Consider This from NPR - BONUS: Barack Obama Talks About What It Means To Be A Man

Episode Date: May 30, 2021

Former President Barack Obama is thinking a lot about our values as Americans. These days, in a divided America, he's particularly thinking about what it means to be a man. Is a man thoughtful, caring? Are men held back by what society traditionally expects a man to be?These are questions that Aarti Shahani recently asked Obama on a recent episode of her podcast, Art of Power, from member station WBEZ in Chicago.Listen to Art of Power on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and NPR One.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, Consider This listeners, it's Adi Cornish. It's Sunday, we've got a bonus episode for you, and this one comes from NPR member station WBEZ in Chicago. They've got a podcast over there called Art of Power. It's about people who have wielded power in sometimes unexpected, sometimes traditional ways, but also in ways that have changed the world in which we live. And in this particular episode, that person is Barack Obama. Art of Power host Arthi Shahani spoke with the former president about feminism, balancing personal and professional ambitions, and what it means to him to be a man. Here's that episode of Art of Power from WBEZ. Be a man. What it means to be a man is an open and contentious question. Diametrically opposed

models of manhood are battling it out everywhere, from the home up to the American presidency. Which man wins will fundamentally reshape the world. So I decided to call a guy you may know to talk about it. We're very comfortable, I think, in saying to girls, you can do anything you want. You know, you can be girly, you can be a tomboy, you can be ambitious, money, physical strength, girls. It's which chimp has the most bananas. Today on Art of Power, President Barack Obama occupies extremes in the public eye. He is widely seen as the alpha among alpha males, the bro who plays

basketball, the leader of the pack. He is also the first American president to call himself a feminist. Raised by strong women, married to a strong woman, during his presidency, he legislated for women's rights. After his presidency, he's shifting focus to the inner life of men and boys. Among the most prominent men on earth, he is pushing to redefine manhood itself, away from domination and toward caretaking. Hello there. Hi, how are you, Artie? I'm very good, President Obama. Did I pronounce that properly?

Almost perfect. Like a T-H, Sanskrit T, Artie. Artie. Yeah. President Obama and I are on Zoom. He in Washington, D.C., and me in my home office in Oakland, California. So this is a relatively new show, right? It is. You're like the seventh or eighth episode, I think.

Glad to be in on the ground floor. He's our eighth guest. Three previous ones, each who changed the world, had their lives fundamentally altered by a decision Obama made as president. I didn't seek that out. His footprint is just that huge, though he's quick to point out it wasn't always. Yeah, BZ is my home station. Yes.

BZ used to have me on when nobody cared what I had to say. I have a lot of questions for the former president about policy, how he campaigned as a radical yet governed as a centrist. But given that American democracy was just disrupted by a man whose very definition of manhood is the opposite of Obama's, it felt timely, urgent even, to drop down to a fundamental level, the story he tells himself about what it means to be a man. We start by rewinding to a moment Obama describes in his latest memoir, A Promised Land, when he had to balance his life as a young father with his enormous political ambitions. You start rolling. You pitch, I'll pitch.

All right. There is a moment in your life that fascinates me. I think of it as the comeback kid moment because basically you're this guy. You're 40. You got obliterated in a house race. I mean, I'm sorry. I'm going to remind people. you lost 61% to 30%. Nobody is telling you, hey, Barack, I really think you have a future in national politics. But you cannot let it go. And you see there is an opening, not in the House, but a step up in the Senate.

And you gotta take it. Why? Why? Yeah, well, look, as I write in A Promised Land, I did get a significant beatdown in that congressional race. That first failed race was against a popular incumbent. And after a crushing defeat, he made the brash decision to fly off to the Democratic National Convention, the who's who of his party. But he didn't get credentials to actually get on the floor. So it was a waste of time. I'm flying back feeling woe be gone. And I considered actually leaving politics. Maybe I took a wrong turn here and this wasn't destined to be. But he had this nagging thought. I felt if people heard me and knew who I was, I could connect. The problem in the congressional race was nobody knew who I was. But I did make a promise to Michelle that we were up or out.

