Baratunde Thurston On Social Media Perils, Institutional Distrust & Why Empathy Is The Solution To Our Political Divide

26:25You worked really hard. You studied and you married. And that is such a partial truth to be very generous. Sure. And it limits our ability to create better outcomes for more of us. And I don't want to take things away from people who've worked hard and done well. And I don't want to just give stuff to people who are going to waste it. It's not, you know, there's no extreme is ever good, but we have overdone it on the individualistic blame and credit game. And that's a part of, you know, the challenge we're living with in the economic system right now. like infinite growth. I saw this speaker years ago, Alnor Lada, A-L-N-O-O-R.

27:04Never forget it, because that's a cool ass name. And I have a cool name. And he described infinite growth as cancer, right? That's what we call it in the human body. When cells just continue to replicate without control and metastasize, that's malignant cancer. And we do everything we can to shut it down before it destroys the body. Capitalism, as we practice it on earth, especially in the West is predicated. It's the paradox, it's the paradigm that is, it's not the contortion, it's the mission. Consume all resources to maximize shareholder value. Everything's an externality that doesn't show up on my Excel spreadsheet.

27:40And lo and behold, the host earth is unable to bear that. And so it's really a bad business model to destroy your addressable market, but that's the logical conclusion of this extremist interpretation of growth. Sure, yeah, from a biological point of view, it's parasitic, it's malignant and terminal. Absolutely. When it's played out. So there has to be some, I think if you take it to that extreme, the most libertarian minded person would still have to acknowledge there is a limit, that limit of being unable to sustain business life on earth. And then hopefully something short of that, because that sounds pretty desperate and desolate to live in a just barely survivable environment.

28:24Mars is way worse. So what is that limit? And the donut economics you brought up, Kate Raworth, she takes that outer bound, it's like this ecological limit, and then some floor, some inner limit of human dignity. Okay, what does everybody really need as a base level? We got all this inequality, we got massive houselessness, and it's just embarrassing, and it's preventable, and it's sad, and it's kind of stupid. So how could we raise the bar, raise the floor, have a minimum? So everybody's basically taken care of, have a maximum so we don't commit mass suicide. And then in between, we could thrive.

28:59And there's so much money to be made, so much money to be made, so much joy to be had, so many products to be invented and innovated around. But within these guardrails and these bounds, that sounds like a useful provocation to me in a different way versus GDP, which is also a meaningless number. Like we literally know from the mainstream economy, it doesn't capture the stuff that we should be measuring ourselves against, but that's what we chase. So, you do what you measure and we're measuring the wrong thing. And the people who built the measurements acknowledge it, yet we still do it. Right.

29:36We're all interested in creating a sustainable environment. Yeah, hopefully. Like this is something we're talking about, right? I don't know that we're doing a very good job of it, but we're talking about it. We're getting better. But on that kind of biological metaphor extension, we thrive when we have sustainable practices that support the biosphere from the cell all the way to mother earth. And those ecosystems are most healthy and most robust when they are diverse. You want a diversity of species. This is why we love the Amazon. And these are really important. And there's so much knowledge and truth in understanding that that could be so easily applied to these other systems that we're struggling with as human beings from government to economics, to housing, to social media.

30:33Yeah. It's yeah. Yeah, I've been hired by a lot of white run companies and organizations to talk to them about race stuff. And during the summer of 2020 in particular after, there's like, we need a black person who can kind of come in and shake us up and shame us, but with love and some jokes. I'm your dude for that. Now I'll keep it real, but I'll keep your attention, right, not scare you off too much. You don't actually hear the punchline. And one of the things that I have been thinking about with this diversity thing, so much of the way that conversation has been set up is around loss, giveaways, and charity.

31:18So I, in my institution of whatever, am being asked to compromise my quality to give something to this undeserving person from this special interest group because the brigade says so. The liberal brigade, the woke brigade, and I got to meet these new requirements and get off my core mission to help out some scholarship kid, some low-income person, some black person. And that's a possible interpretation. It's certainly like there's some validity to that. And if that's the real truth, like, yeah, you should be upset about that. Also, diversity of perspective and mindset and experience are just objectively valuable.

31:57Being able to have a window into a different demographic for the development of your products is going to help you sell more stuff and recruit more talent and be more sustained in your operations. And that person who you're kind of condescendingly looking at because they're different from from you as less than you, that difference could actually become your strength if you saw it that way as well. And so there is an opportunity. There's like literally more money to be made by embracing that new perspective rather than by fearing it, seeing it as threat and only as losing what you're familiar with.

32:34Losing familiar is a painful process. It's not fun always to move homes, move towns, move schools. loss of familiar triggers a whole bunch of psychological stuff. So that's not unique to white people or men, it's human. But we know that, and we know that growth and the diversity of experiences and inputs can create a much more robust set of outputs, economically and otherwise. So how can we shift the way we talk about this stuff to focus on some of those gains? Like Heather McGee is a great example of this. Her book, The Sum of Us, and challenging this premise of zero sumness in our kind of racialized economy.

33:11If I gain something, you must lose something, for example. Not the case. We could actually both gain more if we work together, but it's very easy to demonize and prey on people's fears of loss and let the conversation stop there. Right, it is presented as a binary, zero-sum situation. And when somebody is in pain or anger or frustration because they are in a situation in which they feel they've been, sort of not given a proper chance or whatever, whether that's true or not, it's baked in. It goes all the way back to the American dream and rugged individualism. And if you're not succeeding, it is your fault, right?

33:54And internalizing that guilt is going to foment and turn into rage. And that rage is gonna look for an outlet and it's gonna look for a victim. Yeah. And there's plenty of people out there, who are more than happy to serve up, the face of who that person could be to then become the locus of that anger and frustration. And so to untie that knot, unravel that, and try to tell a new story about possibility, you're confronted with having to kind of work your way through all of that to get to the core of that person so they can actually hear you. And it's a layered thing. It's really hard, but it's really, really, really, really important that you started this conversation saying like, I don't know even where to kind of start in with what I'm doing in the world.

34:47It's a lot of stuff. But if you strip away the outlets, the media formats, the aspect ratios, I am trying to contribute to telling a new story of us that binds us together more than it tears us apart and kind of gives us something to build on together. Like I'm not trying to take anything from anybody. I'm trying to create something more with you that we couldn't do on our own. And that's the driving ethos of all of these things. We can't do that. We can't get past that fear and resentment. It goes from like, I deserve this, ends in rage, but in the middle is like resentment. You got this thing that I deserve.

35:28I'm salty about that. Who's to blame? Oh, scapegoat over here. It's a Mexican Muslim immigrant from over there. Okay, cool. Got my scapegoat. Part of the reason that's such an attractive narrative is the at scale miseducation of a whole society for generations about how we got here. And we're now in this era where telling the truth, just being real about American history is partisan, is described as hate speech. You know, you're trying to turn white kids against their parents.

36:08Can I tell you a short story? Sure. All right. So my mother was the best mother in the world. She got me through the crack wars of Washington, DC. She raised me and my sister with no college degree. She put a computer in my life, which has unlocked every economic opportunity. And the reason I'm sitting here now is because of her. and I give her credit. I put it in my book, How to Be Black, greatest mom ever, my mom versus your mom. My mom wins every single time, no offense. Also, my mom wasn't perfect. You know, and I realized some things about her and her impact on how I developed that are not great.

36:46And it was a really difficult reconciling moment to be like, oh, this stuff goes back to that same Saint Arnita who I had created in my mind. and I was really angry with her and I couldn't talk to her because she's dead. She died in 2005 from colon cancer. So I'm sitting, I'm resentful with this perfect mom who I have been so publicly grateful toward and told everybody she's the best. And she is, also she messed up in a couple of very significant, important ways that I've had to wrestle with. And I had to break out of that rage cycle and it was a simple realization that she's a human being and of course she's not perfect and that allowed me to be less perfect and opened up a relationship with my dead mother that wasn't possible when she was here.

