Baratunde on How to Citizen

Ertinde, why do you think of citizen as a verb? It’s a good question, Tom. I think of citizen as a verb because I want to live in a world where we can all make a difference. I don’t like this idea of outsourcing our responsibility or our privileges to a select

group of allegedly powerful people. When citizen is a verb, it’s inclusive. We can all do something. In addition to that kind of positive spin, I think I’ve been saddened by our use of citizen as a dividing line that separates people based on legal status and amount of

paperwork on hand at a given moment. There’s just a lot of people I’ve met who are contributing in some powerful ways that are not legally citizens, but they are very much citizening and living into this idea of people, power, and of community. Hey, you’re listening to Getting Smart Podcast.

I’m Tom Van Der Rik and I’m joined today by my favorite podcast host, Baratunde Thurston. He’s the host of How to Citizen. Baratunde, welcome. Hello, Tom. Thank you so much for having me and I’m glad we made the cut as favorite.

Hey, we do this 100 podcast you should listen to and you, when you came out in 2020, jumped to the top of our list. We love what you’ve been doing. I think you’ve put out more than 40 episodes now, right? Yeah, we just crossed 41 as you and I speak within the past week.

We’re going to talk about 41 because it was a bonus episode that was awesome. Hey, we were stoked to find out that you’re going to be speaking at South by. I will. I’ll be joining my friend, Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, and she’s a great leader, coach, dope human, and we’ll be sharing a keynote stage at South by Southwest EDU.

Then I’ll stick around for the full South by Southwest interactive film and music and get on as many stages as I can find the backstage door to. I hope that two of you dive into what it means to be a conversation host in these difficult times. We work with EDLators and we just see so many of them getting the heck beat out of them

every week over race, over COVID, over how they’re leading community. It’s a tough time to be a conversation leader, but probably more important than ever, right? Who’s beaten them up? Well, this is interesting, right? It’s parents that are frustrated by the last two and a half years have been brutal for

most families, right? You’ve been knocked off your routine and we’ve seen increases in equality that we’re really worried about from the pandemic, from climate change, from automation in the economy. So, man, if you were running lean two years ago, it’s been a tough two years. And then next door to that, sort of this underground, organized conspiratorial conversation

that is putting candidates up for school board that are given a playbook of misinformation and potential misdeeds. That’s the nasty part of what’s going on. And the combination of the two, of just trying to run school in the middle of a crisis and being attacked for trying to do the right thing, it’s a tough time to be a teacher,

school leader right now. I appreciate that. That’s a very simple and from my perspective, very accurate diagnosis that two-part and one-two punch is bad. And it reminds me of how a frontline healthcare worker might feel now as well, where you’re

in these positions, teachers, medical professionals, and not just teachers, but I guess anyone involved in education, as administrators, as coaches, as bus drivers and all kinds of other folks who we trust with our kids. And so, these points in society see a lot and they are pressure points or pressure release points depending on how well we design things.

So if we’re not feeding people, if we’re not housing people, if we’re not providing clean air and a solid healthy environment for people, if we’re stressing folks out, it shows up in the hospitals, it shows up in the doctor’s offices, and it shows up in schools. And so the past two years, ish, have been extra intense on the one hand, making that stress so much higher.

And then I think a lot of people miss this at second point that you did not, the conspiratorial organized attack to undermine the faith that we have in these systems that are barely keeping us together to begin with. So yeah, seeing educators as conversation leaders, I like that. I like the idea of hosting and facilitating, not necessarily proselytizing.

Even though I have some things I’d love to proselytize, I think teaching and educating are not indoctrination or shouldn’t be and often are. And so if you can bring that out and help people lead themselves to a better place, you’re doing a really great job. And the folks who are on the attack, I noticed you didn’t mention kids themselves.

And I think the bulk of this from what I’ve been able to see are parents. And their parents who themselves are stressed because society has failed them in some way, their parents who themselves are insecure and afraid and in some cases ashamed or embarrassed by things that they don’t know. And rather than asking questions, they mouth all statements that make them feel good, but

aren’t necessarily true. And they take it out on people who really don’t deserve it. But it’s because there’s something in themselves that doesn’t sit right or threatens them. And they don’t want their kid exposed to the thing that threatens them. Their kids fine.

