesn't have to be grand, it doesn't
have to be running for president. Yeah, but it can
be so many small things that they add up to
(45:04):
something very big. And the good news is that it's happening.
So many people are taking these kinds of actions, they're
joining with others. Indivisible is a wonderful organization because visill
has chapters all over the country. Just a few days ago,
I was in Houston, Texas, UH talking to many people
(45:27):
who really don't want Texas to redistrict and feel like
it's a it's a terrible assault on system. And we
talked about what they can do and how they do it,
and and they're they're activists. This country based on activism.
(45:49):
We do not bow to a dictator.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
Yes, no kings, no kings. I am really curious. You
know you you referenced her. You're a bit of your history,
which I don't want to make you tell the story
of because you've done it before. And you know, folks
have amazing books and a doc they get to watch
about it. But I do wonder, through all the governments
(46:16):
you've been a part of in this country, the administrations,
you know, sitting as our Secretary of Labor, all these
things you've done, is there a moment or a memory
that you hold on to, something that absolutely multiplied your
love for this country, something that made you really understand
(46:42):
viscerally the power of our labor force. Like I want
to know what that thing is that that lit the
inextinguishable flame of Robert Reich.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
Oh, well, it's very hard to tell you, but if
you want to know a particular instance that is emblazoned
in my mind. There was a time in nineteen ninety
six Republicans had taken over both houses of Congress. Everybody
I knew was demoralized and felt nothing could happen. And
(47:17):
I said to the President, Bill Clinton, why don't we
try to raise the minimum wage? And he thought it
was the worst time to try and do it, because
Republicans were in control of everything. But I told him
that I thought, and this goes back to our common
sense morality, that the public wanted the minimum wage raised.
It seemed like the fair and necessary thing to do.
(47:40):
It turned out that that was true. The polls showed
that ninety well maybe eighty five, eighty six percent of
the public was in favor of a minimum wage increase.
I went around to all of the offices on the hill,
the Democrats and Republicans told them, showed them the polls
talked of the minimum wage, and Sophia, we got a
(48:04):
minimum wage increase the first time in many years. And
I came back that afternoon from being on the hill
and counting noses and trying to twist arms and getting
pushing the thing right over the finish line, I came
back to the Labor Department. The Labor Department is a big,
big building on Constitution Avenue. It has on its first
(48:28):
floor a big atrium, a kind of big opening. I
came in the front doors, and there were hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of Labor Department employees, many of them
career people, who all applauded and cheered, and my eyes
welled up because we all understood how important a minimum
(48:50):
wage increase was. You know, something in the order of
forty or fifty million people at that moment, at that day.
Because of what happened that day, we're getting a wage increase. Now.
It wasn't the be all and end all. It was
just really in compared to everything that's needed. It was
(49:11):
a very small event, but it felt like progress. It
felt good, it felt important.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Yeah, we'll be back in just a minute. But here's
a word from our sponsors. Even when something doesn't feel
like perhaps enough, it can still be profound to move
a needle in a country this big. It's a big deal,
(49:42):
and you guys did it, and you did it to
your point at a time where people didn't think it
could be done. And so that's a wonderful spark to
carry well.
Speaker 2 (49:53):
Any small victory we need to celebrate in life. I
don't mean only in but any small victory we need
to we need to put into a special little box
in our minds, in our brains and our bodies. We
need to be able to go back to that box
(50:15):
when we're feeling down and feeling discouraged and bring out
those victories and know that those victories are possible. We've
experienced them. They may not be huge, they may not
change the direction of the world, but they are vitally important.
(50:35):
And I think that just as all of us or
most of us have been brutalized in some way, or
bullied in some way, or felt vulnerable and powerless in
some way. Most of us also have had these tiny
victories that give us a sense of power. And in
(50:57):
times such as we are now in when everything seems
very dark and it is when you have people in
power who are dangerous, who are authoritarians or worse neo fascists,
(51:22):
when people are stressed because of it and feel terrible
and feel that the world is coming apart, I think
is very important for us to feel instead our strengths
and feel our power and join together with others and
make that power a reality.
Speaker 1 (51:44):
What do you think of America's legacy and how are
you thinking about your own legacy as you're ready to
hang up your teaching hat and continue on wearing your leadership.
Speaker 2 (52:01):
Well, you use a word leadership, I think that that
is a very important idea to dwell on. What is leadership?
Do you have to do you have to have an
an office? Do you have to hold public elected office
to be a leader? Do you have to be an
(52:22):
appointed office to be a leader? No? Martin Luther King
Junior was a leader. Some of the most important leaders
in our society or in any society. Mahatma Gandhi never
held elective office. They were leaders because they helped. Instead,
(52:44):
going back to many of the points we've been talking about,
help people focus their energies and attention on a problem
that needed to be addressed, a problem that they all face.
They help people see that the work avoidance mechanisms, denial
(53:09):
and despair and scapegoating and everything else we're getting in
the way the real leaders, the real leaders, are people
who teach the power that people have and the responsibility
people have. Now I don't know my legacy. I'm never
going to stop writing or doing whatever I can to
(53:33):
help people understand their own power and responsibility and duty
to each other. But I think that this country, over
the long term will be fine. I think that we've
had crises. You think of the Civil War, think of
(53:53):
the Great Depression, the Two World Wars. The country has
had stresses. When I was a boy, I remember Joe
McCarthy and his communist witch hunts. We have not always
done the right thing. I'm ashamed of some of the
(54:16):
aspects of American history, but I think there is a again,
a common sense morality, a really basic goodness in America.
When I go around the country and I talk to people,
even people who say that they are Trump supporters, we
(54:39):
start talking about their own lives and their children, and
their communities and what they care about, and get away
from the labels, get away from the Trump stuff, And
there's a certain decency and fairness that is the I
(55:00):
can't tell you exactly why, but I think that it
is inherent, and I like to think that that will
continue and maybe be stronger in the future.
Speaker 1 (55:12):
I hope. So, I hope that what seems to be
coming a part allows us really to build something new together.
Speaker 2 (55:24):
Well, we will, we will, Sophia, we will.
