♪ Hi.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, and I'm so happy you're here for this very special episode of "Tell Me More."

I feel like the whole world is pulsing with negativity and vitriol, and there's just not enough media space devoted to world-positive people doing world-positive work.

And they're out there.

The whole impetus for "Tell Me More" comes from this idea that the media landscape is just too negative.

It's going to keep us all pinned to the sofa in states of depression.

And so we wanted to change the mix by putting forward all these positive stories of people doing great work.

We are now in our sixth season.

We have 43 episodes behind us.

And I just wanted to set the table for a minute about how this season is different and how this episode will set that up.

It's been interesting to look back and see this theme so clearly emerge, which is trying to uncover what it takes to make it in America today.

A thing that's very cool about this set of conversations that we've had so far on "Tell Me More" is that you hear these threads come up over and over again in a way that's really validating.

Our best qualities are looking out for each other.

And many Americans have done that.

To be an American is to continue the fight for democracy, to fight for fairness.

I truly believe that success is how much compassion you have for another human being.

Kelly, voice-over: There are conversations we've had on "Tell Me More" that I will never forget, that float through my mind on bad days.

I have been forever changed by people like Samantha Power, W. Kamau Bell, Dolores Huerta.

These are people who have changed my outlook.

Our first guest was Bryan Stevenson, who is a guy who makes you want to work harder and smarter to make things better for more people.

There's a couple of things about Bryan that are unforgettable.

He teaches us over and over again to get proximate, get closer to the people that you want to be in community with and people you want to help.

Bryan Stevenson: I tell people all the time that the power of proximity, the power of going into jails and prisons and sitting with young kids who have been condemned, the power of going to death row, the power of going to places where people have been excluded and neglected and marginalized is that if you go there with the right kind of mind and the right kind of heart, at the very least, you can get close enough to people, and sometimes you will be asked to simply embrace them, to hold them and affirm their humanity and affirm their dignity.

I've felt powerless at times to do anything beyond just affirm someone's humanity and dignity.

Father Greg Boyle: You know, if love is the answer, then community is the context.

Tenderness is the methodology.

All those things that are vexing social dilemma.

Kelly: We went to East Los Angeles to see Father Greg Boyle in his environment, which is Homeboy Industries.

You realize, like, how much you can embed yourself in a community and how much good you can do if you decide that it is not about you.

Sometimes in your line of work where you're the center of something, a big part of your work becomes decentering yourself.

Do you feel that way?

And if so, like, how do you get out of the way?

Well, I don't know if it's about decentering, but I know that it can't ever be about you.

That's kind of a cautionary tale for folks who are of service or who are seeking what we seek here, which is to foster and create a community of kinship.

So it's helpful because, A--you won't burn out because then you're spending all this time just delighting in who's ever in front of you and doing the best you can and paying attention and noticing folks.

♪ Kelly: What's a thing that you could have only understood by listening?

The power of caregiving.

Kelly: Aijen Poo is one of those on-the-ground great Americans, where she can relate to so many kinds of people and synthesize all their needs into what she calls a bill of rights for caregivers.

And, boy, do we need it.

Why don't we see caregiving as a profession?

I think that it's because of who's done it as a profession.

It's always been women of color.

Some of our first domestic workers who were our original caregivers were enslaved African women.

And we've treated the workforce as less than real work because in our culture, we see a set of people as less than fully human.

♪ Dolores Huerta: Some people say to me, "Well, you're 91 years old.

Isn't it time that you retire?"

I say no.

As long as we know that there are more people that we can meet with them, awaken them, make them understand that they have a role and a responsibility to make our government better, that we have to keep on doing it.

Kelly: Dolores Huerta is over 90 years old.

She has 11 children, and she is tireless.

She still believes that she can make a difference, and she does.

I think being an American is to fight for justice for everybody.

When you think that people are discriminated in their own country for no reason except for their ethnicity or their color of their skin, in order to end the systemic racism that we have, income inequality, the homophobia, I think it all comes down to two things, really-- education and civic engagement.

And when you put that together, it kind of sounds like democracy.

♪ When you have women and people of color at the table, they see other parts of society that just one part of society, like a white male, doesn't necessarily see.

It's exciting to be around somebody with a beginner's mind.

Melinda French Gates has been studying the world and what makes change.

Like, she's a real student of the world.

She's not constantly pontificating.

She's more studying what is working and how can we do more of it.

Melinda French Gates: Even in the United States, if you don't address the underlying needs, people can't expand their mind and be curious if they've got all this trauma or somebody's told them they're less than.

