August 4, 2025 • 67 mins
In this episode of the Shaping Freedom podcast, Baratunde Thurston shares his deeply personal journey of healing from generational trauma while exploring what it means to be an active citizen in today’s world. Known for his work at the intersection of justice, joy, and possibility, Baratunde offers a powerful framework for understanding citizenship as a verb—an ongoing practice rooted in both self-awareness and collective responsibility.
Baratunde, an Emmy-nominated host, New York Times bestselling author, and Webby Award-winning podcaster, reflects on his current projects, including America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston on PBS, the How to Citizen podcast, and A Life With Machines, where he explores our evolving relationship with AI and technology.
Throughout the conversation, themes of community building, freedom, and self-determination are woven together. He challenges the notion of freedom as a solo pursuit, emphasizing that true freedom exists in relation to others. His vision progresses through courage, justice, and freedom, ultimately leading to peace—a message that encourages listeners to embrace their role in creating a more connected and intentional world.
Learn how to set boundaries without guilt. Join Lisane's next Protect Your Peace Shaping Session today: https://shapingfreedom.com/boundaries-workshop
Baratunde, an Emmy-nominated host, New York Times bestselling author, and Webby Award-winning podcaster, reflects on his current projects, including America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston on PBS, the How to Citizen podcast, and A Life With Machines, where he explores our evolving relationship with AI and technology.
Throughout the conversation, themes of community building, freedom, and self-determination are woven together. He challenges the notion of freedom as a solo pursuit, emphasizing that true freedom exists in relation to others. His vision progresses through courage, justice, and freedom, ultimately leading to peace—a message that encourages listeners to embrace their role in creating a more connected and intentional world.
Learn how to set boundaries without guilt. Join Lisane's next Protect Your Peace Shaping Session today: https://shapingfreedom.com/boundaries-workshop
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
And in the rise of the machines and the moments
that we're in with artificial intelligence, we must expand our portfolio,
our range beyond mere cognitive intelligence. There's emotional intelligence, and
embodied intelligence, and spiritual intelligence, and a whole plethora of
intelligence is to connect with.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to the Shaping Freedom Podcast, where we dive into
conversations that inspire personal growth, transformation and clarity and challenging times.
I'm your host, Lysan Basquiat. Friends, I'm so happy to
welcome to the show a guest whose life and work
reflect a deep commitment to helping us live more fully,
(00:51):
more consciously, and more connected to ourselves, each other, and
the world we share. Artunde Thurston is an Emmy nominated host,
New York Times best selling author, Webby Award winning podcaster,
and cultural thought leader whose voice resonates at the intersection
of justice, joy and possibility. Through his work as a writer, activist, humorist,
(01:14):
and storyteller, Baratunde invites us to reimagine what's possible when
we engage with our lives and our communities as active
participants in shaping something better. He's the Emmy nominated host
and executive producer of America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston on PBS,
where he explores how diverse communities across the country connect
(01:37):
to nature as a source of resilience, healing, and belonging.
He's also the Webby Award winning host of the acclaimed
podcast How to Citizen with Baratunde, named one of Apple's
Best Podcasts of the Year I Think That Was in
twenty two, which challenges us to see citizen as a
verb and to embrace our collective power to create meaningful chess,
(02:01):
and in his newest podcast, Life with Machines, he helps
us navigate the complex and very human questions raised by
artificial intelligence and technology. Baratunde is the author of the
New York Times bestseller How to Be Black, which is hilarious,
insightful and a lot of fun, and the ted talk
(02:22):
How to Deconstruct Racism one headline at a time. It's
been viewed over five point five million times, offering a sharp, funny,
and deeply human lens on how the stories we tell
can reinforce or dismantle injustice. A Harvard graduate with a
background in philosophy and a career that has spanned corporate boardrooms,
(02:46):
comedy writers rooms, and community movements. Baratunde has chosen again
and again to use his platforms to tell better stories,
to ask better questions, and to help all of us
to connect more deeply to our power, to each other
and to the kind of world we want to leave behind. Baratunde,
Welcome to the Shaping Freedom podcast.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Lissan. That is a beautiful biome. Thank you, and it's
so good to be here with you.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Thank you. I'm so I am very excited that you're here.
I tripped up over your name. I'm normal, I'm typically
good with names, but it was because you made such
a point of it in your book.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I did, and so I was reading.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I'm like, I said, Barras, give it to me.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Baratun day Thursta.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
So simple, baratun day Thurston.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Okay, there are there are people. My my preferred pronunciation
is actually Spanish. That's simple, it's easier.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
There we go, There we go.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
I'm not a native Spanish speaker, normal parents, but I
love that.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
And you're also not Nigerian. Well then yes, so okay,
now I'll get that. There we go, perfect, perfect, perfect.
So one of the reasons why I wanted to have
this conversation with you is because one of the things
that I talk about, or the thing that I believe
(04:22):
is part of the reason we're each here, is to
find a way to free yourself of whatever it is
that is standing in the way of you being who
you were meant to be on this planet. And I
believe in doing that by dismantling unlimited, unlimiting beliefs, by
(04:43):
helping people to give themselves pause and to take a
moment to look at how they were programmed and how
that's showing up in the world. And you do the
same work.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Thank you for seeing that and seeing that, and thank
you for what you do in that epic mission. It
takes a lot of hands.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yes, yes, And in looking at the work that you've
been doing, what I am so impressed with and also
so deeply grateful for. It's the fact that you do
that in many different ways. It's like you seem to
have a mission that you fold into or speak through
(05:29):
all the different things that you do. And so I
do see that, and we appreciate you for that. We
the world.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Oh cool. I was like, is there a committee or
sometimes how it goes?
Speaker 2 (05:45):
It's here, you didn't know and I didn't want you
to know, but.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
We've been watching and we approve.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yes, we the folks who are listening, the folks who
are watching the work you're doing. We the collective, we
see you, and we see the contribution that appears to
be very intentional contribution that you're making.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
It is. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, Yeah, we're gonna have
some feelings today.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Okay, yes, yes. Let's start with the concept of freedom.
When you think about the work that you do and
the man that you are in the journey that you
are on and have lived thus far, what does freedom
look like to you?
Speaker 1 (06:38):
A lot? It looks like a lot. The first thing
that comes to mind is collective. I think in this land,
in this country, we interpret freedom as very individual. I
am free to do what I want first person, singular,
and freedom exists in the context of others as this
all life, and it's not merely rights, but responsibilities and
(07:03):
a kind of belonging and cohesion to it. The freedom
from pain and injustice is a part of freedom to me,
I think, because so much of my work is storytelling.
The freedom to create a story and then live in
that one that is encompassing and has room to breathe. Yeah,
(07:27):
it's and the other thing that's on my mind. I've
been in so many indigenous spaces lately, American Native indigenous spaces.
And there's a really powerful woman, Loretta afraid of Bear Cook.
She's Oglalla Lakota, and she talks about what I saw
(07:48):
as like the series of consequences or conditional relationships. There's
a group of us who've been in relationship with her,
and she's had this mandate herself to learn to go
out there and get along and have the courage to
stand up for yourself. And then she tells this story
(08:09):
about courage which weaves freedom into it. Courage is a
prerequisite for justice. Justice is a prerequisite for freedom, and
freedom is a prerequisite for peace. And so I see,
and I'm starting to experience the idea of freedom in
(08:32):
that wider context from courage to peace. And I on
a deep learning journey myself about the peace that existed
on this land before any of us showed up here
or were dragged here. And it's really beautiful. So freedom
is a story. The last thing I'll say on this
one is my mother, aur Anita Lorraine Thurston. I was
(08:55):
able to start making more sense of her life after
it ended, and was I able to ask her some
questions that I couldn't when she was alive. But I
still got answers even though she's not in this form anymore.
And I saw her life as a pursuit of freedom,
looking born into a much more constrained reality as a
(09:18):
black woman born in nineteen forty in Washington, DC, layers
of non freedom, taxation without representation in this federal city,
a woman in this male dominant society, a black person
in a white run world, a child of abuse in
a household of parents who did not love her in
the right way. And so many of the moves she
(09:40):
made was to create her own freedom. And if I might,
that's led me truly one last thought, because I found
a paradox.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Well that last thought, because we're here, well.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Not last, but I think I'm feeling like I'm on
a senate with an opening statement. I was like, still
hoar to who's but these things are just flowing. And
I encountered a paradox in my own seeking of freedom,
and it was partially resolved in Paris with another black writer,
(10:15):
Carvil Wallace, and I had discovered really just encountered for
the first time for myself this contradiction that so much
of the work I had been doing around race was
seeking freedom but through the agency of others, namely white people,
that I'm going to explain us to you, that I'm
(10:37):
going to prove our humanity to you, that if I
just used the right words and the right jokes and
the right timing and delivery, like you'll see me get it, yeah,
And you'll be liberated from whatever's holding you back. So
I can be liberated from you holding me back. So
my liberation was dependent on them. So I put my
(11:00):
myself in a prison of my own making. And Carvelle
said to me, He's like, oh, you mean deliberation paradox,
Like it's like a star Trek phenomenon or something like, yeah,
he's in seven, episode ten, that liberation paradox. But yeah,
I had made myself a dependent variable in someone else's equation,
(11:20):
and so that required a nonlinear escape because there are
real forces, there's real constraints, laws are real, bodies are real,
physics exist and this is all made up, that's right.
So what's this tangential, orthogonal, nonlinear pursuit of freedom that
(11:45):
allows an achievement of escape from that story, and that
reminds me of brother Casey wrote a beautiful piece in
twenty nineteen, the Art of Black Escape. His name is
(12:05):
his last name may come to me later and you
can patch it in in your show notes. But black
dude named Casey, we'll start with that. Her head run
of a business called MBAs across America. He interviewed Barack
Obama myself by Southwest in a very beautifully challenging way,
and I don't know, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, something like that,
and he wrote about this, like there's another path to
(12:27):
freedom that is ephemeral, symbolic, spiritual, it's energetic, and that
we create our own path through art, through belief, through meditation,
through like we're already free actually, And so, yeah, my
(12:49):
concept of freedom is increasingly encompassing and a non literal
and certainly non individualistic. But those are some of the
elements that come to mind when you raise that prompt.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, I think it's also about the contribution that we're making, yeah,
and being aware of that and allowing yourself to be
free enough to truly consider the contribution that we're all
making in this very individual way into the collective. This
(13:26):
has been an interesting weekend. We're having this conversation just
after the fourth Independence weekend. Oh yeah, an interesting one
for me personally. But on the other side of the weekend,
I did a twenty four hour run to New York
(13:48):
to spend a day with my stepmom, And it was
also the anniversary of my father's death, the thirteen, the
twelve year anniversary of my father's death. And I too,
have spent a lot of time asking questions of my
father that didn't stop when he passed away. They increased,
(14:11):
They got more intents, We had some conversations that we
needed to have. And my father was an incredibly determined, smart,
committed man to the role that he had on this
planet during his lifetime. And he taught me that to
(14:40):
think more about who I am than to think about
being black, because he came from a country where he
didn't need to think about the fact that he was black.
