Democracy, Fiscal Justice & The Parenthood Advantage Featuring Jerren Chang, Dr. Bhumika Muchhala, Mason Donovan and Mark Kaplan

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Welcome. I'm Erik Fleming, host of A Moment with Erik Fleming, the podcast of our time.

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I want to personally thank you for listening to the podcast.

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Thanks in advance for supporting the podcast of our time. I hope you enjoy this episode as well.

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The following program is hosted by the NBG Podcast Network.

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Hello, and welcome to Another Moment with Erik Fleming. I am your host, Erik Fleming.

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So today, this episode was recorded as we were going into the holiday,

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so there's going to be one omission, and that'll be we won't have a news summary with Grace G,

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and hope that she enjoyed her holiday weekend.

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And, you know, and I tried to substitute a couple of times and yeah, I'm not doing that.

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That's not, it's been a long time since I was doing news recaps and all that

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in my life. And it was strictly sports when I was doing it then.

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So we just going to take that week off.

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We just took this week off and Grace will be back with us next episode.

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And as far as the changes that I was talking about in-house that we're doing,

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things are going smoothly.

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So it won't be, well, you won't have the torture of just dealing with me talking,

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and not having any guests over the remainder of this year.

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We're getting ready to start season 14 anyway. So it just, you know,

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things work out in the balance of the universe.

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And so, you know, it's all good. It's all gravy. You're still going to have

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some good guests coming on.

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It may not be as many, which for some of y'all that might be good.

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Because, you know, you might be able to listen to a whole episode in just one

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commute instead of having to break off parts or just find a person that you want to listen to.

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But I do hope that y'all are listening to the podcast as a whole because all

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of these guests that I've been very privileged to have are very, very special people.

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And the guests that we're going to have on this episode are very special.

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We're going to start off with Jerren Chang.

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He is the president of Partners in Democracy. So he's going to be talking about

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his work and how he got involved.

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We're going to be talking to Bumika Muchhala, who is probably one of the,

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you know, all of everybody, every guest that's on is smarter than me.

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But she is so in tune as an economist and really as an activist as well in the

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academic arena for sure.

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And so she's going to be talking about some of her theories as far as from a

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feminist economist perspective.

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And dealing with how we address capitalism, right? Yeah.

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You know, how we get out of this negative culture that capitalism has brought.

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And then I have two gentlemen who are actually partners, and not just partners

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in business, but partners in life, Mason Donovan and Mark Kaplan.

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And they're going to be talking about probably their most.

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Engaging venture, definitely most satisfying venture, and that's parenthood.

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So they have used their expertise to write a book to help employers deal with

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employees that, you know, are becoming parents. And so their book is called

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The Parenthood Advantage.

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And so we'll be talking to them about that. So instead of my normal,

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move, oh, by the way, I still want y'all to go to the website,

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www.momenterik.com and donate, subscribe, whatever your heart leads you to do.

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Check past episodes, the whole nine yards.

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But instead of the normal kickoff to grace, we're going to go right into the

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guests, you know, for this episode. So the first guest is Jerren Chang.

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Jerren is the inaugural full-time president and CEO of Partners in Democracy.

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He comes to PID as a dedicated democracy advocate

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and the co-founder and CEO of GenUnity,

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an innovative nonprofit supporting the civic learning and leadership development

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of hundreds of grassroots residents in Massachusetts communities,

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and now a core pillar of PID's holistic,

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democracy renovation strategy.

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Under his leadership, GenUnity has grown from a pilot program in 2020,

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to a statewide civic infrastructure that brings hundreds together each year

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across race, class, and age to learn from each other, build trust,

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and make a positive impact in their communities.

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Jerren also serves as a board member for Massachusetts Public Health Alliance,

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and Democracy House, as well as a contributing columnist for The Fulcrum.

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Jerren's journey to the pro-democracy movement was shaped by his time serving

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in the Chicago mayor's office as an economic development policy staffer

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and working as a consultant at McKinsey & Company advising public and social sector leaders.

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He holds an MPP and MBA from Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School

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and is a graduate of Duke University.

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So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to kick this off.

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With this guest. I'm sorry, I stumbled on that. Jerren Chang.

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All right. Jerren Chang, how you doing, sir? You doing good? I'm doing good,

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Erik. Thanks for having me on.

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Well, I kind of wish I had an audio podcast because you've got a cool T-shirt

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that just says democracy.

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I think that's a T-shirt we all should be wearing and kind of remind some folks.

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But I really appreciate you coming on to the podcast to talk about the work

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that you're doing towards democracy.

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Jaren, what I like to do when I start my interviews, I do a couple of icebreaking

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exercises. You call it the moderator facilitator in me.

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But the first icebreaker is a quote that I want you to respond to.

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And the quote is, our nation needs a beacon to light the way for our democracy. Hmm.

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Well, I love the quote. You know, I think that at the heart of it,

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we're in this time right now where so many states are being asked to answer

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the question of what does democracy mean to you?

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I think a lot of people are being asked individually, what does democracy mean to you?

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And frankly, I think we're struggling to answer the question.

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I think a lot of states are struggling to answer that question. And.

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We need an example of leadership. We need something that can inspire people,

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to imagine what the next chapter of our democracy can look like.

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And my hope is that the work that we're doing, whether in Massachusetts or across the country, can be,

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a beacon that lights the way for other states as they think about the different

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pieces that make a democracy healthy, whether that's civic education,

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whether that's bridge building work, whether that's the policy reform or the,

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new digital civic infrastructure that can create new connections between constituents

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and their elected leaders.

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And I think that at the end of the day, what we all want is a deep level of

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trust and responsiveness and effectiveness in how we make decisions together,

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and how our democratic government facilitates that. Yeah.

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All right. So now the next icebreaker is what I call 20 questions.

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So I need you to give me a number between 1 and 20? 18. All right.

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What's one thing we might all agree is important, no matter our differences?

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I think one of the biggest things is to be heard.

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If you've ever been in a conversation where someone wasn't a very good listener,

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I think everyone gets universally frustrated by that.

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And I think that the root of that is a deeply human need to be heard,

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to be seen, and for that to be reciprocated.

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And I happen to think that that's foundational to a healthy democracy.

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And I worry sometimes that that last piece, the reciprocal piece of that relationship

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to want to hear others is eroding.

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And I'm sure we'll spend some time talking about that, Eric. Yeah, yeah.

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All right. So you said, as an Asian American and a child of immigrants,

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I have wrestled with the tension between our country's stated values of equity

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and the reality of how our society treats people who are different.

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Treats people who are different differently.

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While working in Chicago city government, I got to peek behind the curtain of

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how decisions are made, but I also saw how we create barriers to people,

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especially young people from marginalized communities,

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to affect change, further cementing inequity.

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Since then, it has been my mission to change this.

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So initially i had a couple of questions off of that but the i want to add an

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additional one since now that the data we're recording this the supreme court has made a decision,

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to affirm birthright citizenship so what is your you know decision just came

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down so we haven't really it's like 194 pages so neither one of us had read this.

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But just on the initial reaction to the Supreme Court affirming birthright citizenship.

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How do you feel about that?

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Yeah, I think it's really exciting, really exciting to see that rule of law upheld.

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And for the kind of tradition, the cultural tradition of this country, which is really about

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a story of immigration and entrepreneurship, of people coming here and finding

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ways to build a better life and hopefully find ways to build a better life together.

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Such a core part of the American fabric. And I'm glad that we're standing by

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that cultural commitment.

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As you mentioned, I'm the child of immigrants, and I think a lot of my journey

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to democracy work has really been shaped by how I understand my parents' immigration

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journeys. My father was born in China. He fled to Taiwan during the Civil War there back in 1949.

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And he really, his family's journey out of poverty, my family's journey out

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of poverty on his side was a story of getting access to,

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education and kind of systems of opportunity that created the kind of economic

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mobility out of poverty, right?

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Whereas on my mom's side, she was an orphan, she was adopted by a low-income

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single mom, and her story is really one of how a single individual,

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single individual's compassion can change the whole trajectory of someone's life.

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And those are the two halves of what make a democracy work, right?

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The structure and the culture, how we show up for one another in the everyday.

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Those just cultural moments, whether that's at church or whether that's in the

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neighborhood meeting, as well as the formal structural ways in our elections and our politics.

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Ultimately at the end of the day democracy to me about how we're building a

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country and a community together and how we're sharing power to do that effectively,

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and i'm excited that we reaffirm today that that commitment is that everyone

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is included in this political project everyone that comes here and is born here is included,

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and so i think it's an exciting day yeah,

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What was your initial mission before working in government?

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So before government, you know, I think I was, you know, I was a young person

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who really, I was civically engaged in the kind of classical sense,

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Eric, like, you know, involved in church, involved in my community and community

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service and things like that.

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Kind of the ways in which you're told in high school to get involved in your community.

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But I didn't feel like I had a good sense yet for why the world works the way that it did.

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And for me, my goal was really just to learn. I think a lot of my early career

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decisions were shaped by trying to answer questions about, you know,

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how do we make decisions in philanthropy or in business or in government?

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And the more and more that I asked those questions and sought out the answers,

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the more that I shaped my own theory on how we need to change our politics of,

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how we work together. So that's, that's led me to where I am now.

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Yeah. So was there a specific, since you, you, you got your,

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I guess, baptism in Chicago politics, I grew up in Chicago, so that,

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that, that means a lot to me.

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Was there a specific incident or issue that came about that really activated

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you to, to go on this path and, and, and do this work?

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Oh, man. I mean, Chicago is such an amazing city for its civic energy.

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I think it's one of those cities where you touch, as soon as you kind of like

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butt touches the ground, you know that in this city, people have a deep,

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deep care for the place that they live. And that was really inspiring to me.

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You know, I grew up in a small town and had good, you know, small town energy.

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But to see a city at that scale, right? Three million people with every single

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person having a deep thrive to make the city a better place is really,

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really unique. And I think Boston has a lot of that too.

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And at the same time, I felt like there's also a deep frustration with the level

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of voice that the everyday person had in shaping decisions. You know,

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Chicago is obviously famous for its machine politics.

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And it's obviously not as bad as it was back in the day.

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But it was clear that we had both a structural and a cultural problem there,

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where people felt like their voice wasn't being heard in a meaningful way,

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that government wasn't as responsive or as effective as it could be in listening

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to the issues that residents really had.

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And I became obsessed with that problem, right? I think that at the end of the

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day, you know, government, city government, particularly, you have to make a lot of hard choices.

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And Chicago in particular had to make a lot of hard choices without a ton of,

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resources, a lot of constraints.

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But I always come back to like in a family setting, whatever community setting

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you're imagining, you can make hard decisions together where people don't get

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everything they want, but there's a sense of being held.

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There's a sense of, I understand why this decision was made and I still felt heard.

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And I have a sense of where my voice gets placed in all of this.

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And I feel like we are missing that. And there's a huge opportunity,

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I think, to reimagine, to renovate democracy and government so that it delivers

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this experience of deep sense of belonging,

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where people feel empowered with the knowledge, skills, and relationships for

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civic life, and that the institutions are actually responsive and inclusive

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and effective in collaborating with residents.

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And so, left Chicago on that mission and have been on it since. Yeah.

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What is the significance of the phrase, fall in love with the problem?

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I think that there's a lot of, this is a kind of a classic entrepreneurship

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mantra, fall in love with the problem. And it's really stuck with me because

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I think a lot of democracy work in particular is a lot of falling in love with the solution.

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It's, oh, I think that this particular policy is going to make everything better.

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And the reality of it is is that uh,

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democracy is just about sharing power right and you tweak that a little bit one way,

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people are going to find a way to navigate the new power dynamic right and so

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nothing's a silver bullet,

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it's all it's it's like this dynamic organism right and people are going to

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find ways to evolve and kind of push the limits and the rules of the game are

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going to I have to evolve alongside it, right?

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I'm a big basketball guy, so I kind of think about how in the NBA.

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We've changed the rules about how you can play defense. I don't know how you

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feel about this, Erik, but the game evolves along with it.

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We've evolved how we call travels, and the game has evolved with it.

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And you see players kind of finding ways to push those boundaries,

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and then the rules change again. And the same is true in our democracy.

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We try to set up rules to make sure that it's kind of fair and accessible and inclusive.

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And sometimes people abuse those rules, and we need to find ways of updating

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and renovating those rules for the current context, right? I'll just give you

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one kind of quick example, right?

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In the kind of electoral context, you know, we initially kind of set up parties

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as ways of helping to organize voters and educate, et cetera.

00:19:46.170 --> 00:19:50.171
But now we kind of, over the last 30 years, really seen this arc of parties

00:19:50.171 --> 00:19:53.451
trying to, in some ways, like narrow the base of voters that actually get a

00:19:53.451 --> 00:19:56.881
meaningful vote through party, closed party primaries in particular,

00:19:56.881 --> 00:19:59.121
seeing a lot of that in the deep South, right?

00:19:59.121 --> 00:20:04.371
But we also see remnants of that in other places. I mean, Louisiana is a classic

00:20:04.371 --> 00:20:09.879
example of this, where they used to have these all-party or nonpartisan primaries.

00:20:10.540 --> 00:20:17.033
And then in order to kind of concentrate more power in the hands of kind of, in that case, like a.

00:20:18.371 --> 00:20:24.689
Republican insider class, they decided to close the primary and try to basically

00:20:24.886 --> 00:20:28.941
decide who the nominee was going to be before voters could get to about most

00:20:28.941 --> 00:20:30.221
voters who get to a ballot box.

00:20:30.221 --> 00:20:36.541
Right and that's that's the dynamic that's the dynamism of people trying to

00:20:36.541 --> 00:20:40.671
like you know capture power and and and and take advantage of the rules and

00:20:40.671 --> 00:20:44.316
we need to update the rules to adjust to that and i think that

00:20:44.703 --> 00:20:49.783
falling in love with the problem and i think the problem is ultimately again how do we share power,

00:20:50.399 --> 00:20:53.652
responsibly that's what has to guide us,

00:20:54.531 --> 00:20:58.301
And when we fall in love with the solution, sometimes we get a little bit too

00:20:58.301 --> 00:21:03.638
bogged down in our thing, and we fail to see and remember the bigger picture.

00:21:04.050 --> 00:21:07.928
And I think that the democracy movement is so ready for this,

00:21:08.577 --> 00:21:11.781
falling in love with the problem, falling in love with what does a healthy democracy

00:21:11.781 --> 00:21:14.556
really look like in our community, in our state.

00:21:15.067 --> 00:21:20.701
And I think once we shift to that mindset, we'll see a sea change in how we

00:21:20.701 --> 00:21:27.694
collaborate across different policy areas, whether that's like campaign finance or election reform or,

00:21:28.141 --> 00:21:30.782
civic education and bridge building and organizing,

00:21:31.532 --> 00:21:36.128
and will help states come to a really honest answer about what democracy means to them.

00:21:36.881 --> 00:21:43.201
Yeah. Yeah. In politics, a lot of people fall in love with a solution that is

00:21:43.201 --> 00:21:44.787
not even attached to a problem.

00:21:46.918 --> 00:21:51.910
And so you know that's one thing so that's why I really like that phrase,

00:21:52.911 --> 00:21:57.711
And I love a good sports analogy, which, by the way, before we started recording,

00:21:57.711 --> 00:22:00.749
LeBron made an announcement he's not playing for the Lakers next year.

00:22:01.731 --> 00:22:05.111
I missed that. Yeah, he is going to play. Wow. He's not going to play for L.A.

00:22:05.111 --> 00:22:09.642
So just let you ruminate on that as we go through.

00:22:10.651 --> 00:22:15.412
All right. How did you work with the nonprofit GenUnity?

00:22:15.882 --> 00:22:18.661
Am I saying that right? Or is this supposed to be GenUnity? All right,

00:22:18.661 --> 00:22:23.603
GenUnity, lead to you becoming the president and CEO of Partners in Democracy.

00:22:24.346 --> 00:22:28.632
Yeah, so GenUnity, you know, I co-founded GenUnity back in 2020,

00:22:29.149 --> 00:22:33.581
largely to focus on the cultural side of the problem, right?

00:22:33.581 --> 00:22:37.481
To bring people together across difference, across race, class,

00:22:37.481 --> 00:22:43.131
age, ideology, around the local problems to find that sense of common purpose, right?

00:22:43.531 --> 00:22:47.301
Coming out of my time in Chicago, I felt like if we could have these kind of

00:22:47.301 --> 00:22:52.051
direct lanes of communication between people, for example, working on housing

00:22:52.051 --> 00:22:56.126
problems, as well alongside the people experiencing those issues,

00:22:56.750 --> 00:23:02.391
we could really develop a type of trust and connective tissue that allows us to iterate, right?

00:23:02.391 --> 00:23:05.283
Because same thing here, one policy is not going to fix everything.

00:23:05.789 --> 00:23:10.502
It's going to require kind of this constant back and forth and really having a deep partnership.

00:23:11.247 --> 00:23:18.080
I started genuinely to do that work. And, you know, we saw a lot of that incredible impact of.

00:23:19.146 --> 00:23:25.291
Whether that was helping, you know, folks at healthcare institutions realize

00:23:25.291 --> 00:23:27.545
gaps in culturally competent care,

00:23:27.928 --> 00:23:33.480
or that was kind of uplifting and connecting research being done on,

00:23:33.863 --> 00:23:39.203
you know, discrimination against black renters and folks with Section 8 vouchers

00:23:39.615 --> 00:23:42.747
into the legislative process, we saw,

00:23:43.310 --> 00:23:44.785
some incredible, incredible,

00:23:45.566 --> 00:23:52.189
examples of that type of connective tissue leading to better problem solving in community.

00:23:52.926 --> 00:23:57.405
And at the same time, a lot of the, particularly the legislative work,

00:23:58.250 --> 00:24:02.330
didn't actually fully materialize into new law, into new policy,

00:24:02.330 --> 00:24:03.412
into new systems change.

00:24:04.140 --> 00:24:08.440
And what we started to realize is that the responsiveness in Massachusetts,

00:24:08.440 --> 00:24:12.720
in particular, of our state legislature, was an issue, right?

00:24:12.720 --> 00:24:17.290
I mean, we have the least competitive elections in Massachusetts of any state

00:24:17.290 --> 00:24:21.235
in the country. We have the least transparent state legislature of any state in the country.

00:24:22.163 --> 00:24:27.932
And what I realized was this cultural work has to be accompanied by the structural work.

00:24:28.500 --> 00:24:31.096
And Partners in Democracy, you know, founded by Danielle Allen,

00:24:31.397 --> 00:24:36.990
was doing that, was doing the structural work to figure out how do we change

00:24:36.990 --> 00:24:42.012
the rules of the game, tweak them, update them, so that we are sharing power more responsibly.

00:24:42.870 --> 00:24:46.705
And that, again, this was kind of me falling in love with the problem,

00:24:47.012 --> 00:24:51.680
trying to let go of any sort of like ego associated with, hey,

00:24:51.680 --> 00:24:54.315
I started this thing and I want to continue to grow it.

00:24:54.740 --> 00:24:59.820
To now this has to be one piece of a broader puzzle right in order to build

00:24:59.820 --> 00:25:04.160
a state-based model for this is what healthy democracy can look like and there's

00:25:04.160 --> 00:25:05.941
no place better than to do that at home,

00:25:06.481 --> 00:25:12.129
in massachusetts where honestly we're we are blessed with a whole host of incredible

00:25:12.489 --> 00:25:18.070
kind of resources the best civic educators and technologists and organizers

00:25:18.070 --> 00:25:20.780
that you could find almost anywhere in the country are here.

00:25:20.780 --> 00:25:24.190
So it is an absolute privilege. Yeah.

00:25:25.055 --> 00:25:33.534
On PID's homepage, it says American constitutional democracy is in a vicious cycle.

00:25:34.091 --> 00:25:40.268
Ineffective, unresponsive institutions fuel disengagement and distrust and vice versa.

00:25:40.784 --> 00:25:42.473
We need to flip the switch.

00:25:43.160 --> 00:25:47.590
What is the holistic approach to flipping the switch? Yeah.

00:25:48.969 --> 00:25:52.340
Two things, structure and culture, again, coming back to that.

00:25:52.833 --> 00:25:59.239
That is the virtuous cycle. How do you have empowered everyday people that are

00:25:59.239 --> 00:26:06.980
ready and informed and engaged to engage in civic life and the democratic process?

00:26:07.369 --> 00:26:11.259
And how do you make sure that the institutions and the leaders within them are

00:26:11.259 --> 00:26:18.567
ready to digest and respond and be effective in making decisions off of that constituent input?

00:26:19.529 --> 00:26:23.442
And I'd say right now, the situation that we often find ourselves is,

00:26:24.187 --> 00:26:29.179
you know, you go to any town meeting or town hall and, you know,

00:26:29.179 --> 00:26:32.799
typically you see the loudest voice is kind of the one that wins,

00:26:32.799 --> 00:26:34.405
typically by shutting things down.

00:26:35.035 --> 00:26:39.639
Not the best idea, right? You go to social media and you see kind of like a

00:26:39.639 --> 00:26:46.247
similar story, right? You see often the algorithms are amplifying the loudest, angriest voices.

00:26:46.769 --> 00:26:50.246
And, you know, our legislators, our elected leaders see that too.

00:26:50.973 --> 00:26:57.159
And in many ways, we've kind of had this breakdown in how constituents engage

00:26:57.159 --> 00:27:00.921
productively with electeds. And...

00:27:02.040 --> 00:27:08.999
What we can do is create new ties, right? We can give folks better civic information, education.

00:27:09.486 --> 00:27:14.140
We can create kind of digital civic threads, digital civic infrastructure that

00:27:14.140 --> 00:27:19.640
connects constituents to their elected representatives in ways that allow them to,

00:27:20.220 --> 00:27:25.040
kind of synthesize, use AI to synthesize the themes that we're hearing across

00:27:25.040 --> 00:27:27.360
thousands or hundreds of thousands of constituents.

00:27:27.360 --> 00:27:32.430
This is technology that's not untested. It's already being used in different

00:27:32.430 --> 00:27:33.619
parts of Asia and Europe.

00:27:33.844 --> 00:27:38.580
It just really hasn't really kind of found a home here in the U.S.

00:27:38.580 --> 00:27:43.385
And we're hoping that we can really be some of the leaders in driving that practice.

00:27:45.631 --> 00:27:50.360
And, you know, I think that our elected leaders also need slight tweaks to the

00:27:50.360 --> 00:27:53.400
incentives of how they engage with constituents, right?

00:27:53.400 --> 00:27:57.220
I mean, in Massachusetts, for example, we still have a party primary system

00:27:57.220 --> 00:28:01.070
where you're an elected official, you know, and you're running an election,

00:28:01.070 --> 00:28:04.720
you're really only targeting the 15% of people that vote in,

00:28:05.266 --> 00:28:08.906
the party primary, typically the Democratic primary, because we're such a deep blue state.

00:28:09.818 --> 00:28:14.900
If we want to really engage people broadly in the democratic process,

00:28:14.900 --> 00:28:20.563
we need to be meeting those 70%, 80% of the general electorate where they are

00:28:20.963 --> 00:28:21.979
in the general election.

00:28:22.513 --> 00:28:27.560
And so reforms that we're advocating for, including all party primaries,

00:28:27.560 --> 00:28:31.186
ballot initiative in Massachusetts, will help to facilitate that.

00:28:31.737 --> 00:28:35.380
Getting everybody involved in the process at a decisive point in time where

00:28:35.380 --> 00:28:37.500
they're already showing up in November. Right.

00:28:38.526 --> 00:28:41.326
And that's how we start to flip the switch, right?

00:28:41.886 --> 00:28:45.856
It doesn't happen all at once, but it happens by doing the work to prepare people

00:28:45.856 --> 00:28:50.406
to engage and meeting them where they are and giving them a meaningful say, right?

00:28:50.406 --> 00:28:54.573
And slowly but surely, as we start to incorporate those different tweaks,

00:28:55.266 --> 00:28:57.632
we trust people with more voice.

00:28:57.952 --> 00:29:01.985
We allow them to verify how that voice guides decision making.

00:29:02.426 --> 00:29:07.488
And then ultimately, we give them a meaningful say in whether the electeds did a good job in...

00:29:08.760 --> 00:29:10.395
Being responsive to that voice.

00:29:13.272 --> 00:29:17.700
It sounds simple in some ways, and I think it is.

00:29:18.105 --> 00:29:24.130
It just requires a lot of grit and determination to actually do that work on the ground.

00:29:24.479 --> 00:29:28.432
But I think it's a North Star vision that almost anyone can get behind.

00:29:28.873 --> 00:29:34.106
I think we want to see that level of deep engagement and trust from everyday

00:29:34.106 --> 00:29:35.646
people in our democratic process.

00:29:36.046 --> 00:29:42.756
And elected leaders want to be responsive and effective in delivering for their constituents.

00:29:42.756 --> 00:29:46.465
It's just that we've got all of this kind of gunk in the way, whether it's our,

00:29:47.126 --> 00:29:50.506
information ecosystem, whether it's kind of the different political centers

00:29:50.506 --> 00:29:55.806
we have right now, we can clear a lot of that out and really build a democracy

00:29:55.806 --> 00:29:58.027
that delivers for the people. Yeah.

