Episode 489: Brooke Baldwin
In conversation with CNN Anchor Brooke Baldwin, about her new book, Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Power.
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Musical credits:
"Are You Listening" from Elephant Shaped Trees by IMUNURI.
Released February 3, 2018.
Composed by André Pilette, with the help of Adam Garcia, Stephanie Leary, and Dan Wilson.
Lyrics written by Stephanie Leary.
Produced by André Pilette and Stephanie Leary.
Mixed by Brett Ryan Stewart of The Sound Shelter in Nashville, TN.
Mastered by Michael Fossenkemper of Turtle Tone Studio in NYC.
Song used with permission by the band.
Episode Transcript
Kelly 0:00
This is Two Broads Talking Politics. Our guest today is CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin, author of the new book "Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Power."
Hi everyone, I am Kelly and this is Two Broads Talking Politics. And the other broad with me today is Brooke Baldwin. Brooke has worked for CNN for 13 years, I believe and has now published her first book: "Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Wower. Hi, Brooke.
Brooke Baldwin 0:50
Kelly, what's going on? Thank you for having me.
Kelly 0:52
Yeah. I'm excited to talk to you. So there's so much to talk about with this book. I think it is wonderful. I'll be totally biased here. I thought it was a great book. I loved it. I've been recommending it to people.
Brooke Baldwin 1:05
Thank you. Music to my ears. I just want one in people's hands. I want to inspire. I want to you know, add the word huddle to everyone's lexicon.
Kelly 1:12
Yes, yes. Well, I'm hoping that will happen too. So talk to me a little bit about what what inspired you to write the book, how you kind of got started on this path?
Brooke Baldwin 1:22
Yeah, um, I'll just jump straight to these two crazy days for me January of 2017. Right. I write about it at the very beginning of the book. Where on on a Saturday in a very cold Washington DC on the day that Trump is inaugurated and is in his motorcade, winding his way down Constitution Avenue to the White House for the very first time. I was embedded in the Trump motorcade. So what that means is he's in this giant motorcade all eyes, all cameras are pointed on his limo and I am essentially balancing on the back of this flatbed truck with a couple other correspondents and our photographers. You know, we're just setting the scene for all of our live television broadcasts. And I am there surrounded by a lot of MAGA hats, a lot of Trump supporters, some some protesters. And, you know, was very aware of having covered the the lead up to his election, was very aware of what was seen on a video very near to that day of where he likes to grab women. And I'll be honest, like I, as a woman, and as a journalist, I was troubled and I didn't know what the next four years would look like, covering this man. And then the very next day talking about, you know, emotional journalistic whiplash, I am in the middle of half a million women in this one giant huddle at the Women's March in Washington, DC. The MAGA hats were placed with the pink hats. And I am interviewing various powerful women about why they wanted to show up that day. And I thought it was really important though, Tamika Mallory, the activist, stood on stage. And she taught she said, you know, we're not all here protesting because of one man. And I really took that point to heart. And my own journalistic spidey sense, having just covered the 2016 election and criss crossing the country and covering various campaigns both on the left and the right, I just, I just noticed that women were showing up in ways that I had never noticed in my 20 year career. And then I had my own personal moment where I realized, oh, my goodness, I don't think I have a huddle. I don't think I had at that point in time, just a couple years ago, a group of women who would've shown up with me, and I had amazing singular girlfriends, but I just didn't have a huddle. And I made it my mission when I returned to New York and back to my job to really dedicate the next chapter of my career to covering women. And that was the unofficial beginning of this book. And ultimately, my activating my own huddle and inspiring other readers and women to do the same.
