Drama Queens - Work in Progress: Robert Reich

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Robert Reich has spent a lifetime standing up to bullies—from the playground to the halls of power. Now, the former Labor Secretary and bestselling author reveals what we must do to take a stand against social injustice while democracy itself is under attack.Find out why the most impactful leaders might be the ones who never hold public office and why he still believes the antidote to darkness isn’t optimism—but action.Follow Robert on Substack: https://robertreich.substack.com/Learn how you can host or attend a screening of Professor Reich's documentary at https://www.thelastclassfilm.com/Find his memoir "Coming Up Short" at bookshop.org.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Your time and energy are precious. And the people you date should honor that. That's why everyone loves Bumble, today's sponsor. It's built for intentional dating, helping you connect with people who genuinely respect your boundaries and your heart. And because so many of us want to feel safer when meeting someone new, Bumbo gives you peace of mind with options like photo and ID verification.

So you know the person you're talking to is who they say they are. If you've been thinking about dating again, take this as your sign. Start your love story on Bumble. Hey, everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome to work in progress. Hi, whipsmarties. Today we are joined by someone who I think is actually one of the smartest people that I know. And that's not hyperbole. That's just a fact. If you are wondering how we got here, meaning this present moment in American and global history, or what the is going on in the world, or what we do about it, today's guest is for you. Today we're joined by none other than Robert Reich. You likely know him from his incredible social media content from Instagram to Substack. He is, an incredible academic, a professor at Berkeley, one of the most brilliant economists of our time. He has spent his life in public service, serving as the Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton. He is a best-selling author, as I mentioned, a professor, and he is one of the most

recognizable voices on inequality in America. And in his newest memoir coming up short, he's looking back on his life from growing up after World War II to serving in politics and teaching. And he's reflecting on what his generation got right, where they fell short, and how we can still reclaim a fairer and more democratic America. Whether he is leading a classroom or writing on a page or in a public forum, Robert has spent his lifetime guiding others to see not just what is, but what could be. And that's part of what excites me so much about the fact that I get to call him my friend, because he's someone I can ask about what America is, not just in data or policy, but as a story, what our dream could be. And he manages to be so

incredibly inspiring and also really sobering about what we're up against and where we can go. So let's dive in with Robert Reich. Sophia. Hello, Robert. How are you? I'm very good. How are you? I'm great.

I'm just thrilled to see you. I adore you. I've been thinking about you a lot, given the craziness of this year. And it certainly makes me realize we're very long overdue for a meal. That's right. Well, I'll tell you, whenever you get to the Bay Area, where are you,

most of the time? At this point, I'm mostly on the East Coast, just outside of New York City. And my family's still on the West Coast, so I am out there quite a bit. Good. Well, I'll promise you a meal at Saul's Deli. How's that? Deal. That's perfect for me. Okay. One of the nice things about New Jersey is we also have very good delis, so it's nice to be here. We don't. Saul's is the only deli on the West Coast. Now, that can't be the case. Well, we've got a few in L.A., but that's not really helping you up at Berkeley. No, and as you know, Northern California is a completely different state from Southern California. So we need our deli up here. Indeed.

But back to your point. Yes, well, we'll talk about all this. It's much worse than I ever expected it would be. Yeah. I'm finding myself constantly on this. kind of see-saw between absolute shock and somehow being unsurprised. And it's a weird place to be. Well, I'm probably on the same seesaw as you are.

But I think the real one that I keep on going back and forth on is despair and anger versus absolute resolution to do something. about it and to change it. Yeah. Certainly in my lifetime. Certainly. Which is getting smaller, shorter and shorter. No, don't say it. You know, it's something I admire so much about you, not only your willingness to, you know, really confront truth in ways that are so deeply factual that you manage to

take some of the hysterics out of it. And despite the fact that so much of what you talk to us about is math and data, you manage to make it emotionally resonant. And I've been reflecting on this a lot lately because people have asked me, why is this so important to you? You know, why is it so important to you to fight for democracy, you know, fill in the blank, whatever question they want to ask? And the only way I know how to respond is to say, I can't not do it. And you strike me as a person who feels that, who can't not do this, who can't not show up for other people. Have you always felt like that? There never seemed to me to be a choice, Sophia.

When you say can't not, I didn't even go that far. It just seemed to me that I was doing it. that was part of my being. And a lot of people talk about callings, but I think it's more profound than that, not only for me, but for, I dare say, you and most other people who feel strongly that they have got to take action,

speak out, speak up, stand up to. I mean, we're talking about our country and our society. We're talking about the world. It goes way beyond the United States. We're talking about issues of social justice and the fundamental questions of what we owe one another as members of the same society. These are the most fundamental moral questions that anyone addresses and they are personal but they're public at the same time. And we can't not address them. I mean, even if we think we are not addressing them, we are addressing them by not addressing them.

