Hi, everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to work in Progress, where I talked to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going. Hi everyone, you are in luck. We have a second episode this week. I recorded this conversation with Jenna Arnold a few months ago, but her new book, Raising Our Hands is out now and truly feels more timely than ever. Raising Our Hands is described as a quote reckoning call for white women. It asks us to step up and join the new front lines and the fight against complacency in our homes, in our behaviors, and in our minds. Powerful stuff, right. Jenna is an educator, an entrepreneur, and a long time activist and a mother. Oprah named her one of her one Awakened leaders who are using your voice and talent to elevate humanity, and over the years, my friendship with Jenna has certainly elevated so many important thoughts, ideas, and practices in my own life. I really loved this conversation and the ladies, I am sure you will too. I'm excited about the subject matter of your book and the conversation that we're going to have today. I feel like before we get into it, we should we should take people back a little bit. And it's funny because I started thinking about this and realized that I couldn't put my finger on it. I was like, wait, where did we even meet? Like? Where did we do that? Do you remember? I don't even remember. I just feel like you've always been here. I think, Um, it must have been Summit, Yeah, one of the conferences. Maybe I don't know. Actually, I like the real first time that I feel like I entered your world is oh um, okay. I think the first time we kind of sort of hung out was in Israel on the shoes on the Superman trip and I wasn't on it, but I came to hang out with you guys. But then I also remember coming to your house for a Johnny Swim concert. Yeah, and home, which is like still in my top ten. They're the best. They're the best. They're the best, and I'm so happy about their success, I mean too so happy about their success. But I don't know if I can think of like the first first first time, But I think I like throw the bone to Summit. They probably deserve it. Yeah, I definitely, I know it was a it was a conference gathering of some sort, and then we were in touch and we were in touch on activist stuff and then yeah, it was it was really when we were halfway around the world that we got to really hang right. And I think what I find happening that I've found throughout my professional career is like I just gravitate towards sisters of the same tribe of women who are like I could sort of call and their emotions or their frustration or their confusion or whatever has either at the same octave as mine or has been there before, and they can help with guidance and or like, if I asked you how you were, you could probably answer the same question for me, right, Like, or if I could if I asked you about the world was and whatever your answer was, like I could probably copy and paste that if someone asked the same. Yeah, we were so lucky. I feel like over the last decade, especially, a really incredible group of smart women have kind of magnetized, you know, We've we've circled up in a way that has been really motivating and also really healing, because when I'm when I feel like I'm on the precipice of just losing my mind at the state of the world. I always know that I can call you and that you'll be like girls same. But here's why we're going to be okay. And I value that I actually and we can we can save this for later. But like, I actually think that the world hasn't done that hard left turn that I think we're about to, Like I don't think we've actually seen anything yet, and it's gonna it's gonna be so bored. I always think about my relationships with UM women from this specific family which I consider you a member, And whenever I have my moments of being insecure or being UM confused or curious or often just raging, I know, knowing that that you are too, and that so many of other of our other sisters are too, just blows the wind in my sales. Today I got an email from a friend who she's very successful dubrenour Um. You all know her company and IF and some of her investors are trying to reorganize her cat table and she's infuriated. And I wrote her a text message back and I was like, hold the line, do not move. All of your sisters are standing behind you. Blowing wind in yourself, do not move, Do not move. And I often have to think of like, not only my ancestors and the good things that they did and the things that I have to make up for in this lifetime, but also the women who are with me in this life, standing behind me, blowing wind in myself. Yeah, and and we can't do this without each other. And I think now more than ever, at least, my hope is that we're realizing that we can't do this without each other, without our tribes, without our teams, but that we're all really on a big team together. And I'm curious, you know, I think about us doing a lot of activists work together, about the places that we show up and the people that we show up for, whether it's you know, marching together at the first Women's March. It's crazy to me that it's been over three years. You know, I could really go down the list, but I'm I'm curious, can you talk a little bit about the organization of that, the mobilization of women in response to what's happening to the world, And then I'm really going to want to back up farther. But I do feel like that's kind of an amazing place to start. Yeah, So one of the things that I dive into in great depth in the book is this idea that now is a different time in human history, in that we can now look back at history, I ask more difficult questions about motivations, agendas which didn't didn't actually happen, make really smart conclusions both from an academic and a moral perspective, and and then also potentially apply some of those learnings to the future. In addition to that, we're more connected now than we ever been. Both by this this concept of a pandemic. Forget the fact that there's a name for it and everybody knows it. Um that there is this sudden like wow, there are no boundaries and everybody is vulnerable. Clearly, there's more marginalized populations, and there's this internal what I like to say about what happened on January seventeen at the Women's March, the largest protest in human history, that every time I ask somebody why they showed up, they sort of stumble through an answer, and it's never articulate, and it's always like, well, because I had to and because something was wrong, and and it's really comes down to this, like mammalistic drumbeat that's happening in our chest bones of like, uh not, no, not, Now I have to do something. I'm not sure what it is, but I have to be in community with other people who might reflect my confusion and my my desire for a better world. And then since then, for the past three years, all I've seen in my research for this book, I've done listening circles across the country, asking primarily white women, very existential questions like what are you willing to fight for? What stereotype of value is true? And at the end of every listening circle, they're all like, I want to talk about this more. I want to do more. How can I get in the game? What do I do to be a part of something bigger than myself? And so from that moment in Washington, d C. When I stood on stage and looked at a sea of millions of pink hats, and then later that day came to a television screen of a grid of every city around the world and was blown away by it, to what happened this past Saturday when I was doing a virtual workshop and I capped the Zoom rs v P or the Zoom room for only a hundred people and like seven women tried to log in to participate in a conversation about white women holding white women accountable and what that means. And so again, everybody's pulse is thumping differently today, and we have access to different information, and we're more connected than we've ever been. So there's this huge opportunity, and I genuinely believe it's a very short window, like as in a couple of years, like a single digit amount of years for us to actually hold the front line and keep pushing forward. M hm. To hold the front line and continue to push feels like a really, really important call to action that resonates very deeply with me. Yeah, And I think one of the things that one of the ideas that I've been wrestling with, and as I try to answer a lot of these women in these conversations when they say things like, well, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do, I think that we all need to be looking for front lines in places where we haven't. Traditionally, socivic engagement for decades and generations have been voting, calling your senator. In the recent years, in the sixties, marching, donating two different organizations but to me, that's like so super obvious, Like next, please, like what's the real work and what I'm calling my reader and um, women who look like me and had similar life experiences to me in this country, is to see we can find new front lines to do civic work, which isn't like, oh, let me go find another preschool to do another fundraiser for Yeah, that's great and important to do it, but it's really to hold ourselves accountable and examine our biases, examine how we're making excuses for our institutions or the men and the men in our life. Um how checking out very much thinking about our behaviors and our thoughts, um, as it relates to the most marginalized, as it relates to our insecurities, as it relates to our role in the world. To um, that's where the front lines are. That's all right. I always say, it's probably at your front lines in the room with you. Mm hmm. Okay. So we're we're talking today and and you're in a place of perspective on the systems that we all partake in, whether consciously or unconsciously. Where did this kind of passion for change and the desire to fight for others come from. Was was this in you always? You know? Was it was ten year old Jenna out there banging pots and pans, you know, trying to call attention to social issues. Yeah, so there was this book I had had trouble reading. I couldn't until I was eleven. And for context for those listeners who are in the education space, the average reader started around five or six um, so I couldn't read for a while. So it was really passionate about like finding other ways to engage and and participate in the subject in school. And there was this book, I think it's titled three hundred sixty five Ways to Make the to save the World or to make the World Better is some sort of environmental book, and it was like put a brick in your toilet to displace a certain percentage of water, because it's like every you know, toilets, if you flesh them, it's like standing gallons of water or sory that