The kids are fine. The parents, on the other hand, maybe didn’t have some of these opportunities and are not taking advantage of them now they’re running from them to offer. I appreciate how the, particularly your first two seasons of How to Citizen brought this theme up that it’s hard to citizen when you can’t pay the bills.

You connected citizenship and well-being. I mentioned the triple ratchet that I’m really worried about how these forces in society of the pandemic sort of ganged up with climate change, ganged up with automation and have made it harder for some people to citizen. And I love how you took that on in your first couple of seasons.

I’d love to just talk about some episodes and see what it triggers. So you’re actually your very last episode, the bonus episode that you did with harassed, jazan, was on homelessness and how naming the problem and actually trying to get some data behind that problem. How important that is to activate real solutions.

That was a great, great episode. I’m glad you think so. I learned about a Ross’s organization. It’s a group called Community Solutions from my wife, Elizabeth. She’s been my co-conspirator in building this podcast was key in that thesis that is hard

to citizen if you can’t pay the bills, like the link between economic pressures and the things we perceive as tearing our society apart. We don’t always make that connection. So our Ross works with Community Solutions and they have an initiative called Built for Zero, which believes that homelessness is solvable and that we can achieve a functionally

zero level of homelessness. And they have this four step process, which starts with agreeing to what success is, what are we aiming for? And then agreeing to a shared set of data that gets to the person level to measuring and holding ourselves accountable, holding our leaders and ourselves accountable, which

in a democracy. And I loved his definition of being functionally zero is that homelessness should be rare. It should be very short in duration. And that shouldn’t be repeated. Like people shouldn’t be launched back in into the cycle.

And I loved how putting data behind this can get a community series about getting to functional zero. Yeah. I mean, we say that about a number that we could say that about incarceration. You know, we’d want it to be rare to have to fully separate someone from society.

Have it be brief, ideally, certainly not have it be a recurring feature of someone’s life or of our system around that life. And so yeah, being on how it should be all those things. And when you have some of our leaders who don’t, they don’t have a definition of success. They don’t have a rec or updated set of data about how we’re doing.

Then the rest of us are left with fear, you know, and other emotions to drive our perceptions and our decisions. And it’s usually better to have data drive perceptions and good information drive decisions. But too often in this, we don’t, we don’t have that. So yeah, our ass was a great guest.

I loved having him on. You’ve had a number of episodes that have really taken on the wealth gap. I appreciated your conversation with Heather McGee, the author of The Sum of Us. Yeah, Heather. I’ve known Heather for a while, mostly from a distance, but we’ve been in the same rooms

a few times. We met up at a conference once. I’m like, you’re just, you’re just cool. We just hang out and her book really, you know, talks about this, this bad deal that we’ve made here in the U.S. that says, you know, we have a zero sum society that if someone

else gains, then we must lose. And then the, the someone else has been, you know, people of color, particularly black people and the we has been white people. And so we struck this bargain to, to maintain that racial hierarchy, even against the interests of a majority of white people who might have gotten more power if they also aligned with

black people in historic moments. And but she highlights some, some possibilities of still pulling that off. And the, the good we can all experience if we work together, she calls this the solidarity dividend. But her, so her historical analysis and her hopeful picture of what’s still possible are

very much aligned with my belief system and what I’ve perceived to be true and also possible. And there’s sometimes a distinction between those two things. But I like to hold both because just being focused on truth and, and some of that’s very devastating can be pretty immobilizing. So we, you know, being focused on what’s possible is a big part of Heather’s work that

I appreciate. Do you remember the episode you did with Tanika Johnson, the folded map project? I’ll never, I mean, I don’t want to pick favorites. All 41 of my podcast babies are my favorite. But Tanika is in the top percentile one, because I found out about her from a listener.

