Transcripts For CSPAN2 The New Better Off 20161224

Hello, everyone. Welcome to lawrence park. I am so happy to be here with Courtney Martin and you can all be here with us. I want to say trent tillis, one of the cofounders of our project, is Courtney Martins editor on the blog, he is said he cant be here, he is sick today. I want to bring his name in here. Envious. Host Courtney Martin send an email yesterday. When we planned this we were not looking at the calendar saying what is happening that week . Courtney martin emailed yesterday and said should we do this . Should we have a book launch at a salon to talk about the new better off reinventing the American Dream in this unsettling election, unsettled Political Landscape . I said absolutely. Because of what happened this weekend how unsettled we are, it is important to sit together and talk about things that matter to us. I was thinking this morning about introducing Courtney Martin and i wont do a big introduction, you can read her credentials. I love what she brings to our media space where she walks that line that is so lifegiving and illuminating for everyone reading it. Her rigor as a journalist and as a human being she is there in her fullness and is there every week. How to introduce Courtney Martin, happy she is here because i love her. Guest i love you. Host she is a journalist, also a new journalist. She is one of the people who is modeling and innovating and incubating new forms of journalism for the 21st century. The old forms are failing us. They failed us through this election. I feel like i am speechifying but here we are. Guest do it, i need it. Host is true of our institutions in the early 21st century, things that made sense and seemed like they worked even ten years ago just dont make sense anymore. It is true of schools and medicine and prisons, it is true of religion and journalism. We are going to have to remake it and that is one of the things we all kind of get this week. How we do that, not clear but you are one of those people who is figuring this out close to the ground so that is exciting for me. One of the things i am discouraged about is our best journalists, these hysterical apocalyptic analyses of what is going to happen in the next four years and what it will mean for the end of civilization. These are people who didnt see what was right in front of them for the last 18 months and that kind of hysteria is not helpful. My question and i know your question is how can journalism be of service to common life to give that kind of journalism is not just a service to common life. This is a moment when some humility is helpful. So, one of the things i want to do, framing this base run tonight, pull back to a long lens which i find helpful, and meaningful in moments like this, if people were looking at our moment in time a century from now, what are they going to say is important, that is happening right now . What is happening right now that will be something hundred years from now say this shaped the world we inhabit . It may be the election of donald trump. It might be. It might be the fact that it is 70 and sunny in november, in minnesota and all the things that implies. It may be these millions of human beings as we speak in this warm room making their way across europe, millions of refugees. How is that going to shape the world that emerges . In all the years of doing the show, i have loved and been inspired by this story, she loves her. So she says imagine sixth century rome. What the New York Times in sixth century rome, it did not ever carry a headline that says benedict rights rule. Because there was this crazy guy over here who in his lifetime, 10 communities of 10 people 12 communities of 12 people, one of the earlier communities, not a great successful venture. Not a successful start up. Nobody noticed or wrote a headline but 1000 years later, what this person with a vision of Community Set in motion, actually these were the communities that saved civilization, kept western literature alive. We dont know what is happening right now in our world planting those invisible seeds that are setting that in motion. However, i suspect the kinds of people Courtney Martin write about in her book, Courtney Martin and her ecosystem and probably everybody here, are part of spinning those webs. I find it i take hope and delight in the fact that with my research as a journalist, i dont know what is happening in our midst that will save us and that means we have to continue with what we are doing and feel called to with vigor and passion and shine a light on everybody elses good work. That is what we are here tonight to do. The new better off reinventing the American Dream. I want to read a little bit to start to just give you a flavor of why i said to the question, should we cancel tonight because of what happened in the world, resoundingly know. This is from the first chapter, the introduction. What i am finding, what you will find, i hope, is being mature doesnt mean being numb. To be sure, living in america at this unequal messy moment can break your heart but it doesnt have to break your spirit. Living in america is so interesting, so fertile, so up for grabs, it is also disintegrating and reconstituting and recalibrating. It is up to us to make life that we can be proud of and make communities and systems and policies cradle those lives. It is up to us to reject tired narratives about success. Instead authoring new ones that are less about exceptional heroes and more about creative communities. It is up to us to reclaim the best of what previous generations did that made this country so unique and beautiful. As well as to own up to the destructive legacies we are part of, to expose them to the light and figure out how to fix them. It is up to us to be humble, to be brave, to be accountable to our own dreams. It is up to us to be iconoclastic, to be