How To Citizen, with Baratunde Thurston

Most Americans can agree that society isn't perfect -- in fact, most people in other parts of the world can say the same about their own societies. But how can we attempt to address these issues? Is there genuinely a conspiracy between the world's wealthiest people to keep the disadvantaged divided? This week, the guys welcome special guest, author, comedian and philosopher Baratunde Thurston to explore these questions and more.

They don't want you to read our book.: https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/stuff-you-should-read/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, fellow conspiracy realist. Quick disclaimer for this interview. We're
massively excited to talk with our good friend Barratunde, who
you'll meet in just a moment, but we do want
to give you a heads up, especially if you've got
kiddos in the crew today. Uh, there's some strong language
and we just decided it was better not to censor it.

(00:20):
Now on with the show. From UFOs to psychic powers
and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You
can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't
want you to know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello,

(00:47):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noel. They called me Ben. We're joined as
always with our super producer Paul, Mission Control decand most importantly,
you are you. You are here and that makes this
the stuff they don't want you to know. There's a
big question that many people don't think about as often

(01:07):
as we should, which is simply put this, what does
it mean to be a citizen, whether you're talking about
being a member of a community, a citizen of a
specific nation, or on an international level, a citizen of
the world. And why do so many people so very
often argue that the rights and responsibilities of citizenship are imperiled.

(01:27):
What does it mean to be a citizen in two look?
What should we look forward to? What should we be
mindful of? These are challenging questions and some of these
have been explored for thousands of years, so we didn't
want to tackle them alone. We needed an expert. That
is why today we are thrilled to be joining with
the one and only award winning writer, comedian, philosopher I

(01:52):
would argue, and podcaster Barton day Thurston. Thank you so
much for coming on the show. Also, I know it's
kind of awkward to hear me list off that stuff
like while we're on the call. I gotta do it.
You gotta thank you, Thank you, Ben, Noel and Matt
for having me. Thanks for calling me a philosopher, unlocking
that degree that I paid a lot of money for

(02:13):
I got. I gotta ask you that that. There was
a clip from the new uh Norm McDonald thing where
he says he feels sorry for the real modern day
philosophers when people call comedians the philosophers of the modern day,
So what about the real philosophers of them? You're you're
both kind of that's pretty cool, kind of mean I
stopped at like thesis, I didn't not have right a thesis.
I didn't go to grad school and like pick apart

(02:34):
a single problem. But I'd like to I'd like to
ask questions. I like to pick up part answers that
were given. Um, I mean I think we share that. Actually,
the four of us and listening to your show, we've
got a lot of questions and uh, and I appreciate
the wrestling, the intellectual wrestling, so amateur philosopher proud to
say it. So yeah, we of um quick background for

(02:56):
everybody we connected in person number of months ago, I
can't remember how many at south By Southwest, and we
decided I think we all decided to become fast friends.
Because Matt Nolan, I survived the very difficult proposition of
speaking directly after you. I wish your opening act. It's

(03:21):
pretty honorary positions. It's pretty wrong, I think. Well, I mean,
I don't know, it was cool to see you out
there watching us too, and like you smiled a few times,
and that's how I knew we kind of did okay,
because we did did wrapped by your presentation and just
your whole vibe. It's like, I say, presentation, that's not
what I was. We watch you, you're just speaking, You're speaking.

(03:42):
Perform Yeah, but that's again, I think the performance is
almost a misnumber two. You have to wrap these things
in some performative elements. But I think what you do
is so you and I just love it, even your
ted Tucky. Obviously this is something that you wrote and
that has beats to it, but it just feels like
I'm seeing a person and I'm experiencing a person. I'm

(04:02):
just this is me complimenting you, basically thanking a big fan,
but I love compliments. I'm I'm a rare person that
really appreciates validation. So thank you so much. Well, well
let's let's get into it why you were there and
why we were talking and having those discussions. So you're
an author, You've written a ton of books. I am
probably most interested in keep Jerry Folwell away from my

(04:25):
Oreo cookies. Uh the slightly less Okay, that's little research.
I just gotta pause to acknowledge the real research because
when you said several books, I'm like, he must be
counting the self published ones that kink goes. Yes, oh, yes,
you've also you know you've you've shouted out congressional pages
even in the titles of your books. But but you're

(04:48):
a podcaster and you've you've been making podcast content for
a long time, whether it's as a guest or you know,
creating different shows. But the one we have you on
for today, the one that we really want to talk
to you about, is how whose Citizen? And at that
talk you were you were telling us about why you
made that show, how it came to fruition. I'd love
for you to just tell our audience like that story

(05:11):
just a bit. Yeah, hello audience, I'm Baritunda, and I'm
gonna tell you a story about anger, frustration and transformation
of those emotions into something healthier. It's a little thing
called social emotional learning that some parents are threatened to
buy because they want their kids to be worse than them.
But that's another chapter. So I was I was frustrated.

(05:33):
I was frustrating with the news, something I think you
can identify with. And in my telling and experience, the
news is designed to disempower us. We just hear a
lot of bad news. We hear problems, uh, we hear
about powerful people off in some distance. And the implication
is we the listener, the viewer, the watcher, we're powerless. Uh,

(05:55):
there's all these problems, but there's there's like no one
doing anything about it, and the only thing we're asked
to do is to tune in at eleven for more despair.
And that that story didn't line up with Another part
of my experience was what my actual life, which is
filled with amazing people who are doing things, who are

(06:15):
doing things proactively, constructively, compassionately to try to make whatever
version of their world better. And I was like, why
can't we hear more about those people? Why can't we
be given something to do besides listening to more disaster
and occasionally vote, which is this empowering act, but quite

(06:36):
honestly also a little bit of uh, an abdication kind
of act. It's a it's a deferential act. Um, it's
an outsourcing act. Right, I'm I'm giving an elected person
in some of my power and hope that they act
on my behalf and I get to hold them accountable
a couple of years from now. Um, So voting super important.
I am never never going to say don't vote, but

(06:59):
there are many people who can't uh in in a
few retrograde states because they committed a felony. Uh in
most of the world because their children. Right, there are
a lot of people who exist in this world, who
contribute to this world, who can't vote in this world.
So there's gotta be other ways to exercise that power.
That's a that's a long set up to say. Um.

(07:20):
When faced with such a challenge and such frustration, I
did what anyone who wants to change the world would do,
and I'm inde a podcast, and I called it how
to Citizen to help us interpret citizen as a verb, uh,
not this um noun that we used to divide us
along these borderlines, but instead like, what would it look
like to to to to embody it, what would it

(07:43):
look like to live out as sort of active participation
in our self government beyond just the voting thing. And
so that question has begotten three seasons of episodes, about
fortysothing episodes, and we're gearing up of this moment for
our fourth season. Is he going to be on conspiracies? Oh? Sorry, No,

(08:07):
we have to we have to ask at some point.
But I think there's plenty of us to go around
for sure, and think we're about to kind of talk
about one in terms of like, uh, language and disfluency
and how words beget other words that are kind of
designed to make us think of ourselves differently. Right, Yeah,
that's one of the questions. Yeah. One thing that really

(08:29):
struck me, Um, it was initially learning about how this
citizen is the that exploration of citizenship as a verb.
I mean it's it's no secret, um, at the risk
of sounding cynical, that there are many power structures in
the U s. It would kind of rather you not
vote depending on your demographic and spend a lot of time,

(08:51):
you know, making it boring, making it super inconvenient, difficult
and cryptic. Yes, yeah, exactly. So that gives us the
I think that empowers us to talk about the danger
of passivity. And I'm interested in learning what advantages we
discover when we reframe this concept of citizenship or citizen

(09:14):
real I should say as a verb, like what what
does that mean to citizen? So my wife and I
came up with the sort of belief system that powers
the answer to the question how to citizen? And this
was her insistence. She's like, before we go out here
telling the world, how does citizen, we should understand what

(09:36):
we think it means. And so we consulted the sacred texts,
We looked at the Constitution, Wikipedia, our inner souls and UH.
And we listened to our very early guests who are
kind of co founders of this project because they were
they were chosen especially because they've been wrestling with these questions.