Kelly 3:55
So we've interviewed so many women who've said that the Women's March was sort of the singular inspiration, it was the inspiration for this podcast. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it was such a moving emotional event. How do you how do you do that as a journalist, how do you, you know, sort of try to try to have this objectivity that you need to have? I never have to have objectivity. That's not part of podcasting. But as a journalist, how do you how do you sort of step outside of that and try to focus on that objectivity,
Brooke Baldwin 4:24
My arm hair was like standing up; I had the goosebumps, all of the things. I stood there as I'm that I'm backstage at the women's march on the quote unquote, red carpet of the Women's March, interviewing people like Cher, you know, and Cher was like, Brooke, I've lived through 17 presidents, like we're gonna be okay. You know, to America Ferrera, to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. You know, Gloria Steinem. Of course, all these women were back there, and I'm taking it in objectively, as objectively as I possibly can, but how can I am. I'm a woman right at the time, like what was it 38-39 years of age, thinking, holy, you know what, I had never seen so many women gathering like that in my life. And it's hard to think back to, you know, the the December prior to that January where people were saying, yeah, maybe a couple thousand women will show up, like no one knew. And I do think it was a little bit of that element of surprise, and just women kept coming. And I remember hosting a show that afternoon from the roof of some building in Washington and I could, I could hear, I can hear the the women, the cacophony of the just the marching and the protesting, vibrating through our coverage, as I'm juxtaposing, you know, and pivoting between that and the first Sean Spicer White House news conference, where it was the first time, like, buckle up everyone, because this is the Trump administration, and this is how they're going to roll. And we're gonna need to, you know, really hold them. Hold them to it. And you know, facts first here at CNN, and so I, at the end of the day, like, how could I be fully objective as a woman being in the middle of that. It changed my life.
Kelly 4:46
Yeah, yeah, it changed, I think, a lot of our lives. And so many of the women that, that you talked to in the book, who was sort of that was the moment they thought about running for office, or, you know, as that has been such an incredibly powerful movement. What, as you were writing this as you were talking to all these women, which thankfully, you got to do a lot of in person before COVID, what were the kinds of things that sort of surprised you? Or maybe not surprised, but just really sort of hit you over the head like, wow, this is this is something that I need to think about?
Brooke Baldwin 6:41
Well, I think we live in a culture where the the dominant narrative is pitting women against one another, right? And that if you are successful, if you have leaned in and in primarily, you know, white male dominant structured workplaces with very few women's seats at the table, that you are the, you are the lone survivor, the hero, the lone successor in this world. And I think my biggest surprise was how many women who are successful are like F that. They want to, as Megan Rapinoe said, throw down their ladders, they want to share their success. They want to leave the door open and actively, you know, sponsor or mentor younger women coming up from behind, in a way that I tried to live in my own siloed world here at CNN, but just to hear story after story after story of all these women huddling, I was surprised by that. And also, footnote within those conversations, I got this amazing access to Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon's production company in Los Angeles. And so had a back and forth with Reese and then really talked to the CEO, Sarah Harden. And she just made this point about intersectionality, too, right. As we huddle, and we build our own damn table, her point is, you know, we have to do it from an intersectional feminist perspective. And if we just replace the patriarchy with a bunch of white women like nothing, nothing changes. And so just reinforcing that point, as well. And just also how so many women, like bucked the system, you know, whether it was the five Congress, women I talked to on Capitol Hill, where the Democratic Party when they were huddling in on the campaign trail, and they're like, we don't really like that, you all on a stage together. And they were like, okay, well, too bad, because that's what we're gonna be doing. Or the Houston judges, you know, these 19 women who came together as judges and when won their races in Harris County, Texas, in 2018. Equally, like the Party was like, yeah, we don't like that. And they, they didn't listen. And every single one of them won.
Kelly 8:58
That story, and that picture of those 19 women.
Brooke Baldwin 9:01
So good! You don't know we're talking about? GoogleL Black Girl Magic Houston, Texas.
Kelly 9:07
Yes. Yeah, I'll I'll put it up on our website. Just amazing. One of the things that struck me as I was reading this book: we're very close in age, I think you're slightly younger than I am.
