On our Season 2 premiere episode, new host Dave Anderson sits down with Writer, Activist & Comedian Baratunde Thurston to discuss taking a more proactive role in how technology serves us.
Technology is changing every aspect of our lives, but we often don’t give it much of a thought as we go about our day-to-day: how it helps us get from point A to point B, communicate with friends and family, procure what we need with relative ease, or monitor our health.
As such, we don’t often think about how technological advancement decisions are made or who makes them (who decided self-driving cars should be the next big thing?). In reality, very few people make the key decisions about what purpose a technology will serve, whose lives it will change as a result, or how success should be measured and communicated.
On our Season 2 premiere episode, new host Dave Anderson sits down with Writer, Activist & Comedian Baratunde Thurston to discuss taking a more proactive role in how technology serves us.
Technology is changing every aspect of our lives, but we often don’t give it much of a thought as we go about our day-to-day: how it helps us get from point A to point B, communicate with friends and family, procure what we need with relative ease, or monitor our health.
As such, we don’t often think about how technological advancement decisions are made or who makes them (who decided self-driving cars should be the next big thing?). In reality, very few people make the key decisions about what purpose a technology will serve, whose lives it will change as a result, or how success should be measured and communicated.
Barantunde Thurston (00:02):
We're reshaping reality. That's what we're doing. We're not deploying technology. Technology's not an industry anymore. It is an integrated enabler of everything that we actually care about. Most people don't care about technology, but they care about the quality of their lives. And technology's changing all of that. If you take the idea of natural language processing, conversational AI, and enough competence in building the services, we could interact with our government differently. And I think we could be more responsive and make the experience of government and the experience of tech more human.
AIVOv2 (00:43):
Welcome to More Intelligent Tomorrow, a podcast about our emerging AI driven world, critical conversations about tomorrow's technology today. On our season two premier episode, new host, Dave Anderson sits down with Barantunde Thurston.
Dave Anderson (01:06):
Very exciting to be talking to you. I've been most inspired, maybe it's me being Australian and maybe not being as worldly as I should have. Only recently discovered you and I've like, "Where on earth have you been in my life?"
Barantunde Thurston (01:22):
I've been lurking around the corner, keeping to the shadows, trying to avoid direct eye contact with you. But here we are.
Dave Anderson (01:30):
Here we are.
Barantunde Thurston (01:31):
You have found me, Dave.
Dave Anderson (01:33):
I have found you and you have one of the most fascinating podcasts.
Barantunde Thurston (01:37):
Thank you.
Dave Anderson (01:37):
And history, Ted talks. I'll tell you this right up front. I sat listening in the car with my daughter who's 10 years old and she doesn't listen to any of my podcasts. And she listened to your entire podcast, particularly the one with your sister and talking about the origins of your tech history, including an Apple IIe, which we share in common. And she loved it.
Barantunde Thurston (02:02):
Okay, so that's one of the highest complements anyone could ever give. For me, that a child who has infinite options and zero attention span, not picking on your daughter, just like a 10 year old in general, like onto the next one very quickly, would actually want... And you didn't strap her into the car and not let her out. She volunteered to listen.
Dave Anderson (02:24):
Well, we were on a freeway and she couldn't get off, so is where I was going to go and I'm you did that first.
Barantunde Thurston (02:29):
It was live or die. Okay, that's a fair choice. [crosstalk 00:02:33].
Dave Anderson (02:34):
Yeah, but she's 10, right? So she has the opportunity to complain, "Dad, I don't like this. Put something else on." And she sat and she was really listening. And I knew she was listening because she was also dual screening. She was playing her Nintendo at the same time because that's what kids do these days apparently. And I'm very concerned about where it's going, but nonetheless, every now and then she just spike up and she goes and ask me a question about something that you said, why is that? It was awesome.
Barantunde Thurston (03:03):
Thank you for sharing that, man. That means a lot. You look at the like stats behind the show and you see download numbers or not, or maybe a review, but a child who is not bored by my podcast is a massive win.
Dave Anderson (03:19):
Tell us a bit about your background for those that don't know who you are.
Barantunde Thurston (03:22):
Yeah. So my name is Barantunde Thurston. I am a person who wields words in many formats. I speak, I write, I host on camera and on mic and I do that in service of what I hope is Liberty and justice for all, the freedom thing. I care particular about race and about technology and about democracy and increasingly about climate. I'm all over the media space, but those are the ways I try to show up in them. And this podcast, How To Citizen With Barantunde is one where we take the word citizen and interpret it as a verb, not an immigration status, noun, which has its place, but that is not as useful an interpretation for the state of this country, the United States and many countries around the world where democracy is losing, it's slipping, and in part it's because we, the people haven't kept up our practice, we've forgotten how a citizen. So the show was to help us do that.
Dave Anderson (04:22):
Yeah, and is it getting worse?
Barantunde Thurston (04:24):
Oh yeah, for sure. That's easy, yes. Yeah.
Dave Anderson (04:27):
Is that because we're getting older or is that because it actually is? You know how you start to get older and your thoughts become that sort of middle-aged person and you just angry with everything. It was never the way it used to be.
Barantunde Thurston (04:36):
That's a thoughtful question because at times I paused is in my assessment of the worsening and I'm like, "Is it worse? Doesn't this always happen? Aren't there always forces against change and progress and including more people?" There are, right? Didn't we fight a civil war in the US. Didn't we go through periods of lynching? Haven't we been through multiple world wars? We have. And yet, I feel paradoxically like we had a broader sense of common ground, even in our more explicitly divisive history. And I don't quite know how to square it, but the acceptance of political violence as a credible action on the part of many in the US here terrifies me. The embrace of what I can only describe is as [wholeism 00:05:34], it's just the formal embrace of trolling as a service by a whole political party like people just trying to own the libs and it's like, oh my. It's very petty. It's very immature. And it's very potent and very powerful.
