Persuade, Energize, Transform Featuring Anat Shenker-Osorio and Dr. Stacey Schultz

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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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truth to power, and to expand and improve the show.

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listen to it. That will help the podcast tremendously.

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make this moment a movement.

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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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Music.

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Hello, and welcome to another moment where Erik Fleming, I am your host, Erik Fleming.

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So today, I have two guests, two young ladies who are seeking to change the

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world in their own little niche.

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One is trying to change the world through effective communication,

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and one is trying to change the world by transforming education.

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And, you know, both of these women are very, very cerebral and they're pretty

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distinctive personality-wise, but their heart is the same.

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And it was really, really cool to have both of them come on and talk about their work.

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And I hope that you will develop the same appreciation that I have for them by listening to them.

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And yeah, I just think you'll enjoy the conversations.

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We're in some perilous times that if you've been listening to the podcast or

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just paying attention to what's going on, you already know that.

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But I got a couple of thoughts about that I'm going to share it with you later on.

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But yeah, I think this is going to be a good podcast for y'all to really listen

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to because we got to get into some really, really good discussions.

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And it's just always a reminder there are people out here that's doing the work.

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So anyway, let's go ahead and kick this off. And as always, we kick it off with

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a moment of news with Grace G.

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Music.

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Thanks, Erik. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met

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in Alaska, where a tentative agreement was reached towards Russia ending their war with Ukraine.

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The Texas legislature adjourned their first special session,

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and Governor Greg Abbott called a second session, as Democratic lawmakers continue

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employing tactics to prevent a quorum and a Texas redistricting plan from being adopted.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled plans to ask voters to approve a ballot

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measure to redraw the state's congressional map to create more Democratic seats.

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President Trump deployed 800 National Guard troops to Washington,

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D.C. and took control of the city's police department.

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A Georgia man who blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for his depression attacked the

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CDC headquarters in Atlanta, firing over 180 shots, breaking 150 windows,

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and killing a police officer before he later died.

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A U.S. judge has denied a request from the Justice Department to unseal grand

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jury records from Ghislaine Maxwell's sex trafficking case.

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The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the recent tax and spending law

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will result in 10 million more Americans becoming medically uninsured over the next decade.

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President Trump has removed Billy Long as the IRS commissioner and replaced

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him with Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, who will serve in an acting capacity.

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Three people were shot and wounded in Times Square, New York,

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with a 17-year-old male now in police custody.

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A former New York corrections officer was sentenced to 15 years in prison for

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his role in the beating death of Robert Brooks, an African-American inmate.

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A Ugandan judge denied bail to opposition figure Kiza Besije,

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who has been in jail on treason charges for nine months.

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And the Trump administration is considering reclassifying marijuana to a less

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dangerous drug category.

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I am Grace G., and this has been a Moment of News.

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Music.

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All right. Thank you, Grace, for that Moment of News. And now it is time for

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my guest, Anat Shenker Osorio.

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Host of the Words to Win by Podcast and principal of ASO Communications,

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Anat Shenker Osorio examines why certain messages falter where others deliver.

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She has led research for new messaging on issues ranging from freedom to join

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together in union to clean energy and from immigrants' rights to reforming criminal justice.

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Anat's original approach through priming experiments, task-based testing,

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and online dial surveys has led to progressive electoral and policy victories across the globe.

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Anat delivers her findings packed in snark at venues such as the Congressional

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Progressive Caucus, Center for Australian Progress,

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Irish Migrant Center, Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation,

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and Lush International.

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Her writing and research is profiled in the New York Times, The Atlantic,

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Boston Globe, Salon, The Guardian, and Grist, among others.

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She is the author of Don't Buy It, The Trouble with Talking Nonsense About the Economy.

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Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest

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on this podcast, Anat Shenker Osorio.

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Music.

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All right, Anat Shenker Osorio. How you doing, ma'am? You doing good?

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Well, my standard answer these days is there could be less fascism,

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but I'm awake. I'm vertical.

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Yeah, yeah. Look, I understand. And, you know, I just, I'm thankful because

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of my anger with the current president is the reason why I have a podcast. Yes.

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So that's the silver lining I have to go with on that.

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So what I want to do is I want to get into it. And usually I do a couple of icebreakers.

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So the first icebreaker is a quote. The only people that get rich playing by

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the rules are the people that make the rules. What's your thoughts on that quote?

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Yeah. I mean, I would probably see you that quote and raise you.

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That the entire concept of the rule of law is actually just that the rulers

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get to decide what the law is in every dimension, not just around economics,

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but around who gets to speak and what they get to say,

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who gets to move through the world and how, who gets to love who they want to love,

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who gets to reside where they desire to reside and pretty much everything else,

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every facet of our lives.

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And so we change our laws to comport with our values. We do not change our values

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to comport with our laws.

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And when we hold up rule of law or the law as the ultimate arbiter of what purportedly

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is good and right, instead of an actual value like justice—.

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Or equality, then we quickly fall prey to the situation that we are in right now, where,

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many people on the left and especially sort of more mainstream democratic circles

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have been yelling since,

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I don't know, at least 2020, no one is above the law, no one is above the law,

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as if we were running for hall monitor, which is everybody's favorite person.

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It's very attractive. it.

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It's very compelling. Everyone wants to vote for the hall monitor.

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And then it whips around.

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And now, of course, we are subjected to an endless litany of right-wing people

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justifying everything from, you know, throwing Senator Alex Padilla to the ground,

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to grabbing that judge in Milwaukee,

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to, you know, whatever happens between now and five minutes from now,

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saying that they're allowed to do this because no one is above the law

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because the law is in and of itself is not

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a value yeah and i and i know that the

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playing by the rules thing is not your favorite phrase based

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on my research and uh and it was like ironically i was i i was watching a cnn

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cnbc interview with hakeem jeffries and the clip they showed that was the first

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thing he said well you know, we got to play by the rules.

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And I was like, Ooh, I better not play this clip for a Nazi.

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She's going to cuss the speaker out.

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

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Okay. So I need you to give me a number between one and 20.

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

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I think almost universally, that most of us believe that we want to move through

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our lives and be with our loved ones and be able to put food on the table and be home in time to eat it.

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Yeah. Yeah. That should be universal.

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I don't know who would be opposed to that.

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But, yeah, that seems to be a universal thing. So let's get into it a little bit.

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Why did you decide to use your talents for politics?

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I guess I'm self-loathing.

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Well, I had the experience as a very young child of, I mean,

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I can go into the story, basically, my first ever school memory.

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My parents sent me to kindergarten young. They'd had enough of me, so I was four.

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And we had all been given these notebooks, and each notebook had a very nice cover.

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Mine had the Muppet Show on it. That's how old I am.

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And the teacher was called into the principal's office and so said to us,

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OK, all of you just like draw on the first page of your notebook.

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I have to just go because, you know, this was in an era where this would happen.

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Your listeners are like, what is she talking about? But you'll back me up.

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Teachers did things like this.

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And she'd been gone roughly zero seconds when a bunch of the kids started picking

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on one boy in particular. and they grabbed his notebook and they ripped the

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cover off and they're making fun of him and he was crying.

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When the teacher came back, she saw this scene and she said,

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okay, I'm taking all of your notebooks. And she took back all of our notebooks.

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And I said, but most of us were not doing anything.

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Like most of us were not harming this kid. And she said, but did you stand up for him?

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Did you try to stop them? Did you say anything? I was like, no,

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I was drawing in my notebook like you told me to do.

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And she said, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

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And that has pretty much been my guiding force, or at least I hope it's my guiding force.

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And I think that I decided to get into politics because I was absolutely determined

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to try to make the world better, as cheesy and hackneyed as that sounds.

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And I think there are many, many different ways that people do that.

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I think the arts is an incredible way. I think that cooking for people is an incredible way.

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I think that being in medicine isn't, like, I'm not arguing that there's only

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one way to do that by any stretch of the imagination.

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But I'm a person who thinks a lot about language. I grew up in a multilingual

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household. I grew up with a very strong interest in linguistics.

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My mother's an interpreter.

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She speaks seven languages. and so I

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just have always had in a facility with

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and an understanding of words and not

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just what they mean but how they alter people's perceptions of

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what is true what they desire what they want to happen and so I think that it

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was sort of that idea of trying to speak more effectively about the world we

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want to create and also more effectively about the foes that we face. That kind of got me here.

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Yeah. Well, your story is cooler than mine.

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I just, when I was three years old, I saw in the World Book Encyclopedia,

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the article about presidents of the United States, and I said, oh, I want that job.

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And so that was the start of my journey. It wasn't a life lesson kind of thing, but that's cool.

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That's cool that a teacher felt...

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That a four-year-old could understand that. And I think that's.

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Obviously, it's had a pretty positive impact, at least from my perspective anyway.

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So talk to the listeners. There's a couple of things that you talk about on

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your website, and one of them is the race class narrative.

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So talk about that, and how has that been utilized since 2017?

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Oh, big topic. So in 2016, when the first Trump scene began,

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I was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley,

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specifically at the law school named Ian Haney Lopez, who famously wrote the

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book Dog Whistle Politics about what I'm going to guess you can guess it's about dog whistling.

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And he'd come to me we'd met

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through a mutual friend and basically said i've been

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running around the country trying to tell different operatives

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democrats progressives that actually this idea that

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we should just talk about race which some

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people espouse and sort of center racial justice

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framing which is obviously incredibly important and then

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other people arguing very loudly that talking

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about race is a distraction and we just need

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to do quote colorblind economic populism because that's

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the thing that everyone can get on board with and you know

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like everyone knows what it is to have more month than

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check doesn't matter how much melanin you got and so that is actually the way

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even to racial justice because of the overlay between race and class and basically

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his argument was that you have

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to do both and he had been trying to make this argument over and over.

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And as sort of Democratic operatives or want to do, the rejoinder that he was

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receiving most of the time was, yes, but do you have testing that that would work?

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Because, of course, in the what I like to call polling ism, there's there's

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like a massive illness that has infected Democratic thought processes, big D.

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That like we have to pull everything and everything needs to be pulled and we

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need to just figure out what people purportedly already want,

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which is fixed and immovable.

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And we just have to figure out what it is, take the temperature and then repeat

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it back to them. I don't know if we're going to come back to that topic,

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but basically, I could yell about that for 7,000 hours and like all of the ways

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that it is wrong. But I'm going to answer your question.

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So we embarked on this project we brought on board, then president of the think

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tank Demos, Heather McGee, who went on to write a book called Some of Us.

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It's largely about this phenomenon as well.

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And basically what we did, and I'm a researcher too, you know,

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for the crap I just threw at polls, it's not that there's no utility,

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it's that you only get answers to the questions you ask.

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And it's extraordinary what you can make happen when you decide which questions

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to ask and which ones not to.

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So we first did a bunch of qualitative research where we did focus groups,

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but we also did these really interesting dyads where we would have a mom and

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a son, or we would have two best friends who had been pals since college or high school, whatever.

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And one of them would be more decidedly progressive on both economic and racial

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dimensions, and then the other more right wing.

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And so we weren't just sort of having conversations with groups,

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we were watching people trying to persuade the people in their own orbit.

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Because the basis of all of the work that I do, including the race class narrative,

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which now actually we've innovated to the race class gender narrative more recently,

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is rooted in the idea that if your words don't spread, they don't work.

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And if the base, which I like to think of as the choir, is not going to sing

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from the songbook, the congregation's not going to hear the joyful noise and

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go out and convert new adherents.

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And this fundamental idea, which is like the basis of every successful,

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not just social movement, But, you know, Christianity,

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Islam, like basically anything that has become a phenomenon in human society, period,

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ever, seems to be remarkably lost in this notion that we can just sort of like

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figure out this milquetoast thing that everyone's going to kind of sort of agree.

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So the race class narrative is basically an architecture.

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It's a structure of a message. And that structure is values,

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villain, vision, which we've simplified in the hopes that everyone can easily

00:19:37.636 --> 00:19:38.956
remember it and pull it off.

00:19:39.436 --> 00:19:44.176
And what you do is you sort of fill in the bits with what you need to talk about.

00:19:44.816 --> 00:19:49.416
And the way that you fill in the bits is that you begin by opening with a shared

00:19:49.416 --> 00:19:51.516
value, which I will model in a second. And the way that you fill in the bits

00:19:51.516 --> 00:19:51.516
is that you begin by opening with a shared value,

00:19:52.272 --> 00:19:57.632
And as opposed to the left-wing standard, which usually a message will begin,

00:19:57.772 --> 00:19:59.112
boy, have I got a problem for you.

00:19:59.252 --> 00:20:01.812
Or this is the Titanic, would you like to buy a ticket?

00:20:02.052 --> 00:20:05.752
Or we're the losing team, we lost recently, so you should join us.

00:20:05.832 --> 00:20:08.732
That's how we like to begin messages. That doesn't work.

00:20:09.612 --> 00:20:12.492
So instead, we open with a shared value.

00:20:13.572 --> 00:20:17.352
A shared value, not a outcome.

00:20:17.792 --> 00:20:21.732
So a shared value would be no matter what we look like or where we come from,

00:20:21.952 --> 00:20:24.552
most of us believe that people who work for a living ought to earn a living.

00:20:25.252 --> 00:20:28.012
A shared outcome would be no matter what we look like or where we come from,

00:20:28.232 --> 00:20:30.752
all of us are subject to the same amounts of discrimination.

00:20:31.052 --> 00:20:34.112
That second thing is just a lie, and that's not a shared value.

00:20:34.192 --> 00:20:38.952
And the reason that I get all in the weeds about this is because people will

00:20:38.952 --> 00:20:43.092
sometimes misunderstand and be like, wait, you're saying that we have to say

00:20:43.092 --> 00:20:44.492
that everyone has it the same?

00:20:44.592 --> 00:20:51.792
I'm like, nope, definitely not. But I'm saying that you name a big we on the

00:20:51.792 --> 00:20:55.752
basis, I mean, ironically, of sort of the opening question you asked me,

00:20:55.892 --> 00:20:57.492
what is something we hold in common?

00:20:58.052 --> 00:21:02.752
Because yes, our experiences are different. And yes, our outcomes are different.

00:21:02.752 --> 00:21:04.132
And that is not accidental.

00:21:04.552 --> 00:21:11.212
But our aspirations, our dreams, our desires, our hopes, even for most of us,

00:21:11.332 --> 00:21:15.492
unfortunately not everybody, the things we believe in. So another example of

00:21:15.492 --> 00:21:19.012
a shared value would be, in America, we value our freedoms.

00:21:19.512 --> 00:21:23.072
So you open with a shared value. Then the second sentence, not the first,

00:21:23.212 --> 00:21:24.512
is where you name the problem.

00:21:24.992 --> 00:21:29.892
We call this the villain sentence because we do not name the problem in passive terms.

00:21:30.052 --> 00:21:33.772
So we do not say wages are falling as if they got heavier.

00:21:34.592 --> 00:21:40.272
Or democracy is eroding as if we, like, left it out too long and too much rain fell on it.

00:21:41.064 --> 00:21:46.804
We say, but today, MAGA Republicans, or but today, a wealthy and powerful few,

00:21:47.044 --> 00:21:49.364
or but today, this asshole.

00:21:49.564 --> 00:21:52.284
It depends on what the message is going to be about, right? Is it going to be

00:21:52.284 --> 00:21:56.584
about passing rent control in your city, or is it going to be about the government,

00:21:56.924 --> 00:21:59.264
the regime trying to turn our government into a weapon?

00:21:59.484 --> 00:22:04.644
So it depends on the topic. But that middle sentence is but today villain is

00:22:04.644 --> 00:22:06.844
trying to divide us from each other,

00:22:07.284 --> 00:22:14.104
hoping that if they can make us shame and blame black people or new immigrants

00:22:14.104 --> 00:22:17.584
or exploit our lack of familiarity with trans folks,

00:22:17.604 --> 00:22:22.904
we will turn against each other and they can continue to pick our pockets,

00:22:23.384 --> 00:22:25.004
steal our health care and abduct our neighbors.

00:22:25.004 --> 00:22:28.504
That's me making the sentence longer than it needs to be, because it depends

00:22:28.504 --> 00:22:29.484
what you're going to talk about.

00:22:29.664 --> 00:22:33.164
But the middle sentence is where you narrate the dog whistle.

00:22:33.844 --> 00:22:40.464
You basically say, hey, look, if you'd like to know where your money went,

00:22:40.744 --> 00:22:43.264
it's the people who have all the money.

00:22:43.384 --> 00:22:45.884
The people who have all the money, they took your money.

00:22:46.584 --> 00:22:52.004
And Jose, who's sitting in front of Home Depot trying to get some day labor, he has no money.

00:22:53.144 --> 00:22:57.844
So the people with the money, they took your money. But if they can talk you

00:22:57.844 --> 00:23:03.844
into believing that it is newcomers or that it is Black folks,

00:23:04.044 --> 00:23:08.004
of course, coded as Milwaukee in my home, you know, my state of origin,

00:23:08.404 --> 00:23:10.944
Wisconsin, which of course is a dog whistle.

00:23:11.164 --> 00:23:14.164
Everybody from Wisconsin can tell you what Milwaukee means, just like everyone

00:23:14.164 --> 00:23:16.084
from Michigan can tell you what Detroit means.

