Michael Moore is an Academy-Award winning filmmaker, best-selling author, and now podcast host. He joins Sophia on "Work In Progress" to talk about why he wanted to start his new show "Rumble," share his thoughts on the 2020 election (he believes four or five of the Democratic candidates could beat Trump) and he reflects on our gun violence epidemic and how it has progressed since "Bowling For Columbine." Executive Producers: Sophia Bush & Sim Sarna Supervising Producer: Allison Bresnick Associate Producer: Caitlin Lee Editors: Josh Windisch and Matt Sasaki Music written by Jack Garratt and produced by Mark Foster Artwork by Kimi Selfridge. This show is brought to you by Brilliant Anatomy.
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. On today's episode, I made a new friend, and I am beyond excited because he's always been a personal hero of mine. Today I'm talking to Michael Moore. Yes, the Michael Moore whose brilliant documentaries like Pulling for Columbine, Fahrenheit nine eleven and Fahrenheit eleven nine have made us take a step back and examine the systems in which we're living. And now he has a new podcast called Rumble. We'll talk about why he chose to start it and the importance of having long and thoughtful conversations and listening to others. He also tells me he thinks four or five candidates have the ability to beat Trump. Thank you, Michael, And he explains that the America he wants to save is the America we haven't had yet, but he believes it's coming. I hope you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Welcome Michael Moore. First of all, let me just say I'm thrilled you're here and I'm now extra excited to learn that you drink your coffee out of an Oprah mug. Yes, that was fantastic, my Oprah Mug. I was on the show. I think four or five times love that over the years. And uh, you know, have you ever met her? Yes? And I I kept my cool somehow. I thought I was going to pass out, but I held it together. It really is like you're in the room with some other worldly person. And when she comes out before the show to talk to the audience in the pre show, it's I mean literally, people are in tears. You cannot believe they're in the same room. But she's such a good soul and a force for good. And I've been encouraging her to run for president for some time because I think she would win very easily. I do too, And I think she would be so wonderful. Yes, oh my god, Yes, Uh, she would care, she would be kind, but also she would expect people to get the job done. Like if anybody in Congress was misbehaving, they'd have to come in for an hour session with Dr phil or something like that. Wouldn't that be great? This I said to her too. I said, listen, I will if you will run for president, I will make sure that you'll still be able to do the four pm show every day from the Oval office, because I understood or Oprah becoming president is not it's really a step down. I mean, what's your Oprah, what's above that? I mean, it's like, but she said no. But this was the years ago when I asked her to do this, and now she has been toying with it, as you probably know, in the last year or so. Maybe the two of us need to take her to dinner and just have a little brainstorm. Yes, yes, I will. I'm down with that. I will do whatever it needs to be done. I mean I have felt. Look, here's how I feel about next year's election. The Democrats that are running. There's easily four or five current Democrats that I believe will beat uh Donald Trump. Oh my god, Michael, you don't know how relieved I am to hear you say that. I actually just my whole body just relaxed. I was so scared that today you were going to say we're fucked and he's winning again, and I I can't tell you what that means to me. Well, we are fucked. I mean, I will not need equivocally. But listen, if the election were held today, I'm absolutely convinced that in the popular vote, Hillary won by three million votes. I believe the Democrat, whoever it would be, whether it was Bernie or Elizabeth, Biden or Boudage, they would win the popular vote by five to maybe even six million votes. I believe it would almost double from what people have been going through. The people who stayed home, especially in the large states like California, New York, they are going to come out in droves next year. But the keywords there were California, New York. Because what we have to win is Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Hillary just one Minnesota by a few thousand votes, so that's a state on the edge, as his New Hampshire. So we have our our work in front of us. I'm i hesitate because I don't want anybody to think when I when I just said that that I'm I'm somewhat hopeful, because I also know that we could very easily again kill it in the popular vote, and we could lose the electrocology again. It's very possible. So relax, relax a little bit, but you know, don't sit back in the chair. All of us from this moment until next November three, we have to be um. Every available moment we have should be spent on what am I doing to help end the madness and the madness and then not just get rid of Trump. I think we have a were's two jobs to do. Get rid of Trump, but also get rid of the pieces of the system that gave us Trump. You know, the electoral system that's all messed up, that where where Russians can interfere with it, where people can hack into the We should have no computerized voting. I mean, I wish, I hope states are stopping that between now and next November, because that's a real danger. But the system that Trump didn't fall out of the sky, so we have to we have to understand how did he get here, how did this happen, and how do we make sure it never happens again. God, I'm excited to get into this with you today. I before we before we take a deep dive down the rabbit hole, I am very excited to tell my audience about something. You just launched a podcast of your own called Rumble, which I love. You're the first person I'm speaking to. I mean literally, we just launched a couple hours ago. I'm so excited about it. Michael. I saw the name and I and I and I had this vision of you like you, You send these sort of seismic shock waves through systems of complacency. And I think Rumble is a genius title for you and for your podcast. I might also be partial because I grew up in California. I'm an earthquake veteran um and I and I and I just love the idea of of causing kind of a you know, shaking through the ground to to wake people up. So what's it about and what made you want to start a podcast? Well, I've always been a great efficionado of sound. I believe sound, especially in the work that you and I do, is often neglected or ignored or given the short shrift. And when I go in to speak to a class of film students, I tell them right away sound is more important than picture, uh the because it's the sound that carries the story. If you've ever been in a movie theater, and let's say the frame of the film is a little off on the curtain or or the camera person who shot at the camera jiggles a little goes out of focus. You know, the average person does not care. But watch what happens in a movie theater. Suddenly the song goes out. People people are screaming that writting out the door to tell the manager. They're throwing you know, goober's at the screen. And that's because the sound is what is really carrying the story the picture. This is the art part of it. This is the the nice icing on the cake. But if you can't hear it, it's no good. So I've always thought that the medium that allows us to not see pictures. I remember my grandparents. I mean they had a big old radio in the living room. And my grandfather was born just three years after the Civil War. So yeah, I know you're you know, you're looking and you're thinking, Mike, really, I mean, you look so young. How could this be possible? It's impossible. But what happened is in my family and that's just my grandfather. Now, that's that's my mom's dad. Civil War. But it seemed like the men and if these three generations all got married late, they didn't get married to their or have children. Maybe they got married earlier, but they didn't somehow, they didn't have children until they were in their forties or fifties, and that kind of slowed everything down. What happens when you have grandparents that are from the right after the Civil War is the stories that are being passed down through the generations don't go through seven sets of grandparents. It's just it just went from him to my mom to me. So I saw a different way of living. They didn't have I don't know if they had any paint on their walls or wallpaper, because it was nothing but bookshelves. Every wall was a bookshelf and hundreds of books. Because that's how they entertained themselves. They read. They read books, and the two other things that were in the living room was this big gas radio and musical instruments. They played the Irish fiddle, my uncle played the saxophone. Everybody everybody played the piano, and it was one of those kind of old Irish upright, you know, pianos, not the grand sort of but that's how they entertained themselves. And so out of that radio they would sit around and I remember that they were probably the last people in the town that I grew up in that had a television. So this is right up into the sixties they're still listening to the very few shows that are left on the radio that told a story, The Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet. And it was clear to me, after I reached a certain age, the reason they enjoyed just the sound so much was because they got to make the movie in their head. They got to create the images. And everybody has a different camera and a different director in their heads, and everybody is filming it and seeing it in a different way, slightly different. The story is the same because they have the audio for the story. I was fascinated by that, and so I listened to that for as long as it lasted into the sixties and then around um and I kind of tell the story in this first podcast that we just posted a few hours ago, of how Kennedy President Kennedy was assassinated in November of and I was nine years old, and it had quite a chilling effect on a nine year old like me. And two days after he's killed, three days after he's killed, I was the only one in delivering watching TV and a man stepped out of the shadows. They were bringing the assassin, uh Lee Harvey Oswald through the police garage and a man stepped out, put a gun to him and killed him. And as a nine year old, I'm literally watching a man being shot and killed in front of my eyes, and I'm screaming at my mom to turn off the vacuum because I couldn't hear what was going on, and they didn't have instant replay then, so they weren't replaying it. She's what's wrong. They've They've just killed Oswald. And I was pretty messed up for the next month. I had a lot of nightmares. And so it was Christmas time a month later, and the one gift that I got that my parents got me for that Christmas was a large reel to reel tape recorder. It was like thirty pounds. It was not a portable thing. It had the big reels of tape. And immediately I just started recording, recording my thoughts, recording the thoughts of my sisters. The kids in the neighborhood would come and stare at it. We'd sit around the table and have a discussion. And so I've been doing this a version of this since I was nine years old, and I appreciated an early age the idea of just capturing the sound just that you and I having this conversation without anything other than but listening to each other, something that is an art that sadly has been lost, certainly in the contentious times in which we live. The idea of listening to somebody else it seems out the window. I think that's really the foundation of why I wanted to do this too. As as an activist and a journalist and also a storyteller by trade, I found that, you know, sure, I can write a version of a short essay on Instagram about a cause, but this allowing people into the room for a personal dialogue, for an exploration, for the ability to talk about something and find your feeling about it rather than be expected to have a sound bite ready to go. It feels like a way to bring us back to