Anderson is pleased to present the first episode of Audie Cornish's new podcast: The Assignment... but first a conversation on the intimacy of podcasting with Audie and Anderson.Fiery Twitter threads and endless news notifications never capture the full story. Each week on The Assignment, host Audie Cornish pulls listeners out of their digital echo chambers to hear from the people who live the headlines. From the sex work economy to the battle over what’s taught in classrooms, no topic is off the table. You can find The Assignment wherever you get your podcasts.
To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

I want to take a few minutes to introduce you to a new podcast from my friend and colleague, Audie Cornish.

And Audie's with me now to talk about the program and also talk with me about my experiences making All There Is, because before I started even making all there is, Audie was the first person I talked to about, and really the only person I talked to about podcasting.

So I'm, it's such a pleasure to be able to talk to her about her new podcast and stick around after the conversation to hear the first episode.

I love talking to you now at the end of your process.

Because I caught you originally maybe the middle to end.

I started making recordings in my mom's place, but I hadn't actually like taken a step into forming it into a podcast, I don't think.

So you've already done it in kind of memoir form.

You've already talked about it in your medium of choice which we'll talk about.

What was it that you thought this could do for it?

It was more, I mean, honestly, I didn't really think about, I mean, when I started, I didn't plan on making a podcast.

I was just sad in my mom's apartment going through her things, and I'd been reading Viktor Frankl's Men's Search for Meaning, and he had talked about narrating himself through situations, and not to compare my situation all to his obviously, but it's something I've done in my head a lot, like distance myself from something to narrate, to get through things and narrate myself through them, sort of observe myself as a human being doing something.

And so that's how I started making recordings and then decided that it's ridiculous that I don't know anybody else who's talked about going through their parents stuff and I don't know who to even call to talk about going through my mom's stuff.

And so I thought I should just start doing that.

And I'm too shy to actually like call up people and just ask them for advice on, like I would never call up Stephen Colbert and say, hey, can we talk about, you know, this thing I'm going through in my life?

But to be able to say what to somebody, you know, I'd like to interview you about this.

It was, for you, what is the assignment, first of all?

Well, I mean, 1 of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you is because the assignment does something similar to what you did, which is you talk to people about their personal experience.

And I think in the news business, we're really used to kind of bringing someone on as an anecdote, and then we're like, okay, go back to your life while we get back to the rest of the news, sentence caps.

And I really felt like, you know, some of the best conversations I've had while reporting were with those people in that experience and how can I expand that and is this the right medium to expand that and to like let that breathe a little bit?

And just to give people the background, we're going to be speaking with what I call the original gig workers, but some people in the OnlyFans economy, people have sort of migrated into the business of, I guess, what you would call sex work online.

I actually, I know a couple of OnlyFans, people who have like been very successful in OnlyFans.

No, my, my, well, anyway, it's a long story.

But immediately you can tell the approaches like from the inside out.

It's, as you said, it's not sort of just having some voices in to illustrate a point and then moving on.

Sort of it's all crafted around these voices.

It's like you've taken the innards and you've pulled them outside and it's very compelling in that way.

It gets at something that I liked about your show, which is the intimacy of it, which in your case I think comes from the subject matter.

It's incredibly hard to talk to people about the things you spoke to them about.

But this leads me to my question, which is about intimacy in our discussion about which is the more intimate.

I didn't, I mean, I knew Audie's work, but I didn't know her personally.

We ended up having a dinner together that was a very, ended up being a very long dinner after show 1 night.

And it was just a very, it was a really great dinner.

But it came out of me being like, I don't know how to do TV.

Tell me what you do to make this feel less crazy.

Because to me in a studio, a TV studio, it's lights, giant monitors with your own image being broadcast back at you, people speaking in your ear, this camera guy, that camera guy, a desk,

I think I really fully understood the concept of the anchor in all of that.

Whereas at, you know, public media, we're like, we're hosts.

And so I was saying it's not intimate at all.

I do think television can be extraordinarily intimate.

I think there's, you know, it's, I think you get, I think people get, get stuck looking into the camera, looking at the camera lens and that piece of glass and they get stuck in the front of the camera.

Someone once said to me, a producer, David Borman was talking to me a long time ago about, you're not looking at the front of the camera, you're looking into the back of the camera.

You're looking through the back of the camera.

You should see me with my little eyes searching around.

You're sitting down with people and having, you know, you have to be vulnerable in the conversation you were having as well.

I'm finding that as I'm doing the assignment, I have to share more than I have in the past, where I've been a more distanced observer in a way.

Because you know what it's like when you're reporting and you're trying to get people to talk, you have to give of yourself.

So did you find this space any, how did you find this space different?

I thought the intimacy of being in the room with somebody was really interesting and different than a television interview.

I mean, in television, there are more things going on in one's mind, or at least in my mind during an interview.

I mean, there's questions about light, you know, there's questions about lighting, there's questions about sound.

If I'm shooting a story in a place where something, you know, I've been in situations of in a children's hospital in Maradi Niger in a malnutrition crisis with dying children, and there is the horror of what you are seeing and the sadness of it, and at the same time, part of your mind is also thinking of, is the sound person recording the sound properly and getting the sound of the fluid dripping, the IV, or this person's breath coming in, and raspy breath coming in and coming out, all these things which are horrible to think about in that moment and yet they're also part of television production.

In recording for the podcast, I don't think there is that same level of, it's just you and the microphone, so there's not a lot of moving parts

dirty secret, which is sometimes I am editing people in my head because I'm so used to conversations having to be edited down.

And, you know, people are discursive and they go off.

And this has been really exciting because it's forced me to come out of my own head the way you're talking about.

Like stop trying to edit and manage this conversation that you're in and just be in it.

