(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - If you think you don't have the power to make a difference in our chaotic world, the change makers you're about to meet will inspire you to try.

They're following in the footsteps of civil rights activist Florynce Rae Kennedy, who issued a call to action that endures.

"Don't agonize, organize."

From defending democracy to protecting our planet, never underestimate how the power of us is the antidote to anxiety.

(upbeat music) The apocalypse wrapped in a global mental health crisis.

As stress and anxiety over climate change surge, that's how the threat of a volatile planet is being billed.

Or as one Idaho teenager put it, "I'm mad, I'm powerless, I'm exhausted, and I'm only 18."

But thankfully, there's some good news on the horizon.

Here to guide us through that and the forecast ahead are four distinguished climate champions.

Joining us are Cristina Mittermeier marine biologist and photographer.

Bill Weir, chief climate correspondent at CNN.

David Wallace-Wells, "New York Times" opinion writer and author of "The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming".

And later we'll talk with Ambassador Cindy McCain, who's on a mission to fight global hunger exacerbated by our warming planet.

But first, we're grateful to have you all with us.

- When I was working for National Geographic, we were spending months photographing animals that are dying because of heat waves in the ocean and lack of oxygen in the ocean.

So we just wanted to help people stop for a moment and think about what it means to die of starvation because you can't find food.

And I think, you know, that photograph was very controversial.

It stirred up a conversation.

And five years later, people are still talking about it.

People look at photographs and they immediately want to ask questions about the things that they're looking at.

And for me, that breaking moment when somebody asks a question is such a good opportunity to engage in what I think is the most important conversation of our lifetimes.

So I use photography to lower the price of entry, to bring people into a conversation.

I start by trying to be really inspirational and hopeful and positive because I think people that are afraid tend to reject and recoil.

So it's just a way of bringing people in.

And that photograph of the starving polar bear you're talking about, you know, Martin Luther King didn't start his famous speech by saying, I have a nightmare.

He told us where we're going.

You know, you have to paint the vision of what a potential future could be like if we do all the right things.

So he told us that, and then he reminded us that we have a long way to go.

- David, I do want to talk a little bit more about the scope of where we are right now in the overview.

And we don't want people to be lulled into a false sense of complacency that things are necessarily fabulous.

But you had written, when you were at New York Magazine, a cover story about what you consider to be the gravest threat of the 21st century.

And it was entitled "The Guilty and the Damned".

And I think it's an important point to be made.

I want you, if you would, explain what that's about.

- Well, it's about justice and equity as core features of the climate crisis.

To keep in mind sort of ballpark, two degrees is what is described as dangerous warming, sometimes catastrophic warming.

Island nations of the world have called it genocide.

African climate diplomats have called it death for the continent, certain death for the continent.

And this is, given where we are now, almost a best case scenario for where we're ending up.

And last year at New York Magazine, I wrote a piece about what it means for those who have the least and who have done the least to cause this crisis to be heading into a future that might be somewhat manageable for the rich countries of the world, but will be much, much less so for them.

And what kind of politics that opens up, what moral obligations and demands it makes of those of us in the rich world.

And how broken our way of seeing our relationship to other people in the world is, that we can see, you know, four or five straight failed rainy seasons in the Horn of Africa and just think that that starvation as a sort of a natural feature, not something that we've sort of designed and allowed to happen for our own benefit.

And I do think that, you know, your, your misgivings about data aside, some of these numbers are unbelievably striking.

So all of Sub-Saharan Africa, which is nearly a billion people, in their entire history, is responsible for something like 1% of historical emissions, 1% of historical emissions.

The United States is responsible for about 20% of historical emissions.

The average person in sub-Saharan Africa uses less electricity than the average American refrigerator.

You know, a transatlantic flight, one ticket on a transatlantic flight melts like I think nine tons of arctic ice.

The way that we live, sort of somewhat casually in the global north is having unbelievably large consequences on the climate that are going to be felt primarily by people living elsewhere who can do the least to protect themselves from them.

And the thing that I was trying to get at in that piece, and I think is opening up more and more in the climate conversation more generally, is that it doesn't have to be a feature of our climate future.

We can design a new geopolitics around climate obligations that take the suffering of people in the global south more seriously.

But we're very, very far from that today.

- Bill, you famously have said that all the worst disaster movies start with somebody ignoring a scientist.

- Right.

(audience chuckling) - And let me, I mean, from what I read, the science community, climate community is not happy.

I mean, they're fed up.

They feel they're not being heard.

People aren't paying the attention that should be paid to the warnings.

And basically the deniers are blocking, as you put it, exits to a burning building.

So I want to talk about this human behavior part of this today, because it's not that I have misgivings about stats, David, it's that I sometimes feel people really don't, you know, they don't resonate with people.

So in terms of the impact that that denialism is having, what have you seen?

Because you've been everywhere.

