June 10, 2021 • 35 mins
“It’s hard to citizen when you can’t pay the bills.” This season’s theme has revealed the economic causes of our deep division and has opened our eyes to how our democracy and economic well-being are incredibly interconnected. This week, Baratunde weaves together lessons from across this season, discovers surprising takeaways, and revisits stories that have more in common than we expected when we set out to make this season. Listen to a virtual conversation among our guests that will reveal new insights.
Show Notes + Links
Go to howtocitizen.com to sign up for show news, AND (coming soon!) to start your How to Citizen Practice. And become a paid subscriber to newsletter.baratunde.com for ad-free versions of the podcast.
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ACTIONS
PERSONALLY REFLECT
Reflect on the Season
Ask yourself, how did this season make you feel? How has it challenged you and what have you learned? And if you're comfortable sharing, we’d love to hear from you! Send an email to comments@howtocitizen.com or leave a voice memo with feedback in general, how does citizen.com/voicemail
BECOME INFORMED
Keep Learning
Understanding the economy and the structures behind it is essential to being able to participate as a citizen in our democracy. We hope we have made that case this season, but there’s always more to learn. Head over to www.bookshop.org/shop/howtocitizen for plenty of reading materials from the season including titles written and recommended by our guests. We particularly recommend Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us and Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s Collective Courage.
PUBLICLY PARTICIPATE
Choose your own
We’ve asked you to do a lot this season, from joining the fight for a $15 minimum wage to supporting various bills to investing in non-extractive real estate. And sometimes, it’s hard to know where to start. All of the actions from this season will be available at howtocitizen.com, plus we are designing a choose your own adventure to help you get started on, or further deepen, your citizen practice. Sign up for our email newsletter to stay connected as the digital arm of the show launches later in Summer 2021- visit www.howtocitizen.com to sign up!
If you take any of these actions, share that with us - action@howtocitizen.com. Mention in the subject line. And share about your citizening on social media using #howtocitizen.
Also sign up for Baratunde's weekly Recommentunde Newsletter and follow him on Instagram. You can even text him, like right now at 202-894-8844.
CREDITS
How To Citizen with Baratunde is a production of iHeartRadio Podcasts and Dustlight Productions. Our Executive Producers are Baratunde Thurston, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha Euceph. Stephanie Cohn is our Senior Producer and Alie Kilts is our Producer. Kelly Prime is our Editor. Original Music by Andrew Eapen. Valentino Rivera is our Engineer. Sam Paulson is our Apprentice. This episode was produced and sound designed by Stephanie Cohn. Special thanks to Joelle Smith from iHeartRadio.
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, I'm Baritune Day Thurston and this is how to
citizen with Baritune Day in season two. We're talking about
the money, because, to be real, it's hard to citizen
when we can barely pay the bills. Many years after
(00:21):
I graduated from college, like maybe ten, I started noticing
types of mail showing up and it was about how
to fix your credit. We can help you consolidate your debt.
And I was like, what, this is a very particular
type of spam. What what are you trying to tell me? World?
And uh, I decided to like look up my credits core.
(00:46):
Oh dear lord. The amount of red that I saw
it was there was this one card that I kind
of forgot about because it was after my mom died,
and I got very distracted and I was like, I
don't pay bills anymore. I cried, That's what I do.
And then when I stopped crying, I didn't remember to
go pay the bills. I just I was like I
moved forward as well. I don't look back. And I
(01:08):
was ashamed because I was like, I got this college degree,
I'm twenty something years old. I am a full grown up,
you know. I signed a lease rate I owned a
car for a minute, I'm doing this adulting thing, and
I felt really alone because I thought I was supposed
to know. I thought I was supposed to be better
and have done better until I've met a good friend
(01:30):
of mine who also had a college degree and he
had a terrible credit score too. Oh that was that
was an interesting reunion. We're like, yo, you have terrible
credit who's embarrassing their family? This guy? Know? This guy?
That's me. That's me who should have been better but
(01:50):
isn't doing better. Oh that's YouTube. Wait, so we're not
so alone in all these feelings. Well, that's actually pretty cool.
We shared that shame, which made it feel less like shame,
and we made some fun of it, and then we
got to working on it together. My point is the
(02:13):
economy we're living in makes us all feel alone, the
same way my credit score made me feel alone. So
many of us feel ashamed and embarrassed, and sometimes we
even feel like it's our neighbor's fault that things are
so bad. In other words, isolation and shame lead to division.
But the truth is we're not alone. That's what we
(02:37):
made this season for. How do we bring a different
story of this economy to life. I wanted to understand
the forces that stop us from being able to show
up as citizens. This wealth and equality built on racial exclusion,
fueled by a corporate consolidation of power, resulting and growing
numbers of people who are overworked, underpaid, and undersupport with it.
(03:00):
I wanted to understand all that and talk to the
people who are moving us forward into a more united,
equitable future where we could all pay the bills, where
we can all citizens. And I think we did that.
I know we missed many things. We couldn't cover everything.
(03:21):
We didn't talk about overseas tax shelters, we didn't talk
about the massive economic impact of the climate crisis. But
the point wasn't to gather every piece of the public.
The point was to paint a bigger picture, to tell
a bigger story of an economy that could work to
benefit us all. And by pursuing this bigger story, I
(03:48):
learned that this wealth and equality that's aparated in us
its roots run deep into our past. Our original economic
model was stolen people, stolen land, and stolen labor, And
in order to justify that within a Christian society, they
had to make those people who were being stolen less
(04:10):
than human back to what Heather McGee calls this zero
sum worldview, this US versus them mentality that for one
to win, another has gotta lose, and it's designed to
keep everybody in their place. And the model was, I profit,
you lose. You don't get to share any of the
games of your land, your effort, your labor, nothing. But
(04:34):
even then this was the real like aha for me.
Even then, that worst possible economic model only truly maximally
benefited a narrow elite back then of white people. Wealthy
white folks created a story, a story designed to exclude
(04:55):
people of color and to distract the poor white folks
from what was really going on. And so that white
slave owning, landowning elite had to convince the far more numerous, landless,
indentured white folks who were sitting there in the you know,
rocky fields alongside the black folks, that they were better
(05:16):
than the person down the row, and that in fact,
justice or freedom for black folks would be a threat
to white folks period. The I of course, always knew
our country is built on racism. I'm very much on
the record saying that. But I've got to say, I
(05:36):
was surprised to hear from just about everybody that a
major point in our country's history of racist economics was
also this era that our history books tend to paint
as a time of tremendous growth and prosperity for Americans.
