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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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I m thrilled to welcome today s guest, the brilliant Baratunde Thurston, one of our most interesting minds when it comes to issues of today, whether it s the intersection of self and tech or the promise and pitfalls of AI.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context,
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the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks on their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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There s a thin line between feeling enhanced and improved versus feeling disconnected from my own self.
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Did I have a good night s sleep?
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I think so.
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My ring says no.
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Who do I believe?
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Did I get enough steps?
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Do I even know what enough steps feels like?
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Or do I only know what it looks like on a screen?
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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?
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If I m not in touch enough with my body to feel those outcomes, am I experiencing them at all?
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Or am I just on this gamified treadmill in a monetized system
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where someone else is getting a very tangible reward in terms of financial compensation or remuneration.
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So the way that AI can give us capabilities and insights while skipping all the steps required to gain or experience them,
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is a deeply existential concern I have about where all tech is going and where this version of tech is kind of the tip of the spear right now is going.
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So says Baratunde Thurston, a true multi-hyphenate whose journey has taken him from stand-up comedy stages to the heart of political and social activism.
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He s the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, 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.
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His mission, tell a better story of us.
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challenging the status quo and fostering meaningful conversations about the intersections of race, technology, democracy, and climate.
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The stories we have inherited are too small for us, he tells us, urging us to nurture stories that are bigger, bolder, and better.
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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.
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We discuss the great potential and great concerns surrounding AI and the fine line between enhancement and disconnection through mechanization.
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We can heal people, landscapes, even society as a whole, he tells us, but technology alone will not get us there.
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We must tap into something that we have known but chosen to forget, how to live.
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Thank you for being here.
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And I m thrilled to talk to you and know you, because you have a fascinating mind.
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And I always enjoy anyone who can talk about anything, truly.
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There s also a name for us.
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BS artist might be one of them, too.
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Doesn t necessarily mean I have a fascinating mind.
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Could just mean I m full of nonsense.
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But we ll find out.
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We ll find out.
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I read very widely as well, although I find as I age that my interests narrow.
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How does your mind work?
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Are you encyclopedic?
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I think that my mind is like a relational database.
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I absorb and retain lots of information.
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My wife might challenge that statement, but she s not here.
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And my mind likes to make connections.
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between things.
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And that s been useful in a decade of stand-up comedy where I used to really focus my attention and brain and mouth.
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It s been useful in writing.
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It s been useful in trying to make sense of a chaos-filled world.
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And so things just with practice maybe or with disposition, probably both,
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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.
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And so I m not a specialist on any particular set of dots.
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I have certain areas of dots that I focus on, but the real way my mind is satisfied is by bridging dots.
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Is there a central animating question in your life?
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I sort of have a sense of what mine is, but what are you after?
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What is yours?
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I mean, what s the purpose of life, obviously.
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No, I just, I really like to try to understand, I wanna understand the larger container that we live in.
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And I have become, I didn t grow up in a religious household, but I ve become quite,
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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.
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So yeah, I just, I ultimately want to understand, I m always looking for the larger picture or the closet on which, in which we all hang.
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Yeah, that s cool.
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What are you, what are you after?
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I am trying to find slash tell a better story of us.
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I think the ones that we ve inherited are too small for us.
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And they don t fit most of us.
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And even the people they were designed for, they re ill-fitting for them too.
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And so we ve got to find something else.
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Something bigger, something bolder, something better.
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That is where my story weaving comes into play to try to bring some strands from that larger textile closet together and contribute to a larger fabric of our concept of ourselves.
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And what do you think is so limiting?
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Is it that we live in these tiny snapshots amongst a much larger tapestry?
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Or where do you see us getting stuck or constrained by story?
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We have an emotional limitation biased toward fear rather than love in our story of us.
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We are limited by ideas of our separateness rather than our interconnectedness.
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And when we get fed fearful, disconnected stories, we become more fearful and disconnected.
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And we are what we eat, including the stories we consume.
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There s some very tangible stories we ve inherited that kind of play out some of those dramas.
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of supremacy of one kind or another, male dominance, white supremacy dominance.
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These are all just stories.
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There s no scientific basis for them writ large.
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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 imposed them and used them to limit our collective potential.
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So shedding those
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harmful narratives.
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They re not the only ones out there, but they have, some of them have held sway for far too long.
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And I think it s time to move on.
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Yeah.
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I just wrote a book.
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Oh, wow.
