What is the impact of that as that toxicity travels?

The impact is horrific.

When Donald Trump became president of the United States in 2016, we normalized rape culture.

We allowed for the sort of ascent of the manosphere and individuals like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson and Nick Fuentes to come into our living rooms, our bedrooms, to speak to our young boys.

I mean, it is really, really troubling for me as a mother of two daughters and two sons that we are living in a culture where the person in the highest office in our country is normalizing violence against women.

encouraging the bro code and the code of silence and protecting predatorial behavior.

Most men are good men.

What kind of a conversation do you have with your kids in a moment right now where you see leaders attacking a survivor of

Why now for this?

Why now? Yes.

So my first very first documentary as a writer, director and producer, Miss Representation, which premiered at Sundance in 2011 and sold to Oprah Winfrey Network, was really doing its work in the world.

We were shifting attitudes and behavior, hearts and minds around limiting gender stereotypes and norms.

We were part of this whole campaign called Not Buying It, which transformed the portrayal of women and girls in advertising, and separately Ask Her More, which really validated women as more than what we're wearing or who we're wearing on the red carpet and really sort of anchored the power of women in the entertainment industry as fully realized human beings and encouraged reporters to ask more of them the way we ask more of men on the red carpet.

So that was misrepresentation.

We were making all this progress.

exactly describe it you would know better than i but it just feels like a level playing field women do really well

[laughs]

But I, but, but 80% of the Farm to School grantees are Title I schools, and our public school system is not Title I, and so we weren't prioritized.

But also it, what it, all it requires is a passionate individual in the school or school district to make this a priority, and then to connect the dots and to start the process.

Because we have created an entire...

This is like an ecosystem change, um, in the food system.

That's what we've created.

So what's, what we did was we basically, um, pulled in outside advocates in education, food, uh, farming, uh, healthcare to basically help us create a roadmap in partnership with an interagency working group that I convened with the Secretary of Ag, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Superintendent of Education, Natural Resources, EPA, Labor, et cetera, et cetera, to basically design a pathway forward to create real systems change.

[laughs]

think you know it's so important that you know the the film highlights what's happening across the United States not just in California and no offense but like things that work in California don't always work elsewhere they can and this shows that it's possible and I think that's really really exciting and especially right now I'm wondering what made you so passionate about this issue that you wanted to devote you know a lot of your time to it

Yes.

So I have an environmental science background and I lived and worked in Africa and Latin America with indigenous communities in sustainable agroforestry and ironically connecting food suppliers, indigenous food suppliers in Peru and southern Africa with whole foods and at the time wild oats.

And so that that was sort of part of my journey.

I studied environmental science for part of my, it was one of my many studies at Stanford until I realized I needed to actually have a major.

And so I kind of combined a bunch of things and created my own major.

But I also started my whole academic career at a Montessori school.

I think, you know, probably one of the best parts of your job, I'm just guessing here, is talking to farmers and talking to students.

But is it true that this investigation started during the Biden administration?

I, you know, I, I don't know the details.

Um, I do know that, you know, Trump was coming after my husband when, back when Biden was, was president, and Biden was running for the presidency, and I thought it was, uh, ironic.

Uh, so look, I, this is, this is a fishing expedition, and I think what you're saying is that it's just been going on for a long time.

My husband is Trump's most outspoken critic, and he's the GOP's, uh, biggest, um, you know, um, I, I don't know.

Uh, they, they've always targeted my husband, and whether the, it's the GOP themselves or, uh, you know, their media empire with Rupert Murdoch and the like, uh, we're just, you know, s- kind of sitting ducks in that regard because they think that my husband's, um, aspiring t- for the presidency, and they wanna silence him, and therefore, they go after his wife and those close to him.

Is he aspiring for the presidency?

presidency?Um, I believe right now we are focused on California.

And then some.

When you asked me about First Partner, you know, my work has always been to center and support women and give kids the best start in life and kind of rebuild community at the same time.

I gave myself the title First Partner because I wanted to signal to Californians that I was going to be a partner to them, to women and families in particular.

And I secretly hoped and I still hope that there'll be a female governor someday.

I was rooting on, in particular, all of the spouses of the gubernatorial candidates because they're all exceptional women and I wanted to be able to pass things off to and share them with them so that to make their transition into the governorship smoother because I actually wasn't, I didn't receive any support or anything we had to start over from scratch because we didn't have a first lady's office and part of that was because the former first lady was really a senior advisor to her spouse but all that being said as first partner i've been focused on women's wealth health and safety And children's well-being.

And then we just recently launched a campaign called California Love, California Strong, which intersects with some of the work I've done on the Gov's Advisory Council on Physical Fitness and Mental Well-Being.

So a focus on self-care, but also on California volunteers, which is all about service.

So looking forward, what's inspiring your work? What stories are you still excited to dig into? And how do you determine what makes an excellent story to tell?