together, to stay awake. It is a wonderful book, an important book and i think one thing i have been so admiring of as you have on just it is you are not just promoting the book. All of us who write books want to sell books but the book is a conversation piece, a conversation starter as you are taking it to communities and companies and building Something Like a movement or contributing to a movement. What had been been like . Guest so gratifying. I feel i am trying to language what i am observing so that fuels like the role of giving language to yearnings people have but also things creating in the world they underestimate the power of and seeing that power, acknowledging it, you guys are doing similar stuff so something greater here then prioritizing, creating a community and the small way you think is significant. It is what will save us all. To the earlier points you are making. What is gratifying to feel like i am the book is acknowledging invisible, deeply important work which from a gender perspective is often womens work of creating community and all these things and poor peoples work. Im very clear that those who are the best at creating community often have less money and so this is something that turns the table on who we think in this country really knows how to do things to create happiness or efficiency or whatever. Host how do you explain that connection of not having money being better at communities . Guest wealth makes us dumb about how vulnerable we are because we think we can buy our way out of a Trump Presidency or to speak of this moments, when you find out donald trump is president of the United States it doesnt matter how much money is in your bank account. You could flee to the Cayman Island and lived there theoretically but if you can america it doesnt matter what your bank account is, you are vulnerable to this government and the way it governs just like every other person in every other socioeconomic bracket. Wealth pools us into thinking we can buy our way out of suffering. Host what is it that not having money or having too much money, how does that create a condition where you get better at community . Guest necessity is the mother of invention. You have to look to people around you to get by and it turns out looking to people around you, makes you happier and healthier and there is a real freedom and Mental Wellness and vulnerability and everything from i am thinking of these immigrant women who needed to clean house is to make money but all had kids so they created a makeshift coop where one would take care of the kid and the other would clean the house and they could do it fast and keep their kids together and small, invisible steps that low income people had to do out of necessity very often but turns out those kids host i think obviously a core idea you are pursuing and trying to trace through the connotations of what is happening for vocation, calling. Which is, i think the 20th century at least in this country conflated with job and title. It is not as you point out, just about what you do but who you are and how you do it. It is a plural thing. We have many callings at once. How would you talk about how this ecosystem of implications can change the way we create our careers and lives. What does that mean to you, how we define that and work with that . Guest i would start with tracing my own relationships, i grew up thinking my dad had the important job because he was a lawyer and came to realize everything i do is basically in mirror of what my mom did and she was 10 different things, none of which made a lot of sense on paper and all of which had this deep influence, she was a social worker, a mom with condiments in the closet, they could go there to make sure this sort of entrepreneur before i even knew that was a word, i grew up thinking i should have a path like my dad if i want to be an important person in the world, i should go to law school and turns out my way of being, quote, important in the world, i happened to be a writer so that is magnified on a larger scale but i think a lot of when you look at the way the future work is happening so much of it to me looks like many of our mothers who we thought didnt have, quote, real jobs. Sort of interesting reclaiming and this is for a lot of men wanting to have jobs like their mothers, not just about women. As work becomes decentralized there is a big risk to reinvent the social safety net and deep systemic questions we have to answer. One by one basis there is a lot of room for flexibility for people to show up as parents and workers, etc. Host that points to the fact that you dont get one vocation. Maybe there are people who are completely singleminded but that is not anybody i know. You have a vocation as a worker and a parent and neighbor and citizen. A lot of us are seeing what is our calling as a citizen . You put those others to one side to do any of these. Guest those world are blending which from my perspective is a good thing. And i feel it is important to keep reiterating there are big systemic questions around this, it is a privilege to be a freelancer and support Health Insurance or the bottom wont drop out if you dont get one page right so this is all relative to our capacity to imagine a new social system and a new social safety net but having said that, i think the blending of those worlds, my best work and paid work is often with friends, collaborators. It is a very new way of living, the sense you have your colleagues, it is hierarchical. Host your friends would be totally separate. Guest the phrase worklife balance makes no sense to me. I dont feel weird about working with my friends. It doesnt feel disingenuous. You are my mentor, my friends, i also right for your website and your project. None of that feels weird to me. I see for older generations there is more separation between the people you collaborate with professionally