The New Deal, the New Deal, the New Deal. There
was New Deal, policies of the New Deal, labor laws,
the Party of the New Deal for white Americans. The
(06:01):
New Deal was the Democratic Party's response to the Great
Depression in the nineteen thirties, where we put these foundational,
sweeping policies and in place to try to reset and
adjust our economy and our democracy for the next phase.
Tens of millions of people made a working class into
(06:23):
the middle class through this massive economic expansion. It included
protections for the right to organize a union, social security
and other assistance for people on hard times, strong anti
monopoly policies, subsidization of housing. We had these state funded
colleges in every state. It was just sort of this
period of time where everything kind of aligned to make
(06:45):
the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. And
it was social movements that created the context for that.
Workers everyday people organizing it sounds like the American dream.
It sounds like the American dream. Ding ding ding, You
got that's it, that was it, that was when we
had it, you know. But the question is who was
the week? And so much of what I just described
(07:06):
was done from a federal policy level in an explicitly
racially exclusive way. This thing we celebrate should probably be
called the New Deal for white Americans because a lot
of us were deliberately excluded, which reinforced that us versus
them worldview that started with the slave owning elite in
(07:28):
the first place. So white people got to move up
while people of color will. We remain stuck, but as
we always have, we fought to be included. We see
America through the eyes of someone who has been the
victim of Americans. We don't see any American dreams. We've experienced,
(07:50):
only the American night movie. We do not want our
freedom graduate, but we want to be fret now all realization.
It takes dedication, It takes the willingness to stand by
and do what has to be done when it has
(08:11):
to be done. We had the Civil rights movement pushing
for everyone to get in on that American dream, on
that liberty and justice for all. But they have always
been those resisting that progress. And you think that that pushback,
that that racism would only hurt the intended targets a
(08:35):
k a. Black people, But the crazy truth is white
folks were so determined to exclude Black Americans that they
actually sabotaged themselves. There's one wild example. I can't stop
thinking about. The town's drained the public pools, rather than
integrate them, took the water out, backed up trucks of dirt,
dumped it in, paved it, over seated it with grass.
(08:59):
In my governery, Alabama, they closed the entire Parks and
Recreation department. They sold off the animals in the zoo,
all to avoid sharing it with black folks. And then
this guy shows up, Ronald Reagan. Do solemnly swear that
I will faithfully execute the office of President of the
United States. Ronald Reagan, he was a Republican heavy hitter,
(09:25):
the former governor of California, and he basically came in
with a big business mentality rolling back the social programs
of the New Deal, and he was very, very successful
at doing that. The ideas essentially were bigger and bigger
industries that are ever more efficient and can put out
more stuff for less money. At the University of California,
(09:48):
college was free for everyone. Why did that get rolled back?
Ronald Reagan was governor. He didn't like that they're all
these protesters at Berkeley. He didn't like the beginning of
the black power movement at Merritt College campus, and he
said this, it shouldn't be subsidizing curiosity. I remember seeing
evictions and plant closures and members of my family losing
jobs and benign neglect. That was when you started to
(10:10):
see a lot of money and resources pulled out of
urban cities, urban programs, and that is really what accelerated
urban decline and the loss of value in urban communities.
He cut all kinds of things. He cut policies that
were designed to better resolve He cut urban programs creating
(10:31):
this benign neglect, cut publicly funded higher education out of spite,
and changed our anti monopoly policies. Selling us this story,
which is fitting for a man who never quite fully
left Hollywood, selling us this bootstrap narrative that if you
just try hard enough, if if you alone wanted bad enough,
(10:55):
you alone can make it on your own that you
already have everything you need to succeed. If you just
want to succeed badly enough, and your failure to succeed,
that's yours alone. You shouldn't need anybody else's help. There
is this moralism associated with poverty, where we believe in
individuals who are poor are bad people, or they're not
(11:18):
capable people, they're not as smart as we have not
looked at or examined the systems, so that make it
virtually impossible for individuals to move up the economic latter.
So much of what we know today is tied up
in what we've been taught for so long with somebody
else told us. When I first spoke with Jamila Medley,
(11:41):
she told me we have to heal from individualism. M hmm,
what a scrumptious and true statement. Individualism as an illness
really stuck with me. We're told all our lives, get
an education, find a well paying job, buy your house,
start a family, do this, do that, And all I'm
hearing is me, me, me, me, me, figure it out,
(12:05):
do it all by yourself. And then I remember what
Heather said, two people in a cold room, one's got
a coat, one doesn't. But if they just sort of
joined together and like shouldered open the door, then walked
out into the sun where it's seventy degrees. They both
be good, you know, but it's the boss that keeps
them in the cold room. Imagine if we dropped the
(12:27):
individualism and work together, things could get a whole lot
better for all of us. When some of us lose,
we all lose. When we work together, we can all win.
And you could say that this idea goes back way
earlier than Reagan, way earlier than the New Deal. We
can take it all the way back to something Astra
(12:47):
Taylor told me about the ancient Greeks. The word idiot
actually comes from the ancient Greek as well. Idiotis and
it didn't mean that you were dumb or uneducated. What
it actually meant was that you were a private person.
You're only concerned with yourself. So in ancient Athens, the
worst thing could be was an idiot. And once we
(13:07):
change our mindset and stop looking just at this separate
world of us and them, seeing ourselves as individuals instead
see ourselves as part of a week that we benefit
when everybody does by definition, that's when we can start
to do some real cool stuff. We can have new
models of business that served the many, not just the few.
(13:32):
So this is a model for how to cement ourselves
as citizens. After the break we talk solutions. So clearly,
(13:52):
our economy has some issues racism, division, all the money
flowing right into the pockets of Mr Bezos, and this
extreme wealth inequality that's been plaguing our nation for decades.
But if there's one thing I learned this season, it's
that people are coming out swinging. There are people working
hard to citizen and to create new models that make
(14:14):
it possible for all of us to thrive. And as
I started looking at some of these incredible new models,
I noticed that they were accounting for something that feels
very far away from capital e economics. They were focusing
on human needs, on the fact that in order for
the economy to thrive, people need to thrive too. First,
(14:39):
you need space, like a space of your own, physical space,
a mental space to feel like you belong, like you've
got room to grow. When you're tied down to debt,
trust me, it's impossible to feel that sense of space.
It's impossible to pay the rent or educational opportunities or
(15:00):
health expenses when you are burdened by that lack of space.
You don't have time to ground yourself, to plant yourself,
to think about growing into something more. You're too busy surviving.
