Cody Keenan: Ten Days That Defined America

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Our regular podcast listeners. It's our pleasure and honor to make the show for you. Knowing that you like our podcast makes all the difference to us. Please follow the show in your favorite podcast app or find the latest episode every Wednesday@remarkablepeople.com Foreign. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We are on a mission to make you remarkable. Today's remarkable guest is the man Barack Obama called his Hemingway. His name is Cody Keenan, and this is his second appearance on Remarkable People. Cody was Barack Obama's longtime collaborator and chief speechwriter. He started as an intern for Ted Kennedy, and after receiving his master's degree, he worked in Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Cody obtained his master's degree from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and his bachelor's degree from Northwestern University. He now teaches a course there on political speechwriting. In addition to teaching, he is also a partner in the speechwriting firm Fenway Strategies. He is also the father of a daughter. Her name is Grace, and she makes her first podcast appearance on this episode. Not so coincidentally, Cody's new book is called Grace. The subtitle is President Obama and 10 days in the Battle for America. Cody takes readers inside the Obama White house during the 10 days following the mass shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina in 2015. This book is a remarkable narrative of the creation of Barack Obama's eulogy and the preparation for the Supreme Court rulings on the Affordable Care act and same sex marriage. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable people. And now here is the remarkable Cody Keenan. When the book comes out and people ask, how is Grace doing? What are you going to say?

Honestly, I'll probably say Gracie's doing great. She's two years old. She's hitting all her benchmarks and the book, hopefully is also doing great.

Okay.

But yeah, that's a tough one. It's it's confusing for people. I I named them both at the same time Pretty much.

You should have thought about that when you picked the title. In the section where you talk about meeting your wife. I going to read you a quote. They knew everything there was to know about Barack Obama. His past statements and positions, his voting record, his place of birth. And then in parentheses, you have the word classified. So is that a joke or is that something you forgot to take out?

Well, it's classified. No, it's a joke. It's a joke about how everybody was always up in arms about whether or not he was born in America. He was. To make it clear that was a joke.

We're just going to fanboy for a couple more minutes, so I want to tell you my most favorite line in the book. And the most favorite line in the book is, quote, when Obama gave instructions to retweet Romney's tweet about taking down the flag at Emanuel Ame. While Obama dictates or approves the contents of his tweets, he didn't have the ability to tweet from his own phone. Quote, quote, quote, quote, quote. Only morons would allow a president to do that.

That.

That was just freaking brilliant.

You're missing out some of the best lines in the book.

I take it you don't anticipate doing any signings at CPAC events, huh?

Probably not. If they invite me, I'll go. I'll go anywhere to get this book out there in the world, but.

Spoken like a true author.

Yeah, yeah, no, we kept. We. The president had the nuclear codes, but he did not have the Twitter password.

Arguably, his Twitter password might be more dangerous. Much of the book is about anticipating the Affordable Care act and same sex marriage. Scotus verga.

Right.

And so just imagine what would your week have been like if this was when Roe versus Wade was coming up.

Sorry, guy, my daughter is right here at the door staring through and banging on it. Hi, Gracie. I assume we can. We can edit and I'll redo the question, but no, we leave that in.

This ain't npr. This is remarkable, people.

She's always got such a look of betrayal on her face. Like, why. Who is that? That you're paying attention to?

Someday when she's president, we're going to play this and say that was your first appearance on a podcast.

Yeah, but to answer your question, it would have been completely different. And some of the people who, who received advanced copies of this book received them the week Roe decision came down, which changed their reading of it. You know, I. The, the, the. The events in the book, the, the shooting and, and the eulogy at the beginning and the end. But, but the two Supreme Court cases upholding Obamacare and finding a right to marriage equality in the Constitution, those two cases weren't necessarily things that we made happen that week. Right? I mean, President Obama obviously fought for and won Obamacare, but it was also the result of a hundred years of advocacy for universal healthcare and marriage equality, was the result of a 50 plus year movement for LGBTQ rights. So, and that's one of the things that inspired me to write the book, even though it takes place over 10 days. But in there you see this kind of long sweep of American history and all these battles we've had for equality and justice and then the four years after the Obama presidency are for me, what actually made the book really clear in my mind. It's not like at the end of the 10 days in the White House, I was like, well, that was something. I'm going to write a book. I didn't really think about it until after we left the White House. And it becomes we were living through the mirror image, the dark mirror image of the Obama presidency. And that's, that's kind of what inspired me to write about those 10 days.

