Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend - Hillary and Chelsea Clinton

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea Clinton feel great (but a little apprehensive) about being Conan O’Brien’s friends.Hillary and Chelsea sit down with Conan to discuss the stories that inspired them to co-write The Book of Gutsy Women, Chelsea’s teenage years in the White House, unusual Halloween costumes, the incredible pace of technology, and why we should never quit betting on optimism. Plus, Conan spins an alternate history of Idaho in response to a listener’s voicemail.Got a question for Conan? Call our voicemail: [phone].

Hi, I'm Hillary Clinton. And hi, my name is Chelsea Clinton. And I feel great, but a little apprehensive about being Conan O'Brien's friend. It could be that we could become really good friends, and I don't know what that would mean for my life. Could also be a great adventure. It could be. I've got a 20% chance.

Well, you know, I've had better and worse odds. And I feel like I have better odds than my mom. Really? I'm at like 30-70. Hello there and welcome to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend. That's the way to experience Conan O'Brien in a more pleasing fashion without seeing my face. And you can stop it at any time.

Not for Sona and me. That's right. Well, you know, I was about to introduce you, Gourly. Sorry. You didn't let me introduce you. I'm joined by my trusty interrupter, the producer, Matt Gourly. And son of Sassian, who can barely be bothered to be here. Yeah.

Hello. You were a little late today. What was going on there? I went to look at a house. You? A house shopping anymore. Right. Because you think it's giving you a bad mojo?

No. Because I hate it. I'm so unhappy. Well, can I just say, just so that the listeners know a little bit about our world, is that Sona has been, and her husband had been looking for a house for, would you say, seriously, nine months a year? A year. And you've looked at over 200 houses.

Easily. Easily. Awful. What if you just went to REI, bought a tent? I mean, and that way you have your own place, you can get the feel, they have really nice, have you been to, listen, we're not getting any money from REI. This is completely my own tangent here. My wife says REI is my happy place.

I love stores that have gear. And so I will go, and it's gear I don't use, because I don't go camping, I don't go hiking, but I love to go and look at their tents. They have like 600 tents. Now I'm telling you, I've never bought a tent in my life. And when I was a kid, I went to camp, we had tents, and they were terrible, they were left over from the Korean War, and they were made of canvas, and they leaked. But these tents they have are so incredible, and they have like adjoining rooms that fold

out. Yeah. And like a clock tower, you know, they're just amazing. And then I love to go and look at all of the lost in the wilderness things, like this fits inside your boot, but it starts a fire, and this turns into a corned beef sandwich if you add one drop of sunflower oil. You know, I love that store. And then again, I'm telling you not a dime.

It's aspirational, is that what it is? Like you're there just thinking like imagining a different life kind of. You want to be that guy. I want to be the guy who actually uses all that stuff, and who needs a watch that tells me what my cholesterol is and where I am on a mountain, like what elevation. Well, why don't you do it? You could go camping in the forest. I'd be killed immediately.

Proposition. Yeah. Three of us go camping and we record a podcast. Oh, I'm busy that day. Really? No, I'm busy that day. Wait, wait, would you really not do it? Why?

Going on a trip with the two of you? Yeah. I don't want to do that. Why not? I don't know. Wait, I understand going on a trip with him would be problematic, but you have an issue with coming with me? No.

Listen, I feel like the two of you would talk about like World War II the whole time and about like, I don't know. About what? Just saying. I don't know. Uniforms. The uniforms people wore. What are you talking about?

The uniforms people sat on and the model of the knives they held. I don't know. It would have been a K-bar probably from World War II. Oh, God. This is awful. No. I'm never going on a trip with the two of you. Who would talk about the chair, speaking of which, by the way, the chair that General

Lee sat on at the signing of Appomattox, do you know who took it as a souvenir? Who? General George Armstrong Custer. Oh, my God. He got it as a keepsake. He took it and walked away with it, only to die in 1876, July to be exact. No, I think we would actually have a really good time. We would.

You know, I think it depends on how much we brought. I don't want to do the real survivalist thing of, okay, let's go find a snake and eat it. Yeah, but no glamping either. Just actual camping. What do you mean, no glamping? Well, no yurts with baths. No, no, no. I don't want to do a yurt with baths.

But I want to bring some high quality wine. Yeah. Oh, sounds good. Would you poop in the forest? I don't do that. I'm on television. He poofs on television. No, I don't.

If we go camping and there's no bathroom, would you dig a hole and poop in the hole? I don't have those needs. I'm someone who exists digitally on the podcast and on television. You're AI. I don't urinate. I don't defecate. Okay. I don't.

You don't defecate. No, I don't. I simply do not. I am what you think I am. Really? Yeah. That's the cleaned up version of Popeye. I am what you think I am.

That's what a Popeye originally said. I am what you think. And then it got perverted and he was at sea a long time and he was eating so much canned spinach, which by the way, back then had all kinds of bad stuff in it, and it became I am what I am. Poor Popeye. And then he lost one of his eyes. We don't know how.

Oh. Well. Anyway. From defecation into former secretary of state. Should we do this? Oh, God. There's no good way. We can't.

We can't do this one. Yeah, we can. Yeah, well. Also, we were doing really well and perfectly fine. And then you brought up pooping out of nowhere. So thanks for nothing. I'm sorry. Thanks for nothing.

But it is part of camping, is pooping in a hole. Would you just stop? I'm trying to. You kept going with it. You said you don't urinate or defecate. We have high class guests today and you're being incredibly inappropriate. Seriously. And so I just want you to try and clean up your act.

You rolled with the pooping. Yeah. Stop saying it. Be quiet. Stop saying it. Stop saying it. Stop. You're talking about pooping.