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Congratulations.
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That s a big deal.
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Pause, pause.
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At least wrote a, not just wrote a book.
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A lot of people write books.
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You published a book.
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Like your book is available for people who didn t write it.
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That is a bar that most writers never cross.
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So I just want to acknowledge you.
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Thank you.
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It s about internalized misogyny and internalized patriarchy and the stories that we ve told about who we are.
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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.
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I mean, it s true of any systemic structure, right?
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You can say, now that I think people like me have a sense of, oh, now I understand systemic racism.
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I never quite understood it until I read things like Caste or Ibram.
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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.
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I m part of it, whether I choose to be part of it or not.
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The book I wrote is about, in that vein, how can we understand misogyny as something that s just
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culture, rather than nature.
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Right.
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It s in the water.
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It s in the air.
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Yes, exactly.
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So like you.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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And then we re colleagues.
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We re the same.
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What s up?
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Yeah.
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And the way you just described that, too, is quite metaphysical or mystical to me.
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Or that s my understanding of that, this truer story.
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And who are we really?
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What are we doing here?
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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?
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Yeah, we re probably always in a state of creation and destruction of story.
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But at the same time, I think there are moments where we re in a plaque buildup kind of situation.
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And it becomes clearer to more that the old story doesn t work as well anymore.
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And so there s a seeking for something new.
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We re in that moment right now.
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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 is already present.
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and nurture that and give our attention and that s our power to that.
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And by doing so, we make that story more real.
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It s Buckminster Fuller rules, right?
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You don t worry about tearing down the system.
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You build a new system and you kind of attract people into that.
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And that s how you win.
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And so it doesn t have to be destroying anything.
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It does involve letting some things go.
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And it might involve, as well, letting some things die and mourning that death and acknowledging that passing.
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to make space for this new life and this new story.
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So I see it in examples of how people politically organize.
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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.
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people who have relationships with money and business that don t make you feel dirty.
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Actually, these tools are just different forms of energy.
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We can use them to harm or to heal, to sully or to clean.
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And so, you know, we have other ways of being with our elected officials.
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Maybe we don t have them.
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Maybe we do deliberative democracy and we conscript a random allotment of the public into service.
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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.
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Those are happening.
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There s a neighborhood in Brooklyn.
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People are policing themselves, in part, with the blessing of the police.
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Let s try this out.
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So some places, these things have taken hold very strongly.
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Some places, they never left.
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in terms of an indigenous, sort of regenerative, circular, donut economic view of the world.
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And some, they re experimental, and we re trying things out, and we should be experimenting.
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So I m seeing all that, yeah.
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Can you explain, you touched on it briefly, but this idea of little d democracy or the way that you see citizening, it s a hard word to say, happen from the inside out or what that model is in the world?
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So there s a story of what it means to be a citizen.
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And that story is predicated on birthplace, on location of parental intercourse, basically.
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Nothing to do with us.
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And on legalisms and other stories of borders and separations that the land itself
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And the wildlife that lives on it, they have nothing to do with.
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They re like, okay, human, sure.
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Now you re in Idaho.
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Now you re in Oregon, whatever.
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But we make it real.
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And we set up different customs and culture around these fake lines that somebody drew a long time ago.
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And we have distinctions.
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And they re often useful.
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But in terms of citizening, and what that word can mean, what citizen can mean, basic premises in our new story of this that we re finding, citizen is a verb.
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And the way you express that verb, the way you act that out is premised on at least four principles 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.
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We knew, okay, it s citizen as a verb.
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That sounds good.
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What does that mean?
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That was my wife s major contribution early on.
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It s like, but what does that mean though?
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So it means four things.
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Show up and participate.
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A world where a citizen is to assume you have something to do.
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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.
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Invest in relationships with yourself, with others in the planet around you.
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Understand power.
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Systems cause people power.
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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.
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Doesn t have to be harmful, doesn t have to be dirty.
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It s very natural.
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But if we don t understand how to use that, we are shortchanging ourselves.
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And the fourth is to understand the value of the collective self, not just the individual self.
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So that s kind of like the quick curriculum on the how to citizen thing.
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But if I go deeper and just
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kind of feel your question more.
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Part of the animating motivation behind it is that we, I believe we re capable of more than we ve been asked to do.
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And when we receive this image of our world,
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It is very dystopic.
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It is very divided.
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It is very depressing.
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And our options are limited.
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We can complain, of course.