And that meant we were doing something right, you know, because they only knew the spirit of the show. We laid out these principles that define what we think citizen as a verb means. And somebody hit me up on social media and said, you got to find out about Tanika Johnson. She’s a Chicago resident and she put together this public and participatory art project

called Folded Map, which takes the corresponding address system. Chicago is a grid. And there’s Northside and Southside, and there’s often a corresponding street address that’s the North and the South version. And she finds the residents, let them find each other through her platform, her art,

her website, and they meet and they ask and answer a shared set of questions and they start, they fold the map, which also just as a sort of future sci-fi, Star Trek kind of fan folding space time, you know, jumping across a great distance by cheating in that way. I like that part of it. I like the advanced physics of map folding as a way to close great distances.

It’s a beautiful example of art plus tech plus hosting a conversation, right? And making the evident plane. It was it was a really beautiful thing. What else she does that I aspire to and appreciate in others is helps people, helps us see us. I think, you know, we are in, we’ve had rhetoric and propaganda and sort of political and even

economic messaging that helps us, you know, not see the most of who we are, just see a little part of ourselves or only reflect back to us the part that is exploitable, that makes us want to buy more stuff that we don’t need or shows us the part that makes us feel superior to someone else as opposed to connected to someone else. And so her work in letting residents of Chicago see the other side of themselves, but still

see a Chicagoan, you know, still see an American still see a human. That’s really powerful, emotional and the existential work, I think. And with the algorithms that define so much of our realities now, reflecting back to us, just little monetizable parts of ourselves. Oh, it looks like you’re interested in slippers.

Here’s a 500th slipper ad in a row, even though we know you already bought slippers because we’re tracking you like that. That’s not a useful reflection. It’s a really broken mirror. So I think her reflection is more useful, more whole and more beautiful.

On that front of building better public systems, Eli Periser came on and talked about he has a beautiful design framework for better public digital spaces. Yeah, Eli is the homie. I’ve known Eli for a very long time through a lot of his transitions. Eli is the founder of MoveOn, helped create Upworthy, wrote a book about the filter bubble

and online spaces, and is now partnered in a new organization called New Public, which is doing some of what you described here, helping us create digital spaces that are not merely commercial and a shortcut to understand like, why do we need a digital public space? So in the physical world, the analog to what we’ve done online is we’ve taken all of our activities, our sex life, our spiritual life, our civic life, and we’ve had it all play

out in the mall. We do all of it in the mall. We go to church inside of a mall. We date inside of a mall and we talk politics and decide public policy inside of a private mall.

And malls weren’t built for that. They were built to take your money. And that’s what the online versions are doing. They’re taking our money, but they’re also taking away some of our power to determine what we want, just even the emotional experience.

And so thinking about a public park, a public library, the types of interactions we have there, how they make us feel emotionally, who we interact with, what sorts of things go down there versus what happens in a mall is a really quick shorthand for like, oh, we could do some other stuff with the tech. All tech doesn’t have to be a mall.

Let me tell you a quick story. So I listened to this episode while I was traveling to this little town of Linwood. It’s west of Kansas City, Kansas. And so I’m listening to Eli talk about better public spaces. And I met 43 freshmen that are working with their town to plan and provision and name

a public park. So it’s a beautiful thing. Imagine high school freshmen in an English and Social Studies class, they’re spending all their time in these six different groups, planning this park with the city council. It was a beautiful example of what high school could be and inviting young people into provisioning

this public space. And it sort of brought to life what Eli is trying to do in the digital space. Well, that’s a beautiful example because we’re rarely, I think many of us, really rarely have the experience of being asked what we want this to be like. You know, nobody asked me what I wanted my Facebook experience to be like.

It was pushed on me pretty aggressively. No one asked me what I want Twitter to be like. You know, no one asked me what I want. There’s so many things that we just get dropped into or dragged into. And it’s commercial pressure.

It’s peer pressure. They reinforce each other because there’s commercial pressure to create peer pressure. That’s how investors get rewarded. And that’s not all evil. That’s not all bad.