and your friends and i see that all breaking down. Host it is breaking down. It is messy, it is challenging. Traditional organizations and hierarchies. What are the boundaries, workplace boundaries . Figuring this out on the fly. Guest boundaries and the complexity of life. For me that makes the work all the richer. Whether my husband i collaborator one of my dearest friends, i know her in such a real textured way but our capacity to create excellent work rests on knowing and the complexity, support her in certain ways, makes it harder but more excellent. Host you were thinking about how it feels like black lives matter or social movement or social entrepreneurial things, often these days clusters of friends. Guest the hashtag itself came from three women communicating with one another and look what it has brought. There is so much these days born entrepreneurial he and professionally, friendship is shifting. I thought about that, the person i love to write about, my favorite people are people who seem so masterful at friendship, almost like a new wellness skill, not that it is new but there is something about the way people are thinking about friends and creating a community of friends that seem a little different. Host friendship is something to cultivate. I love that. I tell recent college graduates, dont worry about the resume, worry about your friends. Do you have amazing interesting friends . Then you are going to be okay. I dont just mean you will be okay after hours. Your work will be better because you have amazing friends, you dont have to network with intimidating older person. You should do that too. It is not about who is the most elite person in my field and how do i befriend them. Your friends grow up and become those people in your genuine relationship sentiment when you were 20 and eating pizza. I do feel a new generation is coming up organically doing that, friendship is changing and you see a new generation valuing it differently. Guest i experience that and feel amazed the younger people i am in touch with in their early 20s and what they are thinking about and the way they are supporting one another and psychology abundance about things, people have their jealousies and competition and whatever but there seems to be a very generous zeitgeist around how much people love their friends. I see young women marrying their friends on facebook and they are not in a romantic relationship but they want to say this is my dearest friends, friends getting ted tos. How much people are committed to mastering friendship. Host something you do, which we talked about across generational friendship, one of the most, one of the pieces of advice i have been so grateful for in my life, i always had friends in 70s and 80s, one of those older friends who said to me i always had younger friends but when i was growing up, that was not a concept. I see you, robust, mentors, especially women of other generations. Old man thing and this dear mentor of mine from college, a lot of 80s friends and women friends of all ages, i love my elder women friends, women are 10 years older, being able to see yourself, it felt so important to me, especially as a new mother like being able to see my friends who have 6yearolds and 7yearolds, that has been so important for me. Host you said the language of Work Life Balance makes less sense in the way new generations are beginning life and i see that too. But i think you point at the challenge for your generation is a new challenge for your generation and others, life, technology balance. We are all in uncharted territory with this. These devices, beautiful and terrifying, landed in the middle of our lives. You are on that ground in describing that ground, so many people in your generation figuring that out, making it humane. Guest that is part of a chapter and tension in the book, thinking about what generationally could not have been written 10, 20, 50 years ago about how we are creating the good life and that is so central. Host it was not on anybodys horizon. Guest and now it is central to your capacity to create robust healthy relationships not to mention your individual mental health, how do you relate to your device, how do you think when you are online and i dont think there are easy answers. When i thought the younger people probably have figured this out more because they had grown up with it and it is a counterintuitive thing, interviews with teenagers about it and the next door neighbor who i loved and tell me about that. When you are having an important conversation, never dont look at our phones even when having this conversation. Counterintuitive thing, so frightening to me. Im worried about that in general. Like my kids. Told me i wasnt on facebook. Plenty of people who are doing that, i do see these kids working with this but they are not equipped at those ages, not all about selfcontrol and self discipline. Guest going through a mess. What worries me is most of the models at this very moment we are wrestling with as we get out of our adolescent phase in technology is about abstinence, we will have every 24 hours we look into each others lives and the other six days we talk to each other like this. We are still trying to understand the nuances. Almost like we are treating it like alcohol or a drug, we either do it fullbore or we cant. Host it has addictive it works addictive things in our brain. Like your 21yearold, the beep goes you just got a jolt of dopamine. Explain board and brilliant challenges. A radio show that challenged people, delete your favorite apps off your phone. These very habitual challenges, the peoples capacity to be board and let their minds wander and do that nondistributive thinking. Host take your brilliant challenge, without looking at your cell phone, notice weird little shifts, have random thoughts, lose track of time. Love people the way they deserve to be