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Everybody s got a microphone.
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And that is a mob-encouraged mentality.
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I m more disappointed in my politicians than you are.
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I win.
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Do I?
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OK, great.
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We can vote for people.
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which is useful to a point, not sufficient.
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We can give money to people who text us a lot, telling us to vote for them.
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We can shop.
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You know, we had a massive crisis of story and existence in our country with the attacks of September 11, 2001.
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And the headline call to action from our leading public figure was to shop.
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I remember that well.
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I read about that in the book.
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Yeah.
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Missed opportunity.
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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.
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And so small story, small story, small story all along the way.
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Let s expand, let s rewrite, and let s reconceive of or redefine a word like citizen.
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to help us move through this transition in a more positive, generative, and ideally loving and joyful way.
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I m Rachel Martin.
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After hosting Morning Edition for years, I know that the news can wear you down.
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So we made a new podcast called Wildcard, where a special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful.
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It s part game show, part existential deep dive, and it is seriously fun.
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Join me on Wildcard, wherever you get your podcasts, only from NPR.
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I know that so many people are excellent community organizers.
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I feel like people sort of 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.
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So my hope too is that
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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?
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And then you can go back to your life.
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Then you come back and you push and then you go back.
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Cause I feel like also so many of us sort of run out, our rage runs out, our energy runs out.
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We just, but.
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Hopefully, in time, that s one of the great promises of technology, right?
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Well, let me pause on some of what you just shared.
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We go out, we come back to our lives.
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We go out, we come back to our lives.
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Our rage runs out.
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So rage is a fuel source in this telling.
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And it is powerful.
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really inefficient.
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It s not a sustainable fuel source, right?
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Love is a much more sustainable fuel source.
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So just within that metaphor and that language, we have some choices we can make.
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The idea that I understood and still largely understand and I m trying to shift for myself is,
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Okay, I citizen out there, right?
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I politic, I small d democracy.
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I m just verbifying everything, but that happens out there.
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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.
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And so even in that language, we ve created a separation.
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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 we citizen inside of ourselves, that even we had the pillar right there, right?
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Invest in relationships with yourself, with others, with the planet around you.
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Those are concentric circles of increasing and escalating ideas of self.
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But it s blurry lines between all those things.
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And so with Adrienne 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.
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The question can remain in the kind of indivisible resistance mode of current politics or the MAGA world of current politics.
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Pick your poison.
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Who am I going to yell at?
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Whose office am I going to sit outside of?
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And those are very necessary actions in concert with what do I need to learn?
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How do I show up for myself?
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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.
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And so if we started even at that micro level of citizening, the culture of misogyny or white supremacy or patriarchy, it emerges from inside of humans.
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and the story that we project onto the world.
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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?
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It s not a rage for like, I gotta be better.
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I m such a bad activist.
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I m such a bad citizen.
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Like that is, you don t need to self-flagellate over this.
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You know, you re not naughty unless you want to be.
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And we could probably have a BDSM version of this if that works for you.
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But I don t think that s for like the great swath of people.
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I just spank yourself into citizenship.
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Yeah.
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No, it s true.
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It s a beautiful idea.
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I think that there s just such a persistent idea of what this is supposed to look like.
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And I think it comes down to sort of how we re each uniquely or innately gifted and some people are better.
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sort of behind a keyboard.
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Others are better in front of an audience.
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Others are, you know, more persuasive.
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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 sort of the way that we ve been conditioned to outsource our sovereignty and outsource all of this to other people.
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Which is functional, sure, but maybe not getting us where we would like to be.
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Yeah, as far and as joyfully as we could go.
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Yeah.
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We ll still move.
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but it will work harder and enjoy it a lot less.
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So boo on that, thumbs down.
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Boo.
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So what s fascinating to me is that you, when we were emailing, the two worlds that you are between, right, are this sort of where you seem to be most passionate right now is AI, the man-made sort of hyper-technical world and understanding
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or hyper-technological world, understanding sort of how to match our progress there with our evolution.
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Because I feel like we are way outpacing ourselves with progress, but no evolution.
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Air quotes.
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I saw that.
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Yeah, you saw my air quotes, like there s no, we do not have the consciousness to manage what we re making potentially.
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And I want to talk a little bit about the people who are making it and sort of where they are collectively.
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I don t know that they re leading with love rather than fear, right?
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So you think about how these systems are made and programmed.
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That s where I get concerned.
