Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast
Ellen DeGeneres, Washington DC
Little Everywhere / Higher Ground Productions / Audible
Speaker:
Higher Ground and Audible Originals present: Michelle Obama, The Light Podcast.
Ellen DeGeneres:
Thank you so much. Hi. Hello. I'm very excited to be here. I have to be honest, I had stopped filming my show in May, and I haven't really spoken to anyone or done anything for however many months that is. It's been a while since I've spoken to anyone and—Portia once in a while—but mostly I'm talking to my dogs all day long, so this could get weird. [in talking-to-dog voice] Yes, it could. Who's going to be a good audience? Who's going to be a good audience? Huh? I'm sorry I haven't spoken to people. I love this woman so much, and the book is amazing. You're going to love it if you read, I don't know who reads anymore, but if you read, you're going to love this book. Please welcome my friend, Michelle Obama.
Michelle Obama:
Woo!
Ellen DeGeneres:
Woo.
Michelle Obama:
Everyone. Ellen DeGeneres.
Michelle Obama:
Hey everyone, this is Michelle Obama and you're listening to The Light Podcast. I want to talk to you about fear. Yes, our fears, those little monsters that all of us have to wrestle with. Maybe you're afraid of public speaking or conflict or what people think of you. It can be anything really, but we've all got them, and if we don't take the time to understand them, they can really hold us back and then all of a sudden, a fear is not just a fear. A fear becomes a limit.
Fear might mean that we start shying away from opportunities or risks or adventures. It might mean that we eliminate whole categories of activities or passions or people that might expand our life experience. And then we have to ask ourselves, is this really how I want to live? That's one of the things that I dive into with my good friend, Ellen DeGeneres in this episode. Now, Ellen is someone I met when my husband was first running for president, and I've been so thankful that over the years we've built a real durable friendship that goes beyond our day jobs. It's not always easy to sort out who you can genuinely connect with when you’re First Lady of the United States, but with Ellen, there was never a question. We text each other, meet up for dinner, visit each other's homes, and to that point, I fully recognize how much she loves her home time. So it meant a lot to have her travel across the country to join me for this conversation. Of course, one of the things I know for certain, anytime I'm with Ellen, is I’m in for a good laugh and that's exactly how our conversation started, with her struggling to sit on that big beautiful chair I selected for the stage.
Ellen DeGeneres:
Gifts.
Michelle Obama:
I heard the chairs were too big for you.
Ellen DeGeneres:
Listen, Michelle, I came out here to... They said see if the chair's comfortable for you. Well, what she's done—
Michelle Obama:
It's my show, my chair size.
Ellen DeGeneres:
So then I had to bring this out.
Michelle Obama:
You got a little booster. There you go.
Ellen DeGeneres:
She's tall, you guys. She's very tall.
Michelle Obama:
Oops-a-daisy.
Ellen DeGeneres:
Yeah, [baby voice] here I am.
Michelle Obama:
We have taller moderators later on in the tour.
Ellen DeGeneres:
Oh, okay. These are like lifeguard chairs. They're like...
Michelle Obama:
These are huge. I mean, this is like, "Woo."
Ellen DeGeneres:
Yeah.
Michelle Obama:
All right.
Ellen DeGeneres:
If I still had my show the next time you'd be on, I'd have a tiny low load share fee.
Michelle Obama:
Low nursery school chair.
Ellen DeGeneres:
I have to say before I start asking you questions about the book, it's so good. It's so beautifully written. It's got so many wonderful tools for what we all are needing to have right now. No, it's a beautiful, beautiful book.
Michelle Obama:
Thank you, babe. Thank you.
Ellen DeGeneres:
You talk about in the book being comfortably afraid, which is I think such a great way to put it, and it's a way that I think everybody can understand. So talk about comfortably afraid.
Michelle Obama:
Yeah. I spent a lot of time talking about fear because when you look over what's been happening over the course of not even just the last years, we have gotten so used to being engaged by our fear. It feels like our fear is being used against us. You look at the headlines every day, every year, every decade, each year is worse and worse if you just look at the news. If you listen to some of our leaders, we can't trust each other. We can't trust anything. You should be afraid. When I think about how fear affects the choices that we make and the choices of how we treat each other, a lot of times that's usually grounded in some fear. The fear of you are new, you're different. So I started thinking about fear and the fact that we struggle to properly decode fear.