And I think for so long in society, in so many places, we've told girls and people of color that they're less than, that they maybe can't be the CEO.

Society puts all these biases and messages on certain groups to kind of hold--hold them in place.

And that just, to me, that shouldn't be.

Authenticity is a word that everybody loves to say.

Mahogany Browne, through and through.

Mahogany L. Browne: What's funny is I only came to writing poetry through anger, sadness.

And after year six, I was exhausted.

I was like, "I'm not mad anymore.

"I have a good life.

My daughter likes me.

"You know, I have a partner.

I like this writing thing.

How do I access the joy?

How do I access the love?"

Kelly: Is that what poetry's for?

Is it to try to help us share things that are so difficult to put words on and then maybe connect with someone else over it?

The purpose is connection, but the purpose is also self-exploration, archiving.

We need to tell the truth.

More times than not, the art is there to remind us of what we've survived.

Kelly: Neal Katyal has argued, like, 50 cases in front of the Supreme Court and goes to, like, two concerts a week, year-round.

He relishes what's great about America, and then he's totally determined to change what's wrong.

I certainly wouldn't want to be guided by the dead hand of 1787, but I think we're not.

I mean, you know, everything from women or minorities being able to vote and be equal participants in society, that's all a result of the Constitution being flexible and allowing an amendment process and the like.

I think the alternative to me scares me.

If we had a constitutional convention right now, I don't know if the First Amendment survives.

♪ Since we left shoot-around, 14 children were killed 400 miles from here... and a--and a teacher.

And in the last ten days, we've had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo.

We've had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California, and now we have children murdered at school.

When are we going to do something?!

I'm tired.

I'm so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to-- to the devastated families that are out there.

I'm so tired of the--excuse me.

I'm sorry.

I'm tired of the moments of silence.

Enough.

Kelly: Steve Kerr has such a special and important point of view around gun safety in America.

He has this really hard-earned passion about violence.

Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, was murdered at close range outside his campus office by two men with a silencer-equipped pistol.

Kelly: He was so interesting to me because the minute I asked him about his dad, he instantly got choked up.

Oh, man.

Um, it's kind of hard for me to talk about still.

Because my dad died that way and because it's such an enormous problem in our country, that's become my sort of pet project.

Kelly: And I thought two things-- one is how beautiful that we can mean that much to each other.

And two is we have got to get our heads around gun safety.

And it is no wonder that he's as devoted to the cause as he is.

Do you have hope that there'll be new legislation?

Steve Kerr: I do have hope, mainly because of the March For Our Lives kids.

There's so many young people now who are so angry and invested.

We sat on the set of "PBS NewsHour" with Judy Woodruff on a Friday afternoon right after I dropped my daughter off at college for the first time.

And she has somewhat of a singular perspective on how America has changed and is changing.

Her perspective is both alarming and kind of a clarion call.

Judy Woodruff: For the longest time, I've been saying it's got to come from the younger generation.

These young people who've grown up, who are in their teens and 20s, they must be looking at this and thinking, "I can do better."

There's a way for people to work together to address the problems that face all of us as a as a society, as a country, as Americans, whether it's the environment, whether it's health care, whether it's poverty, inequality, education.

There's got to be a way to work together than just this-- this civil war.

I'm putting my chips, you know... On the kids.

on the kids.

♪ There is a commonality in our guests that I would describe as people who still have their sleeves rolled up even though they don't have to.

Judy Woodruff could have retired 20 years ago, and she still would have been a legend.

Bryan Stevenson could go from speech to speech to speech.

Steve Kerr could just be the best coach in the NBA.

But they're still out there fighting for something better, and that's inspiring to be around.

That makes us at "Tell Me More" want to work harder.

I think maybe my favorite thing about "Tell Me More" is the way that conversations end up connecting with one another over time.

When we approached this season, we were thinking about, What does it take to make it in America today?

I live very close to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

I see them every day on my walk.

And when I look at them, I think about this progression of feeling where you look at this country and you think you're allowed here, you're welcome here, you belong here, this is yours.

And that's what I've been wondering about, is how do we get to a feeling where everyone here feels like this belongs to them?

There's some very simple things that you would like to see everybody in America have.

You'd like everybody to have a great education in a clean, safe place with people who are trained and caring.

You'd like everybody to have a job where they're valued, and that value is obvious because they have benefits and they have a path forward and they have some professional development and they have some time off.

You'd like everybody in America to have three meals a day, a clean bed to sleep in, and someone to love.

