We're Gonna Need Some Builders — Live in London with Jon Alexander - How To Citizen with Baratunde

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Yo, it's me again. Baraitune day. What to how to
Citizen audio drops in two weeks. Is the podcast back?
We'll see, we'll see. But I just feel the need
to keep my word to you last week when I
told you we'd be dropping something next week. And it's
next week. So welcome back to how to Citizen. Now.

(00:25):
What you're about to hear here has been in the
wings for a while and the timing right now, like
literally right now, is perfect. So let me set the table.
Four five years ago, we were in pandemic Noess and Elizabeth,

(00:46):
my wife and I. We started this how to Citizen
podcast and along the journey I got invited onto another
dude's podcast. Oh it is Rob Shoot, I should I should.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Look this up.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
I'm gonna pause and find this man's name. Yeah, I'm
back with accurate information. Rob Hopkins had a podcast called
from what If to What Next? British Dude. He invited
me on and I shared that episode with a man
named John Alexander, who I did not yet know that.
John had written this book called Citizens and Why They

(01:21):
Answer that everything is all of us and he quoted
me in the book. And meeting him on Rob's podcast
it was like, Yo, this is my brother from another motherland.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
John Alexander is British, He's very British. He's very British, yaw,
and he's very great. He's a very good dude. So
after the rob sessions, we had John on How to
Citizen twenty twenty three and we did it in person.
We were doing this whole virtual season, but he was
like traveling the world. He's like, I want to meet

(01:53):
you in person. I'm coming to LA And so we
booked a studio in LA that wasn't at my house,
and all kind of technical challenges. I mean, if you
listened to that episode from February twenty twenty three, it
was rough. I mean we probably edited out a lout
of the roughness to be honest, but the zoom version

(02:14):
very rough. At any rate, John and I went out
for old fashions after the podcastaping and we began this
beautiful friendship, me and him and Elizabeth, and we've been
collaborating sometimes very actively, sometimes just like cosmically spiritually, because
his world revolves around repurposing this word citizen in a

(02:38):
similar way that mine has. And we even did an
active collaboration around what would happen with how to Citizen
and the role of interdependence. And John and I collaborated
a year ago on these ig short stories series that
we call them citizen stories of people demonstrating. We talked

(03:02):
about Alta Dina after the that is my dumb phone
acting smart or my smartphone acting dumb. Anyway, if you
tuned into those stories on this feed or on my
Instagram about how to Citizen Instagram, that was a co
production of me and John. He provided a lot of
helpful editorial oversight. All right, I'm getting to the point.

(03:27):
Back in the fall of two thousand and four, September
twenty twenty four, Elizabeth and I were in London and
we went there did an event that John invited us to.
It was like featuring us at this incredible community space
called the Conduit. It's in or right next to the

(03:47):
West End and it's a community space focused on like
participatory everything, and John curated a bunch of stuff there
and so we walked into this full room with p
people with full art hearts, like clear eyes, full hearts
can't lose energy, And it was this kind of night

(04:09):
that reminds you what all of this is for and
so the three of us had a conversation and it
was really John elevating us, bringing us into the London space,
and there was a lot of beautiful connectivity. We were
also just like explaining America. And this is before the
twenty twenty four elections, so you should keep that in mind,
Like this is September twenty twenty four. Donald Trump had

(04:32):
not yet been re elected, and we had a great time.
And the reason I'm dropping this right now is because
this Saturday, the thirteenth of June, forty eight hours from
now as my recording, but it might be happening right
now when you're listening to this. John is going to

(04:53):
be stepping onto the Ted Democracy Stage in Philadelphia, the
alleged birth place of American independence as a part of
the two fiftieth and Ted's been doing this program and
they're sourcing all these stories about what comes next, and
John's going to talk about his citizen story and the
fact that we're no longer in the subject story or

(05:15):
the consumer story, but the story of citizen and share
some of what he's seen in his travels, some of
which overlaps with what I've seen in my travels. So
we try to support each other. This is me saying
thank you John, out loud and in front of the
world and break a leg and y'all are in for

(05:37):
a treat to find just get this right. It's a
British dude who's crossed the Atlantic to tell these former
colonies that the real move is getting back together. Come on,
these are these jokes right themselves. So please check out
John's podcast. So I'm embedding his podcast version of our
London conversation. It's called how to Save Democracy. He's got

(06:00):
is co host Omasine Khalifa, and they're walking the same
beat we have been. Democracy is something you do, not
something you have, which this is how embedded. It is
like I don't remember if I said that or if
John said that, So we say that, how about that?

(06:20):
All right? Here's me, Elizabeth and John at the Conduit
in London live from September twenty twenty four. It might
all be going to help, right, Like the structures are falling,
We're not imagining it. Things we have known are less

(06:42):
stable than they have been. Media institutions, government institutions, business institutions, civicians,
all kinds of institutions and part of this project not
the headline, but the subtext is to prepare us right
to practice the moves and the muscles and the coordinated

(07:04):
sets of movements we will need to create something new.
It's quite possible that what we're up to is a restoration, right,
it's fixing up the edifice, it's refirming up a supporting
column or beam. It's also quite possible that this whole
building will fall down, and we're gonna need some builders,

(07:25):
and we're gonna need people who understand, people who understand power,
who understand relationships, who understand commitment to the collective to
forge society which we will always have. And what the
other side has, which is not so much the left
right other side, but it's a we me other side,
the authoritarian side has a promise that we will meet

(07:47):
your basic needs, that you don't need to worry yourself
about power because I got you and screw them, That
the real problem is actually them, and your sense of
belonging only exists because there's a villain out there who
looks a little different, or praise a little different, or
talks a little different than you. And if I raw
you up about them, I'm just distracting you. But the
feeling is all that matters. So you'll rock with me,

(08:10):
and when things all fall down, they'll be the ones
to pick up the momentum to attract the people and
promise the future that's never delivered, but the promise is
so meaningful that many of us will follow it. So
we're trying to create an alternative path to that authoritarian
over promise, under deliver, to the idea of not just

(08:32):
patching up an institution, but maybe we have to wholesale
build a new one. We're not gonna be able to
do that. We don't have practice building with each other.
There you go, it's on the record.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
Welcome to how to Save Democracy. I am a miszine
and I'm John and we love democracy genuinely and wholeheartedly.

Speaker 4 (08:51):
But it's like a dysfunctional relationship. Democracy today is full
of flaws. It's not by the people for the people anymore.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
There are resiltments and frustrations and anger.

Speaker 4 (09:02):
And we can't go on like this.

Speaker 3 (09:04):
We want to make this relationship work though, so it's
a long term thing. It's valuable and we need to
work through this and we need to have the tough conversations.