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And then you have a PBS show about nature.
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So I love sort of the,
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split, which I think we all feel acutely, right?
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Like we re torn.
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SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m trying to bridge all those concepts of technology.
2
SPEAKER_00
The large, the generative large language model and the regenerative mycelial networks and universality at the atomic scale of life.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I hope that we can find a way to
2
SPEAKER_00
recognize the power of both and wield them for our collective self-interest.
2
SPEAKER_00
Those are not always the default settings in some of these systems, but we can recode them.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
I try to be optimistic.
2
SPEAKER_01
I try not to sort of buy into doomsday scenarios where humans are extinct because the world is run by machines at all.
2
SPEAKER_01
Where are you excited and where are you concerned?
2
SPEAKER_01
And we haven t really talked about AI much, so on this show at least.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I have my head not under a blanket about it by any means, but it s just not as
2
SPEAKER_01
I am a writer, I like writing, so I m not looking to sort of outsource myself.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a little strange to me.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, you re tapping into like one of the great annoyances of our time.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I cannot cite who first put this thought in this way into my head.
2
SPEAKER_00
I may have seen it on social media, 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,
2
SPEAKER_00
you re taking the jobs we actually like.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like writing s fun, I like it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Don t take, like take away the laundry, cool.
2
SPEAKER_00
Take away the dish washing, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Take away tax filing, go for it.
2
SPEAKER_00
But when you find this like creative, passionate thing,
2
SPEAKER_00
why would you want to automate and kind of disconnect?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so I get that.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, excitement and concern for me.
2
SPEAKER_00
I haven t weighed them in the scales, but I have ample supplies of both.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I ll start with concern, because it s probably most, based on what you just said, closest to where you are.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then I ll see if maybe through sharing the excitement, I can even help you see that for yourself.
2
SPEAKER_00
We ll see.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, good.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, on the creative front, I am concerned about a narrowing of creativity.
2
SPEAKER_00
because of the technical way these systems are built.
2
SPEAKER_00
So these generative large language models are trained on a large set of largely ripped off data.
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SPEAKER_00
We call it data to kind of dehumanize the intellectual property associated and disconnected from kind of human spirit.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s, everything s just data.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then maybe data becomes information.
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SPEAKER_00
And then maybe if we re lucky, information becomes knowledge.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then that funnel steepens where knowledge might become wisdom.
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SPEAKER_00
But we re not dealing in the realm of wisdom here.
2
SPEAKER_00
We re dealing in the realm of data, according to the worldview of the people who ve constructed these systems.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we ve hoovered up a vast minority of human experience and then proclaimed it to be capable of generating anything.
2
SPEAKER_00
So there s already a really steep funnel.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like English language, documentable human experience from recent history, largely in the West.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s going to make all the emails now.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s going to make all the slideshows.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s going to make all the Getty images, you know, the stock photos.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s going to make the paintings.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s going to make the songs.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s going to make the TV shows.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s going to make the poetry.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I mean, we have kind of just, we re a derivative of a
3
SPEAKER_00
derivative of a derivative.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re inventing a new thin form of calculus here that s reducing us in the way that you reduce something in a stew but not nearly 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.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that concerns me.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
I have a laundry list of concerns, which I limited to like three-ish.
3
SPEAKER_00
Second big concern that I have is
3
SPEAKER_00
about disconnection, disembodiment.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m wearing a very smart ring device right now on one side of my body and a smart watch on the other.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there is a smart device constantly listening to me over here and another one over there.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then there s this one I m talking to you on.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I m an enhanced person, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a thin line between
3
SPEAKER_00
feeling enhanced and improved versus feeling disconnected from my own self.
3
SPEAKER_00
Did I have a good night s sleep?
3
SPEAKER_00
I think so.
3
SPEAKER_00
My ring says no.
3
SPEAKER_00
Who do I believe?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did I get enough steps?
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SPEAKER_00
Do I even know what enough steps feels like?
3
SPEAKER_00
Or do I only know what it looks like on a screen?
3
SPEAKER_00
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?
3
SPEAKER_00
If I m not in touch enough with my body to feel those outcomes, am I experiencing them at all?
3
SPEAKER_00
Or am I just on this gamified treadmill in a monetized system
3
SPEAKER_00
where someone else is getting a very tangible reward in terms of financial compensation or remuneration.