Barantunde Thurston (05:52):
I drove across parts of this country over the past few months, especially in the summer months. And I saw these political signs, these flags, and they said F Joe Biden, they spelled out the profane word. And that was just in front of someone's house where their kids play. And I was like, that feels new. Even with the acknowledgement of McCarthyism, that's the thing that happened a while ago. So we'd never had a fully innocent, fully unified past, but things have gotten to my view, much more coarse, much more tribalized, much more violent in small, but significant ways, just that everyday disrespect feels like it's ratcheting up. And COVID made everything worse. Selfishness feels up too. So I am worried. I am worried. And the podcast was in part a way to process that concern.
Dave Anderson (06:44):
Can you put your finger on some of the causes of this polarizing outspoken-ism, trolling that you just mentioned?
Barantunde Thurston (06:54):
I think for us in the US, we have a political system, which truly isn't responsive to the will of the people in so many measurable ways. It's responsive to the will of the donors. That's proven. That's quantifiable. But the will of the people, eh, not so much. And that creates this spiral of divestment. I think we've had 40-ish years of bad mouthing the idea of government, which in a democracy is just bad mouthing yourself, but we haven't interpreted it that way. And so it's just like, "Government bad, strangle government, drown government, shrink government, crush government." And government is always good, but no one is. It's not always efficient or effective, but nothing is. I think we've overdone it a little bit on the self hate in the form of anti-government-ness, we've starved ourselves of resources in terms of a collective pot of funds we could use to take care of one another.
Barantunde Thurston (07:57):
And then we say, "Look, people aren't taken care of." And we have failed to connect the dots. A lot of the growth and the benefit that have happened in this very wealthy land have gone to very few people. So folks out there are many, really don't have enough. And certainly the marketing campaigns out there remind us that we can never have enough. So if you really don't have enough and then you want more than you even need, but you can't get it, that breeds a certain level of resentment. Also, racism. Also, racism. And we've been very willing to sabotage our collective Goodwill to keep from benefiting, immigrants, women, black and brown folks. All kinds of people who weren't in the seed round of America, who weren't top on the cap table of business Americana. There's a level of selfishness and I think small mindedness, "zero-sumness", Heather McGhee, a great author, book called The Sum Of Us. She articulates this better than I can.
Barantunde Thurston (09:05):
But the idea that we see someone else's gain as our loss and I don't subscribe to that, but it's a very compelling narrative and we've had some good sales people pitching it for a very long time. So all those chickens are coming home. They're roosting at the same time and they're feasting on the Carcass of what was a commons and a public sphere that could get things done.
Dave Anderson (09:27):
Juice, get the sense we're going to get a tipping point. Is COVID a moment where people are like, I actually have had enough of this? And I liked in one of your podcasts, you were talking about the collective. And actually if you win, someone else doesn't have to lose. We can all win together. And I think as technology prevails, we need to distribute more wealth and all these things, we actually could all live pretty happily if we were nice to each other and we became more of a collective and a more of a cooperative, right?
Barantunde Thurston (10:02):
The collective and the cooperative, I agree with you. I'm still working on how to sell that in a nation predicated on hyperindividualism. The me, myself and I, my freedom, individual freedom, personal freedom. We don't really talk much about collective freedom. It's almost literally not vocabulary. Many of us interpret freedom as I get to do what I want, when I want, how I want it. Consequences be damned, your interests be damned and it doesn't serve the person who thinks they believe it. It may serve the profits of some other entity. It may serve gun manufacturers for everybody to go buy a gun. But collectively and individually, the idea that if I get in an argument at the grocery store, that person might be armed. That's not good for me. Or that I might in a rage, use the weapon on me to take out that rage on someone, when, if I didn't have it, I would just yell, that's not good for me either.
Barantunde Thurston (11:03):
Now I may have injured someone. Now I might be in prison. Now I have this weight on my conscious of this extraordinary act I did in a moment of non-clear thought because freedom. So how do you talk about collective and cooperation and collaboration in that environment? We tried with the podcast. We had our very first guest in the series. We're in season three now. Season one, episode, one, a woman named Valerie Kaur. I think she's a blessed being. I used her in the show and she was willing to be used this way in the show, as a kind of spiritual invocation, because she talks about the power of love and revolutionary love. And she says, we should love ourselves and love others and love our opponents.
Barantunde Thurston (11:52):
And her book is called See No Stranger. And the core premise of that is, a stranger is a part of me, I do not yet know. And so if we can see ourselves and others, then helping others is also helping ourselves. That's the rhetorical hack that I'm attempting and the math plays out well, if we're willing to stick with it long enough to have those benefits come back to us. We invested in space programs a long time ago, and now we have GPS in our pockets and that's good for us individually. It saves me the individual time in traffic, but it required me giving something up, tax dollars and time, patience on the return, for it to come back a generation or two later and have it power a whole new set of innovations and create billions, if not trillions of dollars in wealth, just off GPS, satellites alone.
Barantunde Thurston (12:52):
I mean, shipping, mapping, logistics, games, Pokemon, GPS, GPS, GPS, GPS. But if we had all been like, "I don't need a satellite right now," if we had just a selfish, short minded attitude toward it, we would've opted out of all this individual benefit a few years down the road. So I'm working on it. We have a strong culture of individualism that I think is only increasing lately because of COVID. But I don't think it's the end of the story. That's my partial hope.
