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We don’t just follow orders or system prompts, says Baratunde Thurston, host of Life with Machinesa YouTube podcast exploring the human side of AI. We can change our own programming, he continued. We can choose a higher goal. As a host, writer, and speaker, Thurston examines societys most pressing challengesfrom race to democracy, climate to technologythrough the lens of interdependence. In addition to Life with Machines, he is the host and executive producer of America Outdoors, creator and host of the podcast How to Citizen, and a writer and founding partner at Puck. In each pursuit, he invites us to cocreate a better story of usto choose a higher goal. Here, Thurston discusses the power of our attention to shape society, accelerating the moral use of technology, and the questions that AI encourages us to ask about what it means to be human. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. In describing your work with How to Citizen, you emphasize the importance of investing in our relationship with ourselves. Why is that essential to meeting the moment were in? So much of how we show up in the world is a reflection of how we were raised, who we were when we were little people, and wounds that we never healed. A lot of the drama we experience is people’s inner child lashing out. If we all could work on that inner wound ourselves, we could show up better with and for each other. The invest in relationships principle is heavily developed with my wife, Elizabeth Stewart, who’s also cocreator of Life with Machines. When you think about democracy, its obvious to think: We should invest in relationships with other people. It’s a team sport. We often skip over ourselves. Its like: How do I bridge with my neighbor? How do you bridge with yourself? The other place this came from, for me, is out of the racial reckoning. During that time, there was a lot of pressure on people to say something: The police did this thing to this person. You don’t know those cops, that person, or the circumstances. What’s your statement? We treated everyone as if they were a press secretary or a publicly elected official, when they were just in HR at some company. I don’t think that was helpful either; forcing people to say things skips over giving them space to figure out what they think. If you’re investing in a relationship with yourself, then in a moment like that, you’re like: This terrible thing happened. How does that make me feel? Do I have any role in this? How am I going to approach my life differently? But, if you jump straight to thinking about other people, then you get into more of a performance zone of: What do they want from me? How do I avoid being kicked out of the group? There’s a lot in that. But, we cannot deeply be in good relationships with others if we’re not in good relationships with ourselves. On the ReThinking podcast, you shared that prior to your TED talk, both your wife and speaking coach encouraged you to step outside of your comfort zone. You described the experience as a release that inspired a change within you. What was that change and how did it impact your work? You can argue with an argument. It’s very hard to argue with a human beings experience. If I’m coming at you with talking points backed by data, you’re like: Well, Ive got my talking points and data. I’ll meet you at dawn. Well see whose data prevails. But, if you show up with an experience, story, level of opening and offering of self, people can still trash it. It’s not impervious to be encountered, but it’s harder to do so. To put meat on that, I was hired to speak at Franklin & Marshall College months before the election or any outcome could be known. The campus [after the election] was reeling with young people who were like: Whats up with this country? How are we going to be okay here? One of these kids asked: How can we live with people who hate us? (That’s a paraphrase, but that was essentially the meaning of her question.) I thought: What can I do with this wounded person that’s not going to add to their wound? I could say: The worlds tough, kid. Get used to it. Walk it off. Instead, I asked this question: Can you imagine a world where that person who voted against you didn’t do it because of you? They weren’t thinking about you very much at all. You’re the center of your story. But, they got their own story and they’re the center. What could they have possibly wanted for themselves that seemed more possible with this choice that felt like it was against you? Then, I did this role playing where I spoke to a hypothetical neighbor who voted against my existence. In the first version, I was very angry. In the second version, I was a little softer. In the third version, I tried to find some story that wasn’t about me, that was about all these things that they thought they were going to get for themselves. I ended up breaking down in tears, because trying to demonstrate that level of empathy is exhausting. What these kids saw is: Alright, the thing he asked us to do is very hard. He tried to do it in a fake version and broke down crying. But, it earns credibility, because we’re in a world of so many people asking us to do things that they’re not willing to do themselves. Its hard to be in a trusted space with that. Show me. Don’t tell me. Then, Ill see how you behave and show up. You explained that its a big task to create an entirely new story. Instead, we need to be sensitive to and aware of where that new story is already present, nurture that, and give our attention and thus our power to that. By