Baratunde Thurston: The Art of Citizening
My guest today is Baratunde Thurston, a true multi-hyphenate whose journey has taken him from stand-up comedy stages to the heart of political and social activism. He's the author of the critically acclaimed, New York Times Best Seller How to Be Black; an Emmy-nominated host and executive producer of the PBS television series America Outdoors; and the creator and host of the podcast How to Citizen.
His mission? Tell a better story of us—challenging the status quo and fostering meaningful conversations about the intersections of race, technology, democracy, and climate. The stories we have inherited are too small for us, he tells us, urging us to nurture stories that are bigger, bolder, and better. Our conversation today touches on the concept of citizening—as a verb—as Baratunde suggests that we are capable of more than we have been asked to do and gives us the steps to better citizen. We discuss the great potential and great concerns surrounding AI and the fine line between enhancement and disconnection through mechanization. We can heal people, landscapes, even society as a whole, he tells us—but technology alone will not get us there—we must tap into something that we have known but chosen to forget—how to live.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
How to citizen…10:36
On AI…21:24
Undoing the harm we have done…47:00
MORE FROM BARATUNDE THURSTON:
Read How to Be Black
Baratunde’s writings at Puck
Listen to his TED Talk: How to Deconstruct Racism, One Headline at a Time
Explore Baratunde’s Website
Listen to the How to Citizen podcast on APPLE and SPOTIFY
Follow him on INSTAGRAM and MASTODON
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Well, thank you for being here and I'm thrilled to talk to you and know you because you have a fascinating mind and I always enjoy anyone who can talk about anything, truly.
BARATUNDE THURSTON: There's also a name for us, BS artists might be one of them too. Doesn't necessarily mean I have a fascinating mind. Could just mean I'm full of nonsense. But we'll find out. We'll find out.
ELISE: I read very widely as well, although I find as I age that my interests narrow. But how does your mind work? Are you encyclopedic? How does it function?
BARATUNDE: I think that my mind is like a relational database. I absorb and retain lots of information. My wife might challenge that statement, but she's not here and my mind likes to make connections between things. And that's been useful in a decade of standup comedy where I used to really focus my attention and, and brain and mouth. It's been useful in writing. It's been useful in trying to make sense of a chaos filled world. And so things just with practice maybe, or with disposition, probably both, my mind likes to draw dots between things and then use those dots newly connected to paint a picture of something that I might not have been able to see if I was just looking at the dots and so I'm not a specialist on any particular set of dots, I have certain areas of dots that I focus on, but the real way my mind is satisfied is by bridging dots.
ELISE: Is there a central animating question in your life? I sort of have a sense of what mine is, but what are you after?
BARATUNDE: What is yours?
ELISE: I mean, what's the purpose of life, obviously? No, I just, I really like to try to understand, I wanna understand the larger container that we live in and I have become, I didn't grow up in a religious household, but I've become quite, I don't even know if spiritual is the word, like interested in mysticism and the metaphysical and the things that we are sort of on the tips of our understanding. I'm always looking for the larger picture or the closet in which we all hang. I don't know, what are you after?
BARATUNDE: I am, trying to find slash tell a better story of us. I think the ones that we've inherited are too small for us and they don't fit most of us. And even the people they were designed for, they're ill-fitting for them too. And so we've gotta find something else, something bigger, something bolder, something better. And that is where my story weaving comes into play to try to kind of bring some strands from that larger textile closet together and contribute to, you know, a larger fabric of our concept of ourselves.
ELISE: And what do you think is so limiting? Is it that we live in these tiny snapshots amongst a much larger tapestry? Or where do you see us getting stuck or constrained by story?
BARATUNDE: Yeah, we have an emotional limitation, biased toward fear rather than love in our story of us, we are limited by ideas of our separateness rather than our interconnectedness. And when we get fed fearful, disconnected stories, we become more fearful and disconnected and, you know, we are what we eat, including the stories we consume. I think we've, there's some very tangible stories we've inherited that kind of play out some of those dramas of supremacy of one kind or another: Male dominance, white supremacy, dominance, like these are all just stories. There's no scientific basis for them writ large. There are differences among all kinds of people, and you can probably categorize them to some degree, but not to the degree we've codified them and impose them and use them to limit our collective potential. So shedding those harmful narratives, they're not the only ones out there. But they have, some of them have held sway for far too long, and I think it's time to move on.