Dave Anderson (13:28):
That's interesting. Can I take a different viewpoint for one second on COVID?
Barantunde Thurston (13:34):
Please do. Yeah.
Dave Anderson (13:35):
So I agree with you. And one of the questions I was going to ask is, do you think technology is making things better or is it making it worse? And we're children of a very similar age, so we grew up without some of the technology, but with some of the technology and some of the stuff was basic at the start, the game would end and you would go out and play outside. And now other games don't end, they [respond 00:13:57] and you keep going like a zombie. But I wanted to just touch on COVID.
Barantunde Thurston (14:01):
Yeah.
Dave Anderson (14:02):
And maybe this is just me and you have a more worldly view potentially. But I sort of think we're getting to a tipping point. I sort of reading more about how workers are getting their rights back where they're like, "I don't want to be a slave to this job anymore, working 70 hours a week and stress. I want to do something that I want to do. And I know we haven't solved the distribution of wealth and how..." These people are just like, "Oh, I'm just going to quit my job." And please, I obviously have to say this, I know COVID is not a good thing. And people have lost lives and respect to all people and families and for whatever who have lost loved one's. Horrible disease. I have to say that and I truly believe it. But what are the other consequences? Is this one of those industrial revolution type moments where it's like "Enough of this shit, let's be different now, let's change things?"
Barantunde Thurston (14:53):
I want to think, yes. There's been a lot of obvious things that COVID has made worse. CEO pay went up another 20 or 30% just in the year of COVID. I don't think they were that much better executives during some of the worst years of anyone's lives. And we've got the anti-mask, the anti-vax, the conspiracy theory ratcheted up. So that doesn't feel like a good outcome. But we also got to experiment with some things, just giving people cash without a ton of strings attached and the whole economy didn't collapse and people just weren't out in the streets on drugs and meth acting the fool like they had no responsibilities. And what you brought up is really important that this great resignation of people who are like, "I'm not going back to that," restaurants are such a tremendous thing. And anybody who's been out to a restaurant since COVID, it's worse, they are short staffed and the supply chains are all jacked up.
Barantunde Thurston (15:55):
So you might not be able to eat what you expect to eat. And we all expect a lot after cooking for ourselves for a year straight. So patience is thin. But a lot of people in that industry, which has had issues forever are just like, "Yeah, you know what? I'm not signing up for verbal abuse and sexual harassment and physical exploitation on a daily basis. I think I'll be an artist." You know?
Dave Anderson (16:19):
Yeah.
Barantunde Thurston (16:20):
That's kind of interesting. And I think it's a moment of liberation. Many people had a moment to pause and contemplate what was good for them, what felt right, what felt healthy and I think that's a blessing. I think that's a good outcome. Certainly we've seen a lot of people helping each other too. We featured a ton of it on the show. It helped me get through COVID just to hear direct stories of mutual aids societies, and people feeding people they don't know.
Barantunde Thurston (16:51):
And companies getting creative. We figured out for people who have office jobs, you don't really need to be in the office that much but maybe there's a different way we can organize this and spend time with our families and still be productive without all the extra FaceTime. And that was good. That was good. So definitely a lot of good has come here. Look, good came from world war II. It was a heinous horrible thing, but also the world paused and we stopped something really horrible. We invented a ton of things out of a war that have had great peace time returns. So COVID certainly has had some positive outcomes. It's not an unmitigated disaster.
Dave Anderson (17:36):
I think the community coming together was a good example. We put a bonfire in the middle of the street, in a pretty middle class suburb and sat around and met neighbors that I'd never really had a conversation with before because we had nowhere to go and nothing to do. So we just sort of came together, it was like old school prehistoric fire building times where we would come and be by a fire as a community. And I went, "There's hope for us." Yeah.
Barantunde Thurston (18:05):
It's so good. The level of support too. I have a next door neighbor and she was trying to start the Italy thing, the banging the pots and pans for the healthcare workers. And she was alone initially. There was one person at all these houses who were like, "What's that racket?" And then my wife and I joined her, we're like, "We can't let her be out there all by herself like that, it's embarrassing." And then the people across the street joined. And pretty soon you had a majority. We couldn't even see each other because it was that frightening at the time. It was like, I can't leave the premises, but we could hear each other and we could feel each other. And there was a sense of community that was really grounded, that was really local.
Barantunde Thurston (18:50):
And that was benefit of the doubt granting. That was lovely to see. My own wife, she helped organized to get face masks and shields and people in the healthcare system who didn't have it because we failed early on in a number of ways. And just watching strangers come to get other in Slack and WhatsApp and figure out like, "Who knows somebody in China?" Or, "Can it get some masks?" It was great. It's the level of effort I saw people put into World of Warcraft half a generation ago. And this was like a real world of Warcraft. This is the massive multiplayer online role playing game you've been waiting for, and many people stepped up and they worked with their guilds, created them out of thin air to help.
Dave Anderson (19:37):
It's amazing sense of community that it's been created. So we're in Australia at the moment and we had to reach a certain vaccination target before we were allowed to go and do things. And it felt like it was the world's worst university assignment, whereas, the couple of slacker kids sitting in the corner and you're like, "Come on, man. I really would like the kids to go to school at some point. Do you mind, please?" It does feel like everyone did sort of Bandi together. And I do think at that point there wasn't the selfish nature of, I'm going to do it for myself. It's like, I have to do it for everyone else because if I don't, we all can't get on with it. Whether you agree with the thing or not, it's an example of coming together.
