Baratunde Thurston: Humans, Machines & Democracy

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher. Welcome to the FoST Podcast. My guest today is an old friend, Baratunde Thurston. Longtime members of the future of storytelling community will remember him from our FoST Summit where he lit up the stage with his trademark mix of wit, wisdom, and warmth. Baratunde is a writer, comedian, activist, and one of the most thoughtful observers of the intersection between technology, democracy, and culture. Since we last sat down together, Baratunde has hosted How to Citizen, a podcast exploring our collective power and the word citizen as a verb. He’s explored our relationship with nature through his PBS show, America Outdoors. And now he hosts Life with Machines where he examines what it means to live well alongside artificial intelligence. Baratunde uniquely sees all of this work of his coming together to form a profound question. How do we live well with technology, with each other, and with the planet?

We dig into the weeds of this question today as we talk about AI, agency, and democracy. Baratunde reminds us that the future isn’t something that just happens to us. It’s something we create together. I hope you enjoy my conversation with my friend, Baratunde Thurston.

Baratunde, welcome to the Future of StoryTelling, man. So good to have you back.

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

Charlie, it’s good to be back. It’s been years, and thank you for having me. And hi. Hi.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Hi. So fun. We have a history. You came and helped emcee and bring down the house at Future StoryTelling Summit, for which I am forever grateful and will always remember you as a hero.

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

Ooh, I like hero. Thank you.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So good to have you here. You’ve done amazing stuff since I’ve seen you last. You continue to innovate in the world of storytelling and do it with your own particular passions and blends. And so give us a quick update on the steps since I’ve seen you last.

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

The steps. For most people, they won’t know me, and I just always got to give credit to at least partially where I’m from. I’m the son of a woman named Arnita Thurston, a man named Arnold Robinson. My mom was a computer programmer. She was also a rabble rouser in the streets. She loved the people. She loved the planet. She took me on hikes, and it’s because of her in so many ways that where I’ve landed is telling stories of how we live well together, how we do it with the earth, with each other, and with the machines. I have launched this podcast called How To Citizen, where citizen is a verb and we take democracy as something we do, not just something we have. And we spent several years and seasons celebrating stories of people in the deep practice of democracy, including but far beyond voting for other people.

Then I was presented with an amazing opportunity with PBS to leave the home Zoom studio and go out and touch grass and climb mountains and fly, literally fly through many means and tell stories through the series called America Outdoors. And that would continue with another series called Hope in the Water. And so really getting grounded again in our relationship with Earth in my own body, in my own sense of spiritual, natural everything. And then ChatGPT happened to us. So my primary storytelling now within this trifecta is a show called Life with Machines, exploring how do we live well with tech and not just endure it.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

One of the things that I love about your storytelling is that you’re willing to take on the accepted truths. You’re willing to touch on tough topics and look at them with fresh eyes, but always with a little humor, with curiosity, with a bit of an activist’s heart and with empathy. And I know that one of your core beliefs is that not all technological progress is good, is for the better. Yeah. That’s a sacred cow, man. A lot of people are just like, “No, no, all good. All tech is for the better.”

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

I think that it’s no longer a sacred cow to challenge that primacy of technology. We’re in this really split world where there is still a potent, loud group that wants to believe that, and I think has literally a trillion dollars worth of reasons why they have to believe it because they owe some investors 10 trillion or a hundred trillion dollars based on all the debt and equity that they’ve issued on a promise that is unclear at best. There’s that camp. And then there’s a very reactionary camp, which is like, “Oh, hell no.” And so it’s not even curious about anything having to do with technology. They want record players, they want in-person meetups, they want handwritten essays. And then the vast majority of us, we’re in between those poles living on the rest of earth, the majority of earth, trying to figure out, “Okay, but what do we really want?