37:32I'm still getting to know this person. And now that I know her more, ah, that's love. When you know someone, you love them. You know, you can appreciate someone, you can celebrate them. Loving is knowing. And if you don't know the dark stuff, you can't love the whole person. And if you only love them because they make you feel good about you, You're just using them. So we scale that relationship concept out to a country. We gotta love our country the way we love our moms, the way we love our kids, the way we really love the people we know. And we cannot love a nation while simultaneously refusing to fully know it.

38:11That is false patriotism. That is exploitation. And so you, it's hard. Like I wanna rant and rave against the people who are afraid of critical race theory and CRT, DEI, ESG. They're angry at letters. They hate Sesame street, I guess. But because of this one little nugget I've had with my own experience of resentment, of a changing story, I get it. Also, we gotta get through it and we cannot be cowards in that. And there are a lot of people promoting cowardice, restricting children's access to knowledge, being afraid that your kid knows more than you is the opposite of good parenting. We all want our kids to be better than us.

39:07We should be excited when they bring home some new knowledge. And so to kind of lock them into a restricted state of knowing prevents them from loving fully, prevents them from being real patriots. And that's the opposite of what we should want. So that's like a different way to have this conversation. I don't wanna get into like this author, that author, do you have faith in your children? Do you trust them enough to know and really love America? Because I can tell you with my mom, I know her better now and I love her more now. And I'm more solid now because I've faced those parts of her. I was walking around with this superficial false thing for a long time.

39:45And I think a lot of people wrap themselves in the flag in that sense. And that's not good enough anymore. You had to come to that realization on your own though, right? Like you had to go on a journey to, you know, wrestle with your resentment and finally get to a place where you could kind of open your aperture and accept her on different terms. But I suspect that you couldn't have been told that when you weren't ready, like you need to get over, you need to understand this and get past it. but like that was an internal, you know, kind of journey that you had to go on for yourself, right? So when you think about that idea, you know, how do you scale that up?

40:25You can't foist it on America. They have to go on their own, you know, everybody has to have their own kind of journey with this, but it is a process of like, I think it begins with like not turning a blind eye and kind of unraveling the fear that is leading to these bad decisions. Like you said that, I heard you say that, that America uses amnesia as a feature, right? Like, which is related to what you're sharing right now. Like we wanna pretend certain things didn't happen. We wanna think of it in an idealized way when in fact there's a lot of warts and healing and health comes from addressing, diagnosing and treating that.

41:10It does. And it's, foisting is a great word. Bad practice, but I give you points for using the word foist. So foist and force are not the right things and not the right language. Model and invite are. And that takes leadership. We are what we eat. We practice what we see. And so if we only see people practicing amnesia, we're like, oh, I guess amnesia is the way to be patriotic. I guess the way to love your country is just to wave the flag and ignore all the warts. It's not the only way. And enough modeling and enough leadership and enough stories that demonstrate the power of embracing the full story can unlock a deep well of patriotism that we've occasionally experienced.

42:02It's asking people to do something more than shop and vote. we don't ask very much of the citizenry. Give me money, give this company money, consume, consume. That is like a low bar, man. And then we're capable of a lot more. And I think there's a lot of folks in leadership who in every industry, you see it in Hollywood and the way they talk about the audiences, there's a lot of condescension. They're not smart enough. They wouldn't get the nuance. They can't handle the truth. It's patronizing. And so I think we could use, and I found through this How to Citizen Work and just my life examples of people who have more faith.

42:44That's the kind of faith we need. That's the faith based, it's faith in each other to be able to handle it. We've been through a lot in this country. We have accomplished magic, literal magic from the perspective of most humans who've ever lived, rockets and all the technological advances and the wealth creation. So we're capable of so much more than hiding from the truth. And I just think we need to hear that more. We need someone to believe in us and not just demand that we accede to them. Yeah, it's a very interesting kind of razor's edge to walk that you walk very elegantly because you do lead with empathy and there's a compassion about you and an openness and an inclusiveness while also being very clear about the truth and where you stand on these issues, right?

43:36Which is very difficult to do without it coming off in a way that is, you know, off putting in certain circumstances, right? Like that's a really skillful, artful dance that has to be performed. Is that a fair? It's fair. I'm a good dancer. Yeah. I mean, you see me on a dance floor, man, I cut it up. You know, I got some training DC, go, go music, let's go. But yeah, it's delicate. There's a risk in every approach, right? To go so far as to just keep people feeling good, not push into any discomfort is not serving the truth. And we can't be free if we're not honest. If we live in a lie, we're held captive and we're enslaved to dishonesty.

44:27And that's not liberation. So we gotta keep it real. We gotta be honest. we also have to be effective and not just right. And it's like, do you wanna be right? Do you wanna be effective? This is the dance. This is the artful dodge sometimes. And it requires a calibration to keep people engaged enough to hear the truth. Otherwise you're yelling into the wind, being right as you can all by your damn self. Right. And bringing nobody with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you pander to the ego into the sense of comfort and fragility on the one hand, or you embrace the righteousness on the other and got nobody with you.

45:08That's like a classic challenge. I don't think that's anything new to our time.

45:17In thinking about change, producing change, creating community around change, you're on the two sort of ends of the spectrum. We have grassroots organizing, ground up, and then there's top down. So take government, like what are we doing about Citizens United or lobbying and you name it, gerrymandering and all of these systemic issues that drive us in a certain direction, right? Like how do we untangle those knots? And it's hard because they're invisible and it's challenging because you can't, there's not one person that you can go to. It's like, it's diffused. It's a lattice work, right? And it operates again, kind of invisibly to those who benefit from it, who are participating in it almost unconsciously.

46:08So that makes it challenging. And yet the sort of grassroots lobbying isn't quite enough either. And what's interesting about how to citizen and the episodes that you're doing and the conversations that you're having is like, these are really creative. this is outside of the norm of the three things that we typically think of, as you mentioned, like beyond voting to like, well, let's do a march or let's do is like, no, there's a lot more here. There's all these other interesting creative things. But I guess the bigger question is,

46:45is addressing the binary of like, do you live to create these little incremental changes within the system? or are we gonna have to blow up the system and create a new system, right? Is that a false binary? And we're in it. Yeah, like how are we gonna? Yes, this is why I'm here. Because you can do all the little, all this little, you know, grassroots stuff over here, but as long as Citizens United and all these other things exist, how much progress are you actually ever gonna make? How much time we got, bro? I got time here all day. It's such a, it's a beautiful conundrum. I'm starting to think of paradoxes and conundra as like these beautiful things because we cannot be baited into the falseness of that dichotomy, the either or, the binary.

47:33It's a spectrum like gender and light and everything else. And I think we exist along that wavelength and then we got to tap into the wave at different frequencies. That's not really a cop-out. I think there's value. I hope it doesn't come across as a cop out. So we have been in this current season of how to citizen focused on creating culture. How do you create a culture of democracy so that the things that emerge from that culture are more reflective of small D democracy. And we don't just get hung up on the Citizens United and like the high level Supreme Court type fights, but that there is a way to connect the local and the grassroots to that larger effort.

48:15and there's a lot of physics theories in there, fractals with Adrienne Marie Brown, which is so much fun, this idea that small patterns replicate at every scale. And so if we shift internally, we can actually shift externally. I think that is a key to unlocking the connection between grassroots and systemic and that grassroots has to be expanded in terms of our understanding of practicing democracy. It doesn't just mean a grassroots petition in your local school district. It means, you know, the way we kind of articulate citizen as a verb in the sense, it means showing up and participating. It means investing in relationships.