Dave Anderson (20:25):
What worries me, and I love technology. I work in technology, right? We grew up with technology. I've automated everything in my house. And we were only talking before. But what happens when the batteries go flat on the front door and you can't get in? I was like, "Uh-oh." But I love technology. I love working in technology. And I work for a company that's progressing AI. You do read a little bit though about these big companies and how they're leveraging technology and how it's not for the betterment of society and community. Does that worry you that technology is going at such a rate that the people haven't got enough control over it, and we are not coming together, we're not banging pots to together. We're sitting silent in sort of virtual cubicles?
Barantunde Thurston (21:11):
We're reshaping reality. That's what we're doing. We're not deploying technology. Technology's not an industry anymore. It is an integrated enabler of everything that we actually care about. Most people don't care about technology, but they care about getting from point A to point B. They care about how their kids are educated. They care about what food they put into their body and how many vacation days they get and the quality of their lives. And technology's changing all of that. And so for the size of its impact, relatively few people have a say in how that impact manifests. It's not mostly through the government that these things have decided, it's not any kind of collective civic debate. Should we? Shouldn't we? It's just being imposed. We collectively didn't decide to pursue self-driving cars. I never cast a vote for that. I don't remember it coming up in a town hall or presidential debate, but there's just this consensus amongst the people with money and power over a lot of engineering resources that it's the obvious way we should go.
Barantunde Thurston (22:24):
The problems that we've decided to solve. We're going to use machine learning, train them on a set of photographs to identify threats. Okay, what photographs? How are we defining threat? There's no jury involved. There's no one of my peers involved in that judgment about my potential criminality. So we have an imperfect, but relatively robust system of accountability the way many of our nations have set up their democracies. You have a judicial branch, you can appeal and look at stuff. You have a legislative branch where there's some kind of voice of the people. You have an executive, which actually has to implement and get things done, but they got to reapply for their job every certain number for years, you got coalitions that need to be formed. All that doesn't exist.
Barantunde Thurston (23:16):
We have the market in part, and I think it's a poor substitute, even if it's working very well because a market is optimized for shareholder value, not for civic values, not for moral values, not for ethical values. But the market's not working that great either because you talked, you said big companies, there's such dominance and such concentration in so many parts of the business and tech world.
Barantunde Thurston (23:43):
They've prevented new competition. They've prevented new entrants. If we hadn't brought Microsoft to heal, we probably wouldn't have Google. And Google's out here not learning the same lesson, not being willing to learn the same lesson. The government will have to teach it to them again if it can get its act together, we can get our act together to say, you're preventing the next thing from happening.
Dave Anderson (24:07):
Is the divide too big now? Can the government actually reign it in? Because you're right about when they did sort of pull Microsoft apart and said, you cannot be this monopoly, but we do have these monopolies and they're getting stronger and they're getting more powerful and can the government keep up? Do they know how to keep up? Do we have the right legislation in place? I know Australia is like one country. We're very small. I don't know what the rest of the world's doing. But we're like, hey, you're not allowed to go online. For a little background, you can't be anonymous online. They don't want people to go online and they don't want me just to start trolling you and go, "I can't stand you Barantunde, and I really dislike your podcast." This is all lies. It's the opposite. But just imagine.
Dave Anderson (24:49):
And I'm John Smith. I'm not me. I have to be me. You have to identify as who I am. But we are just this tiny, tiny little thing. And we've done this in the past where Australia has said, "No Facebook, you're not allowed to do that." And then Facebook's going, "Oh, we'll just shut. We'll just shut Facebook down in Australia," because it's nothing to them.
Barantunde Thurston (25:10):
Yeah.
Dave Anderson (25:10):
Are they too powerful?
Barantunde Thurston (25:14):
They are too powerful, but I do not think it's too late.
Dave Anderson (25:17):
No.
Barantunde Thurston (25:17):
And I think in the case of something like on Facebook, they represent a larger set of entities. I think we lost our imagination and a few decades ago, as we were deploying all this connected technology stuff, the internet in particular. And what I mean by that is we made some kind of choice. Enough people decided that the way to support this financially was A, through advertising, and B, through surveillance. And then that just became the unimaginative obvious step for everybody. So, okay, we're just going to grab a bunch of attention, get as many users as possible and then carve them up into these little segments and auction them off in an online market. We're going to turn all of the human experience into a stock market of attention and human worth. In many ways, that's very regressive.
Barantunde Thurston (26:13):
We used to have markets full of people. They were slave markets. And this isn't as grotesque as that. It's certainly not as violent as that, but it is violating and it's base. It's like entry level shit.
Dave Anderson (26:29):
Hmm.
Barantunde Thurston (26:29):
And there are other ways to do it. You talk about not being anonymous so that you can't just go and troll people. Facebook requires you to use a real name and there's lots of untrue, heinous stuff happening on their platforms. So an anonymity or the lack thereof doesn't fully solve it. But I had a conversation recently with someone who man, she opened my eyes to a totally different way of thinking about it. Her name's Esra'a Al Shafei, she's from Bahrain. She runs the online social network for LGBTQ+ youth in the middle east, primarily. And in order to be able to comment on someone else's feed or page, you have to have been a member of the community for a certain amount of time, And you have to have unlocked that privilege by going through a series of other unlocks to get there. They game-ified it.
Barantunde Thurston (27:24):
But they did something that we do very naturally in the offline analog world. When you're in a new institution, you don't just roll up to a random person who's been a part of that and tell them what's on your mind. You don't do that at a new church, in a new neighborhood, at a new school, at a new job. There's no society where that's normal. You observe, you shut the hell up. You ask somebody who's been there, "How do things work here?" You figure out the norms. And what happened with our online spaces is we forgot that there's still just spaces with people. And we said, well, we just need as much data as possible, as quickly as possible. So here's an account. I don't care where you live.