ourselves, and it feels it's so nice. Yeah, yeah, I love it. I love I mean, look, I like going on Rachel and and uh MSNBC and all that. But you know, they tell you you have seven and a half minutes for a very large discussion, So you are talking in those bites. You're talking in those sound bites, and this allows you and I the comfort to be ourselves, be authentic, you know, the voices. People are listening to us now. They're not listening to you playing a character, and they're not listening to me chasing down Eric Trump or whatever I have to be doing on any given day. There is a malaise in this country right now. The despair, the level of the despair is intense. People come up to me. I'm sure they come up to you. They want to talk, they want to tell you. They ask you, Sophia, what can we do? What? What? What? What's the plan? What's the and you know, you and I mean, we have some ideas, but we're you know, we don't have the plan in our back pocket here. But I see it, and I just I felt like I could do what I would normally do an election year, which is to make a documentary and and that'll take me about a year to make, and so that means it'll be done. If I had started a couple of months ago, i'd be done next October and it would be in theaters for you know, three or four weeks before the election. That's great. I know the impact that my films have had over the years, I'm well aware of it. But I thought to myself, and I had this offer to to make my next film. I also had an offer to do a episodic TV series with you know, one of the big streamers, and I just said, I know, I have got to do this. I've got to do something where I have daily or at least weekly contact with people, be it online or whatever. But I have got to jump in and be with the with the mob. We need to serve the mob. We need to be I need you and I were all one and of the same. We're all in this together. We're gonna sink or swim together. I'd rather not sink. And so I thought, you know what I'm gonna start. I'm gonna do a number of things digitally and online, but I'm gonna start with a podcast. I'm gonna go back to what I did when I was a child, what I loved doing, and I'm going to listen to people, and I'm gonna I'll put out some ideas every week about what we can be doing. I don't want people to feel lost. I don't want them to give up. Yeah, feeling I mean, feeling lost is such an inhibitor to action. And I think that's actually the aim of the people in power right now is to make people feel so helpless that they give up, and it really is on us to kind of hold on to that hope. And I guess it makes me curious what kinds of things do you want to talk to people about it. Are there a few things that you can share with us that you're going to offer to your audience in the coming weeks. Yes, First of all, I want I need everybody calm down, and what I what I had said at the beginning of this, We have a good chance of winning. So let's enter it with that in mind, not with this sort of oh, I don't know, and you know, let's let's just go for it here. And let me say to everybody who's listening, get behind somebody, Study all the candidates, find the one that's closely aligns with the things that you believe in and care about, and then get supporting that candidate in the primaries right now, because the IOWA is what seven weeks away, not I mean not long first Monday of February, maybe eight weeks. But I really think it's important for everyone to do what they can do. And I make no judgment. If you're for Mayor Pete, get out there and help mayor Pete. If you're for Elizabeth, help Elizabeth Warren. If you're for Bernie, help Bernie. I mean, listen, I don't need to state the obvious. Any of the eighteen running or we're running, would be better than Trump. So you can't go wrong. If you're just throwing a dart with a blindfold on, we're gonna do better. I mean, I'm sorry to set the bar so low, but um well, he's really pulled us down. It's like we're past the basement. We're so far down the bar has been lowered into the earth. Somebody said to me the other day that we actually we do better if we voted for somebody who voted for Trump then up himself that that there's at least a third of the people that voted for Trump that are probably fairly decent people and and have good thoughts, and they're raising good kids, and it might actually good at bus. You never know, you never know, you never know, So I'm gonna I'm getting into that. Obviously, it's an election year. I'm gonna talk about that. You know, I'm I personally am supporting Bernie, but I've supported him since the first time he ran for Congress back in I think he was having a rally up there, trying to get elected to Congress, and um he was trying to get he was reaching out to celebrities, and he couldn't get anybody to come and stand on the stage with him. And there were I mean, there were very big celebrities at that time, Crocodile, Dundee, Millie Vanilli. I mean, there were some, you know, big people he could have got, but he couldn't get them to come. And and so I got there, and the only people he could get to come on the stage to speak for him were two guys from Vermont who made ice cream and Ben and Jerry's, and one guy from Michigan, me who eight ice cream. So that was that was all he had. So I've been a supporter of him and what he believes in and what he's fought for for many, many, many many years, and saw no reason obviously to change that now. But I will tell you that Elizabeth Warren has appeared in two of my movies. I first encountered her back in two thousand and five, was blown away by the way she was articulating what the problem was with our income inequality, and and she has remained true and has fought for that all these years and have put her in you know, I've ended up putting it in a couple of my my films. You know. I've run into Joe Biden on a number of occasions. I'll tell you this, he's actually but of course I remember, I'm a guy, so m this is just he's never sniffed my hair. Um so but so easy for me to say. But he was always nice to me and seemed like a decent person, and I always gave him props for kind of pushing President Obama sort of accidentally to come out publicly in favor of same sex marriage in the election, which Obama was a little afraid to do, but Biden kind of put it out there and he couldn't do anything about that. I don't know if you remember that, but he was, you know, kind of instrumental and moving that forward, uh, in his own kind of goofy way. So my point is, whoever you support, I support, you just do something. Don't stay at home. If you stay at home, call these campaigns because digitally now you can make phone calls. You can call voters from whatever state you're in to support a candidate. You can, they'll give they will give you a set list of people who vote in Iowa, and you can sit there in Pasadena or Tacoma, Washington, or Boise, Idaho and make calls for your candidate. That's my main thing. I want to just encourage that people study the candidates, see who best supports you and what you believe in, and go for it. That's great. There's actually a really cool online resource. I'm not sure if you've heard of it. It's called I Side With and it's a quiz. It's a political quiz and you go through and take it and it tells you with what percentage of accuracy you identify with which candidate. And I've been really illuminating for a lot of people to go, oh, I've made perhaps this one issue my tent pole for voting, but actually I of what's important to me. I side with Warren or Bernie or Buddha. You know. It's a really, I think good wake up call because politics, as we all know, has been so weaponized against us in such a strange way, and we outsize certain issues over others, and we shouldn't. You know, the point of being an active member of society is that we live in society, we function well in society. We should be prioritizing our society, our community, our neighbors, and the powers that be, I think really prey on our natural little lizard brain tendencies to be very individualistic and very tribal, and that's actually not what makes any of us happy. You know, we're village creatures and we we should be voting with our village for their betterment and and to me at least personally, and whatever to your point, Michael, whatever it means to people listening, But to me, that means health care, that means clean water, That means prioritizing the environment for everyone, regardless of their political beliefs or religious beliefs. You know, we we're in this together, and I would like for us to start voting like it right, But that I that's beautifully put because what you're right, As a species, we are social animals, we are social beings. We are not hermits, and we don't function well when we are just all about ourselves and with ourselves. And I think that quiz which I'm going to take as soon as we're done with this, because no, because I'm imagining what it does, is it would show me, like, say, let's say you like Biden because of where he stands on labor and unions. So that's your one that's your one issue. But take the quiz and you realize, oh, he's not really that as good as i'd like him to be. A mass incarceration or some of the attitudes about women or whatever are make me uncomfortable. Could be any even number things you discover if you took you know, took this test. So this is that's not like a great idea. Yeah, it's pretty cool, and I think it can just remind us what's important for me. You know, when when you talk about the candidate spread sometimes I look at the debate stage and I go, I'll take any of you five or you four for president, and then how about we just fill the entire cabinet with the rest of you, Like, let's give everybody a position and you go be a pro on what you are incredible at. You know, we need all these people, we need all their progressive ideas. We need in in my opinion anyway, to be frank about the financing of America. You know, somebody said to me recently at a at a debate night gathering, Okay, well, if you were president tomorrow, what would you do? And I said, the first thing I would do would bring in a bunch of auditors, a bunch of like forensic auditors. You know when someone goes through a lawsuit, let's say in our business and entertainer SUSA Studio, and they do a forensic got it. I want to see a forensic audit of the entire United States budget. I want to know where all this money is going. Because I know we've got the money to pay for healthcare. I know we've got the money to pay for infrastructure spending. I know we've got the money to pay to transfer our agricultural system to a Regenerative Act system, which in five years would completely reverse climate change. I know we've got the money to pay for education. So I want to know where it's going, right, you know? That would be that would be my first step. So I I would like to see some candidate or some elected official in a high cabinet position say, you know, this is the thing we should be doing, and state by state, every state should be forensically audited as well. Where is all the money going? I lived in Chicago for four years. Oh it's my dream. I lived in Chicago for four years, and when I tell you, the same roads were under construction for the entirety of my tenure as an Illinois state resident. I was like, guys, what's going on here? Something shading? You know, you're telling me we don't have you know, you grew up in Flint. You're telling me we don't have the money to replace the water pipes and Flint, I know we do, and I just wonder, what are we going on that? Yes, all these years later, the pipes have not been replaced, and now what they're doing is they're only replacing the pipes out under the street, the main line of the pipes, but the pipes that go into each home and then the internal house plumbing. This is all wrecked. It's all poisons and the whole thing has to be torn out and put back together. And yes, it's expensive, but you know it's we probably the cost of half half of the bombing of a bomber would of those. It's just, yeah, that's such a good idea. You see, you're so you obviously have a logical mind, you're smart. Definitely, the first thing would be, let's figure out where the money is and who's been spending it, who's