00:29:59.056 --> 00:30:02.606
And that kind of sounds like that really leads into my next question,

00:30:02.606 --> 00:30:09.077
because it sounds like one of the terms y'all use is democracy Democracy Renovation, right?

00:30:09.936 --> 00:30:14.708
So can democracy renovation work beyond the boundaries of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?

00:30:15.496 --> 00:30:21.146
Absolutely. I mean, I'll give you a great example because our founder and board

00:30:21.146 --> 00:30:24.959
chair, Danielle Allen, just put out a new book called The Radical Duke.

00:30:26.176 --> 00:30:33.756
And it kind of traces the journey of this English duke who was connected both

00:30:33.756 --> 00:30:37.863
to the American Revolution through being kind of the patron of Thomas Paine,

00:30:38.334 --> 00:30:40.736
author of Common Sense, while also,

00:30:41.276 --> 00:30:43.857
kind of doing the work to renovate.

00:30:45.356 --> 00:30:49.476
The government in Britain to rein in executive overreach, right,

00:30:50.516 --> 00:30:51.653
of the monarch at the time.

00:30:52.256 --> 00:30:57.216
And i think that's clear evidence historically that uh you know if you look

00:30:57.216 --> 00:31:00.936
at king charles right now and you look at the president we have and you ask

00:31:00.936 --> 00:31:03.974
which exactly which executive got reined in better,

00:31:04.828 --> 00:31:10.871
you can see that democracy renovation even without a revolution can work right and,

00:31:11.896 --> 00:31:16.016
we're seeing that every day on the ground and i work in massachusetts in terms

00:31:16.016 --> 00:31:21.726
of When you give folks the information to understand how our democracy works

00:31:21.726 --> 00:31:23.689
today, why it isn't as responsive,

00:31:25.076 --> 00:31:26.346
they don't get frustrated and acquit.

00:31:26.346 --> 00:31:30.476
They ask, well, okay, what can we do to make this better? And I think.

00:31:33.075 --> 00:31:37.616
We've done a lot of almost like victim blaming of voters. we've done a lot of

00:31:37.616 --> 00:31:42.146
oh you didn't show up to vote in the primary so you must not have cared if you

00:31:42.146 --> 00:31:46.171
were more educated or you cared more you would show up there right and I think,

00:31:47.592 --> 00:31:50.702
This is kind of like how we were treating folks in the healthcare space like

00:31:50.702 --> 00:31:54.652
30 years ago, right? We were saying, oh, patients aren't showing up for their

00:31:54.652 --> 00:31:56.971
appointments, so they must not care about their health.

00:31:57.559 --> 00:32:00.522
If they were only more educated, they would show up. And then we started to

00:32:00.522 --> 00:32:02.862
unpack that more and realize, oh, there's some structural barriers,

00:32:02.862 --> 00:32:06.590
like can people actually leave work and take the time off and all these things.

00:32:07.102 --> 00:32:10.832
And we haven't gotten there with democracy. We haven't gotten to that mindset

00:32:10.832 --> 00:32:14.522
shift of, oh, we need to meet people where they are. We got to stop blaming

00:32:14.522 --> 00:32:15.972
people for not being engaged.

00:32:16.613 --> 00:32:25.175
And we got to start inviting them in, inviting them to the table in a meaningful and inclusive way. And.

00:32:28.166 --> 00:32:30.976
That opportunity is just there for us. You know, as we...

00:32:32.342 --> 00:32:36.483
To this inflection point, the 250th anniversary, right, this Saturday,

00:32:37.518 --> 00:32:43.492
the dual, the kind of like twin forces of the democracy movement really are

00:32:43.492 --> 00:32:46.142
about how do we expand suffrage?

00:32:46.142 --> 00:32:51.082
How do we give people a more meaningful voice and vote in the democratic process?

00:32:51.395 --> 00:32:56.612
And how do we fight corruption? How do we fight back against the maybe darker

00:32:56.612 --> 00:33:00.912
parts of our human nature that seek to consolidate power and to kind of impose

00:33:00.912 --> 00:33:01.929
our will on other people.

00:33:03.147 --> 00:33:11.801
And we have an opportunity, I think, to write that next chapter of how we update the rules,

00:33:12.512 --> 00:33:18.083
check the corruption, expand meaningful participation, and get to a place where,

00:33:18.770 --> 00:33:23.147
this is my dream, Erik, like when you touch, when your foot touches the ground in Massachusetts,

00:33:24.202 --> 00:33:28.532
someday in the future, in the near future, I want you to be able to feel not

00:33:28.532 --> 00:33:31.652
just that civic energy that I felt in Chicago, right, of, oh,

00:33:31.652 --> 00:33:33.242
people really care about this place.

00:33:34.082 --> 00:33:38.262
But people actually feel like when there's a problem, they can raise it.

00:33:38.714 --> 00:33:43.052
They know that it'll get responded to. And if a decision gets made that they

00:33:43.052 --> 00:33:48.824
don't agree with, they'll at least have the ability to see that and to understand

00:33:49.128 --> 00:33:50.915
the kind of perspectives that went into it.

00:33:51.392 --> 00:33:56.562
And they'll know, you know, next time around, how they can shift the hearts

00:33:56.562 --> 00:34:00.727
and minds of people so that we make a different decision the next time.

00:34:01.140 --> 00:34:06.370
And I think that if we can do that, call it in the next five years in Massachusetts,

00:34:06.893 --> 00:34:10.496
we're going to set a model that really inspires the rest of the country for what's possible.

00:34:11.880 --> 00:34:15.360
Again, so many states, especially the southern states, with so many states are

00:34:15.360 --> 00:34:17.680
being asked, what does democracy mean to you?

00:34:18.330 --> 00:34:22.830
And they're looking for an answer, one that's not just the kind of same as the

00:34:22.830 --> 00:34:26.257
whole polarized national political conversation.

00:34:26.762 --> 00:34:30.580
I think that this is a moment for every state to look inside,

00:34:30.580 --> 00:34:35.875
to look within, and to ask, yeah, how do we share power here?

00:34:36.569 --> 00:34:41.764
How do we think about representation here? How do we think about honoring our neighbor's voice?

00:34:42.929 --> 00:34:48.449
And I think if we can do that, honestly, we will see this kind of grassroots

00:34:48.449 --> 00:34:52.134
democracy renewal and renovation in the next 10 years.

00:34:52.821 --> 00:34:55.809
Yeah, I think you're on the right track.

00:34:57.164 --> 00:35:00.599
The South is going to be vital.

00:35:01.087 --> 00:35:05.819
When you just look at the history of the United States, most of the challenges

00:35:05.819 --> 00:35:09.876
to democracy have come from the South, from the very beginning.

00:35:10.450 --> 00:35:14.629
And I've really been putting a focus on that on the podcast,

00:35:14.629 --> 00:35:18.749
but I'm glad that you touched on that a little bit because like I said,

00:35:19.129 --> 00:35:23.718
we can go on a different tangent, but I just appreciate what you said.

00:35:25.169 --> 00:35:28.829
And can I add one other thing there, Erik, which is like we need to address,

00:35:29.329 --> 00:35:33.389
definitely those areas like in the South where democracy is most under threat

00:35:33.389 --> 00:35:35.341
and in some cases most broken.

00:35:35.875 --> 00:35:39.655
And also we need that bright spot. We need that beacon.

00:35:40.067 --> 00:35:43.819
We can't sit on our laurels up here where people aren't that enthused about

00:35:43.819 --> 00:35:47.239
democracy here in Massachusetts or in a lot of the, you know,

00:35:47.239 --> 00:35:51.323
even in other states and kind of the liberal north, so to speak.

00:35:51.948 --> 00:35:55.894
We need we need to show people this is what it can look like at its best.

00:35:56.653 --> 00:36:01.919
Yeah. All right. So my next couple of questions is based off of what I read

00:36:01.919 --> 00:36:05.993
with your 360 degree democracy standard.

00:36:06.301 --> 00:36:11.585
And it centers around the word robust. I noticed it was used frequently in that thing.

00:36:12.130 --> 00:36:16.849
So what does robust media coverage of politics look like?

00:36:18.050 --> 00:36:21.218
So I'm going to go back to falling in love with the problem, right?

00:36:21.474 --> 00:36:25.999
And ultimately the problem here is we want voters to have the information that

00:36:25.999 --> 00:36:30.199
they need. We need more people to have the information they need to trust but

00:36:30.199 --> 00:36:33.401
verify what the government is doing in their name.

00:36:34.999 --> 00:36:41.239
And the media environment should facilitate that, right? So we want people to

00:36:41.239 --> 00:36:47.100
have access to the diversity of perspectives and analysis on what's going on.

00:36:47.727 --> 00:36:54.199
We want that to be as accessible as possible. And we want it to not only be,

00:36:54.199 --> 00:36:56.479
I think, the collection of.

00:36:57.899 --> 00:37:02.469
Writers and voices in the media, But people also, I think, increasingly want

00:37:02.469 --> 00:37:05.801
to hear what are my neighbors and friends thinking about this too.

00:37:06.372 --> 00:37:10.609
And when I think about the kind of like media environment of the future that

00:37:10.609 --> 00:37:14.569
will help enable that, I think about these like digital civic platforms that

00:37:14.569 --> 00:37:17.881
are being built. We're building one in Massachusetts called Maple,

00:37:18.218 --> 00:37:20.430
the Massachusetts platform for legislative engagement.

00:37:20.860 --> 00:37:27.620
But what people do is essentially be a platform or a home for if you care about a particular issue.

00:37:27.830 --> 00:37:32.049
I'm just going to pick Massachusetts. We have a record number of ballot initiatives

00:37:32.049 --> 00:37:36.199
this cycle. So say that you really cared about a particular ballot initiative

00:37:36.199 --> 00:37:39.177
in Massachusetts, maybe something on housing.

00:37:39.576 --> 00:37:45.179
You could go to this page where you see, oh, for this particular ballot initiative,

00:37:45.283 --> 00:37:46.711
here's all the different media coverage.

00:37:47.182 --> 00:37:52.389
Here's all the peer-reviewed research that's being done by academics and connecting

00:37:52.389 --> 00:37:56.505
the ivory tower work into practical decisions that people need to make.

00:37:57.027 --> 00:38:02.159
Here's what all my neighbors are saying right and and how their perspectives

00:38:02.159 --> 00:38:05.832
are differing whether by demographic or geography or whatever.

00:38:06.609 --> 00:38:10.690
So that i can start to create a more informed perspective,

00:38:11.168 --> 00:38:15.339
and maybe even it's accompanied by places where we can digest all that information

00:38:15.339 --> 00:38:21.030
together these kind of deliberative third spaces that i think are so essential to civic life where

00:38:21.397 --> 00:38:25.509
you can sit virtually or in person with people and and really unpack like oh

00:38:25.509 --> 00:38:27.845
i saw this What do you think is happening there?

00:38:29.210 --> 00:38:32.624
That is really still how we learn in dialogue with each other.

00:38:32.960 --> 00:38:37.854
And so the media environment is one piece of that ecosystem of making sure that

00:38:38.156 --> 00:38:44.570
coverage is diverse and strong and with integrity, that it's accessible to people all across,

00:38:45.830 --> 00:38:49.440
a particular state or community, but that it's accompanied by these other things

00:38:49.440 --> 00:38:53.670
around listening to your peers and understanding what those different voices

00:38:53.670 --> 00:38:56.450
are saying beyond your personal echo chamber.

00:38:56.915 --> 00:38:59.893
And then also having the space to really digest and process,

00:39:00.258 --> 00:39:01.953
well, how do I make sense of this?

00:39:02.551 --> 00:39:08.380
Yeah. All right. So what does a robust civics education curriculum look like?

00:39:09.694 --> 00:39:14.564
Robust civic education. So it's a gold standard in terms of kind of framework

00:39:14.564 --> 00:39:18.224
for civic education, in my mind, is the Educating for American Democracy framework.

00:39:18.787 --> 00:39:23.774
And that's one that, you know, our founder, Danielle, helped to spearhead alongside

00:39:23.774 --> 00:39:27.087
a number of the leading civics educational organizations across the country.

00:39:27.579 --> 00:39:30.807
And, you know, I think especially in a day and age where,

00:39:31.592 --> 00:39:36.871
there's so much politicization and polarization on facts,

00:39:37.508 --> 00:39:42.814
that you know even what even what fact base we're looking at that the educating

00:39:42.814 --> 00:39:46.764
for american democracy framework offers kind of a brilliant solution to that

00:39:46.764 --> 00:39:49.217
which is it's inquiry led so,

00:39:49.886 --> 00:39:54.084
we might not agree on the answer to a question might not even agree kind of

00:39:54.084 --> 00:39:58.640
what evidence is most trustworthy to answer a particular question but what we can agree on,

00:39:59.362 --> 00:40:03.644
is what are the really important questions to ask and then give students and

00:40:03.644 --> 00:40:07.755
learners the opportunity and the skills and the support,

00:40:08.552 --> 00:40:10.456
to start to answer those questions for themselves,

00:40:11.364 --> 00:40:16.534
and i think that that is just such a good principle for us again in a day and

00:40:16.534 --> 00:40:21.974
age where even here in massachusetts i can tell you for even some of the like simplest,

00:40:22.846 --> 00:40:27.234
problems that we're trying to kind of have a clear and honest story around it's

00:40:27.234 --> 00:40:30.137
hard for a bipartisan group of folks to agree on a set of facts.

00:40:31.054 --> 00:40:34.423
But we should be able to agree, what are the questions we're trying to answer?

00:40:34.701 --> 00:40:36.740
Let's put all of our different facts on the table.

00:40:37.249 --> 00:40:40.535
And ultimately, let's talk through what we find to be the most persuasive.

00:40:41.034 --> 00:40:45.834
And I think preparing learners with that skill as early as possible is really

00:40:45.834 --> 00:40:52.374
going to be essential to building the citizenry that can engage effectively,

00:40:53.114 --> 00:40:55.874
in deciding how we live together, right?

00:40:55.874 --> 00:41:00.807
Deciding who represents us and what they should be prioritizing. Yeah.

00:41:02.339 --> 00:41:08.479
When your term at Partners in Democracy is over, what would be your milestone?

00:41:08.479 --> 00:41:13.229
And let me explain how I came about the question.

00:41:13.229 --> 00:41:19.449
So in Atlanta, where I'm based, the most sacred artifact in the city of Atlanta

00:41:19.449 --> 00:41:25.478
is the milestone for the Western and Atlantic Railroad.

00:41:25.798 --> 00:41:27.859
That's the terminus post.

00:41:28.665 --> 00:41:36.559
And from that post, Atlanta's history expands, you know, through,

00:41:37.299 --> 00:41:43.429
race riots and segregation to hosting the Olympics and being one of the 10 richest

00:41:43.429 --> 00:41:45.329
cities in the United States.

00:41:46.130 --> 00:41:50.039
You know, everything goes back to that milepost, right?

00:41:50.757 --> 00:41:55.158
When you look back at the history of Atlanta, it's like it all started with that.

00:41:56.039 --> 00:42:02.969
So Genesis, the question is, so when you leave, what is the milestone when you

00:42:02.969 --> 00:42:07.425
look back and say, I did that, or I helped make that happen?

00:42:08.659 --> 00:42:14.497
What do you envision that being? Yeah. Yeah, for me, again, it all starts at home.

00:42:15.150 --> 00:42:19.742
Here in Massachusetts, it starts with lighting that beacon. That would be the milestone, right?

00:42:20.590 --> 00:42:23.412
That it's not about...

00:42:24.638 --> 00:42:30.438
That again, you could set foot here in a state and you would just feel something

00:42:30.438 --> 00:42:36.065
is different here about how people work together to solve shared problems.

00:42:36.806 --> 00:42:44.198
That there is a, you know, you sit in on a town meeting and it's not just kind

00:42:44.198 --> 00:42:49.958
of angry, loud voices getting up to yell at the elected officials who say,

00:42:49.958 --> 00:42:51.150
okay, your two minutes are up.

00:42:51.685 --> 00:42:56.287
But it looks like people actually seeking out each other's perspectives,

00:42:56.415 --> 00:43:00.861
like asking questions to seek out deeper mutual understanding.

00:43:01.436 --> 00:43:07.358
It looks like spaces where even the kind of careful, quiet voices get heard.

00:43:09.186 --> 00:43:10.677
Just as equally as anyone else's.

00:43:11.674 --> 00:43:16.648
It looks like when we make decisions, people have kind of clear transparency

00:43:16.648 --> 00:43:19.424
into why those decisions were made the way that they were.

00:43:20.704 --> 00:43:25.338
Whose interests were taken into account and what was prioritized.

00:43:26.197 --> 00:43:31.694
I think that so much of our politics right now is that we're afraid to hold

00:43:31.694 --> 00:43:32.774
these tensions together.

00:43:33.438 --> 00:43:38.232
We're afraid that if we make this choice and if this seems to favor,

00:43:38.702 --> 00:43:44.484
corporate interests or moneyed interests or one particular marginalized group

00:43:44.484 --> 00:43:48.676
or another, that people won't be able to stand for that.

00:43:49.454 --> 00:43:52.854
That people won't be able to understand why we chose what we chose.

00:43:52.854 --> 00:43:56.980
And so we try to hide that and we try to control the narrative.

00:43:57.398 --> 00:44:00.494
And I think we got to move beyond that.

00:44:00.820 --> 00:44:05.772
We got to get to a place where we're willing to be transparent and give the

00:44:06.067 --> 00:44:08.813
community the tools to understand,

00:44:09.595 --> 00:44:17.397
and verify that what government is doing in their name is something that they can get behind.

00:44:18.491 --> 00:44:24.898
I would love to see a world where, Erik, I just had my first kid a baby girl,

00:44:25.292 --> 00:44:29.257
she's four months old now, I would love to see a world that, you know,

00:44:30.138 --> 00:44:35.538
My milestone would be that she grows up in this world where democracy works

00:44:35.538 --> 00:44:36.983
like what we're talking about.

00:44:38.010 --> 00:44:42.899
She feels heard equally in any civic space that she enters.

00:44:43.567 --> 00:44:48.358
She sees a level of responsiveness from her elected leaders who actually reach

00:44:48.358 --> 00:44:52.479
out to her when they're campaigning to understand her perspective and her neighbor's perspectives.

00:44:53.778 --> 00:44:57.518
And most importantly, she doesn't even think that any of that's remarkable because

00:44:57.518 --> 00:45:01.017
that's just the water that she grew up in. That would be my milestone.

00:45:01.773 --> 00:45:04.189
Yeah, that's cool. Well, congratulations, Dad.

00:45:05.218 --> 00:45:08.966
Thank you. Welcome to the fraternity. Appreciate it.

00:45:09.591 --> 00:45:14.432
All right, so I want to end the interview with a challenge I've been issuing to all of my guests.

00:45:15.054 --> 00:45:18.409
Finish this sentence, I have hope because.

00:45:19.515 --> 00:45:24.238
I have hope. I have hope because I started this work with a deep,

00:45:24.238 --> 00:45:29.462
deep belief in the equality of humanity, human dignity.

00:45:30.169 --> 00:45:38.201
And, you know, for me, personally, that comes from this place of deep spirituality.

00:45:38.725 --> 00:45:47.052
And I think that whether you're spiritual or not, there's this deep connectedness, human to human.

00:45:47.366 --> 00:45:51.588
And there's a part of our soul that yearns for that recognition,

00:45:51.588 --> 00:45:54.042
that connection, you know, it goes back to that first question you,

00:45:54.425 --> 00:45:56.668
one of the first questions you asked me in the icebreaker, right?

00:45:56.668 --> 00:45:58.578
Like, what does everyone want? We

00:45:58.578 --> 00:46:04.337
all want to be heard. We all want to be recognized as equal human beings.

00:46:04.762 --> 00:46:11.303
And I think that that is a profoundly universal feeling.

00:46:11.615 --> 00:46:13.971
And that's what gives me hope. Because if we can tap into that,

00:46:14.122 --> 00:46:15.915
if we can stop ignoring that.

00:46:17.436 --> 00:46:20.492
Else is possible. Yeah.

00:46:21.194 --> 00:46:25.976
Well, Jerren Chang, I really appreciate this conversation. If people want to

00:46:25.976 --> 00:46:31.166
find out more about Partners in Democracy and, you know, pick your brain a little

00:46:31.166 --> 00:46:32.551
more, how can they do that?

00:46:33.188 --> 00:46:38.582
Yeah, I would encourage folks to sign up on our website, partnersindemocracy.us,

00:46:39.235 --> 00:46:44.282
sign up for our listserv, you know, reach out to me and my team.

00:46:45.287 --> 00:46:51.383
You know, my email is very simple, jaron at partners in democracy.us and this

00:46:51.493 --> 00:46:57.271
work you know only happens with kind of broad-based engagement of everyday people,

00:46:57.943 --> 00:47:03.746
and so i would encourage folks you know whether you think that democracy work

00:47:03.746 --> 00:47:08.166
is for you or you're honestly just interested in following along or dipping

00:47:08.166 --> 00:47:11.185
your toe and you're not sure just sign up and,

00:47:12.031 --> 00:47:16.887
start to engage in the conversation and start to read to start to learn because we need to.

00:47:17.872 --> 00:47:24.419
Well, Jerren, again, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your time.

00:47:25.430 --> 00:47:29.596
Really appreciate that. One of the rules I have is that once you've been a guest,

00:47:29.596 --> 00:47:31.277
you have an open invitation to come back.

00:47:31.828 --> 00:47:35.016
So you don't have to wait for me and you'll say, look, I need a platform.

00:47:35.016 --> 00:47:37.795
I need to talk about something and we'll make that happen. So,

00:47:38.283 --> 00:47:43.535
but I really, really am honored to have had this conversation with you. So thank you again.

00:47:44.086 --> 00:47:48.978
Thanks, Erik. Likewise, so, so honored for the invitation and the open invite.

00:47:49.412 --> 00:47:52.406
I'm sure we'll be in conversation again soon. So thank you. Yes,

00:47:52.406 --> 00:47:55.354
sir. All right, guys, and we're going to catch y'all on the other side.

00:48:15.582 --> 00:48:20.743
All right. And we are back. And so now it is time for my next guest, Bhumika Muchhala.

00:48:21.330 --> 00:48:28.802
Dr. Bhumika Muchhala is a critical feminist political economist and theorist whose

00:48:28.802 --> 00:48:34.542
work spans advocacy, research, and movement building in the fields of international

00:48:34.542 --> 00:48:35.827
financial architecture,

00:48:36.327 --> 00:48:39.241
feminist economics, and the colonial futures.

00:48:40.020 --> 00:48:44.922
She serves as a senior advisor with the Third World Network and as a lecturer

00:48:44.922 --> 00:48:49.975
in the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Program at the New School.

00:48:50.538 --> 00:48:56.142
Her teaching portfolio includes research as accompaniment, scholar-advocate

00:48:56.142 --> 00:49:01.902
methodologies, critical political economy and ecology, from extraction,

00:49:01.902 --> 00:49:04.673
accumulation to regeneration, reparation,

00:49:05.277 --> 00:49:08.389
and global environmental policy and politics.

00:49:09.155 --> 00:49:13.432
The Transdisciplinary scholarship integrates international political economy,

00:49:13.874 --> 00:49:19.278
feminist theory, political ecology, and critical traditions within dependency theory,

00:49:19.922 --> 00:49:25.216
world systems analysis, anti-colonial thought, and decoloniality.

00:49:25.940 --> 00:49:31.522
Dr. Muchhala's research examines economic and financial subordination through

00:49:31.522 --> 00:49:36.992
the political economy of sovereign debt, austerity, and financialization in the global South.

00:49:37.561 --> 00:49:42.502
She interrogates the complex dynamics of neoliberal capitalism in the current

00:49:42.502 --> 00:49:47.272
era through intersectional analyses of dependency, decolonial,

00:49:47.272 --> 00:49:49.363
and social reproduction theories.

00:49:49.990 --> 00:49:55.102
Her work seeks to reveal prevailing logics and trace the historical genealogy

00:49:55.102 --> 00:49:57.612
of structural, gendered, and

00:49:57.739 --> 00:50:02.813
epistemic power in order to unsettle the foundations of global inequality.

00:50:03.771 --> 00:50:08.891
Her research methodology, she engages with communities across the global South

00:50:08.891 --> 00:50:12.997
experiencing and resisting economic austerity and financialization

00:50:13.427 --> 00:50:19.242
by formulating social democratic alternatives across policy and politics.

00:50:19.927 --> 00:50:26.501
Her recent publications from 2022 to 2025 further examined the interrelation

00:50:26.501 --> 00:50:32.491
between climate reparations and sovereign debt through the colonial origins

00:50:32.491 --> 00:50:34.487
and epistemic roots of sovereign debt,

00:50:35.143 --> 00:50:39.606
international financial subordination through currency hierarchies,

00:50:39.956 --> 00:50:46.845
and financial discipline, the gendered dimensions of debt crises in Sri Lanka and Pakistan,

00:50:47.496 --> 00:50:52.811
The epistemic foundations of neoliberalism and global governance, the counter.