Speaker 1 (55:27):
I sure hope.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
So I'm absolutely sure of this. Again, I want to
stress this darkness may be important in terms of reminding
us of what we hold dear and sacred. Yeah, twenty
years ago, when you talked about the rule of law,
(55:48):
eyes would glaze over. Nobody knew what the rule of
law was, or due process or democracy or redistricting or
anything that people now have a fairly sophisticated rip on. Right,
here's twenty years ago. There was a kind of we
took everything for granted. Yeah, we won't take it for
(56:12):
granted now.
Speaker 1 (56:13):
That's really well said. I think sometimes the problem with
incredible progress is that we forget where we were before
it happened exactly when you bring it in, you know,
into your lovely office that I find you in today,
and into your interior life, both in self and in
(56:37):
your home at this moment, because I know you focus
on the outside world so much, you give so much.
But for you, what feels like your work in progress
as you look at the year and the time ahead.
Speaker 2 (56:53):
Well, I think that the issue for me inside is
twofold challenge. One is to bring my life into balance.
That is, I'm a workaholic, as I suspect you are, yep,
and us or we workaholics, we have got to work
(57:17):
very hard on understanding that if we are not in balanced,
if we don't balance our work with joy and play
and love, we we can't be as effective even as workaholics,
and we lose something very precious from our lives. The
(57:40):
other piece of that, and it goes along with that,
is you know, I've never been very good at finding joy.
Maybe it goes along with workaholism. Maybe it goes with
you know, being a child who is bullied a great deal.
Maybe it goes along with my parents and grandparents who
(58:06):
who remembered not only war and depression, but also anti Semitism,
and so there was very little room for true joy
in my life. And as I get on in years,
I say to myself, well, the two big projects, Bob,
(58:30):
are trying to find balance in your life, trying to
constrain your worlcoholism, and trying to really find joy. How
about you, Sophia.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
I'm right there with you. Really. Only in the last
few years have I begun to say, oh, I also
deserve joy. If I want joy for the people I love,
I should also want it for myself.
Speaker 2 (58:57):
Deserve deserve joy. Yes, it's a wonderful, wonderful.
Speaker 1 (59:02):
Yes, we all deserve joy, We really do. And I
think I think there's something tremendously important about giving that
that worth to yourself, especially if you grew up a
bullied kid, which I know you and I both did.
As signing worth to self I think is a work
(59:25):
in progress for me. And yeah, the joy is It's
a cool experiment, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (59:33):
We're all in an experiment.
Speaker 1 (59:35):
We sure are the American experiment. Robert. Before I let
you go and thank you for giving me a few
extra moments of your time. I could talk to you
all day. I love this book so very much. Coming
up short is beautiful. Can you tell our friends at home,
who I imagine are ready to hit the streets in
your service by now, tell them where they can find
(59:58):
the book. Please tell them where they can watch the documentary, which,
as I mentioned earlier for earlier friends is called The
Last Class. Let's let the people know where they can
be with you.
Speaker 2 (01:00:11):
Well, the book you can find in any bookstore, and
you can order it not through Amazon.
Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
I don't like Amazon, you don't say.
Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
And I, but I urge people to order it. There
are several portals that I actually put on my substack
in terms of the movie is now being shown in well,
let's see thirty six states in one hundred theaters, and
(01:00:46):
I also on my substack indicate kind of how people
can find out where the movie is being shown. And
maybe you or your technical staff can put up a
little notice.
Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
We can put some links in the show notes. That's
easy for us.
Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
Links and show notes. That's what we all need metaphor
metaphorically and right actually, but the movie and the book
are both aspects of what we've been talking about Sophia
in terms of empowering and teaching. Yeah, and telling a
story that runs counter to but also explains why we
(01:01:31):
are in the darkness we're in. I'm want to thank
you so much. Thank you for your hosting this and
for your talking to me. And it's been a complete pleasure.
Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
It's always a delight when I get to see you,
and I do because one of my favorite things that
I get to do in my life is brag about
my friends. And while this episode will be airing for
our friends at home a few weeks after our tape
date on Zoom Today, you did become a number one
New York Times bestseller, and that's worth bragging about.
Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Well, you can brag about it, I don't want to.
Speaker 1 (01:02:10):
I will brag about you with pleasure, with pleasure, thank
you for today.
Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
Thank you, Sophia,
Hey, everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome to work in Progress. High
wif smarties. Today we are joined by someone who I
think is actually one of the smartest people that I know.
(00:23):
And that's not hyperbole, that's just a fact. If you
are wondering how we got here, meaning this present moment
in American and global history, or what the is going
on in the world or what we do about it,
today's guest is for you. Today we're joined by none
other than Robert Reisch. You likely know him from his
(00:47):
incredible social media content from Instagram to substack. He is
an incredible academic, a professor at Berkeley, one of the
most brilliant economists of our time. He has spent his
life in public service, serving as the Labor Secretary under
Bill Clinton. He is a best selling author, as I mentioned,
(01:08):
a professor, and he is one of the most recognizable
voices on inequality in America. And in his newest memoir,
Coming Up Short, he's looking back on his life from
growing up after World War Two to serving in politics
and teaching, and he's reflecting on what his generation got right,
where they fell short, and how we can still reclaim
(01:31):
a fairer and more democratic America. Whether he is leading
a classroom or writing on a page or in a
public forum, Robert has spent his lifetime guiding others to
see not just what is, but what could be. And
that's part of what excites me so much about the
fact that I get to call him my friend because
(01:53):
he's someone I can ask about what America is, not
just in data or policy, but as a story, what
our dream could be. And he manages to be so
incredibly inspiring and also really sobering about what we're up
against and where we can go. So let's dive in
(02:15):
with Robert Reich.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Sophia.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Hello, Robert, how are you?
Speaker 2 (02:31):
I'm very good. How are you?
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I'm great. I'm just thrilled to see you. I adore you.
I've been thinking about you a lot, given the craziness
of this year, and it certainly makes me realize we're
very long overdue for a meal's rite.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Well, I'll tell you whenever you get to the Bay Area.