00:23:17.004 --> 00:23:22.244
Then they can continue screwing all of us over. So that middle bit is the villain.

00:23:22.384 --> 00:23:27.824
It's where you make the connection between the scapegoating on the basis of

00:23:27.824 --> 00:23:33.364
race or the attacks on the basis of gender or the attacks on the basis of immigrant status.

00:23:33.984 --> 00:23:38.404
And then the third sentence, which is a return to the positive, is...

00:23:39.210 --> 00:23:43.430
But we know better. We can reject their hatred and lies and join together to

00:23:43.430 --> 00:23:47.830
demand, you know, the wages we all deserve if, again, it was going to be about wages.

00:23:48.230 --> 00:23:52.330
And so the race class narrative, that's more or less how it works.

00:23:52.490 --> 00:23:56.350
There's resources, everything under the sun, everything we do is open source,

00:23:56.370 --> 00:23:57.630
so you can see it on our website.

00:23:58.130 --> 00:24:01.730
There are so many places where we've been able to implement this.

00:24:02.190 --> 00:24:07.770
The shining star first example where we did a full-blown campaign on using the

00:24:07.770 --> 00:24:09.030
race class narrative was in Minnesota.

00:24:09.210 --> 00:24:15.630
This was in 2018, when Republicans in the state, having come within around 10,000

00:24:15.630 --> 00:24:23.010
votes of almost winning in 2016, were like, aha, we shall dog whistle more.

00:24:23.010 --> 00:24:28.710
And they saw in that endeavor, the Somali American population,

00:24:28.710 --> 00:24:34.330
which is large in Minnesota, especially relative to how white that state is.

00:24:34.650 --> 00:24:40.670
And so that population is primed for what I think of as the turducken of hatred,

00:24:40.670 --> 00:24:43.910
because those folks are black, they're Muslim and they're immigrants.

00:24:43.910 --> 00:24:49.630
So basically, like, any way you want to slice the meanness, you got yourself an angle.

00:24:50.470 --> 00:24:57.330
And they began pumping out endless stories about suitcases full of cash sent

00:24:57.330 --> 00:24:59.530
to Mogadishu, Somali daycare fraud,

00:24:59.730 --> 00:25:03.750
that the daycare program, the child care program that the state had,

00:25:03.950 --> 00:25:08.310
there was, you know, a lot of folks in the daycare system who were Somali American.

00:25:08.310 --> 00:25:12.330
And supposedly they're taking these sweet, sweet bundles of cash because everybody

00:25:12.330 --> 00:25:16.350
knows the richest people in our society are child care providers.

00:25:17.010 --> 00:25:20.710
That is how you get rich in America is by providing child care.

00:25:20.910 --> 00:25:24.150
This is a pro tip for your listeners. If you're trying to figure out a career

00:25:24.150 --> 00:25:26.330
path, that's it. That's the money path.

00:25:26.730 --> 00:25:30.410
So don't do hedge funds. Don't do VC.

00:25:30.810 --> 00:25:34.790
Don't come to Silicon. Don't abduct neighbors and steal, you know,

00:25:34.910 --> 00:25:39.330
people's information. And basically, like, no, that's not it.

00:25:39.730 --> 00:25:46.290
So that was having potency and resonance, because of course,

00:25:46.490 --> 00:25:51.890
that's what the purpose of this dog whistling has always been from time immemorial.

00:25:52.190 --> 00:25:56.270
And, you know, Nixon, that was the basis of his Southern strategy.

00:25:56.450 --> 00:26:03.390
Basically, like, if you can get poor whites to at least view themselves as better

00:26:03.390 --> 00:26:09.170
than African-Americans, then they'll go along with the rich landowning whites

00:26:09.170 --> 00:26:11.210
basically fucking them over too.

00:26:11.630 --> 00:26:13.810
Sorry, I didn't ask if I could swear. Here I go.

00:26:15.250 --> 00:26:19.770
So basically, we ran this campaign that we called Greater Than Fear,

00:26:19.810 --> 00:26:23.470
because in Minnesota, They call the rural parts of the state greater Minnesota.

00:26:23.710 --> 00:26:26.430
They like to make up weird words for things. They call duck,

00:26:26.490 --> 00:26:29.890
duck, goose, duck, duck, gray duck, which is the most controversial thing about Minnesota.

00:26:30.150 --> 00:26:32.850
And people need to know because it's wrong.

00:26:33.250 --> 00:26:35.110
I digress. So...

00:26:35.997 --> 00:26:39.077
We did this campaign. It had a look. It had a logo.

00:26:39.317 --> 00:26:43.017
It had radio ads. It had digital ads. It had this beautiful poster,

00:26:43.237 --> 00:26:47.137
which was iconic, you know, people pushing the car out of the snow.

00:26:47.837 --> 00:26:52.017
And it had dogs against dog whistling, beautiful dog contest.

00:26:52.417 --> 00:26:57.177
It had hot dish around the world where people would come together and make lotion

00:26:57.177 --> 00:27:00.237
hot dish and Somali hot dish and Mexican hot dish.

00:27:00.357 --> 00:27:05.117
Hot dishes for the non-Midwestern listeners. It's basically cancer in a Pyrex.

00:27:05.997 --> 00:27:09.537
But people like to eat it. I'm from the Midwest, so I'm allowed to say this.

00:27:10.657 --> 00:27:17.917
And it basically, what we did was we just kind of shoved this idea that we are greater than fear.

00:27:18.457 --> 00:27:23.057
So what that sounded like was in Minnesota, we know long winters and we know

00:27:23.057 --> 00:27:24.737
how to dig our neighbors out of the snow.

00:27:24.897 --> 00:27:28.257
So whether it's your first Minnesota winter or your 50th, we've all been there.

00:27:28.557 --> 00:27:34.677
And when certain politicians try to make us afraid of each other,

00:27:34.817 --> 00:27:37.557
we know that means they've got nothing else to offer.

00:27:37.937 --> 00:27:40.897
There's lots of ways to be Minnesotan, and all of them are greater than fear.

00:27:40.997 --> 00:27:47.497
That was our main ad copy because it was C3, so we were more judicious in the call-out.

00:27:48.417 --> 00:27:55.157
And it worked. It not only was what the outside groups used,

00:27:55.197 --> 00:27:59.377
and when I say used, I mean SEIU Minnesota, I mean Take Action Minnesota,

00:27:59.637 --> 00:28:03.337
I mean Faith in Minnesota, I mean Unidos, I mean, the Somali Workers Center,

00:28:03.717 --> 00:28:05.597
I mean, Education Minnesota, the Teachers Union.

00:28:06.057 --> 00:28:11.277
Instead of going door to door and doing a different message for each group,

00:28:11.297 --> 00:28:14.377
which makes it impossible to break a signal through the noise,

00:28:14.557 --> 00:28:18.537
they all went out canvassing in their greater than fear shirts.

00:28:18.537 --> 00:28:23.137
And they had a greater than fear script about driver's licenses for undocumented,

00:28:23.557 --> 00:28:28.097
about taxes, about school funding, about child care, about whatever their thing

00:28:28.097 --> 00:28:31.337
was. So people were hearing greater than fear, greater than fear,

00:28:31.477 --> 00:28:33.197
greater than fear over and over.

00:28:33.397 --> 00:28:39.057
And it became so popular that actually then candidate now Governor Tim Walz

00:28:39.057 --> 00:28:42.097
adopted it as his messaging, as did the two.

00:28:42.237 --> 00:28:45.557
We had two Senate races that year because of Al Franken and,

00:28:45.617 --> 00:28:47.897
you know, also in the Minnesota House.

00:28:47.897 --> 00:28:52.597
Anyway, one, all the races that we participated in in that year,

00:28:52.777 --> 00:28:58.717
then did a version of that in 2020, obviously in the midst and the wake of the

00:28:58.717 --> 00:29:00.337
horrific George Floyd murder,

00:29:00.637 --> 00:29:03.597
having to deal with all of the sort of.

00:29:04.237 --> 00:29:06.237
You can't even go to the Twin Cities.

00:29:06.237 --> 00:29:09.377
Governor Walz owes an apology to suburban moms.

00:29:09.497 --> 00:29:12.497
We had to clap back to that. We did this full I'm a suburban mom campaign.

00:29:12.737 --> 00:29:18.677
Just basically, instead of either accepting the idea that you just don't talk about race.

00:29:19.739 --> 00:29:25.559
Which is a fiction. Because basically, it's as if you're handing people headphones

00:29:25.559 --> 00:29:31.139
and in one ear is blasting horrific, terrible dog whistles.

00:29:31.539 --> 00:29:35.999
And in the other, there's silence. So this idea that we can just not talk about

00:29:35.999 --> 00:29:39.819
race or just not talk about immigrants or just not talk about queer people,

00:29:40.019 --> 00:29:43.759
we don't get to decide because politics isn't solitaire.

00:29:44.139 --> 00:29:50.979
Our voters are hearing all this crap. And if there's nothing in counter to that

00:29:50.979 --> 00:29:54.819
crap, then our economic promise can't break through.

00:29:55.199 --> 00:29:59.079
And so, you know, Minnesota is one example. We use the race class narrative

00:29:59.079 --> 00:30:03.459
in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, again, Michigan in 2020.

00:30:03.839 --> 00:30:07.179
We've used it in other countries very successfully.

00:30:07.179 --> 00:30:11.419
In Australia, we used elements of it in the Lula Bolsonaro race,

00:30:11.419 --> 00:30:19.339
which I worked on in Brazil in 22. Two, we used elements of it just now in the defeat of Le Pen.

00:30:19.759 --> 00:30:23.979
I mean, just now, just a little bit ago in France, successfully as pushback

00:30:23.979 --> 00:30:28.119
against the AFD in Germany. I could go on and on because I work internationally.

00:30:28.939 --> 00:30:33.599
So I wanted to play this little game and I'm going to cut it because of time.

00:30:33.859 --> 00:30:37.599
But this is from your Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit.

00:30:38.459 --> 00:30:44.839
So what I want you to do is is close your eyes and listen to me read one of

00:30:44.839 --> 00:30:46.299
the posts that you put out there.

00:30:46.599 --> 00:30:53.699
And you tell me which Democratic progressive comes to mind when you hear this phrase.

00:30:54.279 --> 00:30:57.299
And so I'm just going to pick one for the sake of time.

00:30:57.639 --> 00:31:03.059
Any elected official who lies to the American people, stokes violence in the

00:31:03.059 --> 00:31:07.299
vision and refuses to take responsibility as unfit to represent us.

00:31:07.599 --> 00:31:13.459
We must come together to hold the MAGA Republicans who have harmed us to account.

00:31:13.959 --> 00:31:19.339
Who is the person that's out there now that you think best articulates that?

00:31:20.234 --> 00:31:25.294
That best articulates that. Maybe not in those exact words, but James Tallarico,

00:31:25.894 --> 00:31:29.094
the Texas representative, I think.

00:31:29.754 --> 00:31:34.694
Not her vernacular, but staying in Texas, Jasmine Crockett, she would express

00:31:34.694 --> 00:31:36.314
it differently, but that vibe.

00:31:36.934 --> 00:31:42.434
I think Tim Walz would say a version of that in Minnesota.

00:31:42.754 --> 00:31:45.654
I think J.B. Pritzker would say a version of that, Illinois.

00:31:46.234 --> 00:31:51.934
Yeah. So those names you mentioned, are these people that you've identified

00:31:51.934 --> 00:31:57.494
as clear spokesmen for the Democrats or do we really help?

00:31:57.494 --> 00:32:06.434
I mean, I think those are some of our best examples of people who are actually

00:32:06.434 --> 00:32:14.454
understanding that we are in an epic raging battle against fascism, not inflation,

00:32:14.754 --> 00:32:21.934
although inflation is also real, and that unless we are clear about the foe

00:32:21.934 --> 00:32:26.074
that we are facing, we have absolutely no hope of defeating them.

00:32:26.694 --> 00:32:32.194
So I hold them up as among elected leaders, better examples.

00:32:32.894 --> 00:32:39.134
So what happened in your mindset happened message wise in 2024?

00:32:40.114 --> 00:32:45.134
Oh, my goodness. Well, there are so many things that happened.

00:32:45.414 --> 00:32:50.534
But from my view, and, you know, an election isn't one thing.

00:32:50.694 --> 00:32:52.354
The United States isn't one thing.

00:32:52.714 --> 00:32:55.154
Life is complicated. There's a lot of people.

00:32:55.854 --> 00:33:01.094
So this is by necessity a simplification, because otherwise you can't talk about

00:33:01.094 --> 00:33:05.834
things unless you pick a lane, right? I can't drive in all the lanes.

00:33:05.934 --> 00:33:06.754
I'm going to pick this one.

00:33:07.794 --> 00:33:15.934
In my view, once we changed candidates and we had Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket,

00:33:16.294 --> 00:33:27.034
we had a halcyon six-week period in which Harris was running on kind of everything

00:33:27.034 --> 00:33:30.374
that I would advise—not everything that I would advise because, you know,

00:33:30.774 --> 00:33:36.734
still a center of—I mean, the Democratic Party is a right-wing party in any other country.

00:33:36.754 --> 00:33:39.354
Context, like in a European context, the right wing party.

00:33:39.534 --> 00:33:46.614
So when I say like the best, I mean the best within sort of not greatness that

00:33:46.614 --> 00:33:49.014
is the United States political reality.

00:33:50.034 --> 00:33:55.614
And what I mean by that is sort of embodying the edict that if you want people

00:33:55.614 --> 00:33:57.714
to come to your party, you've got to throw a better party.

00:33:58.454 --> 00:34:01.894
If you want people to come to your cause, you need to be attractive.

00:34:02.594 --> 00:34:06.714
And the way that you be attractive is like any other magnet.

00:34:06.914 --> 00:34:10.334
You understand that you have to have a polarity, which means that you will draw

00:34:10.334 --> 00:34:12.774
people in, but you will also repel people.

00:34:13.708 --> 00:34:17.608
And there is actually no way to draw people in without repelling other people,

00:34:17.608 --> 00:34:22.928
because the alternative, the pollingism version, is that you're just sort of

00:34:22.928 --> 00:34:25.448
blandly inoffensive to the greatest number of people,

00:34:25.948 --> 00:34:29.628
which means that you don't have a choir that wants to sing your tune.

00:34:29.768 --> 00:34:34.848
You don't have people that are excited to go and convince other people that

00:34:34.848 --> 00:34:38.148
they should also be excited to vote in the first place and to vote for you.

00:34:38.248 --> 00:34:42.368
And in that six weeks is when there was lots of freedom.

00:34:42.368 --> 00:34:49.388
I mean, look at her, revisit her opening ad and look back at the work that we

00:34:49.388 --> 00:34:53.368
had done in 2022, a whole collection of us with the Protect Our Freedoms campaign.

00:34:53.388 --> 00:34:56.228
I have a podcast episode about it where I go through the messaging.

00:34:56.408 --> 00:34:58.728
It was that. In America, we value our freedoms.

00:34:59.368 --> 00:35:04.008
Above all our freedom to pick our leaders and have a say over the decisions that impact our lives.

00:35:04.188 --> 00:35:08.548
But today, MAGA Republicans trying to take away those freedoms from our freedom

00:35:08.548 --> 00:35:13.128
to decide what happens to our body to our freedom to earn a good living and have a good life.

00:35:13.368 --> 00:35:17.848
Like, listen to that ad again, the first one. She picked Tim Walz.

00:35:18.328 --> 00:35:21.808
Again, I've worked in Minnesota since 2018. It's been a long time.

00:35:21.948 --> 00:35:28.728
Tim Walls has been through an extraordinary amount of information and knowledge

00:35:28.728 --> 00:35:31.928
and training in the race class narrative, thanks to the folks in Minnesota.

00:35:32.728 --> 00:35:35.748
And he's mastered the clapback, right?

00:35:35.848 --> 00:35:39.828
He's mastered the kind of unflappable, ooh, I want to feed children,

00:35:40.068 --> 00:35:43.548
like how dare I, instead of getting defensive.

00:35:44.268 --> 00:35:48.988
Andy Beshear is another example of this. And shout out to Kentuckians for the

00:35:48.988 --> 00:35:52.008
Commonwealth who've done great RCN work in that state.

00:35:52.408 --> 00:35:55.748
You know, it's Charles Booker from the hood to the holler.

00:35:55.928 --> 00:35:59.808
It's basically first create a big we and then make clear that the villains are

00:35:59.808 --> 00:36:04.868
the villains because of the harms they are doing to particular communities,

00:36:04.868 --> 00:36:09.668
but also because you've got to point your finger at the bad guy,

00:36:09.788 --> 00:36:12.728
not the brown guy, right? That's like the essence of RCN.

00:36:14.028 --> 00:36:21.388
So that was going on. You know, he's an unserious man who is a very serious threat. Great line.

00:36:22.068 --> 00:36:27.748
And voter registration was like through the roof. People were happy. They were excited.

00:36:28.008 --> 00:36:31.448
Our focus groups, it was if like, you know, the clouds had parted and people

00:36:31.448 --> 00:36:35.148
were suddenly, you know, hopeful and joyful and like, oh, my goodness.

00:36:35.808 --> 00:36:41.748
And then the adults came. The adults came into the room and they said, oh, no, no, no.

00:36:42.208 --> 00:36:46.288
There has been too much fun at this party. and there has been too much economic

00:36:46.288 --> 00:36:47.828
populism in this platform.