00:50:54.747 --> 00:51:00.761
Hegemonic origins of sustainability in the global South, and possible pathways

00:51:00.761 --> 00:51:05.080
epistemic delinking to decolonized economic assumptions.

00:51:05.977 --> 00:51:11.867
Has also articulated propositional principles and analysis for a decolonial

00:51:11.867 --> 00:51:18.157
and feminist global Green New Deal as a cross-border world-making and collective initiative.

00:51:18.825 --> 00:51:24.287
With over two decades of experience in global economic and climate justice movements,

00:51:24.700 --> 00:51:28.587
Dr. Muchhala has led leadership roles in strategic advocacy,

00:51:28.587 --> 00:51:31.131
research, and political education initiatives.

00:51:31.840 --> 00:51:35.683
Through her role as senior advisor and strategist for the Third World Network,

00:51:36.222 --> 00:51:40.637
She has been actively involved in transnational social movements and global

00:51:40.637 --> 00:51:44.599
coalitions such as the End Austerity Network, Debt for Climate,

00:51:45.196 --> 00:51:50.636
and various initiatives focused on systemic reform of the international economic architecture.

00:51:51.284 --> 00:51:55.537
She also advises policymakers and negotiators from the Global South within the

00:51:55.537 --> 00:51:59.957
United Nations Conference and Negotiations, including the General Assembly.

00:52:00.635 --> 00:52:04.091
The Sustainable Development goals process,

00:52:04.625 --> 00:52:09.247
the Financing for Development Conferences, the World Conference on the Global

00:52:09.247 --> 00:52:14.427
Financial Crisis, and numerous resolutions on reforming the international financial

00:52:14.427 --> 00:52:17.341
architecture and addressing sovereign debt.

00:52:17.993 --> 00:52:23.473
Her consultancy and advisory engagements include work with the UN Special Rapporteur,

00:52:24.123 --> 00:52:30.212
on the Right to Development, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and UN Women.

00:52:30.840 --> 00:52:35.277
She has also reviewed flagship reports for international research and advocacy

00:52:35.277 --> 00:52:40.982
organizations such as Oxfam and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.

00:52:41.475 --> 00:52:46.108
Currently, she serves as a member of the Independent Expert Group on Just Transition

00:52:46.473 --> 00:52:51.667
for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Advisory Group on Sovereign

00:52:51.667 --> 00:52:55.111
Debt and Colonial Reparations at Debt Justice.

00:52:55.483 --> 00:53:03.341
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest on this podcast, Dr.

00:53:03.637 --> 00:53:05.362
Bhumika Muchhala.

00:53:16.825 --> 00:53:22.022
All right. Dr. Bhumika Muchhala. How you doing, ma'am?

00:53:22.980 --> 00:53:27.845
I'm doing great. How about you? I'm doing okay. I appreciate that smile you

00:53:27.845 --> 00:53:31.080
gave me when I said your name. That gives me some reassurance.

00:53:32.607 --> 00:53:38.415
So, you know, one of the distinctions I have on this show is that I usually

00:53:38.415 --> 00:53:41.914
get, well, most all of my guests are smarter than I am.

00:53:42.565 --> 00:53:48.105
And I think that truly applies to you and once we get to talking I think the

00:53:48.105 --> 00:53:50.523
audience will understand where I'm coming from with that.

00:53:51.636 --> 00:53:55.788
Well, what I do is I start off the interviews with a couple of icebreakers,

00:53:56.119 --> 00:53:57.989
kind of get the conversation going.

00:53:58.662 --> 00:54:02.760
And the first icebreaker is a quote that I want you to respond to.

00:54:03.306 --> 00:54:10.405
And the quote is, healing can only begin when deeply entrenched hierarchies

00:54:10.817 --> 00:54:14.381
rooted in injustice and dehumanization are dismantled.

00:54:15.174 --> 00:54:20.451
Yeah, the quote you said is central to my work, to my value system,

00:54:20.799 --> 00:54:26.296
to my vision of the world and what I share with communities,

00:54:26.767 --> 00:54:31.596
that are resisting and recreating the world in many ways.

00:54:31.596 --> 00:54:39.266
So it's really about understanding what decolonial theorists or decoloniality

00:54:39.266 --> 00:54:42.405
calls the colonial matrix of power.

00:54:42.933 --> 00:54:50.406
It's a way in which to understand the scaffolding of inequalities and justices

00:54:50.406 --> 00:54:55.722
and power politics that we live in from a past to present continuum.

00:54:56.302 --> 00:55:02.897
That everything is historically situated and has been created by human societies,

00:55:03.286 --> 00:55:08.764
you know, in ways that carry through past the present.

00:55:09.171 --> 00:55:16.195
So that's really talking about how, as a global community of the human family,

00:55:16.711 --> 00:55:22.145
to go forward to heal, we need to address the sorts of hierarchies that we've created.

00:55:22.696 --> 00:55:28.746
All human societies are built on explicit hierarchies, and the hierarchy that

00:55:28.746 --> 00:55:36.707
most concerns me in my work that I see play out on every level is the unequal hierarchy of humanity.

00:55:37.539 --> 00:55:42.989
This is undergirded by an unequal hierarchy of knowledge systems.

00:55:44.372 --> 00:55:48.598
Of legal systems, of the financial system.

00:55:49.155 --> 00:55:53.727
So everywhere we look, we see an unequal hierarchy, but I think the scaffolding,

00:55:53.890 --> 00:55:57.721
in my view, is the unequal hierarchy of humanity.

00:55:58.208 --> 00:56:02.419
What humans are more valuable, what humans are less valuable,

00:56:02.419 --> 00:56:08.646
and how our society is really built with this scaffolding,

00:56:09.174 --> 00:56:14.011
whether consciously or unconsciously, whether embedded or explicit.

00:56:14.663 --> 00:56:20.339
This is one of the key hierarchies I feel must be confronted in a more explicit,

00:56:20.891 --> 00:56:27.288
honest, painful, collective manner to go forward in new ways.

00:56:27.497 --> 00:56:33.911
So the transformation really begins from the embeddedness of how things are.

00:56:34.364 --> 00:56:40.086
Yeah. All right. So now the next icebreaker is what I call 20 questions.

00:56:40.799 --> 00:56:44.665
So I need you to give me a number between 1 and 20.

00:56:50.221 --> 00:56:55.806
What is one thing you'd like to learn from someone with a different perspective than yours?

00:56:56.418 --> 00:57:00.528
Yeah, something I'd like to learn from a different perspective.

00:57:01.514 --> 00:57:09.101
I think a perspective that's always fascinated me is indigenous cultures and communities.

00:57:09.794 --> 00:57:14.331
Because if I think of in the world today, who are the people?

00:57:14.331 --> 00:57:21.231
What group of people really think, feel, do, see, be in a completely different

00:57:21.231 --> 00:57:26.849
ontology from those of us who are situated in,

00:57:27.423 --> 00:57:33.425
the crevices and organizations of modern industrial capitalism?

00:57:34.183 --> 00:57:39.151
How do they see the world? I know so little. It's a very superficial knowledge

00:57:39.151 --> 00:57:44.830
that most of us have of cosmo-visions and cyclical views of time.

00:57:45.277 --> 00:57:51.312
I'm particularly fascinated by how they understand time, the teleology of time,

00:57:51.899 --> 00:57:55.186
how things do not repeat but are cyclical.

00:57:55.546 --> 00:57:57.392
What does the cyclicality mean?

00:57:58.208 --> 00:58:03.701
You know, at this point in my life, well into my fourth decade of life,

00:58:03.701 --> 00:58:05.868
I really see how things are cyclical.

00:58:06.257 --> 00:58:10.161
I see the same sorts of boom-bust economic policies.

00:58:10.161 --> 00:58:15.531
I see the same sorts of, you know, the pendulum swing, as Polanyi put it,

00:58:15.531 --> 00:58:20.310
you know, the double movement from the left to the right, to the right, to the left, from,

00:58:20.791 --> 00:58:25.241
one party to another party, from, you know, action and reaction.

00:58:25.241 --> 00:58:31.831
I think indigenous ways of life could teach us a lot about how to navigate the

00:58:31.831 --> 00:58:33.544
cyclicalities of society.

00:58:34.072 --> 00:58:35.525
All right, let's start from the beginning.

00:58:36.185 --> 00:58:42.681
What is a critical feminist political economist and theorist and how did your

00:58:42.681 --> 00:58:44.623
life journey lead you to that pursuit.

00:58:45.966 --> 00:58:53.331
Sure. Great. So I'll start with my life journey because it is specific.

00:58:54.192 --> 00:59:04.374
My parents are from India and I grew up, my entire first 18 years of my life were in Indonesia.

00:59:05.136 --> 00:59:10.493
Indonesia is an archipelago nation that most people do not know much about.

00:59:10.795 --> 00:59:12.803
It's the fourth largest country in the world.

00:59:13.361 --> 00:59:20.118
It was at the center of colonial history, one of the largest colonies of Europe.

00:59:20.524 --> 00:59:23.815
The Dutch ruled it for over 350 years,

00:59:24.742 --> 00:59:29.253
and it has a really incredible history of the melding of different cultures

00:59:29.671 --> 00:59:35.880
from Hindu civilizations to Arabic civilizations overlaid onto an indigenous,

00:59:36.548 --> 00:59:39.046
pastoral agriculture civilization.

00:59:39.342 --> 00:59:46.616
So I grew up in Indonesia in the 80s and 90s during one of the world's most

00:59:46.616 --> 00:59:49.222
notorious military dictatorships.

00:59:49.657 --> 00:59:53.558
It was a dictatorship of Suharto, President Suharto.

00:59:54.423 --> 01:00:00.466
And after the Dutch left, Indonesia has a deeply entwined relationship with

01:00:00.466 --> 01:00:03.351
the United States of America. In fact...

01:00:04.349 --> 01:00:11.639
We look back at, you know, the full accounts, Indonesia was one of the central

01:00:11.639 --> 01:00:14.661
playgrounds of U.S. imperialism.

01:00:15.299 --> 01:00:23.194
The CIA was deeply involved in the coup d'etat that overthrew the populist Sukarno, President Sukarno,

01:00:23.734 --> 01:00:28.449
who was instrumental in the freedom fight against the Dutch and was leading

01:00:28.449 --> 01:00:32.685
a populist nation with a decolonial vision.

01:00:33.272 --> 01:00:38.432
And that populist ethos, which was swinging to the progressive left,

01:00:38.804 --> 01:00:44.589
was completely dismantled with the technical assistance, the military arms,

01:00:44.589 --> 01:00:46.579
and the financing from the CIA.

01:00:46.579 --> 01:00:50.829
This is well documented in a book that has been quite successful.

01:00:50.829 --> 01:00:52.322
It's called the Jakarta Method.

01:00:52.810 --> 01:00:57.029
And it really shows how the U.S. government then used this Jakarta method in

01:00:57.029 --> 01:01:04.109
other places also well-known, such as Chile with the overthrow of Salvador Allende

01:01:04.549 --> 01:01:09.609
and the Pinochet dictatorship, and so on and so forth in many other parts of the world.

01:01:10.021 --> 01:01:18.374
So growing up in a military dictatorship, the main sort of vision of the key purpose of the U.S.

01:01:18.374 --> 01:01:25.379
Intervention, was to really open up the trade liberalization and investment

01:01:25.379 --> 01:01:33.069
for U.S. multinationals, as they did across the Global South in the 1970s and 80s.

01:01:33.441 --> 01:01:39.979
So I grew up in an American school that was run by the U.S. embassy that was

01:01:39.979 --> 01:01:45.568
filled with Texans. Most of my classmates were from Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, Texas.

01:01:45.735 --> 01:01:50.833
Why? Because they were the children of Texaco, and Exxon, and Mobile,

01:01:50.961 --> 01:01:54.984
and BP, and Shell, and Chevron, and Caltex.

01:01:55.904 --> 01:02:01.314
Are the folks I grew up with in Indonesia. As per the arrangement between the

01:02:01.314 --> 01:02:05.589
U.S. government and the Indonesian government, Indonesian citizens were not allowed into my school.

01:02:06.142 --> 01:02:12.674
So I have a childhood understanding. I have a front view. I have a deeply embedded

01:02:12.674 --> 01:02:15.005
experience in imperialism.

01:02:15.458 --> 01:02:21.474
I understand imperialism from the body and muscle memory of a five-year-old.

01:02:22.425 --> 01:02:26.825
And that has helped me to understand the world. That has helped me to understand

01:02:27.237 --> 01:02:33.628
how injustice and inequity functions, you know, how the hierarchy of humanity is upheld.

01:02:33.936 --> 01:02:38.035
Because this is what I have seen from childhood, right?

01:02:38.035 --> 01:02:40.983
With the domination of

01:02:41.349 --> 01:02:47.282
Americans over Indonesians, the way they would be treated, the kinds of explicit

01:02:47.403 --> 01:02:53.485
racism, not implicit, explicit racism that I saw growing up, right?

01:02:53.485 --> 01:02:58.328
Where the local people were essentially dehumanized into native subjects.

01:02:59.345 --> 01:03:04.485
They were demoted into native subjects. And really, the rulers of the land were

01:03:04.485 --> 01:03:07.605
the oil companies and the expatriates.

01:03:07.605 --> 01:03:11.529
And expatriates are very, it's the opposite of immigrants. It's folks who come,

01:03:11.750 --> 01:03:17.575
you know, for an explicit purpose of capital accumulation and a political economic,

01:03:17.575 --> 01:03:22.463
you know, purpose of a temporary stay with the intention to go back.

01:03:22.776 --> 01:03:28.859
So there were kids and communities from all over the world, but it was dominated

01:03:29.028 --> 01:03:33.205
by the Americans who created a replica

01:03:33.605 --> 01:03:39.305
of American suburbs, American grocery stores, American pool clubs,

01:03:39.305 --> 01:03:41.121
American roller skating rinks.

01:03:41.446 --> 01:03:47.725
So you really saw how this divide and rule and this exclusive difference-making

01:03:47.725 --> 01:03:53.062
worked as an underpinning logic, that we are here for a certain amount of time.

01:03:53.317 --> 01:04:00.895
We feel completely entitled to ecologically plunder and accumulate from a foreign

01:04:00.895 --> 01:04:07.397
land, but we are superior to the people, so we are entitled to do what we are doing.

01:04:07.717 --> 01:04:12.085
So this was an era in which there was profound human rights and.

01:04:13.506 --> 01:04:19.904
Of the Suharto dictatorship. Many are familiar with East Timor and many other,

01:04:20.406 --> 01:04:23.460
political and civil violations.

01:04:23.913 --> 01:04:27.856
And all of this was not talked about. We never learned about it in school.

01:04:27.856 --> 01:04:29.259
We learned U.S. history.

01:04:29.584 --> 01:04:36.277
We learned European history. We learned ancient world history of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

01:04:36.521 --> 01:04:40.718
But we learned nothing about Southeast Asia, nothing about Indonesia.

01:04:41.147 --> 01:04:46.506
Everything was silenced. So I also understand epistemic erasure and epistemic

01:04:46.506 --> 01:04:50.266
hierarchy, what knowledges are taught, how we understand the world,

01:04:50.266 --> 01:04:55.056
how we know the world, you know, what we consider knowledge, right?

01:04:55.056 --> 01:04:59.706
And in a dictatorship, you don't have media, you don't have TV stations.

01:05:00.025 --> 01:05:05.283
There's one newspaper, a lot of it is censored with black ink that rubs off on your fingers.

01:05:05.706 --> 01:05:12.056
So it was an incredible life experience growing up in Suharto's Indonesia with

01:05:12.056 --> 01:05:16.654
the Texans, and that has informed my entire path going forward.

01:05:16.996 --> 01:05:22.546
I have no choice but to work on social and economic justice through an anti-colonial,

01:05:22.546 --> 01:05:30.858
decolonial, anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberal discourse lens and structural analysis, Because,

01:05:31.639 --> 01:05:36.507
that is precisely what I know from a childhood.

01:05:37.506 --> 01:05:41.526
Basis point as the imperative of my life,

01:05:42.126 --> 01:05:46.960
as my life duty, as what makes sense for me in my life journey.

01:05:48.019 --> 01:05:55.445
It's not simply about my own experience, but about what I saw firsthand happen all around me.

01:05:55.827 --> 01:05:59.358
The expressions on the faces of the Indonesians I grew up with,

01:05:59.898 --> 01:06:07.872
those expressions, those reactions of indignity, of insult, of dehumanization will never leave me.

01:06:07.981 --> 01:06:13.776
And that's really what guides me forward because I know what I saw growing up is a global phenomenon.

01:06:14.296 --> 01:06:17.598
Okay. That's powerful. That's awesome.

01:06:17.919 --> 01:06:23.544
Which leads me to my next question, which you sound like that you would be the right person to ask.

01:06:24.089 --> 01:06:27.856
Why does America do capitalism wrong? Aha.

01:06:28.905 --> 01:06:37.602
So I think we need to situate American capitalism in a very separate kind of understanding.

01:06:38.442 --> 01:06:44.919
It is not only hyper-capitalist, but it is the essential creator,

01:06:44.919 --> 01:06:48.159
formation, holder of neoliberalism.

01:06:48.159 --> 01:06:51.769
And neoliberalism is different from capitalism, so I want to make that distinction

01:06:51.769 --> 01:06:54.339
right away, that neoliberalism is distinct.

01:06:54.966 --> 01:07:02.299
Neoliberalism is really a paradigm of monopoly capitalism, right?

01:07:03.305 --> 01:07:07.745
Understand it as liberalization, privatization, and deregulation,

01:07:08.145 --> 01:07:13.448
Reagan-Thatcher since the late 1970s, the rollback of the state.

01:07:13.847 --> 01:07:21.455
But we need to understand the U.S. neoliberal paradigm actually was a case study

01:07:21.455 --> 01:07:24.245
in positioning the state, the government,

01:07:24.814 --> 01:07:30.945
to explicitly serve the interests of corporations and private investors,

01:07:30.945 --> 01:07:33.121
the private sector, the financial market.

01:07:33.551 --> 01:07:38.282
And this redeployment of the role of the state was not that the role of the state shrunk.

01:07:38.525 --> 01:07:44.290
The role of the state was as enduring and flourishing and massive as ever.

01:07:44.649 --> 01:07:52.215
But for the legal protections, the trade agreements, the regulatory infrastructure,

01:07:52.215 --> 01:07:56.810
that would serve the private sector, that would serve private interests.

01:07:57.233 --> 01:08:02.755
So it was really this positioning of the corporate and private domain over and

01:08:02.755 --> 01:08:06.325
above the social contract, over and above economic, social and human rights,

01:08:06.325 --> 01:08:09.476
social equity, distributive justice.

01:08:10.353 --> 01:08:14.075
And this is a particular feature of the U.S.

01:08:14.075 --> 01:08:20.651
Capitalism that is distinct, and that has led to the birth and the creation

01:08:20.790 --> 01:08:27.905
of this untenable monstrosity that we know as financialization.

01:08:28.384 --> 01:08:34.055
The birth of finance capital, Wall Street, the globalization of money,

01:08:34.457 --> 01:08:36.824
where financial markets are today,

01:08:37.488 --> 01:08:44.075
you know, just exponentially larger than the real market or the real economy

01:08:44.075 --> 01:08:50.287
of jobs, production, factories, income, consumption, trade, exchange.

01:08:50.728 --> 01:08:56.145
You have essentially what the U.S. gave birth to through the Wall Street and

01:08:56.145 --> 01:08:58.449
through the alliances with the City of London.

01:08:59.452 --> 01:09:07.773
Is a world in which the investment banks, asset managers, rule the world.

01:09:07.935 --> 01:09:11.582
They have come to dominate everything from production, consumption,

01:09:11.582 --> 01:09:13.479
regulation, health, education.

01:09:13.949 --> 01:09:17.912
And this is in line with intellectual monopoly capitalism, which the U.S.

01:09:17.912 --> 01:09:21.853
Has really created in perfection.

01:09:22.242 --> 01:09:26.292
This is the world of patents, copyrights, trademarks that act as a monopoly

01:09:26.292 --> 01:09:31.080
force that reduce competitive supply, exclude others from using patented knowledges,

01:09:31.504 --> 01:09:34.383
and mark up prices, right?

01:09:34.778 --> 01:09:39.562
And then what the United States did is it created these Bretton Woods institutions,

01:09:39.562 --> 01:09:43.422
which we'll come to later, but the Bretton Woods institutions and international

01:09:43.422 --> 01:09:46.276
financial institutions maintained,

01:09:46.856 --> 01:09:52.572
a particular kind of economic model oriented around exports and cash crops and

01:09:52.572 --> 01:09:57.346
plantations and extraction for the global South to ensure that,

01:09:57.892 --> 01:10:03.272
the United States would always have very cheap access to fruits and coffee and

01:10:03.272 --> 01:10:07.488
cocoa and sugar, you know, in alignment with past history.

01:10:08.078 --> 01:10:12.949
But one of the things that U.S. and that American capitalism really.

01:10:14.012 --> 01:10:18.792
Especially in the last 20 years that we've seen the rise of the far right in

01:10:18.792 --> 01:10:23.962
the United States, Is it abandon the social contract, the abandonment of the

01:10:23.962 --> 01:10:28.001
social contract to provide health and education,

01:10:28.494 --> 01:10:34.532
and, you know, decent work and some sense of security and meaningful stability,

01:10:35.332 --> 01:10:37.347
in life, the rise of the precariat.

01:10:40.235 --> 01:10:44.868
The lack of any certainty that people have, the inability to afford housing,

01:10:45.199 --> 01:10:49.892
you know, all public goods and services plummeting in quality.

01:10:51.032 --> 01:10:52.305
And delivery.

01:10:53.448 --> 01:10:58.138
This abandonment of the social contract is also specific to U.S.

01:10:58.138 --> 01:11:04.623
Neoliberalism, as opposed to its descendants in Europe.

01:11:05.425 --> 01:11:10.358
The United States abandoned the social contract in a very particular way that

01:11:10.358 --> 01:11:14.127
is inextricably entwined with racial capitalism.

01:11:14.696 --> 01:11:19.247
European colonialism practiced racial capitalism, but the United States,

01:11:19.695 --> 01:11:24.884
well, European colonialism practiced racial capitalism with their colonies across the seas.

01:11:25.226 --> 01:11:29.487
The United States practices racial capitalism within its borders.

01:11:29.969 --> 01:11:36.395
So the United States is such a particular example of practicing external neocolonialism,

01:11:36.685 --> 01:11:39.900
but also internal racial capitalism.

01:11:40.149 --> 01:11:45.428
And it does this in a really deft way by abandoning the social contract and

01:11:45.428 --> 01:11:50.488
by positioning the financial market in such a powerful position over.

01:11:51.828 --> 01:11:58.668
The real economy and the intellectual monopoly capitalism, where it controls

01:11:58.668 --> 01:12:03.550
the technologies and the value chain across the world.

01:12:03.945 --> 01:12:08.183
So these are some of the features that are so specific to American capitalism.

01:12:09.055 --> 01:12:16.268
Yeah, because in my limited capacity, I think I focus more on the abandonment

01:12:16.268 --> 01:12:19.628
of the social contract. As somebody that's been in politics,

01:12:19.628 --> 01:12:23.316
that's where my focus has been.

01:12:23.850 --> 01:12:30.086
But to tie it in with what's going on with these big tech corporations,

01:12:30.608 --> 01:12:34.789
historically, the oil corporations and all that stuff,

01:12:36.065 --> 01:12:39.861
Yeah, I really, really appreciate the way that you explain that.

01:12:40.643 --> 01:12:48.074
So since we've mentioned the term several times, define what the Global South is.

01:12:49.875 --> 01:12:55.204
So this will be my definition, and I'm sure it can and will be contested.

01:12:55.825 --> 01:13:00.235
In my view, the Global South are regions.

01:13:00.235 --> 01:13:07.235
It is not simply geographical, but they are regions that have experienced a

01:13:07.235 --> 01:13:13.630
history of domination, of territorial conquest,

01:13:14.583 --> 01:13:21.979
of the intervention into their economic and social structures.

01:13:22.815 --> 01:13:29.215
They are regions that have experienced a history in which their social and economic

01:13:29.215 --> 01:13:34.019
practices were altered, were disrupted, were compromised,

01:13:34.795 --> 01:13:37.905
where their traditional ways of living existed.

01:13:38.982 --> 01:13:47.813
Were interfered with, where their natural resources were exploited or decimated, and where,

01:13:48.394 --> 01:13:57.281
the people, the human bodies in these geographies experienced exploitation,

01:13:57.879 --> 01:14:02.256
migration, servitude, violation,

01:14:03.076 --> 01:14:04.259
and control.

01:14:04.797 --> 01:14:13.162
So these are, it's a term that is used for really delineating regions that experienced

01:14:13.562 --> 01:14:19.027
certain events on a historical basis.

01:14:19.555 --> 01:14:22.997
It's a historically derived experience.

