Sacred Lessons in America & A.I. with Baratunde Thurston.

In this episode of Sacred Lessons, host Mike de la Rocha sits with Baratunde Thurston at the BOOST Conference for a thought-provoking conversation about masculinity, America, and the future of humanity in the age of artificial intelligence. Together, they explore how the stories we inherit about power, work, and manhood continue to shape our culture, institutions, and emerging technologies, and what it means to rewrite those stories before they are coded into the future. From Indigenous frameworks of interdependence to the emotional impact of AI on identity and purpose, Baratunde challenges us to imagine a version of masculinity rooted not in control or production, but in care, connection, and community. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What are the cycles fathers passed down that son they're
left to yield.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
What if being a.

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Man was holding it all together and learning how to
let go.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
This is a space where let's speak to.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
Find the power to heal and transform.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
I'm Mike Dela Rocha. Welcome to Sacred Lessons.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Before we ever learn what it means to be a man,
we're already living inside a story about it.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Welcome to Sacred Lessons.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'm Mike Delarocha, and today I'm honored to be at
the Booze Conference, the largest global convening for after school,
expanded learning and in and out of school time professionals.
To sit with someone whose work lives at the intersection
of storytelling, technology and humanity. My dear dear brother Baritunee Thurston,

(00:51):
through his work with How To Citizen Life of Machines
and American Indigenous Democracy A Call for Interdependence, a new
book that Baritune wrote, The Four Two, He asks us
a number of powerful questions. Can AI help us become
more human? Will AI be the end of us? And

(01:11):
can the wisdom of Native American ways of living be
applied as an alternative to our present political dilemmas at
a time when fear and control. The foundation of America's
story continues to be written into our laws, policies, and culture,
will it also be written into the technology of the future.

(01:34):
Because the code, the data, and the algorithms behind AI
are not neutral, They're being built by the same frameworks
have always defined power. Together, we're going to explore what
parts of the old story of America are being carried
forward and what agency we have to rewrite the story
of AI and of our collective humanity.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Dear bather baritone day rather than Michael, what's up? Well?

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Before I jump in, It's been a long time coming.
I said it earlier on the stage, but I want
to reiterate. I talked to my partner Rap before I
got on, and just wanting to just share how much
I am grateful and appreciative of not only your presence
in my life, but your presence in our life. You

(02:25):
make me a better person. You push me in such
inspiring ways to remember who I am and who we are,
your expansive heart and curiosity to unpack the wisdom of
the land and of our ancestors, to allow us to
have a path forward. It's truly beautiful, and you're one

(02:47):
of those people that can do comedy, sketches, PBS specials, books, podcasts,
whatever medium is going to reach the heart of folks
that need to be reminded of their sacredness.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
You do, and I love you. I thank you for
being a part of this.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
We had an amazing opening talk, so I know something
magical will happen here.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
But before we.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Begin, I just want to say thank you for being
on the podcast.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
Brother Mike. Thank you for having me, and thank you
for creating this.

Speaker 4 (03:18):
Thank you for this book, the sacred offering of these
sacred lessons, and for the space you make. I've listened
to a bunch of the dialogues you've had, and sometimes
more than dialogues, trialogues or quadriloge how you know how
it works.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
Math will be mathing, But I think you're doing.

Speaker 4 (03:33):
A really good service to elevate how we talk about
this and leave with a heart.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
So thank you for bringing me into the circle. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Well, it's one of my favorite storytellers. I want to
jump in. July fourth is coming up. It's the big
birthday bash of this experiment called the United States of America,
Big Awkward birthday party, awkward birthday party, but it's also
an opportunity to reflect on and to reimagine the future.
You've been in this conversation, but I want to like

(04:00):
focused specifically around this idea of masculinity in manhood and
how the idea of even those concepts was part of
the forefounding of these quote unquote founding documents.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (04:14):
Yeah, So I grew up in the nation's capital. I
was raised by my mother.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
There.

Speaker 4 (04:20):
I got the official story, I got the backstory from mama,
And in my adult life, I've been essentially fulfilling an
assignment that my mother gave me, come up with the
system we live under after democracy and capitalism have failed.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
I was twelve.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
It was a lot to.

Speaker 4 (04:35):
Put on a kid's shoulders, so I didn't do it then,
but it animated a lot of my life. It was
a seed that she planned. A lot of community has
nurtured and watered it over the years. So a lot
of what I perceive has been gifted to me, sometimes painfully,
sometimes beautifully by the lessons that that life tends to
offer this founding story, and what's been missing is a

(04:57):
really rich opportunity that how the citizen works we've done
in America, out doors work we've done have gotten me closer,
but nothing has quite scratched the surface like the story
that was here before white people got here.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
And I think there's.

Speaker 4 (05:12):
One way to understand what the United States of America
is is to see it as a story. So I
like to start there and try to move quickly. You
can see it as land, You can see it as
a political project. You can see it as a business
and a venture. It is all of those things. You
can see it as bodies and people and activity. I

(05:35):
think what binds it and what defines it is the
story of it. And so you have people from Europe
come here and under the sort of umbrella of a
certain story that they thought gave them license to impose
that story on the people who are already here, to
snatch people up from where they belonged and bring them

(05:58):
here to work for free. Alright, So we're descendants of
that story, me and you. All kinds of mixes of
those stories run through many of us, So no one's
just super simple.

Speaker 3 (06:08):
But I think what has.

Speaker 4 (06:10):
Gone unchallenged is the inadequacy of that story and the
original first people here. And every land has some first people.
But the people indigenous to Hear have been living in
a very beautiful democratic way and still continue to do so.
Many of them, and one nation, one said A nations

(06:32):
in particular, the whole of Nashoni Confederacy have been practicing
and living under something.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
Called the Great Law of Peace.

Speaker 4 (06:39):
And I've come to some of this nowge very late
in my life, from forty eight years old. I was
about forty five when I found out about this is
very late for somebody who's very proudly woke. We all
have more waking to do, and so everything's a learning opportunity.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
Let's shame more opportunity.

Speaker 4 (06:55):
And what is amazing about the principles of their democracy
is that one of the first is that women are
at the center of government. And they made an invitation
this confederacy to the founders to live more like them,
to live under their grat tree at peace. It was
partially accepted, but mostly exploited. Mostly the founders are like,

(07:19):
thank you so very much for keeping asses alive. Now,
if you just kind of get yourself out the way,
we're gonna take all your stuff, We're gonna take all
your land, We're gonna take what's left to.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
Your people, We're gonna abuse.

Speaker 4 (07:32):
And there was this narrative that got planted in their
heads that was not at all in respect of women,
of mother of a story of care. There was instead
an elevation of a story of dominance and control, backed
by fear, justified by religion to excuse what is obviously

(07:56):
unacceptable behavior and behavior that is against the teniate to life.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
So that's a clash of culture at a very deep level.
What is the role of.