- Yeah, well, it's really a America specific problem.

And you see it in Australia a little bit.

But this is purely the result of the stories we've been told.

You know, that I grew up in a world where fossil fuels were unlocking longer lifespans, and we saw the proof of that.

It built the modern world.

So it's hard just on a baseline to make the cognitive leap to realize, wait, all the things that we think are fantastic about human beings are coming back to bite us in just these violent, unpredictable ways and I have to feel responsible for that?

That's a tough one for the average person to wrestle with.

And is a easy one for a denialist or somebody with a vested interest who profits off of this way, or the politicians who love them, to sow doubt into that.

And ultimately, the piece I had to make with this, I went down to the very tip of southern Louisiana where I did a story on this Isle de Jean Charles this small community, mostly Native Americans who, they've lost 90% of their land in the last 50 years.

They just raise their house every decade about three feet, and they're living on stilts.

And they want a grant to move inland, that the federal grant would give 'em $50 million or more to build a brand new community.

Most of them don't want to leave.

They don't trust the government.

As long as it's above ground, it's theirs.

That's a whole 'nother layer of psychology we don't talk about enough when it comes to this story managed retreat, what that means.

But I think the conversation really is changing.

And another way to frame David's numbers before, some people now are seeing, even those who denied it or then delayed it for ideological or political reasons, see that there's a $50 trillion carbon capture business out there for somebody to come along and get rich off of.

Maybe I should take a look at that.

And so some people are going to come to this story as climate allies for completely different motivations.

But I think we should be empathetic to all and take all the help we can get.

And that is, we can't, Jane, solve this problem without common ground, so.

(laughing) - There you go!

Of course!

Thank you.

(upbeat music) - Racial inequality is a result of deliberate choice.

It is the country we made.

If we're going to resolve it, we have to be just as deliberate.

- That call to action from Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude puts into stark focus our challenge to purge systemic racism from America's soul.

Today we welcome four distinguished guests to talk about how we can confront the racism that's subverting our democracy.

Joining us are Roxane Gay, critically acclaimed author of five books and "New York Times" columnist.

Ibram X Kendi, historian and bestselling author of "How to Be an Anti-Racist".

Imani Perry, author, columnist for "The Atlantic", and Princeton University professor.

And Ali Velshi, journalist and host of "Velshi" on MSNBC.

Talk about the weaponization of other people, basically.

- Well really, you know, it's the weaponization of difference.

Because it's an easy wedge to create problems, to create discord, and to make people who already feel disenfranchised feel justified in that.

You know, Ali was speaking earlier about accountability, and that's so true.

And one of the things that gets lost in so many of these conversations is that you can acknowledge that you hold power in some ways and still suffer.

You can still experience hardship.

What people tend to term culture wars is that there are people who are marginalized who would like equality and equity and like, human rights.

And all of a sudden that becomes a culture war, as if we're trying to foist certain types of identity on other people, when in fact it's, no, I would like to be able to live freely and openly and safely and not have to worry about the integrity of my marriage and whether or not this new Supreme Court is going to overturn it.

So if that's a war, yes, but let's admit what the terms of engagement actually are.

- Imani, you've also talked about the culture wars and how detrimental they can be to all of us.

What do you have to say about them?

- Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I'm a movement baby.

And so I believe deeply in the processes of acquiring knowledge and political education.

And I do think that there is an intense effort to control what people know and an effort to control how people think.

As opposed to sort of this equivocation that happens with cultural wars, as though there's just two sides and then that tends towards us thinking, well, we have to wind up somewhere in the middle, we need to think about the side that is actually oriented towards the fuller, deeper, more robust story.

And those who want people to continue to believe in mythologies and mythologies that were put in place in order to sustain various forms of domination and inequality, I think we have to make it claim that those are the stakes of the two positions.

- Yeah, I was going to say, I think we need a little bit of, I won't go to optimism, Roxanne.

There have been some positive developments that have come out in the last couple years.

And I know, Ali, that you were in Jackson, Mississippi, you went down there to talk to students and teachers about the sort of danger of, again, the lies of not telling the truth about who we are.

And there was a young man you interviewed named Timothy.

And do you know who I'm talking about?

- Yes.

- I knew you would.

- And he basically said, the problem is we don't stand in our own truth.

And talk about that.

- I'm sort of first of all blown away by how you know all this stuff.

There's no prompter, there's no notes.

Like, how you remember.

- No, it's all my head.

- That's amazing.

- Thank you.

- Yeah, you know, first of all, there were the students who had grown up in Jackson, Mississippi and had gone to Tougaloo College, the historically black college.

And they were saying, wow, you come up in the public education system in Jackson, Mississippi, and you hear about a new Confederate hero every week.

And then in Black History Month you hear about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and like one other person.

And then you go to these historically black colleges and universities and you learn that there are lots of people, there are lots of heroes all the time in the climate movement and all sorts of movements who were black.