He was just black. And it wasn't until he came
to this country that he discovered or there was an
(15:01):
attempt to impose upon him the box that black is.
And so that's what came to mind for me when
you mentioned your mom and the conversations that you and
she had after after she passed away. What was the
biggest or the greatest lesson that you learned from your mother,
(15:23):
If you don't mind me asking, there were a lot.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
I think it's a version of you have to love you.
She wasn't loved in the right way as a little person,
and she worked really hard to figure out how to
be that for herself, and she made a ton of progress.
I don't know if she achieved. I don't know if
(15:54):
there's an end point on that journey, but there was
a beautiful self evolution there with some sad limitations. But
I think that's the biggest one. Yeah, you got to
love you? Yeah, how about you?
Speaker 2 (16:13):
The biggest lesson that Gerard Bosquiet taught me was to
stand that, no matter what's happening in life, and no
matter what I get confronted with, to stand in it,
because when you're standing, you can. This is my little
(16:36):
add on to it. Right when you're standing, it's the start.
It shows to myself and to others a willingness to
be accountable. And once you're accountable, then everything that flows
from there is going to be It's going to work out. Okay,
(16:57):
One way or another. So I think that that's probably
the biggest lesson.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Stand.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Yeah, he wasn't into personal growth, my dad. I just
I told a story. I did a I've been very
interested in storytelling, and I told my first story down
in San Diego like.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Two weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
In what format it's a vamp. It's a vamp storytelling thing.
And in what format?
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Meaning was it a moth thing?
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yes, so not moth. It's a vamp, which I guess
is kind of the San Diego equivalent, although they have
stories here. It's a group called so Say It All.
And a friend of mine what I mentioned wanting to
find out more about moth and wanting to go look at,
you know, to watch one of these performances. She mentioned
that there was vamp, but it's in San Diego and
(17:50):
just do it there. And so I submitted a story,
and so did she. Mine got selected and it started
off being a story about one thing and turned into
a story about my father and a story about the
relationship with him and the dichotomy in him as a
person on one hand, very loving and supportive and pioneering
(18:14):
in his thinking, and on the other hand, very closed
to enrich about certain things, and and uh and very
and and uh. He did the best he could. He
did the best he could with what he had. Uh.
And I have the result of that, and now it's
you know, for me to do with that that you
(18:36):
can and do the best that I can.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah, So I don't know how he got there, but
that's okay. What were some of the legacies that you
had to heal or reimagine or reconstruct along the way.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Legacy of abuse. My mother was abused by her father.
My sister was abused by my father, who is not
her father. I knew, I've known that for a very
long time. It wasn't like a buried family secret. It
was actually shared with me at a pretty young age
so that I wouldn't be it can be weaponized against
(19:17):
me later. That's how my mom explained it to me.
It's like, I want you to hear this from me
so somebody doesn't come twenty years from now being like,
your daddy this and you're kind of knocked aside by
that and all over by that. So I had to
heal from And I don't know that that's complete, but
it is one of the legacies. One of the things
(19:38):
I've inherited. Is that dynamic in that relationship. I think
I've had to heal in a way that's pretty fresh
well before I get to that one. That dynamic and
the fact that I was raised by my mother only
(20:00):
my father was killed when I was quite young, eight
years old, and I was raised in part by my
older sister, and literally every animal we had in the
house was female. So I had no male energy around
me of any species. I don't know if plants have gender.
Maybe was a dude, and so yeah, I I I
(20:25):
learned a lot of respect and deference because of their
experiences with men and just because of being surrounded by
female and feminine energy. But I didn't learn some of
the other energy and layering in race stuff of you know,
(20:46):
just wanting to like survive and not stand out too much.
Is you know, I'm dichotomous as well, and like I
got a ton of confidence speak my mind, and I'm
not an idiot, and I'm not trying to get got
by the authorities or you know, just mouthed off because
I can, and I certainly can, but I don't much
(21:09):
very diplomatic by nature and by nurture. So I think
finding assertion and strength and force, even still respectful, but
these are important attributes of being a human being and
being a man healing from that, And I think with
(21:34):
my relationship with my mother, there's some healing from all
that she demanded of me, that she needed that she
shouldn't have expected from me because of the hand she
was dealt and the choices she made how to handle
that hand. Yeah, and so a lot of pressure on
(21:55):
a little boy two be companion to mom, and the
love I had for her was really really important to her,
and she was not. She was sensitive to threats to
that love between us, and so that loyalty and like,
I think it just made her do things that she
(22:16):
shouldn't have in terms of trying to protect what she
got from me, which isn't what I needed either, And
so healing ultimately from being a mama's boy who loves
his mother dearly. And the way I wrote about her
and how to Be Black is less nuanced than how
(22:36):
I would write about her today twelve years later, thirteen
years later. No less love, but more information, more context,
And to heal from not asserting or even naming or
being aware of my own needs. It's a lot of
(22:59):
like making sure mom's Okay.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Where do you if you don't mind my asking how
many children? And where do you fit?
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I am the second of two, okay, just me and
my sister, different father's, same mother.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yeah, that happens a lot, you know where, And that
that that I'm referring to is when you're raised by
a single parent, sometimes the child of the opposite gender
gets caught in kind of that that web of what
their role is supposed to be. And specifically, I think
(23:49):
it happens a lot in Black families in the relationship
between sons and mothers, especially when there's some semblance of
dysfunction that led to the family structure being that way,
you know. And it comes from most of the time love,
total love and all of that, but it also creates
(24:10):
something that that son and that mother have to also
work out and work through as the son gets older,
you know. And it's and I'm bringing it up and
I hope it's okay. And I'm bringing up because that
I lean into something, but up because there are so
many people who are experiencing that today. I look at
(24:33):
what's happening out in culture, in the culture with mothers
and the biological fathers of children especially their boys, and
raising these boys in a home where there isn't a
lot of male influence, and maybe that woman is feeling
(24:53):
the scabs of the relationships that they're in, so they
try to protect the boys. But then it creates this
thing where it's like, that's not who I'm here to
be for you. I can't fill that.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
And that's part of the contradiction with Aarnita is that
she's magnificently self aware and transparent relative to I think
most humans of her age at any given time, and
certainly in her disclosures to me, I saw a lot
of this, and she tried to compensate for it. There's
(25:31):
something she kept for me that I learned later from
my sister or her friends. But she enrolled me in
this rights of passage program very afrocentric black men and
African men, trying to fill that gap, not just with
her energy. She knew she was.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
I was going to ask you, how did you get it?
Because I know you got it?
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Yeah, where did you get it? Some of it was
that A lot of it that was a big dose.
And it's an extra irony that we found that program.
It's called Uncle Bea and it was part of the
Nation House Wattto School in Washington, DC. We only knew
about that program because of the white private school that
(26:12):
I went to at the same time. So the economy,
it's like so many false binaries that create the beautiful spectrum.
So I start going to Sidwell Friends in seventh grade,
in part because the principal of the middle school at
the time was a man named Bob Williams, who's a
black man and like a very man and very black person.
(26:34):
I knew who he was proud of his people, also
know how to navigate this space at a very high level,
and saw me and saw my mother, and she saw
some kind of surrogacy in him. I could be an uncle,
and he tipped her off to like, yosis, I'm a
part of this other thing that has nothing to do
(26:55):
with this world, but can probably help a boy like
yours be fortified in this world. Know what their conversation was,
but she was primed for it, and whoever initiated like
I could only be as comfortable as I was in
the Sidwell environment because I had this uncle bea environment.
And that was a couple of years of overlap and
(27:17):
parallel educations, sometimes directly in opposition to each other. That's
so important, very important, balance, very important. You can't just
go with the official narrative. No, And that that was
the other thing that my mother offered me. Choices. Expose
this kid to all kind of stuff and let him
(27:38):
figure it out. And do the boy Scouts thing, do
the DC Youth Orchestra program thing, do the Uncle be
a thing, do the community garden thing, do the political
rally thing, do the musicals and clubs thing, and the
computer thing, and then and then make nature and the
hiking and like be out. And that was I think
(27:59):
that approach is more common. Now there's the tiger mom
trope I called my mom. My mom was the black
panther mom. It's still a predatory cat. It hits a
little different with Arnita, but yeah, I think she was
trying to open up channels and she held a few
(28:22):
things close. But when it comes to when it came
to what I would do with my life, she was
not prescriptive. She was invitational, which is beautiful, really rare
and really beautiful because I saw a lot of friends
who had very driven, intelligent parents with literally infinitely more
degrees than my mother. She had zero degrees, and they
(28:45):
had specific ideas for their kids, and they created incentive
structures and perversions to nudge or shove doth so yeah,
and my mom was like, you could do this, you
could do that, which is beautiful, be excellent?
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Yeah, at whatever?
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Right. So that was the immigrant mom and hers like
just be great. Yeah, but the like non immigrant mom
is like, but you choose the arena of greatness.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Do you I feel myself tiptoeing around this topic. Uh so,
I'm not going to Okay, what advice do you have
for the character that is the mother and the story? Yeah,
and the character that is the young man.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Oh, for the mother, Yes, you are enough. And when
you aren't, it's okay. You have reserves of resource and
strength that you cannot always see. So when it feels
(29:58):
like the world is on your shoulders, know that others
are right beside you to carry it. You do not
need to solve your child's life. They won't even get
to do that. Keep having fun. This whole thing's again. Yeah,
(30:19):
And I think this wasn't quite to my mother, but
I think for a mother today, and I mean, yes,
we live in the society that encourages optimization, that we
are trying to maximize the return on investment. Right, it's
capitalism everywhere, all the way down. That is literally not natural.
(30:48):
And so the relationship with your child is not that
of developing a product or managing our portfolio and trying
to make the optimal choice for education and extracurricular and
lesson learning and social exposure and religious like you'll drive
(31:09):
yourself just stop, stop, stop, you know, and when you don't,
it's okay. There's something in us. Let it come through.
And I think, let your child come through. They're not you,
they're part of you, and there's something new to try
(31:32):
to let them come through. For the kids today, for
the sun today. Your parents don't know shit, let's just
say it.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
They're struggling. They're trying to figure it out, processing their
own childhood stuff while they're trying to.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Show for you like your parents are people.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
I had such a moment of like, oh my mom
was Aernita. Yeah, not just ma, right, she had a
whole life, a whole loss identity, had nothing to do
with me for most of her life, and certainly the
(32:15):
formation of it, no inkling of me or my sister
that humanness of the parent is it's that the transition
from all powerful or hero or dominator the dynamic could
be different into human. You can come from all different directions,
(32:37):
but there's a power shift and there's a humility shift.
It's very humbling and disorienting for me to see my
mother as a person. Yeah, it's just that's hard. That
came after she was gone. When she was here, she
was like saintly, sacrificing, heroic, overbearing, all something, and I
(33:03):
was like, Oh, she's just trying to figure stuff out.
She really didn't know all the time, and I overinterpreted
her power and her role and that's on me, right.