Speaker 4 (08:07):
People in caring for each other and the natural world.
What is the role of women in playing a part
in that? So I'm not an expert on this, I'm
a student of it, and so I'm sharing my learning
along the way with you as I want to kind
of ratchet down any sense of super expertise, but immense

(08:28):
This has left an immense impression on me because the
story that brought a lot of Europeans here, the justified
religious story that came from the Vatican, was a doctrine,
the doctrine of discovery, and this was a papal bull
It's an edict from on high that says finders keepers

(08:51):
and if somebody's already there, they don't count. You can
do to them what you will in the name of God,
the Father, and the Crown, and that unleashed people who
had themselves been broken and suffering, limping through the Middle
Asies and the plague and all the stuff Europe had
to deal with, and inflicting that illness and that subhuman

(09:16):
idea onto the rest of the planet. So we got
hundreds of years of a story and then it culminates
in a version in this land with those colonists and
settlers who create this project that we're living in now.
And there was a lot of enlightenment, there's a lot
of brilliance, a lot of good ideas. But one of

(09:38):
the clashes was that the men who put themselves at
the head of the table to define this country didn't
see a space for the women. And there are many
stories of colonial euro descended women who found themselves on
a trail landing in some indigenous community and were like,
I like it here. I'm staying, these are the most

(10:01):
free people I've ever seen. These are the most free women.
These women speak, they hold the ceremony, they determine when
the nation goes to war or not. This is a very,
very very different story than women as property. Women just
to be a vessel for children who are also property,

(10:22):
to work the land, which is also property. A and
so the worldview that says, no, everything is alive. We
are a part of nature. We govern with nature. Women
is at the center of that governance.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
We govern for a very long time.

Speaker 4 (10:37):
Horizon that has landed in a lot of everyone's bodies,
men and women and those who are neither. But that
story has resonated for centuries now, and we are we
have I think we're being forced with an opportunity to
unwind it right, and some are clenching harder, more fear, more, control,

(11:02):
more dominance.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
Let's rip the earth open harder, Let's.

Speaker 4 (11:06):
Burn methane to power machines, to strip us of our
humanity more, let's subjugate women even more. That is a
reaction to this feeling of loss and of control that's happening.
And then there is another reaction, which is we are one.
Let's work with the natural world. Let's love first rather

(11:26):
than fear first. Let's see ourselves as a part of
all of this and reconnect with this part of ourselves
that's been severed. But that severing of the feminine is
something that we're all paying for and something that we
have a beautiful chance to stop. Stop doing that. Let's
as something else, which is something old and I think

(11:49):
more true.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
It's reminded me.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
I had the great honor last week to interview Anna
Tubs and incredible black.

Speaker 3 (11:59):
Right.

Speaker 1 (12:00):
Yeah, this book just came out and everyone should buy it.
It's called The Race What American patriarchy has hidden from us?
And in that she talks about you know, I think
the thing that's really amazing with the book that you
have coming out, it's pre contact. It's these ways of
being and ways of relationship that were ages probably thousands

(12:23):
of years before the slave ships came over. And Anna's
book starts with the founding of the documents and even
like John Adam's wife saying, hey.

Speaker 4 (12:33):
Abigail, women exist, reminder hello, because it was.

Speaker 1 (12:39):
Very clear that it was for white, straight land owning
men and that everything from the structures to the policies
to everything was literally going to be indoctrinated with that philosophy.

Speaker 3 (12:54):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is this book.

Speaker 4 (12:57):
I want to update the language a little bit because
you're being generous, but I need to shift it.

Speaker 3 (13:03):
I'm not coming out with a book.

Speaker 4 (13:05):
Yeah, the book you wrote the forward for Yes, the
book that I was invited to write the forward for.
It's called American Indigenous Democracy a Call for Interdependence, and
you can find out more about it at American in
American Indigenous Democracy dot com.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
So it's available for pre order.

Speaker 4 (13:22):
It fully drops June fifteenth, in time for the Big
Auca Birthday party. It's a great birthday gift for America,
and it is a gift. That is the point that
when the Europeans arrived here, they were welcomed, as they
have been in almost every place they've landed. Alter roa
what we call Australia, the whole continent of Africa, to

(13:43):
some continent in India.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
Peoples who love.

Speaker 4 (13:46):
Life generally like, hey, that's a different form of life
I'm not familiar with. Come on down, let's hang let
me help you not die, right. That is like the
general welcoming energy. It's not always but overwhelmingly welcoming story.
And so that invitation was formally made many times and
is being made again. The man who edited this book,

(14:08):
Jose Borero, is a Tino from Cuba and he is
a longtime activist, journalist, spiritualist who was intimately familiar with
indigenous communities all over Turtle Island, North and South America,
and he married in to the hodnneron the Mohawk Nation.
So he comes through it by way of many decades
of study, of practice, and of love, and he and

(14:32):
his fellow elders welcomed a bunch of us younger people
and really modeling the same thing. Okay, we have some
outsiders who are expressing some curiosity. They seem a little lost.
That's who we were, and let's.

Speaker 3 (14:45):
Help him out.

Speaker 4 (14:46):
And they're doing it because of the status of the earth,
which is way out of balance, and that we all
go where the planet goes, so they see it as
this opportunity.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
So there's just a little more context.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
For what this this book is.

Speaker 4 (15:01):
The people who are in it are all indigenous elders.
Some are no longer with us in this realm. Others
are just coming up and putting these principles into practice.
And that's the invitation is to put these into practice,
not to.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
Become Don't do that.

Speaker 4 (15:15):
Don't don't show up to your nearest indigenous government meeting
that you were not a part of and be like,
I'm in what do I do? Put me in but
instead try to embody the universality of these practices.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
Can you can you share their very specific practices, Can
you share what those are?

Speaker 3 (15:34):
Yeah, and and principles.

Speaker 4 (15:35):
Really the practice is something we all got to figure out,
but the principles are very clear. Number One, Women at
the center of governance? Was that actually the number one
it is? Or they probably don't have a linear thing.

Speaker 3 (15:47):
I'm thinking that, No, that's that's that's a good question.
That's a good question as I have.

Speaker 4 (15:53):
Been encouraged to spread this and share this. That is
the first one that has been told to me. And
then the forward. Now we ran it past, not just
jose but Louise hearn who's a clan mother in.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
The Mohawk Nation of Michelle Shenandoah.

Speaker 4 (16:12):
There's a lot of voices and they're like, that's the
first one, right, mother is law. That's what clanmother Louise
Hearne would has and will continue to say. So I'll
start with that, and given the topic of our discussion,
it is the most important because it is the most
contrary to what we've inherited that really isn't working out

(16:33):
so well. Women at the center of Government is one
of the five and I think the first of the
five a reciprocal relationship with nature, reciprocal relationship seven generation thinking,
as in the decisions you make now, you must account
for seven generations from now, and that is a common
principle of many different indigenous communities.

Speaker 3 (16:53):
It's not strictly holding.

