Work in Progress with Sophia BushAs a child, Luke Russert would grab a mic and narrate his surroundings, a habit that was not surprising given his parents' profession. His early exposure to journalism, growing up on sets and around politics, laid the foundation for his future career.
Luke joins Sophia to share his experience growing up in the world of journalism and the impact the loss of his dad, Tim Russert, had on him. He opens up about delivering a eulogy to a room full of presidents and senators, forging his own career path, dealing with comparisons to his father, and the surprising advice he received that made him decide to walk away from the world of news for a while.
He also talks about his journey of self-discovery and coming to terms with grief which led to his book, "Look for Me There: Grieving My Father, Finding Myself," available now.
Hi everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome to Work in Progress. Hi smarties. Today we are joined by a journalist that I absolutely adore, which feels a important because he's really fun and be important because it is an election year and we have.
Work to do. Friends.
Today's guest is none other than Luke Russert. He is an American author and broadcast news correspondent who worked for NBC News from twenty eight to twenty sixteen. His reporting was seen on NBC Nightly News, Today, Nbcnews dot Com, and MSNBC. He has been a guest anchor on so many other programs, including with Andrea Mitchell, and currently he is back at MSNBC launching their live events programming. I was lucky enough to attend the first one in Washington, DC and it was so cool. Luke is a really, really good guy, a great journalist, and as of this year, also an incredible author. He wrote a book called Look for Me There, Grieving my Father and Finding Myself. It was August of two thousand and eight, two months after the death of his father. Luke was just twenty two when this happened. By the way, when he got hired by NBC News as a correspondent, and in our interview today, we're going to talk about how sometimes diving into work can really be a distraction from grief and Luke's journey to admit to himself at the age of thirty that he really needed to look inward and it was that introspection that allowed him to grieve his father, that brought him so much closer to his mother, and that wound up leading to this beautiful book. Look for Me there, Let's dive in. I actually really like to ask people, you know, everybody I sit across from has these incredible stories of their lives, their careers. You know, you're this incredibly accomplished journalist. And I actually like to ask if if you were to look back at Luke as a kid, you know, what were you into as a little boy. Do you see kind of a through line in who you were as a kid and the things that you do or are curious about as an adult, or are we looking at two totally different people now.
I think there's a through line. It's a wonderful question. And something my mom like to say to this day is when Luke was a little boy, because I was an only child, is an I'm a leo as well. Is that I used to like to grab a microphone for like a little kid's microphone that was connected to a cassette player. Back then. You remember those things, right, the gen Z's like, what the heck are you talking about cassettes? So it was a cassette player and I used to talk into it and just have sort of roving conversations as a young boy about what I was seeing. I was like, and here comes the fire truck, and here comes the Bard landing blah blah blah. And so I always had this sort of comfort with a microphone or sort of being a little bit boisterous. But then it was almost like a show. So I would perform and then as an only child, I had to go back and be by myself for a long period of time and then go back out and whatnot. So I've always kind of been like that, where I like to be around people, but there's a certain time limit. And I was like that with my friends too, So I'd be, Oh, I'm so excited to play with my friends, but okay, six thirty, you gotta go home now, Johnny. Yeah, that was always interesting as far as my interest. A lot of them are similar always. I grew up loving sports. I grew up loving playing baseball. I grew up really interested in politics, as my father worked in politics and my mom was an investigative reporter. So there's always conversations around the dinner table that had to do with current so I've always had a real interest in that. And then growing up in Washington, I always loved history, and that's really continued on. I think the one that was a sort of learned behavior that came to as I got older and I started learning more about how the world works is really travel. Because I was a young kid, I was like, oh, it's cool, you know, I like to go travel a Baltimore to watch a baseball game or go to the beach. But these the idea of seeing all these places that were so far off and so enchanting in all their different ways, it was sort of like, No, those are in a book, or those are on the National geographic thing that we're watching on TV. I'm okay with that. It wasn't until I got older that I realized the value of seeing things really in person, and I've always been fascinated. When that switch happened, I think at some point you kind of get to a realization that you want to make up your mind for yourself and you want to feel and see how they are. And when I got there, it sort of was my completion as a person.
I'd say, that's so cool.
It really is credible when you can kind of look back and see that connective tissue and when you talk about being little and running around with a microphone and you know, recounting all of the observations you were making in the world. It's not lost on me that it's very much in like anchor voice.
Right.
Do you think you.
Know because both of your parents worked as journalists, So do you think that that was something that was just sort of in you, like you had absorbed that cadence and that manner of communicating almost by osmosis.