ELISE: Yeah, I just wrote a book. It just came two weeks ago.
BARATUNDE: Oh, wow. Congratulations. That's a big deal. Pause. Pause. A lot of people write books. You published a book, like your book is available for people.
ELISE: It's available.
BARATUNDE: That is a bar that most writers never cross, so I just wanna acknowledge you.
ELISE: Thank you, it is about internalized misogyny. It's and internalized patriarchy and the stories that we've told about who we are, and primarily through a Judeo-Christian patriarchal lens, and how those stories have become distorted over time and that we don't necessarily subscribe to them. I mean, it's true of any systemic structure, right? You can say, now that I think people like me have a sense of, oh, I, now I understand systemic racism. I never quite understood it until I read things like Cast or Abram. But now I see that I'm not necessarily choosing to participate in this system, but it's the culture that's whispered into my ear. I'm part of it whether I choose to be part of it or not. The book I wrote is about is in that vein, how can we understand misogyny as something that's just a culture rather than nature?
BARATUNDE: Right. It's in the water.
ELISE: Yes, exactly. And the way you just described that too is like quite metaphysical or mystical to me, or that's my understanding of that. This like truer story. And who are we really? What are we doing here? Do you feel like there is, have you been able to find that story or do you think we're just creating it as we live and starting to shed what's been false?
BARATUNDE: Yeah, we're probably always in a state of creation and destruction of story. At the same time, I think there are moments where we've, we're in a plaque buildup kind of situation and it becomes clearer to more that the old story doesn't work as well anymore. And so there's a seeking for something new. We are, we are in that moment right now. It's not so much that we need to create a whole new story, it's that we need to be sensitive to and aware of where that new story's already present and nurture that and give our attention and our power to that. And by doing so, we make that story more real. It's, you know, Buckminster Fuller rules, right? You don't worry about. Tearing down the system, you build a new system and you kind of attract the people into that, and that's how you win. And it's so, it doesn't have to be destroying anything. It does involve letting some things go and it might involve as well, letting some things die and mourning that death and acknowledging that passing to make space for this, you know, new life in this new story.
So I see it in examples of how people politically organize, you know, I do this whole podcast, How to Citizen, and we're full of examples of folks around the world who are tackling climate with a level of savvy sophistication, creativity, and joy that is not typically associated with climate activism. People who have relationships with money and business that don't make you feel dirty. Actually these tools are just different forms of energy. We can use them to harm or to heal, to sully or or to clean. And so, you know, we have other ways of being with our elected officials. Maybe we don't have ‘em. Maybe we do deliberative democracy and we can script a random allotment of the public into service. Compensate them for that time. Equip them with expert facilitation, inform them of all ranges of position on a topic, and trust them to come to a near consensus opinion or set of policies around whatever this topic is. Those are happening.
ELISE: Yeah.
BARATUNDE: In Brooklyn, you know, people are policing themselves in part with the blessing of the police. Let's try this out. So some places these things have taken hold very strongly. Some places they never left. In terms of an indigenous sort of regenerative, circular donut economic view of the world. And some they're experimental and we're trying things out and, and we should be experimenting. So I'm seeing all that.
ELISE: Yeah. Can you explain, you touched on it briefly, but this idea of sort of little ‘d’ democracy or the way that you see citizening happen from the inside out or like what that model is?