Speaker 4 (16:56):
That peace is the highest calling of government, peace not property.
Peace and peace has a requirement of justice to be achieved.
That that ultimately, and John Mohawk is is really the
spirit of this book. He was a Seneca scholar who
is among the greatest thinkers, representing among the greatest political

(17:19):
thinking that this land has ever produced. And he's no
longer with us in this realm, but a lot of
his words are. And then he does some really good
breakdowns of that one where the point of the system
of government is to prevent people from abusing one another.
And then the fifth is that the law itself is

(17:39):
aligned with life and is sacred, like there is there
is a sacredness, hey sacred lessons, there is a ritual,
there is something more than cold calculation and analysis. There's
something more than visible, there's something else going on. And
so those principles they live inside of something called the

(18:01):
Great Law of peace, and that great law of peace
was brought to a bunch of warring nations by someone
known as the Peacemaker, because these nations were at each
other's throats, that there was so much violence between them,
involving innocence and children and situations we know of today
and have known throughout our own history.

Speaker 3 (18:22):
And so to soothe that, to calm that down, a
new way of being have to be brought into the fold.

Speaker 4 (18:30):
And so the Peacemaker worked across these nations to get
them all to agree.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
And this is pre contact.

Speaker 4 (18:36):
This is very much pre contact, which is intense. It
complicates the story of just like, oh yeah, before white
people showed up, it was all good people be people
in you know, Africans were doing dirt to Africans before
the Europeans showed up. Indigenous folks on this land, we're
doing dirt to each other before any European showed up. Europeans,

(18:58):
before they were enmeshed in their own empire, were indigenous.

Speaker 3 (19:03):
They lived in tribes, they were close to the land.

Speaker 4 (19:06):
They have you know, festivals that aligned with the stars
and the plants, and you know, we all.

Speaker 3 (19:12):
Have this in us. We all have that in us too.

Speaker 4 (19:16):
We have peace in US and we have the capacity
for war in US. So that is the the stack, right,
that's the set, that's the box set of principles that
undergird the great.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Law of peace.

Speaker 4 (19:32):
The way the Holding Shone Confederacy has moved, and what
they offered to the founders and what they continue to
practice and to attempt.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
And there's a really.

Speaker 4 (19:40):
Humbling you know, in the US story and documentation, there's
so much good.

Speaker 3 (19:47):
There's so much good.

Speaker 4 (19:48):
A more perfect union, right, that's humility in that, not
a perfect union, a more perfect union. We're striving, man,
we're striving. And I think in this particular indition the
former government what has popped to me, what my wife
Elizabeth pointed out as she's going through and is like
they say, like you're never going to achieve it, but

(20:10):
you pursue it.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
You try.

Speaker 4 (20:13):
And I think if we're going to try, we might
as well set an appropriate goal. And the goals we
have set for ourselves right now to own and control
and dominate are unworthy of us. The goal to belong
and to honor and.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
To appreciate that feels better.

Speaker 4 (20:32):
It feels better, and it can be a really hard
transition for those of us deeply invested in that old
story because we feel like we might be losing.

Speaker 2 (20:39):
Ourselves too, and I know earlier.

Speaker 1 (20:47):
And then one of the principles that you're talking about
is this relationship.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
That we as human beings have.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
Not just with the landing with each other, but with
the unseen, with the ancestral, the spiritual.

Speaker 2 (20:59):
World, whatever verbiage you want to use.

Speaker 1 (21:01):
But I wonder if you can unpack that a little
bit more, because when we're talking about the Founding documents,
it's it's a road map, but it's written with a
particular framework in mind, and that framework is all about
the material consumption and ownership of land and people, if
you're even seen as a person. But how does the

(21:25):
world of spirit come into this conversation?

Speaker 3 (21:29):
I will this is this is a unique opportunity. It
is a unique opportunity.

Speaker 4 (21:34):
I'm feeling excited to share what I've been learning that
I think has some universal appeal. I'm feeling cautious and
nervous not to try to speak on behalf of so
I just want to put that out there so you understand.
Any hesitation is me trying to calibrate and do this well.
And do this right and not claim shit or even

(21:58):
just like even just for you.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
Yeah, So for me, there is more than what we
can see.

Speaker 4 (22:10):
I grew up with a mother who practiced many different
forms of spirituality. She escaped the Baptist Church as a kid,
with its entirely eurocentric view and hierarchical view of life
and human worth and no view of value for animal
and plant worth, and she went through a path.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Of Buddhism, path of Taoism and the eaching.

Speaker 4 (22:36):
And I've gone to different ceremonies if I've gone to
pow wows with my mom when she was alive, because
she was on this quest and this exploration knowing that
there's something else available to us.

Speaker 3 (22:48):
And I think I'm.

Speaker 4 (22:49):
Here because of people who believed in things that they
couldn't see, like.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
Their own freedom day to day.

Speaker 4 (22:56):
There is some version of faith that has powered many people,
and I am a consequence of that power, and I
carry some of that myself. So I think, in the
contradiction of story, the people who showed up here a
bit broken, very hungry, we're looking for their own safety,

(23:22):
We're looking for their own perch and place in the world.
They were trying to improve their lot.

Speaker 3 (23:28):
There's a lot of seeking.

Speaker 4 (23:29):
They're trying to honor their God, and some of them
figured out better ways to do it. But overall, the
story that they got handed just so damn tiny, and
it had a vast disrespect for I remember reading this
book White Trash, the four hundred year history of like

(23:53):
poor white people in America, and it lays out Thomas
Jefferson's view that the highest calling, you know, it's to
be a yaleman farmer, to take your applot of land
and make it productive because of forest just out there
making air for you to breathe not enough. Providing food

(24:15):
for you to eat, providing medicines for you to heal
is not enough.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
It only counts if it's money. Oh, it's so sad.
It's so sad.

Speaker 4 (24:28):
And for me, I've been on this journey of being
in the very tangible world of technology and political argumentation
and some activism, and then being in the very physical,
nature rich world of being on canoes and hiking with
some of the people who do it the deepest, and
my own childhood experience is being brought back to me

(24:49):
through some of that experience of making just making the
America out doors show the Hope in the Water Show
on PBS.

Speaker 3 (24:55):
There's so much more.

Speaker 4 (24:57):
And there's so much more to be gained by giving
of ourselves to communal membership with life rather than private
ownership of life. It's it's seeing ourselves as peers and partners,
not having a paternalistic and a property centric attitude toward

(25:19):
the rest of life. And that, for me is very beautiful,
and it's really hard. It's I can say the words great,
but then day to day.

Speaker 3 (25:29):
What does that mean? You know?

Speaker 4 (25:30):
And then how does that undo some of my own
coding and programming to try to appreciate everything, to try
to just notice life. I mean, I find myself I
don't kill as many bugs as I used to.

Speaker 3 (25:46):
I really don't.