Fear is an important emotion. It protects us, it saves us. I write about my first memories of being afraid. You're afraid of the dark, you're afraid of scary movies, you're afraid of people who look dangerous. I was afraid of a stuffed turtle in my Aunt Robbie's recital when I was four. The whole notion of a stuffed animal frightened me, I wouldn't get on stage. But I remember clearly overcoming that fear because I wanted to wear this red velvet dress because I thought I was cute. I remember telling myself, it's just a turtle. It's just a turtle, girl. Go on over there, just pet it, and then you can just twirl your little butt off because it's not going to hurt you. It's like I remember at a young age decoding my fear to get to someplace I wanted to go. But then there's the fear that keeps us stuck.
The fear of other, the fear of somebody who's not like you, the fear of somebody who's got a different skin color than you. That's an irrational fear and if we don't learn to decode it and to know when our fear is keeping us safe from when it's keeping us limited and narrow and small, if we don't start thinking about how we process fear, I know I do. I've had to learn how to determine when my fear is rational and when it's just me not wanting to do something that makes me uncomfortable. And I think the biggest example is when Barack approached me about running for President of the United States. Yeah, that happened. But he played a, I wouldn't say played a dirty trick, but it was like he said, "A lot of people want me to do this. It's going to be hard, and I know this is going to be a lot on your family, and if you don't want me to do this, then we just won't." And I'm like, "Really?? You gonna put this on me??" He's like, "No, really. Really." So I had to sit with that choice and think about it. And for weeks I walked around and I described walking around with the notion of that in my head, and my first gut instinct was, "No. No way. No. Heck no." But then I had to say, "Well, what is that coming from?" And if I'm honest with myself, as I said here, it's coming from the fact that I didn't want change. I didn't want discomfort. It was all about me. It was all about not wanting to do something that would put me in an uncomfortable place. And then I had to ask myself, Was that a reason to impact what could be a historic thing? Would I want to live in the legacy of many of my ancestors? I talk about our grandparents who had legitimate fears because they grew up in Jim Crow and desegregation. And men, our grandfathers had limited worlds because they would be in danger if they stepped too far outside of their comfort zone. So I saw in my own time, my grandfather's worlds get smaller and smaller. One of my grandfathers died of lung cancer because he just didn't trust doctors. He didn't trust anybody. He didn't trust white people, so he didn't go to the dentist because that's all there were in our community were white dentists. He didn't have a tooth in his mouth. Fear. The legacy of some of our grandparents was small lives because of fear, fear that their kids would be harmed. Don't try this, don't go away from home because we don't know what's going to happen to you. Real legitimate fears. But my mother and father didn't want us to live with that legacy of fear and let our worlds be narrowed. And so those thoughts came into my head and I said, "Well, if I say no, only because of my fear, then what am I teaching my girls?" What am I saying to them? How am I going to look back as an old lady and my kids say, "We hear grandpa could have been president." And it's like, "Yeah, girl, he could have been, but I don't want to be bothered with that. So we still here." So learning to be comfortably afraid is learning to rationally deal with your fear so that you can get to the other side. And when you get to the other side, nine times out of 10, there's a lot of growth and opportunity and possibility if you can decode it properly.
Ellen DeGeneres:
So yeah, I grew up with a father that was afraid of everything. He literally lived in fear of everything. He wouldn't let me... I never learned to roller skate because I could have fallen down and hurt myself. And we didn't go to doctors because we were Christian Science so I would have a split open knee and bone would be exposed, and he'd just pray.
Michelle Obama:
You'd be fine, baby.
Ellen DeGeneres:
Oh, he gave me some cherries and just prayed. Cherries. I had a bowl of cherries, and then he tied a rag around my knee and with a Marks-A-Lot drew a smiley face, which seems like ink could go into the bloodstream. But anyway, yeah, he was scared of everything, and I just grew up with that and I didn't realize at the time how much OCD he had. He was a very fearful person and so I really worked hard to try to grow out. I didn't want to become that person. I didn't want to be that fearful. He was fearful of not having enough money, so we didn't have enough money because he made that come true. He thought about it enough that we didn't have.. so fear to me... And so I've pushed myself. The comfortable fear for me is, I want to host the Oscars. I want to do something really dangerous so that I can feel good about myself. And it's hard. It's hard to push yourself to do something that's really scary.