3
SPEAKER_00
So the way that AI can give us capabilities and insights while skipping all the steps required to gain or experience them,
3
SPEAKER_00
is a deeply existential concern I have about where all tech is going and where this version of tech is kind of the tip of the spear right now is going.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then the last thing I ll name is the industrialization of self.
3
SPEAKER_00
One of those core ingredients in what we re experiencing generative AI right now is capitalism.
3
SPEAKER_00
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 on a hyper economically stratified planet
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a deeply limiting motivation for all of this.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
We are so much more than that and we need more than that and we re capable of more than that.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that s a limiting little story that s driving the engine that is allegedly going to write all of our stories for us.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and there s no regulation.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we have no regulation on social media.
3
SPEAKER_01
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 on the, it s like.
3
SPEAKER_00
In terms of open AI specifically.
3
SPEAKER_00
Microsoft has no such limits, nor does Google.
3
SPEAKER_01
I wanna go to where you re hopeful, but first I just, we re the same person.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m kidding, but when you re listening to you, I wrote this piece for Oprah earlier this year about wholeness versus wellness and sort of the way that we re outsourced with the biohacking and the tracking and seeing people in LA walking around with their continuous glucose monitors and the instinct to mechanize ourselves or to treat ourselves like,
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, robots, effectively, that should be optimized at every turn.
3
SPEAKER_00
A supply chain to be optimized, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s very concerning.
3
SPEAKER_01
And to that end, it s interesting, because 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 tenets of health, whole foods, sleep, walking.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right, it s in the name.
3
SPEAKER_01
breathing.
3
SPEAKER_01
And to see it co-opted, you know, I call it bro wellness, but this sort of... It s good.
3
SPEAKER_00
I like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I have to wonder, and maybe you re going to get into this and the positives.
3
SPEAKER_01
In a way, I m like, don t give me any of my data.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is not healthy for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t even own a scale.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I don t mind the idea, particularly in our healthcare-strapped society,
3
SPEAKER_01
that well-tuned sort of AI model could be assessing our data, looking for massive trends or concerning insights that then could be put into actual advice.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I don t know that we know enough.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think the citizen scientist model, I m like, we re not Peter Atiyah, most of us.
3
SPEAKER_01
Nor should we be.
3
SPEAKER_01
That does not look joyful to me at all.
3
SPEAKER_01
I just want to live.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let me live.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know?
3
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, please tell us.
3
SPEAKER_01
Tell us why we should be excited.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because it s so early and we don t know yet.
3
SPEAKER_00
The concerns of which I named a few and there are so many more about copyright intellectual property of misinformation, deep fakes.
3
SPEAKER_00
What even is truth?
3
SPEAKER_00
How do we trust anything we get through a screen?
3
SPEAKER_00
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
3
SPEAKER_00
at the most generous interpretation, the inefficiencies of our policing system.
3
SPEAKER_00
At the most aggressive, the systemic destructive abuse of power inherent in a racialized way, our policing system.
3
SPEAKER_00
I went to college with a man now known as Dr. Phil Goff.
3
SPEAKER_00
He was just Phil back then.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he s at Yale University now.
3
SPEAKER_00
He created something called the Center for Policing Equity.
3
SPEAKER_00
And data is a big part of his world.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s a psychological training background with neuroscience and some behavioral stuff thrown in because he s never satisfied.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
Scale that up.
3
SPEAKER_00
Think about this tool in the hands of activists and all the things the activists you know, respect and love, care about.
3
SPEAKER_00
That makes me very excited.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s some precedent for caution around that excitement, same with social media, but still possibility.
3
SPEAKER_00
My friend Ron, Ron J. Williams has coined this phrase.
3
SPEAKER_00
He first called it radical comprehensibility.
3
SPEAKER_00
Then he s like escalated and calling it the bionic customer.
3
SPEAKER_00
There are businesses who get away with and profit literally from obscuring the facts of their business.
3
SPEAKER_00
They make money off of customers forgetting
3
SPEAKER_00
that the business is taking their money?
3
SPEAKER_00
How many subscriptions am I signed up for that I forgot about?
3
SPEAKER_00
How many weird fees and charges is some financial institution charging me?
3
SPEAKER_00
How many false things have I been charged for?
3
SPEAKER_00
I just don t have the time to challenge.
3
SPEAKER_00
That kind of profitability through obscurity is coming to an end.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because we will have AI agents who will make that call for us.