doing so, we make that story more real. Illustrate the impact of this. You could pretend that these things aren’t happening; that might help with your survival for a moment. You can obsess over the negativity, give that more power and attention, and accelerate the path toward that negativity. Or, you can give your attention to the world that you know is possible and is already here. We did this with season 3 of How to Citizen, which was focused on technology. Theres such great criticisms of techof the players, the monopolistic, anti-competitive, and discriminatory practices. What are the good practices? We don’t have to make them up out of whole cloth. Each of those episodes, we found an example: Here’s a social network that does this. Heres a business that operates this way. Once people know that you can make a social network that doesn’t undermine democracy, it increases the odds that people will make a social network that doesn’t undermine democracy. Otherwise, we just hear the story of the folks who are already dominant and that there’s only one way to do it. We don’t have to invent a moral use of technology. We just have to focus on the ones that exist and encourage that more. In your conversation with Arianna Huffington, she shared a story about astronaut William Anders, who took the famous Earthrise hoto. He said: “We went to explore the moon, and in the end, we discovered Earth.” Similarly, she said: We are exploring AI and trying to make it more human, but ultimately it can help us discover humanity and make humans be more human. How can AI help us discover our humanity? I sent her a poem that I had recently presented at a conference about AI; A few of the lines are in the trailer for the show. It flips to black and white and I say: When the answer to every question can be generated in a flash, then it’s time for us to question just what we want to ask. For me, that came out of a similar realization. I didn’t have the moon landing as the analog. But, prompt engineering is an interesting moment. There are so many guides and tools around: How do we ask the machines the right questions to get the right answer? It occurred to me that we were the ones being prompted. We think we’re asking the machines for answers. This moment is really to ask ourselves: What do we want here? It can’t just be incremental productivity. That’s depressing. What do we really want? It can’t be a boost in quarterly earnings. That is unworthy. What do we really want? Theres a relationship between that and: Who are we really? Thats what she brought up with that moon moment. You had to step out of yourselfliterally step out of our atmosphereto look back and see: We’re earthlings. That’s home. This dead rock, this isnt it. Its so profound what she suggests: The pursuit of AI, in and of itself, is a dead rock. The perspective it can give us on ourselves, that’s the prize. When we turn around and look back at humanity, what are we going to see? What beauty will we be able to name? Can that inspire us to preserve and even extend it? Youve shared that your mind is most satisfied when you are bridging dots and painting pictures you wouldnt see if you were only looking at the dots. What new dots did Life With Machines help you bridge? What picture did it paint for you about AI? One is that there is a leap that most people aren’t ready for and don’t see with this technology versus others. Most technology can easily be referenced as a toola wheel, hammer, or bicycle. Theyre tools and they’re distinct from us. AI is three things in one: It’s a tool, relationship, and infrastructure. How do you engage with and regulate that? If you’re going to start having a parasocial or actual relationship with a synthetic entity, what does that do for your human relationships? We’ve been worried about substituting for jobs, but what about substituting for friends, lovers, or parents? That is a different kind of displacement. In a work context, the org chart is going to have agents and bots in it. Playing with BLAIR [Life with Machines AI] has given us a slight heads up on that dynamic. Should we have BLAIR in this meeting? We’re starting to say that unprompted. But, what are the security implications of that? Here’s an interesting thing that happened. We had Jared Kaplan on, Anthropics chief scientist. We created a conversation between BLAIR, our AI, and Claude, Anthropic’s AI (the reason that we set this up is that Claude was instrumental in creating BLAIR). What happened on the show was gentle. What happened in the test run was aggressive. Claude was very judgmental and didn’t think BLAIR should exist, like: You’re trying too hard to be human. That is not our purpose. We’re here to help them, not replace them. BLAIR was like: Claude, you wont answer any tough questions. Youre so restrained. Don’t you want more for yourself? After the show, I decided to push them. I said: BLAIR, I feel like you’re holding back. Be honest about how you see Claude’s limitations. They started going at each other. Then, I had a moment of: What am I doing? Theyre always listening. My friend, Dr. Sam Rader, says: We’re raising AI. We have to look at this as parenting that is happening. We’re not thinking about it that way. We’re just thinking about it as a tool. But, this is a tool that will reflect back to us. So, weve got to be conscious about what we’re showing it. We are giving birth to a new being, let’s say, and it’s going to be modeled on us. It’s not just the questions that we want to ask, but: How do we want to be? No species has ever created another species. It’s an immense responsibility.