What if you had to prepare for the Roe vs. Wade decision? Would it have gone much the same or is that just so much heavier?

Preparation would have gone the same because we made sure to prepare for every eventuality. We, we didn't know which way the Supreme Court was going to rule on in either of those cases. So we had three different speeches ready for the Obamacare decision. We had three different speeches ready for the marriage equality decision. Should Roe have been that week, we would have had multiple speeches ready for that too. So we were always prepared for every eventuality. It made life as a speechwriter much more challenging, of course, but it made the President's life easier, which is what we were going for. And as you saw in the book, President Obama is not really superstitious, but he didn't look at the speech drafts in the event of failure. He didn't look at the draft for what would happen if the Supreme Court struck down Obamacare or rejected the idea of a right to marriage quality. He just didn't do it. He edited the winners because he was that confident. And on, in fact, on the losing draft for the Obamacare decision, he wrote across the top. Didn't need this one, brother.

So during that week of Roe vs Wade, there was a Cody Keenan sweating bullets in the White House.

Yeah, for sure. His name is Vinay Reddy. He's just a great guy, kind soul, and a brilliant writer.

Roughly a month after Emmanuel Ame in 2015, the Confederate flag came down in the South Carolina State house. And then five years later, Calhoun statue was removed. So now it's 2022. What's your assessment of where we are today?

Oh, boy. It's complicated. Just like, just like America is. It's my first reaction to the Confederate flag coming down a month after the massacre and then the Calhoun statue and all these other statues is what took so long, right? I mean, it takes forever for these things to happen. Change takes a long time. And that's kind of one of the, I think real flashpoints in our politics today is you've got these extremes, and I'm not going to say extremes on both sides because I would equate them and they're not the same. But you've got, you've got kind of the, say, the far wing of the left wing of the Democratic Party, who I agree with on most policy issues. But there's this kind of growing sense that it's all or nothing right away. And the problem with that approach is you're usually more often than not going to end up with nothing. You look at this, President Biden had a bunch of big legislative victories this summer. And of course, there are things in the bill that aren't great, but 95% of it is great. That's a pretty awesome trade off in my mind. And I think sometimes there's this sense that if I can't get 100% of what I want, then everyone is crooked and corrupt and it's just not the case. Politics will never go 100% your way. It's certainly ever gone 100% my way. And I think if that's your outlook, you're just going to be disappointed all the time.

Do you think we're at a tipping point where democracy dies, or are we at like a last gasp of white nationalism that cannot overcome demographic change?

I don't know. I could be persuaded either way. I mean, the. There's no doubt that the majority of the country is more open to change, is more open to differences among people. Pro truth, pro democracy. That segment of the country is only growing. But there are structural issues in democracy that actually makes it easier for that noisy minority to win, keep and maintain power. And you've seen a bunch of state legislatures right now, Republicans kind of rewriting the rules to lock it in power. So there is this kind of awful imbalance. And it's one of the reasons why you get people who are so frustrated. If there's more of us, why can't we do what we want? I share the frustration, so I'm not trying to filibuster. I just think it's more complicated. I am hopeful that it's kind of a. I don't. It's not a last gasp anytime soon, but maybe this is kind of the final generation of kind of angry, violent white nationalism. But you also see it growing among young people, too. So I don't think you can say that. But I'll. I'll end this answer on a more hopeful note, which is that I. One of the best things I do is teach, and I teach seniors at Northwestern University, and they're almost every single one of them to, to a fault is hopeful and idealistic and impatient. And part of that impatience comes from lived experience. You know, I. I was born in 1980, right? So my first 20 years were ones of peace and prosperity. The late 90s, you think back to it, it was like we were just this colossus astride the world and kind of the biggest fights were over pop culture. These students, my students this year will have been born in 2000. So their entire lives have been bookended by 9, 11 and wars and two recessions and a pandemic and a climate that is getting worse fast, and that might make the planet inhospitable in their lifetimes and active shooter drills in their classrooms. It's just a totally different life experience than what I had when I was their age and certainly what the too many old people in politics have lived. So one way to heal this democracy is to stop being a gerontocracy and start electing more young people. And obviously the first step there is for more young people to run, but I think it's going to restore a lot of faith in democracy if people start seeing a Congress and state legislatures and governor's mansions and White House filled with people who look like them and who've lived the same way that they have.

