This interview originally aired on October 6, 2026
Tim Lynch: This is KALX Berkeley, and this is Berkeley Brainwaves. Robert Reich is a professor of public policy emeritus at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, including as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. Professor Reich has written 18 books, several of which are bestsellers. He is also the executive producer of a new film, The Work in Progress. It’s an unusual and provocative glimpse of America in its 250th year. It’s an invitation to all Americans to pull up a chair, invite a stranger, and lend an ear. A special screening of this film is slated for October 14th at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, and will feature a discussion with Robert Reich following the showing. We are honored that Reich took time out of his busy schedule to talk to KALX News directors Tarini Kakkar and Brooke Kirchner for Berkeley Brainwaves.
Tarini Kakkar: At the beginning of the film, you cite a loss of genuine dialogue in politics today; in the second half of the film— specifically referring to The Work in Progress—you used the phrase “eloquent listening.” According to you, what is the relationship between these two things?
Robert Reich: Well, very closely related. I think we have lost the art and practice of talking to each other across the divides of class, race, ethnicity, certainly politics. And part of the loss is a loss of our capacity to listen, listen eloquently to what the other person is really saying. I think that in this very polarized age, we tend to listen for buzzwords, for any kind of litmus test of where people are, their allegiances, their identities. Um, and we don’t really listen to what they’re trying to say. We’re afraid, very often, of what they might say. We’re afraid of conflict. We’re also afraid of silence. Sometimes eloquent listening means allowing there to be silence… Like we did just, just then.
Brooke Kirchner: I’d like to turn one of the questions from the game in the film on you, and ask: In your early life, how did you learn about what America is, and were there any particular events that stabilized those perceptions, or caused you to break with them?
Robert Reich: I think the most important and illuminating experience I had was, because I’ve always been very short, I needed a couple of older boys to protect me—when I was five and six and seven— from the bullies, and I found one older boy in particular who was very kind and kept the bullies at bay. And then, of course, I didn’t need protection. By the time I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, I was then, you know, sort of… society among teenagers is not quite as violent as it can be among little kids. I got to college in 1964, and I got word that one of my protectors, named Mickey, one of the boys who had protected me when I was very young, had been in Mississippi in the summer of ‘64, trying to help people register to vote, Black people. Now, this is Mississippi in 1964. So you can imagine he ran into a lot of opposition from white supremacists. Well, it turned out, I learned, that Mickey, whose real name, full name, was Michael Schwerner, and two other civil rights workers were brutally murdered that summer. And when I learned that my protector from the child bullies had been murdered by the real bullies of America, by members of the Ku Klux Klan, by the white supremacists, I think that that had a very profound effect on me, because I began to see bullying all around me. I saw men bully women. I saw employers bully employees. I saw people with power bully people without power, and I began to see the entire American society differently. I mean, it’s as if I got a new pair of glasses and I became aware of power and the abuses of power that were central and still are central to America; you can’t get away from them. And certainly my interest in politics, in civil rights and then in the anti-Vietnam War movement and on and on and on, really dates from that turning point. I think many children grow up, if they are lucky, with good parents, with loving
parents, thinking that the world is a just place and they learn somewhere along the way that there is social injustice, not necessarily everywhere, but they learn that there are deep problems. American society is rife with them. I think one of the reasons that Donald Trump was elected twice is because
there are so many Americans who feel bullied. People without college educations who, many of them from the South or the Midwest or the Rust Belt, um, many of them men, white men who have not got ahead and feel angry. Um, I think that anger and that frustration was utilised by Donald Trump in 2016 and then again in 2024, but he channeled that anger and frustration towards scapegoats that were not really the reason why so many people in this country have felt overlooked and demeaned. He channeled them toward immigrants and to misogyny, to women and to people who look different and acted different. Gay people, trans people. Um, and that was enough to get him elected, I think, because the anger is so intense. Um, and I hope that Democrats—not to be too political about it, but I hope Democrats have learned that the most powerful force in American politics is angry populism against elites that are now wealthier and more politically powerful than ever before, and that have a lot to do with how the economy has changed, and politics has changed, to accentuate the power of people at the top and to reduce the power of almost everybody else.