It’s just that there’s more than just that. And so the idea of these kids designing their park, it’s like, well, how do you want to use it? Do you want to skateboard in there? Do you want to pond in there?

Do you want benches? You know, will there be swings, bird feet? Like there’s so many interesting choices and they get to play with, well, what are our needs? What do we already have?

What do we like to try? And then negotiating with other people who might want different things. You know, like that’s the whole game right there. Now, how do we live together with difference? That’s the point of democracy.

All right, this one’s going to make you smile. Audrey Tang, digital minister of Taiwan. The most mind blowing guest by a mile. It was crazy amazing. I’m glad you picked up on it.

So Audrey Tang is the digital minister of Taiwan. It’s a cabinet level position. Audrey started as an agitator, a civic hacker and a bit of a revolutionary in a very small d-democratic society where young people took over the parliament. Kind of like our January 6 minus the violence and the pooping in the halls and modeled what

they thought parliament should be doing in terms of debating this very controversial bill. They debated in place of the politicians and they live streamed it. And all these hackers who had been working on the outside to develop partially technological solutions to some of the challenges of living in Taiwanese society became the government.

And Audrey is, you know, really interesting representative of what’s possible with technology, meeting democracy in a formal like civic political space, you know, not in the library, in the halls of government and in the halls of power, but still with the people. And Audrey is a poet and just has these radically like radical ideas packaged in simple statements. Like participation should be fast and fair.

Yeah, fast, fair and fun. That’s just, I mean, I want my DMV experience to be fast, fair and fun. I want trying to reach my member of Congress or the assembly to be fast, fair and fun. I want, you know, access to the park to be fast, fair and fun or, you know, engaging with the school system, you know, to be fast, fair and fun.

And it can be. It can be. So Audrey is great. And yeah, just the vision for the future that they have. Super super super cool.

My head hurt at the end of that conversation. It was really, I was just like, oh, because the other things I’m like, I like this, this season that Audrey is a part of is our third season is focused on technology. I have a above average background in tech and I grew up in a household with computers. My mom was a programmer and I’ve been around, you know, 44.

I’ve been around since the birth of the internet. I’ve been online since almost the beginning of that. So I can hang, you know, in conversation with a tech person and Audrey just kept pushing and pushing. And it was just like, I mean, we, we edited.

Like your conversations here. So there’s even, I should put out the raw, actually the raw version is public because one of the conditions of getting that interview with Audrey is that we had to open source the conversation and have the full unedited version available to the public and particularly to the people of Taiwan.

So it’s on the digital minister’s website in Taiwan. Yeah. We’re talking about how does citizen, uh, Baratunde Thurston’s podcast, Baratunde, you have four pillars of what it means to citizen. What are those?

Uh, briefly, as I can, number one is to citizen is to show up and participate. And this is just about presuming that you have a role to play and that it’s an active like if you’re using a sports metaphor, citizen is an active sport. So get in the game. Number two is that we invest in relationships with ourselves, with others and with the planet

around us. Uh, and this is about valuing interdependence. A lot of talk about being alone and our individual freedoms, but to citizen is necessarily a collective endeavor. It’s a team sport.

It was taking the sports and relationships, you know, with ourselves, we start there because a lot of times we skip how we feel about a thing before we dive into it. Uh, what, what we worry about with it, what our interest or our stake is with others and with the planet because we’ve separated ourselves so effectively and, and devastatingly from the planet around us.

And all life, you know, is important and supports life. We’re in this mutual system here. We actually, we literally need trees. It’s not being a tree hugger is hugging yourself. It’s not some distant, you know, luxurious thing.

We should all hug a tree and at least be conscious of its contribution to our ability to breathe. So that relationship one is really important. The third pillar is about power and it’s to understand power and become fluent in it. Understand the many different ways we can wield it and use it and not be afraid of it. This was really inspired heavily by Eric Liu, our second ever guest from citizen universities

been doing this work for a long time. And the last pillar is really a cumulative pillar. It’s you know, use all these use all the above in service of the many, not just the few value in the collective, not, not just the individual self. And that kind of comes back to one of our first guests, our literal first guest Valerie

Core, author of Ceno Stranger, who’s, you know, posited that a stranger is just a part of me I do not yet know. And so there’s a nice little mind trick there, you know, if, if someone else is really just me, then if I help them, I’m helping myself. And it’s an enlightened self interest as Eric would call it.