00:36:48.768 --> 00:36:52.048
And Jacobin did a really good analysis.

00:36:52.108 --> 00:36:56.548
They developed what we call in linguistics a corpora, where they took every

00:36:56.548 --> 00:37:01.388
word that she publicly uttered over the course of her campaign, speeches, ads, etc.

00:37:01.728 --> 00:37:05.128
So this is an objective analysis. This is not like an impressionistic,

00:37:05.128 --> 00:37:07.168
I sort of feel this is what happened.

00:37:07.488 --> 00:37:11.528
And they traced how her economic discourse altered and how her economic discourse altered.

00:37:12.538 --> 00:37:16.418
And in the first six weeks, she was saying concrete things because you also

00:37:16.418 --> 00:37:19.918
have to say concrete things. She said, I'm going to raise the minimum wage.

00:37:20.518 --> 00:37:24.298
Fuck this shitty wage. She talked about price controls.

00:37:24.598 --> 00:37:27.758
There was half a second. You want to talk about if you, you know,

00:37:27.998 --> 00:37:30.578
having a polarity. She talked about price controls.

00:37:31.398 --> 00:37:34.298
Trump went ballistic, right? They were like, she is a communist.

00:37:34.458 --> 00:37:35.678
She's going to control prices.

00:37:36.338 --> 00:37:41.698
Imagine if the debate all through the election instead of being about the border,

00:37:41.958 --> 00:37:47.258
which is having the argument that MAGA wants to have instead of having the argument

00:37:47.258 --> 00:37:51.158
you want to have, which is like debate 101.

00:37:51.598 --> 00:37:54.958
Debate 101 is if you want to win the debate, you have to pick the trance.

00:37:55.338 --> 00:37:58.278
Had she stuck with, yeah, I'm going to price control. And you know what?

00:37:58.398 --> 00:38:01.878
I'm going to stick a capital gains tax. And all you rich assholes,

00:38:02.098 --> 00:38:07.398
all of you billionaires that have been profiting off of this pandemic and bankrolling

00:38:07.398 --> 00:38:12.978
your own lives while you steal from ours, it's about time that the people who

00:38:12.978 --> 00:38:15.618
do well in America do right by America.

00:38:15.778 --> 00:38:18.858
And that's what I'm going to do. And I'm not saying everyone would have agreed

00:38:18.858 --> 00:38:20.978
with that. They would not have agreed with that.

00:38:21.298 --> 00:38:24.318
But most people actually do believe that.

00:38:24.478 --> 00:38:27.178
And then that would have been the debate. He would have been attacking her about

00:38:27.178 --> 00:38:33.458
price controls instead of attacking on terms she then responded to by basically

00:38:33.458 --> 00:38:37.298
being Republican light, which is the problem that center-left parties,

00:38:37.518 --> 00:38:41.438
the mistake that center-left parties make all over.

00:38:41.498 --> 00:38:45.818
We just watched it happen where law and justice came back into power in Poland

00:38:45.818 --> 00:38:50.498
after a heroic, extraordinary victory in 22.

00:38:50.618 --> 00:38:56.018
This year, they came back into power because the center-left governing party

00:38:56.018 --> 00:39:00.678
tried to do a, you know, law and justice light.

00:39:01.198 --> 00:39:04.598
And what happens when you give people

00:39:04.598 --> 00:39:07.658
the full fat version and the low calorie

00:39:07.658 --> 00:39:10.598
version of the same thing they want the full fat

00:39:10.598 --> 00:39:13.678
because what you've done is you've let the other side control

00:39:13.678 --> 00:39:17.538
the terms of the debate if you want to score a goal you have to move the ball

00:39:17.538 --> 00:39:21.298
not be crying that it's over there on the wrong side of the field i realize

00:39:21.298 --> 00:39:26.418
i'm saying many things at once so what happened is that her economic discourse

00:39:26.418 --> 00:39:30.338
for one actually changed and again this is not an impression,

00:39:30.478 --> 00:39:32.078
this is like a cataloged fact,

00:39:32.298 --> 00:39:35.638
away from I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this.

00:39:36.628 --> 00:39:41.008
To, I mean, the capital gains. She walked back. Like, she literally walked back

00:39:41.008 --> 00:39:42.988
the amount that she was in support of.

00:39:43.148 --> 00:39:45.708
The adults came into the room, and by the adults, I mean the funders,

00:39:45.748 --> 00:39:46.968
and they said, oh, no, no, no.

00:39:47.528 --> 00:39:52.148
And the campaign began to speak in vague platitudes around the,

00:39:52.968 --> 00:39:56.748
opportunity economy because, you know, they had this notion that they had to

00:39:56.748 --> 00:40:01.968
present an economic argument, but they couldn't actually do so because they

00:40:01.968 --> 00:40:06.708
were hemmed in in terms of what kinds of policies they were capable of saying they wanted.

00:40:07.328 --> 00:40:12.828
Contrast that with Mamdani, who's like, I'm a free to rent, make the buses free,

00:40:12.828 --> 00:40:15.508
and I'm going to open public grocery stores.

00:40:15.848 --> 00:40:20.808
That you can take home, that you can remember, that you can imagine what that

00:40:20.808 --> 00:40:22.588
will feel like inside of your wallet.

00:40:22.768 --> 00:40:26.308
It's not some sort of, like, what is the opportunity economy and is it going

00:40:26.308 --> 00:40:27.728
to make me dinner? I don't think so.

00:40:28.128 --> 00:40:34.488
So that plus, you know, a healthy helping of the Cheney of it all,

00:40:34.528 --> 00:40:39.468
and this kind of, we will appeal to these moderate swing voters,

00:40:39.748 --> 00:40:43.088
even though there's like seven of them left and they all had to quit their jobs

00:40:43.088 --> 00:40:46.568
so that they could be in focus groups full time because we're so obsessed with

00:40:46.568 --> 00:40:49.728
them, like every pollster wants them in their focus groups.

00:40:50.428 --> 00:40:54.468
Instead of recognizing that you actually

00:40:54.468 --> 00:41:00.528
had to make the debate about two extraordinarily different futures,

00:41:01.108 --> 00:41:07.108
one in which you would have your freedoms and the other in which the MAGA Republicans

00:41:07.108 --> 00:41:10.548
would control you and decide your future for you.

00:41:10.648 --> 00:41:13.848
And, you know, that's my view of what happened. Yeah.

00:41:14.348 --> 00:41:20.488
So I'm going to try to narrow it down because like I said, I wrote down a whole

00:41:20.488 --> 00:41:24.268
lot of questions for you and I knew that this was going to be enlightening.

00:41:24.268 --> 00:41:32.088
So now I got to discipline myself. So in hindsight, was Michelle Obama wrong?

00:41:33.568 --> 00:41:39.068
About what? The classic line, when they go low. When they go low. Yeah.

00:41:39.628 --> 00:41:46.888
I think that there's a pretty strong misunderstanding of what it means to go high.

00:41:47.648 --> 00:41:55.268
Okay. I think that the way that when they go low, we go high was understood

00:41:55.268 --> 00:41:59.048
and interpreted was we remain polite.

00:42:00.421 --> 00:42:06.621
We observe the norms and the standards of the august offices like the filibuster,

00:42:06.861 --> 00:42:08.021
for example, in the Senate.

00:42:08.681 --> 00:42:10.681
To me, none of that is going high.

00:42:11.701 --> 00:42:17.381
If you're breaking into my house and you're going to set the place on fire and

00:42:17.381 --> 00:42:20.821
you're going to drag out my children and you're going to hurt them,

00:42:20.821 --> 00:42:23.801
the absolute highest place i

00:42:23.801 --> 00:42:27.401
can go is to throw my

00:42:27.401 --> 00:42:34.501
body and to kick and to scream and to punch and to fight to stop you and i think

00:42:34.501 --> 00:42:40.621
that i mean maybe i'm evading the question i think the way that we go high was

00:42:40.621 --> 00:42:44.301
understood and maybe even the way that she meant it and that part i can't know

00:42:44.301 --> 00:42:45.521
because I'm not inside her brain.

00:42:45.781 --> 00:42:54.481
Yeah, that was wrong. And the reason that it was wrong is because you cannot appease a fascist.

00:42:55.061 --> 00:42:58.281
You cannot play nice with a bully.

00:42:58.801 --> 00:43:06.241
You cannot norms and standards, especially when those norms and standards are

00:43:06.241 --> 00:43:10.621
built out of such fundamentally undemocratic ideas.

00:43:10.821 --> 00:43:15.921
And when, you know, we're in focus groups since the beginning of 2021,

00:43:16.701 --> 00:43:24.101
we're now like 270 focus groups in with disaffected Democratic and swing voters

00:43:24.101 --> 00:43:27.341
every week, every week listening to these people.

00:43:27.541 --> 00:43:31.541
It's an explanation for why I have the attitude that I do.

00:43:33.001 --> 00:43:37.721
And among the higher information ones, which is rare, but still,

00:43:38.121 --> 00:43:45.601
when we were talking to them in 2024, one of the most common things that we would hear is,

00:43:46.648 --> 00:43:50.768
You told us in 2020 to turn out to protect our freedoms.

00:43:51.228 --> 00:43:55.808
You told us that everything was on the line and that, you know,

00:43:55.968 --> 00:44:01.668
and I don't know, but it seems to me that Dobbs fell on Democrats' watch.

00:44:01.848 --> 00:44:05.928
I don't know, but it seems to me that all of these anti-voter restrictions that

00:44:05.928 --> 00:44:10.368
were passed in southern states happened when Democrats were in charge.

00:44:10.548 --> 00:44:14.008
I don't know, but it seems to me, and this is what the higher information ones

00:44:14.008 --> 00:44:20.068
would say, that you had a trifecta. And you didn't pass voting rights and you didn't codify Roe.

00:44:20.468 --> 00:44:25.148
And so you're telling me now that I need to turn out to protect my freedoms?

00:44:25.428 --> 00:44:27.888
How would voting for Democrats achieve that?

00:44:28.968 --> 00:44:34.308
Because here's the thing as much as i am messaging lady and studying perception

00:44:34.308 --> 00:44:39.568
and persuasion and coming up with you know not just like words but stories and

00:44:39.568 --> 00:44:44.908
overarching narratives there is absolutely nothing that you can say anyone can

00:44:44.908 --> 00:44:47.248
say that is louder than what you do,

00:44:47.948 --> 00:44:55.308
and you cannot tell people that the house is on fire and then refuse to run

00:44:55.308 --> 00:45:01.448
in and douse it with water or take the people out of the burning building.

00:45:01.928 --> 00:45:07.948
And so going high in practice, whether she meant it or not, and this is the part I don't know,

00:45:08.848 --> 00:45:15.408
amounted to there is, you know, an increasing authoritarian threat or like there

00:45:15.408 --> 00:45:19.848
is, you know, amounting pressure and there's anti-democratic and democracies

00:45:19.848 --> 00:45:23.348
eroding, like I said before, but then you don't actually act,

00:45:23.608 --> 00:45:28.128
but then you don't actually use the power of your office.

00:45:28.908 --> 00:45:33.888
And one of the exercises that we often would do with voters,

00:45:34.008 --> 00:45:39.048
not always, but we would ask them, if you had to liken the Democratic Party

00:45:39.048 --> 00:45:40.788
to an animal, what animal would it be?

00:45:41.697 --> 00:45:46.577
And pretty much without exception, and this is among Democratic voters,

00:45:46.757 --> 00:45:52.937
among swing voters, etc., people would say a slug, a sloth, a turtle, or a tortoise.

00:45:53.957 --> 00:45:58.917
More recently, the animals have changed and they've become a deer in headlights.

00:45:59.757 --> 00:46:02.617
You know, roll over and play dead, a possum, whatever.

00:46:03.857 --> 00:46:08.357
And when we ask that of Republicans, they always name an apex predator,

00:46:08.357 --> 00:46:11.657
a lion, a tiger, a shark. And they say it like this, you know,

00:46:11.737 --> 00:46:14.877
I don't agree necessarily with what they're doing, but you got to give them

00:46:14.877 --> 00:46:16.077
credit. They get what they want done.

00:46:16.537 --> 00:46:19.937
They're in the majority. They're in the minority. They get what they want done. I don't know.

00:46:20.317 --> 00:46:23.237
How is it possible that the filibuster doesn't impact them?

00:46:23.517 --> 00:46:27.077
How is it possible that even in the minority, they can block things?

00:46:27.357 --> 00:46:34.237
How is it possible that, you know, President Obama couldn't have Merrick Garland as his judge?

00:46:34.477 --> 00:46:41.157
Like, they somehow manage it. And so how are people meant to believe that we

00:46:41.157 --> 00:46:43.277
are knock, knock, knocking on fascism's door?

00:46:43.397 --> 00:46:46.397
And by the way, we're no longer knocking, like we're living in the house.

00:46:47.157 --> 00:46:52.717
And so you say that on Monday, but on Tuesday, you promise to pass bipartisan legislation.

00:46:53.837 --> 00:46:56.877
Either MAGA is an authoritarian force and

00:46:56.877 --> 00:47:00.577
a threat that must be defeated or it

00:47:00.577 --> 00:47:03.317
is a co-equal governing partner and you just have like

00:47:03.317 --> 00:47:07.457
differences of opinion about levels of taxation but both things can't be true

00:47:07.457 --> 00:47:14.157
yeah yeah I feel you on that so I wanted to get a couple of things that's going

00:47:14.157 --> 00:47:19.537
on now and and get your take on it real quick what is the best way to message

00:47:19.537 --> 00:47:22.017
I am against gerrymandering,

00:47:22.257 --> 00:47:25.117
but I will gerrymander my state to fight for democracy.

00:47:25.717 --> 00:47:31.797
Yeah, great question. So the way that you message that is by saying,

00:47:32.217 --> 00:47:37.717
look, in America, most of us believe that voters pick our leaders.

00:47:38.197 --> 00:47:41.957
Our leaders do not pick which voters to heed and which to silence.

00:47:42.437 --> 00:47:48.377
But today, MAGA Republicans again and again are proving that they will grab

00:47:48.377 --> 00:47:51.497
and seize power any way that they can.

00:47:52.509 --> 00:47:57.109
That's evidenced by them abducting our neighbors, stealing our health care,

00:47:57.329 --> 00:48:04.769
and moving in and deciding that they will redraw lines because they know voters don't want them.

00:48:05.349 --> 00:48:11.309
This is a power grab, plain and simple, by a regime of the bullies for the billionaires.

00:48:11.489 --> 00:48:13.269
And do you know the way that you confront a bully?

00:48:13.569 --> 00:48:16.069
By calling his bluff.

00:48:16.569 --> 00:48:20.229
By refusing to back down. And so here we are.

00:48:20.349 --> 00:48:26.529
We're at a crossroads. We are at the place where we will either allow this power-hungry

00:48:26.529 --> 00:48:31.969
regime to keep themselves in power and destroy our lives and our loved ones,

00:48:31.989 --> 00:48:36.429
or we will fight back with every available tool that we have,

00:48:36.589 --> 00:48:42.089
including ensuring that what the majority of Americans actually want,

00:48:42.289 --> 00:48:46.269
which is a country of liberty and justice that is indeed for all,

00:48:46.449 --> 00:48:49.269
can actually have our voices heard. That's it.

00:48:49.429 --> 00:48:52.449
You say it's a power grab, they're bullies, and you stand up to bullies.

00:48:52.549 --> 00:48:57.349
You don't get into the details of like, well, actually, no, we're going to retaliate,

00:48:57.429 --> 00:49:00.489
and it's fair because tit for ted, and they did a wrong thing,

00:49:00.509 --> 00:49:02.009
and maybe ours is a wrong thing.

00:49:02.149 --> 00:49:04.269
And eventually, we also believe in fair maps.

00:49:04.429 --> 00:49:07.669
You can't get into those details. You have to reframe the entire endeavor.

00:49:09.249 --> 00:49:12.609
All right. So listening to some—this would be a final question—listening to

00:49:12.609 --> 00:49:15.629
some of the commentary around the police takeover in D.C.

00:49:16.209 --> 00:49:21.029
Yeah. Some folks were warning the Democrats about falling into the trap of not

00:49:21.029 --> 00:49:26.149
acknowledging crime, just like how they fell into the trap of not acknowledging inflation.

00:49:26.589 --> 00:49:31.689
One, is that a solid premise to start with? And two, what is the best way to

00:49:31.689 --> 00:49:33.789
counter the MAGA message about big cities?

00:49:34.449 --> 00:49:36.449
Ugh, big city.

00:49:38.089 --> 00:49:44.989
It's difficult to overstate the stupidity of engaging the tough on crime.

00:49:45.884 --> 00:49:50.904
Argument. It is the, you know, canard about mud wrestling a pig,

00:49:51.064 --> 00:49:54.184
like the pig enjoys it and you're not going to win.

00:49:54.884 --> 00:49:59.804
If you allow the debate to be, there is so much crime and we need to get tough

00:49:59.804 --> 00:50:03.004
on crime and they will also get tough on crime and everyone's going to get tough on crime.

00:50:03.664 --> 00:50:09.404
When you tell people that they should make a decision on the basis of who's

00:50:09.404 --> 00:50:14.044
going to be a bigger asshole, Democrats are giving it their best to fulfill

00:50:14.044 --> 00:50:16.364
that role. But Republicans are always going to take that cake.