Barantunde Thurston (28:06):
I don't care what your real name is. Tell me what you think. What's on your mind? Horrible things are on people's minds. And if there's no tension, if there's no friction. We've made a lot of things frictionless that should be full of friction. Nazis should experience a lot of friction. It should be hard. It used to be hard. You had to get a magazine ad and run a Zen out of your basement and hope somebody read it a month later and shipped you a check in a PO box. And you have a secret meeting because no one would want to see you meeting in public. So you met under the cover of dark at a gas station, but they went to the wrong gas station. So that Nazi meeting never happened. Now we're just like, "Hey, do you have Nazi thoughts? Uploaded to a video service that will amplify it instantly." We've forgotten some of the basics.
Barantunde Thurston (28:58):
It doesn't have to be that way. I don't think legislation solves all that. I think in concert with real competition, we can provide different choices to people and let us feel how does it feel to log on and be afraid that someone's going to attack you for everything you say, because there's no actual community here versus warming up getting acclimated, welcoming people and let us have that kind of AB test. We haven't even given ourselves that opportunity.
Dave Anderson (29:26):
Well, that's really mind blowing because you think back to a really early days of humans. Or you look at a Japanese culture that have so much respect for their elders. So you think about that respect and as you were talking about it, I was thinking about that and I'm thinking about my kids and they're growing up and I just don't think in the online world, you're right, they don't have this hierarchy and sort of respect for someone. And on the flip side, some of the tech companies will have like discussion forums and they'd recognize people that have been a member for a certain period of time and they have certain gold status or platinum status or whatever, I think, and so there's little pockets of it.
Dave Anderson (30:06):
But something like Facebook and these other sort of social platforms, it doesn't matter. You can publish anything. And the more sensational it is, the more interesting it is and the more we spread these fake news and people are believing things that they shouldn't believe, but we're not rising up the authorities. And I've had conversations with AI thought leaders in the past. And I'm like, "Why are scientists not given more hierarchy and educators and authors and dignitaries. Why aren't they given more respect online than they deserve?" I don't know how to solve it.
Barantunde Thurston (30:39):
Well, it's the beautiful thing about this is that it's real messy. Those historic hierarchies were also not great for many people. If you weren't a part of the hierarchy, then you never had a voice that could mean it's because you were a child. That could mean because you were a woman. That could mean because as you didn't speak the predominant language or because you were poor. And so the beauty of all this chaos is that we are smashing some of those hierarchies and that a random person does actually have more of a voice. They can go viral, they can build community, they can be amplified and find others who share their thoughts in ways that were impossible or even illegal before. But there's a balance.
Barantunde Thurston (31:31):
And I think just offering instant community and amplification to anyone with any idea has downsides too. And for our long, we treated it as, this is just a universal good. More people saying more stuff, finding more people who agree with them is good until it's people, who most of us agree shouldn't be doing that so easily. And until it threatens public health and until it threatens the stability of the whole society. Okay, then if facts aren't required at all, then we can just create fictions that are attractive and people can opt into the fictions and then the fiction goes viral, but it's impressing itself on the actual factual world. That's very dystopic.
Dave Anderson (32:24):
Yeah.
Barantunde Thurston (32:25):
I don't pretend that it's simple to solve, but it creates some incredible challenges.
Dave Anderson (32:32):
Yeah. We should premise the fact that I subscribe, I'll speak on behalf of me. I subscribe to the fact that I'm not against technology at all, actually, I love technology, right?
Barantunde Thurston (32:44):
We're using technology.
Dave Anderson (32:45):
We're using it right now. And so if I wasn't-
Barantunde Thurston (32:48):
Would be dead without technology.
Dave Anderson (32:49):
Exactly. Same for me. I live and I breathe it because I fundamentally believe that it gives a voice to people. I've discovered you in the past week. And for me, I'm like, I was searching for a purpose and we had this discussion and you thought I was joking. I wasn't joking. I was like, I feel like I'm this person that is a Jack of all trades, but a master of none. And I'm at this middle age now where it's like, I need to pass. I need to do something purposeful. And you come along and I'm like, here is a person giving a voice to the need for us to be better citizens.
Dave Anderson (33:28):
And if there's more of a collective and more discoveries like this, maybe it'll change us. And if you change me and I change my daughter who changes the neighbor and we all start to collect this movement, big companies, I don't think are necessarily evil, if they're made up of people and within them, there are good people that will have a voice and stand up for what they believe in. And I think the more we educate through your sort of podcast, the better we can hopefully provide an outlook to the world that in the next, we can make change.
Barantunde Thurston (34:01):
I share your subscription. I will log into that subscription with your password.
Dave Anderson (34:06):
Okay.
Barantunde Thurston (34:06):
So that you pay for it.
Dave Anderson (34:07):
Yeah.
Barantunde Thurston (34:08):
But I'm on the same service as you.
Dave Anderson (34:09):
$2.99 a month though, to have my subscription.
Barantunde Thurston (34:14):
Yeah, I don't think tech is bad. I think I would've died of several injuries or diseases by now were it not for technology. Or if my car hadn't warned me, I would've been in multiple accidents by now. Were it not for that early alert system, I would've missed out on a lot of income, on a lot of jobs. I wouldn't have met my wife. There are many things that, not to say my life would be destitute, but it's certainly, I can point to hundreds of moments that have been made possible by or better because of tech. So it's not just like, "Oh, tech is bad, smash!" That's not it. I think we need more examples. I think we need better incentives. I think we need to remember that speed isn't always our friend and that there's more to life efficiency.