Where are you are you located.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Most of the time at this point, I'm mostly on
the East Coast, just outside of New York City, and
my family's still on the West Coast. I am out
there quite a bit good.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Well, I promise you a meal at Saul's Delhi Dau.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
That's perfect for me.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
One of the nice things about New Jersey is we
also have very good delis, so it's nice to be here.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
We don't is the only deli on the West coast?
Now that can't be the case.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Well, we've got a few in LA, but that's not
really helping you up at Berkeley.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
No, And as you know, northern California is a completely
different state from southern California, so we know we need
our deli up here. But back to your point, yes, well,
well we'll we'll talk about all this. It's it's much
worse than I ever expected it would be.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, I'm uh, I'm finding myself constantly on this kind
of seesaw between absolute shock and somehow being unsurprised, and
it's a weird place to be.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Well, I'm probably on the same seesaw as you are.
But I think the real one that I keep on
going back and forth on is is despair and and
anger versus absolute resolution to do something about it and
(04:22):
to change it. Yeah, certainly in my lifetime, certainly, which
is getting smaller, shorter and.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Shorter, no, don't say it. You know, it's it's something
I admire so much about you, not only your willingness to,
you know, really confront truth in ways that are so
deeply factual that you manage to take some of the
(04:51):
hysterics out of it. And despite the fact that so
much of what you talk to us about is math
and data, you manage to make it emotionally resonant. And
I've been reflecting on this a lot lately because people
have asked me why is this so important to you?
(05:12):
You know, why is it so important to you to
fight for democracy? You know, fill in the blank whatever
question they want to ask, And the only way I
know how to respond is to say, I can't not
do it. And you strike me as a person who
feels that, who can't not do this, who can't not
(05:32):
show up for other people? Have you always felt like that?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
There never seemed to me to be a choice for
you when you say can't not. I didn't even go
that far. It just seemed to me that I was
doing it. It was part of my being. And a
lot of people talk about callings, but I think it's
it's more profound than that, not only for me, but
(05:58):
for I dare say you and most other people who
feel strongly that they have got to take action, speak out,
speak up, stand up to I mean, we're talking about
our country and our society. We're talking about the world.
It goes way beyond the United States. We're talking about
(06:18):
issues of social justice and the fundamental questions of what
we owe one another as members of the same society.
These are the most fundamental moral questions that anyone addresses
and their personal but they're public at the same time,
and we can't not address them. I mean, even if
(06:40):
we think we are not addressing them, we are addressing them.
By not addressing them, we are making choices, all of us.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Indeed, do you think back, because you're you're clearly doing
a lot of reflection about your life. You know, I
had such a lovely time watching your documentary and I
can't wait to dive into it. But it struck me
so much the way that you've been thinking about how
(07:09):
to communicate with your students, the sort of evolution of
what you understand about the young people who walk into
your classroom, And I wonder about that reflection not just
for them, but for you. If you could, at this
stage from this place. You know, say, walk onto the
(07:29):
quad on your campus and run into yourself at ten
years old or maybe a high school age Robert, do
you think you would see yourself in him?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yes, I'm afraid so. I mean a lot of people
I think have the delight and luxury of thinking about
themselves when they were ten or fifteen or even twenty
and thinking back and saying, well, I've changed a lot.
I mean, I was a totally different person then. I
don't have that luxury. I just look back and I've
(08:03):
always been pretty much who I am now. In fact,
the startling thing to me is that I look in
the mirror and I'm not the person I believe I
am now. I think I'm still that you know, young
person who I would meet in your metaphor. You know.
(08:23):
The arc of one's life is a very difficult thing
to describe because we don't fundamentally understand it. We understand
that we do have youth, and we do have middle age,
we do have old age, and we have another final stage,
which I describe in the book as you look great,
Because some very old people, when I see them and
(08:46):
I say you look great, they say to me, well,
that's the last stage of my life. But we don't
really understand much about that's great arc, and we certainly
don't understand much about the arc when it applies to societies.
When we look at what is the arc of America.
(09:09):
Henry Luce, Time Magazine's founder, said that the twentieth century
was the American century. He said that after World War Two,
and I remember that I heard stories. I was very young,
but I heard stories my father and my mother and
my grandparents talking about going through the Depression and World
(09:33):
War II and making the sacrifices they needed to make
in order to both survive personally but also to make
sure that the values they believed in inside the American
culture also survived. But what I get to in the
book is the sense that my generation, and perhaps yours
(09:55):
and other generations took for granted a lot of things.
But my parents and grandparents did not take for granted.
They couldn't take for granted. They were confronted with, you know,
an economy that really had crashed. They were confronted with
Nazi Germany. They were confronted with a world that was
(10:16):
threatening the basic tenets of their lives, and so they
had to rise to the occasion. We have not had
to rise the occasion until yeah, well until now.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Why do you suppose it is then that, when we've
been met with these moments to rise to an occasion
to have our generations freedom bonds and freedom fries and
all the things that are supposed to make you really
double down on your country. And I mean this in
(10:52):
terms of a global health crisis with COVID, in terms
of the looming authoritarian threat and now full blown authoritarianism
we see with a second Trump term. Why do you
think so many people are leaning gleefully into the harm
being done around them. Is that a cognitive dissonance or
(11:16):
is it this sort of slight detachment from impending doom
that makes you think, oh, well, it's happening over there,
but not over here, not to me. Why do you
think we're not reacting to what should be a rallying
cry for the nation as a nation.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
A lot of people, number one, are in denial. It's
easy to be in denial. In fact, it's a comfortable place.
A lot of people, even in conversations I have had
over the last month or two, they tell me it's
not that bad, you're being alarmist. Well, it is that bad.
(11:57):
Other people are in total despair. They are feeling that
there's nothing they can do. They feel helpless, they feel powerless,
they feel alone, demoralized, depressed. I've come into contact with
a lot of those people too. But what I often
(12:20):
say and certainly believe, is that these two responses to
the crisis, we're in denial or despair, are both useless.
