Full Interview: Michelle Obama Talks To Stephen Colbert

[Music] there you go nice nice i'm also very excited because our musical guest tonight is common he's going to be out here for the show to perform for all of us and for the first lady too yeah may's gonna be big it's gonna be big but right now it is my honor to welcome back to the late show an author whose new memoir is already the best-selling book of 2018 please welcome the former first lady of these united states michelle obama love and happiness hey nice thanks so much for being here as you can tell

i'm not the only one who's excited that you're here tonight and uh i'm guessing you get that a lot these days on your book tour people are very excited to see you again yeah it's been good it's been good to be back out here it has been more than good as i said before i'm used to talking to you as flotus yes but now uh you are the best-selling uh book author the best-selling book of 2018 becoming is that red it's beautiful you like it i liked it very much very very much i only have

one i only have one quibble with you and obviously you know they're gonna be some tough questions tonight i might as well get to the first one right now uh in the preface uh you describe making a cheese toast you you toast the bread uh and you move the slices of bread to the microwave and melting fat mess of gooey cheddar between them you microwave bread madame microwave bread after it's toasted after it's toasted so you still maintain the crispiness because it's toasted all right the microwave is only seconds it's only seconds it's only let's

get on that the science is not in on microwave cheese toast yet you would do it differently independent scientists check that out um when you when you went to write this book um when you reflected on your life and and did you keep a diary you you say you started diary when you met that was that was when we were dating that i had the journal but in the white house i didn't have time um so but i did meet with a friend um a good friend of mine a few times a year throughout the

the term and she would interview me so we had these transcripts to help me remember the white house years because there would be because we did so much and the days the weeks would just blur by there were whole countries that i forgot i visited i mean literally i had a debate with my chief of staff one day because we were talking i said you know i hear prague is lovely i want to get there one day and she said you've been to prague and and i literally i debated her i was like nope never

been to prague we were in moscow but never prague and she was like nope she described what it was she had to show me pictures and then i was like oh that was prague well i can imagine because you have there's so many things you have to do and then you have to sort of emotionally like flush everything out and then go on to the next thing absolutely i once asked an astronaut what was like to go to the moon and he said i have no idea i i spent all three days in ten minute

increments and then i had to flush it all out of me and you were you and your husband were on a moon shot that's absolutely right i mean i tell the story of the evening that uh gay marriage was legalized same-sex marriage was legalized but i had forgotten that day that we had the funeral we had attended the funeral for a set of shootings and that was the day that the morning barack gave the sermon where he sang amazing grace and i totally forgot that those two uh heart-wrenching things happened on the same day the

emmanuel nine funeral was the same day it was the exact same day and that's why it was so important for me to get outside of the house and to see that white house lit up because i needed to feel some positive energy because we had attended too many shootings and we had mourned too many lives and there was too little being done so we were at a very low point and then we came home and there was literally a celebration outside of our house so i tell the story of how malia and i had to

fight to sneak out of the house to see the lights because secret service would let you guys out you just can't walk out your front door apparently when you live in the white house getting out of the house is an endeavor do they lock you in or you are locked in you're alive as i discovered because i i we snuck down we snuck past the secret service agents you saw them they were listed they were like they're moving and we were like don't get on the elevator me and malia we're like get down the stairs

go quickly and then the ushers started following us and we went to the front door and i said we're going out we're getting out of here and we pull i pulled on the door and it was locked but by then five people were standing behind me and i had on shorts and my hair was a mess and the usher was like ma'am you don't want to go out that door because that's where all the press is looking and i thought you're right i said but get me out of this house because we are going to

see these lights and it took 15 minutes to get outside to look at the white house lit up um but it was a it was a moment that we needed to come down from that day well that sense of always being protected by like the secret service for you and obviously for your husband and for the children you write very vividly in here about your childhood growing up on the south side of chicago and uh for much of your childhood your father was ill and and you her your father and your mother sort of uh

brushed it under the rug said everything's fine and y'all accepted that yeah so very stoic very moving forward you as a family were under tremendous pressure in the white house and on the campaign trail another reasonable you know actual threat at times did you hide that from the children or did you pretend like there wasn't like how stoic were you about it in raising your own children compared to how your parents sort of kept things from you even listening to you say that i realized yeah i adopted probably a lot of the same strategies i

