Share This Podcast

AOC backs Zohran Mamdani for NYC mayor, DOGE engineer calls federal fraud ‘relatively nonexistent,’ and one far-right influencer finds outrage doesn’t always pay. DeRay interviews Amanda Litman about her new book When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership.

 

News

Former DOGE engineer says federal waste and fraud were ‘relatively nonexistent’

AOC backs Zohran Mamdani for NYC mayor

He’s a Master of Outrage on X. The Pay Isn’t Great.

 

Follow @PodSaveThePeople on Instagram.

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

[AD BREAK]

 

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, this is DeRay, and welcome to Pod Save the People. On this episode, it’s me, Myles and Sharhonda, back to talk about all the things that happened this past week with regard to race, justice, and equity that you might’ve missed or that you saw and didn’t hear this perspective on. And make sure that you join our community on Instagram at pod save the people. Lets go. 

 

[AD BREAK]

 

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, we are back on the eve of the National Guard being deployed in LA. It feels like every week just gets wilder and wilder, and there is a lot to talk about. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles E. Johnson at @PharaohRapture on Instagram. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: And this is Sharhonda Bossier at @BossierS on Spill, or you can find me on LinkedIn. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Sharhonda, let’s just jump right into it. I’m actually going to just volley over to you. Because we don’t talk about the issues on the podcast before the podcast, I have no clue what you think about it. But I’m interested in, are the, is the National Guard near you? How is it being covered locally, the protests, the ICE raids? I’ll tell you, in the last week, I saw the stories about ICE attending elementary school graduations. That’s wild. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: The stories about ICE, uh sent, texting people to come to their immigration hearings early and then arresting them at the immigration hearings. What is it like–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: –to live in LA at this moment and to experience it? I’m really interested in that. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, so just to position myself in this conversation so people understand sort of my, you know, purview here. I grew up in Watts, which is um a part of Los Angeles, the city on the east side. Um. And a lot of what is happening right now that is being covered nationally is actually happening in the county, which is very different than the city, right? So I think it’s really important for people to understand that, especially as people are talking about who is in charge, who should be intervening, etc. Um. I last night ran a half marathon through Inglewood, right? Which is on the sort of west side of you know parts of the county. Uh. My family is still very much in Watts and Compton, as are a lot of folks that like I grew up with, et cetera. I think the overall sentiment in the city right now, though, is that things are really scary. And if you uh look like you can’t see my air quotes, you might be undocumented, uh that it’s important for you to like keep your head down and stay safe. I had brunch with a friend earlier today, and you know she’s Mexican, speaks Spanish, had an Uber driver who only spoke Spanish. And like all she was trying to have a conversation with him about in the car was like what his rights were in the event that someone else got in the car with him and started asking him questions, right? So I think there’s just like a sense that everyone is on edge right now. I’m seeing people who have historically been really quiet around issues like this, even when we’ve seen stepped up deportations under other presidential administrations be really vocal. And as I was running the half marathon last night, you know, usually you see signs that, know, are like Ryan Gosling’s face or some like funny like running slogan. And instead I saw lots of signs that said, ICE out of LA, chinga la migra, no human being is illegal, solidarity across borders, et cetera. So even in a space where people were like trying to accomplish some sort of athletic feat uh and were meant to be like celebratory and cheering on their friends around meeting, you know, for many people what’s a bucket list item, ICE raids are top of mind. Um. And everyone is focused on what’s happening in the city and in the county right now. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Myles, what have you seen the protests happening? What’s your take on the National Guard being deployed? I don’t know if you saw the Secretary of Defense threaten to deploy the Marines also to LA. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. No, I definitely seen it. I think if we’re talking about our local interactions with it, me being in Ohio, me being in the Midwest, I have to be honest. I’m really disgusted with a lot of like what it means to be an American citizen and how and the temperature and the personality of the average American citizen. I am disgusted with of course, the people who voted Trump in and who are allowing this to happen, but I’m also just disgusted by the kind of like the white neoliberal people I’m listening to say they just can’t take it. As if um it is their child who has to go and be in front of a judge and say, and represent themselves as if it’s their child, who has autism or um cancer, who who has to now defend themselves as as if, as if is them who is who are putting something on the line um other than their voice. And that’s kind of my taste for it out here. Um. The only thing I can really say about the whole national crisis is that this type of fascism has always been right underneath our culture. And if it’s one election cycle away, if it is one president choice away, that means it’s always there and always present. And no matter who’s in office, Democrat or Republican, we should always be making it so we’re abolishing ICE, not just when it’s motivated by these type of moments, but forever. And just figuring out inventive ways to keep that fresh in people’s minds. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: I think the best local journalists here have been really helpful in reminding us that while we are seeing an uptick in the drama surrounding the raids, we’re not actually seeing an uptick in the number of people who are being ensnared by them. Uh. Because I think that perspective is really important to Myles’s point about there in most instances not being a significant enough difference between what happens under a democratic administration or a Republican one. And so I think the best journalists I have seen have really helped us really maintain that perspective. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, nobody’s numbers are touching Obama’s yet. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I will say, I am struck at how much the storytelling matters in all of this to make it possible. I think the conversations about ICE are interesting. People talk about ICE like it’s one of the ancient agencies. ICE was created in 2003. It’s a relatively young agency, so when you think about getting rid of it, it’s like we had a whole, you know, 100, almost 200 years without ICE and the world didn’t end. So that’s interesting. The second thing is I today online, at least, there has been a lot of conversation about nonviolent protests. And like I was one of the protesters you know a decade ago at this point. And nonviolent tactics, I think, make sense. And I get it. And as a strategy, I think it is probably the best strategy. But I think the strategy of nonviolence presupposes things like you know communication and like being able to know what’s true and not true. Like those are actually preconditions, I think, of this type of strategy. And it is interesting, I’m telling you, every time I get into an Uber and hear Kristi Noem’s ads about how wild illegal immigrants are, I’m like, the storytelling’s sort of nuts. And there was a poll that came out that showed that people don’t support what ICE is doing when they realize that ICE is arresting people at hearings and in elementary school graduations and grocery stores. But this idea that all of the immigrants are killers and in MS-13 is like part of what is fueling um people’s support for what’s happening right now. And that is interesting. And even in LA, because from afar, the national news is like, it’s chaos out there and da da da. And you’re like, whew I don’t know. I think 2,000 guards coming outside for a handful of people feels pretty crazy. The Marines being threatened feels pretty crazy. But if the story is this idea of chaos, and I don’t want to be like, and I told you so guy, but you know, we were in the street a decade ago being like, the police are crazy. People looked at us like you hoodlums. And now, you know Maxine Waters is getting the door shut in her face when she showed up at the ICE place today. And she’s like, ICE is crazy. And it’s like mm yeah, you now Maxine, we tried to, you know people tried to tell you guys ICE was crazy a while ago, so. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Two other things I wanna I wanna add to that. One is that a lot of the images I have seen have been um of Black people in the streets, particularly like in Compton and um and some of the other surrounding communities. And that’s important because Compton is no longer a majority Black community. And people don’t think about immigration as an issue that impacts Black people, though it very much does, right? Um. The other thing is, I think that what we’re experiencing right now is very similar to what we were experiencing in 2020. And that is people are in the streets, yes, because they think that what ICE is doing is wrong, but also because overall, people are unhappy. People were out, yes because of George Floyd, but they were out also because there were other factors like people were experiencing mass layoffs, the economy was tanking, there was COVID, people were feeling socially isolated. All of those things are also influencing people’s decisions to be in the streets right now. And I think our elected leaders are again, missing an opportunity to speak to a lot of the underlying motivations for why people are in the streets. Because ICE raids are yes part of it, but not the entire story. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, we’ll see how this goes. You know, people have been saying from the beginning that Trump has wanted a civil war and wanted to deploy the National Guard on a large scale. And LA is a prime target. If this story is this liberal bastion of people who didn’t vote for him. Um. Did you also see that the travel ban is back and it goes into effect Monday? So the day before this podcast comes out, this episode comes out. But it is 12 countries. They are banned from entering the United States because the Trump administration is saying, and I quote, “that they have a large scale presence of terrorists. The 12 countries are Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. And then there are seven countries that have a partial restriction on their citizens, Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. Venezuela was interesting to me since we just sent a bunch of people to Venezuelan prison. And now we won’t let the Venezuelans really come in the country. Um, but I, the travel ban is back and it’s wild, because, you know, the first time the travel ban came, people flooded the airports, the ACLU was there fighting ICE and this travel ban seemingly came out with like very little, I don’t know. It didn’t, it wasn’t a big splash in the news, maybe because other things are a bigger splash, but what do y’all have to say about, have you, did you see the travel ban news? 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: I did. And as I was reading the list of countries, I was like, damn, what the Laotian people do, right? [laughing] And I think it’s just really hard to keep track of, to your point, like the narrative they’re spinning around certain people. Um. I think, it’s also really interesting because you know a lot of reporters have reported that the administration seems to have learned it’s lesson the first time around. And so they have gotten really good at crafting these kinds of rules or exclusions or policies in a way that make it harder for people to challenge them in court. And so it seems like every chance we have to like push back, they take those lessons and come back stronger and figure out how to avoid either scrutiny or have them, you know, thrown out in court and so, you, know, I think for a long time we had assumed, let me actually speak for myself. Let me use I statements. I had assumed um that we were encountering an administration that would try and strong arm us into stuff, and it would be very clear, and that they wouldn’t try and leverage the way that the system was set up to their advantage. And instead, I think what I’m experiencing and what I am observing is that they are like, okay, fine. If you want us to operate within the rules, we can learn to operate within the rules instead of bending the rules to help us get um to what where we want to go. Just a really interesting um thing to observe, I think particularly around the travel ban. And I think because they are launching assaults on multiple fronts, I think we just are overwhelmed and spread too thin to push back in any meaningful way. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And they aren’t afraid of the courts at all. They’ll like sue. It don’t matter. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Because they know that things the train will have left the station by the time we get to the courts, yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I think about the portrait this paints, right, because when we think about white supremacist terrorism and how much we’re kind of quietly, that’s kind of like ghost surveillance. I think sometimes because everything’s not necessarily literally connected to the government or sometimes when it comes to white supremist terrorism, it is, but because everything is not literally connected to the government, we don’t necessarily see the picture that the portrait of the nation that we’re living in. And I was thinking to myself, I’m like, oh, wow, we’re blocked off from these people now. And now we’re in this nation that the government is um is a neoliberal fascist government who’s going to go through the the system in order to let these kind of romantic genocides happen instead of the brutal ones that we witness in the Middle East, we’re gonna see these types. And then we are surveilled and we are kept in our place by these kind of quiet sleeper white supremacists who are in every state, who um decide to wake up and decide to destroy us and that is and they decide to end lives and that is um where our focus should be as a nation. That’s where we should be really be able to focus on. But because we’re so wrapped up in the fascism, we’re so wrapped up in the white supremacy, it’s not even an idea that we’ll be addressing this, you know? Like I, again, I kind of, in my head, maybe just for my own survival, think about 2028. And I don’t even think they’re gonna wanna talk about race. I think that that’s why I’m so excited about the AOC and the um and whatever, no matter what kind of critiques that I have or have or will have. But I’m excited about that kind of break-off because I’m like, I don’t even, I think the answer for a lot of people is to step even clearer off. I think that’s why we don’t see things being addressed in the media. I think that the Democratic party and a lot of powerful liberal folks have their hands in those medias and they’re saying, we are not going to um make this a big deal and they are calling the shots on that and crafting those stories and hope something new sprouts from it, that’s that’s my hope. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: So Myles, when the last time you were like, yeah you up here to break with the party, and da da da I was like, I don’t know, Myles. I was like a little you know I’m just nervous about it, because when I hear that sometimes, I get nervous that the only thing that’ll be left is the Republican party, and that freaks me out. And so, but I thought about it some more. I’m like, Myles has, you know good head on the shoulders. So I’m be like, entertain this idea seriously. And I’m like–