Speaker 4 (09:14):
And that's what we are doing today.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
We'll be getting into a conversation I hosted in London
back in September twenty twenty four, when it briefly looked
like the US election might have a very different outcome. Barretton,
Da Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart are the life and creative
team behind the How To Citizen Project, which they began
in twenty twenty with an ambition to tell the stories
of the next democracy with the people already practicing it.

(09:42):
As you'll hear, I've been getting more and more involved
with these guys over the last couple of years, working
with them more and more because we're very aligned. Their
core proposition is that we need to think of the
word citizen as a verb, not a noun, and democracy
is something we do, not something we have. It's about
how we all have a role to play in rebuilding

(10:03):
this relationship we're talking about, and about how so many
of us already are.

Speaker 5 (10:12):
What we were feeling back in twenty twenty was so
much doom and gloom. We're divided, We're divided, We're divided,
narrative over and over and over, and so we came
up with this idea of you know, citizen as a
verb and these four pillars, which we'll get to, but
that it was trying to conceive of it more as
a way of being in the world, almost like a

(10:32):
value set that each of us could enact and live
out versus mechanics, right of just how does the government function?
And my only way to interact with this thing is
to vote, which is very important, but it's not the
only thing. And what we're seeing play out, I think,
is the shift from head and policy and logical arguments

(10:52):
and fact based arguments to something that's a lot more
heart right, this emphasis on joy the vibe, What is
the vibe? What do people want to feel? And there's
pros and cons right, like they can be a dark
underbelly to kind of play to just emotion, right, we
so it's not just like rosy, because that's happening. But
I do think that it's important to recognize in this

(11:15):
in the zeitgeist, especially I think with social media and
things becoming less and less verbal and more and more
image based, that emotions and what we're taking in without
much many words or discussions. I mean, you know, having
debates and salons and you know these things are really
sadly kind of more and more think in the past

(11:37):
in terms of people communicating a whole lot just through memes,
and you feel something with the memes, and that's how
you should feel about the news in your week. And
so I think that the rise of that lends itself
to this kind of politic and unless I think the
Democrats recognize that strategy, which is in my opinion, at
the most primal level of how we behave as humans,

(11:59):
we won't beyond an equal playing field. I think with
how you know, the Republicans have sort of been playing
for a very long time. It's just the difference is
they're playing on the primal fear kind of driver of emotion.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, I totally unsurprisingly agree with that. And I think
the additional note around Layton Love, it's something that we
all share, we've kind of vibed with each other about
the possibility of an invitation to contribute in more ways
that there is latent love, there is latent capacity to

(12:34):
do more, to see oneself as a citizen and not
just a consumer, to not just download, but to upload
and to peer to peer build something. What kind of
country do we want to live in? That's an invitation
to dream and to imagine and that it didn't start
with we must defend democracy, Like what are you even
talking at? First? Defense is like aggressive, and I don't

(12:56):
really know what this democracy you're talking about is. Look
at voting rights, look at the history of life that
it's enfranchising, look at the conspiracy theories. But what kind
of country do we want to live in? Is an invitation,
It's a feeling and a vision that we can try
to cast together, and so I think there's some room
there to grow. And I certainly after many catastrophes in
the past, we've lamented not being asked to do more

(13:18):
than like buy stuff or vote for somebody to do
stuff for us. Both are very important forms of power,
but they're we're capable of a lot.

Speaker 5 (13:26):
More point, I think that the ideal is to integrate
head and heart, right Like, to me, that is the whole.
And we have spaces that incentivize tend to incentivize one
or the other. But I think really where we're heading
in terms of like a healthy politic and a healthy
way of interacting is this integration. And it's very I

(13:46):
think it's a rare model to find. So it's really
kind of looking for people and leaders that can really
hold both both in a more integrated passion.

Speaker 6 (13:57):
I'm going to bridge u a little bit from here.
I'd love you just to talk a little bit, both
of you, maybe about how you see the role of
storytelling actually, like the and the part that this work
of telling these stories has to play.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
Right now, we know the world because of we know facts.
We think we know the world, but what we actually
know is a story of the world. And if we
were to diagnose our knowing and really itemize it throughout
a day or a year or a decade, overwhelmingly our

(14:32):
knowledge is mediated by someone else telling us a thing,
someone showing us a thing, someone demonstrating, a parent choosing
for us before we've ever made a choice for ourselves
who to worship and how because they heard a story
from their parents, who heard a story from their parents.

(14:52):
And so we're really in the business and the legacy
of like inheriting story stories of money a pound versus
this is a euro. That's a choice you made to
live a different story, right and so, but they're real
enough that we make tangible decisions about our time and
our energy and our resources based on figmentary, collectively delusional

(15:15):
agreements that a story is a tangible, real thing. And
so when you recognize pretty much everything is actually some
version of a story, it gives story a lot of power,
and it's a power that must be wielded, responsibly, distributed, fairly, challenged, regularly,
because it may not be the underlying thing we have

(15:35):
an issue with. It may be the story. It may
not be us that we have a problem with. It
may be the story of us that we have a
problem with. It's the story of us is defeated and
dysfunctional and unable to come together to solve problems. That
is causing us to be dysfunctional and not able to
come together to solve problems. But innately we are capable.

(15:56):
And it's this catch twenty two cat and mouse thing. Well,
if I start to tell tell a different story, do
I start to believe a different thing? Do I then
become capable of different things merely because I've told myself
a different story. There's a big old industry which agrees
with us, called advertising.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
This idea of shifting the story and shifting the politics
actually as a result of shifting the story, for me
is really fundamental. Like I began my career with ten
years working in the advertising industry, and actually what I
came to believe is that that's about telling a story.
That's about telling ourselves the story that we are consumers constantly.

(16:38):
The idea embedded in it, embedded all in all of
the thousands of commercial messages we see every day, is
that humans are consumers, that our agency is limited to
choosing between a fixer of options, that we are inevitably
guided by self interest in that, and that shows up
then in our politics, in our democracy. So I would
argue what we've got is consumer democracy, where we choose

(17:00):
between a fix that of options, where we're assumed to
make that choice on the base of individual self interest,
and that kind of democracy isn't commensurate. It's not possible
to face the challenge of our times from within that
we're just voters, and so that democracy is failing. It's

(17:22):
like we're diners at the only restaurant in town and
there's only two or three dishes on the menu, and
we've got to the point where we just don't think
any of them are that inspiring.

Speaker 4 (17:31):
I agree. I think though that is very important to
say that.