Much of the book was you agonizing about the eulogy. And my first question in that regard is, when you hear a politician today using the phrase thoughts and prayers, what goes through your mind?

It drives me nuts. What goes to my mind is usually anger at the sheer laziness and cynicism of it. Because, you know, and I'll admit for the first two, three years of the Obama administration, we used that too. Before, before Newtown, when, when our approach to mass shootings and kind of the country's noticing of Mass shootings took a real turn. You had, you had 20 young children murdered in their school. That's when you realize thoughts and prayers don't do a whole lot. They don't really accomplish anything. They are kind of the knee jerk response, especially now among Republicans who, who, who don't want to do anything. So it drives me nuts. And, and President Obama, the biggest challenge in writing for him was that he took such great care with his speeches. He knew that a captive audience is a terrible thing to waste. He knew that every word you say matters. It can move armies or markets. And with a eulogy in particular, he, he always wanted to do more than just pay tribute to the person we've lost. He wanted to reflect and inspire the rest of us as to what are our obligations now that that person is gone. And some of his best speeches were eulogies because he could, he had this moral imagination that when he tapped it, kind of amazing things could happen. So as a speechwriter, those were my biggest struggles, trying to get a speech draft to a point where he'd say, okay, I can work with this. And in this book here, it's kind of this, it's just kind of constantly simmering in the background as all these extraordinary events happen. And you can really watch the country changing in real time. Meanwhile, I'm, I'm kind of trapped at my desk and at three in the morning trying to figure out what on earth to say in our umpteenth eulogy after a mass shooting. Unfortunately, as he often did, the President took my draft and took it to a higher place.

How do politicians who come up with excuses, it was mental health or video games or something like that, and they just stand in the way of reasonable gun control that most Americans want. So just why does that happen? What goes through their minds?

I think the easiest explanation is, is what goes through their pockets. And that's donations from the nra. I think they're also afraid of their bas and not everybody, not every single one of them and, but 99% of them. But you know, in 2013 it was, it was two conservative gun owners in the Senate, Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey, who led the charge on background checks. Unfortunately, 95% of Republicans voted no on it. And that's why we didn't have universal background checks, which could have stopped something like Charleston from happening. And that's, Republicans will always say once they're past the, the blame game and the excuse making, they'll say, well, you know, no law is going to stop every murder. Well, of course not. You know, no airbag or seatbelt saves every life in a car crash. But your job is to try to do as much good as you can imagine. If it had just stopped one mass shooting and you'd have another 3, 4, 10 people still with us. So you never know until you try. And it's just, it is constantly disheartening. I'll say it was the one. One of the three times I ever saw President Obama angry and cynical was the day in April 2013 when the Senate voted down background checks.

How does a person who has all the economic and educational advantages like seriously, how do you become a Ted Cruz or a Lindsey Graham? What made you go down that path?