Speaker 4 (25:47):
I really don't because I have a second thought, sometimes
a third thought. And I live here in Palm Springs,
and I've learned we have a moth season. So I
see a moth the house, I'm like, they're gonna eat
all the.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
Food, burrow through all the clothes, moth bat.

Speaker 4 (26:07):
And now we're on opposite sides here it's man versus moth,
and I'm representing all of men, so I have to
stand for my species at least for my textiles.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
And it's not that simple.

Speaker 4 (26:18):
Like, and I've learned that the moths, the ones that
I hear it primarily it's a seasonal thing. And then
I bother with me. They're just attracted to the light
color on the walls. They don't even eat clothes or
burrow into food. So now I'm just like, what's up?

Speaker 2 (26:34):
You know?

Speaker 3 (26:34):
I see some crawley.

Speaker 4 (26:36):
Thing and instead of smashing it, like can I get it.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
Out and put it back outside? You probably lost?

Speaker 4 (26:45):
How would I feel if I was just having like
fields of gold and then one day just roll up
into this cold, right angle riddled place. It's totally unnatural.
And then my last moment is like pressure on my
head before the splack.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
Rather just be returned home, So let me help you
get back home.

Speaker 4 (27:03):
And when it comes to the ground, squirrels burrowing under
my foundation, we're working it out. We're working it out.
I have encouraged the arrival of hawks to tend to that.
For me, it's not outsourcing, you know, it's just it's
letting nature be nature.

Speaker 3 (27:18):
Well, let me ask you this.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
You're teasing out this truth I would argue of interdependence, right, Yeah,
the hardest thing about interdependence is because this structure, the
society has this hood one to think it's us versus
depth and it's either me, you're with me or against me.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
And you've said this a few times today that.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
The men that were populating the slave ships that came
to these lands were often broken men, similar to I
would argue broken men and positions of power now, both
in government and both in technology and AI. And the

(28:06):
hard part for me is I don't want to start
to cancel and dismiss these broken men, because that's not
going to get to the root cause of this all.
And so I wonder, in this exploration and remembering and
relearning these texts and these philosophies, how your relationship to

(28:26):
these broken men. The oftentimes the are just mirrors for ourselves,
because I myself am a broken man in certain moments
when I have to like look at myself and be like,
don't do that, dude, Like you know the consequence that's
also your childhood wound that's coming to surface. So how
have you shifted or have you even shifted? And how

(28:48):
you see that narrative?

Speaker 3 (28:50):
It's a shift in progress.

Speaker 4 (28:52):
And you know, I've been with my wife for over
a decade now, and we have.

Speaker 3 (29:01):
We've learned so much from each other.

Speaker 4 (29:03):
And one of the things that she has given me
an opportunity to learn about myself is my responses. And
we met in twenty fourteen that we've got some time
in and there's just certain things that.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
Are a reaction. I have a reaction.

Speaker 4 (29:21):
I interpret a word or a tone or a moment
in a way that assigns threat, that assigns judgment, that
assigns attack to me. And so because this particular pattern,
and I think many couples have this, I'm not saying

(29:41):
sharing anything unique or talking out of school. Like, if
you're in a relationship, probably had this kind of dynamic
parent child can have it, as well as siblings. But
the beauty of being in relationship long enough is that
if the pattern keeps presenting, you start experimenting with different
ways of engaging with it. And so I'm like, what
if I just slowed down and these ideas are not

(30:02):
just like I have brilliant new insights, Like she's suggested
some of these things to me. I've had support through
counseling and other modes. But if I could instead of
assuming that this person who I know loves me is
out to get me, Like, maybe that's the leap. Maybe
my assignment of attack value or judgment value to her

(30:28):
motive is me and that's not her at all. So
can I move in slow motion? Can I take a
breath before I open my mouth and wonder? Why might
she be sharing this that isn't to.

Speaker 3 (30:43):
Get on my nerves?

Speaker 4 (30:44):
Right? Could there be any other reasons why she's doing Yeah?

Speaker 3 (30:49):
What might those reasons be? Bearison? They? Oh because she cares,
Oh because.

Speaker 4 (30:53):
She knows you're capable of doing something differently. Oh, because
the way you're shown up doesn't feel good to her.
So there's a dynamic at play here that is awesome
and it's exhausting and it's really slow. And when I
think about the men who are in formal positions of power,

(31:14):
who have run away from those opportunities, who've had deeper
scarring maybe than I have, and have deeper pools of
resource to deal with it, I'm like, Oh, I'm sad
and I'm mad at the same time.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
I'm sad and I'm mad at the same time. And
I want for them and I need for them. I
think we need for them to be healed.

Speaker 4 (31:36):
To reconcile, to take that breath, to slow down, to
not see all of us as their enemy or their property,
which is equally dehumanizing and distancing, and to see us
as connected. And then that requires me to see them
as connected to me, which I don't love, but what

(31:59):
I know to be true. So when you're holding some
that you know to be true and it feels very inconvenient,
what do you do with that hold both? And it
doesn't mean that I'm out here blithely rooting for you know,
Elon Musk, for example, And nor am I sacrificing myself.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
To try to change him. I'm not trying to.

Speaker 4 (32:24):
Expose myself to his particular line of fire or what
have you.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
But it also means I'm not I'm going to try
to do to him.

Speaker 4 (32:32):
What I see him doing to others, and belittling and
berating and to humanizing and objectifying. And I think that
we all who want the better world have to start
creating it before we get there, and that involves how
we approach, how we even conceptualize of, and what we

(32:53):
assign to with our language. These people who seem so
hell bent on under mining us and life by extension
and that's that's very very very very very hard.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna jump in this because you
mentioned the first trillionaire in human history, and these same
men have a lot of the same frameworks, if not
the same frameworks, as those are wrote the founding documents
of this country. But now we're getting into this time

(33:27):
of AI and radical shifts in relationships, and what I'm
seeing this aspect of fear men having a fear I'm
losing control. I'm losing the control because my job is
being eliminated because of AI. I'm losing the control because
I can now no longer provide or protect from my family.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
These these these.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
Definitions traditional forms of masculinity. But with it AI coming
there is great peril and great opportunity. But when it
comes to men and what AI is doing to disrupt
because I was even having this conversation, like you can
assign a gender to AI now right like and so,

(34:14):
and a lot of men are lonely, don't know how
to talk to other people they're interested in, so therefore
they feel safer in the virtual reality that could be
a bot that they name and they provide because they're
controlling yet again, because this is this fear of not
having control.

Speaker 4 (34:31):
That makes sense, It absolutely makes sense. There's so much
in that might. One thing that comes to mind is
the men who until this moment thought they had control,
the ones who owned property, the one who had money
in the bank, the ones who work in tech or

(34:52):
used to, because they fail to recognize the truth, they
fail to understand the assignment that we're all connected. What
happens to one of us eventually happens to all of us.
And so you're okay with the displacement, the disruption, the
dehumanization for them, you're okay with it for those women,

(35:14):
or for those immigrants, and for those brown people, or
for those folks who eat that food that smells different
than anything that you understand, so you call it weird,
who speak that language that you don't understand, so you.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
Call it weird.

