All About Change - Ron Suskind – Influencer at the Top of His Game: Oscar-nominated Don’t Look Up Producer & Pulitzer Prize-Winner

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist, and filmmaker, who most recently co-produced the Oscar-nominated film Don’t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry, Cate Blanchett, and more. His book Life Animated, which explores his son Owen's autism and how he learned to communicate through Disney movies, was also the subject of an Emmy Award-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary of the same name.  As a veteran journalist, he has written extensively about presidential administrations and is dedicated to uncovering America’s social, historical, and political injustices.  Listen to the latest episode of All Inclusive as Ron discusses the making of Don’t Look Up, how he predicted the insurrection, and the powerful story of how he and his son learned to communicate with each other through Disney characters.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

All Inclusive, a podcast on inclusion, innovation, and social justice with Jay Ruderman. Hi, I'm Jay Ruderman, and this is All Inclusive, a podcast focused on inclusion, innovation, and social justice. and social justice. Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and award-winning producer who has spent most of his career uncovering America's social, historical, and political injustices. He gives me 19,000 internal documents of the United States government, which is the largest download unauthorized since the Pentagon Papers. Most recently, he co-produced Adam McKay's film Don't Look Up about climate change and

the social spread of misinformation. They look to each other. They're like, well, Leo's in it, now Jen Lawrence is in it. And then Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Tyler Perry, Cate Blanchett, Timothee Chalamet. I mean, it's kind of everyone you'd want all together. His sixth book, Life Animated, explores his most personal subject matter yet, his son Owen's autism

and how he learned to communicate through Disney movies he changed and went to a different place a place where we we could not engage with him and our life changed we're still living in the world as it was reconstructed at that moment for us the book was also the subject of an Emmy award-winning and Academy Award nominated documentary of the same name. Ron often appears on network television and has been a contributor for the New York Times Magazine and Esquire.

He was the Wall Street Journal's senior national affairs reporter for seven years. Ron, it's a pleasure to welcome you to All Inclusive. It's great to see you, Jay. Great to be here. So, Ron, you've spent your career as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist writing about politics in Washington, and now you've produced a Netflix hit, Don't Look Up. How'd you get involved in this film? Interestingly, I first met Adam McKay, who was the producer, director, and quite a character. He was the former head writer for Saturday Night Live, you may know. And he and Will Ferrell then matched up.

You know, Will is a Saturday Night Live alum to do all those movies that everyone knows. Anchorman, Talladega Nights, the other guys. And then Adam took a pivot and he did the big short drawn out from Michael Lewis's book of the financial crash. And after that, he continued down that path, trying to bring all of his skills, comedics, cinematic narrative skills to more events of the day, which he did Vice, the Dick Cheney movie. Now, I'm considered one of the leading experts on Dick Cheney. And I hooked up with Adam there. I was out at Sony and helping him with Vice. And it was more than just being the kind of expert consultant on the life of Dick Cheney and his influence. I also got involved with the movie, looking at some scenes and thinking about

story. I mean, the difference for me is, as McKay said in our first encounter, he's like, you're interesting and different. You dig up these huge historically consequential disclosures and then you weave them together in books that are very cinematic. That's what McKay said. And McKay and I kind of bonded up and we started to talk about the great issues of the day and how to bring a new kind of cinematic energy and framing and expression to the fault line issues that are defining us. And interestingly, the subtext and the context issues that, that are defining us. And, and interestingly, the subtext and the context of that, uh, is that so many other ways to communicate have collapsed public dialogue and, uh, the way journalism, uh, gets embraced and adopted, you know, far and wide. And then all

of those things that we relied upon when I'm a younger man and a kid, so many of them have collapsed that it's my belief that cinema ends up being a significant cross-border lingua franca, shared language, upon which I think more pressure falls and more can be done to carry forward these big ideas and help us see the moment in which we live in new ways, with new eyes, as Proust would say. And that's where we were. In 2018, the Dick Cheney movie Vice comes out. And right around that time, he talked to another interesting character journalist friend a guy named david serota who um has written for a bunch of different places and ends up being a speechwriter for bernie sanders so he's a bit more of a partisan

journalistic character obviously than i am but serota in a rant, said to McKay, you know, this climate's amazing. It's like there's a meteor, a comet, you know, coming straight for Earth, and no one cares. And McKay said, ah, aha, there it is. That's the way to do the climate movie. He got right back on the phone with me. He says, I think, there, I got it. He got right back on the phone with me.