She agreed to it primarily because she figured, well, maybe this is a way for him to finally get his sense. Get it out of the system. I will ask about that in a moment. I guess I just want to drill a little bit deeper here. And as I read it, there are actually two explanations you offer in your book for the seminal moment. One is you're seeking a stage big enough for your vision. You need that. And you're not finding it in local politics, state politics, or even the House Congressional District. You need something that fits you. Yes.

Now, the other thing, and listen, my jaw dropped when I saw you use this word. You use this word megalomaniac to describe yourself. Explain that part of it. No, look, I think that by definition, when you offer yourself up as a political leader, you're going out there and you're saying, vote for me and I will represent you and be your voice, you have to have a certain ego that probably tips beyond healthy into sometimes a little delusional. And certainly that's true when you run for president. Now, I was self-aware enough to know that maybe I am delusional. And so I've got to kind of test this out in the world. President Obama recalls the famous sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King, The Drum Major Instinct, where he describes the desire to feel important as the most fundamental human desire, even more than sex. He talks about the ego, I driven aspect of any kind of leadership. We all want to be important. You want to be first. You want

to lead the parade. We all have that drum major instinct. But the question is, can you channel that so that it's I want to be first in service. I want to be first in helping others. And that's a way of maybe squaring the circle so it doesn't become just about ego. this as you feeding your own ambitions, as Michelle described it, whatever holes you have because your father left you or you were a mixed kid in Hawaii or what have you, if you don't have enough sense of those motivations, then you can probably become somewhat insufferable. And you see that in some politicians. You sure do. Yeah, right? That neediness to be center stage. And if they don't reflect on it, then it can consume them and make them less effective and sometimes dangerous. One more question about that. When you think about 40-year-old you doing that thing that no one's telling you to do.

And I can think about moments in my life where I've sought something ambitious and that reflex to turn and look and ask someone, well, do you think I can make it? But it seems fundamentally you didn't have that. That is coming from inside of you. I wonder what is the lesson that you think is important to share with people today? Well, you know, it's not entirely true that no one was saying it wasn't possible. I'd gotten thumped in a race partly because it was the wrong race, wrong time, hadn't thought it through, hadn't done the research. When I decided to run for U.S. Senate, actually, I had consulted pretty extensively with a lot of folks. Now, there were people who assumed if you couldn't win the lesser seat, you certainly can't win the bigger seat. But there were others like Senate President Emile

Jones. I had a bunch of downstate white legislators who I had befriended partly from poker games. And I said, you know what, Brock, I actually think you could win some votes around here, even though this is a largely white rural or suburban district. So I actually had done my homework. And I guess the lesson to impart when I talk to younger people who are interested, not just in public service, but any kind of risk taking is, are you taking a calculated risk? I would not have run for U.S. Senate if I thought I had no chance of winning. It wasn't just a lark. It's too hard. And you're asking too many people to commit to investing themselves and their resources into a campaign for you to just do something on a lark. But everything important involves some risk. Politics in the United States is not like politics in many countries around the world,

where if you take on the powers that be and you fail, you may be in prison or your family may be threatened or you may not have a livelihood. So the risk is not that risky. So at the end of the day, the worst that can happen is you get embarrassed. I figured I'd been embarrassed enough in the past and survived. I could do it one more time. You know how this story ends. As he campaigns for the U.S. Senate, he finagles his way back to the Democratic National Convention.

Not just to attend, but to speak on the main stage this time. To introduce himself to America, to make his story our collective story. The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him too. And back home in Illinois, you may not remember this part.

The two men he has to defeat. First, it was allegations of spousal abuse. The leading Democrat and the Republican in the Senate race. Fending off sensational allegations tonight about his divorce. Get mired in sex and marital scandals. Barack Obama, the ambitious man and the family man is victorious. And those calculated risks, he took them at home too. So now let's flip the focus, okay? Because I do now want to talk about this decision in the context of a family, of a power couple. Okay.