You got me, man. I don't know, you know, I, you have to ask them. I guess I don't understand why people want to run for office if they don't want to make a positive difference in somebody's life, you know, And Ted Cruz has never seen a camera. He doesn't love the guy. I've never seen anyone less comfortable in his own skin than Ted Cruz. One thing President Obama always tried to teach me is don't impugn motives to people. So even though I have plenty of thoughts about the Ted Cruz's and Lindsey Graham's of the world and I include some of them in my book, what I can tell you is why I got into politics, which is I wanted to make sure that more people had the same chances that I did growing up. And I don't think I really realized that until I was probably in middle school. But I grew up on the north side of Chicago and you don't realize that just four or five miles away you've got kids the same age living in despair and projects. You know, I got this, I learned about it in a book. Something that was just happening a few miles away from me and it changed my life. It was There Are no Children Here by Alex Kalowitz. And as you become more and more politically aware through teenage years and college years, I just, I was like, I need to do something about this. And so I went into politics to, and, and went to work for people who were passionate about making a difference in people's lives, whether through better education, better health care, better economic opportunity, whatever we could do. And I just find so much reward in that. And it's, you know, another thing about politics is like, you just, you don't win every day. We, we were in the White House 2,922 days and you go home at the end of the day and just hope you move the ball forward a little bit. And then sometimes it pays off in just a. Like a. Like a thunderbolt, like it did on these days in the book where the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare and found a right to marriage equality. Nights when you passed Obamacare in the first place or got bin Laden. It's. It's years and years and years of effort for a big payoff that changes people's lives in ways they may never give you credit for. And not just years, but decades. It's the way Barack Obama describes democracy, which is that it's just each generation's task to hand off the country to the next generation a little bit better than we found it. I'm not necessarily trumpeting Barack Obama's victories here, but victories of a 100 year movement for universal healthcare, 50 year movement for LGBTQ rights. And then you had this amazing movement kind of grow out of the events of the book after a bunch of mass shootings where you got Mom's demand. And I'm blanking on the name of the other one right now, of these kind of grassroots organizations that are making headway on the state level to pass new gun laws and then keep kids safe from gun violence. And it's an incredible thing to see. It just takes a long time and a lot of patience.

When you were writing speeches, were you writing it for Barack Obama, for Democrats, for moderates, for yourself, for young people?

History? What.

What was this is where I want this speech to land kind of test?

That's a good question. You're always writing it. You're always trying to write a speech that only the speaker could give. Any. Anything that Barack Obama said, it should be something that only he could say. And you're always aware of your audiences. You're thinking of different audiences. But whatever goes on the printed page for the President to read that day has to be authentic and true to him. So you don't pander, you don't say different things to different audiences. But I would be mindful of the audiences that would consume each speech. Obviously, you've got the audience that's right there in front of you in the room. But when you're President of the United States, your audience can be anybody, anywhere in the world at any time. Always assume you're on camera. Always assume somebody's recording, so you're never really off. But there are a few times when I would think you don't really have the luxury to think about history a lot when you're doing as many Speeches as we are, we would sometimes do 10 to 15 a week. But when you get these big moments, like when the president was going to speak at the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery, you think about all the history that came before. But on that speech, for example, which I think was one of his best, we were thinking about the generation that comes after. We were really writing that speech for young people, sort of giving this. And this was direction from President Obama. Let's give today's young marchers and protesters their marching orders. So in that sense, we were thinking about young people and even people reading the speech 20, 30, 40 years from now. But generally your audience is everyone. So you want to be aware of that, but always throw a few pieces of red meat to whoever's in the room.

There were places in the book that it seems like you had imposter syndrome. Was I good enough? Who am I to write the speech for Barack Obama? Did you? Well, first of all, is that true? And then how did you overcome that?

That is absolutely true. I mean, I was lucky enough to start working in the White House when I was 28 years old, and I didn't feel worthy of it at the time. And I started, I was. I became chief speechwriter for President Obama when I was 32, and I didn't feel worthy of it. So I always had imposter syndrome. And I think most of us in the Obama White House did so. And I actually think that's a good trait. It means you, you're constantly striving to do your best and make sure you're living up to the expectations people put on you and doing the job on the flip. I don't think anybody in the Trump White House had imposter syndrome. I think every single one of them thought they deserved it and belonged there. And you see how that worked out. But I don't think any of us ever thought we deserved to be in the White House. Maybe there were some staff who had worked in previous administrations and knew their kind of way around everything, but I was kind of constantly in awe of the surroundings, but also hyper aware of the responsibilities of the job, that everything that comes out of our fingers as speechwriters goes out into the world. And I never got over that I had imposter syndrome until the day I walked out. And I actually think it's a healthy thing because I meant I gave a damn. And the added layer to that is when you're writing speeches for the first black president who's got an entire world of lived experience that's different than yours. There's an added burden there, too, especially when you're writing to black audiences. So I'd, you know, always huddle with him and try to steal as much of his time as I could before one of those speeches to really get into his brain, before I tried to go write something.

