Kai Wright: I'm Kai Wright. This is The United States of Anxiety and we've been thinking a lot about what motivates each of us to get involved to try and make some kind of positive change in our own communities. I think it's got a lot to do with our own stories, what we experienced, how we think of ourselves, who we are, what we value. Over the next several months, we want to meet people from all over the country who have stepped up in their immediate communities in some way. We want to hear their stories, and learn how those stories propelled them to try something new, especially things that haven't quite worked out yet. As always, we want to hear from you.

If you know someone we should meet, let us know. Tonight, I want you to meet Michael Tubbs he was elected mayor of Stockton, California at 26 years old, making him the youngest mayor of a major US city ever and the first Black Mayor of Stockton, everybody from Oprah to National Democratic Party operatives fond over him. He's a Stanford graduate with this up from poverty, personal story, bright political future, and a record of trying out bold ideas in a city that has faced many economic challenges for many years but then he lost his reelection by a lot.

There were political post-mortems, of course, but I think he tells the most interesting story himself. His memoir, published last fall is called The Deeper the Roots: A Memoir of Hope and Home, and it's less about electoral politics than the life and the values that led him to even try politics in the first place, initially as a city council person, and then as a mayor, the book was written before he lost actually. When he and I spoke, I asked him first about how he processed his unexpected defeat in the 2020 election.

Michael Tubbs: Yes, that's a great question and I think part of the difficulty was that was public and much of the processing was being done with everyone either being very excited, I loss or mourning, that loss and all processing out loud. There's a lot of noise and static, but what was helpful about particularly that loss, because they gave me a lot of clarity, in terms of what I was willing to lose for, and just really kind of crystallized my focus on in the white supremacy on ending poverty and those are being things I'm willing to be ridiculed for or loose for.

Kai Wright: We've been thinking a lot about how things just feel stuck politically at the national level and then that makes us think about big, bold change at the local level instead and I just wonder if you have key takeaways about your time trying to spur that kind of local revolution. What do you think or how do you think people should think about change at the local level?

Michael Tubbs: When I look back at where Stockton was my startup city council, we were bankrupt, and we lead the nation in homicides per capita but that's how I left Stockton and we were in that just because of me, but definitely had a large party. We had become the second most heavily fiscal city in the state. We have seen 40% reductions in homicides and shooting. We were the first city to pay the basic income. We were doing all these things that seemed so impossible, particularly for Stockton. I mean, it didn't come without struggle. It didn't come without cost. It didn't come without backlash, but it was possible with worth it. That's fine people to get that it's not easy. It's not linear, but it is possible.

Kai Wright: In your memoir, you are strikingly open for a public official about your life. Despite the fact that you start the book with a quote for your mom's saying, don't tell her about your business and you proceed to do just that. You share that your mother had you when she was just 16, I believe that and for most of your life, your father, who was also named Michael Tubbs was incarcerated. Share a bit about your parents' story. How did they meet and how did their crossed paths change the trajectory of each of their lives?

Michael Tubbs: Yes, my mom and my dad are both from Stockton, and they both grew up and I think it really speaks about sort of a social mobility particularly for Black folks in this country because they both grew up like at least lower middle class like my grandmother worked for the county, some work at the post office and the work that the county as eligibility worker for folks on welfare, a government job not rich but solid and my grandfather on my dad's side, he was one of the first Black firefighters, at the Stockton police department. Solidly middle-class jobs and my mom and dad met as teenagers at a roller skating rink.

My mom ended up being pregnant at 16, getting go to college, and ended up making less than her mother, which is the story of a lot of folks in this country, particularly Black folks in terms of upward mobility and with my father, he ended up being incarcerated and incarcerated and incarcerated, it has been incarcerated since '95 but even before there was always a need out of jail, their experiences actually gave me a lot of my policy focus in terms of opportunity in terms of criminal justice reform, in terms of educational attainment, but I think it's just learning from their experiences and sort of growing up on the underside of this "American Dream" has really made me the man I am with empathy, there was an understanding that the solution isn't found in individual attributes, but it's really in structural policy changes.