We are making choices, all of us. Indeed. Do you think back because you're clearly doing a lot of reflection about your life? You know, I had such a lovely time watching your documentary and I can't wait to dive into it. But it struck me so much the way that you've been thinking about how to communicate with your students, the sort of evolution of what you understand about the young people who walk into your class. room. And I wonder about that reflection, not just for them, but for you, if you could at this stage from this place, you know, say walk onto the quad on your campus and run into yourself at 10 years old, or maybe a high school age, Robert, do you think you would see yourself in him? Yes, I'm afraid so. I mean, a lot of people, I think, have the delight and love

luxury of thinking about themselves when they were 10 or 15 or even 20 and thinking back and saying, well, I've changed a lot. I mean, I was a totally different person then. I don't have that luxury. I just look back and I've always been pretty much who I am now. In fact, the startling thing to me is that I look in the mirror and I'm not the person. I believe I am now. I think I'm It's still that, you know, young person who I would meet in your metaphor. You know, the arc of one's life is a very difficult thing to describe because we don't fundamentally understand it. We understand that we do have youth and we do have middle age. We do have old age.

And we have another final stage, which I describe in the book as, you look great. because some very old people when I see them and I say, you look great, they say to me, well, that's the last stage of my life. But we don't really understand much about this great arc. And we certainly don't understand much about the arc when it applies to societies. When we look at what is the arc of America, Henry Luce, Time Magazine, Zines founder said that the 20th century was the American century. He said that after World War II. And I remember that I heard stories. I was very young, but I heard stories my father and my

mother and my grandparents talking about going through the Depression and World War II and making the sacrifices they needed to make in order to both survive personally, but also to make sure that the values they believed in inside the American culture also survived. But what I get to in the book is the sense that my generation and perhaps yours

and other generations took for granted. A lot of things that my parents and grandparents did not take for granted. They couldn't take for granted. They were confronted with an economy that really had crashed.

They were confronted with Nazi Germany. They were confronted with a world that was threatening the basic tenets of their lives. And so they had to rise to the occasion. We have not had to rise to the occasion until, well, until now. Why do you suppose it is then that when we've been met with these moments to rise to an occasion, to have our generation's freedom bonds and freedom fries and all the things that are supposed to make you really double down on your country.

And I mean this in terms of a global health crisis with COVID, in terms of the looming authoritarian threat and now full-blown authoritarianism we see with a second Trump term, why do you think so many people are leaning gleefully into the harm being done around them? Is that a cognitive dissonance? Or is it this sort of slight detachment from impending doom that makes you think, oh, well, it's happening over there, but not over here, not to me? Why do you think we're not reacting to what should be a rallying cry for the nation as a nation?

A lot of people, number one, are in denial. It's easy to be in denial. In fact, it's a comfortable place. A lot of people, even in conversations I have had over the last month or two, they tell me it's not that bad. You're being alarmist. Well, it is that bad. Other people are in total despair, Sophia. they are feeling that there's nothing they can do.

They feel helpless, they feel powerless, they feel alone, demoralized, depressed. I've come into contact with a lot of those people too. But what I often say and certainly believe is that these two responses to the crisis we're in, denial or despair, are both useless. They are dangerous. It is very important that we understand what's happening, face it directly and clearly, and that we understand our obligation to fight it. Now, I don't mean in the streets.

In fact, I think it would be foolish right now to give Trump ammunition in terms of his attempts to take over. American cities and states and trigger the Insurrection Act. But there are countless ways we can fight back, and we should and will fight back and are fighting back. I come in contact with so many people who are doing so many important things. We used to call it in the first Trump administration resistance.

I think it's more than resistance. It's now a kind of empowerment that is critical. And we can talk about that. I don't think there's anything particularly dramatic. It's a frame of mind as much as it has particular actions. And now a word from our sponsors that I really enjoy, and I think you will too. No one can resist a rule of culture. So here's one for the dating files.

Rule of culture number 72. Chemistry isn't just vibes. It's values. Because what's the point of matching with someone if you can't talk about the shows you binge, the books you dog ear, or all the hot takes you'll defend it brunch. I mean, you definitely have friends who have met their partners on Bumble, and it makes sense. It's not just about matching with someone. It's about finding someone who gets your references, your obsessions, your whole vibe. With shared interests and prompts, you don't

just see a profile. You get a glimpse of someone's personality, which makes it even easier to start conversations that actually lead somewhere. Plus, with photo and ID verification, you can trust that the person you're talking to is real. With that added piece of mind, it's so much easier to show up as your full self. So whether your rule of culture is, for a state start with the shared hot take on Renaissance or compatibility as having the same hometown bodega order, download Bumble and turn those connections into something bigger.