Pee-pee. You two are the worst. Pee-pee-pee. Pee-pee-pee. Pee-pee-pee. Poo-poo-poo. Poo-poo-poo. My guests today are two extraordinary women, Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state.

You're both going to hell. The first female senator for New York and the first woman to earn a major party's nomination for president and Chelsea Clinton, the best-selling author and global health advocate. Together, they've authored the book of gutsy women, favorite stories of courage and resilience, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. Glad that you're just coming into the room now and you didn't hear the introduction. It's so nice to have you here. Welcome.

Talk about how things have changed. When you played basketball, they made you play half court basketball? Half court basketball, yes. And that was for a specific reason. Women had to play half court basketball. Why? We never really knew. They had all kinds of excuses.

The excuses were, we think it would be bad for women's hearts. We don't think women can run that far. I mean, these were all the things we were told. That's insane. So as we've been going around on the book tour, so many women of a certain age, like Cecile Richards, our great friend, just interviewed us in Austin, Texas. And she said, I played half court basketball and she was like a good basketball player. I was mediocre, but I loved the game.

So you'd have three on each side. You would have to pass over the center line in order to get the ball to, you know, your forwards to score. And the whole thing was so ludicrous because in our rules, you also could only dribble three times because apparently that was also bad for our hearts. What are they thinking? Like, it's bad for your heart. So basically, basically, we know that you, it's okay for you to give birth to multiple

children. That's right. But three dribbles on the basketball. And I think that should do it, sweetie. Exactly. Wow. That's insane. You know, sexism has never been about science.

No. I'm telling you, I'm a scientist. Four dribbles will kill a woman. Exactly. I played quarter court basketball. That was my own decision. People saw me moving and I looked like a large bird that had been injured. Wow.

Well, maybe, you know, maybe someday we can play half court. I'll show you how to play. Really? Anytime you want to play half court with me. Absolutely. Yeah. But if you're going to play by the half court rules. All right.

We heard it here. I will be playing half court three triple basketball with Secretary Clinton and you'll see that very soon on the internet. You know, we just, we just sat down. It's really lovely having you both here and very impressed by the book, the book of gutsy women. I was stunned at the number of women in this book that obviously there were women that I expected to be in the book and then there were a bunch of names that I, I'll admit,

I was not aware. I was not aware of a bunch of these names and I would read their story and I was completely blown away and I have a 16 year old daughter who is not thrilled with being my friend. We grow out of it. We grow out of it. Do we? Do we grow out of it? We do.

Yes. That's part of the process. Okay. Well, I want to start there because I'm very impressed that a mother and a daughter wrote a book together because if I wrote a book with my mom, I think the title would be why won't he sit up straight and why didn't he consider law school? And so, uh, did be, we would do it, we would get- But that means you cleaned your room.

Uh, no, I was not, I was not great at cleaning my room. There's a lot of things I, and so, uh, as you know, uh, Chelsea, there's stuff when you have, there's daughter, mother stuff that is so fraught. That's my wife's favorite word is fraught. She, uh, my wife and my daughter can get into something that's about nothing seemingly. And my son and I will walk in and they're suddenly both crying, weeping because of something involving a teaspoon or a sugar spoon. And my son and I just silently back out of the room because it's fraught, but you guys

managed to pull this off. Were you worried at all? Because there's obviously got to be differences in styles and the way you approach writing and the way you approach building something like this. Well, I should let Chelsea go first because she was on the receiving end of fraughtness. And so, I think, uh, she would have a, uh, a certain perspective, but it is part of the, you know, whole effort to seek independence and find your own way and construct your own identity.

Um, so I'm not at all surprised. Here would be the difference. Secretary Clinton is that you can say, just had an argument. She stormed out when she was 16 or 17, find out from the secret service where she is. That's true. That's an advantage. Yeah. I also think I realized now, particularly as a parent, um, you know, and, and my husband

is, he would acknowledge was quite rebellious and I, I think I was painfully unrebellious. So I never really stormed out. In fact, I had a mom who would come in on Friday nights when I was 16 and say, you know, you really don't need to do your physics homework. Like you should go be with your friends, but I was so nerdy and like painfully type A. And so I really needed my mom to kind of prod and push me. And I'm so thankful that she did because I think, um, so many of the friendships that I still treasure, you wouldn't have been as meaningful in high school or throughout my

life if I hadn't had my mom continually kind of pushing me out into the world. You were doing that. You were saying you've got to get out there. You've got to hit the clubs. Come on. Well, not quite that. Well, more just like go over to your friend's house and watch a movie. Make sure you're back by 10 o'clock.

Oh, no. Well, look, I think you made a, a funny point, but which was a, an accurate one. So she lived her teenage years out in the White House, which is a bizarre place to be a teenager, um, obviously, but she did, uh, have secret service protection, which meant that, uh, if she did go to a party, um, or she did go out, you know, I didn't have to worry all that much, but it, you know, look, I think it's much harder being a parent of a teenager today. I think even forget about growing up in the White House.

I just think it's harder no matter where you live, uh, with your kids. There's just so much else going on in the world to demand their attention, distract them, create anxiety, depression about they're not good enough. They're not this enough or that enough. And really, so much of it's the internet. That's what we have found. It is so much, Conan. It is so much the internet.

What happens is my wife and I made all these decisions about what we were going to do. And my wife is an amazing mom. And I think we've, she's done an amazing job and I haven't gotten too much in the way. But what has happened is technology and the internet has blown up so much that our rule about no screens can just, it becomes impractical. You got to let them watch some screens. They have to have phones somewhat for their safety and to communicate and be part of the world.