hiding it? All that? See, my first idea, if I were president on the first day, it would be free Hbo for everybody like that, you know, just give That's a really nice perk, Michael. And maybe and now maybe free free Netflix and Amazon too, just because all the good shows are there. People shouldn't have to pay extra for that. They work hard all week, they come home at night, they come on the weekend. You just want to sit on and watch something good. Look, we all deserve a little Mrs mais Al, Yes, exactly. And have you watched this season yet? No, I'm saving it. Don't tell me anything. Okay, we'll say I'm literally saving it for my holiday break, and I i am. The anticipation feels electric. Yes, well, it won't disappoint. But the other the next thing I would do is I would decree that there is to be from now on one charge chord for all devices, the same exact chord, so you don't have to buy three or four chords every time they change the device you gotta buy new chords. Just one chord for everything, your phone, tablet, the laptop, and why not now the have the that wireless circle. So imagine if everything could just go on the wireless thing and stack up at all. No courts just do that. Because here's the thing. Big government, that what they like to call big government of the people to ride our government over a hundred years ago decided, when electricity was putting people's homes and people were going to buy lamps and radios and whatever, they decided that every device, everything in the house would have a plug. It would have two prongs at the same exact distance the prongs from each other, and there'd be two holes in the wall. That hasn't change. To look over the wall, look over the wall, it's the same two holes in the wall, the same anything you have to plug in, it's the same two that that big government did that. And if you were a lamp manufacturer, and you know, back then, they didn't have refrigerators, they didn't have TVs. But whatever new device came along, including the laptop, the laptop that's plugged in right now, boom, uh, there it is and everybody has it and it's all equal. It seems like such a simple idea. And if it's gonna happen with the blue circle or whatever it is that you were mentioning there some bluetooth means or whatever, that's what we should be doing. I just want to make people's lives simpler, and I want them to when they get sick, never have to worry about going broke, losing their home, or cutting back on well. I guess I could take half the medication that the doctor wants you to take. This madness people who are dying because I mean, we're monsters. Yes it is no and I'll tell you history. Assuming the planet gets to live. Actually I think the planet will live. We're the ones that are going to die. The planet is going to take care of us. For trying to kill the planet. We forget how powerful they will take care of us. In a hundred years, they will look back at us and they're not going to believe that we wouldn't let people see a doctor when they got sick, that if people wanted to educate themselves, they had to be in debt for the next thirty years. Crazy crazy stuff you touch on education and education really is the foundation of all things for me, and I think about how lucky I am to have had the trajectory that I did and to have been able to attend schools that were wonderful and to have been able to study journalism and political science and and all sorts of creative avenues. And I'm very curious what your take on the demonization of higher education is, because Trump and a lot of his cronies do this thing where they call anyone with a degree and elite. And to me, the the sort of highest expression of a country working well is that it's people can be educated in whatever way they want to be. Be a botanist, be a molecular biologist, be a journalist, study philosophy. You know. These things expand our minds, they make us more creative. They help us create technology that saves lives. They're the reason that we have medical devices and hospitals, and and I I find it to be tragic that they deny resources to the average working American, keep them out of higher education, and then tell those people who have been denied the opportunity to pursue education that it's the educated people who are against them and judging them. It creates this evil It's the same sort of circle of sort of evil messaging that I think about when they demonize immigrants. And I take it very personally. You know, my grandmother immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island from Italy. Was one of those families who came through and signed the Ledger and and had the Italian immigrant experience. And my father immigrated from Canada before I was born, but at twelve became When I was twelve, my dad became a United States citizen, and I remember helping him study for his citizenship test and making flash cards in the day that he did it. And it was this whole experience. But my dad's family immigrated to Canada through from Ireland. And so it makes me crazy that all these people who demean immigrants are either the children ever the grandchildren of immigrants themselves. And I'll just I'll say it right out. Every single person who's an American listening to this or lives in America, even if you're not a citizen. Everyone, with the exception of Americans who are descendant of slaves and Indians, Native Americans who are the original people. Everybody, everybody, let's say this is a descendant of immigrants. You are only enjoying the fruits of this land because somebody in your family found more than likely a very difficult way to get here, a very expensive way to get here, and when they got here, they were not treated very well either at that time. Because this is it seems like human nature that once I get in the door, I need to shut the door so nobody else comes through that door so I have a better chance. Once I climbed the ladder, I'm gonna pull the ladder up because I don't want all that competition from down below. It's just a sad statement about us as human beings, and certainly as Americans. But no, that's true. Like your Canadian, your dad was Canadian? Right, And were you born in Canada? No, I was born here. You're born here? Yeah, I was. I was born here in the US. I was born in California. My dad moved from Montreal to go to Art Center, and my mom moved from the East Coast and moved into the same apartment building my dad lived in. And my mom had this big bruiser Doberman, and you know, she's like this tough Italian broad from Jersey, and my my mom's dog, who was the best behaved dog on the planet. I grew up with him, would always try to bite my dad. And my mom was like, it's so weird. This dog has never growled at a person, let alone like nipped at their heels. The dog just hated my dad from ghet and I guess he had more of a spiky sense that he my dad was coming to encroach on his territory. But that's how that's what got my parents talking to each other. Or the dog was trying to take care of your mom to talk to this guy. Um, thank god for that dog because we have no you. Oh yeah, my mom was like, I don't know. Your dad wasn't the kind of guy I grew up with. He was like, soft spoken, he was an artist. It was the seventies. He wore tight pants, he had long hair. He was always lipp in his hair. She's like, I thought he was gay. She was like, you know, he's hanging out with like all these cool makeup artists. I just thought he was gay too. I didn't know he was hitting on me. So it's like this hilarious story of how they met, and yeah, it was. It was the dog. Was he a French speaking Montreal in order? I mean, he fancies that he speaks a little bit of French. But I'm always like, Dad, please stop, I love you, just don't it's embarrassed. Just don't because my dad's family is not French. There you know, again descended from the Irish, from from the Irish, but again the Irish. The Irish. Hundred years ago, there were signs all over New York, no Irish need apply. They thought of Irish has to be in the real kind of scummy white people that they didn't want to associate with. And that's what's so interesting to me too, is that it is so many descendants of people who were mistreated who are willing, it seems now, you know, you look at half the Senate who are so willing to mistreat people who look different from them, and it's like, can we just acknowledge if you know how hard your grandparents had it, if they were like mine, you know Irish and Italian people, if you know what what a struggle they were put through, you really can't, for one moment pull back to a bird's eye view and acknowledge how much harder and how much more compounded the oppression has been for people of color, for black and brown and indigenous people in this country, and you can't say, wow, I know how my family suffered, and I know how much more these people have been put through suffering. I should try to be the best ally and accomplice that I can to help heal historical wounds. I can't fathom that that's not how we all walk around in the world. Yeah, listen, I would I hear Irish and Italian make bigoted comments or make comments about immigrants. You know, I stopped them and I say, you know this, your grandparents are your great grandparents. If they could hear you right now, you are saying the exact same words that they had to suffer through that they had to listen to when they came here. And you're putting just another knife in them by talking like this and then and then I'll say, well, by the way, so I assume you're so, you probably voted for Trump. Yeah, I voted for Trump. Two thirds of all white men voted for Trump. So I tell people, just as a precautionary measure, anytime you see three white guys walking down the sidewalk, two of them voted for Trump. You maybe moved to the other side of the street. But I I said, I say to them, you know, Catholic or Catholic, Irish Italian? Why does President Trump hate Catholics? Well, what do you mean he hates Catholics? I said, well, when he refers to what he calls these ship whole countries. He was talking about Central America, Haiti and two of these African nations where catholicis is is actually the main religion that all these children mean put in cages. Where are they from? Mexico Catholic country, Guatemala Catholic country, El Salvador Catholic country. He hates these Catholics and then you can see their ants are coming. Wait a minute, and weren't looking at it like that. But see, that's why, when you like what you said earlier, when we try to define our group more and more narrow, you know, we circle the wagons. I'm just all about me. I'm gonna take care of me, myself and I and my family. That's it. This is when we lose. This is when the country starts to fall to pieces because we don't see ourselves as part of the greater whole. And how quickly we forget, to your point, the reality of what those who came before us went through, you know, it shocks me. I remember the first time I was in Germany, the memorials and the museums and and walking, you know, just through a city square and there will be this unbearably heart wrenching, beautiful, poignant memorial to the Holocaust, and it's a reminder of what's happened on that ground. In those spaces, people aren't trying to pretend it didn't happen. And yet in countries like this, you find out that of millennials or I guess it would be is it gen Z just below, the millennials don't answer quizzes that they don't really know anything about the Holocaust. People don't know about they don't really know where, they haven't really been taught what our real history is. You know, the Thanksgiving play in the third grade is a lie. We haven't talked about what we did to indigenous people's we haven't talked about the the real experience of people in the Transatlantic slave trade. We ignore it. We want to pretend we didn't have any part of it. And so we see these modern versions of oppression continuing to happen. We see the way people are demonized, We see kids being put in cages. We have concentration camps in the US. They're not death camps yet. But then you get alerted to the fact that over thirty people have died in these detention centers, and it's like, well, aren't we already on our way? What are we doing? What