You do not tell your wife, Michelle Obama, that you intend to run for the Senate until you already have a plan in place for how you might be able to win. It's a secret. Secret makes it sound sneakier than it was. I think it's fair to say that until I got the sense that I could actually win, I wasn't even going to raise it with her because if I'd had a bunch of conversations and everybody had been like, no chance, we're not supporting you, you're not going to be able to raise the money, forget about it, then no reason to sleep on the couch any extra nights. Well, I mean, you're making a slight joke, but I'm actually wondering if it's serious. Why wouldn't you from the get-go say, hey, I'm thinking about this?

Was there a concern about strain? Well, Michelle doesn't like politics. And she doesn't like it, not because she thinks it's unimportant, but because, A, we had small children and she had a very specific concern about the strains of me being away and her being a working mom, which were entirely legitimate and be as, as Michelle once described it, she doesn't like mess in her life. So I did not take that lightly. And I always felt obliged to do my homework before I broached the question, honey, I'm thinking about maybe doing this. What do you think? And by the way, also had to be certain myself that this was even something that I was considering doing.

Because part of the internal dialogue that takes place, for me at least, was, is this worth it? Because I miss my kids. I know I don't like being away from my wife that much. Let me ask you two follow-ups from what you've just said. One, use the word sneaky. I'm making it sound sneakier than it was, right? Let me be real with you. When I read that part of your book, I was like, I'll be damned. He really has to compartmentalize his ambitions to get things into place so he can pull that trigger. And so I understood the move, but I wanted to hear you talk about it because that is some real compartmentalization. Well, you know what it is, and I think that all of us go through this in our partnerships.

You know, Michelle, there were times where she would make career decisions or career changes. But part of what we've tried to do is let each person figure some stuff out and have clarity about what they really want, what they really think. Then bounce it off the other person, see how the other person reacts, what their views are. The one thing that the saving grace, I think, with the dialogue, the dance that Michelle and I did around my political career, was she always knew that she had veto power. That at the end of the day, if she absolutely said, you know, I can't do this. Is that true for the, because I didn't read it that way. Maybe I didn't read it correctly. It didn't sound to me like she had veto power for the Senate race.

Well, I think that the way I presented it was more damning to myself because I was trying to give her perspective because I was sympathetic with her perspective. But I think that she would say, and because I said this explicitly multiple times, and she knew in her heart that if at the end of the day, this is not something that she could manage or she thought would be damaging to our family or our children, we would not do it. Michelle Obama, in her memoir, Becoming, uses the term sacrifice to describe her role, not veto power. At one point, he was away so much he'd spent less than four full days at home with his young family in a six-month stretch. She felt she could, and she did, compel her reluctant husband to go to couples counseling. But some of us will wonder, did she really think she could use that veto power? There's one other word you used I want to go into a bit, strain. The strain, and you've acknowledged this so much, and she's written about this extensively in Becoming.

The strain falls on her, right? How did you think about it at the time, father of two young children, wife who is very accomplished and has her own ambitions. How did you think about, did you think about the way the strain would fall on her? Yeah, well, that's what I'm writing about. I mean, this is no like in retrospect. This is in real time. And my wife's not shy. So when things were strained, she let me know, there's a strain here, brother. And yeah, this was not something that I only looked back on and realized somehow, huh? We went through it. At each juncture, we were having to wrestle with these issues.