But then it just gets, it's, it's fighting a constant battle, which you haven't hit yet. So I can talk very condescendingly to you. And, and I hope give advice because right now we do exercise total dictatorial control. And thankfully my kids think it's like a huge deal when they get to watch something and not anything they have kind of agency over. But I know that's because they're five, three and well, I mean, the three month old doesn't watch anything. But like, I know that will change and I know we have to be ready for that.

The other big change agent is grandparents. Grandparents love to slide in and correct me if I'm wrong, Secretary Clinton, you love to, it's fun to slide in and when the, your, when your kids are gone and you're looking after the grandkids, I've seen this with both sets of grandparents. They love to give them everything we don't give them because you get away scot-free and you're a hero. Absolutely. I think it's one of the joys of being a grandparent is to be a little subversive.

Yes. I had that experience with my mom and Bill's mom when it came to Chelsea, they literally would give me just, you know, of course, of course, then go off and do exactly the opposite of what I had asked them to do and even more, not do. So yeah, we feel lucky to be close enough to our grandkids that we can see them a lot. And when we do have them, look, if it's two on two year outnumbered, so whatever we can do to just make them happy, we're willing to do. So pizza for lunch and dinner, that's fine.

You're basically admitting to breaking all the rules that Chelsea set up when she left. Yes. Chelsea sets all the rules. Yes. And then, you know, we kind of say, oh, well, just this once, it wouldn't make that big a difference. Right. An eclair for breakfast.

Whatever. Perfectly. Just so they're happy. There's unlimited octanots. You know. Screentime does help grandparents deal with all that goes on in a little kid's life. I relate to you, Secretary Glinger, because I know that you had a difference in working style for this book.

And I relate more to your style. I know that Chelsea's all about. Outnumbered. Well, I'm sorry, but you should have done your research. I am 88 years old. I've just had a ton of surgery. And looked really good at your age. Thank you.

Thank you. It's a fortune keeping this thing going. This is why you live in Los Angeles. No, the Irish don't move to Los Angeles to look younger. If I go outside for five minutes, you can smell cooking ham. But I know that you work on your high tech. You've grown up in that world and you're familiar with it. So you're working off a computer and then you would ask for your mom's draft and she

would give you handwritten notes. Yes. I write in longhand for books, obviously for other things, using the computer is fine. But for a book, I can only think if my hand is actually holding a pen and moving across a page. Chelsea knew that, but I don't think she realized quite how much a burden it would place on her because she loves Google Docs. I live in 2019.

Yeah. She thinks she's a very modern person. What's that like in 2019? Tell me about that. Because I don't. I write stuff longhand and then a carrier pigeon takes it to somebody. And I mean, I want to go as old school as possible. I would use a quill if I could.

I really would. It's what I'm comfortable with. I don't know why I'm such a throwback. I'm not going to try to find a quill in ink pot and send it to you for Christmas Conan. And then I expect you to send a photograph of yourself with the quill. Guess what? You will lose this wager because I will use the quill and then I will write you and then people will intervene and tell me to...

That means that the odds of our friendship are just going to go up. I know. Exactly. I wanted to quickly tell you one of the reasons why this book resonates with me is that my mom, Ruth O'Brien, who came from a very middle-class family in Worcester, Massachusetts, got a full scholarship to faster than she was one of the early women to go to Yale Law School. Oh, wow. And she graduated in 1956.

And she told this story and she's always been this heroic figure in my life. I love my dad too and he's a great man. But my mom, she told this story that in around 1957, 58, when she started working at a law firm in Boston, she's a graduate of Yale Law School. She did very well. She was working at a high-powered firm in Boston. She went to a meeting of the other lawyers. She's the only woman.

They're all working. They finished their work and it's time to break for lunch. They all go into the dining room, but it's a men's only dining room. So they set up a card table and my mom sat at the card table and she said two of the other young associates were very nice, so they sat with me at the card table, literally a kid's card table. What always blew me away is not just the story that if that happened today, that would be a $100 million lawsuit.

What blew me away is that my mother had no anger about it, none. She said that's just what it was. And I think one of the things that resonates with me in this book is optimism. Well, that's really one of the themes of the book which you picked up on because despite what they encountered and the obstacles that they had to overcome, they remained optimistic. They remained optimistic about their own goals, their own purpose in life, and they remained optimistic that they could make a positive difference. And I think part of the beauty of the 103 women's stories that we tell is that there's

something for everybody to relate to. But I'm thinking about the story of your mom because at the time that she was practicing law, late 50s, she was in a very small group of women who had gone to law school, had gotten jobs. Remember, Sandra Day O'Connor was basically told she couldn't get a job as a lawyer. She could work as a secretary with Bader Ginsburg, same kind of experiences. So when they got that job, they wanted to prove themselves and they had to do that by sitting at the card table, showing that they were willing to do the work and take a little

bit of the blowback that institutionally they still had to deal with because they wanted to prove themselves. And this was the women of a prior generation's means of demonstrating that they belonged. And now we can take a lot of optimism, but we can also say part of what we've had to do since then is to knock down all the barriers as many as we can so that a woman like your mom wouldn't find herself in that position. She would be judged solely on the basis of how her work measured up. So the optimism is really deep.