are we doing to these people? And how could we allow it? We we like to say things, we like to espouse these theories like never again, and we'll never forget, But we've we seem to have forgotten. And again I worry that it all ties back, that you can really trace or pull that thread from the education system or the lack thereof. Right you mentioned Germany, It's a law in Germany. Their schools have to teach the Holocaust from first grade to twelfth grade. The students have to learn about it every single year. They and those memorials you talk about you everywhere around Germany. Everywhere you go, don just a random street, there will be some reference to memorialize and what they've done over the years. Homes that belong to Jewish families that were taken from them as they were shipped away, they now put a little a tile in the sidewalk in front of the house. If the house is still standing, that's says so and so used to live here. This was the home of the love and family until they were taken away and killed in the Holocaust, And you cannot walk down that street in and not be reminded that your people, your parents, maybe your grandparents, did this, and that that you and we we all have a responsibility to make up for this. I'm sure that there are people listening who when you hear us talk about something like this thing, But God, isn't that depressing? What does that do? I actually think it's where we come alive. I think when we really acknowledge the truth of who we are. We look, we're human beings. We are, as you said, we're a species. We're animals in a way, and we've done some incredible things as a species, and we've done some really hideous things to each other. And I think it's only when we acknowledge the fullness of our potential for both greatness and evil that we get to decide who we want to be in this incarnation, in this iteration, in this generation. We get to say, look what happened. Who am I going to be? Now? How am I going to make the opposite impact? Now? How am I going to carry the memory of these people and exist in my body in their honor, and I think it can be such a beautiful motivator. I think the danger comes when we refuse to acknowledge what we're capable of. On the on the dark side, we can behave really darkly and pretend that it's good. Yeah. I think when people say that to me, I don't want to get depressed. Right. Why do I have to look at that? It's not that you have to look at it. It's actually by looking at it, it can actually inspire you to create a better world, to do better than the generations that came before us. Every time you walk by that, you say to yourself, I'm picking up the mantel here, I'm going to I'm going to lead the charge for a better world. That's the other way you can choose. So to look at this. I mean this whole thing about I don't want to be depressed. I think what we're living through right now, I can't think of I can't think of getting well. It can get worse. But we were going to stop that. But I think it's if everybody has to sort of what was that movie with Madonna and Rosie o'donnald and Um Tom Hanks. The Baseball League then it's such a great movie. Tom Haig says, there's no crying in baseball, and I just I say that to myself all the time. You know, there's no crying in politics. There's no there's no crying and stopping. And we have to end this war. There's no crying and trying to put an end to the climate disaster that we are part of. I mean, if we could just talk about that for a second. I just this is just on my mind lately. I met Greta Greta Tunberg a couple of months ago, and uh, it was so moved by her, so inspired by her. I'm so happy that young people now are not letting the adults off the hook. They know the world that we're leaving them. They are mad as hell at us for it. They should be, and we have a responsibility to Uh. You know, I remember a couple of months ago. I'm not saying this is how you should decide to vote, but as I said, you know, I'm friends with both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and have supported them both in the past. I saw this poll of eighteen to thirty five year olds, who do you want to be president of the United States, and the top number one that the young people wanted was the oldest person running, Bernie, the one millennial in the race. Pete had two. So I remember saying to somebody, I said, you know, if it really all things being equal, if it comes down to it for people between say having it for Bernie or Elizabeth, I think it's my responsibility as an adult, as an older adult. Two, I have to side with the kids. I have decide with young adults is their future. I am gonna probably hopefully just scoot by in the final you know, years of my life, and I won't see the calamity that you, Sophia and those younger than you are going to see. And it is I need to think about that. I need to think about because I think about Bernie. Why don't why do young people like him because they see in him somebody who is completely committed to on this issue stopping it. Not for his future. He has no future, no offense, Bernie. But you're you're in the last quarter of the game here. But if you're twelve, wow, twenty or thirty, I think the older adults should be thinking about in this election. I'm not just gonna be voting for what's good for me in my fifties or sixties, But what what responsibility do I have to my kids and my grandkids here? And who's the candidate that is going to end? And this it's so beyond. I'm sure you've read all about where we're at. Remember they used to tell us that three or people you said, tell us, if we went past the way in fifty parts per million of carbon in the air, we were doomed that there'd be no way to turn it back. And now we're at four parts per million, so we've cast the point of no return. If you just stop and think about that for a second. People say you don't want to get depressed, Well think about that for two seconds. You know who really made me feel hopeful though? In terms of that, I just interviewed him for the pod, and I'll be excited for you to hear that discussion. I spoke to this incredible man, Dr. Zach Bush, who was give ving us the breakdown on what transferring our agriculture system from the way that it works now to regenerative agriculture would look like. How it reduces costs for farmers by upwards of which means it increases their profits by upwards of and that within five years farms can become not only they can't they can not only neutralize their carbon output, they can actually start to reverse it. And I'm sitting here going where is the national plan for that transfer, for that for that opportunity for us to change our food system. So I agree because I really get caught in the in the doom of climate change. And he was one of the people who helped me sleep a little bit better at night since we spoke. So I would just like to offer that to you because I know that when you try to close your eyes, these are the nightmares that start, you know, playing. Yeah, I also believe that as a species, we are smart enough to find our way if we choose to sure hope. So whether it's what you just said, with this said with Dr Bush or I do believe this. There's no way now, it's too late. There's no way now to solar panel or windmill our way out of this tragedy. Right, So if you're just focusing on that and not like what you just mentioned, how we grow food and these other things that we haven't really thought about, we should be doing at all all of it. So I have a question because you you talked about, you know, obviously your support for Bernie, your friendship with Elizabeth Warren, who I will just be clear as one of my favorite candidates in the race. I think she is just unbelievable. And whether it's him or it's her or any anyone coming down the line, I appreciate the progressive nature of the campaigns that they're running. I was lucky I helped to host a gun sense for him with every town in Iowa actually early in the fall, and I got to spend quite a bit of time with Senator Warren and was just so inspired by our conversation in person. Unfortunately, didn't really get to hang with Bernie. He was in and out really fast because he had another thing to go to, and I was like, I just want to pick your brain about some things, but it'll happen later to go. I gotta go, I gotta go. But he was he was very nice in passing. But I I'm curious when you talk about when you became involved in politics, when you began supporting, you know, candidates for Congress and Senate. You were eighteen years old and you were the youngest person ever elected to public office. In the state of Michigan. And normally I start audiences with where people begin, but we we just really went down the rabbit hole. And this is why I'm obsessed with your brain because now we're quite a while into this interview and I'm realizing I need to go backwards. But but in between you becoming this passionate sort of or d and kid journalist, if you will, with your reel to reel, how do you go through school and then wind up getting elected to state office? And what did you tell the listeners what you got elected? Tom, I'm fascinated by this story. It's like oftentimes many good things that happened in life happened by accident. And so when I was in high school, you had to have your shirt tucked into your pants in public school. Interesting, yes, And so now i'm you know, this is the seventies and it's it's time to you know, untucked the shirts. Let's just put it that way. It's um and I my shirt wasn't tucked in this one particular day, and the assistant principal saw me, grabbed me from behind and said come with me, brought me into the cafeteria and in front of all the students got out this piece of wood, which they called a paddle, and whacked me five times, bent me over and whacked me five times on the rear end for having my shirt tail out, and all the kids laughing, and I'm totally humiliated. And oh man, I remember walking home that day at plus I was sore, you know, I mean, it was a giant hunk of wood. And um, I walked in the house and I pick up the daily paper. This an that cool thing about my mom. She taught me to read when I was four, before kindergarten, and she did it by starting with the newspaper, starting with a little weather box at the top of the page and all this stuff. And I was so fascinated that I could find out what tomorrow's weather was going to be because it was there on the front page. And it was such a gift that she gave me to be So I always read the paper. And I was bored to death through most of elementary school, because you know, that had shoved me ahead simply by being able to read, you know, And I was bored in school for most of the time. But anyway, so I pick up the paper and it says there's A headline says school board president retiring um election in June, and I'm only seventeen years old. Two months earlier, eighteen year olds had just been given the right to vote. The voting age in America had always been twenty one, and they had lowered it to eighteen for the first time. I'm seventeen, and I'm thinking the elections in June. Well, my birthdays in April, I'll be eighteen. I wonder. I know I can vote, but can I Could I run? I called up the city clerk. I said, yeah, hi, I'm I was just wondering how old you have to be to run for the board of education. Uh. She goes just just a minute. She comes back, she goes eighteen, whoa, whoah and uh. But then I'm thinking, oh my god, how how do I get on the ballot. It must be expensive. I must I might have to get ten thousand signatures. Oh what do I have to do to uh to get on the ballot. She's reading the rules and I can hear rifling through the papers. Uh. It says here, all you have to be is eighteen and have twenty signatures on a petition of voters. Twenty I mean I knew twenty stoners who would sign anything I put in front of them. You know, I would just just like that's it. And so I did. I want to get the petition, and I got twenty names on it, and I submitted it, and I submitted my my essentially my platform, and in addition to all the things I wanted to do educationally to make the schools better, the final thing was I will fire the assistant principal and the principle of the high school should I get elected. Oh my god, that