loved which is to say without a cell phone obstructing your adoration. Ultimately our attention which is remember finite is spend one small seemingly mundane choice at a time. In sure your tiny choices reflect your grand ambitions for how people experience you and how you experience the world. It is all you have really got. Guest i am going to ask one more question and open this up. Host and see what is on your mind and then bring it back. Let me see where i want to go next. The stuff effort equation. Talk about that. That is a new balancing act. Guest the stuff effort equation is, with my language i came up with, please let me not be plagiarizing anyone, this idea that we have come to understand consumers and major costs not just environmentally but psychic and emotional energy. The more stuff we have the more we have to organize it and repair it and yet new stuff when the old stuff is out of fashion and just the sort of endless cycle. Along with the way in which identity is decentralizing and changing faster and faster, the way we use to buy stuff to symbolize who we where is changing and all of us are, we hope, a lot of us are thinking about stuff in a different way in terms of wanting to get rid of it and not consume as much in the first place and share it and i profiled this interesting organization that is trying to make it so you give away your old stuff and get your dollars which allow you to buy other peoples stuff. Telling people dont buy new stuff. It is a kind of deep shift in capitalism, they are trying to sell more coats somehow and in a big brother way but they really are genuinely interested and what does it mean to be a company that doesnt make new stuff but makes new systems and how does that humanize and make our lives better . I am interested in that. Host the word enough, reflect on that. Guest a very important word to me on many levels. It is important to me in the sense that i felt like growing up, this is typical of a lot of people in our generation, i was born the last day of 1979 so i am the oldest millennial, a millennial elder. I felt like i was raised with a sense of bigness, that i was very important, what was i going to do out in the world, theres lots about being raised white and privileged. Host the vocation was save the world and so i think guest i have done a lot of spiritual work in my life stealing my expectations not only about my own impact on the world but where i want to spend my energy and my time. I am more interested in having an incredible local network of community and friends and being famous or recalibrating all that to think about it in a different way and that is attention and stuff and admitting it is finite which once you have kids it is hard not to realize, because their mortality is still in your face, having children sort of made me wake up and it is all going to end so this is all i have got and i thought i would do the best i can in every moment but before i had kids it felt especially hard to wrap my head around enough. Host not a word we cultivate a relationship with culturally. I think we associate lower expectations, like it is sad. Guest this is the first generation of kids who are not better off than their parents and there is a sadness around that. You are not going to be able to afford the big house or have a fancy job and i wanted to say i am not sure that is making people happy. You can be said for the next generation look at ways in which maybe they are realizing the big stuff, the big house and fancy job didnt create a lot of wellbeing anyway and maybe it is not so sad to have a smaller life however you define small or spend a lot of time investing in a Smaller Community of people. That is the root of wellbeing and we have to return to that to some degree. Host over the years, i heard before we used the term millennial, a lot of younger people, one of the words they use that i look at, what they see in their parents generation and people running the world now is a loneliness that they dont want for themselves. Would you talk a little bit about, you and john made a decision to move into a Cohousing Community. Was your first daughter born now you have two children born into this and that is an old model but we are reinventing it. It is a new model again. Another language you have about the lost neighborliness. What have you gotten for this, what are you learning about the lost art of neighborliness . Guest i dont know how to start, people who are not familiar, we are a group of 25 people in 12 units who have our own homes but also share an industrial size eating area, kitchen, garden, kids playroom, bike shed, toolset and eat together thursday nights and sunday nights and beyond that this informal commitment to radical hospitality, we are there for people in oakland so in that neighborhood and also for each other. I am just i lived there about four years and it gets more complex as these relationships deepened but it continues to move me to know end what it means, particularly to my early points, last night, and about the election, i sent an email saying should we gather people, what should we do and for myself, my 3yearold daughter and my 78yearold neighbor louise endeded up walking to the park and walking down the sidewalk and louise and i talking about the carrots pointeded to the garden and how those are growing and walking sticks in the middle of urban oakland, about the trip her every ten steps because shes an erratic toddler. This is what matters, the fact that we get to live with these incredible human beings, the vastness of all this, constantly reminding me of those, and she has been through so much and devastated too, and the light of such vastness and reminding me of that and being enriched by this 3yearold, that energy that is overwhelming but invigorating. That is what it has been for me because this constant thing of being generational friendship and