Nony Sessions saw firsthand what happens when people lose that
sense of physical space called home, without land, without permanence,
(15:24):
the path in the future go up and smoke, They disappear.
There's nothing to connect you to before, and there's there's
very little the ground YouTube after. Nony is a third
generation West Oaklander, a community that's been assaulted by gentrification,
or what she calls accelerated racialized displacement. As she's watched
(15:46):
countless evictions, the encampments of houseless Oaklanders get larger and larger,
and big developers swarm their way in. She realized that
the solution was ownership, and that her community was vulnerable
because her community didn't own their land. So she created
eb PRECK, the East Bay Permanent real Estate Cooperative. This
(16:09):
fights gentrification in West Oakland by buying up real estate
and historically black and brown communities and then collectively owning
and managing those properties democratically. So this is a model
for how to cement ourselves as citizens structurally. So ownership
permanent is critical for culture building, identity building, the building
(16:31):
of futures. Ownership gives us room to breathe. And there's
this thing that I've felt through all of these conversations
about the power of place and community, about being grounded
somewhere and having a platform from which to launch, to
become more, to become citizens, to citizens not just legally,
(16:56):
but in a community sense, to feel connect did to
other people, to feel valued with and buy other people
in a way that isn't captured by dollars. It's captured
by something else, something Richer small business owner and distiller
Maria Strada remembers that feeling so clearly. When the pandemic
(17:17):
hit her community in Bushwick, I started realizing that people
did love us in a way, which is something I
didn't really recognize. When COVID hit Marie's distillery, Moto Spirits
turned around and started making hand sanitizer to supply hospitals
and to keep her community safe. And when Marie needed
(17:37):
her neighbors to show up, they did. Everyone was reaching
back out to us, the relationships that we had initially
fostered with random things like motorcycles and dogs, and they
just came, you know, everyone just said okay, well we're
gonna do this. Or bartenders came and we did this
bartending event once this competition, and they reached out and
(17:59):
they said, hey, how about if we do you know,
a special cocktail thing for you online and then we
can you know, give that money to a certain organization.
So that's that's how we've been doing things. Now, I
gotta say hearing how Mri showed up for her community
in its time of need challenge. The way I often
think about businesses, like our US concept of how a
(18:21):
business works tends to involve the image of cost cutting
and operating opportunistically, competitively and above all, capitalistically to maximize profits.
I think about CEOs get the basils who make piles
of money while workers fight for a livable minimum wage.
(18:41):
But so many guests really elevated my idea of what
a successful community centered business should and can look like.
Jamila Medley has seen the cooperative ownership model working for
hundreds of years. But what exactly is a cooperative? Like?
What's a co op? I thought I knew, but I
really didn't. So a co op has two components. One
(19:04):
is the association of people who come together. They identified
that they have a shared need economic, social, cultural, and
they determined that they want to democratically own an enterprise together,
and so they create that business to fulfill the need
that they have. So co ops sound new ag, but
(19:26):
really certain communities have been practicing cooperative economics on the
d L for a long time. For black folks in Philadelphia,
cooperative economic and mutual aid practices have been essential to survival.
So we can think back to periods when black folks
were enslaved and there were people who were running away
(19:48):
from slavery who came to Philadelphia and created a rich
and robust community of black folks here. But they survived
in many ways through cooperative economic practices. Here's the thing
that resonates most with me about the cooperative model. It
gives people a chance to make their voices heard. It
(20:09):
gives people a choice. It's like this little place where
democracy plays out. And as I started to explore these
new models of business, it became clear that that sense
of agency is key well beyond voting, well beyond business,
just in life. It's a lot easier to thrive when
you have the space to make your own decisions rather
(20:31):
than someone prescribing those decisions for you, giving you the
feeling of choice while having pre selected a certain set
of options that you're limited by now. Bruce Patterson saw
that when he set out to bring a public option,
a choice for broadband to the small town of amin Idaho.
There's no way for you to invest in a different
(20:53):
outcome unless you own it. That's the only way you
can invest in a different outcome. So as a community,
people that decide to join AM and Fiber, they're invested
in that. So when they call and we've got an issue,
they know they're talking to somebody that lives in the
same community. After the break public broadband and free money,
(21:17):
I gotta say I am a total nerd. I said
it before and I'll say it again that the Internet
is a subject close to my heart and I feel
like something that doesn't get talked about enough. Is this
connection that broadband has to our economy, our society, and
our ability to show up as citizens. Without equal internet access,
(21:38):
we don't have equal access to information, and in the pandemic,
it means we don't have equal access to work, to school,
even to vaccines, which is why I was so excited
to talk to Bruce. How would we as a small
town in idahobe competitive in attracting businesses and residents with broadband.
So the hardest part about this isn't the technology, but
(22:01):
the absolute hardest thing is consensus. Bruce found that locals
were paying for this essential need access to the Internet,
which is like access to electricity or water or even air,
but their needs were not getting met, not getting met
by the private option. There are people in neighborhoods that
(22:21):
want fiber, they want better connectivity, they want another choice.
And here's the brilliant thing to me, Bruce didn't just
jam the option down people's throats. He knew that wouldn't
go over well and conservative rural Idaho. No, he found
those people where they were in their neighborhoods and gave
them a space and opportunity to discover and voice their needs.
(22:45):
These people came out of the woodwork and found us
and said, if I talk to my neighbors, if I
go knock on doors, can you give me anything to say?
So we started to call these folks fiber champions, and
they did it am and Idaho now has the choice
to opt into some of the cheapest, fastest, most public
(23:08):
internet in the country. The Open Technology Institute did a
cost of connectivity research program and found am and to
have the cheapest gig internet in the world. I gin
poos fight for domestic workers is about giving those workers
more choices. The choice to have health benefits comes to mind,
(23:28):
but it's also about lending the care and support our
society needs to open up choices for the rest of us.
We think about infrastructures, bridges and tunnels and broadband, but
what could be more fundamental infrastructure than the ability to
make sure that our families are loved, ones are cared
for so that we can work. I call these jobs
(23:50):
job enabling jobs because they make it possible for everything
else to work and everyone else to work, space to live,
access to internet, access to health care, and job options.
All of that equates to choice. But at the end
of the day, so much choice in this economy comes
right down to money, and giving poor black mother's choices
(24:13):
is why Yandoro started the Magnolia Mother's Trust Magnolian Mother's
Trust as the first and only guaranteed income project in
this country that takes a racial and gender equity approach
to our conversations about wealth and equities within this country.