They are dangerous. It is very important that we understand
what's happening, face it directly and clearly, and that we
(12:45):
understand our obligation to fight it now. I don't mean
in the streets. In fact, I think it would be
foolish right now to give Trump ammunition in terms of
his attempts to take over American cities and states and
trigger the Insurrection Act. But there are countless ways we
can fight back, and we should and will fight back
(13:07):
and are fighting back. I come in contact with so
many people who are doing so many important things. We
used to call it in the first Trump administration resistance.
I think it's more than resistance. It's now a kind
of empowerment that is critical, and we can talk about that.
(13:29):
I don't think there's anything particularly dramatic. It's a frame
of mind as much as it is particular actions.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
And now a word from our sponsors that I really
enjoy and I think you will too. Do you think
some of that clarity for you comes from your own
personal experience as a kid, And I mean that because
(13:59):
you write in your book, you know really beautifully about
what it was like to be bullied as a child,
and how you actually had wonderful educators that helped you
accept yourself, that enabled you to be yourself. And I
(14:19):
think about that in terms of mentorship and in terms
of the things we passed down, and it sort of
feels like you learned as a young person to trust
the helpers, and you've become a helper, and it seems
to me that you want to empower the rest of
us to trust the helpers and be the helpers. Do
you think those things are correlated.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
I think they're very closely connected. Because as a kid,
because I was very short still am, I was bullieved,
I was harassed, I was teased, and many children are bullied,
harassed and teased, but I was in a very extreme
way to the where I didn't want to get on
the school bus in the morning, and I didn't want
(15:04):
to be on the playground, and I didn't want to
even go to the boys room because I was felt
really seriously endangered. But I also felt shamed. I felt
that I was a kind of a lesser human being,
(15:24):
if you will, I felt and turned that vulnerability and
powerlessness into a kind of self loathing. I think that
much of America, not because of Donald Trump, but even
before Donald Trump, because of so many decades of bullying
(15:47):
by employers, by the system, by insurance companies and landlords,
by you name the bully, and I will give you examples.
Americans have felt this sense so many of powerlessness, of anger, vulnerability,
and to some extent that has turned into shame and
(16:11):
an anger, but anger toward themselves. And so when Donald
Trump came along in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen and
said to Americans, I am your savior, I am you,
I will speak for you. I will, in effect, I
will be your bully. I will bully the rest of
the system for you. That's what people have heard, and
(16:34):
obviously it was a fake. He was a stalking horse
for the wealthy. He gave them a gigantic tax cut.
He's given them another gigantic tax cut. He wants to
protect wealth, he wants to amass his own wealth. He
is not a tribune of the people. He's a tribune
(16:56):
of the billionaires. But nevertheless, he talks as if he
represents average people who are being bullied. And when he talks,
he has this swagger, this anger, this ridicule, this kind
of attitude that a lot of people in America also have.
(17:18):
And I think that it's not because of Donald Trump alone.
It's because he has legitimized their decades, in decades and decades,
feelings of powerlessness, of self blame. And I think that's
where his power comes from. And that's why I've said,
(17:39):
and I've said this for years, that if Democrats want
to be relevant, if Democrats want to be a party
that is still important to average working people into much
of the country, they have got to stop worrying about
the suburban swing votes and stop worrying about big corporation
(18:00):
and wealthy people who might donate to the Democratic Party,
but instead change entirely their approach and really be truly
the tribunes of the people.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
How does that go over?
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Well, it hasn't. I haven't. I haven't swayed too many
people yet. But Sophia, I think that it is inevitable
this bully in the White House named Donald Trump will
go the way of all bullies. I mean, all bullies
historically end up in the dust heap of history. I
(18:40):
can't tell you exactly how he's going to end and
how much so called collateral damage there will be on
the way, and I worry about that a lot. But
undoubtedly he and his reign and his bullying will end.
But the way you deal and this is what I
learned on the high school or school it wasn't even
(19:01):
high school, on the grade school, playground, kindergarten, the way
you deal with bullies is you can't try to appease them.
You can't try to humor them, you can't give in
to them. You've got to stick stand up to them.
And you've got to use and bring and unite with
other people to stand up to them. An individual college president,
for example, cannot hope, even if it's Harvard University, can't
(19:25):
hope to deal with the bully of Trump alone. You know,
you need all of the universities working together. A single
law firm. I can't hope to deal with the bully alone.
All the law firms have to work together the same
as the media companies and the museums and libraries. And
(19:47):
we have to approach this as if he is trying
to bully all of us simultaneously, and he is. He is,
of course he is, and present a united front. I mean,
it's not you know, Chicago versus Washington, versus versus Oakland, California,
or Baltimore when he sends in troops. It's all of us.
(20:07):
All of us need to create a united front.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Why do you think so many corporations, law firms, newsrooms,
Why are people bending a nee to this man? Because
what he's doing is clearly and plainly illegal. It's unconstitutional,
it's outside of the purview of power of the president
in the first place. And yet he's making us pay
(20:37):
for his golf trips. He's made almost four billion dollars
since he took office. Again, he's more than doubled his
personal fortune, and everyone's kind of going, well, that's Trump, Like,
how is this happening?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
I think partly if you're talking about the private sector,
that is, take for example, Amazon, Jeff Bezos has a
lot of businesses and he is I won't call him greedy.
I mean all people who are in business want to
make as much money as they possibly can. It's the
nature of capitalism, I suppose. And Jeff by Bezos is
(21:13):
therefore going to tell the Washington Post editorial page you
will not criticize Donald Trump. I don't want you to
editorially endorse Pamla Harris. I want you to do nothing
that's going to antagonize this man, because this man could
make very make things very hard for me as a
(21:35):
business person. The same goes with CBS. I mean CBS
as a profit making corporation and its owner than paramount,
did not want to do anything to in any way
antagonize the bully. Wherever you look in the private sector, greed,
greed takes precedence over principle, and that's I don't think new.
(22:02):
I think that's the way the private sector capitalism works.
It's the public sector, or the not for profit sector
that I think is the surprise. When university how to Trump,
When Columbia University says, okay, we'll give you whatever you want.
When Harvard is now in the process of making a deal,
(22:25):
or any other university, why don't the universities work together?