He says, I think I got it. An asteroid headed toward Earth. And all of the issues in and around our inability to deal with climate, to look at it clearly, to act accordingly, to activate, to support our own survival and the survival of the planet. All those things we can do, Ron, through this motif of the asteroid coming. And then Adam went off and wrote the script at the end of 2019, right before COVID hit. And he got back and I got the first copies of the script before COVID, I think it was January of that year. And then whammo, almost everything in the movie is occurring around everyone, not just in terms of climate, but in terms of COVID. So you were kind enough to invite Shira and I to a screening of Vice

in Cambridge. And Christian Bale, I thought he was excellent in that film. But you've spent your career as an activist journalist. And you know, climate change is the big focus of Don't Look Up. But there's also this focus on misinformation. Yeah. Which you've looked at, did you have an input on that? And and did you like make sure that that was part of the direction of the movie for sure i mean that's my thing as you say jay you know i've been in on the dis and misinformation nightmare uh for 20 years uh you know I wrote that piece in the New York Times in the lead up to the 04 presidential election, which put out powerfully in public the phrase reality-based community. It was a New York Times piece that was spoken to me first by an advisor to George W. Bush. It was

a time at which they had taken the country to war under false pretenses. I was reporting that. Remember, I had in the first of the big three books during that period, the kind of source that you live your whole life as a journalist praying for, Paul O'Neill, who was the Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush for the first two years of that administration. O'Neill was a famous truth teller, had been his whole life, actually served Nixon and Ford, then went off to run big companies like Alcoa, then came back. He was kind of a Rip Van Winkle from a time way, way back when there was more of a respect for truth in the nation's capital. When there was more of a respect for truth in the nation's capital, O'Neill saw that almost everything was subordinated to the political mandate. And in fact, this information was a part of the arsenal of tools that presidents, essentially George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were using. were using. He gives me 19,000 internal documents of the United States government,

which is the largest download unauthorized since the Pentagon Papers. I use that to write the big number one bestselling book called The Price of Loyalty. O'Neill was the main protagonist. But of course, there are dozens, 100 plus sources in that book. I mean, the thing is, when you have a document with someone's name at the top and I had 19,000 of them, it's amazing how forthcoming they could be. And that really defined the Bush-Cheney era, that whole terrible first ought decade of this century. century. But in that Times piece, that advisor to the president saying, Ron, you're a member of what we call the reality-based community. I'm like, really? I'm a member of it. What is it? He says, well, you believe solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. I'm like, yeah, of course. Look, I got a history behind me. Empiricism, Age of Reason. I mean, the Greeks are behind me, I think, too. Yeah, yeah, we know. But that's not the way the world works anymore. You see, we're an empire now. And when we act, we create our own reality. It circles the globe 20 times before you get up for breakfast. It shapes behavior. It shapes action. You see, that's the way the world works now. See, that's the way the world works now. We will act and you'll study us, you little reality-based communitarian patting of off the record not for attribution from me and i i will never violate such an important agreement

uh but you know i said look other people have believed in this idea of creating reality and they end up in history's dustbin right Right. Let me just say something about this, Jay. Is that a big part of what I wrote in the 1% Doctrine about the aftermath to 9-11 and what it did to America is that I looked at the origins of the debate over whether we should even have a CIA or intelligence services because we had them during World War II, OSS and whatnot. But there was real debate in 1945 and 6 and 7 as to whether we should have one permanently in a democracy that has to prize and rely on informed consent and on truth. And part of that debate ended up with the creation of intelligence services with the 1947 National Security Act. And they say specifically, it is illegal to run disinformation