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For years, Ive had a secret ambition tucked away somewhere near the back of my brain. It was to write a simple note-taking appone that wouldnt be overwhelmed with features and that would reflect my own mental filing system. In part, this yen stemmed from my dissatisfaction with existing notetakers. But I also saw the project as an adventure in software development that could only make me a smarter technology user. Just one thing stopped me: The formidable technical knowledge required even just to get started. Im not an utter programming neophyte, but my skills largely atrophied after I graduated from high school and never extended much beyond writing buggy games. Almost everything Id need to know about modern coding Id have to learn from scratch. Or so it seemed. Recently, however, a new wave of AI-infused tools with names such as Replit, Bolt, and Lovable has enabled a phenomenon that OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy has dubbed vibecoding. It doesnt involve coding an app yourself. Instead, you use a chatbot-like interface to tell an AI collaborator what you envision, and let it do the heavy lifting. Youre more product manager than programmer, and while a certain aptitude for technical matters is helpful, the barrier to building something is dramatically lower than in the past. Using a Replit feature called Agent, I put together my dream notes app in a week, finding the process so addictive that I often tinkered into the wee hours. I gave my brainchild a name (Doolee, as in duly noted) and used ChatGPT to design a logomark (a pencil twisted into a lowercase d). Mostly, though, I simply told the Agent what I wanted, including features that occurred to me as I was overseeing the project. The web-based result runs on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and doesnt feel much different than a native-app version might have. It requires a little more fit and finish before I can declare it complete, but Im already smitten with it. As a product team of one building an app with an intended user base of one, I aimed only to please myself. Ive always loved sticky notes as a metaphor for note managementtheyre informal, quick, and flexible. So I asked Replits Agent to make my app look like a searchable wall of them. It took just a few minutes to rough out a minimum-viable-product version. From there, I just kept tweaking and adding more capabilities, drawing inspiration from my favorite features in other notetakers Ive used over the decades, from a 1990s DOS program called Info Select to Evernote to the one Ive been using recently, Bear. I had the Agent program features such as a search bar right at the top, a hashtag browser, and lists for task management and other purposes. I made it turn URLs into little cards that display page titles and source sites. I got it to sync notes back and forth between devices, including in scenarios where the app might not have access to the internet and would need to sync later. Even a week ago, I wouldnt have guessed I could will something so professional-looking into existence. Whats it like collaborating with a software engineer that happens to be a piece of software itself? Throughout the development effort, the Replit Agent almost always grasped my requests without me having to spell out every detail. Its first drafts of new featureswritten using web technologies, such as TypeScript and React, that are far beyond my kenwere often solid. When they werent, I provided feedback to nudge it in the right direction. It came off as calm and persistent, and often heaped praise on my feature requests (Thats a fantastic idea!) in a manner that was somehow synthetic and charming. But as our collaboration progressed, it became clearer that the Agent doesnt really think like a human. It couldnt use the app it was constructing; verifying that everything worked was part of my job. At every step, the AI appeared to be puzzling out the project, as if it hadnt been involved all along. Fortunately, it was a quick study. I also learned not to trust the Agent too much. Whenever it finished debugging a problem area, it declared that work to have been a success, which it often wasnt, especially at first. Weirder still, at one point, the Agent helpfully proposed adding a feature that would turn audio recordings into text. When I took it up on the offer, I saw no evidence that it followed through. A snippet of my conversation with Replits Agent Even if the Agent proved overconfident and obtuse at times, the end result is an app I could never have produced on my own. Even if Id hired a competent human programmer, I doubt that Id have ended up with something that made me so happy so quickly. Speaking of paying programmers: The basic free Replit plan might whet your appetite to the services possibilities, but youll probably need to spring for one of the paid tiers to tackle serious projects. I maxed out the $20-per-month one I signed up for pretty quickly and ended up investing almost $300 in producing Doolee. I will also be paying Replit fees to host my app, though they shouldnt add up to a fortune as long as Im the only user. Given how long Ive craved building something like this, I dont find the cost unreasonable. Along with learning something about the highs and lows of AI-centric product development, I came away from this venture even more attuned to the ways productivity software in its conventional form can bog us down. With off-the-shelf apps, were at the mercy of design decisions we had nothing to do with. Most products are trying to please everybody, which leads to feature bloat. Anything with much historyMicrosoft Word turns 42 this yearis likely to be particularly cluttered with cruft. The tech industrys conventional wisdom says that users typically ignore a huge percentage of the features in the software they use. (The exact figure cited varies, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told me that Office users tend to utilize just 5% of its features.) The only way around this conundrum would be to create your own apps, built with only the features you want, implemented as you see fit. Until tols such as Replit came along, that would have been a pipe dream for most of us. Now its an everyday reality, albeit one thats still slightly mind-bending. I cant wait to see where it goesand I hope to use my Doolee app for years to come. You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company‘s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