service to each other and having kids just mentioning, i have two mothers, one who was next door and one who was across the street and i dont have any control group to compare it to but i am positive has made my journey in motherhood just so much easier because i can run into them in the courtyard and say is this going to kill my baby and i am like no, it is that simple and giving me that perspective that they have teenagers and all you want to do is get away from your kids come all i want is for my kids to talk to me. I can look at that and go okay, take a deep breath, and joy this moment and it gives me that perspective. Host it is something you wrote, depending on the Nuclear Family to meet all your needs is unhealthy. I agree with that. I dont think we have done a critique of the Nuclear Family, it is unraveling. I have always heard from people, because it turns everything, it is all, you are not held by anything larger and you have no one to work on except a few people you love so much. I always heard from people who live in cohousing arrangements that there are people in the community who work out their issues, they have the guy who drives them crazy and they dont they are not as driven crazy by their husband. You have all these different people to transfer your pathology. Host i love that, doing a fast analysis of people in cohousing giving me a better marriage. That is very true and post election i am thinking who are we in conversation and not in conversation with which i live in this Interfaith Community founded as a Christian Community which i grew up in Colorado Springs colorado which gave me a bad taste of christianity, very hateful, narrow sense of who is an acceptable person, and wrote about what it is like to be a queer question, and published a suicide hotline, and what i experienced in christianity when it is young and deeply redemptive thing to live with christians who are so loving and we do disagree about these things and that is an important practice be on the Nuclear Family piece, i am forced to have conversations with people i disagree with and so grateful because otherwise we can live in such bubbles and especially on the coast by this election. There were people with pathology. My husband can bump into and express his grief over the election or express frustration that i am not fully responsible to be the midwife of his emotional life like so many wives are. That is really important and vice versa but we know this often happens more for women in service of men, that i think is important. I dont have a control group. I only know what i am experiencing but i feel given having grown up not in a Cohousing Community i have this sense this is healthier in so many ways. The other interesting thing is the first generation of kids who didnt grow up in cohousing are a 25 Year Movement in this area, 25 and so interesting to talk to those kids. I did this piece in the New York Times where i did end up talking to them after the book and it was fascinating the way they talked about, they were very realistic, some of them said this sucks, their capacity to understand what it is like to have conflict and work through it was their way of relating to adults in particular, really professionally advantaged a lot of them. They have conversations with adults who are not their parents and they rely on uncles and have a broader sense of who they would relate to and talk to and generationally more fluid. It is good for kids. Host i will read another passage and then open it up. Do you mind if i read this . It is amazing to have someone else read your words. Guest on craigslist, about the election yesterday my sister in law who is maybe keeping her baby quiet, quote, she texteded me a sentence of my own book and i didnt recognize it was mine, i said that is really good and then you wrote it oh wow so honored that i wrote this so i am getting a lot of solace, thinking i said something that might be useful. And a key feature. And very unusual moment in history and a few generations and if you were the right color in the right class things did get better and the laws of physics were defeated for some for a little while. Always went up and up and up. Part of that is owning a home, the white ticket fence and Home Ownership has been at the center of the trauma of this century and a lot of the pain and devastation that fueled a lot of surprising things about this election. A deep doesnt make a house home, the people who batter their do. The best and are not occupied, their joy occupied. They are places, people linger so long at the table and nibbled at all the remaining food and refill each others wineglasses without asking. Places where you feel safe to be vulnerable and where you can heal from physical and emotional malaise. People who inspire inhabitants to put their history and personalities perhaps with a clothesline of book strong across the living room, a shelf lined with beautiful old photographs, painstakingly arranged train set, closet door painted with favorite rap lyrics. These are the things that make a house a home, that make an existence a life. It is the size of our psyches, not our Storage Space that determines the amount of accumulation that is healthiest. What matters is the time we have to appreciate what we possess, time that is inherently limited when we have to work so hard to earn the money to acquire those positions. We are wise to have less and give away more, to pursue experiences over objects and memories over status symbols. We are wise to let go of the century old methodology that would have us believe we havent made it until we have got it, whether it is it, designer bag or home. The new better off mindset is in pursuing the most permanent pleasures which is the fleeting experience we have and intangible stories we tell about them. We talk about this a few minutes. If everybody wants to be in conversation with