Speaker 4 (35:25):
You're okay with dismissal of all that, You're okay with
capture of all of that to feed the machine you're making.
But when that machine starts to eat you, now you
see the problem because you feel the problem directly, and
now you want somebody to save your job.

Speaker 3 (35:44):
You want somebody to help you out. It's the opioid crisis.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
All over again.

Speaker 4 (35:48):
Oh, black kids dying, Brown kids dying, poor people dying
from overdose addiction, whatever.

Speaker 3 (35:54):
White people start.

Speaker 4 (35:54):
Oh, now it's the needs compassion. And so these men
want help and don't know how to ask because who
taught them how to ask for help?

Speaker 3 (36:05):
The world showed them you don't need help. You're the alpha,
you're the omega, You're the man. And and so it's.

Speaker 4 (36:14):
A trap, like they are held as captive by the
story as the rest of us have been. Their cells
look different, right, some of the cells have Bugattis in them,
but you're still in the cell. Some of them had
a lot of zeros in their bank account, but you're
still in the cell. You're still a prisoner.

Speaker 3 (36:30):
Of a lie.

Speaker 4 (36:32):
And so a beautiful and painful part of this moment
is that many men are being forced to wake up.
You thought Elin was your savior. He's coming to eat you.
He's coming to put a methane factory to power his
rock Ai thing.

Speaker 3 (36:51):
That he called Mecha Hitler. Right, he was cool with it.

Speaker 4 (36:54):
He's cool with the thing calling itself mechas cool with
Nazi salutes. He's coming for you too, Like you're not
no one special and even the men who think they're
at the very top, you know, the most like aiable job.
I could think of CEO, what do you do bro
run in a movie office space?

Speaker 3 (37:14):
Like what would you say you do here?

Speaker 4 (37:15):
Like I want Claude or Chat to pull up on
Sam right, to pull up.

Speaker 3 (37:23):
On these guys. But what would you say you do here?

Speaker 4 (37:26):
Because by my reckoning, I'm doing the work and you're
taking a meeting. You know who can take a meeting?
I'm taking thirty right now. I don't need to sleep.
You're sleeping? What are you doing?

Speaker 3 (37:37):
Right? Your brain is slow, you're bound by your meat body.
What are you doing?

Speaker 4 (37:43):
So they're they're creating, and it's there's something historic and
poetic and artistic and tragic about a person who.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
Creates the mode of their own.

Speaker 4 (37:53):
Destruction and thinks of it as triumph, like you reaching
or a trophy and you're grabbing a chain.

Speaker 3 (38:05):
They just don't know it yet.

Speaker 4 (38:07):
Somebody should probably tell them, but they have left around
and they will find out. And the sadness is that
a lot of us will find out as collateral damage.

Speaker 3 (38:15):
So that was experience.

Speaker 4 (38:18):
It's all of it, Fanstein, It is Frank especially Frankenstein,
which a woman wrote Mary Shelley, like, you don't have
to dig that LRD to figure out all these guys.
They always take the wrong lessons from fiction. They always
see it as a roadmap instead of a warning. Right,
these are cautionary tails, not business plans. There should be

(38:43):
a difference. So I am hopeful for these men and
for us that the speed of this change is going
to disrupt so much that we can't hold onto the
old thing anymore, that we've got to anchor into something
deeper and more true, That what comes from one comes

(39:04):
for all, that we're stronger together, that there is no
me and you, there's just us and we. That that
is going to and not because of a sense of threat.
I mean, that's one thing. An alien invasion brings people together.
We've seen all the movies, you read the books. That
could be the case. An AI alien could emerge that
really binds us together, and Terminator becomes a documentary like that.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
Could be a thing, or was it already a documentary?

Speaker 4 (39:27):
But I think the other thing that could happen for
us is you named really compassionately.

Speaker 3 (39:34):
Men who don't.

Speaker 4 (39:36):
Know how to interact, don't have the practice feel more
comfortable connecting with a chatbot versus a flesh and bone,
meat based human breathing person.

Speaker 3 (39:50):
I get that, and a.

Speaker 4 (39:51):
Lot of the men who are creating these technologies are
also not like. They didn't choose their brokenness, they didn't
choose their inadequacies.

Speaker 3 (39:59):
I have I own. I didn't choose it.

Speaker 4 (40:01):
It's just stuff we're born with, and so we're all
on some kind of spectrum, and so some of them
have been gifted with superpowers and super resources to play
out with their own shortcomings for all of us to
live inside of. And I don't think that's how it
is supposed to go. I think they deserve compassion. I

(40:21):
think we should hope for them the best. And I
think there is a role for this technology to help
us all learn how to connect with ourselves, learn how
to connect with each other.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
So I see possibility and promise in AI.

Speaker 4 (40:34):
Forcing us to be inspired, forcing us to dig deeper. Okay,
if writing emails fast isn't my competitive advantage, if building
a PowerPoint slide isn't the thing, or whatever, why am
I here? If making money isn't the thing, then why

(40:56):
am I here?

Speaker 3 (40:57):
And could we set a goal to create us society where.

Speaker 4 (41:01):
People had time. I met a school teacher yesterday, Mike Taubman.
He's ridden up in the New York Times. He teaches
in Newark, New Jersey, and Uncommon charter schools and he
has a couple of courses that bring AI into the
high school and one of them, the bulk of the course,
it's a looping thing. I think it's three week loops.
And these high school kids ask themselves what they like,

(41:29):
what they want, who they are, what they enjoy, how
different parts of school and life make them feel. No,
just first, just them, just like who am I? Who
gets to do that? We're so busy jumping through the hoops,

(41:49):
We're so busy living up to an image of what
we think we're supposed to be, that we don't take
the time to find out who we actually are. And
so he's got these kids running reps on and then
they get to play out the character and they do it,
and they use technology and they build a LinkedIn profile
as that and they try to find the mentor in

(42:10):
the space and they.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
Talk to a chatbot and get feedback on their plan.
And so it's a human AI human in the middle
and at the edge with a teacher, adult with the kids,
not just your alone.

Speaker 4 (42:24):
And you're room ashamed at night for sixteen hours straight
going back and forth with a chatbot or a sex bot, right,
or a nazi bot or all of those three things
rolled into one.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
Right, that's not healthy.