(09:57):
They are philosophers and advocates UM and and active citizens.
One is a woman in Valerie Corps who has written
a beautiful book called Sin No Stranger and and her
shorthand as a stranger as a part of me I
do not yet know. And there's just a beautiful connectedness
and empathy to that which unlocks a whole different set
of relationships. Uh. And then the second guest was Eric

(10:19):
lew who founded something called Citizen University, So me, Elizabeth, Valerie.
Eric had a asynchronous um, you know, constitutional convention and
came up with these four pillars of what it actually
means the citizen. Number one, show up and participate. Just
assume that there's something to be done on that. You

(10:42):
have a role to play. Does an actress sport get
in the field? Um number two two Citizens to invest
in relationships with yourself, with others, with the planet around you.
We can't do the citizen thing alone. Otherwise we're just
a bunch of individual a Tommy units trying to do
everything for ourselves, which is extremist. Like I can't build

(11:06):
a house, I can't make a vaccine. I tried to
make a vaccine. It was a delicious whiskey cocktail, but
it did not stop the COVID. So I need other people.
I selfishly need other people for my own best interests
to be realized. And the planet is other, you know,

(11:27):
it's another part of me as well. And I think
a lot of us have been fed this story that
we're only here to dominate Earth and not to relate
to it and not to contribute to it and to
understand ourselves. I think a lot of us feel pressured
to almost like issue statements as if we were communications
directors on behalf of a major brand or nation state,
and it's like, I don't, I don't know it is

(11:48):
an acceptable response. But we have to create space and
time to get to know and to to check in
with how we feel. And a lot of us, especially
as men, are discouraged from connecting with our emotions in
any healthy way, and so it ends up in violence
quite often because that's acceptable for men. So it's not

(12:10):
just the vote, it's like how we are members of
society together. So I spent a lot of time on
this relationship. Point number three, two citizens to understand power.
And when you say have power structures, um, we have
power in many different forms. This was Eric lose great contribution.
We have power with our money, with our voice, with
our time, with who we spend time with, with where

(12:32):
we place our attention. A lot of us given a
lot of power to TikTok right now because it's very
good at taking our attention. Is that our choices at
serving us um. And then lastly we do all these
things two citizens to deploy all this the showing up
and participating, the investing in relationships. Understanding power. We don't
just do it for our individual selves. We do it

(12:53):
for as I like to think about our collective selves.
And there is there is an eye that's great eater
than just me, right, there is a wee that we
are also a part of. And if we're looking out
for each other and we recognize our interdependence, then when
we're considering others, we're also considering ourselves if we set
things up in a healthy way. And I think in
our country, in particular in the US, we've over indexed

(13:16):
on the the the rugged individualism, and so we've created
this world where we can't trust anyone. It's like deep throws,
trust no one. And so if you don't trust anyone, yeah,
of course you buy thirty guns, and you put the
biggest wall around your house, and you you school your
own kids and your own home, you have your own
basketball court. You you recreate a whole society for one

(13:40):
and that is very inefficient and less joyful. And I
think what you get out of this this is, you know,
you partly asked, like what happens when? What is What
do we get from? What do we feel? What does
it feel like when we're citizening in these ways? We
feel less alone, we feel more supported, we feel more hint,

(14:00):
we feel more secure. Security doesn't just come from my
solo ability to use gun food like John Wick. You know,
it comes from trusting the people around me and that
they'll look out when I'm asleep. And that is a
level of security that's kind of the whole point of
self government and people power. So it's just it's like

(14:23):
the whole thing, the whole The show nailed it, no doubt,
the whole individualistic angle. Like is interesting to me because
a term that always comes to mind when I think
of the word citizen is probably pretty dated at this point,
but I think there's a modern analog of it is
the idea of a citizens arrest. You know, you see
it in like TV shows like cops, shows like I'm

(14:45):
exercising my right and doing a citizen's arrest on you criminal,
But now it's kind of like the people doing citizens
arrests are like Karen's and and casual racists, and oftentimes
it involves killing the person that you're citizen arresting because
they threaten you because they look different than you, or
that you think they're up to no good, when in

(15:06):
fact they're just living their lives and maybe you're even
you've moved into their neighborhood and now they're a threat
to you. Um, but you're just not used to seeing
somebody it looks like them, or doing stuff that that
they're doing that it absolutely poses no threat to you.
Can you talk about that a little bit? It was
it was in your Ted talk you expressed them withly
and just this idea of like the modern day citizens

(15:28):
arrests and what that means. That's a great interpretation. Man,
I've never heard anybody put it that way, and I
hadn't thought of it myself, So thank you. That's the
beauty of like putting anything in the world. Other people
pick it up and they remix it, and you're like, oh,
that's a dope addition to the original traffic okay, um, yeah, yeah.
Many people feel empowered, uh to impose, you know, their

(15:51):
perspective on others. Many people are empowered to have their
fears restrict other folks, and so let me take it
out the abstract world. White people in the United States
have been trained to process their fear of blackness through
the state through the apparatus of policing. Policing one of

(16:16):
its original intentions was as slave catching. I remember when
I found that out, it was just a few years ago.
I'm like, this is the wokest Black lives matterist fact
I have ever heard. Who came up with this? Uh mo, Mia,
you know where did this come from? And it came
from like the National Museum of Policing, you know, in Washington,

(16:37):
d C. Like they acknowledge it on their own website,
and I was like, damn, that's that's really deep. Um.
And so there's a reflex, there's there's an overused muscle
when something, as you put it, feels threatening, other doesn't belong.
We don't engage we broadly. You know, rich people, white people,
like those who have some sense of bubble or security.

(16:57):
But I'm talking in a racial context here. So white
people have been trained you don't say hello. You feel
a certain type of way, you feel threatened because media
has trained you that these people are monsters and they're
probably gonna slit your throat and you know, take your
child from you, burn your house down, like all kinds

(17:18):
of terrible things gonna happen. So it's best to just
call an armed person to the scene instead, uh, Instead
of saying like, hey, what are you doing here? Can
I help you? How are you? It would be like
a really dope response to just seeing a person you've
never seen before. Um. But a lot of folks don't
have practice. They have the other muscle, the fear muscle.