We have a society that doesn't do a very good job in providing families with support systems for kids, basic stuff like daycare. And what is undoubtedly true, and this I think you can extrapolate from our experience, no matter how enlightened the guy thinks he is, there's still a tilt in the direction of more burden falling on the woman. And do you feel like that's a biological given or is it because of a dynamic playing out? I think it's embedded in our social structures, in discrimination, in expectation, in the messages that we're sending in the media and in entertainment. And it's something that now, as a father of two daughters, I'm constantly

warning them against and trying to ensure that they're not limited by. It's interesting you bring up your two daughters, daughters make a man think a lot about masculinity and the division of labor between men and women and where things fall. And I wondered, you know, would you want your daughters to find a partner like you in terms of that division? Well, you know, I think that you're seeing an evolution that's more generational, right? I mean, Michelle and my relationship is different from what her parents' relationship was like. She grew up in a wonderful family, but there were times where her mom was just not just but was a stay-at-home mom and wasn't thinking anything about that um whether she liked it or not she kind of thought yeah that's a role i fall into um michelle obviously progressed from that but the society

didn't always support you know the kinds of changes in family support and structure that are necessary. I think Malia and Sasha and a lot of their friends just automatically operate on the assumption that I'm not expecting to make more sacrifices than the guy or partner that I'm with. Which is part of the reason why I think you're seeing this next generation marry later in life, because they recognize that if they marry too early, then it's natural to be more vulnerable to some of these social pressures and expectations that fall on women. I want to highlight, this is some groundbreaking parenting advice. Even in 2021, so many of our parents pressure us to get married before we become spinsters.

Put a ring on it. Obama says that is not the message he gives to his daughters, Sasha and Malia. I encourage them to actively resist that and make sure that they know what they want before and don't just fall into something because that's what society says is the easiest path. So you give them dating advice? I try to pick and choose my spots, I think it's fair to say, because if I were constantly giving them dating advice, they would definitely close the door to their room and I wouldn't see them. After the break? Partly because I grew up without a father in the home. I had to spend time thinking about, all right, what does it mean to be a full-grown man?

Barack Obama offers an alternative definition of manhood. If you're new to Art of Power and you like what you're hearing, we got a bunch more. I'd recommend our episodes on Mary Trump. I don't believe family trumps everything else. Carol Moseley Braun. You know, nobody thought I had a chance in hell. I'm winning. Gabby Pacheco. Here was, you know, the most powerful man in the world being disregarded because he disregarded us.

Or David Collins, who created the Netflix hit Queer Eye. God needed a voice to tell this story. Subscribe now and let us know what you think. A couple days before Barack Obama won the presidency, he had a pretty bad gaffe. Brothers should pull up their pants. Just pull up their pants. You know, you're walking by your mother, your grandmother. He was doing a town hall on MTV.

Your underwear is showing. What's wrong with that? Come on. He's since steered away from regulating male bodies. But the inner life of himself and other men, he is leaning into that conversation. It became urgent for Obama in the Trump era. Many newsrooms framed Donald Trump's victory as a battle between forgotten, working class, white America and the coastal elites. But Obama, he says it's more complicated than that. And masculinity is at the core of how we are to understand where America is today. It's a topic he broaches in his podcast, which he did with rock star Bruce Springsteen. President Obama, this line of questioning that I'm picking up with you,

fundamentally, it's about masculinity and what it means to be a man. Right. And it seems like that's something that you are thinking about a lot. Maybe I'm now drawing more from your conversations with Bruce Springsteen. Okay. Yeah. That was a fun podcast. And that was a major theme of it. Huge theme.

Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think that partly because I grew up without a father in the home, I had to spend time thinking about, all right, what does it mean to be a full grown man? There are a lot of ideas of strength, masculinity, power that are defined by dominance and subordination. Sadly, in our society, admired a man, seep into how we think about public policy and how we organize our societies and often is a stunted view. And that part of what we have to do is to expand our notions of manhood and power so that providing people health care and caring for children and being good stewards of the environment, that's what men do, as opposed to just going to war and making lots of money and telling other people what to do.

I asked President Obama about a specific juncture where he really thought about his evolving sense of himself as a man. He talked about a moment from his presidency. He had women in his cabinet and other senior advisors. And one day they came to him with a few complaints about their male colleagues. They talk over us. They ignore what we say. If we provide a viewpoint or analysis or solution to a problem. Nobody says anything. And then 10 minutes later, a guy repeats the exact same point and suddenly everybody says, that's brilliant. A bunch of you are nodding your heads because you've had this experience.