And what’s actually possible? And how do you separate the hype from the unfounded fear mongering? But also we should probably be a little bit afraid.” And so I think we’re in a time of a certain type of nuance being called for in addition to clarity. And very importantly, because when you and I met, I was heavy in my. I was probably at The Onion or just leaving. I was doing satire through cultivated wit. And I think satire is like a public service right now. Ridicule is absolutely called for in these very absurd moments where tiny, tiny groups of people, some of whom with tiny imaginations do want to impose a certain vision and a certain story on the rest of us. And at the same time, we have such potential to tell a story ourselves. And I’m here for that. I’m here for that collective authoring of a future that we want.

I maintain the optimism even though, and maybe especially because I’ve been burned along with the rest of us, and I think we’ve learned some lessons.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Okay. Well, so let’s dig in a little bit on AI. So do you feel like this is just purely a negative tool or are you somebody who still sees the benefits and the positives and the negatives? And where would you like to see it go?

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

Yeah, it’s not purely a negative tool. I see positives and I see negatives. But I think more important than seeing AI as technology, I see it as power. I see it as a set of choices that particular humans have made to develop it in a certain way. The large language models become the default stand-in for what AI is. It is so much more than that. A requirement for massive amounts of energy, computation, and dollars or any currency has become a baseline sort of unchallenged sacred cow of what it takes to create AI. And even within the common understanding of chatbots and generative AI, there is so much good that can be done. Here’s an example. You like stories. Let’s get out of the abstract. I live in Palm Springs, California in the Coachella Valley. For the second year running, we have hosted a community technology gathering.

The principal organizer is my neighbor, Peter Laforte, a veteran alum of Microsoft who has seen what’s been coming and decided he was less interested in more personal gain for what’s happening with AI than in a collective response. How do I prepare my neighbors for this moment? And so this gathering features 20% of the attendees are students, like the school district, the community college, college of the desert, small businesses, the governments, plural, local governments and residents. And one example of what emerged from this is that small businesses ahead of this gathering raised their hands and said, “I have tech challenges. I have business operations challenges, and I would love some help from my neighbors in solving those.” So I witnessed and participated a little bit in neighbors helping neighbors build their own solutions. The local zoo showed up with a problem and people love the zoo out here.

It’s the living desert zoo. They got all kind of crazy animals. And so to be able to use these tools in this lateral way, a mutual aid kind of vibe, that’s the level of invitation that I’m trying to extend in the way I talk about this technology moment. And we can craft a different narrative around it and we can do it together. So that’s what I’m interested in.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

That’s beautiful. And congratulations. That’s amazing. But you are using the existing tools and they’re trained on certain set of LLMs and —

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

They’re trained on my book.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

On a lot of people’s IP. How do you feel about that? I mean, how do we make. Because there’s a bias in that. There’s also a kind of repetitiveness or a lack of originality. How do we address the core technology in a way that’s human and socially minded?

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

I think some of what you’re speaking to has to do with literal capabilities, performance outputs. I think there’s an additional layer of morality and we’re implicated in the limitations on both fronts. On the capabilities, I am extremely humble. We have in the past three years seen prediction after prediction of what AI will not be able to do be overturned. Not by a court decision, but by a model’s capabilities. It’ll never do this. It’ll never sound like that. You’ll never, and everybody’s wrong. So as much as I would love to stand proudly upon a hill of humanity with quotation marks around it and what our unique capabilities are or our unique talents of distinguishing and discernment are, we are going to be in a role where we can’t tell. We are going to be moved by art, spewed forth by what a lot of people call AI slop.

That’s a conundrum, and that’s the world we’re going to be entering. And for some of us, we’re already in it. So capability-wise, I think we have a whole body of work to redefine what we’re trying to protect here. If we’re going up against machines in a race for output, we will lose, but we shouldn’t be in that race. And I think we have to clarify for ourselves, what is our life about? What are our lives about? Why are we here? I’m here for experiences. I’m here for meaning. I’m here for the subjective truth that I know that I experienced something. There’s a felt truth that a machine can never optimize us away from. Then the morality side of this, what is it like to use these tools that are predicated on the mass leveraging, if I’m being kind, on the mass theft, if I’m being more direct of a lot of people’s work and intellectual property.