Why do they feel that they can get away with
an individual deal. I think, Sophia, it's partly because they
are all in competition with one another for students, for money,
for prestige, for faculty. They don't know what it means
(22:49):
to collaborate against. I kind of believe.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
How do you make sense of our economics stories, the
pr machine that makes us think, oh, everyone's this greedy
and if I'm lucky, I'll get into the greed class
and then screw everybody else, Like we know that so
much of what the ultra wealthy tell us about this
(23:18):
is the way it is isn't true. It's a story.
It's a result of policy. It's a result, as you said,
of the second over one trillion dollar tax cut that
Trump has given to the wealthiest people in the world,
again at the expense of rural hospitals, public transportation, safety
(23:40):
nets for our communities. So, as a professor, as a
brilliant academic and an economic mind, how do you help
people make sense of the math and not get so
bored because it's math that they stop listening. How do
you do what you do well?
Speaker 2 (23:58):
You deal with power. You don't talk about math. You
talk about who has the power to do what and
what has happened in the United States is a very
simple story in one way, and that story starts in
nineteen seventy one when a lawyer in Richmond, Virginia named Powell,
(24:21):
not your own Powell, this is a Powell who became
a Supreme Court justice. This particular Powell was asked by
the United States Chamber of Commerce to come up with
a memo telling American business what they should do to
fight off what at that time seemed like a tsunami
(24:43):
of special interests, environmentalists, neighbor organizations, nader Nator's raiders, consumer groups,
all claiming that American corporations, big corporations, were nefarious, that
the were doing bad things. And what Lewis Powell did
(25:04):
in nineteen seventy nine with that seventy one, with that memo,
very very important document, is he told American business that
they should pour a lot of money into American politics
and into public relations. That is, they should have trade
associations in Washington. They would tell America a story, a
(25:28):
fabricated story actually, about how the kinds of things that
you and I think are necessary, the kinds of dividends
that Americans should get out of their tax payments, what
we owe each other as members of the same society.
How all of that was hokum. All of that was inefficient,
(25:52):
It was dangerous. It would undermine the se news of America.
They called it, yes, socialism or communist, they had a
lot of words for it, but fundamentally they were scared
of it. Fundamentally they did not want the public to speak.
They did not want big corporations to have to respond
(26:13):
to workers and communities and the environment. And so that
was the beginning. I saw it, Sophia. I was working
at government in the late seventies and then again in
the eighties, and then with Secretary of Labor in the
nineties and help Barack Obama in the early part of
this century. I saw it. It was there, I saw
(26:36):
the money flowing in. This is about power. It's about money.
It's not about mathematics. It's not about economic formulae. It's
not something that eyes should glaze over over. This is reality.
This is about big corporations and some extraordinarily wealthy people
(26:57):
who became far wealthier, far more power powerful. Big corporations
become far far bigger, monopolizing entire industries. And today what
do we have. We have more tax cuts for the wealthy,
more tax cuts for big corporations, fewer regulations we have.
Climate change is threatening the entire world that we are
(27:20):
living with, and we have somebody in the White House
who is as close to a tyrant as we have come. Well,
I say the story begins in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
And now for our sponsors. Interesting too, that that story,
that timeline where everyone was so threatened to your point
by labor unions. I was like termind people. My listeners
(27:55):
know this. But for anyone who might be new to
the show, thanks to your presence on it, I can
only go to the doctor because I'm in a union.
You know, everybody assumes you work on TV, you work
in Hollywood. Everyone's just like swimming and pools of money,
like Scrooge McDuck. That ain't it. I have health care
because I am a member of the Screen Actors Guild union.
(28:19):
I know what the power of collective bargaining is for people.
I know what it meant to my grandfather. I know
why my dad chose to immigrate to America to start
a business here because of what was possible and this
shift toward lobbying and more dominant control to your point,
corporations wanting to gobble up other corporations and become these
(28:42):
you know, monopolies, megaopolies. It's not lost on me that
it was happening in such a moment societally of progressive
social power. You know, we had come through the civil
rights movement, not to say by any means we had
racial justice equity, but we were having national conversations. People
(29:03):
couldn't unsee what they'd seen, the photographs from the Freedom Rides,
the death of doctor King. It was undeniable. Women were
building power. We were on the precipice of Roe becoming
the settled law of the land, which you know, to
reference the top lying tyrant in the White House. He
also put lying tyrants on the Supreme Court, who said
(29:25):
they'd honored settled law and then overturned it. So apparently
we can't trust any of our institutions anymore. I feel
the emotional reality of all that data, and I was
just I was so tickled watching the doc and for
our friends at home, the most gorgeous documentary about Professor
(29:46):
Reich is called The Last Class Is. It is so
beautiful about your final semester teaching. Also, it makes me
want to sob because I'd always planned on coming and
taking your class, and life has just been busy and
here we are, so we might have to do it
on zoom. We'll talk about it later, but you talk
in it. You literally say about the graphs. On day
(30:10):
one of the class.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
You go.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
You know, they're not reacting to the graphs the way
I do. They don't love the graphs the way I do.
We have to reach their emotions, to reach their minds.
And you start to talk about how you're going to
communicate the emotional reality of data, and I was like,
this is why he's my brain person. How did you
come to understand this grander concept? Because you are a
(30:35):
walking encyclopedia of days and times and facts and math
and all the numbers and all the things that I
just wish we could shake everyone in the world and
say this is what you should be focusing on. But
you figured out, as you said, how to talk about power,
to communicate the math, how to talk about justice, to
communicate about policy. How did you come to this theory?
(31:00):
And when did you have your aha moment of Oh,
there is an emotional reality of data, and if I
can give it to my students, they will be inspired
to change the world.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Sophia. I think it happened when Mickey Schwarner, Michael Schwarner,
who was about five or six years older than me,
I had asked him one summer to be a kind
of lookout for me, protector of me from the bullies.
When he was in nineteen sixty four registering voters in
(31:36):
Mississippi along with two other civil rights workers, and he
was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. When I found
out that my protector from the bullies had been murdered
by the real bullies of America, something changed in me.