Speaker 3 (17:36):
We can't dismiss voting, and a meaningful vote is still
really the foundation, and coming from a dictatorship or being
born and raised in a dictatorship. I always have this
real perspective of what it is to live without the
voting rights or with a masquerade of voting rights when
you think you are going to choose, but actually even

(17:58):
there is a fraud vote right, they choose for you,
and so it's not actually a real vote at all.
So we need to assert that this is the foundation,
and we want more. Most of the world population don't
live in a democracy, and they actually live in hybrid
regimes or dictatorships. This was a rhetorical question a few

(18:22):
years ago, but now we're seeing more and more authoritarianism
in places where it was safe to call it liberal democracy.
And so, yeah, voting is a fundamental right. It's not enough,
but it's fundamental and we need to preserve it and
to have it as free as possible.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
If we take that as the baseline, and then we go, Okay,
what more do we want? And I think this is
where Barreton and Elizabeth are starting to take us into
this question of like, what would it look like for
there to be a politics that goes beyond that? What
does the politics of the heart not just the head,
but positive politics of the heart, not just the head.
Look like, what if we could be asking questions like

(18:59):
what kind of country do we want to be? Then
things might taught to get really interesting.

Speaker 3 (19:05):
I think this was very interesting to me as a
former politician. For so long we've been taught to think
with our brains and value logic above all, and as
a result, my first reaction to what Elizabeth was saying
is resistance. Yet I can deny that I feel more
connected to an argument when there is a real story

(19:27):
behind it and where I can connect or empathize with
what is being told to me. I think emotions is
really important in this, and maybe there is another thing
as well, not just the politics of the head and
the heart of reason and emotion, but also politics of

(19:49):
the gut of intuition. It's like the holy trinity of
holes on decision making, head, heart, gut.

Speaker 4 (19:57):
You need all three at the moment.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
Politics and in many of our lives, we're in fear,
in survival mode because of the system and because of
the crisis, and so we're trapped in fight flight freeze
are fun and I think people who are going into
therapy can understand what I'm talking about. It's what the
psychologists say. You react to this feeling of danger in

(20:21):
those ways as an animal trapped and you know that
the only four ways to survive You escape, you try
to fight the enemy, or you freeze to make him
think that you're dead, or you try to seduce.

Speaker 4 (20:37):
Right, how can we apply this to.

Speaker 2 (20:40):
Why you start to see that? I think like fight
is kind of I don't know, getting angry, getting hating
politics and politicians. Freeze maybe is is actually just not
knowing what to do, getting apathetic. Flight, I guess is
that in flight and freeze maybe in this context they're
kind of the same. You just just desert the field
and don't engage at and Faun. I think I can

(21:03):
really see that this idea of the strong man leader
who looks after his people at the expense of the other,
that is a dynamic of thaun And so I'm really there.
This thing of the politics of intuition is really interesting that,
especially when you say, maybe the politics of fear that
we have in an awful lot of ways and places

(21:24):
isn't just about emotions of fear. It's actually a whole
thing that goes way beyond.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yeah, it's our nervous system trying to survive the very
toxic environment we're in, and I think we need to
get into a different state completely.

Speaker 4 (21:39):
I think I've been learned in my life personally.

Speaker 3 (21:42):
To distinguish between anxiety and intuition and trying to differentiate
between what is the underlying thing emotion that is making
me react right now. So anxiety would be coming from
past dramas I guess, and would be triggered by any
event that is likely to be similar to the trauma

(22:02):
I've lived through. But intuition is something that says in
a quiet, tranquil, serene way, no, maybe or yes. It's
not coming from a part of anxiety. It's coming from
a part of me that has deep inner truth that
this is not good for me. And so I think
as a collective, we need to get to a place
where our politics isn't about fear and anxiety and politicians

(22:26):
making us more scared of the competition than we are
of them, because while we do that, it's not even
the politics of head or heart. It's like the politics
of anxiety. And I think that they are talking about.
What they are talking about really is we need to
be in a different relationship with our politics, and maybe
to get there we have to be in a different

(22:47):
relationship with.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
Ourselves and maybe also as we're about to hear, a
different relationship with nature in the world around us and.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
The state's called America outdoors. And I found a line
and making that show where it said we think of
ourselves as people who like write our destiny or write
our own story. But the truth is we are co
authors of this world, not just with our fellow humans,
but with all life. Right, that river has a strong
say in my reality. So does the wind. So does

(23:17):
the precipitation heavily hear, for example, and so on and
so forth. And so if we imagine that this is
a collaborative storytelling process, then it gives us some boundaries,
like no one entity just dominates it. But I think
mostly it gives me at least a sense of freedom
and possibility to edit the story or write something different

(23:38):
and not feel the burden that we have to do
it all alone. Either that we each can contribute to
the story of us in ways that serve more of us.
That's the goal. The common thread in the stories is
interdependence and the reality I'd say even more than the
idea that we need each other in the widest sense

(23:59):
of other. We need our fellow humans, we need our feather,
fellow life forms, our fellow atoms. We are just riding
the wave of the Big Bang, and we're ultimately like
energy scattering through the cosmos together, So we are part
of this same thread. But to bring it back down,
what unites these stories is a focus on relationship with nature,

(24:22):
with fellow humans, and with technology, because each of those
areas feels so disrupted and in crisis and chaos, and
each of those areas is full of renewal and rebirth
and rejuvenation, and there is a balance required to shape
a future that really taps into all three of those.

(24:44):
We are nothing without this earth. Literally, we don't exist.
We are very little without each other. We're wired to
need each other. We go technically insane in isolation, like
we need each other. And we have created and conjured
these tools that are increasingly becoming colleagues and companions that
are shaping our perception and the reality that we experience,

(25:07):
and we need to have a right relationship with them
that doesn't undermine our relationship with each other and this planet.
So there is a trilateral balancing acts going on with
the types of stories that we've chosen to focus on
to ensure a future that is worthy of all of
us and then fit for all of us.

Speaker 5 (25:27):
Yeah, and I would just add that in all three domains,
we're looking for stories that are tapping into, you know,
a different way of being that is more hopeful, that
you know, shows possibility, because if we can't see it,
it's very hard to imagine and then to create if
we you know, don't don't have that spark of imagination

(25:49):
in those three areas, So it's really an exploration of,
you know, how do we want to live with nature?
How can we tell a different story around being truly
connected and separate from nature and earth in this climate crisis?
And I think same with each other, how to citizen
and then machines.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
I think I first heard that language from a major
and Marie Brown in terms of the technical terminology of
being in right relationship, And it's a thing we feel
when we're not and it feels more right when we are.
And there is like a justice involved in a right relationship.
There is a balance involved in a right relationship, and
we are so obviously out of that with the natural world.