BARATUNDE: So there's a story of what it means to be a citizen and that story is predicated on birthplace, on location of parental intercourse, basically nothing to do with us and on legalisms and other stories of borders and separations that the land itself and the wildlife that lives on it have nothing to do with, they're like, okay, human, sure. Now you're in Idaho. Now you're in Oregon, whatever. But we make it real and we set up different customs and culture around these fake lines that somebody drew a long time ago, and we have distinctions, and they're often useful. But in terms of citizening and what that word can mean, basic premises in our news story of this that we're finding citizen is a verb. And the way you express that verb, the way you act that out is premised on at least four principles that, that we came up with. We being myself, my wife, Elizabeth, and our early guests who we were in public conversation with, feeling out this topic, we knew, okay, it's citizen as a verb. That sounds good. What does that mean? That was my wife's major contribution early on. It's like, but what does that mean though? So it means four things show up and participate. A world where a citizen is to assume you have something to do. And it doesn't mean you have to run everything, but it means you have to assume that there is something for you to be a part of. Invest in relationships with yourself, with others in the planet around you. Understand power systems, calls, people power. We have very few classes on power in our educational experience, but it's a big part of the ballgame, getting people to do what you want them to do. It doesn't have to be harmful, doesn't have to be dirty. It's very natural. But if we don't understand how to use that, we are short changing ourselves. And, and the fourth is to understand the value of the collective self, not just the individual self. So that's kind of like the quick curriculum on the how to citizen thing. But if I go deeper and just kind of fuel your question more, part of the animating motivation behind it is that we, I believe we're capable of more than we've been asked to do and when we receive this image of our world, it is very dystopic. It is very divided. It is very depressing, and our options are limited. We can complain. Of course, everybody's got a microphone and that is a mob encouraged mentality who are, I'm more disappointed than my politicians, than you are. I win. Do I? Okay, great. We can vote for people, which is useful to a point, not sufficient. We can give money to people who text us a lot, telling us to vote for them. We can shop, you know, we had a massive crisis of story and existence in our country with the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and the headline call to action from our leading public figure was to shop.
ELISE: I remember that well. I write about that in the book.
BARATUNDE: Missed opportunity. You know, like we, we are called to hire opportunities, but we need leaders to also trust that we're capable of answering that call and to know how to make it themselves. And so, small story, small story, small story all along the way, let's expand, let's rewrite and, and let's reconceive of, or redefine a word like citizen to help us move through this transition in a more positive, generative, and ideally loving and joyful way.
ELISE: Yeah, no, and I know that so many people are excellent community organizers. I feel like people hit one wall of resistance, or there's like, I'd like to help, I don't know how, and then it sort of stops. So my hope too is that with ongoing organizing the power of the internet, like we can create incredible relay races too and figure out, you know, you see this with like the WGA strike, but how, when can you participate and then you can go back to your life. Then you come back and you push and then you go back. Cause I feel like also so many of us sort of run out, our rage runs out, our energy runs out. We just, but hopefully in time that's one of the great promises of technology, right?
BARATUNDE: Well, let me pause on some of what you just shared. You know, we go out, we come back to our lives, we go out, we come back to our lives, our rage runs out. So rage is a fuel source in this telling, and it is powerful. It is really inefficient. It's not a sustainable fuel source, right? Love is a much more sustainable fuel source. So just within that metaphor and that language, we have some choices we can make. The idea that I understood and still largely understand, and I'm trying to shift for myself, is okay, I citizen out there, I politic, I small ‘d’ democracy. I'm just verbifying everything. But like, that's where that happens out there, I go to a march, I write a member of powerful position, I boycott a business. I write a letter to someone and then I come home. And so even in that language, we've created a separation. And one of the most beautiful moments that I learned from in the recent season of our show, was to tear down that wall that, that we citizen inside of ourselves, that even we had the pillar right there, right? Invest in relationships with yourself, with others, with the planet around you. Those are concentric circles of increasing and escalating ideas of self, but it's blurry lines between all those things. And so with Adrian Marie Brown, who was our first guest in this fourth season, She spoke of the power of fractals and patterns at large scale represented in the small scale and vice versa. And so the question can remain in the kind of indivisible resistance mode of current politics or the MAGA world of current politics, pick you poison, who am I gonna yell at?Whose office am I gonna sit outside of? And those are very necessary actions in concert with. What do I need to learn? How do I show up for myself?
How do I have a clear enough relationship with myself that I know what I need right now is a healthy meal, a nap contact with family, human eye, contact, touch, breath, and, and so if we started even at that micro level of citizening, the culture of misogyny or white supremacy or patriarchy. It, it emerges from inside of humans and, and the story that we project onto the world. So if we can shift our relationship even in here, then when we come home, we're still in it, but we're not fighting ourselves, right? It's not a rageful like, I gotta be better. I'm such a bad activist. I'm such a, a bad citizen. Like that is, you don't need to self flagellate over this. You know, you're not naughty unless you wanna be. And we could probably have a BDSM version of this if that works for you, but I don't think that's for like the great swath of people want, just spank yourself into citizening.