It's funny because my father had a kind of untraditional way of getting into TV. He was never trained in television, like through communications or anything like that. And I think for me it was my own way to sort of distinguish myself because he had a great TV voice, but it was not very polished. And I would say, Ivy the first one to say that to him, and he would say that was an advantage because it was very conversational. And I agree it's true, but for me it was all It's like I was emulating Tom Broke call and when I saw that, I thought that was funny. But what I've noticed is just sort of years go on, is you got to find that sweet spot between being believable and then being like Anchorman. Right. If you're up there and you're too rigid or you're two wooden, people immediately just go, oh my gosh, this guy came out of plastic packaging. Right. But if you're clear and concise, then people listen. So it's it's finding that right right tone and pitch. And I learned a little bit how to do that in school, which was neat. I had one professor, Kara ms Matowski, who is very very hardcore on trying to cut out ums and you nose. And so I'll be on the phone with my buddies and just shooting the breeze and I fall into you know, you know, and then I hear her voice, don't do that. So yeah, I love that.
Did you did you feel inspired to pursue journalism and communications or or did you feel any sort of pressure in terms of you know, having to follow in their footsteps, or do you think it was kind of a little combination of both.
I think it's a combination of bull thenk You grow up as a especially as an only child, when you're around your parents, you idolize them, and you're comfortable with what they are comfortable with with, oftentimes because it's the world, you know. I mean, I grew up around TV studios. The smell of Gaffer's tape to this day brings me back to holding my dad's hand walking onto his set. I grew up around politics. I even want with my mom on some of her assignments, so that's always been sort of natural. But I think to give my parents a lot of credit, they never put pressure on me to go in a particular path. What they always said is that whatever you choose to do, do it well, and be mindful of all the privileges that have been bestowed upon you and make use of them. That was the sort of message that was drilled into me. It's a very Catholic, you know, guilt to a degree, but also what have you done to improve the situation? And I carry that to this day. I think they were certainly proud when I went in that direction. But you know, when I was in college, I really was at one point wanted to be an international relations scholar or something in that place. So I really enjoyed that depth of study. But I was always drawn to getting a sort of gratification from being on camera or being on radio, or even at seeing your name printed in the written word. There's something to be said about that.
Yeah, I mean, it's such an incredible achievement. And I would imagine, especially because you grew up in it. You know, you saw the product we all get to watch, you know, on the nightly news or the special or you know, the election coverage, whatever it is. But you know you also had, as you say, the behind the scenes experiences of walking through the sets and meeting all the cameramen and knowing what a village it takes to, you know, get the news out there.
And it's not glamorous. And that's the thing is you go from your career, everybody thinks about television or the movie, Oh it's all this glitz and glam and it's so great, and it is a very dirty business, literal and physical. And what I mean by that is you'll go to these sets and they're dusty and decrepit, and there's a million people walking everywhere, and there's it's chaotic, right, and then in that fifteen second moment, it looks like the most beautiful thing that was ever put together. But it took a village. It's of great words, and I always remind people that, I always go, it's not easy to put together a good production. There's so many arts, and there's so many folks who are invaluable off camera, and whether you're in television news, or you're in sports, or you're in movies, it's not just cliche, and it can lead to a real breakdown.
I can tell you totally, yeah, totally, and the behind the scenes stuff, I mean, aside from you know how often just like sweaty and uncomfortable, like making television is there.
There must have.
Been an added kind of factor for you growing up as a kid, because you weren't just you know, on these sets and around journalists, but you grew up around a lot of really prominent political figures. And I think, you know, we're we seem to be having conversations at current about you know, the fact that it's really just people who are in all of these roles trying to figure out like how to hopefully make the country or the circumstances better for folks, Like was it sort of surreal to have seen inside of the world of politics as early as you started to.
I love the question because I think what you're hitting on is something that has often missed, which is that our leaders have the same failings that we do. They are people at their core, and as a young kid, remember what would kind of make me nervous would be the pomp and circumstance around a situation. So it'd be like, oh, we're going to visit Senator McCain. You go into the Capitol and there's these marble floors and these beautiful paintings, and you go through the office and there's a security person. But then once you get there, it's like, oh, this guy's kind of a short, white haired man in a suit, right, and you get past those layers. And I think there's something to be said about that, because oftentimes we can put people on pedestals, or we have these expectations that are just impossible to fulfill, and at their core, you have to sort of see them with their beings. I think for me, though, there was something that was very interesting that my father really instilled in me at a young age. He is, remember, he goes these folks who are elected officials and other people within government, they work for you. You are their boss. Don't forget that. He goes, there is a part of the job where they need to connect with you, because remember, you reelect them. And I was always fascinated by seeing the politicians who really understood that, who understood that they had to do well, they had to give back to their communities, or they had to give back to the people who put them there, versus the ones who were just so ego hungry and so power hungry. And you could make that differentiation from a very young age and you'd learn interesting things. I remember my father he worked for Senator Mornihan from New York before he got involved in television news, and we would go visit Senator moynihan, and Senator Mornihan would take all these photographs with kids, and he would you write out his signature on four hundred five hundred photos, and you'd be like, those are all voters someday, right, And you'd just remember those little things and it's good to ground you there as well.