Download Bumble and start your love story. Do you think some of that clarity for you comes from your own personal experience as a kid? And I mean

that because you write in your book, you know, really beautifully about what it was like to be bullied as a child and how you actually had wonderful educators that helped you accept yourself, that enabled you to be yourself. And I think about that in terms of mentorship and in terms of the things we pass down. And it sort of feels like you learned as a young person to trust the helpers, and you've become a helper. And it seems to me that you want to empower the rest of us

to trust the helpers and be the helpers. Do you think those things are correlated? I think they're very closely connected. Because as a kid, because I was very short, still am, I was bullied, I was harassed, I was teased. And many children are bullied, harassed and teased, but I was in a very extreme way to the point where I didn't want to get on the school bus in the morning

and I didn't want to be on the playground and I didn't want to even go to the boys' room because I was felt really seriously endangered. But I also felt shamed. I felt that I was kind of a lesser human being, if you will. I felt and turned that vulnerability and powerlessness into a kind

of self-loathing I think that much of America not because of Donald Trump but even before Donald Trump because of so many decades of bullying by employers, by the system

by insurance companies and landlords by you name the bully and I will give you examples Americans have felt this sense, so many, of powerlessness, of anger, of

vulnerability, and to some extent that has turned into shame and anger, but anger toward themselves. And so when Donald Trump came along in 2015 and 2016, and said to Americans,

I am your savior, I am you, I will speak for you, I will in effect, I will be your bully. I will bully, I will bully the rest of the system for you. That's what people heard. And obviously, it was a fake. He was a stalking horse for the wealthy. He gave them a gigantic tax gut. He's given them another gigantic tax gut. He wants to protect wealth. He wants to amass his own wealth. He is not a tribune of the people. He's a tribune of the billionaires. But nevertheless, he talks as if,

he represents average people who are being bullied. And when he talks, he has this swagger, this anger, this ridicule, this kind of attitude that a lot of people in America also have. And I think that it's not because of Donald Trump alone. It's because he has legitimized their decades and decades and decades feelings. of powerlessness, of self-blame. And I think that's where his power comes from. And that's why I've said, and I've said this for years, that if Democrats want to be relevant,

if Democrats want to be a party that is still important to average working people into much of the country, they have got to stop worrying about the suburban swing votes and stop worrying about big corporations and wealthy people who might donate to the Democratic Party but instead change entirely

their approach and really be truly the tribunes of the people. How does that go over? Well, I haven't swayed too many people yet but

Sophia, I think that it is inevitable. This bully in the White House named Donald Trump will go the way of all bullies. I mean, all bullies historically end up in the dust heap of history. I can't tell you exactly how he's going to end and how much so-called collateral damage there will be on the way. And I worry about that a lot. Me too. But undoubtedly, he and his reign and his bullying will end. But the way you deal, and this is what I learned on the high school or school. It wasn't even high school, on the grade school playground, kindergarten. The way you deal with bullies is you can't try to appease them. You can't try to humor them. You can't give in to them. You've got to stand up to them.

And you've got to use and bring and unite with other people to stand up to them. An individual college president, for example, cannot hope, even if it's Harvard University, can't hope to deal with the bully of Trump alone. You know, you need all of the universities working together. A single law firm can't hope to deal with the bully alone. All the law firms have to work together. The same as the media companies and the museums and the libraries. And we have to approach this as if he is trying to bully all of us simultaneously.

And he is. He is. Of course he is. And present a united front. I mean, it's not, you know, Chicago versus Washington versus versus Oakland, California, or Baltimore when he sends in troops. It's all of us, all of us need to create a united front. Why do you think so many corporations, law firms, newsrooms, why are people bending a knee to this man? Because what he's doing is clearly and plainly illegal. It's unconstitutional. It's outside of the purview of power of the president in the first place. And yet he's making us pay for his golf trips.

He's made almost $4 billion since he took office again. He's more than doubled his personal fortune. And everyone's kind of going, well, that's Trump. Like, how is this happening? I think partly, if you're talking about the private sector, that is, take, for example, Amazon. Jeff Bezos has a lot of businesses, and he is, I won't call him greedy. I mean, all people who are in business want to make as much money as they possibly can. It's the nature of capitalism, I suppose.

And Jeff Bezos is therefore going to tell the Washington Post editorial page, you will not criticize Donald Trump. I don't want you to editorially endorse Kamala Harris. I want you to do nothing that's going to antagonize this man because this man could make things very hard for me as a business person. The same goes with CBS. I mean, CBS as a profit-making corporation and its owner then Paramount did not want to do anything to in any way antagonize the bully.

Wherever you look in the private sector, greed, greed takes precedence over principle. And that's, I don't think, new. I think that's the way the private sector, capitalism works. It's the public sector or the not-for-profit sector that I think is the surprise. When universities, cow-tow to Trump, when Columbia University says, okay, we'll give you whatever you want. When Harvard is now in the process of making a deal or any other university, why don't the universities work together?