It provides a thousand dollars a month twelve months and
no strings attached extremely low income Black mothers. Yeah, that's right,
(24:37):
a thousand dollars a month, no strings attached for a
full year. Because you can't citizen when you can barely
pay the bills, when you live in poverty and don't
have savings. How that constantly holding your breath? Um, how
stressful that is, and how that takes away your ability
to plan and dream and hope. One of our moms
(24:59):
went do in the pandemic and became a paramedic. She's like,
I always want to be a paramedic. They need paramedics now.
I'm like, yes, they do need paramedics now. And by
giving people money, Magnolia Mother's Trust is giving people options,
giving them a chance to decide on their future, a
chance two citizen. And that's exactly what Astra Taylor told
(25:21):
me about ancient Greek society. Greece is this mythic birthplace
of democracy in the US. And there's some parts of
their society that definitely needed work. Women were excluded, and
you know they own slaves. But there's one thing they
really did get right. They paid those who counted as
citizens to participate in self government, and when it was
(25:42):
your turn, you'd actually get called up to serve. It
was like jury duty. But for Congress, they were thinking
about these problems we're not thinking about, which is how
do you create systems of equality? How do you compensate
people so they can truly participate? Right? And this is
why I'm saying that we're stuck. We just aren't being
very creative when you think about all the tools or disposal,
and when we think democracy equals elections, I think we
(26:04):
have to be honest that might be a contradiction in
terms when we give ourselves room to citizen to really
show up and invest in relationships and understand our power
and benefit the many not the few. We give ourselves
room to pursue things that some of us have deemed radical.
(26:24):
I'm talking public broadband and giving people money just to
do with what they say they need. So many of
these things were a pipe dream to so many of
us until the pandemic. Right now, in particular, I think
we are in this a new New Deal moment, honestly,
(26:45):
where more deeper, impactful change is possible than my entire
twenty five years of organizing. Yeah, that's right, I'm bringing
up the Rhona. Look, I'm not gonna sit here and
tell you how great COVID nineteen has been for everybody,
how good it was for society, because it's not, and
(27:08):
it hasn't been. It caused us a lot of pain,
a lot of distraction, a lot of agony. But it's
also shown us how dire things have been and how
much better they can be. And it's shown us that
when pressed, we can rise to that opportunity. You know,
(27:31):
we've kind of been here before. This happened with the
Great Depression. Our entire nation's economy crashed, and we responded.
We were forced to respond with the New Deal. So
what's gonna happen now. Adoption of a widespread guaranteed and
(27:53):
come on a national scale. I think that that will
look like as finally eradicating poverty. I think that will
look like us having healthier families. I think that would
look like us having healthier kids. I think that would
look like us finally looking like the greatest nation in
the world. I think that would change the trajectory of
(28:15):
our future, not just for some before an entire country,
before the pandemic, universal basic income was this radical, relatively
fringe idea. Now everyday Americans are cashing stimulus checks and
enhance unemployment benefits, and we're starting to expect it. Maybe
now we can create that new new deal that doesn't
(28:37):
leave out people of color and explicitly exclude so many
who we need to all move forward. Maybe we'll get
to be just go out and limb here free. Do
you believe? Is you know a biblical term, right? It's
this ancient term, uh, for the moment the deaths are
(28:59):
canceled in the land is given back, the economy we
get so out of whack, people would be selling themselves
into debt servitude. And you know ancient Babylonia, and so
periodically the king would say, jubilie, wiping up the slate.
So that's been canceled, and now you're free. You can
go back home. What would it mean to be free
of crushing debt, free of small mindedness, free of being
(29:23):
penned in and not being able to show up as citizens?
That excites me? Can you hear it in my voice?
Oh my goodness, I'm getting a little excited. Okay, calm
down here. Today. I am cautiously optimistic about this future.
But I've also lived, and I know this is not
going to be easy. It's never been easy. Literally, it's
(29:45):
always hard. Doing good stuff is almost always hard to
do because there's gonna be pushed back. People will get
impatient with the pace to change. Some of us will
remain stuck in the zero sum us versus them mentality.
And we're still struggling with how to grow through the
systemic racism that's held us back so long. We're still
(30:07):
struggling to accept all people as people, regardless of how
they identify themselves versus our limited expectations of who they're
supposed to be. We're still struggling with just really starting
to face the size of the climate crisis. Yeah, climates
hanging out there like I see your plans? What? And
(30:29):
still with all that, with all those real challenges that
I've named and some that I haven't, I feel like
something big could happen. I know something big could happen.
And I know what's more likely to happen if we
all do our part, if we show up right, if
(30:50):
we participate, if we if we citizen, even in small ways,
to help make those possible big changes, real, big realities.
That's the story we put together. But there is one
(31:13):
more story to tell in this season. Next week we
have a very special guest and a very special episode. Yeah,
I get called like a professor doing comedy, which you know,
it feels good in some way because it makes my
parents feel good to hear the word professor next to
my name. At the same time, it's I don't want
to be teaching people. I want to be making them laugh,
(31:35):
and I want to be able to make anybody laugh.
Next week, Harri Kondabolo, and now time for some action.
Ask yourself, how did this season make you feel? How
has it challenged you and what have you learned? And
if you're comfortable sharing any of those reflections, please share
(31:56):
them with us. Send an email to comments at how
to Citizen, doctor m or leave a voice memo with feedback.
In general, how do Citizen dot com slash voiceman. We
know there's always more to learn, which is why we
set up a special bookshop just for you. Head over
the bookshop dot org slash shop slash how to Citizen.
(32:16):
We've got shelves with titles written by our guests, those
recommended by our guests, and those we have learned to
love as well. I am sure there's something on those
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asked you to do a lot this season, and if
you've missed any of it, we got you head over
to how the Citizen dot com for all those actions
plus more. There's some bonus thing happening over there where
(32:39):
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(33:00):
in those reviews. We need you to tell your friends,
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I've got to thank some people for helping make this
show possible. I want to thank all of our guests.
It's pretty obvious I couldn't have done this without them.
(33:21):
It would just be me talking to myself, which, trust me,
has its limits. I want to thank the Economic Security Project,
who helped us find so many of these guests. To
my producing team, Stephanie Cone, Ali Killed, Sam Paulson, Kelly Prime,
thank you for your patience with me, for your creativity,
and for your dedication. And a special thanks to Misha Yusuf,
(33:44):
Tamka Adams, Arwin Nix, and Rachel Garcia all at dust
Like Super Dope. Special extra thanks to this show's executive
producer and my wife, Elizabeth Stewart. I used the term
we a lot when I'm describing this show, and sometimes
I mean that generically, like we're all part of a
(34:05):
collective find the week, but often I mean that very specifically,
like me and Elizabeth. You hear my voice, but you're
often experiencing her thinking, her brain, and her big picture vision.