mean so much of the the children's lives they grew up with such odd circumstances campaign events and people cheering and ice cream all the time and you're trying to keep them balanced so a lot of what we did was pretend like this is normal this is fine and keep them on a straight clear path i i always say it's sort of like when a toddler is is is learning to walk and they bump their head the first time they look to their parents to figure out whether they should be upset about it and if you

look cool it's like it's fine it's gonna be fine they don't cry that's what we did for eight years you know it's like you you're driving around with men with guns it's fine that's normal just go to school all the time you know when we would go to parent-teacher conferences and barack would come you he came in the presidential motorcade which is 16 motorcycles blocking the streets the cat team and they're black and their machine guns out on the roof of their school um we i remember that one of the first times we went we

were crossing the courtyard where kids were you know outside playing in the sandbox and malia looked up and there was a cat guy standing outside and she looked at barack and said really dad really does he really have to be here for this and we were like and i like i like that even the most powerful man in the world you know not push my teacher out of the way and we're like this is fine this is how we do parent-teacher conference so don't complain just get in the school don't talk back uh we got

to take a little bit of a break but don't go away when we come back more with michelle [Applause] [Music] obama hey everybody we're back with michelle obama author of the beautiful new best-selling book becoming available now um now when you were a young lawyer in chicago you mentored uh just uh a a a little upstart this guy just out of harvard who was a hot shot and he uh was named barack obama okay that's the guy that's the guy and you guys started you guys uh you mentored him and you guys started dating that

summer that you were mentoring yes do you recommend workplace romances just in case anyone from hr is watching they worked out fine for me all right yeah yeah so [Music] you he wasn't hot on the idea of marriage you know he he was more hot on it he was just being himself he he made an argument out of it right he made an argument that marriage was not necessary exactly is that not the sort of thing you want to hear though if you're well exactly that would spark an argument which he liked to do so

we would have these deep discussions about whether marriage was really necessary if two people really loved each other and he would make his loyally arguments and i would be irritated and that's how he decided to propose to me by starting that argument at dinner on on that raised the idea he was like you know let's talk about this marriage thing and how you know i'm not sure that it's really that and then he got me revved up and you guys are out at dinner at dinner supposedly celebrating the fact that he had finished the bar

exam so this was a celebratory dinner and so he just brings up it out of nowhere he picks a fight and so i deliver because i too am a lawyer and i have my points to be made so i was in full making my point and i was like in three and a and if you think and and by then dessert was coming out and the waiter put a platter on in front of me with a little box with a ring on it in the middle in the middle of the argument i was like and

i opened it up he opened up the box and he said now that ought to shut you up it did it did that's nice now um uh you you were um a partner you know you had you're very much of a partnership marriage and you were sounding bored for your husband when he became president united states um was the sound the board of you made always a happy sound or did he sometimes bounce ideas off of you of president you'd go like i don't like that you know i tried to make home uh a safe

place uh from the policy talk uh i i didn't want to be yet another person in his ear saying you should do this and you should do that i mean everyone in the world thinks that they can coach the president of the united states it's always amazing to me it's like people won't tell their dentists what to do but they feel like they can you know they know more than the commander-in-chief when it comes to a lot of issues so he he would get a lot of that ceos and hot shot folks and everybody's coming

by telling him you should do this better and you should do this differently and i felt like when he came up that elevator and came home for dinner that we wouldn't do that at our dinner table so you would never say when he came in is like i know what you did at work today no if if i wanted to if i wanted to deliver a real message i did it through staffs so i had my chief of staff talk to his chief of staff which was the same thing essentially but it avoided us having

discussions about stuff at home so we we had we we had uh intermediaries when it came to business it's like go tell them would you like like what what sort of things would you have your your staff tell his staff like give me an example about uh anything i can't think of anything off of hand we don't have time do we have time i've been told we have plenty of time no disagreements no [Applause] [Music] that's like we have time for plenty of time no that's pillow talk okay okay okay well that's office pillow talk