And it empowers you, right?

It makes you realize that that myth that Ibram was talking about isn't true, because the myth doesn't just get taught to white kids, gets taught to black kids, gets taught to everybody, right?

And a lot of black parents and grandparents and great-grandparents didn't want to inculcate their kids with what is sometimes thought of to some people as a shameful history, something to be embarrassed about.

So we really do have to live in our own history, and to Imani's point, in the south, they do struggle with that.

In Alabama and Mississippi and places like that, they really struggle with telling real stories about what the war was, what the Civil War was, what it was about.

And white kids and Black kids learn different things there.

And sometimes Black kids have to go outside of the circle of public education to get the full story.

So we are not living in our own truth.

We're not living in a shared experience.

If we all were in this country, our prospects for progress would be better.

(upbeat music) - Reports that American democracy is dying are greatly exaggerated.

So say those who admit our great experiment may be battered and bruised, but it can still be saved.

But others say the shining city on the hill has gone dark, and our democracy is already on life support.

Here to tell us what they think is a distinguished bipartisan panel.

Anne Applebaum, staff writer for "The Atlantic" and a Pulitzer Prize winning historian.

Michelle Goldberg, columnist for the "New York Times".

Will Hurd, former Republican congressman and author of "American Reboot, an Idealist's Guide to Getting Big Things Done".

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut.

And George Packer, staff writer for "The Atlantic", and author of "The Last Best Hope, Crisis and Renewal in America".

And we're grateful to have all of you with us.

Anne, I'm going to start with you.

Out of the wealth of wonderful things that you've said, my absolute favorite thing is that "Democracy is not like tap water.

It won't necessarily always be there."

And you raise the whole issue, which I think again, resonates with a lot of people.

It's actually in some ways like climate crisis, people aren't sure it exists.

They don't think it can happen.

They don't think anything bad's going to happen.

They don't think they can make a difference.

And those things can really be said of how people look at our democracy.

I mean, it's a big issue.

So what do you tell people who say that, you know, I can't really have any kind of impact on this.

- I tell people to focus on their own local communities and what they can do with the people and the issues immediately around them.

Whether it's your local community, whether it's your local, you know, co-op, whether it's your local village or your town or your city, being more involved in those things will help you have those institutions and bodies come to more rational solutions and make better and have better conversations.

I mean, a lot of this isn't even about which solution you come to.

It's about a better conversation.

It's about how people talk to each other.

George spoke about Tocqueville a few minutes ago.

One of the things that he observed about Americans was that they were good at democracy because they practiced democracy.

And by that he meant that they engaged in whatever it was, local church construction funds or local, you know, committees to help the poor or local bridge building groups or local sports clubs, that Americans were involved in all kinds of organizations and institutions at a very, very basic and low level.

And through doing that became better at negotiating and dealing with people they disagreed with at higher levels.

And we really lost that lower level of involvement and engagement, partly because so much of it has shifted online and become something else, partly because people think they don't have time.

And partly because, as you said, people had had come to treat democracy like tap water, just this thing, you know, you go to the election once every four years and you vote and you don't really have to do anything else.

And then there are some people who are experts and those are the politicians, and they worry about these things for the rest of us.

You know, actually democracy isn't like this.

It's like water from the well and you have to go and get it and do things and think about it and be engaged in it.

That's the way to fix democracy, and it's also the way to fight this feeling of helplessness.

- A fabulous introduction to the last part of this show.

And we are almost out of time.

So Will, I'm going to ask you, it's been suggested that you might be a contender in 2024.

And so my question to you is, if you ran, if you won, what would you do that sort of carries out the themes in your book "American Reboot" to try and fortify democracy?

- Well, look, I would implement a simple formula, right?

Freedom leads to opportunity.

Opportunity leads to growth.

Growth leads to progress.

I think, you know, George started off, we're talking about education.

We have income inequality in the United States of America because we have education inequality.

This should be our singlemost focus.

And not just the content that we're providing our young kids, but also making sure that half of teenagers don't feel scared about going to school.

We can get back to having a actual civilized competition of ideas to have the best issues come forward.

It's getting back to solving real problems, and by solving problems, that's how you start bridging that trust gap that exists between the public and their institutions.

- George, you wrote very eloquently about the fact that the war in Ukraine and the bravery of the Ukrainian people actually was one of the brilliant miraculous moments when people, when the world, a lot of the world, not all of the world, but in this country pulled together.

Talk about that synergy.

- When you think of the moments when we might have come together and stayed somewhat together as Americans, the pandemic, global warming, on and on, and never, in fact became more divided as a result of those crises, the one issue that seems to have held as a uniting force has been the war in Ukraine.

And the percentages of Republicans and Democrats remain very high in support of arming Ukraine.

It's gone down a bit on the Republican side with inflation and gas prices.

But I ask myself, why is that?