48:55It means understanding power. And it means valuing the collective. And we can do that in our households. Are we practicing democracy in our own households and our own relationships? Do we understand the power going on at home? Do we understand the power going on in this studio with our colleagues and coworkers and funders and all like that? And are we cognizant of it? And are we operating within that? and how are we using that power? And so making people aware and giving us literacy in this gives us tools at the grassroots to start realizing the world the way we want to experience the world. And so we may not have to blow up the system.

49:31I'm still open to the possibility, but we might seed a system in the smaller space that produces more people who are coherent within this system, who go on into this system and say, but I really preferred the way we operate here. Let's bring it in. And so you're growing a new culture and nothing has to be blown up violently or metaphorically. It just fades. It becomes less relevant. Right, the better system in the Petri dish begins to replicate because it's just - Evolution, baby. Yeah, evolutionarily, it will crowd out and ultimately render, you know, So mute the old system that was broken and not replicating in a healthy way.

50:19And here's a feature. Here's a beautiful feature of the United States and probably humans in general, but the way we codified our institutions here with the constitution in particular and the federalist system. We gave ourselves a ton of petri dishes, states, federalism. We gave ourselves amendable source code, constitution. We can append it. We can amend it. That's commendable. So we have intrinsic tools that are pro-modification and pro-experimentation. So then we can take an idea like citizens' assemblies, which are these deliberative democratic bodies where basically you conscript people into government function and group argument, debate, deliberation around a policy proposal that's widely representative of the region.

51:06Not people who could get elected because they're charismatic and pretty. People who are geographically, economically, and otherwise distributed, compensated for their time, kind of like jury duty, turned up to 11. And they wrestle with an issue. In Paris, it's climate policy. In Belgium, it's something else. We have experiments going on here in the United States as well. And folks are able to practice self-government with each other, listening to experts, having eye contact in these small groups, and coming up with much broader base support for a policy because it didn't go through the filter of campaign finance and charisma and extroverts only, you know, the price of entry into our political system.

51:48I mean, just the extrovert, the overt exclusion of introverts in our system already leaves a lot of ideas off the table. And I'm very extroverted. So that's gonna dilute my voice a little bit. Many of us are not. And so you take that and then you can imagine it. Okay, that can work in like a school. That can work in a school district. That can work in a county community level. That can work in a watershed area. That can work in a state. and that can roll up into a national government practice the way Ireland has done, where they did a national kind of civic assembly around their abortion rules and how they went about legalizing abortion.

52:30And there was so much more nuance in that proposal because people felt heard. And part of what this fragmented media landscape and this competition with the cheap drug of fear gets us is we wanna feel heard and we don't. And the way the vast majority of us feel about something, there's no place for us. We get pushed to the edges and the extremes because it's life or death for everybody. And there's so much common ground in the middle. We have no process to discover that because we're all alien to each other because our process doesn't let us see us as humans. And I think that that gives us a distorted view of where most people are.

53:08Absolutely. Because all we see are the extremes and we assume that like everything is just like, you know, up in flames. But we have, the way Congress works now, they are running on a social media algorithmic like influencer model. Yeah. Truly, like you can better explain the behavior of members of Congress based on influencer economics than you can based on representative democracy. They've been captured by a different business model, by a different operating model. And so we need a different model to grow and replace that system. There's a group of veterans that come together after floods and hurricanes, et cetera, because they have a sense of unit cohesion because they have practice at being on a team.

53:51And they use that practice at playing well with others to be effective in a totally non-combat arena in something peacetime and governed by different rules, rules of engagement totally, but structurally the same. The public at large, we need practice playing well together. And if we can do that in our grassroots local areas, we can then use that to take on Supreme court policies and the lack of ethics or adherence to them in the Supreme court, because we will have some squad practice in the minor leagues down here too. And so I think all of that kind of rolls up, you know, in the same way that some of that culture has felt like it's rolled down.

54:35And the success of that type of model goes back to this idea of trust, right? Like it's the analog experience of groupings of people spending time together, getting to know each other that breeds that level of trust. And we throw the word community around, like it doesn't mean anything. Like the word friend. Thank you. Sure, yeah, you were talking about the mall versus like a real community and how social media operates. Like we have these Facebook groups or other online communities, but they're not, we think of them as communities and perhaps for a lot of people, they're creating kind of identity out of their affiliation to whatever group it is.

55:21But because of the ungated nature of them, there isn't that kind of process by which, the trust is earned through experiences in the real world. So talk a little bit about like how you think about community because it's so core to like how to citizen and to the solution to all these problems, like real community versus like how we've cheapened that notion. Let me tell you how Barack Obama taught me what community could be, especially with respect to the internet. Wasn't a private one-on-one lesson. It was in my mind, I'm like, okay Barry, You're in the Oval Office. He pulls me aside. He gets you on the phone.

56:09You gotta come down right now. I gotta talk to you. And then a couple of years, I want you to tell the people. So I was really excited about this candidate and especially his internet embrace. And I remember the evolution of excitement around his use of technology. And first it was like, okay, he is a single point in a node and he's using the internet to better address multiple publics and communities and groups of people. That's a little innovative. He was the first to do it. I think it's, we can't underestimate like what a watershed thing that was at the time. So that's level one kind of digital community, upgraded broadcast capacity, right?

56:51And being able to micro broadcast broadly to different communities. Then the next thing I noticed was listening, right? It's kind of the inverse flow, tapping into all these communities, sourcing ideas, perspectives, talent. He's still at the center of the diagram, but he's informed by all this social listening. And the agencies figured it out and they call it social listening posts in terms of the digital marketing and advertising agencies. That was another evolution of the innovation of kind of community and communications online. The third and final step I experienced as a volunteer on the campaign, offline and online, he was at the center, but the arrows weren't flowing from him in terms of broadcast.

57:39They weren't flowing toward him in terms of ideas or money, which was the real evolution that the media celebrated. Look at his fundraising capacity, sucking all these dollars from small donors. Revolutionary. The real revolution was connecting the end points in the network, peer to peer. and I found community and fellow volunteers when I was on the streets in Dallas and Pennsylvania and Northern Virginia and online in Reddits and Facebook groups and Wiki communities and so many different places. And we started making our own policy sheets for the neighborhoods that we were walking. We made our own playlist and our own posters and we gathered and we self-organized and he was the excuse, but he was a facilitator of that.

58:21and passively so. He created some kind of permission and enough inspiration for us to run with the ball. Community has got to be about its members seeing each other, not just seeing a principle, not just serving a principle. There's gotta be a sense of peer-to-peer awareness and acknowledgement that is enabled, perhaps by a central note of attention, but not only in deferential service to it, for outbound or inbound attention or dollars. And so it's used a lot flippantly in internet language, especially, oh, my community, my community, my community. It's your audience. It's your customer. A customer base is not a community.

59:04An audience is not a community. An audience online is not a community. Until the people can really see each other, I don't think it's the most robust form of community. And so we can get into shades of grading around like how intense is your community, how well thought out or how deep is it? But I think the high watermark for all of us using that word is, can people connect to each other? Is there a level of self-organization, self-actualization possible through the members of that community having agency of their own? Yeah, that's very well put. I mean, I think of it in terms of, I sort of think of it like, everybody wants to be part of a community, but we already feel like we're part of these fractured communities because they're called communities.

59:55So, it's like greenwashing. It's like, I feel really good about buying this product because it has the right label and whatever. And so, it ends up neutering like the real action by making you feel better about something that actually isn't real, I guess is the point that I'm trying to make. Here's another, you know, I wanna try to bridge like some of the things we've been talking about in terms of how we might take some of the ideas of online community, attention fragmentation and structural challenges or impediments to progress. Let me try it. Your boy went to Paris. Life is good sometimes. And while in Paris with my wife, we met up with this activist who helped create an organization called Make Sense.