Speaker 4 (42:39):
But if you're doing it in community, with your peers,
with your teacher, with yourself, if you're given the space.
Doctor Riel Epps is someone we had on Life with
Machine show. She's spent a lot of time studying the
impact of technology on young people and algorithmic AI on
young people's sense of self, especially kids of color, and
all these filters, all these beauty hacks built into the

(43:01):
app platforms, it's really devastating to a young person sense
of their own value. Well, obviously I'm not pretty. I
need that filter to be pretty, and that filter they're
all pushing in a certain direction, a certain definition of
beauty and worth and value. The greatest protection against that
that doctor Ebs found wasn't a talking to from parents

(43:24):
saying no, you're good enough, you're smart enough, and you're beautiful.
It was a deeper thing. It was reminding these kids
who they are building up their self knowledge, what is
your culture? What is your food, where do you live?
Who lived there before? What is your language? What are
the dance moves? Armed them with self knowledge? And that

(43:46):
acts as a shield, an inoculation against the infectious harm
of a norm imposed on you from on high that's
ultimately designed for you to just see yourself as a
consumer to buy more.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
So that's great. So then the.

Speaker 4 (44:03):
Question is, well, how do we bolster people's sense of
self knowledge? How do we help people find themselves? And
that can happen with or without technology, But it's not
necessary that technology that disables that just on its own,
it won't.

Speaker 3 (44:18):
We have to choose it.

Speaker 2 (44:25):
So I hear this.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
We're in a moment a radical This is like if
you are alive in like the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Speaker 3 (44:33):
Yeah, this is that.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
And how everything completely I don't want to say almost overnight,
but radically rapidly change your relationship to work, your relationship
to your partner, to the land, to each other. We're
in that same, similar, parallel universe. The difference is, like
you said earlier, there's another population that's being born, and

(44:55):
that is an artificial population. Yeah, and so I'm wonder like,
how do we hold this tension of the a bod
like you just said, like reminding us of our self worth,
our cultural medicines, our traditions, our practices a human is
doing helping us remember that, but then also using the
machines to maybe get more clarity. But how do we

(45:18):
hold this straddle, this line between the and and the both.

Speaker 4 (45:23):
With great difficulty, I think, and humility. There's no one answer,
there's no one way. I don't have it, and no
one does and no one ever will. And we're not
in a historical moment of quite any kind that we've
had before.

Speaker 3 (45:44):
But there are some that rhyme.

Speaker 4 (45:46):
We know that moving together gives us more strength and
moving alone, So we do this stuff in community.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
I think it's.

Speaker 4 (45:54):
Generally true that an extreme and out of direction is
never the healthiest.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
Right.

Speaker 4 (45:58):
Extreme sustained for too long throw the systems out of balance.
That leads to too much fire or not enough. It
leads to too much water or not enough. It can
lead to too much of one human trade or activity
or outcome, or not enough in terms of resource, in
terms of time spent, in terms of anything you might
choose to measure. So just some respect for probably some

(46:19):
middle ground here that we need to find I think
about I think about ingredients like a little formulation, and
I'll try to see if I can find something tangible
to ground this, because this whole field and this whole
moment can get very philosophical instantly, and then it becomes like, oh,

(46:39):
a thought experiment. But people already are finding themselves in
challenging situations. Parents are having trouble relating to their kids,
kids are having trouble relating to each other. Employees and
employers workers with each other.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
Like it's all.

Speaker 4 (46:55):
Happening so so so fast. And that's the other distinguishing
character is besides the voice and the face and the
sort of population level of this AI is the speed
of it. The formulation is this agency is a very
popular term that people want to celebrate with AI.

Speaker 3 (47:15):
It can increase human agency. I think it's important for us.

Speaker 4 (47:18):
To be clear about what that truly means. Agency as
sold by industry is simply the ability to do more.
It's more skills, more capability, upskill, become AI literate, learn
to use these tools to do more with less right.

Speaker 3 (47:35):
Become a better human machine.

Speaker 4 (47:39):
They don't call it that. I'm calling it that it's
one dimensional. It's just along like an X axis. The
other axis is power agency And you know this from
a political context like that means a lot, but it
can mean having the power to shape the conditions in
which you deploy those capabilities at all.

Speaker 3 (47:59):
And from me, power means choice, do I or don't
I at all? If I do? What kind of AI?
Like let's get more specific, which.

Speaker 4 (48:09):
Large language model? But maybe not a large language model.
Maybe there's a small language model. Maybe there's not a
language model. AI is actually way bigger than is being sold.
So choice which requires information control? Can I actually set
the terms of engagement? Do I know what the terms are?
Can I alter them?

Speaker 3 (48:28):
Community? Can I do this with others?

Speaker 4 (48:32):
And so as we approach and try to get to
and create a good future, I think it's really hopeful
to practice answering do I have, how does this affect
my capabilities?

Speaker 3 (48:43):
What choices do I have? What amount of control do
I have?

Speaker 2 (48:46):
With whom?

Speaker 3 (48:47):
Do I have?

Speaker 2 (48:47):
All these things?

Speaker 4 (48:49):
And if we can apply that in any moment, then
that's that works in a sit down conversation. It works
with you and your kids, all right, So you're dealing
with this thing, that's great, Huh, where did this come from?

Speaker 3 (48:58):
Did you have a choice. Do you feel like you
had a choice? Who else are you engaging with this?
What is this doing to your skills?

Speaker 4 (49:04):
Is it you think it's enhancing them or maybe it's
atrophying them. Maybe we're losing some skills? And are we
okay with losing some skills? I've lost a lot of
arithmetic skills thanks to the calculator.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
Generally okay with that? Do I want to lose my
cognitive skills, my emotional skills? And what?

Speaker 2 (49:22):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (49:23):
So that's a way that I'm thinking about this.

Speaker 4 (49:27):
The other is if we do the inventory of ourselves
and identify where we feel weak, where we feel under
informed or under capable.

Speaker 3 (49:40):
We could do that. As an individual, I'm working on
the finances right now.

Speaker 4 (49:43):
I've never felt very strong on the bookkeeping and the management.

Speaker 3 (49:47):
And investing and what do you do? What do you
do with money?

Speaker 4 (49:50):
I got a fancy degree, but what do we do
with money is not a part of how what I
did to get it? What do I do in this
relationship with that relationship as an employer, as a husband,
as an uncle? And then if I approach these systems
with that question of how can I be better at
that as opposed to how do you do everything I
do faster?

Speaker 3 (50:12):
That's different?

Speaker 4 (50:13):
And then if I can apply that, If we can
apply that, what could our what is our city not
good at?

Speaker 3 (50:19):
What is our government? What is our nonprofit? What is
our school? What is our camp organization?

Speaker 4 (50:24):
What's our group chat not good at? Then how can
we work together to improve it? And maybe how can
we apply technology to help us improve that? But it's
setting the goals, doing the inventory, working with the technology
potentially and with other humans, and then looking back and like, Okay,

(50:45):
did we get there? Or are we just waking up
every day feeling behind because somebody else set the goal
for us and they keep shoving a new thing every
day and that is not a word that we should.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
Be trying to create.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
Well, before we get to this last segment, I want
to ask, because this is the most concentration of wealth
that we've ever seen, like the stratification of resources, and
there's more folks that have less than have more in
this particular moment in time, what do you tell a

(51:22):
young person who seen all this changing going on, is
like the only way that I can have a future
is if I subscribe to the trap, the lie, the
myth that I got to be the alpha male, that
I got to control everything around me, that everything around me,
including the land and a person, is.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
For my benefit. So I have to be the Elon.
I have to be the Peter TiAl. What do you
tell that young.