3
SPEAKER_00
We already have tools like Truebill now, which can find those subscriptions and turn them off.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so you pair the insight with the power to execute on our behalf.
3
SPEAKER_00
And now I ve got a call center of my own.
3
SPEAKER_00
Bring it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Let s go.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve got lawyers of my own.
3
SPEAKER_00
No more shitty terms of service.
3
SPEAKER_00
Nope.
3
SPEAKER_00
I see what you did there.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I say, no thank you.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so that kind of arbitrage, that informational arbitrage between a business and a customer will narrow greatly.
3
SPEAKER_00
We can already find deals and have transparency around pricing for airlines, but this goes way deeper into the operations of an organization potentially.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then I think about the upsides for the
4
SPEAKER_00
good things we want to see, like medical research and all the insights, radiological image screening, early alerts.
4
SPEAKER_00
You mentioned healthcare.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, every American has a tragic story involving health, usually involving the alleged system we have to care for our health.
4
SPEAKER_00
And within that funnel, usually around the insurance companies that are supposed to provide for the care and the system that s supposed to offer us a sense of health.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so to have allies, you know, my mother died of colon cancer and she was not listened to early in her experience.
4
SPEAKER_00
She didn t know that that s what it was.
4
SPEAKER_00
And she had two kids.
4
SPEAKER_00
We weren t physically there to be able to kind of be the lawyer you need to be to be a good patient.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like to be a good healthcare patient in America, you gotta be a great lawyer.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, we just,
4
SPEAKER_00
suck in some databases, and now we got it.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, I test Unleashed Chat GPT on my own health care policy, 180-page PDF.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m not going to read that.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I can read really well and really quickly.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I have a degree to prove it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I ve written a book myself and published it, like you, Elise.
4
SPEAKER_00
Other people have read the book I wrote.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I don t have time for all that.
4
SPEAKER_00
So no, that idea
4
SPEAKER_00
of being able to gain those insights and bring that power to bear on health individually, but also collectively on climate.
4
SPEAKER_00
I ve been using this tool, GreenGPT, 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.
4
SPEAKER_00
Again, any data that s obscure
4
SPEAKER_00
from a congressional bill to a terms of service for an app, just do a text processor on them.
4
SPEAKER_00
What does this mean?
4
SPEAKER_00
Explain this in plain English to me.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s what s in the bill.
4
SPEAKER_00
So now none of these fools has any excuse to not know what they re voting for.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I will have receipts to show.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the ability to hold people to account, holding ourselves to account, really fascinating.
4
SPEAKER_00
Really, really interesting.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then you ll low hanging fruit just,
4
SPEAKER_00
I m a sucker for getting rid of drudgery.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like I don t like writing captions on my social media posts.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I like writing, but not that kind of writing.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so 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.
4
SPEAKER_00
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,
4
SPEAKER_00
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?
4
SPEAKER_00
We re just going to work harder?
4
SPEAKER_01
We re just going to generate more bullshit?
4
SPEAKER_00
Or are we actually going to spend time with our friends?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
So talk to us about nature.
4
SPEAKER_01
So did you grow up in nature?
4
SPEAKER_00
I did.
4
SPEAKER_00
I grew up here on Earth.
4
SPEAKER_00
Very natural environment.
4
SPEAKER_00
Atmosphere, oxygen, photosynthesis benefiting me constantly.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m a very natural being.
4
SPEAKER_00
I have my doubts about some other alleged humans, but I can attest to my humanity.
4
SPEAKER_00
I do too.
4
SPEAKER_01
There are definitely aliens amongst us.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you know, I grew up in Washington DC.
4
SPEAKER_00
I was born in 1977 to Arnold Robinson and Arnita 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.
4
SPEAKER_00
He was he was killed when I was young.
4
SPEAKER_00
So my mom had the solo of responsibility slash great opportunity of stewarding me into this world and she
4
SPEAKER_00
was a tech person.
4
SPEAKER_00
She wasn t born into that, but she hustled and figured things out and she became a computer programmer.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that partly explains why I m so invested in technology.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
The other tangible tool my mom brought in the house was a bike, though.
4
SPEAKER_00
She gave me a bicycle when I was really young, and my mom loved the outdoors.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we were going bike rides together.
4
SPEAKER_00
We would go on hikes.
4
SPEAKER_00
She was a Sierra Club member.
4
SPEAKER_00
She helped me enroll in the Boy Scout troop.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was this all black, pan-African, Afrocentric Boy Scout troop.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was basically a, you call it a militia these days, but there were no weapons.