you're cutting the six pact, you know, that plastic thing that holds hands together. And so I would like I was doing that, I were destroyed a couple of toilets because the brick idea doesn't actually make sense because brick is clay and it dissolves and destroys toilets, of which my father won't let me forget. But there was just like all these things of like, you can do this to save the rainforest, Like that was the big thing when I was a kid, was saving the rain person when can we just go back to saving the rainforest? And so yeah, it was. And I do think a lot about why I was so obsessive about so many of those things, because I don't I didn't see it reflected in a lot of my immediate world. But there was definitely a calling to um. There was definitely a calling that pulled me to a place of you got some work to do here. I felt that too. That that National Geographic VHS box set of six videos. I watched the one on the rainforest, I think until the tape burned through and I and I just I was inconsolable about the fact that it was being cut down, and my parents, you know, would just look at me with a sort of horror of like what do we do with this child who won't stop crying about the street. So yeah, I feel that very deeply. Were just to be clear, like I do order a lot online, and I do have lock boxes that show up at my front door, and so in holding myself accountable, I'm not necessarily protecting Ray for us the way that I would like to. I mean, I think again, we haven't really designed a world that makes it easy for us, and as humans, we need to create systems that make it simpler to live better and in better communion with the planet, and we we just do because we can't. We can't be, you know, filling our toilets with bricks. Right aside from being very annoyed with you for doing that, what what were your parents like? Where did you grow up? What was what was kind of the world around you? I was. I had a very average suburban childhood. I grew up outside of Philadelphia to an architect and a nurse and UM. I had a lot of after school sports, and I came from a huge family and we spend our summers together at the beach house. And that was always really important because I knew that no matter what happened to me, I had always had a couch that I could sleep on or there was always out safe. So having um the safety net of extended families, and I guess their couches always let me jump off slightly more steep cliffs, and my parents, I think probably looked at you the same way with just like, oh, that's cute, cares about the rainforest. I guess we'll get her some you know, tropical birds for her birthday or like it wasn't they didn't. And then when I was in high school, I decided that I needed to see more of the world, and my mom said, it was always like you were a cage tiger, like there was just so much for you to go and see and consume and eat and proud. When I was fifteen, I moved to Spain by my self, which I cannot believe my parents let me do. And then sixteen, I know, what are you talking about? Like in the summer for summer school, what are you saying to me? Like, uh, eleventh, tenth grade and then eleventh grade France. I mean it was crazy, and sometimes I said my dad like, what were you thinking? He's like, I don't, I don't actually know. I just knew that you were capable, I guess. And and you went there for school. Yeah, I went there for school because I kind of schools. I don't I honestly don't understand what you're saying to me. It's like you're speaking another language. I went it was like it was all It was like in a broad program. And I lived abroad when I was fifteen, and a lot of the fifteen year old I know today I look at them and I'm like, hm, I'm sure I would let you go live in Spain by yourself. So yeah, So I went and lived in a small town outside of Barcelona where they speak Catalan. I went to are in Spanish, and I quickly realized after I landed at the airport that they don't speak Spanish. Where they speak Spanish is a second language. In uh in Barcelona they speak Catalan. So I was really in over my head. We're what inspired you to do this? Why? Why did you pick Spain and then France? Did you have role models you were looking at? Where you were you in love with the stories of writers who had moved to Europe to be creative? What what prompted this? Well, I think the best way I can answer it is very much couched in a lot of the things that I talked about in the book, of what I had access to and what I was exposed to and Europe. Spain will call a great Britain, but people would just typically say London, maybe, uh, France, maybe a little bit Germany, Like that's where the rest of the world was, and there wasn't something that was like and there's this other continent south of it, in the southern Hemisphere with fifty seven other countries, or let's talk about the huge, you know, Russian continent or Southeast Asia, oh and Central and South America. So I think it was just like the only place to go to get out of my country, which I in retrospect I don't have an appreciation for. I didn't have an appreciation appreciation for it then but do now. Is that it was part of this process of me seeing my homeland from a foreign shore and what that meant and hearing what people had to say about Americans when I was young. Has very much been something that I've watched throughout my travels, throughout my life of being like, oh, what do you think of my country? What do you think of my people? What do you think of our elected officials? Or the reality television show that ends up on your screens, And that's so important spending decades listening to people tell me what they think about me. The narrative that they've already preassigned to me has been very telling. Well, yeah, and it reminds us that everyone's got a narrative, everyone's got an assumption, everyone's got a stereotype, and we certainly don't like it when those things are put on us, So why do we put them on other people? You you had this experience on a class trip to Mexico City. When when did that? When did that occur? And can you tell the listeners a little bit about that? Sure? And that's good research, um, because I'm thinking about all your travels in the way that they affected you. But this, this story feels particularly important to share this. Um. So I was when I was in eighth grade. I went to Mexico on a class trip and I was sitting in the back of let's say, a fifteen person van, and we were driving down what wasn't a major highway, but it was like an eight lane highway and it was very busy impact and we ended up finding ourselves in bumper the bumper traffic, and it was unclear what was causing this traffic jam. And as we inch closer, the driver was getting more agitated. And the people to our left and right, we're getting annoyed. And the people in the van were like, come on, come on, we're missing whatever was they were missing. And as we got closer to what the bottle neck was, I saw a gentleman on the side of the road and the outside lane because there was no shoulders on this particular highway, in his wheelchair, rolling his his wheels incredibly hard with a tremendous urgency. And I realized that the bottleneck was being caused by this gentleman who was taking up a third of the outside lane. And I had this thought of like, well, why doesn't as we're resuming by, well, why doesn't he just get up on the side sidewalk. And that next immediate sidewalk that I had spotted, which was, you know, ten fifteen feet ahead of him, didn't have an on ramp on the corner, and so I realized that this gentleman could end as of how he was mobile, couldn't get up onto the sidewalk because there was no on romp. And as we're dooming by, I was like, oh, well that's really easy to fix. How come no one has done that? And I realized in looking back like that was my first human rights violation that I was really processing because this man was in jeopardy and he there was also a tremendus amount of disruption um caused by the things be caused by an inadequate system that wasn't allowing him to get up on the sidewalk, And so it sent me off on this like, wow, there's probably a lot of problems that have easy solutions, like on on a sidewalk. And then if you think about the amount of people that benefit from ramps on the side of sidewalks, Forget you know, forget the individuals who need them to to get around, but you know people with strollers or the elderly who have carts that they need to weel. So it was sort of this idea of like, oh, wow, there's probably a long list of things that need to be done in the world. Tackle them. And it's interesting too, isn't it that sometimes as a child, you just see it so clearly where you're like, well, problem solutions right there. Yeah, you're like I don't understand, like that's so simple. But as you get older and you dive into those spaces, you realize everything requires policy, every everything requires someone to make a rule, which then allows for the decision making process to move down, you know, downstream in the social system, to allow for protections for a person like that man who is disabled to have an on ramp for his wheelchair. It's so simple unless it isn't there, and then it's devastating, which is why you see this rise of youth activists and women activists all around the world right not just what we were doing at the Women's March years ago, but you see it in Sudann, you see it in ri odd being in places that didn't have places it didn't have um women to rage. And you also now seeing what's happening with the youth when they're just like, let me tell you the problem. It's actually from a perspective, it's quite basic. And I do think this moment in history is um yeah, there's a lot of nuances to it, but but asking the hard question of like problem a potential solution B and maybe the solution is like a D E f G. Maybe it's further down down the road, but but it exists. And what's happened I found in this country, particularly in working in the organ donation industry for a while is that what feels like it might have an easy solution is actually way more complex than than one initially sets out for it to be. But it's because our systems have become overcomplicated to begin la, yes, and overcomplicated in ways that are inefficient, redundant, and in ways that they don't need to be. That's right, and so sometimes there's ways to gloss over it. Like what we were organized, where there was fifty there was fifty two different registries when we started organized Register to become an organ do owner. They were state based and they weren't communicating with each other, and if you look at that, you're like, well that really doesn't make sense. So that there was contemplation to merge them all or a new option of building a new one, which is a glorified Google form obviously with lots of hippo requirements. And