Speaker 4 (51:53):
Person Elon Musk is a miserable person. I'm not saying
this as a judgment of his character. I'm saying this
as an observation of how he has described his own life.

Speaker 3 (52:08):
He lives a miserable life.

Speaker 4 (52:11):
He sleeps at the office, He's on planes all the time,
He's up all night posting on social media. He's managing
thousands of people and billions of dollars. He's not happy.
He has everything in the world and nothing at the
same time. He is not a role model. He is
not a goal and I'm not a billionaire. I wouldn't

(52:34):
want to be one. Is mass stressed well, people trying
to kill you, people trying to steal from you, people
judging you, people think they know you.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
Is a high stress lifestyle on the best of days.
Do you really want that?

Speaker 4 (52:48):
I would encourage a young person who's looking up to
an Elon Musk to look at Elon Musk, look at
his eyes, look at his skin, look at how he
moves in his body, at the patterns of his life,
the sleep patterns, the parental patterns, the employer patterns, the
political patterns, and just write down what you see, and

(53:12):
then look at the words you wrote down and ask,
is that what I want to be?

Speaker 3 (53:16):
Slow it down, Slow it down.

Speaker 4 (53:18):
It's very easy for us to accept imposed role models
due to default settings. But the system is broken. And
to the same young person, like you know, the system's
broke and.

Speaker 3 (53:30):
Everything's literally on fire around us.

Speaker 4 (53:32):
And so someone thriving in a broken system, is that
a sign that that's the path for you? Or is
it challenging that system? I think the accumulation of things
is a poisonous concept.

Speaker 3 (53:50):
And it's easy for me to say because I have
enough things myself.

Speaker 4 (53:52):
Right, I eat and I don't worry about where the
next meal is coming from. I have enough clothes that
they always smell good. Right, I have a bed that
I can rely returned to at the end of the day.
So if you really don't have those things, you're in
a different situation. And I'm reminded of a doomsday prepper
show that I saw years and years ago and I
don't indulge in the show, but I was watching it

(54:15):
this one time, and one episode had a contrasting response
to the doomsday prepping.

Speaker 3 (54:20):
On the one hand, in this corner.

Speaker 5 (54:23):
You had Chad, right, He's got his tattoos, he's got
his container ships, he's got his canned foods, he's built
a bunker, he's got turrets, he's got.

Speaker 4 (54:34):
All the AMMO and all the guns and all the
barbed wire and all the walls, and he's all alone,
trying to protect all of this by himself. His planning
for the apocalypse is to be miserable, to be alone

(54:54):
and always on watch and never trusting.

Speaker 3 (54:58):
Head on a swivel muzzle, out and up. Chad's going
to age.

Speaker 4 (55:04):
Chad's gonna age, and its Chad slips one moment, it's over.

Speaker 3 (55:10):
And all those cam goods and all those bullets go
to someone just like.

Speaker 4 (55:13):
Chad, who was slightly more prepared and exploited and opening.
In the same episode, there was a woman, a New
England woman who said, not really good at guns.

Speaker 3 (55:28):
It's not my thing.

Speaker 4 (55:29):
Wasn't trained in gun fu, didn't.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
Watch John Wick. Good at growing things. Kathy over there,
she's good at making clothes.

Speaker 4 (55:40):
Daryl, he's good at fixing machines, and Donnie he's.

Speaker 3 (55:45):
Gonna cook him.

Speaker 4 (55:47):
I think I planned for the apocalypse with my neighbors,
and she started running totally different types of drills. Not
target practice, community practice. Okay, let's meet, let's talk about
let's do a skills inventory as opposed to a guns
and ammo inventory. And then just the knowledge of who

(56:09):
knows how to do what made everybody in the network stronger.
And if one of them slipped, the others didn't exploit them,
they caught them, they held them. And I know, I
know one hundred percent that's the only sustainable way forward.
You might be able to hoard your way into an

(56:31):
elevated and secure position for a moment, but you will
hold yourself together with others for much longer over the
course of the long run.

Speaker 3 (56:42):
Every freaking time. That's what history really shows us.

Speaker 4 (56:46):
The dictators, the autocrats, the oligarchs, read to the end
of the story. How does it end for them? Saddam
died in a hole, Kadafi's ripped apart by his own people.
Folks find themselves falling out of buildings all over Moscow.

Speaker 3 (57:05):
It's not a happy ending.

Speaker 4 (57:07):
It's a miserable life and ultimately all of that angst
and all of that inequality.

Speaker 3 (57:13):
If you don't give it an outlet, the people, they
find an outlet for it, and.

Speaker 4 (57:17):
It's usually targeted that those folks who thought they could
have it all and realize they ain't got shit at
the literal end of the day, they die with.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
Nothing like wish to South Stage.

Speaker 4 (57:35):
It's just more fun with others. We also who wants
to just like Gray, it's the.

Speaker 3 (57:40):
End of the world and you've got your bunker and
you've watched like you've reached the end of Netflix. Now
what well, what are you gonna do? Like it be
better to be with other people.

Speaker 4 (57:50):
You can make up new games, you know, you can
sing songs to each other, you could joke about each other.
You could build crafts and you could start a society
again or create a better version of the one you're
already in. And that is the moment, that's the choice
we have. We're celebrating a declaration of independence.

Speaker 3 (58:07):
Okay, do we need more independence right now?

Speaker 4 (58:09):
Do we need more single player solo thinking I would
submit The answer is no, I'm offering and many others are.
There is the next two to fifty project. There's a
unity campaign. There's all kinds of folks promoting this concept
and have for the past one hundred years.

Speaker 3 (58:26):
A declaration of interdependence. That's what's going to get us
through this.

Speaker 4 (58:30):
Time, and that is what's going to set up the
time that we deserve, the one that we haven't quite reached.

Speaker 3 (58:38):
But we can still take hold of if we hold
on to each other.

Speaker 1 (58:46):
Well, with that being said, I want to get into
what we call the sacred five ooh, which is at
the end of every episode.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
I just asked five questions.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
Okay, you answering a word or a sentence, a word,
There's gonna be a channel. But this is because practically speaking,
we we shared a lot right now. And for folks
that are listening, the one thing I always want folks
to take away is that the macro lives within the micro.
That what's happening out there is embodied in our own

(59:16):
personal bodies that are connected to each other. And so
I had all these other questions, but I think you're
going to see them in the sacred fire, right. So
the first question, okay, name three things that make you
feel safe connected and whole.

Speaker 4 (59:32):
Safe connected, hugs, immersion, and water wind. At the most

(59:54):
stressful moments in my time in college, I would get
on my.