that i won't share it's not in the book but i tended to try to stay away from telling my husband what to do from a policy perspective and here's the thing i usually agreed with him on everything he did i i i thought that his positions uh generally aligned with what i believe and the times you didn't agree would be it would be on small things it would be on things like you know um you know how you reach out to the public you know how much formal stuff you needed to do how many times

you needed to do something in the rose garden versus being out with people you know there was always sort of an optics sense on the west wing side and i tell the story about optics it's like even when we wanted to do the first halloween party you'd have people on the west wing who would say should we really be celebrating halloween when there is an economic crisis and it was like it's halloween dudes come on you know kids still need to trick-or-treat so there there's a you know a lot of times i would incur i

would have to encourage them to lighten up a bit because the the country needs seriousness but they need joy at the same time well the country also needs i have completely agreed when people look to the first family people fdr said the presidency was essentially a moral position and people looked at the president for a moral center for the country and looked for the first family to set that example um what was that like how did your own family's morality and the morality you were raised with here how did that inform that sort of public

morality that is part of being the example family for america did you guys ever talk about that the pressure of that well being the first of any you know when you're the first of anything the bar feels higher you feel like you have uh you don't have room to make mistakes one of the things i don't talk about in the book but i talk about on the road is that i do remember that at the end that that last flight that we took out when i was leaving from the capitol and we waived we got

on air force one the last time i forgot about this because i didn't put in the book but a friend of mine reminded me that i cried for about 30 minutes and it was just the release of eight years of feeling like we had to do everything perfectly that there wasn't a margin of error that we couldn't make mistakes that we couldn't that we couldn't slip that our tone had to be perfect um because i that was that was the bar that was set for us but it was also the bar that we always set

for ourselves thinking that as the first people will measure everyone of our race of our gender by what we do and there is pressure that comes with that so that's how we carried ourselves and that had to trickle down to all of our staff so the pressure was on everyone we couldn't afford to make a mistake we couldn't afford to look cavalier we had to watch our language and we also knew that everything we said we thought about how it would be viewed by children not just our children but all of our children we we

knew that we we were the moral compass so we had to speak carefully and clearly and intelligently uh and we couldn't just say things off the cuff now now hold on you know my next question so you know my next question may i ask it you can ask the question is that as people took people who took that moral position seriously and it is a serious position how does it feel to see the next occupant at least of the oval office i can't speak for anyone else's family who seems indifferent to that responsibility well i

have been very clear about how i felt about that i i gave a speech about it at the 20 at the 2016 convention um the question that we have to ask ourselves is how does the country feel about it because i i don't think it matters how i feel feel about it i felt i felt torn about it from the day i watched it happen um but now the country has to ask itself what do we want what is the bar that we're setting for ourselves it doesn't matter what you or i think at this

point it's up to the voters now to figure out what do we what kind of moral leadership do we demand in the white house regardless of party regardless of race regardless of gender regardless of where you are what do we want our president to look like how do we want them to act and if we vote for one set of behavior then that's obviously what we want until we vote differently well you you have time for this one right here say you know uh from the from the from the from the moment it happened from

the day uh he was elected president of the united states our next president you did not stay up for the results that night you should write in this book that you're like i saw a look on my husband's face and i just went to bed i didn't want to know i didn't want to know how did you sleep that night and how have you sleep since because i have not you should sleep i should sleep i know but how did you find out who told you well i when i went to bed i knew um

because when when i when barack got a call that some of the polling places was were looking a bit odd the numbers weren't looking the way they had thought i thought well that's that's not a good sign you know this should this this shouldn't even been close right so if it was close it could be a problem and i just needed to sleep on that and pray that maybe i was wrong how did you find out who told you that morning i i woke up and i saw my husband and i said what what happened

and he said you know she lost uh and uh and then we we went about the task as i wrote to try and and and quell the nerves of a lot of young people that were on our staff because our staff was a diverse staff we had people who are same-sex partners and uh people who were uh have families who were immigrants and you know young people were afraid of what this meant you know and there were a lot of tears and we had to be the moral compass for our staff first and foremost and

then the moral compass for the country for those who were shaken by the results so we had to steady ourselves and be clear and to keep people positive because the truth is is that this is as we told people this is how democracy works you know people who vote get to determine the direction of the country and you know as as we talked about when people sit on the sidelines especially young people which were the case in that election the people who vote get to determine the direction of the country they're going to live in