we had an amazing tech team that built, you know, a stunning product which was not just a Google form, but but this idea that like, there are things that we can just you know it, three fifty two doesn't two regisgues don't work right now, I'll just make a new one. And that's in like every single silo of the country. Yes, so you see your first human rights violation and systemic failure in junior high. You're talking about the ones you were working on quite recently. I know that you moved to Europe as a teenager in between, which is insane, But what what happens after that? Because obviously, traveling has always been an incredibly important part of your education, both in what you've been able to see and in what you've been able to understand people see in US. So I'm curious how all of that puzzle pieces itself together to take you on your path to go to college, to be a teacher, to be the youngest American who ever worked at the United Nations? Like, how how does all of this happen? My experience seeing other peoples in places and other ways of life in my early teens, coming out of a really safe, secure, relatively standard childhood, shook me out of this idea of there's one way to do things, and that layered with oh, I see problems that possibly have easy solutions, and while my assumption about the way that we should be living our lives the way that I've seen my extended family build their lives, the way that the American blueprint tells us to build our lives might not actually be in the best interest of all. And that's a pretty ground statement. But we have this idea and concept of this American exceptionalism and entitlement as if we have all of the answers and we therefore need to find ways to solve them both and whatever. It is that our greatest most powerful entity, often being governments, are very powerful men with large checks, check books and a tremendous power. They must have all of the answers. And what I have found, and what I started finding early in my life, is that in fact they don't. And in fact, you know, there's a lot of discussion around like imposter syndrome and are you really qualified to be in the position that you're in and um, and a part of me is like, no, nobody's ever qualified unless you have a decade in you know, the medical institution, to operate on brains, like even flying planes. There's so many different things that like, I actually think most people are qualified to participate in most solutions, and and there's just this belief that there's this scaffolded system that if you haven't continued to climb these certain wrongs on the ladder, that you're not um, that you're not capable, or you have no place participating. And I think that's what keeps so many women on the sidelines, particularly the most power. A full demographic of women on the sideline did that answer. It does, as far as understanding that you want to jump in, as far as saying I have the passion and I'm going to show up and I'm gonna do this work. But I'm I'm just curious what. I'm curious about your actual timeline. I'm curious about you come home from Europe and then what how how does the rest of it unfold? So I come home from Europe? Well, I first come home and came home from Mexico and I was like, hey, there's problems. I need solutions. And I remember that first Friday evening I went to Hulands with my best friends, um as we typically did on Friday evenings, and one of them was like, did you hear Brook hooked up with Travis? And I looked at her and I was like, wow, I don't. I don't care like I did three weeks ago. I didn't care about these small, tiny things that are happening that are just sort of inconsequential to the comings and goings of the world. And so it made me look my horizon just got broader, and the questions I had about the world got that list just got longer. Right, So, studying like the graphics a little bit more closely, I was really excited about trying to figure out that next place I can go. And what ended up happening, which I hear everyone say, is oh, I caught the travel bug right the second you you haven't experienced somewhere else that helps you cut closer to yourself, like gives you a different perspective about your very specific place in society. You're like, oh, I'm hooked. I need more of that drug, and so um, I think I moved to Europe. I went to the University of Miami, where I studied elementary education and astrophysics because at the time I really wanted to be an astronaut and my plan was to go to Rice to go into the astronaut program, and I by my junior year, I actually in in being quarantined. I was going through a ton of boxes and I found my report cards for my grades, and I found the last physics class I took and I was like, oh, that's why, that's why I stopped pursuing my dreams to go to outer space, because I think I got like a B minus or something like that. And my friend was laughing at me, like, oh, that was the end of that. And then uh, in undergrad, I traveled the world on a program known as Semester at Sea, which was a really phenomenal taste of fifteen countries something like that. And while we were abroad, UH nine eleven happened. So we were in a couple of days out from Japan during nine and eleven, and I think my first stop in Japan was here Ashima, so I came from. So it was like this very hard. I still even struggle with it today, processing what happened at home, and then also being at the ground zero row of um the first nuclear bomb that was that was dropped in human history and sadly I don't believe the last, and just sort of reconciling it and looking at there's this very specific sort of spot in a park where they say this is where the actual bomb landed, and I remember looking at the sidewalk there and seeing, um, these like weeds just grow through the cracks, and and oh wow, life was able to come back even here, and life therefore is going to be able to come back even there, and no matter why, life will always find a way. And that's where I am at this moment in history, where I can get very exhausted and very demoralized by how we're treating each other, and and I still always think back like life will always find a way. And and then that took me to grad school or you're like forcing me to clear my cobwebs of my life, and I'm scared. Then I went to grad school, a teacher's college, and studied peace education UM, and peace education sort of unbeknownst to me is really the study of war. So I spent a long time diving deep into all the conflicts around the world and what that looks like and what was the foundation for countries falling into civil war. And I remember and I references and raising our hands leaving grad school after talking about what the l r A did does to children involved an armed conflict in parts of Uganda, and looking at these terrific photos of six year olds being made, and then leaving grad school, getting on the subway to go and then pick up my dry cleaning and having to reconcile the reality that that does exist on my watch even as I'm paying my dry cleaning bill and how to reckons, And I still wrestle with that. And I've spent many decades of my life, I imagine sitting in this, I'm extraordinarily fortunate knowing that I stand on the shoulders of privileges that were fairly earned but mostly not and you know the state of the world, and so it's a really hard it's a really hard balance. Then I worked at the United Nations and we packaged a list celebrities with global issues, which was like the first time that that happened. How did working at the u N happen? How did you decide you wanted to go there? How does one get a job there? One does not get a job at the u N unless they're extraordinarily persistent. And this is that I have for everyone again, which is this like belief that there's some grand person or exam or institution that is untouchable unless you have five PhDs. No, in today's world, if you have an email address and access to WiFi, you can google the head of a department their email their LinkedIn and you can full blown reach out to them and pitch yourself, which is essentially what I did for many months until someone when I was finally like, okay, you can come and do have an internship. And when I say that young people often is when they're like, how did you get in there? How do you When people approach me to work with me, it's I often say yes quite quickly if they come to me with the idea six bait where they're like, hey, I think you need to do this, this is how I would do it, this is the strategy, the timeline, how much it's gonna cost, and I'm happy to own the project that gets an easy yes from me. And that's what I did. At the u N. I was like, I think we should bring more celebrities together with more global issues and create curriculum and then see if we can go to places like MTV and create content around it. And they're like, go for it, and you did, and that's what we did. So what was the kind of stuff Because you mentioned no one was doing this, no one was leveraging sort of celebrity platforms and outreach to partner with issues. So at the time, this was obviously a new a new way to do Yeah, it was new strategy, a new way to talk about impact. So what were some of the issues that you worked on? Child soldiers, um uh, terrorism in Northern Ireland. So this is dating me a bit. We did a great project with jay Z around water and sanitation. He went to two different countries in Africa and spent some days um looking at what is required for youth to have access to water and juggle education. We did gun violence, we did sanitation based issues. So it was really landlines in Cambo. Yeah. Um, so it was really again looking at a bunch of problems. If I go back to the gentleman in the wheelchair, we have there's this long list of social issues and we all have to participate in solving them and and most of them had solutions, but bringing attention to them. I remember when I had this moment where Angeline and Julie I think it was just Angelina went to Haiti with Ye Cleugh and there was a tiny little article about it in like a People magazine, and I was like, wait, a second People magazine will cover Angelina going to Haiti and look at some of the living conditions there. Will wait a second, why doesn't Angelina just go to all these places around the world if People Magazine will come with her. Because I often thought about one the audience of the people who are us weekly were very privileged, well educated, lovely intentions, well meaning um women who can do things to make the world a better place. And you saw that same democratic immediately after the Haitian earthquake, for example, donate hundreds of millions of dollars to the Asian Relief Fund. Or same thing with the tsunami in Indonesia, where I kept saying to my colleagues at the u N, y'all, only because these issues are being covered, is the rest