(17:39):
So I think the citizens arrest in that sense that
the calling the cops on the unfamiliar is a logical
extension of a system that has, you know, dehumanized so
many of us and then prevented others from connecting to
their own humanity as well, because it's actually I'm not
just the dehumanized. And in the story, like if your

(18:02):
first response to a stranger is I must call an
armed agent of the state to the scene to deal
with them, then I would contend you've lost some of
your humanity too. We're gonna pause just for a moment
to hear a word from our sponsor and we'll be
back with more. And we've returned. Uh, just had a thought,

(18:27):
I'm gonna try and pieces together. I got you, I
got you. So I'm imagining the same I'm trying to
imagine like one person, right if so, I think about
an example or an allegory, Uh, the person who was
empowered by the state historically to fear the other in
that way in this case blackness. Um, it feels like

(18:49):
in our modern age of technology of interconnectedness through a computer,
that person has lost their faith in the power structures
that empowered them initially to feel that way. So it's
as if, um, I'm i'm I'm I'm seeing this vision
of somebody who um, you know, has so much fear

(19:12):
in their life, as you're talking about building castles around
them to try and protect themselves and their family from
whatever it is that threatens them, is now also afraid
of the economic and governmental structures that like create their power.
I don't I don't know what I'm saying. I'm just
what I get it too. And I think again, y'all

(19:36):
are bringing some new flavors to the recipe. This is exciting.
You're reminding me of a scene out of the movie
Judas and the Black Messiah, which is about chamman Fred
Hampton and the Black Panther Party and Chicago, and he
has the scene where he's, you know, he's been pulling
together this rainbow coalition before Jesse Jackson came on the
scene with that ton of of black panthers, of of

(19:58):
Puerto Rican activists, uh, and of poor white folks. And
he rolls up in this gathering of I think it's
called the Young Patriots, but I don't hold me to it.
People should look it up, do your own research, but
they just look it up. And then he gets up there,
he starts giving a speech to you know, these very
young racists, white races and He's like, what if the

(20:19):
slaves and the poor white folks that got together and
slip the masses through. Uh, you know, your your schools
are shitty as our schools. The cops disrespect you as
much as they disrespect us, but they got you thinking
that you're one of them. And so what you've described
reminds me of that speech Rosey, that scene, because you've
got an apparatus that was set up explicitly to benefit

(20:42):
certain folks at most at the top of that list, landowning.
Why you know, Christian Protestant men and more people got
included into that club. Over time, white women got included more,
other immigrant white groups that were considered animals got elevated
to human and then to white um. And so we

(21:04):
set up all these legal and economic structures like you
can buy a house, you can't buy a house um,
and you serve in this way, and you don't serve
in this way, and you get this type of education,
and you live near the pollution. And the problem with
that system is that it didn't really benefit a lot
of those white people either. It was a nice divide
and conquered game um that benefited those at the very

(21:27):
top even more and folks are rightly angry, you know.
Let's let's let's get more specific this. Let's give a
caricature of just a poor white man who's not rich,
never felt privileged day in his life, working class. The
system is not really working that great. No opioids, suicide
rates are up for this group of people. The wealth

(21:49):
and equality, no good jobs. But that guy's only been
told well, you're better than these motherfucker's, and and and
and before or he's even encouraged to think he's given
an answer. It's the Muslims, it's the Mexicans, it's the
trans kids. It's the black guy in Chicago gang banging.

(22:13):
It's Obama, it's George Sorross, it's the bankers. Like it's
a whole story, is prepackaged and shipped, ready to go.
It's like fast food that comes to your house, right
into your ears. Right. Yes, his anger is so justified.

(22:35):
He has been bamboozled, he's been shook, he's been hoodwinked.
But he's got it twisted, you know. And and he's
been made to victimize even as he's being victimized, and
and to turn on right. It's just that's that well,
practiced muscle. It's probably these black people, it's probably these monkeys,
it's probably these immigrants. That is, um, it's a very

(22:59):
effective rategy for keeping people dis empowered, and it doesn't
have to be the only way. Well Lyndon Johnson, you know,
uh completely, you know went on record. We would later
find saying the same, like very much the same thing,
uh for albeit for his own Machabellian purposes, right. But
the thing that I think can help in those sorts

(23:24):
of explorations something to let me make sure I'm saying
this correctly. I'm not gonna beat I'm gonna keep Paul
are keeping it in. I'm gonna figure this out. Uh.
So we also see I think this, uh, this really
interesting tendency that I wasn't aware of for many years,
which was in the halls of government, people started like

(23:48):
elected representatives who in theory represent you, Like, they started
using the word consumer instead of citizen, like in place
of that. And it was one of these moments where
you look around and you think, am I the only
one who gets it? It's like when I figured out
the main ingredient and soy sauce is soy, and I

(24:08):
was like, oh, I thought that was just the name
because I don't really think about it and this like,
I'm so glad you have this platform, pin So I
do that every every week I get one of those
obvious like to everyone else except me, Oh that's my

(24:29):
wife was like, I thought you were smart man. Thank you,
I think. But that's the other thing in in what
I love about what you're saying about a greater I
called a wee is the idea that in the ways
that matter, people are very much in the same boat.
And there is you know, we go back and forth

(24:51):
on this show, uh, questioning the amount of intention behind
things like um feeding people prepackaged fear responses. You know,
is this something that is like is there really some
shadowy cabal in a lobby lobbying firm in Washington going

(25:15):
And then they'll think of Pelosi, like to what do
the actual like Senator Palpatine, you know, yeah, yeah, like
with the Marty Burns fingers and everything like this. The
big question that I know a lot of our listeners
constantly asked themselves as well, is how much of these

(25:36):
sorts of larger like macro situations, how much are they
by design? And if so, to what degree. Yeah, So
so I stumbled into the meeting one day. It was
a guy named Jerry, a guy named Bob. They had
these big cigars. They were dividing up land, they were
ranking the races, they were determining what currencies we're going

(25:57):
to go up the next week. And uh, I just
I didn't want to get to aised. I just I've
moved on to the next room, which is a nice
little Pokemon meeting. Um, these people do there. There is
intention and and there is culture. Um. I'm remembering one
other thought on the previous point we were discussing. When
I think about the Charlottesville tiki torch valley, and you

(26:20):
will not replace us, and Jews will not replace us,
and and these men for whom this whole system was designed,
like the system is rigged against me. There there's an
absurdity there, um and and I think it's the absurdity
of the entitled actually approaching a fairer marketplace and not

(26:41):
knowing what to do with themselves because it feels tilted
against them when you actually have to put forth a
little more effort. Um. I want those guys to be
liberated from that mindset. You know, it's it's is to
buy so many guns for fear of a government that's
still structured to advantage you. That's a your your mind

(27:05):
super twisted on that. It's really like it's literally your
government still your but both sides are like rigging the
game against you. Like I don't know, I don't want
to send to whack job. I just mean, it's just
it's an umbrella, man, and they're all in it for
goals and ends that are beyond our pay grade and
that we will never benefit from or or or you know,

(27:28):
you know, be able to revel in no matter who
you are, no matter how white you are, whatever, Like
it's just not a thing. And like I'm again to
your point. I'm not saying don't vote is the best
we've got, but dan, if I don't feel so disempowered
no matter where, there's a whole big ra ra when
you have like an Obama victory or you know, to
a much lesser degree of Biden victory, or whatever side

(27:49):
of the fence you're on. But that's all just kind
of smoking mirrors too. It's like, oh, here's a little
shot of dopamine and then let's get right back to
the status quo. Where I mean, yeah, Obama's election and
for me was like yay, Biden's election was like who
totally different, totally different exclamation. Um. I think to the

(28:10):
system design perspective. UM, I don't subscribe to Illuminati level
explanations for why things are the waere they are. I
think incentives explain a lot. Um. I think culture can
get established, and we can as humans, which is very
capable of creating perverse culture that doesn't really serve most

(28:35):
of us, but it rewards enough of us that we
stay in it, and and most of us don't like
any kind of change. Most of us are very risk
averse people. So over decades and centuries, we end up
in in the absurd situation of like, oh, we're in
the wealthiest country in the world and also like the
largest number of unhoused people, in the largest prison population,

(28:56):
and the largest poverty rate and the largest maternal mortality rate.
We clearly quantifiably have the resources to take care of
more of us, but we've got this story of like, well,
if you're poorer, then you're also a bad person, you're
immoral in some way. If you're rich, you clearly earned
it and worked hard. It's not because we set up
the tax code to advantage you and homeowners, which is

(29:18):
only available to wealthier people. It's because you're just more
worthy as a person. And it's not just rich people
who accept that, it's poor people too, And so poor
people out here like, man, what did I do wrong?
I'm not. I guess I gotta pray harder, you know,
and rich people like I guess I'm just that great,
you know. I just I must be so amazingly great

(29:40):
that I should pay less in taxes on a percentage
basis than the poor person. That's my spiritual reward, my
fiscal reward from my quality spirit. And I don't think
a teeny tiny committee decided all these little things. But
I think we concentrated enough decision making authority and enough resources,
and we only ask the people winning from those resources

(30:03):
to set the rules for themselves, which I would do.
Like if if I'm five years old and you say
make your dietary rules, I'm like ice cream, ice cream,
ice cream, all the freaking ice cream. What you're not
gonna get someone like voluntarily broccoli, you know, it's just
like it can't compete with ice cream. And so we

(30:26):
we we're supposed to have checks and balances. We're supposed
to have real representation. But even that system has also
been captured, you know, by folks for whom the system
is already disproportionately working. So it excuse even further, and
we end up, you know, in this very unhealthy place.
We're in a super it's like the calmest way I
could describe this the embers of civil divorce slash civil war.