Yeah, I mean, is there something of the conversations you've had, is there something, a moment that stands out to you?

For me, like in our opening episode about these activist parents who have run for election and now on school boards, for me it's the moment where they themselves have to pause and think.

And you hear a little bit, like you hear that silence, which is very powerful, while they say, well, is that what I mean?

You know, and it's very rare that we let people have the grace or space to think, right?

It's like, don't do that, because if you falter, you know what I mean, like you could go viral.

And there was a moment where I'm kind of pressing them about whether or not they kind of want to roll back school policies.

And it's interesting, we end up going back and forth over just the phrase rolling back.

The perception is that people in your position are trying to roll back

certain policies, whether that is discussions around social issues,

Do you see yourself as rolling back excess?

I think, unless you're talking about just maybe over the last 5 or 6 years.

But, I mean, I'm talking about the activism in the classroom where the teacher is bringing their own political.

I mean, I thought you meant like roll it back to, I don't know.

So let me re-ask, at this point, would you like to see a rolling back of classroom discussions based on the current events of the last 5 years?

So LGBT issues for 1, certainly how race and history are discussed in the classroom is certainly another?

I think what we would hope to be done is just to adhere to the standards of providing each side without bias.

Like if if you feel like something has gone to excess,

sounds to me like the remedy is to pull back.

Or you could say that they haven't been following what, let's say, you got people going on the extremes, you know?

Yeah, I don't know if rolling back is the right term.

It's about getting back to basics and teaching the standards.

What's so interesting to me about that is that we are in this age where people are talking at each other and in bumper sticker slogans, and people have the slogans down, but when you actually just sort of try to lower the temperature and actually listen to what somebody's saying and respond to them as a human being and sort of start to just explore what they're saying, it's disarming to people, and sometimes they don't know how to put away the bumper sticker slogan and actually express what they actually think or even explore what they actually think.

Yeah, and their people are on guard a little bit, you know, and rightly so.

Their words can be weaponized against them, et cetera.

And the goal of the conversation, at least my opinion, is not to change minds.

You know, I don't have that kind of sense of just like the power of conversation.

It's more like what would this conversation be like if we actually listened a little bit.

You might come away with different understanding.

You might come away with a better understanding of how

to talk to people you disagree with, which battles to fight over the course of a conversation, and how to open some doors instead of close them.

And I'm hoping to make the strange familiar, right?

Like that there will be a lot of communities that people hear from that they'll go, I did not think I had anything in common with a sex worker, you know, or like I did not, I didn't know what was going on for gender affirming care doctors.

I think we've got a lot of interesting shows coming out.

You can check out The Assignment wherever you get your podcasts and follow so you won't miss any episodes.

This week on The Assignment, with me, Audie Cornish.

We're going to share today's assignment with Larry Wilmore.

We'll talk about his prolific career in television, mentoring younger writers, dapping up President Obama, and what he's working on next.

I do have some fans out there who kind of know that I've been a producer for all these years.

And in the last few years, I've got many podcast fans.

Listen to the assignment with me, Audie Cornish on Spotify.

OK, before we start a little bit of personal history.

My mother was an elected school board member.

And in my small hometown outside of Boston, this was back in the mid-'90s, That meant she spent long nights at meetings in salary fights with teachers unions or with parents angry over a lot of things Fast forward to today and I have a kindergartner and I can't get these images out of my head of parents raging at school board members last year.

This wave of parent activists were upset about how schools handled the pandemic, handled teaching gender identity, handled issues of race.

Since when did the public school system take it upon itself to become the moral authority from which our children learn their values?

After so much deception, radical politics, and eruptions of violence, We are pulling our son today from this school district.

But the thing is, it wasn't some pandemic-induced moment.

It's the latest chapter in a long-running movement.

And the Historians who study this stuff say school battles are really just proxy fights for what it means to be American.

So I wanted to know more about these activist parents.

And now that they have power, What do they plan to do with it?

We need to be teaching our kids to think for themselves and to have their own opinions and we need to be supportive of that.

Unless a parent thinks it's inappropriate.

Then they can make a phone call to a tip line, right?

And say, I didn't like the way that went down.

Well, and that's a discussion to be had between the school board and the parent.

And it's uncomfortable, but we need to be having discussions.

I'm not going to pretend that the parents' rights movement is new.

I grew up outside of Boston in the decade after the school busing crisis, when parents angry over mandatory integration fueled riots in the late 70s.

And I was part of a voluntary busing program.

Covering education over the years, I found that most of these stories were really about power.

The analogy that works for me is the family dinner.

Adam Latz is a historian of education at Binghamton University, and he studies the power struggle over what belongs in the classroom.

We think about public schools as America's dinner table where everyone comes and has to sit down and has to get along for a certain amount of time.

It makes sense that this is where all the underlying tensions, all the long-festering angers get expressed from time to time.

And without going too far down the historian rabbit hole, 1 of the most interesting of those times he told us about wasn't Boston in

And that's where a school board fight about so-called multicultural textbooks spiraled into a boycott and bombings.

Shattered windows, chairs scattered about.

first grade room at Midway Elementary School at Campbell's Creek, West Virginia.

right, but let me back up because like I said, It all started with textbooks.

By the way, I feel it's a God-given responsibility for me to educate my children.

We feel that in no way can this type of literature benefit and further our children's education.

We do not want any teacher to assign any of this material at any time for any of our children to read.

West Virginia had recently tried to modernize its curriculum.

And remember, this was a tumultuous time in the U.S.

With civil rights and women's rights and the Vietnam War all in the mix.

And around the country, there was a progressive push not only to integrate classrooms, but also to integrate reading lists.

See all All There Is with Anderson Cooper transcripts on Applepodcasts

When Anderson Met Audie