(26:33):
It's screaming at us, urging us urgently to shift course,
and we are slowly shifting course, but we could move
a lot faster. And I think similar things are happening,
and the fact that it's not just in the US
version of democracy and self governance or the UK version,
but although there's something unstable happening in our relationship with

(26:54):
each other and how we figure out how to govern
ourselves with ourselves, and the tech thing kind of speaks
for itself. Yeah, that's o chaos.

Speaker 2 (27:01):
This is such a huge idea but also something so humble, right,
This is something all of us can play a part in.
And what Barretonda and Elizabeth have done in their work,
as we're going to hear now, is they've broken down
this idea of citizen ing of citizen as a verb
into four pillars, so we're going to take them one
at a time in the rest of this episode. The
overview is this invest in relationships, understand power, commit to

(27:26):
the collective and show up and participate. He's Elizabeth.

Speaker 5 (27:32):
They just felt sort of whole and solid, kind of
out of the gate, but they were a hypothesis. We
didn't know how people are going to react to citizen
as a verb as the first thing, question mark, and
then these four pillars. And what we've found is, you know,
people really wanting to take a step back and get
into something that just feels more first principles when we

(27:55):
talk about democracy, when we talk about citizen and so
we've gotten a tremendous response. I mean, you can talk
about some of the examples of schools and rabbis and
you know a lot of people taking and building on
these principles and we intentionally made them pretty big and
broad so that you could imagine there's imagination capacity to

(28:15):
what does it mean to invest in relationships with yourself,
with the planet, with others that can look like a
million different things. And that's part of the point.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
The four are show up and participate. Commit to the collective,
which was a nice edit with you, John. We had
to value the collective and in our own workshop, and
that's part of the beauty of It's like this kind
of open source thing that even we have edited our
language in response to contribution and commitment. That commitment is

(28:47):
stronger than value. So commit to the collective as opposed
to just the individual self, understand power and invest in relationships.
So the full language of invest in relationships is to
citizen is to invest in relationships with yourself, with others,
and with the planet around you. And there's a lot

(29:07):
woven in there. It's like we're not alone. That's a
pretty obvious one, but the focus on investing in self.
I remember our early conversations about this. This was your
insistence that it wasn't just between me and the world,
It's between me and myself. And I have found strong
resonance with that, especially with young people. We've been living
through moments of feeling the need to react, to know everything,

(29:32):
to be on the right side of everything, to have
an opinion about everything, even if you just found out
a second ago about some crisis that happened, some statements
someone made that they shouldn't have some act of violence
or riot, and you literally don't know all the information,
but you're expected to speak on it. What is your
relationship with that moment? What is it your relationship with

(29:52):
yourself around that? And a lot of us have been
put into or put ourselves into positions of proselytizing about
the world, including leaders and people with explicit forms of power,
without processing their inner world, and like okay, well, what
do I believe? What are my values? How does this
sit with me? Does this resonate with me? And if
we take a beat to breathe and feel, we might

(30:16):
say nothing, and that's quite all right, at least for
a time. We might find something more intelligent or valuable
to say. If we say something at all, we might
be surprised by where we come out because we've taken
a moment to pause. So the tricky part about this
one for me is the relationship with self as a
foundation and being in right relationship with self before you

(30:39):
can be with the world outside of you. That's been
my own journey as well, because I'm a proselytizer. I
love clearly speaking into amplification devices at people, and so
to slow down enough to consider my own experience, my
own feelings, my own values, is work, but it is

(31:00):
work worth doing and makes everything a bit more aligned
and true or not worth saying at all, which is
again also quite valuable.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
This one invest in relationships is so fundamental for me
because it really takes me back to the idea of
politics of intuition over the politics of anxiety. And I
think what Baratunde said before interacting with the world. We
need to have a healthy relationship with self or be

(31:28):
in right relationship with self is not exactly accurate because
when we start working with ourselves and try to heal
and try to improve, we know when we start, but.

Speaker 4 (31:43):
We don't know when it ends.

Speaker 3 (31:45):
It's like a lifelong process, right, So we can't really say, Okay,
I'm going to stop and heal myself and then go
back to the world.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
Right.

Speaker 3 (31:53):
It's like something we do while we are also interacting
with the world and invest in relationships with others. And
I think that's what we need to be doing as
a collective.

Speaker 2 (32:05):
Maybe actually it can't be sequential, but also it's never
going to be. Maybe it's more like a Adreamrie Brown
as this thing about fractals, like how you are in
relation to yourself is how you will be in relation
to your community, is how you will show up in
the wider society. Like what happens at the smaller level,

(32:25):
at the individual level, at the internal level actually then
replicates out you invest in relationship with yourself and actually
in so doing, you are investing in relationships with others,
and just it follows.

Speaker 3 (32:38):
I think that's totally that it's behaving from a place
of consciousness. It's or at least understanding how and why
we are behaving in a way or another and not
be led by some subconscious patterns that we are repeating.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
Does the show up in your life?

Speaker 3 (32:55):
I mean, I remember the inner struggle I had when
I saw Tunisian young people coming out in the streets
back in twenty ten and peacefully protesting against the dictatorship.
And I had this inner struggle of being very scared

(33:16):
and afraid. And this is one part of me that
was the dominant part, because we have been taught to
be afraid.

Speaker 4 (33:25):
Of showing up publicly. But then the moment.

Speaker 3 (33:31):
I decided, for many reasons to get involved and support
the peaceful protests, that was a part of me that
I was unaware of that was brave and took over
and said, okay, it's not about my own safety. And

(33:52):
even my concept of safety changed because before safety was
about being quiet and not getting noticed publicly because of
the risks from.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
You know, the pressions to yourself.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
Yeah, from the dictatorship, myself and my family and everyone.
And we saw people getting harmed because of their public
statements against the dictatorship. But then the concept of safety
change when I saw, okay, like these young women and
men are being killed by the police for protesting, and
their work is liberating all of us, and I'm not

(34:34):
safe watching them being killed, Like I was ethically completely challenged,
Like my duty as a human being, as a Tunian
who was able to help in some way, was to
support what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
So it actually became unsafe for you not to get involved.