Why do they feel that they can get away with an individual deal? I think, Sophia, it's partly because they are all in competition with one another for students, for money, for prestige, for faculty. They don't know what it means to collaborate against a kind of bully. How do you make sense of our economic stories, the PR machine that makes us think, oh, everyone's this greedy, and if I'm lucky, I'll get into the greed class and then screw everybody else. like we know that so much of what the ultra wealthy tell us about this is the way it is isn't true it's a story it's a result of policy it's a result as you said of the second over one trillion dollar tax cut that trump has given to the wealthiest people in the world again

at the expense of rural hospitals public transportation you know safety nets for our community So as a professor, as a brilliant academic and an economic mind, how do you help people make sense of the math and not get so bored because it's math that they stop listening? How do you do what you do? Well, you deal with power. You don't talk about math. You talk about who has the power to do what. And what has happened in the United States is a very simple story in one way. And that story starts in 1971.

When a lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, named Powell, not Jerome Powell, this is a Powell who became a Supreme Court justice, this particular Powell was asked by the United States Chamber of Commerce to come up with a memo, telling American business what they should do to fight off what at that time seemed like, tsunami of special interests, environmentalists, labor organizations, Nader, Nader's Raiders, consumer groups, all claiming that American corporations, big corporations were nefarious, that they were doing bad things. And what Lewis Powell did in 1979, with that 71, with that memo, very, very important document, is he told American business

that they should pour a lot of money into American politics and into public relations. That is, they should have trade associations in Washington that would tell America a story, a fabricated story, actually, about how the kinds of things that you and I think are necessary, the kinds of dividends that Americans should get out of their tax payments. What we owe each other as members of the same society. How all of that was Hocom. All of that was inefficient. It was dangerous.

It would undermine the sinews of America. They called it, yes, socialism or communism. They had a lot of words for it. But fundamentally, they were scared of it. Fundamentally, they did not want the public. to speak. They did not want big corporations to have to respond to workers and communities and the environment. And so that was the beginning. I saw it, Sophia. I was working in government in the late 70s and then again in the 80s and then was Secretary of Labor in the 90s and

helped Barack Obama in the early part of this century. I saw it. I was there. I saw the money flowing in. This is about power. It's about money. It's not about mathematics. It's not about economic formula. It's not something that eyes should glaze over. This is reality. This is about big corporations and some extraordinarily wealthy people who became far wealthier, far more powerful. Big corporations become far, far bigger, monopolizing entire industries. And today, what do we have? We have more tax cuts for the wealthy, more tax cuts for big corporations, fewer regulations. We have climate change that's threatening the entire world that we are living with.

And we have somebody in the White House who is as close to a tyrant as we have come. Well, I say the story begins in 1971. one. And now for our sponsors. Okay, friends, real talk. You are worth the wait. We've all been there, giving our energy to connections that didn't honor ours, and watching friends do the same. And honestly, we all deserve better. That's why Bumble is built for intentional dating. Safety is such a big deal for us all, especially when meeting new people. And Bumble gives you the peace of mind with options like photo and ID verification. That little extra step means,

you know the person you're talking to is who they say they are, with their real photos, and they are ready to show up authentically. And once you feel safe, you can actually focus on what matters, finding someone who gets you. With shared interests, it's easy to see right away who vibes with your passions, whether that's true crime podcasts, yoga mornings, or weekend hikes. So take a pause, affirm your worth, and protect your peace. Bumble helps you create safe, meaningful connections, the kind that truly respect. your boundaries, your energy, and your time. Thinking about dating again, take this as your sign.

Start your love story on Bumble. Interesting, too, that that story, that timeline where everyone was so threatened, to your point, by labor unions, I always like to remind people, my listeners know this, but for anyone who might be new to the show, thanks to your presence on it. I can only go to the doctor because I'm in a union. You know, everybody assumes you work on TV, you work in Hollywood, everyone's just like swimming and pools of money like Scrooge McDuck. That ain't it.