There are things that she did that contribute to the
dynamic and the relationship, good, bad and otherwise, and there
(33:25):
are things that I did. And so the sooner that
a child of a person can recognize the person, not
the parent, I think that's liberating and important. I think
because of the technological space we're in, we owe a
lot of grace to any parent at this time, because
(33:46):
they are being put into a position that few, if
any previous generation has ever been in in terms of
the lack of relatability of experience. There are things that
children today are going through that older siblings haven't even
gone through who are six years older. So how would
a twenty year or forty or fifty year older person
(34:09):
have any direct experience to offer useful advice Back when
we was all farming, Yeah, it was the same. This
is how you hold what you did, you know, we
figured it out like this. It's been the same since
time immemorials. But like, how do you interact with a
relational AI chatbot that feels human and knows all your
business and the super refirming or with addictive porn service
(34:31):
like the access to temptation. Versions of this have happened before.
Books were those things, yes, long ago. Television was that.
Not at the rate, not at the rate, not at
the scale, not at the pervasiveness and the immersiveness. You know,
hip hop was that thing. Rock was that thing, The
Blues was that thing. And they're not the same.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Either, because now it's everything at once.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Everything everywhere, all at once. Yeah. And so some grace
for your parent, yeah, because they are drowning in lack
of relatability to your experience, and so we will need
some different ways to get through this.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yeah, And have fun it's a game. Have fun playing
all of it? Yeah, all of it fun. Yeah, that's
some of it.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah. You talk about the idea of citizen as an.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Action verb a verb nouns?
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yes, will you tell us a little bit more about that?
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (35:34):
What does that look like?
Speaker 1 (35:36):
My wife Elizabeth and I jointly developed this how to
Citizen podcast after I had tried to make it come
into being in different forms for several years, and it
finally was ready to be born in twenty twenty. Basic
premise being that citizen is noun was limiting. Citizen iss
(35:59):
urb is reading and more invitational and invites us to
actively shape and participate our environments, our communities, our democracy.
But that underneath that it means four particular things in
terms of the principles of it, and then what it
looks like can follow from that. So the four principles
of citizen as a verb are to show up to
(36:21):
participate some version of assumed role beyond voter participant, to
understand power, to not have a feeling of fear around
it or of zero sum around it. If somebody else
has power, I can't. That's a very popular narrative, especially
(36:44):
amongst those who are fighting for freedom. It's those powerful
people over there crushing us. Powerless over here leads to.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
The same thing. Yeah, you're playing the.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Same game, but the difference does not just play the
game and have changed the game. And to recognize power
is it ebbs and flows. It's a moving force, but
one that doesn't increase or dissipate. It just it shifts,
it moves. It's like energy. To commit to the collective
and not just the individual. That is what number three
(37:18):
of citizen as verb, and to invest in relationships with yourself,
with others and with this planet. It's to citizen, it
belong to each other. So what that tangibly and practically
might mean is that you should read up on candidates
for the election. It's cool. You should also think about where.
(37:40):
Think about what you want for your life and the
lives of the loved ones around you, and where you
have power. Like, think about where you have power. It's
not the most tangible action. It's like I should sign
a petition or organize a nonprofit. Those are valuable actions
as well. But contemplating your own power in the decisions
(38:03):
you make, as small as they be. Will I drink
from this water bottle or that plastic one down on
the floor beside me. That's a little teeny bit of power,
and it rolls up to a big collective set of choices,
and vice versa. We receive limited sets of choices, sometimes
from people temporarily empowered, but to be aware of it
is already an act of participation of power itself and
(38:25):
of citizen as verb. It demystifies and reacquaints us with
our own capacity, and that's really important now when it
feels like other people are making really big decisions that
are limiting our freedom and our choices. Yes, that is true,
and we have the power, we just do. It's people
(38:48):
power system. That's the whole premise. So citizen, I also
think it means to ultimately like we're figuring out how
to live together, and that requires practice, and in a
system where it's capitalism all the way down, and it
encourages a transactionalism and an optimization engine behind everything, we
(39:14):
atrophy the muscles of co living. All right, So how
do you and I exist right now in this dynamic?
Do you have the power because you have the paper
in your hand and I'm just waiting for what you're
going to do reacting? Can I flip it around and
ask you a question. You know, we're mutually interested here.
(39:35):
This is your show and I'm a participant with you
in it, and every episode is going to be different
because of that. So the living together is something that
has been actively discouraged by some of us who really
profit off of concentrating power by isolating us from each other,
(39:58):
from the planet, and even from our very selves. Let me,
you don't know what you want. Let me tell you
what you want. I don't know how you feel. This
is how you should feel. Pop this pill, now, feel
like this, Install this app, now, feel like that. Do this?
Speaker 2 (40:13):
Disconnect from all that.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
So when you do the opposite, when you reconnect with yourself,
that's an act of citizen ing to tune in to
your body, to know how this moment makes you feel,
how this proposal makes you feel. Not think thinking super important.
But we're over indexed on the cognition and in the
(40:39):
rise of the machines and the moments that we're in
with artificial intelligence, we must expand our portfolio, our range
beyond mere cognitive intelligence. There's emotional intelligence and embodied intelligence
and spiritual intelligence, and a whole plethora of intelligence. Is
to connect with and so when we do that, then
(41:01):
we're creating new systems and centers of power, new coalitions.
I mean, yeah, across time, across species, there's a lot
more possible. It gets everything gets spiritual fast. But I
think to keep it a little ground. Citizening and the
active nature of it can mean that. And it doesn't
(41:23):
have to be an electoral context or a political context
in the explicit sense. It can be in the family,
in the small business, in the group chat with friends.
How are we living together well? How do we resolve
our conflicts? And if we're just increasingly conscious of that
and trying to improve at that, then the explicit things
(41:46):
that we experience that we think of as democracy and
citizen and politics, they all emerge from those group chats
and from those parent child relations and from those school systems,
from those community interactions. So if we can practice living
well together there, living better together there, doing the democracy
thing there, then what emerges from there should be better.
(42:10):
It's soil and we're just growing these institutions.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
So what does living better actually look like from your perspective,
Because there are folks who believe that, Like you mentioned,
it is the petitions, It is the rant on social media.
It is the pointing to the opposite end, you know,
the opposite teams. I don't know, you know, like, what
(42:37):
what does that actually look like?
Speaker 1 (42:40):
I have two thoughts on that. For me, it looks
like feeling connected. It looks like eating well, being literally nourished.
It looks like being able to breathe easily, and certainly
it looks like being in some kind of community, not
(43:02):
being alone, knowing that it feels good to be a
part of something. If that's a group of people cheering
on a sports team, that's one version of it. It
can also mean that I know I have someone I
can reach out to when I'm going through a difficult
time and moment. It means having material needs met without
(43:24):
extreme agony, like I'm really really willing to work hard,
And I think there is like a baseline dignity and
net of provision that makes being in society much more fun,
(43:46):
more useful, more interesting, more sustainable. So living together better
for me means many of those things. And it means
having a sense of purpose that is resonant in some way,
right that what I'm doing means something to somebody. It matters, Yeah,
(44:09):
And I mean it might be to my niece and nephew,
right that like I have some relationship with them and
they like my jokes, all right, I got my purpose
to day's checks my jokes cool. Or it might mean
something more explicitly civic, right, that that my choice or
my opinion matters, or that what I do for work matters.
(44:32):
I want to matter, and I think a lot of
us do. There's another way I'm thinking about this, which
is I'm always thinking like tangible and intangible at the
same time I think and less tangibly. It's it's being
able to define for yourself and with others what you value.
(45:11):
In our How to Citizen series, we talked with roughly
sixty people. They all stand out for different reasons in
this moment. In say, Oofa stands out. She was recruited
by Stacy Abrams to help run the New Georgia project
and really change how get out the vote operations and
(45:32):
canvassing it all happen. Building much more relationship than give
me your vote, and you know every I can come
knocking on your door a few months before the election
making promises transactionally right and saying would you like to
buy my candidate? They look at their feature set relative
to the other one. We can do more for you. Okay,
probably not, but it sounds pretty pretty. Talk is a
(45:54):
beautiful thing. I engage in it constantly. And she was
telling us the story of entering a community in a
neighborhood with questions, first, what do you love about this community?
People are not used to that from a campaign, right
(46:16):
or from a fellow human being office.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Who are you as a citizen?
Speaker 1 (46:19):
You are a citizen of a place, of a place,
and what do you love about it? Maybe it's the shops,
Maybe it's the weather, Maybe it's the way the kids
mess around in the yards. Maybe it's the fruit trees
you know, in this particular neighborhood in Highland Park in
Los Angeles right nearby. But identifying that part of your
membership in this community that you love is an essential
(46:43):
prerequisite to any democracy action because that's a big part
of your why. That's what you want to preserve or
build on at least. And if you can't name that,
you're just getting triggered off the jump by other people
and what they love and what they want. So you
got to find that a moment with yourself. Yes for you, Yes, yes,
(47:06):
and and then it goes from what you love to
what do you want for the people you love in
this community, and they start naming stuff I want. I
want healthy food, I want good paying jobs, I want
safer sidewalks, I want clear, cleaner water, I want cheaper
(47:28):
gross whatever that. But you start getting aspirations right, and
that gives you directions. You establish foundation and you got direction.
All right, Now, let's move, get some momentum, let's throw
some mass behind this, and then you start bringing people
together to find Okay, well, we all love these things
in common. We've been told we're super different and that
(47:50):
you're over there because this is the color next to
your name, or the letter next to your name, or
the hood you're from. We got a lot of different divisions,
but we all love the low quat trees. Interesting, well,
we all love the birds. Okay, cool, Let's we all
love the river, the America Doors, the PBS. Here is
I found this deep love of place like a sports team.
(48:13):
People love their mountains, they love their national forest, they
love their creeks and creeks however they pronounce it in
whatever part of the country. So you build on that
shared love and then you all find the overlap and
you build on the shared aspiration. This is not what
I want, this is what apparently we want this. Huh.
(48:33):
So now you got mass and you got some velocity
and they can get some momentum going to get those
things done.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
Yeah, that's what I appreciate about everything that you do
and everything that I've heard you say and hear you
sing right now is it's the big things, right, It's
how do we impact and influence our cities, our divisions,
our neighborhoods, the state, the country. But what you're tapping
being into that resonates so deeply with me is that
(49:03):
it starts with you. It starts with you understanding who
you are, why things are important to you, what your
vision is, and if you're Unless you're willing to have
the patience with yourself to disconnect from the things that disconnect.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
You, you won't know.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
And it's really hard to matter when you don't know.
