Good Life Project - Ambassador Samantha Power | Education of an Idealist

Episode Date: January 21, 2020

Samantha Power served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, as well as a member of President Obama’s cabinet. In this role, Power became the public face of U.S. opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, negotiated sanctions against North Korea, lobbied to secure the release of political prisoners, helped introduce laws to cripple terrorist finance networks, and supported President Obama’s actions to end the Ebola crisis. Called by Forbes “a powerful crusader for U.S foreign policy as well as human rights and democracy” when it named her one of the “World’s 100 Most Powerful Women,” Power has also been named one of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” and one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers. She immigrated to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. Her new book is The Education of an Idealist.You can find Ambassador Samantha Power at: Instagram | Website | Twitter-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today is former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and professor at Harvard's Kennedy School and Law School, Samantha Power. Forbes has called her a powerful crusader for human rights and democracy, one of the world's 100 most powerful women. Time named her among the 100 most influential people and one of foreign policy's top 100 global thinkers. Power has also served on the National Security Council as a special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights, where she really focused on issues including atrocity prevention, UN reform, LGBTQ plus, and women's rights, the promotion of religious

freedom, the protection of religious minorities, and the prevention of human trafficking. Interestingly, she was actually born and spent her early life in Ireland before immigrating with her mom, first to Pittsburgh and then Atlanta, and then beginning her career as a journalist, what she thought would start out in sports, ended up actually reporting as a war or conflict journalist, reporting from places like Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, Zimbabwe. In her new memoir, The Education of an Idealist, she gets really personal, sharing so many of the moments, the stories, the big wins, equally bigger challenges and failures that have brought her to this place in her career and in her life. And we dive into many of those moments in today's conversation.

So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. Between me and you, it's going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. We're hanging out in New York right now, and there's so much I want to sort of like circle around to in the last 10 years or so. But let's take a bigger leap back in time. Actually, I have a really big curiosity. So we're having this conversation shortly after your latest book is out.

It's a memoir. You've written books before. Not like this, though. It's kind of fascinating because objectively looking at the career that you've had to date, there is ample opportunity for you to write a book which basically says, this memorializes my dent in the universe. And you kind of chose to write a book that was more about how the universe has dented you along the way. Not in a bad way, but just sort of like it wasn't about this is a list of my accomplishments. to promote human rights from the outside as a critic and then going inside. I mean, my record is checkered. I can't, you know, even if I wanted to, you know, do the sort of full litany of impact in the world, I still have to answer for Syria and so much of the searing pain that persisted even when I had the opportunity to work in the cabinet of the

president of the United States. So part of it is just, I think, a healthy realism. Part of it is I'm a reader as well as a writer, and I know what puts me off. That wouldn't do much for me as a reader, so I'm consequentialist about that, I guess. But also I think the core of it is more profound. It's, I think most people are in their lives, whether in small ways or large ways, you know, generally see around them things that they think should be changed that aren't cool, that shouldn't be that way. You know, If we lived in a fully equal and free world, wouldn't be that way. And aren't sure whether they have a place in making a difference and in making, speaking of dents, in making a dent. And I think that as I began the process of writing

and reflecting, it seemed to me that the universal tale was that tale of how to overcome one's knowledge of one's smallness. You know, again, especially if you have a healthy realism and an objective sense of you being one person in the world and not some vainglorious sense that the world is going to adapt itself to you. But if you know you're just one person, how do you get on with it and try to do the good that you can in the time that you have and learn as you go? Because the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I get that. And so I thought that there was far more universal in a story that got into my inner life as best I could, consistent with my limitations as... Just looking at your face and your body language, you say inner life, it's like even saying that feels like... I know, I'm all coiled up. But, you know, compared with most former senior government

officials, man, I'm Socrates or the Dalai Lama. So at least in terms of what they're prepared to put out there, I actually think they have rich inner lives, but to lay it all out there is a leap. But that's the essence of it, is that whether Bob or Joe or Barack or Donald or whoever are the presidents, or whether we're in 2019 or 2059 or 1919, they're just a set of challenges that are timeless. And so I wanted to try to capture what is timeless, which is struggles in oneself to put one foot in front of the other, you know, questions of how one works alone or with other people, issues of paralyzing doubt, which many of us are wracked with. But then I hope in a non-celebratory or at all triumphalist way, given the state of the world, but to do take note of when

individuals do come together to do good because there also aren't enough, I think, of those stories in our world. And that's probably why I blanched a little bit when you said the way the world has dented me because I do leave this 20-year period of my life, 25-year period of my life, my career, as I took the time to look back on it in a way that I never had before, really struck by the power of individual agency of human will leaving its mark in a very positive way. And the negative on that is we know what happens when we don't band together and when we don't believe in ourselves. And so that's where I decided to take this book, as you note, with my body language, very reluctantly. I mean, I really had to go to places that not only had I not gone in writing, but that I'd kind of steered clear of even just as I motored through my life and went from one job to the next. But I think that that's for this moment, right,

when we're very divided, it's finding the story that has those universal sort of shared themes. I think that's where I felt I needed to be right now. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You've been in the US for pretty much your entire adult life and a solid chunk of your truly teenage life also, but grew up in Dublin, early 70s, I guess, which was an interesting time to be in Dublin as well, right? Because you had the troubles up north, but it also like mid-ish, like 73, 74, touchdown in Dublin as well. You were really young. I'm curious whether you were aware of any of that, even as a young kid there. I would have been more, what would have been more salient would have been Irish Republican fight songs and poems and, I mean, not at age three or four, but, you know, six, seven, eight.

And definitely a sense of dignity as an animating force. I know it sounds like too sophisticated for a kid, but just the idea that in the context of the British occupation, that Irish people's dignity, that our language, that our prayer, that all of that was violated. That would have been in the water, even if you, whether you knew the troubles began on this date or that date. And then, as you noted, it did touch down. I mean, there were attacks in Dublin, 1974, really near where we lived, in fact, the year of my brother's birth, my younger brother's birth. It was a big attack, not far from where my mother worked. But I would say, I think that if I took something from the experience, I cannot say it was a sense of physical vulnerability, which I would develop later because my dad would end up dying at a young age and when I was young and when he was young. And so I did develop that sense that anything good can vanish in an instant, but it didn't come from violence being so nearby or from the refugees who were flowing down into the Republic from the North. I think, again, it came from more of my personal trauma that I unluckily

experienced. What I did take was a sense that conflict can happen anywhere. In other words, so even if I wasn't living its visceral effects and didn't feel the vulnerability of my countrymen and neighbors up north, I still had the sense that the north is like here. You know, we're all, there are many, many college educated people. There are many, many working people, sophisticated people who still, you know, can feel their sense of identity shrink to something very narrow and that all of us can lose sight of all we have in common as parents or as football fans or, you know, you name it, neighbors, and suddenly one's religious identity, one's sect can just become the defining quality and all of those other forms of shared identity can melt away. I mean, again, that wasn't my eight-year-old thought, but that's what I

superimposed back on it. I think I really do think that that's what I took was, it's going to happen anywhere. Like we're not immune. It's just because, you know, people are, are educator. We've been at peace for a long time. I mean, things can slip quickly. Yeah. I mean, it seems like there was, even if it wasn't sort of an intentional, let's look at what's happening and let's study this. Like, like you used the phrase, it was in the air, simply kind of like knowing pieces and bits of it and part of the ideals and the conversations. And the idea of freedom. I mean, really, that's what I mean by the poems and the songs.