1:00:40It's a volunteer group. They operate across the world, largely outside of the US, but it turns out most of the world is. So they are globally significant. And they've evolved to a form of climate activism that is the most sophisticated model I've seen. They've got an app. It's called Regroup, R-E-G-R-O-O-P. And they've taken hints of Be Real in terms of a daily action and like an alert, it's now's your time. And it's coordinated climate action informed by activists on the ground who kind of know what the situation is and analysts and researchers who studied the levers and pinpoints of power in the system.

1:01:20So in this particular example, there's an oil pipeline in East Africa that could do a ton of damage. There's decision makers in the European parliament, in Paris, in a French government company, in a Chinese government company, in American and British insurers and banks. And each day they give you something to do. And you see your progress. You see how many other people did it. So like, oh, 113 people, 115 people, 500 people, 800 people. And they prepped something for you to do. All right, we're gonna send an email to this group. How do they know where to send the emails? Well, they haven't just started a petition to protest the bank.

1:01:56They've gone to the bank. They've done a creative activation outside the bank. And they've had conversations with bankers. And they said, do you know that your bank is financially supporting this project? Here's what the activists in Uganda, Tanzania in this case, are saying about, no, I had no idea. Let's go to the pub. Let's talk about it. They take them out for a beer and they get email addresses of other people in the bank or they find out the threshold inside that bank that creates an internal alert for customers are upset. We might want to revisit this policy. And they do the same at the insurance companies and the same with the legislative bodies.

1:02:31And so the actions that we're being asked to do are sophisticated, thoughtful, and achievable. And they're prepped enough that it's simple enough that it's also accessible. I'm like, what is this? And I can look back, I'm done 15 actions and it helps with climate anxiety. I'm doing something and it's vetted and I can see how many other people are involved. So even the way I describe community, I'm not in a chat group with all these other people. But I have visibility into who else is in this action with me. I have trust because it's people on the ground and people from a research policy realm, kind of combining forces to inform what they're asking me to do.

1:03:13And never had they asked me for money. Not once. Woo! That's very cool. And the actions are all designed around trying to achieve a result. Like they're result oriented as opposed to make a bunch of noise. And every week they celebrate. Every week there's a post internally and publicly. We did 850, we did 1500 actions. We had a meeting with the CEO of the bank. We got two meetings scheduled. This insurer just dropped out. They're not gonna underwrite the project, increasing the number to 25 globally. We're boxing them in. And here's the deadline we're working toward, this big UN thing. And here's the deadline for...

1:03:52So there's a level of transparency too. So many groups that want us to do something for a good cause, save the planet, save the earth, stop poverty, stop hunger, aid in this abusive situation, they don't let you in on the game. You have no idea what your$10 is going to. Yeah. And giving$10, for me, easy for a lot of people, easy for some people, impossible, but a really low grade ask versus share this message, invite a friend to do this, send this email. I was sending emails to Japanese bankers Like, yo, konnichiwa, baby. I love Japan. I've got friends there. And I would love to tell them that your bank is on the right side of history and have them move their company's business to you versus your competition.

1:04:38Don't you want that? Versus me having to tell them, you know, carrot and stick. I just think that is an evolution of how we citizen. It's an evolution of how we think about how we use these digital tools to mend democracy rather than fragment it. And it's fun. You know, it's just literally like a way to engage in this heavy word activism, which comes with so much baggage. I don't, I'm not educated enough. I like money, you know, like there's all kinds of other labels that we carry that prevent us from wanting to carry that one. I'm nuanced. I don't wanna pick fights. This is just a way to do something, man.

1:05:15And then you having a platform to be able to talk about that. And like, I'd never heard of that. Like now I do. Now other people do, which is a really cool privilege, right? And I know that like how to citizen kind of comes out of this sense that, you know the news is all bad and you know, it's just, it's disaster porn and all it is, is like all the terrible things happening all over the world. And in truth, like humanity is fucking awesome. And people are doing really cool stuff. Yes. Those stories don't travel quite as well, but to elevate them and to find those people who are, you know, coming up with those kind of creative, innovative solutions to, you know, problems small to existential is like really important, you know, to allow the visibility, you know, to rise up.

1:06:06There's, we're entering a phase and era of like our human existence where things are gonna get harder. They just are, they're gonna get more magical, right? We're gonna have all kind of technological wizardry. I'm basically a spell caster with these AI tools now. And just the power of my creation is like, how could you cast that spell? Did you turn someone into a butterfly or a frog? Depends on your prompt. At the same time, the temperature is literally rising. Weather's getting more volatile. Income inequality is worse. Trust is down. And in that kind of environment of increased seeming scarcity, we're gonna have a choice of who and what we listen to and what we consume informationally.

1:06:50And the quick hit, the dirty drug is gonna be blame somebody. The reason the weather's bad, homosexuals, trans kids in their bathrooms, they've smited Jesus, they've offended the Lords. And I know I just ruined, I really, really misstated the religious case against homosexuality, but it's a terrible case. So I don't mind that. there's gonna be scapegoating of all kinds of people that have nothing to do with our current situation. The immigrants coming across our Southern border are long-term truth, like fleeing a problem we created in the West, in America in particular. We so cranked up the temperature on the planet that their droughts at the equatorial region are driving a bunch of displacement and they're naturally migrating North.

1:07:36People have always fled to other areas. Turns out we're the cause. So we're mad at them for stuff we did. Okay, so you can listen to the people telling you that it's their fault, that we have to draw up borders and that the little scraps we have left, we gotta fight to the death for them. Or you can listen to the people citizenry. You can plug into something like regroup. You can listen to new public about how we create a different kind of discourse in space, Adrienne Marie Brown, and how we can practice belonging, practice democracy, practice problem solving with a whole different spirit of celebration of what we're capable of.

1:08:15You said it, we're awesome. Humanity is awesome. You've had a bunch of awesome people on this show. I was just listening to Rick Rubin. Yo, we're amazing. And wouldn't it be so great to feed ourselves and to heal ourselves and to nourish ourselves with that kind of quality diet going into these very extraordinary times, then the diet we know is poison. That's like a no brainer to me, man. I know what I'd rather listen to. Yeah, I think the other thing that that speaks to is a path to meaning and purpose and fulfillment, which I feel like a lot of people are desperately in search of or are lacking in their own lives.

1:09:05and to kind of invest yourself in something important that's bigger than you, where there is real community and innovative solutions and a real need for people to step up and show up, this is affording you that possibility for yourself because it's in that act of service that you find that, right? And that unlocks happiness. It's like, again, almost like a biological system. Like, hey, go do this thing that we need you to do. And actually you're gonna, all the stuff that you're upset about, like suddenly life gets better. And that's the good drug, right? That's the good hit. That's the healthy adrenaline.

1:09:48You don't need - But this is the broccoli to the cheeseburger. But it's not even calling it broccoli. I think it's like fricking like locally sourced, fair trade deep dark chocolate, you know, versus the commercial diluted high fructose corn syrup bullshit you get at the corner. I'm very coastal, very elite, proud of it. I went to a great school, but I'm just saying like, you know, when you've had like a piece of fruit, that's just real, right? A fresh strawberry right out the dirt. That ain't coastal. I mean, in some cases, California, we feed the world, so it is, but that's not like Los Angeles, Tui elite stuff.

1:10:29That is like people working with their hands. They already know this. You'd eat that fresh strawberry any day from the plastic wrapped, globally shipped, genetically preserved facsimile, this cosplay strawberry that we're served up to be shelf stable and beautiful, but it's empty calories, right? So even with the same fruit, there's a difference. And we know, we know the difference. It's just that the shrink wrapped one is a lot more airtime and a lot more investment. but the one that was grown in the dirt, that's got the nutrients we need. That's the real thing. And we deserve the real thing.