(30:51):
We're in now. It's very unhealthy and and it's just
getting more exaggerated. Okay, hold up one second, let's take
a quick pause. We're gonna hear a word from responsor
than we back with more of this conversation with barretton
Day Thurston. And we've returned, let's get back into it.

(31:12):
I'm thinking back to two thousand four, Baritone Day, when
you were writing better than Crying, and you know, you're
talking about President Cheney excuse me, Vice President Cheney, and
that purposeful about just thinking about the problems that we
were facing at the time. You're tackling them with comedy,
and like, like the title says, it's better than crying,

(31:35):
we can at least poke fun at the absurdity that's
occurring right now the people that we've elected to represent us.
And I'm just wondering in your mind as you've watched
politics evolve in our interconnectedness through social media and the
way we can all comment now and we can all
get on Twitter and say something, Um, how has the

(31:55):
discourse evolved on the way we think? I know it's
it's hard, yeah speak for the whole internet bear Tonday,
But I mean, what have you observed? How have you
observed a discourse on politics change throughout those years since
two I'm a long time UM user and practitioner of

(32:16):
the technological arts. I mean, I've been on life since
ninety three ish with dial upe bulletin boards. My mother
was a computer programmer. I was born way back in
seventy seven, and I've had a computer in my house
since maybe six years old, which was super rare for
anyone of any means, any religion, any race, anywhere in
the world. So I'm in a one percent of my

(32:38):
own just that stat alone. And so I mostly was like, Yeah,
technology is awesome, Like it's empowering and everybody has a voice,
and that's this beautiful thing. We're all connected, um, and
it's still a beautiful thing. There's so much good. There
are a lot of people who find a community that
were previously alone. But it's not just uh sort of

(32:58):
subjugated minority ease. It's not just previously um marginalized folks.
It's also Nazis. Like Nazis used to have to work
a lot harder to find other Nazis. You have to
like create a print zine and put ads in like
a newspaper classified section with a p O box, and
someone have to mill you a check, and you have

(33:20):
to meet up at like the roadside stand at an
odd hour. You have to try hard. And now the
algorithms find you and validate you. And so the discourse
isn't just among people, it's among machines, intermingled with people
who have far less of a sense of morality. They're

(33:42):
optimizing for a different outcome. They're optimizing for popularity, they're
optimizing for time on site and time on screen and engagement,
these very neutral terms, quantifiably neutral, but morally very skewed. UM.
And And I think that in that behavior where everybody
gets this right to like address the whole world instantly,

(34:07):
UM without a sense of responsibility for that right, has
infected I r LL. Now, so we have members of
Congress from multiple party perspectives performing like Tiktoker's on the
floor of Congress Georgia. You know, yeah, watch a political

(34:32):
ad in Georgia. I had a friend visiting from l
A and there were these political ads with like anti
trans like that, you know, the gays are infecting the
minds of our Do they just say that on TV?
It's insane. So the comments section is in our legislative
bodies and like the worst parts of the comments section.

(34:53):
But it comes back to because I want to I
can do a real good diagnosis like anybody else. I'd
like to get my prescriptive head on for a sec
because I set up this podcast how does This? And
dot com because I was tired of just like it
it's all bad, and so yeah, we the internet has
helped um corrode all of our institutions and helped reveal

(35:15):
them for for what they were doing and what they
were not doing that they said they were doing. And
so our trust and everything is lower than it's ever been.
Like every like the NBA, the church, the state, the banks,
like anything with the in front of it. We're like,
I'm not messing with that anymore. You know. It's just
like I got I do my own research. But we

(35:36):
set our internet up in a particular way, and we
use the word community when we did it, but what
we were really setting up were commercial establishments, were malls.
We set up a place for business and we called
it a public square. And we had a guest on
our podcast, Eli Paris er Um in this most recent season,

(35:57):
and it's like, what if everywhere you and a acted
with anyone it was a mall. What if you went
to church inside the mall. What if your dates for
all at the mall. What if your gym was at
the mall. What if you're where you took your kids
to learn how to walk? What's at the mall? That's
what Facebook is, That's what Twitter is. We're asking them

(36:19):
to be all this other stuff when they're the mall
and and we've just thrown people in called them a community,
but it's not it. That's not any community that I'm
a part of for real. I know, to people, there's
a sense of like we're here for a shared reason,
whether it's pickleball or justice, you know, like, and there's expectations,

(36:43):
there's norms, there's a sense of like this is out
of line. We don't do that here. And there's some
kind of warm up before I have like a full
membership experience. There's there's an unofficial probationary period where the
kids who are already at the school show the new
kids what's up. You don't give the new kid at
a new school the microphone at a symbol and say

(37:04):
say whatever you want about anybody right now. It's free speech.
Free speech, that's insane, Like we have free speech, but
we restrain ourselves out of a sense of shared commitment,
out of a sense of responsibility and belonging and and

(37:25):
what we want to experience. I don't just want to
hear people yelling what's on their minds all the time.
But that's what Twitter is that in the damn community,
so we can build community. And all of these sites
have community terms and they're not it's just gatherings of people,
it's audiences. It's they're mining us literally in our data.

(37:45):
But it's not the kind of rules and norms that
you're talking about. And it's like these are the kind
of rules they had just over time to make it
less not sified, maybe, but it's still too little, too
late on the back end, you know, they weren't no
one who understood how how people enjoy gathering was involved
in setting up these digital gathering spaces. For the most part,

(38:09):
there are others, you know, we had a guest on
from the from Bahrain, little teeny TEENI Middle Eastern nation.
She set up this on social media network for lgbt
Q plus people in the Middle East. So by some
definitions in those countries, she's she set up a network
for criminals, for people who are punished violently for being

(38:32):
who they are. So she had to be very cautious
and careful how she set this up. And they made
trolling so difficult because on day one, you don't just
get the keys to the whole site. You gotta go
on board. You gotta like just you're in read only
mode for like seven days. Then you get to unlock
these different sections of the site. Then you get the
ability to tag somebody else in a message. And but

(38:53):
you've got to behave a certain way you you unlock
the privileges like any healthy environment we've all been a
part of. So nine months later you have pretended to
be a good person and now you want to start
doxing someone like that doesn't That doesn't happen most people.
Most trolls are lazy, just like most stammers, like you

(39:15):
do it because it's cheap and easy. I can send
a death threat to every member of Congress in the
next thirty seconds. Why is it so easy? Tax that ship? Right,
That's such an interesting concept because you're essentially providing exposure
therapy to somebody who may have like homophobic views and
then immersing them in that community. That's really that's great impisodes.