There's research on this. The way women or minority voices get sidelined in the workplace, it hurts people and it hurts the work, the contribution the excluded group could have made. It gets lost. Obama had not realized this was happening right in front of him. He had a three-hour dinner to talk it out with his senior women. And then I went to the men in the White House and I said, listen, we have to change our behavior.

Now, partly because I was raised by a couple of very strong women, I'm glad that I habitually didn't myself engage in some in these conversations. But I had to ask myself, to what degree was I complicit in this atmosphere? Because I, with a lot of male staff, would get argumentative or raise our voices or create sort of a locker room atmosphere that just wasn't comfortable for a bunch of the women. How did the men respond when you pulled them aside and had the talk with them? You know, some of them were a little defensive, but generally they were apologetic and they improved. I won't say they got perfect.

You know, you take the example of my first chief of staff and former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. As he and others pointed out, he could be brusque, rude. He has that reputation. Not just women. That's how he operated generally. That's how the men operated with each other. So from their perspective, this wasn't in any way gender directed, but embedded in how we operated, quote unquote, was certain styles, practices, ways of communicating design situations that silence or amplify others' voices. There's a time I was in the room and saw President Obama use that power. It was at Stanford University at a technology summit.

He was on stage, not getting interviewed, but doing the interviewing. So why don't we start with you and tell us, I was hearing some of the great work you're doing. Tell us more about it. Beside him, a young female startup founder from Egypt. Thank you. It's so great to be here. I was dumbstruck. He is asking the questions. She, young brown woman wearing a hijab, is giving the answers. I'm a software engineer. I have an engineering background. Obama, a master of optics, was sending a message around the world.

Other times, he's used that power behind closed doors. Cecilia Munoz, an advisor of yours, I spoke with her in advance of speaking to you, to get a sense of, you know, what does she think President Obama has to teach people about how power works and how to use male privilege? Because she believes you do that. She shared this interesting story. Without naming names, I remember a time when one of us had a hot flash in front of him in the middle of a meeting. One of the women breaks out into a sweat, face turns red. It's obvious something's happening. And you could see he's starting to look concerned. And so anticipating, she's like, hot flash. Don't mind me.

Ignore the sweat pouring down my face. It's just a hot flash. Knowing that it was, like, okay to say that. And then everybody chuckled and moved on. Like, I know there are men in my life who would be absolutely mortified. It's hard to imagine any other president having that conversation with his staff. Do you remember that? I do.

Well, and we joked about it. Not all walking on eggshells, but that we are able to get the job done, stay focused, put mission ahead of our egos, but still just be mindful of the fact that it's different for women. It's different for people of color in many of these corridors of power. You know, the conversations I would have with the women staff, senior staff, was to both empathize, but then also say to them, you know, doggone it. My expectation is if a guy's talking too much and you're not being heard, tell the guy. Stop. I just finished your sentence for you. Look.

Right. Exactly. I haven't finished my point yet. Right. Right. And these are the kinds of adjustments that I think we're all making in our society all the time. This is crazy timely. I mean, just to be real about it and part of my fascination with Barack and Michelle Obama and that relationship and the division of labor, it has everything to do with what we as a society right now are dealing with.