I have health care because I am a member of the Screen Actors Guild union. I know what the power of collective bargaining is for people. I know what it meant to my grandfather. I know why my dad chose to immigrate to America to start a business here because of what was possible and this shift toward lobbying and more dominant control to your point corporations wanting to gobble up other corporations and become these you know monopolies mega-opolis it's not lost on me that it was happening in such a moment societally of progressive social power you know we had come through the civil rights movement not to say by any means

we had racial justice or equity, but we were having national conversations. People couldn't unsee what they'd seen, the photographs from the Freedom Rides, the death of Dr. King, it was undeniable. Women were building power. We were on the precipice of Roe becoming the settled law of the land, which, you know, to reference the lying tyrant in the White House, he also put lying tyrants on the Supreme Court who said they'd honored settled law and then overturned it, so apparently we can't, you know, trust any of our institutions

anymore. I feel the emotional reality of all that data. And I was just, I was so tickled watching the doc and for our friends at home, the most gorgeous documentary about Professor Reich is called the last class. It is, it is so beautiful about your final semester teaching. Also, it makes me want to sob because I'd always planned on coming and taking your class and life has just been busy and here we are. So we might have to do it on Zoom. We'll talk about it later. But you, you talk in it. You literally say about the graphs on day one of the class, you go, you know, they're not reacting to the graphs the way I do. They don't love the graphs the way I do. We have to reach their emotions to reach their minds. And you start to talk about how you're going to communicate the emotional

reality of data. And I was like, this is why he's my brain person. How did you come to understand this grander concept? Because you are a walking encyclopedia of days and times and facts and math and all the numbers and all the things that I just wish we could shake everyone in the world and say, this is what you should be focusing on. But you've figured out, as you said, how to talk about power to communicate the math, how to talk about justice. How to talk about justice. to communicate about policy. How did you come to this theory? When did you have your aha moment of,

oh, there is an emotional reality of data. And if I can give it to my students, they will be inspired to change the world. So, Faya, I think it happened when Mickey Schwerner, Michael Schwerner, who was about five or six years older than me, I had asked him one summer to be a kind of lookout for me, protector of me from the bullies. When he was in 1964 registering voters in Mississippi,

along with two other civil rights workers, and he was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. When I found out that my protector from the bullies had been murdered by the real, bullies of America, something changed to me. I saw that emotional connection you're talking about between the abstract theories and facts and data and the reality of how we treat one another or don't

or how we brutalize one another. And I began seeing bullying and brutalization all over men brutalizing women, white, brutalizing black people, employers, brutalizing workers. I began to see that power and how people exercise power and how people with power abuse their power if they did, some people don't. But if they did have power, how they abused their power in order to hurt others, I saw it all over. And it seemed to me that the central struggle of civilization, The central struggle of creating a social order that was admirable

was to constrain the bullies. And when I teach or when I write or when I do movies or whatever you're talking about, I think that that moral center has got to be front and center because that's what people respond to. Everybody knows it. Everybody has had some experiences. I mean, whether it's parents or friends or lovers or some brutalization that they felt in their past, they know it, they feel it. And so if you can connect with that, that is where their understanding of social justice actually comes from.

That's where you build. That's where you connect. that's beautiful and do you feel like that is the key to helping to undo the skepticism helping to undo this wildly aggressive version of partisanship it seems to me you know watching for example the the the gop today suddenly not care at all about big government or government overreach or, you know, the militarization of the armed forces against our own people, you know, all the things that they claim they're creating militias to fight. It's a cult mentality because Trump is doing it, it's okay.

But if anybody did anybody from the other side even spoke about it, it would be, you know, high crimes. do you think that that willingness to interrogate the way we treat each other and how we define power, whether it is brutal or it is righteous is a way to undo skepticism? Do you think it gets above the noise of the donkey or the elephant and gets to something more human that can make people listen? to each other a little bit better? Well, the donkey versus the elephant, the left versus the right,

the Democrats versus Republicans, all that is historical. It's no longer part of our present. It's no longer relevant. The Republican Party is not a Republican Party. It is, as you say, it is a cult, it is a religion, it is an angry, bitter religion.

It comes out of people's sense of, again, being brutalized for years and years and years by a system, that didn't listen to them or care about them, and it still is that way. And the Democratic Party lost its bearings. I mean, I am old enough to remember the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Democratic Party that was built on labor and farmers

and really the people who were at the grassroots working very hard. But the Democratic Party, by the 1990s, by the beginning of the century, was a party that was more and more dependent on money, big money, big corporate money, money from very affluent people, not willing, therefore, to bite the hands that feed them. Now, the question you asked is really the central question to me, and that is, how do we get? people who have been brutalized, who have been bullied and who are in either denial or despair or just pure anger, whether they call themselves Democrats or Republicans, whoever they are, whatever they call themselves, how do we get them to understand what is happening right now under their noses that this regime in Washington is really funneling, handling their money, their investments, their tax dollars, everything they had worked for

into the pockets of billionaires who have never been as rich as they are today and taking away their liberties. That is the liberties of average people and the freedoms of average people. And how do we convince people that this is not a matter of white, male, Christian nationalism, but it's a matter of average. working people joining together to enjoy the fruits of their labors and their investments in our society, in democracy. It's about a moral understanding of what is happening. Yeah. We'll be back in just a minute after a few words from our favorite sponsors.