We say these are favorite stories of courage and resilience. You have to be optimistic to have courage and resilience because lots of times it's just easier to walk away or when you're knocked down, stay down or when you're somewhat demeaned by go sit in that card table, not in the men's room. You got to take a deep breath and you got to decide what's important to you. And you've got to be optimistic enough that the path you choose is going to turn out well for you and help others along the way. And Conan, when we write about Vera Rubin, went to Vassar around the same time as your

mom and she knew she wanted to pursue a doctorate in physics and she really wanted to go to Princeton. Although the faculty supported her, she was turned down because even then there were no women allowed into the Princeton physics PhD program and it wouldn't be until 1975 when that changed. So it wouldn't be until after Title IX. And we write about Title IX in the book and it's kind of profound effect on athletics that kind of before Title IX, the early 1970s, there were about 700 girls playing competitive high school soccer and last year there were 390,000, but it also had a huge impact on

opening opportunities for women in academia. And Vera Rubin is considered kind of one of the Nobel prizes inexplicable misses. I mean, she helped prove dark matter, which is the majority of the universe and yet kind of she wasn't recognized for that. But one of her kind of proudest achievements, as she said, kind of at the end of her life were the truly hundreds of young scientists and particularly women that she'd mentored. And part of what we wanted to show in this book kind of about these gutsy women is that so often kind of their optimism was expressed through kind of breaking down barriers and

bringing others along. There really was about sense of community. Yeah, the community and building the future and empowering the future in a really profound way. What's fascinating to me, these things that we think existed a quote long time ago just happened. Secretary Clinton, you're writing about how when you were a young girl, there was one comic in the newspaper, which is Brenda Starr.

And Brenda Starr, no one was looking at Brenda Starr when I was a kid, I mean, I was a big fan, but nobody was really, you know, but Brenda Starr was really the one comic book character that was sort of meant to empower young women. And then there's Nancy Drew. And then that's kind of it. And then you have to go looking. That was absolutely the world I grew up in. And that was one of the fascinating differences between Chelsea and me when it came to thinking

back about who inspired me when I was a little girl, and there weren't very many women in our school lessons when I was in elementary school or junior high school, even high school that I can remember. I mean, you know, famous women would be mentioned like Elizabeth the first or Cleopatra. But other than that, there wasn't a lot of discussion at all about, you know, roles that women had played. Amelia Earhart, who I discovered when I was a little girl, Margaret Berkwhite, who was the first war correspondent who traveled the world following the incredible exploits of

the American soldiers in World War II, Helen Keller, who I learned about on a TV show, Margaret Chase Smith, the Republican Senator from Maine, who took on Joe McCarthy, I would come across these women and my mother would be very encouraging. She would tell me about people she had read about or she would take me to the library. But that was beyond my personal experience. My personal experience was the only women I knew who worked outside the home were my teachers and, you know, my public librarians. I never knew a woman lawyer like your mom.

That was just not in my atmosphere. It would have been like seeing an alien if you saw a woman doctor. I wouldn't have even understood it. Yeah, a woman doctor, no. A woman lawyer, no. A woman who owned a business, no. I just didn't know them. I know they were there, but they were not part of my upbringing.

And by the time Chelsea was a little girl, that had begun to change. And there were a lot more role models and a lot more examples that you could actually point to and say you could do this or you could be that. I mean, one of our favorite characters in the book of gutsy women is Sally Ride. And she famously said something that we talk about a lot. It's hard to imagine what you can't see. And when I was growing up in Little Rock, yes, my teachers and the public librarians were still predominantly women, but when I was in first grade, our mayor was a woman.

My principal was a woman. My pediatrician was a woman who then later went on to be the head of the Children's Hospital in Arkansas. And my mother also didn't have to work as hard as her mother had had to work to kind of bring role models into her life. Right, they were readily accessible. They were readily accessible. I mean, one of my earliest memories Conan is going to see Geraldine Ferrero in 1984 when

she came to campaign in Little Rock. And so it was just so much easier for my mother to help me imagine what was possible because it was in my lived kind of everyday life. Right. And she did go to space camp when she was... I did go to space camp. A little camp. Oh my God, my son went to kind of a space camp, but it's the same thing that there was probably

a time where 25, 30 years ago, if you did go, it would seem odd, you know, like, well, what is she doing? I just didn't really care about seeming odd. But I was obsessed with kind of outer space and Sally Ride. And so I went to space camp in Huntsville, Alabama, and it was awesome. And I'm sure that a lot of people in my school were like, she's so weird. And I just, like, thankfully could have cared less about what they thought. I'm here to tell you that being thought of as weird when you're young often turns out.

Does that... That turns out okay? Well, better for you than for me. I don't know about that. Well, I'm just saying. I'm getting less apprehensive every minute. Good. You know, shoulders dropping.

Yeah, yeah. Very relaxed. You seem, you really seem like you're starting to accept me. You know, one of the things I want to ask you about, and sort of feeling weird, is I know that you went out one Halloween as Joan of Arc. Oh, I did. How old were you when you went out as Joan of Arc? And here's my second question.

Did anyone in your family explain to you what happened to Joan of Arc? I think I did know the interest story. Because it would be really sad if you went, I'm me daddy, I'm Joan of Arc. Oh, that's great, honey. Yeah. Honey, what happened at the end? What kind of candy did you get? Well, I'll talk about that in a minute.

What happened at the end? My grandmother, my mom's mom, was a hugely important person in my life for many reasons, including that she made my Halloween costumes. And I had all sorts of, maybe this is a perfect continuation of how kind of zany and nerdy and weird I was as a kid. Like, I was a peacock in an ice cream cone and Joan of Arc, I think, like in three consecutive years. And you're like, yes, you were zany and weird.

A bird, a dairy product, and then this martyr. And a natural one, two, three. So I was probably eight or nine when I was Joan of Arc. And I had the whole white tunic with the red cross, and my grandmother made me what looked like a chain link belt, and I had a shield and a kind of hat. And I just remember that that was a really frustrating Halloween, because I have to explain who I was. Yeah.

Those are the worst. Yeah. You're like, well, okay. I was like, trick or treat. You're like, who are you? I was like, Joan of Arc. Let's talk about the papacy. It's about 600 years ago.

You have to sit people down and really talk about it. I wanted to, just the personal experience that I had that involves both of you that has always struck me, and I've recounted it many times to people, but in the 90s, during your administration, your and your husband's administration, I was invited, very kindly, invited to an Irish-American dinner at the White House. And I'll never forget this. This is a huge deal. I'm not getting any invites these days, but that's okay.