ELISE: Yeah, no, it's true. It's a beautiful idea. I think that there's just such a persistent idea of what this is supposed to look like and I think it comes down to how we're each uniquely or innately gifted. And some people are better behind a keyboard, others are better in front of an audience. Others are, you know, more persuasive one on whatever it is, I think part of it too is like understanding who you are and how to use those gifts towards a better world and ideally creating new tools rather than just relying on the way that we've been conditioned to outsource our sovereignty and outsource all of this to other people. Which is functional. Sure. But maybe not getting us where we would like to be.
BARATUNDE: Yeah. As far and as joyfully as we could go. We’ll still move, but it will work harder. And enjoy it a lot less. So boo on that.
ELISE: Boo. So what's fascinating to me is that you, so when we were emailing, the two worlds that you are between, right, or where you seem to be most passionate right now is AI, the man-made sort of hyper-technical world and understanding or hyper technological world, understanding sort of how to match our progress there with our evolution, cause I feel like we are way outpacing ourselves with progress, but no evolution. We do not have the consciousness to manage what we're making potentially, and I wanna talk a little bit about the people who are making it and sort of where they are collectively, I don't know that they're leading with love rather than fear, right? So you think about how these systems are made and programmed. It's, that's where I get concerned. And then you have a PBS show about nature. So I love sort of the split, which I think we all feel, right? Like we're torn.
BARATUNDE: Yes. I'm trying to bridge all those concepts of technology, the generative large language model and the regenerative, my mycelial networks and, you know, universality at the atomic scale of life, and I hope that we can find a way to recognize the power of both and wield them, you know, for our collective self-interest. Those are not always the default settings in some of these systems, but we can recode them.
ELISE: Yeah, I try to be optimistic. I try not to sort of buy into doomsday scenarios where humans are extinct because the world is run by machines at all. Where are you excited and where are you concerned? And we haven't really talked about AI much so on this show at least, and I have my head not under a blanket about it by any means, but it's just not as, I am a writer. I like writing, so I'm not looking to sort of outsource myself.
BARATUNDE: No, you are, you are tapping into like one of the great. annoyances of our time and I cannot cite who first put this thought and this way into my head. I may have seen it on social media. I may have seen it on a sign at the writer's strike for the WGA writers for TV and film, but it was essentially like you're taking the jobs we actually like, you know, like, writing's fun. I like it. Don't take like take away the laundry. Cool. Take away the dish washing. Yeah. Take away tax filing. Go for it. But you know, when you find this like creative, passionate thing, why would you want to automate?
ELISE: And AI art. Yeah.
BARATUNDE: So I get that. So, you know, excitement and concern for me. I haven't weighed them in the scales, but I have ample supplies of both. And I'll start with concern cause it's probably most based on what you just shared closest to where you are. And then I'll see if maybe through sharing the excitement, I could even help you see that for yourself. I mean, I'm on the creative front. I am concerned about a narrowing of creativity because of the technical way these systems are built. So these generative large language models are trained on a large set of largely ripped off data, we call it data, to kind of dehumanize the intellectual property associated and disconnected from kind of human spirit. So it's, everything's just data. And then maybe data becomes information, and then maybe if we're lucky, information becomes knowledge and then that funnel steepens where knowledge might become wisdom. But we're not dealing in the realm of wisdom here. We're dealing in the, we're in the realm of data, uh, according to the world view of the people who've, who've constructed these systems. And so we've hoovered up a vast minority of human experience and then proclaimed it to be capable of generating anything. So there's already a really steep funnel. It's like English language, documentable human experience, from recent history, largely in the West. And that's gonna make all the emails now and that's gonna make all the slideshows and that's gonna make all the Getty images, you know, the stock photos. And that's gonna make the paintings and that's gonna make the songs and that's gonna make the TV shows and that's gonna make the poetry and. I mean, we have kind of just, we're a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. We're inventing a new thin form of calculus here that's reducing us in in the way that you reduce something in a stew, but not merely as delicious because we're not so cognizant of those base ingredients, because we're not allowed to know, which is also part of the design. So that concerns me. The effect, the winnowing effect on creativity and the implicit large scale bias of the raw information that's put into these models to begin with, I have a laundry list of concerns, but I'm try limited like three-ish. Second big concern that I have is about disconnection, disembodiment. I'm wearing a very smart ring device right now on one side of my body and a smart watch on the other. And there is a smart device constantly listening to me over here and another one over there. And then there's this one I'm talking to you on. So I'm an enhanced person, right?
