Today's episode is brought to you by Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice produced with Fox Creative.

Their second season tells real stories from real people directly impacted by some of today's most pressing issues.

Their latest episode of Into the Mix takes listeners to the dairy barns of rural Vermont to tell the story of how grassroots activism for safe conditions, competitive wages, and humane working hours

led to an innovative worker-led program that let workers decide for themselves what dignified working conditions look like.

Hear their story on Into the Mix, out now.

A New York Presbyterian, our data scientists and doctors are combining decades of medical experience caring for diverse communities with the power of data science.

To one day get ahead of a health issue before it becomes one, stay amazing, today and tomorrow, New York Presbyterian.

Hi, I'm Cara Swisher, Editor-at-large of Recode.

You may know me as someone who's using her time in quarantine wisely by which I mean watching top gun every single night, but in my spare time I'm just a reporter and you're listening to Recode Decode, a podcast about power change and the people you need to know were part of the VOX Media Podcast Network.

Today in the red chair, I am thrilled to have Samantha Power, the former US ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017.

She's also a professor of practice at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School.

And last year she published a best-selling memoir, which is really wonderful, called The Education of an Idealist, Ambassador Power. Welcome to Recode Decode.

Great to be here, Cara.

So I do one of the things that I want to talk about was the book, because I think we're sort of in this time that I think we do need a lot more idealists now.

We had been in such a cynical era for most of the Trump presidency so far.

And I want to talk a little bit about how you're looking back on writing your memoir and your book. What would you call yourself now? I mean a realist? What is America right now?

Well, America above all is divided. So that's unanswerable in the whole, but I think in terms of myself, my definition of idealism is pretty modest.

You know, you think things are going well the way it's going. If not, chances are there's some set of standards you have or some set of aspirations where you like things to bend a little bit in that direction.

And I think the hardest and second leap to make is do you feel you have a hand in making some small change in bridging that gap between where you want to get and where we are.

And so, you know, it's not some very fairy sense of the world as Utopia or anything like that. And I think the more I went from being a journalist and a commentator into the belly of the beast, the more actually affirmed I was in a belief that people can

turn rooms, you know, change history, reverse setbacks, make mistakes for sure, but learn and grow. And so I just saw people all around me on the outside and the inside making it.

So I guess in that sense, my idealism is deepened by my experience, but my realism about the world that I see around me and all that is broken in it, you know, gets also hardened in many ways every day.

...