Dave Anderson (35:03):
What if we slowed down? What if we use technology to slow down?
Barantunde Thurston (35:08):
We could. We would just need a different funding model for tech. What people don't talk about as much with tech is how tech is paid for. And a lot of the things that are celebrated are paid for by very, very wealthy investors who are itching to get even wealthier.
Dave Anderson (35:29):
Yeah.
Barantunde Thurston (35:30):
That's it. It's millionaires trying to be billionaires and it's billionaires trying to be trillionaires. And that's a small interest group on the scale of our species. But they want to turn their a hundred into a thousand or a hundred-thousand preferably. And so they're willing to break stuff, move fast and break things in order to multiply the money. But they're also magnifying and multiplying some harms in the process and we could build a tech that... Apple flirts with this? With the whole, how much time you've been spending. Google's copied them on Android.
Barantunde Thurston (36:06):
There's hints at what might be possible. I was on TikTok and I reached a TikTok, which was like, "You've been spending way too much time on TikTok. You, you need to take a break." It was a video that they had recorded that they clearly had algorithmically programmed to surface for somebody like me who had just been scrolling for two and a half hours. I had to stay up in my mid forties. I had to do a colonoscopy. And so there's some drugs you got to take to clean yourself out. And I had to take it at midnight, which means I was going to be up until at least three in the morning, so that was TikTok time. And TikTok was like, "Yo buddy, you need to chill. You need to chill right now." And the video had been viewed 1.5 billion times. But I appreciate it. It was hilarious. It was timely. And it was absolutely accurate.
Dave Anderson (36:55):
But like I tell you, you're telling the point and you're telling me it about the colonoscopy. And I now say, everyone's just picturing anyone who's done it. It's like, oh yeah, that [dream 00:37:02].
Barantunde Thurston (37:02):
Absolutely. Yeah, we keep it real here, man. This is life. This is real life.
Dave Anderson (37:06):
What in all? Let's hear it all.
Barantunde Thurston (37:08):
Yeah.
Dave Anderson (37:12):
Hey, what are we going to do? What can we do? Or what should be done? Not necessarily what we could do, but what's going to happen in the future and what can we do about it?
Barantunde Thurston (37:22):
That's a very simple question, dude.
Dave Anderson (37:23):
Really? It's not, is it?
Barantunde Thurston (37:25):
Things are going to happen in the future and we're going to do things.
Dave Anderson (37:28):
It's so easy.
Barantunde Thurston (37:31):
Next question. No, look, when you think about the money here and the concentration of it. We actually featured someone on the show, Peter Mancini, who's building a different funding and administrative layer for groups of people who want to get stuff done. We don't have to build it on Zuckerberg's property. No one should be forced to share crop for mark Zuckerberg in his weird version of the metaverse. So how do we make it as easy to spin up something if you're not on one of these big platforms as if you are, and there are people working on that. There's decentralized finance as wonky and weird as that is and as bred out and libertarian as part of that movement is. There's also something really interesting about having a vast distribution of stakeholders and even liberal share holders who, in a decentralized autonomous organization, a [dough 00:38:24] collectively make decisions and have group governance in ways that some of our larger companies don't, especially if you're not publicly traded, they might not even have a shareholder meeting.
Barantunde Thurston (38:36):
It's just like a family decides. So I think we will see more of that as the tools of creation get even easier to use. There's no code build as a movement happening and you can just roll something up, Webflow. I don't work for them, but like we built a site on them as well, and it's even different from what I remember meant to make a website. There's good stuff coming. There's different stuff coming. There'll be new challenges coming with it, but I'm excited about anything that shifts power. And then for those who are in power, if they're willing to put themselves in a position of accountability, to more of a collective through a cooperative model, there's a movement in finance, especially around tech called exit to community so that when you become very successful, you don't just have to go public to the stock market or get acquired by some big public company.
Barantunde Thurston (39:33):
There's a way to exit to people where the people buy you out and they become joint owners and managers of the thing. And even governments have been working on that. Government of Taiwan is doing tremendously innovative stuff with technology and governance. And they have a conversation running between the government ministries and the people. And it's human touch. You can just call up the government in Taiwan. A certain department, you call and talk to a person and they will help you. As an American, I can't imagine that. I cannot imagine calling... Unless it's 911. 911, they're calling under pressure. It's pretty universally available. They're very effective, but that's it. That's like if you're dying, you can call the government every other day. Any other need, good luck.
Barantunde Thurston (40:28):
And if you have money, you can outsource the pain to somebody else or skip the line. But the way Taiwan has set it up, they take in a lot of a civic hacking community and they embraced it. They didn't take deep offense. How dare you make something that works better than what the government did? They partnered with. I find great hope in that. I hope they're not so special and unique that no one else could do it. I think a lot of us could try stuff like that.
Dave Anderson (40:56):
Well, when I was in Boston, the Australian government rang me because I needed to renew my passport for my daughter. And it was Paul from the Australian Constellate in New York because I didn't have one. And I spoke to the government and he was hilarious because he said, "What's your daughter's birthdate?" And I went, "Um..." And he goes, "Haha. See, I knew you would pause." And I'm like, "What? What is going on? Is this is this really the government?" And he is like, "Your wife told me that you wouldn't remember your daughter's birthday." And I'm like, this is how all conversations with the government should go, guaranteed.
Barantunde Thurston (41:28):
Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. If you take the idea of natural language processing, conversational AI and enough competence in building the services, we could interact with our government differently. We're not staffed for millions of people or hundreds of millions of people and just like, "I want to talk to the government today." But we can combine forces the way Kasparov and Deep Blue combined to play chess better than either of them could alone. And I think we could be more responsive and make the experience of government and the experience of tech more human.