We often think we know our type in dating. Tall, funny, a certain job, but the research shows we're usually not the best predictors of who will actually make us the happiest. As we often say on the happiness lab, our minds lie to us about all kinds of stuff, and that definitely includes the kinds of things we need to be happy in a relationship. That's why it helps to stay curious.

On Bumble, features like shared interests and prompts make it easy to notice right on someone's profile initial sparks of compatibility, like a shared love of cooking, or the same nostalgic TV shows. Shared interests and prompts let you showcase your person right on your profile, and connect with people who get your vibe. And with photo and ID verification, you can feel confident the person you're talking to

is real, so you can date with a bit more confidence. When you treat dating as exploration, instead of sticking to a rigid type, you open yourself up to happier, more meaningful connections. So maybe your type isn't tall, dark, and mysterious. Maybe it's Love's podcast as much as you do. Stay open, stay curious, and let yourself be surprised. download Bumble today. The fact that no matter what side of the aisle you're on,

if you don't raise $40,000 a day, you lose your Senate seat, like, who's going to succeed in this system? That's bad for our vision. It's almost like we've created a society where no matter what level you get to, you're still in scarcity. Like the fact that Jeff Bezos, doesn't think he has enough money? I'm like, bro, how many yachts do you need?

How many pools need to be at your property? Can you be in more than one at once? Like, I don't even know what we're talking about anymore. It seems crazy. It seems crazy. And often we don't know what we're talking about. Yeah. You're saying, Sophia, that there is a kind of common sense morality here.

I would hope that parents should be able to take sick kids to a doctor that people ought to be able to go take their kids to a park without worrying that the kids are going to be shot and I'll let me add to that that if somebody is working full time they should not be in poverty they should be earning enough to lift their family out of poverty

that everybody who wants to work and is able to work full time should be able to get a job that pays enough I mean, these are not the kinds of high theoretical, mathematical, economic, complicated issues. These are, again, moral questions. And most people in this country would agree with you

and agree with me about this common sense morality we're talking about. So who doesn't? Well, I think there are people who are so injured and angry that they are willing to follow a strong man named Donald Trump and the regime that he's created around him into a different kind of society. Now, the road we were on was a dangerous road. It was getting worse all the time.

More and more money in politics, wider and wider, inequality, greater and greater power in the hands of fewer and fewer people, corporations monopolizing our economy. I mean, we could not have stayed on that path. If Donald Trump had not come along, somebody else would have come along. Our bad fortune was that it was somebody like Trump. But maybe the silver lining on this terrible dark cloud is that we are being shaken up so much that we see that the common sense morality you and I are talking about really is the key to the future. that we can get people together.

We can join with people who are maybe, in many ways, don't agree with everything that we're saying, but on these basic principles, everybody can agree. Yes, getting back to a little more of a live and let live, you know, if every human, let's say, had five most important points to them, they can be different across the spectrum, but we have to be willing to defend each other's right to pick our five.

And that feels like we've lost some of that in the weeds to me. We forget, you know, what our inalienable rights are meant to be. We forget what our Constitution says. I'm really curious how you think about that going forward. Because clearly we're in the weeds on this. We all kind of wish we could shake the nation. But how do you see us organizing out? What are the things you would say to people at home feeling paralyzed by despair or overwhelm?

Are there organizations you think are doing a particularly great job? Are there things that are useful locally, no matter where a person lives, that they could go out and do this weekend or next Monday and kind of get in the trenches with their neighbors? where do you point people in a moment like this? Well, I say, first of all, that any action, any action that is guided by the kind of common sense morality we were talking about and a love of the country and a sense of duty to each other, that is at this point in history critically important. It's the people that don't take the action that have to be reached. They have to be told that denial or their sense of despair or their refusal to acknowledge what's happening. All of that is very dangerous.

So what do you do? Well, I say to people, what can you do? Some people say to me, well, I could call my representatives in Washington and my senators. I say, do it. And then they say back, but it's not going to make any difference. I say, look, I was on Capitol Hill. I know how the system works. They keep track of how many calls come in, especially from their constituents and what the

constituents are saying. Don't think you're powerless in that respect. Or somebody else will say to me, well, I would really like to boycott Tesla or another company that I really think is cooperating too much with Trump. And then I say, but they say, but my boycott is not going to make any difference because nobody else is doing it. I say, it can make a difference. You don't understand how much these companies spend on their brand images. If you can just make a real fuss, good trouble, as John Lewis used to say, then you can have a big, big influence. Other people, I say, who are very concerned

about what's happening to their neighbors who happen to be undocumented, who have been working in their communities for years, I say, well, why don't you start a community that is going to help protect those people from ICE agents so that you broadcast to this community where the ICE agents are, what they're doing, who they're going after. You take pictures, you take videos of what they are doing. You make sure the news organizations have that information. We could go on and on and on, Sophia. It's not so much what people do. It doesn't have to be grand. It doesn't have to be, you know, running for president. But it can be so many small things that they add up to something very big. And the good news is that it's happening. So many people are taking

these kinds of actions. They're joining with others. Indivisible is a wonderful organization. because Visile has chapters all over the country. Just a few days ago, I was in Houston, Texas, talking to many people who really don't want Texas to redistrict and feel like it's a terrible assault on the system. And we talked about what they can do and how they do it. And they're activists. This country is based on...