So even if my freedom was not trampled, I led a relatively easy life for sure. But I was a Catholic. I self-identified as a Catholic. And there was a sense, again, that that had been violated for others. And that was stirring, even in a kid. Yeah. You were really close to both your parents. They struggled with each other, though.

Your dad was a dentist and also loved to hang out at the local pub, Hartigan's. Your mom ended up a physician, I guess, specializing in kidney transplant. Pretty intense. She's a badass. It sounds like it. She's a badass. She's still at Mount Sinai Hospital across the park. Oh, she's New York.

Oh, no kidding. That's amazing. Doing kidney transplant. Yeah. I mean, it was amazing because you tell a story about how that became her focus. And in fact, she ends up going to Kuwait, which becomes important in your life for a couple of different reasons, but she's there to set up, I guess,

the first transplant unit there. Yeah, she was just undeterrable, is undeterrable in this world. And when I think about, which of course I didn't as a kid, but now as an adult, I think about all the signals that were sent to her by so many people, whether her priests or her own dad, honestly, who was wonderful, but had an old school sense of the place for girls. She was the first girl, one of five sisters, the first of the

sisters to go to college, and just a lot of skepticism that she could be what she wanted to be, which was a doctor. She always knew that about herself. So she got routed through doing basic science and then actually went ahead and got a PhD in biochemistry before she just decided that the voices inside of her were too loud and she was not going to listen to these people. And even though she was old by the standards of the time and had already gotten an advanced degree, she went back to medical school. And I was already born by then. So you can imagine, again, the challenge that would have been in those times. But she did it. And but at the same time, she was playing really competitive sports in Ireland. She was the top squash, female squash player in Ireland, had been the captain of the Irish field hockey team.

She was just an amazing person, but made me feel very loved. She was extremely present, despite being absent, inevitably, and doing her training and banging her balls around various sporting venues. But I always felt that light shine. And with my father also, who notwithstanding his drinking, which really week after school, again, to feel the light of a parent shine on a child and just to feel his pride in me as his sidekick, reading my mystery novels in the basement and so forth. You know, one of the themes also of my reflections are just that life is lived in these gray areas where it's, I think the, in silhouette, what my father did dragging me to the pub, you know, it wasn't a clean pub. A few pubs are clean, but this was definitely on the less clean side of the spectrum. But it just, it's out of, again, a textbook of what not to do with a child. And that's in the

textbook for good reason. On the other hand, you hand, how many kids got to spend those kinds of hours with their dad and just his delight when I would come up the stairs looking for a new mystery or him coming down and playing the slots with me, another thing that's in the textbook not to do. So I'm just, especially given that he died when I was so young, I suppose on one level, I feel lucky I had that so much time with him as his sidekick in that, even in that setting. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like from both of them, you had this sense of unconditional love and almost friendship with your dad to a certain extent in a way that probably a lot of really young kids don't have, whether it's like male

or female. And I would have to imagine too, to sort of see what your mom accomplished and what she was willing to do in the name of accomplishing it had to have in some way influenced your sense of possibility at a relatively young age. Yeah. And definitely my sense of sort of whether I had it easy or didn't have it easy. I mean, she never was one. There are parents who say, oh, you know, back when I was young, you know, I had to walk uphill both ways to school. I never got any of that from my mother. And, but there was just an implied sense of, you know, even when things aren't easy, take them, go for it, dream big, don't, don't let what anybody tells you. So it wasn't, it wasn't,

you know, you have it easy, Samantha. I had it hard. Never. I mean, that's so far from how my mother would think about the world. And it was not a lot of explicit kind of coaching or let me derive the five lessons from my life of hardship. It's like witnessing more. Yeah, just pure witnessing. I mean, just pure like, wow, she's just out there and not to be stopped.

And so when, you know, the things come up that come up that arise, the first thing I wanted to be when I was a kid was a professional sports athlete. I was never good enough at anything, but very quickly fell back to wanting to be a sports journalist. And it was a very male-dominated profession in those times. It never would have occurred to me as a young woman that that would be off limits to me. And not because anybody explicitly told me go for it, but just, again, because my mother had done that. And so it's just a wonderful,

the true definition of trailblazing, where the trail is there and so get busy. It's an amazing thing to just sort of like know in your soul from a young age. Yeah. Because I think a lot of times we're told that, but then the actions betray what we're told. Right. So to sort of like see that coherence or not even be told it, but just to see somebody acting in a way where it says like, yes, this is possible. And it may be really, really hard, but that doesn't mean you can't go out and do it

and give it everything. Stuff gets tough between your parents. And when you're, I guess, about eight, nine years old, they end up splitting. You end up, you and your mom end up coming to the US, landing in Pittsburgh. When that all happened and you're sort of like saying, okay, I'm a doubler, getting on a plane with my family or like part of my family.

We're going to Pittsburgh and your mom was involved in somebody else who would eventually like become her husband here. And did you have a sense for what was really happening? You know, like when you land in Pittsburgh, did you have a sense for the fact that like we are now like here and living here for the indefinite future? No, I don't think so. I think, I mean, I wasn't immune to my different, right, from this pretty sheltered Dublin childhood to, again, a very sort of not uncomfortable middle class life in the Pittsburgh suburbs. But just everything, the scale of everything was different and bigger and joyful for me. I mean, there was a neighborhood of boys who would play any sport. Many of the sports were new sports like American football and baseball, which I had to learn, but I learned quickly.