00:50:17.064 --> 00:50:22.004
And so first on the like bigger question, and then I'll come to the DC of it all.

00:50:22.504 --> 00:50:27.264
There's extraordinary folks at Vera Institute for Justice and using initially

00:50:27.264 --> 00:50:30.084
the work that we've done with the race class narrative, they've now done like

00:50:30.084 --> 00:50:36.924
70 million research, I lost count, on messaging about this topic.

00:50:37.404 --> 00:50:42.804
And what we find, what they find, because we've done it ourselves and we've

00:50:42.804 --> 00:50:49.384
verified it over and over again, is that you need to attend to people's underlying desire.

00:50:50.184 --> 00:50:54.524
When people are talking about crime and they're worried about crime, understandable.

00:50:55.224 --> 00:51:01.404
What they want is safety. The basic human desire, very understandable for yourself

00:51:01.404 --> 00:51:04.124
and your loved ones, is you want safety. Of course you do.

00:51:04.244 --> 00:51:06.804
There is no person on earth that does not want that.

00:51:07.044 --> 00:51:10.784
And in fact, back to Minnesota, when we were doing focus groups in the wake

00:51:10.784 --> 00:51:16.104
of the Floyd murder, one of the things we heard in Black groups over and over

00:51:16.104 --> 00:51:19.624
again was, I want the police to come when I call and to get off my back.

00:51:20.264 --> 00:51:24.264
We want the police to come when we call and to get off our backs. That is what we heard.

00:51:25.304 --> 00:51:31.404
And so a message that works is, we know what keeps us safe.

00:51:31.524 --> 00:51:35.144
It's living in communities where we look out for our neighbors and where we

00:51:35.144 --> 00:51:39.244
have the things that we need to make it through our lives and care for our loved

00:51:39.244 --> 00:51:40.724
ones. We know what keeps us safe.

00:51:40.884 --> 00:51:45.744
It's having the people sworn to serve and protect us, treat us as equals,

00:51:46.104 --> 00:51:50.284
do their jobs, and respect our rights.

00:51:50.724 --> 00:51:56.564
We know what keeps us safe. And these MAGA Republicans hope that by making us

00:51:56.564 --> 00:52:03.184
fear each other and convincing us that safety for some has to come at the expense of justice for others,

00:52:03.184 --> 00:52:10.204
We will let them take over and steal the things that all of our communities require,

00:52:10.544 --> 00:52:15.164
from great schools to accessible health care to affordable transit.

00:52:15.384 --> 00:52:18.984
But we know better. We need to get serious about safety.

00:52:19.144 --> 00:52:25.204
And Democrats are ready to do it, implementing proven solutions that have made our cities vibrant.

00:52:26.178 --> 00:52:29.918
So what you want to talk about, I mean, the rule of thumb is say what you're

00:52:29.918 --> 00:52:32.938
for, say what you're for, say what you're for, what you fight, you feed.

00:52:33.398 --> 00:52:37.438
If you get yourself into a crime is up, crime is down, crime is up,

00:52:37.558 --> 00:52:40.998
crime is down, as people are doing right now, crime is down 30% in D.C.

00:52:41.118 --> 00:52:42.538
Well, here I have news for you.

00:52:42.658 --> 00:52:45.958
If you're talking about crime, then you are bringing crime top of mind.

00:52:46.118 --> 00:52:49.918
You are making people think about crime in an earnest effort to make people

00:52:49.918 --> 00:52:54.478
think that it's gone down. Second of all, if someone told me my cancer was 30%

00:52:54.478 --> 00:52:57.218
down, I'd be like, well, the amount of cancer I'd like is zero.

00:52:57.798 --> 00:53:01.818
Like, thanks for the news. The amount of crime people would like is zero.

00:53:02.038 --> 00:53:07.398
So if you're saying crime is down, you're, first of all, crediting the idea

00:53:07.398 --> 00:53:13.438
that it would be justified for the federal government to send, you know,

00:53:13.838 --> 00:53:19.698
military and federalized law enforcement into a city, that that's a justification.

00:53:19.698 --> 00:53:22.998
Situation what if it were 20 you

00:53:22.998 --> 00:53:25.738
know whatever it was when crime was 30 percent higher two years

00:53:25.738 --> 00:53:28.738
ago three years ago i don't know was it justified then of course

00:53:28.738 --> 00:53:32.978
not so you are sort of implicitly crediting

00:53:32.978 --> 00:53:35.718
their story which is a bunch of bullshit that's not the

00:53:35.718 --> 00:53:41.358
reason why they're in dc so why are you making believe that it is by answering

00:53:41.358 --> 00:53:46.438
back and crime is down if facts were going to persuade people we would not be

00:53:46.438 --> 00:53:50.918
in this situation i don't know how anybody can be living in the America of 2025

00:53:50.918 --> 00:53:53.618
and think that the facts are going to set us free.

00:53:54.138 --> 00:54:02.238
That ship, it didn't just sail. It got burned for parts in one of Elon's 57 homes.

00:54:02.438 --> 00:54:07.858
So basically, the way that you contend with it is, again, you say what you're

00:54:07.858 --> 00:54:12.838
for and you make clear their motivations. And you say.

00:54:13.737 --> 00:54:20.657
Families are joining together to stop this regime of the bullies for the billionaires

00:54:20.657 --> 00:54:24.717
from turning our government into a weapon against our people.

00:54:24.897 --> 00:54:28.817
They are trying to turn our government into a weapon against our people.

00:54:29.357 --> 00:54:31.037
That's what D.C. is.

00:54:31.757 --> 00:54:34.617
Yeah. All right. So I got to let you go.

00:54:36.037 --> 00:54:41.757
But because me being selfish, we could have this conversation forever until

00:54:41.757 --> 00:54:47.497
you tell me to go out and do something. So how do people reach out to you,

00:54:47.737 --> 00:54:48.697
connect with your company?

00:54:48.977 --> 00:54:50.837
Go ahead and give the whole spiel.

00:54:51.657 --> 00:54:57.657
Yeah. Thank you for asking. So first, I would say you're listening to this,

00:54:57.737 --> 00:54:59.117
so you're a podcast person.

00:54:59.457 --> 00:55:03.757
I have a podcast called Words to Win By. It's a narrative podcast.

00:55:03.757 --> 00:55:08.017
So each episode is about a campaign we won somewhere in the world and how.

00:55:08.337 --> 00:55:11.897
We make a whole season. We release a whole season. So we've done three seasons.

00:55:11.897 --> 00:55:15.497
It's not, you know, and then we will make another season and release it.

00:55:15.777 --> 00:55:21.357
It is a feel-good podcast. Almost all the episodes, there are some that break the form.

00:55:21.517 --> 00:55:25.957
But, you know, the spoiler alert is that we win. That's what happens in every episode.

00:55:26.377 --> 00:55:33.897
And the point of it is to show, not tell that progressive ideas not only can when they do win,

00:55:34.497 --> 00:55:39.037
when you actually message them correctly, and when you develop a full surround

00:55:39.037 --> 00:55:43.857
sound communications campaign, and you actually are for policies that help people

00:55:43.857 --> 00:55:46.597
as opposed to policies that help donors. You gotta do all those things.

00:55:47.289 --> 00:55:51.729
So, Words to Win By, if you're into podcasts, listen to it, rate it,

00:55:52.329 --> 00:55:53.649
you know, review it, all the things.

00:55:53.829 --> 00:56:00.529
I have a Substack, which I use sometimes, and when I do Substack Lives,

00:56:00.629 --> 00:56:02.709
you'll get alerts. It's also called Words to Win By.

00:56:03.329 --> 00:56:07.449
Sometimes I rant and rave on Blue Sky. And then importantly,

00:56:07.789 --> 00:56:14.329
on the asocommunications.com website, when we do projects, we make them open source.

00:56:14.549 --> 00:56:19.429
That means that on there, there are messaging guides on how to push back against

00:56:19.429 --> 00:56:20.669
anti-trans attacks, how to

00:56:20.669 --> 00:56:24.749
talk about immigrants. We have a lot of our resources in Spanish as well.

00:56:24.869 --> 00:56:27.769
We do a lot of work in Spanish. you know how to talk about crime

00:56:27.769 --> 00:56:30.509
how to talk about climate change how to talk about you fill in

00:56:30.509 --> 00:56:33.489
the blankets on there for the most part and there's

00:56:33.489 --> 00:56:38.869
also sample ads that we have made and tested so asocommunications.com if you

00:56:38.869 --> 00:56:44.989
want resources and yeah those are all the ways well Anat Shenker Osorio like

00:56:44.989 --> 00:56:51.449
I said I'm honored and I could do this all day because I like talking to people smarter than me.

00:56:51.689 --> 00:56:57.969
And you are obviously very, very in tune with how to articulate messaging.

00:56:58.609 --> 00:57:05.749
And I admire your work and I admire not only your professionalism,

00:57:05.869 --> 00:57:10.109
but I also admire the way that you make it plain for people.

00:57:10.349 --> 00:57:16.109
So I'm glad that you agreed to come on the podcast and share that with us.

00:57:16.389 --> 00:57:18.829
Well, I'm honored that you asked. Thank you.

00:57:19.249 --> 00:57:22.129
All right. All right, guys. And we're going to go ahead and catch up on the other side.

00:57:22.960 --> 00:57:41.200
Music.

00:57:41.761 --> 00:57:49.121
All right. And we are back. And so now it's time for my next guest, Dr. Stacey Schultz.

00:57:49.701 --> 00:57:55.321
Dr. Stacey Schultz is a mother, seasoned educational leader and professionally

00:57:55.321 --> 00:57:59.861
licensed coach with a proven track record of driving student achievement.

00:57:59.861 --> 00:58:05.641
As president of Educate LLC, a New York City-based company providing innovation

00:58:05.641 --> 00:58:09.161
and transformation coaching to educators,

00:58:09.481 --> 00:58:14.581
she leverages her extensive experience as a teacher and director of special

00:58:14.581 --> 00:58:17.141
education in a K-12 system.

00:58:17.361 --> 00:58:21.821
This experience has equipped her with a deep understanding of the challenges

00:58:21.821 --> 00:58:27.201
faced by learners and a strong ability to build high-performing teams.

00:58:27.201 --> 00:58:33.041
She holds a doctorate in organizational change and leadership from USC and has

00:58:33.041 --> 00:58:38.201
completed her executive certificate program in leadership coaching at Georgetown.

00:58:38.661 --> 00:58:43.921
She is dedicated to continuous learning and data-driven decision making.

00:58:43.921 --> 00:58:49.801
An informed, creative, and results-oriented leader with more than 20 years of experience,

00:58:50.461 --> 00:58:54.801
she is passionate about guiding educators and implementing innovative solutions,

00:58:55.101 --> 00:59:01.781
including practical technology-based tools to foster meaningful learning experiences for all.

00:59:02.501 --> 00:59:08.701
Stacey co-hosts the podcast Educate US and is co-author of the book Transforming

00:59:08.701 --> 00:59:12.581
Collective Power that's due out this year, I believe.

00:59:12.581 --> 00:59:17.701
In her spare time, she enjoys being active outdoors, traveling to new places,

00:59:18.261 --> 00:59:23.861
getting lost in a book or TV series, and spending time with her husband,

00:59:24.221 --> 00:59:25.861
three children, and two dogs.

00:59:26.181 --> 00:59:29.941
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest

00:59:29.941 --> 00:59:33.541
on this podcast, Dr. Stacey Schultz.

00:59:34.320 --> 00:59:44.080
Music.

00:59:44.261 --> 00:59:48.681
All right, Dr. Stacey Schultz. How you doing, ma'am? You doing good?

00:59:49.701 --> 00:59:53.121
Doing good. How about you, Erik? I'm doing all right. I'm doing okay.

00:59:53.121 --> 00:59:57.281
I am honored that you accepted my invitation and decided to come on.

00:59:57.981 --> 01:00:07.701
I have a special spot for educators, teachers, historians, and so you've fallen to those categories.

01:00:08.321 --> 01:00:12.461
And just wanted to highlight some of the work that you're doing and talk about.

01:00:13.841 --> 01:00:17.461
Education in the United States, at least from your perspective of it.

01:00:18.441 --> 01:00:23.321
So what we're going to do is we're going to start this off with a couple of icebreakers.

01:00:24.001 --> 01:00:29.801
So the first icebreaker I do is offer you a quote, and I want you to respond to the quote.

01:00:30.001 --> 01:00:33.761
So the quote is, without risk, there is no growth.

01:00:34.161 --> 01:00:40.281
Without growth, we risk staying exactly where we are. What does that quote mean to you?

01:00:41.222 --> 01:00:45.202
Well, I love that quote because, as you know, the work I do in education,

01:00:45.202 --> 01:00:48.962
we talk a lot about taking risks in our learning.

01:00:49.302 --> 01:00:54.242
Because if we don't take risks, and risk means something different to everyone.

01:00:54.482 --> 01:00:58.522
But to me, it's about really trying something new, getting outside of your comfort

01:00:58.522 --> 01:01:04.082
zone, which really provides you some different level of perspective and experience,

01:01:04.462 --> 01:01:07.702
which I think is part of what that growth means in that quote.

01:01:07.702 --> 01:01:13.362
It's like if we just stay in our myopic view and keep in our own trail,

01:01:13.662 --> 01:01:14.962
then we don't really expand.

01:01:15.422 --> 01:01:22.382
And what's important to know, right, is like our bodies are physically growing and changing every day.

01:01:22.822 --> 01:01:30.382
And we deserve doing and growing in our mind and in our relationships as well.

01:01:30.382 --> 01:01:32.722
And so we need to honor that, I believe.

01:01:33.002 --> 01:01:37.202
And so to really, truly honor that, we need to take some risks.

01:01:38.222 --> 01:01:43.842
Yeah. OK. All right. Now, speaking about risk, I need you to give me we're going

01:01:43.842 --> 01:01:45.422
to do this thing called 20 questions.

01:01:45.722 --> 01:01:49.202
So I need you to give me a number between one and 20.

01:01:50.622 --> 01:01:57.082
One in 2010. All right. What one fact do you wish people who voted differently

01:01:57.082 --> 01:02:02.282
than you in the last election knew? Is it about how you vote,

01:02:02.502 --> 01:02:05.382
about the current state of the world, whatever?

01:02:06.905 --> 01:02:10.285
Well, so, Erik, I do a lot of voter volunteer work.

01:02:10.785 --> 01:02:15.605
And for listener's sake, I do identify with the Democratic Party,

01:02:15.985 --> 01:02:21.145
even though, you know, I do agree in some ways the Democratic Party has gotten

01:02:21.145 --> 01:02:25.945
away from truly identifying with the people, which was the essence of the party.

01:02:26.825 --> 01:02:32.625
But in my voter volunteer, I do a couple things where I support people to find

01:02:32.625 --> 01:02:36.165
ways to get out and vote, get all the things they might need,

01:02:36.305 --> 01:02:38.005
how to make it maybe easier.

01:02:38.345 --> 01:02:42.005
So some people, you know, sometimes I'm talking to people in Georgia and they

01:02:42.005 --> 01:02:47.165
might need just a support like they live really far out and they need to organize a car.

01:02:47.425 --> 01:02:52.325
So I will work with them to get that free transportation so that they can get

01:02:52.325 --> 01:02:56.065
to the voter booth. And or, right, in states where you can vote,

01:02:56.565 --> 01:03:01.685
get early voting sent to your house and vote in and know where to go to do early voting.

01:03:02.245 --> 01:03:11.485
And I also talk to voters who identify as Republican, but have at some point voted Democratic.

01:03:11.985 --> 01:03:20.045
And so a lot of times when I'm on those calls, the things that I hear are,

01:03:20.045 --> 01:03:23.425
they're not discerning facts for themselves.

01:03:23.745 --> 01:03:28.365
A lot of times they're listening to the people around them, right?

01:03:28.565 --> 01:03:33.085
The echo chamber that they might be a part of on social media and all of those

01:03:33.085 --> 01:03:40.405
things. So I think one fact I would like them to know is to please fact check yourself.

01:03:41.185 --> 01:03:47.365
Go and if someone's telling you something, check it out yourself and build your

01:03:47.365 --> 01:03:48.925
own understanding of it.

01:03:49.005 --> 01:03:55.005
Because there are so many times I'm in these dialogues and I'm like, well, can we pause?

01:03:55.665 --> 01:04:00.005
And I take more of a coaching effect. I'm not slamming anything down someone's throat.

01:04:00.225 --> 01:04:04.485
But I take more of a coaching conversation and I'll ask, you know,

01:04:04.565 --> 01:04:07.705
can we just pause and I want to play this back to you.

01:04:08.105 --> 01:04:10.745
From your standpoint, does that make sense?

01:04:11.668 --> 01:04:17.948
Or let's play that scenario out a little more. What might that really look like?

01:04:18.388 --> 01:04:24.428
And so that's the fact I would want people to really think about. Okay.

01:04:25.188 --> 01:04:27.628
Why did you decide to become an educator?

01:04:30.508 --> 01:04:34.828
So I tell this story often, but I didn't want to be an educator at first.