created such a ship storm, the stories about in the paper. You know, I kind of long eash hair, not Montreal longash, but you know, for Michigan, long enough. And uh and I uh all the adults, the adults were so furious that I was running and saying this that seven other adults took out petitions to also run because they're gonna stop me, not stopping to think that they are going to split up the older adult vote, the seven of them. And so so when I on election night, when they announced the results, I come in first place, I win, and they split up. They split up all the rest of the the votes. So I so all of a sudden, I'm on I'm on the Board of Education, and they didn't know what to do with me. But enough people have been through that high school with that principle and natsis of principle where it was like I was not alone in this feeling that something was not right. And within a year, all I needed was three other votes. There are seven votes on the Board of Education. I just needed three other votes. And I got those three votes, and we removed the principal and the assistant principle. Every student's dream, you know, come true, that you would actually hold that power in your hands. I was still eighteen years old when this happened, and they were gone, and and right away, Sophia, I realized a dangerous, dangerous lesson had been taught to me, that you actually can make change happen by doing very very little pony signatures on a petition, show up to a meeting once a month, to the Board of education. There wasn't really a whole lot to it. I just decided to do it. I did it. It happened, and I can't tell you how many times that we've seen him in just the last decade. I never thought I would see an African American president United States boom. It happened after the OH four elections when fourteen states, including Michigan and Ohio, made it illegal to marry the person you're in love with, should they be of your gender. That was put in the constitution of fourteen states in oh four, not ten years later. Ten years later, it's gone. It's legal. Are the Republican Chief Justice a Republican court says this is wrong that you can't marry who you're in love with. It was about the human lesson at that early age that just by doing and never allowing the thought to enter my head like I have no right as an eighteen year old to be on elected the public office. But I became the first eighteen year old elected to any public office in the state uh that year and then the next year there were a number of eighteen year olds that ran, and a couple of actually are a member of Congress from Flint. He was one of the people. He ran as a nineteen year old for the Flint Board of Education. Was a friend of mine. I ran his campaign. He's now in Congress representing Flint, Michigan. So there you go. But when you look at the great at Thundbergh's and the m. A. Gonzalez Is and and and the David Hoggs. Why not you know, the young people will win. They are they are not bogged down by being jaded or having some sort of expectation of how the system is. They know what they wanted to look like. And so I think it's incredible. I interviewed Senator Gillibrandon. She said, well, you have to run for office, I don't you know, maybe like eventually, like remember when I'm fifty, And I'm like, you know that that could be a time. And she just looked at me and said no. Now. I was like, lady, give me a minute. But it's interesting because we all have such a natural inclination to think, well, I couldn't possibly be ready for that yet. And and AOC said, if if it's not me, if I'm not going to fix it, who's going to fix it? And it's it's really a reminder that's right. And I believe and a lot of people your age and younger I think would do a better job, would certainly have their head and their heart in the right place. And I'd rather take that risk. I'd rather go with where your head is at than the other way. And I wish more young people would run for office. It's so easy. In fact, one of the things I'm going to do on my podcast is somewhere in the next few months, I'm going to require, if you're a subscriber to my podcast, that you have to run for office for all. The first thing you're probably thinking is, well, wait a minute, there's not that many offices. But the truth is is that there is this thing called precinct delegates, and in every neighborhood, every polling, wherever you go to vote, you've probably seen it on the ballots. Usually the last thing where you get to elect the delegates that you want to go to the county convention for the Democratic or Republican party, and and then at the county convention they elect the ones who go to the state convention, and sometimes depending on the state, they're the ones who decide who's running for attorney General, who's running for Secretary of State, who's running for the University of Michigan Board of Regions, and so everybody that it's usually blank too. If you look at the ballot, it's a lot of people aren't voting on these precinct delegates. They're just they're just empty. And so then the party leadership gets to a point and then it just becomes the same, you know, revolving door. But every next you should think about next year wherever you live, of running for precinct delegate in your neighborhood. You literally, I don't think this is where you only need ten signatures on a ballot. It's very low. And get your name on that ballot. Let people see your name there and then and all you gotta do is go once a year to the county convention. And if you're elected to go to the state convention, that's once a year. That's it. Sophia Bush living in or where you you live, somewhere in southern California, Los Angeles. Yeah, yes, don't don't tell us the neighborhood please just times um. But but you literally could be one of the three precinct delegates for your neighborhood and all you have to do is commit one Saturday morning a year to your elected job as precinct delegate. Sophia Bush. So you're eighteen and you're and you're running the school board. Yes, and then you founded a weekly magazine which was originally called The Flint Voice, when did you do that and what were you covering? And where did that idea come from? I because I had learned to read the paper and was a newspaper reader from the time I was a child, It became clear to me, as when I became a teenager, that boy, they're leaving a lot of stuff out of the paper. There there's a lot of things here that we're not hearing anything about. And frankly, because we lived so close to Canada, we listened to Canadian radio. We watched the Canadian news every night, and especially like during the Vietnam War, when our country, our government was not telling us the truth about Vietnam, the Canadians, who refused to send troops to Vietnam, told the truth every night. And we if you lived in Detroit, if you lived in a border city like Buffalo, Detroit, Seattle, not really the border, but close enough where you can pick up the signal, boy you've got a whole different newscast. And isn't that fascinating? So this gave me the idea to start my own newspaper because I was aware often that there was another side, or two more sides, or three sides to the story, and I thought the local paper and Flint, which was very much a Republican pro General motors paper, pro Vietnam War paper, pro Richard Nixon paper, that we needed a different voice, and so why don't we call it the voice. We'll call it the Flint Voice. And for ten years we put out really this sort of award winning newspaper of us most of us. I have a high school degree, that's all I have. I don't have a college. I dropped out the first semester of my sophomore year. I think most of the people work in the paper had not gone to college. You know, we're working class kids. Our parents worked in the factories. My mom was a secretary or clerk, even though she was valedictorian of her high school class, number one in her class. As a woman in that era, the she wanted to work, she had to type. She had type for the people. I had to know how to do that. It's very sad. Well when you think about this, of all the women, all the women, all the genius that we missed out on. Who which woman had the cure for cancer? Which woman had had the next great invention to make our lives better? Uh? Which woman that could have run for office that would have that would have been kinder to the have nots in our society. This too bothered me as a child seeing this and bothered me, you know, being raised Catholic and the Catholic Church and not understanding why women had no say that they were second class citizens in this institution. And I know, I don't want to make a sound like as a kid or a teenager, I was like obsessed with all these dark Uh why is the world such an awful place? Thoughts? I was like every other kid, and and you know, I played sports, and I was in the boy Scouts, and and I had two sisters. I always I've often thought this too. I've I've only lived my entire life in male minority households, meaning the men are always have the lowest numbers. Whether it was when I was growing up, I only had sisters, no brothers, got married daughter, no son. But I actually, again am grateful for this gift, even though as a kid it might have been annoying at times to have only these girls and all their their girls girlfriends all were because girls. But but it really was a gift because my mom and my sisters and the women that I've lived with in my life where it's been good for me to to sort of shut the funk up to listen. And what a gift also to be because the world, if we think about it, like the analogy of scales, right, the scales are always tipped for men in the world, and especially the generation in which you were a child, and you talked about how your mom was forced to be a secretary, and and maybe a secretary had the cure for cancer, but no one would listen to her. Uh. You being in a household where the scales tipped in the other direction simply because of representation, enabled you to see your mom's struggle, enabled you to see the way your sisters were treated differently than you were, and and whether or not you were fully cognizant of it. That's an illuminating experience to have and and for all of us. I think it's so important to open our eyes to the way that some people are held back and others or not, that that should be a learning opportunity for all of us. Well it was for me. And and if you have just the basic sense of fairness, forget for you know at that age I'm not elevated enough, am I thinking to have, you know, feminist theory going on in my head. But I do know right and wrong, and I do know what's fair and unfair. And it's evened unfair that my sisters were relegated to a certain group at school and the boys got to do this or that or whatever. So I started to go against this. First of all, my mom made me do the housework, so I had to do it. Wasn't just my sisters doing it. I had to do it too. And then when I went into high school, they're asking what classes I wanted. And my dad had learned to type when he was in the Marines, and he became quite a good typist. And I said I wanted to take typing class, and the school counselor said, well, it's mostly just girls in there. Now. First of all, uh, what's wrong with that on any level? Right? But I think he was trying to say to me, you don't want to be seen in a certain way. You're taking the girly classes. And I said to him, sign me up. And so I went in there and I was one of two boys in the typing class. And to this day, boomers my age, I don't know how to type. Still peck away with one finger, and I'm doing I'm doing forty words a minute, and all because I didn't care what anybody thought that I was in the girls class learning to type. I thought my life would be better, actually if I learned to type. And and again I didn't think this out in advance. I don't give me any real big credit for this, But if you're sitting for two years in a class where there's thirty girls and two boys, you have no choice but to listen to what the girls are thinking. And it's in a room like that where they don't have to worry about what the boys are going to think of them, or whether they're whether they're taught to worry about the boys. So they're talking honestly