 

Myles E. Johnson: My moisturized shoulders 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah yeah, and I’m and I think I’m now at the point that I think that the break from the party will be like a re-invention of the party in a way, so I don’t know if it’ll be a break in a the whole thing goes away. But I just watch the apparatus miss this moment. And you’re like, Trump is so wild that this should be the moment where the stars are starry. Like this should be, like if there was ever a moment where there was like a clear message and a unified front and da da, like this would be the movement to me and they just have not done it. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: The game plan to me seems obvious, and I feel like I’ve even heard members of the Democratic Party say this. I don’t wanna say names because I don’t wanna give it to somebody who didn’t say it. But um I think it’s true for people to suffer so much that they are lustful for a Democratic ruling and they’re saying, oh, well, even though the Democratic party does this, this, and this wrong, They’re better than Trump, and we come running back. I think that is the game plan. But I think what’s actually going to end up happening is that people, mass groups of people are going to feel betrayed, abandoned. And that’s going to be even harder to mend. I think even the feelings that, again, I’m talking about a personal eye, but I’m kind of, I am speaking for a collective we, I’m thinking about the Black [?] Queer community, I’m thinking about um Black people, I’m thinking about how many people were removed from the democratic party when it was time to win, and I and that was just, in comparison, a small little, little cut for us, you know, this is really, really, really big. And I think that only people who don’t seem like they’re in control right now, who couldn’t help it, or who are saying things are going to be able to be looked towards as leaders from here. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think that I do think that they are thinking that midterms come, this was so wild, they’ll obviously win in the midterms. And instead, there’s a there’s a base of people, even hardcore leftists, like or people who are dems, who are like, y’all didn’t even fight for me. Like you let you know, there are real consequences to Trump’s decisions, like the people layed off, it’s the student loans, it’s the all the healthcare stuff, all the grants at universities. I know people who are impacted by the grant and like. I think people will be okay if we lost a fight, but people are like, oh, you didn’t fight. And I think that the party is like missing that. And I’ll never forget, at the height of the protests, when I was like really you know a thing on Twitter, I was criticizing Bill Maher. And I got a call from a really high-ranking person at the DNC being like, DeRay, Bill is our friend. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And I was like, girl, I don’t know, I’m, like. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Oh, brother.

 

Sharhonda Bossier: No. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I’m like, I’m like. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Oh no. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Bill is going off. I’m like this is crazy. And she’s like you know–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: He’s anti-black, he’s a misogynist. [?]

 

