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Part 2 (notes from the interview):
Starts with writer’s guild strike.
BO: “As someone who believes in storytelling and the craft of it…”
Speaking about a book, “Working,” by Studs Terkel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studs_Terkel
>He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.
>Terkel was born to Russian Jewish immigrants, Samuel Terkel, a tailor, and Anna (Annie) Finkel, a seamstress, in New York City.
>From 1926 to 1936, his parents ran a rooming house that also served as a meeting place for people from all walks of life.
>A political leftist, Terkel joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project, working in radio, doing work that varied from voicing soap opera productions and announcing news and sports to presenting shows of recorded music and writing radio scripts and advertisements.
>On May 22, 2006, Terkel, along with other plaintiffs, including Quentin Young, filed suit in federal district court against AT&T Inc., to stop the telecommunications carrier from giving customer telephone records to the National Security Agency without a court order.
>The lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Matthew F. Kennelly on July 26, 2006.
>At his last public appearance, in 2007, Terkel said he was "still in touch—but ready to go".[15] He gave one of his last interviews on the BBC HARDtalk program on February 4, 2008.[16] He spoke of the imminent election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, and offered him some advice, in October 2008.
>Terkel died in his Chicago home on Friday, October 31, 2008, at the age of 96. He had been suffering since a fall in his home earlier that month.
BO: “Studs was such a master listener, and he was so curious about everybody’s life…”
BO: “If you listened hard enough, [everybody] would tell you something, not just about themselves, but about the world…”
IG: Quoting the book, “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence to the spirit as well as the body”
BO has a company, Higher Ground.
IG: “[Obama is trying to] tell a story that’s counter to the one that’s out there … is this TV show part of your counterprogramming?”
BO: “Studs was such a quintessentially American writer… there’s a democratic aspect of what he was doing and what I was trying to do”
BO: “What makes America exceptional is that we explicitly say … all men are created equal.”
They bring out guests:
Karthik Lakshmanan, Senior Robotics Engineer
Randi Williams, Direct Care Worker
Luke Starcher, Senior Data Operations Specialist
Caroline Suh, Director of ‘Working: What We Do All Day’
BO: “[Caroline] bullied me a little on the set.”
CS: She and BO have known each other for four years. Call to dig?
BO: “Caroline did the heavy lifting.”
BO: “Michelle teases me about that all the time, she calls me the fact guy … human Google”
CS: “the fact that … now we all have so much stuff … we all can have nine pairs of shoes and TVs in every room if we wanted to”
This is BS, earlier on RW says that she makes $1,400 a month. I thought that comment was odd given RW’s circumstance.
LS played music for BO “in his basement.”
IG: “You were president, and now you’ve become a TV show host. Did you know that the man who followed you in office did it in the opposite order?” BO: “I did, I’m aware of that.” IG: “Have you thought at all about how you play as a TV host and who he plays as a TV host on his show?” BO: “Well, I have not fired anybody… I wanna be modest about this, I am not a TV host, I was a participant, collaborator, and prop for Caroline…”
BO: “Our goal … is just to shine a spotlight on other people’s stories…”
IG: “You’re talking to people as equals on your shows, and [Trump] is firing them.”
BO: “If you are suggesting there are some differences between me and my successor, that is accurate. This may be just the tip of the iceberg.”
CS: “One of [Obama’s] favorite books is ‘Self Reliance,’ by Emerson. … there’s that quote … ‘What’s true for you, is true for every man.’”
BO: “Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, our greatest literature has that same democratic quality”
RW works with mentally disabled. Call to dig?
LS is wearing suspiciously red glasses (no red shoes) and worked as a teacher. Call to dig?
BO mentions that there are people in his own party who weren’t moving toward “the goal.”
IG: “In Episode 4, [Obama says the thing he worries about most] is the increasing polarization everywhere.”
BO: “I ended up spending a lot of time with our military … it’s very democratic.”