Michelle Obama:
And another thing is that I explore how much fear affects bigotry and racism and isolation from each other. And that's what people try to feed on. Be afraid of the other person, be afraid of them. And that's why we have to be really careful when people try to lead us by our fear. We should be suspicious of that because I live in this country, I've traveled around it, and let me tell you, people disagree with one another, but the fear is coming from other places, noises in people's heads, things coming from folks phoned and I think that's one of the reasons why they encourage us all to be mindful of getting out of our comfort zones, of reaching out to people who are not like us, because we will not see the truth of each other if we just sit in our fear and isolation and assume that what people are telling us about them is true because they're telling them about us. And that's not true. So it can't just be one way. So I think decoding fear is a part of us being able to drop our guard and really learn each other and not be manipulated by power that's trying to gain more power because of our fear.
Ellen DeGeneres:
Well, yeah. I think we have the noise. The loudest noise is from extremes so we are hearing extreme, extreme right voices and extreme left, and that's just noise. The most of us aren't feeling or thinking that, but it just looks like that. And so the middle part of us, all the smart ones have to go, we're as loud as you people on each side. It's really hard to quiet that noise and it's a really horrible thing. Your daughter was scared of Chewbacca, and yet you brought it to the White House.
Michelle Obama:
I did. That was a big mommy fail. We thought we were doing something great. We invited all the Star Wars characters, and I forgot that Sasha hates all things big and furry where you can't see the face. That poor child had on the cutest little costume. You don't see her here because she's crying in her room upstairs but I eventually got over my fear of stuffed turtles, and she is now no longer afraid of big hairy things. So we are now comfortably afraid together and moving through life normally.
Ellen DeGeneres:
She's gotten over that.
Michelle Obama:
She's good.
Ellen DeGeneres:
That's good.
Audience Member 1:
I'm a physician and being a black woman is not always easy. So there have been many times where my voice just seemed very muted. If I made a suggestion or something like that, it wasn't heard whereas maybe one of my counterparts who doesn't look like me, is heard. And so there have been many times where I've had to bite my tongue or pretend like the microaggressions weren't there and just keep moving, keep my head down and keep doing what I know that I need to do. At the end of the day, it's about patient care, and if I can't take a breath and let that roll off a little bit, then it comes back on them. And the other thing is, as a black woman, I always have to be very cognizant of how I'm handling my black patients because they don't get to see us all the time. And so it's really good that they see somebody that they're like, "Oh my gosh, she looks like me and she sounds like me and her hair is mine," and things like that. If I get bogged down with that other stuff then I don't get to show up like I need to for them.
Ellen DeGeneres:
You talk about in the book of meeting yourself and others with gladness, and this is your friend Ron who does this, and I think it's a really beautiful thing to do that.
Michelle Obama:
It's a short chapter in the book called Starting Kind as one of the tools that I learned. I describe a friend of mine, Ron Kirk. Some of you may know him. He used to be the former mayor of Dallas and was in Barack's administration. Handsome, charismatic, funny southern dude who is confident and poised. He's a good friend. His wife is one of my dear friends and she would tell me about a habit that Ron would have in the morning. She's lying in bed and she'd hear him getting up. So he gets up early, starts his day, and she'd hear him talking to himself in the mirror and he would say, "Hey, buddy."
And I was like, "He'd say that out loud?" She's like, "No. Oh, no, no, he’s talking full–" "Hey, buddy, how you doing? You're going to have a great day." And so she tells me, and we're just cracking up because imagining Ron Kirk giving himself that little morning pep talk. Now, I asked him before I told him. I said, "I'm about to write about you in this book." And he said, "Go ahead." He just wants the percentage of the mug sales when... The hey buddy mugs that are going to come out of this. But I share that story because while we teased him because he can stand teasing, is that it is a simple thing that we do not do, particularly women for ourselves. We do not send ourselves simple, kind messages, not even, especially not in the morning, and it is such a simple tool. It's a tool that I know I have to practice more and more because those negative thoughts, I don't care what they are sitting comfortably in my head, even if I can play it off, that negative thing. It's like, "Oh, girl, your hair didn't look good," or "This didn't happen. Oh, did you gain weight? And what's wrong? Where'd that wrinkle come from?" And "Oh, why does your face look like that?" We all just get used to these negative messages and we practice that over anything else.