And I think it's because what Americans see in Ukraine is what we want for ourselves, which is freedom, courage, unity, a mobilized society in which people work together in a common cause.

(upbeat music) - When I started researching today's show on social media, I wasn't sure if it was more of a pox on democracy or just a place for millions to obsess about a 13 year old pug named Noodles on TikTok.

Blaming social media for the state of our broken public square can eclipse the real issues that divide us, but algorithms that keep people hooked on anger, foment violence, and hurt children need to be rebooted.

Here to explore how to do that is a distinguished bipartisan panel.

George Farmer, CEO of the conservative social media platform, Parler.

Francis Haugen, former Facebook engineer and activist, best known as the Facebook whistleblower.

Lynette Lopez, senior finance editor at "Business Insider".

And legendary tech journalist and entrepreneur, Kara Swisher.

Since you're an educator and I've heard you talk about this and I think it's important, again, goes back to the humanity of this, which sometimes I think gets bled out of it, talk about how it's easier to push people in the direction of hatred than to cultivate empathy or compassion.

Explain why that's possible.

- Hmm.

These algorithms today are based on something called engagement based ranking.

That means when they go in there and say like, is this piece of content better than this piece of content?

They have to come up with a mathematical way of describing the goodness of that content so that the computer can take 10,000 pieces, 40,000 pieces every time you open the app and decide what's the first thing to show you.

And the way they simplify that down is by saying, if you get more clicks, you get more comments, you get more re-shares, that must be better content.

And the only challenge with that is that the shortest path to a click is hate.

You know, was it enragement leads to engagement, as Kara said earlier?

When you have a system like that where good speech cannot answer bad speech, you begin to have differential forces.

So you asked a question earlier, is social media a mirror or is it an amplifier, right?

Or is it an inducer?

If people begin to see the content that makes up more and more of their feed is angrier or that the posts that get the most comments, the most likes are those ones that are hot takes, it trains us that that's the kind of speech that's appropriate for these platforms.

They're all interactive cycles.

And so I always like to say, we don't have a misinformation problem.

We've always had misinformation.

What we have today is an amplification problem or a conversational problem.

And those are all the results of intentional architectural design decisions.

- It's also addiction.

This is an addiction element to it.

- Oh yeah, addiction.

- You cannot look away from it.

It's very in tune to the human nature, except that it's always on and it's always there and you're always distracted.

And you get pieces of information.

You don't get the whole story.

- But you're talking about living in a low information age where people, I mean basically it's sound bites.

It's how fast can you be?

Nobody-- - That's correct.

It's called snackable.

But think about what snacks are, this is not unlike sugar.

Like, you know, sugar tastes delicious.

Like, it really does.

And there's a human element to loving sugar.

Doesn't mean we should be eating it all the time.

And so if you have a high sugar environment, you have crazy people, right?

As anyone who has children knows.

- What do you mean by low information age?

- Well, low information diet is what it is, is what we're getting is Twinkies, Twinkies, Twinkies, Twinkies.

Just, we're getting pieces of information and so we can't substantively understand, every story gets overwrought.

- Yeah, 'cause I mean, I would say that information, I mean, in terms of accessibility to information-- - Never had more.

- Yeah, exactly.

So in theory, therefore, we should argue that people have the ability to research and do their own, I mean, the basic premise of Western civilization is that human beings are rational and can make rational decisions.

If we don't even agree with that premise, then democracy is a farce, an illusion, and we should just abolish it now and replace it with monarchy, right?

Because if it doesn't work, then why are we even trying?

So we have to rely upon people to make rational decisions, basis information that they can access.

- I think devices make it, there's an element of casino to it, that you can't look away.

- Lynette, I want to, at this point we have to go to, I can't believe it, but solutions, future, what's going to happen?

You have been on the record as saying that you think that the tech titans are in trouble and basically that the bubble, the party's about to be over and the bubble's about to burst.

Why do you, I mean, you read that Meta brought in-- - It's been bursting.

- $29 billion of revenue in the second quarter.

I mean, so what could be bad?

- You know, as much as Kuwait if you really want to put it in perspective.

But again, these business models are not assured.

We are coming at a moment where we're starting to think about what really drives these companies and what it really takes to make a pro-social social media company for millions and millions and millions of people.

And I think that some of the decisions that Congress might make or some of the regulation that's coming down the pipe will be harmful to giant social media companies like Facebook.

I think that we should be having more transparency around the algorithms, how they work, who they target, and where they take those people.

I think we're starting to have those conversations too.

And I think we need to have conversations about antitrust and how big we let a certain big social media company get so that there's a lack of competition.

These are all things that are being discussed.

But you are right, George, there's a certain amount of personal restraint that we as a society, when these technologies came to us, we didn't know we would have to exercise.

And so I find, yeah, it's dangerous for young people to be on social media.

We've seen that.

And I worry about my parents.