And so I settled in. There would have been almost, to use modern lingo, like no startup costs. I just plopped down and lost my accent, practiced losing my accent so I could be like everybody else. But in part, I mean, because I was so young, maybe that's why there seemed to be no cost to that. But in part because I thought I'd get my accent right back when we went home. And so it was sort of to be a chameleon and to adapt, it didn't really seem like I was renouncing anything or giving anything up. And I think for my mother, notwithstanding what we've already talked about, about her drive and her, I mean, even just on paper, her achievements, she's also like a little Irish Catholic girl who

knew she was doing something big. And I think for her, there was no divorce in Ireland at that time. And she was part of a very tight-knit family, still is. For her, I think, to have acknowledged to herself that she was moving away to get a capital D divorce, that she was moving away to start a capital M marriage, even if a common law marriage initially, but eventually a real marriage with my now stepfather, that she was capital I immigrating to America, you know, the idea of embracing all that Americanness. I think all of that, and this is, I think, how a lot of people make decisions. Maybe it's on one level, you know, just that the threshold would be too high to clear if it became a capitalized version of everything in its conception and in its execution. I think a lot of life is mission creep.

And maybe we know it deep down, but we can't bring ourselves to that realization or we wouldn't plunge. And so she plunged with, I think, an incremental tale in her mind. We've just come over. She'd get to explore things with Eddie, her new partner, also an Irishman from Dublin. She'd see how the kids would get on. We would have the best of all worlds from my standpoint, the sense that I would still see my dad for every holiday and, you know, stay in touch with all of my friends because I'd be back in Ireland so often. And everything just seemed, it's like you never want to give anything up. And so it seemed as if you could go on this path without closing off the

path of your roots and your whole identity. And it turns out, of course, nothing is like that. To do anything large, usually it requires giving something up. But probably had we seen that, I would have probably contested it more, mom, what about dad? What do we do? But instead it was, oh, we'll see him. He'll be back at Christmas. He'll be back at Easter. He'll be back in the summer and we'd be back in no time. Yeah. And in fact, I mean, even had that schedule worked, which it kind of fell apart fairly quickly

within a matter of a few years after that, you know, the ultimate loss happens. And, you know, in that context, which is your dad passes and at a young age also. 47, yeah. So suddenly, to me so suddenly. Yeah. Yeah, no, and that, I mean, so, I mean,

I was giving up more than, you know, my Irish identity, I suppose, but in being away, or at least this is what I grappled with as a child and really quite deep into my adult life, still grapple with on one level, but just, you know, asking myself those questions after hearing of his death, you know, had we stayed, would it, would he be alive? Would he have been able to hold off those addiction demons? And, you know, of course all the literature on addiction tells you, um, don't exaggerate your, your own importance or your own agency in someone else's journey.

And especially if you're a child, where the propensity is the greatest to inflate your own impact, sadly, for many kids who've lived with the aftermath of addiction or such loss. But even if you cognitively know that there's very little you can do when those demons are sort of refusing to relax their grip, it doesn't make you kind of opt out of the story, right? And so for me, I carried with me for a very long time, I think, a sense of responsibility. Interestingly, I didn't really,

I was so grateful because my father died so suddenly. I was so grateful that my mother was in my life and managed still, despite being a very busy doctor and providing for my kid brother and me and in many ways being, even though she was remarrying, you know, kind of to us, at least something of a solo parent initially. I managed through all of that to just be very grateful that she was alive and be very appreciative every time she'd come home from work. Like, okay, she's home. I mean, I really carry that sense that something bad could happen at any time, which probably held at bay whatever anger I might have had that she had taken me away from my dad. But for myself, I wasn't as forgiving and I wasn't as appreciative that I was around. So I was very hard on myself and definitely, you know, again, deep into my adult life, not only had trouble forming very close,

loving relationships or lasting romantic relationships in part, because I think I was just afraid that, that I would disappoint somebody again, or that I would be left as my father left me. I mean, the great love affair as a young daughter to, you know, to a father and the ultimate disappearance, right? And so why get close again or make yourself vulnerable in those ways again? So I carried, I definitely carried all of that, but then also maybe a more positive, you know, kind of effect of all of this, who knows really why we do what we do professionally, but is also if I can help somebody, if there is someone now that I do have agency, now I am an adult, now I can get on airplanes. And there are certainly plenty of

people who don't have their own destinies in their own hands, not because of necessarily addiction or some forces that are bigger than them, but because maybe their governments are locking them up or maybe they're getting steamrolled by some militia or you name it. And so there are therapists who have rooted my professional work in these- Piece the puzzle. Yeah, they have. I sort of resisted a little bit because I feel really,

like, surely there are enough intrinsic reasons to want to promote human rights or particularly my earlier work on mass atrocity and genocide. You know, when therapists would say, I think, you know, you're playing out your guilt over your father. And isn't the fact that genocide is occurring also a relevant fact here. Can't that also actually just tap empathy and concern independent of what I might be carrying, whatever baggage I might be carrying? And they would concede the point partly, but not really. It's like the improv approach. Yes, and. Yes. Yes, but. Yeah.

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You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. I mean, it's interesting, too, because, you know, this shows up in you, this thread which weaves out your entire career, which is like this blend of giving voice to the voiceless and relieving suffering.

Not too unlike your mom, interestingly enough. You end up, so you're in Pittsburgh. You are there for, I guess, a couple years, and then the family moves to Atlanta, where it seems like also that is the first time, and you're also a hardcore athlete. You end up competing on the teams in school. And Atlanta at that moment in time also, especially the school you were at, was going through

some challenging times. And that seems like that was your first exposure to, oh, there's racism going on here. There's tension. There is inequality. And you kind of had it like a firsthand seat. Yeah. I mean, I went from this pretty homogenous childhood in Ireland where I knew about difference, of course, and its consequences, as we've discussed. Then I go to Pittsburgh, pretty homogenous, suburb, white suburb, middle class. And then I go to Atlanta, Georgia, and I show up at high school. The first day high school went from eight to 12. So it was just, I got there like the day before eighth grade. And on the morning of the first day, there's just this sort of snake row of yellow school buses,

where just busload after busload after busload of African-American kids are getting off the buses to enter this white suburban school, which was a very high-performing public school in athletics, sending people to Division I athletic programs, but also even a couple people to the pros in football, and really good academically, especially for a Georgia public school, one of the top performing public schools in the state. So just like my mother and my new stepfather had settled upon this community, this neighborhood for me on the basis of this great public school, so too had a lot of African-American parents whose kids were growing up, whose families were growing up in areas where the schools were not nearly as high performing. And the courts had ordered that this busing program be created to create more equality and opportunity in the schools, which as a concept, of course, was exactly the right one. And this school and this community had resisted and resisted and resisted and making up so many excuses for why they rejected applicant after applicant after applicant until finally in the courts right before we arrived completely