Tarini Kakkar: You spoke of protection and bullying, and in face of that, resilience relates to a term that was recurrent in the documentary, which is “survival.” Do you think your definition of survival has changed over time? Do you think it changed during your engagement with this documentary, and do you think it aligns with your past experiences or maybe with something that the interviewees said in the documentary?
Robert Reich: Survival is an interesting word, because it can be used to signify merely somebody’s capacity to endure a very, very difficult set of circumstances. I hope, though, that in the documentary and elsewhere, people are seeking more than survival, more than endurance, more even than resilience, which is another word that came up a lot in the documentary in our conversations. I hope that people feel empowered to genuinely seek a better life for themselves and a better world. That’s why I loved teaching, and I still do teach at Cal because the students are so great. You guys are so terrific. I taught undergraduates for… Let’s see, it must be about fifteen, sixteen, eighteen years. Um, and they were big classes, 750, 800. Um, but I, I loved the resilience and the empowerment that I felt from our students.
Brooke Kirchner: This movie, in my view, was much more about establishing a process for remembering that it’s in our collective interest to be governed together despite our ideological opposition to one another, rather than naming and hashing out the sort of concrete forces behind those divisions. Why, in this political moment, do we need a film like this?
Robert Reich: Well, it’s a good question. I think that talking to each other meaningfully across all of these boundaries is the most important thing we can do. It sounds very modest, doesn’t it? It sounds like, well, of course we can talk to each other, but it doesn’t happen. One of the key aspects of a democracy is deliberation. What do we need? What do we want? What do we seek together? Um, I think that if we come out of this… go back to the term survival. If we survive these dark, polarized, angry times, I hope we begin by talking with each other about what happened. Why were we so angry? Why are we so angry? How can we actually focus our anger on the sources of many of our problems? How do we get back our political power? It really has to start with conversation. And that is what the idea, the fundamental idea of the film, is all about.
Tarini Kakkar: How would you define patriotism in face of polarization in America?
Robert Reich: Patriotism? I believe that patriotism has a great deal to do with sharing the burdens and the sacrifices entailed in engaging in public life, engaging in a collective life. Paying taxes in full is part of patriotism. Uh, making sure that your neighbors and your friends and people in your community are safe from ICE agents, I would say that that’s part of patriotism. Some would disagree with me, obviously, if they think that it’s very, very important for ICE to do what it’s doing, but I think it’s important to protect the people in our communities. Um, patriotism has a lot to do with love of country, but not waving the American flag or standing up for the national hymns and national songs. No, patriotism really is about helping each other, sacrificing for each other. And only when we are trained in that kind of patriotism are we able to extend our gaze beyond the national boundaries and borders, and understand and empathize with what other people around the world are going through.
Tim Lynch: You’re listening to an interview with Dr. Robert Reich about his new film, The Work in Progress. The interview is being conducted by KALX news directors Tarini Kakkar and Brooke Kirchner.
Brooke Kirchner: I’d like to return to something that you said earlier about surviving these polarized, angry times and figuring out what happened, to ask, you know, what do you see as the roots of our present political discontent? You mentioned factors like class, and race, and religion. Is there one that you see as the most prominent divide among the American population today?
Robert Reich: Well, we’ve always faced the divides of race and religion and class. But what’s new is the extent of inequality of income and wealth, which translates into inequality of power. Wealth and political power are inseparable. If you have vast amounts of wealth in the hands of a few people, relatively speaking, few people, then they are also going to have an extraordinary amount of power over the rest of the economy and over politics. I mean, just look at the amount of money being spent in elections. Now, you guys are much younger than I am. It may seem to you to be perfectly appropriate and inevitable that there would be this much money, corporate money, and individual wealthy money in politics. But it’s not. It’s really corrosive. And it comes from, mostly, big corporations and wealthy individuals who are pouring extraordinary amounts of money. Elon Musk, for example, in the 2024 election, contributed a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Donald Trump re-elected. A quarter of a billion dollars. How can that be pro-democracy? How can that be allowed? I think one of our most important goals has got to be to get big money out of politics.