Yeah, we'll be back in just a minute. But here's a word from our sponsors. I'm sort of gobsmacked thinking about what you grew up around and got to see. And I think, you know, there's such an immense, as you said, a privilege to that, to seeing you know, how the sausage is made. And then I think about also how young you were when your dad passed, Like to be twenty two and lose a parent, I imagine was just so immensely hard, and because of who your dad was, it also put his passing on such a large, I mean literal stage, like you had to deliver a eulogy to.
A huge crowd.
Was it hard to have the size and scope of his passing be so big or was it comforting in a way because you got to see how many people whose lives he touched and how much he was so loved.
So in my book, I open up with his passing in the whirlwind that surrounded giving that eulogy, and it's remarkable in those times of great turmoil and you're super stressed out, you're super upset, you're trying to figure out how to proceed forward, and something like that actually became almost comforting in a way. I'm going to write this speech to the best of my abilities, and I'm going to go out there and just try to make my father proud. That was really the goal. Now, when you go up to the lecter and you look out and you see Barack Obama and John mccad and Nancy Pelosi beca it's a little oh boy. But I took a deep breath and did it. And I think for me is that I realized in that immediate moment when my father passed away and there was such an outpouring of support, I fed off of that and it was very comforting in the moment because it was a loss that was shared by everybody. I think as I got older, it wasn't until oh, I think maybe when I was in late twenties or thirty that I realized that in in that time, I was really trying to be there for everybody else, and I wasn't so much there for myself, because to be there for myself would really have to admit everything that happened, that my dad was really going on, I'd have to process that pain. So to some degree it was easier to try to be this living embodiment of him to all those folks who were aggrieving and then feed off their energy. I tell this story. I was I think about twenty eight, twenty nine. I was having lunch somewhere near the Capitol the friend of mine, and it was outside, and this lady walked by and she just started crying and gave me a hug. And I immediately stood up and gave her a hug, and I said, thanks you. I loved your dad. I said, thank you so much. And my friend said to me, she goes, isn't that strange for you? I said, no, that's not strange, it's just nice. It's such a nice moment. Then it was when I sat back and I was like, yeah, it's a little strange that you're sitting on the street and someone gives you a hug and starts crying about your lost parent. So I think it's always been a balance for me for that to this day. People come up and say very nice things, and I always think it as a source of strength. But I've grieved properly now, so it's easier.
Yeah.
Well, and I think there's something really powerful in what you're speaking about, and I particularly appreciate you, know, the way that you share in the book, and the way that you are willing to discuss these topics because you know, we're in this I think wonderful era where we've got so much research, Like our generation now understands more about mental health and trauma and processing and grief. Like you know, I think about our grandparents. They didn't have any of these resources, right, And yet I think it's still really hard, particularly to get men talking about these experiences. And there is something really profoundly inspiring for me watching the way that you do this.
And I don't know.
This generational experiences for you as a man who is you know, a peer and someone I really admire who's talking about this sacred relationship with his dad and being so open about what the process has been like for you because you were young and you did, in some ways have to perform and thank the people who were crying to you about your parent who you had lost, and there is I think something that can delay your experience of your feelings when you have to perform and take care of other people. And I just I really appreciate that you're willing to share sort of all the aspects of that and how long it took to start to realize that you need to grieve differently.
Well, thank you. I think what you say about our generation is something that I take pride in for our generation because I think we have shifted the narrative on grief. And when I was twenty two and my father passed away, so much of what I was, what I would heat was stay strong, be tough, get through it, be there for mom. You'll be fine, you know, make them proud, go out there, you know, stiff upper lip. And I took that to heart for a long time. But there's a certain emptiness to it because in that space, you're not really processing the enormity of what happened to you. You just sort of are trying to go along. But how are you to go along when your anchor in your rocket and your best friend is gone. And it wasn't until I really went to that space of vulnerability where I could admit that I didn't have all the answers, that I was not okay with everything, that I got to eventually a place at peace. But it's only within that vulnerability that's possible. And I think for men, thankfully, the narrative is changing on that. There's a lot of work in the space of meraal vulnerability about It's okay to be to open up, it's okay to check in on your friends. But I think there's a sort of deeper conversation to be had, which is that we're to time now where we have all these resources available to us, and we see that there has never been a wider gap between those who have access to mental health and those who don't. And that is something where I'm a big proponent of we need to close that gap, because when you have these services available to people and they really start to use them, not only do they improve themselves, they improve their community. And that's just something where I think so many men and there's a crisis for men in America now, especially young boys who are trying to figure out their way forward and what is masculinity in America today? And it seems to be these two extremes. And I always say, no, just at the core, be a good human being and go out from there. And it's not easy, but the more vulnerable men could be, or the more they can just open themselves up to having those conversations, they get to a much better place. So it's a friend of mine. I don't. I'd like to tell the story. He very tough guy, big football player, and he lost his dad and he was very upset and we talked and he ended up going to therapy about it. And now every conversation I have with him, this was one of the strongest, because everybody, I love you. Man. It's just like, oh my gosh, you know, just to be able to say those words. And you know, traveling around the world you encounter a lot of cultures that's very normal. You know, that's very, very very normal, especially in South America and parts of Italy. Of course we all know, but it's just that connection that men can have where it doesn't feel so isolating and you don't have to keep everything inside.