(39:38):
I think that is um. Her name is Estra al Shaffi.
It's E. S R. A. And it's in the season three.
I don't know the episode number, and I can't think
of the title of the second. It's something about scale,
like scale is bullshit, but we we all you know,
can benefit from that. And I am very guilty of
just having judgments about people who I don't experienced with.

(40:01):
And I show up with my talking points and I
grab whatever the latest factory that the internet gave me,
and I'm like, I'm informed, here's my opinion. And I
don't start with a question. I start with the imposition
of an answer. And that's not good for me either.
It's not like I'm just saying, like conservative right wing
people are uniquely wrong. We are all wrong, but we

(40:23):
have created tools where we're made to feel righteous, uh
as well as right and then justified in that right
nous as really not healthy and it's exhausting. It's actually
exhausting to get angry about everything all the time. I think,
I'm sorry, I'm ranting. You're in You're in the right place, sir,
and you want to shout out that has moved slow

(40:44):
and fixed things. Season three, episodes four, thank you for
suing what I was too lazy to do. We're a community.
I'm like, I don't know what's a podcast episode? Is
there any where I could figure out who was on
my show to I like, I mean the idea though,

(41:06):
of funk, it's brilliant, you know, the idea of um
earning trust, right, that's another big part of a community.
I love the I love the school analogy. I love
the idea of this great mall because you know, whenever
we hear people talking um often you know, like tune
in at the six o'clock news for more bad shit. Uh,

(41:29):
as you said, they there's this notion that the private
for profit entities, the metas the um you know, the Twitters, etcetera,
should have some sort of moral compass. And that's if
there is a definition of morality for a large for

(41:51):
profit entity, It's morality is profit year over year. That's
kind of the closest that gets to so. But the
question then comes, how can one how how can one
attempt two build an actual community in this mall that's
going to be stuck in my head? Got to be

(42:11):
from scratch. You can't legislate, you know, these other they're
not selling this product that you're describing, and and it
doesn't make sense for them to sell it because you
you talked about scale. You can't scale this with Facebook.
It's too much work. People don't want to work something.
If your goal is to generate as much attention as possible,

(42:33):
you'll do one thing. If your goal is to create
as much of a sense of belonging and community as possible,
you'll do another thing. Um And a lot of the
way our Internet was built its financed by a very
small group of people who wanted one thing, to get
rich as fast as possible. They were rich people who
wanted to get ten times richer they were. There were
millionaires who wanted to be billionaires, and that's cool, like

(42:55):
I want to make more money than I make, um,
But they took that desire and used it to design
our de facto public space, and that's not a choice
we should have to go along with. We should have
digital public spaces, is what what you know Eli and
his organization New Public's perspective is. And I like that. Um,
I think the I don't know, I think too many things.

(43:19):
I am there there is a limit to even my
own sense of faith and like our ability to do
the self governing thing so that we all have a
good and positive experience. And it was something one of
you said a little while back, just about the vote,
and it's like, yeah, I know, oh you know. You

(43:40):
were like, I don't want to knock voting, but I
don't know how effective it is. Right. I can see
you like struck and we have like the numbers are in.
Our representatives don't represent us, you know, their their votes
aligned more with their donors than with their constituents. We
also can see when of US wants something like universal

(44:01):
background checks on firearms sales, we still don't get it
because fifty people refuse to do their jobs. That's not working.
That's broken. We see the electoral college, you know, giving
a ton of influence two states with far fewer people,
the same states that held slaves, which was partly why
it was designed that way. So you go back to

(44:21):
system design. There is a great vast conspiracy, but it's
out in the open. You know, it's in It's in
the Constitution in certain ways, and so you don't need
to go as far as like George Soros to arrive
at some of that stuff. You can go to our
phone founding fathers um and be like, oh, they they
did that. Are we gonna fix it? They gave us
an amendable constitution to are we gonna change it. We're

(44:41):
gonna make equal rights amendment as well for women. Maybe.
So I don't know this stuff, Um. At this very moment,
I'm a bit on the knife's edge of I'm a
hopeful self. I believe in we the people, and I'm
just like, what the fuck? What is going? Like? Where
do we draw the line at these you know, whether

(45:05):
it's the shootings or the row roll back, the Buffalo
or the Vivaldi or by the time you hear this
insert new tragedy, it's a template now and and that is,
um are the inability and unwillingness of our government to
actually represent the will of the people on the healthy

(45:25):
interests of the people. It is a failure and we
we have to we have to fix that or else
they'll just keep failing. And so I'm looking for answers myself.
I have a few ideas, but I have nothing like
a here's what we do. It's weirdly, Richard, because I
was talking to uh, to some of my associates who
are not based in the US, and I think there's

(45:48):
there's a danger in human psychology. It can be beautiful,
but it's dangerous how quickly the strangest things and the
most unclean things become normalized. Right, Like it's just always
been that way. Talking to talking to somebody from you know,
South America, talking to somebody from you know, the Middle
East or Australia or something you to, and they will

(46:11):
ask about politics, about the vote, right, you say, Well,
people are very sticker motivated for the most part. So
about every four years we get in line because we
want to have a sticker to post on social media. Uh,
and we you know, it's voting. So there's like not really, um,
not really bribery, and they're like, well, okay, what what

(46:35):
do you have? Then? Like what we call it lobbying
because those those votes are you just can't say the
B word, but you can still do the game. And
so it's tough with money. Uh, you know, it gets
reduced down to it's like thought terminating cliche of money
and politics until people get bored terminating cliche. Not our invention.

(46:57):
But I think it works, Um, so what like that's
one of the that's one of the big questions in
my mind is the you know, people are incredibly intelligent
for the most part. People are extraordinarily intelligent and can
smell bullshit about a kilometer away, right if they really

(47:18):
think about it. But I I think as a result
of that, it's it is highly unlikely that anybody who
really pays attention to what a system is supposed to
be in theory, right, and it's aspirational form versus what
we see in practice. Do when you are talking with

(47:40):
with these great minds on how to citizen do you
do you find yourself in your guests kind of like
I'm word salady already, I'm falling into a cycle of
like this sucks, but then also this sucks, and then
also I'll keep going, Um, do you feel like do
you feel like how to citizen? Um, whether it's you

(48:00):
all or guests arrive at at concrete. You know these
are things to do. Now, I know that's a big
part of it. Yes, yes they do. It is a setup. Um.
The short answer, which I've been terrible at during this time,

(48:22):
is yes. Uh. We we created a template ourselves to
make sure to put action in every episode, and so
we give people kind of three ways to approach whatever
the topic is. And the first is like a personal reflection.
I think of it as like single player mode. You
can do this by yourself, you don't need anybody else. Uh.

(48:43):
The other is is be informed and so you like,
go learn something, go get out of here a little more.
And then the third is publicly participate and that's the multiplayer. Uh.
It's a real time mode because it takes all three levels. Um.
We reflecting as I think really important. I mentioned it earlier,
but I think a lot of us just skip that stage.

(49:04):
And so we just have all these emotions and they
show up at a school board meeting screaming at teachers
for being groomers. Right, that's just an emotional response, like
reading off or prompter without just thinking like do I
feel like this is this how I want to show
up in my community right now? Is this the image?

(49:25):
Is this the lasting image I want my neighbors to
have of me with like a pitchfork, screaming at the
school board for grooming kids, for just like trying to
have a book on the shelf that has two moms
in it. But we don't pause there, like we're just
so quick to act. So I think again, the same
with the like you know, investing in relationship with yourself.

(49:47):
So every episode, we've got sets of actions. We've got
over a hundred things that people can do. We have
how does citizen dot com with like a catalog of action?
And there is salvation, Uh, there is m some satisfaction
in the local And I think a lot of us,

(50:07):
you know, we were we have nationalized our sense of
citizenship and the conversation about it. We just think of
like America and the country. It's like, well that's a construct.
You know if we think about like our neighborhood, maybe
we think about our city, but even a lot of
us live in massive cities that are beyond human scale.