01:04:36.248 --> 01:04:43.168
But I always was one. So when I grew up in Philly, and of course,

01:04:43.328 --> 01:04:46.168
I say of course, but I think this is true for most Philadelphia people,

01:04:46.488 --> 01:04:48.228
your basketball courts,

01:04:48.628 --> 01:04:53.208
right, the courts is what we usually call them, are really instrumental in your

01:04:53.208 --> 01:04:54.828
social life as you're growing up.

01:04:55.208 --> 01:04:58.468
It's where you meet, you play, you have a lot of pickup games,

01:04:58.588 --> 01:05:01.848
right, and a lot of people participate in it, and it's a lot of fun.

01:05:02.528 --> 01:05:05.348
Our basketball courts when i

01:05:05.348 --> 01:05:08.268
started going right on my own had a

01:05:08.268 --> 01:05:11.088
lot of glass a lot of like drug needles and a

01:05:11.088 --> 01:05:13.728
lot of things that and there was a lot of

01:05:13.728 --> 01:05:18.248
kind of violence happening there instead of what we were all really trying to

01:05:18.248 --> 01:05:24.408
gather around to to be together and play you know basketball you know run games

01:05:24.408 --> 01:05:32.408
and so i wrote the 76ers i wrote to the recreational department i kind of I did this reach out.

01:05:32.608 --> 01:05:35.608
I organized a cleanup of all the people that were there. I'm like,

01:05:35.728 --> 01:05:38.948
let's clean this up. Let's get this going. The Sixers came out.

01:05:39.088 --> 01:05:40.588
They like redid our court.

01:05:40.848 --> 01:05:42.728
They painted it, put new hoops up.

01:05:43.208 --> 01:05:46.628
And we got new lights. The rec department put new lights in.

01:05:46.848 --> 01:05:52.468
And so it really changed like the momentum of what was going on in that space.

01:05:52.828 --> 01:05:57.628
And it became more about what we want, what we all really wanted it to be about. Right.

01:05:57.848 --> 01:06:03.588
And it provided us a safe space to do that. And then I noticed there was a building

01:06:03.588 --> 01:06:05.248
that was on the property.

01:06:05.388 --> 01:06:08.348
I was like, well, can we use this building to do some peer educating?

01:06:09.208 --> 01:06:13.468
And, you know, and at the time, I think it was 16 or 17. I can't quite remember.

01:06:13.708 --> 01:06:18.868
But I was like, can we use this building to do some peer educating?

01:06:19.008 --> 01:06:22.348
Because teenage pregnancy was something that we were seeing a lot of.

01:06:22.468 --> 01:06:26.428
We were also seeing, as I mentioned, drug use, right? And so can we do that?

01:06:26.548 --> 01:06:31.588
And the rec department said, sure. So I was able to host these peer,

01:06:31.848 --> 01:06:33.768
because I was certified, right?

01:06:33.848 --> 01:06:37.068
And I also brought in other certified people to do some different trainings.

01:06:37.368 --> 01:06:42.568
And it really, well, first it was a lot of fun, but it really built a different

01:06:42.568 --> 01:06:44.708
kind of community dynamic.

01:06:44.888 --> 01:06:48.608
And it's something that was always really important to me, was that,

01:06:48.748 --> 01:06:50.648
like collective care, community.

01:06:51.188 --> 01:06:56.708
And so when I got out of college, I don't know why I was really adamant about

01:06:56.708 --> 01:06:59.468
not being a teacher. And I was like, no, no, no.

01:07:00.108 --> 01:07:03.908
But after about a year out of college, I was like, you know, actually...

01:07:05.196 --> 01:07:09.876
Being a teacher really allows me to live into values that are really important to me.

01:07:10.576 --> 01:07:16.336
And so I did, in fact, become a teacher from there. And one of the things that

01:07:16.336 --> 01:07:18.516
stood out to me, I had a baby brother.

01:07:19.336 --> 01:07:25.856
Both of my brothers have passed, but my baby brother struggled through school always.

01:07:25.956 --> 01:07:29.276
And teachers just didn't know how to help him.

01:07:29.456 --> 01:07:33.756
And he was an extremely good football player, so he got passed through.

01:07:33.756 --> 01:07:37.896
And he even got a ton of scholarships to college and all of this stuff.

01:07:37.956 --> 01:07:43.676
And he was like, no, no, no, college is not for me because the learning was so hard for him.

01:07:43.856 --> 01:07:48.896
And it was hard for him, I think, because the educators, the adults in the building

01:07:48.896 --> 01:07:50.156
weren't meeting his needs.

01:07:50.156 --> 01:07:54.236
And so when I decided to become a teacher, I decided I would become a special

01:07:54.236 --> 01:07:59.416
education teacher to really support students who weren't necessarily getting

01:07:59.416 --> 01:08:04.876
their needs met and helping to provide a new way of thinking about teaching

01:08:04.876 --> 01:08:06.376
and learning into communities.

01:08:07.396 --> 01:08:10.656
Wow. Yeah. That's a cool story.

01:08:10.796 --> 01:08:17.516
So you were, how were you when you asked the 76ers to help with the basketball club?

01:08:17.876 --> 01:08:20.176
I was 14. Wow.

01:08:21.016 --> 01:08:24.756
Wow. That's powerful stuff. That's pretty cool.

01:08:25.396 --> 01:08:31.096
All right. So I'm going to ask this question and then I'm going to throw in

01:08:31.096 --> 01:08:34.696
some descriptives to kind of fill it out.

01:08:34.896 --> 01:08:37.576
So it's really three questions in one.

01:08:37.816 --> 01:08:43.416
All right. So the question is, how does being blank make you a better educator?

01:08:43.856 --> 01:08:47.716
So the first descriptor I'll fill in is a mom.

01:08:50.576 --> 01:08:54.376
You know, that is a really good question.

01:08:54.776 --> 01:08:59.356
And the reason I'm like pausing and one of my own children, so I have three

01:08:59.356 --> 01:09:05.536
children, my middle child receives special education for behavioral issues.

01:09:05.536 --> 01:09:13.076
He also, you know, has diagnoses that are related to like depression and ADHD

01:09:13.076 --> 01:09:15.456
and OCD and some other things.

01:09:16.336 --> 01:09:25.076
And for me, it has clashed a little bit of being a mom and being an educator because,

01:09:25.456 --> 01:09:29.376
and I know this isn't exactly your question, but it comes up there's a lot of

01:09:29.376 --> 01:09:35.116
tension in it for me because I see a lot of what's happening in the school for him.

01:09:35.116 --> 01:09:40.976
And of course, I advocate for him. And I have also empathy for the educators.

01:09:41.316 --> 01:09:48.556
However, I struggle a little because I know some of what they're doing is not in the best way.

01:09:50.036 --> 01:09:53.636
It's not the best for my son, but also for other kids.

01:09:53.856 --> 01:09:56.596
And it's a point that is really frustrating for me.

01:09:56.796 --> 01:10:00.536
And I've tried to raise it in different ways over the years.

01:10:00.576 --> 01:10:05.516
And one thing I always get is we just don't talk to parents about this stuff. And it's like, okay.

01:10:06.296 --> 01:10:11.496
But so it's been a little challenging. But the question really was,

01:10:11.596 --> 01:10:14.356
right, how does being a mom make me a better educator?

01:10:14.636 --> 01:10:18.536
I think it is that perspective, though, right? So flipping that,

01:10:19.156 --> 01:10:22.576
having that perspective of being a parent,

01:10:22.796 --> 01:10:27.676
right, and even being on the other side of some assumptions that you hear educators

01:10:27.676 --> 01:10:34.736
have about parents, I feel like I have now evidence from my own experience of

01:10:34.736 --> 01:10:37.036
how to disrupt some of that thinking better.

01:10:37.036 --> 01:10:43.216
You know, I think there are stories that teachers can tell themselves about

01:10:43.216 --> 01:10:48.776
a relationship with a parent or why they might not be showing up, you know.

01:10:48.856 --> 01:10:52.996
And I remember talking to another educator like, I can't show up at 9 a.m.

01:10:53.196 --> 01:10:57.216
Like, I have a job too, right? And then there's always this,

01:10:57.376 --> 01:11:02.976
and not that on a personal note, I always saw that for parents because my parents,

01:11:03.116 --> 01:11:07.316
you know, worked, my dad had multiple jobs, right? So he wasn't showing up at school either.

01:11:07.496 --> 01:11:13.196
And it really did bother me when I saw educators have a preconceived notion

01:11:13.196 --> 01:11:15.976
about whether or not education was important to my family.

01:11:16.116 --> 01:11:18.196
It's like, no, that's, you're missing the point. Right.

01:11:18.956 --> 01:11:23.436
But so I think there's a lot. But now I think I can tell the story from my own

01:11:23.436 --> 01:11:28.676
perspective of, hey, here's what we need to be thinking about.

01:11:28.916 --> 01:11:34.556
But I think just as a human, I always took almost like a nurturing approach

01:11:34.556 --> 01:11:38.376
to being an educator anyway, that and taking it very seriously,

01:11:38.376 --> 01:11:40.136
that these are other people's kids.

01:11:41.036 --> 01:11:46.016
And, you know, Lisa Delbert wrote that book, right, many years ago about other

01:11:46.016 --> 01:11:47.616
people's children, she named it.

01:11:47.756 --> 01:11:52.536
And even before I read that book, that always resonated with me of like,

01:11:52.676 --> 01:11:55.296
this is a community experience.

01:11:55.296 --> 01:12:02.416
And if I am not including parents, if not including family, then I'm not doing this child justice.

01:12:02.416 --> 01:12:05.756
So that, I think, in some ways,

01:12:05.876 --> 01:12:13.016
it helps me feel clearer on what I'm able to support educators in thinking about,

01:12:13.076 --> 01:12:15.696
because I have my own perspective now on it,

01:12:15.816 --> 01:12:22.456
but always operating from a place that acknowledged and respected that there's

01:12:22.456 --> 01:12:26.236
family involved and they're important in this ecosphere.

01:12:27.156 --> 01:12:31.016
Yeah. How does being an athlete make you a better educator?

01:12:32.059 --> 01:12:39.159
You know, some of my team who are not athletes are over my athletic metaphors,

01:12:39.159 --> 01:12:47.899
but I don't think you need to be a—I think people don't respect the fact that

01:12:47.899 --> 01:12:50.539
many people are actually athletes in some shape or form.

01:12:50.539 --> 01:12:57.459
Because to me, being an athlete is about being dedicated to something,

01:12:57.719 --> 01:13:04.119
to hone and grow in your practice in that and have a relentlessness about that, right?

01:13:04.239 --> 01:13:06.879
About I will get better, I will improve.

01:13:08.079 --> 01:13:13.379
And learning to give yourself grace, especially as I get older as an athlete.

01:13:13.379 --> 01:13:18.239
And there are just days, right, that, you know what, that is achy and it hurts.

01:13:18.239 --> 01:13:21.379
And so I'm going to back off a little or I'm going to shorten that up.

01:13:21.539 --> 01:13:27.559
And so I think there's so many lessons in being an athlete about what does it

01:13:27.559 --> 01:13:31.119
mean to persevere through pain,

01:13:31.579 --> 01:13:39.059
through tough moments, to understand that it's not always about getting it right, but about growing,

01:13:39.799 --> 01:13:42.399
right, and that there's always an opportunity for that.

01:13:42.399 --> 01:13:48.379
I also just think being an athlete teaches you a lot about how to navigate and

01:13:48.379 --> 01:13:54.879
work with others, which has always been important in my work as an educator to me and a value of mine.

01:13:55.699 --> 01:14:01.999
Yeah. All right. Finally, how does being a restorative justice advocate make you a better educator?

01:14:02.659 --> 01:14:08.799
You know, I, gosh, there's so many layers to that question, I feel like,

01:14:08.879 --> 01:14:13.979
but at the base of it is just that perspective you bring to it,

01:14:14.139 --> 01:14:20.339
is that the situation isn't always as it seems, right?

01:14:20.339 --> 01:14:24.119
What you can see is only part of what happens.

01:14:24.519 --> 01:14:32.799
So how do you really expand your thinking to understanding what else is there? What else happened?

01:14:33.239 --> 01:14:40.519
And generally speaking, right, because I've always done behavioral work in a lot of ways.

01:14:41.299 --> 01:14:45.539
Behavior is communicating something, right?

01:14:45.679 --> 01:14:49.999
And everybody communicates that differently. And everybody has their own spectrum.

01:14:50.339 --> 01:14:52.459
And so really trying to understand.

01:14:53.583 --> 01:14:59.683
You know, and helping that other people understand the impact that that has on other people too.

01:15:00.043 --> 01:15:03.903
So there's a, how do I understand myself better and what happened here?

01:15:04.063 --> 01:15:09.723
And giving someone a platform for exploring that in a meaningful way.

01:15:10.023 --> 01:15:13.503
And then also, well, how does that impact others?

01:15:13.523 --> 01:15:16.883
And what maybe do I need to learn and think about next time?

01:15:16.883 --> 01:15:23.583
Because it really, it further allowed me as an educator to embrace that value

01:15:23.583 --> 01:15:31.083
of community and create stronger communities by shifting that thinking for all of us, not just myself,

01:15:31.363 --> 01:15:33.603
but asking different questions, right?

01:15:33.603 --> 01:15:36.183
And now I'm, by all means, have slipped up.

01:15:36.303 --> 01:15:38.963
Sometimes a kid does something, you're like, what did you do that for?

01:15:39.383 --> 01:15:41.323
Sometimes it's just like, what is what?

01:15:41.843 --> 01:15:47.923
But most of the time, I'm able to pause and have a different conversation,

01:15:47.923 --> 01:15:52.103
which allows the student to respond differently.

01:15:52.363 --> 01:15:57.443
Because now they're not feeling accused. They're not feeling blame.

01:15:57.903 --> 01:16:02.243
And which often leads to shame, which leads to acting out a lot of times.

01:16:02.243 --> 01:16:05.763
It was more like, let's figure out what happened here together,

01:16:05.763 --> 01:16:10.083
you know, and take a pause for that and make space for it.

01:16:10.703 --> 01:16:14.843
Yeah. All right. What is your strongest value?

01:16:15.323 --> 01:16:22.143
Daring to lead, being open, humble, and reflective, being innovative, or showing respect?

01:16:22.863 --> 01:16:25.443
Ooh, you took from the educate values.

01:16:27.103 --> 01:16:32.463
Yes, those are the values that educate lives by. You know, I'm going to go with

01:16:32.463 --> 01:16:33.663
open, humble, and reflective.

01:16:35.507 --> 01:16:40.427
I think, you know, it's a journey, really, to that.

01:16:40.587 --> 01:16:43.787
And I think when you can do that, you can do those other things.

01:16:44.167 --> 01:16:48.967
You can be more respectful, almost as I was just talking about with the restorative justice, right?

01:16:49.027 --> 01:16:53.927
If you can understand yourself, you can also understand the impact you're having

01:16:53.927 --> 01:16:56.907
on others and consider that.

01:16:57.747 --> 01:17:02.447
I think what it means to be humble,

01:17:02.887 --> 01:17:11.407
right, and learn to make space for other people and understand that there's

01:17:11.407 --> 01:17:14.287
so much beauty in what everybody brings to the table.

01:17:14.287 --> 01:17:19.767
Like it really pushes your thinking on what's possible, right?

01:17:19.827 --> 01:17:23.687
So I love that, that open and humbleness that we're all bringing something so

01:17:23.687 --> 01:17:27.007
beautiful here and being open to what we might create.

01:17:27.187 --> 01:17:30.547
Like Adrienne Murray Brown talks a lot about an emergent strategy,

01:17:30.707 --> 01:17:34.827
right? Like who's here right now is creating something unique.

01:17:35.027 --> 01:17:39.147
And to me, that's part of what open and humble is also about.

01:17:39.147 --> 01:17:46.107
And then reflective, which I think it's more than reflective to me because I

01:17:46.107 --> 01:17:47.227
think there needs to be action.

01:17:47.447 --> 01:17:52.767
I think it's great if you acknowledge these things, but then what accountability

01:17:52.767 --> 01:17:56.607
and responsibility are you taking to those things you're reflecting on?

01:17:57.387 --> 01:18:01.847
Yeah. All right. So you mentioned the name. What is Educate LLC?

01:18:02.607 --> 01:18:08.727
And in explaining that, kind of going to defining what the innovation spectrum is.

01:18:09.400 --> 01:18:15.200
Yeah. So I'll first tell you, Educate LLC is now actually Educate because we

01:18:15.200 --> 01:18:20.600
were acquired by a company called ChangeForce and they do change management,

01:18:20.600 --> 01:18:23.980
mostly in higher education and corporate space.

01:18:24.160 --> 01:18:27.340
So we're their first like kind of K to 12 arm.

01:18:27.540 --> 01:18:32.680
And so we have kept the branding and the work of Educate itself.

01:18:33.080 --> 01:18:38.440
And so you asked what we do, right? Yes.

01:18:39.280 --> 01:18:43.700
Sorry, I always get caught up in like, I have to explain that because we haven't shown that yet.

01:18:44.200 --> 01:18:51.120
And so we at the at the floor, what we do is really build partnerships and relationships

01:18:51.120 --> 01:18:54.080
with schools to help them realize their potential.

01:18:54.620 --> 01:18:58.140
Right. That create meaningful learning, relevant experience,

01:18:58.480 --> 01:19:03.000
relevant learning experiences for all people in our community.