and we have to live with this now so the question is what do we do next those were the conversations that we were having and continue to have the thing we have to do next take a quick commercial break but uh i thought we had all the time in the world we do but we don't have all the money in the world and the advertisers have to sell something we'll be right back with more former first lady michelle obama hey everybody we're back here with michelle obama the author of the best-selling book already of 2018

becoming um you end of the president as i said earlier we're on such a rocket ride um did it help you uh did it prevent you from or give you the opportunity to not be cynical not to be jaded not be exhausted by politics by how fast everything happened because in you know 2004 he's elected to the u.s senate and then really from that speech at the democratic convention in boston our lives change completely right and then and then the whole thing is that whole aspect of your life is is over just 12 years later

some people have 40 years before that happened that's right how do you keep from being cynical about politics here and this is where it may sound corny but it is true uh we got to travel around this country and and meet people on the ground you know we didn't we had the advantage that most people don't we we learned about our country not through pundits and television and news talk shows but we learned about it from meeting people and what we learned is that we in this country there are decent people of all persuasions and

whether they agreed with us or not you know when you were in their face in their community people were kind and gracious and generous they reflected the values that i grew up with one of the reasons why i tell these stories about my life is that everybody can resonate with the story of my upbringing because that's how everybody's grown up with a little hardship and a little you know with a little pain a little little hope and a little joy the problem is we don't know each other we don't let each other in and i

said in this book it is hard to hate up close uh it is easier to hate when you were when you're hating a person through a filter and the filter was gone for me and barack for our nation and so we got to see the truth and that's what i try to pass on to people you know don't let what's happening now be the filter filter through which we see one another it is not a clear or clean or accurate filter we saw the country as a whole we've seen the world as a whole so

do you think that the division that's in the country right now is an aberration this is not the norm i think it is so easy and lazy to lead by fear um it is much harder to lead and buy hope with hope so it is it is only an aberration if we find leaders who reflect our values and if we don't no this this can be this this can go on you know but it depends who's at the top speaking of not not leading by fear as i said earlier this is the number one selling

book of 2018 already and this is beaten this has beaten bob woodward's fear so once again hope has beaten fear that's a good one there you go here's some here's some stats for your time as flotus one billion dollars invested in girls education millions of kids eating healthier and getting more physical activity persuading business to hire and train more than 1.5 million veterans and military spouses and i got to say the best white house parties i was ever invited to what what when you look back what do you what do you hope to be most

remembered for for bringing hope to young people because in the end that's who we're counting on people ask is it you know do you still believe in going high absolutely because what's the choice what what do we want to model for our kids you know we want them to believe in the possibility of more and better and we we owe it to them because kids don't come to this earth jaded and racist and cynical and misogynist they come here pure and open we teach them all of that stuff we owe them better so yeah i

want to have a legacy of of making the next generation better than than we are there are so many do i have a moment to breed can i read a little something from here something uh there are so many beautiful passages in this book uh your childhood your relationship with your with your your parents uh and and your brother and getting to know the president and the burdens of being the first lady and and your hopes and your your own fears but there's a passage in this book to me that is the it is there

the quiet center of of of your story and it's in page 402 you say uh you're talking about uh getting funding for girls education raising awareness you say i knew how to make a little noise for a cause it was natural i understood for americans to feel disconnected from the struggles of people in far away countries i had to try to bring it home calling up celebrities like stephen colbert to lend their star power at events and on social media and i think if only that was in this book i would think it would be

it would give me hope i mean that that that's the sort of thing i'm going to hold on to from this book if i forget nothing if i remember nothing else in here i'll remember that um and you should and i want to thank you for lending your star power your voice your heart no i know you know and this wasn't in the script and there's no script it's not scrolling this wasn't yeah but i want to thank you because you you do wonders to bring hope to people well thank you thank you and i

want to point out this book is uh now available all everywhere books are sold and on amazon where and this is true i checked right before the show frequently bought together becoming and whose boat is this boat i had we have nothing to do with that thank you so much for being here so much becoming is available now michelle obama everybody we'll be right back with the performance [Music] [Applause] [Music] you