(31:58):
I saw that emotional connection you're talking about between the
abstract theories and facts and data and the reality of
how we treat one another or don't, or how we
brutalize one another. And I began seeing bullying and brutalization
(32:19):
all over, and brutalizing women, white people, brutalizing black people,
employers brutalizing workers. I began to see that power and
how people exercise power, and how people with power abuse
their power. If they did, some people don't, but if
they did have power, how they abused their power in
(32:42):
order to hurt others. I saw it all over and
it seemed to me that the central struggle of civilization,
the central struggle of creating a social order that was admirable,
was to constrain the bullies. And when I when I teach,
(33:05):
or when I write, or when I do movies or
whatever you're talking about, I think that that moral center
has got to be front and center, because that's what
people respond to. Everybody knows it. Everybody has had some experiences.
I mean, whether it's parents or friends or lovers or uh,
(33:25):
you know, some some some brutalization that they felt in
their past. They know it, they feel it. And so
if you can connect with that, that is where their
understanding of social justice actually comes from. That's where you build,
That's where you connect.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Mmm. That's beautiful, And do you feel like that is
the key to helping to undo the skepticism, helping to
undo this wildly aggressive version of partisanship. It seems to me,
(34:08):
you know, watching, for example, the GOP today suddenly not
care at all about big government or government overreach, or
you know, the militarization of the the armed forces against
our own people. You know, all the things that they
that they claim they're creating militias to fight. It's a
(34:31):
cult mentality. Because Trump is doing it, it's okay, But
if anybody did, anybody from the other side, even spoke
about it, it would be, you know, high crimes. Do
you think that that that willingness to interrogate the way
we treat each other and how we define power, whether
(34:51):
it is brutal or it is righteous, is a way
to undo skepticism? Do you think it gets above the
noise of the donkey or the elephant and gets to
something more human that can make people listen to each
other a little bit better?
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Well, the donkey versus the elephant, the left versus the right,
the Democrats versus Republicans, all that is historical. It's no
longer part of our present. It's no longer relevant. The
Republican Party is not a Republican party. It is as
you say, it is a cult. It is a religion.
It is an angry, bitter religion. It comes out of
(35:34):
people's sense of again being brutalized for years and years
and years by a system that didn't listen to them
or care about them. And it still is that way.
And the Democratic Party lost its bearings. I mean, I
am old enough to remember the legacy of Franklin D.
(35:55):
Roosevelt and a Democratic Party that was built on labor
and farmers and really the people who were at the
grassroots working very hard. But the Democratic Party by the
nineteen nineties, by the beginning of the century, was a
party that was more and more dependent on money, big money,
(36:19):
big corporate money, money from very affluent people, not willing
therefore to bite the hands that feed them. Now, the
question you asked is really the central question to me,
and that is, how do we get people who have
been brutalized, who have been bullied, and who are in
(36:44):
either denial or despair or just pure anchor whether they
call themselves Democrats or Republicans, whoever they are, whatever they
call themselves, how do we get them to understand what
is happening right now under their noses, that this regime
in Washington is really funneling, channeling their money, their investments,
(37:09):
their tax dollars, everything they had worked for into the
pockets of billionaires who have never been as rich as
they are today and taking away their liberties, that is,
the liberties of average people and the freedoms of average people.
And how do we convince people that this is not
a matter of white male Christian nationalism, but it's a
(37:34):
matter of average working people joining together to enjoy the
fruits of their labors, yes, and their investments in our society,
in democracy. It's about a moral understanding of what is happening.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Yeah, we'll be back in just a minute after a
few words from our favorite sponsors. The fact that no
matter what side of the aisle you're on, if you
don't raise forty thousand dollars a day, you lose your
Senate seat. Like, who's going to succeed in this system?
(38:19):
That's bad for our vision. It's almost like we've created
a society where no matter what level you get to,
you're still in scarcity. Like the fact that Jeff Bezos
doesn't think he has enough money. I'm like, bro, how
many yachts do you need? How many pools need to
be at your property? Can you be in more than
(38:40):
one at once? Like, I don't even know what we're
talking about anymore. It seems crazy.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
It seems crazy, and often we don't know what we're
talking about. Yeah, you're saying, Sophia, that there is a
kind of common sense morality here.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
I would hope.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Should be able to take sick kids to a doctor.
That people ought to be able to go take their
kids to a park without worrying that the kids are
going to be shot. And I'll let me add to
that that if somebody is working full time, they should
not be in poverty. They should be earning enough to
lift their family out of poverty. Then everybody who wants
(39:22):
to work and is able to work full time should
be able to get a job that pays enough. I mean,
these are not the kinds of high theoretical, mathematical, economic
complicated issues. These are again, moral questions. And most people
(39:42):
in this country would agree with you and agree with
me about this common sense morality we're talking about. So
who doesn't, Well, I think there are people who are
so injured and angry that they are willing to follow
a strong man named Donald Trump and the regime that
(40:05):
he's created around him into a different kind of society. Now,
the road we were on was a dangerous road. It
was getting worse all the time, more and more money
in politics, wider and wider inequality, greater and greater power
in the hands of fewer and fewer people, Corporations, monopolizing
(40:27):
our economy. I mean, we could not have sustained on
that path if Donald Trump had not come along. Somebody
else would have come along. Our bad fortune was that
it was somebody like Trump. But maybe the silver lining
on this terrible dark cloud is that we are being
(40:48):
shaken up so much that we see that the common
sense morality you and I are talking about really is
the key to the future. That we can get people together.
We can join with people who are maybe in many
ways don't agree with everything that we're saying, but on
(41:09):
this these basic principles, everybody can agree.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Yes, getting back to a little more of a live
and let live. You know, if every human, let's say,
had five most important points to them, they can be
different across a spectrum, but we have to be willing
to defend each other's right to pick our five. And
that that feels like we've lost we've lost some of
(41:35):
that in the weeds. To me, we forget, you know,
what our inalienable rights are meant to be. We forget
what our constitution says. I'm really curious how you think
about that going forward, because clearly we were in the
weeds on this. We all kind of wish we could
shake the nation, But how do you see us organizing out?