And check the mailbox every day. But I went to this event at the White House, and there was a receiving line, and I shook hands with the president and with you. And we're all sitting, I believe, I could be wrong, but I think we were sitting outside or someplace that seemed like it was sort of outside. Beautiful night. What a great occasion. I'm so aware.

And then at some point, you're walking sort of from table to table saying hi to people, and you're a kid, and you walked over to our table, and we all said, oh, hi, hi, Chelsea, how are you? And I don't, you know, you didn't know who we were, but you were very nice. And you said, yeah, it's trying to do my homework upstairs, and there's just all this noise, but this happens whenever they have state dinners, and it's hard to concentrate, and my mind exploded. And I think you also said you would try to practice an instrument.

I think you had an instrument to some. It's possible. You were, you know, in some impractical instrument, like a xylophone or something, and you're like, I'm upstairs, and I'm trying to do this, but state dinners. And I just thought, I'm a terrible actress, so it's just whatever is in my head doesn't come out of my mouth. What I looked at, first of all, everybody at the table was loved it, and I've never forgotten it.

And I thought, what a great, my first thought was, your parents are doing a good job. I don't know much, but your parents are doing a really good job because you are a kid. And you're a kid who's living in the White House whose attitude is, I'm trying to get this stuff done, and this is annoying, because the, you know, the prime minister of Ireland is here, and all these Irish people. Don't they know I have a test tomorrow? I have a test tomorrow, and I just, I really thought that. Back to being so nerdy that I was like, if this is going to take my grade from A to B,

that's just not acceptable. Exactly, yeah. And you're probably like, and I'm talking to this guy who's on, what, at 12.30 at night? Who even watches that? Who are you? What happened to Letterman, you know, and I was like. You're giving me too many cool points. Okay, well whatever.

Too many cool points. But I, but anyway, I was very impressed that... I'm sorry I was so... No, no, you were great. Homework and instrument focused. No, I guess the point I was making is I saw this snapshot of, oh, this is a... Tried to be normal. A family who is normalizing the least normal situation in the world, and how do you do

that? It is really hard. But I think, you know, for us, it was an effort since neither Bill nor I had had any kind of opportunity to live the way a president lives, you know, with people taking care of you and cooking for you and doing all of the stuff that makes a huge house run. So we just were determined to try to make her life as normal as possible. So yeah, she... Chores.

She had chores. She had to... How do you have chores at the White House? You gotta clean your own room. No, you don't. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. Yes, you do.

Calling in Delta Force. Calling this room. Yeah, calling. I mean, you know, this child is gonna be... Let's get some Navy Seals in here and clean this. No. There are so many workarounds you could have used, Chelsea, if you wanted to. But then we also, you know, we said she had to learn how to do things like, you know,

wash her own clothes and iron them and learn to cook. Oh, my gosh. So yeah, because otherwise you could come out of that experience totally warped, warped, not only warped, just kind of dependent on other people to take care of you. Yeah. And who wants to be that? Yeah. Well, I mean...

I'd like to take a shot at it. It's too late. It's too late. No, it's not. You have no... My ability for sloth is unrivaled. I would like to take a shot at it. Well, keep trying to get an invitation to the White House and I can tell you so.

And tell you some places to hide, they won't find you for months and who knows what might come from that. Great. Yeah, if you could, we'll have a talk off-mic. Yeah, okay. You'll tell me. Yeah, I don't want everybody to go. There's a room, just pull on, it's, uh, this, this is like the Puget of Britannica.

They're like, they're what are called safe rooms, you know, hidden spaces and, you know, you wouldn't know are there. Great. So yeah, I can help you on that. Okay. Thank you very much. And bring back the Irish to the White House. Really?

What is the problem here? Well, I am Irish and no, I don't think the Irish should be placed in the White House. God, we had so much fun at those parties though. We had a party every St. Patrick's Day. We had the state dinner that you're talking about. We really, we really had a good time. It was really, uh, it was, uh, really magical and, um, I was very impressed with just before the podcast started, you're talking about, yeah, you know, talking to your kids over

the internet and how that's frustrating because you want to be there right now. It's like the same thing that my wife would be talking about in this very same situation. And I think that gets lost. It does. A lot. It's so easy and probably always has been, but I think it's even easier now to get reduced to a caricature. And sometimes it's a positive character, sometimes it's a negative, but it doesn't do justice

to the full human being that somebody is in whatever area of enterprise, whether it's politics or entertainment. And it, it always surprises me because, you know, I'll meet somebody and you can see them kind of looking at me through slightly narrowed eyes and, you know, I'll say hello and talk to them and everything. They'll say, you're so much nicer than I thought you'd be. And I said, yeah, I said, I'm sorry about that. That's too bad.

Um, I'm sorry that you had that impression, but it's better than the people who, uh, think that I've killed, you know, at least 50 people or done some other crazy stuff because they see it on the internet. And so when you meet, when my friends meet somebody, especially during the last campaign, they'd be knocking on doors saying, please vote for Hillary Clinton. Oh, sorry, I can't do that. She kills people. And they say, oh yeah, I've known her since sixth grade.

I don't think that's true. They say, oh yeah, but I saw it on the internet. I saw it on the internet. And so it's, it's a really complicated world we find ourselves in right now to make sense of it, to hold on to the humanity that each one of us has and wants to keep and to try to figure out how we're going to create much better and fuller images of people who are in the public eye. It's really tough.

I think we're at this time, American politics has always been nasty. That's not new. And, uh, I always like to point out to people that George Washington had a very difficult second term where people criticize when I thought, it's George Washington. He's the first one. There was nothing really controversial at that time about George Washington. And yet the second term, people were like, really George Washington, what has he done for us lately?