DeRay Mckesson: And she’s like an older Black woman who is a party establishment. I mean, been around for a while. I will not name names. But it was this whole lecture about like, you know, he’s in our corner. DeRay, like, stop beating him up online. And I’m sitting here like, this is why people don’t trust y’all. Like, you see, like because I’m right about what I’m saying about Bill Maher. Like I, and Bill might be–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Sure. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: –right about some other things. But the thing I was critiquing, I was ten toes down right on and you know I’m a soft I’m not like a attacker online I was just writing the critique but I’m like you called me about that, that is crazy to me. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: And it’s the cult, it’s the cult [bleep], sorry AJ, who has to bleep this, who’s the producer, but it’s the but even the language, right? That’s our friend, that kind of collective idea of like um, this is what we do, you are a political government corporation who is whose job is to morph and morph yourself into representing the progressive populace of your constituency. That is what you do. You’re not a collective we, you’re not um, it’s not a social club. It’s not, oh, Bill Maher, because what it really says is he has a show on HBO. We need to be able to go on that show on HBO that nobody cares about anymore, by the way. I mean, like, not even thinking about Bill Maher, I’m thinking about just legacy media in general. I watch um Bill Maher’s podcast show and, like regularly, because you must know thy enemy. And it’s amazing to see how how what it really sounds like is there are certain people who have been given permission to talk about politics in the media and certain people who have not and some people who play by that rule. And like that whole dynamic is um sucking us dry. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Well, the only good news that I can think of uh this week is that uh sister girl, home girl, our little cousin, Coco, who’s only 21 years old, just won the French Open and she did it beautifully. I don’t know if you saw the video of her adorable mother praying before the match point, like head down, full blown, that be like good mom prayer. She had it out, Spike Lee is in the crowd, front row and Coco did this beautiful interview. Where she was like, I saw him there. He like has been to a lot of my matches and he was going, if I won, Spike Lee was going to be the first person I dapped up. And she went over and dapped him up. Then she went over and danced with the ball kids, like the ball boys and girls on the court, had a little kiki with them. And even more adorable, I’m team Coco all the way. Coco and her family are riding the trains in Paris and they have like pictures of like, it’s like five of them on the train in Paris, just like riding. And it’s like, Coco, I love that you are like kind, sweet, and that girl on the court. And she has such a beautiful reverence for Serena and Venus and all the women that came before her. Um. But I just want to shout out Coco because she has been both an inspiration and a star. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Agree, and it’s been great to see just like a Black girl having fun in this moment, right? Um. And like walking in her greatness and having people be really excited for her um and to cheer for her I think has been a nice balance and counterweight to all of the heaviness in so many other parts of our lives in the world. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: You know I don’t care about the sports, but I do care about the Black people. I was gonna say I don’t care about sports, but I do care about the Blacks, that sounds a little crazy. [laughter] What I am excited about, and maybe this is just my ignorance, I, because I’m on the periphery of sports, so if you become a Serena Williams, a LeBron James or whatever, I will obviously know who you are. Apparently, if you start dating Cardi B, I will also know who you are, but or whatever gets you that kind of crossover fame. But I am excited about the sport that I’m seeing people talk about because I, from my perspective as an outsider, it felt like, oh, Serena Williams was the last kind of like tennis player who was Black, who, um who captured so much um of the public’s imagination. And it’s cool to see a Black person, specifically a Black woman inside of tennis getting this kind of acclaim and um and kind of attention right now, specifically because I love Black people in tennis because it’s such a class sport. It’s really only the golf, the tennis, the fencing. Whatever they do on the horses. Those are the class sports and I love seeing Black people disrupt that um with with our skill. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Which is why I’m always so surprised about your feelings about sports when we ever try and talk about them, because I feel like they’re such a lens onto our broader culture and how we think about and talk race and class, and particularly when it comes to Black women, how we talk about um, like, how we do or do not embody femininity, right? Um. And so, yeah, I’m just, I am fascinated by that. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Wait, can I do a brief interlude real quick and just a really–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: –quick history fact is that there’ve only been three Black women to ever win at Roland Garros which is where Coco just won. It’s Coco in 2025, Serena won in 2002, 2013 and 2015 and then the first Black woman to break the color barrier. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Althea Gibbs? 

 

DeRay Mckesson: In tennis was Althea Gibson and she won in 1956. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Oh Gibson, there we go. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: She also in May of 1956 she was the first Black athlete to win the French Open and then she was the first Black athlete to win at Wimbledon and the US Open has hired a Black woman artist, Melissa Colby, to create the official US Open artwork that will commemorate Althea Gibson’s legacy 75 years after she broke the tennis color barrier. It is wild to think that the gap between Black woman winning at Roland Garros was Althea Gibson in 1956 and then Serena in 2002, ’13 and ’15. And now Coco in 2025. Coco is only the–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Wow. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: –second American woman to win in the French Open in the last what chunk of years because Serena last won it in 2015, ’13.

 

Myles E. Johnson: That’s wild. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Wow, wild.

 

DeRay Mckesson: Okay, but back to you, Myles, to respond to Sharhonda. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Um, so yeah, that’s really fair. So first thing is I probably do, I probably should apologize because sometimes I say sports and I really mean football and because I don’t care about sport and because don’t about sports, sometimes they can mesh together. So I have like a really probably just negative view of football because of the price of um just the price of the body and the price and like. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: What people put into it. And then specifically, I believe we’re talking about somebody who was already a child of a rich man, and I’m like, so why do you wanna put your child up for this and for him–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: –to do all of this? I’m, like, he can’t, if you don’t go do some ballet and do some, you know, if you just like torturing your body, there’s like ways that you do it without, you know without head injury. So that’s one thing too, but even when it does come to tennis, because I know that Coco has some controversy around her, around a white opponent saying it was because of that white opponent not necessarily being on top of her game and some technicalities happening. That’s what let Coco win, not just because Coco was a more skillful, masterful player than her. And I know that that created some, a backlash and some uproar online. 

 

[clip of unnamed interviewer] Do you think there was a momentum shift in the first set because you started the match really well, you led 4-1, what happened at 4-1, do you think that Coco got better or the conditions got tougher? 

 

[clip of Aryna Sabalenka] You know I think it was more uh more windy and got more windy and also I think I was over-emotional and I think today I didn’t really handle myself quite well mentally I would say. So basically that’s it. I was just making [?] errors. Like I don’t know, I have to check the statistics. I think I, she won the match not because she played incredible, just because I made all of those mistakes from like if you look from the outside, kind of like from an easy [?].

 

[clip of unnamed interviewer] But is it harder because it’s the final of the Grand Slam? I mean, these events are so much bigger than–

 

[clip of Aryna Sabalenka] Yeah, that hurts. I mean especially when you’ve been playing really great tennis during the whole week. You know you’ve been played against a lot of tough opponents, Olympic champion, Iga. You know and then you go out and you play really bad. Like I don’t know, I think Iga if Iga would win me another day, I think she would go out today and she would get the win. It just you know like yeah.

 

Myles E. Johnson: Here’s what my critique is slash observation is, or andmy hope is. And hopefully this will say everything off how I feel. I would love for people who do like sports and to engage in sports to understand that sports in the landscape of sports, no matter if we’re talking about trans people, Black women, Black men kneeling, whatever, it’s consistently used for right-wing conservative propaganda and as seeds in order to create and to continue the steam and the fire over the um with the propaganda that they wanna spread. So when moments like this happen and you have maybe a Black cohort or mixed race cohort, all going for Coco and saying, you’re wrong, white opponent, that then gets fed into the right-wing apparatus. And I wish that people who enjoyed sports were a little bit. I don’t want to say smarter, because I really don’t think it’s a thing about intelligence, but I just wish it was just a little bit more strategic with how they engage, because it seems like every single time I turn around, it’s the same dynamic over and over again. And I would want for people to transcend that and be like, okay, we onto what you’re doing and you’re not going to take our joy and turn it into your fascist fodder. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come. 

 

[AD BREAK] 

 

Myles E. Johnson: So my news is around AOC and her recent endorsement of, y’all know me and names, Zohran. Is it? Come on. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: It’s Zohran. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Nod your head. Zohran Mamdani. Okay. So she just recently um endorsed, AOC just recently endorsed Zohran Mamdani for um New York City Mayor. The reason why I wanted to bring this to the news is obviously it’s big news. And I just feel like an eternal New Yorker. And I care. And New York is such a compass of where uh, things can go where people are at. So I just think paying attention still to the elections are important. And then also I really wanted, I’ve been having just these eyes on AOC to see where her moves are going to go. And I think right now there are so many Democrats who are either just lost in the middle and they’re not saying anything they’re just being silent or so many democrats who are essentially going more conservative and I think are gonna go veer center, more center right, more rifle talk, more immigration talk, more all that talk. And I love that AOC because she’s centered inside of this so much power because of where she, because of this tour she did with Bernie, because of um just honestly the desperation going through the nation. I love it that right now she didn’t decide to uh, go with the corporate candidate. I love that she still aligned herself with somebody who was more left leaning. And of course, um, cause I am friends with so many, um deeply annoying leftists, of course, uh, he nor she is ever going to pass any of the leftists uh, purity test, however, it does bring me some hope that in this moment where I feel like it might have been opportune for her to maybe even stay silent or to back away from somebody, specifically somebody who was so open and transparent about how they feel about Israel and AIPAC and all that other stuff to still endorse him, lets me feel like, oh, there is somebody who is a part of the Democratic Party or who’s a part the left, I really want to say. I really don’t want to say the Democratic party. I want to say somebody who’s a part of the left, who is still saying, oh, this is where we were? Let’s go further into our politics, let’s run away into our politic. That’s why Trump is in there with neo-Nazis right now, because he leaned more into his politic, not further away into his politic. And I like the idea of us doing the same thing. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways we’ve talked about the ways in which like gerrymandering and close primaries have moved the Republican Party further right, but we have not talked about the impact of those same forces on moving the Democratic Party like also further right, right? And so I think, Myles, to your point, it’ll be really interesting to see how this plays out in a city like New York City. Uh, I think I’m also very curious to see how ranked choice voting is, like how, how that impacts how this all shakes out. Um, I think, oh man, like Mamdani is like the person that, uh, cause I’m on an annoying number of like democratic email list and text lists, right? That everyone is warning Democrats about right now. They’re like, can’t be that guy. Can’t be, that guy can’t be that guy, right. And so it’ll be really interesting to see what coalitions form on the other side of this endorsement too, as a way of like warning, like the rational Democrats that this is a dangerous precedent, that this a dangerous position and a dangerous direction for the party to head in, is all of the messaging that I’ve been seeing, um, as somebody who, you know, lived and worked and organized in, in New York city. And so I just am really fascinated to see how this all plays out. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: The thing that I love about AOC, there are a couple things. Um. One is that she’s so deeply rooted in her district and not just in the way that some of the older people are across the country in our party. [?].