amongst themselves. And I'm typing away, going whoa, whoa. I had no idea you're listening to this, And it was such an education, and I learned that this was best if I just said nothing, kept typing, but kept my ears open. And I think I've benefited from that, you know, through the rest of my life. That's so cool. So you're learning these things in high school, you become an elected of visual you start a newspaper and then you make your first documentary. Roger and Me came out in what was the transition into being a filmmaker like and what prompted you to make that film first? Well, okay, as I stated, I only have a high school education, so clearly I did not go to film school. I did not know how to do this work. I thought I could make a film. Honestly, God, this is I'm either I was crazy or I was so full of whatever I was about myself, but I thought to myself, I want to make this movie. And then the voice comes in right away and says, you know nothing about making a movie, don't even attempt that. But then my real voice says back, well, I've seen a lot of movies. I would go to three movies a week. I mean, I was a movie nut. I went to everything. And as soon as I had a driver's license at sixteen, I drive d ann Arbor where they have this wonderful University of Michigan campus and they had seven film societies where they showed everything every night of the week, foreign films, documentaries, indie films, avant garde films, and I drive forty five minutes to Ann arbor, just so I could watch these movies. Yet I never I was doing my newspaper. Eventually I took a job. I was offered a job in San Francisco to be the editor. They'd seen my paper in Michigan, to be the editor of a national magazine. I was so excited. I took the job, and I only lasted four months. I was let go ironically on Labor Day, and um I had done some things that upset the owner of the magazine. He had given a column to an auto worker who on the assembly line, and I thought their voice has never heard assembly line factory workers. So I gave him a column in the magazine. I was taking a sort of a working class approach to the magazine, but it was based in San Francisco, and it was a very kind of kind of liberal, you know, a good, good magazine dig good things. But you know, my uncle was in the sitdown strike that founded the United Auto Workers, that took over the factories and flent for forty four days in the middle of winter and locked management out of the factories and wouldn't let them in until they gave him a union contract. That founded really the UAW. And it's yeah, but this is what I was raised in. So but the third thing that happened in the week before Labor Day is the women on the staff of the magazine walked into my office. I'm in the new editor there, and they shut the door. They said we need to talk. I said, okay. They said, uh, we're gonna walk out. We're gonna walk off the job. The publisher of this magazine has been hitting on us, sexually, harassing us. I don't even know if in ninet, this was six, if that was even a term then, but they basically conveyed to me, what again, if you're listening at all anywhere, even back and when there wasn't a term for it, you knew how women were being treated in the office, and as a man, you learned to just look the other way, best not to get involved, don't get any trouble. And they came in, they said they were gonna walk and I said, no, no, hold on, I do nothing of this. I'm just I've been here a month or two. Let me go talk to the owner of the magazine, and they gave me the whole list of grievances. I went over to his house and I told him what they had told me, and he's cut me off, and he said, why are you listening to these women? I said, well, they came into me too. They're upset and being treated. They're gonna leave, They're gonna like, listen, I've heard all this before, and the publisher I've arranged it. He's getting help whatever that meant. But he's still there every day on the job. And it wasn't three or four days later that I was fired. And when the owner fired me, he brought these things up that I was going to so some sort of division within the staff. By siding with the women on this, I said, I wasn't siding. It's I side on the side of people should be treated right, and I think of two sides on these issues. There's no two sides. There's no two sides. And this is why people say to me, Mike, you're you're polarizing. I go, yeah, that's right. I'm proud of it. I there's no two sides to whether women should be paid the same as men. There's no compromise position, there's no middle ground, there's no compromise position. If you say that a fertili egg is a human being, there's no halfway about that. You either believe that or you don't. There's no way to get into the control. We can't. We just find a middle ground. No. Actually, if you believe that, if that's your religious belief or whatever, fine, I have the science on my side. The seed is a seed, not a flower. A stem is a stem not a flower. A flower is a flower when it's a flower. And I've had these arguments forever, and I have the hardest time because I'm just like, there's no side here. Twenty women come in the office and they say they're being abused, and nobody does anything about it. And I lose my job as one of the three reasons I was given for losing my job, so I was unemployed. I was getting ninety eight dollars a week from the welfare unemployment office in Michigan. And I'm really pretty low and I'm laying in bed most of the day or laying on the couch. And the news comes on and it says that Roger Smith, the chairman of General Motors, is going to lay off another thirty thousand workers, ten thousand of them in Flint. Ten thousand. Flint's not a huge city. That's a lot of people, A lot of families are gonna be ruined. And I set up on the couch and the start instantly came to my head. I've got to make a movie about this. And I'm like, I have no idea how to make a movie. But I figured I could learn. And I had a group from New York, a documentary group had come to Flint the year before, and they asked me, because I had my newspaper, if they could go through the archives. They were doing a film on something and what I helped them, and I did, and I went and I was like a p a on their set. And you know, even I, as the editor of my paper, I wanted to I just wanted to see how movies are made. And so when I was fired and I had the idea to make this movie about Flint and general motors, a movie that became Roger and Me. I called up the documentary director and his producer in New York. I said, I want to make a movie. Can I come there? Can you show me how to load the film in the camera and all this? And he said, well, you were so helpful to us, I'll do you one better. We'll come to Flint. We'll come to Flint. We'll come back there for a few days right now, and we'll show you how to operate the camera and the sound machine and and everything. And they did. They came to Flint for nothing to teach me how to do this. It was so it was such a gift. And and so I just started learning, mostly learning through failure. Another thing gift that my parents gave me. They never thought failure was a bad thing. If I got bad grades and something. It was just like, well, they just want to learn. They wanted to know what did I learned from making all those mistakes in that class, Because that's what making a mistake is. That's how we learn. When we're little kids. You try to ride a bike, you fall off it, you get back on, you ride again, you fall off it, you get back on. Finally you're riding the bike. When Sophia, when you and I were born, we couldn't speak a word of English. If we were we're in this country, right, how did we How did we learn how to talk? By the time we went to kindergarten, we didn't have any textbooks, we didn't have any foreign language. Class. We always started out with was Google, Gaga and mama, dad, dad, How did how did we? How did we? And here's how we did it when we couldn't talk. Our parents didn't go knock it off with that Google Gaga stuff. God damn it starts speaking English, you know. No, they were like nurturing mama, mama, mama, over and over and finally we have a vocabulary of four words, mama, dada, high, goya and but by the time we go to kindergarten, we learned that we know thousands of words and speaking complete sentences. Yeah. One of my best friends has a baby, and I'll walk around my backyard with her. When I'm watching her over and over again, you go, what is that? Can you say? Tree? And she says gee? And then I pointed to my dog and I say, what's that? Is that a doggie? What does a dog? He say, and she says wolf. You know, we teach, We teach each other, and you're right. I think I think there's so much learning that we've done that sometimes we don't have faith in we don't think we know how to do something. And those little kids, how excited they are when they learn a new word, when they when they are shown the alphabet. Oh, they're so because you know why, as humans we crave knowledge. So to get back to an earlier question of yours, why how has Trump and the Republicans made being smart a bad thing? Why why do we call that being elite? We are actually we're wired to want to learn, to want to know. When when my when I was growing up, my dad worked on the assembly line in the spark plug factory, and all the other men and women that worked with him on that assembly line there, they were all behind John F. Kennedy for president. They weren't looking at Kennedy going, oh, he's who is the smart guy from Harvard? Who's he think he is? No, they were because they only had either a grade school or a high school education. They wanted the president to be smarter than them. They demanded the president be a lot smarter than them, and they admired him for his intellect. They were they were so proud to vote for somebody so smart. The fact that we've got to this point where that we're told that you're stupid if you vote for somebody smart, that stupid should somehow vote for stupid? This is this is if my dad was still with us, he would just be so disappointed because whenever he ran into somebody that knew more than him, he marveled at it. He wasn't threatened by it. In fact, he saw an opportunity to learn things that he didn't know and then came away from it smarter himself. And I think there is we need to sort of jostle ourselves and remember, Okay, if I sit down and I interview somebody like a doctor or a physicist, of course they know a ton of information I don't know. I want to learn it. I want to know. I'm curious. I want them to teach me something. I find them to be just as fascinating. By the way, if your dad was still with us and could explain to me how a spark plug worked, I'd listen to him talk about it for two hours, because guess what, I don't know about that either. You know, we all have such inherent value in what we know, whether what we know is a craftsman skill or a deeply specific scientific specialty. And I don't understand how they've been pitted against each other. And I really don't understand how a guy like Donald Trump, who owns private jets and pent houses in the most expensive city in the world is calling people like you and I who are storytellers elitists. I'm like, bro, I don't know anybody with a jet except for you, Mr. President. What's going on? Who's the elitist? It's like you and a bunch of faceless billionaire guys are are the elite. Most of us, like most people with SAG cards, work second jobs because they don't act enough to pay their bills. It's it's such a strange kind of bastardization of facts in all these arenas. The irony of this is that our current president is other than Ronald Reagan. I believe the only and I think Reagan was retired at that time. Trump maybe the only union member president who was a union member when he ran for president that we've ever had. Think about that. Mr. His so called hatred of the elites, that that he holds a SAG card, He had a TV show that was on for fourteen seasons and had a brother in laws. He installs furnaces and air conditioners, and he's you know, he was saying when he was thinking about doing something else, and I said, well, that's good, you should if you want to. But let me just tell you something nobody knows how to do squat