When you're just attaching yourself to whatever the momentum is
that someone else told you you were supposed to be.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Part of the part of the complication is that those
external forces, the people telling you what to connect to
and tap into, is not necessarily wrong it's often really
good things, right, fight for this sign that suppose this absolutely,
but then you're also getting like uncentered and tubbed. And
(50:02):
if there's one other citation I would make in this,
it's Adrian Marie Brown, author of a book called Emergent
Strategies Pleasure Activism. Who do you want to spend the
apocalypse with? Or She has a whole podcast series looking
at the work of Oxavia Butler and what that means
(50:24):
for these times. But she speaks really eloquently and has
practiced really eloquently about this scale thing. And yes, it's
about the big things at the same time it's about
the small things. And then there is a fractal nature
to our world in reality, and these patterns repeated every scale.
So if I don't know what I love about myself,
(50:51):
about my community, about this country, if I don't know
what I want for myself for my community, for my country,
how are we you going.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
To know that that's right?
Speaker 1 (51:03):
And so if the sense of direction of the country
doesn't feel clear, it's in part because maybe our own
individual senses are not clear either, and we're all reacting
to others who are also not that clear.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
Right, And we're being dragged being dragged along the way.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
And there are some who are super clear. Yes they
may not be clear with us, that's right, but they
are clear with themselves about what they want to create,
and they're dragging us into their story and we don't
have to do that.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
It's a better way tell me about life with machines.
AI has become such a huge, huge part of our lives.
I saw this real the other day on one of
the social media platforms where it was like your friend
(51:56):
who loves chatchipt and it's like chatchpt time is it?
You know?
Speaker 1 (52:03):
What's the web?
Speaker 2 (52:03):
You know whatever. It's just a huge part of our
lives and people are using it for more and more
ways to make decisions about what they're doing on a
day to day basis, to create and all of that.
And there's a lot of fear around AI, how and
you're exploring it in Life with Machines. So how should
(52:28):
we or how could we be looking at AI and
and the ways that it can impact our future or
what do you think the role of I don't know
what my question is.
Speaker 1 (52:37):
I feel it. I feel your question.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
I appreciate that. I appreciate that, and part of what
I am interpreting as your lack of clarity in this
moment is because the thing itself is not clear. Yeah.
Are we talking about a new set of technologies? Are
we talking about apps? Are we're talking about enhanced tools?
We're talking about machine learning and automation? Are talking about
a reflection of our thoughts? Yes, a reflection of what's
(53:03):
really happened and inside? Is that what we're afraid of?
So there's a lot going on, and AI is not
one thing. It is many many things. Technically it's many things,
but also in terms of the impact on the human experience,
which is our primary question and curiosity in life with machines,
it's many things. So a simple framing that I'm playing
(53:27):
with is like, AI is a form of power.
Speaker 2 (53:33):
Tell me more.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
The implications and impact are going to be very wide reaching.
We can, but I say it's a form of power
one because of universal impact that it can have and
lack of clear outcome. It's up to us to like
marry that power with intention, with community, with the other
(53:57):
principles of citizen Like, there's no between how to citizen
in life with machines. We got to show up and
participate in this moment and not just let Silicon Valley
dictate things to us or hope that our regulators and
legislators have our best interests at her. They've been very
clear they don't. They've actually been pretty explicit. Yes, you know.
(54:17):
The latest attempt in the Big Dumb Bill was to
prevent states from doing anything to protect their people from
the consequences of use of these technologies. And the first
order of any government is protecting its people. So you're
already abdicating your primary function. So thank you for your clarity. Cool,
(54:39):
I still want to live, so I got to show up.
I got to understand this. So I've got to understand
this power and its implication. I got to commit to
a collective and I think a lot of the AI
logic right now and the salesmanship is like it empowers you.
You can do so much more than you could. Individual
agency is going to go through the roof a one
person unicorn company, the first billion a a company home
(55:00):
by single human being. It's just around the corner what
we're supposed to be excited about the lack of need
for other people, So question that and maintain a commitment
to collective benefit. That's doesn't mean you can't also be accepted.
I use a lot of hyper individualistic applications of AI tools.
Transcribe this interview for me. You feedback on my essay? Okay, absolutely,
(55:23):
and how do we expand how can this be beneficial
to my tiny household of me and my wife, my
slightly larger extended family household, to my group chat of
college homies, to this black men's group I'm a part of,
to my neighborhood and palm springs right, to the society
layers and layers and layers, and can we engage collectively
(55:47):
that's not the default settings on the marketing materials and
investing in relationships. I think AI can be applied to
destroy all of what we need to be strengthening relationship
with self. I don't know, ask chat GPT, ask Gemini. Right,
(56:09):
look at I'm wearing this super smart ring. Tell me
how I slept last night?
Speaker 2 (56:13):
Well, it's yeah.
Speaker 1 (56:14):
I've had ridiculous moments in the morning where I wake
up feeling good. Yeah, my wife says, how'd you sleep
feel great? I must have slept great? Did I checked
the app and was like, no, you just didn't feel
sixty nine sixty nine out of them, what's the sky
hot of one hundred? I failed sleep me this morning,
(56:36):
I know, so apparently now I feel terrible. Thank you
so much. One ring to rule them all? So okay, cool?
And if I'm spending all this time with a very compelling, personable,
agreeable gassing me up chat buddy.
Speaker 2 (56:56):
Yeah, that encourages you to speak twits.
Speaker 1 (56:58):
Yes, and and and sounds like a per person now,
and they want it to look like a person now.
So if it talks like a duck and walks like
a duck, it's a duck. So if it talks like
a person, it is. Even if it's not a person,
it's substituting for a relationship with actual people. We have
a fixed amount of time in this life, so there
(57:19):
is a level of trade off and replacement. Not every
moment with JADGBT would have been a human moment or
Jim and I would. I'm not picking on them, they're
just the most popular. And then same with relationship with
the planet. This could we could be in the middle
of a great severing of so many relationships to substitute
for a relationship with these entities, which have their own motivation.
(57:44):
They were created by humans and given prime directives all
out of commercial you know, ninety nine percent of them
commercial interests first. Yet they've been unleashed in every element
of life. So this has be a great way to
commercialize all of existence, to colonize all living. This could
(58:06):
be a great recolonization project that we are opting in.
We're signing up for it. Let me let you into
my church and my relationship with my sister, and every
not just my fields and my businesses, every level. And
we've been through versions of this in history before, have
(58:26):
we not. So I'm not saying that that will happen,
but I'm saying that that is the context of what
could happen, and that we have to use this time
in particular, while things are still getting set up to
make choices to ensure that we are still living, that
we still can shape our freedom. And then a lot
(58:48):
of that is a collective shaping. So I see AI
as beautiful set of tools that is also transitioning into
a complicated set of relationships and teammates and I have
you know, Brian Eno was on our show. He said
it really well, He's like the thing about AI, I
don't trust the people who are making it. I don't
(59:08):
trust their taste. I don't trust their politics, and that's
a problem. So what are we gonna do with that?
And how do we create alternate pathways? How do we
hold that form of power to account while creating new models.
It's possible. We've done it before. We're always in a
dance of doing it, whether it's capital as the thing,
or technology as the thing, or agriculture and crops and
(59:31):
fields as the thing. So I'm excited. I'm really excited
about how I'm excited about the fun yeah, and mess
and monkeying around. I'm a tech nerd deep inside. My
mom was a computer programmer. Underneath all that stuff, she
was also doing that. I'm concerned and worried about the
(59:52):
window of opportunity and the clarity of purpose that many
of those who are driving this at the highest levels have,
which feels anti life in many ways. They take joy
in job displacement. They want to replace Hollywood, they want
to get rid of writing. It's like, why are you bothered.
Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
By speaking all of it?
Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
A poet? Like? How are they threatening you? Like? I
get if you're bothered by the amount of time it
takes a book an airline ticket. Okay, fine, your burrito
delivery could be a little faster for urgent needs, for
the best use of water and energy, and advanced mathematics
definitely speed up food delivery. And like you seem, there's
(01:00:38):
a subset of the thinking and the world views behind
many of the Silicon Valley Digerati broligarchy tech lords. That
humanity itself is an inconvenience, that life itself is something
to be defeated.
Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
And that didn't start with AI. No, this is been
this is a snowball that has been gaining momentum for decades.
That it is an inconvenience to be a human being,
that the needs that are associated with being a human
being are a bother, and that if we could just
(01:01:18):
get rid of the thinking, the feeling, the connection, the
discernment that is part of the human experience, everything would
be better. I don't get it, but don't get.
Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
It, and you do. I think you do. I do
in that.
Speaker 2 (01:01:41):
What I don't get to clarify, what I don't get
is I don't get why we are not Let me
change that. I want us to push back harder on that.
I want us to type a differently. I want us
to pause and to have a moment to connect with
human beings. I want us to not devalue and diminish
(01:02:05):
the importance of seeing someone on the street and saying,
oh my god, Wow, we're going to have this great conversation, Hey,
who are you? Those things are important. They're important. And
blaming AI with all of the commercial intent behind it.
(01:02:27):
Blaming AI, I believe, is a way of us not
showing up as a citizen.
Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
I'll say it louder for people at the back, right
Ruman Doctor Raman Childry runs an organization called Humane Intelligence.
They help communities in a collective sense, test these systems
as a kind of game, but also as a practical
value and as a way of demystifying them. You know,
(01:02:55):
we're being tested on all the time. Yeah, but test
back and find the weak isn't find the biases in particular,
and she says something that will stick with me forever.
In the context of the phrase AI is taking jobs,
She's like, AI is not taking your job. People at
companies are deploying AIB.
Speaker 2 (01:03:15):
To take your job.
Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
But it's people. It's soil and green, right, It's just
AI as people. And sometimes in a very literal sense,
there's a lot of data, labor, and work that goes
on underappreciated and undercompensated. But at the highest sense, there's
human beings directing the application of this power. We are
human beings who can do the same, that's right, and
(01:03:36):
we can challenge the use of power in that way,
we can redeploy it. It doesn't mean there's no AI, but
it means we direct it toward different sets of needs,
different problems to be solved. I don't think humanity is
a problem to be solved, and I think that's the
baseline operating premise of some of these people. It's like
(01:03:57):
they're trying to solve humanity with technology, right, faulty premise.
We're not on the same page here, We're not the
same book.
Speaker 2 (01:04:06):
All right. So I think that we can drop the
mic on that statement, because that that is, that is
the thing. And I could talk to you for hours
and we don't have ours.
Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
You could absolutely do this for a long Yes, maybe
a part two.
Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
Yes, maybe a part two. One quick question for you,
how can we support you?
Speaker 1 (01:04:30):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
Wow, huh, since we're talking about humans, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
I mean inviting me here is a great act and support.
This has been a lovely conversation, please publish it the media.
Speaker 2 (01:04:46):
We didn't talk about the humor part there.
Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
You don't make assumptions, you know, it's like, oh, we
have a great recording in our library. But I think
in less tangibly and connected to me is try to
apply some of this stuff. See where it lands for you,
anyone listening, not just you, I think specific to me.