Brooke Kirchner: I don’t want to be such a cynic about it, but sometimes I do feel like… what is possibly in our power as individuals to come up against such a huge force, such a massive imbalance of power and lobbying power? What do we do?
Robert Reich: Well, here’s what we do. One thing. Zohran Mamdani got elected mayor of New York because New York City has a system of public financing of elections. The big money could not elect Andrew Cuomo in New York. Or look at Portland, Oregon. Katie Wilson became mayor in Portland, Oregon, because Portland, Oregon, has a system of public financing of elections. So what you can do
as an individual is go to your hometown and demand and work for public financing of elections, just to take one of many, many examples.
Tarini Kakkar: Echoing Brooke’s feelings, and speaking of the divides that the millennial generation featured in The Work in Progress often felt, do you have any advice for our listeners who are experiencing similar feelings of a lack of unity and community in America recently?
Robert Reich: Well, look, first of all, and I think that I felt this in the interviews and discussions, remember, this movie is about strangers talking to each other who otherwise would probably not talk to each other. And we go to prisons in which people are, again, interestingly, not talking to each other. We go to places like Hawaii, where people of different ethnicities and different economic strata are not talking to each other. We go all over the country; Birmingham, Alabama. We talk about race—and they talk about race; we actually don’t talk. It’s all about these people coming together. People feel isolated in America. They feel alone. They feel powerless. It’s only through working and talking and deliberating together, through creating community, through organizing, mobilizing, and energizing with others that we overcome our feelings of powerlessness.
Brooke Kirchner: There is a choice in the film that I’d like to hear more about. In the part with the “hope chest,” where people are choosing what to put in this sort of time capsule, in quick succession, we see three clips of three people explaining their choice, and we see a Navajo musician who chose ceremonial tobacco, we see a Colombian artist who chose a necklace made of cans left in the desert by migrants, and we see a cattle rancher from Arizona who chose a thumb drive of three pictures of himself with Donald Trump. What were you and the filmmakers intending to show by placing these clips next to each other?
Robert Reich: The whole device—and it is a device—of asking people, “What would you put in a time capsule?” is really a way of saying to these participants in the film, again, random people coming together, “What do you owe the next generation or two generations or five generations hence in terms of their understanding of what your life is like? What can your contribution be to the future?” It’s a first cousin question to the central question in the film, that is, that we want people to ask each other, and that is “What do we owe each other as members of the same community, society, human race? What do we owe each other?” We are so accustomed to speaking in terms of rights that we don’t, in my humble opinion, speak nearly enough about our duties. But we only learn our duties, it’s a chicken-and-egg phenomenon, we only learn about our duties through talking with each other, through confrontation in a positive sense. Through really witnessing and experiencing each other.
Tarini Kakkar: Speaking of the “hope chest,” several items put into the “hope chest” were products of art and artisanship, and the arts have gone through a period of change in the last year or two. What role do you think art plays in American history and society?
Robert Reich: Wonderful question. I was an art major as an undergraduate, and I loved the arts, and I spend whatever time I can get looking at art and enjoying art, and art is inevitably a product, an outgrowth, a symbol of what it is that a culture is focused on: its hopes, not fears so much, although art can express fears. But a lot of it is about, and particularly the art that was put into the hope chest, about aspiration, and what aspiration we want to share with each other.
Brooke Kirchner: I have two related questions about the choice in the film to have a particular age gap between the baby boomers and the millennials, and also I wanted to ask: why an age gap and not explicitly a political gap?