She's been a key to the architecture of this season,
helping us all connect these dots. So thank you, Bo. Finally,
(34:27):
thank you for listening, for emailing and social media in
and sharing your literal voice with us. Thank you for Citizen.
We're in this together? How does Citizen? With Baritone Day
is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and Dust
Like Productions. Our executive producers are Me Barritton, Day, Thurston
(34:47):
Elizabeth Stewart and Misha Yusa. Our producers are Stephanie Cone
and Ali Kilts. Kelly Prime is our editor, Valentino Rivera
is our engineer, and Sam Paulson is our apprentice. Original
music by Andrew Eaple. This episode was produced and sound
designed by Stephanie Comb. Special thanks to Joel Smith from
(35:08):
my Heart Radio
Hey, I'm Baritune Day Thurston and this is how to
citizen with Baritune Day in season two. We're talking about
the money, because, to be real, it's hard to citizen
when we can barely pay the bills. Many years after
(00:21):
I graduated from college, like maybe ten, I started noticing
types of mail showing up and it was about how
to fix your credit. We can help you consolidate your debt.
And I was like, what, this is a very particular
type of spam. What what are you trying to tell me? World?
And uh, I decided to like look up my credits core.
(00:46):
Oh dear lord. The amount of red that I saw
it was there was this one card that I kind
of forgot about because it was after my mom died,
and I got very distracted and I was like, I
don't pay bills anymore. I cried, That's what I do.
And then when I stopped crying, I didn't remember to
go pay the bills. I just I was like I
moved forward as well. I don't look back. And I
(01:08):
was ashamed because I was like, I got this college degree,
I'm twenty something years old. I am a full grown up,
you know. I signed a lease rate I owned a
car for a minute, I'm doing this adulting thing, and
I felt really alone because I thought I was supposed
to know. I thought I was supposed to be better
and have done better until I've met a good friend
(01:30):
of mine who also had a college degree and he
had a terrible credit score too. Oh that was that
was an interesting reunion. We're like, yo, you have terrible
credit who's embarrassing their family? This guy? Know? This guy?
That's me. That's me who should have been better but
(01:50):
isn't doing better. Oh that's YouTube. Wait, so we're not
so alone in all these feelings. Well, that's actually pretty cool.
We shared that shame, which made it feel less like shame,
and we made some fun of it, and then we
got to working on it together. My point is the
(02:13):
economy we're living in makes us all feel alone, the
same way my credit score made me feel alone. So
many of us feel ashamed and embarrassed, and sometimes we
even feel like it's our neighbor's fault that things are
so bad. In other words, isolation and shame lead to division.
But the truth is we're not alone. That's what we
(02:37):
made this season for. How do we bring a different
story of this economy to life. I wanted to understand
the forces that stop us from being able to show
up as citizens. This wealth and equality built on racial exclusion,
fueled by a corporate consolidation of power, resulting and growing
numbers of people who are overworked, underpaid, and undersupport with it.
(03:00):
I wanted to understand all that and talk to the
people who are moving us forward into a more united,
equitable future where we could all pay the bills, where
we can all citizens. And I think we did that.
I know we missed many things. We couldn't cover everything.
(03:21):
We didn't talk about overseas tax shelters, we didn't talk
about the massive economic impact of the climate crisis. But
the point wasn't to gather every piece of the public.
The point was to paint a bigger picture, to tell
a bigger story of an economy that could work to
benefit us all. And by pursuing this bigger story, I
(03:48):
learned that this wealth and equality that's aparated in us
its roots run deep into our past. Our original economic
model was stolen people, stolen land, and stolen labor, And
in order to justify that within a Christian society, they
had to make those people who were being stolen less
(04:10):
than human back to what Heather McGee calls this zero
sum worldview, this US versus them mentality that for one
to win, another has gotta lose, and it's designed to
keep everybody in their place. And the model was, I profit,
you lose. You don't get to share any of the
games of your land, your effort, your labor, nothing. But
(04:34):
even then this was the real like aha for me.
Even then, that worst possible economic model only truly maximally
benefited a narrow elite back then of white people. Wealthy
white folks created a story, a story designed to exclude
(04:55):
people of color and to distract the poor white folks
from what was really going on. And so that white
slave owning, landowning elite had to convince the far more numerous, landless,
indentured white folks who were sitting there in the you know,
rocky fields alongside the black folks, that they were better
(05:16):
than the person down the row, and that in fact,
justice or freedom for black folks would be a threat
to white folks period. The I of course, always knew
our country is built on racism. I'm very much on
the record saying that. But I've got to say, I
(05:36):
was surprised to hear from just about everybody that a
major point in our country's history of racist economics was
also this era that our history books tend to paint
as a time of tremendous growth and prosperity for Americans.
The New Deal, the New Deal, the New Deal. There
was New Deal, policies of the New Deal, labor laws,
the Party of the New Deal for white Americans. The
(06:01):
New Deal was the Democratic Party's response to the Great
Depression in the nineteen thirties, where we put these foundational,
sweeping policies and in place to try to reset and
adjust our economy and our democracy for the next phase.
Tens of millions of people made a working class into
(06:23):
the middle class through this massive economic expansion. It included
protections for the right to organize a union, social security
and other assistance for people on hard times, strong anti
monopoly policies, subsidization of housing. We had these state funded
colleges in every state. It was just sort of this
period of time where everything kind of aligned to make
(06:45):
the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. And
it was social movements that created the context for that.
Workers everyday people organizing it sounds like the American dream.
It sounds like the American dream. Ding ding ding, You
got that's it, that was it, that was when we
had it, you know. But the question is who was
the week? And so much of what I just described
(07:06):
was done from a federal policy level in an explicitly
racially exclusive way. This thing we celebrate should probably be
called the New Deal for white Americans because a lot
of us were deliberately excluded, which reinforced that us versus
them worldview that started with the slave owning elite in
(07:28):
the first place. So white people got to move up
while people of color will. We remain stuck, but as
we always have, we fought to be included. We see
America through the eyes of someone who has been the
victim of Americans. We don't see any American dreams. We've experienced,
(07:50):
only the American night movie. We do not want our
freedom graduate, but we want to be fret now all realization.