campaigns on the US population. Of course, that's what intelligence services do to foreign adversaries. We do that. We've done that for years as part of their menu. But what we're seeing now is disinformation campaigns run on the US population for political gain. Okay. And we're seeing exactly what that looks like and what happens in terms of the havoc that is wrought from that. And that's a big part of what Don't Look Up is about. But its antecedents, of course, are right there in Vice, in the movie about Bones and Chaney and all the books that I wrote. We're just down the path now, many steps. Right. And you've been excellent at finding great sources and working them and getting the truth out there. And, you

know, we'll get into this a little bit later, but I know you can draw a line between, you know, what happened during the Bush administration and what we've gone through and what we're still going through right now in terms of misinformation. But I want to jump back to the film. How were you able to attract such a star-studded cast like Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, just to name a few? What drew them to this film? Oh, well, a whole bunch of things. They started to negotiate with Netflix and go to them in the fall, winter of 2019. DiCaprio was really the first of the big stars that said, yeah, I'm in.

You know, he loved the script. He's a big climate change activist and has done documentaries and has been quite forceful and ardent and public and creates content. He said, I've been waiting for this film for 20 years. Everyone knows the effect that Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's documentary had, but that's 2005, 2006. That's a long time ago. Leo was looking for a project like this that would go at climate change in a new and powerful way. project like this that would go at climate change in a new and powerful way. He's first. Others then when that happens say, oh, well, if Leo's in, I'll get in there too. There was an advantage, though, that occurred in that during the negotiations, COVID hit. uh in their wisdom the don't look up team uh created thought about creating you know a way to shoot uh the movie safely with this expensive mind you netflix remembers paying

the bill here covet safe environment and they went right at constructing that or planning how that would be. And so all of a sudden, everyone's projects got canceled because of COVID. But Don't Look Up was a safe and insurable place to shoot. And that helped in getting more and more of the stars in the tent. That's my understanding of how that all happened. They look to each other. They're like, well, Leo's in it. Now Jen Lawrence is in it. And then Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Tyler Perry, Cate Blanchett, Timothy Chalamet. I mean, it's kind of everyone you'd want all together. Well, it sounds like a really smart investment for Netflix since they've done really well. Yeah.

And they've broken, the film has broken all records on Netflix. Talk a little bit about Meryl Streep playing the president. To me, it was very obvious like, you know, who she was playing, but maybe you can give me your insights into that. Well, you know, I mean, I think that there was always an attentiveness in the movie and the writing and the creation of the movie to not fall into partisan traps. Okay. So there are a couple of clues there that take you away from a left-right axis there. I mean, there's a picture of Meryl Streep hugging Bill Clinton. So people are like, well, it's not necessarily a Republican. This is a model of power. And the way it is with power, it'll be repeated until it's shown to be ineffective. And that goes to attitude. It goes to presentation.

It goes to how people gain constituencies and rise to power. And so you're not sure what party she is in. She clearly has a lot of Trump features in her mix of character, in her arsenal. But it's not exactly Trump uh she's trump like you know i think part of what's interesting is is how the movie kind of plays off of but doesn't own directly the occurrences of the present day which is getting more and more difficult to parody because it's becoming so extreme. And you see that here. She obviously has a family member who is the chief of staff. So that, again, plays off of the Jared Kushner thing and the Trump family. Meryl Streep owning it and doing lots of brilliant improv. That's another about adam mckay mckay is a real

improv guy and what he does is we get the script everyone has to play through the script totally all right that's like part of the contract actually it's part of what everyone guarantees so they're going to basically we're going to film everyone doing exactly what the script offers. And then improv. And then people, they riff. They wing it. They play and exude new things as their characters. And that gets filmed again and again and again. And so by the end of each scene, Adam has got many, many offerings to work with.