Dave Anderson (42:07):
Oh, I see. Now you're hitting on a point that I'm very passionate about, which is if you use the machines to do the mundane tasks that we don't need to do, we can then focus our tasks on being people. And dealing with people instead of doing what the machines are capable of doing, filling in paperwork and filing and segmenting and doing that sort of stuff. We can then just be people. We can have conversations and we can learn.
Barantunde Thurston (42:31):
For that to happen, Dave, we need our leaders to value us as people. All this technology, whatever version of it, whether it's a cotton gin or a washing machine or a machine learning instance, they've all promised the same thing. We're going to make your life easier. We're going to give you your time back. And they've all delivered the opposite.
Dave Anderson (42:54):
Yeah.
Barantunde Thurston (42:56):
Because the machines don't care. They will do the job they're programed to do. But the managers, the owners, the leaders, they haven't been willing to follow through on that promise. They've reneged every time, and we just end up working more and we work harder. Oh, now you can work from home and at work, so you just work all the time. Thank you Blackberry. It didn't free us. It chained us more persistently. So this is beyond technology. There's not going to be a technology to solve greed. There won't. We need systems.
Barantunde Thurston (43:34):
We need leadership. We need cultural norms and a level of investment ourselves in oversight and scrutiny, and be like, "Is this how we really want to live? No, we're going to provide a common base of X, Y, or Z. We're going to put limits on this and we're going to come back later and see if you're doing what you said you were going to do." And if not, there'll be some kind of price to pay through loss of customers, through lower share price, through a regulatory, fine, through a suspension of a license. That accountability means some kind of consequence. And we haven't had that because the way the economy's grown is just making all of us work a lot harder.
Dave Anderson (44:16):
Do you think it will changes the generation changes with the political leadership? You are doing these Senate inquiries in America and they're explaining Facebook to them and you're like, "Oh my." You're watching it going, "Oh, come on. Really? This is how the internet works? Oh, well, how's this happened?" As our generation comes through, we've grown up with technology and we're like, wait a second. We know both the bad side and the good side, hopefully with the new leadership, we can push it towards, well, this is actually how we think it should run and how technology could work for us instead of us working for technology.
Barantunde Thurston (44:55):
I hope so. I think there is some promise in a generation of nubes who didn't grow up in the culture of deference to management or to processes that don't make any sense. Not just have the bot do that piece. And, "I'm not feeling well today, so I'm not going to come in. I'll work from home and I'll get it done. Focus on my output. Not my FaceTime." That's anecdotally happening. I know people who that's happening to. Yeah. I know people who are behaving in that way and imposing that upward inside their organizations. So there is some hope there. There's also something else I think could happen. And this is an early partial theory. So forgive the incompleteness of it. But we've been organized for the past little while as a species the past couple of hundred years around this nation state thing.
Barantunde Thurston (45:51):
And it's like, "Oh, okay. So we have centralized semi-distributed, but largely centralized authority that provides for common defense and general welfare," some version of that. All right, so [inaudible 00:46:06] going to have half the population just starve to death. We have some floor, we got a common military to protect against domestic and foreign. We have domestic police services and international defense forces. And we may be moving past that into some other organizing principle. I don't think we'll ever just be Adams, just individuals floating in the ether, because we'll get taken out by a mosquito bite real quick. And no one of us could have everything any one of us needs to survive for long enough to make that kind of life worthwhile. Our biggest innovation is cooperation. So we've cooperated through government and through companies and then maybe through churches and hockey clubs or something, your gun club, your pickle ball club, something in between those two extreme examples, but maybe the way we primarily organize and self-govern isn't in the future as much about the state.
Dave Anderson (47:09):
Hmm.
Barantunde Thurston (47:10):
And it's some other hybrid organization, it's part sports team, part fashion brand, part tech platform. And I'm just a member of the society of Amazon Peloton. That's just how I roll. I don't know it. It's getting a little funky and creative, but I don't think we should assume that the 190, 200 nations that define our primary interface to each other on this planet is going to remain that. I think for many people that already isn't. They identify with their discord server and with their Subreddit, and with their Facebook group and they pay taxes, because they're not total rebels, but they're not invested in the society in which they pay those taxes.
Dave Anderson (47:57):
You're not talking about an international world order, are you? Where we're banned [crosstalk 00:48:02].
Barantunde Thurston (48:02):
I think I'm talking about multiple international world orders, thousands of them.
Dave Anderson (48:07):
Yeah, because it's small blue marble that we live on.
Barantunde Thurston (48:10):
It is.
Dave Anderson (48:11):
It doesn't take much to go up into a plane and realize all these borders are imaginary. There are no lines, unless some people try and build walls, which is a bit dumb. But it is a small world. Technology should be bringing us closer together.
Barantunde Thurston (48:25):
It does. Sometimes we don't like that proximity.
Dave Anderson (48:29):
Yeah.
Barantunde Thurston (48:29):
Sometimes it brings us together unconsciously, unconsciously, sometimes technology just smashes us into each other. I can bring two people in two different vehicles together via a crash or I can bring them together at a rest area on the side of the road with a picnic table and a view of a valley. Both of those, technically, I've brought people together. I think technology is often smashing us into each other and it's not gentle. It's not positive, but we're together now. So mission accomplished.