What was it that led you to, to social media for this?

So Misrepresentation was made 15 years ago, and with the advent in around 2011 of the like and share button, we started to see a dip in girls' and women's mental health.

57% of girls experiencing persistent sadness and hopelessness, one in three seriously considering suicide, 99% of deepfakes targeting women and girls, 96% of them non-consensual pornography, and then we started to see a downturn in women aspiring towards political leadership.

And so this all together helped us understand that tech-facilitated gender-based violence was harming girls' and women's mental health, safety, and power.

Are you ready for that spotlight?

[laughs] I will continue to do the work that I'm doing now for as long as I, um, can imagine.

I love, uh, championing and focusing on uplifting and supporting women and girls and children, and giving, you know, families the opportunity to experience the California dream.

And so, um, I've loved our time in office, and we have a lot of work left to do to, um...

But as they're having these deep mental health issues, what is the responsibility for these big tech companies in ensuring or protecting young women

and or just women and young and girls? I mean, transparency and accountability, right? We saw that 76 percent of all of the hate speech on X was ignored.

Ninety-three percent of the threats and harassment, some rape threats and death threats towards female politicians, once again on Instagram, just not addressed.

They have a tremendous responsibility.

They're profiting off of our victimization, off of our pain and suffering.

And we have an opportunity to right this ship.

It's really about our individual responsibility as citizens, electing people that represent our values and are willing to stand up and hold folks accountable at the federal level.

Are there any companies that are making changes, stepping up, or do they simply not care?

Has your work pivoted at all during Trump 2.0?

That's a great question.

I mean, my work has been consistent, but I didn't think I was going to have to make misrepresentation 2.0 or even the mask you live in 2.0 because when misrepresentation was born in 2011 and it was doing its work in the world, screening everywhere from Abu Dhabi to Singapore to Afghanistan, all across our country, people have stopped me and said they watched the film Seven times it transformed their life.

They were running for office.

They were going into the media.

It had such an impact.

And then, yes, 2016 really contributed to this horrific backlash that we're all experiencing.

What advice do you have for other parents raising children in the era of deep fakes and powerful social media algorithms that are designed to make people feel bad?

But I wonder, as a Californian, how you see that.

I mean, do we believe anything out of his mouth anymore? I think he needs to be fact-checked constantly.

Uh, I, California takes seriously voting and the process, and it takes time.

It is frustrating to many.

That's understandable.

Uh, the governor has passed, uh, legislation to expedite, uh, the process, but again, so much of what we do in California is local controlled, and we can only do so much.

And in a culture that's sort of obsessed with, you know, whether it's fame, efficiency, or progress, you know, are we at, are we at risk of losing our sense of purpose, uh, just to kinda keep the machine running?

Uh, I believe, you know, media's the greatest cultural communicator of our time.

It's the largest communicator of our cultural values, and I do believe that there is a disconnect, um, that there is a toxicity, that there is a danger in the narrative that we are communicating, not just to United States children, but to the globe's children.

I was just with, um, folks from Africa earlier this morning up in northern California on a walk, and one of the conversations, because I, we connected on the fact that I'd lived and worked in southern Africa, was about the youth in Botswana absorbing the American accent and American values, having never been to America before.

And when I made Misrepresentation, the royal family of Abu Dhabi invited me to come speak to them because they were so alar- alarmed by the pornographic mainstream media culture that their children had ingested as a result of the iPad and the iPhone.

And so I share all this because we do have a responsibility in our country that needs to be beyond getting rich quick and making money, but really about, um, leaving the world in a better place than we found it, which means creating media, um, and stories that are inspiring, that are uplifting, that are informative, that are educational, um, and not just that are, um, the lowest common denominator of what it ultimately means to be an American.

Yes.

And without giving the film away, a component of the film, um, that is obvious to me and is obvious and it'll be obvious to you, obvious to most people, but is, is really just the fact that we don't have women in leadership designing these technologies.

Yeah.

Which is a commitment to all of us, not just their individual pocketbooks.

And we see this reflected in their ally in the White House, who is 100% for himself and his family, and it's about power and money and dominance and control.

And so I think the, the pendulum has swung.

We've awakened enough women and men just who understand that we have an opportunity to course-correct.

And while my husband's political party may be trying to do it a certain way, and it's taking a bit of time, there is enough of movement and the feminine in leadership, whether women or men who embody the feminine, who are saying enough is enough.

And so I have hope because I believe that our values are coming back into the picture.

What is your hope that comes out of this?

... and whether you agreed.

You know, I, uh, [laughs] you know, I, I was...

And some of you may know this.

M-most of you probably don't or won't believe it.

I, I can't read speeches.

Uh, you'll never see me if someone hands me a speech, and I start to read it.

I can do a teleprompter, and it just takes dozens and dozens of hours for dozens of minutes, and it's hard just sort of focusing on that written word.

... like, how do you square those two potentially contradictory ideas?