If the Life with Machines convo is feeling like something
(01:05:11):
you want to be a part of, find us. It's
a video podcast on YouTube or on substack as Life
with Machines. And I'm Baratunde, you know, on substack and
all the places, and I'm really working on elevating the
storytelling you and I started acknowledging the context of Independence
Day July fourth, twenty twenty five. In one year, we
(01:05:34):
will be in a fever of celebration of a perversion
of that history in terms of independence. And I and
my wife Elizabeth and the others are working with some
indigenous leaders on retelling that history and a more deeply
honest way about the democracy that was already here and
(01:05:54):
highlighting the relationship between sovereignty and interdependence that we need
to be channeling right now over indexed on just the
independence part. Let's remember that we need each other and
that there are ways of being with this planet, with
each other that are still on offer to practice. So
(01:06:15):
join us in that, and let's practice this together.
Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
Lisa, thank you so much. I know how busy you are,
and I am warmed and filled by this conversation. Thank
you so much for the work you're doing for the planet,
on the planet, and for the humans that are here,
whether they recognize that that's who they are or not.
(01:06:43):
And we're going to continue to watch you and continue
to celebrate and support you for the wonderful work that
you're doing. Thank you so much for being here. I
truly appreciate it from the bottom of my heart.
Speaker 1 (01:06:54):
Is a real honor to be here, to be here
with you, to be here with your family, and to
be a part of the family of people who've been
on this journey with you in this show. It's beautiful
what you've got going, and thanks for making me a
part of it.
And in the rise of the machines and the moments
that we're in with artificial intelligence, we must expand our portfolio,
our range beyond mere cognitive intelligence. There's emotional intelligence, and
embodied intelligence, and spiritual intelligence, and a whole plethora of
intelligence is to connect with.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to the Shaping Freedom Podcast, where we dive into
conversations that inspire personal growth, transformation and clarity and challenging times.
I'm your host, Lysan Basquiat. Friends, I'm so happy to
welcome to the show a guest whose life and work
reflect a deep commitment to helping us live more fully,
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more consciously, and more connected to ourselves, each other, and
the world we share. Artunde Thurston is an Emmy nominated host,
New York Times best selling author, Webby Award winning podcaster,
and cultural thought leader whose voice resonates at the intersection
of justice, joy and possibility. Through his work as a writer, activist, humorist,
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and storyteller, Baratunde invites us to reimagine what's possible when
we engage with our lives and our communities as active
participants in shaping something better. He's the Emmy nominated host
and executive producer of America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston on PBS,
where he explores how diverse communities across the country connect
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to nature as a source of resilience, healing, and belonging.
He's also the Webby Award winning host of the acclaimed
podcast How to Citizen with Baratunde, named one of Apple's
Best Podcasts of the Year I Think That Was in
twenty two, which challenges us to see citizen as a
verb and to embrace our collective power to create meaningful chess,
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and in his newest podcast, Life with Machines, he helps
us navigate the complex and very human questions raised by
artificial intelligence and technology. Baratunde is the author of the
New York Times bestseller How to Be Black, which is hilarious,
insightful and a lot of fun, and the ted talk
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How to Deconstruct Racism one headline at a time. It's
been viewed over five point five million times, offering a sharp, funny,
and deeply human lens on how the stories we tell
can reinforce or dismantle injustice. A Harvard graduate with a
background in philosophy and a career that has spanned corporate boardrooms,
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comedy writers rooms, and community movements. Baratunde has chosen again
and again to use his platforms to tell better stories,
to ask better questions, and to help all of us
to connect more deeply to our power, to each other
and to the kind of world we want to leave behind. Baratunde,
Welcome to the Shaping Freedom podcast.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Lissan. That is a beautiful biome. Thank you, and it's
so good to be here with you.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Thank you. I'm so I am very excited that you're here.
I tripped up over your name. I'm normal, I'm typically
good with names, but it was because you made such
a point of it in your book.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I did, and so I was reading.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I'm like, I said, Barras, give it to me.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Baratun day Thursta.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
So simple, baratun day Thurston.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Okay, there are there are people. My my preferred pronunciation
is actually Spanish. That's simple, it's easier.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
There we go, There we go.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
I'm not a native Spanish speaker, normal parents, but I
love that.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
And you're also not Nigerian. Well then yes, so okay,
now I'll get that. There we go, perfect, perfect, perfect.
So one of the reasons why I wanted to have
this conversation with you is because one of the things
that I talk about, or the thing that I believe
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is part of the reason we're each here, is to
find a way to free yourself of whatever it is
that is standing in the way of you being who
you were meant to be on this planet. And I
believe in doing that by dismantling unlimited, unlimiting beliefs, by
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helping people to give themselves pause and to take a
moment to look at how they were programmed and how
that's showing up in the world. And you do the
same work.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Thank you for seeing that and seeing that, and thank
you for what you do in that epic mission. It
takes a lot of hands.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yes, yes, And in looking at the work that you've
been doing, what I am so impressed with and also
so deeply grateful for. It's the fact that you do
that in many different ways. It's like you seem to
have a mission that you fold into or speak through
(05:29):
all the different things that you do. And so I
do see that, and we appreciate you for that. We
the world.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Oh cool. I was like, is there a committee or
sometimes how it goes?
Speaker 2 (05:45):
It's here, you didn't know and I didn't want you
to know, but.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
We've been watching and we approve.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yes, we the folks who are listening, the folks who
are watching the work you're doing. We the collective, we
see you, and we see the contribution that appears to
be very intentional contribution that you're making.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
It is. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, Yeah, we're gonna have
some feelings today.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Okay, yes, yes. Let's start with the concept of freedom.
When you think about the work that you do and
the man that you are in the journey that you
are on and have lived thus far, what does freedom
look like to you?
Speaker 1 (06:38):
A lot? It looks like a lot. The first thing
that comes to mind is collective. I think in this land,
in this country, we interpret freedom as very individual. I
am free to do what I want first person, singular,
and freedom exists in the context of others as this
all life, and it's not merely rights, but responsibilities and
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a kind of belonging and cohesion to it. The freedom
from pain and injustice is a part of freedom to me,
I think, because so much of my work is storytelling.
The freedom to create a story and then live in
that one that is encompassing and has room to breathe. Yeah,
(07:27):
it's and the other thing that's on my mind. I've
been in so many indigenous spaces lately, American Native indigenous spaces.
And there's a really powerful woman, Loretta afraid of Bear Cook.
She's Oglalla Lakota, and she talks about what I saw
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as like the series of consequences or conditional relationships. There's
a group of us who've been in relationship with her,
and she's had this mandate herself to learn to go
out there and get along and have the courage to
stand up for yourself. And then she tells this story
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about courage which weaves freedom into it. Courage is a
prerequisite for justice. Justice is a prerequisite for freedom, and
freedom is a prerequisite for peace. And so I see,
and I'm starting to experience the idea of freedom in
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that wider context from courage to peace. And I on
a deep learning journey myself about the peace that existed
on this land before any of us showed up here
or were dragged here. And it's really beautiful. So freedom
is a story. The last thing I'll say on this
one is my mother, aur Anita Lorraine Thurston. I was
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able to start making more sense of her life after
it ended, and was I able to ask her some
questions that I couldn't when she was alive. But I
still got answers even though she's not in this form anymore.
And I saw her life as a pursuit of freedom,
looking born into a much more constrained reality as a
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black woman born in nineteen forty in Washington, DC, layers
of non freedom, taxation without representation in this federal city,
a woman in this male dominant society, a black person
in a white run world, a child of abuse in
a household of parents who did not love her in
the right way. And so many of the moves she
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made was to create her own freedom. And if I might,
that's led me truly one last thought, because I found
a paradox.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Well that last thought, because we're here, well.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Not last, but I think I'm feeling like I'm on
a senate with an opening statement. I was like, still
hoar to who's but these things are just flowing. And
I encountered a paradox in my own seeking of freedom,
and it was partially resolved in Paris with another black writer,
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Carvil Wallace, and I had discovered really just encountered for
the first time for myself this contradiction that so much
of the work I had been doing around race was
seeking freedom but through the agency of others, namely white people,
that I'm going to explain us to you, that I'm
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going to prove our humanity to you, that if I
just used the right words and the right jokes and
the right timing and delivery, like you'll see me get it, yeah,
And you'll be liberated from whatever's holding you back. So
I can be liberated from you holding me back. So
my liberation was dependent on them. So I put my
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myself in a prison of my own making. And Carvelle
said to me, He's like, oh, you mean deliberation paradox,
Like it's like a star Trek phenomenon or something like, yeah,
he's in seven, episode ten, that liberation paradox. But yeah,
I had made myself a dependent variable in someone else's equation,
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and so that required a nonlinear escape because there are
real forces, there's real constraints, laws are real, bodies are real,
physics exist and this is all made up, that's right.
So what's this tangential, orthogonal, nonlinear pursuit of freedom that
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allows an achievement of escape from that story, and that
reminds me of brother Casey wrote a beautiful piece in
twenty nineteen, the Art of Black Escape. His name is
(12:05):
his last name may come to me later and you
can patch it in in your show notes. But black
dude named Casey, we'll start with that. Her head run
of a business called MBAs across America. He interviewed Barack
Obama myself by Southwest in a very beautifully challenging way,
and I don't know, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, something like that,
and he wrote about this, like there's another path to
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freedom that is ephemeral, symbolic, spiritual, it's energetic, and that
we create our own path through art, through belief, through meditation,
through like we're already free actually, And so, yeah, my
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concept of freedom is increasingly encompassing and a non literal
and certainly non individualistic. But those are some of the
elements that come to mind when you raise that prompt.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, I think it's also about the contribution that we're making, yeah,
and being aware of that and allowing yourself to be
free enough to truly consider the contribution that we're all
making in this very individual way into the collective. This
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has been an interesting weekend. We're having this conversation just
after the fourth Independence weekend. Oh yeah, an interesting one
for me personally. But on the other side of the weekend,
I did a twenty four hour run to New York
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to spend a day with my stepmom, And it was
also the anniversary of my father's death, the thirteen, the
twelve year anniversary of my father's death. And I too,
have spent a lot of time asking questions of my
father that didn't stop when he passed away. They increased,
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They got more intents, We had some conversations that we
needed to have. And my father was an incredibly determined, smart,
committed man to the role that he had on this
planet during his lifetime. And he taught me that to
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think more about who I am than to think about
being black, because he came from a country where he
didn't need to think about the fact that he was black.
He was just black. And it wasn't until he came
to this country that he discovered or there was an
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attempt to impose upon him the box that black is.
And so that's what came to mind for me when
you mentioned your mom and the conversations that you and
she had after after she passed away. What was the
biggest or the greatest lesson that you learned from your mother,
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If you don't mind me asking, there were a lot.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
I think it's a version of you have to love you.
She wasn't loved in the right way as a little person,
and she worked really hard to figure out how to
be that for herself, and she made a ton of progress.
I don't know if she achieved. I don't know if
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there's an end point on that journey, but there was
a beautiful self evolution there with some sad limitations. But
I think that's the biggest one. Yeah, you got to
love you? Yeah, how about you?
Speaker 2 (16:13):
The biggest lesson that Gerard Bosquiet taught me was to
stand that, no matter what's happening in life, and no
matter what I get confronted with, to stand in it,
because when you're standing, you can. This is my little
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add on to it. Right when you're standing, it's the start.