Ron Kirk:
When Michelle told me I was going to be in the book, I was at first flattered, surprised, and then a little anxious how a story about somebody who talks to themselves in the morning might be received. Most of my life, I'm up at 5:30 in the morning. My wife is very much not a morning person, and I'd just like to think through what I'm going to say. And so it got to be on Wednesdays. I like to just remind myself, you got this. Then it evolved. I would call and leave myself a voice message if I could. So I called and I was like, "Hey, buddy, it's me. You're going to have a good day." But I didn't know she was listening. My wife never gets up. So at some point, I could think during one of their trips, she would take her girlfriends and she shared this story with Michelle and the group and then the next thing I know when we were all together in Martha’s Vineyard a couple of years ago, Michelle, Barack, everybody's, "Hey buddy, how you doing?" So I can't believe she remembered that story. I didn't know that it resonated like that. It speaks to her unique talent to take everyday life stories and find something of value of them. I just never dreamed I'd be one of those stories.
Ellen DeGeneres:
You have been attacked in so many ways, and people have tried to turn off your light and just the strength that you have, and it really is, I think a big part, like you said to your parents because they were amazing parents and really gave you the tools, but to go through what you've gone through, how do you keep that light strong when you have people saying such horrible, negative things?
Michelle Obama:
And a lot of people, it's really interesting, young people now who know me on this side of it don't even remember how bad the attacks were on me when Barack was running and the country didn't fully know me. I mean, these are major magazines. They took the image of a smart, articulate, outspoken black woman, and they turned it into a threat.
And so, yes, it definitely hurt. It was stunning at first because it's like when you see yourself in a way that is not you, you wonder, well, wow, how easily your whole persona can be manipulated when you're in the public eye. Ellen, you've experienced as a public figure. Unfortunately, we often treat it like, "Well, that's the cost of being a public figure." And it is sad. But sadly, social media and the press, again, preying on negativity, praying on fear, praying on anger. It's become the easy go-to. What pain and anger and fear must you be holding onto that you would do that to anybody, let alone a woman, a mother. What prevents you from seeing my humanity? Something is broken, and when you're the first lady, your job isn't to worry about it. Your job is to figure out how to fix it because people are in pain.
People are afraid. People are afraid of people who aren't like them because they don't have enough, and that's the problem with living in a country where people don't have enough. They take their anger and their bitterness and their loss out on each other, which is why we should all be promoting more taxes and more support systems and better schools for everyone of all races, because it makes people feel like they have a stake. And then we don't have to go after each other. So I get through it because it's an armor that I built. Another tool is that you learn how to not let that stuff in and to grasp on to the truth of who and to rise above it to see your own light and to hopefully help them see theirs so that they're not in that place.
Audience Member 2:
I overcame the fear of animals by getting an animal. I was afraid of dogs and cats. As a child, dogs especially were seen as something scary, not necessarily as pets, but as things that chased you down the street. And we never had pets in my family, and so someone said a cat might be an easier thing so I got a cat. Prince the 23 pound cat that started off as a cute little kitten and became a 23 pound cat.
Audience Member 3:
My biggest fear was for a long time of saying no. I felt like a lot of the time I would say yes to everything, because if I said no, then I maybe lose the person that I'm saying no to. But I found out as I got older that it's important to say no sometimes because you have to refuel yourself. You can't say yes to everything because you're giving more than you're receiving when you say yes to everything. So you have to learn how to say no, just to keep your own sanity.
Ellen DeGeneres:
Well, you're an inspiration in that way that you could take all that and still stand strong and still put yourself out there because when you had to, you had no choice. You had to just be keep...
Michelle Obama:
Well, then there was that.