1:11:08We just don't have time. You know, I think there's also this other kind of headwinds, crossroads we're coming to where like distinguishing real, it's getting harder. Sure. Right? Like the facsimiles and the cosplay and the simulated realities are really seductive in themselves and harder to distinguish. So there will be this parallel movement for real, for tangible, not virtual, you know, tactile, not haptic and 3D real immersion, like in a physical sense rather than in a virtual sense and just getting out in nature, you know, and being with other people. And what you described about, you know, the purpose reminded me of Jose Andres in World Central Kitchen.

1:11:58and this guy's infectious in the best way. And what he helps unlock through that type of leadership, giving people a way to channel that sense of loss, isolation, mourning at the darkest moment, creating some light, feeding people, using the local people on the ground to do it. Now we all got something to do and we feel better. Even if we got no electricity, we feel better. And so the material thing ain't the thing. Right. It's the emotional thing. It always is with us humans. Another example that came to me, you probably know Scott Harrison, Charity Water. Yeah, old school. It's a very similar kind of arc that he went on to that kind of a place.

1:12:40Yeah. So when reality itself is for sale and we can have a superficial experience of it, where are we gonna fulfill the deep need for that real connection and that real sense of purpose and real sense of belonging. I'm not saying it's impossible through the virtual world. I just gave you a case with regroup where it's all powered by technology. But I think it's important to keep our eyes out as new waves of tech hit the shore. What parts of us are they drawing out? What are they asking of us? And is it the part of us that we wanna amplify? And those new technologies are gonna hit the shore, I think sooner rather than later.

1:13:22I mean, it's already insane. This is non-linear progression. It's gonna get so much more insane. And that breeds instability. 100%. In your sense of purpose, belonging and meaning for how you do everything. I remember maybe 15, 20 years ago, having this realization, not unique to me, but it was unique at the time, as in I hadn't read it anywhere. The distance between us is growing within a generation, you know, for thousands of years, most humans lived to, I don't know, 40 years old, lost their teeth, died young, right? We just didn't have a, I mean, I'm not talking about like the biblical era when apparently they lived for hundreds, but generally speaking, life was, you know, brutish and short.

1:14:07And then we slowly expanded that, but a great, great grandparent would have a lot of practical advice and wisdom for the great, great grandchild. And now an older sibling is having a hard time I'm doing that with a younger sibling five years apart. So that's a level of social fragmentation, familial fragmentation. What do you have to, how do you parent your child? How do you mentor your niece or nephew when you didn't go through anything like this yourself? And the thing they're going through now is gonna be radically different six years from now, one year from now, not to mention the governing, but even take the governing, just keep it in the family.

1:14:46It starts at home. And so if we're not able to pass on values and wisdom and best practices within a generation, because the reality in which we're operating is changing so radically, our frame of reference is totally gone. Then we're kind of, we're untethered. Yeah, it makes it impossible to, there's no coherence. Exactly. from one, not even generation to generation, but within generations. Just it's the acceleration of change is so massive. What we have to share then suddenly becomes irrelevant almost overnight. And so I - But truth is always truth. There's always wisdom that transcends whatever is happening.

1:15:32We may not be able to relate to the specific experience of what it's like to grow up with technology X, but there are still some, there's an architecture of how to be in the world. There's something underneath that superficial reality, whether it's virtual or physically tangible, our humanity has some consistency, right? We have an emotional experience, we have desires and needs, we have fears, we have a sense of belonging or it's opposite, a sense of purpose or its absence. And so we have to figure out a way to tap into that deeper frequency. If you're trying, I mean, I remember telling businesses when I would advise them on social media strategy, don't ask me what your Vine strategy should be.

1:16:25Vine will one day not be here. What's your story, right? And then you figure out how you're gonna express it in the medium of the moment. We all need to kind of get below the surface it's increasingly important because the surface is ever changing. And I don't have a simple answer for that, but I just acknowledge it as a major contributing challenge to the sense of rupture and disruption that we're all facing. That part is unprecedented.

1:17:00The big thing here is, you know, we already feel like we're in a post-truth world, but we ain't seen nothing yet. but the undercurrent of humanity is this notion that truth is important, right? Like we agree on that, right? I mean, you and I do. What's true and not true, like understanding the difference between that is important. But I feel like we're creeping towards a situation where there's gonna be a lot of people who would rebut that and say, actually truth is not important. What's important is winning or audience capture or just making sure that your narrative is the one that's on top. And when you have, you know, when the deep fake technology, and it's like the ability to obscure truth or tell whatever story that you wanna tell in the most convincing way, completely untethered from anything real or true, you know, it becomes, you know, pretty apocalyptic.

1:17:56We don't just need a sort of competitive system. We don't just need a system in which truth competes with untruth, we need a system in which the incentives for truth compete with the incentives for untruth. And where we are now, that is not really the case. You can be outlandish and dishonest and generate the markings of reward through attention, through likes, through money for being untruthful. And the punishments aren't quite aligned with that either. So the downside could be turned up and the upside could be turned down. Meanwhile, for those of us who love and value truth, we've also got to build a system that rewards it and offers demerits for undermining it.

1:18:45We've got to be able to show transparently that truth has value. And I don't want to just sit here and say, yeah, the truth is always better. Like clearly, historically speaking, it doesn't always win because untruths have been able to attach themselves to things that people value. And ultimately we value belonging, perhaps as an example, more than we value truth. We value self-preservation more than we value truth. Genocides are built on lies, all of them. They somehow compelled millions of people to participate actively or passively in them because they saw something in it for them. self-preservation, belonging, lack of ostracization to uphold a lie.

1:19:35So lies had a lot of co-conspirators and we've got to make sure we rally when it's so much easier to create and spread a lie. We need the truth to have some allies and some rewards built in. I haven't thought about that at all. This is a real time like, oh snap, what does that even mean for us? But I think if we ignore or try to pretend that the truth is just obviously better, we are in for a world of hurt because it isn't obvious a lot of times. No, and there's debate about what is the truth? Who's truth, my truth, your truth. And then that brings in, you know, a sort of freedom of speech argument.

1:20:15I mean, this is, you know, the battleground of this right now is, you know, happening on social media, trying to figure out like how to create healthier incentives to do that. and I don't think we're doing it in a very elegant way. I'm confident there are solutions out there to do that. I mean, if you were to create a social media platform. Wouldn't do it. Love myself too much. Next question. But like, just imagine, you know, if you had your druthers and you could create something that would have the proper incentives that would, you know, elevate like a core set of, you know, kind of higher values around how humans could organize, communicate, coordinate, et cetera.

1:20:56I mean, do you have a sense of what that would look like or how that would function? I got a couple of pieces in mind here. One I'll cite once more, New Public. It's a great organization that is trying to answer this question about how, as they phrase it, how we create healthy and thriving digital public spaces of which social media is a part. But the design of those, they've identified these core principles and signals that are just a great provocation to the communities building spaces for themselves, you should go through this process. And the process doesn't in any instance involve just installing something that a venture capitalist wants you to, right?

1:21:36That's just, they've asked none of these questions. That is not their business. Literally, it's not their business. So they don't need to. I'm not trying to change who they are. I'm just trying to let us be who we are. In other words, throwing scale out the window. Throw scale out the window. At the beginning. and throw that financial recovery at scale out the window. So look to new public for somebody's principles. I'm thinking of an old friend who lives in France, Felix Mark Hart, and he has created this community called Black Elephant. Why is everything happening in France? This is like the third France story.

