Translator: Theresa Ranft Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So, my name is Brad,
and I have a quick confession before I start.
And that is, at the tender age of nine years old,
I thought of myself as a very strong black man.
And I heard a little bit of nervous laughter.
It is a little funny.
It was like a combination of "Shaft" and LeVar Burton from "Reading Rainbow."
(Laughter)
It was a diverse blackness.
And it was thanks to my father -
this is my dad here and this is my beautiful mother.
This is when they met in Seoul, South Korea.
My father was an officer in the army.
He was shot a couple of times in Vietnam.
He was stationed in Korea.
And my parents met, and they fell in love,
and they made sweet, sweet love,
and they made this family.
This is the Jenkins family.
This is me, Brad, this is the guy in the middle,
mean mugging.
This is my brother, Sean, to the left, who's in the audience.
And this is the beautiful Jenkins family
or melting pot of a family,
and this is the reason why I thought of myself as a strong black man.
I emulated my father,
who was a great person, a great American.
And he was also my coach.
And this year - I was nine years old -
he decided that I needed to go to basketball camp.
And this was a big summer for me.
I had never been to basketball camp.
I didn't really know what it was.
I didn't know if there were tents in the court,
it was very confusing.
I was also nervous
because my father enrolled me in a basketball camp in downtown Trenton.
We lived in Trenton as well, but we live in Hamilton,
which is very different, demographically speaking.
It was mostly Italian-American.
And this camp, none of my friends were going to, it was just me.
And so, as we're driving up to this camp,
I had that, you know, that kind of nervous pit in your stomach,
where your hands get clammy,
you're just like, "Uh! Man! I'm not going to know anyone.
I don’t know if I'm good."
And as I walked into the gym, I looked out,
and I saw a sea of black kids and their parents and their families.
And I thought to myself, "Oh, thank God, my people!
I'm fine here.
Father, why did you not bring me
to my brothers and sisters earlier in my life?"
And so, my dad got in the car and I was fired up.
We had drills in the morning,
we had defensive drills and we had dribbling drills.
And in the afternoon, we had our first scrimmage game.
And as I mentioned, I was extremely fired up.
I had a headband, I had a wristband,
I had fake Air Jordans because my parents were cheap.
(Laughter)
And as I was dribbling the ball up the court for the first time,
I remember my teammates,
they were looking at me, I was looking at them.
They were all saying the same thing,
and I remember the sound of it to this day.
It was like - it was like a symphony orchestra really.
There was a tenor,
and there was a bass, and there was an alto.
And they were all yelling,
"Chinese boy! Chinese boy! Pass me the ball, Chinese boy!"
"Hey, yo! Chinese boy! Move it, man, pass it, pass it!"
And I'm dribbling up the court and I'm saying,
"Who are they talking to?"
(Laughter)
"Who is the Chinese boy that they are referring to?"
And then I realized, "Oh, they're talking to me."
And I had a moment of realization.
I literally thought to myself, "I'm Chinese!"
(Laughter)
I didn't know.
And so, I passed the ball, and the rest of the game I was distraught.
Every time the ball was passed to me, I'd just pass the ball away
because I really was embarrassed, to be honest.
At the end of the day, my father picked me up from camp,
and he asked me how the day went.
And of course, I was very angry.
And I said, "Well, dad, apparently, I'm Chinese!"
(Laughter)
And my father said, "What?"
And so, I tell my father the story and, you know,
I’ve heard my father laugh over the years, over the course of my life,
but he had never laughed so hard as when I told him this story.
And I didn't think it was funny, I didn't think it was funny at all.
In fact, you know, this was my identity -
granted, it was a nine-year-old identity, but it was shattered.
And I felt like an outsider.
I felt like I didn't have a home.
And I told my father,
"You know what, I'm not going back to this camp."
My father pulled the car over, very dramatically.
And my father called me - who I call Poppa J -
gave me three words of wisdom.
And these three words of wisdom were my words of truth,
speaking about "truth be told."
I thought about these words of wisdom all throughout my life
whenever I was in crisis or I was vulnerable.
And the first word of wisdom was,
"Brad, don't take yourself so seriously.