01:14:23.612 --> 01:14:29.235
And this is the Global South, right? Because if it's simply geography,

01:14:29.513 --> 01:14:33.122
well, Australia and New Zealand are in the global south, technically speaking,

01:14:33.122 --> 01:14:38.526
and so is South Africa and perhaps other places I can think of right now,

01:14:39.193 --> 01:14:42.792
where it's not exactly the same.

01:14:42.792 --> 01:14:46.763
Well, I make an exception for South Africa as it's a settler colony.

01:14:47.117 --> 01:14:51.946
So it is distinct. But say, for example, Australia and New Zealand as examples.

01:14:53.421 --> 01:14:56.621
There is no essentialism here. That's what's most important,

01:14:56.621 --> 01:15:01.132
most critical. I have to emphasize and highlight and stress there's no essentialism.

01:15:01.672 --> 01:15:07.187
Not all of the global South is, you know, on the same continuum, right?

01:15:07.316 --> 01:15:14.601
China is an incredibly different history than Kenya, and Kenya is a very different history than Brazil.

01:15:15.166 --> 01:15:19.607
And again, very different from India to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia.

01:15:20.216 --> 01:15:26.257
There are so many differences. But I think the one thread is that the Global South.

01:15:27.141 --> 01:15:36.671
Is regions of the world who bear the brunt of economic and ecological asymmetry, structural asymmetry,

01:15:37.159 --> 01:15:41.785
in that their economies tend to be more dominated by extraction,

01:15:42.011 --> 01:15:47.984
mining, plantations, low value added and labor intensive manufacturing,

01:15:48.385 --> 01:15:51.362
where the informal sector tends to be large.

01:15:51.734 --> 01:15:58.044
Where corporate and firm activity is much weaker than that in Europe and the United States.

01:15:58.480 --> 01:16:04.364
But perhaps even with all of these characteristics, the one characteristic or the one feature,

01:16:04.910 --> 01:16:10.991
I would want to highlight is that the global South is entwined in a dependent

01:16:10.991 --> 01:16:18.314
relationality with rich countries that were former colonizers or that benefited from,

01:16:18.965 --> 01:16:22.901
the colonial history of the last 500 years.

01:16:23.522 --> 01:16:27.301
So again, we're really, it's a short frame of history, right?

01:16:27.301 --> 01:16:30.941
Human beings have been around for tens of thousands of years.

01:16:30.941 --> 01:16:36.731
So we're only talking about a speck, a speck of history, you know,

01:16:36.731 --> 01:16:40.901
half a millennia, half a millennia that has shaped the.

01:16:41.907 --> 01:16:48.799
The current geography and topography of power and access and resources.

01:16:49.222 --> 01:16:54.897
I mean, if we go back even a thousand years, I mean, the world was run by China

01:16:54.897 --> 01:16:57.495
and India, 2,000 years India.

01:16:57.780 --> 01:17:04.337
So you have, I mean, this is why, again, going back to indigenous ways of understanding

01:17:04.337 --> 01:17:06.947
cyclicality and change and.

01:17:09.427 --> 01:17:16.557
Impermanence is really, really, really critical, you know, that things are constantly

01:17:16.557 --> 01:17:21.933
changing, but the structural realities have to be taken seriously.

01:17:22.544 --> 01:17:25.717
And one example of how it needs to be taken seriously, I mean,

01:17:25.717 --> 01:17:32.387
today we have an enormous imperative for critical minerals, Because the new sort of tech boom,

01:17:32.907 --> 01:17:38.227
from AI to other kinds of developments across the,

01:17:39.147 --> 01:17:44.907
industrial and tech sector require critical minerals for the new green economy.

01:17:45.343 --> 01:17:52.327
And we're seeing perhaps a reproduction of old forms of resource grabs because

01:17:52.327 --> 01:17:55.819
most of the critical minerals are on the continent of Africa or other,

01:17:56.261 --> 01:17:59.495
you know, developing nations in the global south.

01:17:59.844 --> 01:18:06.867
So, why is there such vulnerability with this critical minerals resource rush, right?

01:18:07.387 --> 01:18:10.727
Where is the dependency? Where is the vulnerability? You know,

01:18:11.367 --> 01:18:12.856
who has the technologies?

01:18:13.129 --> 01:18:17.564
Who has the resources? You know, who has the financial power?

01:18:17.837 --> 01:18:24.081
You know, what is the calculus of negotiations and agency?

01:18:24.784 --> 01:18:28.801
And that is really what the Global South is about, agency and power.

01:18:29.610 --> 01:18:31.547
So based on your definition.

01:18:33.645 --> 01:18:38.253
There's European nations that fall under the Global South.

01:18:39.406 --> 01:18:43.256
Moniker. Because in my mind, I'm old enough to remember there was a country

01:18:43.256 --> 01:18:46.891
called Yugoslavia, and now it's been divided up.

01:18:47.100 --> 01:18:52.406
And it seems like that, you know, my limited knowledge of world history,

01:18:52.406 --> 01:18:56.286
it seems like they would fall under the category of being global south.

01:18:56.626 --> 01:18:59.502
Would you agree with that? Or am I being too simplistic?

01:19:00.633 --> 01:19:06.446
No, that's a great point, because, say, Eastern European nations do demonstrate

01:19:06.446 --> 01:19:12.614
some of the same tenets of dependency and vulnerability in the power calculus.

01:19:13.047 --> 01:19:21.506
However, what distinguishes Eastern European nations is their connectivity to

01:19:21.506 --> 01:19:24.926
mainland Europe is distinct,

01:19:25.586 --> 01:19:32.266
is undeniably distinct from that of African nations or Southeast Asian nations.

01:19:33.260 --> 01:19:40.818
They're they're embroiled in a power asymmetry or resource asymmetry within europe but.

01:19:44.091 --> 01:19:48.498
I would place Eastern European nations as sort of, you know,

01:19:49.214 --> 01:19:54.148
a hybridity, a hybridity between Global South and Europe. Okay.

01:19:55.990 --> 01:20:02.530
So you kind of explained in your definition of why America does capitalism wrong,

01:20:02.941 --> 01:20:09.124
how that has impacted the Global South, especially when it deals to austerity and financialization.

01:20:09.734 --> 01:20:14.030
How much has climate change economically impacted the global South?

01:20:15.143 --> 01:20:20.682
Yeah, this is a very critical question. Thank you for asking it.

01:20:21.491 --> 01:20:29.231
You know, first, I think it's very important to situate climate change within

01:20:29.231 --> 01:20:30.799
the history of colonialism.

01:20:33.311 --> 01:20:38.391
The rise of industrialization, right? I mean, when we look at those charts,

01:20:38.391 --> 01:20:40.391
right, They talk about how...

01:20:42.106 --> 01:20:46.836
Carbon emissions really peaked from the advent of industrialization,

01:20:46.836 --> 01:20:51.298
you know, early 1900s, early 20th century.

01:20:52.162 --> 01:20:59.146
But industrialization, you know, in terms of our typical understanding of smokestacks

01:20:59.486 --> 01:21:03.731
and factory chimneys and the production of,

01:21:04.425 --> 01:21:10.927
technology and manufactured goods and high-speed world trade,

01:21:11.680 --> 01:21:16.509
and private firms leading to the modern corporation.

01:21:17.003 --> 01:21:20.850
This industrialization is firmly situated

01:21:21.279 --> 01:21:28.686
in the financial and the resource extraction that the former colonizers and

01:21:28.686 --> 01:21:32.458
current imperial nations were able to enact,

01:21:33.246 --> 01:21:37.502
in this period of half a millennia of historical processes.

01:21:37.897 --> 01:21:42.307
So it is this accumulation of the resources, both,

01:21:43.285 --> 01:21:50.017
commodity, labor, land, because the commodity also used land, right?

01:21:50.442 --> 01:21:55.472
And labor in terms of, you know, transatlantic slavery, indentured labor,

01:21:56.117 --> 01:21:58.625
and the financial accumulation, right?

01:21:59.665 --> 01:22:07.331
The unspeakably voluminous financial accumulation, this massive critical supply,

01:22:08.125 --> 01:22:13.253
of money resources really led to the advent of industrialization.

01:22:13.729 --> 01:22:20.995
Now, industrialization affected climate in undeniable, empirically illustrated

01:22:20.995 --> 01:22:24.545
ways, thanks to the work of the IPCC,

01:22:25.105 --> 01:22:31.405
and international scientists and associations around the world over the last many decades.

01:22:31.405 --> 01:22:35.729
We know that industrialization has a direct link to carbon emissions.

01:22:36.096 --> 01:22:40.449
Carbon emissions do not know borders. They do not need passports.

01:22:40.670 --> 01:22:44.890
They do not travel in, you know, certain routes.

01:22:45.430 --> 01:22:48.390
Carbon emissions are diffused globally.

01:22:49.000 --> 01:22:54.145
Due to the history of unequal infrastructures, where you don't have as much

01:22:54.145 --> 01:22:57.429
technological and infrastructure resources in the global south,

01:22:57.748 --> 01:23:01.329
climate change will hit the global south far harder,

01:23:01.889 --> 01:23:07.160
far deeper, in much more damaging and devastating ways than in the north.

01:23:07.526 --> 01:23:11.980
Every typhoon that happens in the Philippines, the floods in India,

01:23:13.045 --> 01:23:19.643
the droughts across African nations, earthquakes, Venezuela a couple days ago.

01:23:21.055 --> 01:23:24.375
It's devastating these communities far harder than it would.

01:23:24.895 --> 01:23:29.435
It also devastates communities in the United States. Let's not get that wrong.

01:23:29.435 --> 01:23:34.345
It also devastates communities all over the North or the rich,

01:23:34.345 --> 01:23:36.281
advanced, industrialized countries.

01:23:36.600 --> 01:23:42.065
It is universal. But I'm talking about the degrees, the degrees in Jamaica,

01:23:42.065 --> 01:23:47.746
entire villages wiped out, families sliding into the floods.

01:23:51.295 --> 01:23:55.130
The ways in which roads are structured, the ways in which homes are structured,

01:23:55.703 --> 01:24:01.782
the absence of the resources, financial, technological, infrastructure,

01:24:02.136 --> 01:24:03.795
you know, transportation,

01:24:04.463 --> 01:24:08.097
staff, equipment, institutions.

01:24:08.270 --> 01:24:14.795
You know, we really need to go into this sort of layers of provisioning,

01:24:14.795 --> 01:24:16.635
of what is the provisioning?

01:24:16.635 --> 01:24:21.525
What is the provisioning in that society to address climate, right?

01:24:21.525 --> 01:24:26.785
If forest fires happen outside of California or Australia, you simply don't

01:24:26.785 --> 01:24:32.882
have as much capacity of helicopters shooting at water as you did in California a couple of years ago

01:24:33.184 --> 01:24:38.987
or in Australia where the forest fires led to such devastation of the animal communities.

01:24:39.149 --> 01:24:42.043
You don't have that kind of quick response systems.

01:24:42.468 --> 01:24:51.085
So you have this asymmetry that is economically and resource situated in colonialism,

01:24:51.085 --> 01:24:54.185
and it gets compounded by climate change.

01:24:54.475 --> 01:24:59.091
The key thing I want to highlight, though, about the economics of climate change

01:24:59.421 --> 01:25:05.556
or the economic injustice sort of embedded into climate disaster or climate urgency.

01:25:06.020 --> 01:25:12.296
In the climate emergency we have today, most global South nations...

01:25:13.848 --> 01:25:21.969
The world have to take out financial loans when they're hit by climate disasters.

01:25:22.440 --> 01:25:27.106
When they're hit by climate disasters, first of all, the financial markets downgrade their economies.

01:25:27.386 --> 01:25:31.426
They face all kinds of capital outflows and economic distress.

01:25:31.792 --> 01:25:36.328
On top of it, they don't have the necessary financial resources to address the

01:25:36.328 --> 01:25:39.571
loss and damage, the adaptation, the response measures.

01:25:39.843 --> 01:25:44.188
So they take out financial loans. The financial loans create more debt,

01:25:44.188 --> 01:25:49.317
which adds on to the sovereign debt distress or the sovereign debt burdens they already have.

01:25:49.741 --> 01:25:59.033
So climate, the climate emergency, the way it fuels the economic emergency.

01:25:59.641 --> 01:26:05.585
And then compounds the lack of resources for the climate emergency.

01:26:05.816 --> 01:26:12.294
So this is called the vicious cycle between sovereign debt and climate debt.

01:26:12.550 --> 01:26:18.278
And I say climate debt because climate change is, you know, situated within

01:26:18.278 --> 01:26:20.113
an ecological and climate debt.

01:26:20.595 --> 01:26:25.942
What I explained about the colonial history that underpins climate inequality,

01:26:26.452 --> 01:26:32.949
is oftentimes known called ecological debt, ecological imperialism that leads to ecological debt.

01:26:33.303 --> 01:26:41.268
So climate debt is what the industrializing nations owe to the global south

01:26:41.268 --> 01:26:44.373
for the damage created by industrialization.

01:26:44.821 --> 01:26:50.538
And let's also point out that most of the manufacturing or the carbon emissions

01:26:50.538 --> 01:26:54.143
of the global south, for example, through palm oil plantations,

01:26:54.446 --> 01:26:58.728
or through mining that takes place in the global south today because,

01:26:59.373 --> 01:27:04.318
the global south, the majority of carbon emissions is in their economic structures.

01:27:04.973 --> 01:27:07.489
It's in their production structures. It's not in consumption.

01:27:07.761 --> 01:27:11.355
It's not in transportation. It's in the mining, in the plantations.

01:27:11.674 --> 01:27:17.063
Those mines and those plantations are producing things for the rich countries,

01:27:17.063 --> 01:27:20.923
the palm oil that goes into your peanut butter jars or the cobalt or the copper

01:27:20.923 --> 01:27:22.168
that goes into your iPhones.

01:27:22.752 --> 01:27:28.366
So let's really trace what is essentially called climate colonialism.

01:27:28.995 --> 01:27:34.523
Yeah. So that leads me to this, because, you know, from a political standpoint,

01:27:34.523 --> 01:27:39.770
we've always talked about, especially in the United States, this Green New Deal. Right.

01:27:40.670 --> 01:27:48.273
And so but you you basically you wrote an article that talks about it from a

01:27:48.273 --> 01:27:52.421
different perspective as a feminist global Green New Deal.

01:27:53.593 --> 01:27:58.793
And you were saying that that has to be foundational in any kind of changes

01:27:58.793 --> 01:28:05.013
to address climate change economically and in other facets. So explain what

01:28:05.013 --> 01:28:07.998
is what is a feminist global Green New Deal?

01:28:09.483 --> 01:28:14.963
Absolutely. So let's contextualize. This is when Bernie Sanders and Alexandria

01:28:14.963 --> 01:28:19.523
Ocasio-Cortez and perhaps several others during the pandemic,

01:28:19.523 --> 01:28:24.384
well, no, before the pandemic, 2019, they came out with the Green New Deal sort of,

01:28:25.130 --> 01:28:29.771
platform or proposal or project, right? The Green New Deal. We all remember.

01:28:30.177 --> 01:28:33.149
I think it sort of faded in relevance because now we have.

01:28:34.623 --> 01:28:40.473
Endless wars and other kinds of commodity and oil price shocks that are far

01:28:40.473 --> 01:28:48.133
overshadowing the kind of more world-making propositional vision of the Green New Deal.

01:28:48.451 --> 01:28:52.028
So I just want to situate, we're talking about this proposal for a Green New Deal.

01:28:52.843 --> 01:28:58.193
I mean, I was intrigued. Many of us were intrigued. A lot of us were saying,

01:28:58.193 --> 01:29:00.458
okay, this is interesting.

01:29:01.031 --> 01:29:03.251
What are the components? What does this mean?

01:29:04.079 --> 01:29:08.963
And I think, you know, in terms of where I'm coming from with my understanding

01:29:08.963 --> 01:29:13.763
of global inequalities, of colonial histories, of, you know,

01:29:14.323 --> 01:29:20.503
the social construction of hierarchies, of financialization, and, you know,

01:29:21.763 --> 01:29:28.143
how global governance really works to, you know, keep a few countries rich and

01:29:28.143 --> 01:29:32.739
maintain, you know, subservience of most other countries. around the world.

01:29:33.701 --> 01:29:36.123
So I'm really looking at it through that lens. And I'm saying,

01:29:36.123 --> 01:29:39.147
okay, well, this is not international.

01:29:39.779 --> 01:29:47.375
It is not addressing the colonial realities of our world systems.

01:29:49.392 --> 01:29:57.357
It's not even intersectional. So, you know, let's take their framework and let's expand it.

01:29:57.822 --> 01:30:02.382
Let's take their framework and instead of saying, well, this is not a good framework,

01:30:02.382 --> 01:30:05.478
let's say, okay, we'll roll with this.

01:30:06.166 --> 01:30:09.957
Let's expand and layer it.

01:30:11.445 --> 01:30:16.571
Let's, you know, infuse more complexity and vision into it.

01:30:17.224 --> 01:30:27.040
So I, you know, at that time, I was also during the pandemic deep in my dissertation for my PhD.

01:30:27.324 --> 01:30:33.912
So I was in the mix with all the reading of what I call my midlife crisis PhD.

01:30:35.252 --> 01:30:40.142
And, you know, all of that literature and all of that reading really helped

01:30:40.142 --> 01:30:44.976
me to understand what was happening around me, especially during the pandemic.

01:30:45.342 --> 01:30:54.173
I mean, we had, you know, explosive moments of societal emergencies on many levels, right?

01:30:55.392 --> 01:31:00.882
On race justice, on climate justice, economic justice. We really saw how all

01:31:01.311 --> 01:31:06.495
the layers of race, class justice come together in moments of a global crisis.

01:31:07.086 --> 01:31:12.687
So I'm thinking a feminist and decolonial Green New Deal has to be international,

01:31:12.896 --> 01:31:18.732
truly international, internationalist, meaning that it has to address the inequalities

01:31:18.732 --> 01:31:21.998
and the asymmetries and the relationships between

01:31:22.381 --> 01:31:25.992
different communities, between borders.

01:31:26.514 --> 01:31:30.612
It has to resist the socially constructed hierarchies of race,

01:31:30.612 --> 01:31:35.481
of gender, of class, of caste, of sexuality, of ability.

01:31:36.115 --> 01:31:40.689
And this is really at a time in the pandemic where we were really talking about intersectionality.

01:31:42.090 --> 01:31:48.360
Have to understand these intersectional inequalities as underpinning colonial,

01:31:48.360 --> 01:31:51.951
neoliberal, and capitalist structures, systems, and discourses.

01:31:52.508 --> 01:31:56.570
So a global Green New Deal would recognize that the ecological collapse we are

01:31:56.570 --> 01:32:03.120
experiencing in climate change is the direct result of unequal social and economic,

01:32:03.625 --> 01:32:06.981
arrangements, unequal social contracts, unequal economic structures,

01:32:07.404 --> 01:32:13.360
in which these hierarchies shape our social and economic relations, right?

01:32:13.360 --> 01:32:18.313
Going back to the sort of structural understanding of unequal relations.

01:32:18.840 --> 01:32:24.010
So a decolonial position, as I wrote about it, means that we cannot deny that

01:32:24.010 --> 01:32:28.460
we live in a world where black, brown, feminine, queer, and working class bodies

01:32:28.460 --> 01:32:30.569
endure acts of injustice.

01:32:31.022 --> 01:32:38.069
And a feminist and decolonial global Green New Deal would actively create new paradigms that forge.

01:32:39.646 --> 01:32:48.712
Distributive and structural justice between climate change, racialized and gendered exploitations,

01:32:49.259 --> 01:32:56.068
and economic structures such as trade and financial rules that reproduce inequalities,

01:32:56.451 --> 01:33:00.967
right, within the borders and between the borders.

01:33:01.565 --> 01:33:06.087
So it was proposition, right? It was a world-making endeavor,

01:33:06.778 --> 01:33:11.237
to be internationalist, to be intersectional, to address global historical justice,

01:33:11.689 --> 01:33:14.319
and to address a shift in consciousness,

01:33:14.807 --> 01:33:18.656
to recognize that no country or region exists in isolation in a world that is

01:33:18.656 --> 01:33:24.299
inextricably interdependent through trade, human, capital, and climate flows, right?

01:33:24.561 --> 01:33:27.856
So this was sort of a world-making attempt.

01:33:28.516 --> 01:33:34.047
I wrote a paper of just 21 pages on it, and then I wrote a few op-eds and articles.

01:33:34.512 --> 01:33:38.086
Interestingly, it went a little bit viral. People picked it up,

01:33:38.086 --> 01:33:43.426
especially people in my community of advocates and campaigners and social and

01:33:43.426 --> 01:33:45.901
political movements, progressive academics.

01:33:46.683 --> 01:33:51.536
So there was a period during the pandemic where I was speaking about my proposal

01:33:51.536 --> 01:33:53.579
about, you know, a couple of times a week.

01:33:54.125 --> 01:34:01.995
So case in point, as the pandemic wound down in 2022 to 23, it disappeared.

01:34:02.833 --> 01:34:11.026
Disappeared. That's it. Nobody was interested in this paper or in this more

01:34:11.026 --> 01:34:16.138
sort of propositional and bold way of addressing inequalities.

01:34:17.378 --> 01:34:22.048
Reverted back. It was devastating to see. And I think the reversion back was

01:34:22.048 --> 01:34:28.792
also in the context of the rising global authoritarianism and neofascism and the far right.

01:34:29.087 --> 01:34:33.939
And the attention shifted to one of damage control, to one of emergency and panic.

01:34:34.295 --> 01:34:38.608
And so when I look back at this paper, I feel nostalgic that we were in a really

01:34:38.608 --> 01:34:43.278
propositional mode during the pandemic, where we were talking about the pandemic

01:34:43.278 --> 01:34:46.980
is a portal, right? All those phrases that we heard inventory.

01:34:47.858 --> 01:34:52.633
So it's in that context. And, you know, we're only in 2026, but I feel like,

01:34:53.667 --> 01:34:56.019
that was a moment that is not the case now.

01:34:56.124 --> 01:35:00.778
We're in a different reality now. But I hope some of the tenets,

01:35:02.178 --> 01:35:10.088
are still resonating, perhaps not as immediate to the issues we have on hand

01:35:10.088 --> 01:35:15.801
right now with war and commodity shocks and AI. So,

01:35:18.058 --> 01:35:24.138
with every sort of turn of the moment, you have different issues come on the

01:35:24.138 --> 01:35:29.602
table. And I think our challenge as theorists, as thinkers, as,

01:35:31.035 --> 01:35:38.503
social movement leaders, as political thinkers and critics, we cannot be defined

01:35:38.822 --> 01:35:41.675
merely by the topics du jour.

01:35:47.035 --> 01:35:50.831
We have to be the vanguards of continuity.

01:35:51.122 --> 01:35:58.825
So I am actually honestly struggling with that, how to keep some of that world-making

01:35:58.825 --> 01:36:04.045
boldness and vision that we saw during the pandemic, how do we keep some of that alive?

01:36:04.543 --> 01:36:11.824
How do we act in ways that are not limited by damage control and reactionism?

01:36:12.451 --> 01:36:19.525
Yeah, but, you know, once that spark has been lit, once those ideas have been

01:36:19.525 --> 01:36:23.710
germinated and put out there, there are people that are paying attention.

01:36:24.226 --> 01:36:29.049
And so I would say, don't despair too much.

01:36:29.955 --> 01:36:33.123
It's going to manifest itself in some way, I believe.

01:36:33.753 --> 01:36:38.049
And I think with the dynamics of politics now,

01:36:38.734 --> 01:36:42.949
I think the politics that you're seeing, the knee-jerk reaction is one thing,

01:36:43.540 --> 01:36:47.115
but these people that are running for office now, these younger folks,

01:36:47.115 --> 01:36:51.645
people that have been exposed to your teachings and others, they're starting

01:36:51.645 --> 01:36:53.291
to be brave enough to run.

01:36:53.779 --> 01:36:56.705
And so, and I'm just looking at it from a U.S.

01:36:56.705 --> 01:37:02.235
Lens, but I think it's global as well. I mean, Orban got kicked out,

01:37:02.646 --> 01:37:06.825
you know, and a lot of people didn't see that coming after he had been there

01:37:06.825 --> 01:37:10.817
for 16 years. So don't despair too much, Professor.

01:37:12.135 --> 01:37:15.788
I think we're going to be okay. It's going to take a little more time than we wanted.

01:37:16.755 --> 01:37:20.845
A lot of the work that you do, and I'm going to try to close it out because

01:37:20.845 --> 01:37:23.425
I've really appreciated the time that you've given.

01:37:24.824 --> 01:37:29.754
Of work that you do is based on this concept of fiscal justice.

01:37:30.793 --> 01:37:35.888
And so I have a particular interest in Africa.

01:37:36.370 --> 01:37:44.114
And I know that in 1885, the Berlin conference happened and they wanted to divide

01:37:44.114 --> 01:37:47.173
the continent of African to European colonies.

01:37:47.798 --> 01:37:54.045
Ironically, the United States was a participant And they ended up getting nothing out of that deal.

01:37:54.520 --> 01:37:57.621
But a lot of the European nations did.