And, um, you know, well, he, he won the revolution and I guess he did, but what's since then, you know, and, um, what about, what's with the teeth? And it was, it's just this, uh, uh, so people have always struggled. I think with that, I have this theory that the internet is something that, uh, has outpaced human biology. I don't think our brains are wired to handle it. I think you're right. I think it's, it's, uh, a sense of evolution.

So we are now glued to these screens. We carry them around with us everywhere we go and we get information, we send information, but we're all addicted. I mean, there's a, there's an addiction to this dependence upon, uh, social media and you know, the screens on which we, uh, read it and it is, um, especially an experiment on kids. I mean, those of us who, you know, lived without the internet for decades, you know, we're still addicted.

Don't get me wrong, but it's not the same impact on a developing brain. And there's now evidence that this addiction, uh, actually changes the way the brain develops. Routes, neurons, yeah, it does. And so I don't know what we're going to do about it. If we had, uh, you know, if we had a, uh, a sensible normal government, we'd be looking into that to try to figure out what advice we would give to people and what could be done about it. Uh, so we're going to have to figure out how to do it ourselves, I guess.

Yeah. Are you going to be, I'm guessing, my guess is you would, no screens is the best way to go for a while when children are growing up. And then at a certain point you have to start making adjustments. And I think Conan, we have to help teach kids and our families and also expecting our schools to be kind of part of this kind of purposeful education so that kids can navigate like what is kind of truth and opinion and kind of outright falsehoods in an era where that's not just something kind of that they're reading or they're hearing, but that it is almost surrounding

them because of this addiction, um, because one of the things I really worry about is just the erosion of, of truth everywhere and that, you know, the reason we're even having a debate about climate change is because somehow like it's okay to interrogate and disbelieve science, which I think is absurd. No, it did, it did feel like we, I grew up in the seventies, eighties, and I was in a good public school system and I just kept thinking, oh, we're, we're moving forward. I remembered thinking I had friends that were African-American from, you know, from Roxbury and I remembered thinking, well, we, we took care of racism, right?

I mean, I, I'm sad that I, but I really remembered being about 14 and thinking, well, racism and evolution, we figured that out with the scopes trial. So we're just moving ahead, you know, and then that's just, it feels like the tide searches forward and then it pulls back in this way that's, uh, profoundly depressing at times. Yeah. Which is why I want to get back to optimism. Yeah. Let's get back to optimism because fundamentally we are.

Because well, you know, there's so many people in the book, I didn't know, Secretary Clinton about your, uh, like lifelong attachment to Eleanor Roosevelt and I, I, I am a big history buff and I'm a big, uh, Roosevelt aficionado and so I was really interested that you honed in on Eleanor Roosevelt as someone who I could see in the 19, not just the thirties, but also the forties and the fifties and really into the, until she dies in 1962, she is this woman who's breaking all the rules and her advice, one of the things that she said in the book that I, it feels to me like you've taken to heart is you gotta have a thick skin. Right.

It's thick as a rhinoceros. I think she used to say. And the other thing is you might as well do what you want because you'll get criticized anyway. A hundred percent. You know, she was somebody who I knew about when I was growing up. I knew that she was married to President Roosevelt. I knew that she, uh, visited American troops in the South Pacific.

I knew kind of bits and pieces, but I didn't realize how courageous and resilient she was until some biographies started coming out, um, and it wasn't until like the seventies and eighties that they pieced together all of her work and her writing and began to provide a fuller portrait of this woman who, uh, overcame being orphaned at a very early age, uh, being kind of rejected, uh, having, um, uh, interesting, but challenging life being a Roosevelt. I mean, at her wedding to Franklin, her uncle Teddy, you know, gave her away. I mean, she just had all of this weight of, uh, responsibility on her, which she rose to fulfill.

And she was such an advocate for people who were left out, even with all the good things that Franklin Roosevelt did during the Great Depression to try to lift people up. There were lots of people who were left out, uh, and left behind by even the programs that were passed. But I zero in on the book on her singular accomplishment, uh, after her husband died, after Truman became president, and he asked her to be part of a very small group that was going to, um, plan the United Nations, you know, so that they could try to prevent the wars of the 20th century from ever happening again.

And she was one of the people who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And if you want to feel, you know, a sense of pride, uh, to know that right after the Second World War, all these countries that have been devastated by war, populations that had been wiped out in the Holocaust, I mean, people said, we can't let this happen. So how are we going to do it? Yeah, we'll build institutions like the UN or NATO or something, but we need to lift our sights. We need to look at what we could do to treat each other with dignity.

And you know, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the single document that has been printed more, um, in the course of its existence than anything else. I mean, obviously, you know, the Bible's been around for a long time, so it outranks, uh, everything, uh, but the Universal Declaration is, you know, way up there. And so Eleanor Roosevelt continues to be an inspiration, uh, to me. And at the end of her life, she started getting, you know, very, uh, outspoken about, you know, what she expected our country to be able to do to live up to those, um, those values. So she's somebody that deserves to be read about on her own.

Yeah. And, you know, another person in the book, Greta Thunberg, uh, who's obviously, what I like about the book is it, there are names I expected to see, you know, and you'd say like, well, Harriet Tubman, you'd expect to see in the book. And there are all these, uh, iconic women that I would think, yes, they're going to be in the book. Uh, Greta Thunberg's a name I didn't even know a year ago, you know, and what's amazing to me about her is she's so young and I feel like that is part of her secret

weapon, is that it's very hard to dismiss someone, I mean, first of all, it's very hard to attack a child, you know, and other people do. They do. I know they do. Including our president. Yeah. But it may, but it makes it, it, it provides somewhat of a challenge to them, maybe a little bit.