Speaker 3 (34:56):
Yes, I couldn't live with myself anymore if I was
just what and keeping quiet and hidden while you know
others will be in putting their lives at risk for
all of us. And I was living in France at
the time, so I was thinking, Okay, the risk I'm
taking is that I would live forever in exile, and

(35:18):
the risk they are taking is being shot at and
killed or amputated or whatever. And so I guess I
thought it's safe enough for me. I can take that
risk if it means for them not being killed. And
so I think spiritually it was something very, very powerful

(35:38):
because the moment I make that shift, not only I
was able to live with myself and do the work
that needed to be done, but I think many of
the people had that same awakening. So the revolution was
inside of each of us, before getting outside to the
world and identifying other people and forming the sort of

(36:01):
spontaneous collective that was doing whatever they could do to
support the movement of the that became the revolution.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
The revolution was inside each of us. Thank you for that.
Let's turn to the second pillar. I think understand power.

Speaker 1 (36:22):
Power. This was heavily affected by our second guests, Eric
lou And the idea is to understand power, and there's
you know, people power. That's like the etymological root of
democracy from the Greek language of demos crato. So at
the most fundamental level, to do it well, you must
be fascile with, fluent in people, and fluent in an

(36:47):
understanding of power. Otherwise we're just pretending. And if we
think of power as this thing that only a few
people have, or that if someone gets it, I can
never have any myself. If there's a small percentage which
is awarding all the power forever, that is rhetorically powerful
and can be a motivating tool for organizing. And it's

(37:08):
ironically disempowering to think of them as the ones with
power and us as the meager ones without it. Power
something we generate and there are different forms of it,
and some of it's financial and that has a certain imbalance,
but some of it is ideological and physical. Some of
it is attentive. You know, which you give your attention to,
you give power to. You're all engaged in an act

(37:28):
of extraordinary power sharing right now by focusing on us,
and we want to honor and respect that and certainly
not abuse it. But when we look at our phones
all the time, we're being sapped of our power, especially
if we're doing some unconsciously, and so just that extra
layer of consciousness around power empowers and then we can

(37:49):
be more deliberate about choosing where and how to use it.
So Eric Lewit Citizen University argued for this level of fluency.
It was one of his words we even added to
his list, especially around the attention things. We're like, well,
wait a minute, really ties into the tech thing. And
that's partly why we feel the way we do around

(38:09):
technology is it's not just a tool, it's a it's
engaged in a power exchange with us, and often it's
very one way. And so how do we reassert.

Speaker 2 (38:18):
That friend of mine, a man called Simon Duffy, who
we might meet on this podcast sometime. He has this phrase.
He says, the existing forms of democracy, all they really
mean is that you choose who to give your power to,
rather than like how to use your power. It's like
one step up from autocracy where you don't even choose,
as we've talked about. But it's not real power.

Speaker 4 (38:40):
Yeah, it's kink A versus King.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
B, and King A versus King B is not a
massive shift from just King right, but Baryton Day I
think here is reminding us that there are different forms
of power, and many of them we do actually have
and we can generate together. And I really want to
underline this thing about the idea that your attention is
part of your power. There's this phrase what you pay
attention two grows like what we choose to give our

(39:02):
attention to we actually feed.

Speaker 4 (39:06):
I think the example of the phone is great.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
I mean, everyone has a phone, and what if instead
of being unconsciously hooked up to ours screens, we would
consciously use it to connect and create more solidarity and
noise around the cause. And this reminds me of Chiley
app that was created by Christian Vanizette and his team,

(39:30):
and it's like I love the concept of this app
because it's not only activists who can connect and rally
behind a cause, but anyone who has access to the
phone and want to support and participate. They can be
part of a mass movement digital mobilization from the comfort
of their homes. And so sometimes, yeah, that's the only

(39:52):
contribution someone can make, and it's good enough. It's like
participating in a collective effort for change.

Speaker 2 (39:59):
Right, Sorry, good on that note, Let's turn to the
third pillar, commit to the collective.

Speaker 5 (40:08):
Yeah, I mean, I think that that commit to the
collective is very important because if you're doing all these things,
then you're not committed to the collective, then you're doing
them for personal gain, right understanding power for not the
collective is not where we're trying to head in terms
of this message, you know, the commit to the collective

(40:29):
to us felt like that is the whole idea, right,
is that we're thinking, we're moving from me to we,
thinking we're trying to be you know again, thinking at
an order up in terms of how our actions impact
others and how to build together, co create together. So
the collective and that idea had to be in the

(40:51):
mix to make it feel complete.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
And a little example. I'm thinking of our third season
in the Tech Conversation with Esra Alshaffi Bahraini activists and
technologists who built a social media platform. I want you
to stick with me on this. I'm going out on
a limb here. But she built a social media platform
that does not destroy the social fabric. It's quite possible.

(41:13):
It didn't undermine democracy in any way. But there was
a collective intent and a lot of our platforms are
built with individualism as the prize. Your likes, your feed,
you're in once, much less your needs, but you're mere
once and your right to do what you want to
do and say what you want to say to whomever
you want, regardless of the impact that that has on

(41:36):
other members of the society. And so they put some
restrictions on how a new user could interact on the
social platform. The classic ones say, from day one, you
get to address the world. It's an extraordinary amount of power.
You can direct message anyone that you find in your
feed and start bullying and harassing them, an extraordinary amount
of power. What they did is delay that gratification. You

(41:59):
unlick those privileges over time, after you've observed how the
society works. In your first day at a new job
and your first day at a new school, you don't
immediately take to the public addressed system and start mouthing
off your opinions to everyone. You mostly stay quiet and listen.
What's normal here, what's good behavior? What is not good behavior?

(42:20):
Who's being punished for what? Oh, apparently that's an offense.
And we have not built most of our social platforms
with that collective well being in mind. They did, and
it was because it was targeted for LGBTQ plus youth
in regimes where that is not encouragedment it's not even allowed,
and so they were prising a collective safety. And what

(42:41):
they found happened is that the people who showed up
with the intent to troll had to wait because trolling
was impossible, and in order to unlock the ability to troll,
they had to pretend to be good people for like
nine months. It was a just stay period involved and

(43:01):
by the time those who stuck with it long enough
had actually been turned into good people. By the end,
they it turns out they cared because they had built
relationships with other people and they had practiced this muscle,
and they'd built up this capacity, and they weren't about
to throw it all out the door to get dinged
with a violation, and most of them, I suspect bailed

(43:22):
before that point. But you were able to weed out
the people for whom the cost of trolling was so
close to zero that why wouldn't you do it. You're
basically created a trolling platform in most of these, but
with a collective well being as a primary mindset rather
than merely an individual wellbeing, you could sustain something that's
better for the whole. And a lot of those individuals

(43:44):
there are much much happier with it because they're not
being toxically assaulted with FEN like they have to police
things because the norm is established. And that's a model
that we've practiced in the real world with the model
form ecology. So we're not reinventing things, we're remembering things
and reapplying.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
So I really loved that Bahrainy story on the night,
and I wanted more stories, so I asked Bartunde to
tell another one one that i'd heard actually on the
Health to Sit some podcast before about a conservative, right
wing guy in a small town in America who they
called Broadband Bruce.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
We've got a lot of states. It's the United States.
There's a lot of states, and one of them is
called Idaho, and it's very rural in most parts, which
means it's very conservative. Something we can all understand, there
is not an equal distribution of Internet broadband access across.
Bruce wanted broadband for his people. He was in a
small town in Idaho, and their companies weren't providing it.