01:37:58.258 --> 01:38:03.553
And then after World War II, Africa began the process of decolonizing politically.

01:38:04.157 --> 01:38:08.697
But it's very apparent that the continent has never decolonized economically.

01:38:09.585 --> 01:38:17.050
And then you wrote this paper that was entitled Bandung Woods,

01:38:17.628 --> 01:38:23.424
and you had mentioned Bretton Woods, which basically said the United States, the U.S.

01:38:23.424 --> 01:38:28.624
Dollar is the standard that the economy, that's the agreement they came to near

01:38:28.624 --> 01:38:32.004
the end of World War II, that the U.S. dollar would be the standard that all

01:38:32.004 --> 01:38:35.976
other currencies or economies would be based on.

01:38:36.678 --> 01:38:43.074
So I guess I'm trying to combine a couple of questions in because I think that they can be done.

01:38:43.707 --> 01:38:49.324
Specifically, what can be done to move Africa from an extraction accumulation

01:38:49.324 --> 01:38:52.953
existence into a regeneration reparation one?

01:38:53.648 --> 01:39:01.374
And, you know, so what kind of public policy would be needed to end that and

01:39:01.699 --> 01:39:05.159
just to end global economic inequality as a whole?

01:39:06.478 --> 01:39:12.878
Thank you. Yes, indeed. I wrote a piece called Bonding Woods on essentially

01:39:13.258 --> 01:39:19.508
mapping out the contours of economic colonialism today, past the present.

01:39:19.508 --> 01:39:25.828
I was taking that historical view. But I also wrote a paper called Feminist Fiscal Justice.

01:39:26.129 --> 01:39:30.218
Well, the title is A Feminist Social Contract Rooted in Fiscal Justice,

01:39:30.218 --> 01:39:36.994
where I outlined eight feminist economics alternatives for intersectional justice that come from.

01:39:37.800 --> 01:39:43.058
Feminist political economy literature, where I think the way to understand it

01:39:43.058 --> 01:39:49.568
is I was really looking at the phenomenon of the naturalization of austerity

01:39:49.568 --> 01:39:51.778
regimes across the global South.

01:39:51.778 --> 01:39:57.058
I mean, across the world, around the world. But what distinguishes economic

01:39:57.058 --> 01:40:00.838
and fiscal austerity in the global South is that,

01:40:01.510 --> 01:40:07.078
most global South nations do not have welfare systems in place.

01:40:07.078 --> 01:40:10.187
They do not have welfare systems that are already in place.

01:40:10.621 --> 01:40:14.078
So when budget cuts hit the,

01:40:14.778 --> 01:40:20.295
health budget, the education budget, social protection, these budget cuts have,

01:40:20.646 --> 01:40:27.554
you know, particularly pernicious and devastating effects in the global South in essentially,

01:40:28.106 --> 01:40:35.638
eroding or eliminating public goods and public services that women and girls

01:40:35.638 --> 01:40:39.570
then de facto provide for free.

01:40:39.779 --> 01:40:43.838
So the idea of gendered austerity is one in which all.

01:40:44.836 --> 01:40:49.141
And girls become the shock absorbers of economic austerity.

01:40:49.745 --> 01:40:58.319
And as such, being shock absorbers, they take on the added burden of unpaid care work.

01:40:59.896 --> 01:41:07.136
Of low paid or exploitative informal sector work, of the health and education

01:41:07.136 --> 01:41:09.632
services that are not being provided by the state.

01:41:10.131 --> 01:41:15.604
So we really look at gendered austerity as the key channel through which austerity,

01:41:16.057 --> 01:41:19.436
is practiced in the global south in particular.

01:41:20.018 --> 01:41:25.556
But, you know, just as a caveat, austerity is a global phenomenon.

01:41:25.857 --> 01:41:31.940
Austerity is a naturalized regime of neoliberal late stage capitalism.

01:41:34.516 --> 01:41:42.809
It affects all parts of society and the way in which it is rationalized through the kind of,

01:41:43.321 --> 01:41:50.866
mythology construction of balanced budgets, balanced budgets being the imperative

01:41:50.866 --> 01:41:55.610
over and above the kinds of goods and services that create,

01:41:56.225 --> 01:42:04.370
economic dynamism, growth, jobs, trade, exchange, resilience,

01:42:04.521 --> 01:42:07.650
long-term viability, right?

01:42:08.009 --> 01:42:14.073
So this erosion of the understanding that investing in the social contract,

01:42:14.317 --> 01:42:21.109
investing in public goods, public services, the essential building blocks of human life,

01:42:21.446 --> 01:42:25.980
health, education, social protection, meaningful work.

01:42:28.448 --> 01:42:38.953
The erosion or the intentional obfuscation that the social contract is what generates long-term,

01:42:39.589 --> 01:42:47.610
resilience, strength, and growth, and that all the success stories we have today

01:42:47.941 --> 01:42:51.351
are built on the backs of the social contract, right?

01:42:51.351 --> 01:43:00.397
The United States, with all of its injustices and flaws is built on a social contract that produced,

01:43:00.960 --> 01:43:05.151
some viability of human life here, that it would generate, you know,

01:43:05.151 --> 01:43:09.893
the kind of innovation and technologies, the educational institutions.

01:43:10.253 --> 01:43:17.556
So fiscal justice is a consensus, right? It's a consensus that resists the austerity consensus.

01:43:17.875 --> 01:43:23.459
We position fiscal justice in direct confrontation, not as simple as opposition,

01:43:23.680 --> 01:43:28.527
but in confrontation to the austerity consensus, to redirect.

01:43:29.631 --> 01:43:37.864
Public investment, right? Public investment into public goods and public services

01:43:38.173 --> 01:43:42.131
that uphold intersectional equity.

01:43:42.630 --> 01:43:47.332
So gender, but also race and caste and class.

01:43:47.865 --> 01:43:54.481
Such a reorientation in the political governance frameworks is really about

01:43:54.893 --> 01:43:59.282
activating that importance of public, patient, and sustained financing.

01:43:59.659 --> 01:44:06.107
That is oriented towards regenerative returns over the long term, intergenerationally.

01:44:06.578 --> 01:44:09.651
And this requires a real sea change.

01:44:10.271 --> 01:44:15.157
It requires really confronting the short-termism of the financial sector.

01:44:15.430 --> 01:44:21.757
You know, capital is short-term. Capital flows move very short-term.

01:44:22.731 --> 01:44:24.559
They pretend that they are agnostic,

01:44:24.733 --> 01:44:28.355
that, you know, it is just the risk aversion and the profit motive.

01:44:28.633 --> 01:44:35.873
You know, it's not any kind of ideological agenda. It's really about the calculus of risk and profit.

01:44:36.291 --> 01:44:41.411
And there is some kind of a claim that goes on with sort of capital markets

01:44:41.644 --> 01:44:45.388
that this is not a belief system, that it's not ideological,

01:44:45.643 --> 01:44:49.916
that is simply, you know, agnostic calculus, right?

01:44:50.107 --> 01:44:54.745
So we have to confront that. We have to confront that. No, it is not agnostic.

01:44:55.047 --> 01:45:00.684
It is not void of ideology. It has real human implications.

01:45:02.191 --> 01:45:08.811
The way capital moves is, you know, just this assumption that supporting the

01:45:08.811 --> 01:45:15.171
social and care structures and economies of life, supporting a caring life that

01:45:15.171 --> 01:45:17.041
is rooted in well-being,

01:45:17.675 --> 01:45:20.338
you know, that can be outsourced,

01:45:21.359 --> 01:45:28.189
be, that is trickle down, or that will just come about naturally through capital

01:45:28.189 --> 01:45:32.028
accumulation and financial and economic accumulation.

01:45:32.499 --> 01:45:35.849
And accumulation is not growth. What we're seeing today with financial markets

01:45:35.849 --> 01:45:41.227
and big tech and oligarchy, that's not growth. That is not economic dynamism.

01:45:41.790 --> 01:45:47.579
That is monopoly accumulation. And let us remember that the kinds of public

01:45:47.579 --> 01:45:55.583
financing, that all of Silicon Valley and in fact, the incipient multinational corporations, the kind

01:45:55.966 --> 01:46:00.092
of financial assistance they receive from the public sector,

01:46:00.603 --> 01:46:06.289
the kind of infrastructure assistance from higher education institutions in

01:46:06.289 --> 01:46:07.839
science and research, the kind of infrastructure.

01:46:09.017 --> 01:46:15.687
That also part of the, you know, wasn't that part of how they came about,

01:46:15.687 --> 01:46:17.459
like part of their success story?

01:46:17.982 --> 01:46:24.317
They relied on public financial resources. They relied on a public contract, right?

01:46:24.657 --> 01:46:31.606
They explicitly relied on the provisioning, right? The provisioning.

01:46:34.397 --> 01:46:37.843
Of science and research, the provisioning of money resources,

01:46:38.104 --> 01:46:42.657
the provision of access to technologies, the provision of, you know,

01:46:42.977 --> 01:46:44.799
economic and firm leadership.

01:46:45.376 --> 01:46:50.955
So we are talking about provisioning for life, provisioning for care, right?

01:46:51.285 --> 01:46:56.577
So the fiscal justice is essentially an anti-austerity agenda,

01:46:57.157 --> 01:47:02.487
right, that connects to the social reproduction economies and to understand

01:47:02.487 --> 01:47:08.581
social reproduction as the processes that produce human beings.

01:47:09.138 --> 01:47:13.397
It's the infrastructure of life that produces human beings, the human beings

01:47:13.397 --> 01:47:16.557
that produce wealth, the human beings that produce capital, the human beings

01:47:16.557 --> 01:47:18.455
that produce economic value.

01:47:18.659 --> 01:47:21.201
Well, who produces those human beings?

01:47:21.805 --> 01:47:27.197
You know, what, what, from the time people come home from work to the time they

01:47:27.197 --> 01:47:28.925
go to work, what sustains them?

01:47:29.314 --> 01:47:37.117
The nourishment, the housing, the upbringing, and in fact, birthing is the social reproduction economy.

01:47:37.617 --> 01:47:43.037
So some of the ways forward, some of what we're calling for in the anti-austerity

01:47:43.037 --> 01:47:49.417
movement and economic justice movement is a real revamping of how fiscal policy

01:47:49.417 --> 01:47:51.617
works. Fiscal policy today can't.

01:47:52.534 --> 01:47:57.044
Be understood as a private-first policy. You know, let the private sector take

01:47:57.044 --> 01:48:02.347
care of everything, and only when they can't will we do public financing.

01:48:02.632 --> 01:48:07.253
So kind of reformulation of fiscal policy from private-first to public-first.

01:48:07.630 --> 01:48:13.603
And that means really shifting the understanding of balanced budgets and budget deficits.

01:48:14.579 --> 01:48:18.887
Historically speaking, there was an acceptance of fiscal activism.

01:48:19.223 --> 01:48:24.934
We saw fiscal activism during World War II. It was for war. It was for the production of arms.

01:48:25.230 --> 01:48:30.794
We saw fiscal activism during the Fordism era for creating manufactured goods

01:48:30.794 --> 01:48:32.304
and for building the companies.

01:48:32.628 --> 01:48:40.855
We see fiscal activism today in green technologies and in critical minerals for the tech boom.

01:48:41.197 --> 01:48:43.802
We see fiscal activism today for AI.

01:48:44.150 --> 01:48:47.309
In fact, fiscal activism is what made Musk.

01:48:47.681 --> 01:48:53.628
So we really want to revive this fiscal activism for intersectional equity, right?

01:48:54.354 --> 01:49:00.461
It's case in point that all sorts of progressive reformulations are made possible,

01:49:00.989 --> 01:49:05.314
you know, under the radar usually, for capital, you know.

01:49:06.714 --> 01:49:12.464
For powerful conglomerations, for intellectual monopolies, for monopoly capitalism,

01:49:12.464 --> 01:49:15.412
and for the concentrations of power. But

01:49:15.553 --> 01:49:20.534
not for the people, right? So again, also, we're talking about progressive taxation.

01:49:20.813 --> 01:49:24.283
We know in today's discourses, tax the billionaires, you know,

01:49:24.283 --> 01:49:26.971
it's become mainstream, thankfully.

01:49:27.262 --> 01:49:32.453
So progressive taxation, tax the billionaires, but also redistribute that tax

01:49:32.453 --> 01:49:38.730
revenue for intersectional equity and for public services and public goods for public resilience.

01:49:39.160 --> 01:49:43.293
And then we're talking about debt justice, from student debt to global South

01:49:43.293 --> 01:49:45.759
sovereign debt, particularly in Africa.

01:49:46.055 --> 01:49:51.553
Most African nations today are spending 48% of their budget revenue of their

01:49:51.553 --> 01:49:57.473
public money on average in repaying their debt because they have to bear the

01:49:57.473 --> 01:49:59.453
burden of such high interest rates.

01:49:59.714 --> 01:50:04.293
African nations have interest rates that are multiple times higher than interest

01:50:04.293 --> 01:50:08.184
rates in the rich countries and even interest rates in Asia.

01:50:08.451 --> 01:50:14.383
Why? Why? Is this not systemic racism built into the interest rate structure

01:50:14.662 --> 01:50:19.053
because we know how the calculus of risk works. The poorest countries are the

01:50:19.053 --> 01:50:21.750
riskiest countries, so they have the highest interest rates.

01:50:22.092 --> 01:50:26.121
Well, this results in a legacy of debt injustice.

01:50:27.433 --> 01:50:32.907
Where the poorest nations are spending the largest amount of their public money

01:50:33.070 --> 01:50:37.263
on repaying their richest creditors on the planet, right?

01:50:37.263 --> 01:50:42.113
Because private creditors have multiplied by an exponent of five times.

01:50:42.113 --> 01:50:48.676
There are five times more private creditors in the creditor mix today in sovereign debt contracts.

01:50:48.925 --> 01:50:54.043
It used to be a national creditor, state creditors, or multilateral creditors,

01:50:54.043 --> 01:50:55.120
institutional creditors.

01:50:55.370 --> 01:51:00.223
Today, it's private creditors. The Wall Street creditors have enormous power

01:51:00.223 --> 01:51:05.817
over the national economic policies of the So progressive taxation,

01:51:06.067 --> 01:51:09.020
debt justice, what are the ways forward for debt justice?

01:51:09.277 --> 01:51:14.563
A sovereign debt restructuring mechanism, a statutory mechanism akin to Chapter

01:51:14.563 --> 01:51:18.449
11 bankruptcy filing for the private sector.

01:51:19.397 --> 01:51:23.487
Like Chapter 11 exists for sovereigns. Why? The global South nations have been

01:51:23.487 --> 01:51:27.893
calling for a statutory sovereign debt restructuring mechanism,

01:51:28.404 --> 01:51:35.032
that includes all creditors, official, bilateral, private, and multilateral, that,

01:51:35.617 --> 01:51:38.990
does fair burden sharing, that is statutory,

01:51:39.495 --> 01:51:43.338
that abides by responsible lending and borrowing principles,

01:51:43.586 --> 01:51:49.416
that actively reduces the interest rate burden, that actively reduces the debt stock.

01:51:49.596 --> 01:51:56.463
This sort of mechanism does not exist. Global South countries have been calling for it since 1955.

01:51:56.751 --> 01:52:02.077
1955 calling for this one mechanism and the fact that there is no political

01:52:02.077 --> 01:52:09.210
will to yield really illustrates how central debt injustice is to.

01:52:10.219 --> 01:52:16.247
Late-stage capitalism to neoliberalism, it really, debt is the fulcrum.

01:52:16.247 --> 01:52:18.101
Sovereign debt is the fulcrum.

01:52:18.393 --> 01:52:24.186
And the resistance to really create institutions and processes that address sovereign debt,

01:52:24.738 --> 01:52:28.967
really shows the might, the sheer might of the financial sector,

01:52:28.967 --> 01:52:34.215
which is, I think, what I began with is that largesse of the financial sector.

01:52:34.487 --> 01:52:40.958
So fiscal justice is really about a kind of global, historical,

01:52:41.172 --> 01:52:44.486
systemic, economic justice, right?

01:52:44.765 --> 01:52:48.829
One that really nurtures life over capital,

01:52:49.136 --> 01:52:55.452
one that really creates infrastructures for care and nourishment and human thriving

01:52:55.726 --> 01:53:00.490
over and above monopolies and accumulation and power.

01:53:01.120 --> 01:53:08.177
Okay. So my challenge to all my guests this year has been to finish this sentence.

01:53:08.912 --> 01:53:10.641
I have hope because.

01:53:11.430 --> 01:53:13.640
Oh, great sentence.

01:53:15.792 --> 01:53:24.568
I would say that one of my primary sources of hope and resilience,

01:53:24.568 --> 01:53:26.076
what makes me get up in the morning.

01:53:26.741 --> 01:53:33.533
Is that there are young people leading social movements for,

01:53:34.163 --> 01:53:40.128
all variations of justice, from climate to economic to racial to feminist to

01:53:40.128 --> 01:53:43.728
indigenous to land back to ecological.

01:53:44.259 --> 01:53:46.518
And these movements are persisting.

01:53:47.092 --> 01:53:53.449
Despite all the odds, despite all the threats, the movements persist.

01:53:53.953 --> 01:53:58.888
And in fact, in the United States, the movements are also creating critical

01:53:58.888 --> 01:54:04.998
shifts in political representation and who gets into office, who's voted in.

01:54:05.098 --> 01:54:13.126
And I think there is a great possibility for progressive leaders in Congress,

01:54:13.734 --> 01:54:15.959
and that could really pave the way forward.

01:54:16.261 --> 01:54:21.896
So it's the social movements that are really keeping the flames alive.

01:54:22.430 --> 01:54:31.910
But I also have hope that as a global community, we are really unpacking and removing the veils.

01:54:32.357 --> 01:54:36.757
What we have always understood implicitly, we are now making clear.

01:54:37.129 --> 01:54:39.236
We're spelling out the structures.

01:54:39.735 --> 01:54:46.678
We're looking at the ways forward, the reformulations, the proposals, the alternatives.

01:54:48.678 --> 01:54:51.898
I mean, I refrain from saying solutions that makes it sound too easy,

01:54:51.898 --> 01:55:00.180
but the kinds of, you know, the kinds of change-making and transformations that can be possible.

01:55:00.639 --> 01:55:07.164
We're learning from history, right? We're learning from each other. And I think there is an,

01:55:08.133 --> 01:55:15.803
incredible wave that has been taking place on decolonizing, decolonizing ourselves,

01:55:15.803 --> 01:55:21.936
our diets, our economic systems, our relations, our worldviews, our conditioning.

01:55:22.428 --> 01:55:28.273
We talk about unlearning and relearning. You know, we talk about intersectionality,

01:55:28.273 --> 01:55:29.801
the power of disruption.

01:55:30.162 --> 01:55:37.671
I think the way forward is what is happening on the individual and the communal level.

01:55:38.545 --> 01:55:43.643
And I really have hope in social movements persisting because history shows

01:55:43.643 --> 01:55:48.448
us that these movements have been the main force of change-making.

01:55:49.145 --> 01:55:55.049
Well, Dr. Bhumika Muchhala, thank you for coming on.

01:55:55.555 --> 01:55:59.247
Outside of enrolling at the new school?

01:55:59.871 --> 01:56:05.258
How can people reach out to you? How can people tap into that magnificent brain of you?

01:56:06.677 --> 01:56:09.983
Reach me by email. I'm on LinkedIn.

01:56:10.797 --> 01:56:14.707
I apologize. I don't do social media. Might be a generational thing,

01:56:14.707 --> 01:56:17.997
but also I don't have the capacity for a lot of social media.

01:56:17.997 --> 01:56:23.167
So I'm not on Instagram, but I am on other, I am on X and well,

01:56:23.167 --> 01:56:25.877
that's problematic too. So I need to shift to blue sky speaking.

01:56:27.217 --> 01:56:30.837
But I think the best way to reach me is email. Honestly, the old school email,

01:56:30.837 --> 01:56:32.301
which I will share with you.

01:56:32.667 --> 01:56:39.154
But if I can spell it out here, it's my first name, period, my last name at gmail.com.

01:56:39.636 --> 01:56:49.406
So it's b-h-u-m-i-k-a, period, m-u-c-h-h-a-l-a at gmail.com.

01:56:49.841 --> 01:56:55.497
I am always happy to talk, to discourse, to exchange, to debate.

01:56:55.817 --> 01:56:58.154
I welcome critiques.

01:56:58.676 --> 01:57:02.887
I welcome contestations. It makes us stronger to consider other points of view

01:57:02.887 --> 01:57:05.862
and to rethink our own points of view.

01:57:06.245 --> 01:57:10.198
And thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

01:57:11.529 --> 01:57:15.768
Thank you as well to the power and clarity of the questions you asked.

01:57:17.009 --> 01:57:21.929
I particularly appreciated that. Well, thank you again for coming on.

01:57:22.851 --> 01:57:26.939
I felt like I had re-enrolled in college myself listening to you talk.

01:57:26.939 --> 01:57:33.689
I think, you know, when I came across your profile and saw the work that you

01:57:33.689 --> 01:57:38.516
were doing, I felt that I wanted to put you on this platform.

01:57:40.189 --> 01:57:42.249
And allow you to reach my audience.

01:57:42.249 --> 01:57:49.489
And I hope that, like you said, a lot of the ideas are getting out there.

01:57:49.489 --> 01:57:57.469
And I really encourage you to continue to do what you do, as well as the listeners,

01:57:58.069 --> 01:57:59.989
to pay attention to what you're saying.

01:58:00.535 --> 01:58:05.231
One of the rules I have is that once you've been on, you have an open invitation to come back.

01:58:05.764 --> 01:58:10.109
So if there's something that you need to discuss, please, please,

01:58:10.109 --> 01:58:13.099
please reach out to me and we'll get you on to talk about it.

01:58:13.099 --> 01:58:16.938
So, Doc, thank you again for doing it.

01:58:17.558 --> 01:58:23.269
Thank you. Thank you, Eric, for providing space for these issues,

01:58:23.269 --> 01:58:27.229
for uplifting such critical points of view.

01:58:28.020 --> 01:58:33.309
These spaces are rare and I treasure them and I salute you and thank you for,

01:58:33.850 --> 01:58:39.789
making this happen, for having your podcast and for embracing more critical

01:58:40.109 --> 01:58:41.224
ways of seeing the world.

01:58:41.520 --> 01:58:45.055
Yes, ma'am. All right, guys, and we're going to catch you all on the other side.

01:59:06.165 --> 01:59:12.686
And so now it is time for my next guest, Mason Donovan and Mark Kaplan.

01:59:13.411 --> 01:59:17.857
Mason Donovan and Mark Kaplan are managing partners of the Dagoba Group,

01:59:18.304 --> 01:59:23.515
a global consulting firm advancing inclusive leadership, employee well-being,

01:59:23.515 --> 01:59:25.143
and organizational culture.

01:59:25.671 --> 01:59:31.405
They are also the authors of The Inclusion Dividend, perennial bestseller leveraged

01:59:31.405 --> 01:59:39.992
in corporate and academic classrooms worldwide, as well as Set for Inclusion and The Golden Apple.

01:59:40.514 --> 01:59:45.415
Their work has been featured by Harvard Business Review, Forbes,

01:59:45.415 --> 01:59:48.476
and Fast Company, and they live in New England.

01:59:48.807 --> 01:59:51.835
But we're going to be talking about another book that they have written called

01:59:51.835 --> 01:59:53.602
The Parenthood Advantage.

01:59:54.014 --> 01:59:58.437
So ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as guests

01:59:58.768 --> 02:00:02.389
on this podcast, Mason Donovan and Mark Kaplan.

02:00:15.447 --> 02:00:20.245
And Mark Kaplan. How y'all doing? Doing well. Thank you for having us here.

02:00:20.441 --> 02:00:22.062
Absolutely great. Thanks, Eric.

02:00:22.688 --> 02:00:25.947
Well, it's good to have y'all here. As we're recording this,

02:00:25.947 --> 02:00:31.001
we're getting ready to celebrate 250 years of American independence.

02:00:31.697 --> 02:00:37.099
And what y'all are embarking in, what we're going to be talking about is total opposite of that.

02:00:37.807 --> 02:00:41.357
Because we're going to be talking about parenthood.

02:00:41.357 --> 02:00:44.677
Y'all have written this book called The Parenthood Advantage.

02:00:44.677 --> 02:00:48.377
And so I want to get into that a little bit. But before I do that,

02:00:48.377 --> 02:00:54.297
I want to do a couple of icebreakers. I usually start off the interviews that

02:00:54.297 --> 02:00:57.045
way. And so the first icebreaker is a quote.

02:00:57.474 --> 02:01:00.742
And either one of you can answer this one.

02:01:01.622 --> 02:01:06.160
Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.

02:01:06.601 --> 02:01:11.635
The other four balls, family, health, friends, integrity are made of glass.

02:01:13.493 --> 02:01:17.205
Well, you know, my first reaction to that is I get the I get the part about

02:01:17.205 --> 02:01:25.132
about work bouncing back and I understand how fragile those other aspects of my life are.