Courtney Martin. I have a question. I am jane. Loveliest readers, never met the most generous. I think courtney really. Anyway. It is an honor to meet you finally. The people who elected donald trump, i am the black sheep of the family. We moved away for five years, coming back has been brutal. We are moving back west, so much so my husbands families completely divided and we are on the out to the point, the 2 of us did not get invited. That is how far the gap is. I thought if i studied it, if i read enough, if i read the columns and you were the hardcore evangelical, black, white, if you learn this you can change this, you can change this. I started to watch my religion become republican. I grew up a republican and didnt ever think god was one. And so i guess my question, if it is a question, is how do you get what you guys know and what you have taught me because courtney taught me a ton and Krista Tippett taught me a lot as well, but how do we get this message of compassion and unity to a populace that doesnt want to hear it . I am just broken in 1 million pieces over this election because gosh, men now have permission to call me names when i walked down the street . Do they have permission to grab me without asking . Not that i am the hottest whatever, they probably are not going to be grabbing me, i get that. Guest dont underestimate your hotness. Thank you. Here that, honey . She is 8 and her parents were all dressed in red, white and blue and all we are voting for our kidss future, these huge mansion, more money than they will ever need and her grandma is like i went by the grand canyon and saw it for ten minutes and it was like i did that. You did that . Who does that . Just drives by the grand canyon . Total unconsciousness. I am just like, maybe the next book will be how do we do that . I dont know. We have to figure it out. We dont have an option. They told us, they dont care about us. They really dont. When your own family is willing to let you go because you are one of those liberal people stealing their money, i dont know what to do. I dont know how to be right now. That is a lot, sorry. Guest i doubt Krista Tippett wants to give any trite responses because that is a pretty deeply personal, deep suffering you are experiencing in your family. I will say you are in very good company if youre a black sheep. I know some amazing black sheep in this room and all over who are similarly feeling alone in their families, think of all the black sheep as one big heard of brave people. I would offer i tried to write about it tomorrow. To produce something, this is a hard moment to do that. I think a lot about belonging. I was talking about disciplined books. Downstairs flipping through the book. Not the way to read these books. I did read something in a book called positive discipline, at the root of all tantrums is a quest for belonging and significance. Only those two things, belonging and significance. I have been thinking about that as i try to process this election. What is it about the way we vote whether we voted for whoever we voted for that is about our own relationship for that and so i offer you that. As alienated as you feel from your family, something about how they relate to their own belonging and significance is at the root of both making the choices they are making and rejecting in a way that feels personal but is really about their relationship to that if it makes any sense. Host that is a great analogy because the way we structure our political dialogue, political speech, political formats, media echoes those things and that is what has been covered, is infantile. It is like it actually it appeals to our most inventive brains, i was going to say adolescent but it is infantile. It actually draws fourth a kind of worst instinct and that is part of why we get polarized because it creates conditions for that. That is a great analogy. It is a question, a phenomenon we are living with. Somebody else . Courtney wrote yesterday about progressives organizing but not being placemats in doing so, not being poisonous. Guest patronizing. Patronizing too and i was thinking about how i advocated for things i believe to be right, justice and equity and at times it has been poisonous and patronizing and condescending, from the belonging and connection and i wanted to hear more about that. Guest thank you. I didnt know people actually read twitter. One of the things i tweet to do that the yesterday is i feel like in days and weeks after the election it is on progressives to check their own patronizing intellectualism and i was speaking in large part to myself, to my peers also. I feel like part of what happened in this country is those of us who say we value social justice have intellectualized it in this way that makes it very alienating for people, the language we use, our posture around it is this kind of elite feeling it very viscerally these days, this kind of elite distance from know it all snobbery. No wonder a lot of people arent hearing our message in the way they should be hearing it. My brother and sisterinlaw today, we were talking about this paradox, how do we hold, talking about whiteness especially, how do we hold that we dont want to be these kind of intellectual patronizing people or these sappy compassionate anything is good, if you voted for trump, i can understand that is where you are coming from. How do we we need to be thinking about, we need to call people basic ways in which we cannot have the president of the United States, someone who says the things this man has said about muslim people, black people, like it is just wrong. There has to be grounds we can stand on and not going into this intellectual place where we can have a righteousness that is more about deeply held values and especially white people calling other people white people out on that and some effective way. I havent figured that