It shows to myself and to others a willingness to
be accountable. And once you're accountable, then everything that flows
from there is going to be It's going to work out. Okay,
(16:57):
One way or another. So I think that that's probably
the biggest lesson.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Stand.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Yeah, he wasn't into personal growth, my dad. I just
I told a story. I did a I've been very
interested in storytelling, and I told my first story down
in San Diego like.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Two weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
In what format it's a vamp. It's a vamp storytelling thing.
And in what format?
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Meaning was it a moth thing?
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yes, so not moth. It's a vamp, which I guess
is kind of the San Diego equivalent, although they have
stories here. It's a group called so Say It All.
And a friend of mine what I mentioned wanting to
find out more about moth and wanting to go look at,
you know, to watch one of these performances. She mentioned
that there was vamp, but it's in San Diego and
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just do it there. And so I submitted a story,
and so did she. Mine got selected and it started
off being a story about one thing and turned into
a story about my father and a story about the
relationship with him and the dichotomy in him as a
person on one hand, very loving and supportive and pioneering
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in his thinking, and on the other hand, very closed
to enrich about certain things, and and uh and very
and and uh. He did the best he could. He
did the best he could with what he had. Uh.
And I have the result of that, and now it's
you know, for me to do with that that you
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can and do the best that I can.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah, So I don't know how he got there, but
that's okay. What were some of the legacies that you
had to heal or reimagine or reconstruct along the way.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Legacy of abuse. My mother was abused by her father.
My sister was abused by my father, who is not
her father. I knew, I've known that for a very
long time. It wasn't like a buried family secret. It
was actually shared with me at a pretty young age
so that I wouldn't be it can be weaponized against
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me later. That's how my mom explained it to me.
It's like, I want you to hear this from me
so somebody doesn't come twenty years from now being like,
your daddy this and you're kind of knocked aside by
that and all over by that. So I had to
heal from And I don't know that that's complete, but
it is one of the legacies. One of the things
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I've inherited. Is that dynamic in that relationship. I think
I've had to heal in a way that's pretty fresh
well before I get to that one. That dynamic and
the fact that I was raised by my mother only
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my father was killed when I was quite young, eight
years old, and I was raised in part by my
older sister, and literally every animal we had in the
house was female. So I had no male energy around
me of any species. I don't know if plants have gender.
Maybe was a dude, and so yeah, I I I
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learned a lot of respect and deference because of their
experiences with men and just because of being surrounded by
female and feminine energy. But I didn't learn some of
the other energy and layering in race stuff of you know,
(20:46):
just wanting to like survive and not stand out too much.
Is you know, I'm dichotomous as well, and like I
got a ton of confidence speak my mind, and I'm
not an idiot, and I'm not trying to get got
by the authorities or you know, just mouthed off because
I can, and I certainly can, but I don't much
(21:09):
very diplomatic by nature and by nurture. So I think
finding assertion and strength and force, even still respectful, but
these are important attributes of being a human being and
being a man healing from that, And I think with
(21:34):
my relationship with my mother, there's some healing from all
that she demanded of me, that she needed that she
shouldn't have expected from me because of the hand she
was dealt and the choices she made how to handle
that hand. Yeah, and so a lot of pressure on
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a little boy two be companion to mom, and the
love I had for her was really really important to her,
and she was not. She was sensitive to threats to
that love between us, and so that loyalty and like,
I think it just made her do things that she
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shouldn't have in terms of trying to protect what she
got from me, which isn't what I needed either, And
so healing ultimately from being a mama's boy who loves
his mother dearly. And the way I wrote about her
and how to Be Black is less nuanced than how
(22:36):
I would write about her today twelve years later, thirteen
years later. No less love, but more information, more context,
And to heal from not asserting or even naming or
being aware of my own needs. It's a lot of
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like making sure mom's Okay.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Where do you if you don't mind my asking how
many children? And where do you fit?
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I am the second of two, okay, just me and
my sister, different father's, same mother.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yeah, that happens a lot, you know where, And that
that that I'm referring to is when you're raised by
a single parent, sometimes the child of the opposite gender
gets caught in kind of that that web of what
their role is supposed to be. And specifically, I think
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it happens a lot in Black families in the relationship
between sons and mothers, especially when there's some semblance of
dysfunction that led to the family structure being that way,
you know. And it comes from most of the time love,
total love and all of that, but it also creates
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something that that son and that mother have to also
work out and work through as the son gets older,
you know. And it's and I'm bringing it up and
I hope it's okay. And I'm bringing up because that
I lean into something, but up because there are so
many people who are experiencing that today. I look at
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what's happening out in culture, in the culture with mothers
and the biological fathers of children especially their boys, and
raising these boys in a home where there isn't a
lot of male influence, and maybe that woman is feeling
(24:53):
the scabs of the relationships that they're in, so they
try to protect the boys. But then it creates this
thing where it's like, that's not who I'm here to
be for you. I can't fill that.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
And that's part of the contradiction with Aarnita is that
she's magnificently self aware and transparent relative to I think
most humans of her age at any given time, and
certainly in her disclosures to me, I saw a lot
of this, and she tried to compensate for it. There's
(25:31):
something she kept for me that I learned later from
my sister or her friends. But she enrolled me in
this rights of passage program very afrocentric black men and
African men, trying to fill that gap, not just with
her energy. She knew she was.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
I was going to ask you, how did you get it?
Because I know you got it?
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Yeah, where did you get it? Some of it was
that A lot of it that was a big dose.
And it's an extra irony that we found that program.
It's called Uncle Bea and it was part of the
Nation House Wattto School in Washington, DC. We only knew
about that program because of the white private school that
(26:12):
I went to at the same time. So the economy,
it's like so many false binaries that create the beautiful spectrum.
So I start going to Sidwell Friends in seventh grade,
in part because the principal of the middle school at
the time was a man named Bob Williams, who's a
black man and like a very man and very black person.
(26:34):
I knew who he was proud of his people, also
know how to navigate this space at a very high level,
and saw me and saw my mother, and she saw
some kind of surrogacy in him. I could be an uncle,
and he tipped her off to like, yosis, I'm a
part of this other thing that has nothing to do
(26:55):
with this world, but can probably help a boy like
yours be fortified in this world. Know what their conversation was,
but she was primed for it, and whoever initiated like
I could only be as comfortable as I was in
the Sidwell environment because I had this uncle bea environment.
And that was a couple of years of overlap and
(27:17):
parallel educations, sometimes directly in opposition to each other. That's
so important, very important, balance, very important. You can't just
go with the official narrative. No, And that that was
the other thing that my mother offered me. Choices. Expose
this kid to all kind of stuff and let him
(27:38):
figure it out. And do the boy Scouts thing, do
the DC Youth Orchestra program thing, do the Uncle be
a thing, do the community garden thing, do the political
rally thing, do the musicals and clubs thing, and the
computer thing, and then and then make nature and the
hiking and like be out. And that was I think
(27:59):
that approach is more common. Now there's the tiger mom
trope I called my mom. My mom was the black
panther mom. It's still a predatory cat. It hits a
little different with Arnita, but yeah, I think she was
trying to open up channels and she held a few
(28:22):
things close. But when it comes to when it came
to what I would do with my life, she was
not prescriptive. She was invitational, which is beautiful, really rare
and really beautiful because I saw a lot of friends
who had very driven, intelligent parents with literally infinitely more
degrees than my mother. She had zero degrees, and they
(28:45):
had specific ideas for their kids, and they created incentive
structures and perversions to nudge or shove doth so yeah,
and my mom was like, you could do this, you
could do that, which is beautiful, be excellent?
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Yeah, at whatever?
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Right. So that was the immigrant mom and hers like
just be great. Yeah, but the like non immigrant mom
is like, but you choose the arena of greatness.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Do you I feel myself tiptoeing around this topic. Uh so,
I'm not going to Okay, what advice do you have
for the character that is the mother and the story? Yeah,
and the character that is the young man.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Oh, for the mother, Yes, you are enough. And when
you aren't, it's okay. You have reserves of resource and
strength that you cannot always see. So when it feels
(29:58):
like the world is on your shoulders, know that others
are right beside you to carry it. You do not
need to solve your child's life. They won't even get
to do that. Keep having fun. This whole thing's again. Yeah,
(30:19):
And I think this wasn't quite to my mother, but
I think for a mother today, and I mean, yes,
we live in the society that encourages optimization, that we
are trying to maximize the return on investment. Right, it's
capitalism everywhere, all the way down. That is literally not natural.
(30:48):
And so the relationship with your child is not that
of developing a product or managing our portfolio and trying
to make the optimal choice for education and extracurricular and
lesson learning and social exposure and religious like you'll drive
(31:09):
yourself just stop, stop, stop, you know, and when you don't,
it's okay. There's something in us. Let it come through.
And I think, let your child come through. They're not you,
they're part of you, and there's something new to try
(31:32):
to let them come through. For the kids today, for
the sun today. Your parents don't know shit, let's just
say it.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
They're struggling. They're trying to figure it out, processing their
own childhood stuff while they're trying to.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Show for you like your parents are people.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
I had such a moment of like, oh my mom
was Aernita. Yeah, not just ma, right, she had a
whole life, a whole loss identity, had nothing to do
with me for most of her life, and certainly the
(32:15):
formation of it, no inkling of me or my sister
that humanness of the parent is it's that the transition
from all powerful or hero or dominator the dynamic could
be different into human. You can come from all different directions,
(32:37):
but there's a power shift and there's a humility shift.
It's very humbling and disorienting for me to see my
mother as a person. Yeah, it's just that's hard. That
came after she was gone. When she was here, she
was like saintly, sacrificing, heroic, overbearing, all something, and I
(33:03):
was like, Oh, she's just trying to figure stuff out.
She really didn't know all the time, and I overinterpreted
her power and her role and that's on me, right.
There are things that she did that contribute to the
dynamic and the relationship, good, bad and otherwise, and there
(33:25):
are things that I did. And so the sooner that
a child of a person can recognize the person, not
the parent, I think that's liberating and important. I think
because of the technological space we're in, we owe a
lot of grace to any parent at this time, because
(33:46):
they are being put into a position that few, if
any previous generation has ever been in in terms of
the lack of relatability of experience. There are things that
children today are going through that older siblings haven't even
gone through who are six years older. So how would
a twenty year or forty or fifty year older person
(34:09):
have any direct experience to offer useful advice Back when
we was all farming, Yeah, it was the same. This
is how you hold what you did, you know, we
figured it out like this. It's been the same since
time immemorials. But like, how do you interact with a
relational AI chatbot that feels human and knows all your
business and the super refirming or with addictive porn service
(34:31):
like the access to temptation. Versions of this have happened before.
Books were those things, yes, long ago. Television was that.