It takes dedication, It takes the willingness to stand by
and do what has to be done when it has
(08:11):
to be done. We had the Civil rights movement pushing
for everyone to get in on that American dream, on
that liberty and justice for all. But they have always
been those resisting that progress. And you think that that pushback,
that that racism would only hurt the intended targets a
(08:35):
k a. Black people, But the crazy truth is white
folks were so determined to exclude Black Americans that they
actually sabotaged themselves. There's one wild example. I can't stop
thinking about. The town's drained the public pools, rather than
integrate them, took the water out, backed up trucks of dirt,
dumped it in, paved it, over seated it with grass.
(08:59):
In my governery, Alabama, they closed the entire Parks and
Recreation department. They sold off the animals in the zoo,
all to avoid sharing it with black folks. And then
this guy shows up, Ronald Reagan. Do solemnly swear that
I will faithfully execute the office of President of the
United States. Ronald Reagan, he was a Republican heavy hitter,
(09:25):
the former governor of California, and he basically came in
with a big business mentality rolling back the social programs
of the New Deal, and he was very, very successful
at doing that. The ideas essentially were bigger and bigger
industries that are ever more efficient and can put out
more stuff for less money. At the University of California,
(09:48):
college was free for everyone. Why did that get rolled back?
Ronald Reagan was governor. He didn't like that they're all
these protesters at Berkeley. He didn't like the beginning of
the black power movement at Merritt College campus, and he
said this, it shouldn't be subsidizing curiosity. I remember seeing
evictions and plant closures and members of my family losing
jobs and benign neglect. That was when you started to
(10:10):
see a lot of money and resources pulled out of
urban cities, urban programs, and that is really what accelerated
urban decline and the loss of value in urban communities.
He cut all kinds of things. He cut policies that
were designed to better resolve He cut urban programs creating
(10:31):
this benign neglect, cut publicly funded higher education out of spite,
and changed our anti monopoly policies. Selling us this story,
which is fitting for a man who never quite fully
left Hollywood, selling us this bootstrap narrative that if you
just try hard enough, if if you alone wanted bad enough,
(10:55):
you alone can make it on your own that you
already have everything you need to succeed. If you just
want to succeed badly enough, and your failure to succeed,
that's yours alone. You shouldn't need anybody else's help. There
is this moralism associated with poverty, where we believe in
individuals who are poor are bad people, or they're not
(11:18):
capable people, they're not as smart as we have not
looked at or examined the systems, so that make it
virtually impossible for individuals to move up the economic latter.
So much of what we know today is tied up
in what we've been taught for so long with somebody
else told us. When I first spoke with Jamila Medley,
(11:41):
she told me we have to heal from individualism. M hmm,
what a scrumptious and true statement. Individualism as an illness
really stuck with me. We're told all our lives, get
an education, find a well paying job, buy your house,
start a family, do this, do that, And all I'm
hearing is me, me, me, me, me, figure it out,
(12:05):
do it all by yourself. And then I remember what
Heather said, two people in a cold room, one's got
a coat, one doesn't. But if they just sort of
joined together and like shouldered open the door, then walked
out into the sun where it's seventy degrees. They both
be good, you know, but it's the boss that keeps
them in the cold room. Imagine if we dropped the
(12:27):
individualism and work together, things could get a whole lot
better for all of us. When some of us lose,
we all lose. When we work together, we can all win.
And you could say that this idea goes back way
earlier than Reagan, way earlier than the New Deal. We
can take it all the way back to something Astra
(12:47):
Taylor told me about the ancient Greeks. The word idiot
actually comes from the ancient Greek as well. Idiotis and
it didn't mean that you were dumb or uneducated. What
it actually meant was that you were a private person.
You're only concerned with yourself. So in ancient Athens, the
worst thing could be was an idiot. And once we
(13:07):
change our mindset and stop looking just at this separate
world of us and them, seeing ourselves as individuals instead
see ourselves as part of a week that we benefit
when everybody does by definition, that's when we can start
to do some real cool stuff. We can have new
models of business that served the many, not just the few.
(13:32):
So this is a model for how to cement ourselves
as citizens. After the break we talk solutions. So clearly,
(13:52):
our economy has some issues racism, division, all the money
flowing right into the pockets of Mr Bezos, and this
extreme wealth inequality that's been plaguing our nation for decades.
But if there's one thing I learned this season, it's
that people are coming out swinging. There are people working
hard to citizen and to create new models that make
(14:14):
it possible for all of us to thrive. And as
I started looking at some of these incredible new models,
I noticed that they were accounting for something that feels
very far away from capital e economics. They were focusing
on human needs, on the fact that in order for
the economy to thrive, people need to thrive too. First,
(14:39):
you need space, like a space of your own, physical space,
a mental space to feel like you belong, like you've
got room to grow. When you're tied down to debt,
trust me, it's impossible to feel that sense of space.
It's impossible to pay the rent or educational opportunities or
(15:00):
health expenses when you are burdened by that lack of space.
You don't have time to ground yourself, to plant yourself,
to think about growing into something more. You're too busy surviving.
Nony Sessions saw firsthand what happens when people lose that
sense of physical space called home, without land, without permanence,
(15:24):
the path in the future go up and smoke, They disappear.
There's nothing to connect you to before, and there's there's
very little the ground YouTube after. Nony is a third
generation West Oaklander, a community that's been assaulted by gentrification,
or what she calls accelerated racialized displacement. As she's watched
(15:46):
countless evictions, the encampments of houseless Oaklanders get larger and larger,
and big developers swarm their way in. She realized that
the solution was ownership, and that her community was vulnerable
because her community didn't own their land. So she created
eb PRECK, the East Bay Permanent real Estate Cooperative. This
(16:09):
fights gentrification in West Oakland by buying up real estate
and historically black and brown communities and then collectively owning
and managing those properties democratically. So this is a model
for how to cement ourselves as citizens structurally. So ownership
permanent is critical for culture building, identity building, the building
(16:31):
of futures. Ownership gives us room to breathe. And there's
this thing that I've felt through all of these conversations
about the power of place and community, about being grounded
somewhere and having a platform from which to launch, to
become more, to become citizens, to citizens not just legally,
(16:56):
but in a community sense, to feel connect did to
other people, to feel valued with and buy other people
in a way that isn't captured by dollars. It's captured
by something else, something Richer small business owner and distiller
Maria Strada remembers that feeling so clearly. When the pandemic
(17:17):
hit her community in Bushwick, I started realizing that people
did love us in a way, which is something I
didn't really recognize. When COVID hit Marie's distillery, Moto Spirits
turned around and started making hand sanitizer to supply hospitals
and to keep her community safe. And when Marie needed
(17:37):
her neighbors to show up, they did. Everyone was reaching
back out to us, the relationships that we had initially
fostered with random things like motorcycles and dogs, and they
just came, you know, everyone just said okay, well we're
gonna do this. Or bartenders came and we did this
bartending event once this competition, and they reached out and
(17:59):
they said, hey, how about if we do you know,
a special cocktail thing for you online and then we
can you know, give that money to a certain organization.