02:01:25.387 --> 02:01:30.255
On the other hand, when I think about how I all the little mistakes I make day

02:01:30.255 --> 02:01:34.875
to day, I'm glad that there is an aspect of my family life that does bounce

02:01:34.875 --> 02:01:39.515
back because, you know what I mean? It's like no one's a boy.

02:01:39.835 --> 02:01:44.205
Have I learned this in the last two years? You know, no one is perfect at being

02:01:44.205 --> 02:01:47.285
a parent and no one is perfect at balancing all these things.

02:01:47.285 --> 02:01:51.835
And so it's tough if they're glass, because, you know, we're all going to make

02:01:51.835 --> 02:01:54.255
a little mistake, even if they're just little mistakes. We're all going to make

02:01:54.255 --> 02:01:55.407
mistakes. You know what I mean?

02:01:55.878 --> 02:02:00.265
Yeah. Yeah, Mark. I definitely understand that. All right. So Mason,

02:02:00.265 --> 02:02:06.560
since Mark asked, answered the quote, I want you to play a game called 20 questions.

02:02:07.124 --> 02:02:11.795
All right. So I need you to give me a number between one and 20. 13.

02:02:12.745 --> 02:02:18.701
All right. Do you think there is such a thing as unbiased news or media and why?

02:02:19.347 --> 02:02:25.198
No, I think we're all humans are biased. It's just natural for us to be biased.

02:02:25.744 --> 02:02:29.495
And that's what we work on to become aware of those biases.

02:02:29.495 --> 02:02:33.025
And they're not always bad. Sometimes they can be positive biases.

02:02:33.025 --> 02:02:36.705
Sometimes we automatically give a positive bias to somebody because they walk

02:02:36.705 --> 02:02:41.115
into a room, or maybe it's a tall male, we just assume they have leadership

02:02:41.115 --> 02:02:43.615
skills or they play really well at basketball.

02:02:44.035 --> 02:02:46.140
Is that our biases connect in there? Yeah.

02:02:47.485 --> 02:02:53.065
Yeah, it's we're all biased. So, no, there's news or humans and there is always

02:02:53.065 --> 02:02:57.165
a little bit of bias and all sometimes there's conscious bias in that because

02:02:57.165 --> 02:03:01.087
they're trying to really influence a particular group of individuals.

02:03:01.412 --> 02:03:04.622
And so the news is slanted for them. Okay.

02:03:05.307 --> 02:03:09.883
All right. So, Mark, I guess I'll start with you on this question, because,

02:03:10.555 --> 02:03:15.155
you know, we ever since we just, you know, set this interview up,

02:03:15.155 --> 02:03:20.355
something happened with Pete Buttigieg, the former secretary of transportation.

02:03:20.355 --> 02:03:25.525
He was swatted and he had to go through child protective services,

02:03:25.525 --> 02:03:27.684
interviews and all that with his child.

02:03:28.280 --> 02:03:38.058
And what did how did you all feel about that? How did that hit you all being parents?

02:03:39.638 --> 02:03:42.875
Well, I like the way you asked the question, because my first reaction to that

02:03:42.875 --> 02:03:47.445
was it felt like I kind of felt it in my gut. I mean, obviously,

02:03:47.445 --> 02:03:48.728
I don't know Pete Buttigieg.

02:03:49.368 --> 02:03:52.845
And I think I reacted differently than I would have before we had kids.

02:03:53.625 --> 02:03:57.645
The first thought, just the first emotion was just, oh, my God,

02:03:57.645 --> 02:04:00.632
if someone did that to me, how would I feel?

02:04:00.922 --> 02:04:07.223
And it was, gosh, it's kind of paralyzing in a certain sense to think about it, right?

02:04:07.461 --> 02:04:09.980
That someone suddenly steps in and takes control.

02:04:10.363 --> 02:04:13.335
And then when you read so that was my first reaction and then when you read

02:04:13.335 --> 02:04:19.795
about the context of that and the obvious political targeting you know i think

02:04:19.795 --> 02:04:23.593
it's probably political and probably his sexual orientation as well frankly,

02:04:24.271 --> 02:04:31.645
that someone would invade you know his his family space like that it's just

02:04:31.645 --> 02:04:35.835
it was so offensive to me and then so after i went shocked i got really angry

02:04:35.835 --> 02:04:37.473
about it honestly and i felt,

02:04:38.082 --> 02:04:41.252
just horrible i i That to me is just...

02:04:42.454 --> 02:04:48.064
You when you when you're a parent like there's really i know this sounds cliche

02:04:48.064 --> 02:04:52.217
but i mean there's just nothing more precious than your relationship with your kids,

02:04:52.798 --> 02:04:57.064
and so to violate that with somebody even if you really strongly disagree with

02:04:57.064 --> 02:04:59.154
them that's just horrible and.

02:04:59.955 --> 02:05:05.114
And the i guess the the child protective services were kind of doing what they

02:05:05.114 --> 02:05:08.077
had to do under their policy but on the other hand it's sort of like,

02:05:08.766 --> 02:05:12.944
this was pretty shady right from the start wasn't there a different way to handle

02:05:12.944 --> 02:05:17.574
that but you know that stuff i'm not an expert in you know i i don't know but

02:05:17.574 --> 02:05:20.575
so i had all those reactions in a fairly short period of time actually,

02:05:21.312 --> 02:05:26.484
yeah mason did you want to chime in on that or you're good yeah it's first that

02:05:26.484 --> 02:05:30.574
yeah the child's protective services is this if this is the path they take we

02:05:30.574 --> 02:05:34.746
want them to protect children first and foremost that mean regardless of who the parent is,

02:05:35.421 --> 02:05:39.234
if this is the path they would have taken with any other individual,

02:05:39.234 --> 02:05:41.156
okay, fine, we'll go through this.

02:05:41.550 --> 02:05:46.764
It's from what I hear, it was an anonymous person talking about a third party

02:05:46.764 --> 02:05:49.114
of something happened years ago. That was my understanding.

02:05:49.625 --> 02:05:54.984
So it felt very watered down, but it sounded like it was handled well by Pete

02:05:54.984 --> 02:05:57.804
Buttigieg's family. He waited for his partner to show up.

02:05:58.100 --> 02:06:01.450
He then left, went through the process, allowed everything to take place.

02:06:01.838 --> 02:06:07.645
But yeah, it's scary to think as a parent that anybody can call in and separate you from your children.

02:06:08.381 --> 02:06:13.654
That, to me, that point of something that's just anonymous and for any grievance

02:06:13.654 --> 02:06:17.034
they have for you and allow themselves to be anonymous to do that.

02:06:17.034 --> 02:06:19.828
So that's a part that I had a lot of contention with.

02:06:20.299 --> 02:06:22.261
Yeah, I just know.

02:06:23.567 --> 02:06:27.042
Be, I think, I think that the secretary handled it pretty well,

02:06:27.629 --> 02:06:30.967
considering the fact that he even had the composure to write about it.

02:06:30.967 --> 02:06:37.187
I don't, I, I would be so angry if somebody did that to me, but I just,

02:06:37.187 --> 02:06:41.817
I just wanted to get y'all's take on it because y'all, y'all have a unique perspective,

02:06:42.525 --> 02:06:45.480
on that as compared to a lot of other folks.

02:06:45.956 --> 02:06:49.217
All right. So let's talk about this book, The Parenthood Advantage.

02:06:49.217 --> 02:06:52.649
What motivated y'all to write this book? Mason, I'll start with you.

02:06:53.261 --> 02:06:57.047
Yeah, a number of factors. So we've been in the field of behavioral management

02:06:57.047 --> 02:07:02.125
for a long time, speaking to inclusive management and work-life balance.

02:07:02.490 --> 02:07:08.266
And we would hear during our work, we would hear parents bring up issues.

02:07:08.615 --> 02:07:13.957
So our work was never fully focused on working parents, but they'll bring up

02:07:13.957 --> 02:07:19.017
issues because obviously we know work-life balance is a huge issue for working parents.

02:07:19.017 --> 02:07:24.267
Inclusion, things that we talk about, how do we make sure working parents are included?

02:07:24.587 --> 02:07:28.957
And all the issues, especially with women, that was happening to their career

02:07:28.957 --> 02:07:30.347
when they became a mother.

02:07:30.706 --> 02:07:34.297
Very unconsciously, we bring it back, that bias that we talked about earlier

02:07:34.297 --> 02:07:35.947
in the conversation today. Yeah.

02:07:36.827 --> 02:07:40.487
But it was one of those things, until you do it, you don't fully understand

02:07:40.487 --> 02:07:44.787
it. So we can understand it conceptually. But when we became parents and we

02:07:44.787 --> 02:07:48.347
became working parents and understanding the stress and what was going on,

02:07:48.347 --> 02:07:49.838
we started sharing these stories.

02:07:50.112 --> 02:07:55.197
So our kids are born prematurely, going through the IC, the neonatal unit,

02:07:55.197 --> 02:08:00.617
the NICU, and spending six weeks there and doing the shifts there.

02:08:00.617 --> 02:08:03.120
And then also trying to struggle to maintain work.

02:08:03.544 --> 02:08:06.057
At the same time, we started talking to other parents there.

02:08:06.417 --> 02:08:09.447
And that grew to stories and we started sharing our stories with

02:08:09.813 --> 02:08:14.087
with our clients and then stories just started coming everywhere when we sat

02:08:14.087 --> 02:08:18.627
down at the restaurants or we're in line and we started talking everybody had

02:08:18.627 --> 02:08:20.471
a story like there's something here to share,

02:08:20.953 --> 02:08:25.437
and that's what really started this book was everybody else's stories ours was

02:08:25.437 --> 02:08:30.137
our own story to you know open our eyes up wider but it was everybody else's

02:08:30.137 --> 02:08:34.709
story that came on and we just applied what we were already working on,

02:08:35.224 --> 02:08:40.567
with this lens and leveraging other stories to write this book to help those

02:08:40.567 --> 02:08:44.467
working parents and also help the corporate manager to create,

02:08:45.007 --> 02:08:48.035
a better culture for working parents. Yeah.

02:08:48.372 --> 02:08:55.427
Mark, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 27 percent of private

02:08:55.427 --> 02:08:58.386
sector employees have access to pay parental leave.

02:08:58.869 --> 02:09:02.003
How has this created issues in the American workforce?

02:09:02.818 --> 02:09:07.648
Oh, I think it creates all kinds of issues for all kinds of people. There's...

02:09:09.236 --> 02:09:15.696
When you when you have to make decisions about how to manage your time and what

02:09:15.696 --> 02:09:20.228
you're weighing is what's best for your children and what you have to do to pay your mortgage,

02:09:21.156 --> 02:09:24.526
that's or or your rent or get food.

02:09:24.526 --> 02:09:28.196
Right. Like, do we really want to have people making those decisions all the

02:09:28.196 --> 02:09:31.396
time when we just look around the world and see that there's a way to do this

02:09:31.396 --> 02:09:35.532
differently that works for families and actually everybody benefits from?

02:09:35.980 --> 02:09:39.340
So you look at something like that and you say, well, that's going to hit most people pretty hard.

02:09:39.979 --> 02:09:43.486
But then if you do a cut around socioeconomic class on that,

02:09:43.486 --> 02:09:48.156
you see where it lands even hardest, which is among people who who usually get

02:09:48.156 --> 02:09:52.996
less of the benefits of of policy, you know, policies that are in place.

02:09:52.996 --> 02:09:57.166
There are some good policies in place, right? It's not awful all the time,

02:09:57.166 --> 02:10:02.363
but you look at who really has the bigger burden, and that's the folks.

02:10:03.860 --> 02:10:08.726
Who may not have the resources to work out something in between where they can

02:10:08.726 --> 02:10:13.096
maybe take some unpaid time and kind of manage to give their kids what they

02:10:13.096 --> 02:10:16.138
really want to give them, which to me would be,

02:10:16.836 --> 02:10:21.229
at least three months, but preferably six months or more, right? So I think it just...

02:10:22.428 --> 02:10:26.387
It's bad for families. It's bad for parents and it's bad for kids.

02:10:26.620 --> 02:10:29.661
And and what we found in our research, and I'm sure we'll talk more about this.

02:10:29.876 --> 02:10:31.740
It's not good for companies either.

02:10:32.338 --> 02:10:39.132
Right. It's really not. You know, this book is we're trying to flip on its head a little bit.

02:10:40.429 --> 02:10:44.322
The basic assumption that companies, I think, have made most of the time,

02:10:44.322 --> 02:10:46.791
which is that when people, when their employees

02:10:47.227 --> 02:10:50.302
get pregnant and usually they're thinking consciously or unconsciously about

02:10:50.302 --> 02:10:53.962
their women employees, that it's a problem for the company and they have to

02:10:53.962 --> 02:10:56.423
figure out how to manage this problem and minimize its impact.

02:10:56.713 --> 02:10:59.145
What we found is that the opposite is true.

02:11:00.112 --> 02:11:04.542
If you think about this fully, then it's an opportunity for everybody.

02:11:04.542 --> 02:11:10.752
It's because how a company handles this, what a parent brings into the workplace,

02:11:11.612 --> 02:11:16.492
once they become a parent, the skills they learn, the commitment that they increase,

02:11:17.192 --> 02:11:19.056
the way they engage at work is different.

02:11:19.593 --> 02:11:22.752
And that's the company benefits from that. So we really we're trying to flip

02:11:22.752 --> 02:11:27.112
that sort of first reaction of like, oh, you know, parenthood is a problem that

02:11:27.112 --> 02:11:30.072
the company has to solve because we don't think that's the case at all.

02:11:30.072 --> 02:11:32.615
And we and our research shows that.

02:11:33.337 --> 02:11:39.132
Mason, what is it about American culture that has us lagging behind our European

02:11:39.132 --> 02:11:40.769
counterparts on this issue?

02:11:41.432 --> 02:11:46.905
Yeah, it's interesting because nationally there is no legislation that requires paid leave.

02:11:47.488 --> 02:11:50.855
And in all the other developed countries, there is.

02:11:51.406 --> 02:11:57.914
So America is fractured. It's state by state. Even at the state level, it's very weak.

02:11:58.355 --> 02:12:02.532
And there seems to be all the talk from both parties about being pro-parent.

02:12:02.532 --> 02:12:04.747
We want to take care of these working parents.

02:12:05.977 --> 02:12:11.267
There is lack of any action to do that. Now, some states are starting to put

02:12:11.267 --> 02:12:15.659
some policies in place and sort of patchwork policies.

02:12:16.228 --> 02:12:21.377
And it's, you know, it's a paradox because we talk about how important it is.

02:12:21.865 --> 02:12:27.157
Companies talk how important it is, but there's no action a lot of times to,

02:12:27.737 --> 02:12:29.516
require a systemic approach.

02:12:30.003 --> 02:12:34.427
Now, this is a place where corporations are ahead of U.S. legislation.

02:12:35.036 --> 02:12:39.477
So a lot of corporations who are giving paid leave, they're not required to do that.

02:12:39.794 --> 02:12:43.257
And as you talk about the percent of those that get paid leave,

02:12:43.257 --> 02:12:47.857
realize that this is really, ones that are getting paid leave are almost solely

02:12:47.857 --> 02:12:49.412
in the white-collar jobs.

02:12:49.650 --> 02:12:54.177
Hourly jobs, there's very few companies out there that hourly jobs provide paid leave.

02:12:54.177 --> 02:12:59.083
Now, FMLA, which is the Family Medical Leave Act, is the only national act,

02:12:59.438 --> 02:13:05.533
national legislation that says you need to give leave to mothers who have given birth.

02:13:06.043 --> 02:13:10.497
It's unpaid. I think it's six to 12 weeks. It requires you, the company,

02:13:10.497 --> 02:13:13.245
to be a certain size, means they have to be over a certain number of employees.

02:13:13.534 --> 02:13:17.127
And the employee had to be working there for a certain period of time before

02:13:17.127 --> 02:13:19.177
that company is required to do that. Yeah.

02:13:20.318 --> 02:13:24.298
There's such a lack. There's such a lack of where we are in a cohesive approach,

02:13:24.698 --> 02:13:30.110
which is interesting because both parties say and talk how it's so important.

02:13:30.469 --> 02:13:35.768
And so this should be an easy win to go and have required pay leave or some

02:13:35.768 --> 02:13:38.828
kind of program that's systemic that pays for that.

02:13:38.828 --> 02:13:42.548
So we're waiting. But right now, that's why we wrote this book,

02:13:42.548 --> 02:13:47.635
is to help companies to get here and create that. It's beyond just paid leave.

02:13:47.906 --> 02:13:51.358
There's all those support services that we talk about in the book that you can

02:13:51.358 --> 02:13:53.276
do to support the working parent.

02:13:53.917 --> 02:14:01.299
Yeah, because I worked for Fulton County Sheriff's Office here in Atlanta for a time.

02:14:01.816 --> 02:14:06.375
And we did a variation of FMLA where it was paid.

02:14:06.958 --> 02:14:12.238
So, you know, it was like and if we got hurt, we would qualify under FMLA, too.

02:14:12.458 --> 02:14:17.538
Too, but it all depends. If we got hurt on the job, we had to get workers comp.

02:14:17.538 --> 02:14:21.068
But if we got hurt outside of the job and could not do our job,

02:14:21.068 --> 02:14:26.698
then we qualify for FMLA, which was better because we got our full check.

02:14:27.230 --> 02:14:31.078
Oh, nice. Yeah. It was like with workers comp, you only get like two thirds

02:14:31.078 --> 02:14:34.178
or whatever, but that- You're working in the local grocery store?

02:14:34.178 --> 02:14:37.614
That's not going to happen. The local restaurant, cleaners, you name it,

02:14:37.777 --> 02:14:41.328
that's not going to happen. Yeah. Not in my current job. It's like the officers,

02:14:41.328 --> 02:14:46.439
they don't get paid leave. So Mark...

02:14:47.783 --> 02:14:52.679
Yes. Your question is, studies have shown that employees tend to be more productive,

02:14:53.184 --> 02:14:55.418
during their early parenting years.

02:14:55.936 --> 02:15:00.416
What skills do they develop that make them better employees slash leaders?

02:15:03.203 --> 02:15:06.033
I love that question because I'm going to need Mason's help,

02:15:06.033 --> 02:15:10.506
I think, because there's so many things that change and there's so many things you get better at.

02:15:10.610 --> 02:15:14.941
And when you become a parent, and this is stuff that I sort of thought about

02:15:15.289 --> 02:15:17.768
kind of theoretically before I had kids.

02:15:18.268 --> 02:15:21.010
Because I have a certain style, you know, I'm not really structured,

02:15:21.406 --> 02:15:24.183
you know, I don't like, I don't like a lot of order. I don't always get things

02:15:24.183 --> 02:15:28.017
done in time. Mason could spend the rest of the podcast telling you all about that.

02:15:28.563 --> 02:15:35.773
But you know, when you have these kids who have to be fed and you know,

02:15:35.773 --> 02:15:40.203
we're, we're, we're believers in like, like structured sleep and,

02:15:40.803 --> 02:15:44.543
like, we think they do, our kids do much better when we do everything at the same time.

02:15:44.543 --> 02:15:48.002
So you, you have to like you got to really get,

02:15:48.629 --> 02:15:53.813
organized the other thing is that you know you have to multitask you got to

02:15:53.813 --> 02:15:59.065
get really good at doing multiple things at once you you learn how to be a better prioritizer

02:15:59.488 --> 02:16:04.603
because there's the things that must be done right now you know when when there's a diaper emergency,

02:16:05.260 --> 02:16:08.983
you know like that has to be you don't have any time you got to deal with that

02:16:08.983 --> 02:16:12.123
right now so it's it's like i mean i'm joking a little bit but i think you know

02:16:12.123 --> 02:16:14.523
i'm not also You develop all these skills.

02:16:14.523 --> 02:16:18.118
And even if, you know, I thought about this more afterwards –.

02:16:19.742 --> 02:16:24.782
Myself, I have become more present in general, right?

02:16:24.782 --> 02:16:28.992
Because with your kids, you kind of, not only do you sort of have to be present,

02:16:28.992 --> 02:16:32.482
I think, to pay attention to what's going on, but you really want to be present,

02:16:33.039 --> 02:16:37.132
because you see quickly how fast they grow and you don't want to be sitting

02:16:37.132 --> 02:16:40.682
there scrolling on your phone while your kids are learning, you know,

02:16:40.682 --> 02:16:43.802
how to climb up a little thing in the playroom or something.

02:16:43.802 --> 02:16:50.304
You know what I mean? So presence, I would also say assess risk differently now.

02:16:50.929 --> 02:16:54.922
Like I walk into a situation and I look for what might be dangerous.

02:16:54.922 --> 02:16:59.792
So that's a short list, Eric. I'm sure Mason would add, but I think it's a lot of stuff.

02:16:59.792 --> 02:17:05.252
Yeah. When we started beyond the interviews of individuals, we did over 200

02:17:05.252 --> 02:17:08.582
interviews for the book. We did a deep data dive and we found there's so much

02:17:08.582 --> 02:17:13.824
research out there that's coming out that have shown that parents are after they become parents.

02:17:14.149 --> 02:17:18.412
They specifically looked a lot at women. And women are better at multitaskers,

02:17:18.412 --> 02:17:20.846
better at prioritizing, better, more efficient.

02:17:21.193 --> 02:17:25.152
But then we get stories from everybody we answered, we interviewed.

02:17:25.372 --> 02:17:30.172
And one of the questions we always asked is, did parents becoming a parent make

02:17:30.172 --> 02:17:33.138
you a better employee or worse or the same?

02:17:34.543 --> 02:17:38.202
And resoundingly, 100%, everybody said it made them a better employee.

02:17:38.202 --> 02:17:40.724
And then we asked, how, why? How did it make it?

02:17:41.235 --> 02:17:43.982
And we got these stories that came out. You know what?

02:17:44.362 --> 02:17:47.772
Like Mark says, I'm a type A personality. It's sort of like we have things,

02:17:47.772 --> 02:17:52.240
we put them in boxes. We have this is a structure and this is how we go forward.

02:17:53.500 --> 02:18:00.860
That I had far less empathy and sort of the people management skills or more

02:18:00.860 --> 02:18:03.569
sort of a type A, you know, A to B C.

02:18:03.802 --> 02:18:08.590
But with children, it can't happen the way you have to manage the tangents.

02:18:08.590 --> 02:18:13.701
You have to manage, you know, things that they just are not understanding what's going on.

02:18:14.091 --> 02:18:18.670
So you have to breathe and stop and do the things we teach about and work-life

02:18:18.670 --> 02:18:19.884
balance. But in the moment.

02:18:20.237 --> 02:18:23.220
It allows you to transfer those skills to employees as well.

02:18:23.220 --> 02:18:26.960
So we don't, in the book, we don't say, hey, changing baby's diapers is really

02:18:26.960 --> 02:18:31.140
going to give you those skills in the workplace.

02:18:31.140 --> 02:18:36.110
But what we're saying is that that tract is going in your mind over and over

02:18:36.110 --> 02:18:40.630
again. For example, ask anybody that's brought a child, especially infant child,

02:18:40.630 --> 02:18:42.138
to a doctor's what they need to do.

02:18:42.450 --> 02:18:45.470
So when you're bringing a child to a doctor, normally you're packing the baby

02:18:45.470 --> 02:18:49.640
bag, make sure everything's extra oh and they might be late so we better we better have a snack

02:18:50.080 --> 02:18:53.350
and oh here's all the things i need a question ask them when i go to the doctors

02:18:53.350 --> 02:18:56.150
and when we're there it's a whole long list and when we come back i have to

02:18:56.150 --> 02:18:59.216
make sure that the nap time's ready or the bottle's ready whatever it is.

02:18:59.813 --> 02:19:03.560
And what happens you're constantly doing that for everything you're doing you're

02:19:03.560 --> 02:19:07.910
you're building this track so one of the people we we interviewed was the ceo

02:19:07.910 --> 02:19:12.147
and she said well you know i had five employees i'm a few years back she

02:19:12.468 --> 02:19:15.928
wasn't a mother at the time and three and they're all happened to be all women

02:19:16.218 --> 02:19:20.228
and the the three they're all managers and three managers when i would give

02:19:20.228 --> 02:19:25.460
them tasks they already started planning them out and she goes wow they're just really good employees.

02:19:26.024 --> 02:19:29.478
She goes a few years later i became a mother and i thought about it and went

02:19:29.478 --> 02:19:33.428
back and realized those three people those three women were mothers and other

02:19:33.428 --> 02:19:36.303
two were not it doesn't mean the other two were not mothers weren't good employees

02:19:36.734 --> 02:19:39.748
but their mothers were forced to build this track everything was,

02:19:40.248 --> 02:19:43.638
put in front of them they had to start creating that process.

02:19:43.638 --> 02:19:46.491
Okay, what's A, what's B, what's more, what's more important than the other one?

02:19:46.787 --> 02:19:52.018
So it creates this skillset that is very easily transferable,

02:19:52.018 --> 02:19:58.365
the empathy, the organization, the prioritization, all that is transferable to the workplace.

02:19:58.656 --> 02:20:01.468
And that's what's happening. That's what the data shows. And there's more and

02:20:01.468 --> 02:20:05.394
more data comes out like that. And that's what we heard in every single interview.