01:19:03.300 --> 01:19:06.760
So for us, that's family. Yeah.

01:19:06.840 --> 01:19:12.100
That's school leaders, that's staff, all the various staff, that's the teachers

01:19:12.100 --> 01:19:14.000
and the students, right?

01:19:14.100 --> 01:19:18.740
And so we really work at the point of supporting directly adults.

01:19:19.160 --> 01:19:24.660
We have all been educators ourselves. We have all been leaders in some capacity ourselves.

01:19:24.660 --> 01:19:31.380
And so we are coming from a very rich and diverse teaching and learning backgrounds

01:19:31.380 --> 01:19:35.900
that allow us to bring a lot of efficacy to the work that we're doing.

01:19:36.060 --> 01:19:40.980
And we like to call that collective efficacy because we also see ourselves as a whole team.

01:19:41.180 --> 01:19:45.580
Like when you get an educate coach to support you in your journey,

01:19:45.840 --> 01:19:48.720
you're getting the whole educate bench.

01:19:48.920 --> 01:19:51.440
You're not just getting one person.

01:19:51.720 --> 01:19:53.980
And so we really emphasize that.

01:19:54.772 --> 01:20:00.952
We also, at the inception of Educate, it was about bringing technology into

01:20:00.952 --> 01:20:02.152
classrooms meaningfully.

01:20:02.432 --> 01:20:06.992
We have expanded beyond that because it's like technology is a vehicle.

01:20:06.992 --> 01:20:12.052
So it's definitely a part of our forte, but it's only a part of it.

01:20:12.212 --> 01:20:17.172
And with AI, because there's so many implications for teaching and learning

01:20:17.172 --> 01:20:23.012
with AI, we have been supporting our schools and really diving deep in what does that mean to them?

01:20:23.292 --> 01:20:26.752
What does that look like? Like, how do they think about it? How do they challenge

01:20:26.752 --> 01:20:30.752
some things? How do they leverage and work with AI?

01:20:31.112 --> 01:20:36.772
And we also created our own AI product called Unlock AI with educators,

01:20:36.772 --> 01:20:41.152
because something really unique about us is we are in schools every day. Our team, right?

01:20:41.232 --> 01:20:47.032
We're in schools with educators every day. So we're able to truly build this

01:20:47.032 --> 01:20:54.172
alongside of educators and consistently we innovate with our educators and to

01:20:54.172 --> 01:20:55.492
really meet their needs.

01:20:55.492 --> 01:21:03.612
And so it's LLM agnostic, but it's built in these closed chambers, so to speak,

01:21:03.912 --> 01:21:11.332
with not only the codification of our research, which is leveraged in the innovation

01:21:11.332 --> 01:21:16.872
spectrum and all of the 25 years of our work and experience, but also the schools.

01:21:16.872 --> 01:21:23.172
So each school that engages with Unlock can put in their sort of philosophies,

01:21:23.472 --> 01:21:28.712
scholarship, et cetera, that they leverage to really influence teaching and

01:21:28.712 --> 01:21:29.532
learning in their school.

01:21:30.392 --> 01:21:35.092
Yeah. So what does transformation in the classroom look like?

01:21:36.048 --> 01:21:40.868
So, to us, you know, we love to meet people where they're at.

01:21:41.088 --> 01:21:45.868
So, what we and what we're also saying, though, is that as educators,

01:21:46.328 --> 01:21:51.588
our responsibility is to ensure that students are ready for their future,

01:21:51.588 --> 01:21:55.168
which means what is the future they want to realize.

01:21:55.308 --> 01:21:58.388
And sometimes kids don't know that. So, at the minimum for us,

01:21:58.508 --> 01:22:03.308
it's about them being able to recognize economic prosperity that provides them

01:22:03.308 --> 01:22:07.668
with a life, right? That they can appreciate.

01:22:07.928 --> 01:22:10.608
And most students can acknowledge what that means to them.

01:22:11.028 --> 01:22:14.368
So they might not be able to say, hey, this is how I want to get there,

01:22:14.488 --> 01:22:16.728
but this is how I want to live, right?

01:22:16.868 --> 01:22:19.808
And so we know we can ground in that.

01:22:19.808 --> 01:22:23.228
And then working backwards from there of, okay,

01:22:23.448 --> 01:22:28.248
so if this is what the future is calling, right, these are the kinds of skills

01:22:28.248 --> 01:22:33.548
and capacities that students need, and how that we keep on top of how is that

01:22:33.548 --> 01:22:37.928
changing, which is changing rapidly these days, right?

01:22:37.928 --> 01:22:40.508
How do we backtrack and support?

01:22:40.868 --> 01:22:45.908
Okay, and here's where instruction is now. What does that mean about how this

01:22:45.908 --> 01:22:52.768
classroom needs to transform and evolve to meet that need to really ensure students

01:22:52.768 --> 01:22:55.648
are able to live into the future they want?

01:22:55.648 --> 01:23:02.388
And so that's really what, I know it's not a direct answer, but we're working

01:23:02.388 --> 01:23:06.428
with people that are at so many different levels instructionally and classrooms

01:23:06.428 --> 01:23:09.568
look so very different across the schools,

01:23:09.788 --> 01:23:12.088
across the country, across the world.

01:23:12.368 --> 01:23:17.308
So we really acknowledge that and meet people where they're at. Yeah.

01:23:18.008 --> 01:23:25.868
All right. So how will the dissolution of the U.S. Department of Education impact your work?

01:23:26.947 --> 01:23:30.767
Some of that is still, I think, yet to be seen.

01:23:31.547 --> 01:23:36.487
I think immediately like our world. Some of, and I've spoken,

01:23:36.687 --> 01:23:41.307
I've gone on different news channels and podcasts, and I've spoken to,

01:23:41.707 --> 01:23:47.767
my concern is what the Department of Education, and it's a pretty new department.

01:23:47.767 --> 01:23:51.427
I know the rhetoric is, oh, it's been around, it's been around, it's been around.

01:23:51.527 --> 01:23:56.287
It has not been around that long, right? So, but what it was,

01:23:56.467 --> 01:24:03.627
and what it was trying to achieve is ensuring, right, that there is a standard

01:24:03.627 --> 01:24:05.447
of education across this country.

01:24:06.067 --> 01:24:10.887
And whether or not I agree with how they were creating that standard or the

01:24:10.887 --> 01:24:14.887
policy, because I'll say not everything they were doing do I agree with.

01:24:14.887 --> 01:24:23.327
I think there are ways to better create, you know, equity within education across this country.

01:24:23.327 --> 01:24:27.407
But the fact that that's what they were striving for, they were striving to

01:24:27.407 --> 01:24:33.367
have, this is the benchmark for how our young people of our country,

01:24:33.807 --> 01:24:35.767
right, can be tomorrow's leaders.

01:24:35.767 --> 01:24:40.427
And that is, I know, aspirational, and there's a lot of messiness,

01:24:40.867 --> 01:24:46.687
but that is what worries me most, is by taking that away, there's no benchmark.

01:24:47.207 --> 01:24:50.747
Then who's defining that benchmark? A private organization?

01:24:50.747 --> 01:24:56.207
But how do we trust that they're doing that in the best interest of everyone

01:24:56.207 --> 01:24:59.287
around them and not in their own interests, right?

01:24:59.287 --> 01:25:04.007
The other thing that worries me about dissolving the Department of Education

01:25:04.007 --> 01:25:10.227
is not having someone investigate the different civil rights violations that

01:25:10.227 --> 01:25:13.667
might be happening in different parts of the country,

01:25:13.807 --> 01:25:15.867
in different classrooms, in different schools.

01:25:15.867 --> 01:25:21.067
Than, you know, if you're, and every state still has one, right?

01:25:21.247 --> 01:25:25.707
But there is some national sort of, again, kind of coming back to this national

01:25:25.707 --> 01:25:30.147
standard that we might have for what should be happening in our schools.

01:25:30.347 --> 01:25:36.367
And so I think that's really important as a country, any country,

01:25:36.587 --> 01:25:43.147
right, to have something like that, some kind of body governing that and ensuring that.

01:25:43.147 --> 01:25:47.747
And also one other thing that the Department of Education.

01:25:48.007 --> 01:25:53.267
Aside from title funding, which I do believe, you know, other groups could potentially

01:25:53.267 --> 01:25:58.487
monitor, but again, kind of coming back to without tying it to equity,

01:25:58.727 --> 01:26:03.127
how will this money get distributed is a concern.

01:26:03.127 --> 01:26:11.667
So these are these are real concerns that will impact schools and a lot of schools

01:26:11.667 --> 01:26:13.827
that don't even realize that it's going to impact them.

01:26:13.927 --> 01:26:20.647
And in fact, when Trump originally froze the title funding right earlier this summer.

01:26:21.699 --> 01:26:27.299
I think states all over were going crazy, right? Because they were like, wait a minute.

01:26:27.819 --> 01:26:36.099
And so many states that actually voted for Trump were going to be deeply impacted by that.

01:26:36.459 --> 01:26:41.059
Because there's a lot of disparity in all of our states, unfortunately.

01:26:41.379 --> 01:26:46.399
But as far as economic disparity, there's a lot within kind of our Midwest part

01:26:46.399 --> 01:26:52.679
of the country. And they get a lot of federal funding because they don't have a lot of state funding.

01:26:53.399 --> 01:26:56.439
So, you know, that funding was released.

01:26:56.439 --> 01:27:02.139
I'll be really curious as to see how does that get allocated in the future.

01:27:02.139 --> 01:27:06.399
One thing they talk about is going back to the States, giving the money directly

01:27:06.399 --> 01:27:09.739
to them to figure out. I mean, you know, we'll see.

01:27:09.919 --> 01:27:15.539
We'll have to watch and see how that gets disseminated as we go forward.

01:27:15.719 --> 01:27:22.319
But there's definitely a growing concern, you know, around so many pieces of

01:27:22.319 --> 01:27:25.479
this that I do think it's just very important.

01:27:25.479 --> 01:27:30.939
And countries that are, you know, outpacing us as far as students being ready

01:27:30.939 --> 01:27:38.179
and jobs and et cetera, have very strong national systems.

01:27:38.979 --> 01:27:44.059
And we don't have a national system, actually. We have a state-by-state system

01:27:44.059 --> 01:27:46.879
that has some national governing, some.

01:27:46.879 --> 01:27:51.539
And that's another thing that people don't seem to understand is actually we

01:27:51.539 --> 01:27:52.939
don't really even have, like,

01:27:53.139 --> 01:27:56.079
that department is getting sort

01:27:56.079 --> 01:28:00.939
of unfairly judged, too, because they also don't have the power, right,

01:28:01.059 --> 01:28:05.939
that other maybe national agencies do, because it really is,

01:28:06.039 --> 01:28:09.299
for the most part, most things are state, you know,

01:28:09.599 --> 01:28:12.239
laws for education. Yeah.

01:28:12.959 --> 01:28:17.859
All right. Which congressional legislation will have the longest effect,

01:28:18.059 --> 01:28:23.639
the Big Beautiful Bill or the Educational Choice for Children Act?

01:28:24.279 --> 01:28:29.059
Well, you know, they put it in the Big Beautiful Bill. Yeah. Right? The Act.

01:28:29.499 --> 01:28:34.099
So since it's a part of that, I'm going to go with Big Beautiful Bill. Okay.

01:28:34.919 --> 01:28:41.279
Because it really, what was really discouraging to me is that that Big Beautiful

01:28:41.279 --> 01:28:45.959
Bill had so many parts that were so harmful to people.

01:28:47.379 --> 01:28:48.979
And we will...

01:28:50.056 --> 01:28:53.636
See those trickling effects, I think, for years and years to come.

01:28:54.236 --> 01:28:59.256
Because repassing a bill like that to undo all of those pieces at once,

01:28:59.256 --> 01:29:02.036
I think will be hard to do.

01:29:02.876 --> 01:29:09.956
They often say, right, like policy people, like if they hadn't put the ECCA

01:29:09.956 --> 01:29:14.116
in a big, beautiful bill, it wouldn't have gotten passed, actually.

01:29:14.376 --> 01:29:19.916
So it was kind of passed in the shadows because there were really important

01:29:19.916 --> 01:29:23.736
issues like health care at the forefront, right?

01:29:23.856 --> 01:29:29.696
And other issues that that got a little overshadowed and not as talked about,

01:29:29.876 --> 01:29:33.636
which is, you know, unfortunate in a lot of ways, because I do believe health

01:29:33.636 --> 01:29:36.956
care and education are so tightly wrapped, right?

01:29:37.056 --> 01:29:43.156
Especially when we think about education and the potential of it giving children

01:29:43.156 --> 01:29:48.156
the opportunity to have economic prosperity. And we know when people have economic

01:29:48.156 --> 01:29:50.216
prosperity, they have less health issues, right?

01:29:50.316 --> 01:29:55.236
So we're kind of in this cycle into, you know, we need to talk more and more

01:29:55.236 --> 01:29:56.636
about how they intersect.

01:29:56.776 --> 01:30:02.696
And I do appreciate there are agencies out there that do that and bring that

01:30:02.696 --> 01:30:05.556
whole as like a whole justice issue, right?

01:30:05.696 --> 01:30:10.556
There's like many parts to that. And I truly support that, like the Urban League,

01:30:10.676 --> 01:30:12.216
right, that does a lot of that work.

01:30:14.336 --> 01:30:19.016
So I think it will just have a

01:30:19.016 --> 01:30:21.796
lot of what I see as writing

01:30:21.796 --> 01:30:25.876
on the wall it's like how are we privatizing more and more of this stuff which

01:30:25.876 --> 01:30:36.836
just further creates economic burden on people that is really unjust yeah so

01:30:36.836 --> 01:30:39.856
what is the biggest challenge in education right now?

01:30:41.896 --> 01:30:44.656
I mean I think it's

01:30:44.656 --> 01:30:50.796
the age-old challenge you know the the model is antiquated and has been for

01:30:50.796 --> 01:30:58.196
some time and that's not new information and but when you when you really haven't

01:30:58.196 --> 01:31:02.296
been able to break out of the box of that,

01:31:03.253 --> 01:31:08.633
I think, you know, you're just perpetuating the challenges over and over again, right?

01:31:08.673 --> 01:31:13.813
You're not really disrupting any cycle that is not working.

01:31:14.113 --> 01:31:17.813
Now, even within that, though, I think there have been, I want to acknowledge,

01:31:18.093 --> 01:31:23.493
there are some schools in pockets everywhere that are doing amazing things, right?

01:31:23.613 --> 01:31:27.573
Even within the confines of those challenges, right?

01:31:27.773 --> 01:31:31.553
They have found and created communities. And I was a part of one,

01:31:31.733 --> 01:31:34.373
Eastside Community High School in the Lower East Side in New York City.

01:31:34.633 --> 01:31:38.493
It was a consortium school. And it very much was like that. It was like a lot

01:31:38.493 --> 01:31:41.533
of innovative cycles, a lot of opportunity for students.

01:31:41.813 --> 01:31:46.093
And in fact, like they measured like what are students doing five years after graduation?

01:31:46.493 --> 01:31:49.613
Not our measure was not can we get students to graduate?

01:31:49.813 --> 01:31:54.653
Our measure was what success are they having five years out of the school?

01:31:55.213 --> 01:31:59.653
And I think that creates a different environment, right? If that's the end goal,

01:31:59.913 --> 01:32:05.033
or not, I shouldn't say end goal, but if that's how you're really looking at, have we done our jobs?

01:32:05.393 --> 01:32:10.653
You really think differently about, well, what does this school experience look

01:32:10.653 --> 01:32:17.693
like within these confines? And I think that is that kind of thinking is not happening enough.

01:32:17.913 --> 01:32:22.813
And I also think it's challenging thinking, right? It's challenging to think about that.

01:32:22.953 --> 01:32:28.833
So how I think it needs personally a heavier hand of disrupting some of these

01:32:28.833 --> 01:32:34.753
confines that we have to allow for communities and, you know,

01:32:35.213 --> 01:32:40.873
schools to really redefine what is needed for our students.

01:32:41.633 --> 01:32:45.913
And some of that is going to have to shift on like, well, how are we holding schools accountable?

01:32:46.113 --> 01:32:51.993
Because this also locks us in if we're currently measure school accountability

01:32:51.993 --> 01:32:54.613
on whether or not they're passing the standardized test.

01:32:55.359 --> 01:32:59.859
And we know a lot of the challenges with these standardized tests.

01:33:00.519 --> 01:33:05.999
And yet, we still haven't worked to shift that, right?

01:33:06.099 --> 01:33:12.599
And it's a big machine, like similar in healthcare to the insurance machine that's out there.

01:33:13.199 --> 01:33:18.119
Education, the testing machine is deep. And there's a lot of money wrapped in that.

01:33:18.279 --> 01:33:22.139
There's curriculum wrapped in that. There's a lot to untangle there.

01:33:22.299 --> 01:33:26.019
So to really have lawmakers say, you know what? We're going to shift the way

01:33:26.019 --> 01:33:30.099
we measure meaningful outcomes for schools.

01:33:30.099 --> 01:33:38.759
If we can go there and schools have some flexibility to define how they get

01:33:38.759 --> 01:33:40.719
there with their community, right?