of the country now texting a pledge? When that first started coming out, so many people are very willing to give their money and willing to give up themselves and the resources that they have to help solve the problem. We just have to get these stories in front of them. I mean, it's such a cool idea, and now it's obviously so ubiquitous. When you mentioned having been a teacher, was that before or after the u N Where did teaching kind of fit into the equation? I was a first grade teacher after I graduated undergrad and it is still my most favorite position and I cannot wait to return to the classroom. What did you love about it? Watching the wheel spin when students are trying to process hard concepts about humanity. Because of course, I closed my door and we taught off curriculum and we were studying Jane Goodall and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and just things that I happened to have been obsessed with. I had a principal who, for good or for not, did not care what I was doing in the classroom. So it was like off to the races um and just watching them try to process good and evil, watch them find value and self worth in doing something for another student. To me, and I still say this as I wrestle with the education and my two children. I don't really care if my daughter can nail the quadratic formula. I just want her to be a good person. And I said that to the parents of my students at the first back to school night. I was like, Hey, I cannot promise they're going to kill they're spelling, but I promise you like they are going to have a global perspective that's going to help them find humility and responsibility. And I still talk I still talk to those students all the time. I love so teaching. Obviously. What sticks out for me in the way that you talk about teaching is that it's so obviously highlights what's important in the formation of a wholehearted human. And I think that our education system could certainly use some work two teach us how to be in the world, rather than simply to teach us our multiplication tables. So I imagine that a lot of those lessons, be they you know, full consciousness kind of awareness, top of mind lists, or more subconscious aha lightbulb moments, informed the work you were than doing at the U. N Well, what what happened was is I realized that my students were craving this character based education that the curriculum, the California State standards wasn't providing. And so I went rogue and didn't myself. And again I am not any smarter than anyone else who is listening to this podcast today. I just sort of figured it out. I just trouble shooted some you know, potential scenarios and and um, and I realized that it was easy to scale those that kind of education and I said, Okay, I have my nineteen first graders who I'm obsessed with. And I even tried to make a deal with the distract and they almost actually they let me do it, but I still had to leave to go to grad school. I wanted to travel with my students for like to first to second grade, to third to fourth grade, just to continue to do this work with them. And but what I realized was the lessons that I was teaching them, I could scale UM and could get to more students more quickly, or to more youth more quickly. And I had heard a statistic that Barney the Purple Dinosaur was in thirty seven different countries the television show and had a reach of eighty million viewers under the age of like eight or something like that. And I was like, it is second if I can find a value, if there's a way to scale values based education, which you know, organization like Sesame Street and I will shamelessly plug them as I um uh on their advisory board and I think they're one of the best organizations. I love Sesame Streets so much. Me too, And most people have no appreciation for the work that they're doing abroad. This is not just what we are seeing UM on air and the A B c s, which we are eternally grateful for, but they're they're teaching dignity. And so when I realized that, I was like, oh wait a second, let me just let me give this scaling of character based education to go. And then I left, went to grad school, went to un and started doing all this character based education sort of in in People magazine and with American women, and then UH came up with my own television concept where we took spoiled American teenagers to live with indigenous cultures around the world and used one of my cousins as a guinea pig for the pilot, and we went over to Kenya to live with the Messi and she went through a modern day coming of age ceremony. And in some communities and some asside communities in Sub Saharan Africa, they circumcised women. And there's one particular family in the Messi community was raised their hand not to do that anymore, and so they came up with a UM, a pseudo coming of age ceremony and writes of passage. Ceremonies are so important in society, and I don't think we have enough of them, And so I put my cousin through this parallel um coming of age ceremony obviously both in the side and my cousin stands circumcision and shot that when I was like twenty four, and I sold that trailer to MTV and turn that into a television series known as Exile. Mm hmmm, how do you look back on that experience now? Because I think about our increased awareness and and sensitivity to understanding our impact, you know, traveling into communities, traveling into indigenous cultures. Are there are there things that stand out to you that really worked as an education piece of that show When you think back on your like twenty four year old idea, are there things you would do differently? I'm curious, like, how do how does that hold up now? I don't know if I would do that again. I don't know if I could do that again. I have spent a lot of time with indigenous community these throughout my career, both of the u N and in research for this book, I spent a lot of time on the Denay Reservation also known as the Navajo Reservation and and the role that primarily white people play in coming into their communities and UM, at least for what it was that I did. However long ago it was for this television series wouldn't hold up to my moral and ethical bar anymore. You know, we were There's there's this fine balance between educating people about a community, and I was obsessed with the preservation of indigenous languages and the preservation of culture, also trying to do find ways to wedge women and girls rights into those things. But there really isn't my work to be done, and those aren't my stories to tell, surely, not to create a piece of content and then to to UM then air it on MTV. But I will say that mtb AS at that time had a spectacular viewership worldwide, and there were many viewers who signed up to join the Peace Corps, which is a two and a half year commitment in the rural community somewhere in the world, so it's not to be bought at. And then there were other viewers who are like, oh, I didn't realize Africa was a continent. I thought it was just a country, right, So there's this huge spectrum ponces from viewers and then one of the other uh, full circle moments for me with regards to the show. As I was in Bahrain and I came across a camel farmer and he was like, Oh, you're American. I just finished watching this television show about this girl who went to Thailand and she started crying because of the risk of malaria and da da da da da. And I was like, Oh, that's my show, and he started laughing. He's like a new Americans had that coming. You guys have such lessons to learn about the way the state of the rest of the world. And I had this moment of like, oh, is this is there a foreign polo see element here in this content about watching Americans go through um very humbling experience about their privilege, And I think there is. That's very cool. So what's the path from the u N and content creation to organize? So I when I created this television show titled Exiled, I left un to produce and direct it, and then I created a boutique content creation firm to help nonprofits celebrities sort of tell their story better. This is my issue. This is a workshop that I was on last night. One of the top organizations in the world that no peace building organizations in the world that nobody knows about. They participated in the negotiations in Rwanda between the WHO two and the Tutsis are on the front lines of what's happening in Yemen with the Ranga, and nobody knows about them. So I'm always like, the people are doing God's work, No, but he knows their stories and nobody knows yet behind them and support them, and people want to and so I'm I became very passionate about finding issues that I could help market and communicate again the five thousand foot perspective and the thirty five thousand foot perspective on the issue and pubalizing more people and resources around it. And then I got connected with my co founder, Greg whose father waited uh five years for heart And admittedly I wasn't particularly interested in the organ donation crisis in this country. I was my eyes had always sort of been abroad, you know. I was like, well, let's talk about you know, water and sanitation in parts of Substanharan, Africa, or let's talk about landmines. Was talking about saving the whales organ donation. I feel like that's probably, you know, far down on my list of things that I wanted to try to tackle but after a couple of months of really workshopping what the potential solutions were, I had this very this moment of clarity that oh, wait a second, there's actually some really concrete, turnkey solutions that can be applied here that not just solve a problem, but could expedite and cattle pull the state of organization crisis to a place of solution, not at some point in my lifetime, but in my very near lifetime. What interests me about those things because I began so much of my activist work abroad as well, And the light bulb moment for me was when I realized that I have always had this really ridiculous assumption that here, in this very privileged country, there were obviously adults in charge of our problems. There was somebody responsible handling things here. Yeah, there's them. And you realize, especially since there is no them, there's literally nobody who is optimizing our systems. There's there, there just aren't. And so that to to your earlier point about how you have to find the new front lines. You have to find, you know, the moms in every community that are working on fixing problems, the people who are dealing with housing crises, homelessness, gun violence. There are there are all these boots on the ground everywhere because so many of our systems are broken. And you, I'm so lucky because of our friendship and our overlap. When you were starting organized and launching the program for me to hear in real time how utterly