Kai Wright: You also talk about this split between the life you created at Stanford and the reality of others in your family you talked about your cousin, who was tragically shot and killed while you were interning for the Obama administration. This tension between trying to be leading a life where you are succeeding, while holding your family at the same time, and I asked you because it's also I struggle with the framing around this idea of those of us who make it need to go back and help those who didn't make it. There's something about that framing that's weird to me.

Michael Tubbs: Yes, I think my story, particularly in the book, but even in my life is also about survivor's guilt. That's something that let me go back to Stockton frankly, there's something I still struggle with in terms of what's the line, what's the balance between being individually happy and be concerned about myself, with these wider community concerns, particularly when other people who have similar jobs or similar roles don't have that extra responsibility? I think that's what you're speaking to in terms of like, the unfairness of it but also, I think, just given the history, particularly of our people in this country.

We've always had to be communal when thinking we've always had to sort of think about everyone else but I also would say, you don't have to, I don't want people to feel pressured to do more than what they want to do but I think if folks have that gumption, it's probably good to listen to that because you might find a whole lot of lessons and a whole lot of blessings and things in that choice to go back and help. I don't think it should be a requirement, nor do I think it's fair to assume it. Oh, because you come from this, you have to work on that. Like, I don't think that's fair at all.

Kai Wright: The first time you've ever opened up about your family was your college admissions essay, which I think a lot of young people of color can identify with. It's really one of the only times for a lot of people where their struggle actually gives them a form of power. It's interesting point about that.

Michael Tubbs: Honestly.

Kai Wright: Right, but you write that, quote, it's storytelling, truth-telling is how we make sense of the world as it is, and gain the vision and courage to create the world as it should be. You say more about that, just the power of storytelling.

Michael Tubbs: For me, I think storytelling is a way to get folks outside of your like ideological camps and really central humanity. It allows folks to be disarmed enough to listen, take in and understand other experiences from their own and find ways that there's commonality, find ways that there's similarities, I think, leads to more empathy but I tried to do one in the office even more out of office to use storytelling as a tool to get us to an understanding of sort of shared humanity that will lead to the policies I want to see like pay leave, or universal childcare, or basic income, or baby bonds.

Because I think the impediment for these policies is that the story we tell ourselves as a nation, or some people tell themselves is that this nation was started by these people and then by God's smart and thrifty and hard-working.

They just work hard and that's why they have much and other folks who don't have anything because they lazy and they take, and they're dependent on government and we know that's a false story. I try to do with being brutally honest, in my book, and even when I speak, it's let people know like, now, here's a truer story of what it's like to be poor in this country and why people are poor in this country, and actually, how this country came to be, I think, understanding that those stories we create a policy landscape where the policies we want to see can happen.

Kai Wright: We've talked about your family, but you also talk about your own dramatic mistakes, things like your DUI that you had to confront while you were a council member. Even this conversation about what led to your loss in 2020, why is that part of it important to include to you?

Michael Tubbs: Well, the point of writing the book for me was because I grew up reading memoirs of folks. It gave me a lot of courage, inspiration like Manchild in the Promised Land, Makes Me Wanna Holler, Black Boy, Autobiography of Malcolm X, et cetera. What I liked about those books, they were so honest. [laughs] It was real, very terrible scenes, very terrible choices, and still love these characters.

I thought particularly, as a political figure, it would be too easy. The easy route would be to paint this story of exceptionalism and paint this story of everything working perfectly and paint this story of perpetual victory. Yes, it started hard, but now all I do was win. Now, thoughts important to talk about the low moments, talk about being stupid 24-year-old getting a DUI and how difficult that was and how embarrassing that was and how I'm still paying for it almost a decade later, or talking about what does it mean to lose?

I thought that was particularly important for the book because I think it gives to what I said earlier, it give real credence and credibility to what I'm saying. These issues are issues I care about win or lose.

Kai Wright: During your mayorial term, you, as we've talked about, focused a lot on poverty, you became known for piloting a universal basic income program. You could have chosen a lot of things to build your public life around. Why was poverty the one that you thought this is really important to center in the conversation?