out, marching around the lake. I am hungry to learn how to do that better. Dont know if you talked about that. Again, we have to find new ways to approach each other. There is this culture of what we talk about and how we talk about it that by its very nature pits us against each other. It welcomes what is inflammatory and how we distinguish ourselves against others and it is very cerebral. Even people who dont think they are cerebral, some of that position is about abstractions. The other is such abstraction on this and whoever the other is we are talking about, whether it is rust belt workers, and africanamericans and inner cities, objectified and abstract, if we happen to engage, completely pull back from what we have been talking about and create a new lets just meet each other. Ruby sales right here said guest that interview, everyone who has not listened to it, you have to listen to it, not so much to me but every person i talked to who listen to it feels it was a spiritual moment for them. All your shows have that to some degree depending on where they are, such a huge gift. Host she is the builder in our midst and one of the things she said isnt talking about white people or other white people, is it more fashionable for white people, what are we doing about white people . What are you white people doing for these white people in pain . Is it more fashionable to care about black people than to care about white people . The wrong kind of white people . But, but focusing on the pain, the questions she said she learned to ask and the Civil Rights Movement offered new possibilities to get into a space, we dont have trustworthy spaces for this, but to say where does it hurt . Right there. It hurt, you obviously cannot start there because have to establish trust and expect an honest answer. How do we just find new ways to walk towards each other . It is a process. This is now our work, its a longterm process if we really care about relieving our common life. Its a longterm project and yet, i feel very impatience about, white people have had a long time to think about our own history of enslavement and discrimination in we havent thought about it as much as we need to and theres something about really reimagining whiteness itself, what is it mean to be a white person with a deep social but not spend all my time trying to be the good white person in the room which is like the first step. Theres all these sort of versions of what i think we need to do that weve been trying to do and all of them are very anemic. So its like im grappling with like what is a way to feel the kind of like depths and spiritual drive, like a dorothy day whose birthday, of course is like a couple of days ago. What would dorothy day say aboua whiteness . Maybe she did Say Something i havent read, but im really craving that. I think a lot of people out of the selection are craving moreih of what ruby was like calling us spin i just interviewed last week we talked about, and will be on the air at some point. Very uncomfortable. She said in the middle, this is mortifying. And it is. Ti it is going to be. This is all so, theres isabel wilkerson. Isabel and i mean she really does something that feels important to me that we take seriously what were learning about her brains and bodies, there was a, she says the heart is the last frontier, we have changed a lot of laws with good intention, we have thought about it. But because we didnt actually understand that we walk around, all of us with all of these, those who our minds are difference seeking machines. Because we have not been aware of that even though we have thought about it and had intentions, we have an actually created the structures that go along with the intentions. We have knowledge now work differently with ourselves. Im getting back to friendship again, as stupid as i have black friends, friendship for me has been the place where interracial tension, interfaith friendship is were talked about earlier has been the place for this feel most alive. I feel closest closest to what im trying to talk about. I have a dear friend who is an incredible is working on a complicating idea about family. But she and i can have real conversations will say i dont want to be in a room with white people proving their the good white people and shes like thats your job courtney, i need you in those rooms talk into those white people, even if you hated. And that hate it. And that friendship is worse li maybe our families going to sometimes think about, what about our friendships . Is that where hope in this moment is . Hamlet is the hardest place to make progress. Those most intimate spaces are probably the last place we can break open. Ably the last that wn break open. I love that about friendship. So we should close this down and then youre going to sign some books. I wonder how you think about your, how would you and understanding that vocation and youre defining it as something thats constantly going to be evolving in the life, right now your vocation in your calling her callings at this moment. I want to say thank you are an example of what were talking about with vocation, your journal is that you have created this thing that some people dont even recognize as journalism even though it is, so for me you are a model of that. It feels like you have search for this core understanding of what your gift is and then you plight to the world over and over again and creating these spaces so im very grateful for your model. I think, i know im obsessed with storytelling and solutions. I just keep gravitating toward those two things. Im also very interested in the limitations of storytelling which is another book or conversation. But i think my gift is this pattern keeping and emotional, intellectual coupling, like how i see the world, dont know how to be articulate about this but as i walk around a very interested in connecting dots