inefficient and non communicative across even state lines, as you said, our organ donation and harvesting program is in America was so shocking to me, Like the fact that all these organs go to waste when people are dying waiting for organs was just bonkers. And one of the things that I loved was seeing how easy you made it for anyone and to join a registry by simply sending a tweet, by posting an Instagram like anything. Once you posted something, it was it was in a national data bank and problem solved. If you know, God forbid you were ever in a fatal car accident or whatever, there there was an answer and an immediate solution. How did you How did you guys come to understand, as you said, that this could be solvable, not even in your lifetime, but in the immediate future. Well, I think the lessons that I took from when I stepped up to that plate that I can apply to today is that some of the systems are so broken that it's almost like just scrapped the whole thing and start over, which is for some of the technicalities of registering to become an organ owner, how you're declaring your end of life wishes to your next of kin, Like that was easy. That was easy to do. Some of the policy relate aided efforts that we have been working on are still ongoing. And I had made a commitment to the organization community and my partner um that I was going to give this issue five years and no more. And we were like, oh, yeah, we can wrap this up in five years, and like we potentially could have if sten looked a little different, but it's still it's still an ongoing process. And then what's ultimately happening is that once you're like, okay, I solve that, you're like, oh wait a second, But there's that one thing right behind it that maybe if we just that's which we could increase it by another we could say, tax player billions of dollars, Well, what's right behind that? And so what I found is that there's there's definitively know them, particularly when there's an assumption, particularly when an industry or a system is being run by organization and institutions that are employing people who have to secure healthcare and have to secure food on their tables, there's not a lot of encouragement to rock the boat and to challenge and to ask harder questions. And and that's just not how the American narrative and system is structured. That says, for junior person, you should ask the hardest question to the most senior person. Like that's just not our government or charts are situated. But but what I found is that it's much easier to maneuver when you're sitting on the edge of the sandbox versus in the smack middle of it. It's that same experience when you get on a flight and you start talking to the person next to you and you tell them all of your woes and they can just start poking holes and setting the record real straight, real quick, like almost the further outside of the system are the easier it is to maneuver. And so we an organization definitely stayed on the outside, and we were constantly reminded, like you've paid your dues. You are not in the inside. You do not know what you're talking thinking about. And that was just like intentionally so, and what you said earlier about boots on the ground, There is no them that's going to fix it. And sometimes there are right, like there's amazing women on the front lines of the labor and delivery crisis in this country, or where we have where black women are three to four times more likely to die in pregnancy related deaths than their white women even if they have like two or three higher degrees of education. In New York City twelve, there's amazing women on the front line solving those problems. So them exists in that situation, and our responsibility to them is at resources and to do what it is that they say that they need, which is a very unique position. But in some cases, like who's making sure that there's healthier food at your kids school, who's taking care of the elderly down the street, Who's like there's for them there? That's you, Yeah, yeah, And I think it's so incredibly important to identify those pockets and those varying degrees of tangible activists that might be around you because so many people, to your point, say I want to help and don't know where to start. And and some of the best advice I've ever heard is help the helpers show up and help the people who are already working on this, which leads us to the book, the book. I'm so excited to talk about the book. So for our listeners, Jenna wrote this incredible book. It's called Raising Our Hands. How white women can stop avoiding hard conversations, start accepting responsibility, and find our place on the new front lines. And you mentioned it earlier that after after women who look like you and who look like me realized that so many women who look like us betrayed us and really betrayed women, but obviously didn't think that that's what they were doing. Like, I don't imagine that many of the percentage of white women, you know, sixty three plus percent who voted for Donald Trump, thought I'm absolutely going to sell out women and the environment and my communities and my education system and health care and and and by voting for this man, I'm going to vote to close down the pandemic response networks. And I don't think people got it. But we've also heard a lot of really compelling arguments that explain what proximal power looks like in the structure of white supremacy and the patriarchy. And so you took the shock that so many of us felt and said, I'm gonna go interview all these women and figure out why they did this? Why why? Why did this feel like a reasonable option rather than voting for a woman like what? How? Why? So you you picked up and you went on these listening tours all across the country. Where did you go and what kinds of women were you seeking out to speak to? What ended up happening immediately after the Women's Well, there was the election November eight. On November nine, when some of the data was coming through and it was saying there was numbers that were saying between fifty two and of white female voters voted for Trump. That mixed with a lot of the difficult conversations I was having in my own family. As I mentioned earlier, I come from a very large family. My mom is one of nine. It's not that simple, but one of nine for for for the point of this conversation, and some of them voted for Trump. I mean, these are human beings who loved me and raised me and produced me. Right produced like raging. We have to go. We works in the toilet to offset you know, the amount of water waste every time we flushed. Jenna still pull the lever for Trump, and to take knowing who they were and their kindness and their love and their good intention, and how they've been such a phenomenal support system and cheerleaders for me over the years, watching them pull the lever, hoping in my head it was just the four of them, right, like just those four women are the only women in America that were God forbid, would be pulling the lever for Trump. And then seeing how many women showed up at the Women's March and looking at it a sea of while a lot of pink hats worn by a tremendous amount of white women, and I reconcile, um, the women I know who did vote for Trump, who were are phenomenal and loving and all of the good things women, human beings with what I what I knew in my bones, he stood for. And then watching so many of them show up on the streets, just the math wasn't adding up. And what's saying is, right after the Women's March, I went and um, I spent some time with the organizers of the Women's March in Wyoming. So just to we're clear, the national team only organized one march in Washington, d C. We picked across Street, we picked a logo, we created messaging, and then all these six sixty seven other marches worldwide were organized by other women in that zip code in that city. And so in this one town in Cheyenne, Wyoming, there were a handful of organizers mind do Wyoming as the red est state in the country, and they expected to fifty people to show up, and tre people showed up, and they were telling you, like, and everybody voted for for Donald Trump in that election. So even people who weren't necessarily aligned with the messaging of why we were marching and protesting that day still showed up. And so trying to reconcile the voting behaviors with the amount of love, intention and intention that I found with the women I knew in my life who had ultimately voted for him, And there was no data that existed in this going back to the who's the them? So I heard I've heard for years from activists of color who have said, you know, white people, go get white people, White women go get white women, what what's going on with your cousins? What's going on? And I never really understood what that meant. So right after the women's manchers like, all right, who's going to ask the hard questions of white women? And I like had this moment where I was looking around, like peering over fences, like who's doing the work so I can sign up for the listener, donate the money, help the helpers. And I realized that nobody was Do we have this statistic around white American voters that surfaces during the mid terms and during the presidential and a couple of really key facts. White American women are the largest voting block in the United States. They take up forty two of the voting block. They will be the largest voting block through six Even when white people become a minority in this country, white women and their vote will still control fifty six of the hundred Senate seats. So here we have this demographic, the most powerful voting demographic in the country. Even even if we bring all the disenfranchise voters online, they're still the most powerful because of where they're aggregated throughout the country. Based on our electoral college and nobody is going to have conversations with them about their voting habits outside of SANA and Fox, MSNBC. And I was like, oh, no, this isn't working. And so when I look back at what worked when you were taking celebrities to go look at global issues, or when I look back and what I did in creating the television show where we took spoiled American teenagers to live with those indigenous cultures and the viewers were like oh wow and putting things together and there was no one doing that. I was like, well, let me go see what's really on the mind of these women. So I traveled to so many different types of zip codes throughout the country. I loved it, and I want to continue to do it. Um. So if you're listening and you want to have a listening circle, I am. I am totally game. And what I tried to do is I it was very much focused on white American women, and I tried to take that demographic and break it down into the most stereotypical stereotypical variables that I could. So I spend