There’s a thin line between feeling enhanced and improved versus feeling disconnected from my own self. Did I have a good night's sleep? I think so, my ring says no. Who do I believe? Did I get enough steps? Well, do I even know what enough steps feels like or do I only know what it looks like on a screen? Do I only feel the reward of healthy diet or eating because of the literal virtual trophies that I get from the smart device nudging me toward allegedly positive outcomes. If I'm not in touch enough with my body to feel those outcomes, am I experiencing them at all? Or am I just on this gamified treadmill in a monetized system where someone else is getting a very tangible reward in terms of financial compensation or remuneration. So the way that AI can give us capabilities and insights while skipping all the steps required to gain or experience them is a deeply existential concern I have about where all tech is going and where this version of tech at the tip of the spear right now is going.
And then the last thing I'll name is the industrialization of self. One of those core ingredients in what we're experiencing in generative AI right now is capitalism and the competitive drive unleashing, unfinished, untested tools on billions of people so that a handful of organizations can return outsized investment returns to already hyper wealthy people when they're hyper economically stratified planet. Why? You know, like that's just, it's a deeply limiting motivation for all of this, and I'm not a complete anti-market, anti-capitalist person, but I'm market skeptical because the human experience, in no way could it be fully satisfied by supply and demand. You know, it just, look, we are so much more than that and we are, we need more than that and we're capable of more than that. So that's a limiting little story that's driving the engine that allegedly gonna write all of our stories for us.
ELISE: Yeah. And there's no regulation. I mean, we have no regulation on social media. And isn't sort of the AI body, aren't they saying that they're essentially a non-for-profit, but only after they return like 200X.
BARATUNDE: Microsoft has no such limits, nor does Google.
ELISE: Yeah, I wanna go to where you're hopeful for, but first I just, we're the same person. I'm kidding. But when you are listening to you, I wrote this piece for Oprah earlier this year about wholeness versus wellness and sort of the way that we're outsourcing with the biohacking and the tracking and, you know, seeing people in LA walking around with their continuous glucose monitors and the instinct to mechanize ourselves or to treat ourselves like, yeah, robots effectively that should be optimized. It’s very concerning. And to that end, it's interesting cause originally I would argue that the wellness movement was a push towards recognizing intuition, a woman's knowing the fact that we had been sort of silenced and ignored and the basic tenants of health, whole foods, sleep, walking, breathing, and to see it co-opted, you know, I call it bro wellness, but I have to wonder, and maybe you're gonna get into this in the positives in a way, I'm like, don't give me any of my data. This is not healthy for me. I don't even own a scale, but I don't mind the idea, particularly in our healthcare strap society that a well tuned AI model could be assessing our data, looking for massive trends or concerning insights that then could be put into action advice. But I don't know that we know enough. I think the citizen scientists model, I'm like, we're not Peter Atia, most of us. And nor should we be. That does not look joyful to me at all. I just wanna live, let me live, you know? Anyway, please tell us, tell us why we should be excited.
BARATUNDE: Because it's so early and we don't know yet, the concerns of which I named a few, and there are so many more about copyright, intellectual property, about misinformation, deep fakes, what even is truth? How do we trust anything? We get through a screen, but if we unleashed chat GPT or something like it on the data set that is policing, we would find patterns we would explore differently. We would learn still up to us to do. We'd have fewer excuses to not act on, at the most generous interpretation, the inefficiencies of our policing system, right at the most aggressive, the systemic destructive abuse of power inherent in a racialized way, our policing system. I went to college with a man, now known as Dr. Phil Goff. He was just Phil back then, and he's at Yale University now. He created something called the Center for Policing Equity. And data's a big part of his world. He's a psychological training background with neuroscience and some behavioral stuff thrown in cause he's never satisfied. And what he and his team were able to do with just data science was really shedding powerful light on some brokenness in this particular system. Scale that up. Think about this tool in the hands of activists, you know, and all the things the activists you know, respect, and love care about, that makes me very excited. You know, there's some precedent for caution around that excitement. Same with social media, right? But still possibility. My friend Ron J. Williams has coined this phrase, he first called it radical comprehensibility. Then he is like escalated and calling it the bionic customer. There are businesses who get away with and profit literally from obscuring the facts of their business. They make money off of customers forgetting that the business is taking their money. How many subscriptions am I signed up for that I forgot about? How many weird fees and charges is some financial institution charging me? How many false things have I been charged for? I just don't have the time to challenge that kind of profitability through obscurity is coming to an end because we will have AI agents who will make that call for us. We already have tools like Truebill now, which can find those subscriptions and turn them off. And so you pair the insight with the power to execute on our behalf. And now I've got a call center of my own. Bring it. Let's go. I've got lawyers of my own. No more shitty terms of service. Nope. I see what you did there. And I say, no, thank you. And so that kind of arbitrage, that informational arbitrage between a business and a customer will narrow greatly. You know, we can already find deals and have transparency around pricing for airlines, but this goes way deeper into the operations of an organization potentially. And then, you know, I think about the upsides for the good things we want to see, like medical research and all the insights, the radiological image screening, early alerts. You mentioned healthcare. I mean, every American has a tragic story involving health, usually involving the alleged system we have to care for our health. And within that funnel, usually around the insurance companies that are supposed to provide for the care in the system that's supposed to offer us a sense of health.