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Like Maxine. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: We have a very old party where like they just have name recognition that is unbeatable it just is so whether they are doing community services or not doesn’t matter they just will win because literally people grow up knowing their name but AOC does not get enough credit for homework help program she runs during the school year, helping people get groceries, right like there’s like a there’s a organizing part of this that she actually does really well that is part of the reason why. She will always win her district and that security is what gives her the comfort to be able to say the things and do the things because they could spend an AIPAC  and come to our district and do whatever they want and she has the people because she knows them. Her team organizes them. She does that well. And I and she’s obviously a great communicator and stuff like that around the country. But she’s not lost the focus on her district. And I think that one of the things that made a lot of the Dems vulnerable who lost in this last wave is that they won, nobody had ever seen them in their district. So Elon poured a lot money into a district and was able to flip it easily. Um. And you know with Zohran, I’m interested. I you know I like him. I think he’d be a great mayor. He’s young. He did go to Bowdoin. I did not know him, because he is younger than me. Um.

 

Sharhonda Bossier: I love those disclaimers you feel the need to–

 

DeRay Mckesson: Now I’m like. Didn’t know him.

 

Sharhonda Bossier: For every time.

 

DeRay Mckesson: But I will say um, I hope that we make sure that if he is a nominee, that we do not allow the Dems to do to him what they did to India in Buffalo. If you remember India won to be the mayor of Buffalo in the primary. She was a very clear socialist. And then the Dem’s ran a write-in candidate at the very end and he beat her. And it was a write in thing, but the party supported him. And she loses. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: But what are you all’s conclusion around these moments being sabotaged, like these candidates being sabotaged by the Democratic Party? 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, there’s a critique of people like Zohran, like India, that’s like the idealism can’t run a city is too big of a, too big a machine to essentially have like a child who just has really cool ideas, who’s never done anything. So, but if they win, it’s a sign that the ideas can win. So just swap out the person for like a more mature leader. And because, because Zohran and India aren’t really using the apparatus of the party to win, they’re using the people and the base and the energy. If you just get the apparatus to come in and have a candidate, all of a sudden, what will happen on election day is that people just vote for the Democrat because they or they’ll, they’re like, do whatever the party says, because you know, even with Zohran, Zohran is like very publicly like, I’m a socialist, da-da-da, which is fine for a group of people. And then it scares a group people on the left. And if you get somebody that comes in, that’s like, I am a Democrat, I am not a socialist. I believe in these things. That’s what they did to the woman in Buffalo. So, you know. They it is annoying because you know who they didn’t do that to? Crazy Eric Adams who ran as a Democrat and is a Democrat only in–

 

Myles E. Johnson: That’s what I was just, I was like, like, Cuomo, Eric Adams. I’m like, these are, these are, these are–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: –messes. Like this is not, it’s not like it’s being well-organized and, and yeah, that, that’s just wild. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: But I’ve heard sane people say it and they’re like, you know, they’re going to point all these and there is, I will say, and I don’t know him so I can say this, you know, freely is that the case study that people say is the mayor of Chicago. He comes in as like an organizer, organizer, and sort of universally people are like, he’s not a good man. They’re like he just doesn’t have the skill to run a city that big. Like he just was out skilled by it. So he has lost some key votes with the city council, like the activists are annoyed with him about something, like it just. But there’s this idea that like he just couldn’t, he came in as an organizer, he was like a community organizer, he wins as mayor, Chicago’s one of the biggest cities in the country, and just literally can’t do the job. And that is, he’s a case study in this current moment. Sharhonda, you’ve heard that critique of him, right? 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, like the alderman are pretty upset with him, etc. But I, I also think that sometimes we are looking for change and won’t accept that that change is going to be painful, right? And so like, if you if you look at, like Trump supporters, for instance, right, he’s been telling them I’m going to come in, I’m gonna disrupt stuff, it’s gonna hurt for a little bit, but you should grin and bear it, because on the other side of that pain is going to be the promised land. And like we have zero tolerance for like what happens in transition on the left. And the fact that like if you elect someone like a Brandon Johnson in Chicago, and he really does try to lead differently, there are gonna be some things that feel kind of icky at first, right? And like what’s the, how I’m not saying that you get people forever, right, but like what’s the grace period as like things try and like settle into a new normal? And like, he’s not a bureaucrat, which is sort of why you elected him, right? But then you want him to get in and operate like a bureaucrate. And so you have these situations where um I do think that sometimes people get jobs for which they are not prepared. That does happen. And also if we want systems to operate differently and we want them to be led by people who want to lead them differently, sometimes those transitional phases are gonna be a little bit bumpy. And I think we need to have a higher tolerance for that. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Don’t go anywhere, more Pod Save the People’s comings. 

 

[AD BREAK]

 

DeRay Mckesson: I’ll go into my news now, which was reported by NPR. NPR, as you know, uh Trump is trying to end NPR um there is. They have a quote from a DOGE employee, as you remember, DOGE was Musk’s um unit that went in, cutting up the government, laying off all these people to find fraud and waste. I will just read exactly what his quote is. “I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse. And I do believe that there’s a lot of waste. There’s minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse to me feels relatively non-existent. And the reason is, I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook. These companies that have plenty of money are funded by investors that have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.” I thought this was so interesting because A, we already knew this. We knew that like there might be a million processes and stuff, but largely the government runs as efficiently as you can doing a thing at scale and trying to serve all of these people from a million different backgrounds. That is a hard thing to do. I think about, I ran a big department and a big school system and there were a lot of imperfections, but we did it literally as well as you could have done it trying to service 10,000 people a day. But it was interesting, the end of the quote, because he talks about the tech industry and you’re like, I’ve never seen as much waste as I have in Silicon Valley. That you have just a gazillion people who make a ton of money and produce relatively very little you know at the person unit. So that was interesting. But the second is DOGE made real, like negative impact on people’s lives. Tons of people lost their jobs. Like whole bodies. I was flying out of Newark, I had to fly out of the ill-fated Newark this weekend. I sat on the tarmac for three hours. At one point, the pilot goes, I don’t know when we’re gonna get out of here. They just told us that everything but international flights are shut down because the airspace is crowded and we do not know anything. Like DOGE, that was DOGE. DOGE did all of those things. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Mm-hmm. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And then the employees are coming up being like, yeah, there was no waste, no fraud. And it’s like, that is just frustrating, it’s annoying. And we actually need those. And now, I don’t know if you saw it, but the Trump administration is like, oh, we fired too many people. Uh. Yes, you you yeah we knew that. That it doesn’t look like you needed that person, but you needed that person to process this or to move this along. Like you actually, you know, government is actually a little bit leaner than people think and I say that as somebody who was in inside of one and this is frustrating. He gets no brownie points for me for saying that. I mean, I’m happy he did this interview, but it doesn’t seem like he has taken any account for the harm that he caused. He just gets to go back to his beautiful life in tech making a ton of money while the people he his work laid off and, you know, made homeless are really, really screwed. So I brought this here because it was interesting to me and makes me sad. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, I, you know, I hate that I, I mean, maybe I don’t hate it, but I kind of do think in memes nowadays. And there’s that meme of the person who like has the brain and it starts glowing. And basically, it’s this kind of like analogy for the more you progress on this chart, the more enlightened you are. And I kind of can’t wait until we get to the point where we don’t take the conversation because when they first started talking about waste, when they first start talking about all this stuff, I wish we didn’t grab that conversation because to me, it feels obvious that Elon and Trump and the entire right wing wanted an excuse in order to do some things to our data, to be able to cut people uh from their jobs in order so they can have even more money to be able to go towards what they want in the businesses and the agencies that they want, that it just so happens to be able to funnel it back to their pockets like I wish we were at the point where we could just paint the picture of what’s actually happening when we get the conversation and not go down the rabbit hole of proving that there is no waste, but go down the rabbit hole, of, oh, here is the strategy that they’re lying about. And I even think about Project 25, I think that’s how come that those warnings were such failures because they said this is what they’re going to do, this is what we’re going do, this we’re gonna do. Why are they doing this? Why would they do this? Like paint the picture and say, oh, you remember Nazi Germany? They want that with wifi. And they want. And those Amazon people, they want you to go to Amazon High and Amazon Hospital. And if you think about saying something, you can’t say nothing because you’ve got to pay Amazon rent. And now you’re there ain’t no protest and there is no union. There’s none of that. More than just saying Project 25, saying that the items on the list of Project 25 is really about painting the portrait of the America that Trump wants and the America that we live side by side together, which the Democrats and the left seem to not want to do, because we want to keep this illusion that there is this kind of like, mostly happy, mostly great America, where we see that there’s another America happening too, and we have to be real about what that means and, you know, go back to saying um deplorables. Like like just just like like I think people got scared by saying it because she lost, but she lost for so many other reasons. The deplorable parts was the right thing to say, call it what it is, say what they want to do, what they’re producing and move on. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: You’re so funny.