Michael Tubbs: I think it's because of one lived experience, but then number two, I think in almost a prophetic sense that I just don't see a path forward for our country with so much poverty. It's also a question of potential. There's so much genius and potential locked into poverty and it's something that's solvable. It's something that's manmade. It's something we can fix.

Kai Wright: In answering that, you mentioned your lived experiences as part of it, and we've implied some of this, but I want to be explicit about it. Can you say more about your own life in that regard?

Michael Tubbs: Yes. Grew up poor. My mom, she's a teenager. She was single with a child and eventually two kids. My father's been incarcerated literally my entire life. Spent seven years on welfare. I spent time living in some of the worst neighborhoods in Stockton. At least when I was mayor, we had a list of hot zones. There was five of them. I had lived in every single one.

I was literally living in a city with a lot of problems, but in a place in a city with a lot of problems where the ponds were most concentrated and what I saw there was not lazy people. I saw people working two or three jobs, people working incredibly hard, immigrants coming here for a new life. I saw children who at least started off liking school and wanted to do better in school, where the schools they went to were terrible.

This is not things I studied at Stanford, these are things I lived. I was lucky enough to go to Stanford. Now I'm just driven so that no one has experienced that type of stuff because again it's avoidable. It doesn't have to be this way.

Kai Wright: You've said a couple of times that your father was incarcerated most of your life. What's his story and how has that shaped your choices?

Michael Tubbs: I didn't realize the story about father's incarceration and how it really ties into everything I'm working on that we discussed until writing the book and doing research. Apparently, he was arrested for robbing a rival gang member for money to pay for his daughter's funeral. That story is really moved me for a couple of reasons. Number one, because he had been incarcerated for so long.

I had assumed he had murdered somebody. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm a child of a murderer. What does that mean for me?" It had real guilt and intense anxiety about that to a young person. Then, I recognized like, wow, $3,000 cost this man 30 years of his life. $3,000, because he didn't have enough money to bury his daughter. Then in the time of great mourning and loss in trauma, made a terrible decision.

I think maybe that helps explain also why I'm so passionate about ending poverty. I don't want any father to be unable to bury their daughter. I don't want any father to lose 30 years of their life and of their child's life because they don't have money.

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Kai Wright: After Michael Tubbs lost his election and left public office, he created an initiative called End Poverty in California. It's also a storytelling project, at least in part.

Michael Tubbs: End poverty in California is provocative name on purpose because we are serious when we say, in the fifth largest economy in the world with more billionaires than every country in the world, besides the United States and China, we don't have to have poverty. We can end it in California. We have the tools to do so. Initiative is also about working with local leaders and working with leaders period on trying new approaches, trying new ideas, but really centering the conversation on why do we have so much poverty in a state with so much wealth and why do we allow that.

I think part of naming this is to be a provocation because I think every time someone says, "How do you end poverty in California?" I'm like, "Well, how are we going to sustain it?" There's two options here. There's either sustain poverty or-- Are you comfortable with sustaining it? How do you want to do that if I want to do the opposite? I think part of it is really to get people to think about like, Oh, wow, can we end in poverty in California?

Do I want to end poverty in California? Am I actually fine with poverty in California? A third of the state of California is in poverty or web paycheck away. That's a lot of people. We're not going to be the fifth largest economy in the world if we allow this to continue and debated. We are actually hypocrites in terms of our professed values given what we see in our communities, and we have to do something about it.

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Kai Wright: Michael Tubbs is Special Advisor to California Governor, Gavin Newsom for economic mobility and is the Founder of End Poverty in California. He's the former Mayor of Stockton. Michael, thanks for joining us.

Michael Tubbs: Thank you.

Kai Wright: The United States of Anxiety is a production of WNYC studios. You can follow us wherever you get your podcast or check us out on WNYC's YouTube channel, where we also stream the show live each week. We're produced by Emily Botein, Regina de Heer, Karen Frillmann, Kousha Navidar, Rahima Nasa, and Jared Paul. Matthew Miranda is our live engineer and a special thanks to our intern, Katie Steele, who leaves us this week. We've loved having you, Katie. I'm Kai Wright, and you can find me on both Instagram and Twitter @Kai_Wright. Thanks for spending this time with us tonight. I will talk to you next Sunday.

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