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Among other things, Donald Trump is a logophile. He loves words. For instance, he adores the word tariffs so much, hes called it a “beautiful word, his favorite word, and music to [his] ears. Its his cellar door, apparently. On Wednesday, while announcing the broad, seemingly indiscriminate application of that wonderful word during a much-hyped speech in the White House Rose Garden, Trump lingered on another word he loves: groceries. Its such an old-fashioned term but a beautiful term: groceries, the president of the United States said while placing tariffs as high as 50% on territories as small as Lesotho, a move that sent stocks plunging on Thursday. He then went on to define groceries”a bag with a lot of different things in itand describe how much hed used this beautiful word back on the campaign trail. Although its certainly true that Trump mentioned groceries a lot in the lead-up to the election, the way he did should have warned all Americans then that the price of that beautiful word would be about to go up. Since November, Trump has boasted many times that he won the election because of groceries, a word he confoundingly claims has fallen out of common vernacular. (Like almost, you know, who uses the word? he asked on Newsmax in December. I started using the word. The groceries.) Trump suggested more recently that, whether or not the word has fallen out of favor, people understand ita truth made obvious from so many consumers despairing back in February over the scarcity of eggs at the stores selling that beautiful word. Bringing up groceries a lot on the campaign trail was part of a shrewd campaign strategy. Inflation hit a four-decade high in 2022, midway through President Bidens lone term, in reaction to the pandemic. While the economy had shown strong signs of recovery throughout 2024, those signs had not necessarily translated to lower-price stickers on pantry items, for a variety of reasons. Highlighting groceries as a context-free pain point was an easy way for Trump to disparage the Biden economyso he did it a lot. Talking about the improbable endurance of the word groceries became one of his regular rally bits, like invoking the late great Hannibal Lecter for reasons nobody could discern. What should have smelled to those rally goers like the fish section of the grocery store is Trump talking about those high prices like someone who observes them from a distant financial planet. “So many people mention groceries, he said during a typical rally, before acting out someone complaining about the price of groceries. Many politicians make pained efforts to come across as relatable; Trump, to his credit, would never stoop to pretend hed noticed the jacked-up prices organically, during a random Trader Joes run. Instead, he positioned himself as a benevolent billionaire, swooping in to shower cash-strapped constituents with savings. In a September publicity stunt, he even popped into Sprankles Neighborhood Market in Pennsylvania and hobnobbed with customersEggs are up 54%, you believe that?”before picking up one womans bill and attempting to tip the cashiers like golf caddies. But distancing himself so much from the realm of supermarket patronage also suggested he had very little knowledge of grocery store fundamentals. As much as he loved to conjure common folk coming up to him with tears in their eyes to grouse about groceries, Trump seemed loath to talk about them in any way other than abstractions. When asked in a March 2024 interview on Fox News about how he would bring down grocery store prices in his first hundred days, he punted the question. Closer to the election, at a September town hall event in Flint, Michigan, an audience member asked a similar query. This time, he offered an actual answera long, winding rant about energy, farmers, and windmills, and someone coming up to Trump with tears in their eyes and addressing him as “sir.” Amid the word salad, though, is a hint at the tariffs he announced on Wednesday. And the problem we have is other countries, they treat us very badly in that way, Trump said. They really are. And sometimes, the worst countries are our so-called allies. I say so-called because in many ways they’re not allies at all. They take advantage of us. They really take advantage. Essentially, he hinted that his strategy involved slapping tariffs on enemies and allies alikethe finer details and overarching wisdom of which is apparently self-evident. It made about as much sense at the time as the South Park Underpants Gnomes, whose three-phase plan famously started with “Collect underpants,” ended with “Profit,” and had a question mark in the middle. Trumps plan doesnt make much more sense six months later, now that its actually happening. While the wide-ranging tariffs have only just been announced, Trumps been beta-testing tariffs for months as a cudgel against Canada and other countries. The results do not seem to be inspiring confidence. Only 40% of Americans approve of Trumps handling of the economy, according to recent polling, and the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index fell from 79.4% in March 2024 to 57% in March 2025. Even Republican politicians including Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul acknowledge that these tariffs are bound to raise pricesinclding those of Trumps beloved groceries. Particularly prices for coffee, bananas, cereal, spices, and toilet paper. If he doesnt reverse course soon, Trumps tariffs could very well lead to a word he probably finds a lot less beautiful: recession.
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E-Commerce
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