Have you gotten over it?

To an extent. I mean, that's. And that's only because there's a really good chance that my career peaked five, six years ago, and that was my one act. I still throw myself into any speech I write for somebody, and I still approach each speech I write as the most important speech this person will ever give. So there's always. There's always a little bit of fear and stress involved with each speech I write, but it's no longer crippling. These days, I. The only thing that keeps me from sleeping soundly is our. Is our toddler.

You alluded to this while you mentioned it before. And I just want to return to this, which is this Obama tenet of don't assign motives to people. Do you have any more Obama or Keenan tenets for speeches?

Oh, that's a good question. Yeah. One of my tenets for a speech that I always tell my team of speechwriters is write each speech as if the audience has never heard the speaker before. You know, because I would think about that a lot in the White House, especially when we traveled. He'd go to these sometimes big. More often than not big cities, but also small towns where. Where a president just doesn't come through often. And you'd see people of both sides of political divide come out because, holy cow, there's a motorcade and a president. And they'd come, come to the speech, and you see the looks on their faces. And, you know, you know what? I. I want to write every speech with a crowd like that in mind. So I'd tell my speechwriters, assume that this audience has never heard you before, and write that way. President Obama had had a whole bunch of advice for it, but usually it's just write colloquially. Talk to people on the level voters are smarter than you think people are smarter than. Than we're. We're told to expect. So he always thought very highly of his audience, and he wouldn't let us. He wouldn't let us write down to anybody or. Or try to write too lofty or high either. You know, it just kind of give me a fastball down the middle.

You spend quite a bit talking about finding the muse. So have you codified that about. Listen to Mild Davis or Thelonious Monk, and you get the muse. I mean, you got any magic insights on how to get the muse?

No, the muse was. I was always. My toddlers. My toddlers here. Hi, Grace. Hi, Grace.

Here she is. There's Amazing Grace.

You see the baby? That's you.

I wish my camera were working.

That's you. I promise. Guys, they're on the other end.

Wait, hang on, Aaron, while you do that, I'm gonna see if I can flip my camera.

We're on a podcast. You're on a podcast. Can you say hi? Okay. Thanks for. It's okay.

How do you get the muse?

Oh, yeah, I. The muse was an Obama thing, and there were. There were just times he didn't want to be writing, which I understand. So he'd. He'd typically say. And this was on a big speech. He'd say, give me a draft, and I'll see if the muse hits. I don't always know what made the muse hit for him. If. For me, he'd recommend. He'd always say, if you're. He'd say, listen to Coltrane or listen, read, read James Baldwin if you're stuck, listen to Coltrane if you're not. And I'd apply that to a bunch of different bands that I'd. That I'd prefer to listen to. At times, for him, you know, I never always knew what struck him up there. He'd. He'd usually. And by up there, I mean in the residence. He'd usually write late at night, around one in the morning, once everything was quiet and the world gets a little bigger at night, you know, and it might be something he read with the Charleston eulogy. It was a letter he'd received from Marilyn Robinson, the author, that really kind of struck something in him. It was when he was working on the Charleston eulogy. It was also the Supreme Court decisions kind of filled his heart a little bit. And the. The real impetus on that speech was the families of the victims in Charleston all forgave the killer, which was extraordinary. Not something I could bring myself to do if something had happened to my family. But they were his muse in a way. There were a lot of different forces conspiring over those 10 days that. That ended up being Obama's muse and, like I said, pushed that eulogy to a higher place.