All of that properly arrayed set of characters trying out lots of different things that he then gets to choose from. It's a little bit like when you write a book. You get zillions of people talking lots and lots of tape often they're talking about the same set of things and you get to pick and choose and fit it together and that's what adam gets to do which he's so so good at i mean some of the best lines in the movie are improv so adam actually gave you a lot of credit for what he said was his favorite scene in the movie and i know that there's been press that timothy chalamet was reluctant to sign on but you gave the hook to get him on the movie and maybe you can talk a little bit about you know

what that was yeah absolutely so while adam and i are in our riff-a-thon during 2019, I was saying to Adam, I said, you've got to get a really strong cross-border dialogue in this movie, meaning you're going to have to have a faith-based character that is fully drawn and realized because you know much of the country is faith-based we've got to have in this movie uh the voices uh that represent the true breadth and diversity of what is now america hence the creation of the timothy chalamet character and from that character, I was pressing the idea of the way you can bring God into this through that character. That's part of why that character is here. You know, we are a country of believers in our various religions. And I said, if you're going to end the world you got to get God in there and uh and that yields a beautiful scene at the end of the movie where you know as folks on the right have said in some of the columns that they've written one of the most fully drawn characters in Don't Look Up

is in fact Yule which is the Timothy Chalamet character, the Christian punk skateboarding guy who enters into a final relationship with Jen Lawrence, who is the big scientist whistleblower on the oncoming comet. And it's a beautiful relationship. And at the end of the movie, when they're all sitting around the table and the earth is right there at its final moments, somebody says, what about a prayer? No one really at the table seems to be anyone who has spent a great deal of time in faith settings. And Timothy Chalamet says, I got this. I got this. Xiao Mei says, I got this.

I got this. I got it. And offers just a beautiful prayer about us. Dearest Father and almighty creator, we ask for your grace tonight, despite our pride, your forgiveness, despite our doubt. Which forgiveness. Despite our doubt.

Which is what prayers are. So I love Timothy Chalamet's character. And I thought it was a necessary part to the movie and really added something. As you said, I want to give you a chance to respond to people, some critics that have said it's too heavy handed. It hits you over the head with climate change and misinformation. And what do you say to that? I mean, is that what satire does? Precisely what satire can do.

That almost nothing else can. I mean, look, we all create any number of barriers, Jay, to hearing things that are discomforting. Denial, rejection, not me-ism. We all are complex beings and we hate being told that we are not worthy or that we have made grievous errors or that we maybe are not looking at something that is so hard to look at. Satire can get to all of those things because it makes you laugh and it allows you to see the exaggerations and extremists of behaviors that become part of your life norm. And that's, you know, being hit over the head. Hell, what's wrong with that?

You know, that often gets results. That's true. You know, it allows us to see ourselves in a mirror. I mean, look, I've got a lovely little passage that's in my head, and I've used it at least in one book, where I talk about a moment where my mother was in an early stage of dementia, Alzheimer's, but still quite compus mentis. but still quite compus mentis. And I sat with her on a particular day, and it was kind of all set up where I really was using it as a moment, an opportunity to talk to her about her end of life wishes, and just being straight with her, leveling with her about the fact that she does have Alzheimer's dementia, and she's on her way down that path. And the discussion was a miserable failure. I mean, she just would not engage at all.

I mean, she looked right through me like I barely was even sitting there. And I was just so frustrated by this. And I talked to a famous psychiatrist who's the father of a best buddy of mine. Just a few weeks later, and a guy named Max Plutzky. And Max says to me, Ron, Ron, Ron, you know, you're a big truth guy. I mean, you even do truth for a living, right? I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. But he says, you know, let me explain to you, Ron, respect denial. I said, what? He said, respect denial. And as soon as he said that, the combination of those words just they seeped into my pores it's such a beautiful construction you know don't celebrate don't pin any banners to denial respect it though this is

a key part of the human architecture that allows us to get up that next morning when we are in the way of an untenable future of things that we cannot face. So powerful. And let's, on that vein of denial, you sort of predicted what was going to happen on January 6th. You had a very powerful op-ed in the New York Times, the end of October, which you had many sources within the Trump administration who were really, really worried about what was going to happen during the election and post-election, which you detailed quite accurately. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about and where we are now? So I got into a discussion with the New York Times in January, I think it was of 2020.