I worry about older people because they're not taught how to read this kind of news.

They're not used to being bombarded with this information.

They're used to reading newspapers, listening to the radio, watching television.

It's not the same format, it's not the same quality, and it's not the same distribution process.

So figuring out what is quality news or what is quality information and what is not quality information is something that we as a society are going to have to learn.

(upbeat music) - For many of us, life often feels like a terminal stress test.

Every day it gets harder to cope, and some days even that's impossible.

Then there are people who seem to have a boundless reservoir of grit and resilience.

They stand on the precipice of disaster and seem to magically emerge stronger than ever.

Today we'll introduce you to five extraordinary women who have done just that.

We'll talk to them about how they deal with adversity and what we can all learn from them.

Joining us are Patti LuPone, Broadway legend and three time Tony winning actor and singer.

Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace prize winner and author of the new bestselling book, "How to Stand Up to a Dictator".

Topeka Sam, who went from serving time in federal prison to becoming one of the nation's leading criminal justice activists.

And MSNBC anchor Katie Tur, whose latest bestselling book is called "Rough Draft, A Memoir".

With democracy in danger around the globe, our next guest distinguished herself as a fearless defender of freedom who offers a roadmap to fight authoritarianism.

We're honored to welcome veteran journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Ressa.

Maria is also the author of the new book, "How To Stand Up To A Dictator".

And we are going to talk about, Maria, your real life version of how you stood up to a dictator.

But before we do that, you were so eloquent on the whole subject of how living in a world, a post-truth world where lies have turned everything upside down and brought out the worst in humanity, very often, actually is endangering democracy around the globe.

Talk about that a little bit.

- I mean, you know, I feel so much of public discourse today talks about the cascading failures downstream, but really the main failure is that the main distribution platforms for news, right now we're on television, but if you are on social media, the incentive structure for that is actually, spreads lies faster than facts.

Imagine a world where you have kids and you tell your kids, lie all the time, and then keep rewarding your kids when they lie.

And when they tell the truth, take away rewards, you know, punish them for it.

That's the world we live in today.

And what happened was that lies and facts were indistinguishable, no one could tell the difference.

When you don't have facts, you can't have truth.

Without truth, you can't have trust, right?

Without these three, you don't have a shared reality, we cannot have democracy, we can't solve any problems.

That's the fundamental core problem that we face today.

And it is existential.

- You actually have studied how democracy has deteriorated.

I think that it's 60% of the world is now under some sort of authoritarian rule.

And democracy, even in America, has been downgraded by very many metrics.

That sounds hopeless to a lot of people.

Is it hopeless?

- Absolutely not.

I actually think we now see the pattern and the trend.

Now is the time when we need to act.

And that's part of what I've been saying over and over.

This is where I feel like Cassandra and Sisyphus combined, you know, this is an in incredibly important moment.

When we look back a decade from now, we're going to look at this moment and say, what did we do?

This is it.

This is the time when we need to, and actually I came down to, you know, here's the long-term, medium term and short term, right?

Long term it's really education.

Medium term it's legislation.

And then finally in the short term, it's us.

It's just us.

We need to move away from being users, being passive consumers, to active citizens, to figuring out what civic engagement means in the age of exponential lies.

(upbeat music) - Was 2016 the worst or the worst year ever?

When late night host Stephen Colbert asked that question, he got laughs.

Since then every year has been named the worst year ever.

But for those of us yearning to escape the assault of bad news for better days, it's no joke.

Today we'll debunk the meme that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and look at what the facts show, that life is improving for most people around the world, we just don't believe it.

Joining us are four distinguished guests.

Danielle Allen, professor and director of the Software Center of Ethics at Harvard University.

Sister Simone Campbell, co-founder of "Understanding Us", and founder of Nuns on the Bus.

Masha Gessen, staff writer for "The New Yorker".

And Steven Pinker, psychologist and professor at Harvard University.

We are really grateful to have this brain trust here today to talk about this very, very, very big issue.

And you all come at this through a different lens.

Marsha, I want to go back to a conversation I saw you have with Tim Snyder, who famously wrote "On Tyranny" and a lot of other amazing books.

And you were talking about how loneliness can drive people, it's this whole, kind of breeds authoritarianism.

Talk through that a little bit 'cause I also think that's part of what we're going through right now.

- Oh, absolutely.

And I think what we're talking about is that, according to Hannah Arendt, loneliness is the defining condition of totalitarianism.

Loneliness is what totalitarianism produces, and it's also what it feeds on.

And I think that, you know, I just want to react to what Steven and Simone said that, you know, there's fundamentally not a huge difference between believing in what we call science and believing in conspiracy theories.

You know, most people are not able to read medical papers and come to their own conclusions.

And I think that, you know, suggesting that we show people that this is data driven and data proven is a little bit, you know, unproductive because most people are not, I'm not in a position to read the data and draw a conclusion about the vaccine.

