And I

was going to ask you, which is a verb. Where does the L word love come into this? But you've already gone there. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, citizen as a verb is something that emerged in many ways, for me, at least from a lot of the life we've touched on, a lot of the mom that that we've loved on. And even from the comedy world, you know, that I was a part of where I saw a lot of and participate in a lot of really great storytelling about how broken everything is. It's it's it's some of the greatest, you know, the things that get passed around on social. So and so destroys. Right. So there's like violence in comedy or, you know, just explain and breaking down why we're so broken down. And I wanted to kind of move forward a bit and tell the story of the the mending work that's happening and finding the people who I personally knew. I have a eclectic network based on the life I've lived and the people I've associated with. That said, everything I'm seeing on the news doesn't really match up to what I'm experiencing through my own relationships. And they're they kind of stop at the first half of the story. And and then our ways of addressing some of the brokenness are presented to us as very limited set of choices. We can buy things. We can vote for other people to fix the things. And then we can protest the people that we voted for when that didn't fix the thing or the purchases didn't solve the problem. So that was a lot of the energy going into the formation of how to citizen. And then with my wife Elizabeth during COVID, she came into it and workshop that. And and helped us ground this in a series of actual principles, not just that kind of that's a more vague high level poetry that I was coming into this with. And I've got feeling, but in between there, there's an articulation of what does that actually mean and what counts and what doesn't count and what is so we call them the four principles of the four pillars that was another birth out of my death valley. COVID.

And there's such a strange well, it's just this polarized way. It's the kind of hyper reactive of polarized time when habit, which I think I also don't think we stopped to just acknowledge that what we've just been through and that our bodies are aroused and overstimulated. Fear just we lived, we lived in fear, however, conscious or unconscious, we were every single one of us. Obviously there's a spectrum, but so that just amped everything up, amped up this quickness to leap to acting angry when actually you're terrified. Right. But I want to ask to just ask you about this because I come up against this, you know, you've used the word healing, mending. And there's often this sense in kind of public cultural spaces that justice and healing are kind of incompatible things, right? That you can't even talk about healing until there's justice. And then what is love coming to all of that, right? Like there's this kind of complex mix. I just wonder how you think about those things together in this work of

let me let me lay out briefly what these four pillars are. Yeah. I think that will help us find a way into love, justice and healing as simultaneous things we can experience. I think they kind of unlock each other sort of this circle. So we have these four things to citizen is to show up. Right. We just assume there's something for us to do and we don't always know what that is, but we have a kind of orientation toward put me in. I don't have to lead, but I have to be a part of the thing. Number two, to citizen is to invest in relationships with yourself, with others and with the planet around you. We have inherited a story of separation of all these things and they're actually all one. The quantum physicists will tell you that really in like a short sentence. So that myth busted. And there's a.

Yeah, but we inherited this fiction that we do that that we have internalized and

moved and it's in our bodies and it's in our stories and it's in our laws. And it's in our economics. All those things we made we can remake and unmake. That's the beauty of it. It's all fiction, actually. And so we just do a different fiction. So relationships at the center of this to citizen is to understand power. And all the different ways we have it. Eric Liu was one of our, I call him one of our founding guests, founder of Citizen University. He says, power is just the ability to get somebody to do what you want him to do. And we have different ways of doing that. Physical force is obvious money, especially in this society is pretty obvious. Ideas sharing them. You're very powerful, Krista. Right. Putting our attention on something. We give power to what we give attention to and we can choose within default settings and design incentives, but we have the power to choose what we give our power to with our attention. Fourth of four of these principles is to citizen is to value the collective. Right. We do all these things out of a sense of collective self interest, not just personal individual self interest. Valerie Core. Was our very first guest. For how to citizen. She is a spiritual leader in the sick community. S.I.K. H. For those who don't know, she is a civil rights lawyer. She is an activist. She leads a movement called the revolutionary love project. Yeah, I listened to that too. Yeah. And I just, the fact that you started our discussion with spirituality and we started our podcast project with Valerie. There's a lot of people out there doing civic engagement work. That's right. Yeah. And we did not go on their doors. I knew about Valerie. I saw this beautiful poem that she presented in what for many of us was a very dark moment after the 2016 election. She was on stage with Reverend William Barber and she said, what if the darkness that were ran is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb. And we can use this as an opportunity for new birth while we honor the death that we are experiencing. That still moves me. But so does her call to see a stranger as a part of ourselves. We do not yet know. And that's the premise of her book, C. No Stranger. We are each other. Love is at the center of that knowing each other and my amateur conception of self discovered elements of love, seeing ourselves as each other in Valerie's conception, which is inspired by King and Gandhi's subject and Audrey Lord and so many other people. That helps give life to this possibility. Yeah. Even in the midst of death. And so when we're in this moment of justice, healing, love, they support each other. And, you know, we have this tool, this process available to us of restorative justice. Yeah. It's restoration is healing. Right. We restore wetlands. We restore the financial health of a business. We restore our bodies through medicine and meditation and all the tools that are disposal. We can restore the relationship of one who has transgressed in society and restore their relationship and role in that society through a process. It's not just a switch. No, there's a record. There's a record to it. There's a record to it. There's honoring of the act of violation that happened. There's honoring of the humanity of the violator. They're seeing them as more than just that transgression, that violation, seeing them as possibility still to be among and with us that we are worth being a part of and that they are a part of us. That's all kind of love stuff in there. Yeah. And so, yeah, there is a lot of that orientation in the how the citizen work. We are finding people who exhibit these pillars and who have some deep love for their place. They are committed to their city. They do. There's a project in Seattle with architects who are trying to address this housing challenge we have in our nation. They didn't wait for the city council and wait for the developers. They got an ADU design additional dwelling unit and they say, raise your hand if you want to put one of these in your yard to help our unhoused neighbors be housed neighbors and so many people. They're doing that. They're citizens assemblies. Why haven't