 

Sharhonda Bossier: This is amazing. I think a lot about like this sort of, I’m starting to sound like Myles the more I’m on this podcast. I’m like this neoliberal fascist, like um fascist obsession with efficiency, right? But I um, I do think a lot about that. And I think a lot about how we all were sold a bill of goods around all of the problems that big tech would solve for us that big tech has not, right? And um I think people um if they’re honest about it, are are looking at big tech and thinking that they would apply that same lens to government and again, realizing that like, this is actually not a set of problems that big tech can solve for us. And I think it’s what happens when you have reduced um people, right, to bottom lines in this way. Um. And I think actually even about small things like, because we were talking, I was talking with a friend earlier today who chose to take a Waymo to brunch, right? Um, and it’s because the Waymo was cheaper than the Uber, but if you remember Uber was selling us on this idea that Uber would be more accessible to us, particularly like I was in New York when, when Uber launched, it was like, if you live in the outer boroughs, you’ll be able to get there. The driver won’t be racist. They’ll take you to Brooklyn, right? It’ll be great. And if you think about the fact that like we were subsidizing those Uber rides, cities were subsidizing those Uber rides, they were getting so many tax breaks, right. And now when I look at an Uber ride, I’m like, if I pay the driver what they’re worth, if I tip the driver, what they are worth, right? Like you actually haven’t made anything more efficient. In fact, you’ve made it harder for me to have an opportunity to choose among various providers for a ride from the airport, right? And I think what’s interesting is I feel like we were on the verge of having a reckoning around Big Tech. And then the Trump administration pulled big tech more integrally into our federal government and bringing that lens to some of the problems we were wrestling with just hasn’t proven to bring the quote unquote “efficiency” that people claim to so highly prize. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Can I just say one annoying thing that you what your comment made me think of is I do also wanna remind us that who helped paint the picture of Big Tech is the liberal media. So Elon was was, you know, a child of the liberal media and a darling. So a lot of this story, the stories that we’re having to fight and oppose now, and these kind of monsters we had to create are things that the liberal media helped create. So we have to tell, we have do something on the left besides myth making in that way, because the myth always becomes our monster later on when we don’t pay them what they wanna be paid, apparently. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Or do what they want to do. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. I think, yeah, my news this week, uh I think that was a perfect segue and setup, uh is the story of a 31 year old Black man um who was born in a small town in South Carolina, and now lives in Miami, uh who has figured out, or he thinks anyway, has figured out how to make a living, um basically posting outrage bait on Twitter or X. Um. And I wanted to bring it to the pod for a couple of reasons. And I have a few quotes that I wanna um set up for you. Right. One is that it feels almost like he fell into this work when he felt like he couldn’t find another viable career pathway. Um. The second was, it feels like being a Black man in this right wing outrage space makes him feel very special and seen. And then the third is like his leveraging of outrage directed at women, particularly Black women, to help him sort of continue to build an audience and make a living. So um I two things I wanna read, right? So he says, I was a nobody, I wasn’t a creator, I wasn’t no one famous, I ain’t have no clout, no followers, no nothing, no money. Um. He told his followers in a video while walking the White House grounds and look what’s able to be created in the land of the free. So this is what he’s saying like on a live as he is at the White house getting ready to attend a, a, a convening, uh by the president and his team. And then, you know, to my earlier point about him leveraging outrage directed at women and particularly Black women. Um he wakes up one morning. And there’s a clip of Brittany Greiner, who’s a WNBA player, she’s speaking, people are at least feigning surprise at her voice and the bass in her voice. And he leverages that moment to kind of kick off his engagement for the day. And when the reporter asks him why he chose her, he says, honestly, Brittany Greiner should be proud because this is truly wild. Um. Because Brittany Greiner can get 500 comments in an hour, I could post about many people. Not everyone can get even 20 comments because they’re not famous enough for people to care. It validates her position, if anything, it validates that she’s big. And so he feels like directing his outrage machine at her is something she should actually be grateful for. Um. Anyway, I just, I thought as, you know, Myles has been pushing us and pushing me in particular to think about how people are leveraging their social media platforms in this attention economy. This really struck me, especially because he’s a young Black man who has, anyway, seemingly found his space and his way in this part of the internet. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: This just made me sad. I don’t know if I have anything deep to say. It was, and he not even making that much money. That’s like, it’s–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: He’s not. Yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: He is over here, brokey broke, and like selling his soul. The policies hurt people that look like him. This is a game to him. It’s not a game to real people’s lives. And even, I was mad at the New York Times for even giving him the space to do this, to even like validate his, like I was annoyed by the attempt at redemption that I felt like this gave him, but he just made me sad. I like am like, oh my God, you make me sad! 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: You didn’t think it was sort of like the freakonomics, like, here’s how much money a drug dealer actually makes during a day. They make less than minimum wage. You should get a real job, you know? 

 

DeRay Mckesson: No, and I don’t think he gets that like he’s a joke to white people. Like he, they don’t take him seriously. Like the MAGA people, he’s like a they would drop him off right at the plane to El Salvador or Venezuela like they drop anybody else off. They don’t nobody has any, the MAGA people don’t have any affinity to him. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Well, they profile that, right? He has this experience with this young white person, and this guy is very clearly a white supremacist, and he dismisses it as this white man being young and misguided. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Crazy this and he made me sad like get out of here. Myles what you got? [laughter] Boo on this guy.