unwitting. I mean, I wish I could say my wonderfully progressive mother, and she is wonderfully progressive, but that she had kind of honed in on this and said, you know, Samantha needs this exposure. You know, her life has been too, you know, too sheltered or, you know, this is, these are the most important issues of our time. Nothing like that. I mean, we had, not many, but enough of the white parents who were very upset that my class, the class of 1988 at Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, would be the first majority African-American class in the school's history from previously having, I think, a high of maybe 10% minority or probably not even close to that. And so it was a big shift for the class and all kinds of, you know, derogatory assumptions about what diversity would bring to the classroom and how the standards would be lowered and this and that, none of which were borne out in my experience. I mean, it was what we know from what diversity can offer. It can be different forms of education, right? Learning

about people's very different life experiences, but just the takes on whatever came up in the classroom were different because we were coming from different places and backgrounds. And so for me, it was the experience of a lifetime, honestly. And to this day, it's the most diverse environment I've ever lived in and worked in. My teammates were my close friends. I was just in Atlanta doing an event at the Carter Center. And, you know, so many of my basketball teammates came out, African-American and white. And, you know, we all got together and I actually asked them, you know, about how they were, now that it's been back in the news unexpectedly, the question of busing, you know, and many of them, I mean, they describe what it was like to just get on that bus at four in the morning and then take one bus to a hub and wait out in the cold or in the heat, you know, for the next bus to come in order to get you to Lakeside. And meanwhile, I'm in my suburban cushy life, rolling out of bed and walking up the street 10 minutes to school.

And then they stay for basketball practice or cross country or track or whatever we were doing in the season. And the activity bus wouldn't come to take them to the hub. I wouldn't even leave Lakeside until, you know, 7 or 7.30 at night. They get to the hub at 9 o'clock. They get home at 10 o'clock. I mean, how is this an equal opportunity? How are they going to perform in the way that I, you know, with four hours more sleep, I'm able to perform. And so just seeing that up close, I think, you know, makes you want to dig a lot deeper when you see test scores and when you see what look like apple to apple comparisons, but you really need to know a lot more about the context in which what are people carrying with them when they are in what looks like the same environment.

Yeah, it sounds like that experience was started to really plant some seeds for you. I mean, from there, you end up in Yale. In the beginnings, thinking that journalism, especially focusing on sports, it's going to be your jam because you are, you have been this hardcore athlete. That's a deep passion of yours, journalism and telling the stories. And like you said earlier, you were the kid who was always loved books and writing was a big part of you. You've end up, I guess, getting a job or an internship at a local station. And that's the time where things are happening in Tiananmen Square.

And there's a moment that kind of changes the trajectory of everything for you. Yes, in retrospect, definitely. And even at the time, I think I knew it was a big moment. But it was just me. I was sitting there having gotten this dream internship. I'd only been in the job maybe for three or four weeks because it was early June after my freshman year. And I'm taking notes on a Atlanta Braves-San Francisco Giants game in order to help the head of of the day, the moment, I suppose, at which the Chinese government decided that they were going to shut down protests that had been going for several weeks.

Young people had thought that there was actually some hope of liberalization. Current events, trackers, China watchers in this country had thought that that liberalization was really a crossroads in China's history, but I didn't know any of that. All I knew was, oh my gosh, what is happening to these young people? And I just saw these tanks just mowing these kids over and them running to their bicycles and getting on their bicycles and kind of draping the wounded over the front of the bicycle and just trying to hightail it away. And then, you know, I did not say to myself, okay, this is my moment. I'm now going to reassess my career path. And one day I will represent the United States at the United Nations as our country's ambassador. And I will represent the United States at the United Nations as our country's ambassador, and I will bring a human rights perspective to our dealings with foreign nations.

No, it was much more simple and gradual and remedial than that. It was, okay, my heart breaks for these people. I didn't actually know that I would feel that way, that it would move me so much. That's it. So I was kind of like an anthropologist. I was like, hmm, that it would move me so much. That's it. So I was kind of like an anthropologist. I was like, hmm, interesting how moved you are by this. But also, I am so ignorant. I don't know. I don't, what are these protests about again? Who are these people? Why would this government be doing this? And what is the U.S. government going to do? Now, this was

just a few months before the Berlin Wall would fall, but I, of course, didn't know that at the time, but there was, something was fermenting. You know, you could feel a sense of hope and promise. Maybe I was just 18 and feel, every 18 year old feels some version of that. But honestly, my, even though it was an epiphany, the implications, and this gets to sort of what we're talking about with my mother and coming to America, the implications were modest, right? It was a first step. It was, I'm going to go back to college. I'm going to face the fact that I don't know much about current affairs. I know geography because I'm Irish and every Irish person in their DNA knows that they might have to leave someday to go somewhere. So I was good on geography, but everything else was, reading the New York Times was like reading Swahili. I mean, it was just so many names and places and events. But I just took out my highlighter and my felt pen and I underlined

the articles and I circled the names when I got back to campus. And mainly I just started taking classes kind of knowing that I would be, that I would have a ton of catch up to do, but being okay with that. And sort of, I mean, without, you know, it wasn't so self-conscious as I'm making it sound, but it just, I decided I was going to get smarter. Not smart, but smarter, which was the lower bar. and there was only up to go because I really felt the gaps in what I understood about what was happening around me were so large. And then I get back to campus and then the wall falls and then you see these people dancing

and being reunited who've been separated for all these years between East and West Berlin. Then you see the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. You see Poland have its first election. I mean, so in a way, once I'd opened my aperture and had my head up, my timing was impeccable because it was rewarding. It wasn't like had I, if today I was similarly situated and watching sports and then, you know, saw anything from a massacre in Syria to an extreme weather event somewhere because of climate, you know, there's plenty of bad news to consume me today. But,

you know, you have to work a little harder to find the good news stories that can really sweep you away. But to be 18, 19, 20 years old when liberal democracy was spreading, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, when it really felt as if people were going to have the chance to reach more of their potential because fewer governments were going to stand in their way and stifle their right. I mean, it was an exhilarating time to be sticking your head up and being prepared to learn. I mean, it was just coming at you, and it was satisfying. It was exciting. It was hopeful. It was optimistic. And I rode that wave for some number of years. I mean, you end up going from there. Was it immediately into being a journalist? And you're dropping into Bosnia eventually over a period of year, Sudan, some of the other places.

East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, places like that. But after the genocide in Rwanda, yeah. Right. What was it about being in the middle of that that made you feel like, I have to be here? What was the job that you felt you were being called to do in the context of these things? Well, I think, you know, even as I'm talking to you, when I think about going back to campus, right? So before I was out in the work world, my mindset was learn, right? It wasn't fix something. It was just, it was lower your guard.