They literally stole our journal entries. They stole our type pads and live journals and bloggers and product reviews and Reddit posts. In my case, book, collectively books and research. There’s so much of all of us in there. We are all shareholders. We are all co-founders. We are all at a minimum contributors to this thing. And let’s work out legally, regulatorily, morally, financially, better accountability and literal accounting for that. But in the meantime, I don’t feel a deep betrayal in every moment that I use these. I try to use them well and I try to hold the contradiction. Maybe I’m just really good at fancy self-justification. I acknowledge I’ve chosen a life where I kind of have to use these tools so it’s in my interest to have a story for myself that makes it okay.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

That you can live with.

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

Yeah. Yeah. And I do believe it. It’s not just like, “I’m going to say this to Charlie and I hope nobody really checks my heart”. If you could scan my heart, oh, this dude really believes it. So take it as that heartfelt at least.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So how do you propose that we use technology to build more community, more connectivity? So much of what we consume does tend to enrage us, alienate us, polarize us, make us feel lonely and angry. What’s Baratunde’s approach to just the opposite, make us feel together and connected?

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

I think an older version of me and certainly a more techno-solutionist version that still prevails in Silicon Valley in that way of thinking is here’s how you design the app to do that. What we really need is a technical platform that scans people for their will, finds the overlapping wills, finds just enough distance between wills. And that’s what got us into this mess. So ask yourself, what do you want in your life? How do you want to feel? What is the experience that you value and that you’re trying to have? Then ask that question with someone else. Ask it with your partner, ask it with your child, ask it in your classroom, ask it in your fucking standup meeting at work. Ask it in a neighborhood commission gathering. What do we want? What are our needs? How can we meet those needs together? We’ve got to identify ourselves first.

The machines can also be helpful in that process of collective kind of mutual discovery, helping us coordinate amongst ourselves and then build the stuff we actually want to build. Build the stuff that we’ve said we need built. We also need robust legal, regulatory, capital infrastructure to support this type of decision-making and follow through. Literally every other area of life, we’ve decided to maintain the balance. We need enforcement mechanisms, we need transparency. So this world that I want with tech that I think a lot of us want, we just need to treat it like every other part of life with the same respect and with the same humility.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

As a storyteller, how are you using AI?

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

Yeah. One of the projects I’m involved with right now is this multi-world collaboration, Life with Machines. We’ve gotten more clear and a bit, I’d say more strident in offering up a point of view and not just sit down interviews about what AI might mean. And so I’m doing this monthly satirical technology column called superficial intelligence. I didn’t start it, but I’ve sort of inherited, I’ll sit in this chair for at least a couple of months and get to pop off satirically about what’s happening with tech and the business world. But I purposefully just start with the blankest of pages and I need to sit quietly and feel who do I need to make fun of right now? Who gets it? Where’s the joke?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Who deserves it?

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

The model that it needs to move through is my body and it needs to move through a collective intelligence of a type of humanity. AI has no real place in that. I do love anything that has to do with the infrastructure and system support around storytelling just to organize my creativity. I use a software called Obsidian, which does really great linking between ideas. What I learned is that I do think with my mouth, maybe you’re feeling that right now. Maybe someone listening to this is like I’m inside this dude’s brain. It’s like when the model says “reasoning” and it goes on — like, that’s me. They took that from me. But what it means is sometimes the preferred medium of first draft is audio. And so I’ll just do a voice memo and then I’ll give it to the machine and say, “Clean this up so I can have something on the page to react to.” And then I rewrite and edit that. And it’s really fun and it’s really weird to experiment.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

You have written about agency.

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

Oh yeah.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

It’s a word that gets a lot of play these days. And often it’s talking about the AI and the tech having agency. But anyway, tell me your thinking around that word and how else to think about it.

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

Thank you for bringing that up. Agentic AI is very popular. It’s talking about these machines who can do things without human supervision. But a promise of a lot of the salespeople of AI is it’ll expand human agency. It’ll empower you. And that’s good. I’m definitely for empowerment and I’m definitely for more human agency. I’m also for clear definitions of what words mean. And generally speaking, what these salespeople have in mind is more skills, more capabilities. AI lets you, Charlie, get more done in your day. You can process more emails. I mean, you can generate more Google Docs. You will essentially increase your output for the system and be a better worker for someone else’s reward. That’s the unspoken part. That’s the quiet part. And AI is power. Power is politics. And that’s not about elections, that’s about how we decide what happens, how we shape our world.