Look at COVID. Look at so many couples, young couples, younger generations than you and your wife. And part of the reason I'm familiar with that is because a lot of the folks who started off as junior staffers on my campaign, they nobody's named their kid Barack yet, which hurts my feelings a little bit. That's funny. No one who knows you, but people who don't know you have done that. So we tend to think about politics and government as being all about tax policy and grand diplomacy and so forth. But a lot of this has to do with, you know, you're surfing a wave of all kinds of social trends and shifts in values that hopefully go in the right direction. It's interesting you say that because, you that because I brought up a little bit ago your podcast with Bruce Springsteen, which I didn't hear it as a fun little project. I thought

it was a very ambitious effort. What I heard you doing is in the wake of the Trump era, and you say this, you have a little theory that part of Trump's success had to do with selling a notion of manhood that many men, and it's not safe to say this publicly sometimes, but many men are hungry for this notion of you're fired and life is gold plated. Right? I've always saw Trump's presidency as a symptom of something bigger. Right? We always saw Trump's presidency as a symptom of something bigger, right? And some of it is rooted in the changes in our racial demographics and insecurities around what's happening to the caste system and who's on top and who's not in our society. Some of it is a response to these shifts in gender dynamics and power. And, you know, people feel insecure when suddenly their status feels potentially at risk, whether it's from immigration or, you know, changing economic circumstances or a black president. And part of what my podcast with

Bruce Springsteen was about was a big chunk of that has to do with men and how they define themselves and how they define their own status and seeing if we can redefine that in a more healthy way. Part of it was also trying to think about what does it mean to be an American and redefining what it means to be patriotic? What does it mean to care deeply about this country? What's the better idea or the essential idea of this great experiment that we're under, which oftentimes gets skewed? And those things are connected. They're deeply connected. And I will say this, I feel like my understanding of what it means to be American has been deeply shaped actually by your first book. And the point you make about the inordinate

diversity of America being the feature of this country- Yes. It's not a glitch. No, it's the feature. It is the feature. It's central. It's where the world converges. And so I take your point and the many layers you're operating on, I'm not trying to act like there's just one, but for the sake of following a conversation through, going back to manhood, we've had not enough, but we are having conversations about white privilege. Look at the New York Times bestseller list and the books that are selling, what people are

hungrily consuming in their quiet rooms. We haven't, I don't believe, talked so much, for lack of a better term, about male privilege. And I wonder, what is it you are trying to learn or teach others about male privilege? Well, you know, I think that obviously we've made progress in the Me Too movement and in other places recognizing the most toxic, the most egregious elements of bad behavior by men towards women. I think what we haven't spent as much time doing is thinking about what are the positive values that we're trying to instill in our boys so that when they grow up, they are respectful, thoughtful partners with women, whether it's in the family or the workplace. What are those things that are not constructed based on the man being able to do what he wants and then the woman adjusting, but rather, how do we meet as equals and work together to raise families, build businesses, make the world a better place, we still define what boys can do. Michelle and I talked about this the other day. We're very comfortable, I think, at least within a lot of families in saying to girls, you can do anything you want. You know, you can be girly.

You can be a tomboy. You can be ambitious. You can be more reserved. You can find what fits you, what feels right. With boys, we still say sports, money, physical strength, girls, you know, uh, those are the things that you are going to be measured by, you know, the way Michelle and I talk about it. It's, it's which chimp has the most bananas. Um, and I think broadening how we think about men and- Broadening to what? Broadening the definition so that we're telling our boys, you being a good caregiver is part of what you should be as a man because it's part of what you should be as an adult, right?

Showing compassion is not weakness. Listening is as important as talking. A few of my male friends have told me, Arthie, you talk about women's rights. Well, we men can feel trapped too. Now I hear Obama making the same point. Evolving what manhood means, it doesn't only benefit women. It's for self-empowerment for men too. As I interview leaders, there's something I've observed. Just about every single one has some

seminal experience at age 19, give or take, that is a clear window into the leader they will become one day. President Obama, when writing about himself around that age, describes a guy who's angry sometimes, wants to swing, split a lip when someone insults him, describes a guy who's angry sometimes, wants to swing, split a lip when someone insults him, and a guy who's into books, sometimes for the wrong reasons. He'd read this French philosopher, Michel Foucault. And I love your descriptions about 19-year-old Barack Obama, reading Foucault to chase skirts. That was one little line. I love that because I dated that guy too. 19-year-old Barack, you have a sort of beautifully self-effacing way of talking about him. I'm still curious though, does he provide a window into the leader you would become?