I make a decision to believe in something, right, based on who I think is credible, but also based on the people I talk with and the people I'm in community with, right?

And I think that what you were saying is that especially during the pandemic, people were left so profoundly alone to make up their minds.

And you know, if you also think about the way we talked about the pandemic and what people's responsibilities were, there was not a single state in this country that had a public health information campaign that was based on messages of interdependence and community.

Every single state had a public campaign, to the extent that some of them had them at all, about individual responsibility, right?

You are alone with this thing.

It's your responsibility to do this.

It's your responsibility to wear a mask.

It's your responsibility to protect others.

And it's your responsibility to get the vaccine.

Not a single state had a public health campaign that said, we're all in this together, right?

That began with a sense that there was something that was actually bringing us together, not something that was just forcing people to stay home and do things alone.

And when you are alone and you feel lost in this world of information, you are going to make decisions that, yes, decisions about belief that feel most comfortable.

But I don't think that we need to make such a huge distinction between sort of the natural state of people believing in woo-woo and the advanced enlightened state of people believing in science.

Fundamentally, those are the same decisions.

- You know, I agree that if you show people the actual, the data, then their eyes will certainly glaze over.

But if you convince them that behind the scenes, we can show our work.

This is why we're not just a priesthood, but if the facts change, we would change our recommendations.

We are not a wing of the Democratic party, we're not a wing of the Republican party.

To restore the trust in institutions that reached a high mark in the 1960s and has been in decline ever since, although it was low before that as well.

Trust in institutions is not such a common human situation.

That's, I think, crucial for aligning people's belief in our best guess at the truth, simply because it's true.

Maybe-- - I would love to challenge that to be honest.

- Okay, you challenge it.

- So, I mean, I did a fair amount of COVID work and public health work, and the work I did mostly with mayors around the country.

So I can't, you know, precisely count through sort of what I saw in different states in response to your comment.

But I know for a fact that there are plenty of mayors who made the core of their public messaging around the pandemic that we're all in this together.

And in fact, I do think where we saw success in the pandemic, that's exactly what people were doing.

So, and a lot of folks in the public health space spent a lot of time trying to think about exactly that, how to activate that sense of sort of in it together, working on this in a shared way.

I mean, and sometimes what that can mean can be surprising.

There was one mayor where the way that everybody was in it together was that, you know, this is how we're going to get football games back again.

You know, we all love football games in our community.

This is how we're going to get football games back again is by doing these things together.

And for me, that's a real source of hope, a real indication that we do have the resources that we need to name our problems.

Your questions are really tapping into, I think, what is a shared sense of anxiety, right?

And that word anxiety has been coming up a lot.

And I think everybody in the audience feels anxiety about where we are.

We do have the resources to, again, link arms, name problems, and find some solutions to that.

Just lots of evidence supports the idea that when you have a society where communities are more connected and the economy is empowering people in a more egalitarian way, and this doesn't have to mean redistribution, it can just literally mean that you're investing in education, you're investing in all the building blocks that actually give people a chance to live empowered lives, you have a higher level of happiness as well.

These things go together.

So you can actually be making progress in macro terms, even at the same time as you're eroding some of the underpinnings of an experience of wellbeing.

- You're like human Google.

(all laughing) (upbeat music) When President Biden's asked to define America, he does it with one word, possibilities.

But for too many, those possibilities don't exist.

The word that defines their lives is unfair.

Today we'll focus on America's tale of two economies.

As many revel in the best of times, millions more feel like they're getting, as President Biden says, "Ripped off in the worst of times."

Joining us are Anand Giridharadas, author of the bestselling book, "The Persuaders at the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds and Democracy".

And two veteran journalists who are collaborating on a book about race and money in America called "The Black Dollar", Louise Story and Ebony Reed.

And later, personal finance guru Susie Orman will tell us what's ahead for the economy and your money.

I mean, people increasingly understand they have to be proactive.

This is affecting their lives.

And young people, I was actually surprised to read a story recently about how they've become the real advocates for resurrecting unions.

And they see that as a way, because the grand bargain of the parents, if you work, if you go to college, you work hard, you have a great life.

That's not true anymore necessarily.

And so they see unionizing as a way back.

And it's unbelievable, I think it's 70% of college graduates really support unions at this point.

You have three children.

I mean, what is your plan to sort of move us ahead and get us back to a better place?

- Well, with my children, the most important thing that I try to focus on with them is that they should embrace change and be involved in leading change.

And they should live every day to make the world better.

And I see actually a lot of education that's rooted in primarily teaching traditions about why things are the way they are.

And education that kind of says, here's how you navigate change.

And so you asked about my children, what I try to talk with in my family is about how change is needed and be part of change and push for things to be equitable, inclusive, and fair in what you do each day.

- Your children are young, your children are, Zora and Orion, are very young.

But do you think about this in terms of their future?