You're not Chinese ...
... you're Korean.
(Laughter)
And you're black, but you are Brad.
You're Brad.
Your new teammates - they don't know who you are.
And so, you have to be able to laugh at yourself.
You have to give them a chance to learn how incredible the person you are.
So, laugh at yourself."
I said, "All right. Fine dad, I'll laugh at myself."
And rule number two, "You got to be good at what you do."
He said, "Well, how well did you play?"
And I said, "Well, I didn't play. I was so embarrassed.
I just passed the ball and I gave up."
My father looked at me in the eye and said,
"You know what, I want you in life to never give up.
There are people who are spectators,
there are people who watch from the sidelines,
and there are those that give their all,
and they are active participants, and they jump in that ring.
And I want you to be that person.
So tomorrow, I want you to play as hard as you can."
I said, "All right, dad. I’ll play as hard as I can."
His third tip was, "Brad, you got to be good to people."
And he asked me,
"Were you nice to your new friends? Did you introduce yourself?"
And I said, "Well, no! They called me 'Chinese boy' ...
(Laughter)
... I was really embarrassed,
I just kept to myself for the rest of the day."
He said, "Well, look Brad, in life,
you're going to be called a lot worse than 'Chinese boy.'
I promise you.
You're going to have to learn how to take it,
you're going to have to learn how to be good to people.
And I promise you, Brad, if you're good to people,
if you're honest, and you're genuine,
that goodness will come back to you ten-fold."
And so, I took my father's advice.
I hit the game-winning shot, which was very dramatic.
And when I hit the game-winning shot, the center of my team came up to me,
he stuck his finger right in my chest and he said, "What's your name again?"
(Laughter)
I said, "Brad!"
He's like, "Great shot, Brad!"
And I was never "Chinese boy" again.
And it was an incredible moment for me.
It was an incredible lesson for me.
As you see in this next slide,
I took this lesson all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I did not become President - this is a little misleading ...
(Laughter)
... if you're wondering ...
But I worked for the President.
I somehow got to work for the President of the United States
for four years.
And my job was in the Office of Public Engagement.
And our job was to connect the millions of Americans
who could benefit from the President's policies.
And it was not just to connect with them;
we didn't just want to do an ad
or do one thing or the other.
We wanted to connect them and inspire them to action.
And the most important thing that we worked on was healthcare,
which I'm not sure if you guys have read
but it's [been] a little bit of a divisive issue
over the past few years.
In March of 2010, Congress and the President
passed the largest overhaul of our healthcare system.
And since then, there has been $400 million
of negative advertising about the law,
compared to about $15 million of positive advertising.
A lot of it was partisan,
and a lot of it had a lot of negative effects on the law
and also just on regular people who needed healthcare.
The biggest negative effect was there was a lot of misleading information,
things called death panels -
not sure if you guys heard that -
things called the government takeover of healthcare -
which was in fact not true, it's private insurance healthcare.
And that first year of enrollment, which was actually not even a year,
it was just a few months,
our office in the White House, in order for this law to work,
we needed 7 million Americans to sign up for healthcare.
Not only sign up but in some cases, pay, of course.
For this thing to work,
we also needed a lot of healthy young people to sign up.
And so, my office reached out to influencers, to innovators,
to people who could carry the President's message much better
than the President can, without the partisan nature,
really speaking to their fans in a genuine way.
And the first day of enrollment, we got 70 celebrities:
Lady Gaga - who has like 70 million Twitter followers, which is incredible -
Pharrell, Kerry Washington, and Amy Poehler.
People all over the country telling young people,
"Look, if you don't have healthcare, go to HealthCare.gov,
get healthcare for your families, get covered."
And I remember this day,
not because this was a beautiful, beautiful sign
of how the country can come together,
but I remember this day because these millions of people
were being activated and mobilized to get healthcare for their families ...
saw this.
[The System is down at the moment] (Laughter)
Do you guys remember that?
I remember that too.
(Laughter)
It was brutal.
In case you don't remember it,
here's a little short video of how ugly it was.
(Video) [In early 2014]
Media voices: Another day, another problem.