(44:40):
They didn't find it in their economic interest, and they
ran the numbers and said no. So he lobbied, he petitioned,
he cajoled, and they weren't doing it. So he decided
to organize a municipal broadband effort and contract directly with
a physical provider to build a network that would be
owned by the people. Bruce is not a socialist. Bruce
is a very conservative man, but he so believes in

(45:01):
rights and freedom that he wanted it for all his people,
which is socialism. But don't call Bruce's socialists, all right,
But what he did was organize his community. He needed
neighbors to sign on to this, and so he went
door to door making a case. And the more people

(45:23):
who signed on, the less it would cost per person.
Socialism and so he found himself into a community organizer.
He was just trying to deliver a quality service to
his community. He made a business case, he made an
educational case, he made a work from home COVID case,
whatever case it could be, and he had relationships. So
he had these principles in play very organically for himself,

(45:46):
and they built it. And the more businesses they are
signing up, other towns want to do it the same.
And it was very shameful for the corporate providers who
said it couldn't be done and in an economically viable way.
This is not a money losing venture. It's a different
model than what they were willing to explore. But Bruce
stood up, and he didn't stand up alone. He stood

(46:07):
up with his community, and he had to convince them.

Speaker 3 (46:09):
I find this way of talking about the idea of
the collective so interesting because it's very different to what
you get in the usual political conversation, the philosophy conversation.
You know, in that context, the freedom of the individual
is usually assumed to be in contrast with the interests
of the collective, and so.

Speaker 4 (46:30):
There is the harm principle.

Speaker 3 (46:31):
For example, John Stuart Mill, the idea that people should
be free to act as they wish as long as
their actions do not cause harm to others. And it
reminds me, ironically, one of these things that I was
taught in school still under Teenesian dictatorship educational system, but
they still gave us this principle where my freedom stops

(46:54):
when yours start. And I guess it's all the challenges
you know of democracy is what is concept of freedom?
Freedom comes with responsibility, but who determines what this responsibility is?

Speaker 2 (47:07):
Right?

Speaker 4 (47:07):
What's respecting other mean?

Speaker 2 (47:10):
I think that's true, And I also think like, in
a way here what's going on is is almost just
a totally different question. It's like they're coming at the
idea of the collective from a different start point. They're
not really saying, like what can you do before you
harm the collective? They're almost actually asking the question what

(47:32):
can we do together that none of us could do alone.
It's almost like a positive question, not a negative question.
In my work, the phrase I use a lot is
all of us are smarter than any of us. And
it's this idea of maybe it's like collective agency rather
than individual freedom, Like you're focusing in a different place,
so it's less about asking how can we not limit

(47:54):
each other, how can we avoid harming one another, and
more about our asking how can we multiply each other?
And I think that's what brought ban Bruce and the
story from Pahrain are both about.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
So with Bruce, he can do it on his own
and the government won't do it, so we organize the
collective to do it. It's not ideological or philosophical, really,
it's just pragmatic common sense, as simple as that. And
I think the people that Bruce involved, they all need
this broadband, and no one is trying to take profit

(48:28):
from this thing or to take advantage of it. It's
the idea that we are all in this together. And
I guess when you have someone who's genuinely initiating this
thing for that matter, not because behind the scenes he's
plotting some other stuff, people can feel it. People get
involved and they see the benefit and participate in this initiative.

Speaker 2 (48:50):
Which takes us nicely to the last pillar. Show up
and participate.

Speaker 5 (48:54):
Yeah, you could do the first three, which is good.
It's like good, you know, but really to see change,
we need to show up and participate, and we added
publicly participate right, So it's really joining with others. Putting
yourself kind of publicly out there to contribute in some
way with other people was sort of the idea, and

(49:15):
we really you know, it is a circle, but we
did put that I believe at the end.

Speaker 1 (49:20):
It used to be at the beginning.

Speaker 5 (49:22):
Used to be at the beginning. And John came along.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Yeah, John is our editor. It makes things better.

Speaker 5 (49:27):
He helped to make a case for why it should
come at the end. And it does make sense. I mean,
given that a lot of folks get, you know, passionate
about something, they show up and then they stumble because
they didn't take the time to invest and learn and
you know, understand the space that they newly find themselves
in and build relationships and whatnot. So I think that

(49:50):
coming through the first three really equips you to be
able to more effectively show up and participate with others.

Speaker 1 (49:57):
Sometimes it's only when you've show not to participate that
you feel called to invest in the relationship. And you
you responded to a flyer or a text, or an
advertisement or a friend or a dinner and you didn't
know what you were getting into. And that's part of
the fun of it. It's part of the thrill, part
of the risk. But once you're there, you're like, Oh,
I think this is my team, this is the collective

(50:18):
I'm going to commit to. I like how they move.
Let mean develop some relationships and express that commitment more deeply.
Let me understand the power not just in this organization,
but how this organization relates to the world outside, so
they can be very interchangeable. The on ramp that you
choose doesn't matter. Just get on the circuit.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
So those are the four principles. Invest in relationships, understand power,
commit to the collective, and show up and participate. That's
the model that Barretton and Elizabeth are offering for what
it means the citizens a verb. So after we'd set
out the model on the night, we decided to invite
some questions. We sometimes do that the events of the conduct,
and on this occasion, I think the questions were really

(51:04):
profound and took us even deeper into this.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
And I love how Elizabeth brings capitalism and the economic
model into the conversation, and how Baratunde opens up the
idea that actually this might not be about saving democracy
at all.

Speaker 4 (51:18):
It might all be about preparing for things to fall apart.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
On the way here.

Speaker 7 (51:26):
I was just rereading an economist article on democracy and
it said that only eight percent of the world live
in a truly fair democracy, and they have a global
index on democracy which has been declining for every year
of the last ten years.

Speaker 2 (51:44):
So how do you see that?