Brooke Baldwin 9:17
I'm 41.
Kelly 9:18
I'm 42. So we're very close in age. And
Brooke Baldwin 9:20
There we go.
Kelly 9:20
You know, I think I have sensed the same thing that you see in the book that, that this isn't something we learned how to do when we were younger. You know, it was still that moment of, you know, women who made it sort of were in competition against each other, this idea of scarcity. And and now now I embrace the huddle. I think the huddle is great, but I don't I don't know how to mentor other women in the way I best want to because I don't have that experience of having been mentored by women along the way. How do you, how do we sort of learn that because you know, we're in our 40s. This is the time that we should be mentoring the next generation. So how do we not just have our own huddles but but learn how to sort of proactively encourage huddles of younger women?
Brooke Baldwin 10:09
How to throw down our own ladders. You know, I think to myself, I'm like, Do unto others as was not done to me. So and let me be clear, even though my first TV job fresh out of University of North Carolina, I'm in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I encountered one one young woman in particular, with very sharp elbows. And I learned very early on, All right, this is the game this is this is how people roll. I didn't, I didn't want to do that. And I sleep pretty well at night. But that's like just how it was. Because there were so few spots for women. It's so much better now. Thank goodness. And just side note, you know, I was watching the President Biden presser the other day, and I was watching all these women, just one after another after another of these correspondence covering the White House standing up, and I'm just like cheering them on my feet like shouting, YES. You know, so many Chief White House correspondents to these networks now are now women. But if you don't know how to mentor, think of when you work, this is what I do, I think of when I was coming along, and when I could have used some help, some wisdom, some advice, some of the the sharing of the wealth and the access to power. And I, and I think about what I could have used and I try to give that to these other younger women coming along. And also like, I'm a big believer in modeling behavior. So you know, if I show up to work, and if I show up vulnerably, some days emotionally, some days really having to put my foot down, these younger women who I work with see that without me saying, you need to do this, this and this, you know, but they they see that. And I slowly see bits of, bits of that in their everyday work lives. And that I find incredibly encouraging. And I'm also just curious, I wonder what you think to Kelly, just about younger women. I didn't do this in the book. I just wonder like generationally, it's just seems to me that the younger women coming along, have much more of a predilection to huddling in a way that some of us older gals did not have as much of. What do you think?
I think they do. I mean, maybe I should flip my own question and say maybe they can mentor us.
Totally. I get such inspiration from the young folks. Yeah,
Kelly 12:26
Yeah, I've spoken to groups of like high school feminists and things and they're just amazing. Yep, they're, they're whip smart, of course, but they also just, they have this sense that Yeah, we're gonna help each other. Of course we are and yeah, like, it's not gonna do this intentionally. And I find it really inspirational. And I think they are intersectional in a way that I didn't even realize was the thing you could do. You know, I went to practically an all white High School. So it didn't even occur to me. Yeah. And they just sort of do it. Whether it's intentional, whether it comes naturally to them. I'm not a sociologist. I'm not gonna try to figure that out. But yeah, but it is something that they are doing and that they're doing so well. Yeah, it's, it's great.
Brooke Baldwin 13:12
Well even look at the young women on the frontlines of the protests last summer in the wake of the George Floyd death, right. I mean, I live in New York City, and I saw so many people protesting and certainly was covering it last summer. And just knowing how many young women beyond the three women who started Black Lives Matter. There were so many young women last summer leading those protests.
Kelly 13:34
Yeah, and I think and you point this out, but this idea of huddling that seems foreign to us, as you know, middle class white women, it is something that Black women have been doing for generations.
Brooke Baldwin 13:48
Before slavery man. Before slavery.
Kelly 13:52
Yes, yeah. And it could be that with intersectionality, you know, again, this idea of of mentorship, you know, maybe I shouldn't be putting myself into this role of I can mentor them, it's more what can I learn from all these other women?