02:20:05.836 --> 02:20:09.738
Yeah. All right. Now I got to flip a coin who I'm going to ask this question

02:20:09.738 --> 02:20:12.058
too. All right, Mason, we'll go with you.

02:20:12.423 --> 02:20:19.558
Almost 70% of LGBTQ plus parents are concerned that taking parental leave would

02:20:19.558 --> 02:20:22.937
negatively impact their job or career.

02:20:23.325 --> 02:20:28.614
How would you advise a couple from that community to navigate that fear of discrimination and judgment?

02:20:30.987 --> 02:20:35.387
I would add on to that, what we found too is regardless of your sexual orientation.

02:20:37.674 --> 02:20:42.554
Both parents have a fear of that, that it's going to negatively impact their career.

02:20:42.961 --> 02:20:45.867
It's less so with the father. Often with the father, there's what we call a

02:20:45.867 --> 02:20:50.838
fatherhood bonus that plays out, except when the father actually takes the full leap.

02:20:51.413 --> 02:20:54.333
When the father, even a heterosexual father takes the full leap,

02:20:54.588 --> 02:20:58.059
there is a career impact, and we've seen it in studies that have shown that.

02:20:58.350 --> 02:21:02.237
So what we we say in the book we talk about this like how when you know you're

02:21:02.237 --> 02:21:05.767
expecting what are some things you should do so we get we get very granular

02:21:05.767 --> 02:21:08.346
and and logistics based the first thing is

02:21:08.741 --> 02:21:12.406
talk to your manager when you feel compounded but that that's not just hey i'm

02:21:12.714 --> 02:21:17.231
expecting a child because what often will happen they'll say oh congratulations go to hr,

02:21:17.878 --> 02:21:22.027
and that's where it stops it ends what it should be is hey i'm expecting child

02:21:22.447 --> 02:21:26.846
i really like this is a good time for us to talk about my career path.

02:21:27.288 --> 02:21:29.977
Let's set aside a time. I'm going to go to, I know I have to go to HR,

02:21:29.977 --> 02:21:34.507
Phyllis and Forum, but let's set aside a time for us to talk about that transition,

02:21:34.507 --> 02:21:38.877
how I can transition my job's responsibility during the time I will be on leave.

02:21:38.877 --> 02:21:40.257
This is the time I expect to take leave.

02:21:40.541 --> 02:21:44.087
And then what it looks like when I come back. So we want you to start talking

02:21:44.087 --> 02:21:47.089
about your returnship before you even leave.

02:21:47.369 --> 02:21:49.787
We want you to start talking about that because that's important.

02:21:50.024 --> 02:21:53.137
And it lets the manager know that you're committed, that you're committed to

02:21:53.137 --> 02:21:56.637
stay, you committed to go, and also you create that career path.

02:21:56.852 --> 02:22:00.827
That is your responsibility. Not every manager is going to be helpful.

02:22:01.647 --> 02:22:04.867
It's a good chance you're not going to have a great manager out there.

02:22:04.867 --> 02:22:08.217
The stats are shown to help effectively manage your leave.

02:22:08.217 --> 02:22:11.887
So everybody says, as an employee, you have to manage your own career.

02:22:11.887 --> 02:22:16.136
Well, guess what? You also have to manage your own leave and make sure it's structured well.

02:22:16.136 --> 02:22:21.814
Talk about it, what it means, How effective and what are things that you can put in place,

02:22:22.422 --> 02:22:28.087
to make sure it's a strong return and this makes you a better employee and a

02:22:28.087 --> 02:22:32.418
stronger relationship with that employee, regardless of your sexual orientation.

02:22:33.642 --> 02:22:39.462
Let me can I add on to that, Erik? The statistic you quoted is a pretty powerful

02:22:39.462 --> 02:22:41.566
statistic, and I can certainly relate to it.

02:22:42.119 --> 02:22:46.452
But it's funny when you asked it, I thought of a conversation I had about this

02:22:46.452 --> 02:22:52.559
has been a good 20 years with a woman who was in an inclusive leadership workshop that I was conducting.

02:22:53.231 --> 02:23:00.682
And we got into the topic of sexual orientation and she said that she she she

02:23:00.682 --> 02:23:04.462
and her partner wanted to have children and she was going to be the one who

02:23:04.802 --> 02:23:08.185
would physically would become pregnant and give birth physically to the child,

02:23:08.834 --> 02:23:11.080
and she said that,

02:23:11.793 --> 02:23:16.822
she felt that in her organization people would not accept that very well it

02:23:16.822 --> 02:23:18.639
could be it could be a career problem for her,

02:23:19.376 --> 02:23:22.900
And I remember in that moment Because you sort of want to, you know.

02:23:24.687 --> 02:23:28.016
Well, I like to think the best of people. I know that's a little naive at times,

02:23:28.279 --> 02:23:31.968
but I just felt like what a horrible dilemma, right?

02:23:32.362 --> 02:23:36.536
That this woman was in. She was sort of choosing between her job,

02:23:36.937 --> 02:23:39.369
which was an important job for her to have.

02:23:39.822 --> 02:23:44.587
She's a woman in a company 20, 25 years ago, you know, and it was a good job.

02:23:44.587 --> 02:23:47.337
And so she's got to choose between that and whether she wants to have kids or

02:23:47.337 --> 02:23:50.497
not. Because if she has kids, then she's going, she wasn't, I should have added,

02:23:50.497 --> 02:23:52.523
she was not out to her colleagues, right?

02:23:52.871 --> 02:23:56.117
But if she was going to get pregnant, then, you know, you're going to be out

02:23:56.117 --> 02:23:58.293
of the closet at some point. You can't really keep that hidden.

02:23:58.706 --> 02:24:03.227
So when I think about that and where we are now, I think we've made a lot of

02:24:03.227 --> 02:24:06.152
progress on the one hand, right? Like.

02:24:08.269 --> 02:24:11.157
On the other hand, I think people may make different assumptions if you're a

02:24:11.157 --> 02:24:12.657
same-sex couple, right?

02:24:12.657 --> 02:24:18.457
They may make different assumptions about, well, and they might even be well-intended

02:24:18.457 --> 02:24:21.747
questions or assumptions, sort of like they want to know, well, how are you doing this?

02:24:21.747 --> 02:24:27.117
And, you know, are you using a surrogate? So people may be curious and they

02:24:27.117 --> 02:24:29.052
may not see you in the same way.

02:24:29.650 --> 02:24:35.247
I think these days, some of what this woman 20 or 25 years ago would have described

02:24:35.247 --> 02:24:42.042
as not just unconscious bias, but conscious bias has probably shifted to mostly unconscious bias.

02:24:42.229 --> 02:24:46.677
So you still I think you still have stuff to manage and you still don't know

02:24:46.677 --> 02:24:48.382
how your employer might react.

02:24:48.615 --> 02:24:53.287
And you still don't have control over what people really think who make decisions that affect your life.

02:24:53.723 --> 02:25:00.697
But I would also say we're making progress over time. And these are times in

02:25:00.697 --> 02:25:05.117
which sometimes we're not always clear that we've made any progress, right?

02:25:05.321 --> 02:25:09.957
But I think if you step back, Mason said earlier, companies often lead on this

02:25:09.957 --> 02:25:12.612
stuff, right? They lead society, not always, right?

02:25:13.059 --> 02:25:19.752
I mean, I think the army Was really, really led on Racial diversity in this country Right? But.

02:25:20.446 --> 02:25:23.316
Of other aspects of diversity, it was really companies who led.

02:25:23.316 --> 02:25:27.026
And I think when it comes to sexual orientation, it's companies who lead.

02:25:27.026 --> 02:25:32.946
So, you know, I look at the glass as half full, but that doesn't mean there's no challenges.

02:25:33.266 --> 02:25:35.854
You know, I mean, that's how I think about it.

02:25:36.374 --> 02:25:38.650
Well, Mark, I'm going to stay with you on this question.

02:25:39.706 --> 02:25:44.296
Excuse me. Black women face significant disparities in access to pay parental

02:25:44.296 --> 02:25:48.576
leave, with 55% of their parental leaves being unpaid.

02:25:49.079 --> 02:25:53.113
They are less likely to have access to employer-provided pay leave,

02:25:53.509 --> 02:25:56.673
often working in lower wage or part-time positions.

02:25:57.183 --> 02:26:01.926
This lack of coverage creates economic instability, as Black women often serve

02:26:01.926 --> 02:26:06.876
as primary breadwinners, resulting in shorter leave times and increased risks

02:26:06.876 --> 02:26:08.659
to maternal and infant health.

02:26:09.332 --> 02:26:13.362
So my question to you is, what do you think should be done to improve this?

02:26:14.279 --> 02:26:18.376
Well, I mean, I'm going to speak not as a policy expert, per se.

02:26:18.386 --> 02:26:22.496
You know, I'm not a public policy expert. But I think what you're describing

02:26:22.496 --> 02:26:28.557
is the way inequitability gets built into a structure. Right.

02:26:28.928 --> 02:26:34.026
And so even if no one intended for black women to have a worst experience because

02:26:34.026 --> 02:26:37.806
of all these other factors, that's just the way it plays out structurally.

02:26:37.806 --> 02:26:44.326
So I think sometimes, I mean, you can address it as a company by having policies

02:26:44.326 --> 02:26:48.760
that you don't tilt towards people who are in more senior roles potentially.

02:26:50.261 --> 02:26:55.911
Or in different roles. And I think also this is where the government can have

02:26:55.911 --> 02:27:03.281
a big impact by by by having policies that apply equitably across all groups and and,

02:27:03.811 --> 02:27:08.471
and remove some of these sort of structural barriers that get in place for people.

02:27:08.471 --> 02:27:12.971
I mean, I think you can't, if you're going to try to deal with inequity,

02:27:12.971 --> 02:27:18.531
you can't do it on a sort of case by case or ad hoc basis.

02:27:18.531 --> 02:27:23.221
There has to be something bigger that sort of sets at least a basic standard for people.

02:27:23.221 --> 02:27:31.361
I mean, I think in my opinion, this is why having more inclusive federal policies

02:27:31.361 --> 02:27:34.545
would really be helpful when it comes to parental leave because it would cover everybody.

02:27:34.806 --> 02:27:38.254
It doesn't make every barrier go away, but it certainly helps.

02:27:38.801 --> 02:27:43.009
I'd like to add on a societal concern there, too, because studies have shown

02:27:43.369 --> 02:27:47.251
that when a parent's not able, at least one parent's not able to stay with a

02:27:47.251 --> 02:27:52.088
child for the first three months, there is developmental challenges for that child.

02:27:52.754 --> 02:27:57.721
So you're now, not only are you creating economic situation for that family,

02:27:57.721 --> 02:28:02.481
but now you are creating children with more developmental challenges because

02:28:02.481 --> 02:28:06.651
they're missing. And as regardless of who it is, that first three months is so important.

02:28:07.028 --> 02:28:13.641
So this is, again, speaks to that systemic need and we could make it a income-based

02:28:13.641 --> 02:28:18.040
need if we want it nationally, but there's a systemic need for paid leave.

02:28:18.499 --> 02:28:22.760
And for what research has shown is that first three months is critical.

02:28:23.455 --> 02:28:28.349
Yeah. So Mason, since you brought up the term fatherhood bonus,

02:28:28.855 --> 02:28:34.311
talk about that and the motherhood penalty and how would you advise companies

02:28:34.311 --> 02:28:35.761
to avoid that bias? Yeah.

02:28:36.811 --> 02:28:41.591
Interesting. And the more we talked about it with individuals,

02:28:41.591 --> 02:28:47.986
we've heard stories of both of a fatherhood penalty when they take the full leave.

02:28:48.571 --> 02:28:55.141
But the fatherhood bonus basically is the companies are bestowing this bias

02:28:55.141 --> 02:28:59.311
upon fathers, which I think rightly so, that they're going to become better

02:28:59.311 --> 02:29:01.871
employees. They're going to be more loyal to the company because now they have

02:29:01.871 --> 02:29:03.044
children to provide for.

02:29:03.891 --> 02:29:06.951
So they're going to be more diligent. There's a lot of treats we talked about

02:29:06.951 --> 02:29:11.081
before, skill set that will transfer over to work. Fantastic.

02:29:11.637 --> 02:29:15.771
Why women don't get that exact same positive bias? Remember we talked at the

02:29:15.771 --> 02:29:19.601
beginning of this podcast, there's positive and negative biases.

02:29:19.601 --> 02:29:23.191
Well, that's a positive bias that is bestowed upon this man to become a father,

02:29:23.191 --> 02:29:25.286
whether he earns it or not.

02:29:25.873 --> 02:29:30.271
But then when women become mothers, it's the opposite.

02:29:30.271 --> 02:29:33.124
They take that away, even though she's going through the exact same things and

02:29:33.404 --> 02:29:38.011
the exact same experience sometimes and a lot of times women are the primary caregiver.

02:29:38.011 --> 02:29:42.301
Still, the majority of primary caregivers are women going through more.

02:29:42.301 --> 02:29:45.397
She's going through more of this sort of training and skill sets.

02:29:45.710 --> 02:29:51.172
But mothers show there is a motherhood penalty for every child that they have.

02:29:51.521 --> 02:29:53.350
Their career earnings go down.

02:29:54.790 --> 02:30:02.548
And it is so much the way companies are inadvertently and unconsciously pushing mothers to the side.

02:30:02.901 --> 02:30:07.020
For what we hear often is that the moment the mother gives the,

02:30:07.020 --> 02:30:11.980
and it's a funny anecdote, that mothers will tell their employees much later

02:30:11.980 --> 02:30:16.473
that they're expecting a child than their spouses, than their male spouses.

02:30:16.676 --> 02:30:20.600
Male spouses tell, even when they have a commitment with their wife not to tell

02:30:20.600 --> 02:30:22.451
work at a certain time, they still tell work.

02:30:22.995 --> 02:30:26.780
Because they're so excited about it. Whereas the mother is very hesitant and

02:30:26.780 --> 02:30:29.551
knowing how this has seen an impact on your career.

02:30:29.793 --> 02:30:33.463
So the mother waits a lot longer before they tell the employer.

02:30:33.857 --> 02:30:37.720
And then some of that, what we talked about the book of how this,

02:30:37.720 --> 02:30:41.556
we should be looking at this as an opportunity, advantage of skillset training.

02:30:42.014 --> 02:30:48.010
But the mother's also bringing it on herself as because it's been so influenced

02:30:48.010 --> 02:30:50.893
in our culture that this is going to set back a career.

02:30:51.143 --> 02:30:54.504
And that sort of translates in the conversation as well.

02:30:54.765 --> 02:30:57.450
And so what happens, the manager's just thinking, oh, this is so nice,

02:30:57.450 --> 02:30:59.473
go to HR, oh, we take care of you.

02:30:59.769 --> 02:31:02.660
And the moment she's gone, they're talking to one of the colleagues and say,

02:31:02.660 --> 02:31:03.808
oh, I wonder if she's going to come back.

02:31:04.208 --> 02:31:07.340
You know, let's kind of sideline her. When she comes back, let's not give her

02:31:07.340 --> 02:31:11.761
some, she's taking care of her child, let's not give her any challenging assignments.

02:31:12.086 --> 02:31:15.365
And that starts taking away and the mother's like, oh, wait,

02:31:15.505 --> 02:31:17.293
I'm not really that valid here anymore.

02:31:17.549 --> 02:31:21.530
And the conversation is not taking there. What we say is you need to talk to

02:31:21.530 --> 02:31:24.754
that mother like, hey, we have these assignments. Would you like to take them when you come back?

02:31:24.980 --> 02:31:30.136
Instead of just, you know, out of good intent, pulling them away.

02:31:30.274 --> 02:31:33.732
So what we're saying is, as I said before, you have to own your leave.

02:31:34.279 --> 02:31:38.121
So if this is happening to you, whether you're a father and you took the full

02:31:38.267 --> 02:31:41.517
amount of leave and there's a negative consequence to that...

02:31:42.960 --> 02:31:46.390
I was at a dermatologist talking to him about this book. He said,

02:31:46.390 --> 02:31:48.936
oh, my wife works for a private equity firm.

02:31:49.255 --> 02:31:52.110
She was on a call. She was six months pregnant.

02:31:52.493 --> 02:31:55.646
And the senior partner was on this call. And he says, well, where's Peter?

02:31:56.344 --> 02:32:00.795
And she said, well, my wife said, well, his wife just had, they just had a child

02:32:00.929 --> 02:32:04.620
two days ago. And the senior associate's partner said, well,

02:32:04.620 --> 02:32:07.439
his wife had a child, not him. So why is he on this call?

02:32:08.136 --> 02:32:10.504
And she came back to us and said, I don't want to work at this.

02:32:11.699 --> 02:32:16.431
It's that mentality that's going on that, hey, women set aside,

02:32:16.627 --> 02:32:17.753
they're not expected to work.

02:32:17.922 --> 02:32:23.483
Men are. And but when men actually take that leave, it's dinged against them.

02:32:23.890 --> 02:32:27.953
So it's a lot of work. It's something that if you're going to own your leave,

02:32:28.243 --> 02:32:29.939
you have to have a conversation up front.

02:32:30.217 --> 02:32:33.390
If your woman say, hey, I understand, put it on the table. I understand sometimes

02:32:33.390 --> 02:32:36.312
this is seen as a negative for women and we get sidelined.

02:32:36.625 --> 02:32:40.362
I don't want that to happen here. I want to have a productive career here.

02:32:40.688 --> 02:32:46.300
So what can we do to make sure that, you know, I don't get sidelined inadvertently?

02:32:46.300 --> 02:32:52.239
I want those high profile assignments, or at least I want you to talk to me about them.

02:32:52.553 --> 02:32:55.940
And the same thing for men are taking full leave. Hey, I understand sometimes

02:32:56.300 --> 02:32:58.136
there's this negative bias when we take full leave.

02:32:58.705 --> 02:33:02.990
What can we do to make sure we mitigate that? You have to be open and you as

02:33:02.990 --> 02:33:05.689
an employee, as a worker, you have to take the leave.

02:33:05.815 --> 02:33:08.272
Do not expect your manager to take that lead.

02:33:09.070 --> 02:33:13.814
Yeah, I understand. So, Mark, I asked you this question this way.

02:33:14.608 --> 02:33:21.130
To make the lead process go smooth, Mason has pretty much enumerated that the

02:33:21.130 --> 02:33:25.023
employee has to own their lead, right?

02:33:26.520 --> 02:33:30.385
What would it take for an employer to make the lead process go smooth?

02:33:31.160 --> 02:33:34.190
Yeah, well, I think the employer needs to own the lead process,

02:33:34.190 --> 02:33:35.410
right? I mean, I think...

02:33:36.861 --> 02:33:41.615
There needs to be an expectation of a certain process that happens every time

02:33:41.767 --> 02:33:43.862
someone is going to become a parent. Right.

02:33:44.071 --> 02:33:47.306
And managers should be held accountable that it accountable for that.

02:33:47.306 --> 02:33:51.766
It shouldn't be optional. Right. We we think and we advocate for and describe

02:33:51.766 --> 02:33:56.278
in the book a process for what happens when someone is going to have a kid. Right.

02:33:56.725 --> 02:34:01.740
There should be a manager should be held responsible and accountable for having

02:34:02.152 --> 02:34:06.065
not just communicating policies, but setting expectations with the employees,

02:34:06.309 --> 02:34:10.337
having a process, talking through all the elements of that process.

02:34:10.785 --> 02:34:14.466
Because what we found in our interviews is, and Mason may have hit on this,

02:34:14.466 --> 02:34:17.076
is it was kind of, you know, catch as catch can.

02:34:17.076 --> 02:34:22.636
Some managers had the empathy and the experience and they did it really well.

02:34:22.636 --> 02:34:26.991
And others might've been well-intended, but just didn't have the experience.

02:34:27.149 --> 02:34:32.506
So the company needs to own this, like it owns other expectations it has of

02:34:32.506 --> 02:34:36.346
leaders, right? Which means- Things are an option. Yeah, which means developing

02:34:36.346 --> 02:34:38.216
the leaders. Like we develop leaders.

02:34:38.556 --> 02:34:42.896
It means creating coaching programs, mentoring programs. Also,

02:34:43.416 --> 02:34:47.596
a lot of companies create parent research, employee resource groups so parents.

02:34:48.196 --> 02:34:50.219
Can get together and talk about their concerns.

02:34:50.556 --> 02:34:54.826
It creates all that beyond just the sort of the paid leave.

02:34:54.826 --> 02:35:00.646
And it talks about a systemic approach of, hey, when somebody mentions that

02:35:00.646 --> 02:35:03.276
they're going to leave, here's we work with companies to create,

02:35:03.276 --> 02:35:06.166
okay, what does this process look like? How does the transition go?

02:35:06.166 --> 02:35:07.861
What are the checklists that we need to go on?

02:35:08.181 --> 02:35:11.476
What is the communication policy while they're off leave? And what does the

02:35:11.476 --> 02:35:13.866
returnship look like and how is that structured?

02:35:13.866 --> 02:35:18.706
So there's a lot of effort that goes into it for companies who want to get this right.

02:35:18.706 --> 02:35:21.342
And companies that want to get this, that do get this right,

02:35:21.801 --> 02:35:27.976
they see 100% return, retention of employees within their full year afterwards.

02:35:27.976 --> 02:35:33.548
Whereas a great percentage of companies, because they're just bondage.

02:35:33.788 --> 02:35:38.549
It. There's no process in place. The employees just leave because it's so critical.

02:35:38.799 --> 02:35:44.648
When you think back of the critical points in your life, having a child is one

02:35:44.648 --> 02:35:45.925
of the biggest ones, right?

02:35:46.227 --> 02:35:50.952
And how the people around you and your managers, your friends and family,

02:35:51.167 --> 02:35:56.398
how they support you during that first initial few months, you will remember

02:35:56.398 --> 02:35:57.709
for the rest of your life.

02:35:58.127 --> 02:36:02.178
You will form of opinion of that manager, of that company, and that will either

02:36:02.178 --> 02:36:05.748
make you more loyal or the opposite of what's going on.

02:36:05.748 --> 02:36:09.888
And this is the company that has a chance to create amazing employees that will

02:36:09.888 --> 02:36:14.398
stick through them, that will not take a counteroffer from a competitor years down the road.

02:36:15.051 --> 02:36:22.698
So Mason, you mentioned about maybe a federal law that mandates,

02:36:22.698 --> 02:36:27.478
or I guess, for lack of a better term, paid leave, how else should the government

02:36:27.478 --> 02:36:29.904
be more involved in insuring parental leave?

02:36:31.213 --> 02:36:35.113
There's a number of states. New York put in a piece of legislation a few years

02:36:35.113 --> 02:36:41.183
ago, I think it was last year, in which it is requiring employers to give so

02:36:41.183 --> 02:36:45.981
many hours of pre-birth leave to the mothers to do checkups.

02:36:46.595 --> 02:36:49.578
What we need to do is look at those, look, go through the states,

02:36:49.729 --> 02:36:53.003
find the policies in which the states have put in. You know,

02:36:53.003 --> 02:36:55.700
states are typically our testing ground for legislation.

02:36:56.148 --> 02:37:01.863
Actually, I agree with that model. You have a bunch of sort of these test cases

02:37:01.863 --> 02:37:04.042
everywhere. Find ones that work.

02:37:04.361 --> 02:37:09.063
Use those and look at creating a national legislation package that looks at

02:37:09.063 --> 02:37:14.882
supporting working parents and go beyond just talking about how we support working parents.

02:37:15.252 --> 02:37:19.853
Put it in there and look at not just paid leave, but also what we can do to

02:37:19.853 --> 02:37:23.186
support companies. Maybe it's tax breaks for companies.

02:37:23.498 --> 02:37:30.933
Maybe if you can't make a national sort of if there's not enough of a a majority

02:37:30.933 --> 02:37:36.113
to put in a national paid lead program in the US, maybe we can create tax breaks

02:37:36.113 --> 02:37:38.274
for companies who do have paid lead.

02:37:38.690 --> 02:37:44.957
And so we encourage, at least at the corporate level, there's a financial incentive for them to do that.

02:37:45.573 --> 02:37:51.743
And also focus on, we need to focus on the hourly workers because they're the

02:37:51.743 --> 02:37:53.693
ones that basically have nothing.

02:37:54.036 --> 02:37:59.173
What can we do there? So state by state, find out what policies and procedures

02:37:59.493 --> 02:38:04.868
legislation is working and use that to create a legislative approach nationally.

02:38:05.483 --> 02:38:11.418
All right. So, Mark, how do you all want this book to be utilized? Yeah.

02:38:14.084 --> 02:38:20.754
I want it to be utilized by companies who rethink how they think about parental

02:38:20.754 --> 02:38:22.604
leave and their relationship with parents.

02:38:23.024 --> 02:38:27.684
The thing I said earlier about our intent is to flip the assumption on the head

02:38:27.684 --> 02:38:30.594
from this is a problem to this is an opportunity.

02:38:30.943 --> 02:38:39.474
And what to me, what that means is that this starts to get embedded into the way decisions get made.