And so to have allies, you know, my mother died of colon cancer and she was not listened to early in her experience. She didn't know that that's what it was. And she had two kids. We weren't physically there to be able to kind of be the lawyer you need to be to be a good patient, right? Like, to be a good healthcare patient in America, you gotta be a great lawyer. Well, we just suck in some databases and now we got it. You know, I unleashed Chat GPT on my own healthcare policy 180 page PDF. I'm not gonna read that. And I can read really well and really quickly, and I have a degree to prove it. And I've written a book myself and published it. Like You, Elise, other people have read the book I wrote, and I, I don't have time for all that. So, no. That idea of being able to gain those insights and bring that power to bear on health individually, but also collectively on climate. I've been using this tool Green GPT, which helps me identify all the subsidies and discounts and rebates that I might qualify for, for various enhancements I make to my home at the city level, the state, the county, again, any data that's obscure from a congressional bill to a terms of service for an app. Just do a text processor on there. What does this mean? Explain this in plain English to me. Oh, that's within the bill. So none these fools has any excuse to not know what they're voting for. And I will have receipts to show. So the ability to hold people to account, holding ourselves to account really fascinating. Really, really interesting. And then, you know, low hanging fruit, just I'm a sucker for getting rid of drudgery. Like, I don't like writing captions on my social media posts, and I like writing, but not that kind of writing, you know? And so there's, I'm playing with a tool that can just process the information in the video that I'm posting faster than me and can learn my voice from my emails, which I give it permission to do. And so for people to be able to, with consent, control, and compensation opt into this world, create allies, balance, power, increase accountability, deepen insight, and then maybe follow through on the promise of having more time because of this, then we need the wisdom, what are we gonna do with all this time?
ELISE: We'll mechanize all these tasks so that we can return to ourselves and instead there's just more of a cattle prod towards productivity. But, so talk to us about nature. So did you grow up in nature?
BARATUNDE: I did, I grew up here on earth, a very natural environment, atmosphere, oxygen, photosynthesis benefiting me constantly. I'm a very natural being. I have my doubts about some other alleged humans.
ELISE: I do too. They're definitely aliens amongst us.
BARATUNDE: Yeah. You know, I grew up in Washington, DC. I was born in 1977 to Arnold Robinson and Arita Thurston, and the latter of whom really did the work of raising me. That being my mother. My father exited this realm pretty early in my life through gunfire. He was killed when I was young. So my mom had the solo responsibility slash great opportunity of stewarding me into this world and she was a tech person. No, she wasn't born into that, but she hustled and figured things out and she became a computer programmer. And so one of the first things that she brought into the house for me and my sister to be able to access was a computer, and that partly explains why I'm so invested in technology. But the other you know, she brought in knowledge and critical thinking and skepticism about American propaganda as well, and a sense of self-love as a black woman born in 1940, for whom that was in low supply based on the default settings of the society at the time and to this day. The other tangible tool my mom brought in the house was a bike, though. She gave me a bicycle when I was really young and my mom loved the outdoors. And we would go on bike rides together. We would go on hikes. She was a Sierra Club member. She helped me enroll in a Boy Scout t troop. It was this all black Pan-African, like Afrocentric Boy Scout troop. It was basically a, you'd call it a militia these days, but there were no weapons. Right. Which we had our badges, you know what I mean? Like language changes over time, at least language changes. So just like a bunch of little black dudes from the hood in DC, going to a Boy Scout troop meetings in a church, but also going to the Masonic Temple down 16th Street, not far from where I grew up. And questioning them about their use of African imagery in all of their emblems and having them say, we don't know what you're talking about. Like, okay, buddy, we see you. That's cool. And going camping, you know, I went camping with me, my mom, and our dog. Saw the whole east coast I think by the time I was 10 years old and, and most of that through camping and took a cross-country trip on by train all around the US and into Mexico and visited the Grand Canyon and cut across Montana and all the northern states and went to the Mexican Copper Canyon, which is six times as big as the Grand Canyon, which is a fact I learned at age 12 because we went there.