01:33:41.099 --> 01:33:47.679
I think we get to shift education. We're just so stuck in so many ways.

01:33:47.679 --> 01:33:51.959
And again, I want to acknowledge those pockets out there that are not stuck

01:33:51.959 --> 01:33:54.179
and really are serving students well.

01:33:54.859 --> 01:34:02.279
But I also think, on a personal note, some of the heavy layer of school choice

01:34:02.279 --> 01:34:06.119
is actually creating a distraction from that.

01:34:06.619 --> 01:34:11.459
And I've gone into some of the, well, first of all, what you also see from our

01:34:11.459 --> 01:34:15.359
percentage-wise, people taking advantage of that are often people that were

01:34:15.359 --> 01:34:17.159
already sending their kids to private schools.

01:34:18.779 --> 01:34:23.779
And on top of that When you go to these schools It's not like There's not Very

01:34:23.779 --> 01:34:29.679
different teaching And learning happening Actually And so You know There's a lot of,

01:34:30.423 --> 01:34:34.923
I just don't see how the end in a lot of the study and research, right?

01:34:35.023 --> 01:34:39.023
They show in places where they've already thought school choice that it hasn't

01:34:39.023 --> 01:34:42.403
really changed student outcomes.

01:34:42.863 --> 01:34:49.343
So I think it's more of a distraction rather than addressing some of the bigger issues.

01:34:49.823 --> 01:34:54.303
It just creates a distraction like, well, natural competition of capitalism

01:34:54.303 --> 01:34:55.843
will make it better. I'm like, what?

01:34:56.143 --> 01:34:59.143
How? Has that ever made anything better? Yeah.

01:35:00.083 --> 01:35:03.423
You know, it's just an interesting thing to me. I'm like, wait, what?

01:35:03.643 --> 01:35:08.583
Why do we think that? And because a lot of people that are out there advocating

01:35:08.583 --> 01:35:13.683
for that aren't and maybe never have truly experienced what schools are like

01:35:13.683 --> 01:35:16.063
around this country and really gone into them.

01:35:16.203 --> 01:35:20.523
And no, I don't think for most of them that there's a real knowing,

01:35:20.723 --> 01:35:21.763
actually, of what's happening.

01:35:22.743 --> 01:35:27.643
Yeah. All right. Well, Dr. Stacey Schultz, we'll have to end it there.

01:35:28.003 --> 01:35:31.423
But I do appreciate the work that you're doing.

01:35:31.623 --> 01:35:37.723
I know that through Educate that you're going to continue to find solutions

01:35:37.723 --> 01:35:40.843
to address some of the concerns we talked about today.

01:35:41.203 --> 01:35:47.123
But I just want to commend you for now that I've gotten to talk to you a little

01:35:47.123 --> 01:35:53.943
bit, your lifetime of service and commitment and hope that you have much continued success. Seth.

01:35:54.643 --> 01:35:59.183
So thank you again for what you do and thank you for coming on the podcast.

01:35:59.943 --> 01:36:02.903
Thanks for having me, Erik. It was great to be here. All right.

01:36:03.043 --> 01:36:05.223
All right, guys. And we're going to catch y'all on the other side.

01:36:06.640 --> 01:36:17.040
Music.

01:36:17.703 --> 01:36:26.543
All right, and we are back. So I want to thank Anat Shenker Osorio, and Dr.

01:36:26.743 --> 01:36:30.003
Stacey Schultz for coming on the program.

01:36:30.483 --> 01:36:33.663
I had not heard Dr. Schultz before.

01:36:34.123 --> 01:36:40.143
And before I go anywhere, I apologize to y'all, and I definitely apologize to Dr.

01:36:40.283 --> 01:36:43.783
Schultz because normally at the end of the interviews, I give them a moment,

01:36:44.443 --> 01:36:49.783
to plug what they're doing, you know, about, you know, their companies or their,

01:36:49.963 --> 01:36:52.563
you know, social media, their podcasts, whatever the case.

01:36:53.063 --> 01:36:56.483
And we were kind of pressed for time. And so I was very conscious of that.

01:36:56.623 --> 01:37:01.403
So I just kind of wrapped up the interview and then realized I didn't give her her moment.

01:37:01.703 --> 01:37:09.743
So Dr. Schultz has a podcast called Educate U.S., which of course is a play on Educate Us.

01:37:11.063 --> 01:37:15.963
And, you know, so please listen to that If you want to get,

01:37:16.203 --> 01:37:20.123
like I said in the interview We kind of scratched the surface of education But

01:37:20.123 --> 01:37:25.323
that's what that podcast is all about So if you like what you heard in the interview

01:37:25.323 --> 01:37:28.563
Please go to Educate U.S.

01:37:30.803 --> 01:37:37.823
And, you know, and get more nuanced and detailed conversations about that And

01:37:37.823 --> 01:37:41.363
hopefully we didn't even get into the book, even in the casual conversation.

01:37:41.363 --> 01:37:43.683
I know she's been working on this book for a while.

01:37:44.243 --> 01:37:48.843
Hopefully it's going to come out this year. It's going to be called Transforming Collective Power.

01:37:49.163 --> 01:37:54.243
You can reach her. The best way to get her on social media is on her LinkedIn file.

01:37:55.143 --> 01:38:00.263
So, you know, Dr. Stacey Schultz. And so, Stacey, Dr.

01:38:00.403 --> 01:38:05.123
Schultz, I apologize for not giving you the moment to plug yourself.

01:38:06.323 --> 01:38:10.543
Yeah, because that's that's something I deliberately try to do for all my guests.

01:38:10.683 --> 01:38:13.343
So hopefully the plug I gave would be adequate.

01:38:14.523 --> 01:38:20.243
And, you know, Anat is, you know, she she's special.

01:38:21.563 --> 01:38:26.203
And just like, you know, some of the other guests that you've heard me use that

01:38:26.203 --> 01:38:30.983
term before, these are people that I've followed or have heard on different

01:38:30.983 --> 01:38:35.443
podcasts or on the news and, you know, just really...

01:38:36.707 --> 01:38:40.467
You know, just right to the meat of it just gets right into,

01:38:40.547 --> 01:38:43.727
you know, how you how you feel.

01:38:44.027 --> 01:38:48.867
I mean, just I threw out a question at her how to message something.

01:38:49.067 --> 01:38:56.967
And she just like that, you know, was able to have a a a message that could resonate with people.

01:38:56.967 --> 01:39:04.187
And I hope that, you know, fortunately, I record these with notes so I'll be

01:39:04.187 --> 01:39:07.487
able to get it verbatim, you know, the messaging.

01:39:07.887 --> 01:39:13.387
And I might be able to spend it myself or share it with some folks running for

01:39:13.387 --> 01:39:17.027
office that need to address certain issues. Right.

01:39:17.727 --> 01:39:21.287
But Anat is she's a she's really an American treasure.

01:39:21.547 --> 01:39:26.287
And I hope that that was conveyed in the interview as well.

01:39:26.287 --> 01:39:29.627
So, having said all that,

01:39:30.207 --> 01:39:37.267
there is a message that's out there that I think we just need to say it out

01:39:37.267 --> 01:39:41.347
loud and not stop tap dancing around it.

01:39:42.187 --> 01:39:48.567
You know, people like I might not agree with how I'm about to go with it, but it is what it is.

01:39:49.747 --> 01:39:54.787
If you watch CNN and, you know, to be honest, you know,

01:39:55.567 --> 01:40:01.527
I have to watch the clips. I can't sit through a whole thing because the clips

01:40:01.527 --> 01:40:03.567
bother the hell out of me. Right.

01:40:04.227 --> 01:40:11.947
It's just gotten to a point now where we're just we're just sticking anybody on.

01:40:11.947 --> 01:40:17.807
You know, if we were doing man-in-the-street things, if we were doing live remotes,

01:40:18.447 --> 01:40:23.267
you know, even the stuff that Jordan Klepper does on The Daily Show, right?

01:40:23.387 --> 01:40:27.567
It's just talking to random people about thoughts and, you know,

01:40:27.627 --> 01:40:30.067
people might say something unique.

01:40:30.647 --> 01:40:38.147
I won't say crazy, but let's say unique, you know, something a little bit out the norm.

01:40:38.427 --> 01:40:44.347
That's okay. You know, but when you have these shows on these networks,

01:40:44.567 --> 01:40:50.707
whether it's Fox or MSNBC, CNN, OAN, whatever, right, CBS, NBC.

01:40:51.727 --> 01:40:58.447
ABC, whatever, you want people that are knowledgeable about the particular issues

01:40:58.447 --> 01:41:02.907
so that you can have an educated conversation.

01:41:03.787 --> 01:41:09.727
It might get emotional. It all depends on the person's decorum and professionalism.

01:41:10.007 --> 01:41:14.407
But for the most part, you want to have a discussion where you can really flesh

01:41:14.407 --> 01:41:18.907
out some ideas and put some thoughts in people's heads, regardless of what agenda

01:41:18.907 --> 01:41:22.067
you're kind of subtly pushing out there.

01:41:22.947 --> 01:41:26.127
You want to have a great discussion.

01:41:27.187 --> 01:41:35.227
But then you put these folks on, and I guess, you know, I'm of the Christian

01:41:35.227 --> 01:41:40.167
faith, so part of our theology is that God doesn't really make mistakes.

01:41:40.307 --> 01:41:46.467
He puts us in positions to observe and to experience and to navigate through

01:41:46.467 --> 01:41:54.007
so that we can give a better testimony of his existence and his works, right?

01:41:54.687 --> 01:41:57.527
But sometimes, you know, I just really...

01:41:59.949 --> 01:42:05.589
You know, all of us have Gardner Gethsemane moments, especially in this political

01:42:05.589 --> 01:42:07.869
discussion is like, why, Lord? Why?

01:42:08.349 --> 01:42:12.529
Why me? Why did I have to see that? Why did I have to hear that? Right.

01:42:13.329 --> 01:42:24.229
But I guess the nuance, the value of that is it leads me to what I need to say.

01:42:24.229 --> 01:42:29.169
And it's like, America, as much as you don't want to admit it,

01:42:29.509 --> 01:42:32.949
all of this is about racism, everything.

01:42:34.249 --> 01:42:42.169
Even in your subconscious, you thought that a white guy who has failed in business

01:42:42.169 --> 01:42:47.409
six times and, you know, bankruptcies, right?

01:42:47.769 --> 01:42:51.829
Although, you know, you got to take risks. We talked about that at this,

01:42:52.049 --> 01:42:57.569
you know, in this show and previous episodes, we've had people that think we

01:42:57.569 --> 01:42:58.789
shouldn't be averse to risk.

01:42:59.369 --> 01:43:09.089
But you felt that this guy was better at reducing your price of eggs than the

01:43:09.089 --> 01:43:13.469
black woman who was the sitting vice president. Right.

01:43:15.189 --> 01:43:19.049
That's as much as you want to deny it. That's pretty racist.

01:43:19.929 --> 01:43:21.249
When you look at the qualifications,

01:43:22.754 --> 01:43:26.734
pretty racist decision because trust is a part of that.

01:43:26.974 --> 01:43:31.374
And I've addressed this before when I ran for the U.S.

01:43:31.434 --> 01:43:37.374
Senate and we had these, you know, autopsies about the 2008 election, right?

01:43:38.434 --> 01:43:42.754
You know, that was the thing I was trying to convey to people.

01:43:42.894 --> 01:43:47.134
It's like, you're not used to seeing a black person in a position where they're

01:43:47.134 --> 01:43:51.114
making those kinds of decisions. So you didn't trust that, right?

01:43:51.234 --> 01:43:52.094
So you didn't vote for that.

01:43:52.774 --> 01:43:56.354
You voted for what you were comfortable with. You voted for what you knew.

01:43:57.054 --> 01:44:02.794
And where it's not put the hood on and go burn crosses at night kind of racism, it's still racism.

01:44:03.594 --> 01:44:07.674
And it's something that all of us in America have to deal with.

01:44:07.814 --> 01:44:12.954
All of us have preconceived notions based on what we've been exposed to, right?

01:44:13.214 --> 01:44:16.054
Of people that are different than us. Doesn't matter if they're Asian,

01:44:16.174 --> 01:44:18.294
doesn't matter if they're Latino, doesn't matter if they're black,

01:44:18.454 --> 01:44:20.694
doesn't matter if they're white. We all have those notions.

01:44:21.834 --> 01:44:27.734
Skinner talked about in his essay, What is Man, that we naturally have prejudices, right?

01:44:27.834 --> 01:44:34.654
We believe that, you know, if you put an apple and an orange in front of somebody,

01:44:34.994 --> 01:44:37.874
people are going to go with what fruit they like.

01:44:38.054 --> 01:44:40.614
They're going to either reach for the orange or reach for the apple.

01:44:40.714 --> 01:44:44.274
It doesn't mean that the orange doesn't have value or the apple doesn't have value.

01:44:44.334 --> 01:44:49.934
It means that that person has a preference about what fruit they want to eat, right?

01:44:50.474 --> 01:44:57.894
It's when we start incorporating that prejudice into our institutions and we

01:44:57.894 --> 01:45:02.754
start placing value on that prejudice within those institutions,

01:45:02.754 --> 01:45:05.594
that's when we get institutional racism.

01:45:05.594 --> 01:45:08.254
That's when we get cultural racism, right?

01:45:09.014 --> 01:45:14.354
Because white is supposed to be better than black and Asian is supposed to be

01:45:14.354 --> 01:45:17.914
better than Latino and whatever, right?

01:45:18.634 --> 01:45:20.034
Instead of.

01:45:21.242 --> 01:45:27.522
Pitting people against each other based on their ethnicity or their nationality

01:45:27.522 --> 01:45:29.802
or the amount of melanin they have in their skin.

01:45:30.322 --> 01:45:35.102
Let's pit people based on what do you know? What do you bring to the table?

01:45:35.282 --> 01:45:41.962
What kind of person are you as opposed to what I'm uncomfortable with, right?

01:45:43.022 --> 01:45:48.882
And so, you know, one of the things we have to acknowledge in the United States

01:45:48.882 --> 01:45:54.322
of America is that our history is based on the fact that we institutionalize

01:45:54.322 --> 01:45:57.262
racism and people took advantage of that.

01:45:57.402 --> 01:46:00.162
And it's very, very uncomfortable to talk about.

01:46:00.362 --> 01:46:06.222
It's very, very uncomfortable to rehash. But in order to get better,

01:46:06.382 --> 01:46:07.802
you got to learn from your mistakes.

01:46:08.302 --> 01:46:13.722
Football players every week sit through hours and hours of film.

01:46:14.462 --> 01:46:16.962
Why? They know how to play the

01:46:16.962 --> 01:46:21.122
game of football. they know the difference between an A gap and a B gap.

01:46:21.282 --> 01:46:26.222
They know the difference between a slot and a go route. They know that naturally.

01:46:27.042 --> 01:46:33.182
But it all comes down to execution. And what happens is that the other team

01:46:33.182 --> 01:46:38.062
is trying to do things so you can't execute the way that you want to execute, right?

01:46:38.282 --> 01:46:41.302
So you watch film to learn from your mistakes.

01:46:41.602 --> 01:46:46.982
How did that person beat that block? How did that person intercept that pass, right?

01:46:47.742 --> 01:46:55.382
That's what you study. You learn by not only practice, but also visualization.

01:46:55.862 --> 01:47:01.162
You want to see where the mistakes are. You want to recall.

01:47:01.402 --> 01:47:05.902
You want to have that history so that you don't repeat this same mistake.

01:47:07.081 --> 01:47:10.421
If you don't take your film study seriously, if you don't take your practice

01:47:10.421 --> 01:47:15.661
seriously, you're not going to win and you're probably not going to be playing much longer.

01:47:16.361 --> 01:47:22.801
Right. So if athletes understand the value of history, why not the rest of us?

01:47:23.661 --> 01:47:29.741
Why is that a problem? I'm sure those athletes don't want to see a tape in a

01:47:29.741 --> 01:47:31.421
game that they got beat 49 to nothing.

01:47:31.801 --> 01:47:36.361
I promise you they don't want to see that. But if they can turn around and take

01:47:36.361 --> 01:47:39.841
that loss and turn around and beat the next team six to three,

01:47:40.121 --> 01:47:41.921
they've learned something from it.

01:47:42.381 --> 01:47:47.641
You understand what I'm saying? It's like it's painful to look at America's

01:47:47.641 --> 01:47:50.561
history, especially if you're a person of color.

01:47:51.161 --> 01:47:55.781
It's painful to think that somebody that was related to me was told that they

01:47:55.781 --> 01:47:57.381
couldn't drink out of a certain water fountain.

01:47:57.521 --> 01:48:01.361
They had to sit in a certain part of a bus where they couldn't even go to a

01:48:01.361 --> 01:48:05.041
particular restaurant. Or if they went to a store, they had to come in the back

01:48:05.041 --> 01:48:07.001
instead of the front door.

01:48:07.441 --> 01:48:12.141
That's painful to think about. It's painful to think about that somebody related

01:48:12.141 --> 01:48:18.801
to me was whipped and flogged for not meeting their share of cotton picking.

01:48:19.321 --> 01:48:21.601
Right? That's painful.

01:48:22.221 --> 01:48:24.081
It's painful to think that people

01:48:24.081 --> 01:48:28.381
were killed for standing up for their basic rights as a human being.