4
SPEAKER_00
We had our badges.
4
SPEAKER_00
Language changes over time.
4
SPEAKER_00
Language changes.
4
SPEAKER_00
So just like a bunch of little black dudes from the hood in D.C.
4
SPEAKER_00
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 the use of African imagery in all of their emblems, and having them say, we don t know what you re talking about.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is not a fez, this is just the Mason s hat.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, buddy, we see you, that s cool.
4
SPEAKER_00
But going camping.
4
SPEAKER_00
I went camping with me, my mom, and our dog.
4
SPEAKER_00
Saw the whole East Coast.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think by the time I was 10 years old.
4
SPEAKER_00
And most of that through camping.
4
SPEAKER_00
And took a cross-country trip 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.
4
SPEAKER_00
Little kid in the hood, having these kinds of experiences.
4
SPEAKER_00
And she would take my friends and me out on the bike trails,
4
SPEAKER_00
of DC, which is a really, really great place to be a kid, outside of the murder and the crack and the blah, blah.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a great place.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s the right scale.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s alphabetical and numerical, hard to get lost as long as you know which quadrant you re in.
4
SPEAKER_00
Pay attention to the Northwest, Northeast designation.
4
SPEAKER_00
And lots of parks.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I ve lived this duality my whole life.
4
SPEAKER_01
I grew up in Montana, so.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that whole state is outdoors.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes, exactly.
4
SPEAKER_01
So that was my childhood was living on a dirt road.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was amazing, but very, yeah, pretty, pretty isolated.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I went to school and stuff like that, but.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right, clearly.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, 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.
4
SPEAKER_01
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?
4
SPEAKER_01
There are mountain lions, but at the time we were really free.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so do you think, like when you think about the future,
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m assuming you re hopeful.
4
SPEAKER_01
You seem very hopeful, but what do you think, like, do you feel like we re entering some sort of new era that we re about to make some sort of seismic leap forward or maybe we re in the middle of it?
4
SPEAKER_01
Or do you feel like we re just sort of still being torn apart?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes to all of that.
4
SPEAKER_00
My hope is not boundless.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it is very tethered to Earth.
4
SPEAKER_00
And Earth is reacting to us in increasingly dramatic ways that are less and less possible to ignore.
4
SPEAKER_00
You and I both live in Los Angeles, Southern California.
4
SPEAKER_00
Got an update yesterday, LA Times news alert, all state no longer offering insurance in the state of California.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because it s just too risky.
4
SPEAKER_00
for the risk managers.
5
SPEAKER_00
And they re like, yeah, we re just going to cut out on the sixth largest economy in the world.
5
SPEAKER_00
Too risky.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I accept that fact about the world we live in and do not pretend otherwise to be the case, in its entirety at least.
5
SPEAKER_00
Part of where my head is at is, how do we prepare ourselves for the predictably more challenging times that are ahead?
5
SPEAKER_00
How do we practically prepare for that?
5
SPEAKER_00
How do we psychologically and emotionally prepare for that?
5
SPEAKER_00
How do we decide what to do with the resource of time?
5
SPEAKER_00
So that we just spend it well, however much we have, whatever the temperature is or however high the floodwaters are.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so the citizen thing plays into that because it s like, I think we need practice at being together and using and generating and sharing power and disagreeing, because there s a lot of disagreement on the horizon.
5
SPEAKER_00
And if we lean into the fear story and the division story,
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
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?
5
SPEAKER_00
Really?
5
SPEAKER_00
That story and that headline are very, very reversed in the kindest possible way.
5
SPEAKER_00
So there s a reality check for me there.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m not naive about what we re facing.
5
SPEAKER_00
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
5
SPEAKER_00
We ll not only be able to withstand better what s coming, but undo some of the harm we ve done.
5
SPEAKER_00
With America Outdoors, this PBS show, I was recently in Oregon.
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It was the most attuned experience of making this show I ve had yet.
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Every single person we had on was echoing the same thing.
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There was this spearfishing guy, and he s like, I spearfish because I want to be sustainable.
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in how I gather my food.
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I only wanna take what I need.
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I don t wanna take more.
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I don t wanna use a net and catch a fish I don t need.
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I don t wanna use a hook and line and catch a fish I don t know what it is.
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I m gonna see that fish with my own eyes and I m gonna take that one and no more.