In a way, by saying you don't know something, you make yourself vulnerable because you're saying, in effect, I feel dumb and I'm ready, but that's okay. I'm okay with that. I'm going to fade. I'm going to read these things. I'm going to underline them 10 times and I'm still not going to remember, but I'm going to fight through that. And eventually, like I did in part because I'd mastered, you know, as a kid, I'd come knowing nothing about baseball and then had the whole litany of everything. So I knew I sort of figured if I could just make myself kind of motor through those difficult periods of really having a steep learning curve, that there would be some reward on the other side of that, you know. And so that ended up being important. But I mentioned that

again, because interestingly, when I, so my first job out of college was another internship. And of course, what are internships about, but learning and growing. And I was incredibly blessed to intern for somebody who had been in the U.S. government. So now my learning was from someone who'd actually helped shape policy. And he, my name is Samantha. He called me Susan for the entire year I worked for him. He made a much deeper impression on me than I made on him. But while in the U.S. government, he'd been U.S. ambassador to Turkey and he'd effectively convinced George H.W. Bush through James Baker to set up a protection zone for the Kurds in northern Iraq. He'd been ambassador in Thailand and had helped find shelter for Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees and then helped convince the Reagan administration and the Carter administration before it to take hundreds of thousands of refugees here. This guy, I mean, I was interning to this person who'd done stuff for people. And so I went from, let me figure out

what's happening in the world to suddenly here's this person who's found a way to use the machinery to do good and yet is not Pollyannish about American power in the world and knows the harm that it can do as well. It's just a very blunt instrument. But when I went to, you mentioned my travels, I never lost that sense of what is the thing that I will learn if I go. And I think I'm glad about that. And as I was writing the book, I kind of distilled it into this thing I call the X test, which is, I think applies to all careers and professions or even all kind of potential growth moments. And it's so basic that maybe it's not even worth the kind of, maybe it's so intuitive, but for me, it was at any professional crossroads

to say to myself, if all I get out of this experience is X, will it have been worth it? And so in a sense, that's such a conservative way of thinking about things. I mean, so the opposite of, I think what people might think of me from afar, like this flame throwing human rights champion who thinks she's going to, who has these sort of absolutist views and thinks that she's going to show up and everything's going to be better. I don't have any of those things. I've got, I figure out what is the lowest bar that I need to clear in order to make this worth it. And so when I had interned for a year,

I had Mort Abramowitz, the man I'd worked for, who had so inspired me with his constructive approach to contemporary problems and with his experiences, he instilled in me in part also an appreciation for getting close. That's another one of, I think, the things that I've learned over the years, just get to where things are happening. I just find myself learning so much more from the people who are directly affected by the crises that policymakers are thinking about, but are sometimes, you know, can be way off in terms of how we're, you know, the prisms through which we are filtering them.

And so that was part of it was get close. But the other was, okay, he cares so much about what's happening in Bosnia. I want to get close there, but I also, I want to be useful. So like him. So what's a way to be useful? Well, I don't have any skills as such. I'm a liberal arts major, former sports reporter. So having been a sports reporter, maybe my calling card, such as it is, is that make it as a reporter. Like that's not to just become a war correspondent is not an obvious thing that I would have been able to do. And so if I made the barrier to entry, you know, will I succeed as a war correspondent? Will I make a good living? Will I be on the front pages of major publications? I think I wouldn't have gone because I think I would have not. Again, I don't have an infinite store of confidence, especially as I set out on things. And so instead, I think usefully, my bar was if all I do is learn server creation enough to kind of get buy-in, to do interviews and so forth, see the UN and these, this new world of

humanitarian action up close. Cause the, again, the Soviet Union had just collapsed and suddenly the UN was liberated from the post, from the cold war veto and doing things for the first time. I mean, compared to like going to graduate school or another internship in Washington, or even working on Capitol Hill or doing something that is more traditional, wow, I mean, that would be worth it as long as I don't die. So that was like the big caveat. And I think this X test pretty much every juncture in my career, you know, flashing forward when I wrote a book and Barack Obama read the book and I'm having dinner with Barack Obama and I'm thinking, I really would like to sort of go and work for this person. I mean, I've never worked in government

before. He's a first term Senator. He doesn't really need me. He's making clear he's not, he's not offering me, there's no job on offer. And if there was, it doesn't, it's not clear that I'd be his first choice, but I really want to. And so the X test can take very, very sort of process form. I'm in, in my head, I'm in what my head can be a bat cave where there are all these bats flying around saying, no, don't ask. Don't, you'll sound like an asshole. Like, don't know you'd be a jerk. And so the bats are like swarming around. So then it's like, okay, my X test. Okay. If all that happens out of this is he says, no, thank you. I'm fully staffed. What's so bad about that actually?

And this is what women I think in particular have to do. You know, sometimes we have to find our way to overcome that inhibition. But then well beyond that, if I'm going to raise it, I have to be prepared to go through with it. So do I really want to leave it? By then I was running a human rights center at Harvard and teaching at the Kennedy School for young public servants. It was a great job. Do I really want to leave that comfort that I finally have achieved after years of being a vagabond and a freelancer to go and effectively again, and now in my 30s, go and intern in this first term senator's office? It was a fellowship, but it felt like an internship.

And then I asked the ex-test, you know, okay, if all that comes out of this is that I learn how the Senate does and does not work in the realm of foreign policy, how it does and does not hold the Bush administration accountable. If all I do is learn also about domestic issues from Barack Obama, who has this broad vision that I've whose values I think I share, like probably that there are worse ways to spend a year, even though now I'm, you know, it's getting harder to take these, these gambits. But I think there's something to, I think sometimes we, we sort of over-dramatize or we want to know where it can all end. And to get over that threshold, I think sometimes it can be better to define, you know, sort of one's goal and one's ambition in a more, and then maybe you can't even come up with a good answer, in which case,

go do something else. That alone is sort of like kind of answers the question. Exactly. Yeah. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10.

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So interesting. So you kind of, you took us through a series of years and experiences, which landed with you sitting across from Barack Obama and then eventually being offered an opportunity to join in soon after he ends up running president. You're a part of that, sort of in the inner circle. And things are going really well. I know where you're going with this. You know, right?

Icarus. And you wrote about the Icarus moment in your book. So I got to ask you, it was, you know, you're established in what you're doing. You're smart. You're building a career. You're working with this incredible team and somebody who seems like he's flying. And then the moment. Yeah.

So I had also started dating somebody who I'd met on the Obama campaign, Cass Sunstein, the law professor whose work I admired from afar for a long time, and who somewhat hilariously, only hilarious in retrospect, not at all hilarious at the time, but had accidentally sent an extremely disparaging email about how terribly the Obama campaign was going to the entire senior staff of the Obama campaign. As he puts it, his computer had autofilled the entire campaign. And so I reached out to him after he committed the faux pas of faux pas and where his email was being turned into posters at campaign headquarters and the like and ended up starting to date him.