and trying to Say Something about broader patterns and trends in trends not like in the super surface see down way that media talks about it but the deeper rumblings which is like this election its what is success to people and what do we actually want from one another from our leaders. So i think thats my gift, this pattern keeping,. Connecting and then. Connecting and then i can use words pretty well because i have excessively read and written my life. So thats how gets out into the world. So i guess when what are other parts of your vocation . How do you talk about how that fits together with the other things . Also as a human and as a person in relationships. My life is the material in which i am using to connect those dots which is limited because of my life. But its also really rich. So. So the fact that im a mother, thats thats what im experiencing all the time and thats where some of my deepest challenges and, i hope useful epiphanies are coming through so im writing about mothering a lot. So its anywhere that i can be the person in the room whose pattern keeping, whos listening, and whose seen people and trying to do that again from this emotional, intellectual place. Which i feel really committed to in part because of the early conversation where having about patronizing and its so easy to write that way especially if youre writing an oped, to just go into your head and spit stuff out. I really tried to pause, especially kids i want to honor the space that im in. An act of the easy places intellectually, and and really try to bring my confusion and my vulnerability in my spiritual quest to that as opposed always sounded like someone who has the perfect thing to say and i feel safe to say. Im constantly creating community to bring it back to my moms, i have this womens group in oakland that meets once a month and then potlucks and drinks and its everywhere i go i accidentally create these communities which i understood this was a skill this is actually something i may be most proud of. Which you read from the end of the book, is thinking maybe come i cant read my writing. I know maybe just up here, its regular because but its pretty long rather than wishing for Intentional Community we have to doggedly pursue it. Make it concrete. Make a shared google calendar. Just make it real even if you feel are missed and vulnerable. Creating communities like these, creating demand at at all required shared space and time. Slow down, listen to yourself. Thats where our rediscovery of the local comes in. We might feel faint to jetet setting but our encounters with other people on the go can only at up to so much. Whereas our encounters of thee people who live near us and invest in investment and can be deeply edified. That may not run as frequent live minors but the ways in the comes from striving to be from a place, of the place, even when it is complicated. D. And it is always complicated. S and finally when the bore of life is clarified by big lifechanging transition a new partnership, a big birthday, our birth, death can we are learning how to pause and expense alone together in a way that feels both intertwined with the generations past and authentic to the one were just nowansiti experiencing. We realize just because some of the best additions are doctrines of the stroke addicted ritual have been flawed only fools would forgo the final meaning of witnessing these moments. Its the honoring not the authority that matters. This all requires a tremendous amount of creativity and fortitude, selfexamination and coordination. A but its worth it. Its always weve got. This one chance to live life that gives us pleasure makes his product next to some of those in dying questions, that humans ask when they are muddling through. What am i for . Why are we here . What matters . Thank you, courtney. That con [applause] y are we here . What matters . What matters . Thank you courtney. [applause]. Heres a look at some authors recently featured on both tvs afterwards, our weekly Author Interview program. There are good things and bad things as with anything spin what are the good things . The good things are certainly that would have a reliable accessible food supply. And just as you said, that the cost of food in real dollars is significantly less, that is of animalbased protein particularly but also wheat and milk as you know. Those are the good things. The bad things are that this is an industry that has not really come under the appropriate purview, and thats because our view of whom . Consumer. You can watch all previous programs on our website, booktv. Org. Michael dake am your book is called obama is like a sikh. What would you say is the most significant accomplishment of the Obama Administration . Right out of the gate he pretty much save our economy. Look what he was handed in 2009. We were in really bad shape and he went to work and we are doing much, much better, absolutely. On the other side of that what would you say he would be most criticized for . I think what hurts the most as he was not able to make a dent in terms of guns. Did you find any policies or accomplishments that will have a historical significance that didnt get a lot of attention in the public . Permit think the whole issue of clean air, clean water, people really were not paying attention. The things were done with 189 other countries, designed to save our planet. We have three days of booktv on this christmas weekend. Our Holiday Schedule features thats just a few the programs you will see on booktv this christmas w weekend. For a complete television schedule, booktv. Org. Book tv, 7272 hours of nonfiction books and authors. Television for serious readers. Welcome to the Hoover Institution washington, d. C. Office. My name is michael franc and im the director and its my pleasure today to be able to introduce our honored guest, heather hindershot, a professor at mit