And so power in this context, at least to me, means choice, means control, means community. It means we have to have meaningful choice, not just a choice of which millionaire, of which venture-backed entity. It’s not much of a choice. I need a choice of nonprofit. I need a choice of for-profit. I need a choice of B Corp. I need these types of features. And the choice to say no. No, thank you. That’s choice. I need to be able to control my representation in these systems, i.e. Don’t scan my book without my permission. That’s agency. And most important, community, that the salespeople through their need to fulfill the kind of prime directive of today’s capitalism, they need us to be alone in this. They need me figuring it out separate from you. They need me having my own subscription separate from you. And if I’m over here figuring this out by myself and I feel in competition with you, that’s good for the current version of the system and it’s not good for society.

And so multiplayer mode, that’s single player mode, I want multiplayer mode. We’re groups of people figure this stuff out together. We should experience these tools together. We should bang our heads against them and criticize them together. And that gives us the depth of perception required to really understand what’s going on. That’s agency and that’s what we should be fighting for. And that’s what I think we can have more of, but we got to know what we’re actually looking for. Otherwise, we will settle for like, “Oh, I can write my emails faster.” And we won’t question why do we value more email? Who does that benefit?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I’m really with you. I think that what we actually want is more human agency, not more computer agency or AI agency. We want to have more choice and control in our lives. And I think about this and wrote about it in my book, but this idea that when we’re used to being passive consumers of our media, it teaches us that we are passive. It prepares us to not feel like we can make a difference in the world. But if you are actively participating in your stories, if you’re actively participating in your life, honestly, then the lesson is you have agency. You have the ability to make a difference. You have the ability to show up and change things. And I think that a lot of our media has taught us subconsciously that we’re kind of impotent, where we don’t have the right or the power.

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

And the beauty of this moment of collapse that we’re in, which by the way, we’re in a moment of collapse. Empire is falling. All these incumbent institutions and systems, they are clearly not up to it. Millions of people are being hurt right now because of these systems. And some folks are getting paid heavily in the short term off of that and it won’t last. The earth is screaming at us. This cannot last. The business model of capitalism screaming, this will not last. We are setting ourselves up for revolutionary conditions of such hyperpolarization and inequality. And that doesn’t have to be resolved in an actual violent revolution, but it does have to resolve and change. And so this idea of being passive, I think a lot of people are waking up. They realize what passivity has gotten us. Blind faith that democracy will just be there is not a good way to sustain a democracy.

It leaves it to the active people who want to contort it to their will to define the whole thing and capture all of it. So folks are figuring out different ways. You got the mutual aid societies, community developed this, grassroots, that. All kind of innovative stuff is happening. And I think in the world of storytelling, that’s also true. There’s a huge collapse that’s happening of all these older models of storytelling systems, and it’s real painful for people making livelihoods. And there’s a much better way to tend to that transition than what some of these folks are advocating who are profiting from it. And we are going to see the emergence of so much brilliant stuff. We are going to see combinations of voices that were not possible because no human ever thought that put them in the same room or no human ever thought they had anything valuable to say. And now people don’t have to wait for permission. So that’s the part of it. It’s not guaranteed, but it is possible. It is still possible for all of this chaotic breakdown to actually be laying fertile ground for us to grow something that’s really worthy of us.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

What do you think about the collapse of a common narrative? A lot of people talk about our polarization now is because we no longer all buy into a story about our country.

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

Yeah. There’s an interest in having a narrative that divides for some. There’s just a profit in that. That’s part of why. I think the common narrative that some of us pine for and long for wasn’t actually very common. That common narrative had a basis in white supremacy, had a basis in male chauvinism. And so it’s common if you’re in that set and control enough resources to kind of suppress everybody else’s narrative.