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I met this roller derby champion, Mick Rose.
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They had been representing the US in the World Cup of Roller Derby, but didn t feel represented by the US.
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wasn t allowed to fly their own indigenous nations flag alongside the US flag, because the coach is like, that ain t America, get out of here with that.
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And instead they bonded with other indigenous players, formed a thing called Team Indigenous, which is transnational team of many indigenous nations around the world who now compete together.
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And then Mick lives in Portland now and is creating this community garden on what used to be a baseball diamond,
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So the symbolism gets richer.
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And instead of the baseball diamond, it s 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.
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They re using ancient technologies of water sequestration and carbon sequestration to reseed the land and
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kind of un-colonized, you know, decolonized mentally, physically, agriculturally.
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I saw that with my own eyes.
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I verified it.
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This isn t like some random article I came across that made me feel good about the possibilities.
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This is a human being whose hand I shook and whose herbs I touched.
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And it s like, we can undo things.
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And it s not just going to be deploying laser beams and LLMs and AI robots that s gonna get there.
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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.
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We need a new story there.
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So my hope lies in people like Mick and people like that Spear Fisher.
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And those are two teeny tiny examples out of now hundreds that I ve borne witness to and been blessed to experience directly or indirectly through the podcast, through this TV show.
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And that s just the past three years of my life.
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I ve got 42 more under my belt.
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And I was like, oh yeah, I ve seen some other stories play out.
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I ve seen alleged criminals restored to the community.
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and become assets rather than liabilities.
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We can heal people.
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We can heal landscapes.
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We can heal ozone layers.
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And we can heal our collective society as well.
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So that s what keeps me going.
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I don t always believe it.
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Sometimes I look at the news or hear some idiot speech and I m like, oh man, this is where we re at.
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But we re always at many places at once.
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And can I drop something funky on you?
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Yes, please.
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I know I ve been on a kind of a long monologue.
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I sort of apologize.
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But because of your interest, because of your interest in the container, the closet, how we situate ourselves,
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in the whole life thing.
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I m going to share this update on my understanding of the universe that happened just in the past month.
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I met an astronomer.
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I have to take great pains to not call him an astrologer.
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I always slip on that, and he is not going to read my horoscope.
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But he will, through his understanding of the stars, kind of tell a story of the future that s pretty inspiring.
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Energy doesn t dissipate.
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It moves, but it doesn t die.
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And the Big Bang that happened 15.7 billion years ago, all that energy is still here.
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We are it.
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We are a version of it.
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We are an instance of that near-infinite force.
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And every atom that existed then exists now.
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And some of those are us.
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We are riding this cosmic wave.
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We re like surfers on a cosmic wave, billions of years in the making.
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And so my atoms were at the Big Bang.
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They re also in the future, right?
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Their time doesn t, in this kind of math, you can almost take time out of it.
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It s just being.
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We just, we are, we are.
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And so if we can tap into maybe just symbolically,
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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.
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We can, we have.
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And there s something really powerful in that to me.
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That s,
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not like spiritual bypassing, like, oh, just manifest in one, but it s just like a deeper level of truth.
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We can interact with trees in ways that we re just starting to understand.
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Just starting.
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Our dogs fricking know where our hearts are.
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Like, so our atoms were at the fricking bit.
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We are ancient.
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Yes.
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We re just reconstellating ourselves again and again.
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Yeah, and we re already in the future.
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And I just kind of love that.
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Well, Baratunde really is a man of many interests and insights.
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I could talk to him for five hours going into various parking lots.
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Like now I really want to just talk to him about Shriners and the Masonic Temple and
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what that means.
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If you re unfamiliar, he has a podcast called How to Citizen with really incredible guests exploring many of the same questions that I m interested in as well.
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If you liked today s episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.
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You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at EliseLoonan.com.
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While there, please sign up for my sub stack.
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I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this
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show and a deeper dive most Sundays.
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Or follow me on Instagram at Elise Lunen.
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And finally, if you haven t already, please consider picking up a copy of my New York Times bestselling book, On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, available wherever you get your books.
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It s an exploration of how women have been conditioned for goodness, men for power, and all the ways we ve been programmed to police ourselves and each other according to these cultural ideas of what it is to be a good woman.
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread.
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Available now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren Legroso, Mary-Kate McDonough, Ali Brockman, and the entire Cadence 13 team for producing these episodes.
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And to Valero Duval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next week.