And it had real promise. I think he probed some of the things that we were talking about earlier in my own past in a way that I wasn't prepared for. And I allowed him to up to a point. So I had that going. I was part of a team. I had always loved sports. I had forgotten how much I loved team sports until I was on the Obama campaign. It really felt like that. It was the kind of division of labor. If you love baseball, you know, just knowing that you had to hit the cutoff man and that everything is sort of connected to everything else. That's how it felt on the campaign. There was no way for one man, even a gifted politician like Barack Obama, to do this.

Each of us had, there were like little cogs and small factors in this larger journey. And it was going, and then it suddenly started to go well after this. It wasn't Cass's email that made it go well, I assure you. But the, you know, we started to win some of the early primary contests and this little insurgent campaign that many of us were a part of almost on principle, because we want to live in a country in which Barack Obama could be elected. But I think probably in our deepest selves didn't actually think that he could necessarily, that we were yet ready as a country to elect him. And then suddenly it's happening and everything's

great. And I published my second book and I go off to England and do a book tour. And there's more interest in me and my ideas for media than ever tour. And I'm, you know, there's more interest in me from, and my ideas from media than ever before. And of course, this is the mistake number one, right? Is to think that that had anything to do with me rather than the fact that I was working with Barack Obama, the sort of major global curiosity and phenom. But anyway, I then leave England, go to Ireland, you know, my former home. Cass gets on an airplane in America to fly to join me. He's going to meet my Irish family. I'm getting already a little skittish.

I might be on the verge of pushing him away. It's unclear where it all would have gone had things turned out differently. But nonetheless, I did want to spend this weekend with him to show him Ireland. This was a big deal in our still young relationship. I land Dublin airport, text message from Bono wanting to meet for a drink. I don't get text messages from Bono. I love Bono, but I don't get text messages from Bono. So this was just, I mean, it really was all going just too well. It was inevitable that something bad would happen. But that night sitting with Bono and Brian Eno, I get a call saying really hating things about Hillary Clinton.

You know, she's a monster. She does this. She's this. She's deceitful. And my first reaction, because I have such respect for Hillary Clinton, notwithstanding the story I'm telling, was didn't say it, made up British journalism, tabloid nonsense. And this is an interesting, I mean, I think it's a larger insight about people generally. I think it's not just me, but we'll see what you think. But I was absolutely sure that I did not say those things because my considered self does not feel

any of those things and certainly did not feel those things. In fact, I had gotten into trouble on the campaign because in interviews, I'd said all these nice things and people were like, well, you know, you're not exactly making the strongest case for Obama when you're, you know, singing Hillary's praises. So I really thought I hadn't said it. And what I forgot was this moment in one of the interviews where a friend of mine on the Obama campaign had called me ironically looking for media advice from me because I'd been a journalist, because Hillary's campaign was taking out attack ads that featured him. And so what I would later realize, after initially thinking that we should demand a retraction, I began to go back in my mind and think, was there something? And it was actually Brian Eno who was like, think, think, could you have possibly?

Because the last thing you want to do is make matters worse by denying something that's true. And so sure enough, I went back in my mind and the dozen interviews I did that I remembered that he had called and I thought, could her tape recorder have cold light of day, I didn't even recognize the person that could have said have remembered losing my temper, but it's more that you can so lose sight when you're angry, you know, of people's feelings and the risk and your language and just the intemperance of it. I was so horrified by when I, when I came to realize that I had said it anyway. So I had said some of the things she, she used ellipses and some creative reporting for some of it. But once I had said it anyway. So I had said some of the things she, she used ellipses and some creative reporting for some of it. But once I'd said the word monster, that was it. I knew I had to resign the Obama campaign. Meanwhile, Cass, my new boyfriend is kind of smiling happily over the Atlantic, not knowing any of this shit is going down. And so he arrives to Dublin airport and gets an email from me saying, I've really blown it this time.

I've ruined everything. You know, I'm going to have to resign. He writes back, Oh, I don't worry about it. I'm sure it'll blow over. And then he comes to the hotel.

I'm, I'm out. And he searches and it's just everywhere. I mean, it's in Urdu in Pakistan. It's in like Chinese characters. It's just Samantha power and my name, and then Monster, and then like lots of,

and so a unique experience of being a scandal. It's totally self-inflicted. And so I did have to resign. Obama was incredibly present for me. It was a beautiful window into him actually, because he was dealing with some of the most difficult times in his campaign, the tapes from Reverend Wright, his former pastor, many of them had surfaced and he was on the defensive and yet he was calling, emailing constantly. But the larger lesson was,

you know, for the first time, probably in my adult life, I came to a complete standstill. I, you know, my whole life, I, like my mother, you know, I'd been putting one task after another. If I went to one war zone and came back, wrote my story, worked around the clock to get it into the Atlantic or the New Yorker, then there was another story and there was another class to teach and there was another rally about Darfur to organize. And here my whole life had been subsumed by this campaign and this team and in this beautiful way. And then it was over. I was, you know, I wasn't teaching. I was, I, you know, I was, I couldn't write objectively because I was been part of the Obama campaign. And it's the best thing that ever happened to me because I also had this, I had a moment where I could have pushed Cass away or I didn't really feel I had the strength. I mean, I was so sad and so humiliated. I just felt so embarrassed that I'd said these things publicly. I was actually much more embarrassed, even as sad as I was to leave the campaign, I was mainly just mortified that Hillary Clinton could think that I thought these intemperate things, these hateful things. And so I was not in the most Samantha loving phase of my life, not an ideal time probably to launch the next phase of our relationship. But Cass was just so in my corner and I'd never

allowed anybody to take care of me before. And I initially, you know, I couldn't sleep. I was just so ridden with guilt and fear that it would hurt Obama and his prospects. I mean, the narcissism of villainy, by the way, I don't recommend it. You know, like I was so self-centered and Cass is throwing all this behavioral science at me, you know, the spotlight effect, you know, nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it. I'm like, okay, thank you for that handy fortune cookie. But like, I'm in, I'm in, I'm a scandal, but he took care of me. And I had never been that sort of vulnerable and exposed with somebody else. Cause I was just so sad and, and, and so still. And so I married him and I don't know that I would have, you know, honestly, I don't, I had so many mechanisms for, for pushing people away. I'd never met anyone like Cass before. So

I hope I would have gotten it together. And by then I had some, you know, I'd gotten into therapy and I understood some of my bad habits and so forth that I do think dated back to losing my dad as a kid, but he just wouldn't let me. And to be cared for in that way and love so well at such a hard time, you know, I realized what I had and, and, and nothing that I've done since would have been possible without Cass. So powerful to, to come to that place. I mean, not the funnest way to arrive there, you know, completely and utterly on your knees, but regardless of the circumstance, I cannot tell you. And I'm sure you've had so many conversations too, so many people where when you come to that moment where like, all of a sudden you realize a thing that you have to realize to step into the next season of whatever it is. It's like, it almost always happens when

you're on your knees. I wish there was a way around that. Right. I'm hoping I wrote this book, you know, like, maybe the book will avoid that. Please just know that. But the problem is you kind of have to do it yourself. You can't read someone else's. It is. And if we cannot, we have to walk our own walk. You end up, the net of that is eventually a sit down gets brokered where, you know, like you end up saying what you need to say to Hillary. You guys are okay. And you move on.