Robert Reich: I think an explicit political gap would have invited an explicit political discussion. And we have too many discussions that begin with Donald Trump or Republicans or Democrats or anger having to do with those divisions. We wanted to really get underneath all of that and talk about what was really important to people, but have them also contemplate what was important to America. By putting people together who almost never are together in each of these conversations, and we’re
talking about, you know, we had a total of nearly a hundred people talking to each other in groups of two, three, four, as you saw in the film. It became quite emotional sometimes. It became this process of civic discovery, civic discovery, in the sense that we as neighbors, as people in the same community, we as people who really are part of the same civic, uh, community, we are discovering things about each other we didn’t know. We are seeing overlaps. We’re seeing commonalities that we never understood. We ultimately are beginning to, in these conversations, and hopefully the film stimulates a lot of additional conversations. There’s even a little packet of film conversations. This is, you can’t see it, obviously, if you’re just listening to this conversation that we have right now, but this is a little packet of The Work in Progress questions. There are question cards, and the question cards are the kinds of questions that people were given to ask each other questions that are not really deep, penetrating questions, but they’re questions that have to do with what may be on all of our minds. Uh, but they’re open-ended questions. They’re not correct or incorrect questions. They’re questions that can, and hopefully will, if these are used more broadly, and the film hopefully is a launch pad for people getting into these kinds of discussions, um, it will show each other a commonality that we did not know existed.
Brooke Kirchner: I do have, I guess, a follow-up question based on what you said, which is, what is the common project of all of us, as Americans? I know that’s a big question, but what are we moving towards as we agree to be governed together?
Robert Reich: Well, the project of self-government in the United States is a slightly different challenge than it is in cultures that are much older, that have deep ethnic or religious or racial histories, either of conflict or of commonality. No. We are a culture that is a culture almost entirely of immigrants. Even if you are Native American, you are someone who is a stranger in your own land because you have been marginalized. So all of us are coming to these discussions with a central kind of wonderment. And that is, what do we have in common, which should lead to the question: what is the common good? What is the common good? Uh, it’s a very hard question to answer in America, but that’s what we really want people to begin asking each other. I have my view. I think the common good is a respect for the ideals that animated this country and have animated this country. Um, not from the beginning. This country from the beginning was very racist. I mean, after all, the founding members, the founding quote-unquote fathers, were men, and many of them had slaves. We then had a slave society that, even after the Civil War, was a society that maintained racial and also gender differences in law and enforced them in law. It was a society that had engaged in genocide with regard to Native Americans. I mean, think of the profound difficulty of talking about the common good when you have a society that had experienced slavery, that made women and Black people second-class citizens, and engaged in genocide of Native Americans. What is the common good in the 21st century for this kind of society? Well, I think the common good is finding our commonality. We have an administration in Washington that says diversity and equality and inclusion are bad words. Well, I’m sorry. I think that they are actually good words, that they are ideals, and that they are ideals that we need to practice.
Tarini Kakkar: I have a question, and maybe in interest of time, we can make it our closing question, but today we’ve talked about arts, politics, and community, which are all pillars of society in America today, and there is an emerging pillar, which is technology, which is deeply intertwined with all of these aspects of our life today. What are your thoughts on how technology relates to the common good, and everything that you just mentioned in your previous answer?
Robert Reich: Well, let’s put it this way. Without a strong sense of common good, without a strong determination to even find the common good, technology can rob us of our understanding of society. It can pull us into completely separate spheres according to our income, or wealth, or that of our parents. It can empower people who own the technology, who are the major investors and owners. And it can disempower everybody else. We’re on the cusp of artificial intelligence. Whatever that means, it means different things to different people, but it has a very clear technological meaning. And that could take away huge numbers of jobs. It could destroy the human species if we’re not careful. It could lead to a kind of warfare and surveillance of people, a kind of surveillance state that none of us should want. But unless we know what the common good is, unless we have a sense of our common morality—not that we all have to agree, but at least that we seek to understand what is a good society— then I’m afraid technology can be our master instead of our servant.
Brooke Kirchner: Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. It’s been such an honor.
Robert Reich: Thank you. It’s been my honor. Great fun. And I’m going to be talking at Zellerbach on October 14th, and we’re going to be showing the movie. So hopefully you’ll have a chance to join us there.
Tim Lynch: That was an interview with Dr. Robert Reich about his new film, The Work in Progress. The film will be showing at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus at 6 PM on October 14th, and will be followed by a discussion with Dr. Reich. Berkeley Brainwaves airs every other Tuesday at 9 AM on KALX Berkeley. Stay tuned now for freeform music with the Avant Gardener.
