The Excerpt podcast: The life and legacy of activist Ady Barkan

On a special episode of The Excerpt podcast: Ady Barkan was an American lawyer and a social justice activist. He was a powerful grassroots organizer who promoted policies that help America’s workers and was a champion of healthcare for all. Ady was an especially vocal advocate for low-income, elderly and disabled populations. He ended up as a member of that last group after having been diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 2016. Sadly, Ady succumbed to the disease in November. But his life's work is memorialized in the documentary, "Not Going Quietly." Director Nick Bruckman joins The Excerpt to talk about Ady's impact and influence.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, December 20th, 2023, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

Ohad Barkan, known as Ady, was an American lawyer and a social justice activist. He co-founded the progressive anti-special interest PAC Be a Hero and was a powerful organizer promoting policies that help America's workers. He was a champion of healthcare for all, but was an especially vocal advocate for low-income, elderly, and disabled populations. He ended up as a member of that last group after having been diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, in 2016. Joining us now to talk about Ady's life impact and influence is Nick Bruckman, the director of Not Going Quietly, a documentary about Ady's life and work. Nick, thanks for coming on The Excerpt.

Nick Bruckman:

Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here.

Dana Taylor:

So Ady Barkan died last month of ALS at the age of thirty-nine. You directed the documentary about him a couple of years ago, though. What was it about him that made you want to make an entire film about this man?

Nick Bruckman:

Sure. So I met Ady in 2018, right after he had confronted Senator Jeff Flake about his healthcare on an airplane. The woman next to him had captured this short clip of him confronting the senator. And the woman next to him had captured this short clip of him confronting the Senator about his story and about his son, and how he would explain, Senator Flake, to his son, why he was voting against healthcare. This clip and conversation was so powerful that it went viral before the plane even landed. For me as a storyteller, that short clip and the influence it had was a microcosm or a metaphor for the power all of our stories had. That's what I think Ady's message is. Our personal stories have power if we only have the courage to share them. For that reason, I knew there was a film to be made about him. I never could have imagined where the story would go from there or what kind of an influence Ady would have over the next few years of his life.

Dana Taylor:

In 2019, Ady was called the most powerful activist in America by Politico. In 2020, he was on Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders wrote blurbs for his memoir. Why do you think Ady was able to galvanize so much attention and support?

Nick Bruckman:

It's important to remember that Ady was an incredible activist for over a decade before he was diagnosed with ALS. He had fought fights across issues, from securing minimum wage in New York to bringing activists to protest the Federal Reserve, which was an idea that he had and really no organizer had ever done before. But it was only when he was diagnosed with ALS that he realized his own story could be the one that would told and influence people. I think when you met Ady and you knew about Ady, you knew about the power that he had. You knew about how little time he had left. It forced you to look inward and look at yourself, how you're spending your time, and how you are living your life. If Ady could do it, so can you. So I think Ady called all of us into moral clarity, whether that be an activist that he met on the road or even a politician like Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden.

I watched and filmed Ady as he interviewed all of the presidential candidates in the lead-up to the 2020 election. I saw that all of the candidates couldn't give him their traditional stump speeches. They really had to look at him, face their own mortality, face their own morals, their own vision, and tell Ady the truth about what they were going to do for sick people like them. Everybody has a healthcare story, and I think when they look at Ady, they all know that their story could be his or could be a sibling or a family member. I'm 39 as well, and I could be in that position too. I think what Ady asked us is, "What do we do with the cards we're dealt? How do we use them to make a better world?"

Dana Taylor:

This incredible chemistry that he had in his interactions with everyone, tell me about what you saw with his interactions with ordinary people.

Nick Bruckman:

Ady had this incredibly powerful effect on everybody he met, that includes me. When I met him, I basically dropped everything I was doing and I said, "How can I document him?" Just about two months after meeting him, I found myself in an RV traveling across the country for six weeks with him from California to Maine, documenting Ady, organizing people, and bringing them to confront their political representatives just the way he had with Jeff Flake. He said, "I'm going to take people in their wheelchairs, with their crutches, to the congressional offices or wherever we can find them, to eliminate that distance between the representative and the representatives." He called it bird-dogging. He would capture these clips on cell phone video. Of course, I was filming with my big camera. These clips would have incredible impact because it showed the people who watched them that sick people, disabled people, older people were willing to stand up. It's harder for them to organize, but Ady was doing it, and they were doing it too.

It forced the politicians to speak to their constituency directly about this issue. Every city we would go in, more and more people would show up. It was this incredible grassroots movement that led him all the way to Washington, D.C., to the steps of the Capitol and into the offices of Bernie Sanders, of Pelosi, of Jayapal, of Kamala, and ultimately, Biden himself. I think Ady really had what I would say was almost a spiritual effect on people. Of course, that was his tactic. He didn't see it that way, but it forced people to look at their own lives and say, "What's my excuse? If Ady can do it, so can I." And I think that applied to everyday people who were inspired by him and wanted to join his movement and still are today, all the way to the most powerful elected officials in Washington.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. So let's talk about Ady's activism with healthcare specifically. Ady was quite active on that issue years before he was diagnosed with ALS. Why was he so passionate on healthcare?