And it's always this, there's this ancient wisdom that, that children speak the truth. I sometimes think there can't be a better climate advocate than someone who's that young, who clearly is not in anybody's pocket and who's clearly just saying, don't stop messing up my planet, stop it. And you know, that's, she's one of the people in the book that probably, you know, I wasn't, she wasn't on my radar a year ago. And so I love that this book encompasses the iconic figures from 200 years ago and someone who's just on the scene right now, who hasn't done her best work yet.

And is challenging all of us to be part of the solution and also is so fiercely focused on the science. Right. I do think part of her superpower is being kind of young and unbowed and just kind of relentlessly saying, you know, how could we not have done more? And how can we let any minute pass given like the crisis that we're confronting? And my mom and I were both so inspired by her kind of initially very lonely effort outside the Swedish parliament, you know, as a single climate striker.

And then, you know, a few other people joined and then a few more and then a few more and just this deep belief she had that her actions could make a difference. Yeah. There was something I was thinking about with this book, which is, you know, and obviously someone who I expected to be in the book, Maya Angelou, I believe it was your suggestion to your husband, hey, wouldn't it be great if Maya Angelou read a poem at the first inaugural? Right. Right.

You know, she... Was that, was that was you? Yes. You know, I came across years before because of her amazing memoir, I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, talking about her life growing up in a little town in South Arkansas called Stamps and, you know, the racism and the inequality that she had to cope with, but then being, you know, brutally raped as a young child, she stopped talking. She became mute.

And I find her so inspiring because here's this little kid and literally she could have just sat in a corner and never come out of it. But instead, while she refused to talk or thought she couldn't talk anymore, she started reading every book she could find and she started memorizing. She would memorize Shakespeare. She would, you know, memorize long passages from, you know, African-American writers. She would be trying to fill her heart and her head with information, with wisdom. And then when she finally did start to talk again, she was like this changed person.

I mean, that voice she had, even as a young woman, was so compelling and powerful. And when, you know, Bill was thinking about planning his inauguration, he'd always loved the fact that President Kennedy had Carl Sandberg read a poem, one of his own, at the inauguration. So, you know, we were kicking around ideas for that and I suggested Maya Angelou and Bill was immediately receptive and then she wrote a poem for it. So it was a perfect- A very optimistic poem. Very optimistic poem.

The pulse of the morning. It was so exciting to have her part of that ceremony and, you know, there was a lot of optimism but there was also a reminder of how far we'd come and yet we still needed to keep going further. I was thinking about this this morning before we started this interview that the first real division is gender, like that's the first initial division in life is men, women, obviously that's getting, we're learning more now, we're realizing it's a spectrum, it's changing and evolving, but that is the first division and so understanding each other is like the

first step and I think it's been seismic and uncomfortable for a lot of men and scary and the last couple of years, but there is this necessary, we've got to figure this out, we've got to understand each other and this book goes a long way towards, I think, doing that. It's just very, you read it, I'd even read it as a, this would be good for me to read and, or it would be good for my daughter to read this, it just feels like, no, I actually think this is a really good book for men to read. Yeah, I would hope so, Conan, I mean, you're 100% right and I'm not sure all the reasons

why we are so divided and so at loggerheads with each other and the fact that a lot of what people are pointing fingers at and arguing about are really old, old problems, whether it's race or gender or religion or ethnicity or immigration status, I mean, things that have been around a long time and I do think that we're at a pivotal moment in our country's history where people are trying to make sense of what's happening and a lot of people like you just said are trying to say, oh, hey, I've got things to learn, wow, what an opportunity I can expand my horizons, I can understand more and some people are saying, I'm not going there, you know, I'm digging my heels in right here and in fact, I'm going to head around

and go back from where I came and I expect others to follow along. So there's a real, I don't want to say philosophical difference, but in some ways it's an experiential one where people are saying, look, okay, yeah, you know what, I'm kind of into this new world and yeah, it's a little bit confusing and it's not like anything we've had before, but let's make it work and others are saying, I categorically reject it, I'm not changing and you're going to have to change and obviously in politics, you can be either the happy warrior, the optimist, hey, you know, we are the best positioned country in the history of the world to get this right or you can be a fear monger and a demagogue who is going to point out scapegoats

and give you an excuse for how difficult transitions and change is and that's where we are and we've got to bet on optimism. I mean, it's been a kind of congenital American trait that has gotten us through a lot as we've had to change who we were and expand the meaning of citizenship and all the rest of it. If we ever quit betting on optimism, you know, the whole American experiment is at risk. So this is a book that, yes, we were inspired by these women, motivated by them, but it also does carry that larger message like, hey, it's possible.

Some of what these women overcame is almost reminiscent of what people are facing today and look, they got through it, we can get through it and come better out the other side. Amen. And this is the Conan O'Brien, you know, religious hours and here's your donations. The number of donations is 1-800. Now, the money goes to me, but that's so he can, you know, represent the, you know, the way of the truth. Yes.

Right? Well, and also, there's this house I have my eye on in the Cayman Islands and there's this really good car. It's been an uplifting experience for me, I want to say, and I know that there's a lot of toxicity around politics and craziness and what I was really looking forward to today was this book is so not about that. This is not a political book. Right.

It's a book about really fundamental human qualities, human qualities that don't have to be gender specific, but these are women. We're putting the spotlight on women and it was really inspiring and just, I was very happy to get a chance to sit down and say, I need a dose of this optimism. And this was really nice. So I, you know, thank you for agreeing to come here and this very nice hotel that we booked. Well, just thank you, thank you for having us.