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah I think this article with my kind of playing around, right? And I think more than anything else inside of this article that’s set inside of me, speaking of Freakonomics, was the economics of attention and also how so much of the things, because as much as we wanna like laugh about it and stuff, the Manosphere shit is real. We’ve we’ve dealt with um so many mass shootings. We’ve even dealt with so many um cases of rape sex trafficking. And when we look at what’s going on with Andrew Tate, Well, this is real violence happening in the world, and what this article to me does, and and and you know, I’ll always insult the failing New York Times, but what I did think was brilliant about it was talk about how so much of what’s happening inside of the digital space and inside of our physical American culture that’s violent coming from this manosphere is motivated and helping because of poverty. So these people are, so a lot of these men are being starved into these situations where they have to feed this digital uh this digital rage and feed into this culture of rage that is giving us real uh real repercussions, you know, and I thought that was really amazing because at the end of the day, it’s like, yeah, I think they said he was making like 50K a year or whatever, but at the of the end the day he’s making 50K year. That is a lot, that is what, he’s gonna go to AutoZone and be a manager, like he’s saying this is what I found, this is what’s gonna happen, and this 50K a year, maybe um, you know, I can’t get too sick or whatever but at least I get to meet the president with this 50k a year, because the 50K a year that I would got by myself in my neighborhood wouldn’t have had me a part of any type of social class or whatever, even if I have to be poor, most people, not just most people want this, most people are living this, that they’d rather be able to represent a social class than actually have the bank account of that social class or they’ll take that exchange, I’d rather I should say. So um so yeah, that was my ideas around it is just how much of this is motivated by poverty and motivated because we don’t have these socialist and communist programs inside of America to make sure people don’t have to be so desperate that they fall for this. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, I’ll say like the 50k was on the low end, right, because he had made more the year before but had tweeted some stuff that got him kicked out of the revenue, you know, generating part of X and then, you know, Musk intervened on his behalf, deleted the problematic content and then invited him back. Last thing I’ll say is, you know, I know a lot of organizations trying to recruit Black men to the classroom. So if you’re looking for a middle class job, maybe we could help you there. There’s so many other ways that you can make this you know money and not to DeRay’s harm, perpetuate like policies um and and and rhetoric that’s harmful to the communities that you’re from. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come. 

 

[AD BREAK]

 

DeRay Mckesson: We got sat down with the one and only Amanda Litman to talk about her new book, When We’re In Charge, The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership. Now you have to read this book because there are a lot of books about leadership that are just written for a generation ago, a time ago. And when I read this book, I was like, oh, this is actually written for today. I was, like, this, she nailed it. People should read this book. We should do team building around it. There should be leadership book clubs around it like this is the way we do this. Here we go with Amanda. Amanda Litman, it is an honor to have you on the pod because I remember when you started Run for something, or you were one of the people who started it. Um. And I was like, God, this should have existed a long time ago. I’m so happy they did this. And you were one of my heroes from afar, but we never really had time to connect. And then when I saw you wrote this, I told the team I was, like, can you get a copy of can you get a copy of the book, I read it and I was like, this is also, you know, not only is she a great organizer in the real world, um she has written a book that is the leadership book I wish that so many of us had had because so many of the leadership texts that we were all raised on were just not for this moment. They were like, you, know, brutalist and they didn’t care about how people came to the space or um, it was very command and control. And I thought that this book was actually just perfect for the moment. So thank you for your organizing and thank you for writing this book. 

 

Amanda Litman: Oh, that’s so kind. Thank you. I’m really glad you feel that way. I really appreciate it. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Let’s start with everybody with your story. How did you become who you are today, doing the work that you’re doing today? How did you, did you wake up one day and you’re like, I wanna do politics. About what about run for something? Like tell us your story? 

 

Amanda Litman: Um. So I am born and raised in Northern Virginia in the D.C. suburbs. I have always wanted to do politics. I was one of those kids who just thought it was an interesting way to make a difference in the world. My junior year of high school, I skipped a day of school, which is like a big deal for me. I was like a you know good kid. I never did that. So I skipped a day of school and went to see Barack Obama speak at the university across the street from my high school. He was doing his like Students for Obama rallies before he announced his campaign for president. And I was hooked. I wanted to work for him one day. So I went to Northwestern for college specifically because I was like, well, if he’s gonna win. That was my, you know, and then he’ll run for re-election and it’ll be based in Chicago and I can get a job working for him. That’s a dumb way to pick a college. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I love it. 

 

Amanda Litman: Uh. But it did work out. I was hired by the campaign uh my senior year of college, I got an internship on the campaign and was hired and then went and worked for his nonprofit for a year after that election, moved down to Florida to work on the governor’s race in 2014, which sucked, uh and then moved to New York to work for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2015. And ever since about, well, since we lost that election have been doing Run for something ever since. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And can you tell us the story of Run For Something? Like how did were you like at a coffee table and you’re like, you know what, gotta have run for something. Like how did, how did this come? 

 

Amanda Litman: Um. So about a week after election day in 2016, I’d started hearing from friends I’d gone to high school and college with. Hey, Amanda, I’m a public school teacher in Chicago. They keep slashing our budgets. If Trump can be president, it seems like anybody can do this. How do I run for office? And at the time, if you were young and newly excited about politics and wanted to do more than vote and more than volunteer, there was nowhere you could go that would take your call. There was no entry point for young people who wanted to actually lead. So I reached out to a whole bunch of people with an idea. What if we solved this problem and created an organization for people like my friend from college? One of those folks became my co-founder as operative named Ross Morales-Ricetto and we wrote a plan and we built a website and then we launched Run for Something on Trump’s first inauguration day thinking it would be really small. This would be like my side project. What a fun hobby this would be. Uh, we had a thousand people sign up in the first week. As of today, we’re at over 200,000 young people who’ve raised their hands to say they want to run. More than 20% of them have signed up since the November election. So we have built a full-service [?] candidate recruitment and support organization that now has helped elect more than 1,500 people, mostly women and people of color, about a quarter LGBTQ-plus folks, all millennials and Gen Z, in nearly every state. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: So you know, we’re not here to talk about Run for Something explicitly, but if you are listening, please go visit Run for Something if you want to run for something because Amanda and Ross are really are really doing it. So let’s talk about the book. 

 

Amanda Litman: Yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Writing a book is a process. And what led you to say like, okay, I need to write this book. Like this is the book, you could have written. I mean, you’ve gotten all these people elected and da da da, you could have written a lot of books, you’ve had a lot of experience in politics. And you chose to write a particular type of book, why? 

 

Amanda Litman: So the first real moment that I realized that I was in a position that didn’t there wasn’t a guide for, so I had my first daughter in November 2022. And I–

 

DeRay Mckesson: Woop woop. What’s her name? 

 

Amanda Litman: My little baby girl. Her name is Jo, and she is a little, now a little perfect chaos monster of a two-year-old. And when I was preparing to go on maternity leave, you know, I’d been the executive director at that point, the co-executive director of this organization for six years, and I was prepared to go on maternity leave. I could not find a single one of my peers who had actually taken the leave and could give me a model for how to do it. A bunch of the people I talked to who had kids while they were the boss would be like, oh, you got to take the leave. Like I wish I had, I should have. And then I would Google, be like how to take maternity leave as boss. And I would find guides on how to ask your boss to do it or, which is a damning indictment of the American maternity leave system. Or like you know how to hand off this specific project or how to like do a concrete you know a task handoff but like my job is big and messy and the boundaries of it are complicated and I wanted to know how do I hand off like having a vision. Fundraising, crisis crisis communications like how do I hand off all the things that I do in my day to day and I couldn’t find it because there isn’t in many places a leadership guide for people who both want to live and lead, compassionately and also effectively. So when I came back from that maternity leave, I started really thinking about the challenges that millennials and Gen Z leaders are facing and talking to a bunch of political reporters about how weird all of the state and local leaders who are making news these days happen to be run for something alumn. Like what do they have in common? And again, I realized the millennials and gen Z leaders who we’d helped elect were showing up and doing it differently. They had a different way of entering these spaces that weren’t built for them, and they were pushing forward in a way that made a difference. So, realized I had something to say here, put it on paper, and was really excited to be able to put it into a book that I think embodies a totally different way of understanding what it means to be an effective leader without being [bleep]. [?] TLDR.

 

DeRay Mckesson: Um. I loved, so again, I actually think that we’re gonna order this for all of the, for my leadership team at Campaign Zero. But the, the chapter titled, people should be their real selves, not their full selves. I’m like–

 

Amanda Litman: Kind of a hot, kind of a hot take. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Y’all print this out, mail it to people. This is the, this is the chapter, you know, I’m gonna read a part of it on page 84 if you have a copy of your book near you. Actually, can you read it for us? It’s the one, two, third full paragraph on page 84. 

 

Amanda Litman: Let’s see, the, you do not have a responsibility? Mm hm. Yeah, when I sent this to my agent, she was like, [bleep] Amanda. Um. You do not have the responsibility to make every day at work a trip to Disneyland. You do not have the responsibility to fulfill every person’s full social, emotional and physical needs every single day. You do not have the responsibility, nor likely the skills to solve their mental or physical health problems. And you probably do not have the capacity to be their primary entry point for civic engagement. It’s not your job to create the parameters of their social life. [?] keep going?