I heard that? Because you haven't listened enough to our pockets. No,

that's ego, tuned, they're speaking. No, because we have a system that creates incentives to tell a vast minority of who we are. And we have opportunity to expand that. That's part of what I'm so motivated to do.

So great. This is a little bit of a detour, but we'll circle back to the end in a few minutes. I said, I think you as a social creative. You did say that. I actually sent something to my son who's 25 that you said in another interview and I did not write down where he said this. Which felt to me like good counsel on becoming a social creative. And he doesn't always respond to my texts. He wrote me right back and he said, love this. And he's 25 and he's asking all these questions you ask when you're 25. I've got one of my videos of my life. But anyway, so you said this. If you're just starting out, try a lot of things. And if you're going to try five things, make sure one of them is something you never thought you'd be interested in. Exposure has been the biggest lesson in my life. Not everything pans out into a job. A gig, money, accolades or respect. But there's usually something worth learning. Even in the pursuit of something you don't like. The greatest lever in my life has been exposure to variety. In the world that we have created for ourselves, nothing is stable. Nothing stands still in every 25 year old knows that right now. You can't just know a thing, master it and then rest on your ass. You could be great at something that won't exist tomorrow. Look at print journalism or the cable TV model. Things are crumbling around us and new things are emerging. There's a level of flexibility that should be built into whatever it is that you're doing. And constant exposure to things that are new, different, occasionally distasteful, or not obviously interesting is important. And I love that because this is also getting that kind of, you know, how you're crafting your life, your presence in the world. And this kind of approach to it also is going to make you a better citizen. Yeah, yeah.

And it's also, it's nature. Like exposure to variety is very valuable in the natural world. It comes to our immune strength, boosted by exposure to varieties of all kinds of organisms. Plant life, the metaphors scale up and they scale down. They're fractal in the Adrian Marie Blythe of the world, not just hers, but one that she's very good at talking about. I have not thought about that in a long time. Thanks for finding it. I don't remember where I said it either, but I do remember saying it. So Chad GPT didn't make that up. No. We'll talk about that next. But yeah, it's our opportunity in this instance and this level of the simulation on this timeline in America right now is to embrace the invitation to expose ourselves to difference in a generative way, in a loving way, in a collaborative way, so that we can live together better. I didn't use the word democracy in there, by the way. So. Right. It's a technical term. It's a label for a type of technology

perhaps. Yeah, what do you say is that democracy is a relational exercise though. I mean,

this is flexing that relational muscle. Exactly. And it will sometimes it's just tasteful. Yes. Sometimes it's uncomfortable. And we have established and doubled down on systems that ultimately come down to maximizing comfort. Yeah. The algorithms that feed us more of what we just bought, that encourage us to watch more of what we're doing. To watch more of what we've just seen and to meet people like the ones we already know. That is not exposing us to variety. That is not helping us live together because we live in a world of so much difference and increasing collision of that difference without the practice of navigating it. Yeah. Of sharing power. Of contesting power. In a generative fashion. Disagreement isn't the enemy. What's our process for moving through it? Can people still feel heard through that process such that even though they didn't get what they want. They have faith in the process, a.k.a. the institutions. Everybody's right. We're talking about we want to increase faith in the institution. Well, the institution has to earn that faith with a process that we can have faith in. You don't just demand failty. That's very authoritarian. That's very old world story. That's what John Alexander called the subject story. And then we have the consumer story to talk about. We just buy it. We buy all our needs. Our transaction solves it. The citizen story, which I believe and John writes about that we are increasingly in, says we encourage the participation, the facilitation, the working through and with process that allows us to live together and adapt. America's so funny. We're such a funny, funny country. In terms of our potential and like how we've held ourselves back from really realizing it. Fascinating experiment to have a true multiracial democracy. We still haven't done it. No. But we can do it. Now the trick of it is, you know, a lot of nations have existed due to honoring a single autocrat or authority, praying to the same God, having the same shade of skin in the same language. We don't have any of that. We have decreasing abilities to say that that's what we are. We have borders-ish, but that's a fiction. We have texts. We have documents. We have values. We have opportunities to recommit to each other for new reasons that we haven't even come up with yet. We can look back and be originalist or we can be creators together of what and why we want to be together. And the practice at doing that, even with our current differences and instability, will only serve us more because more instability is coming. The water is rising. The temperature is going up. More people of difference will emerge on this land and more people we thought were one thing will emerge as not quite that. Gender is a spectrum, right? We're dealing with we are multiplying even with the people we thought we knew. More difference. So we need to practice these muscles. We need to work this out. Not only that, though, we have