So that's that's how we've been doing things. Now, I
gotta say hearing how Mri showed up for her community
in its time of need challenge. The way I often
think about businesses, like our US concept of how a
(18:21):
business works tends to involve the image of cost cutting
and operating opportunistically, competitively and above all, capitalistically to maximize profits.
I think about CEOs get the basils who make piles
of money while workers fight for a livable minimum wage.
(18:41):
But so many guests really elevated my idea of what
a successful community centered business should and can look like.
Jamila Medley has seen the cooperative ownership model working for
hundreds of years. But what exactly is a cooperative? Like?
What's a co op? I thought I knew, but I
really didn't. So a co op has two components. One
(19:04):
is the association of people who come together. They identified
that they have a shared need economic, social, cultural, and
they determined that they want to democratically own an enterprise together,
and so they create that business to fulfill the need
that they have. So co ops sound new ag, but
(19:26):
really certain communities have been practicing cooperative economics on the
d L for a long time. For black folks in Philadelphia,
cooperative economic and mutual aid practices have been essential to survival.
So we can think back to periods when black folks
were enslaved and there were people who were running away
(19:48):
from slavery who came to Philadelphia and created a rich
and robust community of black folks here. But they survived
in many ways through cooperative economic practices. Here's the thing
that resonates most with me about the cooperative model. It
gives people a chance to make their voices heard. It
(20:09):
gives people a choice. It's like this little place where
democracy plays out. And as I started to explore these
new models of business, it became clear that that sense
of agency is key well beyond voting, well beyond business,
just in life. It's a lot easier to thrive when
you have the space to make your own decisions rather
(20:31):
than someone prescribing those decisions for you, giving you the
feeling of choice while having pre selected a certain set
of options that you're limited by now. Bruce Patterson saw
that when he set out to bring a public option,
a choice for broadband to the small town of amin Idaho.
There's no way for you to invest in a different
(20:53):
outcome unless you own it. That's the only way you
can invest in a different outcome. So as a community,
people that decide to join AM and Fiber, they're invested
in that. So when they call and we've got an issue,
they know they're talking to somebody that lives in the
same community. After the break public broadband and free money,
(21:17):
I gotta say I am a total nerd. I said
it before and I'll say it again that the Internet
is a subject close to my heart and I feel
like something that doesn't get talked about enough. Is this
connection that broadband has to our economy, our society, and
our ability to show up as citizens. Without equal internet access,
(21:38):
we don't have equal access to information, and in the pandemic,
it means we don't have equal access to work, to school,
even to vaccines, which is why I was so excited
to talk to Bruce. How would we as a small
town in idahobe competitive in attracting businesses and residents with broadband.
So the hardest part about this isn't the technology, but
(22:01):
the absolute hardest thing is consensus. Bruce found that locals
were paying for this essential need access to the Internet,
which is like access to electricity or water or even air,
but their needs were not getting met, not getting met
by the private option. There are people in neighborhoods that
(22:21):
want fiber, they want better connectivity, they want another choice.
And here's the brilliant thing to me, Bruce didn't just
jam the option down people's throats. He knew that wouldn't
go over well and conservative rural Idaho. No, he found
those people where they were in their neighborhoods and gave
them a space and opportunity to discover and voice their needs.
(22:45):
These people came out of the woodwork and found us
and said, if I talk to my neighbors, if I
go knock on doors, can you give me anything to say?
So we started to call these folks fiber champions, and
they did it am and Idaho now has the choice
to opt into some of the cheapest, fastest, most public
(23:08):
internet in the country. The Open Technology Institute did a
cost of connectivity research program and found am and to
have the cheapest gig internet in the world. I gin
poos fight for domestic workers is about giving those workers
more choices. The choice to have health benefits comes to mind,
(23:28):
but it's also about lending the care and support our
society needs to open up choices for the rest of us.
We think about infrastructures, bridges and tunnels and broadband, but
what could be more fundamental infrastructure than the ability to
make sure that our families are loved, ones are cared
for so that we can work. I call these jobs
(23:50):
job enabling jobs because they make it possible for everything
else to work and everyone else to work, space to live,
access to internet, access to health care, and job options.
All of that equates to choice. But at the end
of the day, so much choice in this economy comes
right down to money, and giving poor black mother's choices
(24:13):
is why Yandoro started the Magnolia Mother's Trust Magnolian Mother's
Trust as the first and only guaranteed income project in
this country that takes a racial and gender equity approach
to our conversations about wealth and equities within this country.
It provides a thousand dollars a month twelve months and
no strings attached extremely low income Black mothers. Yeah, that's right,
(24:37):
a thousand dollars a month, no strings attached for a
full year. Because you can't citizen when you can barely
pay the bills, when you live in poverty and don't
have savings. How that constantly holding your breath? Um, how
stressful that is, and how that takes away your ability
to plan and dream and hope. One of our moms
(24:59):
went do in the pandemic and became a paramedic. She's like,
I always want to be a paramedic. They need paramedics now.
I'm like, yes, they do need paramedics now. And by
giving people money, Magnolia Mother's Trust is giving people options,
giving them a chance to decide on their future, a
chance two citizen. And that's exactly what Astra Taylor told
(25:21):
me about ancient Greek society. Greece is this mythic birthplace
of democracy in the US. And there's some parts of
their society that definitely needed work. Women were excluded, and
you know they own slaves. But there's one thing they
really did get right. They paid those who counted as
citizens to participate in self government, and when it was
(25:42):
your turn, you'd actually get called up to serve. It
was like jury duty. But for Congress, they were thinking
about these problems we're not thinking about, which is how
do you create systems of equality? How do you compensate
people so they can truly participate? Right? And this is
why I'm saying that we're stuck. We just aren't being
very creative when you think about all the tools or disposal,
and when we think democracy equals elections, I think we
(26:04):
have to be honest that might be a contradiction in
terms when we give ourselves room to citizen to really
show up and invest in relationships and understand our power
and benefit the many not the few. We give ourselves
room to pursue things that some of us have deemed radical.