 

DeRay Mckesson: Maybe read the chapter I mean the paragraph right before that as balance? 

 

Amanda Litman: Yeah you do have the responsibility to pay people well, in line with both market rates and what is needed to live and work within the geographic area you and they are located in. You have a responsibility to provide the best benefits you can afford, given the realities of your business and in line with your organization’s values. You have a responsibility to set clear guardrails and boundaries so people can work to live, not necessarily live to work, and you have the obligation to treat people like people, not cogs in a machine. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Talk to us about what the impetus for this chapter. I don’t wanna give it away. This is how I feel about every chapter. I was like, oh, I don’t wanna like tell all the stories, but I wanna get to the gist. Tell us about this chapter. 

 

Amanda Litman: So I think the overarching theme of this chapter is that work is not the right place to hold every part of who you are. And I think it has become sort of in vogue right now, in the last couple of years, to ask people to bring their full selves to work with them, to like be your most authentic, true you know version of who you are. And that sets both people up to fail and the company up to fail. These are not spaces that are meant to solve all of your problems, nor care for your, as I write, or care for your physical or mental or physical health. And when we tell people that we are, we ask them to bring everything of who they are to work with them, and then we get we penalize them for it because we can’t handle it, everyone gets hurt. And you know I make the case here that it is really hard to say to people, this is not our problem to fix. Like this is not the thing that the workplace can handle. But if we aren’t clear about that expectation, everyone is set up to fail. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And can you pair that with how in one of the early chapters, you talk about responsible authenticity? 

 

Amanda Litman: Mm hmm. Yeah, you know, I think that there is this need right now for authenticity. We see this in our political candidates, we see this is in our you know media, we want like unfiltered communication. But again, work is not necessarily the place for that. And especially as the leader, it’s not always your job to be your real self, it’s your job to be best self in service of your goal. So sometimes shutting up, silence, is actually the most authentic and responsible option, even if it doesn’t feel like true to who you are. And I talk about at length, like how do you navigate this tension between being your your core values, being who you are and being the person that your team needs you to be, and being a person that your job, your goals needs you be. And thinking about all the ways that show up from, you know how does your Zoom window look? How do you dress? How do you talk? Which emojis do you use? Do you use emojis at all? What topics do you like engage in? And what do you how do you structure your day-to-day to make it match? It’s so hard. I think that overarching like argument is that it’s so difficult and for us, and I think you said this earlier, we don’t have good models for how to do this. We just don’t. So what I tried to make the case for is like really articulating, who am I? Who do I need to be to accomplish my goals? And what is the closest possible overlap between those two things that feels comfortable and that I can do consistently? Because being able to do it consistently helps build trust. And that’s the whole point of leadership. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And can you give can you help give listeners like a, like an example of what what it means to be responsibly authentic, or where you’ve seen this done really well in a way that doesn’t lead people to say like, oh they’re being fake? Or they’re being phony? Which is I think what some people could could hear, which is not what you’re saying. 

 

Amanda Litman: No, it’s not what I’m saying at all. Like you know I think about AOC as a really good example for most things I talk about in the book. Um. I think a really good embodiment of next-gen leadership. But she is herself. She talks about makeup sometimes. She talks bout knitting. She talks about video games. But she does not let us in on every possible relationship dynamic. She doesn’t show her partner. She doesn’t really show her family. She’s very careful about the topics that she engages on. You know when she’s really mad. And you know, and like her silence doesn’t necessarily mean that she doesn’t care, but it is being intentional about the things she’s trying to accomplish. That balance of being a real person and also a politician with a constituency and a responsibility to that constituency is I think a good embodiment of like, she’s being herself, she’s just being herself curated. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: You know, one of the other chapters that I was like, God, I need to do a book club at work on this was the one about transparency. Um. And I, I mean, I have my book in front of me, which you all cannot see. Um. But I think on page 143, which is where I am, but you talk about how one of the challenges is that when you give people information, they, that sort of sets them up to believe that they are entitled to give input on it. Like that is just one of the things, right? And that and that there’s a way to actually invite people into decision-making that doesn’t like blur the lines of who gets to say what, or invites them into sort of how decisions are made. Can you talk about what led you to the, was there something that led you to write this chapter on transparency? 

 

Amanda Litman: You know, there’s been a tough internal experience at Run for something over the years. You know we are very transparent. We put our strategic plans out, but we had a rough 2024. And I write about this in the book. We had to do layoffs because of fundraising challenges. Um. I know there are various points over the year that my team got very frustrated with the sort of dynamics of that. And one of the things I learned through that process is there was a real disconnect between the disconnect that people had a hard time discerning between input and insight, that you can understand how a decision is made without necessarily getting input into what the how that decision is make. And I heard this from so many of the leaders I spoke with through the book and I spoke with more than 130 people from across so many different um sectors and industries who would explain like, I wanna tell people this, but if I tell them, then they’re gonna have an opinion. And actually, I like I they’re not skilled to have an opinion. They can’t have an opinion. I can’t take their opinion into account. That wouldn’t be responsible of me. And that tension is so hard to navigate. So one of the things I make the recommendation for in the book is being incredibly and clear what kind of decision-making model you’re using. You know, there’s things ranging from like command and control, as you talked about earlier, to delegating decisions entirely, consultation models, voting models, consensus models, using metrics, all of that. And that if you lay out how a decision is made, when people get to have input, when they don’t, and are really clear about closing the loops, you’re not gonna satisfy everyone, but at the very least, you can make it clear, like this is where you got to have your say, and this is how the output came to be. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And the last um, the last chapter is like a organizers, you know, this phrase is such an organizer phrase and people are like, what’s your dream job? And it’s like, I don’t dream of labor, um which I loved. And, you, we haven’t talked about the chapter on rest, but rest assured, everybody, her book is not, not only about the sort of difficulties of leading, but also about the things that we need to keep ourselves sort of sane. Can you tell us um, I’m interested both in this last chapter and sort of what makes you hopeful about the leadership journey. You’ve you’ve helped so many people become leaders in the political space. You’ve worked for a set of leaders. I’m interested in like what gives you hope for this next generation of leadership. 

 

Amanda Litman: I think that the next generation of leaders is so eager to do it differently, to like really operate under the ethos that the way we did it yesterday does not shape the way have to do tomorrow. And that is in a moment where the way we did it yesterday did not work for so many people. You know, I had a lot of complicated things. I finished the book before the election, but I had chance to review it afterwards. Like my second daughter was born in September and I turned in most of the final manuscript before she was born but got a chance to review it again. And I kept thinking about like, what would it mean if we’re not gonna get big structural societal change in the next four years? Like we’re not, Trump’s not gonna do shit for anyone except him and his billionaire buddies. So what would it mean for the people who can control spaces, can control workplaces, can control communities to do things like a four-day work week, to offer fully paid leave, to give really generous vacation policies, to pay people as much as you can and also treat them like real people. Like if we do that economically, what does that mean for people? But then sort of spiritually and psychically, what does that mean for people? Like if you have a job where you can work hard, know what success looks like, know what failure looks like, get paid well, have good benefits, and then leave it when you come home. How does that change the way you can interact with your family, your friends, your community? What does that open up space for? I think especially right now, that the opportunity for changing the spaces that we can control is so monumental. And as we experience what I think will be big generational shifts in power over the next couple of years, both in the government, but also across a whole bunch of industries. We’re already starting to see it in tech, in media, in Hollywood, all over the place. That’s going to be huge for people. And it has an opportunity to feel good and better. Which I think is exciting. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And what would you say are the things that didn’t work from the last sort of era of leadership that we just need to be honest about? 