anymore. The fact that you know how to install a furnace or to fix it air conditioner, you will work till the last day of your life. You will always have a roof over your head because nobody knows how to do anything anymore. It's really true. Wow. So obviously it's it's easy for listeners to know about your incredible library of work. And and I will say, you know, I remember being a kid in middle school. I was in Mr. Hallman's biology class in the eighth grade, I think it was, or maybe it was ninth grade. I had him two years in a row, so my memories are a little fuzzy. But when when Columbine happened, and one of my best friends from summer camps in the age of nine was at the time going to school in Colorado, and we didn't have Twitter or Instagram to give us immediate updates. We didn't know what was happening. We just got word in the school that there had been a shooting in a school in Colorado and kids were dead, and we knew nothing else. And I remember all afternoon I wondered if it was my best friend's school. I wondered what was happening. And I remember what it was like to watch Bowling for Columbine when you released that film, and when I fast forward to today as we're recording this, there have been over four hundred mass shootings just this year, not since Columbine, just this year, just in that's actually more days than there are in the year. And for listeners, of a mass shooting is defined as four or more people being shot or killed, which is an insane thing that we have to define this. Every town reports that it has tracked at least nine incidents of fire on school grounds alone in two thousand nineteen, and that was that was the status of December eleven, and that include three suicides and sixty three injuries. I wonder how, having been so close to this issue for so long, you think about it now, because you start Bowling for Columbine with a scene where you go to a bank that's giving away a gun for every new checking account opened, which just seems so preposterous to me. When you made the doc, could you have ever fathomed that we would be where we are today? No, just the opposite. We started making that film that afternoon, we came into work it was on the TV screen, the Columbine shooting. We're in the middle of our TV show. We're we had a show on Bravo called The Awful Truth, and we were also stunned by it because we remember, this was not a a regular thing mass shootings, and certainly not school shootings, not that they hadn't happened before, but they were, you know, it just wasn't a thing. And I said to my crew, I said, you know what, we have to make up. We have to start right now on this because this will become a thing and we need to stop it. And all we know how to do is make TV and movies. So we're gonna do something that will hopefully raise consciousness and put a put an end to this. And the very next day I contacted I mean, I figured out where am I gonna get the money to make this movie. I was never gonna get it inside this country. Everyone's so afraid of the n r A. So I called some Canadians. I knew because Canada doesn't kill the Canadians don't kill each other the way we kill each other, even though they're right next door to us. They watched the same movies. They played the same violent video games. They have pretty much the same culture that we have. And yet and they have a lot of guns. By the way, there's more hunters in Canada than hockey players. So there was a statistic was something like, um seven million guns or whatever owned by Canadians, but they don't shoot each other. And I wanted to find out why is that? And I and so I asked the Canadians for the money, and they gave me the money to start making the film. And we started out, Honest to God, this is our thought that day, if we do this right, Columbine will be the first and the last of these mass school shootings. So when you as you started to ask me about this, I don't know why. I continue to still choke up when I think about that day and when I think about we spent the next two and a half years making that film with this grand desire that no more, not again, and that it only got worse that nobody listened, nobody would have the conversation. Everyone was afraid of the n r A that it pains me with on such a level I can't I can't even describe it, because I had just committed myself to making sure that this would end, and it's it's only gotten worse. There have been good things have happened, especially in the off your election last year. The NRA, their candidates lost, many lost to Congress, and we were able to run candidates who defeated the n A candidate. So that's a good thing. A thing. There's also less and less people in this country that actually own guns, and your generation and the generation that's coming out of high school behind you, they don't want to hunt, they don't want to kill animals, they don't want to kill people, they don't want to have a gun. And it's a real problem for the gun manufacturers. One of them just filed for bankruptcy, in fact, one of the big ones. So the Washington posted this great study a couple of years ago on gun owner ship in American and really the message was we are not a gun crazy country. Seventy eight percent of our of our fellow Americans do not own a gun. That's the country we live in. Don't own a gun. But the scary statistic was three of our fellow Americans own half of all the guns, and that is approximately a hundred and sixty million guns owned by just three of the population. That is scary. They are stockpiling guns. I think we know what they're stockpiling them for the fear that they have of the world that is about to face them. And it's why, sadly a lot of them are for Trump. He's the last best hope of of sort of white male domination that we've that served us so well for so many years. Please admit this, Yes, yes, uh in facetious of course, yes, of course, just to clarify for anyone listening, you know, yes, right, just in case you can't see my face. But I don't actually believe that. But these they believe we're having there. They see women getting elected. That's scary. They see this is I think this past September was eight September in a row in America when the majority of our first graders entering school we're not white. I mean that the majority of the kids entering school now in first grade, for eight years in a row, have not been white. So they see that, they see that it's not going to be all about white America anymore. They were gonna have to learn to live with each other. And it's scary to them. And I'm sorry, I'm sorry they're scared, but they're gonna have to live with the future. It's so strange to me, though, that anybody cares, like, why do you care what anybody looks like? What does it matter? I care if you're a nice person, I care if you do good in your community. I'm I'm actually quite jealous of people who are multi lingual. I wish that, you know, I had done more work to study French, and I certainly wish that I had learned Spanish, and it's why I've downloaded a language learning app and now I'm trying, you know, I just think it's so strange that people care about that. Well, you're speaking as a younger person, and that's and this is one of this is one of the hopeful signs that people in your generation by and large are not haters, they're not dig they're not racist, they don't care who you're in love with. And you, your generation and the one after you here are leading the way to a better world. I can see that very very clearly. But but I give to the to the people who are your parents, to the to the older the older adults are boomers. Even you were raised by these people. You were raised by some of these people that had your mom and dad had those values. I'm I'm certain and they raised you to look at people with love and not hate, and all of us benefit from that. But it is funny that you bring up, you know, the stats about Canada, because again, my dad's Canadian. My dad gave me my first rifle when I was twelve. I've been a sharpshooter since I was a teenager. I actually I am a gun owner, and I love it as a hobby. But never have I felt that my ability to have a hobby outweighs someone's right to live. And it's it's just so strange to me. You know that. The day before Parkland, I was actually at the range with some of my buddies who are in the military, and we were doing drills where they are and I appreciate the technical skill also for my job, but never have I ever had the desire to take one of those guns home. And I've worked with swap teams, and I've been on USO tours and I and I go to the range with with servicemen who are like, no, these are weapons of war. You don't need this at home. You shouldn't have this. I came home from I don't want you to have this at home, right, No, it's dangerous to have it at home. If somebody gets their hands on it, somebody's depressed, there's a gun presents much more likelihood of suicide. Uh oh, there's a whole bunch of wrong reasons to have it at home. But you know, the Canadians, I believe the law in Canada is for handguns. It's very hard to get a and gun. You can get rifles and shotguns for hunting, but you can get it. If you like to target practice, you can have a gun. You just have to keep it locked up at the gun range. That's exactly what I think we should do here. Yeah, and you go there, there's your gun. You go, you do the thing, You leave it there. Why do you need that at home? It's it's crazy to me. And you know, it's funny because I I'm now at a point where I only eat any sort of animal product a third of my meals. And people find it ironic that, you know, I advocate for environmental justice, and I also have buddies who are hunters, and I've I've been hunting with a friend of mine up in Montana, a couple of times, and we talk about what his experience is really living off the land and doing it in a sustainable way and doing it in a reasonable way, and taking very little of what he needs and surviving mostly out of him and his wife's garden. And and we were talking about hunting, and he was like, look, he was like, if you need an a R fifteen to hit a deer, you're a really bad hunter. Also, there won't be much of it left, you know, all these arguments that people make about why they want these things. I'm just sort of crushed by how well the n r a S storytelling has worked historically. I'm glad it's changing. I'm glad they're coming apart. I'm glad people are seeing that they really are a lobbying group. They're not actually for anything other than themselves. Have you, Sophia, have you on this podcast, and if you don't want to talk about this, just say so, But have you spoken of the fact that a cousin of yours was shot at the mass shooting incident in Arizona with Congresswoman Gabby Gifford's and when he started spraying the bullets gets struck. Your cousin Christina, there have you talked about that at all? Or I'm just curious as one because I I mean, I I have this again. I get stopped all the time by people in the airport, on the street, whatever. We've had these incidents, who've had things happen where guns have entered their lives in this violent and tragic way, and um, you know, you actually have someone in your extended family that suffered and your family suffered as a result of that. It's not something we've talked about, and not for any reason other than it there hasn't been the right sort of conversation for it. And I try to be sensitive to the fact that that is really her mother's story. You know, Christina's death is Roxanna's story, It's it's her brother Austin story, it's her father's story. For me, the experience was obviously devastating, and part of what it taught me I was already advocating for common sense gun laws and working with gun control advocacy groups UH and and able to talk about it from the perspective of being a person who has grown up in that hobby culture, which very few quote unquote liberals UH did and Christina's death was a for me personally, because I'd been away on location for so long, and Roxanna and her family no longer lived on the East Coast. They had moved to Arizona. We hadn't seen each other, you know, I was living in another state. I'd come home sometimes, I'd see my family once in a while, but we were never making trips to