(50:28):
Are we looking out for are we connected with the
people right around us? Are we showing up? Do we
even know where the nearest elementary school is? Are we
volunteering there? Do we have a relationship there? I'm asked
these are question I really asked myself right now, like
I don't have kids, but there are many schools right around.
I joined the school walkout just last week. It wasn't

(50:50):
a plan. I was so angry. I've been crying all
weeks in between meetings and flights. And I went for
a walk a very aggressive height to just try to
wet out some of his anger. And I took a
turn that wasn't anticipated when I don't usually take, and
I heard these chanting now jos Dad, no peace, now,
Joss Dad, now peace, and the very young voices. I

(51:12):
see these kids coming down the street and they've got
their signs and they're like, take our guns, not our children,
take our guns, not our children. And I started crying.
I'm like just chanting with them, so proud of you.
I'm so sorry we failed you. And I walked like
fifteen minutes with them, and people are hawking and they're cheering,

(51:33):
and you can just see their raw emotion. Like high
school is supposed to be torture, but not like this. Right,
it's supposed to suck and hurt, but not like this.
It's supposed to be for for puberty and hormones and
acne and first everything's first loves and first kisses, not

(51:55):
first shootings. You know so, but but I, you know,
as much as I was ranting and like consuming and
downloading and tweeting, I felt the best when I was
physically next to people who were even closer to this challenge.
And I didn't lead the march, I didn't organize ship.

(52:16):
I was trying to get coffee, but I paid attention
and I joined in for like fifteen twenty minutes, and
I put them on ig Live and interviewed a few
of them are trying to amplify their thing, and they
were happy to have some support. And I had a
healthy outlet for my rage for a moment. And I
think all of us need to to double down on that,

(52:40):
you know, find something close to us that we can
really sink our teeth into, put wrap our arms around.
There's no shortage of challenges, but there's also no shortage
of people approaching those challenges. You know, with a spirit
of citizen ng Um. So I want us all to
I'm trying to. I'm selling myself right now on my

(53:02):
own belief system because it's been hard. It's been a
hard couple of weeks. Well, I was going to thank
you specifically for making, uh your podcast descriptions so robust,
Like you put some of those actions that you can
take in the podcast description, so as you're listening, you
can read some of those actions and literally take notes.

(53:23):
You should be taking notes when you listen to how
to Citizen, by the way, Uh, thanks for that. Yeah.
And and the website, we have full transcripts. You know,
we want people to I want to make it accessible.
Search the site, like look for your thing. We had
a really dope episode, bonus episode about homelessness, and like
there are things we know that work, and a lot
of our leaders and multiple cities and counties and states

(53:47):
are just failing us. And that's not a that's not
a party thing either. You know, I'm a registered Democrat.
I've lived only in cities. Well, No, New York had
Bloomberg for a time, um, and Boston we had of
a looking governor. So I've probably lived more diverse set
than I imagine. At any rate, my county here in
Los Angeles has been flagrantly negligent, having raised billions of

(54:12):
dollars for the problem, spending like six hundred thousand dollars
per unit of housing. That's dumb, that's wasteful, that is ineffective.
But we had someone on who has a better way.
And so now it's up to me to like go
to a meeting or write a letter, or join in
a volunteer effort to try to give more momentum to
the thing that is actually working and not just STU.

(54:33):
That's that's what I wanted to get to In the
second season, you focus on economics. At least to my ears,
that seems what you did, and you have all these takeaways.
I wonder if there's anything you can impart to us
anybody listening that maybe was able to somehow, against all odds,
save just a little bit of money. That that's extra,
Like what the heck should we do with that money

(54:54):
in order to help each other in our community? Where
should we pay? Am so glad you asked my My
crypto walidy address is barely commendating. And if you just
want to shoot that on over. Uh, the people. It's
all for the people. Okay, So you just hook do

(55:15):
their part and I will I'll take so Lana as well.
We can work and from a multi chainer, a multi chainer.
That's a really that's a really good question. So to
two things come to mind. One is banking. Uh, when

(55:38):
we put our money in a bank, we are giving
an institution power, right we are. We are distributing our
power and saying, hold this for me and do whatever
you want with it, to multiply it and give me
like a half a percent, maybe one percent if we're

(55:59):
in an aggression of you know, high yield savings account
two point right. And meanwhile, you can go do credit
default swaps and all kinds of highly leverage nonsense. And
with my money, um, and you can extract it from
my community and ship it to places that have no
benefit to the people I love, no would care about.

(56:21):
We can make a different choice with our bank. Well,
if it's ten dollars in the bank, if it's a
hundred thousand dollars in the bank, who do you want
to benefit from your money? Think about that? Think about
it like that. I don't think about it, just it's like,
who's got the best app or who's got the most
present brand? Who are who are you excited to let

(56:44):
into your house? You know it's your money, it's your
you worked for it, and he's gonna give it to
some random company. Again, I'm talking to myself. I still
bank with Chase. I'm working on it. Well, it's hard
to entangle sometimes, so call me and uh while we're
in the pre show. Yeah, they knew this conversation was coming.

(57:06):
They're trying to they're trying to cut you off, to
offer you a sweet deal. We've done whole episodes on
how crooked and horrible Wells Fargo is. And yet I'm
just lazy and I'm still with Wells Fargo and say,
but I'm a cop touer right now. You know that's
a that's a great So we're all acknowledging. Yeah. I
wrote an episode about how terrible they are, and then

(57:28):
after we recorded, I like had to call them and
it was like, so, can can we put our resources
in a in a co op instead of a bank?
Can we put it in a locally owned bank. Can
we put it in a minority owned bank? Can we
put it in something that's like grounded in the neighborhood.
Can we put in a facility that pays taxes, you know,

(57:49):
and then their charities though, like, why aren't there banks
that are set up to just do good work. Well,
that's a co op, that's a that's a cop. So
a co op is a member owned financial institution, like
a farmer's market co op, you know, like like a
worker co op. And we had two episodes in that
season about cooperatives, and one that really comes to mind

(58:09):
is a it's called the episodes called Land Without Landlords Um,
and it's about West Oakland and a group called the
East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. And basically, you know,
people in Oakland are are getting run out of Oakland
because the money is coming. The wave of tech money
and and tweet white people and electric scooters and five

(58:33):
dollar teeny tiny coffee drinks is coming. And and we've
decided as a nation, through our inaction, that money rules everything. Uh,
and if you have it, you can have a decent life,
and if you don't, you're gonna suffer. So they decided
to pull their resources and buy a bunch of buildings together,
and they governed it together. And they decide who what

(58:55):
types of businesses they want, what types of art institutions,
and provide you know, supportive housing there in a way
that a commercial developer. We haven't set up capitalism to
make that probably, dude, I want to do that. We could,
we haven't yet, and so we said, look, housing is
a stock like anything else. Housing is ah is a

(59:17):
speculative venture. Now it's it's like does And they're like, oh,
the crypto market such a scam, it's such a pyramid scheme.
Have you looked at the housing market. Well, you're just buying.
You're just buying that crypto because you wanted to go
up and value. You're not really interested in the underlying
utility of the coin a housing people, we just buy

(59:40):
houses as investments now, not as homes. And that's a
game that everybody plays because it's what we're all trying
to do. So, you know, we there are other there
are other models for us to subscribe to. And I
think for someone out there who's sitting on a buck
or a million, where you keep your money and how
you try to combine it with others, there's a lot

(01:00:01):
we can do just on that front. Um And also
listen to Season two there's a lot of answers in
that one last dianability because like, I just bought butt
a house, so I've been kind of neck deeping a
lot of this stuff. But like you know, here in Atlanta,
and I'm sure this is the case in many, many
other cities, but it's so difficult for first time or
anybody to buy a house here because you're competing with

(01:00:22):
these developers that can pay cash, and so they come
to the table immediately just by the fact that by
virtue of the fact they're paying cash, they trump any
other normal couple that does want to have a home
or that does maybe maybe you're a made up term
because it's probably not real, but like a benevolent landlord,
or you want to buy houses and rent it for
affordable market rates and not just like check up the price.