I love that.
Yeah.
Do you think some of the pressure, you know, after your dad passed, there wasn't that much time went by until NBC News, you know, hired you to cover politics. You were so young, you obviously you were reared in that world, and yet you were a young guy, you know.
Having to step into this role.
Was it a comfort? Do you think that it was also a little bit of a distraction because you could show up and perform and sort of continue his legacy. How did you make sense of it? You know, at such a young age.
I think distraction is a good word, and as a combination of things, I think the distraction element is the greatest cure for misery is hard work. So if you are miserable, if you're depressed, if you're sad, and you throw yourself into some hard work, that is a temporary alleviation of of what's happening. I think the other component of it was you'd be stupid not to take the opportunity. It comes along once in a lifetime. You had this incredible eulogy that was seen by millions. You are being tagged as a voice of a generation. Do you want to try and tap into that? I didn't say that people did, but sort of, do you want to try to tap into that? Right? And then there's a component of it, which I think it's something that I probably still struggle with to this daye to a degree, which is legacy management, legacy preservation. I want to make the old man proud, I want to make the family proud. I want to keep that fire burning in any way I can. And I think it was a combination of those reasons that you're working hard to alleviate, grief, family legacy, legacy preservation, latching myself onto that rocket that it was at the time, and also the real belief that I could do something worthwhile and do something positive. That's what it came to. But I was having grown up around television. I knew it was very vicious. I knew. I was under no illusion that it was going to be a cakewalk. I knew that there would really a lot of mean spirited things out there. But I think what I underestimated was just given the time, I did not think the social media would be as vicious as it was because social media was not as big as it is now now In two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, Twitter was just kind of starting out. Instagram didn't really exist, you know, there was no TikTok basically, So it was once Twitter took off and you could open up your phone and see the nastiest things about yourself, and people would be like, but there's all these nice things too, but it's like your your eyes.
Yeah, yeah, all had that in common.
It is right, but yeah, it was. It was certainly a decision which I look back on and sometimes I go, oh, do you regret it should you have done something else, And I just try to think. I always say when you ask those questions about do you wish do you wish, you have to go back to what you were in that moment, because that's what was guiding it. Hindsight of Couruses twenty twenty, But in that moment, it was it was the right decision for me. I wish there was things I knew, but I think what you hit, what you said on about the distraction was a big part of it too. For sure.
Yeah, I get that.
We'll be back in just a minute after a few words from our favorite sponsors. How was it with you know, your new colleagues being onboarded into that space? Was were people excited?
As you know, in media, internal rivalries are very they exist, and I would always say about television news is that the job itself is very difficult, but the internal struggles are perhaps even more difficult to a degree, and I think learning about that firsthand was a real education. I think there was a lot of people who are rooting for me. There's a lot of people who are rooting against me. As I got older, especially in my mid twenties, I really used that as fuel as a competitive fuel, and that was great for a few years because every win you had would be ah, I avenged them, I got the better of them. Unfortunately, it's hard to keep going like that at full speed all the time because some part of you feels empty. Is if everything's a competition of everything's I have to prove myself continuously, it's not you don't ever really relax. And I always say, as there's some people were really good at that, and their names were Michael Jordan and Tom Brady, right, and there's others that they do it and TV. But it's I kind of came to realization, wasn't something that I wanted to do to that degree, like especially in comparison to my father, you know, he was on that sort of legend category. So I could be very solid and very good, but it's, well, why aren't you the best of all time? I'm sorry? Right? And I think that was That's sort of something that took a while to get used to. But as I age, I got to a place of peace about that of saying I did pretty darn good.
You know, do you have favorite memories that come to mind when you think about your time as a reporter.