1:22:11I'm not a paid influencer or marketer for the Republic of France. Who knew that like France was way out ahead of every issue. There's a lot of beautiful things happening outside of the States. And I think we should all remember that the world is huge and old. There are things we can learn from, from people who are no longer here or in more diminished numbers, like indigenous people everywhere. So Felix has created Black Elephant and it's kind of a social network in that you meet a group of strangers, it's kind of curated, but you start with like this pod and you answer three, everyone answers one to three questions that are emotional in origin.

1:22:52You know, what was the first time you remember feeling sad, right? There's nothing about your job. There's nothing about what school you went to. It's not a professional network. You're not showing off your creations. You're answering some prompt about your essence in a place where you don't know most of these other people. And what happens, I've attended one of these and I find myself being vulnerable and connecting through vulnerability with other folks. I mean, AA groups have something like this. All kinds of counseling circles do this. And once you have that kind of emotional link, then there's a digital platform to plug into.

1:23:33And you can see, oh, there's other black elephants thing and there's an app that they're building. And you start to have a network of people you deeply know. And then you realize, oh, you're a creative director at such and such. Cool. But you enter through the heart is how I would describe it. So I think if I'm designing a system, I take some cues from essentially like urban design and participatory design of public spaces that new public is leaning on. I take a page out of the Black Elephant book to create an emotional connection. I take a page from Esra al-Shafi in Bahrain who built this LGBTQ social media network where you don't just get to do everything in the first instance, there's an onboarding process.

1:24:14Yeah, I heard you talk about that. Like you have to earn the trust over time. You don't just get the keys to the whole thing. Like a video game, right? And so you don't get all the tools and all the weapons and the access to all the maps. You have to go through some missions, sometimes with other people to demonstrate your understanding of the norms of this space and your participation and belonging through your actions, not your terms of service declaration on day one. Show me, don't tell me. And then I'll let you into the next level. So those are three tangible groups. The other thing, dude, like I would build a network with some scarcity, right?

1:24:49You get a limited number of posts. Maybe you get coins or credits, but I want to force a pause on the interactions. I don't, it'll be a failure of my social network if we're telling our team leadership, people don't spend four hours a day in here. That means we have taken you away from your life. for at least three and a half hours that we didn't need. Because I want you living your life too. And I don't want to define your life. I'm not Mark Zuckerberg. Like I don't want to capture you. And I want to colonize your calendar. And so much of what we have built in the social space is this winner take all attitude about our time, which is all we got.

1:25:32Like even people without money, we got time. And if you're going to take that too, what am I? I just, I work for you now. We're all like uncompensated laborers in the algorithmic overlord system from a handful of very wealthy people. I don't want to replicate that system. So building a little scarcity, there's a window of time. If you miss it, it's cool. Congratulations. You get a FOMO award. And so shift the vibe on that. Yo, maybe I should start like a thing or maybe I should just play in the existing ponds. There are so many that people are spinning up now that experiment with just these dials.

1:26:05Yeah, those are all really, Yeah, those are all really great ideas. And that idea of only allowing access for a certain amount of time and preventing instantaneous replies and responses to enforce sort of a pause when agitated. It's like that thing, like don't send the email, you know, like, wait, send it tomorrow. Like, sleep on it. Absolutely. It's just a cooling off period. You know, you have, right? It's like the Brady Bill for social media posts. You know what I'm saying? He's just like, yeah, you hit send and then it sits for 24 hours. And then, you know, 22 or 23 hours before you get sent it back and it's like, are you still, are you sure?

1:26:43Has anything changed? Do you want to think about this again? And if you still want to send it, go forth. And people will also know you thought about it. Here's a last element. But polling, I remember I get to interact with great people through this podcast, digital minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tang, what they're doing with digital democracy over there is inspiring, especially the stresses on their democracy from China. How we ask questions in polls and how we see each other is really warped right now. We get a ton of yes, no binary representations of ourselves rather than a reflection of the spectrum.

1:27:19And so there's a different way to ask questions to ask, how do you feel about this thing? And how important is it to you, right? Just the secondary level of how important is it to you creates shades of gray. And so I can see that on the trash pickup resolution, you are a hundred percent committed. This is do or die. And you're gonna spend your polling points. You're going all in on that. 10 chips on the table, right? Versus like, for me, it's one chip, but I'm gonna preserve my nine for something to do with the water policy. You know, there's five things to vote on here and I'm gonna allocate most of my resources.

1:27:57So, you know, systems called a quadratic voting. That's kind of a way to exercise it, but there's also a different way, maybe it's called quadratic polling, where you visualize a community and you get to show them how they feel about things. There's such a challenge of us being told, here's how they think about you. Republicans, you know, these libs, they want to destroy your way of life. Black people, these white people, they don't think you matter at all. White people, these black people, like immigrants. So we speak in such extremes about each other. We're rarely given an opportunity to speak to each other.

1:28:33And we're certainly not shown the level of nuance in our opinions about all these issues. There's no one, there's very few people who just want abortion all the time. That's extreme. Like that's just a lot of abortion. You know what I mean? But there's also very few people who are just like under no circumstances ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. And in America, in polling from Pew has shown this, the great swath, like 60, 70 % are on the same page about the window of time and the kind of exceptions and the broad availability of this particular service that is not to be celebrated, but also not to be restricted.

1:29:14and that's a conversation we're not allowed to have. Right, same with gun control. Because we don't see it, exactly. If the polling reveals that the vast majority of Americans are in that middle place of rationality when it comes to this. So we need better mirrors. And I think what social media has given us so far is also perverse warped fun house set of mirrors, creating the Marjorie Taylor Greene's, creating that hyper viral type moment that has nothing to do with governing and very little to do with what most of us want. But very real in terms of the impact that it has on behavior outside the digital space.

1:29:56Like these are not benign things. No, and then they create a situation where I think, you think this is the most important thing in the world to you. And you're willing to do anything to me to get it done. And that just, that ain't true. That's a misrepresentation. And we had this guy, Tim Phillips from Beyond Conflict talking about that in a very recent episode, we don't hate each other as much as we're told we do, but somebody wins when we think that about each other. And so we all gotta take a step back and check ourselves. Like who told me that this neighbor of mine hates me today? and what was in it for them to do that?

1:30:46Have I actually interacted with that neighbor, with that person? And that's a ton of things. And I could play it across a lot of ideological divides. From every perspective, we all have a heightened sense of distance from each other because somebody is blocking our view. Well, that seems to be a big piece of the television show, right? Yeah, America Outdoors. Yeah, America Outdoors, like getting, you know, let's go travel across the United States and let's talk to all different kinds of people. And it's sort of draped in this idea of being outdoors, but it's really about kind of where Americans are at and who they, yeah.

1:31:25You get it, you get it. Oh my, I'm so glad we'll be, yes, it's an outdoor show. I love nature. You like that same way? I love the outdoors, that's so smooth. You're like a professional who's maybe done this a few times. Maybe I should host a podcast, go ahead. I wish that for you so much. America Outdoors is what you said it is. It's a way of view in America from the outdoors. And what I just described about the distance we perceive between us is narrowed greatly when you're standing on shared ground. And so I have been a person who has gone on cable news or gone to my blogging corner or my tweeting corner and popped off about that other America, those people over there who want to do this to my people over here.

1:32:13And I've been embellished often, in my sense of righteousness around that. It's very different to like being a shared vessel, going down a river with someone. It's very different to be in a natural, literally natural environment versus a manufactured studio or social media environment, sharing space, moving at the speed of a river or a tree or a meadow, and then engage in a conversation. And that conversation is not starting with, what do you think about guns? What do you think about abortion? Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what kind of parties do you throw where that's like the opening question? It's like, hi, my name is, what brought you here?