Nick Bruckman:

Ady knows that personal stories are an amazing organizing tool to make people believe in a common vision and see the potential of a better world. He had told those stories around other issues, whether it be black and brown workers rights, minimum wage laws, the economic issues that he brought to the Federal Reserve, and many others. But when he was diagnosed, it was his own story. It was his own denial of coverage that he received for a piece of medical equipment that he needed for his ALS. When that happened to him, he realized that he was one of millions of people being denied coverage for the profits of the health insurance industry and corporations who run it.

That realization that he could bring his own story out as he did with Flake, I think, really increased his power. That's one of the big ironies of the film and of his life, that this disease, which took away his voice, ended up giving him this incredibly powerful platform that, as his voice diminished, he was able to be heard by millions of more people. As he lost his ability to walk, so many more followed in his footsteps.

Dana Taylor:

Healthcare, once again, is in the headlines as we not only enter COVID season but also gear up for a contentious presidential election. You mentioned the ACA, commonly called Obamacare. It's obviously still the law of the land. According to whitehouse.gov, more than 40 million people currently have healthcare because of the ACA. What are the conversations that you're hearing about this nationally right now?

Nick Bruckman:

I would caveat by saying I'm a filmmaker and not a political strategist, but I did spend years following Ady and his team, the Be a Hero Fund, on this issue. It's important for audiences to know that Be a Hero, Ady's organization, is still very active after his passing and is fighting across these issues as we lead into the 2024 election. So I strongly encourage audience members who want to know more about Ady's work and Ady's legacy to find the Be a Hero Fund and join their efforts. Again, as we go into this new election, we're seeing that Trump wants to quote, unquote, "repeal and replace," as they've tried for many, many years, this law but not having any plan to replace it with. There's a long journey ahead. Ady was fighting for a much broader, much more universal healthcare system. I believe that dream is still alive, and I hope that the Biden administration pursues that in their next term.

Dana Taylor:

You mentioned Ady's legacy. He's survived by his wife and two children. What do you think Ady would want his lasting legacy to be?

Nick Bruckman:

Yeah, that's a very powerful question, and one that I dedicated many years of my life to in making Not Going Quietly to help preserve his legacy. When he originally agreed to do the film, it was one, I think, to document his legacy because he knew his years would be short. But it was also that he wanted a time capsule for his children, Carl and Willow, to remember him by. What he told me in an interview that we did recently before his passing was that he agreed to do the film because he wanted his children to know how much he loved them. He wanted them to know that through his work, even when he was on the road, his work was a way of creating a better world for them and to show, demonstrate his love through his activism. I think that's a big part of his message.

He said that doing this work was the way that he found joy and meaning in the darkness of ALS. It's one of the worst diagnoses imaginable. I think all of us, when we look at him, say, "What would I do?" And Ady took this terrible tragedy and turned it into a weapon to fight for a better world for his children and for all of us. I think what Ady wanted us all to know is, beyond healthcare, beyond any single issue, the act of organizing, the act of resistance, the act of banding, and community to create a better world is an act of joy. It's something that we can all find meaning in our own lives through doing. I think that was his greatest message. He sits on the shoulders of many great civil rights icons of decades past who taught us this message, who bent the arc a little bit more towards justice. That's what I believe Ady did. It's certainly the effect he had on me, and I believe millions of others.

Dana Taylor:

Nick, you spent a lot of time with Ady. What do you most hope people listening understand about Ady?

Nick Bruckman:

Ady was incredibly funny. He was not all serious all the time, and he was vulgar, crass, and beyond everything, a real person and an incredibly loving father. Personally, as I enter my own fatherhood journey after making the film, when I think most deeply about him, I think about being the kind of father that he was, not just the kind of activist or organizer. I think Ady wanted all of us to know that our stories have power, and whether it's a story as tragic as his or it's any challenge that we face in our life, illness, death, injustice, and incarceration, all of these sources of immense pain can also be a source of purpose. They can also be where we draw our inspiration from to shape our society into the one that we want to see and live in. I hope that when we look at Ady's life, and I hope audiences have a chance to watch Not Going Quietly on Hulu to learn more about him, they all can find the source of inspiration in their own life through his story.

Dana Taylor:

Nick, thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your stories of Ady's life.

Nick Bruckman:

Thank you. It was a great honor of my life to document Ady's, and an honor to be here and share it with you. Thank you.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer, Shannon Rae Green, for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts at usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.