Oh yeah. I mean the thing that I love the most was especially that time because it was as it was not as toxic then as it is now, So it really was a different era, even though it was not that long ago. You know, I was there between twenty oh nine on the Hill. I was there from twenty on nine and twenty sixteen, and it was a super exciting time because Obama had just come in and there were all these major big bills that were going forward. There was a happened trade bill for the environment, there was a healthcare bill, There's all these different budget fights. But it was a time when people thought a lot was possible and there was just all this action, and there was still that element of civility. It was eroding, it was eroding, but it was still there, especially in the beginning. So I loved it being around that. My favorite memories, though, to be honest with you, was when I lived them, I did not like them, but now retrospectively I do, which is being there those late nights on Capitol Hill, for those big pieces of legislation, being there till two, three, four in the morning, because the bonds you make not only with your colleagues but with also the lawmakers is something that I think is underreported. I think when especially on the hill, when you're covering someone for such a long time, at some point you know they acknowledge you. They don't have to like you, they don't have to hate you, but you're we're in this together. And you get that in film and TV as well. You know, at some point you've around people so much it's sort of we're in this together. So those are the memories that I hold on to. And the other thing was just it was my own kind of participation in democracy at that time, which I thought was really neat just being a young kid being able to report and kind of it's sometimes being too fearless with the questions I would ask, but always going back to well this is this is my government, and I want to contribute, which is always cool.
Yeah, I love that.
So, I mean, you mentioned in the sort of transition and really the I would say decomposition of civility that we all watched from the time that President Obama was elected and people really let the ugly out to you know, Trump being elected in twenty sixteen. It was a hard eight years and you resigned from NBC in twenty sixteen, after those eight years. Was that an immensely personal decision for you, or was it partially motivated by this kind of breakdown in our you know, our ability to collaborate that you were observing.
So I'll tell you his story that's in the book is in twenty fifteen, I was walking down the whole and House Speaker John Dayner saw me and I covered him rather aggressively, and he said, I want to talk to you, and I thought he was upset about coverage. To believe it or not, politicians do you know, chew you out of They don't like the coverage. So I go into his office and he's smoking a cigaret and reading a golf magazine and he asked you a question. He goes, what are you doing here? I said, well, sir, this is your office you called me in. I'm going to go to the Speaker of the House's office. As we go, what are you doing here on Capitol Hill? Because you've been here at that point close to seven years. He goes, You walk around and you own the place, but I just want to tell you. He goes, there's a lot of people who are here ten twenty thirty forty years, and they never know anything else in this world that this is their forever home. It's a transactional place. Someone's always up, someone's always down. You don't really know how the world works. You might be better served to get out of this bubble and go try something new. And it was interesting coming from him because he was someone who's literally on the top of the mountain saying that view up here is not that great. And it was something that was profound because there was a voice inside my head that had always said, is this it is this who you are? Is this just going to be what your path is? And are you truly committed? And him having that conversation with me opened the door to thinking that there could be another way, and then it was okay to think like that. So that was very big, but it was still a really personal, important decision. I felt like I was if I were to leave, I'd let down my family, I'd let down in NBC, I'd let down the viewers. So I had to wrestle with it. What made it easier was this slow decline that had gone on with stability with what was generating coverage and and uh, I was at the end of my contract and they said, you know, you got to give us an answer here. You've been really stringing this out. I said, okay, So I had this report about a veterans affairs issue that I had been working really hard on, and it was a healthcare for veterans affairs that had worked really hard on it, and I was all set to deliver it, and I'm all miked up. I'm in the Capital, and in my ear it goes, we got to scrap your report because we're going to take Donald Trump's reaction to the shooting death of Harambe the gorilla alive right now. And I'm just like, okay. That was the cue, because we've gone to a place where if that's what is dictating the news cycle, then we really have to reevaluate our priorities. And I did that point, and I just knew that even if I left for six months to a year, a year and a half, I needed to get out to just figure out who I was and what I wanted to do. And then this was not where I wanted to be in the immediate moment. And sadly it's gotten worse since then for the most part.
Well, I mean, watching things going on on the Hill half the time, I feel like I'm watching, you know, the latest season of the Real World, like it's an insane reality show fight that is so not based in reality. And to your point that you know should be focused on things like veterans affairs and healthcare, and everyone's just trying to own each other for Twitter points.
It's crazy. You're so right about that. It's so oppressing because you can go to the most conservative places in America, go to most liberal places in America in about eighty percent of the people in those places would say I really want them to just work on stuff like make my life better, make it make it better, do things for me, and they cow they cater to some of the most extreme voices. But yeah, to your point, like, especially on the right, I think this this desire to constantly just score points, to be in the business of being scorned and angry, and I'm going to want up you and one up you. Look at what's happened. They the house representatives can't effectively run like I can't even basically the lights can't even turn on its business. It's really crazy, it is.
And it just doesn't need to be like that.
I imagine that you know, knowing you needed a break because of you know, what was getting covered versus what should was part of it. And obviously, you know, you've shared a bit about how you were also coming to terms with realizing that you had not processed your grief. And one of the amazing things about your book Look for Me There is that you really do go in depth about that journey to find yourself after you left NBC. And you know, as you say, hindsight's twenty twenty, right, like, in the moment, we're just trying to survive and then you look back and go, oh, I guess we see where all.