time with like fifty year old rich Jewish women from outside of Cleveland. I spend time with evangelicals that are new moms from the South. I spend time with Catholics, Republicans, people all across the socio economic spectrum, all across the gender spectrum um. And I asked really difficult questions about power, proximity, privileged, the things that they wanted to talk about, the things they didn't, and I just kept pushing My front line still was then still is today? Is asked those questions about self worth in the context of being a citizen, in the context of being a protect country today, and it was that that there was a total void. So what what did you hear? What what do you what do you mean by the void? What were some of the things that you heard that surprised you. Well, one of the things that I that was that my research confirmed was something that I had heard from other primarily academics and other activists, like Robin de Angelo, the author of White Fragility, who has mentioned that white progressives are extraordinarily dangerous. And I didn't appreciate that until I got into conversations with progressive women who were performing in ways and I used the term performing very intentionally, who were performing their understanding of the world. And I cringe at this wokeness in ways that some of the more conservative women that I spend time with, who had always voted Republican, who had voted who voted Republican in twenty sixteen, they weren't so quick to demonstrate that they have good handle on their biases. So what I found was a level of insecurity around self worth that I think is continuing to bubble up even more. That this um lack of conviction that there is that you are needed. Which is really really important to me, is this idea that that that people and women know that we want them on the front lines with us, that there's this well, I don't I don't know enough. Who am I to make a positive difference? What if I do something to screw up? So there was a lot of that broken record pretty continuously, So that was similar. The difference was very much um the humility that the different political parties were willing to discuss again related to Raach gender in class. Some of the things that were the most shocking to me. The most shocking to me, which is my favorite question, and I encourage listeners if you do nothing else after this podcast except by the book obviously, is ask yourself the question of what are you willing to fight for besides your kids, or your family or your loved ones. And asking that question in that specific way forced forced participants to really go beyond the obvious. And I won't name names intentionally, but there was one group of women who were like seventy five years and older from Virginia, most them politically conservative. My sense was at about twelve of the fifteen participants voted for Trump and I posed the question what you willing to fight for beside your children? And one of the participants hand went up real quick and said, well, I've marched in all the anti abortion marches for the past ten years. I'm a I'm a I'm a strong pro lifer. Which we're not letting that conversation get hijacked the pro life Um, we're all pro life, but this anti abortion activists had marched for for so long and so fast forward. I feel like it's very important to clarify that you are either pro choice or pro forced birth. All people are pro life. Yeah, yeah, thank you for that positive. It's a good piece of vacation. So so, she said, I marched in all the anti abortion marches for the past ten years in d C. And I'm very proud of it. Okay, great, And during these listening circles, I have a stoic face, I mean oscar Worthy stoicism, and I said, okay, file that away, and she was continued to drink her mare low and breathe. And fast forward a couple of years. I was posing the question about what it means to give back and what it means to be an active citizen, and they were expressing their frustration with their not being great vehicles to do that, which is something that I did here pretty consistently, And so I started posing this circumstances. Imagine if there was a woman who had two children, was juggling two jobs, found herself pregnant and decided she wanted to determinate the third because of limited resources um and the toll it would take on her first and her two other children. And I said, and she needed four dollars to terminate the pregnancy, but she didn't have it. This is a hypothetical situation. And I posed the question to the room, would you help her? Would you slide four eight dollars across the table to her? And they all, including this one woman who had marched in the anti abortion march for ten years. Said absolutely, And I said, hold on pause. I just want to make sure I have this cract. You are an ardent anti abortion activists, yet you would slide four eighty dollars across the table to a woman who decided you want to determinate says yes, because abortion might not be for me. And I don't necessarily want that from my from my daughters or from my grand for my granddaughters. But I recognize the difficult plight that this woman is facing of a life of limited resources in bandwidth. And I said, okay, well there's vehicles to get her four dollars, like, if you're willing to, we can help you do that. She's yeah, but I don't. I don't trust any of that. I don't trust any of those large institutions. And she listed some of the obvious ones, and and so I had this moment of like, wow, So the then diagram of this anti abortion activist and somebody like me who's very pro choice we overlap like the way except for that moment of like, she just doesn't want it for her, but she's okay if somebody else does it, right, But what's So interesting to me about that is this woman, this anti abortion activist, would literally have paid for this hypothetical woman's abortion, but will vote to defund the place where this woman could have gotten birth control to not even get pregnant a third time in the first place. So there's a there's a disconnect here between the ways that we want to support each other and and the ways we're voting. Well, and then, but let me see if I can throw this needle for you. The reason she votes for a party that is anti abortion has less to do with the topic and more to do with her not feeling qualified to make an educated decision. So in the early seventies there was a big effort to get more women to the Republican Party. What better way to sort of touch upon the emotive strings of women than through babies, right, Because when rob Wade was passed, it was passed under a primarily conservative judicial bench. And so with the political what the Republican political Party did is they were just like, we need more women voters, because they understood the power of the female vote. We need more female voters. So let's just come up with an issue. Oh that has to do with something that's going to make them freaking out, Well, babies will work, and that's how they sort of hijacked abortion. And then they said, you just have to vote down this ticket. And people have been doing it for decades. Even my loved ones were like, I'm just voting down the anti abortion ticket because that gives them the freedom to completely check out. That gives them the freedom to ask the really hard questions about the candidate with the best foreign policy platform or the best environmental policy platform, because it's not the they don't care about education and environment and healthcare and all of the other things. Is that because the way that our media is structured and the way that we get information, the fire hose is too hard to navigate, So it's not easy and simple for the average person to be able to navigate through so much of that information. So instead of trying to do it, failing, feeling dumb, being reminded that you're not worthy and capable anymore, I'm just going to defer to my husband and or my father and the party that they've always voted for, that would be the Republican Party, and I'll use abortion as my excuse. Wow. Wow, that's wild. It's it's I'm curious about where religion plays into all of this, because I think, similarly to the conversation around reproductive freedoms, religion has really been co opted. And and then I'm curious amidst all of this seeing how much we act actually overlap in these ven diagrams. What makes you hopeful about these women, about about women, about us, about us changing the religious institution is just that it's another institution that has been working for centuries, and as we're seeing in every pew, be it in a synagogue or in a church, they're particularly empty these days. And not just like right now, but like for the past decade, there has been a movement away from organized religion because I think people are starting to call into question, not necessarily the hard things that are supposed to be wrestled with under a roof of a religious institution, your relationship with God, your relationship with yourself, your relationship to fellow man human, but the role that religion does play in the larger world, the rules that it protects um One of the things I get into a Great Death in chapter two in particular, is this checklist that we all have, we're all expected to check. It's sort of this blueprint that has been sculpted over generations, This great American pretending I like to call it, which is a series of two dues that are very structured primarily for women, starting from preschool all the way up until they get to make the most privileged decision of their life, which I'll see if you can figure out which that blueprint is. Sporty and cute in in grade school, have enough friends in middle school that you can pick whatever um table you want to sit in at the cafeteria. In high school, lots of friends, and you know you're constantly asked you have a boyfriend, You have a boyfriend, if you can close the deal on the prom queen title, then you know, you're reminded that you're better than everybody else, and everybody else can also feel pretty bad about themselves. You move into undergrad and again you're drilled constantly around whether or not you have a boyfriend. Your studies tend to be a second question from your grandparents or your aunts or your neighbor down the street. Once you graduate, yeah it's cute. Go live in one of the major cities in the country. Now is the time to do it. But you need to have somebody on your bench that is potentially going to put a ring on your finger, and if you don't, there's something wrong with you. Assuming you find that partner, assuming he puts a ring on your finger, then you spend the next six months or eighteen months talking about the wedding, the dress, cut, strap list or not DJ or a band. Before the last wedding present is unwrapped, you're then asked what when are you going to have a