02:38:39.474 --> 02:38:44.334
One of the things that we saw in our three decades of work with inclusion and

02:38:44.334 --> 02:38:50.304
diversity is that the mark of change is when inclusion and diversity,

02:38:50.944 --> 02:38:52.525
of which this issue I think is one...

02:38:54.400 --> 02:38:58.250
Being a separate thing that people have to remember to think about or be reminded

02:38:58.250 --> 02:39:02.100
about and become something that just becomes a part of the decision-making process.

02:39:02.460 --> 02:39:07.190
So to the extent that our book is able to give enough of a rationale,

02:39:07.190 --> 02:39:12.260
but then also a lot of practical ways to just embed this into the processes,

02:39:12.679 --> 02:39:17.240
then you don't have to remember to think about it anymore. I mean, I think that's true.

02:39:17.380 --> 02:39:24.438
I'm hoping, at least, that's where we're going to get to in a difficult time that we're in now with,

02:39:25.070 --> 02:39:28.760
all of these issues of inclusion that we realize that what we have to do is

02:39:28.760 --> 02:39:33.120
embed this stuff so that we it's not something that's sitting out there that

02:39:33.120 --> 02:39:36.790
people can argue about all the time it's just a part of the way business gets

02:39:36.790 --> 02:39:39.786
done so i think there's enough in our book,

02:39:40.383 --> 02:39:43.500
to support that process for companies,

02:39:44.419 --> 02:39:49.480
but i would be negligent if i didn't also say that we do want new parents.

02:39:50.240 --> 02:39:53.900
We think this is a really good book for someone who is thinking of becoming

02:39:53.900 --> 02:39:58.580
a parent or maybe has recently become one, or actually even someone who not

02:39:58.580 --> 02:40:01.811
so recently became one, as a way to just think through this process.

02:40:02.044 --> 02:40:03.612
This changes your identity.

02:40:04.580 --> 02:40:09.990
It changes your relationship to the world. And it's a real opportunity to reassess

02:40:09.990 --> 02:40:13.370
your goals from a personal, but also from a career perspective.

02:40:13.370 --> 02:40:17.429
So to the extent that we can help people through that process individually,

02:40:17.660 --> 02:40:20.591
then that's also a goal of ours.

02:40:21.236 --> 02:40:26.930
All right. So my last question is really a challenge, and I would like both

02:40:26.930 --> 02:40:28.439
of y'all to answer it if you want to.

02:40:29.066 --> 02:40:32.360
Finish this sentence. I have hope because...

02:40:34.446 --> 02:40:40.716
Hope because i have seen advancement and on this issue in corporations i have

02:40:40.716 --> 02:40:42.626
seen companies who get it right,

02:40:43.201 --> 02:40:48.031
and have then have the data show what it means to them on their bottom line,

02:40:48.506 --> 02:40:55.925
and i have seen so many people lean in and say you know we need to focus on this issue now,

02:40:56.543 --> 02:41:01.146
and i have seen from our search in general a couple years ago saying this is

02:41:01.146 --> 02:41:04.438
a national crisis that we need to fix.

02:41:04.810 --> 02:41:06.772
I have hope because this is the time.

02:41:07.434 --> 02:41:10.173
This is the time where there's enough energy, there's enough focus,

02:41:10.498 --> 02:41:14.490
and there's enough goodwill there to push this issue ahead.

02:41:16.360 --> 02:41:19.470
I'm just, I'm a little bit too optimistic at sometimes maybe,

02:41:19.470 --> 02:41:24.990
right? Like I, I just, I just think we're going to do a lot of the right things

02:41:24.990 --> 02:41:28.864
because we have to, I think in the end it all comes down to that.

02:41:29.160 --> 02:41:33.520
So I'm a sort of, I'm a believer in the notion that we eventually get there,

02:41:33.520 --> 02:41:37.660
even if the road is a little more uneven than we'd like it to be.

02:41:37.660 --> 02:41:42.880
So I just think this is the, this is where we, we, this is where we're heading.

02:41:43.536 --> 02:41:47.100
And so we're, we're going to get there one way or another. And I think the one

02:41:47.100 --> 02:41:49.625
simple answer for both of us, we have hope because we're parents.

02:41:50.280 --> 02:41:54.260
Right. That's what parents have. We have hope that things will be better for our children. Yeah.

02:41:54.980 --> 02:41:59.220
Well, Mark had already admitted he was a half-full guy, so I didn't expect that answer.

02:42:00.109 --> 02:42:04.450
So look, guys, thank you all for doing this. If people want to get the book,

02:42:04.450 --> 02:42:07.205
if people want to reach out to you all, how can they do that?

02:42:07.902 --> 02:42:11.190
Amazon.com, you can find it there. You can find it on Barnes & Noble,

02:42:11.190 --> 02:42:13.350
your indie bookstore. They have access to it.

02:42:13.400 --> 02:42:16.862
If they don't have it on the shelves, just ask them. They can pull it through there.

02:42:17.122 --> 02:42:20.425
You can reach out to us at the parenthoodadvantage.com.

02:42:20.791 --> 02:42:25.198
We're more than happy to talk to you about it just to see where your company is.

02:42:25.570 --> 02:42:29.576
So yeah, feel free to reach out to us or at the very least, just buy the book,

02:42:30.034 --> 02:42:33.959
and share it with your HR and say, you know what, this is something that we need to talk about.

02:42:34.695 --> 02:42:39.740
All right. Well, Mason Donovan and Mark Kaplan, I thank y'all so much for doing this.

02:42:40.138 --> 02:42:44.096
This is a very, very important topic and very timely.

02:42:44.620 --> 02:42:50.461
And so I'm really, really honored that, one, that y'all have developed,

02:42:50.656 --> 02:42:56.920
y'all have allowed your expertise to delve into that and that you took the time

02:42:56.920 --> 02:42:59.220
to come on my little old podcast to talk about it.

02:42:59.220 --> 02:43:01.881
So I appreciate that. Thank y'all so much.

02:43:02.190 --> 02:43:05.040
Thank you for the time, Erik. We appreciate it. Really enjoyed it.

02:43:05.185 --> 02:43:07.670
All right, guys. And we're going to catch y'all on the other side.

02:43:20.637 --> 02:43:26.337
All right. And we are back. So I want to thank Jerren Chang, Dr.

02:43:26.337 --> 02:43:34.044
Bhumika Muchhala, and Mason Donovan and Mark Kaplan for coming on the podcast.

02:43:35.228 --> 02:43:41.137
It is, you know, always tough to, you know, try to secure people,

02:43:41.646 --> 02:43:46.290
you know, especially if, you know, it's holidays approaching.

02:43:46.755 --> 02:43:51.147
And I just really, really am thankful that all of them took the time this week

02:43:51.147 --> 02:43:56.790
to come on and do their interviews, and I hope that they enjoyed their holiday.

02:43:58.653 --> 02:44:02.386
Like I said, when you hear this episode, the holiday will have passed.

02:44:03.074 --> 02:44:11.413
But, you know, again, what I want to stress is, you know, with the people that

02:44:11.413 --> 02:44:17.789
come on here are people that are really trying to do good work.

02:44:18.176 --> 02:44:23.833
You know, whether it's in getting more people engaged, getting more people educated

02:44:23.833 --> 02:44:28.340
or creating environments for people to live their lives, right?

02:44:29.461 --> 02:44:34.120
It's really, really important to have people that are smart,

02:44:34.799 --> 02:44:40.069
that are articulate, and are committed to do those things, right?

02:44:40.998 --> 02:44:44.613
And so I just thank Jerren, Dr.

02:44:44.613 --> 02:44:53.023
Muchhala, and Mason and Mark for their contributions and following that tradition

02:44:53.023 --> 02:44:57.667
and that trend. And I'm not going to hold y'all along because y'all know what's going on.

02:44:58.466 --> 02:45:03.689
I guess, you know, biggest thing is we know that Donald Trump,

02:45:04.266 --> 02:45:10.399
our president, has been making money as president while everybody else is,

02:45:11.288 --> 02:45:13.139
you know, trying to do it honestly.

02:45:15.902 --> 02:45:24.139
And just working their butts off to make ends meet in these challenging economic times.

02:45:24.873 --> 02:45:29.523
I can't say tough because we're not in a depression like maybe our grandparents

02:45:29.523 --> 02:45:31.740
or some people, great-grandparents, we're in.

02:45:32.362 --> 02:45:34.101
But I do...

02:45:36.013 --> 02:45:43.544
To keep that in mind when we're going to vote, because we've got people who think that it's okay.

02:45:44.513 --> 02:45:49.353
We got this congressman who's not running for re-election, but his brother is.

02:45:49.353 --> 02:45:52.253
And I don't know if it's his twin brother, because they look exactly alike,

02:45:52.253 --> 02:45:55.893
or it's just his brother. But you know they're brothers.

02:45:56.273 --> 02:46:01.053
They can't deny it if they try it. This guy named Troy Nels, I think his name is.

02:46:01.513 --> 02:46:04.475
He used to be a sheriff in Texas.

02:46:05.322 --> 02:46:11.213
And a reporter asked him, he had said something about over the holiday weekend,

02:46:11.213 --> 02:46:12.909
he was going to have lobster and steak.

02:46:13.683 --> 02:46:20.723
And somebody, the reporter asked him, well, what about the majority of the population

02:46:20.723 --> 02:46:22.704
that can't afford lobster and steak?

02:46:23.430 --> 02:46:29.057
And he said that they need to work as hard as he does. you.

02:46:31.079 --> 02:46:37.305
So just to break that down, he makes $174,000 a year to work 88 days out of the year.

02:46:38.038 --> 02:46:44.005
So most of us work more than 88 days in a year, and we're not making that kind of money.

02:46:44.213 --> 02:46:48.655
For those of you all who are making that kind of money, keep pushing.

02:46:49.119 --> 02:46:54.395
Keep doing what you're doing and continue to strive to do better because you're going to need it.

02:46:54.749 --> 02:46:58.379
Because those of us that ain't making that kind of money, we trying to find

02:46:58.379 --> 02:47:03.114
ways to get as much money as we can just to take care of what we need. Right.

02:47:03.809 --> 02:47:06.324
But when we got elected officials that don't care about that,

02:47:07.086 --> 02:47:14.481
you know, that that are so brazen now, then we need to use the power that we have to send them home.

02:47:15.102 --> 02:47:19.814
And let's see how many lobster dinners and all that stuff he's going to eat.

02:47:20.390 --> 02:47:24.702
You know, we ain't making $174,000 a year. I'm sure he's probably set.

02:47:25.520 --> 02:47:28.446
You know, because those people take care of their own.

02:47:29.052 --> 02:47:33.609
But for the rest of us, we'll see. The only other thing that was kind of big

02:47:33.609 --> 02:47:41.354
was the sister Malak Keros beat a 16-year incumbent in Colorado in the Democratic primary.

02:47:42.022 --> 02:47:47.529
So there's going to be some changes in there because that district's pretty

02:47:47.529 --> 02:47:49.811
much a Democratic district.

02:47:50.274 --> 02:47:55.409
And barring anything crazy that she might say or do, she's going to be in there.

02:47:55.409 --> 02:48:01.089
But she is a classic story of a person who went to law school.

02:48:02.507 --> 02:48:07.457
At a good firm, took a political stance on something, lost her job,

02:48:08.419 --> 02:48:15.082
was a coffee barista, and then she decided, I'm going to run for Congress. And she won.

02:48:15.831 --> 02:48:20.967
You know, just because you see people at some of these jobs don't mean that

02:48:20.967 --> 02:48:22.860
they're not intelligent people.

02:48:23.536 --> 02:48:28.163
You don't know what their story is. And Ms. Keros is a classic example of that.

02:48:28.437 --> 02:48:32.418
AOC is a classic example that she was working as a waitress as a restaurant

02:48:32.732 --> 02:48:35.690
when she got elected, you know?

02:48:36.377 --> 02:48:40.377
So I was, I was a deputy sheriff when I got elected, you know?

02:48:40.377 --> 02:48:45.257
So it's like you, you can't judge a book by its cover, especially when it comes

02:48:45.257 --> 02:48:51.061
to public service, because no matter what you think of the four founders,

02:48:52.047 --> 02:48:54.704
the founding fathers or whatever you want to call them,

02:48:55.695 --> 02:49:01.756
You know, that vision that they had about America was divinely inspired.

02:49:02.335 --> 02:49:09.277
And when they came years later after the declaration was signed and they fought

02:49:09.277 --> 02:49:13.481
the Revolutionary War, when they were forming a country and drafting a constitution.

02:49:14.707 --> 02:49:19.258
The most important thing they wanted to have was representation from the people.

02:49:19.711 --> 02:49:25.210
And that's why Article 1 is about Congress and setting that up first.

02:49:25.800 --> 02:49:29.689
That's why Congress gets sworn in before the president does,

02:49:30.167 --> 02:49:34.698
because this is government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

02:49:35.288 --> 02:49:42.047
And our most representative body is the House of Representatives in Washington. Okay.

02:49:43.385 --> 02:49:49.733
So that's why when we have a congressman saying, well, you know,

02:49:50.174 --> 02:49:54.139
I can eat lobster and steak, I don't know why ain't nobody else able to do it.

02:49:55.245 --> 02:49:59.824
Those are people that are not in tune with their constituents.

02:50:00.230 --> 02:50:04.617
Because I promise you, Fort Bend, Texas, and I've never been there,

02:50:05.001 --> 02:50:09.708
but I promise you Fort Bend, Texas does not have everybody in that population,

02:50:10.611 --> 02:50:14.132
eating lobster and steak whenever they want to. Right.

02:50:15.613 --> 02:50:20.931
So that's why it's important for us to have people and have a diverse group of people,

02:50:21.622 --> 02:50:26.963
in the House of Representatives, because that is the body that represents America

02:50:26.963 --> 02:50:31.398
more than the president, more than the Senate, more than the Supreme Court.

02:50:32.068 --> 02:50:36.353
And even though the Supreme Court has this unique qualification where all you

02:50:36.353 --> 02:50:41.423
have to be is a citizen to serve, most of the people that get picked for that

02:50:41.598 --> 02:50:43.633
are not average citizens.

02:50:43.633 --> 02:50:48.731
They've gone to Ivy League colleges and law schools and all that kind of stuff, you know.

02:50:49.551 --> 02:50:54.283
And it's not to say that Ivy League people are any different than any other

02:50:54.283 --> 02:50:57.846
human beings, but because of the tradition of those schools,

02:50:58.279 --> 02:50:59.764
especially Harvard and Yale,

02:51:00.389 --> 02:51:03.923
because those are kind of like the founding institutions, and we've talked about

02:51:03.923 --> 02:51:09.203
this in a podcast, of the United States, you know.

02:51:10.733 --> 02:51:11.443
It's a little different.

02:51:12.265 --> 02:51:18.763
But that's okay because we need some of them in Congress and we need some coffee

02:51:18.763 --> 02:51:21.068
baristas and waitresses in Congress.

02:51:21.498 --> 02:51:25.633
We need people that sell feed in Congress.

02:51:25.633 --> 02:51:30.123
We need people that sell insurance in Congress. We need people that own construction

02:51:30.123 --> 02:51:37.213
companies or people that are actually construction workers, farmers, doctors.

02:51:38.013 --> 02:51:44.133
We need everybody, right? So if you have the compunction, if you have the commitment,

02:51:44.983 --> 02:51:46.933
to get out there and run, do it.

02:51:47.650 --> 02:51:51.875
If you're not successful, okay, the world's not going to end.

02:51:53.244 --> 02:51:56.127
Commitment to service shouldn't end, right?

02:51:57.264 --> 02:52:02.048
It's a humbling experience when you don't win an election, but it shouldn't

02:52:02.413 --> 02:52:05.304
take your fire away if you don't win.

02:52:05.874 --> 02:52:13.134
And if you do win, remember who you are and don't let the system taint you in

02:52:13.134 --> 02:52:20.091
any way where you forget who you are, where you came from, and who your people are, right?

02:52:20.714 --> 02:52:24.784
Because once you get in positions where people are patting you on the back and

02:52:24.784 --> 02:52:27.940
giving you special privilege, you can get caught in a trap.

02:52:29.360 --> 02:52:35.320
Can get stroked. And so you have to have a strong enough core belief in what

02:52:35.320 --> 02:52:41.670
you were going up there to do and maintain that. And that applies to any elected

02:52:41.670 --> 02:52:44.198
position. Doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be Congress.

02:52:44.637 --> 02:52:47.214
It could be your state legislature. It could be your county commission.

02:52:49.160 --> 02:52:53.498
County board, your school board, you know, city council. Doesn't matter.

02:52:54.185 --> 02:53:00.770
You know, we have all these positions in place to make sure that the people

02:53:01.150 --> 02:53:03.895
are heard at every level, right?

02:53:04.748 --> 02:53:12.730
So, you know, I just want you to take the lesson of Malakiros and a lot of these

02:53:12.730 --> 02:53:17.439
other folks that are out here running, some of the people that have been on the podcast.

02:53:18.394 --> 02:53:22.260
You know, and just like Kaylee Peterson, for example, or Dr.

02:53:22.260 --> 02:53:27.750
Jasmine Clark, you know, Walla Begay, Amanda Janu, you know,

02:53:27.750 --> 02:53:31.395
George Hernando, all these people that jumped out here.

02:53:31.930 --> 02:53:34.870
And there were some people I was like, really, they're going to run for office?

02:53:34.870 --> 02:53:38.255
And then other people was like, the fire is in them.

02:53:38.873 --> 02:53:43.749
And they're even if they don't win, they're still going to be out here pushing.

02:53:44.382 --> 02:53:47.428
Right. And that's what I like people to be.

02:53:47.870 --> 02:53:53.678
And if you, I always say, I don't want you to be a political junkie like I am.

02:53:54.253 --> 02:53:55.848
You don't have to be that.

02:53:56.628 --> 02:54:01.298
Want you to be engaged. I do want you to pay attention to what's happening because

02:54:01.298 --> 02:54:07.225
the decisions that are being made in all these state capitals and at the U.S. Capitol impact you.

02:54:07.891 --> 02:54:15.088
And you need to know what is going on and why it's happening and understand

02:54:15.088 --> 02:54:18.241
that you have the power to say, I'm not feeling it.

02:54:19.111 --> 02:54:24.198
And you can change the leadership, right? If you're not happy with a president

02:54:24.198 --> 02:54:32.259
that's made $2 billion in one year being president, then don't support that president, right?

02:54:32.871 --> 02:54:37.778
Now, this president can't run for an election, so once his term is out,

02:54:37.778 --> 02:54:42.638
he's done, but there's others of his ilk that say, well, if he got away with

02:54:42.638 --> 02:54:47.368
it, maybe I can too, and we have the power to say, no, that's one and done.

02:54:47.368 --> 02:54:50.788
That's not happening anymore. We can stop that, right?

02:54:51.857 --> 02:54:56.908
The other thing is that I want to give a report.

02:54:56.908 --> 02:55:04.420
So as I'm recording this now, the event has not happened, but I'll give a summary

02:55:04.798 --> 02:55:08.018
next episode about Martyrs Day.

02:55:08.573 --> 02:55:13.578
So as you remember, Gloria Brown Marshall, who wrote this incredible book called

02:55:13.578 --> 02:55:17.085
A Protest History of the United States, while she was doing a book tour,

02:55:17.833 --> 02:55:25.778
she kind of got inspired to say, we need to have a day to recognize the civilians,

02:55:26.546 --> 02:55:28.561
who gave their lives for our freedom.

02:55:29.486 --> 02:55:34.138
And, you know, the obvious names like Dr. King or Malcolm X or Edgar Evers,

02:55:34.138 --> 02:55:38.683
you know, but there's other people like Renee Good and Alex Preddy. Right.

02:55:39.365 --> 02:55:43.667
And all the way back to Crispus Attucks. Right.

02:55:44.285 --> 02:55:48.209
Six years before the Declaration of Independence, he gave his life,

02:55:48.972 --> 02:55:50.568
you know, protesting the British.

02:55:52.145 --> 02:55:57.545
So, you know, there needs to be some kind of recognition that other countries

02:55:57.545 --> 02:56:01.298
do that. Other countries have a tradition of honoring their martyrs,

02:56:01.722 --> 02:56:05.415
the civilians that they gave their life to advance the nation.

02:56:06.058 --> 02:56:11.161
And so she thought that it would be a good idea for us in America to do the same thing.

02:56:11.809 --> 02:56:19.695
And so the plan is every July 5th from this day forward will be designated as

02:56:19.695 --> 02:56:21.905
Martyrs Day in the United States.

02:56:21.905 --> 02:56:25.075
Now, we're not advocating it to be a national holiday and all that,

02:56:25.075 --> 02:56:30.781
but that may happen if we keep this thing going. Right.

02:56:31.640 --> 02:56:35.395
And, you know, it's one thing to celebrate the independence of a nation.

02:56:35.395 --> 02:56:41.009
It's another thing to acknowledge the people who are not soldiers at war.

02:56:42.291 --> 02:56:47.012
Who gave their lives to make sure that that independence continues.

02:56:47.499 --> 02:56:51.835
Regimes, right? That tyranny doesn't set in, whether it's in a region of the

02:56:51.835 --> 02:56:56.470
country, a city in the country, or in a nation as a whole, right?

02:56:57.194 --> 02:57:04.965
And so, you know, based on the conversation and the interviews that I had with Ms.

02:57:04.965 --> 02:57:08.891
Brown Marshall, it was coming to realize that we weren't having,

02:57:09.229 --> 02:57:12.769
nobody had stepped up to do one here in the Atlanta area.

02:57:13.336 --> 02:57:17.715
And so I reached out to a couple of people. And like I said,

02:57:17.715 --> 02:57:22.185
by the time that you hear this podcast, we would have done it that Sunday,

02:57:22.185 --> 02:57:24.456
the July 5th falls on a Sunday this year.

02:57:24.943 --> 02:57:28.106
So I will give a report about how that went.

02:57:29.972 --> 02:57:34.227
From the local perspective, but from the national perspective as well,

02:57:34.227 --> 02:57:35.684
because we're going to do ours.

02:57:36.499 --> 02:57:41.963
We would have done ours that morning and the national would have happened that afternoon. Right.

02:57:42.606 --> 02:57:48.527
So I'll give, I'll, you know, kind of give a brief wrap up about how that went and all that stuff.

02:57:48.527 --> 02:57:54.027
And hopefully some of y'all that normally listen to the podcast would have been

02:57:54.027 --> 02:57:55.817
in attendance at that day.

02:57:55.817 --> 02:58:00.057
We're not expecting a big crowd because, you know, it was kind of like last

02:58:00.057 --> 02:58:05.722
minute trying to put something together, but we just wanted to do something to acknowledge today,

02:58:06.574 --> 02:58:11.537
and set the groundwork and the foundation so that next year,

02:58:11.811 --> 02:58:13.964
July 5th, will be a bigger deal.

02:58:14.603 --> 02:58:20.947
And we want to keep this going. And, you know, as long as Sister Brown Marshall,

02:58:21.817 --> 02:58:27.567
and I and others are on this side of reality, we're going to do our part to kind of keep it going.

02:58:27.567 --> 02:58:32.027
So I just wanted to kind of give you a preview of that, and then I'll give you

02:58:32.027 --> 02:58:35.227
the update next week. So that's really all I got.

02:58:35.974 --> 02:58:39.533
I appreciate y'all sitting through another long episode.

02:58:40.687 --> 02:58:45.597
Excuse me, as you do all these other episodes, because, again,

02:58:45.597 --> 02:58:50.665
I want you to get to know these people and know what they are doing.

02:58:51.215 --> 02:58:57.809
You know, I don't want to give you like a two-minute, five-minute hit on something as major as...

02:58:59.687 --> 02:59:07.231
Ending the accumulation culture of capitalism, right? Or how employers can be,

02:59:07.793 --> 02:59:11.520
more responsive to employees that are having children, right?

02:59:12.421 --> 02:59:14.801
You know, you can't just do that in five minutes.

02:59:16.481 --> 02:59:20.157
You need to flesh some things out, right?

02:59:21.141 --> 02:59:25.893
And pick people's brains, especially these brilliant people that are coming on the show.

02:59:26.606 --> 02:59:30.864
So I appreciate y'all sticking with me. I appreciate y'all support.

02:59:31.479 --> 02:59:33.414
And we're just going to keep it going.

02:59:34.033 --> 02:59:37.484
We're just going to keep it going because we got to. We got to.

02:59:39.475 --> 02:59:43.312
So, all right. That is all I have. Like I said, next week, Grace will be back.

02:59:43.986 --> 02:59:49.342
And we'll have a full show. And I may not have any guests next week.

02:59:50.721 --> 02:59:55.721
That's still kind of up in the air. But if I don't, then it'll just be a hot mic episode.

02:59:55.889 --> 02:59:59.751
And you'll just get to hear me talk and run and rave. And I'll probably have

02:59:59.751 --> 03:00:09.437
a lot to talk about based on how everything's going after we celebrate 250 years of existence.

03:00:11.852 --> 03:00:16.453
All right, guys. On that note, like I said, that's all I got. Until next time.