The doubts connect. But in the moment you.
Did you have a plan? Did you say, Okay, this is where I'm going to go first, or did it all sort of unfold and you just kept following the path.
So my only plan was to travel. And my mother was a peace for volunteer at Columbia in the early sixties and one of the things that she had always said to me is that her travels instilled a sense of her of what she knew was possible for herself, and when she was able to measure herself up against the world, especially at that time, as a young woman in a very sexist culture in Colombia in the sixties, having to try to build a school. Dealing with this machismo, she found a sort of inner strength, and she said, you really only find that when you travel, when you take yourself out of your comfort zone, and you put yourself someplace where nobody knows your name, you don't know the language. What are you made of? So she had always kind of said to me that I wouldn't say worthless, but that there was a part of the lacking that I had not subjected myself to this, that I had not jumped into sort of travel. So I knew I wanted to travel. The question was I didn't necessarily know where or how, but I knew I would just start doing it. And the original plan was maybe six months to a year. I love John Steinbeck's book Travels with Charlie. So first the first trip I took was I got in my old truck and I drove around Nain with my pug just for ten days of unstructured time, which I had never had believed or not my entire life. At that point, I was thirty years old and there had unstructured time for ten days like that, there's always something going on, there's an internship. When I was a kid, I had studied, traveled, football, everything, So having that time to reflect on, Okay, who are you independent of this privileged bubble you grew up in? Who are you independent of your last name? What are you about? And what are what is holding you back? Or what is It was an internal diagnostic check that started in that trip at Maine, and then it started to become more profound the more places I went and experiencing different cultures and getting out of my comfort zone and realizing that the further I got out of my comfort zone, the more fulfilled I felt. The more the more fulfilled that I had actually accomplished something and not living with as much regret. And it was a very powerful journey, especially in the beginning, especially those first year and a half where it was so eye opening and I was journaling, had to clip. It was really a profound space for me.
Do you think that you always knew you'd write a book about it? Is that part of how you managed to stay on the road for so long because you were writing and writing and writing and thought, this is something.
The reason why I kept these journals is because my mother god lover had said, you know, you got to have something that grounds you, and I took that to heart because I had worked my I always was working when I was when I was fourteen, my parents you have to get a job in the summer. You're of age. Now you have to go get a job, go work. So it was working since I was fourteen. There's always sort of something I felt like I had to do my parents. Did you do your homework, did you clean your room? Did you do everything that you had to do? So having that thing to ground me ended up being the Journal. But it was also a period of immense reflection there. And it wasn't until I had gone through a sort of difficult time of all, right, when is this travel going to end? Or will it end? Or am I permanently untethered? I don't really know what this is about anymore. It was at that moment that I had this idea. There was a voice in my head that says, go back and rewrite. We read them. You haven't really read a lot of the stuff from the beginning in a while. And I sat down for a few days and I read it from beginning to end and got there's something here, because I think there's a lot of people out there that feel lost. I mean, there's a lot of people out there that can't quite put their finger on what is bothering them or the weight that they have on their shoulders, but are really trying to explore it. And I realized that my narrative was I was doing two things. I was simultaneously running away from something, and that was my last name, the burdens and expectations of Washington, DC and the culture of politics. But I was also looking for something, and that was the finding piece with what app with my father. And it was those sort of two lines that I saw, those two through lines that I saw in the journals, which I said, Okay, I think there's something here about self discovery and I think there's something here about grief and what can you do about it? And a friend of mine, she said, you know what writing a book to a degree is to some degree of selfish act, or the sense that an egotistical act, like what do you have to impart on this world? I mean, why should I care? Why should I give my time to read something like that? And I thought it was a very smart question, and I answered it in the immediately, and I said, I don't care if this book ends up in the bargain bin in a gas station. If some kid picks it up and they feel a little less lost, then I've done my job. And when I gave that answer so fervently right away, that's when I knew, all right, you got to pursue this and do something with it, because you're clearly passionate about it.
Yeah, it's lit a fire in you.
I did.
And now for our sponsors, I imagine that writing a book like this is immensely therapeutic both I would think, to a grieving process but also to you know, unexpected moments of discovering joy. And I'm curious how that how those sort of scales tipped for you, because I would imagine that in writing the book, you really got reacquainted with amazing lessons that your dad taught you, and you went through these feeling exercises of grieving his passing. Was it very sort of moments of high and low to write it?