baby? And then, assuming you can get pregnant and carry it to term, three months before your first child, you were asked the most privileged question of most women in the entire world. It is a past. It's a past that American women get to pick up or not. You're asked, what question is it? Are you going to go back to work or stay at home? What kind of question at or thirty two is that? And I'm not interested in the mommy wars. Let's keep that in the nineties, for it belongs. But this idea of you have to choose whether you're gonna maintain a professional existence or whether or not you're going to raise your children. It doesn't matter which direction you take. You're then handed a bucket of guilt to pour on your head for the fraternity no matter what you choose. And let's assume you're in a heteronormative relationship. They never ask your husband that question. A man has never been asked when his wife is four weeks away from her due date, are you going to stay home with your baby or go back to your office job. So when women say to me, you know what, I do really feel like women have the same access to power and opportunity and success is men, I always go back to this question. So, well, if women are allowed to opt out of their professional career and raised children, then why are we giving extending that same privilege to men like that? If you want to talk about an equalizing question, the biggest fork in the road for women in this country is when they become mothers. It is not that for father's period. Full stuff. And even in a day and age when we're so desperate to say, you know, there are men who are getting up in the middle of the night to change diapers or um men are only more responsibility in the house. Their studies that are coming out that women still labor forward attend times harder than there are men. And I will say this question about whether or not you're going to stay at home or work. It's sometimes people push back and they say, oh, that's so, that's socio economic. It's not. I've had conversations with women on military basis where you know, they're living off of a very nominal salary for their partners and they're still opting out and they just make it work based on their salary. So women one of the most educated, because access to our education system, one of the most educated, the most powerful, and the voting booth the most well resourced. Meaning American women make all of the consumer decisions for our family. They decide the toothpaste, are the religion, the schools that our kids are going to go to. At the when they start having children, they're given the past to opt out of participating in reading the headlines and participating in things people you know, just raising your kids or you know, they're there elements, and then they opt up. And I would take it a step farther and argue, not only are we given a pass, we're encouraged because women are, as you said, we're affected by this notion of children and other people's children. And if women are really up on the news, we rage and we protest kids in cages at the border. So if they can keep moms removed from the news, you have less of a likelihood of an empathetic and enraged controlling the purse strings, you know, consumer base swinging political group. So to disenfranchise women, to keep women saddled with so much unpaid labor in the home that they don't have time to pay attention to the news is an excellent way to keep us numb and dumb and out of the voting booth. And and when there's two things happening. One, there's very literally no about with I hear this a lot, and like I am the first raise my hand on this subject. I sometimes really struggle to get to my news. I will sometimes and it doesn't happen until when I get in bed, and I'm like, well, I could sit here and read the news, or I could go to sleep because I only slept five hours the night before. So there's the there's a lack of access to like smart, sharp quick information one. And then too, I remember during the Muller trials, I was writing the book, and I would like tap out for three or four days because I would dive into a really deep rabbit hole, and then I'd come up to be like, Okay, so what's happening, and I would have missed so much that there was a tendency on my part to be like, you know what, I can't catch up. Forget it. I don't know. I don't know what's happening. I don't know the players, I don't know who said she said. I didn't see what happened on Tuesdays, So now I don't know what happened on what's happening on Thursday. And so when that happens, our instinct, because we're reminded that unless we're getting ais on tests, including being up to date on what's happening in the news, if you're not going to ace the understanding on what's happening in this particular investigation or what's happening around the world, you're gonna instinctually step out, and then you're gonna feel like that's just gonna snowball of Well, I don't really know. I'm not part of what's happening around the world. My husband knows more because he's reading our news because we're where he's laboring forward to ten times less than you are. So I'll just defer to what he thinks. But this idea that we can defer to someone's paraphrasing of an issue rather than form an opinion of our own based on the issue itself is problematic. And we see how it's problematic again if we're overlapping in event diagram and we're mostly purple, yet we're voting against each other's best interests. The disconnect is literally costing human lives, and it's costing lives of women, and it's especially costing the lives of women of color. So I'm curious, looking at all of this, where do you see, after this entire listening tour, after writing this book. And I know a lot of the the calls to action and the things to do and the illuminating data is in the book. And I do want all of the listeners to get a copy, and you know, maybe we'll all read it together, we'll book club. It will do something. But I wonder where you see the ability for us as white women to move, to make change, to wake up to the dissonance and shorten or close those gaps. Where where do you see it? A couple of places, So, in light of the work in Progress podcast there's so much work that has to happen on the psyche, the behaviors, the thoughts of American white women that if we start doing, if we start raising our hand to do that kind of work on ourselves, we will inherently start to be making change. And what I mean by that is, I think the most important tactic and the stance that we all have to take is that of the inquisitive three year old. And I referenced my daughter ever in the book often because when I was writing it is when she first met a unicorn, and we spent a tremendous amount of time debating do unicorns like pink or purple better? And recognizing that that's a circular conversation and a debate that might not ever have an outcome. There are so many debates that are comparable to that, i e. When does life first begin in the womb? And whether or not you know where what happens related to abortion or not abortion, And again, that conversation is very much connected to women's control over their body, so I'm not trying to minimize it to that, but the idea is that there are so many different types of circular conversations that can be had that we have to be willing to step into that that performance of asking really hard questions. So I find myself and the specific things I offer women are as when you're in the country club, when you're at the line, when you're at the water pooler at work. Is when you hear something be it a inappropriate joke or a statement like democrats want to come and take your guns, ask hard questions, Ask posing questions. Don't show up with like lots of statistics about how any of that information is off. Just start asking questions about, Oh, where did you get that information? Oh, that's really interesting. Does that then decrease the state of what's happening in our classrooms with guns? Oh? Tell me more about that. I want to hear more about your your your understanding and your position of this particular subject, and the idea that like, we have to be willing to ask harder questions of our history. Right. That's one of the things really important in the book is that in chapter three I really dive into our understanding of one of the most revered presidents in history. And if I ask you the question, who's the most revered American president? Who would who's at the type of your time, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is always the answer. However, on Lincoln's watch, we launched the Native nation's genocide, killing millions of this country's original inhabitants. And the number is anywhere from one million Indigenous to a hundred and twenty million. And I'm really not qualified to decide what numb bird is to determine whether or not it was or wasn't a genocide, and I don't use that term lightly. The bottom line is that we all revere this one individual. Yet he launched a genocide um that completely wiped out cultures as diverse as the Chinese to the French that had occupied this land. And we revere him because we revere the one good thing we've been taught since we were little that he did right. We it's it's the adage of if it's always the hunter who tells the story the lion, you know, Victor's right, So they paint themselves in the best light possible. That's right. And I it's one of a phenomenal scholar. His name is Mark Charles. He's the one that helped me has sort of had these epiphanies, particularly related to Abraham Lincoln. I encourage you all to seek him out. He said to me, he was were really diving into this concept of victor's get to tell their stories. And he said, I don't jenda like what a Hitler one? What would be the story about World War two? Right? And I don't know how to answer that, But victors tell their stories. So again, if you look at the way that we tell the story about our history and what happened on the soil where our homes are built, where our home goods exist, where we go to get our you know, our skinny vanilla latte's from Starbucks, that's not new. That was somebody's home and they were intentionally, intentionally slaughtered. So we asked part of questions about our history, we have to ask part of questions about our institutions, like well could I make is there a better way to educate our youth than I think what's been happening recently related to how students are being educated in their homes virtually is really challenging this idea of like in school, you know, it's challenging all the concepts around the institutions. I mean, don't get me started on higher education right now. I really a challenging that price tag and how those very wrote rules are required. So start asking harder questions of our universities, of our schools, of our medical