Image Source: Spotify
The Michelle Obama Podcast officially dropped on Wednesday, and the former first lady’s inaugural guest was none other than her husband, Barack. The power couple sat down to chat — and adorably banter — about a series of topics, including their love for each other, the value of community activism, young people’s perception of the government, and raising their daughters, Malia, 22, and Sasha, 19.
The intimate conversation is the first of many from Michelle’s collaboration with Spotify, which will explore different facets of meaningful relationships. And if anyone knows about the importance of interpersonal connections, it’s Michelle (just read her Grammy-winning book Becoming and watch her Netflix documentary of the same name). Keep reading to see standout quotes from Michelle and Barack’s chat, then listen to the full episode!
Barack Obama: It wasn’t just my looks, but that’s OK.
MO: You’re cute, you know. But, no, one of the reasons I fell in love with you is because you are guided by the principle that we are each other’s brother’s and sister’s keepers. And that’s how I was raised!
MO: I was on the track. I was checking my boxes because I was doing what I thought I needed to do because I was a poor kid. So, I didn’t feel like I had the option to just go off and do other things. But I also had a limited vision of what I could be because schools don’t show you the world. They just show you a bunch of careers. But I came to learn the same thing you learned that while working on the 47th floor in that fancy law firm making all that money, that it felt lonely, and it felt isolating. And, you know, I had this amazing view of the southeast side of the city from my office. I could see the lake and I could see all of the neighborhood that I came from. And I never felt further from that neighborhood than when I was sitting in that office working on briefs and cases that had nothing to do with anything that helped a broader group of people outside of myself. And it felt lonely. And I say this to young people, “Why did I leave corporate law and go into community service?” The truth is, it was selfish. I was happier. When I left that firm and started working in the city, getting out into the broader community of Chicago and seeing the interconnectedness of these neighborhoods by being alive in the dirt and the grit of helping people, I never looked back.
MO: Really, we were young. We didn’t know.
BO: We were so young and inexperienced.
MO: We were stumbling around trying to figure it. We can fix it. It’s like, “No, we can’t.” We don’t know anything.
MO: Yeah. And how beautiful and safe — stabilizing — that would be. We all have each other to lean on, that we don’t have to hold up this big, gigantic thing all by ourselves.
BO: Everybody benefits from their ability to advocate, to make sure the resources are coming in. That whole process of lifting all boats comes about from this network of relationships in a community. And the good news is, that when you look at all these young people who’ve been out there protesting in the wake of the George Floyd murder, that’s their instinct. It’s not uniform, and it could still go both ways in this country just like it’s teetering one way or the other in countries all around the world. This is not unique to the United States, it’s we just got our own version of it.
BO: Well, partly because they have been told. The message is sent every day that government doesn’t work. They take for granted all the things that a working government has done in the past. In some ways, we’re still living on the investment that was made by that greatest generation.
MO: I always joke, and I’ve always said one of the challenges of being president — like, you don’t have a marketing budget, you know? There’s really no structure to market government, right? The average young person knows far more about the cereal they’re eating, and the car they are driving than they do about what government actually does for them because they don’t have marketing budgets. There isn’t a jingle.
BO: The only time they know about what government doing is when —
MO: Is when it doesn’t work, right?
BO: So we’re getting a good lesson in that right now.
BO: Young people are idealistic as they have ever been. I think they are more idealistic now than they were when I was growing up. The difference, though, is that idealism that they feel as if they can channel it outside of governmental structures and outside of politics. The problem is, again we’re getting a pretty good lesson in this right now, there’s some things we just can’t do by ourselves or even groups of us can do by ourselves. As general proposition: we can’t build infrastructure by ourselves, we can’t deal with a pandemic by ourselves.
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