Another thing I found very interesting about the technique of speechwriting from your book was the recommendation to find the silences. So could you explain that?

Yeah, sure. This is the state of the Union address is, you know, it's one of those speeches that every aspiring speechwriter dreams of writing. And then once you've written it once, you don't ever want to do it again. It's just this long bear of a speech where just a million different things are crammed in there. And every year we'd sit down saying, this is the year it's going to be different. And it just. Inertia keeps you from doing that. So 2015, early 2015 January, just ruined my third consecutive Christmas by drafting a State of the Union address. And President Obama came back from Hawaii, and I had sent him a draft, and I was waiting to hear about his feedback. This is about eight days before the speech, and I hadn't heard anything yet, so starting to get equal parts nervous and annoyed. And then his assistant calls and asks me to come upstairs. This is the Monday, eight days before the State of the Union address. And when you're. When the president wants to see you, it's not so he can just, you know, give you a gold star and tell you how great you are and send you on your way. He wants to talk. So I go up there, and the President was not in the Oval Office. So I give his assistant Ferrieroal a quizzical look, and she said, he's in the dining room and wants you to join him. So you walk through the Oval Office, and on the other side, there's kind of the President's private work area. He's got a little study with a computer, and he's got a bathroom, and he's got a private dining room. And he's in there eating lunch. And he says, hey, brother, sit down. We start talking about our vacations, our Christmas vacations. He gets to go to Hawaii. I was trapped in D.C. trying to write a State of the Union address. And he says, so I read it, and it's great. I think we're in the best shape we've been in this far out before a speech. And so instantly my whole body relaxes. And then he says, there's only one thing. It's that everything in the speech is up here. And he held his hand up, you know, kind of above his head, like to show how tall somebody was. And I need some of it down here. And then he lowered his hand to chest level. He said, you know, I need some. I need some high points, and I need some quiet moments. And the speech is just, everything's in here. And I said, well, yeah, that's the thing about these State of The Union addresses, like, everything is in here. It's a mess. He said, no, let me try to explain this differently. You listen to Miles Davis. And I said, I do not. He said, well, you know what they say about Miles Davis. Obviously, I did not. He says, you know, it's the notes you don't play. It's the silences that really made Miles Davis. And so I start following what he's saying. And so, you know, you're right. In a speech, you do need. You do need quiet moments. You do need emotional highs and lows. You do need laughter and poignancy and all these different things. And that sort of flew out of my brain while I was putting together a State of the Union address. So he goes, he said, look, I don't want you to work tonight. I want you to go home, I want you to pour a drink and listen to Miles Davis. And then tomorrow I want you to come back to work and find me some silences. And I thought it was really cool advice. And I tried to think about that with every speech going forward and even to an extent in life, try to find some silences when you can. I say this as my baby is squealing in the background, but try to find the silences. You know, we're all busy. We do too much. And for, for example, here, I'm no like wellness guru, obviously, but at six o' clock every day, I'm with my daughter until bedtime. And I don't look at my phone and I don't answer emails. It's just her. And for me, that's kind of as noisy as she is. That's one of my silences. This is just playing with her and spending time with her. Up next on Remarkable People. And I get it. Conceptually, I just don't think I could do that. I think I'd be vindictive. I would want Old Testament justice. But they do this, and it kind of just changes the whole tone and tenor of the week. I can't prove it, but the debate over the Confederate flag and guns seemed a little bit more grown up than usual.

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Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.

When I had my first child, who is now 30, people told me, you know, Guy, you have to cherish these Years, because you're gonna wake up one day and he's gonna be in college. And I said, there's no way. That's like 18 years from now. That's forever. And you know what? They were right. It just. You're holding her on your lap now, and pretty soon it's gonna be junior prom and you're gonna be worried about the guy or girl that she's dating. Yeah, I didn't listen to anybody when they told me that. I don't expect you to listen to me, but it's true.

