The Michelle Obama Podcast features the former First Lady diving deep into conversations with loved ones — family, friends and colleagues — on the relationships in our lives that make us who we areAs they pull the curtain back and invite listeners into their home, the former US President Barack Obama joins First Lady Michelle Obama in The Michelle Obama Podcast for an intimate conversation about the challenges we all face, the legacy (and the world) they hope to leave behind for Sasha and Malia, the relationship between young people and politics, and the President’s eternal optimism.
Excerpts from the show’s first episode:
On why Michelle fell in love with Barack
Michelle Obama: You know that at the core of everything you have done politically, what I know about you as a person and one of the reasons why I feel in love with you is...
Barack Obama: It wasn’t just my looks... but that’s okay...
Michelle: 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!
On quarantining together
Michelle: Like most Americans we’ve been spending a lot of time together in quarantine.
Barack: You don’t seem too happy about that the way she said it, right?
Michelle: It’s just a fact.
Barack: [Laughs]
Michelle: There wasn’t a judgment. We’ve been together...
Barack: I’ve been loving it.
Michelle: Yeah, I’ve been having a great time. But we’ve had some interesting conversations because these are some crazy times.
On why Obama became a community organiser
Barack: I think I figured out once I got to school that if I am chasing after my own success, that somehow, I am going to end up alone and unhappy.
Michelle: Yeah.
Barack: That’s why I ended up going into community organising. When I thought about how I was going to spend my life, what I looked at was what those civil rights workers had done and the freedom writers had done. I thought, you know, that looks like hard work but it never looks like lonely work.
On political apathy in young people
Michelle: The only thing that worries me, and I agree in terms of the hope that I feel when I look at young people — just how they were raised, the values, their exposure, the questions that they have, the change in the economy that’s forcing them to ask a certain set of questions — that give me hope. But the thing that I worry is that I hear, I think, too many young people who question whether voting, whether politics is worth it.
Barack: 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...
Michelle: Yeah.
Barack: In some ways, we’re still living on the investment that was made by that greatest generation.
Michelle: 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?
Barack: Yeah.
Michelle: There’s really no structure to market government, right?
Barack: Right.
Michelle: 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...
Barack: [Laughs] The only time they know about what government doing is when...
Michelle: Is when it doesn’t work, right?
Barack: So we’re getting a good lesson in that right now.
On raising daughters and idealistic young people
Michelle: When it comes to fathers raising their girls, I do think that the average father today does believe that their girl can be anything she wants to be and they are delivering those messages around the dinner table.
Barack: Right.
Michelle: There is a different way of parenting. But what we didn’t do... We delivered those messages at the dinner table but we didn’t take them to the board room. We didn’t change our workplaces; we didn’t change things outside the home.
Barack: We didn’t institutionalise...
Michelle: We didn’t institutionalise the values that we’d been teaching this generation of kids. So now, they are growing up. They are leaving the dinner table and they are going out into the world and going, ‘The world doesn’t look like what I was taught back home.’ You know, this isn’t right.
Barack: 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.
(The podcast can be streamed on Spotify.)