Today, we have Heather McGee on the podcast. Heather is an expert in economic and social

policy, the former president of the inequality-focused Think Tank demos. McGee has drafted legislation

and testified before Congress and contributed regularly to news shows, including NBC's

Meet the Press. She now chairs the Board of Color of Change, the nation's largest online

racial justice organization. McGee holds a BA in American studies from Yale University

and a JD from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. Her latest book

is called The Some of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prospere Together. Heather,

thanks so much for being on my show today.

Hey, good to be with you.

I'm a fellow Yale alumni, so I want to talk a little bit about the development of your

thinking about this topic and why you're so passionate about it and what kind of trace

that development a little bit. So you spend years working on economic policy for demos,

right, which is a liberal Think Tank. How did that work relate to what you're doing today?

What are some things that you saw, some of the kind of conversations you had when you

worked there that made you start to go in this direction?

Well, I really was lucky to get an entry-level job when I was 22 years old at a startup

Think Tank that was focused on an issue that wasn't really top of mind for a lot of

policy makers and media folks at the time, which was rising inequality. The fact that we

were having more and more concentration of wealth that the quality of jobs for working

in middle-class families was starting to decline and the costs for the basics, health

care, housing, childcare, et cetera, was sort of shooting through the roof. And in previous

eras in economic policy in the United States, there had been big consensus-making efforts

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