1:32:55Let's start with where we are. What does this place mean to you? How did you discover it? Why are you fighting to preserve it? What are the threats and risks? What do you get from it? Oh, these immigrant refugee kids in Idaho are feeling more American because they're literally tapped into the physicality of America. And they're enjoying the woods and the hiking and they're getting to connect across their various languages with each other through the excuse of a hike. Oh, and they're really loving those Purple Mountains majesty. That's so cool. Going to a conservative community in the Chesapeake Bay and literally the Trumpiest town in America by some measures.

1:33:31and being able to see the real impact of rising sea levels and climate change and feeling the emotion of the mayor, Uker, who is near tears, telling the story of how he had to exhume the graves of his ancestors because the bay was taking him back and buried him in his own backyard. That was the same sense of mourning that I felt from the indigenous community on the South Fork of the Idaho River, the Salmon people, who have a sense of mourning about the fish that helped their people come into existence and thrive for so long, who can barely survive in their own home either. They're both being subsumed by changes in the water, one directly in their human experience, one indirectly in the animal experience, which they don't see as any different from their human relatives.

1:34:20And so we're bridging this conversation between Trumpy crabbers in the Chesapeake Bay and indigenous folks in what we call Idaho. That's a great excuse. Yeah. That's a great excuse. Yeah, it's beautiful. And it also - Love the show. And I get to do cool stuff. Yeah, you get to go to cool places. And it also allows you to tell a new story or perhaps a more honest story about our relationship as a country with the outdoors, because we have this kind of calcified idea that when you speak about exploring the outdoors, it's a white guy with a backpack. You know what I mean? Like it's a very - Conqueror.

1:35:05Yeah, and in fact, that's not really the case. Like when you unpack a more honest story around the various indigenous populations and cultures and how they relate to the outdoors and what outdoor access means. And that of course comes into race and how marginalized populations, you know, struggle with their relationship with the outdoors in terms of safety, it's access, things like that. And then it's, you can't do a travel show without it being kind of a climate change show too, right? Like when you, because wherever you go, you're seeing, you're seeing indicia of kind of what's happening, right?

1:35:48It's sort of like the low, kind of the hum beneath everything. It's the uninvited co-star of every episode. Oh, here goes climate change making an appearance. Look at the smog, smell the fires, the thinness of the ice, the sloshiness of the snowfall or the excessiveness of the rain or snowfall, depending on where we go. It's real. And so this is, I love working with PBS on it. I think it's nice to do a project with public media. I love the luxury of being able to visit all these places just as the little kid who went camping and still loves biking and walking outside, sometimes called hiking. That's a great privilege.

1:36:28But it also makes real like the climate change story and experience is we were in Maine recently. We're kicking off season two with a week in Maine. And the week we were there was not as cold as it was supposed to be. It was still pretty cold compared to California, but two weeks before Frigid Blast, it was an unseasonably warm February week in Maine. And one of the things I was out there to do was an ice harvest. And there was just not a lot of ice to harvest. And you can see they have the catalog each year of how thick the ice is on this pond. And it was very thin this year. And a lot of people fell in.

1:37:06It was a shallow pond, no one was injured, but that's just no better illustration. It's not just the polar bears on ice. It's like humans and this tradition that they have. And so another indicator, as we discussed with technology of our changing reality. So even as the virtual environment we're in is rapidly changing, the physical one that we could have counted on is gonna be very different. It's gonna mean something different to be a Mainer than it has for many generations. It's gonna mean something different to be a Southern Californian or an Idahoan or an Arkansan. And so again, that's an incoming strike on identity.

1:37:45And so if your granddaddy can't take you out the way his granddaddy or your grandmother can't take you out the way her grandmother did, just another link in the chain of human connection that is changed. Not just the climate, it's us. How does all of this weigh on you as somebody who's been an activist for so long? because you carry yourself with such enthusiasm and optimism. That's the espresso, my boy. Yeah, but you have this kind of ebullient personality and you are outgoing, extroverted, and you're a comedian. Sometimes. And you have charisma. And so it feels like you're able to hold it, but not let it completely erode your soul.

1:38:33But I think there's another kind of aspect to this because you wrote about it, this paradox of, you know, what it means to shoulder that kind of responsibility. And with this call to action around how important it is to like take care of yourself, especially if you're in this game and you wanna be in it for the long haul. Like you can't just martyr yourself on the cross of your cause. Yeah. You know, cause I think a lot of, you know, a lot of people, they feel like taking care of themselves is indulgent, you know, when there's so much harm that needs to be addressed or spoken about. Yeah, so I do feel the weight of what I have chosen to carry or what history has pre-packed in my rucksack.

1:39:23Increasingly as I age, I think it's becoming more apparent and my youthful energy, I can't just like push through the way I might have in my younger years. My body gives way, my mind and sometimes my heart. And I'm just like, oh, this is, I'm not new. Like there's been a lot of people doing this. And if I'm still doing it, is that an indicator that it can't be done? Right, there's a dearth of hope at times and just the sense of impossibility around a lot of this. And I do experience that. I don't just believe we're gonna get through this and it's gonna be better. Like, I believe that's possible.

1:40:03I don't always believe we're going to do it. And I sometimes question how much of my energy I should be devoting to this. I can't make that my whole identity. Otherwise, I ebb and flow with the success or failure of each little thing. And I got to tether myself to something more substantial and stable and lasting, other relationships, other activities, other things to value outside of that construct and that lens on reality. And so seeing things as a struggle and seeing things as like some historic ancestral baton passed from my enslaved people to me to make cool, cool. But also like, I need a nap.

1:40:49You know what I'm saying? I need to watch something stupid right now. I need to sit and not listen to a podcast to better myself. Right. And more importantly, perhaps not to feel guilty about that, right? Like that that's okay. And to actually celebrate it. There is, again, a lot of these things, some of this stuff is newish to me. It's not new to the world. And so Audre Lorde, a great former living American who's written about the beauty and power of rest and rest as resistance and self-care as a revolutionary act, especially for folks born with a sense of burden that you got to struggle. And that applies really obviously to like a black body in America, but there's a lot of people born into that, depending on your family.

1:41:36There's immigrant stuff. There's your parents who did their own business. Now you gotta, you know, take on the mantle. We all inherit some stuff we didn't choose. And then at some point in our lives, we realize we have to decide for ourselves, is this me? Is this who and how I wanna be? And if I opt out of that, how do I live with, in a positive sense, that choice and not shame myself or feel bad or guilty about it, despite what others, maybe my own family might say or my own group might say. So that's a part of how I moved through all of this. And I'm getting more comfortable at tapping out and not making it all be about some epic journey to help America figure out its Americaness.

1:42:24Like, at the end of the day, America's gonna America. And whatever fruits there are of the seeds that I'm helping plant, or maybe more accurately, the watering that I'm doing of seeds that I've found in the ground, I won't see most of those fruits. And so I also have been trying to find ways to be, feel a sense of reward and satisfaction from the act of watering, not from the harvest. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. but America is gonna America. I mean. But we can citizen my friend, right? We can. And I think there's something, there's so many parallel models of this. We did a project with the NCAA, a pilot program with a bunch of mostly basketball coaches who were trying to help their student athletes feel more of a sense of civic agency, especially coming out of the summer of 2020.

1:43:21You got a lot of black athletes, a lot of not black coaches. and these athletes are like, we need to do more than just play ball. And they felt their power, the power of attention, presumed leadership, literally more visibility. They're very tall people. And how you think about, sports is a powerful metaphor for this, physical activity as well. We got to make the game itself worthy, not the outcome, right? If it's only worth doing if you win, And I don't know if that's like worth all this investment. And so winning is great. Playing is the thing. And every coach of every level of athletics in any part of the world and every player who's been through it will probably tell you, yeah, maybe they won a championship.