Barack ends up in office. And then when he's putting together his cabinet, some time has passed. He deeply values you and your lens and your input. So he invites you back in first in the early days for national security advice. And then eventually to become the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., which is, I mean, it's interesting to me. So like you are now in the inner circle of power, right? You started out sort of like in the early days saying, oh, wow, I need to learn a lot

more about this world. Like, here's my X, which is like significant. You go out into the world and you're learning all this stuff and you are using your catchphrase, getting close. Now you are in the inner sanctum where you're in a position where you can really affect change. I mean, you are in conversations, you're in the room with the people

who have a stunning amount of power to make a difference in the world. Two things I guess I'm curious about. One is how do you then deal with this new challenge slash invitation where you're like, oh, now I have so much more input about so much of what's going on, which includes so much more conflict,

so much more pain, so many places where there is like a need for us to go in. And yet our ability to do that is constrained by so many more things on a day-to-day basis. How does your psyche handle that? You know, not a lot of time to go meta on the experience. I mean, I definitely, I kept a journal still tried on flights and, you know, to kind of catch up and to try, that's one of my guardrails important, where you really do get just driven by, not by the news cycle. I think that's true a lot on the domestic, but in international, it's usually i come back to in the context of my personal life which is not lean in which i also believe in of course but lean on and that's really something in government that i learned pretty quickly i mean you just you really see your own limits the

limits of your knowledge base i mean i yes i knew a few countries and i've been to those places and thought about them for some number of years. But I mean, nothing prepared me to work on the Ebola crisis. Right. And so what do I need to do? I need to get the CDC on the phone and get me smart really quickly. Not because I need to be the world's expert on Ebola. But if I'm going to help President Obama mobilize an Ebola coalition, I better be able to disarm and disable whatever bad argument another government is making for not doing their share. And so, you know, it's sort of like figuring out just

what kind of preparation is needed to be able to anticipate and then diffuse something that's standing in the way of you getting what you want. I think the toolbox, which I had as a phrase that I'd come to use when I wrote my first book, A Problem from Hell on American Responses to Genocide, that was a very useful kind of accompaniment to have in the government. And maybe it's a version of the X test in the sense that I'm not going to judge myself or our country on the basis of whether or not we've solved problem X. I mean, we're not the world's policemen. I've never argued we should be. I know that very little will happen in the world without the U.S.'s catalytic leadership,

but that's not the same as doing everything ourselves. So the toolbox kind of takes the heat off a little bit. It's like, okay, look, what is our responsibility? You know, if an atrocity crisis is brewing or if people are being killed or raped on the basis of their ethnicity or their religion or for any one of a number of reasons. So, you know, that takes it away from the kind of low-grade human rights crisis that can exist in a lot of places. And as the person responsible for atrocity prevention for President Obama in the first term, it brings it to my desk. So then my question becomes, okay, who do I assemble in the government who knows more than I do about whatever place we're talking about, about South Sudan or about, you know, the Lord's Resistance Army and Joseph Kony. And then you bring those people together and you say, okay, people, let's get creative. What are the kinds of levers we have? Okay, Joseph Kony is

sexually enslaving young girls, recruiting young boys as young as seven and eight into a militia. They will never be the same. What are we going to do to lure people out of, okay, loudspeakers, telling them what, offering them what? Can we get money? Can we mobilize money from Congress so we can pull people away? Okay, what about, is there a military component? The local African militaries are part of taking on his army. What's their equipment like? Is there specific equipment? Anyway, we don't have to get into any specific case, but it's sort of freeing to just say, okay, what's the menu? What other countries and under what sort of legitimate rubric, preferably an international legal rubric, and again, aspiring, of course, to resolving something, to using diplomacy to get at the root cause. But on a given day to say, look, if we can

make something better, that's a beginning and can be also the beginning of a virtuous cycle. But again, without those experts who lately have been in the news a little bit, you know, the intelligence professionals, the civil servants, the foreign service officers, whose names are never in the news, you know, who are just laboring in very unglamorous positions for very little pay in service of their country without the kind of public narrative that we offer our troops and the sacrifices they make. But these people, I mean, I learned so much. And so I viewed my role as sort of elevating the ideas that were already existing among the experts. And then, especially when I was UN ambassador and in a position to do the diplomacy myself, what a privilege, right? And so you asked about the psychological toll. I never,

I mean, I was shattered by what was happening in Syria, shattered, right? Just by our inability. I mean, here I was in the cabinet of the president of the United States and over the life of that conflict, more than 500,000 people have been killed, right? I mean, in the universe of the number of people killed in Rwanda, this paradigmatic genocide where a million people were killed, but 500,000.

So it's searing, but I never had the sense of, oh, woe is me, It's so hard being me. I mean, I'm not Syrian. I'm not somebody who's having to tell their child whose stomach is growling, I have no food and will have no food for the next two weeks because the UN has been blocked and can't come. I'm not the person trying to nurse a loved one back to life after a gas attack. And so I guess I always had that sense of I'm the lucky one. I'm the one, you know, I may be trying to get water from a stone here, but I will never give up on both trying to get more done by the U was just some way to make Russia see the conflict differently so that we could not be across purposes in the way that we were. So I don't know, there was always like, I had this expression with my team, there's always something we can do.