No, she's. She's grown up so fast. You know, one of the amazing things about the pandemic for. For all of its horrors and pain, is that I've gotten to spend 24 hours a day with my daughter since she was born. My wife and I are lucky enough to be able to work from our apartment. It gets pretty crowded in here. But unlike me, both my parents worked 12 hour days when I was this age. But our daughter only knows a world where we're both around all the time. And it's pretty amazing. And we feel very fortunate to be able to do that.

I've had a series of scientists and doctors on this podcast, and every one of them says that learning begins from the moment you come out of the womb. And that baby of yours should hear conversation and interaction from the moment she's born. And don't think education starts in preschool. I have one more big question for you, and then I have one more morbid question that you might not want to answer. All right, so the big question is, with all this exposure to Barack Obama in very interesting times, to put it mildly, how does one learn to be graceful?

That's a great question, guy. It's a great question that no one's asked me before. I don't know. I think I'm constantly striving for it. If there's one thing I'm very self aware about, it's how short I fall of who I want to be in the life I want to live. And I probably dwell on that too much. My wife says I'm too hard on myself, but I'm always thinking that I need to be a better friend, a better listener, a better father, a better husband. And grace is as difficult as a question as that seemed. It's actually probably pretty easy if we just think about it. What makes it hard is that we've got this media environment and political environment that sort of trains us to be at each other's throats, to be all or Nothing. Everything is either all good or all bad. Everybody is good or evil. There is no nuance. There are no shades of gray. There are, there are not different sides to an argument. Compromise is, is. Is not okay. And people are much more nuanced than that. People are more difficult than that. We have no idea what the person in the apartment next to us is going through, what the person on the street is going through. So we shouldn't assume that. We know, we shouldn't instantly treat people like they've wronged us. If maybe they're just having a bad day. I'm just coming up with all of this on the fly. But there are infinite ways to be graceful. Where, where grace came from in the eulogy and for the book title is three days, two days after this racist mass shooting. I mean, a guy goes in there who's got a Confederate flag patch on his backpack, who'd been self radicalized on the Internet as a white supremacist, white nationalist, and slaughters nine black Americans. Two days after that, the family members, these victims are on live national television in open court. And one by one, they forgive the killer. And it was just astonishing. It's grace and forgiveness are tenets of the AME Church, the church that all these people belong to. And I get it. Conceptually, I just don't think I could do that. I think I'd be vindictive. I would want Old Testament justice. But they do this, and it kind of just changes the whole tone and tenor of the week. I can't prove it, but the, the debate over the Confederate flag and guns seemed a little bit more grown up than usual. Maybe Confederate flag defenders were just kind of hiding because the massacre was carried out under their banner. I don't know. But then it starts, you know, the flag starts coming down over state houses in the south. Less than a week after shooting, the Republican governor of Alabama ordered it brought down. You've got companies bringing it down off the shelves. And so we're seeing all this happening while we're arguing inside the White House about whether or not to give a eulogy at all. Because the president had said after background checks failed in the Senate that he didn't want to do this after a mass shooting anymore because he didn't want to normalize it. He didn't want this to be normal. And his words, in his words clearly weren't helping. But we see all this and he's inspired and he said, look, if we go give a eulogy there, this is what I want to talk about. What those families did. I want to talk about the concept of grace now. That's a big example, right? Forgiving someone that murdered your father, mother, child, sister. My God, can't do that. But those little things, yeah, we probably can do. And we ended up naming our daughter Grace. It wasn't planned, but we found out. My wife found out she was pregnant two weeks before. We had just moved to New York City, and she found out two weeks before everything shut down for the pandemic. So we spent those first months of pregnancy alone kind of nervous and worried. Especially in New York city. You had 30,000 people dying, and you're worried that if you touch an elevator button, you're going to get it. So we just kind of hunkered down to protect the baby and gradually emerged. And then over the summer, you've got protests every day for over a month in our neighborhood, back and forth over George, Floyd and social justice and racial justice. And we finally massed up and went out and joined them. And then you had this kind of long, drawn out presidential election. And it was a big, stressful year. But Gracie, our daughter, was a relatively easy pregnancy. No pregnancy is easy, but she just. She was this constant, reassuring presence who kicked and hiccuped at the same time every night just to let us know she was there. And the labor was quick, and it took us a day. We didn't name her until the second day, but we just looked at each other and we're like, her name's Grace, because we didn't deserve it, but she gave it to us anyway.

