This is The Beautiful Writers' Podcast.

I'm Linda Sievertson, and I feel like I won the literature lottery today with the perfect duo for this show.

Glennon Doyle is back as our guest host.

If you don't yet know her work, you will in a few minutes.

Glennon is here to get bookwormy

and political with one of our environmental and human rights heroes, the best-selling author,

activist and CNN correspondent Van Jones. We have all had this experience, I know you have,

where you hear someone speak and time slows. They come on

the airwaves and you feel instant relief. The things they say ring truer and saner than the

clamor around them. They're people, right? So they're fallible, but they rise above the fray. Their

eyes change to things brighter and higher. I think both Kennedy's, Bobby and John had that,

certainly Martin Luther King Jr. and Mandela had it. It's a rare gift. Obama has it. Their hope and

faith and vision helps us write our course and get back on track. Van Jones has it. A voice, a vision,

a lifetime in the making. As a little boy in the South,

Ben went to sleep at night underpinned photographs of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther

matched to his Star Wars action figures. At Yale Law School, he was idealistic and optimistic

until painful inequities met him there. He saw, for instance, that

white students caught doing drugs were not punished or they were sent to rehab, while Black kids

three blocks away caught with smaller amounts of those same drugs were sent to prison. Vance

professor asked him to monitor a peaceful rally, but when the police arrived,

despite following their instructions implicitly, Van was arrested. America was no longer the land of

the free. And when police officers were caught on video brutally beating Rodney King and were not

...