1:44:11Maybe they remember winning game, but they remember the bonds. They remember the shared suffering, the shared losses and the shared wins, maybe more so. I remember the rise in the team bus. I remember the trust that my coach placed in me. I remember learning from a fellow teammate. I remember the consoling from men and boys emoting in a way that generally wasn't promoted. And so I think, with the citizen work, yes, outcomes. Yes, we need goals and we wanna, but the culture of it, like the game itself, how we play it is always more important in the day to day than the scoreboard. And if we play well, then I think the odds are, we'll be proud of the results.

1:44:57Even if in an individual match, we don't win. So part of that is just honoring the struggle and the journey and not like doing it so that it's over, but just sort of, you know, kind of being present with it and understanding that there's nourishment, even in that struggle in the relationships on the path towards the objective. You know, take the victories before the game is over. Also, there's time in between games, there's timeouts, there's half times, like rest is also built in to any labor. And so we all have to kind of moderate the intensity sometimes and like breathe and move at a pace befitting our bodies.

1:45:47and as much as our minds are being drawn to faster, more parallel, we're still in these meat bodies and we're just these like thumb having simians, right? Who are trying to make sense of all this stuff. And it's hard. I was talking to my wife a lot about calibrating the time skills. She has this theory that we're just not meant to exist essentially at these different paces simultaneously and that we're being asked to shift times constantly. And some of that is really disruptive as well. So like finding a pace and easing into things, ramp up slowly, ramp down from something, don't just hard cut from a peaceful activity to an intense analytical thing to some physical stuff and back that also like wears out our internal transmissions I think.

1:46:38In the podcast, How to Citizen, you do such a good job of it being kind of action oriented and even in the show notes and everything, having like links and suggestions and like actions for people to take. So if Baratunde's work is new to you, like check that out, it will give you more than enough resources and kind of avenues to explore. How to citizen.com, we have the transcripts and all these actions every episode. It's so well done, not just for that, for so many reasons, but maybe just as a way to kind of like round this out and, you know, bring this to a conclusion to share a few of maybe some of your favorite ways people can get more engaged than they have historically to energize people around, you know, these ideas.

1:47:27We're big on frameworks and structures behind the scenes of the show. And we try to show it and we try to show it on a regular basis. So there's two that matter here. One I've mentioned before, but it bears repeating. We grounded the show in this idea of citizen as a verb and there's principles behind that. And so every guest we bring on kind of checks at least one of these boxes. So there's like these four principles, four pillars. Show up and participate is number one. Number two, invest in relationships with yourself, with others and the planet around you. There's no separation between those things.

1:48:03Number three, understand power and all the ways that we have to wield it. Some are financial, some are physical, some are idea sharing. Attention is a big part of that. What we give our attention to, we give power to. And the fourth is to value the collective, to do all the above for a sense of collective self-interest, not merely individual self-interest and moderate that over-indexing on individualism that I think has created too much separation between us to our collective demise. So that's kind of how we enter and set things up. The way we leave each episode is we give you three ways to do something, three ways to citizen.

1:48:44And we've got three levels. Number one, personal reflection. We just give you something to think about. In the gaming metaphor, this is like single player mode and you don't even need an internet connection, right? So you can just do this by yourself. There's no public performance. You don't have to go read a book. So we ask you to think about something. Think about the communities you're a part of. just like you, maybe you write them down. Maybe you just think aloud to yourself. That could be a book club. That could be an intramural sports team. That could be a special interest group at your office.

1:49:18That could be a guild that you're a part of as a worker or a laborer. It could be a union. All the communities and societies you're a part of, I think you'd be surprised at how much you already belong to something. as just an entry point. And then you might escalate that to, well, how am I showing up in that space? What kind of relationships do I have there? How is that community making its decisions? Who's got power in it? Do I have any? Do people set agendas? Could I affect that? Just the awareness of it. So that's an example of like the light touch, personal reflection. Number two out of three, get more informed.

1:49:59Just go learn some shit. You know, there's like, We don't have to reinvent everything. And so that's get out there, read a book, watch a little video short or a documentary, talk to someone who's going through something. And so we have asked people to talk to young people in their lives and find out from them in their educational environment, like what they're struggling with. Don't just trust the newspaper. You might have some young people in this community you've identified, ask them directly. It means so much more when you hear from someone you already know than some intermediary. no shade on journalism or understand the history of your community.

1:50:38There is liberation and knowing where you've come from. It helps open a path of where you could go in a more honest sense. And so we've packaged resources specifically for people on topics, or we've encouraged them to find them themselves in the climate realm. It's just like, look, type into your favorite search engine, climate action, and the name of your town. and find out what you could do locally. I'm not saying ignore Washington. I'm saying prioritize your city, your county, because that's where you're gonna build relationships that matter and that's gonna produce the national legislation you're gonna be proud of.

1:51:13And then the last of three is public participation. And that's the multiplayer gaming mode. That's playing with others. Join something, start it or join it, but start with finding out what already exists. You know, there are citizens' climate lobbies, There are ways to support local sports teams. There's a thousand volunteer organizations that can help channel that sense of purpose into something positive and productive. One of the worst things we can do with our pent up anxieties, rages, and negative emotions is just look at a screen and scroll. It's a really unhealthy outlet for our capacity.

1:51:56And we can like a thing, We can down vote a thing. We can pop off with no waiting period for the post to go live. Or we can go outside and like help sandbag around a community that's preparing for a flood. And I promise you, you will feel so much better doing that than listening to someone else tell you who's to blame for your problems. I got some work I gotta do. We all do. We all do. And the beauty. But that's the thing about - We all do, everybody. The way that you talk about this stuff and perhaps part of your gift is, I can listen to the episodes and I can hear all this stuff. And of course I'm reflecting, I immediately reflect on like how much better, all the things I'm not doing or whatever.

1:52:41But like you do it in a way where it's like, I don't feel like guilty or shamed as much as I feel encouraged or empowered. We want this, my energy, what I bring to this is inviting energy, not shaming energy. I'm capable of wagging my finger in your face and making you feel bad about that thing you didn't do or that thing you don't know. But I know what that feels like and it's not good. I would much rather be invited to the party than being shamed for my lack of presence there. And that goes for voting. That goes for any kind of civic participation. That goes for showing up in a relationship.

1:53:18Let's welcome people, at least as the first step. Shame can be called for. Some people need to be shamed. They should be ashamed of their behavior. They're setting bad examples. But as a starting point, I think an invitation is a much better way to go. I agree, man. Beautiful. I really appreciate you coming here today, man. I appreciate you. You know, huge supporter of the work that you do. And I just wanna acknowledge you for the courage and the conviction with which you kind of show up for really important stuff. So meant a lot to me to have you come here today and share. I have really, really enjoyed this conversation, man.

1:53:59We went deep and I didn't knock over my espresso. No, you didn't. Came close. I didn't ask you anything that was in my outline. So that's good too. I'm so glad you did all that preparation. Maybe you come back for that. I will absolutely come back for a part two on this. This is the depth and level of kind of conversation I really enjoy and it's rare. So thanks for creating this space. It's really powerful. Cool, man. And if people wanna check out more of what you have to offer, they can go to puck obviously, how to citizen, where else do you wanna direct? America Outdoors. Season two is coming out.

1:54:37Yes. It's gonna start airing Wednesday, September 6th at 8 p.m. Eastern standard, 9 p.m. Central. Yeah. The premiere of season two again on PBS. Yeah. And it's all available in the PBS video app, which I think of as like the people streaming app. It's so good and it doesn't harvest your data or give you a terrible ads. So support the PBS video app. How dare they not take my data. You're already paying for it. You might as well benefit. And yeah, I'm on the socials, wherever Baratundes are found, I've claimed all the names. Right on, cool, man. Thanks. Thank you, cheers. Peace.

1:55:22That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

1:56:07Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake.

1:56:45Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Daniel Solis, as well as Dan Drake. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.

1:57:42reference at a Küche