 

Amanda Litman: Hustle and grind culture. Nobody’s doing their best work after 40 hours or really after 32 hours, but you know, rise and grind, hustle culture. We’ve got to work around the clock. No work-life balance. Like that’s bullshit. That doesn’t work. And it especially doesn’t for people who want to have lives outside of work, which hopefully should be most of us. I think this vilification of diversity, equity, and inclusion is total bullshit. I think both practically and for business imperatives, we need to build diverse, equitable and inclusive spaces and that means being a little exclusive. To create spaces that are inclusive, you gotta keep them bigots out. And that’s hard, but you have to draw a line and you have hold to it. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about this political moment, because you have had so much experience in politics. There’s, this book is obviously about leadership that is meant to be transformative, not only just sort of like hanging out the house as a leader, but this is about leading people in change. What do you make of the efforts to fight back in this moment? Or, I don’t know, I’m like interested in your reflection about where we are under a Trump presidency, we’re just at the beginning of it. So we got a long, you know, this is a long slog to survive. Maybe sort of what do you see people doing well in the fight? Do you have any advice to people? I don’t know. I’m very open here, but I’m interested in what you have to say. 

 

Amanda Litman: I think there are people who are doing it well. I think we’ve got a lot of Democratic leaders in particular who have forgotten one of my ethoses of leadership. And I think [?] said before is like, leaders are the thermostat, not the thermometer. We got to set the temperature, not read it. We have to tell people how to feel and how to fight, not like take it from them. And I think that moving forward, like hopefully we try and push where we can go. I am really inspired by so many of the folks who’ve like stepped up, by the 45,000 people who’ve raised their hands to run for office, by the protestors who are taking down the Tesla stock price one diver truck at a time, by the law firms who are fighting back, by some of the entertainment who is fighting back and like deeply disappointed by those who aren’t. And I think those ones are gonna feel real dumb when that thermostat [?] in the other direction. [?].

 

DeRay Mckesson: And are there any lessons learned from the election? 

 

Amanda Litman: Um… I think our leaders need to be real people, not just caricatures. And I think that was one of the mistakes of, I’ll say, the Biden presidency. And that was like a skills issue on his part. He couldn’t be a real person. He lost the skills to be able to communicate like that. And then Kamala just didn’t have the time to rebuild that trust with people about who she really was. But that our leaders moving forward, like they got to show up as people, not robots because like we can’t have any industry plants here. We need like real genuine folks who give a shit and who can communicate by giving a shit, even if what they give a shit is actually about something different than what you or I care about. What I care more about is that they care about something. And I think that is often the challenge. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And I wanted to ask you on your own journey as a leader, uh how have you grown as a leader? 

 

Amanda Litman: Oh, I’ve changed exponentially over the last decade that I’ve been managing teams. Um. You know, part of it is my growth as a parent of really changing my relationship to time. You have little kids and you have responsibilities outside of the workday. Like those hours when my kids are in childcare, which the women who care for my children, the daycare providers should be millionaires. And again, a separate systemic problem to tackle. But my relationship to time and how I treat it and the things I say yes to and no to have changed dramatically. I also think I have gotten more um clear-eyed about what the role of the company is. Like, you know, as I wrote about and read about earlier, like clarity as a kindness and being incredibly on the level with my team, with anyone about what we can and can’t do for them, even if the answer is not satisfying. Like it is better to say the hard thing than to say nothing. The final thing I would say is that I have learned sometimes the hard way that part of being a leader is to be disliked because you have to make hard decisions and you have to do hard things. And my job is to care for the whole, to care for the organization and the mission. And sometimes that means doing harm to the individual, whether intentionally or hopefully unintentionally. But if I have made those decisions with integrity and with my values and with a mission at the forefront, the criticism doesn’t get to me as much because I know I did the right thing. It’s those moments when the critics are right that I put ego or something else above to care for the whole. Like that’s when the haters start to feel really loud. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I love that. And is there anything about managing people? You know, I’m so struck. One of the things I think is really powerful about the book and why managers of teams and senior leaders, young leaders should definitely read it, um is that managing people is very different than sort of leading work. And I think in this moment, I found a group of people, a generation of people who are very good at managing work, they can like, take a task, get it to completion. They’ve nailed it, you know, and they don’t need to do it in 80 hours. They can do it in and those same people struggle with managing people like leading people. I’ve just seen it be a very different experience. Um. And I’d love to know if that if you’ve is that true for you, too? I don’t know. Like, I’m interested in that. 

 

Amanda Litman: Management is a skill. It is like we don’t train people well enough in this movement or in this line of work. We like promote people who can do the work not lead the people to do the work because you described it. It is something that I have had to grow a lot at you know when I was writing I kept coming back to this moment when I told a friend of mine who’s known me since 2012 that I was writing a book I told him what it was about and he was like you you’re writing a book about management. And then he laughed at me. Because I, and I think that’s one, that’s stuck with me because fuck the haters, but two, um but well despite that, I’ll never forget. But two, like I have told myself this story that I’m a bad manager. Because when I first started managing people back when I was 24 years old, I was a bad manger. Now I don’t think that true. I think I have learned a lot and grown a lot and really understood like how to define success, how to delegate projects and how ultimately managing a team is not about me as a leader, it’s about them. And what are their motivations? What do they need to hear? How do they need the project broken down? And understanding that tension of like, I wanna be myself, but I actually need to be the version that they need. That’s one of the challenges. Managing is so hard. And like, man, when you get a good manager, it can be a force multiplier. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, that’s right. Now, um as we close, I want to ask if you have any advice, I mean, the whole book is advice. So this is sort of get the book everybody. But if you have any advice for people who, who are not very hopeful in this moment, who are like, not only did Trump win, but I think the chaos is bigger than even people had imagined it would actually be. We read Project 2025, and da da but I feel like I’m finding a lot of people who are like real hope challenged and hope starved right now. What do you say to those people? 

 

Amanda Litman: The president is bleak. Like, I don’t want to dismiss that. The president is so bleak, like Trump keeps losing. He’s not as strong as he thinks he is or as even some of the pundits think he is. He keeps losing in court. When people push back, he folds. And there is a group of leaders, like I see them among the run for something candidates and alumn, who are so unafraid to call out the bullshit that if we get to the other side, and I think we will get to the other side. Like the future is so bright. You know, I think about people like um James Tallarico, a state rep down in Texas, who is holding the Texas Republican Party’s feet to the fire around the way they’re destroying the public school system there. Or Ana Eskamani, who’s currently running for mayor of Orlando, who has just been a fierce inside outside fighter in the state legislature there. Or, you know, Megan Hunt, a State Senator in Nebraska, who has like continually put her values front and center in a place where it’s been so hard to do that. And Zoe Zephyr, the state legislator in Montana who’s been fighting for trans kids um and trans people statewide since she took office. There is just a sea change of new leaders coming up that I think will make us feel better about the the where government can go and what public service can look like. And that if we just keep doing the work however we can, whatever our role is to play in this moment. And like, it’s gonna be really special when we get to see them really rise. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Boom well remind people of the title of the book. 

 

Amanda Litman: Uh. So the book is called When We’re In Charge. It comes out May 13th. You can get it wherever you get your books. Um. I am so excited for people to read it and if you like it, I wanna hear about it and if don’t like it that’s none of my business. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah. And then uh also tell people where they can find you every day. Is it Twitter? Is it Instagram? Is it Facebook? Is it TikTok? 

 

Amanda Litman: Um, so I am all over the internet. I’m mostly on blue sky these days at Amanda Litman. Um, I’m on Instagram, AmandaLITM. I try and post on TikTok when I walk the dog in the morning, Amanda Litmann, um, but you can also find me on sub stack, which is just amandalitman.substack.com every Friday, trying to write every Friday this year. It’s one of my goals, so. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Boom. Well, we consider you a friend of the pod and can’t wait to have you back. 

 

Amanda Litman: Thank you so much, DeRay. This was really fun. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Well, that’s it. Thanks so much for tuning in to Pod Save the People this week. Tell your friends to check it out and make sure you rate it wherever you get your podcasts, whether it’s Apple Podcasts or somewhere else. And we’ll see you next week. Pod Save the People is a production of Crooked Media. It’s produced by A.J. Moultrie and mixed by Evan Sutton, executive produced by me, and special thanks to our weekly contributors, Kaya Henderson, De’Ara Balenger, and Myles E. Johnson. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

 

[AD BREAK]