activism we do not bow to a dictator yes no kings no kings i am really curious you know you referenced earlier a bit of your history which i don't want to make you tell the story of because you've done it before and you know folks have amazing books and a doc they get to watch about it but i i do wonder through all the governments you've been part of in this country, the administrations, you know, sitting as our Secretary of Labor, all these things you've done, is there a moment or a memory that you hold on to? Something that absolutely multiplied your love for this country, something that made you really understand viscerally the power of our labor force. Like, I want to know what that

thing is that that lit the inextinguishable flame of Robert Reich. Oh, well, it's very hard to tell you, but if you want to know a particular instance that it is emblazoned in my mind, there was a time in 1996. Republicans had taken over both houses of Congress. Everybody I knew was demoralized and felt nothing could happen. And I said to the president, Bill Clinton, why don't we try to raise the minimum wage? And he thought it was the worst time to try to do it because Republicans were in control of everything. But I told him that I thought, and this goes back to our common sense morality, that the public wanted the minimum wage raised.

It seemed like the fair and necessary thing to do. It turned out that that was true. The polls showed that 90, well, maybe 85, 86% of the public was in favor of a minimum wage increase. I went around to all of the offices on the Hill. The Democrats and Republicans told them, showed them the polls, talked about the minimum wage. And Sophia, we got a minimum wage increase the first time in many years. And I came back that afternoon from being on the hill and counting noses. and trying to twist arms and getting, pushing the thing right over the finish line.

I came back to the Labor Department. Labor Department is a big, big building on Constitution Avenue. It has on its first floor a big atrium, a kind of big opening. I came in the front doors, and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Labor Department employees, many of them career people who all applauded and cheered and my eyes welled up

because we all understood how important a minimum wage increase was something in the order of 40 or 50 million people at that moment at that day because of what happened that day we're getting a wage increase now it wasn't the be all and end all it was just really

and compared to everything that's needed, it was a very small event. But it felt like progress. It felt good. It felt important. Yeah. We'll be back in just a minute, but here's a word from our sponsors. We often think we know our type in dating. Tall, funny, a certain job.

But the research shows we're usually not the best predictors of who will actually make us the happiest. As we often say on the Happiness Lab, our minds lie to us about all kinds of stuff, and that definitely includes the kinds of things we need to be happy in a relationship. That's why it helps to stay curious. On Bumble, features like shared interests and prompts make it easy to notice right on someone's profile initial sparks of compatibility, like a shared love of cooking or the same nostalgic TV shows. Shared interests and prompts let you showcase your personality right on your profile and connect with people who get your vibe.

And with photo and ID verification, you can feel confident the person you're talking to is real, so you can date with a bit more confidence. When you treat dating as exploration, instead of sticking to a rigid type, you open yourself up to happier, more meaningful connections. So maybe your type isn't tall, dark, and mysterious. Maybe it's Love's podcast as much as you do. Stay open, stay curious, and let yourself be surprised. Download Bumble today. even when something doesn't feel like perhaps enough, it can still be profound to move a needle

in a country this big is a big deal and you guys did it and you did it to your point at a time where people didn't think it could be done. And so that's a wonderful spark to carry. Well, any small victory we need to celebrate. in life. I don't mean only in politics, but any small victory. We need to put into a special little box in our minds and our brains and our bodies. We need to be able to go back to that box when we're feeling down and feeling discouraged and bring out those victories. And know that those victories are possible. We've experienced them. They may not be huge.

They may not change the direction of the world, but they are vitally important. And I think that just as all of us or most of us have been brutalized in some way or bullied in some way or felt vulnerable and powerless in some way, most of us also have had these tiny victories that give us a sense of power. and in times such as we are now in when everything seems very dark and it is when you have people in power who are dangerous who are

authoritarian or worse neo-fascists when people are stressed because of it and feel terrible and feel that the world is coming apart. I think it's very important for us to feel instead our strength and feel our power and join together with others

and make that power a reality. What do you think of America's legacy and how are you thinking about your own legacy as you're ready to hang up your teaching hat and continue on wearing your leadership one. Well, you use a word leadership. I think that that is a very important idea to dwell on.