Have you revised your feeling about being, because I was going to say the Joan of Arc thing creeped me out. I no longer want to be here. Well, gosh. We wouldn't let her take matches with her. You definitely wouldn't let me have matches anyway, probably until I graduated from high school. Well, that day they really didn't want you to have matches.

Yeah, the Joan of Arc thing was, yeah. Yeah. I wasn't that literal. Yeah. Pretty literal. Not the door is Joan of Arc where you and your husband are all like, that's a little extreme, the Joan of Arc. Yeah, you're right.

Be safe and call us if you need it. What happened to the ice cream cone, right? Like, what happened to the ice cream cone was probably what my mom was thinking. You know, you could be Wonder Woman or Door the Explorer, you know. My daughter was Wonder Woman one year. Oh, was she? That's cool. That's a good costume.

Yeah, we love her. It was a great costume. I was Wonder Woman four years ago. Oh. How did that work out for you? I was escorted to a police station. Which... Is it another story?

No, I'm not telling that story. Oh, okay. The next time. Yeah, that would be... Seriously, thank you so much, both of you for being here and the book once again, The Book of Gutsy Women. I have a 16-year-old daughter and I'm giving her three copies of this and she will have them all.

Great. Thank you. And I'm going to give my son a copy of this book as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And when I get him to stop playing whatever game he's playing on the internet right now. You figure out how to say, you know, read a chapter and then you can have another hour

or two of, you know, playing the game, you know. You don't even know what the games are. I have no idea. I could see you going, and then you can go back to playing the games. The games. Whatever the games are. Yeah. Thank you both very much.

This was a real joy. Thank you. Thank you, Conan. It was a lot of fun. Do you guys want to check in on a voicemail? Yeah, sure. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, with some trepidation.

You're safe. It's good. Okay. Will, if you could play it, please. Hey, Conan. This is Mark, and I live in Twin Falls, Idaho. Hey, I know you're a big fan of history stuff, and my parents are coming out here this summer, and there's not really much history in Twin Falls, or there might be.

I don't know. But I was wondering if you could maybe make up a fake history story that I could trick my parents with about the Twin Falls area. Thanks. Okay. That's an interesting challenge. You could say that it's very little known fact that during his very short tenure as president, Gerald Ford went missing for a while.

He was only president for about two years. He was, of course, the interim president between Nixon and Carter. But little known fact, sometime around 1975 in the fall, Ford disappeared. They didn't know where he was. Ford, of course, famously played football in college. Some people thought that he had sustained a lot of concussions in just a moment of dementia from one of his many concussions, left the White House because he was under the belief that he was a mailman who worked in Twin Falls, Idaho.

So the Secret Service went looking. They didn't know where he was, and it's 1975, they didn't have all the kind of GPS tracking they have today, and they found him as a letter carrier in Twin Falls, Idaho. He was revived. He was reassured that he was the president of the United States. He was given some smelling salts. They applied a hot mustard plaster to his chest, and over a period of time, he recovered and he finished out his presidency.

But for two and a half months in the fall of 1975, President Gerald Ford was a letter carrier in Twin Falls, Idaho. How did he get to Idaho? Well, he hitched a ride. Okay. He hitched for a while and some hippies picked him up and they're like, hey man. You look like Gerald Ford, man. And he's like, I don't know who I am.

And they were like, yeah, we're hippies, man. I mean, yeah, the sixties are over, man, but not that far over. Yeah, man. They were only like five years ago, man, the sixties. So it's plausible that we're still hippies, man. Yeah, man. Yeah. And these hippies talked exclusively about how they were still hippies in 1975.

They were justifying their existence. That's all they pretty much talked about. So that's how Ford was able to get away with. They didn't ask Ford a lot of questions because they spent most of the ride in this VW bus justifying, yeah, man, I mean, it's plausible, man. It's like 69. It's like Woodstock. And this is like six years later, man, yeah, man, totally plausible, man.

How did Ford get the job or was he just doing it as a hobby? Well, first of all, he had an excellent resume. No. I mean, he had. He had his resume on him. Yeah. He had before thought to bring his resume. He had lost, you know, first of all, I mean, he had lost a lot of his memory, but he did

remember, you know, that he had been on the Warren Commission. He did remember that he had served faithfully in the Congress and that he also remembered being very well. He remembered being vice president, and so he just forgot the president part. And did his wife go with him or he just took off? No, no. He was so happy to just take a break. Going back to his resume, you said he put, he was a president on the resume, but that

he forgot. No. Oh, he did it. I said he was vice president. Uh-huh. You got to listen in improv. I'm sorry. So he remembered he was vice president.

He remembered that he was vice president. He just didn't know what he was president. Oh, okay. He forgot Nixon's resignation. Look, these questions didn't make what I said any funnier. It didn't. No, but I'm just trying to figure it out. You're blaming the questions?

Yeah. What I'm doing is I'm hang gliding beautifully, and you guys are throwing bank saves at me with your questions. Catch this. And that's hurting my beautiful arcing dives, my twirls, my pirouettes, if you will. Anyway. All right, let's let you hang glide. We'll back off.

Yeah. Anyway, that was, I thought that was a pretty good answer. That was good. Conan O'Brien needs a friend with Sonamov Sessian and Conan O'Brien as himself. Produced by me, Matt Gorely, executive produced by Adam Sacks and Jeff Ross at Team Coco and Colin Anderson and Chris Bannon at Earwolf, theme song by the White Stripes, incidental music by Jimmy Vivino. Our supervising producer is Aaron Blair and our associate talent producer is Jennifer

Samples. The show is engineered by Will Bekton. You can rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts and you might find your review featured on a future episode. Got a question for Conan? Call the Team Coco hotline at 323-451-2821 and leave a message. It too could be featured on a future episode. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend on Apple Podcasts,

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