And when that starts to fade, the truth of some of the fragmentation emerges because you never tended to it. You just kept moving on as if we weren’t in pain. But I do think there’s something changing underneath of all that. I think people are certainly hungry for something that brings us back together. I think a lot of us feel the exhaustion of just battle narrative. We’re in the 250 for the United States of America. America’s a story more than many other things. It is territory and with some boundary that nature doesn’t recognize, but our political institutions generally do. But it’s largely like a set of agreements and words. America’s an idea and it’s a story that we keep telling ourselves so much that we believe it and we’ll pick up muskets to separate the story of us from the story of them. But part of the defining story that’s colonial is we’re not nature.

We’re not earth. We’re not animal. We’re not these other forms of life. We own those things. We dominate those things. We’re not African. We’re not poor. We’re not this. We’re not. And that shit don’t work anymore. It’s really insufficient to the moment. There’s too many people not thriving, not happy, not connected, not sleeping well. And so there’s got to be a reckoning with some of that origin in terms of that common story of who we are and an acknowledgement of what was here before is the more indigenous way of thinking about democracy.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Which is a perfect segue to the book that you just wrote the forward for, American Indigenous Democracy. So just tell us quickly about that.

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

Yeah. So listen, the website is americanindigenousdemocracy.com. And I think if you hear that, just remember that and type it in or have your agent type it for you but look at it yourself. Don’t have your AI scan it. You need to see this with your body or sense it with your senses at least. This is a book that is a collection of essays, oral histories. It’s an anthology reminding us all of the story of how democracy has existed on this land long before any European arrived to this land through the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Six Nations of Mohawk, Onadaga, Onaida, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora, and their relationship with the founders, their invitation to the colonists and settlers to live under the great law of peace. I had a limited understanding of America’s founding story. And I learned within the past three years about the richness, robustness of really deeply practiced democracy that was offered to our founders with principles of women at the center of governance and reciprocal relationship with nature.

Peace as the highest calling of government. And hearing those things and feeling those things, it just changes what’s possible. There is a longest running democracy on this planet. It is not the United States of America. It is in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and other indigenous similar systems. And those principles are available to all of us. And as we’re all seeking something right now, as we’re looking for a bigger story that can kind of contain us and not always just pit us against each other, that can reconcile our need for independence with the truth of our interdependence. There’s some great models in all people, not just those specific nations, but all people who remain close to our actual mother, the earth. And the more we see ourselves in that kind of peer relationship, the more we acknowledge our withness rather than our aboveness, then I think the more we can come to something that feels like a common story and that we can find ways to live better together and still maintain ourselves.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Baratunde, I so appreciate you as a storyteller in creating the kinds of stories that help us imagine and realize the future that we’d like to all have. So thank you brother for doing all of that and sharing it and keep spreading those stories. And by the way, also finding those amazing people. I mean, that’s the other thing you do. You’re giving voice to others as well all the time, so.

BARATUNDE THURSTON:

I’m like a scout. I’m like a little story scout and I’m just out here. And maybe that’s under something. I mean, I have my own story to tell, but I find there’s so much more power in pairing it with and linking it with others. And it’s hard for me to separate my own story from those that I’ve experienced. And I think that’s my own dance with, well, I’m independent. Yes, I am. There’s a Baratunde. And I’m clearly in this deep conversation and interdependence with all that I’ve encountered and lived and want to celebrate and incorporate. And thank you for inviting me into this. Thanks for riffing with me on all this stuff. It’s really fun to think out loud and banter and hear some of what you’re seeing and just seeing what FoST has evolved into as well. Looking forward to listening more and reading the books and enjoying the experiences once again, so happy reunion.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Once again, I’m Charlie Melcher and this has been the FoST Podcast. My thanks to my friend Baratunde for our conversation and to you, our listeners, for tuning coming in today. To learn more about Barret Tunde, check out his Substack and podcast Life With Machines. To join the FoST community of creative leaders who are shaping cutting edge storytelling today, please check out our FoST Explorers Club. You’ll get access to exclusive speaker sessions, curated trips, and events. For more information, visit our website at fost.org. The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe. Stay strong and story on.