What is leadership? Do you have to have an office? Do you have to hold public elected office to be a leader? Do you have to be an appointed office to be a leader? No. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a leader. Some of the most important leaders in our society or in any society, Mahatma Gandhi, never held elective office. They were leaders because they helped instead, going back to many of the points we've been talking about,

and help people focus their energies and attention on a problem that needed to be addressed, a problem that they all faced. They help people see that the work avoidance mechanisms, denial and despair and scapegoating and everything else, we're getting in the way. The real leaders, the real leaders are people who teach. the power that people have and the responsibility people have. Now, I don't know, my legacy. I'm never going to stop writing or doing whatever I can

to help people understand their own power and responsibility and duty to each other. But I think that this country, over the long term, will be fine. I think that we've had crises. You think of the Civil War. Think of the Great Depression. The two world wars.

The country has had stresses. When I was a boy, I remember Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunts. We have not always done the right thing. I'm ashamed of some. of the aspects of American history. But I think there is a, again, a common sense morality, a really basic goodness in America. When I go around the country and I talk to people, even people who say that they are

Trump supporters, we start talking about their own lives and their children and their communities and what they care about and get away from the labels, get away from the Trump stuff. And there's a certain decency and fairness that is there. I can't tell you exactly why, but I think that it is inherent.

And I like to think that that will continue and maybe be stronger in the future. I hope so. I hope that what seems to be coming apart allows us really to build something new together. Well, we will. We will. Sophia, we will. I sure hope so. I'm absolutely sure of this. Again, I want to stress this darkness may be important in terms of reminding us of what we hold dear and sacred.

20 years ago, when you talked about the rule of law, eyes would glaze over. Nobody knew what the rule of law was or due process or democracy or redistricting or anything that people now have a fairly sophisticated grip on. 20 years ago, there was a kind of, we took everything for granted. Yeah. We won't take it for granted. that's really well said i i think sometimes the problem with incredible progress is that we forget where we were before it happened exactly when you bring it in you know into your lovely

office that i find you in today and into your interior life uh both in self and in your home at this moment, because I know you focus on the outside world so much, you give so much, but for you, what feels like your work in progress as you look at the year and the time ahead? Well, I think that the issue for me inside is twofold, or the challenge. One is to bring my life into balance. That is, I'm a workaholic, as I suspect you, are. Yep. And us or we workaholics, we have got to work very hard on understanding that if we are not in balance, if we don't balance our work with joy and play and love, we can't be as

effective even as workaholics. And we lose something very precious from our love. The other piece of that, and it goes along with that, is, you know, I've never been very good at finding joy. Maybe it goes along with workaholism, maybe it goes with, you know, being a child who was bullied a great deal. Maybe it goes along with my parents and grandparents who remembered not only, war and depression, but also anti-Semitism. And so there was very little room for true joy in my life. And as I get on in years, I say to myself, well, the two big projects, Bob, are trying to find balance in your life,

trying to constrain your workaholism and trying to really find joy how about you Sophia I'm right there with you really only in the last few years have I begun to say oh I also deserve joy if I want joy for the people I love

I should also want it for myself deserve joy that's a wonderful wonderful insight yes we all deserve of joy. We really do. And I think there's something tremendously important about giving that worth to yourself, especially if you grew up a bullied kid, which I know you and I both did. Assigning worth to self, I think, is a work in progress for me. And yeah, the joy is, it's a cool experiment,

isn't it? We're all in an experiment. We sure are, the American experiment. Robert, before I let you go, and thank you for giving me a few extra moments of your time, I could talk to you all day. I love this book so very much. Coming up short is beautiful. Can you tell our friends at home, who I imagine are ready to hit the streets in your service by now,

tell them where they can find the book. Please tell them where. they can watch the documentary, which as I mentioned early, for earlier friends, is called The Last Class. Let's let the people know where they can be with you. Well, the book, you can find in any bookstore, and you can order it not through Amazon. I don't like Amazon. You don't say. And I, but I urge people to order it.

There are several portable. that I actually put on my substack. In terms of the movie is now being shown in, in, well, let's see, 36 states in 100 theaters. And I also, on my substack, indicate kind of how people can find out where the movie is being shown. And maybe you or your technical staff can put up a little,

notice. We can put some links in the show notes. That's easy for us. Links and show notes. That's what we all need. Metaphorically and actually. But the movie and the book are both aspects of what we've been talking

about, Sophia, in terms of empowering and teaching. Yeah. And telling a story that runs counter to, but also explains why we are in the darkness we're in.

I want to thank you so much for your hosting this and for your talking to me. And it's been a complete pleasure. It's always a delight when I get to see you. And I do, because one of my favorite things that I get to do in my life is brag about my friends. And while this episode will be airing for our friends at home a few weeks after our tape date on Zoom, today. you did become a number one New York Times bestseller. That's worth bragging about. Well, you can

brag about it. I don't want to. I will brag about you with pleasure. With pleasure. Thank you for today. Thank you, Sophia. This is an I-Heart podcast.