Speaker 5 (51:46):
So, you know, something that I've thought about is the
statistic quite a bit. But just you know, as I'm
in the garden or as I'm having tea, so you know,
this is just anecdotal thoughts. But what strikes me is
people are saying no to late stage capitalism, and I

(52:09):
don't think we're having enough honest discussions about in the
pro democracy movement of how intertwined these two things really are,
and people are feeling the effects, and yet they're linking
it to democracy because in some ways rightfully so, they
are so interconnected. And that's the part that I think
people are reacting to. More than the idea of people power,

(52:35):
of free and fair elections like these sorts of things.
I think they're reacting to this fact that we're in
a moment of late capitalism and most of our democracies
are upholding that versus trying to address it.

Speaker 8 (52:46):
I'm just talking about Nagal farage and it's so much
I agree with what you're saying, and it's a little
bit sometimes it smacks a little bit of motherhood and
apple pie, like who would disagree? And yeah, yeah, there
are so many who are totally disenfranchised, totally fed up,
And so I'm just wondering what you say about that

(53:07):
kind of darker part of our psyche that almost will
tear it all down rather than playbook.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
Here's some of what's happening. So we got to figure
out how to live together. Yes, we want some basic
needs met, and that's not seeming to happen under a democracy.
For a lot of people, one of the most basic
needs is belonging, which actually rises often above meeting of

(53:36):
material needs. If I have a team that I feel
has my back, if I have a purpose that shared
with other people, the specific ideology of the team is
less important than the existence of the team. Whether that
team feeds and clothes me or just talks a lot
about food and clothing, that distinction matters not so much
as the feeling of belonging and part of what we've

(54:00):
been up to and I really haven't said this much
on recording but fuck it, it might all be going
to help. Right, Like the structures are falling, we're not
imagining it. Things we have known are less stable than
they have been. Media institutions, government institutions, business institutions, civicans,

(54:21):
all kinds of institutions. And part of this project, not
the headline, but the subtext, is to prepare us right
to practice the moves and the muscles and the coordinated
sets of movements we will need to create something new.
It's quite possible that what we're up to is a restoration,

(54:44):
right it's fixing up the edifice, it's refirming up a
supporting column or beam. It's also quite possible that this
whole building will fucking fall down, and we're gonna need
some builders, and we're gonna need people who understand, people
who understand power, who understand relationships, who understand commitment to
the collective to forge society which we will always have.

(55:07):
And what the other side has, which is not so
much to left right other side, but it's a we
me other side, The authoritarian side has a promise that
we will meet your basic needs, that you don't need
to worry yourself about power, because I got you and
screw them, that the real problem is actually them, and

(55:27):
your sense of belonging only exists because there's a villain
out there who looks a little different, or praise a
little different, or talks a little different than you. And
if I rall you up about them, I'm just distracting you.
But the feeling is all that matters. So you'll rock
with me, and when things all fall down, they'll be
the ones to pick up the momentum to attract the
people and promise the future that's never delivered, but the

(55:52):
promise is so meaningful that many of us will follow it.
So we're trying to create an alternative path to that
authoritarian over promise, under deliver, to the idea of not
just patching up an institution, but maybe we have to
wholesale build a new one. We're not gonna be able
to do that. We don't have practice building with each other.

Speaker 9 (56:10):
I am an activist myself, and I think the hardest
thing is to keep pushing, and especially people who put
themselves on the front line and have been pushing for
a while.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
And that's great.

Speaker 9 (56:22):
That we have to work on relationships and we have
to bring more people on board to keep pushing, but
how do you keep the hope and how do you
just it's a really, really tough job. And when you
keep pushing, pushing and you don't see the result, that's
the most motivating thing. So how can I bring others
on board if I cannot?

Speaker 1 (56:42):
Sure?

Speaker 5 (56:42):
You know, one thing that comes to mind that I
also think is the eleve in the room. I'm an introvert.
I don't always like people. I don't always like to
be around people. And I think when we talk about
investing relationships and everything that we're saying here, relationships are
really hard. And I think that we're also not We're

(57:03):
not being brought up at least my generation with a
lot of emotional intelligence and focus on how do you
have rupture and repair? How do you take a step
back and resource yourself and how do you do self referencing,
which is another tool of you know, really checking in
with do I have the capacity.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
To keep giving right?

Speaker 5 (57:23):
What is where is my mental health in this moment?
What do I need to do to refuel when I'm
on the front lines?

Speaker 7 (57:29):
Right?

Speaker 5 (57:30):
And so in instead, we keep pushing and pushing and pushing.
So there's just a whole host of tools around relationships
that I think is a big piece of this puzzle
that again, at least the rooms that I've been in
thinking about civic engagement, thinking about pro democracy, that we're
just not bringing into the equation as much as we
need to be, because fundamentally, it is about us knowing

(57:52):
how to interact and live together with other humans, which
is not always the easiest thing as all of us
in this room, no, which I I think is also
a reason why people go the super isolated route or
turn to just like you know, the robots, and there's
the desire for that. So I think we just we
need to have more of an honest conversation in some
of these spaces about how hard it is and more

(58:13):
tools and training to do it better, because yeah, I
think just being an activist without those tools is a
really exhausting and can be very lonely path, you know.
And I think the other thing I would just say
that I've always hoped more for is the idea of
what Audrey Tang was saying around you know, protesting versus
the demonstration of the new thing, and wanting that to

(58:38):
be seen more as a spectrum where we're honoring the
folks that feel called to be on the front lines,
but we're linking those actions directly back to folks that
feel like they're called to be the builder of the
new thing, right, And if we had more solidarity and
more connectivity, I think across that and saw it as
a whole. I think those on the front lines pushing

(59:01):
so hard wouldn't feel quite so alone and so exhausted
all the time, because I think it really takes both.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
I saw an episode of a television program over maybe
twenty years ago now called Doomsday Preppers, and it left
a mark on me because it showed all the terrible
ways we might die, but it showed two ways we
might respond. And predominantly these shows celebrate the rugged individualists
with a ton of guns and a lot of canned food,
and that's a terrible quality of life. You're technically alive,

(59:31):
which you might as well be dead because you're afraid
of everything and you're eating shit, not good living. But
they had the presence to feature a different kind of response,
and they focused on this hippie New England community where
people are like, we'll never have enough guns, will never
individually be able to meet all of our needs. We're
investing in each other. We're trying to create a resilient

(59:52):
framework to catch all of us when things start falling apart.
And so we know who knows how to sew, we
know who knows how to We knows who understands animal husbandry,
we knows who understands structural engineering. We know who's good
with kids, we know who's good with elders. And regardless
of the specific form of calamity that comes, they didn't
need to know that they knew each other and they

(01:00:14):
could respond together, as opposed to I'm going to build
an entire society in my backyard, secure my own private border,
make for the individual welfare, feed and nurse and teach
and cook all. That's truly insane, but that's what we've
been oriented to. And that's what capitalism does. Is we

(01:00:35):
can buyer way through. We can just have enough provisions
to outlast the thing, versus knowing how to provide with
each other.