Dave Anderson (49:11):
There's hope for us though. I think there's definitely hope for us. You mentioned Peloton and you're like if there's... Because I love Peloton a little too much, especially during the pandemic. And someone goes, "Oh, it's just a cult." And I'm like, "Well, if it's a cult, I'm signed up because I like it, and it brings me positive energy and I'm feeling good and I'm fit and it's like take technology for the better."
Barantunde Thurston (49:33):
Absolutely. I just got one of those and I, literally, yesterday used it for the first time.
Dave Anderson (49:39):
Really?
Barantunde Thurston (49:40):
And my wife came into the room and she's like, "What's going on here?" Because I was biking. I was on the bike. I was clipped in. I was in a half hour class. I made through 20 minutes of that class. But I was motivated by a very attractive British woman. And she was like, "What's going on over there?" I'm just like, "Leanne lean is just who I'm into right now, babe. It's not personal. This is 30 minutes max." But she is getting me to do things I haven't done.
Dave Anderson (50:07):
Isn't it true? They develop these personas that we all can tap into. I need Adrian Williams right now in a strength class just to beat me up.
Barantunde Thurston (50:17):
See? We are. They're the new priests.
Dave Anderson (50:21):
Ah, watch out. It's a lot of positive reinforcement. You don't realize fitness is only their secondary thing. What they're actually doing is motivating you because I've never felt... I finish a Peloton class and I feel very clear in the head. I feel very clear because there's a lot of positive engagement going on. And if that's the future, then I'm all for it.
Barantunde Thurston (50:45):
It's a big part of it. As long as we also manage the downsides and try to limit them, we'll never stop them. We're always going to have crime. We're always going to have pain. We're always going to have some degree of suffering, but we know enough now. And we have enough tools at our disposal to try to limit it and try to minimize it. Accentuate the positive, reduce the negative. Never eliminate it, but we can reduce it.
Dave Anderson (51:17):
Congratulations on your podcast.
Barantunde Thurston (51:19):
Thank you.
Dave Anderson (51:20):
You are an amazing voice internationally for people to listen to. Do you feel proud of what you've done? And do you feel you are where you are?
Barantunde Thurston (51:29):
I feel very good. My ratings oscillate with the days and some days I'm like, I'm not as successful as I want to be. As many people don't know about this, as I want to know about it. Other days I couldn't consider myself luckier to be able to make any money at all, much less a good living, doing what I get to do. I get to just mouth off, have interesting conversations like you.
Dave Anderson (52:00):
Yeah.
Barantunde Thurston (52:00):
Right? This is a privileged profession that we have, just media, just talking shit. It's great. And very recently, my wife and I, her name's Elizabeth, she helped me create the podcast and she really helped us ground it in principles. We need to have some clear ideas of what we believe before we go off telling this story to other people. So what do we believe?
Barantunde Thurston (52:27):
And it was like, what do we mean by citizen as a verb? And it came down to four things. It means show up and participate. We presume that we all have a role to play. It means investing in relationships. We can't do this alone, so we have to know ourselves, know others, be in relationship with the planet around us, even extending that circle of care to the trees and land that provide for us. We have to understand power. It's not a dirty thing. It's just the thing that makes the world go round. And if we're in a system predicated on people power that behooves the people to understand that power. And as you and I have been talking about a lot, we have to value the collective, not just the individual and rebalance that. So I'm ever grateful to her for that.
Barantunde Thurston (53:09):
We had a very interesting data point, which was bigger than any download figure, a school near San Diego, California was so inspired by the podcast that they built an entire day around it. They've been annually doing something called citizenship day and this year they took those four principles and they built a whole program around each pillar for kindergarten through 12th grade. And their parents came and joined and members of the community came and sat on panels, people from local community gardens came and worked with the kids. And I got to go. They invited me to speak to kick off the day at the 50 yard line of the football field in front of the whole school. It was like a rally for How To Citizen.
Dave Anderson (54:01):
Wow.
Barantunde Thurston (54:01):
And I never got to play football in high school. This is literally my first time in the middle of a football at a high school of any kind.
Barantunde Thurston (54:08):
And it was still 25 years later. And to see little kindergartners reading story books that have to do with relationships with other people and recording messages and then having older kids respond to the younger kids, dude, that puts me over the moon because that's the one we know about. We only know because they invited me to speak.
Dave Anderson (54:32):
Wow.
Barantunde Thurston (54:32):
And they were amazed. I said, yes, it was driving distance. I got to go to check out. Maybe you're jacking up the podcast. What are you telling these kids? And they were crushing it and they shared all their curriculum. So there's probably other places doing things with this, that a download number or a rating on iTunes could never communicate. It's a human reminder to me because a lot of this tech stuff and the capitalism stuff, you want the share price to go up, you want the growth curve up into the right. You want a positive, measurable thing and some things are measured beyond the numbers. They're measured in commitment. They're measured in time. They're measured in people and their relationships. And anytime I'm feeling low now, I'm just going to think about that school.
Dave Anderson (55:24):
So for anyone that's listening, you got to check out Barantunde's podcast and website. I scrolled through your website a lot last night, signed myself up with my real name and look forward to learning more. And you've inspired me to want to do something about it as well. Many of us are stuck in our own ways and we need this education to break us out.
Barantunde Thurston (55:45):
Well, folks hearing that, interested, check out howtocitizen.com, Imbarantude.com and open to suggestions. It's a collaborative venture and some of the most interesting things aren't what I've initiated. It's what somebody else built off of that like the school one as other examples. So Dave, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so, so much. I'm invigorated by this and I'm definitely feeling inspired.
AIVOv2 (56:15):
Thank you for joining us on this More Intelligent Tomorrow journey. Discover more and join the conversation@moreintelligent.ai. The future is closer than we think.