So I think, you know, we have a particularly extremist interpretation of self. We extreme on a lot of interpretations in the US of a free speech on gun access. But on the power of the individual and the primacy of the individual above everything else, there’s a cost to that. There’s a lot of benefits to it as well.

I don’t ignore it, but I’m trying to balance it some. I think our project has helped me see ways in which it needs to be balanced and which that balance can be good for all of us. Let’s talk about education. Where does school fit in?

How do you think now about the purpose of education and what, what is, where does learning how to citizen show up in that? Yeah. Or a two days definition? I think I mean, schools are training grounds for, for many skills that we need.

Sometimes they’re technical and literal. Training grounds for arithmetic and literacy of all kinds and writing and geography and the particular lessons. It’s good to be able to understand the world and navigate. But I also think they can be training grounds for how we show up.

You know, our world is going through a lot of changes. And with that change, there’s fewer constants. It’s less to hold on to. So we hold on to principles. We hold on to ideals.

We hold on to a sense of purpose that can shift with what type of industry is the number one revenue producing industry at a time. Even borders can be in fluctuation and we can still feel like we are shared people. I think schools are an important arena in which to forge that collective identity, that sense of belonging and that sense of responsibility.

You know, an ownership of and responsibility to each other. And we get to play around with that. We get to practice that. I also think it’s a good place for folks to practice not knowing. I think schools should be a safe place to not know.

Literally it should be the safest place to not know something is in a school because then we get to learn. And that’s the mission. It’s a safe, it should be a safe place to be wrong. It should be a safe place to be uncertain and to air things out and to contend with each

other and wrestle with things. And so, you know, an educator probably shouldn’t be in the business of convincing necessarily, but in enabling people to come to reasonable conclusions, sound conclusions based on a combination of factors that include, but are not limited to logic and evidence, but also emotion and relationship because we’re doing this with other people.

And we got feelings involved. We got hormones involved at different stages of this game. And so how we navigate all that, like schools are big laboratories for how we do all this. And they teach us whether they want to or not. And we learn many things that are not formally in the curriculum.

I know that was my experience. I went to public schools and private schools. I learned lessons that were unintended. And I learned some that were, you know, in the reading list. And both types of lessons were valuable.

Do you have a sense as young people sort of move into high school and become of legal age to a couple of experiences that you’d love to see high school students have that might make citizen more of a verb to them? I mean, I think having people in school design their own class, like when we have ownership over the outcomes, you know, over our own experience, we’re literally more invested.

You know, if you become a shareholder of a company, you’re more invested. If you become, you know, member of your neighborhood, you know, community center or something like that, your neighborhood watch, your homeowner’s association, something on those lines, you care, your church board. And so I think, you know, what often happens and was definitely a point of frustration

when I was a child is, you know, adults often forgot that we’re people. And some of them treated us as if we were vessels to be filled with knowledge and information. And then we produce test scores and grades that will make them feel validated so that we can become further accepted by another institution down the line so that they can feel validated and then we can show up economically useful.

That’s a real low bar. I mean, that is a school, but it’s not a very great one. And I think, you know, giving students the chance to practice creating their experience will have them more invested in that experience. I sit on the board of an organization called Build and it’s focused on entrepreneurship

as a key to learning. And it’s very participatory. It’s about communications and grit and team building. And basically, you know, high school freshmen have to come up in teams with a business. It can be any business, meet some kind of need.

It could be a sneaker cleaning business. It could be a cell phone holder, a hands free cell phone holders. You can walk and tick tock and also eat at the same time, which I’ve literally seen some kids come up with. Those are the problems, real problems in their lives that they wanted to solve and they wanted

to test to see if somebody paid anything for this. That’s a really valuable experience and it helps them show up in math class, you know, and in rhetoric class and in all these other forms because it’s useful. And I think, you know, the other thing I’d hope for for any school is, you know, allowing these students a chance to practice and see the real world version.