Speaker 3 (59:56):
Bike right along the river to force the field of
wind and I felt helped by it, safe and connected, beautiful.

Speaker 1 (01:00:07):
What song, book or prayer brings you back home to yourself?

Speaker 4 (01:00:14):
Oooo? I don't know the words, but I can hear
it Da by Mary Mkiva. That song was my mom's jam.

(01:00:37):
It brings my mother into the room. It brings freedom
songs into the room. I watched Sarah Fina as a
musical as a child. I saw Mandela in person at
the DC Convention Center when he finally got free of
that prison on Robin Island, And uh yeah, it's it's

(01:01:00):
this rooted rhythmic true mirror.

Speaker 3 (01:01:04):
Mckida is like a prophet. So that song Pata Pata,
that's my mom.

Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
What's your mom's name, so you can bring her into
the convo ari Anita, Lorraine.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
Thurston, it's Lorraine Thurston. All right.

Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
What's one daily ritual or practice that grounds you?

Speaker 4 (01:01:22):
Meditation twenty minutes at a time, two times a day.

Speaker 3 (01:01:28):
That's the plan. The reality is I probably.

Speaker 4 (01:01:33):
Had about forty five percent completion rate, but it's it's
it's in the calendar and it's on my mind even
if I don't engage in it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:41):
That's the ritual.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
I'm in the same boat. So grace that.

Speaker 1 (01:01:46):
Yes, Yes, what's one small action that listeners can take
on their healing journey?

Speaker 4 (01:01:53):
Oh small, I'm gonna go about as small as you
can it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:04):
One day.

Speaker 4 (01:02:06):
Decide that every person you encounter, you know, look them
in the eye, make eye contact. Small thing, it's reconnecting.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Why is it so powerful? A but the eye?

Speaker 4 (01:02:21):
It's a window into the soul. I didn't make that up,
but I think it's true. I think it's also an
active choice to engage with the hear and now and
the living and disengage from the glowing rectangles in our hands,
the supercomputers you walk around with that are literally programmed
to take our attention. Attention is a form of power.

(01:02:44):
Whatever we give our attention to, we give our power to.
So if we give our attention to another person and
to their eyes, that's an exchange. If you're both doing it,
you feel something.

Speaker 3 (01:02:56):
It doesn't have to be like fall in love with
a stranger.

Speaker 4 (01:02:58):
It's just you acknowledging humanity, your acknowledging life. And there
are too many moments, too much news, too much information
that has us heads down, not connecting on the human
to human level. And I think if we want to
rebuild democracy and make a healthier society, that's always in

(01:03:20):
the beginning two. It's a pair that becomes four, that
becomes eight, that becomes it continues to grow.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
Last question, what's a one line blessing or quote that
inspires you?

Speaker 4 (01:03:37):
Hm Jose Barrero, editor of the forthcoming book American Indigenous Democracy,
A call for interdependence. Everything he says is inspirational and
a blessing. He described a principle of indigenity that rings

(01:04:05):
true regardless of specific land or tradition. That everything wants
to be appreciated. Everything, and so if you can carry that,
Appreciate the four directions, as he described it, Appreciate the
two leggeds and the four legs and the wing that,
appreciate your partners, Appreciate the person you don't know, Appreciate

(01:04:28):
this table and this microphone and this other microphone and
these clothes. That there's an exponential, infinite web of appreciation
which makes all of this possible. There's hands behind it,
there's energy behind that, there's food and fuel. So to

(01:04:48):
appreciate everything is to acknowledge the connection of everything. And
it's humbling even as it places us at the center,
because we're the ones doing appreciating. It's this radically simple concept,
and it undermines and replaces the tiny story with an

(01:05:09):
infinitely large one.

Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
Oh, my dear dear friend, when you were talking about
the eyes, I was thinking about the men that I'm
blessed to be in relationship with that are part of
the Dini Heels Men's Circle. We've worked about a little
bit more than about one hundred and fifty men, predominantly
black and brown men. Most lost their homes in the

(01:05:34):
fire and alta Dina and a big shout out to
Yancey Cummins. He made us do this exercise where men
had to look each other in the eye for ninety seconds,
and how uncomfortable that made us men feel. All Just
speak for myself, how uncomfortable I felt because I am

(01:05:55):
conditioned to not look at people in the eye, let
alone a man, and condition not to look at a
man because for some reason, that would like take my
manhood away because I might get emotional because I'm looking
at someone that is a reflection of myself and maybe
I don't love myself enough, but that person is showing
me that it's possible or maybe this will be some

(01:06:18):
type of romantic thing. And I start going in tangents
and I realized in that moment was that is the
power of the eyes and community, because you get to
appreciate and see each other, like really see each other.
And I want to appreciate you. I want to look

(01:06:38):
at you in the eye. I want to appreciate you.
I want to just really really because in this moment
there was so much you unpacked, untangled, and it wasn't
it was our collective story. You always are reminding me, Mike,
I wrote a forward. I'm still a student. I'm learning this.
This is ancestral wisdom. This is stuff that's all of

(01:06:59):
our customs have never been written books. They've been orally
passed down at least the most ancient texts, and whoever's
hand is writing those scriptures or those words, whatever biases
that person has comes out in the text.

Speaker 2 (01:07:12):
But you can't hide spirit.

Speaker 1 (01:07:16):
And I just want you to know how incredibly grateful.

Speaker 2 (01:07:20):
I, we us are.

Speaker 3 (01:07:23):
For your ability to take these.

Speaker 1 (01:07:27):
Very huge concepts and break them down into digestible ways
so that we can write a different story for the
next two hundred and fifty years, and that those of
us men that are trying to be better people, that
may have trauma and wounds and pain that we don't
know how to uncover. If I can look into the
eyes of a Baratunde and I say that with all

(01:07:48):
the love and respect I have, bro because you are
unique and special, but you're also just like every other
man that may be broken or maybe healing. And the
thing about this is that we are mirrors of each other,
even the ones that are hoarding and stealing and robbing
and killing us. At some point I have to look

(01:08:11):
them in the eye enough for them to see their
own humanity and that it's connected to us. And so
at the bottom of my heart, I thank you for
this conversation. I thank you for your life's work. I think, Elizabeth,
I thank your mother. I think all the people have
come before that dreamed enough for some beautiful man. They
bear tune, They thirsted to breathe the same air that

(01:08:32):
we are all breathing.

Speaker 3 (01:08:32):
So thank you for your work, thank you for your gifts.

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
And I'm just.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Really hopeful that this unfolding story of America will start
with the unfolding of the story of each and every one.

Speaker 2 (01:08:46):
Of us, seeing our divine connection to each other.

Speaker 4 (01:08:50):
Thank you, Thank you, my brother, beautiful, beautiful way I
am Cool.

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
Sacred Lessons is a production of My Heart's Michael through It,
a podcast network, Sacred Lessons Media, and the Prints Group.
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