Little kid in the hood having these kinds of experiences and she would take my friends and me out on the bike trails of DC which is a really, really, great place to be a kid outside of the murder and the crack and the blah, blah. It's a great place. It's the right scale. It's alphabetical and numerical. Hard to get lost. As long as you know which quadrant you're in. Pay attention to the northwest, northeast designation and lots of parks. You know, Rock Creek Park was so close to where I grew up that I would play there with my friends and go on bike rides with my older sister, Belinda. So that was as much a part of my early childhood, my entire childhood as was being on the computer dial up modems, early bulletin board systems, which became the internet. So I've, I've lived this duality my whole life.
ELISE: Oh, it's so interesting. I grew up in Montana. So that was my childhood, was living on a dirt road. It was amazing, but very, pretty, pretty isolated. I mean, I went to school and stuff like that, but I grew up very, very, very, very much in nature, with, you know, making my own fun. By myself with my older brother, but like really on the mountain, up the creek, in the cave. It's wild now because my mom, I can't imagine my mom being comfortable with my little kids just doing what my brother and I did. You know, there are mountain lions, but at the time we were really free. And so do you think, like when you think about the future, And you think about this story that we're trying to sort of remake or unplug from and, and reweave and where we're going technologically, I'm assuming you're hopeful. You seem very hopeful, but what do you think, like, do you feel like we're entering somenew era that we're about to make some sort of seismic leap forward, or maybe we're in the middle of it, or do you feel like we're just sort of still being torn apart?
BARATUNDE: Yes. Yes to all of that. My hope is not boundless and it is very tethered to earth. And, you know, earth is reacting to us in increasingly dramatic ways that are less and less possible to ignore. You and I both live in Los Angeles, Southern California. Got an update yesterday, LA Times News alert. Allstate no longer offering insurance in the state of California. Cause it's just too risky for the risk managers, right? Their whole business is risk and they're like, man, this is just, this is too risky for us. Allstate, right? This is a massive, well-known, generationally present company and brand. And they're like, yeah, we just going to cut out on the sixth largest economy in the world. Too risky. So I accept that fact about the world we live in and do not pretend otherwise to be the case. Part of where my head is at is how do we prepare ourselves for the predictably more challenging times that are ahead? How do we practically prepare for that? How do we psychologically and emotionally prepare for that? How do we decide what to do with the resource of time so that we just spend it well, however much we have, whatever the temperature is or however high the floodwaters are, we're still in space and time, and we still have choice about what we're gonna do with our bodies and our minds in a moment and who we're gonna do it with. And so the citizen thing plays into that because it's like, oh, we, I think we need practice at being together and using and generating and sharing power and disagreeing, cause there's a lot of disagreement on the horizon. And if we lean into the fear story and the division story, then we'll draw borders on top of our borders and we’ll build walls on top of our walls and we'll heap blame on people who had nothing to do with it.