Yeah, I mean it's a huge undertaking, I think in my case, because I had gone to so many countries and I went to north of you know, seventy countries. So I had to figure out a way. All right, am I going to talk about all of them? But then I also had to figure out what did I have in those journals? So I wrote them all out. I went into San Francisco, my grandmother's old apartment, and I literally wrote out the journals and what I was what I called the Beast, which is kind of like war in peace, just over over one hundred thousand words. I want two hundred thousand words, to be honest with you. It was very, very, very long, just to sort of see what I had. And it was doing that first draft that I experienced those reigns of emotions where I would start crying while writing something that I was trying to find my voice, so I could see my voice in the journals. How was I going to get that into pros that actually made sense to people? Something that was I noticed. It was very interesting, and this is a blessing of the technological times we live in. I took so many pictures during my travels that I could go back to a day in the journal and then look at the picture on my phone and the brain would fire off, Oh, I remember that Tuck Tuck ride. I remember what I ate that day, right, and that is incredibly helpful. What was very interesting in the writing process that was once a publisher agreed to do it and I had to write it out in a way that was more formal, and write out in a way that was good God willing. That was when I really started to see the enormity of I think, everything that I had gone through, and it added to the richness of the text and the reason why it was at that phase and not the sort of initial ones. I think the initial one was you got to get everything out, You got to get everything out, and I'm simultaneously doing all the historical research about the places I was at, and I'm making sure my geography is correct and I'm making sure the numbers are correct, and blah blah blah. It was the second go around where I'm really trying to get go deeper and you have an editor that says is that all you have? Can you open up a little bit more? Can you open up a little bit more? And the most honest is the most creative. And when you get to that place of honesty, you get on a roll, then it just comes out. And I was fortunate to get there. It took a minute, but you can get there.
That's amazing. And what was it like, you know, for you with your relationship with your mom, because obviously she's processing, you know, her own loss were what was your relationship like growing up with her? And then how did this whole event and subsequent time period change it if it did.
The book was my relationship with my mother the single greatest exercise I ever did, and the reason why it was through writing it that I came to realize who she was as a woman, independent of the role of mom. And I write the book very candidly. I grew up closer to my father. My father was my best friend. We would go to ball games, we would hang out. You know, mom, I love my mom, but mom was always harder on me. My mom as the coach that it would say, you know, you could have done better if I brought home a B plus. Why wasn't an a mis? Or brought it home an a mis? Why wasn't in an a You know, you scored twelve points, you should have scored fifteen, right. Whereas my father was more of the coach of like, you did a great job out there, you know, switch up a few things. We can do even better the next time. They both had high expectations, but it was a sort of different delivery. And that's just a result of the household my mom grew up, and she grew up in a very strict house where excellence was the expectation. It was that we don't demand excellence. Excellence is what you will do no matter what. So it was through the writing process in recounting the travels that I did with my mother, we went around Latin America together and mentioned she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia. We travel to here is the first time I had ever done a one on one trip with my mom. I had done so many with my dad, and it wasn't until I was thirty one that we'd actually traveled away together for a long period of time. And it was in those moments where I saw how fearless she was in these foreign countries. I saw her deep desire to get into places where people really lived, and I saw her challenge people. I saw her challenge the standups quo, like asking these aristocrats in Paraguay, why do you have such terrible income inequality? Just being very forward and very blunt, and I came to realize, I go, you know, that person who may I may have felt was really hard on me, This is how she This is what she did as a woman to be a successful writer in the time when when she graduated from college a lot of her friends were told to be storedicses or teachers or paralegals. The pathway into doing big time jobs was very hard, and she always used to say to me, because you know, for a long time, especially in the seventies, when I was working, I felt like I had to work four times as hard, and I was always being at my shoulder. I was always kind of a token that I felt like I could be disposed of at any time. So it was in writing the book and then seeing her in act in foreign places that I began to understand who she was independent of the woman who I thought was too hard on me growing up, and I realized why she was so hard on me. It's because she wanted me to a know how the world works. But B I think more importantly, get to that place where you could be the most giving of yourself because you're trying your hardest h to totally to be successful totally.
That's so special and.
What is it like for you now, you know, coming back into You've had this huge, you know, period of growth and exploration and you know, trenching through family history and on this real global landscape, you know, as you traveled the world, and now you're you know, you're back home, You're coming back into MSNBC. You're creative directing live events. We were lucky enough to do one together recently.
And thank you did great.
Thank you. We had such a good time.
Nia and I got to go to d C with Luke and the whole MSNBC team and.
Mea is fantastic. She's got to run for president one day.
Oh my god, I know, I can't wait to vote for her. And you know, we sat with Steph Ruhl and chatted about finance and women and feminism.
Was so cool.
And I think, you know, now, having taken this dive into your book, I don't know, I feel like I understand more about what makes you tick, obviously, and I guess I wonder, you know, what does this homecoming but doing something totally different feel like, why was this new role the one you wanted to take on?