Ellen DeGeneres:
Yeah. I mean, that's really tough. I mean, I say this all the time, but like people say, you're in show business and you have to have thick skin. You just have to grow thick skin. It's like, "I don't have thick skin. I don't want thick skin. I like being sensitive. I like feeling things," and it's taught me compassion and empathy because now I know what it feels like to be attacked and to be judged and to be criticized. And I don't ever want to do that to anybody because I know what that feels like. And if I had thick skin, I wouldn't know what it felt like. So I'm happy that I feel things because I want other people to feel good like I feel good like you said.
Michelle Obama:
Well, that's why people love you.
Ellen DeGeneres:
Well, it's one of the reasons. I think that social media though, has exponentially just... I think it has created... And it seems to prey on all the negative and all the tax versus anything nice that you're saying about somebody. They love to keep sharing and spreading nasty. I mean, I don't know what we do about that, but social media has really hurt.
Michelle Obama:
Well, I don't think that it's a coincidence that we're seeing high rates of anxiety and depression, especially among our young people. There are wonderful things that social media has done. It's opened up the world in so many ways. It has connected us in ways. It gives you access to information. My children can now correct us on point by going, "Mom, you're stupid. This is the right answer. You don't know what you're talking about." And it's like, "Ooh, I hate Google. I hate Google. Makes parents look stupid." They do it to my mom all the time. It's like, "Grandma, that science experiment didn't work that way," but we don't know where all that is coming from, and it's too much information. It's like everybody's opinion doesn't matter. It really doesn't need to be heard and shared. It really doesn't. Before you had a crazy uncle and he just talked crazy at the kitchen table, and now he's got followers.
It's like, nobody was supposed to hear from Uncle Bubba ever, ever. We were just like, you just listen and go, "Um hmm," now he's spreading that stuff. We haven't yet figured out how to manage it so I think we have to be wary, and I think and it's hard as parents to set those boundaries for your kids. And we just escaped it because Malia wasn't as old enough where she wasn't hooked on it like a drug. Sasha is just right in that cusp so I know it's easier said than done, but for the sake of our young people, our young adults, we've got to be... We don't know what this is doing to them and I think that it's just making us all way more anxious and suspicious. It is dividing us in ways that we just have to be careful of, and it's going to take us some time to really know these effects. But I am wary of social media, even though I'm on Instagram and Twitter and all that stuff. I know.
Ellen DeGeneres:
So follow her.
Michelle Obama:
Yeah, right. So follow me. Well, you saw my community page. So you know.
Ellen DeGeneres:
You talk about your mom a lot in the book. She's amazing, Marian, but you talk about some pretty... Her rules. Do you want to talk about her rules?
Michelle Obama:
Well, the chapter is called Meet My Mom, because let me tell you, you want to know what's my source code, what's my biggest tool is that I have Marian Robinson as a mother. She is common sense, unique wisdom, but it's called Meet My Mom and there's a lot of little Marianism in there. Just to share one, this notion is, "You don't go to school to be liked. You come home to be liked." And this is another thing that helped me get through some of those tougher times because my mother's view was, "Oh, you go to school to learn. You can't control whether the teacher likes you. What you need to do is get the math that she has from her head into yours. You come home to be liked." That's just an example of just the steadiness that my mother provided to me and my brother, our family, her entire life.
And that she upended her life to come and live in the White House, which she did not want to do. And the only reason she did it is that her favorite child, my brother Craig, convinced her that it was the best thing for her to do. So she reluctantly came and lived in a couple of suites in the White House to do me a favor, but it was a huge favor creating a stability. I talk about the fact that grandma lit up for us all those eight years in the White House. She was there seeing us as ourselves, Barack, the girls, me. She was that source for me to come to when that stuff would happen. I could go up to her room and just sit and let out a breath, and she would remind me who I was, who we were. If we were traveling, and we wanted to keep the girls on a schedule and make sure they were doing what they were supposed to and they didn't grow spoiled or pampered or didn't take advantage of the staff there, grandma was there to be like, "You know what you're supposed to do? You know who you are. Don't come in here acting new."
All of that kept us grounded. So one of the biggest gifts in this book is the chapter on my mom, because there's so much that she teaches us and me. One other important thing is that you raise the child you have. I mean, you don't try to change them into another version of yourself. It didn't make sense until, not after the first child, but the second, because the first one you think, if it works out, you think it's you. You think, "Oh, I'm such a good parent. Look how normal they are and how they think and they listen." And then the second one comes and they're very different. I share a story about when I was about to give up on parenting, when it was clear, when my children were showing me who they were and I share this story about... It was one of those nights Barack is campaigning, kids are little, it was time for bed and they weren't listening.