You know what's a consistent threat? And I can say this with some confidence because part of me sort of transitioning from a wild, somewhat irresponsible teenager to maybe overly serious guy who ends up going to community organizing. You know, it's that period around 19, 20, 21, where I'm making this change. I kept a lot of journals and I can read these journals looking back on them. And, you know, some of them are, are, you know, mortifying because, you know, uh, you know, I, I'm just taking myself so seriously and they're so angsty and, you know, there's, you know, uh, bad writing and bad poetry

in there. And, and, uh, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm just navel gazing, but it gives me a sense of who I was. And I do think there were, there are a couple of things that were consistent and that did preview elements of myself that continue. Such as? with how to bring people together and appreciative of the fact that humanity in all its variety is full of beauty and cruelty and that the superficial differences that we put great stock in don't mean as much as what's underneath, that there's a commonality to people. I always believe that out of necessity, given that I'm the product of, you know, a white woman and a black man who grew up in Asia and Hawaii, right? So I had no choice but to believe that. And that, I think, was it was a lasting theme. kindness as a primary value of empathy and looking at other people and asking, gosh,

how are they feeling? What's going on with them? That shaped my politics. And then finally, I think a certain level of self-reflection. Being comfortable with analyzing things and having strong points of view, but allowing yourself some measure of doubt or being willing to question yourself so that you don't get so cocksure and confident that you don't listen to other people. The guiding question in our show, Art of Power, is, so how does power work in the real world anyway? Tell me something based on your experience. Is there something that you've learned on your extraordinary journey about how power works that you wish 19-year-old Barack Obama knew? You know, when I was an organizer, we used to say,

this is sort of a standard organizing credo. Power is organized people and organized money. It's not that complicated, right? If you've got either a lot of people who are organized or a lot of money that's organized, then it can influence and impact our world. But what I would say is more important than we, I think, give credit to is the power of stories. Because it's stories that organize people and it's stories that organize money. The stories we tell about what's important, the stories that we tell about who we are, where we're from, the stories we tell about what's right and what's wrong, that has enormous power.

And I think that we don't spend enough time maybe in our classrooms really thinking about the stories we're communicating to our kids. We're surprised when people don't vote or our democracy is weakened or we see what happened in the Capitol in January when what happened here was something we did not think could happen again.

And yet, if you look at the stories we tell on TV and in movies and over the internet, we haven't been telling much of a story that this is an experiment in democracy and self-government. And it requires everybody to participate effectively and be respectful of each other. You know, those aren't necessarily stories we inculcate in our children. So, you know, that's something that I would, I think, emphasize to all the 19-year-old Baracks and Michelles who are running around there thinking that maybe at some point they want to change the world. My lessons from President Barack Obama.

One, be self-aware. And if you're not, cultivate that muscle. It will help you take risks that are calculated and be a little less insufferable in the primordial quest to matter. Two, don't trap yourself in an identity that forces you to be unbalanced. Give yourself permission to interrogate and expand your definition of foundational words like manhood. Three, stories are a tool and weapon to turn information into meaning, to move people and money. Be conscious of the stories you tell, especially to yourself. This episode of Art of Power was produced by Justin Bull, Hina Shravastava, and me, Arthi Shahani.

Our executive producer is Kevin Dawson. If this episode landed for you, made you stop, think, feel, hit subscribe or go OD on the other episodes. There are amazing lessons being dropped, wisdom bombs that you're going to want to hear for yourselves. Share with your friends and family.

Let me know what you think. You can text me at 917-708-5139. On Twitter and Instagram, I'm at Arfi411. Guest ideas, feedback, whatever you're thinking. And one more thing. Last week, my family and the Obamas lost our beloved dogs. This episode is dedicated to Ladybug, to Bo, and to all the dogs who show us how to love. I hope we humans can learn to be more present like you.