(26:24):
I'm talking public broadband and giving people money just to
do with what they say they need. So many of
these things were a pipe dream to so many of
us until the pandemic. Right now, in particular, I think
we are in this a new New Deal moment, honestly,
(26:45):
where more deeper, impactful change is possible than my entire
twenty five years of organizing. Yeah, that's right, I'm bringing
up the Rhona. Look, I'm not gonna sit here and
tell you how great COVID nineteen has been for everybody,
how good it was for society, because it's not, and
(27:08):
it hasn't been. It caused us a lot of pain,
a lot of distraction, a lot of agony. But it's
also shown us how dire things have been and how
much better they can be. And it's shown us that
when pressed, we can rise to that opportunity. You know,
(27:31):
we've kind of been here before. This happened with the
Great Depression. Our entire nation's economy crashed, and we responded.
We were forced to respond with the New Deal. So
what's gonna happen now. Adoption of a widespread guaranteed and
(27:53):
come on a national scale. I think that that will
look like as finally eradicating poverty. I think that will
look like us having healthier families. I think that would
look like us having healthier kids. I think that would
look like us finally looking like the greatest nation in
the world. I think that would change the trajectory of
(28:15):
our future, not just for some before an entire country,
before the pandemic, universal basic income was this radical, relatively
fringe idea. Now everyday Americans are cashing stimulus checks and
enhance unemployment benefits, and we're starting to expect it. Maybe
now we can create that new new deal that doesn't
(28:37):
leave out people of color and explicitly exclude so many
who we need to all move forward. Maybe we'll get
to be just go out and limb here free. Do
you believe? Is you know a biblical term, right? It's
this ancient term, uh, for the moment the deaths are
(28:59):
canceled in the land is given back, the economy we
get so out of whack, people would be selling themselves
into debt servitude. And you know ancient Babylonia, and so
periodically the king would say, jubilie, wiping up the slate.
So that's been canceled, and now you're free. You can
go back home. What would it mean to be free
of crushing debt, free of small mindedness, free of being
(29:23):
penned in and not being able to show up as citizens?
That excites me? Can you hear it in my voice?
Oh my goodness, I'm getting a little excited. Okay, calm
down here. Today. I am cautiously optimistic about this future.
But I've also lived, and I know this is not
going to be easy. It's never been easy. Literally, it's
(29:45):
always hard. Doing good stuff is almost always hard to
do because there's gonna be pushed back. People will get
impatient with the pace to change. Some of us will
remain stuck in the zero sum us versus them mentality.
And we're still struggling with how to grow through the
systemic racism that's held us back so long. We're still
(30:07):
struggling to accept all people as people, regardless of how
they identify themselves versus our limited expectations of who they're
supposed to be. We're still struggling with just really starting
to face the size of the climate crisis. Yeah, climates
hanging out there like I see your plans? What? And
(30:29):
still with all that, with all those real challenges that
I've named and some that I haven't, I feel like
something big could happen. I know something big could happen.
And I know what's more likely to happen if we
all do our part, if we show up right, if
(30:50):
we participate, if we if we citizen, even in small ways,
to help make those possible big changes, real, big realities.
That's the story we put together. But there is one
(31:13):
more story to tell in this season. Next week we
have a very special guest and a very special episode. Yeah,
I get called like a professor doing comedy, which you know,
it feels good in some way because it makes my
parents feel good to hear the word professor next to
my name. At the same time, it's I don't want
to be teaching people. I want to be making them laugh,
(31:35):
and I want to be able to make anybody laugh.
Next week, Harri Kondabolo, and now time for some action.
Ask yourself, how did this season make you feel? How
has it challenged you and what have you learned? And
if you're comfortable sharing any of those reflections, please share
(31:56):
them with us. Send an email to comments at how
to Citizen, doctor m or leave a voice memo with feedback.
In general, how do Citizen dot com slash voiceman. We
know there's always more to learn, which is why we
set up a special bookshop just for you. Head over
the bookshop dot org slash shop slash how to Citizen.
(32:16):
We've got shelves with titles written by our guests, those
recommended by our guests, and those we have learned to
love as well. I am sure there's something on those
shelves that will help you keep learning. I know we've
asked you to do a lot this season, and if
you've missed any of it, we got you head over
to how the Citizen dot com for all those actions
plus more. There's some bonus thing happening over there where
(32:39):
we've got personalized ways to get you going on your
citizen journey. We know it's not always easy to know
where to start, so we built something a little customized
just for you. And lastly, just tell somebody about the show.
If you've been with us this long, you know what
we're up to was dope. We need you to tell
the algorithms how dope we are with those five stars
(33:00):
in those reviews. We need you to tell your friends,
your family members, and your colleagues. And if you go
loud on social media, our hashtag is how to Citizen Now.
I've got to thank some people for helping make this
show possible. I want to thank all of our guests.
It's pretty obvious I couldn't have done this without them.
(33:21):
It would just be me talking to myself, which, trust me,
has its limits. I want to thank the Economic Security Project,
who helped us find so many of these guests. To
my producing team, Stephanie Cone, Ali Killed, Sam Paulson, Kelly Prime,
thank you for your patience with me, for your creativity,
and for your dedication. And a special thanks to Misha Yusuf,
(33:44):
Tamka Adams, Arwin Nix, and Rachel Garcia all at dust
Like Super Dope. Special extra thanks to this show's executive
producer and my wife, Elizabeth Stewart. I used the term
we a lot when I'm describing this show, and sometimes
I mean that generically, like we're all part of a
(34:05):
collective find the week, but often I mean that very specifically,
like me and Elizabeth. You hear my voice, but you're
often experiencing her thinking, her brain, and her big picture vision.
She's been a key to the architecture of this season,
helping us all connect these dots. So thank you, Bo. Finally,
(34:27):
thank you for listening, for emailing and social media in
and sharing your literal voice with us. Thank you for Citizen.
We're in this together? How does Citizen? With Baritone Day
is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and Dust
Like Productions. Our executive producers are Me Barritton, Day, Thurston
(34:47):
Elizabeth Stewart and Misha Yusa. Our producers are Stephanie Cone
and Ali Kilts. Kelly Prime is our editor, Valentino Rivera
is our engineer, and Sam Paulson is our apprentice. Original
music by Andrew Eaple. This episode was produced and sound
designed by Stephanie Comb. Special thanks to Joel Smith from
(35:08):
my Heart Radio
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