I mean, the amount of skills I’ve needed in life that school had nothing to do with. That gap is way too big, man. Way too big. I love that definition. I’m happy to say that I’m seeing more of this, at least more people talking about inviting

young people to co-author experiences and learning journeys. I’m excited to see more entrepreneurship, education, more encouragement for social impact in schools. As we close, I want a couple more questions. One is, who’s one person that helped you begin to see citizenship as a verb?

I mean, it’s very obvious to me, but my mother, she encouraged me to question authority. I think that’s an important part of showing up, important part of understanding and exercising power, challenging what feels like power, you know, in whatever your context is, could be school. I definitely questioned a lot in school.

I was very irritating to my teachers and administrators and I’d wear that as a badge of honor. If you are that teacher or that administrator, you should be really grateful if your students are showing up questioning things, questioning the integrity of the system, the consistency of the rules, the validity of the rules, the relevance of the rules.

Why are we teaching this? Why are we not teaching that? That means they care. Sometimes it means they just don’t want to work, but even if they don’t, it’s because they care about how much they work.

My mother encouraged me to question authority and I think that was a really key element of this verb version of citizen. I also think she showed a lot of what I just absorbed. We did weekly community service in the local soup kitchen and on the meal wagon. We donated.

We explored the outdoors. We were members of the Sierra Club. We went to rallies and also to festivals and parades. We read the newspaper and listened to the news. We were informed locally.

We interacted with people across generations. I saw her debating. I think she modeled this and she wasn’t at every other moment looking over her shoulders. See, this is citizen. Here’s what I want you to do.

She was just being her. I think that’s often an overlooked element of teaching. Many people are engaged in education that are not formally trained as educators, but we can learn from anybody. I learned a lot from my mother in terms of informing me about what citizen as a verb,

what that could look like, what that could feel like. I have gathered a couple insights for Ed Leader from our conversation. The first one is to host the conversation, to be in relationship with the people that you serve and invite conversation. The second is what we just finished on is invite young people to co-author learning

experiences to invite entrepreneurship, to invite social impact. Would you add another insight for Ed Leaders? I mean, I think it’s useful for education leaders amongst themselves, but also in relationship and conversation with their students, their parents, the wider community. What is your goal?

What are you hoping to get out of this? What are you worried about losing out of this? What are you afraid of? And what do you hope for? It’s maybe an even simpler way to distill it.

I think a lot of meetings could kick off with that and change the tone immediately. What do you hope for? Don’t tell me what you’re upset about first. Tell me what you hope for. Now tell me what you’re afraid of.

Now tell me what you came here to say. And taking a deep breath before initiating any of that is just a process point. I think it’s useful in meeting conversations just among teachers. Teachers have fears too, and they’re often not allowed to express them because they’re supposed to be holding up society on their backs and having all the answers because you’re

the teacher. Well, you’re also a human, so you can’t have all the answers. So what are you afraid of? What do you hope for? What do you need?

And rehumanizing educators and humanizing the students and humanizing these parents out here, some of whom have lost their humanity. Maybe they’d be excited to rediscover it in answering a question like that. We’ve been talking to Baratunde Thurston, the host of How to Citizen and a keynote at Upcoming South by Southwest.

Baratunde, it’s been a treat. It’s heavy on the podcast. Thanks. Thank you. I mean, I feel like the title is working.

I feel smarter than when we started. So I feel like I’ve gotten smart. Holding up your promise. Thank you so much, Tom, for the invitation and for the great conversation. And thanks, everybody, for listening.

Thanks to our producer, poet, music-making, bread-making producer, Mason Pasha. And for the rest of you, keep innovating for equity. We’ll see you next week. Thanks for tuning into the Getting Smart podcast today. We want this podcast to be actionable and insightful and a great way to learn about

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