And the editors said, Hey, we understand you don't have a book in the mix. Like, you know, your old competitor, frenemy, Bob Woodward.

I said, no, no, I don't. I'm doing this Bunga media thing and I don't have a book going. And they're like, well, would you consider a writing kind of a big signature piece right before the election?

You know, kind of a special event. And I said, yeah, I'll do that. I think it's a consequential moment. It's certainly a year that will go down in history 2020. I realized what I would need to do for the big piece, which ends up being a big giant, 70,000 words, I'm sure around that amount, which runs on October 30th, the weekend of the election. So I got in there and I got two dozen plus senior officials of the government. These are senior officials who are at the highest reaches of the administration.

What I wanted to do in the piece was to help people understand in a different way of how we got to this moment, you know, a bit of a recasting of the Trump administration of his presidency, to help the readers get a sense of what was so different about it that would have an impact on not only the election, but what happens after the election. And that was very, very much the moment which I map in the piece of midway through his presidency when Trump had an aha, which is that the public servants who were working for him and people, in some cases, who were in senior positions in the White House, if they had a primary loyalty to the Constitution, they were not going to do the things that he was needing them to do, were not going to do the things that he was needing them to do, plain and simple.

They needed to be in a central and primary way loyal to him as an individual and to what he commanded them to do if they were to be people who were appropriate to serve him. That was quite a moment, actually. That was quite a moment, actually. And you saw any folks who were traditional public servants who took an oath on the Constitution starting to get excised out of the administration. They were vanishing and getting replaced quickly by people who would take a primary oath to Donald Trump and his dictates and his desires. Um, that's what you have at the end of his administration. And, uh, what that meant was that he would be able to use the levers of power granted to him by article two in the constitution in support of his own interests, uh, and in support of winning this election by whatever means were necessary. You see that in his actions in the final months leading up to the election. You also see a map, which I laid out for the readers, of what would happen

out for the readers of what would happen arguably after the election based on a variety of scenarios. And one of the primary scenarios is Donald Trump loses, but loses by a margin that is narrow enough that he can claim victory and can begin to contest the outcome of the election. And here, as I wrote, is probably the ways he will do that. Now, some of that I drew from terrific pieces that were already written. Bart Gellman wrote a great piece of The Atlantic. Bart's an amazing journalist. Others had written too. But I went a step further to say, look at what we have here. We have something that we've not seen in American history. We have an enormous array of Americans, really an army of folks who have signed on to personal loyalty to Donald Trump. I mean, whether they're members of the political party is really a secondary issue.

Many of the folks in the base that are Trump adherents are really loyal in a way to Trump himself. We haven't really had that in American politics and in the American political array. And they will move based on what his dictates are to them. He will at some point activate that army. How big are they? I make various estimates of the piece. But if he is in a position where various legal remedies and attempts to contest the election through the processes of government, both legislative and legal, are exhausted. He will activate that army and that army will move. claim and thereby instruct people loyal to him that they would have to basically take it back for him and on his behalf. And that's what we had.

So you were correct. I think I saw an interview in which you said there could be as many as 15 million people who fall into that category as loyal to Trump. Trump's still around. He has control of the Republican Party. What happens going forward? Are we in for more potential violence, conflict? In your opinion, how does this thing move forward? Yeah, well, you know, that 15 million estimate is based on what I call concentric circles of folks who are most ardent and some of them willing to engage in violence. Groups circled around them who also sign on to that. Now, you know, some of the polls show an incredibly high number of folks who support Donald Trump who said that if it takes that, they will engage in violence or support violence.

that, they will engage in violence or support violence. We are moving into a period, Jay, in which violence or the threat of violence will be a central factor in our self-governance, in how we move forward, you know, in this unfinished experiment of democracy. What it means for us now is that we are further down a path in which liberal moves to illiberal moves to autocracy. There are other countries that have taken this path. We feel exceptional in America. You know, we're different. We're human beings trying to govern ourselves. All right. The founding fathers wouldn't call us exceptional if they were sitting here in their powdered wings. The reason they created this system is because they understood what people can do to each other

and how they are swayed by will to power and how our self-interest need to be counteracted against other self-interest to form this sort of modest, manageable, and hard-wrought set of virtues. That's the Madisonian genius of America. And it's also the genius of the way our democracy was constructed. Well, that democracy has been profoundly compromised and is now facing a real live threat. I think certainly in any of our lifetimes, I would say for the first time since the middle of the 19th century. What we're seeing now is a struggle and it's terrifying. Let's just map it out.