Not at the rate, not at the rate, not at
the scale, not at the pervasiveness and the immersiveness. You know,
hip hop was that thing. Rock was that thing, The
Blues was that thing. And they're not the same.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Either, because now it's everything at once.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Everything everywhere, all at once. Yeah. And so some grace
for your parent, yeah, because they are drowning in lack
of relatability to your experience, and so we will need
some different ways to get through this.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yeah, And have fun it's a game. Have fun playing
all of it? Yeah, all of it fun. Yeah, that's
some of it.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah. You talk about the idea of citizen as an.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Action verb a verb nouns?
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yes, will you tell us a little bit more about that?
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (35:34):
What does that look like?
Speaker 1 (35:36):
My wife Elizabeth and I jointly developed this how to
Citizen podcast after I had tried to make it come
into being in different forms for several years, and it
finally was ready to be born in twenty twenty. Basic
premise being that citizen is noun was limiting. Citizen iss
(35:59):
urb is reading and more invitational and invites us to
actively shape and participate our environments, our communities, our democracy.
But that underneath that it means four particular things in
terms of the principles of it, and then what it
looks like can follow from that. So the four principles
of citizen as a verb are to show up to
(36:21):
participate some version of assumed role beyond voter participant, to
understand power, to not have a feeling of fear around
it or of zero sum around it. If somebody else
has power, I can't. That's a very popular narrative, especially
(36:44):
amongst those who are fighting for freedom. It's those powerful
people over there crushing us. Powerless over here leads to.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
The same thing. Yeah, you're playing the.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Same game, but the difference does not just play the
game and have changed the game. And to recognize power
is it ebbs and flows. It's a moving force, but
one that doesn't increase or dissipate. It just it shifts,
it moves. It's like energy. To commit to the collective
and not just the individual. That is what number three
(37:18):
of citizen as verb, and to invest in relationships with yourself,
with others and with this planet. It's to citizen, it
belong to each other. So what that tangibly and practically
might mean is that you should read up on candidates
for the election. It's cool. You should also think about where.
(37:40):
Think about what you want for your life and the
lives of the loved ones around you, and where you
have power. Like, think about where you have power. It's
not the most tangible action. It's like I should sign
a petition or organize a nonprofit. Those are valuable actions
as well. But contemplating your own power in the decisions
(38:03):
you make, as small as they be. Will I drink
from this water bottle or that plastic one down on
the floor beside me. That's a little teeny bit of power,
and it rolls up to a big collective set of choices,
and vice versa. We receive limited sets of choices, sometimes
from people temporarily empowered, but to be aware of it
is already an act of participation of power itself and
(38:25):
of citizen as verb. It demystifies and reacquaints us with
our own capacity, and that's really important now when it
feels like other people are making really big decisions that
are limiting our freedom and our choices. Yes, that is true,
and we have the power, we just do. It's people
(38:48):
power system. That's the whole premise. So citizen, I also
think it means to ultimately like we're figuring out how
to live together, and that requires practice, and in a
system where it's capitalism all the way down, and it
encourages a transactionalism and an optimization engine behind everything, we
(39:14):
atrophy the muscles of co living. All right, So how
do you and I exist right now in this dynamic?
Do you have the power because you have the paper
in your hand and I'm just waiting for what you're
going to do reacting? Can I flip it around and
ask you a question. You know, we're mutually interested here.
(39:35):
This is your show and I'm a participant with you
in it, and every episode is going to be different
because of that. So the living together is something that
has been actively discouraged by some of us who really
profit off of concentrating power by isolating us from each other,
(39:58):
from the planet, and even from our very selves. Let me,
you don't know what you want. Let me tell you
what you want. I don't know how you feel. This
is how you should feel. Pop this pill, now, feel
like this, Install this app, now, feel like that. Do this?
Speaker 2 (40:13):
Disconnect from all that.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
So when you do the opposite, when you reconnect with yourself,
that's an act of citizen ing to tune in to
your body, to know how this moment makes you feel,
how this proposal makes you feel. Not think thinking super important.
But we're over indexed on the cognition and in the
(40:39):
rise of the machines and the moments that we're in
with artificial intelligence, we must expand our portfolio, our range
beyond mere cognitive intelligence. There's emotional intelligence and embodied intelligence
and spiritual intelligence, and a whole plethora of intelligence. Is
to connect with and so when we do that, then
(41:01):
we're creating new systems and centers of power, new coalitions.
I mean, yeah, across time, across species, there's a lot
more possible. It gets everything gets spiritual fast. But I
think to keep it a little ground. Citizening and the
active nature of it can mean that. And it doesn't
(41:23):
have to be an electoral context or a political context
in the explicit sense. It can be in the family,
in the small business, in the group chat with friends.
How are we living together well? How do we resolve
our conflicts? And if we're just increasingly conscious of that
and trying to improve at that, then the explicit things
(41:46):
that we experience that we think of as democracy and
citizen and politics, they all emerge from those group chats
and from those parent child relations and from those school systems,
from those community interactions. So if we can practice living
well together there, living better together there, doing the democracy
thing there, then what emerges from there should be better.
(42:10):
It's soil and we're just growing these institutions.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
So what does living better actually look like from your perspective,
Because there are folks who believe that, Like you mentioned,
it is the petitions, It is the rant on social media.
It is the pointing to the opposite end, you know,
the opposite teams. I don't know, you know, like, what
(42:37):
what does that actually look like?
Speaker 1 (42:40):
I have two thoughts on that. For me, it looks
like feeling connected. It looks like eating well, being literally nourished.
It looks like being able to breathe easily, and certainly
it looks like being in some kind of community, not
(43:02):
being alone, knowing that it feels good to be a
part of something. If that's a group of people cheering
on a sports team, that's one version of it. It
can also mean that I know I have someone I
can reach out to when I'm going through a difficult
time and moment. It means having material needs met without
(43:24):
extreme agony, like I'm really really willing to work hard,
And I think there is like a baseline dignity and
net of provision that makes being in society much more fun,
(43:46):
more useful, more interesting, more sustainable. So living together better
for me means many of those things. And it means
having a sense of purpose that is resonant in some way,
right that what I'm doing means something to somebody. It matters, Yeah,
(44:09):
And I mean it might be to my niece and nephew,
right that like I have some relationship with them and
they like my jokes, all right, I got my purpose
to day's checks my jokes cool. Or it might mean
something more explicitly civic, right, that that my choice or
my opinion matters, or that what I do for work matters.
(44:32):
I want to matter, and I think a lot of
us do. There's another way I'm thinking about this, which
is I'm always thinking like tangible and intangible at the
same time I think and less tangibly. It's it's being
able to define for yourself and with others what you value.
(45:11):
In our How to Citizen series, we talked with roughly
sixty people. They all stand out for different reasons in
this moment. In say, Oofa stands out. She was recruited
by Stacy Abrams to help run the New Georgia project
and really change how get out the vote operations and
(45:32):
canvassing it all happen. Building much more relationship than give
me your vote, and you know every I can come
knocking on your door a few months before the election
making promises transactionally right and saying would you like to
buy my candidate? They look at their feature set relative
to the other one. We can do more for you. Okay,
probably not, but it sounds pretty pretty. Talk is a
(45:54):
beautiful thing. I engage in it constantly. And she was
telling us the story of entering a community in a
neighborhood with questions, first, what do you love about this community?
People are not used to that from a campaign, right
(46:16):
or from a fellow human being office.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Who are you as a citizen?
Speaker 1 (46:19):
You are a citizen of a place, of a place,
and what do you love about it? Maybe it's the shops,
Maybe it's the weather, Maybe it's the way the kids
mess around in the yards. Maybe it's the fruit trees
you know, in this particular neighborhood in Highland Park in
Los Angeles right nearby. But identifying that part of your
membership in this community that you love is an essential
(46:43):
prerequisite to any democracy action because that's a big part
of your why. That's what you want to preserve or
build on at least. And if you can't name that,
you're just getting triggered off the jump by other people
and what they love and what they want. So you
got to find that a moment with yourself. Yes for you, Yes, yes,
(47:06):
and and then it goes from what you love to
what do you want for the people you love in
this community, and they start naming stuff I want. I
want healthy food, I want good paying jobs, I want
safer sidewalks, I want clear, cleaner water, I want cheaper
(47:28):
gross whatever that. But you start getting aspirations right, and
that gives you directions. You establish foundation and you got direction.
All right, Now, let's move, get some momentum, let's throw
some mass behind this, and then you start bringing people
together to find Okay, well, we all love these things
in common. We've been told we're super different and that
(47:50):
you're over there because this is the color next to
your name, or the letter next to your name, or
the hood you're from. We got a lot of different divisions,
but we all love the low quat trees. Interesting, well,
we all love the birds. Okay, cool, Let's we all
love the river, the America Doors, the PBS. Here is
I found this deep love of place like a sports team.
(48:13):
People love their mountains, they love their national forest, they
love their creeks and creeks however they pronounce it in
whatever part of the country. So you build on that
shared love and then you all find the overlap and
you build on the shared aspiration. This is not what
I want, this is what apparently we want this. Huh.
(48:33):
So now you got mass and you got some velocity
and they can get some momentum going to get those
things done.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
Yeah, that's what I appreciate about everything that you do
and everything that I've heard you say and hear you
sing right now is it's the big things, right, It's
how do we impact and influence our cities, our divisions,
our neighborhoods, the state, the country. But what you're tapping
being into that resonates so deeply with me is that
(49:03):
it starts with you. It starts with you understanding who
you are, why things are important to you, what your
vision is, and if you're Unless you're willing to have
the patience with yourself to disconnect from the things that disconnect.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
You, you won't know.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
And it's really hard to matter when you don't know.
When you're just attaching yourself to whatever the momentum is
that someone else told you you were supposed to be.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Part of the part of the complication is that those
external forces, the people telling you what to connect to
and tap into, is not necessarily wrong it's often really
good things, right, fight for this sign that suppose this absolutely,
but then you're also getting like uncentered and tubbed. And
(50:02):
if there's one other citation I would make in this,
it's Adrian Marie Brown, author of a book called Emergent
Strategies Pleasure Activism. Who do you want to spend the
apocalypse with? Or She has a whole podcast series looking
at the work of Oxavia Butler and what that means
(50:24):
for these times. But she speaks really eloquently and has
practiced really eloquently about this scale thing. And yes, it's
about the big things at the same time it's about
the small things. And then there is a fractal nature
to our world in reality, and these patterns repeated every scale.
So if I don't know what I love about myself,
(50:51):
about my community, about this country, if I don't know
what I want for myself for my community, for my country,
how are we you going.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
To know that that's right?
Speaker 1 (51:03):
And so if the sense of direction of the country
doesn't feel clear, it's in part because maybe our own
individual senses are not clear either, and we're all reacting
to others who are also not that clear.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
Right, And we're being dragged being dragged along the way.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
And there are some who are super clear. Yes they
may not be clear with us, that's right, but they
are clear with themselves about what they want to create,
and they're dragging us into their story and we don't
have to do that.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
It's a better way tell me about life with machines.
AI has become such a huge, huge part of our lives.
I saw this real the other day on one of
the social media platforms where it was like your friend
(51:56):
who loves chatchipt and it's like chatchpt time is it?