Brooke Baldwin 14:06
Totally. And I'm so glad you brought that up. And I talked to obviously a number of Black women huddles, and also a Black historian Kimberly Springer, who was very, who brought up the point that it's not wasn't just because of slavery, that Black women have this rich history of huddling, because, you know, they were all they had it, she she she made this clear point. And so did one of the women who started GirlTrek and they said, listen, it predated slavery, because you know, Black women just have always had this mutual admiration and Sisterhood of one another that that has just gone back centuries. And so I just that's also why I really started the first major chapter in the book in Houston with those, I talked to six of the 19 Black women judges because I just wanted to honor that legacy in America.
Kelly 14:55
So I think the, the one thing that we're still striving for in this country, of course, is that we have not had a woman president. I think we did not see a huddle supporting Hillary or there were huddles, but they were in secret that no one knew about. So, can we use this idea of a huddle? Can we huddle together to finally elect a woman president and then not just elect but support her? To make sure that, that she will be successful?
Brooke Baldwin 15:21
It's such a good question. And, you know, it makes me think of a couple of things. Number one, I interviewed Megan Rapinoe, for my book, and I, she showed up, you know, she bless her, it was early in the morning, we're having coffee. And she had just won this huge award from Sports Illustrated the night before. And she came downstairs to this like, you know, random midtown Manhattan hotel. And she was on a tear already, because she had seen the Hillary Clinton interview with Howard Stern. And if you have not seen it, people, just watch a little bit of it, because it is like Hillary Clinton, unfiltered. This is this is who I am. And she was pissed. Megan Rapinoe was pissed because she was like, where was this Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. And part of her point was that she feels like, you know, so many women still don't feel and you can argue like did, did she really have a good campaign? Like, there, there are all these other points to this, but you know, there is this societal expectation that women need to comport in a certain way publicly. And she she just did it. And you know, even though she won the popular vote, we didn't see it in the White House, and like CASE CLOSED, but I just go back to Megan Rapinoe's point about and look at her like, like, you think of the Megan Rapinoe shot that everyone knows with her arms like out wide, literally taking up space. And she is like, not at all apologetic for who she is. And she shows up as herself every single day. So she can't possibly understand how anyone else can't. So number one, we need to make sure, society needs to encourage and allow whatever woman becomes president to do that. Number two, I talked to these five moderate democrat Congresswomen up on Capitol Hill, and they huddle they have this text chain, they call themselves the badasses. And they all have previous lifetimes in either the CIA or the US military. So these national security women, and they talked to me about how they huddled on the campaign trail, and their whole thing was unlike a lot of the men who were campaigning and would really sort of boast about their resume is they really connected with voters through emotion, through story, through experience. So number two, I would say if you are a woman running for president, maybe take a page out of their playbook because it seems to really work for them because they won in 2018, and they won again. And then lastly, you know, whoever it is they need the the candidate herself needs to huddle. Stacey Abrams is someone I talked about quite a bit in this book. And Stacey Abrams is someone who was the House Minority Leader in Georgia once upon a time. And so she had to learn how to fundraise, right? And it's just, it's a skill. And so when time came so many years later, for her to truly try to flip her state of Georgia to blue, which hadn't been done since 1992. She pulled it off. And she pulled it off, not just because she's an extraordinary human, but also because she had a huddle of other women who were helping fundraise and helping get the word out. And she literally, Kelly, shared as a wealth. She shared all of this money, I want to say she gave away like a fourth of however much she had made, she had fundraised, to various other women and a lot of other women of color fighting for the same thing Stacey was. And and so it's sharing the wealth and huddling. And I do believe that we will. I mean, representation matters. Even seeing you know, Kamala Harris as the vice president matters. And it'll happen.
Kelly 18:48
It'll happen. You heard it here, folks. I think we've said it many times, but it will happen.
Brooke Baldwin 18:53
Yeah, it will.