If they weren't fully ready, they should've delayed it another year.
Two weeks into the Obamacare website, guess what? It still isn't working.
More chaos on the Obamacare front, as you may know.
Obamacare is a failure,
it's always been a failure and it will not succeed.
(Video ends)
It was brutal.
It took two months for us to get the website up and running.
The enrollment period was only five or six months,
so we lost two months.
And during those two months,
we had John Stehr and Stephen Colbert making fun of us pretty much every day.
So we had a fundamental problem.
There is also some history here.
In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt also had a crisis on his hands.
It wasn't a dysfunctional website,
it was the banking system.
In fact, it was our whole economy.
So, eight days into office, he did the unthinkable.
He did something that no one else did before him.
He went on the radio,
and he spoke to 60 million people,
and it was called the "first fireside chat,"
and within two weeks of this fireside chat,
half of the people were hoarding their money,
[putting] their money back into the banking system.
And many credit this first fireside chat with being the beginning of the end
of the Great Depression.
It's pretty amazing, the power of communication.
But for Obama and for this White House,
we didn't quite have the bully pulpit.
We couldn't just go on the radio have 60 million people activated.
We had to do something different.
And to be honest, we had a little bit of an identity issue.
We had to think big, we had to think bold.
And so, we had to talk to Poppa J.
(Laughter)
And I'll admit, Valerie Jarrett and the President did not call my father.
He couldn't pull them over on the side of the road.
But I was there, I was at the White House.
And the first step when we thought about this was, "Well, look,
that was a disastrous rollout, that was just brutal.
But the website was working now."
So, in order for us to say, "Hey, guys, the website's working, let's go back.
Go back to the website and sign up."
We needed to be honest about that, we needed to be truthful,
and the only way we could really talk about this
was using comedy and using humor.
The second thing,
if we're going to use comedy and we're going to use humor,
we had to go to the best people who knew how to do this.
The White House does lots of things, they have great policymakers,
but they're not great at comedy.
(Chuckling)
We went to the funniest people on the planet,
a company called Funny or Die.
It's been making these videos for years,
hilarious videos for social good.
And we called them, we said, "Hey, we need your help."
And they were like, "We're in."
And the third thing was that the stakes could never be higher.
This was not just about comedy, speaking truth to power
against the 400 million dollars of negative ads.
This really meant life or death to so many families.
Millions of families were counting on this law working,
families that needed that life-saving cancer treatment,
families that were being kicked off of their healthcare plan
because of pre-existing conditions.
We needed this to work,
and we needed this to work for the most important reason.
We needed a comedy hero,
and that came in the form of this guy, Zach Galifianakis.
(Video) Zach: OK, what did you come here to plug?
President: Have you heard of the Affordable Care Act?
Zach: Yeah, I heard about that. The thing that doesn't work ...
(Buzzing)
Media voices: It worked, it's boosted traffic to HealthCare.gov by 40%.
This video had actually gone viral into the very people that they need.
Those kind of media appearances are really going to define Presidents -
In ten years, people will look back and that's just going to be how it's done.
(Video ends) And it worked.
Forty percent uptick in traffic to HealthCare.gov,
over a million hits to HealthCare.gov
within the first few days of the video launching,
30 million views of the video.
And the incredible thing about this was 90% of the people
who were clicking on HealthCare.gov from the video
had never been to the website before.
It's the exact demographic we're trying to reach.
We were trying to reach those healthy young people
who otherwise would have never gone to the website.
It was an incredible success.
It showed the power of truth and the power of comedy.
But the most important thing
is that it meant so much for so many people.
And back to Poppa J's third lesson, which is be good to people,
this is what be good to people looks like.
This is when the Obamacare coverage expansion kicked in.
It has been the biggest drop in the uninsured rate in 50 years
and one of the biggest uninsured rates in the history of this country.
And I'm not saying that Zach Galifianakis saved Obamacare,
I'm not saying that comedy saved Obamacare.
What I am saying is, when you listen to Poppa J,
and you're honest and you're truthful and you do it with a little bit of humor,
a lot of good can happen.
And I think that's an idea worth spreading.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)