I'm sure you can imagine we spent a long time trying to figure out who are the experts at both a personal level and a macro level, who can help unpack this question.

Some of the people you're going to meet on this season of "Tell Me More" include Matthew Desmond.

Matthew Desmond is a sociology professor at Princeton, but, more, he is a guy who went to live in projects to get ready to write the book that won the Pulitzer.

It's called "Evicted."

And he is newly out with a book called "Poverty, by America."

He was an essential voice to sort of set the scale and scope of the problem so that we could understand it as we dive into all these other conversations.

I think a country without poverty is a freer country for all of us.

It's a happier country.

It's a safer country.

And I think that what I'm trying to do with this book is make a case, poverty has stolen from us scientists and poets and artists.

Like, poverty has stolen safety from us and a feeling of lightness in America.

It's created a stingy kind of affluence.

Would we want something better, even if it means that some of us who have means have to take a bit less?

A question I asked a lot of guests this season is, What do you love about America?

I think it's important for us to keep that in our hearts at all times.

I think that's the lens that we want to be looking through is, What are we doing right and how could we do more of it?

Linda Villarosa is a really positive, smart journalist.

She's a person who is sort of unflinching in the face of the facts but still believes that we can get from where we are to somewhere much better.

Her interest is around health and health outcomes and how they intersect with race.

There's so much more going on in our country and in our world.

Much of it is environmental.

Much of it has to do for Black people and other people of color and other oppressed people, has to do with how you're treated and the effect on your body.

Today's medical students, many of them were politicized.

They were in high school or undergraduates in college when the police killings of Black people started happening and they became political.

And that's come with them to medical school.

I've traveled to a lot of medical schools, and I see a lot of growth, change, movement, anger, commitment to be different, to be better.

And you see them pushing back against some of the things in the textbooks that are wrong, like this idea that Black people have a superhuman tolerance against pain, the idea that we have lower lung function, which are in--you know, some of these things are in current textbooks.

I see them pushing back.

It's hard to push back, and I'm impressed that many are trying.

You can't talk about what it takes to make it in America without talking about service.

Greg Gadson, who is a retired colonel and a double amputee, has served in every military conflict in the last 30 years.

He really believes that at the core of American values is decency.

We're at times distracted and myopic in our own worlds, but I believe that under the right circumstances, in the right circumstances, we do rise up, we do try to do what's right.

Sometimes the motivations behind it are different, but I think there's a fundamental belief that we're going to do what's right.

It's very unusual for someone at the top levels of government to have been a sort of small city mayor.

Pete Buttigieg has such an interesting mix of backgrounds, and that on-the-ground experience gives him this point of view about democracy, which is, the best case we could make for democracy abroad is that it works well.

Part of what makes America America is the idea that you should be able to prosper no matter where you come from.

That's part of what I think we are responsible for helping to make possible when you work in public policy.

There's an intimate connection between social mobility, economic mobility, and actual mobility.

For some people, your range of motion is infinite.

It's literally global.

For other people, it can be very difficult just to get where you need to be within the boundaries of your own community.

One of my first trips as secretary provided an example I think about a lot.

We're in Chicago, where we're helping to expand the Red Line to the South Side of Chicago.

One of the things that I learned about on the ground there was a neighborhood called Roseland.

And that neighborhood, within the city limits of Chicago, if you don't have a car, it can take you almost an hour and a half to get to downtown, where a lot of the jobs are.

I think there's an interesting relationship between transportation and imagination and inspiration.

Absolutely.

And to the extent that you never get to leave your tiny pocket, you're just going to have a different quality of imagination.

Your exposure to the world, your exposure to opportunity, your exposure to other people and ideas, all of that depends on the access you have to transportation.

It's a funny thing to be 55 years old, sitting across from a 17 year old, who you recognize instantly is a total executor.

Gitanjali Rao is probably one of my favorite interviews of all time.

She's a big thinker who is already teaching workshops all over the world that get to the heart of how to solve a problem.

She's a freshman at MIT.

She has several patents, and she is determined to conquer a long list of goals through a career in tech.

We've spent the past hundred years with the same education system, and it took us a whole pandemic to even think about going online and offering opportunities like remote learning to people who have significantly less opportunities than we do in the United States.

A big thing is mandating this idea of rooting everything in empathy and impact and talking about problem solving and creativity in school.

School really should prepare you for the real world, and where some of that real world expertise comes from is empathy and solving problems and innovation.

And so ideally, I'd like to implement some sort of problem solving or critical thinking curriculum in schools.