(42:01):
What are the things you would say to people at
home feeling paralyzed by despair or overwhelm Are there organizations
you think are doing a particularly great job. Are there
things that are useful locally, no matter where a person lives,
that they could go out and do this weekend or
next Monday and kind of get in the trenches with
(42:22):
their neighbors. Where do you point people.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
In a moment like this, Well, I say, first of all,
that any action, any action that is guided by the
kind of common sense morality we were talking about, and
a love of the country and a sense of duty
to each other, that is at this point in history
critically important. It's the people that don't take the action
(42:49):
that have to be reached. They have to be told
that denial, or their sense of despair, or their refusal
to acknowledge what's happening all of them is very dangerous.
So what do you do? Well, I say to people,
what can you do? Some people say to me, well,
I could call my representatives in Washington and my senators.
(43:11):
I say, do it, and then they say back, But
it's not going to make any difference. I say, look,
I was on Capitol Hill. I know how the system works.
They keep track of how many calls come in, especially
from their constituents, and what the constituents are saying. Don't
think you're powerless in that respect. Or somebody else will
say to me, well, I would really like to boycott
(43:34):
Tesla or or another another company that's that I really
think is cooperating too much with Trump. And then I say, well,
but they say, but my boycott is not going to
make any difference because nobody else is doing it. I say,
it can make a difference. You don't understand how much
these companies spend on their brand images. If you can
(43:58):
just make a real fuss good trouble, as John Lewis
used to say, then you can have a big, big influence.
Other people, I say, who are very concerned about what's
happening to their neighbors who happen to be undocumented, who
have been working in their communities for years, I say, well,
(44:19):
why don't you start a community that is going to
help protect those people from ICE agents? So that you
broadcast to this community where the ICE agents are, what
they're doing, who they're going after, You take pictures, you
take videos of what they are doing. You make sure
(44:41):
the news organizations have that information. We could go on
and on and on, Sophia. It's not so much what
people do. It doesn't have to be grand, it doesn't
have to be running for president. Yeah, but it can
be so many small things that they add up to
(45:04):
something very big. And the good news is that it's happening.
So many people are taking these kinds of actions, they're
joining with others. Indivisible is a wonderful organization because visill
has chapters all over the country. Just a few days ago,
I was in Houston, Texas, UH talking to many people
(45:27):
who really don't want Texas to redistrict and feel like
it's a it's a terrible assault on system. And we
talked about what they can do and how they do it,
and and they're they're activists. This country based on activism.
(45:49):
We do not bow to a dictator.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
Yes, no kings, no kings. I am really curious. You
know you you referenced her. You're a bit of your history,
which I don't want to make you tell the story
of because you've done it before. And you know, folks
have amazing books and a doc they get to watch
about it. But I do wonder, through all the governments
(46:16):
you've been a part of in this country, the administrations,
you know, sitting as our Secretary of Labor, all these
things you've done, is there a moment or a memory
that you hold on to, something that absolutely multiplied your
love for this country, something that made you really understand
(46:42):
viscerally the power of our labor force. Like I want
to know what that thing is that that lit the
inextinguishable flame of Robert Reich.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
Oh, well, it's very hard to tell you, but if
you want to know a particular instance that is emblazoned
in my mind. There was a time in nineteen ninety
six Republicans had taken over both houses of Congress. Everybody
I knew was demoralized and felt nothing could happen. And
(47:17):
I said to the President, Bill Clinton, why don't we
try to raise the minimum wage? And he thought it
was the worst time to try and do it, because
Republicans were in control of everything. But I told him
that I thought, and this goes back to our common
sense morality, that the public wanted the minimum wage raised.
It seemed like the fair and necessary thing to do.
(47:40):
It turned out that that was true. The polls showed
that ninety well maybe eighty five, eighty six percent of
the public was in favor of a minimum wage increase.
I went around to all of the offices on the hill,
the Democrats and Republicans told them, showed them the polls
talked of the minimum wage, and Sophia, we got a
(48:04):
minimum wage increase the first time in many years. And
I came back that afternoon from being on the hill
and counting noses and trying to twist arms and getting
pushing the thing right over the finish line, I came
back to the Labor Department. The Labor Department is a big,
big building on Constitution Avenue. It has on its first
(48:28):
floor a big atrium, a kind of big opening. I
came in the front doors, and there were hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of Labor Department employees, many of them
career people, who all applauded and cheered, and my eyes
welled up because we all understood how important a minimum
(48:50):
wage increase was. You know, something in the order of
forty or fifty million people at that moment, at that day.
Because of what happened that day, we're getting a wage increase. Now.
It wasn't the be all and end all. It was
just really in compared to everything that's needed. It was
(49:11):
a very small event, but it felt like progress. It
felt good, it felt important.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Yeah, we'll be back in just a minute. But here's
a word from our sponsors. Even when something doesn't feel
like perhaps enough, it can still be profound to move
a needle in a country this big. It's a big deal,
(49:42):
and you guys did it, and you did it to
your point at a time where people didn't think it
could be done. And so that's a wonderful spark to
carry well.
Speaker 2 (49:53):
Any small victory we need to celebrate in life. I
don't mean only in but any small victory we need
to we need to put into a special little box
in our minds, in our brains and our bodies. We
need to be able to go back to that box
(50:15):
when we're feeling down and feeling discouraged and bring out
those victories and know that those victories are possible. We've
experienced them. They may not be huge, they may not
change the direction of the world, but they are vitally important.
(50:35):
And I think that just as all of us or
most of us have been brutalized in some way, or
bullied in some way, or felt vulnerable and powerless in
some way. Most of us also have had these tiny
victories that give us a sense of power. And in
(50:57):
times such as we are now in when everything seems
very dark and it is when you have people in
power who are dangerous, who are authoritarians or worse neo fascists,
(51:22):
when people are stressed because of it and feel terrible
and feel that the world is coming apart, I think
is very important for us to feel instead our strengths
and feel our power and join together with others and
make that power a reality.
Speaker 1 (51:44):
What do you think of America's legacy and how are
you thinking about your own legacy as you're ready to
hang up your teaching hat and continue on wearing your leadership.
Speaker 2 (52:01):
Well, you use a word leadership, I think that that
is a very important idea to dwell on. What is leadership?