Kelly 18:54
You have been an anchor at CNN for a long time. You are leaving CNN now. And you know, this, this is/was your dream job. What, what comes next? And how does this idea, writing this book, learning to have your own huddle, learning about huddling? How does you know how does that sort of prepare you for whatever comes next?
Brooke Baldwin 19:15
Well, the book changed my life. And I write that, I remember sitting and writing the epilogue in 2020 and saying I had a feeling changes were coming and that it has changed my life and this is how. It is being with these women, interviewing, like having the privilege of interviewing all these women absolutely changed my life and I have to be as brave as I possibly can even though that's also painful because you know, I'm I am leaving a job that I have held dearly for so many years and also a family that I've had. But you know, this book taught me to huddle. And so as a result, I have activated multiple huddles and in in, you know, huddling with my girls, they have all been such champions for me and sounding boards and have been such like a rocks and believers that I have to do this thing. And I'm also so moved by this work and these stories that I am hoping that I can create Huddle: the TV series. I mean, How awesome would it be to be able to go home, and if you're looking for a little inspiration, you know, binge watch a whole series on a streaming network all about huddles. And so that is part of my next dream. I am recalibrating my dreams. And beyond that, I honestly don't totally know. But I do want to say how grateful I am to have been at CNN for as long as I have, it has been a dream job. And you know, to the audience, and to the viewers, and to the listeners. Just thank you.
Kelly 20:45
I had to laugh as I was reading your book, I kept thinking, oh, I hope she talked to so and so. And then like, I'd turn the page and that would be the next. I remember, I was reading the section with Alicia Garza and thought, I hope she talked toShannon Watts, and I turned the page like, I was like, Okay, good, good. I think I think I counted about five people that I've interviewed who are in the book. This is great. But the section that resonated most with me, perhaps was, I believe it was your sister in law who had a huddle with moms online.
Brooke Baldwin 21:15
Wren, with her new moms Facebook group.
Kelly 21:17
I have to say the most powerful huddle in my own life is a group of moms that, you know, all sort of met when we were around the same time that we were pregnant or had very little kids and, and we're mostly knitters. And so it's I'm always talking about my knitting moms group said.
Brooke Baldwin 21:34
That's your huddle.
Kelly 21:35
It is. It's amazing.
Brooke Baldwin 21:37
You think about the things that you shared with him. I mean, my sister in law hasn't even, you we talked about how it's been really hard in the pandemic flexing our huddling muscles, you know, virtually, these new moms on so many of these, you know, Facebook groups they've never met, and they are leaning on one another and sharing vital information for their little babies is in a way that has saved them. And for my own sister in law's story, you know, gave her the faith to be able to have my second precious precious nephew. You know, she wasn't too too terrified or intimidated by by the thought thanks to these, thanks to her mom huddle. So rock on moms and knitters, love.
Kelly 22:15
Yeah, well and my kids are nine and six now. So they're not even babies anymore. But this mom huddle is everything. It's everything. Is there anything else you wanted to make sure that we talked about?
Brooke Baldwin 22:26
I think you hit on everything. Thank you so much, Kelly. Yeah, I'm good.
Kelly 22:30
All right. Well,Brooke, thank you so much for joining me. But thank you for writing this book, too. It really resonated with me, and I can't wait to see what's next with the world of huddles.
Brooke Baldwin 22:41
Thank you Kelly. Thank you so much.
Sonya 22:44
Thank you for listening to Two Broads Talking Politics part of the DemCast Podcast Network. Our theme song is called "Are You Listening?" off the album Elephant Shaped Trees by the band IMUNURI, and we're using it with permission of the band. Our logo and other original artwork is by Matthew Weflen, and was created for use by this podcast. You can contact us at TwoBroadsTalkingPolitics@gmail.com or on Twitter or Facebook @TwoBroadsTalk. You can find all of our episodes at TwoBroadsTalkingPolitics.com or anywhere podcasts are found.
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