to practice them together alongside each other because this way of living this moment to be alive where we have to actually befriend uncertainty because that's what we've got. But that is so hard in a human body. And that's why I feel like it's really useful to say, how do I exercise these muscles, but this is not an individual. This is also not about us doing it in that fiction of separation. No, we... It's about us accompanying each other in this.

We can on paper have extraordinary wealth and resources and opportunity. And if we have all of those things alone, we are miserable. We can on paper have no money, no job, no housing, limited food. And when we have those things and go through that experience together, we feel complete and loved and like we belong. We feel rich. Going through it together is the only way to go through it at all. Otherwise, we can't make it on our own. Yeah,

we're kind of back to wholeness too. We

are. We can't be whole on our own. And so the idea of how we deal with any of this is how we deal with all of it. The change in difference in economic opportunities wrought by technology, the change in difference in the truth and understanding of who we have been historically, the change in difference of the number of languages spoken, the change in difference of the borders not through act of legislation, but through act of ecological change through climate change. Water coming and going. Fires are coming and going. And that's going to put pressure and how we handle that pressure is who we are. Who do we want to be? Let's practice that. Let's get ready.

It's already here. Let's go. And those are the human questions. Those would be elemental questions. And we ate the first. And we're that we're evolving those questions. Yeah. Yeah. Mmm.

You got me all fired up.

You got me all fired up too. I just, there are other things. You know what? I want to read, do something you wrote, you said about yourself. I'd love to have part of my legacy be that I was compassionate, that I exuded joy, warmth, confidence and confidence, and that I was more than talk. I was a man of substance. And I just want to say to you, good job. You've

done that. Thank you. Thank you.

And you had a lot of time left, I think.

I hope so. We never know. We never know. I'm doing what I can within my control to have that time. Yeah. And to make the best use of it. Yeah. You know, I think we all are invited. Citizening, all the stuff we've been talking about. There's like the macro way of thinking about it that involves commissions and blue ribbons and all this kind of stuff. There's the sphere of influence that we have with the people directly in our lives and the community groups and businesses and teams. And then there's within ourselves as well. And so, you know, this, we've had a really, really, really opening. There were tears. There was jokes. There was laughs. And, you know, what's the story of me that I want? You know, for you listening right now, what's the story of you in the context of the cells that comprise you and the history that brought you here in the future that's unfolding before you? And in the context of who else you belong to? In a human sense and a broader sense of life itself. And I'm trying to remind myself constantly of our power, my power to change that story and to do it in community with others, even community of myselfs. You know, and the people that brought me here. Yeah. The community of the Arneetas, most of

whom I wasn't willing to see when she was alive. You know, I just remember there's a picture in your book, a photograph of your mother at your Harvard graduation. Hugging you. It's so beautiful. And what did she say to you? We did it. We

did it. She said we did it. All right, lady. I took the test. But yes, I understand your point. The metaphor. She was a metaphor. Literally, you know, I showed up in Boston. She was just saying what you did. I know. I know. No, I literally remember when she said that. And I had this moment. I had both responses. I had a, what you talking about? And then I had a, oh, dummy, you know, like, come on, man. Yeah, we did it. And we is not me and her. No. It's, you know, it's not me, her and Belinda, my sister. We did do that. But it is Arnold, my father, who's not around anymore. And his parents, Leon, and Dora, and my mom's parents, Homer, and Lorraine, and the people who beat them in the community that poured into them simultaneous to my mom's life. The Africans who introduced her to the diaspora and got her all in the Afrocentric activism. Like, we did it. The people who wrote the checks for me to go to that school that work in the family, the scholarship. They did it too. You know, the US government has a little piece of that. The DC government has a little, DC public schools did it. The Boys and Girls Club did it. The DC Youth Orchestra program did it. So we are always, at every moment, a culmination of we.

Okay, we did it. We

did it. Holy cannoli! Is the sun still up?