January 6th. January 6th occurs. All sorts of things happen in the immediate aftermath. I mean, you know, did Donald Trump and his gang of supporters, of co-conspirators, did they essentially engage in a coup where they plotted it out letter and verse? I think what they're going to find is that Donald Trump and others encouraged it and then capitalized on it and pushed it along on the 6th. But there's no doubt that intent was there to suborn and flip the democratic process

for Donald Trump to remain in power. So what happens after that? Everyone stands up and says, that's it. I'm out. As Lindsey Graham says, Donald Trump's responsible for this. He's responsible for a grievous crime. I mean, there's no crime above this. He basically tried to flip the democracy to stay in power. And everybody was square in those first few days. And then the toxin of partisanship again started to assert itself. You see bit by bit the way the desires of will to power, will we be able to remain in power if we're Republicans? What do we have to do? What are the calculations and rationales we'll embrace start to take shape? And by the time you get to the impeachment hearing in the middle of February, you have a tiny group of Republicans voted for impeachment. voted for impeachment. That was the opportunity. There's no doubt about it. That's where the congressional version of rule of law might have actually exercised itself. That would have meant Donald Trump can no longer be the president of the United States. Imagine how different that would be.

I mean, let's just think about that. He would have been off the political stage at that point. Now, he would have been probably a mischief maker in all sorts of ways. And he could have been out there as a kingmaker supporting someone else to replace him. But he's a unique actor. There's no one else like him on the stage. There really isn't. You know, no one's going to replace Donald Trump. And he would have been somebody barred from running again to be president of the United States had they acted to convict. And as well, by virtue of that conviction, it would have changed the dynamic in terms of other prosecutions that might have unfolded. That didn't occur. So what do we have? What do we have? We have Trump then moving forward, deepening his hold on the Republican Party, really moving down another powerful strategic pathway where he is going to claim and rightfully claim responsibility for the election of many, many people.

There's no doubt about it in this midterm election. His endorsement matters. His base is held. In some ways, they've grown in their ardor. And almost certainly, you're going to have a Republican and Trump-dominated Congress intact after 2022. And Donald Trump, if he's alive, he will run. And we will have probably a constitutional crisis in the early days of 2025. That is an American nightmare.

So it sounds like you're talking about a second civil war. So it sounds like you're talking about a second civil war. There certainly is going to be probably years of significant havoc and potentially insurrection and violence on the American political landscape. How do you allow people to see that this is an oncoming comet due to hit you and your life? If you let events unfold as they have been along the path they are already on. I mean, this is the dilemma. I got to ask you, as a journalist, how do you function in an era where there's so much misinformation out there? And there are actors that are foreign and domestic that are putting it out there on a minute-by-minute basis.

I mean, Jay, I've been at this since we're young men, my friend, saying you can't say that. That's demonstrably false. You know, lying to the public, using disinformation. I mean, there's a reason there were built laws against that but people got away with it and people grew to distrust government and to start to default disinformation that looks true but ain't or carried forward by people who claim to be journalists but or anything but why is it that that the journalists, are the only profession mentioned in the Bill of Rights? The founders got this. They had no great love for the journalists of their day, you know, James Callender and other members of the yellow press, but they understood that they

are kind of a necessary element in the mix or none of it works. Otherwise, consent of the population is not informed whereby they can make sound judgments. I mean, you can see how undermining the fourth estate and journalism and truth has led to habit. Well, there's so much truth there. I want to end with a different type of conversation, which was your life. And you wrote about it in your book, Life Animated, about the personal story of your son, Owen, and his diagnosis with autism and how he communicated through Disney movies and Life Anim animated became a film. Can you