(01:00:44):
You can't compete with these developers because if the seller
thinks that they're gonna not have any chance of losing
the sale because of financing falling through whatever, they're gonna
go with the cash offer. But like you made, you
made the point of like we're not set up for
this kind of thing to work for actual human beings. Wow,
what does that look like? How can you legislate and

(01:01:05):
make it where these developers can't just buy up every
available piece of land in the city to the point
where it jacks up the rent for people that have
been living there for generation. Dude, we were talking about
before you jumped on likely. We absolutely were. And the
fun thing is, I do have answers for everything. I
don't know if they're the right answers, but I will

(01:01:25):
just share. Like I remember living in New York. I
was there for twelve years. I left three years ago,
and and feeling what I will call again the wave
of money, where the housing is occupied by money rather
than people, and and so you have empty apartments sitting
there just as investments you're rising and value but not

(01:01:48):
providing homes and experiences and community for human beings. We
can make difference sets of rules that limit how many
units of housing a commercial to tea can own and operate.
You know, we can make a transparency requirement on a
company like Airbnb with the city to make sure that

(01:02:09):
folks aren't turning long term apartments into short term hotels,
and that one that neighborhoods aren't being totally swallowed up.
You can put a cap you know, Palm Springs has
put a cap on percentages of a neighborhood that can
be short term rented so that there's still a sense
of belonging. No one, very few people want to live

(01:02:30):
in a hotel or in a resort or like a
hotel strip environment or else. We'd all just moved to
Vegas and that's that's a place you only should go
for no more than four days at a time. You
can't live in that year around, not on the strip.
That's insane, but that's what we've turned. But so there's insensives. Now.
The problem, you know, it's like our legislative process is

(01:02:51):
bought by the people making money off the legislative rules
in place and ensuring that. So that requires democracy reform,
same with gum or form saying with all this stuff.
So the money and politics thing is a big, you
know phrase, but there's tangible things we can do to
limit it. Public financing of campaigns, transparency even about the

(01:03:12):
people raising all this money that's unaccountable, you know, to
to us the people. Term limits uh combination of things
and districts that don't look like spaghetti, that actually correlate
to neighborhoods and not, you know, an incumbent protection racket.
And then also you are you brought up lobbying like
we banish bribery. But I mean, it's just that's a

(01:03:40):
funny thing. They tell us call your member of Congress,
and when we call there on the phone with the donor,
you know what I mean, like, we don't have we
don't have the Yeah, they're in a meeting. So make
the donors get in line with us. We there's there's
a handful the things that I think would make a really,

(01:04:01):
really big difference. But in terms of this housing thing, yo,
it's I don't think we'll do most of this anytime soon.
I think we'll just live with the horrible consequences of
an action further until it reaches an even more severe
breaking point. But we all have our limits, and you know,
Occupy Wall Street represented a limit for a lot of people,

(01:04:23):
and they were just like, enough, we are occupying these
physical spaces. The civil rights movement represents a threshold. People
just had enough. We're gonna sit in on this counter,
we're gonna occupy this space, we're gonna march, We're gonna
coordinate with legislative strategies as well. So we're not just
quote unquote marching, so I we are approaching that. I

(01:04:44):
see it already with climate stuff and with the next generation,
the tolerance is thinner, you know. And I'm with them.
They're they're occupying like oil tankers and whatnot over in
England like Greta and all the kids who are taken
under the Friday's Office school to protest. It's building up. Um,
So be ready to um to stand with. You know,

(01:05:05):
when you're walking down the street, I see a group
of kids marching for their lives. At least, be ready
to join them. Yes, and this is you know, I
knew we were going to run into this as soon
as we were actually hanging out again. But we have
so much more stuff to explore, and Matt Noll, I
know that you guys have like we have transparency, right,

(01:05:30):
we have this document right with all the with all
these questions, and there's stuff that we were thinking about
and I'm going through it like I might save that
when we want to prioritize and be respectful of your time.
But we absolutely must have you return on this show
again if you are at all interested, because we've we've

(01:05:51):
had a wide ranging conversation touching on things that affect
every imaginable listener to this show. You know, and I
want to thank you uh for creating How the Citizen,
and I know it could not be easy, even when
it feels worthwhile sometimes, especially when Ben h thank thank

(01:06:13):
you all, thank you all for Ben Madden off of
having me, I have lost track of time completely, And
that is a huge compliment because it's hot in this
room and I could talk with y'all for hours. I
already already can feel it. We can just keep riffing.
I mean, I we didn't even get to my background

(01:06:33):
with conspiracy theories and like I was early to the game,
I was early to the game pre x files, like
early bulletin board stuff. Um, actually i'll drop a name.
Maybe one of your listeners will recognize. Sherman Skolnick was
um a Chicago based like he had the Citizens something court. Anyway,

(01:06:54):
he had crazy theories about like Bill Clinton's inauguration and
how there's a temp just filled the Japanese televisions and
like mind controlled. I used to eat that stuff up.
I was on Alex Jones, but not physically on the show.
I was listening to him before he was supernationally syndicated
and then dangerously disruptive to our whole democracy. Um. So

(01:07:15):
he was kind of interesting. I mean he was sort
of like a being so harmful and then he you know,
tipped on that spectrum of entertainment to destruction, towards destruction. UM.
I classify a lot of pundity type people in that category.
They got high on their own supply and and and

(01:07:36):
they started making money, uh, increasing the extremity you know,
of their comments, and they got disconnected from reality. Um
on purpose. I think most of them know that what
they're peddling is bullshit, but it's serving them um. And
so they're actually they don't have listeners, they have victims. Uh.
It's it's funny. There's a projection by all these people
like they're the predators, they're the groomers right there. They're

(01:08:00):
people for white supremacy, right Like they're softening up and
making palatable terminology and language that it should be absolutely
not accepted in society. But that's not that's me warming
up rather than cooling down. So I, um, may I
plug one, may I plug one project? Okay? Okay, so

(01:08:20):
I made a television show um for PBS that's airing
this summer. It's called America Outdoors with Barritune day Thurston,
and it is it feels disconnected from everything we've been
talking about, but it's actually very connected to everything we've
been talking about because I had the privilege of traveling

(01:08:42):
for six weeks in the summer of one week per location,
one location per episode, interacting with Americans of every kind
of background, of every kind of ability, um and ancestry,
who all have a deep connection to the outdoors. There
were trumpy waterman in the chest of Peak Bay. There
were you know, woke black surfers in l A. There

(01:09:04):
were indigenous you know nations in Minnesota harvesting while rice. Uh.
There there were ranchers in Idaho and mountain bikers too.
So there's something kind of in this show for everyone.
And I think for all the discord and disconnect and despair, uh,
I was so absolutely recharged by investing in that relationship

(01:09:29):
with others and with nature. At the same time, I
think if the shows like how do Citizen Outside um
and it's it's just with all the screen stuff and
the algorithms and everything we've been talking about, how easy
it is to not want to say hello or to
ask a question and to immediately other And I think
that applies not only you know, between white people seeing

(01:09:49):
black people are someone that doesn't look like them. It's
like the same with neighbors that look the same. It's
just the people see white people not talk to other
white people. And I'm like, but you have so much.
But I think one thing that we all have in common,
and I think that you know, Matt, you're so good
at this and there's something that we all share. But
you know, Matt will just strike up a conversation with
a stranger and get their life story out of them,

(01:10:11):
you know, in the first like five minutes of the conversation,
and it is a gift, um. But I think we
all genuinely value that, and that's what makes us ask
questions and are curious and we want to find out
about our neighbors and what they think about things. And
you know, there's there are no strangers to us. So
I think that's a good way to be and it's
a good message to spread. So that's well, this this show, um,
it's a birthday gift to the US. It premiers July five,

(01:10:35):
So in your in your celebratory hangover, tune in for
six weeks running to America Outdoors and I'm baritone day
on all the socials. Um, and I'm gonna I'm gonna
I I write for a publication called Puck You can
just find it Puck Down News. I'm gonna go into
too much detail on that, but it's dope and some
of my deepest thinking is in print there because I
get to think about what I say before I say.