And what do you think the odds, I mean, there may be a sea change and things may be heading in a better direction.

But by the time they're of age, what do you see at that point?

- You know, when I was writing "Winners Take All", I guess that was like 2015, 16, 17, those kind of years.

I had the one child at the time and was heading towards having the second.

And one of the things I tried to do, I mean, I think for all of us who write about inequality, I mean, it's the problem with the word and the concept is that everyone thinks they know what they think about it already.

So it's a hard topic to work on because you have to really try to reframe it for people and allow them to see it afresh.

And so I was a new parent and thinking about the topic and thinking about how to reframe it for people.

And I realized that basically like, we all love our own kids, right?

And we would all do anything for our own kids.

And then there's everybody else's kids, right?

And one way to think about different societies with different attitudes to inequality and different tolerances for inequality is where do you draw the line between your love for your own kids and some amount of concern for everybody else's kids?

And I think we have gotten to a place in the United States where we have privatized everything.

Not just our schools, not just our military contractors.

We've privatized the idea of taking care of the next generation.

So it's become a private family obligation to give everything to your kids because we just starve the commons.

We starve the commons, we starve schools, we starve, you know, parks and playgrounds, we starve childcare resources.

And you know, I come from, my family's from India and my parents are immigrants from India.

India is a society.

We're on that spectrum.

Everything is what you do for your own, you do for your own people and you don't worry about the commons.

And what that makes for is an incredibly impoverished society.

What that makes for is an incredibly brutal society, when people only love their own and no one loves anybody else's kids, it's a death spiral for opportunity for everybody.

And I hope we avoid that route.

- I'm actually going to leave it right there.

This has gone very quickly.

You're talking about collective good and that's something that we've lost, I think we all would agree, in this country.

- Common ground.

- Common ground.

We're living in a world that, more than ever, demands we get off the sidelines and do something for the public good.

Or as the late iconic civil rights leader, John Lewis said, "Never ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble."

Our guests today have met that call to action with fearlessness and resolve to make a difference.

And they have.

Joining us are Sarah McBride, state senator from Delaware.

Mallory McMorrow, state senator from Michigan.

Kyle Spencer, author of "Raising Them Right, the Untold Story of America's Ultra Conservative Youth Movement and its Plot for Power".

Shannon Watts, founder of the gun safety organization Moms Demand Action.

And later on we'll meet Melanie DeMore, a true believer in the power of vocal activism.

Turning to Mallory at this point, you catapulted onto the national stage for speaking out against hate speech last year when you denounced a political opponent who accused you of wanting to groom and sexualize children.

Here's part of your video that went viral, which so far has like over 16 million hits on Twitter.

Here it is.

- I didn't expect to wake up yesterday to the news that the senator from the 22nd district had overnight accused me by name of grooming and sexualizing children in an email fundraising for herself.

So who am I?

I am a straight white Christian married suburban mom who knows that the very notion that learning about slavery or redlining or systemic racism somehow means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are white is absolute nonsense.

I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard and supported, not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight, white and Christian.

We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people's lives.

And I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen.

- So many people have felt those feelings.

They're not as articulate as you are.

You became an instant, I don't want to say sensation, because that sort of doesn't really capture the gravity of it.

Why do you think you got the reaction you got?

- I mean, first to be very clear, I was angry, I was livid.

The idea that, you know, just to kind of paint a picture of what happened, I woke up on a normal Monday morning and started doing my job.

And my husband texted me a screenshot of a report on Twitter of this email that my colleague had sent out about me, accusing me by name of wanting to groom and sexualize kindergartners.

I don't know how anybody could not not be angry, right?

And I think in this moment, you know, there was a lot that led up to my response.

But that night, you know, I went about my entire day and there were a couple of kind of key things that happened.

One, I was visiting a high school in my district and meeting, you know, 16, 17, 18 year olds, meet and greet with your state senator, which is usually not controversial at all.

It's, you know, what is your job?

Do you have any internships, and those kinds of questions.

But there was a girl who asked, she said, I'm queer.

Why do all these bills targeting us keep moving?

And why does my state hate me?

And then that night I was bathing my daughter, who's now two, she was one at the time.

And I just remember looking at her and her laughing at me because she's oblivious and she has no idea.

And I just started crying.

And recognized that for this 15 year old girl and for my daughter, this is not okay.

It's not okay to demonize and target other people.

That I was fine, I'm not actually the target of this attack, but my daughter might be.

And this 15 year old girl definitely is.

Because this attack says that if you are queer, you are wrong, and it's not okay.

And I was in a position to be able to do something about it.

But I think that for too long, especially for women, we've been told we can't show emotion and we can't be angry.

And I was in my community the day after, two days after giving this speech, and another mom walked up to me, especially after two years of COVID.

And she said, you felt exactly how I feel and you made me realize I can fight again.

And I think there's power in anger, but we have to be very intentional in the words that we use.