Speaker 5 (01:00:42):
If we peel it all back, the question remains how
might we live together?

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
Period?

Speaker 5 (01:00:49):
And like, if that is the question, where we're not
going to go. I'll find our individual islands and sail off,
but we will have to in some form figure out
how to make decisions together, or how to share resources,
how to share power, how to develop consensus, or there's
a skill set or a set of behaviors or practices
that no matter where you find yourself, whether you call

(01:01:11):
it democracy or not, we're going to have to figure out.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
What I found so empowering that night, because when you
when you look back at that, or if someone reads
the transcript of this last bit, it feels like it
would have been really dark and heavy and like things
are going to blow apop. But actually in the room,
it felt it felt like a huge energy, It felt

(01:01:35):
really up, and it was like someone was kind of
finally naming that it might not be all right, and
that honesty in itself was actually really generative. And it
was like we all know at some level that we're
living in this very hard time to be human, right,
We're living in this moment when we kind of know

(01:01:57):
we're living with systems and struct and processes and jobs
that don't really work, and yet we also know that
we sort of have to work from within them. And
so naming this thing, naming that it might not hold

(01:02:18):
is almost an acknowledgment of how hard it is. It's
a way of saying, actually and the power. Then by
seeing that, by naming that, you allow yourself to then
go cool. And the work is still the same, like
whether we are firming things up to use Baritunde's language,

(01:02:40):
in which case we need to invest in relationships, understand power,
commit to the collective, participate, or whether it is going
to fall down and we need to do those things
in order to be ready to rebuild. Like, it's still
the same work. And I think naming that, as I say,
just felt like it allowed people to be free actually

(01:03:02):
in a really interesting way. It was such a thing
to witness.

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):
So that means if we practice this citizens story citizen
as a verb, it can help us save democracy. It's
us taken accountability for ourselves for our part in this relationship.
And it's also what is going to help us survive
in the apuocalypse. And this is who we are because

(01:03:27):
it's what has always been like, it's what always happened
in crisis.

Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
This is who we are citizens, not just consumers. This
was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who
love democracy but no, we've got serious work to do
to save it. This episode was hosted by Amazine Khalifa

(01:03:55):
and me John Alexander and produced by Joe Barrett.

Speaker 3 (01:04:00):
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, or if you want
to get closer, find us online and sign up to
the mating list. How to Save Democracy is produced in
partnership with the Conduit and wouldn't be possible without the
kind support of Open Society Foundations and you, our listeners.
We've got big plans, so if you can ship in
to help us make them happen, we'd love to have

(01:04:21):
you on board.

Speaker 1 (01:04:30):
And again, I'm back. It's just me, just us. That
was Elizabeth and me in conversation with the homie John
Alexander from the Conduit in London, September twenty twenty four,
as edited and wrapped around by John and Omeazine's podcast
How to Save Democracy. John was, you know, he's really

(01:04:55):
pushing in a good way and I was feeling exhausted
and so what I said, you know there, I actually
hadn't really said out loud on a on a microphone
like that before a by what my real motivation forward
to how the citizen project was and it it it
wasn't remains as real as this, like all of this

(01:05:19):
waves hands gestures that world might be going to hell
might be dying, might be a as Sister Valerie Corps says,
the darkness of the tomb, the structures are shaken. We're
not imagining it, and it's quite possible that we're not
just here to patch up some old building, but that

(01:05:42):
the whole edifice falls down. And if it does, and
maybe when it does, we're gonna need some builders. We're
gonna need the other half of Valerie's statement in that
poetic line, We're gonna need to see this as the
darkness of the womb, and to create life, the new life,
the next life, We're going to need people who understand,

(01:06:03):
people who understand power, who understand relationships, who are committed
to the collective, because we will always have a society.
The only question is what kind? And do we know
how to build it together. That's been the motivation and
the impetus for this show, for this feed, for so

(01:06:25):
much of my work, for so much of our work.
That's the practice, that's the whole assignment. And I want
you to keep practicing democracy, not the once every four
years kind, the everyday kind, the verb kind. So I
encourage you to subscribe to John and Nomasine Khalifa's show

(01:06:46):
how to save democracy. They're holding space for these beautiful,
inspiring and sometimes difficult conversations and we need more of that. Two,
I'm gonna plug this book again. The book is all
about what was on this land and has remained on
this land since before Europeans touched this land. The story

(01:07:07):
that we're all rooted in here. American Indigenous Democracy a
call for interdependence. That book comes from Hodanashoni elders and
wisdom keepers who been practicing a living democracy on this
land over a thousand years, with peace and women at
the center of government, with responsibility to generations, yet born

(01:07:30):
with seven generation thinking with just beautiful principles, and their
story helped shape this country's founding and there's so much
we still have to learn from that offer. So that
offer is extended at American Indigenous Democracy dot com. And
I will tease one more thing is I'm just in
a teasy mood. But this week, forty eight hours before

(01:07:54):
this recording, I was sitting where I am right now,
I was in conversation with jose the editor of the book,
with Gudgie Cook, one of the authors and contributors to
the book, with Loretta Afrederbert Cook and Tom Cook, who
are Oglallalala, Lakota and Mohawk Elders, respectively, with Valerie Core

(01:08:16):
my sister Valerie Corps from the Revolutionary Love Project, who
partnered generously with me to create this space for that conversation,
and with Alicia Keys. Yeah, and we all chopped it
up about what comes next. And there's something in the air,
there's something in the water. There's something that's been here,

(01:08:38):
but it's bursting out of the soil. It's bursting out
of history and making itself known as the constant that's
always been true. So I want you to feel that
wherever you are, I want you to find that relationship
with yourself, with the land, with others, with a deeper
practice of this thing we're calling democracy. We're going to

(01:09:00):
drop that session, that conversation in this feed shortly. I
won't say next week, but it will say soon. All Right,
I'm going to be doing a lot of travel in
the next couple of weeks. It'll be harder for me
to do this again. But if you like my voice,
and if you miss it, I'm using it a lot
more over at Life with Machines dot Media, where I'm

(01:09:23):
applying a lot of these principles of how the Citizen
to our tech future because that train is moving so
fast and I want to make sure that we are
affecting that conversation and how we get to and create
that future. But it is all an extension of the
spirit of this show. This is the heart how to Citizen,

(01:09:44):
So please keep citizening. I will be there with you.
Love you, take care and good luck. John

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We're Gonna Need Some Builders — Live in London with Jon Alexander

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}We're Gonna Need Some Builders — Live in London with Jon Alexander