And you have to keep, you know, that can be a kind of recipe for American adventurism. You have to be very careful that that's checked by, you know, an interest in consequences. But there wasn't, I certainly, as heartbreaking as it was, it was never, I never in my, I always felt the clock is ticking. I will only be in this job for so long. When will I ever have the chance to be able on a given day to reunite a spouse, you know, and, and, you know, his wife who'd been separated in our refugee program by red tape? When will I ever have the chance to negotiate with a Russian ambassador to get cross-border assistance to Syrians

who otherwise wouldn't be able to get? I've got to just use these opportunities. Yeah. I mean, I would imagine that when you're in that place, if you go down the rabbit hole of focusing on all the things you can't fix, you just end up in this really dark place. Whereas like you said, you can't do all of it,

but you have a fixed window of time and a fixed amount of energy and a fixed amount of resources. And hard as it may be to figure out how to allocate and devote those, you've got to make the absolute best of whatever it is, knowing that some of it's going to work well, you're going to make the absolute best of whatever it is, knowing that some of it's going to work well, you're going to make some big mistakes along the way. And then living with whatever sort of like happens at the end of the day. Sitting here now, like you're a couple years out of that at this point, you're back at Harvard at the Kennedy School and the law school teaching. So you're in this position to sort of play a pivotal role

in helping people who are in the early parts of their lives figure out like, why should this matter to me? And looking at the world of politics these days or civil service, I think it's so easy to say there's so much need and there's also so much potential there's so much need and there's also so much potential heat and so much bad stuff that's going to come my way if I say yes to this as my vocation. So curious what your experience is, sort of like being the role of the mentor and

the professor and the teacher to people who are in this sweet spot of trying to figure out, am I willing to go there? What's your experience of the conversations around that right now? Really wide ranging, but I think definitely with that core tension pretty close to the surface right from the start of the conversation. So I don't think I've ever taught at a time

when there's been more activation around a set of challenges on the horizon, whether racial injustice here or inequality here or anywhere. Of course, climate change, guns, women's issues, women's empowerment, Me Too. It's just the salience of politics across the kind of broader student body, I think is there. And that sense really of dissatisfaction with the world as it is. But that's the first part of the conversation. And then the next is, but okay, so what can I, little me, what can I do about it? And I think that's certainly when I went back to look at my own life, I thought that, okay, it's at that juncture, not the, do we care about what's happening in the world? Because I think a lot of people really do, but it's more in that next phase of where people

quickly, their initial impulse to do something gets swallowed by a sort of a sense of disempowerment or a sense that the hurdles are too high or or that the you know the structural force is now polarization and money and this just feels like on a lot of different fronts that there's a lot that stands in the way and and kids are young people are very smart and so not, you know, you can't blow past those, you know, real challenges. So I guess what I would say is that I fastened on, you took one approach to what I was describing as how to kind of deal with the mess of the world when I was in my job, which was to just acknowledge that you can't do everything. And I think that's really important. But the other thing is, the other idea I fastened on isn't mine. It comes from a book called Switch by the Heath Brothers. And it's this idea of shrink the change.

And that's what a lot of my conversations end up being about, is that, you know, it's like, forgive yourself. You're right. You're not going to be able to solve climate change. It's all right. You're right. You're not going to be able to solve climate change. It's all right. You know, I can tell you, you can do nothing to help even make a dent in climate change. If you give up, if that's your passion, if that's, if that's what you, what keeps you up at night, which for so many young people, climate change keeps them actually up at night. The question is, how do you skinny this problem down to something that is within,

that's a stretch for you to achieve, but that is conceivable for you to make that difference? You know, I feel this way about the world's displacement crisis, where I have more expertise than I do on climate change. 70 million displaced people in the month of October 2019, the Trump administration took exactly zero refugees. First time in the history of the U.S. refugee program that we took zero. You know, we've taken more than three million over time. And I'm not going to change that, the question of, you know, this administration or that administration and refugees. But, you know, there are refugees and undocumented students where I teach who have never lived or studied in a less hospitable America. You know, they, that this wasn't what,

when they got on the plane and they thought they were coming, whether they were a kid as a DACA student or more recently as a refugee. And so that's in my power. And people say, that's all you can do for refugees? You were the cabinet president. I'm like, well, welcome to citizenship, right? We've got to think in terms of a collection. Like, how do we build a kind of portfolio of things that are within our power to do? I work with the International Refugee Assistance Program,

which basically sues in order to use the laws that we do have on the books to reunite families that have been separated by, for example, the Muslim ban, the travel ban. But who are the organizations we can work with? Is it money we can give? Is it organizing we can do? Is it getting a candidate elected locally at the very localist of levels who's going to bring the values that we have to local government, it's going to feel small. And what I'm saying is a bit counter-cultural at the moment, because we're in a very transformational moment. But even there, I'll say, okay, who's your favorite in the... Young people love Elizabeth Warren and, of course, Bernie Sanders. And I'll say, well, okay, but

I get it. And the transformational vision, I completely, you know, relate to that. And the objectives are so sound. And maybe, you know, these are the right candidates, all things considered. But just think about how you get from point A to point B. You still have to canvas for Elizabeth Warren. You still have to find a way to raise a hundred bucks here or there for Elizabeth Warren. Even getting her to the, if you believe that that's the vision that you don't want to settle for anything less, more power to you. But it's going to be about shrinking even that change to something that is within your power to contribute to. And so that's the sort of form I think that the conversation has taken. And sometimes I see them looking at me thinking, you know, like, she's old, she's given up. I haven't given up. Oh my God, I'm the furthest. I've never been more determined, more also sort of alert to the range of tools we do have at our disposal and more certain that it's citizenship and mobilization more than anything that's going to give rise to the kinds of outcomes we need, not just here in America, but also in places that suffer some of the most egregious human rights abuses around the world. And we're seeing it. We're seeing people rise. You know, for all the doom and gloom about democracy, ours, others, and there's a lot of bad news for sure and setbacks, but we're in a period of such ferment and protest and activation. And on one level, the future is going to be dictated less by persuasion, at least in the very near term, and more by turnout and by who

wants it more and who cares more and who's not gonna give up when it doesn't work the first time. Yeah. Not necessarily the answer people want, but I think it's the, it's interesting that you said like, you know, idealist is front and center in the title of your book. And it seems very much, you are no less an idealist now, if not even more than ever before than you were 25 years ago.

Much more. Because I've seen it now. I've seen so many different ways to make it different. It doesn't mean that I haven't also seen plenty of really hardworking people bang their heads against the wall, including me and my team at different occasions. But it matters. And it is on one level about outlasting people and caring more and trying harder and just not taking no for an answer. Yeah. So as we sit here in this container with the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Gratitude. I'm working on gratitude. And I think what I'm finding is that when I go through the day,

and these are difficult days, but when I go through the day looking for things to feel grateful for, if that's the lens through which I'm filtering the day, it doesn't mean I don't see some of the cruelty or the indecency in the basement that I feel is happening now in ways that I did not see coming at this scale, at least. But it means that the small acts of kindness or the sort of unexpected gesture or someone who stands up in the face of such cruelty and projects decency and integrity. I mean, just to notice those small things, I'm finding gratitude is my fuel for this period. And without fuel, I have no aspiration to live the good life or to live an impactful life.

I need that fuel. And I think gratitude is centering for me. But I have to work at it because there's a lot. It's easy to fall into a doom loop, and I see many of the people I love most doing it. And to pull back, you have to discipline yourself to go through the day with those antennae in overdrive. And then it's everywhere. There are things to feel grateful for everywhere if you're looking. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show

possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode.

And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. We'll be right back. Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

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