01:48:29.524 --> 01:48:35.464
That's painful, but we learn that so that, one, we can draw inspiration from

01:48:35.464 --> 01:48:42.004
the courage that these people had to exhibit and the strength to endure all of that,

01:48:42.184 --> 01:48:46.624
to give us the hope that we can go forward and can do better.

01:48:47.224 --> 01:48:51.464
Because through all the pain, there was also some joy.

01:48:51.944 --> 01:48:56.604
There was also some victories. There was also some satisfaction, right?

01:48:56.604 --> 01:49:01.444
Because even if you get beat as a team 49 to nothing, there were some good things

01:49:01.444 --> 01:49:07.604
that you as an individual did or some things that your teammates did that you also need to repeat.

01:49:07.684 --> 01:49:13.584
So if everybody is in concert, you won't get beat 49 to nothing anymore. Right.

01:49:14.044 --> 01:49:22.224
And the same with us. We learn how to avoid these situations so we won't be

01:49:22.224 --> 01:49:24.424
subjugated like that anymore.

01:49:24.704 --> 01:49:30.224
Right. So when we protest, when we say, hey, we got a problem,

01:49:30.804 --> 01:49:34.004
when we say, ouch, you need to deal with that.

01:49:34.144 --> 01:49:41.404
When your body expresses pain, whether it's your wrist, whether it's your knees,

01:49:41.664 --> 01:49:45.704
whether you get a cut, even if you have some kind of trauma,

01:49:46.044 --> 01:49:47.544
your body's going to react to that.

01:49:48.004 --> 01:49:54.504
And the natural thing is your body's going to try to fix it intuitively.

01:49:55.264 --> 01:49:59.104
Right. It's going to try to repair itself. If you get a cold,

01:49:59.344 --> 01:50:01.624
that's why you take these medicines.

01:50:01.824 --> 01:50:05.864
That's why we're supposed to take vaccines, Mr. Secretary.

01:50:07.204 --> 01:50:12.204
So we can help our bodies fight things off. Right.

01:50:12.924 --> 01:50:19.464
But we also learn from that. Right. So we we try, you know, not to do things

01:50:19.464 --> 01:50:24.844
that put that kind of strain on our body or pain or avoid situations where.

01:50:25.264 --> 01:50:29.664
We could get this virus or get this cold, whatever we got to do.

01:50:29.884 --> 01:50:33.024
You know, that's why in the wintertime we bundle up. And in summertime,

01:50:33.424 --> 01:50:35.784
we try to shed as much clothing we can get away with.

01:50:36.484 --> 01:50:40.404
Because your body needs to be comfortable. It needs to operate at a normal temperature

01:50:40.404 --> 01:50:43.184
of 98 degrees, 98.6 to be exact.

01:50:45.207 --> 01:50:51.347
It's learning. It's evolving, which is a word that conservatives are allergic to. Right.

01:50:52.027 --> 01:50:57.927
That's why when they talk about make America great again, that is the ultimate conservative slogan.

01:50:58.667 --> 01:51:02.787
Because one, it's a fallacy. We've never been as great as we should have been.

01:51:04.167 --> 01:51:08.467
Therefore, we can't go back to something that we've never fully achieved.

01:51:09.107 --> 01:51:15.767
Right. And then you have this preconceived notion, well, some of us had it better than others.

01:51:15.987 --> 01:51:22.727
So let's go back to that instead of the struggle of competing in an equal playing field.

01:51:23.707 --> 01:51:30.607
That's racism. So when a Jillian Michaels laments and says that the Smithsonian

01:51:30.607 --> 01:51:38.747
Institution National African-American Natural Museum for African-American History

01:51:38.747 --> 01:51:43.087
is an anti-white person institution,

01:51:43.087 --> 01:51:44.707
that's racism.

01:51:44.707 --> 01:51:50.527
It's a celebration of the history of African people in the United States.

01:51:50.787 --> 01:51:54.507
And whether you want to call yourself a Black American or African American or

01:51:54.507 --> 01:52:00.247
Afro or whatever, that museum is about us, right?

01:52:00.647 --> 01:52:02.307
Whether we immigrated from the

01:52:02.307 --> 01:52:07.687
Caribbean or Africa directly or some Latin American country or whatever.

01:52:09.307 --> 01:52:17.507
It's a story about us. Now, white folks played a major supporting role in it, in that story.

01:52:19.027 --> 01:52:24.707
No question. But it ain't about y'all. It's about us. Get over that.

01:52:25.307 --> 01:52:29.607
You're offended by the fact that there's government money being spent to tell

01:52:29.607 --> 01:52:31.667
our story. That's a problem.

01:52:32.167 --> 01:52:37.887
Our story is as important, if not the most important story in the American history.

01:52:38.787 --> 01:52:44.147
The relationships between black folks and white folks, kind of the underlying

01:52:44.147 --> 01:52:45.587
foundation of this nation.

01:52:45.767 --> 01:52:49.987
It is really the barometer of whether we can be great or not.

01:52:50.667 --> 01:52:58.027
And if you're too fragile, if you're too ill-equipped to deal with that,

01:52:58.247 --> 01:53:01.007
I don't know what I can do to help you.

01:53:01.147 --> 01:53:08.027
I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. I, you know, I guess there's some

01:53:08.027 --> 01:53:14.087
counseling you can take, you know, but you've got to get over it.

01:53:14.667 --> 01:53:22.027
Because the sooner you get over that, the sooner we can get to that greatness that has eluded us.

01:53:23.227 --> 01:53:25.987
You can't be great again if you never were great.

01:53:27.364 --> 01:53:32.004
You know, Joe Biden's phrase was corny, but it was more accurate.

01:53:32.824 --> 01:53:35.564
Build better or build back better.

01:53:37.064 --> 01:53:40.704
Mississippi had the best slogan. Onward.

01:53:41.124 --> 01:53:47.124
From this point forward, onward. From this moment in time, onward.

01:53:47.624 --> 01:53:52.644
When we say don't look back, it means don't get caught up in your mistakes.

01:53:52.644 --> 01:53:57.844
You need to know where you came from because that's your point of origin,

01:53:57.844 --> 01:54:02.364
but don't get stuck back there, right? Learn from your mistakes.

01:54:03.324 --> 01:54:09.724
Learn from your past transgressions. Learn from your inconsistencies and do better.

01:54:10.144 --> 01:54:17.404
And why is that a problem for a certain section of the population? That's the question.

01:54:17.804 --> 01:54:22.164
Why is it a problem to challenge you to do better?

01:54:22.644 --> 01:54:26.584
Why is it a problem for you to accept the fact that there are people that don't

01:54:26.584 --> 01:54:29.924
look like you, that don't have the same life experience as you,

01:54:30.104 --> 01:54:33.124
that coexists with you? Why is that a problem?

01:54:34.224 --> 01:54:40.824
Because there was nothing in any book, whether you can find the Torah,

01:54:41.024 --> 01:54:45.604
the Koran, the Holy Bible, there's nothing in there that says that you're not

01:54:45.604 --> 01:54:46.904
going to deal with other people.

01:54:47.844 --> 01:54:52.924
As a matter of fact, most of those books encourage you, I would say all three,

01:54:53.744 --> 01:54:57.044
encourage you to interact with other people.

01:54:57.364 --> 01:55:02.124
You are supposed to be the example of the faith that you are a part of.

01:55:02.344 --> 01:55:08.444
Even if you don't believe in any organized religion, if you don't believe in

01:55:08.444 --> 01:55:14.824
the existence of God, you know as a human being that you have to interact with other human beings.

01:55:14.824 --> 01:55:22.024
You did not come to this planet by yourself you needed another human being to get here.

01:55:23.412 --> 01:55:28.712
So you have to have a relationship with that human, or at least try, right?

01:55:28.892 --> 01:55:33.732
If nobody else, you may come in a situation where there's other humans in the

01:55:33.732 --> 01:55:39.032
house with you that came through that same journey. You've got to interact with them.

01:55:39.812 --> 01:55:43.452
And those people, even though they have the same last name as you,

01:55:43.872 --> 01:55:48.192
even though they live in the same house, you are just as different as can be.

01:55:49.172 --> 01:55:53.952
Because everybody has to have their own journey. So if you can learn to coexist

01:55:53.952 --> 01:55:58.932
with different people in your house, why is it a problem for you to interact

01:55:58.932 --> 01:56:01.172
with different people outside of your house?

01:56:02.192 --> 01:56:07.152
That's what we call maturity, right? That's why you go through all these emotions.

01:56:07.152 --> 01:56:09.792
When you're a baby, you're learning stuff, you're developing.

01:56:10.012 --> 01:56:13.892
When you're a toddler, you're developing. When you're in elementary school, you're developing.

01:56:14.072 --> 01:56:18.172
When you're in high school, it's almost like you're going back to being a baby

01:56:18.172 --> 01:56:20.612
because now you're about to take the next step to adulthood.

01:56:20.612 --> 01:56:21.992
And then when you get to be an

01:56:21.992 --> 01:56:26.532
adult, you've got to learn how to make decisions and survive on your own.

01:56:27.472 --> 01:56:33.972
It's evolution. It's constantly changing until the day that we cease to exist.

01:56:34.392 --> 01:56:40.112
Right. Whenever that day may be, it could be tomorrow. It could be 30 years from now.

01:56:40.552 --> 01:56:46.392
Whenever that day comes, that's when you stop evolving in a sense. Right.

01:56:47.272 --> 01:56:54.532
Intellectually or physically or whatever. But if you count decomposition,

01:56:55.192 --> 01:56:57.012
you're evolving then too.

01:56:58.272 --> 01:57:04.752
All I'm saying is, if your politics is based on your level of discomfort,

01:57:04.752 --> 01:57:14.172
your politics is based on your fear of the unknown, if your politics is based on your insecurities,

01:57:15.112 --> 01:57:17.612
you need to get out of that.

01:57:18.192 --> 01:57:24.272
You need to focus your politics on what's best for my house,

01:57:24.572 --> 01:57:29.152
my neighborhood, my community, my city, my state, my nation.

01:57:30.052 --> 01:57:33.212
That's how that's supposed to work. It's not supposed to be about,

01:57:33.612 --> 01:57:38.772
well, I don't want to see people that I don't know, that I can't relate to.

01:57:39.272 --> 01:57:40.972
I don't want to see them succeed.

01:57:41.792 --> 01:57:46.432
I don't want them to make me feel guilty for what happened in the past.

01:57:47.612 --> 01:57:52.012
I think if you feel guilty about something, even if you didn't directly have

01:57:52.012 --> 01:57:55.192
anything to do with it, it means that you're human.

01:57:55.532 --> 01:57:57.412
It means that you have empathy.

01:57:57.972 --> 01:58:05.532
Right. And it should put something in your soul to make sure that that never happens again.

01:58:06.957 --> 01:58:11.517
I don't want my great-grandchildren to feel the same guilt that I'm feeling now.

01:58:12.077 --> 01:58:16.837
That's how it should trigger in your brain. We have to do better.

01:58:17.957 --> 01:58:25.897
You know, we made the evolution from throwing garbage in the street to actually

01:58:25.897 --> 01:58:28.057
having a sewer system, right?

01:58:28.317 --> 01:58:33.617
We evolved from having outhouses to indoor bathrooms. We evolved.

01:58:34.837 --> 01:58:38.137
So we don't want to go back to stuff.

01:58:38.677 --> 01:58:45.517
We want to go onward. We want to go forward. We want to progress.

01:58:46.377 --> 01:58:52.737
There's no way that anybody can convince me that progress is a bad word and

01:58:52.737 --> 01:58:54.137
say, oh, he's a progressive.

01:58:54.777 --> 01:58:59.997
I probably need to listen to him. She's a progressive. I probably need to listen to her.

01:59:01.037 --> 01:59:04.577
Because where we are right now, that's a conservative thought.

01:59:04.917 --> 01:59:08.357
You want to stay with that, and that's not working.

01:59:09.057 --> 01:59:12.317
Yeah, maybe it's time to explore some other options.

01:59:13.017 --> 01:59:20.277
Let's transform. Let's change things. Let's see if we can do better next time, right?

01:59:20.937 --> 01:59:27.677
And you don't have to feel guilty because you didn't make it the first time that you made a mistake.

01:59:28.197 --> 01:59:31.617
You know, we're human. So we have guilt. We have regrets.

01:59:32.037 --> 01:59:37.337
But we can't dwell on those. We got to shake that off and keep going forward.

01:59:38.077 --> 01:59:43.617
And even if we're reminded of something that we did, you have to have the mental

01:59:43.617 --> 01:59:48.457
fortitude to realize I'm a better person than when that happened.

01:59:49.137 --> 01:59:53.637
We should say that America is a better society now than when it happened.

01:59:53.637 --> 01:59:59.777
And our goal is to make it even better, not to go back.

02:00:00.397 --> 02:00:05.297
We want to make America great again. We want to make America more racist than

02:00:05.297 --> 02:00:10.577
ever because there's been no period where we've been great. We've.

02:00:15.014 --> 02:00:19.014
Anytime you have a society where not everybody can participate in it, that's not greatness.

02:00:19.994 --> 02:00:23.754
Never has, never will be. I don't care who you date.

02:00:24.054 --> 02:00:27.854
I don't care what you want to identify as. I don't care what religion you are.

02:00:27.974 --> 02:00:32.394
I don't care how much melanin you got in your skin. It does not matter to me.

02:00:32.834 --> 02:00:39.094
What matters to me is, are you going to make it better for all of us to exist?

02:00:39.094 --> 02:00:45.234
Whether that's in government, whether that's in sports, entertainment, whatever.

02:00:45.634 --> 02:00:49.514
I want the best people doing the work.

02:00:50.094 --> 02:00:54.734
Science and technology, all that. I just want the best people doing the work.

02:00:54.834 --> 02:01:00.714
Whatever people do to make them feel good about themselves outside of their

02:01:00.714 --> 02:01:03.374
chosen profession, I don't care.

02:01:04.494 --> 02:01:09.594
I don't care if the best physicist in the world listens to rap music. I don't care.

02:01:09.814 --> 02:01:12.594
I don't care if they listen to rock music. I don't care.

02:01:13.054 --> 02:01:16.874
I want them to help us unlock more mysteries in the universe.

02:01:18.234 --> 02:01:24.394
Which may mean that I get a cell phone that never goes out of service, right?

02:01:24.714 --> 02:01:28.974
Or an internet that is always at the top bandwidth.

02:01:29.854 --> 02:01:34.474
That's what I want, you know? And it's like people say, well,

02:01:34.634 --> 02:01:39.234
you know, slavery wasn't just an American thing and all that. I don't care.

02:01:39.914 --> 02:01:43.154
You know what I'm saying? From a historical standpoint, that's great to know.

02:01:44.014 --> 02:01:49.494
But since I'm an American, I'm dealing with what happened in American history first.

02:01:50.374 --> 02:01:55.894
I'm not worried about slavery in Arabia or slavery in Rome or slavery in Jerusalem.

02:01:56.054 --> 02:01:59.974
I'm worried about the slavery that happened here in the United States and what

02:01:59.974 --> 02:02:03.014
impact does that have on us now?

02:02:03.734 --> 02:02:07.934
Because there has been some residual impact, right?

02:02:09.454 --> 02:02:15.654
Please, ladies and gentlemen, get over your insecurities. Get over your fear.

02:02:15.994 --> 02:02:18.414
Get over your lack of comfort.

02:02:19.821 --> 02:02:24.441
Focus in on what is best for all of us.

02:02:25.101 --> 02:02:31.561
If you want to be mad because you lost an athletic event to somebody that identifies

02:02:31.561 --> 02:02:33.541
as the same gender as you,

02:02:33.781 --> 02:02:38.121
that wasn't born that way, and you both ended up in fifth place,

02:02:38.281 --> 02:02:41.021
if that's what you want to do, knock yourself out.

02:02:41.601 --> 02:02:48.041
But don't impose your discomfort, your lack of self-esteem on the rest of us.

02:02:48.881 --> 02:02:53.461
If you are uncomfortable with the fact that there is a museum that reminds you

02:02:53.461 --> 02:02:55.921
that slavery actually happened in the United States,

02:02:55.921 --> 02:03:00.461
and it was not a good thing for a certain group of people who still exist in

02:03:00.461 --> 02:03:06.701
this country, and it vilifies your group, get over it.

02:03:07.521 --> 02:03:12.121
Understand that we just can't have that kind of mentality, the mentality that

02:03:12.121 --> 02:03:15.101
allowed that to happen. We can't have that mentality anymore.

02:03:15.721 --> 02:03:23.681
And if you feel guilt, use it to do something better rather than complain about it.

02:03:24.161 --> 02:03:28.841
Complain about the fact that you actually have empathy. Complain about the fact

02:03:28.841 --> 02:03:30.621
that you actually have a human emotion.

02:03:31.021 --> 02:03:34.501
Why are you mad that you are guilty? You feel guilty.

02:03:35.201 --> 02:03:39.281
You should embrace that and that should give you a challenge to do better.

02:03:40.081 --> 02:03:44.281
You could be great if you stop getting mad about being guilty.

02:03:46.181 --> 02:03:50.281
All right, so I got to go. Thank y'all for listening. Until next time.

02:03:52.080 --> 02:04:38.313
Music.