And these, like, ideas that I'm seeing are ranging from everything, right?

Technology-centric ideas to completely activism-based to art-based to music, to history, incredible ways to solve problems that don't all center around science.

There's times you're mixing math and history and all these weird subjects that you wouldn't think to put together.

Kelly: Ginni Rometty most people know.

She was named the Most Powerful Woman in the world multiple times.

She ran IBM and totally transformed their business.

She pointed out this really important thing, which is that so many jobs require a four-year college degree just to start, and maybe that's not necessary.

95% of our jobs require a Ph.D. or a college degree to be hired.

And I thought to myself, "Oh, my gosh.

I am leaving out a huge new talent pool."

And by the way, my experience was 90% were Black Americans, Black or brown, but were people, underrepresented communities.

Because there was this barrier.

There was--it was, I call it a false barrier.

Poverty is also, yes, money, but it's also that side of opportunity.

And so there is so much more to do than just give people money.

That is not the only answer, just like erasing debt is not the only point.

The point is, Did you get something worth value for that or did you give someone the dignity of a job?

A part of the American story is the immigrant story, and Arianna Huffington is one of our most well-known, most well-loved, and most interesting.

She created something in a time when everybody had an idea for how to build a content company on the Internet.

"The Huffington Post" was the third most-visited news site in the world when she sold it to AOL.

And since then, she's been thinking hard about what it takes to thrive.

I loved America before I came here.

There was this incredible land of endless opportunities and dreams realized.

And right now, I believe we just need to change direction.

And part of that is an individual journey, but we also need to stop treating each other so harshly.

We need to give each other grace.

It goes back to the first Industrial Revolution, when we started revering machines.

And the goal with machines and, after machines, software is to minimize downtime.

But the human operating system is different.

For the human operating system, downtime is a feature, not a bug.

When you look at the macro and you look at what holds people back in America, pain, chronic pain, is a major factor, if not the biggest.

It's the number-one barrier to productivity.

Rachel Zoffness is a pain psychologist, which is not something I knew even existed.

Chronic pain is on the rise.

It's not going down.

Our treatments are not working.

We have an opioid epidemic.

The reason chronic pain is on the rise is because we continue to frame pain as a purely biological/ biomedical problem.

And it isn't working because it's not true.

Chronic pain is a thief.

It steals your ability to work, to play, to hang out with your kids and your grandkids, to engage in sports and your beloved hobbies.

Now, when you've had chronic pain for ten years, you bet you're going to feel depressed.

You bet you're going to be anxious about your body and your future.

Of course you're going to feel hopeless, especially as it marches on and on and on and all you're ever given is a pill.

So I want to reframe the way we think about this.

There are certain things we can't control, but there are many things we can do in the social and sociological domain of pain to change pain volume.

It is not hopeless.

That's your message.

My message is that it's extremely hopeful because there's a million things we can do to change pain.

A really important part of attacking this question is understanding how we know what we know.

And one of the most respected storytellers in America for the last 20 years has been David Brooks.

We had to have him because he helped us appreciate the connection between individual lives, communities, culture, and society.

Give me three things that every American needs and deserves.

The first one is dignity.

I mean, that's really at the center of my politics.

And I don't care if you're religious or not, it's super useful to have this phrase "made in the image of God."

And you might not believe in God at all.

I don't care.

But if you have that logic in your head some, this person has an infinite soul, then you'll probably end up treating them well.

The second thing, everybody needs a container.

They need their 5 or 6 people who are their core.

One of my favorite sayings about-- from attachment theory-- is all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base.

And so you've got to have that secure emotional base, that unconditional love.

And then I think the third thing--and these are broad-- but a sense of movement, a sense that my life is going somewhere, I'm a vector, I'm going somewhere, I'm going up.

There's a phrase that's a favorite of mine from Nietzsche.

"He who has a why to live for can endure any how," that if you know why you're living, then when the setbacks come, you can endure them because you know, "That's where I'm going."

So you got to have that ascent toward a goal.

And so those would be my three.

It's interesting to think about what we mean when we say "making it."

And everyone we talked to had a slightly different opinion, but there was a subset that overlapped.

It was some meaning in your life, some savings, some downtime from work, and connection.

We have enjoyed every minute of putting this season together for you.

The conversations in this season moved me, and I hope they move you, too.

So join us for next week's episode of "Tell Me More," as we ask the biggest question we can imagine: What does it take to make it in America today?

If you liked these conversations, ♪ ♪ ♪