talk about that conversation and how that shaped you and your family and other families? There's something Cornelia, my wife and I say to each other is that Owen, our son, who was a late onset autism guy. So he's chatting away at two, two and a half. I love you. Let's get ice cream. Where are my Ninja Turtles? He has regressive autism. So he regresses dramatically at around two and a half years old, and he loses all speech. And that's about a third of all cases of folks with autism. The regression is very dramatic in his case. He basically is chatting away a few hundred words of a two and a half year old vocabulary, and then he loses all speech. And we're thrown into a place of havoc. It's like he vanishes. We used to say we were looking for

clues to a kidnapping. Now, what happened was he just changed. He changed and went to a different place, a place where we could not engage with him. And our life changed. We're still living in the world as it was reconstructed at that moment for us. is that we started to change in how Cornelia and I were. You know, we used to say Owen is our best teacher. We started to see things with more depth, more clarity. What does Owen see? What can Owen feel? What does he feel? What can we learn from him?

And we learned a great deal. In the famous twist that everyone now knows, Owen memorized dozens of Disney animated movies. He then created his own language using lyrics and dialogue. Winniperg,

what are you doing out of rags? Never mind. How would you like to have our little boy lost and alone in the jungle? We learned to speak in Disney dialogue.

We learned his language. That's the way we could communicate with him. That's the way over years he got speech back and it becomes this extraordinary character in the world that relies on what he can draw from content, especially from movies, to help him grow and learn and connect with others. and connect with others. What occurred there is it changed me as a journalist, as a writer. I began to see things that I otherwise would miss. I started to look everywhere I could find them for left behind people in America. The most dramatic example of that, in America. The most dramatic example of that, living in my house, my own son, who was deemed uneducable, was slated for an institution, according to what many of our specialists would tell us. And it changed me. And that led to all the work that mostly I get noted for. And from my book, A Hope in the Unseen, about a kid in a blighted inner city hoping to find a home in America, to all of the books about the nature of truth.

You know, Owen would say, I'm different, not less. Though so much of what he encounters in the world presses him to believe he is less and presses him to accept that. But he will not. And he has convinced others that he is right not to. That defines our life. And it's defined my work. And sometimes it has made me ferocious and outraged at what I see in terms of the many, many people who live in the giant discard pile in America. And for what reason? Why is that? How is it that we grow better as a people when we understand that diversity is our strength, that we essentially grow larger through the enormous variety and expression of equality and the justice that flows from that idea of equality.

Well, Ron, you are in many ways a national treasure and you have changed our society and continue to change our society in so many ways. One takeaway, and I think it was Cornelia that said this, that who determines what a meaningful life is? that who determines what a meaningful life is. And I think it's such an important message for us all to take away because we're all different. We live in a society that judges constantly, but we all have meaningful lives, and I think we have to pay attention to that.

Jamie, I just say thank you for mentioning that, the signature concept. your insights into this, of course, are owned deeply from your own life. That idea, though, who decides what the meaningful life is, that's something Cornelia and I would say to each other as we were educated, as we learned from living with and through our son. And I think it is a question that as we are confronted with it and answer it, allows us to see all lives are lives of meaning right and the way we often judge meaning is uh something that is in many cases put upon us by the society or by the the circumstances of life uh in the country in which we live and there is a deeper understanding who decides what the meaning for life is? Each of us do. And each life has meaning. The key is to discover it. And if you happen to be in a line of work like me, to trumpet the way meaning lives in people's lives far and wide.

So I love doing that. I love doing it here on the show with you. That's kind of what we've been talking about from the beginning of our time together. Thank you so much. And Ron, may you go from strength to strength. Thank you so much. All Inclusive is a production of the Ruderman Family Foundation. Our key mission is the full inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of society. You can find All Inclusive on Apple Podcasts,

Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher. To view the show notes, transcripts, or to learn more, go to rudermanfoundation.org slash allinclusive. Have an idea for a podcast? Be sure to tweet at Jay Ruderman.