(01:10:56):
I'm like with you, Yeah, who's uh? And for? But
for for this stuff they don't want you to know. Crew. UM,
I'm gonna give I'm gonna give your listeners my phone numbers,
a special number. Don't be alarmed. Um, it's a community
so semi public number. You can text this number and
if you do so, you will basically join a text
mailing list. But I won't hit you up for fifteen

(01:11:17):
dollars every week like Nancy Pelosi. I respect you too
much one time to just extract dollars from one time.
I'll give you that while of a dress. But but
the number is two oh two eight nine four eight
eight four four and uh two oh to eight nine
four eight a four four and just send in the

(01:11:39):
body of the text put s t d w y
t K. Also, when I say it out loud, it
just makes me think a sexually transmitted If we could
go back and get a different name for this show,
Like we thought we were gonna get fired when we
started making this show, and then when we realized weren't
gonna get fire, we confronted the next problem, which is

(01:12:02):
it's the longest freaking name for a show. Stuff they
actually hold up. So if you have patients due to
the whole acronym that the letters or just say stuff,
just put text me with the words stuff the wait,
wait do we call it our phone? We might say

(01:12:26):
that after the end maybe we'll catch but yeah, also
U dot com. That's where it is. One of my
starting points for a lot of your current and previous work.
I want to also shout out we're having a moment um,
which we because we mentioned how the Citizen first, but
we should also mention we're having a moment and definitely

(01:12:48):
don't sleep on keep Jerry Folwell away from my oreo. Cos. Okay,
now I feel like you know we are. This is
how you know we're actually maybe becoming friends. It's hard
to say goodbye it's like, Uh, it's like a nineties
R and V. I have to say that the joke
that occurred to me when I heard the name of
that book, Jared follows the kind of guy that he's
an oreo and just goes, oh, don't mind, Drake. I

(01:13:12):
used to do when I was early in my stand
up career. I was like, I need a product, and
I didn't have the equipment to do a quality audio
recording and make like CDs for sale. But I was like,
I'm a writer. So I would take my weekly newsletter
and I'd write little jokes, momentary jokes. I call it
basically as weekend update style jokes. And so I had

(01:13:32):
these Mojo quarterly momentary. Every quarter I put the best
of my jokes and essays and little pamphlets and I'd
sell them at the back of the club for a dollar.
They were just like these xerox zines of my stuff,
and that provided a little money, but it gave me
people a calling card. Uh. One of those book titles,
books and very big quotation marks was this keep Jared

(01:13:54):
fall well away from my oreole cookies because he and
his focus on the family group. UM. May he rest
in peace. Were so appalled that there was a an
lgbt Q plus like Olympics event, the Gay Games. It
was in Chicago, and and the BISCO was a sponsor,
and so they were boycotting the BISCO for destroying the

(01:14:16):
American family by promoting like athletics and community amongst people
who we've excluded for for quite a long time. And
you know, Shaker, I took some offense at that, but
I wrote some really uh hilarious and disrespectful things about
Jo in that zine. So if if you can find it,
you are very good at internet sleuth thing because it

(01:14:37):
wasn't a big a big online thing, um special rewards
that you'll be one of the we will be one
of the deep deep cut fans. At which point let
let us know, because we will. We will try to
find We're gonna try to find this too. That's that
one is one of the ones I haven't read yet,
so I want to can't believe you'll went that. Literally,

(01:14:58):
no one has ever brought up like in a decade.
In over a decade, no one has brought up those
little self published book titles. But these congressionals are just
so damn sexy, sexy that's the thing about momentary. I
feel like, why would you call a book that It

(01:15:19):
made sense At that time, there was a member of
Congress and he was up in the pages and he
had to be this whole thing. Remember, I'll date myself.
This was back in a time when uh, you know,
public officials uh, and people have trusted leadership positions in
the community were sometimes inappropriate with children. I know that's

(01:15:39):
hard to imagine nowadays, but we we used to live
in that one Yeah, yeah, ye old oh six. That
was back when we could call uh, the early twenties
the odds right, never did that. I just wasn't cool enough.
I didn't have the social capital with my friends, so

(01:16:02):
I just didn't say. I just skipped. There's nothing happened
between two thousand and the tins. It was just period.
I can't believe you made a full episode and a
bonus episode like this is crazy. Yes, thank you please God. Yeah,
we're not We're not blowing smoke. Uh. This is given

(01:16:23):
me the last time that we'll say it. Don't take
our word for it. Go check out how to Citizen
and let us know what you think and take advantage
of that phone number. Go learn more. About the work
and spoiler, we don't know what's happening in season four,
so we're tuned in right with you. Uh, and we
cannot wait to hear your thoughts. It is always a

(01:16:45):
pleasure to hang out. We actually made it happen from
all those months ago in Texas. Thank you so much,
Thank you so much. This means a lot. Yeah, thank
you all. It's been a pleasure. What a ride. I
am so you know what. I'm so glad we were
able to make this interview. I don't I don't think
it's in the interview, but one of the first things

(01:17:07):
we were talking about when barritun Day hopped on is uh.
He said, you guys actually made this happen. That's so
very un Los Angeles of you, and I'm so glad
we did. Did you guys enjoy that kidding? The best
part of my week so far. What a thoughtful, lovely,

(01:17:28):
interesting fellow. Uh. And it just felt really great to
just kind of, you know, shoot the breeze with him
and not really necessarily have a specific direction. Um. But
it went in so many directions that I think are
going to be valuable for for listeners and certainly valuable
for me. We hit on in an interview, but the
work Bear toun Day is doing, and especially how the citizen,

(01:17:48):
it does feel like it's important stuff. And the takeaways
that you get with every episode. I don't know of
those actionable items. It's something that you would learn in
a class us. You know it does. It does feel
like you're in a class, But when you're inside the
episode listening, it feels like you're just in a conversation.
So I couldn't be happier that we got to speak

(01:18:09):
with them about all the various subjects we did, and
we hope that you enjoyed this interview as much as
we did. Folks, we can't wait to hear your thoughts.
You can find us online Facebook and sacrim Twitter all
the hits. Uh. You can also call that number Barrett
won Day was talking about it Israel. I'm texting it

(01:18:31):
as well, and while you're around your phone, if you
don't like the sip in the social meds, you can
also just call us directly. That's right, We're one three
three S T D W y t K. Leave a
message to the sound of Ben's dulcet tones. You have
three minutes to tell your tale, ask your question do
with whatever you would like. Uh and if you need
more time than that, totally cool. We've got another way

(01:18:53):
to reach us. Why not, said us a good old
fashioned email where we are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Ye.

(01:19:17):
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.