systems, of our hr departments, of fraternity policies at work, just clarifying questions. And then this is the thing that I believe, which I can't take any credit for this epiphany, because every philosopher and most religions and poets have been saying it for eons. Is what God you said, be the change you want you wish to see in the world. We have to put ourselves under a microscope. We have to call into question our biases. We have to call into question how we're allocating resources in ways that might be taking things away from the marginalized population. We have to think about the outcome of what we think is just a no big deal vote in a presidential election. This I we and I'm telling this too. I'm speaking very specifically to American white women here. We have a power that is unprecedented politically, economically, culturally, and it's important to recognize that power and then to figure out what to do with it. And in some cases it means being hyper silent. Right, in some cases it means helping the helpers in being in an ally and advocate and activist and accomplice. I break those down in the book, the difference between all of them, and in some place, in some scenarios, it's what you're supposed to do with your vote, your money, how you on the question your husband that you share the double sin Carrera tiled vanity with on Friday nights, and and the jokes that you hear, Oh, you know, isn't she hot? Oh that's just men bonding. Well, I know appropriate, And so it's our front lines are in the room with us, you know, the questions that we have. One of the things I often reference as an example as being the different behavior that I saw in very liberal, progressive listening circles and very conservative Republican is that in some of the more conservative conversations, women would very quickly say, well, I have some difficult questions about waste that I don't know how to ask, like is a black or African American? Now? You will never hear that question in a progressive listening circle. I mean hours and hours and hours and hours and hours, even if we talk about race, gender, and class, they're still not admitting that they don't know the answer to that. And I can tell you with certainty that we that there's no clear answer to that very specific question. So there's no single person who has that singular answer to answer that. So this idea that like being willing to ask yourself those honest questions and then going to Google. When I first started this process in educating myself about where my biases, where I really relied on my very close friends, mostly of color and help educate me, and I didn't have an application for what that bourbon was for them, and I was like, oh, wait a second, I can just go to Google to ask me, you know, to ask the question about what's a politically correct term here and there. And because there's a tremendous amount of resources and there's a tremendous amount of educators that are willing to shoulder the burden of that kind of education. So, um, my two readers and listeners, is it feels um so broad, but it is so urgent. The constant questioning of ourself, of our history, of our news, of our institutions. Just over and if you sit in the position of ever wanting to know whether or not unicorns like purple and pink and be comfortable in that constant work in progress. We can all push ourselves in the direction we need to go. Mm if everyone listening could incorporate something, some change, some perspective point uh to consider into their daily life, to improve the ways we show up for each other, the ways we help each other, how conscious we are of each other's experience? Is there? Is there something that jumps out to you. There's a Quaker concept. I was raised quaker Ish. Uh. There's a Quaker concept of how we understand any given topic, which is our understanding of any subject is incomplete at best, but we should always strive for completeness. And sitting in a place of humility and not necessarily having to perform knowing or being an expert is a really important position for all of us to be in right now. What's happening. There is more segregation in this country arguably than ever before, not just from social check anomic and the way that our cities are structured, but I geologically right. People are just hanging out with people who think just like them, and it's incredibly dangerous. And instead of sitting in a place of knowing, what if we reverted to the place that found forced ourselves to be comfortable in the unknowing, and in that unknowing and asking questions about our peers, who are you know, acting in very specific ways that initially we would be completely aligned with. Maybe it's time for us to ask whether or not that makes sense. And so I think the immediate position is and I hope this is a This is a relief, like I hope I can lift something off of your shoulders saying hey, you're never actually going to know the answer, so don't try. This isn't a cop outleg go watch season two of Tiger Gang, but this is like, hey, you're never gonna know, So stop beating yourself up that you can't say year it out. Stop beating yourself up that you don't know the solution of how to solve the education system or Medicare and medicaid or Russia China relations, Like, stop eating yourself up that you don't know, you don't get it. Just be a constant student and ask the harder questions. And oh my god, do not vote. Do not vote? Um in the you're you have an inherited a voting pattern would be in my like desperate play, you have an inherited a voting pattern. Yeah God, that doesn't get past with the oriental rugs. Yeah no, please God. Um okay, based on the hopefulness that you feel despite the hard things, we need to look at what is your hope for or call to action for women in the next election. What I know for sure is that this demographic white American women in our shopping in a way that they haven't been previously, in a way that I wasn't really previously either. Um. It's not like when Obama ran for his second term that I was really holding his speed to the fire, right Like I was just like, yeah, no, of course Obama, yes, like back to my life. So I can say with certainty that, um, this demographic is going to be asking a harder questions of our candidate, and my goodness, our candidates need to be put under microscope too, and they have opportunities to hold themselves accountable and and raise their hand and acknowledge the things that they have and haven't done, um, in ways that can be great role models for how we want society reflected in our political systems. Um. And so I I can say with certainty that they're shopping, and you should be and if you have any level of angst about what is happening in the world, not just as it relates to your um six year old or your sixty year old parents. Um, the most marginalized are not often protected in highly capitalistic systems, and capitalistic systems tend to be protected in the more conservative political parties. M hmm. That is me and saying what I'm not saying yet. I know every listener knows exactly what I just said, reading between the lines of how I hope the listener votes. But it's also going to get all of those people in your lives that you're like, I don't really feel like talking to my father in law or my husband or my boss about this. Like that's the front line, right, Like you gotta have those conversations, as exhausting as they are, Like you don't need to talk to Sophia about her political perspectives, but I'll talk about political perspectives of people all day because I think to your point, you know, I feel like part of my purpose is to help illuminate what we really believe in for each other rather than what we've been told to believe. Yeah, my favorite question to ask everyone, so you know, that the podcast is called, as you mentioned, work in progress, and I'm just curious when you hear the phrase, what is something in your life, whether it's personal or professional or political, that feels like a work in progress for you? Right now? I answered this question in a bulleted paragraph. Give me a second to just read what I wrote, because last night, when I listened to the opening of your show, I'm like, oh, wait a second, here's my work in progress. Let me just say I love it. I love that you've made notes. Of course you did. My work in progress is asking myself the challenging questions about how my thoughts and my behaviors are preventing the liberation of myself and of the most marginalized. How how I can work to prevent my ego and my supremacist tendencies from making decisions or being the easiest option for me, whether it's in relationship with other people or relationship with um, how I consume on behalf of my family, or my relationship with people I disagree with. So this idea of I'm desperate to be kinder to myself as it applies to not knowing the know and taking that opportunity to break systems that I embody in my own psyche, in my own being hard on myself, recognizing that that comes from an inherited system of patriarchy and white supremacy that came over by Europe, my European ancestors at the blessing of Pope Nicholas the Fifth in fifty two that said, go take if you're a white and Christian and mail, you're allowed to take anything that is not owned the person or land by another white and Christian male. You're invincible. You have the right, and you're entitled to it all. And I have hundreds of years of that behavior that I have to break inside of me as it applies to my own personal a quiet behaviors, let alone how I'm acting in a public way. M hmm. Well, I'm immensely grateful for that honesty, and I'm I'm immensely grateful that you wrote this book that can really give us some of that history, some of that data help us look in the mirror in ways that feel clarifying and also illuminating as to where we go from here. Because to me, I think a lot of people ask me when we have conversations like this, well, doesn't that feel heavy? No. To me, it feels inspiring to me, it feels illuminating to me. The entire point of being alive is to learn and dig deeper and evolve and grow. And I think that this is really the most important kind of evolution for us as a as a society right now. You know, we've got to be able to look into our past in order to move into a new kind of future. So I'm so excited for the book to come out. I'm so excited for the listeners to get to read it, and I can't wait. This work is liberating for all. This work is liberating for all, and I'm excited to have everybody doing it. This show is executive produced by Me, Sophia Bush, and sim Sarna. Our supervising producer is Alison Bresnick. Our associate producer is Cate Linley. This episode was edited by Matt Sasaki and our music was written by Jack Garrett and produced by Mark Foster. The show is brought to you by a Brilliant Anatomy