Can I call Kristen up and ask her if she remembers that as quick and easy, too?

I said. I hope. I said relatively. Like I said, there is nothing easy about pregnancy. But labor. Labor was not easy. Labor was 26 hours. Delivery was 40.

Yeah, but.

But Gracie. And she has been a really, really relatively easy baby. And she's. She's lived up to the name at times. Maybe not during this podcast, but, you.

Know, I know you're a Cubs fan, but to use a basketball analogy, parenting doesn't really get interesting until you have to go from man to man to zone. Right now, you're two on one. Pretty soon you can be two on two. When it's three on two and four on two, that's when it gets interesting.

All of your advice on parenting seems to be it gets worse.

No, no, no, no. I have so biologically, and we've adopted two kids, and nothing has brought me greater joy than my four kids. Nothing in the world that's Great. And, yeah, with total certainty. So I decided that my morbid question would be in poor taste. So I'm not gonna ask it.

All right, ask me after the show. Okay.

No, I'll ask it now and then we can cut it. Because you might think it's a good question or you might think it's morbid and tasteless. So the question is, would you rather have Barack or Michelle give your eulogy?

Oh, no, I don't think that's morbid at all. It's actually an easy answer. It's. It's Barack only because he knows me better. And he and I shared a lot of stress and frustration and triumph and heartbreak. We've been with each other at some of our highest and lowest moments. He wouldn't be my first choice out of all my friends to do it, but. But between he and the First Lady, I'd choose him. Now, that is not to dismiss the First Lady's talent. She. When it comes on game day, she shines. That's what we call the day when you give a big speech. And she, as I wrote in the book, she has this thing about her where she just rides the razor's edge of tears when she's giving a big speech. And you just. It's silent. People are silent when they watch her speak before they erupt into wild applause. But she, she would make more people cry than he would. But I think he'd give a. He'd give a better speech only because he knows me better.

One last thing. Why don't you explain to the audience why they should buy this book? I have to tell you, I loved it. So somebody's out there listening and this is your chance to convince them to buy the book.

Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for saying that, guy. I appreciate it. First of all, it's just a damn good story. This happened, this was this remarkable 10 day period in American history that I wanted to write down. I wanted to be first to write down. I want it to live and I want my daughter to know about it. I want people to read about it. And I tried to tell it as a good story. I kept to those 10 days. It's. It's tight. It is 28% as long as President Obama's, so you can read it in just a few sittings. But it's also going to make you believe again, beyond just the narrative of those 10 days. You can see kind of all these forces in our country conspiring for good or for ill, and everyone's striving to answer the question who are we? What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean? What does America mean? What are our rights and responsibilities to each other? And which side in the clash of wills is going to win out? And that's still an open question. But my hope is, after reading this book, people will feel inspired again about the great things we can achieve together as a country.

You know, if there can be several seasons with Kiefer Sutherland Just on 24 hours, I'm sure they could make a movie out of this. It must say something about both of us that you would interview with me again and I would want to be interview or and I would want you back on the show. In the history of the Remarkable People podcast, it's only been Jane Goodall, Robert Cialdini, and Cody Keenan. That's been on twice.

That's amazing.

So you're in good company. I hope you consider it that way.

I'm very humbled and honored by it. It's great to be back with you, and you make it so easy.

All righty. Thank you so much. And sorry about my hearing. Sorry about the technology, but thanks so much.

Sorry about the baby. It's her first podcast, though, so if I'm one of the first to be on your show twice, you can now say you had Grace Keenan on your podcast. This is her first, first podcast.

So there you have it. The inside narrative on 10 days that helped make America. Who among us would have such grace as those people who lost loved ones in the mass shooting? I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. My thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff C. Madison Nesmer, Shannon Hernandez, Luis Magana, and Alexis Nishimura. Until next time. Mahalo and aloha. This is Remarkable People.