And I was like, "Go to bed," laughing, laughing and I was just at the end of my rope and had a long day, and I had asked too many times, and I just went upstairs and said, “Okay. Y'all don't listen to me. I quit. You just don't need a parent so I'm out. You could just do this all on yourself since you know so much. I'm just retiring." I'm standing there. I've got Malia, the older one who's empathetic and sweet. Her reaction was, "Oh no, mommy. No, we wouldn't know what to do without you. No, don't." She walked in her room, brushed her teeth, hopped in the bed, and I was like, "Ah, okay, this works." And then the little one, Sasha, she was about five. She grabbed her blankie and was like, "Oh, good!" She walked... That little girl was like, "I am so glad you are finally handing me my life." "I mean, this is what I've been trying to tell you. You don't know what you doing!" And I learned right then and there, two different people—and I have to approach them—and it's been that way their whole lives. They are beautiful, amazing young girls, but they are separate individuals and I have to approach them that way—different kind of ways to show love, different ways that they hear it. That was something my mother taught me is like, don't turn your child into amending me. You have to parent the child you have. So that's just some of the wisdom.
Ellen DeGeneres:
I love that. Yeah. I think that's a lot of the reason that people have kids is because they think they're going to mold them into exactly what they want them to be. Any final thoughts, anything else you want to say before we say goodnight? What a night. What a night.
Michelle Obama:
I just want to say, this woman is light. Ellen, I love you. I am grateful that you've taken time out of your world to share this stage with me. Let's give Ellen DeGeneres a round of applause. I love you.
Ellen DeGeneres:
I love you. I love you.
Michelle Obama:
Thank you guys.
Ellen DeGeneres:
Delan, I love you.
Michelle Obama:
Good night!
Michelle Obama:
Throughout my life, my mom's wisdom has been the armor that helped me get through my toughest moments, not just when our girls were little, but as they grew older, and especially during the White House years. Honestly, the topics we've talked about in this episode all fit together because my mother's grasp of these smaller truths gave her a sort of fearlessness of her own and she shaped the way I looked at fear, the way I see my place in the world, the way I interact with all of you, because look, we'll never completely rid ourselves of fear and uncertainty. That's just a fact. But when we fixate too much on our fears, on the dangers that might be lurking around the corner, whether real or perceived, or when we give too much power to what other folks think of us, or how they've mistreated us in the past, we risk letting our fears dim our light. So we've got to get comfortable with our fears. Sometimes a fear is like a hater that you just brush off and keep it moving. Other times, a fear is a true nemesis that you have to look dead in the eye and face down in order to really let your light shine and isn't that all we are really here to do, to kindle our light, to look in the mirror and tell ourselves that we can do this. And once we do that, then we can share our light with others as well. So I want to thank Ellen for her friendship, her perspective, and for guiding us through such a wonderful conversation. Thank you again, all of you for listening in. I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker:
This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original, produced by Higher Ground and Little Everywhere. Executive produced by Dan Fierman and Mukta Mohan for Higher Ground and Jane Marie for Little Everywhere. Audible executive producers, Zola Mashariki and Nick D'Angelo. Audible co-producers, Keith Wooten and Glynn Pogue. Produced by Mike Richter with additional production by Joy Sanford, Dann Gallucci, Nancy Golombisky, and Lisa Pollak with production support from Andrew Eapen, Jenna Levin and Julia Murray. Location recording by Jody Elff. Special thanks to Melissa Winter, Jill Van Lokeren, Crystal Carson, Alex May-Sealey, Halle Ewing, Merone Hailemeskel, Sierra Tyler, Carl Ray Njeri Radway, Meredith Koop, Sara Corbett, Tyler Lechtenberg, and Asra Najam. The theme song is Unstoppable by Sia. The closing song is Lovely Day by Bill Withers. Audible Head of US content, Rachel Ghiazza. Head of Audible Studios, Zola Mashariki. Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound Recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Voiceover by Novena Carmel. This episode was recorded live at the Warner Theater in Washington DC.