I didn't at all attack my colleague back.

I didn't call her a name.

I talked about myself and my values and why people like me, who are generally okay, have to stand up for other people.

- Sarah, it actually is talked about that you can have a great bumper sticker, you can have a great slogan, but if you don't have a clear vision of what you want the future to be in terms of change, you really don't have much.

And in your case, you ran on something that came from a very personal place, which was watching your late husband Andrew battle terminal cancer.

And out of that, the issue of the importance of healthcare and family leave emerged.

Talk about that, 'cause you ran on something that people relate to.

Talk about why you did that.

- When I was running, I made clear that the most formative experience in my life is not being transgender.

It was serving as the caregiver to my husband Andy during his battle with what ended up being terminal cancer.

And during that battle with cancer, Andy was lucky.

He had health insurance.

We were both lucky because we had access to flexible workplace policies, policies like paid family and medical leave that allowed Andy to focus on the full-time job of getting care that would hopefully save his life.

And ultimately, when Andy found out it was terminal, paid family and medical leave benefits allowed us to spend that precious time together, for us to get married just four days before he passed away and for me to be able to be there by his side, to walk him to his passing.

And up until Andy's last moments, even as he faced death, he considered himself lucky because he had access to benefits, to coverage, to care.

That is far too uncommon here in the United States.

We are the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn't provide some form of paid family and medical leave to workers.

And so when I ran, I made clear that it shouldn't be a matter of luck, it should be the law of the land.

And just this past year, about a year and a half into my first term, the governor signed my legislation, Senate Bill 1, which guarantees up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to Delaware workers.

Because we can't stop all loss or all pain as elected officials, but we can make life a little bit easier for people when they face inevitable hardship in life.

- Sarah, I asked Shannon earlier, I'm going to ask you now, because I'm listening to you and you know, you just, you're in my heart already, listening to you.

And I wonder how you get through something that's that grueling when you're in the public eye.

And do you ever say to yourself, you know what, I can't do this anymore.

- Yes.

One of the experiences that I had during the last month of Andy's life gave me a totally new perspective on things.

And frankly, it's a perspective that I draw on now in my work, but also right now just in this moment in our country, when it can feel like we have every reason to give up hope.

And that experience was in the last couple of weeks, my brother, who's a radiation oncologist and who's watched far too many people pass away from cancer, said to me, the next couple of weeks are going to be incredibly difficult, but you should take stock in the acts of amazing grace that will fill your life.

And that grace, those miracles were everywhere, from our friends and family organizing a wedding for us in just five days, to Andy surviving long enough to make it to our wedding.

And what that experience reminded me and taught me, really, is that all of us, even in the most difficult challenges, we can all bear witness to acts of amazing grace, that hope as an emotion, hope as a phenomenon, it only makes sense in the face of hardship.

- Do you think that there's been, I'm sure you would like to see more song in terms of Black Lives Matter and the movements that are so active today.

Because basically what you say is that songs help build community.

Just, we're almost out of time, but just talk about that for a minute.

- Well, I mean, it's completely, it's the one thing in the world, of all of the arts, song is the one thing that connects people the quickest.

And you think about all of these movements, when people get scared of something, they just call up a song.

All throughout when the people were fighting against apartheid, what would keep you moving would be the songs.

You know, would keep you moving together, and you couldn't do it by yourself.

That's why work songs are so important and all of those things, is that songs give you a little bit more courage and gives you the energy to take one more step towards whatever your goal is.

- I think-- - That is the magic and the power of song.

- I didn't mean to cut you off, but I was going to say that I think all of us could take another step if we had you next to us.

So I want to thank you.

I want to thank you for being the power of us and for joining us.

And that's our show for today.

Which we hope has inspired you to get into some good trouble of your own.

We want to thank all of our guests and you for joining us.

Until we see you back here next time, we're going to leave you with Melanie DeMore's "Lead with Love".

Take care.

♪ You got to put one foot in front of the other foot ♪ ♪ And lead with love ♪ Put one foot in front of the other foot ♪ ♪ And lead with love ♪ Lift up your eyes ♪ Lift up your eyes ♪ Don't you despair ♪ Don't you despair ♪ Look up ahead ♪ Look up ahead ♪ The path is there ♪ The path is there ♪ You got to put one foot in front of the other foot ♪ ♪ And lead with love ♪ Put one foot in front of the other foot ♪ ♪ And lead with love ♪ You got to put one foot in front of the other foot ♪ ♪ And lead with love ♪ Put one foot in front of the other foot ♪ ♪ And lead with love ♪ I know you're scared ♪ I know you're scared ♪ And I'm scared too ♪ And I'm scared too ♪ But here I am ♪ But here I am ♪ Right next to you ♪ Right next to you ♪ You got to put one foot in front of the other foot ♪ ♪ And lead with love (upbeat jingle) (bright music)