You know, poor people from the global south, subject to our industrial excess for hundreds of years now, logically seeking refuge, and we will say they are bringing disease and death and destruction to us. Really, that story and that headline are very, very, reversed in the kindest possible way. So there's this reality check for me there. I'm not naive about what we're facing. I also allow for the possibility that if we get some of these base level pairings right, then the strands of DNA that make up our collective cells that emerge from that will not only be able to withstand better what's coming, but undo some of the harm we've done. With America Outdoors, this PBS show, I was recently in Oregon, it was the most attuned experience of making this show I've had yet. Every single person we had on was echoing the same thing. There was this spearfishing guy and he's like, I spearfish cause I wanna be sustainable in how I gather my food. I only wanna take what I need. I don't wanna take more, I don't wanna use a net and catch a fish. I don't need, I wanna use a, a hooking line and catch a fish. I don't know what it is. I'm gonna see that fish with my own eyes and I'm gonna take that one and no more. I've met this, you know, roller derby champion Mick Rose. They had been representing the US in the, in the World Cup of roller derby, but didn't feel represented by the US. Wasn't allowed to fly their own indigenous nations flag alongside the US flag. Cause the coach is like, I'm that ain't America. Get outta here with that. And instead they bonded with other indigenous players and formed a thing called Team Indigenous, which is a transnational team of many indigenous nations around the world who now compete together. And then Mick lives in Portland now and is creating this community garden on what used to be a baseball diamond. So this symbolism gets richer and instead of the baseball dominance, now a medicine garden where they grow native plants, where they grow their own medicine, where the breadth of the garden they have has allowed them to bring back species of plants that people thought were extinct, which has brought back species of bees and birds that people thought were extinct. They're using ancient technologies of water sequestration and carbon sequestration to reseed the land and kind of un-colonize, you know, decolonize, mentally, physically, agriculturally. I saw that with my own eyes. I verified it. This is like some random article I came across. It made me feel good about the possibilities. This is a human being whose hand-eye shook. And whose herbs I touched. And it's like we can undo things and it's not just going to be deploying laser beams and LLMs and AI robots that's gonna get there. We have to tap into something that we have known but have chosen to forget, which is how we live with all the life that's already here and how we see ourselves as a part of that network, not dominant over it, we need a new story there. So my hope lies in people like Mick and people like that spear fisher. And those are two teeny tiny examples out of now hundreds that I've born, witnessed to, and been blessed to experience directly or indirectly through the podcast, through this TV show.
And that's just the past three years of my life. I've got 42 more under my belt and I was like, oh yeah. I've seen some other stories play out. I've seen alleged criminals restore to the community and become assets rather than liabilities. We can heal people, we can heal landscapes, we can heal ozone layers and we can heal our collective society as well. So that's what keeps me going. I don't always believe it. Sometimes I look at the news or hear some idiot speech and I'm like, oh man, this is where we're at. But we're always at many places at once. And can I drop something funky on you, Elise? I know I've been on a kind of a long monologue. Because of your interest in the container, the closet, this, you know, how we situate ourselves in the whole life thing. I'm gonna share this update on my understanding of the universe. That happened just in the past month. I met in a astronomer. I have to take great pains to not call him an astrologer. I always slip on that and he is not gonna read my horoscope, but he will, through the his understanding of the stars, kind of tell a story of the future.That's pretty inspiring. Energy doesn't dissipate. You know it moves, but it doesn't die. And the big bang that happened 15.7 billion years ago, all that energy is still here. We are ‘it’—like we are a version of it. We are an instance of that near infinite force and every atom that existed then exists now. And some of those are us. Like we are riding this cosmic wave. We're like surfers on a cosmic wave, billions of years in the making. And so my atoms were at the Big Bang. They're also in the future, right? Time doesn't, in this kind of math, you can almost take time out of it, it’s just being, we just are, we are. And so if we can tap into maybe just symbolically, but maybe actually, I don't know, but certainly the value symbolically is enough for me to take the leap to say, the things we want to do, the things we aspire to, we are, we can, we have, and there's something really powerful in that to me, that's not like spiritual bypassing, like, oh, just manifesting, but it's just like a deeper level of truth. We can interact with trees in ways that we're just starting to freaking know where our hearts are like, so our atoms were at the freaking bit. We are ancient.
ELISE: And it makes you think too, like in a shift of understanding like that in the way that we're so terrible at advanced planning or thinking of, you know, this idea of seven generations of planning for the future, which we fail at, that maybe we can find some self-interest In making it a habitable planet that doesn't just affect our children, but also will be affecting us.
I could talk to you for hours. Let's do this again, please.
ELISE: Baratunde really is a man of many interest and insights. I could talk to him for five hours, going into various parking lots, like now I just want to talk to him about Shriners and the Masonic Temple and what that means. If you are unfamiliar, he has a podcast called How to Citizen, with really incredible guest exploring many of the same questions that I am interested in as well.