Yeah? I never thought I'd go back into media, especially Yeah, and anything that kind of brushed up against political media. I thought I was going to go more in to sort of travel and rule exploration. And what I realized around well traveling the world is that most people are really decent, and most people their basic cares. They want a roof over their head, they want food in their stomach, they want opportunity for their children. And then, interestingly enough, when I got back to the United States and I went on this long book tour for about four or five months and went around north, south, south, east, west and met all types of people. The commonality with the people I met around the world is the same is it's just sort of people even in the country is privileged and is wealthy United States, people just won't have a sense of dignity and they won't to have a sense of opportunity. And I left realizing that we don't necessarily talk about that enough. We get very caught up in the news of the day. We get very caught up in the extremes, or we get caught up in what stirs the pot or gets under people's emotions, these sort of wedge issues. And I became attracted to sort of having these new conversations about issues that exist and how do we solve them? Because all the Republicans are not going to disappear tomorrow, All the Democrats are not going to disappear tomorrow, right, all the corporations aren't going to disappear tomorrow. You have to figure out a way forward and what is that? And by the way, kudos to you because you've been on top of these things for a very long time and you have so many wonderful ideas you put them into action. And I've always so great about your presentation. Was you look at the issue empowering women through finance, empowering especially young companies with investment and seed growth. It's that's something where if you frame it, you can go to the really conservative places and they would be like, actually, think that's a good idea because that provides an opportunity and it provides jobs. And suddenly you have a town which may be down on their luck and you have these grants and young female entrepreneurs but already entrepreneurs and wait, they just built a business that has fifteen people, right, and that's better for everybody at the restaurant down the street. So it's having those conversations and getting that out there was attractive to me and what can we do to foster that? So I've been working on that now for the last few months. It's really interesting. It's kind of just sort of see the landscape of where companies are and where policymakers are, where thought leaders are, where activists are, and kind of crafting programs that sort of showcase there's a lot of solutions. So it's not something I already thought I would do, but I'm much better for it because of the global perspective that I was able to gain and the real national one too. I've been into forty nine states, north Dakota. I got to get to you and just to see the sort of diversity of the world and diversity of our country and what solutions can work for everybody. And I don't think it's that complex. That's you know, I thought what you said about Capitol Hill is so true. Is there's so many things that we need to address, but the solutions are there if people can just get out of their own way or at least jump start, they at least get on the path right. And it's this hesitancy and this bureaucracy and this partisanship that don't even allow us to get on a path. And that's what that's anything I can do to try to help that at least get on the path is worthwhile.
Yeah, I find it.
Really it's just important and it's important to inspire people and remind them.
Yeah, it's important to care. I mean, like, that's the thing that there's so many young people who they feel just so burnt out or they feel unheard, and it goes, what's it matter? It's all the same. Now, it does matter because if you don't participate, the people who you dislike the most are the ones who have power. The people who are actually taking the time to organize are the ones that are eventually going to have the power over you. And once you think of that in those terms, exactly some folks wake up exactly.
Well, you know, you're you're sitting in this really interesting position where you're bringing people back to the table literally at these you know, live events. You're putting people in community, which I think, to the point of what you were sharing earlier, when you sit with people, no matter how differently you think they believe or act or vote or whatever, then you do you realize we're all largely the same. We care about our families. We want people to be happy. You know, when you look ahead at this year, whether it's a personal goal or a professional one, what do you think as you survey the landscape? For you feels like your work in progress.
I am obsessive about the idea of stivility, and I think what made my father very special and why you was so beloved across the political island from all sides, was that he was able to maintain a sense of stivility in a sense of quorum. And I think for me, anything I can do to foster that is beneficial. It's so hard now, and I think a lot of people shy away from that because it is easier to get angry, It is easier to sort of say things that are completely outlandish. But I think you can have very healthy debate and you don't have to be so dismissive or just treat the other side like the absolute enemy. It's not easy, naive, right, But that's one thing I want to contribute to. The Other thing, though, that I find myself coming back to, is the idea of nuance. And so much of what we see in this country is deemed black or white, when I think we really kind of live in a gray. It's a perpetual gray. And when you understand that nuance and you understand the trade offs that are being made, and you understand or where's reality what can really happen? People tend to appreciate it. And I think that's something that spurs action into Okay, what's the art of the possible? What can I get a decent deal out of it? I might not get everything, but can I get a decent deal out of this? And that's that's an important thing that I want to work on and kind of promote a little bit because I wish there was a different system. I wish and it's great. We can pray for it and we can work towards it, but it doesn't come overnight, right, And so you guys to be created and you have to take one step at a time and move forward. And just because not everyone's on the same page as you are, doesn't mean they're the enemy. And I think that's something where a lot of people can work together to make things happen.
I agree, Well, from your lips, my friends, let's see what we can do this year as we ramped.
Into the election.
It'll be interesting.
Thank you. So much, Luke, you have a good rest of your day. I'll see you soon.
Indeed, bye bye, okay bye