Do you have to do you have to have an
an office? Do you have to hold public elected office
to be a leader? Do you have to be an
(52:22):
appointed office to be a leader? No? Martin Luther King
Junior was a leader. Some of the most important leaders
in our society or in any society. Mahatma Gandhi never
held elective office. They were leaders because they helped. Instead,
(52:44):
going back to many of the points we've been talking about,
help people focus their energies and attention on a problem
that needed to be addressed, a problem that they all face.
They help people see that the work avoidance mechanisms, denial
(53:09):
and despair and scapegoating and everything else we're getting in
the way the real leaders, the real leaders, are people
who teach the power that people have and the responsibility
people have. Now I don't know my legacy. I'm never
going to stop writing or doing whatever I can to
(53:33):
help people understand their own power and responsibility and duty
to each other. But I think that this country, over
the long term will be fine. I think that we've
had crises. You think of the Civil War, think of
(53:53):
the Great Depression, the Two World Wars. The country has
had stresses. When I was a boy, I remember Joe
McCarthy and his communist witch hunts. We have not always
done the right thing. I'm ashamed of some of the
(54:16):
aspects of American history, but I think there is a again,
a common sense morality, a really basic goodness in America.
When I go around the country and I talk to people,
even people who say that they are Trump supporters, we
(54:39):
start talking about their own lives and their children, and
their communities and what they care about, and get away
from the labels, get away from the Trump stuff, And
there's a certain decency and fairness that is the I
(55:00):
can't tell you exactly why, but I think that it
is inherent, and I like to think that that will
continue and maybe be stronger in the future.
Speaker 1 (55:12):
I hope. So, I hope that what seems to be
coming a part allows us really to build something new together.
Speaker 2 (55:24):
Well, we will, we will, Sophia, we will.
Speaker 1 (55:27):
I sure hope.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
So I'm absolutely sure of this. Again, I want to
stress this darkness may be important in terms of reminding
us of what we hold dear and sacred. Yeah, twenty
years ago, when you talked about the rule of law,
(55:48):
eyes would glaze over. Nobody knew what the rule of
law was, or due process or democracy or redistricting or
anything that people now have a fairly sophisticated rip on. Right,
here's twenty years ago. There was a kind of we
took everything for granted. Yeah, we won't take it for
(56:12):
granted now.
Speaker 1 (56:13):
That's really well said. I think sometimes the problem with
incredible progress is that we forget where we were before
it happened exactly when you bring it in, you know,
into your lovely office that I find you in today,
and into your interior life, both in self and in
(56:37):
your home at this moment, because I know you focus
on the outside world so much, you give so much.
But for you, what feels like your work in progress
as you look at the year and the time ahead.
Speaker 2 (56:53):
Well, I think that the issue for me inside is
twofold challenge. One is to bring my life into balance.
That is, I'm a workaholic, as I suspect you are, yep,
and us or we workaholics, we have got to work
(57:17):
very hard on understanding that if we are not in balanced,
if we don't balance our work with joy and play
and love, we we can't be as effective even as workaholics,
and we lose something very precious from our lives. The
(57:40):
other piece of that, and it goes along with that,
is you know, I've never been very good at finding joy.
Maybe it goes along with workaholism. Maybe it goes with
you know, being a child who is bullied a great deal.
Maybe it goes along with my parents and grandparents who
(58:06):
who remembered not only war and depression, but also anti Semitism,
and so there was very little room for true joy
in my life. And as I get on in years,
I say to myself, well, the two big projects, Bob,
(58:30):
are trying to find balance in your life, trying to
constrain your worlcoholism, and trying to really find joy. How
about you, Sophia.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
I'm right there with you. Really. Only in the last
few years have I begun to say, oh, I also
deserve joy. If I want joy for the people I love,
I should also want it for myself.
Speaker 2 (58:57):
Deserve deserve joy. Yes, it's a wonderful, wonderful.
Speaker 1 (59:02):
Yes, we all deserve joy, We really do. And I
think I think there's something tremendously important about giving that
that worth to yourself, especially if you grew up a
bullied kid, which I know you and I both did.
As signing worth to self I think is a work
(59:25):
in progress for me. And yeah, the joy is It's
a cool experiment, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (59:33):
We're all in an experiment.
Speaker 1 (59:35):
We sure are the American experiment. Robert. Before I let
you go and thank you for giving me a few
extra moments of your time. I could talk to you
all day. I love this book so very much. Coming
up short is beautiful. Can you tell our friends at home,
who I imagine are ready to hit the streets in
your service by now, tell them where they can find
(59:58):
the book. Please tell them where they can watch the documentary, which,
as I mentioned earlier for earlier friends is called The
Last Class. Let's let the people know where they can
be with you.
Speaker 2 (01:00:11):
Well, the book you can find in any bookstore, and
you can order it not through Amazon.
Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
I don't like Amazon, you don't say.
Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
And I, but I urge people to order it. There
are several portals that I actually put on my substack
in terms of the movie is now being shown in well,
let's see thirty six states in one hundred theaters, and
(01:00:46):
I also on my substack indicate kind of how people
can find out where the movie is being shown. And
maybe you or your technical staff can put up a
little notice.
Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
We can put some links in the show notes. That's
easy for us.
Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
Links and show notes. That's what we all need metaphor
metaphorically and right actually, but the movie and the book
are both aspects of what we've been talking about Sophia
in terms of empowering and teaching. Yeah, and telling a
story that runs counter to but also explains why we
(01:01:31):
are in the darkness we're in. I'm want to thank
you so much. Thank you for your hosting this and
for your talking to me. And it's been a complete pleasure.
Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
It's always a delight when I get to see you,
and I do because one of my favorite things that
I get to do in my life is brag about
my friends. And while this episode will be airing for
our friends at home a few weeks after our tape
date on Zoom Today, you did become a number one
New York Times bestseller, and that's worth bragging about.
Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Well, you can brag about it, I don't want to.
Speaker 1 (01:02:10):
I will brag about you with pleasure, with pleasure, thank
you for today.
Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
Thank you, Sophia,
Hosts And Creators
Sophia Bush
Bethany Joy Lenz
Robert Buckley
Hilarie Burton
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