Arizona. We were doing the typical family, you know, emails and newsletters and photo exchanges. And when she died, I realized how quickly time had passed and I had never met her, and and it was such a reminder that time is such an illusion, and we all assume that we have more of it. And every kid who's ever walked into a school and not gone home that day, those kids at Marjorie Storm and Douglas all thought they had more time. They all thought they were going to go to college. They all thought that they had a future ahead of them. And my sweet cousin, who wanted to run for school government, who was really passionate about the news, so much so that her neighbor said, I know she's really into this, and can I take her to see Gabby Gifford speak. She thought she was gonna, you know, run for class president in middle school. And this idea that we are untouchable just isn't true. And it's the reason that I fly anywhere that the Parkland kids need me to be. It's the reason that anytime Shannon Watts calls, I show up somewhere. You know, anyone who thinks that this can't happen to your family is acting on borrowed time. This is all of our issue, whether it's my cousin or your cousin, or or his child or her brother. You know, this is our issue, and we're failing our kids. I hope it was okay to yeah, no, I, I I know it's I. I. You and I don't know each other personally. And somebody had mentioned this to me, and I had not heard this, that you were related to this young girl that was killed in this uh in this shooting, and and I and yet it just reminded me of how many times I've heard this story. I had a cousin that was killed with somebody shot him right in the stomach and killed him. UM that this is this is something that um is all too common, affects all too many families, and which actually just gave me another idea. But when you said that about having not met your cousin because we all live all you know, my sisters now live in California. I'm either in Michigan or New York. You know, family is now so disparate, so many ways, so many corners around the country of the world. And I just sat here thinking, you know, I've got to do that family reunion I've been wanting to do with a larger extended family. All those second and third cousin as I've never met that I want to. I want to know them. I want them to know me. You know, we're not gonna probably have a close personal relationship or whatever, but we are family, and I want to be connected in that way. I don't want to. I don't want to accept that this is the way it has to be, that this is the way the world's going to function from now on, and that we just have to accept it. I won't accept I refused to accept it. And you know I'm so. I I have followed you just as a fan for some time that this is not anything new to you. Your activism and the and the ways that you have spoken out and doing so many things. You know you're known in in places like Detroit. You know where I'm from, because you have helped to help people that want to start a business in low income communities, people who do not have white privilege. People were not white women, women trying to start anything with absolutely no means of capital by which to grow their business. You have been doing so many things on so many levels, whether it is with guns, whether it is with issues regarding women or the environment or whatever. And the fact that we even connected to Detroit and even in a small way, just is is like I you know, we have paid attention to you, and and it gives me a lot of hope that uh, you said that you were in high school when Columbine happened, Right, yeah, I would have been a junior. You would have been a junior in high school, and and my daughter was just graduating then from high school in that year. And that we we adults, older adults, boomers, have allowed this to get worse and worse. That we haven't fixed this. This is on us, And I feel I feel a personal responsibility and I try to speak to everybody I can that we all share this responsibility. Two, it doesn't have to be this way. The Canadians are not better than us, They're not smarter than us. They have the same twenty three chromosomes in each of their cells that we have. If if they and all these other countries have figured it out, we can figure this and health care and everything else out too. Yes, it's a matter of prioritization. It's a matter of enacting policies that show the way we care for other people. I think it's a matter of making sure that every decision that we make in our country is grounded in a philosophy that human rights matter. And I think that's what we're missing. I think I think in a way, we've lost our moral compass, and we pretend to espouse that we make decisions for morals, but we're not. We're making decisions very often for money. And I guess that's that's why it will be very curious, you know. It feels as that we've reached a boiling point and now we're we're in the midst of all this impeachment business, and I'm I am curious to see how it shakes out in the coming weeks. I hope that in a way the votes and the evidence presented will will help us kind of right the ship. And and hopefully with this as a start, and to your point, more and more young people running for office, more and more progressive and inclusive policies being enacted, hopefully we can start to to live some real values. We have no other choice but that. I just can't tell you what it means to have this conversation. I'm actually getting weirdly emotional to them about this conversation with you. I felt this. I felt this way too, and I think they're worried about me in the right and I'm okay, but but this is the kind of conversations we need to be having. And again this this crazy concept of the podcast. You and I never would have had this conversation if if we had been guests on Jimmy Fallon offense to Jimmy call I love him. But but we're sitting we'd just be sitting there side by side on the chair, and we don't have opportunities to have this kind of conversation. And I am so blessed to be able to have had this time with you today. Oh God, I almost forgot to ask you my my closing question that I ask everyone. I'm like over here, just crying like a baby. Hello obvious. The title of the podcast is work in progress. And I ask everyone who comes on the show, when when you hear that phrase, when you think about those three words work in progress, what comes up for you? What? What are you in progress on in your life right now? In my life? Personally or are you speaking in anything you like? It could be professional, political, personal, that's up to you. Well, let me say this because the first thing I thought of when you just asked that was what's really a work in progress? Is this thing we call the United States of America. We've tried from the beginning to get it right. The original idea of a democracy. It hadn't really been tried for what a couple of thousand years since the Greeks gave it a good shot. The Romans tried to republic, but they soon had a dictator and authoritarian that came in to run things and that was the end of that. And then these founders try to get give it a good go, and it was a decent go. It wasn't anywhere near a full go because it left out so many people that never thought the majority of people in this democracy, women and people of color, and and if you if you didn't know him property back then, you couldn't vote. So we've come a long way. It's gotten better. We're in the year anniversary of women getting the right to vote. So it does get better. It does get better. But but we have to this work in progress we call the United States of America. We have to keep working on it. We can't just sit back. I feel bad that after al Gore won the popular vote, that we didn't do anything to get rid of this crazy system that makes it not a democracy. And that was that was nineteen years ago. I won't do this anymore. I won't do this again. When it happened the second time with Hillary, you know, I was like, Okay, that's it. I'm not a true American if I allow this to continue. So I try to participate and do the things I can do to to make the work in progress become a fully realized democracy where everybody has a seat at the table, everybody gets a slice of the pie, no one is left without that. I often say, the America that I want to save is the America we've never had. That's what I'm working towards, and I do my best. I'm only one person and the work in progress that is me. I think that it's really important I say this to fellow boomers all the time, as you enter your fifties in your sixties, that you not lose sight of all of the verve that you had when you were young. You know, they they may have laughed at you, at us, because we had these dreams. The dreams weren't wrong, and growing up and becoming mature doesn't mean killing your dream. In fact, if anything, that if you're still alive, you're still with us. Every single day, you could be working on that dream. Whatever the dream was, whether it was a personal thing you wanted to achieve, or whether it's a better neighborhood or a better country, it's all still available to you to do right now. Right after you're done listening to this podcast, you can put it down. You can go on Sophia's site. You can see her links of the things that you could you know, check out, get involved in. It's all there for you. It didn't have to end up like this. We didn't have to get to this point. I'm sorry we did. And now we'll do our damnedest in these next eleven months to pull back from the Brink. I think we can do this. I really really believe we can do this. We still's do it together. I've told some of the candidates the and some of their staff that are running for president, the Democrats, you know, what you to do in the last two weeks of January before the caucuses in the primary start is instead of having these these debates where we all know where everybody stands now, you guys should do a stadium tour, you know whatever, the last six or eight of you there are whatever, Literally do a stadium tour around the country where you come out together on the stage, hand in hand, saying we are here. We we are the you know, we're the Avengers, We're the We're the Justice League, Worth or whatever. We are committed to each other. Even though we have different ideas about how to get there, We're going to get there together. And your idea what you said about you know, yeah, so some somebody, you know, maybe Corey Booker isn't gonna make it, but you know, everything he's been saying about mass incarceration, I want him in charge of our prison system or our justice part of our justice system. Julian Castro has said so many important things about immigrants and how we treat immigrants. I want him in charge of immigration. They all should be given a job, like you said, in this administration. You know, even Joe Biden. We'll find something for him, you know, and and not and that White House greater. You know, somebody said that the other day. There's something for him to do. Uh, It's like there's something for everybody. We're all in the same boat. And like I said earlier, we're gonna sink or we're gonna swim together. And the boat has been going down and I refused to I refused to go down with it. And I believe when I see what you're doing, when I see what others are doing. Look how many people listen to this podcast you so Sophia pushes podcast. It's an amazing because for every one of these tents or hundreds of thousands who are listening to you right now, they're gonna tell ten people about this, what's something they heard on your on your podcast, And suddenly the five thousand people listening to I don't know the exact number to day, I'm sorry if I've I've lowballed it here, but suddenly five is five million. So you're doing the Lord's work, and I thank you for it, and I'll write that oup ed with you, and we'll bring other people into this and well and we will succeed. Thank you so much. This show is executive produced by Me, Sophia Bush, and sim Sarna. Our supervising producer is Alison Bresnick. Our associate producer is Cate Linlee. Our editor is Josh Wendish, and our music was written by Jack Garrett and produced by Mark Foster. This show is brought to you by a brilliant Anatomy