You know?
Speaker 1 (52:03):
What's the web?
Speaker 2 (52:03):
You know whatever. It's just a huge part of our
lives and people are using it for more and more
ways to make decisions about what they're doing on a
day to day basis, to create and all of that.
And there's a lot of fear around AI, how and
you're exploring it in Life with Machines. So how should
(52:28):
we or how could we be looking at AI and
and the ways that it can impact our future or
what do you think the role of I don't know
what my question is.
Speaker 1 (52:37):
I feel it. I feel your question.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
I appreciate that. I appreciate that, and part of what
I am interpreting as your lack of clarity in this
moment is because the thing itself is not clear. Yeah.
Are we talking about a new set of technologies? Are
we talking about apps? Are we're talking about enhanced tools?
We're talking about machine learning and automation? Are talking about
a reflection of our thoughts? Yes, a reflection of what's
(53:03):
really happened and inside? Is that what we're afraid of?
So there's a lot going on, and AI is not
one thing. It is many many things. Technically it's many things,
but also in terms of the impact on the human experience,
which is our primary question and curiosity in life with machines,
it's many things. So a simple framing that I'm playing
(53:27):
with is like, AI is a form of power.
Speaker 2 (53:33):
Tell me more.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
The implications and impact are going to be very wide reaching.
We can, but I say it's a form of power
one because of universal impact that it can have and
lack of clear outcome. It's up to us to like
marry that power with intention, with community, with the other
(53:57):
principles of citizen Like, there's no between how to citizen
in life with machines. We got to show up and
participate in this moment and not just let Silicon Valley
dictate things to us or hope that our regulators and
legislators have our best interests at her. They've been very
clear they don't. They've actually been pretty explicit. Yes, you know.
(54:17):
The latest attempt in the Big Dumb Bill was to
prevent states from doing anything to protect their people from
the consequences of use of these technologies. And the first
order of any government is protecting its people. So you're
already abdicating your primary function. So thank you for your clarity. Cool,
(54:39):
I still want to live, so I got to show up.
I got to understand this. So I've got to understand
this power and its implication. I got to commit to
a collective and I think a lot of the AI
logic right now and the salesmanship is like it empowers you.
You can do so much more than you could. Individual
agency is going to go through the roof a one
person unicorn company, the first billion a a company home
(55:00):
by single human being. It's just around the corner what
we're supposed to be excited about the lack of need
for other people, So question that and maintain a commitment
to collective benefit. That's doesn't mean you can't also be accepted.
I use a lot of hyper individualistic applications of AI tools.
Transcribe this interview for me. You feedback on my essay? Okay, absolutely,
(55:23):
and how do we expand how can this be beneficial
to my tiny household of me and my wife, my
slightly larger extended family household, to my group chat of
college homies, to this black men's group I'm a part of,
to my neighborhood and palm springs right, to the society
layers and layers and layers, and can we engage collectively
(55:47):
that's not the default settings on the marketing materials and
investing in relationships. I think AI can be applied to
destroy all of what we need to be strengthening relationship
with self. I don't know, ask chat GPT, ask Gemini. Right,
(56:09):
look at I'm wearing this super smart ring. Tell me
how I slept last night?
Speaker 2 (56:13):
Well, it's yeah.
Speaker 1 (56:14):
I've had ridiculous moments in the morning where I wake
up feeling good. Yeah, my wife says, how'd you sleep
feel great? I must have slept great? Did I checked
the app and was like, no, you just didn't feel
sixty nine sixty nine out of them, what's the sky
hot of one hundred? I failed sleep me this morning,
(56:36):
I know, so apparently now I feel terrible. Thank you
so much. One ring to rule them all? So okay, cool?
And if I'm spending all this time with a very compelling, personable,
agreeable gassing me up chat buddy.
Speaker 2 (56:56):
Yeah, that encourages you to speak twits.
Speaker 1 (56:58):
Yes, and and and sounds like a per person now,
and they want it to look like a person now.
So if it talks like a duck and walks like
a duck, it's a duck. So if it talks like
a person, it is. Even if it's not a person,
it's substituting for a relationship with actual people. We have
a fixed amount of time in this life, so there
(57:19):
is a level of trade off and replacement. Not every
moment with JADGBT would have been a human moment or
Jim and I would. I'm not picking on them, they're
just the most popular. And then same with relationship with
the planet. This could we could be in the middle
of a great severing of so many relationships to substitute
for a relationship with these entities, which have their own motivation.
(57:44):
They were created by humans and given prime directives all
out of commercial you know, ninety nine percent of them
commercial interests first. Yet they've been unleashed in every element
of life. So this has be a great way to
commercialize all of existence, to colonize all living. This could
(58:06):
be a great recolonization project that we are opting in.
We're signing up for it. Let me let you into
my church and my relationship with my sister, and every
not just my fields and my businesses, every level. And
we've been through versions of this in history before, have
(58:26):
we not. So I'm not saying that that will happen,
but I'm saying that that is the context of what
could happen, and that we have to use this time
in particular, while things are still getting set up to
make choices to ensure that we are still living, that
we still can shape our freedom. And then a lot
(58:48):
of that is a collective shaping. So I see AI
as beautiful set of tools that is also transitioning into
a complicated set of relationships and teammates and I have
you know, Brian Eno was on our show. He said
it really well, He's like the thing about AI, I
don't trust the people who are making it. I don't
(59:08):
trust their taste. I don't trust their politics, and that's
a problem. So what are we gonna do with that?
And how do we create alternate pathways? How do we
hold that form of power to account while creating new models.
It's possible. We've done it before. We're always in a
dance of doing it, whether it's capital as the thing,
or technology as the thing, or agriculture and crops and
(59:31):
fields as the thing. So I'm excited. I'm really excited
about how I'm excited about the fun yeah, and mess
and monkeying around. I'm a tech nerd deep inside. My
mom was a computer programmer. Underneath all that stuff, she
was also doing that. I'm concerned and worried about the
(59:52):
window of opportunity and the clarity of purpose that many
of those who are driving this at the highest levels have,
which feels anti life in many ways. They take joy
in job displacement. They want to replace Hollywood, they want
to get rid of writing. It's like, why are you bothered.
Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
By speaking all of it?
Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
A poet? Like? How are they threatening you? Like? I
get if you're bothered by the amount of time it
takes a book an airline ticket. Okay, fine, your burrito
delivery could be a little faster for urgent needs, for
the best use of water and energy, and advanced mathematics
definitely speed up food delivery. And like you seem, there's
(01:00:38):
a subset of the thinking and the world views behind
many of the Silicon Valley Digerati broligarchy tech lords. That
humanity itself is an inconvenience, that life itself is something
to be defeated.
Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
And that didn't start with AI. No, this is been
this is a snowball that has been gaining momentum for decades.
That it is an inconvenience to be a human being,
that the needs that are associated with being a human
being are a bother, and that if we could just
(01:01:18):
get rid of the thinking, the feeling, the connection, the
discernment that is part of the human experience, everything would
be better. I don't get it, but don't get.
Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
It, and you do. I think you do. I do
in that.
Speaker 2 (01:01:41):
What I don't get to clarify, what I don't get
is I don't get why we are not Let me
change that. I want us to push back harder on that.
I want us to type a differently. I want us
to pause and to have a moment to connect with
human beings. I want us to not devalue and diminish
(01:02:05):
the importance of seeing someone on the street and saying,
oh my god, Wow, we're going to have this great conversation, Hey,
who are you? Those things are important. They're important. And
blaming AI with all of the commercial intent behind it.
(01:02:27):
Blaming AI, I believe, is a way of us not
showing up as a citizen.
Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
I'll say it louder for people at the back, right
Ruman Doctor Raman Childry runs an organization called Humane Intelligence.
They help communities in a collective sense, test these systems
as a kind of game, but also as a practical
value and as a way of demystifying them. You know,
(01:02:55):
we're being tested on all the time. Yeah, but test
back and find the weak isn't find the biases in particular,
and she says something that will stick with me forever.
In the context of the phrase AI is taking jobs,
She's like, AI is not taking your job. People at
companies are deploying AIB.
Speaker 2 (01:03:15):
To take your job.
Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
But it's people. It's soil and green, right, It's just
AI as people. And sometimes in a very literal sense,
there's a lot of data, labor, and work that goes
on underappreciated and undercompensated. But at the highest sense, there's
human beings directing the application of this power. We are
human beings who can do the same, that's right, and
(01:03:36):
we can challenge the use of power in that way,
we can redeploy it. It doesn't mean there's no AI, but
it means we direct it toward different sets of needs,
different problems to be solved. I don't think humanity is
a problem to be solved, and I think that's the
baseline operating premise of some of these people. It's like
(01:03:57):
they're trying to solve humanity with technology, right, faulty premise.
We're not on the same page here, We're not the
same book.
Speaker 2 (01:04:06):
All right. So I think that we can drop the
mic on that statement, because that that is, that is
the thing. And I could talk to you for hours
and we don't have ours.
Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
You could absolutely do this for a long Yes, maybe
a part two.
Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
Yes, maybe a part two. One quick question for you,
how can we support you?
Speaker 1 (01:04:30):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
Wow, huh, since we're talking about humans, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
I mean inviting me here is a great act and support.
This has been a lovely conversation, please publish it the media.
Speaker 2 (01:04:46):
We didn't talk about the humor part there.
Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
You don't make assumptions, you know, it's like, oh, we
have a great recording in our library. But I think
in less tangibly and connected to me is try to
apply some of this stuff. See where it lands for you,
anyone listening, not just you, I think specific to me.
If the Life with Machines convo is feeling like something
(01:05:11):
you want to be a part of, find us. It's
a video podcast on YouTube or on substack as Life
with Machines. And I'm Baratunde, you know, on substack and
all the places, and I'm really working on elevating the
storytelling you and I started acknowledging the context of Independence
Day July fourth, twenty twenty five. In one year, we
(01:05:34):
will be in a fever of celebration of a perversion
of that history in terms of independence. And I and
my wife Elizabeth and the others are working with some
indigenous leaders on retelling that history and a more deeply
honest way about the democracy that was already here and
(01:05:54):
highlighting the relationship between sovereignty and interdependence that we need
to be channeling right now over indexed on just the
independence part. Let's remember that we need each other and
that there are ways of being with this planet, with
each other that are still on offer to practice. So
(01:06:15):
join us in that, and let's practice this together.
Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
Lisa, thank you so much. I know how busy you are,
and I am warmed and filled by this conversation. Thank
you so much for the work you're doing for the planet,
on the planet, and for the humans that are here,
whether they recognize that that's who they are or not.
(01:06:43):
And we're going to continue to watch you and continue
to celebrate and support you for the wonderful work that
you're doing. Thank you so much for being here. I
truly appreciate it from the bottom of my heart.
Speaker 1 (01:06:54):
Is a real honor to be here, to be here
with you, to be here with your family, and to
be a part of the family of people who've been
on this journey with you in this show. It's beautiful
what you've got going, and thanks for making me a
part of it.
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